It's a realisation I've had before and undoubtedly will have again!

I'm experiencing basically All Of Every Feeling Ever, realising that just like how my love of whump and illboy archetype characters can be traced back to having been disabled for a long time in a way that was making my life worse but went unadressed because I wasn't "sick enough" for it to bother other people, and finding characters doing things despite constant discomfort and pain affirming, I'm starting to realise that one of the reasons I often gravitate towards underwritten characters who seem to vanish off the face of the plot when they're not needed and seemingly have no goals and motivations of their own is because that experience is a lot like what being profoundly depressed in a way that manifests primarily as working compulsion is like, and that I can relate to an existence of just continually doing things without any larger goals, how that has the same emotional imprint of just existing in that disjointed-from-reality way having underactive brain chemistry causes.

Even the way people respond to that kind of character feels affirming, in some ways characters being treated with no internality feels familiar to me.

This isn't a depressing post, btw, this is an "oh shit this is why I like the stories I like", because one of my hats for whump is the idea that noble suffering is still ugly and unpleasant, and that every character has internality, and those who seem to display less of it simply come with deeper-set layers that most characters around them aren't worthy of seeing. I like writing whump with characters like that because it's about breaking the mask, in some way, it's about stripping away the artifice of being composed, when self-reliance is in my experience not at all a self-assured and composed place to be in. Likewise, this explains why I find traditional hurt-comfort with the characters I like so thorny -- it's really hard to strike the balance of being sympathetic and being firm with how they've made the situation worse for themselves by not asking for help, and I don't like the expectation of gratitude imposed on largely self-sufficient characters.

And yes I do still like whump and drama because it's sexy and I like bad things happening to my faves for hte sadistic thrill of it, also. This is strictly a "yes, and" kind of realisation.