my father is dead and i couldn't be happier.
the following is a sort of. reconciliation/vent post since i just got the news a few hours ago that my father died, and i finally feel like i can sort of talk about everything that happened to me as a child. for the first time. without the threat of potential violence.
so. tw for neglect, abuse, parental death and honestly just. a lot. if you don't like the most stereotypical 'bad dad' shit, don't read this post.
my father was a cruel man.
it was only until recently i was informed that my father used to actually shake me as a baby, no more than a few days old. when i was a few months old, he used to do the same to watch my 'funny reactions' and had to be actively reprimanded by aunt and mother in order to get him to stop lest i die a very sudden death.
when i was a little kid, my father i guess got this idea in his head that i was a little innocent flower and that if anything touched me, that'd be it. i'd be sullied. i'd be dirtied. somehow 'impure'. mind you, my father wasn't a religious man. really, honestly, the opposite. i wasn't allowed to talk about religion or god, explore spirituality, really have 'faith'. this would earn me hostile looks, a loud scolding, or called stupid. this also might displace onto my mom, who received it much worse than me.
when i was 7, my father made the move to go somewhere out into the deep west virginia mountains where i would never be in danger. except by him. we moved to a place where the closest store was 45 minutes by car, getting home from school was 35 minutes-- not counting school bus routes, that was up to 2-3 hours-- and there was not a single neighbor that could see the house nor talk to us. we were alone. for good.
for over 11 years of my life i was alone in a house with a man who grew actively more and more hostile to being in that house. as i aged, tried to be a teenager, explore my gender, sexuality, ect. it was all shut down. my computer-- my only lifeline-- was bugged with spyware that allowed him to look at my screen and take control of anything i was doing. a vivid memory of mine is when i used to write fanfiction of innocent teenager things. kissing, holding hands, professions of love, the usual-- nothing explicit. at some point i was caught and had my computer thrown and i was screamed it. i could only run to my room and cry, and hope i wasn't chased.
this left me with no sense of privacy, as any computer or technology i ever got passed through him, and as he was a engineer for networking, most things were bugged by him first as much as i tried to remove them.
my mom suffered similarly to i, both of us being called slurs and having things thrown at us for existing in his radius. we walked on eggshells. we had no room to breathe. if we weren't in his general space, we were yelled at for avoiding him. if we were actually there, we were yelled at for laughing or even breathing too loud.
there was no right answer.
my friends never wanted to visit because of him, or he would often get mad at their parents for being 'flakes' or 'untimely', leading for me to be berated about my choice of friend. i wasn't allowed to go out unless it was with 'other girls', and i didn't have many friends to begin with due to the many social problems i faced due to his neglect.
i grew up in that house, with many other issues i can't even begin to list, but i grew up and left as soon as i could, and didn't really do much. mostly just coasted by after dropping out of college that he pressured me to be in, lest i end up homeless. my mom divorced him shortly after i left due to being threatened with a gun, and at that point i was pretty sure he was officially off the deep end.
this is sort of my 'getting it off my chest' moment as i was never able to speak out about what i faced in any regard due to him consistently monitoring my online presence. for all i know, he could've known about this blog-- choosing to hold onto it for some sort of legal proceeding as he had done to my mother. he tracked her car, recorded her calls, did everything he could to fuck her over. his father did something similar to him back in the 90s, and i needed to avoid it at all costs.
he never got the chance now.
i never felt like i had a father, more like an angry dragon that guarded a tower with someone who didn't wanna be there. some sort of 'king' that transformed into a dragon, i suppose. but, i remember relating a lot to the imagery of people trapped in towers by beasts. i wanted to make a comic about it at one point. 11 years of solidarity does a lot to a motherfucker.
to this hour, i haven't shed a tear. i cheered and celebrated, put on my mask as i'm talking to the funeral home people, family, his friends, whatever it is. i've just been blaise and calm. i have to go back to my 'tower' this weekend and see it for the first time in years, now with the memory of my father dead seeped in those walls.
it's been a relief i didn't know i needed, but that house haunts me with the horrors that went on in it.
i guess this is sort of my testimony to his life. i refuse to have a funeral. i refuse to have a memorial. he's being cremated and disposed of as soon as i can. i can already tell what little remains of his side of the family has an issue with it, but i don't care. they didn't live the life me and my mom had, and they never will now.
for what it's worth, somehow, even though i was forged in fires that i don't think any man should go through-- it made me a more hardened and aware person. you get time to think when you're alone for 11 years. a lot of time to see emotions, patterns, understand, and just pick things apart.
he never knew me, elf, he knew my dead name. and i'm thankful for that.
i came out a good man all things considered, i have my flaws and issues, but who doesn't. but at least i never was like him.
here's to getting out of the tower.
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not to like wax poetic about the literary nuances of Black Fucking Butler but i feel i need to point out how insanely campy it is. oh okay cool the butler is throwing butter knives at people with guns and winning. we're battling undertaker's zombie army by starting a boy band (we actually got the idea from the ZOMBIES' boy band). theres a curry making competition and its so important it needs an entire volume and a continuing motif dedicated to it. the Grim Reaper Death Gods are all cornballs with gardening sheers. the contradiction. the unintended irony.
i think the manga is like. toeing the line of camp. like its silly yet takes itself so seriously but its not too silly. my immersion is not broken by the silliness. but the anime is uncharted levels of camp. what the Hell was going on with pluto. you're gonna look me in the eye and tell me the phantomhives own a fifty foot dog thing and no one has noticed. simply one hell of a deer. ice skating. theres opium in funtom candy. the queen of england is maybe a little girl. speaking of which, the city of london just burned down. yeah the whole thing. the fifty foot dog was there too.
it's so ridiculously out of left field and the fact that none of the characters seem to notice or care feels like being gaslit. camp so visceral it's causing psychic damage. i am constantly begging the narrative to break character just once and acknowledge its silliness but doing so would negate the lack of awareness that makes it camp. its dated and timeless. an absolute milestone in camp history.
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For years, I've been trying to put into words Why I give a single iota about Bendy & the Ink Machine, but it's such a tangled mess that no thread can be seperated -- they're all interwoven in a way that makes it hard to pick them out. The game, overall, makes me miserable, because I can see that there was love put into it, but a lot of it is thrown to the wayside in favor of a story that I think was retroactively improved by the sequel's recontextualizing of it, but is ultimately not worth the price of admission & majorly drops the ball.
It's easy to list things I don't like about it -- the gameplay is sparse, the combat is uninteresting, none of the chapters feel connected, the bugs that assault all my playthroughs & kill my saves are consistent & fill me with dread every time I open the game, the lack of thought in the contents of a chapter (chapter 3's wheel ""puzzle"" & the animatronic Bendy from chapter 4, in specifc, really grind my gears), which speaks to the amateurish & rushed way that the game was crafted -- there's a lot to hate, & it's easy to hate it. But I don't. Despite all that, I am compelled by this game, by what it's trying & failing & trying again to say.
It's really easy to understand why you dislike something. I couldn't have told you much about what I did like, in Ink Machine.
& then, I played Dark Revival. I didn't realize I liked the story of Ink Machine, until I played Dark Revival. It's a better made game, it's just not fucking interesting, to me, because it doesn't have a story worth tuning in to.
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