throwback to this vid I made of our party experiencing the aftermath of the cassalanter ball from waterdeep dragon heist. first pc death! he got better tho <3
@cleverclove said something really important on a post of mine that i wanted to talk about so bad. Two-Bit suffers so much on his own because he thrives off the idea that he's made for other people, specifically to make them smile/laugh. when he's alone he spends time thinking up jokes or anything funny to distract himself from the fact that he's nobody without anyone else. occasionally he'll catch himself sitting there zoning out for ages because he has nothing to do, feeling useless, it all really starts getting to him. then he goes to his little sister's room (i'm pretty sure shes confirmed to be younger) and plays dolls with her just to make her laugh and be acknowledged by somebody at least.
his modus operandi is making people laugh because he's forgotten otherwise. he never wants to graduate because he'll never get a job fooling around like he does.
after johnny and dallas died, 2bit found it really hard to stay positive. he spent sleepless, sweaty nights shaking in bed because he knows the gang will never be the same again. when he finally makes a joke while everyone's still mourning, darry tells him to shut up with your jokes for once. two-bit is bloody shattered, he gets up and leaves and goes home and he just cries. for the first time he feels useless to the gang, that not even his special ability to make people laugh no matter what worked. it reminded him of how helpless and useless he felt when his dad left him when he was younger. he was always able to cheer up his mother with his jokes and silly antics, so why was it different for the gang?
“Sorry for lugging a dead body into your living room, but I have nowhere else to take it until tonight.” The kill has done nothing to soothe her rage. If anything, she’s angrier than she was before she’d brutally stabbed this man to death. “He made the mistake of calling Mark my boyfriend, so he had to learn his lesson.” The word ‘boyfriend’ filled her with embarrassment, which quickly turned into a more murderous feeling. She hasn’t had a boyfriend since she was 21, and that relationship ended up with her being humiliated. “I’m going to put him in a woodchipper, I think. Motherfucker can fertilize the plants in the woods.”
We all know at this point that the name Astarion is connected to the word "star" (starry or little star).
But Larian decided that they wanted to go all in with the details and they delivered!
The flower you can place on his tomb in the final romance scene (which I think is such a cute and tender gesture and I love his reaction to it), seems to be an Ornithogalum umbellatum, a star-shaped white flower with six petals. Among the plant's many common names, there are summer snowflake, starflower, and star-of-Bethlehem.
Moreover, in the language of flowers, its meanings are related to trauma, mourning, and welcoming pain without repressing it.
According to Doctor Edward Bach (1886 – 1936), these flowers are "For those who find themselves in a state of great anguish due to situations that, in a given period, have caused so much unhappiness", and can be used to help with the aftermath of a trauma, the alleviation of pain and the mourning process.
Edit: every time I see an artist include this flower in their Astarion fanart my heart swells with joy. Love this community
anyone else have multiple traumatic memories associated specifically with holidays/family vacations? because that is a topic I never see discussed in all the So You Had A Shitty Childhood, Now What? self-help books i've been reading. but for me, it was a significant thing. and the more i think about it the more it seems like this would be an (unfortunately) common experience. would be grateful to hear if this matches other peoples' experiences...
they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?
they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.
you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.
you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.
mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.
you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.
So, I experienced some deju vu during this scene in Trolls Band Together:
John Dory grabs his backpack, says he's leaving (I'm done, YOLO, etc.), and then the last thing he says is "Goodbye Forever!", followed by Branch's distraught face, and the next thing Branch knows, all his brothers have left him and he never sees them again.
I was trying to figure out why that little snippet stuck with me, then it hit me:
Trolls Holiday in Harmony, when Branch is trying to figure out a gift for Poppy. He's worried about doing the wrong thing, disappointing her or freaking her out, and says "I CAN'T let that happen". He illustrates his point with Poppy packing a suitcase, and what does she say right before she runs off?
Really brings his abandonment issues into the light😢
I've seen a few comments of people being annoyed when Branch said to Poppy "aren't you going to leave me anyway", but they clearly don't understand how trauma affects people's mental and emotional state.
He knows Poppy loves him and doesn't actually believe she'd leave, but after a lifetime of being alone, even though he's happy and loved now, there's still that subconscious fear that he'll end up alone again. Poppy means everything to him, and he can't bear the thought of losing her too, especially as a result of something he's done (his grandma died to save him, and he believed his brothers leaving was his fault because he 'ruined everything' at the concert).
Sometimes this results in Branch trying to push Poppy away, which seems conflicting, yes, but again: trauma messes with your mind. He was already heartbroken and angry at his brothers, so he wasn't thinking clearly and blurted out his hidden main fear.
And when he says "everyone else [leaves me]" I hear "everyone in my life has left me so I must deserve to be alone, so you might as well leave me too."
And that's probably why Branch was so hesitant to be open with Poppy - 1. I might scare her away, and 2. why bother expressing my feelings to someone when I'll likely just lose them anyway. Plus he's still getting used to having someone to confide to in his life. Keeping emotions bottled up for years is a hard habit to get out of.