#MY REPUTATION......TARNISHED...!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[theemporium]

Quinn Hughes +ice skating❤️

thank you for requesting!🫶🏽

.

“I think this counts as cheating.”

Quinn’s lips twitched upwards. “How is it cheating?” 

“Because this is your profession,” you retorted, your head still staring down helplessly at your own skates. 

Quinn looked at you with a fond expression. “You said you wanted to do something fun and wintery for date night.”

“This is hardly a fun winter activity when it’s like breathing for you,” you muttered, letting out a harsh breath when you felt your skates slip a little but Quinn’s grip on you kept you upright. “Fucking hell, I am going to die.”

Quinn snorted. “You’re not going to die.”

“This might literally be the last date night we ever have.” 

It was no secret that NHL players had schedules from hell. You knew that. Quinn had warned you constantly at the start of your relationship. So many other partners had reiterated the point until it was drilled into your head. You knew that no matter what, the scheduling was going to be a constant hurdle you would have to jump over in your relationship. 

But you had your ways around it. 

The date nights weren’t always every week or anything, but they were planned. It was dedicated time you both put effort into, took turns planning and always stuck to. No matter what was happening in either one of your work lives, it was all left behind for the duration of the date. They were even marked out on your shared calendar because Quinn was oddly endearing and organised like that.

You had made a passing comment to Quinn a week or so ago about wanting to do something more seasonal for your next date night. You just had assumed he would be as predictable as choosing ice skating—albeit, city ice skating in a public rink, but your point still stood. 

“You think I would let you die?” Quinn mused, choosing not to comment on the way you were digging your nails into his arm—even through your gloves. 

“You were the one who dragged me out onto the ice,” you grumbled, letting out a whimpering sound when a kid skated past you at such a high speed that it almost knocked you over by surprise. “This is public humiliation.”

“I would never let anything happen to you,” Quinn assured you as he pulled you closer, continuing to skate backwards with ease because he was a dick like that. “My reputation would be tarnished if you died under my supervision. Jack and Luke would never let me forget it.”

You lifted your head to glare at your boyfriend. 

Quinn’s grin widened in response. “Kidding. Mum would kill me first.”

“Ellen would avenge me,” you said with a nod. 

“You are her favourite.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” you snorted but at least you were smiling now. “But I’ll take it right now because I’m pretty sure I am getting a cramp in my leg and I need you to drag me along before that kid skates by again.”

.

[palomahasenteredthechat]

I’ve Seen Celebrity P.R. Tactics at Work. Blake Lively Is Not Alone.

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

The actress Blake Lively is not someone I had a real opinion about before a few days ago, when the news broke that she had filed a legal complaint against Justin Baldoni, her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star, for sexual harassment and retaliation. But I saw a video a while back in which she appeared to be hostile to a reporter making a seemingly innocuous reference to her pregnancy. My impression was that she seemed a little rude and needlessly antagonistic. I saw the video thanks to a Daily Mail article suggesting that she was facing a backlash — one that, unbeknown to me, was allegedly the product of a smear campaign by a public relations firm hired by Mr. Baldoni to damage Ms. Lively’s reputation in order to pre-empt her accusations about his wildly inappropriate behavior on set.

Much of what we know about celebrities’ lives is shaped by P.R. professionals who are paid handsomely to create and spread stories that are flattering to their clients and unflattering to their perceived enemies. Reputation management is big business: The time and resources spent in Hollywood and New York to buff, polish and protect a star’s image can be greater than what’s spent to protect the reputations of some chief executives or senators. It’s a ruthless business, too. Dishonesty is often tolerated, on the dubious basis that entertainment is a frivolity and the stakes are low, and things like talent and truth can be tarnished with the art of the smear.

I saw the brute force of celebrity P.R. tactics up close early in my career after I co-founded the website Gawker in 2002 — which mostly covered well-known New Yorkers in the spirit of Spy magazine, which had christened Donald Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian” — and freelanced for The New York Post’s Page Six gossip column. In the first months of Gawker, in spite of having just around 10,000 readers a day, we got a cease-and-desist letter from Marty Singer, a well-known entertainment lawyer who insisted that we take down an unflattering story about one of his clients. The threat never went anywhere because we had not published the story but had merely linked to it. These were the early days of the internet, and many people didn’t understand how hyperlinks worked. It’s unclear to me even now whether his firm understood this perfectly well but sent the cease-and-desist letter to try to intimidate us anyway.

At Page Six, the P.R. apparatus of blocking and tackling was even more apparent because the gossip industry is so intertwined with celebrities. P.R. people wouldn’t just defend their clients; they would try to plant flattering stories, derail unflattering ones or pit celebrities against each other to redirect attention.

Most of the plants were fairly innocuous — a sighting of a celebrity at an upscale restaurant or a note about what a celebrity was wearing. Others were more strategic, and publicists would sometimes try to negotiate more flattering coverage of one client by offering a scoop about another or a tip about a client’s rival.

Sometimes publicists would use access to celebrities as leverage. On one occasion a powerful New York publicist was so angry that the head of the column wouldn’t kill a story about a friend and former love interest that she threatened to ban its staff members from all of her high-profile events. In retaliation, the columnist she threatened published a salacious blind item about her and called her parties “horrific.”

No one is more sensitive about celebrity image making and reputation management than the celebrities themselves. I was once on a panel with the actor Alec Baldwin at the Hamptons International Film Festival for a documentary that was partly about Gawker, and he more or less lit into me onstage because he was resentful about an item that the site published years after I left, reporting that he had called his then-11-year-old daughter, Ireland, a pig in an angry voice mail.

He suggested that entertainment journalists were leeches determined to invade his privacy and that he tried to stay out of the spotlight. I laughed because, in my view, this was obviously not true. Mr. Baldwin and other stars appeared regularly in Page Six — often because celebrity publicists called to plant flattering stories about them. (His wife, Hilaria Baldwin, a former lifestyle correspondent for “Extra,” a show about Hollywood celebrities, acknowledged to me at a dinner after a panel that this happened but suggested that their P.R. people did it without their knowledge.)

Now that so much reputation management happens on social media platforms and elsewhere on the internet, the sources of information — and ultimately, the truth and the manufactured lies about a celebrity — are harder to sort through.

This was something Mr. Baldoni’s P.R. firm is accused of exploiting on his behalf via coordinated posts on various platforms. They allegedly used a technique called astroturfing, in which they used social media accounts to create the impression that Ms. Lively was difficult to work with and betraying feminism in some way while playing up Mr. Baldoni’s credentials as a self-proclaimed feminist who cared about preventing domestic violence. And his P.R. firm was largely successful until Ms. Lively’s legal complaint laid out the alleged smear campaign. Her business suffered, and so did her reputation. (Mr. Baldoni’s attorney said in a statement to The Times that the accusations of a smear campaign were “categorically false.”)

Why are these techniques sometimes so damaging? Celebrities, actors in particular, traffic in narrative. People want to know about them because they see them play out human dramas onscreen and feel they can relate to them. Viewers develop what social psychologists call parasocial relationships with them — one-way relationships in which people identify with and feel they understand another person, who, to put it bluntly, doesn’t know they exist. They think they know something about who a celebrity is because they relate to characters the celebrity has played, and they’re genuinely curious about the lives of actors beyond their onscreen roles. Celebrities deal with this by hiring P.R. people to manage their reputations or simply keeping a low profile.

For stars like Ms. Lively and her husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds, keeping tabs on their public image is a necessity because the way people perceive them directly affects the success of their work. They are not just people who have a job in entertainment; they are brands. The machinery to protect or upend those brands is often as or more extensive than it is for large, high-profile companies, in part because people relate to stars very personally in a way that they don’t relate to institutions or products.

My 9-year-old son plays a video game called Fortnite and was delighted to discover Mr. Reynolds popping out of an A.T.M. in the game because he thinks Mr. Reynolds is hilarious and likable. (I agree, but I don’t know him personally, and this could be the work of very good P.R. people and a generally positive parasocial relationship.) These parasocial relationships are crucial to the business of Hollywood, where a popular actor can make or break a big-budget movie.

In this sense, Ms. Lively had another thing working against her: the particular line women have to walk in the public eye. They must be likable in a way that men don’t have to be. It probably says something positive about her that the worst thing Mr. Baldoni’s P.R. firm could produce in terms of smearing her were clips and social media posts that suggested she was unlikable and nitpicked about her posture and tone, which is easy to do with any high-profile woman, especially one who’s been interviewed hundreds of times. Everyone has an off day or a clip that can be unflattering out of context. If you have an impression of Ms. Lively and it’s generally negative, it may be because, like me, you saw one of those clips and the sprawling campaign that put those clips in front of you was invisible to you.

The allegations Ms. Lively makes in her complaint are chilling. Among other things, she says that Mr. Baldoni kept insisting that she perform sex scenes that were not part of the script, touched and kissed her without consent, suggested she was too fat and old to play the part and absurdly called for her to be nude for a scene in which she delivers a baby, because, she says he insisted, that’s what women do when they give birth. (Ms. Lively is a mother of four, by the way. She is not exactly unaware of what that process looks like.)

She dealt behind the scenes with all that she says happened, and the irony is that you and I would know nothing about it if Mr. Baldoni hadn’t allegedly tried to harm her reputation and was successful in doing so — at which point she felt she had little choice but to sue him and make it public.

The complaint itself is a kind of reputation management, one that’s far more effective than an astroturfing campaign because it’s transparent. You know who’s making the allegations and why. You know that a court will evaluate facts and evidence — not just viral gossip and planted stories about a given celebrity, often shaped by people you never see. You know the verdict can’t be reversed simply by the subterranean digital warfare of P.R. executives. And you know the reputations of all parties, in the end, will rise or fall not on celebrity image making but on something far closer to the truth.

[veradragonjedi]

If you two see this.

[stealerofthe2ndbraincell]

There's an aspect of Original!Elias Bouchard that makes me so sad to think about in a weird kind of "meta" way.

And that's the fact that he has to be labelled as the "OG" not as Elias.

Technically speaking Elias has been dead for years. It's Jonah that's taken over - literally having his eyes removed and replacing them with his own and living as him (he even seemingly keeps his "old fashioned haircut" on Elias' hair).

And yet we as the audience don't often call that form of Jonah "JONAH". Instead it's Elias, cause he's been Elias for 4 series at this point.

"Elias started the apocalypse", "Elias beat that old man to death with a metal pipe" when it was never really Elias in the first place.

He's been so robbed of his own identity that not even death can spare him; all of Jonah's actions in his body are recognised as him.

(Btw this isn't me saying you can't call Jonah!Elias straight up Elias, I do that regularly ofc. I'm just being emo rn lol)

[eaissilyy]

Their gossip session is either about planning to kill you or just making fun of you falling to your death. (especially when you're fighting Margit and fell off a cliff. Just As Planned.) There is no in between.

(CALL ME A TRUE BELIEVER IN OMEN TWINS GOSSIP SESSION. THEY SAID THEY DON'T LIKE EACH OTHER BUT IK THEY CANNOT STOP YAPPING WHEN THEY MEET. THEY COMPLAIN ABOUT EVERYTHING. I NEED TO LISTEN TO THEM YAPPING PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.) hello back to normal bark bark.

[rhymesswith]

Yeah I have some favourite characters.

What I'm really appreciating this re-watch is how Rin is canonically a Weird Girl. I like to think that everyone expects her to become more "normal" after coming to the village and getting more human socialization but gradually realize that oh. that's just the way she is.

[beemochi-art]

Kilomegs silly goodies I had stored in the back. Ft:Ravage. The only other that currently knows about Megatron’s relationship.

Megatron: I can’t wait for him to find out I’m not mysterious and sexy and instead weird and annoying…

[lovelesslittleloser]

Just thinking of Danny in preforming at the Ice Lounge in a Robin costume and the only reason everyone knows he’s NOT Robin is because he’s chanting ‘WE AT THE HOTEL, MOTEL, HOLIDAY IIIIIIIINN’

[tubbytarchia]

Points at my pinned message. There's a message there in bold. I'm sorry I don't clarify that I'm talking about CHARACTERS ONLY in posts that I don't maintag. I presume if you're on my blog to see these posts at all, you would already know as much. CHARACTERS please... just characters.... I've acknowledged that CC Jimmy is not bothered by the bullying many times. I'm very aware... I'm talking about characters......................

[catominor]

another thing about the c. martinus and l. furius scholarship too is that their story gets received into the historical record with some. significant differences to what Actually happened so i get to have soo very much fun with that...

[c0rinarii]

i dont know why this has to be constantly reinstated in some parts of the community but "lol reimu racist" arguement is at most a strawman and a terrible read into her character even without the deep dive into her lore (see: literally the chapter in WaHH where she willingly takes in Reisen II)

[robinsnest2111]

great. nightmares about my fuck up as soon as i close my eyes 👍

[stilltrails]

If I were to write Thomas More and Alice More's relationship in Wolf Hall, More would still be an asshole to everyone except his wife and his daughters. He'd break the conversations he's having with everyone in Greek just to drag Cromwell in English so that Alice could understand and join in.

Cromwell would have to defend himself in English & Greek.

[aimlessetymology]

misty's greatest crime was saving coach ben

[justanothergeneralkrow]

UKvtw finale is such whiplash for me.

Marina's lip sync getting botched in the edit. I weep, cry and throw up.

Tia being an actual camp cow and making me fall in love with her all over again. I scream in joy, I cry in happiness, I cheer when she is crowned.

[aviaris]

it’s so funny to me the way high-concept yuri that runs for like, any longer than a one-shot runs face-first into a tangled web of hard choices as they try to navigate their way into accidentally having a plot.

some of them give up just, Immediately and within three chapters the story about being bullied by a cool delinquent has become indistinguishable from any off-the-shelf romance fluff. some of them shoot off in a different direction entirely, all but abandoning the original premise in favor of an adjacent one with longer legs. all too often, of course, we get wrapped up in the banal lives of the less compelling side characters.

imo, the mark of a truly good gimmick yuri is how many angles on the premise it can play before it gets bored or distracted. what happens after that almost doesn’t matter— I can’t be mad after I’ve gotten a good three volumes of what I was promised, after all. But if you ask me, you really gotta give the audience what they came for before then.