#meow writes stuff

[lazydayslivin]

recoil (with no context)

[cookiedough77]

pet peeve with miraculous fandom is that whenever there is something they dont understand they dont take time to think about in universe logical explanations, they just chalk everything up to "bad writing" when this show can actually be cool if you think about stuff

[ayahur]

“I will go to hell for you,”

Would you? Would you throw away everything to spend eternity with me? Even if you're forsaken till the end of time? 

[yea-baiyi]

trying to write fengqing from either POV is funny bc mu qing will not, under torture, admit that he finds feng xin hot. feng xin readily finds mu qing attractive he just doesn’t see why that matters in the grand scheme of anything in his epic beef with this guy. or whatever they have going on in their relationship at any given point. they are simultaneously a hairs breadth away from fucking and yet fully capable of perpetuating an eternity of bitchlessness. ridiculous. i’m gonna make them cry.

[naemiblanch]

Here's my pathetic little bitch beloved OC. He will now experience torture growth in order to complete his miserable character arc.

[forwhump]

a/n; more wren ‘cause I’m obsessed w him 😀 I think I said before but I consider this part of the story the “farmhouse arc” & it is some of the worst time of wren’s entire life 😛 this probably doesn’t really count as story progression this time it’s just a random snippet of sad things happening to a sad guy 😛 but when your entire life is sad we call that slice of life babeyyyyy

(I really wanted to write a manhunt which is why I did but them being on the run comes w there being like 100000000 oneshots of just like bad things happening to wren & I probably wasn’t gonna post them all ‘cause at what point does it just get gratuitous ??? but then I didn’t post anything for months so now I’m posting one of those things anyway)(maybe I’ll post another even)(who can say)

tw/cw: kidnapping, captivity, objectification, mentions of rape/noncon, transphobia, misgendering, psychological torture, sexual torture, exploitation, creepy whumper

Once, Wren was an artist. He’d been a damn good one, too. Good enough that he could support himself doing it, that he was able to afford his dream apartment in Sugar Land, that he’d started making a name for himself not within the general public but amongst his peers, his fellow artists, and that was good enough for him. He’d had to move back home after a while, had to help his mother look after Robin, and that was hard but if he could, he would still go back. He was at home. His cows were always there and always happy to see him. Robin wasn’t doing well, but he wasn’t a mutated super soldier without a tongue. Every day, Wren got to hug his mom. 

That was a long time ago. Fuck, what he wouldn’t give for just one more hug from his mom. 

Now, Wren isn’t an artist, and he isn’t a person. He’s a doll, and even that, just barely. He’s a warm body. Now, Wren sits in a booth in a shitty diner in the middle of the night, the shiny plastic of the bright red seats cold against the backs of his thighs. White corset and white garters, white stockings and white cowboy boots, he’s barely more than naked and keeps his hands folded in his lap to hide how hard they tremble as he shivers. Across from him, handsome in an old Hollywood kind of way, almost twenty years Wren’s senior, Point is wearing a white ten gallon hat and a t-shirt that’s supposed to look like a tuxedo. 

“We just got married,” he tells the waitress, putting on a thick Texan accent. 

Once upon a time, they’d been strangers. It’s hard to remember that time. For so long, for years, for every one of Wren’s adult years he’s lived as Point’s pet. He knows he was an artist, a brother, he knows he loved his cows and his mom, but that was a whole other lifetime ago. Those are somebody else’s memories. 

He knows he was an artist but he doesn’t remember how it felt. He misses his mom but he doesn’t remember anymore how her hugs felt around him. He doesn’t remember who he is without Point. As much as Wren tried to fight it, as stubbornly as he tried to get out and get home, as many times as Silas died for him to do it, Point had not only changed his life, but fundamentally who he is as a person. Everything that was once Wren’s, everything that used to make him who he was, it had been taken from him. Point had taken it from him and he’d delighted in doing it. He made Wren watch as he crushed it. 

What’s left? Wren’s got pretty hair and warm skin. He doesn’t have anything else. 

The waitress looks at him and only sees what Point had wanted her to see. He likes to hurt Wren in any way he can — it’s never only been physical. He hurts him in the clothes he dresses him in and the way he introduces him to people, smug, the lengths he goes to humiliate him, the way he makes other people hurt him, too, whether they know they’re doing it or not. The waitress looks at him but doesn’t see him, she sees his bare skin, she sees somebody young and pretty and half naked with a man visibly older than he is. Newlyweds. The waitress looks at him, and she looks at him judgmentally. 

He flushes, looking away as Point grins. 

“Pretty,” he says, “ain’t she?” 

Fuck, Wren misses being a person. He misses wearing the clothes he wants to wear. He misses being able to form his own thoughts and have his own opinions. He misses being able to speak the way he wants to speak and to whoever he wants to speak to. He barely remembers what it’s like, but still, he misses when he was a person and he wasn’t always cold, he wasn’t always in pain, he wasn’t always bleeding. Wren can’t remember the last time he wasn’t hurting. He always hurts. He’s always bleeding. He misses taking his fucking testosterone. 

Weird how far removed he is from that version of himself. Weird that he’s now lived more years beneath Point than he ever got to live as himself. 

Hard to imagine there was ever a version of himself that wanted something so much and actually got it. His mother, a Southern Baptist beauty queen from Texas, had struggled with his transition but not nearly as much as Wren would’ve expected. She tried a lot harder than he thought she would. At some points, she took it upon herself to be the is Wren passing? police, which he didn’t usually appreciate but he knew it was her trying her best. She drove him to and from his top surgery, had doted on him for the time he spent recovering afterwards. She made sure to always pick up his hormones for him during her trips into town. She still referred to him as her daughter sometimes, but she always called him Wren. She’d been delighted that he’d picked another bird name. That he and Robin still matched. 

He misses his mom. He doesn’t remember the scent of her perfume anymore. 

“Right,” the waitress says. A plump woman probably in her early fifties, she looks down her nose at Wren as she barely looks at him. She doesn’t like him. He’s sure it would hurt his feelings, but it’s hard not to want to know what she thinks when she looks at him. What does she think of him, really? 

Wren had lost a lot of what faith he had in humanity while he was in the district. Their most closely guarded secret wasn’t human, and he was still the most human being in that place. The men there were hardly men. Every one of them was a monster. 

Wren had been so desperate to get out of that place, to get away from those men, but to what end? Had he really, truly convinced himself that all the worst men in the world were hired on to work in the district? Were they not just regular men? On the surface, in the world Wren had begged so hard to be returned to, the men aren’t any more human. How had he never noticed before? 

Wren is so sick. He’s so sick. He’s so skinny and starving and he’s always dehydrated. Point barely clothes him, and when he does, the clothing is barely clothing at all. It does nothing to hide the cuts or bruises or bite marks. His fingernails are all broken off. The ligature marks around his wrists had once been so deep they had scarred. Still, somehow, nobody sees him. The men on the surface look at him and they see the same thing the men in the district had seen. They look at him and they see warm, bare skin and a pretty, crying face. They see somebody that’s begging them to stop, it hurts, and they love it. 

The women on the surface look at Wren and look down on him. They judge him. They sneer. For some reason, they don’t see the scars or the bruises or how tight Point’s hand always is on his hip. For some reason, they, too, only see how short his skirt is. Why doesn’t anybody see him? Why, after all this time, can’t he let go of the hope that somebody will? 

The waitress doesn’t. She smiles at Point and tries not to look in Wren’s direction. Hard to imagine what she sees when she looks at him, either. Point, mostly, is very conventionally attractive. He looks like an old Hollywood movie star, tall, dark, and handsome. But Point doesn’t have human eyes. Point has the dark, empty eyes of a wild animal. When he smiles, it never reaches them. When he smiles, the way it stretches across his face is unnatural, a grotesque mimicry. He smiles like he’d seen somebody else do it once and is trying to recreate it. It isn’t a human smile. 

The waitress doesn’t see this, either. She sees a handsome cowboy and the blonde slut taking advantage of him. It almost makes Wren want to laugh. He doesn’t. 

“What can I get you both?” 

“My bride’ll have a glass of water,” Point answers, “and I’ll get a coffee, please, ma’am.” 

“Nothing to eat?” 

“No, ma’am,” he says. 

She smiles at him again. It might make Wren laugh again if he had more in the way of a sense of humour. “I’ll be right back with your coffee.” 

“Thank you, ma’am,” he says. 

She smiles again as she scurries off. Beyond the window in their booth, stars twinkle brightly above a long stretch of dark highway, lit up every few minutes with the glaring light of a passing truck. Inside the diner, there’s a man at the counter, sleeping or dead, and a few young people crammed into a booth in the furthest, darkest corner, heads down as their hangovers start to set in. 

Across the table from him, Point clicks his tongue to get his attention. 

Wren’s never been an especially violent person. A little reactive, maybe — when Robin turned eighteen and immediately enlisted in the military, Wren had thrown every one of their mother’s plates at him — but he’s never been violent. Even still, even after everything, if Wren had the means he wouldn’t go back to the district to hurt all those men for what they did to him. If Wren had it his way, he would never think about them again. He wouldn’t stop Silas from hurting them, he doesn’t wish them mercy, he just wouldn’t want to hurt them himself. He wouldn’t want to watch Silas do it, either, he’d just want to know it was done. He’s had enough violence for more than one lifetime. He’s seen enough people die. 

Except for Point. Wren would kill Point. He’d start by gouging his dark, animal eyes out of his face with his filthy, broken fingernails. 

Point grins at him. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “I love when you look at me like that,” he says. “You’re more fun when you got some fight in you, cowgirl.” 

Wren doesn’t look at her when the waitress drops a lukewarm glass of water down in front of him. Point’s cup is placed on the table with an unnecessary amount of care. As she fills it, she asks sweetly, “cream and sugar?” 

Point says, playing cowboy, “no, thank you, ma’am.” 

She smiles at him. “Holler at me if you need anything else, okay?” She kind of mimics Point’s fake accent as she says it. How deeply it offends Wren is almost irrational, but how is that any fair? Really. She won’t even look at him. She won’t help him. It’s his accent. Point lives in fucking Greenwich. 

He tips his hat at her. Wren can’t help that he snorts. “Thank you, ma’am.” 

“Of course,” she says. Wren can feel the look she gives him before she swishes away. Pretends he can’t. 

Point doesn’t touch the coffee. Looks over it at Wren and looks at him too closely. Wren isn’t sure if he keeps doing this to remind him that nobody will or wants to help him, that Point owns him, or if he just likes to see it for himself. Maybe both. He flaunts him like he isn’t actively evading a military manhunt and that Wren isn’t legally a dead person. He didn’t want shitty coffee in a shitty diner off a barren stretch of shitty highway, he wanted to see Wren suffer, around other people but completely alone. 

“You’re so beautiful,” he says. 

Wren swallows bile. 

Looking across the table at Wren, he isn’t smiling anymore. The intense, almost empty set to his face looks a lot more natural. He lifts his chin. “C’mere.” 

His shoulders tense. He presses himself a little harder into his seat. “No.” 

Point’s eyebrows lift. Otherwise, his face doesn’t change. “Excuse me?” 

Wren swallows again. Unsurprisingly, he has to swallow more bile. He looks into the diner, at the man at the counter and the farthest, crammed booth, but Point says, “don’t look at them. They won’t help you. Look at me,” and as Wren looks up at him again, slowly, Point demands, “you do what I fuckin’ tell you. You know that. C’mere.” 

With all the grace of a newborn fawn, Wren slides out of the booth. Point, either impatient or not trusting him, probably both, reaches for him before he can take a single, shaky step and pulls him down into his lap. Instinctively, Wren tries to pull away, but Wren is weak and malnourished and Point is so much bigger than him. Point has always been so much bigger than him. 

He takes both of Wren’s wrists in one hand, holds them between them, and Wren is totally helpless. With exaggerated ease, Point maneuvers him how he wants him, pulling Wren into him, spreading his thighs over his lap. 

Wren’s breathing hitches. 

Point holds him there, holds his legs apart with bruising force but so softly, too softly, he says, “kiss me.” He lays his accent on thick. 

Instinctively, Wren flinches, trying to lean away, to pull himself off Point’s lap, and Point presses his fingertips so hard into the bones of Wren’s wrist that static starts to crackle down his fingers. “I said kiss me.” With his other hand, he arranges the white frill of Wren’s skirt very carefully over his lap. 

Wren can feel his heartbeat in the side of his throat. “Darren,” he pleads softly. “There’s people here.” 

“When do you think I started giving a fuck about other people?” 

Wren tries to push himself up on his knees and Point watches him, smirking. “I don’t want to.” 

With a raise of his eyebrows, he smirks a little wider. “When do you think I started to give a fuck about what you want, either, cowgirl?” Pushing a hand up and under his skirt, he pulls Wren back down with the hand he curls around the back of his thigh. “I want to kiss my wife.” 

Point has a wife. A real one. Wren tries not to think about her but it’s hard not to wonder sometimes. They have kids. Young ones. Wren’s pretty sure the youngest is still only a newborn. Wren, they’d named the baby. Does she know? Does she have any idea? 

Not gently, Point guides Wren’s arms around his neck. Pulling his skirt out and over his lap again, he pushes both his hands beneath the tulle and Wren can feel the cool metal against the inside of his thigh as he pulls open his belt buckle. 

Wren makes a hitching, gasping sort of sound as he tries to lean away, and Point reaches up quickly, clamping a hand over Wren’s mouth with a force that knocks his teeth against each other. 

“You can go ahead and make a scene, cowgirl,” he says quietly, leaning in too close. “You know it won’t help you. I’ll blow the brains out of everybody in here and then I’ll fuck you in the mess, won’t I?” Slowly, he slides his hand from Wren’s mouth, pressing his fingertips too hard into the hinge of his jaw. “Or you can be good, baby, and you can be quiet, and everybody can walk out of here alive.” 

“Somebody will see us,” Wren says softly. 

“Not if you’re quiet,” he coos. He covers Wren’s mouth again as he moves, gripping the edge of the table behind him, caging him in. “Kiss me.” 

“Please,” he whispers. 

But Wren isn’t a person, and he isn’t a human being. He’s bare skin and short skirts. He doesn’t have thoughts or opinions of his own, not that he’s allowed to express. He doesn’t get to want. He isn’t allowed to say no. 

“You’re gonna wanna hold onto me, cowgirl,” Point says with a grin that doesn’t meet his eyes. 

Wren starts to cry, because Wren is usually crying, but he’s been dehydrated for so many days that he doesn’t produce any tears. He only sobs, and Point leans in quickly to kiss him, to swallow the sound with a groan of his own. 

Nobody comes to help him. He’s sure the rest of the diner can see them, and he’s sure they must know, as much as they can, what they’re doing, they aren’t discreet and Point isn’t gentle but still, nobody comes to help him. Nobody comes to stop them. Like usual, they watch and they don’t do anything else. 

Not for the first time, Wren thinks back on his last day. He thinks about kneeling in that sinking apartment building, begging Robin to come home with him while Robin begged him for a couple bucks. He thinks about looking up at Point for the very first time, black mask and black uniform, black machine gun. He thinks about the way Point had looked at him. 

Not for the first time, Wren wishes Point would’ve just killed him. 

[luckyjorabbit]

I've always dreamed of having a comic in Meow Wolf, but never imagined it manifesting in the form of a Bazooka Joe parody ^w^;;;

Some of the little things I got to do for the new MW location in Houston, Radio Tave! Which one is your fav? :^)

[sharkjumpers]

okay. tomorrow i need to lock in and do ALL of the work for class 2 that i didn't turn in last week. saturday/sunday i will dedicate to class 1, and then on monday i will perform my usual miracle of getting all of that weeks assignments done before 6 pm, and i will look at class 2's midterm on tuesday. and i NEED to look at disability accommodations, i just keep forgetting. okay izzy yes izzy

[ayahur]

My heart whispers out as I try to lull it to sleep 

“I yearn to call someone my own” 

The hopeless wish that one day I can call out your name without restraint. 

The pointless desire to laugh with you until the sun rises. 

The pathetic feeling of wanting to cry out while you console me. 

I yearn for the day you stand beside me, hands interlocked as our heart beats one. 

[a-sparrows-melody]

lol I literally got so fired up and motivated after, like, 8 people gave me some interaction that I literally wrote 2000 words in one sitting. I've never written this much, that too for the first chapter.

Since I'm nice, here you go:

it's still the first draft so it's really bad (so shitty I can't even look at it without cringing). BTW this is MC one, Felicia's thing (MC two) starts in Chapter 2 - and I'll probably post snippets of that, too, but obviously I'm not posting the whole story. What's the point of a surprise, then? Just know that it would have a shit-ton of aro/ace rep and a lot of magic so I'll be really happy reading this and writing this.

Anyway. I'll go now. I'm so excited, this is the biggest writing project I've ever taken on, and I'm finally writing the damn novel after a whole year of deliberation! Thank you for all your support, guys :D

ALSO I only have to endure my finals for seven more weeks (51 days, to be exact). I'm literally counting the days down till liberation.

Bye :) Send pigeons!

[sparklykat-hideoutenthusiast]

Bluurrrggg...

5 wips and one finished drawing, can't find the motivation to do anything about it.

[nervocat]

rebaal you're a freak but you seem to be loved for it

[thexgrayxlady]

WIP Wednesday

Murtagh leaned back against Thorn’s side. He was still nowhere near where he wanted to be, but he could maintain his training regimen for a little longer than he had the day before. He could take a moment to catch his breath, then he felt more than well enough to continue. While he made his plan for which exercises came next, the dragon wrapped his head around and pressed his nose to his chest.

“No,” Thorn said. “Don’t push yourself so hard.”

“I’m fine,” he said, scratching Thorn’s chin. “I’m having a good day, I should take advantage…”

“And if you do too much, then tomorrow will not be a good day.” Thorn nuzzled his chest and gave a low rumble of concern.

“You worry too much,” he said. Already, his heartbeat slowed. Maybe his shoulders were a little sore, but not in a bad way, none of the usual twinges or tension that foretold back pain. He could push through that to continue. “I’ll be careful.”

“Every time you say that…” Thorn nudged him back against his side. Since waking up in Illeria, the dragon had become increasingly protective and he could not begrudge Thorn in this, even if it was a touch frustrating. And he couldn’t deny that the dragon’s sun-warmed scales felt very nice against his back.

“Alright,” he said, reaching over the dragon’s foreleg for a jar of water. “I’ll take a break. If I still feel good in the evening, I’ll continue.” Thorn huffed, but accepted the compromise. He took his time stretching, careful to pay full attention to his back and shoulders. His injuries and subsequent convalescence took away a lot of hard-earned strength and mobility. While he knew that building it back up would take time, the interim flareups were maddening

[m00n-pr1sm]

Amy Dunne Character Analysis

Disclaimer

This analysis will be of Amy’s character from both the book and the movie, although the 2014 movie adaption takes greater precedence with only some additional details and quotes included from the book as it does delve deeper into Amy’s psyche and add further characterization. Thus some traits may be accentuated further than they are in the movie, not being completely faithful to either story. It’s an analysis of Amy in her totality across mediums, of course being entirely my opinion. There are of course adaptational differences but I will not include the major ones from the books (ex. her relationship with Hillary Hand). This is an analysis focusing primarily on Amy’s neuroses she demonstrates and the childhood links to them, it doesn’t cover in-depth the events nor themes of Gone Girl.

Amy Elliott Dunne, the ever enigmatic dual protagonist- antagonist of Gone Girl is one of the most iconic female villains in modern memory, and one of the paragons of the “good for her” trope in media, is, frankly, one of my favorite characters of all time. As such I have been dying to write a full analysis examining her neuroses and characterization. Beneath the cultural perception of just another “crazy psycho” for girls to claim “she did no wrong” or “she just like me fr!”, lies a fascinating character who is masterfully written and developed by Gillian Flynn, as well as perfectly portrayed by Rosamund Pike. Amy Dunne is a character with a deep, complex psychology that I will do my best to thoroughly explore in this analysis.

From Amy’s childhood we first see the emergence of a literal high ego ideal, Amazing Amy. Of course this is the children’s book series created by her parents with a fictionalized version of Amy being the eponymous protagonist. This was a version of herself that rectified her own personal failures. Amazing Amy became a prodigy at cello, when Amy quit at 10, Amazing Amy made varsity volleyball, Amy got cut freshman year. Even in the (at time) final book in the series, Amazing Amy got married, a task Amy had not yet done. The entire book series revolved around Amy always making the most virtuous, the most selfless, the most perfect decisions.

>”With me, regular, flawed, real Amy, jealous, as always, of the golden child.”

An interesting detail in the book that is omitted from the movie is Marybeth’s numerous miscarriages and stillbirths (which totaled 7). All of these girls were named Hope, until Amy was born. Amy expresses her jealousy towards them, as they were always seen as perfect without ever living; meanwhile Amy herself has to live life everyday knowing that she will never truly live up to the Hopes. That she has to try everyday to be the best she can be. Her very birth was mired in the expectation of a perfect child; given that she was practically a gift from the heavens to her parents.

This sets up Amy’s perfectionism, as the childhood experience of never living up to a projected ideal led her to want to be perfect (and as we’ll later see, the expectation that everyone else is too), to live life always through the gaze of another. Evidently this leads to a loss of one’s inner essence, one’s individuality and sense of self.

>“-I’d never really felt like a person, because I was always a product” (Book Quote)

Amy’s obsession with personas can be seen as emerging from this, as she adapts a personality depending on who she’s interacting with, as to always be the most appealing she can, she is Amazing Amy after all.

>”I’m not sure, exactly, how to be Dead Amy. I’m trying to figure out what that means for me, what I become for the next few months. Anyone, I suppose, except people I’ve already been: Amazing Amy. Preppy ’80s Girl. Ultimate-Frisbee Granola and Blushing Ingenue and Witty Hepburnian Sophisticate. Brainy Ironic Girl and Boho Babe (the latest version of Frisbee Granola). Cool Girl and Loved Wife and Unloved Wife and Vengeful Scorned Wife. Diary Amy.” (Book Quote)

This general attitude leads to people trying to impress her as she places herself as someone special and especially someone to keep around. She entices both the characters and viewers of the film through her manufactured charisma and enchantment. However, we’ll see this dramatically backfire in her relationship with Nick, just you wait!

For now we can focus on the beginning of their relationship as well as what I believe to be Amy’s view on romance.

I believe that Amy has an impossibly high standard of love, one that stems from her perfectionism and general inability to let down her guise of being amazing. Not to mention how her parents were a perfect match, Amy even referring to them as soul-mates.

>”They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish—expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly. Making it look easy, the soul-mate thing.” (Book Quote)

In her childhood it’s implied that she was into romance novels, specifically Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which obviously contributes to the idealization of romance, of a literal scripted love.

>”You were an alienated teen and only Elizabeth Bennet understood you”

I think this little quote is incredibly indicative; it establishes a sense of alienation, of Amy never quite fitting in and blending with others.

>”So many lessons and opportunities and advantages, and they never taught me how to be happy. I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that too, but I wouldn’t understand why. I would sit there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun.” (Book Quote)

Back to the topic of romance, through these stories it allowed her to imagine her perfect romance: if Amy could find that one person that truly understood her, beyond the illusion, that then would constitute a perfect union of love. She does deep down (whether consciously or not) want to be loved for who she is; not the idealized, palatable, literal marketed version of herself. Thus she holds trust as a premium, expecting that if she does the Herculean task of unspooling and revealing herself to another, that the other person would love her no matter what.

>”Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you?” (Book Quote)

However all of this culminates in an impossibly high standard of a lover, of a practically divine mythical love; where one loves totally and absolutely. Of course where this neurosis is most demonstrated is in Nick and Amy’s relationship.

Amy comments that after meeting Nick she finally felt like a person as he brought out a side of herself that hadn’t been seen, in her own words “a lightness and an ease”, something that Amy enjoyed. In her eyes they had the perfect relationship in the beginning, Nick was her compliment with the witty banter, with their inside jokes, and charm.

However this doesn’t just vanquish her childhood neuroses, through her desire to be seen as perfect, she modifies herself to be a “cool girl” for Nick, complying endlessly to standards to maintain this perception.

>” When I met Nick Dunne, I knew he wanted a cool girl and for him, I’ll admit, I was willing to try.”

Amy essentially became Nick’s image of a perfect girl, witty, fun, and most of all easy-going and forgiving.

Yet one cannot live forever in images and ideas; and as such, the real, true Amy emerged. The Amy that cares too much, that’s hard to get along with, that is a controlling perfectionist. She also tests Nick through the treasure hunts, weaving in little details about their relationship as to challenge Nick and hope that he remembers the things they do together as deeply as she does. Combined with the 2008 recession and declining health of Nick’s mother (the consequences of which will be explored later). As well as Nick’s growing dissatisfaction in the relationship (evidenced by his worsening performances in the treasure hunts, the cheating, using her for sex and ignoring her otherwise, etc). The illusion both Nick and Amy were living in crumbled; they couldn’t possibly sustain their relationship as they were both striving to fulfill reciprocating images for the other.

One of the biggest parts of her character is Amy’s elitism and entitlement, in which she thinks of herself as someone superior, someone that deserves to be loved absolutely for who she is, although only to people she considers worthy.

>”She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment—that just anyone could like you.” (Book Quote)

Once again this stems from her childhood, in a seemingly contradictory way, she also sees herself as special for being the one that survived from her mother’s attempts, as well as the fact that her birth was so tumultuous that she would be an only child. From this also stems her entitlement for love.

Amy actively looks down upon women she considers “average”, whom she sees as coming from mediocrity and continuously perpetuating that in their lives. She scoffs at them with her wealthy parents and NYC background until her marriage with Nick crumbles. Only then does she realize that she’s become the very woman she would previously disdain. A woman with a failing marriage, the loss of her previous wealth following the recession, and moving to a failed development in Missouri (What the hell’s in Missouri?) for Nick’s mother.

I truly believe this, combined with Nick’s infidelity, and most importantly the loss of her idyllic love culminated in the iconic Gone Girl plan.

>”Nick took and took from me until I no longer existed, that’s murder. Let the punishment fit the crime”.

Nick took Amy’s identity, her sense of self that she so generously revealed to him and rejected her. Implying that she would only be loved if played the role of the “cool girl”; stripping her of who she really was, losing herself in yet another persona. Although Amy admits she doesn’t really have a personality and lives through personas, she still has a semblance of self that she holds dear.

>”-made me realize that there was a Real Amy in there, and she was so much better, more interesting and complicated and challenging, than Cool Amy”. (Book Quote)

Worse yet, Nick had cheated on her with a “newer, younger, bouncer Cool Girl”, leaving Amy in the dust, surely damaging her pride.

But Amy truly fell in love with her idealized version of Nick, believing that she was responsible for shaping that version of Nick. That she deserved that man in his entirety, of course what gets Amy to come back to Nick is the Sharon Scheiber interview, in which he promises to make up with Amy in just the way that makes her think that Nick is the one person who gets her. He makes the little references to their inside jokes (2 fingers on the chin when they’re not bullshitting the other) and a reference to the end of the treasure hunt (always a contentious issue in their relationship). She’s reminded of who he was, that he was once perfect for her, who else could know how to appeal to her heart in just the right way? With the same passion and conviction she reverses the judgment on Nick, clawing her way back to him. She does so in an especially brutal manner, slashing Desi’s throat with a boxcutter right after he climaxes. Putting aside my enormous personal bias against Desi, he was technically an innocent man, taking a great risk in sheltering Amy. However it’s clear that Amy sees him as merely an asset and something to be disposed of once he serves his value, as another prop in her ever evolving masterplan; she did string him along for years through their letter correspondences. He was just another casualty in Amy’s search for idyllic love. She comes back dramatically, literally falling into Nick’s arms while still covered in Desi’s blood like a dress; fabricating an elaborate story about a love obsessed former boyfriend kidnapping and violating her. Despite the glaring holes in her whole story (If Amy’s marriage was as bad as she made it out to be, why did she go back to Nick so easily? How did she get access to a knife and kill him so seamlessly? Why didn’t Amy do anything when she discovered the stuff in Margo’s shed? etc), law enforcement, media, and the public all fully believe it, infatuated with the persona and narrative that Amy’s created for herself. In the end she traps Nick into the marriage and eventually, the family. The last shot of the film is a haunting recall to the beginning shot of the film, as Amy has both revealed and secured herself to be the master of the narrative, finally obtaining her perfect love, no matter what the cost may have been.

Conclusion

Through a constant demand in Amy’s childhood emerges a need for perfection, simultaneously bringing about a sense of superiority and entitlement. The use of personas and façades facilitate this, painting Amy as the most amazing cool girl for whomever she’s performing for, to feed her need to be seen as perfect and desirable. Yet there emerges a psychological detachment from others; as the need to perform inevitably leads to an internal hollowness. However underneath all these layers there also lies the true Amy who has the deep unconscious desire of wanting to be loved absolutely, to have a perfect union of love where she can reveal herself fully and be loved for who she is truly.

>disclaimer for tumblr lol, this is not me trying to claim Amy was innocent I am fully aware that she’s a terribly entitled and narcissistic person but she can still be complex and have relatable desires & be a person even if she’s massively fucked up!!

[maddiemuu]

a month or two ago i made the horrible horrible mistake of "being honest" and "emotionally open" and telling my therapist how many weird hangups i have around interacting w/ fandom spaces no matter how badly i may want to. so now i just have to live with the knowledge that eventually she's probably gonna challenge me to change that. and then i'm going to have to make the most humiliating choice of my life: become more active in fandom because my therapist told me to. OR: don't do that. fail utterly at the task of talking to other nerds and then pay a woman with a doctorate to listen to me explain in rich detail exactly how badly i beefed it. i can't decide which is worse.

[maochira]

The reason why I no longer write romantic requests is that I've lost interest in romance in general. I'm on the aromantic spectrum and while I have experienced romantic attraction and have been in romantic relationships in the past, I've just been thriving on the love in my queerplatonic relationship with Remy :3 So that's a reason why romance isn't that interesting to me anymore.

Also!!! Most x reader fics out there are romance already. For the aromantic spectrum folks and the people who just want to enjoy platonic, family and queerplatonic fics I'm here because someone needs to feed them.

The only place where I somewhat enjoy romance is in my OC ships and if it's written well in whatever media I watch or read. But I never really consume media thats main genre is romance. But if it happens to be there I usually like it.