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Tennyson and Hallum is so heronstairs coded and In Memoriam by Tennyson is the proof
#the fact they met in uni and then hallum died very soon when he was supposed to marry Tennyson sister and then so for the next 17 years#Tennyson wrote a hundred pages elegy dedicated just for hallum like u telling me will woudlnt do this for Jem and hasn’t already done it????#after reading the entire poem and writing a whole essay on it like it is heronstairs Idc#shadowhunters#the shadowhunters chronicles#tsc#tsc incorrect quotes#incorrect tsc quotes#heronstairs#jem x will#will herondale#william herondale#jem carstairs#james carstairs#ke jian ming#brother zachariah#the infernal devices#tid#alfred lord tennyson#in memoriam
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high school was interesting. we got asked to write essays sometimes and i remember three essays of mine that got graded as zero. keep in mind i sometimes just didnt deliver anything and that got a zero too, but these are the ones i actually did something and got a zero.
first one was right after my teacher said my essay that mentioned gay rights was "too political". i didnt even read the prompt for the next one, i just attached the communist manifesto in pdf. that was in 2020 or 2021. i got my first zero.
my second one was when i was actively going through a depressive episode and i couldnt focus on writing anything serious, so i gave up halfway though and restarted my entire essay and treated it like a page in my diary. i said how i was feeling, what id done recently, and ended up rambling about how i wish marvel's civil war had ended and all the wasted potential the mcu had when it comes to steve and tony. it was fun, and i left significantly more relaxed.
third one was directly after that last one, which made the teacher pretty mad. mad enough that he called me out in front of the whole class, saying i wasnt even trying (which is true) and that, at least, i was showing some way with words in my speech, though i "sounded insane", whatever he meant by that. two weeks after that public calling out we had another essay. i was feeling a little better that day so, for shits and giggles, i wrote a poem about how much his class felt pointless to me and about how sometimes it felt like school was actively trying to scare us away. got my third and last zero, and even after that, i still managed to pass his class at the end of the year.
high school, man. i still don1t get it.
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Could you tell us about all the wips you have planned cus I can't keep track anymore 👀
omg i'm so so sorry i really do talk about a bunch don't i? i've always got a bunch of fics going at once so no matter what i feel like writing i have something i can jump into... which must make keeping track a nightmare. so yes! let me recap for you:
in no particular order we have:
shirt-sharing fic: this one keeps changing (and taking longer to write than i wanted lol) but essentially the bare bones idea is matty borrows a shirt from george before a interview with the whole band and it Doesn't Go Unnoticed.
new parents fic: a brief glimpse/collection of glimpses into the life & times of new parents george and matty!
the "if i believe you" fic: based on a line in a poem: "God did a very good job with you." it's in the country recording studio/abiior-era and matty just has a lot of thoughts about how God makes good things-- of course He does-- but he, himself, is not one of those things. but george is. george is divine, matty just is. (very prose/internal monologue heavy and i'm loving writing it tbh.)
non-famous!matty fic: george, ross, and adam are still (a version of) the 1975. waughy has this really nice officemate at the uni he's teaching at that's a TA/PhD candidate for the lit dept. george has to pick waughy up for rehearsal one day and the rest is history... we just get to see matty being The Biggest Fan of the 1975 and also, entirely by coincidence, being bespectacled and having hot takes on books (that i'm reading...)
the gatty ft. raughy fic: matty is apparently the last person to know that two of his closest friends/bandmates are dating and he's confused that 1. he missed it completely 2. everyone else (including his own husband) seemed to know but him and 3. they let him just Be That Oblivious for years. he starts paying closer attention and enjoys seeing his friends happy (with the correct context now)
camera roll collection: basically i found a bunch of candids (taken by the band/jordan) of matty and/or george and said, context be damned, i'm using this as a photo prompt like i'm in middle school and this is a timed essay. first picture is this 2019 pic of matty at the airport.
the hours of the left behind part ii: this fic was originally intended to be a standalone of the hours right after george drops matty off to fly to barbados. but now part ii is when george picks him up and tries to help matty readjust to being home. but also matty begins to sees how george was while he was away (having put on a brave smile every time matty called).
(be my) god and country ch 3/epilogue: not sure how i want to expand this universe bc i really love the foundations that fic has for timelines/ideas on certain aspects of their relationship that i want to keep returning to and building on (and not rewriting again and again lol) BUT i have ideas for a honeymoon maybe, a wintering-type fic where they go home for christmas, they talk about having kids... it's a whole world of possibilities!! open to suggestions...
#thank you for asking!!!!!!#i try to tell myself there's no glory in the process so i don't like to talk about my wips TOO much until they're done#but sometimes talking about them helps me get and stay excited and also i can see which ones y'all are into (and finish those first hehe)#answered#asks#andfacedown fics in progress#also yes i know thats a lot of wips im 1. chaotic and 2. just got out of an mfa program where i worked on the same thing for two years#i love variety now....
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9 favourite books
Thank you @gwiazdziarka for tagging me (and thanks for all those book recs, I’m adding all of them to my list, except for the ones that I’ve already read), and I agree, maybe all of these won’t be my absolute favorite books, but they’re either books that I think about a lot, or books that have a special place in my heart, but not necessarily something that I go back to over and over.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exúpery
This one is definitely a favorite. It’s a book that I’ve reread many times, because I feel that it has a different feel every time, depending on what I’m going through at that moment. Also a classic. Love it so much that I’ve started to collect editions in different languages; so far I have Spanish (of course), French, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Euskera (possibly one of the rarest), and Swedish (of course, because I intend to be able to read it by next year).
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Also an absolute favorite, classic down-the-rabbit-hole type story that takes place in London Below. Fell in love with it, with the world-building within an already existing world. If i actually had to list 9 of my favorite books, pretty sure the whole list would be Neil Gaiman, but this book is both entertaining and comforting, so I pick this one. The BBC radio drama adaptation starring James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer is also excellent. Still waiting for the book sequel, though…
84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
The most charming book in history, composed entirely of letters between an aspiring writer and rare books collector in New York and the manager of a rare books bookshop in London. Their relationship is platonic, and yet one of the most romantic things I have ever read. The movie adaptation is equally charming and it has Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench in it. Read the book first, then watch the movie, then cry endlessly. Rinse and repeat.
Like a Hole in the Head by Jen Banbury
You should know that I get a lot of book recommendations from TV shows, so I decided to hunt down this book when Monica was reading it in more than one episode of Friends (felt like a subliminal message). And it was fucking worth it. Also a book about a book. A dwarf comes into a bookshop where the protagonist works, to sell a first edition of Jack London’s White Fang, and only after he’s gone she finds out just how rare it is. Heist plot ensues. It’s equally strange and exciting, mind-blowing and cathartic.
The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
Very melancholy, this book is a collection of essays, poems and short stories published posthumously, as Keegan died in an accident at 21. She was very talented and could write convincingly about many things. Can’t even pick a favorite one out of the collection, because they’re all very good in very different ways. Very bittersweet.
Los Caballos Estornudan en la Lluvia by Dimas Lidio Pitty
Another short story collection (the title literally translates as “Horses Sneeze in the Rain”), from a Panamanian author, from the region where I spent my childhood summers, which still holds a very special place in my heart, and which has a mysticism about it that he helps preserve in these stories. Dimas Lidio Pitty was very good at magical realism. One of the stories in particular is so brief, but it’s incredible how good it is in such a short narration.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
I’m a huge fan of classic dystopic science fiction, and this one has got to be my favorite. The narrative is interesting, moves along at an excellent pace, and it covers everything. Another book about books too. If you haven’t read Fahrenheit 451, the premise is simple: in this dystopic society, firemen don’t put out fires, they start them… to burn books. Book banning to the extreme. What happens next? You need to read it to find out.
El Misterio del Solitario by Jostein Gaarder
I have been obsessed with this book (The Solitaire Mystery in English) by Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder since I started reading all his books when I was a teen (I don’t even know how I came across him, I just picked one up one day and went with it, it wasn’t even Sophy’s World, it was Through a Glass, Darkly). Of course Sophy’s World is probably the most famous, and it was very good, but this one is so strange and magical that I read it several times ages ago, and it was such a comforting book, and now I would like to reread. Maybe one day soon I’ll read it in Norwegian!
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Another classic and favorite, which I have also read many times. Some people like Alice in Wonderland, some like Peter Pan, I like the Wizard of Oz. I like anything Oz related, the movie, the musical, Wicked (the musical, not the book, tho), everything. But the source material is still where it’s at.
No pressure tags: @makingupachangingmind , @voldiebeth , @raincitygirl76 and @phoebenpiperx .
#booksbooksbooks#booklove#book recs#i love learning about what people are reading or have read or love to read#give me all the book recs#i wish i could have a book club with everyone here
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[Outdated! No longer applicable]
RQDL Announcement + Wednesday Art Dump!
Started December 13th, 2023 at 8:00AM, Home
Finished December 13th, 2023 at 10:45PM, Home
Announcement #1
Hello there, wonderful viewer!
(“Meet the Demoman” Art by me— more on that later!)
Firstly, the bad news.
I’d like to apologize for not posting these past couple of days. I realize that the whole point of these logs is that they are supposed to be daily… hence the name Rosain Quivan’s Daily Logs, LOL, and me breaking that purpose so soon after starting is a bit disappointing.
However, as I was attempting to continue King of Hearts (Part Three) over those two days, I came to realize that, unfortunately, I actually don’t have enough time to write as I initially thought I would. At least, during the weekdays. This is mostly in part due to classes, extracurriculars and just general life stuff, and as much as I want to urge myself to write and just wing the rest, that’s sadly not possible. And I don’t think that the only 3 hours I have free before sleeping is enough time to write anything substantial, much less of good quality that both of us could enjoy.
I’m sorry if you were looking forward to anything recently, like KoH3, only for it not to be there. I know I promised you that it would be the next log, but I believe I may have to push that farther out to this weekend, or worst case scenario next week.
I know it’s probably not such a big deal for you as I’m putting it here, since I am probably just another random TF2 person on the Internet for you (who, mind you, has only really been active for about 4 days), but it means a lot to me.
I made this vow of continuity and quality to both myself (to improve my writing skills and commitment) and you (to give back to the community whose inspiration never ceases to amaze me), and it pains me to know that I have already failed to follow through with it.
However, as much as this sucks, this does not give me the right to sulk over it, because sulking is for MAGGOTS!!! (Just kidding- sulk as much as you want, we still love you!)
Which is why in order to fix this, I propose….
A SOLUTION!!
(Now, the good news!)
(“Meet the Engineer” Also art by me— explanation coming in a bit, just a little more patience!)
Now, what I’m about to propose is a bit complicated, and I’m not entirely sure if this is going to work… but hey, at least it’s only after the 4th log right? Beginnings offer a lot of room for experimentation. And if it doesn’t work out, we’ll fix it when we get there.
So, because of real-life scheduling conflict, the best way for me to balance this out with writing (as well as all the other things I’d like to include here), I have decided to make a schedule for when and what these logs will look like and contain. Most of what will be on it will likely be considerably shorter works in comparison to say, King of Hearts, because of obvious time constraints, but they include a lot of different things to look forward to aside from the same old writing scheme, like say, artwork!
This way, it provides a bit more variety (so you’re not just stuck reading TF2 essays everyday LOL), and also the possibility for you to provide input, ask questions and make requests!
The first goals I had in mind when making these logs was for this to be fun and enjoyable for both of us, as well as sustainable. So, by having this schedule, hopefully that can fulfill both those goals. Now, enough of my babbling; here it is!
RQDL SCHEDULE
Weekdays (Mondays-Thursdays, possibly Fridays)
Posting time: around 10:30PM, Atlantic Time
Monday : short writings (poems, vignettes, opinions, other stuff like that.)
Tuesday : same as Monday
Wednesday : artwork &/ musical composition (such as shown above!)
Thursday : same as Wednesday
(Friday, possibly) : art requests, anything you’d like!!! (Within reason, of course. I have never attempted NSFW, so let’s maybe steer clear of that… for now)
Weekends (possibly Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays)
Posting time: earlier or later than 11:00PM, Atlantic Time
(Friday, possibly): writing requests, anything you’d like!!! (Again, within reason, of course. still steering clear of NSFW for the time being)
Saturday: long projects (multi-part stories, opinion essays, major art or music projects, publishing, etc.)
Sunday: same as Friday / Saturday
So, yeah, that’s the schedule for the logs! I hope you find it has more variety, and I’m really looking forward to being able to follow through with it, especially the requests part because it allows me to be able to interact with you all more and be able to hear your thoughts!
Again, I’d like to stress that the purpose of these logs is for them to be sustainable but most of all enjoyable for the both of us, so please let me know what I can improve over the course of these logs so those purposes can be realized! Your input is as important to me as booze is to Demo’s survival, so feel free to let me know what you’d like to see next.
Anyhow, that’s it for this announcement! I’m sure you’ve had enough of my rambling as much as my fingers are getting tired of typing, so I’ll just end this off with a final Spy art.
Have a great day, pally!
(“Meet the Spy” Art by me!)
(P.S. All of this artwork dates from around January from an old Daily Art challenge I made for myself, so it is quite old, but I thought it might be nice to share them anyway instead of them just sitting in my camera roll for the rest of its lifetime, LOL. I might post the rest tomorrow!)
Credits: Team Fortress 2 by Valve
Image source: Rosain Quivan
Written by Rosain Quivan Cross posted on Amino ( Rosain Quivan )
#tf2#rosain quivan's daily logs#team fortress 2#writing#tf2 spy#tf2 engineer#tf2 demoman#tf2 art#team fortress fanart#red spy#blu spy#tradtitional art#art#announcement#art dump#apology#sorry for not posting#I promise that I will do my best to now that there is a schedule#so yeah#scheduled#daily art
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29. Who are your favourite characters?
MUNDAY RP MEMES
okay well to no one's surprise, obviously the goat himself: pete. I could go on about why him but that'd be an essay.
but lets see, I'll name five others. this got long so i'ma put it under a read more.
tim drake aka robin aka red robin. he was actually the first character I ever wrote, I adore him. I love how damaged he is and he's so much fun to write in contrast to pete. pete who's outgoing, friendly, warm, etc. and tim is just cold, calculating, almost a sociopath fjaskljdlf.
katara from ATLA. I mean, how can you not love her growth from teaching herself the art and then going through the struggle in a sexist society and proving herself capable? I love seeing her slow growth from barely able to hold up a ball of water to becoming the most powerful water bender we've seen in the show. I actually really like how she keeps her caring side, but she has an edge to her too. she has her limits of what she's willing to do for someone and what she'll let go of.
luke skywalker. I know, kinda basic but what can I say? farmboy being thrust into a galactic conflict, finding out that he has a connection to the main villain. also the way he was so determined to turn anakin back to the light, his growth from being a whiny brat to being a stone cold badass?? I love his conflicts and struggles in the later books too. I love him bringing the jedi order back and reforming it because he learned from the mistakes of the old jedi order (which it was, the jedi order at the prequels was terrible and deserved to be destroyed #palpatinedidnothingwrong) luke trying to find where his jedi order is going to fit into the new galaxy too, learning to be a father and husband and mentor to his nephews and later his son.
samwise from lotr<3 tbh I could've put any of the hobbits on here but sam is just the best man. I love the fact that he's so young at the start of the journey, he's so innocent. you see him getting wowed by things like seeing the trolls turned to stone, i love him making the little poems of stuff that they see throughout their journey in the books. I love the idea that he's willing to go through all of this pain and turmoil with frodo simply because they are friends. it's such a beautiful thing and so heartwarming, the fact that someone is willing to put their life on hold and help someone else simply because of the bond they have as friends. I mean how can you not love the "I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you!" like...come on.
another lotr one but gandalf. I love that he's so wise and patient and full of compassion. the fact that he was close with Nienna who's whole thing is making wisdom from grief and sadness and I mean, that's what gandalf takes with him. I love the fact that he sees true strength coming from small, every day acts of kindness. simple things are all it takes to keep darkness at bay and that's something that's so true. you'd be surprised how just being kind and showing a bit of outgoing love can help someone's entire day shift, you never know what people are going through. i mean also the fact that he's a badass wizard. I never understood why there was ever a debate over which kind of wizard you'd wanna be, one from harry potter or lotr? like bRUH FOR REAL? Yeah, lemme go to fucking hogwarts and study and take notes during class and take some fucking wizard SAT-NO! Bruh, I wanna be an immortal spirit who comes down to earth, you wield a sword called the FOE-HAMMER, you ride the king of the horses and you fight hell-demons for three days, kill them and then get all the xp and come back after you leveled up.
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✧・゚: * 👒🍓🌼 Dearest blog,
[ ☀️ ] OKAY SO I KNOW IT'S BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK.
This blog post might not be crazy long ( it is now summer break, I am going to try and draw even more ) but I just wanted to acknowledge just how pretty poetry on Pinterest can be sometimes. Like there was this one poem I found where somehow the writer managed to line up two completely different paragraphs detailing the before and after of the loss of their father and then make it so that you could still read the whole thing both as two separate paragraphs and then one whole essay. Then there was that one poem that went "we'll write about the flowers as if we own them." Or the one about wishing death were kinder than man
I have an ENTIRE PINTEREST BOARD dedicated to POETRY--- written poetry, poetry here on Tumblr, in the depths of the internet... I'm considering printing it all out because I know the examples I just gave may seem pretty?? simple ??? basic ????? but I love it all anyway writing will never ever ever cease to be so impossibly beautiful to me
Abby *:・゚✧*:・゚✧
#the day I realized poetry didn't have to rhyme (I was nine or ten or maybe older) was the day I realized I really wanted to write#I want to find ancient ancient ancient poetry#sometimes I sit in class and wonder at how it doesn't seem as if a lot of people are interested by writing or the reading selections given#like these pieces were written by people long before we were born and it is the only way we could learn how these people lived in such#specific moments#and I want to write and draw and leave something people can remember me by#and poetry just means so much to me because it can express so much and it doesn't have to be perfect to be GOOD
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The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay
Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.
(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)
First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?
Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).
The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.
This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.
As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?
Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.
Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.
However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.
Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.
This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.
In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?
Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.
The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.
By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.
As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).
Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?
Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?
This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?
If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?
In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.
As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?
The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.
(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)
Further Reading
Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.
Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.
Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.
Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.
Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.
Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.
McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.
Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.
Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.
Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.
#the green knight#the green knight meta#sir gawain and the green knight#medieval literature#medieval history#this meta is goddamn 5.2k words#and has its own reading list#i uh#said i had a lot of thoughts?
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Someone submitted something in my inbox and they wanted to remain anonymous. Since this is an extremely long essay, I will put it under the cut. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
xxx submitted: hey, i was the one who ask what do you think of Misha and Jensen's current relationship First off all thank you for your answear it means much to me cause im easy to be convice and this person who keep telling me that they are no longer friends can be so convicing, so I'm actully trying to forget what she said 😅 so I'm just writing a few. she said that since they no longer work together, they will forget about each other, and do their common things like the gay jokes, face touches ect. With other people, and neglect each other, don't talk to each other, and then meet new people who will replace the other. And and she talked about the gish thing, she said she sure they didn't talk since the end of the series, because Jensen didn't know where Misha was and Misha didn't know about the Radio Company vol 2 (but i saw people say that, they were just pretending, because Misha liked something about Radio Company Vol 2, before the gish live, so in theory he already knew then or something like that) and She said Misha wrote a poem about Darius not Jensen and now I will write down what she sent me : I saw a post about Jensen's current activities on social media, and I've come to the conclusion the only person he doesn't interact with is mish. Sadly this makes my break up theory even stronger. I feel like this is a goodbye to one of the biggest parts of my life. They've moved on from "uk what I haven't told you today? That i love u"+ from "miss my only jensen" from "i love u misha i mean it from the bottom of my heart" from "jensen has no flaws" from "misha is the funniest thing ever happened to me" from all that love and affection from everything they developed together and now they're apart leaving their lives like nothing happened and call me a dramatic but they both have the same energy now as someone has after a big break up. and Jensen comments on almost every of his friend’s post except Misha’s"+ Jenmish is genuinely the best thing that has ever happened in my entire life. I owe them literally everything. They're the reason i hold on. Unfortunately on this essay i have to start using past tense verbs for them, and i have to continue on that. I don't know for how long y'all been in spn fandom. But even if u joined one year before the show ended you'd know how close and intimate jensen and misha were. Everything about them was unmatched.+ The chemistry and how they just fit eachother. They had always been all over eachother. Like they were holding on eachother for dear life. They completed eachother and were like world's most powerful thing. They were the definition of soulmatism. No matter where, they ALWAYS kept interacting with eachother. Each possible tweet or insta post. On cons that the other wasn't there, the other one would bring up the othere's name for no absolute reason. +The looks and repeated love confessions. How invested they were both into eachother. The family they had built together cuz we know how close dee and mish are (look all the charity work they've been doing together recently). There are youtube videos to proof everything I've said so far.When i say break up, my real intention is that they've grown apart. Everything started in the the third or forth month of pandemic. Before than jensen used to interact +(comment mostly) on almost all of misha's posts. But after a while everything just stopped. At first personally didn't care that much. Bcuz I believed too much in them that I thought not even the gods above could separate them. I told myself maybe they spend long hours chatting or video calling and that's why online public interactions are gone. But as it passed it almost diminished to zero. Except some likes from jackles and eventual ones from misha there weren't anything else.+ We got absolutely no content and the show went off too. We were helpless and were sticking to everything we had Dee had a big social media shot down, so as jensen. Misha was busy with the election. We got some interviews for it with all of them. But we didn't get much.except remember both of them pulling a bff
move. and texted eachother during an online con where everyone else were dead-serious about politics? That flickered something in me. That showed me that+ they can't ever possibly let eachother go. And the times everyone else were talking and these too would just talk random things together (the one jackels had a white hat on with stacy abraham).And then Misha posted that for jensen's bday We really overlooked it. That shit was too intimate. To close. Fav march baby? U just don't go around and called ur bestie baby and when u mean it deeply. Especially not when ur friend is jensen ackles the "I suffered form internalized homophobia my whole life+ but fuck my wife's an angel and i have an angel bf too and another angel which is his wife but I'd rather die than come out cuz my asshole dad pulled a John winchester on me". It doesn't work like that. But uk how mish is. Carefree and open. I believe they got into a fight bcuz of this. He didn't even like the post. AND that was when the tiny bit of interactions we had was gone too. For a while jensen didn't even liked his posts. After a month it started again.What made me finally believe in that they had grown too+ far: I still remember the night misha posted that he and jensen were going to have a con for gish together. I remember how hard I cried. Lile the whole world was given to me. But deep down in my heart I knew that something would definitely happen. It didn't sit right with me and unfortunately my senses never lie to me. Jensen showed up at the wrong time bcuz of misunderstanding the time zones (this was HILARIOUS). That's not even my point.+ I've seen that interview 3 times so far. It always reminds me of when i saw my ex at a party and we were both so thrilled to see eachother and we still loved the other dearly, but we just couldn't work it out. Jensen and Misha's expressions were EXACTLY the same. The genuine smiles and longs pauses were they just stared at eachother. I'm so happy that it was online cuz if they actually gave that looks to eachother standing right next to the other one I would've collapsed. Misha didn't know that jensen's album+ was out. And he got so embarrassed when he found it out. He didn't know that jensen was on set and hadn't been home for 8weeks. Jensen had no idea where misha was. And this means that they hadn't talked in a long long time.When you're that close with someone for more than a decade, i mean THAT close, even if u're separated from eachother you'd at least check on the once a week, or at least once in two weeks. But it was vividly clear that they hadn't. I hate how this world works. They would always be in my heart.+ I would be thankful from them for everything. It hurts, and it won't stop and im so sure I'd be carrying this pain for a long time. They mean too much to a lot of us. Sometimes I think to myself that god i love them so much. Remember in 2019 when we used to get SO many jenmishdee interactions? That was LIT. It was THEE year for us. I hope they're doing good. I really do. I hope we don't get more proofs and I won't have to update this thread. Cuz my heart won't be taking it very+ well.Something i gotta add U may say that Jensen's busy and that's why he doesn't comment. But he comments on a lot of jared and his new costar's posts. So that's no excuse. So yeah that's it. I don't know what am I supposed to think. english isn't my native language, so sorry for the mistakes
Here is my response:
I don't know who this person who has been talking to is but I have to say they seem to be project their previous relationship experience on cockles.
I believe Jensen and Misha are okay and are together. Social media likes and comments don't mean anything. I mean it's not like Jensen or Misha used to comment on each other's posts before. Jensen didn't even wish Dee Happy Mother's Day this year, does that mean they are not together anymore? Nope. He has other best friends he has known for over 20 years like Jason Manns, Steve Carlson etc that he doesn't wish happy birthday, does that mean they are not friends anymore.
Please let's not put value on social media likes. I don't even follow my own family on sm and I don't always like or comment on my bf's or bff's posts on sm. So it doesn't mean anything.
As for the Gish Panel, I have talked about it before, the time Jensen was slotted to attend the panel, he was meant to answer fan questions. I honestly believe they decided to not do it at that time because they knew the questions would be about Destiel and not their new projects. If you watched that panel, Misha knew that Jensen's album was out as I pointed out. He was just trying to promote the album and soldier boy. He knew Jensen had also buffed out. It was all to promote Jensen. Anything else you hear is trolls and antis just being loud. Also don't forget Jensen called him "babe".
If Jensen and Misha weren't okay, he wouldn't have attended or participated all those panels Misha organized especially for Gish. Danneel also posts a lot about RA and likes Misha's posts. I am 100% Misha visited the Ackles when he went to Colorado last month.
Stop listening to trolls and/or antis or just people who are projecting and look at facts.
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Kaylor Inspired Reading
There are so many great books I’ve discovered thanks to this little community on here! I thought I would organize a collection* of ones we’ve discussed at one point or another. I’d love to add more books on here and other recommendations. These are the books I’ve found pertain to Kaylor or that we’ve discussed were similar to Kaylor story. Books that inspired some of Taylor’s work or that both the girls have referenced.
1. Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
This was a quick and easy read for me. I really loved the Hollywood era parts of it. The book does a great job of showing that bearding in Hollywood is something that is not unusual. It makes it more palatable to the average reader who doesn’t really understand how Hollywood operates. I recommend showing this book to a friend who has heard about Kaylor but doesn’t really understand how Taylor’s “boyfriends” play a factor into it. Here’s the tweet that originally inspired the discussion about it:
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2. Untamed by Glennon Doyle
“Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. It was like an awakening, for these words did not come from on high, they came from within. This was her own voice, the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to abandon the world’s expectation of her and embrace knowing her true self. Now she takes us on her journey of realization. She had to be willing to burn down what she was taught to want and rise from the ashes knowing the truth about who she is and who she was meant to be with. Only then would she truly be free and start living and loving as she was intended.”
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3. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
"When I was reading 'Rebecca' by Daphne du Maurier, I was thinking wow, her husband just tolerates her. She's doing all these things and she's trying so hard and she's trying to impress him and he's just tolerating her the whole time...there was a part of me that was relating to that because at some point in my life I felt that way so I ended up writing this song Tolerate It which is all about trying to love someone who is ambivalent” - Taylor Swift
4. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I included this side of Paradise because Spade had a riddle quote from it. We all know Taylor’s epic love of F. Scott Fitzgerald. At the time the Spade riddle sent there was a lot of imagery of palm trees and the idea of paradise Taylor was hinting at as well. This was pre- Lover release.
♠️1 | I began the riddle with a line from the poem, “Tiare Tahiti”, which inspired the title of Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, “This Side of Paradise”. An easter egg mentioned in the Elle essay, “Pop is Personal”. Anyways, at this point, the ellipses were to guide you to a section in this novel called ‘KISMET’ - “…within”. This entire section and the interlude, contain underlying themes in Lover. You can see parallels of the story that unfolds in Lover within these paragraphs.
Spade’s Riddles: LINK
5. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The discussion for this began after the You Need to Calm Down music video. In the video most people featured are famous or are clearly shown. Which made us curious who the Orange Girl was whether or not it was Karlie disguised and why she was on an exercise bike eating oranges whole. This one is the next one I plan on reading after my current book!
Jeanette is brought up as one of God’s elect and seems destined to spend life as a missionary, but she falls for one of her converts. So she decides to leave her life and home for the woman she loves.
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*Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you.*
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You’ve [Mike Davis] been organizing for social change your whole life. How do you deal with a future that feels so bleak? For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless. I’ve always been influenced by the poems [Bertolt] Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages? What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight. Can you share some of the messages you’ve received? [Davis picks up one stack of papers from his printer, and opens a drawer and pulls out another stack, and begins to read passages aloud.] “We’ve never met but like many people out there I’ve been changed by your work. I’m a brown kid from Orange county who spent many years trying to understand and articulate the complex but unshakable love I have for our home, its haunted uncanniness, its beauty, its cruelty …” “I hear you are in the final stretch of, well, all of this. I write to you from Paris a few hours before I fly back home to LA, and I know that when we make the final descent into the LA basin this afternoon, I will cry softly, as I always do, so in love with the place I call home …” “You came on my podcast back in late 2020 and we talked a lot about rural America. Right now my community is in shambles, because last week eastern Kentucky was hit really bad by a one-in-a-thousand-year flood. I’m having a real hard time time finding any hope anywhere. But I read this interview you did, and it made me feel, not necessarily more hopeful, but more at peace ...” “It is pretty common for people to underestimate their own legacy. So allow me just to say that I’m glad that you did not die on the barricades too soon, before we had your wonderful books. After all, aren’t they a kind of barricade for the ages?” There is so much un-mobilized love out there. It’s really moving to see how much. What are you and your family doing with the time you have left? Avoiding this trap where writers feel they must weigh in with famous last words or a long essay on dying. We’re watching a lot of Scandinavian noir on HBO. In the last month, I’ve started consuming immense amounts of military history, an infantile throwback. I find the counterfactuals – this battle, what did it decide, what was the alternative – deeply fascinating. You can’t expect to die at a very heroic moment. It’d be nice to die in 1968, or with the liberation of Europe in 1945. You’re on the barricades in 1917, 1919. Go out of life with the red flags flying. But despair is useless.
— snippets from an interview with Mike Davis, by Lois Beckett for The Guardian; Aug 31, 2022 (x)
This summer [summer 2022], the 76-year-old stopped treatment for esophageal cancer and began palliative care, giving him an estimated six to nine months to live.
#mike davis#lois beckett#god bless mike davis truly i hope he has a peaceful end of life#'but despair is useless' he says#just like when raymond williams said: To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.#the brecht poem he is referencing is 'To Posterity'
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So while I was reading GtN and HtN I occasionally stopped to be like “Wow, it’s great how these can be just so gay!” And like. That is really great. Super great. I love that about them. But I also remember at least once stopping and going “Wow, it’s great that there’s no homophobia here!” And like at the time I just kind of nodded along to myself. Around when I just finished GtN, I remember being very fond of the bit after the book with like the guy explaining like. The deal with necro/cav relationships in The Media and throughout history and how actually none of these things have ever been romance. This is just a pure relationship, unaffected by naughty things like ROMANCE. WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED TO BE ROMANCE?! shouts the author of this paper. And I laughed at this. Because it reminded me a lot of people who do this shit with queer love. They do it with history and just go “Why does Sappho have to be gay, why can’t she just have passionate feelings for her BFFs”. Which is mindbogglingly stupid to me and anyone who has so much as LOOKED at some of the poem fragments. But like people do say that shit. And they do this a lot over like queer anything in fiction unless it like punches you in the face with rainbows immediately. “Why do Bubblegum and Marceline have to be gay? They’re just friends!” is a take that I legitimately saw on the day of the finale. And not just once. I saw it a few times. And I’ve seen that happen over so many ships in so many things, whether or not the ships end up canon. “Why does it have to be gay?” and the specific sort of outrage over it I’ve seen in essay length posts is just common, and that sort of outrage reads very similar to the argument that dude made about necro/cav relationships. It reads like that and close enough so that I made a joke about it even. I didn’t think too, too much on this at first though because I mean. We have Abigail and Magnus. They’re right there. A man and a woman, a husband and a wife. So like I was able to simultaneously go “omg it’s just like those why can’t they just be friends WHY DOES IT NEED TO BE GAY people” and also “wow it’s nice that there are spooky negative queer experiences of SADNESS here”. Which has got me thinking. Ok. So we have that essay. Now what else do we have in the books? I suppose could point at the entirety of Gideon and Harrow’s just furious refusal to admit that they might actually be in love with one another. Even though it appears to be obvious to literally everyone else in the galaxy. And is obvious to the readers. Hell, Gideon even has a moment of feeling like she needs to tell Harrow something the day before she dies. Something which is heavily romance coded, I don’t know the word for it. But like a “Wow I feel a need to tell them something and it’ll be my last shot” before a death just kind of always reads “It was an ‘I love you’. They needed to say it and didn’t get a chance”. So we’ve got that and, specifically, we’ve got their outrage at the suggestions. Gideon stresses that she’s JUST Harrow’s cav. And she’s very fucking insistent on that. Part of the why is that she knows Harrow is in love with a fucking dead girl in a casket but like. It just hits a certain way. There’s also Harrow’s just repeated disgust she expresses towards the concept of necro/cav relationships. She needs to explain away to herself that like, well, Abigail and Magnus were ALREADY married before he was named her cavalier primary so maybe that makes it fine. And even then she’s not like super duper comfy with the idea. A taboo has been broken, Harrow feels, and she needs to get really rules lawery to find any comfort with that. Other small things that feel of note to me here are the nature of the ways we know that these two are gay outside of like. Their weird thing for one another. With Gideon we’re introduced to it basically immediately with her joke about titty mags. Harrow specifically makes a comment at some point that some of the magazines Gideon gets are very gross, yes. Her interest in women is explicitly made sexual from the get go, and the idea that The Gays are just weird sex fiends and there is no love there is a frequent one. With Harrow meanwhile we know because she says she’s in love with the girl in the Locked Tomb. Who is very much dead. A thing that is fucky enough that like there is an entire song and dance about “GIDEON THE FIRST IS MAKING OUT WITH A CORPSE??????” and how Harrow is a hypocrite for being so offended by that all. Also the girl is behind the door. She is something that isn’t supposed to be seen or known about or, heaven forbid, woken up. That is all the ultimate taboo and Harrow not only fucking broke that but she looked at the girl and went “Wow I’m in love” on the spot. So we have this collection of things that could be read as some sort of metaphor for like...The taboo nature of queer love. “Why can’t they just be friends?” and issues of purity and the lack thereof. And we have characters who are very clearly in love but who can’t just admit that because they think there’s something fucking wrong with that. Gideon’s JUST her cav and Harrow is also in love with a dead chick. We also have Magnus and Abigail around who are just like. Happily married and fine with things regarding their whole necro/cav aesthetic. Ianthe doesn’t seem to give a shit that Gideon’s into Harrow at all. There’s a fondness for necro/cav relationships enough that there’s an entire romance genre centered on them and like characters in the cast are fond of those, some of them. Things appear to be Fine, at least as far as their friends are concerned. Maybe the asshole writing the essay that kicked this pondering off would have an issue and a stuffy old grandma would pitch a fit. But like their friends don’t have a problem with necro/cav shit. But we still very much have Gideon and Harrow being “Well no. We’re just a necromancer and their cavalier. GOD.” Now part of what got me thinking about this is that I recently decided to start watching Bly Manor. Because fuck it we haven’t yet. And specifically part of why is I remember seeing an analysis of it done by Rowan Ellis which had this bit where like the argument that “Bly Manor proves you can do queer stories without homophobia being a part of it!” is brought up and like...Ellis is like “Ok but we very much do just lock a queer woman in a literal closet while she screams to be let out”. And lo and behold in the first episode we very much do just lock a queer woman in a literal closet while she screams to be let out. In an episode showing that she’s like just unable to go back home for...some reason. And that she has some sort of difficulty with her relationship with her mother. No, the show is not having the character literally go “Wow I sure am in the closet and I kind of fucking hate that woe is me I am so gay”. But figuratively? It’s all over the place in that first episode. I’m not sure about the others because I haven’t watched them, but it is there in the very first one. And that’s something horror does very well. It takes things that are scary and uncomfortable and bundles them up in shades of metaphor. It hides them from you by showing you the thing cleverly disguised. Maybe you do not notice it the first time through perhaps. Maybe you felt that a certain thing like the closet scene resonated very hard with you and you’re not sure why. But you perhaps don’t consciously go “Aha! It is the horror of being closeted!” Upon looking back on it or back through it though you might notice it. And be like “Oh that was there. Holy fuck.” Now maybe you’re also someone who isn’t like. Comfortable. With straightforward depictions of specifically queer suffering. Maybe it’s just too scary. But with this show hiding it in a metaphor you got to sit through that. You got to be brave enough to sit through a very, very scary thing. And afterwords you go to think about it. This is the power of metaphor and it’s something horror has been very, very good at doing for ages. Maybe racism or homophobia or whatever else is too nerve wracking for you to look at face on in media, but maybe you can watch a movie or a show where the horror of those things are very much there but cloaked in metaphor. And so maybe we are getting that with Gideon and Harrow’s weird issues around how “taboo” their feelings are. Two people who are just unwilling to believe that it might be that thing, in part because that thing is “taboo”. Except instead of the taboo being literally “They’re lesbians, Harold,” it’s instead cloaked in a comforting metaphor of necro/cav relationships and some dude who is really fucking offended at people’s space ao3 fanfictions about his historical favs. Which is important because every fucking scrap of anything one gets is an argument. It can’t just be that they’re in love. It’s that you must PROVE it and some asshole with a degree or just a bone to pick is going to come by and be like “WHY CAN’T THEY JUST BE A NECRO AND A CAV” about it all. And like I’m someone who’s known they’re into other women for a long while now. At least half my life. We have conquered that hurdle. But we haven’t entirely unpacked all the weird little societal bullshit that is still in there. Hiding. Lurking. And that societal bullshit specifically frames that sort of love as something gross and taboo and “Why Can’t They Just Be Friends?”. With that last thing hurting a lot. I’ve constantly run across people going “Why can’t they just be friends?” or going “They just have a sisterly relationship!” about things I shipped. Even when those things involved shit like the characters kissing on screen or mentioning that they’ve been dating in a sequel series. I can’t simply like my ships. I can’t simply see myself in romance. Because my sort of love is so taboo that it is, in itself, a debate. Maybe being shown the thing cleverly disguised as another thing might help me unpack that. At the very least it helps me look at it. When it’s something that hurts a lot to this day.
#the locked tomb#gideon the ninth#harrow the ninth#spoilers#this is a bit painfully long#but i have FEELINGS about uncomfortable things being hidden in metaphor#and that metaphor being the thing that helps you be brave enough to look at it
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here’s 7.1k of Toni pining and Shelby and Toni being childhood friends and also far more character analysis of Rachel than I was expecting? also Marcus is real and I made him a gorgeous himbo. it’s based off that poem by @theycallmedizzy and you can find it here. lmk if you want a second chapter from shelby’s perspective, tho i literally just finished this one. like literally ten minute ago.
Mr. Williams finishes reading the poem and looks over his spectacles at the class. Yes, they’re spectacles, those kind of tiny thick ones that make his eyes too big because he’s much too old to be teaching.
It’s eight am on a Tuesday, Toni walked the three miles to school because she missed the bus only to walk into her shitty honors English class and hear the teacher reading a poem aloud to the class. Her poem. She’d sat down after a momentary pause and listened to him read the final damning stanza.
And then he looks at Toni.
He reads her essays right? What if he recognizes her writing voice? Is that a thing? Or maybe her handwriting or—
“Toni, I was just explaining to the class that whoever wrote this should submit it to the state literature festival,” Mr. Williams says, Toni almost sags against her chair. “I was hoping someone would come forward,” He turns back to the class, eyes hovering over Quinn and Monty, two of the more sensitive guys who sit in the back and ruin the curve for everyone. “But I’ll leave it on the board here,” he clacks it on with a magnet and Toni flinches, “and hopefully someone will come forward. Now onto today’s lesson.”
After class Martha goes up to the board and takes a picture of it, her eyes a little starry at the words and Toni grits her teeth.
“You have to admit it’s pretty,” Martha says. “Even you can’t deny that.”
“It’s dumb,” Toni says flatly, crossing her arms.
“Well I’m keeping it anyway, maybe someday someone will write a poem about me,” Martha says.
“How do you know it’s not about you?” Shelby asks coming out of nowhere and uninvited too. Toni glares at her, letting her open disdain shine through like sunshine through clouds after a gully washer.
“No guys notice me,” Martha informs Shelby sadly. “I bet Andrew wrote it for you.”
Shelby purses her lips and looks over the poem, “I doubt it. He’s more of a doer, I think. Besides, I’m sure that guys notice you, you went on a date with that boy Sam last month.”
Martha sighs and before she can launch into what a disaster that date was, Toni tightens her hands around her backpack.
“I’ll see you in science,” She tells Martha and manages to escape Shelby’s eyes burning at the back of her neck.
———
reasons not to kiss her
1.) this sort of love is not allowed. you are both too soft, and the world around you is all knives and chipped teeth
Toni had played about every sport she was allowed to growing up. Basketball was her favorite, but she loved beat it ball, the game she made up with the other kids in the neighborhood. It was basketball but without rules, devolving into fist fights within the first half. Nothing tasted better than her own bloody lip on a hot summer day. Not even the cool glass of lemonade Mrs. Blackburn always had ready when she ran all skinned knees to Martha’s telling her about how she beat guys two years older than her.
She got angry when she had to stop playing, moving to a different neighborhood. Apparently, Mrs. Blackburn had figured out that she wasn’t only getting her split lip from the older kids in the neighborhood.
The new foster parents were a little stricter, a little richer, and signed her up for youth soccer when she complained about how there was nothing to do without beat it ball.
Martha Blackburn would always be her person, but Toni didn’t expect to find her people so young. Dottie killed as goalie, and Becca’s sweetness made her defense all the better. But it was Shelby and Toni who were the dynamic duo. Toni had a never ending amount of energy as a midfielder and Shelby’s precision made her the perfect striker. It worked the same way every game, Becca would kick it to Toni, who got it to Shelby, who scored a goal. It got to the point that Becca didn’t even need to do much and the coach had to pull Toni aside to tell her to pass to the other girls too.
At the end of the season they sat together at the team party, wearing orange slice smiles. With sticky fingers they held hands and Toni kinda wondered how someone’s eyes could be so green.
Toni doesn’t remember why Shelby’s parents were so angry about them holding hands, but she knows Mr. Goodkind talked to her foster parents and Toni was off to a different home, in a different district, and she lost even Martha for a few months.
———
At lunch everyone’s talking about that fucking poem. Martha sent it around to the whole school and Leah is discussing its merits with Rachel and Nora. Even they don’t seem bored with the topic, though Nora is sure Quinn didn’t write it.
“It could be Monty,” Leah says. “I wouldn’t have thought he had an eye for this stuff.”
“I don’t think it’s Monty,” Rachel says. She looks at Nora, “C’mon, you know what I’m talking about, right?”
“What?” Nora asks.
“I mean it smells like Anna Akhmatova had a baby with Adrienne Rich,” Rachel says.
“Who had a baby with who?” Martha asks.
“Please,” Fatin says. “You’re not exactly the world’s leading expert on free form poetry.”
“Uh, I know when something’s written by a girl,” Rachel says. “I bet you fifty bucks some closet case wrote this.”
Everyone looks at Toni. “You caught me,” Toni deadpans.
“Rachel’s right,” Nora says. “A girl definitely wrote this. Toni, do you know anyone?”
Toni glares at her. “I’ll shake the lesbian phone tree and see what comes out.”
“Well, could it be Regan?” Martha asks. “Maybe she wants to—”
“It’s not fucking Regan,” Toni grabs her books and stalks out, kicking a chair randomly strewn around away as she did.
She hears Shelby sit down just as she leaves, “What’s got her madder than a baptized cat?” Shelby asks and Toni rolls her eyes.
———
2.) no one ever taught you how to love. your war paint and scarred hands could never hold her like she deserves
The worst of it was that Shelby was gentle. Her hands were warm and soft around Toni’s callouses, and there was a crinkle between her eyebrows as she focused on Toni’s hands. No, the worst of it was that Shelby didn’t let go of Toni’s hands when she finished, kept holding onto them as she met Toni’s eyes.
“Well?”
Toni swallowed hard, “I’m not gonna apologize.”
Shelby sighed, her thumb traced little circles around Toni’s hands. “I know today ain’t easy for you.” Toni scoffed and looked away. “But you know you were pickin' a fight. Andrew promised to leave you alone.”
Toni ripped her hands away and jumped from the bench of the locker room. “What the fuck do you know? You weren’t fucking there.”
Shelby’s calm only made Toni’s anger redder, “You ain’t denying it.”
“Why the fuck are you dating him? He’s a self-satisfied little asshole who just wants a little trophy girlfriend to—”
“Toni,” Shelby cut her off sharply and got to her feet, meeting Toni’s eyes.
“You’re not denying that either,” Toni spat.
She could’ve screamed at the hypocrisy. She wanted to scream. She wanted to pound her fists against the walls and bleed all over the bandages Shelby wrapped around her knuckles. She wanted to hurt, to make Shelby hurt. She wanted everyone to see and feel how hurt she was, and hurt them with that hurt. Finally level the playing field.
“Andrew is my business,” Shelby said. “Not yours.”
“He becomes my business when you—”
“When I what?” Shelby asked.
Toni looked at her hands, “Never mind.”
Shelby sighed, “Martha’s helping you move in today, right? Shel’ll be there the whole time?”
“Don’t pretend you give a shit.”
“Of course I care. The last time you lived with your mom you didn’t eat for a week.”
“I was five, not fifteen,” Toni said. “And seriously, stop pretending you give a shit.”
She shoulder checked Shelby as she walked out and winced at the sound of Shelby hitting the gym lockers. Her hands still sting where Andrew’s teeth had scrapped them.
———
Regan approaches Toni during science, her eyes serious. Martha straightens, and Toni does her best not to make eye contact.
“It’s not mine,” Regan says.
“Yeah duh,” Toni mutters.
Regan frowns, “I just—I didn’t want you to—”
“You made it perfectly clear what you want,” Toni says.
Regan sighs and leaves and Toni regrets it.
“Shelby thinks it’s Marcus,” Martha tells her. Toni blinks up at her and Martha nods. “She thinks he wrote it for me.”
“Martha, that kid is dumber than a box of rocks,” Toni says.
Martha furrows her brow, “Maybe he has hidden depths.”
“If you think it’s him ask him out,” Toni says.
“Shelby thinks it’s him,” Martha is quick to correct. “But he doesn’t even know who I am.”
Toni rolls her eyes. Marcus had been in love with Martha since the ninth grade. They had gotten placed as lab partners and he literally didn’t take his eyes off her the entire time. Every time there was a dance he would always look like he was about to say something, shoot his shot, when Martha would loudly proclaim she couldn’t wait to go with her friends.
Toni would’ve pulled the guy aside and told him to grow a pair, but a guy who’s not brave enough to go after what he wants wasn’t good enough for her Marty, not by a long shot.
“Rachel still thinks a girl wrote it,” Martha says.
“Maybe Rachel wrote it,” Toni mutters.
Martha’s eyes light up.
———
3.) no one has ever loved you this full surely you would drown in it all
Being a lifeguard was the worst. It was super boring, the pay was shit, and also Toni would probably get someone killed. Like, they pretended she was CPR certified but she absolutely had no idea how to do it. She went to some hour long course, slept through it, took a test that was just: should you kill people? And then they wrote some bullshit on some papers about a three week long set of classes.
But Shelby was tanned and golden looking and on their shifts they’d text back and forth about which kids they were betting on to win sharks and minnows. Tweenage boys in all their adolescent infancy would gaze open mouthed at Shelby and Toni alike but Shelby was the only one who let them down gently. Toni would ruin them for girls forever with something enough to cut through even the thickest skin.
On the fourth of July the pool paid for fireworks and Toni found a blanket and Shelby found her and they sat watching the reflections of the lights together. Shelby rested her head on Toni’s shoulder, all gentle, like she was afraid Toni would spook.
“I know this ain’t much of a holiday for you,” Shelby said. “But thank you for spending it with me.”
She had her hand on the blanket, splayed out like she was waiting for Toni to take it, there in front of everyone. Toni imagined a world in which she did.
———
“Yeah it’s not me,” Rachel says. “I wish I could write that good.”
Which is such bullshit because Toni knows Rachel could say well if she wanted to. Rachel’s weird inferiority complex about Nora pisses off Toni to no end. Nora’s the smart one, Rachel will be the first to say, and Rachel’s the athletic one. But Nora has a six minute mile and Rachel has perfect pitch so Toni hates them both.
“Maybe it’s Dot,” Toni suggests and Rachel, Nora, and Martha snicker.
Out of all of them, Martha’s the best driver, but they always end up in Rachel’s car after school anyway.
“Most of the school seems to think it’s by Andrew,” Nora says. Toni’s fists clench.
“Yeah,” Rachel rolls her eyes, “I’m sure he would love to take the credit. C’mon Toni, you don’t know any lesbians who could’ve written this?”
“You’re a lesbian too,” Toni says. “You don’t know any?”
“I don’t have a life outside of the pool,” Rachel says, “and none of them have picked up a book since Hop on Pop.”
“Regan says it wasn’t her,” Martha cuts in helpfully. “But maybe it’s another kid in theatre. Shelby says—”
“Oh my god,” Toni grits out. “What is everyone’s deal with her anyway? Why is everyone still obsessed with her? She’s just another basic Jesus bitch.”
The car goes quiet and Toni wishes she could melt into her seat cushion.
“I didn’t mean that,” Toni says.
“Except you did,” Martha snaps.
Toni winces.
“What’s your deal with her?” Rachel asks. “You guys were fine last year.”
“Quinn says there’s a poetry club,” Nora says. “Maybe it’s someone there?”
No one takes the bait and they don’t talk the rest of the way.
———
4.) she belongs in a museum, and you are merely here to gaze. look around you, all the signs scream ‘do not touch’
“Shelby?”
Toni grabbed the shoulder of the girl and pulled her away from Marcus. Shelby was bruised lips and ruined make up and Toni took her by the hand. Thank god Martha wasn’t here, thank god Andrew wasn’t here, thank god Marcus looked just as trashed.
“Toni?” Shelby sorta stumbled, her ankle twisting painfully on her heel and Toni steadied her.
Shelby could do a cartwheel in six inch heels.
“I’m gonna get you home, okay?” Toni called over the music.
Shelby didn’t really respond, just leant into Toni as she led her away and outside. The party had spilled into the backyard and front yard some, the cops probably already on their way, but everyone was too fucking hammered to notice them making their way out.
Shelby’s house was only about a twenty minute walk but it was cold and Toni was only wearing her basketball shorts and her mom’s jacket that she promptly put over Shelby’s shoulders.
“Are you still—” Shelby swallowed hard, “You’re still living with your mom?”
“Mostly with Martha,” Toni said.
“Martha’s great,” Shelby said. “She’s so pretty it makes my eyes hurt.”
“One of our finest,” Toni grunted as Shelby nearly fell on her heels again.
“She could be a model,” Shelby told her. “We should get waffle house.”
“Shelbs, we’re nowhere near a waffle house.”
“What was Becca’s order? At waffle house?”
Toni sighed, looping an arm around her. “I dunno.”
“Neither do I,” Shelby said.
“I’m sorry, Shelby,” Toni said.
Shelby shook her head and stopped right there, circling her arms around Toni and pressing her into a hug. Toni closed her eyes, holding her back as tightly as she dared.
“Oh, Shelby, I’m so fucking sorry.”
———
“Day two!” Mr. Williams calls. He taps the poem again, “I will investigate the handwriting if the poet doesn’t come forward by Friday. I know it’s someone in one of my classes.”
His eyes narrow as he takes them all in and his eyes don’t linger on Toni. Not even for a moment.
There’s a part of her that wants to march up to the front of the room and write her name down, make eye contact with everyone who never even considered her before. But no one expects shit from her, and even if he does go over the handwriting he won’t really be able to pin it on her. He might not even bother checking to see if it matches.
Toni tries not to jump when Marcus takes the seat in front of her during quant lit. It’s not like they have assigned seating but everyone sticks to the same seats anyway. Marcus won’t get shit for it though, perks of being the quarterback.
“So, listen,” he scratches the back of his head and Toni rolls her eyes at him. “I know we aren’t really friends but I—um.”
“Marcus,” Toni says.
“I wanna ask Martha out,” Marcus rushes out. “She’s like the nicest, smartest, coolest girl in the school and like her eyes are out of this world radical.” Radical? “And I would take her somewhere nice like Olive Garden. Or Cheesecake Factory? And pay for it, and open all the doors for her, and I’d carry her books to class—”
“On your date? This is happening during school?” Toni asks.
His eyebrows furrow as he tries to connect the dots. Football players.
“Oh no! I meant like, after, if she wants me to,” He says. “Can I?”
“Can you what?”
“Can I ask her out?”
Toni blinks at him. “What?”
“My buddy said if you want to get with a girl you get close to the best friend first, and I figured I’d ask you for your blessing because that’s what they do in old fashioned stuff right?” He bounces up in down in his seat. “Can I? Or like, do you wanna give me your blessing?”
She feels like she’s having an aneurysm.
Listen, Marcus having feelings for Martha is one thing. Everyone on the planet who’s ever met Martha falls a little in love with her. That’s kinda just how she operates. Toni narrowly avoided that pitfall by being lucky enough to know her since she was five, but it was a tough time. But Marcus was never gonna act on it. Marcus can’t—he’s the quarterback.
It’s basic math, Marcus is a six foot five football player with shoulders wide enough to bench press the Subaru Forrester Toni’s legally required to buy when she turns thirty-two. He’s got that all American boy smile that shows of perfectly white teeth, and dark hair that sweeps in front of his eyes. His face looks like it was sculpted out of marble, like literally he looks like some sort of roman god, except if that roman god volunteered at the humane society on the weekends and called his mom Mami.
Martha is a res girl who’s best friend is the dyke with anger issues. And like yeah, she’s stupid pretty, but Marcus has exclusively dated varsity cheerleaders since the seventh grade.
So yeah, even if Marcus may have feelings for Marty, everyone fucking does, and there’s a host of reasons why she doesn’t have a date to every dance and a new guy every week. And most of them are the cliche high school movie hierarchy sort.
“It’s really none of my business, man,” she says.
“Dude, it’s totally your business,” Marcus says. He leans closer, “you two are like sisters right? What do I gotta do to prove I’m not gonna hurt her? I’ll do your math homework for a month, no two months.”
A thought occurs to Toni and it’s a terrible one. But when has that ever stopped her?
“You’re in my honors English class right?”
Marcus’s face screws in, “Uh, yeah. But I don’t think you want me doing your homework in there, I’m like totally failing.”
“I have a better idea.”
———
5.) she touches you like youre fragile, and if you break you wont be able put yourself together again
Dot was asleep which was Toni’s first indication that something was deeply wrong. The second was that Shelby wasn’t. She was definitely trying her darnedest, but Toni could tell she was awake. Awake in her arms.
Toni shifted, just enough to let Shelby know she was awake too. The movie was some horror flick, something dumb and flashy and almost muted it was so quiet. It was the only thing rated R that they could all agree on. Dot’s house was the only place they were allowed to watch anything rated R when they were still thirteen, so it was all they watched there.
She felt Shelby shift up, so her head rested on Toni’s chest, shifted until her lips met Toni’s clavicle.
Toni wondered if she’d die.
Shelby went up instead of down, pressing kisses up the length of Toni’s neck, soft barely there things that made Toni’s breath catch as she watched Dot snore on the couch next to them.
Toni’s hands moved to the inside of Shelby’s thighs and they stared there, tracing delicate patterns that only made Shelby curl closer.
“I think you’re probably the most beautiful girl I ever saw,” Shelby whispered.
“I—”
“I’m not done.”
Toni’s mouth clamped shut.
“I think about you all the time,” Shelby whispered. “Even when I—”
“Shelby,” Toni warned. Shelby pressed a kiss to the corner of her mouth.
“You’re right,” Shelby said.
Neither of them slept that night.
———
Toni walks into class three minutes late with Mr. Williams, and takes her seat with a sulk.
“He still won’t let me redo that paper,” Toni mutters to Martha who’s eyes are wide.
“Toni, Marcus just—” She nods her head at the poem where Mr. Williams is studying it too.
“Marcus Gonzales?” Mr. Williams asks.
Marcus gets to his feet.
“You wrote this?”
“Yessir.”
“This poem right here?”
“Yessir.”
Mr. Williams blinks and takes off his spectacles, setting them down on the desk. “We’ll talk after class. I should hope everyone has a copy of—”
“I wrote it for Martha,” Marcus doesn’t sit down and the entire class stares at him.
“—Franny and Zooey and I would like you all to turn to page 52. Begin by annotating—”
“Martha, can I take you out on a date?” Marcus asks.
“—this first section, and on to page 64. Remember what Seymour serves as in—”
Martha blushes hard and glances at Toni who smiles before she looks back at Marcus in all his golden boy 6’5” glory.
“Um, okay,” she mutters out and he grins.
“Cool.” Marcus finally sits and gives Toni a thumbs up. She rolls her eyes.
“—this story and compare that to his roles in the other parts of the work we’ve read.”
“I told you it was for you, girl,” Shelby says on Martha’s other side. “People always have a way of surprising you.”
———
6.) she is all bubblegum skies and chapped stick kisses, and you cannot watch the love run out of another persons eyes
They were all a little bit slap happy by the end of the night. A little bit drunk, a little bit high, and laughing far too hard at one another.
“I’m scared,” Shelby told them, still grinning wider than any pageant smile.
“Girl, you picked dare,” Fatin said.
“I did,” Shelby bit her lip. “But all y’all dared Leah to do was finish the vodka.”
“That was—that was bad vodka,” Leah slurred from her position on Dot’s lap.
“But now we’re out of vodka,” Martha sang. “You picked dare.”
“I’ll go with you,” Toni got to her feet, surprised when they were more steady than she assumed they’d be. “Two chairs right?”
“Alright,” Shelby said. “And you’ll hold my hand?”
“Sure princess,” Toni rolled her eyes.
It was an office supply place, probably. The parking lot had this killer decline, and it was one of those spring nights where nothing could really ruin anything. Not forever.
The rolling chairs were kinda gross, left there but not yet picked up by the garbage men. They had to do a special pickup for that, which costed extra. No one in the office had done it for the weeks the girls had been going there after parties.
“Be careful,” Nora urged.
“Don’t fall,” Rachel suggested.
“Hold on, I’m not recording yet,” Fatin said. “Okay now go.”
They pushed off in their rolling chairs, holding hands, and sped down the decline laughing as they barely managed to hold on and steer at the same time.
Toni went flying as she bumped into a patch of grass and for some reason, Shelby went flying with her, landing on top. Toni grunted, but she wasn’t in pain, not really.
They met eyes.
“Sorry,” Shelby said. She didn’t sound sorry.
“You okay?” Toni asked.
Shelby smiled, this real soft thing, Toni wondered what it’d taste like.
“Fuck yeah bitches! I’m so putting that on snapchat!” Fatin screamed and Shelby pulled away, turning white.
“God if this is you in in freshman year, I’m terrified of you as a senior,” Toni called back.
Shelby’s hand slipped out of her’s and Toni tried very very hard not to overthink it.
———
“So I’ve been thinking,” Leah said. Toni took her gym bag out of her locker, pretty much the only thing she kept in there.
“Oh no.”
“Rachel was right about that poem being written by a girl,” Leah continued. “Which meant Marcus lied. And Marcus would never do that unless someone gave him permission to take credit. And since Marcus lied so he could ask Martha out that means the person who wrote the poem wanted Martha to be happy.”
Toni swallowed hard and tried not to fumble with the lock, stumbling with it.
“Toni,” Leah walked over to her. “You need to face the facts: Shelby’s into you.”
Toni blinked, “What?”
“She wrote that whole poem for you, don’t tell me you don’t see it. It’s about you!”
“She—” Toni stopped and furrowed her brow, finally making eye contact with Leah, “You think she wrote that poem for me?”
Leah nodded, “And she let Marcus take the credit. Listen, I know I’m right. I’ve been thinking about it for ages. Whatever fight the two of you had—you need to get over it. She’s into you, Toni. She’s been into you.”
“You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” Toni told her. “Seriously, fuck you Leah and fuck off. This is none of your fucking business.”
“You aren’t denying it,” Leah crowed. “Shelby likes you.”
“No she fucking doesn’t!” Toni spat at her. “She fucking hates me! She didn’t write that poem Marcus did! For Martha!”
Leah’s brow furrowed, “But… but you wanted her to. Didn’t you?”
Toni looked away.
“Shelby’s actually straight, isn’t she?” Leah asked. “Fuck Toni.”
“I’m happy for Martha,” Toni said, and marched away.
———
7.) if you jump, she might catch you, and then youd have to watch as she tumbled through the dark
“What if we ran away?” Shelby asked, which was Toni’s third indication that the punch was spiked.
The first two were her arms wrapped around Toni’s waist, swaying in the soft breeze to the distant music of Junior prom.
“Oh yeah?” Toni asked. “Where’d we go?”
“Peru,” Shelby said. “Or LA, or New York or—” Shelby sort of trailed off, losing her thought halfway through it.
“Our parents,” Toni pointed out. She’d moved in with Martha a few months ago but her mom had taken it as a wakeup call, promising to get her shit back together as soon as she could. Toni couldn’t help but believe her, even if it put her in stasis.
“Right,” Shelby sounded cold, “Our parents.”
“Are things worse with them?” Toni asked.
“No,” Shelby said. “The same, really. They’ve lightened up since—since Becca. Have you heard from your mom?”
“Every week or so,” Toni said. “And if you ever need a break you know—“
“Martha is happy to have me,” Shelby finished.
Toni smiled and pulled away enough to meet Shelby’s eyes, her hands slid from behind Shelby’s neck to either side.
“Did I tell you you look beautiful tonight?” Toni asked.
“You did,” Shelby said.
“Can I say it again?”
“You can.”
“You look beautiful tonight.” Shelby closed her eyes and Toni tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “You’re gonna get out, you know that right?”
Shelby nodded, leaning into Toni’s hand.
Later, Toni will learn that was one of two lies Shelby told that night.
———
Martha gets home at 11:30, exactly when Marcus promised, and Toni smiles as her sister collapses backwards into her bed.
“Toni,” she actually giggles, giggles like a little school girl. “It was amazing.”
“Where’d you go?” Toni asks.
“Olive Garden, I think he was trying to win points with you,” Martha says.
“As he should,” Toni nods.
“He was the perfect gentleman,” Martha swoons. She rolls onto her stomach and looks at Toni and oh god, Toni knows that look. “He did tell me something about you, though.”
“Oh yeah? How I’m better in quant lit than him?” Toni asks.
“He told me you wrote the poem,” she says.
Toni looks away, “Okay, and?”
“You told me you were over Regan,” Martha says.
“It’s complicated,” Toni decides. “And whatever. I wrote it awhile ago anyway.”
“Have you thought about submitting it to that contest Mr. Williams was talking about?” Martha asks.
“Can we go back to talking about your date with Prince Charming?” Toni says. Martha acquiesces, she’s too damn giddy to do anything else.
———
8.) her gaze is too gentle. you will not be the one to tell her that not everything can be fixed with a smile
“Toni,” Dot began, and Toni could tell she was looking at her. “Toni, is Shelby—is she gay?”
Toni snickered, “Dot, Shelby is possibly the biggest straight girl in our school. Maybe our state. She’d sooner give herself a buzzcut than she would ever even kiss a girl."
“Andrew said Shelby got a job as a counselor at this church camp—Guiding Light—in Plano,” Dot said. “I wanted to find the address so I could write to her and it’s a conversion camp.”
The breath left Toni’s body.
“What?”
“And I got to thinking,” Dot said. “About what a mess she was after Becca died this year. Ignoring us, going to all those parties, signing up for a crazy number of pageants. Hell, it was only once you two started talking that she talked to us again.”
“Stop it, Dot.”
“Toni is Shelby gay?”
“Dot,” Toni said.
“Because if she’s gay, if she’s not there as a camp counselor—Toni, did you know about this?”
“Of course not! Jesus!” Toni said. She jumped to her feet and started to pace, “Jesus Christ. Oh my god.”
“Toni is Shelby gay?”
Toni looked at Dot and Dot sighed, her entire body sagging.
“What do we do?” Toni asked.
Dot, her solid, steady, friend since fucking youth soccer was silent.
“Dot, what do we do?”
“Dot, what the fuck do we do?”
———
Shelby finds her before school, Toni smoking like she hasn’t since ninth grade when Bernice gave her a stern lecture about lung cancer. It made Toni cry, actually. Not because it was so stern but because Martha and Toni had been separated for three years and Bernice still cared enough to get angry with her. She promised then and there to stop, and each drag she took now makes her feel like she’s committing treason.
“Smokin’ kills,” Shelby tells her, like they didn’t all go to Dot’s dad’s funeral last year.
Toni takes another drag, just to watch Shelby roll her eyes.
“How’d Martha’s date go last night?” Shelby asks.
Toni glares, “Seriously? You avoid me all year and now you’re asking about Martha’s date?” Shelby looks away. “It went fine. Whatever.”
“I just—I was surprised Marcus wrote that poem is all.”
“You literally said multiple times you thought it was him,” Toni says.
“I know, I know but—”
“Still holding out hope for Andrew?” Toni sneers. “Marcus may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but he cares about Martha. Even a fucking idiot could write a half decent poem if they had someone worth writing about.”
Shelby meets her eyes and Toni’s breath catches.
“Know a lot about poetry, Toni?”
Fuck fuck fuck.
Toni flicks the only half used cigarette away. “I have to go to class,” She says, aware it’s just about the worst thing she can do.
Shelby doesn’t even need the last word, she’s aware she’s already won.
———
9.) she is so good. she is so good, and you cannot ruin one more good thing
It hadn’t been the first time Toni found her mom overdosed on the couch, but it’d been the most terrifying. Toni had waited in the school parking lot for a pick up for twenty minutes before Shelby had offered her a ride.
When they trooped inside, after having to use the key Tamera kept tucked away in a loose brick, her mom had been passed out on the couch. And the stupid thing had been that Toni had known her mom hadn’t been doing great. Like she’d known Tamera had lost her job, and was close to losing the car, that the pain in her back had been getting worse again from stress. Toni had known that.
But for some stupid, naive reason, Toni had never thought she’d pull this, go back to who she was.
Her tolerance was low, the doctors had told her, because she’d been clean for so long. She hadn’t realized it and had taken more than she could handle.
Shelby had taken the three of them to the hospital, helped carry Toni’s drooling mother into the ER, and held Toni’s hand until the other girls showed up, who she texted to come.
Shelby had been there when the police and social services came to talk to her about going back into foster care. Shelby had never left her side.
Toni couldn’t help but contrast that to the Shelby she saw now. The Shelby who showed up for senior year was barely christian, barely anything, just sort of blank and empty and waiting to grow up so she could have daughters that'd also wait to grow up so that they could have daughters that’d also wait to grow up so that they could have daughters that’d also
Shelby didn’t even look at her, for the first week of senior year she didn’t even look at Toni. She talked with Martha in that faux friendly way, she passed off on lunch invitations to do school work and Toni felt like she was going insane.
Sometimes she would just stare at the back of Shelby’s head in English class, writing whatever gibberish came to mind, and not listening to Mr. Williams at all. Just stare, for forty-five minutes, at a girl who wouldn’t even make eye contact, Toni’s pencil moving rapidly as she barely even glanced at the words her hands produced.
On the last day of the semester Toni finally looked away and came to two realizations:
a. Her mother was never getting better. Not really. b. Toni had written P E R U over forty times in her notebook.
As quietly as she could she tore the page out, and maybe about fifteen pages behind it, filled with similar drivel and recycled them at the end of class.
When the next semester started the seats were changed and something she’d written that she barely remembered was on the board.
Her mother was still in rehab.
———
Toni watches Marcus carry Martha’s backpack to class and watches as Martha giggles at him, argues with him. She is literally so happy it makes Toni’s heart burst.
“Shelby’s quite the matchmaker, huh?” Fatin asks.
Toni looks at her.
“Leah told me,” Fatin explains.
Toni rolls her eyes.
“Yeah, that’s what I said too,” Fatin says. “Leah’s good at noticing things but putting the pieces together is not her strong suit. So I called Dorothy.”
This makes Toni’s shoulders tense and Fatin wraps an arm around them.
“Dorothy didn’t want to talk but what she didn’t say was enough.” Fatin sighs, “I’m all for a little drama but this is cutting into my me time.”
“What going from twenty-four hours a day to twenty-three and a half?” Toni asks.
“God forbid,” Fatin nods sagely. “I didn’t know you could write.”
“I can’t.”
“Clearly not.”
Toni slips out from under her arm, and follows Martha into class. Mr. Williams glares as she comes in and Toni realizes if Marcus came clean to Martha he definitely came clean to Mr. Williams. At least the poem is off the board.
When he passes out papers from a recent essay her’s has a “see me after class” sticker that makes Toni slide down in her seat. Martha doesn’t even notice enough to give her an odd look because she and Shelby are yukking it up about the quarterback.
When everyone files out she hangs back and he looks at her, over his spectacles.
“I’m disappointed,” he says at last.
Toni scoffs.
“You write essays based off spark notes, you never participate, and half the time you don’t even do the homework. But you write this.” He slides the crumpled paper over his desk, her poem shining back at her. “So all I can conclude is that you’re lazy.”
Yeah, obviously.
“Why did you have Marcus tell everyone he wrote it?” Mr. Williams asks.
“So he could ask out Martha.”
“He didn’t need to have written the poem to do that,” Mr. Williams says.
“Can I go?” Toni asks.
“I want to submit this poem to a contest, I want you to start trying in this class, and this,” he hands her a slip of paper with about twenty sets of numbers on it, “is a list of Dickinson poems I want you to read by next week. Pick at least three to write me at least a page about. Single spaced.”
“What?” Toni asks, “You can’t make me do that.”
“I know half the kids in this class write off spark notes, I can easily have them all—including you—fail. So yes, yes I can actually.” He takes off his spectacles and Toni glares at him. “You’re a smart kid, Toni. You’ve got a talent for this.”
Toni shakes her head, “I’m a one hit wonder.”
“You know Britney Spears said the same thing after Baby One More Time.”
“That’s not true,” Toni says.
“Yeah,” Mr. Williams says. “Because she kept working at it.”
And Toni takes the slip of paper with the numbers on it, and marches to her next class and he watches her the whole way, not bothering to put on his stupid spectacles.
———
10.) you will not watch her crumble under the weight of your sins. she is too light, too breathless to be caught up in the dizziness of your heart
Dot didn’t invite them all to the funeral but they came anyway, even Shelby who Toni knew had been waffling back and forth.
Some of his army friends showed up, a doctor or two, and Mateo—the hot nurse Dot steadily ignored. It was a small and quiet service, and the seven of them sat towards the back, holding steady for her.
There was too much on Dot’s shoulders, there always had been, but she didn’t look any freer now that the burden was lifted. She just looked scared, small, and sad.
Toni couldn’t help but wonder if that was what she’d look like, if she got the call about her mom. It was a terribly selfish thought but who could blame her?
Shelby’s hands interlocked with hers, in broad daylight, and stayed there for the entire day. When Toni met her eyes she saw pure terror reflected back at her.
God, were they really only seventeen?
———
Rachel is complaining at lunch about owing Nora five bucks, how she was so sure some closet case wrote the poem but it’s no surprise Nora got it right.
Fatin and Leah don’t contribute and Martha probably wouldn’t have either except she was eating lunch with Marcus, they had found their own little table and were smiling at one another.
“They’re certainly cute together,” Shelby says, glancing back at Martha and Marcus.
“I say it’s weird they have the same name,” Rachel says.
“Says the girl who dated a guy named Raymond,” Nora says.
Rachel throws a straw wrapper at him, “That was a phase and you know it.”
“Marcus is sweet,” Shelby says. “If anyone deserves someone sweet it’s Martha.”
“Don’t you think he’s a little,” Leah trailed off and they all looked at her. “You know a little…”
“Spit it out, Leah,” Rachel says.
“Like the porch lights on but no one’s home?” Leah says.
“Martha is smart enough for the both of them,” Toni says. “And thank god because I was sick of doing his homework in quant lit.”
“That’s literally the easiest math class there is,” Fatin says and Toni shrugs.
“What’s that?” Shelby asks, pointing at the yellow slip sticking out of Toni’s binder.
“Some extra credit stuff, from Williams. Apparently I’m not doing so hot in that class,” Toni says.
Rachel leans way over from the other end of the table. “What is that, Dickinson?”
“It’s a list of numbers,” Shelby says. “Why would it be Dickinson?”
“All of Dickinson’s poems were numbered. It was only after she died that other people named them,” Nora says.
“And Nora said it so you know it’s true,” Rachel smirks.
“Join the fucking club,” Dot says to Toni. “I don’t know why y’all didn’t take non-honors English twelve with me. We just sit around and talk about whatever football game was on the most recently.”
“Well I’ve never liked football so.” Toni gets up, “I’ve gotta talk to my science teacher. I’ll see you guys after school.”
“I’ll go with you,” Shelby smiles and Toni clenches her jaw. “Ms. Roberts said I needed to rework my psych paper.”
“See you guys,” Rachel says and as they leave she’s arguing with Dot about why football is stupid and Toni can feel Fatin’s eyes on her all the way out.
———
reasons to kiss her
1.) she loves you, and her eyes are closed, and didnt your mother ever tell you not to leave a good thing waiting
Toni hated the magnet program kids at her middle school. Like everyone not in their cluster she found them annoying, rich, and privileged as fuck. They only hung out with each other and it was clear they’d never give—
———
“Toni?”
The stair well is empty, it’s the short cut through the language hallway and no one goes there during lunch.
Toni is working hard on ignoring Shelby but is forced to turn around when Shelby stops halfway up.
“Ms. Roberts doesn’t need me to rework my psych paper.”
Toni stares at her.
Shelby takes a step up, one step closer to Toni.
“I had hoped maybe you wrote it for Regan,” Shelby says.
“No such luck,” Toni croaks out.
“That’s a lot of reasons not to kiss someone,” Shelby says. “You’d think if you really shouldn’t kiss someone you’d only need the one.” She takes another step up, until they’re only separated by a few inches.
“I guess,” Toni says.
“Are you really gonna keep me waiting?” Shelby says.
Toni blinks, “You mean you still—”
“I have to do everything myself,” Shelby says.
She kisses her.
#did something different with time than i usually do#and with structure#lmk what you think#shoni#the wilds fanfic#the wilds#goodfoe fanfic#goodfoe#shelby goodkind#toni shalifoe#gus writes#ren don’t
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Why Julie and the Phantoms is a masterpiece of a show. Part 2. Heroes and Villains or Let that foil shine
NOTE: Thanks again for your kind response to Part 1. I never expected that. It being my first tumblr post and a first meta in quite a long time I was blown away. I read all the tags, some were really hilarious. About having more than one brain cell xDDD I laughed so hard. It means a lot.
NOTE2: Please remember that the gifs are made by me, so don't crop, edit or give as yours.
Part 1.
Before diving into meta, I have to mention that the Villain of the story is actually one of the best in the decade. He’s cool, evil from the start, we understand his motives and we certainly are not supposed to love and make excuses for him. The writers made sure of that. So back to the main topic.
A foil is a character who contrasts with another character; typically, a character who contrasts with the protagonist, in order to better highlight or differentiate certain qualities of the protagonist
Foils in literature are not necessarily antagonists. A friend can be a foil or sometimes even a thing, a song. Whatever can make a good and real contrast to the protagonist. But it’s not very simple to use this author’s device and not fall down a deep hole. Because you have to make sure you did just the right amount of work to make it understandable for a reader, the things you want to contrast are definitely there and still you don't waste a character. On TV it can be even harder given limited air time. And, well, I don’t come across this device being used in full very often nowadays. It’s usually good and evil fighting for the plot. That’s why I personally appreciate JaTP so much.
Caleb is clearly a foil to Luke. As much as I’d love to say that Julie also has one, that’s not entirely true, at least not this season. Carrie is not her foil though it may seem so, and I really think that’s cool as Julie’s journey is being presented through her own demons and I'm going to cover that next. That being said, of course Caleb doubles as an antagonist plotwise, but I personally consider him being written more as a contract to Luke so we could see and appreciate his character and journey better.
1. Origins
Caleb and Luke have extremely similar backgrounds. They are both natural performers. They know how to deliver, because c’mon, “Now or Never” is something and so is “The other side of Hollywood”. Stage is their natural habitat, their element, power. Although they channel this power from completely different places.
Let’s start with our little ball of energy. It’s emphasized TWICE that he doesn’t care about the money aka the physical side of art.
All Luke wants is to make music. Connect with people. He is so happy just to be heard despite him loving to perform. Making music is what makes him feel alive and basically that’s enough. I think if there was no “hologram” magic at all, Luke would have still been extremely happy to make music with and for Julie. Because that’s the way he is.
But Caleb doesn’t know that. He knows, and I’m standing by that, right away that Luke is the one to aim at. Because we always feel the similarity in people. If Luke said yes, Reggie and Alex would have followed. So Caleb recognizes the passion and shoots at them what he thinks is appealing. And, oh boy, he delivers.
“The Other Side of Hollywood” is a perfect song to emphasize Luke and Caleb being foils for each other. Follow me here:
But these lines come from very different places. For Caleb the only thing that matters is himself. He owns the show, he IS the show. It’s about being famous, drowning in applause, admiration. Look at how he performs. Confident, yes, but still very much in control. He must keep his perfect face. No flaws, no real emotions, no real connection (Did you miss ME? I did too // This band is back). Whereas Luke is simply living the best time of his life each time he performs. Is it just jamming? Bring it on. Doing fun riffs? He’s all for it. He doesn’t care how he looks (though who could deny gorgeous sweaty Luke), he owns the show just because he is a natural.
So back to the business. Caleb immediately puts the boys in his own shoes:
On the other side we live like kings // Your soulprint on the walk of fame on the boulevard of your wildest dreams // I got your glamour, got your gold, got all you’ll ever need
And, I mean, he is not that wrong. You can see the appeal on the boys’ faces. They are young, passionate, handsome, talented musicians. Of course they wouldn’t deny fame. Of course they would want all that to some extent. And Caleb is very sure he pulled the right strings.
Watch me make a move, I’m your number one choice
Also I have to mention, as we are talking about TOSOH (IKEA name again) and it being a foil for Luke, thy lyrics still don’t forget about what is important for Reggie and Alex (we’ll talk about that just a bit later):
Welcome to the brotherhood -> Reggie
Where you won’t be misunderstood -> Alex
Then again, lots of foreshadowing in the song, if you listen carefully the lyrics are stressing the true colors of the offer:
A tomb with a view
Man, what a metaphor. I would have run out of there the minute I heard this line. But our boys share one brain cell (I can’t get over how funny this is) and it’s currently taken by Julie, so I don’t blame them.
Disappointment is huge. Caleb read it all wrong. So we are moving to the next point in our Heroes and Villains essay.
2. Recruitment
It’s very cool that Caleb offers the boys to join his band right after Luke offers Julie to join Sunset Curve. They both are going out of their ways to get that (although have different budgets apparently. But look, they live in a garage). Luke made a hit with a bunch of Julie’s not very well structured lines (I love Flying Solo with all my heart as a song, but as a poem it just looks weird to me) to impress her, and we all saw the show Caleb had thrown to impress the boys. Plus food. And fancy dancing. But here is where contrast comes again.
Caleb offers to join the band, yes, but only as backup singers. It’s his show, remember? It’s only about him. He doesn’t care if they are even good. He wants their magic under control.
Share the spotlight with ME / How do you like MY new band?!
Luke offering Julie a spot in the band is a completely different story. He saw what she is capable of. He instantly knows she must be the key to a new sound, a new level. And he, a natural performer, frontman, lead guitarist, steps back and gives the spotlight to Julie. To think about it, he could have just got her magic under control by giving her simple lines, incorporating piano in the songs and that’s all. They would be visible, he would still be a center of attention, and Julie herself wouldn't mind that much. But that’s not who Luke is. Yes, there is a funny scene of “Hey, I’m your lead singer” and “you don’t have to be mean”, but it’s just messing around. Because right after that he finishes Flying Solo, writes several other songs with Julie, seeks her approval of Sunset Curve songs and basically follows her around like an adorable excited puppy.
Moving on and back to the rejection. Again the writers are mirroring them. Julie quits the band & the boys decline the offer. What does Luke do? Well, he tries the way he knows: books a gig, makes Reggie and Alex sing in perfect harmonies and does his puppy eyes thing. And it doesn’t work. And Luke goes to reflect and then probably try to come up with a plan. But something tells me he would not have haunted Julie until she joined them.
What does Caleb do after the initial rejection? Puts a cursed stamp that leaves them no choice but to join HGC. You don’t need to say more.
But in fact the more I think about it, the more I suspect Caleb also not possessing enough mental capacity for a human being. Like, if it wasn’t for Willie, how would they even know? Has Caleb planned to simply show up one day and casually explain? Look, foils in everything.
“You’re in a tough spot… So, you wanna join the band?” | “Looked like it hurt… you know where to find me”
But we sidestepped a bit.
3. Pulling the strings
After the song Caleb comes out to consolidate his success. What he does is clever and, btw, that’s the only time he becomes Julie’s foil. They are stating basically the same thing.
Again, Julie is concerned about the band and the boys, while Caleb is only concerned about having them under control. But they both are pulling basically the right strings.
What is interesting, Caleb actually impressed the wrong person (and that person is our sweet Reggie). Luke follows the string Julie pulled. Although the offer is tempting, he insists twice that they are in a band already directly to Caleb and then in Eats&Beats he says "It's like Julie said, we have a new band, a new sound». No matter what Caleb promised, Luke is not affected at all although Caleb’s offer is a very-very safe choice.
Speaking about using friends as foils, Alex and Reggie also serve as contrast characters for Luke at some points. Luke’s indifference to money is first stressed through Alex who is clearly the chief accountant for the band. His lines about not getting tips, living in a garage and «it’s a little bit about the money» are waved aside by Luke. Reggie is clearly the most affected by the whole Bobbie thing. His lines «I don’t care what Julie said, I’m glad we scared Bobbie», «So we’re gonna forget about getting back at Trevor?» are getting a clear contrast by Luke’s «It’s what Julie said, we have a new band, a new sound» and «He has to live with that guilt».
While editing the article I realised a very cool thing I haven't noticed before. How badly Luke wants to go on tour. And again that's another thing Caleb offers as if reading his mind. That's actually brilliant, to think about it.
Caleb is a VERY good reader. He tests the waters with a speech about disappearing from stage and going around the world and all dreams coming true. Still he doesn’t know the boys and especially Luke, so his phrase “no real connection” doesn’t register that much.
But he learns. Remember the lines I’ve marked before?
Reggie is afraid they will not be together after they cross over. He is in desperate need of a family. So wouldn’t it be nice to spend the rest of your afterlife with your brothers? (Reggie's main insecurity is loneliness, feel of a broken family. That's why he is the most concerned about crossing over. Will his family stay intact?)
Alex is insecure, and not being understood by the people closest to him will always hit hard. So welcome to a place where you won’t be misunderstood. And actually we know there is a guy you like and find comfort in. (Alex's insecurity is growing up in times when he could not truly be himself even with his family and for sure not believing he would ever be able to find someone meant just for him)
That mirrors the whole Luke’s beach speech perfectly. Only comparing them we can truly appreciate why Luke is the leader. He shuts down his own demons to make Alex and Reggie remember that they are not alone (“and I believe in you”. sorry. Olicity fan).
Caleb makes them suffer to get what he wants. But this time he is careful with the words aimed at Luke. Yes, he repeats his words about vanishing and applauses BUT he makes sure that his words about CONNECTION are the key words for Luke. Intense look, calming voice, touching - these are all elements of hypnosis. And Luke is in a daze. (Continuing the parents' thing, for Luke the main insecurity is not managing to connect with his mom. Maybe that's such a big thing for him: through all these people he wanted to find that connection with her)
4. The Hero’s journey
That’s the best part actually but I won’t be saying anything new or that you don’t know. Luke is made of lyrics and music. That’s his soul, heart, that’s the feeling running through his veins. He doesn’t need anything other than that in his life. Playing for eternity is “a gift no musician would ever turn down”. But he actually does turn it down. As well as his dream to go see the world with his band (is there covid in jatp universe?). He is the one who resists the hardest to the pull. Luke, who always has a guitar in his hands, doesn't want to play. Because it’s not only about the music now. He has this amazing girl in his afterlife who was willing to accept them for who they were, helped Luke battle his own demons, eased his pain and made him open up. And it doesn’t make sense any longer without her anymore. “And you’re a part of me now till eternity”.
Caleb, being Luke’s foil, completely misses the whole point of connection. It’s not in his nature. His house band are just recruits (Just so happens you’re in luck we’ve got a vacancy). For Luke his band is his family (We are the only family we ever gonna need). The Connection theme is one of the main in the show. And it’s so cool to show it focused through Luke whose best way of interaction is a touch. But not being able to touch Julie Luke has to find other ways, although it’s not that simple for him. And Julie backs that up: We connect in so many other ways. They literally touched each other's souls. Without knowing she put a stamp of her own on Luke, Alex and Reggie. They’ve never felt loved enough, appreciated enough, supported enough. They’ve only had each other. And Julie’s stamp is love. And for Luke (as well as Reggie and Alex) from now on this girl is worth dying for all over again.
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So yeah. I hope you enjoyed it, as I for sure enjoyed writing. There is gonna be a part 3 about Julie and a few honorable mentions of parallels of the Pilot and the Finale (I hope at least to do all that). I’ve also figured very very cool connections in the songs and I can’t wait to share.
Also as I was heavily speaking about The Other side of Hollywood, @catty-words has a wonderful meta on rain metaphors here (sorry for tagging, if you don't want to be tagged), check it out if you somehow missed it. It's super clever.
#jatp#julie and the phantoms#julie molina#luke patterson#reggie peters#alex mercer#jatp meta#jatp analysis#my gifs#my edits#don't crop#please be nice#caleb covington#ana's meta#am i smart? i am#having more brain cells then sunset curve
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wow okay i am skipping the lingerie party lol and am instead going to just briefly jot down some thoughts before i go to sleep and wake up at 5 for my flight tomorrow morning. jesus christ i have ONE MILLION thoughts and feelings about this weekend. i want to preface this by saying that on the whole, it was a fine social experience! it was nowhere near as awkward or painful as i was expecting. or like, parts of it were painful, but it was 100% to do with my own complicated feelings about literally every part of this tradition and the wedding industry in general lol, and not anything to do with the people themselves. the other women were friendly and very welcoming, i made an event best friend who was wonderful company, and it was really fun to get to spend time with both my sister-in-law and her older sister, who was so charming and wonderful. i’m glad i came even though thinking about the $$ i spent on this trip makes me physically gag.
but okay i want to just record some THOUGHTS that maybe i will continue unpacking with some distance. i feel likeeeee okay here are my thoughts.
the social norms around femininity are just a fucking minefield and i feel like i really just gotta keep walking back the impulse to judge other women for the choices they make as they navigate around the manifold traps and snares and half-buried landmines that constitute the landscape of being a woman. like jesus christ. it’s so fucked up, it’s so fucked up, the received and socially enforced norms of femininity are just so fucked up. I think ALL THE FUCKING TIME of this margaret atwood poem i love so much, which was REALLY on my mind this weekend:
How can I teach her some way of being human that won’t destroy her?
I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin.
I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone’s voice, Be ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it.
I feel like the first bit was very much on my mind throughout the weekend, but those last three lines have come to the forefront over the course of this last day, as i have tried to do some Thinking about what i observed/experienced/felt this weekend. whether or not this is what it means in the context of the poem, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it, expresses something of my complex feelings: I don’t know that I can tell the truth about femininity because I don’t know that I can see it. i am both too close to it/still emotionally entangled in it and too far from it to know which parts of it are ‘real’ and which parts are just performance.
i feel like one thing that struck me this weekend, in ways that i don’t know if i’ve noticed as much before, was that so much of the things women say to each other or do in these social contexts is performative, and they know on some level it’s a performance, but we are all going through the motions of doing and saying the expected things anyway. that has not always been clear to me. i have spent so much of my own life as a woman thinking that other women perfectly, seamlessly, naturally embodied the norms of femininity, and i was the only one (or part of a group of only ones) who couldn’t remember my lines, or kept fumbling my cues, or felt so painfully, self-consciously aware that i was playing a role that i could never deliver a convincing performance. but this weekend, after the initial social panic had passed, i started trying to get out of my own head a little bit and look for things that disproved the very strong theory i had brought into the weekend. and of course then i started seeing more and more of the little moments where women say one thing and do another, or profess one belief/conviction but then the whole corpus of their lived experiences and choices contradicts that stated belief, or whatever. and also just like, moments of pathos, where someone i had judged harshly at the beginning of the weekend offhandedly revealed something about her past that really changed my perception of her, or at least made me think like, ah god, i have to have empathy for and with this person, because i think she might be a complex person just like me, with an intricate inner life that her performance partially reveals and partially occludes from view, and agh, it sucks to have to think of people as complicated instead of as safely two-dimensional & easy to dismiss, and the reason it sucks is because then it forces you to realize that you share more with this person than you’d like to admit, and that some of your wounds are the same, even if you dealt with those wounds (the wounds of girlhood, or rather the emotional wounds that our culture inflicts upon girls, which then become tangled up in complex and painful ways with the lived experience of girlhood itself) in really different ways.
but also ugh. we are all performing gender norms but there is just something that does not feel playful at all about embodying conventional femininity. i can’t think of a better way to phrase that right now but it’s like.. the performance isn’t fun. it doesn’t seem to be fun. i don’t know that anyone here was having fun doing it, even if they were having fun being with each other. but it was like doing the intensely gendered social rituals was like, the price of admission? like it was the toll we had to pay to be together spending time in the company of other women? i don’t know man but it fucking exhausts me. like i can push myself to stretch my genuine empathy and sense of solidarity with other women much further than my knee-jerk judgmental reaction, but i can’t ever get to a place where i find any of those social rituals anything other than fucking exhausting. they feel so fucking joyless. they feel like things that many women have internalized as ‘things we must do in order to have relationships with other women.’ (please do not even get me started on how exhausting heteronormativity is i think i could write an entire other essay on how women use these bachelorette party-type rituals to spend time with their closest female friends, but the whole event is still implicitly organized around men, and these women’s male partners are still positioned as the priority in their lives, and the whole event is framed as like, a last burst of intense closeness between women before the bride is delivered over to her husband. like i KNOW that this is not how women think of it but all the RHETORIC of the bachelorette party, the little events and rituals and games, the little comments everyone makes all fucking weekend, good fucking lord, my jaw is so TENSE.)
anyway god i just AGHHHH. idk sorry this is definitely not coherent at ALL because i’m tired and still need a bit more distance/time to process some of this. i guess here is one last thing i want to register before i sleep. i am in my 30s now and i am living a life that is so, so far removed from the social world i grew up in. marriage is not a norm among my friend group, almost all of my female friends are queer women, many women i know are not partnered and have no interest in being partnered, and the friends who are in heterosexual relationships tend to be in very gender-balanced relationships or slightly nontraditional relationships where it feels like both partners have engaged in conscious reflection about what they want their relationship to look/feel like. also i now date women, am out as a lesbian, and spend most of my time teaching/working with queer- and trans/nonbinary-identified kids.
so like, the world i live in now is just so different from the world i grew up in. and sometimes it is easy for me to kind of downplay the intensity of my own gender distress as a teen and young adult, or to sort of - act like it was a phase in my life that had much more to do with me than with the social environment i lived in. i don’t mean ‘phase’ in a dismissive ‘those feelings weren’t real’ kind way, but more like, ‘oh that was just part of the normal growing pains of figuring out who you are and what kind of person you want to be as an adult - everybody pretty much goes through some version of that.’ it’s true that everyone DOES go through some version of that, as just like, part of the process of individuation in that age range. but also like. idk man. being back in this environment - straight white women from the midwest and south, all engaging in the rituals of heterosexual white femininity - was just so intense and so MUCH, and it brought back a flood of feelings and visceral memories that i feel like i will need to spend some time sorting through over the next few weeks. like, what i experienced back then really WAS gender distress, and it was so, so distressing. i spent the years from age 11ish to 24ish existing with this constant lowgrade baseline feeling of wanting to claw my own fucking skin off because my own gendered body felt like such a prison, and i sometimes felt like i literally wanted to destroy my own body because i could not yet conceive of an alternative to inhabiting that body or playing the role that had been handed down to me. until i started reading queer memoirs and inhaling lesbian media and (especially) reading about queer femme identities, i literally did not have an image or any kind of felt sense of what another way of inhabiting my own body might look/feel like. i literally could not imagine it!!!
and that is why the distress feels so distressing, and becomes internalized in such violent ways, i think. because it’s the blind, mindless panic of a trapped and wounded animal. except that you lack any real understanding of the larger social forces at work, or any language with which to describe or conceptualize what social norms are or how they’re enforced. so in your mind, the only thing you can see wounding you is your own gendered body, or the way that gendered body is socially 'read’ by others. and that is why you want to claw your own fucking skin off, just literally dig your nails into your own flesh and claw it the fuck off. because you can’t see a norm, but you can see your gendered body, and you can see the ways that it causes other people to react to you, or treat you, or hold you to a certain set of expectations, and so in your mind you are like: this must be destroyed. in your mind you are like, the only way out is to get out of this fucking body, but that’s impossible, surely, you can’t get out of your own body, so you have to settle for starving it and self-harming it and ruthlessly punishing it in a thousand terrible ways, because you might not be able to leave your girl’s body behind, but you can make it suffer and pay for what it’s done to you.
i am old enough now, and have spent enough time thinking and writing about those feelings, to identify them when they arise again, and to get the necessary distance from them so that i can say, what i want to destroy are the norms themselves, and the distress they cause, and not the body that has done nothing to me but be me. so i am not quite as sucked under as i used to be. but i think that there is something about the violence and intensity of those feelings that i forget sometimes, or misremember with age and distance. it’s easy to be a little bit patronizing to my younger self (or by extension to my younger students sometimes), because i now live in a social world that is largely arranged in ways that minimize rather than intensify or amplify gender distress. but when you have no choice in how to arrange your life, and no language with which to understand what is happening to you or what you are experiencing, and no frame of reference to help you understand that this is a period in your life and not forever, and no models you can look to in order to discover alternative ways of inhabiting your body or arranging your life... my god, that’s quite different from being an adult with a wide range of experiences and with much greater autonomy over your own body and life. anyway idk i need to keep thinking but now i must go to bed and try to sleep five hours before the plane.
#how can i teach her some way of being human#that won't destroy her!!!#gender#mw#to think further#girls I have been
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Is there anything you wish your students would do, not do, or get better at? Other than like... Making sure to read their syllabi? Just curious!
1. Please, I am begging you, read the assignment instructions. In fact, read them twice. At least.
I’m going to tell you a secret: every (decent) professor will tell their students that there is no such thing as stupid questions and to please contact us with any question (please please please). However, the truth is, even though every (decent) professor will politely answer any question a student sends, if the assignment instructions say “Read the poem on page 345 of our textbook and answer the following close reading questions” and then I open my email and see that a student has sent me a message asking “What page is the poem on?” that is, in fact, a stupid question.
After an entire day’s lecture on determining purpose and audience in essay assignments, I recently gave my freshman students an activity that was clearly labelled “Figuring Out Who Your Audience Is.” This activity was a packet that contained the instructions for three different essays, with instructions at the top of each page that clearly stated “Read the assignment guidelines below, and determine who the target audience of this essay might be. Think about demographics--is this essay targeting older people, younger people? People of a certain ethnicity or from a specific location? Describe the intended audience of the essay.” At least five students from the class failed to read the instructions and, instead of describing the audience for each essay... They simply started trying to write three full essays. (Because yes, I definitely wanted you guys to stop in the middle of our unit on audience to write a full op-ed piece about bicycle trails...)
Read all the instructions on the assignment, please.
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2. Be an active participant, not a hapless bystander.
At least a few times a semester, I have a student come to me after an assignment was due and go “I’m sorry I didn’t turn the assignment in. I didn’t know how to do _______ thing, so I didn’t want to turn it in and be wrong” or “I’m sorry I didn’t do the peer review, I couldn’t find my partner’s contact info.”
What? Every time this happens I just thousand-yard stare for a second, because honestly, in what world is not doing anything the correct response to being confused?
If you’re confused, you do need to ask your questions (yes, even if the questions seem dumb). Just doing nothing because you’re confused about something is the absolute worst response. If you don’t know how something works, don’t know how to find something your professor told you to go work on, or don’t know who your group members are for a group project, do not just passively assume the information will be given to you if you wait long enough.
You need to be a proactive participant in your own education; if you cannot find something your professor told you to go find, you need to ask for help right away. If you don’t know who your group members are, you need to ask for help right away. If you don’t know which pages you’re supposed to be reading that week, you need to go look for that information right away, not two days after the work was due.
Likewise, I also want to specify here that even though (decent) professors will answer the really obvious questions (honestly, a student once asked me “What chapter are we supposed to take notes on for the Chapter Five Notes assignment?”), that doesn’t mean that students are excused from putting in a modicum of effort to try to find out the answers to obvious questions on their own. If you can’t find the pages for an assigned reading, check the obvious places (your LMS such as Canvas, the class syllabus, etc.) first before asking. Re-read the assignment title and instructions before sending in your questions. Check through your emails/LMS announcements for messages from the professor first.
If you’re confused, please ask questions--but do put in a basic amount of effort to check first and see if your question has already been answered.
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3. Learn how weighted grades and percentages work and how they will impact you.
Most classes in college sort assignments into weighted categories. What this means is that even if two assignments are both listed at 100 points, one might actually be worth more if it is a category that is “weighted” more heavily. For example, if there are three categories in a class, one worth 50% of the final grade, and two worth 25% of the final grade, assignments in the 50% category are automatically more important and worth more to your final percentage than assignments in the 25% categories.
Understanding this is important because this is how you get away with not doing everything.
To be honest, as a literature professor, I assure you that I am fully aware that students are not going to do every single reading assigned in my class. When I was a literature student, I didn’t do all the readings either. I’m aware.
But what I do expect, as a professor, is that students think ahead and skip strategically--make sure to do all the assignments in the heavily weighted categories, and if you’re going to miss assignments, make sure they’re the smaller assignments in the lower-weighted categories, which will have less impact on your total final grade.
Often I see students fall behind and then tell me they are working hard to catch up. But what do I see as they’re trying to catch up? They turn in all the little assignments and leave the big assignments missing, which means that inevitably they still struggle to pass the class as a whole.
Pay attention to the weights of grades and assignments in your classes so that you know exactly which ones are going to affect your final grades the most, and make sure to work hardest on those.
There’s plenty more, of course, but I think that’s enough for now.
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