Cope by Creating

Original comic by Asaf Hanuka

Lisa: If you're feeling depressed, do what I do and write something. A novel, a play...
Bart: Or I could write something that's not gay.

— The Simpsons

When a character uses art (such as painting, dancing, singing, crafting trinkets, etc.) as a coping mechanism to deal with extreme stress, such as trauma, loss, or isolation. This trope is a Truth in Television, as studies have shown that any kind of fiber art (knitting, crocheting, sewing, etc.) can reduce anxiety and depression. It is known as a form of sublimation in formal psychology.

Captivity Harmonica is a situation- and mechanism-specific subtrope. Compare Cope by Pretending, where the character instead copes by pretending their stress is not as big as it is; Comfort Food and Heartbreak and Ice Cream, a.k.a. "Cope by Eating", and Cathartic Chores, a.k.a. "Cope by Working and Doing Chores". Contrast Percussive Therapy, a.k.a "Cope by Smashing". A Sad Clown is a character who copes by cracking jokes. See also True Art Is Angsty.

The inverse of this is Too Upset to Create, which can cause things like Writer's Block when a character's emotions leave them unable to create.

See also Escapism.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• K-On! High School: Sumire realizes that playing drums relieves her from stress, which motivates her to join the light music club.
• Maria no Danzai: Maria was once a happily married woman and a mother. However, her beloved son was killed right in front of her, and she discovered that she was killed in a prank gone wrong by demonic bullies who tortured her son before they killed him. She snapped toward revenge and threw away her life and marriage, eventually taking a new identity as a nurse at her son's old school to kill the bullies one by one and destroy them emotionally before killing them. It was revealed in chapter 14 that in her spare time at home, Maria sews together sock dolls of her deceased son Kiritaka; she has dinner with the doll and pampers it like it was her son. It's clear that this is a coping mechanism Maria uses when she's not focusing on destroying the demons that took her son away.
• Outbreak Company: A while after the werewolf Elbia joins the protagonists as their group artist, she starts hiding away in her room, drawing non-stop while avoiding food, sleep, and baths. Shinichi confronts Elbia over this, fearful that he's turned her into a Hikikomori. Instead, she explains that short-term obsessive episodes are considered perfectly normal for werewolves, who had to find more socially acceptable ways of channeling their hunting instincts after they were integrated into human society. The Animated Adaptation, however, isn't an example — Elbia is shown losing sleep, but it's treated at face value as Shinichi getting her addicted to Japanese art (in general, the adaptation drops a lot of the novels' racism themes in order to focus more on its allegories for the British opium trade).
• Dororo (2019): Mio sings so that she doesn't feel sadness even when she's selling her body.
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, after Kamina's death, Simon is seen sculpting several statues of him.

Comic Books

• Watchmen: After the Reality Warper Dr. Manhattan flees to Mars in the mistaken belief that he accidentally caused cancer to develop in people close to him, including his ex-girlfriend, he calms himself by creating a huge, intricate glass palace out of the sand.
• Subverted in V for Vendetta. Delia Surridge thought that the Man In Room Five's fooling around with fertilizer and grease solvent was just him trying to cope with the trauma of his experiments through art. In reality, he was using the various chemicals to create napalm and mustard gas for his eventual escape.
• In Doom Patrol, Dorothy Spinner uses her psychic abilities to create lots of imaginary friends as a way of coping with her profound loneliness.

Fan Works

• Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail: Chloe Cerise writes a lot of macabre stories to help vent out frustrations in her life about people not noticing her — or if they do it's about her following her father's footsteps — and her bullying problems and school.
• In With Pearl and Ruby Glowing, Luz and Kyle made (poorly written) fanfiction based on their abuse, and several guests on Bev's show pour their trauma into acting, dancing, or book-writing. The writers have also noted this is what they're doing themselves with the entire AU.
• In The Hunger Games Prequel Collection, Terra (the victor of the Thirty-sixth Hunger Games) struggles to come to terms with the death of her younger sister in the Forty-first Games. Her fellow District 8 victors encourage her to take up painting to give her something else to think about; it seems to help, though she still has moments when she is painfully reminded of her sister and doubts she will ever completely get over losing her.
• A Second Chance: When Luan’s in a state of serious depression, she falls into “mime melancholy” (as her siblings call it), where she takes a vow of silence and stays in her mime persona for the indefinite future. This happens in No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, when her family accepts to stay at Kathleen’s summer home for a week and Luan's “protesting” (staying outside and roughing it) goes horribly wrong immediately, leaving with nothing but to sulk in her own bizarre way.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug story A Small but Stubborn Fire, while looking at the sketch that Marinette has made of a man in a white suit and mask with words like "love destroys" and "regret" Sabine wonders if this is a silent cry for help from her daughter over being assaulted, not knowing that the drawing is of an akumatized Cat Noir.

Films — Animation

• In Barbie as Rapunzel, Rapunzel often paints as an escape from her miserable living situation, including painting places she dreams of visiting one day once she's free. Her painting skills come in handy when she gains a magic paintbrush that turns her paintings into portals to real-world locations.
• Frozen (2013): After Elsa escapes Arendelle, she creates a beautiful ice palace both to test her Elemental Powers and to release her pent-up emotions. She is singing "Let It Go" as it forms around her.
• Klaus (2019): After the death of his beloved wife, with no children to tend to, the eponymous toymaker resorted to making birdhouses in her memory.

Films — Live-Action

• This House Has People in It: The Sculptor, creator of the in-universe show "The Sculptor's Clayground", keeps referencing his messy breakup with his ex and his time in prison, where he apparently learned to work with clay to get his emotions out. He's not very good at it, however, and it may or may not have given him "Lynks Disease".
• The Shawshank Redemption:
  • Andy copes with the monotonous reality of his imprisonment by carving little stone figurines. There is more to it than his fascination with art. He purposefully invokes the trope to avoid suspicion while secretly using the carving hammer to dig out a tunnel and escape.
  • Subverted when Andy gives his friend Red a harmonica as a present hoping it will cheer him up. It reminds Red of the free days too much to serve as solace, so he avoids playing it.
• Detective Callahan from Sudden Impact investigates a brutal murder in a small seaside town outside San Francisco. One suspect is a rape victim that moved back to town recently. Callahan visits Jennifer in her studio and sees the grim and ghoulish canvases that she has painted. Jennifer becomes his prime suspect upon viewing these works.
• Marwencol and its derivative Welcome to Marwen are based on this trope. After a severe beating left him brain-damaged and unable to draw, artist Mark Hogancamp created a miniature town populated by dolls, which he manipulated and photographed to deal with his trauma.
• In the framing scenes of Moulin Rouge!, Christian writes the story of his romance with Satine because it was her Last Request, and it ends up serving as a healing process for him.
• Tony Stark in Iron Man 3 is shown dealing with the stress from his PTSD of the chitari invasion using this. This results in several dozen different Iron Man suits of various sorts.
• Throughout Waitress, Jenna channels her problems into new flavors of pie. Most of them are inspired by her Awful Wedded Life, conflicted feelings about her affair, or both (i.e. “I can't have no affair because it's wrong and I don’t want Earl to kill me” pie).

Literature

• The title heroine of Thais of Athens falls into a deep depression after her Best Friend Aegesichore and her lover Menedem are both murdered in a single day. The only thing that keeps her afloat (until major changes in her life help her overcome it) is riding out into the wilderness and dancing for hours at a time.
• The Last Continent: The god of evolution reacts to problems by making beetles as he says it relaxes him (the god being based on both Charles Darwin and the "God has an inordinate fondness for beetles" quote). Stibbons, who is ready to give up everything to live with the only scientific-minded god on the Disc runs like hell when it turns out the god's evolutionary masterpiece is a cockroach.
• The Wheel of Time: Perrin Aybara, a former village blacksmith who's childhood friends with The Chosen One, takes his mind off the world-shaking events he's been caught up in by spending time at work in the forge, even after becoming nobility. After the death of his friend Hopper, he starts smithing and inadvertently creates the first Power-wrought weapon since the Age of Legends.
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel A Stitch In Time 2000, Garak is living in a gardener's shed in the ruined remains of Cardassia. Unlike most people, he has no intention of rebuilding his house but instead turns it into a memorial to his mother who was killed shortly before the war ended when her body was trapped under the rubble. He stacks the debris in ways that appeal to his current emotional state. It doesn't take long for others to notice and start coming by to see it as well, for the construction has artistic and emotional meaning for them as well.
• The Stormlight Archive: When Navani believes that her brother-in-law has been betrayed and killed in battle, she dissociates slightly and paints a huge prayer-glyph on the ground. After her mind clears, she realizes it's the symbol for "Justice".
• The Handmaid's Tale: Offred, the story's narrator, mentions that Wives are not very satisfied with the grim realities of women's life in Gilead either, even though they are the top class women who have servants and their husbands are in power. About the only creative things they can do is gardening or knitting scarves for soldiers who fight at the fronts.
  "Many of the Wives have such gardens, it's something for them to order and maintain and care for."
• This Alien Shore: Ian Kent used to be an outpilot until a docking accident destroyed his color vision, making him unable to navigate the ainniq. Now his main hobby is his art. He struggles to capture the beauty of the ainniq, but it would be impossible even with color vision.
• Russ from Asperger Sunset paints the sunset partly as a coping mechanism for his anxiety.
• Diane from If I Fall, If I Die plays old folk songs on her acoustic guitar to keep her mind off her anxious thoughts.
• The Someday Birds: Gram deals with worry during Dad's surgery by knitting about a dozen caps.
• Carl from Every Shiny Thing took up gardening after the death of his eight-year-old daughter from cancer. Watching and participating in the cycle of life makes him feel better about what happened.
• Dana from the Pilgrennon's Children series makes Airfix models, on the advice of her therapist that she go somewhere quiet and do something she enjoys that takes up all her concentration when she's upset.
• Social Queue: After a Career-Ending Injury left Zoe's dad unable to contribute to the family's finances, he was depressed for a long time, complete with a Beard of Sorrow. He eventually found fulfillment when he took up cooking.
• Starr from Orange Clouds, Blue Sky deals with her problems, including her father's abandonment and her mother's depression and drug addiction, by drawing with crayons. When she's drawing, she can shut out everything bad and focus on her work.
• In Little Women, when Jo is deep in grief after Beth's death, Marmee suggests she comfort herself by writing again, which (apart from one poem about Beth) she hasn't done since her professional career failed in New York. Jo takes the advice, and not only does it help her to heal, but she soon revives her career by publishing her short stories and poems in a magazine.
• Katya from By Any Other Name painted to cope with missing her dad, who had made powerful enemies through some kind of business deal, and worrying about his safety. But it was her own safety she should have been worried about, because her father's enemies kidnapped her to hold her to ransom.
• In The Mermaid's Daughter, opera singer Kathleen is a descendant of The Little Mermaid who suffers from severe chronic pain in her feet and tongue. Singing is one of the few things that can distract her from it. Her friend Tom is also an example - singing makes him forget about his insecurities and his father who disowned him for being gay.
• Ivan, the caged gorilla in The One and Only Ivan, feels that he's been an artist ever since he was a baby living with his family in the wild, when he would paint mud across the back of his patient mother. Captured and caged in an almost intolerable existence, Ivan mainly Copes By Pretending that things are fine and forcibly not remembering his old life, with a side of being really interested in food. But sometimes his owner gives him paper and crayons and he feels genuine pleasure and excitement, at least some of the time. It frustrates him that to most humans his work is completely abstract, when he thinks he's clearly portraying things in his cage.
• Before The Ship Who... Won, Carialle survived a truly harrowing experience and was rescued, poisoned by her own wastes and in utter terror of the dark and of being alone. This being a setting that averts There Are No Therapists, numerous people poured intensive time and effort into helping her, and art therapy was part of this, starting with the suggestion that she paint her fears. She started by flooding canvases with utter blackness, only gradually working her way towards more complex work. By the time of the book she's better, with only a few rare reminders of her trauma, but she's discovered a love of painting as a hobby. With a new brawn who enjoys LARPing, Carialle also happily becomes his Game Master, designing holographic places and characters and challenges for him in her cabin.
• The Golden Hamster Saga:
  • Freddy, the world's only literate hamster, copes with his traumatic experience in Freddy in Peril by writing a book about it.
  • In Freddy's Final Quest, Freddy realizes that reading and writing is a coping mechanism for the unnatural situation of being a wild animal who lives in an apartment, since golden hamsters aren't domesticated. If he lived in the wild, he wouldn't want to read or write.

Live-Action TV

• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Hard Time", O'Brien is sent to prison and, in order to cope with forced isolation, taught by his cellmate how to make "eseekas", geometric patterns formed by tracing his finger in the sand covering the cell floor.
• Doctor Who, "Vincent and the Doctor": Discussed by a museum curator regarding the art of Vincent van Gogh. Going by van Gogh's reaction, he hit the nail on the head.
  Curator: He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before.
• Shoestring: Eddie doodles caricatures of the people he's talking to in order to manage stress. When he's dragged into an abandoned train car in the pilot, he draws in the dust on the window.
• Brian Topp in Spaced discovers he can only paint when he's angst-ridden; after finally finding happiness when he starts dating Twist, his inspiration dries up. Luckily, Marsha spots his predicament and deliberately taunts him about his artistic block, making him just upset enough to start painting again.
• A Running Gag throughout NCIS is Gibbs' constantly making boats or other carpentry projects in his home's basement to deal with the stresses of his work/several divorces/whatever hell came knocking on his door this week. It's never made clear what he does to the boats once he completes them, since the basement doesn't seem to have a way to get them out and he's never shown destroying them once he's done making them. However, one of Gibbs' finished boats being part of a crime scene is a plot point in "Outlaws and In-Laws", prompting Abby to joke that the team's mystery of the week is to find out how it got out of Gibbs' basement.
• Utopia Falls: After she's traumatized by being caught in a riot, Sage learns capoeira as not only a self-defense technique in the future but to heal, which works.

Music

• The Boomtown Rats song "I Don't Like Mondays" owes its existence to this trope. Frontman Bob Geldof recounts in his memoirs that he was being interviewed on a US local television station when they were interrupted by a news bulletin about a school shooting in San Diego, and Geldof ended up sitting in a corner of the studio listening to the incident unfold in real-time. The lyrics were written in an attempt to put his shock and horror into words, and the result ended up being the most successful single the band ever released, which he admits to having quite mixed feelings about.
• "The Mystery of Your Gift" by Josh Groban:
  So sing higher and higher,
  A thousand new voices ring through.
  If you sing out of the fire,
  The courage you need comes from you.
• "Bird Set Free" by Sia:
  And I don't care if I sing off-key,
  I find myself in my melodies.
  I sing for love, I sing for me,
  I shout it out like a bird set free.

Tabletop Games

• The One Ring has this as a game mechanic to heal the Shadow Points that Player Characters accumulate through misdeeds or traumatic events. The character spends a few months of downtime on a Craft or Song skill check, which represents them rebalancing themselves through creative work.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: The deformed Nosferatu Vampire Variety are usually stuck living in underground enclaves at the fringes of undead society. They're also a rare exception to vampires' Creative Sterility, channeling their alienation into eerie sculptures, haunting songs that use the acoustics of subway tunnels, or bizarre fungus gardens.

Video Games

• Best of Three: In high school, Helen vented her frustrations with her unrequited crush on Grant by writing poetry, which she sees as a given for all angsty teenagers. It's something of an Old Shame for her.
  Like all the angst-ridden teenagers of all time, you once kept and wrote in a notebook the various trials and tribulations of Being In Love With Grant (sometimes in prose, but more often, more’s the pity, in a kind of Dickinsonian verse, touched with long dashes— and heady words— and Thoughts most suitably conceived in a chaise longue[...]
• The Plain Doll from Bloodborne seems to have been crafted by Gehrman as a way of coping with the suicide of his star pupil (and secret obsession) Lady Maria. While he has meticulously recreated Maria's physical appearance, however, he couldn't bring the Doll to life, and so appears to have struck a Deal with the Devil to animate her (and the end result was markedly different from the original, personality-wise).
• Borderlands 2 features a mix of this and Cope by Pretending in the Tiny Tina Assault on Dragon Keep DLC, which takes place after the main game and follows Tiny Tina guiding her fellow Vault Hunters through a campaign of Bunkers & Badasses... which right from the get-go appears to be Tina's means of ignoring (if not outright denying) the recent death of her beloved Parental Substitute, Roland. The players spend most of the game allowing Tina to indulge her wacky fantasies, but as the campaign nears its climax and it becomes increasingly more reflective of recent events through her selectively oblivious lens, they start getting very uncomfortable and try to get her to stop the game and face the truth. They eventually do get to her, and only once Tina comes fully clean with accepting Roland's death does she and the party come up with their own happy ending to Roland's story, allowing her to heal and move on.
• The protagonist of Bound is an adult woman who escapes into a fantasy world where she is a ballerina princess, in order to process her childhood trauma of being abandoned by her father through dance. There are also some hints that her imaginative dancing routines and drawings are a way to cope with her inability to actually dance in real life due to pregnancy.
• An out-of-universe example: Hironobu Sakaguchi's mother passed away shortly before development began on Final Fantasy VII. Given how strongly the themes of loss and grief are in the game's story, it's clear that he threw himself into this project as a way to cope with his loss.
• The title heroine of GRIS copes with personal loss by singing. Notably, she cannot actually sing for most of the game (the "Sing" button is mapped, but only elicits weak gasps from Gris), only finding her voice again in the penultimate stage. At the climax, singing finally helps her to overcome her depression.
• My Child Lebensborn is partly about caring for a bullied child. One of the means by which the child deals with what is happening to them is by drawing. There is at least one event during which the child spends a time unit unavailable for tasks that require their physical presence because they are busy drawing.
• In The Sims 4, you can tell Sims that are Angry or Sad to paint paintings based on their mood. The resulting paintings have an aura based on the mood of the Sim that painted them, making any nearby Sim that same mood. The possible paintings change as a result of this; Angry Sims, for instance, can paint a house burning down.
• Implied in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A desk in Adam's apartment is covered in handmade clocks, which is either this trope or doing delicate work as physical therapy (or perhaps both).

Visual Novels

• Daughter for Dessert:
  • For a time, Amanda deals with her crush on her father by writing erotic stories about a father-daughter couple who run a diner.
  • Notably averted with Kathy. She has dreams of being a successful writer, but she tends not to do anything when something’s bothering her.
• In Long Live the Queen, Elodie gets a bonus to learning subjects under the artistic 'Expression' skillset (being Decoration, Instrument, and Voice) when her predominant mood for the week is depressed, thereby making it easier for her to gain ranks in those skills at those times. Since her mother had recently died by the beginning of the game, she naturally starts out in this emotional state, prompting many first-time players to fall into the trap of doubling down on these (and the similarly-boosted 'Animal Handling' skills) for her initial lessons.
• The title character in Melody writes songs and plays them on her guitar to console herself whenever she misses her deceased mother.
  • The protagonist may do this as well. He is shown to have written songs that are relevant to situations that he faced in life.

Web Comics

• Catherine from Furry Experience is an introvert, and doodles frequently to cope with social pressures. Cat's class notes are littered with doodles. When Cat is assigned Courtney as a project partner, Cat draws Courtney with her cranial cap open and the brain flying out on silly little wings in the Tuesday 8 June 2010 strip. "I don't like her much," Cat admits to Ronnie.

Web Original

• Alantutorial: Alan attempts to cope with his problems the only way he knows how: by doing the one thing he loves and making tutorials for the internet, even if he's stranded in the wilderness.
• Dream SMP:
  • It is revealed that Foolish uses building and construction to maintain a sense of control over his life, a much healthier coping mechanism than burning down and massacring villages as he did in his past.
  • It is implied that one of Eret's main coping mechanisms for dealing with and moving past traumatic events is building monuments or exhibits on them in his museum, like the replica of the Egg, or the monument she made for Foolish after he sacrificed himself to save them during the Red Banquet, for example.
• Invoked for Black Comedy in this article from The Onion: "Abusive Father Can't Wait to See the Art He's Inspiring His Kids to Create".

Western Animation

• Big City Greens: Gloria copes with sadness and extreme stress by painting and is happy to explain how she felt when she painted each work as well as what she was coping with at the time. Unfortunately, she's a Butt-Monkey and nobody sees any beauty in her paintings until Cricket adds crude drawings of common objects to the canvases. The very fact that her paintings got no attention without the help of a small annoying child does not escape her notice.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: In the episode "King Ramses' Curse", a plague of locusts begins to destroy the Bagges' house. Upon witnessing this, Muriel goes into the kitchen and begins rapidly baking cakes until the curse passes.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Fame and Misfortune", when Rarity's boutique is being boycotted because of negative reviews about the friendship journal, she copes by "stress-sewing" and churning out large amounts of dresses. She's later seen wearing a completely ridiculous and tacky outfit. When Rainbow Dash asks her what it is, Rarity snaps, "My emotions, darling! STRESS COUTURE!"
• In The Owl House episode "Reaching Out", Luz Noceda is depressed over the fact that she's unable to perform her yearly ritual of visiting her father's grave with her mother and basically does anything she can to keep herself distracted. When Eda and King wake up, they find her furiously scribbling down notes on a board to try and figure out what Belos' plans are, with her having already started work on a (haphazardly thrown together) portal door prototype and discovered a new glyph combo before they woke up. Both of them are immediately able to tell that something is bothering her.
• In the Steven Universe episode "Made of Honor", Steven explains to Bismuth the revelation that her leader Rose Quartz was also their supposed worst enemy Pink Diamond, that she had faked her shattering the rest of the Crystal Gems were corrupted as a result and that he had unbubbled her without telling the others. When Steven tries making her reappearance a surprise to the others, Bismuth wanders off and drowns her sorrows by working in her forge, making weapons for an army that will never use them because they have either died or were driven mad with corruption presumably because of an idea she had given to Rose.

Real Life

• The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt in Maryland encourages their patients to take up knitting as part of their recovery.
• Frida Kahlo was a promising medical student until a horrible bus accident in her late teens paralyzed the bottom half of her body and worsened her chronic pain. Her parents encouraged her to continue her childhood hobby of painting as a way to kill time during her recovery and cope with her new disabilities. She went on to become one of the most revered painters in Mexican history.
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote "In Memoriam A.H.H." in an attempt to come to terms with the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, a fellow poet whose friendship is of enormous importance to him.
• In the couple of years after his wife Natasha Richardson died, Liam Neeson was in an unusually large number of movies. Some have interpreted this as him keeping busy to deal with his loss.
• David Drake has at minimum strongly implied that the Hammer's Slammers series was at least partly a way of getting past some of his more unpleasant Vietnam War experiences.
• Several artists served in the camouflage battalion of the Ghost Army during World War II. When they had downtime between tactical deception missions, they would often draw and/or paint. In a 2013 documentary about the unit, Sergeant Victor Dowd said, "I was not the only soldier with a sketchbook. I'd have sketched whether I was the only soldier or not. To be quite honest with you, I think it helped keep me in balance, I think it kept my sanity."

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