I'm going to be honest, when the season started, I was harboring a hatred for several of the main characters. Alice destroying the keys was the most idiotic move I could have possibly imagined, and I have always held resentment for Margo because she is kind of an asshole to everyone. But the more the season has gone on, the more I have realized it is because how much of myself I have been seeing in the show, specifically the parts I do not like.

I've suffered from several mental disorders, most prominently anxiety and depression, and a lot of the depictions of these issues for the characters have been so on-the-nose in depicting what I have been working through it's a little scary.

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I never used to really confront my emotions, cause I knew I couldn't handle it if I did, so instead I would just try to make myself the center of attention, like what was revealed with Margo in the desert.

Also back before I started to confront my own emotions, I used to be a jaded asshole who only looked out for #1 (myself), and even though I've gotten mostly past that, when things in life get bad for me I will start to regress and it becomes a mental battle between the me that always knows best and only cared about himself, and the me that wants to care for others. When Alice split herself with the prism, some of that argument her two sides had was almost verbatim to some of the conflicts I have had between my two selves.

When things get really, really bad for me, I have episodes where I will go into completely apathetic, emotionless states, and most of my thoughts become borderline psychotic, so close to The Monster in personality it truly scared me the first time I saw it in full force (the whole "you will give me what I want or I will take everything from you" mentality).

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And Quentin...I see so much of myself in Quentin. The childhood obsession with fantasy worlds, the drive and desire to want to do something fantastic, only to have it be sullied by a little thing called real life. "The idea of Fillory saved my life" hit me harder than anything in the entire show. I play way too many tabletop RPGs, and I enjoy them for the same reason Quentin loved Fillory. For a long span just waiting for the next time to play, just waiting for the next opportunity to hang out with my friends again, to get to be in a world where you really could be anything, where heroes and magic and all sorts of fantastical things felt real, was the only thing that was keeping me from killing myself. And it's gotten to the point where I cared more about my game than I did about my life, because I had a better handle on keeping control of my life in the game than I did in real life. I was spending the majority of waking hours just worldbuilding for my many settings, because there not only did I understand what was going on in the world, but I felt like I cold actually be something. And that mentality almost cost me one of my closest friends when I put my stupid game over them, And it makes you step back and wonder what it really is all for? At the end of the day it's all just a fucking game. Magic isn't real, dragons aren't real, heroes aren't real, so why the fuck devote all of this time and effort into what physically amounts to nothing?

I feel you Quentin, I know what the sullied dream feels like. The look on his face when Plover signed his book, I felt that. I just wanted to give him a hug, cause I know what that felt like, to have your childhood dreams come true, but for them to be ruined and soured by the truth of adulthood and real life.

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It's been somewhat eerie that almost all of the crap I've been trying to work my way through for the past several years have been so concretely represented in this season. I think I had more of a point when I first started this post, but in short it's meant to much to me this season to see the characters actually confront issues like this, that you can't just ignore them or they will build up and fester until something breaks. Mental illnesses suck, but that shouldn't be stigmatized to the point where someone should feel ashamed to try to get help. It triggered some very bad memories the first time I saw them on screen, but once I was over that it was honestly so comforting to see these things depicted, to know that I'm not some mental anomaly. Because what gave me the push to start getting help for my problems was knowing that I was not alone in the matter. I was so afraid that my mental problems wouldn't make any sense to anybody, that I would be an inconvenience on anybody that I asked for help because there wasn't any way they would want to help. But when I finally did I learned that my friends dealt with this stuff too, and it is so much easier to work through it when you go through it together.