User blog:AustinDR/Inspiration for "Luan's Problem"

As with "Lola Gets Nice," I decided to explain where the idea for it came from. "Luan's Problem" is admittedly a personal story for me. Much like Luan in the story, I was diagnosed with ADHD, so I needed to take medicine to suppress it. I was also diagnosed with Asperger's for as long as I could remember. This made it difficult for me to interact with other people my age, and I had no friends. Yeah, my mom and dad always told me that I was special, but they always put the "Asperger's syndrome" first whenever they had to deal with me. They did the decisions for me, they gave me extra help among other things. I will admit that it was thoughtful, but at the same time, I felt that they were limiting me just because I had that disorder. I felt that there was something wrong with me. I wanted to be normal.

And then when it came to school, I could do several subjects well except for one: math. To this day, I still hate math with a passion, but have learned to deal with it via practice. One time my math teacher flat out asked me why I was able to do the other subjects exceedingly well, but I faultered when it came to him. It became too much to bear that I thought about ending my suffering. No, I never overdosed on my medicine, nor did I ever act on my suicidal thoughts, but the idea of taking the easy way out never left. When I was in the elementary school, I cried a lot so much so, that some teachers (that I didn't have, mind you) outright said that they did not want me in their rooms, because they thought I was a troublemaker. They wouldn't even give me the chance to prove myself to them; they just didn't want anything to do with me. Even after I graduated from high school and am currently attending college, I never forgot about what they said.

As for why I chose to do this self-reflection story on Luan of all characters....as I have said, I never hated Luan. I am aware that she has mixed reception in the LH community, so one of the goals with the story was to delve into the roots as to why Luan loves pranks and puns. Now that goes without saying that I doubt that's how it canonically happened, but again, Luan was actually a metaphor for me in some ways. I was hoping to make Luan come off as more sympathetic to kind of lessen the hate that other fans have for her, because ultimately, she isn't a deplorable character. At least to me. With Bitterns, Bitterns was based on several teachers that I had over the years. no, they weren't sadistic nor did they nearly cause me to kill myself, but most were stern. Some tried to have dominion on my individuality by prohibiting me from drawing, or being myself. Of course nowadays, most of my teachers give me truckloads of work to do, that I assume they must take some pleasure out of doing so. And that's not getting into my English teacher wordlessly accusing me of plagiarizing a response I did to an assigned poem even though I didn't. She always seems to single me out in comparison to my other classmates for some reason.

Overall, that's where the idea ultimately came from. It was a self-reflected story that I hoped you all enjoyed reading.