Weekly Update - 105 (Patreon)

Just got back from the doctor. Since all of my heart-related tests have shown up normal, we are left with perhaps a non-critical-but-still-unknown cause for my sudden onset of partial blindness in what I've always sort of referred to as "the bad eye."

The doctor doesn't think I had a mini-stroke (TIA). He is much more of the mind that it might just be related to blood pressure or cholesterol.

For now, I guess that's about as good news as I can hope for. So yay.

Comic this week: Yes. Hopefully. I should be able to get it done. The rest of the page is much further along than this panel.

Drawing: Page 135

Playing: Satisfactory, Cyberpunk 2077, TW: WH3

Ramble:

I wanted to talk more about Riley today.

Yes, I know I've covered Riley and her issues a lot in these rambles, but she remains one of the most interesting and complicated characters I've ever come up with, and it helps to sort of reset myself every once in awhile with a big long talk to make sure I've still got her right. Again, I'm not a therapist or a psychologist, merely a writer with a little bit of a fascination in "abnormal" psychology. Take everything I say with that in mind. I've done a fair bit of research for my own knowledge, but I am by no means a professional.

It's a common misunderstanding, I think, that someone can just "snap" and go insane. It's so common we even have a word for it. Media likes to assume there's this moment, usually an instant, sometimes longer, in a person's life where they flick the switch from "sane" to "insane" and that's that. Irredeemable insanity forever. And why not? It's an easy formula for a comic book supervillain. They got bullied in school too much when they were young so they grew up and decided to hold the world hostage with a laser that turns everyone into frogs because they're InSaNe.

Before I go much further, I do want to say that I feel like we are growing aware this is a very outdated view.  As individuals and as a society we are always learning, and the field of psychology is still evolving, and people are starting to realize that nothing in our world is ever quite so binary as we used to think it was. Things are progressing in the right direction, I believe, albeit slowly, and this is just me, attempting to share what I think I know with what few people might read it in an effort to help it along in whatever small way I can.

In fiction, though I think we've moved far away from the "whoops I'm crazy now" tropes, we still see it from time to time where a character will experience some sudden trauma and "go insane" or gain a permanent mental health problem or negative character trait as a direct result of that moment. A character in a video game watches her parents being tortured to death in front of her, then uses a concealed grenade to escape her captors, then she makes it to safety and just... starts laughing maniacally (Name that character!). It seems to us like she just "went insane" from the traumatic events, which makes sense, from an outside perspective, why we might have thought people could just break in one intense moment of emotional and psychological distress. We can't see into her head, so we don't know what happened. She just "snapped."

But from what study I've done on the topic of abnormal human behavior, it's very rarely a single moment that causes someone to develop severe mental health issues. People are more resilient than we give them credit for. Many people experience extreme trauma and are okay afterwards. We turn to our support networks, our friends and family and we justify our actions and reactions and we dissociate ourselves from negative things and we fortify ourselves against further harm, sometimes becoming stronger people as a result. That isn't to say it is unrealistic for trauma to be a triggering factor for some people, but there are often underlying complexities and what's more important, I think, is how the person processes that trauma. How they ruminate on it, how they manage their emotions, whether they have people to turn to for help or if they have to tank their emotional distress themselves. Some people are prone to certain ways of thinking when compared to others, and some people have varied levels of emotional and psychological stress that might make it harder for them to handle something like an intense trauma. There's the matter of how the memory solidifies itself in the person's mind and the feelings they have surrounding it, other associations they might make with it. Further still, some people are born genetically predisposed to certain mental conditions, which could be activated or exacerbated by a significant traumatic event. These are the factors that will cause a trauma to more likely result in a mental health problem. Less so the trauma, and moreso all these other factors combined.

I knew I wanted Riley to fit some definition of "insane," but the Trauma -> Insanity trope is so overdone in media, I wanted to take a vastly different approach with her. Hallucinations, voices, delusions, these things are generally what we think of when we think of what makes a person "insane." When they are disassociated with the reality the rest of us are experiencing to an extreme where they can't tell the difference between reality and imagination, resulting in what seems like unexpected irrational behavior.  I've been hinting for awhile now that Riley has been hallucinating since she was very young.  I didn't want her "insanity" to be linked to any specific trauma in her life, such as the disappearance of her father or any abuses she may have suffered.

Still though, I also don't want her mental problems to be what defines her. In the scene with Snake, I like to think that for most of that scene she's doing her best to try and figure out if he's real or not.