I've been putting off doing a pinned post even though it's 99% for my own benefit because ADHD and the need to get it perfect before I even start. So fuck it, this is rambly and messy. But that's better than not being done.
I'm Wren, staring down at my 40s, aroace, autistic, ADHD. Not witty enough to come up with a joke about AAA batteries. Transmasc nonbinary. Any pronouns, idgaf, just switch them up if we actually end up talking.
A small collection of video games are part of what I call my special interest library. I intend to make profiles of my characters from these games, and I like commissioning art of them. Games include Our Life, Arcadia Fallen, Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age and Mass Effect. I'll have a list of characters at the end, searching their names or their game should bring up any posts on them.
I love Jane Austen and will post analysis on her works. I also love Terry Pratchett but am less likely to analyse his works, partly because that's been done far better by a lot of people.
I don't post about my pets often enough, but they're tagged as "my pets". I currently have an elderly rabbit called Iniya. I'm married and don't make posts about my spouse at all but they are great.
With games my real love is games that let me have a character who both feels grounded in the setting but also that I can design and build. I like to spend time developing them and giving them arcs, personalities, and a sense of being a full character. Games where I can't decide who the main character is or where the main character is a blank slate don't grip me- I play them sometimes but usually only once and then I'm happy to be done with them.
Game most focused on as of May 2026- Arcadia Fallen 2.
Arcadia Fallen- Reed, they/them.
Arcadia Fallen 2- Yasmin, they/them, transfemme.
Our Life: B&A- Bhelen, he/them, transmasc.
Our Life: N&F- Ellen/Eli, he/she/them, gender fluid. Character still in development as the game is perhaps half done.
Pillars of Eternity (1 and 2)- Thalei, she/her, orlan ranger.
Mass Effect trilogy- Cameron Shepard, he/him, infiltrator, Earthborn/sole survivor, paragon.
Mass Effect trilogy- secondary character- Keya Shepard, she/her, vanguard, colonist/war hero, renegon.
Dragon Age Origins- Theron Mahariel, he/him, mage w/rogue skills, blood mage/arcane warrior/battlemage.
Dragon Age Origins- secondary character- Rohesia (Ro) Cousland, she/her, warrior, champion.
Dragon Age 2- Derin Hawke, he/him, melee mage, spirit healer/force mage/fade weaver.
Dragon Age Inquisition- Dubheasa (Duv) Lavellan, she/her, mage, knight-enchanger.
Dragon Age Inquisition- secondary character- Kaaras Adaar, they/it, mage, knight-enchanter, specced specifically to use a two-handed mage blade.
Dragon Age The Veilguard- Eshalle (Esha) Aldwyr, they/them, Dalish/city elf w/Circle history, orb/dagger mage, spellblade.
Dragon Age The Veilguard- Kalais (pronounced Kah-lay) Mercer, she/her transwoman, Tevinter dwarf, both bow and daggers, saboteur.
saw someone saying that my new book sounds too convoluted, and can I just say, what the fuck is so convoluted about a brain slug alien taking over the Canadian parliament and then getting run over by a truck and isekaid into a fantasy world where a goddess tasks him to kill the demon lord and reincarnates him into a pale twink but he falls in love/lust with a spider centaur instead? hello????
genuine sincere question but why does he need to be in canada at all at the start. why set it up with him being an alien in a foreign world he is unfamiliar with and is strange to him, meaning he has no real attachment to it or knowledge of it, and then immediately send him to a different world that he is unfamiliar with. why not just have an alien crash on a fantasy world would that not have the same effect entirely? lands a spaceship on top of the supposed chosen one of the dark goddess and then has to awkwardly take their place until the spider romance gets in the way? i see the appeal of the sci-fi and fantasy blend but i don't get why the canada bit has to be there like, thematically or structurally, so I'm wondering what the appeal of it is for you to have it set up in this way
it is fun, because when he's a brain slug in a Canadian setting, he has the ability to 'mask'. because he's puppeting someone's body and wrapped around their brain, and he can use what's left of their mind to smooth out any social situations.
but once he's isekaid and transmogrified into a full on human being, that's it, no more convenient brain to reference! so he almost completely loses the ability to act human, and has to just rely on the scraps he remembers from the last body. which adds another layer of "oh, I'm fucked" that you wouldn't usually get in an isekai
So how is that writing every book as an autism analogy going? Sounds like it’s going good!
Seriously though that 100% makes it more interesting to me. Without that at the start I’d really only be preordering it because I love ASCNTD, but add in that context of alienation (aha!) and relying on that scant information and- that really does ramp up how compelling to me so so much.
I’m not sold on the taste of this custom tea blend but I definitely can’t criticise the appearance! (It doesn’t taste bad, it’s very pleasant, I’d just like the rose to shine a bit more.)
trans women and trans men and nonbinary people and everyone else being friends and holding each other close and falling in love and thinking of each other. I'm making this my future. let's all be okay together
My queerplatonic partner is a (closeted) trans woman, I’m trans masc enby, and my spouse is agender. It’s beautiful and freeing to know we’re approaching gender in different ways but we can also just… get each other in really lovely ways.
(We’re also all autistic and my qpp and I are ace-spec and my spouse is… uhh maybe ace-spec, they have no idea lmao. Sexuality is weird!)
@bennetsbonnet FINALLY got to Bath like I said I would a while ago. Nothing particularly noteworthy (imo) in the Jane Austen Centre, much the same kind of thing as before and especially no cursed little felt figures.
Did find these though, and I can tell you now they are BEAUTIFUL. (Not the middle one, I have no knowledge of that.) (Not meaning to be dismissive of it, it might be excellent for all I know.)
When I first bought the Persuasion one I hoped the others would at some point also be done but didn’t actually expect it- but here we are! I haven’t opened the P&P one (naturally I bought it).
I’ll try my best to describe this. It’s a video with a mash-up of a bunch of different Disney movies, set to a song that’s a mash-up of a bunch of other songs. That in and of itself wouldn’t make it praiseworthy, but this is DONE SO WELL that just, holy cow.
if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:
When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.
This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.
and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.
So many people reading my post about Fanny Price having rickets and i love to see people talking about the idea. One of the people who reposted it (@gcballet) got to talking in the tags about disability which is obviously a major theme in Mansfield Park (which makes sense given the number of chronically ill relatives Jane Austen herself had) but also mentioned Fanny's parentification in that book.
Which then got me thinking about parentification more broadly in Austen's works. And to be clear, I know some people think "Parentification" is a buzzword for "children being expected to help out" or "children being expected to be mature" or anything like that. It most certainly isn't, especially when used in a professional context, and it's not what I mean. Parentification is extremely unhealthy to a young person, and it can really screw with their sense of self, among other aspects of mental health it can do a number on.
Children forced to take care of their sick or mentally ill parents. Very young children being forced to take care of younger siblings before they have the knowledge and skills to do so. That is parentification and it shows up a LOT in Austen if you go looking. It was definitely a phenomena Austen was aware of and paints negatively, and whether she condemned it or not, I think she found it wrong just based on how she paints it.
Starting with Mansfield Park. Before moving to Mansfield, Fanny was helping her mother with the care of the house and all her siblings, despite being a small child herself (I've even seen speculation that part of the reason Mrs Norris might have suggested that they take in Fanny instead of any of the others is because it would be depriving Mrs Norris's hated sister of her most helpful/able child and and forcing her to take on all that extra responsibility herself). Then, when she gets to Mansfield, the physical labor may be less, but she's still a full-time babysitter to Lady Bertram: fetching and carrying and running errands and messages; arranging her sewing work so it will be easier to do; and just generally keeping her entertained, happy, and calm.
The way others see her is so strongly tied up in those duties that even her favorite (and most loving) brother William is convinced that her return to Portsmouth will magically make life in the Price household quieter and more orderly and comfortable than it has been since her departure a decade ago. Lady Bertram's desire to have Fanny back after Tommy's injury isn't about Fanny or Tom, but about her ladyship's personal comfort and peace of mind.
Fanny's not the only character to get that treatment to a greater or lesser degree, either. Susan Price becomes Fanny 2.0 both at Portsmouth and then later at Mansfield. She probably considers Mansfield a lucky escape, but she's still a child babysitting a grown woman (I am deliberately not getting into whether Lady Bertram was in any way disabled because an adult who needs a caregiver needs an ADULT one).
In Mansfield, it's not just the girls being parentified, either. I'm going to leave aside William Price being sent at 12 to undertake the life of a sailor (a very dangerous and uncomfortable life that left his father disabled and bitter). Children in hard, dangerous jobs is a different discussion to parentification. At that time, I doubt anyone saw that as anything other than an apprenticeship he was lucky to have landed, and there was no taking care of adults involved for him. If anything, he was (HOPEFULLY!) being taken care of and educated by the other adults on ship. At the very least, he doesn't seem to have been required to support his parents and siblings to any great degree (he probably does give some money to his parents, but he feels no guilty about using some of his money to buy Fanny what was probably a rather expensive amber cross.
But Edmund, despite living a much safer, easier life than Willian, does seem to have been stuck with more of a paternal role. When Sir Thomas leaves for Antigua, not only is it Edmund who is relied on to keep his siblings in check (including his elder brother who by the standards of the time should have been the de facto head of house and who got zero pushback for being an irresponsible wastrel instead), but he is the one his mother relies on to, among other things, deal with the servants (which may even mean he's directing his fathers stewards and by extension all the incoming and outgoing cash and possibly even some of his father's tenants as well). As silly as it seems for him to try to stop the others from having their play, he is the one who was left in charge. And, with everything else he would have had on his plate, he probably wished his aunt or mother would have put their foot down and saved him the hassle.
All this is part of the reason I've always said that one of the major themes of Mansfield Park is neglect. The younger generation are either left to run wild or forced to be the adults in the room. There is no in-between.
~~~~~
But parentification shows up in other Austen books, too. Although i won't go on about them in quite as much length, I do just want to point out some obviously examples of it that occur to me off the top of my head. And I also want to point out that none of these make the parents in question bad people. I quite like some of the parents mentioned.
Sense and Sensibility: No hate for Mrs Dashwood because child parentification is not always the result of evil or neglectful children, but because Mrs Dashwood seems to think she lives in a romantic novel, 19 Elinor does most of the intellectual heavy lifting for the family, including reminding her mother that they live on a budget now, and trying to keep Marianne from setting her life on fire. When Marianne and Willoughby are making spectacles of themselves in front of the whole neighborhood and Mrs Dashwood finds it very sweet and harmless, it's Elinor who needs to remind her the risk to Marianne's reputation, trying to protect her sister in a way their mother should be. When Marianne wants to chase Willoughby to London, Elinor warns her mother against it. Her mother ignores her and things go to shit almost immediately. And it's Elinor there in London to pick up the pieces for her sister.
Pride and Prejudice: I won't be going in detail into my opinion on Mr Bennet (it is not high), but the one thing we can all agree, I hope, is that he didn't do much to take care of his kids. When his wife didn't bother to educate the kids, he didn't try to force her, and he didn't hire a governess or tutor. He actively encouraged his kids (and everyone else) not to respect his wife, and the result is that none of the kids listened to a thing Mrs Bennet said unless it was something they wanted to hear. This left the only two children he actually likes (Jane and Lizzie) to try to keep their younger sisters in check (Jane by example and advise, Lizzie by cajoling, and by trying to make her sisters and parents see reason). They do their best, bless them, but it is seldom enough. When Lydia wants to go to Brighton, Lizzie begs her father not to allow it. She knows Lydia will make a fool out of herself AT BEST and tells her father so. And Mr Bennet, contender for Father of the Year, flat out responds with "look, she's going to make an ass of herself at SOME point, at least this way she's doing it on someone else's dime where I don't have to watch" ... Cue Lydia running away with a serial seducer who fully intends to leave her ruined and alone and facing a life of prostitution. And when Lizzie tries to comfort her father over it later, his response was "yeah, you were right. i should have restrained her. but don't worry, i'll get over it" 🤦 Whatever you think about Mr and Mrs Bennet, Lizzie and Jane were the parents in that family.
Emma: So, in Emma's case, it's not a sibling she's taking care of, it's her own father. He's a sweet, loving old man without a mean or pushy bone in his body. And he is needy like a fretful toddler. I won't even get into whether there's actually anything wrong with his health or not because that's not really the point. The point is that for much of Emma's life, she's lived with a father who needs constant reassuring and cheering up, and the fact that she doesn't MIND consciously doesn't change the fact that that responsibility of hers has gotten so far into her head that she can never imagine leaving him, not even to marry. Her own sister thinks she'll never marry while their father is alive. By the end of the story, there's a compromise. Emma is allowed to get married, but the condition is that she stays at home and continues to be her father's fulltime caregiver while her husband moves in with them.
Persuasion: Much more subtle than the others (especially given her older age), and I know some people will argue that Anne Elliot isn't parentified. To that, I can only point out that after her mother dies, she spends literal years trying to remind her father to behave well and not overspend, all while trying to cope with her own heartbreak and the complicated business of growing up into her own person. When the family gets too far in debt, she once again leads the efforts to economize, even if she's ignored at every turn. When her adult sister, with a husband and servants gets sick, it's Anne who is expected to drop everything and look after her. She is always forced to be the voice of reason (a voice which is seldom heeded) and is always expected to look after everyone else, even an injured child whose parents are Right There. She has all the responsibilities of motherhood and none of the respect, (to borrow and heavily modify a line from another of Austen's novels).
Northanger Abbey & Lady Susan: None. Wait! None at all? In the two books featuring overtly evil parents? omfg 🤯
It is shocking that this doesn't happen in Lady Susan, but Frederica is neglected instead of parentified. Yay...
A note on Mansfield Park, I disagree with this:
The younger generation are either left to run wild or forced to be the adults in the room. There is no in-between.
When Sir Thomas is home, we are told he is very strict, to the extent that Maria wants to marry a man she despises just to get away. This is why the young people get so wild when he's away, because it's their first taste of freedom. Now yes, Edmund is left in charge and it's very unfair to him. Mrs. Norris is also tacitly in charge of supervision, but puts sucking up to the heir ahead of discipline.
As for the Crawfords, they suffer from spoiling to the point of neglect it seems. Henry says: The Admiral has his faults, but he is a very good man, and has been more than a father to me. Few fathers would have let me have my own way half so much. Which sounds like not very much of a father at all. And now with Mary's aunt dead and Mrs. Grant being indulgent, Mary has very little check on her behaviour either. Both of them are adults now, but I think even young adults benefit from a trusted adult who can give them guidance and tell them when they've gone wrong (Mr. Knightely for example)
In the Price household, your statement holds completely true.
I’ve been ruminating on writing an essay on parentification in Jane Austen’s works for a while! Here are a couple of things I’d personally touch on.
Pride and Prejudice- Jane and Elizabeth are not only trying to manage their younger sisters (with very little success) but they- especially Elizabeth- are trying to manage their mother as well. Lizzie is far more aware of the flaws of her father not trying harder to ensure her mother’s respectability (I will die on the hill that Mr Collins’ proposal is supposed to mirror her parents’ marriage, and his marriage to Charlotte is a glimpse of what Mr Bennet could have been like, with her steering Mr Collins into acting more in ways that suit her- including actually leaving Lady Catherine’s side when she’s upset and angry at the end!) She’s more aware of the flaws of her mother and how her parents are a terrible match- I’d say it’s the most important part of her characterisation tbh. She is seen trying to manage her mother, encourage her to behave properly in public without being obvious or improper about it- and, naturally, failing, since she has no power with Mrs Bennet. Tbh that feels more like parentification than with Mr Bennet (not a defence of Mr Bennet by any stretch, but Elizabeth is somewhat taking the role of and trying to improve the behaviour of Mrs Bennet.)
Northanger Abbey- this is a different beast not because it lacks parentification- it has it imo- but because it’s not involving a PoV character it’s definitely less front and centre. But it felt to me like the Tilney children having to manage their father’s moods and constantly be aware of them. While leaning more into abusive behaviour than parentification I do think that need to manage and soothe his moods counts, personally.
So I would say that parentification is a factor in all of Austen’s core works! And bad parenting is key to them all too (albeit not always the same parents).
sherlock holmes deduces you are trans before you've figured it out yourself and refers to you with those pronouns and then when you look confused is like "ah...had you not arrived at that conclusion yet?" and wafts away in his dressing gown to smoke seventeen pipes, leaving you in a gender crisis
Hercule Poirot deduces you are trans by accident because he suspected you of murder and broke into your house and searched your stuff then puts 2 and 2 together when Hastings makes an innocuous observation about your fashion sense or something and he jumps up and cries “mon dieu!!!” before striding over to you kissing you on both cheeks and saying “ah, cher ami, you must live as you choose!” and then running off to confront the real culprit while you stand there in befuddlement
Columbo deduces you're trans from context clues while he's talking to you about the area, immediately uses your preferred pronouns and starts telling you about his cousin, who's also transgender, and how they got this job doing security, and how they told him that a security guard always locks up, and asks you if the guard locked up last night, and isn't it weird the place was open? And you're like, well, someone else must have opened it up. Maybe the guy in charge? He has a spare key. And then he nods and goes "the guy in charge has a spare key... well, how about that?" And then he offers you a cigar and wanders off, and a day later your boss gets arrested for murder.
Miss Fisher learns youre trans and simply gives you hormones, and a little cocaine as a treat. she also invites you out to a club to meet like minded individuals. at the club you watch as she seduces the bartender and then the next day the bartender is arrested for the murder.
Been doing another Jane Austen reread and apparently this time around I've got on my Chronic Illness goggles because I can't get it out of my brain that Fanny Price probably suffers from a mild case of rickets.
But, Kat, what the fuck are rickets? (infodump incoming)
So if you've never heard of rickets, congratulations on living in the 21st century. There's never been a healthier time to be alive 👍
So basically, rickets is more a set of symptoms than it is an actual disease, and those symptoms are caused when a growing body doesn't get enough vitamin D or calcium. That can be caused by either an underlying disease that messes with your body's ability to absorb vitamins and minerals, or by poor diet and lack of enough natural light.
In a culture where food isn't enriched with extra vitamins and minerals and adulteration of bread with things like alum is common, the Price family isn't going to have the most nutritious diet, and on top of that, poor Fanny as the eldest daughter would have been stuck inside all day every day helping out her mother. It's entirely possible that her sunday walk to church was the only time she got any direct sunlight.
And now that I've gotten all that out of the way, what are the actual symptoms of rickets? The main ones are stunted growth, bone and muscle pain, and weakness.
Fanny is noted in the first chapter to be very small for her age, and her fatigue and issues with things like short walks are noted repeatedly. Of course a lot of things can cause symptoms like that and that poor girl has Chronic Illness(tm) written all over her, but I really do think rickets makes sense for one reason.
She gets better when she can spend a lot of time outside and worse when she's confined to the house. More than a few days without riding or otherwise being outside are shown to lead to worsening fatigue and weakness.
Why? Because time in the sun causes the body to produce more vitamin D than would be the case otherwise.
In the present day, rickets is a fully treatable condition, usually only requiring vitamins to reverse all the symptoms (sometimes surgery to correct bone deformities, but many of those will resolve themselves over time). But Fanny doesn't live in the present day and she doesn't have a doctor making sure she gets her 2,000 IU of D3 every day. So while moving to Mansfield (and getting a relatively healthy diet for a change) would absolutely have helped her symptoms, but she was probably always struggling with a chronic low-grade case of rickets that got better or worse depending on how much time she was able to spend in the sun. (Both the diet and sunlight things would also explain why going back to Portsmouth made her ill again.)
Maybe Mr Crawford wasn't entirely full of shit when he noticed she had a growth spurt at some point after her cousin's marriage. Maybe that was her body beginning to self-correct after years of better nutrition and more frequent exposure to the sun.
Which probably means that when the duty of babysitting Lady Bertram was shifted to her sister and Fanny moved to the parsonage, she probably did experience a full recovery, or something very close to it.
The heatwave is breaking with drama. Record highs (both highs and lows), and we’re finally ending with this. Hours of incredible lightning in the clouds and a little bit of rumbling thunder and a tiny bit of rain. Quite charming to sit outside and watch.
Still one hot day to go but it’s normal hot, not record breaking hot.
So I didn't post this for ages after finishing it because I'm, idk. Nobody sees my art, but nobody will see my art if I don't post it, so here we go.
Yasmin- my Arcadia Fallen 2 character- with Elias. Yasmin (they/them) goes from being deserving of the nickname "little mouse" to that being something of an ironic name for them, and I like that Elias' flirting can fall 100% flat and still result in a romance progressing! Elias is really not the sort of LI I'm usually into (I'm asexual, so flirting before establishing a connection is a total deal breaker for me) but the fact that it was superficial an habitual at first, and the relationship really only solidifies once he's being more genuine really felt right with Yasmin. (Also they're both Menders so I definitely see them as knowing each other loosely at the start of the game.)
Drawn from a sketch here. Arcadia Fallen and Elias is by @galdra-studios (and you should play it!)
So back in 2005, I saved up my own money, dollar by dollar, scrimping and saving every nickel and quarter, to buy my very first "just for me" video game- Devil May Cry 3. It was the first game I ever finished by myself, on my own, never having watched anyone else play it before. It was tough, and SUPER frustrating at points, but I loved it. The whole thing was a very special experience for me and that game holds an important place in my heart,
A few years after finishing it, I was talking to a friend who had just played it. He was saying how he dumped all of his orbs (game currency) into upgrading his minimum health pool and how he wanted to start over with a different build.
I stared at him.
"Wait, what?"
He repeated- he dumped all his orbs into increasing his minimum HP and just tanked a bunch of stuff.
That was when I realized that you could upgrade your minimum health. I had not noticed that you could spend orbs to do that. I spent them on everything else OTHER than upgrading my health bar.
I literally spent so so so frikkin long beating the game with MINIMUM. HP. I WOULD HAVE HAD SAVED SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY IF I HAD JUST FRIKKIN NOTICED THAT INCREASING MY MINIMUM HEALTH WAS EVEN AN OPTION. NO WONDER I HAD TO REDO THE SAME FIGHTS 20 TIMES. NO WONDER EVERYTHING WAS SO. DIFFICULT. I COMPLETELY just missed a crucial element to gameplay and specs and I basically played the game entirely incorrectly, exerting WAY more effort to get the same results as anyone who actually took time to examine the obvious upgrade options.
Anyway, that's what discovering that I have ADHD in my 30s has been like.
