#i am so in awe of charles and his ability to put upsetting things out of his mind

[petit-papillion]

Charles wrote a column after the F2 race in Baku in 2017. He gives some interesting insights into how his racing mind works. However, proceed with caution (and bring tissues!).

Some bits that stood out for me:

Strangely, it was also probably the most difficult moment of the weekend emotionally. After the pole lap, it was quite bad sitting in my car with my helmet on, because I was thinking about my father, and it was tough. It was qualy laps every lap to try to get back as many positions as possible, to try to win the race. When I saw the gap in front after passing Artem, I knew it would be very hard, perhaps impossible. I had to push like crazy, and that's what I did; I took huge risks every lap to catch up as much as possible and try to get two wins. I'm glad [the Austria GP] is coming up soon, because I think racing is helping me a lot to go through these difficult times. Obviously it will never bring my father back, but at least I can try to do my best on track, try to honour him the best way I can. I think I'm working harder than ever to try to make the best results as I can, to thank him, in a way, for everything he has taught me, for the making me the driver I am today.

[fandom-------queen]

Kurt x reader

Notes: your mutation is the ability to read people's fears and traumatic memories. You can also produce illusions for everyone to see or put an illusion only in one person's head. These illusions can be based on their fears or memories. Also since it's based off of Wanda and more of the mind stone your power will be yellow and your eyes will glow yellow.

Warnings: intense description of fighting and invading people's minds, using past trauma in fighting maybe one curse word I think, a broken arm, passing out. Please tell me if you find any other trigger or content warnings I should include!

*maybe spoilers for first class

*Not proof read

*Also I love Eric and Mystique but I needed someone for them to fight against and this made the most sense to me.

You were very nervous as you sat next to Kurt on the jet. You, Kurt, Scott, Jean, Peter, Storm, Charles, Hank and Logan were all on your way to prevent Eric and Mystique from wreaking havoc on humans in the name of mutants once again.

Kurt was holding your hand while you stroked your thumb up and down it. He was nervously wiggling his tail around by twisting between your legs and sometimes using the tip to stroke your leg. You would cast him small smiles and give him gentel hand squeezes just to help ground him since he always got nervous when it came to this.

You were getting close to the outside of the city were you would land as to not alert Eric that you were there. Charles spoke up telling people what roles they would be playing in order to stop Eric.

Your job would be to distract Eric's followers and him if nesessary, to allow your teachers to gain control over the situation. You knew you probably wouldn't only use your illusions since they took much concentration and could leave you open to attacks so you figured you would also use your hand to hand combat that all mutants were taught in case it was more useful or nesessary.

Kurt was also going to be distracting Eric's followers but with hand to hand combat so that Logan, Charles, Hank and Storm (even Peter I'd it came down to it) could focus on stopping Eric. When Kurt did hand to hand he more teleported around to confuse his opponent and would lash out at their feet with his tail to knock them down and tire them out. It was different but effective.

You were going to be landing soon and you felt Kurt's hand start to lossen around yours and quickly unthreaded your fingers. You knew Kurt was going to want to pray and you were happy that Kurt always had and always will have something to ground him, besides you of course.

Just as you touched down you heard Kurt murmur and Amen and then he turned to you "Please be carefully meine liebe, check in with me if you can just so I can feel better knowing you are safe" he pleaded as his hand game to rest on your face.

You pressed your hand on top of his and gave him a reassuring smile."I love you too miene liebe and I promise to stay safe and check in as long as you do too' you quickly kissed his cheek and started to unbuckled your seat belt as Kurt did too.

Charles gave you directions to go in so you could surround Eric. You, Scott and Logan were going left around the base Eric set up and Kurt, Jean , Peter and Storm went around right. Hank and Charles were going directly through the middle of the town in an attempt to talk things out with Eric.

You made it around Eric's perimiter and got a visual on Eric and a few of his followers. You watched as Charles attempted to stop Eric, and Hank stood next to him as beast to protect him from Eric, Mystique and their followers. Once Eric began to raise metal and the other mutants started to braise for a fight. Logan gave you the signal and off you all went. You started with the girl closest to you who's mutation was elastic like limbs. Your eyes turned yellow as her motors flossed your mind yellow energy surrounded your fingers as you found a memory of her parents berating her for being a mutant. You almost felt bad for her but her parents actions shouldn't be the reason for everyone's punishment. You twisted your hands in front of you using your magic to invade her mind and cast the illusion. Before you got too involved you backed yourself against a wall to give you some protection since you would be to focused on the details of the illusion. You replayed the memory but you made it more intense. You knew that once she snapped out of it she would be confused and upset but other wise fine so you didn't feel to bad. Your goal was to tire her out so she wouldn't be as big of a threat and now that you had done it emotionally you made her believe she snapped out of it and was fighting you. She swung punches and extend her arms and legs to trip you up. However, you were actually fine, close enough to manipulate bit far enough to be safe. You could feel her growing tired and in the illusion landed a blow to her temple. Her brain thinking it was real knocked her out and you fell out of her brain once it gave in to the exhaustion.

Blinking around you looked to see if anyone was in trouble and saw Scott fighting a winged man who wouldn't stay down your eyes turned yellow and the energy flowed around your fingers as you saw his fear of cages. He had been kept in one and forced to fight and as much as you disliked bringing up trauma you also couldn't leave Scott in a position where he didn't have the upper hand. You sent an illusion that everyone could see of the winged boy being stuck in a cage. Scott looked over and saw you as you held your hands up manipulating them around and it's the yellow energy covered your eyes and swirled around your fingers. You focused your gaze and you brought the cage down making him land on the ground. You saw Scott found some wire from a fence and you saw a three walled pile of debris with more debris on top acting like a roof. You moved him back into there by moving the walls and he kept backing up untill he was secured in there. Scott found some wire, removed his glasses and melded it to some metal structural beams in the debris to make the fourth wall. It was enough space for him but not enough to spread his wings so he wouldn't get out. You stopped the illusion and he looked around confused he saw you and tried to break out of the wire, but that wasn't something his fluffy angel wings were good for. Scott gave you a nod of thanks and the two of you headed into the fighting to find other in need of assistance.

You saw Logan doing fine on his own, Beast and Storm as well. Charles was focusing on distracting Eric and Peter was zipping around sending blows to people to knock them down. You saw a women not far from you with finger lazors, no longer down and about to hit Peter as he stopped to take a quick check of the field and you quickly raced over to her. Before she had the chance to fire you slid onto the ground and kicked her feet out from underneath her. You used your momentum to jump back up as she to came back this time her attention on you. You didn't have time for an illusion so hand to hand it was. She prefered to throw punches and kept close enough to you that neither you nor her could give a strong enough kick. You instead blocked and give the occasional elbow until you eventually saw a sloppy punch, grabbed her arm and put her in a wrist lock effectively snapping her arm, this time she we stayed down. Peter of course came by and high fived you.

You finally saw Kurt and the person he was fighting against seemed to be growing more and more irritated with Kurt and how he couldn't hit him. You didn't like how this man (who's mutation seemed to be super strength) was getting more and more irritated with Kurt. Since he couldn't physically hit him he was getting angrier and taking out by emotionally hurting him. He hit Kurt closed to home by calling him a freak and you were ready to unleash hell. You felt like a highlighter with how brightly yellow you were glowing as you snuck into his mind and fed him visions of pain. Visions of him flying through the air and getting hit by debris plagued his mind as you unleashed your anger on him for daring to insult Kurt. You were so overcome by anger you didn't realise how Eric was getting annoyed with you incapacitating his mutant followers and he hurled metal at you. He want hoping to kill you only injur you enough to knock you out of the fight, Eric wasn't one for killing his mutant brothers and sisters. Kurt was watching you in awe feeling so loved at how protective you were of him when he quickly caught on to the shard of metal aimed to imbed in your legs. He quickly grabbed you and you heard the signature *BAMF* and you fell out of the brutes mind since you were on the other side of the chaos and too far away to slip back in. You looked at Kurt and held him tight whispering a thank you in his ear. He held you tightly to him and mumbled out "liebe you made me a promise to not get hurt, I will be very unhappy if zhat promise iz broken"

"You come before anything, even promises I made to you, but I assure you miene liebe I am perfectly fine" you reassured him pulling back from his chest to smile at him. "And as much as I love being here in your arms we have a job to finish" you kissed him on the cheek and gave him a wild grin he smiled back and *BAMFED* you to the other X-men who had regrouped in front of Eric and his group in the classic sign of unity within the two groups before an awesome battle scene breaks out. Eric lifted himself up along with more shards of metal.

"Time after time, Charles have I bent to your rules and wishes, I am tiered of never having change, of being taken advantage of. They underestimate and underappreciated us Charles and the only way for them to learn is to show them, the only way left is that hard way"

"Eric the more you revert back to anger and desperation for revenge the less they trust us and the harder we must work to show we mean no harm and we can all live together peacefully. We need an ear of peace now then ever, and peaceful wishes from you may be just the thing we need to make our coexistent wishes a reality."

"Your aspirations will never be a reality Charles, they will only ever be wishes, and if I have to show you the hard way as well then so be it." As Eric raised more metal to girl at you all, you developed a potentially dumb plan or potentially great plan.

You worked to invade Eric's head, and despite his helmet preventing telepaths from getting in his head, you weren't a telepath and made it in with as expected quite the amount of resistance. You knew of Eric's past and you knew exactly what memories to use, however, you would have to be careful, after using so much energy especially on that brute you were getting a little to tired for the stunt you were trying to pull. You found the memory of Eric at the camp and losing his mother. You could feel his grief and it only made it harder to consentrate. Your breathing was definetly laboured by know as you pushed that memory to the front of his brain and had him relive it. Watching it horrified you and you could feel tears of exhaustion and pity leak down your face as you trembled with both exhaustion and the pain this memory was bringing, both emotional and physically demanding. You could feel his resistance weakening but his helmet only attempted to push you out more. Your legs you were sure were on the verge of giving out. You could hear Charles telling everyone to stand back, with a protest from a familiar German accent, that crowding you and touching you to keep you from collapsing would only distract you. The memory got to the part were his mother was killed and his powers started to surge. You could definetly feel his power surging now, Eric felt as if he was back there and this time he was determined to save his mom. You knew that you only had to keep the memory going a little while longer and let him build his power up so the sudden surge would use enough energy to knock him out. As the memory progressed and Eric's power grew. You all of a sudden felt his power reach the point to knock him unconscious, and it just so happened to take you too.

Kurt kurt kurt kurt kurt kurt kurt kurt

You woke up to three fingers strumming through your hair and the sound of the jet. You looked up and saw Kurt's face light up at the sight of you awake. "Liebe" he grinned pulling you up gently and resting your head on his shoulder as he pulled you close to him and you wrapped your arms around him.

"What happened?" Was the obvious question on your mind.

"Well" Charles began from behind you " you prevented Eric from showering us with metal debris, you invaded his mind and successfully knocked him out. However, you over exerted yourself and past out along with him. With Eric down Mystique and the others tried to flee, however, but with much assistance through Peter, we managed to keep them from leaving fast enough to esacpe custody. We are almost home, where you can all take a well deserved rest and have the next few days off of classes to recouperate. How does that sound!"

Scott and Peter let out whoops of joy while Jean grinned and you and Kurt gave each other gentel smiles. "Get some rest miene liebe, you deserve it" Kurt said smiling down at you. You snuggled into his shoulder and managed to get a quick nap in.

You managed to wake up just in time for landing. You got many praises for the stunt you had pulled when you came back to the academy. Eventually Kurt got tired of people keeping you away from the rest you so clearly needed, so when people weren't looking he *BAMFED* you two to his room. Too exhausted to get your clothes from your room you slipped on one of Kurt's tshirts and snuggled up next to him.

"I'm so proud of you liebe" he cooed quietly in your ear. "I can't thank you enough for loving me so much and protecting me so vell even vhen you do put your selv in unnecessary danger "Kurt said a goofy smile covering his face and love filled in his eyes.

"Well I can't promise never to be in danger, but I can promise to never stop loving or protecting you." That night you got the best sleep ever as you drifted off to the love of your life planting butterfly kisses all over your face knowing the next few days off would be spent in bed with the love of your life!

Hope y'all enjoyed!

@selemercy(I hope you don't mind that I tagged you it's just that you encouraged me to write this fic and your comment ment so much to me!)

[theexistentiallyqueer]

Okay so I’ve been thinking about that really bad Hot Take that’s been circulating about fanfiction. And it’s been kind of simmering in me. The root of the problem with it isn’t so much that it diminishes the quality of fanfiction so much as the way it characterizes two completely different genres of media.

Preface: at no point is this ever, ever, ever a diatribe or condemnation against fanart or the work fanartists put into their work. This is about the value that is ascribed to visual art vs the value ascribed to literary art. I am trying to talk specifically about the denigration of literary art in fandom spaces and the way it’s been recently, in a very popular tumblr post, martyred at the expense of queer and disabled writers and writers of color.

Fanart (as a collective genre, according to that post) - Good, artistically-driven, pure, wholesome. Fanartists draw for the sake of becoming better artists, and every work a fanartist draws or creates is made with the goal of becoming a better artist. Fanartists never draw anything that is base, silly, shippy, or smutty; if there is pornographic art, it isn’t pornographic but Erotica. There is no such thing as low- or middling-quality art, because all artists are striving to sharpen their skills and become better artists, and there are no fanartists who draw just for fun or shits and giggles. Fanartists achieve fame purely on the merit of their own artistic ability. There’s no room to criticize fanartists who attempt to cis-wash trans (or trans pesenting) characters, or fanartists who blatantly, frequently, and with frankly no impunity (as their art is reblogged, and reblogged, and reblogged) whitewash characters of color.

Fanfiction (as a collective genre, according to that post) - Smutty, ship-fodder, audience-pleasing trash. Fanfic writers write for the sake of expressing their inner boners or enacting their internal fantasies. No fanfic writers seek a sense of growth in their writing or work to improve their writing in any way. The only reason any works of fanfiction are popular is because they cater to the readership’s base instincts, and the True Authors, the Really Daring authors who write Real Literary Content, are cast the wayside.

It’s such a two-dimensional view of the situation--and it doesn’t even take into account edited content, such as gifsets, which makes up a huge portion of fandom content and has been a type of content, along with fanart, that fanfic writers have long voiced their (our) upset about getting more active & polarized attention than written works. It presents this dichotic view of fanart good/fanfiction bad. Which is also incredibly ugly and disturbing when you consider the fact that fanfiction is the earliest form of curated fan content, and fanfiction itself is inherently transformative in a way that fanart and edits are not, because fanwork in general, and and fanfiction in particular, is inherently in and of itself the public (fans) themselves overriding the corporate-owned landscape with their subversive interpretations.

Like, I have seen not-good fanart. I have seen bland, unimpressive, generic fanart. There is fanart from artists who don’t have their own unique sense of style. Fanart from artists who are just starting out and haven’t developed their skills yet. Fanart from artists who draw as a hobby, and damn they may be good, but they don’t give a fuck about contributing to The Body of Artistry because they have bills to pay and career interests outside of art, and damn, they’d really rather draw these two characters making out, or blushing at each other, or straight-up fucking, than they would create something of Great Artistic Importance. That art gets so many notes. It is liked and reblogged and shared.

And that’s all valid, because art ISN’T A COMPETITIVE SPORT. I embrace fanartists who draw just because they want to, because they don’t care about quality or artistic ideals or whatever, and just want to draw someone being happy, or sad, or angry, or getting dicked down, or whatever!!! It doesn’t matter. Draw because you want to draw. Because your art is an expression of yourself that speaks of your experiences and transgresses the definitions of the world you’ve been told to adhere to. You make art for yourself, to say fuck the system!!!! We’re just the lucky souls who get to appreciate it afterwards.

The complaints that come from fanfic writers--and yes!!! I am one, so proceed with the accusations of butthurt--are that fanart and edits get more social media attention (in the forms of likes, reblogs, retweets, shares, etc.) than fanfic does.

And it’s a valid complaint! It isn’t rooted in some alien reality that fanfiction is inherently more base and less artistic than fanart. I’ve seen some pretty aesthetically displeasing fanart get a high reblog count. And I’ve seen some incredible works of literary attention get no recs, no likes, no comments. I’ve seen works of middling writers who have a lot of fucking talent and show it in their work, and yeah maybe they write porn, but their prose SINGS, and no one comments, no one shares it, no one makes their love of it public the same way they do the fanart, the same way they do the edits and the gifsets.

It’s rooted in two things:

1. Literature (which fanfiction is a subgenre of) takes time to appreciate. You can look at a piece of art and reblog it without thinking about it. It could be a work on par with the Mona Lisa, and you could still look at it without any aesthetic or artistic sense and say, “Hey, that looks pretty.” But you can’t read without thinking; reading is an active mental pursuit you have to engage with. (If you try to pull out Twilight on this point to fight me, I’ll fight you back. I’ve actively read Twilight. Even reading awful literature takes effort; arguably it takes more effort than reading something good).

2. Literature is hard to market with words, because when you’re trying to encourage other people to read it, you have to use even more words. You have to use words to convince someone to read even more words! Some fanartists draw comics or fanart inspired by fanfiction--I love those artists and they do more for us than they could possibly know--but for the most part, you can’t use visuals to show someone why they should invest their time in reading a thing. And unlike fanart--when it’s a tribute, when it’s a showcase of the character’s or characters’ canonical attributes--fanfiction can’t be green-stamped by creators, because fanfiction is inherently built in narrative, and canon-compliant or not, that opens the legal owners of the property up to legal disputes.

So much easier, then, to focus on fanart, which distribution and publishing companies love because they see free advertising in sharing it, to complain that fanfiction is a dispirited genre of unartistic creators who just want to read the queer version of a bodice-ripper.

And then we get to the question of: why is the bodice ripper so bad? Are you willing to critique Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski with the same derision you have for queer writers? Are you going to hold the wish-fulfillment fantasies and introspective examinations of sexuality in relation to gender, race, class, and physical ability written by writers expressing their own experiences as inherently debauched and debased because pornographic fanfiction is popular, but not hold George R R Martin to the same standard? Are you going to criticize the prejudices and disparities and biases in publishing that prevent marginalized writers from being able to break into the industry? 

Are you ready to combat the enduring popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is overwhelmingly a series of heroism tales about shitty and mediocre white men?

Are you going to take aim at HBO for taking a fantasy series that, while still written by a sexist author who has a disturbing fixation on female sexuality has uplifted its female characters as heroes in their own right, and then drove it into the dirt to end on a note with the male “hero” murdering his female lover, an abuse survivor, after engaging her in an intimate kiss?

Did you take issue with the streaming blockbuster Stranger Things only confirming a character as canonically gay--after planning to have her be a straight romantic option for a major character--because the actress is the one who repeatedly badgered the showrunners about how she didn’t feel her character fit that role?

Are you invested in the fact that video games continue to be majority white, majority male, majority able-bodied, and majority inaccessible to disabled gamers?

You want to complain about fanfiction having too much porn and somehow that deligitimizes fanfiction as a genre as a whole?

Fuck off. There are hundreds, thousands even more likely, of other authors of equal skill to you or greater, who are struggling to have their works recognized in fandoms that don’t want to put the effort in to reading them, the effort into sharing and appreciating them. It’s harder to make someone care about a fanfic. You can reblog a fanart, and your followers will see the art itself right away. If you reblog fanfic, they have to make the conscious choice to engage with it. And none of that is your fault, because you can’t control how other people engage with fan content, but you can advocate, vocally, for the fair and equal respect for fanfiction and fan-written content. You can remind people, again and again, how fanfic writers do so much for so little.

But you want to come into my house and compare fanart to fanficton and claim one is inherently better? You’re the Banksy to my Catherynne L Valente, to my N.K. Jemisin, to my Seanan McGuire.

Start understanding the system is built against us all and start understanding why your battle is uphill. What’s oppressing your creative success is a white, straight, cis monopoly on what the good story, what the correct story is, limiting your options, tying you to a narrative you don’t belong to. Queerness and marginalization exist beyond what’s depicted in mainstream media, and fans expressing that through their own written content?

That’s us taking back the corporate-owned narrative for ourselves. It’s self-liberation through the written word. And yeah, some of it is porn.

It’s porn when it’s a drawing too.

[joleanssurvivor]

My Truth

I just saw a number in my phone with a Memphis area code. I thought to myself, “what is her number again?”. This is the first time where I could not remember it right off. The other day I was fine, the whole day. I did really well. I even patted myself on the back for being such a trooper. The next morning, I began to think. I started thinking about the woman who is your friend who apparently had all the things I did not. More structured in your eyes I guess. More holy and on track. How you loved but never really liked me. How I declared you as my best friend, not a mutual decision on both parts. I should have known then that I was forcing something. I started thinking about how I so badly wanted to inform you of the repulsive conversations I have heard about, but are no longer my concern because you are no longer my friend. I started thinking about how the “unresolved emotional issues” in the words of Charles *scoffs* in reality, are issues that you could never come to term with. The issue of knowing that Chris had a habit of not being able to keep his hands to himself, leaving me with him, and putting me in the hands of a person who put me in danger. You, not being able to come to grips with the fact that, IT HAPPENED. You not being able to take off the mask and understand that you let it happen by KNOWING these things could potentially occur. This, this is okay. This is okay because I do not hate Chris. I do not hate Charles either. How could I be upset with Charles for wanting to be with you? How could I be upset with both of you being together? How could I be upset with either of them when it is you who would rather continue a cycle of foolishness, instead of move away from it like you so badly claimed you desired? Me. Let’s focus on that for a second. I did things. I was dysfunctional due to traumatizing events that never gave me the chance to fully enjoy my college career initially. I was mentally and emotionally wrecked and used it as a crutch to make you feel awful because you could never admit that you let such a thing occur. I was hurt, and I hurt you. But what’s your line? For letting someone call me and my love for music demonic? For letting them influence you so easily? Giving me all of your organization items? Calling everything toxic and demonic when you were immersed in many things yourself, and still are. What is YOUR line? For not telling your mother the TRUTH? About yourself? You know, when I stood in the face of your mother, a woman who I admire for the love of her daughter, I wanted to tell her the truth so badly. But I respected the fact that you like to keep things private with her. Especially the other side of you. You know, the side that I know of. What is YOUR line? For telling a man who does not know a thing about me, MY business? And YOURS! For me having to hear about it? I thought we were done with those type of men. Then.....then. Then I thought about how one day, I am going to be a Broadway star. How one day I can finally tell my story. How I can talk about my healing journey and how you wrote me off too soon. How I could have lost my life in that car thinking about if you still cared about me or not. MY GOD! I could have died caring about what someone else thought of me! How you were so “weighed down” in the words of Charles that you counted me out. How I was so “weighed down” by you for three years while you went through the trials of your life, that I was worn out by the time opportunity had come for me to go through mine. Oh, how easy it is to throw away a seed. How you complained about always focusing on me that you never realized that I always focused on you. How you never understood that I gave so much of myself to you, without a single complaint from you about it, that I lost myself. Now I’m back. I can honestly say that I do not hate you. What I can say, is that I am WORKING hard to live my life to the best of my ability. If I ever were to see your face again, when you are not dodging and hiding from me or anyone else, I will look in your eyes and know that I am living in my truth. I will know that choosing myself, my life, and my MIND was never a bad choice. Hannaan....I am going to keep putting love into my heart for you. I know that God wants me to do so because I cannot know love if I do not give it. I cannot ask for forgiveness if I do not give it. You made your choice, and I have made mine. I choose love. Real love. For I find that love will ALWAYS be a pathway to my peace.

[trendingnewsb]

The Guy Who Wrote ‘A Christmas Carol’ Was A Total Monster

We don’t want to alarm you, but some of your favorite creators are/were really shitty human beings. Worse, the shittiest are often the very same ones dedicated to making the most wholesome, life-affirming art. That brings us to Charles Dickens, who wrote a bunch of classics, including the tale every single one of you will watch at least partially over the holidays: A Christmas Carol.

Sonar Entertainment, Walt Disney Pictures, Paramount PicturesLook, there are 867 versions of this thing. It’s going to happen.

The story has been credited with both revitalizing Christmas as an important holiday (for a while it was closer in relevance to Arbor Day) and popularizing certain Christmas traditions, like carols and getting together with your family to eat so much food that the limits of the human body are tested. It delivers a timeless, touching message about the importance of family and goodwill toward your fellow human being … a message that Dickens completely failed to follow in his own life.

Dickens Was A Monster To His Wife … Who Always Refused To Stoop To His Level

For starters, Dickens’ attitude toward family was far closer to Scrooge’s, except instead of being fueled by greed, he was just a horny old bastard. His ability to market orphans as adorable made him the 19th century version of a rock star, and like a rock star, he dumped his aging wife for an 18-year-old and didn’t give a shit who knew it. Yeah, it’s one thing to end a marriage; it’s quite another to make your hatred of your spouse as public as humanly possible, which is exactly what Dickens did.

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Seasonal Reminder: The Santa Clause Movies Are Insane

Back in 1836, a then-unknown Dickens married Catherine Hogarth. By all accounts, it was a pleasant enough marriage (hell, it resulted in ten goddamned children). Then Catherine got fat. This was apparently an unforgivable sin in the Dickens household, where the ability to push out ten kids must surely mean you can at least do a couple of push-ups right after. So he went and got himself a mistress, actress Ellen Ternan. Now, cheating on your wife because she got old and overweight is bad, but what happened next truly exposed Dickens as a douche on the level of any evil orphanage destroyer in his books.

Ellen Ternan, Herbert WatkinsA Tale Of Two Garbage People

Once his affair was made public in 1858, Dickens went on the warpath, slandering his estranged wife in newspaper after newspaper and letter after letter. According to him, Catherine was a “donkey,” an “unloving and unloved mother,” not his intellectual equal, and entirely to blame for saddling him with so many noisy-ass children. What, was he banging her under the influence of hypnosis? Note that his annoyance over so many kids didn’t stop him from claiming custody of nine of them, with only the oldest, Charles Jr., being financially independent enough to flip his father the finger and stay with his mom.

Creating that whole “White Christmas” thing helped keep Dickens in the public’s good graces, but so did Catherine’s outright refusal to rebut. She never reacted to Dickens’ abuse and never rebuffed his public letters, or even spoke to a journalist. Literally her only comeback came on her deathbed in 1879, when she handed over a collection of letters Dickens wrote to her, with the plain request: “Give these to the British Museum, that the world may know he loved me once.”

John Jabez Edwin MayalGoddammit, who let all these chopped onions and dust mites into the room all of a sudden?

Ebenezer Scrooge Was Based On A Real Guy, Who Was Not A Penny-Pinching Grump

So A Christmas Carol is more of a “Do as I say, not as I do” morality tale. But hey, there’s no shortage of hypocritical creatives in the world. What takes Dickens to the next level is the fact that one of his most famous characters is inspired by some random nobody who in no way deserved to be immortalized as a miserly penny-pincher. In 1841, Dickens was due to give a talk in Edinburgh and needed to kill some time beforehand. So he decided to walk through a graveyard, because the Victorians never got around to inventing non-creepy ways to have fun (we’ll come back to that in a moment). While this may seem like the setup to his lesser-known work Attack Of The Zombie Scotsmen, that night’s stroll in fact led to the creation of Ebenezer Scrooge.

As Dickens walked through what we assume was a thick Scottish fog, he saw the gravestone for a guy named Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie. The grave identified him as a “meal man,” a reference to the fact that he sold cornmeal. But due to a combination of the gloom and Dickens’ own mild dyslexia, he mistook the words for “mean man.” Which, damn, talk about a rough way to be remembered.

Metro-Goldwyn-MayerThat’s really the type of awful thing you’d have to save for someone who, like, we don’t know, ruined their wife’s life because she got fat.

Dickens was struck by a memorial that he thought would have “shriveled” Scroggie’s soul by having to take “such a terrible thing to eternity.” Two years later, he released his story about a man whose legacy of stinginess would haunt him from beyond the grave, and thanks to Dickens, it’s now about as popular to name your kids Ebenezer as it is to call them Adolf.

Ironically, the real Scroggie was a wild and promiscuous party animal who got in trouble with the Church of Scotland for both knocking up a servant out of wedlock (supposedly in a graveyard, because it seems that’s where Scottish people liked to hang out back then) and interrupting the General Assembly of the church by grabbing a countess’ ass. Had Dickens known Scroggie’s real-life story, it’s possible A Christmas Carol would be a whiskey-fueled porno about a man who visits the Christmases of his various illegitimate children and probably fails to learn a lesson about appropriate behavior.

Walt Disney PicturesNote: We would absolutely watch an adaptation of that starring Michael Caine and the Muppets.

As it is, one of the most famous literary characters in history came about because one of the greatest writers in history couldn’t read a four-letter word. But that’s not even the creepiest way we can associate Dickens with the dead …

Dickens Had A Creepy Thing For Corpses

Dickens was really into visiting the Paris public morgue and looking at dead bodies for the sheer hell of it. He would just go and stare at them, contemplating all the little aspects that went into the vacant expression of a deceased person. He didn’t do this to ruminate about the existence of the human soul, or to lament the tragic passing of another victim of society’s injustices; he simply liked looking at dead folk, in the same way that other people like looking at trains or exotic dancers. We can’t even say he was researching some book, because he never really touched the subject in his fiction.

In reality, not even Dickens knew what this morbid obsession was about. “I am dragged by an invisible force into the Morgue,” he once wrote, possibly sporting a major boner. One time he forced his friend Maclise to come with him to the morgue, and then called him a pussy when the corpses made him upset (but with fancier words). Another time, he witnessed an execution by guillotine in Rome and stuck around to examine the body, describing the “apparent annihilation of the neck.” We’d have to check, but we’re reasonably sure that this sentence doesn’t appear anywhere in A Christmas Carol.

Speaking of which, his addiction to death was such that he even went to the morgue on Christmas day. Think about it, that’s how Charles Dickens spent his holidays: gawking at rotting corpses.

Fred Barnard“To-day? Why, it’s Christmas day.” “Excellent! A new batch of suicides!”

A Christmas Carol worked because it put a human face on the holiday and reminded people about the importance of enjoying life and loving one another. And that message was given to us by a man who abandoned his own family to go bone a teenager and was more interested in spending Christmas with the dead than the living. Life is complicated, kids.

The information in this article first appeared in 5 Beloved Celebrities Everyone Forgets Did Terrible Things, 6 Famous Authors Who Were Nothing Like You Expect, and 5 Random Coincidences That Invented Modern Pop Culture!

We’d like to stand by all our previous statements that Scrooge McDuck is the best Scrooge.

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