idk

Blog I started during the pandemic mainly for Scooby Doo stuff to forget about the dumpster fire that was 2020… and then 2021… and now 2022…

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Now let’s talk about trauma vs neurodivergence in Ben 10 lol. A continuation of my continuous posts about how I think Ben and Gwen have ADHD.

Kevin. Kevin is obviously traumatised. He’s had more than his fair share of adverse childhood events and so he can display similar traits to Ben and Gwen but they present differently and the cause is different. Kevin has a fear of rejection but it’s more of a fear of abandonment, because he was literally abandoned by his parents because of his powers (or at least he believed he was, idk I haven’t watched this series for years and can’t recall and keep up with all the Omniverse and Rooters retcons). Gwen is rejection sensitive because she has heightened emotionality that often comes with ADHD and the environmental influences that come along with growing up with ADHD. She automatically responds to things by coming from a place of that emotionality and impulsivity, whether she impulsively people pleases or hyperfixates on pleasing people when she perceives rejection or thinks she is failing (and that is rejection as in they aren’t happy with her, not necessarily that they will abandon her). Kevin’s rejection sensitivity comes from the fact that he was abandoned because he was a “freak”, and any fear of abandonment he displays comes from that trauma and when that trauma is triggered. Whenever he mutates, that’s him becoming more of a “freak” and his automatic thought process is that people, even Gwen, will detest him and abandon him for it.

Kevin is traumatised and obviously it impacts his social and emotional development. But he doesn’t seem to display developmental symptoms in line with an actual developmental disorder. He has a more focused mind with more typical executive function than Ben and Gwen. He doesn’t struggle with social cues and social development besides from what are understandable reactions to trauma and triggers (so, he doesn’t seem to have either autism or ADHD and clearly doesn’t have another developmental disorder). He always reacts from a place of trauma; Ben and Gwen react from a place of attention difficulties/differences and impulse control difficulties/differences that have been present since their childhoods, which is necessary criteria for an ADHD diagnosis.

Julie seems neurotypical, and could be Gwen’s foil in a similar vein to how Kevin and Ben are foils (though all these four characters can be foils of any of the other ones; maybe that can be a seperate post lol). Julie is high achieving and studious, like Gwen. Julie seems calmer though, and seems to operate from a place of more typically-developing internal organisation skills and executive function, rather than anxiety and dopamine seeking. Basically, Julie seems to have a more organised mind, as well as having goals and the drive to achieve.

In my mind, Omniverse doesn’t exist, Ben and Julie stay together, Ben and Gwen get diagnosed and they, along with Julie and Kevin, revaluate their lives and relationships and their different definitions of normal (considering Ben and Gwen are both neurodivergent and have non-human heritage, while Julie is 100% human and neurotypical and Kevin, even with his powers, trauma and mental health baggage, is still neurotypical; Julie is a person of colour and that can also be brought into the conversation). Humanness/Humanity is such an ongoing theme in Ben 10 that the neurodivergent lens of viewing it fits so well.

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And even more Ben/Gwen ADHD thoughts and headcanons

-Ben’s constant flipping of character (immature to serious to immature) is a sign of masking and coping strategies. Gwen, from a very young age, adopted many hyper organisation/hyperfocused coping strategies and consciously put effort into acting mature for her age to compensate. Ben, some time between being 10-15 matured naturally as a child/adolescent would AND he realised he needed to put on a certain personality to draw attention away from his difficulties such as his struggles to focus, fidgeting etc. Obviously for both cousins the position of being “heroes” comes into play too. And the stress that comes from Ben’s position of having the Omnitrix is a contributing factor to him flipping between acting egocentric to cope and acting dangerously rigid and serious when he harbours extreme guilt or anxiety about things being his fault and thinks he has put other people’s lives at stake (like the Ultimate Kevin arc). He then gets hyperfixated on fixing these situations like Gwen does when she feels like she’s letting people down and perceives rejection from people she cares deeply about.

• Gwen’s rigidity could be seen in her need to schedule things in so much detailed and so early in advance from at least 10 years old. Her room being so impeccably neat and bare for a teenaged girl could be part of it too, if she is really rigid about where things go and what the room should look like as a coping strategy.

•Don’t think Ben’s struggles with school need to be explained much, it’s pretty stereotypical. That’s part of why I’ve focused more on Gwen. Ben’s clearly intelligent, arguably precocious in certain areas of development (like his justice sensitivity) and he struggles for reasons that have more to do with focus and interest.

•Ben and Gwen have both been emotionally driven and justice driven from a young age. I know “justice sensitivity” can be a contentious thing to touch on (of course, it doesn’t mean a person’s sense of “justice” is actually right) but to me it can be part of the emotionality aspect. The very first time we see Ben, he’s trying to defend a vulnerable kid from Cash and JT in a very impulsive, brash way. He and Gwen have a hard time shifting attention away from things that just set them off.

•Ben is bored easily. He was so, incredibly bored and dissatisfied with school and his life at only 10 years old before the Omnitrix saga. Gwen is bored easily too and that’s why she’s so damn busy and always scheduling things for herself and looking way too ahead in the future for things to look forward to and schedule for (like her 11th birthday party).

•Ben’s interpersonal relationships struggle when he forgets to do the things that the relationships need in order to stay in tact. Julie seems neurotypical, and on top of that she is 100% human, and those are just some factors that led that relationship to fizzle out. Being neurodivergent and human would be hard enough, but Ben (and Gwen) are neurodivergent and literally alien and have had huge responsibilities placed on their shoulders as very young people. Gwen’s interpersonal relationships, like with Emily, struggle when she’s too overloaded and scattered and like Ben, doesn’t notice cues that the other person is disappointed with a lack of presence.

•Ken, if he’s neurotypical, could’ve influenced Gwen growing up. Gwen thinks she acts like a neurotypical high-achiever but her strategies and coping mechanisms seem neurodivergent. But Gwen is also aware of the fact that she seems different to her peers. She explicitly said she’d always felt different in What Are Little Girls Made Of.

•Ben’s an only child, he didn’t have a sibling to compete against and model behaviour and interests off of. ADHD is genetic and I feel like his dad could be a contender for it (imo it definitely comes down from Grandpa Max). So Ben’s behaviours could have always been seen as normal behaviour for children in his parents’ eyes.

•Video games. It’s a stimulating dopamine source for Ben.

•Ben wants to do the right thing and do right by others whether it’s as a hero or in his personal life. Again, this can also be part of growing up, but his impulses can get in the way of his true motivations, desires and values, which is a part of ADHD. It clearly causes him shame when he realises he hasn’t met expectations, which is common in ADHD. He’s never appeared to have any actual persistent oppositional behaviours. It’s all focus, attention and impulses.

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More Gwen Tennyson ADHD observations/headcanons. Gotta stress these are just headcanons and I have not watched this series in years.

• She’s impulsive - Emotionally reactive. Tasks have to be done NOW even when they pop up in the middle of other tasks (like in It’s Not Easy Being Gwen where she’s doing her mom’s invitations while listening to her French oral practice, decides she needs food, gets up, takes a call from Kevin, and her spell to get the invites to write themselves almost set the house on fire). She’s not brash like Ben, but gets hyperfixated on things that aren’t a good idea if it’s important to her and if she feels like a failure or she’s let down someone she loves if she’s not succeeding (e.g. the time travel to fix Kevin’s mutation). • She’s impatient - The whole situation with trying to get Kevin to ask her out.

• She is the definition of overactivity (to be honest, as an ADHD person myself, I prefer that term to hyperactivity). There’s always gotta be another extracurricular, another task, a better school, another academic achievement, another spell, another power, another thing to learn. Many of her extracurriculars are sports based and physical. She’s hyper organised but her life is still chaotic because of everything she wants to do. She’s running on adrenaline, dopamine-stimulation and stress more than natural, actual internal/mental organisation capabilities. She doesn’t even remember or factor in time to eat regularly - how organised are you actually if your organisation doesn’t factor in time to do necessary, survival tasks? Many ADHDers don’t pay attention to their body cues too. • It’s also part of being a child and teenager, but she can ignore social cues and contexts. Her emotions and perspectives can cloud her judgement and her perception of how helpful she’s being.

• She’s attracted to dark, traumatised, interesting boys like Kevin who seem like her polar opposite, because they’re fascinating to her and it takes pressure off her to be the perfect mask of a person she puts up.

• She sees Ben, who could definitely also have ADHD, and he presents in a way that triggers her internalised feelings about herself, so he irritates her.

• She’s a people pleaser and can’t slow herself down to say no to things. It’s not a social confusion thing or a passive personality (she clearly is not a passive person), it seems way more part of her impulsivity, emotionality and rejection sensitivity. She doesn’t have the executive function and mental clarity to reason that it’s okay to not always satisfy others.

• Her mother is very uppity, high class, judgemental and “proper” and it certainly shaped the attitudes, mannerisms, coping mechanisms and personality traits Gwen developed. It’s so clear to Gwen that her mom disdains the alien heritage in the family. Natalie: “My side of the family don’t… glow” Gwen: “I glow”. Gwen clearly considers her anodite heritage a core part of her and she’s definitely aware her mother doesn’t embrace it, and Natalie, even though she clearly loves and supports Gwen, probably hasn’t embraced many other natural aspects about her daughter throughout Gwen’s life. Both her parents are wealthy, successful, and seem to have high expectations even if they are also highly supportive. That combined with the fact that Gwen is female (and even that she’s the youngest sibling of her family) contributes to a different presentation to Ben.

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Gonna wager than both Ben AND Gwen have ADHD and it comes from the Tennysons’ side of the family. Of COURSE it wouldn’t come from Natalie’s side (little sarcastic comment in reference to Gwen’s mom’s attitude towards the Tennysons).

Don’t chew me out, it’s just a headcanon and I literally just finished watching one episode from the Ben 10 franchise for the first time in years and years. Yes, it was It’s Not Easy Being Gwen.

Ben has the classic fidgety, unfocused type of ADHD and Gwen always has to be on the go, rigidly overpacking her schedule and staying hyper organised and hyper-achieving to make sure her mind stays stimulated and her life stays together, and she helps everyone and people pleases to a fault. Ben’s lack of a stimulated brain comes out in being more impulsive and hyperfixating on stuff like video games and Sumo Slammers. And while Ben’s more obviously impulsive, Gwen’s been irritable and feisty since she was a child (examples of more emotional impulsivity). She also spent the entirety of her episode forgetting to eat, and she got distracted and switched between multiple tasks to the point where she almost set her house on fire. Both cousins get a thrill from the hero stuff; it’s good for their brains.

Both cousins have also always felt different to their peers. Gwen said this in What Are Little Girls Made Of. Ben was always bullied and felt out of place at school academically and socially, since he was a child. Gwen was enticed by a life of living with Verdona for a reason and it wasn’t just about mastering super cool powers, it was also about her life on Earth and her sense of her place on it. She didn’t even feel like anyone would really desperately want her to stay until Kevin expressed it. Both cousins aren’t just different because of being literally alien, they’re different as humans too. That was kind of the whole point of the original series in the first place, that Ben already felt ostracised and he found himself through this other means of being different. Finding the Omnitrix, gaining extraterrestrial powers, and being able to help people and not feel powerless.

Kevin is traumatised. Other than that he has the calm brain out of those three. Even if Kevin isn’t neurodivergent, his whole arc from the beginning of the franchise surrounded feeling like a freak, on the fringe of society, not feeling human, and it had way more disastrous consequences for him. He’s completely Ben’s foil. Ben found himself by moving away from humanness, away from human standards of achievement and fulfilment.

Grandpa Max definitely could have ADHD lol it’s a genetic condition.

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More SDMI neurodivergent head canons that we definitely need

-Most of the ND characters are undiagnosed.

-Most of the show's main and supporting cast are neurodivergent. Which might be a reach but ND people ARE drawn to each other.

-Sheriff Stone is autistic (and has anxiety), the western-theme thing is a special interest. He was diagnosed young.

-Mayor Nettles has ADHD (combined type). Which is why the Air Force was a good career for her. In the Come Undone timeline she only starts to get the idea that she might have it because of an off-hand comment Stone's father made because he picked it up and assumed she knew and since then she started hyper fixating on the topic and realised people like Brad, Judy, Cassidy, Ricky, and the kids of these people seem neurodivergent. Not that she'll say anything to those people. Her and Stone's kids all have one or two of ASD/ADHD.

-Fred is undiagnosed ASD/combined ADHD in both timelines. In the Come Undone timeline Brad and Judy have three younger kids who are also definitely neurodivergent but they are definitely the parents who go "he/she can't be autistic/ADHD, I do that too". Brad has both combined ADHD and autism while Judy is just autistic.

-Judy spent a lot of time in her school years studying social interactions and dynamics amongst her peers but struggled to fit in with them, despite technically being a "popular girl". She was a cheerleader and hung around the other cheerleaders and popular girls when she wasn't with the gang but didn't really fit in with them. Basically just like what Fred experiences with Ethan and Gary and the soccer team. The moment in the show when Pericles is pissed at her and Brad and she responds cheerfully to Brad "That's right, Brad" and he snaps "Not now, Judy" is an example of how she can struggle to read the room.

-Brad's ADHD is more blatant and draws attention away from traits that are more autistic. His most obvious ASD trait is his special interest in traps in the Nibiru timeline. In the Come Undone timeline obstetrics became a special interest for him and Judy.

-Ricky also has autism and had a special interest in birds and outer space when he was young (in flashbacks in season 2 he had a room filled with bird and space stuff), and in the Come Undone timeline later became fixated on the CreationX stuff.

-Cassidy has OCD and anxiety. But Ricky thinks she could also be autistic.

-Daphne has inattentive ADHD, Shaggy and Fred have combined ADHD, Velma and Marcie have autism.

-Daphne, Shaggy and Velma all know that Fred is probably autistic but none of them realise that they themselves are ND.

-Velma is similar Judy in the way that she observes (and this is Velma so also scrutinises) people and the way they behave and interact, while Marcie prefers to avoid people and doesn't like to pay attention to what they're doing. Daphne more intuitively understands social cues and dynamics but historically her inattentive traits haven't done her favours with socialising with other kids (hence she's with the gang).

-Daphne gets by in school by doing a lot of homework and assignments in class during times when she should be working on something else or paying attention to the teacher. Mayor Nettles used to do a lot of late nights, last minute cramming, and body doubling with Cassidy who was in the library a lot after school. Brad, like Fred, was known for school not being one of his priorities but in the Come Undone timeline, when he became interested in medicine he found ways to hyperfocus on school and hired tutors to make sure he got into college. Shaggy's grades are generally not great unless there's a topic he's interested in, and he forgets a lot of homework and assignments.

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my thoughts and headcanons about the og mystery inc (which I can’t develop too much here without spoiling my own fic) :

(also feel free to disagree, these are just headcanons !)

Ricky probably had social anxiety as a kid/teenager, and only felt comfortable around mystery incorporated

Ricky can play many instruments but mainly piano, guitar and keytar

He was into ornithology as a kid

He’s also very good with coding, and mechanic

Cassidy surely fell first but Ricky fell WAY HARDER

Judy tried so hard to get them to actually go on a date, but Pericles would always find a way to screw everything up

they’re all neurodivergent.

I like to think that Brad and Rickie had that kind of strange bromance as teenagers

Judy and Mayor Nettles had a thing going on. I saw that once in a fanfic in maybe 2017 ? and that idea never left my brain (also the idea of having both Mayor Nettles and Sheriff Stone experiencing a romantic relationship with a parent of Fred’s is funny to me)

Brad disguised as Fred in “The Man in the mirror” should be call bred 🍞

Judy and Ricky were always very chill around each other

Cassidy and Brad however-

Man they were like cat and dog 😭 they cared a lot about each-other in the “sibling-always-picking-on-each-other” kind of way

I like (no) to think that a few seconds before their death in the pre-nibiru timeline, each one of them got a moment of realisation. the kind of realisation that makes you wonder how you got yourself lost at such an extreme point and makes you ask yourself what you’ve become.

Cassidy wanted to be a journalist and travel across the world

Brad and Judy never had another child after Fred because they just couldn’t imagine living a life as parents after loosing their child

Ricky saw Velma like a daughter at some point

Brad was very protective of his friends as a teenager

In the red room, Ricky’s the only one to appear as a teenager, because he lost his best version of himself the day he left the city after the fr est attacked them. His identity was therefore strongly linked to that, and he sort of lost himself by loosing his friends and leaving his family.

they are the definition of “maybe in another universe, we’re still all together”.

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Reblogging because 

1. These are all awesome

2. I had the Judy and Mayor Nettles idea too!! I wasn’t the one who wrote it into a fic (I’ve never seen a fic that includes that) but I definitely made a post about it here at some point, even thought of the fact that it’d mean both Nettles and Stone had a thing with a parent of Fred’s 

3. I definitely think they all and the Scooby gang and a lot of the supporting characters are neurodivergent 

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Here me out... Lola Tung as a younger, live-action version of Mayor Nettles

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the entire scooby gang is autistic send tweet

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Sheriff Stone: “It turns out when you get asked who your favourite child is, you’re supposed to pick one of your own... I know that now.” 

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Scooby: “We may not listen to you sometimes.”

Shaggy: “Or respect you.”

Velma: “And sure, we like making fun of you.”

Fred: “... But?”

Daphne: “There is no but.” 

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I once speculated that the whole gang in SDMI besides Daphne is neurodivergent BUT neurodivergent people tend to gravitate to each other... 

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Lol is it possible that Mayor Nettles’ middle name is Maya (Mae-a) and THAT’S what Stone is saying when we think he’s calling her “Janet Mayor Nettles” 

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Watching scenes in season 1 like where Daphne’s relationship advice to Velma is boys DO like being told what to do, makes me think that Mayor Nettles’ presence would definitelyyy have been useful in season 1 

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How many people were in on the Krampus plan? Did the gang, Mayor Nettles and Sheriff Stone traumatise a whole bunch of kids? Are they all so used to the town being the way that it is that that thought isn’t something that crossed their minds?

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The realisation that in The Man In The Mirror there’s no way that the original Mystery Inc got Fred to the abandoned movie studio directly from the abandoned house and they legitimately drugged him or knocked him out in order to get him to their fake post apocalyptic Crystal Cove set up… as if that’s the most disturbing thing about what they did (which says a lot) but

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More random Nettles/Stone/Jones friendship headcanon:

-Jones’ wedding toast definitely contained what both Nettles and Stone said to him about the other person when they didn’t like each other

-Jones was the one who suggested to Nettles she should run for mayor because of how good she was at interacting with the community

-Billy is Jones’ favourite kid of Stone and Nettles because Jones finds him to be the least arrogant and stubborn

-Stone has a lot of anxiety surrounding leaving the kids with other people, because of potential consequences that you can probably guess. Jones isn’t an exception to that but he’s watched the kids a few times due to necessity.

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Who thinks Fred tried the whole group pow wow thing again (what he tried to do in season 1 with the sheriff as mediator) but with Mayor Nettles at some point in season 2