#He's literally been the primary source of my problems with my mother

[kittycak3s]

I hate that I'm being made responsible for coping with and "forgiving" abusive behavior just to protect myself.

I'm tired of being fucking "understanding". I'm tired of my survival being dependent on how much I'm able to take. I'm tired of being treated like dog shit for no reason.

[imarawbu]

Today was bad.

I've been suffering from burn out for weeks now. Every day it's just more "you need to do things this way", "why don't you be normal", "why don't you be a good mother" and do this or that, etc.

Today he found out that I have five, very small spoon fulls of sugar with my coffee every morning. That was apparently the end of the world as this must finally be the thing that has made me fat after giving birth 9 months ago and continuing to breastfeed, both of which to him are justifications and excuses. He's eliminated any and all other foods that I like that we used to keep in the house going though each one, forbidding it from being in the house, and saying that's what was making me fat- yet each time getting rid of it does nothing- it's almost like holding onto weight while breastfeeding is a medically documented thing.

He went into this whole thing on how I continue to gain weight (I have not, I have been the same weight since my daughter was 2 months and all the postpartum swelling went down.) How shameful I look and how he's not going to tolerate being married to such a fat woman anymore, that I need to do something about it instead of justifying. Quick side note, while my daughter does eat solids, she's under a year and breastfeeding or formula should be her primary food source until she is 1 year old. She nurses at least 15 times a day, mainly as a snack, and has refused formula for the last several months. I got food poisoning when she was 2.5 months old, literally everything came up no matter what it was, food or water. I nearly lost my milk supply from pack of food and my weight did not change a bit, in fact I gained a pound after I recovered. He is wanting me to go back to how I was when we got married, meaning I ate one medium sized meal a day and fasted the rest of the day. That will definitely kill my milk supply, mess with my blood sugar, and energy as well. He does not care, of course. Is he also overweight, yes, has he been the same overweight or more so before, during, and after my pregnancy, yes. But I'm the problem. He said a number of things to insult me, my weight, and my appearance.

The second thing.

I was exhausted most of the day because I am up multiple times a night still and I'm heavily burnt out. He made sure to wake me up "on time" because I got to sleep in yesterday. He also insisted that I am ruining our daughter by not taking her out and doing things with her and instead being lazy and sitting at home all days of the week. Because it's not like I have a job or anything else that my days are busy with.

I had been wanting to take her to a pumpkin patch to do her 9 month photos, so we did that today. She found it interesting, she walks already but is still learning how to walk with shoes so she needed some help getting around. The problem was that there was a lot of wind and so it was blowing my hijab around. He got upset at me and started yelling and cussing me out, I had to tell him multiple times to stop yelling, stop cussing, it's a public place, and there are kids- it reminded me of how it was like to go anywhere in public with my ex husband who is usually so out of his mind that he does these type of outbursts. We left and he threatened me once we got back home how I need to be serious, how I'm such a fake Muslim and so on, which again, it's always hilarious to me born Muslims like him- like my ex- are some of the worst people and have committed some of the worst sins you can do as a Muslim, but it's always me who is not a real Muslim. That he is tired of me treating him like shit and not respecting him and I need to figure out a plan and behave or start planning on separation. He then of course left to go play pickleball with a friend, which is nice because I was tired of being around him anyways and said as much. When he came back he made a big show about how I don't want him around and what am I doing or who am I talking to while he is gone, I don't even text anymore to ask where he is, that I don't love him, etc. He is changing jobs and planned to go home for two weeks and work from home before coming back and traveling to that job's headquarters for his onboarding (the job is remote but the onboarding is required to be in person). I would have had a nice 3 weeks away from him. The job he is leaving would not let him work from his home country- even though the team he manages is in India and it would actually be easier for him to be there as he's be awake during their work hours and work with them. So I will only get one week away from him in a week or so.

In other bad news, my manager resigned or most likely was fired on Thursday. The company I would for is new and small, we have one client and the project with them is not going well and is close to ending. My manager was supposed to be doing marketing and building connections for other fields for us to get into. It seems she leveraged her knowledge to try to get a foothold with starting her own company and it backfired on her. My boss called and told me this, including a note that this is what happened in case someone tried to tell me different which is why I assume she was fired. My boss who owns the company and me are left. I have no business or marketing skills and my boss who owns the company is a scientist and does not have these skills either. If she wants someone with these skills, networking, and experience she will probably have to pay 2-3x what she was paying my manager. The company has no more money, I fully expect to go in tomorrow and be told my job will end that day or in a few weeks when the project finishes up.

I was trying to plan to have enough money, assuming, I got the nice raise for the three person job I do (this was promised once we got new clients) that would allow me to cover the mortgage for the house and other bills. I would save up for several months, scope out what additional things I don't know about so I can keep us living here in the house, hire a lawyer, and divorce my husband finally. The nice thing is his green card is up next year, he gets his green card through me. He says he doesn't want to live in the US and would go back home where he would never have to work with all the money he has. But I doubt it would be as fun as prior to meeting me he was barely making ends meet and assuming he wants any contact with his daughter (something he's shown interest in recently) and doesn't flee the country when he is served, he will have to pay some substantial alimony.

This plan all fails if I lose this job as I couldn't get a similar nice paying job like it even with the salary I have now much less double what I would need to keep the house.

I tried to make a plan and it all goes up in smoke.

Plus he is now pressuring me to quit soon anyways because "it's damaging our marriage."

[ecoamerica]

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[mouseratz]

it's weird to be in the situation I am: (on bad family dynamics)

which is taking care of my brothers in the absence of my mother (she's fine, just separated. she is someone I identify as an abuser even though I have no intentions of cutting her off, since I consider living apart safe enough). this would, likely, raise some alarms if I was a little younger, and I certainly have been taking a big role in childcare since, at least, I was sixteen or so. but I'm twenty now. is it still an issue if I am an adult? If I can hypothetically leave? no one wants to hurt me. They aren't. I'm just doing what I need to do, that's what it feels like. But I don't have anything else. Like, literally anything- no school, no work, I don't get to see friends. I am compared to a housewife by further relatives because I take care of the house and kids.

I don't see another way to manage. I think we are enmeshed, me and my father, but I deflected any issues because my mother, before fully separating, accused my father of actual incest, which obviously wasn't true....but perhaps she was recognizing the enmeshment but her other problems made her escalate it into something that flatly didn't happen, because she wanted to hurt him.

How can you set "boundaries" when they're the only person you have in adulthood? How could you leave, knowing that the alternative is being distanced from your primary source of literal human interaction?

But I don't ever blame me not wanting to leave on him. It's on my brothers. They need me, because my mom left them high and dry. My dad is doing everything he can, but I don't think it would be enough. They deserve better than that, even if it conflicts with what I deserve. And ultimately, what a child deserves overrules what an adult deserves, because they're helpless to their own situation. An adult has to be the one to make it better. Our parents didn't do that very well for me, so I'm left with filling the shoes, even though they're both still here, because I know they'll just do what they did to me again in a slightly different way.

There's also the layer of, we've had traumatic life or death situations with the youngest, and I feel responsible for him, deeply. What would happen without me? And in the worst times, I thought I would rather lose my life than lose his. So it's only fair that I give my life in a different way to him.

so idk. fucked. things to talk about in therapy!

[blackstarising]

coming back to this post i made again to elaborate - especially as the ted lasso fandom is discussing sam/rebecca and fandom racism in general. there are takes that are important to make that i had failed to previously, but there's also a growing amount of takes that i have to, As A Black Person™, respectfully disagree with.

tl;dr for the essay below sam being infantilized and the sam/rebecca relationship are not the same issue and discussing the former one doesn't mean excusing the latter. and we've reached the glen of the Dark Forest where we sit down and talk about fandom racism.

i should have elaborated this in my last post about sam/rebecca, but i didn't. i'll say it now - i personally don't support sam and rebecca getting together for real. i believe what people are saying is entirely correct, even though sam is an adult legally, he and rebecca are, at the very least, two wildly different stages of life. for americans, he's at the equivalent of being a junior in college. there are things he hasn't gotten the chance to experience and there are areas he needs to grow in. when i was younger, i didn't understand the significance of these age gaps, i just thought it would be fine if it was legal, but as someone who is now a little older than sam in universe, i understand fully. we can't downplay this. whether or not you think sam works for rebecca or not, even despite the gender inversion of the Older Man Younger Woman trope, whether or not he is a legal adult, i don't think at this point in time, their relationship would work. i think it's an interesting narrative device, but i don't want to see it play out in reality.

that being said!

what's worrying me is that two discussions are being conflated here that shouldn't be. sam having agency and being a little more grown™ than he's perceived to be does not suddenly make his relationship with rebecca justified. i had decided to bring it up because sam was being brought into the spotlight again and i was starting to realizing that his infantilization was more common than i felt comfortable with.

sam's infantilization (and i will continue to call it that), is a microaggression. it's is in the range of microaggressions that i would categorize as 'fandom overcompensation'. we have a prominent character of color that exhibits traits that aren't stereotypical, and we don't want to appear racist or stereotypical, so we lean hard in the other direction. they're not aggressive, they're a Sweet Baby, they're not world weary, they're now a little naive. they're not cold and distant, they're so nice and sweet that there's no one that wouldn't want approach them, and yeah, on their face, these new traits are a departure and, on their face, they seem they look really good.

but at a certain point, it reaches an inflection point, and, like the aftertaste of a diet coke, that alleged sweetness veers into something a lot less sweet. it veers into a lack of agency for the character. it veers into an innocence that appears to indicate that the person can't even take care of themselves. it veers into a one-dimensional characterization that doesn't allow for any depth or negative emotion.

it's not kind anymore. it's not a nice departure from negative stereotypes. it's not compensating for anything.

it's patronizing.

it is important that we emphasize that characters of color are more than the toxic stereotypes we lay on them, yes, but we make a mistake in thinking that the solution is overcorrection. for one thing, people of color can usually tell. don't get it twisted, it's actually pretty obvious. for another, it just shifts from one dimension to another. people of color are still supposed to be Only One Character Trait while white people can contain multitudes. ted, who is pretty much as pollyanna as they come, can be at once innocent and naive and deep and troubled and funny and scared. jamie can be a prick and sexy and also lonely and also a victim of abuse. sam, however, even though he was bullied (by jamie, no less), is thousands of miles away from home, and has led a protest on his team, is usually just characterized as human sunshine with much less acknowledgement of any other traits beyond that.

and that's why i cringe when fandom calls sam a Sweet Baby Boy without any sense of irony. is that all we're taking away? after all this time? even for a comedy, sam has received a substantive of screen time over two whole seasons, and we've seen a range of emotions from him. so as a black person it's hurtful that it's boiled down to Sweet Baby Boy.

that's the problem. we need to subvert stereotypes, but more importantly, we need to understand that people of color are not props, or pieces of cardboard for their white counterparts. they are full and actualized and have agency in their own right and they can have other emotions than Angry and Mean or Sweet and Bubbly without any nuance between the two. i think the show actually does a relatively good job of giving sam depth (relatively, always room for improvement, mind you), especially holding it in tension with his youth, but the fandom, i worry, does not.

it's the same reason why finn from star wars started out as the next male protagonist in the sequel trilogy but by the third movie was just running around yelling for REY!! it's the same reason why when people make Phase 4 Is the Phase For Therapy gifsets for the mcu and show wanda maximoff, loki, and bucky barnes crying and being sad but purposefully exclude sam wilson who had an entire show to tell us how difficult his life is, because people find out if pee oh sees are also complex, they'll tell the church.

and the reason why i picked up on this very early on is because i am an organic, certified fresh, 100% homegrown, non-gmo, a little ashy, indigenous sub saharan African black person. the ghanaian tribes i'm descended from have told me so, my black ass parents have told me so, and the nurses at the hospital in [insert asian country here] that started freaking out about how curly my hair was as my mother was mid pushing me out told me so!

and this stuff has real life implications. listen: being patronized as a black person sucks. do you know how many times i was patted on the back for doing quite honestly, the bare minimum in school? do you know how many times i was told how 'well spoken' or 'eloquent' i was because i just happen to have a white accent or use three syllable words? do you know how many times i've been cooed over by white women who couldn't get over how sweet i was just because i wasn't confrontational or rude like they wrongly expected me to be?

that's why they're called microaggressions. it's not a cross on your lawn or having the n-word spat in your face, but it cuts you down little by little until you're completely drained.

so that's the nuance. that's the subversion. the overcompensation is not a good thing. and people of color (and i suspect, even white people) have picked up on, in general, the different ways fandom treats sam and dani and even nate. what all of these discussions are converging on is fandom racism, which is not the diet form of racism, but another place for racism to reveal itself. and yeah, it's uncomfortable. it can seem out of left field. you may want to defend yourself. you may want to explain it away. but let me tap the sign on the proverbial bus:

if you are a white person, or a person of color who is not part of that racial group, even, you do not get to decide what is not racist for someone. full stop. there are no exceptions. there is no exit clause for you. there is no 'but, actually-'. that right wasn't even yours to cede or waive.

(it's also important to note that people of color also have the right to disagree on whether something is racist, but that doesn't necessarily negate the racism - it just means there's more to discuss and they can still leave with different interpretations)

people don't just whip out accusations of racism like a blue eyes white dragon in a yu-gi-oh duel. it's not fun for us. it's not something we like to do to muzzle people we don't want to engage with. and we're not concerned with making someone feel bad or ashamed. we're exposing something painful that we have to live with and, even worse, process literally everything we experience through. we can't turn it off. we can't be 'less sensitive' or 'less nitpicky'. we are literally the primary resources, we are the proverbial wikipedia articles with 3,000 sources when it comes to racism. who else would know more than us?

what 2020 has shown us very clearly is that racism is systemic. it's not always a bunch of Evil White Men rubbing their hands together in a dark room wondering how they're going to use the 'n-word' today. it's systemic. it's the way you call that one neighborhood 'sketchy'. it's how you use 'ratchet' and 'ghetto' when describing something bad. it's how you implicitly the assume the intelligence of your friend of color. it's the way you turned up your nose and your friend's food and bullied them for it in middle school but go to restaurants run by white people who have 'uplifted' it with inauthentic ingredients. it's telling someone how Well Spoken and Eloquent they are even though you've both gone to the same schools and work at the same workplace. it's the way you look down at some people of color for having a different body type than you because they've been redlined to neighborhoods where certain foods and resources are inaccessible, and yet mock up the racial features that appeal to you either through makeup or plastic surgery.

it's how when a person of color behaves badly, they're irredeemable, but a white person performing the same act or something similar is 'having a bad day' or 'isn't normally like this' or 'has room to grow' and we can't 'wait for their redemption arc', and yes, i'm not going to cover it in detail in this post but yes this is very much about nate. other people have also brought up the nuances in his arc and compared them to other white characters so i won't do it here.

these behaviors and reactions aren't planned. they aren't orchestrated. they're quite literally unconscious because they've been lovingly baked into western society for centuries. you can't wake up and be rid of it. whether you intended it or not, it can still be racist.

and it's actually quite hurtful and unfair to imply that concerns about racism in the TL fandom are unfounded or lacking any depth or simply meant to be sensational because you simply don't agree with it. i wish it was different, but it doesn't work that way. i'm not raising this up to 'call out' or shame people, but i'm adding to this discussion because, through how we talk about sam, and even dani and nate, i'm yet again seeing a pattern that has shortchanged people of color and made them feel unwelcome in fandom for far too long.

coach beard said it best: we need to do better.

[niche-pastiche]

Sortinghatchats - Centaurworld

This has been sitting in my drafts unfinished for far to long. It’s not done as thoroughly as I’d like, but 

I’m sorting the characters from the netflix original cartoon Centaurworld according to the @sortinghatchats​ system as explained by the estimable @wisteria-lodge​ in this wonderful post.

If you have access to netflix and like musicals and/or cartoons and animation, I highly recommend you check the show out if you haven't already, because from here on out, there will be spoilers. Though I'll try to keep them to a minimum where possible.Okay. Onto the sorting. Starting with our main protagonist.

 Spoilers below the cut, but I’ll try to keep them to a minimum.

Horse - Snake/Lion

"What if I forget your face?"

Horse (she's just called Horse) is the loudest Snake/Lion I have ever seen. Her primary is loud. Her secondary is loud. Everything about her is loud and I love it. Her sorting drives the plot. She's a warhorse who has been separated from her Rider (who is just called Rider) "who she misses like a phantom limb." 

Her exact words. 

Everything she does is driven by the desire to reunite with Rider. 

In the first episode, her instinct is to do that on her own. It takes her repeatedly hitting and being hit by a literal wall before she turns to others for help. But only after charging at it repeatedly like a literal battering ram. The "You're okay. You're alright." of Rider’s Lullaby shows up again and again throughout the show in important moments when horse needs to reassure herself or recenter. She reminds herself of Rider, her person at the center of her Snake Primary's concentric circles and her reason to keep going. All of Horse's main fears and sources of angst are all to do with Rider. What if she never finds Rider again? The entirety of What if I Forget Your Face is such a loud snake primary song full of snake primary fears. 

Of course, over the span of the show, Horse slowly grows closer to the friends she meets in centaur world until they're her people too, but it's a gradual process. And Rider is still her person. Anyway, go watch the show and then come back and we'll talk about how Who is She is just an absolute Snake/Lion anthem! Honestly, I may make a separate post just for that. Because there's not space for it here if I still want to get to the other characters.

Wammawink - Double Badger

“Love still finds us, family finds us Even if we can’t make out their faces”

Wammawink is a badger primary. Her herd is what defines her. She’s the mom of the group and everything is about the good of her herd. What separates her from Horse’s snake primary is how ready and eager she is to call people friends. 

Her reaction to meeting horse for the first time is to instantly try and mother her. “Is... Is that... Is that...  a new friend!? Finally! Oh, it’s been so long! Finally someone to nurture! Like a baby! Not a like a literal baby. More like a baby in spirit. Like a spiritual baby.”

Wammawink is honestly a pretty remarkable character. The small size of her herd and excessive caution towards the world in Fragile Things makes her look like a burnt badger or a snake with large inner circle, but she’s not. 

When her village gets destroyed, baby wammawink immediately tried to from a new herd with the ladybugtaur she sees. “Hi. Looks like you and I are the only survivors. Well, as long as we have each other we-” and then he flies off and she just  says “Oh.” before seeking out the tree shamans. Because that is how she solves problems and has always solved problems. By making connections and seeking out friends, old and new. Her Badger Secondary is on full display at all times. And even when the tree shamans refuse to help her after the destruction of her village, she thanks them for sharing their shade with the village and says she’s “going to find somewhere else to stay.”

She is going through a horrible time, but both her Badger Primary and her Badger Secondary are still healthy and functioning. She is seeking community and trying to leverage or at least maintain the connections she still has. 

And that’s her as a child. 

The first thing horse does when she sees that is yell at the tree shamans and then go try to comfort baby wammawink (even though she can’t hear her) by singing Rider’s Lullaby to her. "You’re okay. You’re alright. I’ll never ever leave your side. I will stay. And I will fight. With you.”

Wammawink is one of horse’s people after that. The rest of the herd isn’t yet, but the rest of the herd matters to wammawink so horse makes it work.

Anyway, back to wammawink. Wammawink didn’t burn. She built a new herd and she’s fiercely protective of it, but she still has friends and she still protects people. And she’s willing to grow that herd. 

If she’s not burnt, then why is she keeping her heard in a literal bubble away from the world at the start? Why is she so against leaving it?

Wammawink’s not burned. She’s an authoritarian Badger primary.

Sweet and kind Wammawink, an authoritarian? Can Double Badgers even be authoritarian? Yes. The dome she built litererally says “I love you!” when Horse runs into it the first time. 

In the first episode when Durpleton admits to Horse that “We don’t really know what’s out there. But it’s more than what’s in this valley.” Which is true. Wammawink admonishes him. He’s clearly broken a rule of some kind. Just like earlier when Glendale told horse about the “we were at war with a ruthless hoard of invading warriors” and was instantly silenced by the rest of the herd and went back to the party line of “hey, lets just pretend it’s okay!”

And though the song Fragile Things sounds like burned primary talk at first, it’s really Wammawink’s authoritarian Double Badger butting heads with Horse’s loud Lion secondary. 

Wammawink’s verse goes:

One careful step at a time Please watch yourselves as you go Better safe than sorry Never made it this far We oughta take it slow

For we are all just fragile things Soft and small and haven't been here before Where the outside can harm you, reject you But just stay close and I will protect you

While Horse sings: 

Oh I never feared the drums of war I crushed the skulls and I want more While you're hiding in the fringes I'll go out and I'll get my vengeance

You can all be fearless too You can fight for yourselves You're alright by yourselves Cause you know only you can protect you

Wammawink repeatedly encourages her herd to use a badger secondary approach to the world, and specifically to reach out to her. But it’s not malicious. Just over protective. And she and horse meet in the middle by the end of the season. Wammawink learns to trust her heard more, and Horse learns it’s okay to ask for help. (And also to consider the feelings of others.) 

Honestly? Wammawink is a Double Badger badass The two big moments spring to mind. One is Fragile Things reprise.  

The other is the part in The Rift: Part 2 where Wamawink tells the old woman she can close the door, “I just have to get back inside first.” and the old woman warns that she’ll be trapped forever, and then Wammawink, instead of saying it’s okay, viscously shoots back “Well that’s up to you, isn’t it?” Effectively mobilizing a foe (who does not just stop being at odds with them btw) to come rescue them by virtue of being just that likable. 

Glendale - Double Bird

Glendale. is fantastic. I love her. She was by far the easiest character to sort from this show. 

Gledale’s bird primary gives her a morality that feels just a bit off from the rest of the show. After learning that glue is made from bones cartilage and hooves she checks with Durpleton, asking "Is it bad wrong that I like it even more now?" She has her gut response to things, and then she interrogates it. That’s bird primary stuff. Also, her morality has clearly settled into something that views stealing as perfectly acceptable and expected. But wammawink pretending she just “found” the merdudes magazines instead of crediting Glendale for her art? Not okay.

Also horoscopes. Apparently  Glendale built herself a morality that’s is against horoscopes but I feel doesn’t have any particular opinion on things like... You know. Murder. Probably. At the very least, she’s drawn a knife on people in the show before and I fully believe she’d stab someone without remorse if given enough reason. Oh, also, this is getting a little meta, so feel free do disregard. But she’s voiced by the creator of the show. So Glendale literally built herself. 

Now on to the secondary. Glendale is a ver loud Bird Secondary. She carries around a bunch of stuff in her tummy portal, and is constantly acquiring more.

Usually via theft.

She even uses the tummy portal itself to help carry things or in combat. She got weird powers from “ancient rights and hormones.” Using tools and acquiring more is just how she operates. When escaping from jail, instead of going through the courts like the others, she digs her way out. 

She’s fantastic and I love her.

Zulius - Double Snake

Zulius is a very mellow snake primary who seems to be drawn to badgers. This causes his primary to take on a little bit of a badger flavor sometimes, but not enough that I personally would call it a model. 

Inferring what I can from the show, I think Splendib used to be his person. (Pretty sure they’re ex’s.) And then there was that big betrayal and the stealing of the glitter cats. I think splendid is a badger/snake who’s loyalty is with the community of Cat Valley, but Zulius mistook him for a snake and got extreemly hurt when that turned out not to be true. He’s still holding a grudge about. And the show devotes an entire song to pretending there’s no history there while they passive aggressively vogue at each other.

Anyway, after their breakup is when Wammawink and the herd came into his life and he latched onto these new people with a fierce loyalty that has been returned just as strongly. He doesn’t seem to be driven by the same need to help horse that Wammawink is, but he’s happy to be along for the ride. Partially just to see what happens and partially because if that’s where his people are going, he is too. He’s left Cat Valley behind. These are his people now. 

Now onto his secondary. He’s such a snake secondary that the magic he does reflects that. Similar to how bird secondary Glendale has her Portal Tummy spell that no one else does, Zulius has Shapley Mane. His signature spell is one that lets him transform his hair into various useful shapes, becoming what is needed in a given situation.

Secondary wise, the culture of Cat Valley as seen in And We Do This Everyday is a perfect fit for him. 

It used to be Cat Valley was disaster-free But the Great War brought death and cats-tastrohphe So we had to find a way to heal Cover up the pain, with pageantry and zeal

You see, each Cataur has a fierceness They express in different ways We strike poses on the runway And do cat tricks And we do this every day!

But Zulius expected that personal loyalty to individuals was something with more emotional meaning and weight in how people act than seems the norm for Cat Valley. And the heard is a much better fit.

Ched ???/Lion.

Ched is burned. Something somewhere in his sorting is burned. I’m leaning towards lion secondary for him because of how up front and direct his confrontations with Horse are. I think he’s either a badger or a snake primary, but I want to wait until season 2 comes out before commenting one way or the other. While it’s possible he’s a badger primary because of his dehumanization (decentaurization?) of horses, I’m leaning more towards a snake who feels betrayed by his mom (who was his person) and the dentist who was a horse. Anyway, he’s got a lot going on and I’ll be interested to dig into that more. But this post has been sitting in my drafts for months and I’ve decided to go ahead and post it. If anyone else wants to sort him, feel free. 

Durpleton - ???

How would you even sort Durpleton? If you can figure that out, be my guest. But I got nothin’. Maybe there’ll be more to go off of in season 2, but right now he’s so childlike in so many ways that I’m not sure he even can be sorted.  

[prorevenge]

Mock my mother’s death? I bankrupt you.

So this could be a very, very long story. I’ll try to summarize where and when I can.

My now ex-wife Kate and I moved to an apartment in 2010. The house as a whole a renovated town house split between two sides with two apartments on the bottom and two apartments upstairs. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the apartment as it was a much older building that I had ever lived in but I quickly adjusted to the wood creaking throughout the night. On the initial walkthrough we noticed that the only problem was that there was a dip in the bathroom ceiling. The landlord, Jay, promised he would get fixed ASAP.

One year to the day when we moved in there was a loud crash at 4AM. The bathroom ceiling had collapsed and there was tiling and wood all over over the floor and in the bathtub. Now Kate was typically the aggressive one, while I was more passive and laid back, and she kept calling Jay throughout the day. When she got in touch with him at around 9PM she explained what happened and insisted that it be fixed immediately. He rebuffed with him yelling that his girlfriend was a lawyer and he didn’t need to do anything. Now this is where I got mad. I went outside and called him myself. I feigned a relaxed demeanor and at first he began trying to talk to me as a “bro” and kept saying “Dude, I’m gonna get someone out there but it’s gonna take a few weeks..” When he couldn’t sway me that way he began yelling about his girlfriend and her knowing the law. What he was unaware of was that I had read the tenant laws in my state and so as he tried to lie I waited until he was finished and I recited the law stating that, if an apartment was considered uninhabitable then the landlord needed to pay for the tenant to stay in a place until it was resolved. He tried to say that our upstairs neighbor Phil was the super but he wasn’t sure if he could get down there that night. He put me on hold, then came back a few minutes later and said that Phil and his girlfriend were out of state. I rang Phils doorbell and asked, with the Jay on speakerphone, if he was assigned as the super. He laughed and said “No.” Dejected, he said he would have people out there the next day (previously he said they were busy for at least three weeks). There’s more to this incident but it lead to two conclusions:

If you’re going to lie then there has to be a consistency in your lie AND make sure that the people you lie to DON’T communicate with each other.

This is where a feud started between me and my Kate versus him and his mother (she was the original landlord and gave the house to him so he could begin to profit.)

So forward to a year later. Jay stopped coming to the house and his mom began doing the pick-ups. Around this time my ex- and I had been laid off and we were working with social security for food, health, and housing insurance. We were approved for all three in April but we would not get the check until May. When our typical check wasn’t in the landlord’s mailbox he immediately gave a summons saying that he was taking us to court for eviction. The day we went to court he had no lawyer and, going before the judge, here’s the summation:

Judge: Does the defense have a means to pay within 90 days of non-payment? Us: Yes judge (hands over paperwork showing that he will be paid for April and May) Judge: I see no problem. They are breaking no laws. Why are we here? Jay: Well your honor, they have been bullying- Judge: I don’t care, unless they are breaking a law then this case is dismissed.

Suffice it to say Jay and his mother’s were NOT happy. Around this time in my life things were tumultuous. My mother, who had been battling lung cancer succumbed to it in June . This happened at roughly the same time his mom came knocking looking for payment. I explained that I would leave it in the mailbox when we got back from the funeral home and to please just respect my right to mourn. She took her fingers and began rubbing them together, pretending to play the smallest violin.

I will never forget what she said next “Oooh, my mommy just died. Woe is me. She probably had it coming. I don’t care if your entire family is dead. I want my money.” She smiled smugly, proud with what she had just said. I saw red and my heart jumped into my throat. I went, grabbed the check, and handed it to her in absolute shock that anyone would say something so...fucked up? She had finally managed to push a button that very few people I’ve known throughout my life have seen. I went into rage mode but not in the way you would expect.

THE REVENGE: We were always told that if a health inspector came by to not open the door. I waited until Aug. since that was when the lease was going to run out and we knew they would not extend a renewal. I walked up the block to town hall to ask for a health inspection of our property. It was scheduled for several days later. Now it’s important to know several things:

I was friends with all of the tenants. Phil had moved out with his fiancé but the new tenant was Dani upstairs in our side. Tom and Hana on the other side of the downstairs floor had moved out and Jay was still looking for new tenants. The only one who wanted to stay out of this was Rose on the upper right apartment.

I had gotten a key so I could let the inspector in Dani’s apartment and I knew that I could use the back staircase on the right side to let him in on Tom’s, now vacant apartment.

I also knew that Dani was moving out in September along with Kate and myself.

The inspector came and it was glorious. He checked the exterior of the house first noting that wires were exposed, there was an old empty dryer along with other odd clutter in the backyard. I bought him inside the shared entrance and, as I was counting on, he noticed that the last inspected dated back to 1994; 18 years. This meant that for each year he did not have an inspection there would be appropriate fines. For our apartment we had black mold growing in our bathroom and the bubble in the ceiling had begun to grow to problematic proportions. Upstairs, Dani’s apartment was suffering from leaks in the ceiling and it looked like her bathroom ceiling was also on the brink of collapsing. We then went to the basement. The boiler was on the verge of exploding, there was flammable items along with gasoline and a pack of matches sitting right beside it. Two things that I did not know was 1. The fire door that separated the two sides did not close all of the way rendering it moot and, on the right basement side there was a toilet. A toilet that had blown up. It had coated the surrounding walls and the leakage prevented us going up to the floor via the right side. The entire time the inspector was photographing and writing constantly.

We stepped outside and he said he needed to come back. When I asked why he said he had run out of space to write down all of the infractions (he had filled the front and had written an entire page on the back portion). I kindly and coyly asked “Well, how much will it cost right now?” He scratched his head and said “Around 20-30k from what I can see but it’s probably going to be higher as this house was never licensed to be split into apartments.” I thanked him and he was going to come back with the county inspector.

So we moved out and but I got the rundown from Rose. Because he was the current owner he owed all current fines and no one new could not move into the empty apartments until everything was up to code. Because three out of four were vacant he was losing 4,500 in potential rent. He handed the property back to his mother and had to claim for bankruptcy. Now here’s the other thing. Every time an old tenant left and a new one was coming in an inspection was supposed to be done. Now that all of the financial burden fell on her they looked into the records and was she was fined for each time she had broken that rule 750/per. By the end of the year Rose had moved out so the place was hemorrhaging money. I sat back, proud of what I had done, and left it be.

Haha, no, fuck that. I wasn’t close to done yet.

I felt like I had destroyed Jay but my real target had always been his mom. I learned that she had about eight properties throughout three towns in my county. I went to each one, spoke to the tenants, and said I was a concerned tenant from another property and asked if they had any problems with their apartments. EVERY person I asked described the apartment in very poor to intolerable levels and that the mom was effectively a slumlord. She would ignore problems unless someone turned to litigations, she was threatened that they would summon the inspector, or, more often than not, the people would move out, she’d refuse their deposit, and sink those into repairs. People rarely fought back because she knew that the occupants were of upper, lower class minorities. So, being the concerned person I was, I want to the inspector of the other two towns and asked for an inspection to be done with at least one, if not more, would be awaiting the inspector when they came. Turns out that she faced pretty much the same infractions on every apartment she owned. It turned out she actually had 12 apartments but I initially only knew about the ones that fell within my county. The remaining properties in the next county over were given a heads up for a surprise inspection. From what I can tell Jays mom had been in the landlord business for about 35-40 years. That collapsed quickly.

Since we moved literally one block down the road from our old one I got to see Jay lose his primary source of income and have to claim bankruptcy BUT also saw that his mother was also trying desperately to find a buyer for all of the apartments so she could pay off the fines. I learned two years later that she too had to file for bankruptcy. Jay and his mother camped out in front of our next apartment two days in Oct. of 13 before she filed for bankruptcy (I’m guessing to scream at me and/or Kate) so I called the cops and said that there were strange people standing in a no parking zone and they kept looking up at the second floor. A cruiser swung by and told them to leave.

I know I should have used the two months I spent monitoring everything to find a new job but this was the one and only time I wanted to cripple a person where they hurt the most; their wallets. I think I got my point across. None of this would’ve happened if you had just fucking fixed the ceiling before it collapsed Jay!

Th;dr: Had a couple of slumlords, they pushed me to a place where I snapped, and so I went a bit crazy and bankrupted the slumlord AND his slumlord mother as well.

(source) story by (/u/Theliterside)

[touchmycoat]

I LOVE YOUR PORN AU!!!!! LIKE SO MUCH - and i'm just. if you don't mind me asking, how - the way you flesh out the characters, their motivations, and feelings in every scene in such an eloquent way, and just little things here and there, a habit or an activity that adds dimension to who they are, and - your prose is wonderful. you achieve this addictive, engrossing narrative space that readers just absolutely melt into, and i have to ask - how did you develop your writing style? 1/2

what books did you read that formatively shaped the way you write? or you know, what did you do to improve your writing? i'm so in awe of how you world-built and established the porn au - like lqg & hc being national taolu champions?? how do you come up with that stuff? i cannot comprehend the amount of research and effort that must've gone into porn au, and i'm just so deeply thankful that you decided to share that with us. i apologize if i'm coming on too strong, but wow. thank you 2/2

--

oh my god please don't apologize, when i saw your ask i rolled on the floor giggling hysterically for a solid 15 min, bless your heart

part of the answer to your question—i've taken like, 8 years' worth of creative writing classes/workshops! there was also a transnational literary component to my degree so whenever possible, i took literature classes fksjdfksd so whatever you see and like is definitely the result of a lot of work. My writing from not even 10 years ago but like, 5? horrid, ridiculous, wild, cringe. The Porn AU itself is the second draft of a MUCH more lackluster piece.

about my writing style. gosh, you really know how to make a writer blush. "I like your writing style" is literally an instant kill LMFAO okay okay, the useful answer: my primary criteria for choosing what to write is, don't be obvious, be interesting. Fiction tells us to show, not tell, right? Poetry is about concretizing the abstract. Screenwriting says cut all useless lines. A lot of writing rules and advice—never start with the weather, avoid detailed descriptions of the characters, don't use adverbs, etc.—are all really about this exact sentiment.

I once took a seminar on writing for horror movies. The golden rule of the horror genre is Never Show the Monster, because whatever the audience is imagining is always going to be scarier than what you actually show them. There are obviously exceptions to this (to all writing rules), but in my mind, it's all the same principle.

LONG answer under the cut

So you start with building a scene. I approach it like essay-writing—I state my thesis for the motivations/main propulsion of the plot. "In this scene, LQG and SY are motivated to save Cang Qiong's porn production, so they have sex on camera." Then you build the sub-motivations: "LQG is also doing this because he's pining after SY."

I learned this "thesis-writing" from theater, specifically from writing 10-min plays. Theater is all about characters being driven by their wants and needs, and the reason I say 10-min plays in particular is because longer forms of writing will give you more leeway, but in 10-min, you pretty much need your character motivations established from their very first line. That's why you need that very clear thesis for yourself—if you don't even know what the character wants from the get-go, then you can't establish who they are, what they want, and where they're going to go in a dynamic and interesting way.

So this thesis drives EVERYTHING that happens in your scene, just like an actual thesis for an essay, just like topic sentences for your paragraphs. Once I do this, I have the emotional direction & narrative scope of how much this scene will cover, I have a sense of where it begins and ends. "Begin with the dynamics of their sex. LQG starts showing signs of his feelings. Reveal LQG backstory for exactly what those feelings are and why he isn't telling SY. The rest of the scene implies that LQG's feelings may not be so unrequited, but also sets up the fundamental problem at the heart of the whole fic—SY's inability to comprehend his own feelings." This is kind of my new thesis now. They're having sex; LQG pines; SY doesn't know he himself is pining.

Now it's time to manifest. This is the "storytelling" part, and the hardest lmfao.

Personally, my approach is largely shaped by my very cool screenwriting teacher, who hammered into us: don't fucking waste lines. The Golden Rule of screenwriting is that every line should reveal something new. I found my old writing kind of repetitive, especially on the emotional front, so this is kind of my editing mantra now—is this line either propelling the story or revealing character? If it's revealing character, is it a revelation that has to happen right now, or is it slowing the momentum of the scene?

But these aren't rhetorical questions! "Momentum" doesn't just mean tumble forward as fast as you can, it also means taking the time to draw the bowstring back further, so your next move has even more propulsion. That's why you get the little "LQG has been in love with SY..." cut scene in the middle of the fucking (at least, that's my reasoning for putting it there). Every line has to bring a fresh revelation that "proves" your thesis further.

That brings me to the details. You said you like the details I inject into the world-building, and honestly that's so gratifying to hear, because that means I'm successfully manifesting my intentions, y'know? "Every line has to bring new info" kind of sounds like a tall order, but the most effective way I've seen it done in books and onstage/onscreen is with these hyper-specific details. If you're writing a scene in which someone feels dirty, never have them just say that—have them say they want to take a shower. Show them running out of bleach again as they scrub down the stall after they wash. Begin the scene like "Steve always washes his throat first now." Then pack the scene with even more revelatory details: "Soap in hand, he heard the pipes above his head groan for a half note on adagio, and readied himself for the blast of icy water that always followed." Shitty shower, probably not rich, is likely a classical musician.

By the same token, I want to build LQG's character. The "Liu Qingge has been in love with Shen Yuan" section is the first insight we get into his background and perspective, right, so: I need to establish LQG's emotional context for filming this scene -> I can characterize him as a nut for martial arts in the same stroke -> so this takes place at a gym, beating up sandbags is a classic way of showing manly emotional distress -> so give me more details on this gym -> Puqi Gym, XL the martial god is obviously the owner -> how do I have XL & LQG a relationship beyond gym owner & client? They spar together -> I want XL & HC's position in this AU to mirror their god/ghost king statuses in TGCF canon -> how can I concretize their fighting prowesses in real-world details? -> they're martial arts champions -> what's an actual competitive martial art form that involves weaponry? -> wushu -> wikipedia Wushu, find taolu weapons sparring

(I just realized that in my songxiao daycare AU, Hualian are Olympic gold medalists by the same narrative logic laksjdnflaksjdnflsd)

So, that's the flow of logic behind my world-building lmao. It's all in the details. Leverage is one of my all-time favorite TV shows and the way they build their stories is super inspiring. If their thesis is "the rich and powerful take what they want, we steal it back for you," they manifest it in the most specific and concrete narratives: mine workers who like the work but are fighting for workplace safety vs. the money-grubbing mine owner who will blow up their livelihoods if it means a bigger payday; the little girl from Iraq with refugee status forced to be an accomplice to antique smuggling vs. international smuggler with a fetish for British royalty.

Last pieces of writing advice I've gotten: pay attention to the real world. A writing exercise we did was just sit in a public spot and make concrete observations on our surroundings. There are stories in everything!!! I learned to observe things like weird holes in the concrete (earthquake? drilling accident? bullet mark?), odd patches of moss or bird shit (look overheard: it's an AC unit dripping water for the former and nesting swallows for the latter), ladies in flipflops walking alongside ladies in high heels (excited mother walking her antsy daughter to the bus for the daughter's first job interview—the daughter's shirt collar is unfashionable and she's taking the bus, so there's a good chance the shoes were passed down, maybe from an office lady aunt. Maybe she's even overdressed for the interview, so will her outfit be an unintended source of tension once she gets to the interview? Is it a group interview, to make the comparison more stark?).

Also, write what you know. You know why SY is a video editor in porn AU? Because I'm a video editor. One of my more popular MDZS fics is set in a plant shop 'cause I worked in a plant shop. SL was First AD in Bachelor!AU 'cause I was First AD on a set once. Concrete details like the editing software having a split-screen, always answering questions about how often to water plants, and being up until 3AM editing call-sheets are the ones that will fully immerse your readers.

And if you can't do the actual things, just watch someone who is, listen to them talk, pick up lingo, and fake it. I watched like a 15-min vox video on fencing for the fencing!AU and a 45-min music theory video on the hospital pianist!AU (also I started learning piano sklfjnlsdjlfkjsd). Of course, I just finished reading a wangxian fic that had me going, "holy fucking shit, the author is literally getting their masters in a music program" so my 45-min youtube video ain't shit, but if you just need a little bit of character establishment, then it's enough to do the trick.

Anyways, tl;dr. Find the details, find the tension. Never tell outright what the tension is supposed to be, manifest it instead. Make the manifestation as interesting as possible, and if it's meant to be funny, make it funnier.

Sorry this turned into a fucking lecture lskjnflskdjnflskd but last thing, someone asked me before if I had formative authors, and this was the list I wrote at the time:

Angels in America (play) by Tony Kushner

The God of Small Things (novel) by Arundhati Roy

The Penelopiad (novel) by Margaret Atwood

“Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out” (poem) by Richard Siken

Night Sky with Exit Wounds (poetry) by Ocean Vuong

Giovanni’s Room (novel) by James Baldwin (and then Go Tell it on the Mountain and then his essays)

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

And, ooh, now that I have this list I think I can even roughly sort it as such: Kushner, Atwood, Siken, and Salinger I really latched onto for their dialogue and very present narrator voice—same is true for Go Tell it on the Mountain. Roy, Vuong, and Giovanni’s Room, I think, are texts more representative of the kind of saturated figurative language I like, and emulate. Of course they all do imagery and voice and overall structure amazingly, but that’s the rough dividing line I’d draw.

But yeah James Baldwin is my fucking hero.

[hearmeouteliza]

So here’s the scene that’s come so far from this post where I’ve been thinking out loud about Pepper’s origins and the Phantom Blot bonding with her and wanting to help her.  For once, I actually do know where I’m going with this (LOL, instead of getting started with an idea and then just winging it), but I want to catch up with some other stories I have out there before taking the full tale on...

Though he’d worked his way into the upper echelon of the organization, Phantom Blot had no real love for F.O.W.L.  They were a means to an end; they gave him the most accurate intelligence regarding significant sources of magic and the resources to track them down. Plus, they weren’t fond of Magica DeSpell either, so they wouldn’t stop him from eliminating the threat she posed once he had the chance.  His working for the organization was an arrangement of mutual benefit and nothing more.  Frankly, after he captured Magica and destroyed all magic to avenge his village – and, more importantly, his family – he didn’t care what F.O.W.L. did or didn’t do.

Over the years, however, Blot had learned a number of the agency’s secrets.  The Eggheads, F.O.W.L.’s grunts and resident fashion disasters, had mostly been the products of one of F.O.W.L.’s earlier projects.  They had taken in a number of orphaned and abandoned children, raising them to become loyal to the organization and join its workforce.  Whether it was truly rescuing them was debatable; many of them might have been adopted by actual families had they not been claimed by F.O.W.L. And the ethics of raising a child for the express purpose of filling a job were questionable.  But, on the other hand, though they had been raised in a very institutional environment, the children had never been abused and the Egghead’s wages were reasonably competitive when compared to similar positions in the outside world.  Blot had decided he had no real opinion on the program one way or another.  Was it ideal?  No.  But the children had been safe and secure, something their so-called families certainly hadn’t worried about when abandoning them.  The orphans were a different situation, and he felt for them, but they hadn’t had any family step up to claim them either.  As someone whose own children had been stolen from him, their lives snuffed out before he could stop it, he had absolutely no tolerance for anyone who would abandon a child to the whims of an often-cruel world.

Something else he’d learned and didn’t particularly care about was that ducks and other species with a predisposition to imprint upon their initial caregivers had something known as an “imprint memory.”  It was a vague memory of their early moments after hatching, involving the caregiver they’d imprinted upon.  There were rarely specifics, just general feelings and a sense of what had been going on around them at the time.  If the initial bond with their caregiver was broken, another could be formed with a different caregiver, provided the child was given the time and support needed to do so.  Those who suffered from what psychologists termed “fractured imprinting” that had never built a subsequent bond in their formative years tended to have significant adjustment and mental health issues in adulthood.  That certainly explained why majority of the Eggheads were so…well, cracked, as the slang went.  They would have probably had those issues anywhere else, especially if they hadn’t been lucky enough to be adopted, but while their physical needs had been met, they hadn’t been particularly coddled.

All of that had been in a mental file Blot had labeled “Not My Problem” previously; it was a broad category that encompassed most things that had little to do with his primary mission.  However, one particular Egghead had wormed her way into his life with her boundless enthusiasm.  She also happened to be a “graduate” of the program.  Despite himself, Blot had become fond of Pepper, even beginning to consider her a friend.  He certainly hadn’t had many of those since his village had been destroyed so long ago. He had insisted to F.O.W.L. she become his permanent mission partner, something Bradford Buzzard had immediately agreed to since there was literally no one else volunteering.  (Why did that bother him?  He’d never cared who liked him or not before.)  And now, between tasks, they’d begun to talk about topics that had previously been off-limits, such as his family.  Pepper’s eyes were wide and sympathetic as he told her of the joy they’d brought him, his beloved wife and their two little girls.

“They sound pretty great,” she said quietly.

“They were,” Blot agreed.  He watched, mildly amused as she toyed with her blonde curls that refused to be contained once she took her helmet off.  With a name (or was it a nickname?) like Pepper, he’d expected her hair to be red the first time he saw it, but that only went to show how far assumptions got anyone.  It occurred to him he knew little about Pepper, other than that she’d been one of F.O.W.L.’s foundlings.  Before she’d snuck her way into his heart, he wouldn’t have cared.  “Do you know anything about your life before you came here?” He wasn’t sure how else to pose the question.  The odds were that her story wasn’t a happy one and he didn’t want to push her to share it if she wasn’t ready.  However, given the way she opened up to him like a flower at the least little bit of affection (or even attention), he suspected she’d tell him.

Pepper shrugged.  “F.O.W.L.’s the only family I’ve ever known…you know, like most of us.  I guess there are a few Eggheads who answered a want ad – bet they had no idea what they were signing up for – but the rest of us were rescued.”

“I don’t know that my opinion will count for much,” Blot told her, “but I find it despicable that anyone would abandon their own offspring.”  He was still trying to figure out this whole “friendship” thing, but sympathizing with her situation was a start.

Pepper grinned.  “Oh, it does count.  And thank you.  It’s…well, it does help, at least a little.”  She sighed, her gaze trailing off to gaze at nothing in particular.  “It’s just…”

Blot frowned, even if Pepper might not have been able to see it beneath his cloak.  One thing Pepper had never been was at a loss for words, so whatever she had on her mind had to be significant.  “It’s just what?”

“Well, we’ve talked about our imprint memories before, me and the others.”  Pepper twisted her fingers together as she talked.  “Most of the others, they’re what I’d guess you’d expect – lonely, sometimes cold…just sad, really sad.  And I feel a little bad that mine…isn’t?”

“You shouldn’t feel bad for that,” Blot insisted, but he wasn’t surprised that she did.  She was the most empathetic of all the Eggheads he’d spent any significant amount of time around; perhaps that had to do with the fact that she might not have had as rough a start as her peers.  Had she been one of the orphans?  “Did you want to…talk about it?”

Pepper nodded enthusiastically.  “It’s really…nice, actually.  I remember a woman – she must have been my mother – holding me and singing to me.  Just…safe and warm.”  Her smile quickly morphed into a frown, however, the rest of her face falling with it. Blot had never seen her look so dejected and he found he hated it.  “I don’t know why she left me.  They said they found me in a box, just a few days old.  Was I a difficult baby?  Did something happen where she couldn’t take care of me?  Or was she even my mother?”

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with you.”  That, Blot could promise her, even if he had no information to answer her other questions.  “You were an infant.  There was nothing you could have done to deserve being abandoned like that.”

Slowly, Pepper’s smile returned, tentative though it may have been. “Thanks.  That’s…really nice of you to say.”  She shrugged, her expression a little sheepish.  “Sometimes when I got lonely, when I was little, I used to pretend she realized she made a huge mistake and was looking for me.  Or…I was really a princess of some country somewhere and she had to hide me away to protect me from an evil sorceress.”

Given that Blot had dealt with more than one evil sorceress in his time and was currently in pursuit of the most menacing one of all, he couldn’t exactly call her fantasies ridiculous.  “Perhaps she did.  Or…perhaps you’re an orphan after all and she never meant to leave you behind.”  It was still an unhappy ending, true, but maybe it would sting less for Pepper to consider.

“Yeah, maybe!”  Pepper perked up.  “You know, you try to be all tough and menacing, but I think you’re a real softie underneath it all.”

Blot glared at her, but it lacked the heat he usually summoned for those who had irritated him.  “I am not.”

“I think you are,” Pepper teased, her voice becoming more singsong.

“Am not,” Blot insisted.  Childish as it may have been, she had goaded him into playing along.  He couldn’t help but be reminded of similar arguments his girls had…and the memory was a balm instead of a dagger to his heart.  This ridiculous little duck just seemed to bring out that sort of thing in him.  Privately, he resolved to do some additional research into Pepper’s origins.  Surely there would be files that could help him put together the pieces and give her some answers.  

It was nice to have someone to care about again.

[dwellordream]

“...Sparta has obtained a reputation in the popular culture – derived from the sources – for affording a greater degree of freedom and importance to its women than any other Greek polis (I should stress this is a very low bar) and, so long as we are talking about spartiate women there is some truth to this.

Spartiate girls went through a similar ‘rearing’ to spartiate boys, although they were not removed from the home as their brothers were. Spartiate girls ran races and were encouraged to be physically active (Plut. Lyk. 14.3; Mor. 227; Xen. Lac. 1.4). The evidence is thin, but points fairly strongly to the suggestion that spartiate women were generally literate, in quite the contrast (again, as the evidence permits) to the rest of Greece.. Now our sources make clear that this is in part a product of the leisure that spartiate women had, since the primary domestic tasks of Greek women – textile manufacture and food preparation – were done entirely by slave labor forced upon helot women (Xen. Lac. 1.3; Plato, Laws. VII; Plut. Mor. 241d).

Whereas the sources paint a portrait of elite citizen Athenian women as practically cloistered, spartiate women had significantly more freedom of movement, in part because they appear to have been the primary managers of their households. Male spartiates didn’t live at home until thirty and were likely frequently away even after that (Plut. Lyc. 14.1; Mor. 228b). Spartiate women could also inherit and hold property in their own name to a greater degree than in Athens or elsewhere in Greece (note for instance Plut. Agis 7.3-4).

The strong impression one gets from the sources is that this gave spartiate women quite a bit more sway; our largely male sources, especially Aristotle, disapprove, but we don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) share their misogyny. The sources are also very clear that spartiate women and girls felt much freer to speak their minds in public than Greek women in most poleis, although they were still completely and universally excluded from formal politics.

But – and you knew there would be a but (surprise! there are two) – but the role of women in Spartan society as we can observe it remains fundamentally instrumental: in the Spartan social order, spartiate women existed to produce spartiate boys. The exercise that spartiate girls undertook was justified under the assumption that it produced fitter (male) children (Plut. Lyc. 14.2; Xen. Lac. 1.4). Plutarch implies that the age of marriage for spartiate women was set in law, though generally older than in the rest of Greece (Plut. Lyc. 15.3; Mor. 228a).

Spartiate women appear to have had no more say in who they married than other Greek women, which is to say effectively none. Marriages seem to have been arranged and the marriage ceremony itself as it it related to us was a ritualized abduction (Plut. Lyc. 15.3-5; Hdt. 6.65) without even a fig-leaf of (largely illusory) consent present in some other ancient marriage rituals.

Husbands apparently also ‘lent out’ their wives to other spartiate men (Plut. Lyc 15.7; Xen. Lac. 1.7-8); descriptions of this passage stress the consent of the men involved, but completely omit the woman’s consent, although Xenophon implies that the woman involved will “want to take charge of two households” and thus presumably be in favor; I have my doubts.

Everything we have about the Spartans (honestly, just read Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women, but also Xen. Lac. 1.4, 7-8, Plut. Lyc. 15, etc.) reinforces the impression that spartiate women were viewed primarily as a means towards producing spartiate boys. Gorgo’s retort that spartiate women “are the only women that are mothers of men” (Plut. Mor. 240e), her husband’s command that she in turn (when he died), “Marry a good man and bear good children” (Plut. Mor. 240e), the anonymous spartiate woman who shames an Ionian woman for being good at weaving because raising children “should be the employments of the good and honorable woman” (Plut Mor. 241d) and on and on. Most of the sayings that don’t involve the bearing of children, either involve spartiate women being happy that their sons died bravely, or disowning them for not doing so.

Now, there is a necessary and very important caveat here: this is the role of spartiate women as viewed by men. It is striking that the one of the largest things we can be reasonable sure that spartiate women did do – they seem to have had the full management of the household most of the time – doesn’t figure into these sayings or our sources hardly at all (save, to a degree, to Aristotles’ polemic in Book 2 of the Politics).

We should not be surprised that our – elite, aristocratic and exclusively male sources pick out the roles that seem most important to them. The average spartiate woman may well have felt differently – for my part, I can hardly imagine many spartiate mothers were overjoyed to hear their sons had fallen in battle, whatever brave face they put on in polite society. And I have to imagine that many spartiate women were likely shrewd managers of their households, and probably took some pride in that skill.

All of that said, I think it is fair to say that, on the whole, spartiate women seem to have had a relatively better condition than free citizen women in other poleis in Greece. Where they were sharply constrained – and to be clear, by modern standards, spartiate women were still very sharply constrained – they were constrained in ways that were mostly typical in Greek society. Quite frankly, ancient Greek poleis did quite poorly by their women, even by the low, low standards of other pre-modern societies. But given that low bar, the life of spartiate women does seem quite a bit better and our sources reflect this fairly openly.

But – and this is the other ‘but’ I alluded to above – a huge part of this is that spartiate women were freed from the demand to do hours and hours of difficult labor preparing and serving food and producing textiles. And here we circle back to last week’s problem: spartiate women probably represented around 6% of Spartan (including the helots) women. If we want to talk about the condition of women in Sparta, we need to talk about helot women.”

- Bret Devereaux, “This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women.”

[elenajohansenreads]

Books I Read in 2021

#83 - Shadowmarch, by Tad Williams

Mount TBR: 69/100

Beat the Backlist Bingo: Cover features your favorite color prominently

Rating: 1/5 stars

Well, that was a slog.

So I have a history with this piece of intellectual property. I was introduced to Williams as an author in college (1998) because several of the friends I made my first year were big fantasy nerds--no surprise there--and I was perfectly ready to move on from my high-school-era love of less sophisticated fantasy authors. I borrowed The Dragonbone Chair from one of those friends and off I went.

So in 2001 when news about Williams writing an online serial went around, and I saw the $15 price tag...well, I was a perpetually almost-broke college student still, and sure I spent money on books, but that was a high gateway, because a) I didn't own my own computer yet, I was borrowing friends' or using the computer lab to write papers and such; and b) sure, a chunky fantasy novel might be $7 or $8 in paperback, but it was portable, easy to reread whenever, and nobody had tablets or smartphones or e-readers yet, so an online serial publication was definitely not portable. Even fifteen dollars seemed like too much for the inconvenience of a book I could only read sitting at a computer, and couldn't read all of at once.

I was genuinely angry about this shift away from the paradigm, and much like Williams vowing this serial was online only and would never be published traditionally (which I distinctly remember but don't actually have a source for) I too vowed that I would never read it.

I held out much longer than he did, if my memory of that claim is even true. But I'm wishing now that I hadn't bothered.

This is bad. Not even close to the level of quality I expect from Williams, based on the earlier Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, as well as War of the Flowers--which was weird but I enjoyed it--and the Otherland series, which was even weirder and not always good, but yeah, I still enjoyed that too, for the most part.

Who am I supposed to care about in this book? I'm no stranger to multiple protagonists, but there are simply too many here, meaning none of them get the development time they would need to be interesting. I'm trying to wean myself from the complaint that protagonists need to be "likable," because a character can be a jerk and still be interesting, but few of these protagonists are particularly likable either!

1. Barrick is a whiny jerk who folds under pressure and abdicates responsibility to his sister, and then makes a spectacularly bad decision for no reason other than to set up some tension at the end, and his future arc. If it's because he's "mad," bad plot reason, and if it's because he's affected by the more general shadow-madness, well, I guess he could be vulnerable to it like anyone else, but that's pretty flimsy too. 2. Briony is a fairly standard "if only I weren't a woman, people would take me seriously" princess who doesn't fold as much under pressure but is dealt a really raw deal. I'll give her credit, she does legitimately try her best to rule her lands, but she's also kind of a whiny jerk like her brother, too. 3. Quinnitan is...pointless. Sure, I see how the end of her arc in this book echoes those of the Eddon twins, but there is no direct connection between her plot and anyone else's. And I mean that literally, if there's anything that ties her story to any other single part of the book, I simply do not see it, it's buried in lore or foreshadowing that was lost on me amid the sheer weight of nearly 800 pages of plodding narrative. I read all of her scenes constantly wondering why I should care, and the fact that her arc is a very basic harem plot, "I don't want to be a token wife but really what choice do I have?" sort of thing, doesn't help, because on its own it's incredibly unoriginal. 4. Chert is marginally likable, because he's arguably got the most defined personality and most personal growth in the book, as a person of a "little" race who is distinctly not human--I get a mix of gnome and dwarf, with a faint whiff of Podling from The Dark Crystal--and who deals with an unexpected foundling by taking him into his family and trying to make it work, even when that foundling is really a big blank space in the story who still manages to get into trouble. 5. Captain Vansen gets points from me for being the guardsman deep in unrequited love, which is a trope I would absolutely eat up with a spoon. The problem is, the object of that love is a protagonist I don't care for (Briony,) leading me to question what the eff he's thinking that he can even admire her from a distance, let alone be in infatuation/love. And his plot arc is mostly "something goes wrong that's not really has fault but everyone blames him anyway." Which got dull.

Chert and Vansen are most of the reason this book gets a second star*, honestly. Chert's scenes with the Rooftoppers are generally pretty excellent, even if they're mostly tied to a plot arc that I don't care for.

The other thing that's getting me about this is that it feels like a deliberately grim-dark retread of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. You've got a castle that's the seat of current government but used to belong to the enemy--the enemy that no one is sure even exists anymore, that lives in a land far enough away to feel distant but also somehow close enough to be threatening, once people believe in them again. That castle is perched upon magically important ruins/caverns, and that enemy has forms of magic/communication that affect humans and can cause or appear symptomatic of madness. There's a race of small likable people who aren't quite dwarves or any other "standard" fantasy race, but are still somehow cute/appealing. There's a crippled prince who's not really well-liked. One of the primary female protagonists is a young woman who laments the limitations of her womanhood under the patriarchal feudal system of the world.

And to someone who's never read either of these series, that list of similarities could mostly read like fairly common fantasy tropes, and I forgive anyone who reads this review and thinks that. But I've read MSaT probably ten times all the way through in the twenty-plus years since I was introduced to it, and I feel like I've just been handed the same story again, with a thick coat of gray paint slathered on it and a few details changed--and those changes are basically always for the worse. No one in this story can be said to be a direct equivalent to Simon, who gets a very clear hero's journey, but if I'm supposed to slot Barrick in as a Simon/Josua mashup (that crippled prince problem) then it takes the entire book to get Barrick out of his comfort zone and on his journey, where Simon got booted from the castle at the end of the first act of the first book.

And that gets at the underlying problem that is at least partially fueling all other problems--this book is clearly just the first act of the larger story, and yes i know! that is what first books do! but this also doesn't have a lot of forward motion on its own, and it doesn't resolve anything aside from the mystery of a single murder at that happens near the beginning. Seriously, all other plot threads get kicked down the road with the "and now they're exiles" theme that the ending has assigned to most of the protagonists. Chert doesn't suffer that fate, but the ending of his story line--also the end of the book itself--is the foundling reasserting that he doesn't know who he is, which is not new information. We've literally not known who he is the whole time, except that we do find out who his mother is, but don't find out how he was taken or why he apparently hasn't aged as much as he should have or what the Qar intended by sending him back "home." The identity of his mother is basically the least important question surrounding him.

I truly feel like I just read a 750-page prologue, and that is not a good feeling.

*Yeah, I told myself this was a two-star book, but by the time I wrote the whole review, it's not and I can't pretend I still believe that. This is a one-star book. This is so bad I don't want to go on with the series, even though it almost has to get better, now that most of our protagonists are out on their journeys. And because it could hardly get worse, right? But this already took up so much of my time (I had to take a week-long break in the middle to binge some romances, as a relief from all this grimdark toil) and even though I've managed to collect secondhand copies of the rest of the series, and they've been sitting on my shelves for a few years waiting for me to invest my energy into them...I'm giving up. Not worth it.

[qqueenofhades]

There are some interpretations going around about whether or not "the rape of Persephone" was a literal rape, regarding translations and what was considered acceptable at the time. I trust your historical knowledge and would appreciate your input. Thanks!

Oh Jesus Christ. Alas, I am aware of the inadvertent and depressing hilarity that results when the amateur historians of Tumblr decide to start The Discourse ™, as they do periodically, and the interpretations, as you put it, that result. I obviously also do support the practice of tackling mythology, reworking it, considering it in context, and trying to understand the culture, moral values, and ideas of society that it was supposed to represent, and whether and how that has changed for our own times (and if we should accept it if it hasn’t). The problem is that, to put it kindly, a lot of people on Tumblr are… not really qualified to do this, or at least should acknowledge their own limitations when doing so, rather than presenting their shallow and ideologically militant versions as Ineffable Fact. The academics have been arguing about all these things, since we argue about everything, and if you’re going to dip your toe into these discussions, you’ll have to recognize when, well, you are wrong. And as I have noted in recent political posts, Tumblr is historically Not Great at that.

As to the subject of Hades and Persephone specifically, I can myself do no better than point you to this excellent post by tumblr user @cthonisprincess, which I reblogged a while ago. It discusses many versions of the Hades and Persephone story in detail, treats the “problematic” aspects systematically, and quotes from a number of primary sources in terms of how their relationship was conceptualized by the culture to which it belonged, the power that Persephone has/had, and how Greek women themselves – rather than looking to Hera, the ostensible goddess of marriage, and her unhappy union with the chronically unfaithful Zeus – considered Persephone as the avatar of a powerful woman in a happy and faithful marriage. It also discusses the stories of how Persephone came to the Underworld, whether and if that should be understood as “rape” in a contemporary sense of the word, and if we, as modern feminists, should be comfortable with referring to/enjoying something still known as the “Rape of Proserpina” in most references. I get it. It’s… not entirely something you do with just a shrug and moving on.

However, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that to the culture in which Hades and Persephone were constructed and venerated, their relationship was loving, faithful, and considered worthy of emulation, and that Persephone was the actual scary one between the two of them. I was also just reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey recently and was struck by the sheer agency of women in the plot; they’re basically the only reason that anything happens as they cart Odysseus’ prevaricating ass from place to place. Books 10 and 11 are largely concerned with Odysseus’ visit to the Underworld, where:

“First [Odysseus] must complete another journey,Go to the house of Hades and the dreadful Persephone, and ask the Theban prophet,the blind Tiresias, for advice.Persephone has given him alonefull understanding, even in death.”

When Odysseus actually gets to the Underworld, the first spirit he encounters is that of Elpenor, one of his crew members who has recently died. But after that, instead of the actual famous Greek warriors or mighty legends (although he meets Agamemnon, Achilles, etc later on), the next people he sees are his mother, Anticleia, and the wives and daughters of warriors:

Then in my heart I wanted to embracethe spirit of my mother. She was dead, and I did not know how. Three times I tried,longing to touch her. But three times her ghostflew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.Sharp pain pierced deeper in me as I cried,

‘No, Mother! Why do you not stay for me?and let me hold you, even in Hades?[… ] But is this really you? Or has the Queensent me a phantom, to increase my grief?’

She answered, ‘Oh, my child. You are the mostunlucky man alive. Persephoneis not deceiving you. This is the rulefor mortals when we die.’

[…]

As we were talking,some women came, sent by Persephone –the daughters and wives of warriors.They thronged and clustered round the blood. I wantedto speak to each of them, and made a plan.

I’m not sure that Homer actually refers to Hades himself as having any part in this throughout the whole section, except geographically (as in Hades as a place/environment). Persephone is later on referred to as dispersing the ghosts of the women, after Odysseus has spoken to them all individually before he gets to any of the now-dead heroes of the Iliad. Which I think is… interesting, given the fact that the Odyssey is obviously one of the most famous of the Greek narratives/epic poems and everybody knew it long before it was ever preserved in a written form (see the long-running “is Homer actually one guy or just a dozen random Greeks in a trenchcoat” argument). So yes.

I obviously love Hades and Persephone a whole lot, my URL references them, most of my OTPs fall into a similar archetype, and I would love them no matter what the shrill hordes on Tumblr said. But in this case, frankly, their interpretations are bad, and they should feel bad. Make of it what thou shalt.

[alwaysbewoke]

alwaysbewoke

dickslapthestate:

ranting-rose:

ittybittykittykisses:

ranting-rose:

vgcgraveyard:

caitallolovesyou:

friendly-neighborhood-patriarch:

lazyhat:

I was pretty skeptical about the figures, since they contradict what I usually hear on the media, so I did a little research. Here’s what I found:  (Sorry this is so US centric)  (I’ll also try to stay close to primary sources as possible)

(http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm?s_cid=ss6308a1_e)

- the 12 months before taking the survey, an estimated 4.0% of women experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner -an estimated 14.2% of women experienced some form of psychological aggression in the 12 months preceding the survey. -*4,774,000 women have been victims of physical violence by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey -*17,091,000 women have been victims of psychological aggression by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey

- the 12 months before taking the survey, an estimated 4.8% of men experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner -an estimated 18.0% of men experienced some form of psychological aggression in the 12 months preceding the survey. -*5,452,000 men have been victims of physical violence by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey -*20,471,000 men have been victims of psychological aggression by intimate partner in the 12 months preceding the survey

*Table 6

By the data presented by the Center for Disease Control, out of the estimate of 10,226,000 yearly victims of intimate partner violence, 53.3% of victims where male and 46.6% were female. As for psychological aggression, out of the estimate of 37,562,000 yearly victims, 54.4% were male and 45.5% were female. These statistics would support the claim made in the bottom left.

Now I couldn’t find a primary source for the 70% of DV is initiated by women, but here’s the facts that I found, which may have been interpreted by the people who made this poster:

(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-sacks/researcher-says-womens-in_b_222746.html) -Women who were in a battered women’s shelter, 67% of the women reported severe violence toward their partner in the past year.

This can be interpreted as “67% of violent couples with IPV is mutual”. But then again, primary sources and full data would be helpful to back up this claim.

But the one that is most interesting is:(http://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/newsArticle.aspx?articleid=111137)(Another report analysis from the CDC)

-23.9% of relationships are violent -50.3% of IPV is non-reciprocal and 49.7% is reciprocal (Reciprocal IPV= Mutual violence) -70.7% of non-reciprocal IPV is initiated by women. 

So summing up the numbers, it’s not that 70% of all DV is initiated by women, its that 70% of non-reciprocal DV is initiated by women. To go further would say that 49.7% of DV is mutual, 36.2% of DV is initiated by women, and 14.5% of DV is initiated by men

Male victims of domestic violence are real. They are hurting. And they often don’t get the attention and compassion they so urgently deserve and need.

Have a heart. Open your mind, and give a care.

Hm. These numbers are all so different to anything I’ve seen before. I’m reblogging and liking this both for my own reference and to spread these numbers to others. I’m definitely gonna look into this and see if I can find more sources and more information.

Mother fuckers can we all just say let’s not be dicks to our fucking love ones already?

Tagging this for my speech project that I need the sources for

Here are 221 studies on IPV / DV for y’all.

You are a life saver.

That list is good, but outdated.  I e-mailed the researcher who compiled that list a couple weeks ago and he gave me three different documents.  I uploaded them to this dropbox folder. You can go there and download them.

The list of studies is now up to 343 scholarly investigations (270 empirical studies and 73 reviews). Not only did he send me that list, but he also sent me two meta-studies (also in the dropbox folder).  One is on male/female perpetration rates and the other is on male/female victimization rates. 

There is also “Rates of Bi-directional versus Uni-directional Intimate Partner Violence Across Samples, Sexual Orientations, and Race/Ethnicities: A Comprehensive Review“.  It’s a mouthful to be sure. Basically this study took the data from 48 other empirical studies, collated the data, placed it online for public viewing, submitted it for peer review, and was found to be accurate. 

It’s findings basically wind down to this:

84% of relationships are non-violent

58% of relationships that are violent, both partners abuse the other.

28% of violent relationships only the woman is violent

14% of violent relationships only the man is violent.

This is featured Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project website and is part of a much larger DV research project.  You can read the summarized findings here or take a gander at the full 61-page review.  This is a compilation of the research of Erin Pizzey, Murray Strauss, Don Dutton, and many others who are challenging the feminist model of patriarchal dominance. They also have some videos that are very informative as well.

Murray Strauss also compiled: Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment.  A report detailing the existence of over 200 studies showing gender symmetry in victimization rates. Studies that show symmetry going as far back as 1975.  He also examines the methods feminist researchers have used to suppress the evidence from public discourse, hence the title “Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence”.

Two other excellent and brief videos on the topic come from the MenAreGood YouTube channel:

Male Victims of Domestic Violence - The Hidden Story

Bias Against Men and Boys in Mental Health Research

I really need to write up a solo reference post for domestic violence data…

so what do we have here? what i’ve been saying forever. women as initiators of domestic violence is one of the biggest, closely guarded secret around. we literally had female FEMINIST researchers hiding evidence. FEMINISTS!! but i’m the bad guy for stating that feminism is filled with man hatred. what would you say of men of who information about abuse women and thus allowed the abuse to continue? YOU FUCKING KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU’D SAY!! am i surprised by the research? no fucking way. we don’t teach women in society to not hit men. we only teach men to not hit women. for little boys on up we are shamed if we even defend ourselves if little girls hit us BUT NOT ONE TIME HAVE I EVER HEARD OR SEEN ANY PARENT TEACHING THEIR LITTLE OR DAUGHTER THAT THEY SHOULD NOT HIT MEN!! we always make excuses for it. “she was emotional” “he said…” “he did…” “he had it coming…” and more. this research is fantastic but let’s be honest, this post isn’t going to get many reblogs at all because most of y'all are married to the idea that women are angels and men are devils. women have no agency and are always victims of men. that only men hit and women never hit. only men can be abusers and women can never be abusers. no amount of research is going to change your minds. men have done some evil shit but i so sick and tired of this narrative that women are just innocent, perfect deities. IF SHE HITS YOU ONCE, LEAVE HER ASS QUICK!!! IF SHE DID IT ONCE, SHE’LL FUCKING DO IT AGAIN!! GUARANTEED. and one more thing, FUCK FEMINISM. hiding empirical data but standing on your high horse preaching gender equality?! fuck feminism. so fucking glad i ceased to be a fucking feminist years ago. eye wide fucking open now.

sinjia

Thank you @alwaysbewoke !!! And did you know that there are feminists on here sending hate mail just because you don’t agree with them? It’s fucking sad, but I’m so happy that you said this. It lets me know that I’m not the only one realizing the shady bullshit that they preach but never practice themselves.

alwaysbewoke

i’ve only known one feminist who was on the right side of this issue and she was so because she works in the domestic violence field as a counselor. she told me she sees it all the time. men get hit, have things thrown at them, women come at them with knives, scratches on their faces and everything and yet we never talk about it. never. the only people who we pounce on for dv are men. we never ever talk about women. never ever. and if you do, you get shouted down. fuck all that.

this is why many men when they hear “feminism” they think “ok that means i get to hit back now.” because we’re tired of the bullshit. we’re tired of women getting away with hitting because society AND FEMINISM tells them it’s fine. it’s okay. they’re allowed. feminism PROTECTS FEMALE ABUSERS ALL DAY!! my goodness. to hide evidence as a researcher is akin to a crime. the ripple affect of that shit is fucking insane. however let them tell it, it’s a problem with men that we think feminism has a man hatred problem. yea the problem is with us because feminism is perfect. feminism ain’t never do no shit, no wrong ever. srsly fuck feminism. fuck it to the depths of hell.

this is why i tell people, dealing with only ONE half of a problem will only allow the problem to continue to exist. it doesn’t change shit. if anything it makes things worse.

racist, sexist feminism. fuck off. i spit on feminism every fucking chance i get. first they fuck over black women (and black men) and then they fuck over men with this type of bullshit. i refuse to align myself with that fuckery. i can help black women much better without it. i don’t need to be a part of something that hates me both as a man and as a black person to help sistas get equal pay and shit. fuckouttahere.

that’s why i call out all these people still posting pics and riding for solange knowles. imagine if i was posting pics and niceties for ray rice. but when women do some violent bullshit, we stay given them a pass smfh.