you're grabbing lunch with a nice man and he gives you that strange grimace-smile that's popular right now; an almost sardonic "twist" of his mouth while he looks literally down on you. it looks like he practiced the move as he leans back, arms folded. he just finished reciting the details of NFTs to you and explaining Oppenheimer even though he only watched a youtube about it and hasn't actually seen it. you are at the bottom of your wine glass.
you ask the man across from you if he has siblings, desperately looking for a topic. literally anything else.
he says i don't like small talk. and then he smiles again, watching you.
a few years ago, you probably would have said you're above celebrity gossip, but honestly, you've been kind of enjoying the dumb shit of it these days. with the rest of the earth burning, there's something familiar and banal about dragging ariana grande through the mud. you think about jeanette mccurdy, who has often times gently warned the world she's not as nice as she appears. you liked i'm glad my mom died but it made you cry a lot.
he doesn't like small talk, figure out something to say.
you want to talk about responsibility, and how ariana grande is only like 6 days older than you are - which means she just turned 30 and still dresses and acts like a 13 year old, but like sexy. there's something in there about the whole thing - about insecurity, and never growing up, and being sexualized from a young age.
people have been saying that gay people are groomers. like, that's something that's come back into the public. you have even said yourself that it's just ... easier to date men sometimes. you would identify as whatever the opposite of "heteroflexible" is, but here you are again, across from a man. you like every woman, and 3 people on tv. and not this guy. but you're trying. your mother is worried about you. she thinks it's not okay you're single. and honestly this guy was better before you met, back when you were just texting.
wait, shit. are you doing the same thing as ariana grande? are you looking for male validation in order to appease some internalized promise of heteronormativity? do you conform to the idea that your happiness must result in heterosexuality? do you believe that you can resolve your internal loneliness by being accepted into the patriarchy? is there a reason dating men is easier? why are you so scared of fucking it up with women? why don't you reach out to more of them? you have a good sense of humor and a big ol' brain, you could have done a better job at online dating.
also. jesus christ. why can't you just get a drink with somebody without your internal feminism meter pinging. although - in your favor (and judgement aside) in the case of your ariana grande deposition: you have been in enough therapy you probably wouldn't date anyone who had just broken up with their wife of many years (and who has a young child). you'd be like - maybe take some personal time before you begin this journey. like, grande has been on broadway, you'd think she would have heard of the plot of hamlet.
he leans forward and taps two fingers to the table. "i'm not, like an andrew tate guy," he's saying, "but i do think partnership is about two people knowing their place. i like order."
you knew it was going to be hard. being non-straight in any particular way is like, always hard. these days you kind of like answering the question what's your sexuality? with a shrug and a smile - it's fine - is your most common response. like they asked you how your life is going and not to reveal your identity. you like not being straight. you like kissing girls. some days you know you're into men, and sometimes you're sitting across from a man, and you're thinking about the power of compulsory heterosexuality. are you into men, or are you just into the safety that comes from being seen with them? after all, everyone knows you're failing in life unless you have a husband. it almost feels like a gradebook - people see "straight married" as being "all A's", and anything else even vaguely noncompliant as being ... like you dropped out of the school system. you cannot just ignore years of that kind of conditioning, of course you like attention from men.
"so let's talk boundaries." he orders more wine for you, gesturing with one hand like he's rousing an orchestra. sir, this is a fucking chain restaurant. "I am not gonna date someone who still has male friends. also, i don't care about your little friends, i care about me. whatever stupid girls night things - those are lower priority. if i want you there, you're there."
he wasn't like this over text, right? you wouldn't have been even in the building if he was like this. you squint at him. in another version of yourself, you'd be running. you'd just get up and go. that's what happens on the internet - people get annoyed, and they just leave. you are locked in place, almost frozen. you need to go to the bathroom and text someone to call you so you have an excuse, like it's rude to just-leave. like he already kind of owns you. rudeness implies a power paradigm, though. see, even your social anxiety allows the patriarchy to get to you.
you take a sip of the new glass of wine. maybe this will be a funny story. maybe you can write about it on your blog. maybe you can meet ariana grande and ask her if she just maybe needs to take some time to sit and think about her happiness and how she measures her own success.
is this settling down? is this all that's left in your dating pool? just accepting that someone will eventually love you, and you have to stop being picky about who "makes" you a wife?
you look down to your hand, clutching the knife.
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There was a beautiful era in the 90s/early 00s of fun, female lead teen movies that just hit different, were like this golden age of girls just being girls and celebrating that feeling, and no matter how Hollywood tries they will never replicate it.
I'm talking "She's the Man," "Bend it Like Beckham" "Princess Dairies" "St. Trinian's" "What a Girl Wants" "Clueless" "Uptown Girls" "John Tucker Must Die" "DEBS".....obviously there's probably a few I missed but you get the idea.
Maybe the stakes weren't as high as saving the entire world, but they were important to the characters and had friendships and silliness and the goal was almost never to get the guy and you just don't get to see that anymore.
Also almost all of them had banging soundtracks.
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no but i need to scream into the void or i'll go mad. listen. kikyo wasn't a bitch. i don't think the way she was written did her any justice; it just makes her easy to hate. and don't get me wrong, this isn't about her relationship with inuyasha or kagome at all, i just want to talk about her as a character because she is one of the most complex of them and she needs to be looked at with more empathy.
i've said it before and i'll say it again: her whole thing is that she is tragedy personified. think about it. everything, and i mean every single thing that could have gone wrong in her life, HAS gone wrong. she had a difficult upbringing, having to raise her little sister and having to shoulder the burden of being the sole purifier of the shikon jewel (which constantly put her and her village under threat). she was never dealt an easy hand to begin with. then, she finds solace in love, tries her best to think of a way of unraveling herself from her duties to live a free life, while still caring for others selflessly: she took in onigumo, and he betrayed her. by pretending to be inuyasha, he had her think that her lover had betrayed her as well, and succumbed to wounds inflicted by him (or so she thought), while sealing him to the goshinboku.
the last wish she spoke of was to take the shikon jewel to the beyond with herself. later, kagome finds a way to actually destroy the jewel, which was what kikyo had intended to do but couldn't. in her heart, her last wish was to see inuyasha again. the jewel corrupts this wish and grants it in the most fucked up way possible.
her remains are robbed from her grave and she is brought back to life with NO agency on the matter, by someone who wanted only to exploit her powers. now, untethered from from her past duties, she is finally free to experience emotion. and that includes bad emotions. so anger, resentment, jealousy, contempt, loneliness, selfishness (and that's part of being human). every unfulfilled wish, the unfairness of it all. she spends the rest of the series navigating this undead existence, the duality of not belonging anywhere, constantly torn between doing what is right and what needs to be done to reach her goal, having no choice but to consume souls of recently departed girls to have the energy to fight her only fight (destroying naraku), all the while helping villagers and kids, and even the inugang, despite not wanting to align with their agenda at first. she contemplates sacrificing kohaku, yes, but ultimately her redemption is that she chose to save him instead of purifying the jewel in the end. she showed that she trusted the inugang to finish what she couldn't, and chose to spare another life, if possible (she says so herself in ch441)
it is very difficult to relate to someone that doesn't give access to her vulnerable side very often. her and sango are the two characters who had it the hardest and were forced to make the most difficult decisions out of everyone. but we love sango, even when she chose to sacrifice rin, even when she contemplated killing kohaku then herself, because we know where sango's heart lies and how torn she is about all of it. kikyo, on the other hand, is stoic and hardened by her life (and also post-life), but ultimately her biggest trait was kindness. we don't get to see her cry and be like woe is me about it, something that could've made us more empathetic towards her like we are with sango.
my point is kikyo deserves to be looked at through kinder eyes. she is a complex character, and she requires a bit more analysis and compassion to actually see who she really is. my tragic girl
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