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ask #2 what head canons do you have about Tom and Mary's relationship

OHHHH A DOWNTON ABBEY QUESTION

Okay okay so i need to acknowledge how feral I am about these two. Also i sorta checked out after the show shoved Mary and skinny chad number 7ish down the aisle (Is his name Henry or something??? the race car driver whatever, fuck him 😆)

(I still dont understand how they expect me to believe that the love of her life dies in a devastating car accident but she would willingly re-marry a race car driver. brain does not compute)

I digress. I think Tom and she develope this insanely deep emotional bond in that first year without their spouses as a result of their shared grief. They each married for love at a time when few others of their social group would have had the chance to do so (Tom is extra isolated on account of he isnt yet accepted into that social group). I think they really heavily depend on eachother in the beginning. someone else who just gets that grief. and also was close to the spouse who died so it's two sides of a coin. they gravitate towards the one other person they feel fully understands them and they help the other A. remember the love who died and B (more in Mary's case) remember what kind of person that love inspired them to be.

And i headcanon that by the time they might be ready for romance again theyve fallen into this inexplicable deep emotional entanglement with the other. it would be incredibly hard to find something more fulfilling. at the same time, transforming that connection into romance would probably be terrifying (would the other want that? would it be a betrayal of Matthew and Sybil to move on together) oodles of grief there.

I think Tom actually goes to Boston at all because he realizes whats happening and it scares him. on the one hand he thinks it isnt fair to mary to hold her back from a romance. on the other hes not quite sure if he could ever move on from Sybil. (And of course be comes back because he cant bear to be away from Mary and figures he can find a way to control the attraction. maybe by committing himself to helping her find new love.)

Which is about where what I headcanon and what the show does diverge. I cant wrap by head around her marrying skinny man number 7. i just cant. Husband material is right there at the breakfast table with her. Why would she go for Henry when she already has Tom?

I also think theyre good for eachother okay! they encourage and empower eachother. She helps him navigate the code switching he needs to do to be a part of the peerage. he helps her find her way out of the constricting box the peerage has always pressured her to conform to. Him being estate agent opens the door for her to take control over it. theirs is a partnership. running the whole thing together. beause he respects her opinion and welcomes her to the table as an equal, it effectively gives her the control over her home shes always felt like she cant have due to her sex.

So in my headcanon she either dumps skinny man or has an unhappy marriage to skinny man that prompts Tom and she to have a conversation about what they really want. And then they would get together And i could frankly read stories about them getting together foreverrr.

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Some ppl are like "I'm a kinky sex-positive pervert freak!!!" and then make fun of virgins and asexuals..... sure, reclaim freakiness but keep working on that because teasing ppl for their sex lives (or lack thereof) is, unfortunately, very normie mainstream vanilla behaviour. the right to sexual determination includes NOT having sex. 101 shit. Like this isnt subversive dude, it's using the edge of an ideology for bullying

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you ever feel like you were born with something rotten inside you and if people get close enough they’re gonna find out

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You know what really fucking Annoys Me about internet censorship is stuff like swear words being heavily censored because that's entirely an American cultural hangup being forced on the rest of us. I don't know a single country where swearing is as taboo as it is in America. In fact most languages have swear words that would have the same effect on an American as giving a Victorian chimney sweep a pepsi max cherry.

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Mindy and BJ in her dressing room last night at Radio City Music Hall in NYC. Mindy hosted an event with Stephen Colbert, Biden, Obama, and Clinton.

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The biggest scam your brain is telling you is that everybody else is human and allowed to make mistakes but that you yourself have to be perfect and flawless to deserve their company

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Being a girl without close girl friends I spend time with feels like some sort of spiritual jail I've been put in for this particular lifetime and it's such a walk of shame in this day and age like I can't count how many reels or tiktoks I see of girls saying stuff like "girls who don't have girl friends??? RED FLAG!!!" Or like jokes about when you befriend the girl who has no girl friends and then you realize why...yikes! Cause she sucks and is toxic and unlovable! And I'm like ouch, that's tough to hear. I know those narratives are popular because girl friendships can be painful and I'm sure there's lot of people out there who have been deeply unkind whether on purpose or not but I guess it pains me to watch people make laughable comments about lonely women. I feel like being a lonely woman is such a derogatory notion already deeply imbedded in society and sexism that I feel like it's just sort of being reframed in the new age as like "she did that to herself" and that's never true, we are all the result of the love we get or don't and it's definitely our own responsibility how we act and how we heal or don't - but it feels so judgmental sometimes to further "other" women who don't have friends

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listen, I’m not the biggest fan of kids but if a child looks at me then you bet I’m gonna smile back at them. kids deserve to experience the world as a kind and safe place to explore okay.

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the only reason why ten year old girls are destroying stupidly overpriced products at sephora to make “skincare smoothies” is because they aren’t being given access to a yard with a variety of mud, sticks, rocks, puddles, and old ceramic planters to make potions in. the children yearn for the apothecary

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I just finished QuintonReviews video on Dan Schneider (go watch it, seriously: as always, he is very thorough and nuanced in his analysis and I think his way of deep-diving is something that deserves more support).

There is on thing I want to note that I have also commented on the video: his take on the character of Spencer possibly serving as stand-in for Dan Schneider in iCarly (which makes a lot more sense of you watched the video) makes me feel a little more justified in misremembering Spencer and Sam as dating on the show before rewatching it.

Let me explain: funnily enough, I also started rewatching the show a few months before the first part of QuintonReviews’ series came out. I had very blurry memories of the show; I did remember some parts, including the whole Sam and Freddie dating, breaking up, him dating Carly at some point thing, but my head had also put some correct memories together the wrong way.

I mean, sure, there was an episode where Sam moved into the Shays’ apartment and left her underwear lying around the apartment, but for some reason, I thought she was living there for a long time, at least a season, if not the rest of the show.

My brain also merged the ‘Heatwave’ episode and the Coconut Cream Cake episode into one; one of the most clear memories that I had of the show was the moment where Sam climbs into the fridge, except I thought that a) it was because she was eating the last piece of cake and she was trying to hide it, b) she was living in the apartment and c) she was not wearing short pants, but was in fact walking around the apartment in her underwear because that was what I remembered the whole ‘underwear issue’ to be.

Needless to say, remembering the show that way, I was very intrigued to rewatch it because, being a lot older now, I realised that my memories were either false or, if they were even halfway true, this had to have been incredibly edgy for a kids show and I needed to see if it was truly as wild as I remembered. Back to the Sam and Spencer thing: for some reason, I thought that, after Sam and Freddie broke up, not only were Freddie and Carly the main ship for the rest of the show, Sam instead ended up with Spencer, who I didn’t remember was supposed to be in his late twenties to early thirties at that point. Despite not having a specific memory of any romantic interaction between the two, I was convinced that these two dated at least at some point during the show’s run, which, in the context of the kind of show I remembered, didn’t even seem that far out there.

When I began my rewatch though, I quickly realised just how big the age difference between Spencer and the kids was, so I began questioning that memory because surely, it must have been false…but I had been so convinced of it that I thought that, maybe, just maybe, it was true? I mean, the show went on for six seasons, so the kids could have been 18 by the end…and Sam was living with them, maybe her and Carly were of age at that point? And don’t some shows do a time jump? Anyway, I had watched enough other shows about teens to know that these kinds of things have happened on TV…all in all, I wish I could’ve been sure, but I just wasn’t.

So I sat down and watched all six seasons- going into it with the expectation that through some weird development, then-26 year-old Spencer would end up dating then-13 to 14-year old Sam.

And can I just say one thing? It is wild, going into the show that way, how much actually ended up pointing to my assumption being correct. I now know that there used to be an actual (albeit small) shipping community for those two, but like…I really can’t blame my young person’s memory because that ‘ship’ is even canonically addressed and, as seen through an adult’s eyes, the way Spencer interacts with the kids is certainly unusual. I’m not saying the character was up to anything sinister by any means, but I do get why I processed what I was watching in a way that would have allowed for such a relationship to happen: apart from the whole ‘Sam has a crush on Spencer thing’, there were so many instances of what could easily be read (or is explicitly meant as) adults flirting with/being interested in dating minors and vice versa or even just hanging out with them in ways that seem a lot weirder the older you get. Going back to the Sam and Spencer example: one of the reasons why, despite logically knowing a show on a children’s network would not have featured a character who is established as an adult and a character who is established as a very young teenager dating, I was not fully convinced that that wasn’t going to happen for an alarming amount of time watching the show, was that they did hang out one-on-one in a way that I just didn’t know any teenage girl would with the significantly older brother of their friend in real life. Of course, Freddie and Gibby also had many plots alone with Spencer, but at least based on the people I know, innocent same-sex friendships between teenagers and adults are a little more common (though I’m not saying the ones on the show weren’t weird at times either). And while it is uncomfortable to think about their interactions that way, if you’re watching the show through the lens that I did, there is very little to distinguish the dynamic between this adult character and this character who is a minor from dynamics between characters who did end up dating on iCarly or similar shows.

And maybe I’m just weird, but I do think the nature of the relationships between adults and minors that is established in these shows is to blame for my false memory. In rewatching, I expected to immediately disregard that memory as false after remembering the ages of the characters, but up until the very end, even when it was very much confirmed to me that it was a false memory, the show failed to fully convince me that it wasn’t possible for an underage main character and an adult main character to end up together in its universe, which is very telling and (I think) fits the video series’ conclusion perfectly, though that of course puts a lot more factors into consideration.

I doubt anyone, never mind Quinton himself, is going to read all that, but I just wanted to share this since it has been on my mind for years at this point- all in all, my personal experience with rewatching iCarly was good, but very, very weird for this exact reason.

The strangest part was that, in my rewatch, I almost…wanted it to happen? Not because I genuinely thought it would be a good thing, more because I became so invested in figuring out if I was gaslighting myself or if there had really been such truly unhinged children’s programming just a few years back. And again, there was a disturbing amount of things in the show (at least kind of) backing my feeling up. The only comfort I have is knowing that I’m not the craziest Sam/Spencer theorist to have ever graced the internet: in trying to figure out why I remembered their relationship the way I did, I dove deeper into the whole ‘Spam ship’ (yes, that was a thing) than probably anyone ever should…long story short, if anyone reading this wants to go on a really wild ride check out this blog post:

(Please note that I did not put that last paragraph or the link in my YouTube comment, but I felt like if there was any place to share this internet relic I found, it would be Tumblr.)

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the "canon isn't real we make our own rules" to "i am begging you people to revisit the source material" pipeline

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Mindy this is some queen shit I love you.

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knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

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tiktok objectively sucks in a lot of ways but I will admit that getting to witness thousands of allegedly heterosexual young women have an identity crisis in real time after attending Olivia Rodrigo's Guts tour is both a) not something I'm seeing on tumblr and b) an absolutely magical experience