Geralt has reoccurring nightmares since the night he found Jaskier on the balcony, but they haven’t talked about it yet. And Jaskier… maybe he does realise by now what this is about.
idk i wish we like… took a moment to just be sad about how a book series a lot of us really really loved turned out to have been written by an awful person?
like yes it has problematic themes but i wish we would stop pretending it always sucked and everyone who liked it was a dumb idiot. yes it’s not Literature ™, it’s a children series, ok nu. but it was a really good children’s series and there were reasons everyone loved it.
a lot of us have lost an important part of our childhood because it’s tainted now and like. maybe we could or should just be sad about that and recognize we lost something.
also if people could stop yelling about how we’re stupid idiots with no taste because we liked children’s books when we were eight years old that would, like, be cool too
like if you were a kid who was abused or different or lonely the idea of being whisked away to a magical world was immensely compelling. the idea of having friends and finding out you were special and there was a reason you were being mistreated was immensely compelling.
on top of that the worldbuilding is genuinely immersive. it really felt to me like there was a world beyond the main characters and that’s something i rarely find in other books.
and yeah as an adult i can look at the goblins and rita skeeter and see how it’s all problematic but as a kid it all truly flew over my head. the goblins didn’t give me internalized antisemitism cause i did not realize they were pulling from jewish stereotypes. rita skeeter did not make me transphobic cause i straight up did not notice the parts about her physical body being “manly” until people pointed that out two years ago.
yeah as an adult i can read it and see a whole boatload of problematic stuff but it wasn’t actually always obvious and like. it could have gone differently. if jkr was a different person she could have apologized for all of this. or explained she hadn’t known better but now she does and that she’s sorry to the communities she hurt. there was a moment when i thought that was possible. now it’s obvious that it’s not, and i think i’m allowed to mourn that.
and i’m allowed to mourn that something that was incredibly important to me as a child and that i really loved is now irrevocably tainted. we all are. we don’t have to pretend it retroactively sucked and that we were all idiots for being nine-year-olds who wanted to escape our lives and found a means to do it vicariously. fuck, it’s sad enough that nine-year-olds wanted to escape their lives. but anyways we weren’t idiots, the books were good for their time and what they were. we genuinely lost something of value and it’s okay to mourn that.
Also, I get very tired of hearing “read any other book” - many potter fans were, and are, voracious readers. We have read and enjoyed other books; many of the books we read as children were marketed as “if you like Harry Potter…” at the time. Feeling grief over the betrayal of one author does not mean that you don’t enjoy, or care deeply about, other books.
if you’re invested enough in a book series that you feel the need to mourn when you find out the author’s a bigot, your life went wrong somewhere.
you mean the part where i was literal six-year-old? no you’re right i should have just skipped right to adulthood
I mean, as noted in the posts above, for a lot of people who escaped into Harry Potter and other books so hard as children, their lives DID go very wrong somewhere.
When the books were coming out, I knew more than one person who were suicidal teenagers who didn’t kill themselves because “but then I won’t find out how the books end”.
So, you know, maybe don’t be a shithead about people having feelings about something that was important to them.
And what’s more, a lot of the kids I grew up with who escaped the hardest? Turned out to be queer. In one way or another. When we grew up, that feeling of being an outsider that made us long so deeply to leave for Hogwarts eventually made sense! This was before she said anything about Dumbledore but we knew the story resonated with us. And when I was in high school and she said Dumbledore was gay? We whispered that rumor excitedly at lunch. We didn’t know about the discourse over what constitutes good gay rep. We just knew that we weren’t supposed to know about People Like That™️ and so we were very happy to find out. I legitimately can’t remember another canon gay character in the media I had access to at the time.
And I know trans people who took Dumbledore’s line “It matters not what someone is born but what they grow to be” and RAN WITH IT. A line from Harry Potter encouraged their transition. So yes, the fact that the women who wrote it wouldn’t have encouraged them the same way is a huge blow. We’re not stupid for grasping on to anything we could construe as support. And we’re not stupid for being hurt when that support gets retroactively revoked.
I want to pass on one of the most powerful things I’ve heard in abuse recovery circles.
One of the most common tactics of abuse is what I like to call the “abuser UNO reverse card”. As soon as you accuse them of abuse once, and sometimes before that, theywill accuse youof abuse. I need to emphasize that this isacommon abuser move and they use it because it works. It’s probably been making you feel like shit for a while, and I’m here to tell you you’re not alone. You are not an abuser even if you’ve:
“Ruined your abuser’s reputation” by being vocal about your abuse
Expressed that you don’t love your abuser
Insulted your abuser
Yelled or cursed at your abuser
Fought back physically against your abuser (even hitting first)
Ignored your abuser’s threats to harm themselves if you do something they don’t want/don’t do something they want
Developed anger issues, a PD, or other stigmatized trauma responses as a result of abuse
You don’t have to take their shit. You’re not a monster, you’re not evil. If you hurt them or ruined their life, it’s because they fucking deserved it for treating you the way they did. And because I’m a victim of solely verbal/psychological abuse, I want to emphasize that this is true even if your abuser never hit you. The damage they did was real, and they deserve consequences as a result. You’re not mean for wanting justice, and even if you were, you have a right to be mean after what happened to you.
[image ID: a banner with a cloudy sky background that says on the first line “this post is about trauma, please don’t derail or traumadump” and on the second like “‘personality disorder abuse’ truthers dni]
Some days all it takes is a single unknown man coming into a space I think of as safe to crack me like an egg.
I had no idea why I was sobbing and shaking and rocking back and forth today until about an hour later, when it occurred to me that I was probably reacting to the simple presence of a man who had in no way threatened me.
Sometimes my body forgets I’m not 6 years old anymore, and that most men have no intention to harm me.
I try not to criticize myself for falling apart at times like those. Our bodies hold trauma. It takes a long time to learn to deal with it or, maybe someday, if we’re very lucky, let it go.
Sometimes the outside world makes you unsafe. Sometimes people harm you physically or emotionally, even people you should be able to trust.
And sometimes the inside world makes you unsafe. Sometimes you might cause yourself physical or emotional harm, even though you’re the person you should be able to trust the most.
We’ve been discussing the past couple days whether I am safe or unsafe. We’ve been discussing whether I trust myself not to attempt suicide. For right now, I trust that my thinking is just thinking, with no intention to act. If that changes, if I begin to doubt my ability to keep myself safe, I’ll go to other people who can help me with that, other people who can keep me safe. That may even mean being hospitalized, however much I would hate that.
I wasn’t able to keep myself safe from other people who hurt me, but I can keep myself safe from myself. I didn’t have the resources when I was a kid, but now I do. I *will* ask for help if I need it. I swear it. I swear it to myself and to the people who love me.
I had a really bad flashback today. A dissociative wall came crashing down and I saw and experienced trauma memories that were new to me and I thought they would destroy me, but I’m okay.
The memory clarified some things and answered some questions. I’m grateful to have those answers. I feel some relief about that even though this is hard.
I’m grateful to the part who shared that memory with me. I know she was scared of how I would react. I’m grateful she trusted me.
Growing up in a doomsday cult muddled much of my ability to be emotional about the tragic things happening in the world. Growing up with the belief that everyone who died unfairly would either be resurrected or they weren’t deserving of life anyways makes taking in horrible things a lot easier- it makes it simple to think about, and it sounds on the surface like everyone will receive justice.
But even if resurrected with the memories of the pain erased, those people still lived through injustice that a loving god wouldn’t have put them through. They also aren’t being resurrected yet, so they haven’t gotten their justice yet anyways. But that thought process brings so much comfort- this idea that the universe has a system to sort everything out in a way that is sensible to human comprehension. That isn’t how the world is, though- people suffer everywhere and being complacent with that fact is to close your eyes to reality before you.
I think this realization is what can cause many ex-doomsday cult members emotional distress and exhaustion, because once you realize the unfairness of the world there is no going back to ignorance.
cool head had , at least , become easier over the past few weeks . nessarose found that it was much harder to go about arguing with daphne than to simply try and talk things out , even if the girl was far from being agreeable . in some ways , the dramatics reminded her of how she could be herself – though , never did nessa have a doubt toward her guardian ; she knew better than that . ❛ it is only a school , ❜ she explains , her voice filled with contempt toward the other . tutors would draw too much attention , as they had with her own father . daphne was past the age of needing an in - home education and , should this arrangement be permanent , needed to attend an institute of higher learning . ❛ and it isn’t far from here . why , we could even arrange for you to come home on the weekends . the train ride is an hour or two , nothing more . ❜ it had been an option for her a few years back , and really was the one that her father was pushing his daughter to choose . though , eventually , the alma mater of her mother won . ❛ you must understand , your life cannot stop because you’re afraid for your sister , ❜ nessa says , the words rather ironic , given her own past . ❛ we can handle things here . you have too much doubt in me , and i find that disrespectful . ❜
To see Bloom every weekend, it’s better than to not see her sister at all. Daphne barely notices as her clothing shifts, changes back into the intricate gold gown of a Nymph of Magix, finally allowing a few stray tears to fall from her eyes. The wind in the office died, the mist evaporating as if it never happened. In their place, a single photograph- Two parents, two daughters. “My normal life, ended the second the Ancestral Witches set foot on Domino, before then even… When my parents founded the Company of Light.” Another photo, one of said company before they went into battle. Mother, Father, motherly Faragonda, wise Saladin, stern Griffin with her green skin and her no nonsense attitude. They and Hagen had made up her band of honorary aunts and uncles. The hovering teenager falls to her knees, arms wrapped around herself. With her hair up and her shoulders uncovered, scars are visible for the first time since she’d entered Oz. Old burn marks and what looks to be a handprint, still red and raw after all these months.
“I do not yet know what’s become of them, nor of the witches. My home is a frozen wasteland and our people are dead or scattered or both. I am the last Nymph of Domino, there used to be nine of us… I mean no disrespect, you were kind enough to open your home to us and I am grateful of that. However, I promised my mother I’d watch over Bloom. My sister is the only family I know that still lives… she’s so young, vulnerable, and still a target due to the great power within her. Would the sister you sometimes speak of have entrusted your very life to someone she’d just met?”
Now that Britney Spears is free, she’s inevitably going to do something weird and off-putting because she was in a long term traumatic situation with very little control of her life and getting your shit together is hard in the best of times and that does shit to a person and I’m genuinely afraid the public who has been rooting for her for so long is going to turn on her and even start questioning whether or not it’s good for her to be free of the conservatorship and people are gonna need to remember that the answer to that question is unequivocally yes
