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mjrtaurus · 3 years

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What your GM told you there is some of the most fucked up shit I've ever heard or read. This is not only disturbing but also damaging. So, even tho I'm an anonymous stranger from the other side of the planet and you've probably know this already, I want to tell you: they're wrong. 100%, completely wrong. You're neither defective, nor do you deserve anything that's been happening. Mental health issues are very really and very scary. They're wrong for telling you this shit. They're wrong for touching you without your consent anytime and especially while you're distressed. They're wrong for involving you in their prayer without consent. They're wrong for yelling at you. They're wrong in every single thing they've said. Please, please. Be safe. You don't deserve this.

Yeah, she has a lot of undiagnosed stuff and trauma going on with herself that she refuses to look into or get treatment for. She got wrapped up in a cult led by her son-in-law for a very long time, but managed to get out of it. She refuses to acknowledge that she has lasting damage from it all. She's cruel without entirely realizing she's cruel, and that is scarier to me than if she was aware.

She would be the same way with my uncle, who is also autistic. This led to him isolating himself and being so deeply depressed that he nearly fucking died of a stroke. He's in a nursing home now, paralyzed from the neck down and only able to breath with the help of a tracheostomy. Now she suddenly seems to care for him. Now that he is nursing home bound, I'm the next in line to be her emotional (and on very rare occasions, physical) punching bag.

She treats my mother like charity case, too. My mother who is in stage 5 kidney failure and has congenital heart failure on top of that. She likes to be controlling of us. She hates when we act independently because she feels it's an insult to her position as the head of the house.

She's a hoarder that goes on sprees of self-pity because "nobody helps" her, but when she is helped, she has the nasty tendency to look a gift horse in the mouth. She's ungrateful and cheap with any help she manages to get, and will insult and nitpick the people who aided her behind their backs.

She once had me clean the kitchen cabinets of expired dry goods, then immediately was infuriated with me for throwing out well over half of the dry goods even though they were often months to years out of date. I defended my actions, saying I was only doing exactly what she had told me to, and then she got pissed at me for daring to talk back to her. She said I was acting like Hitler.

She once decided it would be a perfectly good idea to pick up and hold a stray tomcat she had only been in contact with for five minutes. She immediately got bit by said tomcat. The bite got infected by morning, so I woke my mom up because I was having to go to one of my college classes and didn't want her to be alone. She got angry with me for doing this. She got angry with me for demanding she go to the hospital to get the bite treated.

She quoted the Bible at me, saying "rebellion is a sin of witchcraft" knowing damn well that the Bible states very clearly that you should execute practitioners of witchcraft (which is bullshit because most of these "witches" were just people with more advanced medical knowledge). Thus implying that I was nothing but a demon worshipping hag that needed to be burned alive.

She is entirely fucked up, and if my mother and I weren't financially dependant on our current arrangement with her, we would have left years ago.

She's a sick and cruel old woman and I'm trapped with her.

#this ask unpacked a lot of shit #i need to get it out of my system #or I'm gonna lose my mind #tw abuse #taurus answers

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hireath24 · 4 years

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Everything Wrong with ACOFAS: A Rant Part One

Disclaimer: These page numbers come from the UK paperback edition of A Court of Frost and Starlight. This is my own personal opinion of the book - the writing, the grammar, the characters, etc. I won’t be commenting on anything that may have been plagiarized or has been ripped off from the history of other cultures as SJM has a tendency to do. If you disagree with my opinions, I’m sorry and hope you see the error in your ways.

Page 1: ‘...with a heady cup of tea.’ First of all... heady? Is Feyre spiking her morning tea with alcohol? Someone tell me.

Page 3: ‘I was still new enough to being a High Lady’ see, this is what I cannot understand. Even when I used to enjoy the books, I don’t get why Feyre was made a High Lady?? She has had no training, has no idea how to run a country and, when Rhysand first met her, she couldn’t even read nor write. And if Rhys cares so much about his court and the safety of his people, why put her in charge? THEY DIDN’T EVEN KNOW EACH OTHER FOR TWO YEARS WHEN HE DECIDED TO MAKE HER A HIGH LADY! HOW COULD HE TRUST HER ENOUGH TO SHARE OWNERSHIP OF HIS COURT?!

Page 4: ‘Working had helped. Both of us.’ I’m convinced that this book was spell checked and then sent out for printing, lord help me.

Page 5: ‘It’s more for those who wish to honor the light’s rebirth, usually by spending the entire night sitting in absolute darkness.’ This is actually a pretty interesting concept. I would have loved to see the Inner Circle honor this tradition and maybe have a midnight dance where they all wear black clothing and we learn more about their culture but it was ruined by the need for pointless smut and bickering.

Page 5: ‘I donned the heavy charcoal sweater and the tight black leggings.’ Why is she wearing a sweater? Why is she wearing leggings? Is this not a fantasy novel?

Page 6: ‘the heavy, wicked-looking mace that Rhys had somehow dumped beside the desk without my noticing.’ Look at the feminist hiding big weapons in his bedroom without asking his wife first. Ooooh. Also... Why does he even need weapons? And why in the bedroom? I was of the impression that the war was over?

Page 7: So SJM wants us all to think that Rhysand is this amazing ruler who would do anything for his people and is The Best High Lord but... ‘the court budget that Rhys never really cared to follow.’ Ahem. Also, what budget? Where are they getting their money from? Why is the Night Court the best court and why do they have so much money? Tell me how this works.

Page 11: Okay so this is in Rhysand’s POV and, to be honest, it’s so different from the tone he uses when we see him from Feyre’s POV? His thought process reads eerily like Feyre’s. Also, Rhys supposedly frees ‘old or young’ women from having to do ‘drudgery’ work and this basic act of inhuman decency shows us how woke of a person he is?

Page 14: ‘buried inside her.’ Edit: Oh, dear High Lord, he said it twice.

Page 15: Rhysand’s cock is this magical thing that deserves its own religion and yet the big man can climax at a laugh. Wow. Also,they have sex in the sky and Feyre laughs when they nearly crash into someone’s roof? Isn’t that a bit insensitive considering they have to ‘rebuild Verlaris after the attacks’? THIS IS A YA BOOK. WHY IS RHYSAND CONSTANTLY THINKING ABOUT SEX AND FEYRE BEING ‘bent over’ A KITCHEN TABLE?! Also Feyre said that the house was getting too crowded with everyone there so when the fuck did they do that

Page 16: ‘We can’t kill our way out of this one.’ What an amazing ruler.

Page 18: ‘Cassian and my mate’s sister...’ Why can’t he just say Feyre? Honestly, this is so clunky and it just takes me right out of the scene. We get it! You’re mates! They go on about being mates as much as vegans go on about being... Do I really have to explain where I was going with this

Also, Rhysand tends to say things and then explain the reasoning behind what he said in his thought process. Which is basically a really crappy method for info-dumping. And it’s boring.

Page 19: ‘She’ll be there,’ I said, grinding my teeth,’ Honestly the way Nesta is treated is so terrible. Not only morally but also from a writing viewpoint: SJM can’t write a good, morally gray character and so she makes the MC hate Nesta to make her look like the bad guy.

Page 20: ‘It indeed would.’ Why does the indeed need to be there? It doesn’t. In fact, the line (about violence breaking out if Cassian spoke to Nesta about accepting a job that Rhys offered her) would be much more effective if the indeed... wasn’t there.

Page 20: ‘Your mother was 18 to your father’s nine hundred.’ I just- What? How does the aging system work for Fae? Also ew?? Just to put that into perspective: If I were to date Chaucer, he would only be 700 years old.

Page 22: I’m wondering why Cassian’s POV is in third person when Feyre and Rhys’s POV is in first... And why does every character have to rave about how great Feyre and Rhys are? You can’t tell me that every single character thinks that they are the entire bee’s leg. That’s so boring to read about. These people are cardboard.

Page 26: Why is the mountain called Ramiel? Like, I get that people name mountains but why is it called that when it is older than ‘the first ruler of the Night Court’? I would like history, please.

Page 27: Cassian has burned an entire village to ‘only cinders and debris’ and he never faces any repercussions of that? Rhysand’s ruling feels very biased but go off, I guess.

Page 32: Feyre’s POV again and ‘I’d indeed braved the walk’ WHAT IS THIS OBSESSION WITH THAT WORD?! It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a filler word that shouldn’t be there and should only ever be used sparingly. This book shouldn’t be over 200 pages.

Page 32: ‘Stop importing goods from other courts because it impacts local artisans’ What goods? What court are they trading with? How does it impact local artisans? And impacts what? Their money? Their general happiness? Their time?

Page 32: ‘And I now did, too.’

Page 34: ‘Indeed, the buildings around it...’ WHAT THE FUCK IS UP

Page 35: ‘On her pale green skin’ Why do some people have these skin tones and others don’t? I would have loved to see Rhysand look a little more magical. If his eyes weren’t violet but literally the night sky. No sclera. I would love to see Feyre’s appearance change when every single court gave her a drop of their power. That would have been amazing. But nope.

Page 38: SJM has this shameless thing for cheesy lines. This is a personal nitpick of mine but saying things like ‘What do you paint? The things that need telling.’ and ‘Let’s make this a fight worthy of a song.’ Said by Aedion in the Throne of Glass series is just... It rubs me the wrong way, I don’t know why. It feels like a cliche and also like she’s trying too hard? I don’t know

Page 39: ‘...Without summoning a flame would be handy indeed.’ Guys, I have a new drinking game.

Page 40: I stand by my theory that Amren is an asexual dragon forced to take the skin of a girl when she jumped between worlds.

Page 40: Also, how are people finding these jewels? Are there mines? Are some jewels native to certain courts and they have a trade agreement?

Page 41: When thinking about the disaster that was Mor’s ‘coming out scene’ Feyre doesn’t use the term ‘coming out’ once. It’s just ‘what she told me.’ WHY?

Page 44: I think this has been touched on before but what exactly is the Court of Nightmares? It’s a subcourt for the Night Court but... Does every court have that? And why? Do they have to do the same amount of work as the Night Court? Do they have to do any work?

I was going to divide this rant to 50 pages for each one but I don’t want to start a new chapter and my battery is dying. Part 2 will be up soon. Edit: Part 2 can be found here and Part 3 can be found here. Part 4 can be found here.

#anti sjm #anti sarah j maas #anti acofas #anti acotar #anti feysand #anti acowar #anti acomaf #anti feyre #anti rhysand #anti tog #anti rowaelin #long posts #my post

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thehighestmountains · 3 years

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evermore review and ranking:

overall, i found this album to have more skippable songs than folklore and the middle of my ranking definitely feels like the middle whereas in my folklore ranking, #14 was still a fav. folklore was a true anomaly where i was just adding the whole album to my playlist. evermore really feels like folklore’s little sister getting the hand-me-downs, who just doesnt know who she is or what shes doing with her life, what is the theme exactly.

tis the damn season. i fell in love in the first five seconds. i love the moody mature guitar strums and drum beats amping up the entire song. the story of coming back to an old love in your hometown reminds me of the show ‘the normal people’. im a real sucker for sagas, timeless loves that pull you in time and time again, familiar feelings that just feel right because you experienced them at such a young age. this song gets me.

There's an ache in you, put there by the ache in me But if it's all the same to you It's the same to me

So we could call it even You could call me "babe" for the weekend 'Tis the damn season, write this down

Sleep in half the day just for old times' sake I won't ask you to wait if you don't ask me to stay So I'll go back to L.A. and the so-called friends

long story short. this is such a banger r u joking. i feel every single one of my blood cells pumping as soon as this song starts. i even love the post-chorus, a great break from the chorus and the verses. i could post the whole song as my favorite lines.

And you passed right by I was in the alley, surrounded on all sides The knife cuts both ways If the shoe fits, walk in it 'til your high heels breakAnd I fell from the pedestal Right down the rabbit hole Long story short, it was a bad time When I dropped my sword I threw it in the bushes and knocked on your door And we live in peace But if someone comes at us, this time, I'm ready

ivy. hard not to compare this to illicit affairs, but this is like an upbeat version. if i didnt even pay attention to the lyrics, i would think this is so fun and catchy, it sounds good. there is no anger, there is a joy. and i just like it.

Oh, goddamn My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand Taking mine, but it's been promised to another Oh, I can't Stop you putting roots in my dreamland My house of stone, your ivy grows And now I'm covered in you So yeah, it's a fire It's a goddamn blaze in the dark And you started it

willow. im really glad this was the leading single because this is a beautiful stringy piece with a great melody. when i was reading the lyrics before listening to the song, it sounded extremely cheesy with “thats my man”, “i come back stronger than a 90s trend”, but in the song, i love it. theres a lot of heart and oompf to this.

And if it was an open-shut case I never would've known from that look on your face Lost in your current like a priceless wine

The more that you say, the less I know Wherever you stray, I follow

coney island. i wonder why she picked coney island, a very summery location with the bright lines and merry go, when the whole album is supposed to be a winterscape. i barely understand what this song is about but i enjoy the sounds.

Did I close my fist around something delicate? Did I shatter you?

evermore. i love when justin vernon starts singing with that beautiful falsetto “cant not think of all the cost and the things that will be lost”.

Or the violence of the dog days I'm on waves, out being tossed

champagne problems. before i get into this, i like this song, im impressed with the bridge and the chorus, i enjoy the story. just a small thing: title phrase. i just dont vibe with it, the rest of the lyrics couldve been more connected with champagne, i dont believe champagne to be any alcoholic’s choice of drink. and one more nitpick, who likes that random piano mash at the end, anyone?

Your mom's ring in your pocket My picture in your wallet Your heart was glass, I dropped it

One for the money, two for the show I never was ready so I watch you go Sometimes you just don't know the answer 'Til someone's on their knees and asks you

tolerate it - this is a good mellow song, i can relate to the deep sadness of feeling ignored, every thing you do is just dropped. i feel this could grow on me, especially because at the end we really get that jolt of energy, i can leave, i can do it.

I wait by the door like I'm just a kid Use my best colors for your portrait

gold rush. this song is a little too sweet for me, specifically “i dont need a gold rush gold rush”. its just an upbeat and repetitive pop song. i also find this specific high school energy of really wanting someone but also despising their appeal to just not relate to the headspace im currently in.

no body no crime. whoooa that blast of country. it kind of feels weird in this album. i think the chorus is incredibly boring, “i think he did it but i just cant prove it” over and over.

No, no body, no crime But I ain't lettin' up until the day I die

closure. i cant get over the constant banging of industrial pots and pans throughout this whole song lol. i really went back and forth between do i like this, no i hate it, ok i could get used to it, no no it doesnt fit with the lyrics and how shes singing. i also dont care for “yes i got your letter, yes im doing better”.

we have a large pile of songs at the bottom, they all mush together in a sad corner. these could maybe grow on me but i also would be fine never listening to them again. with folklore’s sad songs, like epiphany or my tears ricochet, there was still something that appealed to me. most of these, there just isnt anything.

happiness - similar to tolerate it, i think the lyrics carry and convey a specific feeling very well, i have definitely felt this way, but i dont feel like the instrumentals match her emotional singing. i think she really carries this song and the instruments just let me down.

No one teaches you what to do When a good man hurts you And you know you hurt him too

marjorie - i feel like a song about her grandmother could have been so great instead we get “what died didnt stay dead” over and over and a bridge that is mostly about herself. “shouldve kept every grocery store receipt cause every scrap of you would be taken from me” is the worst of the lines, thats what you want to keep? grocery receipts? the song should be about her grandmother leaving all her “backlogged dreams” to her, and im not getting much of that.

cowboy like me - takes one... to... know... one...... this song does not embody the type of cowboy shes talking about, perhaps a 80 year old woman singing about her tendencies to run away. im not convinced taylor is singing from a place she understands enough about. my least favorite line in the album goes to “the tennis court was covered up with some tent-like thing”. tent like thing? lol ok. although i will say one of my favorite lines is “forever is the sweetest con”, but that gem cannot save this song.

dorothea - this is the worst version of seven from folklore. its about ten times less interesting, very bare bones, hardly any story or background information. i dont particularly like the name dorothea. giving me major grandma vibes, these last three songs are major grandma vibes.

#evermore #evermore ranking

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thelearningcat · 5 years

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You know what’s a movie that should be redone in this new feminist movement year: Mona Lisa Smile

There’s a lot of problematic elements to this film, but there’s also a whole bunch of potential. I love 1950s feminist films. What could possibly be more empowering then a woman being empowered in a time when women were vastly being pushed back into the home (at least in the States, though I think it is true elsewhere).

Here’s some aspects I would love to highlight in my 2019 Mona Lisa Smile.

Female artists, both in the film and taught in Katherine’s class. In the 2003 movie, we never see any of the women actually making art in any way. Nor do we see her feature female artists. In a film supposedly about female empowerment, there are very few women doing any kind of real work that shows they aren’t just housewives. There are women in the administration and we get what some of the female professors teach. However, even Katherine, we know she does “research” but we never know what she does research on. As someone in academia, I can say, there’s no way it would never come up what she specialized in, even if all she had is a Masters. I want some female artists. I don’t know many but I know Georgia O’Keeffe was probably already painting by then, and in a conversation about modern art at an all girl’s school, it feels like a missed opportunity for the writers to really get some lesser known female artists of the time’s name out through Katherine’s teaching.

Women choosing to not be in a relationships. We have a lot of women finding out their men lied and choosing, but that’s not really a choice. Katherine isn’t even really a chosen single woman. Instead, we have women trying to be in relationships and them failing, and somehow we are supposed to believe they can be happy without a man. You cannot convince me that there are not some happy single ladies as professors. It would have been one of the few professions available to higher income women that might pay decently.

Some happy lesbians. We have one lesbian, who nicely supported the kill your gay trope by killing one off screen prior to the start of the film and the other getting fired early to get her off screen for the rest of the film. I had a split moment in the beginning where I expected two of the female students to turn out to be lesbians, but that was quickly squashed.

More historical discussions. We get a brief discussion of war veterans and contraception, but there is so many rich discussions that could have really played into this movie’s female empowerment. If the point is to show this feminist professors breaking the mold in this conservative school, then really developing all the ways she subverts the ideas of womanhood other than through her dating habits (and lack of marriage) would have really have enriched the character development. Sure, I like the notion that it seemed like the administration was nitpicking stuff to be offended by, but I was left with female characters who felt out of history in a historical context.

Better female characters. All the characters felt just a baby step outside of a stereotype. We have the goody good who did everything right only to have it thrown in her face(Betty), we have the insecure woman falling in love(Constance), the traditional woman who had the intelligence to go far in a career but chose family instead(Joan), and the “whore” who slept around with older, sometimes married men(Giselle). Honestly, the second to last (Joan- intelligent woman who chose family) really highlights the shortcomings of the overall characters in this film. If you’re going to have a movie about female characters in the 50s running up against a feminist, then play with that. None of the women actually chose a career, so while Joan could have really pushed up against the idea that all feminists have to be career women, it instead felt like they were instead supporting the very ideals that their movie appeared to be trying (and failing) to subvert. Here’s the characters I would have liked to see developed.

Katherine: the feminist professor, who was the epitome of what would become 70s feminism. Free-love woman who wasn’t looking for one man to satisfy her. Make her bisexual for some lbtq representation (absolutely no student-teacher relations though!). Not only is she not super into monogamy, but have her really encouraging women to get jobs, push off having children, and learn about orgasm. Encouraging women that they can be tough and men can (and should) be kind. Maybe this would be too far ahead of her time for a 50s movie, but I think really leaning into this idea that the conservatives at this school would be scandalized by her would be really great. I don’t know enough about 50s feminism, so I would even take her being tamer than 70s free-love. But I think she really has to be a progressive feminist to have the narrative really work well.

Betty: A smart woman who believed she always just wanted a husband and family, because she’d never been given another option. She is a great person for a stay-at-home wife gone career woman arch. You don’t need to have the husband have an affair. Instead, just show that she’s unhappy with the wifely tasks. Show her loving to learn or have a passion for a specific subject. We could really dig our teeth into a woman who just never realized what cage she’d been placed in. It’s how many of us feel when we begin reading about socialization of little girls anyway. How many of us became feminist when we realized that our tendency to say “I’m sorry” before a question in class came from gendered socialization lessons of our childhood? I want to see that woman evolve. I want to watch her deal with the cognitive dissonance, and that’s why she’s such a dick in class to Katherine. I want to see her begin to see the cracks in the facade she convinced herself of as she was encouraged by this professor she hated to see the other options she had.

Joan: Honestly other than giving her a husband who didn’t come off as a prick, I like her arch. This intelligent woman who thought about law school but decided to instead stay and be a wife, I love it because that’s what feminism is all about- women being able to choose. However, the whole movie we get this dick of a husband who says things that imply he wouldn’t be supportive and even if we give some credit that they were trying to stay true to what men would say then, it just left a bad taste in my mouth. Even when Joan proclaimed it was her choice, I didn’t have enough grounding to believe that she wasn’t pressured indirectly into it by her husband. He didn’t have to be progressive or feminine, but something further to show that he was entirely devoted to her happiness and would have in fact supported her would have made her arch more palatable.

Giselle: Oh boy, this is just such a problematic character. She’s repeatedly been told she’s a whore, but we are never given a reason that she is friends with Betty, because while we see her being supportive, we see Betty just constantly shitting on her (and Constance for that matter). I think a free-love student isn’t a bad idea for the contexts, but that idea that she would be friends with these other female characters is just hard to stomach. You need to give me a reason to believe they would all be friends, which given the contrasting character Katherine could be, I think they all need to relatively start in the same place of conservative traditionalism. I think instead of just having the “whore” character, Giselle would be better off as a lgbtq representative. Maybe everyone thinks she’s a whore because she sneaks around a lot and no one knows where to (turns out she’s sneaking around with a female professor or student). Maybe she’s dates a lot and sleeps with one man before the end of the movie, but she declares that she’s gay or asexual after the encounter. Her friends could still make comments about her tendency with men, without it being so unlikely that they’d remain friends with her. Her progressive teacher introduces them to the lgbtq world, and that makes her start questioning herself. I’m all fine with a woman who likes sex as a character, but she just doesn’t fit with the group of friends and it shows.

Constance: Oh boy. Her arch is so boring. It makes no sense in the context of the overall plot. It felt especially jarring considering her character’s only development seemed to be this boy she liked. Here’s the thing, there was something to her character that was tossed aside for this romance that could have made for a good feminist narrative: her confidence. Betty constantly puts her down about this boy she likes, and that’s shitty, but honestly, it is clear that her character is very insecure. She believes every time Betty says something that a guy couldn’t possibly like her. That right there could be really well developed into an arch that spoke to women in the audience. Develop the fact she’s an insecure woman who feels more secure when a guy likes her (and is easily convinced he doesn’t). Have Katherine teach a whole lesson about the male gaze in art. Have Katherine shows pictures of woman throughout the ages who were considered beautiful and discuss how beauty changes (and thus what is good art also changes). Have there be a real resolve to the interactions between Betty and Constance that are such toxic interactions. Betty needs to learn that what she says is harmful and Constance needs to learn that other people don’t define her self worth. This doesn’t even touch on all the other characters who need a ton of tweaking/overhalls to make this movie better.

This movie has so many nuggets of potential but end up with a female empowerment movie where at best only one woman is really empowered, the rest are right where they were at the start of the film, or worse off.

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