Here are some specific archery techniques to help when writing a character who practices archery or even to get you started on your own path to learning the sport. This is mainly tips and tricks for a recurve bow, however some of these could be used when dealing with a compound bow as well. Most of this will just be the basics but if you’d like more advanced information, feel free to contact me.
THE BOW
Recurve bow is a standard ‘classic’ bow. This means you draw back the weight of the bow on your own instead of using wheels ( compound ) to help with the draw.
Recurve bow’s perform better when the draw weight is at least 40 lbs or more.
The larger the riser ( the middle section of the bow where the limbs are attached ) the less shock you will receive when shooting.
The recurve has many parts, so let’s break them down:
BOW PARTS
Arrow Rest – This is exactly what it sounds like. This is where you rest the arrow you are loading onto the bow.
Back – The side of the bow that is facing away from you. The side of the bow seen by others.
Belly – The side of the bow facing you.
Grip – The part of the bow you hold with your ‘bow’ hand.
Limbs – The curved upper and lower parts of the bow.
Nocking Point – The place on the string where you rest the arrow fletching.
Riser – The middle section of the bow.
ARROW PARTS
Arrowhead ( Broadhead ) – The point of the arrow. There are several types of these from metallic broadheads to plastic bullets.
Fletching – The end ( vanes ) of the arrow, can be plastic, feathers, or metal. More often than not, it is plastic these days.
Nock – The slotted tip attached to the fletching. This helps the arrow string onto the bow.
Shaft – The main body of the arrow. They can be made out of a multitude of materials.
STANCE AND FORM
Feet – Stance should always be solid and comfortable. Keep your feet shoulder length apart, aiming your body is subjective to the target.
Grip – Do not strangle the bow. Let the bow rest in your hand. The best and most comfortable place is right at the base of your thumb, where bone meets palm.
Bow Arm – A locked shoulder but relaxed, slightly bent elbow is how you should hold the bow. If you press down on your shoulder with your other arm, your bow arm should not move.
Release Hand – When drawing the bow, keep your elbow sideways, it should not move up or down. Keep it straight and squared and let your release hand brush somewhere along your jawline. String to tip of nose. Also called ‘kissing the string’.
Follow Through – Keep your bow arm up until the arrow hits the target. Your release hand should continue it’s motion of when you were aiming, brush against the side of your face and fall down once it reaches parallel to the back of your head.
DOMINANCE AND AIMING
Dominant Eye – Determining if you are a left handed or right handed shooter is not based off of if you are left or right handed. Instead, it is based off which eye is your dominant eye. Most of the time your dominant eye will correspond with your dominant hand but it does not always have to be the case. To determined your dominate eyes, hold your hands away from your face about ½ inch away. Make a triangle with your thumbs and forefingers and center something on the wall inside of the triangle. then close your left eye. If the image stays centered or in view, you have a right dominate eye and vice versa if you close your right eye. While you use both eyes when shooting an arrow, your dominant eye should float to the target before your non dominant eye.
Trajectory – If you are eyeballing your target, it is always good to understand that arrows curve and that your aim and shot should reflect that. If you are using a sight, trust the sight. Do not aim a little above or below the sight.
Breath – old your breath for 5-7 seconds and then release it as you take your shot, this will help keep your accuracy in check and also help you not over-think your shot. This also helps your back tension.
Back Tension – Only your draw shoulder should be the one to hold the tension and pivot as you shoot. If you use both shoulder muscles you will feel a more pushing sensation than a pulling one.
Hospitals and injury are always such a staple of angst fics, but 9 times out of 10 the author has clearly never been in an emergency situation and the scenes always come off as over-dramatized and completely unbelievable. So here’s a crash course on hospital life and emergencies for people who want authenticity. By someone who spends 85% of her time in a hospital.
Emergency Departments/Ambulances.
Lights and sirens are usually reserved for the actively dying. Unless the person is receiving CPR, having a prolonged seizure or has an obstructed airway, the ambulance is not going to have lights and sirens blaring. I have, however, seen an ambulance throw their lights on just so they can get back to the station faster once. Fuckers made me late for work.
Defibrillators don’t do that. You know, that. People don’t go flying off the bed when they get shocked. But we do scream “CLEAR!!” before we shock the patient. Makes it fun.
A broken limb, surprisingly, is not a high priority for emergency personnel. Not unless said break is open and displaced enough that blood isn’t reaching a limb. And usually when it’s that bad, the person will have other injuries to go with it.
Visitors are not generally allowed to visit a patient who is unstable. Not even family. It’s far more likely that the family will be stuck outside settling in for a good long wait until they get the bad news or the marginally better news. Unless it’s a child. But if you’re writing dying children in your fics for the angst factor, I question you sir.
Unstable means ‘not quite actively dying, but getting there’. A broken limb, again, is not unstable. Someone who came off their motorbike at 40mph and threw themselves across the bitumen is.
CPR is rarely successful if someone needs it outside of hospital. And it is hard fucking work. Unless someone nearby is certified in advanced life support, someone who needs CPR is probably halfway down the golden tunnel moving towards the light.
Emergency personnel ask questions. A lot of questions. So many fucking questions. They don’t just take their next victim and rush off behind the big white doors into the unknown with just a vague ‘WHAT HAPPENED? SHE HIT HER HEAD?? DON’T WORRY SIR!!!’ They’re going to get the sir and ask him so many questions about what happened that he’s going to go cross eyed. And then he’s going to have to repeat it to the doctor. And then the ICU consultant. And the police probably.
In a trauma situation (aka multiple injuries (aka car accident, motorbike accident, falling off a cliff, falling off a horse, having a piano land on their head idfk you get the idea)) there are a lot of people involved. A lot. I can’t be fucked to go through them all, but there’s at least four doctors, the paramedics, five or six nurses, radiographers, surgeons, ICU consultants, students, and any other specialities that might be needed (midwives, neonatal transport, critical retrieval teams etc etc etc). There ain’t gonna be room to breathe almost when it comes to keeping someone alive.
Emergency departments are a life of their own so you should probably do a bit of research into what might happen to your character if they present there with some kind of illness or injury before you go ahead and scribble it down.
Wards
Nurses run them. No seriously. The patient will see the doctor for five minutes in their day. The nurse will do the rest. Unless the patient codes.
There is never a defibrillator just sitting nearby if a patient codes.
And we don’t defibrillate every single code.
If the code does need a defibrillator, they need CPR.
And ICU.
They shouldn’t be on a ward.
There are other people who work there too. Physiotherapists will always see patients who need rehab after breaking a limb. Usually legs, because they need to be shown how to use crutches properly.
Wards are separated depending on what the patient’s needs are. Hospitals aren’t separated into ICU, ER and Ward. It’s usually orthopaedic, cardiac, neuro, paediatric, maternity, neonatal ICU, gen surg, short stay surg, geriatric, palliative…figure out where your patient is gonna be. The care they get is different depending on where they are.
ICU.
A patient is only in ICU if they’re at risk of active dying. I swear to god if I see one more broken limb going into ICU in a fic to rank up the angst factor I’m gonna shit. It doesn’t happen. Stop being lazy.
Tubed patients can be awake. True story. They can communicate too. Usually by writing, since having a dirty great tube down the windpipe tends to impede ones ability to talk.
The nursing care is 1:1 on an intubated patient. Awake or not, the nurse is not gonna leave that room. No, not even to give your stricken lover a chance to say goodbye in private. There is no privacy. Honestly, that nurse has probably seen it all before anyway.
ICU isn’t just reserved for intubated patients either. Major surgeries sometimes go here post-op to get intensive care before they’re stepped down. And by major I mean like, grandpa joe is getting his bladder removed because it’s full of cancer.
Palliative patients and patients who are terminalwill not go to ICU. Not unless they became terminally ill after hitting ICU. Usually those ones are unexpected deaths. Someone suffering from a long, slow, gradually life draining illness will probably go to a general ward for end of life care. They don’t need the kind of intensive care an ICU provides because…well..they’re not going to get it??
Operations.
No one gets rushed to theatre for a broken limb. Please stop. They can wait for several days before they get surgery on it.
Honestly? No one gets ‘rushed’ to theatre at all. Not unless they are, again, actively dying, and surgery is needed to stop them from actively dying.
Except emergency caesarians. Them babies will always get priority over old mate with the broken hip. A kid stuck in a birth canal and at risk of death by pelvis is a tad more urgent than a gall stone. And the midwives will run. I’ve never seen anyone run as fast as a midwife with a labouring woman on the bed heading to theatres for an emergency caesar.
Surgery doesn’t take as long as you think it does. Repairing a broken limb? Two hours, maybe three tops. Including time spent in recovery. Burst appendix? Half an hour on the table max, maybe an hour in recovery. Caesarian? Forty minutes or so. Major surgeries (organs like kidneys, liver and heart transplants, and major bowel surgeries) take longer.
You’re never going to see the theatre nurses. Ever. They’re like their own little community of fabled myth who get to come to work in their sweatpants and only deal with unconscious people. It’s the ward nurse who does the pick up and drop offs.
Anyway there’s probably way, way more that I’m forgetting to add but this is getting too long to keep writing shit. The moral of the story is do some research so you don’t look like an idiot when you’re writing your characters getting injured or having to be in hospital. It’s not Greys Anatomy in the real world and the angst isn’t going to be any more intense just because you’re writing shit like it is.
Peace up.
Ya hear that, Buckley? Loss.jpeg ain’t realistic.
of all the additions and replies on this post so far this is by far my fave.
Thumbs up for this from your friendly neighbourhood physician. (Also, I did mostly emergency care for a few years before switching to radiology. I got the adrenaline junking out of my body before settling down.)
One correction from someone who spent almost a decade working in an ambulance across two states: it is required by law to have your lights on if there is a patient in your rig. Now, this might be a state-by-state law IDK, but in both states I worked in, it was the case. You reserve sirens for Serious Shit because, guess what, they stress out the patient, so unless your patient is crashing in the back of your rig, you don’t run a continuous siren. You are, however, once again required by law to turn on the siren briefly while approaching and driving through stop signs or red lights. (You will also use your siren briefly to get idiots in front of you to move over when you’re stuck in traffic and have a patient whose condition can escalate.)
Also, unrelated to the lights and sirens issue, lemme add a detail about us asking a lot of questions. If you want verisimilitude in your story, remember SAMPLE:
Signs and symptoms
Allergies
Medications
Past illness/injury/disease
Last food, drink, and medication taken
Events leading up to the injury or illness
These are the questions EMTs are trained to ask every patient, though they rarely end up coming out in that order. Also, you can totally add a W to that, which is inevitably “Why did you wait so long to call us?” *sighs forever*
And for some more basic on-scene emergency care, remember CABC: C-spine, Airway, Breathing, Circulation. This time, actually in that order (except for cardiac arrest, in which case remember CAB: Compressions, Airway, Breathing).
The long and short of CABC is: if the patient fell or was in a car accident or had any other potentially traumatic injury, start with stabilizing the C-spine (typically via cervical collar and head blocks and backboard), because if there is a fracture in the neck and you don’t manage it and end up severing the spinal cord that high up, your patient’s probably going to die, and if not, will probably be paralyzed from the neck down.
Once C-spine is stable, make sure the patient’s airway is clear (this includes both foreign obstruction and the patient’s own tongue). Yes sometimes this actually involves sticking your finger in their throat to clear shit out, and yes it’s gross. It also means positioning an unconscious patient’s head in a certain way (assuming there is no chance of C-spine damage) to keep the airway open. EMTs also carry little plastic hook things called oropharyngeal airways in a bunch of sizes that keep the patient’s tongue from blocking their airway. And of course if needs be you can intubate, although this is not a skill EMTs have (paramedics do, though, and in some states there’s a certification called EMT-I [the I for intermediate] that also teaches that skill). If someone’s just come across an unconscious person and doesn’t have an airway to use, and you’re sure their C-spine is fine, you can roll them onto their left side and gently curl them; that’ll help keep the airway clear and also helps the heart pump blood a little more efficiently than if you’d rolled them onto their right side.
Anyway, once the airway’s secure, you move on to making sure the patient is actually breathing. If they’re not, you do it for them with an ambu bag. If they are but are struggling, or aren’t struggling but may for any reason potentially go into shock or have compromised circulation (broken leg, high fever, etc.), you give them supplemental oxygen, typically through a nonrebreather mask, though the flow rate depends on their symptoms.
Okay so once we’ve secured the patient’s C-spine, airway, and breathing, only then do we worry about circulation (unless the patient’s in cardiac arrest, remember, in which case we secure circulation first). Which in the case of trauma is generally first aid for serious open wounds and preventing or treating shock, and in the case of medical issues may be getting an ECG reading or administering medication or, if the patient does go into cardiac arrest, chest compressions and defibrillation.
Okay, that’s the end of the CABCs, but you’ll note that in the last para I said treating serious open wounds. Because a minor open wound is going to wait until after the next step after the CABCs, which is a full-body assessment wherein we meticulously assess a trauma patient using palpation from, basically, head to toe, looking for broken bones, soft tissue damage, internal bleeding, etc. Some of those things can be pretty serious, so before we treat a shallow cut, we check for, like, broken ribs that might puncture a lung.
So obviously not all of these things happen all the time. A patient presenting with an asthma attack needs neither a full-body assessment nor C-spine and circulation management. So we just jump straight to airway and breathing and forego the rest. (And then ask anyone with them our SAMPLE questions if the patient is too distressed to speak, because we still need those answers, but also if the patient is too distressed to speak you can bet we’re asking their companion in the back of a moving ambulance.)
Sometimes you spend a Long Fucking Time at a scene, either because the patient is resisting transport (this happens a lot, especially with the uninsured; we stick around and do everything we can to help them while simultaneously trying to encourage them to go to the ER anyway), or because the patient’s trapped in a smashed car and we’ve got to cut the door off and peel the roof back and get a cervical collar and a backboard on the patient while they’re still in the damn driver’s seat and lemme tell you that is a goddamn game of Jenga and can take half an hour, or because the patient isn’t critical but you want to minimize discomfort and damage so you take the time to meticulously package them while also getting all your questions answered on scene to make sure you haven’t missed anything, or because … well, you get the point. Sometimes shit just takes forever.
Other times, we do what’s called a scoop-and-go, typically with patients in critical conditions that can’t really be managed without surgery or medications we don’t carry. Like, patient bleeding out while giving birth? Not a whole lot we can do about that, so we get them in the rig as fast as fucking possible and race to the hospital while trying to get the most critical questions answered. These kinds of situations are very rare, though; it’s much more common to be on scene for 15 or 30 minutes than 5 minutes.
OH AND, another thing. Listen. EMTs do not approach a scene that is not secured. If there’s an active shooter, or a hostage situation, or a raging fire, or a potential for something to explode (or for something that’s already exploded to collapse), or a flash flood, or a hazardous materials spill, or whatever else, we do not go in until the unstable situation has been resolved. It sucks waiting 100 yards away while a critical patient is maybe dying and you can’t get to them yet, but listen, the first thing they teach you is don’t make new patients. IOW, don’t become a victim yourself; you can’t help anyone if you get wounded in the crisis too, and in fact then you’ve just become an additional burden on the personnel remaining.
Okay, so, any questions?
ALL OF THIS. With one exception to what @rachelhaimowitz added, which is:
I’ve never heard of the lights-must-be-on rule. It’s gotta be one or a few specific states. Generally speaking, lights and sirens increase accident rates, and most states are actively trying to REDUCE their use, not increase them, but I don’t know where she lives, so that’s accurate in her part of the country (I’m assuming the US). But it’s inaccurate in most of the country.
This is a ruby-crowned kinglet (Regulus calendula). Images like this are frequently passed around the internet as “round borbs”, “birb”, or “smol friend”.
However, it is incredibly import to remember: your smol friend is a dirty liar.
How does this wizardry work? The magic is all in ptiloerection, or contracting special muscles that raise and lower feathers. The majority of a bird’s body is actually completely bare of feathers– instead, feathers grow from special tracts (or pterylae).
Thanks to the feather erector ptili muscles, these feathers are strategically arranged across the body for thermoregulation and communication. Some feathers are specially adapted for tactile sensory input, too! They can help a bird find prey, or detect air current shifts to alter wing angles for flight efficiency.
okay so I’ve seen a lot of artists,including myself, make this common mistake of coloring the palm of a hand(and the sole of a foot) as the same color as the person’s skin tone.
but in fact ,palms and soles are a different color compare to our skin
March 22, 2015: MASSIVE UPDATE. Greatly expanded descriptions for Stage 3 and 4, slightly expanded 5, and added examples of characters representative of each stage beneath each stages’ descriptions.
May 3, 2014: Slight change in pronouns.
April 24, 2014: This is the most recent update. The first half is unchanged. Differences begin from the “Let’s Review Each Stage" section.
Emotional Development
There are 5 stages to development and they are as follows:
Co-dependence
Counter Dependence
Group-dependence
Independence
Transcendence
All people move through their lives hopefully developing from one stage to the next. The ideal scenario is that you are dependent as a child, counter this dependence as a teen and young adult, become comfortable with shared responsibilities as a young adult/adult, shed your need for obligatory gestures to become truly independent (best stage for parenthood), then transcend and become greater than this. What that looks like I’m not too sure.
Unfortunately, many things in our lives can halt our development. A lot of these things come from early childhood experiences. Example: Abandonment. Your father could have ran out on you and never returned, or you could have been forgotten at Disneyland for a few hours. One will hurt you more than the other, but both can be sufficient to impair your ability to develop emotionally.
Abandonment is a form of betrayal and it instills in people a great anxiety, a fear that all future relationships will mimic this first betrayal. People who’ve been abandoned tend to hover around stage one or two. You’ve probably heard of them. Stage 1: The clingy, “crazy”, obsessed Significant Other that drives her potential mates away. Stage 2: The aloof, apathetic Significant Other that seems to “not care” when his mate learns he’s cheating on her. (For more on this and much more, try The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck).
At this point I’d like to say that a person can exhibit All Five Stages at the same time. People tend to revolve around a certain stage and this explains why perfectly reasonable people can suddenly commit terrible acts or why completely terrible people can say some enlightened words.
So, how would someone go about changing himself? Going up a stage? By the process known as “Grieving”.
Grieving is the process of releasing pain and pent up emotion. The reason that people remain stuck in stages is because they have yet to grieve. It requires that you search out what exactly caused your emotions to bottle up, confront it, and let it all come out in a torrent of emotional release. All the pain, all the misery, all the frustration and anxiety, let it out.
This is what Psychologists, i.e. therapists, are trained and paid to do. Help you search for what’s pained you, bring it to the surface, help you confront and release it without judgment.
Notably, this is a painful process. You will face inconvenient truths, shatter former god-like figures (e.g. your parents), and you will wallow in an ocean of your own misery, pain and frustration. But when you survive, and you will, you will feel a weight literally lifted off you. Seemingly, this weight is real, and it is made of pain, guilt, shame and frustration. It is the drag of depression. (I was diagnosed with Chronic Depression early March of year 2013).
And when this weight is lifted off you, your behavior will… tilt. Not change immediately, for it is usually a long process. I say tilt because the phenomena is called a “Pendulum swing”. See how stage 1 Co-Dependence is opposite to Stage 2 Counter Dependence? And stage 2 is opposite to stage 3? And stage 1 is similar to 3, while stage 2 is similar to 4? Emotional development is like the swinging of a pendulum. To develop properly, you need to swing between extremes so that you can gain the full understanding of each stage and understand why you can move beyond them. It is imperative that you do not attempt to skip a stage, because a) it’s impossible and b) you’ll miss the point.
And the point is this: emotional development is not a change in what you know. It is achange in how and why youfeel, no matter what you know. This is why married couples can argue so much despite being perfectly intelligent, rational people.
Stan can’t see why his wife doesn’t understand that he needs to work late to impress the boss and bring in more money for them. Mary can’t see why Stan can’t spend less overtime, especially considering she, too, has a job and would like to see him more. Are either of them stupider than the other? No, but they’ll call each other stupid for not understanding each other. Fact is, both of them have perfectly rational, reasonable arguments, but they will never understand each other because they exist on different emotional stages. A stage one person can never understand a stage two person just as how a one dimensional being can never comprehend a two dimensional one. Only people at stage 4 and 5 can begin to understand stage 1, 2, and 3.
So a lot of strife, a lot of mistreatment, murder and mayhem occur not from a lack of intelligence but from emotional immaturity.
Now how can someone restart his development? Start by thinking of something he’s been hiding. Something he’s been suppressing for a long, long time. Something he’s never told anyone, is so afraid to tell anyone because of how painful it would be to admit it, how shameful, how degrading. Then let it out to someone you can trust to listen without a) giving advice nor b) making judgment.
A psychologist would be the best place to start.
Let’s review each stage.
Co-Dependence
Counter Dependence
Group-dependence
Independence
Transcendence
Stage 1 Dependence is most prominent at the child age. Children are dependent on their parents for everything, and we expect them to be. But it becomes a problem when people cling to this stage in to adulthood.
It will be difficult for them to leave their parent’s house. If she can’t live with her parents, then she will find something else to cling to. It could be a hobby, and while hobbies are generally good, it will be bad if she’s using the hobby as a distraction rather than as a form of enjoyment. Substance abuse is very very common in stage 1 people. Drugs and alcohol help numb the suppressed pain. She will be distrustful of people, even her spouse and children because she can’t ever expect other people to be independent.
She will tend feel wrathfully angry and despair. She will tend to feel frustrated because nothing she does seems to fix things. She will feel ashamed because she’s failed to fix herself. She will tend to despair and she will tend to blame others for it. She will tend to be prone to violence and quick to judgment.
She will tend to see things in black and white. She will tend to never admit a mistake. She will tend to put others on pedestals, as well as herself. She will tend to think that when she is hurt by other people, those people hurt her intentionally.
A stage 1 individual has no boundary between herself and loved ones. If her child, or brother, or friend is hurt, she is hurt. An attack against someone she is dependent on is an attack on herself. Thus she will tend to be overprotective and suffocating, yet contradictorily violent and abusive.
A Stage 1 person is marked by Lack of Agency, i.e, she feels as though she has no control over her life, that she is at the whim and mercy of forces outside of her control. Thus she is always afraid that everything she loves and cares for could be at once whisked away, never to be felt nor seen again. There is no foundation except that which she can forcibly establish.
She will tend to obsess over Safety. Because she has no boundaries, she tends to feel constantly at threat from anything and anyone. All important things in life are matters of Life and Death to her.
S1 Examples: Steven during the
beginning portion of Steven Universe, Oliver Queen in season 1 of Arrow, Malcolm
Merlyn from Arrow, Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, Boromir when he tried to take the ring in
Lord of the Rings, Agatha Prenderghast, the zombies, and the townspeople from
Paranorman (“All you wanna do is
burn and murder stuff, burn and murder stuff.” I love that line),
Emmet during the beginning of and Bad Cop in The Lego Movie,
Stage 2 Counter dependence is something everyone should do as a teen
and young adult. It is when everyone figures out that they can have a will of
their own and can take responsibility for their own successes and mistakes. It
is rebellion and it is healthy. But it is a problem if someone carries it in to
adulthood.
A Stage two person tends to run from his problems. He is afraid of becoming
dependent again, so he challenges and fights and flees. He will leave the house
of his parents as soon as he can. He will distrust authority and challenge
authority’s values. He will want to reject everything about his authorities,
even if what he is rejecting is a good thing.
He will tend to be consumed with frustration and shame as his pent up
emotions hold him back. He will tend to obsess over not being his parents to
the point where his parents control him. Anything his parents say can make him
instantly upset, angry and sad. That is because he is still emotionally
dependent on them.
He will tend to be excessively logical. His rebellion causes him to express
a lot of counter-dependent emotion, good as well as harmful. If he is unable to
find a means to properly vent these emotions, and if the people in his life are
unable to help him relieve these emotions, he will tend to suppress them. He
will tend to seek out tools to aid his fight against authority. He will tend to
seek out mental techniques to combat the feeling of these suppressed emotions,
as well as techniques that allow him to conquer over others. Unfortunately for
him, the mental techniques he will find are inherently temporary. They do not
relieve emotional suppression, only mask it. They are to be used only a couple
of times during periods of great busyness, until one manages to get enough time
to properly Grieve. I know this from personal experience.
He will tend to obsess over Status and Achievement. Because he
is attempting to establish his own identity, he tends to try and demonstrate
his value. A very common way to do this is to make others feel less valuable.
All important things in life are matters of winning and losing. To him, all the
world’s a game and all are players and pawns.
S2 Examples: Amethyst from Steven
Universe, Jeff Winger, Britta Perry, Troy Barnes, and Annie Edison from season
1 of Community, virtually every character of significance in the movie Birdman,
Hugh Jackman’s character from Real Steel, Gru from Despicable Me, Tim Allen’s
character from Galaxy Quest, Darth Sidious from Star Wars, Hans from Frozen,
Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon, Tony Stark during the beginning of
Ironman, Aragorn until he finally comes to terms with his lineage and takes his
rightful place as king in Lord of the Rings, Scott Pilgrim and Romona Flowers
up until the end of the book series/movie, Wildstyle in The Lego Movie, Sterling
Archer from Archer,
Stage 3 Group-dependence Stage 3 is when you’re ready to start taking
on responsibilities. Everyone would hopefully reach this stage by 20s
adulthood. You are now OK with sharing burdens without feeling you are too
dependent on anybody. You are now OK with doing things independently because
you can trust people to support you. This sounds pretty good, but the major
problem with Group-dependent people is obligation and expectation.
Basically, a Stage 3 person is someone who takes on the burdens of others.
They are emotionally stronger than Stage 1 and 2 folk, so they won’t react as
strongly negative, but they still have a problem with grieving. They still
accumulate negative emotion.
A person who is Group-dependent tends to expect other people to be
Group-dependent. When a stage 3 person does something as a favor to you, she will
want you to return that favor but she will “understand” if you don’t
return it. A stage 1 person might force you, guilt you, threaten you, ignore
you if you don’t return the favor. A stage 3 person will tend to not, but she
will still feel hurt over it. She will accumulate negative emotion.
When I put “understand” in quotations, I mean she is able to more
capably process what is going on emotionally and logically in the head of the
person giving them grief, and in “understanding” they are more
capable of compromising and sharing responsibility. But they take in a bit more
than they can handle each time. They do a little more work than they should,
stretch themselves a little farther than they should. Because they don’t fully
know their limits yet; knowing your limits fully comes at Stage 4.
She will grow frustrated that nobody does what is expected of them. She
will be able to cope with their “weaknesses” and “failures”
for a lot longer than a Stage 1 or 2 person, but she will tend to vent her
accumulated negative emotion in a way that doesn’t help other people to grow as
well they could. She will tend towards using guilt, disappointment, expectation
and obligation to attend to the “weaknesses” of others, not because
she desires to punish them but because these are the primary yet inefficient
ways she can release negative emotion; she doesn’t really understand how else
she can help.
Since she does not understand Stage 1
and 2 people, she will tend not to give them mercy when they betray her
expectations too much. When they do, she will tend to either yell at them or
abandon them. She will think, “They are not worth my time”. She will become
resentful. If the blame is on herself, then she may yell and abandon herself.
What does it mean to abandon oneself? It means to belittle one’s self value,
i.e. she will suffer a Stage 2 identity crisis.
She will tend to grow cynical. She will tend to share only with people who
share with her. To her, what binds a group together is what each member does
for the group, and so she cannot allow herself to not do those things. The
group is her burden and she is the group’s burden. She needs to care and she
needs to be cared for. Thus she tends to be obsessed with notions of Obligation and Duty. While these notions of Obligation and Duty do not always
result in unhealthy behavior and feelings, they do inherently cause
difficulties that tend to harm one’s and others’ emotional development. Notably
she will have the most difficulty in handling Stage 2 people, as folks in Stage
2 will inherently desire to rebel against the obligations and duties a Stage 3
person conjures for herself and others.
A stage 3 person might have the tendency to say, “I am doing this for
your own good”, “You don’t know what you want”, “I don’t
want you making my same mistakes”.
Because a Stage 3 person is past Stage 2, they are no longer concerned with
their self-image; they are comfortable in their own skin. So they are
comfortable with their “Self”. The experiences they’ve accumulated
allow them to be Assured that what they understand about their
“Selves” is correct and good. But the mistake Stage 3 folks often
make is they tend to extend their personal experiences which apply only to them
on to others without bothering to see if their experiences actually do apply to
the lives of others.
“Because I’ve figured myself out to a pretty good extent, it feels
like its the case that everybody else just needs to do what I did to fix their
problems.”
They are Self-Assured. Certain that what applied to their lives naturally
applies to others. Stage 3 is when Emotion and Logic fuse. And what do we call
that fusion? Morality. Morality first emerges in Stage 3. Stage 3 is the
minimum stage a person should reach before they consider marriage.
S3 Examples: Pearl from Steven
Universe, Claire Dumphy from Modern Family, Javert from Les Miserables, Michael
from Arrested Development, Captain Cal from Lonesome Dove, Oliver Queen by
season 2 of Arrow, Tenzin from Legend of Korra, Obi-Wan Kenobi prior to fighting
Anakin in Star Wars, Hiccup by the end of How to Train Your Dragon 2, Tony
Stark during the rest of Ironman, Scott Pilgrim and Romona Flowers by the end
of the book series/movie, The Man Upstairs (Will Ferrell) in The Lego Movie, Lana
Kane from Archer, Valentine (the villain) from the movie Kingsman,
Stage 4 Independence
Not many people get to this stage. The characteristics that most describes this
kind of person is charitable, communicable, confident, and
collected. A truly independent person is someone who can give of himself
without feeling hurt when other people don’t give back. A person at Stage 4 has
come to fully understand his limits.
To understand your limits is to understand others. As you become more aware
of your own bubble, you begin to see the bubbles that surround others, and
being able to do so allows you to better predict their behavior, thought
process, and feelings. You begin to see what would irk them, plague them,
enliven them, inspire them. Stage 5 is when I imagine a person can not only see
these bubbles, but dive in to their depths, to really see and understand the
core of people.
A primary emotion of Stage 4 is Sorrow. Sorrow is a type of sadness, a type
that facilitates pain-free grieving. The higher the stages you
reach, the less painful grieving can become. Sorrow is Sadness
for the unfortunate circumstances that have allowed for trauma to arise. A
stage 4 person can have sorrow for the murdered and the murderer. The
persecuted and the persecutor. They understand at an emotional level the
bullying cycle, that the bullied often (though not always) become bullies
themselves to cope with the pain and trauma.
He can see why people act the way they do. He will tend to be able to
predict what people will say, do, and think next. He will take up burdens seemingly
on a whim and may drop those burdens just as quickly. He will offer up his
home, pick up hitchhikers and volunteer at soup kitchens without anyone knowing
he does, because he wants to. He will also choose not to offer up his home,
reject hitchhikers, and not volunteer even when there is social pressure to do
so. He will help people because he wants to, and he will not help people
because he wants to.
And most significantly, he will actually know what he genuinely wants in his
life because he fully understands his limits. Understanding his limits allows
him to see where he cannot go, and understanding where he cannot go allows him
to see where he can go, and that is
where he will go. Thus a Stage 4 person acquires an incredible degree of
Confidence due to being able to do things he precisely understands that he can
do.
This is a great stage to be at, but it does have some problems. For one,
people tend to get dependent on him. Two, He being sympathetic doesn’t mean he
understands what exactly he can do for them. His generosity could be insulting
to them if they are stage two. He can be frustrating to people in Stage 3. He
won’t mind if they are insulted, though, because that’s their problem,
not his. The greatest limitation of Stage 4 is that while he is able to predict
human behavior, he does not necessarily know what he needs to do to help
people. He tries his best, but that doesn’t mean he will necessarily do the
right thing.
Stage 4 is the ideal minimum stage for people to begin to raise children.
S4 Examples: Garnet from Steven
Universe, Augustus “Gus” McCrae from Lonesome Dove, what the human
boy Finn represents in The Lego Movie, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings,
Stage 5 Transcendence A stage 5 person is someone who has mastered Empathy.
Empathy is a step above sympathy. Sympathy is shared feelings. In the original
Greek, sympathy means sharing of pain. Empathy is beyond that, it is understanding.
A stage 5 person has complete access to the full range of her emotions. In
having access, she is less prone to ever being dominated by any particular
emotion, allowing her to freely choose which emotion, which mix of emotions, is
key to the situation at hand.
She can be sympathetic when someone needs her to be. But when the situation
calls for righteous anger, she can be righteous and angry. She can be forgiving
when she needs to be forgiving, stiff when she needs to be stiff. She can know
when to separate herself from others and when to sacrifice for others. She can
know when to punish, when to give mercy.
Interestingly, the more emotionally mature one is, the more one feels human,
smaller, limited, and less knowledgeable about the world and its inhabitants.
It is in acknowledging that she has increasingly less knowledge and
understanding that makes her more eager to learn, hence why Stage 5
folks can be some of the most learned people and yet sincerely feel that they
haven’t learned all too much.
So it is not the case that she actually knows for 100% certainty what
to do/how to act. Truthfully she merely acts to the best of her ability,
understanding the limitations of her own understanding. But in being
emotionally mature her actions tend to flow out in proper response to most any
situation. Sympathetic when she should be. Angry when she should be. Forgiving
when she should be.
She is Transcendent. Beyond human understanding because stage 1, 2, 3
and 4 cannot understand her. But she can understand all of them.
S5 Examples: Iroh from Avatar the
Last Airbender, Rose Quartz from Steven Universe, Vitruvius from The Lego Movie
(maybe), Mr. Rogers from real life (maybe),
This tutorial contains tips about researching for comics! I use research a lot in my own work, not just for dry stuff, but to make sure I am approaching all of my subjects with sensitivity and respect. In these post-Obama times I think it’s more important than ever to be able to bring that level of deeper understanding to your life and to your work.
Additionally, I’ve mentioned it here and there, but my formal background is in science. I went to UC Berkeley, which is one of the most respected research institutions in the world. I was lucky enough to do some research of my own during my time there, and I’ve included a lot of the same methods I used in my own research here. Anyone can do good research, and I hope this tutorial helps you with your own stuff :] You can see the blend between research and fantastical situations in my comics The Meek and Mare Internum.
All of my tutorials are released in lower-res format to the public 6 months after
publication at the Shingworks Patreon. You can access the full tutorial archive, as well as nearly 1.5
years worth of bonus content, by becoming a Patron :] The next tutorial is going up soon, so feel free to stop by!
and! thanks a ton in advance for not removing my text ❤
Inspiration Haven 