We are the children of Loki:
The lost, the misfits, the broken and bruised.
Loved by the mother of mischief
And the father of change.
The children who have crawled in their skin,
Who have feared for their lives,
Only to meet you there in the darkness
And fall into your waiting arms.
Leading us home to a family
That will love you, raise you,
Guide and protect you
With such gentle, ferocious love.
Jormungandr will coil himself around you, so you can finally rest.
Guarding the boundary of your inner realms.
He will teach you to shed your skin, to heal, to grow,
To thrive in whatever corner of the world you’ve been thrown to.
Fenrir will howl in triumph for every chain you snap
And cry tears of empathy for any chains yet unbroken.
He will hold space for you as you are.
Still wounded, still chained, and still worthy of love.
He will teach you how to survive,
Not through the anger of a raging beast,
But through the wisdom of a survivor
Who learned to make peace with his chains.
He will stand by your shoulder as you stand up to abusers,
Growling “Me too.”
And he will curl around you as you process your pain,
Gently whispering “Me too.”
Hel will guide you through the gates of her realm,
As you break down the walls concealing your pain.
Trauma so great that you once thought
That merely feeling it would kill you.
And she, the walking boundary between life and death,
Will clean the rotting flesh off your bones
Like maggots cleaning out an infected wound
So the wounds can finally, finally start to heal.
She will guide you through Helheim and back again,
For now is not your time.
You can survive far more than you thought
And become far more than you dreamed.
And on the other side of that rebirth,
As the caterpillar becomes a butterfly,
You’ll find parents waiting with open arms,
Ferociously eager to love you.
Sigyn will hold you tight in her arms,
Gently stroking your hair while you cry.
She will catch your every tear as they fall.
She will teach you that it’s okay to be scared,
To be weak or be vulnerable.
It’s okay to need help.
She will teach you how to hold the bowl,
So you too can hold space for your pain.
And if your bowl should overflow,
Her loving embrace will keep you standing.
She will never, ever let you go
And her strength shall never waver.
Angrboda will wrap you in her arms,
As fierce and loving as any mother bear.
She will kindle a fire in your soul -
The anger that loves you and knows you deserve better.
She will sharpen your fangs and your claws
So that no predator will dare harm you.
She’ll teach you the power of calmness
The power to say “No, I am safe here.”
“I am not under threat.”
And my dear Loki - mother of shame-slayers and father of truth-speakers.
Loki will teach you freedom.
They will tear the stitches from your lips, so you can shout out your raw, authentic truth.
They will light a fire in your soul, so bright and so hot that it melts the shame of those around you.
They will poke and prod and ask you “Why?”
Why do you do this? Can’t you see how powerful you are?
Why are you afraid to shine?
To own your strength? To own your weakness? To own yourself?
Why are you scared to be loved?
Loki will guide you across the edge of your comfort zone.
They will teach you how to live.
And above all else, they will be proud of you
As only a parent could be.
We are the children of Loki.
And we will always be loved.
One of the quieter fears I don’t see talked about enough is how invalidating it can feel to be doing better.
When you live with BPD, your symptoms often feel like proof. Proof that something is wrong. Proof that you were hurt. Proof that your emotions make sense in context. When the feelings are intense, it’s easier to believe your pain is real.
And then maybe things start to stabilize. Maybe you regulate more. You cope better.
And suddenly your brain goes, Was I exaggerating? Was I ever really struggling? Was it all fake?
Struggling can feel validating and stability can feel suspicious.
But symptoms aren’t the measure of whether your pain was real. You don’t lose legitimacy just because you’re learning how to cope. Getting better doesn’t erase the fact that you needed to get better in the first place. And it doesn’t mean things are magically easy.
I do think most childhoods are pretty traumatic just, by default. even run of the mill taking your shit, grounding you, setting strict rules (which would be absurd for an adult) style parenting. Physical and sexual violence on top of that is more fuel to the fire, and certainly contributes a heavy mental load, but children are fundamentally not treated like people by most of the world. They're an investment; a form of useful property that might someday become an endebted human being. This is the context under which all child abuse occurs; but the context itself is rather deplorable, don't you think?
i've seen countless kind and emotional replies in the year or so since i posted this comic, but this particular tag set has squeezed me unlike any other. thanks
the use of AI lately has made me feel so hopeless, i translated pages of an unfinished fanzine of mine so i can remember why i love art...i hope it can resonate with anyone feeling the same way
My silly addition that I hope brings a smile to OP's face. Art is a beautiful thing in every single form, and even my silly finger-drawn art deserves to be shared. I hope that people are inspired to keep drawing, regardless of their perceived "skill". Do makes you happy, y'all! Spread the humanity. 🧡
There's a paradox in a lot of plural spaces. System kids are welcome, but only if they're Literal Children who stay in child-only soft boxes where they can be ignored. If a kid wants to have an adult conversation, then they're spoken over, pushed away, or otherwise discounted more often than not- and if they're accepted, then it's often at the cost of expecting them to have absolutely no childlike qualities to "prove" that they're mature enough to stay around. We even see this pattern within systems sometimes.
What are systems without adult members supposed to do if the only place system kids can talk is in the Super Soft Safe Box? What about system kids who want to talk about theoretical physics or drugs or sex or a thousand other taboos? What about kids who function as adults? And what about system kids who are kids but don't want to live their lives in the Super Soft Safe Box like the world expects them to?
Acceptance of system kids as being wildly different from each other in mindset and ability is improving, but we still have a long way to go in treating system kids with a shred of respect and decency in wider plural spaces.
Not to mention... why is there so much intense focus on mental age as some universal concept in the first place? It feels like a lot of the plural community takes the concept of mental age as a given without considering where that idea comes from, how it affects how they treat others, and how it interacts with systemic discrimination and ableism. It can sometimes be a useful construct if approached critically, but I see so little critical thought about it.
If you want some reading on the topic, one of the articles cited is worth at least a skim- it's a fairly good surface overview of eugenics and its tie to IQ/mental age, immigration, racism, ableism, etc.
ID below the cut with the full quotes- sorry to alt texters, I fit as much as I could in there but the text limit is real.
[Image one ID begins:]
There's a subtle sort of discrimination to how a lot of plural spaces treat system kids/littles. Especially those in adult bodies, or with a particularly large gap from their body's age.
"Littles must always be supervised in online spaces or else they'll bother adults and be preyed upon." "There must be an adult in your system if you're bodily an adult- they should handle life while the kids go away to never be seen by adults again. Littles should only talk to other littles. Anything else is unsafe and sometimes pedophilic. Right?" "Littles shouldn't be in charge. They're supposed to be cared for by everyone else and kept out of sight." "You're welcome here! You just have to only ever talk in the Baby Zone that no adults ever visit to talk to you. Yeah, it's empty and no one will answer. But you want to talk, right?" "Sorry sweetie, the adults are talking and you can't be here. Even if you're capable of understanding, consenting, etc. You're not allowed to be here with us if you're not a real adult." "Littles can't take care of themselves or handle any adult responsibilities, ever!" "Is there an adult I can talk to?"
Blue, an anthro cat sitting down, looks angry at the above phrases.
What are adult-bodied systems with no "brain adults" supposed to do? Drawing of a family of stick figures, all of whom are either child-short or hunching to be shorter.
What about systems whose caretakers are their children? Systems where there is no older person to supervise? Systems finding ways to live an adult life when no one inside aligns with it? What are you supposed to do when a 5-year-old does your taxes and drives you home?
"Just grow up." Do I get a choice, or are you ripping that away from me too?
[End image one ID.]
[Begin image two ID.]
Why is "mental age" the bar people are using to decide whether someone is worthy of autonomy and respect, anyway? Where does the concept of mental age come from in the first place, and why does it exist?
From Wilson, R. A. (2024). Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c9a5f080:
"Eugenic traits:
Prominent among the eugenic traits found in sterilization laws were those concerning cognitive ability and mental health. These traits, ordered in terms of their frequency in U.S. state and Canadian provincial sterilization laws, included feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, criminality, imbecility, idiocy, sexual perversion (or depravity), mental unfitness (or deficiency), and moral depravity (or degeneracy). As this listing suggests, these laws especially targeted those perceived to have some kind of cognitive limitation or psychiatric condition on the grounds that they were unfit and would propagate these eugenic traits to their children; approximately 70% of all eugenic traits mentioned in sexual sterilization laws in the United States and Canada concerned cognitive ability or mental health. Given this, there was a clear role for psychologists in programs of eugenic sterilization, given their expertise in psychological testing (Rose, 1985). Such testing and subsequent sterilization were conducted through emerging forms of institutionalization, such as “training schools for the feeble-minded,” especially as eugenics gained state-level backing (Miller et al., 2015).
One of the roles of psychologists was to develop ways to measure those who were cognitively or psychiatrically subnormal. Emerging intelligence tests were adapted to quantify and classify those deemed “feeble-minded”or “mentally deficient” (Thomson, 1998; Trent, 1994). Binet’s famous test of intelligence, for example, incorporated the more specific existing folk categories of “imbecile” and “idiot,” adapting these to designate developmentally delayed children with mental ages, respectively, of 3–7 and 2 years. Following the translation of Binet’s test from French into English by Henry Goddard in 1908, “moron” was coined in 1910 to pick out those in the general population with a putatively fixed mental age of 8–12 years. This resulted in a three-tiered schema of intellectual subnormality—moron, imbecile, idiot—that came to be widely used in the eugenics movement.
In the hands of the psychologist Lewis Terman, what became the Stanford-Binet test initially was deployed in selecting army recruits near the end of World War I (1914–1918) before being used on the general population. The three-tiered scheme was accordingly fed into the newly minted idea of an intelligence quotient (IQ) that remains with us 100 years on, with the fixed mental ages of moron, imbecile, and idiot mapped onto standard deviations from a normalized IQ of 100. From the 1920s, these tests were widely used to identify children who were candidates for eugenic sterilization, whether they were already housed in segregated institutions or within the regular school system or general community."
From Asilverm, & Asilverm. (n.d.). What’s My Age Again: Why Mental Age Theory Hurts People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.disabilitywisdom.com/2018/12/21/whats-my-age-again-why-mental-age-theory-hurts-people-with-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities/:
The concept of “mental age” was first introduced by Alfred Binet, co-creator of the first IQ tests, in the early twentieth century. Generally, “mental age” has been measured by comparing an individual’s score on a standardized IQ test with the average performance of their same-age peers. For people with IDD, “mental age” may also be estimated by comparing the person’s demonstrated physical, speech, adaptive or cognitive skills against the average for various age groups.
Not surprisingly, “mental age” came about alongside the eugenics movement in the United States. Mental ages were used to classify various groups of “feebleminded” individuals by severity: Adults with a mental age of 9-12 years were classified as “morons”; those with a mental age of 6-8 years were classified as “imbeciles”; and those with a mental age of 2-5 were classified as “idiots.” Individuals from any of these groups were thought unfit to reproduce."
A drawing of Blue looks annoyed and concerned. It's labelled, "TFW it's eugenics again. :("
Oh yeah. Why is it always eugenics?
To be clear: I'm not saying anyone is ableist or practicing eugenics for having a sense of their own internal age. I am pointing out how systemic ableism affects how system kids are treated, how the concept of mental age stems from ableism in the first place, and how terribly many cultures treat children and deemed-children to begin with: how children and disabled people are often regarded as objects, burdens, or annoyances who don't know enough to have a say about their own needs. Is this really how we want to assume all system kids should be treated? How anyone should be treated?
How much of how system kids are treated ties back to some form of ableism, in the end? I wonder about this a lot and I feel like I never see people talk about it.
Like let me sit your lap with your hands on my waist while I talk your ear off about something stupid that I just feel like telling you about. Let me play with your hands. Let me run my nails along your muscles to relax you. Lay your head in my lap while I scratch your head so you can fall asleep. Let’s cuddle while we watch tv at night in a dim lounge room with only the soft light of a lamp. Let me brush your hair and play with it. Let me literally just exist in your space.
I’ve always sort of avoided drawing Loki in his myths, for various reasons, one of them being that my style is so different that I suppose I felt like it wouldn’t suit it. Also this particular myth really hurts (as a Lokean) but for some reason, I felt called to finally tackle it in my style. It’s my first Loki piece in quite a while (and I feel it turned into more of a Sigyn piece tbh) and I’m actually super proud of it.
It's always "stop harming yourself or we'll have to lock you up!!!" and never "what do you need to change to want to harm yourself less and how can we help you make some of these changes?" and that's why we're not getting anywhere
Every girl like me I know feels like she was born with an expiration date,
like there’s a number stamped on her forehead that says “26 years old”
that says “six months after the money runs out”
that says “when you can’t do this anymore”
that says “as soon as you work up the courage,”
and I’m one of the lucky ones, because that scares me,
Sometimes I think I have an immigrant’s patriotism for this world,
because it took me 20 years to decide that I wanted to live in it.
Maybe that’s what hope is.
But I don’t know how to say that the greatest poet I know and her girlfriend,
who looks so like me she nearly made my mom faint when she opened the door,
are probably not going to last another year.
So everybody told me to vote for Bernie Sanders.
It’s not enough.
Now people are saying this might be the end times,
but I want to remind them that we have already been living in them,
for as long as I can remember,
and I don’t know why it’s so hard to keep in contact with someone I don’t see,
to reach out across that burden of distance with the uncertain arms of exhaustion,
but I know why it’s hard to reassure somebody,
when all you can say is “I’m scared, too.”
How much money do you give somebody,
when money is the thing you don’t have?
For time, same question.
A trans woman I had never met came into my shop one day and pointed me out to her friend,
she said “you are my sister,”
and I said “yes, I am.”
So when I saw one of my sisters out on the street with a slice of cardboard, I brought her
a bottle of water and all the cash I had in my wallet,
because afterward I couldn’t stop crying for six hours,
and I don’t think anybody asked me why.
Maybe this is why there are so few things that feel important to me anymore.
I said “the only things people like me make are cries for help” and I got
128 reblogs.
Apparently, some people find that relatable.
A lot of people have told me that I’m the most optimistic person they know,
and I don’t tell them that I have to be,
I take it as a compliment.
The thing they don’t tell you about hope is that it’s cyclical,
it needs to be refreshed every single day,
Hope is just like every other kind of work you do on your body.
So what does a story mean, to that?
What can a poem mean, to that?
I abhor maintenance.
I don’t want to have to say anything anymore,
I want to walk to the place where all my words are done,
And build a home there.
It’s not enough.
All your pleas and all your promises, your fights and feats and failures, are not and never will be enough.
Not for us.
This world was not made for us.
So let’s build a better one.
Let’s start right here, right now, just us, not with a kiss or a fist but just
you and me
pledging to not let go
no matter what comes, deciding
even when the love is gone
that we’re not gonna let each other drown anymore.
So I want to offer my hand,
to every girl like me who needs it,
and walk with you into a place beyond these empires,
a place that doesn’t exist yet.
And that,
I hope,
is enough.
Because that’s…everything.
"the education system traumatizes students it deems stupid" and "the education system traumatizes students it deems gifted" are two concepts that can and should coexist.
In these trying times, it's important not to discount your own agency. Change begins at the local level- find something in your community that speaks to you, a need that's going unmet, and get involved. For example, every night I volunteer down at my local commune as the guy who wears the big deer-skull costume and runs around in the woods terrifying the more adventurous youth so they don't get far enough from the main compound to discover the existence of the interstate
"Gee, it seems like maybe that's an internal community matter and they ought to be getting one of their own guys to do that-" WRONG! Due to the endemic rickets and calcium deficiency there are no longer any fulltime adult residents of the commune with necks strong enough to support the weight of the deer skull hat. Check your goddamn privilege. I go where I'm needed
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