#Girls are coming out of the woods

[pennydemise]

Girls are coming out of the woods, lifting their broken legs high, leaking secrets from unfastened thighs, all the lies whispered by strangers and swimming coaches, and uncles, especially uncles, who said spreading would be light and easy, who put bullets in their chests and fed their pretty faces to fire, who sucked the mud clean off their ribs, and decorated their coffins with briar. 

Girls are coming out of the woods, clearing the ground to scatter their stories. Even those girls found naked in ditches and wells, those forgotten in neglected attics, and buried in river beds like sediments from a different century. They’ve crawled their way out from behind curtains of childhood, the silver-pink weight of their bodies pushing against water, against the sad, feathered tarnish of remembrance. They're coming. They're coming. 

A segment of poem by Tishani Doshi

[smokefalls]

We will be dead stars again, thumbs entwined, looking back at the mystery of ourselves.

Tishani Doshi, “Love in the Time of Autolysis” from Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

[bookymcbookface]

Girls are ComingOut of the Woods, by Tishani Doshi

[novelconcepts]

There’s a line from American Gods I keep coming back to in relation to Yellowjackets, an observation made early on by Shadow in prison: “The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment.” I keep rotating it in my head in thinking about the six survivors, the roles they occupy in the wilderness, and the way the show depicts them as adults in society.

Because in the wilderness, as in prison, they’re trapped—they’re suffering, they’re traumatized, they’re terrified—but they’re also able to construct very specific boxes to live in. And, in a way, that might make it easier. Cut away the fat, narrow the story down to its base arc. You are no longer the complex young woman who weighs a moral compass before acting. You no longer have the luxury of asking questions. You are a survivor. You have only to get to the next day.

Shauna: the scribe. Lottie: the prophet. Van: the acolyte. Taissa: the skeptic. Misty: the knight. Natalie: the queen. Neat, orderly, the bricks of a new kind of society. And it works in the woods; we know this because these six survive. (Add Travis: the hunter, while you’re at it, because he does make it to adulthood).

But then they’re rescued. And it’s not just lost purpose and PTSD they’re dealing with now, but a loss of that intrinsic identity each built in the woods. How do you go home again? How do you rejoin a so-called civilized world, where all the violence is restricted to a soccer field, to an argument, to your own nightmares?

How does the scribe, the one who wrote it all out in black and white to make sense of the horrors, cope with a world that would actively reject her story? She locks that story away. But she can’t stop turning it over in her head. She can’t forget the details. They’re waiting around every corner. In the husband beside her in bed. In the child she can’t connect with across the table. In the best friend whose parents draw her in, make her the object of their grief, the friend who lives on in every corner of their hometown. She can’t forget, so she tries so hard to write a different kind of story instead, to fool everyone into seeing the soft maternal mask and not the butcher beneath, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the prophet come back from the religion a desperate group made of her, a group that took her tortured visions, her slipping mental health, and built a hungry need around the very things whittling her down? She builds over the bones. She creates a place out of all that well-intended damage, and she tells herself she’s helping, she’s saving them, she has to save them, because the world is greedy and needs a leader, needs a martyr, needs someone to stand up tall and reassure everyone at the end of the day that they know what’s best. The world, any world, needs someone who will take those blows so the innocent don’t have to. She’s haunted by everyone she didn’t save, by the godhood assigned to her out of misplaced damage, and when the darkness comes knocking again, there is nothing else to do but repeat old rhymes until there is blood on her hands just the same.

How does the acolyte return to a world that cares nothing for the faith of the desperate, the faith that did nothing to save most of her friends, that indeed pushed her to destroy? She runs from it. She dives into things that are safe to believe in, things that rescue lonely girls from rough home lives, things that show a young queer kid there’s still sunshine out there somewhere. She delves into fiction, makes a home inside old stories to which she already knows the endings, coaxes herself away from the belief that damned her and into a cinemascope safety net where the real stuff never has to get in. She teaches herself surface-level interests, she avoids anything she might believe in too deeply, and still she’s dragged back to the place where blood winds up on her hands just the same.

How does the skeptic make peace with the things she knows happened, the things that she did even without meaning to, without realizing? She buries them. She leans hard into a refusal to believe those skeletons could ever crawl back out of the graves she stuffed them into, because belief is in some ways the opposite of control. She doesn’t talk to her wife. She doesn’t talk to anyone. It’s not about what’s underneath the surface, because that’s just a mess, so instead she actively discounts the girl she became in the woods. She makes something new, something rational and orderly, someone who can’t fail. She polishes the picture to a shine, and she stands up straight, the model achievement. She goes about her original plan like it was always going to be that way, and she winds up with blood on her hands just the same.

How does the knight exist in a world with no one to serve, no one to protect, no reason propelling the devastating choices she had grown comfortable making? She rechannels it. She convinces herself she’s the smartest person in the room, the most capable, the most observant. She convinces herself other people’s mysteries are hers to solve, that she is helping in every single action she takes. She makes a career out of assisting the most fragile, the most helpless souls she can find, and she makes a hobby out of patrolling for crimes to solve, and when a chance comes to strap her armor back on and ride into battle, she rejoices in the return to normalcy. She craves that station as someone needed, someone to rely upon in the darkest of hours, and she winds up with blood on her hands because, in a way, she never left the wilderness at all.

How does the queen keep going without a queendom, without a pack, without people to lead past the horrors of tomorrow? She doesn’t. She simply does not know how. She scrounges for something, anything, that will make her feel connected to the world the way that team did. She moves in and out of a world that rejects trauma, punishes the traumatized, heckles the grieving as a spectacle. She finds comfort in the cohesive ritual of rehabilitation, this place where she gets so close to finding herself again, only to stumble when she opens her eyes and sees she’s alone. All those months feeding and guiding and gripping fast to the fight of making it to another day, and she no longer knows how to rest. How to let go without falling. She no longer wears a crown, and she never wanted it in the first place, so how on earth does she survive a world that doesn’t understand the guilt and shame of being made the centerpiece of a specialized environment you can never explain to anyone else? How, how, how do you survive without winding up with blood on your hands just the same?

All six of these girls found, for better or worse, a place in the woods. All six of them found, for better or worse, a reason to get up the next day. For each other. And then they go home, and even if they all stayed close, stayed friends, it’d still be like stepping out of chains for the first time in years. Where do you go? How do you make small choices when every decision for months was life or death? How do you keep the part of yourself stitched so innately into your survival in a world that would scream to see it? How do you do away with the survivor and still keep going?

They brought it back with them. Of course they did. It was the only way.

[sysig]

Here, have an unfinished set of Die Anstalt plushie crayon-scribbles from 2020 ♥ (Patreon)

[static-scribblez]

This will be my barbenheimer

[electoons]

giving my ldb a daughter. embarrassing for all involved. mostly me

[fsharp]

was thinking more about it and the sort of ... infantilisation of ll that a percentage of the fandom engages in really quite bugs me? yeah she is pookie and baby girl etc etc and yes she had a sheltered upbringing due to her religious background but it doesn't? diminish who she is or what she's capable of or what she can handle. i see so many people say that "oh she wouldn't have been able to handle what happened in the wilderness", "it was a mercy she died when she did" and like ... idk my dudes, this girl reads the bible for fun, i think she'd have been less freaked out than she's given credit for

[mushtoons]

not us walking outside to check the mail and some random man laughing from across the road that we already have out christmas tree up 💀☠️ embarrassment and validation all at the same time

[ebbpettier]

*sees you're into Simon Snow and also Percy Jackson*

*points*

YOU LIKE CHOSEN ONES AND THE INEVITABLY OF THE PROPHECY BUT NOT THE WAY THEY THOUGHT! YOU LIKE HEROES BURDENED WITH RESPONSIBILITY BUT WHO FEEL OBLOGATED TO GO THROUGH WITH IT DESPITE THE MORALLY QUESTIONABLE POWERS THAT BE THAT PUT THEM IN THIS SITUATION IN THE FIRST PLACE! HAHA!

(I also enjoy these things hello)

ALL OF THIS IS TRUE!!!! ADDITIONALLY I'M ALSO BISEXUAL AND I LIKE SWORDFIGHTING AND CHARACTERS WITH THEMES

also this picture is awful bc the lighting in here is awful but

[journeysfable]

On one hand we have too many goddesses I think Alpharad should be the token manifested into canon god I think he should join the ranks of Mumza, Mine, Lore, and Pearl, y'know? Lady Luck <3 <3

On another hand I think Alpharad being just some guy, and being q!Jaiden's roommate and trying to figure where the fuck she went would make for a really interesting story

My idea (full of so many headcanons that'll never come true) is that Alpharad is a chosen/champion on Pearl (who I hc to be the goddess of rebirth/second chances) and he met Jaiden after she left the federation. He just found her like laying on the ground with tattered clothes and she just so obviously had seen Some Shit and he was like "Sweet! A roommate!/Ok I guess it's by heavenly duty to help you out" and then they lived together for a few years. But one day she never came back home.

Idk if I'll ever write this and rn my brain is fried so I doubt I could write it. I might try writing a really small part of it, though.

[smokefalls]

Do not bother with stars. / They are for romantics (who are not happy / people).

Tishani Doshi, “How to be Happy in 101 Days” from Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods

[duckapus]

Thought up a few interesting things for the Squid Memes AU

1- Desti was an Elite Octoling back during Splatoon 1, and she and her squad (the three other Octolings that would go on to become the Octoposse) were among those who defected after the battle. Though interestingly, she didn't actually hear Calamari Inkantation like the other defectors, seeing as she was recovering from injuries she sustained fighting Agent 3 and thus wasn't present for the battle/concert. She just found out that her teammates were running away and was like "not without me you're not."

She's fully aware that Paige is Agent 3 (once she finally runs into them on the surface at least) and thinks it's honestly kind of funny that the so-called "Scourge of the Domes" was a freaking kid when they tore through the place, and that of all the people she could've gotten into a rivalry with it of course just had to be 3's big sister. She doesn't tell Meggy both because she's not about to out the kid like that and because it amuses her a little that Meggy doesn't know.

2- Axol and Pearl have been friends since they were kids, partly because I figure it would make sense if the tiny angry rich girl who sings too loud and the otaku who figured out fucking magitech and built a pen that could bring his drawings to life because he was lonely got lumped in together as the Weird kids nobody likes. Plus Marina canonically reads manga so even if Pearl doesn't like anime stuff herself we know someone else liking it isn't a turnoff for her.

3- So for this one I'm also pulling from Spongebob Squarepants canon because I needed an explanation for Heavy Squid and all the other Squidwards we see.

Okay, so we've seen in a few episodes of Spongebob that there are a bunch of squids/octopi/whatever Squidward's meant to be that look almost exactly like him. Obviously there's Squilliam but there was also that town of Squidward lookalikes he moved to once. Well, in this that's because they're not Squids or Octopi, they're instead a fourth (yes, fourth. we count Salmonids in this house) type of Inkfish that I'm tentatively calling "Schnozlings." In terms of abilities they're sort of a halfway point between the playable Inkfish and Salmonids, where they can live underwater thanks to having the right kind of respiratory system and thick enough skin to not get splatted by the ink-eating microbes, while also having Swim forms (which unfortunately aren't microbe-resistant like their humanoid forms).

Their swim forms are round, with six tentacles that all look similar to the long tentacles of an Inkling's swim form, while their humanoid forms are...well...Squidward lookalikes. Complete with four "legs," no fingers, a long droopy nose (hence the name Schnozling) and in a few cases the ability to grow hair on their heads like a human. As a side-effect of their microbe-resistant thick skin, most of them don't have any way to display their ink color in humanoid form, while their Swim forms are color coded just like Inklings and Octolings.

(And yes this means I'll have to redesign Heavy Squid to look less like Heavy and more like Squidward. But still big and muscular because that's his Whole Thing.)

[wildflowercryptid]

that's so interesting that there's move data for light of ruin in scarvio and that they changed the wording of its description even though it's a signature move for an unreleased event pokémon that you can't even use in battle currently. so interesting. <- ( trying so hard to be normal about this )

[bonefall]

Same anon- wasnt trying to imply that with blossom either! Just wanted to say that it could've been read that way and could be triggering to some, and the fact that no one speaks up felt off, even if its against the code. I've never read the more recent books either, so by the way the posts were spaced it felt like the series goes Df battle > Tempest > Ashfur in the span of a few moons, meaning blossom went from one horrible event to another and was still feeling isolated and shameful. Sorry if anything came off as confrontational or mean!

As for the 'why dont they leave?' thing, I think we all default to how Ravenpaw actually DOES leave and we just apply the same logic. As humans we naturally draw connections, and if we see a situation where a whole clan turns on one cat, we ask why didn't they just do what Ravenpaw (or Dovewing iirc) did and decide they can't deal with this and it's better to move on. It's a pattern that we itch to see fulfilled: Tigerclaw turns everyone on Ravenpaw so he leaves, Dovewing gets her whole clan telling her to do better so she leaves, Blossomfall gets named as a traitor and repeatedly gets dishonor titles to remind her of all her faults- why do cat not leave???

But yeah, if Blossom got to heal, i retract my statement entirely. I just was going off the logic that she felt isolated/cut off and that being told she's better off invisible would just shove her further into that belief. I do wanna ask, do you know what the thing Blossom spoke up about that got her slapped with the title?

Ah, I see! Let me clear up the order of events so far;

ThunderClan's Tempest, shortly after the Great Battle, dealing with the Clan moving on. Contains some parts of the canonical Dovewing's Silence but mostly Bramblestar's Storm

AVOS, with Blossomfall joining the Kin and being rescued sometime towards the end. Still working out some kind of incident where her kits are either stolen, or have to be retrieved-- the sire is not known

Squirrelflight’s Horror, a book about how Bramblestar turns a tense political situation into an excuse to leverage his power to abuse his deputy after feeling slighted.

TBC, which is at least a year after AVOS, with all of Blossomfall's children now being young warriors and her life coming back into order

So Blossomfall is having a pretty long journey here! Her life has been rocky and she can be a really nasty person, but she was brought back into ThunderClan because she is still loved. There are people who really want to see her get better.

And as for when she gets Clearface'd, I'm torn on it either being the first sign and SUPER shocking because it was just the normal amount of Blossom-sass, OR it coming right after the death of Bristlefrost and she argued that

"Bristlefrost was a codebreaker but who cares! She was a warrior of ThunderClan! There's no way that StarClan--"

And then interrupted and quashed with the title.

So, first option, to demonstrate Bramblefake's new level of malice at the earliest possible point and use Bristlefrost's death as the "turning point" of the arc where cruelty becomes violence,

Or, as a direct response to Bristlefrost's death, and the moment where there begins to be suspicion, because Bramblestar is NOT this good at naming.

[microwavetoaster-selfships]

Having Tomadachi Life with yourself and your F/Os is all fun and games until it says they don't like you/you have to watch them get hearts over someone else

Uuuhhhh I vent/rant/lose my marbles in the tags just as a heads up. Nothing HEAVY just. Very bothersome