#catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

Now that I'm awake and all caught up, I would like to say that I just realised that the reason why some swifties are saying the most outlandish things about Joe isn't necessarily because of Taylor's lyrics in and of themselves, it's because the only way you can justify those lyrics is the make the person being written about/spoken to absolutely horrible. "You don't get the tell me about sad" is a horrible they to say to someone unless they're abusive, You're Losing Me is about someone who doesn't attempt to communicate in any effective, mature way unless the person they're addressing has a history of shutting down all communication, the jealously present in some songs is irrational and unhealthy unless he cheated. People are literally twisting her music into all sorts of ugly shapes to avoid confront the fact that maybe sometimes she writes about herself at her very worst, at her most petty and irrational, which is okay and can even be healthy so long as the individuals involved (the audience to som extent, but especially the creator) don't actually replace these emotional narratives with reality. (which for me is part of the reason why I've been so annoyed with Swift's approach to music recently, because it's hard to read her passivity as anything other than encouraging, or at least allowing, people to take these narratives as absolute truth, which implies that she might also think her reality is shaped entirely by her feelings, which makes her come across as wildly immature)

oh wow this is genius. it's so true because they'd grasp at any straw to avoid the obvious, simple conclusion; which is that Taylor is also responsible for relationship issues and isn't perfect like any human being. and her nonchalant, absent approach to music just fuels fans need to fill in the blanks themselves with these theories because she's leaving the blanks empty in the first place.

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[placeinthisworld]

No way miss swift is literally getting on stage miming highly aestheticised, old-timey electroshock therapy, getting stripped into a skimpy outfit by two men while burlesque music plays and she acts like she's barely conscious, then is "forced" to perform an upbeat song about being heartbroken on tour 💀 I am begging this woman to read a single book about women's suffrage like what does she think she's doing. Like even from a white feminist perspective not that I'm white, this is bad. I'm pretty sure all those upper class white women who were forced into getting ECT and lobotomies for daring to express any sort of will or emotion would not see this as a positive reclamation of their abuse

ITS LITERALLY SOOOOOOOOOOO😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

the aesthetic is so weird and i hate how swifties have taken this and turned into a meme

like it’s genuinely kinda embarrassing seeing her doing this like wtffff. and then we have fans doing shit like making hospital bracelets as friendship bracelets for the tour as if that isn’t romanticizing mental illness lol absolutely wacky!!!

#catastrophicbleus #answered #i haaaaate it

[meyerlansky]

I was unaware that neopet still exists and now I want one

i legit revived my 24-year-old account last month because they were doing some insane halloween goodie bags [they had like paintbrushes and stuff? i didn't get one but i got some rare stamps and coins, which are also things that exist in neopets now] so if you had an account at some point you might be able to get back into it! i reached out to support and they were very understanding that i don't have access to the sign-up email anymore

they also just started doing a daily quest thing and you get 20k neopoints if you finish all the dailies. every single day. it's nuts.

#catastrophicbleus #asks #and i am now closer than ever to my goal of being a neopoint millionaire #which means nothing now but it's fine #neopets

[andtosaturn]

okay I know you said you were looking them up but he's ung them a few times and I have opinions on which one's are better

(yes this is a 10 minute medely but trust me it's all worth it)

wait i haven't looked it up yet which one do you recommend 👀

#also ur tags on the poll u reblogged from me 🥹🥹🥹🥹 #ily #catastrophicbleus #asks

[youngsamberg]

HAHA THANK YOU

#catastrophicbleus

[jakeperalta]

Happy birthday Ella! Hope you have a magical day ❤️ 🎂 💐

thank you! 💖🥰

#catastrophicbleus #answered #25!

[rimbaudofficial]

Izzy cheating on Ed with Frenchie is such a big brained idea like, yes bitch, get the love you deserve while still feeling too afraid to leave the man who's hurting you

he does leave though! it's like all my things ultimately pretty happy.

#ask #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

Honestly though The Alchemy makes me so sad. It's probably just because I know who it's about, and I know the events that led to them getting together, but there's something tragic about "Who are we to fight the alchemy?" which implies that they're being pulled together by something distinctly separate from themselves - "the", not "ours" and alchemy, not chemistry, which is the actual metaphor people use to describe compatibility. Their relationship isn't about their wills and desire, it's not about them as people, or whether or not they fit together in any personally satisfying way, it's about the fact that their relationship is good from a value system completely outside themselves. It's good PR. It's a good story. They're like stock characters primed for the roles of American Sweethearts. Then there's the recurrent motif of home-coming: "What if I told you I'm coming back?" "I haven't come around in so long/but I'm coming back so strong" "so when I touch down/[...]/ the sign in your heart says it's still reserved for me" "But I'm making a comeback to where I belong." She's constantly trying to reassert herself into a place she left behind, insisting that not only does she still belong, but that she still has a rightful place of power ("get the crown/baby I'm the one to beat") with such persistency so as to be desperate, to imply and instil a sense of disease.

It may be more convincing if a) she hadn't written a whole song about how "home" isn't really where she belongs, isn't comfortable, isn't safe (Florida!!!) and b) if The Alchemy wasn't slow in a way that completely bypasses sensuality and goes straight for ennui. Perhaps this is feeling is most evident in the song's opening and closing lines, "These chemicals hit me like white wine." Not red - the wine more connotative if romance, but white - the wine associated with depressed middle-class white women who drink chardonnay to cope with the fact that their picture perfect lives are deeply unsatisfying. Now to be clear, I'm not making conjecture about Taylor's state of mine now or whenever she wrote the song, I'm just saying that for me, it's more of a eulogy than a ballad.

yes this is exactly it. one of the many reasons why i personally don't like the song is because there's no... passion? or urgency? there's no pull in it. the whole song is just like 'well..... might as well', and that doesn't really move me in anyway. and i'm trying to do this in the least parasocial way possible and not note who the song is about, which she makes basically impossible lol, but the whole song gives the listener the feeling of 'i had nothing better to do, saw an opportunity and whatever here we are', but it's supposed to be a heartfelt ballad? how can someone be moved by something that the subject doesn't even seem moved by?

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

If I may weigh in again because I've been thinking about this nearly all day you're right that it really does not matter whether or not Taylor is mentally ill, and she is not in anyway obligated to discuss her mental health publicly. If she were mentally if, if she was so mentally ill and physiologically resistant to medication that her best option was ECT, it would not change the fact that what she is doing now is sensationalising both mental illness and ECT. There is no ethical way to sensationalise something - exoticisation is inherently racist, fetishising queerness is inherently queer-phobic, and aestheticising mental illness is inherently abelistic. No one is saying that she isn't allowed to engage with the concept of mental illness in her music and performances. What we are saying is that the way she is doing so is incredibly insensitive. She consistently denigrates someone else for being depressed, and having substance abuse issues in TTPD, then turns around and co-opts both those things in a highly performative, trivialising way.

The contrast between the accusatory way she says "You needed me but you needed drugs more" and the flippant delivery of "I was high functioning alcoholic/until nobody noticed my new aesthetic" makes it very clear that she is not approaching substance abuse with any gravity at all - in the first instance she only cares that it's getting in the way of someone loving her in the way she ways, and in the second instance she explicitly states that she views alcoholism as a personality to role-play for attention.

"Here we go again/the voices in his head/called again to end our days of wild" very succinctly embodies a recurring issue in the album - He implicitly has persistent, capital-letter mental health issues, and she is fed up of them interfering with her ability to have fun. She is very clearly trivialising someone's mental health issues, and expecting sympathy for having been victimised and "broken" by it. He's not mean to her, doesn't do anything to her, she's just tired of his problems -- and that's the feeling we're expected to be sympathetic towards, that's what's being valued over mental illness.

And all this is directly harmful. The wide-spread trivialisation of mental illness means that people have a harder time being taken seriously by professionals, it means that their friends, peers, co-workers, bosses, parents, teachers etc, don't understand the extent to which mental illness affects a person's life. Perhaps most dangerously of all, it means that the mentally ill individual may not understand that what they're experiencing isn't normal because the language of their experience has been misappropriated into a causal context. I understand that she's just following a trend, but in following it, she's also perpetuating it in a very big way because unfortunately, we live in a world where she has much more influence than anybody actually qualified to talk about mental health.

(I wanted to rant a little about how disgusting the TTPD choreo is from both a mental health and feminist perspective, but this is probably already way too long.)

yes YES YES! all this is exactly it. no one's saying she isnt allowed to talk about mental health issues or specifically her struggles with it, of course she can. it's the way she's choosing to express it that's just very problematic and she's ignoring the problematic history of and trivializing them for performance/aesthetic purposes. she's just treating every issue she discusses with no empathy or gravity. she repeatedly treats others with mental health issues as a liability but then we should feel sad for her when she didn't feel bad for anyone else.

and the last part is just perfect and wanna reiterate it:

"I understand that she's just following a trend, but in following it, she's also perpetuating it in a very big way because unfortunately, we live in a world where she has much more influence than anybody actually qualified to talk about mental health."

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

It's the fact that she's using this very heavy imagery for very shallow music for me. if you want to use imagery with that much history, where the history is in itself steeped in that much controversy (and obviously mental illness is still a thing that affects millions of people; aestheticising mental illness is harmful towards an already disenfranchised group) you better have a good reason, and she just doesn't. TTPD does not have the thematic acuity to justify using imagery like that by any means.

no exactly, there's even no real talk about female hysteria on the album. and the loudest parts about mental health not being taken seriously is.... her being the one not taking it seriously in other people.... so what's the point of bringing in reckless imagery of past mental health practices?

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

I know you've already said this but it really really does show how rampant casual ableism is, and how despite "mindfulness" and "wellfulness" and "self-care" being so mainstream these days, most people don't actual understand anything about mental illness, there's no understanding that being depressed and/or anxious does not equate to HAVING depressing and/or anxiety, and people who've experienced the former think it's perfectly okay to trivialise, romanticise, and aestheticise the experiences of people who are actually mentally ill and it is not okay. Like there is a massive difference between being sad a relationship ended, and having your psychiatrist/psychologist persistently remind you to go to the psych hospital emergency room if you feel like offing yourself too much! Stop acting like it's the same thing! It is not the same thing!

YES thank you. the tiktok-ification of mental health (or just social media in general tbh) to water down mental illnesses into thinking anxiety = being nervous and depression = being sad is just so dangerous and how casual it is to be using these serious words like 'manic', 'insane', 'delusional', etc is troubling. electroshock therapy is not something that should be lightly displayed on a stage as subtle, passing choreography.... it shouldnt be casual period.

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

I hit send by accident

speaking of infidelity, I saw this anon earlier:

Fresh out the slammer production going offbeat when she starts singing about getting a happy ending because it was all an illusion... can't stop thinking about it

And I wanted to ad the for me, the sudden change in beat/music reminds me of the sound effects often used in music and on screen to denote going back in time. Considering her repeated insistence on "going home", the song could also be interpreted as being about someone who's just come out of an affair - the slammer - and wants to go back to the person they cheated on, but recognises that they can't. Turning back the clock is impossible, and there is not way home. The idea that "the slammer" refers to the affair and not the prior relationship is given further credence by the song guilty as "Guilty as Sin?" (I feel like I don't need to explain the connection between feelings of guilt and prison, like we're all smart people here)

ohhhhhh this is also very very interesting... so much flavor

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

If I wasn't content about having not gone for the eras tour before, I'm down right relieved now. That woman spent almost an entire album disparaging other people's depression and substance abuse issues, only to cosplay severe mental illness in a music video, then on stage in front of what's ultimately going to be hundreds of thousands of people at least ??? Like what is wrong with her ???

it's wild that no one stopped her..... like there were hundreds of people who were a part of that and no one said anything... wild

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

Okay O know we've moved on but I've only recently realised that Chloe et al isn't about someone who had cheated on her in her/their very home, but it's not. Like I thought "You're hologram stumbled into my apartment" was just another odd, somewhat out of pocket word choice, but it's not - she says "hologram" because it's not a memory, it's a projection. The relationship is over but its idea of him of him with someone else that persistently intrudes upon her thoughts, into her most private spaces. Also, similar to "just say I loved you the way that you were", "say you've always wondered" obviously evokes the a sense of what if - what if things had worked, if they tried harder, if the did or didn't do certain things - but it could also be an accusation, particularly if you entertain the similitude of "wondering" and "wandering". She's accusing him of having always strayed from their relationship in one way or another, or he's accusing her of the same. Both of these, I think go well with other parts of the album, like "Pulled him in closer each time he was drifting away" in So Long London, and the multiple reference to her having had an emotional affair

OH MY GOD i was still trying to understand why she chose the word 'hologram' and that makes so much sense. that second part is also sooo interesting and smart wow wow yes!!!

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

You know, when rep first came out and all the siwfties were gushing about how *gorgeous* Joe Alwyn is, I was like. Guys. Come on. He's just some blond guy, just because Taylor thinks he's hot that doesn't mean you have to agree. However, now that many of those same people all hate him, I find him incredibly attractive 😂

finding out a dude has morals and integrity makes them 1000% more attractive it's true

#answered #catastrophicbleus

[allamericansbitch]

okay not to be mean (and I completely get if you don't want to post this) but I'm literally doing a master's in literature, I did a joint lit and creative writing undergrad where I wrote a collection of poetry for my thesis project, for which I got a first class honours and likened to T.S. Eliot. This album cycle is starting to feel like Taylor coming into my house and taking a dump on the floor, then calling the most out of touch post-postmodern art critics to admire her work.

this has me hollering i have to post it 💀💀💀 omfg

#catastrophicbleus #answered