#larries like :

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

[romansmartini]

ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to speculate about the sexual and romantic undertones of celebrities’ professional relationships

[gabrielapazlima]

catnap was feeling silly today-

sorry for the 2018 ass meme format

[t8oo]

[lastchancestardomm]

My mom showing me "hot", buff, alpha males she took from Google: "Do you think he's attractive? He looks really nice!"

Me thinking about stinky opossum guys who look like they've been out in the rain for 13 days: "Yeah I guess I dunno.."

[kotofeden]

Aw dawg, look at my lawyer, I'm going to jail

[bathroomtrapped]

peak romance is having someone to keep you company as you rot

[misersdream]

paldea elite four

[almoststedytimetravel]

Larry being an incredibly talented artist is the funniest gag in the Ace Attorney series. Every time he shows up, Phoenix and Edgeworth always make snide remarks about his art, but it's always really good.

Like from case one of the first game, Larry clearly had mad sculpting ability when he made the thinker clock. He's a good enough actor to play the Steel Samurai at an international display of goodwill. He was able to perfectly paint a variety of scenes he would only have seen for a few seconds across multiple games.

But he's always getting clowned on by the rest of the cast because he's such a pathetic cringefail in every other aspect of his life.

[bulbagarden]

Larry says: 'Happy Trans Day of Visibility.'

[bb-ants]

Why is there even a child working in the elite four LMAOOOO

[doctorsiren]

Part 6

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[villalunae]

wakaba . superior

[rendevok]

Still a trio after all this time 💗

[ID: A drawing of Miles Edgeworth, Larry Butz, and Phoenix Wright; both from the present and past. Near the top of the image the trio is posing for a photo; Larry, in the middle, is grinning widely, and leaning his elbows on the shoulders of the other two. Miles crosses his arms, looking toward his friends and scowling over the contact, Phoenix smiles fondly while observing the interaction. In the middle and lower half of the image, and superimposed over their older figures, is a picture of their younger selves in a very similar position. Young Larry is once again in the middle, leaning his arms on his friends’ shoulders, while young Miles opens his mouth in protest, and young Phoenix is again observing his friends and laughing with a open smile. End ID]

[buttercupyellow]

wanted to draw the whole found family in one pic and this is literally the only moment in the movie where they're all in one shot so.. ta da!