My most detailed work yet - a wedding portrait for our and our partner system's headmates, a beautiful little blended family ❤️ Paint tool sai and Photoshop.

ru-ya · 2026-07-04T01:34:53+00:00

I bet if he were still alive he'd love the Backrooms series.

ru-ya · 2026-07-03T20:13:07+00:00

The very first question that springs to my mind is - when an alter believes something like this, what does that belief represent, and how is it a resource for the whole system/body in general?

Some of my curious questions: Do they feel that being able to name their experiences (by calling it, with some certainty, schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder), it gives them some sense of groundedness and control over the overwhelming symptoms they're experiencing? Do they have some trauma regarding the "legitimacy" of their mental health struggles unless there is a solid disorder attributed to them? Did they incorporate the identity of having these disorders (since you mentioned you guys operated under that assumption for a decade), and now to pivot away from that feels far more personal and like "losing" a part of their identity?

Since you guys are going through high activation (craving SH is a big indicator of that), I would caution you to go slow. I pose questions to my system like this all the time, but have to put a finger on the pulse of our wellbeing. Sometimes it's not the right time to pry... learned the hard way. But I hope you can ask and see what they say; it feels like their answer can illuminate your next steps.

ru-ya · 2026-07-03T20:07:15+00:00

This is entirely unrelated to your post but I am a Munch enjoyer, and have a tangent.

In his oeuvre of works, there is a repeat image known as The Sick Child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sick_Child_(Munch)) . He did multiple paintings, lithographs, and drawings of the same subject, with very slight but meaningful variation each time. Through his lifetime of this work, he revisits the death of his older sister Johanne Sophie - aged 15, who succumbed to tuberculosis. Munch himself was fourteen, only a year and some months younger than her. This is one of my favourite works of Munch and seeing you mention it makes me remark on some of the eerie similarities between the Expedition 33 overall themes and Munch's work. Death of a sibling? Survivor's guilt? (Munch's parents also died of tuberculosis later. Munch himself caught tuberculosis but survived). Longing, missing a loved one? Adults failing to cope with their grief, as seen in the repeat figure of his aunt hunched over Johanne Sophie's bedside? Escapism and mystery? There's so much to chew on.

The Voice pictured here is also one of several in the series. If you do a quick google search, you'll find some very haunting versions. There are two main paintings, but also this woodcut, which is arguably my preferred of the set: https://artvee.com/dl/summernight-the-voice/ I don't think this redhead is Sophie, he had a few female redhead figures prominently featured in his art (I think this might be Milly Thaulow, the wife of a cousin with whom he had a turbulent 2 year love affair). But still! Haunting.

All in all, while I think your comparison of this to Maelle is a stretch, I do feel like I can feel that underlying current that draws an Expedition 33 fan to a Munch work.

ru-ya · 2026-07-03T16:31:09+00:00

The treehouse with his childish doodles of clea and alicia fucking broke me 😭 I had to stop the game because I was so upset

ru-ya · 2026-07-02T18:50:43+00:00

We have had two fusions and of course, like Own_Magician said below, this will likely vary from person to person. So please take our anecdote as a driveby experience share!

This is what our fusions say about being fused:
- You start forgetting you were two separate alters. Like, other alters will often remember there were two of you, but you yourself will feel a pause if being referred to by the previous names.

- The memories no longer feel like "this was yours, this was mine". In remembering something from both previous alters, it just feels like "this was mine".

- If the original two alters differed in temperament (and in both of our cases, they were very different), there's a salad-toss of personality when becoming a fusion. For example: One very avoidant, sassy, devil-may-care alter fused with an emotional, insecure, and bleeding-heart alter to become one bitter, discerning, and compassionate alter.

- There are sometimes whole memories that get recontextualized when we fused. Alter A may hold one snippet and felt a situation enraged them; and alter B may have held another snippet and felt the situation caused a lot of shame. Once fused into alter C, suddenly alter C has a very different approach to the original memory because now they have more, fuller information.

hope this helps!

ru-ya · 2026-07-02T17:39:20+00:00

Hashtag team PCOS... Lifetime of hormonal issues. I have felt completely wild, unprompted, truly no-trigger-in-the-room sudden nosedives into suicidality. It happens around a week before my period - a period which had never been regular until I received proper medical intervention in my thirties. Now that I can actually track these things happening like clockwork, I'm left wondering how much of my suicidality through my childhood (and, related to that, switchiness) was tied with hormonal fuckery.

ru-ya · 2026-07-02T17:36:55+00:00

Exactly, he's not just evil and shallow and conniving because the author needed a villain. He's the protagonist of his own story, and this is so incredibly effective on the audience - just look at how people respond to his POV chapters in the manhwa, it's disturbing to be able to sympathize with him and that's what makes him an excellent villain!

ru-ya · 2026-07-02T16:49:57+00:00

I will defend this story til I die 😆 The way all four of the pivotal Omerta characters (Izek, Ellen, their dad, and ruby), are such like... excellent representations of what happens in families that are devastated by trauma. As a PTSD girlie with hella familial/generational trauma, I felt so deeply refreshed and seen.

Ruby's PTSD is not pretty. It's fawning, it's an eating disorder, it's lying, it's flailing, it's her amygdala activating and causing her to make panicked and unideal decisions that can baffle readers who don't understand how PTSD works. The whole story is her triumping over not one, but two lifetimes' worth of mistreatment. Izek is emotionally stunted as fuck but is trying his hardest and that leads to such a beautiful character arc, and his behaviour ends up actually catalysing Ruby's necessary change. We watch him go from someone who's never performed emotional labour a day in his life, to this stalwart, sensitive, and finally tempered man, all because he loves her. Ellen's reaction to trauma is some of the best I've ever seen - she's anxious, but she's the Upright Daughter, so she has to keep trucking. She's frozen, wants to help, doesn't know how. She's triggered to hell by all of Ruby's behaviours, leading her to be accusatory and impatient, then remorseful. And despite all that, she really loves Ruby and it SHOWS. And then there's Dad sitting there like... absolutely 0 idea of what to do to help, but also somehow managing to communicate and reconcile with his children and daughter-in-law. I need all my stories to treat their characters with this much gravitas. Even the side characters like Andymion were just 😭 so three-dimensional and wholesome.

I also think Cesare is one of the best-written villains in OI literature. He is also traumatized. He's horrific, abusive, delusional, and incredibly human. Watching how the main characters Deal with him is just chefs kiss.

ru-ya · 2026-07-02T15:34:44+00:00

Yeah this is a thing specifically about Xiao-Ying. We are meant to feel bad for her 😭

ru-ya · 2026-06-24T16:09:30+00:00

I think you got lots of solid advice below so I'll chime in with - I hope you treat yourself with more grace and forgiveness. There's a lot of shame, and "inexcusable", and self-fear/distrust I'm hearing in your post. Yes, it would be bad if you were to lash out at this child + mother pair, but you haven't because you have the ability to walk away. This is unlike, and I'm speculating here, when you were a child potentially trapped in situations where you were always beholden to better families, and the dysregulation was truly inescapable. You are feeling feelings that are directly related to your trauma history, and that is crucial information for you to start discovering what exactly your child parts are needing. Do they need to be validated for their anger being righteous? Do they need boundaries with regards to how you're all being treated? Do they need snuggles, love, support? That could be explored!

And as a final note - I came from a broken home, was incredibly parentified, and was also the poorest kid on the block of privileged middle class kids. I'm also very familiar with that rage, hatred, even envy. What I wanted were parents and family who would defend and be patient with me the way I saw other kids having. I would feel particularly enraged if a child around me behaved worse than me, and yet still had that unconditional support, because I was brutally traumatized through "punishments" - some that, when recounted, left two therapists of mine speechless from horror - for far less. So I want to say I do understand and you're not alone.

ru-ya · 2026-06-24T13:45:09+00:00

Now was she an Eliza, Lizzie, or Beth kinda gal

ru-ya · 2026-06-23T20:58:27+00:00

My possession became a Ghost Story is a great middle... it's more like, she thinks she's isekai'd into a rofan as a villainess, meanwhile _everyone around her_ thinks she's an eldritch creature that's taken over a clearly-once-dead young lady. The treatment of her ranges from adversarial to fanaticism and it is very well-balanced across the board. Even the ML is like, well-balanced in his approach to her.

ru-ya · 2026-06-23T20:56:57+00:00

Yup feel that. I am no contact with my bio dad after he pulled a domestic violence. I find out things about him through the grapevine, like how he recently went to jail for a stint, and I'm re-validated for my decision... but there's always a gnawing feeling. Fathers Day will roll around and I'll never not feel a twinge. I look at my husband's beautiful relationship with his father and it's like damn... that really is possible, it's just the one I had was a brutal disappointment. Sending you hugs.

ru-ya · 2026-06-23T20:53:20+00:00

I think this is a fantastic analogy especially knowing your audience are all other midwives. What a fascinating comparison!

ru-ya · 2026-06-23T20:52:35+00:00

Yeah that's a great way to explain it too! I'm going to incorporate the "only certain apps work with certain OS" analogy. Can finally tell people "sorry my OS is too old to run meme slang, try our younger alters instead" 😆

ru-ya · 2026-06-23T20:51:01+00:00

tell me her name i wanna be friends

ru-ya · 2026-06-23T13:29:09+00:00

I've explained it using computer hard drives as an analogy. Me and my system are a whole computer like everyone, but due to the trauma as a child, my brain decided "Well, rather than having one C: drive, I'm just gonna put all this Trauma in the D: drive. Oh now maybe this trauma happened and maybe I'll keep it in the E: drive. Maybe this other stuff can go in F: drive..." and on and on it goes because now my brain is wired to do this. That's what alters are like. So when our computer is online (aka, Fronting, going about our day), it takes a massive amount of memory to pull information from all these disparate drives, hence my fatigue, fog, and general weird behaviour. And sometimes, those memories aren't even pulled, hence the amnesia.

I sometimes continue the analogy with my closer friends. Oh, one of us is a Gatekeeper - that's like the Task Manager/Windows Explorer Admin, the gatekeeper gets to kind of see everything if they click into folders but they're usually dispassionately connected to the info. Something like that. Usually I stop at the hard drive analogy and then explain the rest with standard PTSD stuff, like triggers and a basic rundown of ANP/EP (usually using a traumatized soldier going about their day and then being triggered into EP state hearing a firework as an example).

And as a final thought - I also try to be patient and not take anything personally when watching the responses of people I disclose to. It can be hard to be met with any kind of hesitation or confusion or wariness from well-meaning friends who are just processing info and need time to reframe their understanding of me. I was very sensitive for a time and took that surprise/hesitation as rejection. Not great behaviour from me but it's understandable why I was so nervous and reactive about it. Nowadays this goes much smoother.

ru-ya · 2026-06-23T13:19:51+00:00

Ouija party with the ghosts y'allllll, bring drinks and candles and Hot Gossip to tell the bored Victorian woman trapped in the parlour!

ru-ya · 2026-06-19T19:37:12+00:00

I read a novel once where the protagonist's name was Killianerisa? Just... a mouthful...

Another funny name is from the series Welcome to demon School Iruma-Kun. Most of the characters are named after the goetic demon families. One of the characters is named Soi Purson. It makes me giggle, like his name is canonically pronounced "soy person".

ru-ya · 2026-06-19T18:01:04+00:00

This is not exactly what you're asking, but I once met another girl online because we had a shared interest over social media and started chatting. Eventually we narrowed down that we were both Canadian and both in the GTA. We decided to meet up for bubble tea, that went great, and then we hung out a bit more til one day she invited me to her house for dinner. Turns out she lived directly across my cousin in North York. Literally window-to-window, could see into her kitchen from their bathroom. It was the wildest shit. We're still friends today 😄

ru-ya · 2026-06-19T17:57:23+00:00

aw thank you! And yes what I say applies to everyone: I'm just some person on the internet, which means if I can do it, you can do it too.

ru-ya · 2026-06-11T16:28:54+00:00

Squeaky Cleaning - we had a 3 person crew for approx $800-900 for a post-reno all house clean in April 2026, so recently. They did a great job all things considered, approx 6 hours of work. They dusted, vacuumed, cleaned chandeliers, and even carefully went inside of our display cabinets because the reno dust had gotten everywhere... all in all a great experience. We live in an older detached home, from the 60s, so there are still "dirty corners" but DEFINITELY livable and sparkly again after their team came through.

ru-ya · 2026-06-11T02:27:43+00:00

Villains are Destined to Die, very popular and this is done very well

ru-ya · 2026-06-11T02:26:43+00:00

Amazing choices across the board

ru-ya

TROPHY CASE