Something that's been on my mind lately. I hope you'll hear me out! (View below cut)
There are many typos in this as I did it during an all nighter, and I had to combine some images to meet the Tumblr image limit. Forgive me. And again, as I will repeatedly state, this is for the sake of discussion about the harms of stereotyping heavily stigmatized disorders/disabilities, not hate towards anyone at all.
There is a point somewhere here where I say "difficulty understanding other people's empathy" it is supposed to say "difficulty understanding other people's emotions." I apologize, I thought I had fixed that. I cannot include a screenshot of what my caption had said on other platforms, so I will copy paste it at the bottom.
Caption from other platforms!!
A Splitting Of The Mind (or ASOTM) is an infamous MCR fanwork from the mid 2000s in which Gerard Way has schizophrenia. Still today it is hailed as one the Big Three of MCR fan works, even with demand for a physical release. With that being said...it's handling of schizophrenia is insensitive, shallow, and sometimes just incorrect, as most media about us is.
Normally I'd give it more grace. The author was clearly a teenager when they wrote this, and I want to brush it off as a product of its time. But both the author and the fandom stand by ASOTM to this day. That concerns me. When something reaches and impacts such a large amount of people for nearly 20 years, I think there's room to discuss it. And I'm glad to hear the author has encouraged feedback.
I'm personally not a big reader of written fanfiction, it's just not a medium I resonate with often, and rpf fanfic in particular is absolutely not my cup of tea. But the impact fanfiction has on the My Chem community is unavoidable, for better and for worse, and this is one I wanted to understand. Reading it honestly sucked. Going in knowing that this is a highly praised story in our community, and then finding that Gerard is like a caricature of my diagnosis, was a repetitive reminder of how people misunderstand us. The only way I really know how to deal with this is to talk about it. I'd like to attempt to provide alternatives to these awful stereotypes in schizophrenic characters, correct misconceptions, etc. And if it takes more discussion, videos, or something after this, Im open to that. It just felt like a place to start.
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