#with as little recourse as possible as it is in any other situations where People Just Haaave To Put Up With This Though. thinking; monocle

[unproduciblesmackdown]

deh in the broader Genre of like telling the tale of a (probably teen) child & a difficult/strained relationship with their parent/s where the conclusion to the overarching thread there is tied to the feelings of the parent/s, with the child's sense of emotional resolution hinging on some newfound understanding/recognition/appreciation of those Feelings Of The Parent/s, namely that they Do genuinely love the kid / Care, Regardless of the otherwise "seeming" insufficiency of the provided emotional support of the child, oft justified in full as well by broad things like [doing their best] and [could've been worse / at least not as bad as i had it]. wherein the conflict is resolved probably not totally unilaterally, but mostly by the child realizing their feelings were wrong and/or at least setting them aside by virtue of recognizing how the parent/s felt all along.

like ofc larry in particular, who does Feel Sad that his son died, and other people getting to realize this helps effectively temporarily resolve the murphy family dynamic problems over intermission, and then we come back and larry tells evan he still feels justified in everything he was doing re connor, who died, and evan says that connor (reminder: who died) was really lucky to have a dad who Cares So Much About taking care of Stuff. larry also singing about how Everyone Else thinks & does things wrong for not aligning/agreeing with him on Stuff. and also of course, that doing the right thing is Hard for him. and in the end, words fail, larry hasn't actually changed re: for example never listening to his wife, whose feelings are Not inherently justified like his and who is i guess just not committing to The Hard & Right Thing for not feeling like she has the answers / knows what to buckle down on and never let up about no matter what anyone else thinks, including like, the people directly affected by what you're doing. throw in all the other classic moments like insisting connor simply dropped the ball himself, Somebody Had To Be The Bad Guy, that his daughter be shopping for also not wanting to be monologued at about larry's baseball lore in a garage. ok

but things are fine in the end through the implication that the murphys are staying as married as ever? like, no lmao. we've never seen a single instance of larry showing basic respect for his wife as a peer (tempering addendum: i'm sure this is a slight exaggeration & larry is at least being neutral enough at various times lol. but like at the least disagreement b/w them, she's dealing w/a brick wall). and was zoe being unsarcastic by positing the brady bunch as some hypothetical family dynamic ideal? she's had a hard year but she's fine and mostly what we know about her life is that fact of her parents being undivorced, like, is it assumed that We'd assume she's more bummed out if she was Dealing with that too, rather than relieved/happier. in every case of divorce were the children apparently completely insulated from their parents' dynamic & its effect on their behavior. in the case of every marriage held on to for dear life no matter what For The Children / b/c for w/e other reasons divorce is off the table, are the kids just clapping & cheering regardless of everything else like huzzah to have both my mother & father living together, legally wed. tbt like third or fourth grade & for seom reason, maybe book related, a teacher asking the class who had divorced parents, and saying it was good there was only one person who had to Go Through That. seems inappropriate lol and also inaccurate, having to note that down at the time as an informed adult / child of divorced parents opinion, while actually having a [tragically "divorce is off the table / marriage for the children" situation] unfolding & having to understand things entirely through the lens of how in fact, parents know best / are trustworthy b/c they care, kids just don't get it and are only mad about being grounded and stuff, and mistreatment is an outlier noticeable to all and characterized by nonstop cartoonish contempt blatantly expressed, physical violence/neglect, the classics. but if a parent does something like disallow boundaries / privacy, well someone Had to, and it ranges somewhere from "well that's just appropriate disciplinary measures [cite the usual "it could've been worse" and/or "well sorree that parents aren't always perfect" and/or just general sentiments abt if you don't do xyz kids will never learn that they have to abide by your authority at any time regardless of what's going on for them as their own person]" to, well, also what i just put in brackets like "sometimes you make lil mistakes but did your best, sorry i wasn't perfect, the kid i was raising & mistreating was less perfect though sooo."

heidi is naturally more actually sympathetic but she's also on basically a [her own feelings] journey by and large, even while again it's not totally unilateral? like, there's the misalignments in between, but she and evan were always the one conversation away from their resolution (of not wanting to mutually disown each other). she realizes evan was unhappy at the start, then gets upset about his apparent increasing distance, then realizes he was more unhappy than she realized....? like, okay i guess. (""shoutout"" to cynthia noting that larry dismissed connor being suicidal as essentially Not Actually That. like evidently heidi is clearing that bar, but just throwing another tomato at whatever all larry's up to.) and in good for you, it's like. yes heidi is blindsided by things and none of this is to say that real parents, or parents as characters, should have Irrelevant feelings, or not make mistakes b/c of them, but it's sure A Time wherein she expresses Some Things like, all presumably motivated by her feeling that evan is effectively rejecting/disowning/leaving her, that he shouldn't get help from other people, and even if they're not strangers, they can't be Real Family? and like, certainly evan is just experiencing a bit of [it's free real estate] standing in for A Son here rather than this being some [found family trope] moment with a more genuine foundation, on top of the whole false pretenses thing, but heidi doesn't know any of this and is falling back on like, it's inherently unacceptable b/c they're not Real family, she is [his Real] mother, an emphatic argument Checkmate surely. and here & along the way she's cited the "i'm trying (my best)" / Sorry I'm Not Perfect matters, while being able to criticize evan about ways he's failed to do [xyz] regardless of whether he was trying (his best), generally regarding the anxiety matters like, he Needs to be able to order a pizza, and make friends, and do the therapy exercises that aren't helping, etc. unsurprising evan feels like she thinks he needs to be fixed, he's also Not Wrong that it's not his fault if he's getting support from outside The Family, i.e. his mom and being in their house. interesting that heidi presumed evan was always staying over at the kleinmans' more and was at least more okay with that, with a difference of course being that she knows them already / is(?) friends with jared's mom.

naturally a sidenote right there in the fact that jared doesn't want to / in effect can't tell his parents anything that's true. while on the one hand he doesn't seem too concerned about never breaking rules in any situation, there's also no sense he's like got this whole secret life going on / anything to Particularly hide from his parents, and having no friends doesn't help re: just his getting up to much in general. that we get no resolution for him, and the resolution for evan and zoe apparently involving the former having reconciled w/his mom and the latter just doing okay for the fact her parents are further from divorce, like, are we going to presume as we're often meant to, re: this Overall Genre, that well jared's parents probably care / are trying their best / are there & married, so ultimately He's Fine for that fact alone, aren't we all? seems a significant assumption in this story's conclusion. never heard about alana's parents at all, but i guess if jared was reeeeallyyy unhappy at home or alana was an orphan also, we'd've heard about it. in this story of everyone being completely forthcoming with each other the whole way through

anyways then heidi shifts into "oh nvm" reconciliation mode after gfy via facebook letter posts and having realized evan was That sad at the start of things? like, again that it's not completely unilateral, as is more usual, and she Is affected by understanding more about how He feels, but also like, we know she knows he had a bad year and is currently still generally unhappy / lonely, and herself knows she can't be there for him all the time / as often as she feels she'd like, but like, she had to know he was even sadder / more struggling than that? and that their strained / unideal relationship was just....more so as well? doesn't super feel like a more fundamental revelation about what's Really going on, versus just like "oh you've been Really [those things i was already aware of]" like, the change just being in the Degree of these situations/factors. i suppose a more inherent shift could be that she was thinking of it all in terms of evan's judgment of her and this conversation is showing her he was worried about her judgment of him? just this one conversation away from resolution the whole time....as well as anything being framed as like, a Two Way Street as the best answer to things rather than actually anything being shifted towards the child, like, unconditional support towards them, supposing there's some mutual grievances & hurt feelings, it's Not just [well i'm sympathetic Enough] for a parent to go "my support's a bit conditional tho" rather than in fact having to set their feelings aside more than their child might. shoutout again to larry at breakfast like "of course i openly don't give a shit b/c i'm assessing that connor doesn't either and that's some real fair's fair stuff"

anyways like, ofc already heidi was Never going to disown & leave evan, who ofc doesn't want to disown & leave her either (& even more Of Course doesn't have that option w/the murphys at that point anyways). and like, yeah surely important that they both know that but like, nothing else particularly changes? or is somehow guaranteed to change for their now having this newly informed mutual understanding on how each other has Felt all along. like, guess evan won't be so distant now that he knows his mom doesn't hate him, that's a difference yeah, but again he also Couldn't be b/c [my bad re: the murphys] [fell out w/his one friend and i guess is even More like "well, can't talk to him ever again / that's that" b/c not like we hear in the finale about having had, or planning to have, a chat w/him too]. sure It Matters that evan know his mom wouldn't hate him for xyz, or that heidi knows evan doesn't already hate her or something, and resolving this surely makes a difference, and it's not like this mutual Emotional Component is irrelevant. but it's oft handled as All that's relevant, and definitively tilted in favor of the parent's(s') feelings justifying / negating the child's(ren's) feelings as an impact of their treatment by the parent/s. is heidi going to have a different approach than going "ugh cmon evan" when he's not doing what he "has" to in whatever various situations, besides perhaps reminding him she won't Hate & Leave him if he can't, just still be disappointed & critical & hoping for him to become Can do it....we've all been there re: "i love you / will support* (*how?) you No Matter What.....But....." unless you haven't been there, at least in terms of this only being meaningful to the person saying it & is merely a Hypothetical intro that automatically justifies whatever Actual treatment is about to unfold, in which case hell yeah

the other key thing that happens here i suppose being heidi using her parental experiences to let evan know it feels overwhelming now, but later, it won't. fun re: her character, simultaneously like, well it's true and useful that how you feel on any given day / in any given moment is never permanent, helpful perhaps re weathering negative ones / appreciating positive ones, on the other hand the sentiment can also be applied dismissively like "well you'll get over it" especially re: children / teens, like "oh prom or being bullied or whatever else won't matter to you in ten years so whatever" (also that Feelings Changing Always obviously doesn't mean people are like, psychically made anew in every moment, and unaffected by things that happened prior, even during childhood / adolescence, like oh cringe weirdos still affected by how their parent/s treated them or how they were treated by their peers or how their affected by these kinds of things Now) or that pretty much anything they feel is immature & thus effectively incorrect and irrelevant, b/c the only Real Feelings in this life are [i have to pay a bill :(] or [i have to parent a child :( / :) (?)] like. any sentiment / idea can be cited in any situation, citing it for the purposes of "so it doesn't really matter how i treat you / how i Don't bother to do fuckall for you" as it may to dismiss [my child's upset rn] or something, is not helpful. but for our purposes heidi doesn't seem to be being dismissive, And ofc due to the specific situation there's not really anything she or evan can do to otherwise improve it rn (i mean, he could potentially also talk to jared again or consider it at least, but.) but the conclusion being that Your Parent Doesn't Hate You & Won't Leave / Will Always Be Here For You, Which Means: Step one: Being Here always; Step Two: [???] is certainly thusly unspecific, not exactly revelatory, and like....Thee Whole Time heidi was not hating evan & was planning on being there always, but that alone didn't mean there weren't these major failures to communicate / understand him / conflicts. well and good to i guess keep sitting on the couch like "remember: i don't hate you & won't disown you & leave" but that's like, certainly a premise of the relationship rather than [a particular way that fact manifests in her supporting / interacting successfully with him]. like her saying she Has, Does, And Will fuck up ten zillion ways (real lyric. jk) is like, again, Yes, parents are people which mean having feelings and making mistakes, and it's presumably important to her re: Not feeling so overwhelmed by parenthood that she recognizes this, but it's also like....yeah but then what, what happens when you make the mistakes re: Being A Parent. she wasn't ever going to leave or hate evan, that's irrelevant. again: how will their avg dynamic such as we've seen it, resulting in [failed connection] across the scenes, change re: the day to day for evan now knowing heidi's not planning to ditch him.

referring back to this as a general genre, it's this sort of point in an exploration of a parent/child relationship being A Limit as well, like, welp, where can you even take things beyond "aw hey. remember that your parent really cares & is trying" lol like. and there's the fact that this point as [the resolution] will probably make the child simply Less "Difficult" / "Wayward" in their teen behavior as well. like yes heidi's sympathetic, her feelings are relevant as a character and a parent to another character, yes also to a degree evan Is being somewhat "difficult" and distant and lashing out / verbally critical at times, but ofc Also a) not for no reason, and b) those reasons being His feelings about things / being Imperfect with it, but that herein more sympathy lies with the parent for those same facts / the resolution must be that the parent was already ultimately Enough re: their support, regardless of acknowledged imperfection. larrycore, except he also won't acknowledge imperfection lol.

and then, naturally, cynthia's the entire other parent character, but she just has like, less going on? she's mostly interacting with [the concept of connor] and evan doesn't like get a glove scene with her or anything and i guess her satisfaction with life manifests in how Normal her family dinners are, cough (made it all this way w/o yet citing Normalcy lol (i think). but it is intrinsically relevant throughout) and she's happy with larry so long as he's been outwardly sad about connor. and that according to zoe she was Too Lenient (convenient as well re: us getting to imagine for ourselves what the supposed perfect middle ground would be) which like, seems particularly relevant To zoe if she was apparently nonzero times tormented by connor's goings on with no recourse. but the overall situation staying very Vague, though with enough impression that cynthia a) is sad that connor died and b) doesn't blame him about it / wasn't dismissive of everything and c) her approach involved pursuing anything fundamentally supportive rather than, say, deciding someone can't have basic privacy and you just keep at that until they're a flexible piece of athletic equipment, so she wins out over larry for sure, don't really have to just throw up our hands like well i guess they're both wrong and the answer is generally somewhere between their general approaches. and other than that it's like, what, she wouldn't be having continual identity crises if her family was more brady bunchesque? there's zoe's vague suggestion that being stuck in the house (b/c if she doesn't Have to work, how could she leave) is also a factor in her identity crisis moments that are manifesting in ruining the Family Dinner experience and evan is lucky to mistakenly think he has problems not having much money. but then she's also just like, fine enough by act two, and again in the finale wherein i guess she's still fine enough for the fact of still being married. noted that cynthia is also the most forthcoming / straightforwardly emotionally expressive character here (ft. larry telling her to calm down jeez cynthia our cringe son only died or whatever or we're now being cyberharassed while everyone hates us for that, chill, so hysterical. women be shopping)

oh wait cynthia and evan do have that bit of a one on one prior to ywbf. definitely something, even if ofc cynthia doesn't get a whole song in that scene, and she and evan have less of a direct exchange in it. and naturally she gets the first song but it's like, where's, idk, heidi and cynthia having a later parallel payoff interaction Parent To Parent about not knowing how the hell to do this. didn't Have to be setup thusly but eh, society if. god knows cynthia talking to larry is a dead end, and talking to evan is limited, him not being a parent also. it's kind of like you can get support / understanding / validation from peers / Outside of [your lifelong nuclear family setting up romantic partnership], but this romantic partnership is the only Peers relationship of evan's that he Needs resolution on. though tbf the Real mystifying aspect of this in the finale is why zoe wanted to / why what she was apparently getting from their relationship all along was such that she now feels like he's this theoretical romantic ideal, rather than it being possible that she needn't regret the relationship for what she could've been getting out of it at the time but also doesn't need to now wish she could do it all over again, without the premises that led to them even dating in the first place. dunno why in either love song led by either of them, evan can't cite a Reason he likes zoe, while zoe textually declines to cite a reason she likes him. if you're Not relating to "if he was a boy & she was a girl & they not only don't hate each other but could share the same house with awkward tense amicability / lack of absolutely blowing up at each other all the time....why Shouldn't you assume you might be in love and start dating your way towards ideal eternal soulmateship" then it's like, kinda at a loss out here. ofc evan can be relieved she doesn't hate him forever and zoe can feel she doesn't hate him forever and have the generosity to pat him on the back abt stuff and the orchard, but their already baffling relationship is only way more so when for some reason zoe has to definitively tell evan he's still this theoretical romantic ideal like....we can still interpret it as, idk, zoe having low standards / limited experience at this juncture tbh lol but even so, regardless of this, there's the fact that this Romance being established as centrally crucial in the very beginning and end (and ofc in between) is The Story / Work Overall considering it centrally crucial and it's like ummm. holding this and looking at it like okay..........what is this

one explanation being "well we don't need an explanation. soulmate romance Is supposed to fix and/or justify your whole life and the more isolating it is the more its proven how much Love their is / how that's all you need" and ofc high schoolers would want that asap so long as the other party seems nice enough. whoops compare and contrast with how when we check in with evan in the finale he's also Been doing okay enough and the sole relationship we even know of is that with his mom, and hey, if that's all he has then that just shows that that love of a parent is enough / all one needs. which is the limit here, and the limit of The Genre, like, hmm, families aren't ever perfect and can have these major issues and failures huh: the critical examination/exploration of this then not getting more specific than "but in the end that's who's always there for you, which is heartwarming in and of itself rather than its own problem b/c when people Don't get actual support there for any reason/s, there's nothing else for them, except perhaps support via marriage / romance" where the problems also can be considered utterly unavoidable in a [throw up your hands, can't even begin to speculate on alternatives w/any meaningful specificity] way, and justified as like, kids who just need to be more appreciative / understanding of their parents, and parents who should be appreciated / understood as simply human, which means they're not perfect and they have feelings, but Everyone is simply human with emotions and mistakes, but then the fact in & of itself of Some people's imperfection & emotions gets to invalidate Other people's imperfections (see: however the Former People reacts to the Latter People's mistakes is fine) and their emotions (see: however the Latter People react to how they're affected by anything the Former People do is not fine, so long as the former people feel that their own feelings were sympathetic and/or that they merely made a mistake / can't be expected to be perfect, ugh well sorrreeee) which happens in the direction of Who Already Has The Power / Authority: that being The Parents, vs. children having zero leverage or other options than the immediate family & "ideally" (suburban single family home) isolated, or at least bounded off, living situation they just so happened to be born with. and parents, themselves isolated like "if you don't love your spouse enough that you aren't perfectly happy from just living w/them forever and you'd throw everyone else in your life into a volcano for them & still be perfectly happy, that's just your failure to find a soulmate ig b/c otherwise At Least being able to go 'yeah it's not perfect but it's good enough. & what else is there. also i can't afford to live without splitting 8 jobs w/a partner' is within your grasp" and isolated as parents like, you know what they say, it takes a two parent household to raise a child, if you're obviously overwhelmed like e.g. dealing with a newborn, haha well it's the damnedest thing but that's just how it is and anyone struggling w/parenting alone or even as only two people is experiencing that [just how it is]ness, nothing else to be done, unless legal custody is revoked to punish the parents. if the children are punished then that's just family business, they're the ones who also have no choice in entering a family via entering existence, belong to their parents, oft aren't considered to need / deserve basic elements of personhood, cue connor losing his Basic Privacy b/c someone Had to and whatever.

anyways, Thee Genre where "welp, this is just how it is" can only be preserved like this, like, well, guess this Has to resolve where of course a child is stuck w/their parent no matter what, right, so in turn the child must just ultimately feel okay with whatever's up with their parent/s as Fine Enough, while parents care enough to not want to renounce their claim of this being their child, but really nothing Must be conceded by the parent in terms of behavior, the Family Unit ultimately cannot be denied in any way such that the child really ever has any recourse but to try to accept the parent/s Being Only Human as justification for it all, and more, and/or the potential sort of theoretical threat of ideas like "be glad you had Anyone in the first place / don't have Worse parent/s / aren't Disowned, b/c think of how much worse you'd have it on your own," which yknow spoilers, threats aren't really support, nor are the effects of any failures in support / outright mistreatment Justified by the inner world of the party responsible for it being declared / judged as Good Enough, or certainly as good as you deserve.

anyways obviously it's not a nightmare in deh (at least for evan, lbr. larry....) and in the story it Is posited as enough b/c it's a fictional construction that can say whatever, and or let plenty be unspoken, like skirting around why exactly zoe's supposed to be regarding evan in any which way that she does at any point after iicth, tbh. but this is really a subset of "deh arguably has this premise that The Pursuit Of Normalcy is correct re: amending the kinds of problems evan has here; normalcy is the nuclear family as an ideal, whether Your Parents (as close to two married suburbanite ones as you can get) or You As A Parent (same as prior parenthetical)" wherein that subset genre is another one that must ultimately accept Normalcy as well, where parents have this irrevocable authority in their children's lives, and an exploration of a strained / messy family dynamic at any age can only resolve with "well in the end, parents aren't perfect but they try & care, and their kids have to accept this as ultimate justification for any & all of their experiences they have grievance with. fill in any blanks with [throw up your hands / whaddaya gonna do / c'est la damnedest things]" like. again that jared is only worse off for [the plot] and we have no update on him and we know he has no friends now (evan too, presumably) and only his parents he doesn't talk to. and we can presume this is good enough only by a) dismissing whatever feelings he has to make him not want to share anything w/said parents as Surely frivolous/unfounded and/or b) operating on that premise that, well, he has parents, and they're only human, so that is automatically All You Need To Know (with a little bonus of (c) that any Real Abuse must be so extraordinary that it's this rare outlier and what are the odds? rather than a common experience that's this guaranteed option when parents own a kid and the kid has no choice but to accept this situation / no other support. And, as with all "unusual" Abnormal things, all normal people would be able to diagnose someone with Abused or Disabled or Trans, Closeted Or Otherwise based on fleeting interactions and Not on someone declaring their own understanding of their experiences, which is actually probably wrong / an exaggeration/lie....But also if anyone experienced something abnormal like that, they'd know right off and be talking about it all the time to get help resolving their situation; if people have the idea it's a secret, that people don't just Believe Them, and/or that people Can't just help them up and resolve their situation wholly and safely and soon enough, that proves it's not real or at least not That big a deal, who cares if you have some gender thoughts or ""mild" autism" or kinda shitty parents, if it's relatable just deal with it, if it's not, you're just being weird and try being more normal, which is also supposedly just dealing with it, but all the more dismissively / emphatically) like iunno jared would Have to tell us more explicitly that his parents are terrible, and then we could just disbelieve him, or figure he deserves it, or that he's just mad about being grounded once or whatever. there's two of them, probably married, and they have feelings and are imperfect, so he's fine.

also the fact that any relationship with peers, besides looking for your romantic soulmate asap, is frivolous and optional. coincidentally (is it??? jk. it's not) it's a form of support outside the nuclear family you were born into / establishing your own nuclear family. friendships are about the chats you can squeeze in with coworkers you happen to tolerably get along with, or prior, same but with other students, and if they're not Perfectly Working Out At The Start And Forever (see, in fact: evan's illustration of the perfect friendship in For Forever, wherein he needn't even explain like, how they became friends, or how it was so different from any other dynamics. or explain to us the audience how he and jared threw together this material that emulates it via this roleplaying sesh, but that doesn't warrant eventual resolution) then a friendship does not deserve either "well they're only human, so i guess i have to accept Whatever" like re: parents, nor "i Need to put effort and intent into an active pursuit/continual maintenance of this relationship" of the [it validates your life so you need it, as well as it being the only appropriate/expected support in a legal adult's life, move out with your spouse already] Romance. that alana, though her motivation and sort of silver lining reward in the end (re: the orchard) isn't all about evan, also gets no resolution and was sure not evan's parent nor love interest, so Well Whaddaya Expect....again, if she was a tragic orphan, she'd've announced as much, and if she has parents, they're human and she's Fine Enough

anyways you can perhaps critically explore/examine these experiences beyond these not explicitly, directly expressed premises that in the end the parental feelings override the the child's and justify the reality that the child has no recourse anyways when their nuclear family is all they have and the familial Belonging can be [the children are parental property], wouldn't it be great if that was always okay enough anyways, b/c that's all we can get, and considering otherwise is weird and probably an unrelatable outlier anyways. so The Conclusion to stories abt parent/child relationship problems can't/don't upend the premise that a child can be stuck with their parent/s as people who forever unconditionally retain some ability to actively impact that child in whatever ways, and even if this is questioned, it has to be resolved with the child accepting this Reality w/whatever justifications that supposedly validate the parent enough / even just being like well it's better than the alternative of Not having your "support," surely, b/c that was even unhappier. the child can feel badly about whatever treatment, even treatment they don't think had any ill intent, but the parental authority is A Fact and ya just gotta make peace with it, whether the parent only personally justifies it with "b/c i'm the parent" or "i mean well enough / sorry i'm not perfect"

this versus material where the parent actually does have to change their behavior regardless of their feelings, in recognition of An Actual Relationship rather than eternal justification of the parent = superior / authority figure. or where, as is true re: any actual relationship, a child does get to withdraw from said relationship (as is true even if the child is still in the parent's life / the parent thinks there's A Relationship b/c of the child still being in their life and their feeling they totally have adequate authority here) and like, frankly points to how that often seems to work best when the viewer isn't privy to seeing said child's experiences / interactions w/the parent/s directly. Just Like Real Life, a) can't really convey the reality of such a dynamic via "wow look how Obviously bad it is" snippets, even such [obviously bad] moments can be Dismissed as snippets like well but on Average it's not That Bad(tm), and this leads into b) the premise when we Don't get to be shown the interactions directly being: what we Do get shown being the child's perspective / feelings and That actually getting to be what matters and can in turn justify their being supported regardless of if the parent tries / cares at all / means well / makes mistakes etc etc, and any illustrations from the parent's end of things being secondary really, while things lean such that the child's feelings have more weight and what is Justified by said feelings isn't [anything they do to anyone ever] but actually having other avenues of support than w/e parents they happened to have. and whether things were Really That Bad don't have to be judged by other people who can't have the full picture or direct experience or be Better at understanding the situation for having had more "normal" experiences, and who aren't them and why should someone be judged thusly like "oh sorry it's Not That Bad" and then, again, have no recourse like, can't go anywhere else, and if you can, there's zero guaranteed support Unless it's via whatever particular personal relationships you happen to have, which is why it's great that isolation isn't basically a guaranteed feature of abuse, and that [social support can only come from Personal Relationships] doesn't foster isolation / insecurity / vulnerability overall. this was politics all along, what isn't?

anyways, these like "hmm....social phenomena...." approaches that are limited by unquestioned concepts of Normalcy that the audience must understand similarly too; including this genre here of the Inevitable Reconciliation b/w parent and child justified by the parent having feelings, and the child's feelings being dismissable. kinda the case in deh that said feelings just needed to be aired so as to be understood, and then things are fine enough indefinitely now. arguably Having A Talk is a change in behavior/the dynamic, but also it comes about via a wild specific convoluted series of events and still only manifests last minute b/c heidi saw a facebook post and evan's at the end of his rope here lol. and he has no friends and the nebulous potential of [i'm still theoretical soulmate material for another the perfect girl. someday] and a customer service job??????? godspeed. and the idea of other people and we're out babeyyyy

[frozen-fountain]

Since the feature is due to be discontinued along with much else of what made the site worth using, I got possibly my last ever Reddit award for this analysis of Reeve/Cait Sith I wrote a couple of months ago. I thought I'd commemorate it here, too. Here's why my view of the character is essentially the joke about Cait being a fursona but like, taken seriously:

"Cait Sith's a weird one. I'm not surprised the character is as unpopular as he is because the execution is pretty bizarre, the rest of the party's reaction to both his tagging along and his betrayal are underwritten which adds to the weirdness, and I'm not going to try to defend his gameplay mechanics here - but from a narrative standpoint, I think there's stuff worth digging into. Especially when you consider the man behind the controller.

Regarding the Temple of the Ancients - I think the melodrama of it is purposeful. To all intents and purposes it plays like the typical Hollywood noble sacrifice, a redemptive moment for this creature before the end... and then his replacement comes along, making a big joke out of the moment. The purpose, as I see it, is to contrast Aerith's death as well as many of the others we see on screen. They all meet their ends in ways that are sudden and brutal and don't leave time for last words or moments of closure. I think it's a brilliant addition to what the game is saying about the transience of life and unromanticised inevitability of death.

As for the betrayal (and not to mention the part where a four-year-old girl is taken hostage), yep, that was a lousy thing to do. So was Vincent being a contract killer, Cloud and Tifa and especially Barret disregarding collateral damage and innocent bodies during the reactor bombings, and Cid heaping years of verbal abuse onto a woman who feels codependently indebted to him. They're all broken people in impossible situations left with no recourse, and in the case of Cait and his handler, I think it's easy to imagine Reeve looking on what he's doing as helping to not make a bad situation worse. He can keep Marlene safe from potentially cruel treatment by his peers while maybe doing his part to bring a dangerous guerrilla group to heel. It's still wrong, and I don't agree his methods are either moral or effective - but he's the same as everyone else in the game and doing the best he can with the inadequate hand he has.

And in a story that examines the toll a brutally hierarchical society like the one Shinra imposes on the world takes on the people in it, and the difficulty in resisting it in meaningful ways that don't cause a heap of collateral damage, Reeve is there to represent the futility of trying to change such a system that's already so far gone from the inside. We see him bullied by his coworkers for being such a dreamy idealist as to suggest maybe not crushing thousands upon thousands of people to death to increase the chance of apprehending six, and he then has to watch as the city he worked so hard to improve is treated as a disposable thing to destroy at will. He's also only thirty-five years old, which is terribly young to be in as high a position as he is. So what can we infer about this little-seen character from the avatar that joins the party?

The boundary between headcanon and reading between the lines starts to blur here. But I think to be an engineer, or a scientist of any stripe, you've got to have a streak of imagination and whimsy about you. I've always imagined Reeve, college-aged at best, showing up for work in the resplendent Shinra Tower and immediately boxing away his youth to act professional. And over the years, one moral after another joins his childhood in being repressed and squashed down so he can do his job on the faint promise he can leverage his position to change things for the better. And I think we're meant to see Cait Sith as an alter-ego and manifestation of this - something childlike, which is what the world keeps telling Reeve his moral compass is. His time observing Avalanche makes him question this, and over time, he sees he has people in the party who might genuinely care for him in a way the Shinra higher-ups he's been surrounded by never will. If you take a moment in each scene to imagine what's going on in Reeve's head as he sits alone, weighing it all up, his robot becomes a fantastic addition to the story and a necessary layer to its political commentary.

I am admittedly also a cat lady, though, so perhaps there's some bias creeping in."

I imagine I meant to get into how I see the multiple Cait models as a reflection of Reeve's fear of being replaceable and disposable in the aftermath of the plate drop, and then an affirmation of the opposite ("There's only one me!") as he starts to reintegrate his whole self in the wake of changing allegiances, but apparently that fell by the wayside. My point is that I love the game for daring to make the emotions underpinning a major character's redemptive plotline exist almost entirely between the lines, though it's also hard not to want to see that journey play out. Hence writing fic about it, I suppose.

[motleymemes]

VtMB sentence starters - Cabby / Caine ( part ii )

–– feel free to change pronouns and the like !

“This person, are they really the tyrant they’re made out to be?” “Does he have the iron fist of rumour and does the blood of the people really ooze from it?” “They have lost many battles and more leaders.” “Their rebellion has already failed in the eyes of many.” “Do you feel that their notions of freedom have any real possibility?” “They’ve tried to hold onto this city like it was an ocean. But it continually seeped from their fingers as more and more of them are eaten by sharks.” “Do you really believe that they can keep the predators away forever?” “No, I cannot understand.” “No matter how dire the situation, our blood and theirs cannot be reconciled.” “The blood of each can never reconcile, only boil as they meet the other.” “You could run, but do you really think you could escape your reputation?” “I know little about you, except the rumours that you’ve killed ___ and betrayed your own kind.” “Rabbits also flee, but sooner or later their fate is a wolf’s jaw.” “The wolves have your scent. You’re coated in blood.” “But what of them? Don’t you worry about ___’s vision for this city precludes them?” “Their ways of life seem incompatible.” “I once thought they could provide stability for our kind.” “But certain types in this world have quashed such hopes.” “Perhaps, if he could be deposed, I would regain my faith.” “If they managed to recapture this city, it would not be long before someone challenged them for it.” “Conflict is always an eventuality in their life.” “Could you spend an eternity this way?” “Very well, if that is the destination you chose.” “If I do so, the blood you cary will doom you.” “An outsider forever in one society, a traitor to your own.” “You have been accused. If you were to run this reputation would travel with you until your final night.” “Your only recourse is to clear this charge or smite the conspirators working against your good name.” “You could run, rabbit, or you can become a wolf yourself and tear the throats from the heads of the other packs.” “This is the path of legends and pariahs.” “I have walked before with those who have tried to cast off their struggles.” “Their reasons were many, but their paths always ended in the same place. Emptiness.” “I’m just a driver. I can’t you anywhere unless you tell me where to go.” “If you must.” “When they are destroyed, this city will become chaos.” “With no heads, you can walk past this beast and into a legend.” “But you may never know peace.” “The lives of legends are the prey of the ambitious.” “Then I will drop you off in Chinatown. Your legend can grow there.” “We are here.” “They make many enemies all the time. It will not be long before someone challenges them for this city.” “Is by this sign the best place to stand?” “The knives of every person will try to make their home in his back. Do you really want to stand behind him?” “The spirit exists within the blood of many.” “Few though are willing to listen to it.” “Perhaps if a few did, they would not have lost so much.” “They’ve lost less than is thought.” “I hear there is one left who may be able to revitalise the movement, maybe though it is just a rumour.” “I have heard he’s unpopular with the people.” “Did you know a leader can’t be put in power without the city’s backing?” “If there was one that wanted him removed, perhaps it could be made so.” “I can drop you off downtown if you wish.” “If he’s not a man of action, insurrection is not looked upon lightly.” “I will take you to this representative iff you’ve made up your mind to secure a future with them.” “Very well, I will take this cab to Chinatown, but when you leave it realise that you leave our society forever.”

[cock-holliday]

Deconstructing Copaganda 101

I wanted to throw together a little crash course to undo perceptions about police interaction that we as Americans get consistently spoonfed. As a disclaimer I want to elaborate on two points 1. Legal =/= Right and 2. Demographic risk factors.

1. Just because something is illegal doesn’t make it wrong in all cases, likewise, something being legal doesn’t make it right. In addition, when it comes to the police, what they do and what the law says does not always (or often) line up. An arrestee might try to cover their face to protect from injury and get charged with “resisting arrest.’” A protester holding a sign can be charged with having a “weapon.” Arrests are not convictions. Charges are not convictions.

2. The set of rules applied to affluent white individuals will not be the same rules applied to poor Black individuals. There are certain elevations of risk when it comes to a) resisting arrest b) running from police c) trying to enforce rights. Anyone interacting with police must balance their safety with what they know is right. In some cases a right abused in the moment can be remedied with the legal process and it might be best to remain quiet/compliant. On the other hand, being compliant with illegal/cruel behavior from police may be difficult or even dangerous. Whether an individual is compliant or belligerent, they do not deserve to be punished by the police. What is the legal recommendation and what is safest to do is not always the same, and what is the legal recommendation and what is right is also not always the same. The requirement for civilians to remain calm and at the will of the police is abhorrent. You will have to do what you need to do.

Also note that this is not legal advice, just dispelling misconceptions.

That being said, let’s get into it:

Here are 5 key phrases that get said in dozens of cop shows. All of these are manipulation tactics and ALSO not legally correct. You have constitutional and other federal protections. There are differences in local laws, and some things will depend on your individual state, but federal laws cover all states. Regardless of where you live, you are protected by the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments.

1. “If you had nothing to hide you’d let us in.”

Except in cases of emergency or some circumstances where the police have the belief that a crime is taking place right now, the police may not bust into your home without a warrant. If police show up at your door asking to be let in, ask if they have a warrant. If they do not have one, they can’t come in. If they force their way in without a warrant you have legal remedies regardless of anything they might seize from your home. If they do have a warrant, ask for it. There are specific rules about what must be included in the warrant and this document will be helpful to your case. If the warrant, either as an arrest or a search, has the correct information, legally they are allowed to enter the premises. You do not have to talk to the police and should not. Try not to get in their way and discuss all details with an attorney.

Different rules apply for vehicles. The safest bet is to verbalize that you do not consent to a search. Do not help the police in their search. If you inform them that they do not have consent and they search anyway, in a variety of situations any evidence they find could be thrown out in court. Illegal searches have legal recourse, even if evidence strongly suggests you committed a crime. The specifics of your situation should be discussed with your lawyer and your lawyer only.

In either case, it may be difficult to enforce your rights or stick up for yourself. Entering your space and taking or touching your things is upsetting for people, and it may be difficult to respond “appropriately.” Finding the balance between your safety and protecting your rights is difficult. Always document everything that happens with police and let a lawyer know.

2. “We’re just talking”

There is no such thing with cops, especially in an age of body cams. When people hear the words “custody” and “interrogation” they tend to picture a room with one way glass, a table with a light over it, and a cop and a suspect on either side of the table. This isn’t the only context for interrogation. It can be around a meeting table, in a police vehicle, or on the street. Any process of questioning, whether formal or informal after an arrest is “interrogation.” There is no “off the record,” “just between us” or what have you. 

People feel the need to explain themselves when they’re in trouble. It’s a natural urge. Repress it. Do not talk to the police. Frankly, do not talk to the cops ever. Not even when they ask you something in passing on the street, but especially after an arrest. 

Learn the phrase, “I am invoking my right to remain silent, and I am invoking my right to an attorney.” Then do not speak until you are able to reach out to or are provided with an attorney.

3. “You have the right to remain silent...”

Cop shows instill the idea that the moment the cuffs go on the police recite your Miranda warnings. This doesn’t generally happen in practice. Your warnings need to be read to you before a formal interrogation process, but from the moment of an arrest, the rules apply. Anything you say can and will be used against you by police whether they have read the warnings to you yet or not. Do not speak to police after you have been arrested. Do not speak to the police after you are detained. Decline to speak to the police from the moment they try to establish contact. 

The police love to insist that innocent people wouldn’t invoke their right to remain silent. Resist the urge to explain yourself or answer their questions, even as innocent as they might seem. “What were you doing?” “Where were you?” do not answer anything. Staying quiet does not make you look guilty in court. The cops think it makes you look guilty? Good thing that’s not remotely up to them. Let the cops stew. Don’t try to outsmart them, don’t try to explain yourself. Say “I am invoking my right to remain silent, and I am invoking my right to an attorney” then say nothing else.

It is your RIGHT to remain silent. Use it.

4. “If you had nothing to hide you wouldn’t need a lawyer.”

The same idea applies here. Lawyers know the stupid rules and ways cops like to trip people up. They know legally how things you say might sound, and they can help you navigate the interrogation process as well as possible next steps. Do not answer questions on your own, do not try to clarify anything, do not speak to the police. The cops are not your friend, nothing is off the record, nothing about the process is casual. This is a key tool, use it.

5. “Innocent people don’t run.”

Again, whether you run from the police or not will have different situational consequences. For some people, running escalates the situation. For others, running is what kept them safe. This is not advice one way or the other about the actual situation of running, it is ONLY about the legal side of it.

In a number of jurisdictions (thanks to Federal Rules of Evidence 609′s interpretation in the 2016 Warren case) flight from police is not indicative of guilt. In this current climate, the discussion about what compels one to run from police is making progress, and it is being recognized that certain behaviors are not only not indicative of guilt but may be understandable. 

Two big takeaways for this is that the laws are constantly changing and evolving (for better or worse) and the conversation around police violence is shifting the way steps to protect yourself from the police are viewed by the courts.

_________________

Hopefully this post not only enables you to better protect yourselves and each other, but also challenges you to think about the context in which you hear about police interaction. Someone was arrested for assault and battery of a police officer? Are the charges bullshit and completely made up? Was the arrestee being beaten and tried to defend themself? 

When news covers an arrest and only takes a statement from the police, is it trustworthy?

Think about how defense attorneys are portrayed in media and question who it benefits to view attorneys as evil and shady and that by using legal help you are also seen as evil and shady.

Remember that the police do not represent you, and they do not even represent victims. They represent the state. They are not your friend, and even if you do not have a negative view of the police (which you should), they will not act in your best interest if you find yourself interacting with them.

Stay safe, don’t talk to cops, do not worry about what the cops think something looks like--they do not get the final say.

Know Your Rights (ACLU)

Know Your Rights (NLG)

[insufferablelust]

i have had this in my head for days now and i need to tell you about it lol so a lot of fics on here have the concept of being a brat and a bad girl and I love those but it got me thinking about spencer being with someone whos s u c h a good girl for him like the most obedient little girl who never breaks the rules no matter what he says or does and he absolutely loves it and he asks her why she never breaks the rules and whatever her submissive reply is makes him go FERAL

wow you’re a genius, i’m actually loving this piece so much because this is screaming me, i’m super subby it’s unbelievable🥺 anyways, i hope you enjoy love! thank you so much for the req and support, love you. xx MASTERLIST.

WARNINGS : Soft!Dom!Spencer x Sub!Reader, lots of praising so praise kink, soft cute dom and sub dynamic, oral (f receiving), bit of rough sex but its cute still, and pure submissive and dominant dynamics meaning it might seem like the sub is way too subby but in reality they hold the same amount of control, its just how the dynamics go. :) oh and fluff!

There’s something about Spencer Reid that always amazes Y/N, the way he handle things, the way he talks, the way he thinks, the way he manages all the things inside his head. He was rather complicated, but the mesmerizing kind that always caught her attention, the kind that stopped her from doing anything else but to listen and to cater his every need. He has her whipped for him like a puppy to it’s owner, but she loves it- she loves him, he’ll always her devotion— but so will she from him.

Y/N adores a lot of things, a lot of people— like Penelope Garcia and all her quirks, or David Rossi and all his wisdoms. But no one ever comes close to get the same amount of adoration and respect from her, as Spencer. The moment she joined the BAU, she knew that she had to give him her all, so she did. Now 2 years later, working in different divisions with him still in BAU and her in the human recourses division, their relationship remains strong, even stronger than ever.

Its rather challenging for them both to find the time together with him on case duties while she waited at their shared apartment considering that she spends more time on desk job rather than the field, but lately since he got his mandatory 30 day off, their time with each other becomes more and more interesting and sparked the utmost pleasure.

Of course he has lectures to teach, and papers to grade or sometimes on call cases to help, but that all means he’s mostly home with her. When they started the relationship, her intense adoration for him only sparked to greater level which is submission. When they started dating, she revealed that part of her instantly which ignited something inside the Doctor.

You see, Spencer was experienced but when they met, he never seen someone so devoted... so obedient... and so submissive to him like her. She’s the epitome of raw beauty not because she’s weak when she submit, it’s because she trusts him to take control but in order for him to take control, she’s also the one that holds the wheel— if she said the word, he’ll stop. Their dynamics are as harmonious as an instrumental piece. She submit to him in more ways than one— he owns her and most importantly he takes care of her like she takes care of him.

Y/N is not the one to misbehave, of course there are times when she wanted to be bratty, to break the rules he set for her, which was fairly simple; like she must tell him how she feels at all times (communication is key), no touching herself and no orgasms unless he’s there to give her the permission, and don’t disobey him. And she really wanted to be bratty, and tease him until his palm twitch and bend her over his lap, yet every time she was about to break one of his rules, the guilt settles in, and she thought,

You’re his, you’re his baby, his love, his bunny, his doll, his person, his home— he said so. What are you doing disobeying him? ungrateful brat.

The submissive in her just melt down its brattiness and pushed her deep to subspace, where all she wanted was to please him anyway possible, to be as good as she can be, to behave, to obey, and to serve. She’s willing to do anything to hear his sweet praises and to see the blissed proud expression featured on his face when she did something that pleased him. The euphoria from the praise seared her core, and sent her to heaven.

The atmosphere of this situation always have and always will be the most comfortable content thing in the world for her— and Spencer couldn’t agree more. Praising and taking care of his beautiful lady, seeing her so submissively devoted to him sent a venomous thrill to his bloodstream, and hearing her beg for him just makes him want to stay with her forever— and they planned to stay forever.

———

Y/N found herself pacing around the bedroom as she pouted cutely at the flashing thoughts of their late night rendezvous last night, she could still feel the burning sensation on her inner thigh, the way he whispered on her ear, the way his palm collided with her skin several times, the way his teeth graze on the skin of her breasts— claiming her for the 100th times, the way he fills her up to the brim that rendered her into a pathetic panting mess at the end.

Saying that she’s soaked through her panties surely is the statement of the year, because god she was soaked— dripping at the thought of his sinful immaculate fingers, how does one get excited and aroused by their dom’s fingers?!Certainly Y/N. He was currently inside his study, grading and preparing for his next lecture which is tomorrow, they spent their morning together with over-sugared coffees and pancakes before he went to do his professor things and Y/N went upstairs to.. apparently think about getting fucked by her dominant genius boyfriend.

She was contemplating to just hump the sheets or using the shower head for less evidence, or just touch herself then and there— he won’t know right? he’s busy downstairs, when the doctor is busy, he won’t come here. So here she was, walking slowly to the master bathroom, as she chew on her bottom lip. The closer she got to where she needed to be, the greater her guilt arisen.

“He took such a good care of you last night, he gives you multiple orgasms, give you the privilege of having him inside your mouth and princess part— now you want to disobey him? disobey the man you love?”

She whined at herself before pulling the bathroom door harshly to close it— maybe a bit too harsh because one minute later, Spencer ran to where she was at the front of their bathroom, eyes brimming with tears and lips in a constant pout.

“Hey Baby, come here.. what happened? are you hurt hm? let me see your eyes, dove.” His voice made her whined ever louder and sunk her head even deeper as she fluttered her eyes shut, ashamed that she was even considering to disobey him. “Baby please look at me..” Spencer tried, pulling her close to his chest and rubbed her back.

He knew the look, she’s deep inside her space, what’s gotten him so confused was that they didn’t do anything this morning, she only gets like this after they have a rough session or when she feels— ah.. His mind clicking on its own, and its his job to make sure she crack her shell.

“Y/N, look at me.” Y/N’s eyes snapped open at the authority behind the tone of his voice, causing her to squirm against his front and then she looked up at him, even though she’s not ready to face his disappointment laced on Spencer’s face. Yet when she did look, she found no disappointment but rather a gentle smile and a sigh,

“There you go, Missed your pretty eyes my love.” He mused wiping the tears off of her cheeks before carrying her bridal style to their bedroom and sit down on the edge of the bed. “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s gotten you so upset that you fell under deep like this, princess?” His voice is gentle, laced with adoration and hint of worry which made her swear he’s an angel.

“I-I..” Her lips trembled as she looked up at him, it’s then that he realized just how deep she’s under— her eyes focuses solely on him and the only think that crosses her eyes is him- just Spencer, Spencer, and Spencer.

“Shh, i’m not mad, i’m not disappointed, now let me know what has gotten you like this angel?” His velvet voice sent chills yet the calming kind onto your guts and you sighed, crawls up to his lap and hide your face in his neck, before mumbling cutely,

“I was um thinking about last night... and i just.. Spence i was about to use the um shower head but i didn’t! i stopped myself cause i won’t ever disobey you sir! i promise!” The way she talked made his heart bursts inside his chest, god he’s so whipped for her and she’s clueless sometimes.

So Spencer leaned in to place a lingering kiss on her lips, closing his eyes and transferring all his adoration towards her onto the kiss that surely has her needy by now.

Her lips moved in sync with his, both’s raw emotions could be seen on the kiss, they projected each other’s desires and wrapped it up with a gentle smile. He pulled back a little, caressing her flushed cheeks before muttering, “Baby—“

“So you’re not mad?” She beats him to it, batting her eyes innocently at him, the sight made him weak on his knees, that all he wanted was to worship her in every way he could.

“No, no i’m not mad petal. You’ve done nothing but pleasing me and making me happy.” He could see the way her eyes gleamed at that, the way her lips smiles so big, and the way she held onto him so tightly like an adorable koala, He muttered a low “Fuck me.” under his breath but of course she heard, every one of her senses were sensitive in times like this so of course she heard.

“W-What’s wrong?”

“No no baby, i said it because fuck.. how are you so perfect hm?” Spencer leaned to brush their noses together before trailing kisses from Y/N’s flushed cheeks to her ear where he whispered, “You’ve never broken any of my rules, always obeying me like a good girl, the perfect little love for me... how hm?”

Y/N was visibly shivering at the praise, a whine was stuck inside her throat, as she breathed heavily at the feeling of him biting softly on the skin below her ear causing her to gasp. “Ah!”

“Answer me, dove.” He groaned before making yet another mark, he could feel the way she squirmed that it sent a huge amount of pleasure toward his sweats covered cock.

“Sorry! i just.. just.. I wanna be good, i will always be good for you because you take care of me but most importantly.. you own me sir, i’m yours, body and soul. You can do anything, tell me anything, and just— i’m yours.” Oh to see her was one thing but to hear her high pitched voice spewing out those words awoken something inside of him, The absolute Feral need to claim her again and again. Cause she’s so damn precious and fucking his.

When she didn’t hear a respond from Spencer, she was about to pull away for a second to see if she has made any mistakes, but got cut off quickly when he flipped them over, pinned both of her wrist against the headboard. “Don’t move.” He whispered sternly, and she nodded, all the blood is rushing to her every sensitive nub.

“You’re fucking mine, just me, i will get you a collar, something that will show everyone that you’re mine.” His voice was rough, deep, and dripping with authority as he rip her flimsy nightgown open, trailing marks all over her smooth skin. He was worshipping her, owning her, making her his again and again.

“I’m yours— oh!” Y/N let out a yelp at the feeling of his lips enclosing on one of her nipples, gently rolling his fingers on the unoccupied one, before switching from time to time— making Y/N moaned every time he tugged too hard, suck too long, or licking way too fast. Her whole chest was on fire, overly stimulated yet couldn’t- and wouldn’t stop it.

“That’s right, you’re mine.” His growls were animalistic, as he trail his kisses down from her sternum down to her tummy, lips never missing an inch of its trail without marks. Y/N was positively buzzing with oversensitivity and pleasure, god she could just cum like this.

“My good girl, my best girl.” His praises has her closing her legs which Spencer quickly denied by spreading her thigh as wide as possible and lay on his tummy in between them.

“Sir.. please..” She kept pleading, eyes soaked with tears, panties soaked with arousal, and lips bitten red and raw. Totally a damn sight. “What do you want?” He demanded, he was the one pulling the strings whilst she laid there taking everything he’s going to give her. She wanted to say that she wants her to make her cum, but her submissiveness muttered something else,

“Whatever you want, whatever you think i deserve, whatever you choose for me.” Although her response were shaky, the message was clear enough for him to suddenly yanked her panties down and buried his face on her sweet sweet peach. Licking, and exploring every inch of her burning core as she squirms like a kitten. Spencer Hummed against her sensitive numb at the sound that she was making, lapping every drop of her sweet nectar, and suck on her pearl like there’s no tomorrow.

“Sir! Oh so good! thank you..” She was getting close, he could feel how her walls contracted around his wandering tongue, and her toes curling as her back arched. “Ask for permission like a good girl i know you are.” His voice against her cunt sent right to the edge.

“Please! please may i cum sir?” She was sobbing at this point, positively burning with pleasure and the adrenaline of being his. It was like there’s molten lava that swallow them both to a new world where the only people exists were Y/N Y/l/N and Spencer Reid.

“Cum, now.” He ordered, and she obeyed, instantly. Releasing onto his tongue which he happily lap every bit of it until she’s screaming due to overstimulation which he then pulled back, knowing just how sensitive his girl is at this point.

As he looked up at her, he could see how shivery she was, with a satisfied smile on her face and wrecked with his mark. “Thank you.. Spencer..” She drawled, nuzzling close to him before getting on her knees in the bed to straddle him shakily,

“Hey hey what are you doing?” Spencer grasp her trembling wrist stopping her from moving anymore. “Please let me ride you! please Spencer.” She does the thing with her eyes again, the one that Spencer would never ever dream of dishonoring her every requests.

“Baby, aren’t you tired?” His voice laced with worry as he thumb her lips, which made her instantly suckle on the thumb, and shakes her head. “Please sir! let me be your good girl, wanna show you how good i am.”

“Shh i know that you’re good baby, you don’t have to do that.” Y/N frowned as she suckle even harder on the thumb before releasing it and whined, “But i want to, doctor please!” even in her mushy state she could still think about one of Spencer’s biggest pet name.

“You should be glad, i love you this damn much pet.” He muttered yet still very pleased at the name. “Now come on, ride me, show me you can be good.” He doesn’t hold her, he just place his hand on his sides and watch her intently.

Y/N blushes under his intense gaze, as she took out his cock (finally) from his sweatpants, and god— his cock was so pretty, tip ruddy red, and the veiny skin was hard, her mouth watered at the empty filling inside her mouth— wanting so bad to feel the heaviness warmth on her tongue. “Gonna eye my cock forever like an undeserving brat or are you actually going to be good hm?”

His voice pulled her from her thoughts as she let out strings of apologies which he stopped with a sealing kiss.Y/N graze the tip of his cock against her opening as she took a deep breath before sinking down his length softly, his eyes never leaving his even when she moaned lewdly and shaking.

“You’re so good, warm and tight for me love.” He whispered, feeling immense pleasure being wrapped up inside her, he wished he could stay like this forever. “go on baby, bounce like a little bunny for me.”

And so she obeyed, placing her palm on his chest before bouncing slowly at first yet keep on picking its pace on his cock, their faces flushed, keeping eye contact as Spencer gripped her hips so hard before helping her bounce faster— making sure to hit her spongey spot each time.

“That’s it bunny, good girl.” He praised, earning a scream from her, her eyes rolled back and lips parted as she tightened her walls around his cock “Fuck Y/N..” His eyes shut now at the intense pleasure from the tightness of his girl’s walls.

He then pulled out for a second, flipped them over, before putting himself back in and then continue pounding her into the bed with a brutal pace yet its all so sweet and full of passion towards each other. “So good Spence! oh oh so full and deep!” Her pornographic moans send him over to the edge.

“Cum baby, now come with me.” He grunted against her lips before pulling her into an intoxicating kiss, and then both of them cum at almost the same time— they trigger each other’s pleasurable desires and needs like a soulmate would.

—————

“Shh good girl, I love you so much Y/N. You’re the best girl ever.” He wrapped his arm around hed after he cleaned them both with a damp towel, changing her into a pajama and then change himself.

“I love you.. Spencer...” She whispered, her eyes still swimming with the thought of him, she’s his.

“I need you to come back to me Y/N, come on.” Before they sleep he needs to coax her out of it, or else she would be sad and grumpy the next morning.

“I’m here!” She giggled as she stared at him, pressing onto his pouted lips and then eyes widen at the sad expression on his face that was one of the way to show her how she really needs to sleep now. The next minute she opened her eyes, he could feel the warm graze of hers and Her voice were small but its Y/N’s wonderful voice nonetheless.

“Spencer?”

“Hi Y/N, here with me?” Spencer intertwined their fingers together before pulling the covers up to their chest and then cuddled around her.

“Yeah.. yes baby..” Her voice droopy, Spencer then let out one more ‘i love you princess’ before she drift asleep, as well as him.

——————

Blurb requests and taglist are open so send me a message if you have ideas or want in!

[therealvinelle]

Answering the ask about Carlisle killing humans: take two

In this post, @effervescent-influenza​ asked me what it would take for Carlisle to intentionally kill a human. Sadly for effervescent-influenza, the thought of Carlisle killing people was apparently so inconceivable to my brain that it said “Error. Did you mean: accidentally kills a human?” and so I wrote them a post about Carlisle losing patients as part of his work as a doctor instead. [Insert the meme about Michael asking for a file but getting a cactus from The Good Place here.]

Anyway, here’s me trying to give effervescent-influenza an actual answer and not just another cactus.

What could motivate Carlisle to kill a human?

He was willing to kill newborns in Eclipse. This was in self-defense and to defend others, and he had no other means to stop them. These were unique conditions that had not arisen before in his near four-hundred-years long life.

He’ll never need to defend himself from humans. If he needs to keep a human from hurting other humans, then he will have an array of options, as it is we see him do this in canon with Bella’s would-be rapists. They’re drugged and taken to a police station, where the police have outstanding arrest warrents on them. (Question I’ll return to below: What would he have done if those would-be rapists weren’t known to the police? If they would go back to raping and murdering as soon as they woke up?)

Beyond that, looking for other motives...

Carlisle isn’t going to kill a human for his own benefit, as there would be none. He’s not willing to kill them for their blood, he would not benefit materially, and there’s nothing humans could do to him to provoke him. A patient could become obsessed with him and become his Misery-style terrifying stalker, or a capricious colleague could set out to make him miserable at work, and he’d probably fail but if he didn’t, if a human succeeded in being such a nuisance that it bothered Carlisle, then Carlisle can just move. Always, if a human becomes a problem for him, he can just pack up his things and move. He has a low threshold for doing this.

Carlisle’s not going to kill any humans for his own sake.

But, we do in canon see that he allowed Rosalie to kill her rapists and that he took it for granted that something had to be done about Bella’s would-be rapists.

To take Rosalie and her rapists first, Edward (who is not the best source, but I’ll write a separate post on that. Basically, read the below closely - notice how he inserts himself into this.) explains how it went down:

“In the first year of Rosalie’s second life, before she had disappeared on her several missions of revenge, her thoughts had given her away clearly and thoroughly. I knew what she was planning, and I’d informed Carlisle. The first time, he counseled her gently, urging her to let go of her past life, certain that if she did she would forget, and then her pain could lessen. Revenge could not bring back anything she had lost. But when his guidance met only the implacability of her fury, he gave her advice on how best to be discreet about her forays. Neither of us could argue that she didn’t deserve vengeance. And we both couldn’t help but believe that the world would be a better place without the rapists and murderers who had ended her life.” (Midnight Sun, chapter 18)

For the record, I disagree with the notion that Carlisle would wish Charles Evenson (Esme’s abusive first husband) harm, or harbor revenge fantasies, and this is why. Killing Charles wouldn’t take away Esme’s trauma, it wouldn’t undo any of what happened to her, and it wouldn’t help her heal. It would be for Carlisle’s own benefit, for him to feel better, at the cost of a human life.

More, this would make Carlisle judge and jury of which humans get to live or die. In his life as a doctor, Carlisle has seen countless of cruel men who abused their families. Most of them still have their wives and children living with them, with no rescue in sight. If Carlisle were to kill Evenson, what justification does he have not to kill other abusers?

We know, through Carlisle’s condemnation of Edward’s actions when he ran away to eat rapists, and again when he’s delighted Edward didn’t eat rapists in 2005, that Carlisle doesn’t think humans lose their right to live - or perhaps, to rephrase in light of Rosalie’s situation - killing isn’t worth what it does to you, the killer.

When Rosalie wanted revenge, Carlisle urged her to move past it, to heal without making herself a murderer. That had nothing to do with Royce, or whether Carlisle thought he deserved to die or not, and everything to do with Rosalie. She had a very long life ahead of herself, and Carlisle did not want her to start it off with murder.

Of course, Rosalie refused to move past it, she had to have her revenge to move past this, and so Carlisle agreed. I imagine his consent came because of several factors:

This wasn’t a vampire killing humans, as Carlisle killing Charles would be, or Edward killing rapists for that matter. This was personal: this was a rape victim killing her rapists. Had Rosalie survived and been given a gun, she likely would have done the same thing.

Had Royce and his friends been convicted of the rape and murder of Rosalie Hale, they would have received the capital sentence. Unfortunately there was no body, so no one would know what happened to Rosalie and no charges could be pressed against anybody. Even if they could, and suspected who did it, Royce King II was a rich white man at the top of the social ladder in the 1930′s. He was untouchable. He did what he did to Rosalie because he knew he’d get away with it. Rosalie killing him and the other four rapists was what the legal system would have seen to in an ideal world.

Royce King II would likely have done what he did to Rosalie again, to other women.

Rosalie deserved justice after what was done to her.

Royce King II was a perfect storm of conditions for Carlisle to approve of a killing, and even then he would rather have Rosalie not do it. Rosalie and Edward found out how far Carlisle would go, and that turned out to be not very far at all.

And yet, when Bella was accosted in Port Angeles, there was no question to Carlisle as to whether he should do something or not.

I think, and this is me headcanoning, that when Carlisle has found himself facing the Royces of this world, people who are only going to hurt others, and there has been no legal recourse, his preferred course of action has been nothing, or as little as possible. Action means making himself judge and jury of mankind, and that’s not what he’s for. He walks with humans to help them, not to act as some vigilante above us all . He doesn’t have that right.

In extreme cases, though...

There will always be extreme cases. Serial rapists, child molestors, the worst of the worst. And they’ll be hard to catch for humans, especially in times preceding modern forensics. Carlisle, with his nose and hearing, has likely known the identities of culprits and of undiscovered crimes he knew he could never bring to the police. “Yes, your honor, I smelled him all over the crime scene. He’s guilty!”

I honestly think, in the most desperate situations where to do nothing would be to condemn the innocent to suffer monstrously, Carlisle has gotten creative. This could mean anything, could mean bundling up the offending human and putting them on a boat headed to Australia, could mean gathering up his surgical equipment in the dead of night and making a eunich.

Doesn’t mean murder, though. He made that quite clear with Rosalie and Royce. No matter the evil of the human offender, becoming a murderer would only make it a greater tragedy.

TL;DR: “Cool motive, still murder” - Carlisle Cullen.

[csykora]

A thought about meaningful change

I don’t want to distract from the most recent thing Benn did. I’m going to be talking about several different things, and some might seem smaller than others: I know. I’m not saying that the newest thing isn’t important enough on its own or that everything’s on the same level. But I think patterns can be useful.

(I have also made myself sick with nerves a couple times so I’m posting this as is: sorry for typos, and while I’ll stand behind my ideas there may be some sentences that are a little long or awkwardly worded).

Back in 2015, Jame Benn and Tyler Seguin were doing a radio interview.

Some of you might be thinking, “You want to talk about THIS, AGAIN?” Yes. More of you are probably thinking, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Yeah, that’s what I want to talk about.

cw for discussions of sexual harassment, incest, homophobia, bullying, misogyny and transmisogyny, transphobia

So during this interview, one of the radio hosts asked Benn if he and his brother were ever road roommates. Benn said no, and the host commented that Henrik and Daniel Sedin probably roomed together.

“Well yeah…that’s the Sedins,” Seguin said.

“Who knows what else they do together?" Benn said. Everyone laughed.

“Seriously,” Seguin said.

"Dude, it's creepy," the radio hosts said, "In fact, it's a good example to future brothers in the NHL on how not to do things." Then they reassured Benn, “In no way am I implying that you have a Sedin-type vibe going about you.”

Benn and Seguin laughed. The conversation continued, calling the Sedins creepy for wearing similar facial hair, leaving nearby and spending too much time together.

When asked pointblank, “Are the Sedins weird?” Benn answered, “I don’t know. I can’t say.”

To finish the sentence he didn’t: he was implying that the Sedin brothers fuck each other.

Now, these were shock jockeys. They were almost certainly hoping Benn and Seguin would say something homophobic. That said, even shock jockeys pre-screen an interview. They’re not going to invite just anyone on the air and try this with them, because all it takes is someone saying, “I don’t know what you mean,” or “No, I actually respect Dan and Henke a lot as my colleagues” to ruin that set up. If a shock jockey thinks you’re a mark, you’ve probably said something off-air that made them think you’re a mark. And if they dug a pit in front of him, Benn is still the one who decided to stick his dick in it and make things overtly sexual.

After, the Stars stated that Benn had “reached out” the Sedins to apologize. Seguin did not reach out but was “included” in whatever Benn wrote or said. Neither of them gave a public explanation or apology. As far as I can tell the Sedins never commented on whether they received that message, what sort of apology it was, or whether they accepted it. Henrik Sedin’s only comment was, “I think it says more about them than it does about us.”

Ways that homophobia is working here:

-the idea that two men having any degree of physical or emotional closeness, even family members, is suspicious.

-Benn roomed with his brother. Course he did. The hosts spell out what he was afraid of: that the other men in the room might think he had the wrong vibe. He was so afraid of them thinking he had unmanly vulnerabilities like liking his own brother that he misrepresented the situation and pushed someone else forward.

-the idea that a man having any relationship to another man’s physical body or appearance, is suspicious.

Dressing or looking too similar to another man—which means you’ve paid attention to how another man’s body looks in order to copy him, like you’re trying to take ownership of his body, which = fucking him—is a really common accusation. Gay men are seen as lusting after and trying to copy other men’s real masculinity for themselves (but of course never quite succeeding). A man thinking that another man who he knows or suspects to be gay looks too similar to him, and so must have been watching and ‘copying’ him, is a common spark for homophobic attacks.

-the idea that any of this could have been a joke depends on the idea that two men having sex is wacky and unrealistic. Imagine if that happened, wouldn’t that be weird.

Now, someone might say, “It’s not that gay sex is wacky, it’s that the incest that is!” First, incest accounts for a lot of childhood sexual abuse, so I wouldn’t say it’s wacky either. And while it’s true that people can say awful things to different gender twins as well out of a combination of gender prejudices, in this case there were also homophobic ideas about men and masculinity at play.

Ways that power is working here:

-People forgot this fast. It was treated as settled because the Stars said it was settled. People gave “kudos” to Benn “doing the right thing” afterward, or for seeming to realize what was happening and not saying yes to the final question.

 I would argue that “I don’t know, I can’t say” is somehow a worse answer to a yes-or-no question, because it means that either you want to say yes but you’re scared of the consequences, or you sincerely don’t know what to say. All he had to do was say “No.” After he said “I don’t know,” Seguin continued and said, “They are weird.” If Benn had said, “No, actually they’ve been professional when I’ve worked with them and I won’t comment any more on their personal life,” Sequin might have noticed, and Benn might have encouraged him to change his behavior. Not saying “no” was a direct, demonstrable failure to show any kind of leadership.

-This counts as workplace sexual harassment. I’m not saying a case should have been pursued: that should have been at least partly up to the Sedins (although there should also be workplace rules about what is and isn’t acceptable without the victims having to ask for it). But that’s a word we can use for this, this could have been counted as that. Sexual harassment are actions based on a person’s gender, assigned sex, sexual activity, or other qualities related to sex, not just sexual attraction. I worry that often, conflicted feelings about putting people into the category of “Sexual Harasser” lead people to think that actions “aren’t bad enough” to be sexual harassment when they definitionally can be. In other lines of work, if you talk about your coworkers fucking their twins in the office, there are rules about that: at the very least, you’ll be getting a bunch of trainings and be moved to a part of the office where you won’t see them again.

In the NHL, it seems frighteningly clear that people don’t have recourse for sexual harassment. This was discussed and handled as a “childish insult”, not harassment against two coworkers/employees. Often, there’s a logic that something is just an insult, not a ‘real’ threat, because the person who did it couldn’t possibly be sexually attracted to the person they did it to.

-In 2015 Eric and Jordan Staal were living in identical houses outside Raleigh and ‘playing’ together every night. Seems super suspicious. Unless beefy Canadian boys’ behavior is normal, and European masculinity always has to be questioned as being softer-spoken, slimmer, more intellectual, scared of heavy hitting. There are a lot of reasons you might not call Eric Staal gay—maybe you know he’s bigger than you, more successful on Team Canada than you, more popular with the other Team Canada guys than you. Or maybe you just don’t look at him and think he could be gay. Or both. Eric is positioned so you’d have to punch up at him: Benn tried to position himself closer to that kind of social standing, by pushing someone else who already doesn’t quite fit in further out. This isn’t directly in the words, so I’m not all-out accusing them of xenophobia: what I mean is that it’s always worth asking if and how and why feminization is applied to Those Other People.

There’s the eating out thing. Which he sent to teammate Jason Demers, commenting “I feel like your (sic) the kind of guy who would”.

How misogyny is working here:

-the idea that this could have been funny or interesting or worth saying at all depends on the idea that vulvas are weird. Imagine if someone willing touched a cis woman with anything but their dick. Gosh.

-There’s no good explanation for what ‘the kind of guy who would’ was meant to mean. No one says, ‘Hey, do you do this widely mocked sex act? I don’t, but I think you would, and that’s cool and doesn’t affect your masculinity at all, bro, life is a rich tapestry.’

How power is working here:

-This counts as sexual harassment again. Even if asking a coworker (or really more like someone you shift-manage or who reports to you) ‘how do you fuck your partner?’ wasn’t, saying ‘you seem like you would do ___’ is. Again, I’m not saying that Demers has to feel that way about it, but he should have had options.

-Demers was also in a new relationship at the time, so this could be harassment to both him and his partner, who had no recourse when someone her partner has to work with/for comments on her body.

-I don’t think it was intended as sexual harassment. But there’s not really a nice explanation of what he meant to say. It seems like it was intended as an insult or a ‘warning’: ‘this is the way men are allowed and no allowed to be in our group, do you know your place?’

Around that time, the Stars shared a video of Benn, Seguin, and Valeri Nichushkin. Each were supposed to say a couple lines, including their name. Valeri pronounced his nickname ‘Vall’, with a native Russian accent, more like “Wall” in English. Each time Benn and Seguin laughed and questions him and the producer cut. After a couple takes Benn said, “I thought your name was ‘Val.’” 

Sequin physically turned away from Nichushkin and laughed. Nichushkin, not understanding the comment, and not laughing, turned to Benn for an explanation, but Benn only turned toward Seguin, both continuing to laugh.

It was part of a pattern of comments from observers: “If Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn are having a laugh in the locker room, Nichushkin can only guess what’s so funny.” They themselves commented on how “His English is really not good at all…A lot of times we find him just sitting there.” “(In) normal conversations, he doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

I’ll give them credit—they said they felt pity and “try to help” too. I just can’t find any examples of them doing it, compared to teammates like Sharp or Spezza who can more concretely describe spending time with him.

Nichushkin chose to burn contract time in the KHL rather than Dallas before being bought out, expressing that he no longer felt like he “belonged in the NHL.” He felt that the Stars didn’t “trust” in him, was “nervous” in the locker room, and said his family worried for his mental health because of the culture.

“There is a bit of it because I want to be part of the conversation when someone says something,” Nichushkin said. “But I don’t have enough words I know so I can join in.”

-Is it the worst xenophobia in the world? Nah. It’s not free from xenophobia, when the only joke is that someone speaks differently than you. It’s not Benn joking about his own misunderstanding to invite Nichushkin in. I often point to Tripp Tracy, who asks players to teach him words in their language and then sets up jokes about his accent so they can deliver the punchline and laugh with him.

-Is it bullying? It kind of came off like it, to make a joke about someone you know can’t understand. At least it was unnecessary, and unkind. It’s just reminding someone they don’t belong.

-It’s unimpressive. It’s deflecting. Oh, he doesn’t know what’s going on? What did you do to tell to him? My family communicate through a mix of finger-signing, Scrabble tiles, and interpretive dance: I guarantee you, if you can’t communicate concepts like “we’re going to get dinner now, you’re welcome here, we’re having fun!”, you’re not trying. Which is fine, I guess, you don’t have to talk to people, unless it’s like, your job to work with your teammates.

Wanting to ban trans*feminine athletes from competition is based on a complete misunderstanding of math, medicine, and athletics; it’s unnecessary, unethical, and unkind.

It’s an unsurprising continuation of the ideas that there’s a line between men and women and transgressing it is suspicious, that women are gross, that people who are different are shocking and funny, that social pressure can and should be used to remind people who are different that they don’t belong.

It’s a fascist use of power, which I don’t say to mean that “He is A Fascist in every sense,” but that those beliesf express a desire and a comfort with using power to control other people’s bodies, and which bodies have access to certain spaces, to maintain “purity”.

I’m not saying that anyone should have looked at any of these things and easily decided in that moment, “That’s it, he’s shouldn’t have a platform or power over other players, he’s irredeemable.” You might look at a couple of them and think, “That’s not even a problem at all.” I’ll agree to disagree on some of them, but my point is about a pattern of how this dude uses the power he’s given.

I have a phrase, or more a series of words I sometimes yell when I’m talking about subjects like this—“STRUCK A TIM HORTONS.” I shout this in commemoration of the time that Ryan O’Reilly got drunk and drove his pickup into the wall of a small town Ontario Timmies.

“Struck a Tim Hortons” is a very good phrase to read in a police report. And, also, I’m an ACoA. I’ve experienced impaired driving, I’m terrified to shaking of it, and I know that other people have experienced much worse consequences. This isn’t a perfect metaphor (it’s not an example of prejudice or violence against a class of people, etc) but my point is that I try to hold it in my heart because that’s one case where I know what it’s like to really, really want something to just be NBD. Where part of me wants to just think it was a funny mistake so I don’t have to really think about the serious implications of it, and part of me super doesn’t. I have an instinct to resolve those feelings, to come down and decide that it’s either insignificant enough that I don’t have to think about it, or significant enough that I can hate him and then also stop thinking about it, and then I can have the relief of feeling just one feeling at a time.

I don’t think it’s bad to feel conflicted learning something about someone. I think it’s important.

But the problem is that if one thing isn’t significant enough, and we decide to keep thinking someone is fundamentally Good, we often toss that thing out. So when another thing happens, we only look at the new thing, trying to decide: is this enough? And that next thing might not be enough either. So we can go on and on, until you add up to a lot of things that have each done some harm, but none of them have been enough to change how we see and talk about someone.

Now I, personally, decided that the Timmies wasn’t so bad that ROR couldn’t ever make it up to me. But I didn’t decide to feel fine about it: I tried to just put a pin in how conflicted I felt. It’s been years, and over the years I think his actions have showed meaningful change. He hasn’t struck a Starbucks, a Dunkin, or even a Caribou. There’s a pattern.

I think a lot of people who don’t really like the things Benn says or does or believes have given him a lot of chances to make up for them, because they don’t want him to really mean those things. By which I really mean that I know there are a lot of women and queer fans who liked the guy. I get it (I don’t actually get it get it, but I mean I can try to understand people coming from a very different place than I do about him). 

I’ve read a lot of ways that people who are themselves vulnerable in our society try to empathize with him by imagining him as vulnerable too--he’s also experienced fatphobia, homophobia, he wasn’t expected to succeed, etc! I think that’s a wonderfully human instinct. But often I think people have more empathy for those experiences than he expresses for himself--he agrees that it was Bad to be fat and he’s Worked Hard to fit into the masculine norm, he agrees that it’s Bad to be close with another man and works to avoid it--and certainly more than he has showed in his actions toward others. If you’re going to say I hate him for saying that, I don’t--I want him and everyone in our society not to feel and do this shit!

I see a lot of people starting from the idea he is a good leader trying really hard to spin his choices as a smart strategy when he plays dumb with media, when he doesn’t give specific action plans or give public statements or apologies. (I actually agree with the first one, I think it is a strategy for him to avoid transparency and not do a part of his job that he doesn’t want to do.) It just…it seems like a lot of work to reach a pre-determined goal. It’s okay to like someone and for them to still not be good at their jobs! When I say I think a guy’s not a good leader, that’s not always the same as saying he’s a bad person. And if we keep on promoting a guy as a good leader because we like them regardless of their demonstrated leadership skills…that’s how we end up with a lot of shitty policies in the NHL.

Over the years he has consistently avoided stepping up to his captaincy and using his personal power to say things like, “No,” “Tyler, cut it out,” “This is what I’m going to do to fix a problem,” or “I believe in…” anything, really. 

I really, really want to ask people to be mad as hell and advocate for the NHL to improve its code of conduct and harassment processes. I do. But I’m also tired. I don’t think, if I did ask you that, it would work. I don’t have an argument for why you should be mad at someone who’s mad at my existence. I’m not trying. I just want to encourage you, if you’re feeling the tug of feelings and just want to be able to simplify someone’s behavior and love them in simple terms, to put a pin in the more complicated parts, and remember them the next time, and look for patterns.

[bagog]

What On Earth Has Happened

Hey, no story here, no experiments. Just a play by play of an awful year in my life. Please don't reblog. Trying to just get it down in one place for people who care about me. Long, sob-story beneath the cut.

Air - 'Things are looking up!' I had started to drift a bit from tumblr. The porno purge came and a lot of my friends trickled off the platform after that. I went back to school, attempting to score myself a Masters degree in something that would pay enough to get me out of Student Debt. I was doing great, picking things up fast. I got a new job at a company doing pretty menial work, but the people I worked with were great conversationalists. The work didn't involve dealing with customers at all, paid well, and was small and accomplishable tasks. Essentially I was being prepped to take a better position at the place once I had my Masters. Covid happened, then. Earth - 'The Whole World Sucks Right Now' My company was "essential," so I continued going to work, now on weird schedules. The company I worked for was profiting off Covid, all the while making fun of it as an overblown conspiracy, even as their own epidemiologist urged them to take better precautions. Work became hard to swallow. Water - 'When your lowest place could be lower' The apartment I shared with my boyfriend flooded. The lowest place in any sewage system is typically the bathtub, such that if it backs up, it does so into that tub. Our lowest point is the toilet. So the apartment flooded. Three times. Roots growing through the sewage outflow meant that, often, you needed to wait a solid hour between toilet flushes, or else the toilet would back up with such gusto the sewage would slosh down the hallway and into the living room. We mopped many times. The problem was finally fixed 8 months later, necessitating our having to camp because our house had no water. Fire - 'To destroy all you've done' One afternoon, I smelled burning. Going to our bedroom, I found our shelf a column of flame. I could barely breathe for all the smoke, but I managed to grab a blanket and beat the fire out. On the other side of the room, the pages of the books upon another shelf had begun to crisp from the heat, the blinds on all the windows were warped. The whole apartment had been about to go up. I'm kinda scared of fire now. Heart - 'When moving is too much to ask' Personal health sorta hit a new low. Migraines kept me out of work for two full weeks. I have seasonal foot pain, I always assumed from hiking for a living in my 20s. Turns out it was gout, all the while. Gout is exceptionally painful: it's like a messy pile of razor blades in the ball of your foot every time you step down. At work, I could barely stand. Walking from my car to the door became something I needed to psyche myself up for. Not a lot can stop a gout flare-up once it's in full swing, so I just had to wait it out. For a month. Two. Some of the worst sustained pain I've been in. Little did I know that, in January, come the kidney stones. Kidney stones feel awful. Feel like total shit. Gout and kidney stones are comorbid--brought about as a result of the meds I take to help me focus. So any day I don't drink enough water is a day when my kidneys or my foot just starts aching. But going back to September of 2020... Homophobia - 'goddammit' Finally things are looking better. I'm limping quickly again. Then I am called into the HR office. I am told that two sexual harassment charges have been brought against me. I'm told that one individual has alleged that I, while in the restroom, used a reflective toilet brush to attempt to peep him under a stall wall. I did not do this. I do not understand--reflective toilet brush?? wtf. The second allegation: I just straight up looked over a stall at a guy. I didn't do this either. I'm asked to defend myself, I ask who or date or time of day. I am given nothing. I remark that I don't think I'm tall enough to see over the stall, and I do not understand about the toilet brush. Of the ten minutes of the meeting, I spend 8 of them trying to get my head around how a claim about a reflective toilet brush has me here. "Would you like us to go now to see if you're tall enough to see over the stall? If that would help your defense?" says the HR head. "Yes, I

would," says I. We did not go. I am told that the accusers have no reason to be collaborating, or to even know each other made a claim. This is bullshit, because it was a company of 80 people, and only a quarter of those employees used the restroom where my alleged harassment was to have taken place. Before I am dismissed from work for the day to go home and wait to find out if I'll be fired or not, I march into the HR office once more and say "I hope none of this is happening because I'm gay." The HR head looks positively offended. I got fired cuz I'm gay. Next day I got a call. They'd come to the "objective truth" (that phrase is burned in my mind), and were terminating me. Apparently they discounted the toilet brush rumor, after all. But they really honestly believed I looked over the stall at a dude. Nightmare - 'No Fear One Fear' Let me tell you something: this is a nightmare. This is my honest-to-god nightmare. I've been terrified of getting accused of something in a bathroom since I was 11 years old. I am incredibly self-conscious and careful in public restrooms. To be fired? From a place full of people I like? And all of them will think I'm a pervert. My boyfriend worked at the same place. He would now have to work there every day dealing with people looking at him and wondering what he must think of his boyfriend. That sent me on a spiral. I'm still out of work, almost a year later. It would have been the worst mental health crisis of my life if it wasn't for my boyfriend, my support network, and the meds I've finally been able to get ahold of. Oh, also. My two accusers? Were roommates. HR knew they were roommates. They basically collaborated on a story to get me fired. The story circulating around the place (I still have acquaintances I talk to working there) has dropped the reflective toilet brush entirely. I guess they thought it was too unbelievable. So anyway, the people who accused me are now telling a different set of events than what I was told. Absolute horse shit. Tried to go to my city's human right's council to see if my situation warranted further attention. I gave my side of the story--including tales of the straight manager who had had enough harassment charges brought against him that he was no longer allowed to meet female staff--which indicated I'd been treated differently and wrongly. My old job made an impassioned argument that the committee violated their First Amendment rights(?) ('Freedom of speech' is the biggie with the First Amendment, for people who cba re:USA). I won the vote!! But one member of the committee was missing. So there weren't enough people for the vote to pass. Dismissed. We took it to the EEOC to make an official federal complaint. Just a week ago, an agent of the US Government patiently explained to us that these laws are literally designed to fuck over the worker and protect the employer unless they are epically stupid, and unfortunately, mine had not been epically stupid. So there's nowhere to go, no recourse to be had. It's over, I guess. Family - 'How to sum it up quickly...' My family hit me with the old soft-disown. No more calls, no more communication. They think they are loving me by not having contact with me. By depriving me of my family, they hope it will make me realize that the path I'm on is destructive, and I'll return to them living an upright life. No. I'm living an upright life, now. And if my family can choose to throw me away, then they are not a family I choose. Then my dad hit me back two months later, absolutely gaslighting me and pretending we never had the disown conversation at all. Reality - 'I don't know who I am anymore' I have trouble knowing what's real, anymore. Every message my dad sends on the surface seems loving and supportive and plaintive. I feel I must be the one in the wrong. I got fired for bullshit reasons. It doesn't feel real. "My family can't possibly have ceased contact with me: that's one of those things I know can never happen!!" But that did happen. So what else that feels real, actually isn't? I do

mean to be so dramatic, and I won't apologize for it. But I truly do feel like my mind has been pretty thoroughly unseated by the last year. Whoever I am, I'm becoming someone different. More distilled, at very least. I've discovered a lot of things about myself: trauma that has likely led to a lot of my mental health problems. Discovered I actually have RAGING ADHD, and it has robber me of a lot of things I wanted to do, and now is sort of consuming me completely. I'm looking for help. Trying to get better. Here's hoping. Every bold point above could be its own book, for all my thoughts about them. But enough of that for now. Love you. Thanks for reading.

[qqueenofhades]

Question: were medieval peasants always on the edge of starving, as in couldn't waste food? Or did that vary with time and place? Thanks in adavance!

Well, I have to say that it must be fairly obvious that when we’re talking about a span of roughly one thousand years in an entire continent, in multiple countries/kingdoms/geopolitical situations, and over the course of large-scale, macro-level geographical, climate, crisis, and cultural incidents, it would indeed vary, sometimes wildly, and this is the case for almost any factor that you could possibly think of. It will not surprise you to learn that “medieval peasants were always on the brink of starving” is yet another tired old cliche from the Bad Old Middle Ages grab bag, and while it reflects a different system from modernity, it is not necessarily the case that it was always worse (especially considering the prevalence of hunger in the modern world and the parallel universes in food access between rich and poor, which were simply never that extreme in the medieval era). Today, there’s no relationship whatsoever between how rich people eat and how poor people eat; they exist in completely separate realms. Rich people simply have no worry about disruption to food supply, reliance on local economy or agriculture, the impact of natural disasters, or anything else; globalization and worldwide supply chains means that they can be assured of whatever they want, whenever they want it. Even wealthy people in the Middle Ages did not exist in their own ecosystem the way modern rich people do. Their food was grown on the same land, was subject to the same possible impacts of famine or crop failure, was reliant on having farm labor to cultivate it, and otherwise came from the same place as the food of poor people. Obviously class, status, and money affected what goods a medieval citizen had access to, whether in food or anything else, but food inequality and disparity is WAY more of a thing in modernity than it was in the Middle Ages.

Next, when we say “medieval peasants,” do we mean literal peasants, i.e. manual laborers tied to a single plot of land who worked it, harvested its crop yields, owed rent to a local landlord, and were often rural and on the subsistence level? Because obviously, there are social differences among peasants too, and some of them could be quite wealthy. In his usefully titled “Did the Peasants Really Starve in Medieval England?”, Christopher Dyer points out that the upper class of peasants, who had about thirty acres of arable land and access to common pastures, would easily be able to provide themselves with bread, potage (soup) and ale on a daily basis, have consistent access to dairy and meat, and even enough money to buy extra fish, meat, and prepared foods like pudding and pie from the village or market town. It would be easy for them to eat the usual 2000 calories a day, and their diet would be relatively flavorful and nutritious even by modern standards. Poorer peasants would be more reliant on just bread, potage, and ale, and have less access to meat and dairy, but they still weren’t outright starving. Manual labor doesn’t go well if the laborers are constantly underfed and/or weak from malnutrition, and while the poorest peasants’ diet would have been fairly monotonous and carb-heavy, it still would provide raw calories for energy.

Nor were food economies exclusively local, as that equally tired cliche that people never traveled more than ten miles from home would have you believe (honestly, where did that even come from?) As Food in Medieval Times puts it, “A remarkably wide variety of foodstuffs was available to consumers in the Middle Ages. Besides homegrown and raised products, exotic fruits and spices were brought by Arab merchants into the Mediterranean markets and sold across Europe at premium prices. Although bad harvests resulting in famine and disease occurred periodically, the staple foods -- bread, dairy products, cheap cuts of meat, and preserved fish -- were usually available to the general population. In richer households the foodstuffs were more exclusive and the dishes more sophisticated and varied.” Regional differences would obviously thus play a part. Common people in Iberia, Italy, and southern Europe would be more easily able to access certain delicacies not available in relatively barren England and northern Europe, and would be geographically closer to the Mediterranean markets. They still would not be able to afford expensive delicacies like saffron or other fine spice, but that doesn’t mean they never had it at all. There were many feast days and festivals in the religious and liturgical calendar, and communities would come together with food just as they do now.

There were also social welfare systems and safety nets, wherein, for example, ageing peasants could retire and be provided with a food pension by their landlord (there are numerous legal contracts of this nature, which had to be written down since what a surprise, the landlords didn’t always keep their word or honor their obligations). Even serfs didn’t have to work until they keeled over; they could take retirement and be provided with a portion of the food yield of the estate from their working-age peers, indeed rather like Social Security. There were also almoners at churches, monasteries, and other religious houses, who relied on donations from rich patrons with guilty consciences in order to feed the destitute poor, like a modern-day soup kitchen. These arrangements would obviously not have covered everybody (once again, we note, food banks and food stamps and other arrangements don’t do that for modern people either), but it doesn’t mean there was no recourse.

Of course, the food economy was more perilous than it is now, and more prone to natural disasters and agricultural disruptions. There are certainly famines recorded throughout the medieval period (such as the Great Famine of 1315-18), and several years of bad harvests could have a devastating impact on rich and poor alike. (Since again, the rich didn’t have their own entirely separate ecosystem; their food had to come from the same place as their poorer counterparts.) Climate change, too little rain, too much rain, drought, fire, pestilence, or anything else, in the absence of industrialization, mass farming techniques, factories, or anything of the sort, meant that food supplies were vulnerable to the natural environment, and people did die of hunger in the bad years. While standards did also change and improve over time, the earlier (pre-11th century) medieval period was not necessarily always worse. After the Black Death, when there were simply much fewer people than before, and increasingly so in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, peasants usually had fairly reliable access both to raw food and cash to purchase prepared food. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the threat of widespread food catastrophe had largely subsided; there aren’t any major famines recorded in Europe at this time, though we daresay they had plenty of other problems (not least the wars of religion). Of course, that little thing in 1492 had also happened, opening up the Columbian Exchange and new routes of supply to the New World, including large-scale transportation and trade of food.

As I’ve mentioned in at least one other ask, people also knew how to cook food properly; someone studied the latrines at Warkworth Castle in northern England (don’t ask me who thought that this is a fun research project, but it takes all kinds) and discovered a remarkable lack of food-borne pathogens. In other words, even without modern safety standards or exact temperature guidelines, people were well aware how to cook food so it tasted good and wouldn’t kill you. They also took pride in doing so. In “The Evolution of Culinary Techniques in the Medieval Era,” Barbara Santich explores the evolution of written recipes from a few notes intended to remind the chef of something they already knew, to a more detailed programmatic for someone who might not have actually made the dish before. Skilled cooks were highly prized members of middle-class and upper-class households, and people who had money to spend on food enjoyed banquets, diverse dishes, and whatever delicacies they could get from their local merchants and markets. The extensive system of medieval trade networks, as mentioned above, meant that consumer goods could travel a very long way indeed, and while you couldn’t walk into a supermarket and get whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it, there would be at least some opportunity for you to acquire something new.

Anyway, yes. Medieval peasants: usually not starving. There you have it.

[iceeckos12]

tma fic recs

I’ve seen a couple of fic rec posts floating around. since ive been reading so many excellent fic recently, i thought that id make one as well! please note this list is going to be 99% jonmartin. also buckle up, because this is going to get long.

Completed

the umbrella by Wildehack (tyleet)

"And to think—all of Jonah Magnus’ carefully laid plans, the centuries of scheming, the murders, the sacrifices, all of that work could have been completely undone if Martin Blackwood had gone back for an umbrella" - holdthosebees

Notes: This is probably my go-to fic if i want an apocalypse never happened scenario. The jonmartin is wonderful, as is the h/c.

Diary and Prenon-nous la main by luftballoons99

Diary summary:

Not for the first time since they ran away together, a camera reel of all the things they don't know about one another whirs behind Martin's eyes, and he can't help but look at all the sprawling magnetic tape and wonder if they’re going to wind up a romance or a tragedy.

or: Office parties, garage bands, and the joy of being known.

Prenon-nous la main summary:

They still haven't talked about it, any of it, not even to pass the time on the long train ride to Scotland. Instead, Martin fell asleep in the seat next to him, pressed into his side from shoulder to knee, and Jon thought about love confessions and verb tense and how the two fit together when you think you're dying.

or: Good cows, mediocre poetry, and other crucial topics of discussion.

Notes: Do you love impeccable safehouse jonmartin characterization? do you love characters grappling with the mortifying ordeal of being known? do you love softness so tender that it makes you want to weep? please read these fic. im begging you.

i’ll tell you about all the times i’ve smiled because of you by cryptidkidprem

Summary:

Martin thinks about their shoes, sitting beside each other on the floor by the bed. Thinks of the way Jon wears Martin’s cardigans more often than he wears his own, the way Martin’s started keeping elastics around his wrist because Jon always forgets his own when they go out.

He thinks about all the gentle touches and fussing over each other they’ve done, and how much is still to come over the next… however long Jon will have him.

They have a long way to go, an entire life to build out of the wreckage Jonah Magnus and Peter Lukas left them, but laying together in a comfortable, sleepy quiet, Martin thinks they’ve got a good start going.

Or, Jon quits the Institute, saves the world, and it turns out to be exactly what he needs in order to heal and start moving forward towards building a life with Martin.

Notes: how many times have i reread this fic? more than i can count. jon quits the institute and it’s just full of soft jonmartins. they get married! god i love them.

go softly by doomcountry

Summary:

And there is nothing else besides this.

Notes: every time i remember this fic i reread it. please heed the tags because martin is blinding jon, but he’s like. blinding jon in the most heartbreaking way possible. idk how the author made this so tender but i know i was certainly crying so!

The Reverb in These Holy Halls by  Wolftraps (AlwaysBoth)

Summary:

Undoing the apocalypse would have been enough for Jon, if all his people survived. Without them, Jon's only recourse is making it so it never happened in the first place. He's going to do better this time.

Notes: Do you like time travel fixits? i sure like time travel fixits. reverb is an excellent one. heavy on the h/c, I wanted to hug jon so so badly. 

Yesterday is Here by  CirrusGrey

Summary:

"Who the hell are you?" Jon could feel his hands shaking. The man laughed, taking a step forward and raising a hand to point at him. "I'm you, from the future!" he said, then swayed, eyes going unfocused, and collapsed to the floor in a dead faint. -------- Post-season-four Jon and Martin time travel back to the season one Archives.

Notes: Yet another time travel fixit! also excellent. the teasing was HYSTERICAL. also Im just going to say this now - CirrusGrey in general writes incredible tma fic. You can’t really go wrong.

unassigned supplementals by  bibliocratic 

Notes: I won’t put in a summary just because it’s a long series of oneshots, but bibliocratic’s writing is amazing. Again, you can’t really go wrong with one of their fic!

let the soft animal of your body by autoclaves

Summary:

Standing in the warm kitchen, slats of sepia light filtering through onto the counter in front of him, Martin doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He half expects them to go through the countertop entirely, glossy and solid as it is. He isn’t used to any of it, yet. The safehouse. Jon. Beams of sun pouring into his hands. After being deprived of everything of significance for so long, the longing that crashes over him is almost painful in its tangibility. He wants to laugh, to sob, to scream and hear it echoed back against the neat, square walls of the safehouse.

In the end, he doesn’t do any of these things. He makes eggs instead. He can do that, can’t he? Use his hands for something simple and plain and good.

(Or: In the safehouse after it all, Martin starts cooking.)

Notes: this fic really speaks to me a) because i project on martin like crazy and b) because food is also my love language. this fic is incredibly soft and it’s all about cooking!

“Have you tried turning it on and off again?” by shinyopals

Summary:

I hope you find your new role as Head of the Institute as rewarding as captaining the Tundra, wrote Elias Bouchard, to Peter Lukas. There are so many people working there: all with their own interesting lives, and all desiring your attention and support. I'm sure you will relish the challenge it will bring and enjoy every moment spent with the fine men and women of the Institute. In time I'm confident they'll become like a family to you.

The Magnus Institute has a new boss. The Magnus Institute also has a new tech support technician. These two facts are unrelated, except they both happen at the same time.

Meanwhile Jon's woken up from being dead for six months and for once he's trying his best. He just wishes Martin would stop avoiding him and answer his messages...

Notes: if you’re looking for a good laugh, this fic is SO SO SO FUNNY. i was dying. basically the magnus institute being an absolute bureaucratic nightmare.

hello my old heart  by  firebirdsuite

Summary:

Peter’s wrong, of course. When it’s all over, Martin does still want to tell Jon everything. It’s just—well, there’s a few things they need to work through first before they can get there.

Martin and Jon find each other again in Scotland.

Notes: it’s all about the yearning. and trust me, the yearning in this fic? im just. i sure do love jonmartin, and this is such soft, loving jonmartin it just makes you want to cry

two ships passing by pyrites

Summary:

Gerard Keay is 10 years old the very first time he tries to run away from home, right around the time that Jonathan Sims has just come into possession of his first Leitner.

Or: One dropped stone can change the way the whole ocean moves.

Notes: again, JONGERRY. MY GOODNESS. this fic is beautiful, the writing is absolutely breathtaking and it owns my heart. im so in love with it. the author said you’re going to have emotions about jon and gerry and jongerry and i said OKAY

Terminal Sight by viv_is_spooky

Summary:

Spider silk weaves through the visions of two Seers. Monstrosity is dawning on them both.

Notes: I’d never read a gerryoliver fic before this, but the execution is EXCELLENT and now im sold on the ship forever. This fic has wonderful prose and great characterization and i love it a whole lot.

Incomplete

assistant archivist au by  PitViperOfDoom

Notes: I won’t put a summary since I’m reccing an entire series, but. it is absolutely no secret that i adore jongerry. pit’s assistant archivist au slapped me over the head with some gorgeous jongerry oneshots and then gave me the gift of the main fic (which is still in progress) about head archivist martin. i love this au so so much

dustsceawung by  callmearcturus

Summary:

Martin had always been favored by the summer courts, and moving up north to the little village of Lacuna is a difficult adjustment. It's rainy and lonely and everyone seems to have a strange, distant relationship with the local faerie court.

However: there is a strange man in a cloak who walks past Martin's remote little cottage every few days.

However: there is a moth that keeps getting stuck in Martin's house during the rain.

These events are not as disconnected as they first appear.

Notes: you ever just read a fic that you didn’t know that you needed until after you read it? yeah. featuring the fae and moth jon and excellent characterization.

Illicio by ThatOneGirlBehindYou

As the new Archivist debates between life and death, the Eye ponders on what to offer him in order to avoid an encore of the unfortunate situation with his predecessor.

-----

Gerard Keay opens his eyes at what feels like fuck-ass in the morning, inside a room with far too little space and far too much dust.

Notes: This is also the moment where I reveal that im a sucker for jongerrymartin. please read this fic. gerry is brought back from the dead in s4 and everyone is far better off for it.

where there’s a will, we make a way by bubonickitten

Summary:

"So, what does happen if an Eye learns to See within itself?

What happens is this: the Archive Beholds the Watcher – and the Watcher blinks first."

________________________

Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Notes: this time travel fixit is shaping up to be an absolutely incredible read. i love the way this author writes jon so so much, and the characterization is spot on. this whole fic just satisfies some little part of me. god. also!! bubonickitten’s writing in general? beautiful. please check out their other works.

The Timeline of Theseus by Applea

Jon tries to force the Spiral to send him back, but the Sprial's corridors never twist things quite the way you want them to. Back in 1996, Elias has no idea why or how the Eye made such a powerful Avatar out of an 8 year old, especially when said 8 year old doesn't actually know he has any powers at all. Clearly such a child cannot be left outside the Institute's care. 

Notes: This fic is legitimately brilliant. The author manages to capture the big ADHD mood and the precociousness of baby Jon while managing to write a wonderful storyline. Time travel! Elderly lesbians! A Jonah who is wildly in over his head but was walloped over the head with paternal instinct! Baby Gerry! What more could you possibly ask for?

rooms full of people who do not love each other yet by seaer

Summary:

“Wanted to ask about a book.” The boy has his hand on the counter, and he leans into it, nonchalant. The library is air-conditioned, but by no means frigid, and Jon can’t help but feel sweaty just looking at the layers he’s wearing; what looks like old leather over an olive-green Magnus pullover over his school shirt. “Do you have A Journal of the Plague Year?”

Jon says, tetchily, “We’re about to close.”

“I know. Do you have A Journal of the Plague Year?”

Notes: I am so in love with this author’s writing style and the way they write the characters!! The jon and gerry friendship is PERFECT and the character interactions are all darling.

if you read these fics please send the authors some love, they definitely deserve it!! 

[spiritualgateway]

The Next Wave

written by Steven Black:

We seem to be experiencing a boom of old conspiracy theories. Sometimes woven into a new coat, but at the core they are the same old black and white stories. Is it also true that all the conjecture, relativization, fake news and various conspiracy theories that are currently surfacing annoy the hell out of you? I have to be very careful about the sarcastic part of myself and therefore I keep myself from commenting. Not always, but mostly.

Whenever I open my FB Stream lately, I notice a real war being waged by the self-proclaimed awakened against the alleged sleeping sheep. One „have to know“ after the other is posted and „THE Truth About“ is announced – daily. I know this all too well.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Yes, I went through a phase myself where I believed a lot of bullshit or at least thought it was possible. It started in the late 90’s and ended in 2012, and during that time I probably inhaled every existing conspiracy theory and read all the authors who spread it with a fervor of conviction. Starting with David Icke, Jan van Helsing, Robin de Ruiter and countless others, up to Alex Jones. Hell, I myself have contributed to the spread of such stories. The subjects they dealt with back then were not really different from what they are today.  

Me and many other people, we thought we were „awakened“ then, because we believed we could understand the world more and better, like everyone else. Critical comments were countered with „inform yourself properly“ and immediately some links of „alternative points of view“ were thrown behind, which confirmed our own statement. And one could be sure that other participants who took the same bubble would shout down the critic as „mainstream sleep sheep“. No matter what argument came up – it did not reach anyone. In this phase one is not accessible to criticism, one fends it off. But if the criticism is so valid that it cannot be negated, one still had the recourse to some whataboutism.

It was a time when it was all about „the rise“ and all the political or economic daily news was seen as „there is light coming into the darkness“. We knew that the „end of the matrix“ was near and that a worldwide recalibration of consciousness was coming. We thought of ourselves as light warriors, critics of the system, rebels for the good and enlighteners. Fervently inspired by the conviction that we had all taken the „red pill“ and would now be the only ones to see clearly, we wanted to wake up and enlighten „the sleeping sheep“. In doing so, we constantly reminded them that it was absolutely (!) necessary to do research, think for oneself and question everything! Only WE knew, all others were of course stupid, brainwashed or sleeping. We were the judges, jurors and executioners of the worldly realities – self-proclaimed world policemen and smartass activists. We alone knew how the rabbit had to hop and how it „should be right“.

Pffff. When I look back on it now, I can laugh about it heartily. God, what a wonderful mindfuck.  

Yes, if we had done it like that.. If we had heeded this „winged advice“ that we had thrown at everyone, we would have taken it to heart ourselves. If we had questioned the sources we referred to and believed. Instead, our own thinking, research and questioning was limited to almost everything that came from alternative media and supported our views. Official facts, whether political, economic or otherwise, were „mainstream“ and thus fundamentally untrustworthy. It was all just propaganda … (yes no, that’s clear).

This made us susceptible to believe people and media that had either a political or other agenda. Starting with racist Jew haters, religiously dressed up ideologues, political muddle-heads, esoteric concepts without any grounding, up to „doomsday fanatics“.

But we had heard a call from the universe that the time had come for an expansion of consciousness. It felt like a kind of magical awakening. And I, as well as everyone else in that time who was like that, we were not the first. There have been recurring, rather small movements since the 1950s. But there was a really big, concentrated shift of consciousness in 1986, at the time of the so-called „Harmonic Convergence“. One can certainly call this the first great wave of lightworkers and truth seekers that the world has perceived.      

They did not fare much better either. These people, too, had to rummage through various horror scenarios, actual and imagined injustices, as well as their own overflowing imagination. But the basic themes were the same as they still are today. They are power topics (power and powerlessness), money topics, resistance to living, dying and all kinds of heavy, undigested emotional burdens. At that time, all of this was going on a little more quietly, at least in the eyes of the public. These topics were only discussed in small forums on the early Internet.

And today?

Today, the „social media“ are full of them and various shit storms are spilling over into the media mainstream.

Today the exact same process is taking place, in a new wave of people who have come in the beginning of their own awakening process. Awakened can not be spoken of, it is a slow awakening and it usually takes years.

One „wakes up“ from years of unconscious dwelling within one’s own personality structure, which has usually become quite rigid. One gradually enters into a new process of self-discovery, where many things are simply thrown over, which were normal and acceptable until then. The sense behind this is a broadening of perspective and a restructuring of mental expression.

Yeah, right. They got a call from the universe.

And at first you are thrown into confusion and disorientation. You will also have the feeling of stumbling around in a seemingly endless labyrinth. Individually varying degrees of identity loss can occur, which additionally creates fear. Many things seem to make no sense anymore, you part with friends, views and previously held beliefs, while at the same time you have the feeling that you can no longer find a secure hold anywhere. A well known, often observable reaction to this is a devaluation of the human being, the body, the mind or the human identity itself. In the course of this process one stumbles from one conspiracy theory to the next, constantly stepping on a bullshit cookie and sometimes not knowing whether one is male or female.

Can you prevent this? No idea. Most probably not.

That doesn’t mean that everyone who gets into this process is clinging to conspiracy theories and thinking they are THE thing or the only and pure truth. But a lot of people do just that. In a time of great personal uncertainty, the one-dimensional black and white images of conspiracy theories seem to simulate an unpleasant but seemingly stable reality.

Basically, an essential scenario is happening here – your consciousness is being twisted through the wringer and a kind of battle is taking place inside you. A battle between your old consciousness and the new, unknown. The old consciousness knows only defense and projection, but the new one wants to reflect and express itself mainly through self-reflection.

This inner fight has nothing to do with any Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Bill Gates, vaccinations, cash bans, paedophile satanists, mind control or whatever. In reality, „the universe“ is fucking your old consciousness to break you open and dissolve old encrusted structures. And the first, basic reaction is mostly projection and defense.

Hiking through your own darkness

There is a spiritual metaphor that says: „The dark night of the soul. This term goes back to the Spanish Carmelite and mystic John of the Cross. It is a poem written in the 15th century – in prison. For John of the Cross it was about the mystical union of the soul with God. Nowadays this metaphor is used to describe the difficult period of a spiritual development process, where the human personality has to struggle with disorientation, depression and confusion. Its purpose is actually to achieve a continuous, increasing and lasting reconnection with one’s own soul consciousness. This is a time when many things that once seemed normal and safe for the human personality simply seem to break away. Where instead depressive states are experienced, where crises, insecurity and loss of orientation prevail.

I actually believe that we are all in some kind of global dark night – the entire human species, the entire human family. And, of course, that means a process that will last for several years and probably decades. We are going through personal and global, very individual crises and we are coming into contact with our own darkness. With many things that we have been carrying for a long time, but which we are very often simply not really aware of. And a whole lot of situations and emotions are being washed up inside of us, so that we have the opportunity to check if it still fits for us. Yes, in the end it is years of trials …  

It takes a while to understand that expanding consciousness has little to do with any external enemies, but rather with what is going on inside and how to deal with it. Nevertheless, it is apparently unavoidable that you first shoot yourself on everything you find in the world of Scheixxe and what you judge to be „that shouldn’t be like that“. And so one wades for a while through all kinds of dirt, horror ideas, laments about injustice and deals with horror scenarios. Starting with worldwide mind control, up to some omnipotent enemies of mankind. As an antipole you read channelings or inform yourself about natural food.

Basically, projections are a defense mechanism of the psyche. The term projection describes the transfer and shifting of one or more inner psychological conflicts to other persons, groups of people, living beings or various objects of the outside world.

Relatively harmless projections are when we ascribe characteristics, deficiencies or problems to other people, which we ourselves carry openly or hidden within ourselves. A far more serious form of transference is when I believe that the whole world is conspiring against me (or humanity, the whole earth, health, freedom, morality, faith, etc.).

Whatever the case may be, when we project, we thus transfer our own issues, fears or worries, to other people, organizations or groups of people, so that we do not have to feel it with ourselves. And then link these fears to certain events or circumstances that we do not like, which is then considered „proof“. The point is – what we project and transfer to other people are either unrecognized, personal qualities or unprocessed, emotional problems from our past, which we transfer to the present. And often, both variants intermingle. Projection allows us to transfer self-experienced situations or predominant emotional states, in our own consciousness, that are perceived as unbearable, to ward off these emotions from ourselves by transferring them to x-any situation, people and organizations.

And this, whether we want it or not, is unavoidable in a real wake-up process.

We push away what is inside of us and project it onto politicians, Illuminati, cabal, deep state mind control or whatever. To explain to us why we have certain feelings or thoughts. In this way we can continue to fool ourselves that everything is okay with US – only with THOSE out there, there is something wrong with them.

Talmud: „We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are“.

You can of course now despise all this fear porn of various conspiracy theories and call it bullshit – which of course is a good 99% (in my opinion) of all conspiracy theories. But in the end, they seem to fulfill a need that is not quite visible on the surface.

When you get into such a wake-up process – process, mind you – your entire identity structure is „attacked“. All the things and experiences that we hid from ourselves and that we repressed will be flushed up from our inner self over time and our protective and defensive shields will become porous. Most of the time, we have buried them so deeply that we can no longer feel or perceive many things. Deep, formative experiences that reach far back into childhood. All our deep fears, the inner insecurity, the doubts or our real self-esteem will gradually creep to the surface and say hello. Everything that has been quietly there all along will suddenly start screaming very loudly inside us.

Conspiracy theories are theories, not facts. They are extremely simplified black-and-white images and, moreover, highly exaggerated descriptions of a seemingly alternative reality. Mixed and connected with actual, clearly criticizable, political, social or economic processes. Whereby, however, the really criticizable things are completely lost, because the context with which they are interpreted is completely far-fetched.

BUT …

Now, if a Xavier Naidoo in a video cries because allegedly thousands of children are being freed from an underground torture prison where they were abused as human lab rats to obtain an alleged super drug called Adrenochrome and you react emotionally to it, it is because this extremely shocking horror show is arguing with certain experiences of your own past. Maybe from a past life, maybe in this life – does not matter in the end.

But you can suddenly feel THAT. It breaks down your protective shields and your emotional numbness. You can feel this nameless horror inside you, what it must mean to be tortured, abused and trapped. Powerless, to be exposed innocently and helplessly to something. But at the moment you can’t realize that this might have something to do with yourself. And you do not want to feel all the unpleasant things that have to do with you personally. You do not want to feel your personal powerlessness, helplessness or fears. You want to get rid of that.

I’m not saying that conspiracy theories are good. But everyone has to go through his own processes, even if that means having to go through a nonsense of denial of reality. If you bought into it, then you have to go through it. Okay, whatever makes you descend into your own darkness is good.

Of course, there is no such underground bunker and no tortured children to produce adrenochromes. And of course, „St. Donald Trump“ has not freed anyone. This Q Anon story is completely free of meaning and serves nothing else but to secure Donald Trump’s re-election and keep his conservative voters happy. Apart from the fact that there is child trafficking, that there is organized sexual and also ritual abuse of children, there is no truth in the story itself.

These and other conspiracy theories, however, bring you in touch with your own feelings and emotions that are buried deep inside you. The stronger you react to it, the more outraged and angry your reaction is, the more emotional charge you have built up.

The dark and heavy energy, such formatted information, docks fundamentally to the inner parts of the person that are in pain, traumatized or disoriented. This inner pain is often so well hidden and suppressed, so great and unspeakable – because never processed or admitted by us that only a supermonstrous, absolutely malignant source can explain it, who must be behind it. This kind of milkmaid’s calculation, of an omnipotent conspiracy feeds and triggers the fragmented inner child within us, which then becomes angry and projects its hatred, its rage and despair onto the world.

What do you think it does to you when you wallow in assertions and views that the eternal sacrificial existence enshrines? What does it do to you when you think the world is in the iron grip of a global conspiracy, a supposed elite, with the aim of undermining moral principles and ultimately reducing humanity? If you believe that some malevolent aliens have allied themselves with various leaders or secret organizations to rule the earth? And you yourself are completely powerless in this?

Does it make life much more fun? Does it create meaning, love or harmony for yourself and more connection to the world? Does it produce improvements in your personal life? You will have to admit that this is not the case. On the contrary – you clearly feel worse. If you roll around in dirt, you don’t get cleaner, but naturally dirtier.

If you go through this phase, the day will come when you are „done with the world“. Where you feel so weakened, depressed and trapped in your own darkness that you will experience a kind of inner breakdown. You will approach a state where you give up. Which, as weird as this may sound, is a good thing. When your inner resistance and your defense strategies no longer work and collapse, there is only one way out – to work through your emotional burdens. In reality, this is not a breakdown, even if it feels that way – it is a breakthrough.

This is the moment when the real challenge begins and you are so „backed up“ that you are ready to face your own personal issues. And in the end it’s all about that and nothing else. It is about you, not about politics, economics, Illuminati, cabal, Donald Trump, Rothschilds, Soros, Bill Gates or Rockefeller. It is about you personally, in this process. How you feel with yourself, your body and your life.

The Rothschilds are not responsible for how you feel or whether you have too little money in your pocket. Donald Trump is not coming to save you, Germany or the world. God or the universe will not transport you to a light-filled 5 D world where you don’t have to feel all the pain anymore. George Soros is not to blame if you do not take responsibility for yourself. The pharmaceutical industry is not to blame if you are sick. The slaughterhouses are not to blame if you are meat. Reptilian shape-shifters have nothing to do with it if you don’t feel comfortable with yourself or your body. Illuminati or Kabale are not responsible if your relationship breaks down or you are no longer satisfied with it. No one is responsible for whether you can accept yourself, with all your apparent faults or inadequacies. No one, except ourselves …

All these are deeply personal issues and conflicts that should be looked at. No one will come to save you miraculously. You are the one you are waiting for. You are the one who can „save“ yourself.

It is about making new friends with yourself and life. It is about self-acceptance and self-acceptance, exactly as you are. And you will only achieve this if you really deal deeply with yourself. Everything else is just an attempt to avoid yourself. To avoid the pain, loneliness, loss, anger and many other conditions that have accumulated in you for years. And it takes a lot of courage to venture into a therapeutic reappraisal process and to face your personal stories mercilessly.

This is a very critical time when you are extremely vulnerable and unfortunately some people do not manage to take the necessary step and get stuck in the old stories. They get stuck in conspiracy theories and cling to them desperately. And bullet through one wave of outrage into the next. If you don’t do transformation work and don’t integrate all the unpleasant emotions into yourself, you can get stuck in it for a very long time.

I recommend to everyone who wants to hear it, an examination of the Inner Person Model. And I strongly recommend feeling work. Get professional help if you are in this process. You will find it very difficult to get through on your own and if so, you will have to spend much more time with it. So take care of yourself and your consciousness …

Man is basically not a prisoner of fate, Illuminati, Freemasons, aliens, etc., but of his own consciousness, which he does not care about. When you deal with your inner conflicts, your emotional nebulas and diffuse mental states, you regain clarity – above all clarity about yourself. If you are clear with yourself again, many strange convictions you had about x – any external processes will also be cleared. You will then realize that you don’t need conspiracy theories to criticize various processes or states in our society. There are enough factual, fact-based and also technically competent arguments for this.  

For those of us who have been through it for a long time, for those who find it a bit annoying to see all this old stuff reappearing so massively in the social media. But we should remember that we once experienced a similar phase and had to go through it. No, of course these people are not stupid, even if a part of me has the perception that the concentrated stupidity seems to take over the power at the moment. They are merely in a process of transition and one can only wish them good luck and good luck with it. They are not the first and will not be the last. In fact, I believe that this will intensify.

I have a part of me that thinks it could save people from their own experience if they only had enough information. This part of me thinks he would abandon his tribe if he didn’t say anything about it. And so I sometimes make comments to some people when I feel it would make sense to correct the statement. Most of the time it doesn’t take 2 minutes of googling to find out the facts. Meanwhile I make such comments only once, sometimes even twice. But if I constantly get answers to them, which my 20 years younger self has known for a long time, because he himself answered criticism like this, then I stop.

Because the adult in me knows that it makes no further sense and the person has to go through this experience until the end. Once you are in it, there is no other way out than to go all the way through it. Then I just keep my mouth shut and sometimes I unfriend or put people on „sleep“. Especially those who share particularly annoying „alternative theories“. This is pure self-protection. I just try to keep some distance to the experiences of others that don’t fit (anymore) to mine.

It took me a lot of persuasion to make this part of me understand that it cannot protect or prevent anyone from their personal experience. And to feel all the sadness and regret, at the thought that in this process some will „fall under the table“ and may not be able to rise from there. This part of my personality has now understood that his tribe has to do its own personal, very individual work to come to terms with the situation and that this is entirely his responsibility. Or he will get stuck in his experience.

I am also aware that the term conspiracy theorist is considered offensive by many who are in it. Well, they should thank those people who, by mixing up thoroughly criticizable topics with phobias, paranoia, hysteria and pure fantasy, led to a huge accumulation of absurd theories that no clear-thinking person can take seriously. And no, the term conspiracist was not invented by the CIA to silence critics of the Kennedy assassination. It goes back to the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, who coined the term conspiracy theory as early as 1948.

From where I stand today, conspiracy theories make no sense at all. They are packed with emotional dramas and personal imbalances, cause doubt, create fear and feed the hysterical inner child. Never have conspiracy theories led to anything constructive. They simply invite you to let your hatred, resistance, lack of empathy and inner drama queen out and let the proverbial sow run free. To understand this, just look through the commentary columns under some VT Post.

And it is not at all about the fact that there have been or are actual conspiracies throughout human history. But all the things that are manufactured and suspected about it today, so bizarre and excessive, can’t be put on any cow skin anymore. Conspiracies are by definition top secret – they are so secret that any fool with computer access can find them neatly listed on the Internet. Michael from Recklinghausen knows them all, maybe the CIA should hire him …

Makes totally sense, right?

But okay, it’s just basic personal issues that are transported in this way. Apparently, for some of us it is necessary to exaggerate things so much that we are capable of an emotional reaction. Because no matter which horror story is given for the best – it is always MY personal fear that is then triggered. My anxiety, my paranoia, my hysteria – all kinds of emotional instability that exists within myself is reflected.    

And when you are in there, you believe that it is all real. That some reptiles rule the world, that George Soros is using refugees to destroy Christianity, that Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and white-vultures are still reptiles in human form, that the Corona crisis is a hoax, that it’s the pretext for establishing a dictatorship, that all the famous Hollywood actors or politicians are pedophiles and that Donald Trump is liberating Germany. That the Corona crisis would be the final wake-up call for the rise to 5D or would be used by the elite to initiate a system crash and abolish cash or put all of humanity under mind control … etc., etc., etc.

It’s like a huge buffet where you can eat according to your personal taste. You can buy into any of these narratives – but a real danger is that they will swallow and eat you.

Ironically, it doesn’t really matter if things actually have any truth to them. The only criterion is whether or not we believe the narrated things. And what we believe is in turn related to a certain kind of identity. If there is already a deep conviction in our identity structure that we are victims, helplessly exposed to things and life, then it is not very difficult to convince ourselves of a world in which ALL people are victims of a huge conspiracy.

We all know, the world can sometimes be a terrible, unfeeling and cold place. But it can also be a beautiful, uplifting place, full of beautiful people and experiences. Everything this world holds in store is always an expression of people, of dynamics and personal, national and global processes and the consequences of these. If you look at the world in general with a sober view, you can see what a long way we as humanity still have to go.

It is a war that is raging inside us and that reflects its expression on the outside. The war between all the unredeemed and burdensome emotional content, the mental beliefs built around it and the painful attempts to control it and keep it away from us – but which we always lose because the elaborate stories we tell ourselves about it to rationalize and explain the pain away collapse sooner or later and the pain comes back to us with all its force. We can’t run away from it, because we can’t run away from ourselves.

None of us can „save“ the world, but we can „save“ ourselves and do our inner processing work. Imagine that everyone would do this? In no time we would see a completely different world. But since we refuse most of it and think that we ourselves do not need it – it will probably take some time. Nevertheless, this is the path we must take.

Until next time same station …

DISCLAIMER: Nothing you read here is THE truth. It is my truth, my perception and how I see things – now, in this moment.

THE INFORMATION SPACE

[honestlyhufflepuff]

Taking a closer look at “Why So Blue”

This episode was a lovely break from Steven’s “baggage,” instead focusing on the growth Lapis has had. It was visually beautiful, with a touching new song from Lapis, and an interesting contrast from gems that remind her of her old self.

However, I feel this episode has been a little neglected in the fandom as far as the things it tells us about Steven and the world around him. Remember, Future is primarily about Steven’s arc and anything revealed about another character is bound to reveal something about him as well. “Why So blue” has been overshadowed by more dramatic episodes that had Steven’s anger and negative feelings at the forefront. This is no surprise, as seeing Steven’s issues manifesting so intensely is still such a new thing for the fans to process. This episode has Steven acting closer to his lighthearted, optimistic “old self” than any other one in SUF, and I wanted to delve into the implications of that. Let’s break down some things the episode establishes…

1. Despite his “outbursts,” Steven is still a Pacifist at heart.

This look was all it took for Lapis to regain control of herself. In this episode- this moment- is when he really seemed the most like “Classic Steven.” He’s not shouting at her to stop, or joining in the fight. He is just believing in Lapis’s growth and giving her the space to come around on her own. I don’t think the Steven we saw in “Guidance” would have done that. Part of this shift is due to his personal growth, but it’s also probably because he is falling back into his old role of pacifying hostile gems, which is what he knows best and what he’s comfortable with. That isn’t healthy, especially considering how much we’ve seen him panic when he doesn’t have someone to fix in later eps. However, it’s still a relief to see that fighting is not his first recourse despite his new “pink” powers making an appearance almost every episode.

2. Our Lapis is far stronger than your average Lapis. It is unclear if she was designed to be this way or if it is a result of her trials. Regardless, the Crystal Gems should be very grateful she’s on their side. She has the potential to rival a Diamond in combat.

She fixin’ to mess y’all up.

3. Steven has had growth over the course of SUF.

I bring this up because I think even though Steven is facing a very real personal crisis regarding his growth, he’s still had positive changes since the original series, and since the start of Future.

Lapis: I wish I hadn’t done that. They just remind me so much of myself. It’s infuriating.

Steven: Give yourself a break. You’ve grown a lot. It’s not your fault they’re stuck in their ways.

Contrast Steven’s attitude in this scene with his attitude towards Jasper back in Little Homeschool, after agonizing about his inability to change her:

Are you just going to sit here…waiting for someone to give you a purpose? Because I’m TRYING to give you one!

There have been obvious parallels between Jasper and Steven in this series, as Jasper is possibly the only character almost as stuck in the past as Steven is. I don’t know if Steven is self aware enough to realize that Jasper set him off so easily because he saw himself in her, like Lapis did in the HW Lapises. What he has realized is that not all gems will change in the way he imagined they should, and that’s ok. Him and Jasper, as far as we know, are not exactly friends, but they have an understanding of each other. Jasper may always be stuck in her ways, and Steven has apparently made peace with the fact that her bitterness is not his burden. He even sees value in the fact that she sees the world differently from him, and wants to learn from her.

This was a huge point of growth for Steven. All he did through the main series was try to fix people, and it’s obviously taken a toll on him. The only problem is now that he’s let go of his need to fix others by leaving Little Homeschool, he doesn’t know how to do anything else.

Steven has moments of self awareness regarding his issues (in between all the repression, avoidance, and denial) throughout SUF. One is in this moment with with Lapis, where he articulates that you can’t blame yourself for someone else not wanting to change and grow. He admitted to the Rose Quartzes that he’s “not fine,” but vehemently says the opposite to anyone else. He admits to Pink Pearl that he has “baggage,” although he won’t elaborate. He admits to Amethyst that his need to control others is a problem. He admits to his friends- under extreme duress and prodding- that he is having a hard time coping with cange. He opens up to “Cactus Steven” more than anyone, but after how that turned out the next time he opens up won’t come very easily.

My point is, Steven is still growing as a person, but it is a slow process due to all the trauma he is processing, compounded with having powers just as volatile as his emotions are.

4. HW gems are having a hard time letting go of the old caste system.

He’s half Diamond. Maybe we should half listen.

If the Lapises were really listening to Steven in the first place, then their primary motivation for listening to him would not be him being “half diamond.” The whole point of him overthrowing the empire was to create an equal society where Diamonds wouldn’t dictate what everyone does anymore.

How can the thing we’ve always done just suddenly be wrong?

Everyone is having trouble adjusting to this new equality in practice, including Steven. This is a massive, ancient, complex dictatorship that is now adjusting to a new government created by a human teenager. A Diamond is the one teaching and leading the new way things work, so of course it’s a mixed message for HW gems who have him telling them everyone is equal, but also that they no longer can do what they want to if it impedes his vision. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in Steven’s position. It would make most people uncomfortable to tell someone that the thing they were created for- that they also take joy and pride in- is now not only obsolete but morally wrong. Hooray for minors dealing with the nuances of cultural sensitivity in their galactic imperialism!

“He’s smaller than I thought.

Funny that this was the same thing said by the Rose Quartzes. It’s probably hard for any gem to imagine a Diamond that is not massive and imposing, but Steven is still pretty small even for a human (and still shorter than Connie). I can imagine this is why Jasper was so quick to reject him as her Diamond. Steven does not project the towering picture of immortal and flawless power as the other Diamonds have, and this is inevitably disappointing to gems that have long valued that image.

You really expect us to dance and sing like Pearls?

Gem society was not lacking in the arts, but they were strictly reserved for the elite and those who served to perform for them.

It’s interesting that Peridot had no idea what music was, and I presume this is because she was in a lower status than Lapis. The problem is not that the HW Lapises were unaware of artistic expression, but that they found it beneath them. The Lapises take pride in being instruments of power and destruction, the opposite of how everyone perceives Pearls. It’s no surprise they perceived such a heartfelt song from a fellow Lapis as “pitiful.”

Despite the fact that Pearls were very close to those in power, they had none of their own, and even Peridot considered herself above them when she first arrived from Homeworld. Pearls were created to be objects. Status symbols. Pretty little ornaments. Music boxes. And gems created for more “practical” purposes than entertaining the elite and opening doors would see anything associated with Pearls as beneath them.

5. Hot take: Lapis’s approach wasn’t totally in the wrong.

Lapis: We’ve just got to force them to stop. They’re not nice like me.

Steven: Ummm *avoids eye contact*

Lapis: Exactly.

The HW Lapises- much like Jasper- valued physical power over other virtues. Lapis beat herself up a lot for her loss of restraint, but communicating a bit with a show of the type of power the Lapises valued was enough to get them to listen. Steven’s approach alone clearly wasn’t working.

Sometimes people think so differently from you that you have to meet them halfway to have any hope of getting through to them. Steven did this when he agreed to fight Jasper.

I think the main reason he feared Lapis taking this approach was because he knew her past. He knew how hard she was to reign in once she got started, and how drastic she could be in confrontation. I mean, that’s why we have the entire Malachite story arc.

Restraint takes strength! Patience takes strength! Ugh, I don’t have the strength to deal with you.

However, Lapis has grown past that stage of her life, where her trauma ruled all her interactions with others. She has friends- like Steven and Peridot- who keep her grounded. She has developed healthy coping skills and outlets for her processing her emotions. This is why is so concerning to see Steven doing the opposite. The more fragile his mental state becomes, the more he distances himself from his closest friends and interests.

Lapis had the self awareness to realize she was slipping into old habits and losing control, and removed herself from the situation to cool down. That is huge for her.

Not every gem is going to want to go to Little Homeschool, and there’s probably a lot of them that still like fighting and destruction- especially if that’s what they were made for. Era 3 is so bent on avoiding violence that there isn’t really an outlet for pent up aggression (which Steven could use as well, btw). I think starting up some kind of gem dojo would be a great alternative instead of just expecting every gem to like the “softer” things like dancing and making meep morp.

Also, just imagine Jasper as a dojo master. Hell yeah.

6. Most people probably do not realize that Steven is struggling.

Wow, Steven. It took you a whole 5 seconds to make a new friend. You’re getting rusty.

I found this quote from Lapis telling. She still sees Steven as being able to make and keep friends effortlessly. In “Room for Ruby,” she was actually relieved to hear Ruby’s immediate love for earth was all an act, laughing and saying “No one could be that well adjusted.” The only exception to this rule for her seems to be Steven. She looks to him for stability, just like she did in the fight with the other Lapises.

In reality, Steven is terrified of his friends moving on and changing, while also being resentful if they don’t recognize he has changed. He has unresolved trauma that is eating away at him and causing him to have emotions he doesn’t know how to handle. However, most people probably see Steven as he presented in “Why So Blue-” gentle, charismatic, and carefree. It is not uncommon with mental illness to be “high functioning” in public and then come undone the moment you are home around your immediate family.

Even after the very public display of his stress in “Little Graduation,” none of his friends were like “dude, you’re scaring me, please go to therapy.” They saw one incident, but not the whole picture, so none of them seemed to really grasp how bad things are going for him. This is because Steven is still pretty adept at putting up a positive front most of the time.

***

Anyways, I just wanted to revisit this episode and give it some love. Feel free to RB and tell me things you noticed about it that I may have missed!

[amphtaminedreams]

COVID-19, Negligent Manslaughter, and a Timeline of Tory Indifference

“I feel sorry for Boris Johnson. He is doing the best he can in the situation and I don’t think anybody else could have done a better job.”

[exhibit A: a gem somebody that I’m Facebook friends with reposted earlier]

It’s a sentiment that I cannot quite wrap my head around. I sit here hopeless and furious and trying to hold back tears because it’s been almost a year since England first went into lockdown and yet here we are, almost 100,000 dead, in an even worse position than we were before whilst other countries begin to slowly return to normality. It is clear to me who is to blame for this, however there are a large proportion of people who don’t want to “politicise” the actions of the PRIME MINISTER with regards to his approach towards handling a virus sweeping the country he GOVERNS. 

Typically, these kind of posts making the rounds on social media will be accompanied by some kind of photo of Boris Johnson looking somber as if to suggest that the way things have played out were beyond his control and that he is some kind of broken man beleaguered by the suffering he has, despite good intentions, inadvertently caused.

This one in particular of Johnson with his head in his hands is a staple. In reality, this is a photo taken back in 2018 whilst he was receiving flack from party members for comparing Theresa May to a suicide bomber (for her handling of Brexit, ironically) as well as from the papers due to his rumoured (now also proven, in a completely non-surprising turn of events, to be true) affair with his former aide, Carrie Symonds. 

So let’s shut this narrative-where we should feel for Boris because he’s doing his best, and apparently a better job than anybody else could’ve done in his situation- down right here. In a supposedly developed country with one of the world’s largest economies, if we’re talking by proportion, our COVID-19 death toll is up there with the worst of them. It seems that every other state figurehead (bar a small handful), and I mean almost every single one of them, is doing a better job. People love to throw figures out there about how densely populated we are to combat damning statistics as if we haven’t got just as many factors playing to our advantage, as if it’s unfair to compare our response to Germany’s or Japan’s or Singapore’s (both of which are far more densely populated) or New Zealand’s or Vietnam’s, but we are an ISLAND with world-leading technology and infrastructure and healthcare equipment and professionals and a relatively high standard of living. In what world is almost 70,000 dead in a country with abundant time and means to prepare a response reflective of said country’s leaders doing a good job?

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that Johnson feels some sense of moral responsibility for this astronomical failure. A man who refuses to acknowledge the multiple children he has fathered outside of his marriages and who has had repeatedly engaged in affairs and one-night stands throughout said marriages. A man who continued to cheat whilst his most recent wife was receiving treatment for cervical cancer, for fuck’s sake. Yep, a real stand-up guy. 

So where does this idea that Johnson must feel remorseful for this catastrophe come from? We haven’t seen a second of remorse or a hint of accountability for the lives lost from him nor any members of his cabinet. That much is really no surprise; I have this hypothesis, and it’s not a stretch, that these people do not have an ounce of empathy in their bodies. These ridiculously privileged, privately-educated individuals who have had everything handed to them their entire lives simply cannot put themselves in the shoes of the average working person and that is the problem. Unable to recognise that what distinguishes them from most others is little more than the luck of being born into wealth and the abundance of recourses and connections that has entailed throughout their lives, they see us as beneath them-as less intelligent, less driven, and thus less deserving of the status and respect they enjoy. They see us as a bunch of whining, unmotivated idiots who do not recognise the chokehold they have over our media nor the fact that everything they do is a desperate grab to keep money and power within the hands of a select group of people, an exclusive members club from which most of us are barred (just take a simple Google search and watch Jacob Rees-Mogg’s opinion of the Grenfell victims or the buried Johnson speech where he talks about how inequality is essential). They know that we will squabble amongst ourselves about who is to blame rather than wising up to the truth which is that every decision they make is fuelled by cronyism and the inability to make and follow through with difficult choices, the pandemic being no exception. The supposedly self-made elite see the life of the average working class person as having far less value than their own, and their parties actions over the last 10 years have made that very clear. 

It was in December 2019 that the first case of COVID-19 was declared to the World Health Organisation and on March the 11th that they announced they considered it as a pandemic. In Wuhan, people were dying of pneumonia in their clusters. And what was Boris Johnson doing in this time? Well for starters, here in the UK we didn’t even have a pandemic committee-Johnson had scrapped it six months before. If years of benefits cuts and defunding of the NHS in favour of funding nuclear weapon programs, keeping British troops on other people’s lands, and tax breaks for the mega corporations that donate to their party didn’t convince you that the Conservatives have little regard for human life, them getting rid of this committee-whilst a pandemic has been declared year after year as the greatest threat to mankind-should have been the first sign of trouble. As if that wasn’t enough, he also skipped five of the COBRA (meetings are made up of a cross-departmental committee put together to respond to national emergencies and PMs routinely attend those pertaining to crises on the scale of COVID-19) meetings addressing the situation. Whilst other countries were closing their borders and stocking up on PPE, Johnson and his ministers were selling PPE abroad and simply telling people to wash their hands to the length of the tune of happy birthday. Their only policy was one of “herd immunity”, which was in fact not a policy but just an abandonment of their party’s public duty disguised as one, intentionally obfuscated with pseudoscientific jargon.

Even thinking the absolute worst of politicians you would hope that when it came to the point where the UK’s non-response to COVID-19 was becoming an international disgrace, Johnson and his ministers would take proper protective measures if only to save face. But when they eventually seemed to do so, it became clear that the priority was not the safety of the ordinary people affected by the virus. Outsourcing their test and traces system to companies such as Serco, Sitel, Deloitte and G4S rather than public health services, Conservative ministers could not resist attempting to line the pockets of their friends and benefactors in the process. According to the Guardian, instead of reaching out to the experts or using publicly funded services to handle COVID containment measures, the Conservative party has awarded a disgusting £1.5 BILLION WORTH of contracts to businesses with explicit connections to its MPs and donors, the majority of which lack any relative experience of the tasks they’ve been trusted to carry out. Unsurprisingly, the National Audit office found that when awarding contracts relating to the production of COVID-19 protection measures and treatment needs, there was a “high-priority lane” for suppliers referred by senior politicians and officials; companies with a political referral were 10 times more likely to end up winning a government contract than those without. On top of this, it is not hard to draw a link between the late initiation of lockdown measures and preemptive openings of pubs and restaurants against scientific advice to the interests of frequent donors such as Wetherspoons owner Tim Martin. Even if one chooses to ignore the blatantly obvious correlation between the owners of the businesses whose profits were prioritised over safety concerns and the number of those owners who donate to the Conservatives, party officials at the very least were reluctant to follow the lead of many other countries in financing furlough schemes themselves and instead avoided this responsibility by using loose lockdown measures to leave it down to the discretion of small business owners, who couldn’t themselves afford to furlough staff, whether or not to stay open. 

Time and time again, as the government flounder and fuck about, favouring personal desires to keep their powerful, high-paying jobs and to satisfy the corporate allies who make this possible, blame has been shifted from the public to care homes to NHS workers and back again whilst we, the public, make the biggest sacrifices of all under the illusion that we were being guided out of this pandemic rather than lied to and thrown under the bus. Whilst the elite continue to pick and choose what rules apply to them, it’s students and the elderly and the vulnerable paying the fines and scrabbling to afford basic living costs and hoping that they don’t lose someone dear to them.

Don’t get me wrong, a large proportion of the public have contributed to the spread too with their selfishness and entitlement and the arrogance it takes to develop a sudden refusal to acknowledge basic science from experts who have studied in the field their whole lives so that they can justify their need to go to the pub (speaking of, it’s absolutely HILARIOUS how many “mental health advocates” are suddenly coming out of the woodworks on football avi Twitter after they’ve spent years calling people on mental health Twitter attention seekers). And don't get me wrong, there were inevitably going to be casualties of this pandemic. But it didn't have to spread to this many people, and there didn’t have to be so many deaths due to a lack of preparation, and this wouldn’t have been the case if it weren’t for the inherent apathy of the Conservative party towards the lives of people of lesser status than them, the reluctance to put those lives before party interests. I wish I felt like there was an end in sight, I wish there was some positive takeaway from all of this, but even now, we continue to see corners being cut with the vaccine lauded as our saving grace and anti-maskers gathering outside hospitals to chant about how “oppressive” it is to be urged to wear a bit of cloth over their faces for the short periods of time in which they leave their houses and all I can think of is the selfishness that runs like poison through our country. It makes me sick and leaves me to question desperately where we go from here. I don’t like unanswered questions, I don’t like feeling politically directionless, and I don’t like the growing fear I have about the state of the world which seems to intensify every single day. In the UK at least, it’s starting to feel like nothing will ever change-we’re told we live in a democracy and yet mainstream media is owned by the people whose interest is to keep their Conservative friends in power. The stronghold they have over print media in particular allows them to continually get away with smearing and defaming every person who comes along and seems to want to actually help ordinary people, without being challenged, to the point where the only kind of “opposition” we’re left with promises nothing but a big boss approved tactical reshuffling of the status quo (which they call “electability”); it doesn’t feel like democracy when the majority of the country are being fed misleading information and convinced against voting in their best interests. 

This is the result of that. The state we find ourselves in is the inevitable result of being manipulated into helping the elite build their protective wall whilst the rest of us scrabble to get in and step on each others heads along the way, the people inside shouting over that it’s those even more vulnerable than ourselves that are taking our places. Outside the wall, the earth is falling from beneath our feet, and instead of throwing over the ropes to help us out, the people inside are stockpiling them so they can secure their firm place above ground and then later flog the rest. How many more people have to die before we reach some kind of widespread realisation of that? Where do we go from here and what do we do? Well for one, we can stop spreading those god-fucking-awful textposts on Facebook and get our heads out of our arses. Wear our masks over and wear them over our fucking noses. Have some fucking consideration for others. Don’t wait til an issue affects you personally to give a fuck about it. AND START HOLDING THE FUCKING PRIME MINISTER AND HIS MINISTERS AND HIS ENTIRE PARTY AS WELL AS THE OPPOSITION MPS THAT HAVE SAT BY THE SIDELINES AND ALLOWED THIS TO GO ON WITHOUT PROTEST ACCOUNTABLE. That would be a good start. 

I’m so tired. Things didn’t need to be this way, and yet because of the selfishness of the few, thousands upon thousands are dead. It’s not about “throwing around blame”, it’s not about “throwing around” anything, it’s about expecting a leader to do his best to protect lives. If that is “throwing blame”, let’s get things clear, I have no issue with hurtling it torpedo style at those who handed out a death sentence to so many in this country rather than do anything that might compromise their own privilege. Honestly, pass me the shovel after and I’ll happily bury the wreckage in the ground. Who wants to join?:-)

[rpbetter]

a vent (feel free to ignore if it's too much!): so recently i've noticed psd makers getting anon asks on whether they're ok with people who write certain topics (mostly rpf, incest, rape, underage, the usual "problematic" topics) using their recourses. now, i don't roleplay any of these subjects on tumblr, so even if a content creator said not to use their stuff, it's not even something i need to worry about - but, and maybe this is me overthinking it, what if i, someday, write a noncon fanfic on ao3? i'm still not using their resources on the subject or writing it on tumblr, but i'd probably feel weird about it, like i'm crossing some boundary. what if a psd maker whose content i've already purchased suddenly goes "actually don't use my psds if you rp abusive relationships", which is probably the closest to what people consider "taboo themes" of the things that i roleplay. it just feels like a fine line between personal boundaries and a shitty situation for a customer - not wanting to cross boundaries but already having PAID for something previously, when no such rules existed. it's making me want to 1. block everyone i see saying this, because even though i don't personally roleplay the topics above, i don't feel SAFE around people who tell others what kind of fiction they are allowed to enjoy and 2. just quit using people's resources and spend years learning to make my own psds so i won't have to worry about this shit. it's just stressing me out, as someone who has been harrassed and bullied online for speaking against censorship. i've had literal sock accounts made just to spew targetted harrassment at me on twitter. i've been accused of being a pedo and supporting incest and this is??? literally for saying "i don't think real people should be harrassed for fictional shit", i've not even shipped underage or incest ships. both make me uncomfortable. but fuck, antis make me 1000000x more uncomfortable than people who ship these kinda ships. i digress, this got rambley, i just. do you have any advice on what to do with the potential psd situation, or am i really just overthinking it? (always worried i accidentally send stuff like this off anon. help)

I need you to know that I actually had to rush-scroll back up and just double check that you did submit on anon lol! I always get worried I'll miss the one person who accidentally didn't use anon, if it makes you feel any better! When someone does submit with their URL attached, I message them first to be sure they are okay with them having it posted that way/it wasn't an accident ;) That's what I would want someone to do!

Alright, so, anyhow...

I've also noticed that becoming a more common thing and it's been on my (maybe huge) list of things to look into for a bit because I really do try to make sure I'm not just noticing things in my areas of the RPC/failing to notice things that do not impact me. Since I do all my edits and graphics, it falls into the first category for me. So, thank you for moving that up the list and informing me that it really is more prevalent and not my imagination!

My take on seeing it was a combination of business logic and anxiety, not going to lie.

On the first: charging to do a psd that is just that, just a psd file being used as a template/to act as an easier version of a photoshop "action" in a way, that's 100% legal and fine. Absolutely no muddy waters there. However, charging to do things like icons, edits, etc. that include images of celebrities and stills from movies (or gifs) is quite muddy. Legally, it's not legal. It's a thing we're allowed to do and use (on most platforms) because we're not making money off of it, we're not claiming to hold rights to the images, and so on - it's ignored but illegal. Charging money for it, however, even when phrased as "for my time" (which, absolutely valid feeling), is a more serious form of illegal and potentially attention-getting. This all gets more iffy though when we add donation instead of direct commission/purchase when working with these copyrighted materials. You can ask people to donate and suggest a donation based on your time spent, and that is always what I advise people to do.

Okay, so, that preface is necessary because the thing about stipulating use-rights is that they're iffy, too, there are variables present.

Often, these same people are charging for things like icon packs as well, meaning that even if they're only charging you for a template-style psd file sans imagery they don't own, they've kind of shot themselves in the foot. Not to mention, it's exceedingly damn hypocritical to pitch a fit about someone violating your rights when you're literally using other people's copyrighted materials lmao And that does tend to occur to me, yeah, it's a consequence of attorney friends and running businesses.

The other issues with this are that usage rights have to be stated at the time of purchase and morality clause-style shit, as pertains to products, is not legally binding.

When you purchase something like a psd file, that purchase acts as a sort of contract.

Think of like...buying a photoshop brush set - the person selling it puts very simple rules as to its use, such as: non-commercial use only, brush pack cannot be resold or distributed for free, separate brushes from the pack cannot be resold or distributed for free individually. Meaning that you own the brushes you bought, but you are not legally allowed to make real-life money from anything you use them in, and you cannot send the whole pack or files individually to friends for free or charge other people for them. By buying these, you have agreed to these stipulations of use and ownership.

If the person sells psd's and you agree to what they've stated about the use (you can't use them to do commissions you make IRL money from, you can't give them away to friends, etc.), that's binding even somewhere as casual as RP Land. The exchange of real currency makes it that serious.

However, there are limits to stipulations of use! One of those things is when you agreed - this person cannot, even one literal second, later change their terms of use and retroactively hold you to them. If they were okay with you not crediting them anywhere or using them in works you will gift others or charge others something like game currency for at the time you purchased, then that's it. Tough shit for them, not you, when they decide a month later that they want credit given where the work appears, that they do not want finished products gifted, or don't want you to make even in-game currency from them.

And that absolutely would apply to the morality wank, yes.

Except that this very morality wank comes with its own issues. Reality is not tumblr. In reality, at least in most instances and countries, you can't throw in a fucking morality clause regarding the buyer, use of item, or finished product.

Think of this in this way: Chik-Fil-A starts denying chicken and waffle fries to anyone suspected of being queer. They're legally allowed to run their business (as a private business, everything does have variables) with some things that are morally objectionable that they feel morally aligns with their religious beliefs. They're not allowed to deny queer workers a job or queer customers service, however, in accordance with overarching laws.

While "being gross" online in fiction is not like, making anyone a protected status person lol this is just an extreme example to drive home the point. Legally, when it comes to items/products be they digital or physical, your rights and responsibilities as the seller don't include your moral policing.

What your right is, is to make people uncomfortable to a degree, yeah. You absolutely can do that. You can state some nasty shit about prospective buyers you don't want. For example, they should (I mean, they should just grow up and get some real concerns, but) be stating that they would not like to see their psd's used by people on this following DNI list of idiocy, and they will block those users if possible to prevent interaction and purchase. That's really it, that's what they can do and the least immature way to proceed.

On the second: none of this logic would make me feel comfortable about interacting with them and their psd's in the future once they had outed themselves as morally objectionable and dangerous to me with this nonsense. And I would still feel anxious about using things I had previously bought because once harassed...it doesn't really go away, does it? It would just give me some ease about the latter with things I'd already made. Like, I could keep using the icons I'd made with those psd's with a little bit more comfort knowing that they honestly have not a leg to stand on outside of their harassment.

I might have the tendency to respond to harassment without much upset, but that doesn't mean I want to be harassed. Especially when I am not doing anything that draws that kind of attention. Not that harassment is warranted over anything, but when I make a PSA or answer an ask that I know is likely to get their attention and piss them off? That's an acceptable risk I am knowingly taking. When I'm just going about my life as a RPer, it isn't.

So, I don't feel like you're overthinking it or being too concerned! In no way did you sign up for getting unwanted attention, and because it has happened before, of course, you're trying to insulate yourself from having it happen again. That's totally reasonable!

Now, what you could do about it...

It's another of those situations in which we're only truly capable of controlling ourselves. Everyone else is kind of a NPC.

You don't have to do anything I'm suggesting, but these are things I would do!

I would block the shit out of anyone saying these things/trying to make them stipulations, yes.

By that, I mean that I would also visit blogs they appear to interact with and they'd be blocked as well. We can all reblog something like resources or a shit post from a user we do not agree with without realizing it, but when it's frequent reblogs, direct support, and friendly vibes going on, it's safer to assume that they are aware their friend sucks. More importantly, that they do not think their friend sucks and support their views.

Even if that is not the case, do you want someone else's repeated inattention to expose you to bad actors? Nope! So, don't run the risk of paying and otherwise interacting with the one resource blog in the group that doesn't express these views/"requirements," but does involve themselves with those who do.

Try to find people selling these resources, that are not connected to the problem ones, who do not have those views. Once a trend starts, it is very hard to stop until it has run its course naturally, so, this might be difficult and take some extreme effort. You might want to consider asking like-minded friends who use psd's where they got them so you can check those users out for yourself.

If they're all the same, problem, people...

Look for users well outside of your corner of the RPC(s) who are not asking to be paid. I know it sounds wild, but there really are RPers out there who just enjoy making things for others! I can think of at least one right off on my dash. They might not be advertising for doing psd's or psd packs, but either they might be willing to do so (especially if they do not appear policing-positive) if you explain what is going on, or they could at least fill some requests for you for fully made icons and such. Hell, people who love doing this work usually know others who do as well, and anti-policing people quite reasonably stick together. They could have suggestions for someone not vile selling psd's.

Depending on what it is you want your psd's to do, I promise you that it wouldn't take you very long to learn it. I know...I know lol that's both really easy for me say when I've been doing it for over twenty years and am about to piss some people off. The latter because the most common settings on popular psd's are extremely simple shit, a lot of that is the kind of thing you're expressly told not to do in design work. Like ramping up extreme contrast, pixelating the fuck out of an image, and turning up the primary colors only. Once you get to playing with photoshop or an equivalent, you will totally see what I mean. You can accidentally make an icon look identical to something that is on trend in the RPC. If that was what you were going for? You've hit the mark, and it's just repetition and tweaking it here and there!

Once you start playing with it, too, it's actually pretty intuitive when it comes to the basic things like resizing, adjusting colors and contrast, and doing easy effects like blurs and sharpening. Frankly, playing with it is better than half the tutorials you'll find because they get unnecessarily complicated when all you want to do is crop your muse's face, overlay some color, and add a damn dotted border. Listen, like I said, I have a lot of experience...and I find many tutorials frustrating and overwhelming!

It is not just you, you're not dumb or anything. People get very comfortable with something and when they try to explain it to others, they use terms and methods that are more advanced or specific to them than they realize. That's all!

If you have friends who make their own things, ask them some very basic questions about what you want to do. They know you, so, they'll know better how to explain to you, specifically. Just keep it simple until you've had some time to experiment! Ask things like, "I want to take this image, resize it to be an icon, and add an orange tint to the image while sharpening only my muse's features...how would I do that? Easy mode?"

And! You don't even have to pay for photoshop or pirate it anymore! Photopea is as an exact copy as possible entirely located in your browser for free. It's all overwhelming at first, a real case of too many options and ways to do the same thing, but the only way it gets less overwhelming is just diving into it. Dive in, get a little frustrated, have some successes, make some awesome discoveries, it gets a bit addicting in short order. Then, the tutorials and tips are so much easier to figure out and expand on, too.

If you'd like, you can always send me a pm here and ask me. I'm happy to try to explain how to do things, zero judgment or impatience. Just an additional option if you both decide to try learning and would feel comfortable doing that. Zero judgment as well on not wanting to do either of those things!

Okay, this one is much harder than learning PS basics because it's honestly a bit terrifying...the way these people are, they're going to take issue with you no matter what you do, and in the end, if they notice you and feel like bothering you, they will. There's literally nothing you can do about it. All you can do is try to buffer yourself, stay away from them, and be aware that you are not the problem.

Like with the AO3 thing or writing what could be viewed as toxic relationships. You can never write or be interested in a single, solitary thing that they're on about (and accusing you of doing in real life when the burning Eye of Moron turns your direction), but to them, you supporting the right of other people to do so is just as bad as doing it yourself. To them, the toxic relationships not only would be problematic, they'd be problematic enough. Being uncomfortable with their policing and feeling unsafe because of it is, to them, a red flag of how problematic you are. Writing anything they've deemed objectionable (or reading or viewing it, for that matter) anywhere, doesn't have to be on this platform or RP-adjacent, doesn't have to actually utilize any of their materials, is enough.

They're absolutely including you in who shouldn't use their shit. That's part of the "logic" and methodology of policing. Everyone is problematic, so, everyone can be labeled a pedo and harassed without too many people getting up in arms about it. No one is safe, so, everyone better behave. You don't actually have to be engaging with or enjoying things like underage, non/dubcon, rape, abusive relationships, etc.

It's gross, it's bullying, it's actually a problem...and there isn't much you can do.

All that is truly up to you is making an effort to avoid them, though, this is very often unfair and likely to get more unfair as resource blogs of all sorts deal in it more. At least, in this case, you do have some small bit of actionable power - by not ever buying from them. They wouldn't be charging if they did not either need or want the money, not giving it to them is a bigger hit than things like simply unfollowing/blocking, reblogging PSA's, and so on is!

Nope, it isn't like you're denying them some extreme amount of money by yourself, but every three, five, ten dollars is felt pretty hard when you desperately need money and/or are saving for something.

I know, I mean, I personally do know, that it's impossible to "get over" bullying, Anon. I'm in no way telling you to just get over it and move on, find some great well of not caring somewhere! What I'm saying is that there is power in not giving them power. The power to make you anxious, uncomfortable, unsafe, when you have every right to be here doing your thing and are not hurting anyone. And it might seem to be a deeply contrary sort of logic, but realizing and accepting that there are people out there who irrationally dislike you for literally no reason, that you cannot infallibly escape or avoid, despite doing nothing wrong is a bit empowering. Because it puts into perspective the things you can control, and when we know what is in our control, it's easier to just enjoy our time here without constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. If it drops, we can go put it back in the closet where it belongs.

It starts to put a positive spin on the whole, damned if I do, damned if I don't feeling, if that makes sense? I'm probably way too tired to try to be explaining this lol I'm sorry!

Anyway, again, I'm not implying you can or should do any, let alone all, of those suggestions! I just really hope that something will help you feel even a little bit more at ease. It's an unfair situation, it isn't right, and you have every reason to be uncomfortable and stressed. If I could make it happen, you better believe that every policing asshole out there would be writing heartfelt apology letters and sending donations to everyone they've upset lol but...since I can't make that happen, all I can do is say what I, personally, do, would do, or have done.

[woman-loving]

Reception of Gender Diversity in Indonesia and Women’s Erotic Literature

Selections from "Between sastra wangi and perda sharia: debates over gendered citizenship in post-authoritarian Indonesia," Susanne Schröter, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (RIMA), 48(1), 2014.

In Indonesia, we encounter a somewhat paradoxical situation where gender deviance is tolerated in many quarters while there is, at the same time, an increasingly repressive-patriarchal gender mainstream. This becomes particularly apparent in the issue of acceptance of queer lifestyles. After the end of the New Order period, the emerging liberalisation in the urban areas included that aspect as well. A group called Q-Munity has organised an annual queer film festival, the Q!Festival, in Jakarta since 2002 and activists join in public debates, trying to reduce prejudice and to put an end to discrimination. Within the women’s rights network, Kartini, a training manual was developed to strengthen the position of non-heteronormative life models (Bhaiya und Wieringa 2007), and Siti Musdah Mulia proclaimed in the newspaper Jakarta Globe of 23 September 2009 that lesbian desire was created by God just like its heterosexual counterpart and hence must be accepted as natural. Until today, her statement triggers controversial discussions within Indonesia and beyond.

As could be expected, this unusual awakening was criticised by Islamist hardliners as an adoption of Western decadence. Performance venues of the Q! Festival were repeatedly raided by ‘goon squads’ and in 2010 Surabaya became the site of an éclat that was even covered by the international media. It was sparked by plans of the Asian branch of the International Lesbian and Gay Association to hold an international conference in March of that year. There had been similar conventions before in Mumbai, Cebu and Chiang Mai. The organisers were eager to be as discrete as possible in order to avoid protests. There was to be no Gay Pride Parade, and the organisers planned to publish a press release only on the last day of the event. Due to an unlucky coincidence, however, the local media learned about the planned event in its run-up and there were quick reactions by Islamic organisations. Statements were issued by religious authorities, claiming that homosexuality is irreconcilable with both Indonesian culture and Islam. Such language immediately mobilised the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam) and the Indonesian fraction of Hizb-ut Tahrir[14] to take militant action against the organisers. As a result, the local authorities prohibited the conference and those participants who had already arrived were besieged at their hotels by the mob until they were brought to safety under police protection (Vacano 2010).

These incidents appear to be at odds with the supposedly tolerant attitude towards gender variances in Indonesia as described by anthropologists such as Boellstorff (2005), Peletz (2009), Davis (2010) and Blackwood (2010). These scholars base their claims on the existence of so-called third and fourth genders rooted in local social orders. An often-cited example of this are the Bugis of South Sulawesi who use five gender terms: besides women and men, there are calalai (masculine women), calabai (feminine men), and bissu (ritual experts and shamans who are ambiguous in terms of gender). The bissu have always particularly attracted the attention of anthropologists, who interpreted them as a culturally-accepted variant of non-binary gender. In the Bugis system of gender categories, they are classified as calabai, that is, individuals with a male body and a feminine or ambivalent habitus. They are viewed as embodying a pre-Islamic, double-gendered Supreme Being which is attributed the ability to mediate between humans and spirits; hence, they act as healers and shamans. There is some debate, however, among anthropologists about whether the existence of this phenomenon can actually be interpreted as an indicator of tolerance and liberalism. Birgit Röttger-Rössler, who has done fieldwork among the Bugis, is sceptical, and even objects to applying the term ‘third gender’. According to her, calabai are ‘institutionalised, socially-accepted variants or subcategories of the male gender’ (Röttger-Rössler 2009:287, translation mine). She adds that these types of transgenderism can by no means be interpreted as a negation of heteronormative gender concepts. The reverse is true: they reinforce the latter. As Röttger-Rössler sees it, the order legitimated by this exception is not only ‘defined clearly and rigidly’(Röttger-Rössler 2009:287–8), but also asymmetrical, putting  women at a disadvantage.

On top if this, the mere existence of a local ‘third gender’ does not allow the conclusion that local communities are generally characterised by a liberal attitude towards gender issues. This becomes particularly evident when modern phenomena of transgression, which are usually referred to as queer, meet local forms of deviance. The mobilisation of queer activists in Indonesia and the resulting Islamic counteroffensive is a well-documented example of this.

The same applies to shifts in local gender structures that were triggered by the general climate of open-mindedness after the end of the New Order. In the year when the conference in Surabaya was wrecked by conservative moral ideas, there was also a remarkable public debate on local Indonesian transgenders who are subsumed by the collective term of waria.[15] The debate was sparked by a ‘Miss Aceh Transsexual’ beauty pageant held in February 2010. Many people in Aceh have ambivalent and contradictory attitudes towards waria. On the one hand, they view the latter’s existence as a disgrace for the community; on the other hand, waria are tolerated half-heartedly, not least because men secretly relish their sexual services. Waria often use their beauty parlours and hairdressing salons as brothels and engage in prostitution in the semi-clandestine red light district of the capital Banda Aceh. It is obvious that neither Aceh society nor the police intend to actually eliminate this option for extramarital sex, which is punishable under current legislation. Representatives of the authorities, however, take advantage of the waria’s extralegal status and arbitrary arrests as well as rape in police custody are common. Everyday discrimination, humiliation, and assaults by the sharia police are rampant. In the wake of the devastating tsunami in 2004, which was interpreted by Islamic clerics as a warning to disobedient believers, waria were repeatedly expelled from their homes and businesses because their neighbours feared that their presence might evoke the wrath of God to descend upon them again.

In Indonesia, both the human rights and the Qur’an and Sunna are invoked in the discussion about whether or not the existence of waria is legitimate. In Aceh, more importance is attached to the religious narratives of justification, however, than to secular reasoning, because Islam is viewed as the measure of all things. In the end, phenomena that are incompatible with the commandments of Allah will not gain acceptance. The experts disagree, however, about what is compatible with Islam, particularly if waria make their appearance in modern contexts. The pageant mentioned above, where they performed in burlesque costumes, sparked a pan-Indonesian controversy which dominated the headlines of the local and national press for several days. Well-known politicians, activists, and Islamic clerics piped up to express their opinion. The majority of the religious contributions condemned waria as being immoral and sinners, while secular commentators came to their defence, referring to minority rights.

I had the opportunity to discuss that issue in March 2010 with students at the State Islamic University (Universitas Islam Negeri, UIN) in Yogyakarta and at the Gadjah Mada University (UGM) which is also located in Yogyakarta. The Islamic students, in particular, engaged in a lively debate about whether the Qur’an makes a clear statement about the matter and what the prophet Muhammad said about it. This was their sole criterion for tolerating or condemning waria. On the personal level, the subject did not trigger any emotions in them; it was a purely matter-of-fact discussion without any recourse to moral categories. My colleague Sahiron Syamsuddin, a respected Islamic scholar with whom I held the event, eventually made an important point. He said that three gender categories were already known in Muhammad’s time: men, women, and khunta--transgenders who resembled the waria. He went on to explain that the third gender had fallen into oblivion due to subsequent patriarchal developments. This was acceptable to the students. Sahiron’s reasoning is typical of so-called ‘progressive’ Muslims who attempt to substantiate liberal ideas with little-known data from the Islamic past or new interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunna.

As becomes apparent from the abovementioned examples, upon closer examination, the much-cited Indonesian open-mindedness with regard to gender variances turns out to be a restrictive straightjacket into which some phenomena can be fitted, while others cannot. Transgender individuals are tolerated and may even hold respected positions, provided that they stay within narrow, strictly-defined social confines or already-accepted cultural constructs. Above all, they are expected to be inconspicuous. As long as a beauty pageant is held in a village, whether or not the event is made into a scandal depends on the social relations between the individual actors. At the national level, it is not possible to rely on such local relations. Other narratives of justification then take effect, particularly narratives backed by Islam. It appears that only a minority of the Indonesian Muslims subscribe to progressive interpretations of the Qur’an and the Islamic traditions, and my colleague Syamsuddin would certainly have had a hard time if rhetorically-versed Islamists had participated in the discussion. According to a study conducted in 2013 by the Pew Research Center, 93 per cent of all Indonesians disapprove of homosexuality. Thus, in terms of tolerance, the country is behind Malaysia (86 per cent) and Pakistan (87 per cent) and at the same level as Palestine. As has been noted by Jamison Liang, homophobia is on the rise (Liang 2010). This development is due not only to the strength gained by a conservative, partly militant Islam, but also to the fact that by now there is a public debate on the issue of gender deviance.

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The virulently liberal face of Indonesian culture, despite Islamist zealotry, is also represented by the genre of female erotic literature. Called sastra wangi (fragrant literature) it caused an international sensation.[12] Writers such as Djenar Maesa Ayu, Ayu Utami, Fira Basuki, Dewi Lestari, and Nova Riyanti Yusuf picked out incest, extramarital sex, and homosexuality as central themes. They were not afraid of giving drastic descriptions of sexuality and they played offensively with the breach of all social conventions (Hatley 1999; Listyowulan 2010). One of the most prominent examples is Ayu Utami’s book Saman, of which more than one hundred thousand copies were sold in Indonesia. The novel is about the sexual adventures of three young women from good families, about split identities and the transgression of patriarchal moral ideas. Shakuntala, one of the protagonists, deflowers herself with a spoon and feeds the hymen to a dog. Later, she enters into a lesbian relationship in which she takes the male-connoted part. These are the scandal-provoking parts of the novel. It also has, however, another, political dimension which centres on the priest Saman. During a conflict, he takes sides with oppressed rubber farmers who are struggling against dispossession. He is denounced as their leader, arrested and tortured.

[cw for discussion of incest, child sexuality/assault]

In Djenar Maesa Ayu’s Menjusuh Ayah (Suckled by the Father), a woman recounts the sexual childhood experiences she had with older men, including her father. She states that as a baby she was not fed her mother’s milk, but her father’s semen. When she confronts her father with that story, he accuses her of lying and hits her with his belt. She insists, however, on her version of the past. The first-person narrator tells the reader that her father eventually refused to feed her any longer. Hence, she turned to his friends as a child. ‘I liked the way they slowly pushed down my head and allowed me to suckle there for a long time’ (Ayu 2008:95). When one of her father’s friends penetrates her, she kills him: ‘I am a woman, but I am not weaker than a man’, she writes, ‘because I have not suckled on mother’s breast’ (Ayu 2008:97).

[end cw]

The new erotic women’s literature led to a controversial discussion in Indonesia. The term sastra wangi itself alludes to the public erotic self-staging of the women, which was eagerly picked up by the media. Many stories about the young writers opened with exact descriptions of their looks, mentioning the high heels, the strapless t-shirts, the long loose hair, or the fact that the audience smoked and consumed alcohol during the readings. Like the provocative titles and texts, the media stagings brought fast fame and high sales figures. On the other hand, the women were accused of using sex as a marketing strategy. Not surprisingly, criticism of the taboo breaches came from the religious side, while secular-urban intellectuals mostly appreciated the new literary awakening. Saman won several awards, including a writing contest of the Jakarta Art Institute in 1997 and an award of the Jakarta Art Council (Dewan Kesenian Jakarta) for best novel in 1998. In 2000, Ayu Utami won the Claus Award in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, there has been some reserve on the part of literary scholars. Katrin Bandel criticises the unquestioned male perspective of the sastra wangi (Bandel 2006:115), Arnez and Dewojati find fault with the virulent phallocentrism (Arnez and Dewojati 2010).[13] Positive appraisal, however, prevails in the overall judgment. According to Arnez and Dewojati, the issue of whether sastra wangi can be called emancipatory is still controversial, but nevertheless ‘it can be claimed that in modern Indonesian literature such an open discussion of sexuality and female desire has not taken place before, especially not in such an outspoken language’ (Arnez and Dewojati 2010:20).

[manicpixie-dreamguy]

Find Peace; Living with Alcoholism

By far, the most difficult thing I have ever had to live with, endure, and accept is living with and being closely related to an active alcoholic. By active I mean quite literally drinking at any hour of the morning, afternoon, and night. Large amounts of booze, that  gradually scaled up from cases of cheap low shelf beer, into the current phase we are in which is Vodka. None of the phases were ever pleasant mind you, but they managed to steadily get worse over the years. The mine field I have tip toed through for decades was mostly egg shells, but now have become literal bombs that as soon as they inevitably set themselves off I have no recourse but to become part of the blow back.

 One of the more difficult aspects of living through this has been and still is trying to find a space to vent out all of my own frustrations, confusion, and anger without anyone becoming collateral damage who can't already somehow relate to this type of life to begin with, and finding a way in understanding where it is I am coming from. Even when I preface what I say and how I say it with reassurance that I am being honest and that I am trying to find a solution that benefits everyone involved, there are those who still fail to grasp the weight of what it is I am actually talking about. Or maybe they are "being kind" in the way to just let someone vent without feeling the inherent need to want and try to dish out advice or pleasantries. That is a nice approach, but that's about the same reaction a wall would give. Not to sound rude, but sometimes people vent wanting to hear something, anything in return just to remind them that they are still grounded and within arms reach of some form of acknowledgement.

 I never really took to writing about this part of my life seriously. It always felt like I was only complaining and in doing so perpetuating my own victim complex in order to feel sorry for myself and gain a little bit of relief. It feels that way even now. I know that isn't the case. I know wholeheartedly this is a genuine attempt of mine to not only quell this feeling of hopelessness I have been feeling the past few months more so than ever, but also my attempt to remind myself that this course of action is far more reasonable than following a path of familiar footsteps and drowning my own sorrows into the dirt. I'm here sitting, staring at the screen thinking to myself that if I type too loud or too strongly that it might invoke another wave of violent horse shit from down stairs, and that genuinely terrifies me.

 If this was someone I barely knew, or someone I didn't have a blood bond with there is zero chance I would have allowed myself to weather some of the most destructive storms any young man should ever have to face. I'm not saying other people don't deserve to have someone in their life that cares for them to the extent of enduring abuse, in all of it's forms. Everyone deserves at least one person in their corner. It's just, this person is one of the more important people in my life, and for some reason any time I get the inclination to just stand up and walk away from the whole situation, that's when the guilt begins to settle in. Having other people outside of the situation telling me that I should "try this, or do that" are my favorite kinds of people. Only the one's coming from a place of wanting to guilt me into reacting a certain way, and not someone who is offering compassion in the form of constructive criticism. They are the real MVP's. /s

 I also preemptively guilt trip myself, believe it or not. Once I see a storm brewing I start thinking to myself, "what have i done wrong this time?" "Did I not cater to the specific conditions necessary to avoid this?" "If I decide to not "deal with it" and something bad happens, will I be the one accused of not doing enough?" All of these being extremely unhealthy thoughts given that it isn't and never was my fault. Knowing full well the amount of time, energy, and willpower I have manage to consume and dwindle on attempt after attempt of trying to salvage anything good from the entirety of the situation. It is most unhealthy when I begin to start recognizing my own mental state disintegrating in real time and that also terrifies me.

 There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that in their own, unique way, they do care about me. Hell, they might even love me some how given that their actions often times contradict this thought. Regardless of the literal decades I have spent diving head first into a fire storm and not always coming out in the same shape I was in beforehand, I feel as though maybe I should have just walked away years ago, and that maybe I should walk away now. Even typing that thought out has opened the proverbial flood gates in my mind and the guilt is now pouring in. As if I am some type of slave to this life, slave to the feeling of anticipation when it comes to the fact that if I do walk away and if something negative does happen as a result of it, then I will never be allowed to live that down for the rest of my days.

 That is my cross roads. My cross to bear. My line to walk.

 Do I allow myself to move on from being the only crutch of someone who has done everything in their power to belittle, disrespect, hurt, and abuse me mentally, physically, and emotionally for a sizable portion of my life? Or do I continue to follow through with what someone once told me in response to me voicing my intention, "they don't have anyone else, and you haven't tried hard enough to help. Giving up won't solve your problems."

 I want to be clear, what I am going through compared to let's say a child in the third world some where having their hand lopped off with a rusty machete, for getting caught stealing a loaf of bread to feed their family is relatively inconsequential to the grand scheme of everything. My problems are my own, and will not seem as important to other people as it does to me. I get that. I have been down this road too many times not to get that. There will always be someone on the outside looking in criticizing me for even having the audacity to voice what i am going through and the negative consequences that stem from it, God forbid I don't just "get over it" or "stop complaining." I get it. There are probably thousands, if not far more people then that going through exactly what I have gone and am going through, or quite possibly even worse. I get it.

 If anyone finds themselves reading this full way through, and you can relate to any of this despite my need to be as vague as possible to protect anyone from any type of unnecessary judgement. I just want you to know that you aren't alone in this world when it comes to how we end up feeling due to dealing with this kind of situation. It gets really tough sometimes and it's extremely simple to contemplate "not dealing with it" anymore in ways that at the time seem like our only option(s) left.  Trust me, if you will, in knowing now that I have considered any and all possibilities to remove myself from this situation anytime a storm is brewing, but I stop myself each time. Each and every, single, fucking time.

 Because some where in this world, we matter. What we feel matters. What we are going through may partially be by choice but ultimately is due to societal standards we must adhere to, or surrender ourselves to the mercy of strangers and family alike who will crucify us for not, "playing our role." At the end of the day, after ten thousand tears and a nice long rest. There we are, standing up again and ready for more. That's because we do deserve more than the hand we were dealt in this life and for me, folding would undermine everyday I am blessed with since each one is another opportunity to work my way out of the most difficult thing I have ever had to live with, endure, and accept and that is living with and being closely related to someone who is suffering from Alcoholism.

Find peace, you deserve it.