Want people to get interested in politics, I have the solution! (Looking at you congress)

Simply allow me to sit in on the sidelines of any political meeting/event heckling the congressmen and officials. I don't even need to be paid, just provide snacks. As an independent, I will be able to heckle anyone and everyone with no favor towards party. I will especially disagree with: transphobes, homophobes, racists, sexists, xenophobes, and rapists, so I feel I will have a lot to work with if implemented in the U.S. government.

How is this supposed to get people interested in politics you may ask. Well, this would turn those meetings into prime television AND I would also take suggestions from the public (something not even Congress has thought to do!). After all, the people will be interested in politics as soon as they feel represented!

In fact, we could even have people start paying to be able to heckle, and with all that money, we could lower taxes! Doesn't that sound nice! We will all be able to pay what the 1% pays on taxes!

page 1 (you are here) | page 2 | page 3 | page 4 | page 5 | page 6 | page 7 | page 8 | page 9 | page 10 | page 11 | page 12 This is one of the earliest multi-page comic ideas I had, I drew out the sketches for this comic over a year and a half ago. It took a while to actually get around to making this, but at the same time in some ways, it's been very easy to make this comic, even if my understanding of these characters has changed and grown with time. I was considering posting this comic all at once, but tumblr woudln't let me put all pages on one post, and I fear that the authorial image descriptions would become hard or cumbersome to read all in one post. Maybe one day I'll compile it into a proper little pdf.

image desc below readmore

ID: A traditionally inked, digitally colored comic. Panel one is solid darkness which extends across the top of the comic from end to end. "Please don't react badly," says a crumbling, square speech balloon from Tenzō. Immediately overlapping it is a wavering speech balloon from Kakashi, which leads into the second panel. The second panel is also darkness, but it is smaller, contained, does not spread the width of the page. "—Tenzō!? What are you doing in my apartment? Weren't you on a mission with another cell?" In the third panel, colored in dark reds, oranges, and yellows, we see Tenzō curled defensively around himself, wearing his Anbu gear, clutching a bandaged arm. His speech balloons follow the general curve of his body, as though he's trying to make a second defense of his words. Tenzō says: "This is bad. I know. I'm asking something terrible. But I don't...I can't..." In the fourth panel, we have a low view, looking up at a backlit Kakashi, warm yellow light pouring in around him, his body in shadow. He's standing stiffly. "Can't what? Tenzō, what's wrong?" He asks. The fifth panel is silent. Close on Tenzō's blank Anbu mask where he sits huddled. The sixth panel, Tenzō turns, mask and all, away, hunching even further in on himself, raising his shoulders around his mask. "I'm sorry," he says. /end ID

yakuza: dead souls - american vibes, bigass guns, and why zombies are super weird to have in ryu ga gotoku thematically/ideologically speaking

so i've been playing dead souls recently (hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah) and although i'm having the time of my life with it, there was something about it that kinda felt off to me, and i think i've figured out what it was, but i'm gonna have to walk you through a bit of my thought process to get there.

my first instinct was that it felt... american? and upon further examination i think that boils down to a couple of things:

everyone suddenly has lots of guns and also way way bigger guns

high emphasis on individual heroism (this itself is quite typical for rgg, but it manifests differently here; more on that in a bit)

military/government incompetence, which must be solved by the right individuals having the biggest and bestest guns

[for the sake of transparency i will note that my experience with zombie media is pretty limited and skews american (and i myself am american), so that may create bias. however, the 'this feels american to me' instinct is a rare one for me even in genres where i have seen little/no non-american media, so i think the fact that it did occur to me is notable. what about dead souls triggered that response when little else has? that's why i examined it and, truthfully, i think there's merit in the idea itself.]

the first point is pretty self-explanatory. america's got more guns than it does people, and its gun worship is infamous. japan's ban on guns (aided by its being an island state) means there's far fewer guns in the country, as well as far fewer people with guns (and likely far fewer guns per gun owner, excepting arms dealers/smugglers) than somewhere without such a ban. obviously, there are guns anyway. due to their illegality they are clustered within the criminal population, which explains their presence within organized crime within the series. very few guns will be sitting around in the homes of otherwise law-abiding citizens.

and yet, when the zombie outbreak hits kamurocho, plenty of civilians suddenly have access to quite an arsenal. everyone has the knowledge they need to aim, fire, and reload smoothly and quickly; ammo is infinite for certain guns. characters we've never seen using firearms before suddenly have shotguns under their couches (looking at you, majima). it's not only very different from reality, it's very different from guns' place within the series up until this point, when they were limited weapons used primarily by the enemy.

and they're making a zombie shooter, so of course they would have to do this. it has to be unrealistic to be simultaneously in this setting and in this genre, in the same way that yakuza solving their problems with bareback fistfights instead of guns is itself both unrealistic and necessary to being the kinds of games rgg are.

my point is that this is a kind of focus on and valorization of gun ownership and competency unusual for the series and setting. further, it serves as an argument for why an armed, competent populace is crucial typical in american media.

which brings us to the third point (we'll get to 2 in a minute). guns are often marketed as self-defense weapons. the implication is that the government's defense of the individual (via law enforcement or the military, but particularly the former), are insufficient. this is objectively true. if someone pulls a gun on you at the gas station, will a cop manifest out of thin air to intercede? no. that's impossible. but if you have a gun, or if some bystander has a gun, you or they may be able to do something with that gun to stop the armed person. thus, there is an undeniable gap in the effective immediacy of such responses.

many gun advocates also point to the incompetence or insufficiency of law enforcement, even when they are present to stop an armed aggressor. the fact that law enforcement do not have a 100% success rate in protecting the citizenry is also objectively true.

so, when you are in danger, arming yourself increases your chances of being able to put down (or at least take armed action against) a present or potential threat. whether it is viewed it as a supplement to or a replacement for law enforcement, it is meant to make up for the shortcomings of the government's ability to completely protect all its citizens. it's a safety net for state failure.

back to dead souls. rgg has always centered political corruption in its stories, including politicians, the police, and sometimes even the military, though usually the former two. sometimes this is treated sympathetically (i.e. tanimura, a dirty cop, whose dirty-cop-ness allows him to work outside/against the law to help disadvantaged people, not unlike how kiryu views being a yakuza), and other times it's simply a matter of greed or lust for power (i.e. jingu).

however, something that's almost never touched on so clearly is government incompetence. when the government fails to help people or hurts them or does corrupt things, it's usually due to a competent, malicious bad apple who is removed from power by the end of the game. this implies holes in the system because it keeps happening all the time, but that's on a series-wide scale, a pattern ignored by the series in favor of the individual game solution of "this guy's gone now :) yay".

but in dead souls, the SDF's barracades fall, their men are killed, they are unable to help protect the people outside or inside the quarantine zone. they are weak in a way the government usually isn't in these games. and who is stronger than them? our individual good guys with guns. so we need to be armed because the government is weak and can't protect us. boom. america.

returning to point 2, i'd like to say that dead souls is not particularly more individualistic than any of the other games in the series (other than, perhaps, y7). rgg is an incredibly individualistic series, actually. its protagonists are usually men who defy, oppose, and skirt around the law as a way of helping others and doing what is truly right (with a few exceptions, like shinada and haruka). the romanticized view of the yakuza as a force for helping the community in the face of government incompetence is a real one, and one that tends to manifest itself most in kiryu and how the series treats him. it shows us yakuza who aren't willing to kill, yakuza who cry about honor and justice and humanity and brotherhood, yakuza who never dip their hands into less palatable crimes, or only do with intense regret (and only ever as part of their backstory). the beat-em-up style emphasizes this as well. i mean, what's more individualistic than a one-man army?

put more clearly, this series is about men defying legal and social laws and expectations to live in a way that feels right to them, and about making themselves strong enough to combat those who would get in their way. the individual is placed before the society in importance, (though generally in a way that benefits the community, because they are good guys who want to use that agency and power for good).

all of this is true in dead souls as well, technically. those who live on the outskirts of society are the ones who actually save the day, and the ones who go in there and save people rather than just walling them off and pretending like they don't exist. they have the guns, which are illegal and mark them as criminals, but this broken law is what gives them the power to save themselves when the government will not, and to save their community if they so choose.

where dead souls differs is in the nature of that strength.

rgg places a lot of emphasis on self-improvement, both of one's body and of one's character. do both of these, and you will be strong enough to back up your ambitions. what allows someone to carve their own path in life is the ability to put down ideological and physical resistance by having resolve and the ability to tiger drop whoever won't be swayed by your impassioned speeches. you make yourself a weapon. you make yourself strong. in dead souls, that strength comes from an external, material possession. strength is something you buy (or that you take from someone else). who is able to survive the apocalypse comes not from the heart, nor from rigorous training, but from who has the most, the biggest, and the most bestest guns. it's an intersection of capitalism, militarization, and individualism. simply, deeply american.

[when i was talking myself through this a few days ago, i spent a lot more time on the capitalism + individualism stuff, but i think i'll keep this moving. consider this aside the intermission]

dead souls also differs for a few other interlocking reasons. it can be described with this equation:

zombification of enemies + lethality of guns = loss of emphasis on redemption

if your best friend turned into a zombie, could you shoot them? or your child? or your lover? it's a common trope, but it's a damn good one. watching your family, your neighbors, your town, everyone turn into a husk of themselves, something that looks like them but cannot be reached, is deeply tragic. it's even more tragic when these husks are trying to kill you. unable to be reasoned with and unable to be cured, you must incapacitate them before someone innocent is hurt--or hurt, then themselves made dangerous; each loss adds to the number of threats surrounding you. your life is seen as more valuable than that of your zombified friend, not only because the zombie is attacking you and it's self defense, but because they are no longer a person to you. to be a zombie is to no longer be human; zombification is dehumanization.

and so in a series so focused on connection with one's community, on saving innocent civilians, often on saving kamurocho specifically, one would expect similar tropes to occur. even if one's friends aren't turned, perhaps the cashier at poppo you chat with sometimes is. it's the destruction of that community and of the members one has tertiary relationships with that i expect would occur most within a kamurocho zombie story, since they are likely unwilling to axe anyone more important than that, even if dead souls isn't canon. i'd especially expect to see that in the beginning, before the need to kill zombies rather than contain or redeem them becomes apparent.

this does not happen.

i cannot speak for the entire game, but i can speak of gameplay choices that affect this, and ones i think will not be subverted throughout, even if they are somewhat contradicted by plot events i am presently unaware of.

kamurocho is not a community to protect, nor is it filled with your fellows. it is a playground filled with infinitely respawning, infinitely mow-downable, infinitely disposable zombies. you are meant and encouraged to kill them by the thousands, and never to hesitate or consider whether they may be cured or who may be mourning them. who may be unable to identify their loved one because you were trying to reach a headshot goal from hasegawa. you are not meant to consider them as human, nor beings that were once human, nor beings that could be human again, in the eyes of the zombie shooter. they are merely bodies, targets, and obstacles.

the zombies are contrasted with the true humans, those barricading themselves within the quarantine zone or those living in ignorance outside it. humans are meant to be saved, zombies are meant to be killed. the player character is the only one who can truly help with either of these goals, because the other humans are cowardly, ignorant, or unarmed/helpless. you must be their savior. to be a savior is to eliminate zombies, who are less than human.

the black and white nature of this is also emphasized by another gameplay characteristic: the lack of street encounters. when you traverse the peaceful parts of kamurocho, you are never attacked. you are also never directly attacked by the humans within the quarantine zone. kamurocho feels very different without its muggers and hooligans, but it's because this is a zombie shooter, not a beat-em-up. in a normal rgg title, you'd subdue threats by punching, kicking, and throwing them. you'd use your body in (supposedly) nonlethal ways. dead souls does not have a combat system meant for civilians. you have your guns. you subdue threats by shooting them, preferably lethally. the game doesn't want you to do that to humans, so you never fight humans. this furthers the black and white divide between the salvation-worthy, noble humans and the death-worthy, worthless zombies. combat is only lethal, and only used against the inherent other.

this leads me to the part of dead souls i find most conflicting with the ethos of rgg broadly, and perhaps its greatest ideological/thematic failing.

because the enemy are incurable, dangerous, and inhuman, you must kill them to protect yourself and others, others who are still human. humanity is something that is lost or preserved, but never regained. once someone's gone, they're gone, and you not only must kill them, it is your duty and your right to kill them. you should kill them.

in dead souls, there is no redeeming the enemy.

and that's a big problem.

rgg is about a lot of things, but a key one is the ability of people to change for the better. its most memorable, beloved villains are those who see the light by the end and change their wicked ways (usually through some form of redemptive suicide, though that's another essay in itself). its pantheon of characters is full of those who come from questionable backgrounds struggling to be the best people they can be, to live as themselves authentically and compassionately. it's about the good and the love you can find in the moral and legal gray zones of life/society, and the potential/capacity for good all of us have, no matter how far we may have fallen. it is a hopeful series. it is a merciful series.

this is something bolstered by its gameplay. countless substories are resolved by punching a lesson into someone until they improve their behavior, either out of fear or genuine remorse/development. the games don't just discourage killing your enemies, they don't allow you to (yes, we've all seen the "kiryu hasn't killed anybody? umm. look at this heat action" stuff before, and while they've got a point, i believe it's the narrative's intent that none of this is actually lethal, based on how laxly it treats certain plot injuries (cough cough. y7 bartender) and the actual concept of taking a life, the gravity it is given by the text, particularly when it comes to characters crossing that threshold into someone who has killed. explicit killing is not an option open to you, even when you're being attacked by dozens and dozens of armed men. conflicts are resolved by simply beating up enough guys in this nonlethal manner.

but dead souls is a shooter. to avoid conflict with the series' moral qualms about letting its characters kill, the enemies cannot be human. furthermore, the zombie shooter genre can only fit within the series if its zombies are completely inhuman. this means their pasts as humans cannot be acknowledged, nor the possibility of a cure, nor the characters' own potential conflicts about killing them; or, at least, not in a way that impedes their or the player's ability to gun them down afterwards.

if you can't kill humans in your series, then it cannot be possible to save (in this case, rehumanize) zombies. this is especially true in a game where you are unable to fight humans, and thus human lives are universally more valuable than zombie lives. because if you kill a zombie that can be cured, you are, in a way, killing a human.

and so, in a series where you should always assume your enemies (and everyone, for that matter) are capable of reason, compassion, change, and redemption, and where they are always worth that effort, even if they reject it in the end, dead souls' enemies are irredeemable and only worth swift, stylish slaughter. there are only good guys and bad guys. good guys must be protected, lest they be turned irreversibly into bad guys. good guys are only protected by killing bad guys, and the only way to save good guys is to kill every last one of the bad guys. do not spare them, and do not ask whether or not it's right. only kill.

i love dead souls. it's a silly game. i like seeing daigo in decoy-drag and majima gleefully cartwheeling his way through zombies and ryuji with his giant gun arm prosthetic. it's fun. but when i was trying to figure out what felt off about it to me, one of the words that came to mind (besides american) was indulgent. that, too, felt odd, because i love indulgent media. i am not one to scorn decadent, hedonistic, beautiful high-calorie slop type media. if dead souls was just fan servicey, that wouldn't really bother me. i am a fan and boy do i feel serviced. it rocks. but i think my problem is in what dead souls is indulging.

i think dead souls indulges in the desire to cut loose, and to see these characters cut loose. thing is, they're cutting loose all over kamurocho, and all over the bodies of people they used to (at least in concept) care for. with lethal weapons. it is catharsis via bloodbath, not by pushing your body and mind to the limit in man to man combat, but by pulling a trigger before the other guy can hurt you, or even think about hurting you, for the crime of existing as the wrong kind of thing.

and i just don't think that's in line with rgg's beliefs.

yes, it's probably fair for dead souls' characters to kill zombies. i'm not against that. i'm also not against games letting you do purposeless violence. i spent a good amount of my elementary school years killing oblivion npcs for shits, like. that's not what bothers me about dead souls.

rgg as a series has always taken a hard stance in both its game design and narrative choices against killing and for the potential for redemption in its enemies. and i think the lengths to which it goes to promote that despite the probably-lethal moves you do and the improbability of a harmless do-gooder yakuza is one of the most endearing things about the games. so for this one entry to disregard that key theme for the sake of a genre shift that flopped super hard, well? i dunno. it feels weird i guess. it's out of place not just because it's a dramatic shift in gameplay and style and also zombies are only a thing here (and the supernatural/fantastical are thus only prominent here), but because of what those shifts imply.

so, uh. yeah. my pre-dead-souls thoughts that dead souls wasn't that out of pocket bc rgg's just kinda weird? turns out it was actually super weird to have a zombie shooter in there, but for way way deeper reasons than anyone gives it credit for.

(footnotes in tags)

i'll see when i can finish and post this draft

okay i'm a little impatient after tonight's ep lol

putting this in the tag bc why not

theorizing abt s3 of only murders in the building so if you don't want that then uhhhhh stop reading lol

okay i'm impatient bc like--it's been obvious since the very first episode we saw the writing on the mirror that ben wrote it himself

the video clip that tobert found of him "talking to someone" in his dressing room?

he's talking to a plate of cookies

someone left a plate of cookies in his dressing room

he was already in a fit bc of loretta and charles

and then joy had to come in and fix his face

he possibly got into another argument? who knows idr the exact timeline

anyway he yelled at the cookies

he ate all of them

then he wrote "fucking pig" on the mirror

then he dropped "dead" onstage

at the hospital they pumped his stomach, meaning he was poison, and therefore the cookies were the poison

and who is the only person we've seen all season interact w ben & the cookies?

his brother.

his brother poisoned the cookies, left them in the dressing room, and was also at the arconia, got into another argument, shoved him down the elevator shaft.

his brother did it, ben wrote "fucking pig"

and i'm getting impatient bc i thought the "fucking pig" thing was going to be a like 1 or 2 episode red herring to incriminate a few people briefly and then clear their names

i thought SURELY they would figure out that he was yelling at a plate of cookies

but they're realizing that extending a murder mystery series can be difficult if it's not a procedural or episodic thing like murder she wrote or whatever

and so they're distracting with loretta and joy and tobert and getting the trio angry at each other and having cinda in the background, etc.

but yeah, ben's brother did it.

i'm sure in the final two eps, they will suspect tobert, and his name will be cleared bc ben's brother (yes, whose name i have forgotten--he hasn't been in an episode in like three or four episodes or something) will make an attempt on his life for some reason.

actually, i take it back. something will happen with loretta for that to happen for her instead, bc didn't he become loretta's agent and book her that show in LA and she bailed for this ridiculous [loving] musical?

so actually maybe he tries to kill oliver.

ANYWAY.

point being, it's been obvious, and the only reason i'm impatient is bc the fucking pig and video of him yelling in his dressing room are such obvious red herrings that they should've timed them better if they wanted them to drag out for this much of the season.

also to clarify i'm enjoying the show still, it's silly and fun, and i LOVE many of the characters. but the core murder mystery is uhhhhhh not a mystery. lol

The 'Enjoying watch you suffer' line in Broadcast has always been hard to pin down; Tim's leg getting broken is the biggest incident in Entry #35, so it's natural to want to tie the two together, but it seems to fit so indelicately into what we know about the timeline of totheark's internal relationship that it almost causes more problems than it resolves. However, even though it's very blink and miss it, Tim does actually manage to stab Alex in the arm before he gets knocked down -- we hear Alex cry out in pain, can see blood on the blade when Jay picks it up, and then in the recovered corrupted footage from that tape that Jay posts as Entry #36 Alex says "I did what I had to... he'd just stabbed me" -- and that injury being what totheark was trying to call attention to, to me, reads a lot more clear and consistent than anything else does

i should probably clarify that "why cant my creative side of my brain wake up already" is meant to not be literal just in case

went on a first date today with a nerd (affectionate) and when i mentioned i play the sims he was trying to articulate why he's not a fan and settled on talking about how unsettling it is that your sims can be killed by meteors

i have to admit i'd honestly kind of forgotten about that aspect of the sims 3 but 10/10 a conversation i'd have again, very fun

Why is the Venn diagram between Izzy fans and Corinthian fans a fucking circle???

While I can see the appeal of Jesus Hozier (when people joke on the Good Omens tag saying that Hozier should play Jesus), I just had a dream of demon Hozier and maybe that could be nice

my dad's gonna be in town next weekend. the same weekend i'm going to this music thing hosted by the local trans group. my dad does not know i'm not cis. i have invited him to the music thing. this should be interesting

Thinking about outsider art and how beautiful and amazing and important it is, and yet a lot of the interest in it is not necessarily in the lives, stories, and messages of the primarily mentally ill/disabled people that make it, but rather the fact they're "crazy" and "insane" and "holy shit those artists must have been on drugs or something!" like holy shit can you be any more fucking stigmatizing towards mentally ill/disabled artists whose conditions heavily influence their work

when you explain that you're looking for compassion and believing in the best in each other in a relationship and that you felt it was inappropriate to bring up how someone else's issues (they are unrelated to the problem) were worse and more valid than yours and that you have no right to be upset because you're the villain for things that they misunderstood you doing or just did themselves and blamed you for. they also accuse you of being codependent with your needs. so you try to repeat yourself on your expectations and boundaries in friendships (i will accept no less than someone at least putting in the effort or having the desire to have a healthy friendship) and that there was so much she did that i never asked for nor wanted but i accepted it because i didn't want to seem ungrateful so whatever codependency she felt we had must have been one sided because i explicitly remembered that i never made her responsible for my mental well-being, i did not actually like that she treated me like a child and i had been complaining about that for years in our friendship especially near the end of it. i was an adult and didn't appreciate being treated like a child. but i went along with it because i was willing to let her get away with it if that's what she felt she needed from our friendship. so i sent her a basic infographic about healthy relationships and how they work and noted that the things i had asked for were just basic healthy relationship things and that i have never at any point in our friendship wanted her to take care of me. i wanted us to be equals. she told me that she wasn't willing to put in that amount of effort for anyone and how her boyfriend is her family and her life and her purpose and how friends just weren't really a priority at all and they certainly never got close to the level of importance as her romantic relationship. like... she literally disagreed with treating people with basic respect because friendship wasn't worth that effort. so i told her i hope she heals that wound in her heart and that she can eventually move on from whatever caused it but that i refused to settle for less than a healthy friendship just because she doesn't know how to love anyone fully or put aside her pride. that i genuinely hope she heals and has a good life but to never contact me again because i don't care to see it. that whatever is going on with her that she's been running away from isn't my problem for her to project onto me. she doesn't get to assume my intentions or thoughts or feelings about anything when she never asked me once. but fine, she has every right to think whatever she wants about me regardless of how true it is because I'm not responsible for her feelings, especially not now and i would genuinely appreciate it if she never spoke to me again.

people in the thick of amanormativity who haven't deconstructed relationships with others who are strict monogamists are so fucking exhausting.

...

A character paint of an OC who as of right now I have not been able to conceive any further information about. So you'll have to ask me her name some other time, thnx ^^ oh and also don't ask me for her socials just so you can slide into her DMs like the grubby shmubby sword-wife havers you are or I'll hit you with my light skin stare 👁️ _ 👁️

anyway jokes on you, she doesn't HAVE socials! In fact she's such an out-of-touch technophobic sword wife that she doesn't even have any handheld electronics. Not because she's a medieval knight in a medieval setting. Shes just a medieval knight in a modern metropolitan setting who'll plummet into an anxiety attack if she has to log a credit card into her switch to buy Pikmin 4. Nah man she's an introvert who's mission now is to avoid the embarrassment of being caught a 17 year old who can't work a credit card by the nearest respectable adult she asks for help. she's swallowing her introvert brain like Miss Trunchbull's chocolate cake to walk into a GameStop as a 6'3 white lady here to buy Pikmin 4 that makes the other shoppers think a character performer dressed as Vincent Valentine just walked into the store as part of some promotion stunt for FF7 rebirth. And now she's getting anxious and nervous because she's become a main attraction within a store full of gamers. Now she's jetting out of the store and waiting until one of her friends decides to become a Pikmin fan and gets the 4th game. she'd like Pikmin I think, I mean something cute for someone who *looks* menacing to obsess over in secret because there's no way her fellow war comrades-in-arms can find out that this 6'3 white lady who happens to be dressed like Vincent Valentine is playing Pikmin off-duty wait

wow

hey look at that I just totally wrote like. an entire body of information about her character

well there now you have her 🎊 🎉 🎈

@crippled-sheep​ I don’t know that I feel up to an actual back-and-forth so it may require further revisiting, but I did want to more clearly explain my actual point of disagreement from the other day while I have the (many, many) words for it.

so first a point of clarification, I strongly strongly prefer the term “neurodivergent” over “neurodiverse”. I know they’re nearly identical and probably come from the same linguistic root but neurodivergent pairs much more clearly with neurotypical, and “neurodiverse” has “handicapable” vibes to it for me. neurodivergent (or neuroatypical, which is harder to parse and less ideal) also still has a connotation of Weird, divergence rather than diversity.* my primary issue with broadening “the neurodivergent/neurodiverse community” to cover the entire mental illness community is that “the neurodivergent community” already meant something specific. the term is already in use. and it’s really really valuable for autistic/adhd folks (and folks with other closely related disorders by internal experience, not by behavior, behaviorists can kiss my grits) to be able to find each other easily. we’re not being offered a replacement term and there wasn’t one already in use, so as an autistic person who required access to community in order to figure myself out, it feels very much like nt mentally ill folks going “mm, no, ours now” and actively taking something away. (also see how useful a quick recognizable distinction is even in this sentence.)

if we had a replacement term in common use it really wouldn’t bother me that much! I’d still have some qualms with it** but I probably wouldn’t bother raising a fuss directly when other people used it.

it’s kinda like how the nonbinary community has moved away from using “nb” as a shorthand for ourselves, because we were told that the black community had already been using nb to mean non-black presumably longer than we’d been using it to mean nonbinary, so our use was causing unnecessary confusion and potential distress.*** broadening “neurodivergent” to mean the whole mental illness community and its offshoots/relatives causes unnecessary confusion and distress, as it was already being used to mean something more specific and losing that specificity breaks up community and muddles meaning (which distresses me lol).

I absolutely do think there should be a destigmatized umbrella term available for the broader community! which I did say even in my initial dissent. but I don’t think it should be chosen by actively taking away from a subcommunity, and I also don’t think a word change will magically fix any prejudice against mental illness. based on my own experiences as an ad hoc practitioner, a mentally ill person, and an advocate, I feel efforts are much better directed at destigmatization of existing community terms rather than finding (appropriating) one that might be more mainstream palatable and pouring effort into widespread adoption while leaving the subcommunity it was appropriated from in the lurch.****

tl;dr: the only actual point of disagreement I have is over recent appropriation of This Specific Preexisting Term as the umbrella term due to the additional harm I see from it compared to using the preexisting umbrella term of “mental illness/disorder”. everything else you said about community and subcommunity and representation I genuinely totally agree with.*****

I hope that makes things a little clearer, even if we still disagree about the relative levels of harm between the two.

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* (and I don’t think using “neurodivergent” for one and “neurodiverse” for the other would work, as others will definitely struggle to parse the distinction. to the point where I genuinely couldn’t remember which one you used in the original context until I scrolled back to look. you were using “neurodiverse” and I was using “neurodivergent” and we both proceeded as if it was the same word.)

** (mostly demedicalization of some genuine potentially medical concerns to a degree that smells suspiciously like unexamined internalized ableism, which will significantly negatively impact people’s willingness to seek proper support and potential treatment at a time when we already have tiktok folks going “oh there’s nothing wrong with you you’re just a ~star child~” or whatever to audiences of millions. “oh I wouldn’t benefit from medication or therapy or other forms of treatment/support for mental illness I’m just ~neurodiverse~” yknow? which to be fair in my current usage of nd isn’t generally the case, we’re very big on medication and other supports for folks who would benefit from it even though there’s a very strong push for total demedicalization of autism in particular.****** I just feel that’s how I often see it used by people outside that subcommunity.)

*** (altho there is an even older use as a shorthand for “nota bene” often used to highlight important context, which I’ve picked up from friends that have done academic writing and very nearly used a couple times when writing this :v still think the black community wins custody of that one through a combination of both precedent and priority, especially given the “nota bene” use is generally very distinct contextually and not in direct connotative competition.)

**** (like how the disabled community as a whole is pretty firm about using the term disabled, or the chronically ill community is pretty firm about yes really I am Sick.)

***** (I think, to clarify the original original point of contention, the reason most people use “neurodiverse” to mean “autism and adhd” is because. that’s already the subcommunity term that was in use. we’re focusing on our subcommunity because that’s always been what we mean when we say neurodivergent. and the fact that usage is actively in flux seems to be causing distress and confusion for those who mean the broader usage as much as it is for those who mean the more specific usage. there absolutely should be community and resources for the broader usage gathered under an umbrella term, but I just would really prefer it if a different term could be used, such as the preexisting “mental illness/disorder” umbrella. because while I don’t think the specific usage has any distinct priority over the broader usage, it absolutely has precedent, and ignoring the precedent causes harm in excess of the harm I see in deferring to precedent.)

****** (but not the common secondary disorders that can come from existing as an autistic, importantly - I think the distinction is mostly just “treatment” for autism is generally far more harm than good, with some exceptions that are focused on functioning in a neurotypical world rather than actually treating symptoms. which is generally not the case outside of autism, at least for modern outpatient treatment of the mental disorders I’m familiar with as an ad hoc practitioner. also I’m so sorry for putting a footnote in a footnote lol I just have Many Opinions and A Very Large Character Limit)