Solidarity Forever

I'm sure this person would love extra contributions in replies or reblogs too! But here's some stuff I compiled so far

1.

I think it's important to think about why you want to portray a character with a brain injury

If your reason for wanting to portray it is anything related to using that character's brain injury as a major plot inconvenience (eg. they forget a piece of information and the whole mission is ruined), I really don't recommend it. It's not entertaining writing as it is and just it makes the character seem like a burden to the plot.

If you just want one symptom for plot reasons (like memory difficulties), also ditch the brain injury idea. Either you intend to represent the whole experience or none of it!

I'd say similar things if the character is just going to feel hopeless or awful about it the entire time and it's going to be constantly used to make the readers emotional - we eventually have to live with it, even if accepting it takes time, and learning to accept your disabilities is something that desperately needs representing. Brain injuries are not some kind of eternal punishment for people with them, nor a tear-jerking tragedy for people without them

2.

Do proper research into brain injuries and zone in on what's applicable to your character

What is the cause of their brain injury? What type of brain injury is it?What parts of the brain were affected? How long has it been since they acquired it? How comfortable are they with their reality now? Do they have access to proper medical care and means of recovery? What will their symptoms actually look like?

All of this is important if you want your character to feel fleshed out in this area too

3.

Run your work by people with brain injuries who offer it!!!! You can find people on writing subreddits, discord servers, in-person, all sorts of places, who'd like you to ask questions and help in the writing of your character

Don't just talk about us, include us in the conversation. Acknowledge that you cannot fully understand our experience and so you cannot make the rules on how to portray it respectfully!

4.

Listen to our stories! Spend time with us online and in person if you can! There are so many stories from people with brain injuries on all social media platforms - do not use their words directly without permission, but you can certainly learn from their experiences and think about what your character's experience might look like

I really like this article it goes pretty in-depth into all areas of brain damage & injuries and recovery in writing

5.

Flesh out your character just as much in every other applicable area - if you overly expand upon their disabilities only for the character themself to be pretty lackluster, you're not portraying a real person anymore, you're just portraying the concept of a brain injury

AVOID:

- The 'You're not the same person anymore' trope, where a character experiences an accident or head trauma and is suddenly an entirely different person on every level. It's pretty much just used as an emotional plot device. Severe brain damage can result in significant changes in personality, but they are the same person - Doom and gloom, where you're essentially just writing pure angst intended to make the audience emotional with no real representation of the disability outside the context of 'this is really sad' - Comedic relief, where a character's brain injury is used almost exclusively as a humorous tool (eg. haha they keep forgetting things, haha they talk weird, haha they lost their train of thought, haha they behave inappropriately and don't realise it) - And I'm not saying you can't do something amnesia-related, but if you're looking for a plot device that'll cause a character to do something like forget their entire life before that point for a very prolonged period of time and receive little to no medical intervention, please find a fictional means for it (eg. fantasy/sci-fi elements) instead. It's just so overdone and it's always written as caused by a head injury that you'd expect to result in TBI, but those effects are not realistic for TBI How to write a character with amnesia article

---

happy trans day of visibility, have a pigeon :]

Hello, Tumblr. I've never posted here, only lurked. But this is one of the most important things in the world to me, and I honestly need to ask you for help. Please reblog if you can.

This will be a long post. It will be summarized with a TLDR at the end, including ways that you can help.

With over 9,200 pages, we are the biggest collection of gender identities on the Internet, especially the biggest source that is readily available. We are a community that has existed since 2009, and has taken off in terms of growth in the last few years.

Today, Fandom decided to close the Gender Wiki. We were given absolutely no warning, and they've only given us a two-week deadline to move the entire wiki to a new host, which we are utterly unprepared to do. The download would also not include any of the 17,000+ images on the Gender Wiki, many of which do not exist anywhere else on the Internet.

Here is a link to the post Fandom staff gave us today, and a paraphrased summary of it below:

https://gender.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000000132176

Fandom staff says that they won't continue to host our wiki because it "spreads harmful misinformation". They believe we have gone too far in "positioning everything as a gender identity", referring to xenogenders. They mention pages with xenogenders referring to suicide/self-harm and violence --- which we, the staff members, were /already/ in the process of deleting before this notice was given to us. They decided that the best solution was not to ask us to delete those pages, or even delete the pages themselves, but instead to remove our entire database.

There are many other wikis on Fandom with much worse references to violence than the Gender Wiki, which Fandom appears to have no problem with whatsoever.

I cannot express enough that this is erasure, and it will absolutely negatively affect the LGBTQ+ community to not have this treasure trove of information readily available.

I am an admin on the Gender Wiki, and I can assure you that our entire staff team is already trying to appeal to Fandom staff. I'll add any updates if they decide to respond to us, but they have no yet given staff any more information than the above

PLEASE help in any way you can. Reblog, spread awareness, or sign this petition if you have a Fandom account, OR sign this petition instead if you don't --- please DON'T sign both, as this causes counting problems & can make the point seem less legitimate. Archive any Gender Wiki pages, especially ones that don't have pages elsewhere, with the Wayback Machine or alternatively archive.is, or even write posts about them here or on other sites. Archives will be organized on this spreadsheet. Please help us save this information. It can't possibly be done this quickly without help.

Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨