#the metaphor/euphemism of that line is a lot

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I feel like we as a fandom don’t talk enough about “one single thread of gold tied me to you” 🙃

[wisteria-lodge]

Assorted historical notes for the second chapter of my jedtavius fic (happy pride everybody...)

~ The Thorne Miniature Rooms were the personal project of wealthy American widow Narcissa Thorne (amazing name) who was able to snap up unemployed skilled artisans during the Great Depression and commission hyper-detailed rugs, furniture and decorations. The room Octavius and Jed end up in is “English Bedroom of the Georgian Period, 1760-75.” 

~ Vagina is just the totally neutral Latin word for “sheath.” The neutral Latin word for ‘vagina’ is cunnus (where we get ‘cunt’) and the rude equivalent would be something like spurium, ‘bastard [producer.]’ Romans did go completely ham with referring to a vagina metaphorically as a field, cave, pit, oven, alter, path, crack… but not really as a sheath. What is also interesting is that a lot of these euphemisms for ‘vagina’ were also used to mean ‘anus’ (literally ‘ring’)  because the Romans didn’t really divide sex along the lines of gender. They more divided along the lines of sex acts, and whether you were a top or a bottom. 

Octavius, therefore, is not really bothered by being interested in men, but by being a bottom/being the ‘penetrated’ partner. The Latin verb for 'facefuck; is irrumo, and is honestly fine, in a macho kind of way. However, the word for 'cock sucking' is fello, and is a gigantic insult. Being a guy on the receiving end of things was more okay when you were younger and more twinky, but the older, more masc and more powerful you got - the more of a problem it became. The Romans got the idea of the erastes / eromenos relationship from the Greeks, where the erestes (lit ‘lover’) was meant to be older, more powerful, more masc, and definitely the top, while the eromenos (lit ‘beloved’) was younger, prettier, more innocent, and the bottom. 

(Obviously there were lots and lots of relationships that did not fit into this formula. Ancient writers absolutely had debates about whether Achilles or Patrocles was the top, and it is very funny.) 

~ If Octavius is a Movie!Roman, then Jed is a Movie!Cowboy, and more specifically a train robber.

He’s got the black hat (bad guy coded.) He’s got full gloves instead of fingerless glovelets (bad guy coded. It is VERY rare to see a good guy wear two gloves that conceal their hands. For one recent example, note how in Our Flag Means Death, Ed wears fingerless glovelets when he’s a good guy, then switches to full gloves after he goes villain and becomes ‘the Kracken.’) It would have been very easy to give Jed a sheriff’s star, but that's not what the film does. The first thing the character does in the franchise is tie Larry to the train tracks, villain style. It obviously doesn’t work, but that’s the basis of the joke.

(and as always, thank you to J.N. Adams and his very dry but very comprehensive monograph The Latin Sexual Vocabulary)

[melit0n]

for the lyrics thing: “there’s something in the way you lay / that makes the dead switch graves / you take your leave” from Jericho. is “you lay” a euphemism for sleeping around (so the person is so sexually active that they make the dead roll in their grave)? or is it saying that the person is so wonderful that they can even move the dead? i’ve never been able to figure it out so i’d love to hear your thoughts!

I was hoping someone would ask about the Two ep! Just my luck, thank you anon <33

In the UK, and in America as well I'm pretty sure, "lay" is used as slang for having sex with someone, so you're right on that part, definitely. However, the line "there's something in the way you lay" brings both negative and positive connotations to me. He's saying 'there's just something about you. The way you look like that.' There's either a sense of stillness and serenity with it; a calm brought about by the way they lay, possibly asleep next to their partner.

On note of the next line, which I'll talk about in a moment, a large amount of people are known to 'sleep like they're dead', and others note that having Sleep Paralysis feels like death. The Dead are often confused for the sleeping as well, as long as they don't have any noticible abnormalities.

Even though two is quite sexually charged, I mean hey, take a look at Nazareth, I'd like to go with it being they're just so wonderful, or, in the least, appear to be so.

"Enough to make the dead switch graves" Is a stupidly powerful line. Whoever this is is just asleep, or sleeping around, and they have enough authority to make the dead switch graves.

In addition to this, a typical euphemism you may hear is 'make the dead roll in their grave'. It's one thing to do something so disgusting that you make the dead roll around, but this is something enough for these corpses to get reanimated, dig their selves out, get up, walk to another grave, and switch. This person's mere existence is potent enough that it causes the deceased to get up and leave.

It gives the vibe of a shift in the natural order of things, if that makes sense.

Plus, plus, in Islam (I know, I'm back at the religion again, bare with me lads), after a person has died, it is believed they will rest in their grave until The Day Of Judgement where they will be full body resurrected and either be taken to Paradice or Hell. Aka, the corpse will be reanimated to be eternally judged. There's also a similar idea in Christian theology; some denominations believe they die and either straight up go to Heaven or Hell, or will wait in their grave to be reanimated and judged on Judgement Day. Just something to think about.

Further, Jericho is the 'oldest city in the world', and makes an appearance in the Bible and the Qur'an; Israelites conquer the city and destroy it's protective walls. Nazareth was the home of Mary in the Bible and also where she received Annunciation. Calcutta is the old name for the capital of British India (now called Kolkata). Overarching theme of big cities with violent histories.

Lastly, we have "you take your leave". It's sung in a very final tone, if you get what I mean. Basically a 'you leaving isn't a big deal...but it means a lot to me. You've hurt me; again.'. There's not much to analyse here; it's simple and it's final. Whoever this is is gone, either 'dead' and so thoroughly disgusted/angered by Vessel that they've reanimated themselves and walked off, and Vessel will spend his time dissecting old encounters and feeding off of whatever he can salvage.

On the note of 'death', a bed can also be a grave for some people, either a metaphorical one or a literal one.

[moreespressoformydepresso]

re: ask game

⭐️ i would love to read your director’s commentary on When The Clock Stops Ticking (We'll Be Painted Red) :D

Oh boy what have you unleashed? I hope you have some time because I will not be able to contain myself to one thing this time.

I spent months on this fic, there is so much.

Instead of the doomed endeavor that is organizing this mess or singling out a single topic to talk about at length, I'm gonna go through the fic chronologically and pick the things most important to me. If you want more afterward, don't worry. I will have more.

So the opening and closing lines mirror each other, and fragments of it come back periodically so we'll start there. There's a lot of red imagery in here for fairly obvious reasons and some hidden double meanings. There will be a lot of that tbh. The more explicitly stated meaning is, of course, the usage of red as a euphemism and/or metaphor for blood. It's a way to show Treech's changing perception of the world as everything he's living through starts to affect him in both big and subtle ways. Hence why parts of that opening line keep popping up throughout the fic. While we're talking about that line, lets actually take a look at the wording:

"Blood coated the iron, colored the floor and the rubble, splattered his clothes."

The way it's written isn't really how a normal person would think on a day to day basis, is it? It's a lot more flowery, especially with the euphemism. It's almost like he's thinking about paint on a canvas in an art studio rather than Teslee's blood, which is intentional. He's using this language, this metaphoric description, in order to avoid acknowledging what it actually is. He doesn't want to think about the fact that he just killed someone or that he's about to kill someone else. Originally the fic was supposed to start a little later, right before he kills Lucy Gray, but I decided to move it back a little and start by introducing his current state. The first few paragraphs are slow, with Treech mostly considering his survival options and the unbearable heat. It's in part to introduce where we're at in the games and in part a way to show he's distancing himself from what he's about to do, which only becomes apparent at the mention of footsteps. It's only then that we realize he's about to attack Lucy Gray, who's introduced by her fluttering dress rather than her actual name or face. She's the rainbow songbird, a stage sensation, rather than the actual Covey girl who made it to the top 3 in the games. It's easier for Treech to reconcile killing someone whose face he can't see or whose identity he doesn't think about than it is to kill someone who he knows had a family waiting on them, and it's only later on that he lets go of that mentality, which we'll get back to.

Red comes back later when he drags Lucy Gray to Reaper's morgue, as it's the color of the flag. Treech doesn't explicitly call it out, but he does refer to the color of the flag as blood red, so that in combination with the euphemistic usage from earlier leads to imagery of the flag being a literal pool of blood. Panem is literally built on blood to the point where it's represented by it. It's symbolized by it. It's celebrated by it, as the anthem is sung to the flag, which is hung at every national celebration. Then we get another glimpse of whose blood is being spilled as Treech sees Lamina's body, from her red hair to the blood that spread out from her stab wound over the floor after her death. In turn, that red reminds him of Teslee, someone he killed himself. It's a chilling reminder to Treech that he grieves for Lamina over what happened to her, despite having done that exact thing to two other children, strengthening the guilt he already feels but is trying to ignore. Thoughout the entire fic, Treech consistently sees red as the color of blood and it haunts him, illustrated by the last sentence of the story:

"Blood coated the iron, colored the floor and the rubble, splattered his clothes. 

It drenched his hands, too."

It's the exact same sentence, with two key differences. Firstly, there's the adition of it drenching his hands, an obvious play on the saying "to have blood on one's hands" due to the three deaths he mentally attributes to himself. Secondly, there's no longer a euphemism. There's no more paint imagery, erasing the distance between Treech and the events of the story. It's a show of his loss of innocense (as he's no longer capable of making himself see it as just paint) the same way him no longer swinging his legs on the beams was. Reaper actually calls him out on the second one, playfully calling him a child, but that's why it's so important (to me) that I specifically call out that he no longer does it when he climbs back up after Reaper's death. Treech didn't know Teslee or Lucy Gray, but he did know Reaper. He didn't witness Lamina's death, only the aftermath, but Reaper died right in front of him. That combination kind of shatters him mentally, hence why he spends the last parts of the story so aimless and unfocused. I'll get back to that. Regardless, the one thing more powerful than a euphemism here is the lack of one, especially because Treech is very metaphorical in his thought process. He's an art kid who writes the plays his theater group performs, he even got his hands on some pre-Panem works, and I tried to let that be reflected in the way he thinks about the world. He draws lots of parallels to District 7 and there's lots of metaphors and euphemisms in his inner voice, that's just his usual way of being which he uses to deal with his situation. So when that all falls away for the hard truth, it shows he's lost part of who he is. There are metaphors in the ending paragraphs because it's such an integral part of who he is to describe the world like that, but in the end it's not how it used to be. There's a rawness now and while most of him is still him, in the end he's not the same person he was hours ago.

Now, aside from this obvious euphemism, red also has a symbolic meaning. It's a little dark in context to the story, but it's there. Red is, after all, the color of passion. The color of anger. The color of love. And these three things come back in the story quite a lot. Yes, Treech has killed Teslee and kills Lucy Gray, but he did it with as much compassion as he could. Both died quickly, with one life-ending strike of the axe. In the end, none of them deserved to go home any more or less than the others, and all of them fight just as passionately to get home. Every single tribute was trying to get someone home, whether that's themself or someone else. When Reaper lays dying, Treech tries everything to keep him alive despite knowing it's useless because he doesn't want to let go. He still has that drive to try, even when he knows it won't do anything. Treech is literally drenched in red in that scene as the blood seeps into his clothes and stains his hands and arms, which is both incredibly traumatizing imagery to him and a metaphoric representation of what he's feeling in the moment. He's too filled with passion to keep someone alive to really accept that he has to give up. He's also too filled with love. It's not very explicitly romantic between them, not like Meet Me In The Stars (When There's Nothing Left) was, but the undertones are definitely there. Think to the hyacinths Treech uses for Reaper's figurine. Specifically the myth of Hyacinth and Apollo. In that final scene, Treech loves Reaper too much to let him go and accept that he'll have to die. Several times, he basically begs the universe to give them even just a second longer together. Life is leaving Reaper's body and it's fueling Treech's fiery desire to keep fighting because to love is to lose and he's lost too much already. You can see it as platonic love or ignore the red metaphor entirely, but I won't. These two have my entire heart and they can keep it because I'm writing the Vipsania POV rn to create some setup for later.

Red is also the color associated with anger, which comes back in the fic too. Because while Reaper and Treech hide the bodies of the dead beneath the red flag as a show of respect and care, and while they spend their happy moments separated by it (one on each side of the flag, literally two kids and the love between them), they also rant over it. They sit on the beams, high above that sea of red, and spew venom at the unfairness of it all. At the pain they've had to endure. They fuel the flame of love in each other just as much as the flame of hate, because they understand each other. Treech bitterly talks about Vipsania the way he's wanted to all week, but didn't know who to talk about it to. Lamina's mentor was nice, and she'd been having a hard enough time already so he didn't wanna burden her with it. But Reaper? Reaper gets it. And he can see that Vipsania cares at least a little, but he doesn't push it because he understands. Just because she changed her mind doesn't erase the terrible way she treated him, and Reaper gets it. They understand each other's anger and they love each other all the more for it.

The flag here also encapsulates Treech's feelings on Vipsania as a whole, specifically the dichotomy between his care for her and his utter disgust and pain at what she's put him through. She let him starve to win the prize and Treech will never know for sure how much Vipsania did for him and how much she did for herself even when she did start to care, because not even she knows that. In everything I write, Vipsania has a long road of becoming a better person and most of it is spent convincing herself she's not doing it for him. In this universe, it's actually only at the end of the games that she admits to no longer giving a damn about the prize. It takes her watching him face death for five days straight to fully realize that over time it stopped being about winning and it started being about getting him home alive. The only real sign we get in the games is the water she sends him to stop Reaper from killing him, and that's entirely between the lines. He's not in the headspace to consider things and realize that Vipsania would have won the prize regardless of whether he lived or died. As Highbottom said, their survival isn't a necessity. Vipsania could've sat back and waited it out but instead tried what she could to save his life. The prize was hers, Treech had more sponsors that Reaper and has been far less controversial, and his beautiful singing won a lot of hearts, but Vipsania would have burned that prize if it got Treech out of the arena alive. It'll become more clear why she didn't do so again in that Vipsania's Version fic I'm working on. Regardless, Treech doesn't know that she cares about him, at least not for certain, so he's feeling very confused about her. He can acknowledge that she's changed over time, but that doesn't mean he has to like what she's done to him.

Red means a lot of things, and that contrast between the different interpretations that all work at the same time felt very fitting for me. It's kind of the theme of the whole stor, something can be beautiful and ugly at the same time. After all, the story is about love, romantic or not. Red is everywhere, and it's both the best thing in the arena and the worst thing. Love can be wonderful and it can be horrible, it hurts but it's worth it until it isn't. You wish you'd never felt it so the end wouldn't be so painful but at the same time you don't know how you'd have lived without it. If Treech wasn't so attached to Reaper his death wouldn't have hurt so much, but their time together meant so much to him. It showed him life's worth living, even if the loss that followed left him unsure of how to continue on. We live for the good moments, but they're what makes it hurt so much more when they end. That's honesly Treech's experience in a nutshell.

I can't believe I've gone this long just talking about a color what is wrong with me? I had a lot more to say but this is stupidly long so I'll go to the things I've already mentioned and try to wrap this up. I was gonna talk about my choice of timing and the stupid amount of foreshadowing in Reaper and Treech's conversation or the stuff I cut out but uhm... Maybe another day. I need to post this eventually after all if I discuss everything this post will take me as many months as the actual work took me.

So I mentioned before that Treech starts out removing himself from everything surrounding him by seeing everything in terms of the games and only the games. Lucy Gray is the rainbow girl, the girl from 12, the songbird, because that public, manufactured perception of her is a façade and he knows that. When he kills her, he's even further removed from reality by relating the snake she throws at him back to an everyday scenario back home. It's just another block of wood he's gotta hit, and Lucy Gray herself is just the lumber he works with on a daily basis. It's only when she's dead that he gets away from that thinking just enough to try and give her memory as much respect as he can, but despite that his descriptions of everything are flowery like he's writing a poem or a script to a shakespearian play. It's still doing it's damnest trying to avoid the harsh reality, even when he's face to face with it. It's a sort of shield he's built up over the course of the games that really solidified when Lamina died. If he goes cold, he can't break. However, once he and Reaper enter their awkward truce that ice he's grown around himself starts to melt and things get difficult, because as he lowers the shield he's gaining a friend, sure, but he's also leaving himself vulnerable. Reaper lets him forget the reality of their situation, but that means that when it comes crashing back in it's all the more painful. Over the course of his conversation with Reaper, the metaphors and flowery language stop being a constant shield and starts becoming an attempt to put into words all the ways in which Reaper makes him happy. So when Reaper dies, all he has left are his raw feelings with none of the pretty words to make them seem softer. He uses metaphors, but they're not artsy or pretty. Instead of kids games and the everyday life he found joy in back in 7, it's ice cold rivers and harsh winters that can easily take one's life. Instead of having fun climbing trees it's drowning in a frozen lake. And there are far fewer metaphors than before because Treech is too emotional to make it sound fancy. He's trying to process this but he can't and it's literally taking away who he is.

Finally, I want to point out that I put plenty of thought into all the times Treech nearly got himself killed in this story, because it will come up in that (far shorter) Vipsania's Version. Most of it will be focused on her complicated relationship with Treech and the guilt she feels for how focused she was on herself and stupid High School drama when she should have been worried about the literal child whose life she was responsible for, but the rest will be showing a more complete version of what happened than Treech can give. Specifically in regards to all the times he nearly got himself infected with rabies due to not being aware Reaper has it. There are moments where Treech nearly drinks from the same bottle as him and when they're sharing the apples one gets Reaper's saliva on it. It's only his insistence that Reaper keep it after his stomach growles that saves Treech. These moments go together with the slowly escalating symptoms Reaper is showing to make Vipsania tear her hair out worrying about him. Treech didn't know rabies was even in the equasion, so he's having a severe case of observer's bias here. Sure, Reaper is starting to behave a little eratically, but that could be the dehydration and heat. Treech has never experienced such severe heat before, so it's probably just something he doesn't understand. The loss of focus and confusion definitely tracks with Treech's own experience in this case, and the irritability... Well, they're in the hunger games. Of course Reaper's irritated! So to him nothing particularly bad is going on until the hallucinations because he doesn't have the information available to make rabies the most logical explanation, especially since that means Reaper is going to die and as I've explained Treech is having quite a case of denialism here.

The denial is part of the grieving process, which he's already going through at the start of the story and which he goes through again with Reaper. Once he's gone through the stages of disbelief, denial, anger, and bargaining (least explicit, it's the part where he's going through all the things he would do to get Reaper to stay with him), he ends up at depression. There's inklings of acceptance in the part where he starts singing, but after Reaper finally dies he goes right back to depression. Just mixed in with the guilt that's been popping up all throughout the story but has now involved into a whole state of being. It's not helped by the fact that he has enough grounds to blame himself here. Lamina, he couldn't have done much about without an alliance. Teslee he didn't know, so he can cling to the fact she'd have to die for him to live anyway no matter how guilt-stricken he is, but Reaper is the final straw. Because he didn't kill Reaper, but his friend killed himself specifically to protect him. So basically the guy did die because of him, even though he would have died anyway. That's a hard reality to accept, so Treech sticks with the part where Reaper's throat gets slit and doesn't have the emotional energy to think of much else. It's all too much for him. These past few days have been so draining on a deep emotional energy that his only relief was Reaper. Now that Reaper's gone, Treech now not only has a massive heap of extra guilt to deal with, he also has to deal with the many regrets he can't fix anymore. For example, the implied feelings Treech has for Reaper won't be resolved (in this timeline) and he's coming to terms with the fact that he'll never get to admit them and get closure. Reaper literally saved his life, by sacrificing himself but also by stopping him from accidentally catching rabies several times without knowing it. And Treech will never be able to thank him for it because Reaper is gone. All these kids are gone, and there's nothing Treech can do but wait to go back home and try to move on, so he kind of aimlessly wanders through the arena figuring out any way to give them respect because what else is he supposed to do?

His conversation with Reaper reminded him of all the ways in which these kids deserved to live, but it's too late. They're already dead, and all he can do is try and make sure they're remembered. So he uses every district funeral practice he knows of in an attempt to show them the respect they deserved, but also in a way to try and fill the void in his heart left by the loss he's just faced. To distract himself from the confusing emotions grief, guilt, and the general stress of the past few days have caused him to feel. His time with Reaper made him feel literally warm, and now that he's gone and night is falling, he's cold and going numb with shock as he's screamed out the emotions of the moment. He doesn't know what to do as he literally freezes up both physically and mentally, leaving him to try anything to pass the time in hopes he'll have figured it out once he's done. Spoilers, he doesn't figure it out. At the end of the story Treech is kind of out of it, almost more of a wandering ghost than the literal ghosts surrounding him.

Oh yeah btw if you really wanna hate me, there's some minor implications of ghosts. Reaper's when Treech cleans him up in the morgue and Lamina's when he's sitting alone on the beams and talking himself out of contemplated suicide.

Throughout the story, Treech refers to the arena as a tomb haunted by the ghosts of the other kids, and in the end it's almost like he's the one haunting the arena, detached from his body as he tries to process everything that's happened and come to terms with the fact that it's over now. There's no more maybe's left because everyone is dead. Even him, because while he's still breathing he's lost everything in the span of days and he's so riddled with grief and guilt that he'll have to build himself from the ground back up. Now that there aren't any threats left in the arena to worry about and he's gonna go home, he has to truly contend with the fact that he's the only one who made it out. Reaper, Dill, Lamina, Teslee, everyone, they all had families, and he's the only one who'll see theirs again. In the end the only thing that keeps him going is the fact that he's the soul survivor, so if he dies too it'll all have been for nothing. They'll all have died for nothing. Now he has to take that responsibility, no matter how tempting it is to give up and end himself so he won't have to deal with the emptiness anymore. Even when the what-ifs haunt his every thought and the memories will plague his nightmares, he has to keep going. It's a show that when Treech calls himself a selfish coward he's lying his ass off. Being a scared kid doesn't make him a coward, and while he may be tempted to do the selfish thing, he always chooses the selfless option in the end, which is the important part. He brought Lucy Gray to the morgue despite the dangers, he insisted Reaper take the water and food when he felt the other needed it more, and he stopped trying to save Reaper and instead tried to comfort him when he realized there was nothing he could do and Reaper deserved to be comforted in his last moments. Especially since Reaper didn't mind dying if it meant Treech got to live. And in the end, his motivation to keep going is entirely selfless. Even when he doesn't think he can handle living anymore, he keeps going for his family and for the other tributes. No matter how much Treech self-depricates, he proves himself wrong all throughout the story. I'll cap this post here because uhm... This is a lot, and although I could talk/type about this for ages I do have a sense of when a post gets too long, but as a nice little bonus gift have this cut piece of dialogue that I didn't feel fit quite right into the story, it's right after Treech tells Reaper about his late night sneaking and stealing with his friends:

"One time we defaced the peacekeeper barracks while we were at it.”

“Are you really admitting this on live camera?”

“Oh fuck uhm… Whoops? D’you think they can hear our conversation clearly?”

Against his slightly delusional hopes, Reaper nodded with a certainty that was impossible to go against. Even when, a second later, he suddenly looked a lot less certain for some reason. Looking around slightly dazedly, Treech searched for a little bit before his eyes fell over the camera. 

“H-Hey uhm… hey mom, and dad. I don’t know if you’re, like, watching but… Sorry about that. And sorry for worrying you.” He looked away from the camera for a second, contemplating the pros and cons of doubling down, before deciding this was as good a time as any to have a bout of teenage rebellion. “In my defense- The peacekeepers that caught us thought it was hilarious.”

“You were caught?!”

When he turned back to Reaper, he couldn’t help but feel slightly sheepish at the worried and exasperated look. Kind of like the look of a scolding parent, but with some confusion mixed in as a reminder that the other was also a kid who knew what standard peacekeeper behavior was like. 

“Ha, yeah, when we were almost finished. Technically they didn’t catch me, but I came out of my hiding spot once I realized they weren’t gonna shoot us on the spot. Solidarity with my buddies and all that.”

“I can’t believe they let you all get away with that!” Reaper exclaimed, with a voice that made it sound like he was having an actual crisis. 

“Well this was in the Fringe... It’s not like we were writing anything bad. Call it street-art in an… intentionally unfortunate place.” He smirked slyly. It melted off his face quickly though. “We only did it because we knew who was in those barracks. They don’t mind our antics. If anything, they found it even funnier than we did. If we’d tried it with anyone else…”

“You’re even ballsier than I thought you were. Won’t any of you get in trouble back home since you’re saying this?”

[snekthedemonnoodle]

SAI theory

We all know Scaled And Icy, right? Okay. So, I saw this theory about it that I wanted to share. (I found this on Reddit and copied a lot of it and sorry if this has been posted before.)

So, in SAI, the Bishops brainwashed Tyler and made him write happy songs about all the Bishops. That is why it sounds happier and is more upbeat than anything TØP has done before. Each Bishop is named after a song on Blurryface. So, if you really think about it, there will always be one Blurryface song that matches a SAI song.

Polarize and Good Day

Polarize is about anxiety and Tyler's inability to separate himself from Blurryface. It's a bad realization, and that's what Lisden represents. Good Day is about life drastically changing for the worse. Good Day is Tyler singing in kind of a shocked deny, deny, denial.

Heavydirtysoul and Choker

Both of these songs have a fear of the unknown. HDS is kind of a meltdown, comparing Blurryface to an internal demon. But the last line of Choker, 'The rear view only blinds you', means to just keep running and you'll never see Blurryface. (I was also thinking that it could have something to do with the HDS music video.)

Doubt and Shy Away

Doubt is about being stuck in a toxic cycle about self confidence. Reisdro is the Bishop of cycles about mental health. The only thing that can break the loop is Shy Away, which is about encouraging people to try new things and forget about who they are. Shy Away has tons of metaphors and euphemisms about 'breaking the cycle'.

Lane Boy and The Outside

Even on a surface level, both songs are unhappy with the music industry. Vetomo is the Bishop from Lane Boy, and he represents a dislike for conformity in general. The Outside is also unhappy, but from the other side. It's complaining about conforming being a difficult task due to an always changing mainstream.

Stressed Out and Saturday

Stressed Out has themes of dissatisfaction about every day life, which is what Nico represents in that song: your depression that paves the rest of the way for Dema. But Saturday, on a surface level, sounds like one of the least depressing Twenty One Pilots songs. But if you look at the themes of drug use by the phrase 'medicating in the afternoon' references to the vast ocean and a tight fishbowl, and implied seasonal depression if the days of the week mentioned in the chorus represent time periods longer than days suggest that the disjointed, chaotic but happy life in Saturday isn't so happy at all. Honestly, chances are that Tyler is probably dissociating in Saturday, which also means that the good feels in Saturday don't exist, and that it's just Nico's propaganda track about how depression does not exist if you forget about it.

Fairly Local and Never Take It

Never Take It and Fairly Local is probably the most direct match. In Fairly Local, Tyler tells a story about not listening to himself out of fear that Blurryface might show up. Andre represents a fear of minds that aren't yours and a fear of manipulation, and in Never Take It this is taken literally, where Tyler sings about ignoring people who are not yourself and listening to everything your mind has to say. Every pre-SAI TØP song is the complete opposite of that, but none more so than Fairly Local.

Ride and Mulberry Street

Like Lane Boy and The Outside, these songs are opposites on the issue of fear of life changing that Listo represents. Ride is about how life moves way too fast for Tyler, and that he is moving slowly in life. Overthinking kind of causes this entire song. In Mulberry Street, the same feeling of isolation because of life changing is there. Except in Mulberry Street, it is stated that ignoring it and embracing the moment isn't so bad.

Tear in My Heart and Formidable

Both of these songs are the 'love songs' of Blurryface and SAI, dedicated to the closest people in Tyler's life. Tear in My Heart is one of the most heartfelt songs about Jenna. Tear in My Heart introduces Sacarver and Formidable is his propaganda track, but Formidable is also a subtle encouragement to suppress feelings from Dema. Formidable is quite a sweet song, but the line 'my loyalty will bore you' suggests that Sacarver and the rest of Dema is most alive when Tyler is in his head alone.

Goner and Bounce Man

These songs are, again, opposite takes on a problem. Goner is about the final standoff between Tyler and Blurryface, to search for an outcome. Bounce Man's outcome is no outcome- the entire songs is a cue to run or escape from someone or something. Nills, the Bishop representing conclusions, and his SAI propaganda track is completely contradicting his Blurryface song. Bounce Man is telling people to just keep running from their own Blurryfaces. A lifelong run away from your own head. Both of these songs are running, but one to Blurryface, the other away.

What can we take away from all that?

Well, SAI is definitely propaganda and fits in with the Trench and Dema lore. This also means that Good Day, Choker, Shy Away, The Outside, Saturday, Never Take It, Mulberry Street, Formidable, and Bounce Man are against TØP's true beliefs somehow.

But wait, what about No Chances and Redecorate?

If the rest of the tracks on SAI are Tyler being controlled by Dema, then No Chances and Redecorate are what is really going on inside Dema.

A theory I saw and really liked about No Chances is it comes directly after the end of Trench, and Tyler is in an argument with the Bishops and the Banditos. Tyler wants to leave Dema and is ready to die trying, but the Banditos are telling him to wait and that they will come rescue him. Meanwhile the Bishops are telling Tyler that he doesn't stand a chance leaving Dema and that they will always come back for him.

In the beginning of Redecorate, there's a little 'Oh, oh, oh', but it kind of sounds like laughing. It could be the Bishops laughing at Tyler and/or Clancy's pain and they (the Bishops) are enjoying it. Redecorate could be Clancy's last letter.

Wow. That was a lot. If you've made it this far, kid, thank you for reading. Stay alive |-/

[lipslikethegardensofbabylon]

#ttpd analysis day nine - Guilty As Sin?

there are not enough words to convey how in love i am with the repeated motif of love being a religion. ex, sacred prayer i was there, stained glass windows in my mind, we bless the rains on Cornelia street, lord save me, etc etc etc. it’s difficult to neatly identify all of the lyrics this track parallels but the two primary songs are False God and ivy. this is one of my fave tracks she’s ever done and my only hot take is that this should’ve been a track 13. without further ado -

drowning in the Blue Nile - this line is genius for all of the implications, yes it’s a band, it’s also that (continued) metaphor for depression (ocean wave blues, I’m with you even if it makes me blue, etc), and in discussing with @aslowmotionlovepotion she also said denial is not just a river in egypt

falling back into the hedge maze is one of my favorite lyrics, there’s something so deeply romantic to me about falling (or as she says, crashing) fully into someone and getting tangled up/lost in the feelings. if you follow the imagery and previous tracks she basically describes being lost at sea, clinging (even white knuckling) the raft, and it’s almost like she comes to shore and enters this Alice in Wonderland type labyrinth as partially a reprieve but there’s also this residual guilt (am I allowed to cry?). I just love the imagery; she describes something lush and green when she could’ve described it more clinically like a chess game as she did in Dear John. idk it just speaks volumes to me. continuing with the lush imagery, the song parallels a lot of ivy

one slip and falling back into the hedge maze /your ivy grows and now I'm covered

oh, what a way to die, I keep recalling things we never did/I'd live and die for moments that we stole

my boredom’s bone-deep/I’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones

these fatal fantasies/I wish to know the fatal flaw

If it’s make believe/I can’t stop you putting roots in my dreamland

what if I roll the stone away/my house of stone

it’s a fire, it’s a goddamn blaze in the dark and you started it/my sheets are ablaze

also the religious imagery and the False God (my other beloved) parallels are just

throwing my life to the wolves or the ocean rocks/we were stupid to jump in the ocean separating us

oh, what a way to die/remember how I said I'd die for you?

why does it feel like a vow we'll both uphold somehow?/we might just get away with it

religion's in your lips/messy top lip kiss

the altar is my hips/what if he's written "mine" on my upper thigh?

what if the way you hold me is actually what's holy?/I know heaven's a thing, I go there when you touch me

I choose you and me religiously/even if it's a false god, we'd still worship this love

I keep these longings locked in lowercase, inside a vault could be directly referring to folkmore. it could also be journal entries, poetry, or woodvale! (jk about the last part, lol). but i think the most obvious connection would be to loml on the same album, there are also religious lyrics within that track, but in going through the album I’m trying not to fully discuss later tracks until it’s their turn in the tracklist.

i also want to include this little bit

"La petite mort", from French: Small death, is an expression meaning "short loss or weakening of consciousness / consciousness".

it’s interesting considering the sex/orgasm euphemism and how closely it follows the repeated glimmers of death in Guilty As Sin? these fatal fantasies/building up like waves crashing over my grave/oh, what a way to die/they're gonna crucify me anyway

ending it with the dreamy am I allowed to cry? also reminds me of gold rush which “takes place inside a single daydream where you get lost in thought for a minute and then snap out of it”

[sonder-writes]

As a non-linguist, how do you analise those sorts of transcripts? Looks super intriguing.

oh! in an analytical commentary, what I was taught the main things you look for first up are the situational and cultural context, the audience, the Jakobson function of the text (poetic, emotive, referential, phatic, conative, or metalinguistic), the register (generally formal or informal), the tenor (the relationship between the author and audience or everyone involved), and the purpose, and also maybe the authorial intent

then you just pick out things from the text/transcript that support these things, which could be anything from what words were used to how the words were used to paralinguistic features such as laughter

all that probably doesn't make much sense to you, unfortunately this isn't something I can teach you in one tumblr post! but I can give you a very basic example using the transcript I wrote (link here)

this one is a little weird because we can either analyse it as a TV show, or as if it's something that happened in real life. I'm gonna analyse it as a real life thing because I think that's more fun

situational context - a funeral held by family who haven't seen each other for a long time

cultural context - you're supposed to be respectful and in grief at funerals, yada yada

audience - each other (the family)

function - there are lots of functions within the text. for example, "he was a monster" (line 15) is emotive because Diego is expressing how he feels towards his father with a metaphor. though the most common function throughout is conative (focuses on the receiver), evidenced by, for example, Diego putting emphatic stress on the second-person pronoun "you" (line 26), followed by the taboo of referring to his brother by the dehumanising name of "Number One" (line 27), which is used just to get a reaction

register - Pogo's speech could be formal, evidenced by, for example, his use of the full name and title "Sir Reginald Hargreeves" (11), archaic language such as "shall" (13), and obfuscating language such as "complicated legacy" (14) which is used as a euphemism for the dysfunction of the Hargreeves family

tenor - there's a distant, cold tenor between the speakers, evidenced by, for example, the non-cooperativeness of the discourse, such as the interruption on line 17. there's also evidence of negative face needs (desire to be free from imposition) being threatened, such as Luther telling Diego to stop talking on lines 25 and 31, as well as positive face needs (desire to be viewed positively) being threatened by Diego insulting Luther on line 32

purpose - everyone besides Diego has the purpose of promoting social harmony throughout the discourse. the promotion of social harmony is evidenced by the formality of Pogo's speech adhering to the social conventions of a funeral by reminiscing about the deceased and putting him in a positive light with cliches such as "I shall forever be in his debt" (12). it's also evidenced by Viktor's utterance on line 21 "no, it's okay, Mum"; he's adhering to the social convention of responding to questions as well as meeting Grace's negative face needs, despite Grace's question being a deliberate change in topic that wasn't adhering to social conventions

so yeah :D feel free to send another ask if you have any more questions (<- me meeting your negative face needs lol)

[talenlee]

Fundie Fucking

Imagine you have a jar for jellybeans. I want you to imagine this jar, and it starts out empty. Now, what happens, when you get married, right, is that the first time you have sex, you put a jellybean in that jar. Then, the next time, you put another jellybean in. Another, and another, and another. You keep this up for the first full year of marriage. And then, in the second year, whenever you have sex, you take a jellybean out. You do that for every single time you have sex after that first year.

By the time you die, you won’t have emptied that jar.

Content Warning: I’m going to talk about things I was taught about sex as a Christian fundamentalist.

The above story was told to me by a teacher, in school. It was a geography lesson.

A little history for my childhood, I suppose. At the age of four I started going to school in the Christian Evangelical cult we were in. This was a deeply fundamentalist cult that built its faith statements on text extraction from the Bible that worked a bit like using a sudoku to find phone numbers. I continued in this schooling system from kindergarten through to year 9. In year 8, the church-school’s pastor and principal both left, and in the ensuing fracas, we committed to leave. My family left this church and moved a hundred kilometers away, where we could reconnect with family, and older support networks that my parents had.

I had nothing, no friends, not really, but y’know, I hadn’t been a kid with friends beforehand.

I started on a new school at this point, for the last three years of school. I’ve talked about how difficult it was to be part of this school with no groundings, and no experience having or making friends. It was extremely hard, which is by no means meant to complain about or fix anything, but it’s still part of the context. I was still, at this point, a fundamentalist, and the school was still a Christian, religious school, with a statement of faith and religious staff. We had Bible lessons in the morning and devotions, and we had prayer before events. It wasn’t a fundamentalist school — it taught evolution! — but it was still compatible with those concerns, and if a parent wanted their student pulled out of a topic, they could pull out.

And somewhere along the line, for some reason, in a geography class, a teacher — who I will note took a swing at me on my last day of school! — shared this Pithy Wisdom about what we could look forward to about our future vision of marriage.

Sex is super important to fundamentalist teaching. It needs controlling and suppressing. Sexuality is patrolled aggressively, as is gender. Behaviour that isn’t adequately straight seeming is for correcting, and interests that are perceived as too driven by sex are a problem too. You can probably guess how these controls happen – women are shamed for engaging in sex, especially if they get pregnant. I’m sure I’ve written about this before. But the point is, sex and its control is important.

Yet, sex comes up a lot. Sex usually comes up with teenagers in a sort of gracious, guess-we’ll-talk-about-it-now-way that also wants to avoid any specific terms. There’s all sorts of euphemism and metaphor used for it, and it’s funny hearing people trying to describe the idea of fucking without ever wanting to invoke the word or even that they could be someone who uses the word. Everything is cloaked under stories and metaphor and that meant that even in the post-fundamentalist space, I was hearing stories about how sex was itself, fundamentally, a sin.

But.

But but but.

There was a promise that once you got married, sex would happen. And it’d happen a lot. And it’d be amazing, and also, because you waited, because you held back, you’d be really good at it. You and your partner, both virgins, would work out sex from first principles together, and because you were both just bursting to get into it, you would have a lot of sex. But the n there was this weird follow-on idea that after you had sex, after you finally got to have sex, you’d just… get bored with it and move on. You wouldn’t have sex any more, because you’d had enough sex. Literally your entire sex life was probably going to last for basically one year, and after that point it would just peter out and you wouldn’t care.

This affected me, of course. Especially these days I see in discourse around incel culture the idea that it is reasonable to want to have sex, that whether or not sex is something you can or can’t have is going to affect your mental health and your ability to actualise. That seems good? that seems healthy. Like, maybe your needs and wants change over time and your sperm aren’t a pack of mayflies waiting to burn out in one short year.

I planned at first to spend this article talking about the things I learned and how it related to me. So far I have deleted the paragraph talking about my own sexuality, what it means and how my life experiences have affected it, over, and over, and over again. Some of it is shame, some of it is fear. Some of it is this weird horror at being told, reassuringly, by strangers that hey, it’s okay, it’s okay for things to be this way, or that way. Don’t feel bad. Like just the idea of being reassured makes me feel bad. There’s a depth to this, something wrong that means even talking about the problem is itself a problem. A terminating experience that keeps coming back to that thought about the jellybean jar.

About how I was taught my sexuality should probably have ended when I was twenty two.

And how part of my brain wonders if that’s right.

Like that’s all screwed up right?

And like, it hasn’t gotten better?

I dunno, it hurts.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[yihrae]

I feel pretty bad. I wish I could describe the extent wherein I did feel bad but it’s very difficult to put into words so I won’t try - I’ll just say I feel bad. I wish I didn’t feel so bad but truthfully sometimes I think I deserve to feel bad. There is an archaic idea that people many centuries ago who felt pain would try and lessen the extent to which they felt it because they thought it must be god who is punishing them for their sins, therefore they believe the pain is deserved, and hence it helps people come more to terms with the pain. But an argument goes that doesn’t actually decrease the pain. God knows where I heard this from (some lecture on pain a long time ago) but I still remember “God I hear you, and I understand I must atone for my sins. But it hurts.”

I’m not religious and I don’t really believe in things like that. But the theory about knowing you deserved something so the punishment meted out doesn’t feel as bad resonates with me on some levels. It feels pretty bad. But it’s deserved. Whenever I know I deserve something I can’t help but futilely surrender and accept it. As in to say, I had it coming. It doesn’t lessen the pain much but it decreases the existential pain of asking what one did to deserve this. I know I am being punished for all my wrongdoings, whether it be recent or ages ago. I cannot really ever fully atone for some of them. I will likely be punished again and again many times in the future. I don’t wish for that to happen. I don’t wish to exist in a reality that permits the punishment of the individual that is me. 

I can’t really escape reality. That’s called escapism. But the problem is that, usually a some point you will be called back down to earth. So maybe escapism is not really a valid solution. What about reckoning with the pain? That’s the only way but I don’t know how to. A lot of people look at taking their own lives as a solution when they don’t know what else to do. It’s like a last desperate attempt to claw back and gain some control over something that you may have lost control over. I believe at a certain time in the past I did think that way. While the feelings causing me to think that way may have certainly remained unchanged, that dangerous line of thought has gradually receded. I think.

Anyway, I wanted to write something. I think if I didn’t write something I’d soon go insane. So I will write something. Everything hurts. From my toe to my left eyelid to the part of the cranium that touches the brain. My chest hurts the most, followed by my eyes and then the ridges of my nose. I don’t think vey clearly. It’s difficult to be rational when the bodily functions responsible for rational decision making are impaired. I wanted to write a story. But I couldn’t quite think up what cryptic, saddening, metaphorical, moving, interesting story that is an euphemism for my pain could be written.

It’s the most difficult to forgive yourself I think. When you forgive others you hold them to lower standards than you hold yourself. At least, for some people I would think that’s the case. They may be going through some unknown struggle after all. Sometimes we are also going through unknown struggles to ourselves. But it is so difficult to forgive ourselves because everything we experience is very clear to ourselves and we think we are in control.

I wish I was a bit kinder. A bit smarter. I wish I applied myself more. My parents used to tell me I was clever I just had to apply myself. I wish I could have somehow made the realisation sometime ago that it’s an important concept that falls outside the scope of just memorising information and recognising patterns. I feel a lot of pain. There are hammers falling on my toes and boxes rattling against my skull. There are icicles running along my upper limbs and I feel very cold. I feel like if I were to lean forward previously consumed food would come hurling forward along with my liver and kidneys and everything else. I feel very sick. I can’t take any Panadol because I don’t have any. I can’t see the doctor because I can’t afford to, nor would I expect the doctor to understand any of the gibberish that comes out from my mouth. Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” describes a man who wakes up as a gigantic bug one day and frightens everyone with his new form. His family members, whom he had previously been supporting, isolate him. This improves marginally over time but decays quickly as they simply cannot adjust to the fact he is a bug now. He dies eventually. There is not really a happy ending. Sometimes I feel like I woke up as a gigantic bug. It’s a slight exaggeration but I’m not sure how else to put it.

I wish I could just turn back the clock a little.

[thegeminisage]

one of many reasons castiel spent the first year of knowing dean trying not to strangle him: dean's weird little winchester-only dialect

i’m fucking obsessed with this right now, so buckle in for a meta. a cool fun (horrible) thing about dean's dialogue is that a good 90% of what comes out of his mouth is:

a pop culture reference ("you're just gonna take some divine bong hit, and shazam, you're roma downey?")

references to real life phenomenon ("i don't wanna wake up missing a kidney in a bathtub full of ice" "try new mexico, i hear he’s on a tortilla")

these also often take the form of nicknames, and dean has a tendency to give people nicknames in general or call them something besides their given name, whether it’s affectionate or rude ("easy there, van damme" "so i’m girl interrupted" furthermore castiel = cas, ezekiel = zeke, etc, see also frequent use of "chucklehead" "asshat" and on the nicer/endearments end "buddy" "pal" "sunshine" etc)

an idiom ("a snowball's chance" "if it smells like a duck...")

slang ("drinking the koolaid" "jonesing for some hooch" not to mention the literal endless amount of words dean uses to refer to killing - gank, waste, juice, ice, etc)

a metaphor ("power up your batteries" "fly me back to my page on the calendar")

a euphemism ("cloud seeding" "i'd have given you an hour alone with her first")

sarcasm (his habit of replying "peachy" or "super" when asked how he is)

wordplay (see: the entire "vampirate" and "werepire" debacles)

completely nonsensical (guessing what happened to a magical artifact: "it was dug up by tomb raiders? it was seized by the king of the dead by warlords?")

said at lightning speed - if you pay attention, dean actually talks a LOT, usually a mile a minute (this makes me feel a way when you recall him being nonverbal for a year at age 4 but that’s another post)

slang IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (casual usage of “guano,” etc)

a lie, a deflection, a joke, etc

or worse, something dean’s NOT saying, deliberately, because he’s one of the most repressed people on earth

the end result of all this being:

dean winchester is utterly infuckingcomprehensible. 

think about this. there's an ENTIRE SECTION on EVERY SINGLE EPISODE PAGE of the spn wiki devoted to JUST explaining dean's pop culture references, because the average viewer won't have seen everything he's talking about either. they have a whole page for this called “hunter’s lingo,” but honestly, it’s not all hunters, just sam and dean’s fucking batshit communication style. even i don't understand dean half the time. SAM gets it, sam speaks it back to dean a lot in the early seasons, but that's because sam and dean are 1. practically two halves of the same person 2. FREAKS. every time we get an episode that involves outsider POV is devoted to them going "what the fuck is WRONG with them?"

enter castiel. technically speaking, the show implies that angels are omnilingual. castiel should understand every language known to man, but knowing the meaning of words doesn't help him understand the following:

pop culture references

references to real life phenomenon

nicknames

idioms

slang

metaphors

euphemisms

sarcasm

wordplay

you get the idea.

listen to me. look me in the eyes. castiel cannot understand a single fucking word that comes out of dean's mouth. my guy laid a hand on dean winchester in hell and immediately fell in love with him and has no fucking idea what he's talking about ever. because not only is dean winchester's way of speaking CLINICALLY insane, and sometimes incomprehensible even to other human beings who are not sam, castiel is an angel, and someone prone to taking things even more literally than other angels do

go back and watch and watch seasons 4-5 especially. the reason cas does so much squinting and head tilting is because every time dean opens his mouth castiel has to open up his mental "dean winchester dictionary" and translate entire paragraphs on the fly, because again, dean never shuts up!

what makes this extra hilarious to me is this gem:

this line is from 5.13. at this point cas has known dean for AN ENTIRE YEAR AND A HALF. what you see here is my guy SNAPPING. cas made an EFFORT in this scene. he asked who glenn close was. he's telling dean that he can't understand him. he is doing his level best to have a normal conversation with this guy he has a crush on and for the life of him he cannot do it (equal but opposite energy to cas blowing up the gas station and motel room in 4.01, tbh)

yes, cas can understand dean's tone. he can use context clues, and he usually gets the general idea. and when cas DOES understand dean's jokes, he laughs at them. the first time we ever see him smile is during their 4.07 heart-to-heart when dean says "it was a witch, not the tet offensive." since cas has knowledge of human history, he knows what the tet offensive is; he got the joke, and he laughed.

but as far as actual dialogue goes, he consistently struggles to keep up. even after metatron gives castiel the pop culture knowledge in season 9, cas struggles to put it to put it to proper use (dean: "you wanna just walk right into the death star?" cas: "what does a fictional battle station have to do with this?"). whenever he asks dean to clarify it's always when he’s most annoyed, like most of the time he knows it would be futile but he's too annoyed to care. (dean: "i don't know who's on first, what's on second!" cas: "what IS second???") i’m pretty sure he spends seasons 4-6 wanting to shake dean by the shoulders and ask him why he is LIKE THIS. 

it takes cas - who, again, is omnilingual - YEARS to begin to acclimate to dean’s speech and start speaking that language back to him. it's season 8 before we start really hearing him use slang, season 9 before he begins to understand wordplay, season 10 before he starts using pop culture references (to other angels, who immediately fail to understand him, which disappoints him immensely), and season 11 before he really gets into metaphors. i don't remember what season he started using "yeah" instead of "yes" but i do know it took a really damn long time. 

and honestly, i don't think cas truly got the hang of it until at least season 11-12. that's something like 7 or 8 YEARS. it’s more than half the time they’ve known each other at the point of the series finale. 

so what's true romance, fellas? it's falling completely and totally in love with the most inexplicable person you will ever meet in your whole 4.5 billion year life, even though you have yet to understand a single thing he's ever said to you. thank you for coming to my ted talk

[spn masterpost]

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Could I request... a drabble of Nancy's children cutting her off and not letting her meet her grandchildren? Or even just a summary of events? 👀

Dear Ask Amandla:

I have a problem with my two grown children that has been ongoing for a while, and I am at my wits' end. Years ago, I made some less-than-perfect decisions, supporting someone who was manipulative and overbearing towards a teenager in his care. I knew that some of what I witnessed was illegal, but allowed it to happen and said nothing.

The person in question was the same age as my younger daughter. I NEVER considered him in any way like her. There were extenuating circumstances! I followed my loyalty to someone who turned out not to deserve it. But when my children found out, years later, they were furious. Not just that I had allowed the mistreatment of someone to happen in my employer's household, but that I had never told them about it. Frankly, my work and home life have always been kept separate. I was an assistant to a powerful man and had little recourse myself.

I have never been charged with a crime, and provided the authorities with anything they asked for when the investigation was underway. But when my children told me I should apologize to the now-grown young man my employer mistreated, I will admit I balked. I certainly never hurt him myself, after all, and don't feel an apology would help either him or me.

He was never significantly harmed during my employment with the powerful man, and it's not like I could pay medical bills or do anything else.

My children were upset with me for refusing to apologize for my part in all this, but I don't think that, eight years after the events occurred, my apology is asked for or even wanted.

My son answers my calls only sporadically, and my daughter - the one who is the same age as the young man who was mistreated - has stopped talking to me entirely. She was six months pregnant when I last heard her voice. It's been so long she must have had the baby by now, but my calls go unanswered and she doesn't respond to letters, emails, or anything else I've tried.

I made a mistake, but it was years ago and I was working hard to provide for my children. After the hard work and love I've shown them, I am absolutely floored that they would cut me off over someone they don't know and who they've never even met. What can I do to have my children in my lives again?

Yours,

BAFFLED IN BERRAS

-

Dear Baffled in Berras,

Baffled, I would love to answer you, but I can sense that there is a LOT you aren't telling me between the lines of what you are. In fact, you probably tried to hide more than you revealed.

It sounds like your children drew a firm line in the sand about what they need to feel comfortable with you. You can choose not to respect that, but if you do, they also are free to choose distance or even total disconnection from you.

If you ask me, the root of their unhappiness is probably your way of remembering things perhaps a bit rosier than they truly were. For instance, you continually call an adult individual's abuse of a teenage boy 'mistreatment'.

It was more than mistreatment, Baffled, wasn't it? And despite your phrasing, you were not helpless to report it. You had plenty of recourse. You chose not to help.

Your children are asking you to take full responsibility for your actions and what those actions enabled, and even just by your letter I think it's clear that you never have.

You can take responsibility and seek reconciliation, or you can choose not to. But your children are adults, and they can and will make their own choices, too.

Right now, it seems like they have chosen to step away. You need to respect that, too.

You can start by cutting out all the euphemisms and metaphors and by calling every single part of it what it is and not what you want it to have been.

You aided and abetted abuse of a minor. That's a crime. It's understandable that your daughter would be horrified to learn that you accepted and enabled that abuse while parenting she and her brother.

Good luck.

Ask Amandla

[horde-princess]

i should be going to bed but instead i think i am going to talk about how despondos is a metaphor about accepting your sexuality and coming out of the closet 😌😌

quick recap the first ones and the horde both represent evangelical christianity (not gonna get into that right now ldkfjdljf just trust me ok). mara led a group of rebel fighters to try and stop these empires from destroying etheria. but the rebels were losing so mara did the only thing she could to save everyone--she transported them to an empty dimension, away from the war... but also away from the magic of the stars and the rest of the universe.

i think the reason they included "friends of mara” as a nod to the old-school gay euphemism “friends of dorothy” is because mara’s rebels are meant to represent older generations of the lgbt community. we were fighting back then too but we also had to hide, as an act of survival against a society and religion that hated our existence. and that’s how it was for centuries.

she-ra is the story of a girl who grew up in despondos, literally and figuratively. her community (the fright zone) taught her to suppress her personal desires / hide in the closet. things only get worse when light hope reinforces these ideas, training her to repress her emotions and especially her sexuality in order to be a good sacrificial christian who would follow the “destiny” that god (the first ones) had planned for her.

what im trying to get at is that despondos is actually a big-picture metaphor for adora’s emotional state throughout the show!! s1-s4 she was trapped in an empty dimension, a closet u might say.... then the stars return, etheria is brought back into the wider universe just moments before she breaks the sword. its one of many examples where she-ra’s setting contributes to character development and here its creating a beautiful backdrop to emphasize that theme of breaking free of religious oppression

one of the final shots of s4 shows adora gazing up at the stars, a visual of how tiny and lost she feels after losing her faith -- but also the wonder of having the whole universe opened up to her after a lifetime of staring into an empty void.

of course as soon as etheria is transported out of despondos / the closet, horde prime is there waiting to attack. 

the crew has mentioned before that the stars in she-ra are kind of a larger metaphor for the political climate in the U.S. The lgbt rights movement here really only gained traction a few years ago and for the first time in modern history our community is starting to feel safe enough to share our identities. but that openness also feels really scary and vulnerable. ik i dont have to remind anyone about the anti-lgbt stance of our last administration, elected by the christian right as a sort of retaliation against recent social progress. every day there seems to be some new headline that treats our existence like a controversy. in some ways it feels like /we/ have just been transported out of despondos..... out of a false sense of stability and now we’re facing a war with a giant horde army lol. ofc other places may have it better or worse and there’s still a lot of work ahead but we’ve seen the she-ra finale so we know how it ends right!! [queue she-ra theme song we must be strong we must be brave!!!!] 🌈💘

ok one more little fun fact and this could just be a coincidence but- this is the first thing anyone says right after etheria goes through the portal, and to me it appears to reference dorothy’s famous first line when she leaves her black and white world and takes her first steps in the land of gay oz

so if you’re buying into my absolutely wild theories here then despondos = kansas and the universe = oz and basically she-ra is a wizard of oz au lsdjkdjldjkfkl

in conclusion!!! despondos is so cool i love it. even without analyzing the details you can kind of intuitively understand the metaphor and it really underscores a lot of different themes in the show, so much so that the setting feels like a character itself which i think is something every story strives for but few have done as well as she-ra imo. i’ll never not be amazed by the writing in this show. ok its 2am hopefully i can fall asleep now thx for reading!! 💖

[demi-shoggoth]

2022 Reading Log, pt. 22

Two of the five books I read in this block are my nominees for best books I’ve read this year.

106. Hummingbirds: A Life-size Guide to Every Species by Michael Fogden, Marianne Taylor and Sheri L Williamson. I love this gimmick. Printing a book of wildlife photography where the animals are life sized is not something that can be done for a lot of taxa, although there are some others out there (like The Book of Frogs). Hummingbirds are a small enough group that such a book can be comprehensive, but not so small that the book isn’t publishable as a book. The photography is, as you would imagine, excellent, and there’s info about their life histories and possible classification changes for the birds as appropriate. Not all species are depicted life size, but about 90% are—the back of the book has shorter entries on birds that they couldn’t get photographs of (in some cases, because they’re extinct or only known from museum specimens).

107. 100 Animals that can F*cking End You by Mamadou Ndiaye. I’ve read books based on blogs, and books based on podcasts. But this is the first book based on TikTok that I’ve read. I’ve seen a few of Ndiaye’s wildlife videos, and they were fun enough that I wanted to check this out. This is also fun, but fairly slight, as is appropriate for a book based on a short video format. One of the things I found especially charming is that the TikTok algorithm’s ban on the words “die” or “kill” is maintained throughout, so there’s lots of baroque euphemisms and metaphors for how lethal these animals are. Animals are rated on a 1-10 Merk scale, with 10 being the most deadly (except not, because humans get a 99, appropriately). Wanna know what animals rate a solid 10? African elephant, Bengal tiger, chimpanzee, crocodile (covered in total, but most of the text is on Nile crocodiles), hippopotamus, mosquito, orca, polar bear. A pretty respectable list.

108. Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine by Anna Della Subin. A nomination for Book of the Year; I loved this. It’s a challenging read, but a very good one, and it made me think. The book is about humans who were seen as divine by other humans in the last 500 years, and how our thoughts on that shaped the philosophy of religion. The theses are twofold: 1) that Western civilization, being built on Greco-Roman philosophy and Christianity, shouldn’t be surprised that humans are seen to have assumed divinity, and 2) these instances were predominately those of the victims of capitalism, white supremacy and colonialism trying to cope with these injustices. We start with Haile Selassie and the Rastafarian movement and several other 20th century instances, move on to how India and its enormity of gods, and how porous the lines seemed to be between gods and men, baffled and angered the British Raj, and then how European colonizers claimed that they were seen as gods by native Americans, and invented the concept of whiteness in the process of enforcing these hierarchies. I learned a lot and highly recommend it.

109. Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost Word by Michael J. Benton, illustrated by Bob Nicholls. The book is written for a YA level audience—late middle school or early high school, and covers fifteen Mesozoic animals (not all of them are dinosaurs; that shouldn’t surprise anyone since it’s a pterosaur on the cover) and what their life appearances were, and how we know. Benton was on one of the teams that first discovered the preservation of melanosomes in dinosaur fossils, so there’s a lot of discussion of feather color and the technique. The highlight of the book is in its pictures—both detailed photographic reproductions of the fossils in question, and Nicholls’ life reconstructions of the animals. There is some weirdness in the text, but I think I’m just the most likely to pick up on it; at one point, Benton implies that descriptions of new species and other taxonomic work is less important than life reconstructions, which: rude.

110. Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle. Another nominee for book of the year, this is a breezier read than Accidental Gods but still contains sensitive issues. Namely, patriarchy, misogyny and rape culture. The book is split into three overarching themes, each of which is related to how it scares men and has been reflected and distorted in horror: daughters, wives and mothers. Some of the stuff in here brought things I have often thought about, or at least occasionally wondered about, into sharp relief; one of the author’s theses is that slasher movies and true crime are popular with young women as ritual catharsis. In a world where women’s bodies and lives are vulnerable to male predation, media that recognizes that danger is important and valued. I also have an uncommon recommendation to go along with this book: read the Resources. There’s commentary on the movies, TV shows and books discussed, which adds some good context and is occasionally very funny.

[writingquestionsanswered]

I want to write sex scenes within my story. I know you described elsewhere how to portray them without being smutty, but I want to put in a little more "heat" into the scenes. How could I describe body parts without it being graphic but also not using stilted technical terms?

Writing Sex Scenes with a Little More Heat

When it comes to naming body parts in sex scenes, you have four options:

1) Technical - penis, vagina, breast, etc.

2) Graphic - c*ck, c*nt, titties, etc.

3) Euphemistic - love muscle, mound, lady pillows, etc.

4) Some combination of the three...

Different readers and writers have their preferences, but many feel that technical terms are stilted, that graphic words are inelegant, or that euphemisms are corny. So, what’s left?

You don’t have to name body parts to add heat to your sex scene!

I know you may be thinking “What??? How can I write a spicy sex scene without naming body parts?” but I’m here to say YOU CAN!!! Naming body parts isn’t the thing that gives sex scenes more heat. In fact, for many readers, naming body parts can actually kill the mood. So, what gives sex scenes more heat? Emotional, sensory descriptions.

Emotion plays a HUGE role in ramping up the heat in a sex scene. Not only does it play a huge role in building the chemistry and sexual tension between the couple ahead of the sex scene, it also plays a big role during it. What is your character thinking and feeling in the moments leading up to, during, and after the sex? What emotions are they picking up from their partner? When you bring the emotions of the characters into it, you can make the reader feel those same emotions, and that alone can raise the heat.

Body language and facial expressions are part and parcel with emotional descriptions. How are their bodies responding to the sensations resulting from the sexual relations? Heavy-lidded eyes, licking one’s lips, open mouth, biting one’s lip, raising one’s hips... these visual sensory descriptions tell the reader a lot and can really spice things up.

Sound is another important sensory description that can kick the heat up a notch. A groan low in the throat, ragged breathing, a gasp or a sigh, an elated giggle, even the creak of a bed or the rhythmic thump of the headboard hitting the wall--these are all things that can bring the reader into to moment and make them sweat.

Smell is a sensory description that can get gross or raunchy if you’re not careful, but it can be very sensual, too. Minty breath, cologne, the scent of someone’s soap or shampoo, the sweet scent of sweat on the neck, or even environmental smells like wood smoke from a campfire or the salty breeze coming off the ocean. There’s lots of room to be clever about it.

Taste is can be used without being raunchy, too. The taste of a kiss can be described, maybe tasting a breath mint on the tongue or wine on the lips. A little bit of salt when kissing the skin, or tasting foods or flavored items used in foreplay. 

Touch and physical feeling is also important. The feel of things like: smooth skin, the bristle of facial hair, taut muscles, satin sheets or whatever surface the couple is making out on. The feeling of hot breath on the neck, the weight of the other person’s body, the sensation of electric sparks or butterflies in the stomach.

Locations and actions can also be described without getting into actual part names. What are the hands doing? They can get tangled in hair, wander below the belt or under the shirt, cup a cheek... What is the mouth doing? Nibbling ears, biting the lip, trailing kisses down a neck.

Word play can also be employed to give things a little more sensuality. Fireworks, tumbling into heaven, being transported to utopia, naked bodies dancing among the stars... if you’re careful not to get too ornate (beware the purple prose) you can usually employ a metaphor, simile, or other word play in a way that turns up the heat in the nicest of ways.

Bottom line: while it’s certainly fine to name body parts if that’s what you want to do (you can typically find word suggestions and guides online--also, Bryn Donovan’s Master Lists for Writers has a list of 500 great words for sex scenes), don’t feel like you have to name body parts just to write a steamy sex scene. Capitalize on emotional, sensory descriptions and you’ll never have to employ a single rod, slit, or bud to get your reader hot and bothered.

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[the-overanalyst]

now that it's evermore season, i think it's time i bring back my favorite theory about my favorite song from the album: ivy.

and no, the theory isn't that they're lesbians (that's more of a fact). it's rather more morbid than that. my theory is that both the speaker and the subject of ivy are dead.

first of all, "where the spirit meets the bones" is a euphemism for graveyard. the lovers meet in a graveyard, and this isn't the only part of the song with such a setting. later in the pre chorus, we hear that "the old widow goes to the stone every day, but i don't." this last bit is interesting, as it reveals that the speaker doesn't go to the graveyard because she's already there (how else would she have seen the widow?). she "just sit[s] here and wait[s]."

now, on to the chorus, where we get two pieces of very deathlike imagery. first, there's "your freezing hand," like that of a corpse. this is also the first line that suggests that the subject is also dead. they may have even died first, which causes the speaker's aforementioned pain.

the second verse sees the speaker questioning the subject about their "fatal flaw," which, in classic tragedies, would be the one character trait that leads to the hero's downfall and often, death. in the song, the subject's fatal flaw is whatever led them to pursue this relationship with a woman who's "promised to another," and this is what will lead to their downfall.

in the third verse/first bridge, we hear the line, "how's one to know i'd live and die..." and in the context of this theory, what stands out is the "i'd," because the word "would" can have two meanings. first is the purely hypothetical, used to communicate what you're willing to do without making the action a reality, in which case this would be a promise of the speaker's devotion. however, "i would" can also mean "i was going to," which crucially changes the meaning by making the living and dying real. i also noticed that the phrase "how's one to know" is only used twice in the song, and both times, it's followed by a morbid line, the first being the one that sets our graveyard scene.

now, it's time we move away from hypotheticals and literary devices and look at the much more straightforward narrative climax of the song: the second bridge. with a "blaze in the dark" and a "fight of my life," this is evidently where it all comes to a head. these, along with the earlier assertion that the speaker's husband was "gonna burn this house to the ground," could be seen as metaphorical (and they probably are) but if you accept their literal meanings, you get a visceral picture of how this story ends because this bridge, chaotic and violent as it is, really does seem like the ending, at least narrative-wise. after this, all that's left is a half-chorus that reads more like an epilogue, fading to black on a "house of stone" that, if we were to circle back to the beginning, starts to look a lot like a tombstone in the place where the spirit meets the bones.

[glitter-bunny420]

A comprehensive essay on the origins of “Friend of Dorothy”

When you call someone a “friend of Dorothy”, it usually implies you’re talking about a gay man but it can also refer to anybody who identifies as a part of the LGBTQ+ community. The phrase was most commonly in the early 20th century to covertly discuss a person’s sexuality while keeping the conversation as tight-knit as possible, to ensure that the person being talked about isn’t put into danger (though given the time period, the phrase was most likely used because people didn’t want straight folks being unjustly killed for being gay rather than because they genuinely care about the safety of gay people). Despite its popularity, the origin of the phrase is not officially known, though some have proposed theories which I will be detailing to you right now.

Dorothy Gale, Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz

The origin of “Friend of Dorothy” can pretty easily be associated with either the books or the much more popular 1939 film. Let’s focus on the books for a second and just how unabashedly queer-coded they are. In the sequel book “The Road to Oz”, the character Polychrome remarks to Dorothy “You have some queer friends” to which Dorothy replies “The queerness doesn't matter, so long as they're friends” - perhaps gay men felt comforted by this line, knowing that Dorothy Gale cares about them even if the real world doesn’t. Even part of the Scarecrow’s iconic line from the first book (”Of course some people go both ways”) can be interpreted as a metaphor for bisexuality, and Princess Ozma’s story could be seen as being reflective of the experiences of trans women - ever since she was a baby, Ozma had to hide herself as a boy named Tip before discovering her true destiny as the ruler of Oz; going off from this description, it’s not hard to think of trans women who spend the first years of their lives being made to live as a boy before realising they were meant to live as a girl (yes, this applies to trans women without dysphoria too, truscum don’t @ me).

Moving onto the film, I’m sure everyone knows the famous number “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” sung by Judy Garland. But probably one of the most interesting facts about the song is that some have attributed it to the evolution of the rainbow pride flag. This is most likely because of Garland’s status as a gay icon. Throughout her life, Garland struggled with self-acceptance, childhood trauma, alcoholism and drug use - something that many gay men related to. Lots of them tended to sneak into Garland’s performances, calling themselves “friends of Dorothy” - creating a perfectly direct link to the euphemism. Additionally, Garland’s death and funeral took place several days prior to the Stonewall Riots, though reports have denied there was a direct correlation between the two events.

Dorothy Parker

During the early 20th century, most notably the 1920s and 1930s, Dorothy Parker was a well-known social activist and had many gay male friends. She would often invite them to her parties, with some gay men using the phrase “friend of Dorothy” to gain entry - they would particularly do this at Parker’s parties at the villas belonging to the Garden of Allah, a famous hotel amongst celebrities. During WW2, many homosexual servicemen from both the U.S. and Britain would form friendships and romances with each other. Not wanting to be discovered, they would use the coded language that Parker famously used in her writings as a form of social networking, especially “friend of Dorothy”, so it would be understandable to attribute the origin of the phrase to Parker.

Welp, that’s all the info I was able to find about the possible origins of “friend of Dorothy”. I hope you enjoyed reading this and have a happy rest of Pride Month! :)