Step one: let him hide or shy away from you if he wants to. He wouldn’t let me touch him for a couple days after we got back from the shelter. His comfort was more important than me getting to touch him.
Step two: make yourself nonthreatening. In my case this meant being very quiet, bringing food and lying down on the ground within his eyesight as an invitation to investigate.
Step three: watch his body language and don’t do things that make him uncomfortable. Turns out my cat often bit when he was overstimulated so I made sure not to overwhelm him.
Step four: draw lines, but not with brute force. Even though his biting wasn’t meant to hurt, I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t injure anyone in the future. So I decided when he bit me, I’d yelp “ow!” And then withdraw all physical contact for a few minutes, sometimes leaving the room. Now he never bites, but sometimes he puts his teeth on my hand and then thinks better of it.
Step five: provide a good outlet for destructive behaviors. Aka PLAY WITH HIM, SEVERAL TIMES A DAY.
Step six: be patient.
Step seven: get lucky and somehow pick up the best cat in the entire shelter. I don’t know how it happened but he’s a godsend. He’s literally cuddled me out of a panic attack. We both really needed each other.
Does anyone else love how SU acknowledges all these things we thought were just flaws? Like we’ve been complaining about the crystal gems dumping their problems on Steven because we thought that the crew didn’t realize how shitty that is. But they DO. It’s a shitty thing for the gems to do, but they’re doing it because that’s just how life works sometimes. People do shitty things without meaning to.
this is why i stress that intent matters. it’s not bad writing to write a flawed relationship, if you know you’re writing a flawed relationship. steven universe is excellent at setting up uncomfortable status quos and challenging them later.
a counter-example: the problem with crap like “fifty shades of grey” isn’t actually that the relationship is toxic. not really. there is plenty of media exploring toxic relationships in interesting ways. christian being abusive, in another story, would not be a flaw - it’d be a feature. it’d be about dealing with that. ideally, it’d end with her leaving, or frame it as a tragedy if she doesn’t.
but it is a problem, because the writer doesn’t know it’s anabusiverelationship. they end up “happily ever after”. outright, undebatable abuse is romanticized, or swept under the rug. the meta-conversation about romanticizing abuse ends up more interesting than anything the author wants to convey.
this is why intent matters. it’s the difference between characters being flawed, interesting people, and characters being propaganda of an unjust cause.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.