Hi! Do you have any advice for how to write Cluster B characters? I REALLY love how amazingly you wrote King Candy’s NPD in Killswitch, and I’ve seen a lot of pwNPD in your inbox and comments praising the representation, so I thought I’d ask, because I’m interested in writing about stigmatized disorders myself, but I’m scared I’ll portray it in an offensive way by mistake. Any advice?
AAAA Thank you!!! <333 I am extremely grateful to all the pwNPD that reassured me I was doing a good job, I also had a lot of paranoia thoughts about if I was doing it justice while starting out the fic, lol.
I’d say the most important thing to do is just, y’know, proper research and allat! And I DO NOT mean vanilla google searches, because when it comes to Cluster B disorders, Google is fucking USELESS and will show you 95% stupid ableist bullshit. It can be hard to find reliable information on stigmatized disorders, but the best way to find it is ALWAYS through communities of people who actually HAVE the disorder. Like NPD, for example, there are TONS of really informative blogs that are open to questions about NPD, or have useful masterlists like this one and this one. (Highly recommend, those lists are VERY informative!) So if you were looking up something like BPD, for example, try going through the “actually bpd” tag on tumblr, r/BPD on Reddit, stuff like that. I also have a post here that talks about researching a little bit.
An important thing to keep in mind is that people with disorders are not a hivemind. They are individual people with their own thoughts and feelings and their experiences with the disorder may vary from person to person. It’s also important to write it in a way that the disorder may EXPLAIN their thoughts and actions, but it is not an excuse to hide behind when it comes to their choices. Turbo, for example, was a bad person because of his bad choices, NOT because he has NPD. The NPD contributed heavily to his mental breakdown(s), but so did the EXTREMELY toxic culture of the arcade, and his complete refusal to communicate with the core four about the doubts he was having, when Vanellope especially kept trying to make him feel safe to open up about stuff like that. While the NPD contributed in how badly he was taking everything, he also just made some REALLY terrible choices that ended up making things go sideways. (And even then, he did eventually learn and grow from those mistakes and is making an effort to live a healthier life, which dumbass ableists claim NPD people “aren’t capable of”, lol) Very, very important to make a distinction between the disordered thoughts and the actual choices made, so that it doesn’t feel like you’re painting everybody with the disorder as some evil person who can't control themselves and are doomed to abuse everybody in their life forever or some idiotic shit like that, lol. They’re just people who have different thought processes and lower empathy levels than non-Cluster Bs, and that’s completely fine. It doesn’t make them emotionally stupid or automatically "abusive" people or something, just different in how they think about things and interact with the world. Yes, it is a disorder, and it makes life REALLY fucking complicated, but as long as you’re treating it respectfully and making sure to listen to the experiences of people who have the disorder, you should be okay! A lot of people will appreciate the fact that you’re trying to write Cluster Bs sympathetically in the first place, since they get demonized to hell and back literally all the time. A lot of the pwNPD that’ve talked to me about it were mostly just incredibly relieved that someone was making an effort to ACTUALLY understand them and represent it properly, when most people don’t bother. (I also have an advantage in that I’m friends with a pwNPD in real life, so I already had a good idea of how some of this stuff worked before I even started researching for the fic.)
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