The Galaxy Shattering Around Us

AKA why I haven’t been posting very much. Full thing below the cut.

1) Please do not out anyone (even if you “think you are doing them a favor.” Trust me when I say you aren’t) and make sure you don’t accidentally do so.

Right now my financial situation isn’t stable; I’m transitioning into this new job, but I’ve been struggling to make ends meet with rent etc. All of my payments have been going onto my credit card, which I’ll have to pay back eventually - but I haven’t had the chance to do that yet. Simply-put, I’ve only pulled in about $150 for this month in finances.

I’m not super desperate - I have some options - but it isn’t a great scenario.

That being said, I know I’ve been quiet, but if you guys want to help me out, you have two options. For one, I have a redbubble and make some money from the sales; I also have a ko-fi and will gladly offer small commissions through there. When I say small, I mean like a bust-up picture of a character, sketched and inked and maybe colored; I don’t have enough eggs in any basket to offer more.

Any new content for SWTOR beyond commissions is entirely on hold while I try to pull things together. To be honest, with how things have been I haven’t wanted to put my mind into the fandom at all. Again, unwell.

its not only bad writing but its extremely harmful to people who actually live with conditions that are misrepresented in media. when i found out i had DID, my mom freaked out because her only point of reference was Sybil. when i was younger and first went on psych meds, i thought it meant i was set on a track to be a bad person, because in so many movies and video games you find out the bad guy has medication in his bed side table for some sort of psych disorder. the worst thing a hallucination has ever made me do was wake my mom up at 3 AM to check my bathroom to see if the bugs i saw everywhere were real and the worst thing an “episode” of any sort has made me do is hurt myself. my ptsd doesnt make me kill people, my alters dont kidnap people, my autism doesnt make me so morally unaware that ill murder for senselessly, my ocd doesnt make me hurt people etc etc etc

That’s what I do with Alexei, Natasha, Channery, any of my babies. If something in a scene is scary, it’s because they’re having an episode. Alexei has a flashback and starts screaming because they see Bloodworthy again; Natasha thinks Scourge is going to hit her because she’s thinking of the trauma from her father, and she cannot rationalize that Scourge would never, ever do that (and after that he learns never to even get his body involved when they’re arguing; he doesn’t even pace or anything, he doesn’t want to scare her). Channery starts dissociating because the Force is using her vessel. Freaking Eden has PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and the only bit that’s scary about them is that they’re an ethereal abomination that is so drowned in the Force that they need cybernetics just to keep them on the surface level!

*sigh*

But we write like that because we have experience. My friend’s been in bad places, I’ve been in bad places, I’ve spent the last few weeks in a bad place. These experiences are scary for us because of mental illness, yes, but that’s because we understand we are ill, not because we don’t understand somebody else is ill. And honestly, if somebody told me that my mental illness scared them - you can bet I’d punch them in the noggin, because I’m more fucking scared of my beasts than they’d ever know!

This isn’t even a fear of the unknown thing that people can get away with anymore. One of the most publically-advertised horror films from the last year, Split, was about a man with multiple personalities, which ticked me off because it’s so damn easy to just go online and find out what it means for somebody. It’s so damn easy to go “oh, this is what’s going on, he’s probably just as scared as we are”. But because people never think to look it up, they continue to be scared. Because horror film has taught that it is scary.

This is my problem with the genre of horror movies: when used, mental illness is a scapegoat for horror and reverses the progress we make on mental health awareness and acceptance. Much as we can tell somebody “most mentally-ill people are utterly harmless and more likely to be hurt than hurt others”, it’s very hard to change minds when all the knowledge you get is from horror films - films that are meant to impact your mind. What’s going to stick out to you more, a documentary about a kid with bipolar, or a jumpscare of a bipolar serial killer breaking out of a shack with an axe?? (Okay, maybe I was thinking of Jason. Sue me.)

What makes it worse is that it isn’t really stopping. Split at least acknowledged some of the problems in the genre - the antagonist is shown to be seeking help - but it’s not enough. We need to put an end to this dumb fucking trope that illness=evilness. We need to put an end to it not just by combating it, but also not fucking using it. Which means that us who are advocating and us who are storytelling need to band together and create better characters and better stories with better information. Down with the days where the villain is the sick one; long live characters who can be ill and still be a hero.

The Lumielle (and Shan) Family

You ever want one big dork family in one place?  Here ya go

Although “George Lucas” has become synonymous with “Star Wars,” it’s really his collaboration with – and occasionally intervention from – the creative team surrounding him that helped launch the first movie into the stratosphere.

As the video points out, the movie that won all those Academy Awards – including, critically, the one for editing – was sculpted into its best-known and deservingly praised form by the editing team of Marcia Lucas (seen above), Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew.