then it's worthless to me

If you ever feel stupid just know that I found out my favorite sketchbook brand was going out of production so I ordered 55 of them in a panic and now I possibly have 55 packages coming to my doorstep this week. And it might be the equivalent of 110 books because I didn’t realize they ship out in packs of two

Hands down one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done. They got sent all in individual packages and the UPS guy looked devastated

Catra and neurodivergence

While She-Ra does have canonical neurodivergent representation in the form of Entrapta (and semi-canonical for Adora and maybe Scorpia), 

Catra is also a very good representation, in a semi-metaphorical way, but still.   

Let me present my case:   

Catra, as a feline girl, has a lot of characteristics you also get in neurodivergence. Namely, the physical responses of autism  - high physical sensitivity, aversion to touch, some less than voluntary responses such as her tail movements and ear expressions and purring and hissing.  It also comes through in the way Catra processes the world, which is very different from how Adora does so - Catra is just more sensitive to everything as a byproduct of who she is.   

Catra has needs that other characters do not have. When she was younger, she used to accidentally hurt people with her claws when gripping them. Catra has a hard time communicating exactly what she needs, not having the context and skills to get her feelings across. She’s easily agitated, she wants to stay in quiet, dark spaces, and she has a great weakness for physical affection, as we saw with Shadow Weaver petting her fur tuffs.  

When Catra was going down her villain route in season 4, a very interesting choice was made - Stevenson said Catra wanted to look less like a cat. 

She cut off her tuffs that Shadow Weaver had petted, and grows her hair longer, grooming it to be less fluffy. She gets a brand new, much less rough look that makes her appear as a strong woman rather than a cat teenager.  

Catra is masking her feline traits because she has identified them as a weakness. They make her different from everyone else, they were exploited by Shadow Weaver. She does not want to be vulnerable, to show her true self for people to take advantage of, or reject.  Her cat traits are humanizing, and show parts of herself she cannot control, namely her emotions, so she does her best to cover them up. 

This also coincides with Catra masking her psychological and emotional turmoil. She will not accept help from anyone because it would mean acknowledging that she needs them, that she is not strong, and that perhaps she has been taking the wrong path this whole time.   

Once Adora comes to rescue her, Catra becomes physically and mentally incapable of masking any longer. It is too exhausting. Her cat traits come back in full force- clutching Adora desperately, having enormously expressive ears and eyes, her tail flicks and desire for physical play and affection, her arm stripes are visible again… 

Her physical mask is also gone for good, and her hair is loose. This lets us see a catlike aspect of Catra we never even knew existed - the fluffiness of her cheeks! 

Catra is not only physically awkward for the rest of the show, but also socially awkward - she goes through a much more advanced version of what Entrapta was learning earlier that season. Catra learns to navigate her new space, not as a superior but as a friend, and makes mistakes, says things she shouldnt say, has a hard time displaying affection. But when Catra learns that she can mess up and still be accepted, she is emboldened and becomes comfortable around the Best Friend Squad, being better equipped to face the challenges that lie on Etheria, such as meeting the Rebellion and making things up with Scorpia.  

I also think the use of Melog, in particular, to physically pry the mask away from Catra is genius - the other characters and the audience can get a sense of her true feelings even when she’s unable to process them herself.  

I think reading Catra as neurodivergent is really fun, because… well… that’s how she was written. Maybe not on purpose, but Catra is canonically neurodivergent simply by daunt of being written as a cat person.  

Adora might be autistic too

Alright, most people in the SPOP fandom agree that Entrapta is autistic, as her coding is extremely obvious. However, some of us also believe that our beloved protagonist Adora is on the spectrum as well. She comes off as quite the aspie, and while Asperger’s is no longer a diagnosis in the DSM-V (but is in other manuals), it falls under the blanket diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and its diagnostic criteria is still useful in analyzing people for signs of the disorder. In analyzing Adora’s character I will refer somewhat to both disorders, with the understanding that Asperger’s is a specific manifestation of ASD.

I would like to preface this by saying this is a headcanon and people are free to disagree with me. Some of these characteristics I’m going to bring up could also manifest because of her very sheltered upbringing in a cult-like atmosphere or mental illnesses such as anxiety and complex PTSD (both of which she arguably has). I am autistic myself, so obviously I am inclined to interpret these symptoms this way, but to each their own. It’s also worth noting that Adora has a lot of symptoms that cross over with AD(H)D, a cousin disorder to ASD, and it’s totally possible she has both.

In any case, there is now enough evidence hinting at Adora’s neurodivergence (especially now that the Rebel Princess Guide has been released) that I feel the need to explain this theory in detail instead of just occasionally mentioning it. So here goes…

Keep reading

Endou Yuu versus the cosmic unknown 

have some more 

ok have one more before I go to bed 

Ren is also an eldritch being

I don’t think I ever posted this here

Transcription, because it is worth reading:

There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”

So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.

I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.

First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.

Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.

Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.

In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]

Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]

Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.

There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”

Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.

And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”

The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.

Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]

A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.

Finally, fifth: Fiction.

However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.

Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.

One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]

Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]

Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.

This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…

The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.

And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.

It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.

Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.

But it plays out along the same general lines: Primary sources replaced with modern fiction, victim perspectives replaced with perpetrators, specificity replaced with Star-Bellied Sneetch-style “Why can’t we all just get along?” metaphors.

I haven't done a DTIYS for ages, so this was super fun! Thanks for hosting @aure-magik-art ! 🫶 If you haven't checked out their art and wonderful AUs, definitely get on that! I love these Catradora designs 💙

Bleeding Kansas

i literally went to college with this guy lmao

help

Based on @otrebot ‘s art

Finally finished this idea for the kpdh girls! <3

Making Sleeping Beauty (1959)

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