#adolescent problem

[wildestheart4ever]

Just considering the potential horrific deaths the JL may have suffered under someone who has intangibility in their power list

Like! There’s a general agreement that Dan eviserated the JL [The magic users probably lasting longer] in his timeline but I don’t think we touched on the horrifying potential.

We are all perfectly aware of the gory violent potential Dan is capable of [*Eyeing the unspoken murder/suicide of his human half and how that might have gone*].

If he can kill off his Fenton half [and inflict whatever misery he might have gleefully put Masters through] without a thought, what do you think he would do to the caped community?

Especially if you go the “JL ignored Amity Parks’ call for help” route

Also: It wouldn’t have been a long ongoing battle. This dude would probably disappear from days to weeks at a time [Either rejuvenating in the Ghost Zone or making himself the ghost’ problem]. The heroes would be on edge just waiting for when he’d come back

Ten years of being this unkillable thing’s punching bag

Don’t mind me, just suddenly vying for a violently gruesome fic of Dan against the Justice League.

A hopeless-No light in the horizon-utter desperation fic

[chicago-geniza]

Some of my most frequent audio/visual/audio-visual hallucinations are ads--which, insert paper on the sociocultural construction of psychosis content, blah blah blah--the point is all day I've been hounded by a fake Zohran Mamdani ad, not from the campaign, a grassroots meme ad By Millennials 4 Millennials, that uses Charles Barkley's voice to endorse "Come On & Slam & Welcome 2 The 'Dan" on a slant rhyme despite the long and short a pronunciations. There's an accompanying Space Jam animation feat. Looney Toon Zohran doing a layup. I'm in a hell of my own mind's making

[itsmrshamilton]

Brad Pitt being the executive producer on two shows about abusive/dangerous men ruining women's lives (The Maid & Adolescence), has the same vibe as Drake being the executive producer on a show oversexualising teenagers in high school (Euphoria).

[profounddefendorcrusade-blog]

I feel bad for Starlo. (pt. 6)

I think the main thing we were supposed to see as Star's character flaw wasn't that he was acting proud/arrogant/reckless/badass (I mentioned that it's fine for him to act that way because he deserved it after everything good he did and obviously I still mean it 110%), but how that proud, charming guy was never the real him. He literally lost himself trying to feel worthy and please everyone in town. For years he's been acting the role (for a noble cause) but the price was him losing touch with the nerd he is.

Yet STILL, if only everyone had been a bit more gentle with him, I bet he'd have toned it down during the WE section, and even before that. But they all decided to let him know the truth at the worst possible time, right when he was supposed to make Clover his deputy. Right after they attacked the kid because they were jealous. It was supposed to be the PEAK of Starlo's day and they randomly threw the "we never liked any of this" bomb at him instead of trying to talk it out BEFORE things escalated. I'd be pissed too.

Oh yeah...

... his brother doesn't take him seriously apparently and doesn't realize that staying positive and strong 24/7 is tougher than it looks, especially with Starlo's insecurities (and yeah being a farmer is hard work, but so is being in Star's position; on the contrary, it's even TOUGHER) ...

Orion should try being an entertainer for a day and see what it's like, let alone doing it for years

...Solomon says how Star thought him and Crestina didn't support his life choices...

... and how he rarely talks to his family...

...and it suddenly came to me: in all these years, they didn't ever bother telling him that they did support him? They didn't bother trying to reach out to him more? Understand his passion (Ceroba doesn't get it either; once again, I don't blame Starlo for caring about Clover so much, that kid understood)? Have an honest talk?

No wonder Star stopped interacting with them for the most part. Maybe him feeling worthless came from his family? Who knows (or he was bullied as a kid for being a nerd). In any case, he clearly had to deal with these feelings by himself.

This man's been through some stuff.

P.S. I know he has flaws like everyone, but you've gotta ask yourself the important question: WHY? where did all this come from? But clearly nobody in his life ever asked themselves this. So it all kept building up till he almost killed his deputy for... status. He was SO desperate to feel valued and get his friends back (who made him feel less alone.. but ultimately just left when he needed someone the most, at least ONE person) that he was ready to go all the way to achieve what he'd been lacking his entire life: *feeling like he MATTERED.*

I wonder If he'll ever go 100% back to being his true self. Slim chances :'( this is him now. Half farmer half sheriff

[deutsche-bahn]

Are stressbedingte Geheimratsecken a thing or is this just something that happened to me

[bettyhofstadtdraper]

the way I agonize over my fic you’d think I was writing for some big fandom with lots of eyeballs on me but no. five people are reading this shit. and boy am I terrified of what those five people will think

[sugarcult]

I just read this Opinion piece about the Netflix show Adolescence, posted by USA Today. USA Today does not have a comment section in its online articles, so I can't respond directly to the piece, but I have a lot to say.

The author states that the show ignores Jamie's chaotic school life as a possible contributor to his actions, which is an analysis she builds a chunk of her Opinion piece off of and which I completely disagree with. We see Jamie's school as a place where teachers are not involved with their students' lives and generally don't care about them because the kids are "impossible," as Mr. Malik described them. We see unspoken judgment from the detectives against Mr. Malik when he says this.

Though they don't call him out on his stance, this judgment weighs heavily on the episode. Mr. Malik leaves the children unattended, knows nothing about Jamie's home life, or even what he's like as a student. He's a newly qualified teacher, seemingly swamped with work and the behavioral issues of students in his class, and is deeply in over his head. He senses that the detectives judge him for not knowing more about Jamie, and he defends himself against the unspoken accusation. The kids are impossible to deal with, how is he supposed to do any better than he's already doing?

Mrs. Fenumore, who guides them through the school, doesn't personally know Jamie, nor does she know Jade, the student she assists them with interviewing. She wants Jade to believe that she is there on behalf of the school to support her, but Jade clearly does not believe she or the detectives are there to do anything but blame Katie for her own murder.

Mrs. Fenumore does not know how to assert herself as either trustworthy or an authority figure with any of the students we encounter. The students are jam-packed into classrooms, and they are much like animals running a zoo, with the teachers appearing underqualified to gain control of the classrooms the detectives enter. We see four different teachers directly: Mr. Malik, Mrs. Fenumore, Adam's male teacher, and a female teacher we see interact with Jade. This female teacher is the only one we see who interacts meaningfully with a student. She appears to know a little about Jade's home life and tries to calm Jade down after she assaults Ryan, but she is ultimately unsuccessful. She is also unsuccessful at even keeping Jade in the room to wait for the parents to arrive. Another adult character we see at the school in episode 2 is the headmaster, who is very clear that he does not actually care about the students and cares more about the inconvenience that there may be an inquiry into the school or calls to make changes such as adding metal detectors at the school.

As we can see, the show gives us five examples of adults at the school who are either unwilling or incapable of meaningfully interacting with the students in their care. This appears to be at least in part due to underfunding and understaffing. I don't think it is possible that we as the viewer are supposed to see the chaos at the school and NOT takeaway the idea that his school life has contributed to his mindset and actions. The adults around him don't know or care to know about him as an individual, or about his problems. He gets good grades, and the staff still know nothing about him.

We see Ryan and Fredo being picked on quite blatantly by students for their association with Jamie. This includes Ryan being physically attacked and called a murderer by Jade, who even agrees later that she doesn't believe Ryan hurt Katie. (Ryan did supply the knife, but I digress.) We learn in various capacities in Episodes 2 and 3 that Jamie was being bullied by Katie quite directly in a way that, even when adults WERE paying attention, they couldn't perceive as bullying. Jamie only admits that it was bullying when he is asked about it directly in Episode 3. When they mention Katie's comments on his Instagram posts during the interrogation, he doesn't tell them she was actually bullying him, and he doesn't tell his parents or lawyer either. It's Adam, who didn't even know Jamie, who deciphers this as bullying and relays it to the detectives. Yes, the show focuses a lot on social media verbally, continuously referring to Katie's comments on Jamie's posts, but we have more than an entire episode and a half dedicated to understanding how this bullying originated at school, and how none of the adults ever noticed it.

Another thing the author of this piece claimed is that the messaging of the show casts boys as villains simply for being boys. That is also wildly inaccurate based on what we learn in Episodes 2 and 3. We learn why Katie was bullying Jamie in the first place, which ultimately stems from Katie having been bullied as well. Jamie very transparently asks her out shortly after her nudes are circulated by another boy to seemingly everyone else at school. Jamie's self esteem was so low due to real life external and internal forces, as well as the messaging he appears to have internalized from social media, that he thinks the only way someone would date him is if they're "weakened." Katie is being sexually harassed by others and accurately assesses Jamie's approaching her as him using this harassment she's experiencing for his own benefit. The bullied becomes the bully. Others back her up on it, and her bullying comments on his posts are liked by a lot of people. She has successfully gotten a bullying campaign off the ground.

In Episode 3, Jamie tells his psychologist all of this, and he asks her to agree that Katie "was a bitch," implying that she deserved to die for what she did to him. We see a lot of blame cast about in this episode in an open-ended way. We know from Briony's questioning that she believes Jamie may have learned misogyny and uncontrolled anger from his father. We know from Jamie's statements that he thinks any reasonable person would agree that Katie deserved to die. Briony also establishes that Jamie and his male friends don't talk about their feelings, another facet of toxic masculinity. We know that Ryan at the least thought it would be appropriate to scare Katie by having Jamie pull a knife on her, and maybe that it would have even been funny.

We watch Jamie beg Briony to affirm his assertion that Katie was a bitch, that what she did was wrong, and defend the implication that her murder is no major loss. He wants her to agree that he himself is a victim of Katie's, and he's not entirely wrong. He is a victim of Katie's, and of many other societal shortcomings and abuses. But the messaging of a show tells us, yes, you are a victim, but that doesn't excuse murder. It does not tell us that Jamie, as a boy, is capable of great evil against girls, or that he was always destined to be a predator by virtue of being a boy.

What the show does do, however, is show the very common day-to-day occurrences which can slowly add up to gender-based violence. It shows us the making of someone who hates a girl for rejecting him, thinking he is deserving of her, and lashing out in response to bullying by committing an ultimate act of violence. We even see that Jamie doesn't see himself as an incel or as someone who follows Andrew Tate-style rhetoric. Jamie resents Katie. Jamie murders Katie after she rejects him, but the driving force behind this is not just that she is a girl and he can't handle rejection. It is both of those things, and bullying, and a lack of support from the adults around him, and an unhealthy relationship with his own masculinity and self-image.

The idea that Adolescence portrays boys as being uniquely capable of violence due to being boys reads a lot like media illiteracy. The author of this article has sons, and of course she does not want to believe the true messaging of this show: that any boy could be driven to be capable of something like this. That's a hard pill to swallow, the idea that it could in fact be your own son who could do something so horrible, as we see the Millers grapple with in Episodes 1 and 4. They thought they were good parents and that they were doing their best. Their daughter appears to have turned out alright, or at least not a murderer. But that's the point of Adolescence, and the very reason why it's called that: the pressures experienced every day by modern adolescents can lead them to do something this heinous. Just as the Millers thought they were good parents of a normal son, so do millions of people around the world whose children are in pain from bullying nobody notices, whose minds are being shaped by the messaging they receive at home, at school, from their friends, and online.

I'm a parent of a son myself, and this show was incredibly difficult for me to stomach. Because while schoolboys murdering the girls who reject them is pretty uncommon, the things Jamie felt and experienced to lead him there are not uncommon. They are incredibly normalized. Girls bullying boys the deem beneath them. Boys desperately in need of acceptance. Boys taking advantage of girls for their personal benefit. Children whose parents don't truly know what goes on in their personal lives. Schools with staff who cannot or will not protect children from one another. Quiet, otherwise well-behaved boys who learn to be powerful by hurting others.

All of the above happens to our teens constantly. Adolescence isn't saying, "Every boy is violent, and this is just part of their nature," as the author seems to have interpreted it. Adolescence is saying, "Is it any wonder a boy could do such a horrible thing, when all this suffering is so normalized as being just a part of adolescence?"

My takeaway from the show was not that boys are evil, or that they are solely to blame for the people they become. My takeaway was that this could happen to any one of us or our children, and that we are incredibly lucky that it doesn't happen more. And that it is absolutely devastating to know how painful the lives of our children can be without us knowing anything is wrong at all.

[skyborneveggie]

You know now that I'm thinking about it, musical theater does tend to be the story medium that fails the most when attempting to impart the audience with some kind of societal commentary. There are many hard-hitting plays that do it brilliantly, but for musicals it just isn't there. While what makes a show special to me is the emotional journey of the characters, it's often despite the mangled simplification of whatever message they were trying to get across. It's kind of just a given going in that you're going to have to throw your hands up and say "well, what did you expect?" The only musical I've ever seen that handled its subjects with nuance and gravitas was A Strange Loop, and that is a very unique & alternatively structured experience.

I have to wonder if it's something about the structure of musicals themselves that makes it difficult, or if it's all about the money behind them & backers being afraid of letting creators say anything real at the risk of alienating a certain audience & losing money.

[denpachannel]

the commodification of my interests really made me harbor conflicting feelings of disgust and endless pity for the generations after me like FUCK. these poor people will never experience genuine interest or exploration of hobbies they’ll only ever live like a human sack strapped to a feeding machine of what everyone else is consuming brother EUGHHHhh they won’t know the beauty of stumbling upon an interest in the wild. Only ever will know it in the soiled context of “look what the algorithm and my peers are forcing me to look at. I think I like this and it’s my hyperfixation now” HYLICS!!!!!! That’s so fucking sad. It’s all about void filling and pissing into your eyes bickering about everything. I miss when you were automatically alienated and bullied for liking cartoons.

[the-maddened-hatter]

Honestly it's low-key kind of wild to me that the two main flavors of dentist are A. literally so amazing and fastidious, one of the if not THE most important healthcare providers attending to our food holes, treating and preventing major problems and horrible pain, and sometimes even detecting stuff that's not directly their facet of work like EDs, reflux, cancers, wild shit like that 10/10 important and amazing

Or B. I love money soooooo much please give me some to bleach your mouth and put large strips of very painful metal to make your bite bones more aesthetic angles and also make you feel bad about everything you've ever done in your life

[beatsforbrothels]

The Difference Machine - Problems

[hammill-goes-fogwalking]

Hammill on my banner looks so sexy, like the sort of 80s punk new wave goth (andrew eldritch reference 👀)

[spicyicymeloncat]

Btw shout out to s13 for giving wu character development like that, it did him good

[dietbeverage]

Sometimes I remember a conversation I had with my mom around the time they were learning about my younger sisters adhd and she said "a lot of people with adhd need to do something to occupy themselves to help their brains think. A lot of them doodle or bounce their leg or do something like that in class and it helps them focus." And I remember thinking yeah I do both of those things but I'm built different lmao I just do those for fun and not bc of adhd. Girl...

[videosloth]

me when it gets above 75°F

[kiatheinsomniac]

when you finally try to ask your parents for help and all they say is that it’s your fault for having one thing that you really enjoy and helps you cope 👍😁