I wish my crazy were adorable.

-Stef, The Nature of Nurture

I have a mentally-ill protagonist.

A young woman with a voice in her head, paranoid delusions, the occasional horrifying hallucination, and an overwhelming sense of her own worthlessness. All of this plays into how she acts, reacts and interacts with the world. It touches every aspect of her character – from how she talks to people, to the situations she puts herself into, and how far she’s willing to go.

Heroes can go through a lot, a hell of a lot – but how much of a hero can you be, when you can’t always summon the will to get out of bed?

I’ve never written Stef as a hero – she would openly reject the title if someone tried to apply it to her. She has no designs on saving the world, on doing anything for the greater good, or even advancing through the ranks of the organization she inadvertently finds herself a part of.

Any time she does try to do something that could be considered the actions of a traditional protagonist/hero, it’s usually because she’s trying to impress her new adoptive father – or finally feels like she has the room to fail, without that failure dragging her back down to a point where she’ll never want to try again.

As a point of full disclosure, I’m also a crazy girl – I have depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies. I self-harm more than what’s healthy for me, and count myself a coward that I always do it in a way that doesn’t leave permanent marks (you should see how inventive I can get with office supplies!).

I love fantasy, I’ve always loved fantasy – I used to watch the Neverending Story every Sunday – eating a bowl of coloured popcorn whilst my mum brushed my hair a few hundred times for the week ahead at school. I fell through the Labyrinth, ticking down the seconds until Thirteen O’clock. I absorbed Discworld like a drowning person finding a crate full of Evian. I’ve read my copy of Neverwhere enough times so that it’s more dogeared talisman than actual book.

And heroes are always heroes.

They can be ordinary people, people stuck in a rut, or a dead-end job, or feeling the ennui that somehow seems to come naturally to twenty-something white guys who blow off work but still somehow manage to afford their improbably-awesome, rent-controlled apartments.

I know protagonists who keep collections of cute things on their desk to fight against the Mundane and the Normal before they encounter the Awesome.

I don’t know any protagonists who try to bruise themselves with staplers, or work scientifically to find the perfect pinch point on a lever-arch folder so that they can cause themselves enough pain to distract themselves from the anxiety, so that they can remain sitting at their desk long enough to make it to lunch time – as supervisors tend to notice if you take five pee breaks in a hour.

The fair folk are often strange, having alien mindsets, being written in a way that’s completely counter – or simply beautifully contrary – to how “regular” people think, and authors are praised for that, for showing off an entire new thought processes, and ways of viewing the world.

It’s fine to view the world through the blood-soaked, red-tinged POV of a vampire king, but gods forbid we see the world through the eyes of someone who thinks the walls are breathing.

In a small, subtle way, it’s always been this faint warning, a magic-eye picture that most people don’t bother to puzzle out: If you’re crazy, then the fantastical isn’t for you.

“The Crazy” can – and often is – a plot element. Character who hear voices have those voices turn out to be ghosts; hallucinations are people perceiving other planes of existence/other time periods/etc. Characters apparently on the autism spectrum turn out to be sage guides, who speak when they can say something profound to the protagonist and his cronies. Mental illness as a superpower is common – and it’s worse than representation, because it hurts the people it pretends to portray.

I don’t expect people to turn around to their “sad friends” and say “oh, your depression is because a ghost is camping in your brain”, but when they see those same depressed, anxious or hallucinating characters being able to suck it up and get on with life (or the quest, or the whatever), over time it will give them a false impression about what’s actually possible for the neurodivergent people around them.

As with a lot of issues that affect book diversity, it’s left me being fundamentally unable to connect with the protagonists that I read. I can see myself in elements of the characters, and I can still love, hate or love-hate them along with everyone else, but I’ve never been able to honestly say “huh, that’s how I’d react”.

We’re all stuck with the Mundane and the Normal, we should all have the opportunity to run towards the Awesome, knowing that the gates of Faerie don’t have a “you must be this sane to enter” sign stuck next to the security guard.

-Grace McDermott

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