Dead Serious
4/4
Danny had made peace with the fact he did not have a soulmate. He had! After several years of no response to the countless drawings and writing notes on his skin, he had grown resigned to the fact that he was part of the 5% who did not have soulmates. He was fine with that.
(Dash would tease him about how no one would ever love him, adding salt to an already irritated wound. His parents were soulmates, and he remembered when he was drawing on his father’s arms and watching as it appeared on his mother’s. Jazz had been drawing and writing to her soulmate for years. Her soulmates name was Jason, and she always talked about how he was with her. She was one of the few people who comforted him when he stopped drawing or writing to soulmate. )
Damien taught at an early age that there was no use for soulmates. They were only distractions. He knew grandfather had no soulmate, and his mother had never responded to her own. He never responded to the drawings on his arms notes the notes in English on his (and he didn’t try harder just because he wanted to read his soulmate writing that would be ridiculous.)
Damien never told his family about having a soulmate. Even as he slowly got used to the differences between them and slowly learned how his grandfather was he could never bring himself to respond to the slowly lessening drawings and messages.(He couldn’t bring himself to respond because deep down he knew he didn’t deserve a soulmate. He was a monster, a demon. He didn’t deserve it.)
Danny stopped trying so desperately to contact his soulmate at age 11(the age he held his sister as she cried, her soulmate’s last message scribbled in desperate frantic writing on her arm. He never resented his parents so much when they didn’t even leave the lab for two days, not paying any mind to their sobbing child on the floor above them.)(it was the first time he didn’t envy having a soulmate.)
He was fourteen when he started drawing on his arms again.(it was shaky, much more than the older drawings, but even if he didn’t have a soulmate, he wanted to leave them a mark, just in case, the same way Jazz wrote quotes from different books on her arms.)
(When he found out Vlad didn’t have a soulmate, he refused to acknowledge another similarity they shared. He refused to think about how Vlad’s desperation made Danny think of his own desperate writing for his soulmate. Soulmates were a topic he never spoke of, and Vlad must have known, must have found out about how Danny didn’t have one, but he never commented on it. (It was the only boundary that was never crossed.))
(Damian wasn’t disappointed when his soulmate stopped writing to him. he didn’t trace over his arms, wishing that he had the confidence to write back. He didn’t spend hours wondering if his soulmate was gone without knowing Damian had seen him. He didn’t trace over the drawings his soulmate made with awe after four years of silence.)
Damian always covered up, so he was the only one who noticed when his soulmate started writing to him again. Never sentences never notes like they were before, but shaky drawings appeared on his skin. They were less detailed than before, almost shaky, as if the person drawing them couldn’t hold a pencil, steady, but they were real. Damian never said a word.
It was October 15 when Damien saw something on his arms that made his blood go cold. A message that he read over and over while commandeering the plane and ignoring the rest of his family yelling for him to explain himself. He desperately calibrated the jet while staring at the words, praying to a God he did not believe in that he would not be too late.(Unaware that Todd was following going in the same direction with the similar message written on his arm from a girl that Jason had deemed too good for him.)
Dear soulmate, even if you aren’t there. Everyone in Casper high is writing on their arms and I might as well try to warn someone. I am from Amity Park, Illinois, and we are under attack. The GIW have cut all outside communication. We are currently hiding in Casper high school, barricading the entrances, but it will not last long.
According to the government, we are not legally sentient or human. The agents outside want to dissect us, citing that we are scum. I don’t want to see my classmates die at the hands of my parents. I don’t want to see my friends and my sister die.
I don’t know if you are there, or if I really don’t have a soulmate, but I don’t want to die (fully) without leaving some sort of note.
My name is Danny. I love you. I’m sorry.
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you were raised in comparison.
it wasn't always obvious (well. except for the times that it was), but you internalized it young. you had to eat what you didn't like, other people are going hungry, and you should be grateful. you had to suck it up and walk on the twisted ankle, it wasn't broken, you were just being a baby. you were never actually suffering, people obviously had it worse than you did.
you had a roof over your head - imagine! with the way you behaved, with how you talked back to your parents? you're lucky they didn't kick you out on your ass. they had friends who had to deal with that. hell, you have friends who had to deal with that. and how dare you imply your father isn't there for you - just because he doesn't ever actually talk to you and just because he's completely emotionally checked out of your life doesn't mean you're not fucking lucky. think about your cousins, who don't even get to speak to their dad. so what if yours has a mean streak; is aggressive and rude. at least you have a father to be rude to you.
you really think you're hurting? you were raised in a home! you had access to clean water! you never so much as came close to experiencing a real problem. sure, okay. you have this "mental illness" thing, but teenagers are always depressed, right. it's a phase, you'll move on with your life.
what do you mean you feel burnt out at work. what do you mean you mean you never "formed healthy coping mechanisms?" we raised you better than that. you were supposed to just shoulder through things. to hold yourself to high expectations. "burning out" is for people with real jobs and real stress. burnout is for people who have sick kids and people who have high-paying jobs and people who are actually experiencing something difficult. recently you almost cried because you couldn't find your fucking car keys. you just have lost your sense of gratitude, and honestly, we're kind of hurt. we tell you we love you, isn't that enough? if you want us to stick around, you need to be better about proving it. you need to shut up about how your mental health is ruined.
it could be worse! what if you were actually experiencing executive dysfunction. if you were really actually sick, would you even be able to look at things on the internet about it? you just spend too much time on webMD. you just like to freak yourself out and feel like you belong to something. you just like playing the victim. this is always how you have been - you've always been so fucking dramatic. you have no idea how good you have it - you're too fucking sensitive.
you were like, maybe too good of a kid. unwilling to make a real fuss. and the whole time - the little points, the little validations - they went unnoticed. it isn't that you were looking for love, specifically - more like you'd just wanted any one person to actually listen. that was all you'd really need. you just needed to be witnessed. it wasn't that you couldn't withstand the burden, but you did want to know that anyone was watching. these days, you are so accustomed to the idea of comparison - you don't even think you belong in your own communities. someone always fits better than you do. you're always the outlier. they made these places safe, and then you go in, and you are just not... quite the same way that would actually-fit.
you watch the little white ocean of your numbness lap at your ankles. the tide has been coming in for a while, you need to do something about it. what you want to do is take a nap. what you want to do is develop some kind of time machine - it's not like you want your life to stop, not completely, but it would really nice if you could just get everything to freeze, just for a little while, just until you're finished resting. but at least you're not the worst you've been. at least you have anything. you're so fucking lucky. do you have any concept of the amount of global suffering?
a little ant dies at the side of your kitchen sink. you look at its strange chitinous body and think - if you could just somehow convince yourself it is enough, it will finally be enough and you can be happy. no changes will have to be made. you just need to remember what you could lose. what is still precious to you.
you can't stop staring at the ant. you could be an ant instead of a person, that is how lucky you are. it's just - you didn't know the name of the ant, did you. it's just - ants spend their whole life working, and never complain. never pull the car over to weep.
it's just - when it died, it curled up into a tight little ball.
something kind of uncomfortable: you do that when you sleep.
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Hazbin Hotel is actually healing my inner ex-Christian so hard.
No joke, I nearly started cheering when Lute called Charlie and Vaggie’s love “vile and blasphemous” (and then burst out laughing when Adam immediately followed it up with “Hot as fuck though”). I know that may sound weird considering that I am, in fact, a lesbian, but here me out:
Seeing Christians being explicitly homophobic onscreen? It validates me. It makes me think “Oh yeah, I’m not crazy, Christians are that hateful!” And, call me crazy, but I think homophobia being tied in with villainy is a good thing. Neither Adam or Lute are supposed to be good people; they are very obviously the villain, and that establishes their behavior as bad. Someone on Twitter said that Lute gave them religious fanatic vibes and I couldn’t agree more.
And here’s the thing, too: it’s explicit homophobia, not some dumb metaphor. There’s no way to take it as anything else. And I really need that. I need to see Christians being explicitly homophobic onscreen in the same way that other people need and create worlds where homophobia doesn’t exist.
But me? I want my pain and suffering acknowledged. I want the harm that Christianity does acknowledged. Homophobia is real and the religious kind doubly so. I related to Vaggie so much in that episode; I felt her trepidation about going back to Heaven. Felt like a good metaphor for escaping a fundamentalist church only to be forced to visit again.
And Viv is not afraid to explicitly point this out and criticize them. Like, yes! Say it! They are hypocrites! They don’t care about people being better, they only care about punishment! They maimed one of their own and left her to die because she spared a child! They’re homophobic freaks! They would never see the good that Angel does and how he’s improved and is wonderful, they only see that he’s a drug addict and a sex worker and think he’s worthless for that even though Jesus broke bread with sex workers and people considered the dregs of society. (And of course Angel is gay on top of that.)
And another thing: not only did the Adam line make me laugh, but the second homophobic Lute line about “he blew his shot like the cocks in his mouth” cracked me up too. It reminded me of the pilot where Katie Killjoy said “I don’t touch the gays” to Charlie, which is a line that made me laugh for 4+ years straight. When I told my brother that was the funniest homophobia I’d ever heard in media, he very wisely said, “All homophobia is funny if you think about it.” And you know what? He’s right. It is funny, because it’s so fundamentally goddamn stupid, so let’s give characters ridiculous lines so everyone can laugh at how idiotic they and their beliefs sound.
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All respect to the people who found the Imperator death scene genuinely sad but personally I think seeing Copia throw himself over her coffin like a discarded muppet and make some of the most dramatically fake crying noises I’ve ever heard in my life was arguably the funniest moment of the film
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it’s so odd to me that now, when a man dresses and talks in a way that is mocking women as a part of “comedy”, that’s no longer called out for misogyny, it’s called out for transphobia.
i saw something the other day on tv (i cannot remember what for the life of me now, sorry 😭) and a man did exactly that, playing a “dumb” wife stereotype while keeping himself obviously male. i was surprised to see people talking about it online later, because it’s rare that type of misogyny gets talked about, but they weren’t talking about misogyny. they were calling it transphobia.
and if a sexist caricature of a woman by a man seemingly mocks trans women then idk, perhaps they’re not so different things…
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