#I’m still reporting everyone on twitter who bullies her but …I also have to protect wony….

[aeongy]

omg KITSCH TURNED OUT SO GOOD AAAAA such a good pre single,,,,thank you IVE

[paranaturalpop]

I rate your pnat ships by how well they work as foils

I’m Professor Pops, welcome to Literature 405: comparing and contrasting in pnat ships. Love is in the air but all that really matters is narrative symmetry!

Mina and Agent Day (submitted by @anxanhh)

two women on missions who need a confidante. 

Mina is a calculating woman of science with a tender, vulnerable heart deep down that she guards. Day is a fun, giggly love goddess but beneath the surface she is just as calculating.  

They are both focused on their prospective goals to the point of subterfuge. 

They have similar missions, to solve the many mysteries of Mayview, but they’re at odds instead of working together. Will these lone wolves learn to let their walls down and work towards a common goal? 

Their spectral energies are complementary colors!!!!!!!!!!!! 

9/10 so different yet so alike. They should kiss and also develop as people.

Spendcia

Where's that post about paranatural having what my hero academia wants?

These two had interacted in cannon only once before we found out they were dating, power move on Zack’s part

The cousinhood and the consortium seem to have bad blood…. Enemies to lovers????

As teachers, Garcia is tired and phoning it in while spender is energetic and committed. But when it comes to mystery solving Spender is burning himself out while Garcia keeps him grounded.

Garcia does things like pack spender lunches with little hearts drawn on the bag but was surprised to be called his boyfriend. He acts chill but inside he is deeply invested in spender but also knows about spender’s isolating tendencies. 

8/10 there's a reason these two have been off and on again for 6ish years, they’re walking a tightrope of vulnerability.

Imaax (submitted by Rubyya)

The Destiel of Paranatural. No I will not elaborate.

Here’s a pnat history lesson, the original ship name was Maxaac, but Zack weighed in on twitter with a much better alternative: Imaax. Also sometimes called Team Lightning Rod. 

Black and blue colors, just like the emotional bruises they leave on the people around them. 

Isaac wants to be seen as heroic and Max wants to be seen as aloof. It presents in different ways but deep down they both really care what other people think.

They both fear sincerity. Isaac protects himself with theatrics and Max with sarcasm. 

Isaac puts on a big show of having strong ethics but he’s a little mean on instinct. Max puts on a big show of cutting people down with his snark and devil-may-care attitude, but when push comes to shove he’s kind and cares how other people feel. 

Max immediately insults every person he meets and they still want to be best friends with him, while Issac tries so hard to be cool and nice but people just can’t stand him. 

The meta tension between Isaac, who wants so badly to be the protagonist, and Max “magnetic personally” Puckett who is exhausted with being the protagonist, is delicious. 

There’s a reason official art tends to portray them together. They bring out the best in each other. Isaac brakes through Max’s performative pessimism and Max brings Isaac down to earth. 

10/10 these two were written as a pair and it shows.

Suzabel (submitted by Rubyya)

One of my fav tropes is ‘enemies to friends’ where the enemy part is completely one-sided. Isabel probably thinks she and Suzy get along great. 

Both the heads of their respective clubs, but with very different leadership styles. 

Isabel only studies her grandfather's spectral style to please him and is a near master of it, while Suzy is incredibly self-motivated even though her actual skills are lacking. 

Isabel is at a crucial time in her life where she’s learning to distance herself from adult authority figures in order to take on more personal responsibility. Suzy is already blazing with independence and could help her adjust. 

Inversely, Isabel could teach Suzy a thing or two about treating your club members with respect and doing the emotional labor necessary to prevent future conflict. 

Red and pink! Valentines colors! 

Isabel could kill you but would never, Suzy would actually try to kill you. 

Investigative reporter/person living mysterious double life is a great dynamic.

Back when Izzy had Eightfold they had the ship name ‘Paper Girls’ which is awesome

7/10 Don’t ask me how I know this but they would kill at karaoke together. And they’re ok foils.

Bullymagnet

Max ‘too cool for clubs’ vs a boy who defines himself by his tight knit group. 

Max is learning to be less passive aggressive and johnny is learning to be less aggressive aggressive. 

Max’s entry to spectral life was when he injured Johnny and saw a shade of a doctopi on him, and Johnny's first shade was Max's doctopi after the hit ball game. 

Johnny refuses to commit to not bullying max anymore even though he really likes him, and max is working on being nicer but he’s still gonna be snarky with people even though they’re his friends. Old habits die hard. 

If he hadn't seen that shade, Max might have joined Johnny's gang. He has the style, the stunts, the snark. 

8/10 Just two bros whose lives are changing forever.

Isaac and Dimitri (submitted by Rubyya)

Here’s my pitch for a ship name: Brainstorm

Orange and blue are complementary colors. 

Isaac hurt Dimitri accidentally somehow. Hurting others accidentally is the central theme of chapter 5. 

Idealist/pragmatist is a classic dynamic

They both have relationships with their spirit partners that are rooted in fear. 

Dimitri’s self concept is overly dependent on his sense of intellectual superiority, and Isaac’s on ethical superiority. 

7/10 have not directly interacted in the comic yet but the narrative symmetry is there

Johnny and Isabel (submitted by Rubyya)

Burnhound Vs Shockadile

These two are natural leaders who know how to treat their friends with respect.

These jocks are both lethal weapons, but while Isabel is a master martial artist, Johnny is a passionate but blunt instrument.

They’re both going through similar identity crises.

Isabel is struggling to reconcile her violent and disciplined upbringing with a good, gentle heart and Johnny is trying to reconcile his violent and self-centered lifestyle with a developing respect and empathy for other people.

Johnny dies his hair red, so he would think it’s cool how Izzy emits a fiery red aura when excited.

8/10 there's a reason these two were the team leaders in the hit ball arch.

Violet and Lisa (submitted by Rubyya)

People have been theorizing about what kind of cryptid Lisa is since day one meanwhile Violet gives off big normie energy.

Lisa is very plugged into all the Mayview weirdness as the queen of the school underground, while Violet was the only person who thought to go get a teacher during the hit ball arch. Lisa was also the only one who really spoke openly about how something was clearly very wrong with Jeff, everyone else talked around it and played by the so called ‘rules’. Lisa’s secret brokering Vs. Violet’s ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ attitude presents two different approaches to trying to survive in a school run by a mysterious shadow organization within a town that contains several other mysterious shadow organizations.

“If you were, I’d have to be jealous too.” just two middle schoolers pinning over their crushes.

7/10 two girls against the world.

Isaac and Johnny

ship name: Firestorm?

Just 2 fiery redheaded mediums with anger management issues that command primal forces and wanna be best friends with max

Johnny chooses to have red spiky hair, Issac has had red spiky hair thrust upon him.

Both met Maxwell Pucket and decided they needed to change for the better.

I’ve said this before but Johnny and Issac have equal and opposite philosophies. Johnny doesn't care about the greater good, he just cares about a small group of people who he loves. Issac cares about the greater good, but can’t connect with individuals and ends up hurting them. Together they form one GoodTM boy.

Both their spirit partners want revenge on Spender. This spells trouble.

If there’s anyone to teach Isaac about unconditional friendship, it’s Johnny

Isaac has sworn off violence and Johnny worships at the altar of it.

9/10 they’ve only interacted in canon once so far but I’ve think we’ve got a big storm coming.

Suzy and Collin (submitted by Rubyya)

The Bakudeku of pnat. I will continue to not elaborate.

Suzy once stole Collin's phone which prompted Collin to try to cut her hair which prompted Suzy to stab Collin and at no point did either of them think to move to a different bus seat. As different as they are they are also very much the same.

Collin is the definition of mouth service (constantly disapproving of suzy’s antics but going along with it anyway.) while suzy is all action.

Despite their different attitudes they both seem genuinely passionate about the journalism club.

Fashion icons. Suzy’s sunglasses and legwarmers, Collins sweater vests and wrist bands, this duo could walk for Paris fashion week: middle school edition.

We’ve gotten an indication that Collin cares a lot about what Suzy thinks of him (taking off his wrist bands when she made fun of Max's) but we haven't gotten any sign yet that the feelings are mutual.

5/10 I think their story is yet to be told and we’ll get to know more about how they compare/contrast to each other in the future. Maybe brought on by Dimitri's betrayal?????

Cody and Isabel (Submitted by @a-bitchtm)

Cody is gay by WOG but that doesn't matter here since we are evaluating thematic compatibility, not romantic compatibility.

Red Vs. Blue

Izzy’s arch about stepping into her role as leader through communication and honesty contrasts Cody’s role as the secret class president. Izzy finally told Isaac the truth about the consortium, while Cody blatantly lied to max about being president.

Both seem to have generally good motivations and the skills/talent to back those motivations up.

Isabel is in the process of unlearning the ‘firm hand’ philosophy that she learned from her grandpa and Cody’s dad straight up tried to mind control him into murdering a toddler.

They were both taught to fall back on their capacity for violence and intimidation but those teachings conflict with the people they really want to be.

6/10 just two kids who are being led astray by authority figures trying to learn to be themselves.

Cody and Collin (Submitted by @gatortavern)

They both like vests.

Both beholden to blood thirsty predators

Collin is a journalist, Cody is a vampire/leader of the shadow government. It’s a huge power move on Cody’s part to hang out with Collin.

Cody’s support of his friends is enthusiastic while Collin would have you believe Suzy has kidnapped him.

4/10 they hang out for a reason but those reasons have yet to be fully developed

Isabel and Max (submitted by @Paranatural-goofiness)

They’re both people who have learned to put up walls to keep people out. Isabel through violence and intimidation, max through sarcasm and mockery. T

he other side of this is their mutual journey to let their walls down and connect with other people more genuinely, starting with each other.

Their search for acceptance and identity has led them both to become incredible athletes. Spectral fist martial arts = shred eagle stunts

As we saw in the hit ball game, Izzy faces things head on while Max is all about evasion. However we’ve seen how Izzy has actually learned to be evasive and guarded about her feelings while Max is a little more forthcoming.

8/10  Never has there been faster friends.

Isaac and Cody (submitted by Rubyya)

Drama kings

Isaac wants the likability Cody has.

Parallels of power: Isaac with power he didn't choose and cant control vs. Cody who also didn’t choose to have his power (elected), but wields it like an instrument.

Involuntary anime hair and involuntary glowing monster eyes

These two definitely both fall under the category of “lawful”.

I can see these two ending up on opposite sides of a conflict because they both have such rigid personal codes and an intense sense of duty.

I know I’ve been approaching almost all of these platonically but Isaac probably really wants a cool vampire boyfriend deep down

 7/10 Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. You two should watch anime together.

Hijack and PJ (submitted by @gatortavern)

They both wanna join the activity club so bad

Both have immature ideas about heroism and villainy. 

Both aspire to heroism while at the same time understanding that they aren't that yet and maybe never will be. 

They both, like many people in this comic, wanna be friends with max.  

5/10 Two supernatural babies who should play wii sports together

Stephen and Isaac (@Gatortavern)

Two boys who are easily overwhelmed

Lawful vs. chaotic

Isaac has enough secrets to give Stephen his conspiracy fix for a long time. 

In their own ways they both just want everything out in the open. 

Isaac is Stephen's dream, someone actually living a secret double life, and Stephen is Issac's dream, someone with a cool scar who would think he’s actually very interesting. 

5/10 these two are both very intense in their own way.

Johnny and Ed (Submitted by @theevilbrainman)

Two souls lost in the wind

Two people for whom friendship and loyalty is central to their character, and they’re both struggling with personal growth because of it. Johnny is afraid to change because his friends have always liked the person he already is, and Ed is struggling to even define himself outside of Isabel, the person he cares about the most. 

Both impulsive and uninhibited. 

They both live lives free from expectation. Johnny’s wild bully persona means no one is surprised by his antics or cruelty, while Grandpa Guerra doesn't really care if Ed takes up phantom fist like Isabel. He actually calls him a freeloader. Not having much expected of you can feel free but it’s also lonely and can warp your self-perception. 

6/10 these two crossed paths at exactly the right time.

I didn't cover every submission because even though only 9 people submitted you sent in 34 ships between you. Pnat’s fanbase is small but very dedicated. 

Honorable mentions: 

Johnny and clear sinuses, submitted by @gaul-the-unmitigated

Isaac and therapy, submitted by both @squidgeons and @somethingfishysgoingon

PJ and Johnny, submitted by @gatortavern, who seems to be under the impression that Johnny Would protect PJ and not destroy him just by breathing near him.

Day and Scabs, submitted by @gatortavern, because funny.

Special thanks to everyone who sent in ship between people who have never interacted in cannon, which was a lot of you. My eyes are opened now, so many possibilities.

[lizallanapologist]

The problematic behavior of Tomdaya stans; a thread

Some of you might not be aware of the stalkerish problematic stuff tomdaya stans have done with Tom and Zendaya’s life but it’s gotten to the point where Tom’s own brothers protect with big scrutiny every single female in Tom’s life because they fear they’re going to get bullied or harassed. This is not OK and this has to stop so we’re exposing their toxic behavior. 

This is only to bring awareness and we do not condom any hate or death threats, don’t send hate to tomdaya accounts, either block them or report them but don’t bully them. Many of them might need professional help dealing with the fact that Tom and Z are not together due to the fact that they created an illusion in their heads for a long time but that doesn’t mean some of them aren’t plenty manipulative and love to get away with bullying and harassment. 

If you don’t know, Tom was recently seen with another woman on his instagram, not going to say the name and please don’t try to find out about her, the relevant information is in this post and all of the private information regarding her is being protected for the same reasons. Many stans decided to apply the same treatment to her as they did to Olivia. If you don’t know what happened last year, all information is here. The fact that this kind of bullying and harassment got overlooked is horrifying. 

This specific behavior doesn’t apply to all of the stans but the vast majority is on the same page. 

A big thanks to all the blogs who contributed with information and their writing in this post.

STALKING 

1. Tomdaya stans have made an entire thread/timeline of events in Tom and Zendaya's life that they manipulated so it can be seen as proof of them dating. They stalk every single part of their lives, from paying stalkerish apps to review their instagram activities daily to having a constant GPS to know their exact locations everyday. They ask twitter accs, owners of restaurants/stores, people close to them information about their whereabouts/the things they buy or eat/who they were with, etc.

They order their ‘’interactions’’ with specific dates and they even know information you shouldn’t know about them. 

They pay for apps that helps them stalk their every move. That’s right, they take every like as proof of them being together. 

They hide behind the pretext that they're celebrities and this is what they've signed up for but neither Tom nor Zendaya have signed up for constant daily harassment of their partners in life. 

HARASSMENT OF PARTNERS

Tom was seen last year with a blonde girl called Olivia, everyone speculated that was his girlfriend and that was something everyone should’ve respected since it’s Tom’s life and he’s in control of it, instead, many fans including Tom H. crazy fans and tomdaya stans, decided to stalk and harass Olivia to the point she had to make her account private. They started bullying her by publicly calling her names like ‘’Olive Oil’’, ‘’Ugly old woman’’, ‘’Ugly fake bitch’’ among other names. They continuously compare her with Zendaya and write on her friends and family members’ social media and ask them to tell Olivia nasty things. You really think this is ok? 

Same is happening with the girl Tom was seen with. Tom’s own brothers asked several people to take down and delete the video because they were disrupting her privacy. Many stans didn’t care and started all over again harassing the girl. (I’m not posting images or the identity of this new girl in hopes that this helps maintain a little big of privacy for her.) 

However here are some examples of them harassing Olivia:

’’I saw a troubling post on twitter about this fan dming another fan saying that they’d kill her (Olivia). That they’d find a way. So that “the fans can have him all to ourselves” - source

MANIPULATING THE NARRATIVE

Tomdaya stans and some Tom Holland crazy stans love to harass Tom Holland to the point that they tag family members and friends only because he decided to go out in public with Olivia. They call him cheater, manipulator, a dumbass, made fun of him because Tom is dyslexic calling him an illiterate, mocked him and tried to cancel him in every opportunity given by manipulating everyone into thinking some of these ‘’facts’’ are true. 

Many fans don’t know better and go to social media to frame Tom as a scumbag because many tomdaya stans have convinced the public of this.

This same issue occurs with Zendaya. Her known boyfriend; Jacob Elordi, is frequently called a cheater and is being investigated every five seconds on every social media, candid, interaction ever. Many fans are already calling him cheater, telling everyone Zendaya’s changed her behavior thanks to Jacob and that she needs help. 

Source

BULLYING

The definition of cyberbullying according to Stopbullying.gov:

“Cyberbullying is bullying that takes place over digital devices like cell phones, computers, and tablets. Cyberbullying can occur through SMS, Text, and apps, or online in social media, forums, or gaming where people can view, participate in, or share content. Cyberbullying includes sending, posting, or sharing negative, harmful, false, or mean content about someone else. It can include sharing personal or private information about someone else causing embarrassment or humiliation. Some cyberbullying crosses the line into unlawful or criminal behavior. “

Examples of cyberbullying on Tumblr from good ole Toutdesuite360:

https://toutdesuite360.tumblr.com/post/190572803098/faces-haha-ive-heard-this-has-been-memed-when

Making fun of Jacob Elordi’s wealth… but that isn’t that only thing that the Tomdaya stans have done.

She basically implied that Olivia looked like an elderly lady, and she permitted her followers to humiliate her.

Funny, that a middle aged woman who has never revealed her face on her blog is bullying a young woman.

(She may have deleted the link to save her a** on the post with the Cher pictures, but thankfully @crazypeopleonfandom​ took screenshots of this post; I got most of my photos from them)

The next aren’t pertaining to the ‘innocent’ Toutdesuite360, just some random jerks from Twitter/Instagram. If you have the time, you can read through them.

See the pictures above and below for reference.

Labelling Zendya, Jacob E., Tom, and Olivia as cheaters, when there was no confirmed relationship between Tom and Z, and Jacob broke up with Cari already is plain disrespectful. These are type of claims are considered slander, and I’m surprised that the people who own these accounts haven’t been rightfully sued.

And remember when I talked about the repetition of people tagging Tom and Z’s family for their ‘thoughts’? Why are you tagging Nikki in your post?

Calling Olivia, once again, a vulgar word that shouldn’t be used for any woman.

This person and many other tomdayas are harassing Zendaya and Tom by tagging them repeatedly. Now we know why Tom stopped using Twitter, and why he may be taking breaks from social media.

And, as pointed out in another point on the thread: Tom has dyslexia! I easily ignore the posts that tease him about his lips, but when it comes to his disability, that crosses the line. It is unacceptable to bully someone just because your fantasy relationship doesn’t seem so real now.

Before I finish this point, I just want to remind people that celebrities are humans too. Everyone has feelings, and even if they haven’t seen these posts, it is still harmful to post this kind of information on your account. Fans who are young (or naive) may see these posts, thus making them believe that Tom actually cheated on Z, and that Z is really with Jacob as ‘payback’ to Tom. Bullying is still an ongoing issue, and maybe you should stop harassing/humiliating people on your platform.

DEATH THREATS

Olivia, Tom and his family, friends, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, etc. They were sent death threats as a result of a fictional ship. This is truly upsetting and we’ve shown some proof of that above and it’s truly sickening how many of them really want to attack Olivia in public only because of a few photographs. 

DEBUNKING EVIDENCE

While we don’t know anything for sure, we need to trust and respect what Tom and Zendaya have said several times: they were never together and they were just friends. This is a topic that makes them feel uncomfortable and tomdaya stans decide to twist their words every time they want to clarify the situation, saying they’re hiding their relationship and that they’ve been hiding it for over 3 years. 

Stop believing everything SpideyParker on YouTube says, that person desperately wants them together so they’ll do anything in their power to make it seem like that they’re ’’still together’’. All of their evidence is also nothing but scraps. I can also make a video cropping out certain individuals from the frame to make it look like Tom is with someone or I can also investigate every tiny detail to a borderline degree to make it seem like Zendaya is dating someone. It’s really easy to manipulate the truth, so don’t fall for these things so easily. Check with the real sources, Tom and Zendaya. Trust and respect what they say it’s not your job to investigate and figure their lives out.

Their evidence of the relationship is ridiculous, stuff like them wearing the same clothes,

because obviously there’s no way this jacket is in any random store in the world...This is a unique jacket, made by Tom and Z specifically...And it’s not even the same jacket. If we’re going by their logic, then

More, more, more and more.

Source

Robert Downey Jr. and Tom have been in a relationship for a long time...

Angourie, Remy and Tom wearing the same jacket.

I have no idea what’s going on with the freaking necklace you swear with blood that Zendaya gave him but that’s hardly something special:

Matching necklace with Olivia.

Avengers necklace.

He likes necklaces, nothing special here.

'’Tom only goes to Zendaya’s home, and only goes out with her!’’

Tom Holland went to RDJ's house to watch Black Panther with him.

Tom and RDJ facetime daily.

Obviously, his only friend is Zendaya...

Look at him and Zendaya there, wow.

‘‘Tom looks at her with heart eyes and in a very special way!’‘

Excuse me, what is he supposed to do? Ignore Zendaya and look somewhere else every time she talks?  

MORE

He literally looks at everyone the same way.

‘‘He only does Spider-Man because he wants to be the Peter Parker to his Mary Jane, one of the most romantic comic book couples!’‘

I can’t believe I once read this as proof but I haven’t forgotten about it.

Interview with Tom and Laura:

“Is Zendaya’s character Mary Jane Watson?’’

Tom Holland: “No, no! This is one of those rumours, that like, we’ve all said it’s not true.

Laura Harrier: It’s not true!

Tom Holland: Like, we keep on… You guys keep building yourselves up for disappointment.

Laura Harrier: Unless we don’t know how this started? Because you guys are gonna see this movie and be like “…Ugh.” She’s Michelle!

Tom Holland: She’s a character called Michelle.

Laura Harrier: She’s playing Michelle.

Tom Holland: 100%. Hands down. Her character’s called Michelle. And she’s sort of this weird, quirky one in the friendship group that Peter has. She’s funny, but she’s super strange.

Laura Harrier: Yeah, super dry humour.

Tom Holland: She’s 100% not Mary Jane. It’s funny, everyone’s like “Is she Mary Jane?” and I’m like NO, I’M TELLING YOU! SHE’S NOT MARY JANE!

Source

‘‘He did the Will Smith thing with her, he loves her!’‘

‘’He only ever talks about her! He only praises her!’’

Angourie Rice.

Robert Downey Jr, 2, 3

Laura Harrier, 2

Elizabeth Olsen.

Jacob Batalon.

Chris Hemsworth.

Jake Gyllenhaal.

And the list goes on and on.

‘‘He always goes to her special events only! He only goes to her parties! He only goes to hospitals with her! He was on the set of Euphoria with her!’‘

How about, he goes out with her and everyone else in group and individually? He goes out with Harrison alone, with Jacob alone, with Laura alone, etc. I love how many of them love to leave out certain people to make everyone believe it’s only the two of them. And he doesn’t only goes to hospitals with her, he’s gone with many other people and he does it because he’s a good person, not because he’s on a date with Zendaya. 

Tom AND Jacob visit Zendaya on the set of the Greatest Showman.

Tom and friends celebrating Harrison’s birthday party.

Tom on a double date.

Tom going to Joe Russo’s restaurant to get an exclusive cooking lesson from Jessica Largey.

Tom on birthday parties.

Tom, Laura, Harrison and Harry out for dinner in Brazil.

Tom, Brie Larson, Tessa Thompson, and Zachary Levi in a club in Brazil.

Tom, Laura, Jacob, Harrison in a pool party.

RDJ & Tom Holland visit Jon’s restaurant and participate on his show.

Tom Holland visits Doctor Strange’s set.

Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Joe Russo visit haunted attraction.

He’s a good person and loves supporting his friends.

‘‘He only has chemistry with her!’‘

Tom and RDJ’s extraordinary chemistry.

Tom and Jake’s chemistry.

Tom and Jacob’s chemistry.

Tom and Laura’s chemistry.

Tom and Daisy’s chemistry.

Tom and Chris Pratt’s chemistry.

Also Will Smith, Chris Hemsworth, etc. 

Look below for Ciara and Tom’s chemistry.

Like I said before, maybe he’s a good actor and that’s it? 

‘‘Their FFH kiss was too real and magical!’‘

Spoiler alert for Cherry

Fan about witnessing Tom’s kiss with Ciara Bravo:

His reaction about kissing Laura Harrier:

‘‘He LOVES touching her’‘

I’m sorry, is he supposed to be scared of touching people?

This is it. This is the big touch they always talk about and the only times they’ve ever held hands is in manips or in FFH, but that doesn’t count, those are fictional characters. Well...

Maybe he’s a touchy person. Consider that.

’’She’s the only one that knows him well!’’

How well do Zendaya, Jacob, & Laura know Tom?

I’m sure Harrison, RDJ, his friends and others know him pretty well too. 

And only because he knows she likes ice cream doesn't mean she’s his ultimate soulmate or something blown out of proportion.

‘‘He’s only a gentleman with her!’‘

Tom saves Gina Rodriguez

Tom rescues fan

Karen Gillan

‘‘He looked way too in love with MJ to be fake’‘

Nope.

Nope 2

Nope 3

It’s called acting, pretty sure you guys know by now he’s good.

‘’They’re inseparable!’‘

Jacob, Tom and Harrison 

Also, why is it that every female in his life is his cousin, aunt, close childhood friend or ‘’he probably hates her’’ for you? 

They’ve said this multiple times but:

In an interview with Elle, Tom said he is not involved with anyone at the moment but is "definitely a relationship person." And when addressing the rumors, he says it’s uncomfortable and annoying when people ship him and Zendaya together. 

Zendaya also denied the claims, telling Variety Magazine that she and Tom were simply ‘just friends’. 

You can ship them if you want, as a bromance or cute chemistry, but not at the expense of someone else. Not when you violate their privacy, their lives and specially not when you bully, harass and stalk every detail of their lives.

Zendaya is clearly very happy with Jacob Elordi:

Let her have that. No, she doesn’t look miserable with him, no, he didn’t change her style or her personality. No, she doesn’t dress differently because of him. She is the same as always, she looks even happier. Let her be. This is good for her. She has every right to go out in public with her boyfriend. And for the love of god, stop commenting on her instagram posts ‘’warning’’ her that Jacob is going to cheat on her. Hopefully that won’t happen ever. 

And no, they’re not going to magically ’’get back together’’ when Spider-Man 3 starts filming, stop wishing bad luck on Zendaya and Jacob’s relationship. Tom is not going to magically realize how ‘’wrong’’ he was for ‘’leaving’’ Zendaya. He never left her, he’s her friend. 

All of this have gotten to the point where Tom can’t have a friendship with a female and he has to ‘’protect’’ them every time he wants to interact with them. Do you guys seriously think this is ok? Are you really a fan of his if this is how you want him to live? Controlling him all the time? 

Do you realize how wrong and unfair it is for the other partner every time you comment in every single picture on instagram, twitter, etc about how ‘’cute’’ Tom and Zendaya are? About how ‘’ugly’’ Olivia is? How about when you compare Zendaya and Olivia, or every single female in Tom’s life? Or when you comment on Zendaya’s instagram telling her she is different now and that you don’t like her now because she’s changed for Jacob? Telling her that Jacob is going to cheat on her? Stop sending death threats to the partners, stop tagging their families in your ‘’evidence/proof’’ posts/tweets. Just because they don’t voice these things doesn’t mean they don’t read them. 

Being sincere, if you all, as a collective; really, genuinely cared about Tom, this is the last thing you would wanna pull. In your endless obsession with thinking you have a right to dictate the life of a man simply because he's famous; actually stopped once to consider how this is possibly making Tom and Zendaya feel?? You are basically sending the message that nobody is enough, that him being happy isn't enough, that he won't ever be allowed to be happy until he gets with the person YOU think is best for him. Fucking abhorrent, how they don't have a choice on who they choose to fucking love. This is how you make a celebrity jaded. THIS is how you make a celebrity hate you. And he will, unless you stop your bullshit, and treat him; and whoever he decides to be with, like human beings.

When you focus only on two people it’s easy to believe anything, try and see the bigger picture. Allow Zendaya and Tom to enjoy their lives without harassing them and their partners.

[rachelthompsonauthor]

As a survivor, writer, and sexual abuse survivor activist, I participate in and observe real life and online daily conversations on the topic of sexual violence. Hmmm, the topic of sexual violence — like it’s just a topic, not crimes that affect people for the rest of our lives. That change the very structure of our cells, of our brains. Simply a topic of conversation.

Not a polite dinner conversation topic, of course. Yet, still a topic people bring up regularly, because you see, everyone is an expert (I call them the ‘Should Have Dones) on what a victim of a horrific sexual crime Should Have Done after she was brutally raped, sexually molested, abused, or harassed (unless you’re in the political arena and then it’s referred to as ‘sexual misconduct,’ that vague, gray area that cannot be defined, making it easy for politicians to talk in their circles and loopholes, as they are wont to do).

I refer to victims of sexual crimes (including myself) as survivors. Personal choice. We are, and have every right to refer to ourselves as, victims. Society loves to call us victims, in the negative sense of the word. That’s mistake number one so let’s start there.

Mistake #1: Victim Blaming Sexual Violence Survivors

‘Don’t be a victim,’ people spew at us. ‘Just get over it.’ ‘You just want the attention.’ Or my favorite (from a guy): ‘Why didn’t you just call 911? Seems easy enough.” (Well, I was only eleven at the time, and gosh well, 911 didn’t exist in 1975. Plus you know, the whole thing about how my abuser, the military dad next door, had a gun and had threatened to kill me and my baby sister if I told. So there’s that.)

Soooo easy.

One person on Twitter the other day said, ‘I’m not sure if I want to read your books. Are they an endless loop of hopeless reality, victim-mentality, woe-is-me? I prefer stories of go-getters!’

Funny thing is, I am a go-getter. I am ambitious. I’m pretty chill most days. I am also a victim of a serial child molester when I was eleven. Whether I ‘get over it,’ or talk about what happened and how I’ve dealt with it doesn’t change that he sexually abused me. I deal with that reality every day. It doesn’t define me — I don’t wear a label across my forehead, however, I don’t hide it anymore either. Shame no longer owns me.

If you look at the language people use, the focus is on the victim (I’m purposely using the word victim here so stay with me). Don’t be a victim. Get over it. Move on. As if we, the victims of crimes, have Done Something Wrong. As if discussing it means I’m still in victim-mode — which I’m not (because people do want to know); yet people assume that any victim of a sexual crime who discusses their harrowing real-life experience must be looking for attention because why else would we discuss something so private?

Here’s the bigger question: Why do you suppose people focus so much on the victim instead of the perpetrator? I’ve had years to observe this and here’s my completely non-scientific, non-random, non-controlled, non-trial, half-opinion, half-experience-based conclusion:

There’s more than one conclusion, depending on the person’s most treasured belief system. It’s uncomfortable. People don’t know what to say. They don’t want to get into the mind of an abuser, so to avoid that, they pick on the victim. They bully us. We’re accessible, easy targets. Defensive attacks are easier than compassion.

Victims are easy to blame because it’s harder and scarier to connect in any way with the mind of a criminal rapist or child molester — there might be something lurking there they don’t want to see — themselves.

There’s another school of thought (much more scientific):

“Our tendency to blame the victim is ultimately self-protective. It allows us to maintain our rosy worldview and reassure ourselves that nothing bad will happen to us. The problem is that it sacrifices another person’s well-being for our own. It overlooks the reality that perpetrators are to blame for acts of crime and violence, not victims.” (Source: Psychology Today)

I’d really love to see that paradigm shift. Instead of asking victims of sexual crime anything — because we the public are entitled to know nothing about the victim — let’s ask perpetrators why they perpetrate crimes against others. Is it anger? Is it hormonal? Is it societal? Is it mental? How can we fix this?

We know it’s not about sex. We know it’s about power and control. Examining power and patriarchal structures and how we break these down is a start. According to the latest studies, here’s what we do know about men who rape and sexually assault women:

Heavy drinking, perceived pressure to have sex,

a belief in “rape myths” — such as the idea that no means yes

A peer group that uses hostile language to describe women.

Men who are highly aroused by rape porn.

Narcissism magnifies odds that men will commit sexual assault and rape.

What about the idea that rape is about power over women? Some experts feel that research into hostile attitudes toward women supports this idea.

Rejection in high school and of looking on as “jocks and the football players got all the attractive women.”As these once-unpopular, often narcissistic men become more successful, [he] suspects that “getting back at these women, having power over them, seems to have become a source of arousal.” (Source: New York Times)

In the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and the sexual assault revelation by Dr. Blasey Ford:

“This is what we will expect from the congressional committee:

She will likely be asked to detail every moment of the alleged attack. How much she had to drink. Why she went upstairs. What she was wearing.” (Source: Washington Post)

And she was. That’s exactly what happened.

People feel righteous and justified, as if her drinking or clothing gives Kavanaugh a pass for his (alleged) ‘misconduct.’

**Postscript: we all know the result of that entire situation.

How does what any woman/person wears or drinks justify someone else’s criminal behavior? It doesn’t. In any situation. It simply doesn’t.

Mistake #2: The Language We Use

As I mentioned above, in Western society we focus on the victim:

Mary is a battered woman.

Rachel is a CSA (childhood sexual abuse) survivor.

Joe was raped.

Where are the perpetrators (usually men) who did the abusing in these sentences?

(For the purpose of this discussion, I’ll use men as the perpetrator, though I acknowledge #NotAllMen are abusers so please, let’s not go down that road. It is a well-known and researched fact that men do the majority of abusing (please read the full linked report for more data*) — of women, children, and other men. My point here is not to bash men; simply provide an example. I’m not in any way condemning men exclusively and I acknowledge that women can be abusers too, so everyone breathe.)

*Sex of Perpetrator in Lifetime Reports of Sexual Violence:

Most perpetrators of all forms of sexual violence against women were male. For female rape victims, 98.1% reported only male perpetrators. Additionally, 92.5% of female victims of sexual violence other than rape reported only male perpetrators. For male victims, the sex of the perpetrator varied by the type of sexual violence experienced. The majority of male rape victims (93.3%) reported only male perpetrators. For three of the other forms of sexual violence, a majority of male victims reported only female perpetrators: being made to penetrate (79.2%), sexual coercion (83.6%), and unwanted sexual contact (53.1%). For non-contact unwanted sexual experiences, approximately half of male victims (49.0%) reported only male perpetrators and more than one-third (37.7%) reported only female perpetrators (data not shown).

**For an in-depth discussion on gender symmetry, look at the work of Sherry Hamby, Ph.D.

(“Violence against women, men, and children is a men’s issue, not a women’s issue” — it’s not even a gender issue, according to Jackson Katz. Watch his TEDTalk — an excellent summary of how gendered language is endemic in our society and how we view violence against women and others, perpetuated primarily by men.)

There’s also an assumption (never a good thing) that survivors, especially female survivors, are liars. We must somehow want attention. Women must have ulterior motives for reporting sexual crimes (which violate our civil rights).

Look at the language people use when describing the multitudes of women who accused Bill Cosby in a criminal trial — they must want money or fame — misunderstanding there’s no money or fame to be had, as many of them remained anonymous, he was only convicted for the crimes against one woman, and a criminal trial does not award money.

This is especially true if the victim was drinking or drugged (more on that below). As Jim Hopper mentions in his work, our brains are flooded with chemicals during any kind of intense, traumatic situation, in particular during a sexual assault:

This part of our brain is responsible for executive functions, including focusing attention where we choose, rational thought process and inhibiting impulses. You are using your prefrontal cortex to read this article and absorb what we’ve written, rather than getting distracted by other thoughts in your head or things going on around you. But in states of high stress, fear or terror like combat and sexual assault, the prefrontal cortex is impaired–sometimes even effectively shut down–by a surge of stress chemicals. (Source: Lisak & Hopper, TIME Ideas, 2014)

Mistake #3: Expecting/Demanding a Hero Story

Like the reader above who expected my book to be about a woman who pulls herself up by the bootstraps and conquers the world, we are conditioned, particularly here in the West, to expect and might I even say demand, a mythic hero’s journey. From sitcoms to TV movies to series to Marvel and DC Universe to epics to The Olympics every two years — we are spoonfed heroes journeys at every turn.

Look at Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter — classic if clichéd examples of The Hero’s Journey (with male protagonists and male best friend side-kicks…plus the the oh-so-important scrappy, brilliant yet with not enough screen time female secondary character, who was never completely fleshed out as well as the guys and oh, always became prettier as the series wore on. Think Hermione — whom I love, yet still.). We do love a flawed underdog who grows to a champion!, finds the strength within themselves despite difficult circumstances, defeats the bad guy (ta-da!), and ultimately gets the girl…and, of course, yes, and they lived happily ever after.

Survivors of sexual violence are my heroes. We get up and live each and every day despite living with some combo of anxiety, depression, flashbacks, dissociation, nightmares, insomnia, triggers, hypersensitivity, hypervigilance, migraines, any number of immune disorders, addiction, and all kinds of other shit we are at higher risk for solely because we were a victim of sexual violence at some point in our lives.

PTSD is common in anywhere from one-third to one-half of sexual abuse survivors six months after the attack(s). 94% experience symptoms within the first 24 hours.

If and when we choose to share our survivor experience, we don’t owe anyone a hero story.

Life is hard enough as it is. Navigating it as a survivor adds other layers ‘normals’ cannot possibly imagine. Your expectation that we must live our lives according to your heroic expectations is not our issue.

And if I (or other victims) are still in victim mode — so what? Some victims are so traumatized by the crimes against them, the effects are devastating:

some repeatedly attempt to kill themselves — and often succeed,

become addicted to drugs/alcohol (did you know 75% of addicts and 90% of alcoholics were sexually abused as children? Source: The Right Step),

develop mental health issues (personality disorders, OCD, anxiety, depression, body dysphoria,

have lifelong weight issues

are at higher risk of immune disorders

can retreat to another mental universe completely (e.g., DID or other personality disorders).

If struggling to get through each day is the best we can do — so what?? Who is anyone to judge us?

Mistake #4: The Perfect Victim Myth

People blame victims for not being perfect. If she wore that red dress, if she was drinking, if she didn’t fight back, if she met the guy and they had sex (how dare a woman want sex #gasp), if she was out late walking, if she was asleep in her own bed in a nightie or even naked in her own home! If, if, if.

When you first hear about a crime, it’s our natural curiosity to want to find out more. “What happened? Who was involved, what were the circumstances, is everyone okay?”

However, in a sexual violence situation, many people immediately ask, “What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Was she alone?” This is our go-to. Because it’s somehow her fault for being imperfect. She’s to blame for putting herself in the position to be victimized (and yes, I’m using this passive language on purpose).

Again, with the victim-blaming. Yet the perfect victim expectation goes far beyond that. We��ve all watched enough Hollywood tropes to have been brainwashed into thinking that victims should be thin, virginal, pretty, helpless creatures who are perfect in every way (good), OR they are vampy vixens dressed in leather whom we know have it coming because they ooze sex (bad).

In reality, women are not caricatures (surprise!) and are sexually violated at all stages of life and in all stages of clothing.

Cases have been dismissed entirely because the victim didn’t cry sufficiently or wasn’t hysterical enough (if you recall, PTSD used to be referred to as ‘shellshock’ for a reason). Our brains can react in a multitude of ways during and after sexual assault — see Jim Hopper’s comprehensive work to get the neuroscientific background in understandable terms. As Jim points out, investigators have to learn how to talk to victims differently based on the latest scientific studies on how the brain reacts to intense trauma.

Memory gaps are common — why? Because of the pre-frontal cortex impairment mentioned above. Details can be hazy and remain hazy. The best scientists in the world don’t know exactly why, yet lawyers, judges, and juries demand definitive proof a victim isn’t lying (and even with proof, rape kits are collecting dust. Again, whole other post).

No. Let’s discuss it. If there’s DNA present, the victim can undergo the process of having a rape kit done (commonly referred to as a SAK: Sexual Assault Kit). After being raped or sexually assaulted, a victim must again open themselves up to strangers to be intimately examined.

Then there’s this fact: Most kits are never tested unless there’s a criminal investigation. Go ahead, read that again.

Are all SAKs tested?

No. While there are a few cities and states that automatically test all sexual assault kits, in general, SAKs are not tested unless specifically requested by a law enforcement agency for a criminal investigation. There are a variety of reasons that a kit might not be tested including:

A decision by law enforcement due to a variety of reasons — such as not prioritizing sexual assault cases or a perceived lack of victim credibility or cooperation — not to further investigate the case.

A decision by law enforcement that the results of the kit would not be significant to the investigation. This occurs most often when the suspect does not deny physical contact but instead claims the contact was consensual.

Backlogged crime labs. Due to resource issues, some crime labs may take up to a year or longer to test a SAK.

Lack of funding for DNA analysis. Some law enforcement jurisdictions, including crime laboratories, are underfunded and may be unable to test every SAK. (Source: National Center for Victims of Crime)

Dissociation (aka, spacing out or acting differently) is common after an assault, sometimes for years — even decades (something I still experience now, forty-plus years after my abuse as a child).

I experienced dissociation each time my abuser molested me (not realizing that watching myself as he abused me was not abnormal). I dissociated frequently throughout high school and college — it was normal for me to watch myself from above. Now that I know what that feeling is (something I can do on command), I’m much more aware. Sometimes, though, it happens and I don’t realize it at all. My family knows, though. My guy says he can see me ‘going under.’

You may also find this PTSD visual helpful (Souce: Daily Cardinal) and read more on PTSD here.

As for whether a woman decides to drink, do drugs, wear whatever she wants, meet a guy for sex — she is allowed to do all those things and still does not deserve to be raped. No man deserves to be raped. No child deserves it. No LGBTQ-identifying person. No human.

A person is raped because someone raped them.

By accusing a survivor who is brave enough to come forward for not fitting into the perfect victim myth you’ve come to expect, or accusing them of lying, it’s as if we are all having the wrong argument. What we have here is a faulty car engine (the brain, which in truth isn’t faulty at all), yet you’re accusing, discrediting, and blaming the driver.

When in actuality, the one causing the entire mess is the guy who ran the car off the road.

Allegedly.

Mistake #5: Sexual Violence is Political

Social media is rife with conspiracy theories about the Ford/Kavanaugh situation — which I won’t dignify by going into here on this post. The #MeToo movement, which has brought forward incredible, heartbreaking, brave voices sharing horrific stories of sexual violence, is now being attacked as men vs. women, as right-wing vs those ‘heathen, liberal left’ (never mind the number of priests, GOP’ers identified as child molesters and rapists, Fox News?). Some of the people involved in spreading and believing these stories are tin-foil hat ridiculous.

Geez. See how easy even I lowered myself into the mud? It’s an ugly look, isn’t it? Mud-slinging makes dirty people. Dirty people spread more dirt.

Add to that the conspiracy theorists, fake news, fake accounts, Russian whatevers, bots, and fundamentalists on all sides…we might as well be rolling with the pigs…or is it dogs or fleas? Besides, shouldn’t you be writing instead of arguing politics on social media?)

Which is why I refuse to discuss politics and sexual violence together in the same tweet or post.* I won’t argue with anyone about sexual violence and politics. They are completely separate because my focus is and always will be on the survivor. And if you work with The Joyful Heart Foundation as I do or RAINN (also wonderful), you’ll see they are not political, either (except to help get funding for rape kit testing or more services for survivors).

Advocating is about helping others. Politicizing sexual violence negatively, to further some politician’s career, doesn’t help anyone.

(*If there’s a bill, contributions needed, or volunteering to help or fund services for survivors — then I’m all in to help out survivors).

Making what a survivor goes through, after any kind of assault, fit into some political party ideology is ludicrous to me.

Compassion and kindness are my ideology.

Mistake #6: Assuming All Victims of Sexual Violence Are Liars

One more, on the house.

As I already mentioned above, the other part of politicizing sexual violence is the assumption that all sexual violence survivors are liars (ONLY if the survivor is hurting your candidate). Why do you suppose this is? Because diehard party-line believers and supporters cannot afford to question their own familiar belief system (this topic brings in fallacies, which you can read more about here). Whole other post.

“Why didn’t she report? She had plenty of time!” Such an easy question to ask. So simple. As easy as asking a domestic violence survivor why she didn’t just leave, right? Surely, violent, criminal situations can be explained away with a tweet. I hope this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does to me, yet that’s what people demand from survivors, particularly women.

I’ve shared above how parts of the brain shut off during trauma. If the victim chooses to come forward immediately, investigators must be trained to question survivors appropriately, keeping this in mind. The victim may not answer in a way politicians or the public would ‘expect’ a perfect victim to answer — yet the knowledge of how the brain responds to trauma is not widely known or understood.

The general public is a different story altogether. Zero comprehension of the brain on trauma. Therefore, we see these brutal social media attacks ensue due to unsatisfactory answers to questions the public has no right to ask.

Shame is another reason. It can take decades for a survivor to speak publicly about their sexual trauma (if they ever do at all). It took me three and a half decades to write Broken Pieces and then Broken Places (Broken People will be available soon-ish).

Fear of retaliation (and considering 90% of sexual violence is perpetrated by someone we know, this is an incredibly valid fear). More specifics from RAINN:

Of the sexual violence crimes not reported to police from 2005–2010, the victim gave the following reasons for not reporting:

20% feared retaliation

13% believed the police would not do anything to help

13% believed it was a personal matter

8% reported to a different official

8% believed it was not important enough to report

7% did not want to get the perpetrator in trouble

2% believed the police could not do anything to help

30% gave another reason or did not cite one reason

Read more statistics about perpetrators of sexual violence.

I won’t go into the details of my own sexual abuse here, but I will share this: as someone who did report (eventually) and testified in two trials at the age of twelve (civil and military), I can tell you it was one of the most terrifying, humiliating, and shameful experiences I’ve ever had, facing the man who abused me, having to explain what he did to me while others scrutinized every excruciating, embarrassing detail for further questioning and cross-examination.

Sure, I was young. Younger than both my kids are now. Too young to know the words I was about to speak.

For the record, he got eighteen months.

  Do you need help right now? Contact RAINN 800.656.HOPE (4673). Here are 67 resources for sexual assault survivors via Greatist.

  This post originally appeared on Medium.

  Read more about Rachel’s experiences in the award-winning book, Broken Pieces.

She goes into more detail about living with PTSD and realizing the effects of how being a survivor affected her life in

Broken Places, available now on Amazon.

  The post 5 Mistakes People Make When Discussing Sexual Violence appeared first on Rachel Thompson.

via Rachel Thompson

[sambart93]

2018.03.19 Dance with Devils The Musical: Fermata [Part One Review!]

I have two tickets to see this play (I gotta see both endings, duh!)  and I’m seeing it for the second time on Wednesday but seriously you guys...this is definitely making my top 5 stages/musicals for the year! I HAVE to get this review/report out ASAP! And once I’ve seen it a second time, I’ll make a Part Two post which will be more coherent and more detailed perhaps? Or just has extra notes.. we’ll see. 

MAIN POINT 

THIS WAS AMAZING AND I NEED TO GET THAT OUT ASAP! 

I’m watching Patarillo today (Tuesday) between the two DWD shows but in all honesty, now I don’t give a shit about Patarillo! I just wanna watch DWD again!! Hurry up Wednesday!!!

Official Website here Official Twitter here Press Coverage 1, 2, 3, 4

CAST and CHARACTERS

Kaminaga Kousuke as Remu Takano Akira as Lindo Yamazaki Shougo as Urie Yoshioka Yu as Mage Yasukawa Junpei as Shiki Tanaka Ryuusei as Jek Naitou Daiki as Loewen Washio Noboru as Viv Kimata Hiroyuki as Grand Fukui Daisuke as Ell Kobayashi Tatsuyuki as Shida Fukushima Kaita as Kazura Kitagawa Naoya as Marius Kimotsuki Rui as Ritsuka Dancer: Imai Ryo, Tsuji Daiki, Kimura Atsuki, Osaka Sora, Ozeki Kousuke

*

I had a front FUCKING row for this tonight! I had THE center seat for this! IT WAS AmAZiNG! Pretty much the best 8800 yen I’ve every spent! Excluding that one front row seat in Ki ni Mesu Mama where Tomo held my hand.

*NON-SPOILER WILL BE POSTED AFTER SECOND VIEWING but guaranteed it’s atleast a 9/10 rating.

Jumping straight into spoilers!

STORY

So the story is still the bare basics, the devils coming to the human world to find Ritsuka and the Grimore and the vampires stealing Ritsuka BUT we have Marius who watches over and narrates this story (in fact he even says the 'who will you choose? Akuma or Exocist?' which is what used to just be written on the walls via projection mapping) and hints that history and this story will forever repeat itself and he has some connection with Loewen and Jek ad is able to visually manipulate Shiki which causes the story to change somewhat; Shiki ends up taking Jek's side which ends in Shiki and Mage fighting, Shiki is also manipulated into seeing his old angel friend who he brutally killed and murdered years ago and is the reason why he's so in love with breaking things. << As you can tell, we get a LOT more Shiki this time, so much Shiki story, scenes and development this time around. Also instead of Holland we have Urie's butlers so we get more of Urie's backstory and personality, which leads to Urie being more forward to Remu about liking Ritsuka and this causes a MASSIVE fight between them RIGHT at the end of the story -- it broke my heart! 

The ending I watched for my first show was the Remu ending.

That's pretty much all the major changes, so let's get down to the structure changes.

We actually spend a LONG time doing scenes before we get to the main opening theme song! We have Urie's butlers having daydream scenes of Urie and his relationship with Remu -- they do it via an over-the-top ridiculous comedy skit. And then we have Remu and Urie talking about Remu going to the human world by himself but Urie persuades Remu to let him go too; Mage and Shiki over hear and force their way into joining too. THEN we finally get to the opening theme song.

The story between Ritsuka starting school and Ritsuka being kidnapped is essentially the same 100%; we get their solo songs, we get them trying to talk to her in the school council, we get Remu saving her when her house is burnt down, we get Lindo returning from London and the students trying to figure out who he is etc. BUT we have extra scenes of Shiki and Ritsuka in this when she sees him painting and he goes to destroy it and she tries to stop him and they have a moment. Also Jek's song this time is a crowd pleaser that you're allowed to clap along to and squeal to. AND the freaking students have a song this time around that we can clap along to and is so much fun!

As previously mentioned we also get Shiki's backstory of when he was in heaven and he had a fellow angel friend called Ell but Shiki was drawn towards destroying stuff, so much so that eventually he turned on his friend and murders him and that's why he got kicked out of heaven.

*

OKAY now to me randomly flailing about everything! It's going to be VERY all over the place but as long as you know the basic story, I think you'll understand what I'm talking about:

During the scene when the students are talking about Lindo 'the new transfer student', the students reminisce about when they gave presents to Remu and it turns into a comedy skit where: The students drew the worst picture of Remu but it was during a comedy skit so Remu was fake happy about it and we had Mage behind him like 'it looks exactly like you!' and Remu replied 'STFU!' xD The drawing of Remu!!! Then Shiki came in and took the drawing and ripped it oh so slowly.

When the boys first meet Ritsuka, this time Urie was REALLY feeling up Ritsuka!! He held her and then rubbed his hand up her thigh really strongly and slowly and I was like 'OH MY!' 

When it's just Ritsuka and Shiki, and Shiki holds her close and goes pretty vampy on her with his mouth SO SO close to her neck. I love how after this scene, she goes to her brother but still has Shiki's paint brush in her hand. OHHHHH AND HOW FUCKING MUCH SHE TRIES TO PROTECT SHIKI MULTIPLE TIMES FROM EVERYONE ELSE (cos they're trying to beat him up and hurt him) AT ONE POINT!!! OMG IT WAS TOO PRECIOUS!!!

Also the scene with Shiki and the students and the knife! The students didn't know what to do with him so they tried to hold it but got scared so tried to put it in their pants but got spooked again, their reactions were amazing! Serious kudos to the students this time around! They were absolutely FABULOUS!

In fact in general, ALL the reactions and little movements we get from the rest of the characters when they're in the background and/or aren't the main focus of the scene at that point were all amazing! We got such good moments; like the students (above) and we had things like Mage and Shiki holding hands at one point, and we had Shiki smiling so evilly when things weren't going well for Remu, 

AND!! Marius in general - he's never really the center stage, he's always in his little bubble up on the top left so he is constantly giving the best and most interesting reactions and Naoya does this thing of evilly licking his lips multiple times and I enjoyed it a BIT too much xD But, Naoya is ridiculously thin. You could see all the muscles in his legs and arms (like even the muscles between his wrist and elbow) and his elbows have like THREE points because he's just so thin. I swear he's currently medically anorexic which hurts my heart! I hope he puts weight on soon.

And just... ALL the little things were amazing.

I feel like this time around is SO MUCH DARKER. Especialy towards the end when we have Shiki and Jek pairing up, we also have Shiki almost killing Ritsuka at one point, we also have (I think it was in the anime though) Jek slitting Ritsuka's wrists, we have Shiki and Ell fighting, Shiki and Mage, Remu and Urie fighting. Especially the DAMN ending where it looks like Ritsuka and Remu are about to walk off and Urie is like 'fight me here RIGHT now. I'm not letting you have Ritsuka' and they beat the crap out of each other... goddammit. 

Which also leads to my next point; I CRIED LIKE A BITCH! Seeing Shiki and Mage and then the twist with Remu and Urie, I was in STREAMS of tears! I was an absolute wreck! I also burst out into tears when they did the slow version of the theme song ♡ It's so good!

Personally I feel that ALL the crap they added and change and stuff was just PERFECTION!

Ohh! We also had new songs from Lindo, Jek, the Students and I think one more. I liked all the new songs! And I really liked Lindo's new song and he dances with Ritsuka in it which is so cute! Also he sang this song during the live but it was with Loewen and seeing them do the dance together was ADORABLE! During Lindo and Loewen's duet and Loewen was all curled up and barking and it was adorable! AND during the students' song Lindo was so bullied by them because they didn't know it was him and he tried to join in with their dancing and stuff and they just pushed him out xD

OOHHH BUT I HAVE TO TELL YOU!!!!!! YOSHIOKA AND JP ACCIDENTALLY KISSED AT ONE POINT!!! AND YOSHIOKA COULDN'T GET BACK INTO CHARACTER COS HE WAS SHOCKED AND THE AUDIENCE WERE SQUEALING. JP managed to keep his cool and Yoshioka was taken completely off balance xD It happened just after Mage's solo and Shiki walks in after Ritsuka has run away from Mage.

The new Urie is so damn PRETTY!! He’s the best singer for Urie they’ve had I think. And he reminded me of Ino Hiroki a tad. While I am still Kamisato bias for Urie, this guy did a damn good job and I wouldn't mind him staying as Urie from now on. 

They kept Ritsuka as a male ballet dancer and he did a really good job! He was cute too (not Miura Hiroki cute but cute enough) He was a bit taller than what we've had before - so I kinda giggled when the rest of the boys got close to 'her' because I think she was taller than most of them xD And because he's over 20 (the dancer) this time, it explained why Urie, Shiki and such got a lot more touchy feely with Ritsuka this time around. I feel like they also they weren't as bothered this time about hiding Ritsuka's face because (I assume) they know the audience likes that it's a guy playing Ritsuka and we all want to know what he looks like and such. BUT it could just be because I was right at the front so the lighting and stuff didn't hide any of her face from me? We'll see.

It was either Remu and Urie or Mage and Shiki but either Urie/Shiki smiled and starred at the other for a long time and I was getting just such BL feels.... It was Shiki and Mage! I remembered now! Shiki was just starring down Mage and I was getting a little...hot.

I am so thankful that the production and director listened to us fans this time and gave us so much more Shiki ♡ it was the best!

Also it did not feel like 2 and a half hours which proves it was a damn good play! If something is so enjoyable that you don't feel it, you know they did good.

I feel like Kaminaga is SUCH an UNDERATED actor and I too always underrated him; like I LOVE whatever the hell I see him in but the rest of the time, I just forget about him! But he's such a good Remu!!!!!!!! He's so great!!!! He needs more love!!!

The girls behind me were like ‘woah this is our fifth time! But we haven’t been THIS close (second row) yet! Now I’m super nervous’ xD

ANNND! Can we discuss AKIRA’S THIGHS?!?!?! Can we just?! Because they are SO NICE! They fit his jeans so TIGHTLY! They looked great!!!

Seriously, the ending fucked me up when Urie started turning on Remu!!! Holy crap! And it sounded like the actor really smacked his leg on the floor so I think his hobbling was real for a good few minutes.

OMG and just before Jek's solo, Ryuusei came trampsing on stage like 'Today's magic word it Maji Manji!' and then he went on talking about something like being a high school girl xD I wouldn't put it past him.

I LOVE how Urie's butler Viv and his guard Grand dressed up in school uniforms and had these cute buns and hairstyles for their cover.

During the live Urie gave his rose to Mage and he was like 'what do I want this for?!' and then Shiki ran after him and was like 'give it to me!' but Mage refused and offered to a girl in the front row instead xD Seriously, JP and Yoshioka are such good friends and it just SHINES through whenever I watch DWD. 

There's a moment where Urie is constantly whipping and Mage is constantly punching Shiki.... Urie with a whip is not good o_O but really it is xD

I really really liked the new set! Center back we had this steampunk like bell and we had cogs around the rest of the stage and in the center we had an arrangement of steps around in a circle and the circle platform would spin around. I really liked it!

OHHH! Remu's Sauron eye of a father made several appearances. AND I spend the first few minutes of the stage laughing at Remu because I remembered just HOW MUCH I hate his shoes.

Also after the fight scene, I could hear Urie's actor ripping the velcro straps off his costume the MOMENT he stepped off stage xD It was pretty loud actually, especially because it was a non-music quiet scene on stage.

ALSO I swear to god one of the music tracks is very similar to LoTR music! I heard it and I was like 'where are my elves at?!' it sounds so familiar! 

In general, all the DWD music is great! I don't think I have a song or soundtrack number I don't like...

Final note: I will fight ANYONE who’s all for Ritsuka/Lindo instead of Ritsuka/Remu!!! << But watched me watch the other ending on Wednesday and I fall for Lindo/Ritsuka xD

*

OH! After the show, there were kankeishas in front of me when I was walking out;

Guy: so this is a series? What number are we at? Girl: this was the second one

It took ALL my energy not to butt in and correct her. It is the THIRD one ACTUALLY!

*

GOODS

*

And I’m done! Now to go and see Patarillo now... but I just want tomorrow already!

[mrsabbington-blog]

Farewell, my dear Watson: Amanda Abbington on Sherlock and her break-up with Martin Freeman

The actress’s career was going from strength to strength when her relationship with her co-star imploded. She tells Bryan Appleyard how she contained the fallout

Amanda Abbington — who, as Mary Morstan, took a bullet for Sherlock Holmes — has a new man whom she won’t name. “He’s lovely, we’re keeping it very much on the low down. We don’t want lots of people to know. We’ve been together for about a year now. He’s an actor and he’s delightful. He’s very mindful of my situation and I’m very mindful of his.”

She was with Holmes’s sidekick, Dr Watson — aka Martin Freeman — for 16 years. They have two children, Grace and Joe. They broke up in 2016 while they were both starring in Sherlock.

“We still get on really well, we still really both admire each other as actors … he’s a great guy, but we just couldn’t live with each other any more.”

Given that Sherlock was an international hit, and that Freeman achieved global superstardom as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, this was a high-profile break-up. She was papped, looking supposedly “disconsolate” while out shopping.

Trying to keep the new man a mystery is understandable. But it won’t be easy. Tabloids have recently been reporting that she and Northern Irish actor Jonjo O’Neill are an item. She is neither confirming nor denying this. The paps would have been after her anyway, because she is the star of Safe, a new Netflix series by the crime author Harlan Coben. The first strange thing about this show is her co-star Michael C Hall, who played the Miami serial killer Dexter and the gay undertaker David Fisher in Six Feet Under. Here, he is a dodgy English husband in a wealthy suburban enclave (in fact Manchester, but you’re not supposed to know that). The strange thing is his English accent, which is near perfect.

“He was really worried about that. English accents are hard for Americans to do. I don’t think he had a voice coach.”

Her voice has a slight southeastern working-class flavour. She talks quickly, eagerly and laughs a lot and, for some reason, she seems much prettier in the flesh than on TV. I am sure, however, there is something wrong with her tastebuds. We’re both having tuna salad at a studio in north London. The fish is perfectly inedible, but she eats it all.

To get back to Hall — he will always be Dexter to me, so I’m pretty sure he’s guilty of something other than the affair he’s having with Sophie, the detective sergeant played by Abbington, which is revealed in the first episode. Also revealed is the fact that Sophie’s ex-husband is living in a caravan in her front garden.

This is the second time she’s played a detective sergeant. The first was Jo Moffatt in the series Cuffs in 2015. The BBC cancelled that after one series. She was also Detective Chief Inspector Louise Munroe in Case Histories, another BBC series. Female police officers, we agree, have a long and distinguished screen history. “Prime Suspect,” I suggest. “Helen Mirren!”

“The Gentle Touch!” she replies. “Cagney and Lacey! Angie Dickinson! I loved Police Woman. I wanted to be Angie Dickinson when I was growing up.”

There’s a good reason she fantasised about being a strong woman with a gun. For three years at primary school she was badly bullied — her lunches were stolen and she was called ugly, stupid and smelly. Nobody would play with her.

“There was a group of girls who made my life miserable. I am now very, very aware of it when it happens anywhere. If it happens to my kids or on the street or on the internet I’ll wade in.”

She’s certainly an active and sweary anti-bullying and anti-general-nastiness campaigner on Twitter — she is @CHIMPSINSOCKS.

“I’ve never understood the c**** who abuse and hurt animals,” was her latest tweet as I was writing this. “Wonderful. Just wonderful. Let’s make older women feel even more f****** invisible and unattractive,” she tweeted about a story saying men preferred younger women.

She was brought up in Hertfordshire, her father was a taxi driver and her mother was tough: she finally found out about the bullies and went round to the house of one of them. “If your child does anything like that to my daughter again,” she said, “I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

Her mother’s fierceness and her grandmother’s advice seem to have prepared her for the perils of show business. When I ask her the inevitable Harvey Weinstein question, she says she’s never had a problem. “I always go on a film set as a mate of everybody. I set my stall out. I’m just going to be like the funny mate who hangs out with the sparks and the prop boys, and I make sure I am not someone you can take the piss out of or take advantage of. I learnt that from my nana — be strong, make them laugh and don’t take shit from anybody.”

Anyway, there she is in Hertfordshire worshipping Angie Dickinson and wanting to be on stage. Somehow this leads her into dancing. She studied dance from the age of five. Eventually she got auditions for Cats and Starlight Express, but she knew she wasn’t good enough. In any case, the decision was made for her when, aged 18, she did the splits and ripped the muscles in her groin.

“That ended my dancing career, but I would never have been a good dancer. Then a drama teacher told me that he thought my talent lay in acting and he was absolutely right. I’d always performed, always made up stories and done funny voices. I went to a tiny drama school in Hitchin and I felt like I’d come home.”

She picked up small parts — The Bill, Wycliffe, Casualty and so on. But there was no real breakthrough. Well, there was one: the Maltesers TV ads she made with Katherine Parkinson. Unlike almost every TV ad ever made anywhere, they are still worth watching.

At one point she went 18 months without any work, changing her agent half a dozen times in desperation. The first stirrings of a change in her fortunes came with ITV’s Mr Selfridge — she was Josie Mardle — which ran for four series between 2013 and 2016.

“My character was an amalgamation of quite a few women who worked within the top echelons of Selfridges. There was so much going on in those years — the suffragettes, the Titanic. It was a dream job.”

It was a success, but not huge and a bit middle-aged — it was not for geeks, millennials or snowflakes, so it could not really go, as we must say, viral. All that changed when the actor and screenwriter Mark Gatiss invited her and Freeman to sit in on a discussion on the third series of Sherlock. They wanted to bring in a new character from the books, Mary Morstan, who first appears in The Sign of Four. Abbington had a couple of ideas. “I said Nicola Walker, she would be amazing in it. Or Olivia Colman.”

It was a set-up, they were going to offer it to her all along. She burst into tears. Sherlock was the big TV show of the moment.

“People started to say hello to me in the street when Sherlock started. Mr Selfridge wasn’t iconic. Sherlock hit the ground running and everyone went mad about it.”

She did seven episodes in two series, then she saved the life of Holmes and sacrificed her own by taking the bullet; it’s an invented incident, Mary dies in the books, but the cause is unknown. I ask her why a mouthy, Estuary-accented working-class girl like her would take a bullet for a toff — Holmes being played by the old Harrovian Benedict Cumberbatch.

“I know! Why would she do that? I wouldn’t, I’d run the other way.”

Did being killed off upset her?

“No, it made sense. And, anyway, you never really leave Sherlock, there are always flashbacks. So if they ever do another one I’m hoping they’ll have me back.”

The strange thing about her role in Sherlock was not simply that it made her famous. Out there on the easily offended, lost-its-grip-on-reality internet it made her notorious as the scheming woman who came between the previously happy and — in the imaginations of some fans — gay relationship between Holmes and Watson.

“I made the mistake of talking about the fan art very early on. They used to do some beautiful work about Watson and Sherlock being together as a couple, and I made an off-the-cuff remark that I wasn’t entirely happy with this because my kids might see it. The fallout was terrible and I felt really bad. I wasn’t being disparaging about their work. It got out of hand and I managed to make a lot of enemies. I had to do a lot of damage limitation. It’s because they’re fiercely protective of the show and that’s brilliant! But it means you have to treat it with a lot of respect.”

Meanwhile, Freeman had to be away for years in New Zealand shooting The Hobbit. While away she had the children to look after and had a cancer scare — a lump in her breast that turned out to be harmless. She also landed herself in trouble with the taxman. She was declared bankrupt because of an unpaid £120,000 tax bill. “I didn’t pay enough over a period of years and it accumulated, but for the record I paid it all back with a huge amount of interest,” she says. “Because I’m an idiot and I didn’t put enough away. It was my biggest regret and now I make sure everything is in place where it can never happen again.”

On top of that, their relationship was in trouble and, in the midst of the Sherlock episodes that put them on screen together, they broke up. They kept it as quiet as they could. “When we broke up nobody knew, we didn’t tell anybody except for a few key people because they had to know, because of the logistics of hotels and stuff. It took six months for it to get out and a lot of that was while we were working on Sherlock.

“We were not children, we weren’t going to start throwing crap at each other. We were professional and we were going to get on and make a show and be civil to each other. That’s far more important than being angry and being sad.”

Safe could have her up there again. The first episode I saw looked very promising and Coben does seem to be associated with hits. We’ll see.

Abbington, meanwhile, is back in her home village of Little Heath, Hertfordshire, with her parents living down the road. She’s an only child, they’re close. She loved being an only child because it made it easier to get on with adults and she never had to put up with rows like those between her children.

“Please, Mummy, can I get an agent,” says Grace, who is nine. She wants to be an actor. Abbington thinks she has the talent and presence to succeed. But she’s cautious. Parts like Mary Morstan and Josie Mardle don’t grow on trees.

Safe launches on Netflix on May 10

[lonelier-version-of-you]

OK so since I've got some time I tracked down the episode you listed for that Jac arc (not easy but easier than I thought it would be since the episodes are so old, go fandom) and ok. trigger warnings allll over the place but he depth these episodes give to Jac is massive. That was sides to Jac I'd never seen before and a lot of important context which really puts her in a different light for why she acts the way she does about a lot of things.

I did not expect the first twist to be that she wasn't told the dude was a predator?? my stomach was in knots over that and then it happened and it was terrifying, and the guy kept harassing her and tried to assault her again and ugh god. I was also surprised at how willing the show as to go there and put you in Jac and her feelings and not relieve the tension. they were really like no, this is horrible and you want it to be over and go away but that's not how it works

and the Lola stuff. wow. that was brave, to make a character give that argument when Jac was dead against reporting. and to let them argue and say the things they did - Lola about saving other victims and Jac's whole monologue about how the system doesn't protect victims and it wasn't Lola's business to tell anyone she had been raped. the scene where Lola and the other doctor pull Jac out of surgery and have to make it obvious why was just toe curlingly uncomfortable.

Jac's reactions really said she'd been through it before I thought. there was that extra something underneath in all of her anger and shame that really seemed to hint at another story. I didn't actually know Holby Blue existed lmao so the police twist was another shock and I hated it, I know it's sort of realistic how they were awful and it made me feel anxious watching them gang up on her in the interview and twist things and just keep digging and pushing until she broke

I liked that everyone else agreed that even if Jac had stabbed the predator he deserved it, and that even characters that hated Jac were horrified at what had happened. I half expected them to let someone say that she was asking for it and I'm really glad that they never went near that. It also didn't hit me until halfway through the episode but that was a big gap for a show like Holby to drop and then pick up a storyline??

They do shed a lot of light on Jac's character, don't they? And overall they were quite well-done episodes, albeit really hard to watch. I was really impressed when I first saw them (hate that S9E47 and S9E48 were written by Martin Jameson, who has since outed himself as a massive ableist by bullying autistic people on Twitter back in 2019, but what can you do).

You're very right about how willing the show was to really go there with the storyline and how intense it was. And yeah, the Lola stuff was really good. That argument scene is just brilliant, as with the scene you mentioned with Jac being pulled out of surgery.

Jac's reactions definitely indicated she'd been through it before - it was actually deliberately written that way. Originally, it was supposed to be revealed during the storyline that Jac had been raped in the past and wasn't believed, and that's why she didn't want to report Alan Clooney for assaulting her. The scenes got taken out - cut for time, I'm pretty sure? - but they made it far enough for Rosie to have filmed them, so yeah, it was very much intentional.

I always forget HolbyBlue exists, so you're valid for not knowing about it lol. Literally the only notable things to come out of it were that crossover, and Jimmy Akingbola (better known in the Holbyverse as Antoine Malick) playing one of the characters. As much as it was realistic for the police to be awful to Jac, it was definitely really hard to watch :( It made me anxious watching it for the first time too. The bit where they're like "did you lose your temper?"... god. (Rosie was incredible in those scenes though.)

I hadn't actually really thought about how all the characters, even the ones who hated Jac, were horrified by what happened, and how the show never had any of the other staff disbelieve Jac or say she was asking for it, but now you put it like that... oh. So that's why, while this storyline was obviously upsetting, I still found it so much less hard to watch than Henrik's recent storyline (the whole thing with Sahira not believing him was just awful).

And yeah, they did drop it for a surprisingly long while before revisiting it, didn't they? It feels different when you can watch the episodes at the click of a button today, but I imagine viewers at the time must have thought the storyline had been forgotten about for a while.

[alixzin]

Right you're going to regret unleashing my prompting because I have 31 OF THEM (I'm really very sorry) a whole bunch are cliched but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ , as you said. Please tell me to fuck off 1. Meeting the cast, take 2. Does he meet them individually or all together? 2. Alex is being bullied at school. Does he fight back or not? Does he tell Lin and V or try to hide it? 3. Alex struggles to make friends because of his attachment issues. 4. Alex does make friends but worries about telling them who his foster family are. (alternatively he tries to hide the fact that he’s a foster kid at all) 5. Maybe it takes a while for them to find the right therapist? 6. Alex actually IS embarrassed by Lin. 7. Alex struggles to gain weight. 8. Legal drama arises with a past foster parent. Maybe they’re brought up on charges for the sexual abuse? 9. Family vacation. Would a beach bring up bad memories? Would Alex hate flying or be totally glued to the window the entire way over? 10. Alex struggles with casual money use because he’s used to having to scrimp and save. 11. Meeting the grandparents 12. Meeting the cousins/aunts and uncles 13. The press learns the Mirandas have a foster kid. 14. Lin starts getting asked about Alex in interviews and SHUTS THAT SHIT DOWN 15. Discussion of the London move (maybe Alex thinks they’re going to leave him behind?) (not sure how foster system works but would they have to jump through lots of legal hoops to be able to take him with them? (Vanessa and her lawyer knowledge) 16. Alex comes to a performance and gets totally star-struck by a VIP (alternatively Lin is totally star-struck by a VIP but has to play it cool because his kid is there) 17. Animal-assisted-therapy (apparently helps a great deal with survivors of sexual assault?) 18. WHITE HOUSE VISIT. 19. Parent-teacher meetings (do you have to do that for the age group you teach lol?) 20. Tony awards/Grammy awards etc. Does Lin mention Alex in his raps/sonnets/teary speeches? If not why? 21. Alex gets twitter or something and posts something he shouldn’t (pic of Seb/script page/private comment) cue angry Lin. 22. Alex has to get an MRI when he gets a proper prescription for his migraine meds. 23. Vanessa and Lin deciding they want to foster 24. Obligatory first meeting with Alex fic 25. Alex learning to trust the Mirandas with regards to touch (maybe like a 5+1 type thing?) 26. Lin introduces Alex to some of his favourite music/movies/books/shows and Alex HATING it. 27. Alex opens up to Lin and V about his past abuse. 28. Taking Tobi for a walk 29. Various occasions- birthdays/holidays and the like 30. Alex starts to gain some independence (getting to school on his own and the like) 31. Awkward Safe Sex talk

all-the-worlds-a-fandom

Prompt responses. Not any stories yet, just bouncing ideas around. I know that I work best when I can discuss my ideas first. Once a lifetime ago (okay, not really but being a teenager feels that way) I wrote a 22 chapter fanfic novel with 2 other authors. The experience was incredible. Pretty much everything I know about writing was learned from that collaboration. Basically, it consisted of writing a small piece, sharing it with the other two and then spending hours discussing it and what comes next via the comment section with these two strangers. Looking back, I can’t even say it was my best work, but it was creativity at its finest.

2. He would hide it. Alex would so hide it! I think how he’d react would be a bizarre contrast between little Alex putting his head down just taking it and overreacting/ lashing out big time. I’m picturing the inside out characters fear and anger (still haven’t seen it) fighting over lead control on this one. I imagine this would just egg the bullies on since not knowing which reaction they were going to get this time would add to the fun of it. I’m not picturing physical bullying, just a constant wave of low level taunts and harassment.

3. Yes! One thing I don’t want to do is go the route, that like everyone has done, where Alex quickly has a close group of friends (Laurens, Mulligan, Lafayette, Schuyler sisters). It’s adorable, but already well explored. I am much more interested in the idea of Alex being very isolated and alone in the world. Like I could see one of the reasons Alex and Lin are so close is because Lin is Alex’s only friend.

I’m very charmed by the idea of Alex becoming friends with Chris Jackson’s son whose a few years younger than Alex and has autism. Lin and Chris are best friends so it makes sense their families would spend a lot of time together. I can picture the two boys hiding in the corner together at a cast party, both overwhelmed by all the people and noise for different reasons. I can see it taking Lin a while to acknowledge that with all of Alex’s combined issues, he’s also a special needs father like Chris, but once he does becoming even closer to his friend from having this is common. Maybe there’s a moment at the party watching the two of them together and coming to this realization. (note though that I would only ever write about their interactions observed from a distance, or mentioned in passing, since writing fanfic about a real life child is so crossing the line) I can also see Lin just aching for Alex to have a friend.

4,6,13,14. It will take him awhile but once he starts forming the beginning seeds of friendship this would be a big issue that derails his attempts. Especially with Lin’s overnight celebrity status that comes from Hamilton. Since Alex coming to them when the show is still in development I can see this becoming a major plotline. Lin starts getting recognized on the streets of NYC all the time when he’s out with Alex and it freaks him out. It becomes a thing that Alex is constantly ducking out of the way for selfies, but people also start taking creepy photos of them from a distance and posting it to the internet. Questions start to arise about who this teen is that looks just like LMM. When asked by fans Lin dismissively says he’s a relative, so initially the thought is that Alex is his nephew, but as Alex starts popping up more and it comes out that he’s living with him the circulating rumor is that Alex might be Lin’s bastard child from a prior relationship (since they look so much alike) and that Lin might have knocked up a gf in college that he recently got custody of.  People become extra curious because Lin is always tweeting about his life and sharing photos, but Alex is never directly mentioned which seems suspicious. Lin’s super protective and does not want to let on that Alex is a fosterkid. Any press questions about Alex and the interview would be shut down. He knows the press would have a field day with that story, but at the same time the various circulating rumors start to become very harmful. I also know that in the state of New York it is perfectly legal for paparazzi to take photos of celebrity kids (while it’s illegal in California) which starts to become a problem for Alex. Just to add to the mess, social services starts to question if the Miranda’s are a suitable placement given all of this. Oh boy…

5. Honestly because he’s Hamilton I don’t think he’s ever going to fully open up to a therapist. No matter what they do or which new person they try Alex just keeps on glaring and refusing to talk. Eventually they all realize that it’s currently a waste of time, but since social services is requiring it they keep bringing Alex to his weekly sessions. Maybe after a couple years of this Alex will finally break?

7. Conversation coming back from doctor’s appointment weigh in:

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know that wasn’t nearly enough. I really am trying, I swear. I’ll do better though, promise. I’ll make you proud next time.” Alex is bordering on hysterical, crushed by the look of disappointment on Lin’s face when he saw the numbers on the scale. He hates letting him down.

“Alexander I’m not mad at you, kid.”

“You’re not?”

“No! All this means is we’re stopping for a big serving of ice cream on our way home.”

9. Maybe on a family trip to Puerto Rico? Yeah, I don’t think Alex would do well with the beach, especially in an environment so close to Nevis. I can just see him standing frozen right on the edge of where the ground meets the sand, refusing to take a step further. The whole family is dressed and ready for a fun day on the beach and Alex won’t move. Lin and Vanessa are baffled since the exact details of what happened to him with the hurricane are fuzzy in his report. Alex and the ocean have some major trust issues to work out. If the ocean was a character like in Moana they would need couples counseling. If they stayed in a beachfront resort they’d end up having to switch to a room that *wasn’t* ocean view.

15. This has been in the back of my mind for a while now. I’ve gone as far as to research it a bit and prior court permission is required before even taking a foster kid out of state. Out of the country trips are allowed, but requires a lot of advance planning and paperwork, and an extended time would not be well tolerated. They would probably have to fast track an adoption or legal guardianship (a step between fostering and adoption, I have a friends Mom whose done this with a child of distant Native American decent who could not legally be adopted outside of their tribe) to make it happen. But Alex might not be legally free to be adopted because it can’t be proven that Alex’s dad might not come back into the picture later. Meanwhile they are trying to keep all these legal proceedings a secret from Alex so he doesn’t stress over it, but then Alex reads online that Lin has been cast in Mary Poppins before they get a chance to talk to him about it, and becomes convinced he’s getting left behind. He would probably sit on this for a good week or so before saying anything. Later when it’s looking like it’s not going to go through Lin is ready to turn down the role and Alex feels horrible. This is angst extreme!

18. I just love the image of Alex tagging along shyly behind Lin at the white house. But it’s sure going to take a lot of convincing to get him to come…

19. Yes, I do! I’ve given some thought into the process of Alex needing to be placed on a special plan (like a 504 plan for his panic attacks and migraines since they are affecting his ability to function at school). This is the definition of writing what I know! It can be a tough process and I can see Alex (and initially Lin) being resistant to having any kind of association with special education.

Written weeks ago:

Alex’s mid-term report card leaves him dumbfounded. It’s not even the letter grades themselves, averaging C’s with a splattering of B’s and Ds). It’s the comments that shock him:

“Multiple missing assignments, falling behind, risk of failing, does not complete assignments, frequently misses class, clearly very bright, not living up to potential, work completed brilliant, lazy.”

This is not his Alex. Alex who Lin constantly finds knee deep in schoolwork. Alex who stays up far later than he should reading. Alex who frequently needs to be forced to take a break from his writing. Did they get him mixed up with another Alexander Hamilton?

Some digging reveals that Alex often skips class when feeling especially anxious or having a panic attack or avoiding other students. He hides in the bathroom. He also gets lots of milder headaches which makes it hard to get class assignments done. Also, Alex flat out refuses to participate in group projects.

After talking to all of the teachers a theme emerges: all homework, extended individual assignments and tests Alex excels in. He’s doing horribly in participation points, groups projects and in class assignments. How well he’s doing is proportional to how much weight these items carry in class. Classes where tests and essays make up the bulk of the grade Alex is doing well in. Classes where the opposite is true Alex is bombing.  

20. “Sebastian and Alex, Daddy’s bringing you home a Grammy.” That’s all I’ve got so far, and it might be changed, but it’s cute. I think it’s a given that Alex refuses to come to any of the award ceremonies, despite multiple offers.

22 I’ve been throwing this idea around as well (it’s already been eluded to in the stories). When I was Alex’s age I had, like, all of the brain related tests done. I thought the MRI was super cool, but I can see anyone with claustrophobia or trust issues (a cage like thing is placed over your head to keep it still and the machines quite loud) freaking out. EEGs sucked! I had to stay awake for 24 hours with no caffeine beforehand and then they torture you with flashing lights and weird breathing and such. Then my teenage self got all hysterical about all the glue in my hair because I was so exhausted my emotions were all out of whack. I’m already feeling bad for Alex (and Lin) thinking about how I’m going to use this memory to torture him.

24. Since our first discussion I have come up w/ a few ideas that haven’t been done before, but I’m keeping those to myself for now. We’ll see what happens.

New problem: what do I tackle first?  

[clobov]

LONG VALLEY, N.J. -- The gunshots rang out from the back porch of the farmhouse, a little ways off from the stables and Olympic-level dressage arena, the improbable sound rising over the 53-acre estate. A woman had been shot twice in the chest by a man well known not merely to her but also to just about everyone in the rarefied dressage community: Michael Barisone, an Olympic rider, the owner of the farm and the woman's trainer. The shooting was the shocking culmination of a landlord-tenant dispute that the woman, Lauren Kanarek, had documented all summer on social media, openly fearful of what might happen. "I'm afraid," she wrote, five days before the attack. "I'm being bullied." Barisone, who was charged with two counts of attempted murder, said that he shot Kanarek in self-defense. In the week before the shooting, Barisone had called 911 several times, claiming that she and her fiance were squatters on his farm and were harassing him; in one call, Barisone described the conflict as "a war. And it's going to be dealt with." Kanarek survived the attack but was placed in a medically induced coma. Finally, after an extensive surgery to repair damage from a bullet to her left lung and more than a week of hospitalization, she had recovered enough to start reconnecting with the world. The first thing she saw, she recalled, were comments that "wished I was dead." "They know there is a person suffering multiple gunshot wounds, bullet wounds," she said in an interview, her voice raspy where the ventilator had damaged her vocal cords. "To say those things, is something no one could ever imagine." Seldom do attempted murder cases elicit sympathy for the suspect; rarer still are cases where the victim is blamed. And yet Kanarek somehow found herself the target of an online lynch mob. "Yes, you were shot by an obviously provoked man … but you accept zero accountability," reads one direct reply to Kanarek on an online forum hosted by The Chronicle of the Horse, an equestrian publication. "What a narcissist. It's always someone else's fault." The blind sympathy for Barisone lies partly in his standing in the dressage world; he served as a reserve rider on the U.S. dressage team in the 2008 Olympics and coached Allison Brock, one of the riders for the U.S. squad that won a team bronze in the 2016 Olympics. Few fans could fathom his involvement, and many who tried to find reason behind the shooting ended up focusing on his claims that Kanarek had serially harassed him. Just before the shooting, Kanarek had asked the Division of Child Protection and Permanency to investigate Barisone for potential abuse of a child of his fiancee, according to Jeffery Simms, the lawyer who represented him at the arraignment. "The alleged victim is not a victim," Simms told reporters then. "She's a villain." Kanarek said she did not recall placing the call to child services. Barisone's supporters also point to Kanarek's inflammatory social media presence. She has at least one pending charge against her for cyberstalking in North Carolina, where she used to live."Lauren Kanarek took her bullying too far. Everyone has limits," Susan Wachowich, who runs a popular site covering the sport, wrote on Twitter the day of the shooting. She wrote that the site "100% supports Michael Barisone in his actions." The post has since been deleted by Twitter as a violation of its standards. Wachowich did not respond to a request for comment. As is her way, Kanarek is fighting back. In flurries of posts since her attack, Kanarek has replied to strangers, friends and foes, unspooling her version of events and reminding the people who pile up on her that she was nearly killed. "No matter what -- I was shot twice. It was not in self-defense. While plenty more story exists, what else matters?" she wrote in one response. "Do you condone trainers shooting their students trying to kill them? Sure looks that way." Kanarek met Barisone at a horse competition in Wellington, Florida, in 2018. She decided to move her horses from North Carolina to his Hawthorne Hill farm in Long Valley, in the heart of New Jersey's horse country, for the chance to train with an Olympic great, she said. As part of the arrangement, she and her fiance, Robert Goodwin, would live on the property, in an apartment in a farmhouse where Barisone lived. Tensions grew after a flood in the farmhouse forced Barisone and his fiancee to move into a barn on the property, Kanarek said. Barisone tried to kick Kanarek and Goodwin out of the apartment, according to Kanarek, so he could live there; they refused. A month before the shooting, Barisone began contacting people who had online disputes with Kanarek. He told them that he was trying to build a legal case against Kanarek and Goodwin, and eject them from his property. Joey Ann Stagaard, a hair restoration specialist from New Jersey, received one such call about a week before the shooting. "'I know that you are a victim of this girl Lauren's torture, and she is on our farm,' " Stagaard recalled Barisone telling her over the phone. "He said, 'She is causing nothing but havoc here; we are losing our minds.' " Stagaard has been embroiled in a long online spat with Kanarek, whom she has never met, over a former shared love interest, she said. Her public animus toward Kanarek has continued even after the shooting. Stagaard was one of several women, including a North Carolina-based horsewomen named Kathryn Parkinson, who filed a complaint last spring to the U.S. Equestrian Federation and SafeSport, a nonprofit organization that investigates various forms of misconduct in Olympic sports. They accused Kanarek of bullying. The federation said the complaint was investigated and found not to merit any action. "It seemed to us more like a personal matter," said Vicki Lowell, a spokeswoman for the federation. Separately, Kanarek said she had complained to SafeSport about Barisone this summer. Dan Hill, a spokesman for SafeSport, said he could not confirm whether a report was filed.In the meantime, the situation at Hawthorne Hill worsened in the weeks before the shooting: Police were summoned to the farm at least six times, according to recordings of 911 calls placed by Kanarek, her family and Barisone. "These people have been living here, and they're causing us hell," Barisone told the operator July 31, according to recordings obtained by news site Patch. Three days before the attack, on Aug. 4, Barisone called 911 a final time. "I'm taking my life back," he told the operator. When police responded the day of the shooting, they found Barisone pinned beneath Goodwin, a black and pink 9-millimeter Ruger pistol under both of them. The police report indicated that he also shot at Goodwin but missed. As medical personnel and police officers circled through, Barisone was overheard repeating the same sentence: "I had a good life." Barisone is being held in a Morris County jail, after being refused bail by a judge. His current lawyer, Edward J. Bilinkas, did not respond to multiple emails and calls requesting comment. To Kanarek and her lawyer, the details of the spiraling conflict between trainer and student, whether bandied about in the courtroom or on Facebook, are beside the point. "She is the victim here, and she was fighting for her life and trying to recover, while at the same time being attacked," her lawyer, Andrew O'Connor, said. "A disconnect that a lot of these trolls can't get over, is that, 'I've seen this guy from afar, and I see his bronze medal, and so it must be her.' "Kanarek concurred, saying that it was difficult to "go online and see every single person talking about you." She pulled up her blouse to reveal two entry wounds in her rib cage. "Every part of my body and soul and mind is just thinking, I should be on my horses, riding," she said. "Instead, I was shot." This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8870618 https://yhoo.it/2P40HK3

[duaneodavila]

Return of the Pink Internet

About a decade ago, lawprof Danielle Citron pushed for the notion of Cyber Civil Rights. Her argument was as simple as it was circular. When a woman expressed her opinion on the internet, she was too often met with a critical response from men.

Sometimes the response was threatening, most notably in words of sexualized violence. Sometimes, it was just critical, but in tones that hurt women’s feelings or made them feel uncomfortable. The upshot was that this response caused women to self-censor, to silence themselves, rather than be “bullied” or “threatened” by disapproval.

This, Citron contended, violated the free speech of women, as they could not express themselves online without discomfort. The remedy was that women should be entitled to express their opinions, and men should response with praise or nothing. The fix to provide women with their civil rights was to deny civil rights to men.

Or, to be somewhat less overt about it, at least word- and tone-police men so as to control their tendencies toward violence and unfemale-friendly responses. And since women couldn’t, by definition, defend themselves from bad male words, it was up to their allies and white knights to protect their virtue by coming to their defense. The women would point at their oppressor and their true allies would leap into action to silence those men whose mean words silenced women.

If much of this sounds vaguely familiar, even though not quite as openly expressed, there are many who have taken Citron’s CCR approach to heart. At the same time, women have learned to be as offensive as men, and men are just as offensive to each other as they are to women, though most men manage to withstand the pressure of some random doofus calling them a mean name rather than collapsing in tears at the horror of it all.

Still, there remain the fragile feminists for whom the ability to shrug off mean words, or give as good as they get, isn’t sufficient. So it’s time for another round.

Like too many women, I’ve been harassed online. The harasser described in explicit detail how he intended to violate me, though somehow his threats didn’t violate Twitter’s terms of service. Twitter, despite my repeated reports, did nothing.

So I did. I gradually tightened my privacy settings across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I mostly stopped sharing personal, nonwork-related updates and deleted photos of my children; I haven’t posted new pictures for more than a year.

I’m a tech journalist, so perhaps I am extra-sensitive to the dangers of the internet. But my concerns are widely shared by other women.

One of the marvels of the internet is that anyone gets to play there. There’s no sanity test. There’s no intelligence test. Anybody with a keyboard and internet access can join in the game. While Bloomberg’s Emily Chang tells us she’s been “harassed,” she doesn’t quite say what happened or why. She says “his threats” didn’t offend the Twitter gods, which is curious given their exceptional sensitivity toward blue-ticked women like Chang. Maybe it was disgusting and vicious, which wouldn’t be a surprise.

There are some sick, twisted people on social media. We’ve all met them. Many of us are the recipients of their attacks. It comes with the turf. It’s true that guys don’t tend to get threatened with rape, but we get threatened with murder and beatings on occasion. We get people calling jobs, filing grievances, spreading lies and more. We get told to shut up, called racist, sexist, cuck, libtard, Nazi. But not rape, as least as far as my experience goes.

Several studies have found that women are more concerned about privacy risks online than men and are more likely to keep their profiles private and delete unwanted contacts. Female Italian college students are less likely to share their political views and relationship status than men and are more concerned about risks posed by other users and third parties. Norwegian women post fewer selfies than Norwegian men.

Chang’s evidence doesn’t quite show what she wants it to show. Aside from being underwhelming evidence of anything, it mostly demonstrates that women are more fragile than men. They are more easily frightened and react disproportionately to any hint of fear. As an aside, this might be a good reason not to let women be police officers with guns to kill anyone perceived as a thread.

But from this weak sauce, Chang reaches her point.

In other words, digital privacy is a women’s issue. We just don’t think about it that way, or discuss it that way. Of course, privacy is a concern for everyone, but this is also an issue, like health care, on which women have a particular view. Women know, for example, what consent really means. It’s not scrolling through seemingly endless “terms of service” and then checking a box. Online consent, just as it is with our bodies, should be clear, informed and a requirement for online platforms.

To the extent there is anything approaching logic in there, it’s a women’s issue because, well, it makes them uncomfortable. Don’t they have a right to not experience any discomfort? To feel safe? To enjoy social media without having to use the same level of thoughtfulness, and suffer the equivalent degree of nastiness as everyone else?

And this is where Chang, like Citron before her, tries to gloss over the circularity of her tears and seek redress at the hands of the kind and omni-present government, whose gentle hand will protect and comfort her female hurt.

With Congress considering whether to draft new privacy regulations, it is important that the specific concerns of women be taken into account now, while the rules are being debated.

Pink laws for the internet? Who will champion this cause for the overly sensitive?

So what can Americans do? First, we must elect more women to positions of power who can help write privacy legislation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of the top digital policymakers in Europe are women, including Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s competition commissioner, and Elizabeth Denham, Britain’s information commissioner.

Just a wee bit sexist to assume all women share Chang’s cry of fragility and support the notion of a Pink Internet, where no woman should suffer the indignity of discomfort. You know, like the rest of us?

Return of the Pink Internet republished via Simple Justice

[myrambles1611]

Two sides of the same coin: our different personalities online and in real life

If you are reading this, chances are that you have a blog on this hellsite or at least know the basics of Tumblr. If you don’t, allow me to tell you the basics: firstly, if your post is more than five lines, you always, ALWAYS, apologize; so I apologize for the long post in advance. Secondly, and more importantly, none of us are really ourselves online. Of course there are some of the bigger, more popular blogs that display their complete identities online, but most of us choose to hide our true selves behind fan, aesthetic, meme, and even porn blogs. If you, like me, have been on this site for a while, you have figured out how to enjoy Tumblr’s “relatable” self-deprecating humor, beautiful fan art, and socio-political debate while maintaining your “online” persona. There may be some intersections between your online persona and your true self but most of your online profile is an ideal version of yourself that is far more confident and witty than your offline persona could ever be. We have these profiles because isn’t it so liberating and satisfying to have so many people appreciate the meme you just made? It offers us an escape from our boring, everyday lives so we can live our ideal personality instead of simply chasing it. But if you end up doing this for long enough, I am sure you will realize that soon enough you develop two completely different personalities: one online and one offline. Your online personality is well crafted and maintained, very different from your offline personality. One of the students Donna Freitas interviewed for her article “Instagrim” thinks of “herself, her name, as a brand. She has a reputation and she needs to protect it. She’s a curator,” (Freitas, Donna.) This creates a distinct divide between your online and offline personalities, which begs the obvious question: who are you truly? Now this can turn into an unnecessarily convoluted philosophical analysis of one’s “true” self and I’d rather stay away from that because we all have enough existential crises. So I’ll stick to an analysis of why this dual personality phenomenon is emotionally and psychologically detrimental for users of social media, especially young teenagers who are still maturing emotionally and socially.

It is necessarily to acknowledge the fact that changing personalities online is not just a result of wanting to be someone else online, but also protecting yourself from possible scams. Most of our parents or adults in a similar position have warned us repeatedly about “stranger-danger,” which is just as pertinent online. Romance scams are highly common - “In the U.S., romance scams account for the highest financial losses of all internet-facilitated crimes, the FBI reports. The bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said it received 15,000 romance scam complaints last year ― a 20 percent increase over the previous year,” (Brenoff, Ann.) These scams, as Brenoff outlines in her article “How A Billion-Dollar Internet Scam Is Breaking Hearts And Bank Accounts,” target lonely women who have recently experienced a tragedy and thus readily open up to men who are willing to be their figurative shoulders to cry on. So why would we even bother revealing our true personalities online if we can be exploited because of it? Protecting ourselves is just another reason for the different personalities but it is overshadowed by the need to be a different person online and create a persona for yourself.

Even though I mentioned only two personalities (online and offline), the issue is actually more complicated as we tend to take on multiple personalities based on the social media outlet we are using. “As the number of platforms increase, it’s amazing to watch the way that we are adapting to multiple networks—and our ability to communicate and connect with different audiences through different voices online,” (Casserly, Meghan.) Casserly makes a great point about not only adapting different online voices, but also communicating with different audiences. Each social media outlet has its own audience and purpose, thus we end up creating drastically different profiles that are tailored perfectly to the outlet. According to Ashley Brown, a PR consultant with Jones-Dilworth who was interviews by Casserly, states that “of all her social media accounts, Twitter offers the most well-rounded view of herself.” Perhaps you, like Ashley, prefer Twitter with its 280 character limit, or maybe you like Instagram’s creative, artistic layout possibilities, but we all have that one outlet that we are more attracted to. Richard Laermer “calls this soul-splitting a gift from the Net gods. “I’m not one-dimensional,” he says, (Casserly, Meghan.) I’m sure most of you would agree with Laermer because isn’t it great to be able to casually switch between being a crazy fanatic fangirl on your anime fanblog to being a politically correct intellectual in just the click of a button?

Before we delve deeper into how these different personalities actually affect us, it is essential to analyze how exactly do our “real” personalities differ from our online ones or rather do these personalities actually differ? Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, in his article “How different are your online and offline personalities?” states that “although our digital identity is fragmented, research suggests that our various online personas lead back to the same personality,” (Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas.) He suggests that “it is harder to fake it online when you are being observed for a longer period of time. Conversely, deliberate deception and impression management are relatively straightforward during short-term interactions, such as job interviews, first dates and dinner parties. We all have a window for displaying the bright side of our personality and adhering to social etiquette, but what happens when a great portion of our lives is being broadcasted?” (Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas.) Even though Premuzic is correct in stating that “deliberate deception” is easy during short-term interactions, it is even easier to be deceptive online. Premuzic fails to understand that it is infinitely easier to create a profile of yourself online where people simply don’t know who the ‘real you’ is, and I don’t mean this in terms of “cat-fishing” where an old man is actually posing as a young woman. Slight changes to your personality traits, especially exhibiting the ones that you desire, such as confidence, are very easy when you control what you post online. Take a look at any of your acquaintances’ Instagram and you will know what I am talking about. That guy from your Business class who only posts shirtless selfies at the gym might actually be dealing with self-esteem issues. That girl in your Biology class who has a million Instagram followers because of her trendy outfits might be dealing with severe anxiety. But we will never know because we only get a snippet, a heavily edited and carefully crafted snippet, of their real self. The key here is that we get to create and manage our online personas the way we want to unlike in real life where body language, expressions, tone, etc. quickly give away our true feelings, which is harder to do online. Thus, our online profiles and personalities are scripted, just like reality TV shows, so even though “various online profiles do eventually lead back to the same personality,” is this “soul-splitting” really healthy?

Going back to Freitas’ “Instagrim” article, it is clear that your online version “isn’t a true reflection of yourself. People have pressure now, more than ever, to project an image that everything’s peachy and wonderful in their life," (Freitas, Donna.) This pressure is mainly caused by the fear of being criticized for our true selves by our online audience. With Photoshop and similar editing tools, it is easy to create the image of a perfect life but what happens when we forget to edit out our love handles and accidently let the mask of perfection slip? The answer is cyberbullying, which numerous teenagers face with the increased use of social media. In their article “What parents should know about the 'constant pressure' of social media for teens,” Suzanne Yeo and Catherine Thorbecke interviewed “Dr. Logan Levkoff, an expert in parent-child communications,” who mentioned that “social media plays a "huge role" in causing anxiety for teens.” Yeo and Thorbecke interview five teenage girls about their experience with social media and cyberbullying who mentioned that “there’s just constant pressure” and feel “criticized for almost everything on social media.” They also mentioned that this criticism is especially taxing when directed to the way they look, which translates into body image issues and also eating disorders. Cyberbullying hurts in a different way than other types of bullying because the comments on the internet never truly disappear, thus always reinforcing the criticism. This fear of being criticized and pressure to always seem perfect can also translate into real life, as was the case with “Penn Face” where students of the esteemed University of Pennsylvania face the pressures of keeping up perfect appearances regardless of their serious internal problems, which has led to many suicides (Dent, Mark.) Thus difference in online and offline personalities, although seemingly harmless on the outside, gives way to a much darker and serious issue of cyberbullying, which must be addressed in order to protect the youth and help them develop and mature without the fear of being harshly criticized.

I suppose this is a good time to self-reflect and take a look at how different your personalities are. If you are a teenager like me, then I am sure you will understand these pressures of perfection but I hope that you will also understand that perfection is subjective. Although very cliche, it is important to realize that everyone is perfect in their own ways and you don’t have to pretend to be someone you are not in order to achieve this vague ideal of perfection. So if you enjoy being a crazy fan girl on your side fan blog but also want to be ‘meme-king’ on your main blog, then go ahead, but, as Kevin G. (Mean Girls) says, “Don’t let the haters stop you from doing your thang.”

Works Cited

Brenoff, Ann. "How A Billion-Dollar Internet Scam Is Breaking Hearts And Bank Accounts." HuffPost, 27 July 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/romance-scams-online-fbi-facebook_us_59414c67e4b0d318548666f9.

Casserly, Meghan. "Multiple Personalities And Social Media: The Many Faces of Me." Forbes, 2 May 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2011/01/26/multiple-personalities-and-social-media-the-many-faces-of-me/#3d63a2cf6d51.

Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas. "How Different Are Your Online and Offline Personalities?" The Guardian, 14 Feb. 2018, www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/sep/24/online-offline-personality-digital-identity.

Dent, Mark. "'Penn Face? and the 'social? Ivy's Suicide Problem, and How Students Are Fighting Back." Billy Penn, 11 Dec. 2015, billypenn.com/2015/12/11/penn-face-and-the-social-ivys-suicide-problem-and-how-students-are-fighting-back/.

Freitas, Donna. "Instagrim: Why Social Media Makes Students Miserable." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 May 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/Instagrim-Why-Social-Media/239983.

Yeo, Suzanne, and Catherine Thorbecke. "Teens Lament 'constant Pressure' of Social Media." ABC News, 2 Nov. 2017, abcnews.go.com/Health/parents-constant-pressure-social-media-teens/story?id=50822684.