#it's a lot like the cask of Amontillado meme

[thornescratch]

15 people, 15 questions

@snipertrifle tagged me in the 15 things meme, and it's been sitting in my drafts since early October and I finally finished it.

1. Are you named after anyone? Yeah, my mom told my dad's sister she would name her first girl after her, since my aunt passed away young before I was born, and then they had to find a name that worked with that name. So, my middle name is for my aunt, and my first name was a convenience of assonance accompaniment.

2. When was the last time you cried? Like, actual sustained crying, back in June when my dad died. Some occasional tearing up since then, but each time I have immediately walled it off like some kind of imaginary cask of Amontillado because I have legitimately not had the goddamn time for an emotional breakdown until recently. (Now that it's November, I finally do have the time, but my brain is all, 'Hmm. No. I think we better wait for something innocuous in public to set you off unexpectedly. Perhaps the next time you got to Costco. Gotta keep you guessing.' Some poor customer service person is going to wind up on the witness business end of that, and it is going to be super awkward for everyone.)

3. Do you have kids? No, hasn't worked out that way. I always wanted them, though; I never had any doubt that I wanted to be a parent and have kids. It does make me sad. But I have nephews and nieces and godchildren I adore, so that's something.

4. What sports do you play/have played? Swimming, diving, soccer, some track and field, and I can skate well enough to not fall on my face most of the time.

5. Do you use sarcasm? Never.

6. What's the first thing you notice about people? How we would stack up against each other if we were stuck in a situation where cannibalism of the other was the only option for survival. (But in reality, eyes and voices. Sometimes hands.)

7. What’s your eye color? Brown.

8. Scary movies or happy endings? Happy endings. I do enjoy scary movies the way God intended, by reading about them in great detail on wikipedia but rarely watching them in full.

9. Any talents? I can tie cherry stems into knots with my tongue; I think my record is like, four in one minute. I can also touch my nose with my tongue and wiggle my ears. I'm okay at writing. Apparently I have the kind of face that people ask me for directions a lot (this is a mistake.)

10. Where were you born? Maryland.

11. What are your hobbies? Reading, writing, hockey, swimming, putting together Legos with the kiddos, screaming about Star Wars, occasional amateur skeletal articulation, foraging, the kind of hiking that's actually just rambling, and baking.

12. Do you have any pets? A turtle obtained through dubious legal means who will probably outlive me, at the rate he's going.

13. How tall are you? 5'6"

14. Favorite subject in school? English, Biology, Art. Surprisingly, Latin.

15. Dream job? I mean, optimally I would receive large amounts of money and not have to work at all! I used to say fiction editor, but now I want to just read whatever I want all day without necessarily trying to make it better. As long as I'm dreaming, anyway.

No pressure for tags, but I could always stand to learn more about @milliebeeweasel, @immoveableobject, @darkisrising, @bronze-lorica, @maikaartwork, @soranokumo-is-catt, @sushiburritonoms, and @marloweseyeball, if only so I can eventually steal their identities (both online and physical).

#meme #me

[elphabaoftheopera]

it’s weird that tumblr is so into goncharov all of the sudden. it’s like that stint when we were making memes about the cask of amontillado. like I remember my dad renting this movie from blockbuster once and I watched it when I was a kid but I was kind of bored. I only really remembered the big ice pick joe scene. 

it’s been awhile and a lot probably went over my head as a kid. is it worth watching again?

#goncharov #my dad also showed me the movie brazil #goncharov was better #goncharov (1973) #unreality

[penthepoet]

megaten for the ask meme!

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most)

Aleph. Aleph, my beloved. He's my best friend, he's my pal, he's my homeboy, my rotten soldier, my sweet cheese, my good time boy. I want to turn him into a marketable plushie. I want to see him dance. I want to paint his nails. I want to give him apple juice.

I just think he's such a fun protagonist with a lot of little quirks you can tell the dev team had such fun throwing in.

Aleph SMT II. My beloved little guy. In All His Forms.

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped)

hee-ho! Not gonna lie, Jack Frost, although cliche, kind of wins here. I think it's just because of how much he looks like a marketable plushie.

I also think that Isabeau SMT IV is way too adorable for all this shit and deserves better.

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave)

JIMENEZZZZZZZZ. LET'S GOOOOO. I'll excuse ANY of Jimenez's crimes. He was right. He was right, okay? He was so valid for doing what he did. Plus he's kind of - he hits different. ESPECIALLY when he's got his shirt off in that one form. And I think the fact that one of his routes literally ends with giving the protagonist a ring (from what I can remember) is so fun? Love wins. Plus his voice acting in Strange Journey Redux is pretty solid.

Double hot take: I like Zelenin as well. Strange Journey was the first Megaten I started out with please don't kill me

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week)

Now I'm not saying Heat was right for the cannibalism, but I am saying that he looked good doing it, and that's what counts. I also am strangely hooked on Crispin Freeman's voice acting for him in the English dub. It sort of activates Pop Rocks in my brain. His writing in QDS is also deeply fascinating to read through? You get what I mean.

Also, Jenna Angel, because she's gender as fuck.

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave)

Jyoji Hijiri. I love the theory surrounding him, I love his design, I think he's a really believable character caught up in all kinds of bullshit and I am so utterly sad about his fate that I can't even convey it. I want to give him a bushel of grapes and tell him everything's going to be just fine. He's also just the tiniest bit pathetic and I love him.

Also unpopular hot take, but I really do like Dazai and Abdiel and thought they were a really fun team + fun dynamic to see, even if Dazai's design ended up having him looking like he was going Super Saiyan.

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason)

ah, Isamu SMT III, come to my cellar to taste this cask of Amontillado I just got in! you certainly won't get put behind a wall and made to suffer humiliations, nosiree-

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell)

I know Persona's only a spinoff of Megaten, but that fucking old-ass crusty-ass Crypt-keeper-lookin' ass coward bastard bespectacled two-timing back-stabbing Chairman of SEES piece of shit that reminds me so fucking much of my abuser is going straight to Super Hell, in the Hell Corner, and never coming out ever the fuck again.

#shin megami tensei #smt ii #smt iii #smt iv #smt iii nocturne #smt nocturne #smt v #strange journey #dds #digital devil saga

[james-a-b]

i hope that horse can afford a chiropractor

#horse plinko #btw i love when things get super fucking popular suddenly for no reason? like the original horse plinko post has been on here for YEARS #like.. why now #it's a lot like the cask of Amontillado meme #which is still one of my favourite memes btw

[tafadhali]

Spotify, I did not need you to play me a song I’ve never heard before that I nonetheless knew with certainty the moment I heard it was DEFINITELY on at least one of the angsty playlists my high school ex had about me 

That was like the sonic equivalent of reading a vagueblog on LJ in 2003

#i'm sorry if this feels like a 2021 vagueblog lol #i just mean that this was a song that angrily and succinctly expressed a lot of feelings she expressed to me at the time #and was on an album that a lot of songs she put on mixtapes for me came from #so it catapulted me 15 years back in time the moment i heard it #definitely not as bad as when the cask of amontillado meme was going around #and i was like IS THAT WHAT THAT POEM SHE WROTE ABOUT ME WAS REFERENCING? #i EMOTIONALLY CASK OF AMONTILLADO'D HER? #(i love and am still friends with this woman) #(but we sure were 14 once)

[utilitycaster]

I know this is going to sound pretentious but I do think that the concept of fandom as it exists today in part fuels a lot of the really rigid and, in my opinion, childish ways people engage with works. I'm thinking specifically of the question I got earlier this week about violence, but it's definitely not the only aspect.

Social media fandom often rewards a lack of context. This isn’t new nor exclusive to social media, to be fair; AUs, in which the entire point is to strip out context, have been popular for a long time. But social media certainly makes it easier. Twitter, by design, cannot provide much context. But even longer form places like Tumblr are usually dominated by art or gifs, which may or may not actually engage with what’s happening in the work and which can only provide a moment or so from it. It’s very easy to only relive the highlights, or even a version that never existed. (I’ve seen some wild gif edits.)

Social media can also lead to the phenomenon of people getting into a fandom, more so than getting into the work, and I do think this is a newer thing in that entering into fandom in the earlier days of the internet, or even pre-internet, required a much more significant effort. Today, though, in really extreme cases you get people who only engage with fandom and not with the original in some kind Plato’s allegory of the cave hellscape, and in doing so perpetuate fanon over canon, and because they are in the end fans of fandom, not the work, everything they touch sort of swirls into a bland universal fanon that they overlay onto whatever they see. And because that fanon is meant to cover everything it applies rules that were never meant to apply to the originals.

There’s also a sense of belonging that people like with fandom; but again, if you start with the intent to get into the fandom, you aren’t here for the work itself and that, I think, is where people start feeling betrayed by the work or angry at it for not fitting an idea in their head. There’s a great post outlining, theoretically, exactly how this would happen for The Cask of Amontillado.

That, I think, is why people get so angry at the concept of violence in a work. I mean yeah some of it is privilege/conservative upbringings that they haven’t properly interrogated/the whole other can of worms that is how social media engages with mental health and personal responsibility, but I do think a huge factor is people saw a piece of fluffy art or an incorrect quote, said “this is for me!” without looking into the context or the genre, and then are furious that this was a picture not indicative of the larger themes (or even a picture of something that never happened in the original) because this was supposed to be comfort media! It was supposed to represent them! But it’s not, and it never was.

None of this is to say that art or gifs or memes or even divergence from canon in your fan works are bad. I like those things a lot! It’s just that it’s astoundingly easy to only look at the fan works to the point of ignoring what’s actually happening, and then being blindsided by what is actually happening coming to its logical conclusion. It's deciding to watch a movie because of the blooper reel and then being mad that there's more to it than that.

This ties into something I’ve said before about people focusing on the wrong aspect of recognized problems (”I don’t like labels”, fridging, bury your gays, “Strong Female Characters”). All of those are problems when they’re a dominant trend, but, well, they require a lot of context to properly understand, both in terms of the specific work, and also in terms of the genre and the historical cultural context in which they were developed and you can't just throw those words out to mean "a thing I don't like is happening".

All of this is a long way to say that you can like what you like, but you look like an idiot when you get mad at something for being exactly what it said it would be. If you don’t want a story with violence, then you’re going to have to actually put in the work to find stories without violence instead of glomming on to whatever has some art or memes you like and then clutching your pearls when it’s more than just those memes.

#whenever people reblog a post i have that covers the tiniest aspect and are like what is this from? i'm interested! i full body cringe #like first. check the tags and notes. second are you interested in this work or did you just see a single tiny trope you like #bc believe me i'm looking at my library books and bookshelf right now #and like. i could spin some entirely truthful and yet wholly misleading things about these books in tumblr-ese #you have to put in the work #you cannot pick things up and say This Will Be What I Want and make it true #long post #on fandom

[not-so-innocent-bi-sander]

Not a meme but my friend and I (who use the nicknames Montressor and Fortunado in a lot of games) recreated the catacombs of the Cask of Amontillado (down to the bottles of wine they drink on their way down) with the room at the end being full obsidian. We've trapped one of our friends in it and intend on trapping the whole server eventually.

That is absolutely spectacular. There’s never enough cask of amontillado. Have you see that one meme thing of like.. give me a second

[agendratum]

ok so i’m no meme expert, but @cendiar kinda asked for it and i kinda wanted to try to explain that monstrosity of a meme post. mostly i was just curious to see if i could do it. originally i wanted to send the explanation to cendiar as an ask, but i checked and tumblr ask word limit is 500 characters (unless something changed, this info might be outdated) and my explanation is, em, 4958 characters long soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

this is a post now

1st post by galahadwilder

the core is a reference to the cask of amontillado, a short story by edgar allan poe and a beloved tumblr meme, so beloved that i actually only learned about this story through those memes. basically a guy lures another guy into a trap in the catacombs by inviting him to sample the finest amontillado wine. in this case:

the guy getting lured - a horse

the trap - a plinko

the catacombs - a hospital

here we’re dealing with an intertwining of the two horse related memes: a horse in a plinko machine and a horse in a hospital. 

don’t know how the horse plinko started, but plinko is, apparently, the most popular pricing game ever on the price is right show (specifying in case you, just like me, didn’t even know plinko was a real word). and the meme is that the horse is endlessly falling through the plinko machine into the fires of hell, i guess

the horse in the hospital is a john mulaney bit about, well, a horse that is not supposed to be in this hospital. 

it’s also an intertwining of the two hospital related memes, the second one being the color theory meme, “blood on the floor”, about a children’s hospital that had red splashes of paint of the floor that clearly looked like blood, but someone tried to explain that it’s actually ok because based on the color theory the color red has a lot of positive associations, making it suitable for a children’s hospital. 

it also seems to be spiced up by the good place cactus meme, but i’m not 100% sure about that

2nd by sunfoxfic

the same cask of amontillado core, but this time:

the guy getting lured - blorbo (from my shows)

amontillado - my shows

blorbo, of course, is just any at all favorite character of anyone from any of the shows (their shows, our shows, my shows) 

3rd by queer-cosette

i feel like it’s still referencing the cask of amontillado a little bit, but the lines are starting to blur here 

eeby deeby is a reference to eeby deeby elevator meme, a picture of a screen on the elevator panel that said “eeby deeby” and the text on the meme itself was something like “where the hell is this thing taking me”. eeby deeby itself seems to be an older meme that existed before the elevator pic, but the elevator is what mainly referenced in this post

gay superhell is a reference to the final of supernatural, where castiel went to the so called supehell for being gay for dean, i guess

eebders deebeorg is a mix of eeby deeby and spiders georg, from a joke about a false statistic regarding the average number of spiders a person may consume each year

4th by galahadwilder

now the copper seller is one of the tumblr memes i know the least about, so i’m glad that cendiar said that it’s actually one of the references they recognized.

but, just in case, it’s a reference to ea-nasir, who apparently sold some shitty copper to some person who left a complaint afterwards

5th by queer-cosette

the core here is a dummy thicc ass cheeks copypasta (that sure is a selection of words):

“hrrgnh colonel im trying to sneak around but im dummy thicc and the clap from my ass cheeks keeps alerting the guards”

in this case:

sneaking - getting blorbo into plinko (blorbo from my shows and plinko from horse plinko)

“im dummy thicc” - the eeby deeby (referencing specifically the reblog above) is dummy thicc

the clap - the eebert

from my ass cheeks - of the deebert 

the guards - the horse

“is so scrimblo bimblo” is a reference to scrimblo bimblo meme about super smash bros fans getting really angry about their favorite characters, so called scrimblo bimblos, not being added to the game (do not confuse with blorbo, tumblr users’ favorite character from their shows that they’ll tag any random post with) 

a reference to ever given, a ship that blocked the suez canal, is thrown in there as well

my head is starting to hurt, moving on

6th by queer-cosette again

the core is a miette meme. miette is a cat and her owner posted a tweet, as if written by miette herself,

“you KICK miette? you kick her body like the football? oh! oh! jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!”

in this case:

miette - blorbo

kick - plinko

the football - the horse

mother - glup shitto

jail - eeby deeby

glup shitto is a fake name that was made up to point out how a lot of not well-known star wars characters (and some well-known characters too) have names that make no goddamn sense

7th by galahadwilder

this one is referencing the reblog above too, i think

“an orange buttered cat” is a reference to an aita reddit post about jorts the cat. i still haven’t read the post itself, so i don’t fully understand what the fuck is going on, but i think the cat named jorts gets buttered. whatever that means

8th by digitaldiscipline

and this is a lovely poem that combines all the references already discussed above. the end

now i feel like i can finally go back to university and get my degree

#i don't even know #how to tag this #mt

[thessalian]

Thess vs Marketing Execs

When I’m having a particularly bad day and really need to get my mind off something, I have a little trick, and I have Tumblr to thank for it.

I mean, you look at a lot of media by a lot of the big individuals and a lot of what you find is fairly formulaic stuff. Some of it’s good. Some of it’s bad. But all of it is very clearly micromanaged by a bunch of executives looking at a spreadsheet and saying, “This is what The Young People want. This is what will make us money”.

The problem for them is that their whole model’s out of date, and has been since the internet. Once upon a time, they could reinforce the formula through the only way we The Young People ever got to hear about anything new that we might like - radio, TV, magazines. And then the internet came along and you could type something into a search engine and find the official site ... but also a lot of fan-made sites by people who were into it which often pointed to the other things they were into. Yeah, those sites were cringe, often badly coded on Geocities ... but we got a bigger window to the world than most companies wanted us to have, because they wanted to control what consumers thought was cool as much as possible and suddenly people were just ... sharing what random shit they thought was cool, and people were getting into those things rather than just jumping on The Next Big Thing.

Thing is, even when we got into the social media space, The Almighty Algorithm allowed MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to reinforce the formula. Tumblr, on the other hand ... we’ve called it a lot of things. The Last Wild Frontier of the Internet; the whale carcass that sinks to the abyssopelagic zone of the internet to feed the deep-dwellers there, all kinds of weird analogies. Fact is that it’s just never been that level of profitable. The algorithm attempts never worked here. The format’s wrong for it, and people use it for things that just aren’t profitable in that way. And yeah, we celebrate fandoms, but we also create new ones, beautiful and impermanent as soap bubbles, for the most random fucking shit.

So sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly grumpy and need to start thinking about something else for my sanity, I imagine a marketing team assigned to monitor Tumblr, reporting back to their team lead, and the team lead asks, “...What are they obsessing about this week?” Just because I love the mental image of what happens when the answer is something like, “Sea shanties, The Cask of Amontillado, and this guy who sold substandard copper a couple of milennia ago”. Imagine a marketing department who lives to tick the boxes on a marketing spreadsheet trying to find some way of making bank on something like “Out Of Touch Thursday”. Or trying to figure out what exactly The Young People are trying to say about the viability and direction of the Star Wars franchise in the wake of “Live Slug Reaction” memes.

Seriously, next time you’re depressed or angry, just look at whatever weird and wacky bullshit is on your Tumblr at the moment and imagine someone trying to explain it to a marketing exec. We don’t feel like we have a lot of power in the grand scheme of things, but by the gods we can frustrate people who want to make us little more than a demographic to which to sell shit.

[writeraquamarinara]

as with everything else in life, I’m late to making this post. I tend to make one around Jan 1st every year, but it’s now a few days after that, and all i can say for myself is that time is non-consequential during a pandemic, right? right.

anywho, this is my usual “thank you for keeping me going this year” post, but with even more fervor. 2020 would not have been nearly as tolerable without you all in it. and when i say all i really do mean all. thank you to anyone who follows me here or has read and supported my work on AO3 or has sent me a message or an ask or even just likes my posts. you can never know how many people’s hearts you’ve touched, lives you’ve made better, but i’m telling you now: you made me smile and laugh and feel love in a year that could have easily stolen all that. thank you for sticking around.

a few more specific shoutouts are under the cut to keep from flooding your dashes. i hope you’re all having a wonderful start to the new year.

much love, mari

to @anniemurphys: ria, i cannot thank you enough, for so many things. you played such a vital role in turning this year around for me. your friendship, and the friendships you’ve helped me make through book club, kept me smiling from week to week. i never wanted to leave our meetings, no matter how long they’d already gone. I could listen to your literary analyses and life advice for days on end. you’re such a kind, patient, loving person, and I’m so lucky to have you in my life. here’s to another year of freaking out over taylor swift albums and the power inherent in voluntarily turning oneself into vegetation.

to @bigdsgirl: heidi, you’re one of the sweetest, most hard-working people i know. you amaze me, and you graciously humor my latest hyper fixations—somehow always knowing, always reblogging content related to what i’m obsessing over at the moment. you give such great advice and have such a calming presence that i love being in chats and on calls with you. i cannot wait for more zoom movie nights in 2021.

to @hellodinoflower: raptor, you’ve supported me for so many years now, and whenever i feel down about my writing i’ll go back through the comments on some of my old fics and yours always make me tear up. you’re so thoughtful and kind and excited about my work that i cannot help but be the same. i hope you enjoyed the little dino reference in pride & publishing—i tried my best, i really did—and i hope you’re doing well. sending you so much love.

to @soyforramen: soy, i promise i’ll get to your head canon asks some day. i promise i haven’t forgotten them; i’m just uncreative and uninspired, but what else is new. you, however, are brilliant and kind and thoughtful, and your guidance in making both life and fic-writing decisions has been so important to me this year. wishing you so much luck with school this year, and even more happiness.

to @ithoughtyoulikedmereckless: rach, where to even begin? you’re the person i talk to when i’m feeling happy or sad or annoyed or angry or pretty much anything, really. our FaceTime convos are my favourite, no matter what time of day we have them at (somehow, the ones at 10pm are just as crazy as the ones at 3am, and i don’t really understand how or why, but i love that for us). i’ve learned so much about myself through my conversations with you, and you keep me level headed when i start doubting myself too much. you understand me on such an amazing level and i’m so lucky that you reached out to me so many years ago. i’m so lucky that we just happened to find each other on here and just so happened to move near each other this year. i still cannot believe i get to see you in person and go on walks in the woods with you. you’re such a talented photographer, writer, painter, baker, and all around artist; an incredibly kind and funny person; and i aspire to be you. i’m rambling now, but just know that i love you.

to @catthecoder: lav, my light, my love. seeing your icon and username on my dash makes me smile so hard. you just give off the best vibes and chatting with you always leaves me feeling like i’ve been basking in the sunlight for the past few hours. we need to make a resolution to sprint with each other more often this year, even if 2021 is going to be as hectic as ever, as i find so much joy in reading your snippets as we go along. you’re such a wonderful writer, and i often read your gift to me from years ago for inspiration and comfort. i hope you’re doing well and am sending so much love.

to @stirringsofconsciousness: stirrings!! i know you’ve had a super busy year, but you still made time to chat with me and i’ll be forever grateful. i often think about the advice you’ve left for me and the thoughtful responses you’ve given to my personal posts and find so much inspiration in your own words and actions. i also still cannot get over the time when you sent me a post of artful vases because you thought of me when you saw them. mortifying ordeal of being known who? anyways lol, i just wanted to thank you for being in my life and wish you a happy 2021.

to @heavy-lies-the-crown: alex, i just wanted to thank you for putting your time and energy towards answering my incessant questions this year. you’ve been an inspiration to me as a writer ever since i first found your work, but you’re also an inspiration to me as a person, and i’m always thinking about the advice you’ve given me. i hope you had a wonderful end to 2020, and that 2021 brings you even more joy than seeing your posts on my dash brings me. much love.

to @stonerbughead: maria, you brought so much happiness to my 2020. your support for my work took my breath away every time, and I swear I nearly cried when I saw your latest comments on pride and publishing. you put so much time and energy into this fandom, and into supporting the people in it, and I hope you know that it doesn’t go unnoticed. we all love you, and we’re so lucky to have you; your fics are brilliant, your podcast highlights are a joy to read, and your disdain for ras is hilarious. thank you for being you. sending lots of love.

to @sullypants: sully, it’s been years and i still marvel at how lucky i am to know you. you’ve taught me so much, from how to be more thoughtful to how to navigate therapy and self-love to how to be a kinder person in the world. you introduced me to ask polly and you send me really nice asks and you’re one of like four people who interacts with my posts on a consistent basis, which makes me feel a little less alone in the world, if that makes any sense. i’m going to stop myself from rambling on or else i might cry, but i just wanted to thank you for—here comes the cliche—changing my life (doesn’t everyone we meet change our lives, in some way or another? but you’ve changed mine considerably, and for the better). sending you so much love (in the form of both yellow and blue heart emojis)

to @justcourbeau: mel, our paths cross less frequently now than they used to, but that doesn’t mean i don’t think about you and the conversations we’ve had, or smile when i come across your posts on my dash, or when i happen to open up instagram once in a blue moon and see you’ve posted on your story. please never stop sending me sparknotes memes—especially cask of amontillado ones. your words of advice from the night i called you, distraught, a few years ago live in my brain rent free, and i will continue to carry them into 2021 with me. i hope 2021 treats you well, and that you achieve all you want and more. sending you an immense amount of love.

to @protectorofthesmoll: your string of comments on pride and publishing made me cry multiple times, i swear. i still read them back every so often, when i’m trying to muster the courage to start up on the new chapter. your support means so much to me, and it amazes me how far back it goes: I’m pretty sure I have at least two asks of yours sitting in my inbox, from back in 2018 when I had barely any followers or supporters, both of them writing prompts that I never filled. i promise i’ll get to them one day. anywho, i just wanted to thank you for your support this year, and every year before that. wishing you so much love and happiness in 2021.

to @panalegs27: 2020 was the year of figuring out that we have so much in common: a hatred of dating apps, confusion over tumblr’s obsession with the raven cycle, and an attraction to logan lerman with gray hair. thank you for chatting about all of these things, and more, with me; seeing that you’ve sent me a post always makes me smile, and our conversations make me laugh. wishing you even more love and laughter in 2021.

to @indiebughead: maria, it’s been so lovely getting to know you more over the course of this year. i love listening to your stories and living vicariously through you, lol. (i want updates on new neighbor boy, asap!) thank you for listening to my petty rants and for encouraging me to make bad decisions and be salty on main when i want to be. i couldn’t have asked for a more supportive conspirer ;) sending lots of love.

to @redundantoxymorons: iz, you’re one of the smartest, most eloquent, most supportive people i know. i know 2021 will be both stressful and exciting in many ways, and i wish you all the best. i know you’re going to thrive wherever you end up, and i’ll cheer you on as you navigate this new world, just as you’ve done for me all these years. i’m so lucky to have you as a friend, supporter, and beta, and all of our conversations bring me so much joy. pls continue to gush about taylor swift and rec books and send uquizzes with results that make me feel Known in 2021. i love you very much <3

to @cracklr: leda, i’ve missed your passive aggressive smiley faces, but your gushing insta comment more than made up for that, i promise :) sending you so much love and happiness in this new year <3

to @dottie-wan-kenobi: dottie, the posts we send each other make me so upset, but in a good way—the “if i just had to see this nasty shit then so do you” kind of way—and i love that about our relationship. who else would understand how disgustingly hilarious something is other than my wife? no one, that’s who. i often think about how you were the first friend i made in fandom, and i’ll be forever grateful for that: i couldn’t have found a better person. i love you so much, and am sending you all my love.

this list of shoutouts is really much shorter than it should be, but my brain is currently friend and i cannot seem to think properly anymore. therefore, i’m going to call it a day and reiterate my above statements that I love you all, and I hope you have a fucking amazing 2021.

#i can't find my 2019 one of these so i've decided i need to start tagging them with something so i can read them back #so for posterity: #end of the year appresh #anywho #none of this is edited or read over #so if it's embarrassingly cheesy or there are typos... welp

[thricetriumphed]

Okay, so hear me out (I say, about to produce content that no one would want read): AU where instead of streamers with twitch chats or youtubers with viewers instead they’re gaming to entertain the restless dead, narrating to a void that offers nonsense whispers of eras forgotten to all but the dead.  And that’s what we have instead of memes.  It’s like when the cask of amontillado was a meme, but all the time.   Also, if “streamers” fail to entertain the dead everything gets way more haunted. 

idk if it works vice-versa.  Like, if you have a poltergeist, do you hire a gamer to sit in your living room and narrate as they die repeatedly in minecraft?  I might be willing to have goodtimeswithscar in my living quarters but I think a quackity would cause my neighbors to file a noise complaint with the landlord.  

I need to think of a name for AU that’s not “the streaming dead” because that’s lame even if aloud it sounds a lot like the dreaming dead which is kind of cool.  deadringers AU?  like they’re calling up the dead.  it’s a bad pun but I like it.

I think I’d base people’s characterization more on the way they play IC and lore rather than IRL stuff bc tbh the IC stuff is way more fun anyway.  I’ll probably post more about this unprompted with specific streamers/yters later this is a late night thought written down spontaneously before I could think better of it.

#if no one's gonna give me titles for fic I'll just generate my own #unasked for and unwanted #fools following me for art #I TALK too #this mouth will never be silenced #unless you like it in which case damn I guess you got me there

[lexicals]

Liner notes for An Echo, An Answer

Okay let's give this a go I guess? I may add more to this if I remember things too lol

Fair warning this is an exceedingly long post. It has ~subheadings~ (ooh). These cover: 

Fun Facts

Notes about mira

Notes on actual writing/plot

Post-canon tidbits (to be supplemented by actual post-canon oneshot coming maybe not soon but definitely at some point probably)

Needless to say this contains some BIG OL’ SPOILERS. Please enjoy o:

Some general Fun Facts™:

When I posted the first few chapters of this fic, I didn't have a fucking clue where it was going. I didn't even know how kravitz died until I'd already posted like 10 chapters lmao. This was a stressful way to write and I am never doing that again

In terms of inspo, I remember there being a fic in which taako was a ghost and kravitz was a medium (if anyone knows what fic this is PLEASE tell me I cannot find it) and I think I subconsciously took inspiration from this. Also I’d already written a vampire au and I wanted more undead boyfriend shenanigans, I looove playing with the liminal aspects of kravitz being a dead-but-not-dead character

There was a goof version of this fic where kravitz wasn't from the 1900s at all and died in like. The early 2000s or something. He died having come back from/at a costume party, people assumed he was an actual ye olde victorian ghost, and he decided to just lean into it. Cue fake accent. This was scrapped mainly because I loved the ‘sleepy hollow’-esque man-out-of-time shenanigans way too much and also because I know very little about the early-2000s US but do you know what I do know a moderate amount about? 1900s england

I have not read the cask of amontillado and I did not know what it was until seeing the memes, which was after I wrote the basement body twist. I just wanted to have a cheesy secret basement behind a bookcase c'mon it's a murder mystery in an old spooky house let me have this

Anyone who's followed my content for a while probably knows that I'm a big trans kravitz stan, but I dithered over making him trans in this fic a Lot. This was mostly down to self-doubt abt a story ft. a trans man living as his preferred gender in that time period would be deemed "unrealistic" but in the end I said fuck it I want this & I think that was the correct move. Also I read a fair bit about absolute legend dr james barry & that made me a bit more confident about committing to the decision bc these people did exist & they deserve their rep

You may notice that all of the major OCs created for this fic are women. This was an accident but also I stand by it bc I think it helps to balance out the fact that so much of the ‘screentime’ is being dominated by the male leads (inc. angus, who probably has the 3rd most screentime after taako & krav). They’re also all just, absolutely indomitable people. I have a type when it comes to OCs. Speaking of:

Notes on mira:

Mira was very much a character created to serve a purpose, but she ended up becoming a lot more than that and I'm glad people warmed up to her while reading as much as I did while writing. She wasn't going to have anywhere near as much screen time initially as she did in the end but I just loved her & how her relationship with kravitz turned out so much that I ended up writing a bunch of snippets with the two of them just for me, which eventually turned into the fragment chapters because I wanted to share how gd cute they were. Also they ended up being pretty useful for plot too lol

She and flossy were actually kind of the same character to begin with, being kravitz's best friend who he lived with in a kind of lavender marriage with neither of them interested in the other but being happy enough being friends & pretending. I scrapped this pretty early for a lot of reasons but she was still the cause of his death in that version, whether or not she actively killed him. I think there was a gambling debts element at some point

Whatever iteration of the story, she was always going to be the cause of death. I ruled out actual murder pretty early on because I didn't want to tell a story about a gay, black trans man getting murdered in cold blood in his own home, which in a ghost story only really leaves manslaughter, and an accidental killing by a loved one was an idea that followed pretty hot on the heels of that decision - it's very sad, but there's no hatred behind it, so it's not too outright depressing for what is most likely an audience with a high population of marginalised people. That bittersweetness of tone - sad events, but almost always with loving intentions behind or around them - ended up being a real touchstone for the story as a whole

In terms of post-canon content for her, or I guess just stuff that wasn't mentioned in-fic lol, my idea of how her life played out is that she was a pretty solid pillar of her community for a very long time. She took what kravitz said about thinking about what she wanted to add to the world very much to heart, and her answer was for her to be to as many kids and vulnerable people as possible what kravitz was to her. Obviously in the end she poured a lot of herself into helping others out of guilt for having killed a man who she likely remembered a little rose-tinted, but the intent was always there before that too

I don't know how much this came across in the actual text but mira is mixed race (Black/white), though she is Black-coded in terms of how people see and respond to her (please tell me if I’m using these terms incorrectly). I downplayed a lot of the racial elements of this fic bc I don’t feel like it’s my place as a white writer to delve into those areas, but it is an element of her story that ties into anti-miscegenation laws and general societal attitudes and I didn’t just want to entirely gloss over those aspects, bc that wouldn’t be right of me either, so I can only hope the balance ended up working here, and for kravitz’s story too. I did a lot of the writing for mira’s story before even really thinking about this angle which is something I’ve learnt from now bc oh boy should I have thought about it sooner lmao........

Anyway. I love her. I’m very glad that other people love her too

In terms of story writing:

I used to watch A LOT of crime dramas when I was younger, and got so familiar with the structure of them that I used to predict who the killer was going to be about a quarter of the way into them almost every time. Most of the time the killer is someone introduced early on as someone fairly innocuous, but still notable, before the narrative doubles down on a red herring suspect who's proven innocent about 3/4 of the way through, paving the way for the real twist killer. You see where I took my base structure from here

So, mira is introduced early on as someone important to kravitz, who was involved in his life (& death) somehow, but in general she's more suggested to be a victim than a culprit - because of course she is, she’s a child and she loves him! I'm only just realising now that this is a "person of interest" style plot twist here. (Remember what I said about the crime dramas? Just so many of them.) But then in the end she suffered just as much as anyone else, so I guess you could say she's both a victim and a culprit, even by accident.......

Structurally I'm actually really happy with how this turned out. In my head (BECAUSE OH BOY I DID NOT WRITE ANY OF THIS DOWN! Or at least not in a coherent way) the story was split into three mini arcs - the enemies section ending with the kitchen blowout, the friends section ending with the the bay window scene, and the lovers section which covers the rest of the fic. This ended up integrating really well with the main mysteries/pulls of the story - the first being the will-they-won't-they (they will, it’s fanfiction, but how?) of the romance element, and then once that's tapering off starting to dig more into the murder mystery element, which had been more of a subplot up until then, while the romance moves onto the back burner a little bit. The dual genre was an interesting challenge to try to balance and I think it turned out pretty well!

While I'm on this, setting up my breadcrumb trails for the plot twists was simultaneously very stressful and very rewarding. Trying to keep things obvious enough to be noted but subtle enough not to give the whole game away? Gave me so many headaches lmao. I actually thought for sure that some people would twig about the body in the cellar sooner than ch42, but then actually in ch42 way more people picked up on fisher's sniffing around than I expected. Clues are hard!! But at the same time seeing the handful of people who called mira as an adoptive daughter, or the fact that krav fell down the stairs, or the fact that mira's og parents were involved was very cool and it made me very happy to see people picking up the little stuff and putting it together

QUITE A FEW PEOPLE SAID NICE THINGS TO ME ABOUT HOW CLEVER THE PIANO TUNING ANGLE WAS. I CANNOT TAKE COMPLETE CREDIT FOR THIS. IT WAS A PLOT HOLE THAT I SUDDENLY REGISTERED OUT OF NOWHERE WHILE I WAS IN THE SHOWER & THEN ENDED UP WORKING IN SO I GUESS IT TURNED OUT FOR THE BEST & MADE ME LOOK VERY SMART BUT IT WAS AN ACCIDENT

Something else that a couple of people have noted & that I only realised in the process of writing was the fact that a lot of kravitz's ghostliness in this fic has the potential to be read as an allegory for chronic illness/disability. This was something I only caught onto myself while I was writing the scene on the porch at the end of ch42 when I was writing kravitz's dialogue and was like..... oh shit that's a thing huh. Bc he is, y'know, quite literally housebound and limited in what he can do in a lot of ways, which is part of the reason I really tried to hammer home in that chapter that even though the fic ends with him being 'cured' (because that ending was always the intention from day one before I ever thought about this reading), they would have been happy together regardless. Love is not conditional!

Post-canon thoughts:

Taako and kravitz go into the house. Kravitz says oh my god what is that smell. Taako says he made blueberry pie earlier. Kravitz says okay we're putting bedroom fun times on hold I need that RIGHT NOW

Kravitz eats way too much too fast and spends the rest of the afternoon curled up on the sofa with a horrible stomach ache. He is not used to that much rich food. Taako is not impressed with this

He rolls his eyes and they watch a movie and talk instead and get to the bedroom fun times later

On the topic of food you Know krav ends up with a bit of a tummy from taako spoiling him. He looks & feels great and taako loves how comfy he is

Also on the topic of bodies I think krav does a lot of experimenting initially with what feels good now that he has a lot more freedom in presentation. He likes to mess with his hair a lot. Dresses and skirts are still a bad feel but a little makeup is fun sometimes. Kravitz living his best undeath 2k18 (I took so long to finish this fic it’s set 2 years ago now lmaoooo)

Kravitz lets taako drive him somewhere exactly Once before vowing NEVER AGAIN taako's driving privileges are REVOKED kravitz is going to get magnus to teach him to drive instead.

Taako says what the hell are you gonna do if you get pulled over you are a hundred and thirty and also dead you can't get a license. (He could get him a fake one, but he's not going to, because he's being petty about kravitz insulting his driving.) Kravitz says fine show me yours then. Taako says no but kravitz steals it anyway. A minute later he’s produced his own undoubtedly fake license out of nowhere complete with a fake DOB and a very nice picture

Taako says gasp kravitz that's ILLEGAL. Also you know you have to make this picture worse if you want it to be convincing right

Kravitz starts giving angus music lessons. Angus isn’t a natural by any means but he works hard and that gets him a long way

OH ACTUALLY I SHOULD PROBABLY SAY SMTH ABOUT THE REUNIONS HUH. GINNY THESE ARE FOR YOU:

Maybe it's weird to start with barry but the poor man has to have a sit down. He has so many questions. Kravitz what is the afterlife like it's fine you can tell him just give him a hint please and also can he maybe get like. A blood sample or something. No that's not weird it's for science what are you talking about taako bring him back

Kravitz is fully expecting lup to wreck his shit, and she acts like she's going to right up until she's close enough to give him a big ol hug instead. She says she missed him a lot & that he's much nicer to hug now that he's not a freezy boy, and kravitz goes ;_;

It's a very tight hug though. In some ways it is still a punishment

Also could he maybe hook her up with this death goddess of his? Lup would like to be immortal too, kravitz. Kravitz can you get a resume to your boss and could you write lup a reference while you're at it

Angus!! He’s so happy to have his other uncle back!! There’s a new caleb cleveland book he needs to read so they can talk about it!! All of this after a lot of crying and hugging.

I think at some point they do go over to visit mira’s descendants. Taako says hi remember me? I brought my boyfriend to visit! Unnamed great great grandchild #1 is like um he looks kind of familiar. Kravitz says well yes there is kind of a reason for that and it’s because I’m in that picture on the wall over there, hi I’m your great great grandfather nice to meet you

The family is a little weirded out by this at first but eventually they’re like. Well alright I guess do you want a coffee

Kravitz says yes please god do you know how many people keep offering me tea

He babysits for the youngest ones sometimes. The kids love him and the adults are happy to give him stories in exchange for his time, seeing as that’s all he asks for

Taako says ask them for money and contribute to this household kravitz. Kravitz says absolutely not they’re family and you’re already getting my youtube ad revenue

Yes kravitz has a youtube channel and is also very involved in the local music scene. He can’t do anything that would technically be classed as interfering with the flow of the living world but no-one said he can’t anonymously share some of his music here and there

Johann gets him a gig conducting for his orchestra every now and then. Kravitz is fucking ecstatic and finally gets to conduct some of his own pieces in front of an audience. Maybe they actually get to that biography johann mentioned at some point. Idk I haven’t thought about that part too much

Okay I wrote WAY more than I meant to here but I hope at least some of it was interesting and feel free to ask me questions if there are elements I’ve missed off of here that you want to hear more about! (Bearing in mind some of the answers may be “actual post canon content coming soon/later” lol.) As you can tell I have a lot of things to say about this fic & I’m always more than happy to hear that people are interested!! o:

#wastepaper basket #an echo an answer #God I hope the readmore works on mobile if not I am SO SORRY

[delusionland]

jason write-up:

jason loves cask of amontillado memes, and has a burner twitter but the only things he retweets are Every Meme off the sparknotes twitter, and donation posts that he’s qrts and @ s bruce wayne on

jason todd is actually a very boring person that likes simple things that he considers both classy & orderly & organized. he likes chamomille tea, and the scent of old books, the smell of cardboard boxes&plastic when something brand new has been delivered---but doesn’t collect anything bc of paranoia& is overly clean. his aparment is sparse & chrome.

he’s learning russian in his spare time, mostly over casette tapes which he listens to to get to bed at night.

he listens to a lot of true crime & history & philosophy podcasts, but it’s mostly just to drown out his own negative thinking and the fact that he doesn’t really talk to anybody day-to-day except for himself. (he talks to himself, out loud, a lot though, helps him remember he’s not ACTUALLY dead). he’s a member of an exclusive club of people who have actually sat there and agonized over sending an exquisitely&politely worded and thoughtful question to a podcaster in the hopes that they will answer it privately, fantasized about sending it and what the reprocrussions of sending it would be, and then, decided not to send it bc the podcaster is probably too smart & busy.

jason todd’s politics may have been considered radical in the 00s, but when jason actually says things out loud, most leftists now just think, ‘well yeah, duh. no more corrupt cops, rapists, pedophiles or abusers.’ his interest in his own justice-through-violence is now kind of normalized, and seems properly decent and logical compared to batman’s which seems to have been spinning in circles for the last thirty years. 

he doesn’t really have an active social life, and is desperately vying for his father’s approval thru batman incorporated. he pretends not to want the rest of the batfam’s approval as well since they can all see right through him (same trauma / i have trauma because of you, idiot!). but they all see why he’s still in gotham, hasn’t killed the joker, and hasn’t formed a real life of his own, and the reason rhymes with baddy issues.

jason has been involved with various teams over the years thru bruce’s influence---and i’m welcome to establishing relationships within that including with the outlaws tho i dont really like kori’s characterization within it. but mostly he spends a LOT of time alone hunting down bad guys in gotham.

he’s actually more confident interacting with villains than heroes---with villains, he feels like he’s more on even playing field and can do whatever he wants, puts on a show. even tho bruce says he can’t kill anyone mentally ill which is kind of an underpinning of ‘leave my PEERS in COSTUMED CRAZINESS to me and stick to non-suited perps,’ jason honestly still considers himself a rogue even if he’s technically reformed. 

with superheroes, he feels kind of like he’s just really good at shooting people? like, what is he here for? is a gun a superpower, bruce? is being your son a fucking superpower? like everything about it just seems truly & utterly stupid to him. but he’s surprisingly good at working on a team though, and takes and gives orders really well, if he isn’t drowning in his own awkward overly intense self-imposed tension.

also, everybody in the superhero world is canonically corny. but they carry a confidence & charm with it, a belief in a system and a world of corniness. that jason only has when he knows he’s being bad on purpose. otherwise he seems like he’s trying too hard not to lose his cool, like he’s beating himself up for every word he gets out, like he’s ready to beat ur ass and his own ass just for daring to still exist and be alive around him.

jason todd thinks too much, rambles often, speaks in rhetoricals bc he believes no one is listening or wants to listen, and always feels put-upon, rejected, and smad. he’s calmed down since he’s past that age in his 20s where he wanted to lash out at everyone and anything---but he still feels like 2 steps away from a breakdown at any minute, except now he doesn’t have some convoluted plan for confrontation with his father, he’s just gonna start fucking crying and shooting the next person he comes across who deserves it.

#ooc: hc #hc: jason #ch: jason #fandom: batfam #fandom: dc #fandom: superheroes

[fandomisreality]

I feel like a variation of this three spheres model of music (folk music, pop music, art music) could be applied in some way to a lot of other kinds of art, too. There’s folk art, pop art, and high art. There’s folk literature (fairy tales, folktales, legends, urban legends, and pieces of pop literature that have become so well known they might as well be folktales, like the basic concepts of Superman), popular literature, and highbrow literature. Sometimes highbrow literature becomes a form of folktale (look at all the memes every Halloween about the Cask of Amontillado!*). Romeo and Juliet was sourced from folktales, was written as popular literature, and has now become BOTH highbrow literature (when performed in Shakespeare’s original dialogue) and folktale. The Canterbury Tales was popular literature and has now become inaccessible enough that it’s highbrow literature, and analyzed as such. The difference between highbrow literature/film and popular literature/film is the reason why “Ayoade on Top,” a scholarly analysis of a throwaway Gwyneth Paltrow film, is funny--and the fact that those boundaries between spheres are fluid and artificial is the reason why the academy’s old-fashioned refusal to treat works like Hunger Games or Harry Potter as literary objects worth serious study is so ridiculous. 

*Come to think of it, Cask of Amontillado might have originally been written as popular literature, and we turned it into highbrow literature...

#quality #highbrow literature #music #genre #literature

[zooophagous]

I appreciate your point of view on Poe short story memes, however, Cask of Amontillado memes can never be out due to the fact that they are trapped in. 👀

True, but you know I have a LOT of better Poe memes down in my cellar if youd like to go look...

[codevassie]

Virgil's Book Haul 💜

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

I’ll totally call myself out for this one. I gave my favorite side my favorite book. At first, I was sort of surprised I did this and thought about changing my mind, but it actually makes sense. Certain themes appeal to me, so whatever themes I find in my favorite things probably connect. There’s actually a couple that I think Verge would dig. Loyalty and protectiveness are traits Virgil would connect with, from the loyalty found with the Greasers, to the found family dynamics between the characters. Virgil is pretty loyal to his own little family he’s found, and definitely protective over them and Thomas especially. At the same time, however, Virgil knows what it’s like to be the outcast. As is talked about in the episode “Fitting In,” Virgil has had experiences that have labeled him the “outsider” (pun in honor of Patton). Ponyboy, throughout this novel, often feels isolated from society and even the other Greasers and his family. He also has experience with being judged harshly and superficially, since Greasers have a reputation. Virgil, while judged for the actions which have led him to make Thomas fear him, is also judged superficially. He aims to protect Thomas, and, as we know, he does so in a way that’s unhealthy before AA, but this also comes from a cycle of the others assuming the worse of him. Encroaching somewhat into theory-mode, I believe Virgil became victim to a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts--he was sorted into the villain category and thus a “villain” he became.

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

This book is a little intense, a little haunting, and perfect for Virgil in many ways. For one, it’s a ghost story, something I think would appeal to Virgil. For another, it’s completely in free-verse poetry, which sort of reminds me of the angsty teenage vibes Virge has going (which is not a negative thing. Jason Reynolds’ poetry is magnificent and angsty teenage poetry isn’t inherently bad). Will, the main character of this book, faces ghosts of his past, and though Virgil’s own “ghosts” of his past is a bit different than what Will experiences, I think it’s something he can connect with. This book also deals with perspective and fear. Will has to consider what he has always known versus what may be right. He is afraid to kill someone, and he is afraid to lose face for not following the Rules, not killing someone. This speaks to Virgil’s change in perspective over how he handles being Thomas’ Anxiety, and the fear he experiences as Anxiety, but also of not being taken seriously unless he is scary. 

The Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton

This book here is the reason people label The Nightmare Before Christmas as Tim Burton even though he didn’t direct the movie. And, other than Virgil’s obvious love for the movie, there’s a few reasons I think he’d enjoy this read. For one, it’s a scaring twist on a traditionally jolly Christmas story. If you haven’t read the book, it’s structured like The Night Before Christmas, but with some spooky substitutes. For another, the illustrations are gorgeous, while also twisting a traditional sense of beauty. It’s full of long, thin shapes and dark tones, and, no, Santa doesn’t look like a particularly jolly guy. I just think Virgil would find it neat. 

The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Another predictable one, but, hey, predictable doesn’t mean bad. Virgil is totally into the macabre and seeming edgy. Sure, Poe aligns with the outer image he presents of himself, but we’ve seen that Virgil connects to dark things for reasons outside his need to be feared and heard as well (vampire Virgil hallelujah). Predictably, I’m going to point out The Tell-Tale Heart first. It’s a story literally about paranoia, and though that paranoia surrounds the circumstances of a murder, I think it would interest Virgil as a sort of precautionary tale. While there is definitely a lot more going on in the short story, I think it shows the dangers of too much anxiety. And while that is sort of a depressing outlook of something Virgil might enjoy, with a decent helping of angst because I cannot help myself, it’s one we can’t move on without first addressing. On a lighter note, another short story I think he’d enjoy is The Cask of Amontillado. It’s for the meme. Some poems I think he would enjoy are Annabel Lee, The Bells, and A Dream within a Dream. Since this section is getting long, I’ll go into only one of them. The Bells is a journey between emotions and stages of life. The passing of time is something Virgil is quite intuned with, as well as the possibility that things can go wrong at any time. It is beautiful to read, moving from innocence and joy to fearful and haunting. Poe isn’t someone I think Virgil goes to for a lot of hope, but more to dwell in some good ole’ teenage angst. I think Poe is also cathartic for understanding the darker aspects of life, which can be both bad and good for a guy like Virgil. It’s great for him to seek out positives, but as a person inclined to negatives, too much positivity could alienate him, as we’ve seen when he asks Patton not to treat him like an angel or something. 

Solitaire by Alice Oseman

Alright, so to be up front with you all, this book makes me very sad. Not in the way A List of Cages from Patton’s list makes me sad (somewhat similar, but I won’t get too into the distinctions). It’s not heart-wrenching; it’s not altogether beautiful. It’s raw and it’s real and I would highly suggest being careful getting into it. It’s not graphic, but it’s a very accurate representation of mental illness--depression to be exact, though it includes others. And, no, Virgil is not ‘depression’ and that’s not what I’m getting at by including this, though I understand that train of thought. I do believe he would like this novel, however, because it is so true to life and its lows and how complicated it can really be. Virgil would also probably relate to Tori’s dry sense of humor.

#sanders sides #virgil sanders #ts anxiety #ts #code rambles #sides book haul #i think this photo came out really nice #also for your consideration: #V is for Villain by Peter Moore #maybe? #It's been a really long time since I've read it #but I remember loving it and think it might go #or maybe with Janus? #Hm I'm not sure #I need to reread it to get an accurate tell #book recs