I want to address one thing that I KNOW some people are going to complain about because they've already complained about if it would happen, and that’s The Doctor and Derpy getting together in the end. I understand the concerns. This is in no way meant to say ‘your abusers will eventually change for the better if you just say the right things to them’. This isn’t that kind of story. These are special circumstances that DO NOT EXIST in real life where the abuser was under MAGICAL mind control. That’s not who he actually is and when he’s himself he’s not remotely an abuser. He is safe from having a relapse, the curse is gone and over with because the core Discord was killed while the fragment left over in their universe has been reformed.
Real abusers are not under any kind of puppetry or mind control when they do what they do, and no not even getting drunk counts as this because when someone is an abusive drunk they’re still choosing to get drunk when they are well aware of what they do when under the influence. If The Doctor did any of this abuse on his own terms, I wouldn’t have let them get back together. I’m an abuse survivor, I know better than that. When you try to compare completely fantasy scenarios that can’t happen in real life to.. Well, real life, you’re kind of reaching at straws at that point. Besides, this relationship wasn’t automatically better just because he returned to normal. Both of them suffered damage and trauma and both needed to navigate around it to be able to trust one another again. If there’s any kind of comparison to make, it’d be more like a loved one suffering a psychotic episode and doing horrible things they’d never do in their right mind. And some people are able to understand and forgive, while others are not. The pain of having a psychotic episode and saying and doing things that hurt people is really hard to overcome, it’s hard to trust yourself and it can be hard to make amends. But a psychotic episode does not dictate who a person is. It just doesn’t. And that’s the closest thing to reality this story is. I tried to handle this as best I could, because in my line of work recovery is the most important thing and I understand that someone coming out of a bad episode needs support and compassion (Unless they’re a terrible person in general) and there have been extreme cases where perfectly good people end up going as far as murder- even murdering their own children, but their loved ones are able to reason that they were sick and they are going to suffer great pain upon realizing what they’d done, and they are going to seek help. Maybe you wouldn’t be able to forgive someone who did terrible things in a psychotic state, and that’s within your right, but it doesn’t mean people who can forgive are any less valid. Listen, if a husband can be capable of not blaming his wife for killing their kids in a psychotic state (a very real event that happened rather recently, simply google “wife psychosis news killed children husband forgives” and you’ll find it), it's perfectly reasonable that someone can forgive someone who was under magical mind control.
If you are in a physically abusive relationship, you need to get out of it. The likelihood of this person changing for the better is extremely low, and you can’t cling to the idea of the rare few people who manage to work through these kind of things. Those are very special circumstances and in my opinion if there’s a relapse into violence after making genuine efforts to change, that should be the end of it once and for all. It shouldn’t be happening to begin with, it should not be tolerated. You matter, you deserve to be treated with kindness and compassion. Never let anyone tell you or make you feel otherwise. Please take care of yourselves, and DO NOT use this story as a basis for how to manage your own relationships, no matter how much you might think you see yourselves in it. This is fiction, and the scenarios in this story do not happen in real life. If you can’t discern reality from fiction, that is all on you, not me.
