#a good vagueblog every now and again is okay right

[faeriekit]

What it's been like to try to get into comics thus far:

Someone tells you to try reading comics online. It's free! Cool. You'll try it. You make a mental note to try an online search when you get home, and go about your day.

You try to find a site that has old comics. You click around. The scroll bar is huge. You recognize none of the names. There are some sets of series that seem to have the same name. You pick one at random. You don't understand what you're looking at. You close the tab. You'll try again tomorrow.

"Try reading _____ series! It's so good!" You look for the series name online. Turns out it's just a nickname. You can't be sure which version of the series it is. The wiki is no help. You'll try again tomorrow.

You watch a show based on the comics characters. It's fun; not groundbreaking, but fun. You look it up online later. Everyone complains about how it's not like the comics' characterizations. The writers did them dirty. You should read the comics instead. You close the forum tab.

"Why don't these idiots just get into comics? All these people are just cluttering up the fandom with their horrible takes on the characters. They clearly have no idea what the actual character/plot/series is like!" Okay. You do want to know, so it's probably worth another try. You'll try again tomorrow.

They didn't include a link. You have no idea what you're looking for without context. You keep looking stuff up and getting different names of series and characters and location. You have no idea where you are, and every beginning seems like the middle of the story. There are four different wikis in your results tab and you're not sure which one is actually the think you're looking for. You'll try again tomorrow.

You read the graphic novels. You like them a lot. You know that's not what they're talking about.

You watch a movie. It has the comic characters in it. You like it. You check it out online to see if other people like it too, and all you see is more complaints about how it differs from the comics. You're doing it wrong.

"People who can't get into comics are just weak. Just pick a random spot and start!" Okay. You go back to that endless scroll bar. You try to start reading something at random. It relies on concepts you haven't been introduced to and character relationships that already have an unseen depth to them. You don't have the context for any of it. You don't understand. Why is it moving so fast? Are you just too tired to understand what's on the page? You'll try again tomorrow, just in case.

You pick an omnibus off the shelf at the library. It starts in the middle of someone else's story and ends up with a cast in the low twenties. You try to keep up. You know who most of the people are, but the focus is so large and the story is so overwhelming that you don't think you really absorbed, like...any of it?? You put it back on the shelf. You'll try it again tomorrow.

You've seen more versions of every character than most fans ever will. You think longingly of what it must be like to be a filthy casual. You bet they're not wondering if they're bad at this hobby late at night. People probably vagueblog about them, too, but they don't even notice. Must be nice.

You watch another movie. It's nice. You end up with an omnibus of a short-run of something, so it's easier to digest. That's nice too. You're just reading to read. It's pleasant.

People argue online about what the BEST characterization of this person is and who's an awful writer and the runs no one should read and the stuff that WAS canon but now it ISN'T and there's the RIGHT stuff to read and the WRONG stuff to read, and some of it is truly terrible. You try to remember what the RIGHT stuff is, or else everyone will know that you're doing this wrong. You have to remember that this is just a hobby. You're having fun. You're supposed to be having fun.

"Fans of THIS adaptation are so annoying; they clog up the real works of appreciators of the original comics run and ruin the characters!" You look at the adaptation. It's officially licensed. Neat. The rest of the stuff you've tried has been official too. It hasn't stopped the vitriol.

You think that some of the fans hold the preciousness of the comics closer to their chest than the actual publisher. You're not sure what to do with that thought. You're so tired. You read another comics-based graphic novel, since it's on the shelf at B&N, and it's good. It's really, really good. You know in your heart it doesn't count as liking comics, and you wish it would get the same appreciation as the famous comics in your fangroups. You know it won't.

A fanauthor you like vagueposts about the idiots who can't even read the fucking comics once every other week. You've almost unfollowed them maybe half a dozen times. If you do, you won't get to see their works when they post. They hate you and they haven't met you, and they have no idea you exist. Okay. Maybe you'll do it tomorrow.

You like the characters. You like your fellow fans' interpretations of them. You like their stories and you love their art and you love sharing ideas with them and you're having fun. You're having fun and you're doing it wrong. No one wants you here and you don't understand what makes a good adaptation as opposed to a bad one if they're both well written and well liked and no one is willing to have a full on conversation without condescending down to you for being a fan without knowing anything. It's been a year. It's been a year and everyone else has been reading since they were knee high and you're behind because it's only been a year and there's cultural history you're only just learning and how dare you be ignorant of it. Don't you know how much you're missing? Don't you know how stupid you are??

You see officially licensed merchandise in the store. It makes you feel weird. You're having fun. You have to be having fun, or else what's the point?

People will do anything with beginner or prospective fans except give them a link to a recommendation. You can like a character, but you can't have a different interpretation of them— that's exclusive to officially licensed adaptations, and even then people will complain. You're on your own. No one will help you.

You're on your own. No one will help you.

You check out a couple of comics-based picture books and a graphic novel that looks interesting. You put a DVD of an adaptation on hold. You're on your own, and no one will help you, but maybe you have a right to have fun by yourself.

You watch. You read. You have fun. It's not enough, but you're...happy. You're pretty sure that's what this is.

Close enough.

[blocksruinedme]

Okay I forgot I vagueblogged about the new AU

Unlike every AU I have ever talked about, this one has something you can read, and subscribe to! That's because it's @toasted-cricket's AU that I will probs write in - though I'm doing heavy consultation, including on Joel, where consultation sometimes mean "these 4 ideas should be true, don't you agree?" The series is Just Like Honey and it's gonna be great, give it a sub! (the series that is, the characters have plenty of subs!)

Pull Me Deeper and Down is the first fic, it's 1.7k, it's cleo topping etho, where both of them only let the other top them! It's fun and sexy and it has turned into so much more! Because Cricket said "i want to write more of this etho" and i said "WRITE ME SMALLETHO I DO SO MUCH FOR YOU GIVE ME THIS" and they said "you're right." (this is all light hearted fun between besties). It has good detailed shibari - that's what you can get from this team, really detailed and accurate ropes! And really realistic kink and poly, doing something useful with all my life experience.

So then it was "and maybe a sequel to that SmallEtho sibari" and then "how about this other one as well" and "let's combine them and make the first one three chapters and..." there is now, of course, because it's us, also bad boys and mumscarian. and flower husbands. and clethubs. and some mess of grian scar cleo and... fuck i need to check the chart.... bdubs. actually here's the chart.

the relationship lines aren't all there at the start, joe/oli get together and SmallEtho both thinks the other one wants it casual so if trying not to have romantic feelings, lol.

And the bad boys are a little clueless about what their relationship actually means to all of them, and scott... well i'm planning out an introspective character study where scott sits at a party and watches jimmy have fun!!!!!!!!!! Going hard on emp s1 scott here.

Last Life/Double Life combo inspiration for gaslight gatekeep girlboss.

And Cricket's joe/oli plans are sooooo sweet i'll probably cry.

and.... yeah wait and see. I feel like someone who did fic community forensics could figure out this was me and cricket, based on what we write - last i checked, most of the fics in the joe/oli tag were by us or gifts for us

again the series is Just Like Honey and the first fic, which is short and sweet, is Pull Me Deeper and Down

[fairymint]

Things that you will not tolerate? (from salty munday meme)

death threats ooc, full stop. as a disclaimer, I haven't seen one in a long time, and to that, I say fucking good. And I don't just mean 'ohhhhh noooo haha you don't deserve a death threat ur good person!' etc style, I mean i do not want to see it even for bad people. best case it rings out immature, and worst case rings about a complex personal moral failing and typically also in context drags out the drama. do not bring these to my discussion.

not taking no/not right now for an answer clingy style. I have blocked an ex for 'are you sure?'ing every time i declined having a voice call, I've had a person bother me about when i'm doing threads on fucking twitch, anything to try to 'convince' me or rush me when i am unwilling, unready, or unable to thread/talk/entertain.

any onesided stubborn behaviour, especially when it comes to phobic behaviour or anger. bullying. There is a difference imo between say, a transphobic person, and transphobic behaviour. so when i warn you or say something ain't right, you need to listen, not 'well it's ok because i said so.' and try to logic your way out of it being 'not bad, actually'. definitely don't insist on calling people slurs or names they aren't okay with. crying wolf about resolved situations; there's a fine line between your own feelings and continuing to demonize who crossed you. you dancing and spitting on named graves is not my fuckin problem. I'm talking about vagueblogging, mostly. a block should be a block, from either side. no making fun of them afterwards. no bitching about them speaking their own feelings on their own damn blog, either. leave it alone or don't, but move forward, not back. your blog should be about you, and who's with you. not who ain't.

bad faith. the dash can turn into a real telephone game ooc, but I have blocked someone for consistently going 'what's everyone's problem???' and assuming the worst of a neutral (albeit tense) discussion. They made a conversation sound like drama by assuming the worst, and they pretty much did that for every conversation; overly combative. This applies to enforcing boundaries, too. small, kind, and quick is best. have the concept of a warning, the concept of ignorance/obliviousness, watch some fuckin supernanny if you've never seen it.

consider this a part 1, since i got this question again!

[bookofmirth]

I saw your recent response to an anon where you mentioned the drama that occurred the other day based around bookprofessor’s post. Obviously you don’t have to respond to this or publish it if you do not wish but I just wanted to bring up that while it is important to focus on the real life issues at hand, the OP was hypocritical in her post which is why people were getting upset. She was preaching against ableism while simultaneously flaunting her IQ and degree which is a form of ableism. She was speaking out against racism while ending her post using the racial slur “cracker” when talking about the possibly Caucasian Twitter elriels.

Obviously she had some important points but it was completely overshadowed by her participation in the hate speech and prejudice that she was speaking out against.

This does not in any way justify the nasty messages she received but on the same hand, I do not blame anyone that called her out for her hypocrisy. I hope you can understand why her post was so negatively received and how flawed it was. My hope is that one day everyone can just ignore the negativity, report those who are being racist/prejudiced in any way, and block those who are just being loud and who you don’t wish to see content from. But unfortunately I do not see that happening any time soon.

There are a few things I want to address in this because I think it's a good moment for the fandom to step back and reflect on how we treat one another, how we react to such issues, and how we behave moving forward.

First off, thanks for explaining your point of view without being antagonistic. I do think that everyone's emotional reactions to the post were valid. I do NOT think their responses, in terms of words and actions, were valid. Now before I move forward, I want to clarify that when I use the word "you", I am referring to anyone who may have had the response I am describing - not you personally, anon. Also please don’t freak out about how long this is, as a majority of it is a response to the fandom in general, not you in particular.

What was - and wasn’t - said in the original post

In this post, there were completely valid criticisms of the way that people in this fandom behave, and it wasn’t “generalizing” a certain group, it was literal, actual proof of things that had been said, by multiple people. I’m not going to get too into what Alyssa argued because her critiques of those tweets was flawless. The original post had very valid criticisms of what was happening on Twitter. Alyssa exposed the actually racist, homophobic, and imperialistic underpinnings of those tweets.

However, a lot of people are stuck on the bits before and after those critiques. @bookprofessor apologized for different aspects of her post in a few different asks. There were perhaps better ways that some of those things could have been phrased, some things that could have been left out. And she apologized. People can accept that apology or not but we can’t act like it didn’t happen. Like she didn’t reflect and learn to do better.

However, the people she was calling out have not done the same thing, and if anything, comments that focus more on Alyssa’s tone than why she wrote the post in the first place lets those people off the hook.

On cracker - Using the word "cracker" is not racist in the same way that using racial slurs against POC is. Is it prejudiced? Yes. But you cannot say that it is the same thing when that is demonstrably untrue, given centuries of oppressive history. No one has been oppressed for being white. Those are not the same. Reverse racism is not a thing because a white person punching down on POC is NOT AT ALL the same thing as a POC punching up at white people. The actions look the same, but the impact is so unequal it’s not even funny.

Racism is a systemic, institutionalized problem. It is not defined by individual actions, though those actions can either support or challenge racism. When someone calls a white person a cracker, there isn’t centuries of oppression giving power to and reinforcing that statement. That is not a “gotcha” moment.

Saying “I have x IQ” or “I have X degrees” is not ableist. I’m sorry to whoever told you it was ableist (again, not you specifically anon but people who had read the “aw shucks guys” vagueblogs about it), but it’s not. Those are facts. I have no idea what my IQ is, but I have five degrees from institutions of higher education. Me saying that is in no way ableist. 

Often, people mention those things to be elitist, yes. Sometimes, they can be used to say “hey I know more about this than you”. They can be used in a way that tries to make themselves feel superior. I suspect that this is the impression that a lot of people got of the post. However, there is a fine line between saying “hey that’s elitist” and professing anti intellectualism. Which is perhaps a side issue so I’ll let that go for now.

Another reason that people mention their degrees or qualifications is to establish their background knowledge and credibility. If I were to say “hey y’all I have two MA degrees” (which is true) I am not being ableist! It is a fact! It is factual! And I worked my ass off for those, I will be in student loan debt until I die for those, I have every right to mention them if I want to, and often I do so in order to establish my credibility, to explain the position I am coming from. And my prior knowledge of these topics is relevant when we are talking about literature since that’s what my degrees were on - literature and linguistics. That is why Alyssa mentioned her background, though she did pair it with comments about other people, for which she has apologized.

My final point about this is that I 1000% understand feeling insecure or less than because of educational attainment. I dropped out of high school. I had a complex about that for a long, long time. But I also know that if I took offense at someone else saying they had a PhD, then that offense is about me, not them. Someone else’s inferiority complex is not reason for people to pretend to be less than they are.

If those two comments are what overshadowed the bigger, more important issue for a lot of the readers of that post, then y’all allowed them to overshadow those more important issues. I am 99% sure that someone right now is reading this and thinking “but Leslie, it was the way that she said it!” Boy have I got some news for you!

How we react

This next section is not specific to this ask; instead, it is a discussion of how the fandom responded. If it were only one person who had said “but her tone” then I wouldn’t need to make this point. The fact that multiple people are exhibiting the behavior explained below is what makes this a cultural problem within the acotar fandom.

The main argument I saw on the post itself, and indeed any time I see people bring up how nasty Twitter can be, is that “it was a joke” and “that’s how stan Twitter works”.

No.

Those responses were quite useful for this post, though! So buckle up everyone, because I am going to talk about gaslighting, racism, respectability politics, and tone policing. While I understand that some people might have taken personal offense to what was said, there is a much bigger issue at stake that has nothing to do with individual feelings, and everything to do with ensuring that POC stay silenced and white supremacy is upheld. 

Back to the “but it’s a joke” thing. Thanks for gaslighting! Great example of that, person I’m not going to tag! Gaslighting is when you make someone question their experiences, when you try to make them think “wait, did I really feel that way? Is my feeling about that valid? Do I need to re-evaluate my response to this?? Am I blowing this out of proportion???” And saying “it’s just a joke” is a perfect way to do that. Did I say something accidentally sexist? It’s just a joke, nbd! Now you’re the problem, because you didn’t understand my joke and laugh!!! 

Saying “it’s a joke” or “oh they are old/young/ignorant, they will learn” is not a good response to... anything. It takes the responsibility off the people who are doing the harm, and putting it onto the people who were hurt. And in this case, anyone who read those tweets and found them harmful (which should be everyone?) is completely valid. You aren’t lesser for being angry or emotional or for seeing a problem where other people saw a joke. The people who see those things as acceptable jokes are the ones in the wrong.

This is a tactic that is used against women all the time. Any time a woman is sexually harassed at work or online, for example, and she gets upset about it, and someone chimes in with “oh they weren’t serious, can’t you take a joke?” So you can imagine what this is like for women of color.

It is a very, very common tactic for people of color to be silenced via tone policing and respectability politics. Tone policing and respectability politics are very closely related, especially in this context. The idea is that if Alyssa had just written that post in just the right way, it would have been more palatable to white people, and therefore okay to write. The idea that if she had tried to be “understanding” or “see it from their perspective” or understand that it’s “just a joke” are all ways to silence and de-legitimize any accurate, valid criticisms that were made of those tweets. It effectively re-routes the conversation away from the real issues, and to the person trying to bring them up. It’s essentially an ad hominem attack in disguise. 

We see respectability politics in media when people of color who act or dress or speak like white people are afforded more respect. Or any time that a person of color is pulled over and people say, “well if they had just done what the police officer asked...” There is a pervasive idea that if people just “act” properly, aka if you act white, then the police won’t feel antagonized and try to kill arrest you. If we are nice enough, meek enough, smile enough, etc. then we will be accepted.

When we tone police, we refuse to allow marginalized people the right to be angry. We say that "hey, we can only have this discussion if you leave emotion, which you rightfully feel, at the door, and we can only continue this discussion if you behave in a way that makes me feel comfortable." But guess what? It isn’t about you! These discussions are often highly uncomfortable. There is no nice way to tell someone they are being racist. And yet somehow, that is the ever-moving goalpost. It seems reasonable, right? “Just be civil, be nice, don’t insult each other!” And there is that. But those criteria change constantly, to the point where anyone (white) at any time can say “WHOA WHOA THIS IS MAKE ME UNCOMFORTABLE???” Then we find ourselves at zero, and suddenly the focus of attention has shifted away from the actual problem.

Before we go further, I want to say this: people have a right to be angry. They do not need to make their anger palatable or tasteful for the consumption of others (read: white people). 

We saw this last summer, and I’m not sure how the message didn’t get across. But people are rightfully angry about racism. They are angry about the murder of people of color by police, they are angry about lack of quality education, or clean water, of centuries of oppression that have led to this very moment when all of that ceases to matter because a white woman’s feelings got hurt one time. 

And that is what pisses me off so much. There is no way in this world that we could criticize tweets like those that everyone would agree with, and that everyone would “approve” of, that would be “nice” enough and yet still be impactful and make the authors of those tweets understand the gravity of what they have done. 

The least we can do is allow one another to express our anger, our outrage, because it’s highly likely that those people know exactly what the fuck they are doing, and they do not fucking care. By criticizing a woman of color for the way in which she chose to engage with this topic, we are avoiding the issue and letting the people in those tweets off the hook. 

There were many responses to that post that were positive, that agreed with Alyssa. There are a ton of people who disagree with those tweets, who find them disgusting, who understand exactly how and why they are problematic. That should be what we are talking about. Getting to the core of the argument, on that post or any about racism or other problematic behavior in fandom, requires getting past our own egos. It requires us to be able to step back, say “hm this thing is frustrating but there is a bigger picture here”. It’s not easy, and I recognize that. 

The fact that it is a common tactic though? To say “hey this hurt me personally and so I’m going to ignore any valid points you made?” That feeds directly into centuries of white supremacy because it, once again, silences POC and makes them try to play a losing game. And they will always lose, because no matter how hard they try to play the white game, the goalposts are constantly shifting. So you know what? Fuck the game, and fuck respectability politics, and fuck tone policing and “uwu be nice guys” because when it comes to things like racism and sexism, I don’t expect the people who deserve to be criticized to be nice. In fact, trying to be nice only serves to fuck POC over in the end.

Indeed, in response to that post, certain blogs have taken the opportunity to position themselves as “the nice ones” or “the ones who would never” or “uwu let’s be nice guys” while completely ignoring the fact that a woman of color was attacked for calling out racism. And yes - that was the point of her post. People getting hung up on mentions of her degree are (intentionally or not, it doesn’t matter) completely obfuscating the fact that that is not what her post was about, which was to call out disgusting behavior. idk how many words the post actually was, but essentially, people are focusing on 5% of it to the detriment of the 95% that was actually really important shit. These types of vagueblog posts about the issue fall into exactly what I am talking about - these are people who have decided to look at this issue, see how Alyssa (and anyone else who dares speak up) has approached it, and intentionally try to act like they are “better” because they can be “rational” and “kind”. Newsflash, if you don’t have something to be angry about, then being “nice” about racism isn’t that much of a flex. If it didn’t bother you, then congratulations. That doesn’t make you better than people it did bother. You just got lucky this time, and decided to use that to your advantage to look like the good guy.

I am not saying that all calls for peace are doing this. Obviously it’s what we all want. This is the worst I have seen this fandom in the 4+ years I’ve been here. But we cannot have that by ignoring the real problems and pretending that if we are all just nice to each other, then we will solve racism and sexism and all bullying in the fandom will stop. 

So combining all of this - the gaslighting, the tone policing, and what do you get? You get a fandom that refuses to actually engage critically with its own problems and take accountability for them. You get a fandom that decides that it’s easier to be distracted by this one mean comment over here than it is to engage in the fact that you know what, the culture in this fandom has actually turned incredibly disgusting and a lot of people are just okay with it. You’ve got a fandom that is using the tools of white supremacy to avoid the discussions that should actually be taking place. Maybe people don’t realize that that’s what they are doing. But if someone still thinks that after reading this post, then godspeed my friend, I hope you enjoy Twitter.

Okay so my last thing I want to say is that I didn’t come to all of this knowledge fresh from the womb. I do a lot of work, in my personal life and my professional life, to be better. So here is a list of books that I have found particularly helpful:

How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America also by Ibram X. Kendi

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo (side note, I was kinda meh about this one but the chapter “White Women’s Tears” is particularly helpful)

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins

I’m not going to talk specifically about Alyssa’s post anymore, but if anyone wants to continue talking about these broader issues going on in the fandom, I am game. (I really should be grading papers though, so it might take a bit.)

[skeletalroses]

I was going to submit this anonymously to one of the bigger aspec blogs but it got so long that I’d feel like a pain in the ass. I’m posting this because I’ve recently landed in a bit of a difficult situation in the vein of Just Aroace Things, and I’m not sure what to do or even how to feel. I’m hoping to get some advice from the community re: a topic that comes up from time to time---navigating roommate/housing situations as an aroace, particularly when your potential roommate’s romance fucks you over.

I met my best friend, A, our sophomore year of college when we got paired up via roommate lottery. We clicked right away and had a blast living together. Unfortunately it only lasted a year, since the best option for my major was to transfer to another campus while for her it was best to stay put. We’ve known each other for nine years now and live in different states, but we visit regularly and had always talked about living together again once we both moved away from our parents.

I’m aroace, sex- and romance-repulsed. A is super considerate and supportive of this. She even discovered recently that she’s demisexual (which she learned about while researching the symbolism of the asexual flag! On her own, completely unprompted! Because she thought it would help her understand me more! See? Super supportive!). She is, however, very, very alloromantic. Up until now this has just been one more facet of our overall odd-couple dynamic (I’m an Addams and she’s a Disney fairy), which has always been something we’ve laughed at and reveled in.

A couple months ago, however, A moved out of her parents’ place and in with her boyfriend of a few years. I’m still with my parents, which suits me fine for the time being, but I eventually want to move out. Like I said, A and I have long talked about living together. We never made any specific plans, but I’ve asked her before to verify that yes, this is a thing we’re both Actually down to do when the time’s right. But that was a good while ago, before she moved in with Boyfriend. We visited last weekend and I brought up the subject again, because I’ve been unsure about it since that whole development.

“Feel free to say no; I won’t be offended; I just want to know how my options stand at this point. We’ve talked in the past about rooming together again. With Boyfriend in the picture now, is that still on the table?”

A’s answer: “Boyfriend has a lot of anxiety, so probably not. Sorry. He doesn’t even like having his family stay over. You’re welcome to stay a few days but not for like weeks on end.”

This was a calm conversation had over cocktails in the mall. She asked to make sure my parents weren’t threatening to kick me out or anything; I assured her that they weren’t, and I wasn’t moving anytime soon, and it’s okay that my rooming with her is out.

Only I’m not that okay with it. I wasn’t confident she’d say yes, but I did kind of think it was likely, and moreover I’m realizing how much I was unconsciously banking on that plan. I’ve been sans income during the pandemic, and I have a fuckton of economic anxiety to begin with. A’s a STEM major in a big city who easily found a solidly-paying job right out of college. She gets promotions and raises and shit. I’m a humanities major in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere where all my impressive qualifications (which I do have) can’t get me anything with a living wage below management level, let alone something in my field. And I’m never going to have that built-in cohabitant in the form of a romantic or sexual partner that allos like A can take for granted. A was the person I could split costs with so as to maybe live semi-decently with someone compatible. Without her, my chances of having that have plummeted.

And it’s all because she got a romosexual partner. This guy who’s known her half as long as I have; who never worked her through the trials and eventual breakup of her previous long-term, engaged-to-be-engaged relationship; who has himself caused her massive amounts of grief, suffering, and sometimes outright danger through his inability to competently handle the drama in his personal life that should never have touched her, all while her mother would write letters to me asking me to come visit because, actual quote, A only smiles when I’m around. He was the reason she would be too depressed to function, and I had to long-distance therapize her through it even though she refused to take the basic step of leaving this grown-ass man at least until he got his shit together, because “he needs me.”

It’s like this dude calls the shots in A’s and my relationship now. I hadn’t seen her in seven months because every time we planned a weekend to hang out, it’d get canceled because Boyfriend wanted to go see his family or something (and he can’t do that without her, I fucking guess). Even this last visit got cut down to overnight when it was supposed to be the long weekend, because Boyfriend wanted to make other plans. And now my best option for future living arrangements is apparently down the shitter because of him. It’d have been one thing if A doesn’t want to live with me anymore because she and he need their allo space or whatever the fuck couples do (still amatonormative and lousy for me). But as far as I understand, it’s not even that. It’s not her. It’s Boyfriend. A and I can be planning something for the two of us for weeks, for months, for years, then it all goes away in a minute because ehh, it kinda cramps Boyfriend’s style. I’m, as A called me, her “best friend soulmate.” I Was Here First. I never fucking made her cry. But I can’t kiss her or fuck her, so I automatically take a backseat to the one who can. I don’t need to be her Number One, but I don’t appreciate being pushed aside at Boyfriend’s every whim.

A, I’m sure, doesn’t realize how it looks from my angle. I know she cares about me and doesn’t want me to feel devalued. She’s just an oblivious alloro. I’m not even sure Boyfriend’s intentionally hogging her. (To be clear, I don’t think he’s a bad person; I’ve only met him a handful of times but I reliably clock my friends’ truly shitty partners on less. I haven’t heard about any crises in the past year or so, so I guess he’s finally managing his baggage well enough that A’s life can go smoothly and not suck.) I’m not unsympathetic to anxiety either; I’m chronically mentally ill and I’ve had my share. And I get we’re little more than strangers at this point. But I hate that he can just singlehandedly veto me and A rooming together ever. It’s much more of a blow to my likely quality of life than he or A---or tbh even I did, before this point---realize.

I hate feeling like I’m being jealous and needy. Maybe A just genuinely likes him better and it’s not only an amatonormative thing. I know I’m not entitled to live with her; it’s not like we promised or anything. But the option getting shut down really made me realize how much I resent not having it, and how much I kind of resent Boyfriend in general.

Which brings me to the asking-for-advice part, to the maybe two people who’ve read this far. Aspecs on here have talked about how amatonormativity fucks over single people and especially aros in terms of housing and life in general. Has anyone dealt with a situation like mine? How do you manage the amatonormative behavior of people in your life snatching your prospects out from under you, or feeling like it has? Is my reaction even reasonable? If so, how should I bring it up to A? This would be the closest thing we’ve ever had to a conflict, and also I’m...not great at being vulnerable. I can’t even vagueblog about these topics because my social media presence is limited to Tumblr and hers to Facebook. Hell, maybe I should just forget it for now, since I’m not changing housing anytime soon anyway, and cross that bridge when I get to it. I wouldn’t ask her to leave him, since their relationship seems to be going a lot smoother than it had been. But goddamn, am I filled with aroace salt about this.

[casterblogs]

i’m salty about something so i’m putting it under the cut. i’ll get back to reblogging stuff eventually i swear >>

this is months old bullshit but i’m still angry it happened and i only ever got to tell one person how mad it made me and psychologically speaking that’s entirely not enough to have dealt with it, so here:

fuck you if you think you as a creator, or you a haver of ocs, or you a writer OWN a trope. and fuck you if you bust into people’s spaces accusing them of stealing your trope. and fuck you if you shit on other people for having similar theming for their ocs. and fuck you if you decide to vocally hate someone else’s character based on key words in their description. and the biggest of fuck yous if you lure people into conversations specifically to make snide comments about how little they know about their own ocs. what the FUCK. 

i LOVE my characters. i love telling their stories. i love giving them lives and relationships and likes and dislikes. i love making them miserable and i love giving them support networks to lean on afterwards. they all have little bits of myself in them. and i struggle to love myself, but at the end of the day i can at least love my characters which is SOMETHING. 

so FUCK you for making me feel ashamed of them. fuck you for making me scared to share them. fuck you for taking away the one thing i’ve been consistently excited about since i wandered onto deviantart in middle school. fuck you for thinking you’re so special that nobody else is allowed to explore the same topics as you. 

at the end of the day i still love my characters. they make me SO happy. its important that they do because my life is super rough and i need every little scrap of joy i can get. but now i am never NOT going to feel that underlaying shame and embarrassment in relation to them. as much as i love them and as much as i want to share them with people who appreciate it that is NEVER going to go away. and well and truly fuck you for doing that to me. 

[kane-and-griffin]

dear kabby mom, how do I make my broken heart stop hurting? I fell in love with a girl who I thought was falling back for me too....but now I don't think so anymore. this sucks.

Oh, my sweetsad baby.  

It does suck. 

It absolutely sucks. 

There is nothing I can say that will makethat not true.  There is nothing anyonecan say or do that will make it suck any less except time.

 And I know that’s not the answer you want tohear, that’s not the answer anyone wants to hear, because it doesn’t fixanything right now.  It doesn’t save youfrom having to go through the thing you have to go through right now.  It doesn’t make any of the things that hurtright now any less painful to know that in ten years (or five years) (or sixmonths) this will all feel different. It’s the truest thing that I have to tell you, but I also know thatit is in some degree useless to you right now.

You say thatyou think she doesn’t have feelings for you. Have you talked to her?  Have youdone the excruciating and mortifying and emotionally naked thingwhere you open up your heart to someone without any idea what will happennext?  Maybe you don’t need to ask; maybeyou know already.  Maybe she likessomeone else.  Maybe her feelings aboutyou are platonic and she’s made that clear. But if there’s gray area – if there’s a piece of your heart or mind that’sstill whispering, “But maybe, but maybe …” – maybe with a little time,maybe she’ll change her mind, maybe she’ll see you differently in a year, maybeit won’t work out with the girl she’s dating now – then it might be helpful tosay it out loud, to stop the “But Maybe” train in its tracks before it derails you.  Sometimes you can’t let go andput it behind you until you’ve heard the real “No.”  Until the bubble has been burst.  I don’t know your situation, but I know morethan once in my life that’s been true for me. I knew I’d hold onto unreasonably stubborn optimism, willfullymisinterpreting whatever they said as a “sign,” until I finally got up thecourage to just say it out loud, get my heart smashed into a hundred tiny pieces, pick them up, and keep walking.  It was miserable but it was also the only way forward. 

And you, baby, need to figure out what youneed to move forward.

You’re feeling big things right now, and you need to use whateverhealthy outlets are available to you to start processing them.  Cry to your friends.  Write, draw, sing.  Make sad playlists, watch sad movies.  Swap stories with the peoplein your life about their heartbreaks, to remind yourself that you’re notexperiencing this alone.  Eat goodchocolate.  Go for walks.  Breathe fresh air.  Stay busy. Spend time with as many good dogs and adorable non-annoying children asyou can find.  Dogs and children do notlet you get away with wallowing.  They will absolutely force you to remember that you are alive.

What youabsolutely must under no circumstances do is let heartbreak feed intoobsession.  Don’t check her social mediaa hundred times a day to think about all the other people she might choose whenshe didn’t choose you, or how much fun she’s having doing things you wish shewas doing with you instead, but isn’t.  Don’t useher to process the emotions you need to process, even if she’s yourfriend.  Do not make her responsible foryour broken heart.  Do not punish her, orany future person she dates, for the fact that she didn’t choose you.  If you need to vent these feelings do them quietlyand privately with your closest most trustworthy friends.  Never publicly, and never to her.  Do not vagueblog or subtweet in a forum whereshe might see it, and know, and feel terrible. You have every right to process every inch of the feelings that you’refeeling but you owe it to her to make sure you do it in a respectful way. 

She has not done anything wrong. 

No one here has done anything wrong.  

The first timeI realized I had feelings for someone who didn’t have them back I wastwelve.  The first time I told someone Ihad feelings for them and they didn’t say it back to me, I was twenty.  The most recent time was just last year.  

Once I showedup at a girl’s house for a brunch date and her drunken hookup from the night before answered the door, but I was too polite to bolt so we just satthere eating our eggs and pretending it wasn’t awkward and I was just there because the girl and I were just friends.

Once in highschool I told the tall beautiful blonde star of the basketball team who satnext to me in algebra and with whom I had been silently smitten all year thatshe had beautiful eyes, and when she gave me a weird look I got up and ran outof the room and pretended like I just needed to get something from mylocker.  

Once I didn’trealize that the date I was on wasn’t a date and that the girl was straightuntil I tried to kiss her, at which point she backed away in horror and neithershe nor her friends ever spoke to me again. She lives in my city now and once six years ago we were at a partytogether and even though at that point it had been close to a decade since theincident, she still never came anywhere near me.

I’ve hadfriendships end over this.  I’ve hadfriendships grow ten times as strong over this. I’m thirty-five and I’ve been in the place you’re currently in moretimes than I can count, and the only thing I can tell you from where I’msitting right now which might be in any way helpful is that the thing you areexperiencing is universal. 

Everyone thatyou know has been through this at least once. Some people have been on both sides of it.  All of us have been there.  All of us have been there.  Everyone you love and admire, everyone youthink is tough and strong, everyone you think never lets their feelings get tothem or who you’ve never seen cry, everyone who’s in a relationship of whichyou’re secretly envious because you assume the fact that they’re happy nowmeans they’ve never known what it’s like to be unhappy.  All of us. All of us.  We’re all right herewith you.  And what that means is that weall survived it. 

And you will too.  I promise, baby.  You will too. You’re experiencing one of those things that poets write about.  You’ll listen to melancholy love songs andwatch sad movies differently from now on. You know a thing now about your heart that you didn’t know before, andit’s beautiful and terrible and there will be times that you will probably wishfor it to disappear.

But please don’t.  

Let me tellyou why.

When I was akid, I was quiet and awkward and introverted and shy, and kept everythinginside.  I began to come out of my shella little bit in high school, but I didn’t really blossom until college, when Ifinally found my people, and suddenly it was like I was Dorothy moving from ablack-and-white world to a Technicolor one. I was in love with everything and everyone.  I was in love with the pretentious gayphilosophy major who lived downstairs and I was in love with the blondesorority girl down the hall who is now a major writer for Buzzfeed and I was inlove with anyone who would stay up with me until the sun rose, sitting in thedorm lounge and talking about books.  Ihad this big colorful soft squishy heart that I’d kept hidden my whole life and I justwanted to give it to someone, but every experience was new, so I gave it toeveryone, and because it was all new to me, I had no defense mechanisms to protect myself or avoid getting hurt.  I was forever falling forpeople who didn’t want me back and breaking my own heart and crying and feelingdevastated and writing terrible poetry and being afraid I’d never feel anythingever again.  But hearts are elastic, they bounce back when we let them, they’re made for love and if you just give them alittle time they’ll heal and move on to somebody else.

Then when Iwas twenty-four, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, andI shut down.

The only way Icould cope with the panic and the grief was to force myself not to feelit.  I knew my mother was not fine, but Itold myself over and over that she would be. I knew that I was not fine, but I told myself over and over that Iwas.  Sometimes when I was alone at nightI would feel it, this huge dark cloud thing hovering over me, and I would feelmyself, very firmly, very carefully, shoving it back down into a box andlocking it up.  It was an almost physicalsensation.  I can remember it vividly.  It was spectacularly unhealthy, but it wasalso the only way I could survive. 

Shedied when I was twenty-seven, and my clearest memory of that day, and of theperiod immediately after, was that I felt nothing.  I cried when I got the phone call from mydad, because of the shock.  I didn’t cryagain – about her, or about anything – for years.  I went from being someone who would burst into tears at, like, a Verizon commercial about grandparents, to someone who didn’t cry at her own mother’s funeral.  Some switch had flipped inside me, and it waslike the part of me that could feel things was just gone.  I lost three grandparents in the years aftermy mom died, and I sang at all their funerals, and I felt nothing.  I knew that I loved them, and I knew that this thing that was happening was sad, but I felt it in this very muffled, dim, distant, far-off way where ifyou had asked me if I was okay I would have told you that I was fine and Iwould have believed that to be perfectly true.

It wasterrible.

Grief made mysister more emotional – she cried a lot, she was more demonstrative, she wantedto process her feelings out loud – but it shut me down completely.  And it took that big sparkly heart full oflove for everybody with it.  I tried,every once in awhile, half-heartedly, to go out on an internet date, but I feltnothing.  I didn’t know then what “demisexual”meant, and that I’m simply not wired to sit across the table in a bar from atotal stranger and feel the things you’re supposed to feel in that situation; Ineed that emotional connection before any of the other stuff happens.  But I wasn’t able to form that emotionalconnection.  From time to time I mightfeel a fleeting spark of a wistful crush on the cute divorced older lady poetin my writing group, or develop complicated feelings for one of the revolvingdoor of tortured, dramatic, toxic artistic men that seem to be foreverpopulating my life, but it wasn’t the same. I spent ten years convinced that I was broken; that my mom’s death meantthat the part of me that knew how to feel things was dead too.  I would, at that moment, have givenabsolutely anything to be that heartbroken twenty-year-old sobbing over beingrejected by a pretty straight girl, because at least that Claire could feelthings.

It took me ten years for the switch to flip back on, for me to catch feelings for someone and then get my heart broken again, not that long ago, and it was so disorienting to be feeling things again after all that time, but I was really grateful too.  Because it meant that I wasn’t dead inside.  I was a person who could feel things again.

I’m tellingyou all of this because right now you are heartbroken, and in the depths ofyour pain you feel like this is a terrible thing to be, and you want to make itstop.  And I am here to tell you, yourheart will heal, because that is what hearts do when we give them permission;but in the midst of your heartbreak, remember to be grateful for the capacityto be heartbroken.  For the fact that youhave a breakable heart.  For the factthat you are the kind of person who loves big, even when you aren’t sure theother person is going to love you back. That’s the best kind of person to be.

You’re goingto be okay, cupcake.  I promise.  

[majesticlolipop]

A frank, honest discussion about health

I seem to be too tempted back onto tumblr, so I don’t think it’s fair to be back and not explain why I was gone so long, and why I may go at a drop of a hat again. If you’re a friend or someone who likes me (idk why) then keep reading.

Okay so I’m going to break this into two parts, physical and mental. I have to do physical first, because it’s very intertwined with my mental state too, and it would only make sense if you know what is going on with my physical health.

Physical

Speaking of what’s going on, honestly? I have ZERO clue. I believe I have EDS, but my doctor is so fucking clueless that he just decides that because that disease is rare af, that I can’t have it. I was diagnosed with JIA when I was 4, and have had plenty of other things thrown in since then. Let’s go on to explain what is actually happening in the plainest terms, and as far as I’m aware. My cells? They suck. My cells suck. They are attacking my joints and organs for YEARS. Since  I was four. Now, since I was 7, I’ve been on chemotherapy. I’ve also been on and off other cell blockers since then. (Basically, chemo kills off the cells, cell blockers try and make my body not make more, or make them go to the right places). My care has gone down hill, to the point where my digestive system is completely fucked. The digestive doctor is a pretentious cow, who refused to see me for A YEAR AND A HALF even though I was hospitalized, and has since been incredibly bitchy to me. I do not know what I have in my bowel and stomach. the digestive doctor believes its just damage from years of chemo, cell blockers, and pain medication. But my rhuematologist (main doctor) believes it’s related to all the other illnesses I have. this means there’s a difference of opinion. Which means, I had to be taken off ALL of my medications. And, I only see each of these doctors EVERY SIX MONTHS. Not enough care, at all. I just did my first Christmas in years off Chemo. You can imagine it didn’t go well. this week infact, I have only tolerated water. That is it. My skin is peeling, I’m dizzy, I can’t walk, I can’t draw, I can barely write this. I’m in pain all day, every day. I can’t warm up, I can’t breathe. The day after Christmas saw me being rushed to hospital with a suspected heart attack, which turned out to be my chest bones so incredibly swollen that the pressure made my heart rate be incredibly high and my respiration extremely low. And you know what they did? Nothing. They sent me home with the pain killers that I take anyway. I am so incredibly lost in a body that I don’t want. 

Which leads me onto my next point:

Mental (tw: mentions of sexual assault, emotional abuse, death, grief)

My mental health, as you can imagine, is completely shattered. I left tumblr because it was my safe place, and it turned into this toxic, hate filled place where I couldn’t find solace. It was good for my mental health to leave, but leaving meant feeling alone. I used to have so many friends on here, and when they were all gone, I was broken. But I was broken anyway.  My physical health has taken a huge toll on my mental health. I had to leave college. I can barely take care of myself. I live alone now, as my mother moved in with her new partner, and I find it hard to deal with the loneliness. I feel so unbareably lonely, like the world could swallow me up and I wouldn’t care. I have picked myself up off the floor sobbing countless times.  I had to leave college, and that was heartbreaking for me. My health keeps me out of education, and as most of you know, all I want to do is go to college. My extended family does not understand my health. They don’t understand my choices. They don’t understand that it was either leave college, or work myself to the point of serious physical danger. That has been very hard to mentally deal with. To deal with being a dissapointment, and not be physcially able to do anything about it, even though all you want to do is prove them wrong.  As some of you may know, christmas/New Years is a very hard time for me. I was emotionally abused by my ex partner, someone who has fucked me up so much that even though it’s coming on 5 years, I still cannot get into another relationship. For the last few years, he has done somethings online, mentioned me what have you. I didn’t even check this year if I was vagueblogged or vaguetweeted about because I just didn’t have it in me to hurt more. Our relationship ended on the day something bad happened to me. I was sexually assaulted/abused by someone, and my emotional abusive boyfriend at the time took this as cheating. It wasn’t.  Three years ago on the 21st of Dec, my dad passed away. This year, for some reason, was the hardest. I found it extremely hard to keep up with my demons. I think, a reason is that I had a biopsy taken of my bowel and stomach without being sedated. When I was getting my stomach one done, I had a complete PTSD attack, to the point where I was a mess. I begged them to stop for a moment so I could calm down, they refused and restrained me on the bed. This resulted in me being incredibly unwell mentally, and a little damage to my stomach.  And ever since that day, i still haven’t felt 100 percent okay in my mind. Everything seems raw. Everything seems hard.  I spent christmas eve, and a  lot of christmas day alone for the first time in my life. It was much harder than I thought it was going to be to deal with. We all have demons, and I like to be alone. But there’s a difference than being alone, and being alone with your demons and unable to escape. Honestly? Every day is a struggle. But I’m getting there. I can’t promise I’ll be back on here a lot. It depends on how much drama there is. 

I do appreciate you all. I write for the Mighty now, you can follow me my name is Katherine Reynolds on it. 

As always, Peave and Love

Katch x

[kyberled]

☀ ♦ ♥ ☢ ✖

the salty af munday meme

☀ What’s your rp pet peeve? –> Ship forcing. This is literally the best way to get me to unfollow or even block another mun. I’ll explain what ship-forcing is below, but yeah, that’s one of them.

♦ What was a mildly annoying thing that has happened to you rp wise? –> See above. It happened once on my Warren blog, and once very recently on here. Now, a bit of a definition, here - I don’t see ship-forcing as asking me if I want to ship, or saying your muse has a crush on Braig - heck, that can be flattering (though I prefer if we know each other, first - it can get a bit uncomfy for me, kind of like virtual catcalling, I guess, when complete strangers tell me how attractive they think Braig is). I don’t see it as someone’s muse having feelings for Braig, one-sided or otherwise. All of these things are A-Okay, and can be quite fun, too! What I do see ship forcing is when someone asks if they can ship with Braig, and instantly, as soon as I say ‘we can give it a try’, deciding that our muses are suddenly soulmates, even if they’ve hardly said four sentences to each other, before. I see it as asking to ship, then immediately dropping the thread where they were actually in the process of meeting each other to have them now in the middle of a date, which, given the context of where, when, and how said date was taking place would likely have gotten them both killed. I see it as pestering Braig to do something ‘romantic’, having both Braig and I say no, he doesn’t want to, and the other person keeps pushing, regardless, or getting upset when Braig decides to respond with something not romantic and replying to that with some rude, snarky comment. ‘Uh, I think [muse] wanted Braig to do [X], actually’ - Yes, that has happened, before. I’ve been vagueblogged about, spammed on and off anon, been told I’ve made peoples’ depression/anxiety worse, had on-blog events ruined and muses killed and simply been harassed at all hours of the day because of ship-forcing and my trying to deal with it gently and politely, instead of just flat-out saying ‘no’ or ‘I’m not comfortable with this��. So, if it ever seems like I’m coming down too hard on someone in regards to shipping, I swear I don’t mean to come off as abrasive or rude - I just learned the hard way that you’ve gotta be blunt about your comfort zones or else things go south faster than a flock of geese on an adrenaline high. Basically, to sum this novel up: As long as you respect my boundaries, we’re good; if I haven’t told you you’re skeeving me out, we’re good. If I have told you you are, and you keep doing whatever it was, we’re not so good. 

☢ What fads/trends are you so over? –> I don’t really keep up with trends enough to know lmao. I mean I guess I’ve seen a few, but they don’t really bother me. You do you, and all… Though, I guess I never entirely understood the whole ‘personified objects’ thing? I mean, you do you, and all, but it just never  made sense to me.

✖ How has Tumblr RP changed since you started? –> It hasn’t, not really. I think the only real changes have been purely aesthetic, like small text,  contained themes, etc. I really don’t care what other people do, as long as they’re happy and not hurting anyone.

♥ What’s the WORST thing that has happened to you rp wise?

[Under a cut for length]

Okay, so, I told two of my rp horror stories over on Xig, so I’ll tell my third one here. Since I gave the other two pseudonyms, we’ll call this one ‘Cheeper’. Cheeper was someone I had met when a mutual friend we’ll call Battery allegedly recommended my blog to them. Now, Battery was someone I had approximately zero problems with. Really friendly, sweet guy, talented writer, great sense of humour, one of my favourite people to write with. So, I figured, if Cheeper was a friend of Battery’s, they must be cool, too, right? … Wrong. So, things start out okay-ish, as they always do, but things get downhill pretty fast. Starts off with small things, like ignoring asks or dropping literally all of our threads without letting me know. And I understand wanting to drop threads or not being able to get to everything in your ask box, but when that happens consistently, it gets a little disheartening.

The next little thing was when they started making AUs of my muse, and expecting me to write them. Lemme say here that I am totally fine with people suggesting AUs for my muses. That’s where this blog came from, Rodi suggesting a Star Wars AU where another one of my muses was Obi’s padawan, so, again, I’m fine with AU prompts. What I’m not fine with is when someone writing a really detailed version of my muse without consulting me at all, and then expecting me to write that AU they made with no warning and no problems. Cheeper comes into my IMs listing this novel-length AU detailing not only how their muse changed, but how mine did, as well. Basically, the entire idea was that their muse, who in canon was a big tank-type character who had been straight-up abusive to multiple characters, and turned them into a small, fluffy little mage who was actually a good guy and hadn’t done any bad things, and was being forced to do the bad guys’ dirty work, whereas my muse… Was suddenly the abusive one. For absolutely no reason. In a way that not only completely contradicted all of my personal headcanons - all of which were posted and easily viewable on my blog - but also went against all of what canon had showed us about my muse, and quite frankly made me really uncomfortable. I mean, you’ve seen some of the stuff I’ve written, you know I’m down to write some pretty messed up stuff, but to straight up turn my muse into a child abuser, WITHOUT CONSULTING ME AT ALL, just so your muse can be the good guy? That doesn’t fly so well. On top of that, writing such a detailed version of my muse and expecting me to play it for you? Why not write it yourself? I mean like I said, I am thrilled with AU suggestions, but, hell, keep it to a sentence or two, tops. Let me experiment and develop my muse to fit the AU myself, thanks. … And, while these things were pretty irritating, especially when a few of them happened over and over again, it got worse.

A lot of the time, when I’m having OOC conversations to get to know another mun before we start writing together, I look for a sort of ‘spark’ or ‘click’ - something that shows this person and I are gonna get along. For a lot of people, including my favourite partners, this click is basically immediate - just this instant ‘wow, we’re gonna be good friends, this is great!’, and, for others, it takes a bit longer, and that’s totally okay! Some people take a while to open up, or maybe it wasn’t a good day for one of us, I totally get it, happens to me, too. How quickly the click happens has absolutely NO BEARING ON MY OPINION OF A PERSON WHATSOEVER. There have been I think only three or four times I haven’t clicked with someone - twice on Warren, once on Xig, and once here. If I message you first, send asks, tag you in things, like your posts, etc, we’ve clicked, don’t worry. Anyway, Cheeper was one of these rare occurrences where there was not only no click, there was the opposite of a click. At first I thought it was just ‘cause our first convo was a bit awkward - from what I remember, it was basically just ‘hi, My name is [Cheeper], I’m [Battery]’s friend and he recommended your blog so I thought I’d give you a follow’, you know, typical ‘hi, nice to meet you’ type thing, I didn’t think much of it. Unfortunately, that was the only pleasant conversation we had.

You see, Cheeper had the habit of starting conversations with some variation of ‘how are you?’. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Well, in typical Canadian fashion, I always did my best to follow social protocol and be polite, and say ‘I’m good/fine/great, thanks, how are you?’, and, much like Han Solo, I learned that there are some situations you shouldn’t ask that question. Every time, without fail, Cheeper would say some variation of ‘bad’ or ‘horrible’, and proceed to dump literally all their life’s problems on me, and I mean all of them. I’m perfectly fine with letting my friends vent/rant to me as much as they need, and offering advice is a pass-time of mine. But, I had only known this person for- Less than a week, when this started (I hardly even knew their NAME I had to look it up on their blog), and they kept going on and on about some really personal shit, like hours of how they hated their job and school was stressful, and their family was aphobic and never used the right pronouns, literally everything about their personal life, no matter how private it was, just- Constant negativity, all the time. It was literally all they spoke about, ever. I don’t know anything else about them, just that their life was terrible and they decided to use me as some sort of verbal stress ball. Even if I tried to divert the conversation to a different topic, or just ignore them entirely, I’d still get floods of negativity and complaints. And what makes it even better? They had a frickin therapist! This person, who had a professional, trained therapist, would spend hours unloading all of their mental/emotional burdens on me, an untrained stranger who had only said ‘hi’ to them once. And, after they had dumped all their baggage on me, they’d say, ‘oh, gotta go, it’s time to go to my therapist’. And, honestly? That was the only time I felt safe to post on my blog. Yes, you read that right - it was the only time I felt safe to post on my own blog. I honestly could not make a post on my blog without Cheeper spamming my IMs with boatloads of stress-inducing negativity. And, call me selfish, call me insensitive, call me whatever you want, but, fuck, I had my own problems! I was in university, trying to get law school level grades, while working a part time job to try and help my family out when we were struggling financially, doing what I could to make sure there was enough food in the fridge for my younger brothers, trying to help my grandma take care of my grandpa, trying to keep up with my martial arts - which I have to do in order to keep my job - and trying to write multiple essays for both my younger brother and myself, as we were prepping for our black sash tests, but he was also trying to get into film school, so I’d volunteered to write the sash essays for him, and, let me tell you, I did not need to play counsellor to someone I didn’t even know on top of that. And, like I said, this happened constantly, and I’d get a new flood of messages every time I so much as hinted at being online.

And believe it or not, it got worse, Sakrine.

I remember there was one conversation we had (’conversation’ being used loosely, of course) towards the end of our interactions where Cheeper was complaining at me, as per usual, and mentioned how all of their friends were blocking them without saying why. Funnily enough, I was planning on blocking them soon, myself (probably should have done it a long time ago). But, lo and behold, right after saying how they were always getting blocked, Cheeper goes and says ‘but you’d never block me, so at least I have you. You’re my best friend, Jay’. And I’m sitting here really uncomfortable because, uh, no, we’re not best friends, and I have no idea what gave them that idea, since I never told them anything of the sort, and in fact barely spoke to to them at all, both because I didn’t much care for their company, and because I could hardly get a word in edgewise - and, even if I could, how does one respond to a total stranger badgering you for advice on how to deal with their family not handling their being out well? I’m not out to my family, and I don’t think I ever will be, so, again, how can I give that sort of advice to someone I don’t know?

About the time this was happening was when I met and was chatting with Rodi, who’s actually one of my best friends and the light of my life. Like I mentioned above, it was at her suggestion that I decided to make this li’l OC mess that we know and love here. He was originally gonna be a verse on my other blog, until I realised that I’d have tags for a Jedi verse, a padawan verse, a Sith verse, etc., and that was too many for one AU, so I made a sideblog. Then, after only a day of having that, and a bit of encouragement from both Rodi and Milla (my main Talon), I made this stand-alone blog for my son, and I was having a great time.

Cheeper, however, was not, and made sure I knew it.

Now, my muse for that blog had been steadily dying, mostly because of this, but also for a few other, more minor reasons, and I felt way more comfortable here, was having more fun, and generally just enjoying myself way more on this blog than the other, so, naturally, this is where I spent most of my time. Within a day or two of my neglecting Xig, Cheeper pops into the IMs to complain about me, to me. Yes, I am dead serious, this is an actual thing that happened. They start badgering me to go back to my other blog, and, I dunno if this has ever happened to you, but, it’s really disheartening. I explained to Cheeper that I felt more comfortable on this blog (though I didn’t tell them why I felt that way on Xig; Perhaps I should’ve), that I had more drafts and asks on this blog, and that I had more muse for this character at the moment, so I’d be spending my time over here, at least for a little bit. Their oh-so-eloquent response was, and this is a verbatim quote, ‘boo, you suck.’ And I had absolutely no idea how to respond to that, so I didn’t. I just sat there, staring, feeling an interesting concoction of shocked, annoyed, and offended. About a minute later, they added a ‘lol, just kidding’, and proceeded to… Continue… To complain about me, as well as about their life and still expected me to give them advice and solutions I didn’t have. I’ve never had someone act more entitled to my time and energy as this person did. 

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking - ‘they were probably just some kid, Jay, young people can be like that at times, you’re taking it too hard’, and, hey, I thought so, too. I was nineteen years old when this was happening; Cheeper was around 24 or 25. Yup, this person was about five or six years older than me, and a grown-ass adult the entire time. And like I said, they were constantly acting entitled to everything I did, like I owed them something. There was another time where I’d actually gotten a bit of muse for my other blog back, so I went on, answered a bunch of asks, slammed out some drafts, sent some memes, answered some IMs… It was a really productive evening for me. Once I was finished, I came back here and got a bit more done. Next morning rolls around, and Cheeper messages me with ‘I miss you, dude. You’re never on Xig, any more.’ I tell them that, actually I’d been on last night, for a few hours, at least. Their response? ‘Well, I wasn’t on.’, after which they kept complaining about how much they missed my muse and my writing. I get this was probably supposed to be flattering, but it really wasn’t? Especially considering that, while they were going on and on about how much they missed me and wanted to write with me, they were completely ignoring the THREE STARTERS I had written for them in the weeks leading up to this point. Hadn’t even given them a like, which I like to do to let someone know that, even if I’m slow as all Hell - which I tend to be - I have seen it, and it’s in my drafts. So, I mentioned this to Cheeper, said ‘you know, I have a couple starters for you on the other blog, why don’t you check those out?’ ‘Oh, I didn’t see them, I’ll give them a look.’ And then, blissfully, they stopped messaging. Little while later, a few days, I got another message from them (keep in mind I never contacted them or interacted with them first, since, rude as it may sound, I was kind of hoping they’d get the message), and once again they were whining about how I was never on Xig again, so I went to check the starters again, and… Still no notes. So I ask them about the starters, and they say ‘I couldn’t find them’. You know how I looked them up? [my blog’s url]/tagged/[cheeper’s url], and, bam. There they were. I told Cheeper this and even sent them the link to their tag. They said okay, that they’d check it out later, and started complaining about their life again. I was serious when I said this was the only thing they talked about, outside of basically harassing me to write with them. Few days later, they get on my case AGAIN for not being on Xig/not rping with them. I check the THREE FUCKING STARTERS again,  STILL NO NOTES. I ask, and ‘oh I just don’t have muse for them right now lol’. And I’m left sitting here like, okay, do you really want to write with me, or are you just mad I’m not dedicating all of my attention to you and your godawful AU muses? I mean, I have NOTHING against AU muses - that’s where this kiddo came from, after all - but AUS WHERE THEY PUSHED MY CHARACTER TO BE A FUCKING CHILD ABUSER WERE APPARENTLY ALL THEY HAD MUSE FOR. And my character was a moral fuckhead I admit but he WASN’T OVERTLY ABUSIVE THAT WAS ONE OF THE REASONS I WAS COOL PLAYING HIM AS THE ANTAGONIST HE WAS AND JUST. And as well, when I have no muse, it’s apparently a major fuckin’ disaster and they complain to the ends of the earth about it and go on and on about how I should still be writing that character and how much they miss me, but when THEY have no muse I have to accommodate it and make allowances and write with them anyway???? Like???

So anyway yeah they proceeded to ignore those starters for months, and every time I posted a new starter call,they’d like that, I’d post a starter, they’d completely ignore it, then come crying and complaining to me, berating me and all but sobbing about how much they missed me.

BUT IT GETS WORSE STILL, SAKRINE.

After a while, Cheeper starts asking me about Star Wars. And I’m torn between ‘fuck no, this is my new safe place, and I’m TRYING TO BE SAFE FROM YOU’ and ‘well maybe if they get into this series they’ll stop getting upset with me for not writing on a blog I have no muse for and am not comfortable on’. So they ask me what they need to watch to understand Star Wars. I tell them to watch the movies, since those are the unchanging canon, no matter what Disney did to the Legends material. Apparently they don’t even have the attention span for their favourite show, so they can’t watch the movies. They complain to me about that for a while, because apparently I care. I did not. I tell them that everything Star Wars - or at least, in the era I write in - revolves around those movies. I tell them they can just watch the PT (and explain what the different trilogies are) and that will get them caught up with where I write. Nope, can’t do that. So I tell them there are book versions of the movies they can read, instead, and there are also comics and stuff they can look into if that would be better.

Nope, don’t have the attention span for books.

Complain about that to me for a while, then ask what they absolutely HAVE to watch to understand. 

I tell them about the Clone Wars show, give them a link to the relevant KissCartoon page. They ask how long the show is - I tell them the number of seasons (mention that 6 is unfinished), and the average length of an episode.

Nope, don’t have the attention span for that, either.

They reiterate that they hardly have the attention span for their favourite show, and once again complain to me before asking me what the /HAVE TO WATCH/ to understand.

I tell them that they’re free to try interacting with my muse on their KH blogs, since I’m open to crossovers and still, for some ungodly reason, trying to be civil.

They keep asking about star wars.

I mention the video games.

Don’t have the attention span for video games.

So this person, who apparently can’t watch movies or TV shows, or read books or comics, or play video games, is asking me what source material they need to know to roleplay a Star Wars verse. 

I, as a last-ditch and mostly sarcastic effort, give them a link to Wookieepedia. I’m a terrible person, I know.

…

They don’t have the patience to look through the wiki pages.

I’m all but smashing my face against the keyboard now, while this person is COMPLAINING TO ME ABOUT HOW LONG STAR WARS IS. 

I mean I get it’s a lot but I tried to break it down?? And last I checked I’m not George Lucas like I’m sorry but it’s not my fault, my problem, or in my power to change? And I tell them it’s 40 years worth of worldbuilding and try to help them break it down again and they just KEEP FUCKING COMPLAINING.

And after like. Two hours of me trying to reason with them and help them out they say ‘I’m not even interested in star Wars, I just want to write with you’. 

And now, maybe I’m reading into it too much. Maybe I listen to too many narrated Let’s Not Meet videos too late at night. But holy shit, I have never felt like I had a legitimate stalker until that moment. It was one of the most uncomfortable things that has ever happened to me. I had zero idea how to respond, and so again I don’t think I did. Or, if I did, it was to again try to explain to them that there was a lot of material, and they should [leavemethefuckalone] focus on things they were interested in, especially if they didn’t think they could handle just the show. So they complain to me about that for a bit, before moving on to other topics to whine about. Always comes back to how I’m not writing with them any more (meanwhile, the countless starters I’ve written them are still being ignored, as are any and all threads we had on the go at the time. Everything’s either been ignored, abandoned, or both, all without letting me know.).I honestly don’t remember how that conversation ended. Just thinking about it makes me blank out and get a sort of mild pins-and-needles feeling. I mean, I get it was probably supposed to be flattering, and if we had been friends it might have been, but coming from this person? Alarm bells were ringing like a retro emergency evac PSE. 

AND IT GETS WORSE STILL, BECAUSE FOR SOME REASON I STILL PUT UP WITH THIS PERSON. 

So, enter me, just going back to uni for the spring/early summer semester. Our stage sets itself in my campus’ bookstore, at about noon or one o’clock in the afternoon. The line from the bookstore stretches from the counter, at one end of the store, wraps around the perimeter of that very large, very spacious room that was at one point a lecture hall, goes through the hall to the next room which also used to be a massive classroom, wraps around that and goes out the back door. I had to get up for an 8:30 that was across the field that day. I had non-stop class until this point, I had had no breakfast (though I think I had a sip of orange juice to keep from conking out), I had been waiting in line for close to an hour, my arms were full of heavy textbooks I dreaded having to pay for, and I only had one hand free for typing, and there was a chance I’d be late to my next class if this line didn’t get moving. As you can imagine, I wasn’t much in the mood for talking (though I think I made the effort for Rodi and Maddie (my best friend from public school who I still talk to) since I enjoy talking to them and it made me feel a bit better). Anyway, I’m in line, tired, irate, and scrolling through tumblr, and Cheeper messages me with a ‘hey’. Oh fuck, I think, this isn’t good. I greet them anyway - just a ‘hi’. I’m only giving one word answers at this point, since I’m not in a chatty mood, and, as I mentioned, I’m typing with just my thumb and that fucking sucks and takes forever, and I’m also trying to keep my place in line. Cheeper starts asking me about school, and I’m very confused, because never once in the months I’d known them had they ever taken an interest in me or my life. ‘so you’re in university right’ they ask. I remember most of this conversation word for word, and you’ll see why. ‘yeah’, I reply. ‘What year?’ they ask; ‘Second \o/’ I say, adding an emoji b/c I love that one. ‘Cool, what’s your major?’ they ask, and I’m getting hopeful that maybe they’ve turned a new leaf and my patience with them has been rewarded. So I tell them ‘Classics \O/’ with a slightly more excited emoji, and they tell me that’s cool, mention their major is in foreign languages - I think Chinese? Maybe Spanish? This is the one message I can never remember in its entirety, because the next one almost knocked me over. I replied with ‘cool’, and a half second later, Cheeper asks, 

“Are you out to your family yet?”

This complete fucking stranger, this grown-ass adult I barely knew, straight up asked me if I was out to my family, yet. I have never been asked that question before or since. I am out only to people on tumblr, and a small group of my most trusted friends from high school. And this person had the fucking audacity to ask me right out if I was. 

I was shocked.

I will not lie to you, I almost dropped my phone. I think I stopped breathing for a second, and I nearly lost my place in line. I was torn between just being frozen and being fucking livid. After a moment when I didn’t respond, they added, ‘Can I ask that?’ And I swear those two messages are tattooed into my mind.

“Are you out to your family yet?”

Holy fuck.

So I manage to collect myself enough to type out ‘no, I’m not’. 

‘Damn,’ they say. ‘Because my mom keeps messing up my pronouns and I wanted to know if you have any advice.’ 

Because why the fuck else would they care about me, right?

And then they proceeded to complain about their life and their aphobic family to me AGAIN, for HOURS, but at that point I’d been ignoring their messages and was instead talking to Maddie for advice on how to handle the situation. I had no idea what to do. I was lost. Like. I wanted to block them so bad but they’d been subtly guilt-tripping me about it for so long (’you’d never block me, you’re my best friend’ was just the start of that, tbh) that I felt bad for it? And Maddie was just like ‘jay no that’s fucked up get rid of them’ and I did.

I have never once regretted it and holy fuck it feels amazing to get this shit off my chest.

And yeah, so.

That was one of my worst RP experiences.

Are you out to your family yet.

I’d sell them to Satan for half a stale corn chip I swear to Christ. 

[themaryiestsuetoeversue]

so i’ve been slightly sparse lately due to a multitude of things - work got busy again and after work i’m just too tired to do anything, allergies kicking up again, chronic health issues, other things taking up my mind like video games and tabletop games, dumb anxiety about how my cat is getting older and HIS potential health problems etc. 

but there’s also a little tiny part of me that like....how do i put this without sounding like an ass...fuck it, i’m gonna sound like an ass. my actual partners willing to interact with me has dwindled. and i don’t mean mutuals and friends going on hiatus, that’s okay - because i KNOW those people will always interact no matter how long it takes.

what i mean is i keep trying to like, branch out into new partners and nobody seems to be reciprocating? like i just had to cut an entire verse yesterday because it hadn’t been used in THREE MONTHS and it seemed like nobody was interested and if nobody is interested why bother keeping it around. 

and like that anon earlier, please don’t take this the wrong way because i am happy you like reading but it just make me wonder: am i only good enough to read but not good enough to actually interact with? if it sounds like i am vagueblogging about specific people, don’t worry, i’m not because this has happened CONSISTENTLY, things like i ask someone if they want a starter, THEY SAY YES, i make one, never gets a reply. opens of mine never going answered. me sending in memes that never get answered, me making threads out of memes that never get replied to. sometimes threads - especially threads with actual plot, not dumb ones - will just get dropped after like 2 replies. people i follow not following me back - acceptable - but then their rules never mention if they’re mutuals only or not and every attempt to just INTERACT gets ignored. 

i don’t KNOW where the line is with regards to bugging someone ooc about rp related things i so i just...don’t do it and the way it seems, that’s a good choice because i’m not sure people would give me answers anymore, even to ims which are impossible to get eaten. and i will fully fucking admit that i used to just ignore people i had no interest in and hope they get the hint and go away out of fear of what they’d do if i said no. i know that was a dick move and if i ever did it to you i am SO SO sorry. because getting radio silence from people is like...when people don’t give me an answer, my first thought ISN’T that they aren’t interested, it’s any other mundane explanation for why i haven’t got a response. i don’t take hints very well, you have to be UPFRONT with me. actual communication, PLEASE. 

like i love my rp partners to death but when only a small number actually INTERACT WITH ME, it gets kind of like...like, i know there’s more people out there who can be really cool and have really neat ideas but i don’t even know how to get out there? am i doing something wrong that’s putting tons of people off because if so, i need to know so i can stop doing it? i don’t HAVE that level of self awareness sometimes to recognize mistakes when i make them. 

i haven’t made a promo in a while because last time it didn’t go very far. i’m wondering why i should even bother with a new one. 

and fyi even for those that drop threads a lot, as long as i rp with you consistently and see you replying to threads and sending me memes, thats not the problem. for people who -I- owe replies to, the issue is me, not you (and once life gets less hectic and i get over this irrational complex we will be back in business, i promise.) it’s trying to interact with NEW people that’s the issue. i have 9 drafts right now. 5 are with the same person. Of my 3 verses, i have a grand total of like 2 regular consistent partners for VAMPAU, 4 for JAPANAU, and the rest are POKEAU, with the same person overlapping for all 3 verses. (two of those partners for vampau and japanau, respectively, are not mutuals with me, because i don’t have a mutuals only rule, and yet they still show obvious interest that other people clearly aren’t??? what gives?)

I just...I want to EXPAND and yet I am forced to DOWNSIZE from lack of activity. I used to shoot out tons of replies a day and now I just get so little interaction back that my pace slowed down. I can only be as active as my partners are. (again, i understand being busy, i don’t hold it against you, this is just generalization.) Writing is a perishable skill and lately all my skills have been either stagnating or declining (esp reading comprehension.) I don’t want to lose this one too, which has been a big part of my life, and yet i can’t maintain it that well if nobody interacts with me. (rp has improv elements that solo writing does not have, plus the social interaction aspect.) 

i guess i just...i know nobody is ever obligated to give reasons - and i know my blog isn’t for everybody, which is okay! just, holy shit, if you want nothing to do with me, tell me at the very least? and a reason would actually be pretty helpful so i could know what i am doing to supposedly alienate people? thanks.