#NIGHTMARE NIGHTMARE NIGHTMARE! I LOVE BEING POOR AND LIVING IN POVERTY!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fruityuncleskeletor · 2 months

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I'm so sorry if I sound like a cunt right now but I have so much trouble empathising with rich people when they're "sad". And I get it, idol life sounds like it can be a nightmare half the time, but they know what they're signing up to. Most of us will never have this kind of opportunity in life, or even escape poverty with the way the world is. And sure, money can't buy true happiness but it sure as hell eliminates the vast majority of stressors that drive people into deep depression and gives access to all the treatments and meds that improve your condition. Maybe this makes me a horrible person but I'd much rather go through trauma and depression in a mansion being able to feed myself and my loved ones, all my bills paid on time, than struggle with depression as is plus the depression of having to choose between eating or paying rent. He could retire tomorrow and have his life set.

You know what? Your feelings are valid AND justified. I feel the same most of the time. Buuut... There's also a halo effect at work, surrounding celebrities - just because they are attractive and competent in one area, we tend to assume they are ethical people and in our minds, they can do no wrong. Their PR machine definitely works hard to confirm this biased view we hold of them.

My tags on the story video have just as much chance to be projection as they do to be a reflection of his emotions and intentions while posting that video. There was just something so endlessly sad to it - the fact that he is bare-faced and not smiling at all, and how he shifted the focus towards that one lonely insect in that tiny, mostly dry patch of flowers. It made me feel horrible because I forgot all about festival season and favourite bands and it reminded me that the bugs are fewer and fewer, we have no more seasons in Europe and the heat in the cities is making the elderly die in their homes. I have definitely said it before: I too would prefer to weep in a Ferrari than on a fucking bus. And I am a bigger, saltier cunt for thinking how easy it would be for celebrities to be vegan, to not wear fur and leather, to not work with corrupt brands, to tell people to really think it through before having kids they cannot afford to raise - and seeing that none of my faves are engaging in that. Because being famous and rich is more rewarding than being compassionate and using your platform to ACTUALLY change the world for the better by changing the people you touch with your art. But that stance can definitely coexist with compassion towards him. He could be my child, age-wise, and he seems to have a harder and harder time with the demands of celebrity. And even if he's feeling despair at the state of the world while dripped in Louis Vitty from head to toe, he would still get a hug from me. We're all trapped in this hell together and HE is definitely not the one who's keeping you and me poor and making the oceans boil. Oh and by the way: money doesn't buy happiness, but it definitely buys you the freedom you need to search for happiness. I'm definitely struggling right now, and feeling shame about it too. So we're not looking at things from that different of a perspective. By the end of this summer, all my friends will have seen SKZ live somewhere near them and I will feel really poor and left out. I can't even say, "fuck it! I won't have a future anyway, better live it up now" because I am too salty and it costs nothing to have my friends think I'm a fake fan for not traveling to another country and paying one month's paycheck to see men shaking their butts on a tiny-ass stage far away. So not engaging in that kind of sacrifice just to see my current obsession band is all I can afford right now.

#ask #answered #thank you for sending this bit #these are feelings we all have but no one teaches us how to address them #because it's not socially acceptable to hold the rich accountable #and the rich are always presumed innocent because of the Protestant belief that wealth is awarded by God to the most righteous humans #but that's just old insidious church propaganda and must be questioned every step of the way

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ina-nis · 2 years

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Therapist finally discussed the plateau we hit and I took that as a treatment dead-end: they cannot help me any further.

I’m glad they recognized - and actually told me - that this kind of therapy have the possibility of enabling avoidance further, and making things worse (so I wasn’t imagining things).

Because I have had great experiences with this type in the past, I assumed it would go well but I was wrong: all therapeutic treatments I tried were helpful to treat problems stemming from myself towards myself.

AvPD is a social disorder.

I will not be able to treat it if I’m doing that as if it was a problem with myself. It is not.

They brought up group therapy and I brought it down because group therapy was what made me realize I had AvPD and it was very, very unhelpful overall. The feeling of alienation was too big, and in group therapy, facilitators remain superficial - whereas I need deeper and more reliable support.

The conventional therapeutic approaches for AvPD will not work for me because I don’t suffer from social anxiety. I have good social skills and I’m able to talk to people without any issues, I mask well too. I just think socializing is completely pointless and a waste of the very little energy I have.

If there’s something else, I’d love to try, but if this is all what there is, I don’t think I’ll receive proper help or treatment for this disorder...

I try to remain hopeful but even if I do find a specialist, I don’t think I’ll be able to afford it.

More than living with a personality disorder being a nightmare, living in poverty is a sure way to guarantee I will not get the treatment I need. What am I even supposed to do? I will not stop being poor out of sheer willpower or with positive thinking, nor I’ll be able to find employment when my disabilities make it hard for me to go through the whole process (with AvPD itself being a major issue at that).

#avpd #avoidance #avoidant #avoidant personality disorder #inanis post

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cyberwizardsblog · 8 months

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Why gay marriages won't work in India

Recently supreme court gave its judgment about same sex marriage case declining the request to change the spacial marriage act to facilitate the same sex marriage.

Although I think judgment was unfair to struggle of all the people involved specially women and trans folks

I didn't include gays in that list because being a gay myself, I have noticed several trends in gays of India that makes them unsuitable for marriage.

First thing first there are broad general trends in homosexual men in India

1. Tops are looking for easy release without caring for bottoms pleasure. I have met several tops who says they are pure tops meaning they don't kiss, suck. I have met tops who don't even like touching asshole while wanting to do anal sex.

2. Most tops are married men or going to marry a girl or don't even comprehend the idea of marrying another man.

3. Most bottoms are poor, looking for sugar daddy or jobs/money.

4. Place of doing the deed is big problem for everyone. Even if someone has place, they don't want to do that at their place due mess created during sex or stigma attached to sex or due to society.

5. People says that they are looking for love but actually they are looking someone who can shower his love on them while they were free to fuck someone else/ recently described as situationship.

6. Obviously there is division based on economic status, caste and religion. Gays who are in higher echelon don't care about lower status people despite being in same boat.

7. Then there are several organisations who works for welfare of LGBT people. Although there are some good people and organisations, most of the organisation are full of English speaking woke people who can't comprehend the complexities of India society. Their donors are ultra elite people who just wants to feel good about themselves and brag to their western countries friends without actually making any changes in society of India.

These are personal experiences based on several people I have met. Obviously tops don't share their feelings being toxic males. Its mostly bottoms who are bearing the brunt of highly patriarchal toxic society. Although they are better then lesbians due to patriarchy.

So coming to the point of marriage, there are few points I would like to share, why it won't work for most gays in India

1. Internal homophobia- People who claim to be home sexual behave in the same manner as a toxic male would behave with women. Like anytime harrasment or any bottom.

2. While most tops wants bottoms to do the all the work that are assigned to women in traditional households but doesn't want to support financially, physically or mentally as normal men do to their wives. Tops wants a bottom to submit to their whims and fancies without taking care of their well being.

3. Poverty is big problem to have a place of their own. In traditional marriage women move to groom's parents home, but since most of LGBT aren't accepted by their families, moving in with parent's home is out of question. So where to go after marriage

A. Renting a place for same sex couple in homophobic country like India is nightmare.

B. Most young aren't rich enough to afford home of their own.

4. Everyone need social security. Society function because people are interdependent and help each other during hard times. But with gays there is no society, most people live secluded life, without interacting with other gays or being friends with each other. Either fuck or we don't know each other attitude of gays make them loneliest people.

In India caste, religion or geographical identities works because people support their common identities, even if they don't no each other personally.

For example if two same caste people met in government offices they will help each other but gays won't do the same. They will probably avoid each other due various reasons.

It is this attitude of Indian gays that makes them pathetic creatures on Earth. All of them want to have live like Western countries gays but they aren't ready for struggle that people of those countries have faced. People of western countries have faced brutal murders, conversion therepy, state repression but became victorious because they have each other. Now they are powerful because rich support the cause of poor. They support each other through various means. ( Shopping from gay shopkeeper, to selecting gays for jobs to providing support of mental, financial, social nature to people who are asking for help).

So there is no concept of social gay. Gay who are brand to cater to for business or government aren't exists in India. Marriage is a social institution. It can't work in alone. So if there is no society for gays, of gays marriage for same sex won't work as they do for heterosexuals.

#same sex marriage #india #gay marriage #lost judgment #lgbtqia #social justice #ngoindia #economic disparities #narendra modi

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illmetkismet · 2 years

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Hello this is a shower thought post about moral frameworks in the Dishonored games!

The first Dishonored is a takedown of Randian political principles: that there are exceptional people who know what's best for society at large (Burrows), and that it's acceptable to 'break a few eggs to make an omelette', so to speak. To sacrifice Dunwall's poor in a manufactured plague in order to rid the city of poverty.

Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches are both a takedown of a kind of spiritual determinism - the belief so many of us hold that it doesn't really matter what we choose to do because in the end there are forces greater than us fucking things up (Randians, for example...) and so our actions are nothing but noise. Daud learns the hard way, following his assassination of Jessamine, that it's not true, and he spends the DLCs not only trying to 'atone', but being faced with situation after situation where choice is a very personal, poignant thing.

Dishonored 2 is a takedown of personal narcissism. Delilah as the main antagonist is stuck perpetually lashing out at a world she feels has wronged her while at the same time desperately wanting to be loved by that world. In her delusional quest for universal adoration she mangles what love she has, or could have. Playing as Emily highlights how remaining childish, a bit self-centered, and not being attentive enough to her subjects has made Emily kind of a shit Empress.

Death of the Outsider is in large part a continuation of Daud's struggle with determinism, but it's also a takedown of epistemological obsession, of the belief that there is an absolute truth one can discover about the nature and meaning of life and the universe, and that the pursuit of this knowledge excuses any horrible thing you might do to get there. The antagonist in this game is not the Outsider at all, but the obsessive cultists who've dedicated their lives (and sacrificed the lives of others) to the pursuit of this knowledge.

So, political, spiritual, personal, epistemological. All different angles to the question of what is right, what is good, and in each of the games the answer is always the same: kindness. Mercy. The morality system in the game measures 'chaos', and the less kind you are, the more chaotic the world becomes. It doesn't matter how politically effective someone is, how spiritually consistent, how personally fulfilled, or how epistemologically correct - the only way to live well in the world (Dishonored's world and ours) is to be kind. It's to choose that kindness instead of a knife, over and over.

So many people play these games and they're disappointed at the impact their choices have. After all, at the end of Dishonored, Dunwall is still a deeply non-egalitarian early industrial capitalist nightmare of a city. Daud doesn't find the redemption he seeks until his very last breath in the Void. Emily doesn't dissolve the monarchy in favour of some utopian socialist fantasy. If you give the Outsider his name back, nothing cool happens.

I think that's why people give up on kindness as an organizing principle of morality in real life too. It's a painfully slow-acting medicine for the world's ills and so often it's much more satisfying to get your way, to give in to nihilism, to be cruel, to be right.

Whew, this post has gone on for way longer than I intended... I just wanted to say that the central thesis of the Dishonored games is that most of the time kindness isn't very effective or easy or satisfying or interesting, but it's the only path to something better, for ourselves and for the world we live in. That's all.

#Dishonored

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metvmorqhoses · 3 years

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Hey there! I'd like to hear your thoughts about this. Jkr never put a lot of thought into voldemort as a character did she? The fact that his villainy is oversimplified to be "conceived under a love potion and hence can't love" although there are instances where he has loved. The narrative that is put forth is that every child who was conceived through unhealthy relationships, abandoning parents and difficult circumstances is destined to be incapable of love. (There are problems/issues because of these circumstances but it's not a doomed-to-be-unloved situation)

The abuse he faced or the trauma was never explained and neither was his nature which can be either perceived as arrogance or as self-preservation in his formative years..

I love your blog and analyses btw!🖤

i couldn’t agree more. i don’t know if you are familiar with what i usually write about voldemort as a villain and as an all-around character, but what you are talking about is not only something i always mention when i discuss him in a more complex, adult manner, but much more importantly is deeply linked to what i think about the hp series in general and to the one, major issue i have with it in particular. this is something i consider very important and, honestly, a topic that is never stressed enough: jkr wrote an overly black and white children book, where oversimplification is the fundamental fabric of everything and i find it all very problematic, to say the least.

i understand the series started as a children book and that characterizing so generically and so stereotypically serves as a great advantage to sell copies, since virtually everyone can draw their own conclusions about pretty much every single character of the series and therefore identify, but hp more often than not proudly poses as a moral compass, as a good-vs-evil lecture, aiming to accompany children into adulthood hand in hand (both the books and the movies literally grow in tone, length, targeted audience and themes with the children who are consuming them), so it’s not unfair of me to be concerned about what exactly these morals have been teaching children and then teens (myself included) for more than twenty years about reality, even as a fantasy series.

i often say the characterizations of its heroes is the thing that scares me the most about the hp series. the entirely of the “good guys” in these books lack basic normal human reactions. they all went through hell one way or another, harry constantly witnessing every last one of his family relations dying/growing up abused and hated/discovering he was raised literally to be slaughtered by the man he looked up to the most, ginny being possessed/forced to kill/almost murdered in tender age by the literal devil and whose trauma is never mentioned again, hermione having to erase the memories of her parents - you know, the list goes on and on. the one thing that all of them have in common tho, is their non-consequence to horror. and that’s wildly unhuman. aside from a little sadness, some stubborn dementors chasing bad memories and sporadic plot-serving nightmares, none of the heroes is really effected or damaged by what happens to them. when normal people would have spiritual crisis, ptsd, depression, manic episodes, you name it, jkr is feeding us the idea that really good, brave, strong, valuable people remain unaffected by trauma and that only the weak, wrong, damaged and therefore evil ones are. and i find it beyond disturbing.

paradoxically enough, voldemort is the only prominent example (probably along with snape and draco, but in a very different way) of “normal” human behavior when a child is exposed that much to trauma and abuse in tender age. jkr never really explains voldermort beyond her rhetorical “he’s wickedness personified” motto, yet the little characterization she gave him is entirely built around trauma - a trauma that she openly equates to evil. voldemort is a child born out of rape (there’s a metaphorical love potion and therefore he’s unable to love - leaving aside the idiocy of it, how sick is that? as if a child should carry the faults of his parents, as if all children born from rape were emotionally disabled or soon to be psychopaths! what exactly she wanted to prove with this point will forever be beyond me), a child abandoned to abuse and poverty in the middle of ww2, a child i’m sure shunned for his magical powers if not worse, a child without a single resource on the planet but himself, a child to whom no one, ever, not even later in the wizarding world, ever gave a helping hand or genuine affection (he was literally sent back to a world war because “no one can live in the school in the summer”, i mean!). of course he had to react to survive, of course all that left him scarred, because it didn’t leave him annihiliated! tom and harry share the condition of the orphan, but while harry was loved by his dead parents, glorified and rich and adored, voldemort was unwanted, discriminated against, bullied, poor and ignored. had dumbledore treated tom as he had treated harry (not that he treated harry that well if we really analyze it, but still), had his mother not abandoned him and died, jkr herself said lord voldemort would have probably never existed.

is this a correct way to stereotype human nature? is this a good message to give children? the only plausible human in there is the psychopathic super villain who is physically unable to love?

i like to think voldermort differently. i do think he could, of couse he could, actually love - as we all can if we allow ourselves to. he’s too complex, too intelligent, too whole as a character to lack anything, both for the good and for the bad. i like to think that maybe amortentia (aka the entirety of his early life experiences) left him dissociated and unable to *understand* his feelings in general and love in particular. maybe he didn’t dare to love anyone. maybe he dared once.

i like to think this way because the way jkr characterizes is nothing short of a disgrace.

the question people ask me the most is precisely this, if i think i’m giving voldemort much more depth than the author actually intended in the first place. my answer is always the same - yes, of course i do. voldemort is beautiful the way i imagine him, as a real plausible person, as a deeply flawed and multifaceted and scarred human being who turned to darkness in search for a home and a reason and that had ultimately found one, as terrible as it was. he certainly deserved more, from a literary point of view. yet i understand it was convenient and safe for jkr to only ever play with his godly, evil, black and white facade.

#lord voldemort #hp #tom marvolo riddle #bellamort #asks/replies #anon #one and one thousand stories lis told #thank you dear <3

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surfalldaybaby · 4 years

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”A Very Long and Comprehensive Analysis of Feyre’s Experience w/ Trauma and Abuse

- This is not a kind analysis of Nesta but please still read it if you want. It’s not in the wrong tags tho so please don’t rant about how much you love Nesta. I love that for you. Personally, I hate her. :)

Also- I use many of the quotes that @feysandlover and @dont-rattle-aelin used to prove her point that Nesta is abusive because she pulled many of the really jarring ones.

I was looking through the Rhysand tag and for some reason someone posted something comparing Nesta and Feyre in terms of their trauma, and they said that Nesta had experienced way more trauma than Feyre and I-

That’s disgusting.

First - don’t compare trauma

Second- they were wrong and lacked critical thinking skills that left out Feyre’s full experience with abuse

Nesta was sexually assaulted ( which nobody talks about enough) and her family’s fortune flipped making them poor overnight. Because of this she fostered anger towards her father. I get that. I sympathize with that. She is then taken away from her life and forcefully changed into fae. I cannot imagine what that felt like for her. It must have been devastating. Her whole identity was shifted in one day and she went from hating fae to being fae. Confusing and overwhelming. She then goes into war and develops PTSD and depression from her experiences. She sees her father die and is unable to reconcile her anger and his death. It’s horrible and I cannot even begin to understand the depth of her emotions here. I have zero issue saying that about Nesta because it’s true she has gone through extaordinary trauma and I cannot imagine how she fully feels. She deals with this trauma in unhealthy ways because they only exacerbate her feelings of worthlessness. Not her fault. However, she also treats Mor and Feyre and Rhys in disrespectful ways and Cassian and her have an unhealthy dynamic where they insult each other. Her and Amren have a shaky and partner like relationship but it is by no means a sturdy one. Az and Nesta don’t seem to have a relationship at all. She has no true healthy relationship with anyone but Elain, and you could argue even that is not truly healthy.

Much of Nesta’s trauma is due to extraneous factors and a multitude or variables. It’s valid and it matters just as much as Feyres. They are both real. However the amount of traumatic experiences she has gone through does not come close to rivaling that of Feyre’s and to even try and compare them is disgusting. Trauma should never be compared but I want to show Feyre’s experience in a broader light to show her development from a scared girl to high lady

Feyre was never an active abuser in any relationship she was always the one being abused. Nesta was abused and she was also the abuser. It is important to point that out because it heavily impacts Feyre’s story.

Also, I believe the reason Feyre became so accustomed and slipped so easily into being a victim to Tamlins abuse is because Feyre was already the victim of emotional abuse from her sisters. We see this everyday, research shows that victims of abuse go back to abusive relationship and form new relationships that center around abuse because they are used to it and find it comforting. This is an extraneous point that you can agree with or can argue against it’s just a personal connection I made. However, it is very evident how Nesta and Elains treatment of Feyre affects her. She has no self confidence, she remains illiterate and with no real knowledge of polite manners ( something important in the real world, something that holds her back from being able to assimilate into the real world), her spirit is broken down at home because she knows that verbal attacks are going to come and Nesta is going to lash out and say horrible disgusting things to her if she asks her to do something or holds her accountable for her lack of work. She is constantly degraded for everything that she does and it has a pronoucned effect on her psyche throughout the trilogy and novella.

Like Nesta, Feyre also had to go through her family losing their fortune, she also had to bear the weight of her promise to her mother, she had to support her sisters financially going into the forest alone to hunt animals just as big as herself at 14. She never had money for herself because her sisters took it from her. Like they literally took all her money to buy things they did not need, leaving Feyre with basically nothing.

“I’d love a new cloak,” Elain said at last with a sigh, at the same moment Nesta rose and declared: “I need a new pair of boots.””“I kept quiet, knowing better than to get in the middle of one of their arguments, but I glanced at Nesta’s still-shiny pair by the door. Beside hers, my too-small boots were falling apart at the seams, held together only by fraying laces... I drowned them out as they began quarreling over who would get the money the hide would fetch tomorrow…”

And Nesta complains and whines and doesn’t stop gaslighting Feyre because of her lack of hard work. But, she doesn’t want to do work herself because she thinks it’s beneath her.

“I thought you were going to chop wood today. Nesta picked at her long, neat nails. “I hate chopping wood. I always get splinters. She glanced up from beneath her dark lashes. Of all of us, Nesta looked the most like our mother—especially when she wanted something. “Besides, Feyre,” she said with a pout, “you’re so much better at it! It takes you half the time it takes me. Your hands are suited for it—they’re already so rough.” My jaw clenched. “Please,” I asked, calming my breathing, knowing an argument was the last thing I needed or wanted. “Please get up at dawn to chop that wood.” I unbuttoned the top of my tunic. “Or we’ll be eating a cold breakfast.” Her brows narrowed. “I will do no such thing!”

She doesn’t care about Feyre or the fact that starving is their new reality. Poverty is what they live in. We all know if Feyre didn’t go hunting Nesta would be furious at Feyre and belittle her and make her feel small and responsible for their hunger.

“Take those disgusting clothes off.”

“Any bit of praise for anyone—me, Elain, other villagers—usually resulted in her dismissal.”

“Is there a problem, Feyre?” She flung my name like an insult, and my jaw ached from clenching it so hard.”

“You stink like a pig covered in its own filth. Can’t you at least try to pretend that you’re not an ignorant peasant?”c“Take those disgusting clothes off.”

“What do you know?” Nesta breathed. “You’re just a half-wild beast with the nerve to bark orders at all hours of the day and night. Keep it up, and someday—someday, Feyre, you’ll have no one left to remember you, or to care that you ever existed.” She stormed off, Elain darting after her, cooing her sympathy.

Then Tamlim comes and kidnaps her. More trauma. She falls in love with him, I think partly because of Stockholm Syndrome and also because he shows her a level of kindness that she was not given at home, and then he disappears so she has to go back to her life with her sisters. Her sisters have all the benefits of her being stolen away bcs Feyre was able to provide their old house and wealth back through Tamlin’s gift. Her sisters literally never did anything to provide for themselves or help their father or sister. If you really think about that situation as a whole it’s devastating. Then she goes to save Tamlin and finds that her home and her loved one was basically destroyed. She goes to save him.

While under the mountain Amarantha humiliates and tortures her for fun. She makes her run around trying to get away from a monster, her illiteracy is exploited for amusement while she is under pressure of death by fire, she is forced to kill fae in order to save her love, and she has to suffer with her injuries in a basement where everyone is rooting against her.

Then she fucking dies. And like Nesta she is forced to become fae in order to survive. Like she can’t catch a break. Her whole life has really just been horrible and so traumatic. A series of abuses.

That’s not even all! She goes home and is deeply depressed and struggling with PTSD and Tamlin, who she literally was tortured and died to save, takes advantage of her sexually because he is too scared to acknowledge that she is struggling. He uses her body for his pleasure while she throws up every night after he leaves her bedroom due to the nightmares she gets from saving hundreds of fae. She is also forced to fit into a box that she doesn’t want- wearing dresses, pretending to be happy, becoming a figurehead as Tamlins bride knowing that it means she will have to be submissive and have children. Lucien emotionally abused her and ignores her obvious depression because of his own fear of what Tamlin would say. He is a bystander. She is so broken that she stops caring about everything, even painting, the one thing she always loved. Then he traps her in his house which is traumatizing again because she was just trapped under the mountain! Even the people she loved, the people she trusted, continually can’t stop abusing her.

She finds happiness and stability later on after intensive work on herself, and months of building healthy relationships, but she is still troubled because of the guilt she feels from the townsfolks anger and their sense of righteousness for her actions even though she did the best she could in every circumstance. When she goes to try and save those townspeople it becomes clear that Nesta still hates her. She shows Feyre no kindness. The only reason she is allowed to use the house, the one that Feyre got for them, was because of Elain. Even after that Nesta insults her repeatedly for being fae. Those statments from the first book that I quoted higher up in this post are just a small part of how she speaks to Feyre in the following three books after she finds out that she is fae. Even after Feyre saves her and supports her she continues abusing and blaming Feyre. She continues to insult. degrade, shame, and humiliate her to uplift her own lack of self worth. Its a technique to stop her own insecurity and depression but it is in no way excusable. It’s no wonder Rhysand hates her. She abused his mate for years- something that he experienced under the mountain (shame, gaslighting, and humiliation). That is her life. She goes on to see her father murdered. She suffered so much in such a short amount of time is a wonder she wasn’t more broken.

Don’t come to me saying Nesta experienced more trauma to prove your point that Nesta is a good person and not responsible for her actions because she “feels to much” and is a woman that is cruel, and prideful, and unapologetic “bcs that’s who she is.” She has to be held accountable for her actions, her attitude, and her lack of words and apologies to everyone she wronged- especially her sister.

Feyre sacrifices her childhood, her body, her mental health, and her life in order to provide the stability that her sisters felt was their norm. They are inherently priviledged because of that sacrifice. They felt and still feel entitled to her money, and her loyalty, and that of her friends and mate. They survive because of Feyre. And Feyre never once called them out on their behavior, not even when they continually disrespected her after she provided them with a place to live and money to live off of. This was due to her feelings of guilt and the trauma that she had continually been victim to as a child and in Tamlins court.

Some of y’all use the excuse that they never asked Feyre to do any of that and I’m genuinely appalled that that is even a response to her genuine sacrifice. Her mother asked her to take care of them. Nobody was stepping up. Nesta was not going to go into the forest and neither was Elain, both for different but equally disappointing reasons. They both would have let the family starve. Also, Nesta and Elain were both older than her. Elain and Nesta as Feyre’s old sisters should have, and had a responsibility, to ensure that Feyre didn’t have to do what she did. Their apathy and ungrateful attitude is disgusting. Disgusting and unforgivable. Sure, Feyre may have been able to do it but she never should have had to. The three of them should have figured out a plan of equal work to give and take and survive. Y’all saying that Feyre never had to do that I- ... do you not have a family? Do you not have loved ones? You don’t have to do something to help your family, but you do it anyway because you love them and you hate to see them suffer. It’s just that usually you aren’t being exploited and taken advantage of at 14, for years on end, because the sentiment is usually reciprocated.

Perhaps if they had taken better care of their younger sister she would not have been in the woods and killed the fae. Perhaps all three of them would have bore the brunt of their fathers injury together and made a family. Perhaps if she hadn’t killed the fae in the forest when she was starving due to her sisters laziness, Elain and Nesta would never have been forced into being fae.

They neglected Feyre. They aren’t as responsible for her as their father ofc but they actively neglected her and Nesta even slut shamed her for her consensual sexual relationship with Isaac. The one thing she had that her sisters couldn’t take and Nesta called her filthy and disgusting for it.

“At least I don’t have to resort to rutting in the hay with Isaac Hale like an animal.”

Nesta remains unapologetic and to me she is not a feminist character. Sarah J Mass tried to use her as that trope to fulfill her idea of a “powerful woman” icon but she’s just a cruel and traumatized woman who people let off the hook. She gets away with it because she gaslights other characters while taking no responsibility for herself. She was abused and traumatized herself but that’s never an excuse for her in turn abusing someone else.

Now I don’t mean to say that Nesta or Elain are irredeemable. Frankly I think they both have potential to be good characters if they just apologized to Feyre in the next book, and really put those sentiments into actions. I do think Nesta is a bad person right now, I think she’s an abuser. And I think it’s hard for abusers to change their pattern of abuse. Elain is less of an outright abuser and more complicit in the abuse. I don’t know if either of them can change, but they definitely won’t if people keep letting them off the hook for their disgusting behavior. I am not impressed or charmed by either of them. Until they show a hint of gratitude and remorse to their sister because as y’all can tell she went through hell to make sure they were taken care of. Not to say that they didn’t do anything for Feyre. They both had important roles to play in the war, and they do have their moments of kindness and bravery and showed they cared for Feyre but abusers can be kind and considerate and brave one minute and then switch up just as fast. It’s about showing a consistent pattern of respect and love.

Just because Feyre took care of Elain and Nesta their whole damn life does not mean she has to be responsible for them as high lady. Also she is not responsible for knowing how to deal with their trauma. Her own abuse, and lack of real world experience- because Nesta and Elain never taught her to read, and Nesta continually degraded and made cruel remarks to Feyre about her lack of manners “ disgusting pig, take off your clothes didn’t anyone teach you ...” (manners she didn’t develop because she was in the forest)- means she is not perfect at confronting Nestas PTSD or depression. Feyre’s intention was always good, whereas you can’t tell me that Nestas was good and pure. She is not exempt from being respectful and kind because she is hurt and has mental illnesses. She is not exempt from apologizing because she “feels to much.”

This applies to all of the IC as well. They are all healing. They all experienced trauma that rivals what Feyre went through. It’s no wonder they built a family from that shared bond. They are healing together- not healed. Nesta is not entitled to Feyre’s care or her friends kindness. She is not entitled to be added into the group painting or their secret jokes or parties because she continues to push them all away. Then she insults them and disrespects them. The inner circle has already suffered so much they are not exactly going to be open to accepting Nesta knowing her history and her current actions and remarks, and the history of the IC. Do y’all not remember Mors family nailing a stake into her body for losing her virginity? Or Cassian, Az, and Rhys being forced to bond together to survive, being called bastards, and being ganged up on by all their peers? Rhys being sexually abused for 50 years and seeing his parents murdered? Az being stuck in a basement so long he became the shadows and his hands being burned so badly they were hard to look at? Or Amren being in the wrong body for centuries and still she and all of the IC remain a family because they try to understand each other and their experiences. Nesta was not only rude to them she was cruel and spiteful, especially to their high lady, and they don’t need an excuse, but especially as victims of abuse, they are not perfect, and they sure as hell are not obligated to embrace Nesta into their family. The IC and Feyre deserve better.

A lot of people have posed the argument that if Nesta was male everyone would love her but I disagree. If an older brother let his sister go hunting alone in the woods for years while sitting on his ass, slut shamed her and called her dirty and disgusting, blamed her for her family’s poverty and spoke to her like she was trash for years and years, verbally and emotionally belittled her, felt entitled to her possessions and her kindness while they were both struggling to heal from abuse, predisposes his sister to accepting abuse as a form of relationship, and then rather than apologize “steels [her] back” and says nothing-not even an apology or a thank you for saving their life tenfold- he would never even have gotten a redemption story, or a mate, let alone a 700 page book. He would be the most hated character in the series but because it’s Nesta and she’s a woman and y’all pose her as this feminist it’s okay that shes abusive all throughout the series.

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rufousnmacska · 4 years

Text

I have a lot of thoughts about A Court of Silver Flames, and since it helps me to write them out, I thought I’d share.

It’s behind a cut because SPOILERS and it’s long lol!

Nesta

I had expected we’d learn that Nesta had suffered some type of abuse or trauma as a child that Elain and Feyre were not aware of. I wasn’t expecting it to be so subtle, for lack of a better word. Abuse comes in a lot of forms, which I think SJM is good at showing. Emotionally manipulating your daughter for power, ignoring her in favor of your business and money … those may not be as visible as physical or verbal abuse, but they still cause damage.

I’m not sure how to convey it properly, but I thought it was important to show how the parts of her that were born from the abuse and trauma, while dark or not always healthy, were still useful. The wolf she became to survive her childhood helped her survive the cauldron. Not being able to “turn it off” is what hurt her. My favorite quote:

“So Nesta had become a wolf. Armed herself with invisible teeth and claws, and learned to strike faster, deeper, more lethally. Had relished it. But when the time came to put away the wolf, she’d found it had devoured her too.”

And as Amren said later “That’s the key isn’t it? To know the darkness will always remain, but how you choose to face it, handle it … that’s the important part. To not let it consume. To focus on the good, the things that fill you with wonder.”

I’ve seen a lot of fans upset that Nesta gave up her cauldron powers at the end to save Feyre and the baby. Although I’d initially hoped (post acofas) that her training would be more about her magic than physical training, I’m okay with how it worked out. She never wanted that power and she never liked having it. She stole it as revenge and she fought constantly to suppress it. Was she a badass when she wielded it? Absolutely! But ultimately, her giving it back was the final big step in her healing arc and acceptance of herself. (That doesn’t mean she’s “cured.” This will be an ongoing battle for her. I only mean this in terms of the story in this book.)

She chose to sacrifice it, unlike so many other times in her life when things were forced on her or happened to her. Unlike the future her mother had set out for her. Unlike when they were poor and her father did nothing to get them through. Unlike when she was thrown into the cauldron and then a war. Even unlike when she was forced to move into the House of the Wind, and her apartment – the one place she had chosen for herself no matter how run down it was – got demolished. I’m not going to go into the intervention too much. It was poorly done, but I doubt any of them had experience in doing one. A conversation acknowledging that might have been nice. And I’m not ignoring Feyre and Rhys’s hypocrisy of Nesta being confined to a place where she effectively had no way to leave on her own. The stairway at that point was not an option. But the bottom line is that Nesta needed help and was not in a position to willingly accept it or seek it out.

Regardless, she is still a lethal badass. She still has some of her powers, along with her fighting skills, which will only get better and better. So, the idea that she gave up what made her strong, or ended up as some meek housewife … I don’t agree with that at all. She has the intelligence and potential to become a force in leading armies. Not to mention her skill as an emissary. (Which Cassian finally learned how to imitate lol!)

On a personal note, I’m intimately familiar with the depression and self-loathing Nesta experienced in this book. Although I don’t necessarily react to those feelings in the same ways or exhibit the same coping mechanisms (I tend to turn my anger inward rather than outward), I could still relate to her journey. Her stubbornness and feelings that she didn’t deserve love or anything good or kind were presented accurately in my opinion. Parts were hard for me to read because of that. But I loved that she was able to make her way through the pain and finally begin to accept and love herself. And I especially loved that she was helped not only by Cassian, but by her friendship with Emerie and Gwyn.

And the House! Holy shit. The magic houses in this world piss me off to no end because they are not real and I will forever need to clean my own place LOL! Her relationship with the house was beautiful and funny and I love that she Made it! She needed a friend, someone to understand her, not only what she wanted but what she needed, and boom! The House of the Wind came alive for her.

So, overall, I loved Nesta’s journey. I’m happy she ended in a place that brought her inner peace and the ability to better deal with her problems in the future.

Nessian

I loved them before this book and I love them more after. The smut was a little shocking at first lol but I’ve read the Black Dagger Brotherhood books, which SJM loves, so really, it wasn’t that out there. I loved that Cassian showed that even with the mating bond, he could give Nesta space and freedom. In that respect, their relationship felt more mature to me than feysand. Their banter and the sexual tension was great! (The book is about a book.) They had some not great moments, as they have in past books. But those were realistic. People argue and say things they regret. But they also talk through it and apologize. This is a good time to point out – NOT ALL APOLOGIES INVOLVE EXPLICITLY SAYING I AM SORRY. There are other ways to show remorse and ask for forgiveness.

I don’t know if I had one favorite moment as there were quite a few. I think the most emotional for me was when they reached the lake. I know firsthand how difficult it is to speak aloud the things Nesta said. And I am also lucky to have people in my life who responded the way Cassian did – with love and support and kindness.

The nightmare scene, the prison scene, the dancing, the mating bond, Cassian turning the knife on himself … I loved them all!

The Valkyries

I fucking loved them! Gwyn and Emerie were absolute delights and I’m so glad Nesta made good friends of her own who she could be herself with. Their bonding over books, training, and their pasts was wonderful. Nesta urging them on and defending them from the Illyrians in the Blood Rite was a beautiful step in her healing. Before this book, I was hesitant about the foreshadowing that Nesta would take part in the Rite, fearing it would become some sort of white savior trope to help the female Illyrians. But I enjoyed the way it ended up happening. I know it seemed unrealistic for Nesta, Emerie, and Gwyn to get that far against warriors who’d been training for years. But part of the point was the males were arrogant as fuck. They underestimated the trio, to their detriment. Nesta and her friends used cunning as much as strength and skill to get where they did.

And I loved the image of Emerie and Gwyn just sitting back, sipping tea and admiring the river after going through a week of pure hell and winning the Blood Rite.

I hope we get more of them all together in the next books.

ETA - I can’t believe I forgot! Gwyn writing their story because their stories deserve to be told 🥲💕

The sisters

Overall I liked how things turned out with them.

Elain is still a bit of a non-entity to me. I don’t feel like I really know anything about her. Which, to some extent, is the point I think. There will be a lot to reveal in her story and she has a shitload of healing to do. She may have the appearance of adjusting and fitting in, but I don’t buy it. Nesta telling Elain to fuck off was awesome and long overdue. But Elain was also right in pointing out how others treat her and the trauma she’s experienced. I think there is still more to be dealt with between these two in the next book.

Feyre and Nesta were the more interesting relationship to me. The eldest and the youngest tend to butt heads in my opinion (and personal experience). So I was glad they came to an understanding. And very glad that Feyre did not get angry with Nesta for telling her about the baby. Rhys deserved the wrath for that.

One thing I would have liked to see discussed was the role of their parents in their lives. Nesta holds a lot of guilt for how she reacted to their poverty and I think that is understandable. I think Elain does too. However, I do not think any of the sisters should harbor blame for what happened. Their father was responsible for them. Period. Even if he was physically unable to work or help around the house, he still could have been a father. Yes, Feyre stepped up and fed them. Nesta and Elain didn’t help. It was his role to make them. Not in an abusive way. But step up and tell Nesta and Elain to do something, whether it’s chop wood or gather food from the wild. I don’t know. In my opinion, it is wrong to place blame on young girls who had a parent that did nothing. His actions in acowar were noble, but they don’t erase his failures. That all of this was glossed over disappointed me. I think this was something Nesta needed to be told explicitly by both her sisters. She had things to apologize for and feel guilt for, but she was not the one who should have protected Feyre. All three of them should have been protected by their father.

The Inner Circle

It’s kind of funny to me how blind they all are about each other. I don’t even know what else to say about their dysfunction.

Amren’s sudden desire for Rhys to become High King was weird, and though I should know better, I still really hope the series doesn’t end that way. The IC tends to have good intentions about things, but I don’t think they know how to handle a problem without some kind of force. And controlling all the other courts is not something that would happen easily, especially with perceived allies.

Amren and Mor thinking Nesta belonged or should be sent to the Court of Nightmares was a spectacularly shitty take. The lack of awareness and acknowledgement that Nesta was suffering from multiple traumas was just … unbelievable.

But considering how much this group does not see about each other, I guess it’s not a surprise. I don’t know how much is willful ignorance or just really, really poor people skills. I understand how this all makes for good angst and drama, I really do. But I’m just at the point where it’s grating. They need to sit the fuck down and talk to each other. It’s been five hundred years for fucks sake. 🤦🏻‍♀️😂

Rhys

Okay. I liked Rhys in acotar and acomaf. But the sparkly exterior wore off big time for me in acowar and acofas. I honestly could have done without him in this book. But I wasn’t foolish enough to expect him to not be in it. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that SJM has her favorites and Rhys is at the top of the list.

Having said that, he annoyed the shit out of me in this book. Someone really needs to explain to him that a choice between two awful things, one of which might be deadly, is not really a choice. I don’t have the energy for it, but better writers than me could write a thesis on the illusion of choice in these books. Which is, in my opinion, pretty clearly tied to the brand of feminism presented.

Not only is the choice given to Nesta at the beginning not a choice, Rhys doesn’t seem to consider Elain at all in his argument with Az. All other issues with that bonus chapter aside, he saw them. He saw the mutual attraction and consent. What happened to not forcing females to accept the mating bond? What happened to respecting her choice and autonomy? I considered the possibility that maybe since he knows Az, there’s a reason he thinks they wouldn’t work. But then, that pretty much flies out the window by him asking Az about Mor. Sure, Az is still hung up on Mor, but she is pretty fucking clear about her opinion.

The whole thing about not telling Feyre about the risky childbirth was awful. And not that I would expect it to happen, but not even mentioning abortion as an option was frustrating. That plot line was not good in any way. There were plenty of other things that could have gone wrong with the birth to push Nesta to act at the end. To be honest, the feysand dynamic is not great. While I appreciated her standing up to him about Nesta and other things, he very deliberately uses sex as a distraction to get out of arguments. Yet another way he never really seems to suffer consequences of bad behavior.

I will say I was really glad he got the opportunity to experience the full trauma of what Nesta went through. And my petty ass loved him kneeling before her at the end!

Miscellaneous

Where was Illyria?? My one serious expectation for this book was that we’d learn more about Illyria and deal with the revolution that was hyped up in acofas. To be written off in one paragraph was disappointing. It makes me think that if we are to ever get more details about the Illyrians, it might be in Az’s story. It was mentioned a few times that he hates them (with good reason) and would wipe them off the map if it was up to him. So I’m guessing his arc will require him coming to terms with that.

Elriel-Elucien-Gwynriel

I’ve never been super invested in this story line but I admit I’ve leaned more towards Elriel in the past. Partly because I like some of the complementary symbolism associated with them, but mostly because I’d really like to see a story about rejection of the mating bond. Even with the extra chapters, I feel like we still don’t know much of anything about who Elain truly is. And the same can be said of Az. So, those chapters didn’t sway me that much. With the exception of Az interacting with Gwyn. I agree with a lot of others saying Az has a lot of work to do on himself before he can be with anyone. I think Elain and Gwyn also have a lot of healing to do. SJM can take this in so many directions that I just don’t know what to think.

I will say that originally I was expecting the next book to involve a love square of Elain, Az, Lucien, and Vassa, because I did see a connection between the last two. But now … Was Lucien annoyed by Jurian and Vassa because he’s jealous? Just annoyed? I don’t know. I still think Vassa will be in the next books if only because of Koschei. But I’m not so sure about her involvement with Lucien. I think we’ve got enough people in this love polygon lol! Jesus, what a mess. But maximum angst 😂

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radiorenjun · 4 years

Text

H e l l o !

W e l c o m e !

here is radiorenjun’s official nct dream masterlist!

A n g s t - ♠

F l u f f - ♡

S u g g e s t i v e - ⋆

•〖。M a r k L e e。〗

- [22:41] ♠ ♡

- [03:14] ♠

- [12:04] ♡

• 〖。H u a n g R e n j u n。〗

- [15:47] ♡

- [15:21] ♡

- [13:41] ♡

- [12:23] ♡

- [16:47] ♠ ♡

- [12:23] ♡

• My first and last ♠ ♡

Huang Renjun was born on the coldest day on earth, which causes his heart to be frozen solid, requiring a replacement. The makeshift Doctor, Madam Wendy, who provides midwifery and medical services to the poor and the desperate of Edinburgh, grafts a miniature cuckoo clock in order to save it. However his newfound cuckoo clock heart was so fragile that it could end him in a terrible fate of death if he does not follow the three rules said doctor had provided for him. One of which was he must never fall in love. Do come and enter this adventure through Renjun’s eyes as he falls for a street singer who hates wearing glasses despite of her poor eyesight.

• nightmare surfs ♠ ♡

you've been suffering from random nightmares as of late. You didn't know how but when they get too far, you're glad you have something (or rather, someone) to seek comfort.

• bury me at makeout creek ♡ ⋆

-> Your enemy/rival, Huang Renjun, kept teasing and flirting with you during a party Haechan dragged you in. And you couldn't help but fall deep in love and get addicted to him after this momentous night.

• eine kleine ♠ ♡

-> your selfish, ignorant parents had sent you off to be wedded with a stranger you’ve only met once to save your kingdom from falling into poverty. Fortunately for you, the Huangs welcomed you into their family with open arms, except for their stone-hearted son (alias your fiance), Huang Renjun, who believed that you were just after his family’s wealth and fortune.

Will you manage to finally live the happy life you’ve been craving for all these years of neglect?

Will you manage to thaw his heart like an ice cube in the summer heat?

Or will you crumble under the pressure of being wedded to the cold hearted prince?

• carnations have thorns too ♠ ♡

-> after years and years of hopelessly pining for your step brother's best friend since you were six years old. life for you had gone from stealing roses from mrs. wong's garden to having sushi picnic dates on the park every thursday. to stop you from getting small for the sake of giving him roses, an eight year old renjun told your six year old self that he preferred carnations instead of roses. what he failed to tell you at that moment was that carnations have thorns too.

• 〖。L e e J e n o。〗

- [16:41] ♡ ♠

- [12:45] ♡

- [11:12] ♡

- [17:32] ♠

- [23:58] ♠

- [03:00] ♡

• Habits ♠ pt one. pt two

-> Your ex boyfriend! Jeno pays you a nightly visit after getting drunk and high alone.

• kitchen frolics ♡

-> you and your boyfriend, Jeno, decided to do a Christmas cooking live stream on twitch with no cooking experience whatsoever. It's safe to say you two were just two loud, idiotic simps obnoxiously trying to cook with 6k people tells you say to do.

• 〖。L e e H a e c h a n。〗

- [15:21] ♡

- [17:12] ♡

- [12:15] ♡

- [06:13] ♠ c o l l a b w/ @dreamsafterhours !

- [11:21] ♡ ♠

- [00:00] ♠

- [06:39] ♠

- [11:27] ♡

- [03:57] ♡

- [12:39] ♡

- [11:27] ♡

• twisted strings ♠

-> you and donghyuck were one of the rare soulmate couples unlucky enough to be cursed by your own string

• 〖。N a J a e m i n。〗

- [01:21] ♡ ♠

- [15:21] ♡

- [18:54] ♡

- [21:23] ♠

- [23:09] ♡ ♠

- [18:34] ♡ ⋆

- [07:24] ♡

• we fell in love in october ♡ ♠

-> Na Jaemin, the youngest crowned prince of the Jung Empire, who constantly lived under his half older brother's shadow. Na Jaemin was a prince who used dark magic to turn his own heart into stone, thus eradicating his ability to feel emotions other than his life long pent up anger and hatred towards his family. Alas, even rocks break. His stone heart began to crack the moment he met a certain witch who could produce rare crystals out of her own tears and folds paper cranes during her free time. The witch who made Jaemin realise his self worth and encourage him to rebel for his own freedom.

Jaemin treating his girl like a p r i n c e s s ♡

I Don't Need It ♠ ♡

-> Na Jaemin despised the idea of soulmates, he wanted to fight against fate for choosing his soulmate for him. Even if it means his stubborn childhood best friend wouldn't stop trying to make him accept about the similar tattoos on their wrists.

• 〖。Z h o n g C h e n l e。〗

- [08:11] ♡

• Rain Rituals ♡

- Chenle’s high school life was more than tedious to say the least. That is when he caught you screaming under the rain.

• 〖。P a r k J i s u n g。〗

- [15:21] ♡

- [19:35] ♡

•〖。r e a c t i o n s。〗

- finding out you're extremely rich after dating for a long time → ଘo(∗ ❛ั ᵕ ❛ั )੭່

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pepperish · 3 years

Text

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how one of my least favorite things about capitalism it’s how it purposefully gets in the way of people leading full lives unless you’re lucky and privileged enough. As if enjoying the world and what it has to offer is a luxury only a few should have access to.

Like, of course extreme poverty, housing crisis and being unable to meet basic needs is the very worst of capitalism and that’s universal. No one should need to go without basic decency. A home, enough food with enough vegetable/fruit/meat/etc diversity in it that you are fed and healthy, access to medical services, education. All of that.

But so much more than that. We shouldn’t need to - or be made to - feel guilty for wanting more than the bare minimum. I see so many posts and takes that I find deeply sad and unsettling about the wrongness spending the littlest bit of disposable income on things that make you happy, but fuck, isn’t that the point of life? To actively go after experiences that enrich us, to consume art and talk about it, to connect through entertainment, to experience good food, to share it with loved ones?

Not only surviving, but living our lives to the fullest, as best as we can. Fuck, I want to see the world. I want to meet people from different cultures, I want to see the splendor of nature, eat different food, I want to know more about the planet and the people living in it. And the way to do that is through travel, through cinema, festivals, museums, dinner and coffee and brunches with family and friends and people I just met. That’s not bad and it doesn’t make me - or anyone - morally corrupt. It’s natural.

The thing is if you barely have enough money to cover the basics and you spend all your time trying to come up with enough money to not get evicted or go hungry, etc, how can you ever go do the things that life is all about? And how can anyone think that’s the best way to organize a society?

I think my point is that it’s so terrible that we’re living this nightmare landscape where people are numbed down on purpose, made desperate on purpose, so they are physically, emotionally and financially unable to pursue things that make you happy, and can only resort - sometimes - to alternative methods to cope.

And it’s almost even worse that part of the people who do realize that this is fucked up still fall prey to the propaganda of ‘you should feel bad for doing superficial shit with your money instead of helping people who are doing worse than you’. Because of course we need to help others, uplift them. But this shouldn’t be either/or. The only people who benefit from this line of thinking are the people who want workers to remain poor, unhappy and away from their purpose.

#Personal #Jess rambles #about capitalism maybe?#or the state of society today?#idk #but this sure GETS to me #I think so often about how I love spending my day in the sun #how my favorite thing ever is walking through a town on a country I've never been before finding out new favorite things to love #about the world #about people #and it's ridiculous how much time I spend on my computer working my ass for maybe two weeks of this a year #AND THAT'S BECAUSE IM LUCKY AND PRIVILEGED ENOUGH TO HAVE IT AT ALL #it's crazy

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queenestarcheron · 4 years

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acomaf review

so i recently reread acomaf and i made a post about everything that i liked/didn’t like (more of the latter). i also started another one so some of that is repeated in here. i have referenced page numbers but they are all from the uk paperback edition so i don’t think they will be the same for everyone. it’s all chronological. there will probably be typos since i wrote this on a whim pls ignore them. this is quite anti rhys so if that bothers you just ignore this and pls don’t attack me for my opinions.

(pg. 24) feyre says "I don't know if I can handle them calling me High Lady." implying that she doesn't even want to be in a position of power in prythian. is that the trauma talking? tamlin also says that there is no such thing as high lady which makes no sense bc high lord power is hereditary so it should be able to go to women too. also this makes rhys making feyre high lady make no sense.

(pg. 29) poor lucien i cannot believe his brothers did that to his girlfriend

(pg. 48-49) feyre threw a shoe at rhysand and all im saying is that, if nesta threw a shoe at cassian, they would try and flay her alive

(pg. 73) rhys says there can be high ladies... but there never was one?? how does he know they can exist? it doesn't add up. again, if a person could just be given the high lord power, then what is the point of having the high lord bloodline

the 90 pages in between are just feyre getting upset and rhys saving her from the spring court

(pg. 163) i am diSGOSTED "You know I'm always happy to tangle in the sheets with you Amren ... I know how much you enjoy Illyrian-" seriously?? i don't think this is a normal friendship dynamic. also we hear about how dangerous amren is but cassian literally just made this comment and she did nothing. and we dont see her do anything to others at all. the only thing to suggest that she's a powerful being was the end of acowar

(pg. 169) amren calling the illyrians "barbarians" does not sit right with me

(pg. 209) "They might not be happy about it, but I'll make Nesta and Elain do it" you'll make your sisters risk their lives and status? to help the fae? the race that enslaved humans for centuries? okay feyre. everyone's right, youre a great sister

(pg. 215) rhys offers feyre sex with cassian? how are the nesta stans the ones that don't gaf about cassian when his own friend (who he considers a brother) says this about him? i don't think after 500 years of knowing him and liking him nesta would say any of this

(pg. 229) cassian gets mad at rhys for endangering feyre's life for no reason and then rhys says "you would do the same" like nO SIR NO HE WOULDN'T

(pg. 246) feyre says nesta looks older in her eyes. she's obviously been affected by her sister running away with the fae and her and elain even thought she was dead. don't try and tell me that she doesn't care bye

(pg. 255) cassian's dinner table speech about how feyre died for the fae and nesta should stop being a bitch. um, sir your people enslaved hers for CENTURIES? and you want to play the fucking victim? okayyy sure. have fun with that

(pg. 280) rhys doesn't make his people play the tithe but he lets them live in tents in snowy mountains? while he lives in comfort? and im supposed to support this guy? hard pass for me

(pg. 288) rhys stalks about keeping velaris a secret and says "My people do not seem to be suffering much from it." basically ignoring the people in the hewn city and illyria as his people? tehy are all hated by the rest of the courts and apparently rhys is just cool with that bc velaris is fine.

(pg. 326) all i want to say is that cresseida deserves so much better

(pg. 361) okay lol jurian was "obsessive" in his pursuit to free his people. why couldn't he just be chill about it? his people could wait you know. he didn't hav eto go batshit crazy. it's not like they were servants their whole lives and were being treated like they weren't people.

(pg. 377) okay so this is when cassian comes back from giving nesta the letter (wings and ember) and he says something about how the family is full of "bossy, know-it-all females" my mans you invaded HER PERSONAL SPACE and asked her intrusive and inappropriate questions. she literally did what any other woman would have done.

(pg. 386) rhys fully says "neither side is innocent" when talking to the mortal queens BOI THE FAE KEPT THEM AS SLAVES WHAT DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND STOP TRYING TO SOUND OPPRESSED OMG

(pg. 393) they are talking about how miryam and drakon fell in love when she was still with jurian and apparently it's jurian's fault bc he was too obsessed with liberating the humans? you can say what you want about them fighting for the humans but it's clear they really don't give a shit

(pg. 398) feyre hears mor's story and says that she understands why rhys can't forgive nesta. she actually just compared what mor's family did (trying to marry off mor and nailing a note to her body and leaving her at the autumn court) to what nesta did (was mean to feyre when their family was in poverty and didn't stop feyre from hunting). chilee wut

(pg. 415) the court of nightmares scene and all i want to say is DID ANYONE IN THE HEWN CITY CONSENT TO SEE THAT. also their high lord using women like objects isn't exactly sending his people the best message, especially the youthful ones. like if their ruler is doing it, then why shouldn't they? rhys is kind of making it worse for women ( at the very least he isn't helping AT ALL)

(pg. 443) mor says that she hates the illyrian mountains and says that they should be "burned to the ground", completely forgetting about all of the people there, the culture and the fact that she has 2 and half illyrian friends

(all of chapter 54) rhys tells us his sad backstory and a bunch of excuses but never apologises for his actions utm. am i supposed to excuse sexual assault because he was emotionally distraught? bc im not going to do that

(pg. 548-553) nesta stands up A LOT for the humans and tries to convince the queens to give them the book. we see a lot of her humanity in this scene. don't tell me she's just a cold bitch please read with your eyes and see for yourself. ALSO THE NESSIAN BIT ON PAGE 553 LETS GOOOO

(pg. 559) feyre talks about how nesta feels everything too much and i just want to ask where this feyre was in acofas when her sister was off in the deep end with her ptsd

(pg. 589) jurian is called a monster for literally no fucking reason omg give my guy a break

(pg. 606) lucien helps elain when she is fae and on the ground soaking wet. this is all before he finds out that she is his mate. this is why we stan <3

please feel free to comment on/challenge anything ive said. you can try and come for my favs if you want but it probably won’t change my mind. i might do acofas later.

#acomaf #pro nesta archeron #pro nesta #nesta archeron #cassian #anti rhysand #a court of mist and fury #anti ic

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unforth · 4 years

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So my oldest friend, G, came from a very poor background and decided at a young age that his main life goal would be to make a fuckton of money and help raise his entire family out of poverty. He knuckled his way into one of the hardest-to-get-into high schools in New York City (which is where we met, freshman year) and was the only Hispanic I met there in four years. He went to college, got his degree in economics, returned to NYC, and got himself a job at a major hedge fund.

He’s succeeded wildly, supports his entire family, aspires to join the 1%, and is probably the wealthiest person I personally know.

The reason I know what shortselling is? It’s what G does for a living.

Anyway, I made it less than 24 hours before I cracked and texted to find out what he thinks of this madness cause I suspect his reaction will be hilarious. (he’s a little shit, I love him dearly, he’s been one of my closest friends for 25 years, and my hypothesis is that his reaction will be, “those other hedge funds had it coming because they made stupid fucking choices.”)

If he says anything amazing I will absolutely be sharing it.

(yes I checked a list of affected hedge funds before contacting him, just to be sure, cause I probably shouldn’t rub it in if his folded, even if he is part of the evil empire.)

(note that this should in no way be read as a defense of hedge funds. I get on his case for being part of the capitalist nightmare...if you read Vermillion Ribbon, and read my author’s notes, the chapter where I’m like, “I have a friend and our entire relationship is built on saying the meanest shit we can think of to each other without crossing the line” that’s G, and I love him for it and many other reasons...but he knows he’s part of the evil empire, he just doesn’t care, and that’s his morality, not mine...)

#unforth rambles

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chiseler · 3 years

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Great Zilches of History

Film is light. There are times, though, when that light may take on a Stygian cast, burning with a flamme noire severity, a weird and otherworldly keenness. Or it may burn lurid and loud — especially if it’s a very old film, acting like a séance that summons the unruly dead. The darkness in cinema best typified by that form we call film noir is in its essence an extension of the peculiarly American darkness of Edgar Allan Poe.

Early, nitrate-based film stock, with its twinkling mineral core, gives Poe's crepuscular light its time to shine and thereby illuminate the world. No longer held in the solitary confinement of a page of reproduced text or an image, frozen, rendered in paint or ink. Poe's singularly tormented vision is finally written alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts; into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational thing from one's mind. A Black & White image flipped into negative makes black fire, or black sunlight such as illumines Nosferatu’s Transylvanian forests, through which a box-like carriage rattles at Mack Sennett speed. But with the slightest underexposure, a little dupey degradation of the print, or even a little imagination (such collaboration is not discouraged), this liquid blackness will spread everywhere and anywhere, the most luminous pestilence known to creation. Be it in the laughing nightmare of Fleischer cartoons of old (Out of the Inkwell, indeed) or John Alton’s vision of the night, we are left to wonder: is daylight burning out the corner of a building, or is it the blackness of the building which is eating into the sky?

As with many such questions, film permits us no easy answer. We are simply to watch as the characters smudge. As their shadows pulsate and flicker, emanate out beyond themselves. But if Poe represents the loss of control over one’s existence and the ensuing panic, then cinema, consciously or not, takes existential dread as a given.

God, a vague and unseen deity, died at the moment cinema was born, replaced by a new celestial order. Saints and prophets made poor film characters, giving off the feeling of having stepped out of a stained glass window, flat, Day-Glo icons moving uncomfortably through three-dimensional space. Movies rather rejoiced in dirt and rags, texture and imperfection, so that the most lacklustre clown easily outperformed all the icon messiahs. At 45 minutes, Fernand Zecca’s The Life and Passion of Christ (1903) is one of the earliest feature films, but compared to the same filmmaker’s less ambitious, more playful shorts, it’s a beautiful snooze. A different execution climaxes his Story of a Crime (1901), in which we get to see, by brutal jump cut, a guillotine decapitation before our very eyes. This, as Maxim Gorky prophesied, is what the public wants. Or maybe the events of 1901, cinematic and otherwise, allow “the public” to define itself in ways heretofore unthinkable. The year brings Victoria Regina’s propitious death. And with her passing, Edgar Allan Poe’s pronunciamento on celebrity, “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque," comes to new and anarchic fruition as an incendiary schnook, one of history’s finest.

When he shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901, the currents of fear and vengeance unleashed by Leon Czolgosz would carry him on a journey from reflexive beatings at the hands of police and a post-Victorian mob – ladies in bustles shedding all restraint, transformed from well-honed symbols of middle-class decorum into yowling banshees, screaming “GIVE HIM TO US!” – straight to the electric chair, from whence his corpse would be taken for additional punishment, a process where ghoulish prison authorities at Auburn separated the head from the body, and then poured sulfuric acid on what remained, before secreting the sorry residue of America’s anarchist son into an unmarked grave.

Despite attempts to erase Czoglosz from history, a visual document survives, oozing with pathos and bitter recrimination. It is impossible, looking into those eyes, not to feel unnerved and, yes, sympathetic with him – his desperate act, after all, was as critical a part of America’s greed-engorged industrial fantasia as the near daily spectacle of peaceful strikers, his friends among them, being slaughtered in the name of profit.

Cinema’s misspent childhood years in late-Victorian fairgrounds are followed by a grimy adolescence in Edwardian nickelodeon parlours. The medium, which finally comes of age amid gaudy palaces built in its honor, morphs many times. However, All Talking Pictures are the final death knell for the Victorian standard, belching from the screen a thousand inbred tongues that invade the ear willy-nilly. They remind us that when Queen Victoria breaths her last Naturalism sheds decorum, taste, breeding, good table manners.

Edgar Allan Poe essentially owns motion pictures via ongoing necrophilic obsession, since celluloid preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid. Like amber preserved holograms, they flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion. Film is bona fide illumination — as opposed to religion’s metaphorical kind – representing the supremacy of alchemy and necromancy over sackcloth and ashes. The inmates, emboldened under the spell of Klieg lights, were not only running the asylum, but re-shaping the world in their own image. Both Church and State with their blunt instruments of repression proved impotent against the anarchy of this freshly liberated ghetto.

Holy men were unceremoniously defrocked, their doctrine of abject compliance to class-based norms re-written into storylines enriched by grease-painted floozies, costumed villains, and snooty dowagers brought down a notch by the drunk hobo in her drawing room. Amidst widespread labour unrest and mass poverty, followed soon by the Great Depression, filmgoers of the silent era had a front row view of the plutocracy’s helplessness against a swelling tide of restless humanity. Charlie Chaplin’s itinerant laborer may have accidentally thwarted a plutocrat’s plan for world domination and/or a house renovation, just as Groucho Marx seemed to have spontaneously derailed a social climbing matron’s equally fierce ambitions.

All hail the magic mirrors! Celestial mandalas! Giant eggs and butterfly women! Segundo de Chomón’s The Red Spectre (1907) ruthlessly assaults our eyes with a wraith-magician dissolving through his coffin lid in a red, hand-tinted, flame-flickering hell. His presence, caped, skull-masked, was to herald a new thespic truth, that from this moment forward the art of acting would be reduced to how you respond to light, and how light responds to you. The Specter of Chomon’s dark bauble is in every element Poe’s Red Death — japing and performing tricks for us, his adoring fans and welcome guests, before announcing our doom — literary metaphor slammed against a literal backdrop of amber stalactites, pellucid as an ossuary.

That was a long time ago, in the first decades of the 20th century, before artifice and studios and the commercial paradigm of stardom finally swallowed cinema in one ravenous bite. It was a period when one could see, if one paid close attention, the dreariness of ordinary life at the centre and around the edges of every motion picture brought forth. It lived onscreen in film’s early days, exposing the pretense, however fitful, of opulence or period as simply that: pretense, a fundamental desire to escape reality. But this “escapism” had always been erroneously attributed to the audience’s needs, when in fact it was rather those bankrolling the nascent medium not yet sufficiently in control of itself to impose any order.

The censors were on to something, even if they could never fully articulate what precise blasphemies were being committed.

Take Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for instance, which isn’t pure noir but is pure Poe: what would the surgical excision of an influence look like? Granted, the noir genre seems an unlikely Poe derivative, but what of Laura — fatalism, romance and necro-fantasy (with Lydecker as Usher)? DOA is the kind of concept Poe might have dreamed up; one of the great noir scribes, Cornell Woolrich is channeling Poe through an all-thumbs pulp sensibility. And how hard would it be to cast Val Lewton as the horror noir hybrid, with premature burials, ancestral disease, lunatics taking over bedlam? Jean Epstein, who adapted The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928, complained that Baudelaire’s translations fundamentally mistook Poe’s innocence for ghastliness.

The dead in Poe, writes Epstein, are “only slightly dead.”

To the extent that Epstein was correct, the whimsy that Poe bequeaths to cinema finds itself absorbed in almost material terms — not as sensibility but as a texture whose particular nap or weave is never granted names. In Mesmeric Revelations a voluntary subject is quite near physical death and under the ministrations of his mesmerist, answering precise questions about the nature of God. Before dying, he says God is “ultimate or unparticled” matter: “What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought,’ is this matter in motion”. The same unnamable textures apparently survive on television, a case of Poe resonating inside our minds, a collective consciousness replaced by cathode rays.

Deep within the 18 hours of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, there is a moment that, on its incandescent surface, could have been lifted weightless from the great post-war dream of material deliverance; as if the zeitgeist of the mid 20th century had somehow got lost and ended up in this one: Daytime, the top on the convertible is down, the radio tuned, The Paris Sisters singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky. Within this tapestry of an early Phil Spector production — his trademark reverb eternally evocative of Romance and Death (two conditions Spector knows well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris could be a siren sound from the American Beyond, or a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt. We don’t know. We’ll never know.

In this oneiric echo chamber, Poe smiles down upon American blondness, muscle cars soaked in sunlight, candy for eye and ear; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion and immortality.

If Lynch’s Return means going back home, then home is that Lemon Popsicle/Strawberry Milkshake species of innocence proffered by America's music industry between 1957 and 1964. The horror genre always has to have some component of innocence to devastate, be it the existential kind which inspires the malevolence everyone paid the price of a ticket to have vicarious transit with; or the mere victimisation of the unsuspecting. Either way, there was no other period in American popular culture when innocence, of any variety, was so lavishly examined, toyed with, killed. The free floating chord that opens The Everly Brothers song, All I Have To Do is Dream, remains a lamentation in sound: the sudden recrudescence of Poe’s beating, tell-tale heart. Adoring such guilt-free teenage odes to sleep, death and sexual desire, David Lynch finds a muse in Amanda Seyfried. Specifically her visionary eyes melting Phil Spector’s dark edifice of sugar in a deathless, Sternbergian close-up — iridescent search lights, ever more urgently scanning the sky above, waiting for the sun to swallow her whole. We can only bear witness, and internalize this shimmering ingenue, this angel in a red convertible, trading places with Old Sol; as if whatever she just snorted has entered our system through hers. But in that ephemeral instant she achieves oneness with all things; the transcendence of stardom — true, temporal stardom — shorn of fame and the imperatives of show-business.

To this day David Lynch’s favorite film remains Otto e Mezzo, directed by Federico Fellini: Western Europe’s sorcerer of confectionary delights and unending motion; the man who put the “dolce” in La Dolce Vita. Fellini, he states, "manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do; namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner." Even if one were to take him at his word — and we must, of course, for no filmmaker has ever been known to misrepresent themselves to us — this seems a strange instance of gravitational pull, particularly in the light of the formal strategies of both men as they developed through time. Lynch has always favored a blunt pictorialism that, in its bluntness, borders on the language of Imagism: the studied simplicity of the language used to complex, powerful effect. Fellini, in 8 1/2 and throughout much of his career, by contrast, unleashes upon the viewer an insanely fluid, brutally precise camera ballet. Any good cinephile might be tempted to resolve the disparities and move toward a brighter, less subterranean comprehension. But, ultimately, such understanding would be a didactic burden no moviegoer needs. For here, in these conflicting dialects, you have a fleeting taste of ideologies swirled together like ribbon candy: a blur of four-wheeled luxury from the New World zooming past regional splendor into that fraternity of man: the socio-economic nirvana imagined by Karl Marx in the Old.

Careening from one via to another at harrowing, white-knuckle speed, Fellini was once heard to lament that “Some of the neo-realists seem to think that they cannot make a film unless they have a man in old clothes in front of the camera.” George Bluestone, recording these words for the pages of Film Culture in 1957, was sitting in the literal passenger seat of that ideal metaphor for post-war ebullience in action: expert, 20th century precision hurtling them through Roman streets with graffiti-scrawled churches proudly bearing the hammer and sickle; that famous Black Chevy skirting the Italian Scylla (the Vatican) and its equally dogmatic Charybdis (the Party). At that velocity, anything could make sense.

“Appearances aside" Bluestone wrote, "the Chevrolet is at every moment under Fellini’s control. He weaves in and out of traffic, misses pedestrians by inches, swerves away from Nomentana’s interminable monuments, dodging yellow traffic blinkers as if he were trying out a darkened slalom.” It is every bit a performance. Rome, after all, is the land of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Apollo and Daphne — marble-cum-flesh, even as flesh itself gives way to forms that leave the viewer in terrified awe. While reliving his own mythic, carbureted experience, Bluestone does some weaving of his own, quoting Genevieve Agel’s one-line pronunciamento (and, in the process, defining what would soon be labelled 'Felliniesque'), “Fellini is a visionary of the real”, as the passenger positions his driver somewhere between corporeal reality and ecstatic truth while the big man (no old clothes for this maestro) drives and drives. “As one hand lightly guides the wheel, the other gestures — it acts.”

Spirits of the Dead is one of those compendium films, with voguish directors (Malle, Vadim, Fellini) entrusted with bringing to the screen a Poe story each. Only the Fellini episode, Toby Dammit, is notable, but it's very notable, a hallucinatory yarn owing as much to Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill! as to Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head, its ostensible source. The title character, played by Terence Stamp with white-blond hair and dark roots and constant beads of witch hazel perspiration, is in Rome to attend an awards ceremony and to play Christ in a western, but he's fatally distracted by his new sports car and a vision of the devil in the form of a little girl. Toby's ride through a hellscape of nocturnal Rome seems lifted from Jules Dassin’s 10.30 p.m. Summer (1966), but works even better for Fellini than it did in the Duras adaptation. An oppressively subjective film, Toby Dammit narrows down to the view in the Ferrari's headlights, a ghastly floodlit interzone where human forms are gradually replaced with mannequins and cut-outs, as the city becomes unreal, an elaborate movie set, an uncanny valley laid out for the staging of an epic stunt/snuff film.

Fellini and Lynch celebrate bodily extremes in intriguing if differing ways, which should, in our time, naturally gallop beyond the pale, but nevertheless become wholly, weirdly digestible. It is perhaps the innocent glee of these artists, their wonderment at the vast variety of shapes the human body can assume; an innocence which suspends toward erasure our awareness the way physical representation functions in the 21st century. Lynch presents the disabled as childlike, mysterious, magical beings without ever worrying about lending them agency (The Elephant Man’s John Merrick functions both as passive whipping boy and chic spectacle for the whole of Victorian London), or the mendacity of adult sophistication (the latest Twin Peaks iteration includes a pint-sized hitman who whines like a puppy when his icepick is broken). Is it any wonder Lynch evolved a style which placed them front and center in unmoving shots, without irony or pity?

Poe, while certainly a pioneer of fake news, also had a way of vindicating the lumpen masses of humanity (to the middle-brow’s abiding chagrin).

The Mystery of Marie Roget, a Parisian murder mystery, presented as a fictional sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was simultaneously trumpeted as a correct solution to the real-life murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers in New York. When a news article presented fresh evidence while the story was still being serialised, Poe made minor changes to the final instalment to keep his fiction in line with the facts.

He later published a story about an Atlantic crossing by balloon, accomplished in three days, in The New York Sun in 1844. "Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason's Flying Machine!!!" The piece was presented as truth, and only revealed as "The Great Balloon Hoax" a couple of days later. “The more intelligent believed," wrote Poe, "while the rabble, for the most part, rejected the whole with disdain.” He saw this as a new development: “20 years ago credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic.”

What had changed? Perhaps the acceleration of scientific and social progress meant that the more literate and scientifically-minded had become inured to startling new developments, so the most surprising events now seemed credible. And since these same technological leaps were always presented as social benefits, the working class was growing skeptical, since they rarely saw any improvement in their condition.

by Daniel Riccuito, R.J. Lambert and David Cairns

Special thanks to Richard Chetwynd

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darkshadow90 · 4 years

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Joker: My thoughts on Arthur Fleck

Hey guys. I’ve made a few posts about Arthur already, but I wanted to make another one. I love the Joker movie. I think Todd Phillips and the writers did a great job at writing an intriguing character that works as part of a Joker story or a possible origin story for the Joker. I think Arthur is an interesting take on the Joker because he’s so different from other interpretations. I think he can be really hard to pin down sometimes. I don’t think Arthur was maliciously evil, at least not at the beginning. I saw a post from @another-day-in-chuckletown talking about Arthur’s morality and I thought it was interesting. So I thought I’d share my thoughts too. But she’s probably better at putting things into words than I am. So anyway here we go with another meta post. Yay!

So in the beginning we can see that Arthur has a lot of issues. He’s dealing with mental illnesses and living in dire poverty. Neither one of those things are easy to live with, but both combined are no doubt a fucking nightmare. He’s trying to get help. He’s doing everything he can. He’s taking his medications and going to therapy. He knows it’s not “normal” to do the things he does. Things like stalking, and, well, killing people. As odd as it might seem to read this from me, but one of the most interesting things I find about Arthur is he seems somewhat childlike and doesn’t understand social cues, but at the same time he’s aware that his behavior in social situations is creepy and weird to other people. So I do think he’s somewhat self aware.

Arthur doesn’t know how to approach people so he just stands there awkwardly or he follows them. And it makes sense because he’s clearly been socially isolated for most of his life. He had no one to teach him proper social skills and boundaries. But I do wonder about his past experiences socializing with others because he’s aware he makes people uncomfortable. I think Arthur is smarter than he lets on. He apologized to Thomas Wayne because he knew he crossed a line. He even said he didn’t mean to cause trouble or make him uncomfortable he just wanted answers. And he also knew when he imagined Sophie coming to his apartment asking if he was following her that she would be creeped out when he said yes. He had a look of guilt when he said “yeah” He knew it wasn’t the best way to go about talking to her. Like I said, I think he’s smarter than he lets on. But even with all his struggles and all the bad things that happened to him, I don’t think he’s particularly a good person.

The only people we see Arthur kill are the people who hurt him or wronged him in some way. We’re not really meant to feel sorry for them because most of them are just assholes. I do feel bad about Penny that one upset me. Regardless of the context, of wether or not she lied to him and allowed abuse to happen or not, it was still upsetting that he killed a helpless person. In general, I don’t like scenes in movies where animals and helpless people are killed. That shit is really upsetting to me. So yeah didn’t like that part. Anyway, it doesn’t make him the well meaning guy we think he is. I actually thought it was pretty fucked up that he was opening up to the clerk in Arkham about what he did. It’s fucked up because he knows what he did was wrong and he’s happy about it. He knows what’s right and wrong.

For most of the movie, Arthur doesn’t hurt random people for no reason. He doesn’t do bad things for the sake of doing bad things. He has a code. He only hurts “awful” people or people who wronged him. I think he would feel bad if he hurt an innocent person. He didn’t hurt Gary and I’m very glad for that, but he felt bad that he scared him so badly. He felt bad that Gary saw him kill someone in such a brutal way. He knew Gary would be even more upset if he saw Randall’s body. So he said, “Don’t look, just go.” And then he jumped out and scared him so he wouldn’t look at the body as he was leaving. That scene makes me think Arthur doesn’t like to see innocent people hurt or upset. Up until the end of the movie, I was thinking this take on the Joker was kind of like an anti hero. He only kills bad people.

I find it interesting when Arthur is about to go on the Murray show he tells Murray he doesn’t believe in anything, but then when he confesses to killing the Wall Street guys, he rants about how society treats poor people and mentally ill people like shit, and hold the rich up on a pedestal. He talks about how no one has any empathy for other people, and he’s upset about it, rightfully so. So he clearly does care about and believe in something. Why else would his rant be so passionate? Also, Arthur killing Murray isn’t quite as spontaneous as we think. If you look and listen closely, after Murray tells Arthur not everyone is awful, Arthur says, “You’re awful, Murray.” He literally told Murray he was gonna kill him.

I write different stories about Arthur. I write both fluff pieces and I also write darker pieces where he’s further along his transition into the Joker, and I’ve written a few based on the persona we see in Arkham (I like to call him Arkham Joker because he is the Joker at that point.) My fluff pieces are based on what Arthur would be like if he had someone positively affecting his life and he was getting the help he needed and didn’t become the Joker. My darker pieces focus on the darker aspects of his personality and the persona in Arkham because I like to explore those aspects of his character. I feel really bad for Arthur. I want to believe that if he had just one person aside from Gary who cared about him in his life he would be the person he was in the beginning, but unfortunately he isn’t that person anymore. I feel bad for him, but I hate what he does.

Now, I’ve talked about the persona we see in Arkham and the end of the movie a bunch of times. That scene fucks with me every time I see it. I love it because it’s pure Joker, and it’s probably the best Joker moment in the whole movie. It makes my anxiety skyrocket, too. @another-day-in-chuckletown touched on it in her post. I’m so glad I’m not the only one who noticed the sudden change in his personality. It was jarring to see Arthur like that. He was suddenly much more malicious and had a dangerous presence that he didn’t have at any other point in the movie. He was genuinely laughing without pain which was unsettling and when he suddenly stopped laughing and said, “You wouldn’t get it” I got very, very worried and immediately started shouting in my head “Get out of there! You’re not safe!” And then as he’s singing That’s Life and the way he’s staring at the psychiatrist and grins at her with those cold, dead eyes, I was like “Why are you still sitting there?! Go now!” I was scared for her. I was and still am genuinely afraid of him in that scene. The look in his eyes and facial expressions are the look of someone who is about to do a very bad thing or he’s thinking about about doing something bad to her. Wether or not he killed the psychiatrist is open to interpretation. I think it’s possible he did. He is full on Joker in that scene. It’s glorious and terrifying.

The man sitting there is a mystery. I always find myself wondering who he really is because he so different from Arthur and even the Joker we saw on the Murray Franklin show. The psychiatrist doesn’t refer to him by name, so Arthur might not be his real name. So I agree with Catherine’s post. It’s almost like the man we came to know over those two hours is a persona he made up and the man we see in Arkham is the real Joker, who he actually is. Smug, condescending, calculating, detached, malevolent, vain, petty, and narcissistic. I just get the feeling he’s a huge asshole, not as sympathetic as Arthur.

I’ve talked with some of you about this before and I know we have our own opinions and that’s totally fine. It’s what makes the ending so great. It’s whatever you want it to be. I still don’t see Arthur in him. Arthur wasn’t like him. It’s possible he could’ve been on drugs in that scene, but I doubt it. I think it’s safe to say since Gotham is a shit hole, Arkham is an underfunded hellhole. It’s understaffed, and there could be people working there that shouldn’t be. They probably don’t have enough resources to properly treat patients, and “Arthur” could be being mistreated. But I think he was actually pretty lucid in that scene. Given that he’s the Joker, I think that psychiatrist would’ve wanted him as lucid as possible so she could interview him. It would’ve been a huge career opportunity for her. I don’t think her using the Joker as an opportunity to advance her career would bother him. The Joker loves being in the spotlight and talking about himself. The whole movie is about him and told from only his perspective, so he’s probably okay with it. But whatever the case, I still think the man we see in Arkham is not Arthur. He’s the Joker. God, I love how this movie fucks with me and still makes me question everything even though I’ve seen it so many times. Best ending ever.

#arthur fleck #joker arthur fleck #joker fandom #joker movie #joker imagine #joaquin phoenix joker #joker 2019

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mrialorreine · 3 years

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BAD INTENTIONS [18+]

PROLOGUE.

I was in complete shock. My father was glaring at me as if I had said the most hateful thing in this world. By the look in his green eyes I could tell that he was not happy with my answer. He was quite the strict man, working as a detective for the local police department required him to be ruthless, but I never thought that he was going to be like this with me right now. Perhaps the years he had spent trying not to blame innocent people and find the real criminals instead had taken it’s toll on him? I thought he was supposed to be strict only at work and understanding and compassionate with his family, but was I wrong.

He finally lifted his fist and it soon landed on the table making the spoons, forks, glasses and even dishes to jump slightly and make that loud 'clink’ sound that made us slightly shift in our seats. His face was twisted in pure anger and annoyance as I sat there, not being able to utter a single word. I could feel the storm approaching. I could feel the tension rising. No, I could feel it deep within my bones. I swallowed thickly; my trembling hands remained in my lap. Why did I felt guilty for saying No to him? It was my choice after all, no one could take that away from me.

"You will marry him." I could hear the determination in his voice and that actually scared me more than anything. My heart began racing fast and hard in my chest. I wanted to cry because I could sense that my father has completely lost his mind. I was only twenty years old. I refused to submit to him and his order, since said order was ridiculous. How could he do this to me? He was my father and yet he was ready to marry me off to someone else knowing well that I was in love. I felt betrayed. Broken. The silence in the dining room became suffocating.

My appetite suddenly went away. My mother, Elvira, was horrified as well watching everything playing in front of her blue eyes. I could tell that she was as shocked and confused as I was. It was as if she didn't know her husband who was sitting on the table with us. She reached for her napkin and wiped her mouth gently before rising up from her seat and slowly headed into the kitchen to avoid the future storm coming in between me and my father. She was like this. She could never be bothered with what was happening between my and my father. She preferred to sit and watch while I was there, struggling to face him when he put such pressure on me.

"Father, come on, you can't be serious about this." my brother, who was only four years older than me finally spoke up. Him and I, we were inseparable as children. But ever since he went to study medicine at University which was five hours drive away, everything changed. As time went by, we slowly became distant to the point where we don’t call each other anymore. Now he was home only on the weekends and he barely spends any time at home, simply going out with his friends and partying until the early hours of the morning while I was busy worried if I’ll get accepted in my dream university since I graduated school months ago and now entrance exams kicked my ass off with stress and anxiety.

I took one of the napkins of the table and began crunching it in my hand. My eyes kept shifting from my father to my brother and I felt as if I was going to pass out from how intense this was. Just when I felt wet droplet on my hand did I realise the tears that had been ruining my mascara. Dammit.

"Oh, Dean, I am very serious about this. Evelyn is old enough to be married off-"

"No, I'm not," I protested, but one glare from my father made me go quiet and keep crying silently. I wanted to get up from that table and storm away, but it was as if my feet kept me in place.

My father, whose name was Richard, turned his attention toward Dean and slowly reached for his glass of red wine, bringing it to his lips and took a sip as if he wasn't bothered. Honestly? This hurt me the most. I wanted to break down, I wanted to fall apart but I couldn't nor do I wanted to, at least not now.

"Come on, father, please think this through, Evelyn is still young about this and she has someone she likes." Dean was the sweetest for trying to defend me, but judging by my father's determined face nothing could change his mind. Not even his own son, not even the tears of his only daughter.

I was certainly devastated, it felt as if I was in a dream. I thought I was going to be happy, I thought I could have future with Leo and I thought that I could have supportive family but neither my mother or father liked him since he was poor and we were the ‘rich’ ones.

"There is this one family, Mia and Joaquin Berluda. They are rich, kind, wealthy, well-known, and they do charity. Their son is Ryker Berluda, he is the excellent candidate for your hand. He is only two years older than you and he is a kind man who will cherish your heart." He spoke out in a monotone voice, leaning back on his chair and slowly fixing his tie with a soft sigh. My beloved father looked flustered too, as if this was heavy decision to make.

I shook my head.

“How could you do this to me…“ I whispered, my voice finally broke. I finally broke. I began sniffing and crying, everything went blurry, my heart was aching. “I am doing this for you, not to you, Evelyn!” he raised his voice and that made me jump in my seat. Dean shook his head and tried to interrupt Richard but with a glare he remained quiet.

“Leo is a drug addict and abuses with alcohol all the time! He is poor and he lives in a trailer! Is this how you want to end up? Pregnant in poverty? Who knows if Leo will remain by your side, he will leave you the first chance he gets!” Every word said was like a needle in my heart.

“Leo has his own problems!” I screamed; my face was wet with tears. I rose up suddenly from my seat, I didn’t notice Dean’s eyes growing wide. I glared at my father, “His grandmother is sick, he works at the car shop his father owns all the time, he is kind, he treats me well! He might be poor but he has a good heart, I can see it in his eyes~ let me be happy father, please-“

“Evelyn Thomson!” he yelled out and slammed his fist on the table again. He was utterly pissed off. He didn’t want to hear it.

“This is my last word. You will get married to someone who will treat you with respect and kindness, am I clear? You will break up with that piece of garbage and listen to my orders-“

“Rot in hell, father, you are so busy looking for criminals that you do not notice your daughter’s struggles! You are not a father at all!” I screamed back before running upstairs. I could hear my father’s screams but I didn’t care. I soon ran in my room and securely locked the door, pressing my back into it and slowly slid down onto the ground, helplessly crying my heart out.

Leo loved me. I loved him. He promised me good future. Our love was unconditional. I’d never ever let anyone stand between us.

I cried and I cried for hours ahead. I cried so much that I fell asleep crying, right there, sitting on the ground, my back pressed into the door. I could hear the faint knocks and Dean’s voice calling my name but I ignored it. I felt numb at some point. I kept repeating to myself that this was just a dream, no, a nightmare. This was one big nightmare and I’ll wake up in the morning and my family will like Leo and we’ll live happily ever after.

Happily ever after.

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