i want to rant about comfort characters for a sec.
i’ve noticed something, and that something has made me severely irritated. making comfort characters isn’t what makes me irritated. it’s the fact that comfort characters have to be made within specific parameters in order to be considered socially acceptable, and if your character falls out of these parameters, they become an object of ridicule.
let me bring up a specific example here.
some of you guys were around when handia was making rounds, and some of you were only here for the aftermath. this fantroll went viral from its home source on deviantart, belonging to a young man named damien, user crystals1986. yes, the fantroll looked absolutely bizarre, and the artwork that was produced by damien was oftentimes highly specific and generally odd to the outside eye, most of the art being of himself or of handia herself, touching crystals to make their hands grow in the manner depicted above.
crazy, right? totally hilarious. let’s go ahead and blast it all over reddit and various forums and put this troll on every bad fantroll blog we can find because we think it’s weird.
what most people didn’t realise, because no one cared to actually visit damien’s deviantart page, that he was an autistic young man who had been diagnosed with marfan’s syndrome, which can cause your hands and fingers to become long, thin, and overall bony, as depicted below:
damien created handia as a comfort character to help him work through a telltale symptom of marfan’s that he often admitted that he was embarrassed about. he would write in-depth about the medical equipment he depicted in his artwork because of how familiar he was with it. he even created a mystical means of the hands growing (crystals) to make himself feel more at ease with his condition when making artwork. a lot of his artwork would depict him crying because he was scared in the hospital with his condition, and handia or his favourite video game or tv show characters would be there to help and comfort him.
but no one cared about that. it was easier to laugh.
“make comfort characters to help you cope!!” you all say. but you always forget to add the part where the artwork has to be what you deem good or pretty or cute, because if it’s not up to your tastes and you think it looks bad, then that cheapens your character. and if a comfort character is depicting something you find strange or bizarre, it’s automatically okay to make fun of it.
you think comfort characters are nothing but uwu soft sparkle children in big sweaters and band-aids on their knees, but the minute an autistic person with beginner art skills makes a character to help him cope with a condition that terrified him, you immediately all turned around and decided that comfort characters are only acceptable if they look and act like yours.
you don’t actually care about comfort characters helping people to cope with things. you only care about them looking cute and nothing else.
ellievsbear
yousharknotpass
annaxmalina
