#and that has been my stance on the matter since 2012 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

melancholysway · 1 year

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TMNT Imagines: S/O being mugged/stalked (2012)

Since this user PMed me about this request, I'm just going to put the message here :)

@miss-andromeda

Thank you so much! Could I actually request one more? 2012 headcanons again because it's my favorite era of the boys 😅 Anyway, we know that the turtles can be real protective when it comes to their family being in danger, including April and Casey. But when their S/O is in some type of danger (for example, they get mugged one night or they're being stalked), how would they respond? I do apologize for the back-to-back requests, but your writing is so good I can't help but ask for another request! (Okay, that sounded a lot better in my head 😅) But my point is, it would mean the world to me ❤️

Okay! I'm finally finished! So sorry for the wait! For some reason along with college, I wasn’t sure how exactly to write for this one! Like I said I write TOO much, so I have so many ideas that I can only squeeze in so much Yk? Anyways. Hope you enjoy!

Leonardo

- Now, 2012 Leo is usually level-headed, he thinks about everything before he does it. He’s a strategizer.

-But, if he sees you in danger, he doesn’t have to think of anything other than getting you out safe. He can deal with whoever is mugging you later.

-You’re his priority.

-Leonardo, much like Raphael, is protective over you. It’s in his nature as a leader to look after the ones he loves.

-You just so happened to be that person for him. He loved you, there was no denying that he did

-He trains you, to have some tricks up your sleeve if you were to ever get caught up by a Purple Dragon or some low-life mugger.

-Because he knows you can handle it. You can handle yourself.

-That’s why he fell in love with you in the first place. You were strong, especially during the times others would be weak.

-He spends his time with you, how to get into your fighting stance, how never to throw the first punch. Let them run out of stamina, and then go in for the finishing blow. It’s a bonding experience for the two of you, and it always ended in a beautiful kiss after every session.

-“If you ever get into trouble, Donnie made these, here,”

-He gives you a T-phone. It has a little shell as the case, and when you go through it, you see Leo is the only “special” contact. His name has hearts on it, and his contact photo is a selfie of you and him during one of your all-night Space Heroes marathons. It’s Leo holding up the camera and smiling while you sleep on his chest.

-You can’t help but smile. Leo is a very sweet boyfriend, that was the truth.

-Contrary to popular belief, and by popular I mean the fics about Leo mercilessly beating the shit out of anything that is a threat to his s/o because they mug them is…false.

-That’s more Raph’s style. Leonardo doesn’t handle things that way. -He thinks about you.

-Because that’s what matters here. His anger that someone hurt you doesn’t. He’d rather save you first and make sure to get you to safety before handling things his heart wants to.

-He thinks with his brain, not his heart. However, with you, it’s both.

-So when you press the emergency button on your T-phone to notify the guys, you’re hoping they can come and help in time before anything bad happens.

“Do you think it’s a butt dial?” Donnie asks, looking down at his Shell cell while the emergency alarm goes off. Usually, it goes off when April’s in danger, which is often. She’s the target of the Kraang or Shredder, not you. You- now see this as you want- had no value to either party.

This didn’t stop you from falling victim to any local gangs in your area.

Raphael and Michelangelo emerge from their rooms, yawning after a long day of training. They were visibly tired. Donnie was visibly tired as well since he’s been in his lab all day and night. Leonardo was somewhere in the middle, but the thought of you in any danger had woken him up.

“We should treat each one as an emergency, Donnie,” Leonardo says, a wave of nervousness going over him. This was the very first time you dialed them with the emergency button. After glancing at your location on the map, you weren’t in your apartment. In fact, you were a few blocks away, and the heart icon that represents you (which Donnie programmed to be a heart on Leo’s phone ever since you both started dating,) seemed to be between two buildings, and it appeared to mimic an alleyway.

So, yeah, fluke or not, he had to go see if you were okay.

Leonardo could visibly see the tiredness in his brothers’ eyes and decided to do this solo. He can handle it, he always could. He knew how, especially if it was a petty gang.

“You guys stay back, I’ll check it out,” Leo’s blue eyes stare at his brothers. Raph gives him a confused look, “Wait, you don’t think we can handle it?” He asks, now looking annoyed at his older brother.

“No no, it’s not that! It’s just…”

“Mwah mwah mwah!” Mikey teases, making kissy noises. Raphael and Donnie get the hint, and now Leonardo has a trio of kissing noises in his face, only for him to sigh.

“Guys stop! It’s…okay, it’s that. I want to be able to help Y/n out on my own. What kind of boyfriend would I be if I couldn’t do that? Right? Right? Say something, please,” Raph, Donnie, and Mikey exchange look, only for Raphael to do the talking.

“If you need us, just give us a call, bro. Go help Y/n,” That’s all Leonardo needs. He leaves quickly, while Mikey begins making kissy noises at his older brother, just for Raphael to smack him upside the head.

“Don’t make it any harder than this shit has to be, just fuckin hand over your bag!” You continue backing up into the alleyway, trying to buy yourself time, until your back hits the cement wall. You look up and realize you’ve hit a dead end. You think back to the defense lessons Splinter has given you, and right now, you wished you could move instead of being frozen in place. You were cornered like a mouse. The cat is holding a knife, hissing threatening words, and flashing its fangs into a sinister smile.

Your breathing becomes heavy, as you see the knife come closer to your neck, soon pressing up against it when you still won’t hand over your bag. There was valuable stuff in there. Your ID, a piece of Leo’s bandana that wrapped around your keys as a good luck cloth. Yeah, very valuable shit. You did not want to lose those.

“Don’t make me cut ya for it, love.” The man in a ski mask says, his beady eyes glaring down at you. The word “love” drips like venom from his covered mouth, and you can’t help but shiver in response.

You’re seriously wondering if the emergency alarm worked. It was late at night, almost midnight, what if the guys were sleeping? What if they were all busy or their t-phones died? These scenarios played in your head as to how you would respond to the situation you’re in but…they don’t end very well. You end up bruised and beaten for protecting your bag.

You don’t say anything, but your eyes say all the words your mouth doesn’t. You’re scared.

That is, until, a dagger that’s shot from God knows where perfectly grabs the knife from the loophole in the blade, taking it from the mugger’s hand as it flies and is stabbed into the brick wall off to the side. Nobody could do something with such precision except for one person. Err, turtle.

You don’t dare look around, because the man in front of you is also capable of using his hands to get what he wants. But. it seems that he’s confused, frantically looking around, yelling curses into the atmosphere. He doesn’t seem to look behind him, as can faintly see your savior emerge from the shadows, creeping up before grabbing the dirty mugger and bringing him into the darkness. You hear muffled protests and screams, only for them to go silent after you hear an angry voice whisper:

“Don’t catch me seeing you hurt them again.”

It’s quiet in the alley now, the only noises being the cars on the street nearby and their honking of them. You look into the darkness, trying to see your knight in the soft blue bandana.

“Leo,” You say softly. You can’t see anything, until Leonardo emerges from the shadows, looking at you with worry. Leonardo’s blue eyes scan your whole body, to see if there were any signs that he had hurt you. He looked panicked as if he had been dreading this scenario for the longest.

He has.

“Did he hurt you? Please tell me he didn’t.” Leo pleads, cupping your cheeks and checking to make sure you don’t have any marks. There is a small dribble of blood coming from where the knife was placed on your neck, and Leo notices, sighing to himself and kissing you on the lips. As you kiss back, you can’t help but cry. Leonardo feels your tears land on his cheeks, and he stops kissing you, looking into your eyes and wiping your tears. His big blue eyes were something that you could get lost in, and they could calm you down all the same. As he continued wiping your tears, your sobs passed, only into sporadic sniffles.

“Hey, love,” You feel better. That’s who you wanted to hear call you “love.” Leo was the only one who got the privilege of calling you that. You’re reassured by his soothing voice.

“I’m here,” He lifts your chin, making you look into his ocean eyes, “as long as I’m here, you won’t get hurt. Not on my watch.”

“L-Leo…I froze, I couldn’t…” “Y/n, you’re safe,” Leo reassures you before you can break down again in front of him, “We’ll work on defensive skills- together.” He takes your shaking hand into his own, and the shaking seems to die down. Slowly, but surely.

Leonardo was grateful he got there when he did, or you would’ve been hurt. Or worse, but he doesn’t wanna think about that happening. He knows he can’t be your bodyguard 24/7, and he knows things like this happen, rarely, but they do. The only thing he can do is train you. Train you like Splinter did April. For shit like this, for you to defend yourself, without freezing up. He hates that he never trained you for the actual beginning part of the fighting. How to not completely forget the training you’ve been through. How to calm your nerves. How to not expect the worst. He didn’t teach you that, Splinter wouldn’t forget to teach something like this, but Leo did.

“Come, I’ll take you home.” The leader says, putting his hand out for you to hold. You take it, as you would any other time he offered his hand. As you interlock your fingers with him, you can’t help but feel a sort of comfort. Like his presence is home for you.

Raphael

-Raph was never one to think as Leo does. He’s passionate, and therefore, he’s the type to think with his heart. If anyone hurt any of his family, they better be ready to feel the wrath of an angry green-eyed turtle.

-He was sure he would always be there to help you out. He wanted to be the one you called on. As usual, Raph is very reliable. That’s one of many amazing traits about him.

-Very cautious of you. He knows his strength, and the last thing he wants to do is hurt you.

-But, he WILL hurt those who hurt you.

-He’s fully devoted to you, so it’s only natural that he does this.

-“Need me to give little miss bitch an ass whooping?”

-Yeah, he was like that. And when you came around to meet Casey, ---Raphael made one thing very clear when he saw how the hockey player stared at you.

-“Back off, man. Y/n’s already taken.”

-“By who!? Casey Jones likes what he likes,”

-“Me.”

-“Oh. Well, I guess Casey Jones can let this slide.” Casey knew he would never dare cross his good friend Raph. Plus, Casey literally falls in love with anything that breathes that isn’t named or looks like Irma, so, there’s that.

now, you were almost sure someone had been following you home.

-You weren’t sure who exactly it was, but you had a feeling all the same.

-So when you told your boyfriend about it, he was on it.

-He freaked, though. Because, who’s the asshole who wanted to watch your every move??

-“When I find them I- they’re getting the ass-kicking of the century!”

-He wasn’t one to plan out anything, so he decided to watch you. Watch you walk home at night, and make sure nobody was following behind you.

-Because, well, he cared. He told you that when he had the courage to spill his feelings out.

-You cared about him, too.

-This went on for a while. He would watch over you from the rooftops while patrolling on his own, making sure you were okay during the day, and making his way to see you at night. He would escort you to the lair (what a gentleturtle,) and take you home after if you didn’t stay the night.

-Raph had not seen anyone following you, up until one evening, when he noticed someone in the weirdest of places.

“What the hell?” Raphael squints his electric green eyes into the distance, trying to figure out just who is watching from above the rooftops down at you. What was their reason? As he got closer, he noticed the familiar face.

Xever.

Now, just what the hell did this Salamander want with you? Why was he so infatuated with you? He looked to be studying you. How agile you were, how aware you were of the world around you.

Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t good. Because this quiet stalking would only turn into something worse. So, before Xever can do anything, Raph calls you.

“Baby, don’t freak, but I found out who’s watching you.” Your body turns cold, unsure of exactly who it could be. You start to look around frantically, wondering if someone is behind you. Feeling an overwhelming sense of anxiety wave over you, you walk faster.

“W-Who is it?” You ask after Raphael told you to walk as normal. There wasn’t anyone behind you, but the idea of someone hiding somewhere made you extremely nervous. As Raphael continued to watch over you and monitor Xever, he realized Xever had seen him.

“Fuck, he saw me. Okay, go straight home, okay? I’ll take care of Fish Face for ya.” That’s how he was, always. Always thinking of you.

“Are you sure? Raph, I-” “Of course I’m sure. I want you safe. I love you.”

“Be careful.”

“Do you know who you’re dating? I’m the most careful turtle I know.”

“Raph.”

“Okay okay, I’ll be careful,” With that, Raphael takes his sai from his belt, preparing his body and mind to take on Fish Face by himself.

Xever walks slowly, not with a need to run. He eventually makes it over to Raphael from a few rooftops away.

“Turtle.” He says as Raphael scrunches his nose from the sudden smell of the walking fish market. What he hated most about being around Xever was that he smelled like…well…fish.

“The talking Unagi Don, what the hell are you doing watching Y/n like that? Lonely much?” Raphael seers, throwing the first punch. Xever dodges and counters it, sweeping Raphael off his feet.

“Foolish mutant, I knew this human meant a lot to one of you, and now I know it’s you, I only want to take them to Shredder even more.” Raphael charges, causing the fish to back up onto the rooftop's edge, only to do a backflip and get back comfortably off the ledge.

“You’re not takin’ them anywhere. Not while I’m still around here to kick your ass like our regularly scheduled programming!”

With that, Raphael and Xever fight on the rooftop. It’s not unusual for Raphael to fight angrily, but right now, he was angry. Because, what exactly would Shredder do to you? Who was he to just pick someone he just happened to care about to use as a pawn? Shredder’s pointless vendetta was negatively affecting his family, and now his significant other. He didn’t want you to become another April. Someone that had to constantly look over their shoulder. You had a whole life to live, not that April didn’t, but, you were less involved with the turtle’s missions or issues than she was. It wasn’t right. And of course, he felt guilty.

He felt guilty, because, well, he got you into this mess when he revealed himself to you the first time you two had met. He should’ve thought it through, he let his personal attraction to you wind up to this point, where now you’re more than friends, yet at a cost.

It wasn’t right. And like Leo says, if you mess up something, it’s your job to fix it.

The fight was done. Xever had never experienced this type of Raph before. The “protecting their lover” Raph. Because, if we’re being honest, Raphael fighting for his significant other is a sight to see, yet an experience you wouldn’t want to be a part of. Unfortunately, Xever was.

And when it’s done, for the very first time, Xever feels defeated.

Because Raphael holds back a small part of himself when his brothers fight, but this time, no. There wasn’t Leo there to tell him to calm down, or Donnie to scold him for almost stabbing him on accident. No, right now, it was just Raph.

And as he goes running to your window, he wants to make sure you got there safe.

You hear the frantic knocking on your room window, and you open it, allowing the cold air to rush into your room. You stare at Raph, watching as the cuts and bruises littering his skin, with scratches on his plastron. He looks at you, smiling.

“You okay?” Another beautiful yet detrimental trait of Raph is that he thinks about you over himself. Right now, you were fine. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was Raph.

So you ignore his question and help him inside, sitting him on your bed and just kissing him as gently as you could. He’s a big boy, he can take some hits and scratches. But right now, you were there to doctor him up. He knows not to stop you once you’ve got that look of concern on your face; so instead of protesting, he lets you take care of him.

You clean the cuts and some small gashes, dressing his minor wounds. He doesn’t require any stitches and thank the Lord because that’s more Donnie’s thing.

You give him an ice pack (it’s a frozen pea bag) to put on his head while you retrieve some medicine for his headache when you stop as you see he’s staring at you.

“What?”

“Nothin,’ just like seeing you so…dominant.” He smirks, causing you to smile and roll your eyes in response.

“Hush,” You hand him two capsules of Tylenol, “and take these, you should feel fine, I hope.”

That last part seemed to get Raph. The last thing he wanted was for you to be concerned like that, he was going to be fine and he knew it.

“I’m gonna be more than fine thanks to you, PhD in reviving mutants,” he jokes, bringing you into his arms as he gives you a chaste kiss on the lips.

As long as you were safe, Raphael didn’t mind a few boo-boo’s.

Donatello

-The weakest out of all his brothers so

-Don’t expect him to come alone if you need saving

-Sure, if it’s a few foot ninjas, he can handle. But do NOT get mugged by the Purple Dragons, Donnie kind of can’t handle all of them at once. He’s better when he’s with the team. He fights more confidently.

-He gets overwhelmed if he’s outnumbered. This happens even when he’s fighting with his brothers. He starts to overthink everything and, well, it’s just a mess.

-As your boyfriend, Donnie is pretty protective over you, I mean, look at how he was with april in the show!

-He really wants you safe, because that’s how Donnie is.

-Calls you all the time, especially while walking home, he has to know you’re okay.

-He sees how much you care for him, when he comes back bruised from a mission, you’re there to take care of him.

-Donnie always aids his brothers, but he was so used to helping himself, that it felt foreign to him to have you dress his wounds.

-But anyway, he would freak if you were in danger.

-Like right now, Donnie walked you home after a long day of spending your Sunday with the turtles. They were your therapy, and down in the sewers, there were no worries; just family.

As you’re walking through the alley to climb the fire escape to your apartment window, You both stop as a person appears to peer in the alleyway from the entrance. You and Donnie can’t really see who they are but their figure, but the purple-banded turtle assumes it’s a homeless person. So, you both act normal, standing still for a bit in hopes that they’ll leave, as they probably can’t see either of you.

Oh, but they can. Well, you, at least.

After stumbling a bit in front of the alleyway, you can now see the unknown’s face. It’s a man, an older, greasy-looking guy who doesn’t know what deodorant is. He grins at the darkness engulfing the alleyway, “I see you~” The man’s voice snarls, causing you to scrunch your nose up in disgust. You weren’t sure how he could see you, but one thing’s for sure, there was gonna be a little situation in regard to getting him to leave you and Donnie alone.

You feel a protective arm wrap around you, and you sense Donnie behind you, putting on that protective face of his. Not like Leo’s, where he’s a mama bear looking out for his cubs, no, like a loving boyfriend, looking out for his significant other.

He wouldn’t let anything happen to you. He couldn’t, and this low-life wouldn’t be hard to deal with at all.

“I think you should leave,” You say, feeling a wave of confidence go over you since having Donnie by your side. Usually, you would try and ignore, but right now, you felt confident that he wouldn’t lay a finger on you.

“And I think you…should come with me…back home, sweetie~!” After every stop between his statement, he takes a step closer to you, and now, this is when Donatello intervenes. He’s not one to show himself unless absolutely necessary. And right now, it was absolutely necessary if it meant protecting you.

“Nope. You’re gonna walk away,” Donnie states flatly, hovering his free hand on his bo staff just in case this drunk tries something funny. He steps more toward the man, ultimately revealing himself to him. Honestly, he looks so drunk that he probably won’t remember this shit in the morning.

“Eugh! What the fuck are you!?” After jolting back from the sudden dramatic jumpscare, Donatello sighs. He’s used to that. Although, he always remembers that you didn’t react that way when you first saw him. It was more of a friendly first meet, considering you were being cornered by the local Purple Dragon gang and was saved.

“The one that’ll….put you in a hospital if you keep it up!” Donnie wasn’t the best at clapbacks when he’s in protective mode, maybe while under pressure but, that’s more Raph’s thing. But, he would save all the sarcastic remarks for later, right now, his priority was you.

It’s no surprise that the man laughed at this, and retorted with a comment about Donatello being a…

“I ain’t listenin’ to a fuckin…lizard thing,” Yeah. That. When did lizards get shells is beyond me, dear readers.

As the man steps closer, Donnie tells you to back up and steer away from him, to lessen his chances of a friendly fire.

“Love, let me be the hero for once,” Your boyfriend was so used to being helped by his brothers when it came to saving you or his other 2 human friends, that he never got the chance to be the only one praised. He would love to hear praise from you.

So, you get out the way quickly, to respect Donatello’s request. He smiles gently and kisses your forehead, and he approaches the man head on. He doesn’t want to hurt him per say, just rough him up that he gets the hint.

It all changes when the man takes Donnie’s approach the wrong way, and gets hostile. So, he runs (sloppily, might I add) into the alleyway fully, coming full force at Donnie. It’s nothing crazy, he tries to punch him but, Donnie’s much more smarter and sober than he is, so, it’s not nothing he can’t handle.

So when the drunk pulls out a knife, it’s all a little too cliche. The turtle in purple got shot at, stabbed at, shell, even spat at by a big spider…thing. So, this was nothing. He swore it was nothing.

Donatello ditches the bo staff utilization for a pressure point instead. Yes, it was risky, but, Donnie was sober, he was not. His vision is most likely impaired, and his cognitive ability isn’t so well.

Except sometimes, humans get unknown superhuman strength when drunk. Not in a good way, either. They do dumb things, regretful things.

You watch as Donatello meneuvers around the man, taking notice at how focused your boyfriend was, seeing his rare face covered in self-confidence, up until he got to putting his finger on the pressure point right under the man’s chin. Long story short, he got a little stab in at Donnie’s arm right before he was knocked out. It happened so quick, the ninja didn’t even realize what had happened until after the fact. His body was pumping with adrenaline that he almost didn’t notice. Not until you said something.

“Hey…Donnie! Your arm!” You run toward Donatello, who’s now feeling the pain in his arm as he’s coming down from the adrenaline high. His breath hitches as he notices the new fresh cut on his arm. He wasn’t stabbed, per say, just grazed. He couldn’t believe the man who could barely walk in a straight line managed to get a hit in on Donnie- a highly trained ninja.

He stops to look at the blood trickling down his bicep and onto the concrete, staining the ground with drops of crimson. “Gosh, ouch! Okay okay, ow!” The sudden winces from Donatello break your heart, he’s not usually one to outwardly show when he’s in pain.

“Okay, Donnie? I’m gonna take you back to the lair, okay?” You’re already dialing for Leonardo and pressing the button to let him know it’s an emergency.

You rub circles onto your boyfriend's shell as he struggles with the new massive headache and the world around him spinning slowly, “Leo? Donnie got hurt, can you get the fir-” “Already on it! Do you need any help getting him here? Are you in danger? Is Donnie breathing okay? Is-” Leo’s slew of panicked questions are cut off by you.

“Alrighty mama bear, Donnie’s conscious. I got him-” You take off your sweater, wrapping it around the turtle’s bicep, it seems to relieve him somehow, as the bleeding has slowed, staining your cotton lavender sweater to a deep plum.

“I just, let me be his hero for once.” You say. You can handle getting Donnie back to the Lair. It wasn’t hard. As long as you kept him conscious and moving, you would get back to the lair in no time.

“I…okay. Call me if anything happens, okay?”

“Leo, I got this,”

And you do, you so got this. You get Donatello down to the lair safe and sound, already grabbing an ice pack from the freezer once you set him down on his examination table. Since he doesn’t have the strength to dress his graze, you take charge,

“Just order me around on what to get and what to do, I got it.”

He’s so appreciative. He can’t help but smile at you. How beautiful your face looked when you were concentrated on patting down his graze with peroxide, knowing it’ll burn, so you do it as quickly as possible. How you give him a soft kiss on the forehead when you’re done (he loves forehead kisses by the way,) and tell HIM to rest. You’re the doctor now, and it’s your turn to take care of Donnie. He smiles weakly after it, and his purple-red eyes land on your lips, as you get the hint and dive down to kiss Donnie’s lips, giving him reassurance that you’re okay, and he will be, too.

Michelangelo

-Mikey is very outspoken. He calls it like he sees it. Maybe not in the best way, he’s direct without realizing it.

-So he’s the best person to confront a stalker

-Because he’s not the “rah-rah” kind like Raph is, more like the “go away you’re weird” kind of confrontation.

-If it’s someone he doesn’t know, like a human, he’s not sure how to confront them.

-Like, should I show myself, should i not?

-For the past few weeks, someone on campus had a…weird obsession with you. There was a party coming up in a nearby house known for frat parties, and when you turned down their offer to be your “date,” they were upset. REALLY upset.

-But, they can’t get mad at you! You had a boyfriend.

-When you went down to the lair and complained that Romeo (this was Leo’s nickname for your new stalker) requested to follow you and message you again on Instagram, Mikey could feel a little mad.

-Which never happened, he wasn’t the angry or jealous type

-But when it came to you, he felt the need to be protective over you, and this Romeo guy wasn’t about to get in the way of you both.

-So, he does something kind of dumb?

-He does some FBI searching on the same social media site he found -Bradford, and was able to find Romeo. And trust me, it took a long, -LONG periodically time.

-Luckily, Romeo literally shows ALL of his life, where he’s at, what he’s doing, who he’s with, etc

He's status on facebook is that he's friends with you, which leaves Mikey slightly pressed?

For good reason, you were NOT Romeo's friend.

-When you reject him another time, the stalking gets worse, he begins going to your job, and sitting there, leaving when your shift ends. It’s until today that he tried to follow you home.

-Michelangelo just so happened to catch your emergency call as he was skateboarding on the rooftop, and he was on the job.

-He can handle it, no way he couldn’t. Some desperate guy?? ROMEO?? Yeah, he got this.

“Okay, seriously, stop fricken following me!” You decide to confront Romeo, head on. Although the streets were bare, you were still outside, meaning he seriously couldn’t do you no harm. The blonde haired football player couldn’t do anything but stop in place from a few feet behind you. He stands, slightly upset that you figured it out.

“One date, Y/n! One! Just one! I swear I’ll leave you alone! Or give me your number! Something!” This begging, coming from an soon-to-be adult is frankly very cringeworthy, and you’re catching secondhand embarrassment from the desperation his words hold.

“R-” You catch yourself from saying his code name, Romeo. You’ve been so used to saying it that it’s almost natural. “Steven, no.” You give a simple no once again, yet he persists.

“What could possibly be the reason why, huh?” Steven isn’t giving up, and now he’s just begging to be rejected again with that question.

“I have a boyfriend, that’s why! And honestly, even if I didn’t, I would still say no to you man!” What was so hard to understand?

“That’s harsh Y/n.” Steven’s demeanor had changed, he looked somewhat crazy right now, as he laughed after his statement, “I was being nice, but since you wanna be a fucking bitch to me, I’m gonna be mean.” The blue-eyed Romeo starts to walk over to you, and you back up, both going down the street. You make a turn, but instead of turning the curb, you wind up going into a more secluded area. As you back up even more, you realize the mistake you had made, as you were now in an alleyway.

‘Great,’ you think, ‘How cliché of me.’

You pressed the emergency button on the T-Phone your friend Donnie had given you a while back. This would be the first time you used the emergency feature on it. After pressing it, the signal had been sent to all T-Phones, notifying the turtles. Honestly, you were hoping that it would be quick, but you knew you had to do some serious stalling for the time being.

As Steven circled you like a cat honing in on its prey, you continued to back up, looking all around you for something to use as a weapon. Now, you had some training from Splinter, but you’ve only started to train like he taught April for a few days. So, you had no weapon of your own. But, Splinter always says that a great fighter can use anything around them as a weapon in some way.

After quickly glancing around you, scanning everything in the terribly lit alley, you find a potential weapon- a pole to what looks like an old american flag near the dumpster. Unfortunately, you had to get past Stev- you know what, Leo’s code name is funnier- Romeo, in order to get to the pole. So, you begin to look for ways to get around him. You’re unsure of what his intentions are with you, but you know they aren’t good. Romeo wears a…perverted look in his eyes, and now you realize that you need that pole.

You do something unthinkable, and walk closer to him. It’s a brave act, but you have tricks, dear reader. Romeo is taken back by the sudden change in your aura, as if you’re inviting him to touch you, yet…

When he gets close, you instantly knee him where the sun-don’t-shine. So bad, that he falls to his knees, whining in pain.

“Ow! My…my…my coconuts!” His voice is high-pitch like a school-girl, and you almost felt guilty for doing it so hard.

Almost.

What makes this all so good, is that suddenly, Romeo is hit by what appears to be a balloon, yet as it pops, his hair becomes wet.

As you look around, you can see a two white slits that resemble eyes from atop the rooftop, as it’s dark, you can’t see who it is, but you have a good feeling who it might be.

Suddenly, a large puff of purple smoke appears behind Romeo, and after it fades away, you can see Michelagelo emerge, winking at you as he kicks Romeo back down as he tries to get up, feeling a presence behind him and looking back.

“Eyes straight, Romeo!”

“Romeo?”

“You questioning me?” Mikey challenges, throwing another water balloon on your stalker. It must be some cold water in those balloons, because Mikey has the poor dude shivering in addition to the cold temperatures tonight.

“Uh, no! No! Y/n, you know this freak?”

“The only freak here is you! Following Y/n around like…a stalker!” Mikey exclaims, now pinning Romeo down after his freak comment. Totally unnecessary by the way.

“You’re the freak! What are you!? Some kind of mutant?” Romeo should really learn to shut his mouth if he knows what’s good for him. After the second freak comment, Mikey twists his arms tighter, how Raph does when he wants Mikey to say “Uncle.”

“Yeah, a mutant, and theres 3 others that look just like me so, we better not catch you doing this to our Y/n again!” To finish off the threat, Mikey bonks him on the head with his nunchuck, causing Romeo to whine in pain, and finally agree to leaving you alone after Mikey wouldn’t let go, almost spraining his wrists.

~ “So, our Y/n, huh?” After getting to the window of your apartment, all is fine. You felt a weight being lifted off your shoulders tonight thanks to Mikey. And, thanks to Donatello for being such a genius and making those T-Phones.

“Well, you know,” Mikey rubs the back of his neck, laughing nervously, “You are our friend, but…you know!” He nudges you playfully, wathcing as you giggle and embrace him into a hug.

“Thanks, for getting rid of Romeo.”

“It’s kind of fitting right now, since, you know, we’re on a balcony and such, like a tower,”

“Mikey, that’s Tangled,”

“Oh, well, whatever! I’m just glad you’re safe, cutie,” Mikey always gets excited during loving moments like these, and after breaking the hug, you reach up to kiss him on the lips, it’s no surprise, he tastes like pizza. It’s always like that, but, you’ve come to enjoy it. If pizza lip balm was a thing, it would taste like your boyfriend.

Taglist:

@bee-1n-space

Masterlist

#tmnt x reader #tmnt #tmnt fanfiction #tmnt 2012 #tmnt 2012 x reader #2012 raph #2012 leo #raphael #leonardo #donatello #michelangelo #teenage mutant ninja turtles #tmnt headcanons

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thedreadvampy · 1 year

Text

not very related but every time I think about LGBTQ progress I think about the equal marriage act (the most high profile legal change since I've been politically aware)

and then I think about sitting with my housemate (later girlfriend. later ex) on her bed in 2012 watching and livetweeting the equal marriage debates in parliament.

and then I think about the person who tweeted, in response to a point being made about the diversity of opinions on the matter in the Christian faith and specifically the firm pro-equality stances taken by the Quakers and the Unitarian Church; "Unitarians aren't real Christians and Quakerism is witchcraft"

"Quakerism is witchcraft" has lived rent-free in my mind for over a decade. my two favourite callbacks to make with friends about my religion are "Quakers ritually bathe in oats" and "Quakerism is witchcraft."

#red said #i can never remember who the other church was bc i mix up unitarians and united reform #even though the urc dragged its feet on same sex marriage into 2017 #anyway i don't think it's just my internal perspective that the Quakers were brought up more during the debate #i think maybe cause the Unitarians had been on board for longer and the Quaker commitment came in 2009 #also bc Quakers are a relatively politically high profile group #like the three faith groups that came up throughout the debate as specifically pro equal marriage #were the Quakers the Unitarians and the Liberal Jews #who i think were the three who most unilaterally took equal marriage as organisational policy #for Quakers in 2009 we agreed to just start recording all marriages equally anyway and sending the paperwork to the government #even though they didn't have the legislation to recognise it #which is a thing we could do bc there's a peculiarity in law stemming from 18th century ghettoisation of Quaker communities #which means that i think uniquely among churches in England? we appoint our own registrars rather than having to use state registrars #and Quaker marriage registration uses different paperwork and processes decided by the Quaker National Meeting #so we write and witness our own paperwork then send it off to the government to make it legally recognised #whereas all other religious weddings you have to bring a civil registrar to fill out a standardised registry form #so. we had a legal capacity that other groups didn't to just say Hey Fuck You We're Going To Marry Them Anyway #and 2009-2013 the government just had to deal with getting sent marriages that were validly registered but not legally recognisable

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momentsofamber · 3 months

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Hey uuuuh did you know... Ur big swaggy and hella stronger than ur demons? 😉👍 You've overcome them in the past to make it to today, you'll overcome today's with the lessons from the past, and the future doesn't know what it has coming to it 📣👏😁

Anon, this was so nice to wake up to. 😭 Thank you so much!!

I'm so sorry it took me all day to respond to this and I'm about to ramble so feel free to skim this, I'm gonna dump it under a read more. ( Do people even still use these in 2024? askdjhf )

I never directly attacked anyone in my time while pretending to be an anti. I was just completely silent on the matter, letting my morality complex and p.edophobia ocd wage war on my well-being.

It's ironic, I've been on this site since about 2010; and in 2012 when I started to be at my first most active point on tumblr and had a friend group on here, I would blog about Wincest (SPN) on main and no one said anything or thought anything of it, they just kept scrolling. That was the norm. People just SHIPPED whatever they wanted.

Flash ahead to like 2018 and suddenly everywhere I go there are now neon eyesore banners on posts, including fucking stimboards and whatnot with 'p.roship d.ni' and 'a.nti-a,ntis d.ni' ( I'm censoring that just so this post isn't blacklisted from proshippers because that is NOT my stance ) and I was like 'I don't even know what these terms MEAN?? where did these come from??' but I was too afraid to ask anyone so I just. Stayed silent and promised myself I'd only reblog "safe" content and that I was "happy" I'd "become a better person since then". ( spoiler: I was lying to myself. )

And over the years any time I made new friends who had never seen that content on my blog back then, I'd just say I didn't support Problematic Content(tm) and I'd only talk about and rp and reblog ships that were "normal", because I was now so afraid people would reject me at any time because it seemed like the anti crowd was so large and violent and nasty -- my mental health at that time would not have been able to handle that hatred.

-- in fact I had this SAME experience in the plural community with the a.nti-e.ndos for identifying as a median system. ( we know now that we are a bpdgenic osdd-1b system, but we still prefer most median terminology to describe ourselves. ) But the traumagenic DID systems who were pro-endo were so much more welcome to interacting with us than the exclusionists. And it's the same bullshit different flavor happening here with the proshippers.

How much overlap is there between a.nti-e.ndo and a.nti-p.roship rhetoric, I wonder? It's wild. I wish I had learned how to undo my black and white thinking so much sooner and listen to new points of view instead of just shying away from the unknown in fear.

But this is a new year, and this is a new me. This blog is going to be a source of love and positivity and learning about other people's experiences. Any discourse or negativity ( even the validating kind ) will remain on my sideblog. I don't have to like or even agree with everything I see online, but I am going to support people's right to say it, do it, make content of it, as long as all parties involved are consenting. ( Fictional characters, animated or live action, do not have the autonomy to consent or not consent so people can do anything they want with fiction that makes them feel happy and fulfilled, full stop. Yes, this includes RPF and selfshipping. As long as you keep your content in your safe space and no actors/musicians/etc involved in the creation of that character you're using are able to see it - I will support your right to make or consume any content as you see fit. )

#proship #proship safe #proshippers please interact #ambers.ask #ambers.txt

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dumbestthingiveeverheard · 9 months

Text

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 8/3/2023

Fifth place: Twitter user @eyeskewer

This is a little older than the stuff I normally cover on this blog, but I feel like this is worth highlighting as it perfectly shows my issue when many who make conspiratorial claims about transgender medical care:

my "informed consent" was my doctor I had just met handing me papers telling me my voice would drop soon, I could freeze my eggs, I might get acne, and whatever else. I probably didn't even hear everything she said, I just told her I wanted the shot. so I got it. I just turned 18

So you were told you wanted something medical done to you, were told about the risks and consequences, and then got it. I really don't see what the big deal is here.

Fourth Place: Marco Rubio

Elon Musk's time as CEO of Twitter has been far from perfect, but easily the best addition he has made is the community notes feature. For just one example, here is a Tweet from Marco Rubio:

Also, those claims about the 2016 Presidential Election were never proven to be fake--just wanted to add that real quick.

Third Place: Scott Lively

The deranged homophobe who wrote an entire book blaming the Nazis on homosexuality wrote a column a couple of days back with the headline "Leftist lawfare and the abuse of power." A decent chunk of it is spent defending Russian President Vladimir Putin, but here are some highlights:

In all my years of watching corporate U.S. news about Russia and Putin, I have never seen a single counter-argument ever being offered in defense of President Putin (coverage of him is even worse than that of Trump). It's been more than a decade since Obama restarted the Cold War to punish the Russians for banning "gay" propaganda to children, when every story began to paint him as a "brutal monster" – to the point that even many conservatives (who have zero reason to trust that same media on anything) seem to agree.

The hatred of Putin on an international scale has nothing to do with the anti-homosexuality laws he has put in place while President of Russia--although, don't get me wrong, that didn't help matters, but several countries with anti-homosexuality laws are still seen in a positive light by the international community (wrongfully so, in my opinion). It was more his imperial ambitions--starting with his invasion of Georgia in 2008--that caused the international community to move away from him.

Second Place: Abby Johnson

I've mostly been ignoring the story about a handful of far-right Christians refusing to support the fringe Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy because of his Hinduism, however given Abby Johnson was sold to us a few years back as a a reasonable anti-abortion activist--an oxymoron if I've ever heard one. And she has decided to take a stance against a Hindu President, saying:

Do not be a victim of Satan’s confusion right now. This is an important time for us to have clarity of mind as we are going into an election cycle. So please discern. Please use discernment right now because God hates those who are willing to put up idols over him, and he will not be mocked.

All I wish to say is that if you really want a President that's a dedicated Christian--can I recommend you a guy named Joe Biden? Oh who am I kidding, if Ramaswamy does get the nomination it's going to be just like when Billy Graham took Mormonism off his list of cults so he and his followers could vote for Mitt Romney in 2012.

Winner: Ben Shapiro

This man, considered by many to be serious political commentator, does not know the difference between eating and drinking:

[Trump] would face a whopping 641 years in prison. Which I assume means he would not survive prison. Although he is 70% preservatives at this point because he eats so much McDonalds and Diet Coke.

He eats Diet Coke? Ben, do you know how Diet Coke works?

Ben Shapiro you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

#eyeskewer #marco rubio #scott lively #abby johnson #ben shapiro

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kellyvela · 3 years

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GRRM has said in interviews that he’s purposely played with the romantic tension between the hound and Sansa. What do you think the endgame purpose of the unkiss and that playing is meant to be for?

This is all what he said about the matter in question so far:

The Hound and Sansa, romantic or platonic? It could be very different things to each of those involved, mind you!

JUNE 24, 1999 THE HOUND AND SANSA

Moreta12: I understand, I’ve heard your opinion on that. In ACOK, it seems that the relationship between the Hound and Sansa had romantic undertones. Is that true?

GeoRR: Well, read the book and decide for yourself.

Moreta12: I’ve read the book and I’ve debated those particular scenes with a few others. Half say that it’s romantic and half say it’s platonic. I’ve taken the romantic stance.

GeoRR: It could be very different things to each of those involved, mind you

Moreta12:Yes, but it seem like evidence points towards romantic undertones. Will the Hound appear later?

GeoRR: Yes, the Hound will be in STORM OF SWORDS. In fact, I just finished writing a big scene with him.

[Source]

When will Sansa be “legal”? **ºª@”¡¿x<%$!&?

OCTOBER 05, 1999 AGE OF SEXUAL RELATIONS IN WESTEROS

The nature of the relationship between Sandor and Sansa has been a hot topic on Revanshe’s board. Sansa’s youth has been one focus of the discussion. What is the general Westerosi view as to romantic or sexual relationships involving a girl of Sansa’s age and level of physical maturity?

A boy is Westeros is considered to be a “man grown” at sixteen years. The same is true for girls. Sixteen is the age of legal majority, as twenty-one is for us.

However, for girls, the first flowering is also very significant… and in older traditions, a girl who has flowered is a woman, fit for both wedding and bedding.

A girl who has flowered, but not yet attained her sixteenth name day, is in a somewhat ambigious position: part child, part woman. A “maid,” in other words. Fertile but innocent, beloved of the singers.

In the “general Westerosi view,” well, girls may well be wed before their first flowerings, for political reasons, but it would considered perverse to bed them. And such early weddings, even without sex, remain rare. Generally weddings are postponed until the bride has passed from girlhood to maidenhood.

Maidens may be wedded and bedded… however, even there, many husbands will wait until the bride is fifteen or sixteen before sleeping with them. Very young mothers tend to have significantly higher rates of death in childbirth, which the maesters will have noted.

As in the real Middle Ages, highborn girls tend to flower significantly earlier than those of lower birth. Probably a matter of nutrition. As a result, they also tend to marry earlier, and to bear children earlier. There are plenty of exceptions.

[Source]

Unreliable Narrator

JUNE 26, 2001 SF, TARGARYENS, VALYRIA, SANSA, MARTELLS, AND MORE

[GRRM is asked about Sansa misremembering the name of Joffrey’s sword.]

The Lion’s Paw / Lion’s Tooth business (*), on the other hand, is intentional. A small touch of the unreliable narrator. I was trying to establish that the memories of my viewpoint characters are not infallible. Sansa is simply remembering it wrong. A very minor thing (you are the only one to catch it to date), but it was meant to set the stage for a much more important lapse in memory. You will see, in A STORM OF SWORDS and later volumes, that Sansa remembers the Hound kissing her the night he came to her bedroom… but if you look at the scene, he never does. That will eventually mean something, but just now it’s a subtle touch, something most of the readers may not even pick up on.

[Source]

(*) It was Arya who misremembered the name of Joffrey’s sword tho…

Unreliable Narrator 2.0

OCTOBER 05, 2002 SANSA’S MEMORY

[Note: This mail has been edited for brevity.]

… this is an inconsistency with ASoS more than an outright error. In ASoS, Sansa thinks that the Hound kissed her before leaving her room and King’s Landing. In ACoK, no kiss is mentioned in the scene, though Sansa did think that he was about to do so.

Well, not every inconsistency is a mistake, actually. Some are quite intentional. File this one under “unreliable narrator” and feel free to ponder its meaning

[Source]

Unreliable Narrator 3.0

NOVEMBER 27, 2007 GEORGE R.R. MARTIN ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

Here’s a really particular question (which I realize means it probably won’t get asked in a general interview): In A Storm of Swords, there is a chapter early on where Sansa is thinking back to the scene at the end of A Clash of Kings when The Hound came into her room during the battle. She thinks in the chapter about how he kissed her, but in the scene in A Clash of Kings, this actually didn’t happen. Was that a typo or something? —Valdora

GRRM: It’s not a typo. It is something! [Laughs] ”Unreliable narrator” is the key phrase there. The second scene is from Sansa’s thoughts. And what does that reveal about her psychologically? I try to be subtle about these things.

[Source]

Sansa may be dead but Alayne is alive

APRIL 15, 2008 FUTURE MEETINGS, POVS, ARYA’S ROLE, EASTERN LANDS, AND ASSASSINS

[Will Sandor and Sansa meet?]

Why, the Hound is dead, and Sansa may be dead as well. There’s only Alayne Stone.

[Source]

A lot more dangerous than romantic

AUGUST 2, 2009 AS SER JORAH MORMONT…

weltraummuell: The Hound Oh please don’t cast an old guy for the Hound, his scenes with Sansa are so romantic and erotic, I couldn’t bear if it’d feel creepy all of a sudden. Well, that’s me making demands. LOL

GRRM: Re: The Hound Old guy? No, but… the Hound is still a whole lot older than Sansa, and was never written as attractive… you know, those hideous burns and all that… he’s a lot more dangerous than he is romantic.

kestrana: The Hound Yeah its a “girl always wants the bad boy” kind of thing although Sansa seems to pull something else out of him. It feels so wrong sometimes but I want to see them together again tee hee.

weltraummuell: The Hound Hehe, George, maybe you didn’t intend it, but he turned out to be a very erotic character to female readers. Especially since he’s mutilated and dangerous. Makes him unpredictable and vulnerable which is the most explosive aphrodisiac for a girl’s fantasy. ;)

weltraummuell: The Hound And I know from discussions on other board other women feel just the same about Sandor. He’s an absolute favourite with the ladies!

halfbloodmalfoy: The Hound LOL, you’re such a man. To many of us women, dangerous *is* attractive.

GRRM: The Hound But no one has any love for poor old Sam Tarly, kind and smart and decent and devoted…

[Source]

I played with it but I didn’t get the answer I was waiting for

JUNE 22, 2012 SWORD & LASER VIDEO PODCAST

GRRM: I am sometimes surprised by the reactions, of women in particular, to some of the villains. The number of women over the years who have written to me that their favorite characters are Jaime Lannister or Sandor Clegane [the Hound] or Theon Greyjoy… All of these are deeply troubled individuals with some very dark sides, who have done some very dark things. Nonetheless, they do draw this response, and quite heavily, I think, in the case of some of them, from my female readers in particular.

Veronica Belmont: I’m a big fan of the Hound, myself, actually.

Tom Merritt: Of Sandor? Really?

Veronica Belmont: Yeah, the Hound… Maybe it’s not because I feel any compassion towards them, I’m not really sure what the attraction is. Ah, I’m not going to call it attraction, actually. Let’s just say it’s a fascination, perhaps.

GRRM: [Chuckles] Well, I mean, fascination is one thing, but some of these letters indicate that there really is like a romantic attraction going on there. And I do know there’s all these people out there who are, as they call themselves, the “San/San” fans, who want to see Sandor and Sansa get together at the end. So that’s interesting, too.

Tom Merritt: The TV show has sort of played with that a little, and probably stoked those fires.

GRRM: Oh, sure. And I’ve played with it in the books. There’s something there, but it’s still interesting to see how many people have responded to it.

[Source]

I played with it but I didn’t get the answer I was waiting for 2.0

JUNE 23, 2015 GRRM Q&A AT THE SCIENCE FICTION BOOKSTORE IN STOCKHOLM

Question: “Is there any fan reactions that you have been surprised by, like is there a character that’s more popular than you thought or have people been shocked by something you didn’t think we would be shocked at?”

GRRM: “I’m reasonably certain what people will be shocked by. I knew that the Red Wedding would provoke a big reaction and it did. I was pretty confident that, you know, throwing Bran out the window and then killing Ned in the first book would get reactions, and indeed they did. All of those worked exactly the way it did to the extent that things that have surprised me, they tend to be smaller things. I guess I… Maybe I should not have, I don’t know. How do I phrase this without getting myself in terrible trouble… I guess I don’t understand women, but I was definitely, you know, way back when, surprised by the number of women who reacted positively to characters like Theon and the Hound as dashing, romantic figures. The san/san kind of thing took me by surprise, I must admit, and even more so the women who, and there are some, who really like Theon. So that surprised me.”

[Source]

Unreliable Narrator 4.0

DECEMBER 2016 ASKING GEORGE R.R. MARTIN ABOUT S@N/S@N

My question is regarding Sansa Stark. Her sexuality has evolved through every book and yet the memory that seems to stick the more with her in this regard is the night of the Blackwater. So I was wondering if you can expand on your view on what this is, since as before that night her interactions with Sandor Clegane weren’t really physical.

The night of the Blackwater, yes. Ahhh… Well, I’m not going to give you a straight answer on that hahaha… Uhmmm, but I would say that ahhh… you know a television show and a book each has its own strengths and weaknesses; there a re tools that are available to me as a novelist, that are not available to people doing a television show. And of course there are tools available to them, that are not available to a novelist, I mean they can lay in a soundtrack, they can do special effects, they can do amazing things that I can’t do, I just have words on paper. What can I do, well I can use things like the internal narrative, I can take you inside of territories… thoughts, which you can’t do in a TV show… Ahhh… You just have the words they speak, you see them from outside because the camera is external, while prose is internal, and I have the device known as “unreliable narrator”… Ahhh… Which again, they don’t have. So, think about those two aspects when you consider that night of the Blackwater.

[Source]

Do with it what you will.

#anon asks #sansa stark #the so called unkiss #grrm #asoiaf

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kojandra · 3 years

Text

My Personal Reflection of “Do You Like Brahms?” (with specific reference to the leads)

✨ spoilers below ✨

It’s been a while since I’ve shed tears for a drama. I tried to pinpoint the reason why I was so addicted to every scene while I was watching it; even as I watched the end credits for episode 16, I still had no idea why. But as I made my way downstairs to fill my glass with water, I saw the upright piano. I saw the scores stacked neatly, a dust cover on the ivory keys, and the many many tattered repertoire books from years of commute to the academy and teaching studios, stuffing them in backpacks, and flipping the pages back and forth until the phrase is memorized. And I was reminded of the violin stuffed under my bed and the calluses that became a part of me in grade 4, and how my piano teacher didn’t like the way it sounded on the piano keys.

I remember crying through learning Bach, Bartok, and Liszt. I remember loving Kabalevsky and Chopin. I remember detesting Brahms and Schumann (Robert and Clara) because I didn’t have the emotion to do their pieces justice. I remember the hours committed to perfecting every single bar with precision and emotion.

“Do You Like Brahms?” unearthed a part of me buried with the hopes and dreams of the 10th grader who made the decision to quit music. I didn’t believe I had enough talent--scratch that--I knew I had no talent. I had nothing compared to all the other kids that played before me and after me during lessons and recitals. I picked up every single instrument in hopes that I would have a natural ease with one of them: piano, violin, guitar, flute, ukulele, percussion, and even the banjo. I so desperately wanted to be good at one instrument to play the music I wanted to and I even put in the extra hours to attempt to achieve a sliver of it.

Seeing Chae Song Ah struggle with the same issue had my heart strings tangled. The struggle that I thought was a me problem is being represented! On television! Is this what empathy feels like?

Seeing Park Joon Young lose his passion for the music because of the weight every performance meant made my heart break. And when he said “I’m not happy playing the piano” to his mother in tears, it reminded me how I said those exact same words to my mother in grade 10, asking her if I could quit, with the same heartbreak as Chae Song Ah knowing no matter how hard she tried, she could not compete with those who were born with the ‘musical sense’.

When Song Ah and Joon Young made their decision to quit music, my heart twisted into aches of despair and sadness for them. I feel like I lost it when Song Ah started asking around about the prospects after graduation for those who do not (or cannot) perform.

I see so much of myself in her.

I stopped pursuing music in high school knowing I would only let myself down during the university admission auditions, but seeing Song Ah let her dream carry her to major in music after a business degree sparked a small firework of envy in me. How far can passion take you when “natural talent” is a roadblock? When Joon Young said one should have natural talent to succeed in music, my heart broke more for Song Ah than myself. And when she made the decision to walk away from the relationship giving her anxiety, the chamber position that took advantage of her eagerness to pursue what comes easily to others, and the careful but hard stance she took when it came to matters of the heart and herself...my heart kept breaking knowing hers was already shattered.

I know exactly what she feels.

The whole conversation about finding that conviction to the piece set me back in 2012 when I cried on the cushioned leather piano stool in the practice room for 15 minutes because I couldn’t find that conviction.

It’s your music, so you should take control of it.

I found comfort in these words and in the characters as I watched them each tackle a part of their identity they had lost and are trying to regain control of.

I love every single character in this drama (though I feel the double love triangle is exhausting at times). I really like how the story maintains the Schumann’s and Brahms-inspired story, circling back to it at the end and with a different ending. I thought I would be disappointed knowing the title can be misleading, but I wasn’t.

Without blabbering too long, I guess what I’m trying to say, is that this drama impacted me in ways I will never forget (and it has me learning to love piano again). Maybe one day, I will find the emotion to commit to the pieces by Brahms and Schumann. And maybe one day, I will grasp the conviction to own “Revolution” by Chopin--the one piece I’ve always loved but felt like it could never be mine.

The smallest moment in your life is when your crescendo begins.

Thanks to this drama, I’m playing the piano again. My passion for music is still a little callused (and I’m still hesitant to play some notes for fear that my lack of “natural talent” will seep through the fingers), but I’m regaining that confidence to try again thanks to all the characters in this drama.

I can’t believe this drama also had me rooting for the development of the relationship of the main leads (though I always knew they would end up together). I had the chance to see a really pure love with a mature approach to the way they handle their relationship, which stays really true to the fact that they are in their late twenties. And my heart absolutely broke for the second leads, not completely shattering until Jung Kyung’s flashbacks of her time in love with Hyun Ho.

I’m sad I didn’t watch this sooner, but maybe I put it off knowing I would be a hot mess once I did.

I am not really one to critique dramas heavily and I was tearing up too often to find an outwardly flaw anyways. I am not certain I will have the courage to watch certain scenes again because of the power they have against me.

A well-casted, well-written, inspiration piece for me. I am attached. Whole heartedly attached.

And as a post script: this is a very comforting drama for a rainy day.

Post post script: I thought this was going to be a “do you like Messi?” pt. 2 hahahahaha (don’t kill me, but wfkbj stans, wya?)

#it's literally a blog post y'all #don't open unless you're reading for boredom lmaooo #idk why i feel so compelled to write this #do you like brahms?#queue bc i know how to do that now

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fashournalist · 3 years

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Conquering the Crown: Who Will Be The Next Miss Universe Philippines 2021?

Are you ready, Universe?

Tomorrow, the next Miss Universe Philippines will be crowned in Bohol, and I'd like to share my bets with you (as well as my thoughts on more candidates other than my Top 6. :)

But first, I have to admit I do have a bias for Cavite, Aklan, and Laguna because

1) Cavite is my birthplace and where I spent the first 16 years of my life;

2) Aklan is where my five dear brothers are from;

3) Laguna is where I spent seven eventful years as a UPLB student.

However, these biases aren't the sole reason I'm rooting for these representatives. I believe Victoria Velasquez Vincent, Leren Bautista, and Christelle Abello are really among the best candidates of this year's batch! VVV is actually my top one, followed by Katrina Dimaranan, Maureen Wroblewitz, and Ayn Bernos.

One of the smartest and most eloquent candidates of this batch, Victoria Velasquez Vincent from Cavite has emerged as the Interview Challenge winner, and rightly so. But she caught my attention even before that phase; her Runway Challenge was really impressive as well. As a heritage conservationist and architect, she's committed to solving environmental problems across the globe.

I really wish the winner would be a pure Filipino, but it so happened that VVV impressed me the most. She's half-Irish and half-Filipino, raised in New Zealand.

Now this one's a powerhouse. A pageant veteran, model, actress, and television host, I think (and thousands of others think, too) Katrina Dimaranan from Taguig is the most prepared of them all. She was appointed as USA's Miss Supranational 2018 and finished as 1st Runner Up at the world stage. She was also one of the title holders way back in Binibining Pilipinas 2012.

Kat's charming, authentic personality captivates anyone watching her or listening to her voice. You can see this through the way she nailed the challenges. And though she grew up in the US, she is a pure Filipina.

This woman needs no introduction--Maureen Wroblewitz, the winner of Asia's Next Top Model Season 5. Born in Saudi Arabia, she's a half-Filipina, half-German model and actress who is now representing Pangasinan as she fights for the crown. She has emerged as the Casting Challenge winner, but aside from that, all the results of the other challenges prove how excellent and enthralling she is as a model. Her intelligence can also be seen with every answer she delivers during Q&As.

The most inspiring candidate of all, Ayn Bernos of San Juan, proves that barriers can be broken and stereotypes can be shattered. Proudly standing at 5'3 with morena skin, Ayn represents the majority of Filipino people who are not influenced by foreign blood. I've closely followed her journey from the day she submitted her pageant application, and I'm so happy for her every step of the way. Her millions of followers on TikTok surely feel the same. We feel seen, we feel represented, we feel inspired to also reach for our dreams--no matter how impossible they may seem.

Ayn is a natural Filipina beauty, and she glowed further as she embarked on the road to the crown. Her wit, intelligence, and cheerful personality radiate in every appearance she makes, whether it's an interview or a commercial special by some of MUPH's sponsors.

With enchanting eyes, a driven attitude, and several beauty pageant titles under her belt, Leren Mae Bautista of Laguna is one of the most prepared candidates to represent the nation at the Miss Universe pageant this December.

I started knowing her through the tarpaulins in LB eight years ago. I was still in college, and Leren just won the crown of Miss Los Banos. She conquered the Binibining Laguna title as well. Since then, I knew this classic Filipina beauty and brain would one day captivate the world. Years later, she has placed as a 2nd Runner Up in Miss Globe 2019 and won in other pageants, too. Today, she's aiming for the universe and we all know she's ready.

Armed with an unstoppable grit, this dreamer put her life in the US on pause to once again fight for the crown of Miss Universe. Christelle Abello of Aklan has placed in the top 16 of last year's MUPH, and she has come back stronger this time around. Though she wasn't part of the Top 7 in the Interview Challenge, I think she's one of the most fluent and confident candidates.

Although she was born in America, she embodies the beauty of a real Filipina. I have to mention that I'm not a fan of her evening gown's design, but she still carried it well.

So there, now you know my Top 6! :) They've been my Top 6 for several weeks now, but this doesn't mean I'm not impressed by other candidates.

Michele Angela Okol of Siargao Island nailed the Preliminary Interviews! I haven't watched all the interviews since the KTX pass is just too expensive for me, but I was able to see a few on YouTube. And of them all, Michele's answers were the best. She was certain with her answers. Ingrid "Sam" Santamaria of Paranaque and Chela Grace Falconer of Misamis Oriental are some of the smartest and most fluent candidates as well. Sam placed second in the Interview Challenge.

The Filipina beauty of Janela Cuaton of Albay, Maria Corazon Abalos of Mandaluyong, Mirjan Hipolito of Angeles City, Simone Nadine Bornilla of Marinduque, and Princess Krista Singh of Pasig are some of the most outstanding in their batch. But I think the most outstanding beauty of all, is Jasmine Umali of Manila. She's like a living Mulan, or Barbie. And all these phenomenal women are smart and graceful, too!

Anyhow, if Gianne Asuncion of Cagayan Province wasn't diagnosed with COVID-19, for sure she would make it here and she'd be one of my bets. I hope she comes back next year, same with Maica Cabling Martinez of Nueva Ecija, who didn't make it in this year's Top 30.

You might be wondering why I haven't mentioned Steffi Rose Aberasturi of Cebu Province yet.

Honestly, I can't deny she's gorgeous from head to toe, well-prepared, talented, and confident, but I just cannot stomach supporting someone who supports Rodrigo Duterte. If she wins tomorrow, I will not bash her--I can see why she's one of the frontrunners--but I just cannot see myself rooting for her because of her political stance :( If she was not a DDS though, she would easily be one of my top bets, maybe my top 4 or top 5.

Steffi carries every outfit effortlessly, and her beauty can go from sweet and endearing to regal and fierce. I wish, before the national elections, her eyes would be opened to the atrocities of Duterte's war on drugs. (I also find Bea Luigi Gomez beautiful, but she said during the preliminary interview that the government is doing well. So, I'm afraid she might be a DDS, too. I hope not)

I know, people tell us to separate the pageant from political views, but the thing is, when a DDS gains more influence, they can influence voters to support Duterte, too. That's a real danger our country can no longer afford.

As for Kisses Delavin of Masbate, I'm inspired by her drive to pursue her dreams, not letting bashers stop her. But I just cannot see her wearing the crown, sorry :( I'm not a basher, I acknowledge she is beautiful, sweet, talented, kind, and smart. But I just don't see the fierce, palaban aura that we all need in a Miss Universe candidate. Never thought being baby-faced could be a disadvantage.

But anyway, if Ayn is slaying while breaking barriers and stereotypes, why can't Kisses, right? Kisses did well in every interview she handled. Although, I really didn't like her runway challenge where her hands were stuck on her waist. Good thing her walk improved in the swimsuit competition. Despite getting bashed and doubted, she fights with courage and passion, and that's something we can all learn from--whether we're part of Kissables or not.

Who will win tomorrow? I just can't wait to find out :)

I really wish I have the budget for a KTX pass so I could watch the coronation night in real-time. Sigh. That's 600 pesos! I'd rather spend it on samgyup. HAHA my love for food beats my love for pageants, even when I once dreamt to be Miss Universe myself lol.

How about you, guys? Who are your favorites? Who are your bets? Comment down below :) (wow youtube lang? haha)

Regardless of who wins, let's support her way to the crown. :) Go, proudly raise the Philippine flag, Miss Universe PH 2021!

PS. Photos came from Miss Universe Philippines' page, Philippine Star, and PeoPlaid. And I thank MS Paint because that's where I combined some of the photos haha.

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rainydaysketches · 3 years

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Family Movie Night Gone WRONG!! (Not Clickbait)

(So. Guess who discovered FrostIron the other day? Anyway, I’m operating under the headcanon that Loki was being controlled by Thanos during the attack on New York, and that Thanos has since been dealt with by Carol. No more giant grape ballsack-chin titan to worry about. Also sorry about the title I couldn't think of anything better.)

If you had told Tony back in 2012 that in five years, the Avengers would be divided, half of said Avengers would be on the run, Asgard would be destroyed, he’d be dating Loki of all people, and have joint custody over a teenager who just so happened to be Spider-Man, well, he would probably have punched you in the face with a metal clad fist and sent you to a psych ward.

But that was exactly where Tony found himself, in the newly repurchased Stark Tower’s penthouse, with Loki and Peter on either side of him on the couch while they watched a Star Wars film that Peter had been demanding they watch together for the past week. Tony and Loki occasionally pitched in with a, “that’s not how that works” when it showed something about science or space that wasn’t accurate. Peter just told them to shush with a laugh each time.

It was nice.

About halfway through the movie, Tony heard Peter’s stomach growl, and that made him realize that he was pretty hungry himself. He told FRIDAY to pause the movie and the lights came on. Loki offered to pick up some Chinese, and Peter and Tony readily agreed.

Peter ran off to use the bathroom after Loki teleported away, and Tony decided to grab another cup of coffee before either of them returned.

Before the coffee could even finish brewing, the elevator dinged. This gave Tony pause, because Loki seldom used the elevator, and no one else was in the tower today. Happy and May were on a date (much to Peter’s equal disgust and happiness), Pepper was in Hong Kong, Rhodey was on a short weekend vacation to visit family, and Thor and Bruce were in New Asgard.

While Tony was wondering who could be in the elevator, the doors opened. He brought his hand up near the arc reactor on his chest, ready to activate his suit if need be.

The first person to come out of the elevator was Rogers, followed by Wilson, Maximoff, Romanoff, and Barton. Tony felt his jaw drop, along with the hand hovering near the arc reactor. Rogers caught sight of Tony, in his sweatpants and Star Trek t-shirt that Peter had gotten him for his birthday, standing with his mouth hanging open in the middle of his kitchen. Rogers smiled. Tony didn’t return the sentiment.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he asked, which, in his opinion, was a perfectly reasonable response when someone walked into your living room, acting like they owned the place. Knowing Rogers, he probably thought he did. The smile fell from Rogers’ face, and the others behind him tensed.

“What do you mean, Tony? We got pardoned,” Rogers said, with the gall to sound confused.

“Okay, but why the hell are you in my tower?” Now all the rogues looked confused, and they were looking at him like he’d grown a second head.

“We were pardoned,” Romanoff stated, “So we came home.” The others nodded.

“Home?” Tony scoffed, “Home!? You gave up your chance to call Stark Tower ‘home’ when you betrayed my trust.”

“Come on, Tony,” Barton tried, “We were pardoned, and the first thing we do is come and see you, and this is how you repay us?” Tony picked up on the blatant guilt tripping, and it may have just worked if he’d done it before he met Loki or Peter, but not anymore.

Tony opened his mouth to respond, be before he could get a sound out, a soft voice spoke up behind him.

“Dad?”

The universe just loved to fuck with Tony Stark, didn’t it? He spun around to face Peter, turning his back on the rogues, because even if they literally stabbed him in the back, Peter would always be more important.

“Hey Pete. How about you, uh, sit on the couch while I sort this shit out.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the rogues. He heard an indignant sound come from someone behind him, but he chose to ignore it.

Peter looked wary, and he subtly made a web-slinging gesture with his hand. Tony shook his head minutely in response, to which Peter nodded and headed off to the couch.

When he turned back to the rogues, who were standing stock-still. Tony contemplated congratulating Peter for shocking the Avengers this bad later, but figured once Tony told him about it, Loki would do it for him, so he decided not to.

Barton was the first to break the silence. “You have a kid!?” Tony, just now remembering his coffee, grabbed a mug from the cabinet and poured himself some. He took a deep, long drink before he sighed and answered.

“Yeah, what about it?”

The team was shocked into baffled silence once again.

“We just… didn’t peg you for the type to want a kid?” Wilson said, the first time he’s spoken since they all got here. Tony almost didn’t hear the sharp intake of breath that came from the couch.

“I’ll have you know, that kid is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. I’d sooner let my company go bankrupt than lose him,” Tony told them, loud enough that Peter could hear him, even without his freaky spider-hearing.

The rogues unabashedly gaped at him.

Rogers shook himself out of his stupor first.

“Tony, how long have you had a kid?” He sounded like he couldn’t believe that Tony could possibly care for a child, which a younger Tony would have agreed with.

“About a year and a half now, right?” Tony looked to Peter for confirmation, and Peter nodded at him with a thumbs up, which was actually a lot more encouraging than it should have been. “Yeah, a year and a half ago I adopted him.”

“It’s still joint custody!” Peter called out with a devilish grin.

“Stop being a smartass, Peter!” That only caused Peter’s grin to get wider.

Before anyone else could speak, there was a bright flash of green light in the middle of the living room. Tony felt relief flood through him. Loki was back.

The rogues drew their weapons. Rogers grabbed the shield off his back, red magic danced around Maximoff’s fingers, making Tony take a few steps back with unease, Barton knocked an arrow, and Romanoff just suddenly had a knife. Wilson migrated to the back of the group, because he was in civilian clothes and didn’t have his wings.

The five of them stiffened when Loki began to speak. Tony did the opposite and relaxed.

“So, they didn’t have any more chow mein, which is ridiculous, because they are a Chinese restaurant, how could they just run out of chow mein?” Loki ranted while he rifled through the bags, most likely checking that everything was there. “Also, they kept saying that they ‘were closed’ and asking ‘how did you get in here,’ which, rude, but they did give us three free egg rolls, so-” Loki finally looked up and took in the scene unfolding in front of him.

“Am I interrupting something?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Tony shot Loki a look that hopefully conveyed his thoughts of, “please, for the love of god, help me.” Loki got the memo, but chose to roll his eyes and drop himself on the couch next to Peter instead.

“Traitor,” Tony mumbled to himself, before refocusing on the rogues, who still had all their weapons pointed at Loki, and subsequently, Peter.

“Tony,” Rogers started harshly, “Why is Loki here?” He said Loki’s name with so much contempt that Tony physically recoiled from it.

“Um, because he wants to be?” Tony told them, but it sounded a lot more like a question than he intended. “And because I let him in.” he continued, trying to make it not sound like he was unsure.

“So you’ll let a supervillain into Avengers Tower, but not the actual Avengers?” Barton burst out, “That’s bullshit!” Tony needed to take a deep breath and a sip of coffee before he could respond to that remark.

“Okay, first of all,” Tony shot a glance at Loki who was smiling bitterly at his lap in that way he did when he was feeling self-deprecating. “Loki is not a supervillain now, nor was he ever. And second, this is Stark Tower, not Avengers Tower, and you need to get it through your skulls that I will not welcome you back here. In fact, you are trespassing on private property as we speak, but I’ll let it slide if you leave. Right now.”

Tony could practically see the gears turning in everyone’s heads. It was as if they couldn’t even follow the simplest instructions.

“Tony,” Rogers began, and Tony internally groaned. He just wanted Rogers and his rogues gone. ”Loki is manipulating you. But you don’t have to do what he wants. Come with us, we’ll keep you safe.”

Now it was Tony’s turn to have gears turning in his head.

And when he finally figured out what Rogers was talking about, he burst out laughing. The rogues looked awkward, just standing there watching him laugh his ass off, and that only made him laugh harder.

“Y-you, pfft- you think h-he’s manipulating me?” And that was all that Tony could say before he fell into another fit of laughter.

Peter and Loki found this funny too, because Peter was trying - and failing - to stifle his own laughter and Loki had a fond grin on his face as he looked at Tony.

After a minute or two, he’d finally calmed down. During his laughing fit, the rogues had lowered their weapons slightly, but Maximoff’s magic had only grown and glowed brighter. “Loki is not manipulating me, nor is he controlling me, or doing anything else to me. So drop it.”

Maximoff’s stance shifted slightly, and she lunged at Tony. Before he could activate his armour, she had pinned him to the ground and put her fingers on his temples. He tried to struggle, but she was either surprisingly heavy, or she was holding herself down with magic. Most likely the latter.

More red magic gathered at her fingertips, and Tony felt his eyelids drooping shut, no matter how much he fought to keep them open. When his eyes fully closed, a searing pain seemed to stab him in the brain, but he was unable to scream.

A second later, the weight was thrown off him, the pain was gone, and he could open his eyes again.

Loki and Peter had both gotten off the couch and tackled Maximoff off of him. Peter had her pinned to the ground, even as she was thrashing about. Loki held out his hand for Tony to grab and Tony gratefully took it so Loki could haul him up.

Even once Tony was back on his feet, he didn’t let go of Loki’s hand. The rogues looked warily between Tony, Peter, and Loki, and raised their weapons once again. Tony let out a grumble and turned so he could drop his forehead on Loki’s shoulder. Loki used his unoccupied hand to comb his fingers through Tony’s hair. Tony gave an appreciative hum.

Peter managed to get off Maximoff without any serious injuries, so he went and stood next to Tony on the opposite side Loki was. Tony smiled at him and ruffled his hair.

Tony then glared at the rogues, Steve and Wanda especially. The former was helping the latter off of the floor, both glaring at all three of them. Romanoff stepped in front of Rogers and Maximoff, holding her hands up in faux surrender.

“How about we all calm down and talk about this?” She tried.

“Get out of my tower,” Tony growled, clutching Loki’s hand like a lifeline. Loki squeezed his hand back just as tightly.

The rogues must have realized how much of a fruitless endeavor this was, because they all backed off, though reluctantly. They all crowded back into the elevator and told FRIDAY to bring them back to the ground floor. The AI didn’t reply as she usually did, just shut the doors and brought them down.

Tony slumped in exhaustion.

“Okay, that’s officially too much excitement for what should have been a relaxing movie night.” His comment startled a laugh out of Peter, and Loki even let out a chuckle.

They all went back to their spots on the couch, this time with Chinese food, and started the movie back up. None of them stayed awake long enough to see the end.

#frostiron #irondad #spiderson #irondad and spiderson #i wrote this in under a day and it hasnt really been proofread but fuck it #fanfic #marvel #i dont think i have to say this but i will anyway #not starker

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ishouldreallybeelsewhere · 3 years

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okay so that loki video essay thing was going well, and then like a day into writing it i lost the hyperfixation so it's never gonna be finished. i still think it's alright, completely unedited, entirely a train of thought, i hope you like commas and pacific rim, it's only 2.8k

btw if something doesn't make sense, i was writing this while watching some video essays, and also haven't read it

Introduction

Loki is a show, well you know that, but a show that does everything right, until it doesn’t (crazy, I know). If you’re here, I assume you’ll already know a fair bit about it, but if you don’t, here’s a quick refresher. Spoilers for everything MCU.

Loki begins in 2012, technically, just after the Avengers go back through time from Endgame to meet themselves and grab the infinity stones. Unfortunately, the plan goes awri, and Loki ends up in possession of the Tesseract, the mind stone. With this, he teleports to a desert in [a place] and is quickly arrested and apprehended by the Time Keepers for ‘Crimes Against the Sacred Timeline.’ Sounds a bit cult-y if you ask me, and given that you’re stuck here, you will ask me. Essentially, his actions (taking the tesseract) were not supposed to happen. They created a branch, a new timeline, and, according to the TVA, if left unchecked, the timeline could cause a multiversal war that would result in the end of time. This is, to put it simply, a very interesting premise, and the first two episodes do a wonderful job of exploring the TVA and searching for the mysterious Loki variant who causes chaos and mischief, all while evading the time cops.

What is the TVA? Well, it’s the Time Variance Authority, which clears up nothing to those who haven’t seen the show. I would let a clip explaining it play, but I think I’d get a copyright strike, even though I’m fairly sure it’s within fair use. Regardless, the TVA is an organisation supposedly created by the Time Keepers, space lizards who brought together all of time into a singular sacred timeline. Had they not done this, time itself would have ended, how they did this is unexplained, and likely either impossible, or they are greater than gods in their power. Loki is immediately doubtful, but can’t deny that they must hold some power, because not only does his magic not work in the TVA, but infinity stones are useless too. Time is also stranger there too, more an idea as opposed to a set part of their reality. Many theorise that they reside within the quantum realm, which makes sense, as that is how one travels through time, at least in the marvel universe, but we can’t be sure until we get an explanation. Of course, I’m writing this long before I’ll see the finale, so who knows, perhaps I’ll have to rewrite it.

Now I’ve said all that without explaining what the TVA actually does. It’s pretty simple, similar to Stephen Hawking’s (???) ideas of the multiverse, every decision you make has the ability to make another timeline, one that is not part of the sacred way of time, and therefore must be pruned by the TVA before it grows enough to cause another multiversal war, despite multiverses being well-established in the MCU, but I know that’s different. Or perhaps the Time Keepers are lying (spoiler, they are, just not exactly in that way). Anyway, when someone makes a decision or takes an action that creates a new timeline, the TVA arrives. Minutemen arrest the ‘Variant’ responsible, despite their lack of intentional crime, and prune the new timeline, which we are told destroys it. Then Variants must stand trial for their crimes, in which they can either plead guilty or not, but really, that doesn’t make much difference, as they’re unable to make a case, let alone get away as innocent. Before they reach the court, however, Variants are dressed in TVA jumpsuits, have to sign off every word they’ve ever said, and a snapshot of their temporal aura is taken, for some reason. Yeah, it’s not really ever explained why they have to go through all that, like, why don’t they just prune them all, or just send them straight to court. It seems like they’re putting on a big show for nothing. Of course, if you have to go through all that, you probably won’t have time to think about the whys of your situation, which I’m sure the TVA uses to their advantage.

Now, we’re heading into real spoiler-y stuff, just in case anyone here hasn't watched episode three. If you haven’t, why are you here? Go, finish the whole series, and then come back. Alrighty. Now that everyone’s seen it all (apart from me at this point) we can continue.

Everyone working at the TVA is a Variant, and they don’t know it. The Time Keepers are said to have created everything within the TVA, every analyst, Minuteman, and whatever the other roles are. But that’s not true. They’re all variants who’ve been taken from their own timelines and had their memories wiped. This gives an explanation for the courtrooms, and the process to get into them. Robots will be melted from the inside out if they go through the temporal aura machine thingy, and I have a feeling it’s harder to reset a robot’s memories. Living beings are let through, and their actions in the courtroom could give a good overview of their strengths and intelligence, so it can be decided whether they’ll be pruned or ‘reset’ which we are told is killed, but with the information of them all being variants now available, is more likely having all their memories hidden, replaced with the idea that they’ve been at the TVA their whole lives, and that they were created by the timekeepers. Though why would space lizards create workers in the image of humans instead of like their own lizard-y selves. The TVA as a whole, as we are introduced to it, feels very cult-y. Things such as the videos Variants are shown upon being arrested, the whole ‘Sacred Timeline’ thing, the Time Keepers being viewed as almost gods, and that when one of the TVA’s own minutemen is told the truth (C-20) she is, well, removed. The TVA views Variants as criminals of the highest order. How dare they violate the sacred timeline?!!? Only, no variant knew that what they were doing was wrong, or that it even mattered, but if you’re late to work on a day where you weren’t supposed to be, then you’re removed from your timeline and charged. The sentence? Essentially death, or removal of all your memories and being lied to about everything, which might be worse depending on your stance on that kind of thing.

Anyway, the minutemen themselves are another issue that the TVA has. They respond with violence at every available opportunity, like when a young french child from the 1500s walks into a church, the first thing a minuteman does is reach for his weapon. This is also the scene where we’re introduced to my favourite character, Mobius, but more on him later. For now, I need to stay on track and keep in mind this part of the view has to remain consistent. All I can think of are the nerds I split. It seems I have an inability to stay on topic, however, I’m gonna try so you have fun keeping up with that.

Loki stood trial for crimes against the Sacred Timeline and, like any logical person may in that situation, relentlessly questions the validity of his conviction. The answers he’s provided with he just,, kind of,, disagrees with, which is fair. The concept of the TVA and the sacred timeline as a whole is absurd to him, as who would a god serve?

Part one: Glorious Purpose

Loki, in his own words, it ‘Burdened With Glorious Purpose.’ I’m so glad no one but me is gonna read this draft cuz I managed to spell many of those words wrong. His glorious purpose, in his eyes, is becoming the ruler of all, removing free will and choice from those beneath him, in a twisted attempt to make it easy for all living things. He believes in free will, at least, the free will of himself, and also believes that, out of everyone in the universe, he is the one who is right, the one who can make the world better, that is his burden. Now, you may look at that and think, ‘hey, for a god of mischief, that doesn’t seem very mischievous,’ and you’d be right. It isn’t. He’s evil, like, without a doubt, an evil person in his ideals and views of the universe, however, the change from mischief to villainy was rapid, as it’s shown that he was D.B. Cooper, and, when asked, said it was because he was ‘young and lost a bet to Thor’, which, like, okay, but that was the 60s or something. 50 years aren’t a lot in the face of 1,500, but a lot can happen then

Part something: ethics

So, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m a pretentious asshole, and with that comes three years of philosophy classes and a superiority complex, though perhaps that comes from the whole leftist thing. Anyway, as per usual, I got sidetracked. I’m watching a really good video atm, so lots of things are happening in my head right now. Back to being pretentious, I’m going to be talking about ethics, fun, and how that relates to the TVA, the sacred timeline, Kang, sorry, he who remains. Regarding the whole Kang thing, I haven’t read a single Marvel comic since I was a member of the comic book club 4(???) years ago. Gods, I’m so old. Yup Percy Jackson took up too much of my childhood. Sidetracked again! I apologise, anyway, everything I know about Kang the Conqueror comes from Tumblr, so I’m not going to spend any time talking about any parts of the character that aren’t shown in the show. I really want to be writing about Doctor Who right now but I have my notes up so I’m gonna do this. Okay, right. Ethics. I hope I don’t go into free will right now because I will never stop going on about that. Anyway, let's look at the TVA, ignoring Kang, not for simplicity, but to see if the ends do in fact justify the means as Mobius said. And by that I mean, if what employees of the TVA think is true, are their actions justified? Finally got to the point, after how many words? Too many, anyway, let’s start from the start (kinda).

In an actual, proper, organised essay, I think that whole last paragraph was supposed to be 1 (one) sentence long, maybe. I have been writing year nine level essays for many years, despite not being in year nine for many, many years, so, be glad you’re reading something I’m interested in. Back to the topic at hand, please. Sorry I just got distracted again. I shouldn’t have Tumblr open atm. Anyway, what are the TVA’s means? So, I’ve already explained what the TVA is, and what it does, but let’s use a fun example to show what they really do. Imagine you’re a kid (or maybe you are a kid, so imagine you’re a younger one) and you just got home from school. You just made an awesome new friend who believes in you and loves your art. This sparks your interest in art, leading to countless pieces, days and days spent drawing and painting and having a great time. Your art begins to take hold on the world, speaking to people, letting them believe in themselves, thousands upon thousands of people inspired to start their own art, to rebel against the system of capitalism and teach people that there’s more to life than a job. This begins the global radicalisation of the working class, and with that, rebellion and the downfall of capitalism. I’m in a good mood rn, feeling optimistic, so don’t worry about what’s happening. Anyway, with the downfall of human exploitation and eradication of poverty comes a branch in the Sacred Timeline, and as the root of it is you as a child making a friend, your 5-year-old self just committed a crime that, according to the TVA, is worthy of what they believe to be actual death, like, being pruned.

Now, this was a very umm, off-the-top-of-my-head example, and entirely makes no sense, but give me two seconds and I’ll remember my original point. Right. The risk of allowing the downfall of capitalism is the end of all time. Always. Maybe? But, in the eyes of the TVA, kidnapping a 5-year-old, putting them through a dehumanising process to be shoved in a courtroom and being accused of crimes against the sacred timeline, and what was the crime? Making a goddamn friend. As a child. Being supported in art. Doing what you enjoy, destroying oppressive systems that will eventually be the downfall of us all and so entwined with all the problems in the world that any chance of saving it revolves around its deconstruction. I’ve been hunched over too long and my back is really starting to hurt, but the essay must go on. And remember, the domino effect of that friendship never actually happened. The timeline was pruned before it could happen, so the crime is literally making a friend. Very extreme example sorry, but shock makes your point go across faster, and also sparks outrage, which I don’t want to happen, but with doing literally anything comes backlash, like stepping on the wrong leaf, or a butterfly. I hope you guys know that this is unplanned and probably unedited. Okay I need to watch Pacific Rim again. Okay imagine now they kill the child. Right. That’s likely what would happen. Children are weak (usually, Sylvie is just on another level of awesome) [author’s note, Crimson Peak is a horror movie and I’m very upset by that cuz now I won’t be able to watch it]. Alright, so, kill a child, or destroy all of time. Always. Maybe. The way we see the TVA in the first two episodes is through Loki’s eyes, as a cult-like lie with a cool retro/futuristic aesthetic (like Doctor Who, but more on that later). I have been sitting here for 4 hours and I can confidently say my cat is an asshole whose sole purpose in life is to want to come in right when I’m in the middle of a point only to not want to come in but allow me to lose exactly what I was about to say, meaning I’ve gotten next to nothing done. Hi, I'm back. I got distracted by My Little Pony and Pacific Rim. And checkers. Issues with pacing? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Okay, so, I’m going to say something possibly controversial. When the stakes are the endings of the entirety of time, it’s okay to let a child die, and technically they might not die they’d just be sent to be either devoured the void or saved by a ragtag team of loki variants. Which is not great. That might sound like I agree with the TVA, but trust me, I do not. Not in the slightest. I hate the slimy bastards. (I do love every single character though, like all of them are awesome) The prickly pricks will bury us all!!! I don’t agree with them because I think there is a better way to handle the multiversal problem and the issue that arises regarding the particular cause of the multiversal war. That made no sense. You’re really just gonna have to guess at this point, however, for the solution, we must look into the finale and the reasoning behind He Who Remains’ plan. I said I wasn’t going to talk about him, but I lied (rule number one). Basically, from what I understood of his plan (which wasn’t much, I’m pretty stupid) was that there were two options; option number one was to leave him there, looking over all of time, preventing free will, so that the infinite variants of him that would come from timelines wouldn’t once again attempt to conquer all of the timelines (though if there are infinite ones, how would that work? Just kidding, you’re not allowed to question this). He dictates all. There’s no such thing as free will, and if you dare veer off the path, you will be pruned, and your timeline destroyed. His plan is to hand that power over to Loki and Sylvie, because he’s getting old and has lived long enough. The other option (and the one that’s taken in the show) is to allow Sylvie to kill He Who Remains and let the multiverse unfold, allow free will and chaos to reign, with the possibility and established likelihood of the destruction of time itself. Now, just putting this out here, what if there was a third option? My proposition is based of knowing next to nothing and not having seen Loki in a while, and that is,

#loki #loki show #loki series #loki tv show #i don't even know what this is #uhhh i don't think i agree with all the points i made and i also used some very crap example #this is not a good peice of writing and it's from several months ago #if you talk to me about it i won't get back to you.

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butterflies-dragons · 4 years

Note

oh j0nryas know about balticon report, they just think he was being coy (asdjkahs same delusion with s/ns/ns), that he was rambling bc he was trying not to give spoilers. at this point he could go on live and say "no dumbasses there is no j0nrya, there won't be, there never was" (same w pedoships) and they will all be like "omg it is definitely happening in twow, look at how he's trying to divert our attentions, we are onto you george hehehe"

OK let’s review, again, chronologically, all the times that GRRM was being coy and trying to divert his readers’ attention regarding the ships you mentioned:

The “It could be very different things to each of those involved” Alternative: “Mind you!”

JUNE 24, 1999 THE HOUND AND SANSA

Moreta12: I understand, I’ve heard your opinion on that. In ACOK, it seems that the relationship between the Hound and Sansa had romantic undertones. Is that true?

GeoRR: Well, read the book and decide for yourself.

Moreta12: I’ve read the book and I’ve debated those particular scenes with a few others. Half say that it’s romantic and half say it’s platonic. I’ve taken the romantic stance.

GeoRR: It could be very different things to each of those involved, mind you

Moreta12:Yes, but it seem like evidence points towards romantic undertones. Will the Hound appear later?

GeoRR: Yes, the Hound will be in STORM OF SWORDS. In fact, I just finished writing a big scene with him.

[Source]

The “Why are you asking me about Sansa’s sexuality?” Alternative 1: “Are you really asking me when your fave male adult character can fuck a girl, 15 years younger than him, without guilt?” Alternative 2: “Why are you so gross?”

OCTOBER 05, 1999 AGE OF SEXUAL RELATIONS IN WESTEROS

The nature of the relationship between Sandor and Sansa has been a hot topic on Revanshe's board. Sansa's youth has been one focus of the discussion. What is the general Westerosi view as to romantic or sexual relationships involving a girl of Sansa's age and level of physical maturity?

A boy is Westeros is considered to be a "man grown" at sixteen years. The same is true for girls. Sixteen is the age of legal majority, as twenty-one is for us. However, for girls, the first flowering is also very significant... and in older traditions, a girl who has flowered is a woman, fit for both wedding and bedding. A girl who has flowered, but not yet attained her sixteenth name day, is in a somewhat ambigious position: part child, part woman. A "maid," in other words. Fertile but innocent, beloved of the singers. In the "general Westerosi view," well, girls may well be wed before their first flowerings, for political reasons, but it would considered perverse to bed them. And such early weddings, even without sex, remain rare. Generally weddings are postponed until the bride has passed from girlhood to maidenhood. Maidens may be wedded and bedded... however, even there, many husbands will wait until the bride is fifteen or sixteen before sleeping with them. Very young mothers tend to have significantly higher rates of death in childbirth, which the maesters will have noted. As in the real Middle Ages, highborn girls tend to flower significantly earlier than those of lower birth. Probably a matter of nutrition. As a result, they also tend to marry earlier, and to bear children earlier. There are plenty of exceptions.

[Source]

The “Unreliable narrator - Part 1” Alternative: “The much more important lapse in memory that was promised”

JUNE 26, 2001 SF, TARGARYENS, VALYRIA, SANSA, MARTELLS, AND MORE

[GRRM is asked about Sansa misremembering the name of Joffrey’s sword.]

The Lion’s Paw / Lion’s Tooth business, on the other hand, is intentional. A small touch of the unreliable narrator. I was trying to establish that the memories of my viewpoint characters are not infallible. Sansa is simply remembering it wrong. A very minor thing (you are the only one to catch it to date), but it was meant to set the stage for a much more important lapse in memory. You will see, in A STORM OF SWORDS and later volumes, that Sansa remembers the Hound kissing her the night he came to her bedroom… but if you look at the scene, he never does. That will eventually mean something, but just now it’s a subtle touch, something most of the readers may not even pick up on.

[Source]

The “Unreliable narrator - Part 2” Alternative: “It doesn’t mean what you think it means”

OCTOBER 05, 2002 SANSA’S MEMORY

[Note: This mail has been edited for brevity.]

Well, not every inconsistency is a mistake, actually. Some are quite intentional. File this one under “unreliable narrator” and feel free to ponder its meaning

[Source]

The “Unreliable narrator - Part 3” Alternative: “Better ask yourself about Sansa’s psychological state”

NOVEMBER 27, 2007 GEORGE R.R. MARTIN ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

[Source]

The “The answer is No” Alternative: NO!

APRIL 15, 2008 FUTURE MEETINGS, POVS, ARYA’S ROLE, EASTERN LANDS, AND ASSASSINS

[Will Sandor and Sansa meet?]

Why, the Hound is dead, and Sansa may be dead as well. There’s only Alayne Stone.

[Source]

The “He’s a lot more dangerous than he is romantic” Alternative: “BUT THERE IS SAM!”

AUG. 21ST, 2009 AS SER JORAH MORMONT… - NOT A BLOG

weltraummuell: The Hound And I know from discussions on other board other women feel just the same about Sandor. He’s an absolute favourite with the ladies!

halfbloodmalfoy: The Hound LOL, you’re such a man. To many of us women, dangerous *is* attractive.

GRRM: The Hound But no one has any love for poor old Sam Tarly, kind and smart and decent and devoted…

[Source]

The “That’s interesting...” Alternative: “They are deeply troubled individuals, Harriet”

22 JUNE 2012 SWORD & LASER VIDEO PODCAST

Veronica Belmont: I’m a big fan of the Hound, myself, actually.

Tom Merritt: Of Sandor? Really?

Tom Merritt: The TV show has sort of played with that a little, and probably stoked those fires.

GRRM: Oh, sure. And I’ve played with it in the books. There’s something there, but it’s still interesting to see how many people have responded to it.

[Source]

The “I guess I don’t understand women” Alternative: “I'm shook”

JUNE 23, 2015 GRRM Q&A AT THE SCIENCE FICTION BOOKSTORE IN STOCKHOLM

[Source]

The “Comfort level of femininity” Alternative: “That's not a reference for romance”

MAY 29, 2016 BALTICON REPORT

My con friend asked about the Jon/Arya relationship again and brought her (impressive) Game book that had all of her references marked out with little flags. She brought up the Ygritte connections to Arya that Jon saw in her. George did not directly answer yes or no if there would be anything romantic between the two.

George did say, despite what readers see as clues to a romantic relationship between Jon/Arya in the books themselves, he did not confirm this so easily but inferred that what Jon saw in Ygritte was a comfort level of femininity. <<< She and I obviously discussed these comments after the meeting and this was the general feeling.

My con friend was referring to George explaining Jon’s perception: GRRM replied, “You know, I don’t think it’s a reference for that [for romance]. It’s a reference to a certain physical type, and a certain indication of what Jon finds admirable. It’s like someone who reminds you of, you know… Other people might be put off by this, you know, hair that looks like small rodents have been living in there. It doesn’t put him off because he is used to that.”

The “I was making up shit.” Alternative: "I wish I can delete that"

MAY 29, 2016 BALTICON REPORT

After the Coffee Talk just outside the room:

My Con Friend asked about Arya and Jon again. This time GRRM gave some very pointed replies:

GRRM finished (in the hallway now) by saying that he “wished some past things weren’t such strong foreshadowing,” and that he, “wished some new things had stronger foreshadowing then.”

Friend: Ok, if you foreshadowed something in the first book, like, really cleverly hidden, would you then follow through on that hint? For sure?..

GRRM: “Well, this goes with what I said before, the story changes and expands as I write. I wish I was able to go back and make revised drafts, but that’s not going to happen.”

Here is a transcript of the outline discussion and Jon/Arya portion of the coffee talk:

[question about Jon/Arya]

GRRM: “Alright, you’ve thought about this more than I have. I mean it’s simple, Jon is very fond of Arya. They were the two odd birds in the Stark family nest, here. They didn’t quite fit in with the others, they look like each other, they both had the brown hair, you know, as opposed to the auburn hair of Sansa and Bran and Rickon and Robb. So there was always that closeness between them. And, you know, Arya didn’t mind that Jon was a bastard, and Jon didn’t mind that Arya was a tomboy, so there is that closeness there.”

[question about Jon comparing his lover to his sister]

GRRM: “If he did it, uhm… I began writing these books in 1991, and, uhm, I worked on it in 91 and then I got a tv play, so I put it aside to really work on ‘Doorways’ tv pilot and did a tv show in 92-93. In 94 I returned to it [the books] and worked on it. You know, up till then, in my career as a writer, I’d always written the entire book before I opted for sale. That’s unusual. Most writers do chapters and an outline. They write a few chapters, they outline the rest of the book, give that to the publisher and the publisher says ‘oh okay, I’ll take that’.

“As some of you may have noticed, those who have been paying very, very carefully attention, I’m not good with deadlines. And, uh, and I’m not good with outlines, either. I always hated outlines. So with Fevre Dream and with Armageddon Rag and with Dying of the Light and all my novels, I wrote the entire book. I didn’t do chapters and outline. I sat down, I wrote a whole book, and I sent it to my agent and said ‘Look, here’s a whole book, and it’s finished’. That way I ran into no deadline, it was finished before it even went on the market. And it worked well for me. And my initial thought was to do this the same way, but what happened, you know, was in 1994, uhm, when I returned to it and I’m working on it and I’m very enthused about it and I say ‘I really wanna write these Game of Thrones books as the next part’. But I was still in Hollywood and I’d just lost all this groundwork on ‘Doorways’, I was still in… The studios and networks still wanna work with me, so I’m getting other offers, like ‘We want you to write this movie’, ‘we want you to do another tv pilot’. And, you know, I took a couple of them and was ‘Oh god, I gotta have to put the book away again’. Cause I have no deadline [for the book]. You know, when you think Hollywood, they will give you a deadline, you know, they say ‘here, son, write this movie, we want it in three months’.

“So, I said ‘look, if I wanna get back to being a novelist, I’m gonna have to sell this even though it’s not finished’. So I had my 200 pages of Game of Thrones at that point, but they wanted outline. I said ‘I don’t do outlines. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, I figure it out as I go. And that’s how I always did it.’ No, we had to have an outline. So I wrote two pages, a two-page thing about what I thought would happen. It’ll be a trilogy, it’ll be three books, Game of Thrones, the Dance with Dragons, and Winds of Winter. Those were the three window titles. And, uh, it’ll be three books and this’ll happen, and this’ll happen, and this’ll happen. And I was making up shit.

“And I had thought that those two pages were long forgotten, because, of course, the books did sell. They sold in the United States and in Great Britain, both. They sold for enough money that I didn’t have to take any more Hollywood games. So I was able to say ‘no’ around. I had a few less [?] to wind up in in 94 and 95. Once I had, I said ‘no, I don’t want any more movies or tv shows, I’m going to write these books now’. And I started writing the books. And in the process, I pretty much disregarded the outline. The characters took me off in entirely different directions. So, for 20 years I had forgotten that that two-page thing even existed. And then someone in my British publisher, HarperCollins, they got a new office building, uh, brand new offices, and new conference rooms, big conference rooms that they decorated with books and stuff like that. And they named the conference rooms after the writers, so one of the conference rooms [?], and they put up these plastic display cases, including the outline. The two-page outline, yes. [?], they didn’t ask my permission, they just put it up. And in that two-page outline, Jon and Arya become a romantic item.”

“You know, I don’t think it’s a reference for that [for romance]. It’s a reference to a certain physical type, and a certain indication of what Jon finds admirable. It’s like someone who reminds you of, you know… Other people might be put off by this, you know, hair that looks like small rodents have been living in there. It doesn’t put him off because he is used to that.””

[someone says they have 5 minutes left]

“You know, I was pretty pissed that that outline got out there. It should not have happened. Outlines and letters like that are meant only for the eyes of the editor. They shouldn’t go on public display. And, uh, they also [?] my papers on [?], all my papers and correspondence. You know, I’ve been sending that stuff there for years, and it’d be, you know, available for future scholars or whatever, just like the papers of many other writers. Somehow, in the back of my head I was like ‘yeah, 20 years after I’m dead some scholar will go in and find them’. They’re going in right now!” ”

[question if he is still going with the 1991 ending]

“Yes, I mean, I did partly joke when I said I don’t know where I was going. I know the broad strokes, and I’ve known the broad strokes since 1991. I know who’s going to be on the Iron Throne. I know who’s gonna win some of the battles, I know the major characters, who’s gonna die and how they’re gonna die, and who’s gonna get married and all that. The major characters. Of course along the way I made up a lot of minor characters, you know, I, uhm…Did I know in 1991 how Bronn, what was gonna happen to Bronn? No, I didn’t even know there’d be a guy named Bronn. I was inventing him along the way when I was writing, ‘Okay, he gets kidnapped. Let’s see, there are a couple sellswords there, their names are Fred and Bronn’.

“It was actually Bronn and Chiggen, and then one of them dies, I flipped a coin ‘okay, who dies? Chiggen dies, cause his name is stupid. Bronn is a better name, so I’ll keep Bronn’. And then Bronn became quite an interesting character and plenty of these characters take on minds of their own. They push to the front till you [?] speech and you think of a cool line and you give it to Bronn because he’s trying to talk, and now Bronn is somebody who says something cool. [?]. That’s how characters grow on you. “So a lot of the minor characters I’m still discovering along the way. But the mains-”

[question if he knows Arya’s and Jon’s fates]

“Tyrion, Arya, Jon, Sansa, you know, all of the Stark kids, and the major Lannisters, yeah.”

This report appears in the following sources:

fattest leech of ice and fire blog [Source 1]

asoiaf.westeros.org [Source 2]

westeros.org [Source 3]

The “Unreliable narrator - Part 4” Alternative: “I think I had enough...”

DECEMBER 2016 ASKING GEORGE R.R. MARTIN ABOUT SAN/SAN

The night of the Blackwater, yes. Ahhh... Well, I'm not going to give you a straight answer on that hahaha... Uhmmm, but I would say that ahhh... you know a television show and a book each has its own strengths and weaknesses; there a re tools that are available to me as a novelist, that are not available to people doing a television show. And of course there are tools available to them, that are not available to a novelist, I mean they can lay in a soundtrack, they can do special effects, they can do amazing things that I can't do, I just have words on paper. What can I do, well I can use things like the internal narrative, I can take you inside of territories... thoughts, which you can't do in a TV show... Ahhh... You just have the words they speak, you see them from outside because the camera is external, while prose is internal, and I have the device known as "unreliable narrator"... Ahhh... Which again, they don't have. So, think about those two aspects when you consider that night of the Blackwater.

[Source]

Most of these questions make me think of Nabokov having to clarified, regarding Lolita, that he didn’t write a romance..........

So there’s that, everyone can draw their own conclusions. God knows that in this fandom: “We look up at the same stars, and see such different things.”

Thanks for your message.

#anon ask #grrm #jon and arya #sansa deserves better #the things i have to read...#poor george #poor nabokov

68 notes · View notes

gayathreya · 3 years

Text

leftist suriya characters appreciation post

since soorarai pottru, been thinking more about all the explicit leftist characters suriya has played in his career. and i actually mean explicit - characters that are supported by the narrative framing and structure and not just my own headcanons and stuff or a throwaway generic goody-shoe typical hero line. i have been itching to talk about this cos it’s obviously in my field of interests

suriya has played 4 openly various brands of leftist now, and that’s pretty cool! i love that none of them are cookie cutter personalities of each other, they all have their own select trait. this post is a toast to them;

michael vasanth (ayutha ezhuthu, 2004)

vimalan (maattraan, 2012)

iniyan (thaanaa serndha koottam, 2018)

maara (soorarai pottru, 2020)

[small write up on each character with pics behind the cut]

*****

1. michael vasanth (ayutha ezhuthu, 2004)

so michael was his first, said to be inspired by an actual university popular marxist student leader, george reddy. michael is very obviously somewhere along these lines - he himself is within the film known as the leftist student leader on campus with a huge following, much to the chagrin of his professors who want to stamp that out of him. he’s openly engaged in campus politics as well as politics outside, and he’s most definitely no weak willed liberal because he has no problems with violence or direct action, which he organises. he organises villagers to stand against others on their own feet, never once preaches about lying down and taking it easy or playing polite. which was nice to see lol i hate liberals who have morals about property damage but in ayutha ezhuthu, michael clearly doesn’t give a fuck. he and his group break things and smash cars and lorries on their way and threaten physical violence on their opponents too which is the way it should be because to him human lives are worth more than any property or vehicular damage. he never shies away from that. hell yes to violence and structural damage!

probably the most definite trait of michael compared to other suriya leftist characters is that michael still believes in the establishment and electoral politics, which u don’t particularly see his other leftist ones talk about. but here, michael works within the system, and trusts it to bring change if u put in the effort into that. though, it’s not as frustrating as it sounds cos michael’s work is not geared towards other liberals, but in villages and rural districts where he goes to spread word, and makes them choose their own leadership to represent. it’s way more marxist aligned and ~rise of the proletariat~ here instead cos he bypasses liberal bougie nonsense and never once is his voice used for that, but used towards and for the working class directly to both take up arms and resist violently themselves + hold ranks for themselves and choose their own leaders to influence their local politics/protect their environment.

michael is fundamentally very marxist, with a dose of direct action plus violent resistance if need be, and supports organised proletariat uprising within an established political system playing towards electoral politics

(of course, a point to note in why this isn’t as frustrating as it sounds as mentioned above is cos this film was released in 2004. would michael still believe in the establishment and electoral politics now? things in 2020 are very different with all of us more aware of things around us and globally, it’s definitely a debate to be held. i doubt he will, since he’s not a pacifist or liberal. he’d say fuck electoral politics, all my homies hate electoral politics)

2. vimalan (maattraan, 2012)

second very openly communist character he played. prob gone a bit forgotten for others since he does die halfway through the film (which itself isn’t a favourite of anyone either, fans or neutrals) rip but can’t go by without mentioning cos i remember liking this character a lot and i teared up in the cinema first watch when he died. i was mad they killed the suriya i loved instead of the other one whom i found annoying lmao

vimal supports workers’ strikes and unions against bosses, even when that boss is their own shitty father. this automatically makes him stand out instantly considering he is sympathetic to the working class despite at the cost of his father’s annoyance with him. he’s also the first character suriya plays who’s explicitly anti-capitalist with line(s) about it, since michael had no canon lines regarding capitalism from what i recall. vimal outright does.

the leftist imagery tied to vimal the most is che, which is a nice touch. his room has at least one poster of him, and his phone’s wallpaper is also him. u can also see bhagat singh and ho chi minh books on his shelf. so.. safe to claim where vimal’s political ideologies are. it’s both tied in pictures and him siding with workers for their rights against corporations, since he obviously likes revolutionaries. vimalan was a class traitor and a supporter of the working class poor bb tragically gone too soon. ilu u didn’t deserve your terrible fate, sweet commie good boi :(

3. iniyan (thaanaa serndha koottam, 2018)

iniyannnnnn i love him and i think it’s a suriya char with one of the best character arcs in his whole career. mostly cos he had a very distinct ‘’yes i want to work for the government and change things from within’’ phase which gets squashed over the course of the film. we see him start off obviously in a very blatantly communist neighbourhood in a song that is also very specifically anti-establishment/politicians with a lot of hard resistance vibes. the entirety of sodakku is a very good introduction to him and what he stands for - in general the film promises upon wealth disparity, useless bougie politicians, and the rest of us being crushed under them.

what happens to him at the end of the movie is FANTASTIC because he no longer gels with what he wanted at the start of the movie. iniyan’s key leftist trait to me is that he’s the most anarchist of suriya characters, varying from other leftist suriya characters. he refuses to work with government powers and authorities, he looks down on their entire establishment and institutions (he does not at the start of the film, which is vital cos again, he wanted to work alongside them at first), and depends more on the good will of individual people over job titles, while clearly engaging in mutual aid and distributing wealth. these are very distinct anarchist ideals. i’d still peg him as anarcho-communist but would say he leans more towards anarchy and progressing on mutual aid over official state resources or state people for any kind of positive change since his faith in them has pretty much diminished by the climax. he does not give a shit about politicians, cops, or any kind of authorities at all, leaving them in the dust to raise his black flag and do his own anarchist hot shit.

iniyan is a good example of an anarchist arc for me in tamil cinema in simple commercial terms without heading too deep into actual words and phrases in a big hero movie, cos it’s also very easy to explain to anyone the shift in his ideas and his eroding faith in institutions with power. good for him!

4. maara (soorarai pottru, 2020)

this should be fresh in everyone’s memory, but yes, a character who is obviously in your face about it since he has an actual line - ‘’you’re a socialite, i’m a socialist’’ which caused all of us with good taste to whoop and cheer. plus he was very sexy in this whole scene, so what a bonus. it’s the most explicit thing said by him in the film, but there are also other little things peppered into his speech and background imagery showing u the kind of person maara is.

he gets married to bommi in a self-respect wedding ceremony. no priests or any kind of traditional hindu iyers/chants involved. u see it clearly with a periyar pic hanging behind him explaining who he is. he wears black a lot in the film, which fits him being a periyarist so i’d label him as such and consider it his standout trait from other leftist characters suriya has played previously because this is the only character with explicit periyar symbolism (i kid u not i saw multiple sanghis being very angry suriya dressed in black in this movie and were harassing him on twitter constantly since sp released. die mad, uglies). obviously, this also fuses well with the little things we see of him implying he’s ~lower caste~ like his in-laws being embarrassed about him on behalf of their own caste, and paresh sanitising his hands after shaking hands with maara on the plane, which is not subtle at all and trademark casteist behaviour about touching someone ‘’lesser’’ than you and u view them as ‘’dirty’’ or beneath you. as well as maara’s remark about breaking the class and caste barrier during his radio interview. being a periyarist fits seamlessly.

there’s also a bts vid of suriya on his bike where you can see an ambedkar pic pasted onto the side. i can’t remember any scene in the film where u can see his bike from this angle but it doesn’t matter, cos u can definitely tell the kind of person maara is and how he was envisioned as a character - an explicit socialist and periyarist, with a natural fondness for ambedkar too since ofc they overlap as many do irl as well. it is very in tune with his background in the film and i liked seeing the tiny aspects of these things seeded within the movie throughout from beginning to end. it’s explicit in a way that isn’t jarring or artificial, and a nice layer to him and feel endeared to since maara is a great character. u support him all the way with him being unquestionable in his stance and ideology. the sexiest leftist suriya character, if i say so myself, ahem.

/////

5. ngk (ngk, 2019)

bonus: THIS IS IT. THE BIGGEST SIKE. THE BIGGEST WHIPLASH. THE BIGGEST BASTARD.

it’s here cos damn, when they released that first look, i completely lost my shit cos that poster was sooo heavily che inspired and very, very obviously marxist. cue me thinking that holy shit suriya is openly playing some kind of marxist guerilla revolutionary in ngk and he’s gonna be some brand of violent radical leftist i’m gonna fall in love with. the beret, the raised fists, the red.. i was ready to be head over heels for this guy.

except of course, none of this was true, cos once the film released, u know that poster was only meant to signify how his village looked up to him before he sold them all out. it’s literally just a mural on the wall where a kid stares up at him in a larger extended poster. he COULD have been that character, but ngk’s character arc was a negative character arc and his moral downfall from the start to the end of the film, sacrificing all he stood for to arrive at his end point which was just dragging his village and all the youngsters who believed in him to the pits before jumping party to the winning group and abandoning all of them after manipulating them to act in his favour to gain sympathy. not to mention, also selling out to corporate tools to harness their power and influence in order to rise to the top himself, something he very openly states at the beginning of the film to his mum and wife that working like that is no way to live. he has a full reverse by this point, compared to how ngk was introduced to us as an audience with that first look of him.

the marxist poster was a complete 180 to how ngk falls on the spectrum at the end, but it was a great ride nevertheless and at least one thing was still true - i still fell in love with him cos he was such an asshole bastard but still so hot i had to give in. biiiicchh. i love u, non-leftist regressive jerk. u may have pulled the biggest sike on me, but.. my heart is yours, slut <3

*****

ok that’s really it and all i wanted to say so hopefully at least a few people read this lmafooo. i do think these characters and time have sort of seeped into suriya over the years as evident by his shifting left in the last couple of years, and openly also saying he has had a lot of perspective changes on things around him. he has been noted in recent interviews saying stuff like how he’s in favour of a cashless society, talking about a whole new level of poverty class being created during this pandemic. his written articles/statements/agaram related speeches takes jibes at india’s education system being brahministic/casteist in nature and how it creates barriers for the lowest strata of society while also being very sensitive about student suicides, showing understanding of it as a systematic failure and not an individual one, courts not functioning for justice, not demonising protests as it’s the only act left for the voiceless, etc. it’s nice. i wouldn’t go as far as to call him a leftist until he proves that to me (suriya is still very much in that liberal zone of appreciating the police and military institutions so i will never consider him one of us until he sheds these allegiances and rethinks his stance on them in society), but i’d say he’s definitely the furthest left of all prominent actors in tamil cinema as no one else really has said or written the things that he has, for which i’m very proud of him.

so keep up the good work and hot shit comments and ballsy articles, suriya, i look forward to u shifting further left and pissing off everyone from right wing patriotic assholes, to centrist bootlickers, and even cowardly liberal pacifists. i believe in u and i hope he crosses that steep liberal curve soon since we were all there at some point as well.

that’s all goodbye i love suriya thanks for reading

#hooo lads finally wrote this like i wanted to! target audience? spare target audience??#suriya #tamil cinema #kollywood #mix #mine*#commentary #politics

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thehonestbanana · 4 years

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Hi I’m bored let’s go through Onision’s shitty FAQ.

https://focal.bio/onision-faq

Is Onision married? Yes, to a man named Kai.

It sounds so cold and bitter doesn’t it? Honestly all his answers are cold and robotic. Also yeah he’s married, he almost left this husband after he just gave birth to their daughter whom he cried after finding out the baby was gonna a girl. Also cheated many times.

Is Onision vegan? Onision eats mostly vegetables, eggs, salmon & fruit.

So fucking no...you’re a pescatarian? What the fuck Greg. No. If you eat salmon, which is an animal, which is meat(his own words) you’re not VEGAN. Vegan eats NO animal products whatsoever. Also who gives a fuck what you eat greg.

What does "Onision" mean? It means "One divine community" or "Japanese demon heaven" depending on how you break down the word.

Hehehehehe.

This is cannon don’t @ me. I know but let me laugh at this.

Where did Onision grow up? In Washington State, mostly in the city of Auburn.

Eh who cares.

What Is Onision's age? Onision was born in 1985.

SKSKSKS YOURE 34 GREG! YOURE HOPING YOUR FANS AREN’T OLD ENOUGH TO COUNT! YOU. ARE. 34. That doesn’t make you look younger Greg!

How old is Onision's husband? Onision's husband was born in 1994.

Creepy ass. That looks bad, he’s trying to also them look younger by saying the year and not their ages. Nah Greg. If anything it makes you seem older.

Is Onision a dad? Yes, Onision is a father.

Why yes, my programming says I am, indeed, a father.

See what I mean?! He sounds so robotic. And yeah unfortunately he is a father to two beautiful kids he doesn’t give to fucks about :c

Who is Gregory Jackson? Gregory Jackson is the name Onision's mom had him go by in school.

....just say it’s your old last name. Or your moms maidan name. See what I mean?! Like I know this is grge but my god. He speaks in third person, just say “it’s my moms maidan name.” Also who gives a fuck?!

Is Onision dead? As of 7/12/2020 Onision remains alive.

Actually Greg your career has been dead since 2007. Also wtf was the point of adding this?

When was Onision married? Onision was married in 2012.

When his husband was freshly well into his 18’s 18 and he was 26. And then cheated on many times.

Here comes the juicy shit boyos, gal pals, non binary buddies.

What is Onision's stance on circumcision? Onision feels it is up to each individual to decide what they want for their own body.

This is an FAQ about gag so technically it fits...but.... what does this gotta do with anything? I guess he’s still bitter he is and it’s fucked up or something. Either way it’s such a random thing to bring up...

Why is Onision called onion boy? Many apps correct the word "Onision" to "onion" so the nickname came naturally.

Lmao fuck off greg. Not at all. It’s like he’s trying to take back the word: whatever you say fuckface.

What is Onision's name? James

Greg Daniel Jackson Avowhogivesa shit James Jackson. More names than Christopher Christian Ricardo Christine Weston Chandler.

What is Onision's Instagram?That would be @OnisionPrime

I swore it was taken down, but then I remember he got it back and screeched some honesty shit.

How tall is Onision? 5 feet 11 inches

More like 5’8

Does Onision have siblings? Yes, two sisters plus a half-sister.

What happened to your black foster brother Greg? You brought him up like once... where’s he?

Is Onision Canadian? No, Onision was born in the United States.

His ex who he abused mentally emotionally and maybe even physically was from Canada. Also who the hell cares Greg.

This ones my favorite.

Is Onision related to Shane Dawson? No, they are not blood related.

HES ALWAYS GOTTA BRING UP SHANE NO MATTER WHAT😂😂 GOD HES SO PATHETIC!! HE STILL LIVES IN 2007 WHERE HE WAS KNOWN AS DISCOUNT SHANE DAWSON OH GOD HOW EMBARRASSING!!!

What is Onision doing now? Onision is an adult model and a music producer.

Nooo he’s a “p0rN sTar” and music producer my hot ass. You’re a grown ass man who plays the same 3 keys on your crusty keyboard and talks, not sing, not rap... monotone stupid bullshit. You’re also not a PORN STAAAAR like you claim you need to do porn to be a porn star. Showing your flat misshapened ass in the same pose 50 times doesn’t make you a porn star it makes you a sad grown ass man who refuses to get a real job to support his family.

Now... my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE.... drum roll pls!?

There it is. The one successful thing Greg has ever done with his life. He holds onto that more than he holds onto Shane’s name. He’s “best known” now as a fucking predator. Look up his name the articles about him being such is all we see. The first thing! Greg has to hold on to his one twinkle of fame, the one thing he can say was successful in his decade old “career.” It’s so sad how much he has to remind everyone of this stupid video that’s not even good, it’s aged just as well as Greg has. Normally in a FAQ sure I can see this being something someone puts, but Greg holds onto this shitty video more than he ever held his kids. He stuck to this shitty kind of humor and never evolved, that’s why he’s irrelevant and always will be, he stays in his time.

God he’s been active for a decade. 10+ years and this is his life... he went from making one successful video to shoving things up his ass for 2 bucks. Technically .000000008 of a cent because he always has goddamn sales. He’s seriously desperate for money he went back to Patreon; with all the sales he thinks more people will come and he can get more customers, but no ones buying his shit. He literally is at rock bottom now, next month is the last checkup on the wetlands and it’s clear he’s desperate for the money, that’s also why he came back to youtube after he left for the millionth time. He’s so desperate it’s pathetic at this point, he rather expose himself online than get a real job to pay for his dumbass.

Anyway... TLRD: his FAQ is stupid, he holds onto shit forever, sounds like a damb robot.

#anti onision #onision

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recentanimenews · 3 years

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ESSAY: How Does My Hero Academia Fit Into Global Superhero Culture?

In 1989, Batman became the first film to make over $40 million in its opening weekend. In 2002, Spider-Man became the first film to make over $100 million in its opening weekend. In 2007, Spider-Man 3 hit over $150 million. In 2012, The Avengers nabbed over $200 million. And in 2019, Avengers: Endgame got over $350 million. Despite the fact that there have been concerns over “superhero movie fatigue” for literal decades now, it’s a genre that shows no signs of slowing down. As its universes expand on streaming services like Disney+, it’s apparent the age of the cinematic hero might be an indefinitely lengthy one.

As Marvel Comics luminary Stan Lee once said: “The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.” In that quote, it seems our destiny is almost sealed — we crave heroes and we crave their stories and we crave their sequels.

This is the environment in which My Hero Academia was born.

My Hero Academia is, first and foremost, a superhero story. One could argue that most narratives of its ilk are superhero tales — anime like Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, and others are full of good guys shutting down malicious attempts at local or world domination — but My Hero Academia embraces the iconography, both thematic and physical, of the superhero in a way that many other stories don’t. In fact, it might be one of the purest explorations of that kind of universe ever in fiction. It’s a world where heroism is practically currency, where roughly 80 percent of the earth’s population is imbued with some kind of inherent genetic power.

Populating your superhero story with powerful people instead of going the typical cinematic route of having one or two supernatural characters with a supporting cast of everyday folk might have been subversive 20 years ago. But in the age of the Avengers, where multiple heroes cross in and out of each other's storylines and the narrative objective was to eventually wrangle them all in one mega-movie, My Hero Academia fits comfortably. That doesn’t render it as uninteresting, though. Instead, rather than build to the issues that will inevitably crop up in a world full of Supermen, these themes are inherent in the story.

As such, most of the plotlines have to do with the idea of rampant heroism and the backlash that it would create. Plenty of superhero films address this (multiple Batman movies make the case that if there were no Batman there would be no Joker), but in My Hero Academia it is a constant struggle. Overhaul, wearing a variation of a 17th-century plague doctor mask, looks at these “Quirks” as if they’re a disease. Stain is against superheroes using their status for fame. Tomura Shigaraki wishes to destroy society as we know it, hating its values and its borderline divine treatment of figures like All-Might. These patterns are not just repeated in My Hero Academia, but inevitable. They are anime embodiments of that “superhero fatigue” article I shared above, except in this case they hurt and destroy in their attempts to find an alternative to the super status quo, rather than write essays in The New York Times.

It’s certainly an enthralling formula, though: My Hero Academia continues to be a best seller and has won numerous awards. Its anime has been similarly well-received. Despite the fact that superhero films very rarely have the same box office prominence in Japan as they do in America, My Hero Academia has been able to make an impact. That might be because, at its core, My Hero Academia adapts the ethos found in a hero that many Japanese creators really do enjoy: Spider-Man.

Kohei Horikoshi, My Hero Academia’s creator, loves Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films. Creator of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Hirohiko Araki gushed over his love of Spider-Man 2 to director Sam Raimi during an interview. Yusuke Murata, illustrator of One-Punch Man, has done some absolutely amazing work when it comes to posters for Peter Parker’s cinematic adventures. Hideo Kojima, a video game designer whose creations are absolutely inspired by anime, called Into The Spider-Verse a “great masterpiece” and was “moved” by Spider-Man 2. After it became the best-selling game to be developed in the West but funded by Sony since 1998, Japanese game developers voted Marvel’s Spider-Man as their 2018 game of the year. So why the embrace of this particular character?

Journalist Kuremasa Uno told the Japanese site Business+IT that it’s because Japanese youth are more accustomed to embracing younger heroes. Since so much of Spider-Man’s Hollywood journey deals with him experiencing problems as a teenager and young adult, he fits in among the protagonists of series like Gundam or Naruto. Hideo Kojima even told Famitsu that Spider-Man is “similar to Japanese heroes,” as he has “worries.”

The aspect of youth is particularly interesting, as it’s what often renders heroes like Spider-Man to be the most relatable of all of their peers and rivals. In the comic book world, age tends to warp characters, turning them into beacons of impossible standards rather than troubled everymen. We have little in common with the hulking, aging Batman snapping bones in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. We are enthralled with the story on a narrative level. Even the legendary curmudgeon of the comic book industry, the supremely talented Alan Moore, found The Dark Knight Returns fascinating because it gave a hero a chance to end, rather than cycle through an eternal series of escapades. If you know Moore’s stance on heroes, that’s high praise, but it’s hard to connect with him no matter how cool he looks taking down the Mutant Leader.

In youth we find common ground. We all grow up, and for the most part, we all experience that mix of angst, desperation, and uncertainty that comes with finding yourself on a bullet train to adulthood. In my interview with Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered The World, the writer/historian affirmed these feelings as especially true in anime: “It doesn’t look at adolescence as a lesser form of adulthood and it doesn’t condescend to the young people experiencing problems.” That is true of My Hero Academia, which treats Midoriya’s teenage problems as valid and worth concern, and is also true to Stan Lee’s affinity for Spider-Man: “He’s the one who’s most like me — nothing ever turns out 100 percent OK; he’s got a lot of problems and he does things wrong, and I can relate to that.”

So perhaps it is in collecting a cast of characters that, like Spider-Man, are all dealing with youthful problems that Horikoshi found the fantastic formula for My Hero Academia. It’s a world with teachers and Pro Heroes, but there is no real equivalent of a Justice League, no impenetrable class of demi-gods to impart moral lessons on not just younger heroes but the world at large.

Instead, much like in real-life youth, the characters of My Hero Academia and the class of 1A must discover those lessons for themselves. With that, the reasons for the aforementioned creators’ adoration of films like the Spider-Man trilogy and Into the Spider-Verse seemingly become more clear. Though these films feature a ... ummm ... supportive supporting cast, the integrity must come from the hero alone in the end, no matter how tough their obstacles become. You are born with Quirks, but how you choose to implement them for the good of mankind is up to you. Great power, great responsibility, etc.

My Hero Academia and Spider-Man are not a 1:1 comparison as, again, the basics of its world and the attributes of its cast fit it more firmly with late-term Avengers films where dozens of heroes interact in a spectacle created by the sheer existence of their number. My Hero Academia rarely feels as lonely as Spider-Man tends to be. But in capturing the relatable qualities of adolescence and focusing on the “quirks” of what is essentially high school life, it does manage to hit some of the same high notes, notes that I imagine contributed greatly to its popularity.

Does that mean All-Might is an Uncle Ben character, with his “Now it’s your turn” point to Midoriya serving a similar purpose to the “Great responsibility” speech? Eh, a little bit. But in relating it to the superhero genre that currently forms an entertainment monolith around the world, especially when it has to do with the character of Spider-Man, we start to unlock some of the reasons why My Hero Academia has been such a powerhouse series over the past few years. You can see just as much of Midoriya in Peter Parker as you can in guys like Naruto or Asta — characters that aren’t relatable simply because they’re young, but because we connect to their experiences of youth, experiences that are somehow both deeply specific and also beautifully universal.

Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter!

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features.

By: Daniel Dockery

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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peachdoxie · 4 years

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I get where you’re coming from on the likes/reblogs post but also you aren’t really a content creator (correct me if I’m wrong) so this issue doesn’t effect you as much? I don’t think it’s wrong to ask people to think about how we as a community interact with and support artists on tumblr and to consider if there’s anything else we could be doing. It’s really hard to make it as an independent artist and I don’t think it’s wrong for artists to advocate for themselves

It's not an issue of content creators advocating for themselves and asking people to reblog their posts. I take issue when they basically guilt trip people into reblogging posts by saying things like "We're doing this for free. The least you can do is reblog our content." or "Tumblr has moved from a culture of sharing to a culture of consumption." or "People aren't reblogging original content anymore which is why tumblr is dying."

The first statement is technically true in that engaging with content encourages creators to produce more, but so often the posts I see act entitled about it, that if I see something I like I should automatically reblog it. No. There are any number of reasons I or anyone doesn't want to reblog something, and they're all completely valid.

The latter two statements are complete bullshit. Consumption culture has always been part of the internet. Having the ability to share something doesn't change that. We consume so much content every day on the internet and it is literally impossible to share everything we like. Tumblr has a post limit. Twitter has a post limit. I'm not certain if Facebook does, and to my knowledge Instagram doesn't, but there are other restrictions in place for posting activity on various sites. It's far easier and economical to like posts than it is to share them.

As for "tumblr is dying," I've seen this repeated for at least half a decade, and it's still debatable whether or not that's true, or even what "dying" means. And even if tumblr is "dying," I doubt much of that has to do with people not reblogging content so much as people leaving due to shitty policies implemented by the staff or people spending more time on other, newer websites that offer different styles of interaction. Like, maybe people not reblogging things is a small part of it. But the posts I'm arguing against often act like users not reblogging things is entirely due to the users being only about consumption and not about sharing, which is a take that entirely lacks a nuanced perspective on what impacts people's reblogging choices.

And also, the popularity of different websites waxes and wanes. There's a limit to how popular a website can get before something changes and users navigate to somewhere else. Yeah, those of us who like tumblr want it to stay popular and functional, but how many other social media sites popular for content creation with fair lack of corporate oversight have "died" in the last thirty years? A lot of them. That's just how the internet works, whether we like it or not.

My exasperation with those posts are that other people are trying to dictate how I and others cultivate our tumblr experience, which is very antithetical to my personal stance on internet activity as well as antithetical to a lot of other ethos that circulate on tumblr. I'm not so ignorant as to pretend that tumblr is one cohesive whole in terms of how people approach posting on this site, but there's a common trend of posts that talk about how to shape your tumblr experience. "If you don't like something, it's best to unfollow people that post it or block tags." "If you aren't seeing a lot of something you think is important, you should probably search for blogs and tags that do talk about those things." "Be careful sharing and engaging with depressive posts because constantly surrounding yourself with things that dwell on your depression is a dangerous coping method." This goes all the way back to my early tumblr experience in the early 2010s with the fandom vs hipster divide and the push against it that encouraged people not to feel shame in reblogging posts from the "wrong" side of the divide. It's likely existed before I joined in 2012, and has probably existed since like, the beginning of time, actually.

Like I started this post with: it's not an issue of people advocating for others to share their content. It's entirely true that more engagement with content encourages people to create more. That's part of how content creation works. But I take issue with five specific things that I see constantly arising in the posts I'm criticizing:

That if people enjoy something, they should reblog it no matter what

That users no longer care about sharing content, only about consuming it

That tumblr is "dying" because of bullet point 2

The guilt-tripping that blames users for bullet point 3 because they don't always reblog certain things

The utter entitlement that these posts have that users are somehow obligated to share things in order to support content creators posting things for free on tumblr

I don't like people demanding I reblog specific things. I don't like people acting entitled to attention because they're doing something for free. I don't like people making claims about tumblr's userbase that lack nuance. And I certainly do not like guilt tripping. It's a shitty, shitty thing to do.

Sharing content is good! Engaging with posts is great! It helps encourage content creators to make more content, which benefits both the creator and their audiences! But don't you dare demand that someone must reblog your posts just because they like them. Don't you dare solely blame other people for why you aren't getting the attention you want. And don't you dare guilt trip people into reblogging your content.

For what it's worth, I am a content creator. I don't draw or paint, but I do produce a fair amount of content. I make gifs. I make memes. I make videos. And I write, a lot. the difference is that I don't use tumblr as a way to market myself, and I don't get upset when something doesn't get the number of reblogs I want it to. I love it when something I make gets a lot of notes, yeah, but I also understand that there is an inevitable amount of randomness that dictates whether or not a post becomes popular, no matter how "good" it is or not. That's just how content creation works, and it's not unique to tumblr.

I'm not saying any of this to go "oh look at me, I'm so much better than all those other people" because I'm not a pretentious douchebag. I'm trying to model an approach to tumblr that I believe is considerably more realistic than the one found in the posts I'm describing. People seem to think, since tumblr is good for sharing content and helping users establish themselves as content creators, that that's how tumblr users are supposed to use it, even though there's inherent obligation on how people should be using it. One of the best things about tumblr is that it's very easy to shape your own experience and what kind of content you see, and I think it's wrong to demand people act otherwise.

#anecdotes by peachdoxie

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reading-writing-revolution · 4 years

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This is truly magnificent analysis. It's a bit of a long read, but it is ABSOLUTELY magically clarifying. I'll include my thoughts in a follow-up because this is perfectly in line with something I've been thinking about for a while.

Buckle up, this one is a bit of a roller coaster.

Let’s talk population density.

Do you know the population density of the zip code you live in?

What about the population density of where you spent your formative years?

That’s a bit of a rhetorical question, because I’m guessing the answer is no. I certainly didn’t, so I’d be impressed and surprised if I asked someone this question in casual conversation and they rattled off the number to me.

I’d never thought about population density until I traveled to India in 2018. We flew into Mumbai which has a population density of 75,000 people per sq. mi. To give you some perspective, NYC has 27,000 per sq. mi. (post originally said 10,431people but that is per sq. km. not mi.) and as most of my friends are familiar with King of The Hammers, in Johnson Valley, when Hammertown doesn’t exist, it has a population density of 15.2 people per sq. mi.

Mumbai has the highest population density of any city in the world, and until you’ve experienced it, it’s hard to describe. If you have ever been in the first 10 rows of a sold-out standing room only concert, that is as close as I can relate to how people move through the streets of Mumbai. There is literally no such thing as personal space. Not for you, not for your vehicle. I think one of the most fascinating things our entire group realized in Mumbai is whatever you do, do NOT stop. Merge in, merge out, but sudden stops cause pile ups of humans, vehicles, etc. Everything is in fluid motion, when you step into the stream you go with the current, when you need to leave the stream you move to the edges and hop out. What was also interesting was the lack of rage or frustration we saw, and the lack of accidents! I don’t think I saw two people yell at each other the entire time we were there. Same with car accidents, I saw one slight bumper brush. Nothing worth stopping over, as every car had marks from similar encounters.

You would think with so much closeness fights would break out often, accidents would be on every corner. But something strange happens. There is no space for the individual in that type of population density. If you wanted to stop and be mad or outraged, you would literally be trampled. So you move with the flow, or you step outside of it. One person cannot go against the current and be successful, individual needs simply cannot matter for society to function in that type of population density. This is different from NYC where you do see individuals disagree on street corners. Because even as dense as NYC is there is room for the individual. Even our most densely populated cities are nothing compared to other countries. America has space and the individual has rights.

When this country was founded the population density of even our biggest cities was a fraction of large cities in Europe. Which is why our constitution so heavily outlines the liberties and freedoms of the individual compared to places like England where their population density even today is 10 times that of the United States as a whole.

Ever since news of the pandemic broke I’ve found myself fascinated with population density in the US. This fascination started because it seemed obvious to me that the transmission of COVID would happen far faster in our highest population density areas of the country. Wikipedia has a list of cities by population density. Here’s how the top 20 most dense cities breaks down: 9 in New Jersey (NYC metro area),4 in CA (LA metro area), 3 in NY (NYC metro area), 2 in Florida (Miami metro area), 1 in Mass (Boston metro area), and 1 in Kentucky (Louisville). Except for Kentucky these population dense areas directly correlate to the highest areas of infection in the country.

But my fascination with population density didn’t stop at the pandemic. I wanted to understand population densities of different areas. I started looking up places I’d lived and visited that felt both dense and sparse population wise. It should come as no surprise that cities are always the most dense and rural areas are always the most sparse.

Then as the mask debate started unfolding in my newsfeed, I found myself loosely assigning a population density to people as they made their stance on masks known. Those that lived in higher population densities were usually more for masks than those who lived in less population dense areas.

Again, this made sense. Those that live in cities encounter more people in a day going about their routine. If they live in high-density housing, they share elevators, stairwells, mailrooms, lobbies, etc. The needs of the individual matter less the higher the density, so fighting the mask goes against the stream. You can do it, but it’s not easy.

Those I know that live more rural were less inclined to want to wear masks. I’ve found a general rule of thumb in casual conversation is if you can walk to your nearest market (even if it’s a gas station or 7/11), you understand the need for a mask. If you MUST drive to your nearest market, you likely don’t have to encounter many people in a day if you choose not to, and masks feel like just another unnecessary restriction imposed by the government. The individual has more freedoms and rejects government oversight more the lower the population density.

At some point this year I saw some people sharing an image of the US broken up by red states (Republican) vs. blue states (Democrat), compared to a map of COVID cases. At the time, the blue states almost directly correlated to where the highest COVID outbreaks were happening. The conclusion those sharing this map were trying to draw was that COVID was political and made up by the political leaders of blue states. It was largely those living in unaffected areas sharing this map and drawing these conclusions.

What I took from these images was that the higher the density the more likely an area was to be run by Democrats. Which lead me down a rabbit hole. Apparently, someone named Dave Troy noticed the same thing, and wrote an interesting article based on the 2012 election between Obama and Romney. 98% of the 50 most dense counties voted Obama. 98% of the 50 least dense counties voted Romney.

And this Dave guy sounds like someone I would enjoy having a discussion with. Because this data drew him to the same question I had. Where is the crossover point in population density between those that vote Republican vs. those that vote Democrat? The data says that at about 800 people per sq. mi. people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democrat. Below 800 people per sq. mi. there is a 66% chance that you voted Republican in 2012. The data doesn’t appear much different in the following years.

So why does this matter? Because how you were raised and how you live has a huge impact on what matters to you from your politicians and your government.

Those I know that grew up in less dense areas had to be self-reliant. When calling 911 means you’re likely waiting 20 minutes or longer for police, an ambulance, or a fire truck. You have to be able to defend yourself, handle your own first aid, and rely on your neighbors to help in critical emergency situations. When I tell people in Southern California that where I grew up had volunteer firefighters and EMTs they don’t believe me.

The more rural you are, the less you rely on government entities for your day-to-day needs. The most rural have well water, septic systems, take their trash to the dump, if it snows, they have a vehicle that can plow, and the truly rural use propane for power and heat. They are not reliant on most services provided by the public utilities. They use guns as tools to protect their animals and their family from prey and from vermin. They do not really encounter homeless people, as even the poorest can usually find a shack to live out of and require a vehicle to get around. These people in less dense areas do not depend on the government to solve their problems. They’d prefer government stay out of their lives completely. Less taxes, less oversight, less being told what to do. To the rural, it seems like every time the government interferes in their life, they lose another freedom, and their quality of life diminishes.

Those I know that grew up in more dense areas are used to calling 911 to handle emergencies. Their streets are swept in the summer and plowed in the winter. Their trash is picked up on the same day weekly. They don’t have space for cars and tools, so they tend to take public transportation or walk. They call someone when something breaks that requires tools they don’t own. They are used to encountering the homeless on the streets as part of their daily life. The truly poor and homeless usually end up in cities as the services to help the sick, mentally ill and the poorest among us are more available in dense areas. So the wealthy interact with the poor in cities far more than they do in rural areas. Those in higher density areas are willing to pay for government services because they are a regular part of their daily lives and make life more manageable. Without these services, the quality of life they know would not exist.

This got me thinking about some research I did a few years ago, when I learned that the average American only lives 18 miles from their mother. Those in NY and PA only live on average 8 miles from their mothers. From Kentucky to Louisiana the average is 6 miles. Less than 20% of Americans live more than a few hours drive from mom. The further you move from home depends greatly on your education and income. For the most part, the wealthier you are, the more you can pay for child and elder care, making it easier to travel further from home. Also, the more educated, the more likely you are to travel to utilize your education in a specialized career field.

So what does this have to do with population density? Most Americans never leave the population density we were raised in. Why does this matter? Because that means most Americans can’t understand or relate to the needs of those that live in population densities that differ from their own.

My friends that have been raised in cities see guns primarily as a source of violence. My friends that live rurally see guns as a necessary tool for their way of life. My friends that have been raised rurally don’t understand the need for taxes and government services, where they come from you take care of your own problems. My friends that live in cities, could not imagine a life without public utilities and governmental oversight of social problems.

Neither are wrong. Their needs and perspective are just vastly different.

I also realized that I’m probably in a small percentage of the American population. I have spent the last 20 years living more than 2500 miles from my closest family members, which puts me into the 20% category plus I was raised and lived in both high density population areas and low density population areas throughout my life.

Here’s my life by population density:

Age: 0-10 Zip: 14613 Pop Dens: 7323.5 people per sq. mi.

Age: 11-18 Zip: 14468 Pop Dens: 345 people per sq. mi.

Age: 18-22 Zip: 14850 Pop Dens: 5,722 people per sq. mi.

Age: 25-32 Zip: 92606 Pop Dens: 4,913 people per sq. mi.

Age: 33-43 Zip: 91773/91750 Pop Dens 2,163/1245 people per sq. mi.

I went to inner city schools as a young child. I was upset that my mother could not put my hair in corn rows with the pretty beads like my friends wore. I learned civil rights songs taught to me by our bi-racial music teacher and came home and sang them for my disapproving father who was raised in Shinglehouse, PA with a population density of 26.5 people per sq. mi.

Then at the age of 11 my family moved out of the city and into the country. We lived on 20+ acres of land and the population was 98% white. I didn’t walk to school anymore, heck, we didn’t really walk to our neighbor’s house because country roads don’t have sidewalks.

Then I went away to college for 4 years where I lived part of that time on the 11th floor of a tower, with a shared elevator, lobby, and I didn’t own a car. I walked everywhere, took the bus or would grab a ride from my few friends with cars if it wasn’t feasible to take public transportation.

After college I moved to Southern California. I spent my first 10 years as an adult mostly living in condos and townhomes in wealthier higher density areas, where I would say the majority leaned slightly left, but there was a fiscally conservative undertone. But I spent most weekends taking my Jeep to lower population density areas to live a life more closely to what I had on the farm growing up. Less government oversights. No one ticketing my Jeep for a few stickers as a commercial vehicle, etc.

Currently, I live in Los Angeles County, one of the highest populations in the country. But I live in one of the lowest density zip codes within that county. We have horse property and rodeos, and one of the only country bars in Southern California. Our population is almost completely split down the middle between left and right. I don’t have a sidewalk but a half a mile down the road they do. I can walk to the 7/11 and the subway around the corner but need to drive to the closest grocery store.

I’ve come to realize that just about every polarizing debate I see my friends having; I can see both sides of the argument. And I’m starting to suspect it’s because I’ve lived in both their worlds. I can relate and understand their needs and where they are coming from because I’ve experienced each of their way of life to a certain extent. Most in this country are raised one way and live that way for life. And how we want to live really comes down to the population density in which we have existed.

I truly believe our population density experience matters more to our political views than education, income, race, gender or sexuality.

As a society we are so wrapped up in left vs. right. Liberal vs. conservative. We figure out which we identify with and lump every social/political issue we agree with into “our” category, and everyone we disagree with into “their” category. I don’t see this really helping us hear each other any better. It more results in people trying to prove why they are right.

Since I’ve started considering people’s population density experiences in life (if I know them and have a reasonable idea) I have found a new filter with which to view information that is far more conducive to understanding their point of view than the filters we currently use.

Mark Twain once wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

And while I think there’s some truth to that, travel in Mark Twain’s day and age is different than how we travel today. For instance, when I go to Baja, I like to stay in the small towns and eat at the local restaurants. But I have many friends that only go to all inclusive resorts, or stay in tourist areas, never venturing outside of the luxury they are there to enjoy. They don’t spend time in the rural areas seeing what life is really like. Traveling with ULTRA4 and for off road has kept me outside of most tourist areas. Where there’s only one place to stay and you have to explore local eating options. Seeing the countryside and how people live both in US and in Europe. I prefer to travel this way.

Many of us with the means to travel prefer to vacation how we live. The more rural we live day to day, the less spending a week in NYC sounds like fun. But going camping in the woods likely appeals to us. And those that live in cities, tend to not choose wilderness adventures for their downtime. The travel to help us see how other people live that existed in Twain’s time doesn’t really happen in our service oriented society where restaurants and hotels are abundant most places. We can eat at the same restaurants and sleep at the same hotels from one side of the country to the other. We’ve stopped getting outside of our own bubbles even when we travel.

I don’t know what we can do that would expose us to other ways of life like travel in Twain’s age did. But we probably need to figure it out to stop the divide from separating this country further.

From the beginning of 1900s through the Vietnam War between 7 and 9 percent of Americans were in military service. Today less than 0.5% of Americans serve in the military. That was one way that we used to expose Americans to life outside of what they grew up with. College is another way, but as costs have risen, more students continue to live at home and attend community colleges or local universities vs. leaving home to experience a different way of life between 18 and 22.

I find myself thinking about kids who go off to the army or away to college. They are forced outside their comfort zones. Some thrive there, some don’t. But they learn a different way of existing, at least for a little while. The type of travel Mark Twain is talking about. Part of me wonders if we shouldn’t offer some sort of service requirement for our youth between say 18 and 20 that requires them to get involved in something to help the country, away from where they were raised, military or civil service. If they were raised in a city, working on rural projects. If they were raised rurally, working on urban projects. Just to have a frame of reference for how diverse this country truly is and how different our needs are based on that diversity. But this is a topic for another day. You’ve already been too kind reading this far.

I don’t have the answers. But I’m glad I’ve finally put down some of the thoughts I’ve had floating around in my head regarding population density. Kudos to those of you that stuck it out.

If you’re like me and are curious about your own population density experiences, I’ve included a link in the comments where you can throw in zip codes and see what your exposure has been.

https://medium.com/@davetroy/is-population-density-the-key-to-understanding-voting-behavior-191acc302a2b

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