#after ive said multiple times that i absolutely despise that...thing

[skitskatdacat63]

"Ah I'm having trouble finding a specific source for my argument." "Have you tried chatgpt search?" Sure, let me try that after I go fucking jump off my roof first.

I hate when people offer up chatgpt to me as a solution, I would rather crawl into the depths of hell to find a proper source than ever use that devil technology(I am beginning to sound like a 19th century luddite)(I am not ashamed of this)

[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

tw implied abuse and cheating mention

looking for reassurance and validation and some way to cope with guilt. this is ok to post for followers. a few of my asks have been answered before but namelessly. my name is nettie

I feel guilty that my ex is depressed while I'm doing well for myself now. I have c-ptsd but it's been very manageable in the past two months and I've been happy but I've heard from mutual friends that my ex isn't doing well for themself and is extremely depressed. I have no urge to reach out I just feel really bad that theyre suffering and I'm not. I feel like it should be the other way around and it makes me think that maybe what happened between us wasn't as bad for me as I thought it was. It took ages of self improvement and therapy to get to where I am now but I'm a functional member of society and in a happy relationship while all I hear about them is that they're really struggling. theyre financially fine and in a relationship with someone they (most likely) cheated on me with but theyre still majorly depressed like they were when we were together. they blamed a lot of their depression and anxiety on me and said a lot of hurtful things to me and now im terrified that theyre still feeling that and ive deluded myself into thinking im a victim when im really just a bad person. I've been known to struggle with reality (my therapist and friends believe that I was gaslit and manipulated but I can't remember much of the relationship for whatever reason) so now I'm not sure what's true or not. I don't want to hurt them, I never did and Ive tried everything in my power to make their life easier but it was/is never enough to make them feel better. I feel like I deserve to be punished, somehow. my boyfriend is upset for me because he despises my ex (my bf and I were friends when my ex and I were together; bf and ex never formally met, bf just had a crush on me and thought my ex sounded like an ass and then obviously when i found out I have ptsd he started outright hating them) and he's absolutely adamant that my ex was depressed before-during-and after our time together and I had no influence on that because they are "insistent on wallowing in their own misery and attempting to drag anyone who gets too close down with them". I feel like that's a bit harsh but I thought maybe his thoughts would provide an opposing pov for an outsider in this situation? I dont know. I'm really upset and that familiar "I don't deserve to be happy" feeling is coming up again.

Hi nettie,

I'm sorry about what you've been going through.

It sounds like your ex is blaming things on you which you have no responsibility for. It sounds like you haven't given him any reason to be anxious and depressed, and in fact you went above and beyond to make sure it wouldn't blossom. Perhaps the gaslighting and manipulation you faced may be influencing your impostor syndrome, that you deserve to be punished without any clear evidence as to why.

You don't owe anything to your ex. I think he's making it sound like you do in order to string you back in - my abuser did that by pretending to be sick in multiple ways and blaming it on me, as if asking me to return to his side and tend to him. That's the trap.

You've been through a lot. Why not allow yourself happiness as a reward?

-Bun

[mc-critical]

Hello! Hope you're having a good day

I have a question about mck. I haven't watched it but I've seen a lot of cuts from episodes on youtube and fan's discussions so I hoped you might explain something to me.

Everybody says that Kosem killed her sons only for power and it wasn't for the good of the country. Is that true? Was Murad a good ruler in the show? All I know is that he was harsh and in the end wanted to kill his brothers. What Ibrahim? In history he clearly made a very poor ruler. What about the show?

Hi!

Fans often have different interpretations of the subject matter and what is perceived on-screen, so some of them might say that Murat IV was a good ruler in the show and some might say that he isn't. Really depends on what you consider a good ruler - is it someone who goes on campaigns and wins wars for his country, is it someone who cares about the people, the janissary and their opinions above all else or is it someone who considers himself unquestionable authority and refuses to take any advice, even if they took the wrongest, most problematic decision ever?

To me, show!Murat is anything but a good ruler. He ascends the throne as a kid, with Kösem as a regent, and I feel that he never actually gained any experience in how to truly rule the state. And yet, when the time comes for him to actually take matters into his own hands, he is ecstatic to finally assert his will and dominance for everyone to see and learn. One of the key problems with him are that he not only wants his decisions to be completely unparalleled and undebated, he considers everything he does as right out of principle. He has the mindset that every single decision he takes is absolutely correct and is beneficial for the state, but not because it's actually correct or beneficial, but only because he's the padişah and "the shadow of God on Earth". And there are quite a lot of decisions that are problematic at best (forbidding alchohol and then you yourself drink it) and outright destructive and dangerous at worst. (leaving just like that, even it's after a traumatic event for you, caused a huge literal revolt!) And even if he realizes what he's doing isn't right, he ignores every kind of advice when people around him tell him to do the precise opposite. This guy is so drowned in his own ego and authority that he destroys everyone around him.

But then again, there's that side of things where, writing-wise, you understand where all that comes from - most of Murat's flaws as a ruler stem from the massive past trauma of Osman's death, which only caused irreparable damage to the mind of such a small kid. It created such unrelenting paranoia that Murat began to forever believe that he couldn't count to anyone but himself. This is what his "meeting" with Osman in E47 symbolizes, he hears both what he wants to hear and that part of Osman which could never accept Kösem's outside interference. That's also the episode where "one Murat went away, there comes the other" and there he began to go further into the abyss of his own beliefs. Murat has Süleiman's paranoia, but upped to eleven in a more offending form, because while with Süleiman this paranoia grew gradually and he could let it go more easily, because despite of all he knew how to rule a good state, with Murat it was always there from the very start, constantly preventing him from doing the right thing, especially due to the constant fear of being manipulated and deceived by someone else (just like Osman thought he was.) and always thinking he's in his mother's shadow.

Speaking of which, Kösem and Murat's dynamic is the central conflict of season 2 of MCK and that's not only an interpersonal character conflict, as it would seem at first glance to someone who's new to the franchise in example, it's a conflict of one newly established and another already established powers in the palace that would never back down and fight for what they think is right. Kösem and Murat have a different relationship with the state. The state for Kösem has a dynamic role - firstly, it was a role she had to accept for the greater good (her standing in front of the people in Ahmet's name in E07 of season 1.), then she saw herself engrained in it due to her strong sense of justice. (getting revenge for her father, trying to expose Fahrye, then Handan and Derviş and lastly, ''protecting the country" from Iskender.) By season 2 country and power are already synonymous to her due to her fully taking the responsibility of a regent and taking the country in her wing of protection, always keeping an eye on it and consistently representing it without a second thought. The state for Murat, however, is static - it is something given to him by God himself, it is something he takes for granted, without truly trying to improve it. The first steps he takes as a ruler is to seemingly "clear" his own path, to remove the traitors around him. And while that seems correct and valid at first glance, he never sees the bigger scheme of things, due to his paranoia. He doesn't see the people who actually conspire to remove him (which is why he never found out the true traitor in his palace and died, thinking this person was the most loyal man ever.), but sees what he wants to see, this shadow who is looming in for years. Murat thinks his mother is a problem, which is why the first step he takes, is to immediately remove her regency and then send Kemankeş to follow her around. These two forces clash with each other incessantly, with their opinion of a state at constant odds. There have been many times throughout the show where Murat does a problematic thing, Kösem tries to snap him out of it and fails, because he doesn't want to listen to her no longer. He's always felt that she overshadowed his own reign, even in her regency years (see the flashbacks in E56.) and he wants to believe that he's already a big man, a person who can do anything, even with a big lack of experience. So whoever tries to give him decent advice is immediately washed off and out of the question, because who are they, they don't know better, he's the only one who does. This mindset is reflected as totally wrong in the show with the people and the janissary despising him, with the numerous revolts (the season literally began with a revolt.), with the multiple traitors around him, with everyone (Atike and Farya aside) turning against him sooner or later. That of course isn't appreciated by Kösem, and she, being the self-and not-so- self- proclaimed representative of the state, tries to fix this all, even if it means acting behind Murat's back. She doesn't really wish her son harm only due to him eclipsing her own power, she just sees the genuine flaws of his rule and is willing to achieve everything to fix it. Later on she began to indeed consider him as unworthy due to all the mistakes he made, claiming that the country is able to defend itself and listing qualities that all padişahs should possess like virtue and justice. She saw how messy all of it became and instinctively began to search for solutions that even came to ending him. (her ordering the doctor to cease healing his illness.) The narrative doesn't actually condemn this choice, highlighted by Murat's last flashback with him reuniting with his mother.

Murat is the one that killed Kasım and Bayezid in show, because he considers them a threat to his own power, first and foremost. Bayezid's the primary one, him being the eldest heir, with people wanting him on the throne from the get-go, when Murat was alive. Murat doesn't accept threat to his own power, and his brothers aren't exceptions, even though he told them certain times that he wouldn't put them in the kafes or take their life. Even though Bayezid became so much like his toxic mother (Gülby, I love you, but sorry.), prone to revenge, harsh actions and gaining questionable one-sided morality, his death was heartbreaking. As for Kasım, Murat took drastic measures, because Kösem thought Murat was dead and tried to calm down the people by bringing to them Kasım exactly as the next sultan. This was extremely harsh, because after all Kösem used it only as a desperate measure, to calm the people down and to apply the most optimal solution. Putting Kasım in the cafes when you once said that you wouldn't is honestly chief irony, reaching Süleiman's level, but worse.

Yes, Kösem was the one who ultimately sealed the pact to kill Ibrahim, but this was due to manipulation. Turhan Sultan wanted his death to pave the way for her little son and gain absolute power, so she indeed pushed Kösem's love and dedication to the country against her. She was put in a position where she had no other choice but to accept - we had a mentally ill Sultan as a ruler, one who could be reckless, one who could cause imbalance and instability and one who also doesn't really listen. So she decided his destiny and the theme of the loss of innocence, the core theme of the whole show, came full circle. She killed Ibrahim, but she wasn't happy with it, she was devastated and her conscience spoke so loudly, she couldn't unhear it. And that deed of hers made her give it all up - by the time of her death, she only wanted piece, nothing else, and she wasn't even interested in who gets the ring of power and she wasn't all that focused on her own death, either. Life was over for her.

Anyway, yeah, it all depends on interpretations of the events and characters and where your sympathies extend. MCK has really interesting and complex themes and I wholeheartedly recommend for you to watch it to drive your own conclusions. Thanks for the question and have a nice day!

[omigodimonfire]

Fitness Resources a.k.a. How to Get Jacked 2 tha Max

I pick things up and then I put them back down. I do a mix of strength training, weight lifting, and HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) cardio, interspersed with whatever I feel like doing on any given day, so these are all resources that I have found helpful.

Follow-along workout videos

Fitness Blender, and their youtube channel, is one of my faves for workout videos. They have a crapload of videos of all different levels, and they’re really good about talking you through each movement and modifying movements so that you can do things safely at a level you’re comfortable with. Their website has a fantastic search tool, so that you can sort their 563(!!!) videos by duration, difficulty, training style, body area of focus, equipment, etc. It’s so handy.

Velvet Hammer Fitness tends to post longer and more intense workout videos. They also have beginner-friendly videos, and will give you beginner modifications on the intense videos. It feels like I’ve climbed a mountain when I finish some of these. 

Kat Musni Fitness has fun 30-45 min videos. She’s weird and she keeps things interesting.

Scola Dondo has a series of dance workout videos. They are super fun to follow, and she always explains that she doesn’t teach the moves because she wants you to watch the video a few times and dance until you get it, which is a clever way to keep yourself moving.

The Fitness Marshall has even more dance workout videos! He choreographs cardio dance moves to hit pop songs, and he talks you through all of the steps. He has a curated playlist for a weekly-ish workout, called The Sweat Set, so it starts with a slower song to get you warmed up, and then a bunch of higher paced songs, followed by another slow song for a cool-down. It’s great fun, and he always makes me laugh.

HASfit is relatively new to me, but it seems to be similar to the Fitness Blender channel. They look like they know what they’re doing.

Yoga, Pilates, etc.

Blogilates, aka Cassey Ho, has a ton of 5-15 min follow-along pilates videos that focus on specific areas of the body. These pilates moves look easy-peasy, but damn do they burn.

Fightmaster Yoga has, by far, the coolest name. She has all kinds of yoga videos, from the short ones that explain certain poses in-depth, to the 1.5 hour long yoga “classes”. I did most of her 90-day yoga challenge* and loved it. I could feel myself getting stronger as the days went on. She’s really good about explaining what each movement is and how it should feel.

Yoga with Adriene has a similar style to Fightmaster Yoga, but with mostly 25-30 min videos. She also has a bunch of themed yoga videos, for example: yoga for hangovers. Realistic.

Flow With Adee has great flexibility videos, as well as a series of videos on stretching and recovering the day after a hard workout. Very useful! [Beware, the comments section on her videos gets real sexual and gross. Don’t look at the comments. :( ]

Sean Vigue Fitness has videos that mostly focus on strength-building yoga and pilates. He’s also kinda weird and makes random jokes. I like his vibe.

* “__ Day Beginner Challenge” things are great for motivation. It’s convenient and a great way to instill a daily habit. They’re a very popular thing, so pretty much any youtube yoga channel will have at least one “30 day beginner challenge” for you to try out.

Information, Tutorials, Articles, etc.

Gold Medal Bodies, or GMB, has lots of articles and tutorials. They’re a great place to go if you want to know more of the science behind a movement, healthy ways to move, or if you have a specific spot that you want to work on (for ex: stiff neck, sore elbows, etc.). They focus mainly on bodyweight movement with no equipment, and they have a few youtube videos to accompany the tutorials.

Bodybuilding.com is another website with articles and tutorials. It’s definitely leaning more towards aesthetic results, but they have useful information and about a million ways to get strong AF.

Athlean-X is a very bro-y youtube channel, but the guy makes great videos on the best ways to work out for strength. He covers form, number of sets and reps, the order you should perform things in, and more. If you don’t know what any of that means, this is a great place to learn.

Meg Squats is a fun channel to check out. She’s funny and has a realistic approach to strength training and life, and she’s strong as shit. DAMN inspirational.

Superhero Jacked has themed workouts for nerds. If there’s a comic book, movie, tv show, or game character that you admire, they’ve probably got a workout for them. They break down a weekly routine for each character that, in theory, will make you jacked like a superhero/ villain. It’s fun to read, at the very least.

Muscle for Life has some really useful tutorials and articles, if you can ignore the heteronormative bs way they’re advertising their books. Honestly, there’s a whole lot of bs going on in the fitness industry and I’m exhausted just thinking about it, but some of these primitive idiots really know their shit when it comes to getting stronger and healthier.

That’s all I can think of right now, but I may add to this later…

As a follow-up, here’s this: you’ve probably heard this a hundred times, but in order for you to really stick with a fitness regimen and reach your goals, whatever those may be, your choices have to be sustainable. If you pick something super difficult and challenging and make yourself do it every day, you will quickly lose motivation and burn out. So try a bunch of things and see what you like, and find something (or multiple things) that you can do every week. Find something that you like. Maybe you won’t be excited to do it every week, but at least you won’t absolutely despise it.

I try to remind myself that my workouts are not meant to be punishments. I’m not working extra hard because of that piece of cake I ate, or because I missed a workout yesterday. I’m working hard because I want to, because I love the way it makes me feel strong and capable. I also have to remind myself that some days I may feel weaker or shittier than other days, and that’s ok. Maybe I’m sore from a previous workout, maybe I didn’t sleep well, maybe I’m just in a terrible mood. It’s ok to take breaks when you need them, and to cut workouts short or skip them entirely. Remember, whatever you’re doing has to sustain you. Push your limits, work hard, be smart, don’t hurt yourself. Someone, probably a yogi, said, “thank your body for everything it does for you.”

[maskcftlalli]

OKAY so I have a lot of followers who aren’t fighting game characters or just don’t know much about Street Fighter as a whole, i’ve done one of these before for my other SF muse, Alex (which i’ll reblog from his old archived blog), so this isn’t an entirely new thing to me. This has been sitting in my drafts so i decided to just NOW finish it. yay me.

Ne.calli is a character who has very little in-game information on him, but i’ve dug deep enough to get a good amount of info on him so that i can write him better, he’s also had more information about him released since i started writing for him last year so I feel that now’s a good time to write a summary on who he is as a character! Side note: Even if Ne.calli has only appeared in one stre.et fig.hter title as of this moment, I’ll be going over a few characters from previous games as well as going over the SF timeline, since it’s super wonky if you’re just getting into Stre.et Fig.hter. So without further delay, let’s get started!!

Alright, so first of all, I want to clarify something for all of you. Although it IS the most recent installment of Street Fighter, Street fighter V is NOT the latest part in the SF storyline. In fact, SFV takes place between Street Fighter IV (4 years after) and Street fighter III (4-5 years before). don’t quote me on the years because theyre just estimates.

Necalli is a character we’re introduced to as an in-human creature with one sole purpose in life; to consume the souls of strong warriors.

Here’s some trivia to know about him before we get into his role in street fighter v:

He’s associated with the ground/earth and is alluded to being a ‘mud man’ type creature, but it is unknown as to what he actually is as of right now. His birthday is January 11th, so he’s a capricorn, which again is associated with the earth/ground. Necalli’s command grab (my url), Mask of tlalli, is another thing that alludes to him being associated with the earth. Tlalli means ‘Earth’. Necalli emits a dark aura that corrupts people around him unconsciously. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it and seems to be completely unaware of it. this aura could possibly be used to draw out evil power like the Satsui no Hado.

If someone were to ever witness Necalli consuming someone, they would immediately become paralyzed with fear, it doesn’t matter who it is. They would find themselves unable to move due to the shock of how brutal he consumes people.

Necalli is an arrogant misanthrope and hates people. He sees humans (primarily strong ones) as food, bothersome food at that. He also absolutely despises machinery.

As i said earlier, Necalli emits a dark aura that corrupts people around him. What that means is that slowly, people become corrupted by the aura and turn into soul devouring creatures like he is (albeit not biologically, one would assume). The process becomes quicker the longer someone is around him.

and finally, Necalli can speak fairly well. He just fumbles over his words and stutters a bit.

Now, onto his story mode!!

His character story in-game plays out like a prophecy, told by a character only known as the ‘Warrior Prophet’, who i’ll be referring to as ‘WP’. (pictured below)

WP basically explains that Necalli walks during a plane of time known as the ‘Hour of the battle’, which later on in the general story, seems to allude to a time when the world is in ‘a great crisis’.

The WP also explains “to witness Necalli is to know that you are a true and strong warrior”, implying that Necalli, despite wanting to consume “everything”, only limits himself to beings that are powerful.

He also tells us that Necalli consumes warriors’ souls so that they can nourish him to his satiety, which makes sense seeing the way Necalli actually consumes people... Essentially, he absorbs them. (see below)

Necalli is capable of doing the image above because of the fact that his body is comprised of a slime like substance, but we’ll go over that a bit later.

As I was saying, WP basically explains a prophecy of the next ‘Hour of the battle’, which involves Necalli going after three fighters in SFV. These three fighters are Ry.u, Dhal.sim, and M.Bis.on. 

Necalli goes after these three in particular because of the fact that they’re three of the canonically strongest characters in terms of the power they wield. However, Necalli’s only going after Ry.u due to the fact that he contains an evil power known as the Satsui no Hado (You know the character Aku.ma? That’s the power he wields, it’s an evil power that yearns for nothing but death.), and Necalli is willing to do ANYTHING to get his jaws around it. He goes after Dhal.sim due to the fact that he wields fire of the god of fire, Agni. Finally, he goes after M. Bi.son because of his Psycho Power (A type of energy that basically kills your soul and thrives on negative emotion. Any negative emotion feeds Psycho Power and makes it grow stronger.).

In the prophecy, Necalli succeeds in devouring all three, however... This was prophecized, and thus didn’t show the outcome of Necalli’s current battle against the WP, who was expecting Necalli to show up sooner or later for his soul.

Necalli ends up defeating the WP and devouring him... But it was almost as though the WP allowed himself to be consumed, possibly in an attempt to prevent the future prophecy from happening.

We then see Necalli meeting up with Ry.u and Dhal.sim as he does in the Cinematic story, albeit in a more human looking appearance, possibly due to the WP attempting to weaken Necalli.

Despite the change to his outward appearance, Necalli retains all his previous powers and abilities, which include:

Super-human strength

Liquification ( see below, left is his old form, right is his current one )

Immense lower body strength (allows him to jump long distances and withstand falling from long heights.)

His V-Trigger transformation (Causes his dreads to become undone, and his hair to glow brightly and fly around wildly, along with increasing his strength and other physical abilities

Also the ability to use claw-based attacks with blunt fingernails.

Necalli also has the ability to speak multiple different languages with ease, however he has difficulty speaking, which results in a notable, and rather inconsistent stutter (which many claim are due to the souls he eats, but that’s incorrect. His profile states that he just has trouble speaking.), which causes him to say things like ‘Devour-our-our’, or ‘Power-wer-wer’. He’s proven to able to speak full, fluid sentences however, so his stutter is inconstant as i’ve stated.

Another ability Necalli has is one that he unconsciously uses without realizing. His dark aura causes people around him to slowly become corrupt, and eventually turn into creatures that hunt for strong warriors’ souls just like he does. Just being around him causes the effect to start, however if he touches you, it’s implied that the corruption speeds up slightly.

With how big and bad Necalli seems to be, you’d think he’d be the villain of SFV, right? Well... That’s what capc.om hyped him up to be.

In the cinematic story we first see a cutscene with Cha.rlie Na.sh (known in game by his last name) encountering Necalli, disguised as a sheep.

He then assumes his normal form then proceeds to try and devour Na.sh, before a flash of light ‘saves’ him, and causes him to wake up, showing that it was only a dream. 

A bit later Necalli encounters Ry.u and Dhal.sim as he was prophecized, he defeats Ry.u, then is challenged by Dhal.sim who beats him. Afterwards the sun is blocked by one of few objects known as ‘The black moons’, Necalli hesitates for a moment before crying ‘Getepe!’ to the sky, and showing Ry.u a vision of who caused it (at least, it’s heavily implied that Necalli was the one who showed Ry.u the culprit behind the black moons, which was none other that M. Bi.son.). Necalli then liquefies himself and melts into the ground, leaving Ry.u and Dhal.sim be. Later on Necalli goes after M. Bi.son at the Shada.loo (Evil organization in SF)  base, but loses to him. Bi.sons associate, F.A.N.G, attempts to poison Necalli for his disrespect (Since F.A.N.G has the ability to secrete poison from his hands and create it in his body.), Necalli leaps back to Bi.sons amusement, and melts down and flees.

Necalli doesn’t leave the base but instead tracks down Na.sh and Ra.shid (and Ra.shid’s butler, Azam), who’re also there to try and stop Bi.son, and proceeds to chase them out of the base. He fails in consuming any of them and roars in anger as they take off in Karins helicopter.

Necalli appears later on near the end of the story mode, he battles Ry.u at Karin’s estate, and Ry.u shows that he’s overcome the satsui no hado, so Necalli can no longer devour him, since he harnessed ‘the power of nothing’, which renders Ry.u stronger, but unable to consume at the same time. Necalli then questions why he couldnt consume ry.u, before dhal.sim teleports to the estate and tells him. Necalli melts into the ground, disappointed at the truth, and we don’t see him again in the cinematic story.

Necalli appears in both Bal.rog (Known internationally as ‘Boxer) and Aku.ma’s (Gou.ki in japan) story modes. Necalli attempts to devour Bal.rog, but fails. In Aku.ma’s story mode, Necalli actually succeeds in devouring Aku.ma

However, it doesn’t last long before Aku.ma unleashes his full power and rips Necalli to pieces

Don’t worry! He isn’t dead, Necalli’s made of slime, remember?

Currently in SFV’s story, this is the last time we’ve seen Necalli, but i’m sure we’ll see him again soon.

I’ll update this as more information is given, but for now, this is it! Thank you for reading!!

[theconservativebrief]

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the candy-colored confection that is Netflix’s latest surprise hit, is a near-perfect teen movie. But after we finished watching it a few times (okay, a lot of times), we found ourselves with a few unanswered questions. Who was that at the door in the post-credit scene? Did Gen really leak the tapes? And what happened to Lara Jean’s scrunchie?

Luckily, there’s a resource out there that can answer these questions: the books. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is based on a series of best-selling novels by Jenny Han, and the three volumes go into detail on the answers to some of the most pressing questions the movie raised.

Here are our biggest questions from the movie, and the answers we found in the books.

As the credits roll, the doorbell of the Covey house rings one last time. And standing poised in the doorway, clutching a bouquet of flowers and a calligraphy-embellished envelope, is what looks a lot like a grown-up version of John Ambrose McClaren, the boy to whom Lara Jean briefly lost her heart during Model UN and the recipient of her fifth love letter.

But as book fans know, there’s a lot more to John Ambrose than just the Model UN. And if Netflix does decide to make a sequel, as it is reportedly considering, John Ambrose will most likely play a major part in what comes next.

In Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Lara Jean looks back most fondly on her John Ambrose crush, despite the fact that he moved to another school district before high school. In the book, it was John, not Peter, who kissed Lara Jean during a game of spin the bottle.

So when Lara Jean begins to fear that she is getting too involved in her fake relationship with Peter, she decides to redirect her crush energies toward John Ambrose, even tracking him down to spy on him during a Model UN tournament just before that fateful ski trip. (“Wow. The body ain’t even cold yet,” says Peter when he learns of Lara Jean’s plans.) She gets too nervous to talk to him and runs away at the last minute, but that isn’t the last we see of John Ambrose by far.

In Han’s second book, P.S. I Still Love You, John Ambrose responds to Lara Jean’s letter with a letter of his own, confessing that he nursed a reciprocal crush on her back in eighth grade, and that he wished that he had worked up the nerve to ask her to the eighth grade formal.

To hopeless romantic Lara Jean, this confession is catnip, and when her relationship with Peter founders (she’s concerned that he’s still hung up on Genevieve), John Ambrose becomes an attractive alternative. In fact, as the book goes on, John Ambrose manages to become a more formidable rival for Peter Kavinsky than poor Josh ever quite was.

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before director Susan Johnson hinted that she would like to see John Ambrose in the movie’s potential sequel. “Relationships are hard to navigate and [Peter and Lara Jean will] find themselves in one,” she said. “And they’ll discover what the next person might bring in John Ambrose McClaren.”

Toward the end of the movie, a video emerges on the internet of Lara Jean and Peter making out in a hot tub, with everything framed so that it looks like they’re having sex. Lara Jean is sure that Gen leaked the tape, but when she confronts her, Gen denies everything convincingly, twice. But by the end of the movie, no other plausible candidate for leaking the tape has emerged.

So, who actually leaked the not-sex tape?

We don’t know for sure where the movies might go with this storyline, but in the books, it’s clear that it was Gen who leaked the tape, and the leak is part of an escalating series of hostilities she has engineered against Lara Jean.

First, in book one, she spreads a rumor that Lara Jean and Peter had sex in the hot tub. Once the fallout dies down in book two, she puts the tape online. And after the tape is banned from the school campus, she turns it into a meme — GIFing it, photoshopping in cat heads, adding soundtracks — and makes it inescapable.

If you’re thinking that seems like a lot of work on Gen’s part for a petty high school feud, well, you’d be correct. But in the books, Han does just enough work on Gen’s backstory to maybe sort of almost justify it.

In the movie, Gen reveals that she despises Lara Jean because way back in seventh grade, before Gen and Peter ever dated, Lara Jean kissed him at a party.

“It was spin the bottle, you psycho, and it was tongueless!” Lara Jean protests.

“Well, it wasn’t tongueless to me!” Gen responds.

That version of the Lara Jean/Genevieve backstory might not be quite enough to support a grudge that spans multiple years and multiple movies: After all, by kissing Peter during spin the bottle, Lara Jean did absolutely nothing but follow the rules of the game she was playing. She even offered to spin the bottle again when it landed on Peter. Gen comes off as a petty sociopath for still being so mad about it four years later.

But in the books, Genevieve has a little more reason for her hatred, and that makes her an effective antagonist throughout the first two books in the trilogy.

That’s because in the books, Lara Jean and Peter don’t kiss during a game of spin the bottle in seventh grade. Instead, it happens at a party at Gen’s house. They’re sitting on the couch waiting for their parents, the last two people to be picked up, and out of nowhere Peter informs Lara Jean that her hair smells like coconuts and then kisses her. (It was his first kiss, he admits at the end of the trilogy.)

And Gen, watching, is horrified. “You kissed Peter that day at my house in seventh grade,” she seethes at the end of the book. “You knew I liked him, but you kissed him anyway.”

This is another case where Lara Jean did absolutely nothing wrong — she neither initiated nor reciprocated the kiss and did nothing to break girl code — but if you squint a little, you can see why Gen would be mad.

Unlike the spin the bottle kiss in the movie, this kiss wasn’t a product of pure random chance. It was actively initiated by Peter, which means that in a way, it’s a rejection of Gen. And Gen can’t let herself be mad at Peter, because she’s still pursuing him, so she gets mad at blameless Lara Jean instead, convincing herself that Lara Jean just went for it with Gen’s crush and betrayed their friendship.

And that’s not Gen’s only reason to be jealous of Lara Jean. Lara Jean’s mother might be dead, but she has a loving father and two sisters she adores, and her family home is always warm and welcoming. Meanwhile, Gen’s father keeps cheating on her mother with progressively younger women. “Did you know that when we were kids, I used to wish I was you?” Gen asks Lara Jean. From Gen’s perspective, Lara Jean just keeps on taking the things that Gen wants.

The movie’s Peter Kavinsky is less of an arrogant jock than the book’s Peter, so it’s understandable that the movie would choose to rewrite that first kiss sequence. (Movie Peter would obvs seek consent before kissing a girl out of nowhere, even in seventh grade.)

But while even in the books it seems like Gen’s majorly overreacting by plotting elaborate multi-level revenge four years later, she does look slightly less petty in the books’ version of the story. Slightly.

We don’t know. And to be honest, we’re still mad about that.

Original Source -> The mystery boy in the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before post-credits scene, explained

via The Conservative Brief