#out of the teen conspiracy era into the 'that was fucked' 20s i say even though tyr's closer to 30 as of this
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IT’S DONE. IT’S DONE DAMN IT. [DISTRESSED KAZOO] Shaking, crying, swearing about my feelings, etc, etc.
you are my ddaaadd, you’re my dad!! boogie woogie woogie woogie!!! don’t look at me i’m trying to cope
I’m sorry it’s 2am I’m SO emotionally compromised I love him I love this man why agent hurt so good (beloved, don’t change), anyway, appreciation post for the two (2) whole authority figures in his entire life Tyr ever marginally respected and extra props to them for pulling off ‘major respect’ status (okay, the bar was LOW maybe but. still. its not just bc of that that they cleared by such a margin) and also I’m taking massive persistent damage don’t TALK to me about IA/Watcher Two I’m FINE i’m tOTALLY FIne and. there’s something in my eyes. It’s fine it’s fine everything is fine.
also i didn’t catch it because i was too busy LAUGHING but i brought kaliyo this time and heR COMMENT AFTER HE TALKS TO ARDUN Klnfla;dsnflkasdnflk;sadnfl “if you two are done making out” kALIYO PLEASE I love these dumb bitches so much your honor, the IA crew is just a collective train wreck they’re all doing the action slide gun pose together that’s the collective team brain cell somewhere between james bond theme and pink panther
[inhales] anyway if you haven’t played imperial agent and you’re following me i am propaganda’ing you into experiencing my absolutely unbiasedly favorite swtor class [i’m biased. but it’s also really good.]
send tweet and all that jazz
#dot's live agent replay#imperial agent#ch: tyr#dot plays the star war#swtor#if you're wondering if this will finally make me normal again the answer is probably no bc it is always tyr imperialagent hours in my brain#also the sarcasm dripping off of 'safe hands right' aksfnlsadfnd#tyr loses impintel and all capacity to give a FUCK about appearances in front of the minister given everything#he's smart he'd figure his feelings out anyway#out of the teen conspiracy era into the 'that was fucked' 20s i say even though tyr's closer to 30 as of this#wow okay now we're putting lore in the tags it's that kinda 2 am#uhh... anyway#i'm sorry not sorry for putting you all through this with me this man is in my brain like nothing else#not elaborated on: the mild regret yet resolve that he lies blatantly to the minister bc srry he doesn't trust the empire for shit anymore#'rogue agent' pulls the rug out from under him even though he tells the team it won't change anything#also literally wHY do i not get to say goodbye to my bestie my gf where is my keeper#where is my snuck in personal goodbye maybe i'll just have to make that real too#but also the slight flavor of agony of never saying goodbye y'know#like properly the holos don't do everything he feels and thinks about her justice#missed her he did he just wants the old guard back nostalgia's a bitch etc etc#god he's just. pets him. i'm sorry buddy#also if you read all of this hi wow uhh... thanks#this is where i stop before it becomes too weird though
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The Fandom’s Least Favorite Character - an analysis on Kate
Kate is probably the most hated character in the Robin Hood fandom. Not even probably, she is the one who consistently gets the most hate. So, what has she done? Did she commit several murders? Did she kill off a beloved character? Did she do something so problematic that she deserves to burn in hell? Did she do war crimes? No, her biggest sin is existing among unfair circumstances.
The title of this post is kind of a lie. This analysis is not really about Kate as a character, but about how she is written, how the narrative presents her and how this all affects the fandom’s treatment of her. I started writing this because I am sick of seeing so much unnecessary hate for Kate. This is just me commenting on larger trends I have witnessed and a decade’s worth of frustrations finally being written out. If you do recognize yourself from some of my descriptions, I hope that this post will give you something to think about, but just know that this is not meant for any one person in particular.
I’m not going to try to convince anyone to think of Kate as their favorite character. I’m not even trying to make anyone like her. I’m just trying to see why she is so hated within the fandom. So, let’s start off with how it all began. Grab some snacks, you’re going to need them; this is a long one.
Introduction: Is it all Merlin’s fault?
To understand the context in which Kate was introduced to the show, let’s first look at where we left off at the end of season 2. I’ll start with the in-universe changes first. The biggest change obviously is that Gisborne murdered Marian. This altered the whole course of the show. Marian was such a central part of not only the show but also the Robin Hood legends, that at that point it was obvious that things were going to change. Will and Djaq left the show as well. Them leaving is not as dramatic of a change for the show’s narrative since they were not as central as Marian, but they did make up one third of the gang. This meant that there was a need for new characters to be introduced in season 3.
In our world, things changed between seasons 2 and 3 as well. There was a larger gap in production than before (with seasons 1 and 2 coming out in consecutive years and there being a gap year between seasons 2 and 3), and some of the people working on the show left or were replaced. Robin Hood’s spot on the BBC schedule was taken over by Merlin for 2008 so I guess we could blame that show for everything that went wrong in season 3. (I’m obviously joking here but conspiracy theories are welcome.)
The most important change in my opinion – and I think this is even more important to how season 3 turned out than anything that happened in-universe in season 2 – is the fact that Dominic Minghella was no longer writing or producing the show. It’s surprising to me that the fandom as a whole doesn’t ever really talk about this, when in many other fandoms creators or showrunners leaving the show are usually a big deal and mark the end of an era. I myself only found out about Minghella’s departure from the show before season 3 this year, but it seems to explain a lot on why season 3 felt so different from seasons 1 and 2.
With all that out of the way, the stage is set, and it is time to look at how exactly Kate came into the show.
Six boots, two feet
Season 3 starts off with my least favorite episode of the whole show (see my episode ranking for more details). It tries its best to address the events of the season 2 finale, but in a way that will let it quickly get to the season 3 storylines. Unfortunately, the things that happened at the end of the previous season were so important that they would have needed several episodes to cover the full impact of the events.
Kate herself is introduced in episode 2. She is immediately given a reason to hate the villains and join the fight when her brother dies. She doesn’t join the outlaws right away, but when she does, she essentially has to take over three roles at once. I do not think it’s a coincidence that I think episode 4 is Kate’s best episode and that she’s at her best before she actually joins the gang. That is the point in the show when she is allowed to be her own character rather than someone who is trying to fill a void.
Like I said, Kate has three roles to take over; she gets Djaq’s spot in the gang as “the girl one”, Will’s role as “the peasant with personal connections to the people’s suffering” (and interestingly, since Kate’s family is around, her connection could have been even stronger than Will’s) and Marian’s as “the love interest”. Since the season 2 finale got rid of both of the only female characters in the show, it was inevitable that they would eventually be replaced if the show wanted to include any romantic storylines (it was, after all, 2009, so queer representation was out of the question). With three pairs of boots to fill, and only two feet, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that Kate can’t possibly do it all alone. The show does introduce Tuck and Isabella as well to help fill the gaps, but I think Kate gets labeled as “the replacement” far more often than the other two.
A triangle without a base is just an angle
Kate had all the potential for a good plotline. Her brother died, making her hungry for revenge, yet this part of her is only sprinkled in every now and then instead of being a part of her character arc. Instead, she is made a part of not one, not two, but three love triangles.
I’ll start with the Much/Kate/Allan one. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t actually exist. All sides of this “triangle” are… weird. The writers try to frame it as a legitimate love triangle, when only one person in it seems to have any real feelings for another character. Much is shown to be interested in Kate, but we as the audience are never given a reason for why he likes her or even how he fell for her. I guess we’ll just have to take his “I fall in love very easily” (from 2x4) quite literally. Kate does not seem to have any romantic feelings for Much, and she seems oblivious to his feelings as well.
To be honest, I don’t think Kate ever really saw Allan as an option either. At best I could admit that maybe she had a slight attraction to him, but I never got the impression that it was something she would seriously pursue. I don’t think Allan was seriously interested in Kate either. His flirting with her is quite similar to his joke-y flirting with Marian and Djaq. My friend and I talked at length about this, but Allan doesn’t seem like the type of person to flirt for real. This could be a whole analysis on its own, so I won’t go too deep into it here. But I don’t think Allan considers Kate a legitimate romantic option.
So, this “love triangle” only exists in Much’s head and in the narrative the writers try to force on the audience. The Kate/Allan side of it is practically dropped the minute Kate/Robin becomes a thing.
Then there is the Much/Kate/Robin/Isabella triangle that is not a triangle either. I already covered Much/Kate for the most part, so I won’t go into it. Since the Robin/Isabella relationship is not that central to Kate’s character, I won’t bore you and myself by going through it that deeply. The buildup for that relationship is practically nonexistent, and so is the end of it. The whole Robin/Isabella relationship feels forced, because the writers didn’t know how to properly replace Marian while coming up with something new.
Kate’s crush on Robin seems to develop out of nowhere as well. It looks like a pattern when it comes to romances this season. Robin himself doesn’t appear to have any romantic interest towards Kate until he and Isabella “break up”. After that point, their relationship progresses way too fast. It doesn’t help that they seem to have no chemistry between them, and Robin treats Kate like a child and then five seconds later proceeds to make out with her.
Honestly, if Kate had to have a romance with a character on the show (and with it being 2009 obviously they could not fulfil my dreams of Kate being bi but that’s beside the point), it should have been with Archer. The two of them had more chemistry in the 30 seconds they worked together in 3x12 than Robin and Kate had the entire season. It would have also made me far less uncomfortable, since the characters would have been closer in age. Which brings me to my next point.
“There is only one thing worse than a rapist – a child”
How old is Kate supposed to be? Seriously, this show can’t seem to make its mind about her. In general, I do not trust anyone’s age on this show unless it’s been stated somewhere. I know some people try to base the characters’ ages on the actors’ real ages, but to that I say, “fuck that”. Archer is the best example of the fact that this show did not even try to cast people who are the right age, or even look the part. (Seriously, he does not look even close to being 20.)
That being said, Kate is written like she is both 15 and 25 at the same time. I don’t know if the writers had a specific age in mind when they were writing her, but there is a huge difference between those ages. I think it’s the most reasonable thing to assume that she’s in her late teens, maybe at most in her very early twenties. She is still living with her family (I know that most women at the time married in their 20s but it’s not like this show is concerned with historical accuracy) and her behavior is a little immature at times. With all that said, I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I find it incredibly uncomfortable that all the men that are presented as possible love interests to her are fully grown men.
It is the most obvious in Robin and Kate’s scenes. Like I said earlier, Robin treats Kate like a child and speaks to her in a condescending way, only to then make out with her in the same scene. I must wonder why the writers didn’t just age up Kate. I think it would have been more interesting to make her someone who is already married, and instead of losing her brother, it would be her husband that dies. Of course, I would prefer it if Kate didn’t have to be a part of any of these love triangles to begin with but aging her up would have made the dynamics far less uncomfortable. (I do have to also point out the fact that Meg is also written like she is a teen girl. The show then tries to pair her off with Gisborne, who is even older than the men Kate is being forced into love triangles with. So… yikes.)
Let’s take a break, drink some water
Let’s take a moment to recap what we’ve learned here. First of all, Kate entered the show in unfair circumstances and with only two feet to fill three pairs of boots. She was only ever allowed to be a part romance plots, and she didn’t get a proper character arc of her own. In general, the women in this season were not written well (not that seasons 1 and 2 were the height of feminist television either), and they were reduced to being love interests or tools to further the male character’s plotlines. Without Dominic Minghella involved and with a full year between seasons 2 and 3, the show lost some of its charm. Unfortunately, this meant that Kate was not the best written character. But I do not think she deserves all the hate the fandom has given her over the years.
Interlude: Doctor Death
Before I get too much into how the fandom has reacted to Kate over the years, I feel like I should explain my own history with this show and the fandom surrounding it.
I started watching the show when it was first airing here on TV. It was some time during season 2, and once I had seen my very first episode, I watched all the following ones as well. With the finale, there was a problem. I had seen 2x12 and knew that the final episode of the season would air the next week. I was so excited for it, but then my mother decided that we would all go out and have dinner. I kept looking at the clock all day, hoping I would make it home in time. I got home just to see the credits rolling. I’m still a little bitter about it.
After this, I was desperate to see how the season ended. I’ll remind you that this was before it was common for shows to be put online officially. Streaming wasn’t really a thing yet. I did the only thing I knew what to do; I went to YouTube. The thing is, I did not know that what I had been watching was the second season of the show. So, you can imagine my confusion, when I find the very grainy version of 1x13 on YouTube and start watching it. Eventually I figured out my mistake and watched 2x13. At some point I watched season 1 as well, but I honestly don’t have that many memories of when I first watched this show. My clearest memory is being betrayed by my own mother when she forced me to go out for dinner.
Since I do not remember what year this all happened in, I did some googling and if I’m correct, season 2 aired here for the first time in the summer of 2009, with reruns in the summer of 2010. Because I have no other memories for context, I can’t say whether or not season 3 was even out in the UK at the time. Anyway, I did not watch season 3 for a few years. I also didn’t engage with the fandom until 2012, when I joined Tumblr. (A side note: while trying to find out when season 2 aired, I found the episode titles and descriptions. Apparently 2x4’s Finnish title was Doctor Death. There were some real gems on that list but this one was my favorite.)
Over the years, I had read bits and pieces about season 3 on the internet. I was still upset about the end of season 2, and the things I read did not make me want to watch season 3. Sometime in 2012-2013 I finally gave in and watched season 3. I was mostly disappointed by the season as a whole, and as for Kate specifically, I found her annoying. In the fandom, I went along with the Kate-hate that was popular in the fandom at the time.
I did a full rewatch of the show with my friend in 2016–2017. During that time, I didn’t hate Kate as much as I did before. Maybe it was that I had a fresh perspective, maybe it was that I had matured in those few years. Who knows? I was mostly disappointed by the bad writing. Even back then, I wished that Kate had been given a proper chance.
The next proper rewatch of the whole series I did was this past winter. I watched the show in a non-chronological order with someone who had never seen it before. This time, I was angry at the writers and found myself half-ironically becoming a Kate-stan. I also began to really pay attention to how the fandom has talked about her over the years and was unnerved by the hate has she gotten.
So, here we are. Time to take a look at how the fandom has treated Kate. Most of this will be based on my own experiences and memories, so if someone else has a different point of view to offer (especially from the early days of the fandom while the show was still ongoing), feel free to comment! I just wanted to give you my own history with the fandom to show that I have indeed been around for most of the fandom’s history.
The hate-train for Kate-town leaves from platform 4
It seems that from the very beginning, Kate was disliked. I remember reading negative comments about her way back in the early 2010s (I would try to look for examples, but I just spent 30 minutes trying to find out when season 2 first aired here and it’s currently 1am so I am not spending any more time googling right now). There are fics that make fun of her and how badly she was written, and most of the jokes and dislike about season 3 seem to always come back to her. This attitude has been present in the fandom in other contexts as well. Over the years, the hate towards Kate has come and gone along with the popularity of the fandom.
Every once in a while, someone has tried to either write Kate better or even see her as a character that was let down by the writers. Mostly this has not led to any significant change in the fandom’s attitudes. I feel like whenever some of the older fans outgrow their Kate-hate by either just maturing and realizing it’s pointless or just not wanting to waste their time making fun of her, new fans come in and start the whole thing all over again.
I am grateful, however, that the general consensus in the fandom seems to be (at least in the year 2021) that the actress is not to blame for Kate’s faults. It still does make me uncomfortable that people go so far as to cross out her face on pictured etc. just to show how much they hate the character. This hate that Kate gets feels very misogynistic at times and is at least partially the result of the show’s misogynistic writing, but the actress deserves no negativity for playing Kate.
What about Isabella?
One thing that is very interesting to note is that while both Kate and Isabella were newcomers in season 3 and were both replacements for Marian in the sense that they were love interests for Robin, only Kate has received a significant amount of hate over the years. So why does the fandom not hate Isabella?
I think that a big reason for why Isabella is tolerated – not necessarily liked, I haven’t seen too many people genuinely enjoying her character – better than Kate is the way the narrative treats them. Kate is essentially forced down our throats. The show is so desperate for us to like her that they end up making her unlikeable. Isabella, on the other hand, is eventually made into a villain, and thus we’re not meant to sympathize with her in the end anyway. (I could write a whole rant about how Isabella’s treatment in the narrative is bad but let’s not do it here.) Isabella also has the advantage of being Gisborne’s sister, so her backstory ties better into already existing characters. I think it’s reasonable to say that Gisborne being a fan-favorite in certain parts of the fandom doesn’t hurt Isabella’s case either.
Isabella is also only involved with Robin, while the show keeps pairing Kate off (unsuccessfully) with almost half the cast. I think she was written in a way that reminds people of Mary Sues, and considering how fandoms tend to not like characters like that, it’s no surprise that Kate got all the hate she did.
Murder and being annoying – they’re the same thing, right?
So why exactly does the fandom hate Kate so much? Obviously, the writing is a big reason. Season 3 is not written well, which means that Kate is not written well either. She doesn’t really get a storyline of her own, and instead her main purpose is to be someone else’s love interest. I would also add that Kate doesn’t really get hate for her personality. Most of the hate that she gets in terms of character traits revolves around her being annoying, but that’s not really a personality trait. So I think the issue is not her personality, but her role.
The next reason won’t surprise anyone who has spent as much time in fandoms as I have: Fandoms do not like female characters. Well, I should probably rephrase that. Fandoms tend to hate female characters more easily than male characters. I’m not going to analyze too deeply on why this is, as I’m sure someone has already done research on this with references to actual feminist theory. There is a lot of internalized misogyny in fandoms, and female characters get hate for even the slightest wrongdoing, while male characters who commit far worse crimes often have a strong fanbase that will defend them despite these flaws, especially if said male character is played by a conventionally attractive man.
Kate is also blamed for things such as breaking Much’s heart, even though she was never really aware of Much’s feelings in the first place, so it was definitely not intentional. She’s blamed for every small wrongdoing in a way other characters in the show are not. I’ve seen people criticize Kate for small things that she has not even done on purpose. Some of these people then also go on to ignore the fact that Gisborne has committed several murders, taken part in the oppression of the poor and done many many more atrocious things, and paint him as a more sympathetic character than Kate. I understand if you do not like Kate, but it feels misogynistic that the female characters are held to different standards than the male characters. I can already hear some of the Gisborne-fans saying “but I acknowledge his actions and think what he did was wrong! I just find him to be a misunderstood and/or interesting character”. To those people I will just say: Why are you not applying this same logic for Kate? Why are you making outright hateful comments about her? If you don’t like her, why not just ignore her? If you are a Gisborne-fan and have never made these comments about Kate, this obviously doesn’t apply to you. And even if you aren’t a Gisborne-fan, but you do recognize this way of thinking in yourself in regard to some other character, I encourage you to think about it critically. I just used Gisborne as an example since I know he’s perhaps the most popular male character in the fandom (at least if Ao3’s numbers are anything to go by). I’ve also seen a similar attitude from a lot of Allan-fans, though in their case the hypocrisy is often not as obvious, but I’ll return to Allan in a moment.
Many female characters end up getting hate because they get in the way of a popular (often m/m) ship. In this regard, Kate is kind of an outlier since she doesn’t exactly do that, since there isn’t really a ship to get in the way of. Sure, she’s eventually paired off with Robin, but Marian is already dead by the time she shows up, and if people were truly bothered by someone other than Marian trying to get Robin’s attention, they would also hate Isabella with the same intensity. I do think there is one “ship” Kate does come in the middle of, and here’s where we get back to Allan.
Now, the ship Kate does get in the middle of is not in fact canonical. I am of course talking about the popular Allan/OC trope. If you go on Ao3 or Fanfiction.net, you won’t have a hard time finding fics where Allan is paired with an OC. This is understandable, seeing that the show only has four main female characters to begin with, one of whom is already in a love triangle with other people, one of whom canonically ends up with someone else, one of whom is actively hated by the fandom and one of whom just does not interact with Allan.
I want to make it clear that I think it’s fine if people want to come up with their own OCs for the purpose of shipping them with existing characters, it’s just not my thing, especially when those OCs are any level of self-inserts. (I personally don’t feel the need to ship Allan romantically with anyone. I just tend to not like OCs in any fandom.) Since Kate is presented as a potential love-interest for Allan, I think many fans who would rather see Allan with their own character or even themselves view Kate as an obstacle or a threat.
As you may see, this fandom, like many others, unfortunately treats the women in the show differently from the men. Male characters like Gisborne are viewed as redeemable so long as they are attractive, but Kate is irredeemable for… breaking Much’s heart and/or getting in the way of Robin/Marian or Allan/OC? This is something that really bothers me. I don’t mind the fact that people don’t like Kate, it’s the extensive hate she gets that makes me uncomfortable.
Conclusion: Where do we go from here?
Like I said in the beginning, I am not asking anyone to say Kate is their favorite character or to even like her. I just wanted to provide some things for people to think about regarding how they treat female characters. I think it’s about time the fandom took a proper look at itself and critically thought about how it speaks about female characters. It’s 2021, let’s not hate on female characters just for being a little annoying or getting in the way of shipping.
I haven’t seen the fandom analyze that much why season 3 is the way it is. I would love to see some meta about how Dominic Minghella’s departure and other behind the scenes factors contributed to the story and aesthetics of season 3. I would also love to see some actual analysis on the season 3 characters that isn’t focused on tearing them down. If the fandom never made another post about how terrible Kate is without providing any actual reasons, I would be happy. I can sort of understand this immature hatred coming from 15-year-olds, but I’m disappointed to say that I have seen fully grown adults tearing down Kate in this quite misogynistic way. I know that many people do not intend for their dislike of Kate to come across as misogynistic, but it does not erase the fact that that is how many of those hateful comments appear.
I think Kate had a lot of potential. Season 3 had a lot of potential. It is quite a move to kill Marian in the middle of a Robin Hood story, so they had the chance to take the story to all kinds of places. Unfortunately, the season 3 we ended up with was not of the same quality as the previous seasons. Instead of just hating on the characters or story in general, I think we should focus on really analyzing the season, and even coming up with our own ways of improving it. Many people have already done this (though unfortunately many of these attempts also include thinly veiled hatred towards Kate. It’s your story, why are you not treating her any better than the actual writers of the show?), but there’s always room for more takes.
At this point I will shamelessly advertise my own “Kate should have been the new Nightwatchman” theory and my Nightwatchman-fic. I wrote the latter in a way that would let it be a part of canon if necessary. I think that by refocusing the story and shifting the way we read the text, we can find new aspects of season 3, and perhaps even enjoy it more. That is what happened to me during my latest rewatch, and all it took was watching it in a non-chronological order and talking about it with someone who had never seen the show.
I’m not trying to gatekeep the fandom and say that only thought-provoking analysis or fix-it fanfiction is allowed. I just feel like people should be more conscious of the message they are sending out when they write hateful comments about Kate, censor her name or even cross out her face from pictures. Is it actually funny? Are you contributing something to the conversation? Is it actual criticism or just hate for the sake of hate? You don’t have to start writing posts in the defense of Kate, but you can just start ignoring her. It’s not that difficult. It’s fine to make jokes, but let’s start thinking about what our jokes say about us.
I once more want to emphasize that this is not a callout post I wrote with any one person in mind. So, if you felt offended when I was talking about Gisborne-fans, Allan/OC-shippers or Kate-haters in general, I can assure you that this post was not about you personally. This is not about any individual person. I’m just commenting on trends in the fandom I have noticed over the years. I don’t think any of you have committed any sins or that you need to be cancelled. I just hope that if you did feel guilty reading this, you’ll realize that maybe this post was something you definitely needed to read. As a woman, I would love it if this fandom worked on getting rid of its internalized misogyny.
I’m not claiming to be right on all of this, in fact I have a lot of bad opinions as well. I hope this post has provided people with things to think about. Feel free to use this as a starting point for your own meta or analysis. I’ll end my rant here, and leave you with this thought:
Kate had a lot of potential to be a good character. She did not let us down. The writers did.
#robin hood bbc#bbc robin hood#I'm not gonna tag any characters just to be polite#this is less of an analysis and more like a rant#the second half really is something#90% of this was written at night so it shows#anyway I hope every kate-hater reads this
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The Eras of Lana Del Rey: Lookbook no.9
Hi to anyone reading,
Hope you’re okay! AND that you didn’t end up here because you searched the Lana Del Rey tag so you could see people ranting about her-you’re about to be very disappointed. Sorry. This is not about to be some Question for the Culture discourse because the world is bleak enough right now and the last thing we all need is to be reminded of that saga.
Being a Lana Del Rey fan is easy, they said. She’s not a controversial artist, they said. And yet 2020 had to do what it does best and fuck everything up.
Whether people like her or not, it’s made me so angry reading all the abuse she’s been getting about her appearance for the last couple of weeks, because I really thought that if we could agree on anything it was that attacking individuals for the way they look because you dislike something they’ve done (with the exception of shit like racist tattoos and blackfishing) is, you know, awful and judgemental as fuck? Like you do realise when you treat the word fat as a pejorative that the fat people you don’t have a problem with understood that you meant it as an insult too? I think what all those people tweeting about Lana’s weight, and that includes some of her fans, are forgetting is that she was in her early 20s when she was thrust into the limelight. As much as there’s this conspiracy that her dad bought her a career in the music industry, she’d made the decision to go it alone and had lived in a trailer park as a struggling musician for years. On top of that, we have the unreleased tracks with lyrics seemingly referencing an eating disorder in her younger years. OF COURSE her body is going to look different. Why is it that we treat weight gain as an inherently bad thing without any insight into the other factors that constitute a person’s “health”? It’s fucking insane that so many feel they have the right to comment on other’s bodies in the first place and it breaks my heart that she might be reading these comments. This wasn’t intended to necessarily be a rant about how much I love this woman but all the shit I’ve read about her on the internet these past few months have pushed me to it. You'll respect your queen of alternative music or I shall stan twice as hard on your behalf. You can thank me later when you come to your senses xoxo
I’d love to say it was intentional that I finally finished this post the week Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass was released but that would imply I have my shit way more together than I actually do. If I’m being completely honest, I’ve only heard L.A Who am I to Love You so far 1). because I want to wait for the hard copy for the rest and that doesn’t turn up til September and 2). because I do not have my shit together, lol. That being said, there is no doubt in my mind that I am going to love it-one thing I have always loved about Lana’s lyrics is how well they paint a picture and this is something that poetry only more freely allows for the exploration of. That ability to create such a strong narrative voice and atmosphere is a talent that extends to her visuals and the production of her records too, and is something I really missed when it comes to the Norman Fucking Rockwell era. I’m just going to say it: a strong aesthetic is to NFR as memorable songs are to Lust for Life. Lacking. Am I allowed to say that as a fan? The collaborations don’t do it for me, okay, and as as NFR is concerned, aside from The Greatest/Fuck It I Love You video which went down the whole neon surfer girl route, it’s hard to identify a cohesive theme. It’s understandable that at this point, she would want to just focus purely on the music, and it goes without saying that NFR will stand the test of time in that regard but I don’t think we can deny that when people think of Lana in the future, it’s not gonna be a green windbreaker that comes into their heads.
^Illustration credit to Filip Kozak (https://filipkozaksart.tumblr.com/?fbclid=IwAR3vwLX2pNxoFNhTPD1ky14LllPqlLtL1GxGlD79xuHxdtzcHLw-6aNBZWo)
And here’s where this Filip Kozak illustration comes into it; after years of it sitting in my camera roll for years, it finally has a use. There’s really nothing better to illustrate how mundane life has become this year than the disproportionate level of excitement my photo-hoarding-self experienced realising it would fit perfectly into this post and is thus eligible for deletion. Up there with being able to fit a whole box of biscuits onto the shelf at work rather than having to individually take out as many as I can and then shove them on top of the existing box of biscuits one by one. Truly riveting content on this Tumblr page. Back to the point-by using this as my stimulus for the post rather than the Lana Del Rey albums as outfits tag that went round on Twitter, I can conveniently exclude NFR as an outfit inspiration category, and that saves me from having to buy a charity shop windbreaker with its price bumped up 150% by some upper middle class Depop e-girl or boy who uses the word peng as a descriptor like it’s a nervous tic. To make up for leaving out NFR, I’ve tried to branch out a bit and do the outfits not just based on the music videos or album covers but also from street style and stage looks and photoshoots from around the same period too. It was hard not to be influenced by the general “vibe” and sound of the albums either when I was planning outfits, whether it’s the grand, orchestral instrumentals of Born to Die or the 70s psychedelic rock inspired riffs of Ultraviolence and hopefully that’ll show as well! Enjoy:D
Born to Die (Release Date: 27th January 2012)
It’s been 8 years, and when you ask most people what they think of when they hear the name Lana Del Rey, they’ll probably dismiss her as the one who sings about being sad and doing coke and sleeping with older men. That’s the Born to Die impact. Say what you want but it’s one of only a handful of albums released by a female artist to have spent more than 300 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart and it really established the mythos of “Lana Del Rey” because before all this, before all the think pieces from other women claiming she’d set feminism back hundreds of years with her music, before she ousted grayscale Effy Stonem as the queen of angsty teen Tumblr (which as you can probably guess was a subsection of the internet I was very much engulfed by, lmao), she was just Lizzie Grant, a relatively normal aspiring singer songwriter in her early twenties. But as Lana Del Rey, she was someone else-some beautiful, mystical being that personified the sentiment of being born in the wrong era. Whilst every other singer’s record labels seemed to be trying desperately to thrust them into the future and keep them on top of all the musical and stylistic trends, it was refreshing to hear someone whose music and visuals captured all the most glamorous elements of the past. Part Priscilla Presley/Jackie O reincarnation (the National Anthem video really illustrated how Lana is just as much a storyteller as she is a musician), part high level mobster’s wayward wife à la Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface, she was the good girl by day and the bad girl by night, and I think that’s a duality we can all relate to or would like to think we’re interesting enough to relate to deep down.
Her style from around this period was EVERYTHING. She had those grungy Tumblr girl elements, the camo jacket and the oversized pieces and the leather jackets, but she also heavily drew on the styles and silhouettes of the 50s and 60s with the beehives and the new look Dior inspired cinched waist dresses. Even now in 2020, I think this period is what most people would think if they were asked to describe Lana’s style. I made sure I got the grungy pieces in there with the chunky boots and the vinyl and the oversized leather but the foundation of her looks back then were usually these daintier throwback pieces like the white silk dress and the corset and the mint fur trimmed coat (House of Sunny’s Penny Pistachio coat).
Favourite lyrics from the album? “Now my life is sweet like cinnamon, like a fucking dream I'm living in” from Radio. Nobody asked but I’m gonna give it to you anyway.
Born to Die: The Paradise Edition (Release Date: 9th November 2012)
Lana’s Paradise EP contains probably my absolute favourite song of her’s, Ride, and with that, the beautiful opening monologue that will stay in my mind forever. This era was of course ushered in by Tropico, the short film that included the premiere of the songs Bel Air, Body Electric and Gods and Monsters, which established the ethereal tone of this period-it’s in the name, after all. Both the album and the videos were other-worldly and leaned heavily on religious symbolism which I’m sure pissed off many a middle-aged bible basher at the time. Most prominent in her lyrics were reflections on the freedom of the open road which corresponded with visuals of biker gangs and desert dwellers and modern interpretations of the Wild West, as was an attempt to capture the nature of the so-called “American spirit” which as Lana portrayed it shared more qualities with a kind of celestial, transient being than any kind of solid concept or identity. She played an emotionally detached stripper and a haunted saloon-style-bar singer (almost looking like a runaway bride) and Eve the “first woman” all in the same album and honestly, if that’s not iconic, I don’t know what is. We saw SO many incredible red carpet looks in this period too which built upon this idea of her as the fallen angel tempted by original sin that Tropico established; I feel like this era was all about laying bare the soul of the character she played, this broken, delicate but ultimately liberated being that was so dangerous to the idea of the strong, stable modern feminist ideal. She went about it in COMPLETELY the wrong way in a post that betrayed the ignorance of the privilege she has as a white female performer, but I think this is what she was getting at in it and Ultraviolence only went on to bolster her critics.
In response to the criticism she still receives about the choice to wear a Native American war bonnet in her Ride music video, I’d like to say that it really seems like she’s learnt from that-actions speak louder than words and so though it’s not my place to say whether this makes up for that error, the work she’s done with Native American reparations-focussed foundations since and the money she’s donated to the cause says a lot about her intentions. Again, I want to stress that it’s not my place to say! But it’s a detail that is often overlooked so I thought I’d mention it here.
“I was a singer, not a very popular one. I once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet. But upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky, that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. But I didn’t really mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is.”
Ultraviolence (Release Date: 13th June 2014)
AH, Ultraviolence. My favourite of Lana’s albums and imo, a masterpiece. ONE skip. ONE. Sorry Guns and Roses. I got stoned in my back garden and listened to this (for research purposes ofc, heh) and ended up deciding that this is what I want to listen to when I die (also whilst stoned). It sounds dramatic but listening to this album in that state of mind is such a heavenly experience that I’d be too zen to notice myself slipping away into nothingness on the basis that if I didn’t as long as I could stay in that bubble of awe, nothingness forever wouldn’t be so scary after all. I know, I know, that sentence has big Jaden Smith’s old tweets energy. But if an album is what helps me get over an existential crisis, I beg you allow me the nonsensical ramblings about how I felt like I was ascending into the stars.
Though in terms of the lyrical content the public perception is probably correct, I think the reputation Ultraviolence has as Lana’s darkest, most gothic album (which is something I’ve in incorporated into the outfits I put together) is mistaken; instrumentally and visually it drew more on 70s psychedelic rock and the bohemian counter culture of the period than anything, and her stage looks are a clear reflection of that, and also the outfits I was most excited to channel. It seems counter-intuitive to the moody atmosphere I associate the tracklist with but it’s my go-to summer album; it’s raw (probably her most stripped back work along with NFR, lots of the songs are barely edited) and it’s gloomy but let’s be real, hot as fuck-don’t bother making a sex playlist, just put Ultraviolence on shuffle, and you’re good to go. This was the album where Lana debuted some of her most criticised lyrics and where the notion that she glamourises abuse comes from, one of the points she also seemed to be getting at in the Instagram post, but imo it’s fair to say that she sang truthfully about the initial allure of a dangerous relationship and the nature of the mindset that facilitates staying with somebody poisonous where you do feel like you’re nothing without them. Turning horrific experiences into romantic tragedies is how Lana has always made her music and yeah, out of context there are some fucked up lyrics on the album, but policing how a woman expresses her trauma and complaining that she glorifies weakness because she wrote honestly about the reality of a complicated partnership is hardly any more “feminist” than the lyrics themselves. I can only guess that the reason Lana felt the need to bring up this criticism in 2020 is because these darker themes are going to be revisited in her upcoming album and that in spite of the issues with the way she expressed herself, this time critics will be more accepting of how she chooses to address these themes.
On a lighter note “yeah my boyfriend's pretty cool, but he's not as cool as me” will always be a great line. Simple but effective. If my boyfriend ever is cooler than me it’ll be doing Lana a disservice.
Honeymoon (Release Date: 18th September 2015)
Considering that a lot of other Lana fans are of the opinion that this is her best album, I find it weird that I really don’t remember all that much about this period, other than High by the Beach being released and then hearing Salvatore and Freak for the first time. I guess because she didn’t do a Honeymoon specific tour and didn’t make that many public appearances in this period? It was definitely harder for me to find visual reference points beyond the HbtB music video and the cover art, so I mostly drew on the general vibe of the album, a cinematic accompaniment to a summer in Italy or the South of France, filled with exotic instrumentals and the sense of impending romantic doom that Lana does so well. I suppose if I associate the visuals of this era with anything it’s idyllic florals and warm tones, bygone country club pool days, a rich American’s vacation in Southern Europe, long walks on the beach (and as our Lord and Saviour Jujubee once said, big dicks and fried chicken). Apparently inspired by Lana’s relationship with Francesco Carrozini, it’s a hazy story of some ultra-feminine, submissive archetype becoming unhealthily enchanted by a mysterious “foreign man” who’s ultimately not all that good for her, which as the story goes turned out to be quite prophetic. Going against the grain, it’s my least favourite of her albums after Lust for Life, but in spite of that, I will always remember how obsessed I was with the sax riffs (I think? I don’t know my instruments all that well so forgive me, lol) on Freak and I definitely understand why it’s a firm favourite for so many.
“You could be a bad motherfucker, but that don’t make you a man.” was truly a cultural reset of a line.
-on an unrelated note, OMG, I never realised how I have my mouth open in literally every fucking photo I take, somebody tell me how to pose, please and thank you-
Lust for Life (Release Date: 21 July 2017)
Lust for Life is a controversial one. On the one hand, I appreciate that this album was the victory cry of a happier, more independent, politically-aware Lana in spite of it apparently being a far more optimistic sounding album than the one she wanted to release, but on the other there were way too many collaborations for me and this meant that the album lacked a sense of cohesion and the characteristic narrative thread that usually runs throughout her tracklist. Aside from Love, Cherry, Get Free and Tomorrow Never Came, most of the songs on the album aren’t hugely memorable and it’s a crying shame that a collaboration with STEVIE FUCKING NICKS of all people left so much to be desired. Coming from two witchy icons, I expected something absolutely magical so maybe I was setting myself up for failure, but come on. We could’ve had a real anthem there.
Aesthetically speaking however, this is one of my favourite eras for Lana, which is unsurprising when you consider the tracklist contains references to both Woodstock and Coachella. I’m not gonna lie, I think seeing Coachella fashion in my early teens was my style awakening-I remember seeing Vanessa Hudgens’ outfits and being like, wow, I want to be her (oh, what a fall from grace)-so the late 60s/early 70s flower power groupie style Lana adopted in this period really spoke to me. It was all long hair and dreamy pastels, and this era included some of the most head-to-toe coordinated looks we’ve ever seen from her. Of course I couldn’t completely abandon the grungy touches that I love, that I tend to associate with the early Lana street style days and the Paradise and Ultraviolence music videos rather than with this album, but I’m never gonna pass up an opportunity to whack out a good floral two piece and putting together Lust for Life inspired looks is the perfect excuse to do that.
So, that marks the end of this post! If you made it to the end, thank you so much for reading! I have a Yesstyle lookbook and review to edit but now that I’ve finished that, I’m trying to go down more of a style inspiration focussed route with my lookbooks rather than just putting together outfits from clothes I’ve just bought (though I might still do one every so often to bring in a new season-let’s just ignore the fact that they’re all blending into one bc climate change for now, one catastrophe at a time please universe). I find that if you have a specific idea in mind of what you want, it’s super easy to find something similar on Depop and Ebay and that way you avoid buying new things and also take old things off a person’s hands that might otherwise end up being thrown out by a charity shop and then dumped into a landfill from there. Something I’d LOVE to do before this year is out is put together a lookbook based on the most stylish TV shows of the last decade, but that probably won’t be for a while-even so, if you have any recommendations of series to watch which could fit into this category, let me know!
To finish, I need to go a little bit off-topic so forgive me, but I truly don’t know why this even needs to be said: WEAR A FUCKING MASK. IT IS NOT A POLITICAL ISSUE. IT IS A BASIC HYGIENIC PRACTICE THAT HELPS SPREAD THE STOP OF A HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS DISEASE! RUDIMENTAL SCIENCE! NOT A CHANCE TO PROVE HOW “EDGY” YOU ARE! SERIOUSLY, STOP MAKING A FUCKING PANDEMIC ABOUT YOURSELF! NOBODY ENJOYS WEARING THEM BUT THEY HELP PROTECT OTHERS! SO UNLESS YOU HAVE A VALID MEDICAL REASON NOT TO BE WEARING ONE, DON’T BE A SELFISH PRICK!
Sorry to sign off on a rant-y note with something that has nothing to do with Lana, lol, but all the stupidity has been grinding me gears lately and I had to let it out on behalf of all retail workers: if we can wear a mask for 9 hours at a time, YOU can tolerate the mild discomfort of wearing one for 10 minutes. I know this doesn’t apply to the majority of people but there’s always a couple of arseholes, isn’t there!?
Stay safe,
Lauren x
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Dumb-Fuck #MAGA Teens, children of Dumb-Fuck #MAGA Parents, and QTards Everywhere, resurrect #PizzaGate on Tik-Tok! - Phroyd
WASHINGTON — Four minutes into a video that was posted on Instagram last month, Justin Bieber leaned into the camera and adjusted the front of his black knit beanie. For some of his 130 million followers, it was a signal.
In the video, someone had posted a comment asking Mr. Bieber to touch his hat if he had been a victim of a child-trafficking ring known as PizzaGate. Thousands of comments were flooding in, and there was no evidence that Mr. Bieber had seen that message. But the pop star’s innocuous gesture set off a flurry of online activity, which highlighted the resurgence of one of social media’s early conspiracy theories.
Viewers quickly uploaded hundreds of videos online analyzing Mr. Bieber’s action. The videos were translated into Spanish, Portuguese and other languages, amassing millions of views. Fans then left thousands of comments on Mr. Bieber’s social media posts asking him if he was safe. Within days, searches for “Justin and PizzaGate” soared on Google, and the hashtag #savebieber started trending.
Four years ago, ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the baseless notion that Hillary Clinton and Democratic elites were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria spread across the internet, illustrating how a crackpot idea with no truth to it could blossom on social media — and how dangerous it could be. In December 2016, a vigilante gunman showed up at the restaurant with an assault rifle and opened fire into a closet.
In the years afterward, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube managed to largely suppress PizzaGate. But now, just months before the next presidential election, the conspiracy theory is making a comeback on these platforms — and on new ones such as TikTok — underlining the limits of their efforts to stamp out dangerous speech online and how little has changed despite rising public frustration.
This time, PizzaGate is being fueled by a younger generation that is active on TikTok, which was in its infancy four years ago, as well as on other social media platforms. The conspiracy group QAnon is also promoting PizzaGate in private Facebook groups and creating easy-to-share memes on it.
Driven by these new elements, the theory has morphed. PizzaGate no longer focuses on Mrs. Clinton and has taken on less of a political bent. Its new targets and victims are a broader assortment of powerful businesspeople, politicians and celebrities, including Mr. Bieber, Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey and Chrissy Teigen, who are lumped together as part of the global elite. For groups like QAnon, PizzaGate has become a convenient way to foment discontent.
The theory has also gone global. While it previously found traction mainly in the United States, videos and posts about it have racked up millions of views in Italy, Brazil and Turkey.
“PizzaGate never went away because it encompasses very potent forces,” including children’s safety and the power of elites, said Alice Marwick, a disinformation expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But now there is so much scaffolding from people who have researched it, it wasn’t hard for others to pick up from there.”
PizzaGate is reaching a level that nearly exceeds its 2016 fever pitch, according to an analysis by The New York Times. TikTok posts with the #PizzaGate hashtag have been viewed more than 82 million times in recent months. Google searches for PizzaGate have skyrocketed.
In the first week of June, comments, likes and shares of PizzaGate also spiked to more than 800,000 on Facebook and nearly 600,000 on Instagram, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool for analyzing social interactions. That compares with 512,000 interactions on Facebook and 93,000 on Instagram during the first week of December 2016. From the start of 2017 through January this year, the average number of weekly PizzaGate mentions, likes and shares on Facebook and Instagram was under 20,000, according to The Times’s analysis.
The conspiracy has regained momentum even as its original targets — Mrs. Clinton, her top aides and a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong — are still dealing with the fallout.
Hateful comments have recently surged on the Facebook page and Yelp and Google review pages for Comet Ping Pong, where the child trafficking supposedly happened. The pizzeria’s owner, James Alefantis, said he had received fresh death threats that caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to open a new investigation two months ago. The F.B.I. said Friday that it could not confirm the existence of an investigation.
“There are no real options for someone like me. I don’t have the names or numbers for people to call at Google or TikTok,” Mr. Alefantis said. “But I don’t want to be that person who lives their life in fear.”
PizzaGate was born in 2016 in online forums like 4chan and Reddit, where right-wing users and supporters of Donald J. Trump pored over hacked emails from John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s senior campaign adviser, looking for evidence of wrongdoing. Some emails referring to Mr. Podesta’s dinner plans mentioned pizza. A 4chan participant then connected the phrase “cheese pizza” to pedophiles, who on chat boards use the initials “c.p.” to denote child pornography.
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Mr. Alefantis, who is friends with Mr. Podesta’s brother, Tony, was mentioned in several of the emails. That led internet users to connect his pizza parlor to their conspiracy.
The theory soon appeared in bogus publications like The Vigilant Citizen and The New Nationalist on Facebook and Instagram. On Twitter and YouTube, other users amplified the content.
Fact checkers debunked the idea. But weeks after the November 2016 election, Edgar M. Welch, 32, a North Carolina resident, drove six hours to Comet Ping Pong to free what he believed were enslaved children. He shot several rounds from a military-style assault rifle into a locked closet door of the pizzeria and eventually surrendered to the police. In 2017, he was sentenced to four years in prison.
Soon after, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook suspended the accounts of users who had pushed PizzaGate and took down hundreds of related posts.
To keep PizzaGate tamped down, the social media companies took other steps. Facebook made it impossible to search for hashtags such as #pizzagateisreal. On YouTube, searching for #pizzagate brought up a label that explained the term was part of a false conspiracy. Twitter also stopped #pizzagate from surfacing in its trending topics in the United States.
A documentary promoting PizzaGate, “Out of Shadows,” made by a former Hollywood stuntman, was released on YouTube that month and passed around the QAnon community. In May, the idea that Mr. Bieber was connected to the conspiracy surfaced. Teenagers on TikTok began promoting both, as reported earlier by The Daily Beast.
A week ago, Rachel McNear, 20, watched “Out of Shadows,” which has garnered 15 million views on YouTube. She then turned to Twitter, where she came across Mr. Bieber’s supposed association with PizzaGate. After reading more on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, she created a one-minute description of her research on the topic and posted it to TikTok on Monday.
“The mainstream media uses words like conspiracy theory and how it is debunked but I’m seeing the research,” Ms. McNear, of Timonium, Md., said in an interview.
Her video was taken down on Wednesday when TikTok removed the #PizzaGate hashtag and all content searchable with the term. A TikTok spokeswoman said such content violated its guidelines.
That same day, Facebook also expunged PizzaGate-related comments under Comet Ping Pong’s page after a call from The Times.
YouTube said it had long demoted PizzaGate-related videos and removes them from its recommendation engine, including “Out of Shadows.” Twitter said it constantly eliminates PizzaGate posts and had updated its child sexual-exploitation policy to prevent harm from the conspiracy. Facebook said it had created new policies, teams and tools to prevent falsehoods like PizzaGate from spreading.
Teenagers and young adults, many of whom are just forming political beliefs, are particularly susceptible to PizzaGate, said Travis View, a researcher and host of the “QAnon Anonymous” podcast, which examines conspiracy theories. They are drawn to celebrity photos on tabloid sites and Hollywood blogs to uncover PizzaGate’s supposed secret symbols and clues, he said. Even a triangle — which can signify a slice of pizza — can be taken as proof that a celebrity is part of a secret elite cabal.
“It all becomes a game, and people are drawn in because it feels participatory,” Mr. View said.
For Tony Podesta, John Podesta’s brother, PizzaGate’s revival has opened up old wounds. He had dealt with trolling from conspiracy believers in 2016. Recently, he got a voice mail message from an anonymous caller saying, “Your pizza is ready.”
“It just doesn’t go away,” Mr. Podesta said. “They are always three steps ahead of the sheriff.”
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Sumbission
Thanks for replying to my submission. Funny thing, you took so long to do it that I thought you got sick of the topic and deleted it lol. Which is cool. If you’re tired of talking about it, feel free to delete this too.
Since you did reply though, I just want to reply to a few things. I agree with Peggy that I don’t believe the writers hated Mon El for two years. The Kreisberg excuse has no bearing on what happened to him. Look, here’s an example: after the Harvey Weinstein debacle, do you think the writers/producers of his projects took their hate of him out onto his projects? Why would they? It makes no sense.
So why such a difference between s2 Mon El and s3 Mon El? It’s not because they hated him, it’s because they’re shitty writers who got painted into a corner because of the Mon El hate and let it negatively affect what they did with him in s3,hence making a total fucking mess. s2 Mon El wasn’t written like anyone hated him, he was spoiled but also funny, goofy and genuinely loving and along the way he evolved into a wannabe hero who fell in love and Kara fell back in love with him too. What part of that seems like he written from writers who hated him? Not only that, but you can’t blame it on Kreisberg being there either, he was a producer, not the writers, he didn’t write the scripts so you can’t say Kreisberg is why s2 Mon El was written like that. I doubt Kreisberg stood over the writers and pointed a gun to their heads saying to write Mon El in that way or else. The far more logical explanation to me is the writers wrote him that way because they planned to make him a hero and eventual endgame for Kara.
So why s3 Mon El and the total pile of shit with the way he was written then? Because not only did scs make their lives hell with the constant barraging of complaining, nastiness and hate, but they also got hate from Sanvers shippers and the moron “feminists” who screamed bloody murder at Kara getting ANY love interest, saying it made her weak, an anti-feminist, and all that BS. A smart group of writers would’ve just rolled their eyes and kept on with their original plan [to make Mon El a hero and karamel endgame] and muted the bullies or better yet blocked them but these idiots writers literally believed with all the immensely vocal morons screaming over and over that that’s what all the fans wanted. They tried to rehabilitate Mon El to placate the moron/bully trifecta - they fucked it up not because they hated Mon El but because they got painted into a corner and so came out their weak, shitty writing, not realizing instead of making Mon El look better to the bullies, they were actually making him look worse - and all they did was piss off karamel/Mon El fans but I can assure you that wasn’t their intention. They didn’t realize the real hate of Mon El was ship-related and they thought the turgid mess that was s3 would make Mon El acceptable to the bullies, which of course it wasn’t acceptable to anyone. In the end, who knows what happened? Maybe they gave up and decided it wasn’t worth it to deal with the psychos and just wrote him off BADLY. Or maybe Chris had had enough, decided to go. Insert your favorite conspiracy theory here, Area 51 peeps need not apply.
Anyway, one last thing for people who think fans have no say in how a show is run, trust me, they’ve always had a say even back in the days when there was no social media. Some writers listen more to fans than others but these days, everyone monitors the fan reactions on social media with every show. There have been many shows who’ve basically kept characters around they never meant to JUST because they’re so popular with fans. The actor playing the youngest kid from One Day at a Time basically took over all the storylines. Steve Urkel in Family Matters was meant to be a one-time guest star, and he basically became THE star of the show. When the writers realized Will on Alias was getting so much hate, they admitted in an interview they retooled the entire character because of it. I remember the funniest comment of that era coming from an online fan who posted a huge rant about him online and ended it with the line that everyone quoted for a while “And BUY THE BOY A HAIRBRUSH!” (they were complaining about his hair). But I digress. And of course Felicity Smoak was never meant to be Oliver’s love interest either till she developed a fan following, I’m pretty sure Laurel Lance was supposed to be his initial endgame. Point being, I don’t think Mon El was gotten rid of because of nothing but fan hate. But I definitely do think it was a huge factor in how they ended up writing him in s3 and it’s also why they’ve gotten to the point where they’re afraid to even breathe a word of him now. Anytime they do, the hyenas go batshit crazy. And we all know how afraid of the hyenas they are, hence also why SG has become the Luthor hour now.
Thanks again for putting up with another submission from me. :)
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Yeah, sorry. As I said I’m on fence with this topic. One day I think that, the next this blah blah.
I guess I didn’t make myself clear. I don’t think they hated him because of AK, I think they just didn’t like his character as a whole, a frat boy from Daxam, LI for Kara instead of James etc. But the whole AK drama helped them. There was something about that they could not use AK’s ideas after they kicked him out. I have heard Legion was his baby (while Reign was Queller’s) and they had to changed things. And comparing Legion 3B storyline with 3A storyline – it makes absolutely no sense, there are missing parts, ignored things and simply dumb things – I think, personally, there is some germ of truth in it. Also, well AK was a face of Arrowverse and I don’t think he had at that time other projects. And he is not Weinstein (fuck him very much) league.
Well, they couldn’t have written him differently in s2, because they were supervised. Also, writers can’t openly write their characters like they hate them, because it’s not professional. No writer can admit that, it’s like a say sayonara to your career. We can talk about Dark Angel and Supernatural and about writers who hated characters. Small things. Like writing a dialogue about microagression that haters can twist. Also, you want to tell me executive producers just allow the writers to write anything they want? Plus, I need to check how many writers were changed between s 2 and 3 to have some, hmm, clearer picture.
And I think we didn’t understand each other. I don’t think s2 Mon-El was a problem or that he was written like writers didn’t like him. Problem started in s3. After AK left and Queller and Rowner got more power.
In s2 yes, but in s3 he was written as an end game bait. Imo.
The hate probably was the factor, but just one of many. The same goes for my “writers hated him and karamels”. I don’t think it was the only one possibility (did I sound like that earlier? Sorry).
We all know what fucking FANSERVICE is. It basically killed Teen Wolf and sooo many other shows. When writers and producers become fan’s bitches, you know show is going to drown in shit :’)
But you know, there is fanservice when people demand something JUST BECAUSE THEY WANT SOMETHING, and there is change in plan when something simply doesn’t work. There is fine line between fanservice and throwing away not working plan.
(They were hating on poor Will? Thank god I was not in the fandoms back then xD)
Anyway, all we do here is speculating. Basically I agree with you, just with different proportions. And we won’t know the truth. Maybe in 20 years when some of the writers will write autobiography :P
Thanks for the submission :D
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that one through fifty thing bc i write books and this seems like a cool thing to do
Delilah Fae/Violette Monroe - my self insert bc im a narcissist
1. A little-known talent of your OC?
She can sing pretty well.
2. What trait does your OC like best about themself? (Eyes, guitar skills, random bird facts, etc)
Her 87% survival rate. There were a few times where she died, but she always came back.
3. How many pillows does your OC sleep with?
Two. Always two. Unless they’re especially flat, then it’s three.
4. Is your OC good at keeping secrets?
Well, no one knows she’s basically a God.
5. Your OC’s worst habit?
She flirts with everyone. Literally everyone. It gets her into trouble more often than she’d like to admit.
6. Does your OC prefer tennis shoes/sneakers or flip flops?
Flip flops. She feels trapped in sneakers. She likes to be able to take them off and put them back on without any special effort.
7. What is your OC’s opinion on body modifications?
She loves them. She’s gotten many, taken them out, gotten them again, so on. She’s just very indecisive.
8. Your OC is given a full-ride scholarship to any college they could want to go to. Where do they go and what do they major in?
Anywhere she can get an arts degree.
9. What chore does your OC hate the most?
Dishes. She tends to gag any time she has to load the dishwasher. Emptying it isn’t as bad though.
10. Would your OC prefer to live in the city, the suburbs, or the country?
She literally couldn’t care less where she lives as long as there’s cute girls or guys.
11. Is your OC a blanket hog?
Yes. She will take the blankets from every section of the house and wrap herself up in them. She tends to get really cold at night.
12. Would your OC play by the rules in a fight or take cheap shots?
She doesn’t believe in rules for fighting.
13. Does your OC have a widow ’s peak?
Yes. It’s usually hidden though.
14. Happy birthday! What kind of present would your OC want?
Video games, a cat, any form of positive attention, stuffed animals.
15. Something that grosses your OC out?
She thinks most bodily functions are absolutely disgusting and is grateful that she doesn’t need to do any of those things.
16. Your OC is suddenly on an adventure! Where do they go and what do they do?
Depends on what dimension she’s in. Usually she just tags along with the people who belong in the dimension.
17. Is there a real person that looks like your OC?
Me. She’s basically an OP self insert because I was lonely and had no friends and decided to write myself some.
18. Something that makes your OC laugh without fail?
Vines. She loves vines. Also memes. And stupid jokes. She’s very easy to make laugh, actually.
19. Something that makes your OC cry without fail?
Movies. She always cries at movies. The ending to a series, any series, also gets her a lot. Same with characters dying.
20. A obscure/ridiculous fear your OC has?
She’s scared of moths and lady bugs. Spiders? She thinks they’re cool. Snakes? She has one as a pet. A ladybug lands on her shoulder? She will start crying and screaming and somebody will have to get rid of it for her.
21. Does your OC have any type of disability, whether it be mental, physical, etc?
She has severe depression and anxiety, as well as ADHD and Dyslexia.
22. Does your OC get frustrated when people forget to close the door behind themselves?
Sometimes. Depends on her mood.
23. What is your OC’s first memory?
Her mother telling her she loved her before sacrificing herself.
24. Something you like that your OC would hate?
We like the same things lol
25. Your OC is going into battle/on a mission! What song is their anthem?
Victims or Do your Worst, both by New Years Day.
26. Does your OC have good or bad posture?
She has pretty good posture. But it also really depends on her mood.
27. Most despicable thing your OC has ever done?
She kills people and fucks with people’s lives if she doesn’t like how the story ends.
28. Is your OC a conspiracy theorist?
Not really.
29. Someone does something awful in front of your OC. How do they handle it?
Depends on what it is. Someone steals something? Eh, not her problem. Some murders a person? She’ll do her best to stop them. Someone rapes a person? They will be going down to the deepest depths of hell.
30. What is your OC’s favorite drink?
Apple cider. Sparkling, warm, cold. Doesn’t matter. She’s a slut for apple cider.
31. Does your OC prefer to sleep in a warm or cool area?
She doesn’t care as long as she has a blanket (or a hundred).
32. Would your OC like you if they met you?
I don’t know. I hope she would, as she’s just inter-dimensional me.
33. A song that reminds you of your OC?
Hey There Delilah by the Plain Whit Ts, Primadonna by Marina, Teen Idle also by Marina, Human by Christina Perri, Girls Like Girls by Hayley Kiyoko, I’m No Good by New Years Day.
34. Is your OC a nail biter?
Definitely. It’s a nasty habit she can’t seem to kick.
35. What is your OC’s favorite quote?
“You’re just jealous ‘cause my tits are better than yours.” “I’m sorry; I’m a terrible person.” “I am LITERALLY going to KILL MYSELF if _______ HAPPENS/DOESN’T HAPPEN.” “Badass!”
36. Your OC’s favorite fashion era? (20’s, 70’s, etc)
She’s interested in the Victorian and 1920 eras, but she wouldn’t be able to live without her leggings.
37. Does your OC get excited when they get mail?
Yes. She always hopes for a confession of love, but then is disappointed by only getting the thing she forgot she ordered.
38. Random thunderstorm! How does your OC react?
She will literally drag her S/O out into the rain so they can have that romantic RomCom moment.
39. A strange talent of your OC?
She always comes back.
40. Assuming your OC doesn’t have them already, what superpower would they want? If they do already, would they change it, keep it, or get rid of it?
Depending on what dimension she’s in, she has certain abilities, most commoly: telekineses, the inability to feel pain, the ability to fly, and not needing to eat sleep etc. She’s able to remember the lives of all the parallel universe Delilahs.
41. Does your OC like/make puns?
Yes. Most of her humour is shitty puns. All of her friends hate her.
42. What kind of shampoo does your OC use?
She usually uses Suave professionals in anything rose scented.
43. Your OC wakes up with a coin super glued to their forehead. How do they react?
She probably wouldn’t care at all. She’s beyond the point of caring.
44. Can your OC sleep if there’s any kind of light?
No. She uses a sleep mask because even the smallest amount of light that comes through the curtains at night annoys her.
45. What kind of self-esteem does your OC have?
It depends. She either has really high self esteem, or she’ll feel like she’s an awful, horrible person who doesn’t deserve anything.
46. A word that your OC can’t stand?
The N-word. She hates it more than anything. Words like that disgust her so much.
47. Does your OC fold their clothes, hang them up, or just leave them in the basket/dryer?
She has a basket for clean clothes that she just throws them all in. Unless they’re Victorian era clothing, then she hangs them up.
48. Would society call your OC a good guy or a bad guy? What would they say they are?
Again, depends on the dimension, but soceity usually says she’s a good guy. She, however, thinks she’s the worst of the worst, undeserving of love and affection and anything nice.
49. Your OC’s most prized possession?
A necklace with a bear paw opal pendant. She’s had it since before she became an all-knowing, inter-dimensional God.
50. What is your OC’s happy place?
Anywhere that has all of her friends.
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So it dawned on me.. yesterday. At dawn.
That there’s this cliche little conspiracy thing for us in our mid-20’s that 25 is THE worst age, ever.
And while I can attest to 2017 so far being more ambivalent in its extent of BS compared to others (2009, 2012, 2015?!!?!?)….
I have to say that I agree, and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel with 26.
Suddenly I saw the last ten years weave itself around my mind, counting all of the victories and tragedies and it made way too much sense.
Of course I’m lost right now, as any child byproduct of the dysfunctional American household is going to be. I’m a fucking millennial inheriting nothing but a broken economy and a bullseye painted on my back for everything from financial ruin, emotional self-destruction, and potential kidnapping to a terrorist attack, psychopath killer from my past, and potential Armageddon as we may know it soon.
I think, a lot of other people would feel pretty fucking lost, anxious, and depressed too.
And for the most part, I don’t feel that bad. Maybe it’s my meds zombifying me, maybe it’s just blind optimism because I’ve been too drained of the energy to feel anything stronger than that, or maybe since everything passes- that includes all the negative stuff too.
But I’m fine. I’m on my way to better. I’m almost there. For the first time, I kinda feel it.
26 sounds like a paradise, in fact. And I’m one that HATES getting older. HATES my birthday. I break down. I relapse. I turn into a human tornado of self-destruction. It’s bad, like Marilyn Monroe level of bad.
But not this year. I’m building an empire for myself, just like I have for the past ten years even if I keep breaking it down like the U.S. did to their own towers (oops).
What I did for myself in the midst of all the chaos and ruin was established myself as a writer. I found my words, or they found me, and then they found themselves on paper. Whether it was some mediocre essay project that my teachers inevitably A’d and hailed me for, or my Dragonball Z fanfiction that I still fuck with but with a lot of intermittent adult absences due to my grown up writer’s block from all the imagination that’s left me in my dry and cynical 20’s.
I also got published in both UNLV and my high school’s newspapers. Luckily these are the first things to come up with a google of my full name, and not any mug shots or crazy things like that because those things can stay in the MF past okay.
This is all while my parents divorced, my mom dated and remarried, and I got exiled to my dad’s place all the way across town to another high school- effectively killing the dead end that way my destructive social life at the other school, which was somewhat of a great thing and a terrible thing. I didn’t have people fueling my already turbulent home life with more drugs and alcohol, but then I didn’t have anybody at all either unless they existed in the chat room I dominated as a teenager.
Ahhhh, yes. I will always be proud of such a minuscule feat, with my social anxiety establishing itself and all, because I came up with the MOST LIT AF nicknames. Nikkachu, VenerealCereal, and my very first, Lovily_Lili17- my daughter’s name that I discovered at 13.
Oh yeah. That too. READING. I couldn’t stop. I was addicted to those huge adult novellas like Lace, Where the Heart Is, and anything Stephen King once I had my way with R.L. Stine and his many endeavors to placate his teen base.
Wow. The nostalgia. I can’t.
I still have almost every book from that era. I went and bought a ton of them off of Amazon, but I’ll have to replace some that arrived less than the library form that I originally read them in. I can’t do paperback, they’re much too small.
But that library smell.. My favourite is the one by my mother’s house, where I looked down at my Converse at 12 years old and realized that I was becoming a woman already.
HAHA. Seriously. 12. A woman. Okay.
That moment was just me feeling myself because I had a lot of older male fans that I’m quite sure held a rap sheet for child-related sex crimes, okay.
In that moment, I felt sheer power. My dying self-esteem that had wilted from years of verbal abuse and a total lack of male attention minus that of bullying was suddenly blossoming from the attention I would get from old men. It was exhilarating, and just as addictive as anything else I decided to get my all too curious hands on for the next decade.
At the end of this decade though, I can say I’m no longer phased by it. I get all kinds of attention now, and it’s more of a burden than it sounds like I’m making it. It comes from guys with whole entire relationships waiting for them at home and at work, guys who have kids already (ew), or guys I’m just not into. Period.
So I have a drought of a love life, but I knew this was coming once I recycled my ex’s as much as I could without anyone getting killed. It came close… LOL, but we’re all okay and we’re all separated thank God.
Everybody went their own way to something better, hopefully. Moreso hopefully for me once this drought is over and I can stop losing sleep with all of the PTSD I’ve mustered through the years with all the nightmarish shit I’ve put myself through.
I really went through the ringer, especially my early 20’s. Before I could even legally drink, I had charges. But that’s the territory, right? Being a human Tasmanian devil will do that to you. Having the most unstable self-image will put out a red flag to society that you are disposable, trouble, a force to be reckoned with, etc. So I don’t recommend it.
I’ve really calmed down though. Especially in the past few weeks. Normally after an event like the one I just suffered, I’d be halfway back to my early grave again just like countless times before. But I’m actually way more okay sooner than I thought. It only took a good 3 or 4-day binge of unhealthy, toxic, and intoxicating substances for me to snap into a depression and then somehow snap out of it completely averse to that stuff.
That’s how you know you’re adulting, when life knocks you over for the thousandth time and you just… lay there.
And I type all of this with a huge grin on my face, because it’s great. I can enjoy being sober and feeling like shit at the same time. I can enjoy going to the store at almost 11 o’clock at night for bagel bites and taquitos and feel accomplished for leaving my apartment for all of twenty minutes. I can enjoy binging YouTube, laughing at memes, and obsessing over current event stories in my favourite forum message board places.
So, I’ve moved into my phone. Big deal. My dopamine receptors have to be stimulated by something other than the sun blinding me through my window.
I will say I am neglecting the Tindr app for my own sanity. I think last time I tried to venture it, I got a really fussy man-baby throwing a fit over my very delayed and very mundane response. Okay. That was that, then.
I have a feeling that I can’t rely on electronics for this one. It’s going to have to be some sort of divine intervention to get my love life back on track. I really won’t settle for less, either, because we don’t have the technology advanced enough yet to weed out the assholes, the fuckboys, and the lazy have-nots that I simply can’t build anything with.
There’s always med school. Some very savvy ladies attend just so they can enter the meat market of medicine and date an up and coming doctor. I know I would. Medical terms during foreplay? Needles and a papoose during roleplay? Hell yes.
Okay maybe not anything with phlebotomy but you catch my drift. I think overall, even if they don’t share all the same quirky interests of mine, I would just want someone who is in love with me and stays in love with me. Even if I can’t stay in love with myself.
But I’m trying. This is me trying. This is me giving myself a fucking break because the last ten years have kinda sucked, right? On and off. Sure. But it doesn’t matter. All of the friendships, the relationships, the scandals, the stories.. My God, do I have a story.
I want to publish it, but not in its raw form of pure sugar and salt just piled up in the middle of the table. I want it to be in the form of fiction, set in outer space, in the dark corners of an emotionally dysregulated teenage girl’s mind…
Yep. I got the ideas spinning in my head and everything, it just won’t form a tangible shape.
And it won’t make any money because I’m fucking insane and no one will get it: the big picture, the metaphor, what actually went down.
So I have to make it make money and make sense. Two very difficult things in a day and age where something as basic as Fifty Shades of Grey is hailed as top-notch. Wtf.
At least Twilight is over, thankfully.
And finally my last contribution to this planet and this life of mine in the past ten years is…
BUTTONS.
Yes, my cat. Why?
Because I adopted the most beautiful, loving, playful, and stubborn salt-loving creature on this planet.
So even if I died right here, today, this second.. I will have known true, unconditional love just because of him.
And even if it’s single chick cliche AF… I adore him to death.
So there’s that.
Looking forward to the next 6 months coming and going by so I can be a whole year older, and a whole lot wiser with a lot more laidback to me than before.
But so far, enjoying the ride at 25… (and a half).
Thanks for reading a random rant of mine again! :)
Nostalgic ramblings & revelations about being 25.5 on the way to 26, and much much better. So it dawned on me.. yesterday. At dawn. That there's this cliche little conspiracy thing for us in our mid-20's that 25 is THE worst age, ever.
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It Must Be Dorito’s Fault I’m a Bag of Suet in a Pair of Overstuffed Skinny Jeans
By Don Hall
I smoked cigarettes for just over 20 years. I now smoke pipe tobacco instead. In addition to it smelling better and encouraging the nostalgic grins of perfect strangers, the tobacco is far better. As much as I often argued that I wasn’t addicted, rather I just liked to smoke, the effects on my lungs are exactly the same.
So, in the debate over whether we are addicted to our smartphones or social media, it makes no difference if we are addicted, manipulated, or just weak-willed, the results are still exactly the same: a compromised democracy, the highest teen suicide rate in recorded history, a dwindling attention span and a slow disconnect from humanity in favor of the humanity as represented on a glass screen.
I notice this compulsion. I know that, for the most part, social media raises my stress level (I grant you, I have significantly lower stress than most because I am not a terribly anxious person to begin with, I keep myself busy, and I have so few fucks left to give I’m almost laconic), and yet I keep coming back to Faceborg and Twitter at least three times every hour. You know, just to see if the world ended or if Trump birthed an alien out of his piggy chest.
While I might argue that I’m certainly not addicted to my iPhone/iPad/iMac, the fact that I spend a huge amount of my waking world time engaging them should at least merit some serious interrogation.
But first, a parallel.
From The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
NYT, February 20, 2013
"More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population — 40 million people — clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation’s obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a 'national epidemic.'"
And from The Great Awakening
"And part of what is keeping us from full realization about the impact of technology on our humanity is that we’re too busy with our heads down using that technology. The numbers are staggering:
• By June, Facebook had 2 billion users. And Americans alone spent 56 billion minutes on the site each month.
• YouTube’s 1.5 billion logged-in users average more than an hour a day on YouTube on mobile alone.
• Every minute 300 million hours of video are uploaded and each day 5 billion videos are watched.
• By September, Instagram had 800 million users, up 100 million since April.
• There are now 2.6 billion smartphone users worldwide — a number expected to climb to 6.1 billion by 2020.
• The top ten users of smartphones touch their phones an average of 5,427 times each day. The rest of us clock in at 2,617 touches per day.
• Between midnight and 5 a.m. 87 percent of participants in a study checked their phones at least once.
• Over 70 percent of Americans sleep next to or with their phone.
And all that time spent in the presence of such powerful devices is having a profound effect on us. Our phones are with us almost all the time, and in most of our social interactions, yet we know there’s something wrong with that. In a Pew study, 89 percent of phone owners said they’d used their phones in their last social gathering, but 82 percent felt that when they did this it damaged the interaction.
And it’s also affecting our relationships. In a study of people in romantic relationships, 70 percent said that cell phones interfered with their interactions with their partners.
The parallel between snack foods and high tech in the mobile computing era is creepy. Both are technologies designed to be convenient as well as rewarding in the most superficial way. We also can’t seem to stop ourselves from constantly snacking — both for a food-like thing and an information/social-like thing.
I substitute a couple of days a week for charter schools. From 6th grade through the end of high school, every single one of them have strict rules (laxly enforced) against two things: smartphones and snack foods in class. An average day consists of 15 percent instruction, 15 percent class management, and 60 percent taking away smartphones and bags of Cheetos. The sight of so many kids immersed in chowing down on nutritionless junk and texting, Snapchatting and taking selfies makes me wonder what universe I’m living in. These alien creatures living the scholastic life are so different from my own experience.
None of this is by accident.
Again, from The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
"General Mills had overtaken not just the cereal aisle but other sections of the grocery store. The company’s Yoplait brand had transformed traditional unsweetened breakfast yogurt into a veritable dessert. It now had twice as much sugar per serving as General Mills’ marshmallow cereal Lucky Charms. And yet, because of yogurt’s well-tended image as a wholesome snack, sales of Yoplait were soaring, with annual revenue topping $500 million. Emboldened by the success, the company’s development wing pushed even harder, inventing a Yoplait variation that came in a squeezable tube — perfect for kids. They called it Go-Gurt and rolled it out nationally in the weeks before the C.E.O. meeting. (By year’s end, it would hit $100 million in sales.)"
From The Great Awakening
"Tristan Harris is a former Google design ethicist who founded the group Time Well Spent to raise awareness about how, as the site puts it, 'our society is being hijacked by technology.' As Harris points out, our addiction to our devices is by design. In the attention economy behind those friendly, inviting icons we love so much is an incredible amount of increasingly sophisticated science. 'The best way to get people’s attention is to know how someone’s mind works,' says Harris. The behavioral scientists, neuroscientists and computer scientists on the other side of our screens know we like the feeling of control. But they also want us to cede control of our attention. And so we’re given the illusion of control. 'By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones,' writes Harris. 'But the closer we pay attention to the options we’re given, the more we’ll notice when they don’t actually align with our true needs.'"
The feeling one gets from likes and retweets is subtle but insidious. It feels good. It feels like people are paying attention to you, that they may care what you think. It feels so good that, as all things motivated by reward, your behavior begins to shift. It’s human nature.
If you write a tweet that all of sudden has 50 responses, you will naturally start to find ways to repeat that as that attention equals success online. More eyeballs means more importance. Given that some asshole with a YouTube channel can make genuine money from videos of pranking his kids, the rewards for getting that attention can become tangible.
I catch myself, as Co-editor of Literate Ape, behaving this way. We always want good, solid, interesting writing from our contributors but the intangible reward goes to those pieces that get more reads in the analytics. Does that mean these pieces have more merit than others? No. Not in the least.
In fact, it is often the poetry and fiction that gets left behind in the analytics scales of shares and comments that I start to bristle at the more popular pieces. Even my own.
It is, however, a digital magazine, so relying on the computing devices people carry in their back pockets is sort of the baked in business model.
The pervasiveness of digital devices and the ensuing onslaught of online media that promises a social experience but is, in fact, the polar opposite of meaningful social interaction, is riddled with the salt, sugar and fat that our psyches crave.
We want to believe that our fixation on hot dog memorabilia is shared by others. We want to believe that behind every police shooting or mass murder there is a conspiracy afoot. We want our existing bias’s to be confirmed no matter how asinine they are.
We want to be able to get six pack abs in seven minutes a day, a pill that will eliminate our sadness, and be told that we aren’t responsible for our choices or the consequences of those choices.
We also expect those companies that make massive profits feeding us this diet of empty information to be responsible for curtailing our intact while still providing it.
After all, whose fault is it that we are chronically obese but the companies that make the fake food we eat?
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food:
"The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, 'They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,'Bible said. 'Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.'"
“Well, that’s what the consumer wants.”
It is what we want. We also want no culpability in the consequences of getting what we want.
So we blame McDonald's for making us fat and Faceborg for making us stupid. We blame tobacco companies for our smoking habits and Russian hackers for our gelatinous monstrosity who sits in the Oval Office. We are a fat, stupid nation and we finally have the perfect avatar representing us to the world:
But instead of deleting those social media apps from our phone or choosing to eat a fucking apple rather than a bag of corn chips, we expect those who profit most from our obsessions to own the consequences and be better global citizens. Like hoping the oil companies will invest in green energy or that those McDonald's salads won't have as many calories as a Big Mac (they do).
Don’t hold your breath, fatty.
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