@jereviendrai said: ‘ maybe you should try ‘plan d’ for ‘dumbass’. ’ (FOR PETER FROM IVAN XOXOXO)
The comment gets an eyeroll as a response from Peter. “See, this is why I don’t talk to you about things.” This is untrue, actually, as Peter has no issue with unloading just about everything onto Ivan, so long as it doesn’t relate to the whole Spider-Man thing. At the moment, though, it’s nothing that important, he’s simply sitting on his bed, attempting to get some kind of homework done, but getting absolutely nowhere.
Paper has a small blueprint he had been working on, but by now, all of it felt wrong. So he crumples it up into a ball, and tosses it at the other’s head. Lightly, of course.
"Oh, shut up. You know you love-- hey!”
Ivan is interrupted mid-sentence by Peter’s plan c smacking him in the forehead. It doesn’t hurt, but it hurts his feelings. Just a bit. Just a little teeny tiny bit. Enough of a bit for him to pull a dramatic frown and fix Peter with a kicked puppy kind of stare. Without breaking eye contact, he gathers up the offending weapon and begins the arduous task of delicately uncrumpling it.
“Under attack in my own home. My own friend. I’m hurt, Peter. Abso-fuckin-lutely wounded.”
He looks down at the unfolded piece of paper. His eyebrows furrow.
@jereviendrai said: “well, you’re a very emotional person.” (THIS IS FROMMMM EVE)
A small sniffle comes from the witch. He wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t stop words from sounding like an insult. It sounded like the kind of thing that Michael might say to her, before adding that she was probably faking it or something. Still, Mary had always been emotional, and she was always going to be emotional.
“Sorry.” Maybe not something worth apologizing over, but she felt the need to do so anyways. It was something she did regularly, a habit that stuck around after all the years stuck in the ground. “It’s just how I am. I’ve heard it’s good for you, actually.” She’s referring to crying, as she had been wiping away a few tears when the comment had been made.
Oh. Oh no. How that sweet, soft sorry tugs at his rotting heartstrings. He swears he can almost feel one snap. It’s difficult to repress a grin -- funniest and most honest interaction he’s had with another human being all day. All week. All month, even. Typically, he wouldn’t have said a thing at all, but there’s something about the way she looks with tears streaming down her cheeks that has left him utterly entranced.
“Is it, now,” Eve says flatly, softly. The words should add up to a question, but they come off as a distant statement by someone not quite present. He realizes a little too late that he’s staring a little too much. Before he knows it, he’s offering a handkerchief to her. It’s the polite thing to do.
Nadine didn’t seem offended at all by the nickname. After all, it made sense. It was a real shock to anyone that she was in college, and even more of a shock that she was somehow managing to pass her classes. Sure, she was an underachiever, but part of being an underachiever was just barely managing to pass every test, with the least amount of effort possible. It was a skill on its own.
“What’s up?”
Oh good, he got the right person this time. He’d given the ‘hey, underachiever!’ spiel to at least four other people matching her description, and the death glares were getting just a bit old. He might’ve saved himself the trouble, asked for her by name, except he forgot it immediately after he was told. Natalie? Naomi? Naruto? No idea.
But the girl’s response isn’t overwhelmingly negative, so he’s sure he’s got the right person.
“Your grades!”
Beaming, ever eager, Ivan sets a folder on the table in front of her.
“These’re midterm answers. Fifty bucks, or best offer. Heard you could use ‘em.”
Klara didn’t really know what was considered appropriate. Not in this society, nor in any society. All she knew was that she was hungry. She’d last eaten at the facility, just before her handler had helped her escape into the world. That had been a few days ago, and she’d been running ever since. But now she was starving and needed to eat.
Walking through suburbia was a startlingly bizarre experience for her. All these houses, all these people. Klara had hidden herself as a stray cat, realising quickly that a scruffy, skinny cat drew far less attention than a scruffy looking, skinny teenager did. She waited until dark, until all the lights in the houses had switched off one by one. The streets were still illuminated with light, but the houses and their gardens were dark enough for her to sneak through.
It was too tempting not to try and find food. All day she’d smelt things coming from windows, but not brought herself to try and steal them. Instead, she waited until everyone was asleep. Sliding open an unlocked window and then using her cat form to jump in, breaking in was far too easy. As was using her nose to find food.
The pantry was like a miracle. In her excitement, Klara knocked one of the jars off, sending it shattering to the ground. She flinched, and waited. But no one seemed to react, and the food beckoned to her so strongly. So she continued, pulling out anything she could try.
She heard him half a second before the lights flipped on, but it was too late. Klara was caught, red handed. Wide eyes stared at the young man, unsure of how to answer.
Klara’s lack of a strong reaction gave Ivan pause. Maybe a little too much pause. The pair stood and stared at one another for what felt like ages -- was just seconds, but felt like forever. Too long. It was almost impressive, how quickly the adrenaline left Ivan’s body -- leaving him to deal with the mess of a break-in all by his lonesome. Leaving him with the discomfort of being able to stop and think critically for two seconds. These moments were typically a blessing for him, but this time... well, this time he just wished he could force her to get out.
She hadn’t taken anything. Nothing valuable, anyway. Nothing with any resale value. Just... food. Food that she devoured on the spot, rather than literally anywhere else. It was just weird. Struck him as odd. Not much of a threat -- just a nuisance that he’d have to pick up after.
Some home invasion this was.
“Seriously, what the fuck? What’s- what’s your problem?”
He tried to sound angry, perhaps a little intimidating, but he really just came off as... confused. This was uncharted territory for him. Maybe if she’d been aggressive he could’ve kept the momentum going, but they were both just standing there. He wasn’t able to do much with that, was he?
“Explain yourself, or-- or--”
He groaned, dragging his hands through his hair.
“Christ, dude, you’re fucking up my night. Why’re you here?”
||| ooc; can’t believe i wrote an entire fucking essay about the mental health of the characters on this blog and forgot to mention that ivan suffers paranoid delusions whoops
there isn’t really a whole lot to say??? he just kind of... has them. usually he can keep them in check, but sometimes something fucks him up so badly that he just doesn’t have the mental energy to figure out what’s real and what isn’t.
usually his delusions are like, extreme fear of someone hurting him, using something against him or abandoning him. and if he doesn’t catch it and doesn’t realize that he’s spiraling out of control, he goes to great and messy lengths to avoid that pain.
aaaaand then he comes out of it and he’s like “what the fuck” and brutally hates himself and avoids people like the plague. it’s fun! fun. fun...
so when he’s experiencing something he thinks might be paranoid delusion, he gets really... worried... and he does his best to avoid whichever trigger he’s identified as the root cause of the delusion. ‘cause like, he doesn’t... like to spiral like that. it’s messy and it feels bad/ugly.
iDK THERE’S A LOT THAT GOES INTO THIS...
also it doesn’t help that he has uh, a very real threat in his life. like. there IS someone who is genuinely after him. someone who wants to hurt him, use things against him, more or less isolate him and ruin his life...? so not only does he deal with delusions, but he also has like... something rooted in reality that helps him justify his paranoid and irrational thinking.
so it’s hard for him to talk himself down from it. he tries tho. he tries.
okay, maybe he shouldn’t be bringing his school work home with him. whoops.
billy’s less than perfectly pitying, glad to see ivan back from the realm of the all-seeing after a solid thirty minutes of whatever multiverse insight he’s been gifted with. or cursed. this one sounded more like cursed. ❛ i opened your third eye. it’s a thing i learned. ❜
the students at strange academy are slower to take to peeping into the fabrication and stitches of all reality than ivan— it’s something billy was introduced to at the tender age of ‘ possible next sorcerer supreme ‘ when stephen pressed his thumb gently on his temple, and billy blinked into a world he’d never even knew existed. he only recently picked up the same trick, a prod of his fingertip to anyone’s head, coaxing sight undiscovered out into the multi-world to a thousand possibilities.
but maybe he needs work. ❛ haven’t actually tried it before, though. ❜
‘i opened your third eye. it’s a thing i learned.’
so casual, the way billy says it. so calm, so detached from the horror of it all. ivan can barely focus on a single thing coming out of billy’s mouth -- far too preoccupied with the tears leaking out of his forehead. they drip down the bridge of his nose, slide along the grooves of his nostrils, hang just off the tip. it’s weird. it’s so weird. he lifts a hand to wipe the tears from his original two eyes, then his third eye. it reacts -- blinking, fluttering -- like a normal eye.
it’s weird. it’s so weird.
ivan grimaces, lower lip trembling -- upper failing to remain anywhere near as stiff as he’d like. his three eyes squeeze shut. tears continue to stream down his cheeks, his forehead.
“jesus elizabeth christ, i want to light you on fire,” ivan grumbles through gritted teeth, his upper lip twitching as the beginnings of a nasty headache take root in his frontal lobe. his temples throb. he hisses softly and starts massaging them, for all the good that will do.
a lot happened in the span of those thirty minutes, but one thing sticks out to him above all the rest. a familiar face flecked with his blood, standing over him with a blade in hand, gloating as though he’d finally--
it’s a thought ivan can’t bear to finish. he saw. he knew what he saw.
“so, what? what does it do? amp up the paranoid delusions, or--? ‘cause i don’t fucking need that in my life, guy from the news.”
||| ooc; does every character on this blog have bpd symptoms? is this problematic, considering they’re all villains or would-be villains? is there a way to give a villain a mental health disorder without stigmatizing the disorder? well--
OH AND BIG TRIGGER WARNING FOR A WIDE RANGE OF MENTAL HEALTH TOPICS SUCH AS: eating disorders, mental illness, stigmatization of mental illness, self harm, suicidal tendencies, and a fuckload more. I don’t go into detail. There are just mentions. I’m not gonna say a bunch of graphic shit, I promise! If I went into graphic detail, this would turn into a PhD thesis proposal, and that’d be WAY too long to be worth writing.
Also I have BPD, but I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert on the subject. I’m not. My word is not law, but it’d be nice if my word was taken into consideration.
this post got so fucking long and disorganized jesus christ
The answers are: yes, not inherently, and absolutely.
I want to get into the mental health of all three characters in a second, but I think it’s important to talk a little about the other two points first. That said, though -- yes, they’re all borderline. All three of them! And they all experience it differently! I will come back to that. Anyway--
I feel like it’s important to talk about villains, mental illness and stigma. There’s a really common (and insanely lazy) tendency for writers to explain a villain’s villainy by simply saying, “oh, well they’re a psychopath,” or, “they’re just crazy.” This is not only lazy and offensive, but it contributes to an unfair stigma against the mentally ill.
Mental illness might, say, compel someone to steal a chocolate bar or snap at someone out of anger. It might make a person’s emotions volatile. It might make someone unreasonable. They might suffer delusions of abandonment, of some plot against them, of people’s secret intent to humiliate them, etc. They might suffer and handle their suffering poorly. They may cause harm. But that doesn’t make them... evil. It makes them complex. And how they react to and handle their negative actions says more about them than any diagnosis could.
When you have a villain with a mental illness, you need to examine how the illness is hurting them. Write about how it hinders their progress. Write about how isolating it can be for them. Write about the impact and struggle. Not how the illness makes them so evil or so irredeemably awful. The illness should be what humanizes them and helps to make them relatable. No matter how untouchable and powerful your villain is, they have some personal struggle that is independent of their villainy. When done correctly, it can go a long way in fleshing out your villain and adding interesting inner conflict!
I know, I know. You might be asking, “yeah, but don’t people with mental health issues sometimes cause harm directly related to their symptoms?” To which I say: yeah, duh, of course. Just like a depressed person might say something mean when they’re having a bad day. Just like someone with ADHD might make someone feel like they aren’t being listened to. Just like someone who has social anxiety might make a friend feel unloved. Just like mentally healthy people also occasionally cause harm.
I’m not saying mental health issues don’t cause problems and maladaptive behaviors. I’m just saying it doesn’t... make someone inherently bad -- real or fictional. And I need people to internalize that.
ANYWAY ON TO THE CHARACTERS AND THEIR BPD
(i know, you’re probably like, “dude oh my god shut up and get on with it” sakjlfdkjsa)
I’m going to be referring to the four subtypes. I know these are controversial to some people. Some really don’t like these labels, others feel comforted by them, etc. They’re just to make it easier to talk about this whole thing. No one fits neatly into any one subtype! Some people don’t resemble any particular one! Everyone is different! Don’t box people into these subtypes if you haven’t been given consent, thanks!
Mr. A / Clark Donovan
Mr. A is a classic example of the Quiet Borderline. Someone with quiet BPD mostly directs their symptoms inward. It’s harder to detect than other types, as the symptoms that are most prevalent are mostly expressed, well, inwardly. Self-esteem issues, self-blame, insecurity, withdrawing emotionally, pretending you’re not angry when you are, self harming tendencies, suicidal thoughts, etc. He’s also kind of clingy.
Mr. A is an extremely loyal person to a fault. He is a people pleaser and will go to the ends of the Earth to make his loved ones happy, even if it hurts him. This is of detriment to him, as he often finds himself getting hurt on behalf of people who might not care as much as he does. He’s let a lot of bad people into his life solely because they made him feel loved, wanted and useful. He views everyone he loves through rose-tinted glasses and only takes them off long after he’s been laid to waste by them.
He has terrible issues with self-image and has thus developed an eating disorder. He also has severe depersonalization/derealization disorder, which is a result of how his mental health interacts with his reality-warping powers. It creates a lot of anxiety with him, watching himself phase through things and bend the world around him on a whim.
His motivations in life are connected to this, but his motivation to do evil things is not. He wants to bring other superpowered people together as a united front against humanity, as he feels that humanity is a threat to their continued existence. This has nothing to do with his mental health issues. The part of it that does tie in is that he’s painfully lonely and has chronic feelings of boredom, so being surrounded with a shit ton of different people mitigates that. It’s a motive for him bringing people closer to him, but it is not a motive for him to launch an attack on all humanity. He’d be really offended if you tried to accuse him of doing this on the basis that he’s just a bit ill.
His illness literally just makes him crave contact with other living beings just like him. He sometimes does bad or stupid things because of this, but it literally has nothing to do with his motives as a villain.
As an addendum of sorts, Mr. A’s alias and reluctance to use his given name (Clark Donovan) are a result of identity issues he suffers due to his BPD. He finds it hard to maintain a stable sense of identity, so he just... doesn’t.
Ivan Chanteur
Ivan closely resembles what we like to call an Impulsive Borderline, comorbid with ADHD. He is an impulsive person, as the name of the subtype suggests. He’s a thrill-seeker who suffers from extreme levels of chronic boredom, which he desperately tries to combat by any means necessary. Staying still and doing repetitive tasks is literal torture for him. If he cannot get up and move and do whatever it takes to keep himself feeling fulfilled and occupied, he is probably going to fucking lose it.
When he is actively vocalizing his boredom on a regular basis, this means the chronic feelings of boredom have reached critical mass. It’s not just boredom. It’s anxiety, it’s agitation, it’s existential dread, it’s an inability to focus, it’s pent-up energy that needs to go somewhere and can’t just stay in him anymore. If he can’t get it out in healthy ways, he usually resorts to self-harm or less-than-healthy pursuits. He’s been known to dabble in drugs, self-harm, occasional promiscuity on a bad night. While therapy’s helped him get a handle on it, there’ve been a lot of stressful and traumatic things going on in his life have have made it a lot harder to keep himself in check.
Ivan is pretty charismatic, able to cast a wide net and catch all sorts of people in his social web. He has a sort of natural magnetism that, on a superficial level, should make him quite popular. But underneath it all, he has difficulty trusting people long enough to actually let them into his life. He’ll act like an open book, only to slam himself shut and reshelve himself before anyone can get anywhere near the end. He’s easy to befriend, but difficult to get close to. This has caused him to feel lonely and frustrated. He wishes he could easily form deep connections, but it’s hard and it hurts him.
In addition to all of this, he engages in a wide variety of attention-seeking and risk-taking behaviors. He often spends time with people who are not good to him, simply for the thrill of it. This has often gotten him hurt, but he finds it hard to cut this habit in spite of everything. This leads to a lot of frustration and self-hatred, as it makes it hard for him to protect himself. Every time someone hurts or betrays him, he beats himself up over it and tells himself he should know better by now.
All that said, though, he’s come a long way in therapy. He’s not quite able to keep a handle on all of it all the time, but he’s managed to secure one or two decently stable friendships along the way.
Eve Laurier
Eve is particularly difficult to talk about, but I’m going to try my best. Eve is what happens when you make a conscious decision to be bad. He knows beyond a shadow of doubt that what he’s doing is wrong, but he feels so wronged by the world that he just cannot seem to motivate himself to care. This... again... has nothing to do with his BPD. If anything, it’s his struggles with this disorder that keep him at least somewhat... grounded in reality.
Eve suffered a personal tragedy -- the loss of his twin sister in a housefire. Though ruled an accident, he cried foul play. Consumed with grief at the loss of the only person he felt could truly understand him, he vowed to find the culprit and make them pay. This set him down a path of vengeance that would make John Wick blush.
Eve grew up as the heir to his family’s criminal enterprise. This put him in a position of power the very moment he was born. This also left him exposed to a lot of terrible, violent crimes from a very young age. Because this was normalized by his family, he internalized and compartmentalized any misgivings he had about violence. By the time he was ready for university, he had been thoroughly trained to carry out hitjobs on behalf of the family. He was a weapon from the moment he left the womb. He was groomed to do terrible things, and it’s because of this ongoing and continuous trauma that he developed his particular cocktail of mental health issues.
He mostly fits in with the label of Petulant BPD. Repeated and violent trauma did a number on him, leaving him angry and hurt over what his parents let him fall victim to. He also experiences feelings of self-loathing over the part he feels he played in his own trauma, despite the fact that it started in early childhood. He is self-defeating and self-blaming.
He has a difficult time expressing his feelings and has angry outbursts fairly regularly, often resulting in self-harm and suicidal ideation. He’s been known to reach for the nearest mind-altering substance just to get out of his head for a bit. His mood swings are intense and leave him feeling fatigued and anxious. He has severe social anxiety that sometimes manifests as cold indifference.
He also has issues with control, has paranoid delusions about the people in his life and doesn’t often believe it when people say that they care for him. He will find any and every piece of evidence that points to the contrary, even if he has to make it up himself. This usually ensures that he’ll end up alone again. He doesn’t have very many close relationships, if any at all.
His BPD is not the reason he hurts people. Any hurt caused by his BPD is directed at himself, not at others. His BPD is a direct result of what actually has primed him to hurt people. It’s a direct result of trauma. He’s traumatized.
And no, trauma is no excuse for what he’s done -- but his BPD didn’t make him kidnap and torture Ivan while he waited for Ivan’s parents to send in the ransom. That was all Eve. That was his conscious decision to make, in spite of everything in his head telling him how awful and wrong he would be to do such a thing. He knew it was wrong and ignored it, as he was under the impression that Ivan’s family had a hand in his sister’s death.
If anything, his BPD aggravates his feelings of shame and self-loathing when he does precisely what his parents had been training him to do his whole life.
Anyway--
I hope this was helpful or at least interesting.
The point I’m trying to make here is that mental illness isn’t some kind of ultimate litmus test of good and evil. A disorder doesn’t make you good or bad. It’s just another facet of who you are.
So... to that end... please for the love of fuck stop using personality disorders as the reason for someone’s villainy. Please. I am begging.
I wrote a bunch of BPD villains in various stages of villainhood because I have BPD and this disorder often makes you feel like you’re evil, a monster, etc. Honestly, on good days I feel like an inherently bad person who consciously chooses to do good. That’s very flawed and I know that logically I’m not inherently bad, but that’s kind of what stigma does. It makes you feel like you’re inherently bad. And that feeling influenced how I write all three of these characters.
This is an incoherent mess but today’s the day I find out if I have coronavirus and I’m so fucking stressed out and hopped up on DayQuil. Thanks for reading any of this, I guess?
Third Eye (which is definitely Billy's fault, he's sorry)
fuck guys from the news. honestly, fuck them. ivan had been inclined to feel sympathetic towards the lot of them for the longest time. always having to hide, people constantly up in their business, always having to save the day. it’s tiresome enough that ivan feels immense pity for them.
but that all changed when one of those guys from the news decided to give ivan a little cosmic plastic surgery. thanks to the newest addition to his face -- an eye smack dab in the middle of his forehead -- he’s spent the last half hour screaming his throat raw.
visions of tragedy, of death, of great and catastrophic storms dance before his eyes. ghostly apparitions dive at him and make him cower, clawing and jeering at him. he can see eve’s smirk, the familiar glint of a scalpel, the pristine white tile of the basement floor, blood, a new scar -- his parents frowning down at him as he lay in a hospital bed, his vision forever tainted by shadows out of the corners of his eyes.
lifetimes upon lifetimes flash before his third eye, his original two rolling so far back in his head that only the whites remain visible. veiny, bloodshot, barely-white whites. and he screams and he sobs for each of those thirty minutes, cowering and hiding his face behind the sleeves of his flannel as though he’s naught but a small child hiding from the monster in his closet.
with a soft whimper, a shudder, it stops. the pain, the terror, the chaos -- it all just stops. he stares blankly at his palms, then slowly rests his gaze on billy’s face. all three of his eyes blink in unison.
||| ooc; i don’t mean to sound clinically insane (i mean like, i am but you know what i mean) but i want a warriors au so fucking bad.
like. the cat books. the books about the feral cats that fight each other and have like, holy wars and shit. the books for children that i was obsessed with when i was 11.
kaledo-art
annaxmalina
pixelskylines
jbbartram-illu
titsay
yousharknotpass
germansingergirl
