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babybabymerrychristmas · 2 years ago

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honestly, with taylor reworking and re-recording some of her old music i'm almost desperately waiting to hear the 'taylor's version' of tim mcgraw.

it's such a special song to me, y'know? it was the first. i've liked taylor's music since her country days and it makes me happy to think she has a chance to see these old songs from a different, more mature perspective.

You know, anon, I totally get it because I'm right there with you.

Debut TV is going to have me ugly crying for months, I cannot wait to hear grown taylor's vocals on the most vulnerable album in her discography. I've spoken on here before about how sad I find listening to taylor's music in order because she gets so much more guarded in her work as time goes on.

Like, fuck, bro, you know my kingdom metaphor analysis? Debut for me is peak people pleaser taylor, if you read the lyrics to her earlier unreleased songs- you can see her romanticizing everything around her (even some things, that if are true, should not have been romanticized by her... there is a song she wrote about the supposed death of a girl she didn't really know apparently and that feels icky to me, that song can stay in the vault if this is true, she has several of these songs but i'm not judging her for it). These songs to me showcase the absolute burning desire taylor had to escape from the bullying of her ordinary life.

She grew up in the 90s and early 00s, mind you. As a white woman, of all things, patriarchy during that time was very oppressive to women and white women were definitely feeling the effects of it too. ED-chic was all the rage and white women especially were raised to desire the approval of the white man, against the warnings of everyone else. Like, if you look at the "chick media" from this time, it all serves to brainwash millennial white people at the time into upholding white supremacist values. My personal headcanon of taylor being autistic only further strengthen the desire taylor would have felt growing up around white people to play into this role.

She was heavily bullied and made fun of during her time in school, which she's literally the poster child for popular girl so to me that's so strange that they didn't like her. She wasn't poor either, she was well off and she was still excluded. It's really giving autism to me, tbh. Maybe that's me projecting my own experiences on taylor- i just don't see how someone like her could be socially excluded, to the point where she didn't feel desirable? It's giving autism to me. But anyways, let me get back to what is confirmed to be known about taylor.

When I was about 12/13, I signed up for tumblr and I was eventually led down the "truscum" pipeline, where anti-feminism was all the rage and being an "sjw" was cringe to the max. Looking back at why I interacted with the type of content I did, I can recognize my fear of being the "odd one out" at the forefront of this desire. It's at the forefront of all my people pleasing ways, and it's like coming off of taylor's early works in waves to me. That desire to be seen as normal, as cool and pretty and funny and the girl of somebody's dreams, that desire to be famous and show up all your childhood bullies and have complete and total strangers just want to be your friend and want to be around you and want to get to know you, I see that in taylor and I see the retrospective self-hatred in taylor's newer work especially as it relates to her fame-seeking desires of her teenage self.

Like, I don't know what vault tracks we are going to get from taylor but I do think we're going to see a side of taylor that we never knew with debut because it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? She's driven by the desire to make all her projects unique and interesting, she wants us to "keep looking at her" and she still wants to be in the spotlight and she wants to be a shining light, but she knows that she hasn't done enough. She knows that she's played it safe her entire career and I think that's why we got an era from midnights that was highly conflicting.

Like, even now, looking back at the promo and the ways in which the photoshoot is at complete odds with both the sound of the project and the public image of the project... it's really giving me chills honestly because it's her best era ever. I say it with every era but it's because it's fucking true, she really improves on her craft and her story-telling especially. Like, I fully believe the first ten albums were about taylor herself, and now in this new crop of albums, she's going to start really dissecting her journey to fame and saying everything she couldn't say beforehand.

I think we've gotten hints of Taylor wanting to be taken seriously, she's spent so much of her career parroting back what other people wanted to hear from her (like... esp ts1-5, those were crafted to the play the role they expected from her) but with midnights especially, I was kind of shocked at how many subtle shots she's been taking at her fandom especially. Like, "they" is often used in the record to refer to her fans and I love it so much.

But wow, let me get back to debut tv, I cannot wait to see how she reintroduces Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version). Like, just the title alone, it gives me chills at all the different ways she could reinvent herself. Like, the record itself, it is not very sonically cohesive which makes sense since it's her first record and it's like at the time, your debut was about showcasing who you are as an artist. Taylor picked the classic girl-next-door for the debut record because that is what she wanted to emulate at the time. She wanted to be seen as normal, as desirable, as the beauty queen. And that is why she starts her entire career off with a song about wanting to haunt her ex-lover, it's... tim mcgraw is who taylor swift is at her core. It's an introduction to the image she wanted to project onto the world for decades, until the negative aspects of that image caught up to her and she had to decide whether it was worth it- holding up this fake idea of perfection to the world in exchange for what/who she really is, when that idea of perfection that she was emulating is the ideal white supremacist image to begin with.

Like, oof, I am getting deep into the analysis of taylor's career and her moves as an artist but okay tim mcgraw is a break-up song about how beautiful taylor is as a person and how rare she is, to the point where she will change that person's memory forever. It's like saying to us there is a before taylor but there is no after taylor. Taylor wants to be memorable, she wants to make an impact on people and for a long time, she thought it'd be finding the perfect kiss and creating an iconic love story, because that was how women rose to fame in her time.

But as she's grown up and in the public eye, during a social climate in America that is tired of the image of the 'girl next door' ideals because it rightfully ignores the reality of living in america, she's gotten a lot of flack for not being perfect in her recent years because our definition of what a "good" white woman is has changed to be less white supremacist. Like, we expect someone like Taylor to change the world or at the very least, to be politically radical in her music and image because it's not about what white women can do for the image of the white man anymore, it's about making a difference in your community.

And I think that's why taylor has been shifting her image a lot recently, especially with how queer her image has gotten, I feel like we're going to get a lover redo and once she comes out, she's going to start releasing music that is politically aware and takes aim at the white supremacy structures still present in the industry today.

I just cannot wait to hear taylor swift (taylor's version) because I'm sure we're not ready for the vault tracks, nor are we ready for her retrospective prologue about how far she's come and how she's not the girl on that record anymore, she's grown and changed so much and for the better since then. I just cannot fucking wait for debut tv.

#debut #taylor swift #debut tv #tim mcgraw #midnights #ask and you shall receive #anon love #gaylor

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lovenotesxcitygirls · 19 days ago

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Does He Want Love or Dominance?

Does He Want Love—or Just Control?

Lately, I’ve been stuck in a loop. Same story, different man: they say they want love, but what they really want is control. To them, being “the man of the house” means holding all the cards, calling all the shots, and expecting me to quietly play along.

And yet—this is the kicker—they complain about not getting the love they need. The paradox is wild. They’re clutching so tightly to their illusion of control that they choke the life out of any chance for real connection. It makes me wonder: Are they sabotaging themselves without even realizing it?

Love vs. Control: It’s Complicated

Here’s the truth: love and dominance don’t coexist easily—but sometimes they’re tangled together because of fear, survival instincts, or learned behavior. Control isn’t always malicious; sometimes it’s the only emotional tool someone has. That doesn’t make it healthy, though.

Real love, the kind that’s soul-deep and worth showing up for, is built on equity, respect, and trust. Somewhere along the way, leadership got twisted into this patriarchal fantasy where one person always calls the shots.

The justification? “Wives, submit to your husbands.” Funny how the next verse—“Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church”—always seems to vanish into thin air. But patriarchal control didn’t just sprout from religion. It’s embedded in culture, passed down through families, and normalized by generations of imbalance.

The result? Men are often raised to see control as strength and vulnerability as failure. But here’s what they don’t realize: control suffocates love. It creates distance, not connection.

The Fear Behind Control

When someone clings to control, it’s not always about power. It’s often about fear.

Fear of losing respect. Fear of being seen as weak. Fear of being unworthy of love without control as proof of their “strength.” Society has sold men a fragile version of masculinity where their worth is tied to being in charge.

But here’s the kicker: that isn’t strength. Real strength looks like knowing when to lead and when to listen. It’s making space for someone else’s voice, letting go of control for the sake of connection.

This starts early. For many men, the first “love dynamic” they see is with their mothers. Mothers, as primary nurturers, often hold more emotional power. They teach boys that love and care are managed for them, not shared with them. As adults, some men recreate that dynamic: they crave love but expect it to come through control.

But what works in childhood doesn’t work in partnerships. Real love requires equity, not dependence.

Patriarchy Is a Losing Game—For Everyone

The systems propping up this dynamic don’t actually serve men, either. Patriarchy tells them that power equals love, but all it does is isolate them. You can’t truly connect when you’re fixated on control.

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The men clinging to dominance are often the loneliest.

The women shrinking under that dominance feel unseen, unheard, and unloved.

Both sides lose.

If he’s obsessed with being “the leader,” he’s not just keeping me at a distance—he’s keeping himself from the kind of love that could actually heal him.

What Does Love Look Like, Really?

The love I want—the love I deserve—isn’t about one person holding the reins. It’s about partnership. It’s showing up for each other, lifting each other up, and making space where we’re both free to be our fullest selves.

Leadership in a healthy partnership? It looks like:

Knowing when to step up and when to step back.

Trusting your partner’s decisions.

Listening just as much as you lead.

Sharing the emotional labor.

Love doesn’t demand that one person shrink to make the other feel big. It doesn’t live in control. It lives in trust, vulnerability, and growth—together.

What’s the Path Forward?

If control has been the norm in your relationships, here’s the truth: it takes unlearning, not judgment, to move forward.

For those clinging to control: you’re not weak for letting go—it’s brave. You can still lead without holding power over someone. Real leadership is rooted in love, not dominance.

For those on the receiving end of control: you’re allowed to say no. You deserve love that doesn’t ask you to trade your autonomy for someone else’s comfort.

Let’s Talk About It

Have you ever felt like love and control were at odds in a relationship?

How did you navigate it? What does leadership look like to you in a healthy partnership?

Drop your thoughts in the comments—I want to hear your experiences.

#dating #love #lovers #romance #dating is the worst #dating in 2024 #city life #Spotify

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mittensmorgul · 4 years ago

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Today on the TNT loop... 12.23 and 13.01 (so far, it’s early and we’re going through 13.04 today). So I’m deep in the Grief Arc feels.

But again, it all hits different now. Yes, I’ve rewatched these since 15.20 aired, this is my second pass through the loop since then. But with a bit of emotional distance from that mess, there’s interesting stuff here.

Looking at the finale, at what Jack would become, at how that ties in with themes of Faith versus Free Will... it’s like this was the point where Chuck finally weaponized free will against them, where their choices would play into his story rather than fight against it. No wonder Dean was so angry after this point.

No wonder Chuck abandoned them, refused to answer Dean’s prayer to bring Cas back. Cas wasn’t SUPPOSED to come back. Chuck finally got him out of the way, and it was literally Dean’s grief unwittingly channeled through Jack’s power that woke him up again and gave him the tools to fight his way back. The fact Cas never KNEW this is still one of those things that I will scream forever about.

(In every way that actually mattered, Dean was silenced)

But in today’s viewing, I’m mostly screaming about the “drunk angel” Miriam and her vendetta against Becky.

DRUNK WOMAN: Whoa. What happened to you hand?

DEAN: Nothin’.

DRUNK WOMAN: Doesn’t look like nothing. You punch a wall or something? I punched a wall once. Well, a poster on a wall, but same diff, right? Freshman year, I had this roommate, Becky. She had this giant poster of Elsa. You know, from “Frozen”? And I mean, first, who brings something like that to college? A cartoon? Really? Like, “hello homeschool,” right?

[As she is talking, Drunk Woman is writing something in the dust of the Impala’s passenger side window, and Dean removes a bottle of whisky from the trunk. He takes a swallow and then pours some over his bloody knuckles]

DEAN: You done?

DRUNK WOMAN: Anyway, Becky was - and I say this in the most feminist, screw the patriarchy way - a giant superbitch. She’d take things, and break things, and piss people off, and just do whatever she wanted, no matter who it hurt.

[Dean is making please stop talking faces at her but she is oblivious]

DRUNK WOMAN: It’s like the whole world was just Becky to her, you know?

DEAN: Mmm. So you punched her poster.

DRUNK WOMAN: And lit most of her stuff on fire.

[Dean gives her a look]

DRUNK WOMAN: I got issues.

[...]

[As the Impala pulls away, you can see Drunk Woman has written “BITCH” in the dust on the window.]

So, we have this invented story about a woman named Becky. But after s15, we KNOW how much control Chuck has over the story, and especially of certain characters-- like demons and angels. This is why he was so infuriated that he couldn’t just control Castiel. We saw him DIRECTLY insert Lilith back into the story in 15.05, limiting her power to ONLY follow his “script.” To the point she was entirely self-aware of this and her place in the story, and the fact that she was essentially just a character in the story without free will.

And I kinda wonder how much Miriam functions in the exact same way-- the way Chuck has implied that ALL angels are expected to function.

MIRIAM: Okay. If she shoots you. (Sheriff Barker looks to Dean in confusion) I don't know what he's told you. I mean, I can guess. Some line about how he and his brother... (deepens voice) save the world. Grr. So macho. (she sighs and speaks in her normal voice) But really, he's not a hero. He's Becky. DEAN: Becky? The roommate Becky? MIRIAM: You take things and break things and piss people off, and just do whatever you want, no matter who it hurts. Also, you're a giant super bitch. DEAN: Well, it takes one to know one. MIRIAM: So, yeah, you're Becky, and Becky needs to die. You're on, Barney Fife.

Yes... she says Dean is “Becky,” this Becky that breaks things and who saw the whole world as Becky... Though... her understanding of how free will works in this context really does sound twisted and tainted by Chuck’s perspective on his own “disobedient” characters. Because to Chuck, the story is the most important thing, it’s the only thing, and it’s entirely his own creation.

No wonder creating human souls made him feel a little queasy... and I’m still not sure that was something he actually did on purpose, especially with the free will bit included in the package. Because from the moment free will existed, Chuck began to lose control of the story of creation. People could choose to tell their OWN stories, better stories than the one Chuck created the universe to tell in the first place. Humanity makes things better, bigger than Chuck could imagine, through the power of love that Chuck could never invent for himself or understand for himself. Or even possibly FEEL for himself.

And who was his original human pawn in the story, way back in 5.01? Becky. Becky who took HIS story and “broke” it and pissed him off, doing whatever she wanted no matter who it hurt (even if it was only Him as the Original Author getting precious about his story). But as we saw in 15.04, Becky refused to just take his story as he dished it out. She went out and made her own life, reimagined the Story of Supernatural as something better than it was-- filed with life and humanity and love. She stopped idolizing HIM as the creator and saw it as HER story now too, the version she was passionate about, the version that brought HER joy.

And what did Chuck do to her? Like Miriam, he “punched her cartoon poster” and then burned most of her stuff. Because Becky had the audacity to take the story she’d been written into and make it her own. She refused to “obey” the story Chuck wanted to tell. And he saw her story as infantile and uninteresting. Because he couldn’t just let it go... like Elsa... lol.

And what Chuck can’t control, he tends to destroy, like Miriam did in this episode. Only... Miriam failed too. Sure, it was only one battle in the long war of Free Will versus The Story, but it was the opening note in this section of the story which was supposed to be about Humanity and Free Will finally triumphing over the story to free themselves from it.

The story itself was telling humanity to hold on, to keep telling OUR version of the story, because that was how to defeat the story itself. Human love and choice and will as something BETTER than the story Chuck wanted to tell. Not just handing it off to someone who has been built into the perfect vessel to carry on his story, but literally allowing humanity to be free from the narrative Chuck spent all of creation trying to build for them. And that freedom was literally built upon the very human love embodied in Dean Winchester (and learned by Castiel to the point it changed him and freed him from Chuck’s control). Cas deserved to come back. Jack deserved to be freed from his destiny. Billie deserved better than being manipulated and villainized by Chuck’s final chapter. Eileen deserved the freedom to choose her own happiness. Sam deserved a chance to do the same. Dean deserved to live, and to have a chance to tell Cas he feels exactly the same way about him. And that’s the tip of the iceberg of what everyone deserved.

(they deserved to not be “burned” for their audacity to want something more than what Chuck thought they deserved)

They deserved to hang up their Frozen posters without some self-righteous bitch judging them for it, and to live their lives how THEY wanted to, rather than how Chuck thought they should for his own egotistical self-justification.

Chuck said way back in s11 that he wanted to create the universe to make something better than just him and Amara, and everything after that point reads like he was pissed off at the fact that humanity went out and actually DID grow to be better than him, in every way possible. Sure, we fuck up, we make mistakes, and some of us are actively malicious and terrible people. But... overall? We try. We keep trying to be better, to love more, to choose the right thing... to do our best in a world where it’s far too easy to do our worst, to take a few words from Cas.

And it just hurts my heart to know what we COULD have had if Chuck didn’t actually win.

#spn 13.01 #spn 15.20 #spn 15.04 #chuck's process #spiders georg of the tnt loop #that's what free will is

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lesserfandomappreciation · 4 years ago

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Ariadne and why the Mycenaeans can fuck right off

Warning: Includes brief mentions of r*pe, cultural destruction, ancient patriarchy reminding us why no woman would ever time-travel more than 5 years into the past if that and a great deal of spite for male historians/public education history/mythology classes.

Possible side effects may include a sudden intense rage for an ancient society equivalent to the innate rage one has for the Romans burning the library of Alexandria, a distinct hatred for ancient men not being able to let anyone have nice things, and a sudden fascination for Minoa.

Usually, I stick to writing imagines and being happy with that. It’s fun! I love it! But every now and again, in an attempt to escape the crushing forces known as reality and responsibilities I’ll put on a few cutscenes from games I’m: A) Too lazy to play B) Too broke to play C) Too unskilled to play D) All of the above

because cutscenes are free and why torture yourself with impossible levels when its free on Youtube?* *In all seriousness please support video games and video game creators, but no shame to those of us who prefer cutscenes to gameplay. A few weeks ago I added the game Hades made by Supergiant to the list because the cutscenes were bomb and the characters are so much fun! Intricate as all hell! Hella cute too but that’s unrelated! Now my pretty little simp patootie is especially a big fan of Dionysus and his gorgeous design so the cutscenes with him are my favorite.

I’m re-watching his cutscenes a few nights ago for fun as background when he has a certain line about Theseus. Don’t quote me on this since my memory is foggy at best but roughly it was: Dionysus: Good job with Theseus. Never cared much for him- what he did to that girl was just horrible.*

*I know that’s not his exact line but this is clearly a rant post fueled by spite and ADD-hyper-focused obsessions with ancient civilizations so let’s not worry too too much about the semantics here.

Now, I like mythology! Personally, I prefer the Norse mythology due to the general lack of very very gross dynamics that several other ancient mythologies seem to include, but I’m decently familiar with Greek mythos. Enough to go - “Why does the God of Wine give a single fuck about the frat bro of Greek heroes being a dick to a woman? Grossness is embedded into the very DNA of all distant relatives of Zeus, a woman being harassed by Zeus or his bastard army is a typical Tuesday in ancient Greece.”

Wikipedia confirms that Ariadne is the only woman in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which I kinda knew already so unless Theseus did some f’ed up shit to some other princess of Minos, Dionysus could only be referring to her. Disregarding what I know about Wikipedia and how it can suck you down the rabbit hole of rabbit holes through sheer fury I stupidly clicked the link to Ariadne’s article.

By the time we get to the end of this shitstorm, I will have two separate plotlines for two separate stories based of Ariadne, 2k+ notes (and going) on an ancient civilization prior to a week ago I didn’t know existed and within me there will be a rage towards a different ancient civilization I vaguely recall learning about in high school.

Here’s how this shit went down.

First of all, apparently after Theseus abandoned Ariadne on an island to die (yep! He did that! To the one person who is the only reason he defeated the minotaur! Fuck this guy.) there are multiple storylines where Dionysus takes a single look at Ariadne and falls in love.

“A god falls in love?” you say, aware of how most love stories in Greek mythos can be summed up with Unfortunately, Zeus got horny and Hera is a firm believer in victim blaming. “This poor woman is about to go through hell!” I thought so too! And in one variation of the story, Dionysus does his daddy proud by being an absolute tool to Ariadne. In the majority though? He woos the fuck out of her, and ultimately marries her by consent!

Her consent!

In ancient Greece!

The party dude of the Greek pantheon knows more about consent then his father and modern day frat brothers!

Okay! That’s interesting, so I keep reading.

Ariadne getting hitched to Dionysus is a big deal in Olympus, to the point of getting a crown made of the Aurora Borealis from Aphrodite who is bro-fisting Dionysus, beyond glad she didn’t have to give him the talk about consent. The rest of the gods are pissy especially Hera who doesn’t like Dionysus much since he is the son of Zeus and Semele but they don’t do much. Ariadne ascends to godhood, becomes the goddess of Labyrinths with the snake and bull as her symbol and that’s that on that.

Colorin, colorado, este cuento se acabado. And they lived happily ever after. That’s the end of the post right?

NO! Because curiosity has made me their bitch and there’s more to this calling me.

Also, I was pissed! Still am! Why the fuck-a-doodle-do did I have to learn about the time Poseidon r*ped a priestess instead of the arguably healthiest relationship in the entirety of the pantheon? Why is Persephone and Hades’ story (which has improved since it was first written and I like more modern versions of it, no hate) the only healthy-ish Greek love story I had to learn when Dionysus and Ariadne were right there? The rage of having endured several grade levels of “Zeus got horny and Hera found out” stories in the nightmare of public education led me to keep looking into this.

There’s this wonderful Youtube channel called Overly Sarcastic Productions that I highly recommend that delves a lot into mythology, and I have seen their bombass video about Dionysus and how his godhood has changed since he was potentially first written in a language we comprehend.

Did ya’ll know this man is the heir apparent to Zeus? ‘Cause I didn’t know that!

YEA! Dionysus, man of parties, king of hangovers and inducer of madness, is set to inherit the throne of Olympus! Ariadne didn’t husband up the God of Wine, she husbanded up the Prince of Olympus and heir apparent to the throne! Holy shit! No wonder some of the gods were against her marriage to Dionysus - can you imagine the drama of an ex-mortal woman sitting on the Queen’s throne of Olympus? Hera must have been pissed.

BUT WAIT.

There’s more.

The reason we know Dionysus is a very important god and is possibly even more important than we think is because of a handy-dandy language known as Linear B, otherwise known as the language of the Mycenaeans!

For those of you fortunate enough to have normal hobbies and interests, the Mycenaeans were the beta version of the Greeks. Their written language of Linear B is one of, if not the first recorded instance of a written Indo-European language. This language, having been translated, gives us an interesting look at what the Greek gods were like back in their beta-stages before they fixed the coding and released the pantheon.

Interesting side facts of the Mycenaean Greek gods include:

Poseidon being the head god with an emphasis on his Earthquake aspect, and being much more of a cthonic god in general.

Take that Zeus, for being so gross.

The gods in general being more cthonic, as Mycenaeans were obsessed with cthonic gods (probably due to all the earthquakes and natural disasters in Greece and Crete at that time)

Several of the gods and goddesses that we know being listed, alongside some that we don’t consider as important (Dione)

The first mention of Kore, later Persephone, but no Hades because since a lot of gods were cthonic, there would be no need for one, specific cthonic god to represent the majority of death-related rituals.

That’s not what we’re focusing on though! What we’re focusing on is a specific translated portion of Linear B that we have. One of the translated portions of Linear B that for the life of me I can’t find (someone please help me find it and send the link so I can edit this post) says an interesting phrase. “Honey to the gods. Honey to the Mistress of Labyrinths.”

One more time. “Honey to the gods. Honey to the Mistress of Labyrinths.”

Mistress of Labyrinths.

Now wait a gosh darn minute. Isn’t there a goddess of labyrinths in the Greek mythos? Why yes! Yes there is! Ariadne!

Here’s a question for you. If Ariadne is but a minor god in the pantheon, a wife to a more predominant god, why is it that while all the other gods and goddesses are bunched together in a sentence of praise, the so-called ex-mortal gets a whole-ass sentence to herself singing praises?

And thus, we have arrived to Minoa!

What is Minoa, you ask? Minoa is to Rome what Rome is to us. An old-ass civilization either older than or younger by a hundred years to ancient Egypt. Egypt, that started in 3200 B.C-ish depending on who you ask. That’s old. Old as balls. They were contemporaries to their trading partner, Egypt until 1450 BC-ish. A 2000 year old civilization.

Minoa was founded on the island of Crete, and was by what artifacts we have found a merchant civilization with its central economy centered on the cultivation of saffron and the development of bronze/iron statues of bulls. Most of what we know about them comes from artifacts and frescoes found on Crete that managed to survive everything else I will mention later, but what matters is that we know a few things about them.

Obsessed with marine life for some time, given their pottery.

Had the first palaces in all of Europe, some of them ridiculously big.

Wrote in Linear A and Cretan Hieroglyphs, both still untranslated languages.

Had a ritual involving jumping over a bull, for some reason.

Firm believers in “Suns out, Tits out.”

You’d think I’m kidding on the last one but no! No no no! All the women apparently rocked the tits-out look in Minoa!

^^^^One of many, many Minoan works featuring women giving their titties fresh air. ^^^^

“Wait a second Pinks! What does this have to do with Ariadne being the Mistress of labyrinths?”

Well you see dear wonderful darling, while we know very little about Minoan religion because Mycenaeans (we will get to those bastards in a second), we do know this:

All the religious figures appear to be exclusively women.

The most important figures of their religion seem to be goddesses as there are few artifacts featuring male gods.

Because of the religion, the culture may have been an equal society or even a matriarchy! Historians who are male aren’t sure.

A frankly ridiculous amount of their temples, including the ones in caves in the middle of fuck-all feature labyrinths. A lot of labyrinths!

Their head god is a goddess! Whose temples have labyrinths and whose main symbols are snakes and bulls. Who do we know is a) the mistress of labyrinths and b) is symbolized a lot by snakes and bulls?

ARI-fucking-ADNE THAT’S WHO!

Ariadne didn’t upgrade by marrying the prince of Olympus! Dionysus wifed up possibly the most important goddess in all of Crete and becoming her boy-toy!

I’m not even kidding, most Minoan depictions of the goddess’ consort features a boy/man who cycles through the stages of death. Dionysus himself in several myths goes through the same cycle - life, being crushed, death, rebirth, repeat. Cycles the consort goes through in Minoan legend depictions too!

Okay, that’s great, but what does that have to do with the Mycenaeans? Why do you want to single-handedly go back in time and strangle the beta-Greeks with the nearest belt?

Everything I just said about Ariadne being a Minoan goddess, the Mistress of Labyrinths being hella important on Minoa, is all theoretical. The Mycenaeans are partially to blame for making it theoretical.

Minoa thrived for 2000 years but it had a lot of issues, mostly caused by natural disasters. Towards the end of their civilization (1500 BC-ish), the nearby island of Thera, today known as Santorini, decided to blow up. The island was a hella-active volcano that when erupted, destroyed a lot.

How big was the eruption? Well when Pompeii was wasted by Mt. Vesuvius, the blast was heard from roughly 120 miles away, 200 km.

The blast on Thera was heard from 3000 miles away. 4800 km away.

Fuck me, the environmental effects of the explosion were felt in imperialistic CHINA.

Holy shit that would waste anybody! And it did! Minoa went from being a powerhouse in the Mediterranean to scrambling to recover from losing 40,000 citizens and who knows how many cities. Tsunamis may have followed the blast, further destroying ports which for a navy-powerhouse of an island nation is a bad thing and the theorized temperature drops caused by a cloud of ash lingering for a while would have destroyed crops for the year.

Minoa was fucked.

The Mycenaeans and all their bullshit made it worse.

Up until a few hundred years prior to Thera’s explosion, Minoan artifacts don’t depict much in terms of military power. Why would it? Crete is a natural defense post. Sheer cliffs, high mountains and a few semi-fortified areas would make it pointless to invade. It’s only when the Mycenaeans in all their bullshit decided to attack/compete that Minoa really needed any army to speak of.

Guess who decided to invade while Minoa was reeling from an incredibly shitty year? Mycenaea!

Guess who won?

Also Mycenaea!

Nobody knows how this shit went down though because wouldn’t you know it, the Mycenaeans in all their superiority-complex glory decided to destroy most written accounts about Minoa, a good junk of the temples and culturally eliminated most of Minoan beliefs.

Minoa isn’t even the real name of the civilization! It’s just the name Arthur Evans, the guy who re-motivate interest in Minoan archaeology, gave to the civilization because the writings that would have included the name of the civilization were destroyed.

“That sucks!” Fuck yes that sucks! “What does that have to do with Ariadne though?”

Oh ho ho. Strap in because you’re about to be pissed.

Those of us unfortunate enough to be aware of all the bullshit the Christians pulled on the European pagan belief system are familiar with the concept of cultural, religious destruction. There’s a special name for it I don’t know but if I did I would curse it to be absorbed by the horrendous will of fungi.

An example: Christianity was not the most popular of religions amongst the Vikings. A monotheistic religion that is heavily controlled did not strongly appeal to anyone with a pantheon as rad as the Norse one.

In order to appeal to the Vikings, what monks would do is they would write down traditionally Viking stories which up until that point were orally passed down. Beowulf, the story of the most Viking Viking to have every Vikinged, was one of these first stories.

However! Did these monks write Beowulf as closely to the original oral transcript as possible? Of course not! They took liberties! While Norse features such as trolls and dragons and all sorts of Norse magic occur, there is a lot of Christian features added in.

This happened across all Pagan religions that Christianity came into contact with in Europe. Stories would be altered when written down to be more Christian (this happened to the Greek Pantheon too btw), holidays that were Pagan magically lined up with ones the Vatican just happened to suddenly have. Even names of mythological figures were taken and added onto Christian figure names. Consequently, a lot of pagan religions they did this to got erased over time, with many of their traditions and details being lost forever, and the details we do know being tinted by Christianity.

The Mycenaeans were likely no different.

Minoa and Mycenaea were as culturally opposite as can be. Minoa is theorized to be a matriarchal or equal society*. Mycenaea and most of early Greece absolutely was not. In fact, during early stages of their religion where they believed in reincarnation, the Mycenaeans believed the worst thing to come back as was a woman.

Did you get that? With your options ranging from man to ever single animal on Earth, a woman was ranked as beneath literal animals in Mycenaean society.

Fuck the Mycenaeans.

* This is not to say Minoa was without fault, as a society that is matriarchal or equal can still have rampant issues such as privilege, classism, racism, sexism and more, but when history has a shortage of civilizations that didn’t treat women like shit, you find yourself rooting for them more.

What do you do then, when you take over a society that is very much the opposite of a nightmare of a patriarchy? You fold their beliefs into your own to bait them into yours. Going back to the Linear B line about “Mistress of Labyrinths” that line would/could have been an early tactic of incorporating Minoan belief into Mycenaean belief. Other goddesses and gods were made into aspects of Mycenaean gods. Bristomartis, the Minoan goddess of the hunt, would become Artmeis. Velchanos, a god of the sky, would become Zeus.

With more time, the religion shifted more into Mycenaean and eventually into ancient Greece as we know it. Through trade other gods and goddesses would continue to shift and change, some being straight up imported (Aphrodite for example). Dionysus himself changed a lot too, going from a God representing freedom and attracting slaves, women and those with limited power into his cult, to a God of parties for the wealthy.

Theseus and the Minotaur was a myth likely based on a Mycenaean myth based on a Minoan myth that changes Ariadne from an important, possibly the important goddess of an ancient religion and relegates her to a side character in a pantheon so vast that she would be lost within it.

All of this brings us to today. Today, where as soon as work ended I spent most of the day, as well as the past two days, looking up everything I can on Minoan civilization and added it to my notes. Spite is fueling me to write two possible different stories for two different fandoms where Minoa dunks of Mycenaea and it is giving me life. Expect an update within the next two weeks folks as I lose control of my writing life once more.

In summary: Ariadne deserves more respect, fuck the public education system for skipping over the good parts of Greek mythology instead of the r*pey as shit parts, the Mycenaeans can eat my shorts, and a world were Minoa became the predominant power instead of Greece would be an amazing world to live in.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk. Pink out.

#minoa #minoan #crete #ancient history #ariadne #mycenaea #mycenaean #I hate #HATE #HATE HATE HATE the Greeks so much #homer is a dick #So much spite and curiosity went into this #if I ever get a time machine I will travel to the first years of Mycenaea for the express purpose of burning it to the ground before #they get a chance #the opportunity #to look at Minoa wrong

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twofortheshow · 3 years ago

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Today I was too emotional to relive these moments because 10 minutes into the album I had already cried 3 times. By the end I cried like 20 more and these are the reasons why:

- omg I’m actually listening to RED Taylor’s version I waited for so long

- I love Taylor Swift so much

- Taylor is so smart she found a way to own her music while making us enjoy it with her

- Taylor really and actually loves us

- I missed listening to RED

- omg her voice is so different now, so mature

- she said “asking you to stay” instead of “asking him to stay”!!!

- she’s so great, she’s putting so much effort into this, she’s not just re recording, she’s analyzing, improving these songs, their melodies because she cares to share with us only whatever she thinks is absolutely worth it and she NAILS it every single time

- how will I survive tracks from the vault if I’m already a wreck?

- “I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here”… but I always cry for All too well so I’m not sure it counts… but again, how am I supposed to recover from the ATW 10 minutes version if I’m crying already at the short version?

- I’m a little jealous of swifties who’ll turn 22 from now on cause they have the Taylor’s version of the song to jam to

- every time she doesn’t she almost does 🥺

- a guy found his peace of mind with an indie record that’s supposedly much cooler than Taylor’s album, but now millions of people found their peace of mind with another indie record but form Taylor herself… folklore saved 2020

- Gary Lighbody you guys!!

- omg this is the first time I’m experiencing the release of red as a swiftie, this is making me emotional

- “good girls hopeful they’ll be and long they will wait”

- Taylor gave up a normal life for her dream and now her fans, wondering if she’d make it out alive… knowing now from Miss Americana what she went through “the lucky one” hits different

- I love Taylor’s friendship with Ed so much

- this woman pays so much attention to every detail it’s insane

- Taylor spent 8 months of her life thinking that all love ever does is brake and burn and end 🥺 but look at her now

- crying on your birthday is one of the saddest experiences I’ve ever felt and it breaks my heart knowing that Taylor went through it as well

- “if I had known what I know now, I never would’ve played it so nonchalant” cause who wouldn’t?

- Taylor really cares about us, about the wishes we have that are related to her music, she listens to us and does literally everything in her power to makes us happy

- Ronan 💔

- “What if I really thought some miracle would see us through? What if the miracle was even getting one moment with you?” 💔

- omg I really wanted to hear better man and babe with Taylor’s voice for YEARS… did I actually manifest it? Do I really have these songs now on my phone just a few clicks away?

- this whole song: nothing new. How horrible is it that the industry made her feel like she’s just a shiny new toy and nothing more? That they’d forget about her? I have so much to say about this but I’m not ready to expose all of my thoughts about this

- she really didn’t deserve someone who rolled his eyes at her jokes and laughed at her dreams, this is so fucked up

- again, I love love love Taylor and Ed together

- ALL TOO WELL (10 MINUTES VERSION)

- the whole

- freaking

- song

- “AND you were tossing me the car keys”!!

- not only she said “fuck” but she said “fuck the patriarchy”!!!!!

- “if we had been closers in age maybe it would have been fine AND THAT MADE ME WANT TO DIE” 💔

- it’s supposed to be fun turning 21

This was the train of thoughts that led me through Red (Taylor’s version) this morning. In order to write this I listened again the album and tried to go through the same mental path cause my first listening is just me and the music, no phone, no writing

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drivingsideways · 4 years ago

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k-drama rec list

Prior to 2020 I’d maybe watched 2 k-dramas in my entire life, but this year I got sucked in, thanks to some great recs, and y’know, *gestures * everything.

I think I’d held off watching kdramas because my impression of them was limited to romances that I didn’t enjoy at all. But this was the year I discovered the equivalent of “gen fic” kdrama- dramas that had wonderful ensemble casts, strong story lines that weren’t entirely romance focused and also a variety in terms of themes and styles. A big plus was that I found so many of these dramas had women leading the writers’ room, and seeing the effect of that in the story telling. (Notable exceptions: a certain “star” writer who should please stop inflicting her badly written, formulaic crap on the world, yes Kim Eun-Sook, I mean you, and whoever wrote that trashfire Flower of Evil)

So here I am with my own rec list! Caveat- these are mostly not the dramas released in 2020, I’m still playing catch up! :)

Under the cut for length

My Mister/ My Ahjussi (2018, Written by Park Hae-Young, Directed by Kim Won-Seok, starring Lee Sun-kyun and Lee Ji-eun aka IU)

This was definitely my absolute favourite of the shows I watched this year across western/ asian media. It’s a story about the thread that binds us all and the ineffability of human connection. It’s also a story that deconstructs ideas of masculinity and honour and shame in a non-western context, but with an extremely compassionate touch. It’s a story that doesn’t shy away from showing the consequences of material and spiritual poverty; and how one can so easily feed into the other. It’s a love story that isn’t a romance, except that it’s a Romance. It’s about finding salvation in one another and in the kindness of strangers. It’s about choosing life, and picking yourself up off the floor to take that one last step and then the next and then the next. The one quibble I have with the series is that it could have been better paced, it does get extremely slow after the half way mark. But god, do they land the ending. Both Lee Sun-kyun and IU turn in absolutely heartbreaking performances, and fair warning, be prepared to go through an entire box of tissues watching this series.

Life (2018, written by Lee Soo-yeon and directed by Hong Jong-chan, starring Lee Dong-wook, Cho Seung-woo, Won Jin-ah, Lee Kyu-hyung, Yoo Jae-myung and Moon So-ri.)

Medical dramas are very much not my thing, and I wouldn’t have taken a chance on it except that @michyeosseo said I should, and she was right! It’s a medical drama in the sense that it’s set in a hospital, but rather than a “case-fic” format, this is actually a sharp commentary on the corporatization of health care, and the business of mixing, well, money and what should be a fundamental human right. Writer Lee Soo-yeon was coming off the global success of Stranger/Secret Forest S1 when this aired, so I understand that expectations were probably sky-high, and people were disappointed when this show didn’t give them the adrenaline rush that they wanted. On the other hand, I thought that this outing was really much more nuanced in terms of the politics and also how the ending doesn’t allow you the luxury of easy-fixes. This show has a great ensemble cast, and while it took me a while to get used to Lee Dong-wook’s woodenness (i ended up calling him mr.cadaver after watching this and was surprised to learn that he’s very popular?), in the end I was quite sold on his version of angry angst-bucket elder-sibling Dr.Ye Jin-woo. His best scenes were with Lee Kyu-hyung who turns in a lovely, achy performance as the paraplegic Dr. Ye Seon-woo who just wants to live a normal life. The love story between the two brothers is actually the emotional backbone of the story, and I think they landed that perfectly.

My one quibble with writer-nim is that she ended up writing in a forgettable and somewhat (for me at least) uncomfortable romance between the characters played by Won Jin-ah and Cho Seung-Woo. I think part of my uncomfortable-feeling was that I got the strong sense that the writer herself didn’t want to write this romance, it was as if she was being made to shoe-horn it in for Studio Reasons, and she basically grit her teeth and did the worst possible job of it. I do wish we could have absolutely had the OT3 of my dreams: Moon So-ri/Cho Seung-woo/Yoo Jae-myung like, c’mon TV gods MAKE IT HAPPEN, just...look at them!!!!

Anyway, that apart, I think this was a very engaging series, and by engaging, I also mean thirst-enabling, see below.

Stranger (aka Secret Forest or Forest of Secrets) S1 & 2 : (2017-, Written by Lee Soo-yeon, directed by

2017′s smash hit aired a much anticipated second season in 2020, and I managed to catch up just in time to watch that live, so that was thrilling :D . Writer Lee Soo-yeon mixes up thriller/office comedy/political commentary in an ambitious series. I think S1 is more “exciting” than S2 in terms of the mystery and pacing, but S2 is far more dense and interesting in terms of political commentary because it takes a long hard look at institutional corruption and in true writer-nim fashion doesn’t prescribe any easy solutions. Anyway, please enjoy public prosecutor Cho Seung-woo and police officer Bae Doona as partners/soulmates kicking ass and taking names in pursuit of Truth, Justice and just a goddamn peaceful meal, along with a stunningly competent ensemble cast. Also yes, Han Yeo Jin is a lesbian, sorry, I don’t make the rules.

Search: WWW (2019, Written by Kwon Do-Eun, directed by Jung Ji-hyun & Kwon Young-il, starring Im Soo-jung, Lee Da-hee, Jeon Hye-jin)

GOD. Where do I start? +1000 for writer Kwon Do-Eun saying “fuck the patriarchy” in the most grandiose way possible, i.e. absolutely refusing to acknowledge that it exists. Yes, this is that power fantasy, and it’s also a fun, slice-of-life tale about three women navigating their way through work, romance, national politics and everything in between. It’s true that I wasn’t entirely sold on the amount of time spent on the romance, and I really wish they’d actually had a textual wlw romance, though the subtext through the entire series is PRACTICALLY TEXT. But still, it maintains that veneer of plausible deniability and I think queer fans who are sick of that kind of treatment in media have a very valid grouse against the show. On the other hand, personally I felt that the queer-platonic vibe of the show is very wonderful and true to real life, and it was only reinforced by the ending. This is a show written by a woman for women (like me), and it shows.

Hyena (2020, Written by Kim Roo-Ri, directed by Jang Tae-yoo & Lee Chang Woo, starring Kim Hye-soo and Ju Ji-hoon )

Those of you who’ve been watching hit zombie epic Kingdom are probably familiar with Ju Ji-hoon’s brand of sexiness already. I had not watched Kingdom and got hit in the face by Mr.Sexy McSexyPants’ turn as a brash, privileged-by-birth, up and coming lawyer who gets completely runover by the smoking hot and incredibly dangerous fellow lawyer/competitor from the other side of the tracks in the person of Kim Hye-Soo. When I say they set the room on fire, I mean it, ok. Every single scene between these two is an actual bonfire of sexual attraction and emotional hand grenades, and they’re both absolutely riveting to watch. “Flower of Evil” wishes they had what this show has- an actual grown up romance as opposed to a thirteen year old twilight fan’s idea of an adult romance.

The “lawyer” shenanigans and the “cases” are hit or miss, and I think the occasional comedy fell flat for me. But that’s not why I mainlined like 6 episodes of this series overnight like a coke addict, and that’s not why you’re going to do it either. It’s so RARE, even in these enlightened days to find a female character like Jung Geum-ja: hard as nails, unapologetic about it, and not punished by the narrative for it. The best part for me is that she feels like a woman’s woman, not a man’s idea of what a Strong Female Character should be. Anyways, when I grow up I want to have what Kim Hye-soo has ok?

Other dramas that I watched this year, quickly rated:

The King: Eternal Monarch (3/10 and those 3 points are only for the combined goodness of second leads who deserved better- Jung Eun Chae, Woo Do Hwan and Kim Kyung Nam. Please head over to my AO3 and read my attempts to fix this garbage fire and rescue their characters from canon)

Flower of Evil (-10/100, dont @ me)

Tale of the Nine Tailed (5/10, I think it succeeds at what it set out to do, which is a light hearted, sweet fantasy-romance-melodrama, plus “second lead” Kim Beom will make you cry as the hot mess of a half human/ half fox spirit ALL TEARS character. I think if you’re into kdrama romances as a genre, this is probably a good bet?)

Signal (7/10, This was the first full kdrama I watched this year and would definitely recommend. It’s a police procedural with time travel shenanigans and has an engaging plot, good pacing, texture and compelling performances. My one disappointment with it was the way they wrote Kim Hye-soo’s character. As literally the only female character to survive in any way, she was given short shrift, and toward the end it really began to grate on me.)

Six Flying Dragons - (7/10, also would recommend if you’re interested in Korean historicals. It definitely already feels a bit dated in terms of styling and production values, and even scripting and acting choices. But it has a good balance of fantasy and history and political commentary. I was not a fan of Yoo In-Ah’s performance in this series, but it’s not anything that would make you want to nope out of the series. It’s GoT , if GoT was thoughtful about politics and characters and not the misogynist, racist trashfire that it became.)

My Country: The New Age - (3.5/10, and that’s 3 points to Jang Hyuk’s fan and 0.5.points to Woo Do Hwan’s heaving bosom. If you like your historical drama/fantasy with very pretty men, very gay subtext -seriously RIP to show makers who thought they could hetero it but didn’t account for Woo Do Hwan’s Tragic Face- lots of blood and tears and very nonsense plot, this is right up your alley. I probably would have enjoyed it more in other circumstances, I think? But this one just annoyed me too much at the time!

I have a couple of more dramas to watch on my list, that’ll probably carry me over into 2021, so see ya on the other side! :D

#k-drama #kdrama rec list #2020: A YEAR #i'm a queue for you

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venuskind · 3 years ago

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MEN OF MY AGE (and older)

As much as I have grown up with a decided preference for boys over most girls and have loved my male friends fiercely, I have to share these observations, impression, feelings and thoughts on men of my age that have been at the forefront of my mind and conversations lately.

There is a shock at the speed with which it becomes visible in middle age when men have been letting themselves go, their lack of self care and love becoming dishearteningly manifest in their bodies and loss of health, their lack of shadow work and growth becoming painfully evident in their limited capacity to self reflect and ongoing habit of leaning on others (often females) to do the little bit of emotional and self care labor they allow for.

There is a deep disappointment at the tardiness, laziness, slowness, half-assedness or total disregard of the need for growth that is not in service of external status and wealth.

This makes me lose RESPECT for such men and renders them asexual and invisible to my gaze. I honestly do not feel attracted to how these men show up or their bodies, nor do I feel a wish to befriend or relate to them.

Don't get me wrong, I am aware that conditioning of culture and patriarchy have created blockages, damages and walls standing in the way of delving into the necessary work.

And yet that is also true for all other genders but we others seem to make more of an effort and headway in working through our own BS, illuminate our blindspots, integrate our shadow, dropping egoic story-telling that separates us from reality, etc.

And I wonder, and ever more loudly and impatiently, ask why? WHY is it so unfathomably easy or preferable for men to stay STAGNANT, COMPLACENT, PHLEGMATIC and/or HIDE behind being focused on money, work, and 'having fun'?

I do take responsibility for my part in protecting the fragility of the egos of men around me.

I have been responsible for indulging and enabling them in the narcissistic avoidance of full responsibility for their life and becoming a more integrated and positive force in our communities. I have begun ceasing to do so years ago and keep releasing subtler and subtler ways of enabling as they reveal themselves to me.

I will NOT coerce or manipulate men into focusing on self work and awareness.

That goes against my values of honoring every beings sovereignty and my choice to live from love. Though I understand why many revert to manipulation and coercion from the abject helplessness this stubborn avoidance and rejection of growth triggers. Nonetheless, I will not enable, nurture, engage with or accept the half-assedness or resistance to what I perceive as a fundamental aspect of being embodied.

I explicitly, vocally, and wholeheartedly acknowledge men who go the extra mile, compared to their brethren, and apply themselves to the work with tangible and admirable fruits. Without these few radiant lighthouses I would have lost hope for humanity years ago. But they are few and far apart. Too few!

I cannot help feeling utterly disappointed, frustrated and at times down-right fed up with the stagnancy in men, regardless of how much I feel compassion for, like or love them.

The questions that arise for me are:

When will you step into the fullness of responsibility for yourself?

What are you allowing to hold you back from being the best and most whole version of yourself?

What do you need to get working or apply yourself more to it?

What can we provide or do to co-create a space that is conducive to your growth?

And no, this interest in your journey and openness to supporting you does not imply a willingness to do your work for you - no matter how subtly you try to rope me into that.

Know that the lack of growth, change, maturing in you is an OBSTACLE TO truly RELATING with you. An obstacle to co-creating a meaningful experience of connection, joy, insight, play and creativity.

As long as you do not invest yourself FULLY into loving and healing yourself, my love for you will be limited in its expressions due to a choice to keep a distance from what doesn't align with my path and energy.

Said DISTANCE precludes you from being part of the richness, joy and miracles of community, friendship, and love expressing freely and deeply, which have become my normal. A normal my being longs to share with you too and have it enriched by your unique being!

So, please, do take care of your body and psyche, invest in your self, face your shadow and keep challenging yourself to embody a disciplined and consistent growth mindset in all areas of life and being. I promise you will be amazed at how much better you can do, be, and experience the fullness of life!

Photography by Various Artists

#men #maturity #self work #stagnant #complacent #playing it small #growth mindset #shadow work #invest in self

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everybodyscupoftea · 4 years ago

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dumbass quotes

hi! this is a list of dumb shit issawhat (huge inspo for frat jj) has said on twitch stream, not taking credit at all, one of the viewers created a google doc and i picked 100 of my faves and thought it could be fun to use these as prompts for a blurb thing

so, choose what jj you want (pike, sigma chi, college) and send me some numbers

(i have stuff i need to do today so i’ll start working on these later this afternoon and tonight)

1. I’m emotionally unavailable

2. My body/bloodstream is a pharmacy

3. I hate it here

4. My dick only touched my hands today

5. My dick is very clean

6. Please don’t talk to me

7. Teenagers are fucking pussies bro

8. I can barely read so I like looking at pictures

9. We’re having the opposite of a good time right now

10. I’m not even playing with my team right now, I’m gonna be independent and just run and shoot people in the forehead

11. You piece of dog shit. You utter piece of dog shit

12. IUD. Is that the implant

13. Fuck them kids. No don’t actually fuck kids

14. Are we talking about planets? I love outer space

15. Mars just probably tastes like cheese pizza

16. No offense. Actually, offense

17. You don’t wanna live in my mind it’s loud up there

18. Can we not talk about demons? That kinda stresses me out

19. There’s a video of a guy with a ton of tattoos who looks like he’ll fuck your step mom

20. I swear at one point I had bigger boobs than my ex

21. I just wanna be a shredded skinny boy

22. It’s not like I want to die, I’m just okay with dying

23. I don’t even touch my dick when I pee most of the time

24. Time to fuck some dumb ass bitches up

25. The amount I just got railed was way too much

26. I’m pretty sure nut has more calories than celery

27. I don’t pull out

28. I can’t hear you I’m dropping

29. I’m a fucking laser

30. My dick is 8 inches if I fold it in half

31. Actually my dick has never been on camera. I wear swim shorts in the shower

32. Where the pussy boys at

33. Imagine being married. Imagine having emotions

34. Sometimes I read then sometimes I think what if I didn’t have eyeballs

35. I’m gonna kick you in the fucking forehead

36. My lips are chapped as dick

37. It’s pretty early for arson talk boys but if you want to we can

38. You guys say a lot of sexual things and it stresses me out

39. It’s such a power play ghosting your parents

40. Blinking is for sore losers

41. Refreash

42. I’m gonna see how much of this beer I can delete

43. Don’t shoot me in the back that would not be cash money

44. Sand hanitizer

45. Condoms don’t even work

46. *talking about a funeral* open bar?

47. Adulting is for fucking losers

48. Alcohol? You mean spicy water

49. I hate how they make kids so stupid in movies. They’re dumb but not that dumb

50. It smells like soup in my house bro

51. And it went like

52. I’m not that versatile in my pegging lingo

53. What’s MI? Is that Michigan

54. I’m actually 4 food 5 and legally a short person. And I lost my juul. Oh no I just put it on the charger like an idiot

55. Pew pew pew right in your forehead

56. Guess who’s a dead bitch? You are hahahaha

57. Not in the mood to be trifled

58. Get bodied

59. I know how to talk to women. I’ve been doing it my whole life

60. Did I wash my hands? Sure…

61. You wanna see me in a skirt? No you don’t because I’ll look better than you do and you’ll get mad

62. Mom’s not home, we can’t kill the patriarchy

63. Go kick rocks

64. I’m not a wall puncher anymore

65. I don’t know I just work here

66. Fluffy duffy croissant boy

67. My brain sounds like a rock tumbler

68. Commit sudoku

69. Hit her with an actually

70. A lot of natural light but I wish we could get a bud light

71. I can’t hear you I’m yawning

72. I’m not an object I just want to be treated like one

73. I feel like when I eat I do better in life

74. I am pro elder abuse I agree

75. Nickle sized nipples that sounds like a bar

76. The cologne is in the air and I can taste it on my lips

77. The smell of this cologne reminds me of sex because whenever I use it I have sex

78. God damnit charge faster juul

79. Are you an innie or an outie

80. You can have my belly button pics for free baby girl

81. Does anyone want to meet god because I can help you out looking at you

82. Only if it’s pictures with sound

83. My second life I was a banana slug, learned a lot

84. I’m a virgin, I can’t hear you

85. I’m getting the nicest virgin (meaning version)

86. That’s what people say about my penis. Definitely doable but hard

87. A cat appointment? We call that a normal Tuesday

88. That fucking visor doesn’t slap

89. I should buy you a pair of catch these hands

90. I was watching ant videos last night they’re fucking crazy

91. LOOK UP TOP FIVE ANT MOMENTS

92. Who the fuck is spam risk and why are they calling me

93. What is a jetpack? Is that when you’re the big spoon but you’re small so you look like a jetpack

94. I’m gonna call you backpack though like dora because you don’t shut the fuck up

95. If you threw some long division at me I’d say go fish

96. I can’t even hear myself think. Not that I want to think

97. I don’t think I’ve ever had a fuck honestly. Does someone want to give me my first fuck

98. I don’t need to learn how to do anything, I’m 21. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks

99. That could lead into premarital breathing the same air

100. I didn’t even wear a hat yesterday so I don’t want to play thanks

#frat!jj #college jj #jj maybank #jj maybank x reader #sigma chi!jj #pike!jj #jj maybank blurb

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lavenderafro · 5 years ago

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Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word “patriarchy” in everyday life.

Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly.

The word “patriarchy” just is not a part of their normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences.

I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it.

Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death.

I often use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.

Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about growing up is the system of patriarchy, even if we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to us as children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can best fulfill these roles.

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

When my older brother and I were born with a year separating us in age, patriarchy determined how we would each be regarded by our parents. Both our parents believed in patriarchy; they had been taught patriarchal thinking through religion.

At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to a powerful man.

They were taught that God was male.

These teachings were reinforced in every institution they encountered– schools, courthouses, clubs, sports arenas, as well as churches. Embracing patriarchal thinking, like everyone else around them, they taught it to their children because it seemed like a “natural” way to organize life.

As their daughter I was taught that it was my role to serve, to be weak, to be free from the burden of thinking, to caretake and nurture others.

My brother was taught that it was his role to be served; to provide; to be strong; to think, strategize, and plan; and to refuse to caretake or nurture others.

I was taught that it was not proper for a female to be violent, that it was “unnatural.”

My brother was taught hat his value would be determined by his will to do violence (albeit in appropriate settings).

He was taught that for a boy, enjoying violence was a good thing (albeit in appropriate settings). He was taught that a boy should not express feelings. I was taught that girls could and should express feelings, or at least some of them.

When I responded with rage at being denied a toy, I was taught as a girl in a patriarchal household that rage was not an appropriate feminine feeling, that it should be not only not be expressed but be eradicated.

When my brother responded with rage at being denied a toy, he was taught as a boy in a patriarchal household that his ability to express rage was good but that he had to learn the best setting to unleash his hostility.

It was not good for him to use his rage to oppose the wishes of his parents, but later, when he grew up, he was taught that rage was permitted and that allowing rage to provoke him to violence would help him protect home and nation.

We lived in farm country, isolated from other people. Our sense of gender roles was learned from our parents, from the ways we saw them behave.

My brother and I remember our confusion about gender. In reality I was stronger and more violent than my brother, which we learned quickly was bad. And he was a gentle, peaceful boy, which we learned was really bad.

Although we were often confused, we knew one fact for certain: we could not be and act the way we wanted to, doing what we felt like. It was clear to us that our behavior had to follow a predetermined, gendered script.

We both learned the word “patriarchy” in our adult life, when we learned that the script that had determined what we should be, the identities we should make, was based on patriarchal values and beliefs about gender.

I was always more interested in challenging patriarchy than my brother was because it was the system that was always leaving me out of things that I wanted to be part of. In our family life of the fifties, marbles were a boy’s game. My brother had inherited his marbles from men in the family; he had a tin box to keep them in.

All sizes and shapes, marvelously colored, they were to my eye the most beautiful objects. We played together with them, often with me aggressively clinging to the marble I liked best, refusing to share. When Dad was at work, our stay-at-home mom was quite content to see us playing marbles together.

Yet Dad, looking at our play from a patriarchal perspective, was disturbed by what he saw. His daughter, aggressive and competitive, was a better player than his son.

His son was passive; the boy did not really seem to care who won and was willing to give over marbles on demand. Dad decided that this play had to end, that both my brother and I needed to learn a lesson about appropriate gender roles.

One evening my brother was given permission by Dad to bring out the tin of marbles. I announced my desire to play and was told by my brother that “girls did not play with marbles,” that it was a boy’s game. This made no sense to my four- or five-year-old mind, and I insisted on my right to play by picking up marbles and shooting them.

Dad intervened to tell me to stop. I did not listen. His voice grew louder and louder. Then suddenly he snatched me up, broke a board from our screen door, and began to beat me with it, telling me, “You’re just a little girl.

When I tell you to do something, I mean for you to do it.” He beat me and he beat me, wanting me to acknowledge that I understood what I had done. His rage, his violence captured everyone’s attention. Our family sat spellbound, rapt before the pornography of patriarchal violence.

After this beating I was banished—forced to stay alone in the dark. Mama came into the bedroom to soothe the pain, telling me in her soft southern voice, “I tried to warn you. You need to accept that you are just a little girl and girls can’t do what boys do.” In service to patriarchy her task was to reinforce that Dad had done the right thing by, putting me in my place, by restoring the natural social order.

I remember this traumatic event so well because it was a story told again and again within our family. No one cared that the constant retelling might trigger post-traumatic stress; the retelling was necessary to reinforce both the message and the remembered state of absolute powerlessness.

The recollection of this brutal whipping of a little-girl daughter by a big strong man, served as more than just a reminder to me of my gendered place, it was a reminder to everyone watching/remembering, to all my siblings, male and female, and to our grown-woman mother that our patriarchal father was the ruler in our household.

We were to remember that if we did not obey his rules, we would be punished, punished even unto death.

This is the way we were experientially schooled in the art of patriarchy.

There is nothing unique or even exceptional about this experience. Listen to the voices of wounded grown children raised in patriarchal homes and you will hear different versions with the same underlying theme, the use of violence to reinforce our indoctrination and acceptance of patriarchy.

In How Can I Get Through to You? family therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving home in which antipatriarchal values prevailed.

He tells of how his young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was unacceptable:

“Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a message. You are not to do this. And the medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame.

At three, Alexander was learning the rules.

A ten second wordless transaction was powerful enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.”

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

My stories took place in the fifties; the stories Real tells are recent. They all underscore the tyranny of patriarchal thinking, the power of patriarchal culture to hold us captive.

Real is one of the most enlightened thinkers on the subject of patriarchal masculinity in our nation, and yet he lets readers know that he is not able to keep his boys out of patriarchy’s reach. They suffer its assaults, as do all boys and girls, to a greater or lesser degree.

No doubt by creating a loving home that is not patriarchal, Real at least offers his boys a choice: they can choose to be themselves or they can choose conformity with patriarchal roles.

Real uses the phrase “psychological patriarchy” to describe the patriarchal thinking common to females and males.

Despite the contemporary visionary feminist thinking that makes clear that a patriarchal thinker need not be a male, most folks continue to see men as the problem of patriarchy. This is simply not the case. Women can be as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men.

Psychotherapist John Bradshaw’s clear-sighted definition of patriarchy in Creating Love is a useful one: “The dictionary defines ‘patriarchy’ as a ‘social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family in both domestic and religious functions’.”

Patriarchy is characterized by male domination and power.

He states further that “patriarchal rules still govern most of the world’s religious, school systems, and family systems.”

Describing the most damaging of these rules, Bradshaw lists “blind obedience—the foundation upon which patriarchy stands; the repression of all emotions except fear; the destruction of individual willpower; and the repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure’s way of thinking.”

Patriarchal thinking shapes the values of our culture.

We are socialized into this system, females as well as males. Most of us learned patriarchal attitudes in our family of origin, and they were usually taught to us by our mothers. These attitudes were reinforced in schools and religious institutions.

The contemporary presence of female-headed house holds has led many people to assume that children in these households are not learning patriarchal values because no male is present. They assume that men are the sole teachers of patriarchal thinking.

Yet many female-headed households endorse and promote patriarchal thinking with far greater passion than two-parent households. Because they do not have an experiential reality to challenge false fantasies of gender roles, women in such households are far more likely to idealize the patriarchal male role and patriarchal men than are women who live with patriarchal men every day.

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.

Clearly we cannot dismantle a system as long as we engage in collective denial about its impact on our lives.

Patriarchy requires male dominance by any means necessary, hence it supports, promotes, and condones sexist violence. We hear the most about sexist violence in public discourses about rape and abuse by domestic partners.

But the most common forms of patriarchal violence are those that take place in the home between patriarchal parents and children. The point of such violence is usually to reinforce a dominator model, in which the authority figure is deemed ruler over those without power and given the right to maintain that rule through practices of subjugation, subordination, and submission.

Keeping males and females from telling the truth about what happens to them in families is one way patriarchal culture is maintained. A great majority of individuals enforce an unspoken rule in the culture as a whole that demands we keep the secrets of patriarchy, thereby protecting the rule of the father.

This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionalized gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial.

And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?

It is no accident that feminists began to use the word “patriarchy” to replace the more commonly used “male chauvanism” and “sexism.”

These courageous voices wanted men and women to become more aware of the way patriarchy affects us all. In popular culture the word itself was hardly used during the heyday of contemporary feminism.

Antimale activists were no more eager than their sexist male counterparts to emphasize the system of patriarchy and the way it works.

For to do so would have automatically exposed the notion that men were all-powerful and women powerless, that all men were oppressive and women always and only victims.

By placing the blame for the perpetuation of sexism solely on men, these women could maintain their own allegiance to patriarchy, their own lust for power. They masked their longing to be dominators by taking on the mantle of victimhood.

Like many visionary radical feminists I challenged the misguided notion, put forward by women who were simply fed up with male exploitation and oppression, that men were “the enemy.”

As early as 1984 I included a chapter with the title “Men: Comrades in Struggle” in my book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center urging advocates of feminist politics to challenge any rhetoric which placed the sole blame for perpetuating patriarchy and male domination onto men:

“Separatist ideology encourages women to ignore the negative impact of sexism on male personhood. It stresses polarization between the sexes.

According to Joy Justice, separatists believe that there are “two basic perspectives” on the issue of naming the victims of sexism: “There is the perspective that men oppress women. And there is the perspective that people are people, and we are all hurt by rigid sex roles.”…Both perspectives accurately describe our predica ment. Men do oppress women.

People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns, These two realities coexist.

Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists.

It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.”

Throughout this essay I stressed that feminist advocates collude in the pain of men wounded by patriarchy when they falsely represent men as always and only powerful, as always and only gaining privileges from their blind obedience to patriarchy. I emphasized that patriarchal ideology brainwashes men to believe that their domination of women is beneficial when it is not:

“Often feminist activists affirm this logic when we should be constantly naming these acts as expressions of perverted power relations, general lack of control of one’s actions, emotional powerlessness, extreme irrationality, and in many cases, outright insanity.

Passive male absorption of sexist ideology enables men to falsely interpret this disturbed behavior positively. As long as men are brainwashed to equate violent domination and abuse of women with privilege, they will have no understanding of the damage done to themselves or to others, and no motivation to change.

Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.”

The man who has been my primary bond for more than twelve years was traumatized by the patriarchal dynamics in his family of origin. When I met him he was in his twenties.

While his formative years had been spent in the company of a violent, alcoholic dad, his circumstances changed when he was twelve and he began to live alone with his mother.

In the early years of our relationship he talked openly about his hostility and rage toward his abusingn dad. He was not interested in forgiving him or understanding the circumstances that had shaped and influenced his dad’s life, either in his childhood or in his working life as a military man. In the early years of our relationship he was extremely critical of male domination of women and children.

Although he did not use the word “patriarchy,” he understood its meaning and he opposed it. His gentle, quiet manner often led folks to ignore him, counting him among the weak and the powerless.

By the age of thirty he began to assume a more macho persona, embracing the dominator model that he had once critiqued. Donning the mantle of patriarch, he gained greater respect and visibility. More women were drawn to him. He was noticed more in public spheres. His criticism of male domination ceased. And indeed he begin to mouth patriarchal rhetoric, saying the kind of sexist stuff that would have appalled him in the past.

These changes in his thinking and behavior were triggered by his desire to be accepted and affirmed in a patriarchal workplace and rationalized by his desire to get ahead.

His story is not unusual. Boys brutalized and victimized by patriarchy more often than not become patriarchal, embodying the abusive patriarchal masculinity that they once clearly recognized as evil.

Few men brutally abused as boys in the name of patriarchal maleness courageously resist the brainwashing and remain true to themselves. Most males conform to patriarchy in one way or another.

Indeed, radical feminist critique of patriarchy has practically been silenced in our culture. It has become a subcultural discourse available only to well-educated elites. Even in those circles, using the word “patriarchy” is regarded as passé.

Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny.

The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe. I interpret this laughter as the audience’s way of showing discomfort with being asked to ally themselves with an antipatriarchal disobedient critique. This laughter reminds me that if I dare to challenge patriarchy openly, I risk not being taken seriously.

Citizens in this nation fear challenging patriarchy even as they lack overt awareness that they are fearful, so deeply embedded in our collective unconscious are the rules of patriarchy.

I often tell audiences that if we were to go door-to-door asking if we should end male violence against women, most people would give their unequivocal support.

Then if you told them we can only stop male violence against women by ending male domination, by eradicating patriarchy, they would begin to hesitate, to change their position. Despite the many gains of contemporary feminist movement—greater equality for women in the workforce, more tolerance for the relinquishing of rigid gender roles—patriarchy as a system remains intact, and many people continue to believe that it is needed if humans are to survive as a species.

This belief seems ironic, given that patriarchal methods of organizing nations, especially the insistence on violence as a means of social control, has actually led to the slaughter of millions of people on the planet.

Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life. Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health.

Patriarchy promotes insanity. It is at the root of the psychological ills troubling men in our nation. Nevertheless there is no mass concern for the plight of men. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi includes very little discussion of patriarchy:

“Ask feminists to diagnose men’s problems and you will often get a very clear explanation: men are in crisis because women are properly challenging male dominance. Women are asking men to share the public reins and men can’t bear it. Ask antifeminists and you will get a diagnosis that is, in one respect, similar.

Men are troubled, many conservative pundits say, because women have gone far beyond their demands for equal treatment and are now trying to take power and control away from men…The underlying message: men cannot be men, only eunuchs, if they are not in control.

Both the feminist and antifeminist views are rooted in a peculiarly modern American perception that to be a man means to be at the controls and at all times to feel yourself in control.”

Faludi never interrogates the notion of control. She never considers that the notion that men were somehow in control, in power, and satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist movement is false.

Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others.

To truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist.

This violence was not created by feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction most men feel in their work lives—a dissatisfaction extensively documented in the work of Studs Terkel and echoed in Faludi’s treatise—would not exist.

In many ways Stiffed was yet another betrayal of American men because Faludi spends so much time trying not to challenge patriarchy that she fails to highlight the necessity of ending patriarchy if we are to liberate men. Rather she writes:

“Instead of wondering why men resist women’s struggle for a freer and healthier life, I began to wonder why men refrain from engaging in their own struggle. Why, despite a crescendo of random tantrums, have they offered no methodical, reasoned response to their predicament: Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt?…Why haven’t men responded to the series of betrayals in their own lives—to the failures of their fathers to make good on their promises–with some thing coequal to feminism?”

Note that Faludi does not dare risk either the ire of feminist females by suggesting that men can find salvation in feminist movement or rejection by potential male readers who are solidly antifeminist by suggesting that they have something to gain from engaging feminism.

So far in our nation visionary feminist movement is the only struggle for justice that emphasizes the need to end patriarchy.

No mass body of women has challenged patriarchy and neither has any group of men come together to lead the struggle.

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.

Distinguishing political patriarchy, which he sees as largely committed to ending sexism, therapist Terrence Real makes clear that the patriarchy damaging us all is embedded in our psyches:

“Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system.

Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.”

By highlighting psychological patriarchy, we see that everyone is implicated and we are freed from the misperception that men are the enemy.

To end patriarchy we must challenge both its psychological and its concrete manifestations in daily life.

There are folks who are able to critique patriarchy but unable to act in an antipatriarchal manner.

To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy.

Terrence Real offers this valuable insight: “The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.”

If men are to reclaim them essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.

#LAVENDER queen BEES #LAVENDER pioneers #LAVENDER basics patriarchy

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nichole0523 · 4 years ago

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Sims 4 Legacy Challenge (My Version)

This challenge has many of the same rules as the official legacy challenge. Most of the rules are copy and pasted from the sims 4 Legacy Challenge webpage. In this version you do not have to score your gameplay but you can if you want to by going to the webpage that is linked below.

Rules CAS:

1. Must be a young adult

2. Only sim in the household.

Rules Gameplay:

1. Once you have finished your founder, move them into any empty lot. Return to the world screen. Select your founder on their empty lot and pick “Move Family”.

2. You may found your family in any neighborhood that has a 50×50 or larger lot. Locate a 50 x 50 or larger lot and bulldoze it, evicting the family present if there is one. Move your founder into it.

3. You may use mods and hack for money and if you have MCCC you may use it to level up skills faster.

4. Absolutely no restating after an unfortunate even; that is cheating.

5. You may not move or merge in other Sims into the Legacy Family with the exception Sims that will aid in bringing in the next generation aka the “spouse”. (See the Spouse section for details. As of the latest rule change, you can bring in more than one spouse). You may have non-heir family members leave the Legacy Family, but once they are gone, they may not be moved back in.

6. The family must stay on the same lot throughout the whole challenge. This excludes vacations.

7. A Sim may utilize an anti-aging item ONCE in their lifetime. This includes drinking a youth potion or milking the cow plant. Any cheats that freeze aging or lengthen (or shorten) lifespan times may not be used. Sims lifespans must be set to “Normal” in the gameplay menu.

8. The only time you may change your sims aspiration is when they have finished it and then you may choose another one as long as you haven’t completed it before.

9. You may not bring a Sim back from the dead once the reaper has taken them. You MAY plead with the reaper in order to save a recently dead Sim.

10. You may not move/marry out the sim who currently holds the title of ‘heir’. All of the other children in that generation (known as ‘spares’) may move or marry out. Once a sim moves out, they are ineligible to be heir, even if conditions change that might make them the rightful heir.

11. If you move in more sims into the town you may use them as friends and spouses.

12. When creating your founder you may use the story mode.

(If you want to see the rules for the stuff/game packs you may go to this webpage http://simslegacychallenge.com/sims-4-legacy-challenge-gameplay-rules/ )

Rules Succession Laws. When your founder eventually dies, you will need to determine who among their children will become the next heir, the Leader of the family for the second generation. The title of heir has many important implications that will be explained as we go along. How your family handles succession is actually quite customizable. Your succession law is made up of three components. Think of the succession law as the “personality” of your family. Choose wisely, as you must abide by this succession law for your entire challenge and cannot change it part-way through:

:Gender Law:

1. Matriarchy: The Founder must be female. Only girls are eligible to be named heir unless there are no female children, at which point boys become eligible for that generation.

2. Strict Matriarchy: The Founder must be female. Only girls are eligible to be named heir. Male children cannot, under any circumstance, ever be the heir to the next generation.

3. Patriarchy: The Founder must be male. Only boys are eligible to be named heir unless there are no male children, at which point girls become eligible for that generation.

4. Strict Patriarchy: The Founder must be male. Only boys are eligible to be named heir. Female children cannot, under any circumstance, ever be the heir to the next generation.

5. Equality: The Founder may be of either gender. Both boys and girls are eligible for the title of heir.

6. Strict Equality: The founder may be of either gender. However, only children of the opposite gender to the founder are eligible to be named heir. This repeats itself for the next generation (the next heir must be a different gender than the previous heir) so that each generation will have alternating-genders as heirs.

:Bloodline Law:

1. Strict Traditional : To be eligible to be named heir, a child must be naturally born from their previous-generation parents and be able to trace an unbroken bloodline back to the founder. Adopted children may never be named heir.

2. Traditional: Children who are naturally born from the previous generation are eligible to be named heir. Adopted children are ineligible to be named heir unless there are no naturally born children, at which point they become eligible for that generation.

3. Modern: Both Naturally born and adopted children are eligible to be named heir.

4. Foster: Children who are adopted are eligible to be named heir. Naturally born children are not eligible to be named heir unless there are no adopted children, at which point they become eligible for that generation.

5. Strict Foster: Only Children who are adopted are eligible for the title of heir. Naturally born children may never be heir.

(Even though these are important they do not completely choose who the heir is.)

:Heir Law (Important):

1. First Born: The oldest, by order of joining the family, eligible living child is named heir.

2. Last Born: The youngest, by order of joining the family, eligible living child is named heir.

3. Living Will: The eligible child with the highest friendly relationship score with their previous-generation’s parent will be named heir.

4. Merit: The child with the most fully completed aspirations will be named heir. If there is a tie, the child with the highest level in a single skill will become heir from among the children who are tied.

5. Strength: The first born eligible child becomes heir by default… but the tile can be forcefully taken from them if an eligible sibling beats them in a fight. That sibling may have their title taken, (or taken back) if they lose a fight to another eligible sibling.

6. Random: The title of heir is randomly selected from the pool of all eligible children. Every time the eligible pool changes size, The heir must be re-rolled using the new pool.

7. Exemplar: At the beginning of the challenge, name a single trait. This trait must be one of your founder’s three traits.. Any eligible heir that has this trait will gain the title of heir. If a single generation has no children with this trait follow the First Born rule. If more than one child has the Exemplar trait then the oldest child WITH the trait will be the heir.

8. Democracy: This rule may be used if you are displaying your Legacy Challenge in some public way. Either via Let’s Play, Livestream, blog or other format where people can leave comment. The heir is chosen by your viewers/readers from among the pool of eligible heirs.

9. Magical Bloodline: Choose the heir by whoever has the strongest magical bloodline trait. If there is no magical bloodline trait (ie in the earlier generations) then the law defaults to first born until magic is introduced to the family. If multiple potential heirs have the same level of magical trait, choose the oldest one.

10. Magical Strength: Similar to the Strength law above, this one requires two or more potential heirs to have a magical duel. Whoever wins the duel, is the new heir.

:Species law (Optional):

1. Xenoarchy – Heirs must alternate between human and alien.

2. Xenophobic – Heirs cannot be a different species from the founder.

3. Brood – Heirs must be carried in a pregnancy by the previous heir, regardless of the heir’s gender.

4. Tolerant – The species of the child has no impact on their eligibility for heir status

:Spouses:

1. Spouses may not bring in any money with them when they move in/marry into the family.

2. With the update that allowed you to customize your Sims genders, you are able to have same-gender couples. There is no rule preventing this.

:Children:

1. Regardless of your succession law, you may always introduce children into your family via pregnancy or adoption.

2. With the addition of The Sims 4 Get to Work alien babies can also be brought into the family via abduction.

3. Children may only be adopted as infants. You may not adopt if there are any infants (natural born or adopted) living in the house at the time and must wait for them to grow to toddlers before adopting a new one. You may rename the baby, and it is recommended (but not required) that you change their last name to the Legacy Family’s name.

4. Regardless of their status, when an infant ages up into a toddler, you must roll for their toddler trait (and later their aspiration and their first trait using the calculator found here when they become a child). Be sure to put the traits of the two parents (even for adopted children) in the calculator because the algorithm it uses factors those in when generating random traits for the children.

5. When the child grows into a teenager, you consult the calculator again for their adult aspiration and their second trait. Finally the calculator will be used to generate the third trait upon reaching young adulthood.

6. You are allowed to use fruit and/or music to influence the gender of an unborn child, should you choose to do so.

7. The addition of Toddlers should not change the flow of your Legacy families, you just have a new age to deal with.

I hope you guys like my version of the legacy challenge please post in the comments with pictures of your households.

#sims 4 legacy #sims4

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