#THE GOTH IS UNRELATED TO THE TRAUMA

[tumblingxelian]

Near Uniquely RWBY - Main Characters

I was chatting with my sibling the other day and we were joking about the fact in 90% of the media I consume I generally don't like the main characters.

Not in the sense I necessarily hate them, but I generally don't find them to be the most interesting, engaging or enjoyable person on screen or page. Instead I tend to gravitate towards secondary or minor characters and even minor antagonists before any of the big names.

Some of this is rooted in my often rooting for what tends to feel more like a real underdog or characters that feel like they got dealt a bad hand by the author unfairly. But its also that in a lot of media the main characters tend to immediately, slowly or quickly go into personality lockdown.

Becoming less a personality and more the embodiment of expected tropes and themes, or they lose their unique edge or circumstances because the plot demands one benefits or personality changes be heaped on them to keep the tone and story going.

Some examples of this would include say:

Ichigo from Bleach, with him and his supporting cast being very unique and super interesting during the initial arc. But as Soul Society came in, he became a much more standard Shounen determinator a the expense of his personality and his supporting casts were largely watered down & left behind.

Or how in Naruto or Dragon Ball the whole underdog/hard worker aspect of the characters felt undercut by legacy power ups and an endless wellspring of natural talent, alien biology, ETC.

I know these are just two examples, but they cover the general gist of what I mean.

So, what makes RWBY different?

Well, off the cuff, is simply that the four main characters are women.

I've often felt simply putting anyone other than a cis-het guy into the main character slot of say, a battle Shounen, or Isekai stands a good chance of making it more interesting by default. Even if the author does nothing with it the audience reaction would be different because the MC would be an exception to the norms.

In that vein, while one can call RWBY some sort of Shounen or adventure fantasy or magical girl show the main four are unique in how they manifest on screen at the very start. From how they participate in action, to how said action is structured and framed and the kind of adventures and topics they tackle.

But being unique alone is not enough, that would simply make it more interesting than the bog standard but what elevates RWBY is the execution and exploration of such elements and its characters.

Going into every aspect would be difficult, but in light of what I said above would be how each of the main four are initially presented as familiar archetypes, only to subvert or deconstruct them.

Ruby is a peppy goth who just wants to be normal but has inborn powers from her mysteriously vanished mother and serves as a beacon of optimism to others.

Except Ruby's version of normal still involved fighting death monsters with a sniper rifle scythe and she is actually one of the more ruthless characters. Her peppy persona obscures that she can have a pretty vicious temper when pushed and has displayed strong bloodknight tendencies.

Her unrelenting optimism and desire to fix the world is a complex mix of true beliefs, coping mechanism for trauma and her grappling with positions forced on her against her will. Her inborn power is potentially useful but also not that much of a game breaker outside specific contexts & said power sure as hell didn't save her mom.

Weiss Schnee is the Tsundere heiress of a powerful family, with a haughty attitude that hides her loneliness.

Except the "Tsundere" is more of a defense mechanism born of coming from an abusive home where every member of her family manifested a different trauma response. Freeze (Mother), flight (Sister), Fight (Weiss) Fawn (Brother).

Despite her upbringing & some projected trauma, she's far from ignorant as to the worst excesses of her nation early on, and her journey was more about overcoming the impacts her abuser had on her and finding a family in her team that let her be safe enough to let down her walls. Also despite being "The ice queen" she's actually one of the characters least inclined towards more ruthless actions and is extremely empathic.

Blake Belladonna is a mysterious and silent rougish woman, something of a shrinking violet even, but she carries with her a wounded heart thanks to her old flame, the edgy Adam Taurus.

Or more accurately, Blake is the daughter of activists and politicians who represent the worlds main discriminated against minority. She spent her youth on the road as a protestor and where even her father could be nearly killed by a lynch mob. She was targeted & groomed by a man who claimed to want to fight the same injustice she did but who was only interested in using the movement to grow his own power.

Her initial aloof-ness was a trauma response to having spent years under his thumb and overcoming him and the idea she had to 'save' him was one of the main corner stone so her character. Also, despite the "Revolutionary fighter" backstory she like Weiss is much less inclined towards ruthlessness than her team in large part because her past experience with it.

Yang Xiao Long, introduced as the fun loving big sister of Ruby & boisterous bruiser of the team who loves to party & flirt.

Except no, Yang was parentified as a child and forced to raise her own sister as their family unit fell apart. Her "Party girl" persona was outright framed as judging a book by its cover in her own trailer and something she put on or took off as she needed.

She became disabled over the course of the series run as well as entered a Sapphic romance with her partner Blake. Unlike the stereotype of characters with her design, Yang is actually an excellent student, fighter and engineer/mechanic. Plus much like her sister she tends to be of the more ruthless and pragmatic persuasion despite being from the "Normal" background.

Character Conclusion

So, all the characters break out of their initial archetypes, which already makes them more interesting. What's more, these sorts of characters just being oput together and made the main characters rather than circling a dude is in of itself unique.

But there are other aspects of the writing which endear me to how it handles the main characters and what keeps them interesting.

Anger & Violence

See, while in various media women do express anger at times it is still often far less so than men. What's more, often women's anger tends to be presented in... Less flattering lights.

With the anger obscuring fragility while in a man it conveys strength. Or implying a sort of hysteria rather than an appropriate or controlled response. Or worst of all being demonized in general unless its rooted in or coming from traditionally feminine places.

The same tends to be true when it comes to violence with a lot of media either trying to find some way to make women in battle less... Brutal than their male counterparts. (More more like fanservice) Along with rarely letting women fight men, unless they are a special exception to the norm.

RWBY does not do this.

The main characters, hell, all the women in the series express a multitude of different forms of anger and violence. They battle men, they battle each other, they battle monsters all with no distinction nor fanservice shot in sight.

What's more though is that said anger and violence are not presented as, for lack of better words, wrong. The writers don't draw overt attention to this fact, they don't hang a big sign up saying "Girls can fight & shout too" or the like.

They just present these women with a range of emotions, motives and actions that are treated according to what fits the theme of the show rather than hewing closer to gendered lines.

This isn't to say anger & violence are lionized, but more that the experience and usage of them is not demonized or undermined because of the characters gender.

I suppose what I am saying is that CRWBY by and large lack double standards when it comes to exploring these things that I see so often in other media. The women in the main cast, among the villains, both sides respective allies and beyond can be flawed, or angry or do both good and terrible things.

But the writers are always treating everyone's pain as equally valid regardless of gender or situation. Which means that the situations that cause anger exist within a tone of respect that forms the depiction and framing of anger itself.

Which is just something I really enjoy.

Thanks for reading!

#RWBY #Save RWBY #greenlight volume 10 #Team RWBY #ruby rose #weiss schnee #blake belladonna #yang xiao long #Some other series that do this or touch on it are She-Ra #The original Sailor V manga but less so Sailor Moon #& to varying degrees the Owl House #Thanks to Adam for helping me with the conclusion!

[punkeropercyjackson]

Summer Kent lore dump

Ages ago @mik3stuff asked me to tell him about my DC self-insert because he wants to make one too and the ask he sent me got lost in my drafts and i FINALLY remembered and got the motivation to make this!It's long and i do mean LOOOONG because they've existed since 2019 + I tagged canon characters for personal organization and i'm very sorry if that annoys anyone!! /gen /srs

Summer Kent was born Frankie Garcia,in Metropolis,to Mayerlin and Sebastián Garcia.His parents divorced when he was a baby with his mom getting custody of him and his dad neglecting him and they were abusive to him in the classic 'neurotypical cishet parents with a queer neurodivergent kid' way along with some racism on his mom's part since she was white and he grew up getting bullied at school and with no friends too.One of his first memory's is seeing Superman for the first time and being a huge fan of his ever since so when he realized how awfully his parents treated him,he started dreaming Clark would save him

On his 10th birthday,Lex did a rampage across the city in a Lexcorp robot and killed his parents by throwing them onto a building so hard they died on impact,immediately kidnapping Summer to experiment on him afterwards.The experiment in question was to inject him with the dna of the last Kryptofang,a kryptonian species that were basically Krypton's equivalent to dragons but with the addition of telepathy,as an attempt to train him to kill Clark.He was encloused to a Lexcorp lab for 3 days until Clark found him thanks to his and Lois' investigations on Lex's plans.Since Frankie wanted nothing to do with his birth parents,he told Clark his name was Summer when asked since that was the season where he discovered Superman

Summer and Clark instantly bonded so he had no hesitation when he found out about them wanting him to adopt them and this also made Lois his adoptive mom and baby Jon his little brother,along with Jimmy and Lana being his(nonromantically involved)honorary uncle and aunt.They became his sidekick under 'Sparks',both because of his pyrokenisis and his new family being sparks of hope in his life,and him and Lois pulled them out of school so they wouldn't get bullied anymore and Lana was their teacher thanks to her children's education degree she'd previously given up on using.Lex did a smear campaign against Sparks/Summer to detract suspicioun on himself and that made them become more angry and violent and pessimistic than ever combined with their fresh trauma(Clark,Lois and Jimmy did their best to spread good word of them ofc)

A year into his sidekick career,they met Jason due to Clark bringing him on a Justice League mission the same day Bruce did him and they butted heads because of their opposite personalities but were best friends by the end of the day,calling eachother 'Basket Case and Bird Boy' as insults turned affectionate nicknames.Through him,Summer also befriended Eddie and Jason dubbed them 'The Magic Trio' due to his belief that being Robin gave him magic,Eddie's demon theme and Summer's powers.Jason was a positive influence on Summer with his optimistic and peppy attitude and genuine belief in him and made him become more of an 'ideal' hero.Ironically,Bruce disliked him because he thought it would be the other way around

Sparks eventually gained the nickname 'Superpunk',much to his dismay because the Metropolis media meant it as an insult and he was also a goth tomboy both in and out of costume

Clark got Dick and Kory to mentor Summer and this led to them becoming Summer first crushes,with him being aware of the Dick one and throughly embarrased by how obvious they were with it against their will and confusing their's on Kory for jealousy over her being Dick's soulmate(but there was no pick me-ness on his part and instead they were always kind and supportive to eachother).His bi awakening happened when he was 14 and slightly unrelated but in this verse,Eddie was Jason's.An unofficial mentor and moreso intergenerational friend was Selina,who he gained his love of cats from

When Jason was 15,he realized he'd fallen in love with Summer and Dick convinced him to ask him out to a Gotham Academy dance as a confession but then Ditf happened and Summer shut down so hard he had to put the sidekick mantle on hold.On june 1st,he flew to Gotham to visit Jason's grave and got into a fight with Mr Freeze,who accidentally killed him via hypothermia and that made the ghost of the last Kryptofang manifest in his headspace along with his own ghost.They had a conversation that ended with him naming it 'Fantasma' and it convincing him to live again.Clark ressurected him with the Kryptonian Regeneration Matrix using a piece of his hair,Summer having lost three fingers by the time he came back to life and now living with prosthetics.Clark and Lois sent him to live with Jonathan and Martha in hopes of helping him cope and it worked as he learned how to do farmwork,diy and bake,was showered in kindness by his abuelos and got close to Fantasma who taught him Kryptofang things(which Clark also had with the info in the Fortress of Solitude but it had even better knowledge on them than him for obvious reasons)

A while later,Summer moved back to Metropolis after demanding to when he saw Superboy(Kon)and Supergirl(Cindy)on TV,wondering what the fuck was going on.Their relathionship had a rocky start to say the least but Summer still tried to be the best older sibling he could be to them once he saw how poorly the adults in their lives treated them and this led to them having a healthy if very weird dynamic and Summer himself got a new pseudo father-son relathionship in John while they worked on fixing the broken KRM.Jon had developed a love of video games while he was gone and got Summer into them too and over the course of these runs is when we get the arrivals of 4/8 the remaining Superkids:Mia,Chris,Laney and Match and since this was at the same time as Stephanie's and Cass' Robin and Batgirl eras,he teams up with them and they become a trio with Summer taking Babs place as their third while Babs is allowed to truly stay Oracle like she deserves-He was also much kinder to Stephanie than almost everyone else and this made it so they're the closest out of all the platonic World's Finest duos

The combo of his character development and constantly being around Kon and Stephanie who're both gnc trans people in their own ways made Summer's egg as a bigender and genderfluid transmasc crack and he got a new costume and official hero identity under 'Superpunk' for reclamation that only lasted 3 months until he switched to newER one under 'Ember' as he realized he's actually a pastl femme now,Kory and Dick helping him make the second costume.As Ember,he became second only to Clark on the beloved Metropolitan hero list thanks to how many feats he accomplished and his bubbly sweetness and humility and told his Papí he wanted a boy middle name so he gave him two:Valentino and 'Va-El',a kryptonian one to show him he saw him as much his son as he does his bio kids.While all this was going down over the years including the above part,he also had his first relathionship in Rose,dated Kyle(who is only a bit older than 90s YJ like him to avoid creepiness)and had a short thing with Eddie and befriended Natasha,Helena,Cassie,Bart,@insomniac-jay's Dahlia,Solana,Lilith and Daisy,@honeypotsworld's Onya and Lucille,@theautisticcentre's Mathew and Jennifer and @refrigeratedboombursts's Kahali.Kara,Mae,Karen and Krypto come in here too

In Utrh,Bruce calls him to Gotham because he has a feeling Red Hood is Jason but dosen't tell him that's why.Summer still resents him for not killing the Joker but Dick convinces him to agree and him and Jason get into a one on one fight where Jason recognizes him and unmasks himself.Summer is nearly shellshocked because they recognize him too now and he tries to go in for a hug while talking about how much he missed them and makes a joke phrased compliment on their current look and attitude but they fly off in heartbreak at their childhood best friend coming back only for him to be evil.Fantasma forms a mindlink between the two since it's tired of Summer's constant thoughts of him yet refusal to talk to him and this leads to them reconnecting and reforming their bond that was never really lost,including Jason coming to visit him in Metropolis,over the course of a whole year.He also regains his confidence in his love for them and starts shamelessly flirting with them and they're very flustered by it and pretend to hate it but they're secretly loving every second of it,as well as being convinced he's just messing with them instead of having actual feelings for them

Duke is the 5th Robin in this verse instead of Damian and We Are Robin still existed but like him they're elementary and middle school ages instead of high schoolers and Summer is an older sister figure to him,Mar'i is also canon here and two years younger than Lian and they grow up to date and Talia gets herself out of the man-driven narratives DC refuses to free her from by taking over Lexcorp and turning into a force for good by completely rehauling it and is a comphet lesbian happily in love with Selina

Summer becomes Damian's first real friend in their miniseries that takes place slightly before SOB which is about him befriending people his age specifically and regularly appears on Stephanie's Batgirl(60 issues here),Duke's Robin,Cassie's Wonder Girl and all the other Superkids' runs(Kon upgrades to Power Boy instead of the T-Shirt bullshit)and @jellyjays 's Blitz Cross,one of Summer's many found siblings,makes it's debut inbetween these time frames

Jason is an influence on him once again but this time in the opposite direction,making him become more sardonic and brutal as Ember and this causes the Metropolis media to frame him as 'evil all along' which hurts him so much he decides to finally join The Outlaws.The original trinity is Jason himself,Eddie and Rose and once Summer joins as 'Ignite' with a new suit he made and an additional black domino mask gifted to him by Jason to match him,they're 'The Dark Core Four' and @moonage-gaydream's Pepper is their Greta in the sense that she joined because of her crush on one of them-Summer,who she befriended before he ditched Metropolis and who liked her back.Thaddeus(who's a trans girl)is added to the team after they accidentally save her life and then come in order Kahali,Kyle,Artemis,Imani,Mathew,Lilith and Daisy simaultanously,Duke,Azriel(Created by Jay once again),Venus and finally Jennifer.Jaysumm are the Team Mom and Dad from the start AKA Dadhood and Supermom but Thaddeus legitimately views Summer as her mother

Their base is an old abandoned but still functional mansion of Bruce's that they call 'The Fortress',Rhato is 104 issues lasting 3 years in-universe,the Outlaws are a crazy ass and morally gray found family,Mathew is the token cis and Pepper is the token allistic and they've disbanded by the end but on good terms and keep in touch.During it,Jason Summer and Mathew are briefly Lanterns(Star Sapphire/Violet,Black and Green respectively),Rose leaves back Ravager to become Willow,Kyle upgrades to White Lantern,Thad realizes she's a girl mid-way through,Kahali gets killed and ressurected just like his didi Summer and Duke gains reality warping in addition to light and darkness powers.He's actually the reason the N52 exists so he's God actually.Summer takes some detours later on in the run as Outlaw bussiness gets him tangled up with the Gotham Academy kids and starring in the Lumberjanes crossover

Canon couples other than Jason and Summer are Eddie/Lilith,Rose/Imani or Rose/Pepper,Tim/Kahali,Kyle/Venus,Artemis/Daisy,Mathew/Jennifer,Duke/Luna(my Aquafam oc i made to be his love interest)and Thad/Azriel.There's also some mix and match verse's in there,including an adult Outlaws polycule

Jaysumm is finally canonized in this series via Summer one day being especially stressed out and missing the Superfam to boot and Jason comforting him which turns into a makeout session and them sleeping together and agreeing to be fwb because Summer somehow STILL dosen't realize Jason is literally in love with him and they're now a couple in every way but going on dates until Summer has another intense missing of the Superfam day on halloween when he wants to take Jon trick or treating so Jason and him sneak out in a werewolf and fairy costume respectively to do it together,with Jon wearing an Ember costume because he missed his first brother just as much.They have a great night and Jon and Jason still get along like they did when he used to babysit him as Robin and after they drop him at home when they finish,they stop by the fast food restaurant Summer used to work at for late dinner and that's when he finally has his Jason love epiphany.He goes through several stages of emotion over the next hours and blurts out a confession when they make it back to the Fortress because it's killing him and Jason confesses back and they have a long session of different kinds of kisses as they go to Summer's room to sleep

Post-Rhato,Summer goes back to Metropolis with Jason in toe due to their dating status at the same time Clark ends up in a coma thanks to saving Jon from Ultraman so Summer takes up the Superman mantle in the meantime since he's the eldest Kent sibling.Kenan,Carol,Jane,Laura and Lucy are Superfam members by now and Summer,Lois,Martha,Kara and John make his Superman suit together as a bonding activity and his hero work is better than ever,the effort he puts into it being to redeem himself from what he did as vigilante.Also,Talia makes him his own Krypto equivalent with kryptonian technology named 'Kryptona',a robotic female supercat who can speak english,spanish,arabic and kryptonian and has pink hearts for pupils

He also mentors Damian's team,the All New Teen Titans,because Jon is a part of it and so do Jason,a newly Batwoman Stephanie,Duke codenamed 'Eris' and Cassie who's now 'Wonder'.The members other than Damian(Shadowbird)and Jon(Superboy)are Maps(Robin),Maya(Nobody),Suren(Fang),Kathy(Beacon),Colin(Abuse),Irey(Thunderheart),Bobby(Wonder Boy),Nell(Batgirl),Keli(Teen Lantern)and Laurel(Supergirl + A trans girl variant of Jon instead of a genderswap and Earth 11 is generally very different here).75 issues,their Titans Tower is in Brooklyn and the ships are Damimaps,Jonay,Mayakathy and Surnell but only Mayakathy is explicit and the rest are just implied since they're all so young.Stephcass and Cassiegeorgia are canon too

Two years pass until Clark wakes up and by then,Metropolis loves Summer so much that when he announces he's been Ember,son and daughter of Superman,the whole time and is going back to it they do multiple kinds of grand apologies to him for their mistreatment and Jason also gave him a domino mask again but this time a baby pink one to symbolize him finally embracing all parts of himself and Summer adds on a pastel trans flag colors Superfamilia battle jacket and pink demonias for the final touch.Them and Jason have officially settled down together as they buy a house and have Metropolitan and occasionally Gothamite adventures and end up having four kids:October,Gus and Zane(identical twins)and Thea.Summer opens up his own bakery called 'Summer's Desserts' but stays Ember and Jason becomes a librarian when he's not Red Hood

#summer kent #latino superfam tag #trans superfam tag #clark kent #lois lane #jon kent #t4t clois #fantasma #jason todd #afrolatino jason supremacy #jaysumm #eddie bloomberg #dick grayson #koriand'r #t4t dickkory #ma and pa kent #superkids #john irons #stephanie brown #blasian stephanie brown #t4t mar'iian #talia al-ghul #damian wayne #cassie sandsmark #thaddeus thawne #maps mizoguchi #kryptona #dc #summerposting #autistic girl summer

[charms-of-earth]

ok ill bite tell me abt ur autism

omg anon. would you believe you are the first person to ask me about this? ok, here goes. wow, i feel like i'm about to give a speech. ok. so, when i was a kid i had a lot of trouble making eye contact. i even remember one exercise we did in class where we had to practice eye contact with our peers and i (foolishly) proclaimed to the whole class "eye contact is easy! see!" (then i proceeded to look at the teachers chest.) she called me out on it of course, and my bullies in class laughed at me. anyway, when i brought this up to adults, it was always "oh, yeah eye contact is hard" or "you'll get better at it, just keep trying." well anon, i didn't really get better at it. i just got better at *pretending* which i now know is called masking, but i'm getting ahead of myself.

fast forward to my teens because much of my formative years are blocked out bc of trauma (but thats another post) and i've learned little tricks to avoid eye contact. looking at the bridge of someone's nose, their forehead, even just below their eyes or above them. i knew nothing about autism except that there was a nonverbal autistic guy in highschool and i was kinda friends with his sister who took care of him. that was my only exposure to autism so of course that wasn't me, right?

i dont remember if i ever had meltdowns as a child, or even as a teenager, but i know i had chronic migraines and was very sensitive to smells, bright lights, crowds, anything super simulating sensory-wise. maybe i had them, but i just blocked them out like i did so many other things? i don't know, the biggest thing for me was always the eye contact thing and the sensory thing.

i always just felt that *something* was different about me, but could never put my finger on what that was. i experimented with alt culture a bit, but i was already the black sheep of the family so if i became goth or scene that would add fuel to the fire. but i did listen to alt music quite a bit (this seems unrelated but from my research people on the spectrum gravitate towards alt culture and lgbtqa+)

then, in college i finally found out what it was that was different about me! (spoiler alert: it wasn't autism. at least not yet.) i came out as trans and started taking testosterone! well, that didn't last long (only about a year) because i realized i didn't want to be hairy and smelly all the time, and i could no longer sing the way i used to, but it's ok. i'm not a musician or anything. so, i wasn't a girl and i wasn't a guy, so i must be neither! and that's when i came out as nonbinary.

FINALLY, on a whim, my partner and i watched a youtube video by yo samedy sam, who also found out she was autistic later in life (and when i say that i mean like early to mid 30s) and it all fell into place. i've since done a little research and joined a discord server for people on the spectrum, and i understand and respect my autistic friends so much more.

i brought it up with my therapist and she recommended i take a few online tests. ( i think it was on embrace autism, the the tests were the CAT-Q, which is about how well you mask and the AQ and the RAADS-R? really legit tests, easy to understand and well worded.) no surprise i guess, i scored really high on all three tests, especially the masking test.

so, there you have it. if you are questioning whether you might be autistic, i really recommend you samedy sam's videos. autism is her special interest so shes really knowledgeable about it and structures her videos in a way that my brain doesnt wander away to other thoughts or what have you (i have adhd as well, which is a really common comorbidity with autism)

anyway, thats about it! thanks for the ask, and i hope you have a wonderful day/night!

#ask #autism #personal

[merluvlee-sims2]

Pleasantview: Lothario - Prologue #1

Who is Don Lothario?

Those words had been echoing in his head all summer long, for some reason. Don couldn't explain why, but lately, he'd just been feeling...off.

Maybe it was the unrelenting heat—after all, it had been an uncharacteristically hot summer for Pleasantview. Or maybe it was the long hours he'd been putting in as an intern at the trauma ward.

But thankfully, today was Don's first day off in awhile. He obviously had some preparations to do for his wedding tomorrow, but that wouldn't be too stressful...

Like, getting in one last woohoo with Nina and Dina before he tied the knot with Cassandra Goth. He knew it was wrong to sneak around behind his fiancee's back, but he kept telling himself that after the wedding tomorrow, he would be a changed man. That he would settle down and start a family, just like men his age were supposed to do.

Besides, it was probably better that he ended things with the Caliente twins before they found out that he was seeing both of them behind each other's backs.

That night, after Woodland Park was empty, Don even convinced Kaylynn to meet up with him for one last tryst on their favorite bench. Oh, how he'd miss the thrill of doing public woohoo with his maid...but he would be a better man for Cassandra. He had to be.

#ts2 #sims 2 #pleasantview #sims 2 premades #sims 2 gameplay #sims 2 simblr #don lothario #dina caliente #kaylynn langerak #nina caliente

[modgirlyreposts-revamped]

i see that and i raise you. maurice singing this as a lullaby to little audrey and millie

no reason other than i like the super melancholy vibe. also i associate it with michael afton and for some reason i see maurice as being kind of like michael, if michael actually got to live out his adulthood and move forward and heal and shit

i mean even when you consider my glammike au, michael has been around since like '69, he's just tired at this point, even if he's still mentally 22, he's a tired old man in spirit, he just wants to rest but instead he becomes a dad figure for a mentally unwell kid who doesn't really have anywhere else to go at least at the moment who unites with him over a shared goal of taking down the corruption in fazbear entertainment, and he certainly still has a lot of fighting drive from his youth and his trauma that hasn't really gone away when that part of his past keeps trying to dig itself up, also he has daddy issues that never got resolved and. are you seeing why i feel like they're kind of similar

this is completely unrelated. here's a headcanon to make up for the sudden lore dump: maurice never stopped buying dark/goth/alt clothes. he generally prefers his more soft colored clothing, but he holds onto a lot of his alt stuff. he still has some of his accessories, studded bracelets and spiked wrist cuffs and the like, and his closet is surprisingly filled with a lot of dark clothing and band memorabilia.

imagine millie coming home from school one day and seeing her grandpa tending to some like plants or sum shit (tell me he doesn't keep plants you can't) or petting her cat and he's like wearing a black sweater over like a fucking slayer shirt and dark pants and a studded black bracelet and he just looks at her and gives her the most gentle and kindhearted smile and is like "hey, girlie, how was school? you bringing any friends over today? if not, tell them i said hello :) by the way, what would you like for dinner?" like there's nothing even worth noting about the situation and she's just fucking reeling because she thought her grandpa had stopped being goth like, 40 years ago

she calls dylan over to see and he thinks it's the coolest shit ever

Him and Michael are really just "unresolved daddy issues, and a burning want to kick the everloving shit out of their fathers for what they did to them" gang

OMG I HAVE THE SAME HC, HE JUST FEELS A LITTLE INSECURE WHEN WEARING HIS EMO STUFF BC OF HOW LONG IT'S BEEN, BUT WHEN HE DOES MILLIE AND THE OTHERS ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT-

Maurice in my AU be like "I am a father of many kids, and most of them aren't even mine" as like every FF character without a father figure, and Breach are just standing behind him gjfdjkgdjkdsd-

#tired dad maurice supremacy #asks #answered #valleyfthdolls

[meret118]

Excerpts:

Goth subculture is largely associated with whiteness, but Black goths, also known as “Afrogoths,” are pushing back on that perception—first, with their presence in the community, and secondly, by challenging the dominant Eurocentric history and aesthetics within it.

. . .

Many goths see their community as one that accepts those whom society deems “other”—which has made the space more welcoming for LGBTQ folks, insiders say. But, like any white-majority space in a white supremacist world, it’s got issues. First, rock music history often leaves out the contributions of Black and brown people. Within punk, as The Guardian recently wrote, this remains “still an unfamiliar and unaddressed topic.” Black blues legend Screamin' Jay Hawkins' 1956 song “I Put A Spell on You”, which has been covered by everyone from The Animals to Tim Curry to Marilyn Manson, could be called the first goth anthem, but remains relatively obscure; none of the Black goths I interviewed credited it as an influence.

. . .

Goth-kid-turned-library-creative-director Leila Taylor explores similar themes in her treatise Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul and finds that compelling intersections between the gothic preoccupation with pain, horror, violence, and trauma makes goth culture uniquely suited to exploring while reckoning with America’s history of enslavement, colonialism, and the unrelenting violence against Black bodies. Black people are the embodiment of the gothic, argues Taylor, in that we are white America’s greatest fear. Or as one T-shirt puts it: “so goth, I was born black.”

Within that context, artists like M. Lamar are performing gothness as the ultimate critique of American history and dominant power structures, through haunting music and intense, provocative imagery. At the literal polar opposite end of the spectrum, Fat Bat Dana merges body positivity with whimsy, a deceptively subversive way of challenging dominant paradigms of color, size, and femininity within the goth space. When I interview Feratu—who has Nigerian, Cameroonian, and West Indian heritage; identifies as vegan, queer, and non-binary; and is a partner, parent of two “baby bats,” and a practicing kitchen witch—their gothness serves as a lens through which their other identities are understood and amplified.

Despite all the intersections between Blackness and gothness, there is still racism within the space. While harassment has long been “horrible on social media,” according to Feratu, there has been an uptick in in-person and online goth-on-goth hate during the Trump era. #GothRight and #GothsforTrump are a thing, and there are also what Feratu calls “the elitists,” white goths who believe “you have to be pale-skinned” to be goth, often using “accuracy” as an excuse for racism in the grand tradition of Game of Thrones-loving misogynists and the science-citing racists who couldn’t get over a Black Little Mermaid.

Still, Afrogoths all over the world are continuing to shift the relationship between Blackness and individual creative expression in new and interesting ways. Nigeria, a Black-majority country that is relatively conservative socially in comparison to the U.S., has its own burgeoning alternative scene, as does Brazil. Afrofuturist fiction, like the dark and richly imagined Broken Earth Trilogy by three-time Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin, and the Afropunk music festival have mainlined Blackness within subcultures long-dominated by white people. Beyoncé’s 2014 visual album Lemonade is rife with Gothic imagery and Rihanna, who appropriated #ghettogothic, mastered “goth chic casual.”

[zyzzyva1936-blog-blog]

“Lemma the Librarian - The Last Dance”

Published: 14 April 2018*

http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html

“The Last Dance” brings an end to the episodic nature of the series. Everything from here on out is welded quite tightly into the main plot - or, rather, the main plot constitutes what happens in the last three stories. Spoilers for “The Last Dance” from here on out. What seems like a straightforward get-the-book smash-and-grab (which involves Lemma and Iola going undercover in a harem, because @midorikonton knows which side her bread is buttered on) turns into the return of fairy murdergoblin “Red” for his third and final confrontation with Lemma. Red loses, although mostly thanks to Iason and Rhoda and Rhoda’s Machamp rage-demon Sonneillon. (Rhoda being, of course, the person Lemma used the ghost last time to call for.)

Lemma’s desire to be enslaved is something she’s been dealing with, more or less successfully, up until this point, but it’s something Iason and Iola don’t actually know about yet. That reticence is now coming back to bite her in the ass. The most important conflict in this story isn’t the fight against Red, or Lugal’s** magic clothes; it’s between Lemma and Iola over what the right course of action while trapped in the palace is. Lemma wants to give in, of course, but Iola’s experience with mind-control has been a lot more traumatic than Lemma’s, and she has a very strong personal/cultural “go down fighting” ethos, and she doesn’t seem to have this particular kink on any level anyways. We were reminded just last story of all of Iola’s trauma around the whole magical mind-controlled sex thing. But unlike that time, Lemma, for strategic reasons, doesn’t feel like she has to room to let Iola do her own thing. So she doesn’t just go along with the enchantments, she actively throws her magical weight behind glamouring Iola too. Iola doesn’t know the actual reasons Lemma did this, but I’m not sure it’d make a difference anyways: she would understand it, correctly, as just as awful a betrayal either way.

The party - now up to four with the addition of Rhoda - is off to Hattush to find the last, most apocalyptic book, and it’s all very dramatic. But what sticks with me the most about the end is Iola’s refusal to tell Lemma everything’s ok.

*Look, it was supposed to be out this week, but the EMCSA (my canonical reference for links and dates) is on a one week break, I’m travelling next week, and its been posted to Tumblr now. Also it’s been burning a hole in my drafts folder for nearly a month now. ;P

**His death at the hands of Red is a little abrupt, but he’s enough of a controlling jerk I can’t brink myself to feel too sorry for him. Plus, you know, dying abruptly is a peril of kingship. (If Red had murdered, say, poor Simta, I’d be a lot angrier; but Jenny seems to have learned her lesson since the Vamp!Brea business***.)

***Yes, I’m still mad. ;P

When The Fuck Are We? 🤷

For the first time, we’re further back in time than the Bronze Age Collapse! “Possession with Intent” is set in Khemeth, which is clearly K•m•t, Egypt*. Ancient Egypt is one of those things everyone at least knows a little about** so I’ll focus on two slightly more obscure points.

The first is Iason’s reference to Khemeth being “the breadbasket of the Inner Sea”, which is both true and false in an interesting way. Egypt, being spectacularly fertile, essentially one-dimensonal, and laid out on a lazy, easily navigable river, is indeed just about the optimum imaginable setting for extracting massive food surpluses with ancient technology and governance. But it wasn’t a big export from Egypt (Egypt’s main ancient export was papyrus, thanks to its ecologically-enforced monopoly). Rather, it was mostly used to pump up Egypt’s own population, and in particular the showpiece capital cities such as Memphis, Thebes, or Alexandria. In the ancient world, having an unnecessarily - nay, infeasibly - large capital was a point of pride, which is where Egypt’s actual role as a breadbasket comes in: after it lost its independence in 30BCE, the Romans told Alexandria to get stuffed and began exporting Egypt’s wonderful easy grain surpluses to Rome, instead***. But of course, there’s not much here to imaginably suggest that we’re in the Roman Empire, timeline-wise.

Which brings us to the other point: the party being around for the invention of pyramids is obviously just for the joke, but even discounting that Egypt is old. The usual comparison is to note that when Augustus began redirecting the Egyptian grain surplus to Rome, the pyramids at Giza were already older than Augustus is now. The Egyptian state that survived the Bronze Age Collapse was the already declining New Kingdom, third of the traditional old/middle/new kingdoms division of ancient Egyptian history; it’s the heir to a polity stretching back into the 31st C BCE. Egypt is old. 

“The Last Dance” takes us to the one city-dwelling society even older than Egypt. Lagasch/Lagash is a Sumerian town, and Sumer (the south end of Mesopotamia, so modern-day south-central Iraq) has recognizable cities all the way back into the fifth freakin’ millennium BCE, and a historical record stretching patchily into the late fourth. Lagash ceased to exist as in independent city-state in the late third millennium*****, so about as long before our stop in Etruria as that was before Mercia, or Mercia is before the present day (and this story doesn’t seem to be taking place at the end of Lagash’s time as an independent polity, either). Based on some truly shoddy historical research******, we might slap this with a date of 2500 BCE - old enough to actually start getting close to the invention of the pyramids.

Sumerian, like Etruscan, is a language that seems to be unrelated to every other known language. (Before you come up with a brilliant theory that will revolutionize ancient history - no, they don’t seem to be related to each other, either.) Unlike Etruscan, we have such a huge corpus of text that we can translate it fairly reliably. (It helps that Sumerian remained in use as a record-keeping language for centuries after it had stopped being spoken - rather like Latin in Medieval/Early Modern Europe.) I’ve already mentioned the problems with king lists and such, but one of the great things about Mesopotamia is that unlike the logistical records of Mycenae, or the glorifying propaganda of Egypt, we have all of that and also preserved letters, and that lets us look so much further afield into the culture, you don’t even know. We even have recognizable preserved jokes: a regional administrator writes the central palace complaining that his requests for supplies to repair a dangerously deteriorating wall have been ignored, and it’s going to fall over and hurt someone. He demands supplies again, “and if you can’t send those at least send a doctor”.

Also, despite what Neal Stephenson will tell you, Sumerian is not glossolalic and you can’t use it to mind-control people.

*Look, you try transliterating Coptic into Latin characters! Like its distant relatives the Semitic languages, Coptic is based around consonantal root-words, into which vowels are slotted to make verbs, adjectives, and so forth. It makes for somewhat awkward transliterations.

**He says, and then panics trying to figure out how much people who aren’t actually historians have read about ancient Egypt. Tutankhamen’s weird Sun cultist dad is common knowledge, right?

***Rome’s peak in the Augustan period at a couple of hundred thousand, maybe a million****, was almost entirely on the back of the annona, a massive subsidized bread ration distributed to the Roman civic populace, and supplied in large part by Egypt. (It’s not terribly comparable to modern food stamps or other social welfare; in an ancient context, it’s more like spiking the football.) The population cratered between then and the burned-out husk the Goths and Byzantines squabbled over in the 6th C CE, but not because of the “fall of Rome”. Rather, the 4th C CE founding of Constantinople and the redirection of the Egyptian grain surplus there (so the new capital would bulk up to an appropriately prestigious population) was what really did it for Rome; and all of that happened when the Roman Empire was still riding high. The state of Rome was closer before and after the Visigoth sack than either was to Augustus’ city of marble. 

****The brilliant if wildly opinionated historian Colin McEvedy had a great turn of phrase arguing for 250,000. (He has a great turn of phrase for everything, you should read him.) After laying out the more archaeological arguments about land use and suchlike, he notes that the one solid literary record for the annona we have, around the time of Augustus, gives a little less than a quarter of a million rations, and “who ever heard of a dictator who put a smaller figure on his largesse than he needed to. If [Augustus] had fed a million Romans he would have said so.” 

*****We can peg it to exact years relative to related dates - the Mesopotamians were pretty through chroniclers, so we know how long kings ruled, in what regnal year they went on what campaign, and so forth, but they’re floating around in a little bit of a void. There are a couple of different possible chronologies depending on which recorded astronomical events you make line up with which calculated astronomical events.

******To wit, googling “Lagash king list dates” and looking for names that resemble “Lugal”. My historiography prof just shuddered and doesn’t know why.

~

Next time: the thrilling climax! Oh, man, does Lemma do some climaxing.

#Lemma Reviews

[literarygoon]

“The misery and the hope we shared”

A review of The Plague by Kevin Chong, Arsenal Pulp Press

By Will Johnson

When Kevin Chong first sat down to write The Plague, it was absolutely unnecessary for him to invent a new epidemic for Vancouver, as the opioid crisis currently ravaging the west coast is already sending a staggering number of residents hurtling to an early grave. By the end of 2017 the city had brought the average death rate down from around 150 per month to under 100, but the epidemic has soldiered on despite aggressive interventions by the B.C. government.

And while the average headline-reader still associates these deaths with the hardcore drug addicts of the Downtown Eastside, picturing homeless derelicts slipping from this mortal coil in shadowy alleys, a closer look reveals that those passing away include teenage athletes who have been prescribed painkillers, upper middle class couples with young children and a disproportionate number of people living in First Nations communities.

In other words: this is hitting just about everyone, from all walks of life — leaving us with even less of an excuse to look the other way.

*

Chong may or may not have had the opioid crisis on his mind while penning his latest novel, but his depiction of our society’s inability to grapple with the threat of imminent death feels both prescient and immediate, a clarion call for those who have become too accustomed to other people’s suffering. Lost in narcissism and materialism, Chong’s average Vancouverite has allowed their selective empathy to negate their ability to engage with others’ personal emergencies. Their solipsism has rendered them incapable of creating the sense of common purpose required to tackle a large-scale catastrophe.

“The city was made up, as it had always been, of people who worked too much for too little … this bustle precluded self-examination,” Chong writes in the introduction. “Yes, there were activists in the city, but those people seemed unhappy and disagreeable.”

The Vancouver he conjures has never seen a war, has yet to experience the great earthquake looming in our future, and contains citizens that “came together to for summer fireworks that celebrated … fireworks”. Because of this, “it was an anatomized city, a place in which the joys and fears were contained within the spheres of self and family” and “collective traumas were experienced but barely heard by the rest of the city.”

These days Vancouverites are being bombarded with social media campaigns that not only plead with your average person to care about the drug users dying all around them, but also to consider the humanity of those being taken from us prematurely. “People who use drugs are real people” is the repeated tagline, juxtaposed beside faces identified thusly: “Cousin, Student, Drug User, Friend”.

Not addressed is why we typically fail to see this truth, why we’ve become so skilled at ignoring the marginalized in the first place.

In The Plague, the city’s residents initially greet the health emergency with faux concern, failing to understand the gravity of their situation. “On their profile photos they posted pictures of themselves wearing surgical masks. Others, hoping to look medieval, wore black cowls, but resembled nerdy sorcerers.” They flee reality by taking in apocalyptic films, “which ranged from Vincent Price’s Last Man on Earth to Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, from camp to comedy.”

It isn’t until a full-out quarantine is called that people begin to take things seriously. “Our devotion to routine was how we sought comfort in the moments after the hot flare of annoyance tapered into disquiet — when we noticed, say, a co-worker absent from a meeting. Or when we saw entire aisles in markets picked clean.”

*

Chong’s sixth book could easily be placed within the genre of disaster fiction, which makes it perfectly suited for exploring the nuances and political realities of the opioid crisis.  

While his earlier novels include a coming-of-age story and an immigrant narrative, this is his first attempt at a larger scale epic. It has parallels with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which plays coy about the apocalyptic destruction that occurred before the opening, instead dwelling on the existential questions raised as his characters struggle for survival in its wake.

In much the same way, readers of The Plague finish the book with very little information about the disease that drives the action, the way it’s contracted or how it’s ultimately cured — meanwhile they know all about the characters’ interior lives. Both of these books have a parabolic, vaguely Christian texture, like you’re reading a carefully crafted sermon by someone who doesn’t believe in God.

And if you’re expecting something akin to a Stephen King door-stopper, you’re going to be mightily disappointed by The Plague. In Chong’s still-operating city we don’t have Walking Dead-style system breakdown, the characters brood and chat more than they do anything else, and there’s no Dustin Hoffman telling his superior “With all due respect, fuck you, sir” like in Outbreak. There are scenes that are funny, but more in the way that makes you cringe afterwards.

Chong’s book is inspired by the work of none other than Albert Camus, whose 1947 novel La Peste documented an outbreak in Oran, Algeria decades earlier. Ten years after its publication, during his speech accepting the Nobel Prize, Camus said of his writing “it was a commitment to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery and the hope we shared”.

Put another way, by critic John Cruikshank, he was depicting “man’s metaphysical dereliction in the world.”

For Camus, writing about a killer disease was his opportunity to tackle the Third Reich. For Chong, it gives him an opportunity to explore topics wholly unrelated to the action, everything from riots and sex scandals to gentrification and the changing role of contemporary journalism. And anyone who has spent any time in the Rainy City will find plenty that’s familiar, including the nihilistic materialism of its residents — though he doesn’t mention yoga pants even once.

And in both books there’s no Higher Power coming to save us. As McCarthy says, “There is no God, and we are his prophets.”

*

Into this setting Chong plunks three main characters: Dr. Bernard Rieux (who shares a name with Camus’ protagonist), an American writer named Megan Tso, and a city hall reporter named Raymond Siddhu. These three each engage with the health crisis in different ways, illustrating both how futile and how meaningful their actions are, at first ignoring all the dead rats with blood coming out their eyes until they’re forced to watch people they love suffer slow, hideous deaths.

When all is said and done, the crisis will last four months and cost 1400 lives, but somehow this feels beside the point.

“Everyone wants to make this health issue political,” Siddhu complains to Rieux, shortly after the first cases are reported. “Infectious disease doesn’t check your party affiliation. Suffering is universal.”

Though it may be new to them, the threat of disease existed long before these characters ever stepped foot on the page. In a televised speech, Mayor Romeo Parsons calls the epidemic “our founding condition” — reminding them that the city is named after an English officer of the Royal Navy who was faced with disease upon arrival. He describes the scene of first contact in the 1890s, noting that the First Nations populace had been decimated by smallpox before the settlers even landed.

“Captain George Vancouver did not see wealth and abundance but devastation. He found abandoned villages and beaches lined with decaying bodies. He saw canoes placed in trees, which upon closer inspection, held skeletons inside them.”

And just like any catastrophe, its the weak who end up suffering most.  “You don’t need to wear a tinfoil hat to see how disease disproportionately affects our most marginalized people, the poorest, the least privileged,” he says.

Chong has put a post-modern spin on the old Stalin quote “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” by showing the meaningless ways public opinion can be manipulated when it comes to matters of life and death. For instance, the mayor’s rise to popularity is triggered by a YouTube video of him making a jump shot that was “widely shared and re-posted”, making people feel “pre-acquainted with him”.  

Meanwhile Tso is the author of a book called The Meaning of Death. She reflects there was “a look that people who organized death-related events cultivated. It wasn’t so plainly ‘alt’ as a high-school goth aesthetic.” She later notes that her marketing manager told her “to tell funny stories about the mummies of the Atacama Desert to make you feel comfortable about turning cemeteries into picnic spaces and taxidermying your pets.”

People will try anything to convince themselves they don’t have to feel other people’s pain.

*

Parsons is easily Chong’s most compelling character, but it isn’t long before he’s dragged off his high horse. Siddhu ends up breaking news of a sex scandal — the mayor mistakenly fucked his own long-lost daughter — and the beleaguered politician goes into hiding.

It’s hard not to see the parallels here with Chong’s former colleague Steven Galloway, whose own scandal has become a multi-year fiasco pitting different factions of the literary community against each other. However, it’s from this unlikely avenue that he comes up with the narrative’s most hopeful storyline, as Parsons discovers a new humility and joins forces with the front-line workers.

“This infection exposed everything that we had wanted to sweep aside. It’s allowed us to see others — not just the ones who looked like us — it allowed us to see them as equals. The disease levelled us,” he says.

Putting aside his political pomposity, Parsons ends up volunteering for The Sanitation League — a service started by Rieux that helps afflicted people outside the hospital system. In the most moving scene of the novel he sits by the bedside of a young girl about to die, witnessing her final moments alongside her parents. It’s cathartic for him, as well as the reader, because it puts a human face on what is primarily an abstract menace.

“Rieux did not need to tell him that this child was not responsible for her own death,” Chong writes.

Here’s where some would draw a distinction between those suffering from Chong’s plague and the people overdosing on fentanyl — they feel one is responsible for their fate, while the other isn’t. But this moralistic worldview allows onlookers to dodge feelings of complicity while ignoring a simple fact: it’s the world itself, and the treatment people receive from their societies, that maneuver them into places of vulnerability. This idea is explored in the book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by journalist Johann Hari, who has worked to humanize drug addicts and call for the legalization of all drugs.

“Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It’s actually going to deepen it,” he writes.

“So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.”

*

The most promising solution to the opioid crisis was pioneered in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver with the creation of the country’s first safe injection site — a move vehemently opposed by Stephen Harper at the time. Recently, Ontario premier Doug Ford made headlines for saying he was “dead against” them, despite the fact that they’ve been proven to be enormously effective at saving lives and helping addicts into treatment.

“Public opinion has slowly begun to turn against prohibition, and policy-makers are finally beginning to look at addiction as a health issue as opposed to one for the criminal justice system,” journalist Travis Lupick writes in his new book Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City's Struggle with Addiction.

For anyone who has loved someone with an addiction — as I have — safe injection sites provide an opportunity for caregivers to demonstrate to the vulnerable that they’re loved, that there are people out there willing to help. Out of crisis comes compassion. And as with The Plague’s Sanitation League, it takes people putting aside their personal comfort (and sometimes safety) to reach out to those on the brink. It’s Mayor Parsons’ willingness to personally participate that wins him Rieux’s approval.

“This is not about your personal business,” he says, shaking his hand. “It’s because I think your idea of suffering is grounded in reality.”

As the book draws to a close, Siddhu is amazed by how the Vancouver community has pulled together, telling Tso “I felt like I was in a community for the first time.”

She agrees.

“I’ve seen people risk their lives for strangers, people who would otherwise be unheroic."

*

Despite everything, inequality and injustice persist right to the end of Chong’s novel — just like in the real world. As the death toll rises, some residents barricade themselves in their homes to focus on renovations while others start new professions: “People were working as amateur massage therapists and running restaurants from their dining rooms.” Others come up with radically immoral ways of coping: “They raised online donation campaigns for friends immobilized by grief and then pocketed the proceeds.”

“I go out in the evenings more than I have in the past ten years,” Siddhu’s colleague tells him. “The city has never been livelier since the funerals started.”

Chong’s novel is bleak, it’s true, and the language purposefully keeps readers at arms’ length — at one point, there’s even a trigger warning. (“We are aware that the suffering of children can be acutely difficult and may prompt, among readers of this history, their own troubling memories.”) But in each of his main characters he’s found something of the human spirit to celebrate. At one point Siddhu is faced with his own powerlessness when a former journalism subject confronts him about how little has changed since he reported on the conditions she’s living in.

“You told me my words would make a difference, and I said you were full of shit,” she says. “It doesn’t matter anymore, I guess.”

The narrative isn’t without hope, though, and Rieux in particular stands out as an example of selfless giving. While speaking with Tso about his views on medicine, he gives a short speech on how he keeps going.

It’s the sort of thing that would work well as a personal mantra.

“I don’t have a view of life in an abstract sense,” he says. “I don’t care when it begins or how precious it is compared to a gorilla’s. I just want to help people.”

[modgirlyreposts-revamped]

basically, all of the ctw kids + sarah are all musical artists.

millie and dylan run a small hit emo band ive been calling "victorian doll" because i thought it sounded cool. brooke is a young international pop idol with a similar style to marina- which you know means im having those be her songs in this au- and sarah is an indie hit who's amassed most of her following online, but no one knows her real face and she's far too shy and insecure to go on tour or perform live- though her fans practically beg her to- due to her bodily and facial dysmorphia, as well as insecurity about her psoriasis.

maurice was actually a rock star himself, in the goth movement in the early 80s when he had just hit 18. he's long since retired, but he's very supportive of millie's musical endeavor, albeit from pretty far in the sidelines because it reminds him a lot of his own musical past in the 80s which was.. not the best time in his life. in fact, it was one of the lowest points he'd ever been at, and he often tells millie not to gamble too much of her future on victorian doll working long term, reminding her that "that's what i did, and in the end i was one of the lucky ones to not end up dying on the street because of it." maurice has a very dark history in this au i could go into in another ask if you'd like to hear-

anyways, millie and dylan go to the same shithole public school, which is sort of inspired by downfalls high, but i never finished that, i straight up could not 😔 it's also inspired by my shithole public school because ~~trauma!!! ❤👄💞💞😊😍😍😍😍~~

sarah also goes to this school, but that's not really a big deal to anybody because she never talks to anyone due to her insecurity issues and being ostracized so again no one knows she's a literal online celebrity for her voice and musical talent. there's a movie i haven't watched yet called belle that from the trailers seems to have a similar premise. that's unrelated.

millie and dylan meet brooke at a local music festival where they're all performing. sarah had told a lot of her followers online she would be attending and performing too, but ended up cancelling due to her anxiety about it and just stayed home and watched it on tv, and this is where sarah's path begins to collide with the others' as well- at the festival, millie and dylan are taken aside for a q&a after their performance, and one of the questions asked to them is what music they listen to aside from their own, and millie says that while she's mostly into rock and metal, she also listens to a lot of sarah's music and is a huge fan of hers.

"i've been following her work for a while, i just really love her style and everything. she'd said online she'd be here, and i'd kind of hoped to see her, i'm a little disappointed she didn't come, but she's also said she's about my age, so i get it. life happens, school gets you, heck, today was my last week to study for my geometry final and i skipped it to prepare and be here, but not everyone can do that kind of thing-"

maurice, from a few yards away: "you WHAT?"

there's a bit more to this au but here

HGDGHKHFFGJJGFCHJ YOUR DESIGNS FOR THEM, I LOVE 💕💕💞💕💕💖💕💞❣️

And I am very much intrigued with your backstory for your Rockstar!Maurice, but am also ready to be hurt-

These are my designs for Millie, Dylan, Sarah, and Maurice in my Rockstar!AU

Sarah is a groupie who later gets hired to help the band backstage

Dylan doesn’t have any family, so he sees Maurice as not only a mentor but a father figure as well, but he feels a little intimidated by him since he still has his spirit despite his age, and retirement

Also Maurice still dies in this AU, I’m not sorry-

#omg your maurice design <33333333 #asks #answered #valleyfthdolls

[modgirlyreposts-revamped]

Kinda sad but kinda funny fact about the CTW YD!AU, YD!Millie, as her nickname "the unfortunate girl" would suggest, has terrible luck and suffers constant misfortune and unlucky/unfortunate events. She brings her favorite ring to school and it gets lost in the first class. She and Dylan spend an extra 30 minutes looking for it and are both marked absent next period before Millie remembers she put it in her pencil bag for safekeeping so this exact situation wouldn't happen. She orders a burger with nothing on it from McDonald's and they put fucking everything on it and she has to get a new bun because she can't scrape the mayonnaise off. The one day she forgets to bring her homework is the one day the teacher checks for it. She's always failing her classes no matter how much work she does. She steps into her Spanish class on the day of the test, forgets all Spanish she knows, starts crying and the teacher has to console her and they agree to do it later when she's in a better place. She trips over fucking nothing. They go to Subway and Millie and Brooke stand in the line for an extra 10 minutes because the employees keep fucking up her order. The cashier forgets to remove a security tag from a sweater she buys and as she leaves it sets off the alarm. Brooke has to cover for her constantly when they go out because she somehow is always just barely below the price she's supposed to pay. She orders a pizza half her flavor half someone else's and they don't do the halves, it's all the other person's topping and she has to pick it off. She has SO much built up minor trauma from constant misfortune she constantly expects misfortune, freaks out at the slightest inconvenience and often responds to things as little as tripping and spilling her drink on the floor a bit with full on emotional breakdowns. She cries and it ruins her makeup and then she cries because her makeup is ruined and she looks like crap.

Definitely unrelated, but YD!Brooke always carries makeup remover and black liquid eyeliner in her backpack, purse or pocket. It's definitely a thing she's always done, certainly not her way of consoling Millie. Not at all, she would never dream of going out of her way and inconveniencing herself to accommodate her girlfriend's severe anxiety because Millie would hate that.

YD!Dylan generally responds to the situation with jokes, not at Millie's expense but at the expense of everything else involved to lighten the blow to Millie's emotional state.

Basically their dynamic:

YD!Millie, after dropping a cup of canned pears from the school cafeteria on the floor: this is my 13th reason

YD!Brooke: *SPRINTS over to give Millie consolation and more pears*

YD!Dylan: *literally starts violently stomping on the pears on the ground for upsetting Millie, slips on the juice while walking away and falls flat on his ass*

YD!Dylan: And this is mine

-

YD!Millie: *falls from somewhere high onto the ground*

YD!Dylan, as they approach to make sure she's ok: Brooke, I think it's raining cute goth girls.

YD!Brooke, sarcastically: My prayers have been answered. You okay, hon?

YD!Millie: I'm alright.

YD!Dylan:

YD!Dylan: Well, if this was your prayer, you guys had better move, 'cause my prayers were for a Cadillac.

It's funny how well the three's coping mechanisms for attachment and shit bounce off each other well in this AU. Dylan copes with his own trauma through joking, and his jokes help Millie loosen up when she's anxious by bringing light to her situation. They also help Brooke, who often feels a need to care for those around her, to stop feeling so responsible for every situation, because if it can be laughed at that's a good start, and it's often then under control. Brooke's caring nature helps Dylan address the serious side of the trauma he jokes about and is extremely comforting to Millie who feels super lonely and unsure of herself. And Millie attaching herself to those two and doing her best to repay their kindness gives them both a rock, someone who will care for them and return the favors they give everyone else because she knows they give those out because that's what they need given back.

GHDFJGFJDKGDFHKJGFDFD HELP MY HEART, THEY ARE SO PRECIOUSS-

My babies, they're all supporting each other and all bounce off of each other so well, I love them sm-

#they are so cute together <3<3<3<3<3 #asks #answered #valleyfthdolls