#It's funny now because it's been memed to all hell for over a decade

[lpsgirl109]

Yall remember when She Hulk episode 3 dropped and people started saying if you didn't like the post credits scene you were a misogynist and "oh well when WOMEN dance in media it's the worst thing ever but when MEN do it it's fine" and the shit they'd bring up in comparison was. The Bully Maguire dance. That one scene in TFATWS where Zemo does a little dance. The literal fucking intro to GOTG. Im being so honest to god someone said if you like Quill's dance at the beginning of GOTG, you cant be mad at the She Hulk scene. As if anyone at all was mad at the mere fact that she was dancing and not the fact that that scene had no other purpose than to sexualize the character. As if scene where character is singing and dancing while on an important mission to establish who he is as a person and how he's a bit of a carefree idiot is comparable to scene where character shakes her ass directly at the screen, which had no contribution to the plot or her character at all, it was only there to make her appear more sexy.

Cause I remember all that

[kitsune024]

|| Part 2 ||

Bucky and Steve's Excellent Adventure by blue_beans I Chapters: 48/48 I Completed Post-Avengers: Endgame Bucky Barnes is very suicidal for a good chunk of this, Sentient Infinity Stones, Fix-It fic, Action/Adventure, Time Travel, slow burn

Six months ago, Steve set out on a final mission to return the infinity stones to their proper timelines, and returned a minute later having lived out a life of peace and contentment with Peggy Carter in the past. He died in his sleep a few days later, surrounded by his friends. Or so Bucky assumes. He wouldn't know, he'd been busy being locked up on the Raft while the government decided whether or not to pardon him for the whole Winter Soldier thing. What with the court-mandated therapy and the constant surveillance by alphabet agencies and the crushing weight of his past, he's not sure if giving him a chance at "normal life" is more cruel than the alternative. But he's doing fine. Great, actually, so don't ask. He didn't have a nightmare. Especially not that strangely disturbing one about Steve... *** AKA I wanted to write the reverse time-heist and I'm still salty about Endgame. This is the result.

Seasons of War by eretria I Chapters 11/11 I Completed Friends to Lovers, World War II, war horrors, Dark

Chasing Bucky, always a step behind, Steve remembers the cycle of seasons that took him from the raw and naive young man to the Captain America who led the Howling Commandos into hell and, except for Bucky, out again. As his memories center on Bucky, one question haunts him: Is the Bucky he knew in the war the same one he knew before?

ampersand by kaydeefalls I Chapters 1/1 I one shot World War II, Friends to Lovers, the Winter Soldier started long before Bucky fell from the train

They've been steveandbucky since they were kids, but that ignores the parts of their lives that don't wrap around each other, that never did. (Bucky needs to figure out who he is, just him, with or without Steve.)

In Vain by kireteiru I Chapters 1/1 I one shot James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers(unrequited), Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Endgame, All hurt no comfort, not a fix it :(

"Nothing of the heart remains, Even if we could've stayed, We've been here long enough, Long enough to know it's all in vain. Everything we tried to say, Up until the final day, I guess we said enough, Said enough to know it's all in vain." _ "In Vain", Within Temptation (Resist) A choice was made, and now the world will bear its consequences.

i'm the furthest thing from heaven, but the closest to home by @buckyismybicycle I Chapters: 6/6 I Completed Guardian Angel Bucky, Identity Reveal, Canon Divergence, Memory Loss

When Steve loses Bucky in Kreischberg, he’s lost the only thing left he cares about. He crashes the Valkyrie into the Arctic, ready to be reunited with his love, but instead, he’s saved by an angel. Except this angel isn’t like the ones he’s read about — no, his angel is armed to the teeth and has wings the colour of blood and night. Yet, there’s something eerily familiar about this angel.

Good God, Let Me Give You My Life by @bellefyre I Chapters 6/6 I Completed Bucky/others, One-Sided Relationship, Non-Consensual Touching, rape, Hydra, Steve/Bucky is Endgame

5+1 meme, five people over the decades who fell in love with the Winter Soldier and died because of him and the one person the Winter Soldier loved and lived because of him.

How to Woo the Winter Soldier by @writeonclara I Chapters 6 /6 I Completed funny fic, gift giving, Steve falls for the Winter Soldier before finding out his Identity, Courting, Identity Reveal, Identity Porn, bad ideas

“I think I’m ready to date again,” Steve said. “What,” Natasha said. “What?” Clint said, lowering his binoculars. He blinked at the dumbstruck look on the Captain’s face, then followed his gaze to where he was staring dopily at—at the Winter fucking Soldier. “Steve, no,” Clint groaned. Or: Steve courts the Winter Soldier.

Ready to Comply by @exclamation I Chapters 31/31 I Completed Canon Divergence - Post-CA: The Winter Soldier, Dehumanization, Hurt/Comfort-But Mostly Hurt, Angst, Protective Steve Rogers

The asset's orders at the end of The Winter Soldier weren't to kill Captain America, but to capture him, so that he could be wiped and turned into another asset. The asset has succeeded in that mission, capturing its target and taking him back to the Hydra base. But the Hydra soldiers are dead, captured, or fled, so there is no one there to give the asset new orders. Alone with its captive, the asset has no instructions on how it is meant to act. But the more time it spends with its target, the more old protocols start to assert themselves, like the protocol that when that face is hurt and bleeding, the asset is supposed to clean away the blood.

From Grit to Pearl by @bluesimplicity73 I Chapters 38/38 I Completed Bucky & Rebecca Barnes, Bucky Recovering, Body Horror, BAMF Bucky, BAMF Rebecca Barnes, Angst, AU - Canon Divergence, Hydra

He does not have a name. He has been called many things over the years; a weapon, a ghost, HYDRA’s Fist, the Soldier, and from what they have told him his work has shaped the century. But he does not have a name. His name, like so many other things, has been taken from him, stolen. Forgotten. Until the day it is not, and remembering, he breaks free, killing his handler and making his escape in a desperate bid for freedom. Frightened, lost and hurt, he seeks out the last person in the world he can trust, his baby sister, now an almost eighty-year-old widow, somehow knowing she is the only one who can help him. It is a difficult journey, one filled with pain, tears, and things that should not be possible. But also with recovery and redemption, rebirth and miracles, family and hope. This story is a love letter between Bucky and his sister Rebecca, the world, and eventually his childhood best friend, Steve Rogers, the boy he once loved. But ultimately, it is the love letter Bucky writes to himself, as he reclaims who he once was, discovers who he is now, builds a new life for himself and realizes he might, just might, be as strong, as beautiful, as precious as a pearl.

Bookmark Series

Til the Sun Goes Down by @scyllaya I Part 1 - 2 I Bucky & Loki, Thor & Loki, Kid Loki

Stucky with Fanart

to memory now I can't recall by @etharei | Chapters: 16/16 I Completed Time Travel, World War II, Memory Loss, Identity Porn, Alien Technology The Good Monster by Taste_is_Sweet | Chapters: 2/2 | Completed Canon Divergence, Transformation, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Body Horror, Self-Sacrifice, Self-Harm despite the threatening sky and shuddering earth (they remained) by @praximeter | Chapters: 20/20 | Completed Non-Consensual Body Modification, Canon Divergence, Identity Reveal, Drug Withdrawal, Body Horror, identity Porn, American Sign Language The Second Labor by @aidaronan I Chapters: 18/18 I Completed wartime imagery and violence, pre-serum steve, Alternative Timeline, Psychological Torture, Medical Torture, AU - Canon Divergence

Bookmark Series

Ipseity by @skyisgray I Part 1-3 I Completed Dissociative Identity Disorder, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Torture

[wysteir]

.

My heart is still fragile

Lots of folks tell me I shouldn't keep it that way, but I think I will

I've spent so much time trying not to feel anything, trying not to let things get to me, trying anything and everything

Now I have a mask I don't like using that doesn't even cover my whole face

Now I have silence /

/ Now I lost much of my voice

They're useful, sure

But I didn't grow or anything. The silence was good in some ways and bad in others. I HAVE always wanted to curb the impulse to just say whatever, I HAVE wanted to get to take a moment before I spoke. And the price I paid was losing much of my ability to speak up. I had to relearn that one, it's still hard.

I have a lot of trouble "naturally" engaging in a conversation beyond listening! If your reading this and think I've been doing a good job, I really appreciate it.

I am trying very, very hard

It's a little difficult with a fragile heart, it's really scary actually!!! I had to learn bravery, to get to somewhere better. I'm scared a lot of the time so I have to be brave a lot of the time and shit, it's exhausting when I have to actually think about it

None of the learning was fun

But I was blessed to have good friends, to make good friends, and to deepen friendships, over the course of the decade

Fell in love and drifted out of it

Indulged infatuations for worse, for better

I keep making mistakes! I just keep making them, and I hated getting back up and it was miserable and anything. But I really wanted to be able to get back up. I really really wanted to be kind, to be cool, to be sexy

It felt silly but hey, maybe it would help if it wasn't so serious. I wanted to smile, I wanted to laugh, I wanted to be alright

Hell on Earth I wanted to be alright

I wasn't before, I still kind of am not

It does get easier but you do have to go get it, and I don't think people talk enough about how much it sucks to go get it. Maybe they don't wanna discourage people or smth. Reader I hope you have the strength to go get it. I really hope you do, fuck it's so hard sometimes.

I basically made this post last night too but I still wanna say things about it I guess HAHA

FUCK it sucks to get up and go get it

I think it helped that I had a good idea of the kind of person I wanted to be

And it's funny, I didn't even become her!!!

I'm too silly with it it seems

I wanted to be one of those cool silent types, but I love to tell jokes and I love to meme. I think that was the downfall of a lot of things in my life, I was mostly doing things because I thought they were cool but I didn't put enough thought into having fun with the process

And now that I am, I dunno I think I look pretty cool doing my thing HAHA

Reader, do you think I'm cool?

I probably think you're cool, fwiw

All of my friends are pretty fucking cool

I think that's all I have to say for now

Reader if you made it here, I appreciate you a lot. You may cash in a sticker, a hug, or a smooch on the cheek/forehead, or all three if you're a greedy lil goober (but I won't get mad ufufufu)

Feel free to reply onto this - maybe don't reblog it with a comment but hey if you think a follower might need to see smth like this go wild.

You can poke me on discord too if you'd like

For the record, I DO bite, but only if you ask, or only if you're mean HAHAHA

Regardless, I'll see you tomorrow yeah?

[thesporkidentity]

this turned much more into a dump about my personal emotions and the importance of queer history rather than actual dracula meta, so it's going under the read more, untagged and unrebloggable and a rather unintelligable mess so i can stop bitching about it in my head and move on lol

so my usual shippy jokes aside for a moment, i'm actually quite emotional (in like, 2 completely opposite directions) about the "Godalming and Seward are both happily married," and not even about the line itself, but about certain reactions to that line. and to be clear, this is not a criticism at all of holmward or doing queer readings of older texts at all, i think those are both great. it's more a very specific subset of reactions i've seen of people talking about how funny it is that stoker wrote it ambiguously and never imagined it could be read be read in anything but a straight way, framed as a "lol, how clueless," and it really drove home to me how much things have changed for our community and how quickly.

when this was published in 1897, oscar wilde had just been released from his 2 years of imprisonment and hard labor for the "gross indecency" of homosexuality, which the judge lamented as an inadequate maximum sentence for such a horrible crime. a little over 50 years later in 1952, alan turing was chemically castrated rather than imprisoned for gross indecency and killed himself 2 years later. they didn't even start official decriminalization until 1967, and even then only in a very limited fashion (higher age of consent than for straights, still no sodomy allowed, only when two people are alone in a structure, so no hotels or even another person in a completely separate room of the house, etc., restrictions not repealed until 2000). same-sex marriage wasn't legalized until between 2014 and 2020 depending on where you were in the uk.

just. the idea of same-sex marriage being a read someone might reasonably have would have been unfathomable in 1897, let alone something it would be laughable not to anticipate. hell, i'm not even middle-aged, and i remember my own country's striking down of sodomy laws in 2003 and the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015. i was a full grown man when that happened. that wasn't even 10 years ago! that's an insane turnaround in just a few decades.

and now we have youngins, some who are even full grown adults now, who think it's silly that stoker never considered someone might interpret that line differently because of course he should have specified "to women and not to each other," blithely unaware of a time in which that clarification wasn't necessary because even the act of being queer, let alone marrying, was illegal.

like, there's a huge difference between "straight goggles" making someone unaware of a very obvious queer read and the realities of their environment precluding certain interpretations in such a way that further elaboration isn't necessary. (and given the inescapability of the wilde trial and the intentional differences between the english and american publications, i don't think stoker was unaware of the homoeroticism in his novel.)

and my first reaction was frustration because god, please learn your history! i love jokes and memes as much as the next guy but i'm begging you to read up on your country's queer history, this progress is so new and so fragile, and you really do need to know the history of your community for a multitude of reasons i don't want to get into on a dracula post! like, it almost hurts to see this lack of awareness, it feels like a denial of our very real lived experience of less than ten years ago or like y'all believe it's not worth learning about.

and then my second, completely opposite reaction, was a sort of begrudging happiness because that's what we want, what we've been working towards. (or perhaps not exactly because my ideal world would have things like queer history included in curriculum so kids actually learn it.) a world where it is silly to think that two men marrying each other isn't an equivalent and obvious interpretation of being told that two men got married. so i'm just sitting here genuinely thrilled that these kids have no emotional memory of a world before the acceptance of, if not legalization of, same-sex marriage. while also being incredibly frustrated by that ignorance because that wasn't and isn't the reality for so many of us, and that very acceptance of marriage equality as a given is what also blinds them to the way their statements can feel so unintentionally dismissive.

like, i'm so glad you've never had to go through what those before you have, but also you need to sit down and read a history book because even if i never want you to have that experience you do need to have that knowledge and understanding of the past.

and then it feels silly to be having all these feelings over a single line about a possible ship between two victorian blorbos, but really the emotions aren't about the ship or the blorbos or the book at all. i just really want people to learn some fucking queer history.

[hotelhamartia]

we're blood-unweaned children who have nowhere to live. | hyde | trial 3 end rxn

The first time Calvin watched Esteban kill someone was a little over a decade ago.

Some grainy, compressed-to-hell YouTube reupload of the December 1999 fight against legendary boxer William Harris. It kept getting taken down due to violence, or someone from his estate pitching a fit, or what the fuck ever— which made it all the more enticing to someone like Calvin, who always had something of a rebellious streak to him.

The whole scenario, due to taking place during a boxing match everyone knew was broadcast, was so far removed from the realm of true crime that the jokes and memes and half-serious speculation comparing this deadly nobody to the likes of Harold Holt and Lord Lucan actually pinged in Calvin's head as funny. Even today, he's still got one or two of them saved on his phone.

If you'd told him back then, volatile and alone as he was, that he'd find himself listening to Esteban explain in no uncertain terms why he did it, and that the path leading him to that moment was eerily similar to his own? He'd go along with what you said with a pff, alright, SURE, but he certainly wouldn't have believed you.

Over a decade later, he wishes that he couldn't believe what he's looking at right now.

But it all makes far too much sense, doesn't it? It'd be so nice if he could get angry at Dove for dragging Pax into a situation that would certainly kill him, but he just can't muster it up more than the briefest flash in the pan. Dove didn't make Pax tell everyone from the start how okay he was with murder, or to joke about killing people with a tone that suggested that he maybe wasn't actually joking— no, the joke all along had been that there was someone willing to go along with it.

(If it wasn't Dove, it would've been someone else.)

Big Purple's appearance, too, has him wishing he could be as angry at her as she was at him the last time they spoke. But he never could match her anger. He never even hated her. Every single word he ever said to her carried the hope that someone else would step in and tell her just how wrong he was, dry her tears, and show her all the kindness and compassion that he himself was never capable of. Even now, he hopes that Pinkie is doing just that.

He hopes, and he hopes, and he hopes, and—

"You are such a fucking phony."

The shock of Bleak's sudden drawl feel like ice-cold water soaking him to the bone. He's heard this sentiment from it so many times. Usually directed at him— in fact, that's exactly who he thinks it's talking to, because the idea of Pax being a phony is so far removed from his realm of experience that it might as well have said that bourbon and Barney the Dinosaur are the fingernails of God. Something that makes so little sense that he has to completely invent his own meaning for it.

Any other day, he would've cackled and thrown the accusation back in its face. Today, his nerves are so frayed that his first impulse is to indignantly explain that this isn't what it looks like at all. Heroically waltzing in to save the life of someone close to him? C'mon, who does it think it's talking to? It can't even understand the idea of not wanting praise.

The truth is that Hyde would've flung anyone into the flames of unfair punishment if it meant that he could be epicenter of everyone's rage. He would've fallen on the sword for Shropshire if he had to. If Novalis had been the one behind the murders, Hyde wouldn't have listened to his pleas for him to shut up and let him take the blame he rightfully deserved— no, he would have lied and lied and lied until he'd finally twisted himself into the worst motherfucker of them all.

But, the thing is.

Bleak is so goddamn annoying, that you know what it makes him realize?

He doesn't actually care enough to keep justifying the existence of his villainous cred to it.

And he realizes. He doesn't want to prove anything to anyone else anymore, for that matter.

And he realizes. He'd rather spend the remaining years-months-days of his meager little life on things with no extra meaning beyond being fun. Watching movies, good and bad. Listening to music and playing it back from ear all wrong. Dancing on a whim, looking stupid as possible. Laughing ugly. Laughing. Laughing. All of it with other people, the ones he's come to call friends, and to hell if it's something the worst motherfucker would do or not, because you can't be the worst motherfucker if you still want.

And he realizes. Despite what he's told himself from the very beginning—

He's still not ready to watch this guy die.

"… Esteban."

Calvin's hand claps onto Esteban's shoulder, a moment before he turns to actually look at him. A light shake, almost playful, and he grins, sharp and crooked and so, so genuine that nobody else in their right mind would ever believe it, because it doesn't fit into that anthropomorphized version of what sincerity on humans should look like.

(Too human for the hotel, but too dog for the humans. Nowhere to fit in, and not caring if they do.)

"Give 'em hell in there, yeah?"

There's so much more he'd like to say. He knows he'll regret if it he doesn't get the chance, if the Landlady's punishment shows an empty boxing ring because the person it was meant to kill managed to time jump to the Mesozoic era, never to be seen again. But Esteban's tired, and he knows that he'll regret it even more if he makes this whole farce even more of a pain in the ass for him than it already has been.

(Because his throat feels tight in a way it hasn't in a while. Not since he'd texted Marie, or since Doll had shown him that post. He'd have ripped his still-beating heart out of his chest long ago if he'd had the opportunity, but it pounds relentlessly against his will even today as adrenaline floods back into him in preparation for a fate that's not even his to face. Like part of him still thinks there's a chance he might be able to take the bullet without anyone shedding a tear over it.)

So instead of saying things that might risk him sounding like how he feels, Calvin pushes off of Esteban's shoulder with enough force that he ends up pushing himself backwards. He nearly falls out of his seat, and as he rights himself, he huffs out a laugh that he hopes says all it needs to.

(Thanks for bein' here.)

(Sorry I couldn't save you.)

(Still don't regret tryin'.)

"Cause I'm gonna laugh my ass off at'cha if you go down too easy!"

And the last vulgar gesture he makes at him starts as a middle finger—

(You're a fuckin' awful person, and I never had a better friend.)

— but ends as a peace sign.

[maagisterpavus]

i spent some time reading through my 'personal' tag the other day, and it occurred to me that this blog is like a time capsule

it's pretty wild because i've never been one to keep journals or diaries or anything. i guess that's one of the cool things about social media. the posts in my 'personal shit' tag span anywhere from me at the age of 16 to 21 (the age i was the last time i logged in here) and like, man, if you ever need to see first hand how much you've grown as a person, just read through your old socials.

i'm not saying that in a "oh my god i was so cringe" way either (i was, and probably still am in a different way, but that's not the point here). i mean it in a... holy shit, that was actually my mindset? kind of way. i have this thing where i don't really remember a lot about my life growing up as a kid (thank you childhood trauma) and i guess that continued into my teen years and early 20s. i look back on those years now and I don't really remember how much i struggled back then. i know things were bad, i know things were stressful--but the idea that i felt like i couldn't possibly go on? like i wanted to throw in the towel and give up on everything? that i don't remember, at least not vividly. i can't even say i remember how it felt, which i suppose is a good thing.

time is funny. i know people say that "time heals all wounds" but i'm not sure that's really what i'm thinking here. but it was wild to read a post from like 2014ish when i learned that my dad was going to state prison, and at the time it was devastating. now here we are at almost 2025 soon, and i haven't seen him in well over a decade. i don't think of him often anymore, my life has moved on and he's simply not in it. i did hear from him briefly a few years ago and all it did was cinch for me that the door needs to remain closed. i don't feel like i'm missing out on anything. Father's Day doesn't bother me the way it once did. there was a time once when i wondered if i'd ever not be angry with him. well, here i am. perhaps i haven't forgiven anything yet and possibly never will, but the anger and hurt has passed.

another one that got me was an ask meme of some kind that said "write a letter to your future self in 10 years" or something. and damn, i was SO HARD on myself for no reason. i must have been in high school when i wrote it, and i said something like "you better be successful because i'll be disappointed in you if you aren't."

like what the fuck does that even mean?? i think back then it meant that i was supposed to go on and have some illustrious career and financial success and get the hell out of my hometown. have i done any of those things? one, i did move away. 800 miles away in fact, with barely any planning, just on a whim. that was shortly after i last logged in here.

i never went on to have a fancy career. i never got my bachelor's degree and never pursued journalism (something i talk a lot about in those old posts). i work in health information management at a very boring job. i don't love it, i don't even like it, but i'm grateful for it. i've been there for over 6 years and it provides a stable (not large, but steady) income and a good work/life balance so i can still have time for myself and the things i enjoy doing. i'd call that successful, especially in today's world. it's not the success that teenage me wished for, but it's enough for me now, and i know that if i want to do more and become more, i can and i'm capable.

am i happy? i don't know. happy is relative. i guess i'd say i'm content with where i'm at, and that's more than can be said for the person i was back then.

i still struggle with anxiety a lot. i think that's what most of my feelings were back then, and i just didn't have a name for it because no one really talked about it. it flared terribly last year when my mom went through cancer, but i'm slowly getting better. i'm in a better place than i was and i know that if i can handle that, i can handle anything. i think my teenage/early 20s self would have crumbled under that pressure. present-day me did not, even when i felt like i was going to.

and sometimes i still feel like i'm going to. i'm writing all this stuff right now, but i'll definitely have some more bad days at some point where i think all of this talk is bullshit. the difference now is that i know it's just a bad day, and not a bad life.

i don't really know why i'm writing all this, i guess so i can have it documented so if this place still exists another 10 years from now, my late 30s self can look back on it and probably say the same things i'm saying about my teenage self. i'm not even trying to tout the whole "it gets better" thing when it comes to mental health. i mean, it can, and it does for a lot of people, and i'm glad for that. i guess for me it's just that things are different.

i might not be the person i wanted myself to be or have the life i envisioned for myself, but i think my life took the path it did for a reason. that was something i could never wrap my head around when i was younger. honestly, even up until a couple years ago. the things i wanted to happen that didn't, didn't happen because they weren't meant for me. the things that ARE meant for me will happen. it's that simple.

anyway, i'm glad that i got back into this old blog. along with just being fun to get back into my fandoms (even if it seems kinda dead around here lol), it's been really eye-opening. i like to think of myself as someone who's pretty self-aware, but reading those posts really drove it home for me that i'm PROUD of the person i am today. i'm stable, i'm responsible, i can handle myself, i take no shit. maybe all the little details don't fit the narrative of what i wanted, but that's all they are--little details. those aside, i bet teenage me would think that i'm pretty fucking awesome.

[nonnymousehouse]

Another annoying trend that I’ve been seeing pop up in media. 

Creators/fans arrogantly saying “We’ve officially made xyz canon now” as though all media has to connect or follow one another. 

I’ve seen it happen with Duck*Tales, ST: D*isco, and SNW. 

When I read the artbook, Suzanne Olson made a comment akin to “Webby is now Scrooge’s daughter and just as important as Huey, Dewey, and Louie. That’s now official.”  

I doubt it was the intention but there’s something so...weirdly scummy about this attitude? Sort of a “Nyeh, nyeh, we made this canon and now all media about Ducks will have to refer to this forever.” Never mind that Duck media (as in everything - the comics, TV shows, video games) is lucky when it can stay consistent on a good day. Plus, they’ve contradicted themselves so many times that it’s kind of a joke. Is Della the twin sister or cousin of Donald? Is her name Della or Thelma? Is she still alive and caring for her husband or dead? 

Same goes for fans of ST and how they’ll get weirdly smarmy about ‘having to accept D*sco and SNW as canon. 

Because, yes, it’s canon, but ST often goes back and forth on details. Hell, Threshhold on VOY was famously ‘decanonized’ because the episode for so bad until decades later, when people learned to embrace the episode as a funny meme. 

Plus, it’s hard to say what shows and stories will be remembered and loved over time. Some may age poorly and some may age well. It’s a crapshoot. 

[andromeda3116]

So let's talk about the Lost Generation.

This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they -- in retrospect, optimistically -- called it the "war to end all wars". And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.

On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.

And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It's often referred to as "the Spanish flu" because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.

But once it was finally contained -- anywhere from a year to a year and a half later -- the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.

Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women's skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.

Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they'd seen and done and all that they'd lost, and lost for nothing.

Reality seemed so pointless. It's not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre -- J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis -- both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.

(There's a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn't live his whole life there. There's a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)

It's also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.

It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn't new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn't been open to them before.

There was also horrific -- and state-sanctioned -- violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.

It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos -- god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.

Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn't fit their mold.

There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn't, and that's the fact that they did it first.

We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren't any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.

I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.

We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There's a reason modern audiences don't find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling -- they're different kinds of humor from different realities.

I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We've been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn't then: there is a future.

The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art -- in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared -- is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.

So don't bottle it up. Don't pretend to be okay when you're not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else -- not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.

Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive."

[maxwell-grant]

i have been watching old (and sometimes new) gmod animations and i grew up watching enough ytps to know the general idea behind them, and i recently gained a sort of fascination for them. there's something special about them that i couldn't quite put into words, but i think you got it down perfectly in your post about grand guignol. basically, thanks a bunch for that.

Well thank you! And, yeah, I pretty much grew up watching GMOD and YTP constantly and even today I still come back to those a lot when I'm restless and taking a break from work, and I think there's genuinely a lot that can be learned or discussed from them as uniquely 21st Century art forms.

I've been rewatching a lot of Raxxo's content lately and I think it was his content in particular that kind of convinced me that the "GMOD/SFM - Grand Guignol" analogy wasn't nearly as much of deranged word salad as I assumed it was, because in all honestly, if you had to try and condense his videos into a genre or definition or something of the sort, what the hell else can you possibly call this that in any way comes close to describing what you experience?

Like, all of his videos are described as "GMOD animated in SFM", because SFM is usually associated with more straightforward dramatic content while GMOD has been cartoon madness from the start (and it's fascinating to watch just how tame even the early Rubberfruit videos are compared to the kind of stuff Eltorro64 or Dr Lalve are putting out), and Raxxo is the latter in the style of the former.

And his videos are not just a non-stop barrage of brain-breaking, because they have weirdly dramatic pauses, and moments of straightforward action, or simple sentence mixing, and there's continuity between his videos, and incredibly smooth and natural gestures following by the characters stretching and deforming like jello monsters on the next second as their screams warble to drown the soundtrack and then everything's back to normal, and then they start doing things that kinda even make some sense as a narrative, but you cannot even begin explaining properly why, and I've watched these so many times that I even kinda start to see what makes sense and what doesn't, even though literally no one other than Raxxo is ever going to guess why he made the choices he did, and god these jokes must have taken hours if not days to render, why does the scretching Soldier head saying "Sputnik!" shows up in everything he does, and oh did I mention he also makes up the soundtracks he uses himself and they don't match in the slightest most people's perception of his content?

And for the finale of the Soldier Dispenser saga he created maybe the most batshit collaborative animation effort on Youtube, which is about an hour's worth of 200 animators all creating their own little batshit mini-stories in reference to his own and, seriously, who the hell could have possibly predicted something like this existing back when computer game Team Fortress 2 was announced in 2007? Or when Youtube was created?

Who could have possibly predicted something like this existing at any point in human history? Where else could anyone possibly experience this much audiovisual chaos anywhere? I can't even bring myself to watch the video in full again, but that this exists at all, and that it's far from the only one of it's kind, and that Team Fortress 2 fan content has spiraled so hard past anything the creators could have possibly predicted that it has self-sustaining meme ecosystems (Remember when smexuals were a thing? Or the Freaks?), that it's still fucking going 15 years past the game's debut, is, it's kind of a lot, is what I'm saying.

Like, I'm speaking as someone who studies a lot of pop culture and combs through it's most obscure and weirdest recesses to find stuff to write about, I'm still just as baffled by how far these things have gotten as I was when experiencing it for the first time. And you can find a lot of stories like these digging through Youtube Poop and the specific styles of certain creators or certain developing memes for franchises that grow and grow and permutate.

Think about what has to have happened to make a video like iteachvader's What'll It Be? happen.

Long John Baldry, blues musician extraordinaire, voiced cartoon villain Dr Robotnik in a Sonic cartoon. Said Sonic cartoon and performance was lucky enough to survive through Youtube clips. People noticed one of said clips of his performance has him saying a word that sounds like penis in a funny way, so they start making jokes about it, and parodies, and then literally hundreds of parodies popularizing the concept as a source of comedy, some of which take the form of music. Said music is done by cutting, remixing and splicing audio from said performance over music beats, which can be a PAINSTAKINGLY LONG PROCESS as someone who's tried doing that several times now, all this to make something with "Poop" in it's name (which I guess isn't that different from pulp writers spending weeks and months breaking their fingers to put out a novel's worth of content every month, for newspapers and magazines that were literally going to be used as toilet paper later)

These parodies catch on a bit and die out for a bit, until iteachvader comes along, and he proceeds to build a career not just by making funny parodies of said cartoon, but also knocking out genuinely really, really good musical parodies, editing voice clips of said performance to make it sound like the villain's singing (and additionally, he also creates his own tunes, and he's shown that literally every sound he uses is taken from the show, which is just, absolutely mind-boggling effort). He's also created over the years a running joke of Tails being Dr Robotnik's son that people liked enough to ask for more, and then we come to the video above, which is a song about Dr Robotnik spoiling his son Tails asking him what he'll want, which is not at all in line with how the two characters are canonically. And said remixes would eventually get remixed even further, even with crossovers with other characters or musicians, and so forth.

And that is the story of how dozens of creators working separately, and with little intent other than goofing around, single-handedly revived a dead man's music career, as the voice of the fan reinterpretation of a animated adaptation of a videogame villain, popular to the billions if not dozens of billions of views over a decade in the making, on a broadcasting platform said man didn't even live to see being created.

I think sometimes we like to think of ourselves as advanced and jaded enough that nothing surprises us anymore, and if we went back in time and showed an iphone to our great-grandparents they'd start screaming in sheer confusion. And, maybe they would, yeah, but imagine if you were Long John Baldry at any point in his life, even after he finished recording his lines as Robotnik, and someone showed up to you and explained that all of this was going to happen to you, to your voice, to your performance. Imagine if you were one of Valve's lead developers working on Team Fortress 2 during the nine years it spent in development, and someone showed you Raxxo's work and Soldier's Dispenser Quest and just, everything that had happened to characters you hadn't even fully created yet.

I imagine Long John Baldry would have taken it well enough eventually, by all accounts he was a fun person who loved to try new things, and he was an openly gay British vocalist in the 1960s when it was literally illegal to be gay in Britain, so I imagine nothing could possibly rattle his cage that deep in the long run.

But can you honestly tell me you wouldn't freak out at least a little trying to understand just what exactly the future was showing you? Can you honestly tell me your cynicism and world-weariness would be worth anything in the face of all this knowledge about what the world was going to do with your creations and work?

Can you honestly tell me, just now, that you have any idea what the hell is your legacy or reputation as an artist, or even what your art is known for, going to look like in a decade or two from now? And that things aren't going to get weirder than they are now?

I find that fact both frightening and strangely assuring at points, and exciting above all.

[fandomdancer]

The Dance

In the year 2169, you are a senior in high school. You've been best friends with the same two young men since grade school. One of them is your date to the senior dance. The other is the class loner: Eobard Thawne. When your date make a suddenly unexpected move, you find yourself feeling like the perfect night is ruined. But then Eobard shows up...

Word Count: 3,754 words

Rating: T, but may be M

Pairings: OC/Reader, Eobard/Reader

A/N: First attempt at a reader-insert fic. Special thanks to @darlingpetao3 @yetanotherwells @wellsaddict and @hawk-lee for listening to me freak out about this, inspiring me, and giving me the courage to actually post it. I hope it's interesting and fun for you to read.

This is Mattobard's version of Thawne, since it takes place during his teenage years.

This fic was inspired by this song (which is the featured waltz in the story). 'Pride and Penance', from World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZtBflZHIcQ

_________________________________________________________

The moment you step into the darkened dance hall, you feel as though you have been transported back in time. In fact, you can’t help but wonder if the organizers of this year’s spring formal are utilizing some of Rip Hunter’s famous Time Couriers to literally open a door to the past. Everything around is, at minimum, dated back a hundred years ago, from the DJ setting up digital playlists to the black-light-illuminated chairs seated around tables littered with drinks, plates of food, and what looks like games. The music right now is from the early 2000s, but you expect the songs to range through decades, possibly even centuries over the course of the night. Multicolored lights hang from the ceiling, giving the place an overall ‘club’ look, accentuated by the powerful underlighting at the bar.

The temperature increases as you enter on your date’s arm, the exertion from the dancing and milling bodies heating up the air in the room. The dance started only thirty minutes ago, but the excitement in the room is palpable, and kids are wasting no time yelling ‘hellos’ and ‘how are yous’ as they toss back nonalcoholic drinks. One table is already full of kids engaged in what looks like an intense card game with multicolored discs sprayed across the table in front of them.

Catching the fever of the room, you cast a huge grin up at your date, a handsome young man you’ve known since grade school. The two of you are dressed perhaps a little fancy for the event, with him in a fine, high-collared suit befitting a 20th century aristocrat and you in a deep red 1940s princess ballgown. Overdressing is okay: the two of you were expecting a slightly more ‘ballroom’ shindig, not this ‘21st century club’ event, and upon looking around you can see that other members of your class had similar ideas, wearing everything from 1800s Victorian gowns to military uniforms.

“They did a good job,” your date says. “Though one would think they could have come up with a more original theme name than ‘Blast to the Past’.”

“Don’t cheesy titles comprise part of the charm of last century?” you ask as the two of you move towards the obligatory picture arena. “Wasn’t stating the obvious considered not only funny, but…what was the word…a meemee?”

“Meme. One word, one syllable. And yes. Memes were a rather popular form of communication in the early 21st century, though I guess they started well before that.” Your date eyes the line and the picture-taking arena before them. “Is that….a phone booth?”

You are both intrigued as you watch a couple go into the booth, pulling a curtain shut and separating them from the outside world. Their feet are obvious as they scrabble into various positions, each one punctuated by a bright flash ands lots of giggling. The couple emerges, looking flushed and full of smiles, and watch as two thin strips of plastic emerged from the wall of the booth. The two grab the plastic strips and look at them, giggling as they walk away.

“It’s a photo booth.”

The voice right beside you and your date startles you, and you quickly look over to see one of the chaperones for the event, Ms. Steinway, a few feet away. The young teacher looks stunning in a green floor-length gown, her blonde hair floating ethereally around her shoulders. She gestures. “You go in, and you have five pictures taken of you in quick succession. There’s usually only three to four seconds between each photo so people often planned ahead what they would do ahead of time. You can make faces, or be serious…whatever you would like!”

“Thank you, Ms. Steinway,” you say before looking back to your date. “Well. I guess we have about a minute to come up with five different poses.”

“Why don’t we improvise? We’re both good thinkers on our feet.”

The tension and pressure of racing to beat a timed photo session is appealing to you, probably a side effect of all the time you've been spending lately with your other friend, Eobard Thawne. He has a strong taste for competition and it’s been rubbing off on you in the years you’ve known him.

The sudden thought of Thawne makes you skim the room, wondering if the class loner has actually shown up to tonight’s dance. You’re pretty sure he’s not here; this isn’t his type of thing at all. It’s certainly why you didn’t ask him to be your date. It’s also the only reason why you didn’t ask him to be your date. Eobard Thawne’s proud, handsome figure and strikingly keen intellect has drawn many a girl’s attention over the years, including yours, and you’ve made a concentrated effort to ignore it. But lately, you’ve noticed that he seems to be hovering near you much more often. And he got into a fistfight with your date a few weeks ago…you never did quite figure out what had caused that argument…

Seeing him here tonight would definitely open a lot of doors, however. Perhaps you would be brave enough to ask him for a single dance. He can be a truly arrogant ass but he has always been at least civil to you…probably because the two of you have also known each other since grade school.

Your date pushes you forward and you realize that, as usual, thoughts of Eobard have distracted you for several seconds. It is your turn in the photo booth.

The booth is small and simple, with a little touch screen that simply says ‘go’. A quick glance over the screen shows that presets are in place, with no way to change them. It is a little aggravating to not be able to customize the photos but you suppose that’s to get the line of kids moving quickly. With a quick glance at your date, the two of you reach out and tap the ‘go’ button together.

The very first thing he does is kiss you. It’s so fast and so intense that you don’t even have time to react. Suddenly his mouth is open and wet and moving on yours and his hand is in your carefully-crafted hairstyle and you are shocked beyond words because of all the poses you had considered in this run of pictures, your longtime friend kissing you was not one of them. You’ve suspected he felt this way about you and there was no doubt in your mind that he would be an excellent romantic partner, but you hadn’t really…thought about him like that. In fact, the only person you really thought about like that was…Eobard.

He finally pulls back and looks quickly at the camera, grinning widely. Your brain is fuzzed and rolling with several unfinished sentences and questions, but some little part of you keeps control and turns to smile bright and beautiful at the screen. The two of you make silly faces next, and as you are setting up for what you think is the next picture, the screen goes dark. You realize in shock that he used three of the five pictures to kiss you. Feeling frustrated and cheated, you get out of the booth, pasting a smile on your face so as not to appear angry to the line of kids waiting outside. You’ll have plenty of time to discuss his choices later.

The pictures print out and they’re definitely difficult to look at. The first one shows your obvious surprise, but the second two are worse, showcasing your desperate attempt to keep control of what is happening by grabbing at his face and responding to his kiss. It was not your best decision, but you feel like it was your only choice at the moment – and that realization makes you furious.

The two of you head to an unoccupied table, and the moment you set down the photos you whirl on your date, your insides twisted in knots and your throat almost sealed shut from the force of your anger. “What the hell?”

“What?”

It’s even hotter in this room with your anger charging you up. You are pretty sure your face is the color of your dress. “You kissed me.”

He smiles. “Of course I did. What did you think we were going to do in there?”

Your mouth drops open. “Make faces and smile! When did kissing appear on the list of things to do tonight?”

His brow furrows. “When you agreed to be my date. Come now, you can’t possibly miss all the signs I’ve given you. You know me better than that.”

His self-entitled arrogance sets your teeth on edge and you clutch the table so hard you’re amazed it doesn’t bend. “I’ve known you for almost all of my life and you have never been so rude as to just kiss someone without making sure it’s all right with them! You wait for that kind of invitation! You don’t blindside her during a timed picture taking session!”

“Spontaneity has never been your thing, and I respect that,” he begins to say.

You cut him off. “Clearly not or these wouldn’t exist!” You wave the pictures at him before slamming them down onto the table. You don’t know what you’re angrier about now; being forced into this situation before you felt ready, his seeming blindness to how the whole situation played out, or the fact that you feel like what should have been a beautiful moment is ruined and you are never going to get it back.

A waltz begins to play, the very song the two of you were hoping would be the focus of the evening, and he reaches a hand out to you. “You’re right. I made a terrible mistake. I thought it would be fun and I assumed you would be all right with it. I am sorry. I truly am. We will go have the pictures retaken. But will you dance with me? This sounds like a beautiful waltz and I don’t want to have ruined the night by making a terrible decision right at the beginning.”

He sounds sincere but you don’t answer him at first. Your mind is still awash with anger and betrayal and a sudden desire to be anywhere but in this room right now. You don’t want to just forgive him for doing this to you. But you also don’t want the night to be ruined, and right now the song playing sounds like it could be a wonderful dance and you aren’t sure how many more will be played with the selection of music likely being offered. Reluctantly, you slip your hand into his.

“We aren’t done with this conversation,” you state firmly.

“Of course not.” He twirls you gently. “But this song fits you and I want to see you dancing to it.”

You don’t know the name of the song, but it has a haunting melody to it, almost ghostlike with sliding violins. Waltzes always have a kind of built-in grace to them, a slippery seduction meant to make it easy to move to. But this piece has an additionally dramatic vocalist that elevates the rhythm to something royal and aristocratic. You can almost imagine the two of you (and the couples that are joining you on the floor) dancing in the hall of an ancient, grand mansion while a dark storm swirls outside the floor-to-ceiling windows and the dry fingers of tree branches curl menacingly in shadows on the floor, trapping the dancers’ feet in their grip.

“Pardon me.”

The familiar voice snaps you out of the daydream you are drifting into, and you rock slowly back and forth in your date’s arms as you realize Eobard is standing in front of you two. Your breath catches and your heart rate picks up instantly as you look at him. He looks as though he has stepped straight out of your daydream: a young lord trapped in a dying manor, cloaked in high-collared black and red with the light shimmering blindingly on his short blond hair. Even more shocking is the dramatic flair he has added to the outfit: a full-length black cape fastened at his neck with a ruby. He is too beautiful to touch and yet your hands…and other, sweeter, deeper parts of you…ache as you stare at him.

His eyes sweep over you and you think you see his jaw clench slightly before he speaks again. “May I cut in?”

“You’re in our way, Bardo,” your date growls, all softness and politeness gone from his voice.

“I wasn’t addressing you,” Eobard responds to him but doesn’t take his eyes off of you. Your throat is growing dry from the simple intensity of his gaze. “I was addressing your partner." He nods to you. "May I cut in?”

You finally register what he is asking, and the thrill that races through you makes you shiver. You had thought you might have the courage to ask him to dance if you had seen him here, but him asking you is completely unexpected. Saying no to him might prevent him from asking again, but saying yes would probably send the wrong message to your date.

Then again, your date certainly sent you the wrong message when he forced you to kiss him in the photo booth.

It’s a very simple question with a very simple answer.

“I would be honored,” you reply, trying to sound as cool and proper as possible. As you pull away from your date, you feel his hands clench briefly on you. You quickly look up at him, seeing the betrayal in his eyes. At first you feel smug, but then you remind yourself that he did apologize. You give him your best comforting smile. “We’ll continue this later,” you say to him, making his expression soften just a little. But the look he gives Eobard is poisonous.

Eobard’s expression doesn’t change. Instead, he unfastens the cape from around his neck and whips it dramatically off, draping it unceremoniously on your date’s still-outstretched arms. “Would you be so kind as to place this on a nearby chair?”

Redness floods your date’s face, and you start to open your mouth to scold Eobard for his rudeness, but his hands grip you firmly and he spins you away into the dancing crowd before you can say a word. Your feet scrabble as you try to keep up, and you have a feeling he’s trying to get you as far away from your date as fast as possible. Focusing on your movements, you catch his rhythm and begin to move in time with him, gaining control over yourself while still permitting him to lead. You’re angry enough now that you’re tempted to just walk out the door after this dance. When did your two best friends turn into such boys? They’re acting like you’re a prize in a competition and while that might be flattering, it’s making you feel a bit like an object and not like the lady you want to be tonight.

“You dance well,” Eobard compliments.

You roll your eyes. “You dragged me out here and I just got my balance back. Don’t patronize me.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” he answers. “I mean what I say. I saw you trying to dance with your date over there. He was trying. You were succeeding.”

You snort and sigh. “I wish the two of you would tell me why you both seem to have lost your minds lately.”

Eobard tilts his head. “Isn’t it obvious?”

Your heart pounds and you know what you hope the answer is, but coming right out and saying it feels like a such a terrible risk. Eobard’s emotional difficulties make him dangerous sometimes, the wrong word or look pushing him away for days at a time. You are not going to ruin this night, this dance, this moment that has been playing in your dreams.

“Obviously not, or I wouldn’t have brought it up,” you say, trying to put an innocent look on your face. You aren’t sure if it works or not, but the hard look in Eobard’s eyes softens somewhat, and he guides you around the floor. Looking up at him, you surrender your mind to the daydream, milking this moment for all it is worth. The seductive waltz paints the image of a great hall, decadent in its decay, the memory of opulence just as romantic as the opulence itself. And Eobard, cold and proud and throat-achingly beautiful, spins you around it, commanding your body with his touch, and commanding your mind with his eyes.

“Your friend and I,” he says in a low voice, “are both seeking your approval.”

Dear God, he actually said it. You’re almost dizzy with excitement as you frantically think of how to navigate the next few sentences. Honesty is going to be key. “You have a funny way of showing it. First that fistfight a few weeks ago and now tonight he just kisses me out of the blue and then you drag me off like I belong to you or something…”

“He did what?” Eobard stops the two of you cold, and you blink, looking up at his grey eyes, watching in surprise as they turn stormy and dark. His pale face begins to flush as he gazes down at you. You can’t tell if what you’re seeing is anger or not, but as his eyebrows draw together you feel your insides flutter. It’s more than just anger. It’s jealousy.

Eobard is jealous.

The realization makes your throat close and you swallow several times as adrenaline floods your veins. The possibilities open up in your mind, and you suddenly realize that while both men are, in fact, treating you like a prize, you are still the one in control.

“He kissed me for our photo,” you say carefully, letting the frustration and hurt show on your face. “I didn’t know he was going to.”

Eobard looks at you, his jaw clenching and unclenching, and his face continuing to grow red. His hands tighten on your waist and hand, and a strange excitement blooms in your chest. Eobard Thawne, so aloof and elitist, suffering from the simple emotion of jealousy. And jealousy related to you, because he’s seeking your approval. Despite the heat of the moment, you find yourself fighting a smile.

“Did you enjoy it?” he asks tightly.

You know the truth and you know what saying it will mean. But right now, you are unable to lie to him, captivated by the thrill of his reaction and the intoxicating crescendo building around you.

“No.”

Eobard’s chin lifts and a smug satisfaction fills his eyes as the music crescendos loudly. With a climactic crash of drums, he decisively pushes you out into a firm spin, and then brings you back in, his hand slipping to the small of your back and holding you flush against his body. And for one fiery, fierce moment, you realize that you can feel him, dear God, all of him, pressed possessively against you, and a weakness makes your knees wobble and your mouth go dry as you stare into his eyes, only inches away, and realize what he is silently saying to you.

Then the two of you are moving again as he takes everything up another notch, whirling you both within the crowd as though you have all the space in the world. The music pounds with your steps, pulsing inside of you, the melody a full-throated cry from the whole orchestra, igniting adrenaline and fire within you. Your mouth falls open to gasp for air as your eyes drift closed. You don’t need to see, only to feel the clutch of his hands and the heat of his body and the light pressure on your waist as he leads you.

And then, in one powerful beat, the music stops. Eobard pushes you backwards into a dramatic dip, holding you up while your hands claw at him. You can’t see the ecstasy on your face but a few gasps from the people around you suggest that the two of you may be in a very compromising position. You don’t care. Your body is shaking and tingling. You feel sweat dampening your skin, and the heat…you’re drowning in it. But you don’t want to move. You don’t want it to be over. Most of all, you don’t want his hands leaving you. Ever.

Your breath comes in heavy gasps as he draws you up to your feet. He steadies you, and your eyes finally drift open. The sight before you makes you shiver again. Eobard is breathing just as hard as you are, and has the same slightly dazed expression on his face that you are feeling. You vaguely realize that while you were trying to keep your balance you gripped his hair and shirt because both of them are bunched and mussed. But neither of you can look away from the other for several seconds.

Finally, he is the first one to move. He gently straightens his shirt and runs a hand through his hair. He brings his heels together and reaches for your hand. He bows, lifting your hand to his lips and placing a chaste kiss on the back of it.

“Thank you,” he says, “for the lovely dance. If you’ll excuse me, I believe I need some air.”

You nod slowly. “I…think I do too.”

Something sparks in his eyes, and he offers you his arm. You consider taking it, but the sensation that sweeps through you as you realize what the implications are stop you. You are awash in powerful emotions now, enough to know that if you go with him, you’re going to do something you want…

….oh do you want….

….but on impulse, caught up in the moment.

You know you need to gather yourself. The night has only just begun.

“I will see you back in here,” you reply, offering a polite curtsey. It isn’t a blatant rejection, just more of a ‘not now’. Eobard seems to understand and his withdraws his hand before turning and striding for the door.

You head for a different exit, catching a glimpse of your date just as you leave the room. His face is a thunderstorm, and you feel a slight chill that cuts through the hazy fog of your mind.

The night has only just begun, and you have a feeling it’s going to be a long one.

[sk1fanfiction]

the many faces of tom riddle, part 5

 - more myth than man... or not? the mortality of tom riddle and the anatomy of a villain-

That leaves us with Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal of adult Tom Riddle/Lord Voldemort in movies 4-8.

I generally find adult Tom Riddle disappointing, even in the books, in terms of character depth. Instead of delving into his motivations and the inner psychology of a villain, we get... slight body horror? And in the movies, it’s even more egregious. 

If a story is as good as its villain, adult Tom Riddle is a bit of a let-down, especially on-screen.

“I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost . . . but still, I was alive.”

Perhaps the very first time I watched it, I found this scary, but I must confess that nowadays, Voldemort’s resurrection is more funny to me than anything else. The forked tongue and the nose slits, yes, are supposed to allude to Tom Riddle’s loss of humanity, but I don’t think it...worked out that way in practice.

I know that’s how it is in the books, but ugly equals evil (and vice versa) is a tired trope. not only that, but under the CGI, Lord Voldemort is so difficult to relate to, so inhuman, that it’s hard to (1) see his true depravity (2) connect with him emotionally (3) at least for me, not laugh at him flapping around the graveyard in GOF like an oversized crow. 

Now, the reason I’m going on about this is not (just) me being petty. Lord Voldemort is the Boggart for most of the characters in the HP universe, meaning their greatest fear is Lord Voldemort. He represents Fear; as such, he should be utterly terrifying. Now, I don’t mean horrifying in that sense, but Voldemort’s grand entrance should at least feel somewhat unsettling, have some sort of a Gothic atmosphere...

"But then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron."

Visually, this looks great. But it’s not scary. And I’m not a purist by any means, but the words are scarier than the book. Darkness induces fear. 

“The lack of any kind of visual stimuli increases anxiety, uncertainty, and tension.”

So, having Voldemort’s pale body materialize isn’t as scary as it could be.

Furthermore, I think Fiennes’ overexaggerated expressions would actually come across as properly horrifying/threatening rather than funny if they just left his face alone. Yes, Fiennes does manage to emote the fear and the anger through the CGI, but it’s like he’s too alien to be scary, at least to me. The amount of memes with Voldemort suggest I’m not the only one this way inclined.

I think there’s probably a problem going on with the uncanny valley. (Images from the Mori essay linked).

[When things are still]

[Creepy things are creepier when moving]

Now, I assume Voldemort is meant to be zombie-creepy, or at least that how Harry describes him in the books.

"The thin man stepped out of the cauldron, staring at Harry...and Harry stared back into the face that had haunted his nightmares for three years. Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake's but with slits for nostrils...."

Now, we can’t get Harry’s experience of being haunted by Voldemort in his dreams, because what I think makes Voldemort’s countenance so truly frightening to the other characters isn’t his snake-like nose or his red eyes, but the potential. Voldemort is, in essence, the Grim Reaper. You are at his mercy, and you’re probably going to be dead. 

“This time, I shall enter the fray myself, Harry Potter, and I shall find you, and I shall punish every last man, woman, and child who has tried to conceal you from me. One hour.“

And yes, Voldemort can be quite funny and witty, but..

“I will allow you to perform an essential task for me, one that many of my followers will give their right hands to perform.” (To Peter Pettigrew)

...it’s still incredibly dark, sadistic humour. Whereas the teenage Tom Riddle we’ve been discussing has just barely dipped his toes into evil, Voldemort is, well... swimming in it. At this point, he think he undeniably enjoys causing pain.

And much of what makes Voldemort scary is subtle. 

For example, what I personally consider haunting is the fact that he’s got a cave full of Inferi. A cave full of reanimated dead bodies. 

Either he dug them up, which is unlikely... or perhaps, a twenty-seven-or-so-year-old Tom Riddle would lie in wait like a bird of prey, very quietly and patiently, perhaps reading a book, waiting for an unsuspecting Muggle to wander past. Maybe killing is a game to him at this point, when it’s not so personal as killing Harry Potter. Maybe it’s a whispered Avada Kedavra, and then he carries the dead body away to his cave. Maybe he Imperiuses them to walk off the cliff. Maybe he tortures them first.

Shudder.

And I don’t think you can show that kind of horror through any CGI or make-up, so...

You know what is terrifying? Revolting? True crime; real-life people who do unspeakably horrible things. And I think a lot was missed out on, in stripping Tom Riddle physically of his humanity. Yes, Riddle is a monster...

But, as we’ve seen, he’s a human monster, not some eldritch horror from the seventh level of hell or something.

I just think it would be interesting to have this perfectly normal-looking human do all the horrific things Voldemort does. I want to see that sick joy in a human face and feel disgusted. I want to see fear make his bottom lip tremble, and feel a misplaced sense of empathy. (Think President Snow from the Hunger Games -- now, that’s a sick, twisted villain who we can relate to as a human being, but still love to hate -- or what about The Joker?).

And out of everything they chose to CGI, why on earth did they not make his eyes scarlet? That might have made him look at least somewhat menacing, rather than a failed lab experiment.

(Don’t even get me started on his and Bellatrix’s death scenes in the movies-)

Here’s President Snow. He’s got a cute little granddaughter, he sends kiddies to kill each other Battle Royale-style every year, and he poisons all his political opponents. He’s also a master manipulator and has a penchant for white roses. They cover up the smell of the sores in his mouth from eating the poison too, to conceal his treachery.

Heath Ledger as the Joker in Dark Knight (2008), who is, according to NYT (which I totally agree with), the best Joker. Now this is a villain done right, with many Voldemort-like traits. On a scale of one-to-ten, he’s absolutely terrifying. Why? He’s (unlike Voldemort in the movies) incredibly intelligent, shows young-Tom-Riddle-like skills for charm and manipulation, plays with humans like they’re his own personal psychology experiment (and to hell with the Institutional Review Board), and has one, single, very clear goal -- chaos. Like Voldemort, he wears an inhuman mask that’s not horrifying in its own right; but unlike Voldemort, the human is all there -- terrifying, real, and with a bottomless, obsessive desire to destroy. His disordered thinking is all out there for the audience to see. The Joker’s motivation is to enjoy himself; whereas Voldemort seems to lack drive. Why does he want to take over the world -- who knows, with Voldemort? The Joker wants to see it burn.

Let’s try to do the same with Lord Voldemort:

[SLIGHT FLASH WARNING]

I had to go with this because Voldemort isn’t legitimately terrifying in many scenes. And yes, this unrefined anger somewhat speaks to Tom’s immaturity

By this point, seventy-one year old Tom Riddle is a hollowed-out shell of a human being. After decades of building his power, he was defeated by a one-year-old, and ended up slumming it as a spirit for a decade, got defeated again, was a shrivelled-up baby for a year, then finally got his body back.

He’s angry, okay! And Fiennes does a great job of portraying the sheer, destructive, unbridled rage of this character.

The body language. again, since his face is inhuman, this is super important. and Fiennes’ body language is great. Voldemort/Riddle commits to his actions. He is very emotionally-driven.

But yet, he doesn’t feel capable, in the way that the Joker or President Snow do. Yeah, we know anecdotally that he’s incredibly evil, sadistic, and second only to Dumbledore in terms of power, but he loses to a baby, and then that same baby as a teenager. So, we really could have done with seeing Voldemort’s power, cruelty, and evil firsthand a lot more often.

Voldemort is not well-characterized. I don’t understand his motives, and the ones that I do understand are not compelling.

Not to die? Well, he’s already made several Horcruxes. Why not sit back and relax? Why start a war and risk himself?

JKR said that Voldemort’s great desire was to become all-powerful and eternal. But that’s... boring! It does little to tell us about Voldemort, other than that he’s a villain and a wannabe dictator. 

Furthermore, the charm, manipulation, and cunning that are hallmarks of younger Tom Riddle’s personality are gone.

Is Voldemort (to return to Jungian terms) all shadow? An empty creature of simple creation and destruction, perhaps? We’ll discuss this further down...

And this isn’t a problem of having a fantastical world with magic and the like. Grindelwald’s quiet, self-possessed, almost coy “So you think you can hold me?” was infinitely scarier than anything that has ever come out of Voldemort’s mouth. It was chilling. 

OOTP is my favorite book, and the Ministry sequence is one of my favourite in the films. 

This scene where he psyches out Harry, talking so quietly that he could just be a little voice inside his head (and again, during the possession scene)? Absolute perfection. 

Why? Because this showcases what’s truly scary about him. Voldemort can get into your head. He can make you do things. And perhaps, if we had seen that more often, we’d understand how scary he is.

I wish this had been his grand entrance, and not whatever that scene in GOF was. Somehow, him screeching “I WANT TO SEE THE LIGHT LEAVE YOUR EYES!” is not menacing. At all. 

But, I can’t help but think how much greater the emotional affect would be if he had more human features (think the burned-and-blurred, waxy features from Dumbledore’s memory). 

Just imagine these scenes if Voldemort looked human, and spoke as quietly as he did in this one.

Because of the reason that I have little to go on in terms of characterization that I haven’t already covered, we’ll discuss the myth and legend of Lord Voldemort.

I can’t decide if the statue in the films is supposed to be the Angel of Death or the Grim Reaper. He has a skeleton and carries a scythe, but he also has wings. There are so many different interpretations, attitudes towards, and personifications of Death across the world that I don’t want to draw any one conclusion. But I must wonder if Lord Voldemort, with his yew-and-phoenix wand (which carries heavy symbolism of immortality and rebirth) and almost deified figure is meant to be a personification of Death himself? His name, Lord Voldemort, is a shade close to Lord Death.

For years, it has stumped me that wizards and witches are afraid to utter Voldemort’s name, especially since we only see the Taboo in the middle of the last book. It didn’t make sense just based on fear; in the real world, we don’t circumvent Hitler’s name, for example.

Perhaps this may have been obvious to others, but it wasn’t to me.

Here’s a counterargument to myself; why Voldemort shouldn’t look human.

Voldemort, in the Wizarding World, is seen as a literal deity.

I promised to attempt to answer this question in Part 3: 

And so, I can’t help but wonder if the opposite is true… if Tom Riddle creates Horcruxes, would that grant him additional magic powers?

In Part 3, I likened Tom Riddle to a sorcerer in Russian folklore, Koschei the Deathless, also famous for sequestering his soul in objects. This source suggests that Koschei was considered not an ordinary magician, but a representative of the ‘other’ world, the world of death.

So, what if... creating Horcruxes makes you... more than human? Now, I could definitely see god-like status being appealing to sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle. Perhaps, even appealing enough to kill for. Now, his proclivity for Avada Kedavra makes sense. We know it’s an incredibly sinister spell, but at the same time, it’s a very humane way to kill. Why might it be so horrifying?

Here’s a weird theory.

To the best of my knowledge, no one but Voldemort is seen using the Killing Curse more than once or twice. 

Perhaps, ordinary mortals can only cast Avada Kedavra a few times, but Tom, having split his soul and having become in some way a non-human instrument of Death, can cast it however many times as he likes, and that is part of what serves to make him so terrifying.

This makes the idea of Voldemort tossing around Avada Kedavras actually incredibly terrifying, if you take into account what that might mean.

The collective cultural fear of speaking Voldemort’s name supports this theory.

Take the chthonic (underworld) deities of Greek mythology; most notably, Hades and Persephone, the king and queen of the underworld.

Hades, the god of the dead, was feared. 

So feared that the word ‘Hades’ (”the unseen one”) was so frightening, that people came up with all sorts of euphemisms to circumvent actually saying it and he was rarely even depicted in art. For example, they would refer to him as Pluto (”the rich one”), Clymenus ("notorious"), Polydegmon ("who receives many"), and perhaps Eubuleus ("good counsel" or "well-intentioned"), amongst many other names. 

However, he was not seen as evil; just stern, cruel, and fair. Like most Greek gods, he had an associated cult (the Death Eaters, anyone?)

Another interesting connection between Hades and Voldemort is that Hades was associated with snakes.

Persephone (suggested to have a pre-Greek origin and probably pre-dates Hades), who was also a vegetation/fertility/spring goddess, similarly, was referred to as Despoina (”the mistress”), Kore (”the maiden”), etc, because as the terrible Queen of the Dead, it was considered unsafe to speak her name aloud. In mythology and literature, she is sometimes referred to as ‘dread Persephone.’

--Just like how Lord Voldemort is referred to as The Dark Lord, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, You-Know-Who... (and if you’re Dumbledore, ‘Tom’.)

Her central myth served as the context for the secret rites of regeneration at Eleusis (which was basically a mystery cult devoted to her and her mother, Demeter), which promised immortality to initiates.

We don’t know for certain what exactly went on, because, mystery cult -- the members were sworn to secrecy -- but it revolved around immortality and rebirth and possibly psychoactive drugs. 

Perhaps ironically, in comparison to the Death Eaters, anyone could join, as long as they could speak Greek and had never committed murder.

And that concludes my assessment!

[devilmeows]

8. for both

thank you for enabling me kib :]]

8. "So you lied to me."

8. "Go on. Make a wish."

not beta read bc i like living Dangerously

8. “So you lied to me.”

Ari knew a lot of things about her girlfriend. Cadence was smart, she was funny, she always needed 8 hours of sleep to be functional, she was incredibly fast despite her short legs, and most importantly, her birthday was extremely important to her. If there was one good thing that she remembered from her horrible family, it was the birthday parties and the hype around that date. The inkling had once told her that she missed throwing herself big birthday parties: her apartment was far too small to host more than three people at once. And that day, as her girlfriend snored in her arms, Ari had grabbed her phone and created a new groupchat.

Cadence’s big 21.

Naturally, the first messages sent on that chat were memes, because Callie and Spencer always had to have a competition for who would send the best meme in any groupchat they were in. It was a weekly occurrence. They had three separate groupchats together. And now Ari had just added a fourth. I’ve made better decisions in my life, admittedly.

Ari - Please stop this or I will kick you out.

Spencer - :(((((

Callie - ok but one more? :D

Ari - No.

Callie - pweaaaaase?

Marie - say pwease again and i’ll throw my charger at you

Callie - pwease? :3

Callie - I DIDNT THINK YOU’D ACTUALLY DO IT

Spencer - marie is a woman of her word

Spencer - one time she said she’d toss me off a roof and then she did

Marie - lskfjgdfgkd

Marie - please stop bringing that up it was an accident

Ari - Is no one going to pay attention to the name of this groupchat?

Marie - no <3

Marie - jk but yeah cadence’s birthday /is/ coming up

Ari - Yes, it’s on February 12th. Aka next week.

Callie - ARE WE THROWING HER A BIRTHDAY PARTY

Ari - That is indeed what I was thinking of doing.

Callie - NICE

Spencer - NICE

Callie - GET YOUR OWN WORDS SPENCER

Spencer - YOU GET YOUR OWN WORDS

Spencer - i can make the food!!

Ari - Good, I was about to tell you to take care of that.

Marie - where are we having this party? if i recall correctly cadence and spencer’s apartments are too small, and our landlord would kill us if we had a party here

Callie - :eyes:

Marie - ?

Callie - so you admit you’ve been to spencer’s apartment before :eyes:

Callie - STOP THROWING SHIT AT ME

Ari - Pearl and Marina will be out of town for a few days, and they’ll only be back on the 13th. So we can have it at the mansion.

Spencer - WOOOO ITS A MANSION PARTY

Callie - OH HELL YEAH

Callie - can i take care of Decorating :D

Ari - So long as everything isn’t pink, yes you can.

Callie - :(

Ari - You can come to the mansion in the morning and we can set everything up together, and then I’ll go get Cadence.

Spencer - gotcha!

Spencer - whats marie in charge of?

Ari - Anything. I trust her.

Callie - ouch????

Spencer - yeah ouch ari

Marie - :)

----------

“This is a lot of pink.”

“It’s not all pink though!” Callie held up a string of orange fairy lights. “Look, this is orange!” With her other hand, she pointed at the army of balloons lying on the floor. “And those are blue and white!”

“Callie, there is a total of five blue and white balloons for twenty pink balloons in this room.”

The inkling stared at the balloons for a moment, as if she’d only just noticed that. Then she turned back to Ari with a wide smile.

“Oops. Sorry!”

She did not look sorry at all. Ari sighed, then pinched the bridge of her nose. Well, at least it’s not khaki. Cadence hates khaki. Do khaki-coloured balloons even exist? At least the rest of the room looked really nice, despite the overwhelming amount of pink. Granted, Ari wasn’t an expert on what birthday parties were supposed to look like, but in her humble opinion, Callie had done a good job. She had even gotten a giant Great Zapfish cutout that stood in a corner of the room, looking at her with its big goofy smile.

“Anyway,” Callie clapped her hands excitedly. “Wanna help me tie some balloons to the ceiling fan?”

“I would love to, but I have to check on how Spencer and Marie are doing. Just to make sure I don’t have to go to the supermarket before I go pick up Cadence.”

Callie smirked. Ari mirrored her smirk. They nodded, exactly as they had a few hours ago when Marie had innocently decided to help Spencer bake. The octoling left Callie to her work, and trotted down the stairs to the kitchen. She checked her phone: it was 12:31pm. She frowned. Hopefully baking was going okay, because she definitely wouldn’t have enough time to swing by the store before 1pm, the time she was supposed to go get her girlfriend. She pushed the door without looking up from her phone as she checked her texts, but a clanking noise did make her look up. Marie and Spencer were standing a strange distance away from each other, considering that their two bowls were sitting right next to each other on the counter. They also both looked the slightest bit flushed. Ari lifted a single eyebrow.

“We’re baking!” Spencer provided a bit too quickly for it to be natural, waving the whisk she was holding as a greeting. “Right?”

“Right!” Marie supplied helpfully. “Baking...food. Good food.”

“Uh-huh,” Ari pointed to her own nose as she looked at Marie. “You have batter on your nose.”

The white and green inkling quickly brought her hand to her nose, her face turning a darker shade of blue. She threw Spencer an accusatory but lighthearted glare, which made her chuckle, and she turned around to grab a paper towel to wipe it off. Ari walked up to her friend, looked at her bowl, then stared at her. Spencer stared back. She cocked her head to the side, as if asking her why she was staring.

“Useless lesbian.” Were they doing that thing they do in the movies where they flirt by tossing food at each other?

“I- What- You-” the orange inkling sputtered, then pointed at Marie, who still had her back turned. She’s right there! Spencer mouthed.

Ari snorted, then shrugged with a slightly smug smile. “Anyway, how is the baking going?”

“Pretty good! The coxinhas are ready to go in the oven, I’ll put them in later so that they can be warm when Cadence arrives.”

“And the cake is almost done,” Marie continued, now back with no batter on her nose. “It looks and smells amazing. Cadence better like it.”

“If she doesn’t, I’ll eat my spatula.”

“There’s no reason she won’t like it,” Ari said, turning around to look at the oven. Inside it sat a chocolate cake that gave off a decadently delicious smell. “This is her favourite. Is the...the thing already in it?”

“The brigadeiro?” Spencer asked. “Not yet. I’m just finishing up the kibes and then I’ll get to it.”

“Perfect.” I don’t need to go to the supermarket then. “In that case, I’ll leave you two to it, and I’m going to go pick up the birthday girl.”

Ari had never been more happy that she’d made a duplicate of Cadence’s keys: it was freezing cold and there was absolutely no way in hell that she’d wait for her girlfriend outside. She loved her very much, but there was only so much she could take in the name of love. And even in the hallway outside her door, with her scarf, Spencer’s old pilot hat, her two sweaters and her thick winter coat, she was still cold. She couldn’t wait to go back to the warmth of Pearl’s mansion. She took a deep breath, then knocked on the door.

“I’ll be there in a second!” Cadence’s voice echoed from inside her apartment.

There was some rattling, then a crashing sound followed by a loud “Fuck!”, then silence. Ari thought she heard the soft thump of something being tossed on top of a bed, and after some more shuffling, the door finally opened.

How is she allowed to look that cute.

Her girlfriend was wearing a fairly simple outfit: she recognised the pale purple dress Ari had bought for her a while ago, as well as the little paintbrush choker which also happened to be a gift from her. She was also wearing black tights and boots just a shade darker than her dress. And to complete the look, she had slung a long black coat over her shoulders. She looked adorable.

Cadence looked her up and down, and chuckled.

“What?” Ari asked with a little smile.

“You look funny,” she replied, pointing at the hat.

“It’s freezing, I don’t even know how you’re not cold right now.”

The inkling shrugged. “It’s only 16°C, it’s not that cold.” Then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Ari’s waist. “Here, let me warm you up.”

The octoling smiled as her girlfriend kissed her. She’d never get tired of kissing Cadence. Or hugging her, or cuddling with her, or curling up in her arms as she slept.

“There you go!” Cadence said as they pulled away, face slightly flushed. “Feeling warmer?”

Ari nodded. “Definitely.”

“Alright, let’s go then!” The inkling bounced on her toes as she whirled around to lock her door. “Crêpe time, crêpe time, crêpe time!”

Ari felt something vibrate in her pocket. Making sure that her girlfriend wasn’t looking, she discreetly checked her phone, and smiled as she saw a thumbs-up emoji sent by Spencer. Nice. Let’s do this.

She gasped, which made Cadence jump and almost drop her keys.

“Sorry,” she apologised, “but I just realised that I forgot your gift at home. Do you mind if we stop by the mansion before we get our crêpes?”

“Oh! I thought this was way more serious,” Cadence laughed, her shoulders slumping with relief. “Yeah, no, sure, we can do that!”

“Great.”

Cadence pocketed her keys, then held out her hand and wiggled her fingers. Ari took her girlfriend’s warm hand in her own, and they set off towards the mansion.

Spencer - ari dont come to the kitchen

Callie - yeah dont

Marie - or if you really want to do that, do it later. way later. like 1am later

Ari’s excitement only grew as they neared the mansion. She’d felt her phone vibrate a few more times in her pocket, but hopefully it wasn’t anything important. At least no one had called her, which automatically meant everything was fine. Everything better be fine. The two cephalopods walked up to the large metal gate and Ari pressed the button to ring the bell and warn the other three that they were here. Cadence gave her a puzzled glance.

“Why are you doing that? Aren’t Pearl and Marina...not home?”

The octoling froze, hoping her look of realisation looked convincing enough. Without a word, she shoved her free hand in her pocket and pulled out her keys, which made Cadence laugh. She pointedly avoided her gaze and focused on the lock, feigning embarrassment, then pushed the door. Thankfully, she managed to keep her excited smile off her face. They were so close, there was no way she could fuck this up now.

The smell of cake still hung in the air faintly when they entered the mansion. Ari tensed. Hopefully, Cadence hadn’t noticed. She didn’t dare look at her to check. Instead, she simply pulled her girlfriend towards the stairs.

“Isn’t your room over there?” she asked, hopping up the carpeted stairs.

“It is, but your gift is in that room,” Ari responded, pointing towards said room.

She could feel her heartbeats racing as they stood in front of the door. Her hands felt clammy under her gloves, and slowly, she opened the door.

Instantly, three party poppers went off and a song in a language Ari didn’t understand started playing.

“Surprise!” Spencer, Callie and Marie shouted. “Happy birthday, Cadence!”

Now, Ari could smile. She looked back at her girlfriend, who was just standing there with her mouth hanging open in surprise. She still hadn’t let go of her hand, and her gaze flicked from Spencer, to Callie, to Marie, to the giant Zapfish cutout, to the balloons hanging from the ceiling fan, to the tables of snacks, back to Spencer, then to Callie and Marie again.

“So you lied to me.”

Ari froze. “What?”

Cadence turned to her girlfriend with the most adorable pout on her face. “We’re not getting crêpes?”

Ari opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. On the other side of the room, Spencer exploded with laughter, quickly followed by Callie and Marie.

“That’s what you’re-”

The short inkling cut her off by cupping her face and kissing her very gently. Ari felt herself melt, and when they pulled away - just a bit too soon, in her humble opinion - she felt her hearts fill with joy as she saw her girlfriend’s face. That smile, those shining eyes...I did it. Mission Cadence’s big 21 is a success.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

It was only later in the evening that Ari stumbled across the mess that was the kitchen. She simply stood there and stared at the carnage. Then she decided that cleaning up was a problem for future Ari to deal with. Right now, all she wanted was to get some water and get back to cuddling her birthday girlfriend.

8. “Go on. Make a wish.”

They’d never been more scared in his life. It came nowhere near close to when Reef had torn them to pieces, or when the alarms had blared the minute Agent 3 had appeared in front of Octavio. They were terrified, because they knew that if they got caught, they would not live to see another day.

The tunnel was dark, damp and suffocating. Not being able to see anything besides the faint glow of their freckles only exacerbated the loud clamor of the soldiers chasing them - and they were already so horribly sensitive to sound. The noise pricked at their skin and their head, and they had to pick between controlling the tears streaming down their face and stopping the pained whines from coming out their mouth. They chose the latter.

I never should’ve done this. I should’ve waited. I should’ve woken them up. They should’ve come with us. I can’t do this without them.

The person in front of them suddenly halted. She was saying something, but their brain couldn’t seem to process her words. They only tightened their grip on her wrist, which didn’t seem to help since they felt a nervous flick of tentacles against their arm. They tensed. If she didn’t know what to do, if she was as stressed as they were, if she was lost...then they were utterly lost. And to be fair, they couldn’t exactly blame her. They fought the urge to curl up on themself and cry. Was it possible to die from crying too much? Right at this moment, they was perfectly willing to try.

A cracking noise split the air. Before they had time to realise what was going on, they felt their companion shoving them to the side. And this time, they were able to hear her scream.

“Run!”

Their body reacted faster than their mind: running was a simple command, and obeying it was committed to muscle memory by now. Everything around them trembled. Where should they run? They had no idea. All they knew was that they had to run.

Behind them, something crashed to the ground with the loudest crack they’d ever heard. A thunderclap of pain coursed through their body, and this time they couldn’t contain their scream as they fell to their knees, hands clutching their head in a silent plea to make it stop.

And then it stopped.

Now all they could hear was their own laboured breathing.

What...happened?

For a moment, they didn’t dare move. Because maybe if they moved, the world would fall apart again, or they would be crushed by either rocks or a steel-toed heel. But nothing stirred as they gently let go of his head. The air around them was completely, entirely and utterly still. They uncurled themself extremely slowly, both out of wariness and because their body was shaking so violently that they were certain they’d fall back down if they moved too fast. When they were finally sitting up straight, they turned around. The faint glow of their freckles bounced off of a wall of freshly-fallen chunks of rocks.

The tunnel...caved in.

Tentatively, they reached out to touch the stones. They felt freezing to the touch, which sent a harsh shiver down their arm. Horrible, horrible feeling. Don’t know why I did that. They rubbed their arm to try and get rid of the awful sensation. The movement seemed to calm their trembling as well. The purple glow dimmed. And slowly, a feeling of dread and apprehension creeped in their gut.

“...Marina?”

Their voice echoed and bounced off the walls around him. No reply came.

Is she…

They refused to finish the thought. They refused to think about the possibility that the other octoling might be…

But she might as well be. Because there was no way they could get back to her now. their limbs were weakened from all the shaking so they couldn’t even think about lifting a single rock, and they weren't that strong to begin with. No matter what they did, they would not be able to find Marina again. They brought a hand to their face and took a trembling breath as they tried to stop the tears from falling again.

A breeze blew past them, making their tentacles twitch. A...breeze? It was cold, so cold, but it felt fresh, unlike the hot and heavy air of the domes. They turned around. It was still pitch black ahead, which terrified them, but...if the surface was beyond that darkness, maybe they could stress themself enough to make their freckles light the way. And maybe if they got to the surface...maybe then they would be able to feel something other than pain.

They got to their feet, and thankfully their legs did not give up on them. They still felt like they might fall over at any moment, and their muscles were screeching with pain, but at least they could stand. Progress. Now...walking. They took one tentative step. Then another. Then another. Then some more. Then they tripped. They managed to grip the wall next to them and prevent another fall, but they immediately regretted it: the earth was squishy and wet and disgusting. They hated it.

But they continued. They continued to walk. They occasionally tripped, which earned them some scratches. They could feel the blood trickling down their legs, but they couldn’t do anything about it, nor did they care. The more they walked, the colder they felt and the stronger the wind was. They knew they were getting closer. The surface was just beyond their reach. Soon, they would be able to call the domes a distant memory.

Somehow, all they could feel at that thought was dread.

Then, they noticed that the tunnel wasn’t as dark. They had to blink several times to notice the difference, but they noticed it. A rush of anxiety seized their chest. I’m so close, they thought, clenching their fists. I’m so close. I can do this. Soon the ground sloped upwards under their feet, and while the roof closed in on them as they progressed, the air only grew fresher. A small hole came into view. Their heartbeats quickened. They could no longer stand, so instead they crawled, ignoring the loud protesting of their entire body. The hole was now an arm’s length away from them. Slowly, very slowly, they inched closer to it. They stuck one arm out, then the other, and once they were sure that their grip on the outside of the hole was secure, they pulled themself out of the tunnel.

A violent shiver shook their body.

They had made it to the surface.

They stood in a large, grassy valley, dotted with the occasional bush and tree. They were blooming. But they didn’t care. Because above them, an indigo blue sky stretched out. It was huge. It looked like the sky they’d always seen on the domes’ monitors, but at the same time it didn’t look like it at all. They didn’t have the words to describe it, simply because it was beyond anything they’d ever known or imagined. It was...beautiful? Stunning? Breathtaking? Magical?

They fell to their knees.

Above them, the stars twinkled. They remembered that old inkling tradition they’d read in a book one of their sisters had stolen. The one about wishing upon stars. They’d promised each other that they would do that once- if they ever reached the surface.

Go on. Make a wish.

But they couldn’t.

They couldn’t bring themself to make a wish when this was how they had gotten here. Sure, they had escaped the domes, but...they were alone. They’d lost Marina during the escape, and most importantly, their sisters had not come with them. Their beloved sisters, the only octolings they knew they could trust with their life down there. The only people that had ever mattered to them. They were up here, while they were still stuck in hell.

They were completely alone.

I don’t deserve this.

This time, they didn’t try to stop the tears. The endless sky above them grew lighter with the sunrise as they sobbed on the cold, dewy grass.

[kens-puku]

Hello again!! Well I was using my personal account @paradisearan (Daisy) and knew that you are pretty popular. I still don't really post anything in that account so that's why no one knows me aside from this account.

And not just me but when the game still has the Turkish server, me and my friends were following your edits/videos with a heart eyes too💓💓💓

My favorite one is this because I always wanted his hug more after the episode 16(or was is 17?) illustration😭💖 It's just so cute and funny in the same time, so Puku style.

I really wish to see him again so we can canonically hug Kentin once again~

oh and I'm still laughing at these;

Aaaah! Ok, I've seen your main blog around, too! We follow each other there too! (and you also seem to like mm ; v; I've been sooo into it lately hahaha) :"3 Aww, jeez, me popular? heeheehee~ I don't feel particularly popular anyway. lol SO Daisy it is!! Daisy is such a pretty name. I'm still so sad that so many servers had to shut down over time... :/ We really wanted to make a forum section on the US server for international speakers, but I guess it ended up kind of impossible... :( You and your friends followed my edits and even videos?? My videos are soo old these days too! ; v; I really wanted to finally upload all of the videos I'd recorded over the past decade from my first playthroughs, but so many of them are corrupted and have messed up parts now... I'd considered someday going back to parts that are missing, but that would be too much to spend for money right now. It'd be a lot. Thank you so much for watching and following, I really appreciate it so much! T vT You know, it makes me so happy that you like my silly doodle style drawings. They don't take much time to make, but I just really like to somehow quickly convey a funny scenario or moment before the adhd makes me move onto something else and entirely forget a project I was working on. The crappy doodles have an important spot in my heart as much as the ones I work really hard and meticulously on, so to know even a few people like those means a lot too. I just really like the dynamic with Ken and Puku. When it's small Ken, I like that Puku will try to take a defensive position for him, and when he's buff Ken, well... buff Ken can make for some really funny content, too. I just really like making him exaggeratedly buff sometimes. He's a small guy either way, but I like that about him. Puku's kind of a whimp either way, but she loves being crushed. lol I think Puku would like to be stronger, though it's funny how weak she is. She wants to pick up Ken like she would when he was scrawny, but dense muscle is heavier.

I want to hug him, toooooooooooooooooooo ; v; ♥♥♥

Ooooh man, that second one is sooo old, but people still seem to like it to this day, makes me feel so proud of that meme thing. :"3 I should attempt to re-draw those just for the hell of it. lol

[doshmanziari]

Architectural Criticism in 2021/2022 || Part 1.5

Before writing a fuller continuation of my previous essay on architectural criticism, I’m inserting a mini-essay that focuses on a particular piece of criticism. Let me be clear: I don’t see Kate Wagner, the person behind @mcmansionhell, as an enemy; I’m just using one of her articles as an example because I had, in my essay, already linked two articles of hers (more accurately, one article and an image from another), and I’d rather elaborate on what I mean when I write “...a vapid buildup to a politically convenient takeaway” than bring in an entirely different item. Wagner, in my view, represents a sort of destabilizing criticism that takes pleasure in tackling “dry” subject matter with breathless, Meme-heavy sarcasm. I find the tone off-putting, but I appreciate it as one attempt to invigorate and broaden the audiences of architectural appraisal. My issue is that by now the joke has overestimated its capacity for judgmental clarity. Really anything can be made fun of if you’re determined enough, and the more of an unquestioning audience you have the easier it is to believe everything you say is true or coherent.

The image was from this 2018 Vox article: “Betsy DeVos’ summer home deserves a special place in McMansion Hell” (a title likely devised by the editor; given the other residences Wagner has lambasted, I would be surprised if she truly believes this is among the worst). My observations won’t make sense unless anyone who is reading this reads her article as well, so please do that if you’d like to follow along. It should take only a couple of minutes.

What I’d first draw readers’ attention to is that Wagner spends the first four paragraphs on the United States’ beyond-vast inequality of wealth. Two of these paragraphs are the article’s largest, and the article is twelve-paragraphs-long, meaning that 1/3 of it is devoted to establishing a socio-economic context -- at least, that is the pretense. Once Wagner writes “...getting paid to make fun of DeVos’s tacky seaside decor is one of few ways to both feed myself and make myself feel better”, it is clear that her personal intent is a kind of vengeful mocking, and that her intent for readers is to prime them to associatively, knee-jerkingly despise anything which could come next with flat-affect “lmao”s. It’s hardly irrelevant to mention economic realities when examining luxury items (and what else is a mansion?), but Wagner’s subsequent analysis is not really architectural or even artistic: it is rather about looking at several photographs of a building, knowing who lives there and hating that person (and also imagining that they were responsible for all design decisions), and then mocking this-and-that in whatever ways one can devise. These grievances are understandable, but understandable grievances do not automatically lead to perceptive criticism.

Please look (perhaps again) at the first image. Note that only four, maybe, of the fourteen details Wagner chooses to focus on -- “no wry comment needed”, “these look like playdoh stamps”, “when you love consistency”, and “oh my god is this a shutter” -- approach anything vaguely resembling coherent criticism; and the other four images fare even worse (with the exception of the highlighting of an apparently absurd interior balcony). The rest are inane attempts at saying anything at all. Writing “hell portal” by an upper porch area may be funny for a moment, but what does it actually express? Well, nothing, except the author’s own irritation which will find whatever it can to announce its contemptuous sarcasm. Wagner’s captions will land only to the degree that the reader is humorously sympathetic.

The aforementioned remarks, excepting the one about the embedded chubby Tuscan columns’ Play-Doh-likeness, suggest that the worst thing a building can do is be formally heterogeneous. The implicative corollary here is that good architecture is eminently justifiable in all of its parts -- consistent, unified, rational. This is as fine a personal belief as anything else, but when it is wielded as dogma against architecture which has no interest in being a Petit Trianon it can only reveal its intellectual self-limitations. Wagner writes that “there is a difference between architectural complexity and a mess”, yet what that difference may be is hand-waved away. We just have to believe that thirteen different windows styles is too much. What’s the threshold? Does it depend on the size of the building? The types of styles used? Who knows.

Now of course bad architecture exists, and sometimes the failure indeed points to deficient editorial acumen; for architecture, like any other art, is as much about what’s included as what’s excluded. But in saying so little about the shingle style itself, Wagner seems to have given no thought to readers concluding that all shingle style houses are freakish -- more specifically, concluding that this freakishness is a damning transgression, and that no self-respecting, punching-up class-warrior would ever be caught dead sincerely enjoying their geometric, “exquisite corpse” escapades. In fact, the freakish tendencies of shingle style houses are just what make them such great fun to see, visit, or reside in. Wagner’s article, as far as I can tell, omits this possibility. When she writes, “Betsy likely went with this style because it is very popular in New England and in coastal enclaves of the rich and famous in general”, one is being pushed to presume that the only probable reason the shingle style exists or could be preferred over another style is to signal élite solidarity.

The photograph right above is of Kragsyde, a Massachusetts shingle style mansion, designed by the US-Northeast-oriented firm of Peabody & Stearns, completed in the 1880s. It was demolished almost a century ago, but the few exterior images of it which remain are, I think, fascinating -- maybe most of all for its enormous archway, possibly a porte-cochère, which has a thin, overextending keystone bizarrely driven into the top like a nail puncturing a petrified rainbow. I bring the building up because Wagner gives us no reason to consider why Kragsyde may have been a genuine architectonic accomplishment and not merely an oversized farce of contiguous pretensions. To the layperson hot off of the Vox piece, there may be no artistic difference between it and DeVos’ place, except that perhaps Kragsyde has a more consistent fenestrative application (would that make it better? if so, why?).

I appreciate that only so much can be said when you’re limited to less than a thousand words, especially when the issue is “complicated” (as the byline for Vox’s First-person series advertises). But the problem I keep coming back to is how DeVos’ mansion is treated as a stand-in for DeVos herself. This makes any architectural critique, no matter how pressed it is for size, flimsily presentist: its durability starts and ends with how alive the architecture’s resident(s) and political presence are. On some emotional level, this is pretty sensible: if we despise monarchical institution, we can find a sort of loophole to enjoying Versailles palace on the basis of it no longer being the residence of royalty. Our awe over its decadence and scope is intersectionally “admissible” on the basis of its having become a UNESCO World Heritage site. Similarly, one can imagine DeVos’ mansion being appreciated in a hundred years (should it still exist then) because the passage of time will have rendered DeVos’ person a historical fact, and perhaps more separable, and then tolerable, in that regard -- even if the building remains private.

But if architecture is, as a craft, critically whittled down to nothing more or less than inorganic expressions of social disparities, with every aesthetic decision a reflection of politically explicable taste, then we must assume that a great deal of the world’s most remarkable architecture is equally ridiculous and despicable, since so much of it was born out of great privilege and required specialized resources. I doubt Wagner actually believes this, because it would betray the entire premise of her McMansion Hell project, which is to demonstrate how so many modern day mansions are deeply unpleasant mounds of visual illiteracy, and cannot hold even a stump of a candle to the luminously learned and eclectic talents of prior great architects such as Mackintosh, Norman Shaw, Lutyens, or Ledoux. So what’s the takeaway here? As far as I can tell, it’s simply that if you hate Betsy DeVos, and if you care about class, you should hate her house too. And I do not think that that is architectural criticism.

[yaoi-yaoieverywhere]

I love that the last few years occasionally I get the rare person judging the URL I've had since 2011. It's really- it's just fascinating, what people will latch on to and judge for the sake of 'fitting in'.

(Below is a Vent, but tl;dr Can y'all stop clutching your pearls over an old fandom term I've had as my URL since 2011 when it hurts no one? I explain below why this is not a slur, the actual usage and some history, and why I don't feel like changing my URL. It's not in depth but if you want to know more there's plenty of research to be had.)

Real talk tho, it is funny. Yaoi is a bad word for you? It's so cringe to have been in early 2000s English Anime fandom? You want me to change a URL I've had for over a decade that references an old meme (Blank, Blank Everywhere) bc it makes you feel a little initial startle when you like content I've bought or made? So silly. Why? Do you think it's- a bad word? A word that's just a genre?? Not a slur??? We don't call couples Yaoi, Yuri, Het That's just. Wh- Where did this come from, is all I'm asking. I remember hearing RUMORS that SOME ladies were doing it at cons (tho I never saw proof) around the time this started. I can understand the initial "what the fuck" but c'mon now. A lot of you making comments have CLEARLY never seen that.

And to be clear, I don't ship Real People. Apologies to the RPF shippers if that sounds rude, but it's just not something I do. So, y'know, don't like ~accuse me~ of calling irl gay people a term that's used for a genre of manga??

I think one of the protests has been like. "Oh, Yaoi means its gay content made for ladies". ...I am reading and writing. Queer fanfic content. On the internet. Primarily made by and for. Queer people. Which does include some ladies like me. Yaoi Manga is bought by a variety of people. Including, notably, actual gay men in Japan. It is extremely hard to get actual Queer Created, Queer Reputed content in Japan- it is literally kept under lock and key in most of the places that decide to stock it "for the children". So when they're curious it's a lot easier to look at what? Yaoi. Titilating, soft, romanticized depictions of young men in lust. Or love, occasionally.

I'm Queer gang. I've been Queer a long time. I know the delicacy of balancing decorum and comfort zones and even the turmoil going on between the older and younger generation over using Queer as a term. But, on a much more lighthearted, minor scale, I'm not going to stop using this url with Yaoi in it just because you don't research or understand the term and go with your knee jerk "I think I heard someone say some lady at a con call a gay couple that". Or even worse. "It's old, so it's bad."

You're not going to get some dudebro on the side of the street spit "Fucking Yaoi" at you. You're not going to have some dismissive teacher say "You have got to stop being so Yaoi." People in the school halls don't laugh and point and say "Look, it's the Yaoi." People on TWITTER, THE IRL HELL THAT IT IS, Are NOT going to tweet "lmao yaoi loser" if you're gay. They might if you post your otp, I suppose, if they're resulting to 8th grade bullying tactics which is surprisingly common on the internet. If people are calling you Yaoi in discord or something and it hurts your feelings, I'm a bit confused, but that sounds like a friend group problem that needs sorted imminently. Good luck with that.

You're okay. I'm not here to hurt you. This word is not here to hurt you. My URL is a joke that has become a lot less easily recognized over time, and that's okay. But it's not here to cause you harm. It's also not going to get you cool points if you diss it, but that's like, a you problem.

[xhxhxhx]

~ show us your big discord posts ~ UwU

some oy my Discord posts, partially cleaned up:

On Conservatism:

secular social and cultural conservatism is about maintaining traditions and hierarchies, so it should always appeal more to older folks than younger ones, right?

like, if you're at the bottom of the pole, as you are when you're a kid, it's hard to see the appeal of the hierarchy, right? you might not have found it that hard, sure, but it'd always be easier if you were at the middle or the top.

if you've lived with a set of norms and traditions for decades, you have, well, a reliance interest in them. but it's hard to turn them into a propositional political package, something you can teach as doctrine, because its appeal is ... informal? lived?

you could socialize people into it, through example, but ... the evidence for it is implicit, tacit. you're not usually going to have a special revelation that turns you into a committed conservative, or a striking argument, at least not one that turns you into a secular social or cultural conservative.

but then, you’re an American, and American conservatism was always a little bit of a special case. there's no ancient aristocracy or clerisy to point to, not generally; the political-cultural traditions that most American conservatives point to are barely a few decades old.

because the core is a special kind of ... propositional liberalism: the Founding, the Constitution, a society of ordered liberty and free exchange, the rights reserved to the states and the people, the freedom of individuals and families. 

so maybe the dynamics are different in American conservatism, such that you can learn and adopt it as a set of propositions, which would make the age gradient less sharp than it is elsewhere

On Dynasties:

[i have never seen a meme about how we need a democrat's child to take up that president’s mantle]

the national Democrats seem to have a good number of ~dynasties, and I don't think it's unique to any faction or ideology

it's an information cue, a heuristic, and given the low levels of information most voters have, it's going to be a pretty powerful one. (you can only keep so many bits of information in your head!) you know what "the Clintons" are, you know what "the Kennedys" are, you know what "the Bushes" are, here's another one

it's especially important in candidate-centered regimes, rather than party-centered ones, like in places outside the old Northeast belt, where party machines are weak and candidates have to prove themselves in open primary contests.

(although maybe the effect is too small to detect and the patronage-style regimes of the party-centered contests would look the same, dynasty-wise)

On Liberalism:

[I heard that the right is much more unified than the left?]

yeah, but the right is just much less divided on demography and policy than the ~left. the right is a coalition of the "normative", whereas the left is everyone left over, so that makes for odd company, like the Blacks and Dixiecrats of the midcentury

the left is a coalition of interests, whereas the right is an ideological coalition, which makes Democrats more ideologically divided than Republicans. see Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins’s Asymmetric Politics (Oxford, 2016):

lmao

"Republicans are not only the more ideologically homogenous party, but are also more likely to conceptualize politics as an ideological conflict over political principles between the left and the right. Democrats instead prefer to think of politics as a contest among social groups competing with each other for influence over the government. Each party therefore maintains distinct criteria for judging policy proposals and outcomes, with Republicans prizing compatibility with ideological doctrine and Democrats emphasizing the protection or advancement of group interests."

I guess it's ironic that I pair my ~informal, ~group-centered understanding of conservative formation with a ~propositional, ~ideological understanding of conservatism as a movement

On Identity and Ideology:

[interested in if this changed recently with trump doing a thicc "white identity politics" thing]

enh things generally don't change all that quickly. you would have to check to see, but those long-term trends -- and this has been going on at least since the 1950s, when these surveys started -- don't get wiped out in one or two cycles, even if they might ebb. 

[how does this relate to like the Southern strategy?]

the Democrats understood white Southerners as a set of interest groups, whereas Republicans understood them as a set of would-be ideological conservatives?

like, the conservative appeal to the white South is, like, "you were conservative all along, join the conservative party" and, if you don't understand yourself as "a conservative" yet, then "our ideology preserves what you find valuable”

[conservatives hint at black people sucking tho? it seems very thinly veiled behind talk of values to me]

maybe? it's a trade-off between appealing to people's self-understanding of themselves ("I'm a good person") with useful heuristics for leaders ("you can tell I'm racist because I'm saying the racist thing, so vote for me, you racist")

so the more sophisticated the electoral environment, the more flattering the appeal, and the less sophisticated, the more vulgar. although you can apparently get a lot of mileage out of being vulgar, as our current president shows, so our discourse was probably set at too high a level before. we needed to dumb it down a bit.

[i mean that thing where some bush ran an ad with a big burly black guy criminal saying democrats were bad because they were lenient to him. or "inner city welfare queens", which is basically a meme at this point]

but I think those messages get a lot more mileage and replay on the left than on the right, because they offend the group-centered identities of the left. 

"this is offensive to a critical member of my coalition; friends, please pay attention to how offensive the other party is being," rather than, like "you're a liberal, so vote for the liberal party"

[i guess i'm confused whether you are claiming conservatives actually care more about values than libs?]

I think part of the story here is that the white South was just much more educated by the 1980s than it had been in the 1950s or the 1930s, so the appeal had to be more ... sophisticated

take Lee Atwater, George H. W. Bush's campaign manager:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

I think Lee Atwater is talking about how political discourse is increasingly ideological as the white South moves from a Democratic stronghold in the 1950s to a competitive two-party system in the 1980s and ultimately into the Republican stronghold that it is today

"you're getting so abstract ... all these things you're talking about are totally economic things ... [and] "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing," where "abstraction" signifies a move from group-centered talk to ideological talk

and like, at some level all ideological talk should be rooted in something you find valuable (tradition, liberty, white supremacy) but part of its value is that you can reason with it, discourse with it. you can hold a coalition together with it, with a sort of political minimum: small government, low taxes, states' rights.

and you can hold together people who are explicitly or implicitly white supremacists with people who wouldn't think of themselves as at all "anti-Black", because you can say "we're talking about taxes, not race.”

so the Democrats are at once advantaged -- because they're the bigger tent, and can make special appeals to one group after another, and don't even have to think of themselves as ideologues -- and disadvantaged -- because there's something grubby about being a coalition of "special interests", and you can ding them for it.

[it's always funny to me that rural whites and economic elites don't count as "special interests"]

it's a difference in how liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans talk about things!

conservatives don't say "I'm doing this for rural whites and economic elites", whereas liberals do say "I'm doing this for African Americans, Hispanics, the poor, the LGBT" etc

alright I'm gonna leave to watch some anime