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steve0discusses · 4 years

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S5 Ep 3: Apdnarg is Really Hard to Spell

Yo guys, people are getting vaccinated, the sun is parting through the clouds, and I felt so nice that I even stopped listening to quite so many throwback 00′s BTS mashups (and yet I keep clicking on these dissonant catastrophes thinking “this time it’s got to be better. This time they’ll figure it out.” and like, no. Turns out you can’t match Brittany’s Toxic with BTS’ Black Swan. You can’t do that.)

This must be a sign that things are getting better. If anything, it means my personal tastes are improving. I mean I only clicked on like 3 “Dark Academia” Playlists where I could pretend I’m some sort of spooky witch in an abandoned library with a bad music player and basic taste in classical music (like can we ban Satie from Youtube for a little while?). Hell, I might even do a prompt update to this blog!

Yeah, you heard me, I’m actually going to stay ahead of the update schedule for Yugioh Abridged (maybe. I haven’t actually watched cuz of spoilers, I just noticed the thumbnail pop up on Youtube and was like “Damn it, they came out of hiatus??? I got hurry UP.”)

Anyway, speaking of the sky parting.

I’ll have you know my bro said this is actually more like a circumcision and it was one of the worst thing I have ever heard.

We get a chance to take in this lineup of confusing and varied character designs, and Joey. who is...still Joey.

The animators probably had to hold a strike in order for them to put Yugi in the audience, lets be real. There are TOO MANY PEOPLE in this shot and one is wearing a turban where you draw every single wrap. I hope those artists charged by the line.

Tea has a subplot where she’s just very frustrated with everyone she knows. They have been traveling together for like many weeks and got trapped in a foreign country so I get it. But at the same time, it’s kind of hard to picture Tea with female friends.

Because right now you got this 12 year old child, the other duelist who does not care about anything besides cards, and Kaiba’s 3 dragon cards that we’ve all collectively decided are female.

Hell it’s almost like the writers are asking themselves why Tea is here. Maybe they forgot. There’s no more ghosts to bus, no more people to knock out with her ass with random Olympic feats. Tea’s just sidelining.

(read more under the cut)

Mokuba is a itty bit bit taller this season, and so I guess that means he can legally climb on top of the cherry picker in order to give a riveting speech.

Really says a lot about Mokuba that he is so unphased about talking to, I dunno...an entire planet of people. Kind of a shame we never see this courage from Mokuba used for anything other than talking really, really big and giving everyone around him a really hard time.

Mokuba takes a moment to dunk on Yugi Muto, as is Kaiba tradition.

And then introduce the first pair of duelists, which obviously must be between the few people in this tournament that we actually know and care about.

Thankfully, in between last episode and this episode, Yugi has figured out who his own Grandpa is. This is a relief, because Yugi is such a mess, that I was fully convinced it would take over half a season for him to recognize it. I mean how long did it take him to figure out he shares a body with a ghost? Like half a season?

Instead Yugi recovered gracefully from not recognizing his grandpa, but it’s not like he bothered to tell anyone else, so the rest of our cast is just gonna be like “Is he my hairdresser? The guy who delivers my mail? Who is this guy who made absolutely no significant changes to his outfit or voice?”

Like sometimes this show goes full Spongebob silly kid’s show and you never know when to take it seriously or not. They might be sacrificing the entire cast next episode. I really don’t know. But for now their big concern is who is grandpa??? Like an innocent card version of “Are you my Mother?”

Faced with public speaking, Yugi decides to have a melt down.

We have seen him face monsters, we’ve seen him on TV dozens of times, he’s been in multiple competitions...but give a speech? Of course he can’t do that. The kid doesn’t attend enough school to know how to do that. Them’s learning skills.

And that was when a newly assembled wife-jet spliced through the sky like a souped up razer scooter and deposited 1 fully equipped Seto Kaiba in a Buzz Lightyear jetsuit.

THE RECOVERY.

Seto always watching over his Brother, ready to save this awkward party if it kills him (and it really should, that suit is held together by two seat-belts), making sure to get on that platform before Yugi starts going off about how he’s half an Ancient Egyptian. (Ah, life before social media. You could just be hella famous and also half a dead dude and people would just not know. I kinda miss the time before I knew literally everything about everyone.)

Please admire how close those flames are to setting Mokuba’s heavily hairsprayed mane completely alight. It would be an unforgettable spectacle.

These were absolutely just random ass jet packs that Gozaburo Kaiba made to kill hell tons of people, right? Like Seto found it in the family cabin, clutched to the heart of some crispy fried corpse and was like “neat! Mokuba! I found a cool toy!” and just plucked that thing out of that skeleton’s clutches and has been flying around for months?

Like this is Seto Kaiba’s Butter Glider, right?

Seriously what type of vehicle license do you need for one of these things? RIP My ‘Seto only has a scooter license’ headcanon.

Which I’m only even thinking about because I’ve had to try and make an appt with the DMV for days to get a freakin REAL ID. I went to sleep in 2019 and I could fly on a plane. I woke up in 2021 and it’s like “Want one last screw you?” and just...can 2020 please stop screwing me over? It’s March.

Anyway, the Jet is removed soon after, so no, this is not part of his new outfit. He goes right back to his Post-S4-Trauma-Normcore.

After wrestling this competition out of his brother’s hands and confusing everyone in the audience, Roland must have gotten the memo to cut the microphone before Seto got too excited and we were quickly ushered on to the next stage of the tournament.

One sec...the BTS Mashup playlist I just clicked on did a Black Swan X 7 rings mashup and it’s the worst thing my ears have ever heard.

Holy crap. I had to actually turn down my volume. Like...Ariana Grande already has music that has way too many overlapping singing parts on it--and then lets just stick a 52-person boy band on top? That’ll fix it. Yeah. Go ahead.

Wow. Even I had to change the song and you know how much I enjoy pop culture mistakes.

Spot the Mickey but like a million times easier because it’s a Massive Dick Shaped Dragon.

Yep. That’s my grocery shopping outfit. Except maybe not a lab coat and a duel disk. Wish I had a duel disk, that would make social distancing just a hell ton earlier. Just a “Yo, only one person in checkout, please” and then bap them on the head with a propelled discuss/hologram.

Anyway, Grocery shopping/Doctor man dueled the Purple Hair Boy, and considering that Purple Hair got screen time and shook Yugi’s hand once--I think that Doctor man doesn’t stand a freakin chance.

Good. I hate him.

Also, every time he breathes he’s gonna fog up his glasses. I have experience in this area. He can’t read his own cards in the same way I can’t read my phone if I’m in the refrigerated aisle.

So the way this tournament works, is everyone has to sit in the stadium to watch the show. Kinda like showing up to a football stadium just to watch a recorded TV monitor...but then again...that is how it feels to watch a football game at a football stadium when it’s live (at least with the tickets I usually get.)

And as we watch Grandpa waiting for his competitor, we find out that his competitor (Joey) is too busy eating snacks to give him the time of day.

Why do cartoon hot dogs always have lettuce? Is that seriously supposed to be relish? Or is there a place in the world where you put lettuce on your hot dog?

Sorry, bro has just informed of his favorite hot dog order, which is absolutely terrible so I will share it with you: a Five Guys hot dog with ketchup, mustard, pickle relish, onions, mushrooms, pickled peppers, and you guessed it--topped with freakin lettuce.

My own kin. How am I over 30 and just finding out that my baby brother thinks it’s normal to walk into a restaurant with normal god-fearing law-abiding people and order lettuce and mushrooms on a hot dog?

I have fully failed him.

The rest of this episode is watching both Joey Wheeler and Mokuba have a shared panic attack while Seto does freakin nothing.

Please remember that Seto has both a jetpack and a dragon wife plane and could have easily solved this problem. But nah.

Then again, Seto Kaiba has given this crew so MANY rides, that maybe he’s tired of being the Soccer Mom for the team?

Like they don’t actually say this episode, but Seto was the one in charge of like...this entire place, do you think he made the 2 for 1 special just to get Joey where it hurts the most? Or does it actually not take any subterfuge to screw Joey Wheeler because he’s just naturally this way?

Like Mokuba wasn’t there when Joey was told “stay right here, and then we will all go together to fight Dartz” and Joey was like “I’mma save Mai from herself although she told me not to!” and then he Hella Died. But, Mokuba did see the result, AKA, Joey’s dead body being carried on the back of Tristan. Maybe Mokuba never realized that Joey died because he went out of his way to be late?

Lets do a tally of every time I can recall with my dodgy memory that Joey was threatened to be DQ’d/pretty much was DQ’d either by his own fault or no fault of his own

-When he wasn’t allowed to go on the boat to Murder Island because he was a stupid nobody kid who did not have a dueling glove

-When he wasn’t actually supposed to be in Pegasus’ tourney and was, in fact, secretly using half of Yugi’s entrance ticket the entire time

-when Bandit Keith stole the ticket that Joey got from Yugi so then Joey had to borrow Mai’s ticket although she had just used it so it really shouldn't have counted. Because, really anyone could have just piggy backed off of each other’s ticket until the whole boat went through that castle.

-When his account was hacked to get entered into Kaiba’s tourney when Kaiba very clearly told him he could not apply solely because he was Joey Wheeler.

-When he was late to his sister’s eye surgery because he got mugged by Marik’s Rare Hunters, so she almost refused to do the surgery.

-When Joey got possessed by Marik, and as Marik, threatened to murder everyone else in the tournament including both of the Kaiba brother’s who’s tournament it was, and then chained himself to Yugi Muto to throw both of them to the bottom of the ocean.

-I think there was a point when he threatened to attack Kaiba in Kaiba’s own tourney while not possessed? Like several times?

-when he got struck by Lightning and almost did not stand up fast enough after being struck by lightning, which is apparently a type of DQ in Duel Monsters.

-When he tried to save Mai from getting hit by a fireball, but then Yugi did it instead, and then so many people were standing on the dueling platform that Kaiba couldn’t possibly DQ them all.

-When he entered the restricted area of the blimp in order to hassle Kaiba into landing the Blimp, which Kaiba did not do.

-When Marik killed Joey before Joey could press the “go” button on his duel disk to play the card that should have won Joey the match.

-When he was dueling a lawyer in a digital universe but then the dice was like...weighted? So Noah had to walk over and be like “The hell is this weighted dice? This is my perfect digital world? How did you even do that?” and then Joey won because the match was no longer legit.

-When Joey yelled at Noah too much and so Noah turned Joey to stone for being a rude ass spectator

-When Mai was like “Wheeler and Valon, listen closely: do NOT murder each other” and then Joey did a murder on Valon so she was like “I guess I have no choice, I was very clear” and killed Joey straight up.

-When Joey decided to block Seto’s fireballs while Joey Wheeler WAS a playing card, somehow disrespecting both Dartz and Seto Kaiba at the same time.

-When Joey was playing cards but then got absorbed into a giant Leviathan and basically couldn’t play anymore after that.

-There’s probably hell ton of S0 stuff I just haven’t seen yet.

-This episode

And Joey runs fast for a montage of wacky things that really have no business being in a theme park. Things like this:

(remember when Bakura almost died from a rock that ended up being a balloon? It comes full circle.)

The stuff that the Kaiba brother’s think is normal and fun.

Anyway Joey fights off a bunch of hologram snakes and bats and everyone is like “Should we tell him it’s just holograms???” And it’s like wow, guys, how many times have these ‘holograms’ straight up murdered Joey Wheeler and everyone else on this cast? Too many? Because I have a google doc with so many deaths on it. 7,805,844,048, to be exact.

Anyway, he gets there with five seconds to spare and Mokuba’s like “well at least you were still entertaining while we filmed you in front of a live audience being a total spaz for 15 minutes straight, so I’ll let you go.”

Grandpa and Joey start playing, Joey completely oblivious that this is just an older Muto, while Hawkins walks up awkwardly and is like “hey guys. I’m so sorry about this.”

(welcome to my font choices, for those new here, I have to make weird font color choices to make sure it’s legible for the colorblind and also for the non-colorblind. This one is not much contrast, so I may change it up in the future, but for now, this is Grandpa Muto’s new font. I apologize to every graphic designer reading this. Please don’t tell anyone who has ever hired me for graphic design about this blog.)

What’s funny about this exchange is that after they find out that Yugi’s Grandpa is Apdnarg (HOLY my brain cannot get around the spelling for that, and I will not change it in the caps. I cannot do a ‘pdn’ ever again), they don’t stand on his side of the field or anything. Hawkins is legit Solomon Muto’s only fan during this exchange and like...damn. Way not to back your Grandpa, Yugi.

Yugi immediately strides up to Mokuba to non-confrontation-ally inform him that he has stepped over a line and Mokuba is like “what are these things you say called ‘lines?’”

According to Mokuba, Solomon Muto begged him to be in the competition so he could relive his glory days (glory days making no sense here, because the game has only been released for the past 15 years, so glory days is like...the before times that can only be referring to disgraced archeologists and Pegasus ((who is, in his own way...a disgraced archeologist, too))) and Mokuba was like

“You trained Yugi Muto, right? Hey that’s good enough for me. This drama is gold. People will eat it up. Hell yes. Don’t be afraid to abduct him a little bit. Maybe trap a couple people in a digital hellscape for a little while? Now we go by Pegasus house rules here, so fire as many lasers as you want, but just make sure not to hit anyone in the face. Oh man, we are going to be swimming in cash. Love it, Muto Sr, love it.”

But I dunno, I feel like Grandpa won’t make it past next episode. It is Joey. We kinda need him to make it past Ep 4 of the arc. If Grandpa Muto becomes the new Joey Wheeler, that will be a weird transition for this show to make.

But that’s all for today, as always, here is the link to read these in chrono order becuase there’s SO MANY that you don’t need to read backwards--don’t do it--just use the chrono tag (and I don’t know if you can add compound tags, but I did separate the Season from the Episode, so if you write S4, it should only pop up stuff from S4. I didn't’ do that to seasons 1-3 though because I just...didn’t.)

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

And because I brought it up: here it is, the best BTS Mashup that I found on my deep dive. Like legit--this one isn’t a mess:

youtube

Most of other ones are horrible in a fascinating way. Like I’m not even a BTS fan, I think I sort of age out of that metric, I’m just bored and quarantined. And lets be real, we all appreciate a good bop when we hear it.

#yugioh #ygo #yu gi oh #photo recap #recap #episode recap #yugi muto #seto kaiba #mokuba kaiba #Joey Wheeler #Apdnarg #Grandpa muto #tea gardner #tristan taylor #professor hawkins #and then I ranted about BTS #but please don't quiz me about BTS I know nothing about them aside from the music #I actually thought there were over 12 of them because every time I see them perform it feels like an entire stageplay production of people #like a 101 dalmations situation where every time I saw BTS there were 3 new people #I assumed it was like the Gorrilaz where people just show up and then disappear in a rotation #but no. There's 7 BTS members #that can't be right #there has to be more than 7 #is this a berenstein bears situation?#how is there only 7?#I swear there used to be like 16 #and they would be introduced like here's jimin and Jungkook and red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and pea #like is google seriously telling me there's only 7 kids in this band?#this is the biggest scam google has ever played on me #this weird alternate timeline that not only has an epidemic but also only 7 members of BTS

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sunakith · 3 years

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hi! sorry in advance for this long ask 😥 i read metamorphosis in your old blog and reread it here again. i remember the asks you got in your old blog with all of the possible theories about WHO the snitch could possibly be: from yn’s friends to suna’s and the wildest one, suna himself. so i’d like to share my theory up to ch20.

THE SNAKE:

* is someone who has been telling yn’s mom about her whereabouts for a while (even before she officially met suna and his friends)

* the only people who yn is close to AND trust are 3: kuroo, akaashi and sora

* the task at the begging was easy: yn didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, was always cautious around people. so it was easy money without getting yn in trouble(?)

* something interesting: the meeting between them and yn’s mom. they had to choose a cafe that was not only suitable for mrs LN standards BUT also a place away from prying eyes (i see it as if someone saw them it would be hard to explain why they were together 👀)

so the snitch CANNOT be any of suna’s friends bc not only they never met yn in person before she went to suna’s tattoo shop but there was no way they could know yn’s whereabouts and mrs LN didn’t know about their existence till after the family brunch at the fancy restaurant (yn told her parents she didn’t know them)

the snitch could be one (you said it was only one) between kuroo akaashi and sora

1. KUROO - probably yn longtime friend among the three. they come form the same family background: rich kids plus their parents are friends. contrary to yn’s parents, kuroo’s seem to be less strict and support his (side/temporary) career as a youtuber but it doesn’t mean they don’t have expectations on their son. he’s studying law school and one if not both of his parents are lawyers (him saying he would use his parents old books bc he didn’t have some at the begging of the smau) - he has to follow his parents steps either bc he wants to or has been forced/induced on wanting to be a lawyer.

even tho he said multiple times he was broke, we should think on HIS meaning of being broke. he has a certain life stile so when he says he needs money it doesn’t mean he cannot afford to pay for rent (does he even have to pay? does he own the place he lives in? and even if he was broke and needed money for food he could easily go to his family’s home.

is he the snake? for me, no he isn’t (and it was confirmed in ch21)

* as he said - (ch21) excluding the easy money - there was nothing for him to risk his friendship with yn. even if yn’s mom doesn’t stand him it didn’t stop her from being friends with his parents

* he’s the one who could really understand yn’s situation with her parents. what it means coming from a wealthy family and your parents put a certain pressure on you and your future wether intentionally (the LNs) or not (the Kuroos)

2. AKAASHI - the perfect guy according to yn’s mom.

* he doesn’t come from a wealthy family, his tuition is paid by yn’s parents (no one knows this info) so he really does need extra money bc he has to cover for his other expenses and support his own family

* he’s close to yn but not enough to know her feelings/doubts (sora)

* the way mrs LN talk/message the snake like she genuinely cares about them

* when yn ditched the dinner with the sakusa’s and her parents, yn’s mom with sakusa went to her apartment (they found sora with atsumu). yn was with suna and he decided to drive her back home, that’s when yn’s mom and sakusa met suna and yn panicked bc of sakusa’s presence. mrs LN asked info about suna to the snake and they didn’t know who she was talking about (sora was there and knew suna was with yn). only kuroo and akaashi weren’t there/didn’t know suna met mrs LN

* akaashi went back home for a month and during that period he missed certain things about yn x suna relationship also he didn’t check that often the gc.

* the brunch (ch20) - akaashi wasn’t there: we don’t know yet how yns mom and sakusa knew where to find yn. did the snake told any of them the address OR did yn ratted herself out by posting the place on her ig (it is public if im not mistaken)? the snake could easily forward the picture to any of them if her profile was private and they didn’t know the address (akaashi)

3. SORA - yn’s only female friend

* like akaashi she doesn’t come from a wealthy family (as far as we know) and she doesn’t go to college but works.

* yn’s mom dislikes her (at least on the surface)

* she doesn’t understand why yn is/was so obedient to her parents, it’s hard to understand from an outside pov (kuroo in a certain way can even if his parents aren’t that controlling)

* the cafe meeting with mrs LN. the way the place should be secluded 👀

* as i said before telling yn’s mom about yn’s life was easy money and there was nothing «interesting» in her life to be hidden from her parents

the snake (for me) is one between sora and akaashi.

AFTER CH21 im thinking more on akaashi bc of the convo between the snake and sakusa where sakusa tells the snake that what they are doing all of this for yn’s sake. akaashi doesn’t know how yn truly feels about suna nor her doubts/worries before they became official (only sora knows) BUT if the snake ends up being sora…(i guess that would be the biggest betrayal yn could get) she deserves an oscars as best actress in a bc not only she played matchmaker with yn x suna but she’s basically yn’s (only) confidant

last but not least let’s talk about my man (sorry yn) suna. not to be a suna apologist (im the first to call his ass out when he’s bitch) but could you really blame him for not wanting to listen to yn? he opened up about his past with her and in one of the first chapters - don’t remember if it was the gc with the twins or he told to yn - was mentioned how his last relationship or the most important one he ended up being emotionally hurt by his partner and he decided to stay away from relationship for a while. so imagine what/how he felt when sakusa told him he was yn’s boyfriend when she not only told him sakusa was just a family friends but they are (suna x yn) supposed to be in a relationship.

yn postponing to tell suna the truth about sakusa (them being together in a arranged relationship bc of their parents business) ended up hurting him. there was never a right moment (the sooner the better) but she should have explained

or at least vaguely mention it to him either when she told him about her parents (when they opened up about each other) or after the apartment incident BUT definitely before they started dating bc she basically lied to suna.

i think that’s all 😵‍💫

The fucking thought & detail that went into this ask!!!! I love it!!!!

Okay, so let me try to answer this properly without skipping over anything, but also without giving away any key parts of the au lol.

So, I did mention this fact on my old blog, but I didn't mention it here, so the snake has been betraying Y/N way before she was introduced to Suna, & his friends. So that fact alone eliminates Atsumu & Osamu from being the snake. You are also correct about the snake having it easy at first. Because there wasn't anything to report seeing how she never did anything until Suna came into the picture. That's when the snake started gathering information. But even at first they were hesitant to say anything, hence why Y/N's mom had to reassure the snake that it was okay, & that all of this was only in Y/N's favor.

We know now that Kuroo is not the snake, because in chapter 21 Sakusa had a conversation with the real snake, & pinning Kuroo out to be the backstabber was all part of his plan to keep the real snake safe. So that means, Sora, & Akaashi are the only ones left.

Sora & Akaashi do not come from wealthy families. Sora makes a very comfortable living tho with her job as a bartender. Akaashi is being put through school by the financial support of Y/N's parents ( this was also a fact I mentioned in the introduction chapter back on my old blog. ) But Y/N does not know about her parents supporting Akaashi, the only one that knows that information is Bokuto.

With Akaashi being financially supported it would make sense for him to be the snake right? Because in return he's doing something for them. But Sora could also very well be the snake. Yes she hates how Y/N parents are treating her, & she wants Y/N to be happy. But there could be a chance that she's the snake because she just simply wants to be on Y/N's parents good side. & at the same time try to convince her parents that Suna is the best thing for her. Because the snake does tell Y/N's mom about how they think Y/N is happier when she's with Suna, & they try to get her mom to see that. Though her mom is a bit stubborn, but maybe that's also what the snake is trying to do. Hoping that the mom will back out of this plan Y/N's family has for her, & let her do what she wants.

You know get on their good side & then win their trust in order to save their friend. So that could be a possibility why the snake is Sora.

Sooo who is the real snake??? 👀👀

& lastly, I agree! Y/N definitely should've told Suna sooner. But in her defense, she was scared that he'd walk away after hearing how much of a complicated mess all of that is. Sure she told him about her parents & stuff like that, but in Y/N's mind that's nothing compared to being in an arranged engagement against your will. She was scared that Suna will leave before she figures out a way to get out of going public with the fake engagement. She was hoping she would figure out a plan that would get her out of it before Suna found out. But it all back fired :(

#thank you for taking your time to send this!!!#<333 #anon #asks #sm au: metamorphosis

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crystalstar8 · 4 years

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Knights of the Night (ch 15)

Chapter 15

Ch 1, ch 2, ch 3, ch 4, ch 5, ch 6, ch 7, ch 8, ch 9, ch 10, ch 11, ch 12, ch 13, ch 14, ch 15

https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139240/chapters/71536491

pairing: Jungkook x oc

genre: vampire au, college au, twilight, romance

word count: 2,459

warnings: blood (obviously), kidnapping, child kidnapping, needles, France

notes: vampires, vampire au, college, college au, so many twilight references, blood, needles, kidnapping, children, homelessness, dance, ballet, flashbacks, romance, slow burn, probably no smut, idk yet tho, France, French things, attempted genocide, inaccurate French history, bisexual main character, @strawberriewithchocolate-blog @mozy-j @daechwitad-2 @zobadak @fallenstar-7

summary: Catalina starts college in a small town all the way across the country. She doesn’t know anyone and isn’t exactly looking for friends. She just wants to focus on dance. But when she meets fellow dance major, Jimin, and adventurous, fellow freshman, Jungkook, Catalina ends up discovering a whole new side to the small college town; one that is dangerous but oh so enticing…

Catalina was nervous. She had changed her outfit almost ten times and was already pulling a sweater out of her closet for an eleventh. She eyed her suitcase in the corner of her room. No, don’t open it, you’ll have to repack, she told herself. Her phone buzzed from her bed. It was a text from Jungkook.

JK: I’m on my way

“Shit,” Catalina mumbled. She looked between the sweater in her hand and the one laying on the floor. The one in her hand was a bit nicer so she pulled that one on. She tucked it into her skirt, then slipped into her ankle boot heels. As she was checking her hair and makeup in the bathroom mirror for the last time, she heard her front door open. Rounding the corner, she saw Jungkook standing in the hallway, tapping the snow off his boots on the rug. Catalina grabbed her coat.

“You look so cute!” he said as she came over for a hug.

“I always look cute, what are you talking about?” she said. He grinned, his nose scrunching up and his eyes turning to crescents. He looked good too, in a turtleneck under his peacoat. It was amusing to her, knowing that he still had a few lingering marks on his neck. They had both dealt with enough teasing from their friends over the past few days, they definitely didn’t need Jungkook’s family on that train as well.

“Ready to go?” he asked. Catalina nodded and followed him out the door, locking up behind her.

The car ride was short, only a minute or two since they lived a block away from each other. There were two other cars in the driveway, which Jungkook parked behind. As they got out of the car, Jungkook said, “So, my brother is kind of annoying. Just warning you. He’s in law school and he’s a bit of an asshole about it.”

“Be an asshole about your film major right back to him,” said Catalina, making him laugh.

“Easy,” he said. “I’ll just start talking about my favorite directors and artsy films.”

His house was warm and inviting, as it always was, but today, it was cleaner than Catalina’s seen it in a long time. Maybe ever. A small Christmas tree stood in the corner, decorated with mismatched bulbs and ornaments.

Jungkook’s mom came out of the kitchen, pulling oven mitts off her hands. She saw Catalina and her eyes lit up.

“Catalina! It’s so good to see you!” she said, pulling her into a hug. “I’m glad you could make it.”

“Yeah, me too!” Catalina said. “I never get to see you guys, so I’m glad to be able to spend some time with you all.”

“Of course, you’re always welcome,” she said. “My husband and I are always so busy with work, I feel bad. Anyway, come into the kitchen. The food’s almost ready. Jungkook, go help set the table.”

Dinner was beautiful, and Catalina had fun listening to Jungkook’s family try to embarrass him by sharing childhood stories. He wasn’t embarrassed though, always laughing with the table and sharing his own details about the experiences. It sounded like the family hiked and camped a lot while the boys were growing up, so there were plenty of adventure stories to go along with that. Catalina asked about his parent’s jobs and they told her about what they do at the hospital during their overnight shifts. They were both nurses, but they also did volunteer work every chance they got. Jungkook’s brother was indeed a bit of an asshole about being a law student, but Jungkook cracked everyone up by talking about his favorite film, “Persepolis”, pronouncing it “Pear-say-po-li”.

Catalina had a great time, but she didn’t stay too late since her and Jungkook had a flight to catch in the morning. Jungkook dropped her off at home that night, kissing her softly in the car before she got out.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at six.”

“I can’t wait,” she said, pecking his lips once more before getting out of the car. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said.

It feels so good to say that, Catalina thought as she took the stairs to her apartment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The airport was crowded with people rushing to travel for the holidays. Catalina was thrumming with excitement. She hadn’t seen her mom since before her first semester. She had never lived away from her home before, never away from her mom for so long. She couldn’t wait to see her, and to introduce Jungkook to her. They found their flight easily enough in the giant building, and soon enough, they were in the air, en route to Detroit.

Catalina’s mom was waiting for them at the airport when they landed. As soon as Catalina exited the gates, she ran, giving her mom a long hug.

“Oooh, dios mio, how I’ve missed you!” her mom said, holding her tight.

“I missed you too, mom,” said Catalina. She pulled away and looked over at Jungkook. “Mom, this is my boyfriend, Jungkook.”

“What a cutie you are!” her mother said as she gave Jungkook a hug as well. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Mrs. Diaz,” said Jungkook.

“Ms. Diaz. Or you can just call me Lucía. Come, lets go home,” she said. “This place is too crowded.”

Catalina sat in the passenger seat of her mom’s car on the way home. It wasn’t a long drive, their house was just outside of the city. During the drive, she wondered if she should reach out to her old friends. They had never once texted or checked up on her while she was away, so maybe it was best to leave them behind.

The house looked exactly the same as when she last saw it and it gave her a sense of comfort to come back to the familiarity. After Catalina and Jungkook got settled into her old room, her mom called them downstairs to help bake cookies. While baking, Catalina and Jungkook told her all about their classes and professors. After the cookies came out, they had fun decorating them in weird and interesting ways. Jungkook decorated a gingerbread man with red eyes and fangs, which Catalina took a picture of to send to their friends.

Later in the evening, Lucía took them all out to dinner at a nice place in downtown Detroit. The restaurant was beautiful; bistro lights dripped from the ceiling, branching out from the twisting paper tree in the center of the dining room. Over dinner, Catalina told her mother about her friends in California, and about their trip to the lodge. Her and Jungkook left out the parts about their friends being vampires.

“I want to know how the two of you got together,” said Lucía. “She didn’t date much in high school, so this is so exciting to me.”

“I had a girlfriend in my senior year,” Catalina mumbled. Lucia waved a hand.

“That doesn’t count,” she said. Catalina glanced at Jungkook, who was frowning after hearing this exchange. Catalina put a hand on his knee under the table and decided not to argue.

“Well, we met in our French class,” Catalina started. “We became friends and we hung out a lot for the first few months of the semester. I mean, I never really knew I had a crush on him at first, I knew he was attractive, but I only saw him as a friend. Then one day, he kissed me, and we’ve been an item ever since.”

Lucía had a hand over her heart as she listened.

“That’s so sweet,” she said. “You two are a beautiful couple and I can see you’re so happy with each other. I’m just…so relieved that you found a nice boy and-“

“Mom,” Catalina interrupted.

“I just didn’t want you to fall back into those high school phases you were in,” she said. “I was so worried I would lose you to the wrong kind of people. There’s so many influences online these days and I just wanted you to be successful in life. That kind of lifestyle comes with drugs and-“

“I’m gonna go to the restroom,” Jungkook said, standing up and giving her shoulder a squeeze.

“Mom, stop it,” Catalina said. As soon as Jungkook was out of sight, she said, “My boyfriend is bisexual too. And so are some of my other friends at school. They’re all amazing people and I would do anything for them. I don’t like when you say things like this.”

“Catalina, you know I love you no matter what,” her mother said. “I just want the best for you.”

“It’s not something anyone can control,” Catalina said. “Whether I fall in love with a man or a woman, I’ve always hoped you could be happy for me no matter what.”

“I am happy for you,” Lucía said, reaching over to take Catalina’s hand. “You’re following your dream and you seem so happy with your life right now. I think I need to get used to the idea of my daughter being bisexual, there’s just so many bad connotations that come with that community. At least from when I was growing up.”

“Things are different now,” Catalina said.

“I know, I know,” Lucía said. “I think I just need to get used to this. At the end of the day, I just want you to be safe and happy. I think a man would be able to provide for you better later in life.”

“You of all people should know that’s not true,” Catalina said. “You raised me alone, and we were always pretty well off.”

Lucía raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “You got me there.”

Catalina giggled and squeezed her mom’s hand.

“I love you, cariña,” Lucía said. “Just remember that.”

“I love you too, mom,” said Catalina.

Jungkook came back and Catalina took his hand as soon as he sat down.

“I’m sorry if what I said earlier was offensive,” Lucía said to him.

“It’s okay,” Jungkook said, flashing a smile.

“I’m trying, it was just so different when I was young,” she said.

“It’s really okay,” Jungkook said with a chuckle. “This sounds exactly like the conversation I had with my own mom when I was sixteen.”

Lucía laughed and the conversation turned to the topic of Jungkook’s family. Dinner went on peacefully. Catalina was glad she got this conversation off her chest. She had been struggling with that topic ever since she came out in high school. It really sounded like her mother was trying to understand, and Catalina couldn’t be more grateful.

The next day was Christmas Eve. Catalina and Jungkook took a day trip to Frankenmuth, which, as soon as they arrived, they realized was a bad idea. Frankenmuth was packed with people, but the pair still managed to have a good time. They ate dinner at the Bavarian Inn and took a carriage ride around the town. They walked the underground mall and the outdoor shops, but only bought gifts for Lucía, since everything was terribly overpriced. They didn’t even shop for each other, since they both confessed they had already bought each other Christmas gifts a long time ago. Snow covered the ground and everything was wrapped in Christmas lights in the little town. Just walking through the beautiful scenery hand in hand with Jungkook was wonderful.

They returned home late that evening, wrapping their gifts in Catalina’s room and going to bed afterwards.

Christmas morning was pleasant; Lucía cooked them a big breakfast, then they opened gifts in the living room. Catalina had two gifts from her mom. The first one was a Visa gift card and a heartfelt letter. The second gift was a quilt. Each patch depicted a different cat from t-shirts, towels and linens.

“You’re grandmother started making this before she passed away,” Lucía said. “You remember her nickname for you?”

“Gatita,” Catalina said, tears prickling her eyes.

“I found it just recently and I decided to finish it for you,” Lucía said. “Just something to remember her by, something your children can use.”

Catalina felt a tear run down her cheek. She wiped it away and got up to hug her mom.

“This is wonderful,” said Catalina. “I love it so much.”

“I’m glad you like it, cariña,” her mom said, hugging her back tight. “I know I don’t have a lot for you, like when you were a kid, but I didn’t want you to have to lug a bunch of stuff back to California with you.”

“No mom, it’s perfect,” she said. “This is perfect.”

Lucía then opened Catalina’s gift, which was a silver bracelet from Frankenmuth. Jungkook had gotten her a handmade scarf and hat set, and she had given him another Visa gift card.

At some point during the day, Catalina made sure to find time for herself and Jungkook. Lucía went to pick up groceries in the afternoon, which was when Catalina took the opportunity to give Jungkook his gift.

They were pressed together on the couch, both holding a little gift bag in their hands.

“You first,” Jungkook said, handing her his bag. She took it and opened it, finding a little box in the bottom. Her heart beat fast as she opened it, revealing a ring with the moon in a glass bubble. She gasped and handed his gift over frantically.

“Open this right now!” she said, pulling the ring out and putting on her middle finger. He did, his eyes getting wide as he opened the slightly bigger box.

“No way,” he said, looking up at her.

“How the hell did this happen?” Catalina asked, holding in giddy laughter. Jungkook pulled the necklace out of the box and put it on. The charm on the chain held the moon in a little glass bubble. The same moon as the one in her ring.

“We bought each other the same thing,” he said, laughing.

It was the waxing half-moon from the night they shared their first kiss in the vampire den.

When Lucía came back home, they immediately showed her their unplanned gifts for each other. She laughed for about ten minutes. She then recruited them to help cook dinner, which was an exciting ordeal. Catalina was happy to learn how to cook all of her favorite dishes.

The three of them ended up having a beautiful dinner together, bright with laughter and conversation.

The next few days passed in a blur. They went out, cooked together, played games, and watched movies. Before they knew it, the week was over and it was time for Catalina and Jungkook to travel again for the next leg of their trip. Catalina was reluctant to leave her mom, but she was absolutely filled with anticipation for her stay in the cabin.

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fishmongeringstudies · 3 years

Text

thirty one: sloth

a life of depravity. video games. manga. white cheddar popcorn. a life of emptiness. video games. manga. white cheddar popcorn. a life of whims. video games. manga. white cheddar popcorn. white cheddar skin. white cheddar ceiling. white cheddar smeared on the inside of the closet door, upon which hangs two canvas tote bags full of crumpled receipts.

this summer i am walking in a circle around an old memory of myself. looking back on the last twenty years it seems that i have spent every school break in more or less the same fashion with the occasional interruption of a vacation or a trip to visit family in some faraway country. after a semester of over-exertion and chasing beautiful girls with eyes for everyone but myself i tend to retreat inwards, which many may find a waste as school breaks are precisely when one leaves the cage and goes careening wildly down the street, but not everyone is a freak of nature. some people are freaks of god. other people are just freaks.

at this point i am inclined to believe that we are all freaks, which removes the purpose of the freak-non-freak delineation to begin with, so instead let us say. we are all normal. because we are all people. and people are all a little insane.

it isn't an honor. but we're honored all the same. that's how you carry your contradictions forward, like bodies slung over your shoulder that you'll put down one by one at every bar you walk into as an offering to the barkeep, who pretends you're not there until you slap a dollar bill on the counter.

did you know? there are dollar bills in america. in singapore, the dollars come in coins. big fat golden coins. i like to stack them in my palm and pretend i'm the sun.

i am discovering a hundred new ways to lie on a bed and use my laptop's keyboard without snapping my wrists in half. we may have snapped them into quarters. but we will not touch the halves.

the other day i got out the sewing kit in my luggage and mended my favorite pair of shorts. i've been meaning to tell you this for a while. i'm inexplicably proud of myself for doing it, though i guess if i prod a little deeper it's probably got something to do with the process of recovery, of mending, of putting back together. anyway it's an old pair of shorts. my mother bought them on vacation in korea in 2013. eight years is a long time to be a pair of shorts. but i have lived longer.

the waistband within which lies a strip of stretchy fabric that may have been lycra or just some generic elastic or another had been falling apart through most of the spring semester and because the stretchy fabric is white and the shorts are black it started to look like my underwear was peeking out everywhere i went, and i was left with no choice but to fix it. i own exactly one pair of good shorts. i don't have the willpower to buy more shorts. purchasing things is its own kind of torture. and the mended shorts look very good. there's a bumpy ridge along two stretches of fabric where i darned the flapping tongue of the waistband shut. when i run my fingers along it the texture is rough and uneven, like choppy waves in a baby pool. i like it.

consider this: if we keep fixing things then we will never run out of things to break.

as a literature student i am inclined to turn everything into a circle. i think it's easier to live that way, to assume the laws of cause and effect apply to all living things, myself included. the alternative is too lonely. the alternative is to think that this room with its soprano air-con unit and its creaky bedframe will go back to being nothing when i leave in ten days. have i mentioned i'm leaving in ten days? i'm leaving in ten days. i'm doing it. i'm leaving.

there's a joke in zootopia (2016) where a sloth takes something like three whole minutes to laugh at someone else's joke. it's not very funny. some people take trains. others travel by foot. your point is?

my point is summer is hot and all my bones are crooked now. i doubt they'll ever be straight again, which is perfect because their owner never was to begin with, so now the physical literature and the actual literature can act as cross-references for each other. the dentist sticks one hand in your mouth but it's not enough so she sticks the other one in there too. you're overcome with the desire to bite down but you need to keep your part-time job. it's hard to pay rent. you're twenty-seven years old. you're living in a world our parents didn't want to give us out of fear that we would realize they had nothing left in the closet but cobwebs. it's dying.

anyway i play my video games and i read my manga and i stare at the empty popcorn bag until it gives me the answers to the really important questions like what is the meaning of life and how come some babies are born with hair and others aren't? and i ignore some text messages. and i reply to others. and people get annoyed with me and i lie in bed and i think about stories where no one dies and friendship is the literal key to magic. and at the end of each sticky mango-colored day i get my laptop out and i pull open this blog and i write about it. i write about what living looks like. are you listening? this is what living looks like. like a mountain cut in half to let the morning through.

06.20.21

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innuendostudios · 5 years

Video

youtube

Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.

It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.

Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.

But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.

How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?

If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.

Step 1: Identify the Audience

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

And so we come to Gabe.

Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.

Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.

This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.

Step Two: Establish a Community

Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.

The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.

These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).

What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.

Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.

The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.

Infiltration is deliberate.

The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.

Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him

Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.

The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.

(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)

You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.

This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.

What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.

Step Three: Isolate

There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.

This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.

But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”

In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)

Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.

As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.

Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.

Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.

To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Step Four: Raise their Power Level

(...and they say we ruined anime.)

Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)

The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.

People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.

And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.

And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.

And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.

Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.

Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.

And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.

And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.

It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.

When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”

This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.

I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?

They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.

Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.

Step Five: ???

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?

This is a machine for producing lone wolves.

Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.

He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.

But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.

From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.

Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.

The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.

But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.

Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis

Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.

If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.

And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.

Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.

Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out

He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.

He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.

He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.

He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.

His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.

He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.

His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.

He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)

He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.

As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.

Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.

Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.

He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.

And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.

Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.

What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.

The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.

I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.

But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.

If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).

But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.

#video essay

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katecarteir · 5 years

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writing prompt masterlist #1

Of course, there’s 75 million prompt lists out there but i figured there’s nothing wrong with making my own. Send me a category + a number + a pairing and i’ll write you a fic. Okay to reblog and use :) (x)

Fake/Secret/Etc Dating AUs:

my parents keep setting me up on blind dates but in reality I’m dating you and it’s so you help me get out of them

i hate commitment but my dad’s dying wish is to see me get married and you’re an old family friend i ran into at the airport on my way to visit him so hey let’s get engaged

you need a plus-one for your brother’s wedding so i’m going as a favor but there’s been a misunderstanding and now your whole family thinks we’re engaged

i’m mad at my parents so i ask you out because they wouldn’t approve of you and you’re well aware that i’m just using you but you agree because you find it funny but hey you’re actually super sweet

there’s this really creepy person hitting on me and i don’t know you but you pretending to be my partner completely saved my ass thanks how about i buy you a drink

we’re just really touchy friends and we get each other gifts all the time but everyone thinks we’re going out and we let them think that but why are you getting upset about me going on a date we’re not actually together?

I’m sorry you always thought your love for me was unrequited but on to more important matters YOU’RE GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING SO YOU HAVE A DECISION TO MAKE YOU ASSHOLE!

Our mutual friend apparently has been waiting for us to get together and so they’re very angry/disappointed/upset when they find out that the reason we kissed last night was because we were black-out drunk

everyone thinks we hate each other and we keep that front up in public, so we have hilarious pretend fights and squabbles and pranks

when we were little I accidentally mentioned that I had a crush on you but I always thought you didn’t hear me because you just looked at me weird and never commented but now we’re in high school and omg you just introduced me as your boyfriend/girlfriend/datemate wtf we never discussed this

friends to lovers aus

You’ve got a date tonight and you asked for advice on what to wear but I’m so in love with you and damn you look good in the outfit I picked out for you

You’ve liked me for ages and were really obvious about it and I didn’t like all the attention but now you’re over me I really miss it and fuck I think I like you too?

You want us both to get in shape and I hate working out/running but your ass looks really good in shorts oh the things I do for my friends and their nice asses

Our best friends are that awful ‘cute’ couple that make-out in public and call each other “sweetie” and “sugar” and “babe” and god they’re awful let’s talk about how awful they are – develops into “shit we’re the awful couple now”

Celebrity/Famous AUs

listen, you may be a famous (and extremely attractive) guitarist, but that gives you no right to practise on the electric at two a.m when we live right next to each other.

We broke up and I used my feelings to write songs and now I’m super popular and you want me back

we decided to make a fake vlog drama for our subscribers and they all think it’s real but jokes on us we end up actually liking each other

I run a prank channel and you were some innocent bystander I pranked for a video but then it turns out hey, you’re also famous online haha shit

we met and started talking but i didn’t know you were a rising star until i noticed cameras following me wtf

you’re a reporter and i think you’re super cute so i’ll only give you personal interviews to help your career and also get you to talk to me more

I’m a celebrity and I have a secret social media account and we started talking online and now we’re close friends but you want to meet up oh shit

I’m a celebrity and I may or may not be following your blog which is dedicated to me. reading your comments and tags are hilarious and very flattering and I’m somewhat smitten

You’re an actor/other famous person that I really admire and I just saw you in the street and as I was debating whether or not to say hi you came up to me and started flirting what do I do??

wedding/kids/marriage/long term relationship AUs

we’ve been dating forever, and you just caught the bouquet at our friend’s wedding

remember when we were in high school and we swore that if we were still single at 30 we’d marry each other, well hey guess whose birthday it is

i’m a runaway bride/groom and you’re driving my getaway car

I suddenly bumped into you after years and wow you look good but holy crap is that a kid?? since when?

you had a breakdown because the baby wouldn’t stop crying and you kept saying how you weren’t ready and how you couldn’t do it

whenever my kid starts crying I just hand them to you and then they just stop and start smiling

“i’m so sorry that my child pointed out how your shirt- actually nevermind i agree, that shirt is horrendous”

i always tease you because that’s just our thing we tease each other but for some reason you snapped at me and are you okay? what’s wrong?

my in-laws despise me GREAT but around you they’re super nice so you don’t believe me

neighbours AUs

You always complain about how loud I am (whether it be TV, video games or music/musical instrument is up to you) and this is the first time you’ve actually knocked on my apartment door and given me a lecture there rather than giving me a phone call, but I’m not really listening because I didn’t realise I had such a cute neighbour

you never open your door for children on halloween so i always pay the kids to smear your door with shaving cream

my printer isnt printing anymore and my papers are due tomorrow so im on my knees in front of your door begging to use your printer when the old lady from above passes us and thinks im proposing to you

we always run into each other on the stairs but we’ve never said more than hello but when we found out that we both hate the other neighbours, we became friends

i came home drunk and wouldnt stop knocking on your door. when you open i keep telling you to get out of my apartment

after a rough party night i find you sleeping on the stairs but since im still a little asshole all i do is put a blanket over you and a pillow under your head

Please help me, I know you have a kid and my sibling just dropped their baby on me where’s the button to put them to sleep?

I’m stressed and sleep-deprived, please let me pet your cat.

I have really weird dreams and you have really weird dreams so now we’re in this contest to see who has the weirdest dreams.

Strangers/Meet Cute (or meet very NOT cute) AUs

We were sitting next to each other in a public place and I saw a mosquito on you and my instincts just acted before my mind.

We mixed up our clothes at the laundry service and I have nothing left to wear and every thing you wear is too big/small for me.

We’re at a comic book store and if you tell me your superhero is better than mine I’m gonna have to punch you in the teeth.

There are no table left at this restaurant and you let me sit at yours since you’re alone.

I’m a single grown-up with busy friends but I want to go to Disneyland so I drop a message on a forum to find someone like me to go wear silly Mickey ears headband and stuff ourselves with cotton candy.

My computer broke down so I called an IT and now I need to find a reason to call them back so I delete important files and download adwares and do all kinds of stupid things.

I almost dropped something and in my fumbling attempts to stop it from hitting the floor I accidentally projectiled it at your face and it’s a really nice face I’m so sorry

first day at a new job and oh fuck my boss is the person I drunkenly hooked up with last weekend/night

I wanted to go on the ferris wheel but there has to be two people to a cart come on random person let’s go oh wait are we stuck at the top? Fuck

Our mutual friend set us up on a blind date and I thought I’d hate it but you’re actually… kind of funny? But because I expected to hate it in no way am I going to let you change my mind just because you’re gorgeous and funny and intelligent oh no my friend is not winning this

college/high school AUs:

i went on a date with a boy who had plans to take me to dinner and drinks. but he lost his wallet at a pizza place so we just walked around the neighborhood, sat in the park and talked.

we’re in the same study group but we dont talk but you brought goldfish and im starving

we have the same notebook and we took the wrong ones home so i used your notes on my open book test

you were my elementary school crush but you moved away but somehow we end up miraculously going to the same college and i barely recognized you because holy hot damn you are more attractive than i remember?

I tripped over on my way to this party and I’m bleeding profusely from the grazes on my knees and you’re a complete stranger that pretty much jumped me the second I walked in the door to play nurse

ive had a crush on you for 3+ years and now youre going out with my best friend and i definitely havent locked myself in a toilet cubicle to cry

We’re in different debate classes and I was constructing a case on the board and I come in the next morning and you’ve replied to all my points really well?? But I don’t even know your name? And oh shit, we’re taking over the entire whiteboard, is that your phone number squeezed into the corner of the board there?

You have braces and I don’t and I keep forgetting you’re not allowed to have gum so every time I offer, you give this death glare

You sent me a text asking if I wanted to go to prom on the day of prom and I’m not in town

I’m a notorious goody two shoes and you look like you get into fights on a daily basis, so when you were in the library on the first day I was supposed to be a tutor, I assumed I’d be tutoring you. But, as it turns out, we’re both tutors, and the people we’re tutoring keep blowing us off to make out and we have to go round them up

we have a mutual best friend but they cannot find out how much i like you then they’ll tell you, but i need to find out if you’re single!

I sat down in the wrong class and I’m panicking but don’t want to get up and leave because the class has started and you think it’s hilarious

You pissed me off in class so I threw a book at your head and now I’m in detention and jesus fuck I hate you so much and the teacher made me apologise and wait you’re cuter up close

soulmate aus

if one soulmate gets an injury, the other gets it as well.

Character A has a soulmate, but Character A died before they got to meet them. As Character A navigates the afterlife in their ghostly form, they discover that they can’t “move on” until they’ve met their soulmate.

the very first words your soulmate ever says to you are tattooed somewhere on your body since the day you are born

when you write something on your skin with pen/marker/whatever, it will show up on your soul mates skin as well.

You get an ‘impression’ of your soulmate when you turn 18 or something but all I got was a strong smell of bananas or something

you have a compass on your wrist and it directs you to where your soulmate is

i usually think i’m having a conversation with myself in my head but it turns out we’re telepathically connected

everybody is born with a map “tattooed” on their forearm that’s centered on the exact location of where they’ll first meet their soul mate

#writing #writing prompts #i did this instead of........ actually writing #eddieways feel free to reblog and/or send prompts

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darealpatyu · 4 years

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The Kingmaker Review: A Story of How One Family Screws the Philippines

Without a doubt, The Kingmaker is one of the best documentary films that I’ve seen in a while. I don’t know if that’s because it’s about a social issue that continues to haunt the Filipino people, or because the Marcoses are such a rare display of narcissism and greed that you can’t help but be astounded by the sheer incredulity of it all. The Marcoses are like the Filipino Kardashians, and it was both a treat and a pain to watch the whole circus of their lives unfold.

Could a Filipino filmmaker have made a documentary like this?

I would say that a Filipino couldn’t have created a documentary with this level of bluntness and sarcasm. Filipinos are more than capable of being sarcastic and artistic at the same time, but as a citizen living in this country, you can’t release a film as critical of current politicians as The Kingmaker was and not suffer consequences. You’d probably wake up dead if you did. Also, I think that the Marcoses wouldn’t have allowed a Filipino team to interview them and ask them about their regime because they already know that they have a band of haters in the country, and only haters want to find out more about that period in life. The Marcoses don’t openly acknowledge the haters, so I highly doubt they would’ve agreed to a personal interview like that. A foreigner conducting the interview, on the other hand, is a different story. The Marcoses love attention. If there’s anything they love more than money, it’s international acclaim. Interestingly enough, studies show that a telling sign of psychopathic tendency is their propensity to crave attention. I’m not directly saying that the Marcoses are psychopaths, but I’m sure you can piece two and two together. Anyways, Lauren Greenfield is an internationally recognized filmmaker, so you can imagine Imelda’s excitement when she found that she was to be her next subject. In the film, one of Imelda’s first lines is literally, “I miss the clout of being the first lady.” She misses the clout, everyone! Who even says that? Getting back to the point, I’m certain that the Marcoses and other prominent people agreed to be interviewed because they thought that they would be having a beautiful historical film about them – which is exactly what they got, in all fairness. Not only was this interview done for the clout, but it was probably also done because they knew that this documentary wouldn’t harm them in any way. They’ve already successfully revised history in the Philippines – they have a steadfast Marcos loyalist base that is only getting bigger. They literally have nothing to lose by taking part in this documentary. Think like Imelda – “I lose nothing, AND become relevant in the international sphere once again; I’ve gotta do it!!”

How were Imelda Marcos’ answers as the film progressed?

As the film progressed, Imelda was trying to portray herself as the victim of everything that had happened. She was trying to turn the experiences of all those innocent people who had suffered into her experience of suffering. I really lost my cool when she talked about how she was the mother of the Philippines and how she had been wrongly stripped away from her child. She would constantly try to victimize herself, probably because she realized that the interviewer’s questions were meant to attack her character, and not to give her the positive clout that she was expecting. When Imelda’s words of care for the country is contrasted with the reality of what happened in Calauit Island, it’s clear that she’s delusional. The historical information presented in the film was meant to be an antithesis to every word that came out of Imelda’s mouth because that’s the best way to expose a liar. You hear her saying she brought the beauty of exotic animals to the Filipino people, and then you see that she displaced over 200 families. You hear her feeling sad about the impoverished state of the country, and then you see her boasting extremely expensive paintings and giving out thousand-peso bills from plundered wealth. You hear her pride about the peace that Martial Law brought, and then you see the blatant disregard for human rights that occurred as accounted for by the Martial Law victims themselves. This presentation of historical truths, presented side-by-side with the proud lies of Imelda, was flawlessly executed. I could clearly deduce how far from the truth Imelda’s words were, and I’m certain that everyone who watched it experienced the same.

Thoughts on Sandro Marcos?

Talking about Sandro Marcos and his future role in Philippine politics, I do think that he has intentions to have a career in politics. I saw this 2017 article writing that Sandro had earned a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. Given that his family has a solid reputation for lying about their academic credentials, I don’t think it would come as a surprise if he were lying too. Because the Marcoses heavily publicize Sandro’s achievements, I really think that they’re planning to make him continue the Marcos legacy of screwing our country as well. In the film, there was this part where in front of a crowd, Bongbong was telling Sandro that he’s ready to become a politician already – even though Sandro was only 21 years old at the time. This kind of mental conditioning – that you’re entitled to a successful political career even though you’ve achieved absolutely nothing and don’t have the passion for service – is the kind of conditioning that creates dictators at worst, and at best, corrupt political dynasties. When you have parents that constantly push you into thinking that your destiny is to dominate Philippine politics, you end up thinking that you’re entitled to it – willing to do anything to get what you want to make your parents and yourself proud. As a young adult, your entire self-worth becomes grounded on whether you become a successful politician or not. I assume Sandro’s conditioning to become a politician is the type of parenting that Bongbong was raised with, and look at how great he turned out, right?

My Three Takeaways on Leadership and Diplomatic Relations

The three takeaways about leadership and diplomatic relations that I got from the film are: 1) you need to be open to honest feedback to be a good leader, 2) just because you personally think a certain plan of action is going to be good for the group doesn’t mean that it’s good for the group, and 3) be critical of yourself and listen to your own words before and after speaking. My first learning was inspired by Imelda Marcos and her inability to acknowledge her haters. She seems like the kind of woman who listens to no one but herself. She hasn’t had any character development after all these years, and in the film, when she showed the picture frame of her acquittal from thousands of crimes, she had the audacity to say “the truth always wins” or something to that effect. She’s not open to feedback at all. My second learning was inspired by when Imelda brought all those animals to Calauit Island. She thought it would bring beauty to the Philippines when it actually had the opposite effect. My third takeaway is inspired by the fact that Imelda thinks she solved the Cold War. Leaders really need to listen to their own words and analyze their statements to understand if what they’re saying is factual and makes sense. If I were to compound all my takeaways into one unified idea, my one great learning would be: A great leader does not do anything that a Marcos would do.

What historical facts did I uncover through the film?

During the film, there were a lot of significant historical facts that I didn’t know about; these facts should really be taught in school. The historical facts that I was not aware of were: 1) exotic animals were brought to Calauit Island, 2) Ferdinand Marcos had affairs with other women, and 3) the reason why Imelda was the chosen diplomat was that the Marcoses were anticipating a coup d’etat. Also, I don’t know if this historical fact is verified but it shocked me when Imelda said that she checked into a psychiatric hospital before her husband became president. Is that true? I’m sure you can understand why I’m a bit wary of Imelda’s stories.

The Big Conclusion

To conclude this lengthy blog entry, I think that the greatest lesson to be learned from this film is that leaders are here to serve us, and not the other way around. They are not gods – they are fallible and must be held accountable for their mistakes. If we fear our leaders, follow them blindly, and make excuses for their incompetence, we encourage a culture of fascism, fanaticism, and corruption. Sadly, a parallel reality of the Marcos regime is happening today. If a dictator will not take advantage of the current political climate now, one will eventually find a way soon. That’s why this film should be making waves and reaching the masses. If only more of us knew about what is happening in the political landscape, we’d take the problematic status quo seriously. This documentary deserves to be acknowledged as educational material for the sole reason that history is being rewritten as we speak, and it is the duty of those who know the truth to let everybody know as well. There are so many material facts that remain unknown and hidden from the public, and it’s ridiculous that people don’t know about them. People need to know because we might just make the same mistake again, and that’s sad.

In conclusion, MARCOS IS NOT A HERO. THE FACT THAT THERE’S A MARCOS LOYALIST BASE IMPARTS A SENSE OF URGENCY TO THOSE WHO KNOW THE TRUTH. HISTORY MIGHT REPEAT ITSELF.

We really don’t want to see what happens if it does. #NeverAgain

#cobibmo imeldamarcos sandromarcos ferdinandmarcos NeverAgain

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blackcoffeeandblankpagess · 5 years

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Things

Was scrolling through my blog yesterday (because who doesn’t scroll through their own blog?) and realized that I haven’t done a life update/list of random thoughts in awhile and I honestly like to look back at them and be reminded of where I was in life at different times + it’s a good way to flesh out my thoughts

So! I guess we can start with law school-I have heard back from 8 out of 9 schools and I have incredibly mixed feelings, I have only been accepted to two schools, and they were two safeties, I have been waitlisted at FOUR and straight rejected from 2 (will go into more details once I have finalized my decisions). Honestly I feel like the two schools that appear to be my options right now in a weird backwards way really are the best choices (at least for my mental health and happiness) because they are in the locations I prefer by far BUT I have also felt a LOT of stress because the legal field is one that places a LOT of emphasis on where you went to school and it seems like if you aren’t at a T-14 you might as well get out now...it’s ironic because when I was applying to undergrad I was so crazy about wanting to go to the school with the best name and seem impressive and when I first started the law school process I just wanted to go where I would be happy and then I found out how much the name matters and I was like wait what no go back. BUT, the schools I have gotten into have AMAZING programs for my specific field soooo Idk, it’s all a give and a take, yeah they aren’t the most prestigious school in the world but they have incredible opportunities for what I want to do and I think that matters too. I’m going to go visit both of them in the next month or two and I’m excited

^also, like I said, mixed emotions. even though I feel like the schools I got into truly are where I will be happiest, I have been feeling a LOT of disappointment in myself for essentially feeling like I ~failed~ in my quest to get into these other schools. I am a super type A high achiever and honestly the past year has been very out of character for me. Sure on paper I did a ton of cool shit and traveled a lot and now I’m working in an impressive position I suppose but I have just felt...off. Like giving 100% of my effort to something is pointless and I have no desire to, and I don’t like that! that’s not me! at the same time I know the admissions process is literally a game. Half the time schools don’t let you in because they think they are your safety and you’re too good and you won’t actually come so they don’t want to waste their space on you, the other half of the time they really aren’t your safety and they are an amazing school but they know that even if you are good enough to get into them, then you’re probably good enough to get into other amazing schools and again, you won’t actually come. IT IS REDICULOUS. and then of course sometimes you really just aren’t good enough but I am SURE that some of my schools are playing this game which on the one hand makes me feel better about myself because wtf is there for me to do in that situation but on the other hand....WTF.

^^also, also I listened to a podcast months ago that someone here actually recommended about the LSAT and they mentioned how big of a deal your score is in determining if you are admitted to a school or not and I 100% believe it. I think my score is a large part of why I’ve had the outcome I have. And that sucks. Because my score is good enough to get me really, really good scholarships to most schools, but not quite good enough to get me into the best schools. And I want to get into those schools. Also I lost my mind studying for that test and I literally just had a bad day on the test day. I never have test anxiety but at the end of the first section I got overwhelmed and just blew it. And that’s what really kills me. I spent months studying, preparing, devoting SO much time to get a score that was literally exactly the same as what I got on my first practice exam. And it was just because I had a bad day.

But it be like that sometimes I suppose!

Okay anyway....so yeah law school things are almost done and I’m honestly really just excited to know where I will end up...also where jared will end up. So far he has been accepted to 2 PhD programs which is really, really exciting because they are HARD to get into...and I think he will get into more because he is a great candidate. It’s crazy to think that we will be long distance for at least 3, maybe 6 years...it’s crazy to even think that it would be possible to be long distance for 6 years because like wtf. I feel like an idiot even thinking that. But in all honesty we have no idea what could happen and it could be much shorter than that or maybe we aren’t even The Ones for each other but...crossing all of these bridges when we get to them.

Keeping on the subject, living together has been really, really hard if I’m being honest. Sharing a small space with another person...sharing a BEDROOM has been rough because so much of me managing my mental health comes from alone time and having a chance to process things and recharge (also I’m an only child so....alone time). Also, like I’ve said, working at the same place is nice in some ways but it means were are together sooooooooo much of the day (not actually when we are working but on the way to work, way home, never being home really when the other one is at work because we commute together, etc.). It’s been a tough adjustment. I feel like moving in with your partner can be hard and nobody talks about it so hello world here I am talking about it.

but at the same time it sucks because I keep feeling like I Need To Enjoy Every Second Of This Right Now because we are going to be apart for 34234112412424 years

But living together aside, jared is still just as incredible and wonderful and loving as ever and I appreciate him so much

It’s also kinda crazy that we only have like 2 months left here and they are SO busy. I think we only have 4 weekends that we are both here at the same time with no other plans. Because he has 2 grad school visits, I have 2 law school visits, he has to travel for a family event, his parent’s are visiting one week, my mom is visiting one week, etc. And we still have so much to cross off of our california bucket list

That being said I think we might take a few weeks to road trip around the west coast in may because 1. I want to travel a lot this summer and 2. we are here 3. there is so much to see out here and a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily want to take an entire trip to see in the future but places I would want to spend a day or two visiting

Think: California national parks, OR, WA, vancouver, etc. Depending on where we both end up going to school aka where the car needs to get to we have talked about driving through canada a bit/the northern U.S. (I’m looking at you glacier national park)

But it’s all very up in the air (much like our lives) so we shall see!

Food stuff....idk, I’ve felt stressed just because my anxiety in general has been high and that applies to food because food is part of my life but overall I know I am in a good place, or at least I am continuing the general upward trajectory. I was looking through old food posts on here and realizing so many places where I have come so far even in just a year. A few examples- I honestly love beer and wine (and whiskey) and I enjoy going to breweries or opening a bottle of chilly white wine to have with dinner once in awhile or ordering a fancy cocktail, and I think enjoying alcohol is fun! and normal! and for so long I told myself I didn’t like to drink because I was so scared of the calories in alcohol and how it didn’t have any nutritional value and was a ~waste~ but it is fun and social and often delicious and I don’t stress about it and I enjoy it when I want it and I don’t have it when I don’t! I think college is also just weird because alcohol use is often just about Getting Drunk whereas as you age I feel like you are more often drinking because something sounds good or because it’s a holiday or w/e. Idk it just isn’t as drastic if that makes sense. Other food things that have changed- I used to be so scared of burritos specifically and now I literally eat them all of the time because they are delicious. There are others but this is already so long so I’ll leave ya with those.

Another related food thing- I feel like I used to be so stressed about food because I was terrified of gaining weight (I guess? I don’t even think it was that I think it was just about being in control.. but anyway) but now I feel like most of my food stress just comes from the fear of feeling uncomfortable- i.e. it’s saturday and 3pm but I feel antsy about eating lunch so late because I don’t want to not feel hungry at dinner time. I have SO much more trust in my body and I literally never worry about it changing in a drastic way because....your body does not really want to change in a drastic way unless you are doing something drastic (or it needs to change to be healthy) in the first place

wow who knew I had so much to say I’ve been typing for like 20 mins and don’t feel like I’ve even gotten into the exciting little details but I should probably stop now because SOMEONE is gonna read this and I don’t want your eyes to fall out of your head (or my fingers to fall off)

#personalposts

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uzuuzuking · 5 years

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so this started out as just a general post about why i like cinderella adaptations, but slowly spiraled into a ranking/review of all the cinderella adaptations i’ve seen in my short, young life. so strap in for possibly the longest post i’ve ever made on this blog. (look, i never know how much i have to say about something until i really get going lmao)

idk why i like cinderella adaptations/remakes/spinoffs so much? most of them are garbage (especially the ones within the last 10 years don’t @ me) but fuck it i like this brand of garbage. it’s fun to watch these movies and rework the bad plotlines and dialogue in my head as i go along.

i guess i like the source material and some of the aspects of all the different adaptations, but honestly i just like re-imagining them because there’s only so much cringey script-written-for-teens-but-clearly-written-by-40-year-old-adults-who-have-no-idea-how-teens-or-even-people-for-that-matter-actually-talk-and-interact i can take in one excruciating sitting.

anyway here’s my personal ranking of all the cinderella adaptations i’ve seen that no one asked for. (not including stage productions because i haven’t seen any and have no opinion of them. also not including into the woods because that’s not just cinderella, but a spectacular amalgamation of fairytale mishap and shenanigan.) and reviews because apparently i had more to say than i originally thought when i first started constructing this list:

cinderella (1997) - the absolute best cinderella adaptation of all time, hands down, this is non-negotiable. this movie has it all: an excellent and diverse cast, gorgeous costume design, beautiful sets, some of the most dazzling dance numbers i ever witnessed when i first watched it at the wee age of 4, and a positive, progressive message that was accurate for its time yet also so ahead of its time. i cannot praise this version of cinderella enough, it is my all time favorite and one of my top 3 feel-good movies. if you watched it today, the effects might not be as magical compared to what we have now, but keep in mind it was released in 1997. anyway, the cast is truly amazing and so effortlessly inclusive (and honestly the fact that the prince was asian with a black mother and white father and they literally never addressed it was such a power move). i could go on about this movie forever (i’ll probably make a whole post dedicated to it in the future) and what it meant to me and many others as young, impressionable poc. in conclusion, this movie set an exceedingly high standard for me and destroyed the chances of any other cinderella adaptation even hoping to live up to that. i love it! so! much!

ever after: a cinderella story (1998) - tbh i never saw this until i was in college but i immediately fell in love. i love the flow of the story as a whole - i never felt like anything was missing. i love the costumes and i especially love how danielle and henry’s relationship progressed throughout the film. slow-burn comes to mind when i watch their interactions and we all love a sweet, sweet slow-burn. it’s romance babes! it’s Dramatic in a few scenes and all i can say is that it really works because drew barrymore’s performance is exceptional, fantastic, engaging, more adjectives to describe how enthralled by her i was. above all, her character is compassionate - she uses her voice to speak in support for those who are suppressed by the flawed government systems and law enforcers, and influences the prince to use his status and power to better his people who lack the privileges of the nobility. she’s such a strong female lead (emotionally and physically - she literally fireman carries her love interest, who is taller than her and definitely exceeds her own bodyweight) and truly the mvp of this adaptation. watch it. watch it for Her.

enchanted (2007) - amy adams and idina menzel - ‘nuff said. okay but for real this one is so unique with its transition from classic d*sney 2D animation style to the real three-dimensional world and i adore it to the ends of the earth. the music? slaps! the story? slaps! the development of the main character? slaps!! she’s so princess-y and d*sney cartoon-y and struggles in the real world, but she adapts at a good pace and i love that she learns to be realistic while also keeping hope and love close to her heart. also her mother figure / daughter figure bond with morgan is so so precious. the only constructive criticism i have for this movie is the fact that we were robbed of idina menzel singing!!! did they know all along she was destined to play the frozen queen years in the future and decided against her singing in this one?? is that it? ridiculous. it’s been over a decade and i’m still seething over this. other than that this movie is *chef’s kiss*

ella enchanted (2004) - anne hathaway’s back must still be hurting from carrying this film. (no shade to the other cast members, they’re good, but anne is a queen and i forever love her.) this is another childhood favorite of mine. the story itself is a refreshing take - hats off to gail carson levine for the source material! i’ve talked about the differences between the movie and book before in the midst of my reread of the book a few months ago, but i don’t remember how much i focused on the movie. it’s so different from the book that it might as well be its own thing. on its own, the movie is pretty decent! again, mostly because of anne. it’s funny, it’s sad (especially that scene towards the beginning between ella and areida, i’m in stupid tears every time), and it gets weird but it’s a fun time. the chemistry between char and ella is so zesty i can feel it through the screen, i swoon over both of them. tbh i probably wouldn’t like this movie so much if not for the fact that anne hathaway is truly talented and i spend most of my time watching it just looking at her.

cinderella 3: a twist in time (2007) - i genuinely enjoyed and appreciated how the characters were written in this one. they all had clear motives and became much more dynamic through their lines and actions (drizella is arguably the most static character here but she still amuses me so it’s fine i guess). cinderella has more agency since the stakes are higher. prince charming actually has a gotdamn personality and has some of the funniest scenes and dialogue. good for him. i was kind of sad that anastasia’s story with the sweet baker boy was thanos snapped by the stepmother, but she and baker boy get a cute credits illustration together so it’s still canon! maybe i’m more biased on this one because i grew up rewatching it A Lot, but i definitely prefer it to the first and second movies.

cinderella (2000) - this one is kind of weird but i like it? the film has a really interesting vibe that i’m still trying to figure out how to describe even after seeing it like 5 times. wikipedia refers to the aesthetic style as “the glamour of the 1950s” which just might be as close as we can get. it follows the general guidelines of the cinderella plot, but the main differences were: zezolla (cinderella) was already helping with the chores before her father remarried, claudette (stepmother) was actively trying to murder zezolla’s father during their marriage, the stepsisters were much more violent and crass (they hunted zezolla’s beloved farm animals for sport and talked about getting “a man in [their] bed”), zezolla’s father was manipulated by everything claudette did and said and treated his own daughter poorly as a result, and prince valiant is honestly kind of a douchebag but seems willing to improve himself after meeting zezolla (basically his vibes are iffy but he’s willing to learn). this whole movie is pretty niche and i have yet to interact with someone who’s also seen it. and the only reason i’ve seen it so many times is because i just like listening to how the dialogue is delivered. (except for prince valiant’s random song at the ball, i kind of hated that and i skip through it every time lol).

a cinderella story (2004) - the classic hilary duff version. very cliche early 2000s high school romance, but it works for the cinderella narrative. not particularly diverse. a classic nonetheless. in my mind this is the pinnacle of the “modern cinderella movie” type. this is one of the most iconic movies for us zillennials and i’d like to think it’s known well enough for me to not go into a lot of detail about it. basically it was fresh and new for its time, had plenty of memorable scenes, and did i mention hilary duff? the film kind of plays into the “not like other girls” trope - as do a couple of the movies i listed above - but i’m just going to acknowledge that the early 2000s were Wack and simply move on. all in all, i like this movie for the nostalgia, iconic scenes, and hilary duff. also jennifer coolidge is pretty funny as the stepmother.

another cinderella story (2008) - again, an early 2000s classic, but this time with selena gomez. i liked the dancing in this one. i like selena’s quiet, somewhat timid characterization of her character, mary. and jane lynch in the stepmother role is perfection. she’s so fun to watch and is always hilarious. the story is nothing remarkable, but it’s okay and i liked it as a kid. after the hilary duff version, this one still managed to feel fresh because, though it was similar in its modern era approach, it focused more on the performing arts and dance. “cinderella” is an aspiring dancer, rather than the 2004 aspiring scholar. the “prince” is a famous popstar, not a football player. the stepmother is an outdated popstar desperate to stay Hip and Relevant with the kids, not a cranky botox lady. honestly i just love watching this one for the dancing, mary’s genuine and innocent love for the “prince”, and literally everything that comes out of jane lynch’s mouth. that woman is a dialogue gold mine.

a cinderella story: once upon a song (2011) - lucy hale is good. missi pyle is good. they play their roles and lines that they’re given fairly well. over all, it’s entertaining. lucy, of course, has them Pipes and i do like the songs in this movie. the only major downside for me was the “token best friend of color” trope. lucy’s best friend is an asian girl who’s good at sports and is there for one liners and support. the prince charming character’s best friend is a black guy who he only knew for probably a month at the most. he can beatbox, sing, and dj. basically he’s also just there as support. they really don’t do much for the plot but they’re there for diversity and whatnot. this movie is.. fine.

cinderella (1950) - the only reason this ranks so low for me is because i watched it a lot as a child when it was on vhs and it always felt like a fever dream to me. i was just really young and didn’t feel invested in any of the characters. it is a classic, though, and i would watch it again and be able to enjoy it.

cinderella 2: dreams come true (2002) - i liked cinderella’s and anastasia’s stories from this one. jaq’s was meh. it was fine.

dj cinderella or cinderella pop (2019) - netflix knows i like cinderella adaptations so, naturally, they shoved this into my recommended and, naturally, i watched it. twice. which is more than i can say for the following review... so this movie is brazillian and is pretty much the cut & mold of modern cinderella movies. but she wants to be a dj. she stars out living a perfect life as a wealthy girl with a loving family, but turns out her dad is cheating on her mom with his secretary. that’s when she “stops believing in love”. which is actually valid bc if i saw one of my parental figures cheating on the other, i honestly wouldn’t know what to believe in anymore. anyway, cíntia dorella (yes. that’s her full name.) and her mom move into her aunt’s place. a year or so passes. stepmother/secretary/cheating lady is throwing an extravagant birthday party for her daughters and hires freddy prince, a popular musician who cíntia doesn’t really like. meanwhile, cíntia gets a dj gig she’s excited for until she finds out she’s the opener for freddy prince at her stepsisters’ party. she ends up disguising herself as “dj cinderella” and freddy is super into her. it’s pretty generic from there but i was entertained enough to watch it twice. take from that what you will.

cinderella (2015) - ok so we been knew that d*sney’s live action remakes ain’t shit, and this one is no exception. d*sney within the last few years has been like 99% aesthetics and marketing. this movie was visually stunning, especially with the settings and costumes. those were the only 2 things i truly liked. everything else was forgettable. in its defense, i did read a post about the “have courage and be kind” message which is something wonderful to hold onto, especially for anyone in an abusive situation like ella. that’s valid and i respect that. i still lowkey hate this movie tho. i started getting a headache about 4 reviews ago, but remembering how much praise this movie got has reignited my fighting spirit. honestly if you like it, that’s good, you like what you like and that’s that. but this is my review and i hated how proper ella’s posture was (she’s been doing physical labor hunched on the floor for years now, how does she not slump around in exhaustion at the end of the day??), i hated how perfectly curated the whole thing was (again, that’s mostly because of d*sney and their aesthetics), and i hated how hollow everything felt. i can’t perfectly describe it, but i never felt emotionally invested in any of the characters. something about their performance was lacking and yet again i blame d*sney. i actually really like lily james, but something about the way she was directed left me devoid of emotional attachment to ella. i remember nothing about ella’s step family or the prince. that’s how much of an impact this adaptation had on me. also i just remembered the fairy godmother as i type this. i ADORE helena bonham carter, but this movie does a horrible disservice to her. if she liked working on this movie, then i’m happy for her, but even she wasn’t strong enough to sell this to me. i saw this movie in theaters and came out of it lamenting my waste of money that i could have spent on something i would have actually enjoyed. but the thing that enraged me the most, the thing i despised, i detested, the thing i seethed over and rant about to this day was the ONE (1) token black character. i don’t even know if he had a name but he was captain of the guard or some shit. if i remember correctly (but probably not tbh this movie was so forgettable), he was the one who heard ella singing and was the whole reason the prince was able to have her try on the glass slipper. this man, who had zero character development, zero relevance to the plot, an insignificant amount of screen time, is suddenly the reason the main character is able to finally connect with her love interest. um. What. i hate how the writers treated him and i will forever be filled with every last grain of salt over this. anyway he’s my favorite character and everyone else is just eh. to conclude this ungodly long review, i don’t like this movie. i tried to watch it again once but got so bored i quit 10 minutes in. do yourself a favor and watch cinderella (1997) instead. (the only reason this movie is ranked above the remaining 5 is the production quality. but i guess that’s unfair bc d*sney has the big bucks. and maybe i wouldn’t be so harsh if i weren’t sleep deprived and grumpy from a sugar-induced headache, but these feelings still come from my Chest so idk.)

a cinderella story: a christmas wish (2019) - i think we all secretly enjoy christmas-themed movies and this has got to be someone’s guilty pleasure. i was mildly entertained (but again with the cringey dialogue written by people clearly not in high school...) and i do like laura marano. but they autotuned her to hell and back - which i loathed - because the woman can actually sing and she has a lovely voice. she got to sing candidly one (1) time and i relished the experience. my ears thank her beautiful, un-autotuned voice. other than that it was.. fine. i didn’t hate it but i didn’t like it either. laura marano deserves better than this. (can’t say the same for the other actors tho because their roles were unmemorable.) also laura marano was super cute in her elf costume!

not cinderella’s type (2018) - i legit forgot about this one until after i compiled the entire list lol. i saw it on youtube and it was decent as far as i remember. it’s another modern day cinderella. i think the “prince” runs over “cinderella’s” cat or something?? i’m pretty sure it was her mom’s cat so now she has nothing left to remember her mom by. prince boy feels awful and tries to befriend her or do something to make it up to her, but she just doesn’t really like him. i think her aunt and uncle are emotionally abusive to her and prince boy does his best to be there for her without making things worse. if i remember correctly, i liked that aspect of the movie because it’s hard to be there for a victim of any kind of abuse if trying to help them could potentially hurt them more, especially minors still under the care of abusive guardians. anyway i think cinderella girl’s best friend is in love with her or something but she ends up not being into him and slowly gets together with prince boy. she eventually moves out of her guardians’ house and into the spare house at prince boy’s home (he’s rich or something). i need to rewatch this movie tbh i could be wrong about everything here lol.

rags (2012) - not amazing, definitely not memorable because i have nothing to say about its plot or writing, but it has keke palmer which is its one redeeming quality. also it’s the only one on this list where the male protagonist is the cinderella. so that’s solid i guess.

a cinderella story: if the shoe fits (2016) - this was a movie. it happened. i vaguely remember how ridiculous it was and sometimes i felt secondhand embarrassment. i don’t remember what about specifically, but i remember the emotion. sofia carson is a talented singer. i think she’s a decent actor but this script was Bad.

elle: a modern cinderella tale (2010) - i only watched this one because i was bored out of my damn mind and saw it on youtube. i felt bad for all the actors because this script was terrible. i don’t recommend this unless you’re about to sit down with your squad and make fun of it.

apparently descendants is on the “cinderella adaptations and references” list on imdb but i refuse to put it on my list because it’s not a cinderella-specific adaptation and i don’t like the descendants franchise. now, if we’re going to discuss a quality series about the children of fairytale characters, that would hands down be ever after high. but that’s a different topic for a different day.

thus concludes the ranking no one asked for but i felt compelled to make. thank you and goodnight

#summer.txt #cinderella #longpost #if anyone reads through this whole thing congrats!#i'll get u a gold star from the esteemed dollar store and bequeath it to you via uploaded photo #i didn't think i'd be typing for 4 hours straight but apparently i have a lot to say #i started falling apart at the end there lol #and around the middle bc i forgot to add cinderella 1 and 2 #god my head fucking hurts #i had a craving for sugar today but i went overboard and now i'm paying the price

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geoviki · 4 years

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I’m catching up on a couple of memes that @plumb19 and @i-got-these-words invited me to answer. Thanks! I blended them together.

1. What do you prefer to be called? Viki

2. Birthday I’m a Sagittarius

3. Where do you live? Denver, Colorado, USA

4. 3 things you are doing right now? 1) Trying to catch up answering my email/messages/Tumblr requests. 2) Fluffing my hair now and then because it’s wet and I’m trying to dry it. 3) Working on organizing 45,000 songs on my hard drive – I’m slowly but steadily trying to weed out songs I don’t actually like. I’m currently culling my j-rock songs, and tonight I’m listening to Psycho le Cemu.

5. Four fandoms that have piqued your interest recently? 1) 19 Days (of course). 2) The Doukyuusei/Sotsugyousei/Blanc manga series by Nakamura Asumiko 3) The Saiyuki manga series by Kazuya Minekura 4) The Rules manga series by Miyamoto Kano I always have at least 2 or 3 current fandoms going, ever since I was little.

6. How has the pandemic been treating you? Personally, well.

7. A song I cannot stop listening to. ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New’ played by Yoshiko Kishino (I also love the original by the Stylistics) https://youtu.be/ayZMYKS2cWA

8. Recommend a movie Billy Elliot.

9. How old are you? Old enough to know better

10. School/uni/work? None of the above.

11. Heat or cold? Aaugh, neither! Our summers get pretty hot, and I have poor tolerance to cold.

12. An unusual fact about yourself? I’ve had several jobs where I was flown around in beautiful wilderness areas in helicopters. I also get motion sickness. I’m terrific at reading maps. I’ve published maps, too.

13. Are you shy? You might mistake me for shy but you’d be wrong. Introverted, though.

14. Preferred pronouns? She/her

15. Biggest pet peeves? Hypocrites and liars.

16. Favourite 'dere? I can’t say I have one.

17. Rate your life from 1-10 8

18. Main blog? This one now, I suppose. Used to be Livejournal (same name). I paid for a lifetime membership there at one time.

19. Side blog? I created ‘fairygodmum’ on LJ, but mainly I use it now as a user name to comment at the Washington Post website.

20. Things people should know about you before becoming friends

I suck at keeping up in a timely manner. But I do care a lot about my friends.

21. Are you staying home from work/school? Yes and no. I’m staying home, but not from work or school.

22. If you are staying home who is there with you? My husband, who’s working from home, quite diligently.

23. What movie have you watched recently? Little Big Man, one that neither of us had seen. But wow, there’s a horrific scene of General Custer massacring women and children that made me sorry we picked it, so I can’t recommend it. We watched both Mr. Rogers films before that (the one with Tom Hanks and the documentary) and those are much more uplifting.

24. What shows are you watching? I don’t watch much TV, but we just finished a 36-part Great Courses video on the history of China. I also just finished reading The Sandman graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman.

25. What music are you listening to? J-Rock. K-Pop, too. K-pop is great exercise music, and I make all the mixes for the Wellness Center where I (pre-corona) work out.

26. Are you a homebody? Big time!

27. An event you were looking forward to that got cancelled? Today I’m supposed to be in Leipzig. We had a trip to Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden all planned. Now I’m home trying to get Icelandair to refund us for all those flights they cancelled.

28. What are you doing for self care? Reading, gardening, walking. Organizing stuff, scanning old photos, helping my sister-in-law with her genealogy. Deep cleaning the house. Doing jigsaw puzzles on https://jigsawpuzzles.io/ , where I seem to be specializing in Hokusai.

Did you go to college/university (if so, what major)? Yes, geology and mineralogy.

Do you believe in aliens? Yes, but I suspect these aliens are most likely one-celled creatures.

Deserted island - 3 items you’ll bring (that’s not in a survival kit)? My Kindle, my mp3 player, chocolate.

When did you first start reading 19 days? Who is the character, that you’d want to be real the most? Summer of 2015, I estimate. And Guan Shan’s mom. We need more kind women in the world.

Where is your dream home? I think here in Denver. Although my dream home would involve way less weeding.

Preferred way of getting around town? Driving with the music on. We also have a light rail system that’s relatively new, and I like to take it downtown. Makes me feel like I’m in Europe or something.

Favourite… - type of animal? dragonfly – they’re killing machines, and what they kill are mosquitos! I have a collection of dragonfly earrings to celebrate them – way to spend a Friday/Saturday night? Friday is happy hour at 5 pm, chatting with my husband and listening to jazz. , Saturday, maybe a movie or to the jazz club. - item of clothing? it’s gotta be stretchy and comfortable. - alcoholic drink ? dry Reisling white wine (or any white except Chardonnay) - mythical creature? Centaurs - superhero? .Elastigirl

#personal #meme

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torispencerkeene-blog · 4 years

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Stand Up

The events happening around America have shaken not just the nation, but the world. In the past few days we have seen firsthand what racism looks like, and how it can be ‘explained away’ so easily by so many. Our country is in crisis, and if we don’t work fast to repair the damage, it will only get worse. As citizens, it is our responsibility, our job, to be part of the change we want to see.

This is on us.

Don’t believe me? When was the first time you saw racism? For me, I was about six years old and lived in Sumpter, South Carolina at the time. It was my first time hearing the ‘N’ word and seeing firsthand how people of color were treated differently

Some of you, if you’ve known me for any length of time, may have heard this story before. To this day, thirty years later, I am affected by this. In fact, this moment had a huge impact on me, then and now.

There I was, a tiny little red-haired girl holding the hand of my best friend. We were on the buddy system. My sister and one of my brothers was just up ahead, chattering away while we walked. It was a bright, sunny day. I have no idea what time of year it was, as the leaves don’t really change all that much in the south.

My friend and I were singing. Just two happy little girls on our way to school. Neither of us was doing anything other than skipping and singing along a rough dirt road to reach the bus stop. I remember hearing the crunch of dirt and rocks under the wheels of the car. I looked up and saw a man driving towards us. I didn’t think anything of it, even when my friend shivered and pulled back.

It was the look on his face that told me something was wrong. A look I had never been exposed to before. Hatred. This man driving down the road hated two little girls who were just skipping to school. Except, he didn’t hate me. I remember the car slowing right next to us. The window lowered and I heard a word I had never heard before. Then the man, who looked perfectly ordinary, spit at my best friend.

Can you imagine how she must have felt? I watched her crumple and start to cry as the man gunned his engine, spewing up rocks and sand at us, and took off. How was a six-year-old supposed to react to that? I hugged my friend and screamed for my sister and brother, then turned and starting walking her home. The bus pulled up and my sister said we weren’t going, then they walked us back.

Now... I’ve lived all over this country. I was born in Virginia, lived in Washington State, South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Maine. Being a military brat, most of my early years were on bases, so I wasn’t really exposed to anything like the racism I saw that day, but as time went on I saw it more and more.

It is a systemic problem. People teach this hatred to their children. So many don’t see a problem with it. And the ones who do... well, we fall into three categories. Those who are apathetic. It just doesn’t faze them. They don’t care about it at all. The second is those who see it and are either too frightened, or too unsure how to step in. And then there are the warriors. The people who see the problem and say ‘I can’t let this stand.’

Where is the problem then? Is it with the protesters, or with the ones who are contributing to the problem? Partly, yes. But it is also because of every single American who is not racist, but doesn’t stand up and say ‘this is wrong.’

Peaceful protest does so much to show that there are people who care on both sides of the fence. I watched so many videos of police standing with, marching with, or kneeling with the protesters. I saw videos of protesters protecting a lone officer who was separated in the crowd, or of white women standing in front of the black protesters to protect them from the police as they tried to gain attention.

There are people out there who can help. You, me, your next door neighbor, my grocery store clerk. Yeah, we’re ordinary people, but we are the ones who can stand up and make things change. If you aren’t part of the solution, you are adding to the problem. Go out and protest, sign a petition, get on social media and open an honest dialogue, write it up in your blog. Just DO something. Don’t stand around waiting for the country to heal itself, because it won’t.

I hate that this discussion has been so marred by politicians changing the focus to the rioting. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that rioting and looting are okay, but I keep hearing the same thing over and over. That as a society, we’ve agreed not to commit crimes like looting or vandalism. I would just like to remind you how this country got it’s start. The BOSTON TEA PARTY. So, as a society, we’ve actually been taught that it is the only way to get what you want.

That said, change doesn’t come from violence. Not really. You are only substituting one atrocity for another. Don’t hurt innocent people or destroy random property to make your point. Instead, talk to the police, the local government, and anyone who will listen about how not to let this happen again. Get together with the leaders of one of the protest groups and try and figure out what CAN change things. Usually it happens with a mix of communication and the changing of laws and rules that increase the problem.

Go to a protest. Add your sign to the crowd of them. Let your voice be heard.

STOP listening to the people who are part of the problem. No person is less just because the color of their skin, or because of their gender, sexual orientation, religion, color of their hair, or any other reason. Every single one of us matters. All of us are important. But we aren’t all TREATED that way.

I know, I know, you think the Black Lives Matter movement is ignoring that police matter, or all people matter. Stop it. This isn’t about you. Not this time. This is about a system of racism we’ve had in this country since the beginning. No one ignores it when a police officer is shot in the line of duty. No one ignores it when a white man is murdered. No one ignores it when a white woman cries for help.

Unfortunately, those in our country with dark skin are being ignored, even when they need help the most. Hearing those cries of ‘I can’t breathe,’ and ‘Mama’ tore at me and brought me right back to that moment when, as a six-year-old girl, I was helpless to stop racism from happening, when I learned that just because of the color of my skin I was considered better than my best friend (who was the better and kinder person), and that not everyone shows people kindness. I felt just as helpless as an adult.

I think all of us are wondering what we would have done, had we been there. Would we have stood there, silently, watching someone die? Would we have shouted at the officers to get up and put the man in the cruiser? Would we have had the courage to raise up that phone and hit record? Would we have done something, anything? The truth is, you’ll never know. But most of us would be too afraid, too unsure, or even too apathetic to help.

That has to stop. We, the white people in the crowd, need to link arms and stand in front of our fellow humans and say ENOUGH! This can’t continue. These people are no different than us. Because they aren’t. We are all made in God’s image. We all bleed red. We all cry tears. We all live with the hope that we will have a future. And we all turn to dust when we die.

So get the hell out there and DO something, or the problem is you. Put a sign in your window, get on that blog, blow up social media. Don’t let the real issue get ignored because everyone wants to focus on the looting and rioting. That isn’t the problem. We are.

#black lives movement #end racism

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saltine-kakyoin · 4 years

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OH SHIT!!!! my clown ass never saw that u rb'd those ask posts, i was Looking at my notifs to see if u would so i could send u some but SOMEHOW I MISSED IT??? clown hours.... ANyways for the emoji one have 🤗💙💘🍀😇 and 👍 (tried to not do repeats from your ask 2 me cause they all apply anyways but, Regardless) and for the questions post, maybe 5, 11, 12, 17, 20, 23 and 25? ;__;/ ily so much and i hope u have a rlly lovely night!!! and that this coming week is kinder 2 u!!!! 💖💖💖💖

ahhh, it’s no worries!!! idk about you but for me, tumblr has been having the Time of Its LIFE lately wrt notifications and most disconcertingly, unfollowing people! D: so i completely get it, it’s no worries!!! ;w;/ i already know for a Fact i’m going to write so so much, so i’m gonna put this under a readmore >w< ruth 🤝 sarah respectful lesbian moments

edit: so I finished writing it and it’s Insanely Long- just in case you don’t make it to the bottom, thank you mein broth-er!!!! ; O; i hope you have a wonderful night too!! writing all of this out made me reminisce on some really nice times, and I’m having an a1 night! ^^ ilysm! it’ll probably be daytime when you read this, so i hope you have a great day! <3

🤗 given the chance I would gladly hug you

on god!!!! ;___; i think i would frfr dissolve if a got a Ruth-Certified hug, things have been so overwhelming lately

💙 you are my closest friend

the feeling is mutual!! <3 we don’t always get to talk often, but fhdhshg when we do we talk about like All of the Madness in Sarah’s Mind^tm, and you are so patient + tolerant of my incoherent ramblings which is something i don’t think i’ve ever fully experienced? anyhow, after a year (more than a year?) of having these kinds of convos and going through the general madness of life together, I totally agree ;w;

💘 I love you so much

i love you too!!! so so much!!! 💃🕺 i don’t think words will ever be able to express how much i love and appreciate you! 💜💛

🍀 i’m lucky to have met you

i know we talk about this often, but seriously i feel the same way! it’s a little crazy that we met, technically, because Joseph Joestar tm deserved more than to be a cheater... there is something hilarious about this wild friendship rooting from him!! of all jojos!! 🤢 but i’m so grateful that we met, it’s been such a wonderful ride ;w; <3

😇 you’re a sweet cinnamon bun

🥺🥺🥺🥺 bro i- fhdhghdhgh thank you!!! ;o;

👍 you are fun to be around

ahhh, thank you!!! i am glad you feel this way bc whoo boy, i think some other people would look at the madness i tell you about and go 👁️👁️ that’s a no for me, luvs. remember last year when i was losing it tryna prepare for ren faire + i cut my palm on that one glass bottle? bc a- i barely do and b- i feel like that moment encapsulates the nicki minaj roman holiday-ness of my life XD i’m really grateful you’ve stuck around through it all 🤗💕💖

now buckle in bro!!!! the essays are incoming!!!

5. Name a movie that makes you genuinely laugh.

i swear on my life the Mortal Kombat movie from 1995 is a national treasure, it is SUCH a solid movie and has so many funny moments. Robin Shou makes such a 🥺🥺 Liu Kang, and jesus fuck he can be so savage when the script calls for it!! there’s one part where he takes Johnny Cage’s luggage and straight up fucking chucks it into the ocean + then bullies him about it later! honestly the Ballad of Johnny Cage and His Luggage is one of my favorite parts from the movie <3 if you haven’t seen it + you like cheesy, old school movies, i really recommend it!!!

11. Describe the memory of the last time you felt true happiness.

So I can’t remember the last time I did, bc my memory is horrifically terrible + probably getting worse as time goes on?? but i will tell you about one of the more recent times I remember! :D There is one crucial expository note for this memory- my brother-in-law makes THE best chili in the entire world. my brother and I were trying to recreate it because it’s such a simple but delicious + filling meal- I think this was our first time trying to create it? and it was SO chaotic, the tomato sauce and stuff kept popping and burning me and we weren’t 100% certain that we’d gathered the right ratios for the ingredients and it was just. madness lmao. Chance’s chili is one that you leave alone for multiple hours at a time (I think this is the case for all chili but i don’t cook often enough to know ;__;), and we were kinda 👀👀👀 because we weren’t sure it’d turn out right? But it did!!!! I vividly remember when it was finished and we taste-tested it + went oOOH FUCK! it wasn’t quite the same as chance’s but ohhh my god it was so good 🥰🥰🥰 but yeah!! we ate it all up and I think this was around the time I started my playthrough of Esteban for Dragon Age 2? which was one of my favorite playthroughs for the entire franchise... he’s just a simple ig beard model mage ;w; i wanted to show you what he looked like in this post but the formatting went wonky so ig i’ll just post him separately?? it’s 1000% in-character for him to infiltrate my jojo blog 😔

12. Name a song that makes you feel ethereal.

hm...I’d say it’s between Forget About or Feet of Clay! They’re both such light and tenderhearted songs, and when I listen to them I feel like I’m in an apartment kitchen slow-dancing with a love, and it’s so dark except for the slowly rising sun. I don’t know if that feeling could be described as ethereal? but it’s close enough for me

17. What is something you own that is important to you? What makes it so important?

I have a small collection of scripts from the shows I’ve been in, and two of the most important ones are from the plays my high school put on during my sophomore and junior years, The Nit-Wits and The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, respectively! The Nit-Wits has a ton of sentimental value to me because it was the last show I genuinely acted in, and it was a show we had to pull together in 2 or 3 weeks!! We were originally going to do a murder mystery play for the fall, but none of the cast was feeling it and it just wasn’t going to come to life in time (honestly this speaks volumes for how much we weren’t vibing with it, because all of our shows came together at like.. the final dress rehearsals if not opening night lmao). I vividly remember we took a vote during rehearsals about whether or not to switch the show, and then we did and it was SO fun + chaotic!! My character was one of the only regular characters in the show, but I think everyone else had a lot of fun acting as actors who were hired to be maniacal, and that made acting off of them so fun! I remember there was also a night my friend Adonis almost tore the entire set down because he ran through a door and tripped over a set brace in his haste!! The Nit-Wits is hugely important because it was a really fresh acting experience for me, and again, my last time genuinely on the stage and not behind the scenes!

MCM is important to me because it was the first play I ever stage managed! I’d stage managed our musical the spring prior, but that was a huge undertaking and involved many different people and moving parts. Stage managing a play, at least at my high school, was a calmer and more intimate experience, and one I really enjoyed! Another huge reason I treasure MCM’s script is because it is one of the last shows I had with my friend I told you about- he was a senior. I have little notes and doodles from the cast and crew scattered throughout my book for this show, and I remember being so irritated by this because it meant I was losing space for stage directions, cues, and notes. Now, I’m super grateful to have these scribbles- it’s one of the only things I have left of him.

On that note, relating to him, MCM is also the show which birthed my most horrific theater horror story!! During one of the performances, I guess he forgot his line?? idk. But he ended up jumping six pages ahead of where the current scene was (I knew this bc I was following along in my book backstage + was frantically trying to figure out where he’d gone), which threw the entire cast, who were all tragically onstage, way off-track. This resulted in the most frightening game of script ping-pong I’ve ever seen: he’d skipped six pages ahead, so Adonis ended up saying a line from two pages after the six-page skip, and somehow someone else went!! oh I have a response to that line! And then said something like 9 pages back! I think the lead actress tried to ground everyone back to the lines they were supposed to be saying, but she ended up just saying a lot of their lines? And one of those lines that was supposed to be said by someone else was supposed to cue a black-out that someone got murdered in, but my lighting techie was SO fucking lost (we were both huddled over the script next to the breaker trying to figure out WHERE the hell we were! i think i had a flashlight in my mouth so I could flip through the book with both hands and thus faster??), so ofc the lights stayed up! I remember getting through this scene being the most painstaking endeavor of my entire life, but thankfully intermission was right after it! We actually extended intermission because the cast needed a hot second to fuckign RESET for Act 2 bc sweet jesus that was so bizarre...Needless to say, after that show we never messed that scene up again + everyone who acted in the show became super anal about knowing their lines as the years went on. The Six Page Skip became a legendary part of our hs theater Canon (like biblical canon ;w; although I don’t think anyone’s talked about it since my class graduated) alongside the times one of our ensemble dudes had to break through the roof of the girl’s dressing room to retrieve the keys to the theater + i got stuck on stage!

20. What’s the sweetest thing someone has done for you?

I really had to wrack my brain to answer this one, as I’m generally not the person people do things for, you know? This answer goes wayyy back, to 8th grade :O but so! there is mild exposition for this- when I started middle school, I lived in North Carolina, but we moved to Florida right before 7th grade bc my grandma is ill. We lived with my uncle while we were looking for a house, so I went to the local middle school bc why wouldn’t I? but in November, we finally found a house + my mom was like....So... are you going to switch schools or...I’d struck up some really solid friendships in this time, so i was like Mom I’d Rather Die OAO. So, we struck up a deal that I’d get to stay at that school on a zone waiver + that she’d drive me to school everyday. Sometime closer to the end of eighth grade she was like, yeah so.. I can’t do this for high school, it’s too much gas- which was valid! I was really sad about it, but I sucked it up.

Anyhow, fast forward to the last day of eighth grade, which was perhaps the saddest day I’d lived up until that point, mostly bc I knew I was probably never going to see all my friends again. My best friend, who I was like hardcore v close to + the person I shared all my wacky AUs and OC’s and headcanons with, was waiting with me for my mom to come pick me up, and then!!! When my mom pulled into the school she suddenly whipped out this lengthy letter she’d written to me about how much she enjoyed my friendship and how grateful she was that we were able to have lunch together (lunch was.. tragically ;__; the only time we really saw each other that year), and that she would never forget me! And she’d drawn me a ton of fanart from all the things I was obsessed with back then!! it was so much so fast, but then my mom was yelling at me to get in the car and I had to go :(

We kept in touch through email freshman year + fake-dated bc a senior was stalking me? ;J; and then we went to Megacon together! but I became really heavily involved in choir and theater after that, and we just kind of drifted apart :( we do follow each other on ig tho! It’s insane to think about her and that letter because on GOD ruth, that was a thinly veiled love letter and I never like... wrote her anything back that was as worthy as what she wrote me. But, she’s doing really well in uni now, so I guess it’s all okay? idk! ; o ;

23. What’s your zodiac sign? Do you think you fit the general characteristics of that sign?

I’m a Cancer!! and also a metal dragon by the Chinese Zodiac, which I’ve always thought was pretty sick! :3 I am 10000% your stereotypical Cancer, super emotional and introspective + often prone to tears ;u; My mom always said that dragons are steadfast and loyal people, and I think this also applies to me, to a fault. I checked around some websites to see what characteristics were often applied to metal dragons specifically, and it seems they are pretty strong-willed, ambitious, and generous? I don’t know if you could call me strong-willed or ambitious, but it’s all good ig.

25. What’s a song that gives off good vibes anytime you listen to it?

Ohh man, I went in on this question for Shannon, but bc I was digging around my library for Jules, I actually found an old fave! This song is from one of my all-time favorite musicals, Once on This Island- it’s The Human Heart! This song is so sweet, and god between the writing for the orchestra + the writing for the ensemble, this song is a straight masterpiece <3 I love love love the line, “Through your love you’ll live forever”, and although I am Hardcore Terrified of getting a tattoo, I really want that line tattooed on my body. if you have time, I recommend giving Once on This Island a listen!! I’ve never heard a show that uses its instruments and singers the way OoTI does (and holy FUCK it is so breathtaking live!!! I got to see it on Broadway and bro.... 🥺🥺 it was transcendental..)

#me when i talk to jules- floods her w a wall of songs #me when i talk to ruth- floods her with a wall of incomprehensible thoughts #the lov is stored in the walls of text! ; O ;#thank you again ruth!!!! this was really fun to write out and i may have cried while writing a few bits but it's fiiiine #i loved writing this 🥰#long post #like INCREDIBLY long post!!!!#sriracha ask game #fullmetal-the-last-alchemist

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suckitsurveys · 4 years

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What would you call your body type? Fat.

Are you a morning person? Eh. I have to be.

Have you ever been to Target? Countless times. I miss Target :(

Do you like iced tea? Yes. I should make some.

When is the next time you’ll be at work? I’m technically at work right now.

Do you have a savings account? Yes.

Has anyone ever hacked your accounts before? Yes.

What color bedsheets are currently on your bed? Light blue.

Have you ever been to Disney World? If so, how many times have you been? Nope.

Does grammar and capitalization mean anything to you? Yes.

Are you good at wrapping gifts for others? Yes.

Do you have a dirty clothes hamper in your room? Yes.

What would you say is your favorite television show? BoJack Horseman.

Do you enjoy big holiday dinners? Yes. I’m so upset that we might not get to do that this year because of covid. Is your vision good? With my glasses on, yeah. ha.

Is there any piece of jewelry you’re constantly wearing? Earrings and my nose stud.

What is one thing you desire as of now? For this covid shit to fucking end. And justice for Breonna Taylor. And actual equality.

What kind of phone do you have? Galaxy S10.

If you could move anywhere, where would you choose? On a lake in the woods.

Do you blog a lot, if at all? This I guess.

Is your present hair color, natural? My roots sure as fuck are.

What makes you the most angry when it comes to people? IGNORANCE. I cannot wrap my head around people who don’t fucking give a shit about other people.

Describe your current outfit? I’m in PJs.

What was the last thing you ordered online? A couple of outfits fro my nieces for the 4th of July per their request.

Have you ever felt as though you were drifting apart from a best friend? Yeah, and I did.

What color are your eyes? Green.

Have you ever worn color contacts? Nope.

What’s the best thing about a hug? Comfort.

Biggest fear? Having my fears used against me.

If you have a significant other, how long have you been together? 9 years.

Do you know any genuinely friendly people? Yes.

Do you buy your friends gifts? Yeah. What was the last thing you plugged in? The charger to this laptop.

How old are you? 30.

What color headphones do you own? They’re purple. I haven’t used them in a long time since I don’t go to an actual gym anymore.

Have you ever shopped at Urban Outfitters? Yeah, just a couple of times.

Where do you buy the majority of your clothing? Torrid and Target.

Would you rather wear necklaces or earrings? Earrings.

Do you consider yourself fortunate? I am in some ways.

Do you enjoy watching fights? Mark watches UFC and I occasionally catch myself getting into them.

Have you ever been in a physical fight? Not a real one.

Do you tend to talk badly about people? I tend to talk badly about idiotic people who don’t give a shit about other people.

Where are your parents as of now? My dad is at home most likely and my mother passed away in 2013.

Does your computer cooperate most of the time? I guess.

Does your family have any cheesy traditions? Yes.

When did you last go to a book store? It’s been a while.

What’s the closest book store where you live? I think there’s a local one not far from here. How much money do you have on you right now? Physical money? None.

Favorite personal feature? My eyes and my hair.

Are you wearing make up at the moment? Nope.

Favorite television channel? I don’t have regular TV. Do Netflix and Hulu count as channels?

Describe any piercings or tattoos you might have? I have 5 piercings and 9 tattoos but I don’t feel like explaining all of them.

Have you ever been fired from a job? No.

Are you currently losing a best friend? Eh.

Describe the worst day of your life: No.

Do you play any video games? Eh. Sometimes.

Would you say you hate anyone? Yes, my fucking brother in law.

Do you think freckles are cute? Sure.

Last time you went to the mall? Back in early March.

Name something that’s your favorite color: That’s in my favorite color? The LED lights above my couch. They’re currently purple.

Have you been to Red Lobster before? YES I miss it.

Do you judge by appearances? We all do to an extent. That’s what first impressions are.

Do you follow a certain religion? Nope.

Who is your role model, if you had to choose? My dad.

Would you rather have nice hair or lips? Hair.

What are you most self conscious about? My stomach.

Do you have any family members who live out of town? Yeah.

Do you consider yourself short? Yes.

What room are you in? The living room.

Hoodies or jackets? Hoodies.

Are you outside a lot? Yes.

Have you ever been dumped via text message? No.

Do you like dreamcatchers? They’re pretty but they’re a Native thing so I don’t use them.

What is your favorite letter of the alphabet? H

Do you hate repetitive people and things? Eh, depends.

Do you think autocorrect is a blessing or curse? It can helpful and annoying at times.

Do you believe in any particular curses? Sure.

Ever play a Ouija board? Yes.

What movie scares you the most? I don’t really like movies like that.

What was your bedtime as a child? I don’t remember.

Reason why your favorite holiday is your favorite: Halloween is just so spooky and creepy and the colorssssss and even more exciting when you have kids in your life. Trick or Treating is so fun.

Do you work with any close friends? Nah.

Do you consider yourself spoiled? In some ways, yes, but I’m not a brat. I am fortunate to have very loving and caring and giving family members, my husband included.

Do you listen to any country music? I don’t not listen to country music, but there isn’t a lot I voluntarily listen to.

Favorite high school teacher: Fuck all of high school.

Do you ever get drunk? Sure. I don’t really like to often but sometimes I get caught up in what I’m doing or who I am with and end up drinking a little more than planned. But it’s not something I actively plan to do.

Have you ever had highlights before? No

Favorite number: 24.

Do you still sleep with any stuffed animals? There used to be two that chilled on the bed but they haven’t in a while. What is your biggest regret in life? Regrets are dumb.

Would you say you think you have a mental disorder of some kind? Yes.

Are you normally an independent person? For the most part.

Do you have any paintings? I do.

What is one clothing fad you wish never existed? I don’t care.

Do you like to be organized? Yes.

Have you ever failed a class before? Uh huh.

Ever been judged because of your weight? Of course. What is your favorite breakfast cereal? Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Ever had a wish come true? Eh.

Do you regret meeting any of your exes? No.

Do you own any coloring books? Yes.

What’s the meanest thing someone’s called you? My brother in law called me “coddled” once very shortly after my fucking mother died so, that. He was saying it because I stilled lived with my father at the time, so fuck him.

Have you ever bullied someone? Not intentionally.

Do you ever watch Lifetime? No.

Ever tried to intentionally sabotage someone’s grade? I don’t think so.

Do you own any brown clothing? Yes.

What color are your walls painted? Very very light blue

Last thing you drank: Water.

Have you ever seen a tornado in person? I’ve been very very close to one.

Do you have an inground pool at your house? I fucking wish.

What is the first digit of your phone number? 1. :P What’s the prettiest town you’ve been to? Boston.

Do you tend to sleep a lot? No.

Silver or gold jewelry? I like both.

Do you sometimes celebrate holidays early? Depends.

Have you ever been in love? Yes.

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? My nieces.

When was the last time you showered? Yesterday.

Would you consider yourself attractive? Eh. Not conventionally, no.

Has anyone made you mad today? Yes.

Favorite smell: Gardenia.

Are you afraid of insects? Not afraid. More grossed out than anything.

Do you have any children? Nooo.

If so, what are their names? --

Would ever consider having children in the future? I don’t want to have children.

Have you ever lived on a farm? No.

Ever played any sports? Not on a team, no.

Do both of your parents have jobs? My father is retired and my mom was a stay at home mom when she was alive.

Where is the best place you’ve been on vacation to? Wilderness Resort in the Dells. GODDDDDDDD I WANNA GO.

Are you afraid people won’t accept you? Whatever.

Are you, for the most part, an honest person? Yes.

Did you make prank phone calls as a child? I did.

Do you like to make donations? Yeah.

What is your current ringtone? The Horsin Around theme song from BoJack in 8 bit. The same ringtone BoJack has in the first few seasons of the show.

Meet anyone from your past lately? How do you meet someone you already know?

Have you ever called a teen suicide line? No.

Have you ever caught something on fire? Yes.

Ever been obsessed with a show? Duh.

What type of perfume or cologne do you use? Differnt Bath and Body Works stuff.

What’s the last book you read? I’m currently kinda reading Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg.

Dream career: Event planner if we’re ever allowed to have events again.

Have you ever climbed a mountain before? Kinda.

At what age do you plan to get married? I got married when I was 27.

Ever been in a car accident? Yes.

#surveys #quarantine

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