hi! your blog is one of my favourites and i absolutely adore reading your thoughts. my grandfather recently passed away and it feels like i lost myself with him. how do i continue living after this? there is this constant weight on my chest and it feels like an emptiness has made a home inside of me. how do i go on when it feels like the world crashed on my shoulders?
hello, love! this is so very sweet and kind of you, and i hope you're treating yourself gently and kindly right now - there aren't words for a loss like this. that heaviness is difficult, and hard, and painful. it's okay if things don't feel okay, right now, or even soon - i think that's something that a lot of the people i know that have gone through similar grief feel: like they should be able to get back to a relative 'normal' in a [insert far too short period of time].
but it's okay if it hurts. that's where i'd like to start. you're allowed to feel that emptiness, that world-crashed feeling that goes beyond words, beyond time. don't feel like you have to rush this to feel some sort of better. things get easier with time, i promise you this, but sometimes painful feelings are important to feel, too. cry, scream, feel your emotions. they're a part of you. grieve.
it's perhaps a little silly, but when i think about death i always think about a couple of space songs: mainly drops of jupiter by train and saturn by sleeping at last. there are perhaps others that speak to the emotions better, but these two have always hit something a little deeper for me, and are popular for a wide-reaching reason.
and while personally i don't know much about grief like this, i do know a lot about love; and i think they're a lot of the same thing.
the people we love are a part of us, and this is why it takes from us so deeply when we lose them, because it does feel like we've lost a part of ourselves in the wake of it. but it's because they were so central to our experiences of living - our lives, that the separation introduces a hollowness - a place where they used to be. a home that now goes unlived in.
an emptiness, like you said.
but just because they're not here physically, doesn't mean he's not still there, in your heart, in your life, your memory. you can hold him close in smaller ways, as well: steal a sweater, or cologne/scent for something a little more physical and long lasting for remembering. hold onto the memories you cherish, the things that made you laugh, the ease of slow mornings and gentle nights. write them all down, slide a few photographs in there, go through it and add more when you miss him. keep them all close, keep them in your heart.
you're not alone, in this. he's still there, with you, it's just - in the little things.
he's with you in the way you see and go about your daily life, in doing what he liked to do, in the ways he interacted with the world that you shared with him. the memories you recall fondly when the night is late or the moment is right and something calls it into you like a melody, an old bell, laughter you'd recognize anywhere.
but i think, perhaps most importantly above all others - talk about him. with your family, your friends, his friends, strangers; stories are how we keep the people we love alive. the connections they've made, the legacies and experiences they've left behind, and so, so many stories.
how lucky, we are - to love so much it takes a piece of us when they go. grief is the other side of the coin, but it does not mean our love goes away. it lives in you. it lives in everyone who knew him, in the smallest pieces of our lives.
the people we love never really leave us, like this: they're in how we cook and the way we fold our newspapers, our laundry, in the radio stations we tune in to and the way we decorate our walls, our photo albums. they're in the way we store our mail, organize our closets, the scribbled notes in the indexes of our books. the meals we love and the drinks we mix, the way we spend time with one another. they've been passed down for generations, for longer than history - and we are all the luckier for it.
think about what you shared with him, and do it intentionally. bring him into your life, like this, again. whether it's crosswords or poetry or sports or anything else. if one doesn't help, try another. something might click.
i hope things feel a little easier for you, as they tend to do only with time. i hope you find joy in your grief, even if it is small and hard to grasp at first. know that your hurt stems from so much love that there isn't a place to put it properly, and that it is something so meaningful and hurting poets and storytellers have been struggling to put it into words and sounds that feel like the fit right for eons, and that it is also just simply yours. sometimes things don't have to make sense. sometimes they just are - unable to be put into words or neat little sentiments, as unfair and tragic as they come.
but i promise it will not feel like this forever. your love is real. and perhaps, on where to begin on from here - i think it's less on finding where to begin and just beginning. and you've already started. you've taken the most important and crucial step: the first one.
wherever you go, after that, from here? you'll figure it out. you always have, and you always do. it'll come, as things always do. love leads us, as does light - and you're never alone in your hurt. in your grief, your missing something dear to you. i think if you talk about it with others, you'll find they have ways of helping you cope as well - and they have so much love of their own to spare, too.
as an aside, here is the song (northern star by dom fera) i was listening to when i wrote this, for no other reason more than it makes me think of connections, and love, and how we hold onto the people we love and how they change us, wonderfully and intrinsically. it's a little more joyous than the others i've mentioned, and plays like a story, and it made me think of what is at the core of this, love and stories and i am here with you, and maybe it'll bring you some joy, if you'd like it. wishing you all my love and ease 💛
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I see people talk about fanfiction and novels being different mediums a lot, and while I don’t necessarily disagree, I don’t feel like I understand either. In your opinion, what makes them different mediums from each other? What decides that two things are separate mediums like in general? It’s totally cool if you don’t wanna answer this btw, I know it’s kind of a lot
No worries I think that's an interesting question! With any categories, the boundaries on this are going to be fuzzy, but the reason I believe they're different mediums is that fundamentally, on a metatextual level, the languages are different. What do I mean by this? Let's use film as an example, a medium that I'd argue is very obviously a different medium than novels, even if we may not be able to articulate all the reasons why.
What are some attributes of film that differentiate it from novels (another storytelling medium) or paintings (another visual medium)? Films and novels are both storytelling mediums, but films have visual and auditory components. They also mainly consist of storytelling through visual cues and dialogue. Exposition is given visually or in media res by characters speaking. In a novel, your omniscient narrator giving you a few paragraphs of background on your main characters is common, and so expected it probably flies over the reader's head. In a film, a narrator doing the exact same thing for all the main characters often comes off clumsy. It takes you out of the story in a film, where it doesn't in a novel.
Film is also a time-based medium. A film unfolds over time, and you cannot experience the entire film in one moment or glance. That's not true of a painting (at least traditionally). With a painting, you can view the whole painting in one look. Now, you can sit with a painting, pick out details, analyze the craft or ponder it for a long time and watch as new aspects jump out at you. Fundamentally, however, if you wanted to view a whole painting in one look, you can, and it would still make sense. You cannot do that with a film. On the other hand, a painting is typically not an auditory experience. To do so would be an experimental use of the form. In modern film-making, the exact opposite is true. Music, dialogue, and environmental sound, all of these things are essential to how a film tells a story. To not use them would be considered experimental or odd.
These are three different mediums with three different "languages" in how they interact with their audience. They may share parts of their languages, like I said above, but they don't speak the same language. What works well for one medium can come off clumsy or strange in another.
I believe fanfic and novels have sufficiently different languages that they should be considered different mediums. Both of them are short or long form written mediums telling some sort of story. But fanfic's relationship to its source material is such an inherent trait that novels do not have. The relationship doesn't have to be positive (it's often, in fact, argumentative or strained or dismissive), but the relationship exists. Even in AU fanfiction. Even in fics full of OCs.
In canon compliant and even canon divergent fics, this relationship is more obvious. These fics are both conversations with the source material as much as they are stories. They're playing in the author's sandbox, or they're wrecking their sandcastle and building something else. They're saying "I like/dislike what you did with this specific story, and I'm going to show you that by rewriting or expanding it." They take large aspects of the author's story whole cloth: the characters, the setting, the magic system, the tech, etc.
These fanfics often have little exposition at the top because they presume a familiarity with the characters, the world, or both. This alone makes them really different from novels. Creatively and seamlessly integrating exposition, immersing your audience in a new world and convincing them to stay, is a really important aspect of a novel that these fics don't have to contend with. This alone fundamentally changes how you'd structure a story.
For AU fics, both fics in AU settings and AU fics full of OCs, the above still applies. These fics are still a conversation with the source material. Something about the source material compelled an author to flip it and remix it and change it around. That conversation might be "in the source material, these characters suffered, and I don't want them to suffer any longer" or it could be "I felt the story had a vacancy that this OC fills" or it could be "if these characters had the time/awareness/ability to grow closer, they would've fallen in love." These are all direct commentaries on the original work.
An exercise that I believe illustrates this point the best is to try and adapt an AU fanfic to an original work. Try to file the serial numbers off. I've done this with some of my fic, and it just doesn't work. You don't realize how much you presume the audience knows until you have to cater to an audience who knows nothing of the source material. That hilarious joke you wrote? Turns out it's only funny because it's a nod to this character's original characterization. This awesome climatic plot point that ties the whole story together? Turns out in relies on a specific bit of lore, a quirk of the magic system, or an aspect of the character's past history or personality. Now that this is a novel, you have to back-fill all of that exposition. And you can try to do that, but watch how your story gets clunky and bloated. You will have to start viciously killing your darlings, as you realize that your favorite scene is beautiful in a fic, but sounds awkward and out of place in a novel. Soon, you're basically just rewriting the whole thing to fit a different medium.
Many fanfic writers are extremely talented. And much of that talent, that wit, that perfect line that you can't get out of your head, is integrally informed by your knowledge of the source material. The irony falls flat without having read the source books. The relationships suddenly feel shallow when you don't have seasons of backstory to deepen them. You do not realize how much of fanfic writing consists of this back and forth until you go looking for it.
And here's the thing: if your fanfic has a totally AU setting and it consists of completely original characters, I'd argue that's just a novel posted to AO3. If all you need to do is change the names to make it work, that's a novel. This is why Clueless is inspired by Jane Austen's Emma and not an AU fanfic of it. If you've never read Emma, if you went into Clueless not knowing that Emma was the inspiration for it, you'd perfectly understand the movie.
In fanfic, the source material is always present. It can be obviously present with canon compliant fic. It can be antagonistically present with canon divergent or AU fic. And it is still present, floating in the background, with totally AU fic. Ultimately, the changes a fanfic author makes to the source material are, themselves, as integral to the fanfic as the words on the page. It is a dialogue with the source material: what it did well, what it could've done better, what this author believes is the essence of the story, or the world pushed to its limit, that even though we're in space or in a coffee shop or 1920s New York, we're still, on some level talking about the source material.
This is an aspect of fanfic I love that novels do not have. Novels have a lot of other great stuff! I love novels! But while novels are often engaged in a dialogue with their present society or their predecessors in a genre, that conversation is much more nebulous than it is with fanfic. You can read Slaughterhouse-Five or Gravity's Rainbow, and while knowing their contexts helps you understand them on a deeper level, that is unnecessary to their enjoyment. They are fundamentally more standalone works than fanfic will ever be.
This is ultimately why I think comparing fanfic and novels is comparing apples to oranges. They're different mediums. They use different languages. They require different skills and they fill different artistic niches. You might as well be comparing a film to a painting just because they're both visual art.
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✨best books i read in 2022 in no particular order✨
Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang (2021)
This "memoir of an undocumented childhood" is a beautiful story of a family who cared for and looked after one another and of a child who had a lot of fears but was at the same time wonderfully brave and curious and determined.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011)
This is the story of Elena and Lila, two childhood friends living in a rough neighborhood on the outskirts of Napoli. We follow their story, narrated by Elena, until they become teenagers, when their paths diverge and their friendship is transformed forever.
Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817)
Persuasion tells the story of a second chance, the reawakening of love between Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whom eight years earlier she had been persuaded not to marry.
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956)
This is the story of David, an american man living in Paris, living off the little money his father is willing to lend him, while his girlfriend is in Spain, On a night out he meets a young bartender named Giovanni and goes home with him.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (2021)
Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works, how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (1961)
When Franny’s emotional and spiritual doubts reach new heights, her older brother Zooey, a misanthropic former child genius, offers her consolation and brotherly advice. These two stories offer a touching snapshot of the distraught mindset of early adulthood and are full of insightful emotional observations and witty turns of phrase.
Jazz by Toni Morrison (1993)
a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (2021)
This is the story of Ailey and her ancestor's journey in America through centuries, from the colonial slave trade to our days. We meet Ailey when she is a child and watch her grow up, until the moment when, as a college graduate, she embarks on a journey to uncover her family's past.
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart (2022)
Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends.
Real Life by Brandon Taylor (2020)
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. But over the course of a weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses.
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (2011)
This is the story of Henry Skrimshander who gets recruited by a small college to play baseball and quickly becomes the star of the team, and of Mike Schwartz, the baseball team captain who recruited Henry, and who doesn't know what to do with his life, as his relationship with Henry becomes more and more co-dependent.
Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett (2022)
Emma was set to start med school but her father got sick with a brain disease and she decided to go back home to New Hampshire. At home her dad and her mum are in a fight, her brother is just out of rehab her childhood best friend is missing and Emma’s dad started seeing ghosts.
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)
Amory is a boy with family money who attends a private high school, and then Princeton and then gradually becomes disillusioned with life.
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.
Fight Night by Miriam Toews (2021)
It is told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
William Booth is a young man living in the countryside, writing for a newspaper little colums about nature, and he is sent by mistake (he has the same surname as a much cooler novelist) to the fictional country Ishmaelia to cover a war for his newspaper. Various other little mishaps ensue.
Maps of our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer (2022)
This is the story of Lia, Harry and their daughter Iris, a beautiful loving family. Iris is a teenager and has to navigate all that comes with that while, at the same time, learning to live with the fact that her mum's cancer has come back, and doctors are telling them it's terminal.
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937)
It narrates the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States.
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (2016)
The memoir of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
It is the story of an epic struggle between an Santiago, an old, seasoned fisherman and his life's greatest catch of fish, after eighty-four days that he has set out to sea and every time returned empty-handed.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
One day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. She is getting ready for a party she is hosting at her house. It is also a day in the life of a young veteran, Septimus who fought in WWI and got shellshocked: his last day. The two move around London and think back to episodes of their past.
Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (1932)
Poirot is vacationing in Cornwall, meets young "Nick" Buckley and her friends. He is persuaded that someone is out to kill her. Though he aims to protect Nick, a murder happens that provokes Poirot to mount a serious investigation.
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STAN HAS THAT K CHOKER RIGHT? DOES THAT MEAN KYLE HAS AN S NECKLACE? like he could totally stack his s necklace with his star of david one
aaaaaaaaa
you know i love a lil matchy-matchy moment~
and actually, i accumulated a lot of different asks actually, mostly, interestingly enough asking me about the same roundabout thing: if jersey wears rings, how he feels about jewelry, if he has any tattoos or other piercings, stuff of the like, etc.
but i never got around to answering those because i'm kind of a perfectionist and i get all worked up in my head about how i'm going to answer things because i want them to be perfect ( i keep trying to structure nsfw ask like it's a nine page research essay, smh ) buuut
basically, as we all know well, jersey is…Particular.
particularly abt himself and what is done to him/on him.
( okay, fair warning: the rest of this answer is very long and i just talk a lot about the former question about jersey/his attachments to material things and also physical-emotional things — people — you do not have to read all that...the short answer is yes, kyle does stack a stan 's' necklace with the star of david, i talk about it more at the end, but this intro part is a lot of exposition and information. so if your curiosity does not end there...perhaps i can further it below xx )
a lot of it ties into his ocd and this need to control every aspect of his life, not being able to put it in anyone elses hands but his own because he's scared of that improbability...that margin of error.
it keeps him up at night.
for that reason, even though he has a ton of health issues, diabetes, etc. he is extremely Defiant and Volatile in doctors offices. like, he will start throwing shit, rip ivs out of his arms, ask you to explain what you are giving him In Detail and will probably still refuse to take it.
tbh, the only reason he's taking any medication at all is because he really loves sheila and she is extremely worried about losing him </3
( jersey is a mommas boy, i said what i said! )
but he takes his own blood sugar, pricks his own fingers, runs all his own tests...he really does not trust anyone else w/ that kind of thing. which ties into piercings because he does...think that they're…lowkey, highkey *jersey vc* Hawt, i’m sorry; it's true.
i do think it's his...Thing.
the man really just wants a little hot topic emo boy accessory display for a boyfriend and he is right for that. cute, shiny, edgy. i respect it.
eye candy, arm candy, if you will?
( jersey is extremely partial to candy, ofc <3 )
and idk, maybe it's just a me thing, but to me, jerseykyle, specifically, is very conceptual and is intrigued by fashion and stuff, but because when he was overweight growing up, he was sort of just shoe-horned into all this oblong, ugly clothing, whatever would fit or they could afford. so he never really got to be able to wear things he wanted to, until about right now and it's been really liberating for him? idk? aaa
i love sleek, chic, dark academia, tired 1940s evil classics professor, thrift store couture jersey in his dollar store blazers and italian loafers. like my man is an off duty model, forreal. i am obsessed with him.
and actually he really Likes tattoos and piercings and dyed hair and thinks all the little rings are cool because you're like this living art form, this distinct individual, there's a uniqueness, a cool rebellion there he can’t create have within himself, so he combats/masks it as disgust and disinterest because he doesn't like to process his complicated feelings and also doesn't like forming attachments...especially...
...to things he's inexplicably Drawn to.
which is why, initially, upon even just bearing witness to raven of crimson dawn, kyle freaked out because he was like immediately Extremely Attracted to him because he checks all these little boxes in his brain, but his brain, of course, is corroded by mental illness and trauma, so he immediately projects extreme amounts of hostility in raven's direction because he is like you're all chaos and disorder, you're a mess, you throw caution to the wind, You’re Unpredictable.
when he’s actually obsessed w/ that capricious energy?
like he makes fun of stan for all his punk rock boy 'hood ornaments' and 'anarchical embellishments', but his heart starts racing every time stan winks at him and his little eyebrow piecing winks back, or he runs his tongue over that lip ring kyle got hyperfixated on, partially because it's pretty, which...rip, not even joking…
if stan comes out in the support rock, fuck a rockstar tank top, the tiny pants and sports that little lip ring chain thing that connects to the cuff on his ear...it does something seriously ( down ) bad to kyle's brain and stan is immediately getting Railed. soz if you were waiting for stan's autograph, hes gettin ky's all over his body. woops.
but!!! it's mostly bc stan had the courage and hedonism to put something through his lip and live with it. that he could get other piercings, get tattoos, let people handle him, put his life into someone else's hands, let them have control for a second, knowing they are executing the thing you want/need without you doing it...
it's literally All a control thing.
or rather, an inability to lose it.
because he's very particular, yeah, about what he likes and doesn't like, he won't wear any fabrics that itch or bother him, he won't buy something if the hem pisses him off, if he has to wear something he doesn't like, he will bitch and moan the entire day about it. and while it's good to have that level of self-assuredness, it's also kind of a self-preservation and self destructive coping mechanism for jerseykyle.
because he pushes everything out...
but doesn't let anything else in.
and a lot of that changes when raven/stan comes back into the picture, because when they were growing up, stan was this beautiful, glowing fixture of nonconformity, this pillar of strength that was twice as strong as he was, even though kyle was the fighter. because stan fought for self-acceptance and kyle fought for self-loathing.
and really...the reason why his ed developed in the first place was because gerald and society as a whole brainwashed him into hating himself and that people would only digest him if he was in small enough, beautiful, palatable enough pieces to eat so even though he acts out or throws punches: It’s All Within The Lines.
or the confines, rather.
of the person he thinks people want him to be.
but, idk, i'm talking too much. basically, gist is, kyle has a hard time handing over control to other people/being vulnerable and the final piece to that is...permanence.
a piercing...a tattoo...is Permanent.
i mean, sure, they close up and you can get them removed, but you are irreconcilably changed and altered. you are different now.
anddddd sigh, the jersey can't say i love you ask strikes again! because jersey can't say i love you because it's handing over control, because it's vulnerable because it's...permanent and he has extremely deep-seated commitment issues because of all of that.
which means he rarely, if ever, makes said commitments.
so when he Does...
it's a very special thing indeed.
because jersey has no tattoos or piercings on his body.
save for the sun/moon one he got on his ring finger for stan ( i can never decide if i want jersey to have the sun tattoo because he is the sun or if he has the moon one so he can wear rae around with him )
*** ( i also think it's possible he might get little hebrew things for his mom or idk, something very important later...i'll think about it more )
and...One ear piercing.
i was going to go at this in more comical and dramatic way in an old post, but basically, i think kenny/bebe/craig someone basically joked about there being reduced earring piercings at claire's and they should take kyle because he's the only one without pierced ears and jersey gets really defensive about it and everyone's like ooooh! kyle's scared to get his ears pierced, so the competitive and aggressive side of him that hates to lose briefly outweighs the neurotic side and is like "fuck you!!! let's go right now! i'm not scared of anything!"
and he gets there, stan's with him, and he is...freaking out in the little plastic chair with some eight year old girl next to him ecstatically getting her ears pierced for her birthday, bc he's going to have to let someone...do something to him/inflict something on him.
( which actually, i think, is what is really beautiful about j.k and r.s' relationship and dynamic, is that jersey teaches raven that you can't just let people do things you don't want them to do to you just because you feel like you should ft. his sexual trauma and stan teaches kyle that it is okay to let other people in, to do reckless things, to allow yourself to feel and enjoy simple pleasures w/o fear. ft. his ocd
lmao, is there a branch in my eye again? y is it Watering )
and ravenstan is like, mi amor, they are just your ears, you will be okay, i will hold your hand…
everything will be fine, i swear. :’) <3
and he gets hyped up, ready to go, the 16 y/o piercing his ears tells him she'll count to three and pierce on one.
...and she pierces on Three.
i'm not sure if it's bc she pressed too soon or because she thought that if she surprised him, it might make him less nervous, but it does not!!!! kyle FREAKS out!!!! his ocd goes haywire and basically has a nervous breakdown at freaking /claires/ bc she pierced his ear before she SAID she would and destroys the confidence that he built up to let himself be vulnerable.
it seems like a Silly thing...but i think it says a lot, yknow?
and though it was a serious blow to his ego, kyle only has...one ear pierced because he panicked and could not get the second one done. and it, to this day, is one of the only asymmetrical things abt him. which, i actually think is important to him coping w/ his ocd
( similar to how kyle, sorry slight nsfw, having stan have to ask for things if he wants them, helps him, in a seemingly innocuous way, build confidence in himself/not let things just 'happen' to him without his consent ) because having only one ear pierced means he has to deal with being lopsided and that, everyday the earth doesn't crash into the sun...means that he's okay.
also a cute thing about the one ear piercing is that i think kyle wears like this cute little gold sun dangly one that has a similar ambiance to the sun and moon glasses chain charms? it's his signature.
and other than showering, sleeping, etc. he only really ever takes it out when raven is going off somewhere far away :( and he switches it with a little stan silver earring ( idk kyle feels very gold jewelry bc of his orange hair and stan feels v silver bc of his blue eyes and stuff ) and stan sometimes takes kyle's with him on tour...AAAAA i'm sad
on the subject of rings, since someone else asked me, kyle does not wear rings even though he does like them/they're pretty because they're heavy, they clank against his pen when he's writing, the sound pisses him off...but he wears stan's lil silver emo boy rings when he's away and gaslit himself into liking the sound because the sound it makes against his pen reminds him of the sound it makes when stan is excitedly scribbling song lyrics and singing to him aaaaa IM :(
WHERE WAS I GOING WITH THIS AGAIN?
oh, yeah.
extreme mental illness.
so jersey never makes adjustments or accommodations for anyone, and when he does it's a big deal...but really...
it's because Stan is a big deal to him.
stan is EVERYTHING to him.
and kyle thinks it's cute that at every show and every concert, stan always wears the little spicy k charm on his emo boy choker ( and got the little even spicier inner thigh tattoo w kyle's name on it...anyways )
so, he starts wearing a little s around his neck for stan.
which, initially, i'm sure you're like...oh God.
jersey making an adjustment to his very specific cartoon character outfit alignment of things he wears every day, things he wears at home, things he wears specifically when going out depending on the environment...this sounds like a recipe for disaster. this is a big change for him. he's gonna spin out or short circuit his brain.
but...really? it feels as easy as Breathing.
because for one of the first times in his life, kyle got something that he didn't just get for him, w/ selfish intentions or bc he needs to be in control...he got it...
to make stan happy. :)
and it does make him very, Very happy, indeed.
which is really funny to me because jersey is super annoying and just starts wearing it and pretends like he doesn't know what's going on bc he's bad at ~gestures~. so stan comes home, sees it and immediately is like *big stan eyes* 'what are you wearing??'
and kyle is like, ‘oh, this? i've had it forever, it's was just in the back of the closet. why? is it wrinkled or—‘ and stan is like 'no, dummy. the NECKLACE' and kyle, playing dumb, trying to act nonchalant because he's kind of embarrassed abt having emotions is like 'oh, that. y'know. just something i'm trying out...' and stan is like
'kyle broflovski, are you wearing a necklace with my initial on it????' and kyle is like 'alright, woah there, mr. celebrity. but not eeeeverything is about you, okay? that s could stand for anything.'
and stan is like *genuine heart eyes wowza because kyle is being annoying but stan loves dumb annoying kyle that's why he wears his lil possessive emo boy k charm on his choker everywhere* 'okay, well the k on mine stands for kiss me or kiss me kyle or whatever you want just, come and kiss me please' kshdlkshd <333 eWW
anyways...they're Gay. they're in love. they having matching tattoos and earrings and wear eachother's intials around their neck. nbd.
but...in a very longwinded format, i hope this answers your question baby and hopefully some other questions you have abt jersey. i'm sorry that was a lot but i literally could talk about jersey forever, like he is so fascinating and bc he's our narrator and he's such an unreliable one, it's hard to understand how his brain works.
hope this helps. <3
uncle nina, keeper of the cryptid jersey whore-lore
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