#admitting to emotionally abusing me with his gf at the time

[callipraxia]

As semi-promised on Thursday night: here is a fuller explication of my thoughts after reading @zephrunsimperium's post about Ford and anger (which you should go check out their various Ford analysis pieces if you haven’t, they’re excellent and, unlike me, actually get to the point in a timely manner!)...thoughts which ultimately melded with some attempts at another essay I had semi-abandoned a few months ago, so hold on tight, friends, you’re in for quite the long ride with this one, should you choose to wade through it to the end, for this essay is more than 10,000 words long. Numbers in parentheses indicate endnotes, which can be found at the, well, end. Trigger warnings for extended discussions of multiple kinds of abuse portrayed/only thinly made into metaphors in the GF canon, and for discussion of mental health. For anyone feeling up to dealing with all that...read on below the cut.

To my way of thinking, one of the most essential things for understanding Ford lies in recognizing all the gaps between who he is, who he wants to be, and who he wants other people to think he is, and the intersection of anger, the performance of masculinity, and his long, long history of relational traumas is the fateful crossroads which those gaps emanate from. At the risk of sounding unduly like a pop psychologist, I also think his father is an important individual to consider in light of these issues.

Filbrick, as Stan tells us in ATOTS, was a strict man who had “the personality of a cinderblock.” Stan is not always a terribly reliable narrator, but he seems to lack the ability to lie to the flashback camera, and the first few flashbacks of the episode give us a glimpse at what the Pines family was like in the sixties which supports Stan’s assertion about his father. In those scenes, Filbrick is the only character we don’t see expressing strong emotion of some kind before the science fair, something that makes the ‘sound and fury’ of the scene where Stan is disowned, when it comes around, all that much more shocking. Until this point, Filbrick came about as close to physically resembling a cinderblock as his personality was said to; even when he expressed approval of Ford in the principal’s office, it was a relatively muted display, barely more emotive than his earlier “I’m not impressed” or his silent disappointment in the season one flashback when Stan recalls the summer Filbrick first sent him to boxing lessons. We learn after the science fair that he can, apparently, express anger very vividly, but “Lost Legends” further underlines how he is otherwise mostly emotionally inaccessible to his family; Stan (despite being far more aware of his emotions than he might like to admit that he is) cannot just talk to his father about how he feels, and once again, the only concrete emotion Filbrick shows on-screen is anger. Pictures near the end suggest possible mild experiences of a few other feelings, and the adult Ford, narrating many years after the fact and very probably after Filbrick’s death, speculates about what might have been going on in his head, but those feelings are never made explicit the way his anger is. We don’t know why Filbrick is this way (the closest thing to a hint we get is the information that he was a World War II veteran - there is, after all, a reason for the common portrayal of the Stan twins’ entire generation as one which was saddled with cruddy fathers in the aftermaths of World War II and Korea – but for all we know, Filbrick could have been like that before the War, too. What was his family life like, growing up? His financial condition? Could he just be someone who was born with a strong predisposition toward an emotional or personality disorder, regardless of whatever else happened in his life? We just don’t have enough information about him to say for sure), but it seems safe to speculate that he was this way pretty consistently: whatever else was going on with him, the only emotion he seems to have felt comfortable expressing was anger.

And this is the guy Ford and Stan had held up to them as their first, and quite possibly most influential, example of what being a man is.

I’d argue that – when they were children, at least – this was more of a problem for Stan than for Ford. Filbrick presumably saw them both as shamefully weak as children, but Ford, at least, had another route to the old man’s approval readily available to him. If Filbrick was at least grudgingly proud of Ford’s intelligence, then Ford could receive the measure of parental approval which Stan craved and could never get; we also see that Ford could apparently hold his own while sparring with Stan by the time they were teenagers, so it’s likely enough that he no longer had to worry about physical assault from his classmates by the time he was in high school, either. Though still isolated and insecure underneath it all because of his childhood experiences and probably in part due to his ongoing social isolation, Ford was able to find a path to a kind of self-esteem: he was both brilliant and quite capable of using his six fingers to break your nose if you had too much to say about them, and he knew it, and everyone else knew it, too. He also had his brother as a constant source of support. When Ford was made to look ridiculous by having a drink thrown in his face in public, Stan promptly threw a drink in his own face in order to look even more ridiculous. When Ford won competitions, which he seems to have started doing at an impressive rate very early in life, Stan seems to have been almost over-enthusiastic in his approval: he looks as delighted about Ford winning the science fair (at the time, before the meeting with the principal) as Ford himself does, if not even happier about it. Even his habit of copying off Ford’s papers in class could have served as a reinforcement for Ford’s ego: he not only could manage for himself, but he could even allow someone else to depend on him.

In this way, by the time everything went wrong, the teenaged Ford had probably already developed a degree of self-respect and self-sufficiency that Stan was still struggling to reliably maintain forty years later. Neither of them could ever be the kind of man Filbrick was, or of which they thought he would approve, they were both too emotionally vulnerable and expressive for that, but it’s probably noteworthy that Ford kept pictures of famous scientists (instead of family photographs) around him during his college and young adult years: because he could also do something Filbrick never could, he was able, to some degree, to carve out an idea of “how to be a man” on his own terms. If Filbrick’s approval was an immovable object in the path between Stan, Ford, and healthy expressions of adult masculinity, then where Stan flailed against it, Ford simply walked around it by choosing new conscious role models.

Tesla, Sagan, Einstein, and company were “great men,” successful (well, at least remembered posthumously) and respected, who were also given to Nerdy Enthusiasms. Said enthusiasm, an open delight in the marvels of the natural world, was therefore an emotion besides anger that Ford could express freely without compromising his view of himself, and it seems that he did so regularly. This appears to have worked well for him; we know very little about his college years – only that he worked very hard, that he made at least one close friend and (based on his usage of the plural ‘friends’ when discussing DD&MD) possibly even had a social group of sorts, and that he continued to indulge his creative side to a degree by playing DD&MD, which was as close as someone in his late teens and early twenties could probably get to continuing the kind of fantasy play he’d enjoyed as a child without sabotaging his probable adolescent desire to feel very grown up – but it seems they were productive and reasonably happy. Six years after them, a slice of his life comes into focus for us in the form of his journal. He was probably around thirty to thirty-three years old when it was written(1), give or take a year or two, and we find him several years into the circumstances he was in when he says, as a much older man, that he’d finally found somewhere to belong. He could be lying - Ford, unusually, even has the ability to lie to the flashback camera, or at least omit things - but we don't really have any reason to believe this; when the flashbacks turn to Stan making an abortive attempt at contact, Ford on the phone sounds cheery. His lack of paranoia and surprise about someone phoning him is also not the only evidence that, at this time, he may not even have been totally socially isolated in Gravity Falls – in the same years, he goes to the public library with some regularity, he declines to buy cookies from a zombie Boy Scout, he converses sometimes with the mailman, and he is on friendly enough terms with Dan Corduroy, even some years after Dan finished building Ford’s house, to know that Dan’s family had a holiday cabin and to ask to use it. Clearly nobody was too close to Ford even then, but his chosen path was going reasonably well for him; it's possible that Stan might have found him rather harder to replace at this point than he did later, after an unspecified time lapse, which may have lasted as long as a year,(2) during which Ford had gradually became a complete recluse as he became more and more consumed by his relationship with Bill Cipher. Before that time lapse, Ford the man seems like a logical enough place for Ford the boy to have ended up; after it…..

Well, after it is where we get back to the topics of anger and its intersection with various aspects of identity and self-concept.

A decent place to begin is with Fiddleford, and with why, exactly, Ford asked him to come to Gravity Falls. Ford tells us that he asked Fiddleford to come because he (Ford) did not have the technical know-how to complete the Portal. There is some evidence to support the veracity of this idea: Fiddleford is, after all, the man who later proves able to build astonishingly lifelike robot monsters whilst homeless (and thus, it seems safe to assume, without conventional sources of funds or supplies), and he is the one who sees the flaws in the Portal design. Indeed, he seems to start spotting them before he even has a chance to physically see them: Ford tells us that Fiddleford started suggesting revisions to the plans over the phone while still in California, in the same conversation where he agreed to come. In the third portion of the Journal, the sixtysomething Ford also mentions hearing about how a Parallel Earth Fiddleford was convinced to come back to the project, at which point the Parallel Portal was stabilized and became something that could be used the way Ford had intended to use it (as opposed to how Bill had intended to use it). The implication is that Ford not only didn’t understand how to complete the Portal, but that he also didn’t understand the plans even as far as he thought he understood them. Certainly the Fiddleford of the main timeline, who would have worked with him before, was instantly suspicious about the existence of a third collaborator once he saw how far Ford had gotten without him, which further supports the idea that Ford was more of a theoretician than a mechanic. This does, however, run somewhat against the grain of much of what we see Ford do on-screen. As a teenager of modest economic means, he was shown to be as comfortable working with his hands as with his pencil, and he was able to build something which acted enough like a perpetual motion device that he won a state-wide competition and drew the attention of an elite university. At university, he created the mind control tie – something which appears, both by its existence and by the glimpse we get of how it’s wired in “The Stanchurian Candidate,” to involve electronics more sophisticated than what Fiddleford was shown working with in roughly the same time period. I tend to run with the idea that the events of the episode “The Stanchurian Candidate” only happened in a particularly vivid nightmare of Stan’s, and therefore include the tie simply because it was in the Journal, but if one goes with official canon and accepts that “Stanchurian Candidate” happened, then Ford somehow, in a matter of hours, with no budget or supplies, invented a thousand-year lightbulb that also improves the complexion of the user in the same episode that shows us the wiring of the tie. In the eighties, he also seems to have developed his mind-encrypting machine as a private project, and in the Multiverse, he survived entirely on what he could steal or construct for thirty years, and it seems he had progressed a long way toward the development of the Quantum Destabilizer on his own before he stumbled into the ‘Better World’ dimension; Parallel Fiddleford really just sped the completion process up because he’d happened to discover a useful fuel source for presumably completely unrelated reasons years before Ford showed up. Clearly, Ford can more than hold his own as an engineer, and as one with a particular flair for doing impossible things with electricity and the laws of energy conservation; even Fiddleford trusted his gift in that area enough to, however reluctantly, briefly accept his claim that he had been working alone despite his serious doubts about the idea, and to allow Ford to bully him into silence about the Portal’s design flaws for weeks or possibly months before the confrontation at the diner. Why, then, did he suddenly become convinced, during that fateful July, that he could not finish the Portal without Fiddleford?

The answer may lay a few pages further back in the Journal. Not long before he calls Fiddleford, Ford makes notes on the plans for the Portal that Bill had showed him in a dream. One of these notes is “I MUST NOT LOSE MY NERVE!” Later, in a state of mind where he is increasingly paranoid and beginning to lose a degree of touch with reality, he reflects repeatedly about Fiddleford’s nerve in similar terms. There may well have been some level, deep down, on which Ford knew he was getting in over his head, and he was scared out of his mind by that realization. If this is true, then, on some level, he knew something was...off, with what was going on around him. He knew he needed help from someone he trusted and who was not Bill. And so he reached out to his college roommate for that help, and he did so in a way that allowed him to still plausibly deny just how much trouble he was in, both to himself and everyone else, and he didn’t only need that deniability because he was inviting a third party into the isolation of an increasingly abusive relationship and would need an excuse if Bill took exception to the idea of Ford relying on anyone or anything other than Bill. He also needed that plausible deniability to preserve his self-concept, because by this time, whatever he had or hadn’t been earlier, Ford Pines had become a deeply, deeply dishonest man.

One of the key moments for understanding this - and, in many ways, the character overall - occurs in “Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons.” There, Ford delivers the exasperated line, “if my hands were free, I’d break every part of your face!” If that line was taken totally out of context and shown to a casual viewer, the casual viewer would likely misidentify it as a line of Stan’s. Stan is, after all, the character with the hair-trigger temper and violent tendencies, right?

To an extent, yes. In “The Golf War,” Stan asks Soos if it would be “wrong” to punch a child (Pacifica) – probably more of an indirect threat in response to Pacifica’s insults toward the Pineses than a true question, but Stan’s moral code is sufficiently different from the standard issue that one can’t completely dismiss the possibility that he really wanted to, well, punch a child. And who can forget his antics in “The Land Before Swine” or “Scaryoke,” where he punches his way single-handed through monsters which had defeated the rest of the cast? Or in “Not What He Seems,” where he takes on multiple government agents in zero gravity while, for at least part of the time, he had his hands fastened behind his back? Or that glorious moment in the finale when he did, in fact, break every part of Bill Cipher’s glitched-out face? Stan is also the character who lost his temper to the extent that he lashed out at Ford physically in the middle of the save-the-world ritual, and Stan is the one who keeps his old boxing gloves around his bedroom, along with owning at least one set of brass knuckles. As an old man, he still seems to take pride in having learned to fight back against the world physically as a child, and he recommends that Dipper try knocking Robbie unconscious bare-handed when Dipper is challenged to a fight. And, of course, the man is a menace whenever he gets within a certain radius of the Stanmobile, the vehicle that can take out roadway railings, light poles, and theme park gates without showing a scratch. There’s no denying it: Stan is perhaps many other things, too, but he’s also a very physically aggressive kind of guy. If, therefore, someone in this series was going to threaten to break someone’s face, it seems obvious it would be Stan…but it wasn’t. It was his supposedly milder-mannered, “goody nerd-shoes,” brother who, on examination, actually behaves far more casually violently than Stan does throughout his sadly short time in the series. To demonstrate:

Ford sets foot in his house for the first time in thirty years and identifies the first person he sees as his brother. Later, writing in his reclaimed journal, Ford describes his own reaction thus: “instinct took over and I punched him right in the face. I feel kind of bad about that!” 

In the very next episode - aside from his antics in the first scenes(3) and the already-mentioned description of what he’d like to do to Probabilitator after the wizard captures him - we also have Ford’s immediate reaction to the wizard’s materialization. Stan is, naturally, most clearly unnerved by an evil math wizard suddenly materializing in the TV room, but there’s a moment where he glances sideways at Ford after Ford pulls a gun; to me, at least, this glance made it seem like he found that behavior pretty disturbing as well. For the past several hours, after all, Ford had been playing board games. Most people do not bring concealed guns to game night with their nephews. Ford does.

Stan and Ford both have wanted posters that show up ‘on screen’ – Stan’s in his box of memorabilia in “Not What He Seems,” and Ford’s in Journal 3. Stan’s talks about “scams, frauds, and identity theft” - all potentially serious crimes that can ruin the lives of the people on the other ends of them, but ones which follow the general tendency (per the reading I did last March) of real-world con men to avoid violence in the commission of their crimes. Ford’s, on the other hand, refers to its subject as ‘armed and dangerous,’ and as someone with a bounty on his head. From the way Ford depicts his own appearance in it, it seems likely that particular version of the poster is at least ten to fifteen years old, but in “Lost Legends,” he is still instantly recognizable in the multiverse for his criminal shenanigans, even in the company of his near-identical twin. In his own words, “a number of dimensions consider me an outlaw to this day.” If one uses the dictionary definition of the term - and considering how much variety comes up just in the few examples Ford gives of worlds he’s visited, there’s no reason to assume he hasn’t visited a few Premodern Justice Dimensions - this means there could be multiple dimensions out there where the authorities took the time and trouble to formally declare that he had done something shocking enough to justify the revocation of all rights and protections he might have otherwise enjoyed under the law, thus allowing anyone to do anything they could physically manage to him with no fear of any negative repercussions except those he could personally inflict on them. He also refers to his own  exploits as “swashbuckling” (a term which brings piracy to mind) and offhandedly mentions travels with “bandits” (a term which describes practitioners of behavior usually classified under the ‘organized crime’ umbrella due to the cooperative nature of the often violent or potentially violent crimes in question).

Much of this behavior, it’s true, can be attributed to a combination of trauma responses and, in the Multiverse, sheer necessity. He refers in the journal to talking “my way into and out of food and shelter,” and the “out of” comment underlines how, like Stan before him, he very abruptly went from having a relatively stable situation (at least in the material sense) to being homeless, which would be at least a serious shock to the system of almost anyone, including people in much better mental health than he was in at that time. Then there’s the more complicated non-material aspects of his previous situation. As an adult reader, it’s stomach-knotting to go through the 1980s portion of the journal, because if you look at the behaviors and dynamics and leave out the “incorporeal eldritch abomination” element, it only takes a very little extrapolation from the material for his ‘partnership’ with Bill becomes an uncomfortably realistic depiction of a domestic abuse situation. Considering that either of these major traumas of 1981-1982 could (and, if the fantastical elements are stripped out, regularly do) induce PTSD in nearly anyone, and considering how many more traumatic events he doubtless went through in the years following, it’s not implausible that the man would develop a tendency toward believing that the best defense is a good offense. However, there is also evidence that at least some of these tendencies predated Ford’s major traumas, and that – despite how he would very likely insist this was not the case - the trigger-happy adrenaline addict we meet in “A Tale of Two Stans” may not represent a total change in character from who he was before the Portal – or even before Bill. The evidence here is admittedly scarcer and more ambiguous, but to illustrate:

In Journal 3, Ford seems sincerely puzzled about why Fiddleford would show signs of trauma after the gremlobin incident. This incident involved Fiddleford being shown his worst fear (something which ended in tourists being removed from the Mystery Shack via stretcher in apparent catatonic states. Fiddleford was a  man who probably had an anxiety disorder to begin with, who was just accepting the reality of the supernatural, and who was living, for at least several months, hours away from where his wife and young son were, something which seems to have troubled him at the best of times. It's remarkable he was functioning at all after the gremlobin incident). He was also hit with a bunch of venomous quills, and flown through the air by something which clearly had no good intentions for him in mind…and that was all before the solution to the situation ended up involving Ford crash-landing everyone through the roof of a barn, breaking Fiddleford’s arm in the process.

The gremlobin incident is not the only time Ford, even before the multiverse, appears bewildered by perfectly ordinary responses to frightening stimuli. While Fiddleford admittedly may have had some form of anxiety or compulsive disorder to begin with (an idea supported by events like his tearing out his own hair under stress and his need to correct the Cubik’s Cube), his reactions to monsters appear far more reasonable than Ford’s offhand assertion that he has survived many monster attacks without registering any of the experiences as traumatic.

When Fiddleford was in danger, Ford’s automatic response involved, essentially, jumping off a cliff and hoping the magnet gun-to-hyperdrive attraction would first catch and then carry him long enough for him to catch up…and that he would then somehow figure out how to land the improvised gremlobinmobile without killing himself, Fiddleford, and the monster all in one go.

When we go into the bunker in “Into the Bunker,” Soos finds a candy dispenser in a cabinet filled with weapons. These weapons appear to be a mix of firearms alongside various medieval or Renaissance-style pieces. It is, of course, possible - though to my mind, improbable; Fiddleford seems to prefer indirect methods of aggression, mostly in the form of homicidal robots - that some or all of these weapons belonged to Fiddleford, but there is also evidence that there was a similar mix of weapons in the house which later became the Mystery Shack: sside from Ford’s singular ideas about how to answer a door in “A Tale of Two Stans,” we also see a box of other manual weapons which Dipper has access to in “Boss Mabel,” and which Stan is seen rifling through to find a crossbow - presumably the same one which had come alarmingly close to his nose thirty years earlier – at the beginning of “Love God.” Stan further asserts there are ten guns in the Shack during “Fight Fighters,” but we never see them; even while fighting against zombies, while following pterodactyls into caverns beneath the town, and during Weirdmageddon, Stan routinely arms himself with bludgeoning weapons, not ranged ones. The only time we see him use a ranged weapon (at least that I can recall) is the time he aims the crossbow at a balloon, which was out of reach. Ford, however, despite demonstrating almost immediately upon arrival that he’s quite capable of fighting without one, repeatedly uses ranged weapons even in close quarters: the crossbow in Stan’s face, the handgun in the living room, the Quantum Destabilizer during Weirdmageddon, the spear in the closing montage of the finale. These examples are, of course, all justifiable enough in their various contexts, but the combination of several incidents and all the weapons around the house and its environs makes it seem eminently possible that Ford was a bit of a weapons nut long before he became an interdimensional fugitive, and that if there actually are ten guns in the house, Stan may have more or less 'inherited' them along with the Stanford identity.

When Bill - who knew Ford very well before the Portal - shows Ford a vision of a possible future in an attempt to convince Ford to join him in his conquest of the universe, it is a vision of complete destruction. We see Bill’s giant finger tearing cities apart in an uncomfortable amount of detail, and are treated to the sight of planets being munched on like apples…and this is Bill’s sales pitch, the ‘party’ he is inviting Ford to and really, really wants Ford to agree to attend. This leaves us with two options: either Bill can’t understand that anyone might ultimately desire anything beyond or besides the chance to participate in unlimited, consequence-free violence (something which doesn’t square too well with Bill’s otherwise apparently excellent grasp of human motivation and how to manipulate it to serve his own ends), or Bill has some reason for thinking that the prospects of immortality and a group of ‘friends’ to destroy things with on a massive scale might genuinely appeal to his “old pal” just as much as the prospect of being “all-powerful” and “all-knowing” would. This is also hinted at by how Bill appears to try to convince Ford to relate to him by revealing that he was once mortal himself and explaining that he burned his dimension before offering Ford the chance to effectively do the same to the universe of the canon timeline. 'Become a god of destruction' or 'get tortured a lot' were also not the only possible options Bill could have offered; he could, for instance, have tried to convince Ford that if he (for all intents and purposes) became a god, then he could save at least some sapient life-forms in the universe from Bill by setting up his galaxy as a benevolent dictatorship or the like, with the alternative being that everyone would die if Ford didn’t take that deal. Bill did not attempt anything of the sort. Bill, at least, thinks Ford is not only capable of observing or even committing acts of great violence, but that he is capable of relishing the opportunity to do so.

Why are all these things easy to overlook? In part, it is because Ford wants us to overlook them, because they do not ‘fit’ with the person Ford wishes that he was. He wants, very much, to see himself as a cool-headed, utterly rational, cultured figure – not least because this would represent a total contrast to his twin brother and everything Stan stands for, either in reality or inside Ford’s imagination - and so he uses long words and is usually fairly softly-spoken. He emphasizes his “well-ordered and scientific mind” even as he behaves in ways which suggest he’s highly volatile and puts in writing (however carefully concealed the information might be behind veils of words) that he planned to make his name on a scientific project which wasn’t of his own design, a behavior which indicates a comfort with shortcuts even more potentially disastrous than Stan’s. When he does, rarely, have to acknowledge something that he would rather not acknowledge directly, he always immediately justifies the potentially unflattering behavior in fairly grandiose ways - stealing radioactive materials, for instance, is rationalized as a ‘doing a public service,’ and all the things he did to become a wanted man in multiple dimensions are, similarly, lumped together and dismissed as crimes committed “for a noble purpose.” No doubt some of them were, but on the page about the Infinity Die, one doesn’t really get the impression that he was particularly discriminating about when he used that thing, considering the usage statistics we’re given. The page informs us that the Die saved Ford’s life three times, endangered it “around 20,” permanently changed the color of a sky one time…and that it’s been used enough other times besides these that he can note the odd frequency of rolling a four(4). When talking to Dipper, he also seems quite confident about just how far the Die can warp reality - he doesn’t speak as if “the universe could turn into an egg” is an exaggeration. Use of the Infinity Die would not be a reliable way to limit damage or even to advance his goals while committing other crimes, so it becomes a bit difficult to justify his apparently relatively casual use of it as something he did only as a last resort and/or only in service of a noble purpose. Most fans recognize that he clearly started over-identifying Dipper with himself toward the end of the series, but he identifies Dipper with himself only when it comes to traits he is proud of having; otherwise, the “grammar, Stanley” remark is one of the few criticisms he has of Stan which doesn’t also come across as something he might want to say about himself and his own less desirable qualities, if he could only bring himself to acknowledge them for what they are in plain language. It reads, to borrow from someone I once talked about the character with on Reddit, like “my man is just as chaotic [as Stan], he just manifests it differently.”

Part of this difference lies in their respective approaches to the truth. Neither is anything you could reasonably call an honest man, but the distinction lies in how Ford appears to lie to himself a lot more often than Stan does. Stan, outside of ‘working hours,’ is utterly up-front about who and what he is and what he cares about: he’s a crook and a grifter and a liar, interested only in that which benefits him and the small number of people he personally cares about. Only once, when contemplating his epitaph in “The Stanchurian Candidate,” does he show anything even vaguely resembling shame about this, and even then, he still includes the detail that he would, of course, be a crooked mayor if he became one. It's entirely possible that the only ultimately sacrificed himself to destroy Bill because of the direct and imminent threat Bill represented to his individual relatives. As the man himself once said: it wasn’t enough for him to be the town’s hero, because his real agenda was being Dipper and Mabel’s. Ford, on the other hand, seems to have shared many of Stan’s desires (wealth, respect, shortcuts to these things) as a young man, but also to have always felt some need to convince himself that he wanted more (for lack of a better term) socially acceptable ‘side features’ as well. When he dreams of scientific accomplishment, he will admit he looks forward to riches and glory...but he also throws in that he wants to revolutionize science to enhance the well-being of all mankind, too. When he writes down the story of how he began his quest to kill Bill, he acknowledges that he wished to “wreak vengeance for the life he stole from me” - but only after saying he would “save the multiverse from [Bill’s] wrath.” Later, though, when talking about his meeting with a parallel Fiddleford, he refers to his vow as a “vendetta” - a word defined as “a blood feud in which the family of a murdered person seeks vengeance on the murderer or the murderer's family; a prolonged bitter quarrel with or campaign against someone.” The word can be used far less precisely in casual conversation, of course, and he probably does sincerely see it as his duty to atone for his mistakes by removing the entity which seeks to exploit them, but at the end of the day, despite his attempts to frame his behavior in terms of doing what is objectively right, there’s also a massive degree to which his quest is personal. Anger and revenge and personal concerns ultimately prove just as important to him as they are to his brother, if not even more important. This is illustrated perhaps most dramatically in the lead-up to the Final Deal: one can only imagine what Bill’s back-up plan was, because Bill came close to not needing one. Ultimately, when put to the test, the principles which went along with the persona Ford tried so hard to project crumbled: the family was, in the end, more important to him than saving the world, just as it was for Stan. He never mentioned the idea of making any attempt to save himself in the deal (on top of doubtless believing that such an effort would be doomed to failure, there are hints that Ford always planned to die in the execution of his revenge, or at least never saw a way around doing so), but he was willing to let Bill take over the galaxy “or worse” just to save (or at least exempt himself from the responsibility of personally dooming) three other people on a probably quite temporary basis. If Bill was unraveling reality all around them, after all, where exactly were Stan and the twins supposed to go?

“What other choice do we have?” It took no few viewings of the finale for it to register why I always find that line so wrenchingly uncomfortable to watch. At that moment, finally, for the first time on screen, Ford admits that he cannot save the situation, or even himself. That he’s been backed into a corner – trapped – forced to acknowledge that another entity can and will hurt him, and that it can and will hurt him on as many levels as it pleases. He’s been taken right back to where he was when his first grade classmates nearly put him in the hospital, and he can’t hide it from himself or anyone else anymore...and it’s after this moment that we almost immediately see a dramatic change in Ford’s behavior and self-representation. The same man who remained remarkably defiant, all things considered, when tied up by an evil sorcerer who was gloating about its plans to consume his brain, or even in the midst of what was probably several days of severe torture,(5) visibly flinches, his hands shaking, while using the memory gun; in the aftermath of that moment, we then see him standing in a corner, looking helpless and at a loss for what to do while other people (specifically, mostly Mabel) try to figure out a solution without his assistance, as he's meekly accepted the situation instead of trying to change it. Dipper notes that some point in that day was the “only time” anyone had ever seen Ford cry, a statement that implies there had been other occasions where Dipper expected him to cry when he didn’t do so – perhaps it’s just because Dipper is used to Stan, who cries rather a lot, but for some reason, Dipper regarded this observation as specific enough to underline the severity of the situation during the first hours of Stan’s amnesia. The closest Ford really gets to his pre-Weirdmageddon demeanor again is when he takes the long way around the block in order to ask Stan to accompany him to investigate some anomaly up north, just as he’d previously made the same excuse about being too old to manage on his own anymore for asking Dipper to stay in town after the summer ended; since even unbending enough to, effectively, ask anyone not to leave him was already a step away from his isolated-hero act, it’s far from one of his more distinctive adult characteristics reasserting itself. Something, it seems, in the man profoundly broke in the throne room of the Fearamid, and based on his worryingly fervent attempts in the last pages of his journal to represent both Stan and Fiddleford as plaster saints, it doesn’t seem like it’s getting fixed any time soon.

I noted earlier that I suspected Ford had no intention of surviving his duel with Bill in the Nightmare Realm during “Not What He Seems.” There are a few reasons for this. One is simple probability, of course (even if he had destroyed Bill, there would have still been plenty of creatures around that would have been more than happy to eat him, and his death ray was almost out of power). More pertinent, however, are a few of Ford’s own words. Twice, he refers to Stan as having “saved” him – not ‘rescued’ ‘retrieved’ ‘gotten back’ or any other possible combination of words, but “saved.” The first, where he’s still grumbling about it, is when he shows Dipper the Rift and explains why he was angry at Stan for this seemingly charitable behavior: he saved Ford’s life, but at the cost of endangering the world, and at that time, Ford was still deeply committed to the idea of himself as someone who sacrifices, not someone who sacrifices are made for. On the second occasion, while trying to explain what just happened to Dipper and Mabel after they realize that Stan no longer recognizes them, he sounds almost bewildered as well as moved as he makes the statement. Shortly before that second occasion, in the Fearmid itself, he also, infamously, uses the word “suicide” on the Disney Channel, when he tells Dipper and Mabel that any attempt to take on Bill – or, in other words, to undertake the very task he was attempting when the Portal reopened in NWHS – was a “suicide mission.” His behavior, from the moment he comes back, is usually varying degrees of reckless, and the Journal illustrates that this isn’t an entirely new tendency: aside from vowing to undo the damage he’d done “or lose my life in the attempt” at the end of the 1980s section, he also put himself through the kind of work conditions that can literally kill a person for, it seems, months before he realized Bill had played him; afterward, he proceeded to have a breakdown while continuing, or even increasing, his dangerous habits of sleep deprivation and stimulant overuse. And even before that, as previously noted: he once didn’t think twice about jumping off a cliff. There has, at least since he came to Gravity Falls, always been a part of Ford which seems to have had some inclination toward self-destruction; he may not have been suicidal as such in the early years, but even then, he seems to have been more than merely indifferent to his own well-being. It is at this point that all the disparate threads of this essay will begin to gather back together into a single line, because this behavior can be interpreted as Ford, essentially, daring the universe to so much as try to make a victim of him, because it was at in those years that he began to feel the need to assure himself that he wasn’t one. After he admits he’s out of ideas in the Fearamid, though, he finally has no other choice but to admit that he has in fact been victimized – specifically, by Bill Cipher.

When Ford chose to adopt famous scientists as his models for how to be a man, he began to lie to himself about himself to some degree. He insisted he was rational and unemotional when he was anything but. He retained some pride in being in better physical condition than the other men close to him during both his scientist and hero arcs, but he downplayed his quite real attraction toward violence (recall that on two of the three occasions where he and Stan came to blows, Ford was the one who escalated the conflict) and thrill-seeking, trying to veil them from himself as well as the reader. Ford’s tendency toward black-and-white thinking didn’t disappear at the end of the show; he simply reversed the polarity, so that now, instead of him being the hero, he recast others in that role and was at least attempting to accept a place among the ranks of those who’d needed saving. This was something that he’d been denying he was for a very long time, even at the price of focusing on anger-inducing aspects of the past, perhaps distorting them out of proportion in his memory so he could keep his mind on the future. Unable to cope with the loss of control implicit in his situation with his 'Muse,' acting as the agent of something else and being manipulated in deeper and deeper over his head, he directed his attention to a future where he would be on top again, focusing on anger toward the past instead of on his fear of the present.

For most of the show, Ford has real issues with anger, and I tend to believe that quite a lot of them had to do with the need to protect two things after the disintegration of his relationship with Bill Cipher. One is his image of himself, and the other - arguably, something dependent on the maintenance of his self-concept - is his sanity – or at least, if not his sanity, then his ability to function. As noted the other night – anger might not feel good, exactly, but it can feel so much better than hurting that it can be mistaken for feeling good. Fury can be paralyzing, yes, but it can also, when directed outward, keep you moving – spite, as they say, is the source of many an accomplishment Self-loathing, on the other hand, will crush you like a boulder, sooner or later...and it’s painfully obvious, in the scrambled, increasingly unhinged journal entries between the Portal test and his decision to call Stan, that Ford is capable of intense self-hatred. Even in later years, when he has focused his entire mind on revenge for decades and reviles the traits in his brother that he dislikes in himself, there’s still that undercurrent of guilt and self-hatred running just beneath the surface, so close to the top that even he can never really fully ignore it. He doesn’t really know how to accept help while maintaining his self-respect, and here’s where we get to him being both an abuse survivor and, arguably, specifically a male one.

Earlier, I referred to his partnership with Bill as an uncomfortably realistic depiction of a domestic abuse situation when you strip the supernatural frills away. Bill could well have marked off items on some kind of manipulation checklist: he would flatter Ford to draw him in, and then withdraw without explanation, leaving Ford despondent and thus that much more dependent on Bill upon Bill’s return. Bill convinces Ford that nobody else really understands him like Bill does, and that nobody else ever could do so. They are all parasites who want to ride on Ford’s coattails, or steal his work, or are people who will hurt him because they are jealous of him; Bill is the one who inspires him, because he’s just that deserving of inspiration...except, of course, when he isn’t. When the Muse would go silent for long stretches of time, waiting with highly uncharacteristic patience until he got just close enough to desperate for a breakthrough. Then the whole cycle would begin all over again, until finally, by 1980-1981, Bill had succeeded in reducing Ford’s world to little more than himself. Based on the state of Ford’s study, he was, by the end, probably literally worshiping Bill as a god.(6) It is therefore possible to argue that the relationship included spiritual abuse in addition to the blatant psychological, physical (“enjoy the mystery bruises”), and financial (in that much of the grant ended up being used to pursue Bill’s agenda instead of for its intended purpose) abuse...and all of that happens before the possession sub-plot after the Portal test, where any illusion that their association is consensual or in any way for Ford’s benefit falls apart. Bill systematically violates every understood boundary within the relationship during the weeks between the Portal test and the Portal incident, and Bill very clearly enjoys doing so. He takes the time to taunt his victim by scribbling in the Journal when Ford blacks out. He seems to derive a great deal of satisfaction not only from the ability to completely deprive Ford of all mental and bodily autonomy on a whim, but from reminding Ford that he had this ability: he seems to have gotten a twisted satisfaction from knowing that Ford knew that, sooner or later, he would be unable to physically prevent himself from sleeping any longer. The hopelessness and inescapability of his situation are thrown in Ford's face again and again, and apparently for no better reason than that Bill is a physical and psychological sadist. Other people's misery and horror are like a drug to Bill, and we see, again and again, in the series that Bill will even undermine the pursuit of his own goals in order to enjoy it.

And the person he did all this to was Ford. Someone who already had profound trust issues (from his point of view, everyone he ever cared for had betrayed him to one degree or another), and whose formative years were during early fifties. This is significant, even aside from the impact of personality flaws specific to Filbrick Pines on his son’s development. Even today, in our rather better-informed times, many people dismiss the idea that men and even boys can be victims of abuse entirely, and even some of those who acknowledge the possibility won’t take it as seriously as the idea of men abusing women and girls. When Ford was physically and verbally bullied in elementary school, the only solution his father could offer was “learn to hit harder than the other guy.” If someone hurts you, you hurt them back; this, in the earliest examples he seems to have had, is how you reclaim power, and if you can’t do that, then Filbrick thinks you’re weak, that you’re an embarrassment, and that he just wishes you were gone, to very nearly quote Stan from “Dreamscaperers.” This was also a general attitude of the surrounding culture, without a lot of prominent examples of better options. Years later, it follows - horrible though it is to say – reasonably enough that when Ford realized he’d been manipulated and used by something that couldn’t be punched in the face, he began to have a breakdown, which only began to resolve in a small way when he convinced himself there was, in fact, a way to do something at least equivalent to punching Bill in the face. His plan was irrational and poorly strung together, and it did require him to ask someone for help, which must have galled – but it’s only Stan he has to ask, after all, and Stan doesn’t really count, and Stan owes him anything he might choose to ask for anyway, and besides, he’s not really asking Stan to help him deal with the problem, is he? He’s going to be the one who defeats that bastard or dies trying. Stan’s just...going to hold his beer, so to speak. Or book, as the case may be. Because he doesn’t need Stan. He doesn’t need anyone. Because he’s in control of this situation. He’s going to save the universe, and then everything will be fine again (or so he tells himself), because then he will be, once and for all, beyond the reach of anyone who might want to hurt him again. Because if he can pull this one off, then who would dare? Who would even want to? He’ll be a hero, a savior, someone deserving of everyone’s respect – and if not, he’ll at least be a martyr, which to him likely seems like a better second choice than continuing to live with the thought that he’s vulnerable and that everyone knows it.

An interesting thing to examine at this point is the similarity between his approaches to Fiddleford and Stan in the eighties. Earlier, it was argued that Ford may have reached out to Fiddleford as much out of repressed fear as from any real need for technical assistance. When Fiddleford first comes to Gravity Falls, Ford cannot stop talking about Fiddleford’s excellence, praising it even above his own. Fiddleford is his friend, his partner, his companion on this path to glory. Slowly, though, it changes. He begins to cast more and more doubt on Fiddleford’s capabilities, in a way, at first, which almost seems reasonable due to Fiddleford’s neuroses. He begins to feel that he is doing Fiddleford a favor – many favors, in fact – by allowing him to participate in “making history” like this. He projects and lashes out. This shows up even more clearly when he writes to Stan. He does not, admittedly, start out with praise in that case, but he still clearly goes through the same process of progressing from acknowledging a need to twisting it around in his own head so he no longer has to do so, just at a higher rate of speed. Almost as soon as he decides to write to Stan, he adds in his journal that “perhaps he can prove his worth to me.” This is followed by some prevarication – the line about how perhaps the mistakes of the past can be made right could apply to his thoughts on how he feels Stan wronged him, his thoughts on his situation with Bill, or even his past actions toward Stan, and when Stan arrives, Ford initially seems to present the matter as one where he needs a partner-in-crime because Stan is the one person he can trust – but within minutes, he shouts about how he’s offering Stan the one chance he’ll ever have to do something meaningful in his entire life. He’s progressed again to the idea that he doesn’t need help, and that he’s just doing these people - people who he has ostensibly asked for help - a favor. He is still in control. Because he doesn’t need them. He doesn’t need anyone. And when he triumphs over Bill, then….

...Then….

...Then we get to the bit I did write about on Thursday night. Specifically, how there’s very likely going to come a day when Ford will start finding it very, very hard not to have Bill around to hate anymore. To paraphrase zephyrsimperium - even when anger is hurting you so much that even you can see that it’s doing so, even when you know, intellectually, that it doesn’t really feel very good at all, it still hurts less than actually cleaning out the psychological wound.

To a certain extent, Ford’s anger did save him in 1982. Coping mechanisms can be necessary, for a time, when a trauma is too close to deal with. Truly dealing with it would be healthier, but there are situations where some distance has to be put between oneself and the trauma before it can be addressed; situations where you’ve just very suddenly become homeless and are being hunted by your reality-warping abuser would, it seems safe to say, be among these. Too much pain from too many sources could not be addressed all at once, especially by someone who, for reasons both cultural and innate, possessed none of the psychological tools or self-awareness to even begin to work through it all, and so when survival became a priority, focusing on hating Bill more than he hated himself probably was the only choice Ford realistically had in that moment. At the end of the show, however...Bill’s gone. Ford no longer has that mission to focus on, and at some point, that’s likely to mean waking up and realizing – if I may be forgiven for quoting a song from the Dark Ages, aka, my childhood -

“Wherever you go, there you are/You can run from yourself, but you won’t get far.”

Learning to defend himself as a child wasn’t enough – he still had to seek validation, acceptance of some kind, through all those competitions. Winning the competitions wasn’t enough – he still needed to find a place where he could fit in, somehow, either as a genius or as an anomaly. Going to college, finding someone he considered even more brilliant than himself, winning a grant – somehow, it still wasn’t enough, he needed to discover a new theory and emblazon his name in the history books...never realizing that even if he’d succeeded in that endeavor, it still wouldn’t have been enough. And all that was before Bill. Afterward, sure...he killed Bill. The being that made him feel weak and stupid and helpless all those years ago, it’s gone now. He won. And it still won’t be enough, because removing Bill doesn’t undo what Bill did to him. It doesn’t take away the difficulty of trusting anyone else after such an acute betrayal. It doesn’t take away the anger at himself for being someone who got duped. It doesn’t take away all those years out in the Multiverse, and the memories of whatever less-than-ideal things he had to do to survive them, or the impulse to hit first and ask questions later that he’s developed, or anything else. Nor is throwing himself into being the Perfect Friend or Perfect Brother in an attempt to make up for the past going to ultimately help much – he can’t undo whatever wrongs he did Fiddleford or Stan any more than they can undo the ones they did him, and all three of them are likely in for a rough ride of learning how to have relationships where sometimes you clash and disagree, but you trust the other person enough that you can have a relationship with them when neither of you is a Perfect Anything to the other…and where you trust the other person to still want to be your friend after you demonstrate that you aren’t perfect, or even able to perfectly fit into a simple, clear mold. As hard as accepting onself as a flawed individual with vulnerabilities that can be exploited is, it's probably still child's play compared with then, after having been taken advantage of in the past, to trust anyone to not do so at the first opportunity again.

Despite the somewhat gloomy tone of this essay, there are reasons for hope. One lies simply in the fact that Ford got this far. His story, after all, follows the arc of many a tragic hero, and yet, he manages to end the show alive and without having gone over to the Dark Side (even if he came dangerously close and was only pulled back from the edge by Stan’s quick thinking and acting skills). Another, more promising, is in "Lost Legends," where we get a glimpse of the Pines family in the week between Weirdmageddon and the birthday party. We see that Stan has recovered his normal personality and memories enough that he and Ford manage to annoy each other throughout the adventure. They disagree on how to proceed, which of them is more competent to look after the twins, etc...and the incident ends with a truce, rather than each of them slinging blame at the other for the situation Mabel ultimately has to rescue them both from. Ford is able to accept that they both contributed to the problem, rather than it being a black-and-white situation, the way he seems to have viewed most situations for quite some time. He even lets Stan play with the super-glue gun of science. It's progress. Here's hoping, for everyone's sake, that it's one step among many to be taken.

Notes

(1) See my essay “The Trouble With Timelines” on AO3 for an explanation of this assertion.

(2) Reasoning for this hypothesis can also be found in “The Trouble With Timelines.”

(3) Based on his lack of alarm when a second specimen later attacks him in the lab, my theory is that Ford staged the near-escape of the Cycloptopus at the beginning from first to last - note how he appears to have a pretty solid grip on it when he enters the gift shop, and later turns to the family, holding it up and smiling brightly, after subduing it as though looking for approval from others before indicating that he’d like to be included at meal times. Later, in “The Last Mabelcorn,” we learn from the read-out of his thoughts that he lurked closely enough behind the vending machine to eavesdrop for at least long enough to hear Stan refer to him as a “dangerous know-it-all;” since his other thoughts in that sequence all involve loss, anxiety, regret, and childhood bullying, it seems reasonable to assume that whatever he had hoped  to overhear, it wasn’t that. Considering how Ford agreed to avoid the children at the end of “A Tale of Two Stans,” it seems likely to me that Ford staged the Cycloptopus incident just for an excuse to interact with the rest of the family for a moment without obviously trying to do so, and that the creature was not actually especially dangerous.

(4) Though it is possible that some of the times Ford rolled a four were among the 20-odd times the Infinity Die allegedly endangered his life; if he was already in a bit of a bind and decided to risk getting a solution that way, rolling a four with something that is highly illegal to own - and, therefore, probably even more highly illegal to roll - would be unlikely to improve his situation

(5) I saw an essay once where someone actually tried to figure out what, if Bill was accurately portraying his own usage of electricity, happened there: best-case scenario involved convulsions violent enough to dislocate joints accompanied by severe internal and external burns. It seems, considering the contrast between his first appearance in “Take Back The Falls” and his relatively physically normal behavior during the rest of the episode, that being turned into gold again resulted in the instantaneous restoration of his pre-torture physical condition, but this would probably provide small comfort if you are under the impression that every time you ‘wake up,’ you’re just going to go right back through the same thing again...and again...and again….

(6) Comments in the codes of all Journals and in invisible ink in the blacklight journal make the question of Ford’s religious beliefs another interesting one; we know he was raised Jewish, but his few remarks after dealing with Bill could suggest that, by the story’s main time, he may have become some form of dualist. An argument which can be used either for or against this idea is the apparent existence of the Axolotl cult, as shown in exclamations by space refugees, carvings in Jheselbraum’s shrine, Bill’s dying invocation, and a bumper sticker in “Lost Legends.” On one hand, Ford expresses confusion about what the refugees meant by “praise the Axolotl!” and makes no explicit connection between the statement and the carvings he later sees in Dimension 52; when he speculates on “the opposite of Bill?”, it is unclear if he is referring to Jheselbraum or her background art/presumed patron deity (“Oracle” is suggestive of the Oracles of Delphi, who were priestesses of Apollo and were supposed to prophesy through divine inspiration, so it does seem likely that Ford, Jheselbraum, or both believe that another entity is the source of her prophetic gift). It is also unclear what, exactly, the power dynamic between Bill and the Axolotl is; the fact that Bill invokes it in the hopes of returning from his deletion implies it is far more powerful than him, but it is unclear (both in Bill’s invocation and in the Axolotl’s prophecy in “Time Pirates’ Treasure”) if the Axolotl could choose to ignore the invocation if it wished to do so. Bill, we know (or are at least told), was once a mortal being which sought escape from all laws, including the laws of nature which dictated his own mortality; we do not know how the Axolotl came to exist outside of time and space, or what this implies about its nature. When Bill muses on his enemies, however, he swears that neither Time Baby nor “the big frilly jerk” will stop him; this could imply that he sees Time Baby and The Big Frilly Jerk (most likely Axolotl, unless the canon version really does have a twin brother) as equal threats, and that perhaps “the ancient power” is something they are all in some way bound to/reliant upon for their seeming immortality? Bill was able to reduce Time Baby to his component molecules, but word of author is that TB is not actually dead and will eventually manage to pull said molecules back together into a Time Baby-like shape again, which renders the issue of power levels even murkier.

#gravity falls #gravity falls characters #gravity falls analysis #character analysis #essay #footnote time! #stan pines #ford pines #thoughts form as typing happens #drafts

[stardustinmyhands]

Trigger warning

Suicide talk.

5/21/24

Woke up and my elbows are already in pain.

Great way to start the day. I have to go buy yogurt and empty the dishwasher (and fill it up). I need to wash my bed sheet, but I have a king size bed and it’s covered in stuffies. Send help.

I feel asleep very fast last night and work shortly after due to a nightmare

My gf said she had a nightmare that society collapsed and she had to give me a special hot cocoa to make me fall asleep forever. We talk about how I wouldn’t survive if that ever happened And how she would make me a “special” cocoa and tell me to go to sleep. I would do that anyway.

We both admit due to my health problems I will probably die first. Which to be honest I’m not afraid to die. I’m more afraid of the way I die. My only concern is if I go before my mom for any reason. She would be beyond heartbroken to lose two children. She worries about me and my sister so much. She doesn’t believe parenting ends at 18. She’s loved us unconditionally since she discovered she was pregnant with us. When I came out to my mom i was dating women, she was a little surprised but she just said her only concern is my safety and that things maybe harder for me. She’s supported me every minute since then, and never stopped loving me.

Ok I know I know this is my chronic illness blog, but look at these dolls. I freaking love them. I want them all.

My gf is off work for 4 days this week. She is gonna put floating shelves up in my room. I get to display my Starbucks cups. I’m excited to decorate my room. This apartment feels more like home than my last apartment. Maybe cause I’m back in the city I grew up in. Mesa is home to me.

Today is some grocery shopping and cleaning in my home. Maybe some laundry. I need to wash my bed sheet. But my bed is so big and covered in stuff, and in the corner of a smaller room than my last apartment.

I think I had an allergic reaction to the sun block I tried yesterday. I will put in the other one she gave me to try. She said cause of my condition and how my skin reacts to the sun, I need to use sun blocks every day. Which is just another way of saying you are to white, protect yourself from the sun. Which I have heard from every skin doctor I’ve seen.

My brother’s anniversary of his suicide is this month. I’m not mourning him anymore, I was never upset that much that he passed. He was my mom’s first born and her only son. So she misses him dearly. I don’t blame her for that, it’s natural. She saw the good person be used to be. As a child, I think my brother turned out the way he did cause one he was just born that way. ( I very much believe that a lot of who we are is just cause we were born that way, and then nurture helped form what is already in us). My brother was a teenager when my parents divorced. It was a messy divorce. And they were rocky before that happened. In fact my dad told me a story about how they found out I was coming along. Day one my mom asked for a divorce, day two my dad lost his job, day three my mom found out she was pregnant with me. So all that happened 3 days in a row. They stayed together cause a baby was on the way. I don’t believe you should stay together for the kids, but this was in 1980. So it wasn’t good before I even came along. And I guess they tried to make it work for the new baby (me). I told my mom I don’t remember anything of the divorce, she said she’s thankful for that. I don’t remember my parents ever being married, but I was 2 when they divorced. I guess it’s a good thing I have no memory of it. But my brother was a very important part of his life when they divorced, he was entering his teen years. And I think that’s what happened to him. Cause if I’m honest my brother wasn’t a good person, at all to everyone around him. I remember him being good to me a few times, but of the time he was abusing me. My brother never sexually abused me. It was all emotionally and physical abuse. I don’t think I will tell my mom any of the very bad things he did. Let dead dogs stay dead. And let her keep her pleasant memories of him. I won’t be that asshole. I love my mom more than I love revealing the truth.

#chronic illness #chronic life #autoimmine disease #spoonie #chronic pain #mothers love #ladygaga #abuse

[zumpietoo]

In Fact...

Here’s a truly bizarre (and bizarro world/oppositeland) word salad from gloria(’s) bunker proving that, what she’s really upset about? Cole dumped her PP and is now saying as much

Errmmm....nope

Ummm.....he said “handshake agreement”? I believe he said “hand in hand and together every day”, but....you know....I’m not insane.

Umm....it was like two (or 3) MONTHS later.....and because she’s Cole’s GF...and visited him in Vancouver. Which “ex fuckbuddy”? 

His GF came to visit him while he was qwaranteened and couldn’t leave? Oh and probably also had work/wanted to see her family in Montreal (did, in fact, so did Cole)---how evvolll, Imagine that, a couple spending time together!

It’s clear to me absolute none of that was said. Ever. 

Ummm....actually, he implied that and the idea that they’ve been together every day since (even when not) is the exact same thing.

Dude, he was already gushing....

Ummm....he legit implied that he was. What’s hilarious here? All of you are furious because he gushed so much.

Plus, again, Cole can talk about his relationships however he so desires, they’re his relationships......AND even if he didn’t imply the above? It still doesn’t make it “transactional”.

Cole never said, “never felt this way before” about anybody (tho he did make the point of how verrryyyyy different things are with Ari and how vastly preferable); Cole got a shit ton of abuse at the time for “muse”, Cole said the sanity thing when he and PP were about to split up for the last, final time (interestingly, he made a similar post for Breetch and they’d be fully split within a couple of months, too)----because he was looking to make her happy/get her to STFU. 

Your entire argument is, literally, he didn’t say what I think he should say, so that means he doesn’t love Ari. When, yeah, he does. 

Actually, compatability, especially given what he went thru with PP and Breetch, sooooperr important. Plus what he’s talking about is the connection they share. Something he clearly neverrr had in any of his prior relationships. 

If anything? He legit said they were all mainly about fucking. Which makes Breetch and PP the prostitutes, not the person he legit likes AS A PERSON!

He said none of that....but so you’re saying Cole finally having a supportive partner in life is a BAD thing? 

Actually, he said he probably didn’t do such a great job as a partner, was in fact (to an extent) emotionally less available to them----and he isn’t that way with Ari. He also said the relationships, conversely, weren’t fulfilling for him because they endlessly pushed him to put them first. So, again, Cole isn’t entitled to have his needs met and be cared for, he only gets to be the caretaker? That’s really vile. 

And shows what a shitty person and partner you must be....

Actually.....wouldn’t that effectively BE a relationship? Companionship and sex? WTF do you think he had with Breetch and PP? Oh, right.....no companionship and just their caretaker and sex. With both of them freely admitting to having had their hands in his pocket the entire time (PP even whined about him not buying her a bracelet).

Ummm.....putting yourself first isn’t always the wrong thing to do. And, again, doesn’t = “Ari’s a prostitute”.

Soooo...wait, she’s a prostitute, but it hasn’t = moar $$$? Gee, gloria, that negates your argument....but I think you forgot what it was awhile upthread, no?

Wait....I thought you said she’s with him for his $$$/gets to live in his house (when you aren’t pretending she doesn’t really live there, that is). Also, again, how can it be “transactional” if the prostitute isn’t profiting? 

And I thought Cole was an indigent hazbeen fatty loser?

Ummm.....it has literally nothing to do with any of that?

Ummm....last part legit completely contradicts itself....plus, honestly? The reason you see this as “transactional” is because you see ALL relationships as transactional/quid pro quos, it’s precisely why you want PP to date up/bragged about her being a booty call for (oh the irony) Chris Evans.....even tho that was all pretend. 

Cole and Ari are happy....honestly....the hilarious thing here is, if it WERE transactional (it’s not), so? If it worked for them, why TF would you care? 

And, if anything was a Pee Arr/transactional relationship-----it was PP with GymD wanting to power couple. It’s also why it fell apart so quickly....

Dude, we see you, you’re mad that Cole wins the break up every day, will continue to do so, doesn’t want you PP anymoar and you’re never getting SH again...

Oh lastly....he talks about lack of trust with his exes (and how that’s not an issue with Ari) and how, honestly, he just didn’t work with them....even when they tried to. Dude....that isn’t love. It never was. Time to suck it

[applefae]

tf when you find your abuser on tumblr and he runs a popular cosplay blog

#chr*me-king #m*sfiled #lmao i still have his jank ass letter #admitting to emotionally abusing me with his gf at the time

[mingmingfufu]

Can we just talk about the ending of KawoShin open discuss. *sort of spoilerish*

I feel like I’m the only one who’s like reallly disappointed LMFAO--ya’ll there’s so much “canon” alternative universe and merchandise for Kawoshin in Evangelion that it kind of makes me upset to realise this couple just went down the drain. Yeah, I can see how people were like, “Kaworu’s toxic” or “Kaworu has a hero complex for Shinji” to which I say are valid points. But the toxic thing I feel like can also be applied to pretty much everyone around Shinji tbh, except for Rei. I did NOT, like Asuka at all but I really love her character though, and I felt for her a lot throughout the series.

I did not ship them either because honestly, Shinji and Asuka seemed better off playing the sibling dynamic instead of trying to play bf/gf which honestly is kind of forced by their living situation. Also since they’re in a similar disposition non existent father and dead mother, you’d imagine they would rely on each other for emotional comfort. Though Asuka—her personality I feel like she can’t differentiate between familial love and romantic love and the affection she wants is a bit of both. But, her character tries to be “mature”; she wants romantic love more and does this through sexual means and romantic gestures e.g. like kissing. One of my friends told me that you can’t stay friends as a boy and a girl cause eventually you catch feelings. Which I say is kinda dumb cause I have a lot of male friends, and I definitely don’t harbour those feelings, but I guess it’s a common phenomena.

I think this is what happens in this case, of Asuka and Shinji. Even after rejection of instrumentality they actually are depicted as childhood friends. But knowing how they both were before to each other, it was not good tbh. Also to mention the choking like thrice— bro if anything, this showcases a really abusive relationship and I think this outstretches the idea of their character tropes. Which I firmly stand by saying they’re superficial to each other. AsuShin were never really there for each other and are using each other in a forced situation. However, you can’t deny that they didn’t at some point catch feels, also Shinji is pretty consistent how he still cares about everyone around him. Which I really like how they add that to his character because it reminiscent of Yui, because you see a duality of both his parents personality in Shinji throughout the series—it’s a really nice touch. But bruh, if we gonna talk about that coma scene—I’m out LOL.

Thoughhhh, she is a true definition of best girl I really like her arc, fighting drive, and her skills as an Eva pilot 😭💗--but bruh she’s still a toxic and sometimes annoying tsundere trope, but still she’s 14 what can you do. So I feel like Kensuke and Asuka are actually a pretty good combo, cause he’s always been pretty mature even without parents. Also Asuka was into older guys, so I guess this is a win win?? Also Rei and Shinji, I honestly cannot get my head around it cause that’s pretty much his mom—so in a way that’s like either his half-sister or mom-ish clone?? Idk but Yui is definitely the donor LOL.

Kaworu and Shinji I felt like brought a bunch of things out of each other. I don’t know which timeline begins first, but I’d like to think the manga, the anime (plus its movies), and then to the rebuild series. Because I think that order is kind of pivotal to observing Kaworu’s character development from being a person who’s trying to understand human feelings to then the kinder person we see in the final series. You can tell how he’s changed and he knows Shinji a lot more as well as being considerate to him e.g. giving him personal space or letting him work at his own pace. Also that “we’ll meet again.” Is an obvious nod to how he’s done this before.

His literal story in every timeline is always romantic LOL, like bruh I can’t remember which game it was but basically a bad ending of Kawoshin route is that you reject Kaworu and he starts the third impact 🤡. Also I don’t know why but I started to see a weird dynamic between those two, in the manga their interactions reminded me of Asuka and Shinji—which Shinji is the tsundere Asuka here. I don’t know if this is relevant but the older character relative to the character they’re with seems to play off a mature vs a childish person trope. Asuka is younger than Shinji and Shinji is actually younger than Kaworu. Then again I could be overseeing this but istg manga Kaworu and Shinji mirror the whole Asushin dynamic. Like he’s seriously agressive against Kaworu, then after killing him he admits liking him. 🤡 I don’t know which is funnier no homo Shinji, homophobe shinji, or just closet Shinji who needs to realise sexuality is a spectrum so he could’ve idk—come out as bisexual, but whatever manga Shinji lol that timeline is over.

Anyways the development of these two is real and I think the rebuild timeline shows them at their best bringing their own personage out from each other like how they both enjoy music together--WHICH I’M SO SAD WE NEVER GET TO SEE THAT CELLO AGAIN. Then there’s those feelings of humanity, love, kindness, etc. Which yeah an angel could represent those things, but Kaworu is still his own person, self-aware of a cycle and if you think about how he initially was there to USE Shinji, but ultimately turned on that plan set by SEELE because he loved Shinji (and a bunch of other things like him showing Kaworu humanity). I also can see the argument, how “ideal” Kaworu is to Shinji, but he’s more self aware of the time he has before he KNOWS he’ll die and knows how to act for himself in that duration to make the most of it. All with Shinji. At some point, I think he fell in love with Shinji tho I don’t know where it began tbh—considering that all those alternate universes do exist. Kaworu does romantically love Shinji--so, in some universe they both reciprocate their feelings to each other. 

In the last movie during that convo with Shinji. Like bREH it’s so emotionally moving because Kaworu remembers ALLLLL the timelines and how he’s been with Shinji and later Shinji himself recalls the events too. Where they show the scene from the manga and anime. Kaworu cries after being set free from the EVA cycle. Which, I definitely understood what he meant by him saying “it’ll be lonely” and how Shinji changed or that he’s actually different this time.

Either way, Shinji did right by him because it’s always Kaworu who has the purpose of “trying to save Shinji” but it always ends up the same. I thought that was really moving because Shinji tells Kaworu he’s gonna let him live a life for himself for once and he wants the same for everyone as well. Which was honestly so meaningful cause I think Kaworu’s character and like Rei too when they start to realise how to “live” like a person and not another puppet it’s truly liberating. Another thing I forgot, bruh Kaworu calls Gendo his father and ngl I feel like this is kind of a weird lore situation because I for sure don’t think he’s the donor. I think he calls him that as an insult because he knows Gendo’s whole doing and relative to Shinji—I kind of see it as a joke LOL. Like it’s equivalent to saying, “daddy chill”, or “hey look it’s daddy and his plans to end the world” also I kind of like to think of it as a father in law thing cause you know, Kawoshin *winks amirite*

The ending, I’m honestly hoping is just an open ending because it gives everything an actual start of their adult lives not being dictated by extraterrestrial forces. Though, I’m kind of wondering if the world doesn’t have EVAs does that still mean everyone else still has the same backstory, and do they remember? Maybe Mari really is just a coworker lmfao, and there’s still a chance for Kaworu and Shinji cause ngl, they did have a convo (presumably from the spoilers) about still remaining close afterwards and that stare at the ending seems very hopeful.

I call bs from Anno saying, “oh Shinji is based off him and Mari off of his wife”, like honestly any OCs made theres always some part of yourself made into that character. Which is probably why a lot of people relate to the characters in EVA because they’re based off real things (e.g. those war machines characters are named after and people around them). I think why Kaworu and Rei are together at the end, is bc they’re very much the same. They’re mass produced dolls—which oddly enough that’s the case for all the children except they don’t recall the loop. Kind of funny also how both Kaworu and Rei became farmers lmfao so ig it runs in the family (yes that’s right I like the idea that they’re siblings it was always noted that they’re like “the same”).

Another thing, i think why the rebuild really did well for Kawoshin and in my opinion canonised it—the convo with elder Ryoji Kaji (Misato’s baby daddy) that there was a time he felt incredibly lonely and depressed thinking Misato didn’t love him and so he started looking out for himself. So self love and found himself a hobby in farming which he suggests to Kaworu—basically saying he might feel like Shinji doesn’t love him but he’s gotta remember to take care of himself. if I go thru a breakup ill feel like it’s the end of the world but Kaji says y’a gotta self love broe and take care yo self gad dam fam 😭 💗.

Though, that look at the end from Shinji to Kaworu—I’d like to believe there is still hope that one day when they’re a bit stable in their adult lives, they’ll run into each other.

#Kaworu Nagisa #shinji ikari #neon genesis evangelion #rei ayanami #mari illustrious makinami #asuka shikinami #discussion #kawoshin #nge kaworu #nge shinji #nge

[spidey-d00d]

You know heard was accused of DV by a gf in the 90s (Ellen Barkin), is on tape threatening Heard with a knife, repeatedly tried to guilt her and emotionally manipulate her into cutting him, is on tape saying he headbutted her, lied about his finger, has been arrested before for smashing up hotel rooms in fights with Kate Moss, has a history of violence and aggression, dated an underaged girl when he was 26, sent texts saying he wanted to murder and rape Amber super super early in the relationship, went out his way to defended a self-confessed child rapist, is friends with several abusers and rapists, called Heard and other women 'fat whores' 'cunts' 'bitches', 'dyke' and spoke about smacking them around, uses homophobic and racial slurs, lied about being native american to steal roles, etc. Like this is who you're defending?

I would defend Johnny Depp during this case any day easily. I am not at all saying he has been the perfect man or husband, but I would rather defend him over someone like her. You are going to defend a women who has been caught in multiple lies, has been arrested for history of DV before, has been caught on video and audio recordings admitting to abusing and hitting Depp multiple times. The same women who told him that no one would believe him if he came out publicly and said he was in a DV situation. And you talk about the whole head butting situation, what caused him to do it? Maybe the fact that he was being hit and basically attacked and had to try and restrain her for not only his safety but for quite possibly her own. Whether it be intentional or not, you are going to tell me if someone is coming at you violently with the intention to hurt you or actually hurting you, you wouldn’t try to stop it and or do something to defend yourself? Not to mention that every recording Heard has on Depp is when he is at his lowest, mental breakdown points and hard points of his addictions or whatever the case might be, every time she has brought in a recording or picture or any evidence is when she has brought him to his breaking point with her narcissistic tendencies and manipulation. The trial alone shows how far she will go just to get in that man’s head, just take a look at the outfits between the two during the days of the trial.

I’ve tried to not respond to the multiple comments and messages I’ve gotten but y’all are really ridiculous. Thanks for the traffic to my page though! <3

Also I am not going to say that I know every single little minor detail about this case, I actually have a life and job, so if any of this is wrong I do apologize but I think I’ve kept pretty up to date with everything and only tried to talk about the stuff I knew about so.. yeah

#TW #TW: domestic violence #TW: DV #justice for johnny depp #johnny depp

[hoochy-coo]

I have a bunch of questions for WS anon since I am interested in other celebs possible pr too!

1. With your job, is it regular for anyone working in the industry to have tea? And do people working in or share what’s real or not?

I would say it gives you the opportunity to hear gossip or rumors that only people in the industry would know. I will say you'd probably need to go out of your way to learn about it. In my case I work with athletes and aside from the people they hookup with, their scandals, vices it's not really a place with tea. But I do make a lot of friends in the industry and we gossip all the time and they share from their respective fields and about the celebs they work with or have a connection to. I guess it's the same as any kind of workplace gossip.

Working in what? You mean working in pr? A celeb's pr team will never tell you what is real/authentic or straight up fake or a mix of both. The most they'll give is what strategies they impose or how they mold things. But not directly, oh this is fake btw. For obvious reasons, they keep a lot of things secret and things only they would know. A lot of friends in pr do like sharing input or teach our gc how things go or look for the signs or the strategies we wouldn't even have figured without their help. A lot of times we also just hear a lot of rumors from inside sources that just outward contradicts what is being presented by the media/pr play of a celeb.

2. Can you tell me your thoughts on often thought pr couples? I am not a harrie at all and I see this from pop culture blogs.

lily/timmy - I don't know if it's pure pr or not but I've at least heard Timmy was also hooking up with other women during all those times he was with Lily. A lot of people have told me it's pure pr/mostly pr though. They did seem like a nice match as future it girl/boy but their reunion it didn't seem as interesting.

seb/ale - I actually don't follow either of those two enough. I thought Seb has always been pretty open about his gfs? At least I thought him and Leighton were pretty public. For his current gf, if it's pr then he hasn't gain a lot of fame imo. The only place I see him relevant or getting talked about is the tumblr/twitter stans which while loud isn't that big. I mean his fans sure let his last film flop hard, I doubt the BO was even enough to pay him.

henry/nat - I feel like I blocked out Henry's love life when he was dating a 19 year old. But I would say this is real. Until I see Natalie suddenly becoming a star I'd say this is pretty standard for Henry. Him and Kaley, yeah none of you can convince me that was real.

chris/jenny - A lot of people will kill me, but since Jessie admitted she also thinks they're pr then I'll admit I do too.

tom/zendaya - I think they're real. Either way I love it. We can probably judge based on how long this will last.

shawn/camila - real, but my friend says they're way more subdued in private at least

bennifer - I already sent an answer to this before

ben/ana - the blueprint

hiddleswift - pr

abelena - pr

If you're asking if I think they're pure pr, I don't know what happens when they're alone together to say it's all fake. I imagine hiddleswift, abelena, ben/ana probably hookup in private but was never as serious or real as they made it appear. If you're asking if they're real and using it for pr, well yeah I would say all of these would qualify as they're using it for pr too which isn't a bad thing. Like Ryan/Blake are obviously real and using their relationship for publicity.

3. Do you think hiddleswift was bad pr for Tom?

Not really. I do think it was meant to be longer with a full better rollout and ended too early with Taylor backing out. As someone who considers herself a self-hating swiftie, Tom gained a lot of loyal fans in the fandom for example and hiddleswift was pretty memorable pop culture moment in general.

4. How do you really feel about the holivia questions and harries in general since you tend to get the most abuse from them?

I'm irritated because of the angry anons and people who can't respect opinion. Other than that, my opinion on holivia still remains the same and it will not physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or financially hurt either Harry or Olivia. In the first place, I don't remember ever spending money for them. I think as long as Jessie allows pop culture discussion and allows the question, we can all and should respect opinion. I'm not in any way anti or pro holivia. I don't mind a pr relationship cause to me it's a normal and harmless part of their job. I also don't think pr should be equated as bad at all. We're kidding ourselves if we don't think celebs are like this.

5. I’m just basing this from the harry stans in this blog, but how do you see Harry benefit from holivia?

I already said this to my one harrie friend here but I always saw his fans overestimate his fame. Harry is big but he isn't BIG. He hasn't come to the level of Taylor, Drake, Ed, JB, or their counterparts for actors. Every celeb who came at that level went to levels of attention seeking and pr. When you're trying to venture into film, there are separate pr that could also be demanded from you. Being big in one industry doesn't equate to being an instant hit or success in the other. Especially when the film industry does have a lot of hesitation with singers to actors. Especially when with Harry he seems to want to be taken as a serious actor rather than the easy going route many of his contemporaries have done to jump start their acting career. Harry is being talked about a lot by blogs and accounts that used to barely mention him before. He is being discussed as a regular gossip which didn't happen for years. Imo fans just think he's too big for anything or that he is immune to pr or attention seeking. Me and my friends never saw him that way and we also never saw Harry as incredibly relevant or big, rather than he has an incredibly dedicated fanbase

Question for WS anon but I would also like to hear your opinion Jessie? Do you think Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling call the paps . Because I've generanlly heard that he is an extremely private ccelebrity but all those spottinga with his kid don't necessarily seem very organic to me Also are there any celebs that dont really call the paps?

You can be a private celeb and still call the paps. Ryan is a private guy but he has always been pretty open who he's dating and end of day they don't give us a lot of update or info about their relationship. Abel has started calling the paps a lot, but in hindsight he's still very private about himself.

I think the only celebs who don't call the paps are ones who don't have publicist.

- Worcestershire Sauce Anon

!!!

You answered this so thoroughly, thank you! X

[the-bjd-community-confess]

Damn, I've had a shit week. 1st I found out one youtuber I follow had been lying about their economic status to make followers give them money, and they actually abused smaller youtubers for years, using their followers, and just doing an entire MLM shtick with their side-business. (I didn't actually know about this bc I don't use Insta.) Also, apparently had been outed to having used slurs on the LGBTA, and other racial groups.

2nd. Youtuber I've been following since 2014, admitted that he did hit his GF in 2018, and he basically let her stand as a liar for all those years, and only NOW admitted to actually hitting her "once". GF forgave him, and they're still together, and now I'm also appalled by people who are now sending abuse to HER (guys, she gets harassed for forgiving him, and people wishing her 1yo son should die wtf? Regardless of people's opinions, that child is innocent), which isn't my business, but damn, my trust in this guy is fucking broken.

3rd. Family member has Corona, and I'm worried bc of their pre-existing medical problems..

4th: Some other personal shit, I won't go into because it's a bit too personal even for anon content.

All of this just has drained me so hard, I've been saving up for some time for a doll, but now I just feel so emotionally drained, and the excitement is kinda gone. I found this doll while listening to the 1st person I mentioned, talking about "treating yourself well" and thought of the dolls as like a "Going to spend a lot of time just being excited about all I want to do with the doll, and planning for it, and treating myself by doing that." Also used to listen to 2nd guys podcasts and content while working on some of the doll stuff, so again, even more of that negative energy tainting the entire process of getting, and preparing for this doll.

It feels like a lot has heaped up at once, and the anchoring points I had watching to those youtubers, with the happy/funny content they made, I had to just kinda "chill" and keep my mood up with all the shit I go through mentally has just kinda made this all worse, and my family member getting sick, and my personal issue, is just like the weights dragging me further down. The fact that my initial want for that doll got tainted by this just hurts a bit. Like, this doll is just gonna be tied to this bullshit, and Idk if I wanna deal with that. Just gives me bad vibes, and energies.

~Anonymous

#BJD #ABJD #BJD Confessions #TrueBJDConfessions #Youtube

[cowstiandior]

phew this rly is gonna be the first post I’ve made in like a year but. Like the others, time to pour my heart out I guess.

I’ve dealt with a lot of trauma. I’m still going through my trauma because every so often I learn things that I had no idea about whether it be because I blocked it out or just never thought about it in an abusive light. I guess, first thing’s first, to explain why a lot of this stuff impacted me in a huge way (not to say that it wouldn’t have otherwise, but.).

My biological father was emotionally and physically abusive. To me, to my sibling, to my mother and all his exe’s. He had mental illnesses that were left untreated like BPD, narcissism, and compulsive lying. When I was five, he tried to get me to believe that my mom was cheating on him with a friend of hers and that this guy was gonna steal her away. And I believed him and cried and screamed until my mom promised me that was the case. I only found out, in my late teens, that he was the one that had cheated. Constantly. Eventually they divorced and I moved with my mom to texas after the school year was finished because that gave her time to prepare a place to live for me. Unfortunately during that period where I still lived with my dad... he did a lot of things. And even though (apparently) my grandparents on my mother’s side tried to have me over as much as they could, there was still long amounts of times that I spent with my father.

He exposed me to a lot of shit I shouldn’t have been as a child. Movies with graphic violence and horror (I once had a panic attack when I lost a tooth because I thought that awful lady from darkness falls was gonna come and kill me), nudity and sex. Hell, anime that borderlined into straight up hentai. Only two years ago did I learn from my mother that she always thought my dad was sexually abusing me, but she never had the proof. And maybe she was right. Maybe he did, and I blocked some of it out. He showed me all that stuff, and I remember how he would cling to me in the bed he forced me to share with him and told me I was the only one that loved him and understood. He would buy and show me things I shouldn’t have been seeing and then told me not to tell my mother.

He once brought me over to one of his girlfriends and while I “slept” on the couch, he had sex with his gf right there in the living room just a foot away from where I was. He had only wait... what, five minutes? For me to fall asleep and didn’t even check if I had. I was facing the back of the couch so I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear all of it. I was too afraid to move or even breathe.

That on its own is a lot, but I’m sharing this to give some background into my feelings about this roleplay groups I was a part of over the years.

My first experience with rping was the alvin and the chipmunks oc community on yt. Which was a very niche thing on its own, but there were a LOT of people. It basically boiled down to us coloring over screencaps and fanart to make our ocs, make songs high-pitched and then vid our ocs using the pictures to the songs in wmm and pretending that was our ocs singing them. Some of us communicated via AIM to actually rp our ocs. At the time I was 11/12. I ended up rping with people much older than me, one of whom, the one I rped with the longest and had the greater attachment to, was 16. We rped smut with our ocs. I thought this was normal. They did it with others so why not me as well? They were popular and I was just starting out in the community, so if I did this, then I’d get more attention. And it worked. I got attention from people much older than me and I felt like I was a huge part of this community. All because one of my ocs fucked a more important person’s oc and they got together.

But eventually I fell out of it. I randomly found nondisney crossover videos on yt and began to watch them religiously. Like, really bad ones also made in wmm, but I thought they were so cool. This was way back before editors ever even dreamed of using AE to make seamless masks for their videos. I lefts the aatc group behind to try and make my own. I didn’t have much success until one of my videos blew up and I got a lot of subscribers. I still wasn’t part of what felt like a closely knit community, but I wanted to be. I made silly reaction videos of vidders getting jokingly ‘married’, I commented and liked others videos to try and get noticed by them. Because I was 13 and had no irl friends. 

Then ‘video rps’ began to be a thing. I instantly was enamored, and having experience in rping before, desperately joined. It was fun, at first! I started to connect with more people, they wanted to plot these stupid stuff ideas with me. Then the group decided to move to good ol’, fresh baby-faced tumblr. And I enjoyed that because, at the time, I thought I was a better writer than I was a vidder (news flash I wasn’t good at either of these things sdfkjdns). Somehow, after this move, I became really close with the mods. Both of whom were in the 20s while I was 14 (and just starting high school). One of them called me her ‘wifey’ and I went along with it and did the same. Because I liked the attention. I thought I was important even though, really, none of my characters except two were ever part of any large plots or got attention. They also talked about sexual things with me because my main oc was dating one of the mods’ oc. I remember them solely getting together because of ‘aphrodisiac dust’ too. 

And I’ll admit, I also kinda forced it on my side. The mod had her oc basically in a ‘love triangle’ between my and my friend meg’s ocs. Which is... honestly a Lot now that I think about it. She kept stringing us along, both me and meg being the same age too. So when I saw the oppurtunity of “hey my oc was forced to be really horny and if I get Jen’s oc to fuck mine, that would mean they’ll be together’! So that’s what I did. And it worked. And it was only way later once I really processed what I’d done that I felt like shit for what I did to meg. This adult had basically tried to get us to fight each other of this dumb fucking ship. Haha jokes on u jen, now they’re both lesbians and are dating.

Though before this, when my oc was dating another member’s, that ended... really badly when said member had her boyfriend raped by their other ocs. One the dash. With no warning. Not even telling me about that possibility. It made me feel sick. So I dropped them.

Anyways, yeah. In this rp group I was, once again, exposed to smut and sexual things by those that weren’t just older than me, but also adults. They tried to get me to turn on other people in the group. They were also homophobic which, at the time, had a huge impact on me since I was, even then, trying to figure out what and who I was.

Both mods were controlling, rude, and eventually, all of us decided to split off from them and move our ocs to a new but similar setting. This shift was lead by gansey, who became the new mod. I was also partially close to them, and given that at the time I thought they were a good writer and they were popular, I relished in that attention. I thought of them as an older sibling. But in the end they weren’t all that different from Jen and Usa, the previous mods.

Even back in TOW, Gansey had this strange fascination with cheating. Given that Jen’s oc and mine were dating, and gansey had this (understandable, at the time) hatred for her and Usa, they tried to get their main oc to be... really close with mine. Always close enough to cheating or being seen as romantic but never enough that they could apply plausible deniability to the situation. They even made this weird ‘au’ video of them together without talking to me about it. ...A lot of things were done without talking to me about it.

Their obsession with cheating even extended into TAR, where they kept hinting at one of their ocs being interest with another of mine despite Sonia being in a relationship with Shelly’s Archie. I thought, perhaps, that maybe they wanted it to become an open relationship or poly. And if they had talked about it with Shelly and I and we all agreed with it, that would have been fine. But such a thing was never brought up. When said character suddenly developed an evil demon personality, them trying to force their affection on Sonia became even more obvious. Only now the character had a proper ‘excuse’, being evil and whatnot.

Gansey really did have this weird thing for cheating, ruining other people’s ships, and also dubcon/noncon. And again, Gansey was an adult while I was in high school. These things Just Kept Happening. And even though I thought we were close at the time, I never really was involved in any of their big plots (or really anyone’s) unless it involved some of these concepts.

Eventually I started to talk a lot with Meg because we were the same age and had similar interests. This led to me talking with Shelly more and then Bonnie, Kyle, and Morgan. And I’m so grateful for that. People I had been so afraid of contacting on my own to talk to or be friends because of my insecurity due to everything else became huge parts of my life. For once I felt genuinely included and not just someone to be used by others. We came up with fun plots, character connections, etc. At this point I had both them and friends in high school. I had a place I felt I belonged. I still do. I love them so much. They’re basically family to me.

Anyways, as I got older, it became apparent there was this rift in the rp group. People being purposely excluded because they weren’t seen as ‘good’ rpers, or just because someone who wasn’t ever really active in the rp group didn’t like the other. AKA Roman hating kyle which resulted in him being excluded despite his attempts time and time again to include others lol. Obviously over the years, there wasn’t much left for me in that group outside of my friends. It was barely active anymore and outside of it interactions had become toxic. So it was understandable when Kyle and Meg decided to leave. Funny how once that happened, they only then decided to have an ‘open forum’, with everyone who was normally quiet coming out of the woodworks to bash my friends when they were no longer there.

Some of us called them out after that and left. Though not before we found out that they’d (gansey and their inner circle) been developing another rp setting called FAR (presumably the setting they attempted when they told everyone they were gonna have a 100 time-skip to shake things up, which ended up not happening bc a lot of the group was like wtf) and also added someone to the discord server that most of us didn’t know. This person had been there for months and Gansey never told us despite them being their friend. This was very upsetting because at that point all of in this group had been together for 8 years. We shared personal stuff in that discord server. Things that I’m sure we wouldn’t want strangers seeing. So yeah, a lot of us were upset!

Then Gansey and their friends dogpiled kyle for understandably being mad about being excluded and alienated. Then they dared to have the gall to message me saying they were terrible and sorry and that they’d always be there to listen if I wanted to talk.

So I talked. And what happened after that? Nada. Nothing. They never replied. They weren’t willing to face the hypocrisy of what they’d done.

In the end they had just been another manipulative adult that had only used me when they needed to. That tried to have our characters be sexual when I was just a teen.

All of you were adults. You should have known better. I admired you guys only to have that admiration used to control me. Fuck all of you. Fuck you for the way you treated my friends. Fuck you for having contributed to my trauma on top of everything else I’d experienced. Fuck you, gansey, for your manipulative ‘apology’. Fuck you for your dumb fucking poetry you thought we’d never see, comparing us to corpses and you to sisyphus.

Boo Fucking Hoo. 

You were never really sorry at all. None of you were. You’re were just ashamed you got caught on all your bullshit.

I was boo boo the fool for thinking I actually meant anything to you guys.

#csa tw #rape tw #noncon tw #dubcon tw #manipulation tw #this ended up being all over the place I'm sorry #Don't even know if this is even coherent #they're all real #i'm not even gonna fuckin use the other walrus tag fuck you

[cutebutstillsingle]

REASONS WHY YOU’RE STILL SINGLE: BECAUSE YOU’RE DATING A NARCISSIST, PART 2 (examples from my “entertained a narcissist” situationship)

                          ...............................................................

Sadly it might have to be one of those horrible experiential learning kinds of situations where you can’t “know” what I’m talking about until you live through it.  But hopefully you catch any narcissistic and inappropriate behavior before it annihilates your spirit completely, and before it starts permanently making you doubt and question your own sound judgement and amazing qualities.  The less you tolerate narcissistic behavior, the better you fare.  

I’m gonna be vulnerable and admit that never in my wildest imagination of knowing myself, would ever think that I, of all people, could get emotionally manipulated by narcissistic behavior.  I like to consider myself a “no bullshit” kind of person.    Either way, I feel like I did take some narc bullets that still have me shook to this day as I learn more and more about myself and do the work of running through that relationship to learn from it.  

Here are 10 real life examples of red flags that I allowed to permanently enter my memory bank, because the chemistry and similarities between me and this dude seemed so unbelievable that I wasn’t thinking clearly.  I’m grateful to God that I still managed to picked up on some of the yellow lights and red flags.  When I dumped him, I literally had to tell myself “do it now, or you’re going to lose your nerve”.  I genuinely believe that was the holy spirit speaking to me.  Because on my own strength I would have stayed in, and what I have gained by parting ways is priceless in getting to know and love myself more.   

CLUE 1= He was still fully in touch wit his ex wife, and would openly  talk about being in touch with her.  At some points he even said he still loved her, despite saying that he loved me within one month of meeting me.  But I was that stupid and I ignored it.  In reality, a man should not be in touch with any past partners whatsoever unless he has kids with them.  And no one should say “I love you” to a complete stranger they just met a month ago, and then turn back around and also say they still love their ex-wife. Also, pay attention: EX wife.  There’s a reason they did not last. And it may have been him.  

CLUE  2= He started disclosing way too much about himself to me, a complete stranger that he had only known for about a month.  I now realize this was on purpose to make me feel like it was a “safe” space to disclose way the eff too much about myself way too soon.  Ladies, pay attention please. Nobody should be revealing classified information about your life to anyone who you have known for less than six months.  You should only be telling your most intense personal information to people who know you the absolute BEST, and who have made it into your inner circle after proving their trustworthiness to know your secrets, keep them, and never use them against you. 

CLUE 3= Whenever I would talk about things that excited and interested me, he would rapidly shut them down, make me feel dumb for being excited by my interests.  I was reading a David Goggins book and he tried so hard to shit on David Goggin’s accomplishments saying anyone could do Navy Seal swimming drills.  He also tried to accuse me of being sexually attracted to David Goggins (David Goggins is of neutral attraction to me, TBH.  One has to imagine David Goggins is not terrible in bed if he approaches sexuality with the same approach he uses for the rest of his life endeavors, lololol.  But that shouldn’t make anyone you date feel that insecure).  If I was excited by learning yoga inversions, he would say he did gymnastics for years as a kid and it’s not that big of a deal. If I said I wanted to learn to bake better cookies, he would say his aunt and mom were the best cookie bakers in the world.  After I baked a kick ass batch of chocolate chip cookies because he said he loved sweets, he wouldn’t even try one.  A narcissist will work hard to make you feel like you can’t ever be worthy or good enough.

CLUE 4= He refused to ever meet any of my friends. And I think this is because he refused to see me in an empowered state where other genuinely kind and awesome people were drawn to me just for being my kind and awesome self.  Weirdly, I had met all his friends and family within a month of knowing him.  

CLUE 5= He would repeatedly say that most people were dumb and sheep-like. Again, with this need to put others down.  

CLUE 6= He actively hated on complete strangers and nearly all of his family members.  Road rage with insults was a common occurrence.  

CLUE 8= He had a history of severe alcohol and substance addiction and abuse. His version of it was “I am in recovery and have been sober for X number of years.  I was arrested in the past for a DUI,  and that was the point that turned it all around and I knew I had to get sober.  I got myself sober with no help”.  

Well the truth was he was NOT completely sober-- he was still a hardcore pothead, and he still drank NA beers on the regular that tasted just like beer because they are beer.   I later ended up background checking him when I was learning how to use background check websites as research for this blog (which I’ll discuss in a future post); and uh... his history was WAY worse than he made it seem.  People with substance addiction issues are often narcissistic. The two often go hand in hand.  

CLUE 7= He once told me that during an argument with his brother and family, his brother said I was ugly. A solid BF would never pass on any indirect insults to his GF. I have a feeling that this was never true, TBH.   Steve Harvey has said in his book “Act Like a Lady Think Like a Man” that if a man truly loves a woman, he will protect her.  And that includes protecting her from anything negative anyone says about her.  If there’s one thing I know about me, I’m in “the pretty girls club”.  Not to sound conceited because looks aren’t everything and we will all end up old, gray, and wrinkled one day.  But I come from a family line of historically gorgeous women; and I have been a competitive and paid professional Tahitian dancer since I was 13.  Google “Tahitian dance Competition” or “Heiva i Tahiti” if you want to see what gorgeous women look like.   But the point is, to this day, that comment began to erode my self-esteem.

CLUE 8= At other times he unleashed passive aggressive insults such as “I can’t deal with your apparent relationship insecurities”-- I called him on this immediately.  And mind you, this line was how he responded when I asked him to join me at a BBQ invite with some of my friends, and I was disappointed when he said no.  

CLUE 9= he was arrogant.  Never did he fail to boast about all his accomplishments, skills, and intelligence.  He also had a lot of grandiose ideas.  

CLUE 10= when I dumped him, he immediately responded by calling me a “train wreck” and a “bitch”.  At no point was there a “wait.. what?  Please don’t do this.  We need to talk, I’m calling you/ I’m coming over, I still want to be with you”.  I’m not kidding in the least when I say his immediate response was “I dodged a major train wreck. Good luck bitch, you gonna need it.  

Well, good luck, narcissists of the world, you gonna need it.  Because narcissists and narcissistic behavior are the real train wrecks we all need to learn to avoid if we want to date successfully.

#dating a narcissist #I dated a narcissist #narcissist examples #dating #relationships #why you're still single #relationship advice #dating advice #online dating

[trashyeggroll]

2, 15, 29, 36, 40, 63, 64, 66, 76 (can be any system not just PC), 81, 94, and 96. Why are you adding banking to the Post Office? Who's the nominee at this point without Joe; I'm not a fan of him just being the nod either but admit now I'll vote because I'm not into the behavior we've seen.

Hey rhanks anon!! 😇🤩😁

2. Have you ever faked an orgasm?

Oh heavens yes, but I don’t recommend it. You teach people bad habits that way and then you’re never gonna get off!

15. If you could choose only one food to eat to the rest of your life, what would it be?

Specifically, beef pho with meatballs (phở tái bò viên)

29. Dumbest lie you ever told?

🤔🤔🤔 I’ve told a lot of bad ones but I guess once I told my parents I went to a football game (& went to make out in my gf’s Jeep instead) and I misunderstood what my friend reporting back said, so I said we lost when they were watching a news clip saying we won 🤪

36. What would you name your daughter/son?

We plan on having one (1) kid, and regardless of sex assigned at birth, their name is gonna be Emerson. We have to hurry bc my cousins are coming close, they’ve already had kids named Eleanor and Evelyn.

40. What was the last gift you gave?

For our upcoming anniversary, I got us one of those WiFi connected, standalone air filters that mrs t has wanted for awhile (given, y’know... five pets!)

63. What are 3 things that irritate you about the same sex?

64. What are 3 things that irritate you about the opposite sex?

I’ma combo these to reject the premise of a same/opposite sex to me, personally, and because I generally am irritated by the same root behaviors that reflect in different ways depending on socialization—

1. When the cishets get married and all of a sudden are very 😇 I am a GOD FEARING woman and OBEY MY HUSBAND (& worse when the husband is posting that shit about his wife)

2. People who act like having a kid is nbd and they don’t need to do any research or planning into doing a halfway decent job. I’m not talking about those who struggle with other oppressive issues like poverty, addiction etc, and I’m not saying you need to have access to classes and books and the best preschools—just, the baseline solidly stable people who seem so committed to passing on the emotionally abusive behaviors they learned from their parents w/o ever questioning it

3. Denim jeans with designs on the butt. I disagree with the lifestyle, but I’ll respect it if you’re into that 😉

66. How would you describe your bad side?

I’m a shutdown-er. Usually if I haven’t been sleeping enough or been bad with my meds, something smallish will set me off and I’ll spiral emotions and then just pull the failsafe switch when it gets too much. 😕 I’m working on it! Helps to practice identifying what’s caused the spiral and talk about it. Also to sleep 😴

76. Do you play any computer games? What is your favourite game? (anon said any system!)

I have Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch systems, no gaming PC, but that spread pretty much covers everything 😌 The Mass Effect games are my all time faves but I also love Witcher 3 and RDR2!

81. How long have you been on Tumblr?

I have a secret trail of abandoned blogs going back to about 2009

94. Do you watch Youtube? Who is your favourite youtuber?

Not really, not the way the kids watch YouTube, and I don’t know if he counts but—

96. What is the meaning of life?

I’m not religious and not even really that spiritual but have you ever sat around with a big group of people who love and support each other unconditionally, family or friends or comrades?

Why are you adding banking to the Post Office?

The unbanked and credit invisible population of the United States are shut out of services and access to funds for absolutely arbitrary reasons, and there’s no social safety net for that. There’s no way, other than money and time, for most people to enter the US financial system, much less begin to build wealth in the first place.

The USPS already has the physical presence throughout the United States to serve poor and unbanked people as a banking branch, and with government backing, they should offer zero fee, no credit check required checking accounts to everyone.

More on this here

Who’s the nominee right now without Joe?

Pie in the sky: Can I get, uhhhh, President Stacey Abrams, VPOTUS Julian Castro, Secretary of Treasury Warren, Secretary of Housing and Urban Devepment AOC

Reality: How about Joe drops out and either encourages the delegates to vote for his next choice, or for the 1st/2nd place from their state? I don’t think there’s a winning way to do this but Joe needs to Go. I’m sick of talking about Bidens and Clintons and if we had any real leadership in the “established” wing of the Democratic Party, he never would have run in the first place. Just different flavors of the same old rich white people in both parties and trying real hard to kill us all

#long post #asks #ask meme

[little-forget-me-not]

I came back and wanted to eat my mandarin oranges that I bought a few days ago as an attempt to look after myself because I haven’t been eaten fruits or veggies since I was back. I had 5 but when I looked for them, there were only 2 left. My brother took them. The sudden overwhelming wave of fatigue and despair was so much. I just broke down. Ugly, broken weeping in front of my dad and his gf. I was so tired. I knew it was stupid to cry over oranges but I was so, so tired. I was so tired of fearing and having my stuff taken from me, so tired of fearing whether whatever food I bought in the fridge would be stolen. I spent a long time wondering if I should buy the oranges or not because they were expensive. Maybe it’s “only $5″ to most people but I don’t have a lot of money and I deliberate over everything I invest in myself, whether I was worth it or not, whether it’s okay or helpful or good. It was years worth of exhaustion coming out of me.

To my surprise, my dad called my brother and started yelling at him. His gf rubbed my back. I felt stupid but I couldn’t stop sobbing. I texted my mum and she also called my brother to scold him. Then she called me and attempted to comfort me (though it was also emotionally/mentally tiring because she told me about her own problems). The worst of my breakdown had already eased by then. My brother texted me to apologise and returned the money to my bank. At some point my dad came into the room and passed me $6, told me to get more oranges and not to cry. I feel confused and a little ashamed, but also grateful and touched at these gestures of care. I’ve known all of them through only abusive, painful, bitter and negative interactions. I’m so used to being guarded and suspicious of my own family, I don’t know how to feel about them appearing to actually care to some extent. It makes me confused and doubtful of my experiences. But I know everything I have went through was real and valid. I think that’s the struggle of toxic relationships/environments. People shift and change and are always capable of good. But just because they are nice to you sometimes doesn’t mean all the darkness from before isn’t real and the trials you’ve gone through are fake. I hope I remember that. I feel very guilty about admitting to people not having been very good to me. Because I understand that in many ways, everyone’s just doing their best. I still had my mental, emotion

I’ll still have to muster the energy to make myself go and buy more fruits, but it’s comforting to know that they might be accounted for and safe this time.

I think the gravity of my fraying mental health may have reached some of them, maybe. I don’t know what to feel about it. Exposed, vulnerable, weak, wary. But maybe a little relieved not to have to keep it all in. My mum seems more sympathetic and tells me that if Singapore is too much for me, take a break and go back to Finland and somehow find studies or work or something there because my health comes first. Health always comes first. I’ve never heard that before. I’ve always heard studies come first. I’ve never heard of my mental health mattering. 

I hope no one finds me weak or pathetic. I’m so used to bearing everything alone in the quiet dark. I am uncomfortable to be witnessed so broken. It’s not who I am, you know? I am made of love and light, softness and tenderness. I care and feel so, so deeply. I’m devoted, loyal and generous and geunine. I’m thoughtful and conscientious in the way I give. I have garbage humor and I like to be silly and childlike sometimes. I’m romantic and sensuality means a lot to me. I like making the worst analogies and making others cringe at my jokes. I’ve forgotten this but I tended to see the humor in everything, no matter how bleak. I harbor wonder and appreciation for the beauty of the world and I am often deeply touched by the vulnerability and fortitude of humanity. I am a soothing and gentle presence to those who need space to be held for them because I listen wholeheartedly, and when I do it well, people feel safe and comforted. I am brave for continuing to choose vulnerability and risk the pain of close connections and love even though I’ve been hurt so deeply each new time I open my heart to someone new. It takes a lot of courage and strength and I do not give myself enough credit for it. I’ve always been hardworking and striving to better and grow myself. I’ve been through abuse and more and I basically raised myself and survived this long. I’m all these things too. I just feel so fatigued now, so much so I often cannot look beyond my grief and despair. I lose sight of myself. I lose myself. I’m more than the suffering and pain I feel. I’m more than my mental ailments. I’m more than my struggles. I’m more than the ugliness I feel, eating away at my core. I’m deserving of recognising these things. 

I’m grateful for some niceness. I haven’t written regularly in so long. I’d forgotten that it was good for me to vent and write down my thoughts and feelings and work through them. I guess in the past year, I just got sick of writing about how everything hurts and how shameful and unattractive it looked to anyone outside looking in.

#rei talks #i broke down #oranges #family #i feel a bit better #self reminder #i said some nice things about myself that i'd forgotten about #when aura said she knows me for my love and tenderness and softness even now..i remembered a little of who i am #i'd forgotten im more than my trauma #and the pain i feel #i thought everyone would see me unkindly

[nevertrustamanwho]

How to make relationships work

When I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, like most abusive relationships it started out great (or so it felt and seemed to me at that time anyway). Then things kind of slowly started going downhill after some months, but even though he'd changed I held onto the hope that he'd change back. I still loved him even though I kinda hated him, and every time we got close to ending it he'd pull me back in by saying stuff like he loved me, like he was sorry, like he'd change (even though previously he'd always said I was the problem, that he only did what he did because of me = major inconsistency. AND the thing that always pissed him off the most was when I told him he was being inconsistent lol).

But anyway, a lot of my strategy and thinking at first was: how do I make this work? I need a better relationship because I am suffering. (I thought of dumping him but I knew that would also cause me a lot of pain and I didn't trust myself to end it for good anyway.)

So I looked up advice on how to make it work (there is sooo much out there), I was pretty much determined to be the best girlfriend ever. Since I wanted a partner who was deeply committed to me and our relationship, I thought I should be that partner, too.

You always hear so many things like "you teach people how to treat you", I thought maybe I taught him to do this to me. "You can't change others, you can only change yourself / how you react to things", I thought ok I just need to change myself and how I react to things so I'll stop being upset with what he does (this is useful advice only outside of toxic relationships!). "Happiness is a choice", so maybe I'm just choosing to be unhappy. Even in therapy they told me "if you can't accept him for the way he is, you should leave him", but what they don't realize is that this is basically the same as "If you want a good relationship, then you need to accept him exactly the way he is" which, NO! Because he is not accepting me exactly as I am! I shouldn't have to do all the work! He is hurting me and putting in no effort and telling me everything is my fault. He is the problem, not me! It didn't help that my mom was getting heavily into Christianity at the time, and passed on harmful ideas to me like "love suffers everything" (yikes) and even though I was feminist enough to see through a lot of the bullshit, there was still stuff like that, and I loved him so much and was suffering so much, so it made sense, right? ("Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional" don't even get me started on that one. Which is not in itself a bad philosophy BUT IN MY CASE, IN THE CASE OF ABUSE, IT WAS VERY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.) He also injected bullshit into my brain himself, for example he didn't like telling me he loved me even though he claimed he did and said stuff like "actions speak louder than words" and cited times he'd been there when my mom had psychotic episodes, and other good things he'd done (doesn't negate him having treated me and still treating me badly), so now I wasn't allowed to feel bad about him not wanting to tell me he loved me, or acting like I wasn't even his gf in front of others, because he "said it with his actions".

You always hear "communication is the key to a good relationship" so I thought, I must not be communicating well enough then. I learned about non-violent communication and tried it, didn't work. In fact, it made him listen to me even less. Another thing was that you shouldn't say to your partner "you always (x)" or "you never (x)"; which yeah it is bad for communication, it'll make the other person get defensive and is probably not 100% true, BUT in order to recognize abuse or toxic relationships you need to be able to recognize and acknowledge patterns. I also sent him every resource I found on improving relationships, all of which he just responded with "we don't need to read things, we just need to feel" or some woo woo crap like that to make himself sound enlightened, and make me seem like I was ridiculous or robotic for approaching relationships and emotional things in a logical manner, while justifying his own lazy ass.

I always wanted to be that person who doesn't bail when the going gets rough, you know? Ride or die is how they call it? So another way I rationalized it was "all couples have problems, I'm not gonna just throw everything away because of that" and I felt proud of myself for not "giving up". (Cutting your losses can often be the best way to go.) One recurring thing was him comparing me to his exes and it's embarrassing to admit but sometimes I basically thought "our relationship has to last at least as long as his relationship with her did, preferably longer". I don't remember if I asked myself why I thought that or how exactly I justified that that made sense.

The other thing was that it hurt so much and I was so frustrated and confused (because gaslighting), so I wasn't a perfect partner either, in part because I'm a HUMAN and in part because being messed with just really messes you up. I once made out with one of his friends in front of his other friends and he ended up catching me doing it also. I once kicked him in the balls out of nowhere when I was really drunk (in retrospect he totally deserved it lmao but in the moment he really didn't do anything to warrant that).

There's probably more to add to this, but I guess in essence what I want to say is:

1) Self-help stuff and therapy doesn't work to fix an abusive / toxic relationship, in fact it can even set you back sometimes.

Therapists basically aren't allowed to tell you what to do, including that breaking up with someone would be the best choice for you. They often can't recognize emotional abuse or maybe don't even know about it? They might even convince you that you're the problem because clearly you're unstable or maybe just because all they can do is help you with only "you" anyway. Couples therapy is known not to work when there is abuse and just makes things worse, and individual therapy for abusers can often make them better at abusing! (Why Does He Do That by Lundy Bancroft expands on this in one chapter.)

2) Realize that not all relationships can be fixed.

One important thing to remember is that love alone doesn't make relationships work, even non-abusive relationships, even if you both truly, deeply love each other. If you are the one putting in all the work, it's not worth it and it's not going to work, unless you define a relationship "working" as being miserable a lot of the time but still together.

3) Don't take pride in how much shit you can tolerate and forgive.

This is something that is so instilled into women to do. And it's hard to think differently because abusers destroy your self esteem, so what else is there to be proud of? What other good qualities do I have? But if you attach this to your identity it's going to make it that much harder to leave, because not only are you attached to him and to the relationship in itself, but now your pride and sense of self also depend on it. You're not a failure if you quit and "failed" relationships are nothing to be embarrassed about.

How to make relationships work? You can't. Not you alone, anyway.

I hope this can help someone out there ❤️❤️❤️

#relationships #non violent communication #relationship advice #emotional abuse #toxic relationships #Mod nico

[ssoheartbreak]

.

my mum is getting annoyed that I dont want to join in on the streets’ whatsapp quiz and bingo this week, like of course I’m not going to join in on it I’m annoyed as fuck like just yesterday I had to fish out several of my clothes from the fucking bin because she decided they were “done”, she complains all the time that I’m eating her out the house, and a whole load of other shit that you could look through my tags for. Yet she expects me to just be all cool with it now and go back to “normal” like no, that’s not how this works, she’ll yell at me for pointless shit and then the next day or even later that night she’ll be fine and try to act normal and internally I’m just like “yeah no, I’m still annoyed, fuck off and leave me alone, everything isn’t all better just because you cooled off or some shit” 

Nothing ever gets fucking processed in this house, like I haven’t trusted her with my mh ever, and I haven’t trusted her with anything serious since before I was 14, she doesn’t know shit about the stuff I’ve gone through like;

The depression causing me to miss school coupled with the anxiety of returning and having to explain and catch up on work, which turned into her yelling and hitting disciplining me instead of yknow getting me help so that became anger issues when I was 13-14, but then she would stop hitting me when it turned out I could hit back, and yet she didn’t think to get me professional help So she get my uncle a couple houses down to “help” her out but that never worked, so she got my now brother in law to “help” and when it turned out that she took me to his and my sisters house and left me so I would stay there and they would take me to school but I left my shoes in my mums car I decided to walk miles barefooted to go back to my house because that’s so normal and yet she didn’t think to get me professional help

That was when I knew I could never trust her with anything, In my 3rd year of highschool I had 30% attendence. And then I found a coping mechanism in self harm and that rose to 70% in my 4th year, she never knew about it because I would keep my arms hidden all the time and I still do to this day. She just thought I was “behaving” more now. and so she didn’t think to get me professional help.

Then in february 2012 I tried to kill myself, I failed and no one outside of my tumblr knew about it. I couldn’t tell my mum or ask for help because well, I couldn’t trust her and all the yelling and screaming had done nothing to change that over the years.

Ever since then it’s just been self harm for periods of time then stopping and thinking i’m doing better only to get worse and go back to it. My family would make comments on everytime I ate or made food and it got so bad for years that I would “eat my feelings” and I just got fatter and fatter, and now here I am the heaviest I’ve been and I have a fucking eating disorder. But that doesn’t stop my mum from constantly making me feel bad for eating

I got better with my long term girlfriend A, I was happier than normal and depression was less of a constant thing, but my anxiety was still super bad. We got together and it was great, I was in school more, I was happier, I had regular friends. And I had someone/where to escape to when I wanted away from my mum. But my anxiety never lessened and things fell apart and she broke up with me because she thought I was using her as a safety net and didn’t need to try. Now I think she’s dating the dude she kissed at the party we went to just before we broke up, nice. All our friends obviously stuck with her, one was her childhood friend fair, one was my best friend but he was in love with her sucks but understandable, and the others stayed with the group. nice

So now I’m in my 20′s,but in the years before I tried going to college for engineering bc I was pushed into in by my mum, did a year and didn’t wanna continue. So I did a year of computer science, dropped out halfway through but made a connection that became a good friend a couple years later. then I went to electrical engineering which I was forced to do, and I dropped that instantly. A year later, gf breaks up with me, and I’m starting my frist year in accountancy, still depressed, still anxious, still kinda decent weight but now i’m getting fatter and fatter since my teenage motabilism is slowing and I’m becoming an alcoholic to deal, self harm has been on and off, I’ve been threatened with homelessness more times than I can count,

This one is quick, after the split with A I became super alcoholic-y and eventually this girl I used to know from my pokemon days hit me up on twitter we got together for a little over a year, I even spent a month in vegas living with her during the summer, and a few days before new year I broke up with her. There was so much fighting in our relationship and she would emotionally manipulate me, and she’d say things like if we broke up she would never date again and all this other shit.But then my friend got me into playing siege which is how I met my current friend group of 2years now, but early on there was this discord server for all of us who played and met on the game to hang out on, there was a girl I started to like, and I brought a friend into the discord so we could all play together. She and I get super flirty and a couple months go by and we start dating, all is good but about a month goes by and my gf at the time and my current bestfriend plan to roadtrip from texas to arkansas to visit the friend I brought into the server for his birthday for a couple days, fair enough, I can’t visit but I hope they have fun, seems all good until a month later on my birthday a good friend of mine tells me that my gf and the friend I brought into the group fucked while she visited, the other friend knew nothing and was blackout for most of the partying, but it took a month to get to me. So I confront them, she admits it but is more concerned about how I found out. I confront my “friend” and he starts being apologetic until I lay into him for being a shitty friend, then he says that I should’ve expected it since it was long distance, and that he wasn’t the only one she cheated with, so that was a whole fun chapter. oh yeah, I figured she was acting sus when she hung out with guys irl so I developed paranoia for the first time and that shit sucked!!!!

I did 2 years of accountancy and I struggled at the end of the second, depresso and anxiety hit hard and I was missing classes and almost got kicked out, I stayed behind to make up work and finished a few days later than everyone with an A grade. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do a 3rd year, not that I even wanted to I was forced into this, so I tried telling my mum that I was gonna look for work and not do the third year yet, she didn’t like that and threatened to make me homeless or send to down to fucking england to livfe with the dad I text once a year. So I ssigned up to the course and got accepted, I went for a decent amount of time, but then I’d miss days, and it would get hard to catch up, so I missed more, then in december I stopped going and eventually was removed from the course. I pretended I was still going while I would just leave for hours and sit in a car park because I couldn;t take the abuse from her finding out. Eventually she did and it was a shit show, I went on benifits and then the summer I started working as a night porter.

Work was okay for the most part, except when I would set up continental breakfast buffet how the previous manager instructed me but then the morning manager would come in and I would get told off, this happened a few times before I learn to just do it for the person coming in and how they like it. Then I would deal with shitty customers who don’t know I can’t serve them booze or anything, or dealing with drunk customers pissing on the chair in the reception, or dealing with customer who get aggro when I can’t help them. Then I went on a fire safety course that taught me almost nothing about proper procedure and order of events that I should follow. Then one morning a steamy shower set off the fire alarm, I was in the restaurant which is seperate from the lodge and I couldn’t hear the alarm nor did my little buzzer go off even though it should’ve good fucking system huh and the manager evacuated the lodge, I panicked and did what I could to help. Then the GM came downstairs and said that’s why I went on the course so I could know what to do and made me feel like shit. A couple weeks later I quit becasue I couldn’[t handle that responsibility. I had some savings that I was gonna use to visit friends in america so I lived off that, but not before my family all asking me why I quit and as we know I can’t trust them because it’ll get back to my mum and I especially can’t trust her. Then my brother in law tries asking and I can’t tell him bc it will get back to my sister then to my mum, couldn’t tell my boss bc it would go from him to my other sister to my mum.

Then in january my savings are almost done, december 31st and my tooth is aching, I hopped it was rotten so I could get an infection straight to my brain to kill me, but 3 days pass and I’m in so much pain that meds don’t work, I’m over safe doses, I can’t sleep and I get super headaches that I almost pass out from. I cry in pain and eventually tell my mum who after some convincing realises how serious it is, she stays up the night, helping me phone emergency dental places or the NHS to try and get it removed. It was bad but it wasn’t infected and had no chance to kill me that way if any. She gets me a cold press and some ice to help with it and although I couldn’t get a dentist appointment until the morning she helped with it until then. I was finally feeling like this is how a mother should be, her kid crying and writhing in pain and her helping out, and I was starting to feel some trust for her for helping me when I needed her but she couldn’t help herself she had to make a snide comment that it’s because of all the fizzy juice and energy drinks that I drink. Just when I was hopeful she tears it all back. My back right top and bottom teeth get pulled, dentist was a great guy, and life went back to the same shit. I went to my benifits appointment and got signed up, I asked for an advance payment bc my mum was hounding me for money, so now my benifits are a bit lower than they should.

Then she argues with me about being late with payments even though I show her when I get paid and how much. and now we’re here, during this pandemic where the top part of this post was today. This is a good grasp of all the shit I’ve went through, it’s not everything but it’s the big stuff that I remember.......minus the whole ///R/// situation which I will likely never talk about, and now a quote from my mother which sparked me ranting instead of just about today but about my whole life

“All you do is cost me money”

#pie being stupid #Pielights #yknow like highlights #this is essentially a catagory of why i'm fkd up #I'll likely reference this if I ever feel comfortable talking about anything here #read or don't idc and i know its long sorry

[scream4johnny]

Hey so I'm really not trying to start shit but I just wanna know what you think about that whole johnny controversy with his wife about the domestic abuse or whatever. I never got the full story and just want to hear your take on it if that's cool?

First of all thank you for being polite and open minded about this situation.Most people on tumblr these days don’t look past the headlines and the sensasional propaganda-like articles.

The truth is that I’ve talked about this situation a lot here in my blog and you can find many of my posts on it if you go want.Here’s what went on:

Amber Heard filed for divorce,2 days after Johnny’s mother died, after he supposedly threw her an iphone in the face.That night that this incident took place the LAPD was actually called but cops say that Amber was uninjured.I’ll put a link in the end of my answer where you can find more info about what went on that night cause otherwise it will take me pages to actually talk about everything.In summary:

Initially there’s no mention about Domestic Violence.Amber sends a blackmail like letter to Johnny’s lawyer requesting spousal support,an SUV car with him paying for everything it needs,3 apartments again with Johnny continuing to pay for everything and attorney fees.She says that if he doesn’t give her what she wants she will go public with abuse.Johnny denies her requests and the shitstorm begins.Amber says that he’s been abusing her throughout all of their relationship and begins selling her evidence to the tabloids but refuses to actually give them to the police and file a police report.She gets a temporary restraining order against him,something that doesn’t need any proof to get .A trial about a pernament restraining order is set.To get  that,Amber needs solid proof that she’s in danger and that she was abused.After weeks of Amber avoiding her deposition and leaking evidence she dropped her pernament RO request,a few days before the court took place(August)You will hear people saying ‘’He settled so he’s guilty’’ but the truth is that she was the once who dropped her case.That famous 7mil settlement was about the divorce and had nothing to do with the allegations of DV.She said that she will donate the money but as of now it seems like she hasn’t done so yet with the money she has gotten so far.You can read more details about the whole case here

My take on this situation is that things never happened like Ms. Heard claimed they did,and there are tons of reasons about why I have that opinion.And no it’s not because I am a huge Depp fan who thinks that he can do no wrong cause,for the record,initially I believed her.I said to myself,wth would a woman lie about DV,it doesn’t make sense.As the days went by I realised that something shady was going on and as I started following the case closely I was persuaded,and still am,that it was all BS.Why I don’t believe Amber?

Well here are some of the reasons:

-She said she was afraid for her life but if Johnny has said yes to her initial requests she would never filed for a RO and she would continue living in his condos with no problem.Make sense.

-She choose to sell her ‘’abuse’’ photos to People mag instead of going to the police.She basically chose publicity over justice.

-The cops who went there when he allegedly threw a phone to her said that there was no sign of any injury

-She actually was arrested for assaulting her ex gf in public back in 2009.Her gf said that it was not true and that the cop was homophobic but it turned out that the cop was a lesbian

-She avoided her own deposition 3 times before she actually sit for one cause she would have been prosecuted otherwise.The first time she said that shw would be in London for a costume fitting but she was papped hiding at an LA hotel.The second time she did go but she threw a temper tantrum and in the end she wasn’t deposed.The third time she said that she couldn’t catch a flight for London.Then a judge order that she MUST go or she will be prosecuted and she finally was deposed,the 4th time.

-She said that she will file a police report to prove that she isn’t lying but she never did cause she still ‘’loved him and didn’t want to bury his career’’.Sure Jan.

-Many of Johnny’s exes came to his defense

-He had a LOT of witnesses not only to support that he didn’t abuse her but also to say that she was the violent one

-He has lots of evidence including text and photos.He never leaked them but there were listed for the court that never happened x

-Neighbours and building workers who saw her the days she was supposedly bruised in the face say that she didn’t have any bruises and that she was make up free

-The phone incident happened on Saturday.On Sunday she went to a party and there was a photo where you could see half of her face and she didn’t seem to have a bruise.He supporters will argue that it was covered by hair but why was the photo taken down then?

-Amber’s bf Raquel lived nexdoors(in one of Johnny’s appartments,rent free of course)and she said that the bruise appeared immediately after Johnny supposedly threw her the phone.If the bruise appeared so quick then how come the cops didn’t see it when they arrived 45 minutes after?

-In the court docs Amber says that when threw the phone at her she was on the phone with another friend,iO Tillet Wright and she screamed at him to call the LAPD.In an essay he published later iO stated that he called the police cause she never would.So,did he call the police by himself or was he told by Amber to do so?We’ll never know.

-There’s actual footage from the tv show overhaulin where Amber actually hits Johnny.Playfouly,but pretty aggresivelly.Now what kind of abuse vitim would even think of hitting her abuser on public tv?

-People who were close to both,or to Amber have choosen to side with Johnny.(Greg Williams,Smantha McMillen,Brittany Eustis etc)

-She has a lying history.She falsified docs and lied to the Australian authorities.She has also lied on multiple smaller occassions so she does have a lying pattern.

-In court documents she says that Johnny had been abusing her emotionally,verballly and physically nonstop for the last 3 years.Later she said that he only abused her when drunk.

-As far as I’ve been informed a judge is obligated to take a DV case to court if he sees solid evidence even if the victim doesn’t want to proceed.A judge saw all of Amber’s evidence yet he let her withdraw the case with prejudice which means she can’t refile it.

(I’m too bored right now to put sources under my points but I’ll definitely give them to you if you ask about them)

Things you will hear about this case that aren’t true:

‘‘He admitted it’‘:FALSE.He never admitted it.There was a public statement released x true.It read that no one lied for financial reasons.Having been an admit of guilt it would read No one lied.fullstop.Therefore no he didn’t admit it.

‘‘He never denied it’‘:FALSE.His lawyer did address the allegations,calling them false.

‘‘He has a history of DV’‘:FALSE.He doesn’t have one and his exes came to his defense.

‘‘He settled so he is guilty’‘:FALSE.She dropped the case by herself.Even if Johnny didn’t want to proceed he could have done nothing if she wanted the court to happen.It was only up to her.The settlemet that happened later was about the divorce.

‘‘But there’s video footage’‘:Yes video footage of an angry man hitting his cabites.Bad behavior,yes.Proof of physical violence no.

‘‘She donated the money’‘.Well although she said she will,it doesn’t look like she has done so with the money she has recieved so far.Plus she’s dating a billionaire and there’s also that thing we call PR.

‘‘He avoided his deposition’‘:He was never ordered to give one,only a sworn statement.

Fun Facts:

Amber leaked the video AFTER she had agreed to drop her case which doesn’t make any sense unless you want to just smear your ex,

She said that all the money will go to charity and when Johnny sent the first 200k directly to the charities instead of her she went crazy.

She had no problem living in his condo till last December although he still had the keys and she was afraid of him.Sure Jan.

There’s a lot more on this case.Whatever you choose to believe always keep an open mind and never believe everything you read.

[sageplease-blog]

late to the party, as usual. hi there! i’m sammie, i’m 23 years old and i’m i the EST tz. i’ve been rping for far to long because i’m ancient. this is my little demon, sage. she’s twenty one, and i’ll tell you guys more about her under the cut!

alright okay hi again! i totally suck at intros but i’m gonna do my best no to jump arounds too much.

okay so the only way i can really describe sage is that she is a complete and total feminist/activist/party girl. she’s an activist for both human and pokemon, and is very passionate about abuse. she grew up in a home where she was abused by her mother (physically and emotionally) so when she was accepted to kanto she packed her bags as quickly as she could and left.

it was a split decision to major in nursing. all sage has ever wanted to do was help people (and pokemon alike). her dream is to open her own pokemon health center. she is often involved in breaking and entering, freeing pokemon that are kept in cages and used for testing. she’s very passionate about it, and she’s never been caught so she’s been getting cocky lately.

her companion is sirena, a dragonair. sage has always been drawn to water type pokemon, because the ocean has always been a safe spot for sage. sirena can be very mischievous and jealous of anyone that takes up sage’s time. 

after growing up in such a screwed up home, she had no freedom. when she got to kanto, she began partying. and sage can party hard. it’s not uncommon for her to pass out in places she’s never been. it’s been getting out of hand, but sage refuses to acknowledge it.

sage can be very kind or very snappy. she’s stubborn and pig-headed and it’s easy to get in an argument about things, because she is so stubborn. she will never admit that she’s wrong, it’s just in her blood (something she learned from her mother).

as for connections... sage needs the following

ride or die

childhood friends

flirty- friends

maybe a half sibling? sage has never met her father

ex gf or bf

co-worker

old protective friend

also i have a list right here! theres a whole bunch so fee free to look them over!

if you wanna plot pleeeeeeease send me a message or like this post and we’ll do the thing!

#kanto.intro #⟨ ❛ ! — ☾ ✧ out of character