#this is a year old but i dont think i ever posted it

[mananea]

Mana knits the boys sweaters for Christmas!

[kingdomsaurushearts]

[astranauticus]

soliloquy

(edit once again i drew something with my ipad screen brightness too high and now that i've posted it nothing is visible. sad!)

[crimeronan]

the VAST MAJORITY of teenage girls are actually very nice and doing their best and even when they ARE mean, it's typically because of the stress of going through an incredibly transformational developmental period while having 6833487 responsibilities and no basic human rights. like now that i'm nearing 30 i have a great deal more love and understanding about this than i did as a kid, you will Never catch me dragging/demonizing teen girls for buying into harmful tiktok and instagram trends or whatever. They Are Doing Their Best .

with that said.

it WAS pretty funny going thru adolescence in the late aughts / early 10s when the most mainstream teen music was demi lovato's "who says i can't wear my converse with my dress" stuff.

because EVERY girl who was ever mean to me LOVED that "i'm a brave trendsetting individual who can Be Myself even if other people Don't Understand Me" pop music....

....while also being like "oh, that girl is CREEPY. don't you know she listens to METAL. and is UGLY. and doesn't TRY TO LOOK PRETTY. and is WEIRD. and UGLY. and SHE LISTENS TO METAL...."

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

Hi hello I watched all of carmilla in a weekend when I was 17 because a student teacher who in retrospect I had a bit of a crush on mentioned that she knew one of the actresses. also I am pretty invested in all your recent vampire stuff because I watched iwtv in 2 days last week because your edit intrigued me

oh hiiii 🫶 thank you for indulging me. thats so cool that you watched iwtv! did it live up to the expectation?

i also watched carmilla at 17! or like, 17-19. i found it when s2 had just started and followed it to the end. did something permanent to my brain but i think it was a good thing. on rewatch now im like, i was right to like this. like it's a solid show, it's good. it has its flaws obviously but it's well written, the emotional moments still get me, i can see why i liked it and i still like it now even when it's not anymore, you know, meeting every need that baby gay me didnt even know they had

what it doesnt reaallyy do though - i dont remember if i posted abt this or if i left it in my drafts but - is explore vampirism as a concept. their subject matter is more lesbianism than vampirism. which is great! thats what they wanted to do and they did it and it's very good. but reading interview with the vampire the book rn im realising how much potential vampires have to be metaphors for like so many things and i started wondering like 'wait, did carmilla just not really engage with it or did it all go over my head'. but it just didnt really engage with it all that much. which again is fine bc that wasnt what they were doing. im glad they were more about the lesbianism than the vampirism

but there's this interesting difference in framing, because in iwtv they keep calling armand 'ancient' right? and emphasising how old he is. and he's like 500? and i was like 'wait isnt carmilla like 400?'. she isnt, shes 340, but still, thats getting there, you know? and we know quite a lot about her history, but kind of just the Big Events. when she was turned, the events of the novella, coffin of blood, silas. thats sort of what we know. but none of the long lonely slog of history day to day you know? with armand i feel like we can really feel how much time everything takes. how every one of those years is made up of single days. with carmilla i dont feel that as much. i keep kind of thinking about daniel, when louis calls him a boy in the first episode, saying "im an old man, with all the triggers that come with it"

because carmilla might look 18 (or mid twenties at this point) but she has lived all that time. shes also seen her native land be claimed by like a succession of ruling powers, right? like armand. shes been buried alive, like louis. when lestat is born, shes already 80 years old, shes lived a whole human lifetime, and the entire adult part of it shes been a vampire. shes lived through 1680-1870 being a lure. i compared her to abigail hobbs in some tags on a post, i dont know if youre familiar with hannibal the tv show, but i do also kinda keep thinking about that comparison

if youre not familiar, in the first episode of hannibal the murderer of the week is this guy garrett jacob hobbs who kills and cannibalises girls who resemble his daughter. and later on it turns out she was made to be his lure. like they'd go places and he'd sent her to the victims to make friends and maybe get them back to their home or smth. not sure if they specified all the details. but that's what carmilla did for mother. and in s2 we hear from mattie that while every couple of decades carmilla had to lure victims for the fish god, she also seemed to just enjoy humans between those times, right? like the doctor, gets lonely, gets a new companion. but we've only sort of got mattie's mocking word for it ("dont eat him, hes a poet! or her, shes got such a wonderful voice. or that one, shes just too pretty to ruin"), we don't know exactly from carmilla's point of view what she was doing or why. if mattie's talking about stuff that happened after the blood coffin, 1950-now, then i think it's a fair assumption based on what carmilla says in the s1 sock puppet show that after she'd figured out what the real situation was and what her role in it was, when she'd started trying to save girls from being sacrificed, that she mightve been doing the same trying to save people from becoming mattie's victims. it's probably more likely that she was just trying to find excuses to stop mattie from sucking someone dry rather than actually having like an aesthetic based morality. but it might be a bit of both. im still trying to figure out what her philosophy actually is, like i dont know what existentialism actually means ghkfjghkj but i will

i also found it pretty striking in the movie when shes turning back into a vampire she says like "this was supposed to be done, you know? the blood lust, the self-loathing, the sleeping tied to a chair in my own bedroom". thats what defines her vampirism, wanting blood and hating yourself for it (the third part is a joke/reference to s1 but also i think meaningful for how she sees her relationship with laura when she IS a vampire. little bit of that 'she will reject me for my monstrousness' shining through). and thats what defines vampirism for lots of vampires across the genre obviously, but i dont know, it struck me. we dont get a lot from carmilla's pov, we know a fair amount about her, but the story is always told through laura. we get laura's diaries, but just snippets here and there from carmilla, what shes thinking, how shes feeling

and i love that shes a philosopher. i love that thats how she seems to try and find something to hold onto, in a world that kind of moves around her, having been murdered, kidnapped, turned and groomed to be a lure on the cusp of adulthood, never having been properly loved (the relationship with her father wasnt good she says in s3, and her mortal mother i dont think has ever been mentioned (like laura's)). the only good relationship she seems to have had for the better part of 3 centuries seems to have been mattie, and mattie seems to love being a vampire. i can imagine carmilla just sort of going along with anything mattie wants to do just because shes so desperate for that friendship. not like, against her will necessarily really. but more like, she hasnt even had the space to develop her own will, you know? and philosophy lets you do that. philosophy gives you frameworks to understand the world and to develop your own opinions on it. and by the 21st century she seems to have developed those opinions, she has a sense of her own values, but shes also still stuck in that same situation. shes jaded and cynical in the face of laura's optimism and strong moral code a lot of the time in s1 because she feels probably pretty powerless. like she does what she can to save some girls but at the end of the day shes scared of her mother and she has nowhere else to go really, right?

i like how she grapples with that over the course of the series, in tandem with laura grappling with her black and white morality. she sort of jumps ship from her mother to laura bc theyve fallen in love, but then laura still stuck in her hero thinking refuses to see her monstrous side. not literally bc i think the biological vampirism never seemed to be a problem for laura, but morally. the having murdered. carmilla needs laura to see that and love her while seeing it bc the last girl she loved rejected her for being a vampire.

but you see her kind of swing back and forth in s2. she softens first with laura but then they break up and she leans back hard into the sarcastic cynic defense mechanisms, leans hard into "im a monster, dont expect heroism from me". but thats like, it's sort of learned helplessness i think. it's powerlessness, resignation. bc morally shes not a monster. maybe she doesnt have as strong a drive to help other people as laura does and is a little more selfishly hedonistic in that she just wants to enjoy her/their life, but she doesnt hurt people for fun, she never has. she just sort of didnt have another option for a Really long time. so she pretends she doesnt care. "im a vampire, this is what i do, this is who i am". but clearly from the way she talks about it when she turns back into one, she doesnt enjoy it

and i like how she goes even further in s3, where she starts swinging even more to the heroic side, bc she sees hope. shes like "wow if we kill my mother, i'd be free". theres hope and she becomes like a lot more active. and shes like that at the start of the movie too, a lot happier, a lot more relaxed, and then vampirism is back and bam depression gfhgkjh like shes immediately more gloomy, ashamed of her past and her self, retreats into herself

sorry i just took this as an opportunity to dump all the carmilla thoughts floating in my head on you. you didnt ask fhkghgjh consider this an open invitation to you or anyone else to come talk to me about carmilla

[foccaccia]

cringe culture is dead. i wrote legend of zelda fanfiction

[luck-of-the-drawings]

when i was in highschool one o my biggest coping mechanisms was drawing all the kids i hated getting killed and eaten and killed. and well. time is a slowly ascending spiral. you will find patterns.(i work as a blackjack dealer. gamblers are FASCINATING

[hivepixels]

.

[give-grian-rights]

you uh. listened to the dream album? god i knew you were a secret dream stan freak wtf

man fucking sees the word "dream" in a conversation about how his music is fucking bad and goes apeshit

[dirtytransmasc]

I'm sorry but the moment Alicent decided to obey her father she knew what was going to happen she knew she would have to have sex with him and have heirs. It's the only reason viserys remarried

"decided"????

what else was she meant to do? this was a day and age where women, especially young girls were controlled by their fathers, to some if not a great extent until they were married off (children of nobles typically betrothed for political reasons not love, these betrothals arranged by their fathers to whoever they pleased and saw fit, no matter what it could mean for the daughter). was she supposed to say no? was she supposed to disobey? what could have happened to her if she did? there was no point in which she could say no, when she could disagree. she was a girl, a child, all she could do was bite her tongue and pray for a miracle, pray for Viserys to not take to her, that at the very least he would wait to get her pregnant (the fact a 14 year old had to worry about that is sickening)

she was 14, she was grieving Aemma and reliving the pain of the loss of her mother, her father gave her an order, though disguised as a suggestion, one she could not deny. it didn't mean she wanted to, it didn't mean she wanted him to marry her, it doesn't mean she would have been forced to bear heirs as a child herself (especially because Aemma died because Viserys tried to get her pregnant to young and cause long lasting health issues that eventually lead to her fatal pregnancy), it doesn't mean she wanted any of it. but she didn't have any other choice, she didn't have a choice when her father sent her to his chambers, when Viserys claimed her hand, when Viserys assumed her consent and raped her in their marital bed, when she bore multiple children before she was 18, when she had to take care of him in his illness, when she had to practically rule in his stead. women didn't have choices at the time, nine of it was s choice she could have said no to, she just had to take it, all of it, cause her father told her to and it's her duty to obey him, and then Viserys married her and it was her duty to serve him.

y'all are so quick to blame a CHILD for the actions of her father and the king himself and forgetting the time and place she was in. nothing she could have done would have spared her fate, if not bringing her a worse one.

[skyburger]

"fnaf is the scariest game ever" "no its silent hill" "well i think its resident evil" everyone shut up!!!!!! youre all wrong. its actually zack & wiki quest for barbaros' treasure (on the nintendo wii) but only the level "keeper of the ice". that level scared me so bad as a kid and you can tell because its the only individual level i remember the name of off the top of my head. like there is nothing scarier than a) being chased and b) being on a time limit. and you know what this level has? BOTH OF THOSE. this level is still scary to me im like AHHHHH!!!! and then i die

[elytrafemme]

i post on this blog for the six mutuals i've never had a delusion about and... smirks while leaning back and falling into a vat of acid... Maybe even the other mutuals too

[spiderziege]

the worlds specialest boy

[nowendil]

.

[milkstoner]

I don't have an insta 😔

I do have to respect that honestly.

[soliusss]

I love reading posts about allistic/neurotypical behavior. Everything makes sense. Apparently in conversations there are cues for beginnings and ends you’re supposed to pick up on. And that’s how you dont accidentally talk over someone else. I do not have the Sensors for that. And that’s just one example of many. This stuff is crazy. No wonder I can’t make friends apparently there’s like 20 million social rules I’m unaware about. Doesnt feel like I’m missing out on much though, it sounds exhausting