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moreespressoformydepresso · 3 days

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Fandom's Takes On Trauma Are Terrible And Here's Why: brought to you by terrible Coriolanus Snow and Anakin Skywalker discourse

I've been on the verge of making this post for a while now, but I kept not doing it because this might be a bit of a hot take and I don't like offending people. However, I've been growing increasingly annoyed with the perception of one specific character type so lets see how much my dumb opinions stir the pot this time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. This will be focused mainly on my current main fandom: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, as well as Star Wars. You'll see why. Now, I need to make it clear that I'm not judging anyone for their opinions on characters for any reason. In no way am I insinuating you're a bad person for having opinions different to mine or that you’re not allowed to have them. What I am saying is that fandoms have some frustrating and frankly insulting beliefs around trauma and those who survived it, and I'm gonna talk about it because I want to get this off my chest. With that said:

Y'all don't understand how trauma works and it annoys me

As stated in the title, I'm writing this because of the Coriolanus Snow discourse, specifically regarding whether he's a good or bad person. Lets rip off the bandaid straight away: He's a bad person. There's no question about it, Snow is a vile human being. And he's one of my favorite characters because of it. He's fantastically written and hands down one of the most realistic, viscerally terrifying yet utterly pathetic villains ever. And what I hate about the TBOSAS fandom more than anything (aside from how some of them treat the actors) is the way they take away all his agency in the story. But I'll put a pin in that because I have a lot to say about him and instead start at the beginning of my growing frustration with how fandom perceives trauma (feel free to skip through this post, I'll label my sections in case you don't wanna read this whole thing). There's two sides, and both are equally stigmatized and wrong. So lets start with the more obvious one through the lens of Anakin Skywalker.

The Star Wars Fandom's Weird Relationship With Traumatized Children Behaving Like Traumatized Children

So Anakin Skywalker AKA Darth Vader is pretty explicitly a Bad Dude who's done some Bad Things. Bro committed genocide, ain't no getting around that, except... It's a little more complicated. Sure, he did all those terrible things, but a lot of people take that to mean he was always a horrible monstrous big bad in the making who was destined to become the galaxy's worst nightmare. That's missing the whole point of the prequel trilogy, because those movies essentially serve to explain all the reasons for Anakin's descent into villainy, and he had surprisingly little hand in it. Growing up into slavery means he not only has a warped view of the galaxy thanks to all the horrors he's witnessed, it also means he lacks the teachings Jedi younglings get when they grow up in the temple. He was pawned off onto Obi-Wan who had only recently been knighted and was in no way ready to raise a child, and became "friends" with Palpatine who fed him all sorts of lies to manipulate him into becoming little more than an attack dog. Not exactly ideal circumstances for a child in their formative years. Did Anakin shirk the Jedi's rules? Yes. Did he do dumb stuff? Yes. But he was a traumatized teenager, of course he's acting out. When he massacres the Tusken Raiders, it's Padme Amidala who reassures him it was the right thing to do. He felt guilty about it, so this idea that he's some apathetic monster from the second he's born is dumb. It's not that Anakin was born wrong, it's that the people around him either failed to help him go down the right path or were actively trying to push him down the wrong one. Anakin never fully grasped the Jedi's ideals, because the person meant to teach him just wasn't equipped to do so. If he'd had someone to teach him how to get a hold of his emotions, distancing himself enough from them to make the best possible decision and helping him understand the importance of letting someone go when you have to, he wouldn't have fallen to the dark side the way he did.

Anakin did terrible things, but blaming it on him just having an evil heart shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how people's environments change who they are. A life in slavery, where he was not allowed to have anything and risked losing what he held dear at any second with no control over it likely caused him to be very possessive of what he held close to his heart once he did have some control over what he kept and lost. Shmi died because he wasn't there to protect her (in his head), so he clung to the people he loved so he could save them the way he couldn't save his mother. Palpatine actively groomed him, if you think that didn't have any effect on him I don't know what to tell you. Throughout the war, he constantly lost people he was close to. That control he had slowly starts to fade as Ahsoka leaves and he starts having dreams about Padme dying. He does everything to save her, only to find out she betrayed him (in his mind, a thought quite likely influenced by PTSD as well). I can tell you that believing one of the few people you trust has betrayed you can make you act very impulsively. Anakin made an impulsive decision and regretted it for the rest of his life. He wasn't born a monster, the world turned him into one.

However, that does not excuse his actions. It explains them and spreads the blame to more people, but his actions are still his actions. Anakin separated himself from his past because of all the pain it brings him, and in doing so he did a lot of bad things. And he still needed to face consequences for those actions, even if the events that led up to them aren't necessarily on him entirely. If he'd gotten therapy, he wouldn't have choked Padme to death. Possibly he wouldn't have attacked the temple. But he didn't, and he did all those things trauma or not. I have major issues with the way some Anti-Anakin parts of the Star Wars fandom insist on ignoring or writing off his trauma, but that doesn't mean I'm absolving him of all guilt.

An explanation is not an excuse, and that sentiment brings us to the reason for this little rant:

Coriolanus Snow's defenders have a habit of infantalizing trauma survivors and I wish they would stop

Oh Snow, how your amazing character completely flew over the heads of most of your loyalest fans. I'm joking, obviously, but also... It's not exactly wrong. Now, I need to make this clear: I'm not insulting Snow fans here. I'm kind of one of them (I hate his guts but I love how he was written, it's a love hate relationship). However, the way people talk about his trauma... I'll be honest, it's kind of sickening for reasons I'll talk about later after getting through the technical(?) stuff. Where the way people view Anakin disgusts me, the way people treat Snow disturbs me. Because people view The Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes as if it's some typical tragic villain backstory that humanizes and in some ways justifies who he became, to show what changed him from a normal person into a monster. It's not. It actually shows that Snow has always possessed the traits that made him the monster we know from the OG series. What it does is explain why specific things were so important to him and how he grew to lose all redeeming qualities, letting the worst aspects of his personality grow and take over until it's all there's left of him.

What made Snow do stuff like poison political adversaries and constantly beat down the districts so they don't rebel? A thirst for power. A thirst he's always had, born from the feelings of entitlement he held thanks to his family's previous status. He deserves that power in his mind, so he'll do anything to get it. Power, control, and influence are his driving motivators. It's at the back of his mind throughout TBOSAS, and by the time he becomes a gamemaker it's the only motivation he has left. Those traits, the things that pushed him to do what he did, they were always there. There was just more stuff to cover it up. Stuff that fell away with time. Snow is a terrible person, but people pretend he's some poor misunderstood baby who just needed a hug because... why? Because he has trauma. And that's the root of the problem. Does he have trauma? Absolutely. He survived a war, he lost his parents, struggled through poverty while being raised by propaganda from the Capitol and was arguably groomed by Gaul. Sound familiar? It's kind of like Anakin. Horrible childhood filled with loss, less than amazing figures raising him and grooming. Except people use the opposite argument for him which is equally wrong: he's traumatized, so we cannot blame him.

Yes we can.

Trauma does not justify your actions. It might explain them, but you are still accountable for your own actions. Snow murdered people, starting with Bobbin, and every single time it was his choice to do so. It doesn't matter why he made that choice, because he still did it. He ruined countless lives and ended nearly as many, both directly and indirectly. No amount of trauma justifies that. I've seen people claim he's just an anxious young boy who's a poor victim of circumstance, and anyone who doesn't believe so is simply unable to separate the actions of an 80-something-year-old from the 18-year-old, but... No. That's one of the most braindead takes I've ever heard, I'm sorry. Snow hadn't committed the crimes of his older self yet, but the behaviors he shows in TBOSAS are the ones that led him to doing so later on and ignoring that is just stupid. I don't need to judge Snow based on his later actions to call out how fucked up he was in TBOSAS. Again, he chose to murder several people and deluded himself into believing he was justified. That's what makes him a great character. Bad people always believe, on some level, that they're doing the right thing. It's fascinating. But people take his words at face value when he says he's doing the right thing, and the whole point is that he's wrong. He's lying to himself. Because that's what people do sometimes. Snow's family was knocked off its throne, and Snow clung to the idea that the districts are beneath him and at fault to cope with that. He deluded himself into believing Gaul's dumbass theory to justify continuing the games.

It's the exact opposite of Anakin Skywalker: Trauma is relevant, it does inform your perspective on the world and your actions, but it does not mean you can do no wrong. Snow had every chance to be a good person: Knocking Bobbin out or running away instead of murdering him, joining the rebellion with Sejanus, staying in district 12 with Lucy Gray and being honest with her. But he killed Bobbin. He fucked over the rebels and got Sejanus killed. He lied to Lucy Gray and destroyed any chance he had with her. Every chance he got, he threw into the fire without hesitation. Anakin leaned into being a bad person to forget the past, Snow chose to be one because it benefitted him the most. Neither of them are excused because of their trauma, their descent into villainy is simply explained. You know why? Because both of them created new victims. Snow was complicit in the murder of hundreds of children before becoming responsible for thousands more, he killed people with his own hands and ruined several lives over the course of TBOSAS. All that pain he caused isn't erased because we can explain why it happened. Even at 18, Snow has many things he should be held accountable for. War, being an empoverished orphan, being groomed, none of that nullifies the shit he's done. People who say Snow's just an anxious, young, traumatized boy are one side of the horseshoe theory of the myth of "the perfect victim". The "Anakin's Trauma Should Be Ignored Entirely" crowd are the other side. Which brings us to...

It's all horseshoe theory

To conclude the analytical part of my post, I'll bring it back to what I briefly mentioned in the intro to all of this. Agency. That's the running thread here. Both in cases like Anakin and cases like Snow, the fandom takes away all agency a character has in the story for the sake of justifying one's feelings about them. Anakin was born a monster and he was always destined to be evil. It wasn't the trauma, it wasn't the events of the story, he's just bad. On the other hand, Snow is a good person who was made to do terrible things by his trauma. It's all the trauma and nothing else. His bad childhood caused him to be this way and it has nothing to do with his own worst personality traits. See the connection? In both these instances, the characters had no influence over who they became. With Anakin, nothing could've had any influence because he's just born wrong. With Snow, it's everything around him that shaped him into who he was. Both scenarios completely ignore the character and focus on external factors to explain everything. One demonizes trauma victims by saying those that went off the rails are just bad people and there's nothing to be done about it, the other infantilizes trauma survivors by saying they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions just because they have trauma and it's only when they're older and should know better that we can bring consequences down on them.

Victims of trauma should be held accountable, though. The only thing the presence of trauma should change is what kind of accountability. Merely locking them up won't change anything, they should receive help to work through their problems while residing in a place where they cannot hurt anyone else. Including themselves. That is what acknowledging trauma is useful for. But this? This is doing nothing but stigmatizing trauma survivors even more than they already are, and I hate it. And you wanna know why I hate it? Because I've been both sides of this horseshoe, and it nearly got me killed.

The part where I talk about my Tragic Backstory(TM) to explain why this bothers me so much

This'll be a little heavy, so while I'm not gonna go into detail I advise you to please be careful. If you're not in the headspace to handle talk about actual real life mental health issues, feel free to stop reading here. I'm putting this at the end for a reason. If you really wanna know why people's perspective on Snow disturbs me but don't wanna risk getting triggered, skip to the last bold line in this post.

Without going into detail, I've dealt with some pretty big mental health issues throughout my life. One of them is PTSD, so believe me when I say I understand that trauma can heavily influence one's actions in ways even they don't understand. But I had to learn the hard way that there's a difference between explaining and excusing. I used to believe that, because of my previous experiences, I was entirely justified in doing what I was doing. Kind of. At that point, I didn't know that what I was experiencing was PTSD, but I did feel justified in my actions the same way Snow does. I explained every bad thing I did away and wrote it off as nothing or sometimes even as a good thing. Granted, I never did anything as big as committing murder, but I don't live in a country as dark and horrible as Panem so we'll chalk it up to that. As I grew older, I started to recognize the ways in which I accidentally hurt the people around me, and eventually had the realization that my past does not in fact justify the pain I was causing people entirely uninvolved in what happened to me. They had nothing to do with that, and shoving all my pain onto them the way I did was wrong. My view of myself pivoted to the other side of the horseshoe. If I'm not justified, am I... am I bad? Am I evil? Am I just born wrong?

I don't know how to explain this to anyone who hasn't gone through this themself, but that is a horrible feeling to have. To feel like you're just bad and there's nothing you can do about it... It kills something inside of you. A hope, a will to keep going and keep trying. Why bother when you cannot be fixed? I've lost the will to live at two points in my life, and that was one of them. And now I get to see both of these mentalities be repeated by dumbasses who don't understand the first thing about trauma. It's... not fun. It's grating and aggravating in a way I can't accurately bring across with just my words. It makes me wanna scream and laugh hysterically until I cry.

Here's the thing: I relate to Snow, and the way people perceive him disturbs me on a visceral level.

As I said, I justified my own bad behavior the same way he does. I convinced myself I was a blameless poor victim who had no hand in their actions. But just like Snow, I did. Not nearly as much as I would have liked, but I did. I learned to control the defensive mechanisms my trauma gave me, and I grew from it. Seeing people defending Snow with the same arguments that kept me from ever getting over what happened to me, crying out that he's just traumatized so none of it's his fault... it disturbs me. Because they're outsiders who should be able to see the pain he caused others and realize that nothing changes the fact that he did that. But they don't. They're me, without any of the personal stakes that kept me trapped in my own delusions. It's all just fiction, and I know that, but it hits just a little too close to home for my comfort. It's a little too raw and a little too real for me to just let it go and move on again like I always do.

I'm sorry for the rant, I didn't mean to make this post this long but I guess I hope you find something of interest in here that made it worth reading? Have a nice day 💜

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recoverr · 7 months

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i don't know who needs to hear this, but guilt, self-hatred and shame are not sustainable sources of growth and healing. you can't hate yourself into feeling better, or being better. you can't repeatedly punish yourself for your flawed humanity and expect wholesome results.

#mental health #recovery #self care #self love #positivity #reminders #healing #be kind to yourself #actually mentally ill #cptsd #actually cptsd #recovery suggestion #trauma survivor #trauma recovery #mine.

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neuroticboyfriend · 1 year

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As an adult still living with their abusive parent, I often find that affirmations meant to empower me are unhelpful at best. They often feel like they're overstating the amount of agency I have as an adult; I've spent my entire life being abused. It's all I know and I have a lifetime of conditioning and nervous system damage to show for it.

All that doesn't just go away now that I'm older than 18, and neither do the material circumstances that keep me here. Even though I have more legal rights and have grown since I was younger, I am still not in control by the very nature of being the victim in an abusive relationship. So, for those who relate, here are some affirmations that might hit different:

My abuser does not have my best interests in mind, even if they think they do.

I am my own person; my mind and body belong to me.

My feelings are justified, and I deserve to feel and express them.

I am doing what I need to survive, and that is all I need to do.

I am doing my best given the knowledge, resources, and support I have.

I am the only person who can decide what is best for me.

My situation is unfair and wrong. I deserve to be happy and safe.

I do not have to engage in toxic positivity; that will only hurt me.

As long as I am alive, there is something good in this life for me - no matter how small.

I have inherent rights just because I exist.

I shouldn't have to deal with this on my own; I deserve support and protection.

Everything I need is something I deserve. Everything I deserve is something I need.

If any of these don't resonate, feel free to discard them. Everyone finds comfort and empowerment differently.

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ash-says · 3 months

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Survival 101 :

Buckle up your seatbelt darling because this is going to be triggering and one hell of a ride. Don't expect mushy from me. Might do it when tapped in my soft girl era but today I feel like a Villain.

1) Keep your mouth shut where you don't hold the power. No power no expressed opinions that can put you in trouble.

2) Learn manipulation and seduction skills. This will help you to detect when someone is trying to manipulate and seduce you. Saves a lot of drama and heartache.

3) Fight back strategically. We don't want to lose a job, a degree certificate, a bruise on your body,etc depending on your situation.

4) Facts over emotions. Always.

5) 90% of older men are creepy. Speaking from experience here. Play with them by ear. Get what you want by being polite and respectful but if they try to harass you or take advantage we turn Medusa on them or if you are not in a position to fight and walk out safe just play cutesy and shy and dumb. Ask him what he means and do not take a word said by him seriously. Dodge his advances like your life depends on it until you get an opening to run for the hills.

6) Snap out of delusions and pay attention to reality. People are not what you make them out to be they are what they show you. Stop making excuses for them.

7) Anxiety can be crippling. Panic attacks are the worst but no matter what happens try your level best to never show them publicly. Men are vultures and vulnerable women are easy prey for men.

8) That one friend who is all sweet to you and is your bff but anything positive happens in your life and suddenly starts becoming passive aggressive. Not your friend. Don't share any secrets. Best to be kept as an acquaintance.

9) Develop sarcasm and don't be afraid to put self entitled bitches and bastards in their place. Better being called a 'Mean Girl' over a 'Doormat'.

10) Bully back the bullies. It's 2024 sweetie we don't wait for an opportunity for revenge we fucking create it.

11) No matter how tough your life is going everyone shouldn't be getting a broadcast about it. At least not by your own mouth. Try to act as put together as you can.

12) Kindness is virtue but being apathetic saves you. Don't be the fool who bleeds through the stabs of the same knives again and again. "Because I can't see them in pain. I have a heart." Babygirl you have a life too. All that emotional stress is going to result in some serious problems in the upcoming years.

13) Learn when to quit. The most emotionally intelligent people I know are great quitters. They know when it's the end of an era.

14) Never disclose your family issues to outsiders. Until and unless a person has proved their loyalty to you year after year only those selected one or two people should know your domestic issues. Anyone else knowing it is like having a good gossip for tea time.

15) Lastly, there are no fucking saviours in real life. You are your own saviour.

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pink-devolve · 3 months

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If you’re a domestic violence survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re an SA survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a CSA survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re an ECSA survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a child abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a neglect survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a war survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a natural disaster survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a gun violence survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a cult survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re an organized abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a torture survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a TTI survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a physical abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a mental abuse survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

If you’re a survivor, I’m proud of you for surviving.

#trauma #ptsd #ptsd recovery #trauma survivor #complex ptsd #ptsd awareness #ptsd support #did system #did osdd

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aurangg · 9 days

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Something really not talked about with trauma disorders is the paranoia.

Being scared and jumping to conclusions when people stand a little too close to you, not believing people’s compliments and thinking they have hidden motives, not believing when people tell you they like/love you, thinking that strangers you see on the street want to hurt you, etc.

#trauma survivor #paranoia #actually ptsd #actually cptsd #complex ptsd #post traumatic stress disorder #osdd 1a #osdd 1b #actually did #did system #actually osdd #osddid #cdd system #complex dissociative disorder #did community #osdd community #actually dissociative

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recoverr · 9 months

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i hope it hurts a little less. day by day. week by week. i hope the ache in your chest eases. maybe it won't entirely, maybe it will. may the thought of feeling joy again alone be enough to keep you going, even if for a while.

#mental health #recovery #self care #self love #reminders #positivity #healing #complex ptsd #cptsd #mental heath support #mental illness #wholesome suggestion #recovery suggestion #trauma recovery #trauma survivor #mine.

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ash-says · 3 months

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Tips for Dysfunctional Family Girlies Part 2:

1) Get your basics straight. Education. Boundaries. Financial independence. Further breaking it down and linking it if you get proper education at some point you are bound to get an awareness of this world, if you are able to adapt and improvise yourself and develop your emotional intelligence and get your boundaries straight you will save yourself a lot of unnecessary drama and problems. Education (formal and informal) both will help you in gaining opportunities and if you are financially independent, you are holding the power to make your own decisions.

2) Develop thick skin. Your mom is calling you names. Slut, whore and what not. Your dad doesn't trust you and abuses you physically. So, what now? Are you going to let them define what you are or internalize the anger and use it as a fuel to become successful? Choice is yours.

3) They say you don't owe an explanation to anyone. Sorry to burst your little bubble. Actually you do. We live in a society and have relationships that we need to maintain for survival. This hyper independent stuff is only good to read. We have responsibilities that we need to fulfill. If you don't owe an explanation to anyone then don't cry about a closure from someone too. If you can live by this go ahead and practice it.

4) Stop isolating yourself. That's it. That's the point.

5) First kill the fear inside you. Being a rebel outside the house is no good. Be disciplined. Know how to manipulate your family members in your favor and if you can't just find the weak points and threaten. I know it's difficult to implement but you learn through trial and error. Plus something is better than nothing.

6) Stop glorifying people who treat you with kindness and love. That's the bare minimum. Just because you didn't get it served in a silver spoon doesn't mean it is not served in a silver spoon. People can have ulterior motives and even if they don't fix it in your brain that's normal. No rose colored glasses allowed.

7) Don't be afraid of indulging in your sexuality. No I am not saying go and have sex with people. I mean it in a deeper sense. Connect with the repressed sexual side and try to find healthy outlets. Don't dim yourself to fit in others'expectations or to ease someone's insecurity. Be unapologetic about your wants and desires. Know yourself. It's a powerful energy source if you know how to use it positively.

8) Cry, cry and cry. Wail like a child. No need to keep it all in. No need to act like a macho woman BUT only in front of your god or your belief system. Max in front of your truly trusted people.

9) Question everything as easily as breathing. Doubt every thing. Every action. Every person. What proof do you have to not doubt ? Stop giving benefit of doubts. Stop looking for excuses on how they could be good and instead look for ways in which they can harm you. That's your lottery to be poised and composed. It's just what it is.

10) Obsession. We have it in loads. That's natural to us. So the trick here is to be obsessive. Hella obsessive but about things, topics, goals, subjects, inanimate things,etc. God forbid but never be obsessive about a person. Not even over your dead body. Why? For that I need to make another detailed post I think.

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wilwheaton · 11 months

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When you watch The Curse, you are watching two children who were abused and exploited daily during production. No adults protected us.

This was originally published on my blog in August, 2022.

I had a wonderful time at Steel City Comicon this weekend. It was my first time at this particular con, so I didn’t know there was such a huge contingent of horror fans, creators, and vendors who attend.

I love horror, and I was pretty psyched to be in the same place as John Carpenter and Tom Savini, across the street from the Dawn of the Dead mall. Pittsburgh feels like one of the places horror was invented, at least to me.

A number of these horror fans came to see me, and asked me to sign posters and other things from a movie my parents forced me to do when I was 13, called The Curse. I had to tell each of these people that I would not sign anything associated with that movie, because I was abused and exploited during production. The time I spent on that film remains the most traumatizing time of my life, and though I am a 50 year-old man, just typing this now makes my hands shake with remembered fear of a 13 year-old boy who nobody protected, and the absolute fury the 50 year-old man feels toward the people who hurt him.

I told this story in Still Just A Geek, and I’ve talked about it in some podcasts I did on the promo tour, but I’ve never put it out in public like this, in its entirety.

I suspect someone at the publisher would prefer I tease this and hope it drives book sales from people who want to read all of it, but I honestly don’t want to have another weekend like this one where everything is awesome, except the few times people who have no idea (and why should they) put that fucking poster in front of me, and all the fear, abandonment, and trauma come flooding back as I tell them that I won’t sign it, and why.

To their credit, each person was as horrified as they should have been, told me they had no idea (if they didn’t read my book why would they), and quickly put the poster away. They were all understanding. I am grateful for that.

But I really don’t need to tell this story over and over again, so here it is, with a child abuse and exploitation content warning, so I can just tell people to Google it.

After Stand by Me, everything changed. The attention from entertainment journalists, casting directors, and especially teen magazines came pouring in. The movie was a generational hit, beloved by critics and audiences alike, and every single one of us could pick anything to do next.

River’s parents and his agent got him Mosquito Coast, with Harrison Ford, as his next movie. I also auditioned for the role, but I knew even then that River was going to book the job. He was perfect, and I’d have to wait a little bit for my opportunity to come along.

I went on a lot of theatrical auditions after Stand by Me. I had tons of meetings with directors and the heads of casting at every major studio. It was all a very big deal, and I felt like we were all looking for something really special and amazing as my follow-up to Stand by Me.

At some point, a couple of producers contacted my agent with an offer to play one of the leads in an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” The script was titled The Farm. (It would, of course, be changed when the film was released).

I read it. I did not like it. It was a shitty horror movie, and I saw that right away. It was the sort of thing you rented on Friday when the new release you wanted was already out of the store.

My mother, already an incredibly manipulative person, used every tool at her disposal to change my mind. My father threatened me, mocked me, told me “It’s your decision” when it clearly wasn’t. It was all so weird; I didn’t understand why they cared so much.

I told my parents I didn’t like it and didn’t want to do it. I clearly recall thinking it was a piece of shit that would hurt my career.

It wasn’t the first thing that had come our way that I wanted to pass on, and every other time, it hadn’t been a very big deal.

Sidebar: I was cast in Twilight Zone: The Movie, in 1983. The film tells four stories, and I was cast as the kid who can wish people into cartoonland. It was a GREAT role, in a movie I still love. (Note that Twilight Zone had four directors. One of them got three people killed. The segment I was cast in was not that one. I mention this because too many people zero in on this to deflect from what this whole thing is actually about.)

But I was CONVINCED by my parochial school teacher that if I worked on The Twilight Zone, which she had determined was satanic, I would go to hell. (This woman and her bullshit played a big role in my conversion to atheism at a young age, but when she told me that, I was all-in on the supernatural story they taught us in religion class.) I was so scared, more scared than I’d ever been to that point in my life, I cried and wailed and begged my parents to not make me do the movie. And I never told them why, because I was afraid my dad would laugh at me for being weak and afraid. My agent tried to talk me into it, and I wouldn’t budge. It’s the only thing I deeply and truly regret passing on, and I really hate I made that choice for such a stupid reason.

Okay. Back to The Curse.

This time, when I told them how much I hated it, they wouldn’t listen to me. My mother, already an incredibly manipulative person, used every tool at her disposal to change my mind. My father threatened me, mocked me, told me “It’s your decision” when it clearly wasn’t. It was all so weird; I didn’t understand why they cared so much.

That is, until they made me take a meeting with the producers of the movie, in their giant conference room on the top floor of a tall building in Hollywood. All I remember about this place was that it was huge; the table was way too big for the five of us who spread around it, and there were floor-to-ceiling windows on three of the walls, but the room was still dark. There was a weird optical illusion in the center of the table, this thing they sold in the Sharper Image catalog, made from two reflective dishes with a hole in the top of one. You placed an object in the bottom of the bottom dish, and it made it look like that object was floating above the whole thing. They had a plastic spider in it. What a strange detail for me to remember, but it’s as clear in my memory as if I were sitting in that room right now.

One man, who I presumed was the executive producer, was European or Middle Eastern (I didn’t know the difference then, he was just Not Like People I Knew), and I was instantly afraid of him. He was intimidating, and seemed like a person who got what he wanted.

So we sat there, my father who didn’t give a shit about me, my mother who was cosplaying as someone with experience, and me, thirteen years old, awkward as fuck, and scared to death.

I don’t remember what they said to me in their pitch or anything other than how uncomfortable and anxious I was to even be in that room. I tried so hard to be grown up and mature, but I — and my parents — was way out of my depth. I’d done one big movie and that was it. We didn’t have my agent with us, who had lots of experience and would have known what questions to ask.

No, in place of my experienced agent, my mother had decided she was going to be my manager, and she tackled the responsibility with an enthusiasm that was only matched by her absolute incompetence and inability to go toe-to-toe with producers the way my agent did. She was outwitted, out-thought, and outmaneuvered at every turn.

“You don’t have a choice,” my father commanded. “You are doing this movie.”

So we sat there, my father who didn’t give a shit about me, my mother who was cosplaying as someone with experience, and me, thirteen years old, awkward as fuck, and scared to death.

At some point, this man, who is represented in my memory by big Jim Jones sunglasses under dark hair above an open collar, said, “We are offering you a hundred thousand dollars and round-trip travel for your whole family. We will cast your sister, Amy, to play your sister in the movie.”

It all made sense, now. I was only thirteen, but I knew my parents were pushing me so hard because this company was offering me — them, really — more money than I’d ever imagined I’d earn in my life, much less a single job.

I knew that the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, was to say no. There would be other opportunities, and it was stupid to cash myself out of feature films for what I thought was, in the grand scheme of things, not very much money.

It’s incredible to me that I knew all of this. It’s incredible to me that I could see all these things, plainly and clearly, and my parents couldn’t (or, more likely, chose not to).

So after this man made his offer, all the adults in the room ganged up on me, selling me HARD on this movie.

My mother said, “Don’t you want your sister to have the same opportunities you’ve had? Wouldn’t it be fun and exciting to go to Rome? Think of all the history!”

The experience was awful. It was the worst experience I have ever had on a set in my life, by every single metric. The movie is awful, and it is the embarrassment I knew it would be.

I don’t think about this very often, because it’s super upsetting to me. Right now, I’m so angry at my parents for subjecting me and my sister to this entire experience. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In that moment, I felt bullied and trapped. All these adults were talking to me at the same time, and I just wanted it to stop. I just wanted to go home and get out of this room. I just wanted to go be a kid, so I did what I’d learned to do to survive: I gave in and did what my parents wanted.

The experience was awful. It was the worst experience I have ever had on a set in my life, by every single metric. The movie is awful, and it is the embarrassment I knew it would be.

But here’s the thing: when you watch The Curse, you are watching two children, me and my sister, who were abused on a daily basis. The production did not follow a single labor law. They worked us for twelve hours a day, on multiple film units (while I work on First unit, second unit sets up and waits for me. When I should get a break to rest, they send me to Second unit, then to Third unit, then back to First unit. I was 13.) without any breaks, five days a week. I was exhausted the entire time. I was inappropriately touched by two different adults during production. I knew it was wrong, but I was so scared and ashamed, and I felt so unsupported, I didn’t tell anyone. I knew my dad wouldn’t believe me, and my mother would blame me. Anything to keep the production happy, that’s what she did. That was more important to her than the health and safety of her children. The director was coked out of his mind most of the time, incompetent, and so busy fucking or trying to fuck one of the women in the cast, he was worse than useless. He was a fading actor who was cosplaying as a director, as in over his head as my mother. My sister and I were never safe. Instead of harmless atmospheric SFX smoke, they set hay on fire in barrels and blew actual smoke onto the set. They took buckets of talc, broken wood, bits of wallpaper and plaster, and threw it into my face during a scene inside the collapsing house. My sister is in a scene where she goes to get eggs from some chickens, and they attack her. So they hired Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror master, to direct her sequence. His idea, which everyone was totally on board with, was to throw chickens at my sister. Live chickens, live roosters, live birds. Just throw them at a nine-year-old girl. Oh, and then tie them to her arms and legs so they’ll peck her. All of this happened under my mother’s observation, and with her full participation.

Everything I need to know about who my parents are is wrapped up in that experience: the total lack of concern for my safety and happiness, treating me like an asset instead of a son, lying to me, manipulating me, and using me to get things they wanted, and then gaslighting me about it.

If just ONE of the things I can remember happened to someone I loved, I would have grabbed my kids, gone to the airport, and flown home. Fuck those abusive assholes in the production. Let the lawyers sort it all out. Nobody hurts my children and gets away with it.

My mom says she “had some talks” with the producers. She claims that, once, she wouldn’t let us leave the hotel. (God, what a fucking dump that place was. It was just slightly better than a hostel.) I have no memory of that, but honestly the entire experience was so traumatic, I’ve blocked most of it out.

The movie was the commercial and critical failure I knew it would be. My parents spent the money. I don’t know what they spent it on. I got to keep fifteen cents of every dollar, so . . . yay?

My sister and I hardly ever talk about this. I suspect it was as upsetting and traumatic for her as it was for me. I told her I was writing about it, and asked her if she remembered anything. She told me she’d been lied to her whole life about this movie. Our mother let her believe she had been cast on the strength of her audition. “I was excited to work with you,” she said. She reminded me about some stuff I’d blocked out, including a scene where my character’s older brother (played by an actor named Malcolm Danare, who was kind and gentle, and made both of us feel safer when he was around) shoves my character into a pile of cow shit. When it came time to shoot the scene, the mud they’d put together to be the cow shit looked an awful lot like cow shit. When Malcolm pushed me into it, we all found out it was real cow shit. I was FURIOUS. The director had lied to me and had allowed me to have my entire body shoved into an actual pile of actual cow shit. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember he treated me the exact same way my father did whenever I got upset: he laughed at me, told me I was being too sensitive, reminded me that he was the director and he wanted to get a “real” performance out of me, and concluded, “If it bothers you so much, we’ll get you a hepatitis shot,” before he walked away.

My sister also recalled that, after she survived the scene with the chickens, it was the producers’ idea to give her one as a pet.

Okay, let’s unpack that for a quick second: you’ve been traumatized by these birds, so we’re going to give you one as a pet. That you’ll somehow keep in your hotel, and then will somehow get back to America. It will shock you to learn that neither of those things happened.

She remembered, as I do, the huge fight I had with my parents in our kitchen, where I told them I hated the script and I hated the movie. I didn’t want to do it, and I hated that they were making me do it.

“You don’t have a choice,” my father commanded. “You are doing this movie.”

“This is the only film you are being offered,” my mother lied to me. She made me feel like, if I didn’t do this movie, I would never do another movie again in my life. I had to do this movie. As my father bellowed, I had no choice.

Both of my parents denied this argument ever happened. Can I tell you how reassuring it is to know that my sister, who was also there, remembers it the same way I do?

The makeup department decided they would literally cut my little sister’s face with a scalpel, in three places, and put bandages over them.

But one thing she told me, the thing I did not know, the thing that makes me so angry I want to break things, actually managed to make the entire experience even worse than I remembered it.

There’s a scene after her chicken incident where I check up on her in her bedroom. She’s got cuts and bruises, and I guess we talk about it. I don’t remember and I can’t watch the movie because I’m terrified it will give me a PTSD flashback (I’ve had one of those and I recommend avoiding it). Here’s the thing about that scene: she has some cuts on her face, and those cuts are real. They are not makeup.

I’m going to repeat that. My nine-year-old little sister had actual cuts on her face that were placed there by an adult, on purpose.

The makeup department decided they would literally cut my little sister’s face with a scalpel, in three places, and put bandages over them. My sister told me our mother wasn’t in the makeup room when this happened — honestly, it seemed like our mother was strangely and conveniently absent when most of the really terrible things happened to us on the set — and when my sister told her what they’d done, she “lost her shit” at the production. She was pissed, I guess, which is appropriate and surprising. I wonder what would have to have happened for her to put us on a plane and get us home to safety? I mean, her son being abused daily didn’t do it, and her daughter being CUT IN THE FACE ON PURPOSE didn’t do it.

I just . . . I can’t. I can’t understand or comprehend allowing your own children to be physically and emotionally abused. They were literally selling my sister and me to these people, like we were some kind of commodity.

This was a tough conversation. My sister’s experience with our parents is very different from mine. My sister and I love each other. We’re close. I know it’s hard for her to hear that her brother, who she loves, was so abused by her parents, who she also loves. I was really grateful she made the time to talk to me about it, and grateful the experience wasn’t as horrible for her as it was for me.

As we were finishing our call, Amy also remembered one man, a young Italian named Luka, who was our driver for the movie. I haven’t thought about him in thirty years, but I can see his face now. He was kind, he was friendly, he taught us how to kick a soccer ball, and in the middle of an abusive, torturous experience, he stood out as a kind and gentle man. I mention him because she remembered him, which made me remember him, and goddammit I want at least one small part of this thing to not be awful.

The Curse remains one of the most consequential times the adults in my life failed to protect me. I’m 50. I still have nightmares.

Ultimately, as I predicted and feared, this piece of shit movie cashed me out of respectable films forever. I got offers for movies, but they were always mindless comedies or exploitative horror films. They were never the serious dramas I wanted to work in after Stand by Me. The industry looked at me and River, wondering if one or both of us would become a breakout star. They quickly saw that River was doing real acting work, and I was in this piece of shit. For River, Stand by Me was a beginning. For me, it would turn out to be pretty much everything, at least as far as film goes.

There are thousands of reasons film careers do and don’t take off. Maybe mine wouldn’t have taken off anyway. Clearly, it’s not where my life ended up, and I’m super okay with that now. But when all of this happened, it hurt and haunted me.

The Curse remains one of the most consequential times the adults in my life failed to protect me. I’m 50. I still have nightmares. Everything I need to know about who my parents are is wrapped up in that experience: the total lack of concern for my safety and happiness, treating me like an asset instead of a son, lying to me, manipulating me, and using me to get things they wanted, and then gaslighting me about it.

This annotation is the last thing I wrote before I turned this manuscript in, because opening these wounds is hard and painful. I put it off as long as I could, and I feel like I’m still holding back, because just this small glimpse of the experience has taken me a week to write. I can’t imagine trying to go back and unpack the whole thing. (Note that is not in the book: I’ve made an EMDR appointment to work on this because the nightmares have come back after the weekend).

Fuck The Curse, and fuck every single person who exploited and hurt two beautiful children to make it. You all participated in child abuse, and you all knew better. Shame on all of you. I hope this follows you to the end of your life. I hope that living with what you did to innocent children has been as hard for you as it has been for me, because you deserve no less.

#tw abuse #tw child abuse #tw exploitation #child actor #still just a geek #lucio fulci #trauma survivor #speaking up for the child who was silenced by his abusers

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intersexfairy · 2 years

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hey uh. don't listen to the people who say the bullying won't matter once you get out of school. because shit. it will.

bullying is peer abuse. it's traumatizing. and while getting out of the environment helps, the hurt doesn't go away. all the things ingrained in you don't go away. just because your bullies might not be in your life doesn't mean the awful things they did to you don't matter. they are still very significant people in your life.

please don't brush it off. please treat yourself with kindness and fight for the support and safety you deserve. you are not the person your bullies thought you were. you never were. you deserve to be happy and confident, and minimizing what happened won't lead to that.