patie9

[patie9]

Real talk, though - why, when faced with discussion and evidence (most of which is “hiding” in plain sight), do Terrance Zdunich’s fans sleep on his disgusting behaviour?  I’ve seen mobilization to take other people down for way less than what he, on his own, presents to the world - never mind what people he’s preyed on have finally started opening up about.  If we can condemn second-rate YouTube personalities and A-listers for the same crimes he’s flagrantly committing, surely we can make someone who falls in the mediocre middle of those two extremes equally as Over, can’t we? Like, how did everyone decide to just give him a free pass on this Rape Joke leitmotif in his personal writing?  He’s been doing that for over ten years, in almost every single blog post he’s ever made.  The very first time he and I ever met (in a non-fan event setting), he flirted (…”flirted”…) with me by miming pouring a roofie into the drink he’d just bought for me and “checking” to see if I was still breathing.  He out-of-context regularly said to other people: “If she didn’t want to get raped, why was she a woman?” - not even his own material, just a regurgitated dumb quote from one of the hundreds of YouTube clips of Howard Stern I had to listen to when we were basically living together, but one he said often enough that I would see people reblog it on Tumblr and attribute it to him.  His “rape van” is one of the oldest inside jokes in Repo! fandom.  Even when he and I had been dating for three or four years, he would still (in front of me, at events) tease flirty girls who asked about his relationship status at Q&As that he would kidnap them in it. (And that was just when I knew him.  I’ve had more than a few people share stories with me about more recent incidents, at American Murder Songs stops, complete with him trying to shut them down or gaslight them out of expressing concern over ways he made them uncomfortable.) He’s always promoted himself as this hero of the outcasts and his fans (and friends) lap that filth up like it’s gospel.  To be fair, I mean, consider Repo! The Genetic Opera and its heroic characters: a chronically ill, sheltered young goth girl with abusive, overprotective parental figures and a charming, rogue-ish cyberpunk recolour of Ché from Evita.  Consider The Devil’s Carnival and its sequel, celebrating a bunch of literal outcast deviants who make a Heaven of Hell and seek to make a Hell of the Heaven that tried to punish them for their quirks and beliefs and flaws.  When I was involved with those fandoms, both of them were celebrated as safe havens for people who identified with these broken, ill-used but well-loved misfits. (Which is a joke, even without his direct influence.  Shadowcast rivalry was one of the ugliest things I - regrettably - was ever part of.  And when rumours started about one girl getting more attention from Terrance than others did?  My god, it was vicious and personal and disgusting - and not even just towards me!  …I mean, a lot towards me, but I also know other girls - some he slept with and some he barely knew - who got harassed, stalked, slandered, etc. almost as badly, if not sometimes worse than I did.) But the art does not matter.  It does not matter how charming he can pretend to be.  I really don’t care if you’ve met him once or twice or maybe even ten times and he’s been kind to you on each occasion.  I lived with him, I went to every local event of his, I listened to every single rant he ever went on about the inferiority of every single person he knows of who is not him for years. Like, to start with, he just straight-up cannot stand his fans, loathes interacting with them, for no other reason but because they are his fans, which I guess, in part, must have something to do with this odd thing he does in regards to his own work that I’m sure I’ve talked about before.  While he’s working on something, he’ll consider it The Greatest Thing Ever Made, but as soon as it’s finished and consumable, it’s The Worst Thing and anyone who likes it is an idiot.  I watched this happen with Repo!, with The Tutor project, with Count Tarakan, with both of The Devil’s Carnivals (though from a distance with Alleluia), and I used to hear plenty of second-hand laments that indicated the same is true of American Murder Songs - even in its early stages.  And god help you if you like something he Doesn’t Like because the ridicule and, yes, even…maybe not mansplaining, but certainly “expert”-splaining about why you’re wrong will never end.   In my time, he could usually hold it together until we were alone in his apartment or a hotel room, at which point he would curl up in bed and cry to me about how fans just Didn’t Get It And Never Would.  But to their faces, he would be charming and kind and give them a clear reason to keep loving and - most importantly - financially supporting him.  “Fortunately”, he always had me to use as a whipping boy when he felt things were going wrong at a signing or a premiere, when he was getting too tired of playing nice for a mass of people he had no respect for.  There’s at least one girl he dated after me who I think got a little of this treatment, too.  And I don’t know if he’s seeing anyone now (or care, other than for her own safety and sanity), but I do know that I’ve had a few people tell me they’ve definitely felt palpable condescension wafting off of him at meet-and-greets.  Interesting. Also.  For someone who is so open (often to the point of graphic lewdness) about an “obsession” with curvy women (particularly their butts - don’t even get me started on that), he was always horribly fatphobic in private.  He coined the terms “gothapotamus” and “Repo! Sized” to describe many of the plus-sized members of his fanbase.  He referred to a girl I had issues with in another local shadowcast as “Chubblies”.  If I ever have the energy to go back through all the emails he and I ever exchanged, I couldn’t even guess the number of times he quoted Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill (”Was she a great big fat person?”) as a derogatory joke towards someone. This is all true.  And it gets better.  Or worse.  Or it just stays the same because he surrounds himself with people who suck his dick - literally and metaphorically - and acts like he has complete control over anyone who might have something to say that would paint him in a less-than-favourable light. Ugh. There is SO MUCH about him that I used to excuse because I stupidly thought of it as satire.  For so long, so many of the terrible things he said were funny to me because I was convinced that I knew he didn’t really think that way, that it was all a parody because he was, in “reality” such a good person.  But the trouble I feel like we’ve all finally started to acknowledge about satire is that it falls completely apart when you aren’t doing anything to show you actually feel the opposite of what you’re claiming to satirize.  You can’t act like your misogyny is a joke if you treat even the women you choose to make part of your life as interchangeable sex dolls and try to make punching girls go viral as a goof (see: Count Tarakan).  You can’t count on anyone to know you “actually” hate rapists if all you do is laugh about sexual abuse and make being a victim of it a literally damnable offense in your art (Tamara in The Devil’s Carnival).  You can’t champion atypical thinking when you condemn people, to their faces, for taking medication for their mental illnesses, then turn around and shame those you’ve diagnosed with “unchecked mental illness” for being “off their pills”.   You can’t count yourself an LGBTQ ally for writing some non-straight characters, then show one of them get savagely beaten (June, in Alleluia) by two comedic relief characters we’re meant to like  (The Translators) and make the other an irredeemable villain (Cora). Or, you know, if your girlfriend tells you when you start dating that she’s queer and your response is to tell her she just needed a man like you to come ~*straighten her out*~.   Both when I was and wasn’t around, he liberally used “gay” and “effeminate” as to refer to things he disliked or looked down on - even when I asked him to stop.  To him, men who used or cared about social media were “fags”.  There was a specific thing he used to tell people, re: social media, that I know I’m misremembering but it was something to the effect of, “I’ve never had a Facebook because I’ve never sucked a dick.”  (The more he did start using his Facebook - which I mostly ran, while we were dating -  it would change to “Twitter” or “Instagram” or whatever other platform someone mentioned to him.  I’m sure some variation of this has made it into print.)  He used mocking lispy voices to make fun of actors, acquaintances, and situations he found beneath him.  One of his other favourite gags on the Howard Stern show was when they would make up song parodies about one of their sound guys (or whatever he was) being “a homo”.  He would tell anyone he thought of as “less” of a man than he was that they were gay, had “gay-ds” - his unclever portmanteau for “gay” and “AIDS” - to their faces.  (Specifically, I remember him doing that to a horror journalist who was friendly with him, one who always without question positively promoted his work.) Even when I was still trying to write his shortcomings off as an absurd…I don’t know, comedic performance art piece, it was because of all of the above that I intentionally never told him that “R” - at the time, my most recent ex (but still my closest and best friend) - was a trans dude.  All Terrance knew was that I’d dated (someone who publicly identified, at the time, as) a woman before him and that I was still friends with "her”. (If we’re being honest, I never felt like he even remembered who “R” was, when I talked about him.  It felt that way about a lot of my friends who weren’t people he knew.  …And most of them were people he didn’t know because he never wanted to meet or do anything with any of my friends.  But I digress!) This is mostly going to be a paraphrase of a story I told on the old edition of this blog, one you can still find in my mainblr if you scroll back far enough, because not even the fear of him harassing me until I deleted every single thing outweighed my need for people to know what he said.  I still, to this day, cannot believe that didn’t spread any further than it did but I wasn’t exactly naming names or tagging tags back then.  I am now.  So I’m going to make you read this again. I haven’t been friends with Terrance’s Best Friend for a couple years now, but I will give him credit for being more sensitive and (mostly) genuine about his respect and even celebration of subcultures and sexualties and genders.  Much more so, obviously, than Terrance.  So he knew about “R”.  And whether it was on purpose or by accident, he made Terrance aware, too, several years down the road. "You never told me ‘R’ was transgendered!” Terrance said to me one day.  Nope, I sure didn’t.  And that was the end of that conversation and, since that was all he really had to say about it (and if he wants to say more about a thing, he will, ad nauseum), I hoped that was nothing more than the end of me feeling like I needed to keep saying “she�� when I talked about “R” to him because even though I had a reason for it, intentionally misgendering someone is just gross no matter why. Alas.  Not too terribly long before he and I broke up, we were walking home from getting coffee and I made the mistake of telling him about something “R” and I were doing or writing or watching or some other thing that I realistically knew would actually disinterest Terrance (because, by this point, I think, we’d already had the argument where he told me that I was correct in my assumption that he wasn’t excited about anything I did, especially not in the way that I was excited about what he did).  I was prepared for him to gloss over it, like he usually did whenever I said…anything personally interesting, and unsubtly change the subject, but instead he did something that bumped my thoughts about us from well we’re fighting a lot and it’s rough to we really are going to break up in the immediate future.  With the most smug, gleeful look on his face, he interrupted whatever I was saying to put these words, put this train of thought, this joke into verbalized existence for anyone else who had the misfortune of walking past us to hear and, more importantly, for me - his queer girlfriend who he allegedly loved about my best friend, a trans man :

"Oh, how is 'R’?  Did she grow a penis yet?”

Did SHE grow a penis yet.   Did she GROW A PENIS yet.   DID SHE GROW. A. PENIS. YET. Said Terrance Zdunich, said your fucking “goth daddy”, said your rebellious, all-welcoming champion of fallen angels who were forcibly ejected from a bigoted, unloving, cruel Heaven. Now, I understand that we are in an internet age that is obsessed with receipts so I’m sorry that I don’t have the energy to dig through years of saved emails for anything to screencap and cite that may or may not be enough to back up what I’m saying.  I don’t have a source to link you to.  I’m the source.  Source: me, who was literally there for all of this, for far too many years.   And if all you edgelord adult baby roleplayblrs - go figure, I can get you those receipts: (in response to a friend’s post & screenshots, just in case) + (in reply to a post about my friend’s post & screenshots, just in case) - wanna try to fight me for that, wellp.  That’s…hilarious, actually, but certainly not going to change what kind of person he is or lessen the crushing amount of disdain he would look down on you - any of you, even those with less severe or overt kinks - with.  Nothing is going to change the fact that his is not a safe space, it is the domain of a mean-spirited, intolerant narcissist who will try to gaslight you within inches of your sanity to see things his way and his way only.  So, if you weren’t planning on hating him for the horrendous way he’s abused or taken advantage of the women in his fanbase that he’s deemed “worthy” enough of his dick, why not consider hating him simply because he hates you, too!

[patie9]

Math is really tiring, im so glad i finally get to relax and do some knitting and crochet and i oh god oh my what the fuck

[patie9]

her pronouns are HE/HIM

[patie9]

AMD GOD GAVE THE BEAST-KINGS GIFTS THAT THEY MIGHT SHARE WITH THEIR PEOPLE:

To the Wolf, god gave ripping teeth, and the Law of the Pack.

To the Bear, god gave crushing jaws, and terrible strength

To the Falcon, god gave slicing talons, and great sight

And to the Shrimp, god gave the concussive plasma cannon.

[patie9]

at dinner people were talking about how much they cried during their weddings and my one cousin said she was SO determined not to cry, made it through the entire ceremony, but then during the reception her husband leaned over and asked 'hey, do you want me to get together a plate of roast beef and hide it in our room so we can have Night Meats?' and she went 'night meats?' and started sobbing because that was so romantic to her

[patie9]

can i interest u in a box of friend??

[patie9]

*whacks you with my animal crossing bug net* *whacks you with my animal crossing bug net* *whacks you with my animal crossing bug net*

[patie9]

Cutiepie — Velociraptor is out, Mononykus is in!

[patie9]

funniest feature on any social media site, uncontested

[patie9]

Nicki Minaj is officially a playable character now on “Call Of Duty”

[patie9]

Ngl I was not prepared for where this was going

[patie9]

kids remind me, often, of the things i've taught myself out of.

i have a big dog. he looks like a deer. he is taller than most young children. while we were on a trail the other day, a boy coming our direction saw us and froze. he took a step back and said: "i'm feeling nervous. your - your dog is kind of big."

goblin and i both stopped walking immediately. "he is kind of a big dog," i admitted. "he's called a greyhound. they are gentle but they are pretty tall, which is kind of scary, you're right. their legs are so long because they are made for running fast. i am sorry we scared you. would you like us to stand still while you move past us, or would you feel more safe in your body if we move and you stay still?'

"oh. i didn't know that about - greyhounds. i think i ... i want to stay still," he said. at this point, his adult had caught up to us. "i'm nervous about the dog," he told her, "so i'm - i'm gonna stay still." she didn't argue. she didn't make fun of him. she just smiled at him and at me and held his hand while goblin and i, with as wide of a berth as we could make, crept our way through.

behind us, i heard him exhale a deep breath and kind of laugh - "he was really big, huh? she said it's because greyhounds have to go fast."

"he was big," she said. "i understand why that could have made you a little scared."

"yeah. next time i - next time do you think i could maybe ask to touch him? when - i mean, next time, maybe, if i'm not nervous."

later, going to a work event, in the big city, i stood outside, trembling. my social anxiety as a caught bird in my chest. i took a deep breath and turned to my coworker. she's not even really my friend yet. i told her: "i feel nervous about this. i am not used to meeting new people, ever since covid."

she laughed, but not in a mean way. she said she was nervous too. she reached her hand out and held mine, and we both took another deep breath and walked in like that, interlinked. a few people asked us - together? - and i told the truth: i feel nervous, and she's helping. over and over i watched people relax too, admitting i feel really kind of shy lately actually, thank you for saying that.

the next time i go to an event, and i feel a little scared, i ask right away: wanna hold hands? this feels a little dangerous. i hesitate less. i don't hide it as much. i watch for other people who are also nervous and say - it's kinda hard, huh?

i know, logically, i'm not good at asking for help. but i am also not good at noticing when i need help. i've trained myself out of asking completely, but i've also trained myself to never accept my own fears or excuses. i have trained myself to tamp down every anxiety and just-push-through. i don't know what i'm protecting myself from - just that i never think to admit it to anyone.

but every person on earth occasionally needs comfort. every person on earth occasionally needs connection. many of us were taught independence is the same thing as never needing anything.

each of us should have had an adult who heard - i feel nervous and held our hand and asked us how we could be helped to feel safe. no judgement, and no chiding. many of us did not. many of us were punished for the ways that we seemed "weak".

but here is something: i am an adult now. and i get nervous a lot, actually. and if you are an adult and you are feeling a little nervous - come talk to me. we can hold hands and figure out what will help us feel safe in our bodies. and maybe, next time, if we're brave, we can pet the dog that's passing.

[patie9]

im putting a fruit sticker on you. im sprinkling blades of grass on you. im offering wedges of my tangerine to you. etc.

[patie9]

[patie9]

Rare pity, mercy and compassion of the giants called humanity

[patie9]

[patie9]

Actual roman epitaph for a dog