#but well. the Psych graduate in me always tries to make sense of tendencies I see in fandom | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

distort-opia · 2 years

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okay this isn't about batjokes but about riddlebat lmao. like i getcha if you ship them cutely (for example lego batman or telltale for batjokes) but when they ship them from the The Batman 2022 movie and they treat them like they're just a bit quirky !! of a normal relationship ship, the whole thing just makes me want to cringe cause what?? they ain't some kind of funny lil villains edgy uwu and if you do want to ship them i feel like it should be something atleast a bit like batjokes ig

I mean... tbh, I'm a little "why would you ask us, a Narnia blog, this" regarding this ask, since I'm not really a Riddlebat shipper :)) But the comparisons with Batjokes indeed seem to happen frequently, which doesn't really work if you look at it in detail. Joker and Riddler are distinctly different characters, especially in comics, and their dynamics with Bruce also heavily differ. But well, if you're a villain and obsessed with Batman... I guess the parallel is easy to draw.

When it comes to Riddlebat in The Batman (2022), I'm not really surprised by the uwu-ification of Bruce and Edward especially. This inevitably happens with this type of character; hell, it happens with most (white and even a little bit attractive) serial killers. For example, a Netflix show about Jeffrey Dahmer came out recently, and you can bet there's a fandom around it as well, despite everything. There's a segment of fandom that'll always find dark, obsessive characters attractive, and derive enjoyment from... well, not sanitizing them, but making them fluffy and cute and palatable, in a sense. Not sure if "I project on the other character in the ship and the thought of this horrible person being desperate and cute for me" is the draw, or if it's more "We're going to depict these two dark characters as what they lack in canon specifically"... or a combination, or something else entirely.

However, the latter is a phenomenon in most fandoms with darker ships, including Batjokes. It's not just Riddlebat. Fanwork tends to reflect what canon has the least of. That's how you get a lot of fluff or found family or happier fics in fandoms that have grim or tragic canon material (this is the case with Batfam-oriented works too). I personally don't begrudge fans who enjoy making or consuming lighter content for darker ships, since I understand what the draw is and the motivation behind it. I'm more of an enjoyer of the darker aspects of canon, and that's that-- I create that kind of content, and I know how to filter and navigate fandom to find what I like. There's only a problem if these fans don't make the distinction between "this is my personal headcanon and preference" and "this is canon characterization". If you unironically woobify the villain and argue they're misunderstood and actually they're so emotional and so hurt, etc. etc... then yeah, I get the frustration, Anon. At the end of the day, if you're going to ship villains who have canonically terrorized and killed people, you should be able to own it. If it makes you that uncomfortable to interact with a character this canonically dark, it's better to just move on to a different one, rather than justify their actions and rewrite the canon in your head to the point where that character isn't even recognizable anymore as themselves.

#then there's the way Joker is currently perceived by the DC fandom #Riddler does not have all that hatred attached to him #even though he's committed his fair share of crimes in the movie #and he's got plenty of similarities in MO with Ledger's Joker in TDK #he's easier to ship with Bruce as a villain because the 'stigma' of Joker doesn't apply #and he hasn't PERSONALLY harmed Bruce to the extent Joker has #but well. the Psych graduate in me always tries to make sense of tendencies I see in fandom #I like to speculate but do keep in mind it's just that #asks #fandom negativity

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thescispot · 3 years

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I had difficulty recognizing C when she arrived.

We had agreed to meet at the on-campus burger joint and I was early. Sitting in a booth in the corner, I finished up some statistics homework as well as the last of my coffee, and although I expected C at any moment, I was nevertheless startled when she peered over my shoulder, an enthusiastic grin painted on her face.

“Hi!” she chirped cheerfully, wrapping an arm around me. I returned the hug hesitantly, partly because I was in the awkward position of sitting while she was standing, but also because it had not yet registered to me that this was, in fact, C - the very person I had been waiting for.

She slid into the seat across from me and we launched immediately into comfortable conversation, exchanging pleasant greetings, and speaking to one another with a familiar ease I had not expected. We might as well have been meeting up after two weeks, when in actuality, it was nearly two years since we last spoke.

She was wearing a sunny yellow top and had her hair tied up sloppily on top of her head, revealing a pale face with large, doe eyes and a friendly disposition. I entertained the idea that her lack of makeup was what caught me off guard and explained my difficulty in immediately recognizing her but I quickly dismissed this theory as absurd; we had once been living together, after all, so her bare face could not feasibly be considered an unfamiliar sight for me.

She apologized profusely for her inability to meet up with me for the interview on two previous occasions and I assured her it was not a problem. We lamented the difficulties of school life, such as busy schedules, relentless deadlines, and the general fatigue that accompanies the Sisyphean struggle of adulthood. She complained about how much time her job took out of her day. I complained about how the lack of a job left too much time in mine. We both agreed that we could not decide if we were grateful for the looming shadow of graduation on the horizon or not; did it promise much-needed reprieve or threaten even greater distress?

I remembered when C and I had first met, moving into our dorm in late September four years ago. After a few lazy and unsuccessful attempts at unpacking, the two of us decided to seek out cold drinks at the neighboring dormitory building, Lothian, in a desperate attempt for relief from the encroaching heat. To our chagrin, we were hopelessly lost within a matter of minutes and were left wandering in circles around the campus, the sun attacking us the whole while as if driven by a personal vendetta. The two of us trudging across the fields, full of regret, must have been a funny sight, only exacerbated by the fact that we looked to be complete opposites of one another; she pale and I tan, she short and I tall, her hair a sleek curtain that brushed her shoulders, mine waist-length and frizzy. I was average-sized but she was very, very thin.

“When did it start?”

I finally worked up the courage to begin the interview. I felt I was being invasive despite her insistence that she was perfectly happy helping me with my assignment. We had spoken about this subject many times before, but something about the academic lens I was peering through felt disrespectful somehow. Almost alienating.

“In hindsight,” she said thoughtfully, “it started when I was fifteen years old. I . . . stopped finishing my dinner.”

C claimed she had always had a large appetite growing up, that she always cleaned her plate. But as her sophomore year of highschool approached, she had fallen into an insidious routine - she made sure to always leave a little bit of food behind, to never completely finish a meal. An innocent enough habit, or so she thought at the time.

“It spiralled out of control from there?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

C nodded. She related her actions from that time in her life the way one might analyze the motives and psyche of a fictional character, like she was discussing the mental health of someone else. She had a great deal to say, but her voice and manner did not betray even the slightest hint of anguish at being reminded of her troubled past.

“The eating disorder takes control of everything it can,” she said wisely.

Anorexia, in C’s experience, was not something she felt she was “suffering” from as she underwent its horrors. She was not punishing herself by not eating, it was quite the opposite. Not eating made her feel better. Invincible, even.

“I felt superhuman,” she explained. “I felt like I was honing a skill and it made me feel good about myself, that I could go to school and handle all these things in my life without needing food. It was an accomplishment.” She paused for a moment. “Really says a lot about how our culture conditions teenage girls, huh?”

We both sighed with tacit understanding.

“What if you ate more than you intended?” I asked. I tried to hide my discomfort about the whole conversation. I felt like I was trying to play the part of a therapist and it would be painfully obvious to any third party that I was woefully unprepared to do so.

“Then it was a bad day,” she said. “I felt like I failed.”

I suddenly recalled something she had mentioned often back when we lived together. She never went into great detail, and had a way of minimizing the despair this subject caused her. But it was clear to me, and probably our other hallmates as well, that her illness was not a result of merely deciding to eat less one day. It was obvious since that night she watched a music video entitled “Till it Happens to You”, drank copious amounts of vodka, and promptly had an emotional meltdown that something more significant triggered her eating disorder.

“What about your boyfriend?” I asked. “Would you say he was the cause of all this?”

“He was definitely a factor,” C replied hesitantly. “ He was older than me and the relationship was kind of, like, secret, you know? My parents didn’t approve. He would always tell me ‘fat girls are so ugly.’ And I wanted to be pretty for him, you know?”

We were both silent for a while, trying to process how something as simple as the desire to impress a boy could derail one’s adolescence so disastrously.

“One time I called myself fat and he said ‘No, babe, you’re so pretty - I could eat cereal out of your collar bones.’” C seemed embarrassed by how much pride she had once taken out of this disturbing remark.

“He wasn’t the source,” she chose her words carefully. “But he was definitely . . . the spark.” She fell quiet and I decided this avenue of conversation had extinguished itself.

“So when did people notice?”

“We were moving,” she explained, “and my parents noticed the self-harm scars I had running up my legs. They put me in therapy for a while. Eventually, I told the therapist I was, you know, done. Just done. I told her I was going to swallow a bottle of pills that night. I thanked her for trying to help but I was just over it. I was resigned about the whole thing, didn’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other. ”

C was immediately taken to the emergency room following this therapy session. At this point in her life, she described herself as having skeletal shoulders and no stomach. She had taken to loose, baggy clothes and was especially partial to sweatshirts, even in the summertime. She only weighed eighty seven pounds.

“And the therapist didn't notice?” I asked dubiously.

“She had her suspicions, I’m sure,” C said. “But she admitted to me later that she felt unqualified to handle the severity of my condition.”

I balked at the idea that no one would see their own daughter, sister, friend, disappear steadily in front of their eyes.

“There was one person,” C remembered suddenly. When she was fifteen years old, a classmate she never spoke to slipped a book onto her desk, a book about eating disorders. Inside the book was a note, encouraging her to seek help.

“I was offended at the time. I didn’t think anything was wrong with me.”

“You were in denial.”

C reached into her bag and fished around inside for her wallet. She slipped out a piece of paper but did not offer it to me. My gaze only captured the name “Lauren” scrawled at the bottom in feminine script.

“I keep the note with me everywhere I go now,” she said soberly.

C was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and major depression, as well as obsessive compulsive tendencies in regards to her weight. She was in the hospital for a miserable two months, which she described as being like “solitary confinement.”

She believes attending “Program” saved her life.

“It finally started to make sense to me that I was sick,” C said, sounding more upbeat. “The eating disorder, it distorts a person’s thinking. I was finally educated on my condition and realized it wasn’t my fault.” Learning the science behind “ it”changed her perspective.

She happily relayed to me the structure of Program, and how she felt it helped her the most during her recovery. It was an outpatient program and she was given a meal plan as well as access to therapy for her and the people in her life. “Family night was on Tuesday,” she noted. I didn’t have to ask her to elaborate.

“My mother could be . . . unforgiving of imperfection,” she looked at me searchingly, trying to make sure she had used the right words.

“Did you feel ashamed of your condition?”

“Oh yeah, big time,” she said. “I felt like I was a burden for my family.”

C recalled how she began forcing herself to eat in an effort to gain weight as soon as possible; the hospital and subsequent program, she decided, were costing her family too much money and now that she knew what was wrong with her, why not just, you know, stop?

She threw up many times as her body was not yet adjusted, not yet ready to let go of its trauma. There were two separate occasions where her nasogastric tube was displaced as a result, an experience she implied was excruciating. An especially compassionate nurse was the one to hold and comfort her during the ensuing mental breakdowns.

“The disease pulled my family together,” C claimed. Her relationship with her mother improved significantly. Guilt was something they all had to confront.

“It was hard, but it was worth it,” C said with a smile.

According to C, stigma against mental illness was a huge factor in the initial conflict with her parents. Their words likely echo in the minds of every mentally unhealthy child of color who has made the mistake of displaying such a vulnerability:

“Why are you doing this to yourself?”

C insists now that both she and her parents understand that it was the eating disorder that did this to her.

Program was run by a man named Dr. Marr, a leading researcher in eating disorders and mental health among youth, and it took place in Rancho Cucamonga. I noted how strange it was to realize that while I was learning precalculus and writing essays on Shakespeare, a girl I would one day live with was recovering practically next door, missing out on such a formative part of her life.

C and I both reached the conclusion that while the hospital helped her physically get her weight back up, all the emotional work was done in Program.

“I grew up a lot,” she said and then added, uncertainly, “I feel indebted to it, you know? It let me see parts of myself I didn’t before. I’m stronger now and I can endure so much more. Like if I could make it through this, I could make it through an algebra test.”

“And what about your identity? Did your mental illness impact your conception of yourself?”

She thought about this for a great deal of time. “Who I was and who I was meant to be...are intact. I’m sensitive, blunt, empathetic, loud, funny, I’m so many things. The eating disorder tried but it could not warp the core of who I am.”

Recovery, C believes, is all about accepting yourself.

“This is something that’s always going to be at the back of my mind,” she explained. “It’s chronic; but I’m getting better. It’s going to get better. I know it is.”

The conversation drifted. We discussed school life, working, friends, etc. She told me about her boyfriend, Ian, and how happy he makes her. I reminded her how the two of them fell asleep while video-chatting with one another one day during freshman year. She told me about an infuriating roommate she had had to deal with the previous winter. I told her about a fight I’d had with my former best friend. She told me about her cat and I told her about my dog. She told me about the time a customer pulled a gun out at her job. I told her why I quit mine. A meetup I expected to take no more than thirty minutes managed to eat up five hours.

Finally, I thanked her for her help and willingness to share with me for my assignment.

“No problem,” she shrugged. “I’m spreading awareness, you know? I’m kind of like, the best case scenario.” She laughed and I agreed. We said our goodbyes.

I was halfway home when it finally occurred to me why I couldn’t recognize her earlier. It wasn’t a haircut, or a new wardrobe, or the lack of makeup that changed C’s appearance in the last two years.

It was the fact that she had, to my utter delight, put on quite a bit of weight since we last met.

#science writing #science #mental health #mental health stigma #anorexia #Anorexia nervosa #eating disoder recovery #eating disorder #Interview #journalism #science journalism #depression #Psychology #neuroscience

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ronaldmrashid · 6 years

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What To Do When Stock Market Volatility Returns

Every so often, the stock market will take a dive when you least expect it. When we sense danger, the natural tendency is to run the other way, preferably in a herd for survival. As a result, sell-offs often intensify as computer algorithms now join us humans in rushing out of positions.

As I’ve gotten older, despite much larger absolute dollar swings, I’ve become more sanguine in times of stock market volatility.

Here are some things you can do to reduce your fear and not sell or buy at inopportune times.

During Times Of Stock Market Volatility

1) Review your financial objectives. There is no point saving and investing money if it doesn’t have a purpose. Once you crystallize the reasons why you’re working so hard and taking risk, you’ll be able to make more rational decisions. You’ll also re-motivate yourself to do what’s financially best for you and your family.

Here are some common financial objectives:

* Save enough in after-tax investments to give yourself optionality to do something new.

* Return at least 2X the risk-free rate of return each year.

* Save enough to make your child a 529 plan millionaire so she can graduate an independent woman after college all thanks to you.

* Save enough to cover any long-term care costs for aging parents.

* Max out your 401(k) every year without fail since few get pensions anymore.

Our key objective: Because we tried for so long to have a child and were finally blessed with one in 2017, my key objective is to enable my wife and me to be stay at home parents for the first five or six years of his life before he goes to kindergarten. Once he goes to kindergarten, one or both of us get to stop sacrificing our careers and income to go back to work since he’ll be busy most of the day.

2) Determine your risk tolerance to the best of your ability. To determine your risk tolerance, simply ask yourself how much you’re willing to lose in your investments before needing to sell. If you never plan to sell because you know stocks and bonds have generally gone up and to the right for decades, perhaps you have a high risk tolerance. If you plan to take profits if the stock market is down 20% or more, perhaps you have a medium risk tolerance. If you’re freaked out by a 10% correction, then perhaps your risk tolerance is very low.

Just know that whatever you think your risk tolerance is, you’re likely overestimating it by at least 10%. When people started losing big money during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, there was mass panic because they were also losing value in their houses, which are usually owned with debt. Meanwhile, when your company is going through its third or fourth round of mass layoffs, the desire to raise cash becomes almost impossible to prevent, especially if you have a family to support.

Our risk tolerance: When we left work at 34 respectively, our risk tolerance was medium-to-high since we only had to provide for ourselves. Further, it took a lot of guts to truncate promising careers so young. But due to our current #1 objective of being stay at home parents for at least five or six years, our risk tolerance is now medium-to-low. We would feel uncomfortable losing more than 20% of our after-tax investments, which cover 100% of our living expenses.

3) Understand the historical returns of different stock and bond portfolio weightings. Knowledge truly is your best friend when it comes to investing. There are no investment guarantees, but we do have historical data we can study to get an idea of how our investment portfolios will perform over time.

Given you’ve gone through your financial objectives and made a best guesstimate on your risk tolerance, you are rationally going to build an investment portfolio that meets your risk profile. Here are the historical returns between 1926 – 2016 according to research from the Vanguard Group.

A 0% weighting in stocks and a 100% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 5.4% since 1926, beating inflation by roughly 3% a year.

A 20% weighting in stocks and an 80% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 6.6%, with the worst year -10.1%

A 30% allocation to stocks and a 70% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 7.2% a year. But based on history, you also increase the magnitude of a potential loss by 75% (from -8.1% to -14.2%).

A 40% weighting in stocks and a 60% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 7.8%, with the worst year -18.4%.

A 50% weighting in stocks and a 50% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 8.3%, with the worst year -22.3%.

A 60% weighting in stocks and a 40% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 8.3%, with the worst year -22.3%.

A 70% weighting in stocks and a 30% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 9.1%, with the worst year -30.1%.

A 80% weighting in stocks and a 20% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 9.5%, with the worst year -40%.

A 100% weighting in stocks and a 0% weighting in bonds has provided an average annual return of 10.2%, with the worst year -40.1%. We saw this sell-off happen in 2008-2009 when many investors sold at the absolute bottom.

My public investment portfolio weighting: I’ve gone from a 95% average equities weighting in my 20s, to an 80% average equities weighting in my 30s, to a now 60% average equities weighting in my early 40s. My objective is to earn 2X the risk-free rate of return, or now roughly 6% a year.

Based on historical returns, having a 30% stock / 70% bond weighting for my return objective would be more appropriate. However, given my financial background and passive income, I’m comfortable taking on more risk. After getting an MBA and spending my entire career in finance, it would be strange if I wasn’t comfortable with investing.

4) Make up for your losses with extra work. Whenever your investments lose money, a humbling way to look at your paper or realized loss is to figure out how many more months of work will be required to make up for your loss. This exercise will not only help you assess your true risk tolerance, but it will also motivate you to build extra income streams.

One of your goals on the road to financial independence is to never experience a decrease in your net worth each year. In the beginning, your income and aggressive savings should be enough to consistently grow your net worth. But once you start amassing a large investment portfolio, there will be a breakpoint where your investments may start generating a significant boost or drag to your net worth. This is one of the reasons why you should dial down risk the wealthier you get.

If your investments are losing money, get offended at your sensibilities. Then get motivated to do some consulting work or take on some gig economy jobs or my favorite, build a side hustle online. Only as a last resort should you be selling and drawing down principal to pay for life.

My hustle: When I started losing big bucks starting in 2008, I decided to finally start Financial Samurai in 2009. I knew it wouldn’t make a lot of money in the beginning, but I had to at least try in order to give me options in the future. If Uber or Lyft had been popular back then, I’m sure I would try and make extra money at night as well.

5) Always have a comfortable cash hoard equal to 5% – 10% of your investable assets. When the stock market is falling apart, you will feel most helpless if you don’t have a cash cushion. By having a cash hoard, you will not only have a financial cushion, you will also have the firepower to take action during violent sell-offs.

Buying stocks during a downturn is a positive that counteracts the negative of losing money from your investments. Sometimes it feels like shooting a rifle at a fighter jet bombing your village, but at least you’re doing something about the siege. At least this helps your psyche.

My cash: At any given moment, I’ve always got between 5% – 10% of my investable assets in cash, especially now that money market rates are paying close to 2%. As a result, I never feel helpless during a stock market correction anymore. Instead, I feel excited to put some cash which I don’t need to work.

6) Have a concrete plan of action. Given you always have spare cash to take advantage of opportunity, you should always develop a plan whenever there are significant changes in the market. For example, we know that the S&P 500 moves +/0 ~0.76% a day on average. Therefore, if you are long term bullish, you should consider buying when the S&P 500 sells off 2X, 3X, 4X, or 5X greater than average.

What I’m doing: My goal is to maintain a roughly 60/40 stock/bonds split. When the equities market is selling off, my stock weighting naturally declines. Therefore, I will look to re-up my stock weighting whenever there is a 1.5% or greater decline in the S&P 500. Generally, I will deploy capital in three to five tranches over a 5% – 10% decline. If the S&P 500 declines by greater than 10%, I will redeploy a set amount of capital for every 1.5% decline over three to five tranches again. Given I don’t plan to buy another property for a while, my goal is to invest 100% of my savings each month to generate passive income.

7) Extend the investment time horizon. We used to joke on Wall Street that whenever we made a bad investment we’d describe it as, “a long-term investment.” But if you can truly extend your investment timeframe into the decades, you’ll feel better about your paper losses.

The trick I’ve learned which helps me elongate my investment time horizon is to think in the future what my kid or younger relatives will think about asset prices today. Every one of us wishes we had purchased and held stocks and real estate 30 years ago. Therefore, think about what the children in our lives will think about the investment opportunities we have today.

My time horizon: I’m certain stocks and real estate will be higher by the time my kid enters the workforce circa 2039, therefore, I’m comfortably in the buy and hold mode. Whenever there are corrections in the S&P 500 index or stocks I believe are long-term winners, I utilize my cash hoard to buy.

Then I imagine the day when my son graduates from college and ventures into the real world to be his own independent man. If he’s a good person with a kind heart, I will be that loving father who will one day say, “I’m so proud of all the struggles you’ve had to overcome. Let mom and dad help you with anything you need, because surprise! We invested in stocks and real estate when you were a baby, just in case you decided investing back then would have been a great idea.”

Of course if he’s mean and rotten, we’ll donate all the money to charity instead. The one thing we’ll at least surprise him with is that we’ll have registered his domain as a URL in case he wants to own his presence online. Now that’s a great idea!

8) Keep busy doing something more pleasurable. It’s counterproductive to overly focus on your tanking investments when you’ve got objectives 1 – 7 down. Instead, go have some sangria with friends and loved ones. Go for a nice free long walk in the park. Exercise. Life is the same whether stocks are going up or down.

My activities: I always feel better after a good game of tennis or softball. The endorphins kick in, the body becomes nice and sore, and my mind feels like it got a nice massage. I also spend more time writing on Financial Samurai because writing is cathartic. It helps me work through logic and emotion to see things more clearly.

9) Earmark some profits to pay for a better life. Instead of having the market destroy all your money, you should consider spending your profits on yourself, especially if you’ve hit your financial objectives. Otherwise, there’s really no point saving and investing. You want to consistently crystallize the value of your investments, which is why buying real assets that provide utility like a house feels so good. Alternatively, you can use your profits to buy experiences that tend to appreciate over time as well.

What I’ve spent money on: I’ve used some profits to buy a family car prior to our son’s birth. Sometimes I catch myself at a stop light feeling giddy the car was bought with the returns from my severance check. I also built an awesome deck facing the ocean off our master bathroom with some NASDAQ proceeds. Eventually, when our son turns five, we’ll take some profits to pay for an exciting international family vacation.

Although I could have made more money if I kept the money invested, it feels wonderful to actually see the investments be utilized for a better life. My biggest hope now is that my son’s 529 plan returns enough in the next 17 years to provide him one or two years of free college tuition.

Stock Market Corrections Will Happen

Accept that part of earning a reward is taking on risk. Over the long run, your risk should pay off if you have the proper asset allocation and time horizon.

The only people who lose are those who are too afraid to take any risk at all. These are the people who hoard most of their net worth in cash. These are also the people who stay at one job forever because they’re too afraid to move. If you have a clear plan for how you will allocate capital, you will better conquer your fear of investing. If not, you can always just have a robo-advisor automatically invest for you once you’ve established your risk parameters.

If you believe in the bull market, then you should buy the dips. If you believe a bear market is imminent, then you should sell into strength. Given my investment horizon is at least 20 years, I plan on consistently generating enough cash flow to buy as many dips as possible.

Related: Why Real Estate Will Always Be More Attractive Than Stocks

Readers, what are some ways you’re able to stay the course no matter how volatile the stock market gets? Are you buying the dips or selling the rallies?

The post What To Do When Stock Market Volatility Returns appeared first on Financial Samurai.

from https://www.financialsamurai.com/what-to-do-when-stock-market-volatility-returns/

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