#I really tried to not make this depressing but this story is sort of inherently depressing

[silvermoon424]

There's a weird, weird, weird criticism of PMMM that revolves around the girls being pitted against each other and how Madoka's wish in the finale somehow is a statement on the "model woman."

Like... I get that pop culture too often has girls going at each other in a vibe that amounts to, "girls, amirite?" but Madoka Magica felt like it treated any of the sort with nuance and an in-universe reason.

If they knew how much the Incubators were screwing them over and the info Kyubey often withholds, they'd team up and fight the power hands down.

Would Kyoko and Sakura not put aside their differences if all we know of Kyubey now was known by them while the former was still stable enough? Would Mami not have tried to gun down Kyubey along with Homura if she learned the truth (preferable not after having to kill Sayaka as a witch)?

I know, that's such a dumb criticism. It's explicitly shown in the series that, unlike most magical girl series where everyone is best friends, the girls don't get the chance to do that because the very nature of the magical girl system in PMMM makes them compete for limited resources.

They're not catty girls fighting over shoes and boys, they're literally fighting for their survival and unfortunately making friends can get in the way of that. I think it's actually a really good critique on systems that divide us like capitalism and white supremacy; we could all be friends and help each other, but there are oppressive systems and structures in place that make us compete with each other.

Moreover, the effect this competitiveness has on the magical girls is shown in great detail with Mami (especially in The Different Story manga). She's desperate, lonely, and depressed because she doesn't have anyone to confide in.

It's no wonder that, when resources aren't as much of an issue, magical girls tend to band together. We see this in Magia Record, where lone magical girls are the rare exception and not the rule thanks to the purification barrier. In fact, a few events showcase non-Kamihama magical girls trying to infiltrate and stir up discord among the Kamihama magical girls only to fail because they're all on good terms with each other, if not straight-up friends and teammates. In Madoka's new universe, magical girls also fight together on teams because they're not competing over limited Grief Seeds.

So yeah, the lack of teamwork in the main series basically boils down to "oppressive systems inherently work to divide the people to keep them from banding together and unlocking their full potential." Man, I really need to write an analysis on the socialist implications of PMMM lol

[riddle-me-ri]

k hear me out we NEED the directors cut for taking care of Jervis through his depression

It has already been a huuuge experiment with his character but maybe theres still smth left to say u know👀👉🏻👈🏻

HNNGGG *vibrating with elated joy* IM SO GLAD YOU ASKED ANON when I saw this ask game I was HOPING someone would ask about Love and Suds! Because I HAVE A LOT TO DISCUSS HNNGGG

Because of that there's a read more tab lmao

I'm so sorry I know its a lot but just please bear with me because I HAVE THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS I need to express lol.

So Jervis is incredibly interesting to me lmao.

I've been in and out of the Batman/Rogue fandom going on about six years. I've always wanted to like Jervis (I loved Alice in Wonderland as a child shush I still do plus mind control?? Hell yeah) but given his controversy and everyone just sweeping him under the rug, aside from BTAS and Arkhamverse, I felt like I was slowly getting a grasp on him but never quite got there.

Now fast forward after a year and a half out of the fandom and thwarting myself back in I am here and I've met a couple genuine Jervis fans for like years, fans, shout out to @march-harrigan and @jervis-tetch-my-beloved and when I read their work and thoughts I was like...Okay so it's not just me that thinks this...it was very affirming to see others got the same read on him.

Because I say this with 0 hesitation, Jervis can be a tricky mad lad to write for. I mean extremely (Jon moreso for me lately, stoicism isn't my strong suit but I'm working on it) difficult.

A lot of people have a bad habit of infantilizing him or making him out to be weaker than he is. Yes he's a wee mad lad with a penchant for rhymes, hats, and tea.

But he's also a murderer, kidnapper, manipulator, and a neuroscientist...he's one of the smartest bastards in the room but because he acts playful, and whimsical people misjudge and underestimate him

Also, Jervis has shown the capability of remorse (again varying iterations but he does seem the usual suspect to feel any sort of guilt whenever he's finally lucid) because of that, I felt a compulsion to do something DC writers are fucking terrified to do....actually give a rogue hope. They tried to reform Eddie but that didn't last (mostly cause of his own compulsions that were never properly addressed...poor baby..)

Now I know for many, a lot of these characters are BEYOND redeemable, Jervis included (y'know kidnapping, murder, mind control...yeah) and they're not inherently good people, but some rogues were once before...

And I truly do think if Jervis had a positive consistent in his life that was able to make reality a Wonderland, he wouldn't need the fantasy, he wouldn't need the delusion.

That's where the idea for Love and Suds came from.

I've written for Jervis a couple times before Love and Suds and when I tell you I had to stop myself from literally doing a character deep dive for a smut prompted request...I had to reel back A BUNCH. I would be almost 1k words in and remember oohhh they're supposed to be fucking goddamnit and have to edit the shit out of it.

So I knew I had to do something just to prevent it from happening again. Slowly but surely the plot came to me, but I was hesitant. Again, I didn't want to infantilize him, but I did want the reader to take care of him. Hence why a lot of the time in the story Jervis is scoffing at himself because he's in reality and he's ultra aware of what's going on but like he's also selfish and isn't going to pass up a chance to finally be clean.

Which is something else I hope I made clear was that Jervis was very much in reality during the entirety of the story whilst in his depression...hence why he wasn't rhyming, he wasn't absolutely appalled by the state of his home (scattered saucers, dirty tea cups everyone some broken after being thrown at the wall, hats with broken seams and holes in them, things I didn't really get a chance to describe). I'm sure you've figured that out but just wanted to confirm it.

It's one of those fics I hold near and dear to my heart.

Because one it was one of those fics I had going around in my head that I finally put onto paper and it was exactly how I envisioned it (its only happened with two other stories)

And two... I didn't realize how much it was wanted/needed? I knew since it wasn't a request from anyone it wasn't going to be everyone's fancy...but like the amount of feedback I got exclaiming that this is exactly what they want to see for Jervis? This is how they see him? Like I didn't realize that was something that people were looking for!

As far as if there's anything more to the story...when I tell you I have thought of sequel ideas for Love and Suds I have thought about it immensely...

I have a couple scenarios were Jervis returns the favor to Reader, one where Jervis comes to properly court the reader but overhears a heated argument with Reader defending Jervis to Batman, like the possibilities are ENDLESS but I also don't want to like...ruin it either you know? Too many may spoil it or make it bad?

But yeah...so sorry this is so long lmao if you guys do want more content regarding the set up of Love and Suds let me know! I may still write a couple connected drabbles here and there for a comfort project for myself but it's also good to know if you guys would be into it too! If tumblr could let us all have polls I'd put it in a poll but nooooo

Thanks for reading all of this lmao and thank you for asking anon I am so glad to get this all off my chest lmao

[unhingedselfships]

5, 10, 13 :)

This got stupidly long. Sorry?

5. Does their existence make any major changes to the 'canon' story? Minor ones?

She inherently causes small tweaks simply by existing. You're throwing a whole new character, how ever minor, into the story.

With Daigo, its pretty consistent she keeps Mine alive.

Majima, I tend to default to the Y0 version, and she makes some changes here and there, not really altering things in a significant way, but making the road just a little smoother.

With Akiyama, honestly we probably see the fewest changes, but thats subject to change.

Kiryu, she honestly doesn't do much for him specifically, but she provides a much stronger support to the kids and Haruka, and absolutely goes over Kiryu's head when it comes to the orphanage.

When she flies solo, the options are nigh endless, from doing nothing but adding fun substory hijinks, to completely rewriting storylines in ways that make exactly no sense. (so yanno, perf for RGG lmlfao)

10. Who do they get along with? How close are they?

Her most notable non-romantic connections off the top of my head :

Nishikiyama : Makes the least sense from a narrative stand point, so I just ignore that part. She does the "talk-no-jutsu" in her own clunky way, and its basically just a big ol' rant about how he's been treated and it turns out basic respect and decency go a long way with him. She has no fear, she can get catty and snippy with him. And it works. She treats him like a person, an equal. They're "bitchy besties".

Saejima : She just kinda dubs him "bro" and refuses to let go. He accepts it. Ends up fairly protective of her. There might be some "lost a sibling" trauma bonding happening here.

Hana : It starts with Kimi just being generally helpful in ways Aki slacks on. Despite being just as lazy (read ; depressed) she feels bad about Hana's work load, so picks up where she can. Particularly in sorting and organization. The build a bond over time and "girls days out" become routine. (on Aki's dime ofc)

Mine : I love how complicated these two are. Calling them frenemies usually works. He loves and hates her in equal measure for her connection to Daigo. Hates that its her and not him, but Daigo is happy, and he can't hate that. When she isn't with Daigo romantically, they estabilish a friendship relatively similar to the one she has with Nishiki.

Nishida : Kimi just low key adores this dude. He's so reliable and he ends up something of a 'neutral party confidant' for her. She tries to make his life dealing with Maji easier where she can. Usually by distracting the man in question.

13. Do they have a fave 'mini game' activity?

There are so many mini games in this franchise. Lets get into a few more.

Poker/Black Jack/Roulette/Etc She doesn't hate card games, but they bore her fairly quickly and she's not very good at them.

Batting Cages She gets hit with the ball more often than she hits it. She tries but after a few bruises whoever she's with hauls her out.

Mahjong and Shogi Will try, and then get completely lost when people try to explain either one. "I'm too dumb for this, sorry"

Bowling, Pool/Billiards, and Table Tennis She is absolutely atrocious at both of these, however unlike the other games she's bad at, she has a ton of fun with them.

Pocket Circut She likes it, and she likes the tinkering, but she doesn't get super into it. She prefers to support someone else doing it, rather than participate herself.

Dancing/Disco Kimi can keep a beat pretty well, she has rhythm, but she's uncordinated as hell. She sticks to swaying happily off to the side. (she gets wigglier the drunker she is)

Darts She has piss poor hand-eye coordination, which makes her being pretty good at darts a surprise. She enjoys it, and gets smug when she does well.

Fishing Is the most tedious boring thing, and she hates it. (loves fishing mini games in video games though!)

MesuKing She finds it silly, and doesn't really play, but enjoys collecting things so she has a huge collection of cards just sitting around.

Karaoke She can actually sing pretty well. If she could stop crying. She has crippling stage fright and performance anxiety so its a no-go. She does enjoy tagging along to cheer people on though.

[ultward]

Since you've been asked about your fic's take on vampirism, what's your take on werewolves in your fic universe? (I know you already talked about them in your vampire ask... But I wanna know more lore. So go as in-depth as you want!)

Also what was up with Leah's weird mood swings in that one scene with Bella? Did that have anything to do with her werewolf genes awakening?

since i've been slacking on my asks i actually have another anon asking this exact same question lol

to answer your 2nd question first, yes! that was nothing new or transformative, i was just emulating the jacob scene from canon to signal that the same thing was happening. that being said, stephenie's weird "werewolf temper" thing is pretty racist, and it's not something i wanted to use in the long run. rather, i just see that initial transformation process as being a sort of "second puberty", and there are probably some hormonal things going on that make people moody (it would be interesting to explore this in other ways, like getting really sad instead of angry. i may retroactively say that seth's werewolf puberty was a little depressing for him? it would make sense)

my werewolf lore is never fully explained in the fic because it's overly complicated and honestly may never be relevant to the story i'm telling. i would have to write an awkward exposition dump, so it's just been left unsaid

my goal was to get rid of the racist elements and also just to have the shifters make more sense in the broader context of the supernatural world. here are the main points:

as it is in canon, there are 2 types of "werewolves" - the children of the moon, and the wolf shifters

my shifters are an offshoot of the original children of the moon

i have not bothered to come up with origins for the vampires or werewolves (i think this sort of ruins the magic of it all), but they've just always been around as long as humans have existed

both vampirism and lycanthropy function sort of like a "disease", though it's pretty inherently magical and not at all scientific. the 2 conditions are naturally at odds with each other

my children of the moon are the same as canon lore - they are big wolfmen with little to no control over their actions that shift during a full moon

at some point during human evolution, people decided that lycanthropy was actually useful because it gave them a defense against vampires (as twilight vampires are nigh invincible killing machines). some early humans tried to "train" children of the moon to work like attack/guard dogs and began intentionally infecting people with lycanthropy to try and produce defenders for their villages

through "experimentation", this form of lycanthropy eventually turned into a genetic trait, and over time it became the wolf shifter form we know today, where people can turn into giant wolves at will and have complete control over themselves

so wolf shifting is still a genetic trait, BUT it is not exclusive to the quileute people - ANYONE in the entire world can be a shifter if they have the family history. as a result, there are actually several existing packs around the globe that operate in a similar manner, defending their territories from vampires

BUT it can't be passed from person to person through any other means, as the "disease" aspect of it was lost. it's entirely genetic, and anyone who inherits the gene can have it triggered and become a shifter. some people might live their entire lives as carriers and never become a wolf because they never had extended, close contact with vampires

meanwhile, the children of the moon still exist in a very limited capacity, as i stuck with canon on them - caius did have a rough encounter with a werewolf that caused him to have them hunted to near extinction. there are a few out there, but they don't spread like they used to and they're heavily policed by the volturi

i haven't decided if this is "canon" to my fanon or not, but i did toy around with the idea of there being some sort of werewolf artifact that acts as a beacon for the children of the moon, and the volturi have it locked up to prevent a werewolf epidemic or something lmao

and that's werewolves! they work the same way they do in canon, but their origins are totally different AND there are way more of them in the world! i think it's just way more interesting if there are more wolf shifters out there, as it gives the volturi something else to worry about lol

[longitudinalwaveme]

There are some villains where I could maybe see characters coming to the conclusion that they're lame jokes.

Rainbow Raider, the Trickster, Captain Boomerang....all of those guys have powersets that don't seem inherently dangerous on the surface. The Flashes should know better, obviously, since they've fought them enough times, but I could see the uninitiated not taking them seriously.

Weather Wizard is not one of those guys. He can control the weather. That's a terrifying powerset to have. Sure, he used to suck at using that powerset sometimes (particularly when he visited other characters' books....he has a hilariously embarrassing history of losing to guys he really should be able to beat), but it still seems like he should be the one Rogue that everyone takes seriously right from the word go. A moron who can control the weather can still control the weather, after all.

Is everyone operating off of the terrible logic that these cops displayed in the "Hell to Pay" arc?

Or off of that "HUMONGOUS LOSER" dossier on him that Jared Morillo had?

The police officers in Central City/Keystone City are worryingly unconcerned by the threat potential of a guy who can throw tornadoes around.

The other thing that's weird about this is that Weather Wizard has been treated like a legitimate threat for a long time now. The story the panel above is from, "Birthright", is from the Johns era, and it was arguably the most important story in terms of really ramping up Weather Wizard's competency and threat level. It was also published around twenty-three years ago (which strangely makes me feel old even though I am also twenty-three), so it's not exactly like him being intimidating is a recent development.

On the other hand, while he's not been explicitly portrayed as a joke for a very long time, he's also been kind of a nonentity for at least ten years now. Ever since the New 52, he's had one story to himself, which renamed him Marco, established that he and his family are from Guatemala (this is actually interesting, and wouldn't contradict anything we know about them since we know so little about the Mardons as it is), that the family ran a drug cartel (this is less great, not only because of the stereotypes but because it upends a lot of the apparent original dynamic between Mark/Marco and Clyde/Claudio), that Clyde/Claudio was murdered in a hit carried out by his wife, Elsa, and then showed Mark/Marco in Guatemala with his sister-in-law when the Flash showed up for reasons that were mostly unrelated to Mark/Marco specifically and were more related to the fact that Elsa and the cartel had kidnapped Patty Spivot. The two of them fought, and at some point Mark/Marco learned that Elsa had murdered Clyde/Claudio and tried to do a murder-suicide via lightning bolt. Elsa died; Mark/Marco survived.

The early New 52 also established that using the Wand negatively impacts Mark/Marco's mental health---making it rain can induce depression, lightning causes rage, etc.

And then nobody did anything with any of this ever again. Williamson brought up Mark/Marco's backstory once, very briefly, during the Year of the Villain arc (the same arc where Mark/Marco had a weather ax and briefly stopped wearing pants), and also briefly gave him a weird sort of environmentalist theme even though that's not something he was ever shown as being particularly concerned about before. Other than that, he's basically just been "one of the Rogues", and hasn't had any real focus or development. It kind of feels like writers are more interested in using him as the showy splash page guy than as an actual character.

If I'm being fair, this was kind of a problem for him in Johns' run too--a lot of Johns' Weather Wizard involved him sort of standing around looking intimidating (or broody) until the story needed him to do a big cool visual effect like making a tornado to destroy a building or striking someone with lightning---but at least with Johns I have a general sense of who and what he wanted the character to be like. Johns' Mark wants to be seen as powerful, confident/arrogant, and well-read, and to some extent he is, but he's also clearly overcompensating really, really, REALLY hard to deal with the guilt over his brother's death and his sense that he's nothing without the wand. In other words, he's not nearly as scary or sophisticated (particularly the latter---"unlike Len and Piper, I'm pretty good with the ladies") as he wants everyone else to think he is.

I can't say with any certainty what most of the post-New 52 writers think of Mark/Marco as a character, or where they intended for him to go. Williamson gives him the least focus out of his Rogues by far (even Sam, who's also been kind of a nonentity ever since the New 52, got some characterization and focus in the Year of the Villain arc), and he really only appeared once in Adams' run, where he was again portrayed as one of "the Rogues" rather than as a distinct character in his own right.

So maybe this "he's a loser" thing is stemming less from the fact that he's been portrayed as kind of incompetent and more from the fact that he hasn't really gotten to be a character in any meaningful sense over the past decade.

It's the only thing that really makes sense to me, because with the exception of the black hole that was the Flash: the Fastest Man Alive/Salvation Run/Countdown period, Weather Wizard has at least been portrayed as a competent threat for the past two decades.

Most of Mark's more impressive feats of idiocy---the ones that really do make him look like an incompetent doofus---come from much earlier than that.

Behold---the Weather Wizard getting defeated by guys who probably shouldn't be able to counter his powers:

This one's not canon, but it's hilarious, so I'll post it anyway:

Yes, the Weather Wizard really did accidentally strike himself with lightning and lose to a cartoon rabbit.

But you'll note that all of these appearances, although hilarious, came from outside the Flash comic, which usually treated him as a bigger threat.

And they're all at least forty years old, and therefore outside most people's frame of reference for the character.

So I have no idea why modern Mark is being written as a loser.

Pictures courtesy of @gorogues.

Spoilers for Flash #14!

You can see the preview pages here.

So I'm not sure why everyone in this issue thinks Marco's a joke -- Wally, the new warden of Iron Heights, Irey -- but for some reason everyone finds him completely laughable and is making fun of him. They do know what he's capable of, right..? No wonder he's off to a new land where he finally gets some respect and is apparently considered an all-powerful sorceror. There's no word on whose voice he heard to lead him there, but it seems like Godspeed might be hearing it too.

Another development is that a lot of the prisoners in Iron Heights have had changes to their powers after the events in "Absolute Power", so we might be seeing somewhat altered Rogues and other Flash villains in the future…that might play out in interesting ways if the writers are creative about it. August has apparently lost his duplication ability and maybe his speed, and Wally may have gained that duplication power because he's seen in Skartaris and the Watchtower at the same time. It's never been clear to me whether Marco still has metahuman powers or not, but if he does that could explain why he's different now.

(Barry has lost his powers completely and claims to be very happy with that, but after Wally leaves he indicates that he may be less okay than he's been letting on. He's definitely over-compensating in the "I'm happy!" department.)

Anyway, it turns out that the West family trip to Skartaris is not a ridiculous flight of fancy on Wally's part; he organized a trip there to deal with Marco without telling them until Jai rightfully shames his dad for keeping it a secret from Linda and the kids. Also, Red Tornado was a dick about Wally taking a family vacation during a time of stress, so that undoubtedly didn't help with the decisions Wally made. He's experiencing competing pressures (family and the Justice League) on at least two fronts.

One wonders what Warden Wolfe's up to now that he's been gone for a surprisingly long time, but that isn't Wally's problem until/unless it finally becomes one. It's interesting that his absence is specifically mentioned, though.

Hopefully this arc garners Marco some respect in-universe, but it really does seem weird that he had very little before it. It reminds me of James Jesse and Iris deeming Roscoe 'the least of the Rogues' back in the Waid era; it's just inexplicable that such powerful villains get dismissed as complete losers and non-threats by seemingly everyone around them. Presumably it's to pump them up for ThEIr bIG STorY arC as sudden scary badasses, but it comes across as very lazy writing when the writer could establish them as reaching previously untapped potential but not pretending they were formerly a joke. I dunno, this approach leaves me rather sour, but we'll see what happens in the rest of the arc.

[earthstellar]

Transformers Deviations, aka “Hot Rod is Depressed”

I’ve been reading over some of the older IDW Transformers comics because I need them in the way land-dwelling mammals require oxygen 

And I dug up Transformers: Deviations, which, there’s a lot to go over here lmao

No really, like this story ends on such a fucked up note. 

So there are gonna be some panel screenshots etc. because I gotta talk about this shit! 

Strap in for another long post, let’s gooooo:

Basic Info on the Deviations Comics

The premise of the Deviations line was that IDW would publish a single issue what-if type story for various major franchises which they had the rights to, with each one covering a major scene or event and how it would have turned out if a critical action was or wasn’t taken. 

(I think I have the Ghostbusters: Deviations one as well, although I could be misremembering that lol) 

With the Transformers Deviations comic, the premise is “What If Optimus Prime Never Died?” In reference to the 80s movie (because I have to specify, because Optimus dies fairly frequently, lmao) 

But the way this is approached is extremely direct, quite possibly because there was really only one comic book’s worth of pages to tell this story lol 

In the Transformers issue, it focuses almost entirely on Hot Rod being the “action which changes” -- Essentially, what if Hot Rod didn’t interfere, and Optimus was able to destroy Megatron outright?

and I’m just gonna say now, I understand why this was the most obvious and easiest/quickest way to handle this “What If” concept, and I get that it was necessary because you can only go so deep in a single one-off issue and most readers (even those who aren’t major TF fans) would likely recognise the scene because it’s so iconic, so focusing on this scene makes a lot of sense in general 

but hooooooly shit does Hot Rod get trashed in this issue

so let’s start looking at this situation but fair warning if you vibe with Hot Rod/Rodimus this is probably going to be emotionally a little difficult because truly he gets obliterated in this issue

like this is not a joke, I literally mean that. that’s what happens. IT’S WILD

TF Deviations: How It Starts 

Right from the opening pages, we get these two panels to drop readers right into what the hell is going on: 

right away the emphasis has to be on the “one point which changes everything”, because this is the singular Deviation, so we just get this super straightforward “if Hot Rod didn’t fuck up, things would have gone THIS way” 

which, okay, yes. but also, jesus lmao something about how direct that is, is so wild. like “this space robot equivalent of a teenager got wrestled to the ground by his not-dad and as a result the God Pope of their people survived and triumphed over villainy” is, I mean, yeah... but damn lol 

again, I understand why this is being set up like this. but I mean, there were other factors involved; other elements were in play which led up to the fight between Optimus and Megatron going down at all, regardless of outcome. since this was intended to be more accessible to a broader readership, I get why they didn’t focus on any other minutia etc. that could have changed things, but this whole issue reads like “fuck Hot Rod specifically” and it’s BRUTAL lol 

I do appreciate the intense dad energy of Kup here, though. love a good space robot dad <3 sometimes you need to wrestle your space robot son into the fucking dirt so they don’t die, understandable tbh 

 TF Deviations: How It Goes 

So, immediately, Optimus takes out Megatron. Of course. 

But then, we see Kup, Hot Rod, and Ultra Magnus on board the Arc, with their deceased comrades lined up. 

Optimus says a few words, after which Hot Rod speaks up, and IMMEDIATELY gets fucked up by a still-grieving and frustrated Ultra Magnus: 

way to threaten a teenager with violence there, Mags, damn. it’s not like your frame type and armour class is multiple times more powerful than a LITERAL SPACE ROBOT TEENAGER 

of course, Magnus is upset and reasonably so, but it’s still rough to see Magnus taking out his grief/anger on Hot Rod like this-- it’s not a reasonable way to deal with the situation. 

which is obvious, and yes drama needs to happen lmao, but I mean I’m trained in safeguarding so like I read this and immediately think “intervention point” lol 

anyway, Optimus does sort of tell them to knock it off, although I feel like maybe that should have been a little more directed at Magnus than Hot Rod??? like okay it’s not great timing for Hot Rod to start making suggestions and that’s fair

but I mean Magnus is a fully grown adult, and as an adult and MILITARY OFFICER it might be worth asking him to not threaten teenagers, especially ones who are quite possibly under his command (assuming Hot Rod counts as a junior officer/soldier/etc.)? maybe talk to both of them a little bit separately after this, Optimus? IDK 

I feel like it’s clear that Hot Rod was at least trying to be helpful here and use his grief constructively, which I’m not sure warrants getting told off for, but maybe I’m just sensitive to this because safeguarding is something I do as part of my actual job and I have also very much seen interactions like this IRL go seriously poorly very quickly so it gets me in a very specific part of my brain lol 

I think it’s the fact that Magnus is clearly using his comparative stature to physically intimidate Hot Rod here, which is making me enter safeguarding mode so hard right away; like, look at how he’s leaned down and closing in on Hot Rod’s personal space in that second panel-- I don’t like that shit, Magnus!!! 

so full disclosure, I inherently Do Not Like seeing adults go off on younger characters like this, especially in a grieving sequence after said younger character just watched the leader of their team take out the leader of the other team at point blank range while being wrestled into the dirt by their not-dad while under some pretty serious stress. he’s a fucking teenager, this is traumatising shit, and he’s trying to be helpful. there are better ways to address him in this moment than threatening to beat his ass!!! 

like IDK why this is specifically making me enter safeguarding mode so hard but it super is, lmao Hot Rod’s a fucking teenager, Mags behaves like this then everyone always roasts Hot Rod for doing out of control shit in general, as if they themselves were ever under control so who’s the role model here!!! BUT ANYWAY 

Optimus, famously, is not so great with soft skills when it comes down to it lmao so the scene sort of ends there 

no wait actually Kup smacks Hot Rod across the back of the helm for blaspheming about the Matrix

like listen it was the late 80s/early 90s and we all got smacked by our parents so this is relatable to the intended reader demographic of “people who were kids in the 80s and had issues with Hot Rod and the death of Optimus in general” so okay, Kup is Robot Father, typically this is excellent and good 

but I mean lmao give Hot Rod like TEN SECONDS to recover from literally any of this, lmao. 

(also I mean I grew up with an Army dad and it’s hard for me to believe Kup would give a fuck about blaspheming about the Matrix because my dad always encouraged me to actively create new bad words LMAO but idk) 

and what an asshole line from Mags there, just like “fuck them kids we gotta go” like my guy! Magnus! leave Hot Rod the fuck alone! IDK it seems like a wholly unnecessarily aggressive response to me, and it’s rude to Kup, too. 

I have always felt like the Autobots desperately needed more soft skills / coping skills training as part of whatever boot camp / recruitment process they go through and this is absolutely proving me right once again lmao 

We’re Only On Page 9: Hot Rod’s Assignment

so Hot Rod and Magnus start to walk away, but Optimus-- god dammit-- informs Hot Rod he’ll be on Magnus’ team

AS IF HE WASN’T PRESENT FOR THIS WHOLE INTERACTION FIVE SECONDS AGO-- I already ranted about safeguarding I have to get through this post lmao but just let me say that this is not adequate!!!! don’t assign a lower ranked TEENAGER / YOUNG ADULT to a mission under the command of a superior officer who just threatened to get violent with them for trying to be helpful, it’s not constructive and actually is fucking concerning!!! 

I know it’s space robots lmao but my brain is just like this!!! 

Magnus continues to be super down on Hot Rod, but Optimus at least is like “you know, I was a dipshit teenager not so long ago, myself” lmao SIGH PLEASE MAKE A WELLBEING PLAN FOR YOUR TEAM, YOU ALL NEED IT SO BAD. I guess because Ratchet’s still dead in this comic, nobody is around to give a shit about team welfare??? this is bewildering to me but entirely on brand for Autobot bullshit???? 

So What Are The Decepticons Doing? 

Starscream is Starscreaming it up, and approaches Unicron with a proposal to do a bunch of evil shit for Unicron as long as Unicron gives him a frame upgrade

Unicron agrees but is already sick of Starscream’s shit so we’ll see how this goes lol 

You Ruined A Perfectly Good Boy: Hot Rod Vents to Daniel 

entirely predictably, Magnus’ little freak out makes Hot Rod feel like shit, which he expresses to a human child because again, Autobots have no wellbeing training whatsoever and obviously Hot Rod is feeling isolated and generally unwanted by his teammates (Optimus sending him away to go with Magnus almost certainly did not get interpreted positively by Hot Rod)

so he talks it out a little with Daniel, a literal human child, which also isn’t great but I mean Hot Rod is war forged so it’s not like he has any formative experiences other than getting shit dumped on him which he shouldn’t have to deal with, and combining that with how shitty he feels after all this, I mean, yeah 

Daniel deals with it like a champ, love this little dude <3 

also Hot Rod mentions having Matrix-proximity induced hallucinatory visions, which seems like it might be fucking significant! 

but Magnus, once again, is wildly out of hand in this issue and insinuates this is treasonous, rather than, you know, something probably fucking significant!!!! 

(I promise I usually like Ultra Magnus but he’s such an asshole in this issue, oh my god) 

like come on Mags, are you for real lmao 

anyway the ship gets hit with something, oh fuck, we’re under attack 

turns out it’s Megascream, which is basically just Starscream but with Megatron’s arm mounted cannon as applied via Unicron lol 

Hot Rod immediately makes some suggestions about how to evade Megascream’s attacks, but Magnus is once again a fucking asshole and straight up calls him an idiot twice in one page, like this is getting to the point where it’s bordering on straight up out of character shit lmao, I feel like Magnus would be a little more reasonable about this given the situation! damn 

but then Magnus gets fucked up and Hot Rod, after Perceptor points out the statistical probability of success (not great, not terrible), implements his plan anyway 

brief kinda sad interlude where Optimus and Kup are watching Magnus’ shuttle (which Hot Rod etc. are currently onboard of) starting to falter under enemy fire 

they jump, and evade death (for now), while Optimus’ squad ends up on Junkion for repairs and run into the Sharkticons / Quintessons 

meanwhile, the crew on board Magnus’ shuttle are fucked, and Springer dumps hard on Hot Rod even though you know I mean it’s not really Hot Rod’s fault that Megascream opened fire and nobody else had a plan but OK: 

jesus, Springer. 

anyway, Magnus states all the other escape pods are fucked, so he instructs Hot Rod to bail out with Daniel in the last remaining option to survive 

the shuttle crashes, and everyone dies except for Hot Rod and Daniel 

they have a short conversation before being picked up by Optimus’ crew, which is really sweet but also emotionally devastating because I mean holy shit Hot Rod is DEPRESSED and also Daniel is a good kid, aww 

but then I mean Hot Rod is fucking depressed so we get a wham line of depression before we get everyone together back on board Optimus’ ship 

Optimus I’m serious please you need to go to some trauma aware emotional sensitivity training or something, anything. nothing you are saying is going to be helpful to Hot Rod here, holy shit I’m trying very hard not to need to use certain content warning tags on this post but there is some dangerously negative ideation going on in the panel above

pretty sure Hot Rod is just internalising Optimus’ advice as “I’ll never be good because I can’t help but feel shitty and bad and Optimus Prime can deal with it because of course he can but I can’t” and that’s not fucking helpful for him right now, or kind of ever!!! the Autobots as a whole have just the worst track record with team wellbeing LMAO god dammit 

like yes what Optimus is saying here is understandable if someone is in a mindset in which this will be interpreted as intended, but Hot Rod is Not Okay in the moment and I get it, Optimus is busy here, shit is happening, but come on 

idk it’s so wild to me that Optimus Prime is a great mission oriented leader but nooooot very good at being a team oriented leader... when he’s depicted like this, at least, he just totally fails to comprehend that perhaps his team mates are not quite on the emotional endurability scale of a Prime like he is (as we know it has been heavily implied that the Matrix has the potential to impact a wielder’s expressive capacity etc. although that is not universal), and this is a very solid speech that might have been better received if had it been delivered to the right audience / at a more appropriate time 

but speaking to the equivalent of a teenager / young adult who is obviously seriously traumatised and developing some serious guilt and self-loathing after he just lost his teammates and closest peers in battle after being verbally lambasted literally all day is not the time to say shit that will inevitably be interpreted as “lol just don’t feel that way” LIKE, THAT’S NOT HELPFUL OPTIMUS 

Final Act: Megascream vs. Optimus, Goes About As Well As Expected 

so alright, finally Optimus is just like “I accept death, I must battle Megascream” and everyone is just like yeah alright there’s not really a better plan lol 

so Megascream kicks his ass, and Hot Rod shows up to beam Optimus over to Moonbase-Two for medical attention, stating the Matrix is calling to him 

Megascream kicks his ass now that Optimus’s ass is no longer around to kick

but he does indeed manage to open the Matrix...

..which releases a surge of power which destroys Megascream, Unicron, and Hot Rod himself. 

I’m not shitting you. 

The ending of this story is that Hot Rod, in a depressive state, claimed the Matrix in such a way that essentially made it a “nuclear option” and surged enough power through it to compromise Unicron’s frame, thus taking out Hot Rod along with Megascream. 

THE OBVIOUS IMPLICATION OF WHAT HOT ROD DID HERE, GIVEN HIS MENTAL STATE WHILE DOING IT, IS NOT GREAT. 

holy shit.

The Ending: What the Fuck is Wrong With the Autobots???? 

so, you remember how Magnus was so affected by the loss of their teammates on board the Arc that he flipped out on Hot Rod way harder than was ever necessary or appropriate? 

yeah, Optimus announces Hot Rod’s death / the end of the war to a crowd of smiling and cheering Autobots / Dinobots

somehow this doesn’t feel quiiiiiiite right to me, I mean, take a look:  

LISTEN, OKAY. 

I understand that the war ending is naturally going to be celebratory

and everyone is only just starting a long journey towards processing incalculable loss and trauma 

but it fucks with me that this is framed as a public celebration and that you can actually see Kup smiling after his not-son just fucking died???? in a self-sacrificial battle against esoteric cosmic evil????? with the Matrix????? 

what the fuck??? this whole story has been wildly hating on Hot Rod beyond what is probably considered reasonable and it’s so bizarrely intense how blatant it is, like IDK I feel like at least Kup would give a shit, and maybe that should be shown a little bit? 

I understand there’s only a certain number of pages/panels to work with in a single issue one-shot but I mean for real though, it’s not just me right? lmao jesus 

this story is so uncomfortable to read especially in the final couple of pages because the whole story comes across as so pointedly mean and the ending is just, like, a little too upbeat? a little too short? there’s definitely pacing weirdness here which I think is just attributable to a lot going on in a single issue comic story 

but really, so much time and space was dedicated to everyone shitting on Hot Rod, then a few action scenes, a couple pages with Megascream to set all of that up, and then the ending all happens within two pages as well 

so IDK maybe it’s just the fact that this all had to be crammed into a single issue which is the root cause of most of this seeming just ridiculously down on Hot Rod because if this were spaced out / contextualised a bit more, maybe expanded into a 4 issue mini-series or something, there would have been more of an opportunity to maybe flesh things out a bit and space things out a little more, which I think may have made it come across as slightly less “fuck Hot Rod” even if the same key scenes were still included

but I mean, it is what it is

and ultimately, the implication is that Hot Rod took himself out possibly intentionally while in a depressed state of mind, claiming the Matrix and saving Optimus in the process of doing so, and the reaction of literally everyone to this is to have a street party celebration 

that doesn’t feel super good! 

like, there are ways to hold public celebrations after serious incidents that are a little more tonally appropriate in consideration of the fact that literally millions of people have died in this conflict etc. and yes OK so they might be doing this on the fly immediately after Unicron was destroyed, event planning isn’t necessarily a priority lmao 

but still. especially after the mourning scene earlier in the same story, I get that the end of the war is absolutely something to celebrate but the vibe of this is so incredibly off to me 

like, the war came to an end because a young adult sacrificed themselves after being treated extremely poorly by at least half of the leading / commanding officers of his faction

and nobody feels like shit about that? a single panel or two couldn’t have been spared here for maybe, idk, a brief couple of lines with Kup, who effectively just lost his not-son as the final casualty of a centuries long war-- which is just so fucking painful and bitter, jesus 

but nope, he’s there in the street crowd, smiling! this is somewhat baffling to me! IDK like I really don’t know!!! 

this is a weird one, tonally. and in general, but the tone of this is WILD 

the fucking implications with Hot Rod and how that all goes down is potentially genuinely upsetting! 

BONUS: The Last Panel, Holy Shit 

what??? 

maybe you SHOULD question the ways of the Matrix you asshole LMAO, look at your life and the past several centuries of war! 

does this not inspire any level of spiritual reflection or any other reflection at all??? you’re the fucking Prime???? IDK I mean I know I keep saying that but I mean, this is such a weirdly confident and definitive statement for Optimus to make at this point 

for so many reasons, too. oh my god 

also, can we check out the fucking narration bubbles there? 

“the ultimate reward of eternal peace is bestowed upon those willing to stand against the forces of darkness” 

UHHHHHH 

NO WAY is this suggesting Hot Rod’s self-termination via Matrix power surge was totally fine and actually cosmically predetermined in this alternate universe specifically and therefore this warrants no further examination and it’s totally fine that a depressed teenager was obliterated at least in part due to self-loathing and an acceptance of death because evil was destroyed too so that’s all good ??? 

WHAT 

here are some fucking questions!

do we know if there may have been other options? was the power surge inevitable / predetermined (YIKES) or were there other possible actions which could have been taken (if Optimus had his shit together / if Hot Rod’s emotional state had been more stable would that maybe have registered differently with the Matrix or something etc.)

would Optimus have any insight, as a Matrix wielder, to at least partially determine what happened here (even though he didn’t witness it, he was present in the first half of the fight and might be able to give some kind of suggestions or brainstorm some possibilities)? 

was Hot Rod’s death strictly necessary? (it wasn’t in other universes!!! but in other universes he also wasn’t thoroughly miserable going into battle hating himself like this, once again, awful implications) 

are the Autobots not willing to review any of this shit because they all totally failed to address Hot Rod’s concerns or distress in any way and they know it and feel shitty about it and don’t want to ruin the good vibes of the end of the war?

is the end of the war such a deliriously positive occasion that they’re just shelving any kind of further investigation into wartime fuckery until they feel more stable as a post-war people, which would be the only remotely sort of okay reason for not at least asking at some point “hey what the fuck happened here”? ??? ? ? ? ? 

obviously, Hot Rod had been treated like shit this whole time, and we know the Matrix reacts to the wielder of the Matrix in somewhat esoteric ways... is it possible the Matrix released the energy surge because Hot Rod did not intend to survive, or no longer had a desire to do so (given his depressive statements earlier / throughout the story), and the Matrix responded in kind to achieve the shared goal of “destroying Unicron” in whatever it sensed the most effective and appropriate way would be-- how discerning is the Matrix? 

I have NO IDEA. the ending of this is so rushed, or at least, it feels like it to me? fair enough it’s a single issue story but yikes, this is a hell of a note to end it on???? 

In Summary: Now I Remember Why I Haven’t Re-Read This One Until Now, It’s Pretty Dark Actually and Not in a Fun Way 

I don’t know what the deal with this story is; There’s so much to pick apart here. 

Obviously, I don’t want to make anyone feel totally awful, so I didn’t get too much into the whole Hot Rod / Matrix / Destroying Unicron stuff in this comic because honestly that would require many content warnings and it’s Friday lmao, I don’t want to depress people just before the weekend 

eventually I might get into it in a future post (probably as part of the Hot Rod and the Matrix post I’ve been thinking about for a while which would also include other stuff to balance out all the depressing stuff) 

But I’d love to hear about other people’s takes on this one, because it’s just...

This story is one of the rare ones which is just sort of uncomfortable, mostly because it is so over the top in berating Hot Rod 

and it’s genuinely not great that they set up this horribly depressed mindset for him to have going into battle; we know the Matrix does (to some degree at least) interact with its wielder in certain ways which make the implication there very, VERY dark in this scenario and SIGH

anyway, I hope this wasn’t too overbearing, I really tried to avoid making it any more depressing than the actual story itself is! lol

gonna add some content warning tags just in case because... yikes 

also, in case it needs to be said for anyone out there, because this was a heavy story: 

if you are a young person (I’m middle aged so most of you probably count as this to me lmao) and any adults in your life have made you feel shitty like this, I want you to fully internalise and understand that it is not your fault-- it is a sign that the adults who made you feel shitty were not handling whatever the situation was appropriately, and this is on them and not on you.

there are ways to address problems or concerns with younger people that do not result in making someone/everyone feel fucking terrible, and more well-adjusted adults in the vast majority of situations can understand this and act accordingly.

if the adults in your life cannot act right, or if they don’t know how to address your concerns or the situation at hand whatever it may be, this is not your fault and doesn’t indicate anything about you personally or the situation in and of itself. 

it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with you, it doesn’t mean you are inherently “bad”, it doesn’t mean your problems are insurmountable or impossible to resolve, and if one adult or authority figure fails you, it is always worth remembering that you are not a failure or a fuck-up and you deserve real support-- and you can find that support from another more helpful or appropriate source, even from other peers if/when appropriate or possible, even when it can be extremely difficult to attempt to reach out after having received an unhelpful or even harmful response after initially trying to do so. 

everyone makes mistakes, everyone misses the mark sometimes, situations get shitty sometimes, bad things happen, and it can be easy to internalise negative experiences or interactions or situations in ways that are hard to sort through and deal with-- and it can feel really awful and bad and overwhelming, but it is not your fault. <3 

you are always, always, ALWAYS worth at the very least ten times more than what you think or feel you are worth at any given moment. even if authority figures or any adults in your life or respected community members or whoever else might not see it, you always have inherent worth, because you are a person, because you are you-- and you are valuable, even when things might get a little fucked up. 

tl;dr Hot Rod deserved better and a lot of us do, too; I realise this story might resonate with some people out there and I know that might not feel too good (let’s just say my own teenage years were not really a positive experience in most ways), so I just want to say I love y’all and nobody deserves to get berated like that, especially not by people you’re supposed to be able to trust or rely upon <3 

---

Huge thanks to anyone who read through all this! <3 I hope it wasn’t too upsetting, and I will pick a less depressing story to review next time!!!! <3 

[torgawl]

if there's one xie lian headcanon i dislike is that he was depressed during the time he was waiting for hua cheng. in any way, shape or form, i just don't think that fits into who he is or his development throughout the books at all?!

don't get me wrong, xie lian did suffer a lot in the past and for a long time he did push back and tried to repress all those feelings. to the point of becoming the xie lian that gets introduced to us at the begining of tgcf. he appears and we question his position to the way others treat him. is he just incredibly confident or is this the way he learned how to face the world and move on? and we do get that answer. and we do see him face his past. and most importantly, rediscovering himself and what being alive is about. we see him rebuild a relationship with the friends he thought he had lost, we watch him be, for once, on the loving end of somebody else. we see devotion, adoration, we see care, patience and understanding. and those things change him. otherwise he wouldn't have said to hua cheng 'only after having met you did I rediscover that it's such a simple thing to be happy'.

i feel like what people misunderstand is that hua cheng wasn't his happiness and xie lian's character doesn't revolve around hua cheng. yes, their story interlaces quite early on. hua cheng decided to live for xie lian. hua cheng gives xie lian what he lacked. but xie lian didn't only receive a romantic partner. he was able to overcome his past and get a new outlook in life. he was able to become a better version of himself. for him and for others.

of course, hua cheng got almost ripped away from him as easily and as fast as he came into his life. i'm not saying it didn't impact him or that he didn't feel insecure or doubtful at any moment in time. those feelings are only natural if you cherish someone. but the fact he learnt of hua cheng's dedication and devotion, that he wasn't alone all those centuries, that the other did his utmost best to be by his side and to contribute to his happiness and well being? those things have to had mattered. and i don't think the xie lian at the end of the book would ever waste his time pitying himself because of it. if anything, i think remembering hua cheng would motivate him to retribute what the other did for him. and the thing is, we do see this. the only insight we have is xie lian being as devoted and as hopeful and as loving as hua cheng did to him. and isn't that part of the beauty of the story? isn't that almost a fulcral point in all of it? that xie lian's time to be on the giving end came and that it wasn't a burden or a task but something natural between the two of them? that they would always be there for each other? that their relationship might have started from a place of distance and devotion but it was never one-sided?!

their relationship is probably one of the healthiest - if not the healthiest - representations of a couple in media i have ever seen. and there's really no other way to look at their dynamic. they bring out the best in each other. their relationship is so good that they had space for personal growth and their inherent value isn't tied to one another. so it feels very reducing to try and make it seem that they have some sort of co-dependency that xie lian would ever go back to such a negative state of mind because he had to wait for his lover for a certain ammount of time. i'm not saying with this that that can't happen in healthy relationships. the brain is something complex. it's more that we have no motive to believe that is the case from what has been showed to us about them and especially regarding xie lian, who is the main character and narrator of the story. of whom we have first hand information. and although unreliable at some points, we have no reason to doubt his reciprocity towards hua cheng.

[uramichi-s]

I wanna watch Uramichi but I’m not sure I can handle a depressive character rn :( is the dark comedy really heavy?

Hi anon! So, this is going to be a not-so-short reply, I hope you don’t mind!

There may be some minor spoilers (?) ahead.

——

First, some personal context for my answer.

When I started reading the manga last year I was in a pretty dark place because of my job and life in general. At the time I was working with children too and although I loved being with them, my workplace was pretty suffocating and the constant stress only added to my anxiety, making me feel completely burned out and empty at the end of the day.

I’m telling you this just so you can see where I’m coming from next: Uramichi can be really cathartic for some but also really depressing for others.

For me it was the first one, reading about a character facing the same struggles as me made me feel kind of understood and less alone, a sort of “oh, so I’m not the only one feeling like this” thing.

For other people though, the dark humor/thoughts of our main character can be too much.

As I wrote in a previous ask, Uramichi is dealing with high-functioning anxiety and depression (and some degree of alcoholism too) so his self-deprecating jokes and pessimism can get very heavy (specially if you decide to binge-read/watch the manga/anime) and you may end up feeling worse than before.

Despite all of this, I don’t think he’s an inherently/purely negative person. He is actually pretty caring towards the children and his co-workers (you can see this every time one of the kids says something nice to him and he’s instantly moved to tears or in how he’s always reassuring Iketeru when he makes a mistake during the show)…

----

And he also tries his best at work, regardless of the director’s crazy demands, when he thinks about the kids enjoying the show.

All this is to say that he’s a fairly nuanced character, he’s obviously not a ball of sunshine but he’s not just some “pathetic, sad man” either as I’ve read some people say.

Lastly, I think any working adult −not just those of us dealing with anxiety/depression− can relate to him in some way or another. The question now is whether the story will make you feel better or worse in this very moment.

I would recommend watching the first few episodes or reading the first volume and see if it may be the right fit for you :) 

Also don’t forget that this is a comedy too, so there are tons of hilarious and over-the-top moments that I’m sure will make you laugh like crazy if you decide to give it a chance.

Thanks for the ask, if you have any other questions let me know!

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

There's this sort of trope I've noticed in a lot of Twilight fanfiction where the Cullens do not return as quickly as they did in canon during New Moon and somehow inexplicably run into Bella years later, when she's in her early-to-mid twenties and I was wondering how you think this would go? In my head the Cullens would skedaddle the second they got a whiff of Bella, but suspending disbelief there I always have a hard time buying it whenever older Bella ends up back together with Edward.

I think it depends on the Cullen in question, or, if it’s all the Cullens together.

The Yoko Ono Effect

To be honest, if the Cullens had stayed away in New Moon, I don’t think they would have made it as a singular unit to five-ten years down the road. The cracks were already to show even a few months in.

This isn’t to say Bella is responsible for the collapse of the Cullens, I believe they’re doomed anyway, but she serves as a catalyst.

After leaving Forks in New Moon the Cullens immediately begin drifting apart.

Edward is despondent and depressed, within a few weeks leaves the coven, and travels down the continent until he reaches Rio where he stays for months. Note, Edward knew by the time he hit Rio that he had long since lost Victoria’s trail (for the record, he lost her in Mexico) but I think it’s very telling he does not return to the coven.

I don’t think Edward was ever coming back.

This puts a significant strain on Emse, as Edward is far and away her favorite child, and she’s noted as being anxious and severely unhappy with Edward’s disappearance. In time, I believe this would lead to the collapse of Esme and Carlisle’s dumpster fire marriage (which at this point only survives on denial and miscommunication).

Alice and Jasper leave the group to both a) get out of dodge b) investigate Alice’s past. While they do later return things are... awkward.

Rosalie desperately tries to keep the family together, tells Edward the bad news to a) be the only one with the balls to tell him and b) hopefully get him to come back to the family. This, obviously, doesn’t work.

I think without Bella’s suicide attempt the coven would have broken apart probably within the year. Rosalie desperately would have tried to keep them together, but Esme would crack and go to be with Edward, Carlisle would let her go, Alice and Jasper would probably keep their heads down and go on extended honeymoons, and eventually they all realize there’s just nothing to go back to. 

They go their separate ways.

The Cullens Are Still Cullening

But lets pretend that things work out.

Edward gets tired of being depressed in Rio and comes back to... be depressed with the family. To be honest, I don’t think he’d get over this. Edward was severely depressed before Bella.

He was very contemptuous not only of his own family but of humanity in general. Yes, he has this very strange idolation of humanity but he also views them as inherently beneath him and lesser. High school is his purgatory where he listens to the mundane thoughts of mundane mayfly humans.

He outright despises Jasper and Rosalie and even Carlisle, who he adores, he often views as something of a fool in great need of Edward’s personal protection.

Edward has lost all passion in life, even in his hobbies like music, and is slowly but surely spiraling down into a place where he can never recover. His obsession with Bella, while far from a good thing, brings light back into his life.

This is an Edward who gave that all up and willingly returns back to what he used to be. And I think that would destroy something in him. Frankly, I think it’d leave him in an even worse place than canon.

So, if the Cullens run into a now adult Bella...

Well, it’d be a clusterfuck.

Edward will be very conflicted as he tried to leave for Bella’s own good but now she’s done exactly what he wanted. She grew up and got over him, Edward presumably means nothing to her now.

Worse, there is now such a gap between them. Edward is physically much younger than she is now, he poses as a high school student while she’s an adult. Bella’s fears were warranted, she’s too old for him now, and in many ways has outgrown him.

If Bella’s in any sort of relationship with anyone, I think Edward would flip his lid, and murder her significant other. As he often fantasized murdering Mike as well as her nameless future husband. If she’s single...

I think with enough time, distance, and therapy Bella would be able to make significant strides towards a healthier mindset. She’d get over her depression and in turn over Edward. She might be angry at him for a while but in time would likely decide that he had left her for what were immature but noble reasons.

What they had was nice, but the relationship was never going to last. Even when she was a teenager, she knew this, which was why she so desperately wanted to be a vampire.

She likely might talk to him to find closure, but I imagine a more mature Bella realizes they know nothing about each other. She’s had so much time in her life now without him and he’s so different from what she remembered, younger. There’s no way to start a relationship, more, Edward himself realized it was never going to work.

I imagine Edward doesn’t take this well either. For all that Edward says he wants certain things, really, he does an impressive job making sure Bella never ran from him. Bella legitimately not being interested in him would destroy him and... likely lead to him devouring Bella eventually.

After all, Alice had predicted that Edward would not be able to stay away and that, ultimately, there are only two futures for Bella: death or vampire.

Edward Comes Back Alone

Alice had predicted that Edward would not be able to keep his distance from Bella. He tries twice. Once, in Twilight, when Alice first announces that Edward is in love with Bella and she will become a vampire. The second time is New Moon.

The first, he cracks in a week. It just doesn’t work out and Edward has a minature crisis over it and tells himself it’s fine because he has to protect her from spiders therefore he has to be in her life AND THIS IS FINE.

The second, he notes that he’s dangerously close to cracking and Alice predicted he couldn’t do it. He makes it six months, but does confess to Bella he often considered finding her again and watching her life from the shadows in Rio.

So, I highly doubt that Edward would make it to five or ten years or that he’d make it with the Cullens. He probably comes back alone by the time Bella’s senior year starts, and intends to watch her from the shadows.

Now, given the plot of Twilight, he realizes that nothing’s working out. Bella’s not free from the supernatural, as her best friend/potential new love interest is a werewolf who might maul her any second now. She’s being hunted by Victoria and everything’s spiralling out of control.

So, Edward probably gives up the charade fast and comes back to get Jake out of the picture and be very upset with Bella for ruining his plan. Bella’s just glad Edward is back. Given Edward probably calls the entire family back, who likely have nothing to say to this nonsense, things proceed pretty much as in canon.

Jasper Runs Across Bella

Considering the last time he saw her, Jasper would run like the hounds of hell are on his heels. This is a world in which he never sees much of Bella after the birthday incident and, as a result, is still mired in guilt. He can’t imagine Bella’s reaction upon seeing him in the wild nor does he want to.

Rosalie Runs Across Bella

Rosalie likely makes no contact. She probably views Bella with bitterness, sees her as the reason for the collapse of her family, and never understood Bella’s appeal in the first place. However, for all Rosalie’s bitterness, she wouldn’t take it out on Bella mostly because there’s nothing to say.

She’d just choose to be distantly happy for Bella that she got to live her human life and glad she adjusted well.

Emmett Runs Across Bella

Emmett and Bella don’t actually know each other that well, Emmett certainly has no personal connection with her. He wouldn’t make contact because it’d be awkward and would piss off Rose.

Alice Runs Across Bella

Alice doesn’t agree with Edward, but she’s also proving a point to him and ultimately values Edward far more than she does Bella. She’ll abide by his rules and not speak to Bella. Also, she sees that if she tries, there’s no way the conversation goes well as Alice would have to explain why she never answered any emails.

Best to avoid that.

Esme Runs Across Bella

Esme values Edward over everything, and while she perhaps thinks that Bella could fix Edward’s desperate unhappiness I think she’d acknowledge that Edward also doesn’t want to see her. She’d snoop from afar but ultimately, I don’t think she’d make contact.

If she did, it’d be with the sole purpose of matchmaking the adult Bella with Edward, which would lead to disaster.

Carlisle Runs Across Bella

Carlisle I think actually would talk to her, to offer up some explanation of what happened and how they got where they are. He and Bella would likely talk about vampires, the Cullen way of life, etc. and ultimately go their separate ways.

He’d try to give closure if she wants it but nothing more than that.

Though if he thinks Bella doesn’t want to talk/see him or any Cullen, he’d likely also make himself scarce.

Some Thoughts On Fanfiction

But that’s not why people are writing these types of stories, and, really while I can give my depressing takes on Twilight I think it’s fair to note that people write these fics for significantly different reasons.

[shihalyfie]

@sage-striaton replied to your post:

Idk how people can say Frontier has characters that lack depth. Imo it’s a very psychological season. The whole adventure thing is aimed to making them grown in their behaviours and feelings, it’s a big metaphor of their development

I’m sorry for hijacking your response to my post to segue this into another rant of mine, but I want to emphasize that one of my goals with this blog (if I can be said to have any) is that I really, really, really want people to re-examine whether they actually believe in the rhetoric that’s been dominating this fanbase for two decades, or whether there’s more to it. This is especially in regards to the fact that we’re talking a series deliberately written in such a way that it’ll change meaning and nuance as you get older, so it can “grow up” with you in a sense, and yet it seems like -- especially in regards to Adventure through Frontier, due to their position as the oldest series that the majority of the fanbase was elementary or preteen age during -- people are still regurgitating the same rehashed twenty-year-old ideas like they’re undeniable law. It’s one thing if they’re saying it because the series didn’t sit well with them the first time and they don’t want to watch it again, but we’re reaching a recurring problem where it’s sort of “brainwashing” even people who don’t actually believe it but feel compelled to go along with it, or wouldn’t feel that way if it weren’t for peer pressure. Obviously, there are dissenting opinions, and ones that are even very loud about that, but that pressure remains.

The mainstream opinion in the fanbase is that Adventure is untouchable and impervious to any criticism, 02 is its inferior sequel with half-baked characters, Tamers is an auteur work that’s the “deepest” of the original tetralogy due to being dark, and Frontier is devoid of much substance at all. Even those who don’t really believe in this will still be pressured to go alongside it, those who like 02 or Frontier will be pressured to consider it a “guilty pleasure”, and it’s only very recently when certain events revealed that the idea of 02 actually having quite its own fervent and passionate fanbase that likes it on its own merits became properly recognized. (I have actually noticed a huge uptick in 02 fans, especially casual ones, being more shameless in talking about liking it in the last two years; you’re still going to get the obnoxious person “reminding” you how bad it apparently is if you bring it up, but it’s not nearly as prevalent as it used to be.) I’m not talking about whether something is a “good” or “bad” series -- that concept doesn’t really exist to me as much as whether it’s “to one’s tastes” or not, and I think one of the joys of this franchise is that it has things that cater to people with vastly different preferences -- as much as a lot of potential for analysis and intimate thought about these very fascinating series. Even if 02 and Frontier were as shallow or half-baked as they were accused of, I wouldn’t think it’d be shameful to like them for one’s own reasons anyway, but what frustrates me is that I just don’t think that’s true in the first place!!

Not helping is that there’s still a refusal among the fanbase to admit that there were substantial differences in American English dubbing (especially in regards to Adventure and 02), which I don’t mean as a bad thing in the sense that some people prefer to stick only with that dub and consider that version what they want to work with, but in the sense that the treatment of them as “the same thing” has been horribly detrimental when two people, one coming from that dub and one coming from the Japanese version (or a dub more closely based on it), will end up often having an argument doomed to go nowhere because they were never talking about the same thing to begin with. Recently, a friend admitted to me that although they’d switched to the Japanese version a long time ago, they still couldn’t get the image of Daisuke and Takeru having an inherently hostile relationship (they don’t) out of their head due to the influence of that dub, and although they consciously knew better -- at least enough to admit this to me -- it wasn’t helped by the fact that the fanbase itself continues to reinforce this image because of how normalized it is to treat the dub version and the Japanese version as “virtually the same” and for Western fanbase discourse to assume you should be projecting those takes into the Japanese version. If you’re hanging out in English-speaking circles but are working from the Japanese version or a dub directly based off of it, you do actually have to filter out a lot of takes you’re hearing because they won’t actually apply to the version you’re watching, but not a lot of people realize this.

All four of Adventure through Frontier share tons of key staff, especially Seki, known for her focus on wanting the kids in the audience to be able to empathize with and relate to the characters on screen. All four share some of the best character work I’ve seen not only in this franchise, but also in kids’ media in general, and I also stress that a lot of this has a ton of nuance that isn’t always apparent unless you read between the lines. I do understand that a lot of this probably went over our heads as kids, and I won’t say that the choice to execute it this way should be impervious to criticism, but nevertheless, I think it’s important to call attention to the fact it is there, and much of it becomes recognizable once you see it that way; for instance, so much of "it's contradictory character writing!" comes from the fact that the series tries to represent humans in their inconsistent, messy ways, and while it'll feel "messy" from a writing trope perspective, when you think about it as "since this person has this mentality, does it make sense to approach this with this mindset?", suddenly it becomes very consistent. The supposedly “shallow” 02 and Frontier characters will act in ways that match existing psychological profiles meant for actual humans to terrifying degrees, in ways that you might actually recognize even better once you’ve hit adulthood and start intimately understanding things like depression or anxiety in ways you might not have before. Shockingly, “having heart, important themes, and kindness towards the human condition” are completely valid reasons to uplift a creative work in ways distinct from technical writing or cerebrality or how many tropes they subvert or whatever.

On the flip side, people praise Adventure and Tamers for being the naturally “superior” works with better writing, but when it comes to talking about why the writing is supposedly better, a good chunk of the reasons stated don’t actually explain anything substantial, or go back to actually being passive-aggressive dunks on the other series in some form -- it’s because 02 and Frontier’s character writing sucks that badly, or because Adventure had the “best plot” (which may be true if by “best” you mean “easiest to understand”, but that doesn’t mean much to someone who might not be very happy about how its story progression is just a boss rush), or because Tamers is the “deepest” when by “deep” they actually mean “cerebral, dark, and unsubtle about it” without any further meaning (as if Adventure and 02 were idealistic series that never went into anything nuanced and not, say, the fact they went very viciously deep into societal issues between parents and children, psychological horror, and intimate takes on the human condition). I’m personally saying this as someone who does think Adventure and Tamers have a lot to praise in terms of their approaches to realism and the unique aspects each bring to the table, and I feel that people like this are doing them more of a disservice by not bothering to uplift them for any reason that isn’t actually just inherently condescending. I mean, even taking this outside of the original tetralogy for a bit, when I was plugging Appmon earlier, there’s a reason I focused more on its theme and character writing and the use of “dark” writing to convey its sheer range, rather than trying to boil it down to a shallow “it looks cheery but gets really messed up later!”, which is unfortunately an argument I’ve been seeing about it lately.

In the end, when I write my meta, I write it "making a case" for my point of view, and I welcome others to disagree, but if you disagree, I really hope it'll be because you personally disagree, and not because the entire fanbase has been saying otherwise for twenty years and I sound like a radical. I’m not saying that everyone’s consensus takes are completely unfounded, but frankly speaking, this fanbase has some really bad takes, and in the past few years I’ve found it freeing to not only “say what you feel without worrying what others think”, but actually go out of my way to outright try and purge all the preconceived notions and pick only the ones I agree with because I actually agree with them. I encourage you to do it too! And if you do, you might find things about something you like that you didn’t realize before.

[williamofwestworld]

William’s Darkness. Spoilers ahead. Do not reblog. I feel the need to talk about this topic today because I feel like it is something that is completely misunderstood by many people, even by myself, since last the season. This darkness that he is referring to is not evilness, but emptiness, the absence of anything, essentially a void. A black hole. Whatever you would like to call it, it’s not evil per say, it is the absence of anything meaningful. 

William, since the beginning, and I am referring to younger William here, has felt like he doesn’t belong to this world. He has been looking for a place to belong because the world that Westworld has created is devoid of any meaning. Programs, such as Rehoboam, has decided many many many things for people until their very existence has felt fake. So he started reading books to find meaning in them. Stories about heroes and villains and knights. He read up on Philosophy to a point where he could quote philosophers to find meaning to his own life and he never found that.

Dolores gave him meaning, though, and that woke him up to a bigger reality... actually realizing how fake everything was and how unhappy he truly was just going through the motions of every day life.

This is depression. All of it. William is severely depressed because everything seems and feels so artificial.

William found meaning in Dolores. He found what he was truly capable of because of her. He had been stepped on by people his entire life and suddenly he was capable of fighting back and getting the things that he wanted and he liked that he finally had some control over his own life and how it could turn out... Dolores was like a mirror for him because he realized that was a part of himself that had been there all along and she made him realize that.

Having her die and not remember him did break him in many many many ways. Suddenly there was this void of meaning inside of himself again. There was no more light there. It was dark again. He had been given light and then it was taken away again.

Now, after all of this, this void could have been filled with some meaning that he had been looking for. He kept going back to Dolores in hope that she may come back to him, but she never did... and he gave up. He went back to what he would consider a meaningless life. Going through the motions again and again, all the while looking at humanity and seeing how terrible they treated each other. How selfish, terrible, and fake everything seemed to be.

Depression can make things seem worse than they really are and that can breed anger and hatred, which William let out in the park. So, while the darkness, the void, the depression isn’t inherently bad, he truly did become a black hole that sucked in everything, even light, all around him and Emily and Juliet suffered because of it. Did he purposely do it? No. He tried to keep it from them, thinking that his darkness was inherently evil and only let it out in the park... but that’s the thing... someone’s mood can spread to those around them, even if it is unintentional. 

We all know that William has an extremely dark view of the world from season 3 during his little therapy session where he compared humanity to bacteria. The host version of himself even admitted to trying to find meaning in the hosts before killing Bernard. Westworld felt like those stories that he had been reading about since he was a kid and so he felt like he could finally live in one of those stories that had meaning, rather than the meaningless existence that the world the show creators had made where every decision was made for you. Westworld let you be free from that for a while and he really quite enjoyed that to a point where he felt like he belonged to one of those stories and wanted to stay there.

Isn’t it weird though, how a supposedly fake world that Ford created was more free and real than the real world? William sort of lived in this delusion until he killed Emily, which woke him up to the fact that not everything going on around him was just a game. The stakes were real now, just as he had always wanted and when he finally got that, he realized he didn’t want it anymore. It wasn’t what he had hoped that it would be.

He realized that both systems, the Hosts and the humans were broken (because they were mirrors, reflections of the people who built them) and there was no hope in saving any of it by the end of season 4, so he was basically like, in his own William fashion, “fuck it, let’s start over.” The human world is fake, evil, broken, and devoid of any meaning and the hosts were just as broken as the people who created them (in William’s eyes), so he decided to pull the plug on all of it. The darkness, while it didn’t start out as evil, it became evil because that’s how the chips fell, because of everything with Dolores, and everything after.

[a-little-slice-of-fandom]

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Irish-ness of Dracula, if you wanna ramble about it!

(Okay I just want to apologise for how long this took to answer because I know it’s been sitting in my inbox for over a month but..depression and work happened and I just didn’t have the time or energy to complete it. I seriously do apologise for this but I hope you enjoy the post anyway!)

So the first thing I need to clear up is this: the concept of a monster or a demon that feeds upon the life force of humans is not limited to one singular culture or folklore. In fact, this core concept is a wider cultural phenomenon and variations of it exist across both countries and continents. And no one country can take sole credit for the this core concept of vampires. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise either doesn’t know much about vampires or is intentionally being disingenuous. There can be cultural variations that are specific to certain folklores (and to just blatantly steal these would be cultural appropriation), but the main idea of vampires exists across a wide range of folklores and no singular person, group of people or culture can take credit for the creation of vampires.

However, arguably it was the work of Bram Stoker that aided in the solidification of the concept of Vampires that we know today. While there were other authors from a wide range of nationalities who wrote about Vampires before Stoker (including John William Polidori who wrote the Vampyre in 1819)...Dracula is the best known. (Now I personally believe that’s because Dracula is an absolutely banging novel, although I do concede that the prevalence of adaptations of Dracula from the 1920’s to today helps keep Dracula in the forefront of audiences minds.) In addition, it’s important to remember that Stoker was inspired by another Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, who wrote the novel Carmilla. As far as I know, Le Fanu and Stoker actually worked together on a magazine!

Another thing I think that needs clarification is the common belief that Stoker heavily/religiously based Dracula on the historical figure Vlad the Impailer. This is heavily debated by scholars. While there’s an obvious, undeniable similarity between the names of these two...the similarities start to wain after this, with only small similarities between the two and there’s even literal contradictions between the history of Vlad the Impailer and Dracula’s history in the novel. In fact, there’s not much indication that Stoker based the character Dracula off Vlad the Impailer, or even that he had a working knowledge of Vlad the Impailer beyond the name. In all 124 pages of his notes, there’s nothing to indicate that Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula came from Vlad the Impailer.

(Plus Dracula in the novel wasn’t even originally called Dracula...he was called Count Wampyr in the original drafts of the novel and this was only changed, from what I can gather, in the last couple of drafts.)

In fact, I’d personally argue that that connection between Vlad the Impailer and Dracula is actually something that’s been retroactively added by other artists, for example the 1992 film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” heavily leaned into this idea that Dracula and Vald the Impailer were one in the same, and as time has progressed people assume that these elements were in the original novel when that’s simply untrue! Stoker didn’t write that! It’s a retroactive addition by other artists that’s just assumed by the masses to be canon. This phenomenon is actually super interesting and it’s absolutely not limited to Stoker’s novel Dracula/the modern day perception of Dracula (another example would be Mary Shelley’s version of Frankenstein versus the modern day perception Frankenstein). I’m not sure if there’s a word for what this is, but I like the term “cultural canon”, where something that’s been added in by other artists has become as good as canon within the minds of the masses and as such is ingrained within the cultural perception of something, despite it having no basis within the original piece or even directly contradicting what is in canon.

(Now I’ll absolutely concede that Stoker taking the name of a historical figure and possibly their likeness from another country and making them into a literal monster is something that should be discussed. I don’t know how Vlad the Impailer is viewed within Romania - whether he’s viewed positively or negatively or a mixture - but regardless he was a historical figure and Stoker did eventually use that name for his own creative purposes. Again, Stoker didn’t say that Dracula and Vlad the Impailer were the same person, that’s other artists doing, but there’s still issues with Stoker that needs to be discussed)

Now, I’ve seen people talk about how Stoker took a lot of inspiration from the Baltic folklore surrounding vampires for his novel, but I don’t really know this folklore very well and therefore I don’t feel like I’m qualified to discuss it. If anyone is more well versed in this topic wants to add to this post then they’re more than welcome to! I don’t deny that Stoker too inspiration from places other than Ireland (like the novel is set in Whitby) but I just feel like people over hype the relation between stokers Dracula and Vlad the Impailer.

Now, onto the Irish mythology side!

So the most obvious inspiration for Dracula comes from the story of Abhartach. here is a link to an actual, respectable retelling of the story of Abhartach which I’d highly recommend people read (it’s really not that long) but the key points go as follows:

There was this Irish chieftain called Abhartach, who was really cruel and the townsfolk didn’t really like him. So, the townsfolk and another cheiftain (known as Cathain) banded together to kill Abhartach. They did succeed in killing him (yay), however, Abhartach just sort of...rose from the dead and began another reign of terror (not yay). However, Abhartach needed to be sustained by blood and required a bowlful every day to sustain his energy. Cathain comes back and kills Abhartach once again, but Abhartach rises from the dead once more and now needs more blood. Abhartach is only banished when Cathain uses a word made from yew wood and wounds Abhartach with it. Abhartach is buried upside down with a grant stone over the grave to stop Abhartach rising once again.

Sound familiar? The similarities between Abhartach and Dracula are undeniable! Yes, there’s some differences between the two but the core story here is almost identical. I could totally reword that paragraph, omitting the names, and it would be indistinguishable from a short summary of Dracula! Even the way that the main characters find out about the wooden weapon that can kill the monster is similar, as both Jonathan and Cathain go to wiser and older members of their community to learn more.

(Also please mythology blogs don’t come for me I know my retelling was an incredible oversimplification but I’m writing on my iPad and my thumbs are starting to hurt. People have wrote full papers on the similarities between Dracula and Abhartach and there’s so many more people more qualified than me, I’m just an 18 year old trying to make a fun and interesting tumblr post. Again, if anyone wants add anything like extra sources or more information or even to point out my mistakes then I more than welcome the additions)

Another piece of folklore that’s also said to have inspired Dracula is the Dearg Due. Now there’s multiple different versions of the tale, but the version I have heard goes like this:

There’s a noble woman who wants to marry a penniless peasant boy, but her dad disapproves and wants her to marry another man who is much richer. The rich man and the noble woman were eventually married but the woman didn’t love the rich man. In retaliation, the rich man locked the woman in a windowless castle where she starved to death. The woman was buried by the locals who took pity on her, but because she was buried hungry she came back to life and drank the blood of her father and her husband as revenge. The version I heard says that the dearg due now basically wanders ireland drinking the blood of men who have hurt or wronged women (as one should) but there’s other endings to the story.

(Again is anyone has a reliable source they want to share then please feel free to add!)

So this is another Irish piece of folklore that clearly includes some elements that we now associate with vampires. Now people (including Wikipedia) claim that this story was specifically what Stoker based Dracula on, and while I definitely think that Stoker was aware of this story and took inspiration from it, I personally think that the Dearg Due inspired the concept of Dracula’s wives more than Dracula himself.

However the key point still stands: Stoker was likely aware of these legends and even the most staunchly anti-Irish person would have to concede that there’s similarities between all three stories. And very rarely are these similarities discussed in classes about Dracula...which I feel is a real disservice. I don’t think students should have to have an intense knowledge of Irish mythology (my knowledge is spotty at best) nor do I think it should be an exam question...but even a brief acknowledgment of “hey, Stoker was inspired by these stories and you can clearly see similarities between them” would be nice. Moreover, it further solidifies my original argument that Stoker was, at least to some extent, Irish and that his Irishness inherently influenced his work.

Also...the social context of what was going on in Ireland in this period can’t be ignored! Again, while Stoker did spend time in both England and Romania, he spent a lot of his life in Ireland and therefore would have known what was going on in his own country.

Dracula was published in 1897, which is exactly 50 years after the worst year of the Irish Famine/ The Great Hunger/An Gorta Mór. Now I don’t have time to do a whole history of the Great Hunger but the effects of the famine were greatly exacerbated by the horrific mismanagement of Ireland by the British government and the British system of ruling in Ireland. How many people died during the famine isn’t clear, but we do know that the population of Ireland at the time was 8 million and the population today is 6 million...200 years later and we still haven’t recovered. So while we all like to joke about the fact that Stoker wrote about an unfeeling member of the aristocracy literally feeding off others with no remorse and basically ruining their lives...are we really going to pretend that there isn’t social commentary there? Scholars specifically think that Stoker was commenting on the absentee landlords (basically British aristocrats who owned land in Ireland but didn’t live there and as such didn’t care about the well being of their tenants) who would often have tenants forced off the land when they couldn’t pay rent...despite the fact that their tenenants were already starving and had no money because their only source of food and income failed.

(I’m not being shady by the way, I also love to joke about the social implications of Dracula, but I feel like people forget that the jokes have actual points behind them)

There was also a cholera epidemic in Ireland in 1832 which is generally accepted to be one of Stoker’s biggest inspirations. You can read more about the epidemic here if you wish, but I’ll summarise what I feel are the key points. Not only was Stoker’s mother from county Sligo and lived through this cholera epidemic, but Stoker also asked her to write down her memories of the epidemic and used her accounts to aid in his research of the cholera epidemic. Now the fact that he was actively researching this should indicate that it would influence his work, especially considering the situation in county Sligo was incredibly morbid. There’s accounts of the 20 carpenters in Sligo town being unable to make enough coffins to keep up with the amount of people dying, resulting in hundreds of dead bodies just lying on the street. However, the most horrific account from this epidemic was the stories of terrified nurses placing cholera patients into mass graves while they were still alive. Stoker himself literally stated that Dracula was “inspired by the idea of someone being buried before they were fully dead”. So while at first there seems to be very little relation between the novel and a medical epidemic, it quickly becomes clear that Stoker’s fascination with this historical event influenced his writing.

My overall point is that Stoker’s irishness inherently influenced his writing. Writers don’t write in their own little bubble, divorced from the world around them, their views and work are shaped by their position in society and their upbringing (it’s why I dislike death of the author as a literary theory). So when people try to claim that Dracula is a piece of British literature...it indicates either a lack of understanding of the context in which Stoker was writing in or a wilful ignorance founded on colonialist ideas. His influences are so obvious to me as an Irish woman but they rarely get discussed, and even if they are it’s seen as overreaching! To call Dracula British literature and to ignore the inherent Irishness of the novel does a great disservice to Stoker!

Anyways I really hope you enjoyed this discussion my love! Once again I apologise for how long this took to write. Also I’m sorry if this comes off as argumentative or anything, that absolutely wasn’t my intention, I just have a particular style of writing long posts haha.

[makeste]

On your katsuki and Izuku meta I think what they both needed is to learn not everyone can think the same way as you like no one should place these impossible standards on themselves. Katsuki biggest weakness isn’t his need to win but his entrie selfish ego whitch blows up on him a lot and izuku biggest weakness is his lack of selfworth in himself that causes him to become reckless he doesn’t place any faith in himself.

one of the points I was actually trying to make is that I don’t think Deku actually has a problem with his own self-worth. @dimplesblogs had a great addition to my post where they pointed out the difference between self-worth, and self-confidence. I hope you don’t mind if I quote you here!

Something I see often in characterizations of Deku is that “lack of self-worth” and “lack of self-confidence” seem to get mixed up a lot.

- self-worth: a sense of one’s own value as a human being.

- self-confidence: confidence in oneself and in one’s powers and abilities.

and as they said, the two of them aren’t always mutually exclusive. but I do agree that in Deku’s case, it’s always been much more of the latter than the former.

Deku berates himself when he can’t save everyone not because he thinks he’s a failure, but because saving others is that important to him. that’s a life he couldn’t save. he can’t reconcile with the idea of that, and so he’s extra hard on himself because he’s frustrated. again, the parallels are right there with Katsuki. we saw that Katsuki ended up blaming himself after Kamino. but that doesn’t mean that Katsuki’s self-worth is inherently low (although I’ve certainly read plenty of takes arguing otherwise, and it’s an interesting topic to explore). it just means his expectations for himself are simply that high. and so he ends up taking on far more responsibility than any child should actually be trying to take upon themselves, because he doesn’t meet his own exceptionally high standards. his goal isn’t to “win most of the time”, it’s to win every time. he’s not aiming to simply be a great hero -- he’s aiming to be the greatest hero of all time. and because of that, even the littlest failure is going to hit him that much harder, to say nothing of an event like Kamino that basically upended society as we know it.

Katsuki did have an emotional crisis after Kamino, but it was a crisis of faith, of confidence, brought on by that one specific trauma. and once he talked it out with Deku and All Might (well, punched it out with Deku and then talked it out with All Might, lol), he moved past it. it was meant to be a stepping stone in the path of his character growth. it was great that we got all of that angst, don’t get me wrong, but ultimately it wasn’t something meant to be wallowed in, but overcome.

and it’s the same with Deku. I fully expect Deku to have a similar crisis of faith after this arc, brought on by the combination of him feeling responsible for other people getting hurt because of him (even though it’s not his fault he was being targeted), and him not having enough mastery over OFA to be able to protect them all. a lot of people got hurt -- a lot of people that he’s close to. Aizawa, Gran Torino, Todoroki, and Kacchan himself. and Deku desperately did not want that to happen, but he couldn’t stop it. and I don’t doubt he’s going to blame himself for that.

but that doesn’t mean he thinks of himself as worthless. that’s a long-running fandom interpretation that I happen to strongly disagree with. Deku is someone who persevered with his dream of becoming a hero for years, despite everyone telling him it was impossible. he may struggle at times with feeling like he might not be up to the gargantuan task of living up to All Might’s legacy, but that has less to do with his own self-worth, and more to do with him putting All Might up on a massive pedestal. and also the fact that he’s only a boy, and that is an enormous amount of responsibility. there’s a difference between having low self-worth, and being honest with yourself about just how far you still have to go.

and he’s basically being called upon to save the world now. and so he’s trying with everything he has to do that, and he gets anxious and frustrated and angry with himself when he fails (at times berating himself, in the same way that Katsuki called himself “weak”), not because he truly thinks he’s worthless, but because like Katsuki, he simply isn’t satisfied with anything less than living up to his own high standard. save everyone. not save most of the people. everyone. all of them. that’s the bar that he has set. and it’s the bar he’s determined to either reach or die trying.

and lastly, for the anon (actually multiple anons, but I didn’t post all of them) saying that’s naïve, I have to disagree with you. again, this is a superhero story. it’s a story about optimism and hope, about never giving up. Deku (who by the way absolutely does not have a lack of empathy, that’s a rather absurd claim lol; just because he yelled at Dabi after Dabi tried to set his friend and his mentor on fire doesn’t make him an apathetic monster who Doesn’t Care About The Villains’ Suffering, jesus. he’s out here trying to save Tomura even after Tomura stabbed his best friend and destroyed a city; where exactly do you get the notion that he doesn’t see the villains as human beings?) is the hero of the story precisely because he doesn’t give up on anybody. he wants to save everyone. you might call it naïve; I call it idealistic. it’s exactly the kind of crazy idealism that ends up winning the day in all of the best stories. BnHA isn’t some depressing narrative where the characters ultimately end up suffering all for naught. we’ve known exactly what this story is from day one. “this is the story of how I became a great hero.”

so yeah, I hope that clarifies some of my points a little better! while Deku may doubt himself at times (just like anyone in his shoes would doubt themselves), I really do think he just needs a little bit of encouragement right now, along with the reminder that he’s not in this alone. and possibly some sort of miracle broken bone elixir, and/or a couple of really sweet new robot limbs, depending on how that all plays out lol. anyways, but we’ll see.

[wexhappyxfew]

Shannon! I have a question for today, it might be a little broad, but how did you come up with Natia’s character? :)

AMY!!! hello! sorry that i have *just* gotten to this as my weeks have increasingly gotten insanely busy between my job starting back up, school, college stuff, and ap exam chaos as well haha! i did this at about 11pm(?) and i'll be queuing it up for the morning for you, but outside of tumblr, i've thought a lot about this question and what i really wanted to include in this question. having almost spent 10 months spent writing and developing natia to who she is today makes a whole lot of stuff move through my brain when i go back to my developing stages for her! thank you for the question (and the broadness, never fear, i absolutely love it!)

Natia's character really came from the idea of just wanting to really push myself out of the box and *out there* to see what I could do. And I will say Landslide is one of my most *out-there* projects in terms of content - I mean we have Death as a personified character, crazy Agent Mortem, all these past connections to Natia? It's chaos haha! But, I had experimented previously with a partly Polish-OC, Hazel Parker of "The Soldier of Stars", and from that, I went, well there's no centrally focused Polish OC yet that I have seen (this was back in like June-July 2020 mind you, so there probably has been Polish OCs created since this time!!) and I had always felt that the Warsaw Uprising was inherently important! I also read up on the Polish Resistance and how they were the most effective resistance group of continental Europe during the war, with ultimately the Warsaw Uprising being their last final push that did sort of end that.

Something I've really enjoyed about creating Natia's character was putting a great focus on her flaws. Now, her strengths are just as important - she is a great soldier in the field, she's highly intelligent and can make quick decisions on the fly, she withholds a lot of strength when it comes to situations where she needs to focus, she's observant, and she keeps herself fairly humble when not bursting at the seems. She doesn't let herself get stepped over very often (unless it's Mortem) and if anything she will insert herself, and show what skills she has, but she won't go overboard. She's also passionate about her country and her people and she always has something to fight for and even when she feels all hope is lost, she withholds a tiny little sliver no matter what, even if she doesn't feel it. But her flaws I feel are a massive part of her character. She's stubborn, she won't let people help her, she has trouble expressing emotion, she numbs herself more often than not to not feel the pain that she is supposed to feel, she blames everything on herself, she gets hot-headed quite easily, and grows to the point of nearly irrational at some moments in time and even will let her emotions get the best of her in times like this. But that makes up who Natia is as a character and who she is as a person in general.

But even with the strengths and flaws of her character, it makes her very much still a human being. And that was one of my main goals when creating Natia - make her human enough to make that angst HURT, but make her human enough that when you see her succeed or even the little wins here and there, you want to cheer. Because those are human moments. And I know this sort of character creation is not for everyone, but for me over the past near-year, this has been one of my favorite things about creating Natia because I've found myself able to relate to her even though I'm so vastly different from her.

I did some research on a British-Polish SOE Agent, Krystyna Skarbek otherwise known as her alias Christine Granville and I took a few liberties from this amazing woman and used it on Natia. But things such as Agent Mortem, Death/War connection and the eventual introduction of another character Solomon Campbell (who will be in Part 3), as well as the Resistance group of Part 1 and her siblings and parents, are all more of my own ideas and connections!

Something I have had a LOT of fun doing is showing that even though on the exterior Natia seems cold-hearted and dark and numb, and whatever other *cold+dark* ideas can be thought up, she is very much underneath -- not that. We can see how much evidently she cares for someone like George Luz; I mean even Joe Liebgott has pointed it out to her. She always is just trying to do her best and do what is best in the situation - no longer it is about what is good or bad anymore to her, it's about doing what's best in the situation for the time being, and I really love that aspect of her character a lot! We can see that when the war ends, she wants to live on the English coast, far away from war all alone with a dog and even a little goat in a seaside cottage. She grew so attached to the word AWOL after Joe Toye came and sat with her that night in Holland and they talked for once about something other than war. She even withheld her name, her nationality and just about everything else to keep the idea of the cold-face agent she thought she was up so the men of Easy Company don't have to know the real her. But -- was it to protect her...or to protect Easy? All these little ideas I threw in there to show that she is actually, very, compassionate in many ways, and caring and attentive and observant of the men and women she works with.

I really try to show that Natia listens when she listens to someone speak and she observes and she pays attention more than anything. And she ends up, holding information like that close to her and finding comfort in it.

My goal with Natia was to show that there can be a balance to "the bad-ass fighter" idea who fights for what she believes, but also remain human as well. We can see how much things affect her, especially the loss of friends. Of course, she doesn't show this to other people, but to use as readers, we see this and we see her occasional breakdown - and in a way, she continues living on their legacies because she listened to what they had to say. For example, Zdzich told her to not let the war overtake her, and throughout the story so far, we've see her sort of repeat this to herself in various ways. Because Zdzich meant that much to her. She's lost so much by this point in war that almost it's so sad to see that she, from what we all know of BoB, still has to go through so much, but at that point, she's fought so much, that all she can do it keep pushing on with it.

I think one of the most interesting moments from writing Natia was when the first few chapters were actually uploaded on platforms and there was someone really coming after Natia for her decisions and for this, that and the other thing (amy if i vaguely remember i think you remember who this person is as well because you clapped back at them once, and man your response was GOLD!!!). One of those things was Natia's approach with food (TW: mentions of struggling to eat with food, references of depression and struggling to eat, mental health issues relating...) and the person who commented would always be saying something about how she needs to eat, and she needs to remain strong and she needs to snap out of it with her depression and all this other stuff and to be honest, I sort of sat there for a moment like??? But there's reasons WHY she's not eating? Why she's holding back? (And of course ones I had mentioned so...) But let's move on.

Mental health was a prevalent thing in World War 2, though it was not looked upon fondly and Natia essentially does have depression as well as a border-line eating disorder. And so when the comment said that she had to snap out of it, I don't know it sort of off-put me because I have family with both those disorders and they've had treatment for it for years and you can't just snap out of it. I really tried to stress that 'the snapping-out-of-it" does not work, and the person kept firing back a bit at it, so I just moved on from it and ignored it. Natia's struggle with eating, as one can see, also comes from the heavy guilt and grief that is slowly uncovered throughout the story of what Natia has done and what has happened throughout the course of the war to her. Natia's number one thing she constantly does and has now become the focus of many character relationships with her (ie Doc Gene Roe) is the clenched fists, that she squeezes until they bleed and eventually need wrapped up by the Doc. Something she also refuses to accept she has a problem with. As we can see, acceptance is a concept she struggles with more than anything and something she will essentially have to learn to simply, accept.

That's just sort of one of the many bits of information about her character that I added, especially in society today as mental health is so important and so I just wanted to share a bit of the backlash I got from someone for it. But I guess that's life, but I'll continue to write Natia Filipska as an OC who does struggle with depression because of her life in war.

Natia's character and her story is probably one of the most complex characters and stories I've written and crafted and created and I'm just extremely happy with how she ended up coming out in the end! I'm about to go and do some writing and editing for her and it's just so exciting writing her because of all these various levels she withholds and she slowly lets uncover as the story unfolds! I just love it! OH - and we can't forget about the infamous mentions of the piano....yep that'll be coming up soon haha!! <3

THANK YOU FOR THE QUESTION AMY!!! IT MEANT SO MUCH!!!! just getting to talk about Natia a little bit and her character and what my mind set was creating her - it means so much. my mindset with her is somehow always changing and shifting as she goes through her character arc throughout the story and how her developmental shifts and it's just something i really love and enjoy more than anything!!! <3 so thank you for letting me just talk about it for a little while as well as my thoughts and opinions, it means a lot :)

[popculturebuffet]

House of Mouse: “Goofy’s Valentine’s Date” Review

Come on in mouskeeteers! It’s Valentine’s Season here on popculturebuffet, and while I may be single, I do love a good romance story. I find them sweet, sometimes hilaroius, and endearing when done right. And the bane of my existance when done wrong, but we’ll be getting to smidgen of that too. Point is I may not be getting any romantic love this season but I can sure celebrate it. So for the next two weeks we’ll be diving deep first into some ending with one heck of a closer. 

So for our opening act since i’ve been going on in to the House of Mouse a lot lately, and since I NEARLY missed this one if not for Kevin, we’re going to be looking in on my boy Goofy as he grapples with being lonely and Daisy misguidedly tries to help him. Blind dates with a manquin and Mortimer hitting on women to predictable and justified results insues under the cut. 

So as usual for house of mouse we’re chunking this up by segment. Let’s go. 

Donald’s Valentine’s Dollar: Easily the segment of the night and the best House of Mouse short i’ve seen in a rewatch so far. The short is simple but awesome: Donald has only a dollar to spend for V-Day, and wants to buy daisy a tiny but sweet box of chocolates, but his dollar blows away in the wind and he chases after it. And that’s.. it that’s our premise. But it leads into fast paced looney tunes style shenanigans with donald zipping up and down kites and later taking goofy’s broken one and putting it on like wings Arthur Everest styles and taking after it. Also the nephews show up and dick around with their kites because their douchebags in some shorts. Also donald tries to punch a whale.. well a whale kite but still let it be said there’s a short where donald tries to punch what he thinks is a sky whale. And that is wonderful.  The climax is also really sweet, as Donald gets the dolalr, after another briliant sequence where they play hide and seek in the clouds, only to find it sold out and himself dejected waiting for her thinking she’ll be mad.. only for her to present him with the very gift he was going to give her and the two to share a look. 

It’s cute enough on it’s own but after SEVEAL weeks of having to put up with the  three cabs version it’s NICE to have a Daisy back whose not an overly demanding monster from some stygian hole in the sky. Not much else to say about this one. I’ts just REALLY good and I could easily recommend checking it out on it’s own. 

Mickey Saves Minnie: The Stairs This is one of those short segments from Mouseworks that lasts about a minute and is off a simple recurring premise, in this case Mickey saving Minnie from some sort of bizzare fortress of pete’s.. in this case THE STAIRS!

I said STAIRS. In this case Gimmicked stairs with all kinds of traps: boxing gloves, giant balls...

And giant slinkies. I knew one day they’d grow big and kill us all but they all laughed at me.. well whose laughing now.. well still them because Mickey gets past them easily. Pete turns the stairs into a slide but mickey rebounds by pure luck via slinky and uses one of the boxing gloves to win, minnie kisses him and this was real fun. Nothing really deep to go into just a fun few minutes of my life i’m glad i’m not getting back. Speaking of wishing I had minutes of my life back....

Pluto’s Arrow Error: Well this one’s messed up. Look Love Potion plots genuinely ONLY work when the writer knows that giving someone something to make you fall in love with them is inehrently messed up. It worked in Buffy because Xander did so for vengance after Cordellia broke up with him, which granted she did REALLY hurt him but it’s still a bit of overkill. However while it ends up backfiing and making every OTHER girl in school into him, and psyotically so as the episode goes on, he never indulges, as he KNOWS it’s wrong and not under their power or choice. Basically it was one long deconstuction of this nonsense. 

My point is unless it’s used to deconstruct this type of plot or for some shenanigans, Love Potion plots are inherently creepy at best and rapey at worst. So naturally we get one with Pluto trying to make a dog who dosen’t know him love him instead of trying to woo her, and accidently making her bodyguard/boyfirend I guess chase after him for 2 minutes while he’s tinted pink. And yes i know he’s a dog, but he’s an intellegent dog who should knwo this is bad and never gets called out on it and his punshiment.. is one long gay joke. 

So yeah while not the worst love potion plot i’ve probably seen, or love magic or what have you, I could make a list of those and might some day, it is still pretty uncomfortable and easily a dead spot in an otherwise pretty enjoyable episode. 

Goofy’s Valentine’s Date: And fitting it’s accompanying shorts, the good ones anyway, this is a simple plot with funny gags. It’s valentin’es day at the house of mouse and Mickey encourages everyone to kiss their sweeties. So we get Aladdin and Jasmine, AWWWW always shipped those two so adorable, a toy soldier and some other toy from a work im unfamiliar iwth and Timon turns down Pumba. Come on man, who are you trying to kid me or the censors? 

But Goofy’s depressed since he dosent have a sweetie and Daisy feels bad for the poor guy while Minnie tells her “not to meddle”. 

Minnie from a buisness standpoint, he’s crying while reading the menu and clealry not in great mental shape. Setting him up with someone or even just talking to him will help with that. And from a human being standpoint... your being a cruel ass to NOT help him in any way shape or form. The guys a fucking widower. He’s probably been lonely for some time and more focused on raising max. And since no one knows where Peg is he dosen’t have a lot options now he is ready to date again. It’s not MEDDLING to help a clearly lonely person whose gotten over his grief move on, it’s just called basic human decency. I expect that from cablleros daisy Min not you. 

So Daisy does end up meddling, in part because she thinks it’s shuffling around coins, and sets him up with a secret admirer.. without actually getting him one. 

So Minnie does agree to help and they.. put him in a blindfold and have him date a manquin. In front of the entire restraunt. I have no words.. since this is pretty funny and Goofy’s shenanigans while blindfolded, because it’s a BLIND date.

Also sidebar it’s very weird that she DID set Lincoln up with a blind date once but didn’t pull this gag. Point is it’s some funny stuff including Gus, in his first apperance on this blog seriously how’d it take so long, eating the shakes he orders since Goofy can’t see. 

Tying into the resolution to this is Moritmer, who spends the episode as you’d expect.. hitting on various characters. He hits on the wicked step sisters, whose cat attacks him, he hits on the lady gargoyle from huncback and her two friends rightfully beat his ass, he hits on madam mim who set shim on fire and he hits on the queen of hearts who somehow DOSEN’T cut off his head, and you know is married, and does launch him into goofy spoiling the ruse. Honestly I found this funny both because Moritmer is objectively hilarious and because the show DIDN’T take his side at all or give him anyone, and he suffered consequences for sleazly hitting on women. He also called himself a wonder man. No sir the only wonder men are these guys. 

And if your wondering about the secod one there was a whole song about it. 

Your welcome. So Goofy’s dejected until after Pluto’s cartoon where it turns out he had a secret admirer after all. it’s clarabelle! Awww.. and Daisy says “Well it’s better than a manquin” what a supportive friend you are. And she’s STILL better than cabs Daisy. Point is happy ending pulled sorta out of their ass, as she showed up earlier but sitll it woudl’ve been easy to have Clarabelle chime in during their scheme or something and have Minnie set them up to fix it. Or Donald or Mickey. Donald was absent outside of the short. That’s not fair. But overall not a bad wraparound, ending is a huge copout and feels like not much, but i’m starting to think that’s usual for season 1. I do KINDA ship the two, but usually I prefer her with horace or him with Peg Pete. Yeah you heard me and you cant unhear it and frankly I don’t want you to. We also get a funny add about the Queen of Hearts valentine’s service.  Overall not a bad episode. Fun gags, a cute premsie and only one really terrble short. Check it out this valentein’s and hopefully disney will have this show up on plus by next valentine’s. Until the next rainbow, it’s been a pleasure. 

[ewdaviddd]

folklore think piece

for a lower case album such as this, i will be writing a lowercase think piece on the subject. i will not explain why. you get it or you don’t.

the 1: i have never been in love or any type of romantic relationship that left me with lasting feelings of any kind. but, on my fourth listen through of this song today, what once was just a promising and fun intro to this peasant girl summer gut punch, brought me to actual tears as i sat on the toilet in my lime green childhood bathroom as if i were mourning the one that got away (another great song). however, i am an expert on being hung up on the past, the “what could have been”, and made up hypotheticals. this song also introduces the film motif seen a lot in this album. i think dating an actor has really gotten to her. anyway what a killer way to begin, top notch stuff. how can a song be so fun and so soul crushing at the same time?

cardigan: when did taylor wear black lipstick? this is important to me. an old cardigan is an inherently bisexual article of clothing. that is not an opinion. i read it somewhere today and i believe it. this is the tip of the queer-coding ice berg in folklore, never fear. another reference, “tried to change the ending / peter losing wendy”. this year i wrote a movie script where both peter and wendy were both gay. coincidence? probably. basically this one is classic taylor poetry on every level and it being one of a trio in a larger story makes it that much better. yet again, high school romance is not a universal experience (like for me for instance) but haunting my “what-ifs” is going to haunt me for a long time. and the thought of someone saying i was their favorite cardigan makes me want to scream into a pillow.

the last great american dynasty: my favorite ts songs have always been the ones with detailed characters and stories and this one introduces the trope of the “mad woman” who comes back later on as well a long with many fun character details. at first this song is just cheeky and cute, very visual, a fun world to jump into. but then this particular stretch of lines makes your heart drop into your chest and reminds you why taylor isn’t just always fun and always cute and always creative, she also holds the ability to nimbly sock you in the gut when you least expect: “fifty years is a long time / holiday house sat quietly on that beach / free of women with madness, their men and bad habits / and then it was bought by me.” my jaw is still on the floor. and i’ve never bought a house myself. but i’ve spent numerous christmases having a marvelous time ruining everything (so i’ve been told) so this song still applies to my life.

exile (ft. bon iver): i’m gonna be honest. for as long as i can remember i have strongly disliked bon iver and i never remembered why. it is a matter of principle at this point. i just don’t trust him. but then taylor announced she wrote a song with him which filled me with tremendous anxiety. but i can rest easy. much like “the last time” this song is a ts and male artist collaboration i can get behind. also the film motif again: the only time i’ve left a theatre when i didn’t like a movie was never because movie tickets are so expensive and if i’m shelling out 11 dollars to sit in a chair, i’m staying the whole time no matter how bad the ending. but i probably would have left my sister’s keeper if i had seen it before if i’m being honest. so i get it. thats why i read spoilers for everything i watch before watching it, because the anxiety of worrying about how it ends make me not enjoy it in the first place. the end of this song: the call and response felt… ethereal? i felt like i was watching a broadway musical from the splash zone seats, crying as i was spat on.

my tears ricochet: this song is what i picture stepping outside in the middle of the night when an inch or so of snow has just fallen and i can see the flakes fall in front of a street light sounds like. or the scorned secret ex lover throwing themselves onto the coffin demanding to know why they weren’t enough.   which is to say it feels like a sign from some sort of god. yet again, haunting is brought up, an overt reference to the fact that this album will live in my brain rent free for eternity. for some reason this song reminds me of the relationship between hamilton and burr when burr kills hamilton. that could be because i just watched the disney+ recording last week. one lives, one dies, but neither survive, both pay for it. Which is a super romantic and understanding view on murder. both musical experiences equally chilling and moving. if i die under mysterious circumstances this will for sure be played at the funeral.

mirrorball: first off, this is my mom's favorite which is very important. also, it has skewered a very specific but also universal insecurity of mine; existing just to please others and yet miserably failing. it is comforting that ts is not a “natural’ and feels she must always “try try try” because i too lack natural ability, but also rarely “try” even just the one time. the best way i can describe listening to this song is walking through a silent disco where everyone else is listening to some classic lady gaga jam and you are listening to a calming lullaby sung very far away. but don’t let the soothing sounds fool you. it still will have you reflecting on what it means to look and be looked at. a dark rabbit whole, like falling through the looking glass. i’ve never actually read that book though so i could be wrong.

seven: i’m dumb and on my first listen of this song i thought she “hit her peak” at 7 clock as opposed to age seven. but i always saw taylor swift as someone with an early bedtime. also a fun discovery while writing this, “seven” is the 7th song on the track list. clever. although this song is young and innocent and so nostalgic for a time when screaming ferociously was a widely accepted form of expression, it also sounds like a very old secret someone is whispering to me. a love from long ago that lasts beyond the person being in your life, passed down to me and it all just sounds a little gay. not just because of the specific line to hiding in the closet. but that certainly doesn’t go unnoticed. when i was seven i was definitely in love with girls and assumed that was just what friendship was, playing pirates and making plans of running away together.

august: the eighth track for the eighth month. her mind. also my birth month so that’s special. controversial opinion: from what i’ve read most people seem to think illicit affair is the third song in the triage of teen love. i will strongly make the case that it's actually this one. first of all, the subject: a short lived summer fling, which is specifically mentioned later in “betty”. the central heartbreak of this song is liking someone who always belonged to someone else. yes, this song is a window into a different summer, far from pandemic central and the escapist imagery is delightful. but a whole song from the pov of the “other woman” to james and betty is just so much more fun. and there are two more specific lyrics that prove my point. “remember when i pulled up and said "get in the car”” you will see later comes back from the other person’s perspective. and most of all: the repeated line, “meet me behind the mall”? only teenagers make plans to meet up behind a mall. i rest my case. so now we have cardigan and august. two pieces of the puzzle.

this is me trying: i’m glad i now have a succinct message to send to anyone when they ask me what the hell i’m doing at any given moment. this song just sounds like regret and waste in the most self-assured and confident way. this is “back to december” with the training wheels off.  i have no apologies for my efforts at wasting all my potential. but in this song, taylor has opened her arms to me in a warm embrace and has forgiven me for all i’ve done wrong and reminds me to not take for granted the “try”. okay mom. i’m crying again, but okay.

illicit affair: this is the kind of thing that makes you feel sixteen, living in a dull suburb, while secretly screwing your 38 year old married neighbor who’s rich but wants to be an artiste. aka like a character in euphoria or something. it’s sexy and dangerous until you think about it and then it's just dingy and creepy. but this song starts and stays beautiful. most importantly, this song is too sad and depressing frankly, to be a part of the trilogy. we could never forgive james for leaving such a mess and making her a fool. you don’t want to be this girl. you want to walk up to her and shake her and yell “you exist and will not be ruined by any dumb man”. and that’s feminism.

invisible string: is it reductive if i say this one’s about joe? all my non-stan friends have asked me which ones are about him. we forgive them and point them in this direction. because it is lovely and beautiful that we are all tied to our soulmate for our whole lives before we ever meet them (because that would in fact mean that there is someone out there for everyone which might be naive or dumb but i am both of those things and whats the point of living if you don’t believe in the power of love). this honestly gives me “begin again” vibes in the best way. it’s red-era level with the wisdom of lover-era tay. sublime.

mad woman: the second mention of the “mad woman” as both taylor herself and the character in the story. as usual, tay stays calling out double standards and the manipulation of women into “going crazy” for expressing reasonable anger. I, personally, wish i could say “fuck you forever” without someone saying i’m “overreacting”. this is my least favorite song on the album and i’d still listen to it three times in a row and need to resist the urge to set a man’s lawn on fire. just girly things.

epiphany: i know she said this one is about her grandfather’s experience in the military but all i imagine is a slow montage of harry style’s character in “dunkirk” on the beach. and it’s beautiful. and much like my sophomore in high school self reading “all quiet on the western front” it evokes a pain from deep inside me that engulfs a loss i could never describe and a sadness too awful to witness. you will listen to this song and feel absolutely powerless to the will of the universe and it’s cruelty. and the faint but steady heart monitor beep in the background… i’ve never seen “grey’s anatomy” but i can imagine why it has so many fans sobbing. and let me end on this: two soldiers in some old war (meaning both men based on dunkirk) watching each other like this and living and dying together…gay.

betty: the first verse was pulled directly out of my subconscious fantasy of being in love in high school and it being so wonderful and painful and dramatic. and taylor riding a skateboard… is a mood. the song has been out for less than a week and it’s already a cold take to talk about how this is her gayest song to date (close runner-ups being reputation’s “dress” and “cardigan”). but of course i will still talk about it. the lyrics embody such authentic awkward gay energy (see the lesbian in booksmart for reference) and having been a 17 year old only three years ago, i can say with reasonably good authority that no 17 year old straight boy could stand in front of a crowd of peers and beg forgiveness from a girl he hurt. it’s just not realistic. these are all awkward, over-dramatic, young girls stumbling through love. and it’s awesome. james is the speaker of this song, and the subject of “august”, the summer fling that was never truly there due to james’ love for betty, the titular role of this song. thus completing the love triangle. and there are so many obvious references in this song to both “august” and “cardigan”. rhyming cardigan with car again makes me want to light myself on fire in the best way. i love it. “i dreamt of you all summer long” is the final nail in the coffin for the girl in “august” who was clearly just a place-holder. totally separate from taylor swift, my favorite word is porch. so the amount of times it appears in her lyrics is wonderful. say it out loud. it just feels nice. anyway, this song makes me want to be young and dumb and in love. the second can really only be tolerated because of the first and third. i hope the story has a happy-ending. if james were a boy i’d wish him the plague.

peace: the coming-of-age movie starring james and betty (and inez) is over. we have come to “the age” i guess. there’s a thought that’s gonna fester. if this song was just the line, “would it be enough if i could never give you peace?” over and over for four minutes it would still smash me to pulp and fill my body with helium gas. i can and will cause a car wreck when this comes on the aux. if this song is what being grown up is like (bare in mind grown up to me is like, 30) then i’m ready to be done coming of age. because i already worry if i’ll be at all enough for anyone and way too much for someone at the same time. but like all good poetry, this song isn’t about what it “means”, but how it “feels”. and this is new york city, the summer, pouring rain, a long walk home, desperately fearing and hoping they are there waiting for you.

hoax: a one-sided conversation between me and my stubborn clinical depression. i too, constantly stand alone on the cliff demanding a reason. one has not yet been presented. it operates both within and and against me. i could be bigger and stronger than it. but instead i tend to it like a prickly plant. (“no other sadness in the world will do”). there is nothing both sadder and funnier then the scene in “avatar: the last airbender” when prince zuko stands alone on a cliff screaming at the sky for lightning to strike him. i don’t know why this song reminds me so much of that. what a way to end such an emotional rollercoaster. it is so emotionally draining that it simply forces me to start folklore again from the top and listen to it all over again.  or take a long therapeutic nap.

there are no skips. and it will still surprise you on your 267th listen. proceed with caution.

i knew you, in a past life maybe. i have not met you yet, but folklore has made me believe you exist.

@taylorswift 10/10 good work

@taylornation this had to be shared and i don’t have a twitter so