-type 2 diabetes is triggered by cortisol and genetics primarily not Being A Fat And Liking Food
-liking food as a fat person does not make you an evil stereotype
-liking food as a fat person does not mean you DESERVE type 2 diabetes. nobody deserves it
-its okay to embrace being fat and liking food. it does not make you Out Of Control if its not disordered eating
-just because fatness is stigmatized and seen as failure in your family even with fat family members doesn't mean youre a failure for being fat or wanting to be or stay fat
Azula and the Issue of Diagnosis- an Essay Which No One Asked For
With the avatar fandom resurgence, I want to talk more in depth about something that I’m noticing an increase of with the increased interest in the show- and that is the occasionally troubling, sometimes deeply ableist, issue of diagnosing of Azula.
What I tend to see most frequently is the use of words like “psychopath” and “sociopath,” often followed by “psychotic” or “narcissist.” Occasionally I’ll see someone refer to her as “schizophrenic,” and perhaps most troubling of all are the people using ableist slurs against her like “psycho” or “lunatic.” Even words like “crazy” in this context are a bit bothersome- it’s not a word I’m going to advocate banning from the English language, but directing it towards a character who’s visibly mentally ill has an unfortunate side effect of continuing to perpetuate stigma against mental illness.
It’s not cute.
So we’re going to talk about this today. Let’s talk about Azula, diagnosis, and mental illness.
My background
Before we deep dive, however, I want to state this plainly. I have a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and I am currently a second-year doctoral student in a clinical psychology PhD program. I’ve been in school a total of five years post-bachelor’s degree specializing in this field. I work in my school’s training clinic and have active therapy cases with a wide variety of diagnoses. I have patients who were easy to diagnose and patients where it took several months to decide what the most accurate label was. Like many mental health professionals, I have also had my own struggles with my mental health which I am not going to disclose today. But I have been in out of my own therapy since I was a teenager. In short, while I am still a trainee and still operate under the license of a supervising clinician, I know what I’m talking about.
Okay, let’s begin. The rest is under the cut:
The issue of diagnosis
I do want to dive into Azula specifically, but first, we need to talk about diagnosis as a concept. I’m coming at this from an American perspective and an American educational background, so we need to talk about the American psychiatric bible: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
I’m gonna let you in on a little trade secret- DSM sucks.
You see the problem with diagnosis is that our diagnostic categories are little more than descriptions of symptoms clustered together. To say that someone has major depressive disorder tells you very little about what that specific person is experiencing. What contributed to their depression? Are their symptoms more of a body-based experience (tiredness, low energy, trouble eating/sleeping) or more emotional/psychological (feelings of worthlessness, negative thoughts, suicidality) or some combination thereof? All you have to do is meet five or more criteria to get a depression diagnosis. It doesn’t tell you WHICH five. To say nothing of the context of the person’s life- are they grieving? Is there a history of trauma to consider? Are they homeless, unemployed, or struggling to make ends meet? Do they have another chronic illness? Have they ever had a psychotic episode? Any anxiety? What about mania, which would require a different diagnosis altogether? All a DSM diagnosis really tells you is what DSM diagnosis a person’s healthcare provider decided was most appropriate to describe their symptoms. It tells you very little about what’s causing those symptoms or what treatments this person might respond to and the nature of the help they need. Even for something as seemingly simple to treat as depression- would they respond better to cognitive behavioral therapy or an interpersonal approach? How about emotion focused, humanistic/person-centered, or psychodynamic? All are effective for depression. What about medication? And what type of medication, because there are several classes of drugs that can be considered.
And there are other problems with DSM besides its lack of specificity. There’s also the issue of significant overlap and comorbidity (multiple diagnoses occurring at the same time). Someone with PTSD might also meet criteria for depression. Someone with borderline personality disorder is also likely to show symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, PTSD, depression, or generalized anxiety. The amount of overlap in the personality disorders alone has caused come psychologists and psychiatrists to consider throwing that entire section of DSM away and starting over with a new method of labelling and diagnosing these conditions. Deciding what disorder someone has is complicated, messy, and very rarely straightforward, because most likely they’re not going to fit neatly into these somewhat arbitrary categories.
The DSM is also incredibly culturally bound. These disorders are very white, very western, and have been used to stigmatize women, queer people, and people of color throughout the book’s existence. It was not so long ago that homosexuality was a DSM diagnosis. Gender dysphoria is still in the book now (though it’s the subject of much debate). Borderline and histrionic personality disorders are disproportionately diagnosed in women than men, and both disorders feature “symptoms” that may just represent misogynistic attitudes about women. One of the symptoms of histrionic PD, for example, is “sexual promiscuity.” People of color have significant disparities in access to mental health care, but when they do get it, they’re more likely to be inaccurately diagnosed, and white clinicians may (probably will) overlook important cultural considerations and over-pathologize people of color as a result.
So why the hell do we still use this thing?
Well, several reasons. The big one is for insurance companies. They often require a diagnosis before approving treatment, so you have to put something down. Another is that these labels give professionals a language to use amongst ourselves- everyone knows, generally, what it means for someone to have PTSD vs schizophrenia vs anxiety, even if those labels are flawed and don’t tell you many specifics. This has been the language of the field for over 100 years now, it might not be realistic to expect that to be upended too quickly. Labels can also be organizing for patients- some people like having a label, they like knowing that the scary and upsetting things they experience have names and that others experience them too. Labels can allow for community. And finally, a lot of psychotherapy and mental health research is done by using diagnosis.
So diagnosis isn’t totally worthless, it’s not going away, and the language we use to talk about mental health is probably not going to change anytime soon. These diagnoses do also represent real symptoms and real distress, there is no minimizing that. But it’s highly nuanced, and more complex than is commonly assumed.
So what the hell does all of this mean for Azula? It means that trying to diagnose her is going to be really hard, inherently flawed, and that the diagnostic label chosen is going to tell you fuck all about her personal experience, her history, and the reasons she’s symptomatic. So what’s the purpose of even trying?
Should we diagnose Azula?
There are a couple reasons we might want to diagnose her. One is if you’re mentally ill yourself- headcanoning Azula to have a similar disorder as yourself might be a way of seeing yourself in a fictional character. There is truly nothing wrong with this. Another is if you’re interested in psychology and mental health care as a potential career- it is a very common training exercise, in both graduate and undergraduate programs, to practice diagnosing fictional characters. It’s a good way to learn how diagnosis works and there are significantly fewer real-world implications to it. Another reason is that giving Azula a diagnosis could lead us to trying to understand that diagnosis better ourselves in real world contexts- if done with sensitivity and a genuine sense of open curiosity. If we think a favorite character might have schizophrenia, we might be more open to learning about schizophrenia and hearing the voices of real people who have schizophrenia. The final reason I can think of is related to the first- representation. Giving Azula a label can cause her to function as representation for others with that same diagnosis- and this can be important to people. Seeing depictions of mental illness in the media does matter, even if Azula is far from perfect in this sense, and even if there are troubling implications to potentially equating mental illness with villainy- and Azula does function as a villain at the end of the day. So we need to be careful in how we talk about this. However, Azula may still be an important character for people with mental illness in terms of representation and it’s important to honor that.
But why might we not want to diagnose her? Well, a specific diagnostic label really doesn’t help us understand her character at all. Labelling her doesn’t alter her character arc, her history, or our understanding of why she turned out the way she did. As well, diagnosing fictional characters can have some troubling real-world implications if the diagnosis is based in stereotyped writing. Worse, for a character like Azula, diagnosing her may reinforce the age-old belief that mental illness (especially severe mental illness) makes a person more prone to violence. There are quite a few ableist tropes in the world of Avatar, which become especially apparent in the comics series that depicts Azula wearing a straitjacket, behaving erratically, and continue to behave violently during an active psychotic episode. There are deeply problematic storytelling elements at play here and as such, we may not want to associate this with real-world diagnoses. There is also the reality that the Avatar world is not our world, and these diagnoses likely don’t exist in this universe. Azula is also a woman of color from a cultural context that might make diagnosis complicated at best, downright inappropriate at worst.
Finally, people with no background in mental health care who have no training on how to give diagnoses are likely to give inaccurate diagnoses (hence the popularity of referring to Azula as a psychopath) or may give a more correct diagnosis, but accidentally perpetuate stereotypes or misinformation in doing so.
So is it right or wrong to give her a diagnosis? Well, like most things, it’s complicated. I would say proceed with immense caution, please do due diligence and research (reading a few Wikipedia articles is not sufficient), and be aware that some people are going to be uncomfortable with it- and those reasons are entirely valid. Be open to hearing from people with mental illness and listening to their voices, as well as being open to correcting yourself if you get something wrong. Mental health professionals like myself may also want to correct any blatant misinformation- this is important- but our degrees ultimately do not trump the lived experiences of people with mental illness. A bachelor’s degree in psychology most definitely does not.
Some brief misconceptions about mental illness
Before addressing specific labels, there is a misconception I occasionally see among those defending Azula that I want to address- I sometimes see it said that we can’t label her mentally ill because she comes from a dysfunctional family background characterized by abuse, war, and trauma. This…isn’t true. Mental illness is not a purely biological construct. Even the single most genetically based disorder- schizophrenia- only has a heritability rate of around 50%. What does that mean? It means that if you look at identical twins- who share 100% of their DNA- and one of them has schizophrenia, the other twin is only about 50% likely to also develop schizophrenia.
This means that there MUST be environmental causes that trigger the disorder. And that’s the heritability rate for the MOST biologically driven of all the mental health disorders. The rates for others are significantly lower. We often consider the causes of mental illness from a biopsychosocial model- meaning there are multiple causal factors that can contribute to a mental illness. These causes can be biological, but there are often psychological, sociological, and other environmental factors that can put someone at increased risk of developing a mental illness. It’s very uncommon for someone to develop a disorder without some kind of environmental trigger- these are not purely biological disorders and to think of them as such is a serious oversimplification.
So dysfunctional families, trauma, abuse- these things do contribute to mental disorders, and in fact, are significant risk factors for many of them. So yes, Azula can be both traumatized and mentally ill- in fact, she’s most likely mentally ill because of her trauma. Reducing it to some biological flaw in her brain is grossly inaccurate at best.
But that still doesn’t tell us anything about what label best fits her. Is there a label we can assign to her? Should we?
Well…it’s complicated.
What Azula is not:
She’s not a psychopath or a sociopath. These are both outdated diagnostic terms that typically refer to what we now call antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). ASPD cannot be diagnosed before age 18, like all the personality disorders, because children just haven’t finished developing enough to assign such a label to them. For this reason, we can eliminate every single personality disorder as a possible diagnosis for Azula- she is 14, and thus too young. So she’s not a narcissist either, and she does not have borderline personality disorder.
It also highly unlikely that Azula’s symptoms can be explained by disorders like depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder. You could potentially make arguments or headcanon that she has them, but these are likely insufficient labels to account for the wider range of her experiences. You could make an argument for a mood disorder with psychotic features, and you might want to consider PTSD- psychotic symptoms can occur alongside it, though this is rare. I’d argue none of these diagnoses are the best fit given what we know about Azula, however, the fact that you even could make an argument for them sort of proves my point about the fuzziness of diagnosis. It really isn’t very clear-cut.
What labels might fit? Pre-Sozin’s Comet
But wait, you say, Azula clearly had a lot of problem behaviors as a child! She was cruel and manipulative, she had low empathy, she blatantly disregards the rights of others, she throws bread at turtle ducks! Why would a kid hurt turtle ducks? That isn’t normal!!
It’s true that we do have a label for this kind of behavior in children, and it’s called conduct disorder. Conduct disorder is characterized by unusual aggression, deceit, rule breaking, lying, and other significant problem behaviors. These are your kids who act out to express their emotions, who show little remorse, and may act abusively towards peers, siblings, or animals. Conduct disorder can lead to a later diagnosis of ASPD- and in fact is required for that diagnosis to be made- but it does not have to. Contributing factors to conduct disorder include but are not limited to: dysfunctional family dynamics, history of abuse/neglect, genetic factors, low socioeconomic status, and peer rejection.
So does Azula have a conduct disorder? You can certainly make a case for it. That does not, however, mean she’s destined to grow up to have a personality disorder. Conduct disorder is treatable, and especially for someone like Azula, who grew up in such a flagrantly toxic environment that no doubt directly contributed to her behaviors. Azula was an angry little girl who felt neglected by her mother and was groomed by her father. Ozai took all of Azula’s worst traits and rewarded them- this child doesn’t know another way of behaving or getting positive attention. Of course she looks like a kid with a conduct disorder- conduct disorder frequently results from childhood trauma.
We do, however, need to be careful when talking about this as a possible label to not act like that makes her evil or unredeemable. Kids with conduct disorder are not psychopaths- more often than not, they’re kids who’ve experienced significant traumas, disorganized attachments, and severe stress. These kids need help, not shame, and Azula, were she a real person, would be no different. It’s also worth considering that Azula is a woman of color, and we need to consider her culture and background- is she really so mentally ill when she was raised in a culture that reinforced her aggression and fostered low empathy in all of its soldiers?
Debatable. You can make an argument that her behavior was actually normal given this context, especially when it was so clearly encouraged by one parent. Kids are sponges- they absorb the things they are exposed to. They learn constantly. If Azula learned to behave a certain way from her father, is that really a mental illness? Regardless, can it be unlearned?
Yes. It absolutely can. She is only fourteen.
What labels might fit? Post-Sozin’s Comet
The next one that frequently comes up is in the context of her breakdown during Sozin’s Comet- schizophrenia. Does Azula have schizophrenia?
First we need to define some terms, because Azula does exhibit some symptoms that lead people to this conclusion.
Psychosis (from webmd): Psychosis is a condition that affects the way your brain processes information. It causes you to lose touch with reality. You might see, hear, or believe things that aren't real. Psychosis is a symptom, not an illness. A mental or physical illness, substance abuse, or extreme stress or trauma can cause it.
Schizophrenia (from mayoclinic): Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder in which people interpret reality abnormally. Schizophrenia may result in some combination of hallucinations, delusions, and extremely disordered thinking and behavior that impairs daily functioning, and can be disabling. People with schizophrenia require lifelong treatment.
So psychosis is a set of symptoms, and schizophrenia is a disorder. I am not going to use the terms interchangeably, and you shouldn’t either. Azula does experience psychosis, this isn’t the debate here. So with that out of the way, can we consider Azula to have schizophrenia specifically?
This one is actually even less clear-cut than conduct disorder, particularly because there’s some debate about what materials count as canon. But first let’s take a look at the DSM criteria for schizophrenia, as it’s changed in the most recent edition of DSM. Schizophrenia is now considered a spectrum of disorders and the criteria are as follows:
1. The presence of 2 (or more) of the following, each present for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated), with at least 1 of them being (1), (2), or (3): (1) delusions, (2) hallucinations, (3) disorganized speech, (4) grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and (5) negative symptoms.
2. For a significant portion of the time since the onset of the disturbance, level of functioning in 1 or more major areas (eg, work, interpersonal relations, or self-care) is markedly below the level achieved before onset; when the onset is in childhood or adolescence, the expected level of interpersonal, academic or occupational functioning is not achieved.
3. Continuous signs of the disturbance persist for a period of at least 6 months, which must include at least 1 month of symptoms (or less if successfully treated); prodromal symptoms often precede the active phase, and residual symptoms may follow it, characterized by mild or subthreshold forms of hallucinations or delusions.
4. Schizoaffective disorder and depressive or bipolar disorder with psychotic features have been ruled out because either (1) no major depressive, manic, or mixed episodes have occurred concurrently with the active-phase symptoms or (2) any mood episodes that have occurred during active-phase symptoms have been present for a minority of the total duration of the active and residual periods of the illness.
5. The disturbance is not attributable to the physiologic effects of a substance (eg, a drug of abuse or a medication) or another medical condition.
6. If there is a history of autism spectrum disorder or a communication disorder of childhood onset, the additional diagnosis of schizophrenia is made only if prominent delusions or hallucinations, in addition to the other required symptoms or schizophrenia are also present for at least 1 month (or less if successfully treated).
So, let’s get the easy part out of the way- Azula definitely experiences hallucinations (the vision/voice of her mother), delusions (the belief that her servants and court will all betray her, and if you consider the comics canon, the belief that her mother has been conspiring with everyone else to take her down). I would also argue that when floridly psychotic she exhibits pretty significant psychomotor agitation- she moves differently during her Agni Kai with Zuko, her behavior is disorganized, sloppy, and her movements less precise. For Azula, who has long been defined by her sense of precision, that’s significant. She does not, however, experience disorganized speech, catatonia, or very many obvious negative symptoms (negative symptoms are typically similar to symptoms of depression- again, there’s that overlap problem).
Also easy- do her symptoms get in the way of her occupational/relational functioning/self-care? Yes, without question. She banishes her entire staff. She cannot maintain relationships, and this is especially prominent during The Search. In terms of self-care, though, she actually manages all right (we’ve all badly cut our own bangs before don’t deny it). She does, however, jump off of Appa during The Search in a way that probably could have killed her if Aang hadn’t intervened.
Onto the third criteria. Do her symptoms last at least six months? If you consider The Search canon, then yes, they last at least a year. If not, unclear. Was there a prodromal period? Yes, the time between the Boiling Rock and Sozin’s Comet. Prodromal periods refer to a period of time in which the person is beginning to show signs of possibly developing psychotic symptoms, but are not yet what we call “floridly” or “actively” psychotic- meaning no full blown delusions or hallucinations yet. Prodromal individuals may be more erratic, have some strange or unusual beliefs, and/or experience symptoms of other psychiatric disorders- it’s common for prodromal individuals to be misdiagnosed until they become actively psychotic. And finally, does Azula have residual phases? Maybe- again if you consider the comics, she may be in a residual phase during Smoke and Shadow. However, this is highly unclear as that story is not complete- she may become actively psychotic again, she may not. We don’t really know. If she does not become actively psychotic again, schizophrenia is no longer an appropriate diagnosis, as the disorder is typically chronic.
Onto the fourth criteria- have other disorders have been ruled out? Well…personally I don’t see too many signs of mood disorders in Azula. You could probably make an argument for mania and I’d be curious to see what that looked like, but personally, I wouldn’t consider bipolar disorder very likely for her. What I do see, however, is an awful lot of trauma. And in a child Azula’s age, I would look at trauma 100% of the time before I considered a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia in a fourteen-year-old is rare. Not unheard of, but incredibly rare.
Criteria five. This one’s actually up for debate. Was Azula’s psychotic break the result of Sozin’s Comet? Was it the result of sleep deprivation and acute stress/trauma? If you don’t consider the comics canon, this is actually a much more likely possibility than full blown schizophrenia.
And finally criteria 6- not applicable.
So does Azula meet criteria for schizophrenia- maybe, but only if you consider the comics to be canon. If you don’t, then no- you cannot make that argument. However, regardless, it’s a troubling label for someone so young and so obviously traumatized. If she does have schizophrenia, you must consider her context, consider the causal factors- schizophrenia and trauma can and do frequently go together- and you must must must be careful in how you talk about this. Schizophrenia is a heavily stigmatized and misunderstood illness, and applying it haphazardly to a fourteen-year-old girl is a serious thing. Especially a fourteen-year-old girl from a non-white, non-western culture.
But if you remove the comics from consideration, what does Azula have?
A single psychotic episode, the causes of which are highly up for debate. And that is all you have evidence for. A single psychotic episode does not a schizophrenia diagnosis make.
Ultimately, the label isn’t necessary, because this is not a world in which diagnosis is needed to conceptualize Azula’s experience or provide treatment because of insurance companies. It’s not particularly helpful. She experiences psychosis, without question. Is it really schizophrenia, though?
Maybe. Maybe not.
If you’re asking do I have a problem with people headcanoning Azula as schizophrenic, the answer is no, with some reservations. It definitely doesn’t bother me if the person doing so has a psychotic disorder and sees themselves in Azula, or else has a background in mental health care and understands how diagnosis works. For everyone else, please do your research and please do your due diligence. These are not labels to throw around lightly, and not every person experiencing psychosis has schizophrenia.
In conclusion:
Diagnosis is an incredibly complex and tricky thing even in the real world, and it is based on a flawed and imperfect system that at best manages to describe clusters of symptoms. Am I diagnosing Azula today? No, I am not, and that is not the purpose of this very long essay. If you take from this that I am definitely saying Azula has a conduct disorder and schizophrenia, you have not read it thoroughly.
At the end of the day, slapping a label or set of labels onto Azula is unnecessary to understanding her character. There may be benefits to it as described above, however, this is something you must be careful about doing as there can be troubling implications to doing so. Proceed with caution, be informed, and do your research.
And for god’s sake fandom, stop calling her a psychopath.
I honestly have been so wound up ‘cause of that commentary video. I feel like I should watch the full thing before I comment on it so I won’t comment but I can ramble here where no one sees. I’m mentally ill, everyone is very surprised by that, I’ve been threatened with incompetence by family at points because ‘why can’t you just not do the symptoms if you know you have symptoms’
The reality for mentally ill people is that we don’t just think we’re scared, or think we’re sad or think we’re going to die.... it’s 100% what we’re experiencing in the moment. Saying ‘oh well when you feel suicidal just stop yourself because it’s your mental illness’ like no, there’s so much feeling involved in that and it absolutely effects thoughts and behaviours. That’s why we have Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Declaring “Mental health is very important to me you should know that” and then literally describing someone suffering from a bad episode of bpd (wow isolation and stress is effecting the mentally ill somehow and suddenly they’ve got all these symptoms) and then saying ‘if you do this you’re bad. you shouldn’t be on the internet. you shouldn’t have a platform.’ and you should know something about an unhealthy mind, we sometimes pick up on subtext more than text, and the subtext “You shouldn’t be seen” is loud and clear.
Saying “You’re bad if you can’t regulate your emotions” to someone with an emotional regulation disorder is just the definition of cruelty and honestly bigotry. “Being the way you were made is wrong and you should be punished for it” is the message.
and on top of that I hate that there’s just a constant use of ‘check the script I never used that word ever in my entire video.’ when you know it’s an argument of semantics. ‘never called you a bitch’ and like.... called her a whole bunch of other things, sorry she shorthanded it to ‘bitch’ in a personal conversation she was having with someone else having nothing to do with you. This weird game of insinuating a million things and then going “I never said....’ etc. like ‘I never said she was a pedophile, I just spent an entire video arguing how someone might argue that she could be a pedophile.” like you’re following letter of the law to avoid an actual slander but like.... who’s the next mentally ill personality?
and how often do other people have to internalize that. you know saying ‘if you can’t regulate your emotions don’t be online’ it says people who can’t regulate their emotions to a healthy person’s level they shouldn’t be allowed on the internet. They’re not wanted. It’s bullshit and it’s fucking high level bullshit, not just ‘oh he said the R word on a video once 10 years ago’ but implying mentally ill people should not be seen or heard for the sake of everyone else’s happiness? That’s the real kinda spicy ableism.
there is literally no reason for people like furiousgoldfish who hold survivors who developed personality disorders as a result of severe ongoing abuse To Be in tags for dissociative systems when both disorders suffer so severely from hollywood movie stereotyping & ableist "punishments" for unattractive victim responses. no amount of good info about abuse is a high enough payment to be allowed unquestioningly into survivor communities with the highest capacity to be harmed by them comparing pd symptoms to pedophilia. thanks for reading xo
I hate to say it but I always felt like they killed Eileen because they knew her and Sam could be endgame but were too fucking lazy to write a disabled character.
Aww nonny I really hope that wasn’t the case. I don’t think they initially intended to kill off Eileen at all.
The story I heard was that for a bigger impact, they wanted the BMOL to kill off someone the Winchester’s knew and were closer to, to make the whole situation a bit more emotionally personal for the boys. From a storytelling perspective, this makes sense, though it is the same kind of lazy writing they used with Charlie to be honest (typical Bucklemming).
They wanted to bring back Garth and use him for this role, but they couldn’t get the actor who played him to come back for it. Baring in mind next to Garth the only other people the Winchesters really know in the hunting world were already lined up for Wayward Sisters at the time, that left Eileen, and only Eileen.
Personally I think they should have just given Garth an offscreen death. It would have been sad, but Eileen’s story had only just brushed the surface and her character had huge potential to go further than they took her. Garth’s story was already resolved and whilst it would have been sad to kill him off, it would have made more sense in the grander scheme of things.
Therefore the choice was made to kill Eileen. The rest of it? The sloppiness of the story, the unnecessarily grotesque way to kill off a disabled person, the poor execution... Thats all just classic Bucklemming. Charlie part 2.
I don’t think it had anything to do with her being disabled and therefore the writers not seeing her as an appropriate fit for Sam. I don’t actually believe the writers are ableist in that way, just like I don’t think they are particularly misogynistic or racist when they kill off women and poc. I just think they can sometimes be lazy with their writing and not actually think these things through the way fandom does. They don’t consider the impact their decisions could have (like the rest of Hollywood, where they are all kinda conditioned to write about the same thing and the same type of (straight white male) people over and over again as anything that deviates from that norm isn’t as “easy” to write). I am not trying to excuse that kind of behaviour by any means, I just don’t think there was specific ableist, malicious intent in killing the character, whether because they were “too lazy” or otherwise.
They wrote Eileen as a strong capable hunter who happened to have a hearing disability and they also wrote her and Sam with a lot of heavily implied romantic tension. Yes, she was perfect for him, and yes, they could have taken that further. I fully believe that they would have done had it not been for that one particular corner they got themselves stuck into and unfortunately the writers took the easy option. I don’t agree with that option, and I still really hope that they will find a way to bring her back. She is the loose end that season 13 failed to fix where it brought back too many other characters. She is ironically the one I wanted back the most.
Don’t tell him you saw him in town today, popping quarters into arcade machines instead of making something out of himself. Don’t call him up on the phone to tell him the kid got beat to shit after school again. Don’t tell him he won some stupid prize for solving a riddle.
Nashton had patience for the boy. Once.
But he’s always been off. Doesn’t look you in the eye when he talks to you, goes between being mute and shrieking, at times, for no real goddamn reason. You’d be tired, too. You’d be sick of constantly having to look after him, of driving him to school and every single morning dealing with the same bullshit excuses for why he doesn’t want to go. For why he’s sick, why he’s scared, his teachers are mean to him, he gets bullied, whatever.
Anyone with half a pound of meat in their skull could see that it’s all just in his head. It’s some unfathomable choice he’s made to be different. For some reason, old man Nashton has been selected by God himself to be the recipient of some cruel fucking joke.
And he’d try again for an offspring – preferably a son, but at his point, he’s not as picky as he used to be – but the old lady at home hasn’t moved off the armchair except to eat and shit since she gave birth. Sometimes, it feels to him like when she pushed that screaming, red face out from between her legs, she was purging the part of her that gave a damn about living along with the gore and placenta. It was a far less magical moment than media had promised him. More nightmarish than anything – and when she gave up on life as anything more than a mindless robot, their marriage crumbled.Now, old Roger frequents the red light district after work. A man’s gotta cope somehow.
They’ll tell you that liquor impairs judgement. Nashton doesn’t see the appeal of the cliche. Sure, he can feel his liver slowly hardening into a slab of dried up, blackened jerky. But when he’s drunk is probably the only time he’s not bothered by the fact that he’s married to a shell of a woman and his only progeny should probably be in special-ed.
When he started beating the crap out of the boy, he didn’t remember it at first. Maybe he didn’t want to – maybe he felt guilty. But after the third incident, he started to notice a difference in the boy’s behavior. He’d get easier to manage. He’d at least shut up if he was scared of getting hit.
The missus looks the other way. As she does with all things in life. So can you really blame him for it? He’s so tired. He works so hard – all day, every day, trying to feed the mouths of people he doesn’t even want to know. Sometimes, it feels like he’d do anything just to get a goddamn break.
So, yeah. Don’t talk to Roger Nashton the full-time, underpaid, underachieving auto-mechanic, about his boy, Ed.
