#and went “aaaa wow my entire childhood....” mind you my parents still have and use a flat crt at home...

[dead-leavez]

I highkey love jjk being distinctly set when it is, with the flashback in the 2000s and present day being 2018. It really bundles together this clusterfuck of nostalgia for me. I'd be pretty close to the kids' ages at the time of the story (never recovered when I realized this) so we've got THAT vein of nostalgia there. But on top of that my damn parents raised me closer to fucking gojo's past/hidden inventory-premature death arc. Basically, a lot closer to a 90s kid, ESPECIALLY technology wise. So double whammy!! Double whammy.

[tumblunni]

OH MY GOSH

I’m doing a reread of the older books that MarkReads did, cos he released his reviews in ebook form after his first site’s hosting went down and we lost the original posts of them.

Its really cool cos he includes an entrie second review of everything that he does years later with all this hindsight and stuff, commenting on the series as a whole and how hilarious unprepared he was in the original review. As well as all sorts of other bonus features and footnote stuff of cool!

And he even edited out any predjudiced or uncomfortable jokes that he’d made back when he was less experienced as an activist for LGBT rights and mental health and stuff, like originally the review about the dursleys in harry potter was framed as a psychologist’s report about how craaaayzy they are, and now its a detective’s report on how criminal they are. Cos seriously its “just a joke” and all but it kinda has unfortunate implications to imply that literal abusive parents are only that way cos of mental illness rather than yknw.. making the choice to be abusive. the “joke” wasnt intentionally meant to be saying that but its still how it ended up. And the really good part about it is that he didnt just take the opportunity of the original site being gone to pretend like he never made those mistakes, he edits out the actual content of the controversy itself but talks about what happened during his self re-review bonus section at the back. And he talks about why exactly he felt that this review was innapropriate and how he’s changed since then. Cos seriously over these years he’s been diagnosed with depression himself and started getting help with it and tried to become a really welcoming community for other mentally ill people! And he was always out about being gay even when he started his first review of Twilight, it was like 5 seconds into the first review before he couldnt restrain himself from yelling “is this really how straight people flirt??” XD But he used to kinda be a bit awkward maybe and uhh.. that relateable feel of trying to be “one of the good ones” according to bigoted standards? Like “oh im gay but i dont act TOO gay and i totally make gay jokes about myself ha ha ha”. I obviously can’t know for sure because i cant read his mind, but the impression i got from the reviews is that this was why he made some of his more crude jokes earlier on, despite being an absolute cinnamon roll of a man who didnt seem to believe any of the bigotry behind them. Either that or just genuinely not knowing that jokes were bigoted at the time, yknow? We all make mistakes and a lot of people amoungst minorities have a history of stuff like this cos internalized shame is a hell of a drug. I internalized transphobic stuff so hard that i was terrified of admitting i was trans, and overcompensated with trans jokes to try and convince people i was normal. And i didnt even properly comprehend what being trans WAS, i had this bigoted messed up idea of something i should be ashamed of, something that was “sick perverts getting off on dressing up” so of course it couldnt be me because I just felt.. yknow.. unhappy with what i was born as? Not any sort of big devious evil reason for it, just “dressing this different way makes me not want to kill myself”. But here’s lil kid me being told that the Only Possible Reason to want to do that is Gross Pedophile Reason, thus I built a big old labyrinth around my feelings and blindly repeated the rude shit my parents said without even understanding what it meant. Sighhh it was a big ol mess!

ANYWAY IM GOING OFFTOPIC AGAIN

I just made this post cos its really cool to see how your favourite creators have changed, especially when they had personal growth like that as well as just getting more and more awesome at the things they create. And it really warms my heart to see Mark being at peace with his own mental illness nowadays, and having like one of the most well regulated forums ever that doesn’t accept any form of bigoted behaviour and strives to welcome people like he is right now, and educate.. well, people like he was back then! And he’s also become so much prouder in his sexuality and found people who support him for who he is, after his super harrowing backstory of being abandoned by his parents and emotionally abused by fundementalist christian authority figures. And he now has an awesome adorable goofball of a boyfriend who even joins in on guest reviews sometimes, and it is absolutely AMAZING to see them teasing each other singing theme tunes to stuff and just generally being the definition of relationship goals!

AND THAT IS THE AWESOME THING THAT MADE MY HEART EXPLODE TODAY

Cos i bought the old harry potter review ebooks, and IT TURNS OUT HIS BOYFRIEND IS HERE! He cameos in prisoner of askaban yeaaaars before they started dating! he was actually the friend who’d already read the series and reccommended it to mark, so he’s kinda responsible for kickstarting the entire MarkReads blog?? THEY WERE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER AWWWW!! Seriously YOOO i was like “huh he mentions a friend here with the same name as- OH MY GOD ITS HIM” And his cameo appearance is a dual review just like the ones he’d do later on, tho here its a transcript of an IM chat rather than an actual video. Man this is so early on that they didnt even live close to each other! God its Love Origins, holy shittt

fuck NOTHING warms my heart more than seeing the journey my fave creators go on! this man has come so far and im so glad he’s in a better place than when he started!! he’s just so happy and bubbly in his current reviews and he started off so grumpy on that first Twilight review and his Harry Potter review was like a kid in a candy store cos he was GENUINELY SURPRISED TO FIND AN ACTUAL GOOD BOOK! Aaaa his future boyfriend’s reccommendation led to him recapturing his love of reading and starting a whole career out of reviews. God thats so romantic!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fuck! My bigass heart cant handle this!!

So yeah uhh if you’re interested in a gay positive review series with an adorable bear of a man with the cutest beard and sleeve tattoos who just squees constantly about all the emotions he was taught to repress during an abusive childhood AND ALSO SMOOCHES HIS BOYFRIEND AND FINALLY GETS TO BE HAPPY YES, check out MarkReads and also the sister site MarkWatches! or his name in general is Mark Oshiro to find all the stuff he’s done. As I said before, there’s kind of this issue with archiving where all of his earliest posts are lost. And he rereleased them with all this bonus content as ebooks so we’d have a way to donate to support the site. So it might seem a bit intimidating for the “place to start” to be a pay-only thing, but I’d reccommend not reading in chronological order honestly. Its best to just go through his site and see if he did any books/shows that are your favourites, then start from there. That’s what i did, i think i discovered him via Buffy and Angel? And then I started watching ATLA because of him and WOW we had very similar levels of fanboy screaming, lol! So yeah you might discover some cool new series via this sweet man’s wonderful bloggings! :D