#I feel like I’m Martin fucking Luther nailing the theses to the door. Fuck this show.

[magpiesbones]

simply INCANDESCENT with rage over the way w*dnesday is so soullessly profitable.

FIRST: the way Wednesday herself has been scrubbed of all personality to be an edgy audience insert. Far be it from me to shame people for their enjoyment of a Mary Sue but do it to your original character at least. Don’t make an audience insert and hold it up as the same character as you had before.

SECOND: the way both girls in the show (and correct me if I am wrong, but there are ONLY two girls plus a hated mother character) are both Manic Pixie Dream girls but to different aesthetic extremes. With all the lack of agency that entails. I doubt Wednesday is the one moving the plot if she’s being (narratively) treated like that. And she’s the goddamn main character.

THIRD: the uncomfortable pauses after Wednesday says something just barely abnormal that you can just TELL are there for audience laughter. The absence of the laugh track was a choice but it wasn’t a choice that gives me less to criticize. At least if you were blatantly hateful you wouldn’t fool people like this.

FOURTH: the uncomfortable and clearly performative wokeness. ‘Don’t make the character talk like they’re getting a good grade in therapy’ absolutely applies here. The way you are dropping these buzzwords and then making them mean NOTHING is sooo bad.

FIFTH: you really went for the ‘hated mother figure’ trope? IN THIS MEDIA??? Where the original joke was that the Addams were the healthy family compared to the normies?? That’s cheap. That’s low. That’s distressingly Freudian.

SIXTH: I’ve heard Gomez is arrested on no evidence. There’s a way you can write it so that the cops taking the Latino man to jail on no evidence is anti cop but I’m going to take a guess based on what I know of Tim burton and say that’s not what happened.

SEVENTH: congratulations Tim burton for sucking it up and putting one (1) black character in there. Next actually write him a non-racist plot line.

EIGHTH: the way this show has been out for what a month? and is already six tiktok trends really says something about marketability in the age of social media. shows have learned how to bank on their fandoms and now how to manufacture a fandom. This is a show for the influencers and nostalgia to sell and Netflix to reap the benefit of.

NINTH: I doubt there has ever been a clearer case of commodification of a subculture. The way goth is used as a set dressing in this show is almost as sad as the way character names are used as a set dressing.

[wherethesunsails]

Wait I have a question. What's the difference between being Christian and being Catholic? I was raised Catholic and I always thought it was sorta the same hat lol

Oh! I (sort of) know how to answer this!

Okay so like Christianity originally was Catholicism but then the whole Reformation happened and Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of whatever the hell church because the Catholic church was selling entrance to heaven (which is whack as shit lmao) and he was like “bro,,, that’s wrong. That ain’t how heaven works. Have y’all even read the Bible” and so the Protestant movement was born. (Fun fact on St Patty’s Day if you’re Catholic you’re supposed to wear green but you’re supposed to wear orange if you’re Protestant)

So Catholicism right? You’ve got your rosaries, your priests, your nuns, your bishops, your cardinals, your pope. (I don’t actually know if the cardinals still exist in Catholicism I’m dragging up history class here forgive me) You do confession, some people get married to God, Hail Mary full of grace, Our Father who art in heaven, midnight mass, the virgin Mary, patron saints, lighting candles, getting confirmed, cathedrals, etc. And I think there are different denominations of Catholicism? I’m not sure.

Christianity focuses more on Jesus and his Life and Times. Our churches are usually less decorative than Catholic churches (some of them aren’t…. there’s a specific denomination that I can’t think of right now that’s like,,,, whoa there buddy.) we’re less about Rules and more “Jesus loves you, come as you are and serve him and become more like him believe he’s your personal saviour and you’ll go to heaven” etc etc. We have an ass ton of denominations (I’m going to rant about the denominations for a while here)(grace brethren, baptist (those two don’t dance bc dancing is a sin), presbyterian, sovereign grace (newer one, my old church switched to that), hillsong (cult. don’t do it), evangelicals, technically mormons and jehovah’s witnesses but we don’t claim them because No lmao, nondenominational for people who need to feel special and millennial (listen i adore millennials but oh my GOD nondenominational people drive me up the wall), southern baptist which holy moses just no, lutherans, calvanists, methodist, pentecostals, angelican, the scientisters or whatever the fuck you call them (you know those ones that are like we don’t need medicine GOD will heal us and you’re just like ,,, bitch take a xanax), oh yeah and like Messianic Jews who are like Jewish people who believe that Jesus was the Messiah from the old testament shout out to those guys)

I feel like I don’t know enough about Catholicism to properly compare and contrast them but like,,, Catholicism is very ritualistic and traditional. Christianity is more about your personal relationship with God. Both of us do communion and celebrate the birth of Jesus but Catholicism focuses way more on Mary than we do. We’re like “hell yeah she got chosen to be Jesus’s mom that’s dope” and Catholics are kinda like “hell yeah she got chosen to be Jesus’s mom so she’s the one we should pay attention to” (I’m so sorry I know that’s wrong I’m trying)

Anyway if anyone knows more about the similarities/differences between Christianity and Catholicism than I do please chime in!

[dirtyfilthy]

Pack the bong with fireworks, blow your face away

Generally speaking, my mind expands to fill all the drugs available. Ah, but not you ketamine, my wretched little red headed step child. You can go live with your mother, and  I don’t want to hear from you until the next court appointed visitation.

Unfortunately for me the same wasn’t true for the gram of amphetamine that was burning a hole in my pocket, then my nostril. And so of course I had try using it rectally, and man….. I was waaaaay too high. Like: compulsively jacking off for twelve hours / avoiding saying anything at mandatory zoom meetings while keeping my camera turned off / dodging colleague & co-worker / feeling like a fried egg in a “this is your brain on drugs” advertisement / scorchingly, motherfuckingly HIGH.

Jesus Christ, I knew boofing it avoided first-pass metabolism, I just didn’t think it would make such a big difference.

One interesting side effect of this was I went a full 14 hours without dosing any opium. In the ordinary course of things, while I wouldn’t be in the full pits of withdrawals after 14 hours, I would most definitely be feeling out of sorts. Instead, didn’t even fucking notice.

Figured “why look a meth horse in the mouth?” and used the opportunity to cut my dose for today by 25%. This is whole idea of the ketamine, so I can stop using opium as an anti-depressant. Cos I know the roller-coaster always twists the same way. Kicking ain’t that difficult. It’s what inevitably happens afterwards. the punch-in-the-guts of existential loneliness,  then, a quantum koan.

Student says to the Master: “Master, I feel absolutely unlovable at the very atomic core of my being. What can I do?”

Master says to Student: “All matter is an illusion. Consider, there are no atoms. In reality you are unlovable at the level of quantum foam, in reality, you are an indivisible,  unlovable one-ness with no beginning or end.... Now go and start making me my dinner you worthless sack of shit and for goddsake stop fucking moping for a minute.”  

Upon hearing this, suddenly the Student was / was not enlightened.

I have this dry wry internal voice telling me (like a crypt door creaking open):  “go ahead kid, admit it, nothing is ever going to change so you may as well go throw yourself over your balcony. Aw kid, whattsamatta? — are you scared of heights? Well then, in that case, as your lawyer I recommend that you order a gram of heroin on the dark web and then just down the whole lot. That’s right. Everything at once, at the same time, in one go. It’s easy: all you need to do is push the boat out from the pier a little bit— & from that point on, it’s smooth sailing”

He looks at me, grinning madly. I’m beginning to think it’s the only expression he knows how to make.

“No need to turn off the lights when you leave, kid. These are the kind of candles that will snuff out themselves”

Fuck off death breath, you plastic old carnival skeleton.. Not yet. NOT YET. You’re trying to cash out insurance policies for psychic real estate you simply don’t hold the deeds for. “Nice place you got here” — I can hear you chuckling as you light a cigarette, then hold up the still flaming match at eye height afterwards — “be a real shame if it all burned down, folks can get so careless”

I say: shut your goddamn mouth, skull features! Before I turn you into some kind of smoking accessory & start packing weed into your empty eye sockets. Before I donate you to some kind of charity for needy goth kids, or worse, slip you in a Halloween store sale, sometime after October.

Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards.

& you’re nothing but a pile of old bones. I’ve seen you at the cross roads when I went there to meet the Devil, came to do a little horse trading, and maybe swap myself a tall tale for some old soul or two; So I know that you know at least how to whistle to the one single note of your own leitmotif: , & hell, you may even know how to dance to it— especially when that old gallows wind from the West comes calling. 

You don’t like dancing. —I get it! You are lazy, and everything aches when you move.. But when that cold old wind comes calling, all groaning  and moaning like a dead man with insomnia seeing yet another unwelcome morning sunrise,   - a dead man who can’t seem to get any of the forty winks he feels that are owed to him, because he hasn’t slept for an entire century,  and so he groans with all the horrible weight of those endless years of bad debit & compound bitterness (you see: he was promised “a well earned rest”, it would be “like sleep” they said,  you’re going to get “a good long sleep, sweet sleep without dreams”, but now everything just feels a constant, crushing nightmare & however much he tosses and turns and rots in his coffin he still remains conscious, & sleep never seems to come). 

So when the wind runs up, coming at a full gallop with a groan rising in the back of its’ throat like a hurricane of pain, it’s hooves striking lightning,  the tongue of the storm cracking and crackling and attacking at random, like the snap of some terrible whip laying about itself with absolutely no regard for friend or foe or favourite, spitting out curses in ancient Enochian, the teeth of the ocean gurning and chewing on the lips of the shoreline -- this being no lovers kiss, not gentle at all but gleeful, with a kind of savage cannibalism, just straight up biting out whole bloody chunks of the cheeks of the beach and casually peeling open the hulls of great sailing ships like the shells of so many pistachos, when that very wind starts to shake your gibbet like a rattle and then begins to play xylophone with your rib bones

Dance! dance! dance me a pretty jig, oh my darling!

But I know this truth too: that old show tune you like to sing does not exactly ring melodious to living ear-drums. The song of Death is just so completely, utterly, monstrously monotonous.. Plainly, considered simply as a song to tap your toes to, it basically totally sucks. To those of us with ears to hear, Death sounds a lot like the village idiot, just mindlessly humming the same single, boring, utterly unremarkable note, over and over to Himself, in no particular time signature, forever to eternity. But the great tragedy of Death is that he honestly thinks he can sing real sweetly.  Utilising those far better acoustics that always seem to exist within the walls of our own heads, Death believes he sounds like the mythical siren, luring us out on to the ocean, only to dash ourselves onto the rocks in search of his irresistible music. But the truth is, we just want that fucking humming to stop, and we’re willing to risk a shipwreck to get it over with.

He also thinks that thing he does with his jaws is a smile.

You see: we are still things with skin, and so we haven’t forgotten yet that to smile & smile genuinely involves the involuntary movement of muscles, it also  invokes a certain twinkling in the corner of the eye, with a judicious pinch of pixie dust (this, despite being a completely imaginary ingredient,  is, none-the-less, entirely indispensable for proper operation).

A real smile is something you can’t fake. It mints it’s own certificate of authenticity, emits it’s own hologram,, and any attempt at counterfeit is immediately obvious.  Sadly, a fake is simply tasteless. A fake smile is not worth even the cheap vinyl skin it’s printed on. A fake smile belongs inside the pocket hell dimension of the “merely bad”, that mediocre & boring category of the not-even-kitsch, a generic garbage pile of cheap plastic crap far too dull to be commented on except in the aggregate. “Take this… and bury it.”

Compare and contrast. A real smile has the kind of articulation that requires REAL animation, rather than just animatronics. You cannot describe a smile as a series of steps to be followed. It’s instinctive, not instructive. It is Art without artifice . .   This is not the image of a fire,  but a real actual fire,  that is really here: burning in a cabin, with a real heat in it, that throws up sparks on occasion, it sends soot up the chimney that will definitely blacken your hands if you touch it. This is  kind of fire that you can come right in if you want and sleep next to and you’ll stay nice & warm & toasty… Here, let me open the door for you.  This is not  “"Ceci n'est pas une pipe” but a pipe you can really blow smoke rings out of, It’s a fact, not a facsimile.  

In comparison, the fixed, empty grin of the skeleton isn’t convincing anyone.

It certainly isn’t convincing me.

SO NOT YET. I swear to you I will NOT go down without a knife fight. Oh trust me, I will crochet my counter-argument in a fine stiletto needlepoint: I will pound my reply into your rib-cage like Martin-Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the false church door  

I REFUTE IT THUS: