#5 teenage boys are running society what could go wrong

[wanttotalkaboutbooks]

The Prey of Gods

by Nicky Drayden

This is an Afrofuturist novel that weaves together elements of sci-fi and fantasy to create a story of five main characters, who are tangled up in the dangerous, fantastical rise of the old gods.

My Rating: 4/5

If I had to describe this in the simplest way possible, I'd say that the book was really fun to read! You get to follow five characters who are VERY different from one another, and see how somehow their paths intersect into this crazy, larger-than-life story, and end up in ways that they absolutely could never anticipate in their wildest dreams. There are so many twists and turns of varying levels of hilarity, absurdity, and questionability, and it can get so weird, in ways where you really have to have fun with it and go along for the ride.

I ultimately did enjoy this book a lot, but I wasn't confident enough in my liking of this book to give it a 5/5; I also have some criticisms which I feel were substantial enough to knock it down to a 4/5 at least for me.

Content warnings (which might be spoilery) and full review under the cut!

The content warnings for this book include death, sexual assault (including brief depictions of SA on children), child abuse, animal death, drug use, medical procedures, and torture.

Let's start with what I liked about this book, of which there was a lot. One specific thing I want to shout out is the author's ability to develop character voice. Giving five different POV characters a unique voice is hard, but Drayden does it and she does it well. I especially like a lot of the chapters in the POV of Nomvula, who is a child, somewhere between 6-10 years old (I can't quite remember). Nomvula genuinely narrates like a child - a child that has been through a lot of trauma and hardships, sure, a child with strong moral fiber, but a child nonetheless. Other POVs that are worth mentioning are Muzi, a teenage boy, and Stoker, a politician - their character voices both reflect their respective personalities and way of speaking based on their ages and roles in society.

Drayden's writing style was unique, in a way I almost struggle to describe, because while its not flowery or prosaic, I also feel like "concise" is the wrong word to use. It's crisp but it's also very animated, which ties into what I said earlier about her strong character voice. It adds to the overall funky vibe of the story, and helps the book stand out against those written by authors who employ a more traditional, typical style of writing.

The plot itself has a lot of fun twists and turns, including a more sci-fi plotline that I won't reveal to you. From the start, the book is weird, and I mean that in a positive way. You have to laugh and enjoy the absurdity of some of the things written, and the good thing is that those absurd sounding things still tie into the plotline, and make sense later. Speaking of plotlines, one of the fun things to see is how the five characters become involved in the same crazy events by the end of the novel. Even at the beginning of the novel, there are tiny threads that show how the characters are loosely connected to each other; by the time the action ramps up, the five characters are at the heat of the conflict, probably wondering how the hell they ended up here.

Each character came from a unique background, and it is a very diverse cast in terms of race and other identities - there are gay characters, trans characters, and disabled characters. I think plugging diversity as a feature of a story can be dicey, because I think that runs the risk of tokenism, but in this story the characters and their various identities are done well - their experiences aren't angst fodder, but they do impact the characters and therefore the whole story in profound ways. There isn't any in-your-face messaging about their identities or any other social issue, for that matter, which I think is important because ultimately, our identities are deeply personal and should mean more for a character than just being a way to preach to the audience.

So while the majority of the things I have to say about this book are positive, there are some things I didn't love that I do have to mention.

One thing is that while I appreciated the author's brisk writing style, I do think it led to certain pitfalls when it came to character development or introspection. There were several instances in this book where I felt like a character changed their mind on a certain thing or had "character development" so quickly that it gave me whiplash. I didn't feel like there was very good buildup to all of these character developing moments - quite literally I felt as if someone had snapped their fingers and the character had changed their mind. I was able to overlook it because I enjoyed the overall story, but I really wish that the author had allowed for more gradual development and introspection for the characters. I attribute this to the writing style because I feel like the way Drayden writes really isn't introspective in general - the text doesn't really try to get deep into the characters' heads, which is fine, but there are some parts where this is sorely needed. There is one specific scene where the change in a side character's attitude to one of the main characters was so abrupt that I think it was, plainly, just badly written, but I won't say more because spoilers.

There were also one specific thing that peeved me enough to mention it here, which is that at one point in the second half of the book, Nomvula, the character who is under 10 years old, starts talking to older characters in a way that's very "wise beyond her ages". There's no reason for this to occur, especially since in previous chapters she clearly talks like a child. I absolutely detest child characters talking like adults, and it makes zero sense to me that Nomvula would start acting like another character's emergency therapist, talking about grief or some shit, while she is quite literally fighting for her life and also about seven years old.

In general, I think that there were certain heavier topics that the book should have addressed with more deliberation and depth. For example, one character is a politician, and while the book's main purpose isn't social commentary, there's clear corruption and all sorts of political mishappenings in the government they work in. Given that, I think the way the author wrote their political career and attitudes towards politics came across as naive - the character had a level of sincerity and optimism towards politics and the governing system that definitely doesn't exist in real life. This is just one example - there are other aspects of both character and world-building that I think should have been explored more to give the story additional depth.

Overall, though, I think this is a good book that I'd recommend to anyone who likes interesting, funky types of storytelling. I think it's important to read these sort of non-traditional styles to make sure we aren't bound by made up constraints of genre or any other standard we have for "good writing", and this book in particular created a fun and compelling narrative that I think can be enjoyed by a wide group of people.

[justdumbfics]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dr. STONE (Anime), Dr. STONE (Manga) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Asagiri Gen & Ishigami Senkuu Characters: Asagiri Gen, Ishigami Senkuu, Ogawa Yuzuriha Additional Tags: Everyone's a Dumbass, gen is a mentalist but he's still a dumbass, let's not forget we have 5 teenage boys running society, what could go wrong, Light-Hearted, practical problems with the stone world

Summary:

Senku was acting strange

For the last few weeks, the women of their Kingdom had been in and out of his tent. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in pairs. They usually came out blushing. Or went in blushing. Or both.

Gen could only think of one possible explanation, and he really didn't like it. This really was no way to use power!

Or, the fic where Gen may be a mentalist but he's still a 19yo boy and a bit of a dumbass, on occasion. Senku is also, like, 18 and also a dumbass. This is meant to be a light hearted fic about practical problems in the stone world lmao pls enjoy!

Spoilers for end of stone wars arc, and a lil bit for the following arc.

[wishingicouldfly]

I've been actively blogging for more than six months, even though I've had a tumblr account for ten years. I started reading One Direction (specifically Larry) fanfiction about the same time.

Originally, I read exclusively canon compliant fiction--I was hungry for industry insider, what-could-have-happened narratives. But I've slowly branched out into other genres. I find fanfic--good fanfic--super calming. When I've had too much stunting, too much noise, I grab a fanfic and immerse myself. So I thought it was time to do a post about my favorites. Keep in mind, I'm terrible at cataloging, and I have over 150 bookmarks on my A03 Account, so this is by no means an exhaustive list.

I'm not including the classics like Tired, Tired Sea and Escapade. While I do love both of those (so well written), because a lot of people know about those already.

My all time favorites are by @helloamhere

1. The Multipicity of Powers - https://archiveofourown.org/works/28580229

Maybe in another universe he isn’t different. Maybe he hadn’t been given an impossible choice. Maybe he wouldn’t have lost everything and broken everything and then fallen impossibly, irrevocably in love with the first next thing that was kind. Maybe in that universe he doesn’t feel like he’s never breathing, always pretending, teaching the kids even though they all have to learn alone, trying hard not to read the headlines, and so afraid, every day, that he won’t be a good enough teammate to the superhero he can’t live without. He knows that love isn’t supposed to feel this way, slid secret under your skin like a surgical razor, an invisible war held close over the tender vein that keeps you alive. On the other hand, Louis wonders, had he ever known how to do it any other way?

Maybe there’s a universe where he doesn’t have to keep all his secrets on the inside.

But this isn’t that universe.

//an X-Men AU.

Me: I never thought I'd love a super hero 1D cross over, but this is so well done. The backstory, the pacing, the characterization, the friendship. Read it.

2. Saving Symphony Hall and it's prequel Night Out - https://archiveofourown.org/works/12633921

“I think I have an idea,” Louis said. Slowly, and reluctantly, but with a growing sense of the inevitable. “God damnit, I think I have a really good idea.”

“Oh christ, that's the problem-solving face,” Babs said. “Last time we saw that face, he sold a company.”

“Wait, what?” Zayn asked.

“Right place, right time,” Louis said. “Also, fuck my life,”

“What?” Zayn repeated. Niall patted his hand.

“I usually just roll with whatever Louis is about to do,” he said. “It’s better for us all.”

“That’s the attitude,” said Louis, “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Tonight, I need to do some research. Zayn, give me your number. I’m gonna save our symphony.”

Me: The best sex scene I've ever read is in the prequel Night Out. Sexy, but tender. I love the characterizations in this duo--ABO but not traditional. Doesn't feel out of character.

3. Just Let Me -https://archiveofourown.org/works/11695350

The party was going well. So well, Niall had already sworn undying love to one multi-tiered chocolate cake, two friendly corgi-poodle mixes, Zayn’s hair, and the entire population of Los Angeles. So well, Zayn had only laughed and ruffled Niall’s hair and not even twitched towards a cigarette. So well, nearly everyone had spilled far past the boundaries of the night’s original plans, extracting bottles of vodka from the cabinets and losing a lot of clothes. Harry had proclaimed that he was finally going to throw a small and very grownup dinner party and of course here they were three hours later, fifty people half-naked in the pool. Soon to be full-naked, if Louis had to guess. Everybody in LA loved a heated pool. Everybody loved Harry.

Me: I love love love this. Harry is so gentle, and Louis is so stubborn and needy. It's ABO but subtle. I'll read this one again and again. It's comforting.

@HelloAmHere is one of the best writers I know--amazing stuff. I also love their werewolf story, but it's not finished, so I won't link it here.

Other favorites:

1. Seven Up by cherrystreet - https://archiveofourown.org/works/5828539

Very loosely based on the British TV show "The Up Series" and somewhat inspired by the song “Something I Need” by Onerepublic, we follow the lives of Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson in an interview setting every seven years. They fall apart and come together, their lives and emotions recorded. Harry calls it a time capsule. Louis calls it a pain in the arse.

Me: Trigger Warning, major character death. I literally SOBBED through the end of this. It was lovely and devastating. So good. But be warned.

2. Light, Spark and Fire series by @greenfeelings

Life’s pretty ordinary for Harry. He lives with his best friend, got into university just like he’s planned, and manages to support himself just fine for an unbonded omega. If he sustains that lifestyle by getting paid to help alphas through their rut every now and then, that’s nothing to be hung up on. Until he’s hired by an alpha that turns everything upside down.

Or, Louis and Zayn run a music label, Liam is Britain’s up-and-coming pop star, Harry’s working on taking Louis’ walls down until he builds his own up, and Niall holds them all together without realising he does.

Me: A nice healthy three-parter. Characters you just want to live with for a while.

3. Relief Next to Me by dolce_piccante - https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117942

AU. What happens when a baker and a graphic designer meet via a very specific Craigslist post? Fate, friendship, food, and maybe more.

Me: This one is super long, so be prepared when you dive in. It's got a lot of lovely bits, and some great smut.

4. 2012 'Verse by ashavahishta - https://archiveofourown.org/series/27601

Me: This is a five-parter and satisfies my love of canon compliant stories. It spans most of 2012 and into 2013, and illustrates the difficulties of Harry and Louis' relationship amid the band success and management disapproval.

5. Love After the End of the World by mercurial-madhouse (writing_practice) - https://archiveofourown.org/works/31251434/chapters/77248901

Society shattered when all electricity suddenly cut off across the globe, plunging the world into darkness. Now, Prometheus Industries is the sole remaining supply of power, a saving grace to those who survived Lights Out. As fugitives in no-man’s land struggling to break into Prometheus HQ, death lurks around every corner for Louis and Zayn. Things get complicated when a routine recon falls apart and Louis collides with Harry and his mates Niall and Liam, survivors with their own agenda.

When staying alive is already a constant battle, the deadliest weakness is to be in love. For Harry and Louis, finding each other sits on top of the endless list of What Else Could Go Wrong.

Me: Really unusual (as far as I can tell) end of the world story. I loved the characterizations of soul mates here at the end of the world.

6. Flightless Bird by audreyhheart - https://archiveofourown.org/works/6401653/chapters/14656807

AU where Louis Tomlinson is a principal dancer with The Royal Ballet. When his rival from ballet school, moody dance prodigy Harry Styles joins the company, old wounds are reopened and old passions reignited. During the company's production of Swan Lake the secret that doomed their love is finally revealed, but will it be too late?

Me: Trigger Warning, sexual assault (by an original character to a major character). This was a little brutal because I hated to see a broken Harry, but it was well written and has a happy ending.

7. Wear It Like A Crown by zarah5 - https://archiveofourown.org/works/1816771/chapters/3900322

AU. As part of a team of fixers hired to handle a gay scandal in Buckingham Palace, Louis expects Prince Harry to be a lot of things—most notably a royally spoilt brat. Never mind that the very same Prince Harry used to star in quite a number of Louis' teenage fantasies.

Me: I loved Louis in this one--actually they are both pretty great. Scratch that, they are ALL pretty great.

8. Shake Me Down by AGreatPerhaps12 - https://archiveofourown.org/works/3331958/chapters/7285322

Harry's new to college, fresh out of Catholic school and conversion therapy camp, and Louis runs the campus LGBTQIA organization.

Me: I don't like the self-hate here, but it was necessary for the story and H comes around. Found family vibe.

9. Gods & Monsters by Velvetoscar - https://archiveofourown.org/works/2090982/chapters/4550871

The instructions were simple: seduce and destroy Harry Styles. Not once did they discuss the option of Louis actually falling in love. So, naturally, that's exactly what he did.

Me: I loved Harry in this one. Louis gets there. I don't like Liam, but I don't think you're supposed to. Zayn is great.

10. Own the Scars by crinkle-eyed-boo (KimmieRocks) - https://archiveofourown.org/series/1010796

Louis has never felt like he was good enough: for his stepdad, for his life-long best friend, for the life he's supposed to want. After an accident that nearly costs him his life, Louis' parents send him to rehab where he’s forced to face his demons. On the long and difficult road to recovery, Louis must confront the truths he’s been avoiding about his future, his relationships, and his sense of self-worth. Because before he can love anyone else, he’s got to learn how to love himself first.

Me: Harry is lovely in this one. Trigger warning, substance abuse and near death.

11. Wild Love by purpledaisy - https://archiveofourown.org/series/1030904

AU: Two best friends try to date each other for forty days. It's supposed to be fun until emotions make it complicated.

Me: I loved this way more than I thought I would. It's lovely and messy and I love it.

12. Victorian Boy by audreyhheart - https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosann1986/readings?page=6

Victorian AU. Harry the virgin Duke of Somerset knows little of love, while Louis the sly Duke of Warwick knows too much. When the two dukes come together for the Bilsdale fox hunt in York, Harry finds himself drawn into Louis' bed. But when secrets from Louis' dark past come to light, Harry fears that the fox isn't the only one being hunted.

Me: Historical fiction I didn't intend to love. I LOVE Harry in this one. LOTS of smut, so be warned.

13. Keep Me Closer by zanni_scaramouche - https://archiveofourown.org/works/30752633

Louis expects Harry to react poorly, maybe even file a formal complaint and that’s gonna suck ass but Louis won’t say shit cause he knows he deserves it, so he prepares an apology before Harry’s even turned around.

What he doesn’t expect is Harry to fucking drop.

Me: lovely, protective Louis just trying to do the right thing.

14. Turning Page by purpledaisy for SockstheDog

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11826345

AU: Harry Styles tries to get lost in a place he’s never been.  Louis Tomlinson has been perfecting the art of being lost for years. What they don’t expect to find is each other.

Me: sweet love story. Niall owns a bar, and is pretty great.

15. Freedom Always Comes With a Price by Cyantific - https://archiveofourown.org/works/30278514/chapters/74624262

A shared dream brings them together onto the X-factor stage, but one decision changes Harry and Louis’ lives overnight. Thrust into a world of instant stardom, they're forced to live a lie to sustain their dreams, but years of living in the shadows and under strict management takes its toll.

With the bands impending hiatus, there’s no better time for change, so they think.

Desperate for a solution, they turn to an unlikely source with a radical plan. An unfortunate accident sets everything in motion, but not how they intended, leaving Louis’ memories altered, Harry broken-hearted and full of regret.

Can Harry figure out a way to fix everything? Will he even want to once he sees how Louis moved on after the hiatus? Will Louis ever find out the truth of their past and can he forgive Harry after all this time?

In the end, two friends find out that memories are elusive, trust is everything and love is the only antidote.

Me: Heartbreaking when they lose each other, but really good in the end.

16. Little Technicolor Things by scary_crow - https://archiveofourown.org/works/6025519/chapters/13821628

Louis is a poor writer and recent university graduate, depressed, anxious, and living in London when he meets Harry, an artist with a secret who likes to paint sunrises and pretty boys from California.

17. Hold You Now by solvetheminourdreams - https://archiveofourown.org/works/30253536/chapters/74556744

Three years ago, Harry Styles said goodbye to communications consultancy firm McQuiston Worldwide, leaving a life of travel and agency PR behind. When he accompanies his best friend to a family wedding across the Atlantic, he'll be forced to reopen old wounds and face his past—one that no one wants to hash out, but may just have to.

Me: Niall is great. They almost miss each other in this one, and you just want to bash them over the head. But they figure it out.

18. At Risk, I Fold by clare328 - https://archiveofourown.org/works/26542480

2015 is a stream of hotel rooms and whisky on the rocks, tired glances and touching hands under tables. It’s the bears and the bees under a rainbow sky, and Harry and Louis have to figure out how to grow up together, instead of apart.

Me: A canon compliant fic that feels like it could have really happened. Set in 2015. Lovely first chapter and scene where Harry writes If I Could Fly--i could read that chapter over and over.

19. Into The Blue by zarah5 - https://archiveofourown.org/works/1035822/chapters/2065499

AU. In which Louis is Harry's scuba instructor and quite happy to provide the requested special treatment, pun fully intended. It can't be all that difficult to convince Harry that they're on the same page, right? Also, Niall and Liam may or may not be dating, and Zayn is surrounded by emotionally stunted idiots. He bears it with dignity.

Me: AKA the Scuba fic.

20. Tie Your Heart by ArcadianMaggie - https://archiveofourown.org/works/546688/chapters/973236

Harry grows wings.

Me: How can you not love a fic where Harry grows wings? Trigger warning: injury of a major character.

21. I think I'll end this here. My last and probably first favorite (read it more than once) is...

my heart is breathing for this moment in time by usedtothebeach - https://archiveofourown.org/works/934996/chapters/1820282

When Louis first saw Harry at the 2010 X Factor Auditions, he thought he was watching a peculiarly special stranger. But Harry has known Louis ever since he was five years old.

Because Louis has a rare genetic disorder that causes him to Time Travel to important moments in his past and in his future - and to Harry, always to Harry. When they're put into a band together, it seems like everything Harry has been waiting and wishing for has finally come true. Except for the small fact that Louis doesn't know that Harry is in love with him- that Harry's always been in love with him. Fate, it would seem, is just getting started.

A story about growing up and growing together, and the impossible love that makes it all worthwhile.

Me: I LOVED the Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, and I'm a huge fan of time travel, so this is right up my alley. It's really well done, weaving canon into fantasy and then going years forward in tme. I love everything about it. Great character development. Really good smut. Trigger warning, there's a little underage sex, so be aware. Anyway, LOVE this one so much.

I'll add to this but it's already longer than I meant it to be.

[myhauntedsalem]

9 real-life horror stories of people who disappeared and were never found

Tales from the Charley Project highlight strange disappearances from an older, eerier America.

The most terrifying stories out there are often true. And the best versions of those are the ones where the answer can never truly be known. Why else do Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer occupy such outsize places in our collective unconscious?

13 classic scenes that explain how horror movies work

The Charley Project is a database that catalogs people who have disappeared without a trace. The site is a great resource and repository for modern cases, but if you look at its database chronologically, you will find cases from far earlier in the 20th century that will likely never be solved, simply because all involved have passed away.

It’s these cases — from an older America where a disappearance was less likely to turn into a mass media sensation — that haunt the memory the most. They’re a record of a time when so-called “stranger danger” wasn’t a well-known topic, or when a woman could run a business selling kidnapped children to the rich.

Here are a handful of the best historical disappearances contained in the Charley Project’s archives.

1) The Martin Family (Oregon, 1958)

Some of the best details in stories like these have to do with the lives of people the disappeared left behind. What actually happened to the Martin family isn’t much of a mystery — they likely drove off the road on the way home, their car plunging into the river below — but the evocative snapshots of a life never resumed make this entry particularly eerie. It highlights all the mundane details of life that might flash before your own eyes in the instant everything changes.

2) Bobby Dunbar (Louisiana, 1912)

Fans of This American Life will recognize this story, as it was the center of one of the show’s best episodes. When young Bobby Dunbar, just 4 years old, wandered off from his family on a group outing, he was never seen again. It’s possible he fell from a railroad trestle and drowned. It’s also possible he was abducted by a “strange man” who was seen lurking in the area. But we’ll likely never know, because authorities thought they found Bobby Dunbar — and didn’t realize it was another child entirely (who simply stepped into Bobby’s life) until 2004, long after it would have been possible to solve the case.

3) Billy Gaffney (New York, 1927)

When 4-year-old Billy Gaffney was left to play with a 3-year-old friend in the hallway of his Brooklyn apartment building for just a few moments, the two boys disappeared. The 3-year-old was eventually found on the roof of the apartment building, and he said the “boogey-man,” an elderly gentlemen with a gray mustache, had spirited Billy away. Serial killer Albert Fish (who fits the boogey-man description) confessed to Billy’s murder years later, but Billy’s remains have yet to be found.

4) Mary Moroney (Illinois, 1930)

Mary Moroney, just 2, is an example of a recurring motif in the Charley Project’s archives: families desperate for cheap child care during the Great Depression who simply trusted the wrong person. Moroney disappeared after her parents allowed her to spend a day with a woman who called herself Julia Otis. A woman purporting to be Otis’s cousin later wrote to the family to say Otis was “love hungry” after the loss of a husband and child and that she would care for Mary. Mary has never been found and would be in her 80s today. She may still be alive and have no idea who she is.

5) Georgia Weckler (Wisconsin, 1947)

The sad story of the disappearance of Georgia Weckler, 8, is haunting for one specific reason: “Curiously, prior to her disappearance, Georgia had made several remarks indicating that she especially feared being kidnapped.” What prompted this, we’ll likely never know.

6) Evelyn Hartley (Wisconsin, 1953)

The disappearance of Evelyn Hartley is straight out of a horror movie. The teenager was babysitting one evening when she didn’t call to check in with her parents at the appointed time. Her father went to check on her and found a completely locked house with the lights and radio still on — and no Evelyn inside. Signs of a struggle and forced entry led to a desperate search for the girl, but she was never found. Pools of blood that may have belonged to Evelyn, as well as eyewitness accounts of a girl who might have been her, make this story all the more mysterious.

7) Bruce Kremen (California, 1960)

Bruce Kremen disappeared while attending camp. He was playing with a few other boys just a short distance from his group, when he became separated from them and was never seen again. Initially believing him to be lost in the San Gabriel Mountains, authorities mounted a massive search, but were unable to find either the boy or his remains. Now, however, authorities believe him to have come in contact with Mack Ray Edwards, one of America’s least known yet most prolific serial killers, who worked on highway construction and perhaps buried the remains of his victims beneath the asphalt, where they would never be found.

8) Marjorie West (Pennsylvania, 1938)

The West family went out after church for an outing in the country, one that involved Marjorie, 4, and her 11-year-old sister going to pick wildflowers. The sister went to talk to their parents, and Marjorie disappeared from the middle of a wide-open field. This might seem like a standard-issue kidnapping story save for the fact that Marjorie’s life might well have intersected with Georgia Tann, the woman who ran the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. Praised for her ability to find homes for children who needed them, Tann actually abducted more than 1,200 children and then placed them with rich families in far-off states like California — often for a hefty fee. If Marjorie did somehow meet Tann or someone who worked with her, she could be alive today and unaware of her true identity.

9) The Sodder children (West Virginia, 1945)

By far the eeriest story in the Charley Project archives is that of the five Sodder children, who all disappeared under suspicious circumstances on Christmas Eve night. The children (five out of 10 siblings) asked their parents if they might stay up and play with their new toys, rather than go directly to bed. Their parents agreed and turned in for the night, and a series of strange events transpired.

First, the phone rang, the children’s mother answered, and the voice on the other end asked for someone the mother had never heard of.

When she said so, the voice laughed and hung up. The mother later realized all of the lights in the house were on, the shades were drawn, and the doors were unlocked. She awakened again by a sound on the roof, and then she woke up for the final time at 1:30 am with the realization that the house was on fire. She, her husband, and their other five children got out, but the five children who had asked to stay up late never emerged from the inferno. When their father went to climb his ladder up into their bedrooms on the second floor, he could not find it. It was later found dragged away from the house.

The official conclusion was that the children had died in the house fire, but the Sodders never stopped believing their kids were still alive, right up until the two parents died. And they were encouraged by a strange photograph mailed to them in the ’60s, purporting to show one of their sons as a grown adult. Did the Sodder children die in a fire set by never-caught perpetrators? Perhaps. But the tantalizing thought that they might have been kidnapped — might still, indeed, be alive, perhaps in Italy — has kept some sliver of hope that this strange case might find resolution.

[maibi]

The Past Never Forgets

Pt. 1

Dabi x reader

Warnings: killing, cursing

Summary: as a cast out by society you find your way to the League of Villains. Your family that had given up on searching for you after you ran away , but after 5 years, in some mysterious way, they found your hide-out. 

A/n: I got the quirk idea from someone else bc my brain isn’t working with me. They have a lot of other fan made quirks I will put the link right here, you can check it out!! ( https://www.wattpad.com/672985786-my-fan-quirks-venom ) 

—————————————————————————

Life wasn’t really something that had been going great for you. In fact your life had been pretty shit. You were an outcast, hated by society, hated by your own family. All because of your unbearable quirk. You had no place to feel safe and no place to call home. Your family made sure you never used your quirk because it could cause deaths among your loved ones. Your childhood was ruined all because of the image they wanted to hold as a family. they put their desires of fame above your well-being and you saw only one option to change that. And that was by running away. The only thing you had been taught was to hate what you used to love, you were basically emotionless.

As a teenager of 16 years old you decided to run away from home. You never got treated right and you were seen as a death-threat. You yourself didn’t see any problems with your quirk, but your family had other opinions about that. There were rules for you, and only you. None of your siblings had any of these rules, because their quirks were hero-like and yours was villain-like. If you used your quirk without permission you would be left in a dark room with no food for a whole day. They would call this discipline, but in reality this was child abuse. The only person caring about you was your grandma, but after she passed away you had no reason to stay in that house.

Your family tried searching for you, but gave up quickly when they realized life would be much better without you around. You quickly realized that life would also be much better without them. You had blamed yourself for your quirk. For all those years in that place that was a so called home, you had believed that your quirk was a threat to society. That if you made the wrong moves they would take a hold of your life. But after running away, and finding people that adored you for your quirk, it made you realize what a real family was. And you realized that your quirk was more than just a threat to society, it was something that belonged to you and only you. 

You were the holder of the Venom quirk.

For 5 years you wandered around, going from city to city and doing about anything to provide yourself some food and a place to sleep. You never stayed put, that wasn’t your way of going. You went from place to place, exploring different streets from every city and making yourself known within the “villain community”. It wasn’t every day people got to see a venom quirk in action, so they were all curious enough to let you stay with them.

One day, before you had settled down, you were wandering around a new city, chewing on some stolen buns, you walked in a side street, hidden from the citizens. You saw blue flames and it struck to you. You had always liked the color blue, it was a pretty color compared to your dark purple venom, you didn’t like the color purple after all. You had watched the holder of the blue flames do his thing on a person who was trying his hardest to escape. He was unable to let out a sound as the blue flame man was keeping his hands strongly around his throat. 

You were interested in this person, not because he was probably a villain, but mainly because you thought his quirk was cool. Oh yeah, and of course because of the color blue. You wanted to know who’s quirk would be stronger. You were curious, so you budged in, not caring about what would happen. You threw your bun on the ground.

“I mean, that’s pretty kinky”, you said. 

his hand shot in your direction, but you were quick to react. Before his flames could hit you, you had made an X motion with your arms, letting out your venom in a shield form, protecting you from the burning flames. If there was one thing you had learned from wandering on your own, it were quick reflexes. you felt that his flames were powerful, but you knew for a fact that he didn’t use all of his strength.

“You got some good reflexes”, he said continuing to strangle the small dude. 

“You seem... interested in that kind of stuff”, you said, pointing at his hands around the man’s throat. 

“well what can I say, it’s tempting sometimes”, he said with a smirk. “I mean you can join in if you’d like that.”

He dropped the man and watched him crawl his way in the other direction. “That’s your prey, you sure you wanna just let him escape?”, you curiously asked, smirking back at him.

“He can’t go far, the next person will get him”, he said as he properly turned around and leaned against the stone cold wall. You couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of him actually freezing against the cold wall right now. “Now tell me, what brings you to this side of the city?”

“I saw blue flames and I like the color blue”, you shrugged, placing your hands in your pockets. “Nothing more.”

He walked closer to you, examining you from head to toe with his eyes. You let him, because in the end what did you have to lose? If he wanted to kill you, he would have probably already tried to do that. But he was just looking at you, probably trying to figure out how your quirk was supposed to work. 

“You saw blue flames and you like the color blue”, he silently repeated your sentence. His eyes stopped trailing down your body when he connected eyes with you. “Do you have any clue as to who I am?”

“Not the slightest”, you answered, breaking the eye contact first by walking past him to the direction the person that was a victim of his blue flames. He was gone, with only a splash of blood and a limb on the ground. You smiled to yourself. He had not survived just like flame boy said.

This could get interesting. You had thought to yourself. 

“What exactly is it that you do around here”, he asked while walking behind you. “Never saw you around here. You new?”

“You could say that”, you answered. But left out the fact that you were only new to the city and not to the whole “villain” thing, because giving away your life wasn’t really your plan yet.

“What about you? I never heard of you”, you said.

“My name is quite known here”, he smirked, walking closer to you. “The name is Dabi.” 

“Nice to meet you infamous Dabi”, you said as you inched closer too, showing him you were by no means intimidated by him. “I look forward to hearing and seeing you more often.”

After that you had made yourself known in the new city you visited, the city were you had met Dabi, the so called famous villain. You did hear a lot about him, making him a lot more interesting. There were many encounters between the two of you and he had tried to convince you to join his little group of friends called the League of Villains. You liked to work independent, so you kindly rejected his offer. 

But it wasn’t after a very fierce battle that Dabi had been heavily injured. You wouldn’t consider yourselves friends at that time, but you were close enough to not let him die. You hadn’t received from him what you had wanted. So you brought him to his hide-out, where the other members of the League were. 

The time you had spent there as just “a visitor”, had turned into you wanting to have more fun so you decided to join, without a plan. You were still allowed to move on your own so you didn’t see that much of a problem. They weren’t people with rules, or whatever. You lived freely, and you were happy about that.

You had made that place your home. Things that started off as a joke, turned into things that were important to you. These people were the people that didn’t fear you, but were happy to battle with you. These people wanted to get stronger for their own sake and didn’t live up to the will of other’s. Even if they looked like emotionless people, they cared about each other. And that was a place you liked to call home.

that all lead to the present. You were sitting with Dabi at the edge of high building, thinking about some random plan Shigaraki had made you think about. It wasn’t even necessary, he just needed a back-up plan.

“We’re not really gonna write this down are we?”, you asked as you held a piece of paper and a pen in your hands. “Shigaraki has to be kidding if he really wants a back-up plan for this one. I’m 99% sure we’re winning this one.” You slowly watched your venom eat up the paper as you threw the pen off of the building. 

Shigaraki had planned to attack UA, you didn’t really care about UA, but because Shigaraki had let you do just about anything while being with them you didn’t mind helping him out. “We can never go wrong with a back-up plan, you know.”

“But I mean, he has been planning for over a month now. How wrong can stuff go? Worst case scenario is that we retreat. They can’t possibly be this cautious beforehand?”

“Oh, you don’t know UA. They do just about anything to keep school grounds safe. They have everything ready for literally the worst case scenario”, Dabi said.

“But everything has been planned out, we literally searched for every possible thing that could go wrong and we found a solution for that. I really don’t think we need this. Besides, since when does Shigaraki want back-up plans, he never did-”, your head shot up in realization and you slapped dabi across his chest as you lightly gasped. “You little shit. Shigaraki didn’t ask us to make a back-up plan! Why did you bring me here then?!”

“Ding ding ding, someone caught on”, he said as he slowly rose to his feet.

“But why!”, you asked as you also stood up.

“To protect you”, he said smugly.

“To protect me?”, you said questionably. “And why would you do that? I survived on my own for 5 years on the street, I think I can handle some high school children.”

He came closer to you and kissed your lips for only a second. He did this often, it’s not like it was the first time he did it, but it always left you a little flustered. It was not everyday you had received any form of affection, so it was all new to you. You two weren’t in a “relationship”, but it sure was something along those lines. Whenever he’d kiss you, your so called superiority went down a little only because you did not know how to act. But you never let yourself get trampled over. 

“Dabi I’m serious here, why did you take me here. If Shigaraki is fighting some people right now we should at least help him. Your own feelings shouldn’t come first place when it’s such a dangerous thing. I can care for my own, so let’s go help Shigaraki. He helped us out too many times to leave him alone there”, you said in a strict tone, showing him that you were by no means playing. “Besides I haven’t thrown a good punch in a while, I need this.”

“It was him that told me to bring you here, tho I would have even if he didn’t ask me to”, he said. “Your family found your occupation. Not the real hide-out, but you know the one where we-”

You slapped a hand on his lips, making sure he didn’t continue that sentence. Your face was flushed and his lips turned into a smirk. You didn’t like it when openly talked about your intimate relationship. He knew exactly how to fluster you, but right now wasn’t really the best moment to do so. 

You looked at the ground, eyebrows furrowed. Your family really had the audacity to come search for you now? It felt like bullshit to you. You looked at Dabi and straightened your posture. “All the more reasons for me to head over and take a look.”

[quillify-tries-to-talk]

Some of my favorite tropes in media

1. Found family

Welp. Why am I surprised?

In addition to a ton of platonic relationships, there's also a bang-on hilarity in each one of these groups.

Six of Crows (the progression in Kaz and Wylan's dynamic??? Nina and Inej being besties??? Jesper and Inej having a running joke of scheming face lol??? Matthias forgoing his prejudices to team up with Jesper and Kuwei???)

The Hargreeves siblings??? (We're not gonna talk about what's going on between Luther and Allison 💀 but the rest of them 🥺🥺🥺)

2. Ballroom dance scenes

Oh, to be twirling across the dancefloor in the arms of your partner (bonus points if it's your enemy💖) and you can't decide if your heightened breathing is due to the music's tempo or the 🌟tension🌟

Whyyyyyyy did we have to stop balls!?!?!? Whyyyyyyyy???? Are you telling me that we lost the opportunity to wear our most artful dresses and have a night of elegant dancing and food and it was replaced by nightclubs??? T_T

3. The sunshine character actually has problems.

Love, love, love it when the sunshine, always joking, always kind character opens up about their own issues and insecurities yet they don't stop being kind and don't lose their heart just because the world is going to hell

Prime examples: Ron Weasley (au contraire, HP fandom, this guy has one of the best characterizations in the books and y'all just sleep on him because you want your special ones so much), Leo Valdez (my boy repaired a whole dragon alone, dealt with losing his mom, was homeless and yet keeps the atmosphere light and happy and makes hilarious jokes T_T), Inej Ghafa (horribly traumatized, has done things to survive in a brutal world, deserves the world, and yet is so, so, so fiercely kind and compassionate and always there for her friends💖)

4. When the tough, scary one is soft for kids or animals

Nothing is more wholesome than watching a stone-cold badass softening towards a kid or adopting a baby animal or just showing love for their family (Five Hargreeves 🥺). Shows that they still have a bit of their heart unguarded wnd hopeful.

5. Wholesome friendships that just stay friendships + siblings being siblings.

My ace ass hates love triangles with a fiery passion and it's really tiring to see every friendship being shipped left and right or being pushed into love triangle *side-eyes CC*

Lucie Herondale and Cordelia Carstairs are my favorite parabatai duo and I need more content of their friendship and antics pleaseee. I need more of them being a chaotic duo.

Alastair and Cordelia are my favorite brother sister duo, just with the way they address each other and how Cordelia thought about killing him during the demon attacks in ChoG.

Percy Jackson and Grover Underwood. The guy sailed across the Bermuda Triangle to rescue his best friend.

Also the potential we lost with Hermione and Ginny because R*wling couldn't write more than one PoV -_-

But on a happy note, Ron and Harry are my favorite and I love these dorks so much. They really become brothers by the end *gross sobbing*

Aru and her Pandava sisters and the two braincells they share🤦‍♀️😂

Once more, the Hargreeves family going from strangers to dumbass chaotic family in TUA s2😂🤦‍♀️

6. Enemies-to-lovers

Bonus points if they're also academic rivals. Why is this trope not used more? We could explore some great themes on the shit education system.

No one? Fine I'll write a fic myself.

Also, enemies to lovers =/= abusive relationships. Keep that trash away from me where the love interests are manipulative, abusive towards their love interests and then later fall in love with them. My favorite progression goes like this:

Ugh pretentious ass, look at them==>ugh why are we working together?==>why do we work so well as a team!?==>goddammit why are they so nice!?==>I guess we're friends now==>what is this tension!?!==>*notices something pretty about them* uh oh. 😳😳😳

Prime examples: Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Kallias and Alessandra from The Shadows Between Us. Jude and Cardan from TFOTA (I know they're toxic. Would not stan that relationship irl but I loved their development in the trilogy)

7. When the best friends go to an event as each other's date and are mutually pining over each other but are oblivious dumbasses.🤦‍♀️

Bonus points if other people mistake them for a couple and they can't even get out a proper explanation ;)

*whispers* Harry and Ron should've asked each other to the Yule Ball

8. More thoughtfully-written boys in YA

Please move on beyond the bad boy and broody, immortal, muscular warrior trope. Give representation to my PoC, neurodivergent, trans and fat boys. Give boys dark features (I promise they are as entrancing as blue eyes or blonde hair). Make them emotional, make them something other than stoic, make them like teenagers (and not adults playing teens). They deserve the world and well-written role models as much as girls do.

Prime example: Ron Weasley, Jesper, Wylan, Enrique and Hypnos from TGW, and Julian Blackthorn.

I could write essays for Ron but all I'll say is that r*wling did a good job by giving the role of emotional support (that's usually considered a feminine job) to a boy and made him funny and kind-hearted🥺

As for Julian, like I said before ruthless characters being soft for their family make me go T_T

9. Showing feminism with an equal society (as Tricia Levenseller does it), wholesome f/f and m/f friendships, normalizing the presence of LGBTQ people, without trashing men or femininity.

If you have to deliberately create a highly patriarchal society to show off your progressive views and badass female MC, then you're doing feminism wrong :)

Oops my saltiness leaked out in the end 😳

[the-queer-observer]

The TOXICITY of straight dating culture: Do you even realize what you teach?

A few months ago, a straight teenage girl explained her crush to me with the sentence “He’s so toxic.”

I know a 17-year-old girl with a little to no clue of how a non-toxic relationship should look like.

I started noticing a certain pattern online and in my real life too.

Now it’s a time for my first disclaimer: I am not straight myself. Nope. Not at all. Perhaps that’s why I see through it.

To this point, all I have done about this is that I have complained to some friends, got over it and went on with my life.

Today, a girl, no older than twelve, has told me about her crush on a “bad boy” and we talked about him for a second. He really did seem like what the definition of a bad boy is for tweens.

I snapped.

And here I am, writing my first tumblr post ever on this very topic.

I want to make clear, this is not an attack on those girls. This is an attack on the society, what it taught them and what it failed to teach.

The youngest girl and me, we talked about music. She said she liked “dramatic” songs and played me some of her favorites.

Disclaimer number two: I did know both the artists, but I don’t actually listen to them. The closest to mainstream music my playlists get is Take me to church by Hozier, the rest being a wide range of songs, interprets and genres from pop punk to death metal and everything in between.

I was actually surprised. One of the two artists she played for me was Billie Eilish. The beginning of the song went:

Don't be cautious, don't be kind

You committed, I'm your crime

Push my button anytime

You got your finger on the trigger

But your trigger finger's mine

The second song was by Maroon 5.

It was even worse:

So what you trying to do to me

It's like we can't stop, we're enemies

But we get along when I'm inside you, eh

You're like a drug that's killing me

I cut you out entirely

But I get so high when I'm inside you

Yeah you can start over you can run free

You can find other fish in the sea

You can pretend it's meant to be

But you can't stay away from me

I can still hear you making that sound

Taking me down rolling on the ground

You can pretend that it was me

But no, oh

I am not going to argue about whether it’s appropriate or whether she understands the lyrics the way I do. It doesn’t even matter. She understands the drama in the song. She understands it enough for me to be concerned.

There are other songs like that. There is a whole culture teaching pre-teen and teenage girls, that “they can’t get away”, romanticizing toxic people and toxic relationships, blurring the lines of consent and guess what? The girls believe it’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I texted my girlfriend and we spent some time looking for straight love-songs, celebrating healthy relationships. None of them were mainstream, but we found things like:

That the world is ugly

But you're beautiful to me

Are you thinking of me

Like I'm thinking of you

I would say I'm sorry, though

Though I really need to go

I just wanted you to know

I wanted you to know

I wanted you to know

I'm thinking of you every night, every day

(My Chemical romance)

And

Desperate for changing

Starving for truth

I'm closer to where I started

I'm chasing after you

I'm falling even more in love with you

Letting go of all I've held on to

I'm standing here until you make me move

I'm hanging by a moment here with you

Forgetting all I'm lacking

Completely incomplete

I'll take your invitation

You take all of me now

(Lifehouse)

First of all: Those are 4 extracts of songs, chosen by me to demonstrate my point and they may or may not reflect the reality, you (the reader) see: those two songs might be just an exception, but in that case this post is still not canceled, because there is enough of other correlations and causation for me to have a reason to write this.

Those songs are “dramatic”, but the drama shifts from the relationship itself and its toxicity to the circumstances and environment. My girlfriend even recommended a punk song called Ne touche pas moi (Do not touch me), which is entirely about consent.

I am not explicitly saying that the songs she played for me are bad. It’s not for me to decide.

But all Billie Eilish’ fans I ever met were in the age range between eleven and fourteen, so I am supposing that’s her target audience. As for Maroon 5, I have no idea. However, music influences us. The girl is old enough to know what kind of music she likes and wants to listen to and with the peer pressure going on there, her parents do not really have a say in what she listens to and they are not to be blamed for this.

It’s the culture.

Toxicity is not a positive trait to look for in a potential partner. Even if he is a good looking one.

Enough of music.

Do you know who the toxic crush was?

Draco Malfoy.

One of the most famous of all characters in media, famously portrayed by Tom Felton in the Harry Potter film series.

Disclaimer number four: I have a problem with the books and movies and I also have some issues with the author.

Still, I see a fandom celebrating the love of Severus Snape for Lilly Evans Potter. Except it’s not love and it’s not a crush either. It’s an obsession. One that has become so iconic, the word “Always” is one of the main symbols of Harry Potter.

It shouldn’t be.

It should have never happened.

Draco Malfoy is quite the same thing. He is a racist, a bully. He is raised to be one, sure... That’s not an excuse. He doesn’t actually have a canonical redemption arch (not counting the deleted scene from the last movie and the Cursed child). If he came up to Hermione, acknowledging his mistakes, apologizing for his behavior, then maybe. Perhaps... That’s another story though. My point is, Rowling fails to actually depict problematic characters as actually problematic, they are romanticized by her, the filmmakers, the fandom and the wider audience.

Girls are taught to be the ones to make the redemption arch happen, irl or in fiction. They are supposed to date whoever is into them, regardless of whether they like the person back, and it’s unbelievably often I see them crushing on villains and problematic people like Draco Malfoy, because they are taught, he would change for them or that they could change him.

Toxicity is not a positive trait to look for in a potential partner. Even if he is a good looking one.

Those together result in a complete lack of knowledge of how a healthy relationship should look like. That’s the case of the third girl I mentioned. Being best friends with both her and her current boyfriend, I had three points of view on their relationship. It’s only been the past few weeks, not more than two month it has shifted to a more positive, healthy relationship.

It’s not the girl’s fault. They learn what a healthy relationship is the hard way, mostly after going through a toxic one(s).

WHY?

The sentence: “I always fall for the bad guys.” lacks the essential: “because the society taught me to” part.

It’s so common.

It’s too common.

It’s not even that we wouldn’t talk about it: we do. But you celebrate it. And that is not okay and that is the reason I am typing this.

Disclaimer number 5: The gender roles in this post are based off of my observations. I do acknowledge the fact that girls can be and sometimes are the toxic person in the relationship and that the lesson boys are thought is no way better (more freeing perhaps, but not right either) . It might not be specific to the straight culture either, but again, my observations were.

I was about thirteen, when I figured out I was gay and I had to learn everything on my own. How the relationships should work out, what is healthy and what is not... I had to learn on my own because the society failed to teach me anything. I am yet to decide whether that’s better or worse than teaching the wrong one.

[hatari-translations]

Matthias has done a recording on RUV called

Það sem skiptir máli

Fylking

Orð dagsins er: Fylking. Umsjón hefur Matthías Tryggvi Haraldsson, handritshöfundur, söngvari og leikskáld Borgarleikhússins.

It’s about 5 minutes. I was wondering if you could translate it?

This is a brief meditation on the show’s “Word of the Day”, fylking (“faction”), where Matthías muses on political parties. Translation below.

English translation

My name is Matthías Tryggvi Haraldsson and I’m a script writer, singer, and the City Theater’s playwright. The word of the day is “faction” or “factions”.

The other day I sat and watched a movie on Netflix in my home when an old acquaintance called me, a boy I remember from junior college. He was older than me, a bit ahead. The social life and all that, that was our faction then. I looked up to him in many ways; he was always joking around with the others, the leader of the faction. But then he graduated, and later I did, and we went our separate ways.

But then he calls me, a little nervous, judging from his voice, like he’s making a big decision, a big and stressful decision. Like leaping from a cliff. Leaping, except he needs the help of some old acquaintances to fly.

He had registered for a political party, he told me. He was running for office. And I don’t know about you, but in the hearts of some people, such as me, there’s an eternal teenager who feels silly about associating oneself with a political party, taking a public stance, showing up somewhere with a sign, splitting into factions. Political parties are just an especially silly concept, a recipe for trenches and polarization and party lines and trickery and everything that’s wrong with the world today. You feel certain about all of this, until the guy you used to look up to in junior college calls you. He’s going to take a shot at the trenches.

And so, to help this guy, I’d have to sign up for the party in question to be able to vote in that party’s primary. And I thought about it. The little teenager within me cringed. There’s also an opportunist within me that said no, it’s bad for your image - like I’m an actor in America, that’d be bad for the image. And finally a little humourist that also lives within me won out, which suddenly thought it’d be really funny to do this. If it’s cringey to sign up for one party, why not just sign up for all of them? I’m a member of the Independence Party; Sigrún, the youth movement of the Progressive Party; Young Social-Democrats; Young Left-Greens; the People’s Party; the Center Party; the Reform Party; the Pirate Party; and I think some others too. And of course I signed up for newsletters from all of these parties, so my e-mail inbox is suffering. I go around and I say stuff like, “Yes, we in the minority have been talking about this for along time,” or, “Yes, that’s what we in the party have always said,” or, “We Pirates think so, too.” “Coffee? Yes, please, we in the Progressive Party love coffee.” I say this at every opportunity.

If I get an e-mail where we the members of the party are asked what matters to us, I say respect, and honesty, and love, and human rights, and liberty, and justice, and democracy, and perhaps the climate, and also the new constitution, but mainly honesty and respect and hope and democracy. And when I was writing this essay I smirked a bit, but it’s not really a joke, if you think about it. If these really are the factions that handle politics for the rest of us, of course everyone should sign up for a party and have an opinion on it, one or many or all of them. I don’t know if you’re even allowed to be in all of them, but then they’ll just have to kick me out, and you.

And political parties are one thing, but why aren’t we all members of all kinds of organizations? The Environmental Protection Association, Search and Rescue, the National Center of Addiction Medicine, the Mental Health Alliance, the Travel Association, the Wound Management Association, the Endometriosis Association, the Car-Free Lifestyle Association, the Sociopath Association, I don’t know. It’s all factors and variables and factions that can affect society. Signing up for the Efling union and the Confederation of Icelandic Enterprise and agreeing and disagreeing with everything that everyone says, all the time.

Next time one party criticizes another I’m going to agree but also take it very personally, as a representative of both sides of the debate - belong to the faction but also criticize it. Connect with those I agree with and disagree with just a bit more. It’s at least hopefully better than belonging to neither faction and not caring about either of them.

Faction: a group that follows certain opinions or political views.

[thebyunhip]

Start Up | episodes 1 ~ 12

I feel like right now is a good moment to talk about the show, with the time jump and stuff. I’ll talk about the characters and then the plot, as I usually do. This is going to be a very long post, I never had so much to say about a drama before, so I’ll add a cut and it’s entirely up to you if you want to read my rant.

Han Ji Pyeong: look, he is not my favorite guy but I also don’t hate him and here’s why: 1) I don’t care how good he is at his job, I don’t care how rich he is, I don’t care how rough he had it in life, nothing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING gives him the right to be a dick to others. I understand that he is scared, had no one care for him and had no one to care for but he is still a human who lives in society. Being polite (and that’s really the only thing I’m discussing here), is not the same being someone that lets people step on him. And we’re all vert aware of the fact that he can tel people the truth, as harsh as it may be, without bein a complete fucking bastard 2) I fucking hate the tropes “he got there first” and “here’s a troubled man, fix him girl”. Like, just no. Teenager me would love that shit and eat it up like a fucking starved bitch, but not right now. I also think he is incredibly selfish and self-absorbed however both of these I can overlook, this is the kind of thing that be blamed on his upbringing (or lack of it).

Seo Dal Mi: the writers really said “let’s take this girl’s sister and mom away, make her sister say very stupid and hurtful things to her, now kill off her dad, she’ll get into a good college but will drop out because she has bills to pay”. I like that she is, after all that shit, bright and is willing to fight for things, not let her dad’s memory die. The world is telling her “bitch stay down” and she is legit yelling back “no motherfucker, I will not” and that’s great. The one thing I don’t like about her is that she is way too forgiving, I mean she found out that she was lied to by grandma, her mentor and her boyfriend of sorts and she just tossed that aside like it was nothing. Some of it I can understand, they work together so she would have to, you know, keep somethings inside. It all went away too fast, she forgave all three of them very quickly.

Nam Do San: at this point, if you’ve seen any of my previous posts, you’ll know that that he is my favorite and I’ll use this bit here to tell you why. I’ll put aside the cuteness, okay? Out of all the characters in this drama Do San was the one with the most personal growth. In the beginning you had a guy who couldn’t speak properly to strangers, let alone look at people eyes, when people put him down (yes, I’m fucking looking at Ji Pyeong and his dad) he kept his head down. And slowly, throughout these 12 episodes we see him mature (because yes, he was very immature), he can now answer, he can look at people in the eyes, hell he even can start fights. Like dude, he stood up to his father twice. He is not perfect and I’m  no trying to paint him as if he were. He still has problem to deal with but he is open to do improve. This was not said anywhere in the show and it’s only a personal thought of mine, Do San suffers of the imposter syndrome and Asperger Syndrome, and that would explain some of his behaviors.

Won In Jae: now let’s talk about an underused character. She is here simply to be a shitty sister and drag Dal Mi down so we all can watch our beautiful protagonist rise again from the ashes. When you look at her, she just has that resting bitch face so she makes it easy to dislike her  (but please can we please stop type casting Han Na as a bitch or someone can please tell me a show/movie she did where she is not one?).

Grandma: finally the real “villain” of the whole story. I get what she was trying to do, okay? Dal Mi’s life was spiraling out of control, shit hit the sky and she need some comfort and surely the letters were the best way to do that and it’s fine. But you all are willing to tell me that in those 15 years she didn’t have a single chance to say “hey kid, listen, there was never a Do San. I asked some boy to write you letters but he is gone now and so are the letters” or idk “The boy who wrote you letters was Ji Pyeong, a kid I used to help, he didn’t want to use his own name so we chose one from the news”. I’ve changed my mind, this not HJP fault. Its grandma’s.

Now, let’s talk about this drama’s biggest and most unforgiving mistake: the first episode. They spent way too much time on the letters and Ji Pyeong, making a lot of built up and then they didn’t showed the main guy at all. We got to see Do San in the last what, 5 seconds of the episode? I can get the confusion people are having as to who is the main and second lead here, for a second even I was confused. I only knew teenager Ji Pyeong wasn’t the main guy because before watching the show I read that Joo Hyuk’s character name was Do San. The first episode was a bad call. I mean it has 1 hour and 24 of running time and they could only spare 5 SECONDS TO THE MAIN GUY? No wonder there is a shit show towards Do San.

The entire revenge plot was poorly used but I’ll admit that I like the whole “my biggest revenge is to prove HJP wrong”. We’ve seen the destroy company, kill a guy ploy way too many times.But the entire thing was just tossed in there, there was maybe one clue but it lead to believe that Yeong San would steal the code, not seek revenge.

I know that some people were bummed out that there the show doesn’t focus a lot on how to build a startup but this is mostly a romance drama, so they wouldn’t include a lot of how to here.

Also, I know that people don’t think Do San has real problems because you know he has both parents and Ji Pyeong is an orphan, but like please… just listen. Being someone that has to live up to parent’s approval and expectations, especially to academic and business success, is not a problem that we westerns face so constantly in our lives. I know it happens, I’m not living under a rock, but we can’t even begin to compare to how it is for them and us. Suicide rates are high in Asian countries amongst younger people who fail to reach standards set by their parents and the society. Both Do San and Ji Pyeon have problem, of course, but they are very different and incomparable.  

As for the next four episodes… I think we will see a very changed Do San, more serious, a lit bit more calloused from the three years in the US (the black gave it out). I feel like Dal Mi might have changed a bit but I can’t point how. Ji Pyeong had on line in the preview and it was enough to not give me any hopes about him.

I’ll just say this here because I feel like I have to: Han Ji Pyeong is not such a great a second lead, full of layers, that could actually make people question why he isn’t the main guy. The only character ever that has that right is Baek In Ho, and would you look at that he is also a character that went through shit but is not an asshole just because he can.

[threeletterslife]

Our Love Like Fibonacci

→ summary: Namjoon likes to solve the never-ending Fibonacci Sequence. The act is reassuring, satisfying, even. It reminds him that there are things other than his life that are never-ending.

→ pairing/rating: namjoon x reader | PG-13

→ genre: 95% mellow angst, 5% fluff | reincarnation!au & immortal!au

→ warnings: death, very brief mention of suicides

→ wordcount: 2.5k

→ a/n: thank you to the wonderful @aaugustlee​, @fangirlfeelz​ and @meowxyoong​ for beta reading!

♫: Jamais Vu by BTS | Something Better (feat. Lady Antebellum) by Audien

cr. 

There is no one on this Earth who has endured more misfortune than Kim Namjoon. Namjoon likes to tell himself that he is in a blessed curse. For more than one thousand years, Namjoon's been stuck at the age of seventeen. He has not aged one single bit physically, but his mind has gone through much more than what an average man would experience in his lifetime. Namjoon's known disastrous conflict, suffered through world wars, survived global pandemics and loved only one woman in his life.

That woman is you.

For 1,026 years, Namjoon has been a man of change. He has accustomed himself to more than thousands of cultures around the world, learned hundreds of languages and fought through the perils of social media in the recent twenty-first century. But if one thing hasn't changed at all; that's you.

You're fated to die at the tender age of seventeen—the same age that Namjoon is stuck in for all of eternity. And fate so happens to bring you and Namjoon together every time. Just a week before your death, you are always scheduled to meet this immortal Kim Namjoon. You are to fall in love with him in seven days and convince yourself that you will live with him forever and ever. Then the universe will cruelly take your life.

Namjoon's watched you die many times. Sometimes, he is unable to hold you in his arms when you're at your very last breaths. Other times, he is with you when you die. Fate is random and strikes when Namjoon least expects it.

When you die, Namjoon must wait another decade until you are reborn. Then he must wait another seventeen years until you turn of age. But those first ten years are always the hardest because he knows you do not even exist in the world anymore; the universe feels empty without you. The day you are always born, the fateful, magical day of November 23rd, Namjoon celebrates it by himself and wishes you a happy birthday from afar. He would then wait seventeen years until fate brings the two of you together a week before your death.

Namjoon gets to see you for seven days after waiting for twenty-seven years. It's an unfair deal on his part, but it is also written in the stars somewhere above his reach that you will always fall in love with him. That is the only blessing in this curse.

Sometimes, he has a rocky start with you. The third time you were reborn, Namjoon had accidentally confessed his curse to you. You were confused, weirded-out, astonished. But two days later, you'd forgotten what he told you and became madly in love with the man. Other times, you fall in love with Namjoon from the first glance. It is always a mystery.

In fact, you are always an enigma.

Though your physical features never change, in some way or another, every time Namjoon meets you, you are another person. People are the product of their environment. Namjoon's seen you born as a daughter of a rich businessman, a princess from an obscure country, a prisoner of war, a peasant in the medieval times, and most often a middle-class citizen in hundreds of different countries. Every time, you are a different person with different values.

Before Namjoon was cursed, he thought it had been impossible to love someone through their changes. But fate has proved him wrong enough. After he's seen thirty-seven different versions of you, Namjoon is sure that he would love you no matter who you became. His love for you transcended time and bled into eternity.

He is always hit by a sense of nostalgia or what he likes to call, jamais vu, when he first sees you. He recognizes you, knows you, but you are always unfamiliar to him in the beginning. Even so, in his heart, Namjoon knows he is destined to be with you—even if it were for only seven days in twenty-seven years.

Twenty-seven years is a lot of time. Namjoon has accumulated a lot of strange, time-consuming habits. He counts sheep before he falls asleep every night. He's read every book in the Library of Congress. He learns and masters a new language every few months. He likes to listen to a lot of music to experience the changes between generations first-hand. But most of all, he likes to solve the never-ending Fibonacci Sequence.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8... The pattern continues on for eternity and Namjoon finds it amusing. Most people stop before they reach a number of over a million. Namjoon's been adding numbers so large these days, they can fill up a whole document when typed out. Now the digits are too long to plug into a calculator, so he's been adding the numbers himself. The act is reassuring, satisfying, even.

It reminds him that there are things other than his life that are never-ending.

This year marks your 38th reincarnation. You are a curious, intuitive high-schooler with hopes as big as your eyes and an intellect as sharp as a freshly crafted sword. This time, you are from a privileged upper-middle-class family, born as an only child and pampered with kisses and words of encouragement from your parents. You ask Namjoon a lot of questions.

How am I only meeting you now? Where are you from? Why do you know so much about history? How many languages do you really know? Why do you look so familiar?

Namjoon prefers the shy version of you who comes once in a couple of hundred years. You ask fewer questions when you are timid, and that means there is a smaller chance of Namjoon slipping up and telling you about his curse.

Regardless of your changing personality, any time Namjoon spends with you is a happy time.

But you are extremely persistent this year. It's as if for the first time, you know what Namjoon is dealing with. It's as if you can sense there is something off about him. This reincarnation, you were gifted with an innate talent for reading people, for noticing the infinitesimal details no one else bothered to notice. You are an inquisitive, confident young lady no longer oppressed by a highly patriarchal society. Namjoon isn't used to you being so straightforward, but a lot has changed for the women in society over the years.

You tell him that you want to know why he seems to know you so well. Why he seems so familiar to you. Why he acts like he's seen terrible things in the past. Why he seems to be hiding something from you. You're compelled by him and you don't quite understand why.

"Every time I see you," you say, "I have déjà vu."

"Really?" Namjoon says.

"I just can't put my finger on it," you say. "But I've totally seen you somewhere before. Maybe in my past life?" you joke.

Namjoon smiles understandingly.

"Sometimes, when I look at you, I see a man who's dealt with time itself," you say. "Is that weird? Does that sound weird?" you laugh at yourself. "I don't know. I just get this vibe."

"Are you calling me wise?" Namjoon chuckles.

"Yeah," you say, bluntly. "You hold a lot of knowledge in that snatched head of yours," you snort. "Like, no cap."

Namjoon squints, but smiles. It seems just like yesterday when you had been speaking in medieval English. Now, you're speaking in an increasingly popular dialect dominated by young teenagers who use Twitter religiously. It's interesting to see how time can shape you.

"What kind of knowledge?" Namjoon asks.

"You have a seasoned nuance to your voice," you point out. "And sometimes, when you gaze far off into the distance, you look like you're having war flashbacks."

"Really?" Namjoon laughs. You're not wrong. He often thinks about the wars he's lived through, the atrocities he's faced, though he tries not to show it. Again, you prove yourself to be incredibly observant.

"Yeah," you say. "I've seen you in my dreams before. You were my knight in shining armor when I was a princess..." you hum, closing your eyes as if to recall the memory.

Namjoon remembers that reincarnation. You'd been beheaded after the peasants in your kingdom had rebelled against your parents, the king and queen.

"You were the local farm boy I was in love with as a peasant," you giggle. "I have a lot of wack dreams." Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, it had been true, too. That year, you'd been killed off by the plague.

Never in the 1,026 years that Namjoon's known you have you ever remembered your past encounters with him in any way, shape or form. You're special this year; Namjoon can feel it.

"And you know? The day before we met, I had a dream full of numbers," you confess. "It looked a lot like a pattern." You squint. "If only I could remember the sequence... The numbers were increasing, too."

Shivers run down Namjoon's spine. There's no way. "Did it happen to be the Fibonacci Sequence?" he asks.

"The what?" you say.

"Zero, one, one, two, three, five?" Namjoon says. "You know? That sequence when the next number is found by adding up the two numbers before it?"

"Wait," you say. "I know what the Fibonacci Sequence is... But how did you guess?" you say carefully as if you were testing the waters.

"Um, well..." Namjoon sighs. "It was a lucky guess, I suppose."

"Or we're just soulmates," you giggle.

Something like that, Namjoon thinks.

"We definitely know each other from past lives or something," you declare. "Though I don't remember anything..."

You can't possibly be so casual about this. Don't you know? You're going to die in two days. And he's had to love you through the pain, get over your many deaths...

When Namjoon's silent, you speak again.

"You know, I've had a reoccurring dream my whole life," you say. "I die in this dream every time."

Namjoon jerks his head towards you. "What?"

"It's always after I see you too, Joonie. I die in my dream after I meet you," you say. "All my life, I've loved and hated your face. Do you know what you mean to me? You're like a poisonous true love. I was afraid of the day I would meet you because I knew that I would die shortly after. But when I finally met you in person," you smile, reaching to take his hand in yours, "a lot of that fear washed away. I feel like I met my soulmate. And if, no, when I die, I'll die knowing I don't regret meeting you."

Namjoon is speechless. He finally manages to stutter, "W-What else have you dreamed about?"

"Sometimes I dream in your perspective," you say. "It's lonely... And sad," you whisper. "You're immortal, though you've concluded that after you tried to die many times. Oftentimes, I wake up crying for you."

"God," Namjoon mutters under his breath. "You know everything, don't you?"

You beam. "I guess so."

"You've been waiting for me."

"Well, I always knew we'd meet one day," you confess. "I prepared myself to love you, too, you know? And in the last few years, I've been writing mini letters for you to read after I'm dead and until we meet in my next life," you say. "I wrote 108 so far! Do you think that'll cut it?"

"Y/N..." Namjoon breathes. "Of course that'll cut it. That's the best news I've heard in years."

"Great!" you say, giggling. "I hope they're not too cheesy for you."

Namjoon shakes his head. "No, I have a feeling they'll make me happy for a long time," he answers. "Thank you."

"Be sure to read the first letter on my 18th birthday," you reply, smiling softly. "You'll appreciate it more than at any other time."

It's the first time in his extended life that Namjoon feels like you know more than him.

Once in millions of Millenniums, people like the 38th reincarnation of you are born. Those who see things they were not there for, those who are clairvoyant, those who are young yet all-knowing.

You even knew how you were going to die in this life, but you'd refused to tell Namjoon. Most times, ignorance is bliss, you'd told him.

On the day of your death, you'd given a box full of letters to Namjoon. Then, you'd taken him out on a final date in your red car. You and Namjoon had both known that this car trip would be the end of your life, but neither of you bothered to meddle with what was destined to be.

It's always 4:44 p.m when it happens. This time, it happened in a busy intersection when the car in front of you had hit a jaywalking pedestrian. You'd screamed, jerking the steering wheel to the right to avoid hitting the vehicle in front of you. But that had caused your car to swerve off the road and flip over, tumbling down the hillside. Namjoon had miraculously survived, of course. But you were dead on the scene.

He's seen you die so many times, but something about that day was particularly worse. Maybe because you knew you were going to die.

And so the depressing cycle starts again.

A few lonely months after your death, Namjoon opens your first letter on your birthday: November 23rd. He hasn't felt this giddy in a very long time.

The envelope is labeled with a large "1," which means the letters are in order. Namjoon carefully opens the crisp envelope, pulling out a folded note. The paper is crisp, so you must have written the letter quite recently.

He takes a deep breath before he unfolds it. When he sees your small, minimalistic handwriting, he breathes out shakily. His hands shake as he grips the letter, and he begins to read.

To the Man in My Dreams (aka Namjoon),

Our love is like a lot of things. But I like to compare it most to the Fibonacci Sequence. We start off at zero. Then, we add on a one. The numbers accumulate as time progresses. The pattern is familiar, but the numbers never repeat. Isn't that literally us?

The me that you know specifically will never happen again. (Trust me, I know.) But you will see girls like me in your eternal life.

Every time you work on your Fibonacci Sequence, think of me, please. And I promise in my next lifetime, you'll find me again. (Though I can't guarantee that I'll remember any of this.) I hope the rest of these letters will keep you company.

You'll like the next Y/N very much, by the way.

Goodbye.

Goodbye, indeed, Namjoon thinks. Until next time.

masterlist

[ya-riotreads]

By: Angie Thomas

Prequel to: The Hate U Give

Goodreads Rating:★★★★★

My Rating:★★★★★

Find a copy near you from a local library: https://tinyurl.com/rcs34hcz

Angie Thomas has returned readers to the streets of Garden Heights; 17 years prior to Starr taking on the injustices of police brutality and in light of BLM movement. Concrete Rose focuses on 17-year-old Maverick Carter as his life changes with the birth of his first child. Taking place around the late 1990’s, Thomas explores the trials of generational stagnation, societal and environmental pressures, and the challenges behind stereotypes from the perspective of a black boy and his transition into manhood. The main question and task Maverick is imposed with is: what does it take to be a man and what type of man does Maverick want to be for himself and his family?

The reason for the 4.5 out of 5 rating stems from the accurate portrayal of urban/ghetto/hood life, Maverick’s character growth, Thomas’s insights to teenage pregnancy from the male perspective, and the setup of character, situational and relationship foils. Anyone who knows where the “concrete rose” metaphor gained traction from will understand what this story and subject matter pertains to. For those who don’t, let’s provide a brief aside to talk about one of thee most infamous West side artist to live—being Tupac Shakur. After the death of Tupac Shakur, a publication of his poems was release as a book entitled by the included work, The Rose that Grew from Concrete. The poem and Thomas’s book details the life of an individual who is meant to fail due to the inequities existing in their environment which is comprised of their familial situation and the type of people existing in their community. Maverick Carter—the rose to Garden Heights’ concrete—is the child of former King Lord legend who is serving jail time, has a mother who works two jobs to make ends meet, and is in relations with the King Lords for protection and means of income. In the beginning of Concrete Rose, Maverick does not see any wrong in following in his father’s footsteps, believing that being a man is to protect your family—blood and gang. Although Maverick Carter does fail in terms of becoming a teen father, falling into drug sales, flunks out of school, and considers murder to avenge the death of his relative, Maverick does succeed in his life in terms of not committing to gang life by the end of story. Maverick succeeds in following the terms of becoming a present father to his children. The ways in which Maverick could have failed was to abandon his children and continue down the path of gang life, however, Maverick learns that true fatherhood requires a father’s presence and guidance. Rather than running away from his problems, Maverick steps up to the plate and takes responsibility of the situation he—as an individual—has placed himself and other’s in.

The portrayal of gang life and living within an urban setting, such as Garden Heights, is an accurate representation of how it is in American urban life. From an outsider’s perspective—i.e. someone not in a gang or even someone living in a more suburban community—Garden Heights is an area where it is undesired to be stuck in. Someone living within Garden Heights (i.e Maverick) knows where safe spots are during what time of day and what risks lie within certain areas. In terms of gang life, there does exist a ranking or hierarchical system members follow. Gang life, similarly, is a commitment for life. The means of getting out is a risk to anyone’s life. The gang assumes a departing individual will be a risk to the gang in the future as they may rat-out information to the police or switch sides between other rival gangs. Maverick’s leaving of King Lord operations, although a risk, is necessary for himself becoming a better person for Lisa and his children, as well as, becoming the father he didn’t have full access to. Similarly, Maverick’s action of leaving foils that of King and Iesha’s residency, which—later in The Hate U Give.

In terms of literature on teen pregnancy, majority of works tend to focus on the female perspective as society claims females have more to lose out on than males. Thomas provides a golden opportunity by writing Maverick’s perspective on being a teen parent. Maverick’s first child—Seven—was born from (a lack of a better term) one-night stand with Iesha. However, rather than disregarding the birth of Seven and the positive DNA test, Maverick does take responsibility in caring for his child. A stereotypical move that Maverick could have taken was not accepting ownership/responsibility of Seven and disadvantaging Seven further by forcing Iesha to keep him without regard. However, Thomas’s theme of family keeps Maverick from going down that path. With the conception of Maverick’s second child with Lisa (someone Maverick sincerely loves and cares about) tests Maverick’s responsibility a step further based on Lisa’s preference to how she want to raise their child. With Seven, Maverick is still connected to King Lord life and imposes the risk of Seven falling into his footsteps in the future. However, with the second child and Lisa’s demands, Maverick must move passed his pride and become more than what gang life has imposed him to become—his father, not a dependable father figure. The male perspective of teenage pregnancy also nods to the concept of family building and parenting being a cooperative effort between both parents. Although our patriarchal society frowns upon men taking on child-rearing or any other “female designated” tasks, Thomas takes incentive by presenting a functionally learning and adapting male catering to the growth and development of his child. Thomas takes the opportunity to level the playing field between male and female pregnancies by having Maverick obtain losses female characters (i.e what Iesha would have endured had she possess a supportive family unit and this been her story) typical would experience during a teen pregnancy: grades falling, monetary insecurity, and a close to nonexistent social life.

Throughout the book foils exist EVERYWHRE. They exist in Maverick’s parents’ parenting in relation to his own parenting efforts, they exist between Lisa and Iesha’s stances and roles of motherhood, they exist between social expectations between Lisa and Maverick in terms of who was likely to become a teenaged parent and who was not, they exist between King and Maverick—which plays out later in The Hate U Give—as Iesha becomes pregnant again with King’s baby—these are only the ones that most forefront in my head, however, all are important as they push and pull against the stereotypes projected upon black people. However, my personal favorite foil is that of Maverick and his father as it leads to my favorite quote in the book coming from Mr. Wyatt in form of a question, aiding Maverick making a correct choice for himself.

““Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?” Mr. Wyatt asks. “However, it can roll away from the tree. It simply need a little push.”

Maverick is appreciative of his father and the ability for his father to guide him when possible, however, Maverick does serve as a foil to his father by not committing to Kingship, not killing out of revenge, and being present for his children to guide them at all times instead of behind bars. Maverick strives to give his children the luxury of presence and convenience as that is something he wished for since his father’s sentencing.

The reason why this story isn’t a 5/5 is due to the lack of development for important female characters. Understandably, this is Maverick’s story and as Maverick is a strong hetero-male. It is, with this regard, that I take his lack of attention to female characters not out of perspective or out of character. The phrase, boys will be boys—as irritating as that may be—is in play here in terms of boys naturally being dense and inattentive to social cues in relation to their female counterparts. Maverick is a strong hetero-male growing up in a patriarchal society and in gang life, Maverick’s perspective is centered on himself and other men because he is searching for guidance relative to him versus doing what comes naturally (which to note, naturality is more of a female designated concept i.e. women’s intuition) but, he does learn to develop from his mother. Not to say that the female characters were weak, on contrary, they were not! The women in the story possessed hardy personalities and dialogue that was strong against Maverick’s actions and tendencies to keep him in line. However, there could have been a little more insight into their weakness. I think Lisa could have used a weak moment much like Maverick’s mother when she learns of the second pregnancy. Although readers do see Lisa cry in learning she was pregnant, that moment of weakness was swept aside as she pulled herself together quickly in the proceeding chapters. Iesha’s character could have offered more perspective into post-partum depression rather than just simply dipping out of eye-sight. However, in rebuttal, this isn’t their stories and if it was… Iesha would have been an unreliable narrator and could have been seen as an attack on stereotypical black teen girls… Lisa’s perspective would have been too convenient and smooth to engage readers as her life was pretty comfy up until her pregnancy… while Maverick’s mother would have been seen as too soft upon her child and the story may have not been about her grandchild, but rather, her relationship with Moe. All in all, I appreciate and applaud Angie Thomas and her publication of Concrete Rose as it provided insight into male teen pregnancy, the black perspective and transition of boyhood into manhood, and the accurate representation of urban/ghetto/hood lifestyles that can be seen within American society.

See my Goodreads rant!

Did you enjoy reading Concrete Rose? Check out these recommendations!

The Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds – poetry (novel in verse), coming-to-age, gang violence, revenge, psychological

Street Love by Walter Dean Myers – poetry (novel in verse), rap, romance (forbidden love), family troubles

Tyrell by Coe Booth – family troubles, identity, homelessness

The First Part Last by Angela Johnson – teen pregnancy, coming-to-age, adulthood

Bloody Seoul by Sonia Patel – gang violence, Korea, coming-of-age

[akechicrimes]

when i was reading "emma" by jane austen in undergrad, one of my professors pointed out it's one of the best examples of a very common plotline: a willful child sets out as some sort of aberration from the status quo, and by the time they grow up at the end of the book, they've wound up reincorporated into the status quo.

in the case of emma, she believes that she knows romance better than society around her. she plays matchmaker according to what she believes is right. we are, at best, supposed to find her humorously wrong; at worst, she's a petulant child. her attempts at matchmaking go terribly, while she utterly and totally forgets to notice a man courting her throughout most of the plot. by the end of the book she's wound up marrying a good man of equivalent social standing, who courted her in socially acceptable ways, and is presumably going to settle down and become the good wife and mother that she was always meant to be.

persona 3 wasn't quite so interested in people who didn't fit in with the status quo, but persona 4 and 5 seemed to think they were hot shit for tackling the subject, while everyone and their grandmother pointed out that persona 4 and 5 started off with storylines that called society out on its bullshit, and then mysteriously rolled back its arguments in the later parts of the game. and i'm not trying to say that P4 and P5 didn't have doylist explanations for why they've got weird shit happening in the character arcs, but the more i think about it, the more it just sounds like emma woodhouse.

akira kurusu is wronged by the justice system, and comes to the conclusion that he must rebel against society. by the end of the game, it turns out that the justice system can be fair if you just work really really really really hard, so maybe we should all just work harder, and really you just need a good lawyer. akira is absolved of his charges through conventional status quo means.

yukiko amagi struggles with having her whole life decided for her. while she wonders whether or not she wants to stay in inaba, she ultimately comes to the conclusion that she will stay and run the inn, mysteriously and coincidentally choosing the societally-acceptable answer after all.

ann takamaki struggles with a society that simultaneously sexualizes her and shames her for exercising any sexuality. after ending kamoshida's whole career and making a resolve to embrace her own sexuality as an empowerment thing, she then decides to go into... modeling, in which she sells images of her body to be sexualized by an entire industry set up around sexualizing teenage girls. by surprising coincidence, it seems that she has decided to express her new openness to her own sexuality in a way that makes her extremely palatable to men like kamoshida.

kanji tatsumi winds up with a crush on a guy and struggles with being rejected for his sexuality. but then we are led to believe that really he just struggles with being rejected in general. and maybe he just doesn't like girls because they bully him. and maybe it's not really about him being gay, maybe it's about him being confused. also coincidentally, naoto is revealed to be a "girl," and kanji theoretically has had a crush on a "girl" all along, rendering the entire thing just a series of silly mistakes and coincidentally bringing kanji back into a semblance of heterosexuality.

goro akechi points out the innate corruption of the government, justice system, and extreme prejudice in japanese society that drives someone like him to the point of where he was, but his heel-face turn involves him deciding to submit himself to the very corrupt justice system that he disagreed with in the first place, pitching his cooperation with the status quo as a positive change.

naoto shirogane presents as a boy and goes out of his way to have others refer to him as a boy, but also by pure coincidence, we are led to believe that naoto was just going through some shit and was using gender identity/presentation as a weird coping mechanism, and "actually naoto was cis all along."

and these are all narratives that occur in conjunction with, like jane austen's emma, the typical coming-of-age story. an aberrant child doesn't fit in. an aberrant child grows up. an aberrant child winds up being reincorporated into the existing status quo after all, as they demonstrate to the reader hey, perhaps the status quo was right all alone, and i was the one who should have been fitting in.

the narrative of a "coming of age" story pitches adults as people who've adjusted to society and have been changed by society, rather than agents who change society around them; a "coming of age" story relies on a general consensus that children, teenagers, and minors in general have opinions and thoughts that are amusingly incorrect at best and completely invalid at worst, and it is the job of adults to tell children how to "be correct."

that works for some cases like, say, shinya from persona 5, who's a literal bully playing violent video games because his mom doesn't pay enough attention to him and picks on other children and steals their lunch money like shinya's personal day job is to be a tiny powerhouse of cliches. shinya could stand to learn that yes, he's fucking wrong, and no, you can't beat up other kids.

but the same logic—that kids are misguided and need to be corrected (or "rehabilitated," to use P5's words)—that same logic is what implies to us that akira's phantom thief rebellion is ultimately a phase that he'll grow out of as he reincorporates himself back into society, because it was "morally skeevy" (read: defined as morally skeevy by the law, which has no interest in anything but itself and its own power). the same logic of "kids are misguided and need to be rehabilitated" is what tries to tell us that kanji was just confused about himself and naoto's gender presentation, and that naoto was just going through a phase that “she'll” grow out of. "kids are misguided and need to be rehabilitated" is what allows yukiko the room to doubt whether or not she wants to take over the inn, but ultimately pressures her to accept the socially-acceptable option she was always meant to.

there's a lot of other characters that i could point to as examples of the "emma" trend. by the same virtue, there's a lot of character arcs that don't always quite fit the trend perfectly. but in general, the trend happens with alarming consistency in P4 and P5, as if the storylines are trying convince us that people and behaviors that do not fit with the assigned social script will ultimately "see the light" and realize that they should fit in with society after all. and if you see yourself in these characters, perhaps you too should think along the lines of these characters as they "grow up" into "good adults."

by allowing people to voice their discontents with the status quo, and then ultimately come around to embrace the status quo in the end, the characters are essentially used as strawmen to be conquered and brought back into the normative fold. and in theory, these strawmen will bring with them anyone who found themselves agreeing with yukiko's discontents, or kanji's queerness, or akira's anger at society. you had your teenage rebellion, the games seem to say. but now it's time to give it up, give in, and grow up.

[fourteendaysinaweek]

Show Recommendations

Grimm

Platform: Amazon Prime

Official overview: Portland detective Nick Burkhardt, descended from a long line of warriors known as Grimms, defends his city from magical creatures known as Wesen, which are part human and part animal. Fighting alongside his partner, Hank, colleague Sergeant Wu and friends Monroe and Rosalee, Nick faces off against internal and external forces, including his police captain, Sean Renard.

My overview: Portland detective Nick Burkhardt thinks he's going insane when he randomly starts seeing monsters at the time his aunt goes into a coma. Turns out he's not, in fact, going crazy. He deals with shit trying to kill him and his girlfriend and friends CONSTANTLY and in reality all he wants to do his keep his city safe, and he accidentally saves the world in the process.

Thoughts on the show: I love it, it does have a habit of setting up for recurring characters and then never mentioning them again, so that's annoying. There are 6 seasons. There are some great romances in the show, and also some iffy ones, but the iffy ones are definitely regarded as such in the show, and eventually either develop past the weird stage or die before anymore harm can be done. Aired from 2011 to 2017

Thoughts on the fandom: Wayyyy too small, I know of 0 people around my age who like it, and 90% of the fan base is obsessed with Sasha Roiz who plays Sean Renard (not that I'm judging). Definitely not enough fics out there, and the ones that I've found seem to be poorly written or basically just pwp.

Warehouse 13

Platform: Amazon Prime

Official overview: Following an abrupt transfer, Secret Service agents Pete Lattimer and Myka Bering find themselves in the middle of South Dakota at a massive, top-secret storage warehouse that holds every strange artifact, mysterious relic, out-of-this-world object and supernatural souvenir ever found by the U.S. government. Lattimer and Bering's new task, as directed by the warehouse's caretaker, longtime agent Artie Nielsen, is to investigate reports of unexplainable and paranormal activity in an effort to secure more peculiar and dangerous objects, and to help Artie manage the warehouse itself.

My overview: imagine the TARDIS except it's a warehouse and not a police box (bigger on the inside) and it's full of cursed objects to be kept there so it doesn't destroy the world.

Thoughts on the show: I love it. It accurately depicts trauma and has decent representation such as a black woman everyone is intimidated by because she's the boss, a gay man who isn't sexualized and has development and a personality other than "gay". There is even an incredibly homoerotic friendship between two women that the actress of said women played up because they wanted their characters together, even if one turned out to be not-so-good. The show deals with sexism and victims of neglect. You'll learn a lot of random history while watching the show as all of the artifacts tend to be historically based (the guillotine blade that cut of Marie Antoinette's head, for instance). There are 5 seasons and I'm s3 or 4. Apparently the show does something weird with Pete and Myka at the end, which probably means they get together. Ran 2009 to 2014.

Thoughts on the fandom: again, way too small, although a lot bigger than Grimm. There are quite a few fics out there, mainly for the two women which I ship with my whole heart. There might be some controversy with Eddie McClintock (Pete Lattimer) but I'm not very well-versed in it. I wish Grimm's fandom was as big as W13's.

The Umbrella Academy

Platform: Netflix

Official overview: On one day in 1989, 43 infants are inexplicably born to random, unconnected women who showed no signs of pregnancy the day before. Seven are adopted by billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who creates the Umbrella Academy and prepares his "children" to save the world. In their teenage years, though, the family fractures and the team disbands. Fast forward to the present time, when the six surviving members of the clan reunite upon the news of Hargreeves' passing. They work together to solve a mystery surrounding their father's death, but divergent personalities and abilities again pull the estranged family apart, and a global apocalypse is another imminent threat. The series is based on a collection of comics and graphic novels created and written by My Chemical Romance lead singer Gerard Way.

My overview: adult survivors of abuse with increasingly weird/out-there superpowers due to the weird circumstances of their birth come together to celebrate *cough* I mean mourn the passing of their "father" And accidentally cause the apocalypse.

Thoughts on the show: I love it. I've finished season 2,currenfly there are only 2 seasons, it's still in progress, I love it. I'm sure most of you have already watched it because what is the supernatural fandom if not emo? Also a good one for representation. Mexican man with a stutter, black woman with a daughter she is in a custody battle for, gay druggie veteran, Ellen Page, Asian ghost boy, 58 year old man in a 13 year old's body, and a half-chimp man.

Thoughts on the fandom: big. Big big big. Haven't found any fics that cater to my specific wants in a fic, but there are fics. Some of them have weird pairings, but since the show made two (adopted) siblings canon, I can't exactly blame them.

Lost Girl

Platform: I actually have no idea

Official overview: Bo is a small-town girl on the run after a disastrous sexual encounter with her boyfriend ends with his death. Bo learns that she is not human, but a succubus, who feeds on the sexual energy of humans. She and her kind are members of the Fae, creatures of legend, who walk among humans and feed off them in different ways. As she searches for the truth about her origins and runs from her inhuman urges, she vows to help those she meets along the way -- human or Fae -- who need to right a wrong.

My overview: bisexual woman finds out she's a succubus and she has to choose to be either good Fae or bad Fae (I think it's light vs dark but it's been a Hot Minute) she has a thing with a werewolf and also a thing with a Fae doctor who is human and a woman.

Thoughts on the show: it's good, 5 seasons, don't think I've finished the first season. Back when I started watching it it was on Netflix and has since been removed. It's on Vudo but it costs money which is bullshit. It's a little weird at first, but I like it. Ran 2010 to 2015.

Thoughts on the fandom: have not interacted with the fandom for fear of spoilers. I'd imagine this show's fandom is about the size of Grimm.

Being Human (USA version)

Platform: again, I don't know.

Official overview: "Being Human," based on a BBC series of the same name, features three 20-something roommates who each try to keep a secret from the rest of the world -- one is a ghost, another is a vampire and the third is a werewolf. The three roomies try to help one another navigate the complexities of living double lives.

My overview: again, weird starts off in almost the middle of the story. It deals with abuse, death, fighting urges, dealing with past sins, and, well, being human. The characters are Sally (Ghost) Aidan (vampire) and Josh (werewolf). The three of them are trying to live like normal, Aidan and Josh as workers at the local hospital as Sally works to deal with her death.

Thoughts on the show: I love it I just wish I could find it on a reliable site, again, it's on Vudo but it costs money. It definitely had the set up for a good mlm relationship but from what I've gathered they end up forcing heterosexuality.

Thoughts on the fandom: again, too small, roughly the size of Grimm. I have seen 0 fics.

The Librarians

Platform: Hulu I do so believe

Official overview: Cued by TNT's popular 'The Librarian' trilogy, this series introduces new members of an ancient group protecting mystical artefacts. Hidden below the Metropolitan Public Library, the secret society's longtime leader is Flynn Carsen, whose job has become very complicated. To help, the Library recruits Eve, a counterterrorism agent responsible for organizational security; Jacob, who has encyclopedic knowledge of art, architecture and history; Cassandra, who links auditory/sensory hallucinations to memory; and Ezekiel, a skilled thief and master technician. Overseeing them is Jenkins, the reclusive caretaker of the Library's sleepy little outpost in Oregon. Noah Wyle executive produces and recurs as Flynn, the role he played in the movie series.

My overview: very similar to W13. This time imagine the Bunker, and the Warehouse, and boom, you've got the Library.

Thoughts on the show: good! I love it, I just found out it was on Hulu and am going to be binging it as soon as I finish Grimm and Warehouse. I'd love to see a crossover between W13 and The Librarians I feel like they'd have a feud.

Thoughts on the fandom: probably the same size as W13 if not bigger as the series came from movies. Again, haven't finished the series so I haven't interacted with the fandom.

Eureka

Platform: Amazon Prime

Official overview: In the years since World War II, the U.S. government has been relocating the world's geniuses (and their families) to the Pacific Northwest town of Eureka. Daily life there shifts between amazing innovation and total chaos. U.S. Marshal Jack Carter learns this first-hand when his car breaks down in Eureka, stranding him among the town's eccentric citizens. When they unleash a scientific creation still unknown to the outside world, it's up to Carter to restore order. Subsequently, he's let in on one of America's best-kept secrets.

My overview: a small town but make every person a genius. Has some crossover with Warehouse 13, they exist in the same universe.

Thoughts on the show: I love it so far. Just the kind of weird shit I enjoy.

Thoughts on the fandom: I'd imagine about the size of Warehouse 13's but I've yet to interact considering I'm still in season 1.

[chaoswillfallrpg]

RABASTAN LESTRANGE is TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD and a SOLDIER in THE DARK LORD’S ARMY at THE DEATH EATER HEADQUATERS. He looks remarkably like DYLAN O’BRIEN and considers himself aligned with THE DEATH EATERS. He is currently TAKEN.

→ OVERVIEW: 

tw: death, murder

Brooding and mysterious, Rabastan Lestrange has always been someone with not a lot to say despite having a multitude of opinions. The youngest of two boys, Rabastan was not privy to any preferential treatment from his parents as most younger children are due to the sheer amount of love radiating from his mother for both her children. Raised in the serenity of Lestrange Manor in Nottinghamshire, Rabastan’s childhood took place in a French Gothic style chateaux, similar to that of the Lestrange Manor on the outskirts of Paris. Surrounded by woodland and rolling hills, Rabastan’s childhood was a secluded one with only his older brother RODOLPHUS and his mother MARIE as constant company. Although almost all mothers claim they love their children more than themselves that was certainly true of his mother, who spent every waking moment of her day attending to Rabastan and his brother. Whilst most wealthy families sought the help of a nanny or a school master, Marie insisted on doing everything herself with only the aid of their House-Elf Posey as a welcomed extra pair of hands where needed. Rabastan recalled his childhood as a romantic one of being taught French by his mother and read novels and children's books outside in the garden as they sipped afternoon tea and played with his toys. 

Rodolphus was the perfect older brother to him, attentive and kind he was incredibly protective over him during his earlier years whilst also acting as his very first best friend. Rabastan and his older brother told one another everything from secrets they’d overheard their parents whispering concerning their father’s work to their plans for tomorrow and their hopes and dreams for their future. It was no secret that Lestrange Manor favoured love, his mother in particular was a hopeless romantic who had fallen for his father during a family trip to Paris when they were teenagers. The way they looked at one another was not lost on Rabastan or his brother who grew up longing for a relationship like that of their parents and were excited by the prospect of meeting their true love one day. Marie had raised them both as perfect gentlemen, preparing them for a world which was very different to the one they later entered. At Lestrange Manor, the flowers were always in bloom and music flowed from all the rooms of their home. They were safe from the Mugles who their father said had always been set out to destroy them and were kept separate from blood traitors their mother warned would try and corrupt them. When Rodolphus finally attended Hogwarts and returned with news of Muggle-Borns and blood traitors running wild she begged their father to send them both to Durmstrang but he refused.

His father told Rabastan it was important they go to Hogwarts and that they both had a part to play which going to school in Bulgaria wouldn’t benefit. Rabastan was unsure as to what his father wanted for him when he grew up, it was quite obvious the role he wanted for Rodolphus but his father took little interest in his future beyond telling him to attend Hogwarts and be sorted into Slytherin. Although THIEBAUT LESTRANGE certainly loved Rabastan, it was clear Rodolphus was his golden boy who would follow him into office, the heir and the spare as they say. His aspirations for Rabastan were quite simple, to marry into a good family to a woman with a lot of money and NARCISSA BLACK was someone his father had considered for Rabastan ever since it became clear Bellatrix and Rodolphus were off the cards. A few years younger than Rabastan, he was instructed to make an effort with her at family events and befriend her when she arrived at Hogwarts two years later, which he dutifully did. Narcissa was beautiful and a good friend to Rabastan but he always had the niggling feeling he could never quite love a woman who was too much in love with herself and quest for power she would never truly consider them equals. Narcissa wanted a wealthy man to give her things, Rabastan wanted someone who would truly love him despite his family name and respect him rather than mock his intelligence which Narcissa often did teasingly. 

Unlike his brother, Rabastan wasn’t the smartest boy at school, though his sarcastic tone and fondness for hanging around with trouble makers tended to squander most of his potential, which led him to ask his friend CAIUS BURKE’s sister LYRA for help in areas he was particularly struggling. Potions and Herbology were particular areas of concern for his parents, which Lyra excelled in and so began their friendship. Lyra was kind to him and withered the storm of his mood swings and sharp anger she never seemed to shy away from. Despite her small stature and kindness, Lyra was a strong woman and had little time to deal with his bitterness that she rather overcame, ignored or scolded him for until he learned which tone he was unable to take with her. Lyra helped balance him out in a way he needed, calming the storm that had raged inside of him for a long while and had only gotten worse more recently. Narcissa’s older sister BELLATRIX BLACK had taken a particular liking to him when he was in his second year and had fallen into what his teachers called ‘the wrong crowd’, hexing mudbloods and ending up in detentions with VIOLET BULSTRODE, ANYA ROOKWOOD and ERIK BORGIN where Bellatrix also often found herself for worse crimes. Bellatrix sensed an anger in him she knew would drive him towards greatness, to be seen above his brother and more than just a chess piece to unite them more closely with a family his father deemed useful.

 Bellatrix began privately tutoring him in the Dark Arts in his fourth year, coaching him on his duelling techniques and Charms ability of which she was quite accomplished. Then, when she knew she could trust him she introduced Rabastan to him. THE DARK LORD was Bellatrix’s mentor in the Dark Arts and a man who promised Rabastan power beyond his wildest dreams. The Dark Lord’s beliefs were not too dissimilar to the ones he had been raised with, but were more radical. He spoke of a world where witches and wizards ruled over Muggles and mudbloods were eradicated or used as servants to serve the more important. Those who joined him were promised an important position in his new world and those who were loyal to him and part of The Sacred Twenty-Eight were promised an even better position. Rabastan tried to lay low after his meeting, spending time with his friends and studying with Lyra to achieve grades that didn’t embarrass his family before graduating to a senior position in The Dark Lord’s army as Bellatrix’s right hand man. He explained away to family and friends he’d taken an internship in London for a private company dealing with experimental potions but gave little information otherwise. In their secret meetings Rabastan sits dutifully by Bellatrix’s side and helps her plot to overthrow the current regime. 

His current job has been targeting magical creatures and convincing them to join them in their quest with strict consequences if they choose not to. Recently Rabastan has run up against an issue, a recruitment gone wrong with an unregistered werewolf named SILAS CRUMP has resulted in him seeking legal advice from his brother Rodolphus and Bellatrix’s sister ANDROMEDA BLACK who have agreed to defend him as he stands trial for murder. Though it is within their plan to recruit Rodolphus and Andromeda, as their work is in its infancy Rabastan needs to ensure that no one knows what he is secretly doing, especially his brother and his associate. Although it was not his intention, the evening of Halloween presented itself with an opportunity. When an argument gone wrong resulted in the death of the Minister’s youngest son and vocal campaigner for creature rights BOOKER BAGNOLD at Rabastan’s hand, Rabastan attempted to pin the death on Crump. Watching as Booker’s wand was passed from person to person at the party he laughed as the Ministry chased an innocent man, sending Crump away on the run and keeping him and Bellatrix out of the spotlight for the Bagnold killing. His escape was a narrow one, though with Crump still at large, evading capture and Rodolphus and Andromeda still defending him Rabastan knows the issue will not be resolved unless Crump is silenced once and for all. 

→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Blood Status → Pure-Blood

Pronouns → He/Him

Identification → Cis Male 

Sexuality  →  Up to Roleplayer 

Previous Education → Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (Slytherin)

Societies → N/A

Relationship Status → Single 

Family → Thiebaut Lestrange (father), Marie Lestrange (mother), Rodolphus Lestrange (brother), Ilar Travers (uncle), Vivienne Travers (aunt), Isolde Travers (cousin), Evora Travers (cousin)

Connections  → Violet Bulstrode (best friend), Narcissa Black (best friend), Walden MacNair (close friend), Caius Burke (close friend), Anya Rookwood (close friend), Lavender Bulstrode (close friend), Erik Borgin (close friend), Erik Borgin (close friend), Lyra Burke (close friend/potential love interest), Bellatrix Black (close friend/mentor), Lachlan McTavish (friend), Victor Yaxley (friend), Cornelius Crabbe (friend), Silas Crump (adversary), Regulus Black (mentee), Booker Bagnold (victim) 

Future Information → N/A

RABASTAN LESTRANGE IS A LEVEL 5 WIZARD. 

[noobtiedoo]

Coming Out

I don’t really know where to pour my heart out other then Tumblr. Considering this site has the most random stuff i think it’s the right place to get this off my chest. It’s gonna be a long post so i will be pouring my heart out under the ‘keep reading’ line. Basically it boils down to the fact that I just came out as Non-Binary to the people i work with. Which leaves me in a whirlpool of emotions. I’ve already bawled my eyes out and i might do it again. Because i’m scared as hell, relieved as all hell and i feel like i can fucking breathe for the first time since forever. Everything is just overwhelming right now. But i need to get this off my chest. And i have literally no where else to post this. Just a heads up, i will be talking about my own experience, which brushes the subject of depression, anxiety and suicide. So if you’re sensitive to these subjects, i completely understand if you decide not to read. 

Onto my story:

First up, I’m Non-Binary. (He/Him Pronouns) And it may be a strange opening line but you have to understand that i haven’t been able to say this out loud, with pride, for years. I have been going through a really rough childhood and up until highschool i thought that it was because there was something wrong with me. As highschool progressed, things didn’t get any better, except for the fact that i started to understand something wasn’t necessarily wrong with me. I was just different then other people. And at the end of highschool i finally figured out what was what. But i couldn’t do anything with that knowledge. Depression, Anxiety, bullying and other things kept a lid on it. 

I thought it was best to suffer in silence because i was so scared that everything was going to get so much worse if i came out as a Non-binary person. On top of that, I’m a Pansexual. It’s a logical but not a great combo as these are two things that are very ‘new’ and ‘recently introduced’ to society. I know these things were existing before we could even give it a name. (And my heart hurts thinking of all those people in the past who struggled with this their whole lives unable to give it a name or come to terms with it)

I was struggling with multiple things, trying to keep my head above the water. Which backfired completely as i got depressed, my first ever girlfriend backstabbed me, which made me feel like an even more sore loser, i struggled with self esteem, my gender, my sexuality, my body, my personality. Basically everything a teenager would be going through except... It was really bad. So bad i wanted to end it all. I did try to push myself to commit suicide, but in the end i couldn’t go through with it. I thought it was too selfish to leave my parents and sisters behind without answers. And though at least i didn’t feel guilty for leaving them behind, i felt miserable with my life.

Fast forward to college, I was struggling. Walking around like a zombie. My education suffered, i suffered. My depression got worse. I had to quit and i spend half a year at home, in bed. Refusing to get up for anything other then food or the bathroom or maybe a shower if i felt like it. At this point i would hurt myself to distract me from the pain on the inside. If i felt pain on the outside, i wouldn’t pay attention to the fact that i felt like i couldn’t breathe, every day.

My parents eventually forced me to do some volunteer work. (no people involved, i had to go to a farm where special care was given to the disabled and feed the animals in the petting zoo there.) The animals made me feel more at ease and the fresh air did me some good. I was getting a bit better. I stopped hurting myself because the volunteer job distracted me enough. But i still felt like i couldn’t breathe. Until my parents suggested i go see a Psychiatrist. Help was help, or so i thought, so i agreed. But (and don’t get me wrong, i love my parents and respect their beliefs) the psychiatrist was from a Christian organization and he didn’t get me at.all. According to him i was suffering from a personality disorder and identity disorder. Which i KNEW wasn’t true. 

Naturally i quit therapy because the man wouldn’t listen to me. Now i’m a Christian too, and i know we aren’t all the same. But i didn’t want to risk it, so i went looking for a more open minded psychiatrist . One who was perhaps an atheist or hanging on some other religion. I didn’t care as long as he was open minded. (I didn’t feel comfortable with female psychiatrists at the time, but if i had i would have considered going to one) So i found a psychiatrist that i had a good feeling with and things started to get better. He helped me get through my trauma (I was sexually assaulted when i was eleven. Because of my low self esteem I couldn’t say ‘no’. I was too shy and timid to stick up for myself and this fucker knew and abused it.) He helped me gain more confidence. He helped me build up more self esteem and accept my sexuality. But Gender was still an issue.

Eventually we were at a stalemate. I felt like i had to figure the rest out for myself. He too said he gave me the tools i needed, but it was up to me to build my life. 

fast forward to my second attempt at collage. I struggled through a relationship that didn’t work. and ended things with my date in the start of the second year. It was a 3 year education program that eventually took me 5 and a half years to complete. But i did it. And i got my degree and boy i was proud. But then... I had to start working and put myself in the professional field. This was 3 years ago. Thinking back on the hell i went through to get where i was, i didn’t want to risk people misunderstanding me or turning me down because i was different. I kept my gender and sexuality trapped tightly in my private life. 

But you may have guessed it: It still made me feel miserable. I was lying to myself. And every time someone addressed me with female pronouns it was like someone was banging a hammer on a piano. I tried to ignore it but people started noticing i was very closed off and quiet and basically not a very happy person. I went from my first job to another employer somewhere else because i needed more hours. (there was never anything wrong with my first job, they just thought i was really shy. but i couldn’t get more hours so i moved on.) Hoping that it would be better there. Same story, same results. They noticed something was wrong. When i tried carefully to open up about what was bothering me, i got fired. That was at the start of this year. I tried hard to find a new job, the first job interview i had i felt like it had to be now or never. So i thought ‘fuck it all’ and i told them about my gender and that i preferred male pronouns even though i looked feminine. Guess what. They decided not to hire me. Big surprise. So the next time, i didn’t say a thing. 

Then i was about to get hired and then lockdown happened. And they laid me off. I was starting to feel depressed again. And helpless. Hopeless. I thought back on my first employer, and what a good time i had there despite my struggles and me being so quiet. So i was like: Why the hell not? And i tried again to get a job with the same employer. They had a place for me, not at the location i worked at before, but at a different one. Five days a week. I felt like i just witnessed a miracle when they decided to hire me. But i didn’t tell them anything about my gender or struggles, i just told them i have trouble opening up but i’m really trying. And they are patient with me and help me wherever they can. It’s also a Christian organization, but they are much more open minded then you’d expect religious people to be. (To be fair not everyone employed there is actually religious) 

Two months go by and i’m having a good time. The job is perfect, my co workers are really nice. I’m having a great time. But there is still that nagging feeling every time a kid calls me Teacher. (I’m Dutch. We don’t have a word like Teacher. With us it’s divided into Female teachers ‘Juffen’ And Male teachers ‘Meesters’) So they naturally call me the female equivalent of teacher. And i absolutely hate it. Again i hear that hammer banging on the piano and i feel like i can’t breathe. Then i learn that one of my co-workers is a Lesbian and in a relationship and everyone is acting so normal about it. And she has been working there for 6 years now. It broke something in me. I just didn’t want to lie to myself and others anymore. But because of everything that happened i was so scared to come out as Non-Binary.

So a few weeks ago i was finally so fed up with everything and the constant feeling that my chest was constricted and a knot being in my throat every time a kid called me teacher. So finally, there were some kids joking about boys and girls and what would make someone a boy or a girl. (kids are so sweet and innocent at the age of 5 they don’t know any better) So some of the girls were giggling and started calling me the male equivalent of teacher. I nearly cried. I never felt so happy in my life. But then one of my co-workers tried to correct them and i just blurted out: “Please don’t correct them. It’s fine. They can call me that.” 

She was surprised. And i thought: ‘What did i do now?’ But on second thought, it didn’t give me the chance to run away again or hide or keep struggling in silence. Because later she asked me what i meant with it and i told her my story. Of how my gender and how i was addressed effected me. I told her everything and i was shaking. I was scared, i was on the edge of crying, because i remembered all the times that me coming out as a person, with my Non-binary gender had caused me more harm then good.

She was very calm about it. I could tell she was trying her best to understand even if she was left a bit confused, and we talked about solutions. She then suggested that if it would make me really happy, then starting immediately, we would teach these kids to address me with my name instead of as a teacher. (I work in after care for kids who’s parents have to work, so we pick them up from school and look after them until dinner time when their parents pick them up. We aren’t teachers anyway.) 

I never really thought about that. And i agreed on the solution. So then we started to teach these kids to address me with my name. Another co worker i often work with heard this being brought into practice, which also kind of left me to explain to her why this was now a thing and why it needed to continue to be a thing. So i told my story to her. Again i was scared as hell, shaking and near crying. But she also responded calmly and told me she thought i was brave and that she would try to help me teach these kids to address me by my name.

I work with one other co worker on a regular basis. I haven’t told her the why yet but i asked her to help me teach the kids to address me with my name. (those kids are 6-7 years old and are a little easier when teaching something new) She agreed even if she didn’t know why. I will tell her soon. Probably next week. But i’m still nervous and my emotions are all over the place.

I also told my ehmm superior? Is that the word? I don’t know but she works at the office on our location to organize everything for everyone and make sure we have a list of which kids are coming on which days and stuff like that. I ended up telling half of my story to her too. She was interested but busy with a lot of other things too, which made it even scarier to tell her. (I always get more scared if i can’t really figure out how a person is going to respond or if the response is too vague for me to be able to tell if it was bad or good). But she was very calm about it too. So i want to see if i can sit down with her sometime and tell her my whole story to see if she can understand it a little better, and how we’re going to implement this in my work. Who needs to know, who can know and how we will solve the pronouns thing. (Although she seemed happy with the solution of calling me by my name. She seemed to support it) 

So as you can guess, after the last two weeks my emotions and feelings have been all over the place. I don’t sleep well some nights because all of this is going on and it’s so recent and fresh that i’m still worried. but... I can breathe.. For the first time since forever i can breathe. I’m happy. I’m not lying to myself. I don’t have to hide. And even if they don’t fully understand it, i’m finally being fully supported. 

(I love my parents as i’ve said before. But because of their beliefs they can’t fully support me. They will always love me. But to them i will never be anything else than their daughter and their little girl. And though it hurts my heart more then they realize, they refuse to use male pronouns for me. But they love me and they will never ever turn me away. I will always be welcome in their home. They will always love me as their child. They will never cut me off or disown me or turn away from me. So they support me. Just not 100% in the way i wished they would.) 

(My sisters are more open. Though my older sister has some trouble, she tries to use he/him even though she told me honestly that she doesn’t think she can ever see me as her little brother. So i told her ‘Don’t. Because i’m Non-Binary. Just see me as your little person.’ She laughed and said: Alright.  My little sister is the easiest. She doesn’t mind calling me Bro. She even said she always wanted a brother so she calls me dude and bro and uses he/him and i love her for it.)

But now at my work of all places (next to my few friends who use he/him as well) i have people who support me fully and try to help me be who i am without me having to feel ashamed for it or repressing it because i think being myself will cause me more harm then good. I can be myself. I can finally just let go. I have cried so hard already and i’m almost crying again typing this all out. Good god i know it’s a long story but... I’m just so overwhelmed. I needed to get this all out there one way or another. Just because i’m so overwhelmed that i need an outlet. So Tumblr. Here you go. This is my coming out story and i’m gonna go off and bawl my eyes out in a corner again because... I am overwhelmed.

[homespork-review]

HOMESPORK ACT 5 ACT 1: Mobius Double Plusungood, Part 3

TW: """funny""" sexual and physical assault of a child by another child, extreme bullying, extreme ableism, a very brief discussion of shipping characters outside their canon sexuality.

CHEL: We get some implications of the part of troll culture we ended on last time when a slightly baffled-looking Nepeta, watching through the viewport, updates her SHIPPING WALL. Instead of hearts, some of the hypothetical pairings she’s painted are marked with diamonds. What this means will be explained shortly.

I can’t help but feel it’s slightly creepy to hypothetically matchmake your own friends, but I’m pretty sure the other trolls know at least that the shipping wall exists if not exactly which ships they’re in, and they do live in a society in which it’s stated later that mating is mandatory, so it would indeed be helpful to have at least emergency-doable matchmaking done well in advance and they might appreciate the help.

I’d like to take a moment to note a ship at the bottom row, left of centre; GA/Tavros. Hussie, on his Formspring, later said that GA was “obviously” a lesbian, or anyway was only interested in women, which doesn’t have a specific term for it in troll culture. It’s actually hard to tell going by what’s shown in canon, because she only displays specific interest in girls except for in a complicated case we’ll discuss later, but trolls are supposed to be bi-normative, plus it’s not like the male selection here is particularly inspiring, so, yeah, the evidence we actually see isn't conclusively "obvious". The fandom, knowing this, systematically harass anyone who even muses vaguely about the possibility of shipping her with a boy, even if they don't know about that Word of God. This is why I’m wondering whether the trolls knew about the shipping wall, because if they did, we can presume GA didn’t care. For the record, I’m sex-repulsed ace and have in fact written about.my own imaginary persona fucking (admittedly fucking an opposite sex clone of herself, it was a complicated injoke) and my reaction to someone else writing it would depend on context and reason, so I can imagine her reacting similarly, but not everyone would. A similar thing with a canonically gay male character explicitly on-screen not caring about hypothetical shipping of himself with girls comes up much later; he’s not a troll, but his upbringing was troll-influenced (long story).

BRIGHT: Harassing people over the ships they make content for always baffles me. It’s not like fanart/fanfic for a ship which contradicts canon has any effect on the canon, and playing around with character dynamics (often in a pornographic manner) is a major part of fanfic.

CHEL: On top of all this, gender and sexuality are really shaky concepts to even try to apply to a species which reproduces hermaphroditically. On this side of the fourth wall it’s obviously because Hussie is a not-very-reflective cisgender heterosexual man, and didn’t think about it any further than “girls wear skirts, right?” Plenty of people fanwank up possibilities for how it could happen on the other side. I think we may have to make a “What The Fuck Is Alternian Biology And Sociology” post or two separate from the sporking at the very end.

Discourse discussion over! Next page, we see some of the relevant terminology used in troll culture, though we still don’t get any explanation of what any of the words actually mean, which is a tad annoying for new readers. The context is a discussion between Karkat and Vriska about getting her into the game.

BRIGHT: Specifically, Karkat wants Vriska to get Tavros into the game, leading to this exchange…

CG: WHY DO YOU EVEN HATE HIM, IT'S FUCKING RIDICULOUS. CG: IF ANYTHING YOU SHOULD PITY HIM. CG: ESPECIALLY SINCE YOU WERE THE ONE WHO PARALYZED HIM. AG: I know. I don't really understand it. AG: It's just a really special kind of h8! It never goes away and it doesn't make a lot of sense. CG: THIS IS KIND OF A WEIRD TIME TO BE CONFIDING IN ME ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS OF BLACK ROMANCE BUT OK. AG: Oh god, what? CG: I MEAN IF YOU'RE REALLY IMPLYING TAVROS IS YOUR KISMESIS I THINK YOU'RE BRAYING UP THE WRONG FROND NUB. CG: BOTH PARTIES HAVE TO HATE EACH OTHER EQUALLY, I MEAN LIKE TRUE HATE. CG: MAYBE YOUR FEELINGS COME SOMEWHAT CLOSE TO FITTING THE BILL BUT I DON'T THINK HE CAN HATE ANYONE, IT'S WEIRD, HE'S KIND OF BROKEN IN THE HEAD.

Finally, our long-awaited introduction to troll romance!

And the introduction is an effective one. We now know that there’s something called ‘black romance’, that it concerns hate, and that one’s black-romantic partner is a ‘kismesis’. The conversation also flows naturally and fits the characters having it, rather than being an awkward as-you-know infodump, although brace yourselves, there’s one of those coming up. Thirteen is about right for kids starting to have romantic feelings and being confused about it, not wanting to talk about it is pretty normal, and Karkat lecturing people at a good opportunity is absolutely in character.

Karkat goes on to lecture Vriska about the emotions involved in different sorts of romantic relationships, and wow, it really says a lot about troll culture…

CG: OK, MOST PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T HAD THEIR LOBE STEM CAUTERIZED ARE CAPABLE OF FEELING THE TWO PRIMARY EMOTIONS, HATE AND PITY. CG: PITY IS OF COURSE JUST THE TONED DOWN VERSION OF THE CENTRAL EMOTION, HATE. CG: AND ALL THE NUANCES OF PITY MANIFEST AS VARIOUS OTHER KINDS OF FEELINGS LIKE WHATEVER CHEMICAL REACTIONS TRIGGER MATING FONDNESS OR THE MYSTERIOUS FORCES THAT ARE BEHIND MOIRALLEGIANCE.

CHEL: It’s never really clear if this is just Karkat’s idea of it or if this is how trolls actually work biologically. Trolls do use the word “love” later on, so I always interpreted it as “pity” being a euphemistic term because “love” in such a warlike and oppressive culture could be exploited as a weakness. Fandom has played it with their love actually being based on a weird form of sympathy/seeing the other as needing protection, which is also plausible.

FAILURE ARTIST: I have played with the pity thing before but in retrospect Karkat is the only one who seems to see it that way. Maybe this is all his fake deep teenager view of romance.

BRIGHT: Vriska makes a performance of how bored she is, but Karkat’s on a roll.

CG: A WELL BALANCED PERSON IS IS GOING TO HAVE A GOOD DISTRIBUTION BETWEEN HATE AND THE VARIOUS PITY HUMORS. CG: HAVING A GOOD BALANCE KEEPS ALL THE EMOTIONS SHARPER, SEE I THINK THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM. AG: Oh???????? AG: I hope you know I already wore out some good note-taking pens today. All the pens. AG: All of them. CG: SEE, MY HATE IS LIKE A FINELY TUNED INSTRUMENT BECAUSE I'M AWARE OF THESE PRINCIPLES. CG: I COULD HATE A HOLE IN PARADOX SPACE ITSELF, STRAIGHT THROUGH TO A NEW REALITY FRESH FOR THE HATING. AG: Hahahahahahahaha, you don't even know how much I'm laughing at this. CG: BUT SEE, YOU'RE TOO HEAVY ON THE HATE SIDE, OR AT LEAST YOU PRETEND TO BE WHICH IS MAYBE WORSE. AG: You aren't reading anything I say are you? You just want to talk and talk and talk. CG: AND YOU THINK YOU'RE HATING UP EVERYONE HARD WHEN YOU'RE REALLY JUST BURNING OUT THAT ENTIRE EMOTIONAL HEMISPHERE. CG: IT'S LIKE LUKEWARM HATE. PRETENDER'S HATE, WITH NO COUNTERPOINT AT ALL. CG: AS SUCH THERE'S NO REAL SUBSTANCE TO YOUR HATE, IT'S LIKE A CARDBOARD MOVIE PROP. CG: WHICH IS WHY YOUR BRAIN IS BROKEN, KIND OF LIKE TAVROS'S BUT ON THE OPPOSITE HEMISPHERE I GUESS. CG: OR MAYBE YOUR BROKEN BRAIN LED TO THE IMBALANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE, I DON'T KNOW. CG: WHATEVER THE CASE IS, YOU'RE KIND OF EMOTIONALLY SCREWED, SORRY TO SAY. CG: YOUR HATE'S TOO DULL FOR A PROPER KISMESIS, IN MY OPINION. CG: AND I DON'T SEE ANYONE CHOMPING AT THE BIT TO BE YOUR MOIRAIL HONESTLY, UNLESS THERE'S SOMEONE OUT THERE WHO WOULD ACTUALLY BOTHER PITYING YOU. CG: AND LANDING A MATESPRIT? HAHAHAHA! CG: SERIOUSLY, LIKE THAT WOULD EVEN INTEREST YOU. CG: BASICALLY ANY FEATURE OF YOUR EMOTIONAL PROFILE THAT USUALLY MAKES SOMEONE VIABLE IN THE REDROM DEPARTMENT MUST BE TOTALLY FRIED. CG: YOUR BLACKROM POTENTIAL'S PROBABLY TOAST TOO.

Whew.

So now we have ‘kismesis’, ‘moirail’, and ‘matesprit’ as terms for romantic partners, as well as the concepts of black romance, red romance, and ‘moirallegiance’ as the relationship one has with a moirail. Troll romance is not going to get any less confusing for a while.

If Karkat’s grasp of psychology strikes you as amateurish, there’s a reason for that: He gets all his knowledge from romance movies.

AG: Hey asshole, stop watching movies for girls.

I think that’s another strike against the ‘girls are the dangerous ones on Alternia’ argument. Romance movies, per this exchange, are both female-coded and seen as inferior -- Karkat defends his viewing choices by saying they’re INTRIGUING SOCIOLOGICALLY, but Vriska isn’t buying it.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 42 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 33

CHEL: I’m not sure an interest in the workings of romance should be a socially gendered thing in a society where, as it turns out, you have to have an acceptable romantic partner by a certain time or die. You’d think most kids would be trying as hard as they could to learn and put into practice everything they could about it, and you’d also think there’d be better information for them than romcoms.

BRIGHT: Has the mate-or-die part come up yet? I’m not sure when Hussie thought of it.

CHEL: I don’t know if he’d thought of it yet, but it does come up very soon.

BRIGHT: Karkat then moves on to the original reason he contacted Vriska -- he needs her and her mind powers in the game, because he’s just run into a double agent called Jack.

Over on the next panel, Karkat is still talking to Vriska, but he’s glancing back over his shoulder at Jack Noir. His hand is covered in blood, which keeps cycling through a range of colours. The blood, it transpires, is because Jack stabbed him. Karkat is amazingly calm about this.

CG: HE'S COOL, IT'S FINE I DON'T REALLY MIND THE STABBING, IT WAS ALL A MISUNDERSTANDING. CG: WELL OK I'M PRETTY SURE HE MEANT TO STAB ME. CG: BUT I KIND OF THINK THAT'S LIKE CG: THE WAY HE GREETS PEOPLE? AG: This game is so stupid. CG: IN ANY CASE I THINK HE'S PROBABLY ALL STABBED OUT.

This would be ridiculously chill even from someone who isn’t extremely cagey about his blood colour -- and it’s not that Karkat suddenly doesn’t care any more, because as soon as Vriska says she’ll ask Terezi or Jack what colour he’s bleeding, he tells her that he’s out of Terezi’s range, Jack is sworn to secrecy, and Sollux (who’s incommunicado) is the only one who knows how to make Trollian’s viewport feature work. (Given we saw how easy it is to use earlier, I’m surprised Vriska doesn’t try to figure it out herself.)

Over on the next panel, the viewer is now Jack, a few minutes prior to this conversation. Contrary to Karkat’s protestations, Jack stabs him because He's got a pretty sharp tongue and can't seem to keep it sheathed. He is curious when Karkat cares less about the wound and more about Jack seeing his blood colour, which is apparently some freakish mutation. Jack looks at his knife…

CHEL: While it’s not a realistic depiction of the colour, recall that this is the shade of red used in-comic to depict human blood. This reveal probably isn’t a surprise to anyone by now, if you’ve encountered fanart, and honestly it wasn’t a huge mindblowing revelation on my first read before I knew, but I do think it’s a clever little “aha, THAT’S why!” moment. Skilfully done.

It seems he's the only one of his kind with this mutant candy-red blood. An outcast. He thinks he was put on this planet covered in an ocean of his own blood to be taunted. Punished for something. Saddest story you ever heard. Got to do something to shut him up.

BRIGHT: Awww. That’s kind of sweet.

This little interchange gave rise to the ‘Stabdads’ fandom phenomenon, where Spades Slick is envisaged as Karkat’s father-figure. In Homestuck canon, it’s dubious how much affection Slick has for Karkat. He seems more irritated by him than anything else, but that’s about on par for how he treats the rest of the Midnight Crew. On the other hand, it clearly makes a massive impact on Karkat. We’ve seen how important blood colour is on Alternia and how insecure he is about his own; his sudden rush of fellow-feeling towards Jack is understandable, even if it does make him way too forgiving about having been stabbed.

CHEL: Karkat and Jack shake hands, and proceed to be in cahoots. Cahoooooooots. Doodling on the defaced parking ticket from earlier, they draft OPERATION REGISURP.

Your whole team executes the plan along the course of its journey, employing espionage, mind control tactics, political sabotage, vicious interrogations and cold blooded assassinations. Everyone does their part and you begin to learn the true meaning of teamwork, as well as this troll disease called friendship.

Yeah, it actually happening is skipped over with one paragraph, but that’s probably a good thing with all the complexity already going on, and we do hear more details about it. First, we’re reminded of the existence and functions of the Queens’ Rings, the magic rings the queens of Derse and Prospit have which give them traits and powers from whatever the players put in their sprites. The trolls have put their lusii in their sprites, except for Aradia, whose lusus died long ago, so she got in the sprite herself. The Queen could put up with getting bits and pieces from eleven hideous monsters (well, ten hideous monsters and one adowable little fairybull thing oh my gosh it’s cuuuute) tacked onto her, but what she absolutely won’t stand for is the other thing Aradia put in her sprite…

She could not stand bearing the visage of the most loathsome creature known to existence. So vile is its appearance, so contemptible its purpose, all depictions of the creature let alone members of its population are permanently banned from any jurisdiction in the reach of her agents. Those of its kind go by many names, and so does the reviled patron god they herald - THE GREAT DETESTATION, KING PONDSQUATTER, SPEAKER OF THE VAST JOKE, or most commonly, BILIOUS SLICK.

Recall that AR thought of the hieroglyphs in the Frog Temple as “illegal pictography”. We’ll find out later why the Black Queen has such a revulsion for frogs, it’s important. But the important part right now is that she took the ring off. At the time of planning it’s in the ROYAL VAULT.

We briefly see a moment in the future of the Black Queen wrapped in rags, just like the human sessions’ White Queen, wandering the desert as the BANISHED QUASIROYAL, and the caption notes the plan was a success.

However, Doc Scratch appears in the desert in front of her, and it’s noted she was given a new purpose. This, it seems, is the origin of Snowman.

FAILURE ARTIST: I would like if there was some canon Homestuck material expanding on this REGISURP plot.

BRIGHT: Same! It sounds really interesting. One example of Homestuck’s idiosyncratic pacing, I suppose -- we spend pages and pages on trivial alchimeter nonsense, but skip over something more meaty.

CHEL: The Red Team work on that, while the Blue Team battle their own session… or so they think. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve all already figured it out, but the trolls hadn’t just yet. They note that their prototypes are affecting the opposite team’s underlings, and the readers are shown Alternia’s two Frog Temples, one near Aradia’s home and the other near Kanaya’s, each with six pillars outside (one seems to have five, but the sixth is hidden behind the building). Superimposed on each other, the pillars make a full ring of twelve.

The truth was it had always been the same session all along. That your teams were not competing, but cooperating toward a common goal. In the more drawn out form of this adventure's narrative, figuring this out would have been a huge deal. We would have been completely blown away by this stunning revelation. Wow. Same session all along. Really? Huh.

This is what Aradia’s been so mysterious about. She knew. We’re provided with a handy diagram, in case we haven’t been able to keep up.

After watching the phrases MOBIUS DOUBLE and REACH AROUND toggle for a few minutes while in a sort of stupor, you finally snap out of it.

(I just noticed, the Blue Team are the Derse dreamers and the Red Team are the Prospit dreamers. Neat!)

The reader’s attention is drawn instead to the Aquarius and Pisces symbols in the top left, belonging to characters we haven’t met yet, and the narration promises we’ll learn about them soon. Drawing attention again to GA’s Virgo symbol, the narration muses about her.

It will probably be quite some time before you get to be her. It could very well be pages and pages and pages.

Naturally, we jump right back to her.

GA’s intro is long, so we’ll take it piece by piece.

Your name is KANAYA MARYAM.

The Sanskrit name for Virgo is “Kanya”, and it’s also the name of a town in Japan. “Maryam” is the Arabic version of “Mary”, as in Jesus’ mother. It may also be a reference to Marya Zaleska, the title character of the movie “Dracula’s Daughter”.

You are one of the few of your kind who can withstand the BLISTERING ALTERNIAN SUN, and perhaps the only who enjoys the feel of its rays. As such, you are one of the few of your kind who has taken a shining to LANDSCAPING. You have cultivated a lush oasis around your hive, and in particular, you have honed your craft through the art of TOPIARY, sculpting your trees to match the PUFFY ORACLES from your dreams. You have embraced the tool of this trade, which conveniently is the weapon of choice for those who would hunt the HEINOUS BROODS OF THE UNDEAD which crawl from the sand at sunrise to feast on the light and the living.

Couple things established here; trolls are not only nocturnal but actively harmed by their planet’s sun, and undead beings other than ghosts exist. Said traditional weapon for hunting them is a chainsaw, which we can see lying against her bookshelf, a reference to the Evil Dead movies.

It would be convenient if you actually hunted them, but it is of course far too dangerous, every bit as suicidal as attempting to poach the terrible MUSCLEBEASTS who roam at night. So you indulge in your bright fascination with the grim through literature. Just before the sun goes down and you join your flora in rest, you immerse yourself in tales of RAINBOW DRINKERS and SHADOW DROPPERS and FORBIDDEN PASSION.

Rainbow drinkers are, as discussed later on, troll vampires. I don’t think shadow droppers are ever expanded on, but they might be zombies or werebeasts. Troll goths, apparently, are the reverse of human goths, dressing in bright colours and staying up in the daytime, which makes sense for a species who can only safely go out at night.

You are one of the few of your kind with JADE GREEN BLOOD. As such you are one of the few who could be selected and raised by a VIRGIN MOTHER GRUB, an event so rare as to elude documented precedent. She would defend you from desert threats, and though her life would be short, in time you would assure her of progeny.

Recall that the Mother Grub is required for troll reproduction.

You are a SEAMSTRESS or a RAGRIPPER or a TREETRIMMER or a LUMBERJACK, whichever you care to be, and your unique hive is equipped with a great supply of advanced technology to accommodate your interests. The technology and indeed the hive itself were all recovered from the ruins nearby when you were very young. The seed of your hive was deployed on the volcanic rocks beneath the sand with the assistance of your lusus and her remarkable burrowing skills, and you have lived there happily together since. You know the ruins and the hive and everything here that is not sand and rock originated from the world of your dreams. You also know that one day you will visit this world while you are awake. That day is today.

Like Jade, Kanaya has been awake on Prospit for years, and the technology in question is Skaian in origin, so that’s how she knows what’s going on with the game.

Kanaya is prompted to equip her chainsaw, which promptly turns into a lipstick in a Problem Sleuth reference. Like Jade, she has a Wardrobifier, set to randomise, which suddenly turns her black shirt and red skirt into a red leaf-print dress. She takes out the lipstick.

You can choose between your trademark jade or black. Even though a troll's lips are naturally black. But they can always be blacker, and a lady with a true sense of style knows this.

She goes with green, her dress turns into a blue kimono, and she’s messaged by someone with a fuschia Pisces symbol. This person, named cuttlefishCuller, turns out to be rather excitable, greeting her in all caps and following it up with Glub glub glub glub glub!

BRIGHT: This conversation is pretty sweet, with some friendly joking about CC’s quirk (they stick hyphens in front of their capital Es) and mention of their Collapsing And Expanding Bladder Based Aquatic Vascular System. There’s another mention of moirails, with CC saying they’ll have to join the game late to keep an eye on theirs.

It also turns out both CC and Kanaya are having some premonitions of what’s to come! Kanaya is seeing visions in the clouds of Skaia, the same way Jade does, but CC hears whispers from a mysterious ‘she’ who needs her voice keeping down. It’s implied to be CC’s lusus, as both Kanaya and CC are aware their lusii are going to die soon.

Kanaya hopes to be with her lusus as she dies, but looks out of the window to find the Virgin Mother Grub has already passed away, apparently of natural causes.

CHEL: The Mother Grub was seen briefly before; it’s a moth-like creature with a huge fat body the size of a bus, with wings too small to ever lift it, horns the same shape as Kanaya’s, and a skull-like head with big lips. The skull on Terezi’s Doomsday Scale was, we can tell now, a Mother Grub, except quite a lot bigger - presumably a breeding Grub.

BRIGHT: Kanaya changes back into her original outfit, and goes down to live up to her end of the bargain… which entails slicing a hole in her lusus with her chainsaw and pulling out a round object covered in spikes the colour of trolls’ horns, called a Matriorb. Kanaya stores it in her sylladex; she’s using a CHASTITY MODUS, which locks each card away, and the key will serendipitously be discovered when it’s time for the card to be unlocked. These modii are getting more and more esoteric.

Kanaya proceeds to have a conversation with her own moirail, Vriska, which we already read earlier.

You then proceed to have the rest of this conversation we already read, bugging and fussing and meddling through the special and magical union one can only describe as being in moirallegiance with another. At least, you guess that's how you would describe it. Maybe. Troll romance sure is confusing!

Yes, yes it is. (Spoiler: It’s not that confusing once it’s explained.)

Kanaya doesn’t have long to dwell on the conversation, as she’s contacted by caligulasAquarium, someone with a violet Aquarius symbol who she doesn’t seem to think highly of. It rapidly becomes apparent why.

CA: kan make her talk to me do somethin GA: Who CA: your no good connivvin fuckin backstabbin girl crush thats wwho

CHEL: Trolls are supposed to come bi/pan as standard, so why does he need to specify “girl crush”? I wonder if Hussie hadn’t decided that yet when he wrote this part, but I’m not sure.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 34

CA’s gender hasn’t been revealed, but let’s not kid ourselves, we know from how he’s talking that he’s a dude. Nice Girls certainly exist but they don’t tend to get portrayed as so whiny in fiction, plus CC comes off as very girly, and that leaves us with six boy and six girl trolls. Balance and opposites and counterparts are a running theme throughout Homestuck. Not that there can’t be nonbinary characters, as some show up in Hiveswap; just that there would most likely have to be an even number of them, split evenly between the groups of players. Fine by me as a nonbinary person with a thing for balance and even numbers of my own.

Also, note that we’ve seen this guy, or at least his hand and foot, before. This is the litter-hater in the bowling shoes.

GA: Overstating Our Relationship Wont Make Me Feel Very Cooperative GA: Its Paler Red Than That Ok CA: pshhhhhh that is a fuckin laugh and you knoww it evveryone does CA: so help me out tell her to talk to me i think she blocked me you got to GA: Why Do I Got To GA: I Dont Got To And Every Time You Take My Help For Granted I Feel Like I Got To A Little Less CA: wwhatEVVER you are so the vvillage twwo wwheel devvice wwhen it comes to auspisticing CA: you cant let a grudge go by you wwont stick your busy stem betwwixt so get wwith the program fussyfangs

BRIGHT: Oh hey, another troll romance term! ‘Auspisticing’ is the last of the lot, don’t worry.

CA: wwho givves a shit wwhy she blocked me or about my fuckin manners come on youvve got a wway wwith her CA: i figure if youre going to auspisticize any twwo brinesuckers wwho sneer at each other a funny wway you might as wwell make it official and be ours right GA: Your Black Solicitation Just Seems Really Indecent

Funny words aside, Hussie does a good job at laying down context for what auspisticism is here; we now know that it involves mediating between two parties who dislike each other and that it’s a form of black romance. Meshing worldbuilding naturally into the dialogue is something Homestuck does really well at times.

Anyway, CA is trying to get in contact with Vriska because he asked her to make something for him and now she’s blowing him off.

GA: What Is It CA: kan stupid wwhat do you think its a fuckin gizmo to bloww up the wworld or somethin CA: ok wwell not that obvviously CA: but somethin thatll kill all land dwwellers wwhat else wwould i be after GA: Can You Just For A Moment Entertain The Thoughts Of One Untouched By Megalomaniacal Derangement And Tell Me Why Id Want To Assist You With That CA: wwell CA: im not goin to vvery wwell kill you am i that wwould be fuckin unconscionable CA: wwhat kind of friend wwould i be

While CA is obviously a douche, there’s something funny about how over-the-top he is about it and how utterly oblivious he is to the idea that Kanaya might have a problem with a device that would kill all landdwellers, although the humour is inversely proportionate to how likely he is to pull it off.

CHEL: Maybe I’m strange, but I think he’s adorable. I get the impression of a small kid trying to puff himself up to adult size.

BRIGHT: There’s also more romance talk, and this next bit is one I find interesting:

CA: you could either play along as our auspistice and do a little mediating like you wwere fuckin hatched to CA: or wwatch she and me devvolvve into fuckin full fledged kismesisses the kind like you dont get once in ten thousand swweeps CA: you knoww thats wwhat it wwould be there wwould be rainboww rivvers runnin through star systems and all nebulizin like liquid firewworks CA: it wwill be beautiful and heartbreaking all at once CA: you should read up on your history instead of poring through that godawwfull sunny rubbish

I’m going to take a step back from Homestuck itself for a moment and talk about kismessitude as it’s portrayed in fandom. People tend to envision it in a variety of ways -- some see it as a BDSM relationship, some as a way of pushing a rival to be better, some as just straight-up hate-sex -- but most depictions show it as something that only affects the two people involved.

Here, though? CA’s talking about kismessitude as something that’s potentially really damn dangerous, to other people besides those involved, and cites history as a backup -- implying it can really be that dangerous, and it’s not just a teenager’s flight of fancy. (Although, that said, CA is clearly using this to try and get Kanaya in a relationship with him, so how sincere he is is questionable.)

CHEL: Later on we do see a little bit of one of the historical cases he might have been citing. We’ll discuss it more then. Also, I do like him saying “sunny” instead of “gloomy”. Makes sense!

Kanaya tells CA none of this matters, and he sneers about the “purity of the bloodline”. That’s an… uncomfortable turn of phrase, especially since he’s speaking to someone not covered by the “purity” standard, but since it applies to aliens and it’s in a society where that’s hammered into its inhabitants it’s not a Problematykks issue. Kanaya tells him it still won’t matter because their race will be wiped out entirely, and his reaction is remarkably understated:

CA: huh CA: wwell ok HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 11

CA says he knows Kanaya doesn’t lie except to herself, surprisingly perceptive for one so puffed-up otherwise. CA might be smarter than he’s letting on? He asks if her clouds told her that; that was the reader’s assumption too, but she says no, she has a different source. Uh-oh. We know what the last source of information was, and it cost Vriska an arm and an eye-sevenfold. CA’s own clouds “hide nothin but misfortune and monstrosities”, so we can guess she’s Prospit and he’s Derse. He goes back to nagging her to tell Vriska to talk to him, and when she continues to refuse he poutily steps off.

CA: you dont wwant to be our auspistice cause you dont wwant to get locked into that sort of relation wwith her i can respect that

Kanaya denies this, and CA says everyone knows, including Karkat.

GA: Its Unbelievable GA: Her Patience CA: wwhat CA: wwhoa wwait wwho GA: Never Mind CA: ok wwait did she talk to you today CA: wwhat did she say CA: or glub or wwhatevver

They’re talking about CC, if it wasn’t clear. Kanaya, in a callback to John’s comment to Terezi, facetiously tells him that she talked about Longing To Touch You Indiscretely and That Shes Basically In The Scarlet Throes For You. CA, flustered, picks up that she’s teasing him, and she tells him the truth, that CC’s just concerned as a moirail.

CA: if youre not savvvvy about howw you define yourself to people CA: you can just splash into the moirail zone before you knoww wwhich wways upwward

I’m going to comment on this attitude in a bit more detail when we get a clearer explanation of what moirallegiance actually is. CA leaves her with some arc words.

CA: being a kid and growwing up CA: its hard and nobody understands

Kanaya heads back to her room, planning to emphatically not meddle but help her friends, and consults her source; it’s fortunately not a Doc Scratch-related one at all. It is, in fact, Rose’s long-forgotten GameFAQ, saved on a server floating in the Furthest Ring, to which Prospit’s clouds directed her. I have to show you the panel for a moment though…

I’m sure there was a way we could see the screen without having it facing away from Kanaya who’s supposed to be reading it.

You can only assume this took place a long time ago. This race is likely ancient, preceding yours by millions of sweeps. Maybe billions! You like to try to imagine the adventures of these players. Were they successful in repopulating their race? Did they manage to protect their matriorb and hatch a new mother grub? Could they hold it together, or were they torn apart by the complex social dynamics, the matespritships and moirallegiences and auspisticisms and kismesissitudes that will surely plague your group along the way? You have little doubt they succeeded with flying colors.

Oh dear, dramatic irony. Kanaya fantasises about a troll version of Rose, thinking she must have been the leader of this supposedly long-ago group.

And yet they appear to have been the only of their kind to have risen to the challenge in a session stacked heavily against them.

Huh. So is this just because Kanaya can’t find more information, or are the four kids in fact the only humans who successfully got into the game? Picking four specifically white-coded kids to be the last of the human race due to supposedly their own competence is… not a good choice. And why the hell couldn’t other people succeed? This strikes me as more of the whole theme of “nobody matters except the people we’re focusing on”. A good lampshading of video game tropes, but in a literary story, that’s the opposite message to everything I’ve ever read, and it’s a creepy one.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 43 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 12 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 35

BRIGHT: I thiiiiiiiink it’s at least implied later on that there are other sessions going, it’s just that each session is a closed loop of players so we don’t see the others...although if that’s the case, does that mean Earth’s getting hit with meteors from multiple Skaias?

CHEL: That over with for the moment, we cut to Tavros’ house as you take your place as the PAGE OF BREATH in the LAND OF SAND AND ZEPHYR. Vriska, his server player, gets down to the business of building up his house towards the Gate…

… entirely out of staircases.

AT: i THINK THIS, iS, AT: pROBABLY MEANT TO ANTAGONIZE ME,

Okay, this probably makes me a bad person, but I’m crying with laughter at his expression and that line.

It’s more disability slapstick, but here the point of the joke comes off as being more that Vriska is a jerk and Tavros’ reaction is really understated than any reasonable person being supposed to assume Tavros is wrong for not being able to climb stairs. Emphasis on “comes off as”, unfortunately. I’m still gonna give a Problematykks point, and further experience with Hussie’s attitude to disability has soured the joke somewhat, even in just the next couple of pages.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 44

BRIGHT: Vriska tries to get Tavros to crawl up the stairs, first by telling him that he promised not to be boring anymore and then by saying that she’s trying to help him get stronger. She caps off the rant by demanding that he apologise.

AT: oKAY, AT: tHANKS, i GUESS, AT: bUT, AT: sORRY FOR WHAT, AG: For 8eing crippled, you ass! AT: yOU WANT ME TO APOLOGIZE, AT: fOR BEING PARALYZED, AG: Yes. AG: Say you're sorry. AT: i DON'T MEAN TO BE RUDE, oR bORING, AT: bUT THAT'S RIDICULOUS, gIVEN, AT: uH, tHE CIRCUMSTANCES, AG: 8ullshit! AG: It's something called 8asic decency and civility you fudge8looded 8oor. AG: Now get down on your useless wo88ly knees and apologize. AT: nO, i DON'T WANT TO, AG: >::::O

Vriska, what the fuck.

Tavros is really great here. He’s obviously not comfortable fighting with Vriska, and repeatedly tries to redirect her into building him ramps instead of engaging. But, at the same time, he holds his ground and doesn’t let her push him around, and won’t let go of solid hard reality in the face of Vriska trying to emotionally manipulate him.

FAILURE ARTIST: And yet people still call him a wimp.

BRIGHT: Vriska retaliates, because of course she does, by grabbing his wheelchair with her cursor and shaking it about. If Hussie left it at that, everything would be unobjectionable, at least in terms of narrative voice. Instead, well…

Now she's done it. She has awoken the mighty inner fury that is... RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUFIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

CHEL: It just occurred to me to mention that the name Rufio comes from a character in the movie Hook, the leader of the Lost Boys after Peter Pan left, played by Dante Basco. Tavros’ mental image of him is a reference to that character.

FAILURE ARTIST: Dante Basco did read Homestuck, with hilarious results as we will see.

But unfortunately, Rufio is not real. He's imaginary. A fake. Like a made up friend, the way fairies are. You continue to be sad and alone.

BRIGHT: Eurgh.

Let me be clear: Tavros having no further recourse to deal with Vriska’s abuse beyond his visualised self-esteem is a problem for the character, but it’s not necessarily a narrative problem per se. Escapism is a thing. You could get a decent character arc out of Tavros learning better ways to deal with harassment he can’t escape. It is a narrative problem when the narrator mocks it and makes him out to be pathetic for even trying it.

CHEL: I’d consider this to be just Tavros’ own thought process, but, sadly, this kind of narrative sneering at him carries on throughout Tavros’ presence in the comic and the fandom seems to buy into it. Tavros gets a lot of hate for reasons which mostly boil down to him being a male abuse victim; there’s a feeling that he should “try harder” to fight back, despite him being physically disabled and a member of a caste out of sight beneath her on the social ladder and legally permitted to be killed by her on a whim. Might that count as a point for WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM, for Huss and the fandom not taking the social dynamics into account for why Tavros can’t defend himself?

BRIGHT: I don’t know if it’s fair to count against the fandom when we’re reviewing Homestuck proper, but we can definitely count against Hussie!

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 36

CHEL: It’s also notable that the common fandom interpretation of Tavros is as Hispanic-coded, at least partly due to his Spanish username, and of Vriska as white-coded. That’s probably not helping.

Since Hussie appears to expect us to agree with Vriska that this is funny, I’m adding another to these as well.

ALL THE LUCK: 2 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 45 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 3

BRIGHT: What’s weird about this whole mess is that Hussie doesn’t — yet — try to say that Tavros should be trying to get stronger; his disability is fully acknowledged. I feel like this kind of mockery is usually accompanied by the attitude that disabled people should just get over their disability, but Hussie’s clear that Tavros can’t. Which means he should do...what, exactly?

CHEL: Not have let Vriska disable him in the first place, presumably. Never mind that, you know, she has mind control powers so he didn’t really have a choice in that either. That is, however, an argument Vriska fans actually make. Apparently some of them actually blame him for not flying when she threw him off the cliff, which… well, unpowered flight is a thing that can happen in the comic but he certainly couldn’t do it then.

BRIGHT: ...Apparently I retain the capacity for surprise at how awful people can be. The fuck?

Back in the comic, Tavros fortunately does have one other means of recourse. Back in her hive, Vriska is suddenly prodded in the back with a flying toilet, courtesy of Kanaya.

GA: Just Presenting A Floating Reminder That Tavros Will Need Plenty Of Inclined Surfaces For His Ascent AG: That's silly. I made so many ramps, you wouldn't even 8elieve it. AG: I specifically decided I wanted to 8uild something ugly and 8oring. It is now the land of ramps and yawns. GA: Hes Reported Otherwise AG: That lousy snitch! May8e I should take his computer away so he can't go crying to fussyfangs anymore. GA: Maybe I Should Upend This Load Gaper Over Your Head AG: No, don't! GA: Im Still Learning The Interface GA: It Could Happen Accidentally At Any Moment AG: I'm only trying to help him. ::::( GA: Think Of Another Way To Help

CHEL: Did I mention Kanaya is my zodiac troll? I can only long to reach her heights of awesome. Of course the ability to levitate toilets would kinda help.

BRIGHT: Vriska heads down to her treasure vault and retrieves a pair of ROCKET SHOES. The captchalogue code for these is ‘PSHOOOES’, which amuses me greatly. Vriska sends the code to Tavros, who combines it with the code for his wheelchair to create a flying wheelchair. Now that is a good use of alchemising!

CHEL: Awww!

Tavros flies up to the Gate, and we cut back to him later on, leading an entourage of communed-with imps and ogres to move obstacles and help him solve puzzles. Using his skills well, I see! In another set of ruins the imps load jigsaw pieces of rock into a frog-shaped alcove,

Things, however, don’t continue to go so well, because Hussie hates this poor kid. I do not mean that facetiously. Statements he’s made elsewhere imply he has a hell of a lot of contempt for several of the characters he created, which I don’t understand at all. We’ll go into this after Act 7, but I get the sensation that the characters are merely tools to show off the complexity and meta references, which are the parts he really cares about.

BRIGHT: It’s not unknown for authors to dislike characters they wrote; the great Terry Pratchett reputedly hated his character Rincewind. The key difference is that in Pratchett’s case, the audience couldn’t tell. Hussie, on the other hand, tends to make his disdain pretty obvious, to the detriment of the story.

CHEL: That’s a point. Conan Doyle grew to hate Sherlock Holmes, too. He didn’t, however, set up situations solely to shit on Holmes in his books.

BRIGHT: I think that’s the key. I’ll forgive a multitude of failings as long as the author seems to be treating the characters fairly. That doesn’t mean that good things have to happen to them — plenty of bad things can happen and I’ll enjoy it — it just means that the author has to...respect how the character feels and would behave, I guess.

Of course, respect is Hussie’s antithesis, so.

Also, nothing so far has shown Vriska to be anything other than a (granted, entertaining) bully. I wasn’t around while Homestuck was updating, so I’m not sure when her fandom took off, but it has to be later than this, surely?

CHEL: I don’t know. I wasn’t around till about mid-Act 6.

What was I on about? Oh yes. Tavros is interrupted by Vriska again, who bitches him out for doing things the boring way and seeking the boring lore.

AG: The minds of your consorts are very soft and impressiona8le. AG: As easily manipul8ed as all those imps you've 8een 8ossing around. AG: I have picked apart their tiny little lizard 8rains and seen through all the smoke and mirrors of their riddles. AG: I have gotten to the truth they are guarding. The great 8ig mystery 8ehind this planet. And you know what it is, Tavros? AT: nO, AG: It's 8ullshit! AG: Meaningless, 8oring, fanciful 8ullshit wrapped in flowery poems to keep you guessing. AG: It all leads to one thing anyway, and that's what we should put our attention on. AG: Real gamers cut to the chase. They power through all the nonsense and go for the gold. AG: They cheat, Tavros. AG: It is time you learned to start cheating.

Interesting theory. Tavros thinks befriending his monsters instead of killing them is cheating, and Vriska grudgingly agrees but is annoyed he isn’t killing anything. She claims to have designed a better and more challenging quest for him; he asks after her own quest, and she says she has time because Kanaya’s busy.

AG: Which is just as well 8ecause I was starting to get nannied HARD. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 37

Strange word choice for a species raised by animals, but okay. Vriska sends Tavros a map to the next Gate, and he sets off in his little rocket chair. Little does he know.

You proceed through what seems to be your second gate, into the LAND OF MAPS AND TREASURE. The THIEF OF LIGHT lies in wait.

In a callback to our last meeting of Breath and Light players, Tavros crashes through Vriska’s wall and is left hanging upside-down in the rocket chair from the large cobwebs across the room, while Vriska sleeps on a pile of broken eight-balls. Doesn’t look comfortable, but trolls rest in worse places later. Vriska wakes, and Tavros falls head-first onto the floor.

Here is where it gets incredibly uncomfortable, and we have to show it in detail to assign points properly and so that there’s no ambiguity about what’s happening, so if you have any sexual assault, ableism, underage, mind control, or victim-blaming triggers you may want to skip this part. No clothing is removed but it’s very unpleasant to read and the attitude toward it is worse. Seriously, this is Taklamakan Zoo levels of bad.

(This heading below’s not part of the comic, I just put it there so you can skip. The sequence ends with the piece of fanart of Kanaya looking at the sideways screen.)

~*THE ASSAULT STARTS HERE*~

Vriska sits up. She’s wearing a very short strappy white Tinkerbell dress with her sign on it, and what look like over-the-knee socks, a commonly fetishised style of clothing. I remind you these characters are supposed to be thirteen years old. The dress is also the same as the one worn by the fairy in the artwork on Tavros’ desktop background. I don’t know if Vriska had seen that or not.

FAILURE ARTIST:

To be fair she’s just in an actually-more-modest version of what Peter Pan’s sidekick/love interest wears and the socks come off as more dorky than sexy.

Oh my! It appears Pupa Pan himself has flown through your window while you were asleep. How exciting! Surely he is here to take you away on the adventure of a lifetime. He is more dreamy and heroic than you ever imagined. But what's this?? It seems the legendary Boy-Skylark has misplaced his shadow. He is looking EVERYWHERE for it, to no avail. He is having a devil of a time, what with being paralyzed from the waist down and all. He clearly needs your help.

CHEL: Vriska is prompted to Help Pupa find shadow, and approaches Tavros with a nasty-looking grin on her face, while he lies on the floor, gritting his teeth in noticeable pain.

Pupa! You truly are a silly goose. Your shadow has been trapped underneath your useless torso the whole time! Honestly, where else would it be you stupid sack of shit?

Charming. Vriska proceeds to kick him in the head, or at least nudge him with her foot, while he lies unresponsive.

Of course, the secret to reuniting with your shadow is to get up and walk around. And play and dance and frolic! Your shadow will surely join in your gaiety. But it appears Pupa has lost the use of his legs. There will be no frolicking in this young man's future. ::::( Unless...

Everyone knows that just a pinch of SPECIAL STARDUST along with a happy thought will allow any boy to get up and walk again. Everyone knows this because it is in the classic tale, PUPA PAN. Young Pupa flies through the window of a fairy girl's respiteblock, falls on the floor, and has trouble getting up like an enormous pansy. The fairy girl then helps him walk again, and in return, he teaches her to fly, even though she probably already knows how to fly. Because she's a fairy. They fly out of her window together, and have magical adventures for many sweeps thereafter. To be honest, you hardly know a damn thing about Pupa Pan. But you do not care.

Pupa remains as pathetic and useless as ever.

FAILURE ARTIST: The story just keeps mocking Tavros for being disabled.

CHEL: Not to mention for being interested in fairies. Because how dare a boy have a gender-nonstandard interest, or a young teenager enjoy whimsical escapism from an increasingly horrible and guaranteed-to-be-short life.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 39

I might be projecting because the fandom has made me loathe her, but it honestly comes off like Vriska dressed up like this in the first place less to seduce Tavros and more to make sure she thoroughly ruined his favourite thing to hurt him further, especially if the narration is supposed to be things she’s actually saying to him.

The stardust did nothing! Probably because it is just glittery powder with no magical properties whatsoever and is basically bullshit. Because in case it wasn't clear, magic isn't real, and neither are miracles. OR It could just be that Pupa has failed to have a happy thought! Your duty is clear. You will have to MAKE him have happy thoughts. Vriska: Make Pupa have happy thoughts.

He certainly doesn’t seem to be having happy thoughts now. Notice his expression, what we can see of it, looks terrified, he’s trembling, and let’s recall that he’s paralysed from the waist down. Even if he wasn’t, she’s of a far, far higher caste than him, legally permitted to do whatever she wants to him, including killing him if he tries to resist. It’s kind of gone back and forth on, but higher bloods are a few times stated to be a lot stronger than lower bloods, and if they work like humans, they’re in puberty right now, a time at which human girls tend to get taller and stronger sooner than boys. Again, it’s gone back and forth on, but a common interpretation is that female trolls are stronger than male trolls in general and/or have the social power advantage. Let’s also remember that, even if none of those factors apply, Vriska has mind control powers. There is no point here at which Tavros has the advantage, nothing he can use as leverage on her. She can do whatever the hell she wants, and she does.

BRIGHT: We’ve also been explicitly shown that Vriska has little to no respect for anyone else’s autonomy if she finds it inconvenient, and that Tavros is her favourite punching bag, and that his ability to stand up for himself when she gets going is extremely limited.

CHEL: Despite the odds stacked against him, Tavros struggles against the kiss forced on him, and when Vriska pushes him back, doesn’t respond with anything but a look of horror, though she appears to expect him to, as a flickering heart-spade with a question mark over it appears between them. I’m not sure whether that’s supposed to be the thought process of him or her or both.

Vriska hurls him onto the floor with some force...

… and activates her mind control, causing little hearts to light up in Tavros’ eyes.

BRIGHT: Vriska has used her mind-control powers on Tavros before, and when it happened she walked him off a cliff. There is basically no way that her doing it again isn’t going to be a traumatic experience for him, above and beyond the inherent horror of losing control over one’s body.

I’m inclined to think that forcibly altering his emotions is worse, though. Being paralysed was bad enough, but Tavros knows what happened and he knows how he feels about it. Making him fall in love with her is just…on one level, it’s a horrible assault on his autonomy as a person, and on another level, it’s tailor-made to make him doubt himself and believe the encounter was something he wanted.

FAILURE ARTIST: I hadn’t thought that he might now consider the encounter as consensual, which would explain his later reaction.

CHEL: Tavros paws at her legs, making kissy faces, and she looks vaguely concerned. Note the background still depicts wavy blue rays coming off her, showing her power is still active.

Looking defeated, she drops the control and dumps him on the floor again.

I’m not sure what she’s supposed to be thinking in this last panel. Is she feeling guilty? Is she disappointed that he didn’t like her under his own power? Has she just decided he’s too useless to be worth the effort? Any could be true.

BRIGHT: I read that as disappointment that even when he ‘liked’ her, he didn’t act the way she wanted. (And the way Tavros acted is kind of disturbing. ‘Mindlessly pawing at someone’ is not what I’d expect from him if he was legitimately attracted to someone.)

FAILURE ARTIST: The common interpretation these days was she was realizing she wasn’t into boys which okay that’s good for her but she should feel more bad about molesting him.

CHEL: That also makes no sense, because she shows interest in multiple boys later.

I’m also not entirely sure if Vriska had the intention of actually raping Tavros here (in the standard way, I mean, as one could argue that mind control is a form of rape), or just making out with him. The fact that she dressed up in vaguely fetishy clothing isn’t making it look good, though. Yes, she’s very young, but traumatised kids in particular have been known to lash out sexually like that. It’s a way of reasserting personal power, and I imagine it would be more prevalent in a society with no sapient adult supervision. While there are mitigating circumstances involved in their social situation and Vriska not really having ever had a chance to learn better, that doesn’t make this not a horrible thing to do, or not traumatising for Tavros.

BRIGHT: The clothing could potentially be down to Vriska wanting to look ‘adult’ without fully understanding why it looks adult. That does come up sometimes with teens — they want to experiment with clothing because that’s how adults dress, not because they want to look sexy, or they might dress a certain way for dates because that’s the social model they have for How Dates Work.

And if I read it like that, this basically looks like Vriska having the date equivalent of a dolls’ tea party. Which says volumes about how she views Tavros’s autonomy.

CHEL: Good point. Though honestly it would say volumes about same either way!

BRIGHT: I said earlier that Vriska is better than Equius at recognising when other people’s desires conflict with hers, and she is, but that doesn’t mean she respects those differences. She just recognises that they’re there, and overrides them. This is a prime example of Vriska viewing Tavros as something between a chew-toy and a prop. First she kicks him around and terrifies him, then she expects him to be able to get over those emotions at the drop of a hat and respond to her advances — and, moreover, she wants him to respond in a certain way, which Tavros has zero way of knowing. This is the first time she’s shown that sort of interest in him, unless her earlier behaviour was the Alternian equivalent of pigtail-pulling.

...I think maybe that was in fact Alternian pigtail-pulling. Or at least Vriska’s version of pigtail-pulling.

CHEL: That’ll actually make more sense, once we explain what the spade symbol means.

Okay, how many counts does this cover?

ALL THE LUCK: 12 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 31 CALL CPA PLEASE: 26 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 55 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 13

It also occurred to me during this sequence to think again about how Karkat contemptuously swears at and hangs up the phone on the injured Tavros. This, at first glance, seems to be very much at odds with the “cranky but caring” impression we’re supposed to have of Karkat… but it fits precisely with Hussie’s opinion of Tavros and how pathetic he is for allowing a much more powerful person to permanently disable him. I know at the moment it looks like I’m not separating the character from the author, but it’ll become clear as we go that that is what he thinks.

IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 14

Why didn’t we start a FUCK YOU, HUSSIE count?

BRIGHT: It would have ended up longer than all the other counts combined.

CHEL: The actual assault is over now, but there’s one more picture of it. The ramifications must continue to be discussed, so tread cautiously. The actual act is over now, though.

Said ramifications come pretty quickly. Kanaya, having dealt with getting herself into the game and prototyped her own lususprite, decides to check on Vriska.

Ideally she has not gotten herself into too much trouble. And ideally the dramatic irony has not gotten so thick you could draw a dotted line on it with a tube of lipstick and cut it in half with a chainsaw.

Of course, she sees the exact moment Vriska kisses Tavros.

(Fanart source has now been deleted, sadly.)

~*THE ASSAULT ENDS HERE*~

Humorous art aside over, let’s watch Kanaya’s reaction in more detail. She angrily looks at a copy of the Tinkerbell dress, which she presumably sent the alchemiter code for rather than the actual item to Vriska, hence why she still has it.

So THAT'S why she had you make this dress for her??? And you just went along with it like a sucker. Argh, you are such an IDIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like Karkat, Kanaya is presented as the caring one, the protective one. The “mom friend” of the group. And yet, she looks at this, in which Tavros is clearly frightened and struggling, and her reaction is to be mad that Vriska didn’t want to wear the dress for a date with her. I’m not sure whether this says more about Hussie’s opinion of Tavros or the social system of Alternia or both, but it certainly says a lot.

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 56 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 13 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 15

BRIGHT: Kanaya has had to corral Vriska on Tavros’s behalf already! Possibly more than once! She has all the information to realise that this is abusive, even leaving aside Tavros’s reaction! Sure, teens can be self-centred, but even so this is egregious.

CHEL: Kanaya’s Grubsprite comforts her and she throws the dress out the window.

Being a kid and growing up. It's hard and nobody understands.

Yes, I’m sure Tavros thinks so too.

Charles: "I know Sir can be prickly, but you have to understand he had a very terrible childhood."

Klaus: "I understand. I'm having a very terrible childhood right now."

-A Series of Unfortunate Events