Things I Hate About Warriors Fanfiction

Let's Talk About Suicide

The bigger issue I see is over-dramatisation of suicidal ideation. I see these characters having constant breakdowns, screaming and crying, always on the edge of hurting themselves. You know, the ones who sound like all those edgy emo posts on instagram. These characters are a walking caricature of suicide; they're an emo twelve year old who's just found out the word depression for the first time and has made it their identity.  That's not what mental illness is like in most cases. It's not what being suicidal is like either. Sometimes people do going around screaming "I want to die." Sometimes their thoughts are constant suicidal mantras. But guess what? That's a mental health episode. It's not a constant. It's not the day to day life of someone with depression. Depression is usually quiet. You drag yourself through the day. You're not "birth is a curse and existence is a prison" all the time. Sometimes you are. But most of the time it's casual. It's a feeling of greyness, or numbness. A lot of the time suicidal thoughts aren't "oh my goood I'm in so much pain all I want to do is fling myself off a cliff." The majority of the time it's subtle. You drop a pencil and your brain goes "well that sucks. Go kill yourself."

I can already hear the comments of "akshually, I'm depressed and it really does feel like I'm in unbearable pain all the time and my brain is constantly screaming at me to die." As I said before, everyone experiences mental illness and suicidal thoughts differently. And I'm not here to invalidate you or tell you your experience is wrong. Because everyone's reality of mental illness is valid and real. But what I will say is when I was younger, that's what my mental illness felt like. And I wasn't suicidal. Not really. I thought I was. I had suicidal thoughts, sure. I was in "pure, unbearable agony, and all I wanted to do was end my life." All I can say to that is...why didn't I? Why did I never try? Why didn't I engage in any suicidal behaviours? Because I wasn't really suicidal. I was hurting and looking for ways to express that pain. Thinking about suicide was a way for me to prove to myself that I was hurting, that something was wrong. It was desperation and looking for a way out. It was a cry for help. I was that emo 12 year old who just learnt the word depression and made it my identity. That doesn't mean my experience was any less valid. It just means that I wasn't truly suicidal. I compare that me with last year me, when I was truly depressed and suicidal. It was much more subtle than the overdramatic characters I read in fics. I had mental health episodes where I did explode like some of these characters. Times when my parents had to call the crisis team on me. I had planned attempts too. But even then those were episodes, not a constant day to day life. Yes, those episodes can last a long time. This kind of portrayal is disrespectful and inaccurate to the majority of people struggling. There are people who are in long term mental health facilities because their day to day life is a crisis situation. Those people don't represent the majority of mental illness sufferers; they have severe long-term mental illness, and their condition is much more complex than "depression and suicidal." Usually there's trauma, ptsd, and bpd involved as well. Basically, if you are going to write a character who is always on the brink, you better research the hell out of it.

When I read suicidal characters who are in a constant meltdown, who go around crying about how tragic their poor little life is...it feels so fake. I just picture the author writing this for pity points. Sympathy. It's a piss poor way of getting readers to sympathize with your character, by writing tragedy porn. It feels exploitative and fetishising. Voyeurisyic, even. Like these authors are sitting there mocking suicidal people, taking our pain and our experiences and twisting a caricature out of it. It's like they're looking down at us and laughing about our lives. We're not a fucking circus.

You can write characters who are in a crisis, even a long term one, and have it still be an accurate portrayal. And that's the problem, the characters I see in most warriors fics aren't an accurate portrayal.

Most authors aren't doing this maliciously or intentionally. Most are young kids making a mistake with writing. Thinking making their character a walking tragedy is the only way to get readers to feel sorry for them. There's a popular fic on this site that I've had issues with for a long time. I won't name names because that won't do any good, I don't want to send hate on another author, and it's old. This fic had a character like what I described, and in one of their big crisis moments where they expressed they wanted to die, it was clearly a "oh, look at me, I'm hurting so badly please feel sorry for me!!!" And readers lap it up. Yay, sympathy points! All the comments are "oh, my heart is breaking, this poor character!!!" This is a technique authors do when they don't know how to write a compelling character.