Moon Knight fic AMA

[erinptah]

Welp, AO3 is being DDOS'd but DW comments are still open, so...

Anybody have questions you've been holding back about any of my Moon Knight fics? Maybe general ones, that wouldn't have fit in a specific fic's comments section anyway? Hit me up, let's talk here.

Comments

[erinptah]

Hah, excellent question! This one goes back a while...

So I was an avid watcher of the Daily Show for a lot of years, and its first big spinoff, the Colbert Report, was the fandom-of-my-heart for most of the time it aired. The main character (fandom would call him "Stephen Colbert", with quotes, to distinguish him from Stephen Colbert, the real actor who played him) had a lot of issues that track with PTSD symptoms, and makes some sidelong references to emotional abuse in his childhood, which got me thinking "I want to write something that explores this more seriously, time to do some reading."

If you're reading widely about PTSD and child abuse, there are a couple topics that you're going to run into, and DID is one of them. And, well, "Stephen" has a regular segment that's just two versions of himself arguing for eight minutes, and a running gag that involves him talking to a voice nobody else can hear, and...

I was in college at this point, so I went through the library's whole section on abuse/PTSD, then everything I could order through Interlibrary Loan. Took a ton of notes. Ended up with this 100K+ word fic about "Stephen" being a system. (Bonus: I organized some of the notes into this review of the character's symptoms, how they played out in the fic, and what they might add up to in canon.)

I was also working on the last few years of my Hellsing fancomic, and Hellsing has a minor character who's explicitly plural in canon, so the same research got used to give Yumiko+Yumie an expanded backstory with a little more realism. (...Not total realism, since she's a katana-wielding combat nun in a series about vampires fighting the army of a Nazi cyborg, but, you know. Realistic in a way that's proportionate to the setting.)

For a lot of years afterward, no other canon-plural or reasonably-fanon-plural character grabbed my fannish attention that hard. But I kept an eye on DID-related media in general. Watched all of United States of Tara as it aired, drew some fanart. Backed the crowdfunding campaign for lb_lee's memoir (they also did a webcomic back in the day, so I was basically guaranteed to be a fan). Checked out the occasional new book as I came across them, like Freshwater, or The Creature of Habit.

Started drawing Leif & Thorn, and didn't immediately have the Neineikuras in mind...but always had a general idea that I wanted to bring that research back yet again, and put a system in the comic at some point!

Fast-forward another five years, and Moon Knight hits me right in the fandom feels, and suddenly there are a ton of people piling into the "actively reading about real-world DID and trying to research all the terms and stuff so I can write more accurate and respectful fiction about these characters" space where I've been living since...uh, 2007! Good times.

[e_k_braveman]

I don't know why I'm surprised the answer to "Why so many system blorbos?" is "A completely different blorbo from way back when!" lol. It's kind of cute, honestly.

I read the write-up about "Stephen's" symptoms and firs of all, kudos for literally showing your work! Second, I really need to comment on this passage:

A diagnosis is usually valuable for insurance purposes, and a lot of people find power in being able to say "I'm not a bad person, and these problems aren't a character flaw; they're a health condition which can be named and treated like any other." But if the label boxes you in, or leads to unhelpful or off-base treatment, it's easy to shed. And it's more important to focus on, say, "am I treating and managing the depressive phases that affect me?" than "what particular depressive disorder should my symptoms be filed under?" A good doctor won't get hung up on the labels at all, but will focus on treating the symptoms.

How the heck is this one paragraph from 2010 more radical—both in the sense of being outside the Overton Window and of targeting the root cause of an issue—about mental illness diagnoses than, like, 97% of modern discussions on the topic?! The "easy to shed" part seems kind of inaccurate (nowadays? in 2010 I was worrying about middle school so idk), but the rest of it had me like "Yes, yes, you get it!!" That's not the only part that made me feel that way, but it's the first one, so it made the biggest impression.

Thanks a lot for the answer! It was very enlightening.

[erinptah]

Aw, much appreciated =D

Heh, someone could probably write a whole other extended post about the nuances of the "how easy is it to shed a diagnosis?" idea. Trying to edit clarifications into 13-year-old posts seems like a bad loop to get into...but I'm pretty sure I meant it in comparison to things like, say, "how easy is it to undo a surgery?"