Awesome / Lily Orchard

• Her defense of Ariel's decision to leave her father for land and Prince Eric is pretty awesome. Think of all the abuse victims who identified with Ariel that felt vindicated. Then there's the trashing that Beauty and the Beast gets for its far more problematic story of a young woman falling in love with her kidnapper. Not only does Lily point out that this story is problematic without bringing up Stockholm Syndrome, she directly calls out Lindsay Ellis (who is often credited with starting the Internet side of The Little Mermaid hate) for perpetuating the brand of White Feminism which makes shitting on Ariel okay but requires someone to praise Belle as a role model.
• Lily's video with ILoveKimPossibleAlot about the virtues and benefits of mental health. There's little snark or jokes, just several minutes of the two ladies detailing their own traumas and the ways that they coped with it all, as well as general advice about how to get through depression.
  • The video has Lily advise against Self-Deprecation in a very blunt and honest way.
    Lily: Let me be blunt: you are killing yourself. People can claim to self-deprecate ironically, but the effect of doing it so much and so frequently can be absolutely devastating to your mental health and your self-worth. You can only self-deprecate for so long before you start to, on some level, believe it. Self-deprecation isn't funny, it's not endearing, it's not cynical, millennial, or Gen-Z humor. It's self-harm.
  • Lily also goes against a lot of common stereotypes and misconceptions about people with depression.
    Lily: There's the age-old question: "What do you have to be depressed about?" To which the answer often is "Nothing, Sharon, because that's not how depression works."
  • The final bit of the video is Lily and KP calling on for the viewer to not view their mental illness as part of their identity, saying that the mental illness is preventing a person from being who they really are.
    Lily: It can be easy, especially when you deal with mental illness on a chronic basis, to acclimate to a mental illness being part of your identity. Part of the fear of medication is the myth that they'll make you into someone else. That you won't be "you" anymore. And people can attach themselves so hard to their trauma and struggles that recovery can feel like erasure. I don't personally know how to break that belief in people. But I can safely say that you are not your mental illness. And medication and recovery isn't going to turn you into someone that isn't you. It's going to bring you back. Because mental illnesses and trauma turn you into someone else. Someone unlike you. And who you are after practicing self-care — taking your medicine, being able to manage these problems, and go back to a stable life — that's the real you. Mental illnesses screw with your perceptions, and it can be easy to trick yourself into thinking this is who you are. But it's not. Take your medicine, please. And let the real you come home.
• "I Played Final Fantasy XIV for 2 Hours and It Was Fine" sees Lily give comparisons between the titular game and World of Warcraft. Lily says that XIV has a pretty decent story — certified heroes and villains who remain consistently written, Call Backs, satisfying payoffs, no random secretly-behind-everything bad guys, definitive conclusions to story arcs and characters, and it's not written by a serial rapist who got control of the story to destroy a character that the writer irrationally hated. Lily admits that all of that is objectively good when it comes to writing, but Lily argues that all of the above is the bare minimum, not the gold standard, and it's more of a testament to how bad WoW is than how good XIV is. Lily even calls XIV a good game even though it didn't appeal to her, and says that WoW could stand to learn a thing or two about getting community feedback from the development team behind XIV, after they managed to Win Back the Crowd from admitting they made mistakes. It's all a very humble video and opinion piece.
  Lily: If anything can be learned from Final Fantasy [XIV], it's that there's no shame in admitting defeat and starting over. I don't like this game, but I was never supposed to. [...] I can see why someone would like this — all the pieces are there, it's not like this hard to figure out — but I'm not that someone.