#sab for ts

[eddiemunsonssoulmate]

Men always pretend they're simple creatures but some of them are complicated as fuck ugh. Mixed signals all over the place.

[chenfordswopez]

Confession: I might have to revoke my swiftie card 😭

[updownlately]

pain

[neoswift]

PAIRING.    jaemin x fem!oc

CATEGORY.    filo social media au, fluff, crack, humor, “enemies” to lovers (kind of… not really), arianator!jaemin, swiftie!oc, stan twitter drama, college!au, established relationship (not exactly ... pero parang ganon na nga HAHAHA)

WARNINGS.    language, puro kagaguhan lang, stan twitter drama?, ag vs. ts discourse prolly

SYNOPSIS.    what are the odds na ‘yung kalandian mo turns out to be the same person na lagi mong kaaway sa twitter? for sab’s case—probably 10/10.

REQUESTED BY. anon! (send smau reqests here!)

STATUS. on going!

NOTE. sa anon na nagrequest neto last year ... sorry natagalan HAHAHAHA ETO NA SYA !! guys swiftie and arianator po ak pls wag nyo ak conceal CHZ HAHAHA anyway super crack lang to and mostly parang walang patutunguhan, just vibes 🤙🏼🤙🏼🤙🏼 also theyre in anitwt for this one kasi ... gusto ko lang ... and theyre dentistry students !! ( no one is surprised HAHAHA) enjoy reading! 🫶🏼

— sab and jaem's playlist!

PARTS!

profiles: main | stan twt | irls

01: resident arianator & swiftie

02: landing-landi

03: what if kayo talaga?

04: briejase first win

05: ???

TAGLIST. @archivedmkl @nctasdfghj @wooyoung-a @morkleetrash @kkotjia @i-aecrysture @injunified @smolpeyy @pepperrye @hibuki-chan @hannie-dul-set @chanfilms @yiz-yo @anya-writes-stuff @w0nderr @mihyu-ckie @remisaki @fullsunld @main-figuresk8-sunghoonie @dejavukirstein @seijenoh @renjun-pretty @skzbeyleynjasnct @yoitbb @najaeminluvbot @hazyru @lune1897@ heynayu @chimajeyn @rensaure @13isacoolnumber @liljeongseong @marahuyornjn @eureah @markleepooh @000rpheus @nanayogurt @luvenshiti @j-8star @flovezen @jaeyuuns @yoonhanzjaem @ssuungchans @shairamaexx @hibernatinghamster @roseltgiri

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

hiii, i just wanted to say that i also hate ts like an unimaginable amount, but i think it’s rly wrong to hate on sabrina bc she hasn’t actually done anything. and she did receive death threats (even tho i don’t blame liv bc she was insanely new to this industry and didn’t realise). and sabrinas music is just pop, it’s not rly supposed to be well written imo.

also also also, if we re hating on sab for being taylor prodigy, please remember that liv also was. taylor (imo) uses young artists to make sure you can’t think of them without thinking of her.

Peace, friend. I simply meant that I do not listen to Sabrina's music and that I don't like her lyricism. However, I don't think she morally irresponsible the way Swift is.

I do wish her luck in being too close to Swift. That is not a great spot to be.

And that is a good point I had not yet considered. I always thought it strange that Swift is good friends with people so much younger than her. That's an interesting thought- that she's not actually friends with them but just wants the young audience to keep their attention on her.

Interesting, thank you.

[mattslolita]

I showed my friends (your nudes) then we high fived 😀, sorry if you feel 😅 objectified 🥺. Can’t help myself 🤪 hormones are high 😈 (give me more than just some butterflies 🦋 🍆)

-Sabrina Carpenter, Juno

she devoured so bad w ts song dawg 😭😭😭😭😭 sab one chance i beg of you

[rlthirteen]

Hello, August!

4 months nalang mag end of the year naaa. August will slip like a bottle of wine char gikan na ni TS haha! Will stop drinking alcohols na kay rag di najud ni maayo. Will drink ra pag naay occasions, di ta palabi kay rag nasobraan na kaayo ta. Aw di man sab hinuon hinubugay pero OA na kaayo nang kada tapok nya maabtan ug gabie kay mag inom. Mag undang ta aning bisyoha kay ako nasab mismo ang naconscious sakong gipang intake.

[knavestrolls]

Althea, if you were reincarnated, what would you want to be in your next life?

H3althy and normal - don't th-nk -ts too much to dr3am for Th3r3's no sham3 -n who - am now, d-sab-l-t-3s and all but Som3t-m3s your g-rl just wants to b3 a normal troll

[him-e]

what did you think of shadow and bone? have you read the books? i only read the duology

Thoughts on Shadow and Bone, now that you've probably seen it?

I think the show is alright? It lacks a real wow factor as far as I’m concerned, but it’s enjoyable. It’s especially enjoyable in those parts I didn’t anticipate to like / didn’t even know would be there. 

Whereas the main selling points leave a lot to be desired.

The good stuff: the visuals. The aesthetic. The overall concept. Production, casting and costumes are excellent, the setting is fascinating. The worldbuilding isn’t perfect and is sometimes confusing, which is probably due to the show jumping ahead of the books and introducing elements that happen much later in the book saga, but I’m loving the vague steampunk-y vibe of it mixed with more typical fantasy stuff and slavic-inspired lore, the fact that it’s set in dystopian Russia rather than your usual ye olde England.

I find it interesting that in this ‘verse the Grisha are simultaneously superstars, privileged elite, legendary creatures and despised outcasts, according to the context and the type of magic they wield. It’s A Lot, and so far it’s all a bit underdeveloped and messy, like a patchwork of different narratives and tropes sewn together without an organic worldbuilding structure. (there are hints to a past when they were hunted, but how did they go from that to being, essentially, an institutionalized asset to the government isn’t clear yet. There’s huge narrative potential in this, and I hope future seasons will delve into those aspects)

Many of the supporting characters are surprisingly solid. I appreciated that Genya and Zoya eventually sort of traded places, subverting the audience’s assumptions about them and their own character stereotypes, despite the little screentime they were given.

Breakout characters/ships for me were Nina/Matthias, and even more so the Crows, i.e. the stuff I didn’t see coming and knew nothing about (having only read the first book). (I thought the entire Crows subplot was handled in a somewhat convoluted way, at least in the first episodes; it was hard to keep track of who wanted Alina and why, but the Crows’ chemistry is so strong it carried the whole Plot B on its shoulders).

HELNIK. As an enemies to lovers dynamic, Helnik was SUPER on the nose, I’d say bordering on clichéd with the unapologetic, straight outta fanfiction use of classic tropes like “we need to team up to survive” and “there’s only one bed and we’ll freeze to death if we don’t take our conveniently damp clothes off and keep each other warm with the heat of our naked bodies” (not that I’m complaining, but i like to pine for my ships a bit before getting to the juicy tropetown part, tyvm). And then they’re suddenly on opposite sides again because of a tragic misunderstanding - does Bardugo hate high-conflict dynamics? It certainly seems so, because between Helnik and Darklina I’m starting to see a pattern where the slow burn and blossoming mutual trust is rushed and painted in broad, stereotypical strokes to get as fast as possible to the part where they *hate each other again* and that’s... huh. Something.

^That’s probably why I’m almost more interested in Kaz x Inej, because their relationship feels a bit more nuanced, a bit more mysterious, and a bit more unpredictable. (I didn’t bother spoiling myself about them, so I really don’t know where they’re going, but it’s refreshing to see a dynamic that the narrative isn’t scrambling to define in one direction or the other as quickly as possible)

-

Now, as for Darklina VS Malina... I found exactly what I expected. 

Both are ship dynamics I’m, on principle, very much into (light heroine/dark villain, pining friends to lovers) but both are also much less interesting than they claim to be, or could have been with different narrative choices. I’ll concede that the show characters are all more fleshed out and likable than their book counterparts, and the cringe parts I vaguely remembered from the books played out differently. And, well, Ben Barnes dominates the scene, he’s hot as HELL, literally every single second he’s on screen is a fuck you to Bardugo’s attempts to make his character lame and uninteresting and I’m LOVING it, lol.

But yeah, B Barnes aside, Darklina is intrinsically, deliberately made to be unshippable. 

It makes me mad, because it’s - archetypally speaking - made of shipping dynamite: yin/yang-sun and moon, opposites attract, COMPLEMENTARY POWERS AND SO ON. And what does Bardugo do with these ingredients? A FUCKING DELIBERATE DISASTER:

^ Placing the kiss so early on (season 1, episode five) effectively kills the romantic tension that was (correctly) building up until that point, and leaves the audience very little to still hope for, in terms of emotional evolution of the dynamic. 

Bardugo lays all the good stuff down as early and quickly as possible (the bonding, the conflicted attraction, the recognizing the other as one’s equal, etc) only to turn the tables and pull the rug so y���all sick creepyshippers won’t have anything to look forward to, because THEY’VE ALREADY HOOKED UP AND THAT BELONGS TO THE PAST, IT’S OVER, THEY’RE ENEMIES. This, combined to the fact that she falls for him *without* knowing who he really is, is the opposite of what I want from a heroine/villain ship (it’s basically lovers to enemies, and while that can be valid too, I wanted to see more pining and more prolonged, tormented symbolic attraction to the Shadow/Animus on Alina’s part). 

But here’s the trick: it’s not marketed as lovers to enemies - it has all the aesthetics and trappings of an enemies to lovers (the Darkling is, from the get go, villain-presenting, starting from his name), so it genuinely feels like a trollfic, or at the very least a cautionary tale *against* shipping the heroine with the tall dark brooding young villain, and I don’t think it’s cool at all. It makes the story WAY less interesting, because it humanizes the villain early on (when it’s not yet useful or poignant to the story, because it’s unearned) but it’s a red herring. The real plot twist is that the villain shouldn’t be sympathized with, just defeated: there’s a promise of nuanced storytelling, that is quickly denied and tossed aside. So is the idea of incorporating your Shadow (a notion that Bardugo must be familiar with, otherwise she wouldn’t have structured Alina and the Darkling as polar opposites who complement each other, but that she categorically refutes)

Then we have Malina. The good ship.

Look, I’m not that biased against it. I don’t want to be biased on principle against a friends to lovers dynamic that antagonizes a heroine/villain one, because every narrative is different, and for personal reasons I can deeply relate to the idea of being (unspeakably) in love with your best friend. So there are aspects of Malina that I can definitely be into, but it troubles me that in this specific context it’s framed as a regression. It’s Alina’s comfort zone, a fading dream of happiness from an idealized childhood, to sustain which the heroine systematically stunts her growth and literally repressed her own powers, something that in the books made her sickly and weak. But the narrative weirdly romanticizes this codependency, often making her tunnel vision re: going back to Mal her primary goal and centering on him her entire backstory/motivation, to the point that when she starts acting more serious re: her powers and alleged mission to destroy the Fold, it feels inorganic and unearned. 

Mal is intrinsically extraneous to Alina’s powers, he doesn’t share them, he doesn’t understand them, he has little to offer to help her with them, and so the feeling is that he’s also extraneous to her heroine’s journey, aside from being a sort of sidekick or safe harbor to eventually come back to. People have compared him to Raoul from Phantom of the Opera, and yeah, he has the same ~magic neutralizer~ vibe, tbh.

The narrative also polarizes Mal’s normalcy and relative “safety” against Aleksander’s sexy evil, framing Alina’s quasi-platonic fixation on the former as a better and purer form of love than her (much more visible and palpable) attraction to the latter. This is exacerbated by the show almost entirely relying on scenes of them as kids to convey their bond. I’m sure there are ways to depict innocent pining for your best friend that don’t involve obsessively focusing on flashbacks of two CHILDREN running in a meadow and looking exactly like brother and sister. LIKE. I get it, they’re like soulmates in every possible way, BUT DO THEY WANT TO KISS EACH OTHER?

Which brings me to a general complain: for a young adult saga centering on a young heroine and full of so many hot people, this story is weirdly unsexy? There are a lot of shippable dynamics, but they’re done in such a careless, ineffective way that makes ZERO EFFORT to work on stuff like slow burn, pining and romantic tension, and when it does it’s so heavy handed that the viewer doesn’t feel encouraged at all to fill the blanks with their imagination and start anticipating things (which is, imo, the ESSENCE of shipping). The one dynamic that got vaguely close to this is, again, Kaz and Inej, and coincidentally it’s also the one we didn’t get confirmed as romantic YET. Other than that, where’s the slow burn? What ship am I supposed to agonize over during the hiatus to season two? Has shipping become something to feel ashamed of, like an embarrassing relative you no longer want to invite in your home?

Anyway, back to Alina/Darkling/Mal, this is how the story reads to me:

girl suspects to be special, carefully pretends to be normal so she can stay with Good Boy

the girl’s powers eventually manifest; she’s forcibly separated from Good Boy

the girl’s powers attract Bad Boy who is her equal and opposite but is also a major asshole

girl initially falls for Bad Boy; has to learn a hard lesson that nobody that sexy will ever want her for who she is, he’s just trying to exploit her

also, no, there is no such thing as a Power Couple

girl is literally given a slave collar by Bad Boy through which he harnesses her power (a parody of the Twin Scars trope)

you know how the story initially suggested that the joint powers of Darkness and Light would defeat evil? LOL NO, Darkness is actually evil itself and the way you destroy evil is using Light to destroy Darkness, forget that whole Jungian bullshit of integrating your shadow, silly!

conclusion: girl realizes being special sucks. She was right all along! Hiding and suppressing her powers was the best choice! She goes back to the start, to the same Good Boy she was meekly pining for prior to the start of the story.

... there’s an uncomfortable overall subtext that reads a lot like a cautionary tale against - look, not just against darkships and villain/heroine pairings, but also *overpowered* heroines and, well... change? Growth?

Like, it’s certainly a Choice that Alina starts the story *already* in love with Mal. That she always knew it was him. The realization could have happened later (making the dynamic much more shippable, too), but no. 

[americachavez]

oh wow you guys weren’t kidding literally less than a minute in to shadow & bone and we’ve got a racial microaggression this is SO funny. white people you are so funny

[eddiemunsonssoulmate]

I just broke up with my boyfriend of six, almost seven years.

It was the right choice for sure but fuck, it hurts like shit. Never wanted it to reach this point but here we are. Really not sure what to do now besides crying.

Guess I'll die bitter and alone at some point.

[chenfordswopez]

Since the good ones call their exes wasted

And since the Lord forgot my gay awakenin'

Then I'll just be here in the kitchen

Servin' up some moanin' and bitchin'

Gwikki (Nikki's pov) - Slim Pickins (Sabrina Carpenter)

[hypermania]

re: s&b, i'm only one episode in but the moment i saw the dekappel hanging in plain sight on kaz's wall i was like oh... they made his ass stupid 🙃

yeahhhhhhhh. it also kind of makes it seem like he stole it because he wanted it and not just to prove he could?? they could’ve accomplished the same thing by showing it leaning against a wall lol

[violet-bridgerton]

anyways sab doing zoya dirty in s2 THEY BETTER FUCKING FIX THIS

[nataliescatorccio]

truly this

[lingeringscars]

couple gris.haverse (primarily alina) things

big fan of nikolai and alina as a friendship. i did not particularly care for nikolai in s&s (or r&r but i still cried at everything related to him and like props to leigh for that) but i did love the fact that alina had someone else that they could talk to. i still think about them linking arms At All Times. It's not a hard & fast no romantic them for me, i guess, but it would definitely depend on the nikolai writer

Alina is never queen <3 hope that helps <3 i understand the show direction here but alina never wanted to be queen and her saying no to nikolai in the end was sooo important. she has given enough.

alina is not ?? selfish ?? or stupid ?? for being like hey i cannot physically or mentally give anything else right now and i need to go

alina is well aware that there are people that are better equipped for this particular role and it was never something they wanted to begin with. they took on as much as they could. they died for it. they couldn't come back from what happened in destroying the fold and Be A Leader.

sainthood definitely plays into this. alina is so much more than a grisha, so much more than a person. alina will never be fully grisha or fully otkazat'sya. that in between is really something that no one else can understand, either.

i do keep alina losing her powers because i personally thought it was powerful and showcased the fact that she literally gave everything to ravka. it also felt like the apt conclusion to her search for the amplifiers, the warnings about what possessing them would do, and in general the passing of them to otkazat'sya was A lot. following, alina is already hounded by sun saint people ( pls i'm forgetting the names for the groups rn ) and that constant reminder of losing her powers is gutting, and it's another reason that they can't just Go Back

alina doesn't stop caring about ravka? or grisha? the fight just looks different for her now

Also putting out there that alina is In Love With genya & Has Complicated Feelings re Zoya

also complicated feelings about the darkling but i have less than 0 interest in exploring anything romantic between them ever

mal has complicated feelings re nikolai thank u <3

it's actually not that unreasonable that mal would need to adjust to alina being grisha and also that he would have to react to his own trauma. i know this is an extreme take.

mal deserted the army for alina, mal would follow alina, but mal also Good at what he did. he was vital. he was a tracker and was useful and he lost that in part. he got to live despite this, in part because of alina, and there is a part of mal that wishes that they had treated him like any deserter

does mal fuck up? yes. is show!mal somehow better than book!mal because he isn't as traumatized? no? he needs to adjust to everything that has happened, and eventually he needs to adjust to him actually dying (+ also to alina killing him even if he was adamant that it needed to happen). it's part of why i'm very okay with his ending in the show because i do think that he needs to find a purpose and explore without his tracking abilities. this is more complicated with Misha because mal is extremely protective of him, but i think alina going back to keramzin with him helps him. at this point he can also better recognize that he can't just go back and it wouldn't be fair to either of them (or himself)

i honestly do not think inej's trauma has been erased. i definitely understand the gripe with tante heleen being killed off screen and the s1 reaction. inej freezing is very important to me. but so is the fact that inej tells kaz that she struggles too.

inej and kaz have different reactions to touch. inej had to adapt to touch in a way kaz also has not needed to on account of their different circumstances. this is not me saying that kaz would have been able to or any of that, but inej in order to survive DID. kaz became the bastard of the barrel but inej became the wraith. able to disappear in a moment, even if not physically.

inej canonly has to spell out that she struggles even when jesper and nina touch her. idk maybe i'm being too kind but i do think that amita showed hesitation in many cases. we're not in their heads so we need those little context clues; inej hesitating before initiating anything, rarely initiating but responding to the people close to her. the point is just inej is accustomed to swallowing that fear, but that does not mean it is not there. it just presents itself differently! and that's okay! something i care a LOT about in this series is that they show the different manners in which trauma manifests because it is not the same for everyone

i think inej would take issue with nina making a show to turn leoni and adrik into saints

i also think leoni does not particularly like this, she just understands and agreed with the reasoning. however, she was dedicated to the mission in fjerda and thinks that more good could have come if her cover had not been blown, making her and adrik unsafe

she does not resent nina for this and does believe much good comes from it. she chooses to focus on that. they helped people who needed help, and that is worth it in her eyes.

it is a choice, though. leoni chooses to be optimistic. she chooses to see the good. she was saved by someone who was willing to die to save her, who took on the poisons herself so that leoni could live, and she chooses to honor this every day. she was blessed in more ways than one.

she also needs to see the greater good because she knows that she is helping create things that are killing people. this is something that she can struggle with a lot. she needs to believe that the cause is just and that it will end with less suffering overall.