disaster DM

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

Your action hero just got shot in the shoulder, stitched it up in a motel bathroom, and is now running through a forest. I need you to know that a shoulder wound severs muscle, nerves, and sometimes bone, and the human body's response to that is not "mild wincing followed by full range of motion." here is what injuries actually do to peoplee...

⊹ Adrenaline is REAL and it does allow people to do extraordinary things immediately after injury, BUT it is a loan, not a gift. you borrow the function and you pay it back later with interest. Your character might genuinely be able to run for twenty minutes after being stabbed. and then the adrenaline drops and everything the body was delaying arrives all at once. the collapse is NOT weakness. it's biology collecting its debt. write the debt collection. it's more interesting than the heroic sprint anyway.

⊹ Blood loss changes cognition before it drops you. you don't go from "fine" to "unconscious." you go through a whole middle stage of confusion, poor decision-making, emotional dysregulation, a strange calm, tunnel vision, difficulty forming sentences. Your injured character making a bad call, saying something they normally wouldn't, becoming suddenly and inexplicably gentle--that's blood loss. use the middle stage. it's dramatically rich and almost nobody writes it.

⊹ Recovery has a timeline and the timeline is long and boring and inconvenient to plot. a broken rib takes six weeks and during those six weeks sneezing is a genuine emergency. a concussion means no screens, no reading, no bright lights, and symptoms can persist for months. a stab wound to the abdomen means weeks of infection risk, limited mobility, and a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. Your character being sidelined and frustrated and useless for a long time is not a narrative problem. it's the story.

so like if the username is something like "dancingwithbears" they'll refer to their husband as "Mr. Bears"

The Rogue One novelization comes at it from the theme of "Several people made selfless, brave choices that allowed the baton to continue to move forward from one person to the next and the next and that's what ultimately causes the Empire to fall."

Andor chose to come at it from the opposite perspective and went more for a theme of "Several people made selfish, greedy, ambitious choices that started an avalanche of consequences that the Rebellion were able to take advantage of and that's what ultimately causes the Empire to fall."

In the Rogue One novelization, the rebellion has SOME inkling that there's an Imperial project out there that could be an issue and they're looking into it as much as they can, but they don't TRULY know what they're up against until Bodhi and Galen make the choice to be brave and to trust each other enough to send a message. It's Bodhi and Galen's selfless choices, no matter the cost to themselves, that ultimately allow the rebellion the opportunity to act.

In Andor, the rebellion has NO inkling of anything the Empire is doing. The first time they hear anything about the Death Star at all is when Dedra fucks up and Lonni gets access to files he shouldn't have had access to and then gets desperate enough to tell Luthen about it in the hopes that he can use it as a bargaining chip for his freedom. The rebellion only gains the opportunity to act because Dedra gets ambitious and sloppy and Lonni is selfish enough to use the information to his own benefit. (Obviously there is an element of selfless sacrifice that does happen after this with Luthen and Kleya and Cassian all working to get the information off of Coruscant and back to Yavin, but it STARTS with Dedra and Lonni making their own choices, so I'm focusing more on that.)