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gothicprep · 2 years

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watched a recent video essay from a youtuber i like that covers the west elm caleb fiasco, and i would like to share a quote from it: "abusers know how to utilize and weaponize the language of the abused very, very easily"

i gotta say – this is an incredibly cathartic thing to hear. sad truth is that people who are either willfully manipulative or very, very dishonest with themselves about the weight of their actions looooove the language of abuse and psychiatry. can i interest you in a story about My Ex From Hell? should i give my fans some delicious public drama?

but i'm going to have to set the context first. give ya a little mise en scene

i very briefly dated this person who was this triple threat new-agey guy, strong believer in progressive politics, and forever victim. to the point of genuine unhinged behavior. i talked to him after my close friend (vic) died by suicide and he told me "you're not the only person in the universe who's going through something right now". why did he say this? because apparently his friend drove their girlfriend to a clinic to have an abortion, which, you know, is super fucking relevant to him. and some other friends were chirping at him about how it was So Terrible that people were putting vic on a "death pedestal" and it invalidated that he would never get aCcOuNtAbIlItY for some drama they had with him during, i shit you not, the fucking bush administration. also he works more than me. also his mom is sick. also he has a nebulous unnamed chronic illness. also he's had more friends die than me so i need to reel it in. anyway, when people act like this, it kind of creates a situation where you feel extremely disincentivized to communicate with them. i tried to be honest and say, bluntly, that it was the worst relationship i'd ever been in. and he kept railroading me into talking it out even though i think that's... making it really obvious that it's futile.

i concluded i was done with him when he threatened to leave me in a city 5-ish hours from home because i told him he was being irrational for threatening to "beat (someone) up" for watching his instagram story. on his public account. his justification for this being "i was stalked years ago and...". he also repeatedly punched his car door after the push to start malfunctioned for a while and i thought. right. something is seriously wrong with this guy and i'm not inclined to stick around and find out what it is.

and you can't communicate with someone like this. so i didn't. i just muted his contact and stopped answering his messages and calls. i feel like you kind of exhaust someone's good graces when you threaten to dump their ass somewhere where they can't get home. i know it's very inconsiderate & me selfishly not wanting to deal with it, but i reasoned the only way to end things was to make him furious with me to the point where it was *his* decision

i removed him from my close friends story on instagram and wrote a brief vent post about what he'd did and that i just wanted to push a button and make it all go away. a mutual friend of ours confronted him for being a flagrant jackass based on information from the post.

so his response is to send me a combination toddler temper tantrum / cartoon supervillain speech (a little bit of a caillou/thanos crossover episode, if you will) that was ridiculously manipulative. some excerpts:

"you ghosted and went behind my back while leaving my family and i paralyzed with worry" - not picking up my phone for 18 hours is shitty, but ghosting it is not. removing someone from your private instagram story isn't ghosting either. i never said anything to his parents, he called them and balked to them. it's a way of escalating the impact of the situation when he was the one who involved them here.

"you don't know how to communicate" - just him insulting me. he's coming at me simultaneously on the attack and trying to ~talk about it~ with me, so i'd wager he doesn't either, if this is really the case.

"you just don't care. you're just like 'yup'." - never said that. all the evidence he had is that i don't feel super inclined to make a real effort at communication with someone who is yelling at me and clearly too pissed to hear me out.

"i'm cutting into my sleeping before work to deal with this, so it's actively proving a detriment to my workday, weekday, and wellbeing" - not relevant. i had shit to do the next day too. i wasn't exactly happy about the situation either. i express this. he says "because it is (a detriment), and anyone with basic concern for others should care that they've wounded someone to the point of losing sleep before the start of the workday." – jesus fucking christ.

so i've laid enough groundwork to say this guy is behaving in incredibly bad faith. so here's the last bit:

"i spoke to you many, many times about the kind of trauma i faced in 2019 related to the way you acted. you ignored it and did the exact same things. i hope you're happy. i hope you got what you wanted [deadname]."

like, look, i kinda reason that he has a reoccurring issue here with intimidating the people he dates into not wanting to speak with him, because the combination of dismissiveness, passive threats/hitting stuff when you're alone together, and dishonest, self-centered freak shit make it impossible to talk to someone.

but notice how terms like ghosting, communication, trauma, and the hand gesturing at empathy are employed in these quotes.

i'm really lucky that i got out of that text conversation and relationship in a way that looked self-evidently embarrassing to him, because i got the sense he was fishing for screenshots, and using very loaded language as an attempt to make himself look better.

i bring this all up to say: some people are seriously not well. they're either malicious or deluded, the difference doesn't really matter, but they know how persuasive the language of abuse and psychiatry is. either to guilt you, or create a narrative to isolate you because of how you lack empathy or what the goddamn fuck ever. people like this are dangerous. and i do think it is within our best interest to at least consider how norms in progressive spaces can be abused

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musical-chick-13 · 3 years

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i love your got takes and ngl im scared grrm will go the "jaime kills cersei" fan-theory route or worse just have jaime fall out of love with her completely and they never reconcile.

Aww, thank you anon! I'm glad someone appreciates my screams into the void, haha. 😊

I'm scared, too. Honestly, I've been worried for years. I remember when season 8 of the show was coming out, I was so stressed because I thought for SURE they were going to do this, but Cersei got...probably the most respectful death out of anyone in terms of being tenderly comforted while she died and not being brutally murdered onscreen. Obviously there are differences between the show and the books (like the show's complete omission of the Valonqar in the prophecy), but if I remember correctly, GRRM said the book endings for the major characters are going to be more or less the same as they were in the show.

I genuinely believe that the two of them are going to reunite (whatever that looks like) and that Cersei is going to ask Jaime to kill her to deny someone else (probably Dany or maybe Sansa) the chance to. ASoIaF is very big about the whole "you don't actually know the whole situation"/"prophecy twist" thing. And I think the biggest twist (and the narrative choice that would most effectively drive home the point of "pursuing absolute power is a double-edged sword and will not actually keep you safe") would be for Cersei to have spent her whole life doing everything she can to avoid an outcome that she ends up explicitly asking for anyway. She is a tragic figure, and the "I lost myself and it was all-for-nothing" bent of that ending is the one that makes the most narrative sense to me. And real talk, Jaime probably won't last long after she's gone. He's still reviled by most of the kingdom, and if they're coming after Cersei they're probably not going to have a lot of sympathy for him. Plus Jaime is...still so incredibly codependent. If his enemies don't get him first, he's not going to be able to live with himself after Cersei is gone, especially if she's gone because of him. Regardless of how much any given relationship breaks down or becomes hateful, you're still going to have...some feelings if that person is gone. There will still be a sense of deep loss, even if it's mixed in with more complicated or unkind feelings. Jaime's been dealing with the fallout of slaying one monarch since he was 17; I don't think he'll be able to shoulder doing that again to someone he was romantically involved with for several decades. So I'm inclined to assume planned murder-suicide for their ending.

As for the potential of "falling out of love"? The thing that I keep going back to is that GRRM has been so incredibly adamant about having a "realistic" take on fantasy. And...if you've been in love with someone for almost 40 years, wrapping up your entire identity in them, you're not just...going to forget about them? It's true that one can distance themselves from that person/relationship and eventually stop loving them; but...it's really hard to stop loving someone, even if you're mad at them, even if you absolutely hate them at the same time (which I don't believe Jaime does, but more on that in a second). It's been...maybe a year? Since Jaime started having Doubts™ with-a-capital-"d"-and-a-trademark-symbol over their relationship. A year isn't going to undo 30-plus years of being deeply in love and having a generally positive image of your partner. And if GRRM is that serious about being "realistic" it would make zero narrative sense for him to write Jaime just falling completely out of love with Cersei forever and ever world without end, amen. And considering Jaime is still immediately thinking of Cersei in terms of a spouse and making...everything about her? Of pretty much always tying up his violent comments with suggestions of romance? Even now, after...everything? It makes even less sense to end the books with Jaime being anything other than still wrapped up in destructive love with Cersei. It's true that Jaime is complex and not a constant total complete monster, but he's still not a good person. He hasn't actually done any sort of significant introspection about how he views morality or the significance of goodness/selflessness, or made any kind of genuine attempt at fixing his mistakes, apologizing for his behavior, reaching out to help others on his own, or even just admitting that some (a lot) of what he did was wrong in five books. I find it hard to believe he'll manage to do that to the point of completely moving on from his past in the last two (especially since the focus is already going to be split between a bunch of different characters, which means even less time for him to realistically do any of this).

Then again, I'm not GRRM, and if there's one thing I've learned in my many, many years in fandom, it's not to trust any creator ever, so I might just be completely wrong. But my feelings ultimately boil down to the fact that, even if my worst fears do happen in the books, such a development doesn't serve the story well and would narratively be a complete ass-pull. There's something oddly consolatory about a storytelling decision I don't like being a misguided or poor choice of the author's, as opposed to it being an arbitrarily personal grievance. And even then, if all else fails, well...I still have the show, which tbh is good enough for me.

#this got long sorry #jaime x cersei #lannicest #valonqar talk #asoiaf #am I going to die for putting this in the general tag? probably.#tw: suicide mention #meta #multi-tASK-ing #that's my new ask tag haha get it #behold! a creation!

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