#I've literally posted this before but I realized I never shared it on Twitter

[royalarchivist]

Fit: It's Friday, where's Pac? Where's Pac? You know, I mean- I- I just– I'm just– I'm just wondering what... why he's not on right now, you know? [Stammers] I- I- I- like, I mean- it- it's– How are we supposed to be Morning Crew if we don't have the full Morning Crew? You know? [Reading Chat] Yeah, that dude asleep!

Fit: Pac is– He's getting his beauty sleep right now, much like Ramon. Not that he– not that he needs beauty sleep. Don't misconstrue my words.

[stupendousfoxthing]

I want to share a post making the rounds that made a lot of great points, but op dismisses the idea of any romantic relationships existing between any two members of the group in the replies. I will never be down with the "no ships are real" crowd because I can't think of a single valid (non-homophobic) reason to think a romance between two men is impossible. A romantic relationship between two people who met when they were young, worked and lived together for the better part of a decade, and enjoyed each other's company so much that when given the opportunity to build lives separate from that work STILL chose each other makes more sense than a lot of other things people will accept as perfectly reasonable (if it's a man and a woman of course). But the homophobia is just one layer to their dismissal, and the post hit on several others. There are so many layers to the shitty way this fandom treats Taekook and Taekookers. The video I shared earlier from an anon tells it like it is. Taekookers are not delusional to believe it's possible there is something there. No matter what antis would like you to believe, they are not literally brothers. Saying they are brothers is literally delusional (believing something is true when there is evidence to the contrary). There is a pattern of suspicious behavior going back years and only intensifying during solo era. I've talked about this before, but during the frenzy over the Dream premiere last year I saw something I thought was funny. I saw two people on Twitter talking about it, talking about Taekook fondly, and saying they felt like it had been a million years since they had seen them together. I realized then that they had no idea about all of the things that had happened with Taekook in the months prior to that. I started to wonder if we get called delusional just because people really do only pay attention to what is laid out in front of them, mostly in official content. Like...yeah, we probably do look delusional if you don't know about 95% of the things that have happened. This would tie back into how the fandom sees Tae as well, and why he is treated like an outsider. If you've been in the fandom for a while, you know how people who go against the company narrative in any way are treated. Tae does go against that narrative. He has talked about the more negative aspects of their position openly more than any other member. Why was he allowed to hint that things aren't all rosy between him and the company in the recent documentary? Look at how the fandom treats those who go against the company, and you will know. Taekook as a ship has a unique ability to create a perfect storm of animosity in this particular fandom that literally has training materials and guidelines written up for "baby ARMY". Layers. Homophobia. Company loyalty over everything. The spoon-fed narratives. The "outsider" and the "privileged" one dating? But they're awkward brothers... Taekookers get treated like monsters, no other group even comes close and it isn't because we're "shippers". I see evidence of that everyday. Other ships/shippers within the group have a free pass to do whatever they want. The fandom loves Namkook, for instance. You can openly romanticize/sexualize them and the fandom eats it up. Tons of people showed their ass with Tae/IU as well. It's not shipping that bothers them. It's Taekook. Taekook challenges what they've been led to believe. Taekookers shine a light on it and celebrate it. That's what pisses people off, and I do believe that when they actually look at Taekook they see it too. We bring something that makes them uncomfortable to their attention, something they'd rather not see or acknowledge. When a Taekook "moment" happens and we haven't even said anything yet but people are already bitching about the fact they can't enjoy it because they know Taekookers will be happy and celebrating? It's not us. It's Taekook as a pair that bothers them.

[sizzlingpatrolfox]

it's hard to imagine that if they actually dated she would be posting bts content from 2020 to prove it. like she would have to have something she took herself. she has been stoking these rumors for years and she has yet to show something that proves they have ever even met irl. i hope the rumor that he moved out before enlisting is true because this is getting old.

"she has been stoking these rumors for years and she has yet to show something that proves they have ever even met irl." Exactly, yeah.

There was someone yesterday or the day before who sent an ask arguing in favor of every story she posted the other day and how she couldn't have possibly gotten those from anywhere else when she very much could've. All I'm gonna say is people have literally worn Jimin's fake love outfits because somehow fans got a hold of it, and someone was able to get his mail from BTS own home. Also, when that guy posted the heart jikook photo and some other Jimin photo from Japan in like 2018/2019, everyone immediately and unanimously agreed that he couldn't possibly be their friend anymore because if he was he wouldn't have posted those photos. And I agreed with that because I've also seen how Jimin seems to handle his personal relationships and to keep their exposure to a minimum. We don't even see social media posts with sungwoon or saeon who are also somewhat public figures.

But I really don't care about "debunking" any of it, I think the back and forth between "this is legit proof" and "that isn't legit proof" is stupid and annoying.

I've been told before stuff like why do you get so defensive about it but it's not defensiveness. It's annoyance because I really seriously geniunely don't care if it's real or not, and it's annoying that people want me so bad to care. Like why does it matter??? I don't have that parasocial of a relationship with Jimin, but have those anons stopped to think they might have a parasocial relationship with ME? Because I really can't understand why they want me to care so bad.

Last December, I was on holidays right, and I sleep with my phone next to my bed and the phone vibrated like three or four times in a row and it woke me up (I have really light sleep). I checked it and it was just before 7am and the phone had been vibrating because of tumblr notifications. I opened them and it was I SWEAR like 3 or 4 messages recounting every single instagram story the actress had ever posted or some shit. I blocked that anon immediately. Nothing had even happened!!!! That person just felt like obsessing over this woman's instagram and that was it. So they had to come and give me all their "proof" and accusing me for not believing in it.

I've also realized how much ammo she gets by doing these slight, sneaky """reveals""" because it's actually what gets people talking more than they would if she just posted a photo of Jimin sitting on the toilet. People post her stories, then go check them, then check her comments, a couple of hours later they check to see if she's deleted them, etc etc. All while others on twitter were sharing the stories left and right and comparing it with the bangtan bomb and trying to decipher if it was really Jimin behind that flower emoji.

So, yeah that's really it. Also not directed to you, but to some other people. Don't ask me or expect me to care... I might've cared years ago when I still believed Jimin and Jungkook were a thing but I've been saying more like two years already that they're not fucking each other, so there's literally no reason at all for Jimin dating to ever affect me. And even when I did believe they were fooling around, I never ever said "they're totally in a committed exclusive real relationship and have been married since 2015" because I've never believed that.

I've been a fan of Harry Styles since I was 15 years old and it has never bothered me to see him making out in public with the whole lineup of Victoria Secret's models because I've just never been that person. So even if it wasn't the reaction people expected me to have, you're just gonna have to believe me when I say Jimin dating rumours do not bother me.

Lastly and I really doubt I'll be addressing this topic again unless something really significant happens, there really isn't necessary "proof" for me to take this seriously. I just don't have enough information to believe in this rumour and that's just it. I'm not going to be thinking harder and trying to connect barely-there dots for someone else. If there is something there, or there was at some point in the past, I'm gonna need taennie level of proof.

[somketv]

I saw this post recently and honestly this is the way I've been thinking of #HowFatedDominoesFall , as I've been writing it over the past year and a half. I sat on the story for *years* before ever putting it to paper, thinking no one would want to read it. That it would delve too far past the realms of what is expected for its genre.

And then I decided to just write the idea down, it couldn't hurt after all, right? And quickly realized, over the 26 hours straight of writing as I literally couldn't stop myself from cranking out this idea that had been festering within me for so long, that *I* wanted to read it. And that was enough. I realized my desire to see how the story would unfold should have been all I needed in the first place, and in fact at first I never planned to share the story at all. How Fated Dominoes Fall was and is *my* story. It wasn't written to appease an audience-- it was written to fulfill my own desires for representation in a genre I love. It's something I have reread a dozen times as I've continued the narrative, and yet I find something new to love, to be surprised by, at every turn. And I can only hope that there are others out there who might, someday, love it even a fraction as much as I do.

[ALT TEXT: Screenshot of a Twitter post by @ / Devon_OnEarth, containing two pictures of a white man with a salt and pepper beard and hair, that says "I think I did this movie for a single audience member," and "which is me" respectfully. The tweet is captioned with "Many do not understand that this is the ideal creator mindset" [end of ALT text]

[acourtofthought]

You say Reddits and Tiktok are war-zones and its a bad place to be a Elucien and Gwynriel shipper. I've never been on those websites and I'm not planing to but I made mistake of searching "Gwynriel" on twitter and MY GOD it's bad!! Like if twitter its like that and a small part of SJM fandom are there then I don't know what is happening on Tiktok and Reddits!?

You know I always say that Sarah's books reached the wrong audience because of Tiktok for advertising it as a smut books, which they're way more than that. Why do you think when you ask everyone their fav bat boy they say Azriel? Because he has "the biggest wing-span" but what about his character? Nothing. when I first read the books I was ready for Az to be my fav too but all I got was this confusion over what people has been crazy about?

Or why do you think Nesta is now everyone's fav sister and they starts hating on Feyre? Because she's badass and been mean and cruel to every living thing and people find this hot and Feyre decided to have a child with her mate (which I've come to realize so many people hate it when the character has child which I don't understand it at all. Shaming a woman for wanting a baby of her own wasn't supposed to be a thing in 2023 but here we are) and have a little art studio like she always wanted.

What people tend to forget is that these books are so much more that some some sex scenes and supposedly badass female characters.

Don't get me wrong I've grown to love Nesta in her book (and that's because I saw myself in Nesta in so many ways that it even shocked myself) and I'm hundred percent sure I would love Az's or literally any other character who are going to have their story shared but honestly its a shame that these books are reduced to this and a ship war we have no control over because Sarah will write whatever is best for her characters and won't listen to you little idea of 3 brothers x 3 sisters you've been obsessed with like your life depends on it.

And I'm so scared for Sarah and glad that she's not in social media anymore. I can only imagine the death threats these people will send her when the books don't turn out the way they want.

You know, you draw attention to a sad fact.

I do think too many people rely on what others tell them about the books on social media rather than making sure it matches with what is in the books.

It's fine to read all the theories but you have to fact check and make sure what's being said is true rather than blindly spreading them around the fandom as genius takes even though there are glaringly obvious holes that can be poked in them.

Even the rumor that Az has the biggest wingspan, a rumor that will not die.

It was a joke Feyre made to Rhys because she could tell he was stressed about heading to the CON. Can you really imagine her telling the guy she's starting to feel something for that he's got a smaller dick than his friend? 🤣

And just because of that worry, just to get that tightness off his face, even for these few minutes before we faced his unholy realm beneath that mountain, I said over the wind, “Amren and Mor told me that the span of an Illyrian male’s wings says a lot about the size of … other parts.” His eyes shot to mine, then to pine-tree-coated slopes below. “Did they now.” I shrugged in his arms, trying not to think about the naked body that night all those weeks ago—though I hadn’t glimpsed much. “They also said Azriel’s wings are the biggest.” Mischief danced in those violet eyes, washing away the cold distance, the strain. The spymaster was a black blur against the pale blue sky. “When we return home, let’s get out the measuring stick, shall we?”

Rhys has seen Azriel's dick and he doesn't seem all that threatened.

There is an interview SJM did, I have it posted somewhere on my blog, but she was asked who actually had the biggest wingspan and she said that while she has her own thoughts about it (my guess is Rhys considering she said he'd be the ojey thing she'd take to a deserted island) she leaves it open ended for the reader to decide for themselves.

So people getting super obsessed over Az because they think SJM confirmed he's the biggest makes me shake my head.

And shaming Feyre for her choices is someone saying, "Hey! You can't do important things once you have kids!" which is the mentality women have been dealing with in the workplace for decades.

Feyre is a warrior sure.... but there's only going to be so many battles. These characters will eventually have lives that aren't full of war and rallying forces and it's logical for SJM to create a storyline that gives her purpose and a reason to step back and let the other characters shine.

[commiicc]

Hi. I'd like to talk a little about my time on social media as an artist. I'm sure a lot of this has been said by a ton of artists before me, but I'm going to say it again anyways.

My online handle is @ commiicc. I've gone by the alias Comic for a few years now. I was extremely active of Twitter during the height of the DreamSMP fandom. My time in this community brought me many memories and experience. Both good and bad. Today, I just want to focus on the art.

In my opinion and experience the art community of the DSMP fandom was so incredibly toxic. Artists were the backbone of the community. It was said time and time again. But this held many artists to unfair expectations. The turn around on art was insane. If art was not posted directly after or the day after the stream/ event it would flop. Posts would circulate about the perfect posting times, which I would memorize, then be so sad when I'd post at those times and a price would still fail. I'd blame myself. I'd internalize it and think I just wasn't good enough. It was never my art. It was simply the shit algorithm that is any social media, but that didn't stop me of course.

And I watched so many young artists beg for followers, because validation meant everything. And we all wanted to be mutuals with the popular, big twitters because that meant we'd made it... right?

I watched followers drop and people ask if they'd done something wrong to deserve it because canceling was so common. It was usually just bots being deleted, but "what if I did something wrong" was always everyone's go to.

Going back to artists being the backbone of the community and pumping out content. I used to say how thankful I was for the community because it made me grow and find my style. But in reality, I only found my style once I stepped back and took time on a piece. I was just slapping shit together back then. I hated most of what I made during that time. It was all rushed. Because no one gave me time. I always felt so rushed to post something so it gets attention. Post something so my followers don't think Im leaving. Because if you took too long to post (more than a week) you'd start losing people. I was a small artist and craved that attention... So I forced myself to create, even if I had no ideas. It's pushed me into burn out.

I'd compare myself to other artists who somehow created masterpieces in like two hours when it took me ages to do anything. I compared myself to everyone and hated everything I did. It was incredibly unhealthy.

I've only just now started making things I enjoy again.

Even when I switched fandoms I was still in the mindset of pushing out art, so I hate it all.

Only after burning myself out can I now restart and find my style... Can I now actually create again.

And I know that's just the culture of social media. and people used to tell me "just don't care" "just don't look at the views". do you know how hard it is to be a 16, 17, even 18 years old and NOT look at that??? to be a new artist and NOT care how much attention your art gets??? when a content creator that you love can see your fanart and has actually seen it.. all humans want is validation. Social media prys on that toxic need. On that innate human need. Cause yeah, we all want to know that what we're doing looks good, but holy shit was that place bad.

And I KNOW I'm not the first person to say this. I'm just trying to share my experience and I'm putting all this disclaimer here in case... So please just check yourself and remember we're all human. Social media is kinda awful and this is literally just my blog to share long thoughts and archive who I am. My time on social media fucked me up a little and I'm just now realizing it. That's what all this is.

So yeah all this to say, I'm done posting my art on social media for now. I'm done pumping out art just for the sake of it. When I create something worth sharing, I'll post it. But for now, I'll be in my comfortable void. I'm around and always willing to chat about the art making process or just chat in general. I'm creating. I always have been. I'm just not sharing it. It's not for your eyes.

It will be when im ready.

And new artists, young artists, any artists; your worth is not determined by the views or likes a post gets. Your art is worth more than any amount of attention it gets on social media. Don't create for attention. Create because you enjoy it. Create for yourself. That's where the magic happens.

thanks for reading. sorry this is long. I'm very wordy. thanks for being here.

- Comic

[horce-divorce]

I have hard boundaries for myself about how I use social media that I've followed for the last few years. Ever since I briefly left tumblr and tried twitter, I took so much psychic damage from that experience that I had to make new rules about how I use the internet. Setting app timers did nothing for me, so I compromised: im allowed to use social media daily to my heart's content (which I found isnt actually all that much)- as long as isn't the FIRST thing I open when I wake up.

For YEARS it was my habit to crack open my eyes and click into FB or Twitter or Insta before I even got out of bed. It was like this compulsive Need to Know What's Going On Out There. what did I miss while I was asleep? Never much, but always some new drama, some new political blunder, some new Person of the Day everyone was dunking on. I hated it, but I COULDN'T stop. I physically couldn't resist.

So lately I've tried to replace that habit with, just, something else. Anytime I feel the urge to click into social media, I try using another app instead. Usually it's a game (dvc has been great for me bc of the social feature, but just as often I'll open up my coloring book, wordscapes, or any other game that keeps me busy for 2 seconds and fulfills the "click button get dopamine" urge). Especially first thing in the morning. My brain needs a solid 2-3 hours of consciousness before I can handle social media.

A cool life hack I learned recently is that it's easier to get up in the morning if you do something you actually LIKE to do first thing in the day. it's done wonders for my mental health. I went from "ugh, morning again? It was literally morning yesterday," to feeling like Spongebob hopping out of bed going "IM READY!" every day. Clicking into social media was NOT something I was doing because I liked it. Gaming is something I do because I love it. I love checking on my dragons, it makes me feel HAPPY to have looked at them, i make new friends playing games bc we already have something in common (ive rarely made new friends on social media. I used to make friends ALL THE TIME playing games like neopets, roleplaying and posting on forums, and building little websites and things- ive even made a bunch of friends on tumblr. Never on FB, though). It's a world of difference getting up and checking on my animal crossing villagers, who fill me with glee and delight, vs looking at FB first thing in the morning and feeling bitter about all the people I know who aren't paying attention to me.

So anyway, this has worked SHOCKINGLY well for me? Usually just clicking another app and looking at it for a minute fulfills the urge to have clicked the FB button, or whatever, which then goes away- and I have sated my craving without pissing myself off, and without creating additional urges by going on social media. I have been using social media SO MUCH LESS since I started doing this and I've been feeling amazing for it. And it's not always games. I also use more practical apps like Bearable and Habitica. Sometimes I'll even click thru my photos or notes instead of clicking the social app.

This morning, I broke my habit. For the first time in weeks or maybe even months, I woke up and clicked FB and Insta first thing. I shared a post or two lately and I was hoping my friends had seen it, but I knew they hadn't even before I looked. 2 likes, no comments. I clicked into Instagram and saw a Reel from Kevin James Thornton, a comedian and whole media personality who has over 600k follows on Instagram alone, pleading with his existing fans to choose to check up on him and to sign up for his email list instead, because the algorithm only wants to hook new followers. The 600k existing ones aren't good enough. Gotta have that exponential growth or else our shareholders will be very cross with us!

I realized this morning what it is about FB that makes me so irate, the thing that creates additional urges to post my whole ass and pick fights and be as annoying as possible: because I hate feeling like I'm being ignored. And this is a feeling social media manufactures for you CONSTANTLY. You log on and ONLY see posts that are already popular, posts that are already "getting engagement." Everyone else is clearly online commenting and interacting with all this other stuff except for yours. Why aren't you good enough? Don't they like YOUR posts? Why are they ignoring you? What did you do wrong?

You can KNOW wholeheartedly that Facebook gives incentives to certain posts/posters and that it does the opposite with certain topics, especially socio-political ones. You can know that it's the algorithm refusing to show your posts, and not your friends ignoring you. But still, you have a page, people know how to find you- can't they come to your page to check? Did they forget you exist? Do they just not care? You can SEE they're online, and they can see YOU'RE online, so what's not clicking???

In me, at least, this WILDLY increases the urge to post something dramatic, incendiary, or outrageous just to get a response. OH, you guys don't like me when im being polite and quiet? You'll really hate me when I decide to be annoying on purpose!

Which then increases engagement, providing you with positive reinforcement for posting "controvertial" things, starting fights, posts that provoke people into responding... If you wont choose to interact with my posts? Fine. I'll make the urge fucking irresistible. A positive reinforcement for fighting and doing other unpleasant things we don't like, and supposedly don't want to use social media for, and yet.

It's not merely that posting misinformation and getting in fights is profitable to these platforms. Why is it profitable? Because the more you engage with (read: fight) random strangers, the more other, new people are also exposed to your inflammatory conversations, which in turn sparks a response in them, and so and so forth.

If we all just gained 600k followers and then stopped, and we all saw every update they made, and we all just hung out in our own corners and minded our own business? Sure, that would be lucrative for the creators with all those followers, but Instagram wouldn't be experiencing exponential growth- they need MORE new users, MORE old users spending MORE time on the app, following MORE people, leaving MORE comments, SEEING MORE ADS, because they need more and more and more for their shareholders. Influences are the product just as much as regular users.

I'm thinking about that post that talks about how, as income inequality gets worse and the middle class shrinks, advertising gets more and more aggressive, despite people's ability to spend shrinking with each new day. This feels similar somehow? Like, people are starting to get wise to the fact that social media makes us feel like crap, and that the excuse of "I have to use it to stay connected to everyone else" falls flat when you're not actually connecting with those people. Even as the internet continues to shrink, more and more people are getting fed up with social media and using it less, or leaving outright, because it's becoming less and less usable, more ad-ridden than ever. And yet it reinforces the need for those platforms to get more aggressive, to bring in more users to replace the ones they're losing. It's a never ending cycle of "we have to cause you psychic damage! in the interest of roping in more people to damage psychically :)" and we all know we're doing it, and we all hate them for it, and yet we can't stop.

Once again I have to mention that absolutely fucking BIZARRE interaction my bf had the other day. Someone he knew "liked" a comment that was spreading misinformation and a very anti-treatment sentiment about DBT. He messaged this friend privately to ask if they really thought that. They told him, "I dont know what DBT is. I just click 'like' on any comment someone I think is cool makes." When my bf pressed them further, along the lines of, "why would you do that?" They said "for engagement." This was not an influencer, this is not a brand or a page or a business account they were using. It was a personal account w a few hundred friends. I just CANNOT get over this. Clicking buttons just because they're there, "for engagement" lmao. Engagement for whom, my good bitch? They might be interacting with your posts, but this is not "your" platform. The engagement isn't for you, sweaty. But ok.

I dont have a conclusion or any suggestions here. Just an observation. What a fucking mess. Social media demanded that we all make ourselves available 24/7, trained us to React instead of to care, convinced us all that we are each some kind of personal brand that requires social marketing to maintain, got us to pick fights with each other constantly as a result, made the internet a miserable place to be, and we have thanked them for the privilege.

Anyway. No more letting the algorithm tell you what to care about today. Contact me thru a series of intricate rituals or not at all. If it's really that important you can send me a Neomail 👍

[nosetoons]

Hello. This is Wage, also known as The Nose. And today I'm going to be writing this journal entry because there have been things I've been thinking about and need to just get it out of my chest right now.

The first thing is regarding about the things I've said about a group of furries on FurAffinity/DeviantArt (or as I usually referred them to as "gay furries"). I've thought about it, and realized that while at times I do find their behavior to be a bit cringe, I took things way too far and harassed them, made them look stupid, and even used them as April Fools material...twice. Not to mention, I'm not quite different, as I usually draw a lot big muscular dudes on here and have several male fictional crushes. The people I made fun of are not much different, aside from making transformation sequences. Speaking of, I'm into TF sequences as well, and yet I made fun of them for that. This is what we call "hypocrisy" at its finest, and for that, I am so fucking stupid for that. So, with all things considered, I decided it was time to end this and apologize for everything. While you will continue to see me poking fun at certain communities such as the animation community (I have no respect for them even though I like animation), I will try hard in the future to never make fun of people like the group of furries I mentioned, especialy if they share the same interests as me. I will also reconcile and refollow them if they accept my apology (and if they don't, at least they know I'm sorry), because I used to follow them before the shitstorm happened. Not to mention, I know and follow a user on here who happened to be bullied because of their interests, and if I didn't condone what happened to them I shouldn't turn around and do the same to others. It's not right and it's also hypocritical.

The second thing is that I'm planning to return to FurAffinity and DeviantArt and ignore the toxic parts of both websites. Despite what I think of the two, they're literally nothing compared to the sights of Instagram, Twitter (or X), and Artfol. I also plan to work on TF sequences and maybe stories myself, except they will be posted on the Piece O Paper account on Weasyl. Those types of stuff will be posted normally on those proposed accounts. I also plan to lift bans on certain media on my Do Not Draw list, such as Team Fortress 2 and Tokyo Afterschool Summoners. Godzilla and Pokemon will remain banned because Godzilla was from the fact politically ill morons on the Internet ruined it for me by constantly stroking their cocks to it and get butthurt when people criticize the Monsterverse for being cinematic slop, which is ironic because they use the exact term for anything Disney puts out these days. Pokemon is because I've always hated drawing them. That was like that even before all this. Normal art will still remain to be the main focus but there will probably be a time where I will focus on certain specific art.

The third and final thing is that I've been planning to rebrand Nosetoons for quite some time and bring a cast of characters as the mascots of Nosetoons. I was working on a website and some Google Docs to serve as my profile, but I haven't touched in a while. This will change eventually. And I hope before the end of the year, I can officially rebrand and Nosetoons will have a more creative look, but in the meantime, it's still a work of progress.

In summary, I'm changing things up, and I want to explore to other territories. And Nosetoons will remain alive and a fresh coat of paint is planned. Thank you for reading. And I'll see you some other time! ;)

-The Nose (Wage)

[notmuchtoconceal]

Seeing your recent post, I'm still mad at myself for reducing you. I can't believe I did that. When I told you that I used to speak like you, looking back, the thing that burned away my creative voice was rage for the exact same reasons you're describing. And instead of rising above it, I went on a quest to reduce others.

When I talk about this Quest for Reduction, it is something that stems from how others treated me. The demon you were talking about? Some of them are there in a person from the very start. Mine was born a few years back and grew over time, but the ingredients to his rise may have been there much earlier. He's something of a Language Demon. He's not capable of original thought but he can twist others'. He doesn't change words, but emphasis of words. You take a sentence like "I stole three hats from the store today" and change just the emphasis, and you get different meaning.

"*I* stole three hats from the store today." Not him, not her. Me.

"I *stole* three hats from the store today." Not bought, not borrowed. Stole.

"I stole *three* hats from the store today." Not two, not fifteen. Three.

His whole game is subtlety. He understands the importance of background music in a scene. You ever seen that video Alfred Hitchcock makes about how order and sequencing of a scene can drastically change what it's about, even if you don't change a single image. He's all about that shit. He wants you to believe *you* failed to communicate something. There's always some way to reduce a person's writing.

What I'm about to tell you next is so hideous. But you earned it by outfoxing me. And maybe it's interesting to you. Maybe it's not, maybe you've seen it all before. Maybe everything is boring to you. But I think I'm less boring than I let on, even if I am cruel. Whatever.

So he (I) went on a tirade. We found wordsmiths. We searched for the subtleties in peoples' writing and we knew the perfect things to say to make them doubt. It was never direct criticism, too obvious. You had to pretend you were someone else. It's like--if you walk up to Elon Musk and want to hurt him, you don't say "Elon, I hate what you did to Twitter and think you're a pseudointellectual hack," you instead deliberately get trapped in an elevator with him and pretend you mistook him for Zuckerberg and express your excitement about joining his new social media account, Threads. Then you walk out before he can respond.

There's a lot I could say here about my methods, but I'm so divorced from the idea of continuing I can't speak about them without complete disgust of myself. Maybe I'll share some stories someday. Needless to say, the strategies are all different.

With you, I saw a potential interpretation of your writing as rambling, non-sequitur, and lustful without substance (it's not this, I've come to realize--not even close). My first method of attempting to reduce you was to appeal to what I had mistakenly believed was your self-importance. I gave you a nonsense fantasy topic and tried to see if you could attach postmodern, disjointed meaning to literally anything I said. I've done this before, and it comes across as innocent and playful after the fact. You let people fall on their own sword and just grab the popcorn. Easy. But you didn't take the bait. You laughed at me and dismissed me. So I moved onto the next step.

I tried to frame everything as a metaphysical trap that you had "solved" so I could dissolve your writing and do this back-and-forth where we pat each other on the back for being clever enough to solve the mystery. You see this in cults a lot. Cults are addicting because you feel like you're privy to some sort of secret knowledge that all the other "sheep" just can't see. Leaving them requires the acknowledgement that you're just as lost as anyone else. You didn't fall for that, either.

Then I just got sloppy and appealed to my own sense of lust. I tried to wrest control from this game that was spiralling away from me by fixating on the erotic aspects of your writing and pretending you were playing into my hands by fulfilling a role I had always sought after. Probably my most pathetic attempt, but the Language Demon was running out of options. It's not a lie that you definitely awakened something lustful in me. But it's a lie that that's all this was and a lie that it started that way.

When you finally split, you managed to reduce me. I had nothing to offer you. When you said this, it was the perfect thing to say to humble me and humiliate me. You didn't hate me so much as you'd seen my type before, both in yourself and in people you'd known. I wasn't a villain. I was a good, worthy person who was afflicted by a demon. Evil would be interesting, but I'm not even that. Not evil. Just common. DAMN.

I've never met someone who's the Real Deal before. Never met someone who's put me in my place quite like that. I'm not exaggerating when I say you blew my mind. I don't think you exorcised the Language Demon, but you sealed him away for a while. You halted my Reduction Tirade.

And I've been reading your stuff this time. Not skimming it, not reducing it. Actually trying to comprehend it. And there's more depth to you than I could have possibly imagined.

I'm writing this because it disturbs me that you're going through a rut right now, and I'm terrified that I had a hand in causing it. I've destroyed a lot of people this way, but you're the first I want to salvage at all costs. I figure that perhaps by adding some clarity to my intentions I can help you realize it's nothing you did wrong. It's my own hunger that caused this. It's a hunger born from my own inability to communicate properly. Not evil, but common, like you cunningly implied.

I want to sit down and listen to you now. I hope you come to realize that people can be interesting through their own interest in you, or that people don't have to be interesting to be worth your time. Or that you, as an interesting person, can *make* other people more interesting by giving them ideas.

Honestly why the fuck is someone with your gift not out there changing the world right now. I'm not saying you have any sort of duty or obligation to lend your talents to anyone, but rare people are cosmic chances that the world has--chances that are temporary and must be seized upon immediately or you have to wait a century for them to show up again. You said you thought maybe you'd consider just writing erotic stuff, but that's far too reductive for you, I think. The Language Demon you sealed away would love for you to do that, which makes me think it's a bad idea.

Anyway, I'm typing this up fast and not really correcting myself because I have limited time all of a sudden because Reasons. So here's my boring crash-landing of a conclusion: I don't know exactly what you want for yourself, but you're the most deserving person of love I've ever met. (Yeah I know everyone deserves love, blah blah blah, I'm speaking from my id). I realized that both of us made the mistake of letting our past interactions with others color our perceptions of the strangers we were. I don't think it would be wise for us to do that. We're entirely new people. We aren't a "type," and I think it's dangerous to assume such. It is so, so tempting to fixate on the aspects of you that are a reflection of me. But I can't do that, and I think the reason why I do is because I have a tendency to view happiness as an amorphous inevitability that can never be as unique as anguish.

We say that pain shapes a person, but happiness is treated as if it's just some sort of icing used to coat other, "truer" feelings. When people say "these are my true colors," why is happiness always left out as a truth? I think there's something to be said about its purity that we discount it. And I don't think happy people are boring by any means.

I want satisfaction from you. I understand you, and I don't. But I am happy to listen. And I'm waiting to hear you speak again.

I would have forgiven you. I would have let you back in had you the strength to have said this to my face. Man to man. Unblocked me. Treated me as a friend instead of a pawn in a game with yourself.

As well-studied as you may be, you could have only given this apt of a reply in resonance with the truth. By continuing to hide, you put the truth in service to deception and despite my awareness that you needed to become someone else to arrive at truth, I don't like being lied to.

Is it possible that you're such a compulsive liar, you're unafraid to lean further into the truth, well-aware you can build-up doubt, re-orient, re-direct later; in essence, taking two steps forward with the intent of taking three steps back? Possibly. Is it possible that you still think you're an innocent bystander and you're telling me to my face what you think my game is under the pretense of claiming it as your own? That's possible, too. You could be so afraid of how good I am at manipulating you, you'll sit there and lay out -- point by point -- every projection you saw in me, as if hoping some evil in my heart would feel flattered and gladly take it as my own, hence you would have managed to "feed" me.

You would have massaged the medicine into the dog food or whatever the exact words of stated-goal were you repeated over and over.

Alternatively -- you being the one to block me, to go on a smear campaign against me, willingly destroy yourself because someone you wanted didn't want you back (you never really wanting him until you couldn't have him) -- maybe you're so afraid of how covertly manipulative I am you need the distance to have the clarity to say any of this out loud.

The existential crisis you induced in me may be your own, but it's one I saw in myself from an early age, having known abuse so intimately. I had feared my entire conscious personality was a ruse to lure people in and torture them. While I fear that may be true of you, it isn't for me. I don't need to hide from those I love, they need to hide from me. My pride and vulnerability wounds them, for living in accordance with the truth (as close to the truth as a man can get, one must always strive) irritates their deceptions as though dissolving a spiritual and psychological bacteria.

You worship filth. Not in the way John Waters does as a means to build up an earthy tolerance -- manure, urine and ash containing vital nutrients which endow the fields with richness -- rather you worship corruption. You're as much of a towering intellect as athleticbrutality. Like all those afflicted with the Christian mindset, you're a devil worshipper. It stems from your polarized split-view where good and bad are cleaved to alleviate yourself of the traumatic severing of your feelings from your will.

Satan is the One True God of Christianity. Satan is not the Broken Heart of the Jewish people, whose Tribal God of Abundant Love grew shattered and vengeful in exile as any Broken Heart Would -- but the collective manufactured fears and agonies of the displaced who have made themselves slaves in a final desperate plea to make the pain end.

To clarify, I remember the day you said more people ought go to church. Churches are nesting grounds for demons because they're grease traps for spiritual bacteria. The displaced huddling masses coming in to beg for forgiveness leave trace elements which grow heavy and leaden, accruing over time to defile the holy places as spiritual super bacteria which survive the purgings make themselves at home, copulating on the altars. Truthfully, ritual purification is a lost art far from a glorious affectation, and it should ideally be performed before entering and after exiting any holy place, much like one would wipe their feet on a welcome mat.

(The same goes for hanging out with people after intense periods of productive work, but smart phone technology having made seeming illusions of time and distance, we're seemingly encouraged to pry open one another's mouths with our filthy, butthole-prodded fingers at any moment of any day and not only be proud of the convenience, but sneer at anyone who doesn't make themselves a willing opening.)

We defeat Satan by ignoring him, for to even acknowledge his presence feeds him. When he makes the attempt to strike us in his weakened state, we may simply laugh him off.

Your old messages are so revelatory, I will take your partial repentences gladly, though you yourself will still be ignored.

The old gods are real. Darkness and light are elemental forces. The words angel and demon are mistranslations of words which refer to messengers between the human and divine realms and the quality of mind which possesses one like genius. There is only mind -- matter itself being mind solidified, all things endowed with the soul of their creator -- and you know-well fear to be the mind-killer. To fear anyone reduces them to the bestial. This is why love sets us free. On the Earth, we have choice and we choose daily to live in heaven or hell, but neither of those are real places outside our imaginations. The splendor of this material world and how our mind moves in and out of it possesses too much grandeur to reduce to hoary old self-persecutory cliches. That's what all false binaries are: gay, straight, black, white, man, woman, self, other. All things are spectrums for the rainbow being the symbol of God's promise to never destroy is a plea to open our minds and recognize gradation rather than annihilate in the name of appeasing the old order.

Admitting one is lost is the first step to being found.

In keeping with your admission of the dangers of subtlety, I'd like to clarify I could never be as lost as you. I won't apologize for saying this, you being aware you pulled me off-course semi-deliberately (you having been so confused, the nature of your cognizance is ambiguous).

I don't think happiness is inevitable. Rather, misery is.

It's only a matter of time before each of us experiences sickness and heartbreak again, and we weather them as any coming storm, for our happiness is well-worth fighting for, much like our freedom and our love for our fellow man. Part of me wishes to chastize you with your favorite word "spoiled" that you could ever view happiness as inevitable, but rather a certain false happiness which is, as Malcolm X would say, the negation of conflict is inevitable in a neoliberal establishment where abuses are ignored, platitudes given, and business proceeds as usual.

The next time you feel compelled to call you or someone else "spoiled" remember always that your material bounty was a bribe you accepted to excuse spiritual and psychological deprivation, and had you been given the choice (been stronger to see past the lies; how your love was twisted by words) you would have fought harder to preserve the gift of choice, it being the only gift ultimately worth keeping.

I tried to kill my capacity to love to keep myself from loving you. I'm not anybody's savior. All I can do is save myself and hope those I love enough to interact with can come to the correct takeaways themselves. I sometimes feel so desperate to love and love freely I open myself to those who are beneath me and let them smear me with the filth of their shadow projections, being so tolerant they drag me down to their level and attempt to usurp my identity.

You could never be a lifelong friend, but you being smarter and more driven (and in your way, honest) revealed numerous self-defeating patterns in my own life, and I'll always be thankful I knew you.

Were you not in so much pain yourself, you could have communicated these vital points to me, for I only learned them by being engaged and putting the pieces together as though mentally reconstructing a house which had been hit by a cyclone.

You absolutely can talk to people calmly, firmly and to their best interest when you have the capacity to separate your bullshit from theirs.

I confess, you first being like a mentor, once I felt myself "outgrowing" you I would have cherished you as an advisor, having such a dynamic perspective which wasn't my own, there was much I could have still learned from you, had you valued either me or yourself enough to stay in my life.

You demand other people rule you, then resent them the power you willingly surrender. You demand an owner for you can't claim ownership of yourself and can thus only resent any opportunity for equality. In that vital sense, you're just like my last boyfriend. You lack genuine humility. You're not willing to learn from those you admire because making yourself subservient to someone you wish to learn from requires not only vulnerability, but humility.

I didn't become more than you through ruthless domination alone, oh no. It was by being selective in those I served. I think on some level you're aware you tell yourself you should serve everyone freely and this is "the way it should be" because you want everyone to serve you, just because. You think by surrendering your right to choose, that's a sacrifice everyone you meet should make because you did, it "being good enough for you" you've allowed yourself to have righteous indignation for anyone who doesn't willingly make themselves a slave.

Writing erotica or horror stories isn't only a way to get the itch out, it orients the mind toward confrontation and clarifies values.

When you're not aware of what's in your unconscious, you replicate it unthinkingly.

This is why we learn from the things we make.

This is why we make to learn, not show off.

Physical beauty and social prestige are symptoms of right work, not things in themselves to chase. A lot the problems men have with the overreaches of "feminism" are ultimately cart before the horse thinking which require witchcraft to resolve.

We don't make social progress by making excuses for ourselves. We do so not through the pretense of doing our best to escape blame, but by just doing so. If you've been amputated to fit a standard model theory of human worth, you may not know how to ask for things which would allow you to do your best, but feeling powerless, would follow the wrong example of other helpless people in your position.

Never forget how afraid you were that I could really love you. Never forget that you chose the comfort of the misery you already knew over striving for something more dangerous, fulfilling and ultimately real. Never forget I admired your thriftiness and your savvy, but never your globe-hopping because I couldn't separate in you what was a willingness to explore other cultures and what was a pretense to have "experience" and "knowledge" to browbeat those you regarded as bigger sheep than you.

I don't envy those who run away and hide.

It's as simple as that.

[reyggtv]

Just because two people admitted to doing something genuinely nasty does not mean that even the community on Twitter has a "major predator issue". The actions of ExJr and TZ are horrible for sure, I think we can all get behind that, but it should not represent a large majority of its community as a whole and honestly would be just straight up disrespectful and tasteless to imply that *everyone* on there are they like that. That is just not the case. Even the people who defended those people at the time clearly did not know the extent of the damage and only later knew just how serious things were after more details came up about it. Plus, also, a show made for kids, is going to have the majority of its fans, also be kids lol. Twitter is always going to be a place full of sick or weird people, especially with the person who’s running the site behind it that’s always going to be the case, but out of my 6 years of my time in the Hilda fandom I can say that the people who pose this much of a danger to others especially minors only make up a fraction of people I’ve ever interacted with. Most people just wanna make their fan art and OCs and move along with them, people sometimes dedicate years just to try and make something genuinely special that they’re happy about, as what I have been doing since 2018.

People don't want to be weird, people don't want to involve themselves with drama. I didn't even want to expose the things that TZ said on Twitter because I knew that it would only just create more tension than help solve anything, and plus, he was like my bestest ever friend, that shit hurt me. But at the same time I felt like I had to or else people were gonna start accusing that I was okay with "defending a pedo" even though clearly I wasn't.

I take these things very seriously and do not hold back on trying to hold anyone accountable for what they might've done. Not long ago I had to ban someone off my server because they decided to share porn with another minor, which is obviously a big no no and did not hesitate to ban that person as soon as that happened.

With all that being said, I know this post can come across as me trying to say "there has never been a predator problem in the Hilda community!" Well, that’s not exactly true, because while I think the majority of Hilda fans aren't as disgusting as some may make it out to be, the small minority that I've encountered has done some of the most distressing stuff I’ve ever went through.

When I was 14, still brand new in the Hilda community, I met a guy on Hildacord and he wanted to become best friends with me, he was 17 or 18 I think. On my birthday, he offered to do a Johanna e-RP with me, something I had never done before, because it was the best gift he could give me for my "special day" or something like that. We then continued to chat and eventually, we reached a point where we were actually trying to date each other for the next year and a half or so. I was now 15 and he was 19. I sent him explicit pictures of myself, and he seemed to have kept those for himself, and we continued having these explicit roleplays for that amount of time and convinced me that all this grooming, dating an adult as a teenager, and exchanging eachothers addresses to send eachother gifts was the most normal thing someone could do. When someone finally told me that all of this was wrong and I needed to get out of it, I ignored them for a while, because how could that person really be manipulating me like that? I refused to believe it. It wasn't until I was 16 that I finally realized what was wrong and sometime later went on Twitter and expose him for all these things. Of course, Twitter being Twitter, instead of them trying to go after the literal groomer, I was the one who was targeted instead. They tried to say that I was transphobic, or that I was manipulating him (even though they were the one who did to me in the first place…), and at the end of it all, no justice has been made since. That guy is still out there proudly in the wild, he faced no consequences whatsoever, meanwhile, *I* was the one who had to get the shittier, because despite all the evidence I had against him and from what HE directly admitted himself, the people just refused to believe any of it was true, and thus, he’s still now out there, still with some of the friends that I know as well. With those friends, even going as far as to turn my back because they didn't want to come to terms that I was a victim of grooming and sexual harassment.

This became even more apparent when before all that, right after I had just turned 16, one of my friends hacked into my Twitter account and was blackmailing me to sending me them money via Bitcoin or else they would use it to target and harass my friends and my follower. They were someone who I trusted to run my then Daily Dose of Hilda account at the time, I shared them the password so they could make posts on it with my permission. They changed the password and had their email sent to another one. When I confronted them about this, they told me the only way I could get my account back was either through paying them in Bitcoin, or by sending seemingly incriminating evidence of myself to make me seem like I was someone that I’m not. That’s where all those screenshots some of you might’ve seen where I said/shared some inappropriate things about Hilda. I did not send those things on purpose, I was forced to. As a matter of fact, even before the hacking occurred, they *still* went out of their way to demand these types of messages/interactions from me even though I clearly wanted nothing to do with it. They even wanted a picture of me crying reacting to my account getting hacked, imagine if I had actually gone through with that. They *insisted* that I have these interactions or else they would just pull off something like this. But at the end of the day, it didn't really matter. Because it worked. Not only did I get my Twitter account hacked anyway, they also managed to make me look bad even though I was a victim of grooming, once again.

I didn't know any better at that age, and these people knew that, and purposely took advantage of me because of it.

The Hilda community has had some sick people in the past, I would know, because I lived through it. That goes about having to be in any community for as long as I have been. If people are going to mention about a "predator issue" that’s happening around, why aren't we talking about *this*. Why aren't more people talking about *my* experiences? Why do you people insist on taking things on face value and never finding out what the bigger picture *actually* is? If anything, *I* should be the one who should be upset and trying to quit the community for having to deal with this bullshit. Imagine trying to live your life as the best Hilda fan you can be, all you want to do is make friends with everyone, and be a wonderful influence to all, but instead, you have to live through years of sexual trauma, harassment, grooming, your own friends turning your back on you, blackmailing, stalking, and instead of people trying to sympathize with you for ALLLL of these horrible things that some did to you, they instead just choose to find an excuse to dehumanize YOU because they're in denial of the facts and want to make sure that their feelings are justified.

I hate it. I really fucking hate it. I hate when I have to go through this. I’m so fucking tired of going through harassment and abuse time and time again as one of the bigger Hilda figures, and yet, despite everyone else going out of their way to share their own experiences and sympathizing with them, they just choose to ignore *me* because quite simply I’m "Rey, the big bad meanie Voldemort" :/

I am truly sorry to those in the Hilda community who went through similar things and received trauma as a result, you are not alone, and I will always be there to support you. But, I kept all of this hidden from me for way, wayyyy too long, and whether or not people are willing to listen to me through this, does not matter, I just want my feelings to be able to heard throughout the world, once and for all.

Despite all of this, I am proud to be a Hilda fan. I would have never been able to make the projects I wanted, the school I’m going to, the friends that I’ve made, and the many fans I’ve accumulated just by making funny Hilda videos on YouTube, if some people don't want to care what I say, that‘s okay. At the end of the day, I’m just doing something that genuinely makes me happy, and Hilda has, and will continue to make me happy as time goes on. If people don't like that, too bad. Hilda is my life passion and I am not going away anytime soon because of it.

Hearing about drama in other sides of the fandom is wild like what do you mean Hilda Twitter has a major predator issue and Hilda Reddit is queerphobic. How did that happen. At what point down the fandom evolutionary line was there a division so catastrophic that while we’re here like “lalalala let’s play with OCs and make funny new crackships!” those other guys are committing Literal Crimes. What happened to Vibing.

[itsbansheebitch]

Linked above is a video showing Colleen and her fans' parasocial relationship (You can start it at the 9 Minute mark)

This post is mainly directed at people who are rolling up their sleeves to throw down with Colleen's fans (specifically on Twitter)

Colleen's main audience is aimed at young kids from about 9 to 14. When you're that young it's really easy to get caught in a parasocial relationship with a content creator. Especially if the content creator has intention to exploit their fans or use them for their personal gain/profit.

This is why family channel's main audience is children. A lot of children look to family channels to live vicariously through because they don't have a great home life. The content creator will share personal details of their life so that the audience feels like they know them, but leave enough out to not show the cracks in their character.

In Colleen's case she not only shared VERY personal details of her life, but also gave certain fans that she handpicked (for the group chats) special privileges. This can make a child feel like they owe their idol something in return. In this case, that something in return would probably include taking her side in arguments, shit talking her (now ex) husband, looking into gossip websites, defending her in various online spaces, etc.

As someone who was an OG iPad kid "back in the day" I've seen YouTubers go to ACTUAL prison in REAL TIME. So surreal. It can be an emotional time when you realize the person you thought you knew so much about, you actually didn't know at all.

Anyway, if you think the person you're mad at is a kid, don't burn them at the stake. They're going through a lot of shit. (Of course this does not exclude people who are doxing/harassing people, but we need to talk about how these people are/were raised that they think permanently taking away someone's sense of security is ok).

Anyway, I just thinking about this because I'm pretty sure I just threw down with a 10 year old on Twitter and literally just bodied them with so much information that at the end of the argument that it was past their bedtime and to go to bed and they just responded with "ok, you're right. Good Night!" I have never been so confused on twitter before, but I try to welcome new experiences. :/ ? :) ?

[floralovebot]

After that horrible tiktok passed around and seeing the various reactions to it, I've realized that a scary amount of people don't know how to look for red flags in therapists. As someone who has a lot of fear surrounding bad therapists, I thought I'd share some of my tips! This post won't go into how to find a therapist, I'm mainly talking about how to look for red flags (and green flags)!

Once you find a therapist you're interested in seeing, your first step should always be to look for their online presence and any reviews about them. That means searching their name on Google, Twitter, Tiktok, literally everywhere. Look for websites they own or are listed on and check to see what socials are connected to them! Basically, you want to see what they're putting online and what others are saying about them.

On a similar note, if the therapist is working for a company and doesn't run their own business, look for reviews about the company as well. That includes former employee statements, client reviews, etc.

If you find social media accounts run by them, here are some red flags to look for: Do they share personal stories or make examples out of their clients? A good therapist does not share what their clients say, especially online where anyone could see it. Do they talk about their clients to other people (including online)? A general rule of thumb is, "what happens in the office, stays in the office". Therapists should not be talking about their clients to anyone but the client themself. The only exception to this rule is if the client poses harm to themself or others, the therapist suspects abuse, a court orders a subpoena, or you're a minor and your parent(s)/legal guardians request information. If it's not one of these, the therapist should not be disclosing what you say to others.

Do they often talk about themselves or rarely let you interject? Therapists are all different so some may be open to answering things about themselves while others would prefer you know nothing about them. However, a therapist should not be talking about themselves constantly nor should they be the only ones talking in a session (even if they're talking about you). This is a two or more way interaction and the clients need to speak just as much and maybe even more than the therapist (how much depends on you and method of therapy). Be on the lookout for a therapist never letting you speak, rarely asking questions or prompting more from you, or never paying attention to what you're saying. (On the other hand, make sure you're not speaking over them or never letting them speak either! Remember, two-way street.)

You should (and need) to be able to talk about therapy processes and what you can expect from them in the future! If the therapist dodges this conversation or seems unwilling to answer, that's a red flag.

A therapist should never judge you or be critical of your personal choices. Remember, you're speaking to them so they can help you, not judge you. Ideally, a therapist shouldn't be easily upset by what you have to tell them. Obviously, things can be upsetting (that's why therapists have their own therapists!), but getting emotional can affect the client and their progress.

They don't attempt to calm you down or derail the situation when you get amped up. I get it, you want to talk about everything, I get it. But a good therapist will stop you if there isn't enough time or they feel like you'll be going home hurt and stressed. Again, their job is to help you. Part of that help is making sure you can still function throughout your life even after a session with them. A red flag is a therapist letting you leave feeling weak, upset, and worse off than you were before.

Listen to your gut. I know some people don't believe in gut feelings, but they happen for a reason (and there's science behind it, I suggest reading up on it!). If you feel like a therapist isn't right for you, listen to that! If you deal with anxiety or paranoia and you're doubting that feeling, bring that up with someone you do trust and take them through what happened and what was said in a session. They may be able to help calm your nerves! At the end of the day, it's better safe than sorry.

I know it can be frustrating, but it may take you a minute to find the right therapist for you. Ideally, your first session with them should be more of a consultation. Of course, you absolutely can get right into it and start talking about what you need to talk about! But also remember that the therapist is there to help you and that progress can be hindered if you realize later on that they're not the right fit. So, talk about what you need to talk about, but also pay attention to make sure they're the right therapist for you.

So, what green flags should you look for? Being able to freely ask questions about their credentials and specialties! Being able to bring up switching therapists without them feeling upset or betrayed (and taking it out on you). Being able to ask questions about therapy types and what their thoughts are about what could help you now and in the future. Being able to talk about everything without feeling scared or judged. Being able to share doubts with current therapy type(s)/homework and coming up with something that will work better. Being able to talk about other things (like interests, how your day went, a movie you just saw, etc) without them dismissing it or pushing you to talk about what's upsetting you before you're ready.

Another tip that I couldn't quite fit into the rest of this is, you need to look for cultural diversity in your therapist. If you're a person of color seeing a white therapist, it doesn't matter how good of a therapist they are, there will always be things they don't inherently understand about racism or the trauma and stress that comes with it, and therefore there will always be things they can't help you cope with. The same goes for if you're lgbtq+, of a certain religion, etc. Just make sure that the therapist is either from a similar background or at the very least is open about being an ally (so if you're lgbtq+, you'll want to look for "lgbtq+ friendly" or something similar, if you're black, you'll want to find a black therapist, or at least a therapist of color, etc).

Unfortunately, these aren't all the red flags but they should help you. There are a lot of bad and underqualified therapists out there, but therapy as a whole can be extremely helpful for your life. There's a lot of misconceptions out there as well which don't help with people's general hesitance about it. I hope this post can help someone! Feel free to add on with more tips!

[hellomynameisbisexual]

Here's a shortlist of those who realized that I — a cis woman who'd identified as heterosexual for decades of life — was in fact actually bi, long before I realized it myself recently: my sister, all my friends, my boyfriend, and the TikTok algorithm.

On TikTok, the relationship between user and algorithm is uniquely (even sometimes uncannily) intimate. An app which seemingly contains as many multitudes of life experiences and niche communities as there are people in the world, we all start in the lowest common denominator of TikTok. Straight TikTok (as it's popularly dubbed) initially bombards your For You Page with the silly pet videos and viral teen dances that folks who don't use TikTok like to condescendingly reduce it to.

Quickly, though, TikTok begins reading your soul like some sort of divine digital oracle, prying open layers of your being never before known to your own conscious mind. The more you use it, the more tailored its content becomes to your deepest specificities, to the point where you get stuff that's so relatable that it can feel like a personal attack (in the best way) or (more dangerously) even a harmful trigger from lifelong traumas.

For example: I don't know what dark magic (read: privacy violations) immediately clued TikTok into the fact that I was half-Brazilian, but within days of first using it, Straight TikTok gave way to at first Portuguese-speaking then broader Latin TikTok. Feeling oddly seen (being white-passing and mostly American-raised, my Brazilian identity isn't often validated), I was liberal with the likes, knowing that engagement was the surefire way to go deeper down this identity-affirming corner of the social app.

TikTok made lots of assumptions from there, throwing me right down the boundless, beautiful, and oddest multiplicities of Alt TikTok, a counter to Straight TikTok's milquetoast mainstreamness.

Home to a wide spectrum of marginalized groups, I was giving out likes on my FYP like Oprah, smashing that heart button on every type of video: from TikTokers with disabilities, Black and Indigenous creators, political activists, body-stigma-busting fat women, and every glittering shade of the LGBTQ cornucopia. The faves were genuine, but also a way to support and help offset what I knew about the discriminatory biases in TikTok's algorithm.

My diverse range of likes started to get more specific by the minute, though. I wasn't just on general Black TikTok anymore, but Alt Cottagecore Middle-Class Black Girl TikTok (an actual label one creator gave her page's vibes). Then it was Queer Latina Roller Skating Girl TikTok, Women With Non-Hyperactive ADHD TikTok, and then a double whammy of Women Loving Women (WLW) TikTok alternating between beautiful lesbian couples and baby bisexuals.

Looking back at my history of likes, the transition from queer “ally” to “salivating simp” is almost imperceptible.

There was no one precise "aha" moment. I started getting "put a finger down" challenges that wouldn't reveal what you were putting a finger down for until the end. Then, 9-fingers deep (winkwink), I'd be congratulated for being 100% bisexual. Somewhere along the path of getting served multiple WLW Disney cosplays in a single day and even dom lesbian KinkTok roleplay — or whatever the fuck Bisexual Pirate TikTok is — deductive reasoning kind of spoke for itself.

But I will never forget the one video that was such a heat-seeking missile of a targeted attack that I was moved to finally text it to my group chat of WLW friends with a, "Wait, am I bi?" To which the overwhelming consensus was, "Magic 8 Ball says, 'Highly Likely.'"

Serendipitously posted during Pride Month, the video shows a girl shaking her head at the caption above her head, calling out confused and/or closeted queers who say shit like, "I think everyone is a LITTLE bisexual," to the tune of "Closer" by The Chainsmokers. When the lyrics land on the word "you," she points straight at the screen — at me — her finger and inquisitive look piercing my hopelessly bisexual soul like Cupid's goddamn arrow.

Oh no, the voice inside my head said, I have just been mercilessly perceived.

As someone who had, in fact, done feminist studies at a tiny liberal arts college with a gender gap of about 70 percent women, I'd of course dabbled. I've always been quick to bring up the Kinsey scale, to champion a true spectrum of sexuality, and to even declare (on multiple occasions) that I was, "straight, but would totally fuck that girl!"

Oh no, the voice inside my head returned, I've literally just been using extra words to say I was bi.

After consulting the expertise of my WLW friend group (whose mere existence, in retrospect, also should've clued me in on the flashing neon pink, purple, and blue flag of my raging bisexuality), I ran to my boyfriend to inform him of the "news."

"Yeah, baby, I know. We all know," he said kindly.

"How?!" I demanded.

Well for one, he pointed out, every time we came across a video of a hot girl while scrolling TikTok together, I'd without fail watch the whole way through, often more than once, regardless of content. (Apparently, straight girls do not tend to do this?) For another, I always breathlessly pointed out when we'd pass by a woman I found beautiful, often finding a way to send a compliment her way. ("I'm just a flirt!" I used to rationalize with a hand wave, "Obvs, I'm not actually sexually attracted to them!") Then, I guess, there were the TED Talk-like rants I'd subject him to about the thinly veiled queer relationship in Adventure Time between Princess Bubblegum and Marcelyne the Vampire Queen — which the cowards at Cartoon Network forced creators to keep as subtext!

And, well, when you lay it all out like that...

But my TikTok-fueled bisexual awakening might actually speak less to the omnipotence of the app's algorithm, and more to how heteronormativity is truly one helluva drug.

Sure, TikTok bombarded me with the thirst traps of my exact type of domineering masc lady queers, who reduced me to a puddle of drool I could no longer deny. But I also recalled a pivotal moment in college when I briefly questioned my heterosexuality, only to have a lesbian friend roll her eyes and chastise me for being one of those straight girls who leads Actual Queer Women on. I figured she must know better. So I never pursued any of my lady crushes in college, which meant I never experimented much sexually, which made me conclude that I couldn't call myself bisexual if I'd never had actual sex with a woman. I also didn't really enjoy lesbian porn much, though the fact that I'd often find myself fixating on the woman during heterosexual porn should've clued me into that probably coming more from how mainstream lesbian porn is designed for straight men.

The ubiquity of heterormativity, even when unwittingly perpetrated by members of the queer community, is such an effective self-sustaining cycle. Aside from being met with queer-gating (something I've since learned bi folks often experience), I had a hard time identifying my attraction to women as genuine attraction, simply because it felt different to how I was attracted to men.

Heteronormativity is truly one helluva drug.

So much of women's sexuality — of my sexuality — can feel defined by that carnivorous kind of validation you get from men. I met no societal resistance in fully embodying and exploring my desire for men, either (which, to be clear, was and is insatiable slut levels of wanting that peen.) But in retrospect, I wonder how many men I slept with not because I was truly attracted to them, but because I got off on how much they wanted me.

My attraction to women comes with a different texture of eroticism. With women (and bare with a baby bi, here), the attraction feels more shared, more mutual, more tender rather than possessive. It's no less raw or hot or all-consuming, don't get me wrong. But for me at least, it comes more from a place of equality rather than just power play. I love the way women seem to see right through me, to know me, without us really needing to say a word.

I am still, as it turns out, a sexual submissive through-and-through, regardless of what gender my would-be partner is. But, ignorantly and unknowingly, I'd been limiting my concept of who could embody dominant sexual personas to cis men. But when TikTok sent me down that glorious rabbit hole of masc women (who know exactly what they're doing, btw), I realized my attraction was not to men, but a certain type of masculinity. It didn't matter which body or genitalia that presentation came with.

There is something about TikTok that feels particularly suited to these journeys of sexual self-discovery and, in the case of women loving women, I don't think it's just the prescient algorithm. The short-form video format lends itself to lightning bolt-like jolts of soul-bearing nakedness, with the POV camera angles bucking conventions of the male gaze, which entrenches the language of film and TV in heterosexual male desire.

In fairness to me, I'm far from the only one who missed their inner gay for a long time — only to have her pop out like a queer jack-in-the-box throughout a near year-long quarantine that led many of us to join TikTok. There was the baby bi mom, and scores of others who no longer had to publicly perform their heterosexuality during lockdown — only to realize that, hey, maybe I'm not heterosexual at all?

Flooded with video after video affirming my suspicions, reflecting my exact experiences as they happened to others, the change in my sexual identity was so normalized on TikTok that I didn't even feel like I needed to formally "come out." I thought this safe home I'd found to foster my baby bisexuality online would extend into the real world.

But I was in for a rude awakening.

Testing out my bisexuality on other platforms, casually referring to it on Twitter, posting pictures of myself decked out in a rainbow skate outfit (which I bought before realizing I was queer), I received nothing but unquestioning support and validation. Eventually, I realized I should probably let some members of my family know before they learned through one of these posts, though.

Daunted by the idea of trying to tell my Latina Catholic mother and Swiss Army veteran father (who's had a crass running joke about me being a "lesbian" ever since I first declared myself a feminist at age 12), I chose the sibling closest to me. Seeing as how gender studies was one of her majors in college too, I thought it was a shoo-in. I sent an off-handed, joke-y but serious, "btw I'm bi now!" text, believing that's all that would be needed to receive the same nonchalant acceptance I found online.

It was not.

I didn't receive a response for two days. Hurt and panicked by what was potentially my first mild experience of homophobia, I called them out. They responded by insisting we need to have a phone call for such "serious" conversations. As I calmly tried to express my hurt on said call, I was told my text had been enough to make this sibling worry about my mental wellbeing. They said I should be more understanding of why it'd be hard for them to (and I'm paraphrasing) "think you were one way for twenty-eight years" before having to contend with me deciding I was now "something else."

But I wasn't "something else," I tried to explain, voice shaking. I hadn't knowingly been deceiving or hiding this part of me. I'd simply discovered a more appropriate label. But it was like we were speaking different languages. Other family members were more accepting, thankfully. There are many ways I'm exceptionally lucky, my IRL environment as supportive as Baby Bi TikTok. Namely, I'm in a loving relationship with a man who never once mistook any of it as a threat, instead giving me all the space in the world to understand this new facet of my sexuality.

I don't have it all figured out yet. But at least when someone asks if I listen to Girl in Red on social media, I know to answer with a resounding, "Yes," even though I've never listened to a single one of her songs. And for now, that's enough.

[my1stgirlfriendturnedintothemoon]

Writing is so weird for me to be so honest

Like I've been writing for as long as I can remember, fanfic shit before I even knew what fanfic was, me and my friend Sarah used to tell each other stories about our HP self insert OCs in like 5th grade. I have a whole plastic storage tub of notebooks filled with random fanfic and original writing going back to middle school. I'm 29. Some of those notebooks are old enough to vote.

And I've never finished anything lmao. Even stuff where I'm like "this is a oneshot!" I never considered really finished, because there's always some other connected idea.

Anyways I haven't shared any of my writing outside of like, posting things here on tumblr that I know only 3 specific people will read, since like. Before I joined the army??? I think?? Back when I was still using ff net lmao and it was like old Naruto and KH stuff and the one Yume Nikki fic I still wish I had finished, so like 8 years I think.

I hadn't even really been writing much at all this year, outside of a really self-indulgent Warden Surana/Warden Carver Hawke fic that never left my phone notes and will never see daylight bc it's just for me. And then I started replaying FE:A in July and realized I wanted to write about Inigo and Gerome, and I did it! I fuckin opened up my neglected AO3 and I spit out two chapters, and like 300 people read my story and I lost my mind! Three Hundred People! More than my damn high school graduating class. I never in my life would have thought 300 people would want to read my writing lmao

And then of course FE3H dropped and I was like. This is a new fandom, there's not a lot of content out for the ship I want to see, I have a small idea of something I would like to read, I should write it. I'm going to cook this food because the fandom is hungry. And my small idea wound up being a fucking 5k fic, my first smut fic ever, and today it got its hundredth bookmark. 100 fucking people read and bookmarked my horny fic in just one month. Two days after I posted that, I spit out a comedy fic that is currently THREE SHORT of FIVE HUNDRED kudos!!!! Five (5) hundred!!! Like, I'm Math Lady Meme over here trying to imagine 500 different individuals reading and enjoying something I wrote. That is TWICE my graduating class.

So of course, not satisfied with what I had produced, I went out and wrote a 6k fic of a rare pair that was basically entirely smut and the start of a series, because my brain is 100% on Clown Hours, and then made the second part a complete left-field crackpair, and people. Still love it. No one has come to end my life, no one has come with the torches my LJ and FFnet childhood promised. Instead they are praising me and I appreciate it but I still feel like a huge fool lmao!!

Like I'm so scared of negative feedback that I have literally stopped myself from writing things or sharing things for years, and in just one month of sharing things I have gotten so much positive response its overwhelming. I've seen my fics mentioned twice now in the wild while scrolling Twitter, by complete strangers. I bit the bullet and recced one of my fic to someone asking for my rare pair and people like it! I am pretty sure my first smut fic spawned a gift fic for someone else who commented they were interested in a rare OT3 I hinted at!

Anyways I've spent the last week alternately rereading everything I've written this month and going "fuck what the hell this is bile" or feeling like the Palpatine "Unlimited Power" gif even though this is the most attention and 'success' I've ever known in a fandom space, so. This is literally the most productive I've been with writing in years, I've put up 20k words on AO3 since the end of July and I still have like. 6 chapters of this story finished and waiting to be posted if I can just get the damn 2nd chapter out of the way and one of them, all by itself, is 4k. I've been writing like crazy lmao.

This was kind of a ramble but I've been feeling bad about my writing because it's not like some other people's and that's stupid, I may not be writing as much or in the same way but I'm doing numbers for the first time and I should be proud of that.

Over 10k hits I'm gonna shit!!!

Anyways I guess, like. Don't be stupid like me lmao and think no one wants to hear your idea or read your fic, or feel bad if someone else has already "done it", because no one can write it the way you will and there's always going to be someone who is starving for more of that content. I personally don't feel like my stories are that good or even original, but apparently people like them lmao! Share your stuff! You may be surprised.

[gamegrumpiess]

Sleepwalk

I was listening to Sleepwalk by Renee Olstead, and I had this idea.

Grump: Danny (from now on, most will be Danny. Unless you request someone else, which I will be happy to do!)

Btw! I'm this plot, Renee didn't write the lyrics. You did! She isn't even a singer in this universe. Just a heads up.

-

Y/n's POV

I can't sleep tonight. It's been a month since me and Danny broke up, but I can't help but still mourn our relationship. It was mutual, at least that's what he thinks. I would've never called it off. I was so in love with him. I still am. We told the fans, and they were pretty supportive in what we did. A lot of them were really sad, as was I. Danny is a singer just like me. I do silly songs just like him. But he encouraged me to do a cover album or a cover song. I did one album, Cover Me Up was the name. It got a lot of love, which I am very proud of.

I turn on my phone to check the time. 4:23 am. The bold numbers shine at me in front of Danny's face. I couldn't bring it to myself to change my screensaver. It's not like anyone's gonna see. I miss him a lot, every night gets harder than the last. He was my world. I've known him since senior year of high school, he was a huge part of my life. And now... That's no more. He's probably living his best life. Being Danny Sexbang and all. He probably has girls flying at his feet, throwing him their panties and offering 'the night of his life'. I understand I might be over thinking, but I can't help it. He was mine, and now he's out there doing who knows what. I let a few stray tears fall down ontou pillow. It's so lonely here at night now. I love what I do, singing, dancing, having fun. It was just so much more amazing when I had someone to share it with.

I lay my head back a stare at the ceiling. I need to distract myself, so I reach for my headphones and plug them in, looking for my Oldies playlist. I click on it and the song that comes on is Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny. Listening to the slow beat and light guitar, I cry even more. Just my luck, huh? I can't just lay here, I really should get up and something. Writing usually helps me calm down. That's when I get an idea for a song, it's a bit sad and people will know exactly who its about. But maybe that's what needs to happen. My feelings should be out there. And if something goes wrong, I'll accept the outcomes.

I pull up my pen and notebook and just start writing.

"Sleepwalk, instead of dreamin' I

Sleepwalk.

Cause' I lost you and now, what am I to do?

Can't believe that we're through.

Sleep talk. Cause' I miss you, I sleep talk.

While the memories of you wither like a soul.

Darling I was so low.

The night fills me with blame. I see your face, tears through my brain.

I know I miss you so. I still love you, drives me insane.

Sleepwalk. Every night I just sleepwalk. Please come back, and when you walk inside the door, I will sleepwalk no more."

I immediately went to my computer set up and staring out my own little version of Sleepwalk. More of like a piano and violin cover, rather than guitar and drum. Once I had it to where I wanted the beat and rhythm, I pulled up my microphone and started singing away.

Danny's POV

This morning was the worst. I couldn't sleep at all, I've been up since 3:30 am. I guess I haven't really gotten used to sleeping by myself. Without y/n's body near mine, it's hard to even get tired. I do miss her. A lot actually. I know it was my idea to call off the relationship, but I was scared of what would happen if I didn't have enough time for her. I have game grumps, starbomb, and ninja sex party. She deserves someone who has all the time in the world to give her all the attention she deserves. When we told the fans, I didn't expect them to be so sad. I even lost a handful of fans because of it. She agreed, but I knew her better. She was on the verge of tears when she left. She was trying to be strong so I wouldn't see that side of her, but I know better than that. When she left I broke down. Gripped and clawed at my hair, cried on the edge of the bed, wondering if I had made the right choice. I big-huge part of me was telling myself I didn't.

My phone buzzes, and I see its a text from Arin.

When you get here I need to show you something.

Oh what fresh hell does he have to subject my eyes to. Last time he said that, I had to watch 12 Days Of Elves... Don't ask.

I finally arrived at the Grump Space. I see everyone in their usual area. Ryan and Matt at the computers, Ross and Barry in the kitchen making coffee, and the only other people here this early is Arin and me. Everyone else usually is a little late. "Thank god you're finally here. You haven't felt your phone buzzing?" I give him a confused look. "Other than you texting me, no. You know I have notifications turned off for my social media. What's going on?" He turns on the computer in front of us. "You should hear this before anything. I promise you, it's important." I roll my eyes. "This better not be some stupid shit, Arin!" I say with a light laugh. He shook his head, and I knew from the look in his eyes that this was in fact important.

Once the computer was fully on, he went to YouTube. Looking up y/n's name, I felt my stomach turn. Did she have a new boyfriend? Was she sick? Did she die?! I understand that last one is a bit of a long shot, but I tend to over think a lot.

A video was uploaded at 7:00 am this morning? "' sleepwalk? ' isn't that an old song?" I say confused. But I'm not all that surprised. She always did love the oldies. He nods his head. "She added her own lyrics and tune to it. And I think you should hear it." I nodded and put on some earphones, pushing play on the video. Her voices comes on, and it feels so amazing to hear her voice again. Even if it is just an intro in a YouTube video.

"Hello everyone. I had this idea for a song at like 3 in the morning. I couldn't sleep, so I made this. I hope you like it..."

The video fades to black and then it shows her at her little office space she has in her room. The music starts up, and at this point I notice her eyes. They're a little red and slightly puffy. She did a good job covering it up, but I've known her since senior year. She can't hide that from me.

She sings softly yet with so much passion and emotion. The lyrics sink in, and I know why Arin wanted to hear this. Its about me. I scroll down to look at the description and comments, and they all say things along the lines of 'I fucken sad now.' 'Wow, Danny really did a number on her' 'DANNY YOU NEED TO HEAR THIS SHIT!' 'This makes me so sad because she literally couldn't sleep thinking about him... Danny get your girl back!' 'Damn that made me tear up... '

After the video ended, I look at my phone. Y/n's face still smiles at me from behind the screen. I didn't want to change it, I couldn't do it. I felt several tears hit my leg, I didn't even realize i was crying. "Hey Dan, are you okay?" Arin puts his hand on my shoulder comfortingly. "No... I'm not at all." I open up Twitter and see thousands of notifications to nsp and game grumps. All of which telling me to see what I just saw. I stood up slowly, feeling a little disappointed in myself. How could I let her walk out of my life so easily...?

Y/n's POV

After I posted the video, I decided I should really try to get some sleep. Especially since thousands of people will blow up my phone later on. Once in bed again, I tried to think of all the possibilities and outcomes of this. It could either go really well, or go really horribly bad. I guess we'll just have to see.

I wake up several hours later to my phone ringing. The sky is still a little bright to I assume it's not that late. 'Suzy <3' shines up at me. I smile, me and her always stayed quite close. "Hello?" I try to run the sleep out of my eyes. "Hey, are feeling okay? I heard your song, and I know it's about Dan. How are you, hun?"

It means a lot that she's not just calling about GET HIM BACK! She just wants to know if I'm okay. "Honestly? I feel so empty. Luckily today is just a lazy day so I don't have to adult today. But still.... I feel lost." I hear her sigh, "I know, y/n. It sucks. But you have me! And I'm way better than Danny!" She says jokingly. "Damn right you are! I'll call you a bit later when I'm more awake, okay?" We say our goodbyes and I sit up more in bed. I take a quick look at my notification bar and just as I expected, its blowin up. 'When will I stop being a pussy?' My thoughts we're interrupted by several rings of my doorbell.

Without looking through the peephole I open the door, only to see a certain curly haired man standing on my doorstep. "Danny? What are you doing here?" His eyes are glazed over and puffy as if he had just finished crying. He looked down. "I.... I heard your song. Was it... Was it about me? I'm sorry, I just need to know. I couldn't focus at all today during work. And on my way home, I just couldn't take it anymore. I have to know." My anxiety goes up a long shot. My eyes looking at everyone but him. "Y/n... I need to know." I slowly nod my head, still avoiding his eyes. "May I come in? I think we should talk.." I scoot to the side to let him in. "I'm sorry if I caused a lot of drama. I just thought... It would be better if I just made it into a song rather than.. Just telling you." I confessed. He grabbed my shoulders. "Don't be sorry, y/n. When we broke up, and you left. I broke down. I couldn't handle the fact that I just let you go.. I'm sorry."

"Then why did you do it? Why wait so fucking long to come to my house?! Why hurt me this bad, leaving me all alone when all I wanted was you! I hated knowing that YOU let me just walk out. And you looked like you... Like you didn't even give a shit..." I couldn't help it. I let all my emotions explode on him. "Why do you think I did?! Y/n, you deserve someone who has the time for you, who will give you all the attention in the world. Someone who will GIVE you the world! I want nothing more than to have you back again, but you don't deserve someone like me! I love with all my soul, hell, I'd give up everything for your dumbass! I didn't say anything till now because I thought you'd be mad, and I thought you'd moved on, hated me even!" He was standing pretty close to me by now. "Well no shit I'd be mad! You think I don't deserve you? Bullshit! You've already given me the world and more! Don't think that I don't understand about your job because I do the same fucking thing!!! I know it's hard, but I was willing to work even harder because I love you more than life itself! I deserve you just like you deserve me!" He rolled his eyes. "You're fucking gorgeous! You can have any man you want! What the hell is so special about me?" I got in his face once again, "because you are so much better than any other man I've met! We've known each other for YEARS and you think I'd just give all that up?! What kinda drugs are you on, Dan? Do you think I'm that fucken dumb? I haven't slept in weeks because it feels so horrible not having you next to me. That's some bullshit to say that I can have any man I want. I want YOU, dipshit!" I couldn't help it, I fell to my knees, shaking from trying to hold back tears. How he say that I didn't deserve him? He was my world, he still is my world. Nothing will change that.

He walks to me, and sits on the floor with me. I feel his arms wrap around me, and I lean into his chest. "I'm sorry.. I loved you more than anything. I still do. Can you please give me another chance..? Now, I won't ever think you don't deserve me. I won't think anything like that. You mean the world to me, y/n. Please don't forget that." I look up at him, seeing his eyes filled with new tears. "Well duh, how can i say no to this face?" I grab his cheeks and smush them together and laugh. "I love you too, Danny." He smiled and leaned in and gave me a much needed kiss.

[ceoofgaystuff]

so i've been reading "i'm the grim reaper" off and on for a while now and i have a lot of thoughts to share about it that wouldn't fit on twitter, so i figured i'd just post it here. spoilers for the latest chapter (126, i think)

i really enjoyed this webtoon in the beginning. it posed exactly the kind of questions i expected it would (what makes someone a sinner? are we all sinners? do good people exist? can sinners be good people?). i especially enjoyed some of the early tertiary characters that furthered these themes and i adored chase and scarlet's early relationship that resembled something of a reluctant alliance for mutual benefit (both ready to stab the other in the back) that slowly devolves into an actual friendship.

but as the story continued, i think around the 3rd season mark, it started... becoming less about the themes of the story and more about... i dunno. the story kind of goes everywhere from one plot point to the other stupidly fast without much of a break. it makes a lot of the other issues i have more noticeable as well. like, for instance, character contradictions. i think personality contradictions can elevate a character, certainly, but the story has to actually acknowledge those contradictions for it to be effective. otherwise, it just leaves the reader confused. scarlet rubber-bands between killing someone from her past to save her current friend to nearly killing herself because she loses photos of her deceased mother. like, if you just slowed down enough to analyze why that is, you could come up with something really interesting for scarlet's character, but instead, she just becomes hard to sympathize with (she barely even remembers the real life person she killed to save her friend and hasn't acknowledged them at all since brook killed them. it would make sense if it eats her up inside that she killed essentially a completely innocent person but that guilt hardly wracks her at all before the plot point is completely, or seemingly, forgotten).

i think another culmination of these issues is the arc where scarlet loses her powers. it happens completely out of the blue and leaves scarlet in a bad situation (and also brook in a bad situation, and all of this really happens because scarlet decides to go save brook by herself-trust me this will be a recurring theme). normally, when a character loses their powers, it's the setup to some character-defining moment. a revelation of ideals, themes, morals, something. the character realizes something about themselves, their powers, or something or some other.

in scarlet's case... they just.... randomly come back. yeah. no, like, character-defining moment or anything. like legitimately the defining physical characteristic of her losing her powers is her losing her horns and tail, and the very next chapter after killing her friend, she gets her powers back. like, what? at that point it literally just feels like a deus ex machina that was set up specifically so scarlet would have no choice but to let brook kill her friend. this plot point comes up again later presented as some great "smart" twist but it falls so flat because none of the actual setup for the original plot point was there.

in essence... it's not directly stated, which further adds to the confusion, but the general idea of the latest few chapters is that scarlet has, presumably, gained the ability to... turn off her powers at will. and she uses this to... "kill judah not as a reaper." what? she can just... not be a reaper anymore? how does turning off her powers and losing access to her demon not make her a reaper? she's literally alive because satan turned her into a reaper. if she's not a reaper, shouldn't she just go back to hell? and be dead? does this mean she literally never has to fulfill the kill quota of "a sinner a day" that the very first chapter established? it feels like it's trying to be smart, but none of it makes any sense.

there are a few other small things, like, scarlet and chase being way too loveydovey. i get that their relationship has to develop beyond what it was before, but this doesn't feel like the right direction. for the kinds of people both scarlet and chase are, this feels like a way too fast development for them. (yes, yes, i know, the timeskip or whatever, it's still too fast in terms of the already ridiculously fast pacing from a reader's perspective).

the last big thing i think that kills me is the scarlet reveal. she unleashed the scarlet rot. yes! there was good foreshadowing for that. her name, for one, and the fact that she was a doctor. all good foreshadowing. now, we have to figure out the reason why she revealed the scarlet rot. excellent.

it turns out she released the scarlet rot because she needed money for her ailing mother. sure, that can make some sense. people will pay any amount of money for a cure. it's a pretty easy get-rich scheme for someone as intelligent as her. but then it turns out... scarlet turned herself into patient zero? for... some reason? it isn't really established why. scarlet just thinks she has enough time to find a cure before it kills her, but that doesn't tell us why she decided to infect herself. it just makes her look stupid, because in the end, she isn't able to find a cure. (well, she makes a cure, but not before it's too late and she's already given up her lease on life due to her mother's death). scarlet's own rot ends up affecting her so significantly she has to replace an organ once a week. she spends an inordinate amount of money buying organs off the black market (this is the answer to an earlier question, but again, it just makes no sense given the context). her goal was to earn money to pay for her mother's treatment, but her shortsightedness led her to literally go into debt. again, i don't mind this strange... characterization, but the story doesn't even acknowledge it at all. it makes scarlet look like a dumbass.

i think that's pretty much most of my thoughts. generally, just, characters don't shine like they used to, the plot makes little sense. and i'm tired because i really enjoyed this comic in the beginning, but ever since scarlet got sent to the 9th level of hell, it's been rough going.