#as far back as the bullshit tweets. but even as recently as this year for tou promo with an article talking about larry stylinson | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

x3rrorx · 6 months

Note

Catching up on everything that's been happening recently.

Juli will kiss ass of whoever she needs to for her benefit at the time, and the fact that she has grown ass adults defending her behaviour that seem oblivious to her antics is insane (who all incidently also interact with the ex). I'm sure this sweet little good time girl they all see is in there somewhere, but jfc the number of times she gets called out by people (including the very band they all worship!) is beyond a joke. And at some point you have to take a step back and realise that it can't all boil down to jealousy, or is Matt meant to be jealous of her too? Wake the fuck up and realise there's a common denominator! And honestly some of the people in that circle seem like decent people but get tarnished by association.

And then there's just all her constant bullshit.

One minute she's going to Europe for CF, then she isn't because it would cost too much.

Then she's going to the Vancouver show to see her bestie, then she isn't because it would cost too much.

But she still managed to go to all the other shows and pay for VIP for all of them (didn't she say one was $200?) so cost clearly wasn't THAT much of an issue (if the "bestie" can't see that then idk). Especially not when she's practically boasting about her credit card debt (weird flex for anyone, let alone an 18 year old!).

Then she claimed she was going to do goofy poses in her m&g but all her pictures are exactly the same pose because all she does is talk.

The whole thing with threatening a Sumerian employee? The opportunity was apparently there for her to make her point in person but instead she comes on twitter and talks about what she could have done. And was the problem with the video on their instagram the comments or the fact she wasn't being paid? Because those comments that were apparently hurting her so badly would have still existed if they had approached her and she'd profited from it. But does that then make it worth it for her?

And what about the email she published on her twitter asking Sumerian for work experience or a job? One minute she's bad mouthing them and the next she's licking ass to try and get into the industry and then when they don't get back to her she's back to bad mouthing them again. Which I suppose takes me back to my original point.

The thing Juli (or someone close to her) needs to realise is that things follow you through life. I don't know her, and she could indeed be incredibly sweet, but that's not the image she portrays online. She comes off as being problematic and the level of documentation out there relating to her dramas isn't going anywhere, it's all over twitter, tumblr, reddit, who knows where else. Hell, I don't even follow her but the drama always makes its way to my timeline, or her posts her all over my fyp. And tweeting and deleting only works to an extent. She has a reputation and it's far from a good one. The level of hate some people have towards her isn't warranted, but the fact that she's so disliked within multiple communities she's a part of isn't a coincidence, neither is the fact that everyone automatically assumed Matt's tweet was about her. Being young can only be an excuse for so long and she's way past that point, she knows what she's doing and has insane main character syndrome.

It's completely possible to enjoy music, bands, going to multiple shows on tour etc. without becoming public enemy number one and creating drama at every turn. The problem is she's never held accountable by anyone close to her, they just continue to enable her. If people close to her truly cared about her they'd realise they need to intervene before she ruins her life (with debt and an inescapable reputation) because she won't be 18 forever.

Not every criticism comes from a place of hate or jealousy. Some comes from a place of worry, because if my friend or family member was putting everything out there Juli is/has, or was acting like she does and getting the reaction she does I'd be deeply concerned. Do all her adult friends that defend her not stop and seriously question what's going on with her? Like, it's great she's got no responsibilities and is having fun (is she really with all the shit she gets?) but the amount of debt she's in would be worrying enough for some people with a full time well paid job, let alone an 18 year old who I'm guessing is still being paid similarly to when she was at Starbucks. Great she has no rent/mortgage to pay and her parents help with her car payments but she's literally spending money she doesn't have and learning no accountability. It's worrying.

And so concludes my TED talk.

Appreciate the TED talk 👏🏻👏🏻

4 notes · View notes

louehvolution · 5 years

Text

#confused. anon #because harry got not that important. don't knock it til you try it. rainbow mug. flags. pin. shoes. not defining his sexuality #and articles about these. as well as about his lgbt+ support. possible bisexuality. and purported breaking of gender norms #- none of it linked to larry #and. as an anon pointed out. has even arguably had non het ships outside of larry insinuated and encouraged by his team #seriously. and even jokingly as with obama. and all his het relationships left as alleged. girlfriend in quotation marks. and even denied #while every effort has gone into refuting louis' homosexuality. and pushing his heterosexuality. and this constantly tied to denying larry #as far back as the bullshit tweets. but even as recently as this year for tou promo with an article talking about larry stylinson #and freddie and eleanor. a toddler to his name and a long term girlfriend - no room for ambiguity for louis #and both pushed to the limit - and denying both explicitly linked to the delusion of larries #see extensive press. dan wootton and andy cohen interviews - and also how it's all been framed so as to try to paint him as homophobic too #or alternatively suffering from internalised homophobia - self closeting. not abused - when is the same ever suggested about harry?#so in essence louis has not been allowed to exist outside of either the stunts and/or larry - with detrimental consequences for him #it's all been calculated to benefit others. hurt louis as much as possible. and put him in an impossible position on all fronts #:(

13 notes · View notes

twopoppies · 3 years

Note

I'm new here so please don't be upset by my question. Why do ppl say that larries ruined their friendship? Did Harry and Louis ever say that? Where did that opinion come from? Also why do ppl say Harry wanted to leave the band so desperately (I read he was distant during MITAM promo bc he hated his time in the band). I haven't been here long but antis/neutrals haven't been nice to me and I don't know any larries to ask my questions irl.

Hi love. I'm not upset by the questions. It's the way people ask those questions that sets some people on edge. I also only have my opinion on this... I'm not some all-knowing oracle.

I know this is going to be long, no matter how short I try to make it, because it's just a super complex situation that's been spread out over 11 years. I'll put it under the cut.

In short, people say larries ruined their friendship because that's what 1DHQ pushed back in the day. 1D's label wanted "Larry" to disappear because it was a big fucking problem for two members of their band to be queer and in love with each other. And they couldn't get the two of them to break up and they couldn't get anyone to believe the ridiculous attempts at denying it, so they insisted that Harry and Louis stay away from each other. Everywhere. Always. And then the media (specifically the Syco mouthpiece, Dan Wootton) started to print stories about how the boys were friends but "fans" took it too far and now they didn't even talk to each other (basically saying they were homophobic dicks who didn't want anyone to think they were gay). They continued to push this narrative in numerous ways, including posting some pretty disgusting tweets on Louis' twitter basically stating that he was straight and that Larry was bullshit. What all of this did was result in one group of fans (at the time, antis, but now it's also spread to various subsets of fandom) thinking they were being better fans by attacking larries. They felt justified because look what larries did!

As for your second question, barely anyone was saying Harry wanted to leave the band in 2015. But there was a concerted effort (IMO, orchestrated by the label) to create a Harry vs OT3 situation that had been going on for a long time. They worked overtime to separate H from the other guys––he always flew separately, he hung out in LA with his famous friends and never saw OT3 unless it was on stage etc etc. The label was essentially building up his solo image long before the band "went on hiatus".

In recent years, people (basically rads/Harry haters) began to say Harry hated the band and had been plotting his world domination since as early as 2013 and they he was actively behind the separation from OT3 and the hiatus and that he kicked all of them to the curb in order to stand on their carcasses to be king of the mountain. I honestly don't have the time or energy to take apart that pile of complete nonsense, but I advise anyone who is agreeing with it to really take some time to look through all of the "proof" because there is so much double talk and distorted reimagining of facts and deluded agenda behind it. I'm not saying Harry was a poor, innocent noob who was manipulated into being a star, but he's not the monster who orchestrated the coup of the century at the expense of his boyfriend and band mates either.

Solo Harry has only spoken positively about his time in the band and only ever acknowledged that he wouldn't be where he is if had hadn't been a part of One Direction. Was he ready to move on from the band by the end of 2015? Sure, probably. But the narrative that was circulated was that Harry sprung it on the other three and they were blindsided by it and they hadn't wanted the break (in particular, it was pushed that Louis felt this way). I just call complete bullshit. That makes no sense to me at all. It's possible they weren't all ready to do it, but they all fucking needed a break because they'd been worked like dogs for 5 years straight. I'm sure there were very complicated things going on, contractually and emotionally, but I just don't believe that the other three cried and begged for the band to stay together and Harry said no, fuck you I want to be A STAR!!!

I think if you really want to understand the answers to the questions you're asking, you need to look through some blogs to really get to the nitty gritty. Look through some larrie blogs like @bulletprooflarry @lornasaurusrex tellmethisisnotlove (the last is archived on the wayback machine) who do a great job of archiving and tagging. Also check some newer blogs who also keep great records like @skepticalarrie @daisiesonafield-blog and really look into things like PR and marketing, bearding, closeting in the music industry, closeting in Hollywood, media manipulation etc etc. Take some time to put the puzzle together. And especially be thoughtful about whose information you take to heart because as I've said before, there are people here who care more about the audience and followers, than they do about telling the truth. Take all the info in and make up your own mind.

I'm sorry this was so long and at the same time I promise you I only told you about 2% of the story. I hope it helps a bit, anyway.

#for newbies

169 notes · View notes

someonestolemyshoes · 3 years

Text

Off the Record

Hello!! I am super excited to finally post my entry for @levihan-drabbles competition :D The prompt was super interesting and I had a tonne of fun writing this one!

The prompt I received was: Hange posts a picture of Levi somewhere and it becomes a meme.

(For those curious, this is the meme I used for inspiration)

Hange pushed her plate across the table and grinned at him. "Levi! Fancy seeing you here! To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Levi's lip curled.

"You know what," he said. Hange braced her elbows on the table and rested her chin atop her knotted fingers.

"Enlighten me."

Colour rose in Levi's cheeks. For a moment, Hange felt a little guilty. For all Levi's grumbling and grunting, Hange had never seen him angry before.

"That bullshit article."

"Ah. Was there a problem?"

Hange met Moblit in a small cafe a little way down the road from the newsroom. She was in good spirits—her morning had been productive; she'd made steady headway with research for her next interview, finished the final edits for a few smaller tabloid pieces she'd been meaning to brush up, attended three short, perfunctory meetings on tedious company policy, and laid the groundwork for another exciting interview opportunity.

She felt good. And now she had the pleasurable prospect of a hearty lunch, a passable cup of coffee, and perhaps best of all, Moblit's company. His company, and his camera.

Hange threw herself into the seat opposite Moblit the moment she spotted him, hunched over his laptop in a corner of the cafe. He lifted his coffee cup just in time for Hange to clatter against the table, the thin metal frame rattling precariously. She offered him a sheepish grin.

"Sorry," she said, and then, "got anything exciting?"

"I don't know about exciting. Interesting, maybe, but no breaking news."

Hange flagged down a passing waitress with one hand, and waved Moblit off with the other. "Doesn't matter, doesn't matter," she said, then paused to order a drink and her favourite sandwich. "Tell me anyway."

"I got a tip-off from a waiter at Sina's."

Hange's eyes sparkled behind her glasses. She sat forward in her chair, folding her arms on the table top as she leaned closer. "Who?"

"Take a guess."

Hange grinned at him. Moblit was not one to play coy; he did his job and did it well, and reported his findings efficiently. To leave her to question it meant one of two things; he had photographed someone very high profile indeed, or it was somebody Hange was, for better or for worse, well acquainted with.

Or perhaps, if she were lucky, it was both.

"Let me see him, then."

Hange had taken far too much time in the cafe with Moblit. He had given her a rundown of all the details he'd gathered during his field work that morning, and shown her through his extensive photo gallery. It was impressive, the kind of archive Moblit could cultivate with only a 45 minute breakfast window.

Hange had been delighted. Moblit was right; it wasn't breaking news, nothing particularly thrilling, but there was a corner of the Internet, Hange knew, that would delight in a trashy little article just like this. Something quick and simple to bulk up the social media feed for the afternoon.

Plus, there was a series of pictures Moblit had snapped, a cluster he'd thought to be of no real merit, that Hange simply could not pass up.

She could lay down no facts with a story like this one. There was no hard-hitting investigative journalism to be had, but she could at least offer some speculation based on her knowledge of the subjects involved, and spin a tale juicy enough to get people talking.

It took little time at all to put the article together. Hange scribbled up an outline for the contents—the location; Sina's in downtown Hizuru, a luxurious restaurant serving five star meals at every hour of the day. High in quality, sickeningly steep in price. The time of day; 9am. To the best of Hange's knowledge, this was rather out of character for the subject. He was an early riser, but according to their interview last March pending the premiere of his newest movie, he wasn't the type to eat much at all before lunch time.

And then, the company. Eren Yeager was a relatively well-known actor, barely an adult at nineteen. He starred in his first role a decade earlier, and had seen commercial success in multiple movies and TV shows ever since. He had been something of a prodigy in his younger years, bold and precocious, possessing a natural talent many actors years his senior couldn't even hope for. As Hange understood it, he had recently hit a rather troublesome phase. An interesting line of inquiry, but despite his talent and his fame, Eren's presence was simply a cameo, compared to the subject of the article Hange was drawing up.

Levi Ackerman.

Levi is a fan favourite and a media delight. He's attractive no doubt, and his performance in any and every role is almost always met with critical acclaim. Outside of his career, however, he's an elusive thing, silent in any matters pertaining to his private life. He avoids any public event like the plague, and rarely shows his face at premieres or award ceremonies if he can possibly avoid it. He gives interviews only when required by some contractual obligation or other, or else when the journalist in question is so painfully persistent that it is simply easier to give in than to keep fighting.

Little of his personal life is known, but it is impossible for someone in Levi's position to avoid interacting with anybody at all, and even the great Levi Ackerman is not above scrutiny.

There are rumours. Several of them, accounts from fellow cast members, from staff, from directors, and even Erwin, his manager, has alluded more than once to Levi's sour disposition. He is prone, Hange has heard, to fits of anger, and is easily disgruntled by minor inconveniences. His dislike of anything unclean or untidy is the stuff of legends—Hange has seen this first hand, at their very first interview. He had entered the room, scowled at the chair before sitting in it, and given Hange a thorough once over before announcing, with no hint of humour, "your glasses are filthy."

Hange had found him both fascinating and quite delightful, in his own strange way. When he acts, Levi sounds eloquent; he is a master of emotive performance, wringing the last drops of anger, despair, or grief out of each and every word, or else injecting the perfect giddy jitter, or a tremor of humour when the scene called for it. As soon as the cameras stop rolling, though, Levi's tone becomes flat, and without a script, his words are clumsy and crass. He communicates poorly, quick to throw insults and crude remarks. Hange has interviewed him a number of times—she counts herself very lucky that Levi will consent to her requests without too much fuss, these days—and each time she finds herself spending half of their time together translating his answers into something a) family friendly, and b) understandable to the everyday reader.

There is nothing for Hange to translate this time. Moblit managed to speak to the waiter after Levi and Eren had vacated in hopes of gleaning any small tidbit of knowledge regarding their conversation, but the venture had been hopeless. The pair had grown silent upon the approach of any staff member, and spoke in tones too hushed for anyone nearby to hear. They learned nothing they couldn't extrapolate for themselves from Moblit's pictures; Eren looked sheepish, avoiding Levi's gaze in favour of staring into his drink, while Levi—

Levi looked furious.

Every picture featured his signature frown, which, in and of itself wasn't enough to assume Levi to be in any mood besides neutral, but some of the photos show a hint of bared teeth or pursed lips, with his brows pulled lower than normal, the space between them deeply creased. Hange found herself curious as both a journalist and as an acquaintance. They may not be friends, but Hange liked to think she knew Levi a little better than most people, at least. She could find nothing in their past interactions to suggest any relationship with Eren beyond the strictly professional. They had over a decade between them, and though they had worked together on more than one set, neither party had ever said anything to insinuate so much as a friendly attitude between them.

There was no resolution to her queries to be easily found. And luckily for Hange, this particular piece didn't require any. It was a gossip article, something spicy, jam-packed with buzzwords, what-if's and more questions than answers, designed to make people wonder. Levi's name in the title would be enough to draw people in; Eren's name was an added bonus. But the star of the show was Moblit's photography. Hange arranged the images she had chosen in a grid. In context, the pictures were intriguing, depicting a particularly ferocious part of Levi and Eren's exchange. Out of context, they looked a little ridiculous. Both would bring readers onto their home page.

Satisfied with her work, Hange queued the finished article for review, and turned her attention back to her schedule.

The article launched mid-afternoon. Hange watched, somewhat satisfied, as it was received much as she had expected it to be. The activity on their Twitter account skyrocketed, the tweet in question garnering more likes, retweets and replies in the hour after it's post than any other they’d dropped in the last month.

Hange had allowed it to slip from her mind after the first hour or so. She received praise from her bosses, and a text from Moblit, jokingly demanding she pay him even more handsomely for his work than she already had, and her cousin had called her in the evening on a quest for insider gossip she could share with her friends, but that had been the end of it. Hange thought of it no more until early the following morning, when she had stopped by the quiet little cafe beneath her flat for breakfast and her favourite coffee.

She had been polishing off her pancakes when the bell above the door chimed. She had paid little attention to the newcomer, until a shadow passed over her table, and a familiar voice said, "Oi, shitty glasses."

Hange looked up to see Levi Ackerman himself standing over her, his face twisted in a scowl.

There are perks of being reasonably acquainted with Levi. Hange always gets to conduct his interviews, and Levi only ever turns her down if her request is unreasonable. Like that time she demanded he meet her at this very coffee shop for "just a quick piece, about the cameo you did for the new season of Titans", only to show him she'd bought a new pair of glasses—"look, all clean!"—and, when pressed, admitted there was no interview at all. He had been far more hesitant to indulge her in smaller affairs after that, but Hange was still lucky enough to be his only regular interviewer after big releases.

More interviews means more commission for Hange, and more high profile work with other celebrities. Yes, being acquainted with Levi has its bonuses.

But it also has its downsides. Namely, that Levi will not hesitate to turn up at her regular coffee shop to berate her after she has posted some complete and utter wank at his expense.

Hange pushed her plate across the table and grinned at him. "Levi! Fancy seeing you here! To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Levi's lip curled.

"You know what," he said. Hange braced her elbows on the table and rested her chin atop her knotted fingers.

"Enlighten me."

Colour rose in Levi's cheeks. For a moment, Hange felt a little guilty. For all Levi's grumbling and grunting, Hange had never seen him angry before.

"That bullshit article."

"Ah. Was there a problem?"

"You're a piece of shit, you know that?"

Hange sat back in her chair and sipped at her coffee. Levi's face was full colour now, a pale pink flush from his neck right up to his hairline. Hange gave him a measured look, then kicked out the chair opposite her.

"Sit," she said. "If you have issues, I'd be happy to discuss."

Levi looked for a moment like he'd like nothing more than to strangle her. Then he pulled out the chair the rest of the way, and dropped himself into it.

"I don't give a fuck about the article," he said. "It's shitty gossip anyway."

Hange raised a brow at him. She opened her mouth to continue when, without prompt, a young waitress approached their table, practically bouncing on the spot as she stopped and gave Levi a dazzling smile. Her cheeks were flushed prettily, and Hange would have thought she were simply starstruck, if it weren't for the light of mirth in her eyes.

"Good morning, sir. Can I get you anything?" She gave Levi no chance to respond, before plowing on. "Water? Or tea, perhaps? Forgive me, but you seem a little upset. Might a nice tea calm you down?"

Levi grit his teeth. "No, thank you."

Hange almost apologised to the poor waitress on his behalf, but she didn't look bothered at all by his rudeness. In fact, she had barely turned from the table before she snorted in laughter, and caught her giggles in her hands as she scurried back behind the counter. A second passed, before all three waitresses snickered.

"That," Levi hissed, "is your fault."

Now Hange truly was confused. She furrowed her brow at him. "How does that have anything to do with me?"

"You and your stupid article," he said. Hange looked back to the waitress, who looked to their table again before falling into a fresh fit of giggles. Hange turned back to Levi, a little sympathetic.

"I think she just fancies you."

"You're trying to tell me you really don't know the mess you've caused?"

Hange shook her head slowly. Levi watched her closely, searching for proof of the lie, but Hange's earnestness must have shown through, for Levi's anger abated a little, and he slumped back on his chair.

In lieu of a verbal explanation, Levi pulled out his phone. He tapped the screen a few times, typed something out, and scrolled a little way, before placing the phone on the table and sliding it towards her. Hange pulled it closer with a frown.

The screen displayed Twitter, and showed the feed beneath the search for Levi's name. Hange scrolled a few posts, eyes widening little by little as she went.

Levi was right. The contents of the article were of little significance at all. The photo grid, however, had gone viral overnight.

It showed four pictures of Levi and Eren, taken in succession. Each one showed only a portion of the back of Eren's head, but Levi's expression in every frame was more animated than Hange had ever seen him outside of his movie scenes, and each was more distraught than the last. Face tight, jaw clenched, teeth bared, with his finger pointed condescendingly in Eren's face. The second last picture shows his brows arched and his lips pressed into a thin line, and the final one—

Hange had laughed at it in isolation when Moblit had shown her. She had fully expected it to garner a few laughs, but she hadn't expected a photograph of Levi furiously slurping his tea to become a meme in less than 24 hours.

"I see," Hange said, as she calmly slid the phone back to him. "In my defense, you don't help yourself. It wouldn't be half as funny if you didn't hold your tea cup so weird."

"In my defense," Levi snapped, "If you didn't post it online nobody would have anything to laugh at."

Hange crossed her arms on the table and leaned towards him, smiling pleasantly. "In your defense, you wouldn't have been so angry in public if it weren't for whatever Eren had to say. What was that about, by the way? I'm terribly curious."

Hange expected a very Levi response to her prying; a scowl, perhaps a quick kick under the table, an 'It's none of your damn business, four-eyes', if she were lucky.

What she got instead was a haughty sniff, and a gruff, "He's fucking my cousin."

For a moment, they were silent. Either Levi's anger at his new meme status had temporarily disabled the part of his brain that blocked any mention of his private life from slipping past his lips in the wrong company, or something about Eren's indiscretion had rattled him so much, he couldn't keep silent about it. Either way, he looked increasingly surprised—and horrified—at himself for saying it out loud. Hange's eyes were wide, and Levi's were growing wider by the second. Of all the people to slip up to, he had slipped up to her. An entertainment journalist, the one person in his life who thrived on this kind of insider knowledge.

Hange swallowed. Levi was still staring at her like a deer in headlights, no doubt painfully aware that there was no taking back what he had said now.

Hange doesn't take a great deal of pride in what she does. She feels satisfied when her stories receive the reception she'd predicted, validated in her ability to analyse their consumer base and make accurate assumptions about what will hit and what won't, but the work itself feels dirty, at times. An opportunistic scavenger feeding on whatever carrion they can find, no matter how rotten it may be.

This is a perfect opportunity. Salacious details of Levi's interpersonal relationships, right from the horse's mouth. If it were anyone else, Hange would be scribbling every word verbatim in her notebook.

But this is Levi. Levi, who seems jarred by her last article (though Hange will maintain this, at least, is no real fault of her journalism, and also, absolutely hilarious) and was clearly, for whatever reason, incensed by Eren's actions.

Hange brushed her palms over her thighs, and picked a speck of lint from her trousers.

"This is nice, isn't it?" She said, "having breakfast together. We should do it more often. It feels good to just talk, sometimes. Off the record."

Levi blinked rapidly at her. He opened his mouth, but, still too shocked by his own loose tongue to speak, he said nothing. Hange pulled her phone from her bag and fiddled around with it some, tapping here and there, until she found what she was looking for. She turned it to Levi, and said, "I think this is my favourite edit so far."

Levi finally pulled his gaze from her, and looked down at the screen. It was truly something, the way the picture snapped him out of his stunned silence. Hange had never seen someone's face pinch up so rapidly.

"Come on, it's kinda funny. And look! That's Tony Stark, right? People are so creative. And maybe, if we're really lucky, Buzzfeed will do a compilation article of all the best ways people have used your new meme."

Levi rolled his eyes at her. It looked strange, with his face so tightly twisted. Hange chuckled at him.

She nudged his ankle beneath the table with the toe of her shoe. "Lighten up, you look constipated."

"Oi, out of the two of us I'm not the one who's full of—"

"—Full of shit, I know, I know. That honour is all mine."

They lapsed into another silence, this one marginally more comfortable than the last. Hange finished the last of her coffee and checked her emails, while Levi tortured himself some more by scrolling through his Twitter feed. After a short while, he spoke again.

"That...doesn't sound bad," he said.

"Hm?"

"What you said about talking more. Off the record. It doesn't sound bad."

It was Hange's turn to flush. Heat rose in her cheeks, and she occupied herself by rifling through her bag in search of nothing.

"Yeah?" Her voice, an octave higher than usual, cracked around the vowels. She cleared her throat, "will you have more gossip for me? It's almost painful that I can't share it, you know."

"Good. I'll share as many secrets as I've got, if it'll bother you that much."

"Sounds terrible," Hange said. She tore a clean corner off her napkin and scribbled her personal number onto it. She slid it over the table to him. "Text me."

Levi pulled a face at the piece of napkin. "Is that used? Gross, shitty four-eyes." He pocketed it anyway.

Hange didn't know what else to say. Levi didn't seem to either, and so he stood, and tucked his chair back in. Hange turned her eyes down to her empty plate. Her stomach and chest felt strange, almost sickly, but in an oddly pleasant way.

Levi rapped his knuckles on the table. Hange jumped, startled, and looked up at the sound.

"This part is on the record," he said. The corner of Levi's mouth quirked into a small, barely there grin. "I heard from a reliable source that Eren was so scared on the set of Last War that he pissed his pants. Twice."

#Levihan #snk #my writing #THIS ONE WAS SO FUN I would like to revisit this one day #I enjoyed their dynamic hehe

101 notes · View notes

cwopf · 4 years

Text

MY THEORY OF GILLOVNY

What if these two actually are together in real life. What if it IS a possibility. As lunatic as it seems, I can’t help but think about it. I have a life of my own, believe me, yet I keep coming back to this thought every once in a while, because I admit I’ve never seen anything like it before and I am not someone who gives even a flying fuck about celebrities. But these two make me wonder and I don’t know what is it about them, but I somehow want to believe in them.

What if their undeniable chemistry truly is real and their love is so much more than just a friendship.

What if Peter Morgan truly is nothing but a colleague and some kind of publicity she caught herself in, because even with all the “proof” of them being a couple, something just doesn’t sit right.

Her behavior, the gestures around him, it just doesn’t seem like a well loved, happy beyond dream kinda woman, I don’t physically see it. I truly don’t get the “love of my life” vibe. Do you?

Stiff, reserved and all in all a bit cold even, they truly make me wonder if it might be just a PR stunt. And, look, if I saw her crazy happy with a guy I’d be happy for her, totally. But, this? Nah, I don’t buy this shit.

Which, when I look back at all the gillovny moments, as crazy as it was, makes me believe that it was more than just an acted out exaggeration. And not even just a deep, year long friendship.

What if it truly passed all of that and became a romance at some point, and a big one. It certainly did look like it at a time. And while it currently looks like it had already ended, it made me think - what if that’s the point?

It takes a fool not to notice their ways towards each other, and even with all the denials, which sure make it hard to believe, when you see it for yourself it naturally comes as a possibility. It seems like a waste not to pursue something like that.

If we go back to the hints. The random sightings. Some might be made up, I am sure, but then some seem just crazy accurate.

What’s with the random dates in their lives, how can it all be so synchronized. Is it just random luck or is it an ode or a message to one another of some sort?

Why were they spotted in the same places so many times, randomly and out of their professional time together. Why the visits on sets, the airport sightings, the deleted tweets that seemed to reveal a little bit too much, the supposed holiday trips to the same destinations.

Why do people in the biz say stuff like “You mean Gillian and David? They’re not married, but they have been together for a while now.” Why does a random person (who apparently works for tv) on fb wish them a happy bday, then posts about how they have been together for a while now and how it was a nice surprise. And why would someone just say that out of the blue? Yep, it probably meant nothing. But, again. What if there was some truth to that? And that was only a fucking year ago.

How do two people accidentally get crippled at the same time? Also the stories from that same event, of how they love each other and their gestures towards one other, them arriving together and entering separately? What the hell are people noticing? Wasn’t she already kinda supposedly taken by then?

Why does she always wear the link bracelet, she wore it in their “good times” and it truly seems like a gift from D, which, of course, we will never know matter of fact, but it just feels like it. She has it on constantly, it seems so telling. She also wears it on red carpets with PM all the time and on almost every photoshoot. What IF it is from DD, wouldn’t that say something?

Also the necklace with a link he once wore on the stage of one of his concerts, could that very link be a part of her chain? If yes, then that is some deeply romantic shit.

Also the recent interviews, one in particular comes to mind. First, her mentioning her supposed boyfriend subtly and only saying the name out loud when asked about it, then proceeding to talk about her “partner” and telling a story of how they were talking about the aging process, but how they respect it because they are both going through it. Why does it feel like the mentioned totally fits someone else, like she’d discuss such a thing with someone who has been a part of her life for a long time and she had inevitably experienced this process with during the years. Does this click for anyone else too, or am I crazy and making up shit?

This was the moment when I stopped to think if just maybe there was a crazy possibility of David still being in her life.

Why does she speak about it being so good not living with her man and how she doesn’t see him that often, but when she does it’s special and it works for them.

While she must have been seeing her “current man” on set all the time. Do you notice how a lot of stuff that are supposedly about PM just don’t add up? Also, again, does the story make you think about someone else as well?

Also, have to throw this in here. The Christmas Jonathan Ross show. The sudden David (dick) reference. The Rob Lowe (apparently a good friend of David’s) saying “not far off from what I’ve been told” then both of them giggling together, almost as if an inside joke. The kind that gives off the vibe of making you wonder if the size thing’s something she’d accidentally blab out and brag about jokingly at some dinner party they once shared.

Why does she usually not give a fuck about half the stuff said, yet she would feel so shaken by people’s disbelief to publicly put it out on twitter about PM being the “love of her life” just to defend that idea? Why does it not seem like her at all? Why do I feel making a joke or being sarcastic about it would fit her more?

Is her SM being totally under control?

Maybe the penis and yoni of the day (along with Nelson) are one of the rare outlets right now, even that being some pre-approved idea for having it seem like she’s being her regular self, cause that’s something that we know fits her character.

But when you think about it, it is still a mini subtle commercial for SexEd. Which I love, yet...Netflix. Again.

Also, the constant mentioning of Netflix along with PM in her stories, desperately trying to fit him somewhere. Like the “what do you eat during quarantine” and bam: “when me and Pete hosted a dinner we froze a chocolate cake...” Riiight. Is it just me, or does it seem like trying way too hard?

Which makes me think of all the contrary. If we go back to the past Gillovny fuckery...“he’s in the shower” and “I’m with schmoopie” shirts and “chewie’s girlfriend” and the twitter saga. What if it was intentionally done that way to make people think “what if”, but obviously take it as a joke, because of course that’s what it is. But was it? Maybe they just knew no one would truly buy it so they could play around for a little bit and actually be a couple for a minute, make out on Kimmel and fuck around on twitter. Propaganda? Maybe.

Some truth in that? God damn it, almost feels like it. Sure felt way more natural, sexy and loving than any of the stuff going on today.

What if we hate MP for no reason, what if she’s just truly a fucking assistant, a help and nothing but it. What if G hugged her after the play in London out of gratitude, because she’s just a prop they need to act this shit out. What if it’s all a big shitshow, but a shitshow nonetheless.

What if I will say the silliest shit of all time and boldly assume...that behind all of this which we do not understand, D&G are still together and fine. What if it was meant to feel like the end to us. But they are there, in secret, because it’s somehow better for them, because they prefer it that way.

What if the shoe pic of “working from home in my Dune London shoes” a day prior to his 60th birthday is just another way to turn people away from that idea and subtly make them not even question anything, while in reality she is with him, somewhere, celebrating his 60th birthday. And things are much brighter for them than what they seem.

I might be so wrong, so off. But something is going on in the background and there are way too many things I do not buy.

Also, it was honestly more probable to me that they were once together, but fell apart somewhere along the way, I believed that and it totally seemed like a probable scenario.

Until the very subtle, yet interesting stuff that have been going on made me question it again, maybe it’s silly, but when I connect the dots, like the constant bracelet wearing, the talking about a partner and not mentioning the name, but referencing stuff that feel completely Gillovny, aging with someone, long distance shit, random people still stating “they have been together for a while now, nice surprise”. Maybe it’s a load of bullshit, but it also just makes it seem like he still might be there, somewhere, after all.

How the hell did I end up here? I ask myself this constantly. I still have no idea.

Yes, it is so fucking crazy. But this is where I leave this at.

#gillovny #david duchovny #gillian anderson #gillian and david #the x files

117 notes · View notes

formulatrash · 4 years

Note

hey hazel i know you said you're swamped so seriously no obligation to answer but do you have any thoughts on will buxton's recent chronic inability to stop digging himself into holes, esp on twitter? i'm not so much of a buxton-hater as a lot of people i've been seeing but he has been dropping the ball constantly as of late. what's up with him

Hmm, well. I want to couch this in saying I think some of Will’s meltdowns have been truly appalling (the ‘racism is now about me’ one, in particular) and that however nice and human compared to a lot of F1 people he seems, he does come from an enormously privileged background. I really like Will - but I think it is worth acknowledging both that his behaviour goes well beyond having a bad day sometimes and that one of the reasons he’s been able to present a personable, friendly attitude in the paddock is that he’s from a class where that’s a comfort zone.

I really empathise with him at the minute. He’s been quite publicly open about struggling with mental health issues and this year has been really difficult for most of us in the industry, especially freelancers. Losing the thing your life revolves around is a major disruption, especially when doing your work in it is what gives you a sense of reward and worth and idk if that’s the problems Will’s having (I’m not his psychologist) but I know it’s hit me and other people in motorsport really hard. Like what do you do, wait? Give up on the thing you’ve been fighting to stay in for so long (and it’s always a bit of a wrestle) - and then to go back in weird, stressful circumstances is hard too.

But I think what gets to Will is what gets to me, too, which is just like skull-caving-in overwhelmedness at the internet. If you can’t post anything without a million people jumping on you then it’s really hard to tell if you’ve actually posted something bad or if it’s just the standard pile-on, which lets things escalate into the sort of Dick Tantrum incident* which was like, mostly harmless but all got a bit silly. (the person arguing with him was also being genuinely unpleasant and brought Will’s daughter into it, which is very uncool)

And I see the things that used to drive me mad when people asked me about when And We Go Green was coming out and I’d be like “I don’t know, I’m not the production company, I don’t know anything please stop asking me it’s not funny” because I was worried about it myself. So when the F1 show moved from YouTube to wherever (as far as I can tell it’s still on YouTube) and a load of people were moaning at Will, whose job it is to present it not schedule it, I really sympathetically winced. Like it’s hard enough having work at the minute, let alone being held responsible for all of FOM’s decisions.

There’s also just a sort of assumption that media people are invincible. Like there’s these irrelevant anime fanboys I should spend absolutely 0% of my brain ever thinking about on Twitter who are convinced I hate men because I don’t think fangirls should be bullied for liking Lando Norris or think their shit edge lord memes are funny. I should not care about this, it shouldn’t bother me and the more I let it the more they crow about getting rent-free space in my head and like. Fine, you fuckers, you have managed to irritate me. Because I’m just trying my fucking best and having a seriously bad time doing it and when I was on an upwards career trajectory I could ignore it but right now everything feels like a kick. Like if I can’t get the jobs, do I have to take the bullshit?

When I got people nitpicking my Tumblr I stopped posting here because it made me so miserable. I had to basically get off the whole internet because I was so wound up because if I had an up moment and said something enthusiastic, it felt like it would get chewed out and dissected and disapproved of. And I’m nowhere near as famous as Will, obviously so I do get that he feels very under it.

And he loves being online and interacting with people and being able to be meme-y and jokey and a bit more human and sympathetic than some other presenters, a little less hardline masc in the traditional F1 sense than the strict shirts-and-slacks Sky Sports team. So when that then turns into something miserable it’s like well how much fucking more of me are you going to take: I can’t work or work is complicated, can’t tool around online...

So yeah. I do get that Buxton is Going Through It. And I’ve used examples of me there because I don’t know what’s going on in his head and I’d rather not speculate but to give you an idea of how it is.

Will’s a nice person, he’s not as educated on social issues as, idk, me or Chainbear or whoever but he is a long way ahead of a lot of F1 and I also get that it’s been very distressing in the last few months having to argue with colleagues and discovering the true, unpleasant colours of people you know.

So I have a lot of sympathy for him. I have to walk away from the internet a lot at the minute, which is really hard when we all live on it all the fucking time and it’s like ok taking a break to maybe speak to friends and oh fuck here I am again in a Grandpa Simpson taking his hat off gif loop.

Anyway, short version: lot of people really going through it right now. I really hope Will can get some support and also maybe someone to do his social media for him for a bit, which sucks because he obviously enjoys it but like, I think I would if I was in a position to right now. Even though people’d probably phone the police in suspicion I’d been kidnapped when my tweets started being spelt right and shit.

*Dan is literally called Dick Tantrum in the paddocks and by his engineers so Will was actually right that it’s a nickname. Not a nice one but there it is.

#f1 asks #work asks

25 notes · View notes

indecisive-v · 3 years

Text

NINJAMUFFIN DOING ANOTHER AMA ON TWITTER, HERE'S MORE SHIT FOR YA! keep in mind i'm just sharing the funkin related stuff, though i am including WAAAAY more than what i shared before 👍 go check out ninja's twitter profile for questions about stuff like ritz! questions in blue, answers in orange. if yall don't wanna read everything i MIGHT make a version of this post where i replace the answers with my own summaries of em (and if the questions are long, those too)

and here's a link to the ama tweet itself! dunno if it's still goin

Q: I figure the answer will be yes but do you have more plans to implement more guest appearances from people in the newgrounds community into FNF? Or are you all gunna focus on OG lore and stuff going forward

A: for guest appearances, I think we have always seen it as getting a healthy mix of both. PERSONALLY I'd like to lean towards having more OG stuff than guest stuff, BUT it's all a matter of what other boys think of that as well. I'm not the sole person working on game!

Q: Are you gonna release the full FNF game or are you gonna be releasing week after week? Like, are you gonna release week 8 or are we gonna wait some years until The Full Ass Game comes out?

A: Release plan for FNF right now is a few more updates or whatev to the 'demo' we have out right now, and then a long silence of probably no updates whatsoever until the full game is done (which will likely be a few years). That's partly why we made kickstarter for game.

Q: Hey so like, how much will Fnf cost after it's finished? And when will you ask the supporters what they want the game on?

A: It's all subject to change, but right now it prob gonna be standard 15-25$ lil steam indie game.

We will ask Kickstarter pledgers and whatnot what they want the game on SUPER close to when its released, to keep options open if we get onto anything like a console people want.

Q: 1. how was your day

2. are you releasing a week 8 song early like week 7, or are you goin full lockdown

A: I am doing GOOD today, and I think recently I've been good in general.

up to the mood, but so far we doing good about not having anything leak or whatev, so I think it'd be fun to have update come out with people not knowing what to expect at all. Build dat intrigue

Q: Will fnf ever get official plushies?? Seems like an untapped market

A: FNF plushies will prob happen some point, we have a lot of current merch stuff on our plates already though! (Mostly kickstarter type stuff, shirts, pins, posters, and all the physical OST stuff) Its a lot to sort out, but in time more and more stuff will happen. We r jus 4 boys!

Q: did you ever expect your game to blow up as it did? what was your first reaction to seeing it become super popular

A: FNF never had a humble moment, literally day 1 before the prototype even came out, the vid on twitter had like 5K likes overnight. Then when ludum dare version came out, it got 5K likes again, like it wasnt just a fluke. Was crazy, and def felt like somethin was different wit FNF

Q: Do you plan on getting other people to come in to help with the music? That seems like a lot of work to dump on one person, what with the erect mode and whatnot.

I guess the question could apply to all aspects of development. Will you be bringing on more people to help?

A: We definitely are getting help from other people. We are always keeping an eye on people for various different things. In terms of programming, already I've gotten 2 people (MtH and Geokureli) to help with certain Week 7 stuff (charting/polish, and loading stuff). Shit like dat

Q: Oh, also, will the Steam version be Workshop compatible? That'd really help streamline the process of downloading mods.

A: Steam version of FNF will likely NOT be Steam workshop compatible, because we want all the mods to NOT be spread out through different places. There WILL be modding support that is as streamlined as Steam workshop though. Mainly for non-steam versions of the game!

Q: Are there any chances that the game will have a physical release? Also any updates on a switch port? I remember one of you guys talking/joking about it.

A: Not impossible for FNF to get a physical release. We would want to see how far we could go with it though. I think it'd be super easy to do something wit people like LimitedRun games or whatev, but I think stuff like that can only go so far. I wanna see Funkin in mf Walmart!!!!!!

not that LimitedRun isn't going to be an option! Just we consider and pursue many different things! FNF release is years away, so we have time to think about everything. Whole mindset can be different just a few months from now.

Q: Out of curiosity, how are you dealing with all the popularity? It blew up so fast id barely be able to handle it if I was in your shoes.

A: The only way I've been able to handle it is having the other boys on the crew and being able to talk to them about all the overwhelmingness.

Part of it feels very lonesome, feels like NO ONE can come close to comprehending exactly how I'm feeling, except them. also other PALS!!!

Q: Do you own any of the bootleg FNF merchandise? Like any bootleg plushies or anything?

A: i dont, i genuinely think they r a waste of money, and I know any bootleg shit that gets made, we can prob go about and make it, and make it 100x cooler because we actually put effort into shit. bootleg shit just in it for the coin, so they aint gettin that from me

Q: How did you go about getting in contact with sr pelo for skid and pumps vocals?

A: Pelo i think was familiar and pals wit PhantomArcade a bit thru various Newgrounds things and collabs and whatnot.

pelo retweeted the first OG FNF posts first ever, and brought a LOT of attention to it. to pay him back, we put skid and pump in game! ask dave for more info prob

Q: what's the plan for having the full ass game open source if it's gonna cost money? couldn't people just download the source and compile the game for free?

A: when FNF is fully released, the full source code will be released as well.

the game will be DRM free so it will be way easier for people to redistribute the released/offical .exe instead of compiling it, so that's not the issue anyways. people will pay for things if they like it

Q: What are the chances of it getting on consoles like switch or Playstation, ps5 would definitely be my preferred way to play

A: it'd be a matter of hiring someone to build out backend stuff for those specific consoles. someone who knows their way around all the wacky code stuff, AND knows console hardware stuff. Then its just a matter of hittin up those console manufacturers (Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo)

the CLOSEST one is SWITCH. pretty much all of that backend is already made, so it just a matter of gettin all that access and shit.

i think in any case though, there's a lot of NDA stuff required, i dunno how much we'd be able to talk about it even IF we get that stuf sorted

Q: any ideas of releasing it on epic store or another platform?

A: Right now, the only thing that is 100% confirmed and WILL happen is a Steam version, itchio version, and mobile versions on respective app stores. Other storefronts aren't out of the picture though, but we don't want to spread ourselves too thin with it.

Q: Will you continue using HaxeFlixel to make the rest of FNF?

A: yes, because it is what I'm the most technically proficient in, and generally is VERY flexible. just a matter of ME becoming a better coder. It's ALL open source, so if I need something done a certain way, either I can do it, or we can hire someone to do it.

Q: have you seen game theory's videos on your game yet and if so, what do you think about them? (not talking about his predictions because i dont want spoilers. i like mystery)

A: it is always good silly fun to watch the Game Theory vids about Funkin with some pals, and see what matpat thinks of the game. i lov the vids, but wish he used my face less! Or at least used a cuter pic of me like this one!!

Q: Ok so: What does the future of FNF look like to you?

A: future of FNF is a rhythm game that not only exceeds every expectation that people have of it, but subverts most expectations and conventions as well.

Q: Do you plan on retouching on older weeks once the game is fully out? Like reanimating sprites, redoing some charting, updating the background, etc

A: retouching and probably overhauling certain aspects is almost definitely gonna happen. Everything is fluid and can be changed (and should be changed when necessary). i dont think anything should be too attached to, especially this early on in development

Q: I honestly do not care if the answer to this is vague as hell to keep surprises and shit lol but… Since Week 7 was the closest we’ll get to a playable girlfriend (still bf controlling tho), do you have plans to make girlfriend playable in spin-off things or just freeplay?

A: wouldnt be out of the picture for a playable GF, i don't think we've had some hard thing AGAINST it. just a matter of what we want out of the game, and what sort of story or whatev we could do with that concept

Q: How do BF and GF manage to meet famous newgrounds characters (such as pico, tankman and the others to come) like is this all in one universe/ timeline or are they being brought in?

A: i think they are all just there existing. i think there's a lot of wacky things in other media that try to justify crossovers, like MULTIVERSE bullshit or TIMELINE shit, but i dunno, its like subspace emissary. Captain Falcon and Olimar from Pikmin just hang out. Shit like dat

disclaimer that all lore shit is in phantomarcade head pretty much and maybe there is wacky dimensions or somethin

Q: Will the game have dlc?

A: its not too unlikely that we'd have expansions of some sort, but i mean right now we plan on packing in as much as we can into base game, and trying to make that as pure as possible.

if there is ANY dlc, i would personally want it to be 100% free updates

Q: How did you meet Phantom Arcade, Kawai Sprite, and EvilSker? And what do you think about the community and its controversies?

A: me and phantomarcade been fukin around NG for years so years and years ago we naturally crossed paths and became pals

about 2 years ago i found kawaisprites music on NG, and started talkin wit him, made Ritz wit him and we fell in lov

and evilsk8r i met cuz of FNF!!!

quik elaborate on evilsk8r, wanted artist for gamejam FNF was for (ludum dare), and OG person i asked wasnt available, so he referred me to evilsk8r, who I have never met or talked to before ever.

#friday night funkin #fnf #fridaynightfunkin

1 note · View note

unsureunsaidthoughts · 3 years

Text

MY FIRST POST & “friends”

So, I’m 24 and have never used Tumblr in my life but now feels necessary, I need somewhere I can vent where it will possibly reach someone - but without anyone knowing it’s me. I have been feeling really overwhelmed recently, run down. I’m not one to speak about my feelings, but something needs to change and this feels like it might help. I don’t care if nobody reads a single thing I have to say.

I have this really heavy, tight feeling in my chest constantly at the moment. I’ve never been diagnosed with anxiety but I know I definitely have it, it’s gotten so much worse over the last 1.5 years that I get this feeling so often now. I don’t want to go anywhere, I’ve gotten far too comfortable on my sofa that everywhere else feels so alien to me.

I can’t remember the last time I really enjoyed spending time with friends, I just feel so fed up y’know? I don’t have the patience to talk bullshit and hear about all the things that they’re happy about when I just feel so miserable. Maybe that makes me a terrible friend but I don’t think I am - I have always put their needs before my own. I guess I have just realised how important my own feelings are during the last year or so and I value my time so much more. I’m not willing to give my time up if I don’t feel like I am going to benefit from it.

Today I put a tweet out talking about how much I haven’t wanted to socialise with anybody recently and my close “friend” replied “what about me?”.... what about YOU??? Why doesn't she care about the fact her close friend who was so loud and full of personality, is no longer that? What do these friends bring to my life? I see people share mental health posts ALL the time, and talk about how important it is to check on their mates but do they FUCK follow what they preach. It’s all just a bunch of performative shit for likes and shares.

I’ve not even read any of this back, I can’t be bothered. I apologise in advance for any bad spelling and awful use of , - . !

It’s been a blast and I already feel a lot better. Things definitely won't be left unsaid anymore.

Bye for now x

#feelings #feels #venting #vent #rant #friends #mental #mentalhealth #blog #blogging #life #diary #personal #onlinediary

1 note · View note

orionsangel86 · 4 years

Text

You know when I first joined Twitter I had many reservations. I had always heard that Twitter fandom was pretty toxic and for that reason I tried to avoid it as long as possible. Eventually with Tumblr slowly dying I just went for it. I was... pretty damn naive when I joined up.

I have always said, over and over again, that my main reason for even being in fandom was to meet new people and make new friendships that would outlast Supernatural. At this point in time I feel I have accomplished this, though I am always open to making new friends. I like to think, that this being my primary reason for being here, it makes me a genuine person. I am not altogether that interested in popularity, getting the most followers, making my opinion the one everyone MUST believe in, and I never had much interest in “fighting” antis first hand. Sure I liked writing meta and would defend myself if I was attacked, but seeking out drama and forcing my opinion on others were never things that I cared about.

Twitter changed me. I said I was naive, and I was particularly naive to people seeking me out, being super nice to me, inviting me into lots of various fandom GCs and welcoming me with open arms. When people do that, you feel loved, you feel like you are a part of something, and very quickly it can become addictive. You very easily start feeling like those people are your friends, and you get protective of them. You support them, stand up for them, and turn a blind eye when their behaviour gives you pause.

The other thing you should know about me is that I am an empath. Sometimes this is a strength, and sometimes it is a weakness. I hate the idea of upsetting people, and I feel strongly towards those who are upset. I always try to see different points of view in a situation, and I am very consciencous of offending people - When I have offended others, I tend to dwell on it for a long time afterwards, wanting to make things right. But I also think that being empathic can make me prone to manipulation. Especially of the emotional kind. When that happens I can get defensive myself, when I suspect emotional manipulation I shut down very quickly, and I can get spiteful towards it. It’s a defense mechanism. I often regret my actions later. I feel like Twitter fandom has brought out some of my nastier qualities, but I feel that I need to explain where I think this has come from.

I was invited into a GC that in hindsight, was a bad place. It was supposedly a place created to vent about things that upset us, and to keep an eye on that “other” side of fandom - the bronlys. It was a secret place, you must never talk about this GC, I was told. This GC didn’t exist. I’m going to talk about this GC, and in doing so will probably get attacked, subtweeted, called out directly, called a liar, exposed for being this that and whatever, probably have my private DMs shared, and yeah... a whole bunch of shit probably. I’m altogether not prepared for any of that, but since I have that whole bunch blocked now, I’m hoping any shit they say about me will blow over. Anyone who truly knows me, knows I am not the person they make me out to be anyway.

When I first joined that GC the point was to call out hate towards the cast and the writers. To find tagged tweets and bullying and harassment and make sure that the wider fandom knew exactly who the problem people were. I believed in that process. I believed that we were doing good for the fandom in making newer fans aware of who needed to be avoided, as I had heard stories first hand of people who had come into fandom reached out to bigger fandom accounts and immediately been shut down and bullied just for saying they liked Castiel or shipped Dean and Cas. I was angry at those hateful people and wanted some kind of justice for them, so yeah, I joined in happily with the call outs.

But over the past year, things have changed. First, it was not just calling out bronlies, it was calling out extreme stans, who also tagged the writers in their hate. Sure, I wasn’t happy that anyone was tagging the writers in hate, so fuck those people. They can go to hell. I’ll support the calling out of those names too. Then, when people started turning on meta writers like me and taking the piss out of our meta, calling it bullshit and mocking us, it was hurtful, so when that GC rallied together to support me and my fellow meta writers and call out those assholes I was all for it. They were screencapping my meta and calling me deluded after all, why shouldn’t I defend myself and get my friends to help? People in fandom can be dicks when they want to be. But then again, so can we all.

Then it got weird. I think people in fandom started getting nervous about the final season announcement and how the show would end. Cas stans started getting extremely negative about his chances for survival. Destiel shippers started complaining about Destiel being queerbaiting and planning on going after the writers if it didn’t go canon. These were people who I was mutuals with, whose accounts I followed, and whose opinions, whilst they were kind of upsetting for me as a positive fan, were untagged personal opinions and not hate. Those people weren’t attacking positive fans, though sometimes discussions got heated, arguably it got heated on both sides. When the GC started going after those people I started feeling uncomfortable. But I kept quiet. This, I have come to realise, was a huge mistake.

Suddenly other fans were fighting against the GC people. They (we) were called “the fandom police” and “the bully squad” by so many others. I started noticing how other fans, fellow Destiel shippers, were blocking me and avoiding me for my associations with this group. I watched as the GC people started slagging off accounts that were my long time mutuals, my close friends, people I had met in real life and knew to be good people all because they had voiced a slightly negative opinion about the show. If you are relatively well known in Supernatural fandom, chances are this GC has slagged you off.

At the same time, I had watched how some of my friends within the GC “clique” had started changing, how their behaviour online was becoming aggressive and mean. How they were antagonistic and bullyish. My friends. People who I knew were good people before. The dog piling, the condescending tones, the entitled sense of righteousness, it all added up. I started trying to voice my concerns, both to people I was close to within the GC privately, and timidly within the GC itself - for which I was shut down. I started reconsidering my own behaviour online. Had I too acted like this? Had I also aggressively gone after people for simply voicing a negative opinion? Had I also shown myself to be exactly what this GC was supposed to be fighting against?

Some of the others privately admitted to feeling the same way. Some of us backed off and stopped associating with the main GC accounts. We kept our distance from them, some I know muted them. But none of us left the GC. I wish I had back then rather than letting it escalate further.

It had once again got worse from just going after people with negative opinions, now they were going after anyone who disagreed with their specific opinions. Either you agree with us, or you are an idiot. I couldn’t stomach it anymore. My friend, who was also in the GC, decided to query this new line of thinking because she disagreed with the “big opinion”. This is what kicked off all the drama. I’m not going to go into detail about it because otherwise it’ll get too obvious and personal and I want to keep this vague because whilst these people have hurt me and spread lies about me I actually don’t intend to call them out personally or reveal whose who in the group.

Just know this. By the time I eventually spoke up it was apparantly too late. My admittence of my discomfort was seen as a betrayal. There were private DMs in which I got defensive and snapped back whilst emotional about basically losing all my closest Twitter friends, and some messages I sent which I am not proud of. If they get out, fair enough. Judge me all you like. Just understand that I was extremely upset and confused how no one else apparantly saw the issues I was seeing; that this GC was indeed bullying and policing fandom, and that these people were intimidating, threatening, and manipulating everyone into believing they were victims.

I tried to let it drop, I tried to ignore it. I wanted to keep quiet. But my quitting the GC, my request to those who were calmer and less inclined towards bad behaviour to at least keep the ones who were bullying fandom in line, didn’t stop them. Their behaviour has only escalated further and Twitter fandom right now is an awful place because of it. The bronlys must be laughing at us, because Destiel fandom has turned cannabalistic.

I spoke out recently. I tried to keep it vague in a tweet about the recent drama in general. But one thing I said gets pulled out separately and suddenly I’m the big bad wolf invalidating people and I’m a horrible person who is clearly fetishising destiel as I want them to fuck on the map table apparantly?!?! I mean, this is what these people do. They take something and blow it up. They twist your words, they basically throw a dictionary of large complex words at you claiming you are x,y,and z. they use terms like gaslighting and strawmanning aimed at you and in the confusion it takes you forever to actually realise that they are doing those things themselves. Constantly. To everyone.

Look I took it too far. I subtweeted too. I exhibited those bad behaviours as well. Hell, I learned from the best after all. I was in that GC for a year. Of course I am still trying to unlearn those behaviours. I am not proud of my behaviour on Twitter. After this post, I will try to do be better. Everyday. I will be better. I apologise to anyone I may have hurt by supporting and encouraging that behaviour.

I have had mutual friends tell me privately that I need to stop. What upsets me, is that those mutuals aren’t exactly telling the others to stop too. No. Those were the mutuals who stayed quiet whilst those particular people just constantly attacked and bullied everyone. So I’m sorry, but this is me not stopping, this is me making one last post on the topic. This is me telling my story as I see it. This is me pouring my heart out and getting it off my chest. This is my truth. I’m not spinning lies here, I’m not trying to twist anything, because I think I also come across quite badly. But the recent accusations against me, claiming I don’t care for anyone else in fandom, that my calling out “so called bullying” is just my personal vendetta against people who used to be my friends. Well, yes. Technically you’d be right there, they did used to be my friends, but no. Where you are wrong, is saying I don’t care. Because if I didn’t care about the bullying that I am STILL seeing on my timeline via upset mutuals reacting to the hurtful tweets of those I have blocked, I would just ignore it and not cause myself further drama. If I didn’t 100% believe those people were bullies, they’d still be my friends. I wouldn’t have called them out. Why would I put myself through all this if I didn’t 100% believe what I’ve been saying? That’s just madness.

Because here’s the thing, I HATE bullies. I have been bullied my whole fucking life, and what I hate MORE than that, was that through that GC I also became something that I hated. Because by associating with them for that year, I might as well have called myself a bully too. And that I just can’t forgive.

So my reason for writing this post is twofold.

1. Yes, it’s to defend the lies spread against me. So that those wondering if I am actually a fake bitch with a vendetta against certain people can make up their own minds. Perhaps this post exasperates that, or in your minds confirms their accusations about me. Maybe it does. I would argue that I am not fake. This isn’t fake. This is my personal truth and a very personal account of things that have greatly hurt me and caused me much internal conflict over the past few months. Those people who I am accusing (whose names I have left out to stupidly protect their privacy because believe it or not I’m not a bitch who encourages harassment against anyone even people I consider bullies) will never admit that their behaviour is wrong. They will continue to attempt to convince anyone who asks that I turned on them for no reason, or because I blindly follow my friend who they are also attacking and exposing right now for getting emotional and taking a DM convo too far. If you choose to believe them that is your right, clearly you and I were never close enough for you to trust my word over the words of people whose behaviour is clearly and proudly splashed all over their own social media accounts. Frankly, if you see all that, and still believe that behaviour is okay, you are no friend of mine.

2. It’s because I want people to know that actually, through all the pain and drama and emotion and loss of friendship, and conflict and struggle with my mental health, I do care. I care too damn much. If I didn’t I wouldn’t have spent an hour of my Sunday writing this out. Because this has been toiling and whirling inside me painfully for months and I am fed up of it. I had to write it down. I had to get it out of me. I want these people out of my life for good, but I can’t sit by and let bullies continue to manipulate my fandom, my mutuals, my friends who I see encouraged by their behaviour to imitate it. They are unfortunately very good at encouraging others to also partake in their behaviour. Please do not fall for it. Please consider your tone when tweeting or replying to someone with an opposing opinion. Please don’t feed bad behaviour by liking it and tweeting it just because you agree with the specific opinion buried within the condescension. Please don’t throw around strong accusations like homophobia against your fellow queer fans just because they have different desires from this dumb show that we all love.

If you can all do that for me, then I will promise to do it for you too.

I am terrified to post this post. I know that in doing so I am burning quite a few bridges. I know that those I accuse will do everything in their power to make out that I am insane, that I am a psycho. I know that I am exposing myself to more attacks, more harassment. I am sure there will be plenty of twitter threads dragging my name through the mud. They’ll dismiss all of this, call it bullshit, once again claim its just my personal vendetta against certain people. I guess I’m hoping that by anticipating all this and writing it down, it might give those people pause to just stop and leave me be. Stop the cycle of bad behaviour that has caused all this escalation and go back to enjoying the show without policing everyone else.

At this point I just want everyone to know the truth. Whether you believe it or not is your prerogative. This show ends in a few months time and I just want to enjoy it without seeing bullying in my timeline. That’s what this has always been about.

We must stand up to bullying. We must not let it ruin the final few months of this show. This post is my final word on the topic. I won’t respond to anything else. I won’t respond to any threats, any subtweets against me going forward. Hateful anons will be blocked. I won’t respond to anyone asking me for more info and I have no intention of naming people personally or giving more clues as to the GC or the people who were in it. So please don’t ask. Just keep an eye out for bad behaviour in fandom and if you see it, block or mute the source, only call it out if you know you have the mental capabilities to tackle the gaslighting. But absolutely do not support it. Do not feed the bullies as attention is what they want most of all, that and making their words the only words fandom follows.

I am done with this now. I won’t discuss this more.

#personal #fandom wank

115 notes · View notes

davidmann95 · 4 years

Note

Hey David? Why is ours such a cruel and merciless God?

mirrorfalls said: (If you don't know what I'm talking about, your inbox should be filling up with more specific deets riiiiight about now.)

cheerfullynihilistic said: THE SNYDER CUT

Anonymous said: You don’t seem to think Superman’s public rep will take another beating from the Snyder Cut coming out. Honestly I thought you’d be way more upset than you seemed on Twitter.

Anonymous said: So uhh, against all thoughts and logic the Snyder cut is being released? Maybe as a mini series? Thoughts?

Anonymous said: SNYDER CUT!

Bullies. Jocks. Guys angrily asking if we know who their father is. Assorted dudebro nerd-oppressors of America:

You have failed us. You have failed us so hard. What else do we even keep you around for if not to head this shit off at the pass? Shame on you.

Okay, so seriously: I’m actually gonna put most bitching and moaning under a cut, because I know firsthand there are as many as several non-slavering maniacs out there who dug Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and who are simply and entirely reasonably excited that they’re getting this movie after all. I don’t feel like throwing a wall of text at them shitting all over this, so I’ll lead off with I think some fairly even-handed commentary on the real-world circumstances here, rambling speculation regarding the production, and some cautious optimism about the actual movie/s. THEN I’ll get to what I imagine most of you are here to see.

So totally in a vacuum: this is a cool, good thing. I’m the notorious theatrical Justice League-liker, but at best it was a compromised product due to the original creator - who like it or not clearly had an incredibly ambitious personal vision for these characters and their world - suffering a horrific tragedy forcing him off the project, and leaving his final stamp on blockbuster culture and a world he’d devoted years of his life to a flop with his name on it when he couldn’t even truly call it his own anymore. At worst, said tragedy was taken advantage of by suits to ditch him in the home stretch so as to try and shove out something ostensibly more marketable. But now because of a...very loyal fanbase, the man’s getting the opportunity and resources to rise like a phoenix and see at least some of his vision through in a huge way. That’s pretty remarkable.

Not in a vacuum this is fucking horrifying. I’ve already seen folks poo-poohing the reflexive fears that this will ‘set a precedent’, and they were right enough that I deleted my initial tweet on the subject because I didn’t think I could express my own opinion with any nuance in the space of 280 characters. Yeah, nerd whining definitely shaped Rise of Skywalker (another movie I enjoyed in spite of the circumstances of its creation). Hell, Sonic the Hedgehog crunched its CGI team prior to unceremoniously firing them to redesign his model thanks to outcry. That’s already a market force, and just to be clear upfront, if we can’t agree the predominant mode of operation for #ReleaseTheSnyderCut has been a toxic nerd harassment campaign when they spammed posts memorializing deceased actors and chased Diane Nelson off Twitter, we’re not gonna be able to have this conversation. And director’s cuts are you may have noticed also already a thing. But this isn’t changing direction on a project that’s already going to exist no matter what, this is turning back 3 years later on a commercial flop and dumping tens of millions of dollars into it, explicitly in response to that harassment campaign. It’s not *actually* going back and, say, remaking The Last Jedi, but by god to the naked eye it’s gonna be as good as for plenty of fanboys, and probably to some shortsighted execs as well. This is a new thing, and in this context it is a very, very bad one. Hopefully one that won’t amount to anything.

As for the movie itself: what the hell is this thing going to end up being? I assume with this sort of cashola being pumped into it we’re not getting any slapdash greenscreen or storyboarded sequences, but four hours? Is it really just going to be an expanded and revised version of what we saw in theaters, or is this including content that would have been in the originally planned Justice Leagues 2 and 3? My understanding is that those were already compressed into a single Justice League 2 before plans collapsed altogether, were they maybe filming side-by-side and this’ll be the whole shebang? If not is Snyder going to hedge his bets and end this on a clean note, or keep it ending on a cliffhanger in hopes HBO will throw another $250 million his way to keep going? Does DC want to keep going? Would they give into fan pressure on releasing after all what was widely publicized as the first film of a duology or trilogy with dangling threads if they weren’t going to be at least watching the numbers to see the feasibility of returning to this in a bigger way? Not that I think WB execs would piss into Snyder’s mouth if he were dying of thirst at this point if he simply asked to be able to do Justice League 2, but if he floated that if they instead just give him a liiiiiiiitle more money he can finally deliver unto them their very own Avengers - one that they can work on even during quarantine since it’s mostly just VFX work left - and hey if it works out he’s got a sequel or two cued up and ready to go? Maybe they look at their scattered plans and say the hell with it and end up giving this a theatrical release and sequel with Snyder holding the reigns again if this ends up a killer app; stranger things have happened, if not many, and somehow this is already happening in the first place after all. Alternatively, if this succeeds, could they go “thanks and good on ya, totally do another, but it’s gonna be an HBO exclusive so you’re only getting a hundred million, figure it out”? Would Ben Affleck return? How much reshooting will he be willing to commit to even for this? And most importantly, since this is potentially going to be serialized as six ‘episodes’, will We Got This Covered count this as another ‘win’ since their bullshit rumor mill algorithm spit out “Justice League HBO TV show” recently?

As for the project itself: I ain’t subscribing to HBOMax for this bad boy, but once it becomes more widely available I can’t claim I won’t probably watch it. It’s basically a new movie about the Justice League, and if there’s anything I WOULD wanna see Zack Snyder do in the DCU, it’s the movie finally moving past pseudo-realism (aside from some of those dopey costumes) and leaning all the way into godlike superbeings bludgeoning each other through continents. I absolutely wanna see his aesthetic take on the Green Lantern Corps, and New Genesis, and time travel, and all the other weird promises of where his movies were going to go climaxing in a ridiculous super-war across all spacetime. It’s the same reason J.G. Jones was an exciting choice for Final Crisis before he had to leave, seeing a guy known for his work in an ultra-real grungy superhero style starting there and building up to seeing his version of absolutely wild cosmic spectacle. And no, to respond to one of the initial asks, I’m not worried about the impact on Superman. Everyone seems to have accepted this is its own distinct thing whether they like it or not, I think him getting to complete his ‘arc’ will quiet down many of the folks who like to yell at every other version as retro nonsense since now they’ll be able to be smug about having had the best take rather than pining for a lost finale, and I’m not interested in further Superman movies at the moment anyway with Superman & Lois in the pipe (which I was originally paranoid would be endangered by this when rumors first started floating, but if it’s been brewing since November then if they wanted to strike that down to ‘make room’ according to their Byzantine ever-shifting rules, they would have by now). Far as I’m concerned, as long as the other DC movies get to keep doing what they’re doing during and past this - even Pattinson in his corner, however that works - then totally let Snyder work out all his Wagnerian superhero bullshit for another flick or two. If nothing else, maybe we’ll learn what the hell that diagram up there is supposed to mean. And a plea I want to clarify upfront is wholeheartedly sincere: we’re already down the rabbit hole, so let Snyder to literally whatever he wants with his non-theatrically released Justice League. Zero input or veto power from outside parties. If he wants Flash to hang dong or Superman to say fuck or Batman to learn he’s Steppenwolf’s secret dad or Cyborg to learn he needs to eat babies to fuel his machine parts, let him go for it. Whole point is this is now his thing for people who want his thing.

Okay, beneath the cut the filter comes off, so go ahead if that’s your jam.

Hahahahahahaha this is gonna be such a fuckin’ shitshow you guys, Jesus Christ.

They’re giving the dude who did BvS and wants to make an Ayn Rand adaptation someday $30 million to take another crack at this monstrosity! 30 goddamn million smackaroos for four fucking hours of by many accounts roughly the same basic movie, except now presumably with what little coherency, fun, and clean character work the theatrical cut managed to pull off excised in return for weighty staring, ponderous pseudo-philosophical musings, hackneyed symbolism, aimless mythology teasing, and Steppenwolf I understand being decapitated by Wonder Woman at the end rather than taken back to Apokolips. I didn’t even spoiler mark that shit because don’t you dare pretend you care about the fate of Steppenwolf. I won’t have it.

I used to wonder if I was indeed missing the forest for the trees with these movies, that I was so inflexible in my personal image of these characters - even though I appreciate plenty of alternate takes on them and even some stories that bend or break what I consider their ‘rules’, just not these - that I was incapable of grasping or appreciating these films on their own merits as works of art using those archetypes in wildly different ways; even I could see there were good moments and interesting ideas on display despite seemingly failing to come together. No matter how much I personally deconstructed how and why it wasn’t working, I couldn’t do it to my own satisfaction to the point of stamping out that niggling little worry with how many folks whose opinions I respect love ‘em. Until I finally remembered that the Cadmus arc of Justice League Unlimited is totally the same basic story as BvS, centrally driven by an even worse take on Superman, and that’s still one of the best superhero stories of all time. These just stink by any merits, and while I think Justice League absolutely has the potential to be the most *entertaining* of the bunch, it’s not going to magically become *good* in the eleventh hour. Not to lift up Joss Whedon of all people as some kind of savior, I’m on the record that my love for Justice League as-is is some kind of inexplicable alchemical accident, but I promise that there is not going to be one single addition to this movie that’s going to make up for the removal of “Just save one person”.

Also I’m already not looking forward to dudes tweeting “whoa, he’s splitting it up into a serialized narrative, reflective of the sequential nature of the characters’ primitive native pictorial medium! Or mayhap in ode to the pulp film adventure serials which inspired those in turn! Even the Justice League children’s cartoon for dumb babies, which was itself...made up of episodes! That’s three references in the structure of the thing alone! The man’s operating on an entirely different level!” “God, isn’t it amazing how much better he understands the source material than you”, they shall say, about a man who I understand just very confidently referred to Doomsday in his livestream as having destroyed Krypton in the comics. Again, don’t you say they won’t, just the other day I saw folks tweeting they just realized that since Jor-El wears armor over his bodysuit that technically means Superman’s whole costume is underwear which means Snyder’s totally honoring that without putting him in ugly dumb red panties so checkmate, dorks.

(Okay, in fairness, I know Snyder was saying that’s his take on what happened to the moon in the past of the movies and maybe I only misheard that he thought that also happened in the comics, and it’s trivial information anyway. Still sucks though, that seeming out-of-nowhere Jax-Ur shoutout was like the one thing I liked about that otherwise interminable Krypton sequence. And why is there a second Doomsday? You did Death of Superman already!)

And further SPOILER thoughts below on the reported plots of 2 and 3:

It’s also an amazing, perfect sort of narrative synchronicity that the hypocrisy of Man of Steel in presenting Superman as a savior would (will?) be matched by the movies also rejecting that promise long-term. In there, Jor-El’s musings on the capacity of every living thing being capable of good, the closest the film has to a singular moral statement, are proven wrong when Zod has to be put down like a mad dog, and rather than the one who’ll bring us into the sun, Kal-El’s presence draws ruin from beyond the stars to our world. And again in BvS with Doomsday. And again in Justice League 1-3, where in spite of claims by Snydercutters that it’s okay for Superman to be a really lousy take on Superman because it’s totally supposed to take several movies after putting on the costume and calling himself Superman, including his own death and resurrection, for him to really, like, become Superman, man, he remains a liability to the end. His death lures in Steppenwolf, the Kryponian matrix in his genes is Darkseid’s goal, he becomes the villain of the first act of Justice League 3 - possibly of his own free will depending on which version you’ve heard about - and at the final showdown, it’s Batman who sacrifices himself to stop Darkseid and save the world and inspire the rise of superheroism, because Batman, you see, rules, whereas Superman, stay with me here, drools. A letdown given BvS was just about the one major story of the last 30 years to unambiguously conclude Superman is better than Batman, but not a shocker. None of what I understand goes down in these - iconography from the likes of Fourth World, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Death and Return of Superman, Rock of Ages, Final Crisis, and Injustice reused but stripped of all context and thematic weight that gives it meaning (even Injustice is built on the premise of having a ‘good’ Superman to contrast the dictator); Lois being the ‘key’ because of her connections to two men, one she married and one she bears; time travel that even by the very generous suspension of disbelief applied to it in a genre like this operates by two obviously completely different sets of rules in its only two uses, and is then used to write the entire second movie of the trilogy out of continuity in the first act of the third, making one and a half of these movies pointless - is shocking. It’s just more empty notions and unfulfilled promises offered up to a fanbase staking everything on the idea that all the tampering, all the wild swings, all the meandering, it’s all building UP to something, not possibly just a dude who doesn’t understand these characters but wanting to look very clever with them before building up to one more rad punch-up. So yes, make these movies. Let what can be gleaned from them as worthwhile be revealed, leave the rest of it up for examination to be judged as it deserves and let it, finally. Finally. Be done.

#Justice League #Snyder Cut #Zack Snyder #DCEU #Worlds of DC #Superman #Man of Steel #Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice #Superman & Lois #DCTV #Analysis #Opinion

42 notes · View notes

dailytomlinson · 5 years

Link

It has been a hard few years. Tomlinson’s mother died in 2016, just as he was about to launch his first solo single. In March this year, his 18-year-old sister was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. We will come to that, but, professionally, Tomlinson was struggling too. One Direction – that supernova of a boy band – broke up in 2015. Or announced they were taking a break. Or “‘hiatus’ or whatever word we use”, he says with a smile.

At the time, Tomlinson, now 27, was finding his place as a songwriter. “I wasn’t singing a lot, I wasn’t the frontman. Without being a sorry little bastard, I thought: ‘How do I do better, how do I make something of myself, an identity?’” In the last 18 months of One Direction, he says, “I felt like I knew who I was in the band, and I felt a real worth for who I was.” The break up, he says, “rocked me. I wasn’t ready for it. I felt like I was getting to be a better songwriter, singer, a more confident performer, and all of a sudden, when I felt I was finally getting some momentum …”

We meet at a bar in north London. Tomlinson greets me with a hug as if I am one of his fans (I am not, particularly, although I am by the end). He seems open but not vulnerable, and more self-aware and modest than you would expect from a man who was once part of the biggest boy band in the world. He is friendly and relaxed, dressed in a black tracksuit, with a beer in front of him.

Tomlinson’s personal tragedies also meant his solo career has had a bit of a stop-start quality, but now it looks as if there is focus and momentum. He released his single Kill My Mind earlier this month; an album will follow next year. Kill My Mind is an indie-pop delight, not so huge a departure as to alienate his fanbase, but it sounds like the music he grew up listening to – Oasis and Arctic Monkeys – and his South Yorkshire accent brings more than a hint of Liam Gallagher-style northern vocals. He sounds confident on them, more so than on the previous singles he put out, a couple of fairly forgettable collaborations. “I think, in hindsight, that was me trying to find my place in the industry and making music I thought I had to make to get on radio.

“I had this epiphany when I was thinking about the music I grew up with,” he continues. “I kind of had a bit of a word with myself and worked out what I want – to be happy and proud of what I’m doing. I love those early singles, but I never really felt proud of them, because it didn’t feel too true to me.”

As a child, growing up in Doncaster with his mum Johannah, who raised him alone until she married Tomlinson’s stepfather, he loved performing. “I liked to be the class clown, I liked to make people laugh, to show off, all that.” When his younger twin sisters were cast on TV dramas, he would sometimes go along as their chaperone, earning £30. “Where I’m from, we don’t have anyone who’s been on TV or anything like that, so it was super-exciting,” he says. He ended up picking up work as an extra. “The pinnacle of my acting career was one line on an ITV drama. I don’t even know if they used my scene,” he says with a laugh.

When he was 15, he joined a drama group in Barnsley, which his mum would take him to when she could afford it. “I think I was confused, thinking I wanted to act when actually what I wanted to do was perform.”

At school he joined a band, where they sang Oasis and Green Day covers, and when The X Factor came up, he made it on to the show in 2010 on his third attempt. He queued from 3am to make sure the producers wouldn’t have audition fatigue before they saw him, and he got his goal – to get in front of Simon Cowell “and just have a professional opinion on how I am as a singer. I was so flustered. Going from school performances to performing in front of professionals, TV cameras, a 3,000-strong audience. I wasn’t present. I sang terribly. I remember coming away from it thinking: ‘I wonder if I’ve got through as one of those lads who looks all right but isn’t really a good singer.’”

Yet he ended up in One Direction, the band the show put together in its 2010 series. For six years they sold tens of millions of records, broke America and each made a rumoured £40m-plus fortune. Their fans, Directioners, are another level of devoted. I don’t know how he coped with the attention, or the pressure.

There were really only a few times when it got too much, says Tomlinson. They were in Australia and a local news station had got a helicopter and a photographer was trying to get pictures of Tomlinson in his top-floor hotel room. “I think I was naked, or just in my boxers, and even in my hotel room there was no escape. I could feel the pressure.” He tweeted about it – “your standard bratty celebrity tweet” – and was attacked. “At times it did stress me out but never was I allowed to whinge, allowed to be a human and say: ‘Today has got too much for me.’ I found that difficult at first.”

But he is keen not to sound as if he is complaining. “There was much more positive that outweighed that.�� And he never blames the fans for their intensity. Theirs is a special relationship, he says. “So many people have bullshitted about what they feel about the fans, but they’re like family to me.”

Even when Directioners have got a bit too ardent – there is a conspiracy theory, for example, that he and his bandmate Harry Styles have long been in a secret sexual relationship – he seems more bemused by it than annoyed. Although he is wary, he says, of adding “fuel to the fire” by talking about it. “I know, culturally, it’s interesting, but I’m just a bit tired of it,” he says. The HBO drama Euphoria recently showed an animated sequence of Tomlinson and Styles together, as imagined by a smutty fan-fiction writer. Was it annoying that a show had taken something fairly niche and given it new mainstream life? “Again, I get the cultural intention behind that. But I think …” He trails off, trying to work out what he wants to say. “It just felt a little bit … No, I’m not going to lie, I was pissed off. It annoyed me that a big company would get behind it.”

Why does he think he never went off the rails during the band’s heady period? “My mates and my family, really. It’s from my upbringing and where I come from. If I went back to Doncaster and I was dripping in Gucci or whatever, I’d probably get whacked. I’m always very conscious of not acting too big for my boots. It’s the people around me who keep me sane and normal, because they give me insight into real life. Some celebrities, in pop in particular, only surround themselves with amazingness, and all they see is good, good, good, which is lovely, but you don’t understand the real world then. I have the luxury of my mates around me, just reminding me how fucking good I’ve got it, really.”

The day of One Direction’s final concert in November 2015, Tomlinson and his bandmate Niall Horan sat together “and had a little cry, because it was such a journey we had been on. That day in general was so poignant. As much as you try and prepare yourself, it’s a whole other thing when it comes.” Because they had worked so much with few days off, he assumed that a break would be exciting. “But it wasn’t like that. When you’re used to working however many days, it’s all that more evident when you’re not doing something. Especially in the first six months. My life became –and I don’t mean this to sound derogatory – very normal, from being a life of pure craziness.”

At the same time that Tomlinson was trying to work out what to do with himself, his mother, to whom he was intensely close, had been diagnosed with leukaemia; she died in December 2016. He performed his first single on The X Factor just a few days after her death, then seemed to half-heartedly continue with his solo career, releasing another single in 2017. It would be another two years – during which he became a judge on The X Factor – before he released Two of Us, a raw and beautiful (and under-rated) song.

“After I lost my mum, every song I wrote felt, not pathetic, but that it lacked true meaning to me,” he says. “I felt that, as a songwriter, I wasn’t going to move on until I’d written a song like that.” He knew he needed to get it out of him, but there was a lot of pressure – he felt he should be an experienced songwriter before he attempted it. Two songwriters he worked with played him the chorus. “It was like the song I always wished I’d written. I went in and put my personal touch to the verses. It was a real moment for me in my grief, and as part of the creative process, because it felt like it was hanging over me.”

Earlier this month, an inquest found that his sister Félicité had died of an accidental overdose; she had been taking drugs, including anxiety medication, since the death of their mother. He has been through some terrible times, I say, which must put a perspective on a pop career. “Exactly,” he says, a little quieter than before. “That whole dark side I’ve gone through, it sounds stupid to say, but it gives me strength everywhere else in my life, because that’s the darkest shit that I’m going to have to deal with. So it makes everything else, not feel easier and not less important, but, in the grand scheme of things, you see things for what they are, I suppose.”

His fans have been crucial, he says. “I’m sure every artist says this, but I do believe it. We’ve been through some dark times together and those things I’ve been through, they carry a weight, emotionally, on the fans as well. And I felt their love and support. I remember really clearly when I lost my mum, that support was mad.”

What have the experiences of loss he has been through taught him about himself? He thinks for a second. “I keep going back to it, but I don’t know if it’s a combination of where I grew up and my mum’s influence, but I just have this luxury of being able to see the glass half-full no matter what.” He is the oldest of his mother’s seven children, which is grounding and means, he says, “there’s no time for me to be sat feeling sorry for myself. I’ve been to rock bottom and I feel like, whatever my career’s going to throw in front of me, it’s going to be nothing as big or as emotionally heavy as that. So, weirdly, I’ve turned something that’s really dark into something that empowers me, makes me stronger.”

He gets up to go to the toilet, which I think is his polite way of asking me to move on, although when he gets back he says, by way of a final word on the matter, “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. That’s not how I feel for myself. Somehow it fuels me.”

One Direction will get back together one day, he believes. He still speaks to the others. “We’re not texting each other every day, but what we do have, which will never go away, is this real brothership. We’ve had these experiences that no one else can relate to.”

Styles has become quite the superstar. The others seem to have steady solo careers. Tomlinson says he’s embarrassed to admit that, when he first went solo, he would have been devastated had his album “only” reached No 3, so used is he to everything he did with One Direction going to the top. Is it hard not to measure himself against his former bandmates? “Oh, naturally,” he says. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. I’ve never been competitive like that, but, naturally, you think: ‘If they’re getting this then I deserve that.’ I think, the longer time goes on, I can see it for what it is and just be proud of them.” And success means something else to him now. “It means I’m happy with what I’m doing.”

#louis tomlinson #pop and rock #one direction #music #the x factor #press #240919 #kmm press #the guardian #Guardian Life & Arts #tw death #stunt mention

182 notes · View notes

hellbabyfromhell · 4 years

Text

i was writing a small thing and then it became big... just my thoughts about my life as of today.

the asks people sent when i told my whole stupid story about my dumb ass life were really very kind and sweet.... i read through them sometimes.... im not trying to Fish for anything when i say this but like... idk the situation i was in made it really hard for me to leave without feeling bad, and they’d thought up every way to in some way make me guilty even though objectively there wa literally nothing..... idk just, me personally i take every bad emotion a person i care about is feeling or might possibly be feeling or may feel at a future time and i soak it in like a sponge.... so they knew if they made me feel bad enough it’d make me stay.....i guess i kind of already made a post about this but some people sent asks about having gotten through situations like this, and people generally like.... expressed pride in me... lame but ever since i disconnected from everyone i ever knew before my dad died excluding maiya and online friends..... i guess what im saying is ever since my dad died and i lost that familial feeling of living in dc because i had to move, and i was far from anything i knew... i felt so, so so weak and frail, and living in my old situation was crushing me up into a tiny ball.... i feel stupid saying it but it feels good when people are proud of me ; _ ; and im proud of me too.... i really felt so small, and i was like genuinely despondent and ready to die, but i realized like.... with all the crazy ass shit that had happened to me, it would have been so easy to just Die..... and for 2 years i was barely present, but i like....survived.... and really, that was a bad time. i used to scoff when people would say i was strong for that, because i’d think: “what’s so strong about not dying...” because it felt like a suspended plan frankly (grimace emoji im typing) but i also decided that i would try as HARD as possible to NEVER act like teen me again. because right up until my dad died, i was a brat who was unwilling to take in feedback.... i wasn’t Bad or anything (questionable) but i’d go to therapy and goof off because i was very flippant about it in a passive aggressive way.... like, CLEARLY this STUPID BULLSHIT wont help me so ill be REALLY sarcastic about it! im cool! i kind of realized it after my dad died but LITERALLY i never did ANYTHING to help myself! like, i’d get really sad, but i’d make no real effort to change that, and i thought it was ANGST and MALAISE and ENNUI, and it was that, but it was also my unwillingness to step into uncharted territory: developing myself as a person consciously lol. at therapy i never took anything in and was too busy trying to make light of my situation that nothing ever got done, and i realized i never took any advice anyway.... like, when people say “try meditation”..... like Duh thats a stupid reply but also like.... Have you? i hadnt until recently.... and guess what! it didnt work at all! but i am like willing to try literally anything (within reason) and i want to ACCEPT everything just like....

i was SO ADAMANT about rejecting like...... idk Norms?????? as a teen , i really dont know what my aim was but it wasn’t working and i was making people annoyed because i’d whine and whine over my problems but never do anything to fix it, and i’d go and say “NOBODY CARES ABOUT ME!!!” with like 5 people messaging me. idk just, life was handing me little tools with which to improve and better myself and i refused. i was a fool at therapy and i was annoying and SOOOOO depressed but weirdly comfortable with it simply out of unwillingness to change my habits.....you know? and after my dad died, like... everything i previously felt was just......i just realized how incredibly petty it all was? NOT t say im not petty now, but i was like GOD DAMN i was suicidal.... over that? like i was really crying and freaking out over THIS? my two years of like PTSD cocoon smoothed it out to the point that it almost just feels like i was thinking for a really, really long time, and only came to when i felt the answer coming on. i’m not saying i don’t still grapple with self pity and stuff but i kind of blinked and absorbed the WORLD for the first time...... i really wasn’t living life yet. i was 19 which is Older than 18 and i lived with my dad and his gf and i was fresh out of high school doing a little community college.... like i was walking around dc and having a grand old time going to the cliff and the woods and then id go home and talk about how badly i wanted to die..... i just like.... i decided that i CANNOT waste any more of my time acting like that because i wasted my most precious time, time with my dad, acting like a crybaby. i’m just disgusted thinking about how many opportunities i had to be happy and have a good time that i DECIDED not to take. and i can’t even really explain why still, but i just know i can never ever be like that ever again oh god the bird is tweeting its mornign sorry im back... just SORRY that was my roundabout way of saying like... i guess i have changed and like a LOT, and i DO feel strong... so thank you for caring about y progress!! AHH!!

#it gets a little depressing sorry but im okay just thinking.#and appreciating u and appreciating the good in my life

13 notes · View notes

hlupdate · 5 years

Photo

Louis’ full interview for The Guardian - 25/09/19

After Louis Tomlinson’s recent show in Madrid, some fans got the chance to meet him. One girl wanted to talk to him about his song Two of Us , which he had written after the death of his mother. The girl had lost her dad, and wanted the singer to know how much his lyrics had meant to her. He’d never had that in his band One Direction, he says. “We wrote cool songs, but they were love songs. It only goes so far, and to have someone say that I could help them with my …” He pauses. “It blows my mind, that shit. I was proper proud.” It has been a hard few years. Tomlinson’s mother died in 2016, just as he was about to launch his first solo single. In March this year, his 18-year-old sister was found unconscious at her flat in London and couldn’t be revived. We will come to that, but, professionally, Tomlinson was struggling too. One Direction - that supernova of a boy band - broke up in 2015. Or announced they were taking a break. Or “‘hiatus’ or whatever word we use”, he says with a smile. At the time, Tomlinson, now 27, was finding his place as a songwriter. “I wasn’t singing a lot, I wasn’t the frontman. Without being a sorry little bastard, I thought: ‘How do I do better, how do I make something of myself, an identity?’” In the last 18 months of One Direction, he says, “I felt like I knew who I was in the band, and I felt a real worth for who I was.” The break up, he says, “rocked me. I wasn’t ready for it. I felt like I was getting to be a better songwriter, singer, a more confident performer, and all of a sudden, when I felt I was finally getting some momentum …” We meet at a bar in north London. Tomlinson greets me with a hug as if I am one of his fans (I am not, particularly, although I am by the end). He seems open but not vulnerable, and more self-aware and modest than you would expect from a man who was once part of the biggest boy band in the world. He is friendly and relaxed, dressed in a black tracksuit, with a beer in front of him. Tomlinson’s personal tragedies also meant his solo career has had a bit of a stop-start quality, but now it looks as if there is focus and momentum. He released his single Kill My Mind earlier this month; an album will follow next year. Kill My Mind is an indie-pop delight, not so huge a departure as to alienate his fanbase, but it sounds like the music he grew up listening to - Oasis and Arctic Monkeys - and his South Yorkshire accent brings more than a hint of Liam Gallagher-style northern vocals. He sounds confident on them, more so than on the previous singles he put out, a couple of fairly forgettable collaborations. “I think, in hindsight, that was me trying to find my place in the industry and making music I thought I had to make to get on radio. “I had this epiphany when I was thinking about the music I grew up with,” he continues. “I kind of had a bit of a word with myself and worked out what I want - to be happy and proud of what I’m doing. I love those early singles, but I never really felt proud of them, because it didn’t feel too true to me.” As a child, growing up in Doncaster with his mum Johannah, who raised him alone until she married Tomlinson’s stepfather, he loved performing. “I liked to be the class clown, I liked to make people laugh, to show off, all that.” When his younger twin sisters were cast on TV dramas, he would sometimes go along as their chaperone, earning £30. “Where I’m from, we don’t have anyone who’s been on TV or anything like that, so it was super-exciting,” he says. He ended up picking up work as an extra. “The pinnacle of my acting career was one line on an ITV drama. I don’t even know if they used my scene,” he says with a laugh. When he was 15, he joined a drama group in Barnsley, which his mum would take him to when she could afford it. “I think I was confused, thinking I wanted to act when actually what I wanted to do was perform.” At school he joined a band, where they sang Oasis and Green Day covers, and when The X Factor came up, he made it on to the show in 2010 on his third attempt. He queued from 3am to make sure the producers wouldn’t have audition fatigue before they saw him, and he got his goal - to get in front of Simon Cowell “and just have a professional opinion on how I am as a singer. I was so flustered. Going from school performances to performing in front of professionals, TV cameras, a 3,000-strong audience. I wasn’t present. I sang terribly. I remember coming away from it thinking: ‘I wonder if I’ve got through as one of those lads who looks all right but isn’t really a good singer.’”

One Direction in 2012 (from left): Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne and Harry Styles. Photograph: IBL/Rex Shutterstock Yet he ended up in One Direction, the band the show put together in its 2010 series. For six years they sold tens of millions of records, broke America and each made a rumoured £40m-plus fortune. Their fans, Directioners, are another level of devoted. I don’t know how he coped with the attention, or the pressure. There were really only a few times when it got too much, says Tomlinson. They were in Australia and a local news station had got a helicopter and a photographer was trying to get pictures of Tomlinson in his top-floor hotel room. “I think I was naked, or just in my boxers, and even in my hotel room there was no escape. I could feel the pressure.” He tweeted about it - “your standard bratty celebrity tweet” - and was attacked. “At times it did stress me out but never was I allowed to whinge, allowed to be a human and say: ‘Today has got too much for me.’ I found that difficult at first.” But he is keen not to sound as if he is complaining. “There was much more positive that outweighed that.” And he never blames the fans for their intensity. Theirs is a special relationship, he says. “So many people have bullshitted about what they feel about the fans, but they’re like family to me.” Even when Directioners have got a bit too ardent - there is a conspiracy theory, for example, that he and his bandmate Harry Styles have long been in a secret sexual relationship - he seems more bemused by it than annoyed. Although he is wary, he says, of adding “fuel to the fire” by talking about it. “I know, culturally, it’s interesting, but I’m just a bit tired of it,” he says. The HBO drama Euphoria recently showed an animated sequence of Tomlinson and Styles together, as imagined by a smutty fan-fiction writer. Was it annoying that a show had taken something fairly niche and given it new mainstream life? “Again, I get the cultural intention behind that. But I think …” He trails off, trying to work out what he wants to say. “It just felt a little bit … No, I’m not going to lie, I was pissed off. It annoyed me that a big company would get behind it.” Why does he think he never went off the rails during the band’s heady period? “My mates and my family, really. It’s from my upbringing and where I come from. If I went back to Doncaster and I was dripping in Gucci or whatever, I’d probably get whacked. I’m always very conscious of not acting too big for my boots. It’s the people around me who keep me sane and normal, because they give me insight into real life.” He lives with his girlfriend, Eleanor and his best friend, Oli. “Some celebrities, in pop in particular, only surround themselves with amazingness, and all they see is good, good, good, which is lovely, but you don’t understand the real world then. I have the luxury of my mates around me, just reminding me how fucking good I’ve got it, really.”

With his mother, Johannah, in 2015. Photograph: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images The day of One Direction’s final concert in November 2015, Tomlinson and his bandmate Niall Horan sat together “and had a little cry, because it was such a journey we had been on. That day in general was so poignant. As much as you try and prepare yourself, it’s a whole other thing when it comes.” Because they had worked so much with few days off, he assumed that a break would be exciting. “But it wasn’t like that. When you’re used to working however many days, it’s all that more evident when you’re not doing something. Especially in the first six months.” He spent time in Los Angeles with his son, who was born in 2016, after his relationship with a stylist, Briana Jungwirth. “My life became -and I don’t mean this to sound derogatory - very normal, from being a life of pure craziness.” At the same time that Tomlinson was trying to work out what to do with himself, his mother, to whom he was intensely close, had been diagnosed with leukaemia; she died in December 2016. He performed his first single on The X Factor just a few days after her death, then seemed to half-heartedly continue with his solo career, releasing another single in 2017. It would be another two years - during which he became a judge on The X Factor - before he released Two of Us, a raw and beautiful (and under-rated) song. “After I lost my mum, every song I wrote felt, not pathetic, but that it lacked true meaning to me,” he says. “I felt that, as a songwriter, I wasn’t going to move on until I’d written a song like that.” He knew he needed to get it out of him, but there was a lot of pressure - he felt he should be an experienced songwriter before he attempted it. Two songwriters he worked with played him the chorus. “It was like the song I always wished I’d written. I went in and put my personal touch to the verses. It was a real moment for me in my grief, and as part of the creative process, because it felt like it was hanging over me.” Earlier this month, an inquest found that his sister Félicité had died of an accidental overdose; she had been taking drugs, including anxiety medication, since the death of their mother. He has been through some terrible times, I say, which must put a perspective on a pop career. “Exactly,” he says, a little quieter than before. “That whole dark side I’ve gone through, it sounds stupid to say, but it gives me strength everywhere else in my life, because that’s the darkest shit that I’m going to have to deal with. So it makes everything else, not feel easier and not less important, but, in the grand scheme of things, you see things for what they are, I suppose.” His fans have been crucial, he says. “I’m sure every artist says this, but I do believe it. We’ve been through some dark times together and those things I’ve been through, they carry a weight, emotionally, on the fans as well. And I felt their love and support. I remember really clearly when I lost my mum, that support was mad.” What have the experiences of loss he has been through taught him about himself? He thinks for a second. “I keep going back to it, but I don’t know if it’s a combination of where I grew up and my mum’s influence, but I just have this luxury of being able to see the glass half-full no matter what.” He is the oldest of his mother’s seven children, which is grounding and means, he says, “there’s no time for me to be sat feeling sorry for myself. I’ve been to rock bottom and I feel like, whatever my career’s going to throw in front of me, it’s going to be nothing as big or as emotionally heavy as that. So, weirdly, I’ve turned something that’s really dark into something that empowers me, makes me stronger.” He gets up to go to the toilet, which I think is his polite way of asking me to move on, although when he gets back he says, by way of a final word on the matter, “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. That’s not how I feel for myself. Somehow it fuels me.”

1D face the fans: the band’s last performance was in 2015. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar One Direction will get back together one day, he believes. He still speaks to the others. “We’re not texting each other every day, but what we do have, which will never go away, is this real brothership. We’ve had these experiences that no one else can relate to.” Styles has become quite the superstar. The others seem to have steady solo careers. Tomlinson says he’s embarrassed to admit that, when he first went solo, he would have been devastated had his album “only” reached No 3, so used is he to everything he did with One Direction going to the top. Is it hard not to measure himself against his former bandmates? “Oh, naturally,” he says. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. I’ve never been competitive like that, but, naturally, you think: ‘If they’re getting this then I deserve that.’ I think, the longer time goes on, I can see it for what it is and just be proud of them.” And success means something else to him now. “It means I’m happy with what I’m doing.” Kill My Mind, by Louis Tomlinson, is out now on Arista. His debut album will be released in 2020

#tw death #tw drugs #stunt mention #louis tomlinson #250919

95 notes · View notes