wanted to start doing characters related to canon characters so here's a sister i made for scott :3. haven't made her a bio cuz i'm lazy rn, but her name is kelly!
also an insert i did of her! starting to get used to doing inserts
it's really funny to me that total drama, one of the most tropey & stereotype heavy shows actually has one of the better reps of OCD & DID
don't get me wrong, when looking at the show by itself both of these are really terrible rep in retrospect BUT they aren't the worst out there
this is gonna be a longgg post because i myself have OCD & DID so i want to put my own retrospective/take on their disorders (or for trents case, hinting to it)
my rambles below:
for trent with OCD, it's totally possible for OCD to be less obvious, which makes sense why trent was more "normal" in the first season, which then the stress with dating gwen and the whole different teams issue could make him stressed and then make his OCD more "obvious". i especially like how they actually relate his 9 habit to something that comforts him because of his fire truck after his grandpa passed away, because repeated behaviors can come from something that comforts people with OCD (ex checking something a specific amount of times). honestly it could also be argued he has autism too if you really want to
the negatives are, obviously, him being treated like some freak of nature. i DO agree that other people can find these behaviors odd as they don't understand it, but they were very obviously trying to lean into him being crazy (especially with how duncan connects the number 9 to trent & gwen being 9 letters. obviously, he's never confirmed to have OCD but it's very obviously they were going for it
onto mike. oh my god. mike. he's a very interesting case to me, as with the appearance of mal, at first he looks like every other character with DID and how they have the evil alter stereotype and honestly he's really more than that? like mal is still the evil alter trope which is unfortunate, but mike is actually more than JUST his evil alter. case in point, everyone else in mikesys. mal isn't the only other alter, we also have svetlana, manitoba, vito and chester. which in most cases of characters with DID, the only present alter other than the "original" (which, mind you, there is no original personality and cores do NOT exist). and all of them are presented pretty positively? like each alter actually has a role (even if super dramatic). you could probably tie common alter roles to them and it would make a lot of sense
also, mike is extremely hesitant to tell anyone about his DID (except for the camera. which was super annoying but wtv) and this is pretty accurate, with how stigmatized and misrepresented the disorder is, it's very scary to admit you have DID especially in IRL spaces. also, mikes amnesia is pretty well done as not remembering anything after a switch is extremely stessful, as you can see in mikes reactions
the negatives for mike are very obvious. he's a very dramatic representation of DID as total drama is naturally very stereotype heavy. but that still doesn't really excuse how he's portrayed. most systems mask their disorder, making it almost impossible to tell if a switch happened, so mikes gasp is very uncommon. HOWEVER this can still happen for some systems, but you usually have to be close to them to notice. also, mals whole existance. mal can totally be rewritten as a prosecutor that genuinely thinks he's helping the system by distrusting others, but in canon he's just evil for the sake of it. also, MPD is an outdated term but i can excuse it a bit as back then it wasn't outdated. also like i stated previously, mike almost instantly tells the camera he has DID which kinda defeats the purpose of him not telling anyone else about it
so all in all, they're not perfect but an attempt?? was there? though with both trent and mike you can tell they did the most basic amount of research (if they even did any at all) and did it very ... stereotypically
