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scoobydoodean · 9 months

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I just want you to know how disheartened I constantly am in the SPN fandom and how I have to constantly unfollow SPN blogs because of the way Dean gets vilified to hell and back in posts. It's so hard for me as a victim of child abuse that really relates to Dean's struggles to see Dean get accused of being abusive or scrutinized as though he were in the same shoes as John. I hate the way it's all about who is worse to each other... Sam or Dean... who is the true victim between them... when they are just both victims of impossible circumstances that get through it all by loving and caring for each other. They both do shitty stuff but everyone wants to paint one as a saint and another as a villain and it's so tasteless. They are both sad little men whose only happiness is their brother, who went through it all with them, who has always been there. Idk, I just wish people appreciated more that Sam and Dean have been through hell together and they're both a bit fucked up but Dean isn't some villain and neither is Sam. Your takes are so refreshing it's so nice to see someone who gets it. Thanks!

❤️ None of these guys are villains! They are fucked up and sometimes they do fucked up things but they are overwhelmingly well-meaning, and even when they aren't they make sense? Like I would rather talk all day about why they are the way they are than spend time vilifying them (unless I am fucking around with crits in which case Sam and Cas are evil! Horrible! Villains of all time, I tell you!)

I think it's a damn shame that a chunk of people here would rather do abuse victim vs. abuser hours with the show—in such a hypocritical way too—and this is not the first time I have, in my notifs, had someone tell me how upsetting they find that vilification from the perspective of their personal experience. Like this is a group of fans who seem to pride themselves on being "sensitive" to victims of abuse and accuse people like me of being "abuse apologists" and being "insensitive" to real people by not "acknowledging" that Dean is an abuser (as if that wasn't a take built from a vile level of hypocrisy, cherry-picking, and willful misinterpretation) but I have had you and people with related experiences in my notifs many times saying how upsetting that framing of Dean is to them based on their own experiences with abuse and relating to Dean in that.

I happen to think a balanced perspective on the show and it's clearly-meant-to-be-sympathetic and well-meaning characters with various traumas and outlooks, presents a much broader stage for real compassion for real people with very diverse lived experiences actually—instead of a state of being where only one type of victim of bad experiences deserves compassion. I mean that's just if this is how people want to talk about Supernatural (2005)—if they wanna get preachy. Personally, I just find the entire argument—the way everything is framed to vilify Dean and absolve everyone around him of any bad action—super gross and manipulative and sometimes I can tell it isn't on purpose and it's coming from a place of someone's own pain and trauma, but other times it feels 100% intentional and then it feels extra ugly.

It isn't just the cherry picking and the dismissal but also how manipulative the framing becomes in order to support the goal of villainizing Dean, and how that manipulative framing in itself can invoke memories of ones own experience with an abuser's manipulations to make them believe they "deserved" the abuse they got or it was actually all their fault. And like. None of this means people can't do whatever the fuck they want in terms of interpreting the show but I just wish they'd stop being so preachy about it and talking about how sensitive and compassionate they are when they are triggering a lot of feelings for people with different experiences from their own—they just don't give a shit about those people or refuse to see them because they don't find their experiences relatable.

I really think people just need to watch the show and 1) learn how to look at someone they don't initially find relatable and work on understanding how they tick, starting from a blank slate perspective and guided by the desire to look at them in good faith instead of seek out flaws and evil intentions 2) learn how to not like a character without jumping to find a moral justification for not liking them. It is okay to just not like a character—to say they leave a bad taste in your mouth. You don't have to start making moral judgements about people who don't feel the same way about that character or invent things to frame the character as some evil manipulative mastermind.

Like at one time I would say—the first time I watched SPN—I was a MAJOR Sam hater. I thought he was horrifically selfish and controlling and I thought he was an ugly, manipulative man-baby brat. So like from the perspective of how I thought of Sam, I can say I can understand how someone might come to similar conclusions about Dean and then feed those conclusions and build on them. But at some point you have to take a step back and ask yourself what you want from this story and why you're watching it, and I don't think the answer should be, "To make myself miserable and marinate in increasing loathing for this character and the story as a whole as I continuously look for more reasons to hate some guy who is increasingly becoming somebody I just made up while the characters around him continue to love and support him and be willing to die for him".

#mail #dont feed the stans after midnight #Things about me are I will complain about this! Frequently!

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ruby-whistler · 3 years

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(quicksandblock) hi! I just left you a giant wall-of-text response on your Dream post, and though I think it came across well enough, I just want to state my lack of hostile intent over here as well lol. I know stuff like this that people feel strongly about can get very tense so I just wanted to make doubly certain you know I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything. it kind of sucks that I feel like I need to clarify that but that's fandom culture for you sometimes :P

also, I would love to talk to you about Dream characterization. I think I disagree with you on a lot of different points and I love his character, so I'm very interested in understanding your perspective!

hey, hello! found a c!dream enthusiast/enjoyer, that’s cool, hi! :]

[copied part i put in front of each reply, hence different capitalization]

Alright, so first as a quick disclaimer, I’m going to put a summary of the original post’s points, just to ensure that we’re on the same page;

The post does say:

- don’t dehumanize c!Dream because it continuously hurts people who relate to and/or sympathize with him, also dehumanization in general is an inherently wrong mindset

- don’t attack people who sympathize with him because he’s a victim of abuse besides other things

The post never says:

- you cannot hate c!Dream and not sympathizing with him is wrong

- the things c!Dream has done are to any degree excused

- don’t dehumanize c!Dream because he’s a good person

- people who dehumanize c!Dream are real life abuse apologists

If you read the post and didn’t get these points from it, i advise you to reread it as I made pretty much all of these abundantly clear.

[end of disclaimer]

i never said anyone could infringe on his human rights! i… literally never said that! i said “they ignore” when characters do it, but that was a run-on sentence, i get how that might’ve been easily misunderstood. but yes, he’s a fictional character, i’d never said people could actually hurt him or anything in that sense.

the thing is, i still find them saying they enjoy it… wrong? the people yelling in tommy’s chat for c!dream to hurt him more were freaking victim blaming pricks, and if what they did was the widespread fandom opinion it would be hurting actual people with trauma. i ask people to look at the c!dream situation with the same severity, because it’s actually happening and it’s highly disturbing, not just from principle, but because of what it leads to within the community.

sorry for comparing his situation to c!tommy, but narratively i believe the prison arc is a deliberate parallel to exile, and comparing his situation to someone they’ve not dehumanized seems to be the only way to knock sense into some people.

i am happy you don’t seem to be one of the people who dehumanize him. you’re not the target audience of this post - neither are abuse victims who project onto him. i know people who c!tommy reminds of their abuser (because of personality traits), or even c!quackity, that’s fine. they’re totally free to hate their respective character, of course, without being,, actually right about them. that being said, majority of this fandom is dehumanizing c!dream and being mad at people sympathizing with him “on behalf of the abuse victims”, not actual victims themselves, and by doing this they are unknowingly hurting other people rather than helping anything, and spreading misinformation as well as making a lot of fans in general uncomfortable. i believe this is something that needs to change in the community.

hating him is fine, but group-based dehumanization in my mind is not. if you go on twitter and search “c!dream” and see 100 people saying they wish the abuse victim you project onto is hurt more (this is not a twitter thing, c!dream tag is the same thing, a majority of the crit is untagged but it,, doesn’t really matter because even tagged hate riles up more people) that freaking sucks and is something that the community needs to work on, not shoved under the rug and pretend it wasn’t there because some people tag it.

“the abuse victims who are hurt by people saying they should be sympathetic towards Dream are in fact just as hurt as the abuse victims who relate to Dream and are hurt by people saying his evil.”

this is not wrong. it’s right actually, but i’m not talking about this fandom calling him evil/unable to be sympathized with/irredeemable. i mean, that’s hurtful dehumanization as well, but this community doesn’t “say he’s evil” it “says he deserves to keep being horribly abused and/or die”.

and… i wasn’t talking about/saying abuse victims should sympathize with him either? i’ve said like five times that people can hate him as much as they want, but dehumanization is another thing. it’s the majority of this community (this post wasn’t targeting abuse victims in the slightest) taking away his positive human qualities, hence believing he doesn’t deserve human rights, and turning him into some sort of punching bag or personification of evil, which i find deeply disturbing since he’s being related to by abuse victims, and also blatantly incorrect to the character.

so, you’d be right, if the situation was what you described. it… really isn’t. the dream smp fanbase isn’t populated by abuse victims in any corner. it’s two small groups, one of them hurt (undeservingly) by a few and the other one hurt (no more or less undeservingly) by a majority of the fandom without anyone batting an eye.

and this post isn’t even about abuse victims in the first place; it’s about dehumanization. while its impact plays a big role in why i wrote this, things like these being widespread in the fandom makes so many people uncomfortable or pressured not to sympathize with a recently made sympathetic character that they might (but could not) relate to. relating to him myself, i might not have a say in this, but my compassion in general made me switch over to the c!dream sympathetic people, not anyone in the community or projection.

the results i relayed here weren’t the only results of the survery. people mentioned pandora’s vault as their reasons for being dream apologists,, over and over and over again. a lot of them mentioned the fandom response specifically.

it’s making the fandom not only unsafe to a small group of traumatized people, but also fans in general, who are equally as important to feel comfortable. hell, the reason dream apologists are such a tight-knit community that accepts little to no outside feedback is because of the hatred that is endlessly nurtured outside, that makes people feel anxious or not safe just for sympathizing with a victim of abuse.

i myself find this a problem that people should attempt to change beyond using crit tags more. feel free to not agree with that, but a lot of affected people do.

i agree the disc finale was actually cathartic! well, that’s a lie, i used to hate c!dream’s guts before that but that was the very instance where i saw a person behind the mask and went “oh, this is a whole mess isn’t it”, but it was,, cathartic to a lot of other people that didn’t use to have intense empathy to inanimate objects as children djskdjsk (i was a weird kid and still am, don’t mind that)

do you know what is cathartic? when a dog terribly bites a child, gets kicked away and gets put in a cage. do you know what isn’t cathartic? …that dog getting repeatedly beaten, starved and abused while trapped in said cage. even in fiction, and i say that as someone who was terribly bitten by a dog.

i don’t mind fictional characters suffering - frick, angst is my jam, i’ll write a character dying over and over again and have fun, but people justify that or make fun of people who don’t by saying openly that they enjoy it,, because he’s done bad things.

here comes the double standard. the exile arc wasn’t cathartic just because tommy burnt down a house, because hell, that wasn’t fair retribution. same goes for dream.

there is a difference between enjoying dark media (something i do frequently and is something i like doing) and open dehumanization and often normalized harassment of people who don’t do the same or condemn that. that is something that in my mind shouldn’t be a mainstream thing in the community.

to be fair, people saying an abuse victim no longer being hurt is “bad writing” or “insensitive” as i’ve seen people say would probably piss me off, but i’m,, not going to harass them. maybe a passive-aggressive vague-post if enough big accounts do it, but i think that’s justified. feel free to disagree - i still respect abuse victims who wouldn’t like that, but people who just don’t want the writers to humanize a character they’ve dehumanized will probably grind my gears.

this community,, isn’t working like this. i wrote this because people are repeatedly being hurt by the community or feel bad in it because of widespread opinions and dehumanization of a character that is as of late written to be sympathetic to the audience. that’s not a disagreement, the people who are actually sympathetic are a minority in the fandom, which would be fine with me, if they weren’t constantly invalidated, triggered and harassed as a direct result of the dehumanization discussed in this post.

besides the fact that the principle of dehumanization applied to c!dream is wrong - and if people find themselves doing that, it’s good for them to find a way to realize that, such as this post, because projection =/= dehumanization, and this post is targeting one, not the other - this is why i wrote this post. i still believe my points are valid and important for this fandom to consider.

you know, we could talk about the characterization right now - but after this i’m going onto a two month long hiatus for the sole purpose of studying the character. i’m not joking, this is what i’m dedicating my summer to. since i’m also closing my asks because of this, i can write this down and @ you when i’m done? :D i’d love to talk about him but i’m going to have so much more evidence after this, so maybe we can put this off for a while if you don’t mind! of course feel free to continue the dehumanization debate in a string of reblogs since it’s pretty much a different debate entirely.

( @zrenia @caketexturepack just tagging some people who responded to your response and might be interested in the continuation of the debate - also curious anon i saw your two asks i was just busy djsjdks please don’t spam about people who replied to me, i have a bad memory but i write this stuff down, actually )

#my asks #discourse #tw dehumanization #tw abuse #tw torture #tw animal abuse #long post

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parrotbeak · 7 years

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I wrote that Steven Universe-The Simpsons comparison with the decision to not mention the colonial angle. But it’s become difficult to read posts, some critical, some not, relating to any of the Earth-made gems and spot the same indifference that’s interwoven with my life as Indo. Hopefully this post educates a little on what it means (or can mean; I only speak for myself) to be caught in-between. I normally couldn’t care less, but in this one case, don’t interact if anti-crit or non-crit.

The don’t-think-this-is-all short of the Indo experience is that the Dutch way back figured it’d be nifty if the Dutch East Indies had a supply of loyal people with a reason to stay right where they are. Marriages between Dutch men and Indonesian women were motivated in order to produce a new identity of people that’d be invested in serving the DEI because that, the colony holding both roots, was their home. The duality of being Indo plays a role to this day, past the violence of 1940-1949, the unwelcome by the Netherlands to which the arrival of Indos (and Moluccans) was inconvenient as well as never supposed to happen, and the undealt-with trauma that followed when quietly adapting was all there was to do. I’m not going into detail, but for me, having been born decades after the end of the DEI, I miss the place. Rationally and morally that’s ridiculous, but emotionally it promises so many answers I’ll never get. A lot of my life perspectives are based on considerations of what being in-between means. And though I love the Netherlands dearly (culturally), being part Asian also makes me different and alerts me of just how much my country still hasn’t given its DEI history a place.

So, for me the theme of home in colonial and war context is big and SU lines that stand out to me include “I never asked for it to be this way. I never asked to be made!”, “I don't have memories of it, just feelings. I know I can never go back to Homeworld, but it's hard not to have some feelings for where you came from.”, “I've been fighting from the second I broke free of the Earth's crust, because of what YOU did to my colony! Because of what YOU did to my planet!”, “Who knows what they would do to me back home after what I did to Jasper? I can't go back to Homeworld and I can't stay here.” I’m going to go ahead requesting that if the urge comes to throw a “you’re projecting”, don’t, because odds are I know better just how much SU fails at all of this. These quotes are just a selection reminding what the show could've been and that the writers do have an understanding of what they’re pretending to dig into before disingenuously scrambling back to the Status Quo of everybody getting along because nothing has meaning. I could’ve done without them shoving that nonsense out to a worldwide audience.

With “On the Run”, I don’t see a tale of “just” abuse as I get the impression generally is interpreted. What I see is a child stolen from her destroyed heritage who is given nothing to cope with that and forge herself a new identity. The happy resolution of what Pearl in particular has done to her isn’t giving her better access to the story she belongs to, but eradicating her psychological ties to it. Like, I know what it’s like to have to think about this stuff and I can’t imagine external judgement and disassociation would’ve helped me figure things out. And that would've come from my own parent, not an ugly outsider like Pearl, let alone an outsider responsible for the loss. That’s the bizarre part of “On the Run”. It knows there’s an inherent attachment difference between Amethyst and Pearl, but it lies around it because otherwise Pearl can’t be easily forgiven. The rebellion was right, of course, but sometimes in doing the right thing you can’t avoid causing harm and your moral compass is still on display in how you deal with the aftermath of your actions. Although it is insult to injury to me that RPG are conditional freedom fighters. Each one of them was ultimately motivated by own gain. Ruby and Sapphire wanted each other, Pearl wanted Rose, and Rose wanted human men. This isn’t something I fault them for, but it’d be nice if the show was honest about it and acknowledged the current passivity. The only original CG who is pure and operates by ideology and who could’ve pulled off shutting out Amethyst’s ordeal while still not being insensitive is Bismuth. Instead, she gave Amethyst a kind of support Amethyst usually only gives, never receives. She even shared a non-judgy detail what amethysts are like, which we’ve never seen RPG do! How come Bismuth is the one whom we’re supposed to believe is bad?

Where Amethyst has meaning to me in direct likeness, Jasper is a bit more complex, falling into my sympathy through my grandfather and the (violence-induced) personality traits that have been passed on, being mine and also not. Notwithstanding what I judge, I cannot disapprove of Jasper on the whole. I’ve grown up knowing of a man who was overly dedicated to his role as soldier, who couldn’t keep his home, whose successes were of lesser meaning than his non-whiteness, and who in response only became more dedicated. Pride’s funny like that. I’m not against NPD and child soldier interpretations for Jasper, though I don’t share them, but I experience frustration that the nature of her existence in relation to her uncomfortable place in society is not picked up on as a possibility too. I wondered for a while why Lapis’s lack of (consistent) characterization does not stop peeps from acknowledging the potential she has (had) while Jasper gets more of a “either/or” treatment, until I realized that with Lapis too the home angle barely gets talked about. Ditto for Peridot; my main problem with her redemption is that it wasn’t completed. We only got to see how she came to love Earth, not how she disconnected from Homeworld. I’ve only twice seen a post bring that up. Same disregard is reason #~4 I’m not dealing with HBA fans anymore.

I dislike posts that suggest Amethyst owes RPG anything. I dislike posts that pose that Amethyst feels impure for not being a CG by choice. I dislike posts that place Amethyst and Jasper on incompatible ends as if they’re not different expressions of the same duality conflict. I do not tell what to ship or not, but from the above it should be clear that I hold a negative opinion of ships involving any member of the Famethyst with anyone who has proven not to understand (do the people who ship understand?). A particular thing that’s been on my mind with Jasper and Lapis ever since “a lapis terraforms” is the theory -- a miniscule possibility that makes my hair stand on end -- that Lapis was involved with the creation of Beta. Roughly the only reason I want her arc to continue is to have confirmation that that theory is wrong. It needs to be wrong. And on a final matter, trying to put this as delicately as I can: I hope all who have compared Homeworld to Nazi Germany come from a place where they own those words. Because there’s a distinct lack of other (and at times more fitting) comparisons. Like, I’ve only ever seen one person compare Homeworld’s deal to the invasion of the Americas and nothing on any other. Just in general, I’m not comfortable with understanding evil only as an externalized condition.

If possible, I’d like to see some more consideration whenever an Earth-made gem is the topic. A loss like theirs is a bad one, and even if you’d argue SU deals with it horribly in a way that can be ignored, both Amethyst and Jasper have made references to their troubles as a result of the loss. I may as well add, to any (future) writers, a piece of advice. When your worldbuilding requires you to create societal details, keep in mind that life’s stranger than fiction and nothing you can come up with doesn’t have a real-life parallel, sometimes with memory still fresh (there’s nothing colonial in SU that’s new to me) or even ongoing. It’s pointless to tell you to educate yourself because you can’t always do that if you don’t know what to look for (and as I can attest, even with a lead it can be difficult), but you can always be a decent person about what you try to do. If you decide on certain themes, carry them full and sincere instead of suddenly hiding behind claims of intentional naivity. It’s not difficult to think of how a certain event ought to affect each character and either reject the event if it gets in the way of the goal or plan for the outcome.

To end on a constructive note, these are specific things I would’ve liked SU to do instead:

Be clear about the place of imperfect gems in society, including the occurence of beta productions. We’ve got, like, five random sources right now and they’re contradicting and vague at best.

Be clear whether Rose (and any others of the pink court) is from Earth or not. It matters.

It creeps me out how the show refuses to decide whether Amethyst is an adult or a child and pretty much lets it depend on whether it wants Steven alone or not. Especially creepy given that Amethyst is stolen while Steven is the grand heir.

Be thorough on gem names. I never thought that moment where Peridot calls herself “Peridot” instead of her code was a moment for her, because in order to be “Peridot”, no other peridots may be around. No other peridots may share in what she has. That’s not “d’awww!”, that’s horrible. It bugs me with the Ruby Squad that we know them only by names Steven’s given them and I don’t get why we haven’t got a gem yet who chose their own name as a way to reject Homeworld’s identity rules. Only Amethyst’s scene of discovering her code made sense. (Needless to say, this non-commitment to name significance is why the DeMayo/Universe and Steven/Nora deals are laughable at best.)

Any plot necessity for Steven and Amethyst not to ask questions is dealt with by focussing on why they don’t ask questions. Fear of what emotions they might unleash? Fear of conflict between the teller and the not-teller? Fear of losing certainties? Fear of being unable to handle the answer? Fear of having to ask more questions? Or maybe they know the answers they need but not the questions to get at them. Stuff like this is like a sudoku; you have some answers and you know there’s more, but you can’t formulate a means to get those answers without finding the starter points first.

Garnet would’ve never said “For Amethyst to be herself“ in “Bubbled”, because, holy heckles, that’s rich coming from Ms. “We kept Amethyst”.

Going back to “Stronger Than You” after “Earthlings” leaves me with distaste. Jasper vaguely seems to respond to “And I won’t let you hurt my planet!”, a line that ought to hurt and infuriate her from what we know now, but it’s barely noticeable and gets contextually hidden by a closeup slasher smile. Either [my planet] should not be there or Jasper’s response should get focus. Yes, it’s Garnet’s song, but you can’t play over this like that. (I despise how the crewniverse hid an ethnicity context behind a sexuality one.)

Malachite would’ve gotten Sugilite’s deal (and Sugilite something much better). Lapis would’ve fused with the aim to trap the fusion and give the CGs a clean shot, having nothing better to hope for than that Steven would save her from whatever fate would be Jasper’s. But the unexpected happens when the two fuse, Lapis’s knowledge that this one act locks her from her home for good and Jasper’s resurfaced trauma of the loss of her home mixing into a singlemindedness neither could’ve foreseen or can control. Malachite would’ve escaped and periodically resurfaced as a break from the Cluster plotline and something fresh in the gem recovery narrative.

The moment Peridot brings up the plans for the Earth colony in "It Could've Been Great", Amethyst would not respond identical to Garnet and Pearl, but rather with a hint of wonder. She was made for it and it was supposed to be made for her; shameful but her story nonetheless. Peridot becomes the person she tries to get more information from what happened and what things could’ve been like after all this time of RPG proving untrustworthy. That ableist nonsense of “Beta” does not occur.

Amethyst and Jasper “bond” after one or the other figures out the other’s identity, if only by playing into Jasper’s anger. Amethyst later defects (though never betrays), resulting in her own time of learning on HW and later visiting/being sent to the pink station, where her story can overlap with whatever is the equivalent of the abduction arc. Consequences of Amethyst leaving are progress in Garnet’s growth into leadership, major self-reflection by Pearl, probs something like Peridot boosting the ranks (Lapis and Bismuth deserve time to themselves), and, since I want Amethyst and Lars to be BFFs over Purple Puma, for this to be a hit on Lars that later helps Amethyst understand RPG’s choices and for which she’d apologize/make up in the equivalent of “Wanted” or thereafter. It could probably also be incorporated in Lars reflecting on his lost friendship with Ronaldo and the choices he made there.

I’m not sure what I want for Jasper. Her getting corrupted is fine by me, especially if she’d be crucial in developing a healing process, but I really wish SU had handled corruption better. Finding peace with her peers would be nice. I’d also like her being able to empathize with HBA (while not tolerating her actions) in a “I’m not where I’m supposed to be and neither are you” sense.

SU avoids talking about it, but it stands to reason some of HW’s planets were populated. You don’t have an army if you don’t have wars. It’s been my interpretation for a long time that Yellowtail is fully alien, Vidalia possibly part alien, and Onion at least half alien, all survivors or descendents thereof from another colonized planet. And after that odd scene between Topaz and Onion, I like to think Topaz is from that colony and that her encounter on Earth makes her think and spread the anti-colonialism beyond Earth.

#SU critical #History #Cartoons #Colonialism

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welcome-to-the-wishingwell · 7 years

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Space, Image and sound... or the unintentional manifestation of nightmares

Be Still My Child - Look me in the eyes and tell me what you see

Part 1

when i started this year i was still coming down from the hecticness that was last year. performing in my first professional circus show. getting a stunt job for american tv, while juggling working on my second year projects, a job and a social life.

I decided that i was going to do a piece on meditation and mindfulness to try and calm the storm that was raging in my head, i originally was wanting to do a piece that involved a computer screen that projected colors onto a mandala on a wall. (I like mandalas because of the symmetry) but this idea was shut down in the crit session (i was told that it could be misconstrued for being culturally insensitive and also a little bit tacky if i was going for the whole meditation thing) but the idea of the colors stayed and the computer stayed so i had a good start to go for.

Moving forward about a week Clint showed us examples of work that ranged from the surreal to the seemingly random and just disgusting projects and it got me thinking, what if instead of creating something that helps everyone relax through “generic meditation” i create something that helps just me relax.

The internal research into what relaxed me was very interesting, i like to play video games, watch sports and movies (like most people) but the thing that stood out to me the most was the music, music was the one way i could calm my self down 100% of the time.

The funny part was that death metal calmed me down the most. in the course of this paper i went to two metal concerts and it was fantastic, jumping into the mosh pit and throwing a few elbows and getting a few back, coming out of the concerts really calmed me down got a lot of pent up emotions out of my body

Part 2, I have become Alice falling down the rabbit hole

After the formative assessment i got a really terrible mark and it was 100% because i didn't write anything down on this blog and now looking back on it i rushed it and wrote about 10% of what was in my head down. but at the time i just thought it was cause my idea was just terrible.

It was also around this time that i started to get busy with other projects and outside uni things and opportunities and all this pressure and weight dropped on me and i thought that id be fine...

This is when i decided that i wanted to really go the opposite direction and explore what makes people uncomfortable so i really started focusing on nightmares.

i started researching Zdzisław Beksiński, he was a polish painter who specialized in painting dystopian surrealism or in other words he liked to paint what we would call nightmares, they arent quite scary but they give you a very uncomfortable/uneasy feel the more that you look at them, you may not know the name but you might have seen his work

the next artist i researched was Nicolas Bruno a photographer who suffers from sleep paralysis which causes him to have wild and very vivid hallucinations so as a coping mechanism he documents them and the outcomes are sometimes lack luster but other times they really hit home, and i think that has something to do with everyone's individual fears

so after being thoroughly creeped out and inspired what i ended coming up with was this

originally when i prototyped this i didnt have the mirror covered, i wanted to see the reflection, but i actually felt so uncomfortable with it playing that i covered the mirror and the lights made a way better effect.

Another unexpected outcome was that i left it on while i was changing something on my computer and the sound coming out of the headphones halfway across the room made it sound like the work was whispering at me. which actually scared me seeing as i was at home by myself at this time.

youtube

As you can hear there is something on quite right about it in a small quite room so here is another view of the project setup

youtube

And lastly here is the full video.

youtube

I still do not know where the name “be still my child and tell me what you see” came from, but it clicked from the first moment i used it.

#space image and sound

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