#I'm gonna be 24 years old it really shouldn't matter so much to me anymore but it does

[aberooski]

I honestly wish my birthday wasn't in 2 weeks. I always get really depressed around my birthday.

[aromanticbuck]

Always asking for elaboration! This time on the soldier, poet, king post, regarding the mice!

I'm gonna guess Brandon poet, mouse Soldier, Gregory king?

I can't tell if the boys or me are the predictable factor in this scenario, because you're the second person to get it exactly right.

Mouse is the soldier. Brandon is the poet. Gregory is the king.

I was already thinking about this in the car on my drive home yesterday, and then I'm getting a bunch of videos about the quiz and what the results mean on my tiktok fyp, so I only thought about it more last night instead of writing or sleeping. Two videos in particular (I screenshotted one and have the other burned into my brain, but no links, sorry) really solidified my choices for each of the Mice, and that's where the elaboration/essay comes in:

One of the videos was about trauma, and how each type (soldier/poet/king) does or doesn't process and work through it. And I was already settled on Mouse as the soldier and Gregory as the king, but Brandon, up until that point, had been the poet by default because that's the third option. But this tiktok...

Kings, like Gregory, are "people who compare their trauma to others' instead of reflecting to find their own answers." And... yeah. I talk about Gregory basically wearing a mask and pretending to be something he's not for his parents' approval. He's constantly being compared to others and their accomplishments and what they have and don't have, even if he's not necessarily being hard on himself. He's held to a higher standard, by his parents and by society. And he has all this money and this comfortable life, so really, he shouldn't be miserable. He has to push down the ache that comes with pretending so often and be this representation for his family legacy, and that is what matters, not trying to figure out if he needs therapy or not (he does he does he does he doe-)

Soldiers, like Mouse, are "people who don't think they deserve to process their trauma and struggle alone." And, I mean, as soon as I looked at the options for this little personality test, I knew Mouse was gonna be the soldier. He literally says it himself in canon. He was born to be a soldier. All of his trauma is from his childhood or a war zone - situations he got out of, he got to escape, he got to start to heal from. But the way he sees it, he's not in those situations anymore, so why is he still upset about them? Why do they still affect him so much? He hasn't talked to his parents in years. He's been in Chicago again for half a decade again before he reenlists. Even when he reenlists, he's too busy facing new trauma and danger to worry about the old wounds.

Poets, like Brandon, are "people who painstakingly think about their trauma to help others while inevitably avoiding their own trauma." I think this fits Brandon, especially, when I consider how he grew up. He grew up watching Trudy walk out the door every morning not knowing if she was going to come back, with his uncles doing the exact same thing, listening to the police scanner when he got home from school just to have on in the background while he did homework or laundry because it was some hollow reassurance that he could know what was going on if something did happen to go wrong. He grew up doing favors for Uncle Hank - picking up Erin when she got into some trouble, doing the same with Justin, eventually playing undercover himself to sit in the back of the theater and keep an eye on things when Lexi went on dates. He played the role of well behaved son, protective cousin, reliable nephew... he was too busy worrying about everyone else to take the time to worry about himself.

The other tiktok I haven't stopped thinking about for almost 24 hours was just one line: the king is just a poet who had to be a soldier. And in the context of the Mice... it just really hurts to think about too much. I love suffering.

[ts1989fanatic]

How reputation Helped Taylor Swift Completely Change Her Narrative

There's a process Taylor Swift goes through each time she sits down to write a song.

It's not as if she steps into the studio, list of former paramours in hand, rubs her hands together gleefully and thinks of all the ways she can call out her bad boy exes. Rather, her method of pulling lyrics from life experiences means she needs to be working through something, an issue spinning in her mind until she's able to memorialize it in verse.

Take the time she penned "All Too Well" about an unnamed ex-boyfriend who invited her over to his sister's house before casually discarding their relationship (but not her striped scarf). The hit, she shared during a Texas tour stop last October, "was born out of catharsis and venting and trying to get over something."

Which is pretty much how everything she creates springs to life. "When I write a song," she told the crowd, "it's usually me just trying to get past something and understand something I'm going through by writing about it."

And when she sat down to craft her latest disc, reputation, well, she had some things to say. The album was every bit the commercial success of her previous five, moving 1.2 million copies in its first week en route to becoming the bestseller of both 2017 and 2018. She added another three Billboard Music Awards to her trophy case, bringing her career haul to a record-breaking 23 and this Sunday she's up for Best Pop Vocal Album at the Grammys, where she's previously collected Album of the Year honors for both Fearless and 1989, making her the first female solo artist to do so twice.

An argument could certainly be made that the immensely popular disc was snubbed in the top category this year. But while those accolades would have been nice, it was never about that.

Rather, this time T. Swift had some important things to get off her chest.

Because her decision to remain out of the public eye for much of 2017 was never about a fear of oversaturation. The back half of 2016 hadn't been particularly kind to the 29-year-old, thanks to another highly publicized breakup and a handful of feuds, including one with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West that left the pop star fairly pointing out that she shouldn't have to be cool being reduced to the term "that bitch."

Not that it mattered. Sides had already been taken in the #KimExposedTaylorParty and those that weren't labeling Swift a snake were wondering if maybe she was kinda over.

So she laid off social media, ceased with her immaculately dressed trips to the gym and managed to disappear as she spent a solid year putting the finishing touches on reputation.

Her absence only served to make her fans' hearts grow fonder.

When she released her first single "Look What You Made Me Do" one Thursday night in late August 2017, a completely different sound dripping with revenge-laced lyrics such as, "Maybe I got mine, but you'll all get yours," it became the most played song in a single day on Spotify. After the video dropped, appropriately at MTV's Video Music Awards, it received 43 million YouTube views in 24 hours, besting Adele's previous record for "Hello" as viewers parsed every frame looking for the easter eggs that might provide a further glimpse into her disagreements with Kardashian, West and frenemy Katy Perry.

Like Swift's eventual tour, which would feature pyro explosions, oversized inflatable serpents and a 63-foot cobra named Karyn, it was heavy on the snake imagery, a choice Swift made quite deliberately. "A couple of years ago, someone called me a snake on social media and it caught on," she shared with those gathered at her May 8 tour opening.

"Then a lot of people were calling me a lot of things on social media and I went through some really low times for a while because of it. I went through some times when I didn't know if I was going to get to do this anymore."

Then she rose up from the dead and realized she wasn't about to go down without showing some fight. Now reveling in her rebirth, she shared, "I wanted to send a message to you guys, that if someone uses name calling to bully you on social media, and even if a lot of people jump on board with it, that doesn't have to defeat you. It can strengthen you instead."

And, then, just as it seemed as if the whole disc would be singularly focused on telling off those who had wronged her, she flipped that script, unveiling "End Game" and "Delicate" the types of romance and butterflies songs generally found in the Swift oeuvre.

"There was a bit of a bait-and-switch that happened with this album when we put out 'Look What You Made Me Do' and we're like, 'Guys, this album is gonna be one thing.' And then the album came out," she shared last August with the intimate crowd gathered at an AT&T-hosted Taylor Swift NOW concert in Chicago. Instead, she shared, per Us Weekly, people realized "it's legitimately an album about finding love throughout all the noise."

The journey began where she was at during the close of 2016, frustrated with the criticism and misinformed attacks on her character. "It starts with the noise and how that makes all you feel and how it makes you feel when people are saying things about you that you feel, like, aren't true and living your sort of life in defiance of that," she shared. "And then, sort of, in the middle of the album you kind of realize, 'How much do I really value that?' If you can find something real in spite of a bad reputation, then isn't that what matters the most to you? And doesn't it matter the most to you that you know who your real friends are now?"

Because what she had spent 2017 developing with boyfriend Joe Alwyn was undoubtedly real. Suddenly Swift was in love again and the unlikeliness this would occur while she was enduring the worst headlines of her career just made her treasure it all the more.

For the first time she realized she didn't owe anyone an unvarnished look at her most private relationship. Leaning heavily into the private jets and blacked-out sedans at her disposal along with UK customs officials willing to check her passport on the tarmac without her having set foot in any of London's airports, she had managed to keep her romance with the British actor, 27, completely under wraps until The Sun outed "Taylor's Secret Brit Love" in May of 2017. And being able to build a romance without, as she once described it, "20 men with cameras" tagging along, had only served to cement their bond, an insider telling E! News, "It's made things more special and sacred."