Hurt-Comfort Bingo Card

I appreciate the tip! I put friendly_crips on my watchlist for LJ, and clicked "join" ... which didn't go through immediately, so may be on moderation or just glitchy. I write and link intermittently on these topics. A lot of folks in my audience are interested in some way too.

I don't watch my LJ friendfeed as closely as I used to, but you are welcome to share any of my posts that look relevant to your community. I have quite a lot of canonical disabled characters. To get things started, I'll make an introductory post about some of them.

>>I've now seen your 'join request' and immediately approved it.<<

Thank you!

Yes, some communities need the extra protection from bots or trolls. I've run Pagan lists, so I know how it goes.

>>What are canonical disabled characters?<<

They are characters who appear with a handicap in the original movie, television show, book, or other official canon; for example, Charles Xavier in X-men uses a wheelchair and relies on his telepathy to make him a superhero. This is an important distinction because fanfic often alters major character traits, creating new disabilities or removing canonical ones. Some readers have very strong opinions about all of that stuff, and if you cross both disability awareness and fanfic circles, you'll see arguments, some of them nasty. I don't mind people playing with character traits in fanfic, but I think it is valuable to distinguish canonical disabilities because that has impact on visibility within a culturally respected context. Fewer people realize the influence of fanfic.

>> Do you mean that you have DID? <<

Spell out the acronym for me?

>>Dissociative Identity Disorder. I hope it's not offensive to equate this with Multiple Personality Disorder: I think MPD was the old name for what is now called DID.<<

Ah, okay. I'm familiar with that, then. It's just that my awareness of it is a great deal wider than the official version. I have friends who are multiples. So from my perspective ...

1) If a trait causes significant difficulty in a person's life, it qualifies as a malfunction. If it's outside the ordinary but does NOT cause intrinsic problems (and problems caused by other people's intolerance DO NOT count) then it's a normal variation, not a malfunction.

2) It matters whether or not memories are shared across personality shifts, whether those shifts yield better or worse results than not shifting, and whether the personality structure is innate or acquired. That is: having multiple personalities within a single body is not necessarily a problem, but having them disassociated from each other usually is. Somebody born with a nonstandard personality structure may be fine. Somebody whose personality got smashed into shards by an abuser is usually not going to come out of that in good working order. The mental health care industry has a more limited view of personality variation because almost all the personalities of any kind that they see are broken. They made the same mistake with homosexual people for decades. So remember rule #1.

3) Then there are people in touch with entities that happen not to be wearing bodies on the material plane. Some of that is socially acceptable in this culture and some of it is not. I chuck out all that cultural judgement and refer to rule #1 regarding problems and functionality. I'm also prone to empirical testing to see which entities can be pretty reliably identified as separate individuals tangent to a contact person, rather than personalities with a system of related minds.

For my part, I have what I call a faceted or aspected personality. Different sides of me have their own skills, habits, vocabularies, and dress modes. My professional mode, for instance, has a more genteel way of handling offenses. I can switch modes deliberately and somewhat reliably, and it's useful. Everything is connected at the edges, so memories maintain; but they're state-dependent memories so crossing those boundaries is more of a challenge. Oh, and my linguistic ability depends utterly on that: learning a new language generates a native speaker inside my head, and they insist on a native-language name. Other than that, modes of address may shift a bit but most of me goes by the same conglomerate of names.

Then there are those things not part of my own personality -- nature spirits, deities, a very few of my story characters, etc. If I can alter the course of events by treating a given entity as real, then for me that counts as real for non-locally-physical values of "real." (One of my cultures actually has a saying for that: "Some things are true but not real, and some things are real but not true.") I'm too much of an empiricist to ignore useful things just because someone else insists on parameters that do not match my observed data. Entities are subjected to the same standards of decency as the human company I keep, which means if they act like jerks I refuse to spend time with them. I have also learned to warn people that if they spend time around me, they may encounter aspects of reality or other earthshaking concepts that are new to them. (That's why I have the warning sign about how my writing may cause permanent damage to narrow minds.)

This stuff works for me, but it's not quite the way most humans work. Since it lets me do some things that most people can't, I'm not willing to trade it away for the approval of people who, let's face it, have a kazillion other reasons to hate me and are never going to approve of me no matter how much of my nature I tried to hack off in hopes of fitting into the glass slipper. So I be myself, and spend time with people who can deal with that, and in return I compensate for other people's quirks. And that's fundamental to my definition of civilization, which is also not terrifically popular in the mainstream but has contributed to the development of a truly awesome audience online.

>>Thanks for explaining about canonical disabled characters.<<

It pops up in some other community discussions. Dreamwidth actually has an Access_fandom community. We once did a theme on disabled characters in the Crowdfunding Creative Jam, and for that I made a list of resources. A couple of the links go to lists of canonically disabled characters. I've heard that some of the communities have bigger lists of them too.

Possibly. Thing is, I already have rape established as a motif in Paladins, and dealing with the aftermath of that is a running thread in the series. So that's right where my thoughts went for that prompt.

Are you thinking about sponsoring something outside the ordinary for this prompt? If so, I'd consider exploring other alternatives. Some prompts immediately gave me specific ideas, while others didn't; but I'm willing to be flexible if other folks are attached to something. I've been putting up some bingo poems for sale, but haven't really pitched the cards to my audience, although I did make sure some of my regular donors heard about cards of topical interest to them personally. The idea of "would you like to sponsor a square" ... just occurred to me.