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vasito-de-leche · 19 days

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hi hello!!! I’ve been reading your Horropedia stuff and oh my goD the way you write him fills my itty bitty heart with glee- would it be alright if I asked for a character analysis on him? I’d love to hear your thoughts on him!! ༄⋆｡˚✵ ໒꒰ྀི ⸝⸝´ ꒳ `⸝⸝ ꒱ྀི১

;R1999 HORROPEDIA - General Headcanons

Compilation of headcanons and analysis on Horropedia as a character and other related things.

TYSM! I'm very happy that you like my horropi posts! my horroposting!!

I don't know much about the horror genre or horror culture because I get scared very very easily so I don't watch many horror movies, but I'll do my best to deliver a good analysis of our boy o7

On the subject of horror, ableism and neurodivergency.

It goes without saying that Horropedia's character revolves around the horror genre. In this bullet point, I'm not aiming to list every single reference to movies or horror culture, but to tackle his relationship with it and how it gives further context into his personality--as well as how his heavily implied neurodivergency is meant to bring focus into the ableist ideals and practices within the St. Pavlov Foundation.

The very first part of Horropedia's storyboard and his 01 Story explains the origin for his love of horror AND affinity for tinkering with technology: his adoptive grandfather, described as a failed researcher and forgotten horror novelist.

In these excerpts, it is VERY clear that Horropedia and his grandfather loved each other despite the poor living conditions. This aspect of community and family, as well as a strong sense of self and individuality is very important, because it goes against EVERYTHING that the Foundation stands for.

Compare the "role models" of the Foundation with the "troublemakers"--on one hand, we have Sonetto and Matilda. On the other, we have Vertin and Horropedia. All four act as parallels and foils of each other in this aspect. I think everyone is more familiar with Sonetto and Vertin, so I'll begin with them to make this whole tangent easier to digest!

Both characters are direct opposites of each other, but their origins are similar: neither of them has any sort of strong ties to the outside world. Sonetto does not know about her biological family. Vertin was the youngest arcanist to join the Foundation, and vaguely remembers her mother. The key difference is that Sonetto hasn't shown any interest in finding about her biological family, adapting perfectly to the model that the Foundation aims to instill into their students--whereas Vertin's character focuses a lot on loneliness, on finding a community. Because Sonetto lacks this support, this solid ground in which she could cultivate her own identity separate to her martyr and obedient dog role, she's considered the best of the best. And because Vertin keeps stepping out of these ideals and strict guidelines, clinging onto her own sense of self and individuality, she's considered a troublemaker.

Now, let's focus on Matilda and Horropedia. Unlike the previous examples, these two HAVE families outside of the Foundation--which are a very important part of their lives--and it's implied that both of them chose to join the Foundation, unlike Sonetto and Vertin who had no choice.

We already discussed Horropedia's grandfather. When it comes to Matilda, it's stated in one of her Stories that the only way for her busy parents to show affection and give her the time of day is through academic success, which explains why she's so hellbent on being the best. Family is very important to both of these characters. Both of these characters also suffer within the Foundation because they have strong identities and lives that the Foundation does not agree with. In Chapter 03 "Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien," the very first stage shows the way Matilda, the newest student in class, is immediately put down by the rest of the class.

In this context, Matilda is being cast aside and ridiculed because her knowledge (of arcanist origin, coming directly from her grandfather) and her inability to give proof (note how mankind considers knowledge discovered or passed down between arcanists as "inferior," as seen in 1.3 "Journey to Mor Pankh", because they cannot verify it themselves).

How does this relate to Horropedia?

Well. The second part of his Storyboard shows the connection I'm trying to make.

Horropedia went through a similar experience. Both he and Matilda were ostracized by their peers because they didn't neatly fit in within the perfect model of a Foundation arcanist. We even see that he had to abandon his love for horror, instead "blending into the quiet campus." Their uniqueness, their history was slowly washed away.

So what is the difference between the two? How are they parallels and foils of each other? The difference is that Matilda, like Sonetto, was assimilated into the Foundation's ideals, whereas Horropedia was able to break free and retain his sense of self. The things he loved, the things that made him himself.

His Monologue voice line expresses this sentiment perfectly:

We all experienced the past where we were denied, distressed, and lost. That beautiful building, the white cradle, cut off all the "inconsistent" parts from us, in order to shape us into a "better" self … All in all, I am relieved that I am still me, and you are still you.

We see time and time again throughout the main story and sprinkled throughout other events, the Foundation is an organization that advocates for order and peace--something that they believe can only be achieved through the assimilation (or taming) of arcanists. They are written in a very specific way that shows how oppressive they can be to every single minority, not just related to neurodivergency. It's intersectional oppression.

It's just like horror.

Horror as a genre has an undeniable connection with communities such as POC, LGTBQ+ or neurodivergent and disabled people. Or just women in general! These groups have been demonized in one way or another in these movies. At some point, we have seen caricatures of people like us used to scare the masses.

...And in some cases, we've reclaimed certain aspects of it. Take one of the latest movies for example, "Lisa Frankenstein", or an older piece of media such as "Carmilla," a book that might be the origin of the predatory lesbian stereotype.

To me, it makes a LOT of sense that a character so heavily coded to be autistic or neurodivergent has a hyperfixation as loaded as horror. Fundamentally, Joshua and horror should not go together--because his Medium is "Logic," which contradicts the whole nonsensical and fantastical aspect of the horror genre. This is the subject of his interview with Pandora Wilson, actually!

In here, he explains how horror has its own set of rules and guidelines, a "rigorous internal logic" as he puts it, which allows anyone to survive--as long as they understand how horror movies work. We see this aspect of him in action during the 1.2 event, many many times! We see the way he interprets it, how it relates to his way of thinking and his life, how he embodies horror as part of his life--it's in his chosen nickname, Horropedia--it all falls into place rather nicely!

Horror can only make sense if you take the time to study the laws that govern it, when you pay attention to the details.

A lot of the discussion surrounding Horropedia is obviously about his hyperfixation with horror, how he would act in a slasher movie, if he would make fun of certain tropes and this and that... Which is fair! That IS the whole point of his character!

But I hope I was able to emphasize just how meaningful his connection to the genre is. It goes beyond a classic hyperfixation that could wear off in the future. Just note the description for his i2 Garment "Screamism":

A little monster under the sheets and a steadfast guardian of the heart.

Details and things I had no idea where to fit in that first bullet point.

I hope these analysis and this entire blog gave away the fact that I'm also extremely neurodivergent and my special interest is overanalyzing things to an insane degree. These are the details that I HAVE to share with others or I'll explode, but I don't know where exactly fit them in the previous bullet point.

Related to this whole discussion about horror, ableism and neurodivergency. Horropedia's Night voice line mentions "The Man in the Frame."

Fine. I've always considered "The Man in the Frame" to be a conventional horror story. But when I myself stay in a frame … I finally realized it's really horrific.

I discussed this voice line with some people and some interpret this as a reference to the way characters in the main screen can turn into paintings. However, I believe this is a reference to the neat, little mold that the Foundation and the School of Discipline insist on using to raise their arcanists.

"The Man in the Frame" is a Russian animated short by Fyodor Khitruk, which you can actually watch here on Youtube--it's only 10 minutes and it's very interesting! I actually watched it to understand what Horropedia was referring to.

For those who don't have time for it, the short follows a man living within a frame and the different phases of his life. At first, it's a simple rectangle, four black lines caging him--when he falls in love, he gets out of this frame, but returns to it. Each phase shows him slowly working to "better" his frame, so it's more elaborate and ornate like those coworkers with higher positions. Until he refuses to step out of this frame, now at the top, even turning a blind eye to the suffering of others who ask for help, ordering everything to be put within more and more frames, his own becoming more and more claustrophobic until there's nothing left of him.

Of course Horropedia finds this story terrifying now that he understands what it's like to be suffocated by conventional and strict rules.

In this same vein, I want to talk about the fact that every character (except Tooth Fairy, since we don't know her real first name) in the 1.2 update has a name that starts with J--Jennifer, Jessica and Joshua.

Horropedia's name is said to reference a movie named "Joshua" from 2007. I'm not going to watch this movie because its premise sounds scary to me and I would like to sleep tonight, BUT the poster for this movie is relevant to the discussion of "The Man in the Frame".

If someone has seen this movie and would like to add their two cents about it and how it might relate to Horropedia, please, by all means! I would love to hear what you have to say!

Next thing I couldn't fit in: Horropedia's items.

A character's items are meant to give us a little more insight into their lives and important aspects that the game wants to highlight about them. If you've read my previous analysis of Dikke and Tennant, then you know what I'm taking about. One of Horropedia's item stands out to me.

His glasses allude to his fanatism and devotion to his interests. His gadget set alludes to his logical side and intellect, the technology that his grandfather taught him. But what about the green tie clip? There is nothing outstanding nor worth noting about this clip, other than the fact that it's green.

Why does it matter that it's green? Because green is Horropedia's color.

It is the main representative color in his design, the one that pops up the most in his i2 Garment and sprites, the color of his shirt and monster slippers, the color of slime and ooze from horror movie's practical effects, the color of the entire 1.2 event. It is the color that, in this case, represents the aspect of horror.

It's the color you see once you understand Horropedia more (by raising his level and insight) and the color that is subdued and hidden by default in his regular sprite, only seen in very specific areas as shown below.

Perhaps this is an extrapolation on my part, I'm willing to accept that if it's ever confirmed, but with the amount of detail given to each character and their items, I think it makes sense for this simple, green tie clip to mean much more than "oh hey, Horropedia wears tie clips!" the same way Tennant's third item is a direct display of how much New Delhi meant to her despite the lies she tells in her voice lines.

Note the first phrase Pandora Wilson uses to describe this item: "A green line cuts through a black-and-white checkered world." To me, this alludes to Horropedia being an outlier within the Foundation, as someone who fought the system and remained true to himself despite everything.

He is the green line that cuts through this checkered world, everyone knows him and his eccentric nature, he fully embraces his status as a problem child and even gives Jessica tips on how to avoid being brainwashed by the School of Discipline in her own event.

The next and final part of this bullet point is more of a personal observation?

I've seen a lot of people focus on the fact that Horropedia would poke fun at every single horror trope because "they're too predictable" and I feel like this is not quite right? Yes, he plays the role of That One Guy who is very aware of the sort of movie he's in, who serves mostly to explain horror tropes to the audience and be self-aware or joke about how certain aspects make no sense when we think logically (outside of the context of horror) about them. But we also see how serious and eager he is during the whole 1.2 event. And tropes exist because they work, because they are part of the formula in each genre. Being able to spot a trope does not mean that the media you're consuming is bad, it's just something that you were able to pick up on because it's part of the genre.

From my understanding, shock value and surprises are part of horror. That's why we have these twists at the end, like the reveal of a killer who survived being killed by the protagonists. Yes, Horropedia DOES mention that jumpscares are outdated, but we understand jumpscares as a cheap and fast way to scare people by catching them off guard, like Five Nights at Freddy's for example. But the element of surprise is still important, it's just something that this cheap tactic and actual horror share.

Logically, horror makes no sense because there's no way for a zombie apocalypse to happen, or for ghosts to haunt you and so on and so forth. This is why we suspend our belief, to fully immerse ourselves in the worlds being presented to us--one must understand the logic within the context of these movies, rather than apply outside logic to it.

This is a really long tangent just to say that Horropedia wouldn't exactly be the type of guy to engage in horror with such bad faith interpretations or opinions, since his To The Future voice line does focus on the impossible, the surprises that the future might bring. Expect the unexpected, as he says!

Future, future, hmm … Our future slides back to the past. What else would be impossible then? Perhaps that blondie would accept an award on the stage of any film festival, or the lame horror novels written by my grandpa would win the Nobel Prize in Literature, haha … I mean, you can always expect the unexpected, my friends!

There is also the fact that his Inheritance Skill is LITERALLY named "Jump Scare," because even though it's an outdated practice, it requires a lot of redirection--to ease the viewer into a false sense of safety only to hit them with the real thing, which fits the way Horropedia's Incantations work! He shoots randomly or with his eyes closed and his shots are redirected to the enemy! It's like his Ultimate description says:

With that, I think I got everything off my chest and out of my brain. Sadly, I don't think I have many headcanons that I could ramble about without making this post longer than it should be?

I guess I like to think Horropedia is left-handed and wears his accesories on reverse to throw people off, if that counts? I also like to think that he just naturally assigns a piece of horror media that he knows to everyone he knows in his brain, and that's how he knows them as or remembers them. Oh! I also think he could figure out the plot of FNAF if he wanted!

#reverse 1999 #reverse: 1999 #reverse 1999 horropedia #horropedia #i blacked out for 3 hours to write this #almost 4 actually #i love him can you tell

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thedaveandkimmershow · 1 year

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I didn't fall in love with her because I thought she'd be a spectacular mom some day. I didn't propose to her because I thought she'd be the perfect parent. And when we got married, our ability to raise a child together was simply not on my mind although on any occasion Kimmer may have asked, my answer would've been sure. I'd like to have kids...

Some day.

Emphasis on the "some day" of course. Which continued to be my mantra right up to the moment she said "I want to start having kids". Or something like that. It was kind of a blur at the time so it's still a blur in my memory because the point was that she'd move the date from "some day"...

To right now.

Right then, obviously.

That answer "some day", by the way, is a wonderful answer. It meant I didn't have to think about parenthood. Like, at all. In a way... like, ever.

So that happened.

Of course the answer to the question of how good a parent either of us is is incomplete without the input of the persons being parented. They have their own take on the question as we have our own take as everyone else has their own take. There remains, however, my personal experience of what kind of mom Kimmer was and is from the perch of being a dad. From behind the scenes, if you will. For one thing, she'd wanted kids for a long time whereas that condition of human adulthood wasn't on my radar until she put it on my radar. As always, of course, the list of things they don't tell you about being a parent is pretty vast. Ultimately, the broad strokes of parenting commentary doesn't do justice to the breathtaking specifics that are relentless in all the ways they manifest. The first of which was how to handle this question:

What if we couldn't be parents?

And these:

What if she was never gonna be a mom?

What if we, what if she... couldn't get pregnant?

And what if she couldn't keep the baby.

We all know these are technical possibilities. But no one ever says Hey, we don't know if this is gonna work. They say We're gonna have a baby!

We're gonna have.

A baby.

There's never a question of IF if children's what you're going for. But there is a big IF. A huge IF. Several of them, in fact. And as a mom, as a dad, we ran into those IFs right from the start.

Now, you can gently correct me and say we don't actually become parents until we have children to parent. You can say we don't actually become moms and dads until, at the very least, pregnancy happens. And you'd be right, of course. All I can tell you is that the possibility of never being parents... was part of our experience of being parents.

I don't know how else to say that.

From a dad's point of view, from the point of view of someone who never grew up thinking about fatherhood or parenthood, Kimmer obviously knew a metric ton about babies and parenting. It helped, I suppose, that she was a medical professional. And, for the most part, her knowledge defined our success in having a baby and keeping it, you know, alive. However. The possession of medical knowledge about babies and toddlers and children is completely useless in the face of straight up medical emergencies. Because fear does its thing. You know? You're scared out of your mind. And the specter of are we really gonna be parents? rears its dreadful presence once again.

An ER doc put it this way:

When it's a baby, when it's a toddler, when it's a child, you know what to do. No sweat. But when it's your baby, when it's your toddler, when it's your child, you're no longer a nurse or a doctor or any kind of medical professional.

You're a frightened parent.

And that's the truth, my friends.

And it wasn't just the one time either. It was a number of times and it rattled what we thought our future as a family would be.

And that fear would be with us for a while.

The question of being a good mom or a good dad also has to be taken in context. Not as an excuse but as a reality. We weren't just a little family living in our little home. We didn't live in a bubble. We were subject to the world around us.

This isn't an exhaustive list, by any means... but it does capture some of the flavor of the complexity in which we swam:

We were both professionals pursuing careers. Much of our family life played out while we attended various churches, while we were youth leaders, while we did our professional things at camps. There wasn't a ton of money early on. But there was a ton of debt. There was school, of course. Pre-school. Kindergarten. Grade school. Jr. hi. Sr. Hi. College. There were friends of different quality who came and went and left their marks. Some of that was good. Some... not so good. There was music, of course. There were experiences and passions we both encouraged and enabled. There were foster children who were part of our family for a bit. There was definitely a potpourri of human experience across the spectrum. It wasn't just one thing. It was everything. Especially where relationships were involved. Any kind of relationship. Even when it came to our relationships with our families and their relationships with our daughter. It was good... until it wasn't.

And then we were on our own.

I said just now that we were also professionals pursuing our careers. Fortunately, we were able to share our abilities and knowledge with the girls. Kimmer, then, was both mom and a nurse, and then a nurse practitioner, and then a bunch of other states of medical and psych professionalism that all came with ever more letters after her name. She was a mom while she pursued those letters and that pursuit informed her abilities as a mom. Turns out knowing a thing or two (or three) about medicine and psychology, about how to navigate the stages of human development, comes in real handy when you're raising young human beings. And even though there were plenty of experiences and distractions and competing priorities swirling around our family life, our professional lives, and even just life... to my unpracticed eye, Kimmer was fully engaged with Linzy and then fully engaged with Rachel. As if she'd miraculously figured out how to exceed 100% time and effort.

I don't know how else to put that.

She seemed capable of so much more as a mom than I was capable of as a dad. In a way, for many many many years... I was learning on the job, playing catch-up. She just knew, you know? She was the one who always knew what to do and could navigate the things that needed navigating accordingly.

Now, fast forward a bunch, and the girls have gotten to calling Kimmer Mama Bear. I'm pretty sure Rachel whipped that out first. And for good reason. The girls could be in trouble in Antarctica and Kimmer would be their one and only call provided there's, you know, cell service in Antarctica. Mama Bear is also an acknowledgement of how much she Loves them and is invested in their personal success. And yes. She has gone to war on their behalf.

So what did that look like? Being fully engaged.

Well, when it's babies and toddlers we're talking about, in general, we're talking about physical care. After that, though, the care of mind and emotions comes into play and then never stops. Never.

Never never never never.

Never.

Call it the details of showing a human being at every stage of human development not only how to be the best human being they can be or just how to get through any given day... but also how to navigate all the stages of human development as well as all the different people passing through each of those stages of human development.

Mostly, of course, I'm talking about school. Teachers and friends, frenemies and homework and tests and was her teacher being mean just then? I'm talking about all the logistics of school that took us by surprise one day because before that we were on our time, our schedule that was, in a single moment, fully replaced by the requirements of schools and their schedules. Despite that plot twist, Kimmer was all over our new reality. And she guided the girls, and she made the calls about their education that were the right calls, and yeah. Sometimes she went to war on their behalf.

My point is that she was engaged with their lives every step of the way including that vast list of things you never hear about when you're gonna have a baby. The array of disagreements it was possible to have with your child and how those disagreements manifested over time. The things about frenemies and problematic teachers. About other parents. About health. About reading people. About the future. About taking the reins. About handling disappointment and loss and grief. About the circumstances that were straight up plot twists. Experiences that were not the stuff of Hallmark greeting cards.

In the most important ways, Kimmer operated as if the vows she took with me once upon a time were the same ones governing her relationships with the girls.

For better.

For worse.

For richer

For poorer.

In sickness.

And in health.

She absolutely walked with them through more of their lives than I did or ever wanted to. She was fully willing to engage more moments head freaking on than I was. Or even wanted to. She Loves them with a fierceness and an empathy and a compassion and a knowledge of what to do that I don't possess.

I don't know how else to put that.

So.

Was she a good mom?

Is she a good mom?

The answer's incomplete, of course, without the words of the human beings who call her Mom.

If I had to guess, though, I'd point to the fact they call her Mama Bear. And. If they were in trouble of any kind in Antarctica, she is the one and only call they'd make.

Provided, of course, there's cell service in Antarctica.

😉

#mother's day #motherhood #love #compassion #mama bear #parenthood #mom #mother #empathy #fierce

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littlemixnet · 3 years

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Little Mix on what it takes to survive being the most bullied band in pop

Still teenagers when they were catapulted to fame, superstardom came at a price for Little Mix. They open up to Francesca Babb about the soaring highs and crashing lows of the past nine years. It is the end of our YOU cover shoot, and I am facing the lesser-spotted sight of a barefaced Little Mix. Wet wipes swipe back and forth across their faces and, as the foundation departs in a deluge of coffee-coloured tissues, Jesy Nelson and Leigh-Anne Pinnock, both 29, and Jade Thirlwall and Perrie Edwards, both 27, visibly relax into their tracksuits and boyfriend jeans, shoulders dropping as they settle into themselves. I’m so used to seeing them contoured and camera ready that I assumed full glamour was their happy place. But perhaps the real Little Mix are not the war-paint-and-leotard-clad pop stars we’ve spent almost ten years watching grow up, but rather the four women they have become behind the glare of the spotlight. It’s those four women that I’m intrigued to meet. Since winning The X Factor nine years ago, there have been highs – selling over 50 million records globally, a significant percentage of which were self-penned, and creating enough accompanying make-up lines and merchandise to keep them and their families comfortable for the foreseeable future (recent reports suggest they have earned a combined £28.5 million to date). But there have also been lows – perpetual picking apart by both the public and the press, bullying and vitriol from online trolls. The most extreme cases of which led Jesy to attempt suicide during Little Mix’s early days in 2013 (she regards a tweet from the controversial Katie Hopkins – ‘Packet Mix have still got a chubber in their ranks. Less Little Mix. More Pick n Mix’ – as the ‘pinnacle point’ for her depression) and pushed Perrie into an ongoing struggle with anxiety. Fame has changed them. In some ways they are still youthful and silly – dropping phrases into conversation that wouldn’t be out of place in a playground – yet, in others, they are wise beyond their years, diving headfirst into battles on feminism, race and mental health. They’re fun enough to be light relief, smart enough to inspire a generation struggling with the pressures of youth and social media even before a pandemic was thrown at them, and ballsy enough to leave Simon Cowell’s record label because they didn’t feel he had their best interests at heart. ‘It’s never really been a cruise, has it?’ Jade ponders, a copy of social activist Bell Hooks’ 2002 feminist theory Communion: The Female Search For Love in her hand (not for show, I might add; when I ask her about it, she is well versed in its content). ‘It’s either been a really big high, or a really big low.’ Jesy, who has found herself the target of some of the cruelest contempt from the world outside Little Mix, agrees: ‘Some of the best times, some of the worst times.’ Comments on her weight, her looks, her place in the band, comments that she should take her own life, all led her into a deep depression and the aforementioned suicide attempt. Her documentary last year, Jesy Nelson: Odd One Out, revealed her journey through it all and, while harrowing, it is essential viewing on the realities of growing up in a world dominated by social media. ‘Before we got in the group, I never looked at myself and thought, “I don’t like that” – I don’t think any of us did. I never thought, “Oh god, I’m fat”, and then we got in the industry, and we all started wanting to change things about ourselves. It’s so sad. There are things [in the past] I definitely wish I hadn’t done,’ she says, referring to the suicide attempt, in which she took an overdose after a two-year battle with depression and an eating disorder. ‘But would I be the person I am today if I hadn’t gone through all of that?’ ‘There was a time when it was worse than it is now,’ adds Leigh-Anne, who has increasingly used her own Instagram channel to vocalise her experience of racism, both overt and underlying, throughout her time in the band. ‘I guess we’re taking steps forward, but I fear for my [future] daughters…’ ‘It makes me not want to have a kid,’ agrees Jesy. ‘Those insecurities that we all have now because of social media, imagine having that embedded in you as a child?’ Before you write them off as four very lucky girls ungratefully complaining about a lifestyle so many dream of, I should point out that they are fully aware of the paradox of their privilege. I suppose the point is, it’s not too much to ask to not be bullied to the point of hospitalisation as a by-product, is it? ‘Little Mix has changed our lives for the better, and our families’ lives, and we have achieved so much,’ says Perrie. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ agrees Jesy (a warning I will hear repeatedly throughout our hour together, perhaps thanks to almost a decade of their quotes being blasted out of context for click-bait). ‘I’m not going to sit here and say we’ve got a terrible life, because we haven’t, but I do think our innocence was taken from us.’ It’s a while since the girls last did any press. Lockdown saw a halt to any activity they had planned, including the launch of their new talent show, BBC1’s Little Mix: The Search (in which they, well, search for a new band to mentor and join them on tour). But the time apart has not diminished their ability to finish each other’s sentences and jump to each other’s aid. It has, it seems, been really rather good for them and allowed them to come back fired up for the release of their sixth album, Confetti, which came out this week. ‘It was needed,’ agrees Jesy. ‘We’re never not with each other and we’re always busy. Our mornings start early, we finish really late.’ Being at home has meant more time spent with their families, with Jade even starting her own show on MTV with her mum Norma. Called Served!, the self-filmed series saw the pair interview celebrity drag queens and challenge each other to cooking competitions. ‘I love drag culture,’ she says, ‘and me mam was by herself in lockdown, so I thought it’d be something nice to keep her entertained.’ ‘Your mum could be on Loose Women,’ Leigh-Anne muses. ‘Imagine our mams on a show!’ shrieks Jade. ‘Nobody else would get a word in edgeways with my mam,’ laughs Perrie. ‘Ooh, when Debbie goes off on Twitter,’ says Jade, of Perrie’s mum’s habit of weighing in on comments from haters. ‘My mam will text me, have you seen Debbie’s been going off on someone!’ It is interesting that all four talk frequently about their mums throughout our chat, and yet there is no mention of fathers. While their mums often appear on Instagram, a sighting of Perrie’s dad on her 23rd birthday was extremely rare. Perhaps the Little Mix dads’ absence in the narrative is because the four girls were predominantly raised by their mothers (all of their parents separated when they were younger), and another reason the group’s bond is so tight. Little Mix are each other’s wall of arms, their own personal bodyguards. Jesy, they unanimously agree, is Scary Mix (although I find her a delight), which is interesting given her own inability to bat off other people’s words. ‘When it’s you on your own dealing with something personally,’ Jesy says, ‘It’s completely different. You feel so vulnerable alone, but we are a force when we’re together.’ It’s not hard to see, in today’s social-media obsessed society where there is little retribution for cruelty, why four attractive, successful young women, with attractive, successful young boyfriends (two footballers – Perrie dates Liverpool’s Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Leigh-Anne is engaged to Watford’s Andre Gray – while Jade is with Rizzle Kicks singer Jordan Stephens and Jesy is going out with Our Girl actor Sean Sagar), who seem to be living a dream life have found themselves at the heart of a whirlwind of vitriol. There was the infamous spat with Piers Morgan, in which he mocked them for posing naked but for the insults that have been hurled at them painted on their bodies. He accused them of using sex to sell records and called them ‘foul-mouthed, talentless, clothes-allergic little dimwits’, which is not how I find them to be. ‘I take Piers with a pinch of salt,’ Jesy says, rolling her eyes. ‘He does it to cause drama, so I take no notice. When we won The X Factor, we didn’t look like a generic girl band: we’re all different shapes and sizes, we didn’t dress sexy, so immediately everyone was, “What’s this?”’ ‘Usually, when you see a girl band, they’re perfection, they have six-packs – and we didn’t,’ continues Jesy. ‘People saw us as kids, so even though we’re now women, people still think of us that way, so when we come out on stage in leotards, they think, “That’s disgusting!”’ ‘One Direction didn’t get the s**t we get, because they’re men,’ states Leigh-Anne. ‘It’s like, “They’re four girls, let’s come at them”. As soon as it’s girls, they think, “Oh you slag.”’ ‘When it’s men, it’s celebrated, but the minute women sexualise themselves and feel powerful doing it, we’re told to rein it in,’ adds Jade. ‘We’re conditioned to think that women are there to be these innocent and pure beings and the minute you step out of that, it’s carnage.’ Little Mix, however, are not scared of embracing that carnage and of sparking a debate. For their show The Search, Jade describes how it was important for them to set the tone on respect when each new person auditioned. ‘Because we are small women, it’s important to show people that they need to respect us, that we know what we’re talking about and we need to be listened to,’ she says. ‘There’s no nastiness,’ continues Jesy about the show, which has been praised for modernising and freshening up the age-old TV format. ‘There’s no making anyone feel uncomfortable for entertainment.’ They also insisted a large part of their budget be dedicated to looking after the contestants’ mental health, understanding, first hand, the pitfalls of talent shows. The Search is not their first attempt at diversifying their talent. As a group, they have LMX make-up line and also a perfume, Style By Little Mix. Subsequently, they have become expert businesswomen, refusing to make the mistakes of pop groups past, so often left completely penniless at the end of their careers. ‘I remember walking into an early label meeting and saying, “This is who we want to be, this is the campaign we want, this is the imagery we want,”’ says Jade. ‘We knew our brand from the get go and we very much steered that ship.’ It’s a long way from their (as Jesy puts it) ‘working-class backgrounds’. Since joining the band, each one has bought their mum a house and, while their tale is not entirely rags to riches, the jump from Primark to Prada in recent years has certainly been significant. When it comes to business, Perrie describes herself and Leigh-Anne as the ones who will often seek a compromise in difficult situations, while they send Jesy and Jade in when deals need to be made. ‘Jesy’s the badass,’ Perrie laughs. ‘Whenever I’m scared, I’ll stand behind her. She’s the one who puts her foot down in a boardroom full of men and says, “It’s going to be this way.” But we pick our battles. We don’t just argue about every decision – it’s when we feel we have to.’ ‘Nobody could say that we are difficult, and if they do, they’re lying,’ says Leigh-Anne adamantly. Adds Jesy: ‘We know what we want, and we know what kids want.’ Little Mix have lived over a third of their lives in the spotlight. They’ve seen how things work, how things don’t, and they’ve learnt how to cope with it all. The lows may have been spectacularly low, but the highs have surpassed any of their expectations. Their story is not your classic fairytale, but it’s one they have learnt they can write their own ending for. If the Little Mix I meet today is anything to go by, I wouldn’t expect that ending to come any time soon. Little Mix’s new album Confetti is out now. Their movie LM5: The Tour Film will be in cinemas nationwide on 21 and 22 November.

#little mix #you magazine 2020 #article #2020 #confetti promo

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beastars-takes · 4 years

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Zootopia Takes: The Power of Really Liking Each Other

Our main event, Beastars Takes, will resume soon, but in the meantime I want to talk about one of my favorite movie relationships:

Has this been talked about to death by other people? Yes. But this is my blog and I write it for free so I can do what I want.

Note: this is not a shipping post--this is just an examination of their canonical relationship in the movie and why it rules.

At first glance, this is your typical enemies-to-friends story. I love those. But while the typical arc tends to involve two characters who can’t stand each other, who eventually develop a grudging respect for one another (often through some kind of shared ordeal) and maybe thaw into actual friendliness at the end. Zootopia packs all of that into the first half--by the midway point they are clearly not just allies, but friends, and by the end of the film they’re inseparable.

It’s important to recognize this isn’t just for the hell of it, or just to be cute--the closeness and trust they build is the linchpin of their success in the final moments of the movie.

All the reasons why, after the jump.

Something I talked about in the previous post was the messaging of Zootopia, and I don’t want to rehash it too much here. It’s a movie about prejudice, and the work it takes to overcome it. A key theme (one that it shares with Beastars, incidentally) is that friendships with those who are different from you are hard--but they are worth it.

Part 1: They Hate Each Other! (Right?)

Now...it goes without saying that when these two first meet, they bounce off each other hard. Each is seeing the other at their absolute worst.

Judy can’t stand Nick because he takes every bit of optimism she has about this world and throws it back in her face. She want to use him as a prop in her vision of an equal society, where “not all foxes” are crooks. He laughs at her. He humiliates her. All he has to do is walk away, but he takes his time. He twists the knife.

For his part, Nick sees a laughably ineffectual bunny who condescends to him and threatens him with jail for the crime of...humiliating her. She may not personally be a threat to him, but she wields the institutional power of the ZPD--a power he has plenty of reason to be afraid of--and she does it irresponsibly.

On first viewing, Nick inarguably wins this exchange. He avoids arrest, reads her to absolute filth and leaves her stuck in cement.

And he makes her really sad. Nice!

But, and I don’t pretend to be the first person to have pointed this out, on second viewing it’s obvious he can guess her story so well because it’s basically his story. The only difference, in his mind, is that he’s accepted the reality that he’ll never be allowed to live the life he wants, while she is still vainly pursuing hers.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the people I’ve met who have always most pissed me off are the people who remind me of things I hate about myself. The people who seem to embody the flaws I’ve worked to minimize. Nick’s naive hope is what has brought him the most pain in his life. He sees this bunny full of the same naive hope, surmises that she’s facing the same failures he did and yet stubbornly refusing to learn from them. It’s irritating.

Pictured: irritation.

Maybe I am projecting, but if Nick is anything like me, he probably didn’t walk away entirely happy from this exchange. Yes, he “won,” but he was also reminded of everything about himself that he least wanted to think about.

Part 2: They Are Not Very Good at Hating Each Other

So, the thing about Judy is, she is naive. By default, she assumes people are her friend. But she’s not stupid.

Nick assumes she is stupid, not least because she hasn’t wisely given up on her dreams like he has, and...he learns that she maybe not so fun to pick on after all.

So they wind up doing the first part of this enemies-to-friends routine, allies of necessity.

So, naturally, because he is Him, he makes it his mission to torment her.

In fact, we get two whole scenes where all he does he does is watch her struggle and make this face.

The first read of this behavior is that he’s just enjoying the failures of someone he hates. He says as much later. But I would also argue--from a viewer’s perspective--Judy is ridiculously entertaining and charming throughout these encounters. She wears her heart on her sleeve, and it’s hard not to like people like that.

Is there more happening here than just schadenfreude? I won’t pretend to know for sure. But worth considering.

By the time they’re investigating the limousine, his sabotage has diminished into something more like gentle trolling. And you can’t see this face, in context...

...and tell me she isn’t starting to like him, at least a little bit.

He’s also starting to help! By the time they’re past the minor detour of almost being murdered by a mob boss, he’s entirely cooperative, helping her conduct interviews and look for clues. The movie doesn’t call particular attention to this, but it almost did.

Finally, let’s look at Nick’s behavior when they’re being chased by a rabid jaguar. He could have absolutely booked it, with no regard for the cop who was blackmailing him into helping her.

These moments go by so quickly, but they’re hugely revealing of his true character, even before he defends her in front of Chief Bogo.

He picks her up when she falls.

More importantly, when he gets to the skytram, his first instinct isn’t to jump in--it’s to hold the door for her:

He sees she can’t make it, and she even tells him to leave without her. He doesn’t. He holds the door until he can’t anymore, and as a result he’s nearly killed.

Nick is a good boy.

Part 3: They Are Friends Now

She save his life, so he saves her job. This is a key story beat, and it’s a Disney movie, so there’s not a lot of subtlety (except how the specular highlights in Judy’s eyes fade as Bogo asks for her badge--the light literally goes out of her. Go watch).

But it’s such a sweet moment of teamwork--he was contemptuous toward her from the start because she believed in herself. This is the first time she’s simply given up in the whole movie, and he steps up. Because he believes in her now.

And she believes in him! Or, she wants to.

Judy’s supportiveness here is sweet, but it’s also still a little selfish. It’s not that different from their interaction at the ice cream shop, really: she wants to meet a fox who defies stereotypes, who is easy for her to like. Someone who ticks all the boxes to prove her family wrong.

When he starts being more foxy, later--self-identifying as a predator, showing his claws, challenging her--we learn that her supportiveness is conditional.

Am I being too hard on her? Sure. She’s been in bunny country her whole life. She’s new to this and she’s trying. But that’s where she’s at.

But still! They’re friends now. They’re no longer pretending they don’t like each other. Judy’s openly encouraging, Nick is fully in her corner, and we get a few cute sequences where they keep being more and more impressed with each other.

He’s still not above affectionately messing with her, and she’s getting worse at pretending to dislike it.

And he trusts her enough to let her flush him down a toilet...

Which gives us this heartbreaking shot where he thinks she’s drowned. He cares a whole lot about this bunny.

She likes him too! Enough to want to team up on a more permanent basis. This is pretty standard-fare enemies-to-friends stuff now, but considering where we started, and considering they’ve known each other for all of two days? Not bad!

It’s clear this moment means far more to him than it does to her, too. It’s actually taken very little persuading from Judy to get him to step up and be brave and helpful and trustworthy. The fact that he’s turned around and opened up to her so fast suggests he’s been ready for an opportunity like this for his entire life, and never got it. I mean, look at his face.

The foundational flaw in her worldview is still there, though, and it’s about to do almost-irreparable damage to their whirlwind friendship.

Part 5: Fuck!

So Judy gives her press conference, and gives a great example of why police usually answer every question with “the matter is currently under investigation,” or “we’re not prepared to comment further at this time.” Honestly, though, this is on Bogo--I had coworkers who once did some press interviews, and they spent over a week doing media training. They didn’t even break a major kidnapping case. So, you know.

So she repeats some weird race science stuff she assumes is true because someone in a lab coat said it, which is amusingly similar to how race science (or “race realism”) often propagates--people with low-rent doctorates from crappy universities write a bunch of scientifically shoddy material and people say “well, he has a PhD!”

And then Nick has a PTSD flashback? I don’t want to be irresponsible and make an armchair diagnosis, but also...that is absolutely what is depicted on screen.

You’re not immediately “better” after something like this, which is why I cut Nick a bit of slack when he basically blows up their friendship.

Judy...doesn’t get it. It’s completely heartbreaking, because she likes him, and doesn’t understand why he’s mad, and isn’t self-reflective enough to stop and think maybe he has a point. Not until it’s too late. He tests her, and she fails.

Their friendship has always been a little inequal. He’s trusted her with everything, shown her his deepest vulnerabilities. She’s never trusted him completely.

So he leaves.

I don’t want to impugn her professionalism by suggesting she wouldn’t have quit the force if she hadn’t had that friendship-ending fight, but, you know. Maybe.

This is the second time she gives up, and this time he’s not there to pick her up again.

Judy is intensely goal-oriented, and I don’t think she realized what Nick’s friendship meant to her, as the first person in the city who truly believed in her, until it was too late. Judy is sweet and well-meaning but emotional intelligence is not really her strong suit (which is actually cool to see in a female Disney protagonist, imo).

So, while it would have been nice for her to track Nick down immediately and apologize, I think it makes sense for them to spend time apart. Her own self-perception has been shattered, and she needs time to figure out how she went so wrong.

So when she does come back, she delivers one of the best animated apologies I’ve ever seen. Only AtLA compares, in my mind.

Part 6: They Are Much Better Friends Now

Nick forgives her, because of course he does.

(Sidebar--people talk about how he kept her carrot pen the whole time they were apart. He also kept his handkerchief from Ranger Scouts, AND he only wears shirts that match the wallpaper in his mother’s house. He desperately needs a hug.)

Credit to Nick also, who can’t fight and has no police training whatsoever, who has multiple times been almost killed helping her out, now agreeing to help her out again. She’s not even threatening him with jail this time!

We, the viewers, are then rewarded with this great montage of them being best friends.

She’s finally stopped pretending not to be amused by his shenanigans.

(One other sidebar here--Nick is canonically a really gentle character. For all their adventuring, this is only time in the movie he gets physical with anyone: to protect the bunny. Again, he definitely can’t fight and immediately gets smacked across the room. But it’s the thought that counts, right?)

Per the post title, more visual evidence of them really liking each other.

Judy trips on a dead body, and here we get the second time in the movie that Judy tells Nick to leave without her, and he won’t--this time, he refuses explicitly.

Which then gives us the opportunity for the big moment--the culmination of all this care and intimacy and trust.

In order to con Bellwether, she lets him stalk her, and bite her throat. This has been often pointed out, but it’s important--throughout the movie, Judy’s wriggling rabbit nose has been used as a signifier of fear and suspicion. It wriggles when she’s spying on Nick at the beginning. It wriggles like hell when he confronts her after her press conference.

Not here. Doesn’t move. It’s a great, clearly intentional animation choice that tells a close observer (or more likely, a repeat viewer) that she’s completely unafraid.

She trusts him.

I could write a whole other post about how well-scripted this movie is, how every scene is doing half a dozen different things, but the way the personal and the professional come together here, the way the threads of prejudice and friendship and the police case all tie together in this moment. It’s good shit.

This is basically where things end, in terms of character development, but we get a bunch more shots of them clearly adoring each other:

So there it is.

To sum up, certainly not suggesting this movie invented “characters liking each other,” or anything like that. But it goes above and beyond in portraying a friendship that’s not just one born of circumstance, one that’s authentic and unmistakably loving. Characters who enjoy spending time with each other, regardless of what’s going on around them.

I hope everyone is able to experience friendships like that. I absolutely treasure the few I have.

Appendix: The Shipping Thing

I hope I’ve made all this ship-agnostic, which was my intention. I personally like the ship, and I think the reason it resonates with people is because that love and trust and closeness is clearly there, and a romantic relationship creates a lot more easy opportunities for dialing those things up even higher.

I would also argue, if pressed, that the amount of teasing and physicality that happens reads as pretty flirty. If they were humans I knew in real life, I’d definitely think there was something going on there. But I’m an American, where touching and emotional intimacy tends to be read as romantic. Also, animals are a lot more cuddly than humans. So who knows? I think it’s perfectly reasonable to read them as platonic friends until the end of time.

But, one way or another, they love each other a lot. Shout out to this, one of the most emotionally rewarding relationships I’ve ever seen in a cartoon.

#zootopia #zootropolis #zootopia takes #judy hopps #nick wilde #disney

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semi-imaginary-place · 3 years

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rewatching decadence part 2 because part 1 got too long

ep7: Getting to see the game Deca-Dence as a new player would with the opening cutscene, skipping the TOS, character creation and all was a good touch. Also the fact that Kaburagi could look like anything, but he wants to look like mid 40′s dad both times. I wonder who it was that decided Minato should vape. The conversation on the top of Deca-Dence is real interesting because its like only 20% of the actual conversation is spoken out loud and the other 80% left unsaid, so we have to guess what was left unsaid. Minato tells Kaburagi to not make things worse for himself, condoning his actions, but also vows to himself to help Kabu even though it is very dangerous for him. Kaburagi leaves after regretfully saying he doesn’t want to cause Minato more trouble, and yet his current and future actions are and will be doing just that. The obscuring fog in this scene adds to the sense of distance or disconnect between these two. Somewhere over the past 7 years they have fallen off the same page.

This episode again highlights how while for the Tankers this is life and death situation, for the cyborgs Deca-Dence is a game. We get a shot of some Gears lightheartedly discussing how fun the latest game event was, followed right after with what that event meant for the Tankers as we see a makeshift medbay in the streets filled with the dead and dying to really drive home the gap of compassion between the two groups. Minato is one of the few cyborgs we really see besides Kaburagi and the show uses him to show how cyborgs don’t think of humans as people. Humans to the cyborgs are just npcs in a game. Now anime and manga about videogames have been around a long time and were especially popular in the mid 2000s (mmorpgs especially) after which the genre dropped the “in a game” part but kept everything else which were today know as the isekai genre. Hot takes like “the videogame characters are actually people all along” aren’t new either, but Deca-Dence is one of the most successful in generating sympathy and compassion for the Other by flipping the script. Most of those series come from the perspective of the player and show the player coming to care about the npcs. This often isn’t done very well or comes off as patronizing, like the other characters act in service of making the mc look like a good guy instead of actually acting like fully realized people in their own right. (*cough* sao *cough*). In contrast to this, Deca-Dence initially starts from the perspective of Natsume who is human just like us the audience, and thus predisposing us to feeling with and feeling for her. So later when its revealed the humans of this world aren’t seen as people by the cyborgs or the the corporation that rules all their lives, it is granted greater weight in the context of all of us who have played videogames before and met npcs and maybe not cared all that much about them. Decadence places the viewer in the position of the npc, the Other.

Episode 7 is also the beginning of several letters exchanged between Kaburagi and Natsume. Its a presence that lingers long after the person has left and also acts as a contrast to the call/social networking apps of the cyborgs. In episode 5 we saw Kaburagi choose Natsume over following the orders of Solid Quake, but through to episode 7 he still believed in its system. Look even at episode 6 where he still believed that if he worked hard and played by the rules, the system would reward him and everything would be ok and compare that calm assurance in episode 6 to his mountain frustration in episode 7. He’s starting to see how thing are run in Deca-Dence makes life really hard and kind of terrible for the Tankers. This frustration at the system culminates at the end of the episode when he realizes the real human cost of perpetuating this system of oppression in how it hurts Natsume. I mean “Late stage capitalism made my adopted daughter Natsume cry, so I'm going to dismantle it.“ is a joke and pretty funny, but like, that’s what actually what happens. Both Kaburagi and Natsume further the theme of pushing the limits. Kaburagi realizes the limits of his society and why its time to break them down, while of Natsume’s side we see her struggle in the face of things much larger than her. Much like how the cyborgs are stuck in their lifestyles of working for Solid Quake, earning oxyone, and playing Deca-Dence, the Tankers are stuck in their role in society to leave their fates to the Gears and Deca-Dence. So Natsume asking everyone to take charge of their own lives and close that the hole is them stepping out of the comfort of what they’ve always done, which is leave it to someone else (deca-dence administration, gears, etc.). Natsume asks the Tankers to push their limits, the step outside of what they’ve always done and to believe in things they thought were impossible to do. We see Fei representing the belief a lot of Tankers that nothing needs to change, thus nothing should change and they will not act to bring change to their own lives. The Tankers live lives that are decided for them. The Deca-Dence administration controls their population, and the system eliminates any who would disrupt it. They don’t have a lot of control and are resigned to live like that, until Natsume comes along. This episode we see her do what she does the entire series, inspire people to be more. Natsume’s doing alright, she might not be where she wants to be but she’s taken steps in that direction. Where Nstsume is psychologically contrast Kaburagi who’s a bit of a mess realizing he can no longer live under the thumb of Solid Quake’s Deca-Dence system and is kind of floundering about. When kaburagi meets Natsume again... he is so awkward, I’m getting second hand embarressmen. and again the assault jokes have got to stop. The shot of the empty chair calls back to the first episode and another talk between Natsume and Kaburagi. I always love it when an anime plays the credits early.

ep8: again the importance of the individual over the group with kaburagi’s lines at the beginning on why he’s taking down the gadoll factory. I’m just thinking about how kaburagi is certain minato kept his avatar. and everyone just agreeing that minato has that vibe. I really love the avatar retrieval part of the first episode. Its a heist sequence. I love heists!. They also did a good job with pacing and tension in that part. Still can’t believe the creators put a sex toy in this show but at least this joke is actually funny. Oh Minato pulled strings to get Kaburagi out of the poor jail. I missed that part. but now the two of them are not only on different pages, but on different books. Minato doesn’t see the tankers as people and follows the Deca-Dence system on what is good and what is bad, so he can’t comprehend why Kaburagi is throwing away everything the Deca-Dence system values for something the system has deems less than worthless. While Kaburagi has formed a moral compass independent of this system, he sucks at communication and doesn’t explain anything to Minato. Interesting how Minato views bugs as bad but has made an exception for kaburagi and probably did some mental gymnastics to do so. It reminds of those homophobic family members that make an exception for their gay family member. Minato never wanted anything but to be by Kaburagi’s side so he prioritizes Kaburagi above pretty much everything else which is why while he defends the establishment, he also breaks rules for Kaburagi. Their little convo continues the same dialectic, Kaburagi’s been inspired by Natsume to push the limits of himself and society, to choose how he lives instead of letting the Deca-Dence system tell him. Kaburagi underwent character development when Minato wasn’t looking and he can’t recognize him anymore but desperately wants to. Kaburagi moving forwards without him and him realizing that he was never as much a priority to Kaburagi as Kaburagi was to him, means that Minato’s really hurting by the end of the scene, and he doesn’t take it out on Kaburagi, he just leaves. ...if it isn’t obvious by now, minato is my favorite character. gotta love the gay robot having a mid life crisis. (i mean his feeling aren;t necessarily romantic, but you know the joke I’m referencing). Turkey just wakes up and chooses evil every day huh. I predict someone on tumblr with a history of unhealthy relationships is horny for turkey.

ep9: why does the reactor look like a cyborg core? Again. WHYYY does Donatello have a gun??? idiots let him keep a working gun. I love the contrast of the actual pretty gritty situation of the prison riot being represented with super cartoony slapstick animations. This probably saves on frames as well as keep the series from getting too dark, because if you think about it the labor camp conditions are pretty horrifying but its disguised with cartoony designs and wacky characters. Kaburagi and Natsume are doing very important plot things, but the core of episode 9 are Sark and Turkey. Through them we see the same conversation that has been repeated through out the series of conforming to society and staying in line, that things won’t ever change so you should just duck your head and follow order, or the “I’m comfortable how things are” versus you should make your own choices with live life how to want to, to push your limits. Turkey sees the Deca-Dence system as absolute and eternal and thus tries to play by the system and help it continue by selling out everyone else. Sark is passive and doesn't really have an opinion of his own, just following whatever the others are doing whether its Kaburagi stealing his avatar or Turkey in betraying everyone. Sark unlike Turkey isn’t malicious, he wants the best for everyone but also isn’t quite willing to put himself at risk for others. After seeing everyone be destroyed as a consequence of following Turkey however, his new resolve and subsequent suicide bombing is the only reason the plan ends up succeeding. For total destruction of the gadoll factory two things were needed: flipping the kill switch on all the gadoll in the dome, and destroying the reactor powering the factory. We aren’t told how Jill and Kaburagi originally planned to destroy the reactor (like was he just suppose to wander around until they bumped into it?), but Sark’s explosion is what allowed Kaburagi and Natsume to get away from Hugin. Without Sark, Hugin would have totally caught them. So it was Sark taking charge of his own life and pushing his limits that saved them all. That said, if the explosion was powerful enough to reach all the way up the giant tube and destroy the reactor, why didn’t it break the tube and why didn’t it destroy everyone left in the prison? ah well it makes thematic sense so I’ll let this pass.

So I’ve talked before about how Deca-Dence’s ending could be improved to build on some of the themes established in the first couple episodes. The problem is that this show isn’t pushing a narrative of collaboration and the power of collective bargaining, its pushing an individualist narrative about how each and every person can reach out and better themself. Now I don’t think these two themes are mutually exclusive, but it would take a very delicate touch as well as an attentive and thoughtful audience to successfully weave these two theme together into a nuanced whole. And if a rewrite were to happen with the minimal amount of changes, I think ep 10 is a good divergence point. The final little arc is about the rogue gadoll outside of the Deca-Dence system and the threat of total annihilation by solid quake, and while big kaiju fights look cool, they don’t quite deal with dismantling systems of oppression at the hands of your corporate overlords. So, I would have preferred something like the cyborgs and Tankers coming together to seize the means of production, destroy Solid Quake, and take its assets for themselves. The ideal rewrite situation though would for this all to be 24 episodes and the big gadoll to be the episode 12 climax while taking down Solid Quake happen in ep 23-24. And since we’re doing a rewrite, Natsume kinda drops off as the main character after episode 5 and I’d like to see her back at the forefront of the show.

ep10: If this show had leaned more into the futility of Natsume seeking to improve herself within a system that rendered it meaningless, it would have ended up much darker, but I also think it would have been richer. Ah poor Natsume, she’s at a low point since the context of what she has been doing has wildly changed, afterall, what’s the point of improving yourself if nothing else ever changes and what you do doesn’t matter. The letter writing continues and it is good. So I’m not going to question how the exit tunnel is still intact, but watching into robot kaburagi angrily drive a car and swear is really funny. I’ve been wondering for a while, the humans literally live in a fuel tank, how is there enough light to grow plants in there? Like as part of the post-apocalyptic aesthetic, a lot of Tankers have little house plants which in addition to being inside the fuel tank, are also inside their houses. oh yeah for any who didn’t get it. The reason as a child Natsume went into cardiac arrest and her chip was read as dead wasn’t because of the severity of her injuries, Deca-Dence’s system had deemed her too dangerous to live and flipped her kill switch.

ep11: on a thematic level I might be meh, but the writing and execution are what really pull the ending through. Everything is nicely set up from the mutated gadoll the victim of animal abuse several episodes earlier to fighting hugin in the factory being how hugin finds out about natsume. I think about Jill’s lines here, that no matter how hard you try to keep things from changing, you’re just fighting the inevitable. Also Natsume took Kaburagi’s switching bodies really well like seeing someone you care about die in front of you but then surprise they just got another body would give most people such whiplash. “our bodies are under the system’s control, but our core’s are independent of it” I’m still thinking about this. It makes sense given how the first generation of cyborgs where humans with mechanical implants, but cyborg’s cores are still such a mystery. The things you can’t control are a part of life too. In Deca-Dence bugs are uncertainties that the master control system doesn’t know what to do with. More than just individualism good, here we get a little more nuance to Deca-Dence (the show)’s theme. Jill was one of the creators of the Deca-Dence game (giant mech, control system, and all), and they tried to create perfect system where everything was under its control and order could be maintained forever, and this inevitably failed (the show tells us). Trying to perfectly order everything is to attempt the impossible, disorder will always creep in and those little individual differences should be celebrated. and is to the backdrop of an old Deca-Denca(robot) part that is rusting away, plants and animals overtaking it much like how the Deca-Dence’s currently enforced status quo of the game will fall away in the face of those it deems bugs. wait did we ever figure out what the bug was that jill left in deca-dence? mmmm I’m still thinking about Minato logging out because the system told him to but unwilling to let things end this way so physically going back down to earth in his real body. Facing the possibility of truly losing Kaburagi forever is what pushes Minato to question following the Deca-Dence master control system. He totally became a bug for Kaburagi. I doubt Kaburagi had any idea how much Minato wanted to hear the words “let’s fight together to the end”, but offered the thing he truly desires, Minato probably would have done anything. mmm he’s got it bad. there’s also that linking Kaburagi and Deca-Dence’s core takes two people and yet, Kaburagi didn’t bring anyone with him. Which is terrible planning, but allowed for this really great scene. that he knew Minato would come after him. And then the last thing me sees in Minato. Minato truly is ride or die. literally. He could have gone back to the spaceship so that he’d survive no matter what, but he choose to stay. If the plan succeeds then he will see it through with/right beside/literally inside of Kaburagi, and if it fails and Kaburagi is annihilated when Solid Quake wipes the dome, Minato will also be annihilated along side Kaburagi.

ep12: so kaburagi just straight up demands admin privileges and the governing sys is like “sure”. Yeah pretty sure the governing system convo was a season 2 hook to show the big wigs. The independent all governing system tells Kaburagi that all this, him and bugs are a part of the system’s learning process, to which Kaburagi responds that all that doesn’t matter since he’s going to do what he wants independent/regardless of the governing system. the context in which you do things doesn’t matter. Also I never pointed it out since its like the 4th wall of scifi, everyone is just trained to suspend their disbelief, but oxyone is total bullshit. A non toxic liquid energy dense fuel that can be concentrated into orbit range lasers. The tankers all helping Natsume push the spare part is a feel good moment seeing everyone working together. Its an unnecessarily scene for the purpose of including the tankers in the action, since the part wasn’t ever really needed and the writers didn’t have to have it severed by the laser to begin with. the Natsume montage overlayed with the music is very good. wait. i just realized, limiter release can be reversed. Afterall, Kaburagi released his limiters with his first avatar, and if he had still been fully connected to it when hugin killed that avatar, cyborg Kaburagi should have died too but he didn’t and just immediately logged in on a different account. Kabu-Dence releasing his limits here and literally giving all of himself to destroy omega is fulfilling both for his character arc and on an emotional level. This entire show has been about pushing one’s limits and making your own choices, and it culminates here’s in Kaburagi literally releasing his limiter, thus putting him in mortal danger, and then giving every last ounce of himself to the path he has decided. The destruction of the mech fortress Deca-Dence is also symbolic of the end of the game of the Deca-Dence mmorpg as we know it. wait wait did Kaburagi hold on just long enough to hear Natsume thank him. aaaaahhh and then the ed song plays!! and then the play the new mmo intro scene. Still real weird that they’re using a cyborg brain as a ball.

#deca dence #deca-dence #decadence #deca_dence #anime #reviews

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aquirius555-musings · 3 years

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A “Modest” Introduction

What is the point of this blog? Do you even care?

Context is Key, so Get to Know Me

For those who find me here, I am Aquirius (not Aquarius, Aquirius). The word “qui” is within my actual name and a nickname I’ve had from a young age. I am an Aquarius sun, and heavily identify with this placement. I am a nonbinary individual (They/Them preferred). I am a neurodivergent individual with ADHD and diagnosed chronic depression and anxiety. I am a witch and nature is my spirituality. I am a writer and content creator who became caught up in the throws of a privileged, catholic upbringing. This meant college and a career path in business.

I went to school and was an over-accomplished student due to my ADHD brain and hyper-focus on “winning” and “success” (most notably financial success), because that’s what I was taught was important. Just before my senior year of university began, I lost one of my best friends at the age of 21, suddenly, and due to something no one saw coming or could stop...a seemingly random case of cardio-respiratory failure. This altered the course of my life, the way that I saw my self, and how I valued my life and the lives of those I love.

After half a year of disassociation, panic attacks, and inability to function as a human adult, I somehow made it to graduation. After not applying to a single job due to my mental and emotional state, I took the only job available to me. One I was afforded due to my privilege. I got an interview and offer at a job back home through a networking opportunity I only had because of my father, who was a businessman in my hometown.

My Turning Point

It took less than 2 years working there, and being out in the “real” world, for what felt like the very first time, to realize how everything I have worked for in my life was for something that I was conditioned to believe, and not something I did believe. I “woke up” as they say.

Waking up and uncovering your true identity is an experience many (if not all) twenty-sometings can relate to. What did it for me was the immense sexism, homophobia and ageism I experienced alongside the racism and other problematic behaviors I witnessed throughout this new world around me that I was meant to make my career. The business world, especially tech and start-ups, is a life-sucking and it values profit and “new” innovation over being human.

I made to leave this world that I had worked so hard to be accepted into. I have now successfully separated myself. I left my last office/corporate job back in March of 2021 (now July, 2021) and I moved 1500 miles to a tiny mountain town in Colorado shortly after.

Get to the point, Qui!

I am now focused on what I want to do with my life, my love, my creativity, and my time.

I went to school to be a leader in business for other women (I am AFAB and was identifying as a woman) and other communities oppressed by this world. I went to school so I could work for myself and wouldn’t have to be victimized or degraded by others who possessed values I disagreed with or who disrespected me.

I have always been passionate about being a leader for my communities, to represent something good, to give opportunities and love to those who don’t receive it from this cruel world. I always thought the way to achieve was to crawl to the top, but I quickly learned how much suffering I would endure if I went about it this way. And what would be left of me to give to others then?

I left behind the career and life I envisioned, the path to financial success I thought I craved, and I gave up living according to what society and others valued. I decided my life would be vastly different than I originally planned and I became someone new to those who saw me, and more myself than I had ever been before.

Change Requires Inspiration, Knowledge, and Motivation

It’s important to note that the inspiration and motivation to do this comes from being inspired by others in my communities and my chosen family (and a few of my actual family members). Many people from all walks of life have paved the path to living one’s truth loudly, and finding success in that despite the cries against it from the public or boomers caught up in the “traditional” way of doing things.

And newsflash, those traditional ways are what’s killing our people.

Some Inspiration Shout-Outs: To my dogs, my cat, to the drag community, to the trans community, the ballroom community, to the enby community, to my two soul mates (my spouse and best friend), to my twin/my sister, to the witch community, to my TikTok community, to the Moon and to the nature of this Earth.

A Few Reminders: Capitalism kills. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Climate change is real and we need to work to save this planet. White people benefit from our country’s and the world’s capitalist-driven systems that exist so that those of other races can get less and whites can get more. Racism is violent, deadly, alive and well today and it is everyones responsibility, especially and mostly white people, to make the changes necessary to decolonize ourselves, our systems, and fix the things that oppress people of color. Especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in America. The prison system is modern slavery. Regardless of any identify a white person may possess (AFAB, queer, LGBTQIA+, etc.), we are always white first.

Back to the Program...

In Summary (what this blog is all about)

I am now on the path to discovering what my talents are meant for and applying my creativity to the many passions I’ve discussed throughout my story in this introductory post.

I love to write and one thing I learned is that I am a damn good writer, content creator, and communicator. I want to apply these skills and talents to projects I care about, ones that are both unpaid and paid.

After weeks of hardcore avoidance, disassociation, and doing things for others, it’s time to get to work. I have no excuses left (and no money), and those are the perfect motivators to get my ass in motion.

I find it hard to get out of my overthinking and fear-driven state of mind to make real headway. I thought starting a blog as a format to write all sorts of things without restriction, without pressure, and with anonymity would be the best way to get started.

Getting started is always the hardest part. But now that I have started, there is no turning back. Thanks for reading.

- Aquirius (July 2021)

#MyStory #Introduction #NewBlog #ProjectAquirius #Enby #Writer #GettingStarted

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deitiesofduat · 4 years

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BASTET: “As it turns out, the project has been due for this type of update for some time -- which the artist @tenicola (aka @teninini, colacanvas, and "Teni") finally got around to, after having enough headspace to approach it.

“And just to avoid worrying anyone seeing this -- nope, Teni is not dropping DEITIES project anytime soon. She's not going anywhere, and neither am I! Or the rest of my pantheon!

“But Teni mentioned she was worried about projecting that outcome, due to how inactive she's been online, and how quiet she's been about progress. She's hoping this update can add some clarity on what's actually going on, and what to expect going forward.”

“The rest of this update is below the cut, as text mixed with panels. It's on the long-ish side, and while it's best to skim through everything for context, you can also skip to the section "SHIFT IN [PUBLIC] SCOPE" if you just want to get to the point.

“Without further ago, let's start with some history that Teni wanted to share for full context -- again, under the cut!”

--------------------------------------------------

[ HISTORY OF DEITIES PROJECT ]

BASTET: “DEITIES Project -- and the main story for said project (Deities of Duat: The Chaos Seal), which is intended as a long form webcomic -- has been in development, privately and offline, since late 2014. Teni meant to keep it private for as long as possible, until she felt “ready” to share it.

“However, she was motivated to take the plunge and reveal the project's existence with these color tests and with this comic, as part of her coursework for her visual storytelling class. You know the one…”

“The surge of encouragement from both her classmates and her followers motivated Teni to create this blog -- the one you're visiting right now! It was Teni's full intention to use this blog to share progress on the main story, as a full-length webcomic, while building and engaging her audience.”

“However, along the way were a few... unforeseen obstacles that reared their head. Some obstacles were mitigated by making steady updates to the story and blog, but some were much more challenging, and she thinks it only fair to disclose some of them for context...”

--------------------------------------------------

[ OBSTACLES OF LIFE ]

BASTET: “The first obstacle was the sudden onset of chronic lower back pain -- just before the launch of the DEITIES blog in 2016. She still has it to this day, and says this ache makes it unbearable to sit or stand in the same position for too long. Among several inconveniences this causes, it also means she can only draw in short bursts before her stamina taps out, or before needing pain relief -- like heat, ice, and pressure.”

“As you might imagine, it's not the most fun condition to have when you enjoy drawing! And it's taken a while for Teni to cope with this daily frustration. She's still planning to find answers and a treatment to help reduce it, but has also accepted that she's been dealt this hand -- not unlike other creatives that deal with some form of chronic pain.”

“The back pain was one obstacle, but having to deal with different interpersonal struggles and friction was another. Some spiked her usual feelings of anxiety, and in one relationship's case, made her question whether or not the project was worth continuing. (On that note -- Teni does not want to call out anyone or guilt them, she just wanted to bring it up as a factor for the larger point she's making — just bear with us!)

“The third big obstacle a few years back, was having a day job that had an... ‘unfriendly’ work environment, and was paying a lot less income than she fairly deserved. And near the beginning of 2018, she was laid off from said job, putting a halt to any income she was earning only a week after signing the lease to her first apartment!”

“Teni didn't go into detail about those months of job hunting and taking tech classes, though she explains bits of it in previous updates. But the lack of financial stability at the time hung over her head constantly. The way she put it was: ‘It was hard to motivate myself to indulge in something I loved, but that didn't provide income, while I was in the middle of an extended job hunt.’"

“She didn't expect all these obstacles in succession when she launched the project. And she admits that she felt a combination of frustration, impatience, and disappointment for not updating the project at the same pace she started.”

“This was not because of any pressure from followers -- she told me you all have been incredibly understanding and patient! It was because of the fact that the project had been publicly promoted for so long, and she set her own expectations and goals so high -- without factoring the likelihood of life getting in the way. There was also the lingering fear of disappointing a lot of people, if one day she had no choice but to stop the project for her own livelihood and health.”

“Ah, why am I adding to this creative angst -- Teni didn't want this to be a sob story! I'll move on haha.”

--------------------------------------------------

[ IN A BETTER PLACE ]

BASTET: “Thankfully, in spite of all those obstacles, things are turning around for Teni in this new decade. A year ago she found a job with a feasible income to support herself, and an overall healthy work environment within her team. She's also fostered healthier relationships with her family and friends, and even made closer connections with the best friends she's had for ages!”

“And while her back pain is… still there, it's a manageable part of life that she's still determined to find answers for and improve.

“Not to mention that in the past year, she's been able to work on other projects, more quietly, and indulge in drawing other characters and fanart for fun. She's consumed more of her favorite media in the interim as well to support others, and to sate her own curiosity and interests.”

“Moving on to how this relates to this update, now that we have some backdrop for what's been happening...”

--------------------------------------------------

[ AREAS OF INTEREST ]

BASTET: “Again, Teni is not dropping DEITIES Project -- she admits the fear of having to make that call had crossed her mind, but it's not something she thinks she'll need to reconsider right now. Her bigger concern has been how to approach this project publicly, moving forward. And after giving it some thought, she's made some observations that may shed light on this answer.

“Teni wanted me to emphasize the idea of her doing a ‘reset’ for the public presentation and development of DEITIES Project -- not to change or hide the development thus far, but to reframe the project's scope -- what it's focus and goals are, more or less.

“...Oh-- looks like she made some visuals to help with this -- you two mind lending me a hand?”

“You all might have figured it out by now, but Teni absolutely loves drawing character art and designs. She also likes panel-style comics, as well as the dialogue, expressions, and SFX that comes with it. She can work on them offline without prompting, but she also loves sharing what she comes up with!

“What she's less fond of sharing is some of the other... *ahem* unmentionables and time-consuming work that comes with traditional comics. Things that take hours to set up and hours to practice, let alone execute for the final product -- an unfortunate hurdle when you're a one-person production team, and you can only draw in small bursts at a time.”

“She initially tried to put off the more indulgent art that she liked, in order to focus the less-favored obligations... but she realized that this just made her feel demotivated to work on anything, and less got completed as a result.”

“Overall, Teni's coming to terms with both her own limitations and her personal drive, and wants to shift her priorities accordingly for the project -- even if it goes against the grain of what's considered ‘good’ or well-meaning advice for a personal project.”

--------------------------------------------------

[ SHIFT IN [PUBLIC] SCOPE ]

BASTET: “Instead of treating the DEITIES main story/comic as the ‘end game’ goal of this project -- and pouring all her available energy in preparing for it and hyping it up -- Teni wants to shift the main story as a future, and more private ambition, until she's in a better place to execute it and share it publicly.

“No, she does not have any estimate or TBD date for when this will be, or when she'll make public updates on it’s progress or launch. It may even remain private indefinitely. And for now, she's okay with this.

“Because (1) The main story "The Chaos Seal" is not the only story that's worth telling from this project. Smaller side- and backstories, and even small character interactions, have their merit as well -- something Teni learned from drawing askbox responses, completing memes with the cast, and character exploration with friends. And with the main story not sucking up all the oxygen, she thinks it'll leave room to tackle the others more easily -- whether they're planned ahead of time or are spur-of-the-moment, and as comics or different formats.

“(2) Removing the DEITIES main story from its public pedestal will also allow her to work on other non-DEITIES things as they crop up -- and with less irrational guilt to indulge in things that aren't ‘priority’ for completing the comic. Meaning more art of her original characters, fanart, giftart, collabs, memes and bandwagons, and other smaller projects. Heck, she might even give herself permission to relax.

“And (3), perhaps most importantly -- Teni realized that DEITIES Project shouldn’t have to start and end with the so-called main story, and placing the story aside wouldn’t mean the project suddenly becomes a waste of time -- as she originally worried about projecting when her life took a twist.

“DEITIES Project just… is. It already exists, and the characters and world already exist -- with or without a completed webcomic to validate that existence.”

“But anyway, I side-tracked. The point is, Teni's planning to shift DEITIES project to just that -- a project, with room to continually grow, explore, and experiment with, and to engage with others as she feels comfortable, without the pressure of having a giant epic to tell.

“So while the main story and comic is going to shift to something more gradual and private -- the way it was originally meant to be -- this shift in scope will help adjust the project’s longevity, and also set the stage for some changes to be made around the blog, and for the public presentation for DEITIES.”

“However, that content will be less scheduled and remain sporadic -- things will ‘happen when they happen,’ but what Teni has in mind will hopefully be enjoyable for those following the project.”

--------------------------------------------------

[ WHAT'S NEXT-- ]

BASTET: “Here’s the thing: we actually had more to share, but Teni made the call to save it all for another day -- to avoid making this update longer than needed, and to also avoid announcing any plans prematurely. No need to risk building pressure all over again or burning out, right?

“She asks for everyone’s patience and to give her another few weeks to re-calibrate things, address pressing questions, and work on some overdue housekeeping on the blog -- and to just draw whatever pops to her mind, cuz hey, why not? After that, she'll wait until any project items are already in the works and on the road to completion, before she announces that they're coming -- an ‘under-promise but over-deliver’ approach.

“But one thing you can look forward to are more featured deities from the main cast and the supporting cast -- including those colors tests she's been working on since last year, and then some! There's no shortage of inspiration or fodder, so to speak.”

--------------------------------------------------

[ IN CONCLUSION ]

BASTET: “So to recap! DEITIES Project will be shifting its scope and priorities, so that the main story and comic is developed more privately, and more characters and lore will be explored online at a more manageable pace. On the surface, that may not look like much is changing, but hopefully this update can make expectations more clear.

“Teni knows that there may be some in the audience who may feel down about this decision, or who were looking forward to the webcomic to be completed above all else. She says that's totally fair, and encourages anyone looking for stories to check out her recommendations. But she also hopes you'll understand, and be willing to stick around for other content in the meantime.”

"That brings Teni -- and me -- to one final point. Which is to sincerely thank you for all of your support, encouragement, and patience these past few years. In addition to things that are still in the works, there's a lot of content on this blog that had been inspired by everyone's engagement, which we can't thank you enough for!

“Teni and I, and everyone else from the pantheon, are excited about what’s next for Deities of Duat and DEITIES Project. And we’re looking forward to sharing more content, more freely, in the upcoming year for you all to enjoy.”

#// If there was only one long-winded update I would encourage you all to read it's definitely this one #// Partially for the actual update and also cuz those panels took a while lmAO;;; but I did it for the sake of this announcement!#// I think Bastet explains it well enough for now; that the project is shifting it's scope online #// But if anyone has questions then feel free to leave it as a comment; I'll try to answer what i can directly and/or in the next update #// Thanks again for all your support and patience everyone; I'm genuinely thinking this shift in scope will be good for the project overall.#// Now excuse me while I draw something other than these mascots for a bit; it was nice to draw them for the first time in a while though #DEITIES Project #Deities of Duat #DEITIES updates #Bastet #Set Spawn #Ba #animals #characters #DEITIES text #artwork #comics #mini comics #egyptian mythology

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letterboxd · 3 years

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Under the Stars.

On the UK release of Harry Macqueen’s tender Supernova, the writer-director talks to Ella Kemp about timeless love stories, his favorite screen lovers and working with best buds Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci.

Love is patient and love is kind in Supernova, Harry Macqueen’s tender story of marriage, memory and maps. It’s an autumnal study of a mature, rock-solid love and the unfair illness that threatens to undo it. We’ve seen stories about gay lovers that end in tragedy before, but this one is different: a sense of security and trust infuses the final holiday of husbands Sam and Tusker, as they come to terms with Tusker’s recent diagnosis of early-onset dementia.

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play the couple—a pairing written in the stars, since the actors have been best friends for twenty years—who are traveling England in an RV, visiting places and people they have loved. Sam is a pianist, Tusker a star-gazing novelist. Together, they mine emotions that manifest in everyday care rather than grand, theatrical gestures. Julien describes Supernova as “a marvel of tiny moments that feel so real they register like bullet wounds,” while Lola feels the destabilizing power of these lovers. “I love love,” she writes, “but love is painful, beautiful, heart wrenching, frightening and forever.”

Supernova is the second feature from Macqueen as a writer and director after 2015’s Hinterland, in which he starred opposite Lori Campbell in a contemporary, rural tale of a companionship that spans decades. A London-trained actor, he made his debut in the under-seen Richard Linklater film, Me and Orson Welles. On Supernova, however, Macqueen remains firmly behind the camera.

The filmmaker opened up about the stars in the sky, the ones on our screens, intimacy, pride and more for his Life in Film questionnaire.

Harry Macqueen on location with Colin Firth for ‘Supernova’.

What do you think the connection is between stars—the celestial kind—and lovers? Harry Macqueen: Historically, we’ve always found the cosmos to be both perplexing and inspiring. I suppose there’s a kind of infinite beauty in space that is definitely related to love, and especially for a character like Tusker, who is contemplating his mortality. He’s looking up at the stars and thinking about what they mean, and what he means in that context, and it seemed like something that would be a natural thing to do if you were in that situation.

In terms of the other kind of stars—your incredible actors Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci—how did you find the right people to bring Sam and Tusker’s love to life? I think that what they do in the film is very surprising, in a way that’s beautiful and delicate. But it was also one of the easiest casting processes of any film, ever. Stanley was the first person we sent the script to and he read it very quickly and responded to it in the way that you hope that people will. We were really interested in one of the characters being not British—we felt there was something potentially quite stuffy about having two Brits bumbling around the countryside, so another culture would add a bit of a different energy to it.

Stanley loved the script and we got on really well. I really wanted, hopefully, to get two actors who knew each other and had a shared history for these intimate roles. And he said, “I don’t know whether you know, but my best mate is Colin, and I could get the script to him.” I obviously said yes and he said, “Okay, well, I already have, and he loves it and he wants to meet you.” So it was all a bit of a dream!

Let’s talk about the inception of the script. Supernova is obviously a story about love, but it’s about illness and death and mortality and all of these things, which feels significant in terms of it being a gay love story. A lot of queer love stories in cinema are tragic, but also are often very specifically reckless and youthful, and don’t really linger on this later chapter in life. How early did you know, then, that this film would be about two men? If you’re talking about early-onset dementia, you’re naturally talking about people in their fifties or sixties, so I knew that I was always going to tell a story about romantic love of some kind in that part of your life. I had done a lot of research around that, and I realized I had never worked with a same-sex couple. All the couples and families that I’d worked with, the central relationship had been a heterosexual one. So my initial reaction was to write that story, but then I countered that really quickly and wanted to challenge why that was my initial inkling.

I just thought, I’m writing about really universal themes—love and death and life and trust and companionship—and it seems to me that no one sexual orientation or gender has a monopoly on those things.

And you’re right, LGBTQ+ cinema over the years, quite often for very, very important and understandable reasons, has been about that period of flux, transitioning or coming out, the moment of becoming your true self at a certain time of life, when you’re usually quite young. And that is quite fraught, frantic and a bit grimy sometimes. So I was aware that there was a gap in cinema to present a love story about two people of the same sex who were in this stage of life. That romantic, mature love we don’t talk about very often.

The film also aspires to be the type of story in this type of community that I hope that I live in, even if perhaps I don’t—to tell a story in which the sexuality of the characters isn’t mentioned. It’s just accepted, embraced and loved. The sexuality of the characters doesn’t impact the story or inform anything, it’s just their lived experience in the world. I’m really proud that we did that, because I genuinely think, in its own tiny way, it’s a revelation.

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci navigate love and illness in the Lake District.

This film, materially and aesthetically, is beautiful. The landscapes, the actors, Sam and Tusker’s knitwear. How did you navigate the balance between creating this very cozy world that also understands heartbreak and decay as potent things? What I want to try and do in films generally is wrap an audience up in an intimate world between two people, and hopefully allow the audience to fall in love with those people. That shared history they have meant that all of these things felt quite organic. They’ve got some money, but they’re in a camper van, they’re not loaded. They’re reasonably creatively successful, but they’re not famous, necessarily. They’re just two guys trying to live under quite extreme conditions.

The intimacy in the film is really, really important to me. What degree of romantic intimacy these characters have, how you film that, and how you plonk an audience in there. Because you don’t want to make a dirge—the film is life-affirming because they love each other so much, and because of that, it’s also devastating.

So that informs every choice you make stylistically. It’s quiet, and it’s patient, and it felt like exactly the right way to tell this story, to not intrude on this beautiful relationship, to not impose anything on it, to be very simple, really—which, as I’m sure you know, it’s not simple!

I know that kind of filmmaking is not to everyone’s taste, that avoidance of melodrama, that lightness of touch. I find it beautiful, but others probably don’t.

Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ (1985).

Now, a few Life in Film questions. Who are your favorite gay lovers on-screen? Carol and Therese in Carol, Russell and Glen in Weekend, Marianne and Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Johnny and Omar in My Beautiful Laundrette.

What is your favorite timeless love story? This is so difficult! Maybe Alice in the Cities, Wendy and Lucy or the Before... trilogy.

What is the best film about pride, the definition of which is very much open to interpretation? Jiro Dreams of Sushi—a brilliant film about having pride in your craft.

What should we watch after Supernova? I tend to be a bit controversial and say the couple from Amour by Michael Haneke. Or maybe Life of Brian, or a Studio Ghibli film—but definitely not Grave of the Fireflies.

What was the film that made you want to be a filmmaker? I’m not certain there is a specific one, but there are films you encounter all the time that make you want to be a filmmaker all over again. The two films that made me think it might actually be possible were Old Joy and Katalin Varga—they inspired me before I had any budget or experience. But it could also be any Yasujirō Ozu film, or Taste of Cherry by Abbas Kiarostami. All very inspiring in their own way.

Related content

Queer Love and Desire: a list by the Criterion Channel

The Pride of Sundance: 400 LGBTQ+ films to watch this June, curated by the Sundance Film Festival

101 Must-See Movies for Lesbians: Jenni Olson’s list (including Carol)

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

‘Supernova’ is in UK theaters now, and available to stream on Hulu, or rent/buy from other VOD services in the US.

#harry macqueen #supernova #queer love #queer film #queer cinema #pride #pride 2021 #gay film #colin firth #stanley tucci #early-onset dementia #road movie #letterboxd

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canttelliotte-blog · 3 years

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Incredibly long, overly detailed post I spent too much time on.

Tl:dr AITA for telling someone they were coming off as an ungrateful, privileged asshole who didn't seem to recognize or truly appreciate what they have? I blew up after a series of encounters, they seemed oblivious to their lifestyle and support and how truly different life could have turned out without it. I called them out after weeks of trying to be empathetic but couldn't take how helpless they were acting when I would kill for the kind the support they were complaining about and taking for granted.

I should use a throwaway because I know this person will probably see this but I don't have the energy. I'll try to keep this short (actually super long sorry) I feel like I already know I was sort of harsh and out of line. This whole thing has just been sticking with me and I feel really messed up about it.

Alright, so context, back story. I had a breakdown in February and tried to kill myself. By some miracle, I got a bed at one of the best mental hospitals on this side of the east coast. After a long history of chronic mental illness, being on disability for years with medicare, getting an opportunity like this was amazing. I had been on waiting lists for months before my attempt, but fate, acuity, and availability all lined up. A true miracle. Unless you have a family with money or amazing health insurance, getting a bed is just extremely difficult at this particular facility.

The reason being, they provide real treatment. Comprehensive, attentive, life-saving treatment. They actually provide real care with empathy, actual therapy, psychiatry, and groups, with educated staff, real food to eat, world-renowned providers, and treatment teams that listen and work with you to come up with effective long-term solutions/aftercare plans that set you up for long term success.

Out of pocket, this place is unfathomably expensive. The more exclusive programs on-campus are for the ultra-elite/ ultra-wealthy, taking celebrities like Selena Gomez. The institution itself is known for its education and research. It is not funded by the state like almost everywhere else. Most state-run facilities are atrocious. a disgusting holding cell, where you're stripped of your clothes, dignity, and rights, fed prison food, overmedicated, physically and chemically restrained, only to be thrown back on the street in 3-5 days with no aftercare, med refills, or plan. Been there, done that, many times, not the point. The point was, I got some really helpful expensive ass treatment by the luck of the draw.

While I was there, I met someone lovely. We instantly connected and expressed interest in one another. They seemed really cool, we talked at length about income inequality and how unfair it was that this kind of treatment wasn't the norm or easily accessible and how unfair that was. They seemed passionate and bright and we got along great. They were set to discharge only a few days after I got there, so we exchanged info before they left. We talked a bunch while I was still there (my discharge was a couple of weeks later) and decided to go on a few dates after I got out.

A few days after I got out, I unintendedly overdosed, confused about my meds, and was incoherent by the time I got to the ER. I was restrained and chemically sedated. I was confused and fought so was deemed severely acute, and got sent to a state-run facility similar to what I described above. It was all very traumatic and I shut down once I got home. I was lucky I made it out semi-okay, that they let me out at all.

I wasn't replying to anyone's messages but the person I had met kept reaching out wanting to hear from me and make sure I was okay. I was embarrassed but it was really sweet and soon we starting talking a lot again and really connecting.

As I got to know them, I definitely thought they were very cool, we seemed to have a lot in common, they made me laugh and we got along really well. I was really digging them and saw us potentially becoming a thing. After talking for some time, we decided to anxiously have our first date. It went okay but something was off.

I didn't really pick up on it at first but the more we talked, the more privileged they offhandedly revealed they were. I know it's judge-y and lame, but that kind of put me off. I've been poor my whole life and struggled hard for everything, it's a whole different world living in poverty, so it made me a bit uncomfortable. I still live in poverty, on disability, with food stamps, and can barely hold it together enough to have a part-time job, but I have no choice. It's rough. I've been homeless, lived in institutions, went through foster care, and have no familial support. I have one of the most serious debilitating mental illnesses. It's been very very hard.

I am biased but I haven't met anyone well off who gets it. Some people don't realize how hard things can be when you've really had nothing, and had to work hard for everything. Even simple things are taken for granted, not understood, or there are miscommunications or assumptions made due to the lack of understanding. That's just my personal experience, it's hard trying to explain things and it's invalidating sometimes, it can be hard to relate or connect due to the lack of understanding.

Honestly, though, it took me by surprise. We had both talked passionately about the struggles of being on disability, the importance of income inequality, how unfair the system is set up, the barriers against the poor receiving adequate mental health treatment. They explained how they advocated for social justice and regularly went to protests. I felt dumb because I did meet them at higher-end facility, but I assumed they ended up there by dumb luck as I did with how they presented and initially came across.

They made it seem like we were in the same boat, poor af, chronically mentally ill, and 4 ever struggling. It was just a surprise because that was very much was not the case.

They moved up here from Florida, (where admittedly their life was much harder and different), but since moving, they were being supported by their aunt and uncle, who were very, very well off. They had a very expensive private practice psychiatrist, multiple treatment providers, and an apartment in a very well-off area, that their aunt owned, so they paid no rent. Their car/insurance/phone everything was paid for.

They seemed to have money to burn, dancing around being well taken care of and not really having to worry. They were on disability though receiving payments and food stamps in addition, not reporting the assistance from their family. When I lightly inquired, they said their grandmother mostly controlled their finances and they didn't deal with bills etc. They spent freely, getting take out almost every night, etc. enjoying all the pleasure of life without a second thought.

I was uncomfortable with this like I said, but they did seem cool and understanding, we did get along and I wanted to give them a chance. I put my biased experience aside and tried to give it a go.

First example that really blew me away was their dog. They had several animals, including a cat and two dogs. Even for someone working, three animals is a huge expense. I only have one cat and while she's my world, it gets hard sometimes. The vet is expensive, litter, food, treats, it adds up. And she's only one animal!!! I provide for her and take care of her, but a $350 vet bill still packs a punch. Of course, I pay it, she's my baby, but it might mean only eating sandwiches for a few weeks. I love her, so I sacrifice, she is worth it in every way, but animals are expensive and a lot of work/responsibility.

When this person and I first started seriously talking, they mentioned the dog they were closest to was very sick with a rare condition. I don't know the full details, but I guess it took a while for the vet to figure out what was wrong, he was on a lot of medications, needed loads of tests and scans. There were weeks of extensive treatments/ blood transfusions, all in a long, painful, and strenuous attempt to save him. They tried for a long time in the hopes he would get better.

He, unfortunately, passed away a few weeks after we started talking. It was devastating to them and I tried my best to be supportive and help them grieve. They were understandably at a huge loss. Their mental health tanked. Their dog meant the world to them, I understand that completely. Pets are family.

A few weeks after he passed. They were talking a little about the course of treatment and how hard it had been and what a long, painful road it was. They kind of casually remarked that his treatment cost over $20,000.

I honestly thought I had misheard. I had to ask twice because I thought they meant $2,000. No. $20,000. $20,000.Holy shit.

I just...$20,000 is what I make in a year. A year. Dogs are family, I totally, totally get that. People will do anything to save their loved ones. A pet is like an uninsured child, even with pet insurance, it can be expensive. I get that. If you have that kind of money, you pay it, without a thought, no problem.

I just... wow. I still couldn't even wrap my mind around it. My cat is my world but it breaks my heart to say, if anything happened to her like that, it would kill me, but I would be forced to put her down. I just couldn't believe, $20,000. And they said it like, no big deal, of course, like anyone would/could afford that, it was obvious, a no-brainer. I just...wow.

Next, kicker. I  came over to hang out one night and watch movies. I had never been to their apartment before. They claimed it had been super messy and they made a big deal about how they had cleaned for me. Sweet, but unnecessary, I get mental illness is tough. It was two bedrooms, all to themselves, decent space and light, but definitely scattered and cluttered. They had a huge king-sized bed, a bidet in the bathroom, and a super nice living room set up. Big comfy couch, loads of nice blankets, and honestly the biggest tv I had ever seen. They joking bragged about having all the streaming options. No kidding. Hulu, Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Paramount, and at least half a dozen more I hadn't even heard of. It just seemed crazy and excessive paying for that many streaming services every month.  But to each their own I guess.

We were both huge fans of anime, and they sort of decided to venture to studio ghibli. They asked if I had seen a particular favorite of theirs. I hadn't. They searched and it was only available to rent. $17. I nearly had a heart attack. I was like no way, we could definitely find it streaming for free somewhere if we look, or watch something else, shortage of options. They were like no it's no biggie that's what I want to watch and clicked rent. Like no problem *sweats intensely* Anytime I spend money, I have a heart attack and second guess it, it takes me like 10 minutes to click buy and my heart always drops when I do. I overthink, whether I really need/deserve it/whether there's a cheaper option, or if it's truly necessary. I know that's a poverty thing. It's just like we could have easily found it somewhere for free with a little effort!

We go to order food, we both have celiac so finding takeout is a chore. They knew the area better so I was trusting them. They were very adamant about ordering expensive sushi. It was $36 for just one of the things they wanted. Not including delivery or tips or fees or anything else, which included appetizers and drinks, the whole nine. I wasn't feeling sushi. They were like fine, we'll order from two separate places then. Double the delivery fee, not something I ever do, it would be cheaper finding a place together, I could get something small and affordable but they wouldn't budge. I didn't really have money to order a big thing on my own, I wanted something small, but I felt pressured. I figured anything I got would be cheaper than having to split a big sushi order I didn't want. I was like okay fine.

They kind of seemed annoyed that I didn't just give in and get sushi. They were a little short with me, didn't give me many options of other places, and were weirdly controlling, not letting me look at their phone to find something. I kind of gave up and said like just a burger is fine. I figured it would be cheap and filling, probably $20 max. I didn't take into consideration that they live in an extremely expensive area. It ended up being almost $30, plus tip. For a burger. I almost wanted to cry. I would have picked somewhere else cheaper given the option. They didn't even tell me the price until after they ordered it. I was like oh how much like $15 and they were so casual like oh no, $30 with tip. When it arrived, it was cold and disgusting, really inedible. I picked at the fries, which gave me a stomach ache as they were not gluten-free friendly and had been cross-contaminated in the fryer. I assumed they picked a place that they knew was safe.

When I wasn't eating, they asked if it was bad. I said yeah and they were like oh well just order something else. Like no, I can't afford anything else, it doesn't work like that. I was like no it's fine I'm not really that hungry. I wanted to say, I trusted you, and you kinda fucked me. I guess they picked that place because there was a gluten-free brownie sundae (prepackaged and not cross-contaminated) on the menu that they really wanted. Obviously more important.

My stomach ached all night. They ate their food happily. No big deal to them, $30 wasted on food I didn't really want, that I couldn't end up eating and got me sick. If it were them, they would have just ordered something else. No big deal to them. It was more important they got their brownie sundae and expensive sushi than making sure I was able to get something edible. Didn't matter that was half my grocery money for the week. Bologna sandwiches it'll have to be then. Awesome.

We spent the night talking, I didn't let on to how sick I was or that I was upset about not being able to choose food. They picked all the movies. I wanted to go home, but it just got later and later, one more movie I just *needed* to see. I asked them several times as the clock was ticking if it was getting too late to drive me home. No, no they were fine. Let's just watch another one. Then casually, they went to their room and brought out their night meds, threw 'em back, and settled into the couch. I started to panic. I asked again, you're taking me home, right? I guess they decided they weren't. I was miles away from home, no public transit running or close by. They were like oh I'm so tired, it got so late. Just order a car. I pulled up uber, $25. That would definitely overdraft my account.

Thankfully, after they saw me sweating and looking panicked, they were like, oh, I feel so bad, I'll order the uber for you. (If they hadn’t, I would have had to explain like, getting home on my own wasn't the plan nor was staying the night. If they thought I would be cool with just staying, they should have said something, if they wanted me to stay, it should have been a discussion, not a surprise.)

I just felt really disrespected. I was simultaneously hungry and sick from dinner, broke and unprepared to stay over with no prior discussion. I didn't have meds, my cat didn't have food out, I was blindsided and essentially stranded/put in an awkward position. They didn't consider that it might be stressful or beyond my limitations to get home. Being able to just roll with punches isn't financially feasible for everyone. It just felt like they were self-centered and inconsiderate. The whole night was what they wanted, what they wanted to eat, where they wanted to order from, what they wanted to watch, changing plans to what was convenient for them without any regard toward how it might impact me. Just inconsiderate and self-centered behavior.

We did keep talking though, I just sort of chalked it up to miscommunication and sort of beat myself up for not speaking up. It was weird though, kept just casually mentioning shit that was so privileged and complaining about shit that made them sound so ungrateful. I don't think they realized how it came across, just completely oblivious to their access to resources and not appreciating their position or supports.

They started talking about starting ketamine treatments to combat their ongoing depression. They had received them in the past and went on about how life-changing and helpful it was, and that everyone should try it. Now, being on disability (and even with most insurances) the treatments are not covered. The clinics that administer them are all out of pocket, bougie as fuck, and extremely expensive.

They talked about having several rounds in the past like it was nothing. It's easily $250-400 a pop and they were going 1-2x a week for a long time. They kept talking about all their options like what a painstaking burden. Should they start with lozenges and work up to IV clinic or ask for patches, and start that way. They wanted to work up to twice a week again but their family was giving pushback. They wanted me to agree with them, saying it was so unfair and lame and unreasonable/closeminded of their family for not immediately agreeing. The same family that would be footing the bill. No, not unfair or unreasonable at all. You sound privileged as fuck.

I was super bothered they were endlessly going on about it and complaining about pushback and asking me to agree with them. My treatment-resistant depression hasn't responded to anything, I've been on every waiting list for MDMA-assisted treatment whenever they pop up but never been selected due to demand and availability. Even ECT is too expensive and not covered. I'd kill for an opportunity like that! And it wasn't even like their family was saying no, they were discussing it in family therapy and seriously considering it.

They talked about it so nonchalantly and kept going on and on about how amazing it was. Like great, tell me all about something else I'll never be able to afford. I'm sure Paris is great, and backpacking across Europe is awesome, like please do tell me more.

I finally mentioned like okay that sounds great, will never able to afford it, glad it's so helpful They told me that I could just buy it off the street. That's what they used to do occasionally. It's only a couple hundred dollars and you get way more. Like oh okay. Let me just not pay a third of my rent in the hopes that this jam band kids ketamine isn't fentanyl or some shit and maybe have a shot at not wanting to kill myself for a week, you know on the off chance it works. Sounds great, super safe, much more affordable. And like as ridiculous as it was to offer that as an alternative, that still wouldn't be something I could afford! They just came off so clueless and privileged and oblivious.

What really got me was how they eventually talked about their family. They did weekly family therapy with their aunt and uncle and occasionally their dad since moving up here. They stayed with their aunt and uncle (lived down the street) more often than not so they weren't alone. This was encouraged/appreciated/welcomed. They did activities together regularly to help with depression and loneliness/ managing symptoms. They had their grandma and brother, whom they saw often and cherished greatly. They portrayed the relationships as really solid and important. I thought wow, truly wholesome and wonderful. They seemed so loved, close, connected, cared for, and supported. Across the board, they had support.

But then tables would turn. They complained often their family was too close, too conservative, and not understanding. They didn't want them so involved in their life, their treatment, decision-making, and recovery process. They resented the support, complained they weren't a kid and were capable/in sound mind to make decisions/have control of their life. I tried to listen and be understanding but I didn't get it. They came off almost like a spoiled, ungrateful teenager.

You're getting help, love, and support all around, everyone wants to support you and see you do well and will give whatever that takes. Like legitimately whatever ?!? You don't have to work, pay for anything, and it is made sure you don't have to struggle for anything. Anything you need, you've got.

I get the concept that having family so close/involved could be crippling or invasive or just downright unproductive. But it was such a slap in the face they would complain to me of all people about having that kind of support.

Family/support is such a foreign concept to me personally. Like I said, I grew up in foster care. I've never had family involved, healthy relationships, or any sort of support like that. The concept of calling your aunt when you're sad and she offers kind words, support, and tells you to come over to do something fun? Like, can't relate. I could only take so much of them complaining about being taken care of.

Living with extreme mental illness, not being able to work for periods of time, living solely on disability paychecks and food stamps is damn is impossible to survive, especially where we live. Without the help they were being given, they wouldn't be able to survive. The cost of living is out of control, you can't even rent a room with a single disability payment. I know, I'm doing it. It takes everything for me to keep a part-time job, barely making enough to make ends meet. But if I don't. I'm homeless again. No matter what, no matter how bad symptoms get. And I have one of the hardest, most debilitating mental illnesses. I don't have any other choice.

Their aunt would pay for them to go to school or learn a trade or anything they wanted. They have a world-renowned private practice doctor that prescribes them literally anything they could want or need to help and they have a great bond/ working relationship. I have a psych who can barely remember my name and sees me for 5-15 minutes maybe once or twice a month. I was asking for medications recently to get through a hard time, nothing serious, but my state-assigned psych does not prescribe benzos. Period. Neither does my PCP. It's state rehab or psych facility for me or bust. Another thing they take for granted. They almost bragged to me about immediately getting two heavy-duty benzos and another maintenance medication, just by saying their panic attacks were slighting increasing. Meanwhile. I was at risk for DT's after relapsing and begging for basic Librium to maybe not die and was denied.

The real reality of being on disability is the bare minimum or bad treatment. My psychologist is thankfully amazing but it took 10 years and hitting absolute rock bottom and being homeless to find her. She's a diamond in the rough but only works with the sickest of the sick. I would be in a state institution right now if it weren't for her and I avoided it by the skin of my teeth.

So here's where I'm probably the asshole. After weeks, I broke. We were texting as usual and they started to sort of mope and complain. They were venting about having a hard time again and how symptoms were bad and there was just nothing they could do and it was so hard. They started going on about how helpless they were and how there was no opportunity to get better and everything was just super hard and impossible for them and how rough they had it. Their family was checking in on them too much and they were annoyed at them for being concerned and that they had no options and no chance and everything was just so hard and impossible.

I understand, that's depression. I'm pretty empathetic and understanding and have been up to this point but it just felt like the rich person complaining to the homeless guy sleeping on the street, how awful it was they forgot their umbrella that day, and how unfortunate it was to be getting wet. I just wanted to scream. If you're anxious take your benzos, take your other meds! Call your aunt. Text your on call therapist. Call your fancy psych who answers night and day. Utilize any of the resources you have and all the support you are given!

I was just tired of it. Things in my life have been super difficult, especially lately, and I have to figure it out alone. The voices were getting loud again which lead to a bad relapse that went off the rails, which I had to pull out of completely unassisted. I am in between jobs, my housing isn't stable, my bank accounts are low, my mental health is chronic and very severe, my treatment team was threatening to section me if I didn't reel it in. Things were bad. But I deal with it, alone.

I know it was wrong of me, but I couldn't take it. They have everything to help themselves!!! They could go to a fancy hospital, they could ask all their supports for help! They would receive the best care. All the medicines, the best treatment. Anything.

I basically kind of spelled it out for them. You have privilege, you have support, you have money, resources, a great treatment team, family, everything... please for the love of God, USE IT! You wouldn't have to worry about losing your job going into treatment, you wouldn't lose your housing. You wouldn't have to worry about falling behind on bills. You'd be fine.

How can you not see or appreciate all you have and or see how oblivious and privileged you come across and how hurtful that is? You're complaining to the wrong person.

I went on a bit too long. I was definitely coming from a place of hurt, mental illness, and jealousy. I wasn't trying to make them feel bad, I just wanted them to understand. That kind of support would make all the difference for so many that are struggling. They are sitting with gallons of water around them, complaining to be inconsolably parched and that don't know what to do, all while sort of offhandedly bragging about how much water they have and how they can easily get more. I've been carefully conserving a 16 oz Poland spring bottle, rationing for weeks not knowing if/when I will be able to refill. They aren't alone, expected to make it on just disability. They weren't recognizing their position, how they were coming across, how hurtful that was. I didn't get anyone to catch me, love me, support me. This is the real reality of living with extreme mental illness on disability looks like without that opportunity or support. This is hard fucking work. We are not the same. You got lucky. Now do something with it.

They ended up calling me a dick, saying I didn't understand, that I was being cruel and mean for no reason. We haven't talked since. I do feel bad, I just couldn't take it anymore.

So if you made it this far, lay it on me, AITA?

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helenarasmussen87 · 4 years

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Writing Asks

This the post where I know no one is going to ask me anyway.

1. Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.

Something that is like a “Oh hey, what happens if we do THIS!” and go from there. Usually ends up having loads of emotions, comfort, angst, introspection, loads of kitchen sink dialogues, not too much action. Families, happy endings.

2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

Fluffy stuff and humourous stuff. I am a little too serious for either one and my humour is drier than the desert and very odd. So no.

3. Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

Teacher and Student relationships. Necrophilia, abuse of all sorts, underage. Just not my thing. I’ve gotten unable to stomach a lot of grimdark and super dark stuff as I get older so I won’t write it. But go ahead if that’s your thing.

4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

Two, since I can’t have more than two on the burner. Learned THAT early on and they’re Terror AU’s One is a fixit, but with health complications and angst. The other is a Modern Day AU which has two professors falling in love after one gets injured and the other worked as an EMT and helps to take care of him and they fall in love.

5. Share one of your strengths.

I can offer insights on what flows and what doesn’t. I can also happily shred my own drafts if they don’t work.

6. Share one of your weaknesses.

Action. I work at it, but it’s not my favourite. Or war writing.

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“Danny had to turn his head away to hide his smile, because he knew that it was a legitimate concern for Jose. Most of the time, he had jumped into bed with his partners first and then did the mating dance.

Although extremely smart in other aspects, dating and social interactions were always a bit skewed, because he was always second-guessing himself and nervous as hell.

“That’s actually how things work out in these situations. At least it did for me and my ex and for me and Claude.” Danny explained calmly, making Jose nod and take another pull of his slurpee.

“So what do I do? Like is there a time when I bring up the possibility of us sleeping together?” Jose asked, the words slightly mumbled as he chewed on the straw.

“You don’t bring it up. You’ll just know when the time is right for it to happen. Sex isn’t what a relationship should be built on. Yes, it’s nice and it’s part of it, but it’s not the end all to be all. Trust me on this. It will happen if it’s meant to happen.” Danny explained, hoping that he had put it all in the plainest and simplest terms he could for his friend.

I am proud of this because it was majorly borrowing from life and I can see the difference from earlier writing.

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

“Sergio laughed shortly. “I’ve already done enough of that, and look at where it’s gotten you. Yeah, legally I hold claim over you. I could make the club buy out your contract and sit at home all day, having litter after litter.”

Iker’s blood froze at that and he turned to look at Sergio to see if he really meant it, but Sergio’s face gave nothing away.

“Or I could sign your rights to the club and let them sell you wherever or to whomever. Take you out of Spain, or sell you to Getafe or Malaga. All of these things I could do. The club actually did bring it up at that meeting you didn’t show up for.”

Iker blinked, his hands going numb as Sergio’s wickedly honed words hit home.

“I’m not telling you this to hurt you. Or make you feel indebted. I’m telling this to you because you’re this close to losing your spot and that’s the last thing I want for you. But there’s only so much I can do for you.”

He sighed and looked at Iker dead in the eyes.

“I miss him too, Iker. I miss Antonio every fucking day. And I miss you.”

Iker swallowed hard as Sergio abruptly turned and left, slamming the front door and freeing him from the command so suddenly that Iker fell onto the couch and curled up in it.

He had no energy to do anything else. Not when he was all too aware he’d fucked up and fucked up big and needed to fix it.

Borrowed from life again and it was more of a dialogue that needed to be had when you finally realize how much you fucked up and how much you need to stop coasting and make it right.

9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?

ALL OF THEM! Kidding. I want to say the one I’m working on right now. I was lucky enough I got a ton of help fleshing it out. I can see the end of the 1st chapter and I am having a hell of a time writing Goodsir’s chunk. He’s turned out more emo and romantic than I was expecting.

10. Which fic has been the easiest to write?

The QuiObi prompts for the prompt week. Took me like two hours to knock them off and post.

11. Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?

Its a passion and a hobby. It helped me through a lot of rough patches and keeps me sane.

12. Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?

Mostly music or a change in life. I tend to write when everything is in flux with me.

13. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Just write. Worry about editing later. Once you have something on the paper, fixing it up becomes easier.

14. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Edit as you write. You don’t get anything done.

15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

Oooh. I think it’s a toss up between my Qui-Gon/Jango fic in a pastoral setting where they have put their pasts behind and are farmers on Concord Dawn. Or the Werewolf fic I wrote during my RPF phase.

16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?

Bloody hard. I would have to say Fitzier (Commander Fitzjames/Captain Crozier)

17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?

Depends. Sometimes I go straight from beginning to end and sometimes I end up writing the middle and not figuring it out until later.

18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?

Outlines. I have notebooks I jot down point form notes about the characters and the plot.

18. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?

Mine is a librarian or an alchemist trying to figure out answers and how things fit in.

19. Describe your perfect writing conditions.

A good playlist. Alone, in my room.

20. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

I revise it along the way when I sit down to write. Then before I post, I give it a once over to make sure it flows and makes sense.

21. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style. (Person sending the ask is free to make suggestions).

All my old fics are honestly gone so I’m skipping this one.

22. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?

Honestly? The Duo and Heero one I wrote about them being in an abusive relationship where they split up, then got back together again. I was again writing from life, and I have seen couples who did overcome it, but looking back, I think I should have written it that they separated and went their own ways.

Keep in mind I was very young when I wrote this, and I was in an abusive relationship myself and didn’t realise it at the time. He hit me once, apologised and never did it again. But he did end up manipulating me, gaslighting me, and emotionally abusing me until I finally had enough and left.

23. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?

Yes. Loads of them due to me not wanting to finish them. Or the hosting sites going under.

24. What do you look for in a beta?

Someone who is honest, someone who knows the way I write, and has suggestions to fix those said things. But someone who is themselves is the best. Because they know what they want. Same here.

25. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?

I do, simply due to lack of steady betas. Flow and story telling, but I also look for syntax and formatting as well as grammar. I will miss typos, so I run spell-check too. I mostly use a mental rubric. Teacher training.

26. How do you feel about collaborations?

I haven’t had a successful one due to the second person always deciding that they can’t follow through or up and disappearing. So I don’t do them.

27. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

Oh my God! I read so much and so many different people that I can’t pinpoint three. I usually end up reading a fic or two, so I can’t say why I read the author.

28. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

I haven’t done that. I do admit to having inspired by fics. I wouldn’t ever presume to do that. It just feels like a snub.

29. Do you accept prompts?

Not really. I can’t tailor write stuff consistently.

30. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?

Oh always! I end up liking the characters that somehow never make it until the end. And in the Terror, unless you want to write angst all the time, you HAVE to ignore canon. And I mean BOTH the book and the show, since the book is nasty. The show is amazing, but oh my god is it depressing.

31. How do you feel about smut?

Yes damned please!

32. How do you feel about crack?

Depends on how well it’s done. Sometimes it is needed. Sometimes it’s like “Why?”

33. What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?

A bit tricky. I don’t mind non-con, but it has to be handled well. Dub-con, especially in A/B/O happens within context and it is usually dealt with. So I can tolerate that more than the first. Outright abuse, no.

34. Would you ever kill off a canon character?

Yes. Not often thought. But yes. I usually try and keep as many alive as I can though.

35. Which is your favorite site to post fic?

AO3, its a wild place and I love it for that reason.

36. Talk about your current wips.

It’s an AU where two professors that live in the same building and work in different faculties get thrown together and start to get to know each other. Due to circumstance, one gets injured and the other kind of volunteers to help take care of him, where they fall in love. The others in the vicinity do also. There’s Canadian shenanigans and baking.

37. Talk about a review that made your day.

That they really liked how I wrote Frank Randall and would like to see more with his son, an OC I created for the story.

38. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?

I either delete, or give a generic reply and leave it. I’ve got stuff to do.

40. Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one).

Nope. It just doesn’t work for me.

*somewhere I fucked up on the number but here you are*

Whoever wants to do this.

#about the author #asks #memes

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22drunkb · 5 years

Text

Some thoughts about Bran Stark

Okay, so--not to butt in and trample around, as someone who never read the books and stopped watching the show sometime around season 3--but the thing is, I feel like the ending has finally allowed me to understand exactly what it was that turned me off Game of Thrones, which I never quite did put my finger on till now, and I want to at least write it out once. (Ironically, this has made me like the story better, though not its execution.) To attempt a spoiler-free summary: I’m going to be thinking about the thematic structure of the story and why that should make certain things make sense, and how they came to not make sense anyway.

The thing is, thematically and structurally, Bran ending up king makes absolute and perfect sense. It’s just that they didn’t write the story in line with the structure they were given. The problem with the show is--and always has been--that the writers don’t actually understand what “subverting fantasy tropes” means or could look like, and they don’t care about it in any meaningful way. What they care about is doing big, bloodthirsty, quasi-historical fiction with a lot of nudity. (See: the Civil War show they wanted to do.) And Bran’s whole situation only makes sense (or would have made sense, if executed properly) in the context of high fantasy.

Keeping in mind that complicating high fantasy tropes was an important part of what Martin reportedly set out to do, each of the Stark kids (the story’s backbone) had a clear thematic purpose. Each of them a) was a take on a trope, b) had a clear character trajectory that would allow that take on the trope to be developed while functioning as a working character arc, and c) through that trope-inflected arc, could allow the audience a window into specific part of the society (i.e., they supported the worldbuilding), which in turn allowed the further development of these takes on the tropes by giving them specific, appropriate settings and side characters to bounce off of. This is to say that GRRM did a good job setting himself up to do “trope subversion” in a way that would comment on the things he wanted to comment on, function as part of a larger world and story, and help support a plot that would be in harmony with all of the above. This is one very solid approach to character design. To be clear, despite this paragraph being about characters, I’m talking about themes--it has nothing to do with their personalities or whatever. This is about what ideas come together in the concept of each character and therefore how each character’s story develops the ideas.

A good reason to approach character design in this way is if you have set out to subvert, complicate, comment on, or otherwise mess with genre tropes. To do so, the characters have to themselves be tropes, or at least be designed in close relation to tropes, in order to derange them. So like, just to take the simplest two examples:

Robb: The Prince. Firstborn, shining favorite, destined to inherit. Set up (normally) to avenge his father, restore order to his kingdom, and go home. Bungles it entirely by seeking true love; meanwhile, in the course of his story we learn about the regional politics of the North, the politics of alliances by marriage and kinship, etc. Narratively, his failure allows the entire political and military situation to get infinitely more clusterfucked. All of those pieces fit together well thematically.

What is being subverted here is the prince’s marital destiny. We have loads of fairy and fantasy stories about prince and prince-types for whom pursuing true love just happens to be convenient (they can marry whoever they want), or whose pursuits of love are rescued by fate (his true love turns out to be his promised princess all along! She’s secretly a magical being of some sort, and that trumps betrothal agreements! The one he was originally supposed to marry died or decided to marry someone else! etc). This is totally kosher in traditional high fantasy (or in the folklore that the genre draws on) because it’s an expression of the harmony of the story-world; the characters go through their trials and adventures and end with a resolution in the form of marriage that announces that all is as it should be. What it looks like GRRM set out to do is ask what happens when people still follow those rules and the rules aren’t in harmony with the world they live in.

In particular, the entire thing points square at the fact that princes are political animals. It seems to me that Robb’s story was meant to say, well, actually, sometimes people with power just have to marry people they don’t love as a condition of being powerful (which comes up constantly throughout the whole show). After Ned and Catlyn, basically every “true love” couple is dysfunctional, incestuous (Cersei and Jaime, Daenerys and John), and/or gets narratively stomped on, as far as I’m aware. (Did Sam and Gilly make it? If so, I think that’s allowed because they’re commoners.) Ironically, Ned and Catlyn set Robb up to fuck up by modeling one of these convenient political-and-true-love marriages. He thought he was supposed to be allowed to have it all. He was wrong. The end. Next. But the show seemed to expect me to feel that the outcome was unjust and tragique for Their Love, when all that was unjust and tragique about it was that Robb was idiot enough to bring the consequences of his actions on his entire group of followers. That is the point. That his status has to constrain his behavior, and when it doesn’t it has consequences for others. The status itself is what’s being problematized.

Jon: The Secret Heir. Second-oldest, bastard-born, treated with contempt. In relation to the family, literally a supplementary person. Set up (normally) to be rediscovered as the true heir to the throne and end up as king (moving from the margins to the center; getting the acceptance he couldn’t have as a bastard). The twist is the “true” dynasty he represents is composed of inbred lunatics, and his potential access to the throne goes not only via that bloodline but via repeating their tradition of incest. Dovetailing nicely with that, he was set up from the start as less wanting access to the kinship system than wanting to be free of it, so instead of becoming king by virtue of being a Targaryen, he stops the reinstatement of the Targaryen line altogether. Meanwhile, for most of his story, as a “supplementary person” he gives the audience a view into a lot of corners of Westeros that are concerned with what is excluded from Westeros: the Night’s Watch, the Wildlings, and indeed the White Walkers.

Again, all of that lines up together well. It’s part of the larger derailment of the blood-as-destiny notion of a “true” king, heir, ruling dynasty, etc. (I think the main reason GRRM goes so hard on the incest, not to mention having not one but THREE bastard characters, is in service of this; it also means Jon’s character arc of wanting out of the bloodline system fits into the thematic structure. See? Everything ties together neatly.) But I mean. We all know the character was not executed well.

And so on. I could do the same for Sansa and all the rest of them. (Sansa and Arya are probably the two most successful executions of what their character designs set them up to do; it’s not a coincidence those are the characters whose stories people seem to be happiest with.) But the thing is, a lot of these tropes, while certainly common in high fantasy, are also found in lots of other genres. Chosen Ones and Unexpectedly Eligible Chosen Ones and Princesses and Warrior Maidens (whether in literal forms or not) show up all over the place. The fact that these aren’t strictly fantasy archetypes perhaps means they were less prone to being mishandled. Bran, though. Bran belongs firmly and only in high fantasy. He is, literally, supposed to be a magic priest-king. A take on the Fisher King, even (I’ll explain about that later). And his story was weighted toward the end because of what it seems like Martin was trying to do more broadly, meaning it was much more on the showrunners to do it right.

High fantasy is always trying in some way to engage with ~the numinous~, which is to say the sort of never-explainable mystery and magic of the world. Magic in high fantasy is usually closely tied to deep time, the land, nature, or the metaphysical. Ancient beings, lost secrets, nature spirits, hidden realms, that sort of thing. It’s part of the genre’s inheritance from the mythology and folklore it’s all based on, which had a much more enchanted, vitalist view of the world than we generally do now. (In a way, that’s the purpose for high fantasy’s existence as a modern genre--keeping some access to that.) What Martin set the whole story up to do was question the tropes that often go along with the genre by making the setting one in which almost everybody has forgotten about all the magic and mystical knowledge that is in their history. Westeros is an extreme, historicized take on the Shire, basically. (”English pastoralism you say? I’ll see you and raise you the English Civil War” -- George R.R. Martin, presumably.) They have no notion of what’s really out there and what’s really possible in the world, and have quite comfortably isolated themselves in a situation where they need not remember. As a result, the social institutions that were developed long ago in relation to the ancient magics and knowledges become, instead, just social norms that can be manipulated, distorted, and played out in a much more historical-fiction kind of fashion, which gives Martin lots of room to point out that, say, ironclad patriarchal bloodlines cause problems. (That is, if you take away any magical justification, by virtue of connection to the land or the spirit realm or what have you, for the right to rule, then you stop having to have your One True Kings also be good people. It allows him to pull apart the different pieces of that trope and suggest that their being connected in the first place is questionable. Which it is! He’s right and he should say it!)

But the magic has to come back at some point, or else it’s really not high fantasy. And it seems like what he wanted to do was have all these elements from outside Westeros--the White Walkers, that god whose name I’ve forgotten, and Daenerys with her dragons--converge on it such that the characters would have to go back to their deep history and call those things back up in order to deal with the real world they live in (instead of the wealthy political bubble of all the scheming) and thus get to a point where they could actually change their system for the better. You can think of it as a very elaborate deus ex machina in a way, except the deus ex machina isn’t Daenerys showing up with dragons to fight the White Walkers or Arya having trained (again, outside Westeros, for the record) just the right way for killing the Night King. It’s all of these external forces forcing the characters in Westeros to get their fucking shit together. Otherwise there’s really no resolution to the war, in a high fantasy version of the story. It’s just historical fiction with some weird bells and whistles. Without a need to go back and figure out whatever the First Men were up to, there’s no incentive to go back to the numinous. That he intended for sure that some version of a return of the numinous end up being a big part of the climax is reinforced for me by the fact that the Starks--again, the backbone of the whole story--are set up as being unusually in touch with this mystic/magical heritage (the old gods, the crypt, the godswood) and unusually faithful to the traditional ways. They were introduced that way for a reason.

So where does Bran come in. The thing is that Bran is literally named after the mythic founding king of Westeros, Bran the Builder. The other thing is that both of those Brans are clearly named after Bran the Blessed, a literal mythic god-king from Welsh mythology whose name means crow (but who for various reasons also often gets associated with ravens, which in turn are commonly associated with transcendent knowledge, magic, etc; it’s a long story). So you have a younger member of the story’s key Stark family, already closer to the sources of magic and mystery than most. You name him after the founder of Westeros who lived in a time of magic, traffic with other beings, and great building works and other inherited accomplishments for which the associated knowledge has since been lost, etc. You have him gain mystical abilities to transfer his consciousness to other bodies, or through time (absolutely typical Mystic Powers). You have him even take on a special priestly status passed down from the era of magic by leaving Westeros to hang out with other kinds of magical beings, which means he is now explicitly named both Bran and Raven.

OBVIOUSLY this kid is supposed to be king. He’s going to restore the realm to a situation in which the ruler, the realm, its various life forces and nature spirits, and the metaphysical are all connected to one another and, in a sense, present in the same body (which is the kind of genuine mythological shit high fantasy is always drawing on). But the writers then just sat around and did nothing with him for years on end until whoops hey he’s king now. Of course no one thinks it makes any sense!! It’s fucking malpractice!!!!

If you go to the GOT Wiki and just read Bran’s page, everything makes sense and lines up well in terms of a list of events. (Although it’s really notable how short the entry from s8 is, and how everything it lists is things that happen to Bran, pretty much.) There is a progression that makes sense. But from what I understand--this was certainly the situation when I stopped watching--nothing was ever done to suggest that any of this mattered. The Three-Eyed Raven, the forest spirits, the magics and so on--it was treated at most as a backstory machine. It had no connection to or effect on the rest of the story, so far as I can tell. The fact that none of this played into the battle with the White Walkers at all is flatly insane. The thing I most remember people saying about Bran after that episode wasn’t even “Why didn’t he use X or Y that he learned in the forest?” but “Why was he there?” which just goes to show how completely and utterly bungled this entire piece of the narrative was. Like, if your high fantasy story is making its audience ask “Why would the story put the one character with the greatest knowledge of ancient magics and powers at the scene of a battle against an all-but-forgotten ancient threat,” then I’m sorry, it has gone fully off the rails, and not just in its most recent season. That’s not subversion, it’s just fully dropping the ball.

You know what would make sense as a lead-in to Bran becoming king? Oh, his performing some spectacular feat of insight, magic, strategy, or all three at the battle that no one else could have pulled off because no one else had his background or powers. Even after years of screwing this part of the story over, that could at least have bothered to make a case for why any of it mattered to the rest of the story. It would not have been very subversive, but when you’ve fucked up this royally you don’t get to be precious about your radikal innovative approach, Davids. I can’t believe Peter Dinklage had to sit there and make a bullshit speech about storytelling, when a decently-handled story would have made it seem natural and self-evident by then (you can still have surprises along the way!) that Bran should be king.

Anyway, in closing: part of the reason I checked out when I did was that I felt like they weren’t doing the things I thought they should do as the story developed. Genuinely, one key part of that was that they seemed to be doing absolutely nothing with Bran, which was baffling to me because it seemed obvious to me he was set up to be an incredibly important character. At the time, I thought they were going somewhere close to this with Bran but just taking way too long at it for some reason. What’s now clear is that the showrunners didn’t understand what they should have been doing with him. (Everybody who was taken aback by this outcome is not a fool for not seeing this. They were, quite reasonably, following the narrative cues they were given along the way, all of which said “Bran doesn’t matter.” It’s maybe clearer to me because I stopped watching.) And what that now makes clear, in my opinion, is that they never really understood what Martin was trying to do by “subverting fantasy tropes”; that in fact they didn’t really understand the genre, let alone what subverting it entailed. Which is exactly what bothered me about it even years after I stopped watching, but couldn’t put my finger on--until, ironically, they proved me right about Bran.

#game of thrones #bran stark #bran the builder #bran the blessed #i really tried no to write this bc who wants to get into got discourse right now but i couldn't get it off my mind #so here #i had a whole thing about disability and the fisher king but honestly it wasn't necessary #let's just say i think what martin (presumably) had in mind for ''bran the broken'' was something more complex #probably still fucked up! but differently

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allsystemsarenotgo · 4 years

Text

A friend and I were talking one day, and she shared this with me.

She was much like me, raised with a quarter between the knees, terrified of the things we were taught to avoid and trying to live reasonably noble lives. She wasn't allowed Birth Control for religious reasons (pro-life) as well as to prevent enablism. Her family was much more religious than mile, though I still went to church during my Sophomore, Junior, and Senior years of high school.

She married a guy 10 years older than herself, who was a long-time routine customer of her family's business. They married right after she graduated high school, long before she applied to higher education.

She is a nurse now. She has 3 kids, works long hours at a hospital, and her husband is a successful farmer as he always has been. She struggled at times, but she made it through.

She knows life would have been easier without the first child, but she was innocent and naiive and I think she realizes that she jumped in the deep end of the pool before learning how to swim.

I did the same thing.

All through high school I pledged to abstinence until marriage. I hated everything to do with sex. The topic, the drama, the action, the result. I wanted nothing to do with it.

But I also never dated through grade school at all. I never had a girlfriend. Plenty of crushes (M.S. above being one of them), but just as many denials. Because I didn't drink, smoke, do drugs, have FFA animals, or play athletics, I also wasn't a member of any social group. I was always the kid in the corner of the cafeteria scarfing food down in 5 minutes and sleeping the other 20, or asking to go to a teacher's classroom, where it was serene and quiet.

My freshman year of college, I even wrote an essay on abstinents for English class. That really didn't go over well in regards to having to read it out loud. There might as well have been fruit flying at me.

My dorm was set up such that we had 3 private bedrooms that shared a living space and bathroom. One of the roommates always had girls over, and he never tried to be quiet (or if he did, he failed...badly).

So those two things were my indoctrination to college life. Getting judged and leered at for writing an abstinence essay, and having to listen to a roommate multiple times a week.

Towards the very end of my freshman year, a girl from high school messaged me. We started talking, and she admitted that she had always had a crush on me and was too shy to ever say anything.

Error #1: For no good reason whatsoever, I agreed to formulate a relationship with this female

So when I moved home from the dorms, I hung out with the lass a few times, but my parents were moving out of the country and closer to my school, so I could live at home. That meant that this would now be a 1.5-hour-each-way medium-distance relationship.

So every 4th or 6th weekend during the remainder of that summer and into the fall semester, I would drive up and spend a day with her. Sometimes, I would drive her out of the country and into the city to give her a glimpse of escape (it was very impoverished where we grew up).

Error #2: Doing whatever made her happy

I really enjoyed the time that we spent together. She got me a purity necklace for Christmas that year. She said she understood that my preference meant something to me.

But then, something changed. She would start dropping enuindos and jokes and send me photos that I didn't ask for.

Error #3: Not standing up for myself

She said that I meant something to her, and asked me if she meant something to me. At the time, I did not comprehend that as a trap...but I wanted to make her happy, so I said "yes".

The next thing I know, she is booking a hotel for us for Valentine's day. Wherein, I learned a thing or two or five or ten that I really wasn't interested in learning in the first place.

-Provides Clorox to help scrub the thoughts from your mind-

After that, she wanted me to come see her more and more often. But I was tied up with school and life.

Mind you, we usually had a phone call every night, or at least every other night. Same time, right before bed. Sometimes we would fall asleep on the phone with eachother.

Error #4: Accepting anything as fact

Well one night, I called her, and she answered...but it was noisy in the background, like she was driving. But she never talked while driving, and wouldn't answer the phone with family in the car.

She said she was in a friend's car and they were going to the beach for the night, which was completely reasonable for the time of year and her group of friends. She cut the conversation short saying they had arrive, so we bid our greeting. But she didn't hang up, and something told me that I shouldn't either. So I didn't.

"Who was that?"

"Don't mind him. He was just calling to check on me. He's controlling like that."

"He sounds like a jerk"

"Enough about him. He won't do this."

-Provides more clorox-

And that's how I found out that her primal needs were more important than our "relationship".

Unfortunately, shortly after I broke up with her, I was sent a photo of her quite visibly pregnant. Fortunately, the timetable did not add up to Valentine's day (aside of the fact that it was physically/biologically 95% impossible).

That summer, I started a job at the student newspaper. Right off the bat, one of the graphic artists and I got along very well. We spent way too much time at work talking to eachother and goofing off, instead of working. Enough so that our boss took notice and things got tense for a bit with him. We still cranked out work no problem, but we were both too young to understand workplace policy and procedure when it comes to "dating but not dating", which is basically exactly what we were doing. We spent alot of time together. I would go to her dorm after class and we would watch movies and just goof off or do whatever. We enjoyed time together.

Error #1: So cliché. So, so cliché.

So Valentine's day rolls around, and she asks 'the question'.

So something in biology: There is a term called "Once an animal has the taste of blood, they will always hunt for it." Unfortunately, humans can sometimes be considered a sub-species of the animal kingdom.

Like the dumbass that I am, I accept to the terms and conditions.

And at the end of the night, she asks: "So are we officially dating now?"

"I...I guess?", I answered nervously.

Errors #2 to #457: Not escaping

And just like that, I was suckered into nearly 2.5 years of having a FWB while having to, very creatively at times, mask it as a legitimate relationship.

We enjoyed the time we spent together.

We enjoyed going places together.

My mum liked her, her parents liked me. (Dad was skeptical at best and thought I could do better)

The small issue: I struggled to communicate at times. I didn't know how to find my voice, so there were times that I would have to text her how I felt. Sometimes I would hide in a corner just so I could cry. (I later learned of my autism, and it all made sense and I learned how to resolve this)

The big issue: I was completely burned out on intimacy. After almost 2.5 years of emulating laboratory rabbits, I was done. My usefulness had expired.

The biggest issue: We were both suffering academically. We had no common interests at all anymore, and we had put eachother ahead of our own academics so much that we were both risking academic expulsion.

So we mutually agreed to break up.

She dropped out of university (and never went back or finished her schooling), and I changed majors twice before getting my Bachelor of Science.

My first relationship lasted from June 2009 to April 2010.

My second "relationship" lasted from February 2011 until May 2012 (Although we started spending time together in significant amounts starting August 2010)

I have not had a girlfriend since May 2012.

I had one friend in my senior year of college, who gave me some non-physical affection while also keeping me firmly locked in the friendzone. But quality time, by itself, only goes so far.

I have not had any physical affection since May 2012.

I have not spent quality time with a female since May 2013.

For most of that time, from May 2013 to August 2019, I really didn't mind it at all. I have been so tied up in working, hobbies, and life in general, that I completely ignored women.

But as my birthday loomed near in October 2019, it donned on me....I was on a crash course to being eternally lonely.

So I have tried online dating. I have gone on a few first dates, but no second dates.

Sometimes, I want to give up. The fight just doesn't seem worth the reward.

And honestly?

Sometimes I feel exactly like my friend's remarks at the top of this post. Sometimes I wish I would have been a little more rebellious, a little more care-free, a little more out-there.

But at the same time, ...

Sometimes I wish that neither relationship would have ever happened.

That I would have never learned the true definition of intimacy.

That I would have never done whatever it took to make the other person happy.

That I wouldn't have been such an easy push-over.

That I would have stuck to my initial pledge in life

That I would have spoke up more and defended myself.

All I am now, is damaged product.

I don't truly know how to love.

I don't truly know how to feel.

I don't truly know how to be myself.

I don't truly know how to be intimate.

I am human, I am male, so of course I have my moments. But I don't want that to be the reason for a relationship. I want it to be the least-important factor, or not a factor at all.

I want a relationship founded on trust, honesty, fortitude, common interests, personality, maybe even a little faith.

Not intimacy.

I just want to not be invisible, or to only have one attribute visible.

I want to be seen for all the other attributes.

I am not A-sexual. I still feel emotions and feelings. I just don't want to let them out of the locked box which contains them. Not without lots of context and preparedness.

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flyswhumpcenter · 5 years

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For You, I Will Give Up My Wings [Whumptober 2019 - Day 17: “Stay With Me”]

Summary: Once upon a time were an angel and a mortal who wished nothing but to stay together despite the forbidden nature of their relationship.

Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V (mythology/angel AU) Ship: Moonblossom (Serena/Ruri)

Wordcount: 2.271 words

Content Warnings: Light religious theming (blasphemy, sin, angels, albeit not used in a Christian context). Secondary character death.

Notes: Another mythology-esque AU for this prompt, this time with Moonblossom and angels. I may not look like it because my Arc-V OTP is Peregrine, but I'm a sucker for Moonblossom's aesthetic, and I felt dirty writing a fic inspired by "Alluring Secret ~ Black Vow" (and its companion song White Vow) for an F/M ship. Again, this isn't whump and more like a story with some whumpy elements, but at this point who cares. Also, my apologies for the abrupt ending to it, I really wanted to finish it by tonight.

Oh, also: an important character in the show dies in this story. I haven't put the "Major Charcter Death" alert on "This Is Gonna Hurt" for this because they're a minor, nameless character in this, but in case you don't wanna read that... Here's your chance to look away.

Event hosted by @whumptober2019

AO3 version available here.

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Would an angel sell their soul to the devil in the name of love?

This was a question as old as time, she realized, as she stared at her own white wings full of feathers. She had heard of fallen angels before, of former comrades that had betrayed their kind’s guidelines to live with a mortal or, in the worst rumours, a demon. They had various names: the black-winged, the banished, the betrayers, the traitors, the fallen, the forgotten. All in all, they all had a common point: they were angels whose identity had been erased by the term, punished for their crimes by getting lost in the sands of times and fading memories.

For a long time, the Angel of the Moon, Selena assumed she was over asking herself that question. She was an exemplary angel amongst her peers, only doing what was right and what was allowed. She used her powers for the greater good and nothing else, defending the right, condemning the wrong, never stepping out of her zone. She had been promoted as an archangel as the result of her hard work, presented as an example for all other angels to follow. Her footsteps had been blessed by the gods, her halo shone brighter than most, a statue had been erected in her name in the place she assured the peace of minds and hearts of, Cordelia.

However, things changed on one fateful day.

The Moon was lighting the territory of Cordelia in its cold, benevolent light. Not a word was to be heard in the peaceful streets of the city, the inhabitants either already asleep or taking care of the last tasks of the day: ends of dinners, children’s bedtime stories, the last words of a letter. The windows shut down one after the other, the walls losing colours, dark blues winning over yellows and whites.

In the dark of the night was Selena, Archangel of the Moon, flying around, ensuring the tranquillity of the city. This was a mere duty to her: she had never had to enforce anything before, merely making sure nobody was stepping out of line. Crime was absent from the streets, even when the sun had set down, because her watchful eyes were always there. She was but a well-meaning agent of peace and order, an agent sent by the gods to ensure serenity in the mortal minds they had given life to thousands and thousands of years before.

However, and despite her best judgement, there were citizens she preferred watching over than others. One of them was a young girl trying to live by with her older brother. Her flower shop was one of the places Selena liked the most watching over during daytime, amazed by her talent at growing flowers and her crystalline voice who sang like the most beautiful of birds. She spent more time there than anywhere else, charmed by her kindness and dark locks of luscious hair falling to her hips.

Unbeknownst to her, one of her feathers once fell on the floor of the shop during the day. The girl picked it up as soon as she noticed it, intrigued by its pure white, and looked up. Unable to flee, back round against a corner of the shop’s roof, the angel’s eyes met hers as her smile melted her surprise away.

I see you, benevolent angel, she said, putting the feather in her hair and against her ear. Thank you for watching over my shop.

Selena was unable to reply, surprised that she could be seen, forbidden to talking to mortals no matter what; so she nodded along, her thoughts swirling around. This was nothing but wrong, she knew it with an undefeatable certainty; yet this felt right, too right, and her wings shivered as she flew away from the shop, leaving another feather behind her. Even in her panic, she wished for the girl to pick it up and wondered if she

However, during a harsh winter that almost froze all of the city’s cultures, the brother of the girl eventually fell sick. Despite his condition and his sister’s pleas for him not to, he continued working to afford them to continue living as they always had. Ruri tried everything in her power to convince him not to, promising she’d go as far as selling the shop or finding a rich husband if it meant he’d rest. Alas, her brother valued her dreams above everything else on this earth and ended up refusing all of her offers, leaving her broken-hearted.

For a time, watching over the shop hurt Selena. As soon as he had collapsed from his illness, the girl spent most of her time at her brother’s side, her hand in his, as she told him stories to less his pain; only to tearfully beg him, in silence and when he’d be asleep, to stay with her. She’d try brewing healing concoctions with her knowledge of plants, to very little effect, until she had spared enough money to pay for a doctor. The verdict was decisive, falling upon the little family like a sword, as the boy was doomed to die soon; and poor Ruri was left even more heartbroken than she had been before.

For the first time, Selena wondered if she shouldn’t have made a deal with a mysterious force for the boy’s life to be spared, as the pain of her citizens pained her to witness. Alas, she was no healing force: her light did nothing to his ill, as the gods had decided for this mortal and no angel could go against the goddesses of life and death. His thread would soon get cut by a steady hand. There would be no benevolence or malevolence in her fingers and scissors as they’d execute their decision, only their mission to make sure the cycle was running properly.

On the day the boy died, the angel was watching over their house, mourning with the girl. His last words were of care and attention, asking her not to cry and not let herself get consumed with grief, for she needed to outlive him now that he’d be gone. He begged her in a voice breaking under its own weight to take care of herself and her dreams, now that he wouldn’t be there for her, promising he’d still keep an eye on her from wherever his soul would go next. Yet, even with his warm words and the smile she was forcing herself to give him, the girl broke down crying as soon as his hand went limp and his heart went cold.

Please, watch over my sister, his soul begged of the angel as soon as it left the body, eyes shining.

I promise, she replied. Now, you can join the skies above and reunite with all those that you have lost, you who spent his life caring for his dearest.

From then on, Cordelia mourned the loss of one of its youngest inhabitants. People gave the grieving sister their condolences, bringing gifts with them, buying her flowers as support. The plants almost died because her tears prevented her from properly caring for them, leaving them to dry and wither away like her brother had in front of her eyes. Would no action be taken, desolation was soon to fall onto the small flower shop, life leaving it day after day, ivy growing and covering the façade.

As such, to honour her promise, Selena spent most of her time in the city taking care of the shop for the girl, feathers meddling with the roots. Her fingers gave their life back to the plants, slowly but surely, petals getting their colours back and the agreeable scent she had always known returned. Things were finally looking better, the light and warmth of the sun coming back: this wasn’t time of dying for the little shop and its owner.

She’d often get spotted by the girl, who’d then tell her some stories or, simply, talk to her about her day. Selena couldn’t answer her questions with words, but she could nod along, and that was more than enough for them. They’d spend a morning, an afternoon, an evening or even an entire day conversing like this. Before long, the mortal girl had earned her smile back, making her promise to her brother a reality. By all means, her mission was a success; but she didn’t leave, continued taking care of a mortal’s plants with her, and loved every second of it.

On one day, the gods told the angel she had been assigned a new task. From then on, her status as an archangel would fully come into play: she’d be supervising other angels and never go back to the mortal’s soil. The news that should have warmed her spirit and gratified her instead made her feel nothing but resentment and hatred: she didn’t want this. She wanted to spend her days with the girl from the flower shop, the mortal that made more sense in her life than so many of the duties she owed to the gods.

She had but a few days to engrave images of Cordelia into her mind before leaving forever. Even if it wasn’t forever, who could promise her that Ruri would still be there by the time she’d come back? Her only wish was to remain with this mortal until the end of her life, nothing else; and yet, she gulped her pleas when faced by the goddess she depended of, for she could not go against the gods. Keeping her feelings concealed, she instead let herself weep in the night streets of Cordelia, finding over and over the words of departure she’d give to her dearest, her soulmate.

Their adieux went horribly wrong. She tried conveying the idea through moves, but it didn’t work, and the girl didn’t understand her. Eventually, the conscientious angel was obligated to explain with the words she had forbidden herself to ever use. Her tongue burned and her throat knotted, the sin puncturing her ribcage. Nevertheless, nothing could have prepared her for Ruri’s reaction to it, full of another wave of grief, anger and confusion all the same. Would have angels had a heart, she’d have broken Selena’s.

Stay with me, she then pleaded with her mortal eyes and her mortal voice, hands tied in a prayer, her legs folding into a kneeling position.

The angel wavered in her certitudes and convictions, a foreign temptation invading her thoughts like poison flowing in its victim’s bloodstream.

I cannot, for I have a duty to serve, Selena replied. I am an angel, you are a mortal; this is not meant to be. I am so deeply sorry for it.

Please, stay with me! Ruri cried, youthful eyes filling with sorrow and misery. I don’t want to see you go, I can’t be without you!

Her halo’s light dimmed with each word she told the mortal, her wings twitching, urging her to stop the blasphemy and go back to her former idealistic self. The dilemma was eating away at her very soul, feathers falling from an anxiety foreign to her kind. That was when this sentence came back to her, the question she used never to wonder about.

Would an angel sell their soul to the devil in the name of love?

Her mind repeated it over and over again, weighing pros and cons, meticulous and obedient spirit leaving place for a burning chest devoured by a very human passion. Her feelings were, for the very first time, sent into a turmoil unknown to her species, the one the gods would go through whenever they were faced by their own faults, and she realized how hypocritical the people commending her had been all along. Would angels have been able to cry, tears would have stained her porcelain face, rotting her luminous skin with the darkness and dirt of the pain she was currently experiencing.

That was, until the girl, whom until then had been nothing but an untouched paragon of pureness, committed the ultimate sin. She ran to an angel, grabbed her shoulders and kissed her with a furious passion, the kind no being could ignore no matter their kind or nature, and the angel found herself giving it back, purposely corrupting her own lips with the saliva of a mortal. On that, her wings turned black as the night, feathers falling and spreading far and wide, the excruciating pain almost locking her into an eternal agony.

To her surprise, and despite the forbidden nature of her acts, her wings didn’t fall; and, right as they turned black, she saw white feathers blossom in the back of the person she had just gladly given her angel righteousness to, her eyes watered for the first time. With a tearful smile, Selena embraced her nature, her feelings and her dearest person.

If the devil was the holder of her happiness, and that of her beloved, then she’d sell her angelic soul to Them; and there was no regret to be had there. There was no shame in being part of the Forgotten if she couldn’t enjoy her immortality with someone else and, as she embraced corruption herself, she gladly let go of her burden.

Would an angel sell their soul to the devil in the name of love?

No, as there was no devil to sell angelhood to; instead, they’d give it to the goddess of love and make someone into an angel to her service. That was the answer that she had not been looking after enough until it had been almost too late.

#arc-v #moonblossomshipping #serena (arc v)#ruri kurosaki #femslash #whumptober2019 #no.17 #stay with me #au: angels #angst #cw character death #cw religious undertones #ship: moonflower fragrance

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sanderssidesfanfiction · 5 years

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We’ll Carry On - Chapter Thirty One

We’ll Carry On Tag

General Content Warnings: Sympathetic Deceit Sanders, Substance Abuse, Abandonment, Minor Character Death, Transphobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dissociation, Bullying, Homophobia

February 1st, 2019

Patton wished, not for the first time, that he could just escape this house and never return. He loved his mom, honestly, he did. But Charles made loving her feel hard. Because she always sided with him and that meant he and Virgil were always the troublemakers, even when Charles provoked them.

Granny was calling their mom over and over, asking for help or something, and Mom didn’t want to help. Charles kept telling her to ignore Granny and she’d go away, but he knew Mom felt guilty about it. And as such, she was much quicker to get angry, to get upset, to point fingers.

Patton knew that Granny needed help, and he didn’t understand why Mom wouldn’t help her. After all, didn’t family help each other when they were in trouble?

July 14th, 2019

Patton was absolutely delighted that Dad’s parents, his grandma and granddad, were staying for the weekend. It had been ages since he had seen Granny, even though she wrote them when she could, it was hard with their mom pestering her for Patton and Virgil’s location. And to have two grandparents from one parent, well! That was really cool!

They talked a lot, mostly asking questions to him and his brothers to get to know them. But sometimes they’d talk beyond small stuff, and let Patton talk about Legos, or Virgil about the Goosebumps books that he loved. And when Logan talked about Jack and his other friends, he’d get this spark in his eye that made him look truly alive. Even Dee got to talk about snakes. The only one who didn’t speak much was Roman. He sat in a corner of the living room, looking like he would rather be anywhere else. “What about you, Roman?” Granddad asked. “Is there anything you really like?”

Roman ducked his head. “I like fairy tales, and theatre,” he muttered.

Logan’s head snapped up from his phone. “Wait, you’re going into eighth grade! You’re going to my high school after this school year!”

Roman looked confused. “Yes?” he said, phrasing it like a question.

“Our after-school drama club is unbelievable!” Logan said. “I’ve worked tech on stuff when the sound booth has issues, and watching those kids act? It’s amazing. You should try out for the fall play, you’d love it!”

Roman looked vaguely interested, but uncertain. “You sure? I probably wouldn’t get that good a part...even if I do well in the middle school play this year...”

“No, that’s the best part of this whole thing!” Logan exclaimed. “There’s two sets of actors! The actual people, and then their understudies. And if nothing happens to the main actors, the understudies still get to have a part, because the school rotates who plays what show on what days! So you might not get to do the Friday night show, but you could always do the Saturday matineé!”

Roman’s lips twitched into a smile. “That sounds nice,” he admitted.

“It’s super fun,” Logan said. “All my friends try to get me to perform, though I prefer helping the techs. Too much attention on me makes me stressed.”

“I can understand that,” Roman said.

“Most people don’t,” Logan replied, “So I thank you for trying to empathize.”

Patton shot his hand up and asked, “Do you know what play they’re doing?”

“Not yet,” Logan said. “Usually they don’t announce that until the beginning of the school year.”

“Oh,” Patton deflated a little. “I was hoping that I could figure out what the play was so I could help somehow.”

“Well, we could always make our own play,” Logan said with a shrug.

Patton blinked, trying to make sense of that sentence. “We can?”

Logan nodded. “I know how to write screenplays, it can be done.”

Patton grinned. That sounded amazing! “Can we do it today?”

“I don’t see why not, provided Grandma and Granddad are okay with it,” Logan said, looking to their grandparents.

“I have one condition for you five working on a play,” Grandma said with a smile. “I want you to work on it here, so your grandfather and I can see your creativity at work.”

“I have another condition,” Granddad said. “I want to see the play when it’s done, even if it’s just a silly videotape that your dad sends us.”

Patton jumped up and down and looked to Logan hopefully. “Can we work on it now?”

Logan looked a little exasperated but chuckled all the same. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll grab the laptop.”

The laptop was a recent gift from Dad and Ami to Roman and Logan, informing them that they could only afford one laptop at the moment, but if the boys shared well enough there could be a second one in the near future. If Patton was lucky, and Logan and Roman had finished whatever work they were doing, he’d sometimes get to play games with Virgil on it.

Logan left the room quickly and Patton bounced where he stood. Writing a play would be so cool! He couldn’t wait to see what happened!

When Logan returned everyone started talking. “We need a concept for the plot,” Logan said.

“We need to figure out who everyone will be in the characters!” Roman said.

“I think we should figure out a setting first,” Virgil volunteered.

Patton watched as the three of them talked over each other, until Dee jumped on the table and waved his hands like crazy. Everyone turned to look at him and he signed, “One thing at a time.”

“Dee’s right,” Patton said. “What should we start with?”

Logan, Roman, and Virgil each said what they were saying before, at the exact same time. Patton frowned and looked at Dee. He had no idea how to solve the problem of everyone wanting their way to be the right way. Suddenly, it struck him. “Why not figure out a theme?” Patton asked. “If we can figure out a theme, then we can figure out the other three things faster!”

The three stared at him, until Logan laughed and tweaked his glasses. “You’re pretty smart, Patton. Okay. What should our theme be?”

“I vote family!” Roman exclaimed. “We could make a play about our stories!”

“Or we could do something where a family fights dragons or aliens!” Virgil said.

“Why not both?” Patton asked. “Brothers who were separated because they’d be too powerful together, and they find out about each other and save the world!”

“That sounds so cool!” Virgil exclaimed.

Dee clapped his hands and grinned.

Roman clapped Patton’s back. “That’s not a half-bad idea, kid!”

Logan thought about it, and nodded. “Okay, I can work with that.”

They all sat down on the floor and suggested ideas, which Logan would dutifully write down on the computer. Patton noticed their grandparents whispering to each other, but they were smiling, so he didn’t think too much of it.

It had to have been hours that they worked, deciding to go with Patton’s idea and then starting to write a story. Roman came up with the biggest ideas, which Virgil would point out might be a bit too complex for them to pull off, and Logan would scale them down to manageable size. Dee would occasionally add his two cents to what they were doing, but was mostly happy if he could play an antihero, to use Logan’s words.

When they finally stopped, it was because Dad and Ami came into the room asking where everyone was, because they had called that dinner was ready and none of them had heard it. Roman promptly answered, “We were fighting aliens in the play we’re writing,” and left it at that, as if that explained everything.

“Right...” Dad said, glancing at Ami. “Regardless, dinner is ready. We should eat it before it gets cold.”

They all went into the dining room and slowly started eating. “So, can we get context for this play?” Dad asked.

“We were talking to our grandsons about what they liked to do, and Roman brought up the fact that he enjoyed theatre. Logan said that he liked the theatre group at their high school, and when Patton asked if he knew what the play would be this upcoming year, Logan said no, but they could make their own,” Grandma summarized. “And these boys are amazing, Emile! They were all so creative, figuring out what to write and how to scale it down to something they could do with five actors! You never told us that they were so smart!”

Patton blushed a little and all his brothers were also in varying stages of embarrassment. “It’s not such a big deal,” Roman protested weakly. “I create crazy stories all the time.”

“And I’m usually the one who drags him back down to Earth,” Logan said.

“I was just trying to be realistic with what we could do,” Virgil said.

Patton shrugged. “I think it’s kinda a big deal, if only because usually the five of us don’t all work together like that.”

“But the fact that you don’t see it as a big deal means that you are talented,” Granddad said. “I would go so far as to say extremely gifted.”

“No way,” Roman said, scratching the back of his neck, as Logan tried to not choke on the water he was drinking. Virgil looked like he had just swallowed a frog.

“The boys still aren’t used to high praise,” Ami said, looking extremely amused. “No matter how many times we compliment them, they try to play it off. I don’t think you’re gonna be successful in getting them to accept your words, Dad. Much as you try.”

“Think I’ll have better luck?” Grandma asked.

“No,” Patton said. “I don’t think the others will be convinced that what they’re doing is a big deal, at least not for a long time.”

“But you disagree?” Grandma asked.

Patton shrugged. “I don’t think it’s as big a deal as you’re making it, but it’s not nothing, either.”

Grandma grinned. “You’re the mediator of the group, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes,” Patton said. “Usually I just say something ridiculous enough to get Logan and Roman to stop arguing, but sometimes I actually add my opinions.”

Everyone continued to playfully argue about whether or not the play was a big deal, long after dinner. When Dee started yawning, Dad took him upstairs to get ready for bed. When he came back downstairs, Granddad haltingly signed, “Can I hug you?”

Dee looked surprised briefly before he nodded.

Granddad smiled and hugged Dee gently, and Grandma kissed his forehead when Granddad retreated to the couch. Dee walked up the stairs to his room, looking dazed and shell-shocked.

Patton glanced at Virgil, who was reading a Goosebumps book. “Do you think they’re gonna do that to everyone?” he asked.

“Everyone who accepts it,” Virgil said. “They’re leaving early tomorrow morning, so they’re saying goodbye now.”

“Oh,” Patton said. “You know, Granny would hug us goodnight, but Mom didn’t do that for a while before we ran away.”

“I know,” Virgil said. “I was there too. It’s nice to have people who care, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Patton said softly. “It’s weird, but it’s nice.”

Virgil looked over at Patton from his book, and Patton was surprised to see the amused smirk on Virgil’s face. Virgil almost never was this expressive with Mom, and it still shocked him to see Virgil come out of his shell. “You say that a lot. Things are always weird but nice to you.”

Patton shrugged. “Maybe one day it’ll stop feeling weird, but today’s not that day.”

Virgil shook his head and sighed. “Yeah, I get that feeling a lot, too.”

They shared a smile before Virgil went back to reading and Patton continued to listen to Dad and Ami talking to Grandma and Granddad about everything that had happened over the past few months.

Patton stretched and yawned, and hopped off the couch, gathering the attention of all the adults. “I’m gonna get ready for bed,” he announced. “I’m kinda tired.”

“Can I get a hug before you go upstairs?” Granddad asked.

Patton nodded and walked over, hugging Granddad tight. He smelled like wood shavings, and Patton wondered if he did any woodworking in his spare time.

When Granddad let him go, Grandma kissed him on the forehead too, and Patton giggled. “I like you both a lot,” he said.

“We’re honored to hear that, Patton,” Grandma said. “Go ahead and get ready for bed, we’ll see you soon.”

Patton smiled and nodded, and headed upstairs. He was grinning the second he was out of sight. Grandma and Granddad were super nice, and he hoped that he’d get to see them again soon. When he was around them, he felt truly loved, which meant he could add two more people to the list of people he had as good people in his head. He couldn’t wait until that list was too long to remember.

#we'll carry on #sanders sides fanfiction #patton sanders #logan sanders #roman sanders #our creations #danger gays

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sadisticscribbler · 4 years

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Why Suicide?

Why do people kill themselves? I’m not talking about those who attempt suicide for attention, nor do I mean to belittle them, but what of the many more who chose to end their lives?

I am not asking some philosophical question here, but am talking from personal experience. You see, I have just found myself about to take my own life, and would have if I wasn’t disturbed just at the point of no return by a mundane phone call. Maybe because of my autism, but I had to answer the ringing phone which subsequently took me out of what I was about to do.

As a result I was left in some sort of limbo in which my body took me back home, and here I now sit talking to myself via this blog post. So how did I get there, and why do so many people find themselves where I did?

There is no simple reason… or rather there is no single event that in itself triggers suicidal ideation. Contrary to popular belief, suicidal thoughts aren’t caused by moments of depression that need to be “got through”, it is a more serious state of being. Let me explain: I was born suicidal.

As shocking and unbelievable as this might sound, it is true. I first attempted suicide before I was aged three (I drank bleach) which was not recognised for what it was… a genuine attempt to kill myself. I subsequently tried two more times in as many months, but survived them all. But what could have happened, you might be asking yourself, to make me want to kill myself? In a word: Nothing. Or in another: Everything.

For some context, I was born autistic; and I also had a very high IQ. Together, these factors, and the world in which I found myself, made this world intolerable. And it still is nearly sixty years later. The reason I have survived thus far is not because I have found some way to navigate this world, but in spite of it. No matter what experiences I have, it all comes to the same conclusion that I shouldn’t be living in this world. So why am I? For several reasons: external interference (such as my parents as a child), my Catholic faith, but more importantly my constantly trying to deny the inevitable. So what has happened now that these mechanisms are no longer sufficient to stop me doing the only thing available?

Until a few years ago I had responsibilities and family: both extended and my own wife and kids. Then I became chronically ill and unable to work. My parents and brother died and my family fell apart. And then my (now ex-)wife decided I was no longer useful to her and took everyone and everything away from me. I was left disabled and with nothing to my name. I had nothing and no-one… except for one very important friend who stuck by me. Last year she killed herself.

Like myself she was autistic and very intelligent. We talked endlessly about her decision to kill herself but I was unable to give her a convincing reason not to. This is because everything she said had been correct, and I could offer her (nor myself) any reason not to die. Unlike me she was an atheist and so the threat of eternal torment was not enough to deter her (as it had been doing for me). So I was unable to satisfactorily answer the question: What is the point of continuing to live? And my being unable to save her affirmed her conclusion in that, in my case, if I can’t save the life of my only true friend, then what is the point of my being around?

Before continuing with my journey, allow me to add her words herein as they show not just how I feel but how I and others, I suspect, see the world and why we can’t live in it. This is her final statement:

If you’re reading this, chances are my attempt to leave the world has been successful. If you happen to be religious, please pray for me to be treated compassionately in my next life, as I will be praying beforehand for this as well, as a relatively quick and painless death, despite my lack of religion.

Many people say suicide is selfish. To those, I would want to ask: is it not also selfish to expect someone to live, when existing seems to them intolerable?

None of us ask to be born, but we can decide when to die and in my eyes that right is fundamental; a human right, just like any other.

People stigmatise death, especially voluntary death, because to them it seems the most terrible thing they can imagine. To that, I say, what is so bad about death? The universe is so very old and will continue to exist long into the future, perhaps indefinitely. So why does it make a difference if someone dies at 20 or at 80, provided their life was not taken against their will?

As an autistic, I long for a world where autistic people can exist happily, but I’m not sure this can ever happen. I have pretty much given up on the world at this point. It’s not designed for people like me.

So who am I in this world? An autistic, chronically depressed, jobless, homeless in effect waste of space who was born into a female body but probably isn’t. Born to a teenage single mother, raised by a grandmother who is now dead and fated to a life where anything I attach to will be my undoing.

Dying isn’t something alien to me. I first began to think about suicide around the age of 7. As a child, I was intelligent and had a seemingly bright future, but that rarely translates into the adult world.

The only thing I really regret is losing the two people closest to me. Mostly, however, I am sad about losing hope, for it is only hope that keeps us going.

I’m also tired. To quote The Green Mile, “I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world everyday. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time.”

Like my friend I am autistic, suffer from chronic depression with episodes of clinical depression, jobless, and as illustrated above: “a waste of space”. I also have a catalogue of degenerative diseases. So what is there left to hope for?

“Oh it’s the depression talking, and that can be managed” you may be thinking. Sadly no… and not just just due to the mental health teams (who spectacularly failed in my friend’s instance). Depression is not an aberration of thought that can be corrected with a shot of serotonin. Rather it is the cold hard truth of reality that serotonin (naturally produced or chemically induced) obfuscates. This is why it is nigh impossible to help someone resist suicide. And I speak from experience of trying to help others, as well as trying to convince myself. In the end, the only argument against ending one’s life is the I “haven’t done it yet, because I’ve managed to knowingly delude myself”.

But what of speaking therapies… can these help? I would say no. This is because that people like I already see the reality of a hostile world, that no matter how hard we try to improve our lot in life, the full horror of it is a mere hair away. Distraction is no solution. So speaking with a therapist can only succeed if he/she can ‘enlighten’ the person to the ‘knowledge’ that life isn’t all that bad… or that it won’t always be that bad. But what if you’re smart enough, or have experienced enough, to see that what the therapist has said does not change the reality that there is no reason to go on, and that continuing to suffer now is worth the remote possibility that a less terrible time might momentarily punctuate the pain.

But it cannot work… there can be no going back: Once a child realises Santa doesn’t exist, there is no way to recapture nor replace what it meant to believe it. And so, once we have seen the world for what it is, there can be no way back. All that is left is how long we can distract ourselves, and finding a reason to so. Sooner or later one or both of these management techniques will fail. And it might take only the slightest of not-so-bad problems to break it all apart. And this is where I find myself.

I cannot promise that what almost happened tonight to me might not happen again, but for now I am still here writing this post in the hope that someone somewhere might be able to find a way to keep going that I, and my late friend, cannot. So, what was my ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’? I have been trying to cope with losing the only, and most dearest friend on whom I leant very much, and whom I loved very deeply; as well as developing cancer to add to my list of debilitating and very painful medical conditions. The Catholic church has become victim to corruption and evil, including in the office of the Pope. So I truly am alone. The loneliness is immense and the daylight short. I am barely managing to live on my benefits, and it is not easy. And then I receive today notification that my benefits have stopped. So soon I shall be unable to feed myself nor have shelter. So is there any reason not to kill myself? I thought not.

I won’t be out on the street tomorrow, but the time is rapidly approaching. This would be the end of the line for me, so as my friend said, we may be unable to fit into this world, “but we can decide when to die and in my eyes that right is fundamental; a human right, just like any other.“

#Suicide

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