#minor tmi putting that tag to be safe

[royalrastafariannaynays]

i’m a dirty rotten ace inclusionist, and here’s why

so against my better judgement and some advice from friends, ive decided to make a post about ace discourse

because it just kinda... hurts to see shit about it every day. and i feel like a broken record saying that, but it hurts. 

if youre reading this, and youre an exclusionist, please read the entire thing and don’t come storming into my inbox to tell me hurtful shit because odds are, ive seen it already and im sure im not gonna cover everything, just some of the stuff ive seen today

So, me. ill tell my story even tho no one asked for it, because unfortunately on this website people demand proof of person in order to give someone validity or some shit. im asexual. and i stick to that, because i don’t really experience attraction or arousal at all. that changes sometimes, but rarely. im genitals-repulsed as well. but i am still intimate with my partner sometimes, and sometimes i force the candle to light, because idk i get bored. 

but when i figured out i was ace, i was texting my best friend. and he suggested it, and immediately i felt broken and wrong thinking about the fact that i could be ace. I had to be convinced that it was okay. that’s something that non-ace people dont seem to get. not feeling sexual, or sexual about other, real people, can make you feel broken. it makes me feel like shit, and i have some dysfunction with partners as well. i have trauma in my past, but im convinced that doesn’t have too much to do with it. And maybe it’s a temporary thing, and ill change in the future. But that doesn’t change the fact that it makes me feel like less of a human being when i think about it. and i have no doubt that the idea has crossed other ace peoples’ minds before. “am i broken?” i ask my girlfriend that question so much. because my body doesnt do this thing that both science and the modern media and society tell me that it should do, and should do very easily. my FAMILY tells me its weird and ill be fine. my FRIENDS don’t get it. my mother thinks it’s horseshit. and there’s another thing.

i kinda feel like, if someone is gonna go excluding ace people and shoving them out, will i be shoved out for being closeted, or straight-passing when im not with my girlfriend, as well? it’s a legitimate fear and it feels really bad. and then, can you imagine how it feels having a portion of my identity actively shat on by this website? every fucking day of this month? the pride month?

another thing that non-ace people dont seem to understand or consider, either, is the dysphoria that ace people experience. ace people frequently hate their bodies, feel like they don’t belong in them, or feel separated from normalcy by what they are. 

it’s not a “whose suffering is worse” game, though we can still understand that people face greater harm and trials in their life by being different parts of lgbt, and allow people who suffer less, like say people who are closeted, bi or pan people who are “straight passing” dating the opposite gender, etc, to be a part of it. in my experience, lgbt+ is about acceptance and love, and ill stick to that. yes it’s possible to recognize that say, a trans woman would suffer more than a cishet ace. but that doesnt mean that one should be less allowed to be a part than another.

“ace people aren’t oppressed” well no maybe not to the degree that the typical lgbt person is, but around the world people are forced into obligatory sexual situations they may or may not want, and if they refuse or cannot perform, they can be labeled as broken, thrown out of their home, or r*ped. there is social pressure from the intensely sexual modern media; there is social pressure from society and family; there is social pressure from significant others and partners to perform, and then, especially for women, there is pressure to accept things, and there is pressure to perform sexually in order to have a happy life; IE: having children, families, satisfied partners, and so on. no, these aren’t as significant outwardly as “getting stabbed to death for existing” ((which yeah, does happen, but is an extreme example that someone i know loves to use to win arguments by playing the manipulative “of course this means you care less about the human lives of gay men than the thing you’re arguing for” card. im not saying that situations are equal here, jesus, im saying that oppression exists in many forms)). and, for a society where sex is a function that bodies easily perform, it seems easy enough to go along with things. But for some people, bodies either do not or will not perform. or there is repulsion, or other things and i lost my train of thought. got distracted, my apologies

ace people might be cishet, yeah, but that doesnt mean they belong any less in my opinion. no, i dont think they should be able to call themself qu**r, thats stupid. they aren’t allowed to reclaim any slurs that dont belong to them. that’s also really fucking stupid. and im sorry, but no decent person will try to do that. and why not let them come to the club, okay? they still face problems. like i say maybe fifty billion times in this post, yes, they don’t face the same problems, but they still have them. 

“start your own community” where? how? if you can give me a legitimate answer on this without frothing at the mouth, please do. But i have no idea how ace people are going to go into starting a community without being ridiculed, shoved aside and stuff. i have no idea how they are all going to bond and meet over a lot of different pipelines of communication, like the ones in communities they are already a part of. shoving people out, putting a stake in the middle of the cracks in the floor, it does nothing to strengthen our community. 

“well this person treated me badly” yes and that exists everywhere on this hellsite. I’ve seen a lot of shit, im sure you have too/

the split attraction model, in my opinion, is useful. but mainly for ace people, or aro people, to make describing themself easier in a shorthand. that’s what the model is best for. and if you come into my inbox and say stuff about how “someone forced the split attraction model on me” that was an individual person and does not lend to the usefulness of the model. and then if you come into my inbox with something about “the split attraction model harms people who arent ace and lets people deny their sexuality”. it is a tool. no one forced you to use it. im certainly not saying everyone should use it. in fact, maybe a lot of the people who do use it, should not. but i like the split attraction model, especially for myself. because i can easily identify and people know what im talking about. that simple. 

okay, that’s all i wanted to say. i wish i had a concrete conclusion but i am just. really tired. i need to unfollow some people. i just wanted to get it off my chest, and say my peace in a place i can find it. again, sorry for my mobile people

#sorry to people on mobile #long post #hopefully this wont pop up on mobile #:l #ace discourse #minor tmi putting that tag to be safe

[tittyblade]

tumblr etiquette 101

a list that is nowhere near exhaustive, from yours truly.

First off, welcome! Whether you’re a twitter veteran looking for anything but whatever twitter is, or a new user just done signing up, glad to see you in our ranks beloveds! Welcome home. Refer to this quick tour to make sure your fandom experience (or tumblr experience in general) is a positive one!

Disclaimer: I know it’s long, but please try to read or skim through til the end if you’re new here! This is by no means meant to be a rule book (for the most part lol), only a guide to help you get settled easier!

1) Your blog

This is where people will see and interact with you, so put some effort into it!

Try to choose a name (url) that’s simple. You can see it as your brand, it’s how people will perceive you and remember you. If you’d like to interact with other users here (and not use the site just for the content) it’s better to have something short and sweet, preferably without spaces. (Of course, these are only suggestions.) Rest assured, you can change it literally any time you want.

Have a theme. Utilize the tool that lets you edit your blog’s color or the font of your bio! You can make it match your profile picture, or your blog if it has a theme of its own. Make it feel homey :]

Fill in your bio. People will be checking out your profile probably more often than you think. Don’t leave it empty! Put in any information you’re comfortable with sharing and isn’t too personal (like your age if you’re a minor, or other TMI that can be found on other people’s carrds). It’s always better to add a name/nickname people can use to refer to you by, but feel free to use your blog description to shitpost still.

You can have an intro post. More often than not, you’ll see a blog have a pinned post, a post permanently appearing at the top of a blog until you pin another post or unpin it. You can make one of those, if you’d like to introduce yourself in more length, link any other socials or a carrd, and show others visiting your blog how you tag things so it’ll be easy for them to navigate. Not an obligation.

Keep your anonymity and your safety. It should go without saying, but there’s no harm in repeating it just in case. Your comfort, privacy and safety has the utmost importance. Don’t share any information you don’t want to. Don’t share your age if you’re a minor, or any other incredibly personal info. I’d encourage you to go by a nickname that’s not your real name, (blog name, your brand, remember?) since there’s safety in anonymity, and that’s lowkey one of the big deals of tumblr, but that’s up to you still.

Choose what you want to be visible. Your liked posts and who you follow are all things you can set to keep to yourself and hide from the publics eye, how handy! You should go through all the setting while you’re at it, set it to your comfort.

Side blogs are a thing. You can have multiple blogs that you can use for different things (see: different fandoms, art blog, etc) to keep them organized or away from your followers. Just remember that the replies and off-anon asks you send will be from your main blog, as well as where you follow other blogs from.

2) Interacting with others

You’ve set up your account, now comes the fun part!

Follow to your heart’s desire. If you care about others seeing who you follow, fear not! In tumblr, usually only two types of blogs keep their following visible to others: newbies, and big blogs using it to point people on other good blogs’ direction. Just turn it off, and go ham following people.

Customize your dashboard. Gonna mention just two things here: this is another reason why it’s really important that you follow blogs without sparing, your dash will collect dust otherwise; and you should turn off “best stuff first” in your dashboard settings, to have a better community here and all.

Follow tags. You can set it in your settings that posts with your followed tags appear on your dashboard.

You can check the og post for edits and context. When you see a reblogged post you don’t understand the context of (or don’t recognize the character in case of fanarts), click on the profile so it will take you to the original post. From there you can check the original poster’s tags to get the context, or see if there have been any edits made to the post, since when you edit a post it doesn’t update any past reblogs.

Send people asks... This is how you make mutuals, people! Do it off-anon if you’d like them to know your blog, or anon if you’d rather not! (You can still end your messages with a signature to show you’re the same person, -[name] is one example.) Send them nice messages, ask their opinion on something, discuss things, or just straight up shitpost lol. Go wild. The sky’s your limit and it’s definitely more than 280 characters.

...and let them ask you! You can set your preference in the settings, do it on desktop tumblr to access more settings tho! What you can customize on mobile is limited (like letting people ask you things anonymously, that’s only on desktop settings). In my personal opinion, it’s always better to tag their username (or a nickname you give them, if they’re a friend) on that post, since you wouldn’t want your interactions with your friends to get buried in your blog forever.

Comment on posts. If you have something to say but don’t want the post to appear on your blog you can add a comment. The owner of the post will get a notif for it, but for anyone else you need to tag them.

For the love of god, reblog. People will only see your liked posts if you have it visible to public and they specifically go on your blog to look at them. You like something? You reblog. It’s already hard for posts to circulate properly, if you don’t reblog them literally no one will see them. If not for anything do it for the artists. Just hold and drag on mobile to fast rb.

3) Your Posts

Finally here! Don’t be a lurker, post and engage!

Make use of “read more”. If your post is long, add it. That’s what you clicked on earlier to expand this post. On desktop leave an empty line and you’ll see three dots appear, and on mobile type :readmore: on that empty line.

Draft a post to come back to it later. Pretty self explanatory.

Queue your post. Whether it’s your own post or you’re reblogging, make use of the queue feature to a) not spam reblog and fill up the dashboard of people following you and b) keep your blog active while you’re gone. Mess around in the settings, it’s fairly easy to set up.

Schedule your post. Same as queueing, the only difference is you get to choose the exact time your post will go up. Handy if you want to schedule a post for certain dates like april fools, or 5 years in the future for some reason. 

Format your texts. You can do all kinds of fancy stuff here (that’s a link, try pressing on it). Twitter doesn’t have this, make use of it. Changes depending on whether you’re on mobile or desktop. (Desktop has less features.)

Check your stats. If you’re trying to understand the algorithm better or want to look at some pretty graphs you can get your data on that on desktop tumblr.

@ people in comments. You’ll get all the notifs when people comment on your posts but they won’t see your reply unless you tag them in your message.

4) Tags, and tagging a post

This is where my earlier statement “this isn’t a rule book” stops being applicable. It’s not a war crime to go against these, I won’t come chasing you (don’t take my word for this) but you’ll work up a bad rep. Just saying lol.

Do NOT crosstag posts. It’s really tempting to add unrelated tags to increase your posts’ interaction, I know, but that’s not what tumblr is about. Don’t be a dick and make other communities’ experience worse for them.

Always tag your posts with “crit/critical/discourse/etc” if it calls for it. There’s no exceptions to it. This is the reason you see people migrating to tumblr. Let people enjoy things.

Don’t main tag a critical/negative post. If your crit post is about “Thing”, you add the “Thing critical” tag, but not the “Thing” tag. People block crit tags if they don’t want to see it, don’t shove it in their faces by main tagging it. 

If you don’t want to see something, just block it. Another reason why people are able to survive on tumblr. You don’t start discourse, you don’t make call-outs, you block. You can find something for every community you can think of if you go looking for it. The worst of the worst probably won’t ever appear on your dash, but if you’re worried or feel the need for it, you know where the block button is.

Feel free to shitpost or ramble. More often than not you’ll see people rb a post with a comment, and their elaboration will be in the tags. The tags are only visible on your profile and the notifications of the owner of the og blog. Just a thing people do.

Reblog artists’ posts with nice comments in the tags! Commenting on a drawing is usually done through the tags (Not an obligation, again, just a thing people do. Feel free to add your comment on the rb itself if you’d want other people to see it tho!) and leave nice messages for the artists! It’s a win-win for everyone involved. 

If you have more than a single follower, always use the common tw warning tags. You don’t need to tw everything, but tw’ing some common things is the bare minimum human decency. Keep it safe for others. 

Tag a post “long post” if it’s really long. Pretty self explanatory. Don’t make people scroll through all that please lol. 

You can use them to organize your blog. This is more of a pro tip, if you’d like to not miss a post in your blog, cause they will start pilin’ up soon enough.

#Liveblogging is pretty fun. If you’d like to talk to people during streams, don’t forget to add the relevant tags still! Again, you won’t show up on people’s dash otherwise.

Whew! That got out of hand. Hopefully I didn’t bore you too much. Check out blogs like @heritageposts and @hellsite-hall-of-fame to honor our past o7. @mcytblr-hall-of-fame too maybe :eyes:. Anyways, don’t forget the most important rule of them all:

Enjoy your stay! You’re meant to have fun on here while also making friends (if that’s your thing). Just be kind and respectful of others, you’ll get the hang of the rest! <3

#mcyttwt #mcytblr #dream team #dream smp #mcyt #dsmp #tumblr #how to tumblr #gonna tag ppl now so more users will see it lol #dreamwasteken #georgenotfound #karl jacobs #technoblade #sbi #twitter #twitter discourse #sbitwt #sleepytwt #sleepy bois inc #HOLY shit this took so long omg my back literally hurts rn #the fuckin lengths i go to make sure tumblr doesnt get tainted w twt LMAO #anyways if youre seeing this you should follow me look at how sexy i am i spent the last 2+ hours typing this goddamn list out #also: ignore how i literally sound like its 2014 at some parts here lol i tried my best #also ignore how wack the paragraph breaks are tumblrs formatting hates me and its 4 am im too tired for this #third also: some bits here are supposed to be ironic keep that in mind pls #rolan.txt #long post #save #yes im tagging my own post as save what about it

[michaelmilkers]

what is it, exactly, that your 'friends' were angry with u about? i dont want to be invasive and u can ignore this ask, i just think that altho im leaning in ur favor i dont want to decide whether or not to continue supporting you without all of the data. i.e., you could be saying something wildly racist, or you could have insulted someones dog. obviously completely different things that merit completely different responses. i can message you if u dont want to share with the general public :)

putting it under a cut

this

i said in the blacklist chat about a month ago “is circumcision common in latinos” for a thing i was writing which was not only something i couldve googled (which i ended up doing) but also incredibly poor phrasing and i apologized

i was sometimes too open about sexual topics in the nsfw chat (which was 16+) because i was under the impression everyone was okay with it because no one ever really told me it was tmi (sometimes i put stuff in general that i didnt consider nsfw but other people considered nsfw but most of those times i deleted whatever it was i said/sent) (also for the record i had a general rule against sending irl porn in the nsfw chat and so i never did that aside from like the first few months of the servers existence where i was still trying to figure out how to go about having a server at all)

there was a “jewish” role in the server that some jewish people in the server asked for but apparently some people were uncomfortable with the fact that there was a jewish role but not roles for other ethnicities or minorities. people communicated this to me and i was going to make other roles but hadnt gotten around to it yet when everything went down bc spoons

i wasnt open enough about the reasons why i banned people (which only happened a couple times) so people assumed i was only banning them because they disagreed with me, which wasnt true

i have a habit of publicly (i.e. on the blog) responding to criticism with passive aggression or jokes, something im aware of and actively working on, and its something i dont do in private conversation because i dont think its productive, in fact one of my rules in the server was not to respond to disagreements or arguments or discourse with reaction gifs or emotes or memes or stuff like that. 

and this is the biggest incident, tw for genital mutilation and nsfw discussion, and its a long one so bear with me:

basically in december i mentioned in the nsfw chat that i happened to come across a video of a woman essentially sewing her vagina shut. i did not send the video and did not describe it in graphic detail. i shouldnt have brought it up at all, but this was another case of me thinking something wasnt that bad but it upset a few other people. because of the nature of the video the most i will say about it is that it was not a permanent thing, it was done with sterile medical-grade stuff, and it was a masochism thing rather than like actually permanently mutilating the vagina. i was browsing around the internet going down various rabbit holes out of boredom and i came across this video, i did not search for this kind of thing, i just watched it out of curiosity.

anyways, some people were upset by it, i apologized for mentioning it and that was kind of that. but then the next day i received an anonymous ask calling me a freak whos into genital mutilation so i copied the ask in the blacklist chat (tagging it any time i mentioned the video in any level of detail) and basically what then happened that night was that i received multiple anons over the course of a couple hours calling me a freak and greatly exaggerating what happened. i would post the ask in the blacklist chat, me and a couple other people would talk about what was said, and then i would get another anon or two about it.

from the start i did not take the anons seriously because like, youre fucking liveblogging a conversation YOURE IN in my inbox, and i stated multiple times that if they wanted to have a serious conversation about it they could dm me or bring it up in the server because i was not going to entertain this back and forth bullshit.

i called the anon a clown and they sent clown emojis in response, which is when it kind of started getting out of control. me and a lot of other people in the server were making fun of the anon and joking about it calling them “clown anon” and stuff. and then the anon sent an ask containing the sentence “do u really want to be on the team of the guy who watches pussy sewing for fun!” (directed at everyone else in the server joking with me) and i thought the phrase “pussy sewing” was fucking HILARIOUS so everyone started making pussy sewing jokes and calling the anon clussy anon and saying shit like “pussy sewing sunday” (bc this was happening on a sunday night) and “pussy sewing club” and shit like that.

i said multiple times during this that i was not making fun of the video or the subject matter i was making fun of the anon(s) and their dramatic bullshit, but some people didnt believe me ig. at the time i was maintaining the opinion that as long as its all sterile and there is no permanent damage then stuff like that is fine and its none of my business what people do to their own bodies, which i still kind of agree with? im not super sure.

but anyway a few people thought i was a shitty person because of this, one of these people left and the other two said they were going to leave so i banned them, one person was very upset by the subject matter and wanted to take a break from the server, i told them sorry about the situation and to be safe. when one of my mods came online and saw what happened she was very upset about the fact that people had left and i didnt really listen to what she was saying (something ive apologized for since then) but said that for the sake of the person taking a break this was to never be brought up again. i agreed and asked my other mod to delete the conversation because i was low on spoons at the time, they said sure and deleted it for me (and during on the incident on friday this person told everyone that i “made them” delete the messages and that they were too afraid to say no to me and it was disgusting) and that was the last time the situation was brought up until this weekend.

i had actually learned from the situation, both about the things i bring up and also the content i look at even out of boredom or curiosity, and the ethics of that, and i have since then not looked at anything like that online. the people in my server were not aware of this because i was told to never bring it up again, so i didnt, and no one brought it up to me privately so i assumed people werent upset about it anymore. so they assumed i didnt care or i was still looking at shit like that and just wasnt talking about it. i had absolutely no idea people were still harboring bad feelings about this incident and if i did i wouldve apologized again and told them about how i had learned from the situation. i explained all of this on saturday and nobody seemed to care.

multiple times during the situation this weekend i said that their criticisms are valid and tried to explain myself and apologize and own up to what i did, but apparently because im mad about them bullying me and getting people to raid the server im not actually sorry?? according to them.

which is more of them just trying to gaslight me and manipulate me into thinking this is all my fault and i deserved it instead of that event being fucking bullshit.

one person said “your criticisms are valid but the way you brought them up isnt” or something like that in quotation marks in an attempt to mock me but like,,, yeah thats exactly what im saying lmao.

so yeah thats basically it? those are the main things. sorry this got so long.

#Anonymous

[yetanotherbuffyblog]

Demon assassin!

I had some trouble with my computer playing the DVD from the library. See, sometimes my computer won’t recognize discs in the drive. And sometimes it will, but it won’t play them on one media player so I’ve got to go with another. It’s bloody frustrating, it is.

But I did manage to get it to work, even if the computer had to freak out a couple of times first.

Oh right so I’m doing a two-parter. This is going to take a lot of recapping. Uh...okay. So.

[takes a deep breath]

We begin with Riley and Buffy having a happy start of a serious relationship, which means everyone’s kind of left out of their happy bubble. So Anya, Willow and Xander are playing poker in Xander’s basement, and with a random comment about spanking from Anya (TMI ANYA TMI), Willow feels a bit like she’s third-wheeling.

Buffy during this time is actually not on an official date, though; she’s being tested by the Initiative, and she passes with flying colors. Because of her skillz, Buffy is officially let in, and gets a tour of the facility and security clearance. She asks a bunch of questions and acts less-than-professional though, annoying Walsh. Oh, and we see what’s in room 314 even if Buffy doesn’t (she doesn’t have that clearance): a human/demon/cyborg thing that Walsh calls ‘Adam.’

That has ‘TERRIBLE PLAN’ written all over it.

Spike is being hunted by the Initiative for being a runaway (“Hostile 17” they call him), and they find him, but he escapes. Except they hit him with a tracker so they can find him later.

Willow’s not thrilled with the Initiative, nor with Buffy bringing new Initiative friends along to their friend date at the Bronze. During this they get called to go deal with a demon, and after they tag-team the demon, Buffy and Riley go make some whoopie. Willow, annoyed, goes off and meets Tara. Apparently hanging out all night. Huh.

And Walsh watches Riley and Buffy through planted cameras, which is ten kinds of weird.

Spike runs to Giles’s house for shelter because he’s a wuss. Sadly Riley is called to lead a squad to hunt down “Hostile 17,” while Walsh decides that Buffy’s too much of a hazard, asking too many questions and clouding her best agent (Riley), so she plots to have her killed while Riley’s out. She tells her to do some sort of routine check-up on a reported hostile, only for her to be ambushed, her stun gun to malfunction, and her locked in a room with two demons. Of course, she being a Slayer, she takes them out.

The Scoobies take the tracer out of Spike and they flush it, so Riley’s squad loses the lead. Riley comes back, and Walsh tells her Buffy is dead, rushing off on a mission on her own. Except then Buffy takes the spy camera that fell off her on the fight, and declares she knows that Walsh tried to kill her and she’s pissed. That episode seems like it’s going to end with her going to Giles’s house and declaring that none of them are safe.

But nope! Walsh is in room 314 trying to work out how to fix the situation, how Riley can be persuaded to be okay with her trying to kill Buffy, and how Adam will fix everything. Except Adam wakes up and kills her with the arm of the demon Buffy and Riley took down now grafted onto him.

Oops.

PART DEUCE!

Buffy tells the gang that Walsh tried to kill her. Riley comes in and tries to make sense of what’s going on, only to turn slightly hostile upon seeing Spike and recognizing him as Hostile 17. If Buffy’s sheltering a vampire, what else could she be hiding? They go separate ways, but Buffy’s gang hides out in Xander’s basement (which Giles is NOT happy about).

Then the Initiative finds out about Walsh’s assassination. Riley is informed while talking to his friend Forrest about Walsh trying to kill Buffy (Riley tends to side with Buffy, though he’s confused; Forrest thinks maybe Buffy did something wrong and had it coming). Upon seeing Walsh’s body, Forrest thinks Buffy did it. Riley thinks it’s probably the demon they caught earlier having escaped and puts a squad together to go find it.

And Adam goes and murderizes some kid. Charming fellow.

While Buffy’s investigating, she runs into Riley a couple of times. At first it seems like he’s pretty tightly wound about everything that’s happened, and asks if she’s happy about Walsh’s death (which of course, Buffy isn’t). When Buffy goes to that demon bar place that hasn’t shown up in a while, Riley shows up and gets all itchy because, you know, monsters all over and Buffy’s not fighting them. But he’s all shaky and pulls a gun.

Turns out there’s something seriously wrong with him.

They take him to the Xander Cave, while Xander and Buffy sneak back into Initiative HQ to find some answers. They corner head scientist guy, and find out that the agents are unknowingly given some sort of steroids to make them smarter and stronger--Riley’s going through severe withdrawal. Riley himself arrives, having left the Xander Cave.

Oh and then Adam shows up.

Crap salad!

Adam reveals what he is, and that he’s...well that he’s crazy, but that he has records and personal files that Walsh made. She thought of both Riley and Adam as her crowning achievements, shaping them to be her personal...I dunno, surrogate sons? Adam calls her mother which is weird. Anyhow, they fight, Adam kills head scientist guy, and injures Adam. When the commandos show up, Buffy and Xander can leave, but Riley is taken to an Initiative medical facility, and Buffy is unable to visit him.

And Adam’s still out there somewhere.

Right that was a lot. NOTES!

-According to TV Tropes, Maggie Walsh was going to be the Big Bad of the season, but the actress got cast in a movie or something and had to be written out somehow. And you know TV writers: murder is the simplest solution!

-I’m a bit iffy on Adam as a Big Bad though. He’s...I’m not sure. He’s kind of a downgrade from the Mayor. He’s a good villain, but he’s not in charge of anything. Maybe that’ll change as the season goes on.

-And OF COURSE the Initiative pumps its agents full of steroids! Why the eff not?? What sketchiness will we find out about them next?

-Was that old lady Riley pulled a gun on in the demon bar actually a vampire/monster? It’s not clear. She doesn’t transform or anything. Riley himself says he doesn’t know if it’ll kill her if he pulls the trigger.

-Spike is beaten up by demons because he’s “making war on other demons” and demons killing demons is...bad? Like, if it were him fighting demons for a cause, I get it, hanging out with the Slayer and all. But the demon refuses to kill Spike because that’s against their rules or something. Which...seems stupid. We’ve seen demons kill other demons all the time. It’s not a rule. I mean if it is now, it’s a clear retcon.

-Alright why did Walsh want to kill Buffy? It seems like they wrote it as Buffy was asking too many questions and she thought Buffy was a distraction for Riley. But it’s pretty...well, they basically try to kill her after her first day, and we see no sign that Riley’s actually any worse because of his relationship with Buffy. Seems like a bit of rushed plot to me, but whattaya gonna do?

-Also, the way she tries to kill Buffy shows how little she actually paid attention to her. She locks her in a room with two demons? Who have axes? Please. You’ve seen her fight. Maybe Walsh assumes that Buffy’s stories about her own exploits are exaggerations? It’s still stupid. If you want to kill someone, friggin’ kill them. There are so many ways to have gotten that done that would have been less risky. Rush job all around.

-The tracker would have been harder to identify if it hadn’t been blinking. Really, guys, stop making trackers blink. I know it’s easier for the audience to figure out what it is, but it’s also easy for the characters.

-The Polgara demons and Adam have a spike thing in their wrist? Basically it’s like an organic Hidden Blade and I think that’s kewl. So maybe I should start yelling “ASSASSINATE!” every time Adam stabs someone. Or play this sound.

  -Have Tara and Willow slept together? It’s unclear. Are we supposed to believe that she spent the entire night casting spells? And the TV Tropes recap points out that Willow’s sweater is inside out when she gets back to the dorm room. So…. 

-Riley does mention his “vitamins” but are those the steroids? If so that’s a really obvious way to administer them, but I guess it’s the simplest way to get them to him without accidentally serving them to the wrong person in the cafeteria or something. Still, wouldn’t there be a lot of red flags if you join a branch of the military, and then they hand you some vitamins and demand that you take them daily?

-Xander’s idea to flush the tracer was actually… a really good idea. Smashing it might be too difficult, and they’d still know the general area to look in. Carrying it around would make Xander a target, and outrunning the commandos would be a huge risk. There weren’t any moving trains or things like that nearby, so sticking them there would be too difficult too.

-How many times are we going to bring up the whole ‘Xander was a soldier in that one episode’ thing? Anya lampshades how weird it is that it comes in handy so often.

-Buffy asks what the Polgara demon is after, and the Initiative seems to think that the monster’s just...a stupid animal. Which is stupid. Clearly these demons can talk and communicate and have specific patterns of behavior??? They have bars??? Why would you think they’re not of human-level intelligence???

-Is it just me, or do the guns that the Initiative commandos use look...so fake? Outside of the handguns, maybe, they don’t feel like real guns. It’s weird.

-Spike points out that Buffy’s got terrible taste in men. Although Riley isn’t so bad, and Angel wasn’t bad until he evilified. So basically it’s better than Xander’s taste in women. Seriously, will Anya do anything useful???

-Willow and Tara’s spell is to conjure the goddess Thespia. I don’t know jack about Wicca, but Thespia is a very minor Greek goddess/nymph? Her domain is a specific well. She’s...like a nobody on the divine stage.

-Riley tries desperately to paint Walsh as a brilliant scientist changing the world, but...like, I’m getting Angelopolis flashbacks because at this point it’s pretty clear that she was a Mad Scientist and the whole operation was crazy from the start. I realize that it’s meant to be Riley struggling with his entire world coming out from under his feet so I don’t blame him as much. At least the Initiative didn’t cut as many corners as Jurassic Park.

-Is the Initiative going to get a new leader? Is it going to be someone who isn’t off their rocker? Find out next time!

#4x13 #4x14 #Buffy The Vampire Slayer #Buffy Summers #Riley Finn #Spike #Willow Rosenberg #Maggie Walsh #Adam #Xander Harris