#nobody should have ever let me have access to tumblr at god knows how old i was when i made this

[awkward-dazai]

IT HAS TAKEN ME FUCKING YEARS BUT IM FINALLY ABLE TO ACCESS THIS GODAWFUL ACCOUNT. i dont apologize for any inactivity and im surely not making a comeback, personally i’d like to forget this fucking blog ever existed. but im back nonetheless to give a life update or closing statement before i log out and finally live my life peacefully or smthn.

1. im not like this anymore. jesus christ. fortunately i’ve matured as a person now that i’m nearly 18 years old and i actually understand bungo stray dogs now.

2. nothing on here reflects who i am now. i fucking hate soukoku. i hate sskk. i hate bsd ships. i think a lot of the jokes on here were in poor taste and the whole schtick was character inaccurate… it was definitely fun at the time, but, alas, it is not that time anymore.

3. i have a new tumblr tjat u should probably go follow instead of this one if u ever want to see content from me. @nouveauxamoris 👍🏽

4. this has no relevance to anything else im just spreading my propaganda . chuuya nakahara is a trans woman . dazai osamu is a transmasc lesbian. dazai and chuuya have the exact same relationship dynamic as branch and his sleazy older brother from trolls. skk yaoi was never real and i no longer pretend like it was

[incorrect-ikevamp-quotes]

Hi! I love everything that you write and heh I am a fan! 😄 tbh this is my first time requesting something on Tumblr! If you don't mind and if I am not being a bother...can you write about how the guys would react If MC suddenly starts making meme references? I don't know how I got the idea but I am REALLY curious. And love you! :D

Hiya! Tyvm for the kind words, and apologies that this took a while! I hope you have the chance to enjoy it regardless ❤️❤️❤️ Love you too, sweet pea! I promise to get to the next request you’ve sent ASAP~

Aight but this would be hilarious because the range of the reactions is just ungodly. I will be putting this under a cut after Napoleon so I don’t clog up everyone’s dash, but all the suitors are included below otherwise! 

Comte is the one that recognizes a few, but didn’t really stay in modern times long enough to be as well-versed as a Gen Z kid might. Regardless he finds the wittiness and absolute chaotic fuckery to be delightful, and will 100% support the harmless nonsense. It never fails to get a laugh out of him

Mozart that first day be like: “Buzz off MC I hate you” MC, because she likes swinging bats at wasps’ nests: “Well that’s not very cash money of you” Mozart: ?????????? Comte, giggling in the bg like the secret fae he is This one’s just because I’m petty, but after the events of Comte rt I just imagine them encountering Vlad again and MC’s just “I lived bitch.” while Comte is flipping him off behind her lkjahgkjhdsg

Comte @ Leo when he finds the latter under his desk: Had it not been for the laws of this land, I would have slaughtered you.  MC: wheezing from the hallway as she’s about to give him his letters

MC: So how was your day, honey? Comte: Good, good--briefly had to go beastmode upon the punk that pilfered my lint roller MC, biting her lip to keep from laughing: So does Leo still have his kneecaps? Comte: for now.

Comte, @ literally anyone upsetting the MC: I won’t hesitate, bitch

Comte: Be careful with my emotional baggage, it’s designer

MC: What if I was evil and ran towards you at very fast speeds Comte: My arms are strong, I would catch and hug you

Leo and Dazai are the ones that don’t have a single reference point but are filled with so much dumbass chaos energy that they just. Understand immediately???? Nobody knows how or why, but they just catch on so fast--adapt the language in a matter of weeks. Never underestimate the power of combined boredom, depression, and humor

I swear to god I just see MC taking them their Blanc/Rouge and being like “here you go sir, one enslaved moisture” and they just go fucking hog wild from day one. MC starts impersonating Theo when he leaves the room around Dazai, like fake deep voice “you all only hate me because you do not like me and I am mean to you. grow up.” Or like the MC meets a baby on her travels with Leo around town and she holds them and says v seriously and sagely “So you are Baby? I have heard tales of your exploits.” and Leo about loses his shit right there. They both think MC is the funniest person alive--they’ve never been more eager to throw a ring at someone in their entire life.

Also a bonus for my beloved Dazai:  MC, facing even the slightest inconvenience (like dropping her fork) in the most dramtic voice possible: Life is not daijoubu. Dazai: wheezing

MC, after watching Theo turn down a woman at the bar in the meanest way possible: bro quit letting the darkness consume you u r scaring the hoes Dazai, literally rolling around on the ground, half-drunk and dying:

MC, walking alongside Dazai and stopping to stare at her reflection in the River Seine. Dazai’s expecting some sad or twisted shit, since people often feel comfortable talking about those things around him, but instead she just: “Oh, it’s you. The source of all my problems.” And he about falls into the river from shock HAHAHA

At this point don’t be surprised if his next book is about an absolute madlad woman similar to MC

Napoleon finds it to be a delightful quirk more than anything? He doesn’t really understand it, but he finds it funny when they change their voice for effect or speak in exaggerated tones. If it’s just comprehensible enough for an outsider to understand--or Sebas gives him context--chances are it’ll send him into a laughing fit

For this one I just imagine MC singing that Ratatouille meme song obnoxiously bad while cooking, and Napoleon and Comte are just so wildly amused by it bc it makes zero sense and it’s only vaguely French at this point

MC @ Napoleon while they’re cooking brunch: Can I offer you a nice egg in these trying times?

MC, conflicted because she’s tired and wanted to sleep in but also got to see Napo’s cute sleeping face for a few hours: For my next stunt, I’ll wake up at 5AM on the day I can sleep in. Sebas: Early to bed and early to rise makes a person healthy, wealthy, and wise MC: early to bed and early to rise makes me a massive bitch Napoleon: laughing in agreement

Isaac is the type to be bewildered and concerned at first (especially when he hears the more nihilistic ones hoOOOoooOO BOY) but eventually begins to understand it’s some bizarre attempt at humor (that hurts Zack baby). While some part of him laments that it reminds him of Dazai and he’s secretly jealous of how she and Dazai bond over it, he will sometimes join in the chaos when the mood strikes him and he’s feeling mischievous

Isaac: How are you feeling? MC: Oh, I’m not Isaac: seconds from dialing 911 Isaac: Are you okay? MC: Oh yeah dw I just suffer from that syndrome where your neutral expression makes you look like you’re an angry serial killer Isaac: say sike rn

Isaac, tutoring MC and correcting something:  MC, muttering while redoing it: The risk I took was calculated, but man am I bad at math. Isaac: unable to help a laugh

One time MC was avoiding Isaac for fear of hurting his feelings and he just confronts her like: Isaac: back by unpopular demand, me! What’s wrong, MC pls MC was so hecking proud of him

Isaac, telling MC about a recent discovery he learned at uni from another professor: bones typically heal stronger after they’ve been broken--so long as they’re set properly, of course MC, looking him dead in the eyes: So what you’re saying is that I should break every bone in my body until I become superhumanly powerful? Isaac: please do not, no

Mozart and Jeanne are just. Totally lost. Why are you talking like that??? Why are you making “crab hands”???? They don’t understand. Maybe never will. They reach a point where they just kind of laugh and shake their heads, endeared by the oddity after they’re used to it and have determined it isn’t a threat/insult. 

MC: It’s a cold and it’s a brooooken, Waluigi. Waaaaluigiiiii...waaaahluigi..... Mozart: surprised, then starts snickering and playing along on the piano

Arthur, asking MC very personal questions out loud because he is an idiot sometimes: Soooo MC, are you a top or a bottom? MC: I’m a threat. (If he asks a second time, the response will be “Wouldn’t you like to know, weatherboy.”) Jeanne, fighting a smile:

MC, about to punch an asshole: Your free trial of being alive has ended Jeanne, seconds from laughing for the first time in 100 years:

Also, because I genuinely can’t help myself. You know that knight meme like “Parry this you fucking casual.” I cannot stress enough that it is literally the personification of Jeanne’s entire character. I’m not even joking.

Arthur and Shakespeare are utterly fascinated by the rapid evolution of wordplay and the sheer hilarity. They will ask all about these so-called “memes” and ask for examples of them if MC can show them (either somehow accessing her phone or drawing them). MC draws Arthur the knife cat meme and he about a s c e n d s at the hilarity of it all, points and yells THEO IS HOLDING THE KNIFE. He is correct. They will be delighted and follow along eagerly, and--god forbid--will make their own based on late 19th century struggles.

Is this where Shakespeare got the idea for “What, you egg? stabs him” and “You are a saucy boy.”? I’m too scared to ask. Don’t even get me started on “The Fool jingled miserably across the floor.” That one is just too on the nose...

I can’t even imagine what would happen to Shakespeare if MC like translated vines and memes into Ye Olde English around him. Imagine she’s at one of those noble balls and hears rumors of these two guys living together and they’re so obviously gay and he says “And those gents w’re roommates.” And in the most false surprised tone ever MC just replies “oh mine own god, those gents w’re roommates.” Imagine having a wife that’s just as hilarious as you are and hits you with all the force of a bag of wet mice every time you speak in retaliation, he’s going into palpitations.

Every time Arthur does smth stupid MC just: “I Pretend I Do Not See It.”

Vincent is tickled pink by MC’s penchant for finding joy and/or amusement in nearly everything they do, and he smiles gently when he sees them muttering and laughing to themselves. He wants to be able to join them in what they love, but he has a harder time following along and understanding the darker humor sometimes. Mostly gets confused??? Please give him the easier ones to mimic and laugh when he tries--or just include him in your jokes MC. He’s babie your honor...

But he also. Will not. Stand any kind of self-deprecation or borderline verbal self-harm. He’s usually very easygoing and calm, but for whatever reason that stuff makes him go deathly quiet and upset.

MC, after something goes horribly wrong, hugging Vincent: Oh Vince, we really in it now Vincent: giggling a little despite his worries, relaxing

MC: Theo stop simping for Vincent that’s my job

MC, when Theo leaves the room and she gets Vincent all to herself: The evil is defeated.

MC: And this is where I would put my will to live...if I h a d one! Vincent: ;-; MC: oh shit, oh fuck, I was only kidding Vincent wait (MC was subsequently lectured and loved on for many hours)

Theo is conflicted because on the one hand, he loves to see you smiling and having fun. On the other, you’re clowning as hard as Dazai and Arthur and he can only handle so many monkeys in his circus. Most of the time he will roll his eyes and be the straight man of this comedy, but you might find him cracking a smile--or accidentally letting a chuckle slip past his lips now and again.

MC, after meeting Theo: I’m a nice person, but I’m about to start throwing rocks at people.

Theo, those first days: Oh? You’re approaching me? Instead of running away, you’re coming right to me? MC: I can’t beat the shit out of you without getting closer.

Theo: Every time I ask MC to explain “vibe check” to me she hits me with some kind of improvised weapon

MC, after the “incident” (you know the one): This year, I lost my dear lover Theo Theo, in the distance: QUIT TELLING EVERYONE I’M DEAD! MC: ;-; sometimes I can still hear his voice...

Sebastian is last because oh boy. OH BOYYYYY I LOVE HIM. Okay so the way I see this happening with Sebastian is just. So wild. Because at first he’s t r y i n g so hard to be the proper butler man. He does not meme. But then he starts to drift closer to what Niles from The Nanny was, where he’ll quip and joke in private or when the situation is just beyond the amount of absurdity he can handle without making a snarky comment. Everyone in the house can’t fathom how Sebas and MC got so close so fast, but there are points where they’re just “Are they even speaking English anymore???” It’s 11 times funnier than normal because Sebas almost never smiles or laughs when memeing, the deadpan quality of his playing along sends MC every time

Has ABSOLUTELY said “HEY. PANINI HEAD. ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME???” jokingly when MC made a mistake in the kitchen. They laugh about it for y e a r s

MC: I can’t date someone who keeps a lamb as a pet, that’s so weird Sebas, brushing Lotte in front of MC: MC: MC: Okay, I will make an exception because she looks very polite

MC and Sebas, fully aware of the fame some of the men will reach in modern times: We will watch your career with great interest.  (I s2g that’s like half of Sebas’ rt right there I’m crying)

Sebas rt with Lotte be like that 500 dollar Mareep meme: “sometimes a family can be just a boy, his gf, and their 500 dollar two foot tall Lotte”

[lifeofroos]

Bonus chapter! (Or part 21, if you want).  ‘Bonus chapters’ will be chapters that don’t follow the story of Nico’s recovery, but still tell something interesting about the characters or the world.

In short: Usually, this story is about Nico getting Therapy from Dionysus, but this is a bonus chapter told in Dionysus Point-of-view. It is not about Nico. The rest of the (and the actual) story is on AO3 and FanFiction.net! (And it can also be found in a few of my tags on Tumblr, like writing, fanfiction and Nico di Angelo).

This might be Crazy: Bonus Chapter: Diluted Wine

It was late. Most people in the town were already sleeping while I ran through the streets, to the ever-lit hearth in the centre. I slowed my pace when I saw it. With a sigh, I sat down in front of the fireplace. The soft crackeling soothed my nerves a little. 

I took a deep, shaky breath. Just a little while before, the events of the last few days had all come crashing down on me, as if I had just now realised what was going on. Even after a small walk, it was still all spinning in my head. I felt guilt, sadness, happiness, pain, anger, pride and euphoria, all at the same time.

I took another deep breath and got out my flask with diluted wine. I let some of it seep into the fireplace. ‘Honoured Hestia,’ I muttered, ‘please accept my offering. If you have any advice to share, can you do it now?’ A few tears ran down my face, while I stared into the flames, not expecting anything to happen. Most gods had done nothing but ignore me for the past sixteen years. I did not think Hestia would be an exception. 

I turned my head away from the hearth. The houses looked quiet and peaceful. I wished that I was in one of those houses, sleeping, like a normal sixteen year old, without mountain-high expectations on my shoulders.

‘Nyssa, it is late, shouldn’t you be trying to get some sleep?’

With a little start, I turned back to the fire. A woman with brown hair and a simple tunic was tending to the flames. When she looked at me, I got the calming sensation that everything was okay, everything would be where it should be. 

‘My name is Hestia.’ 

I bowed my head. ‘Your majesty…’

‘It’s okay.’ She moved her hand through the fire and took out a freshly baked flatbread. ‘Here. You have eaten very little the past few days. You can’t live on wine alone.’ I took the bread from her, but did not take a bite. I had not been very hungry the past few days. 

‘So. What brings you here, so far away from home?’

‘The nature spirits took me here. After they tasted… wait, you have already heard of wine?’ It made me stop talking for a second. I had never thought news would travel so fast. 

‘Yes, of course I have. Go on, dear.’

‘Eh... Well, the nature spirits are crazy about it.’ I hid my mouth behind my hand for a moment. ‘Literally. They were literally crazy about it.’ I tried to push the thoughts of fights, dances and shouting away. ‘And, anyway, they thought we should share it with the rest of the world. So we went to this town that is the closest town with. Tomorrow… they are planning on bringing me to the king. And…’ I shrugged. 

Hestia nodded. ‘Firstly, take a bite. You need to eat.’ I looked at the bread and tore off a small bit. I stuck it in my mouth. ‘It’s delicious.’ 

Hestia smiled and nodded. ‘Thanks.’ She slowly pushed a strand of hair out of her face, while I ate another small chunk of bread. I slowly grabbed my flask and took a sip. 

‘Yet, about your problem. I noticed you are nervous.’

‘Yes.’ 

‘Do you, you yourself, want to go to the king?’

I looked at the bread. I tore off another crust, before pushing it away. ‘I… yes. I want to go to the king. If anything, I do feel like other people might want to know about wine. But I am still nervous. The nature spirits all seem to think so highly of it, and of me, it… it just seems impossible.’

‘You offered some of the wine to me.’ I put my hand on my flask. ‘It is diluted, right?’

‘Yes, it is more water than wine. I noticed that people don’t get sick if they drink water with some wine mixed through.’

‘So it cleans up the water. That indeed sounds like something other people want to know about. Something that can make the water better and more accessible, you can certainly help a few people with that.’

‘A few?’

‘At least.’

‘Just a few. That’s fine.’ I smiled, and took another sip. ‘I’ll… I’ll just have to go there tomorrow, no matter how nervous I am.’ The towns’ people never needed to drink it undiluted. They would never have to go crazy. The thoughts did not calm me at all, but Hestia’s presence did make me almost believe them. The goddess pushed the bread towards me again, but I did not immediately touch it. 

We sat in silence for some time. I had another question and I guess Hestia sensed it. What I wanted to say might be considered rude. On the other hand, I now had a chance to ask it. Who knew when such a chance would present itself again? 

‘What is it like to be a god?’

Hestia smiled at me, like she knew I would ask it. ‘What is it like to be human?’ 

I even let out a little laugh when she answered with that. ‘Difficult to explain. I get it.’ 

‘But I don’t think that is all you meant with that question.’

My smile faded away. ‘...no.’ 

She quietly stared at the fire. If I wanted to say what I wanted to say, I had to do it now. ‘It is just so weird, eh…’

‘Aunt Hestia.’

‘Aunt... Hestia. I mean, many of the gods took a lot of risks to keep me alive when I was a baby. But then I grew from toddler to child, and they were just… gone. They all left and never came back. People told me I was Zeus’s son, made it clear that they had high expectations of me, and then never asked if I wanted any help. Right now, it feels like I  am about to fulfill some of those expectations, and there is… almost nobody. Hermes sent me some weird herbs, but I heard nothing from anybody else. The only one who properly talked to me, are you. And… why? Just why? I… I don’t get it. I just don’t get it, Hestia.’

Hestia stayed quiet for a second. ‘Gods are selfish creatures,’ she said slowly. I looked up. ‘When the gods get attached to their kids, and something happens to that child, it will ache for years to come, if not forever. Being hurt for the rest of your life when that life does not come to an end is…’ She shook her head, with a sad look on her face. I wondered if she had to miss someone, and who that person had been. ‘So most gods choose to let their kids live without them. They try to give them a happy life, but they know they can’t be in it.’ She swallowed. 

I looked at the bread and tore off a bigger chunk. ‘I… sorry, Hestia.’ I wanted to say I understood, and perhaps I did, but it hurt more than I wanted to admit. It still felt so unfair. Why did the gods have demigod children in the first place, if they knew they could not take care of them? 

‘It’s okay, Nyssa. I understand why you asked.’ 

‘I… I need to thank you for being here for me. That you want to do that, even though...’ I stared at the bread in my hand.

Hestia smiled a sad little smile. ‘The fates weave a strange life for some people, Dionyssa. From what they have shown me, I think you need someone to help you right now. With that I also mean that I need to tell you to eat.’ 

I put the chunk of bread in my mouth, a little confused that she called me Dionyssa instead of just Nyssa. ‘Yes.’ 

Hestia looked at me. ‘I’ll see you again some day.’

‘Thanks. Thanks… for everything. The bread, your advice, and the truth.’ She gave me one last smile, before she disappeared. 

I stared into the flames. Dionyssa. Dio meant god, Nyssa was the mountain I lived on and which the people quickly began to name me after. So god of mount Nyssa - the implication of that sentence almost made me nauseous. I remembered what the nature spirits had said after tasting wine for the first time. That only a god could make something like this. I flinched. Slowly, I took another swig of water, which was sweet from the wine. The fates weave a strange life for some people. It felt like I would soon find out what they had woven for me. 

A/N: while writing this, I thought I could maybe do another bonus chapter in the future, which shows Dionysus perspective on the therapy sessions,  or a bonus chapter where he talks to someone else about his experience as a therapist. Good idea? 

I think I announced this bonus chapter a while back. Well, here it finally is. 

Happy and healthy new year to all of you! Next year, I’ll be back with more Nico! (Obviously I have not forgotten around favorite  death child :). A bonus chapter felt like a nice way to close off 2020  ;).

[melissanovels]

♡ Chapter 3 of TRANSIENT TIME TRAVELLER is out! ♡

○ Read on my Website ○ Read on Tumblr (below) ○ Read on Ao3 ○ Read on Royal Road  ○

TTT  is an LGBTQ+ historical fantasy novel about Aida, a time traveller hellbent on proving the innocence of a 1,200-year-old dead queen, and Lorian, an escaped princess-turned-officer who wants to drain the royal blood from their body, & the two coming together with the help of their mischievous future selves.

♡ Reblogs are appreciated! ♡

Read Chapter 3 Below:

The second Aida stepped off the boat, she was struck with awe, an intense yearning of something grander than she��d ever thought was possible.

Then the seasickness sullied the occasion, but she wouldn’t let her bodily issues ruin this once in a lifetime experience.

You could feel when you entered Rome, when you officially made it to the country you’d been dreaming about for months, years. The air was different, the energy warmer. Unlike Bělico, which sprawled out into farm valleys and snow-capped mountains with the occasional farm, Roma was anything but. Firstly, the people here had a place to be. They hauled barrels of water on to carriages, they sang for money, they bartered and sold their wares with the utmost power to their actions. The streets always seemed to be moving, something Aida had wished for in Bělico but didn’t know how in which to hold herself.

After exiting the carriage that brought her deeper into town, she kept herself small, the grip on her cane and rucksacks making her hands sweat. The buildings were ancient and tall, and the noise overwhelmed her to the point of freezing her in place. She knew there were taverns near the center of the city, which was where she was going to sleep until the semester started, but here, in the middle of the busy streets, she was stuck. All at once, it felt like people were staring at her and ignoring her, like she was an uninteresting problem they couldn’t be bothered to solve.

She took a breath, pressed her weight onto her cane, and carried on.

The architecture was dazzling. Rich period houses made of brick, cottages built around markets selling seasoned meats and sugary sweets. Unlike her time as a child, when she thought food was free and people were kind, she now knew what to use her money for and bought cheap food to keep herself alive.

The streets were decorated in triangular pennant flags and ancient art, not for a festival, just to preserve the ancient traditions, and in the center of the intersections, written on that rich paper Aida fancied, was a drawn illustration of that princess that went missing.

Aida heard Lucia’s name whispered in the streets. Women with their hands over their mouths. Men with their hands on their hips, nodding about the obvious as to why she’d left. There were more officers walking around, the men in the red jackets and black hats who kept Roma safe. They patrolled the streets with vigilant eyes, waiting to spot the hidden princess in her wedding dress.

An arranged marriage. Aida didn’t know much about the people of Aldaí, though she supposed one of her birth parents might’ve claimed a place of origin there. The prince sounded like a normal fellow with average values. Though, if she were to re-examine the predicament, she couldn’t blame the princess for escaping such a marriage. If Aida had been arrange married, she too would’ve run, though probably not the day of. The girl must’ve either been a juggernaut for chaos, or an incredibly indecisive person.

The streets winded and were made of cobblestone that the Siinans and Eve herself must’ve walked. It was difficult discerning which parts of the city belonged to Siina, which streets and plots of land had been claimed by the Roman crown after the city-state’s destruction. The city had white, ancient columns, fountains with Circa’s statue atop them, and even a few ancient buildings preserved from the Classical Era. She knew how to spot them with their white walls and timber frames. They must’ve been 1,000 years old, so close to Queen Eve’s timeline yet too far away for her to ever have seen them. Aida wondered how many ancient people had walked these same cobblestone streets, how many buildings Eve might’ve walked into. She’d have to plan a full day just to explore to take everything in.

No true Romans seemed to be paying attention to the history around them, but the notable tourists were looking up at the columns in the same fervor as Aida. She wanted to take a tour of every ancient building. She would’ve even dipped into the depths of the infamous Catacombs that lay underneath her feet, but she couldn’t make a spectacle of herself. She saw Visatorre roaming the streets, those with the circles over their forehead and those who were quite obviously hiding them in head wrappings. Most looked unfortunate, dirty. Some were begging for a bronze lyria. Aida gave them what she could, knowing she should’ve kept all of it for herself, being that she was, in a sense, homeless as well.

As she toured the shops and eyed the delectables of frosted cookies and her favorite, sugar bread, she came across an abandoned shop with its windows boarded and door signs stripped away. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in years, so she rested against its walls to catch her breath. How far had she made it, two kilometers? It was another three to the nearest taverns. Should she’ve called for another carriage? Would they stop for her? She needed to read up more about the unspoken rules in Roma, not ones from a millennia ago. Should she have hidden her marking? She would’ve rather died.

She went to clean off her glasses when a figure in white caught her eye. It—she—sat on the steps, a poor woman wrapped in rags. At first glance, she resembled more of a pile of laundry than a woman in need, she was so knelt over. She was tall, though, even when crouched down, and barefoot. Aida had no choice but to help her, she was drawn to her. How tall was she, two meters? Her sitting state was almost Aida’s full height.

 Aida walked closer, eager to help yet keeping back in fear of the unknown. “Excuse me.”

The woman’s eyes were completely bound by bandages. She wasn’t injured—they weren’t bloody or stained—they just looked like a reminder to show the public that she simply did not have eyes.

Aida pulled back. Most Visatorre, when the time travelled, only travelled back a few decades. The farther back you went, the more messed up you came back. Five years back would get you a bad cough or a throbbing joint. Fifty years and you’d end up with a permanent injury, like her shitty leg or a fucked up eye. 200 years back and who knew. You could lose your leg, your head might fall off. Aida had known one girl from her village that travelled back 150 years, give or take a decade. She had regular bleeding from the brain. It lasted two months before she died an agonizing death.

People had theories as to why a time traveller jumped, and scholars and medics have tried their damnedest to find a solution to why travelling hurt the traveller once they returned, but all signs pointed to the Heavens above. Those who still believed in the Gods—very few in her generation—believed that these things happened simply because the Gods willed them to happen. Why did it happen? Why did the Gods take away children right when they were born? Why couldn’t humans live as long as trees or Aldaían turtles? It was simply nature, a nature human beings had yet to understand.

Taking in the woman’s differences, Aida closed her hand around the coins. “Here,” she said, “it’s ten bronze lyria.”

The woman slowly lifted her head, showing Aida a wide, unnerving smile that seemed otherworldly. Wildly, wickedly, reaching from ear to ear. Despite being homeless, her teeth were perfectly white. They were almost blue.

Aida slowly retracted her offered hand, but still dropped the ten lyria next to her hip. Roma was incredibly different from Bělico. It was grand as well as poor. Beautiful as well as filthy.

Interesting as well as confusing.

She couldn’t imagine what she’d see near the Palace, and the Colosseum.

Where Siina once lay.

----------------------------------

Students were given access to Durante Academy a day before classes officially started. This was mostly for students and their families to tour the campus, to admire the plaques of royal statues and feast in the dining hall together. Aida had no family to see her off and she’d already known everything that was written on the plaques, so she’d taken to just moving in without any spectacle. Alone. Up four flights of stairs. Without anyone to help her.

It was fine. She was fine. It didn’t matter that nobody helped her or that her mother hadn’t come looking for her. It’d been three weeks, sure, and maybe communication between Bělico and Roma would take that long. And it could’ve snowed, so the post might’ve been halted or stopped temporarily.

Maybe her mother had never come searching for her, and who cared? Finally, Aida had become unburdened by the weight of family life. It was all she’d ever wanted.

She just wished, against her better judgement, that she had somebody to pay and help her. She’d spent most of her savings on lodging at a nearby inn before the Academy opened. She would’ve paid for the help with what little money she had left, but she was carrying the weight of every Visatorre in Roma City. Out of the 2,500 people attending this Academy, she’d sniffed out that only six of those 2,500 students were Visatorre. .2 percent. Ten years ago and no Visatorre had the rights to attend higher education. She couldn’t let this opportunity be tainted by her own missteps and selfishness.

Stepping onto the soil of the Durante Academy didn’t feel real, like she was stepping into a painting. It was built up like the Roman Palace, with arches and red brick holding centuries worth of knowledge. It’d been built at the turn of the Neoclassical Era—the Era they were in now—but it was still more than 200 years old. It’d been named Scoppio Erutus Academy in honor of the first king of Roma, but then King Durante had been so arrogant, he forced his wife to rename a historic foundation after himself. What she would’ve done if she meant the man himself. Gouge out his eyes, she would.

She touched the iron-clad gates, then where her acceptance letter was in her bag. She’d done it. All without her family’s help.

She’d taken all but four steps through the Academy gates when she felt her body tense. She’d familiarized herself with her normal bodily aches apart from these ones. When she felt like this, when the world shifted around her like someone was tilting it with both hands, that’s when she knew. That’s when she knew a jump was about to occur.

The first thing she did was take off her glasses. Nothing came with you when you teleported into the past, not even your clothes, so it did right by you to make sure you secured any loose valuables or breakables on your person before you left. Stumbling across piles of clothes was commonplace, and it was a jackpot for thieves or terrible people to loot a defenseless, temporarily lost person of their money.

When she travelled backwards into time, her only concern was someone stealing her books and throwing them into a fountain.

A loud zap of energy stole her from the present. The travelling itself didn’t hurt, not at first, but it left her feeling floaty. That’s the only way she could describe it. You left the Earth that grounded you and was brought somewhere, somehow, against your will and into Circa’s hands. It was magic, Aida knew that, but everything magical about going into the past was stripped from her when she knew it’d leave her with a bloody nose or worse.

She dropped into a forest. Nothing spectacular, just an endless sea of untamed land and pine cones. She would’ve preferred something a little more interesting like a town or even a house. When you went back in time, you couldn’t interact with anything around you, so if you jumped into someone’s room, there you were, and you were stuck there until someone from that time period happened to open a door or window big enough for you to squeeze through. Open spaces like this, while bereft of anything eye-catching, made Aida thankful that she hadn’t jumped anywhere too stifling.

She wandered. It was all you could do for one, two hours in this pause in your life. She heard the birds chirping to each other, she heard the skittering of squirrels and rabbits who didn’t know a traveller was meters away from them. And she felt the wind, heard it flutter through the leaves and branches. But it was strange, distant. And smell, that was something you had trouble with. It was like walking through a moving painting. You were there, you were exploring, but you couldn’t interact with this painted scene before you. It was better, in that sense, if you came across something important. A meeting between generals, an unsolved murder with a new key witness. You could learn about the world in a way most people couldn’t.

And all she got was a forest. Just. Her. Luck.

After maneuvering around a fallen tree, she did come across something prominent: a crystal lake that sparkled with the bright blue sky. It perfectly reflected the white clouds and the treetops around them. Bugs danced across the water and frogs leapt atop their lilypads. And curled within the lake’s natural perimeter lived a cabin that honestly looked like it’d seen better days. It was modern, giving Aida context as to how far she’d jumped back, but some of the windows had cracks in it, and a natural ecosystem grew where its cut lawn should’ve been. It looked cozy, if not a little worn.

The sound of hammering skipped across the lake. Without her glasses, Aida guessed that there were two people sitting on the roof, patching up a hole.

She circled the lake. She heard them speaking, but she couldn’t make out their words or accents, leaving her lost as to who they were and where she was. She almost called out to them before remembering neither of them would hear, see, or acknowledge her.

She tried anyway. “Hey,” she called out. “Where are you in the world?”

Just when she was able to make out their faces, she felt her body being pulled back into the present. She tried to step out of the pull, to find out more about this abandoned cabin, but no Visatorre could do that. They could only go where Circa desired them to go and left when Circa wanted them gone.

When she fell back to the present, reality slammed down with her. Her aches, her bodily pain, the weight of being alive. She was a mass that affected the world, and it sucked and hurt. She was dizzy and it was hard to keep her eyes from spinning, but all in all, she was fine, meaning that she’d only travelled a short way for an even shorter time.

Then she tried to sit up and immediately crashed back down, her legs too tired to hold herself up. Yeah, she wasn’t dead, but check back in two hours when she had a bag of ice on her lower back and a migraine beginning to form.

The Sun had long since set. Night bugs chirped from the bushes around her and most of the lanterns were out. With the Moon’s help, she patted the ground for her glasses, and found them and her bags, shoes. They were all still there, but she’d have to double-check just to make sure. She’d needed to know her books were still with her, otherwise, what was the point of all of this? If she lost her journals…

“Miss, are you alright?”

She lunged for her dress. One-pieces were the easiest clothing for Visatorre to wear to regain their modesty, or what they had left of it, but someone had already seen her, and they sounded like her age. What a great first impression to make at the Academy.

The person coming up to her was a blur without her glasses, but she saw that they were tall—everyone was tall to her, being that she was only 144 centimeters tall—and they had blond hair and fair skin, wearing…

An officer uniform.

Just. Her. Fucking. Luck.

“Here, let me assist you,” they said, this time with a noticeable lisp.

“I can assist myself, thank you. Sir,” she added, hoping she wouldn’t get written up for being too crass with an officer, and got dressed in front of him. She didn’t worry about her undergarments or socks, she just needed to cover her body in front of this person.

A piece of fabric draped over her shoulders: his jacket.

“Please, allow me,” he said, and now, he was way too close. She had a thing about that, about people touching her, getting into her personal space without her consent.

“Not really helping,” she said, and shrugged it off to button up her dress. When she still felt his presence behind her, she said, “Give a woman some privacy?”

“Oh, of course.” He turned on his heel with his hands behind his back. “My apologies. I was keeping watch over your things in case you came back. I heard a loud snap, then saw all these clothes on the ground. I thought it’d be best to help you once you returned.”

“Were you expecting me to disappear?” She flicked out her glasses and put them back on.

“No, I just didn’t want you to be frightened once you returned.”

He was indeed an officer, wearing that gaudy fit the crown made all officers wear—a red jacket studded with gold buttons, black boots that reached their knees—but he was an officer-in-training: no medals or aiguillettes to signify rank, a short rapier attached to his belt as opposed to the long ones real officers used. He was another young fool pulled into the system meant to serve a monarchy who couldn’t be bothered about you.

His green eyes shot down at her naked legs. A hint of red was scratched across his long face. “Forgive me, Miss. I’ve never seen someone jump into the past before. It’s like you were there, then in a flash, you were taken away.”

Ah, so he was pampered. Aida saw his whole life: sheltered, kept away from real life. Most Visatorre weren’t rich, so you either saw them on the streets, working in the fields, or doing manual work to get by. Given that, and by how clean and posh this boy sounded, he’d probably never fought a day in his life.

He stepped back, taking her in from a different angle, then gasped and knelt down to collect her things. “It must be hard,” he said, “disappearing like that and all.” He handed her her shoes, taking note of her right one that weighed heavier than the other. He checked inside for any rocks.

“It’s fine,” she said, and put them on. If the cane didn’t give away her ailments from being a Visatorre, her mismatched shoes would’ve. “The right one has a larger heel due to my limp. Keeps me balanced.”

“Oh.” If he had anything else to say on that, he didn’t.

She sighed. She didn’t need this kid’s pity tonight. She moved to gather her own shit and strained something down her leg. Her right one was worse, the dead weight that made her limp so bad. Sometimes it radiated its anger up her spine and left her toes numb and body with feverish aches for the whole day. This boy didn’t need to know that, he didn’t need to know anything about her. Lucky for her that he’d just seen a part of her that she hadn’t meant neither a man nor woman to ever see. She picked up her bags, her upper lip curled.

“Please, Miss, it’s no problem at all,” he said. “I can help you take them to your dorm if you’d like. Which house is it?”

“…Willows,” she said, though she was unsure if she should’ve been telling this boy where she’d now live.

“That’s across the campus. Here.” He picked up all three of her bags with one arm, as well as her books and uniforms she’d received earlier that week. The Academy almost sent them to her stepmother’s house before she’d intervened.

Aida stepped away from him. “Why’re you helping me?”

“Because I’m an officer.”

“But…” She sighed again. It was too late and she was too tired to argue. “If you do anything insidious, I’ll scream so loud, I’ll make you deaf.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “Please don’t think so ill of me, Miss…”

“Aida. Mirko,” she added, and curtsied shortly, shoeless with her braids coming undone. “What a first impression to make, ’ey?”

The boy chuckled shortly, then bowed, a hand over his stomach. “Lorian Ashwell. A pleasure to meet you.”

Aida scoffed and started walking towards her dorm, her bloomers tucked over her arm. “Not so much from my end. What a bastard of a way to see your first jump.” 

“I’ve heard many different tales of it, no doubt. My father is rather…orthodox when it comes to the views of Visatorre.”

“So he’s a cock.”

Lorian choked on his own spit, then burst into a laugh that Aida couldn’t help but smile at. “How bold of you! I’ve never heard a woman speak so crassly as you do.”

“You must not meet many girls.”

He turned away, still chuckling. “That is true, yes.”

Her forced confidence shrunk. Wasn’t she supposed to make a good impression on this school? This kid must’ve been a hired officer to patrol the grounds at night. He’d report her behavior back to the dean. She needed to watch her mouth.

“So, where are you from?” Lorian asked. “No one from Roma would speak as confidently as you do, and your accent is quite unique.”

Aida arched a brow at him. “And you call me bold, asking for my name first, then asking where I’m from based off of my accent? What about your accent? Wouldn’t that be invasive if I asked you about that?”

He lost a step beside her and touched his lips. “My lisp isn’t something I can control, Miss Mirko, though I have been taking therapy lessons to correct it. I’m sorry it offends you in some way.”

Aida cocked her head at the sudden dip into aggressiveness. “When did I say anything about your lisp? I ain’t that rude despite what everything thinks of me. I said ‘accent’. You speak properly, so one can assume you came from wealth, but I wasn’t gonna say that out loud.”

“Oh.” Lorian shot her a look she couldn’t read, then he smirked and dropped his hand. “You are quite something, Miss Mirko.”

“You just met me, Lorian Ashwell, so cool it with the conclusions.”

“Please do forgive me. I haven’t met many people my age. I’m still getting used to the acclimation.”

“Were you living under a rock up until now?”

“You could say that, yes.”

Aida harrumphed. Rich and ignorant. She didn’t know a worse combination.

But she couldn’t knock him. He was kind, doing all of this for her. Her hands almost relaxed out of their fists, but she kept her guard up. She still had her cane to dig into his eye sockets if he fucked up.

He helped her all the way up the spiral staircase, stopping whenever she needed to. He never mentioned her cane or how she sometimes walked into him due to her balance problem. For a boy who hadn’t properly met a Visatorre before, he was taking it better than most. Most threw questions, insults. Rocks, if they were truly cowards.

Her dorm room was small yet curved along with the edge of the building, giving her an extra window. She also had a writing desk, a small poster bed, a wardrobe, and a sofa. Her radiator had been polished and her bedsheets smelled of freshly cleaned linen. It didn’t yet smell like her, but it would, in time.

She took it in in a circle. No longer would she shiver upstairs in a house she didn’t feel like she belonged in, waiting for a better tomorrow she thought would never come. She’d gotten it.

She turned to Lorian, who’d invited himself in and was placing her things on her bed.

“You can go,” she told him. “Don’t need you sniffing my clothes and seeing my journals.”

“Journals?” He dropped her bags. One of her thickest journals dropped on his boot.

“Hey, careful.”

“My apologies.” He picked it up and scanned the cover, noticing the tiny drawings and carvings she’d etched into the old binding. 

She’d gotten that journal from school in which to write assignments, but she’d used it to write down her actual thoughts instead. After a few weeks, she’d torn out the older pages and spliced in new ones about her interests in history. Timelines, character sheets, her own theories about what she thought might’ve happened in Siina. By now, the journal was near bursting, the original pages yellowed and loose, with thousands of furious writings smudged around her crude drawings.

Lorian smiled at the dried flowers kept between the pages. “What a beautiful piece.”

She grimaced. He didn’t even know what it was.

He didn’t know, yet he still called it beautiful, this handmade book that meant so much to her.

“Thanks,” she said. “It’s what I do when my brain isn’t broken.”

“Is it for school?”

“No. It’s my thoughts on history.”

“Which part of history?”

“All of Lyrica.”

He weighed the book between both hands. “May I?” he asked, and went to open the first page but stopped for Aida’s consent.

She didn’t know. Back home, her sisters had never cared for it, and her mother hated that she wasted her time writing when she could’ve been tending to the farm.

No, she had to stop thinking that way. That place was no longer a home, it was a place, a memory.

“If you can read my handwriting,” she said.

He crossed his ankles as he flipped through the first few pages, skipping over a few centuries worth of notes about the founding of Lyrica, then Roma, then Roma City. He focused on her doodles of all things, the clothing styles and landscapes she thought Siina would’ve had throughout the eras. Not that she was embarrassed because she wasn’t, she just thought the word told a better picture than the, well, pictures.

When he didn’t say anything, Aida, feeling restless by silence, took to decorating her space to fit her needs. She threw her clothes off to one side and organized a few of her books onto the shelves. She stacked her playbooks one the table and centered a figure of a glass ballerina on the windowsill. After getting everything out of her bags and Lorian still standing there, Aida caved to her desires and lit a blunt she’d pre-rolled for the trip.

When she struck her lighter and realized that there was, shockingly, an officer still in her room, Lorian looked up at her.

She took the blunt out of her mouth. “Oops.”

Lorian checked that it was indeed a blunt and not a cigarette that might’ve gotten her off easier. Then he chuckled that damn chuckle of his. Was it irritating? She couldn’t tell. “Oops, indeed.”

“Don’t nark on me. I thought you were cool.”

“And what if I do? It’s in my job description to relate all illegal activity to Dean Falco, and I recently got this job on a whim. I wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone.”

“Nor would I. I have a reputation to uphold. So.” She crossed her arms, joint in-between two fingers. “Whatcha gonna do, officer?”

Lorian’s smile widened, something Aida noticed about him more than anything, and he held out his hand.

Aida smiled back and handed him her joint.

----------------------------------

The hours kind of…passed, which was something Aida wasn’t used to. She usually had her daily chores to grind the day to a halt. Wake up, feed the animals, make breakfast, do dishes. Work, clean, attend. Only at night could she waste her sleeping hours doing what she wanted to do, and that was to get high and study her craft.

Things were different with Lorian, this shit stain of a dude. He wasn’t an officer. She didn’t believe it. Officers were prissy rich boys who wanted to fight because of their terrible childhoods. This kid was, in every way, normal. He didn’t react volatile to the blunt. He was interested in her take on history. She ended up rambling about her life, her mother, her sisters, her desire to become a historian, and she didn’t fear that she was speaking too loudly or too much. What was this, a set-up? Good things rarely came her way, especially in the form of people. Maybe it was a dream.

“So, you’ve tried Nectar before, I reckon?” she asked. They were both on her bed, but for some reason, she didn’t feel embarrassed by it. Lorian didn’t seem so either. His cheeks had returned to their normal shade.

“I have dabbled in it, yes, though I’m more used to drinking it rather than smoking it.”

“Isn’t there less of a high when you drink it?” she asked. Nectar was the golden honey from Aldaí. When mixed with the Aldaían poppy flower that often grew near the beehives, it left you with an incredible high that could last for hours.

“Yes, but I lived in a household where it was frowned upon to smoke,” Lorian said, “so I snuck it in with luncheons and dinners. I feel like my mother knew about it, but as long as my father wasn’t aware, I was fine.”

“And the raw shit is more expensive,” she noted.

He just shrugged and motioned for her joint, which she gladly passed to him. “My household was…it was fine, you know? Once you strip away its policies and protocols, we were normal. But sometime’s life’s just, like, you know, shit? Like it’s all shit, like you can’t get out of it, no matter what you do.”

“I absolutely hear you,” Aida said. “My mo’mma’s the same way. When I become queen, all this shit? Changing immediately. Effective immediately. Life’s not gonna be what we thought it was.”

“You’re going to be queen?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Then you can take my pl…” He paused. “You can’t become a queen. You must be born into it, unless you marry someone who’s high enough in rank, but why would you?” He kept using air quotes as he talked, like it wasn’t obvious that that’s how you became an official royal person. “Royal life sucks.”

“I can take care of it. Those two princesses or whatever ain’t gonna be it like I am. One’s off in Bělico, the other’s…somewhere. Did you hear she died?”

Lorian took another drag, his eyes half-closed. “That’s what they’re saying now, huh?”

“That’s what I hear from the latest paper. Hey, you know what? You don’t seem like an officer to me.”

Lorian dropped his hand. “I am.”

“How?”

“I received a recommendation from His Majesty the king that the dean stupidly took. It was very generous, and I’m not letting the opportunity of a lifetime go to waste.”

“But—”

“I’m an officer.”

Aida glanced over to him, curious that that got a reaction out of him. Here she thought he was a prissy officer, but now, not only was he a stoner, he had a mouth.

He was looking over at her, his cheek pressed against the ruffled covers. “I’m an officer now,” he said, adding on the needed adverb. “I know I may not be as refined or as skilled as the others, but I’m trying my best, and I want nothing more than to show what I can do.”

Aida’s lips parted. Finally, something that clicked. Finally, something she understood. “Good,” she told him. “Maybe you’ll be the officer to finally fuck over the king and make Roma a better place, because I know I’m going to be the historian to rewrite this country’s history.”

“Rewrite history?”

“Yeah. I know so much more than any historian’s in Roma, and I’m going to change the world with what I know.”

“What do you know, Miss Mirko?”

She got up and started pacing. “Well, I know that Queen Eve’s full name is Eve Hyuang Costa, ‘Costa’ coming from her Siinan heritage, and ‘Hyuang’ comes from a province in Aldaí, specifically from the eastern provinces, meaning that she was multi-racial. Not many historians bring that up, but I’ve cross-referenced diary entries from King Julius II and his wife where they both mention her middle name in passing, and how she truly was ‘a blossoming flower’, which is what ‘Hyuang’ translates to. Her full name means ‘a blossoming flower in the river of life’. Isn’t that pretty? They also wash her mother’s heritage from the history texts, you know. I’ve even read texts where they change her surname from Zhao to Zangari. Isn’t that messed up?”

Lorian nodded along to everything in confusion. “It is, but, pray tell, who’s Eve?”

Aida’s jaw dropped, a hand to her heart.

“Did I offend—”

“Yes!” She swiped back her joint. “How dare you say that in my presence? All of my work rests on that woman’s shoulders. She’s the reason I want to be a historian because the history books have her history wrong—No, sit down,” she said as he began to stand. He plopped back down. “Unless you have somewhere to be at—” She checked the watch that wasn’t on her wrist. “God knows what time it is, you’re sitting your ass down and listening to me.”

People her age didn’t look at her like an equal, or someone of much worth, so the way Lorian kept doing that with Aida, it terrified her. She’d built herself up with barriers and outcast people before she got to know them. She didn’t know how this boy had gotten past her, this Lorian Ashwell. Maybe he’d be the one officer Roma City needed, just like she was the best person to fix the country.

“Please, continue,” Lorian said, and she did.

----------------------------------

She spent the next two hours talking to him about Queen Eve and how much this dead queen meant to her. She talked about the queen’s upbringing, her beliefs, how her older sister was supposed to have married King Meyeso but Eve had persuaded him to marry her instead. She was passionate, outspoken, energetic, youthful, and she never let any ruling stop her from achieving what she craved. And she’d done it all as a Visatorre, before the Roman king had murdered her for allegedly murdering his wife.

“Isn’t that fucked?” Aida asked, needing some sort of validation from this boy.

Lorian just kept staring at her. His hand never left his lips.

“Well? Isn’t it?”

He kept staring at her.

“What?”

“I like the way you speak,” he told her.

She faltered. Scratch anyone listening to her rambles, nobody had ever told her they liked the way she spoke, or thought, valuing her thoughts and brain as something to be admired. She pulled down on her dress cuffs, feeling exposed. “Okay.”

“You know so much.”

“It’s one of the things I pride myself in.”

“Do you pride yourself in many things?”

“Of sorts.”

He rolled around. “What about this?” He pointed his boot at her playbooks. “En Tempore Rose. What a collection of playbooks.”

“Woah, wait.” She leaned over Lorian’s figure, the ends of her newly done braids tickling his nose. “You know about Pinnacle Isle?

Lorian pressed himself deeper into her bed. He held his lips in a tight line. “Not the, uhm, book series, no. But I do enjoy the opera—”

“I love the book series!” Aida interrupted. “I have a first edition of the first book in my bag. What’s your favorite chapter? Who’s your favorite character? Mine’s the Goddess, but Pinnacle is always a close second, as is with the Red Dragon, of course.”

Lorian looked down at Aida’s lips. “Sorry, I’ve only known the opera. My parents always took me to see it when—”

“Oh!” Aida moaned. “Oh, for shame! For shame that Roman sensibilities have negated you from indulging in the purest form of art that is Pinnacle Isle and the utter perfection of the hero’s journey.”

She stepped back, a drunken high making her unstable. “Pinnacle, our orphan boy dropped on a forgotten, desolate island. He thinks he’s alone and so unbelievably screwed, but at the end of chapter three, he finds that a feral dragon is being kept at the top of the island’s tower, and it’s up to him, his guardian/Goddess, Sempre, and the dragon’s own two scaly children to find a way off the island before the storm comes. How could you only indulge in the opera, a mere fanfare of what the books truly means to us readers? Have you no shame, good sir?”

Lorian looked Aida up and down. He sucked in his lips as he gave her a simple shrug. “Not really, no.”

She pointed down at him. “You, Lorian Ashwell, are a fake fan, just watching the enormously inaccurate opera instead of enjoying the pages and pages of Pinnacle’s and the Goddess’ story. I need you to stay with me tonight so I can tell you the greatest story told on Roman soil. Do you hear me? You’re staying with me.”

Lorian bit his soft lips. “I wouldn’t mind that in the slightest, Miss Mirko.”

“It’s Aida,” she reminded him.

“Aida, then,” he said, and she didn’t know why, but she liked the way that sounded in his mouth.

[wings-of-indigo]

So, Waitress is closing and Why I am Happy about that: An Exceedingly long essay Rant about Broadway

Look. Nobody's gonna read this, most likely, but it's 2 in the morning and my brain's been obsessing over Broadway (more than usual, anyway) since communing with my people at intensive this week. So, in the interest of getting some sleep before 8 hrs of dance and shitty high notes tomorrow, here goes.

I love classic, high-school-and-community standard musicals. I love new and experimental musicals. I love Disney film-to-stage musicals. I love institution musicals like Chorus Line, Cats, and Wicked; I even have a soft spot for Phantom. I am eagerly anticipating West Side Story next Christmas (seriously, I have a calander).

BUT.

As I said to one of my fellow dancers during post-class stretch (after noting his insane flexibilty and making yet another resolution to stretch more) I am Sick to GoDAMnEd DEATH of revivals, franchise adaptions, and restagings taking up the Broadway and greater theater markets.

I get why it's happening; I do. Musical theater, even shows that never make it out of Regional productions (Be More Chill, btw, I'm so proud of you bby :'-D ) are REALLY FREAKING EXPENSIVE, not just to stage, but also to develop. Broadway productions nowadays regularly go upwards of TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in costs.

Those costs are more and more frequently being met through funding by large groups of wealthy investors, who can expect basically little to no return on that investment. Only a select few shows that make it to the Great White Way do well enough to turn a profit (let alone the kinds of numbers that Hamilton, DEH, and Wicked continue to make), and more and more shows are closing in defict or once they break even. (Coincidentally, this is probably why we're seeing more and more straight plays on Broadway, especially in limited engagements. They're quicker, cheaper, and still have the same level of prestige.)

It makes sense then to assume that a show linked to an already successful property has a better chance of reaching that break-even mark, or perhaps generating a small return, than a more original idea. It's a surer bet, and we've seen it a lot these past few seasons. Anastasia, Beetlejuice, Pretty Woman, Moulin Rouge, Mean Girls... we get it. We promise. Investors want some security in an extremely and notoriously insecure market before they're willing to lay out the dough.

I get it. Everybody gets it.

And, to be fair, some of those shows are and continue to be GOOD. Tony nominees and award winners, even. But here's the problem: it's boring.

And not because I know how Act 2 ends without getting spoilers on tumblr. Unless they're younger than ten, the population of Broadway-and-musicals fans generally has a good handle on where a show's relevant plotlines are going. It's really not the wanting to know the end that keeps your butt in your overpriced red velvet seat and your eyes on the stage. It's the score, the words, occasionally the choreography, and most importantly the magicians on, off, and backstage bringing those things to life in a new and interesting way.

The antithesis of this, then, is having to watch slavish recreation of iconic scenes, lines, and characters from iconic films, presented Onstage! (TM), now with Bonus Songs! for your reconsumption. (Yes, Pretty Woman, I'm looking at you.)

Hey, I love Pretty Woman the Movie, slightly dodgy messages about feminity aside. I love it as a movie, and I really don't need to watch the knock off version of it, even if it comes in a shiny Broadway package.

Anastasia, and Beetlejuice, on the other hand, work extrodinarily well as musicals because they are NOT carbon copies of the original, somehow miraculously transplanted onto the stage.

Ironically, musicals based on original ideas are actually some of the most successful and well reviewed recent productions. Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away, and Hadestown this season are all original works, and well, look at them. (Fishy, huh? Coincidence, I think the fuck not.)

Recently I got to see The Prom on Broadway, the day after I saw Pretty Woman. The contrast between shows and my enjoyment of them was well defined. I couldn't look away from The Prom, despite many of the major story beats being as obvious as our Cheeto-in-Chief's spray tan. I and the entire rest of the theater were completely engaged by what was going on onstage, both comedically and dramatically. At Pretty Woman, I found myself checking the Playbill to see how many songs were left for me to make it through and anxiously comparing the size of my thighs to the dancers onstage to pass the time (ah, pre pro Body Issues, welcome back! We all thought you'd retired!)

Three guesses which show I'd choose to see again.

When I read that Waitress was closing, the first thing I did was panic and start marking pre January weekends where I would both be free and possibly have disposable income (I've never gotten to see the show, and frankly I would like too). My second reaction was, yes, to mourn the closure of a wonderful show, but it was mixed with hopeful anticipation. Waitress had a good long time in the sun, and just like a well lived life, eventually it must and should end. It's better, in my humble student opinion, to live with memories and cast albums (and regional productions) than the stodgy life of a show that's jealously clung to its Broadway berth through the tourist-and-date-night trade (*cough*Phantom*cough*). It's sort of like your 40 something mother taking selfies in booty shorts in an effort to prove she's still 'hip' and in her twenties. Cringe.

Ephemera is the nature of live performance, and probably part of its allure. And just like in the natural world, old things have to end so that new things can become. Waitress closing is a vital part of this cycle.

Broadway has a limited number of theaters. That's a hard and absolute fact. Maybe a quarter of them are effectively taken off the market for new shows by productions apparently cursed with immortality. Waitress has just opened up another spot both physically and creatively for a new project- hopefully something we haven't seen before- and I hope to God, Satan, and Sondheim that it doesn't get filled with another franchise spinoff, celebrity jukebox musical, or -Lin Miranda forbid - yet another revival.

Why the revival hate, though? Aren't revivals an major way to revisit the landmark and important musicals of the past and bring them to a new audience?

Well, yes. They are, especially when they're staged and presented with the emphasis on letting the music and words speak for themselves and giving the actors leeway to work with the material, without the typical levels of Broadway Extra (TM) and creative meddling from the producers. (The recent Lincoln Center staging of A Chorus Line is a good example of the stripped down style I'm talking about.) But even if they have their place, once again, revivals (while valuable and cool and all that) are Something We've Already Seen.

Let's take Newsies for example. A show with a huge fan base (mostly teen, mostly girls) who I frequently see wishing for a revival.

Now, I am a raging Newsies fan. Newsies is the show that got me started on attempting to make a profession out of dance and theater. I can sing both the OBC and Live albums back to front. I may or may not have had embarrassing crushes on certain cast and characters that I will take to my grave (I'll never tell and you'll never know, mwahhaha). So, do I love and worship ever iteration of this show? Yes. Do I wish I had been able to see either the Natl Tour or Broadway productions? Hell yes, with all my heart. Do I wish the Gatelli choreography was in any way accessible for me to learn? More than I want Broadway tickets to cost less than my soul, kidney, and hypothetical but unlikely first born combined.

But do I want a Broadway revival? Hell FUCKING No.

It's over, it's done, and it lives on in reinterpretation in regional and junior productions. Good. That, to be quite honest, is where it should belong.

It doesn't need to be rehashed on the biggest stages, and to be frank, neither do most of the ultra popular revivals that have been happening. (Yes, Ali Stoker is awesome and deserves the world, but Broadway does not need Oklahoma. If you need to see it that bad, go find a high school production somewhere. I recommend the midwest.) Broadway does not need 1776 (even though I am looking forward to it). Broadway does not need a Sweeney Todd revival (even though I want one like I want ice cream after suffering through jazz class in an un-air-conditioned studio on a 90 degree afternoon with no breeze. Seriously, I might be making sacrifices at my altar to this cause in the back of my closet).

Broadway needs musicals that are at least nominally original, and if not, come from something obscure enough (Kinky Boots, Waitress, Newsies) that they can make their own way. Barring that, investors, writers, and directors, please have the courage and decency to take established content in a new direction. Please, I'm begging you. I'd honestly-and-truly much rather sit through something that didn't try to shove the better version of itself down my throat even as it bored and annoyed me to tears. If I'm going to pay $80+ to sit through two hours of something terrible (and less engaging than my dancer body image issues) at least let me get my money's worth in unique horribleness.

[megaderping]

Dealing with some anxiety over the past few weeks about some stuff I dealt with growing up that didn’t fully sink in until just now. It is very personal. It is also very heavy. If you decide to read, please keep in mind that this deals with some pretty heavy baggage, including... Trigger Warnings: CSA, Incest, Abuse, Bullying, Ableism, Trauma, Aphobia, Homophobia Because this is a personal rant, I’d rather avoid reblogs. Thank you for understanding.

So. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time with one of my cousins. She was a good 6 - 8 years older than me. At the time, I looked up to her. I thought she was cool and smart. I trusted her. Because I was so young, I didn’t think it weird that she described french kissing to me in great detail. I never told an adult. I was too young to know that this was not okay. This wasn’t even the last time, though. When I was in first grade, she was so eager to show and describe matters related to being a teenage girl and the changes therein. I won’t go into great detail- but the way she demonstrated this... It was definitely hands on. What bothers me is that at the time, it didn’t hit me that THIS wasn’t okay either. I didn’t tell an adult because I didn’t know I was supposed to. That this was sexual abuse. She did some things with me that- it only happened once, but it REALLY, fundamentally bothers me that my longterm reaction to this was... desensitization. Maybe that’s a form of trauma in itself? I dunno. But I was able to move on eventually when she wasn’t in my life anymore. Sometimes I tell myself I shouldn’t hold it against her because she was a teenager at the time with her own issues, but... I dunno. I didn’t talk about this with anyone. I didn’t really think about it, save for once in a blue moon when I was in high school and I was like, “...maybe that was messed up.” But if you asked me at the time, I would’ve said I was okay. But I’m honestly not sure if I was. I was bullied throughout my entire public schooling. People would punch me. They’d call me names. They’d make fun of me for liking cartoons and video games and come up to me with the most ableistic voices demanding I “draw them pokaymanz”. I was the one who had to go to the school councilor for being a problem. They didn’t get in trouble. In high school, I would go out into the pod to try and study and work on assignments because the very same people who had bullied me in grade school would not SHUT UP when we were supposed to be doing assigned reading. They were not punished. Nobody stepped in when I raised concerns- the best I got was permission to distance myself. I remember sitting on the bus one day in high school, minding my own business when these girls in the seat in front of me started making fun of my name. They started making fun of my appearance. The bus driver never stepped in. I got off the bus in tears. And this was hardly the first time. This was a problem from grade school ‘til graduation. 12 - 13 years of this. Sometimes when I’m at work, trying to do my JOB, my mind will go back to something a classmate said, something a classmate DID, and I’ll lose my focus. It’ll bring me to tears even though I SHOULD be over it by now. And this has always happened to me. People talking behind my back. Spreading rumors. Going to OTHERS to deal with their problems with me instead of talking to me because apparently human decency is too much to ask. People would spread rumors that I “pooped on the playground”. They’d say I liked to sneak into the boys’ bathroom. When I was in first grade, someone shoved a leaf up my nose. I still remember that, too. I remember being told by people I considered friends that we couldn’t be friends anymore because they had new friends who didn’t like me. I remember people being cruel. A lack of understanding. It turned me into a wallflower over time because I was scared to make connections and for a time I dealt with it by being cold and abrasive because I didn’t want to hurt anymore. I remember being asked on a school trip, “Were you ever diagnosed with anything?” OUT OF NOWHERE. To this day, I wonder about that... And I don’t know if I should seek diagnosis. I probably should? I definitely need a therapist, that way I can talk this stuff out with a professional instead of rambling on a blog post just to try and calm down from a random anxiety attack. I remember classmates and chaperones resenting the fact that I got left behind on that trip because I didn’t want to jaywalk. So I had to get help from some local cops who set me up with a cab back to the hotel because I was lost and nobody thought to look if I was left behind. People would talk down to me all the time, too. Treat me like a child. And why? Because I liked cartoons? Because I’m asexual and aromantic? GOD. I remember classmates in middle school were SO OFFENDED by my asexuality, too. I recall this one girl being like, “you better get a boyfriend or people might think you’re a ~lesbian~”. ...okay, first of all. What if I was? I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m not- I don’t really feel that kinda attraction to anyone. But. There is NOTHING wrong with being gay, lesbian, bi, pan, trans, NB, etc, etc. THESE PEOPLE EXIST. People who are not straight and/or cis exist. And also, thirteen year olds acting like they NEED to rush into relationships... That’s. Extremely concerning to me. It always was. But I guess I was just... desensitized over time because of how sexualized the climate was during those days. And it wasn’t just at school.

I have a long history of RPing. When I was in middle school, I was basically pressured into RPing a nsfw situation by some castmates. I should have said no, but I was scared to. And I think, ultimately, that also led to me being desensitized. Because that stuff was everywhere. These were RPs with young teenagers AND adults as players and nobody put their foot down and said, “hey, maybe DON’T RP nsfw in a space with minors”. Nobody said LOCK those posts. Tag them nsfw. It was just there. Out in the open. I was fourteen. And I’m not here to say that all NSFW content is inherently bad or that every adult should constantly be monitoring every space. Internet strangers are not babysitters. I get that. But I do think it’s a problem when communities full of young teens AND adults are too lax on the former’s access to 18+ content. Because there’s a difference between someone ignoring age restrictions and warnings and accidentally coming across content or being pressured to participate in such content. Now. Over time, people wised up. Many of these communities DID eventually lock that stuff to 18+. But a lot of open meme and sandbox communities did not. There were posts that’d devolve into smut on a regular basis that weren’t tagged or properly warned. But because I’d been exposed to this kinda stuff for so many years- it didn’t hit me that there was a lack of moderation. I was taught that it just comes with the territory because “this is the internet.” So for a long time, I just... accepted that. “It’s the internet.” Even within the past few years, I held onto that mindset because... it was just. What I was used to. I didn’t like it, but I assumed that was just... how things go and to express otherwise was pointless. I still don’t condone online harassment and I do think people will take properly tagged fandom content way too far (even if I disagree WITH said content)- but this isn’t ABOUT that. Because properly tagged content establishes the boundaries that were so wholly lacking in these spaces. And the fact is, I don’t LIKE that I am/was desensitized. Because the truth is, I didn’t LIKE any of it. I didn’t like the scenario I was coerced into as a young teen through RP. I didn’t like how easy it was to just... stumble upon NSFW content on accident. It’s just... I dunno. I just don’t know, and I hate that I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t let it get to me. It’s just online stuff that happened ten to twelve years ago, right? It’s nowhere near as serious as the actual sexual abuse and the actual bullying... but I think it still affected me. And just like with my cousin before, I didn’t really... talk to anyone about it? It was a very different fandom climate. The early to late 2000′s were very different. And I think just... it bothers me. That it took this long for me to realize that maybe this stuff affected me after all. Like. I’m a CSA survivor and it only JUST now clicked that I am? What’s up with that? Like. I don’t know. I need a therapist. I think I’ve needed one for years given how often I fall victim to invasive thoughts, how often I get too scared to speak my mind, how eager I am to please EVERYONE and thus it is SO hard for me to confront people when I am upset or draw the line. I’m constantly worrying about hurting or upsetting people so sometimes I guess I’m cowardly. Because I guess it’s a coping mechanism I’ve developed? Just... avoiding. Turning a blind eye. That’s probably not okay either. But I think the root of it all really is just from my childhood. How going to adults when I was bullied or abused never seemed to DO anything. So maybe I just developed a worst case scenario mindset. I just don’t know, so that’s why I need some help. So I can just... work this all out. I guess a part of me is just a little scared. And that’s stupid. Why should I be scared of something that can only HELP me? Ranting on tumblr can only do so much. But for now, just getting it off my chest is the best I can do. It’s a start, anyway.

[dukeofriven]

From An Old Internet Veteran: Go, and Sin No More

I wish I could explain to young people how wild the internet was as it went from the ‘weird niche thing for lame nerds’ irrelevancy of the early 90s and the “Boy This World Wide Web Thing Sure Is Nifty”-style painful optimism that describes 97% of Western Culture between 1994 and 2002 to the ‘Mad Max But Statistically Less Australian” culture that was the internet from 2002 to around 2010. I come neither to praise this era of internet nor condemn it. I merely want understanding. I cannot polish a lumpen pile of rape jokes, Chuck Norris glorification, “ironic” racism, and numa numa fat shaming and say that it’s misunderstood comedic genius. Trash is still trash even if it wins a bunch of Emmys. But at the same time I cannot take you with me back to the 90s and get you to feel, on a visceral level, what it was like to live in a place where Bart Simpson was both promoted as a real and present danger to the moral upbringing of the world’s children and was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential icons of the 20th century. And because I cannot do that I cannot get you to understand how freeing it felt to be on the internet in that Mad Max era. Ten years before a yellow boy shouting “Don’t have a cow” while doing a pathetic kick-flip on a chunky skateboard was considered the potential downfall of humanity’s children, but now you could make something so risqué that the old-guard stuffed-shirt in 1994 would have died on the spot, his brain unable to consider anything so outside his moral world view. I cannot easily make you understand a time when nobody just said whatever it was they wanted, not just because they had no platform to do so but because the rigidity of social convention was so strong. Nobody ever had hardcore lesbian sex on Northern Exposure on prime time television. Nobody on the X-Files ever died by having their head smashed in a car door repeatedly like a melon until viscera spilled all over the pavement. You could not have made Game of Thrones or Steven Universe in 1995. Forget the graphics, forget the budget, you simply couldn’t do or say any of that on television for either kids or adults. The Mad Max internet changed that - changed the very firmament of what was acceptable in media for every genre and for every demographic.  Is this a good thing? Not particularly. Is this a bad thing? Not particularly. If this sound frustratingly ambivalent that’s because it is: were we to go back and do it all again, knowing all that we know now, would we do it the same way? No. But then, we would not know all that we know now had we not learned it by making the attempt in the first place.

This poor comfort for someone who dives into some 2006 webcomic with a reputation of a Legacy Touchstone and finds it full of ‘jokes’ about their gender, or sexual preference, or the liberal use of the r-slur, or a kind of hyper-suburban comedic racial ignorance. I am not here to argue that that had any value merely because it was transgressive. But the same space that opened-up to let such ugly things out also opened-up places for marginalized groups to made themselves known, groups who never before had such public voices.

Imagine an apocalypse. Imagine society rebuilding in the ashes. Imagine how many false starts and missteps there would be and you begin to understand just a little of what that period was like. It was embarrassing. It was cruel. It was childish and stupid. But in living through it we grew up. Or, at least, those of us capable of growing up grew up, and learned, and learned to be better - learned what better was. And then we built new places where other people could learn too - and spread the gospel of being better. One of the things that always irritates me when it comes to young people talking about the past is the unexamined privilege of knowledge being at your fingertips. It’s more than just everyone carrying a wireless-internet connected computer in their pocket at all times. It’s more than just a Wikipedia with hundreds of millions of articles and a reputation for fact sourcing. It’s more than just a Google that works. If you never experienced it you cannot imagine what using WebCrawler was like in 1995 against Ask Jeeves in 2005 against Google in 2015 - or even Google between 2005 and 2015. Most people don’t go around thinking about SEO and search engine algorithms but maybe we should because anyone who wants to go “this info’s been on the internet since day one so people have no excuse not to know it” disingenuously argues that information search and retrieval has been consistent across the decades. There was a time - not all that long ago - when to look something up on-line involved getting the tacit agreement of everyone in your household to lose the use of the sole telephone for as long as you were web browsing. There was a time - not all that long ago - when ‘looking something up’ was to burden everyone around you with inconveniences, and while you were doing your web searches there was no guarantee what you wanted could be found with the primitive technology of the day. Do you know how much I’ve learned since joining Tumblr in 2011? On a fundamental level, both about myself and the make-up of our species in terms of social conception? I recently went through a bunch of old posts, removing those with broken links and meaningless content, but also shit that just embarrasses me now - mostly opinions from a period where I hadn’t yet had a chance to learn because the spaces in which to learn it did not yet exist. It’s not just things like communities for [demographic X] - it’s things like “communities for [demographic X] with an ability to broadcast their voices and have platforms able to network their ideas and audience halls able to receive them and a search engine to guide people to that community and a basic understanding that the community even exists in the first place.” And this does not even begin to touch on internet access, something that even now is not a universal thing, and for which getting angry about people’s ignorance reflects a bias all its own. I say all this because I think that a core tenant of cringe culture is a myth of universal access to knowledge and universal awareness of one’s own ignorance. I look back on old posts of things I said and I cringe with self-hatred - cringe enough to rip them down and stuff them in the trash. “HOW DID I THINK THAT?” and “HOW DID I NOT KNOW?” But why should I have known - what, in my life, would ever have put better ideas across my desk? That I can meaningfully speak now about privilege and intersectionality and historiography is because between then and now I was put in a place to learn these things. I was exposed to ideas that I had never before been exposed to, and was given the grace to learn. I am tired of the expectation that every aspect of our past selves should be held to the same standard as the present. (Yes, to all the disingenuous bad-faith trolls out there, I obviously and of course am advocating for complete and total uncritical pardon for everything in the past ever. Were you a neo-Nazi ten years ago? Water under the bridge without question because that’s obviously, obviously, obviously the sort of extreme outlier case I am talking about good on you for being clever enough to notice.) But for the non-dipshits out there who understand how to read without injecting insincere hyperbole into every argument, I want us to be kinder to our past selves when we have learned to be better. It’s okay that you used to like Sherlock - there were genuinely fun things about it, and it’s okay that you didn’t possess an expert grasp of post-graduate feminist critical theory when you were 21. Or 31. Or 41. More concepts of academia have filtered into mainstream consciousness than ever before - and in saying that we should remember the corollary that ten, twenty, thirty years ago that was not the case. We knew less, had access to less, and were exposed to narrower viewpoints than we are today. It is unfortunate - but it was not our fault, and we cannot easily blame ourselves for it any longer. Nothing makes my blood boil more than seeing people taking umbrage that... oh, Farmer Joe McSmithHead of Buttnut, Alabama in 1963 was ignorant of internal Chinese politics and said some untrue things about Chinese Communism. But the only thing Farmer Joe had to tell him of the outside world was a radio that played country music, a TV with four channels and strict content guidelines to only show pleasant, moral, and god-fearing content, and the three books in the Buttnut library, two of which were the Bible. There have, and will always be, certain moral lines so obvious that people of any era should always be held accountable to them. But above that, in the more trivial space of media consumption, absorption, and critique, we have to learn to be more forgiving - to ourselves and to others, so long as in the present we have changed. Did you use the r-slur a lot because it was practically a form of punctuation on 4chan and that’s where you learned the ways of the internet? Did you learn the harmfulness of this practice and cease to do it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Did you and your friends used to make jokes about how Mexicans smelled because you saw Seinfeld do that in his standup and the whole TV laughed as though it was funny? Did you realize one day ‘wait a minute that’s actually super gross’ and stop repeating it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Have you gone back to a beloved childhood property and found it’s full of woman-beating and weird views on homosexuality? Did you find yourself able to critique this beloved thing and did not defensively double-down on shielding it from all harsh words? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. I will not allow us to dismiss the cruelty and hurt of Mad Max Internet Culture with a flippant ‘well that’s just how it was back then” but nor will I allow anyone to condemn us all as being consciously unfeeling, willfully ignorant, purposefully hateful. Some of us were. But some of us did not know, could not have known, needed to learn - and we were lucky enough to live in a time before cringe culture and cancel culture where we were allowed to have that opportunity to learn and grow. We need that today, for all young people who think themselves as woke as can be and ten years from now will look back and blush with shame for things they said and did in total ignorance. The sin is choosing to never change, not failing to change sooner.

[sprite-goblin]

Pokemon Heartgold Nuzlocke Masterpost

Hey everyone! So I decided that now that I'm consistently trying Pokemon nuzlocks, I may as well record my progress somewhere. So here we go!

The other day I began my Pokemon Heartgold Nuzlocke, and I chose a Cyndaquil as my starter. I named him Trident, probably referencing the gum for some reason. Then we were tasked to go to Mr. Pokemon's house to retrieve an egg. On our way home, however, we ran into a red haired bleephole. Apparently he had just stolen a starter from Professor Elm, and nobody knew who he was, but! After we battled he dropped his id. Who names their child One-Eye?

Pretty soon we were gifted pokeballs, and after an extremely long catching tutorial I was able to catch a Rattata named Mika, a Geodude named Wayward, a Spinerack named Hippo Doll, a Zubat named Fries, and a Bellsprout named Giddy on my way to Violet City.

With Trident, I would be safe for a good portion of the early game, being able to counter the Bellsprout Tower and Bugsy, the bug type gym leader. I was feeling pretty confident, and thought that it wouldn't hurt to go to the Ruins of Alph and catch an Unown. Who knows, maybe I'll get a type typical for the later game, am I right?

Almost immediately I found one, and it was the letter A. I named it Ayyyy. Unfortunately, on my way out I had really bad luck. A letter E appeared, and before I knew it, a super effective hidden power had killed Trident and Wayward, my Cyndaquil and my Geodude. On my way out of the cave, Mika the Rattata and Giddy the Bellsprout died because they weren't fast enough to run from the fights. They were level two and level four, while Unown spawn at the level five. That ten minute excursion had nearly wiped me out. All I have left is a Zubat with no flying type moves, a Spinerak I haven't even touched, and an Unown with a move that I didn't even know the typing of.

Luckily, Johto is really giving with how many routes you can access, so I was able to catch a Ghastly in Bellsprout Tower which I named Heat Gun and a Wooper in Route 32 named TUT (yeah, like the crying emote). I also grinded Fries and Hippo Doll until they could consistently beat the trainers in Bellsprout tower. I also learned that Ayyyy had hidden power flying, which was SUPER HELPFUL. Eventually we beat the old guy at the top and then we beat Falkner, the gym leader of Violet City.

When leaving the gym, we get a call from Professor Rowan saying that his assistant is here to drop off the mystery egg. Apparently there's a Pokemon inside, and I get to keep it! I didn't need to worry about replacing a Pokemon with the egg (since all of my other Pokemon died to the freaking letter E) and continued on my adventure.

Since I had already caught Wooper for Route 32, I didn't need to worry about an encounter, so I just went up and down grinding trainers and trying to get my zebra a freaking flying type move. Unfortunately, I had accidently one shot an Onix, my encounter for Union Cave. I haven't told this story on tumblr before, but I think I'm cursed when it comes to catching Onix. Onix was the first shiny I had ever seen, but since I was like 12 and I didn't know what a shiny was, I wasn't that upset when my Gardevoir one shot it with psychic. Whatever the case, I'm cursed.

The route after Union Cave us still Route 32, so I couldn't get an encounter there either. I did, however, pass right by the slowpoke well, Azalea towns gym, and even Kurt's house to catch a well invited Oddish named CruiseShip.

I switched out Ayyyy for CruiseShip and decided to backtrack to the beginning of the game. I sprinted around town until the Egg hatches into Togepi named Magic8Ball. I got the exposure from Elm and collected everything hidden behind rock smash rocks. I found a helix fossil in one! May lord Helix bless this playthrough. Our eyes are watching, God.

After defeating Team Rocket in the Slowpoke Well, I picked up a Slowpoke named AtomicHart (I should specify that when I choose nicknames I literally pick the most fun word out of a statement I had just heard) and let him sit in the box.

Time for Bugsy! He was a lot harder than I thought... I had trained up Fries up to level 17, when she learned wing attack, so I had assumed that she was going to be mvp during the battle. She would have been! But then Bugsy's Scyther leered four times, and a critical hit from a focus energy killed Fries in one hit. Scyther killed Magic8Ball soon afterwards...

I added Ayyyy and AtomicHart on my team, and then forgOT THAT I HAD TO BATTLE ONE-EYE RIGHT AFTERWARDS! so HERE I GO I GUESS. WISH ME LUCK.

That rival battle specifically had a personal history of being one of the toughest battles I've struggled with. I expected a death so much, but... it never came. I won.

It's ironic that I didn't lose a single Pokemon during a rival point but I did lose half of my total encounters so far to a Scyther and a few freaking Unown.

Anyway, that's as far as I am so far. I saved after the One-Eye fight and it's almost time to continue, where my worst opponent so far has yet to come...

[loftycriies]

Hi tumblr. I haven’t been on here and updated in a while.

On Wednesday the 22nd we were in a tornado and our apartment complex took a direct hit. It was one of the most terrifying experiences I have ever had.

We had just moved into our new apartment THAT day, finally finished unloading and returning the uhaul, and sat down to eat. About an hour after we finished eating, a tornado warning came up on my phone and the sirens started going off but I’m born and raised in the Midwest and I have been through many a tornado warning and I’m not easily scared of storms so I just kind of shrugged and said “hope it doesn’t come this way” and went back to what I was doing. Then “TORNADO EMERGENCY” came up on my phone and I had never seen that before so I started to get worried and asked my husband if we should take our kids and go in the walk in closet. Micah was asleep and stayed asleep the entire time but Elijah was still awake.

Pretty much immediately after getting into the closet things got LOUD. Debris started smacking against our windows and the ground started shaking slightly and... a tornado is just a sound I can’t really describe in words. Yes the freight train example is accurate but there’s also this... haunting whistling from the wind that makes it extra sinister to me. My husband held Elijah and I held sleeping Micah and we just sat huddled together tight while I shook and prayed to a god I don’t even believe in not to kill my kids, to just please let my kids survive this. Then after a while everything just stopped. I was still shaking and terrified and I wasn’t convinced it was over, I thought that was just the beginning since I expected the tornado to rip my house apart and suck us up and spit us out or something so we sat there for a long time in silence, eyes wide, just listening. The tenants above us were also hiding in the closet and we could hear them screaming.

My husband ordered us to stay in the closet while he checked outside to see if it was over.

At this point I was thinking okay the tornado must have just passed us. We didn’t actually get hit....

But then my husband came inside shocked and said we were hit and our windows were busted out. He made me stay inside again because he had to help our upstairs neighbors who were trapped in their apartment because a piece of roofing came down and blocked the stairwell.

Once he finally came back inside I didn’t even think I just BOLTED outside to check our car. If you know us you know we’ve had very bad luck with vehicles in the past two years. We had had THREE cars totaled since the start of 2017 and none of them were our fault. And I’m a delivery driver for Pizza Hut so I rely on my car to make money to support my family. So the car was my first priority. We’d already lost so many vehicles to freak accidents and other peoples recklessness I couldn’t do it again.

I bolted outside barefoot because I was in shock and not thinking “hey everyone’s apartment and vehicle windows busted out there’s glass everywhere”, ran up the cement stairs to the parking lot, and our car was indeed yet again totaled. But I didn’t realize till I got back inside and looked down, that my feet had tons of shards of glass in them and I was bleeding all over the carpet.

Thankfully my brother and sister in law saw on the news that our apartment complex had been hit because our phones had no service from the lines being down and mine died shortly after so we couldn’t contact anyone, they raced over and pounded on the door to see if we were okay. Andrew had ran back to our old apartment (which is around the corner) because he left his contact case and his glasses over there and he NEEDED them so I was home alone with the kids in the pitch dark (the power went out before the tornado hit I forgot to add that but I suppose it’s common sense) when they arrived. When hearing Andrew wasn’t here his brother ran to go find him, and my sister in law stayed with me and the kids. But a few min later EMS and the police started yelling that we had to evacuate NOW because a second tornado was coming so we didn’t have time to think or pack anything, we just grabbed the boys and ran to find my husband and his brother so we could evacuate. We didn’t have time to get the kids shoes on and Micah was still asleep so we had to carry them over debris (glass, roofing, trees, insulation, you name it) back to our old apartment and then all the way to the van which was parked far away because you couldn’t drive anywhere near our apt complex because the roads were completely blocked by trees and downed power lines. I still had feet full of glass but there wasn’t anything I could do about it I had to focus on getting my kids out of there. I ended up stepping on a nail that went through my shoe and into my foot, and just had to yank it out and keep trekking. It was something out of a movie. Carrying our (HEAVY BTW) children in the dark, with all this devastation around us, in the pouring rain, to evacuate. It didn’t even seem real. As we walked to the van we saw that the gas station, Sonic, church, and ymca by our house were destroyed. It was horrible.

After we got out of there another tornado never ended up hitting thank god but the devastation was so bad they had to close the city, then the police barricaded our entire neighborhood from every possible street you could access it, so nobody could get in until they could clear enough of the debris and downed power lines for it to be safe for people to come retrieve their belongings. We couldn’t go home for days. All we had was the clothes on our backs so we had to go spend a lot of our money on changes of clothes, toiletries and hygiene products, and food.

Now I have trauma I never ever in my life imagined I’d have regarding storms and it seems to be a common thing within our community as I spoke to some of my neighbors this morning.

None of us can sleep at night because we are afraid of another storm tearing our homes and lives apart.

All of us obsessively check the weather forecast and have installed extra apps on our phones to keep a close eye on any potential storm that could occur and to get quicker alerts.

Most of us cry every time we go outside and see the houses with no walls, no roofs, and think about just how many people are homeless right now and have lost absolutely everything. This was a big apartment complex. And it also hit several other neighborhoods and towns.

I won’t even go in my walk in closet unless I absolutely have to because I can just feel the tornado destroying everything around me all over again.

But we are safe. And we got out of this very blessed that the damage sustained to our specific unit was minimal enough to be deemed structurally sound enough to continue living in (they just boarded the broken windows up). And our community is doing an amazing job helping one another out and rebuilding.

[tessatechaitea]

Scarab #1

As I picked this up, I said, "If that's not a Glenn Fabry cover then I'm not a virgin!"

Look out! We've got a real barn burner of a tale starting here!

Louis, the old man, gets interesting when he reveals that his wife, Eleanor, has been locked behind a door in his house since 1945. And it's not a normal door! It's a door his father brought home and threatened him with the cutting off of his hands if he ever touched it. He said his father became Bluebeard but I think that was just metaphorical what with the door that nobody can look behind and all. I don't think he really had a bunch of dead wives' heads behind it. Although Louis here now had one wife's head behind it! Probably still attached to her body and possibly not dead, what with the door being magic and all. According to Louis, even Scarab couldn't get the door open. I guess Scarab is a superhero? And maybe it was Louis's alternate identity? Or maybe Louis knew him. I think I'll discover the answer to that question when I read the next page. Well, it's not actually the next page. That page describes how Louis's father disappears inside the door for months at a time and returns with strange items and new venereal diseases. It's the page after that page where we learn that Louis became the Scarab by messing with one of his father's treasures.

Fifty percent chance this isn't a superhero outfit but an alien S&M getup.

I'm not good with double negatives and I just got concerned that the initial caption reads wrong. Just make sure you read it to mean I'm totally not a virgin! Meanwhile, Eleanor lives in the Labyrinth of Doors now. She gets to be eternally young and have grand adventures every day. Sometimes she finds locked doors that can't be opened. Exciting! Other times, she'll find empty rooms behind the doors. Dramatic! Occasionally, she'll discover old appliances and housewares in piles. Swoontacular! How boring is my life that reading about a life where you get to open mystery doors that lead to stupid bullshit gets my heart racing?! Eleanor is living the dream! When I was a kid, one of my fantasies was that somebody would create a game which was just a neighborhood or city void of people. But their houses were all still there and you could go from house to house snooping at all of their possessions. I was so boring that my fantasy wasn't even about the end of the world where I could do that for real. I only wanted to do it from the safety of my room on my Vic-20! Oh, and how delusional was I that I thought a game like that would run on my Vic-20?! What a stupid jerk I was. I heard that, you smart ass! Questioning the tense of that sentence!

See? An assassin! Look at me doing actual research instead of just ejaculating my own precious opinions!

After the Sicari's ritual to find the door is over, he relaxes naked under a ceiling of swords while holding back his orgasm (so as not to commit the sin of Onan (which he wouldn't be committing because the sin of Onan is not a sexual sin but a breach of contract. But since religious people are obsessed with sexual desire (having so much pent up inside of them at all times), they've consistently demanded that the Onan story was something the Onan story was not. Just go read it yourself) and "shivering ... with a terrible sexual longing for death." It's too bad the Sicari is the bad guy because he just became my favorite comic book character. I wonder if Vertigo ever sold t-shirts of the Sicari? Can you wear a t-shirt in public that shows some leprous man whose skin is half barbed wire naked and holding in his orgasm? That sounds more dangerous than holding in a sneeze. While Sicari doesn't come, Louis sits at home thinking about his comic book battles as the Scarab.

I don't remember the time Doctor Fate fought Conjoined Twins Brain Man.

I hope the previous panel is ildchay ornpay! I'm using King Beauregard's suggestion to fool Tumblr's censors! But wouldn't be weird if you couldn't even talk about the negative aspects of ildchay ornpay (which I think are all the aspects, just to be clear!) without Tumblr censoring you? It would almost be like Tumblr didn't want people to be educated on how terrible ildchay ornpay was! Oh, I hope I didn't drive away all of my ildchay ornpay loving readers! Sorry for being critical of you with that whole "it's all negative" take! Eleanor's next adventure is a room full of electric fans. Can you imagine standing in front of not one fan but dozens?! Oh the heights of excitement she must experience every day of her life! So many fans blowing on you all at once! It's erotic!

Holy crap! This is a Vertigo title! They mentioned the lady's curse!

Remember the good old days when you didn't know what a period was or what the word virgin meant and your only wish was to search through a stranger's sock drawer? Oh to be young and naive again! To not have your body betray you and say, "No! Today you are a woman! Put away your childhood things and bleed!" To not have people at school pointing and laughing and calling you a name you had to look up in the dictionary later that day which led you to think, "Everybody else in seventh grade has fucked?!" To never be burdened by the shame of your first forays into masturbation, splashing loudly in the bathtub in such a way that, looking back, you know your mom totally fucking knew what you were doing in there. To feel the sweet granular relief that it was Chris Huff who got labeled "the breadbox masturbater" in junior high and not you (not that you'd ever even though of jerking off into a bread box. Nor did you think Chris did either but some kid has to become the scapegoat burdened with the rest of the school's masturbatory sins!). To never be so old that you find yourself sitting in a dark room thinking, "How fucking terrible must that burden have been for Chris back then if I can still, thirty-five years later, remember his whole Goddamned name?!" I never felt more empathy for a person, before or since, then when Chris Huff's name was said at 9th grade graduation and nearly the entire auditorium laughed. I swear I almost cried right there among all my peers. But I held it in lest I get labeled a bread box masturbator sympathizer! The night Eleanor finds her first window in the Labyrinth of Doors (and thinks about her period) is the night the Sicari finds the door and murders Louis. Or probably tries to murder Louis. He'll probably get his S&M costume on before he dies and it'll heal him because it's magic. I'm only speculating that it's magic because it's created by a scarab and because the Scarab fought alongside Doctor Fate. The Sicari throws Louis out of the second floor window which means I now have to believe that, broken and bleeding, Louis is going to crawl back upstairs to get to the scarab. You know, comic book, it would have been a lot easier on my psyche if you'd just let the Sicari dump Louis by the bottom drawer of the dresser. Sure, I understand it's less dramatic! But realize that just asking me to believe a 78 year old man can survive being dumped on the floor is already straining the limits of my disbelief! You can't also ask me to believe all of his bones didn't shatter after going out the second floor window! My God, I'm already invested in believing in a magic door and an evil being whose brain is composed of conjoined twins! How much more work do you want me to do here?!

No Louis. You're dead and this comic is over.

Being that this is a Vertigo comic book, Justin probably is dead and the rest of this story is just Justin Jacob's Laddering the last few seconds of his life. The Sicari realizes the door to Alamut (whatever that is. I can't constantly be asked to do research while reading comic books. Somebody expects me to check Wikipedia twice in one sitting?! The nerve! (okay fine! I checked. It's a region in Iran! Happy?)) doesn't exist. And in his rage, he does something that would be unthinkable to non-Comicsgate comic book readers in 2019: he threatens to rape Eleanor's corpse! Man, that Vertigo sure knew how to do horror! He also threatens to shit in the Scarab's heart when the Scarab finally shows up. That's the kind of thing that made a person reading comic books in 1993 think, "Whoa! This is cutting edge adult stuff! I can't wait to tell my first boss that I'm going to shit in his heart!" Yes, Louis manages to crawl upstairs and open the dresser drawer and put on his sex suit. He then somehow manages to find Eleanor but not in time. She's been killed by The Sicari. So the Scarab tells the Sicari that he's dead and he dies. And as he dies, the Sicari realizes there is no afterlife, no paradise, waiting for him and he loses his death boner and weeps like a baby that's dying. What a fucking wuss. I don't know why the last scene takes place on a plane but it does. I guess the bathroom door on this flight was a magic bathroom door that led to the Labyrinth of Doors. Maybe all doors sometimes lead there! The Scarab Rating: I rarely get excited by what I might discover on the other side of a door which seems odd when you realize one of my biggest fantasies as a kid was basically just that. Maybe I've been taking doors for granted? From now on, I'm going to stop expecting the room I've always known to be behind the door to be there. I'm going to hold my breath and hope that it will lead somewhere fascinating, like a room full of hatstands or urinals or electric fans or some other noun writer John Smith could come up with off the top of his head to take the place of something mysterious and exciting. Seriously, John Smith. You could have at least filled Eleanor's rooms with fornicating sloths and newscasters eating shit. But I guess the point was for Eleanor to be lonely so every room had to just have useless, inorganic bullshit. Just like the rooms in my house. Oh my God! I'm Eleanor!

[scullyeffect]

how do you feel about younger people in fandom? like the youngest side that are probably on tumblr i.e 13/14ish?

i don’t know if you mean in the x-files fandom, or just younger people getting involved into fandom stuff online nowadays so i’m just going to go with a generalization. 

i’m nobody’s mother and interests are healthy, and honestly i’m 23 so i don’t know anything about anything yet, but i will say that i live with a 15 y/o girl, a 13 y/o girl, and an 11 y/o girl, and i find myself very sad when all they want to do is go on a phone and watch youtube videos and be online instead of doing something more creative or intellectual.

we had a birthday party for 11 last night, and we had to take phones away from like six 10-11 year olds, which is ridiculous. i do understand that we live in a big city (paris, which isn’t exactly the safest) and lots of kids do things independently (walk to school, walk to friends’ houses, take the métro) so sometimes i worry about 11 (who doesn’t have a phone) if she needs to take the métro alone or walk somewhere alone, and i wish she did have some way to reach me if ever she got lost or something, but 11 is so young.

i think in a world that’s become so increasingly digitized and almost making it necessary to be connected in some way, kids are growing up faster, and some of the posts online and on tumblr talk about things they might not understand yet, and cause them to form opinions based on a text post some 18 y/o wrote. i’m even guilty of this. i’ll get too lazy to keep up with the real world and get my politics from tumblr sometimes, and that’s probably not good, even though mainstream news sources can do the same thing. my mom worked for the washington post, and that’s pretty much the only place i get my news from.

i probably got my first tumblr account when i was 15, and honestly i regret it. i was a pretty sheltered kid/teenager who really enjoyed reading, doing art, writing, and watching sad european dramas about dead sovereigns and suffering artists. i somehow discovered pro-ana blogs (blogs that share and encourage eating disorders to the point where healthy people can begin to actively attempt to follow insane tips in order to lose weight), and since i actually had been having trouble with my own eating habits but never really known that those behaviors were bizarre, i self-diagnosed and was part of that “community” for awhile. 

i was interested/ in love with lots of actors and actresses, and as i made it out of kind of the pro-ana area which i realized which was unhealthy lol i found out about stan culture and just real obsession with movie stars/celebrities. when i was a younger teen i was “obsessed” with meryl streep, which at that time meant that i watched all her films repeatedly. i didn’t realize people cared about the actors/actresses’ personal lives until i got on tumblr, and at the time it was really exciting to discover things about my favorite celebrities (i mean, being a fan of someone obviously isn’t new, but it was to me). now that i’m 23 i find it very invasive and somewhat creepy that we’re so interested in someone’s life, sometimes even more than their body of work. we’ll probably never meet that person, and if we do they’re not going to think about you or remember you forever, because there are thousands of other people out there who feel the same way, and they just can’t keep track (at least the huge stars). 

on the flip side, i think it’s good to have role models and people to look up to, but sometimes there’s a thin line there. i’m blonde, but i dyed my hair brown in my first year of high school because i was obsessed with marion cotillard and wanted to look like her. i kept the brown throughout high school because i liked it, and sort of forgot i ever did it because of her, but now i’m blonde again and it looks so much better haha. ALSO i got really interested in france/speaking french because of her (and juliette binoche), although i had a fantastic and enthusiastic french teacher in high school to help fuel my desire to speak french. and now i’m fluent in french and live in france. wow. so, if there are people you look up to in the public eye and they’re influencing you in positive ways, that’s great! i do get suspicious when very influential celebrities share their political views, though. i think we have a tendency to follow in people’s footsteps either subconsciously or in full awareness. that could be in any field. i like certain authors, and sometimes my own writing is heavily influenced by their work. it’s a natural thing that happens. but voting really should be an informed decision...just my opinion.

let’s talk about “just my opinion”. online bullying is real and can sometimes be rampant if there are dividing views on someone and their perceived private life. for example, in the x-files fandom we will, for the most part, absolutely convince you that mulder and scully are fucking like bunnies, when the show’s own creator won’t lol. but there are also people who think that gillian anderson and david duchovny (the leads) were/are/could be at some point in a romantic relationship with each other. they (anderson and duchovny) even cater to the fans a bit, but at the end of the day that’s their business and they don’t owe us an explanation, and a lot of people in fandom sort of act like they do. the point of this example was that because people in fandom are divided about this point of view, if you talk about one side or the other, there are some people who will come at you and say mean things for not agreeing with you, and try to convince you of a truth they have no real authority to speak about. this is obviously just an example, but online bullying is rampant and is often taken personally and can really affect the person being bullied, especially someone younger who may or may not be already facing that in real life at school lol.

i think tumblr is a good place for people who suffer from mental illness to come together in a healthy way to talk through their problems (god i hope i’m telling the truth), and there’s definitely tons of awareness and support that you’ll get on tumblr that you may not find in the real world. for example, i don’t know anyone irl who has epilepsy who i can talk to about mine. on tumblr i’ve talked with people who understand what i’m going through. i think that self diagnosis online, just as much on tumblr as it is when i cough and search “signs of throat cancer or tuberculosis’, read up on web md, and immediately fear my days might be numbered, is a problem. on tumblr i think we’re introduced to concepts and can sometimes treat mental illness lightly, when it shouldn’t. if you’re suffering from a mental illness, the online world isn’t going to be the place that can completely help you (says the girl who refuses to go to therapy and instead complains online about how she’s not getting any better). 

being online immediately takes us out of life and into a different world. we become observers instead of experiencing the world. there’s good stuff about observation, but being online and attached to a website that is more or less just a vice for people will often make us choose to be on our phones instead of doing stuff in real life.

all of these points being said, i’m guilty of a lot of the “bad/unhealthy” facets of tumblr, but as i’ve “grown up” (unfortunately still staying on tumblr for a good portion of that time) i’ve grown out of a lot of these things and can see the good and the bad that the online world has to offer, and know which parts to stay away from. i can recognize that spending too much time on here does nothing for my desire to stay inside and not experience the real world. it also makes me think a lot more about tv shows/films/celebrities than i need to. but i’ve also made great friends from being on tumblr over the years, and gotten support i definitely wouldn’t have gotten in real life. 

back to my real life. do i encourage the girls i live with to be interested in certain media? yes, especially stuff i feel has a good message. i basically sat the two older ones down and showed them the pilot of the x-files. do they experience the same high level obsession i do with tv shows/movies? no. and i’m glad for that. they like to lose themselves in certain tv shows, but when the tv is off they don’t really talk about it. do i introduce them to things i’m interested in media-wise? yes. do i introduce them to books and music i was/am interested in? yes. have i told them about tumblr? no. they don’t have any access to my online “presence” (they don’t know my instagram, twitter, etc), and i don’t talk about it. when my computer is out and they’re in the room doing homework, i’m usually writing. granted, that’s usually fanfiction, but at least i’m writing something. 

one of the boys i tutor is writing a book (he’s 11) which is basically a self insert that takes place in the harry potter universe. he doesn’t know what fanfiction is, and i haven’t told him (although he’d never type it up and put it online lol he barely knows how to turn the computer on), but i’m so thrilled he’s even writing that i make him sit down and write for 10 minutes before we ever start watching a movie (in english). 

ANYWAY. i’m nobody’s mother and at the end of the day i’m posting this online on my stupid blog where nothing i say matters or has any influence anywhere, but i think kids should be able to enjoy a non-internet related childhood as long as possible. some of us on tumblr are old enough to actually have children that age, and as much as we like having an account on this site, if asked this same question we might not as readily say ‘yeah it’s great! i want my teenagers to have the same experience as me!’

there’s my two centimes. hope i answered your question. JuST MY OPINION.

[hexusproductions]

Massive Ask

I was tagged by @ysabelmystic

Rules: Tag 20 people

The Last:

1. Drink: Pepsi

2. Phone Call: From my mum

3. Text message: Talking with my sister when she needed help with an assignment

4. Song you listened to: Rap God by Eminem

5. Time you cried: I think…it was after the death in Justice League Dark.

Have you:

6. Dated someone twice: Not that I’m aware of

7. Kissed someone and regretted it: Haven’t kissed anyone, mate

8. Been cheated on: Never

9. Lost someone special: A few. I’m still fighting for one in particular today

10. Been depressed: Often, for years and years and years

11. Gotten drunk and thrown up: Yes! But I’d never had that much to drink before at the time

List 3 Favourite Colours:

12. Black (I don’t care if you class it as a shade, it is found and used as a colour so it counts)

13. Royal purple

14. Dark blue

In the last year, have you…

15. Made new friends: Yes I have and my introverted ass is so happy about it!

16. Fallen out of love: Not in the last year, no

17. Laughed until you cried: Yes, and having it pointed out just made me laugh more

18. Found out someone was talking about you: Negatively or positively? Positively, not behind my back, but very recently I was negatively. Pissed me off, let me tell you.

19. Met someone who changed you: No

20. Kissed someone on your FB list: No…?

GENERAL

21. How many Facebook friends do you know in real life: If I had Facebook I’m sure I’d be able to answer that question

22. Do you have any pets: A dog and a cat. I might be getting a puppy and/or a new bird next year

23. Do you want to change your name: Yes and no. I use my birth name commonly but I’m not entirely comfortable with it.

24. What did you do for your last birthday: Ooo…it was a while ago now. I went to movies and bought some new Lego.

25. What time did you get up: Nine thirty, roundabout. I stayed in bed for a while because it’s been really cold lately

26. What were you doing at midnight last night: Binging a playthrough of Batman: The Telltale Series. I’ve never had much of an interest until recently with all the stuff I’ve heard about Puzzle Grandpa.

27. Name something you can’t wait for: The DCEU Batman movie we’re meant to be getting, as well as the rumoured animated adaption of The Long Halloween. I just really wanna see more Scarecrow.

28. When was the last time you saw your mom: A couple of days ago

29. What is one thing you wish you could change in your life: I really wish I was more organised, and motivated to do school-related stuff.

30. What are you listening to right now: Fall Out Boy, specifically Twin Skeletons

31. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom: I don’t think so. I can’t remember exactly, but I don’t think so

32. Something that is getting on your nerves: People that keep asking or telling me about ‘my future’

33. Most visited website: Most likely Tumblr

34. Mole/s: Three, all forming a triangle on my stomach. At least I hope that’s what they are.

35. Mark/s: There’s a scar on the bottom of my foot from when I was little and I stepped on a broken photo frame

36. Childhood dream: I went from wanting to be a pop star to a vet to a writer for DC Comics

37. Hair colour: Just a regular brown

38. Long or short hair: Short, almost at my shoulders. I should probably get it cut now that I think about it

39. Do you have a crush on someone: Nobody non-fictional (otherwise, there’s a certain musical dork that everyone knows I’m in love with by now)

40. What do you like about yourself: I’m creative, and people find me funny

41. Piercings: Nothing but regular ear piercings

42. Blood type: I have absolutely no clue. I’m always told that it’s the same as my dad’s, but I don’t know what his is either.

43. Nicknames: A shortening of my birth name that’s used by close family, but I feel uncomfortable when other people use it. One of my friends also calls me Shoe.

44. Relationship status: Single

45. Zodiac: Capricorn

46. Pronouns: She/Her

47. Favourite TV show/s: Mom, Miraculous Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir, and Justice League Unlimited

48. Tattoos: None currently but I’ve been thinking of a couple I’d like to get

49. Right or left hand: Right

50. Surgery: I’ve been at the hospital for a number of reasons but I’ve never had actual surgery

51. Hair dyed a different colour: No, and I’d like to keep it that way for as long as possible, thank you very much

52. Sports: I’m not in any teams or anything, but I can play decently

53. Vacation: I’ve been to Phillip’s Island, which is near a beach and was absolutely fantastic. I plan to go overseas later this year, which I’m excited but also freaked out about.

54. Shoes: I don’t understand people who have dozens of pairs of shoes. I’m good with my old sneakers and a pair of thongs (flip-flops for those of you outside of Oz)

55. Eating: Reheated leftover pizza from lunch

56. Drinking: Just water.

57. I’m about to: Launch into my week off of school and use it to write fanfiction

58. Waiting for: Motivation and the opportunity to finish my enrolments for next year

59. Want: More frequent internet access and to finally play Overwatch

60. Get married: I doubt that’ll happen at any point. I don’t really see myself getting married

61. Career: I’ve been looking at a career in forensic science, but tbh I’m not a hundred per cent certain

WHICH IS BETTER:

62. Hugs or kisses: Hugs! Getting squished is so much more enjoyable, and they’re less complicated

63. Lips or eyes: Eyes can be so much more beautiful

64. Shorter or taller: Taller, even by just a small amount.

65. Older or younger: Probably older. All things considered I’d prefer close to my own age.

66. Nice arms or nice stomach: Hmm, I guess I’d say arms.

67. Sensitive or loud: Loud just like me!

68. Hook up or relationship: I’d prefer a relationship that I can count on.

69. Troublemaker or hesitant: The pot wants a troublemaker kettle

HAVE YOU EVER:

70. Kissed a stranger: Hell no.

71. Drank hard liquor: Nah

72. Lost glasses/contact lenses: No

73. Turned someone down: To my knowledge no one’s ever been interested, so no

74. Sex on the first date: Never. Third date minimum, and only if I’m interested in them in that way.

75. Broken someone’s heart: Nope

76. Had your heart broken: Never got serious enough for that

77. Been arrested: No.

78. Cried when someone died: Not when I first heard that they had died, but a while after I did

79. Fallen for a friend: Possibly? I don’t know if that’s what it really was

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

80. Yourself: Sometimes

81. Miracles: Yes

82. Love at first sight: I believe in attraction at first sight, but not love

83. Santa Claus: No

84. Kiss on the first date: Depends on the person and how the date went, but yes

OTHER:

85. Current best friend: I’ve got two that I’ve known for years, but I also consider @couldyounottalktomethanks a member of this category

86. Eye colour: Hazel/light brown

87. Favourite movie: The Road to El Dorado

Tagging: (I have no clue who’s done this already) @tessalovesozzy @perlethewitch @couldyounottalktomethanks @lawful-evil-novelist @themarchinghare @jonathan-cranes-mistress-of-fear @welcometovonwulfskimanor @hermannco @hugsforvillains @mortalorder @the-mexican-pineapple @yourfavoritehandsomenerd @takedasangel @sophiemoonlightuniverse @cjsfandoms @poltergeistprincesa @thekawaiikitty24 @little-elf-archer @c3powearsacroptop @lobsterquadriille

[backwardspalindrome]

so here’s what’s been going on with me lately (this is a long post with a lot of rambling, sorry):

1. i haven’t been using this blog like at all. the last posts were from pretty early in my first semester at college. once i got through that initial hard part of getting used to the university environment, my life has been incredible. here’s a couple sub-points:

1a) i started hormone therapy (spiro tablets and an estradiol patch) in january. actually started on friday, january 13th which is beautiful and i love it. that also  means that my 5 month anniversary is the day before my birthday this month. but that’s stuff you probably know from my tumblr and twitter.

1b) i really started to connect with a few people at college and now i have a better grasp of who i can trust and who i can turn to. that’s a weird and bad way of putting it, but it’s important that i know those things.

1c) i also started doing more with my online friends like cole and jack. in fact, i am now officially the Founder of something - i run a podcast network along with cole that’s shaping up to be pretty good. again, keep an eye on my twitter and tumblr.

1d) in the few weeks leading up to finals and summer break, i met a transfem person on okcupid in springfield. (she had “trans woman” on her bio when we found each other on the app, but i guess that’s no longer fully accurate. i haven’t asked her about labels or even pronouns yet because i’m a bad person.) her name is leslie and she is just stunningly gorgeous. we like a lot of the same things and we were kinda talking really vaguely about maybe having some kind of not-just-platonic relationship. i met up with her face-to-face for the first time just a couple days before i left for summer break. i like her a lot, but distance is hard and i get paranoid easily.

2. this brings me to the problem, and the reason i’m back on this blog after so long. i had to move back to tipton for summer break. i couldn’t find any internship or job or summer class to keep me in springfield so now i’m back in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and no one to see. and it’s tearing me back down again. here come the sub-points.

2a) i came out to my parents about a year ago. the day before i moved to springfield, actually. my sister told me that it would help if i gave them some kind of expectation or directive - something they could do to show support. i asked them to use my name and my pronouns when we were alone. just in private, not a big task, and i made sure that they knew i wasn’t expecting perfection. my mother has used my name one time in the year since. my dad has not. neither have used my pronouns. i tried to confront them about this the other day. their reasoning boiled down to: well, we have some problems with how you act at home and so we’re not going to give you the basic respect of name and pronouns. fuck, i’m being reductive but they literally brought up how i don’t refill water jugs or how i don’t like eating with other people. during the conversation i was trying to have about my pronouns. they brought up other things that i feel are part of me being somewhat autistic (that’s a separate conversation). my mother said to me that when she thinks of trying to say my name out loud, it makes her want to throw up. she said that to my face. and i’m the one who has to change my behavior.

2b) there’s no one here. in college, i had easy access to my college friends (who are actually pretty good at handling heavy topics), my online friends, support groups, and my counselor. if i felt something and i needed to talk about it, 80% of the time i had someone willing to talk with me. now i have my online friends and that’s it. i can’t talk about anything with my parents, i have no friends in tipton, and there’s not a single community within 30 miles of here where i could actually belong. there’s no lgbt center in tipton, there’s no pride celebrations in tipton, there’s no group counseling in tipton, there’s no therapists in tipton. the only thing i can do with my emotions is let them fester in my head.

2c) i’ve always felt negatively about tipton. my entire life i’ve hated this piece of shit town and everything around it, about it, and in it. i’m starting to think that my attitude of hating the physical place of tipton also started to apply to how i feel about my experiences being in the closet. all of the worst things in my life - being closeted, my bad relationship with my parents, my inability to find friends, the lack of resources - they all are tied to this town. that’s why it was so easy for me to adjust to springfield. i was ecstatic to leave the town where i had to endure 17 years of psychological harm. that’s maybe part of the reason i felt so good for so long in springfield too. i left everything bad behind. and now, i’m back. and all those 17 years and all those bad experiences just sat here in tipton and waited for me. add to that the fact that apparently my parents were fostering more resentment than i thought about the fact that i never wanted to come home. for me, tipton is everything wrong about the world in one place. if you were to make a community built on willful ignorance, it would be named tipton, missouri. my primary goal in life is to never have to be in tipton ever again. but here i am. 

i think i’m done with the points and sub-points now, but now we’ve made it to my big fear right now and the reason i started writing this post in the first place. i think i might be slipping back into the tipton headspace. i went back to dressing more like i used to (old t-shirts, sweatpants). my dysphoria - while thankfully not as bad as it used to be - is coming back. the ever-present fear that i forgot was part of the atmosphere of tipton is back. ever since i got here, i haven’t been able to stop comparing my life during college to my life now. the main thing is that in college, i was actually happy. i was happy most of the time. i was happy in a general way that touched every part of my life. i realized this sometime in second semester.

see, i used to do this obnoxious depressive-nihilist-millenial thing where every time i crossed the street i’d make a half-joke in my head about getting hit by a car. it takes different forms, but i think you know what i’m talking about. sometime in second semester i crossed a street, saw a car, and had that thought about getting hit. and then immediately, i realized that no - no, i don’t want to die. that was the first time i ever remember having the explicit thought “i don’t want to die”. i felt like i had a future for the first time in my life. when i began to fully understand what that moment was for me, it was one of the most terrifying and the most liberating realizations of my entire life. liberating, because i recognized that there was a possible future where i could live as myself and be happy. terrifying, because i realized all at once that i should have had that feeling before, and tipton stole it away from me. 

i described it to my counselor like this: tipton is a bubble, and it has an insidious way of making the people inside it think there’s nothing else in the world but tipton. tipton contains everything, and it’s not possible for someone to need something that tipton doesn’t have. remember how i said earlier that tipton has no lgbt centers, no theatres, no therapy? when you’re in tipton, you can’t need those things. nobody needs those things. what even is it that you think you need? those things don’t exist. you don’t need therapy, you just need to suck it up. why aren’t you like everyone else?

that’s what tipton did to me. and that’s what it’s trying to do to me again. i noticed today that my brain seems to have gone back to being depressed more often than not. but now i know there are other things than this god-forsaken hellhole. tipton is what drove me two steps from attempting suicide. i will burn the entire god damned place to the ground before i let it do that to me again. i don’t know how i’m going to avoid all this shit. i just know that i can’t let tipton destroy me for a second time.

i don’t have a game plan. all i have is this. i’m writing this on thursday. tomorrow i work. saturday i’m coming out to my grandparents. sunday, i’m coming out to my uncle. these are the people that my parents told me i need to talk to in person before i can come out on facebook. my public coming out will be at midnight on my birthday - wednesday. i want every obscure relative and forgotten acquaintance to see this post when they try to wish me a half-hearted happy birthday. i’m gonna spend the following two days dealing with the aftermath. i have no plans after that, but i think once i come out publicly i’ll be able to fight back more effectively. i’m going to rip control of my life out of the hands of this town and then i’m going to be the most important force in my life again. 

i started this post because i felt sad and helpless about what tipton was doing to me. but for the first time, writing shit on this blog has actually helped me. all of this post boils down to what could be described as my supervillain origin story: this town ruined me once. now, i’m going to make it kneel before me.

[transstudiesarchive]

Voices (content warning)

I was so angry, and I tried to figure out why

I could not stand who I was, I made lists about who I wanted to be

When I was a child I wanted to die

“If I had not been raised to give my life away, would I have made such and effective, self-sacrificing revolutionary?“ (p.31)

Feeling safe is really sexy

“There was no place as a safe haven for a gay kid. The only option you had was a bar or to pick up a john to find a place to stay for the night” (7:29)

“Feminist and radical lesbian organizer” (p.17)

“I lived in terror that I might suddenly be seen again as what I knew myself to be” (p. 21)

“I stopped [wearing dresses] for a long time because the boys next door used to try and get fresh with me, you know, try and have sex“ (4:22)

I tried so hard to change

“Having learned the habit of hiding, I found I had also learned to hide from myself” (p. 13/14)

“I started wearing dresses at five years old” (4:20)

“I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys.” (p. 36)

“‘Just use that smile’” (p. 26)

“Resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness” (p. 36)

“The reality of self-hatred and violence” (p.17)

“I could not see all the stuff they could use me for less than a book of matches” (45:58)

I often had to fight off my brother as they tried to touch me. They towered over me and they were laughing

“Those who cannot change their own lives have every reason to be ashamed of that fact and to hide it.” (32)

“But I think I liked the thought that someone would want to pay me, that’s what kept me in the business for such a long time” (45:48)

“[Jesus] listens to all my problems and never laughs at me” (6:05)

“I found out that boys do that when I was raped by this boy who was about, he was about 13 years old” (4:34)

If there was a god I would want him dead

“I had so much trouble, it’s a miracle I am still here I mean, honey, people used to come and bring guns . . .” (33:10)

I will not have sex unless I really want to and  at any moment

“Throw off conditioning of being despised” (p. 36)

“[Claim] the embattled sexuality I had fashioned on a base of violence and abuse“ (p.34)

“I have never been able to make clear the degree of my fear” (p. 14)

“My first mental breakdown started in 1970. It started falling down hill and it’s been falling up and down hill ever since” (20:09)

I will not be used

“I may be crazy but that don’t make me wrong“ (0:16)

“[Jesus] takes me very seriously” (6:05)

“Never expected to live forever” (p. 37)

“They want to give you nothing. Nothing. Not even a cigarette or a cup of coffee nothing whatsoever” (46:04)

“I believed completely that by remaking myself I was helping to remake the world” (p. 22)

“I have come closer to knowing myself as real” (p.14)

I had a sexual relationship with my psychology teacher in high school for a year while at the same time going out with my piano teacher. I was still afraid of boys.

“I could not believe that my body would ever be worth anything to anyone” (45:55)

“I did not think people had sex – period” (5:17)

Marsha was harassed and thrown into the river (Hudson River)

I was the strong one

I am demanding and uncompromising

I was my dad’s favorite, they said

“My mother said being homosexual, she thought I was lower than the dog” (46:52)

“He shot all of this sticky stuff all my over my legs” (4: 51)

“I hated the rule makers” (33)

“Claim my families pride and tragedy” (p. 34)

“I tried to become one with the lesbian feminist community so as to feel real and valuable” (p. 16)

“When I was five, Mama married” (p.18)

“I have loved my family so stubbornly” (p. 15)

“He [Jesus] is like a spirit to follow me around and he likes to help me out in my hour of need” (6:01)

“I never had to have to have sex with anybody for money ever. I just did it because I wanted to see if I could get away with it and I pretty much succeeded” (44:30)

“The prettier you looked as a little boy made up as a girl that’s the most money you’re gonna make” (17:46)

“I stopped talking for a while” (p. 18)

Marsha talking about having been shot “I’m dying, dying, dying but I ain’t dead yet” (45:24)

To save the world from self-destruction I need to understand my own

Degrading sexual phantasies was my body going to what it knew in a situation that did not fulfil my safety requirements

I have been fighting for my life ever since I remember

“Being a hooker is no easy business for no one, it’s one of the most dangerous businesses that you can be in. but if that’s the only thing you know how to do I’d say it’s a pretty sad story for anyone, you know, including myself” (45:27)

“The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed it” (p.13)

Making money “with just a little bit of makeup and have little hormone tits” (18:10)

I had to dissociate and make up stories in my head in order to have sex with a real person

“I have not married anybody in church since then cause I think he [Jesus] is the only man I could really trust” (5:53)

“I have known I was a lesbian since I was a teenager, and I have spent a good 20 years making peace with the effects of incest and physical abuse” (p.14/15)

“Butch/femme and leather fetishism is widely viewed with distaste or outright hatred. . . presumed to be misguided, damaged by incest and childhood physical abuse” (p. 24)

“I got married to Jesus Christ in church when I was 16 years old” (5:48)

“We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed.” (p. 18)

My dad wanted a girl, my mom was relieved when it finally happened

I liked being in love and I went along

I wanted to be a woman, but I felt like a sex-less thing

“Victim of physical, emotional and sexual violence” (p. 36)

“I don’t think like that, but I know they would” (5:33)

I give and receive nothing that my body, my mind and my heart do not love all at once

“I would tell them I was a boy in drag�� (34:18)

In kindergarten I was hiding in corners

“My sexual promiscuity” (p. 34)

Any indication of sexual entitlement is an immediate turn-off

“I am not only a lesbian but a transgressive lesbian—femme, masochistic” (p. 23)

“My sexual identity is intimately constructed by my class and regional background, and much of the hatred directed at my sexual preferences is class hatred“ (p. 23)

I regret having sexually pressured a partner during a hard time. I am sorry

“Her whole life she [my mother] never wanted to know” (47:19)

I was not safe at home. Thank you Frau Wieser for letting me sit at your kitchen table for hours

“The geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over” (p. 19)

I was married three times and I refused sex over long periods because the love was not right, and I did not know the nature of my sexuality

I never got over my abuse but that’s because I get reinjured by the world

“[Police] always treated me like I am the worlds murderer” (36:07)

“After my stepfather beat me so badly it caused a family scandal” (p. 18)

“I began to suspect that we shared no common language to speak those bitter truths” (32)

“Mama miscarried, and while we waited out in the hospital parking lot, my stepfather molested me for the first time” (p. 18)

“The fundamental me had almost disappeared” (p. 16)

He molested me when my mom was in the mental hospital because of a nervous breakdown

I have a body now that belongs to me

“you should not have sex until after you’re married” (4:30)

I don’t hate my family at least not at the moment

A lot of space, no guilt trips and unconditional positive regard is really sexy

“Mama told me she really had no choice” (p. 18)

I love my mother when I can afford to, I feel pain about my father’s nightmare of a life

I had sex for the first time because I wanted to get it over with

“I had separated my activist life from the passionate secret life in which I acted on my sexual desires” (p. 16)

“Honey, I don’t believe you should have sex until after you are married” (5:45)

I might have been a pretty little girl, but I thought I was ugly

“Nobody promised you tomorrow” (0:18)

I want to walk around with no shirt on and be seen as a person

“I have been arrested about a million times for prostitution” (35:24)

I will not be used

I take myself very seriously and fuck you if that is a problem

“I was young and naïve” (4:17)

“I found out the prettier you look as a little boy or a pretty little transvestite, you can make a couple of little dollars“ (17:38)

“Some people could not believe I was not a real woman” (34:34)

I was afraid they would think I was frigid

Feminist and angry woman

They were 5 and 10 years older than me

“I don’t have to do the streets any more. Because I decided, darling, that it was not worth it” (44:24)

My father beat my brothers with a steel spring rod

“I found out that my body was worth some money those days” (17:33)

“Something he continued to do until I was past thirteen” (p. 18)

I love to live

They “pulled guns on me ‘I can’t believe you are a boy’” (34:13)

 References

 Allison, D. (1994). Skin : Talking about sex, class & literature. (pp 13-36) Ithaca, N.Y.:

Firebrand Books.

Kasino, M. (2012, October 15). Pay It No Mind - The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson.

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN9W2KstqE

  Voices of three women: Dorothy Allison (page numbers), Marsha P. Johnson (minutes and seconds) and I (none)

(cited in this way to keep it simple, my color coding did not transfer to Tumblr)

           My goal was to create access to the experience of child sex abuse through the creative voices of Marsha P Johnson, Dorothy Allison and my own. I prefer to have the words speak for themselves and I do not encourage readers to bother reading beyond this point. That said, I will give some explanation about my motivations to collect these words and let them speak together by presenting them in randomized order. My partner who understands computers and loves math, especially Bayesian Inference has randomized the lines for me based on the random number seed 56 (maybe you know what that means) which was the third lucky number of a fortune cookie I received today at a Chinese Restaurant.

           What I wanted to get at was something Marsha, Dorothy and I have in common: a specific form of socializing feminine bodies which is childhood sexual abuse. Although I do hold my father accountable for what he did I see his actions and the actions of his male ancestors as deeply socially conditioned and part of his own curse. The effort of making childhood sex abuse into an individual problem rather than a societal way of disciplining bodies is a convenient smoke screen. All around us we receive messages in words, pictures, sounds that tell us that it is ok to objectify women. The fact that increasingly other than female bodies are objectified is not a consolation.

           Why is this important in a trans archive? I belief that we are all trying to understand how we can escape the trajectory we are on and I hope that people who have genders outside of the norm might have a heads up in understanding the alienation that happens when femininity is disciplined to erase itself, to hate itself, to have no needs, and to be deeply confused about its own purpose. I belief that all feminine bodies are subjected to a measure of the same disciplinary action and that we are flailing to grasp who we are underneath all that. I am appealing to you because I feel deeply alienated outside of the circle of safe people who work hard to create a safe place.