#and it is a STUPID amatonormative thing to be upset about and i am not in the right here

[chaosandthe-deadblog]

aaahhhh. i never learn

[philcoulsonismyhero]

So my flatmate of eight (8) years has decided she’s moving out in order to move in with the boyfriend I don’t think she’s even known for six months, meaning that my other flatmate and I are going to have to also move because without the buffer of a third person with a guaranteed stable income we can’t guarantee we’ll definitely be able to afford to live in this flat, and whether we like it or not it genuinely is the sensible choice to find somewhere cheaper and also move back into the city.

And I am just Really Fucking Angry about the whole situation.

I’m not an angry person. I don’t like being angry, I don’t really do getting Big Angry about things, but I have just been stewing with rage for two days now and it’s not going away.

It’s the fact that she keeps trying to spin this as doing us a favour, because right now we’re paying for two flats between three people because nowhere has a fucking HMO license so three unrelated adults just Can’t live together anywhere but the studenty parts of Edinburgh, apparently, and yes, it is mathematically true that we’ll be paying less bills if it’s just the two of us paying for one flat. But what she hasn’t considered is that Other Flatmate is a student and I’m working very hard to stabilise my income and I’ll Get There but I’m not there Yet so without her we have basically No buffer and so we immediately have to find a safer, cheaper option for a place to live or we Will be risking not being able to pay our bills the first time some sort of emergency crops up. AND Other Flatmate is in the middle of her 3rd year uni exams, which she Has to pass otherwise she can’t continue with her degree and thus being distracted into failing could ruin her entire life plans, so this is The Worst Fucking Time to drop this particular bombshell on us, not even getting into the fact that I’m really busy with prep for a big convention in a fortnight and Also not able to afford a life-upending distraction, it’s just??? She’s convinced herself she’s doing us a favour because she doesn’t want to admit that she’s decided she’d rather live with someone else and hasn’t considered Any of the repercussions to dropping out of what we all thought was going to be a stable situation for at least another couple of years and have built our lives around being able to guarantee wasn’t going to change.

And that’s not even mentioning the Aro Rage side of things, because a) we’re only in the current Fucking Stupid But Workable living situation because of institutionalised amatonormativity that assumes everyone lives with a spouse and three unrelated and uninvolved adults couldn’t possibly want to live together and b) she’s known the guy MAYBE six months, and that’s being generous, because I’m pretty sure there was no indicator of his existence until this year, but apparently it’s fine to prioritise that relationship over eight (8!!!) years of living together and completely fuck up her friends’ lives in the process.

It’s bullshit. It’s total bullshit, and she doesn’t even seem to want to do us the courtesy of admitting that she’s making this choice for her, not to do us a favour. Like, I don’t care!! I want her to be happy, to do what she wants, she’s been my best fucking friend since I was 17, I am not going to be mad at her for doing something that makes her happy. I’m going to be upset, sure! It Doesn’t Count because we’ve never been In A Relationship, apparently, but you know what? This is a breakup! Or maybe divorce is a better term, we have literally been paying joint bills and living together for Eight Entire Years! Moving out is a Big Fucking Deal, it’s ending a situation that’s been a constant for both of us for the best part of a decade and I thought was going to last for a good while yet. That I had no intention of ever ending, frankly. THAT is what her moving out means, and I wish she’d fucking acknowledge that rather than trying to frame it as ‘I’m doing you both a favour because your bills will be less’.

And maybe I’m being ungenerous, we haven’t sat down and talked about it in person, it’s just been Messenger and I muted the flatmate group chat after she signed off herself because apparently I upset her by implying that she wasn’t thinking of us when literally all I said was ‘we should talk about this in person to make sure we actually go about this practically’. Maybe she has thought about this stuff and we’ll talk about it like adults and she’ll accept that hey, maybe I have a right to have hurt feelings about the fact that she’s essentially dumping me for someone I’ve met twice, but apparently she’s not going to show up in order to have that conversation in person until next week so I guess until then I’m just staying angry because she’s given me no reason to be anything else.

Fucking hell.

I really don’t want to move again. I’m happy here, I like the situation we’ve got even if it’s stupid, I’m So Busy for the rest of the year and I was really banking on having nothing to distract me from figuring out how my job works again and doing all these big English cons for the first time, but apparently this is how it is now. And I am really sick fed up of getting my life upended by other people that I thought I could rely upon, especially because this time it’s Because Boyfriend(TM)

[iridescentides]

i watched the ep twice bc i didnt take notes the first time BUT. hsmtmts 2.04 thoughts under the cut

gina first. my favorite part of the episode was when she admitted that she feels out of place living in someone else’s house and that she wanted a bigger part in the play. i was SO worried they were gonna just let her happily sideline herself in a “yay she learned her lesson about not being the center of attention” kind of way bc i would not be able to handle that two seasons in a row. let her be angry!!! she has a lot to be upset about

the gina/carlos conflict was awful bc theyre making carlos unreasonably annoying this season. last season he was nice, he was enthusiastic, not competitive and just rooting for other people. idk why they needed to flip him so drastically to being spoiled, rich, selfish, pushy, and bitchy. and on top of that i have not been vibing with the pieces of dialogue theyve been giving him this season just to score woke points. its so unbearably obvious that even though hes a brown gay character, he was written by a white gay person who thought, on some level, that he was giving the gen z kids the #hashtag representation they wanted. his delivery of every line that screams “remember, im mexican” is so awkward, it doesnt land well, and im begging them to stop. they want so badly to commodify his character and parade him around as a “look how diverse our show is!” thing and im so so sick of it bc you can tell, with all the surface-level pieces of dialogue, that they dont actually care at all

(”look around, theres not a lot of me at this school” we GET it, this show wants to be glee so bad)

im honestly starting to slowly ship rina less and less. in season one i loved seeing someone make gina happy, especially since she had no friends before opening up to ricky. but now its just a whole mess and i wish she would love herself a lil more to realize that its not worth all this stress. he made a choice and no amount of conflicted moments of eye contact is going to fully take that back. im not necessarily against love triangle plots, but i HATE the whole “women wait around hopefully while male character, whose decisions have already hurt multiple people, makes up his mind” bullshit

that being said, gina handled the situation like a CHAMP, im dying over how quickly she was able to mask her pain and make the joke about the twix bar. im love her

we were absolutely ROBBED of an ej/big red performance this episode!!! i am at my LIMIT we better get gaston next week or i will riot

on the ej train, him not getting into duke was extremely predictable. we all kinda saw that coming and knew that would be his main point of growth this season. im glad they didnt wait super long to do it. now please @ writers i am BEGGING you to give my man more screen time than one scene per episode

its very odd that they keep making mr mazzara have emotionally tough conversations with the students. i will do a parallel gifset of those once the season ends. i liked his convo with ej for the most part, but he really didnt have to beat him over the head with the “youre an emotionless robot” thing again. its clear ej is gonna throw himself into av club or whatever (even though at the end of last season that was supposed to be big red?) and discover that he has a lot going for him. because he does, he literally has everything going for him, thats why they had to make his “problem” not knowing himself. bisexual ej caswell ftw

i love the parallels between ej and nini this episode? i think since the beginning ive felt that there was a lot about them under the surface that was similar. it was interesting seeing ej tell nini about duke first, instead of the obvious choice of ashlyn. i wouldve loved to see how that scene wouldve gone with ricky, gina, carlos, or big red though bc each reaction and attempt at comforting him wouldve been so different. i didnt love that nini had to be pulled away from the conversation, but im glad they can still talk to each other after everything that went down. and i love the juxtaposition of ej’s convo with mazzara directly following nini’s convo with miss jenn bc theyre essentially the same.

speaking of, i loved miss jenn in this episode. her stories are always so funny, but i loved seeing her care so much for nini and guide her, like a teacher. i loved how she pointed out that everyone who loves nini just wants her to be happy

im glad nini is leaving yac bc there was no good way to keep that up honestly. but im pretty annoyed that they were so obvious about it? like, they immediately made it the worst place in the world without exploring it very much. the place is super unrealistic, ive never been to drama school but im sure it wouldnt be like that. no creative arts place for KIDS would be so impossibly limiting. plus the weird bluish coloring in comparison to the nice warm tones of the rest of the show was, again, a dead giveaway. why send her to the school at all if it wasnt even gonna matter?

even though im glad nini left yac, im NOT looking forward to the way miss jenn is about to bend over backwards to put her in the play somehow. she plays obvious favorites and im so annoyed

(sidenote: nini just? decided to leave yac without consulting her parents??? ummm)

granted is a very good song, one of my faves so far

ricky deciding to tell nini he wants her to stay was stupid. what did he think that would accomplish? who in their right mind would drop out of a good school for you?

i loved when nini said yac was missing something, and miss jenn said “ricky” and nini said “you.” that was so so sweet and cute

i think the kourtney/howie thing is gonna grow on me. i hate amatonormativity so im not a big fan of them introducing a whole ass character exclusively so kourtney can have a love interest, but i loved the gesture he made of bringing her the pizzas and her flashcards. i feel like kourtneys love language is acts of service, and she was literally this meme when he did that for her:

i liked seeing ashlyn try to be there emotionally for gina! i want more of them together

overall this episode was okay. not enough songs, and i wish they were spreading out the emotional conversations through the season instead of packing them all into literally one episode, but what we did get was pretty good.

after watching the preview i see that next weeks episode is gonna be about carlos’s party, and i love party episodes. BUT i hope that after that ep we finally get an advancement on the north high stuff! i dont give too many fucks about lily, but i wanna see my son asher angel

[arokaladin]

anyway I kinda want to ramble about internalised arophobia for a bit because earlier I was joking with a friend and implied friendship is better than romantic love and immediately felt horrible as if id said something completely contrary to reason that was likely to upset her. and for a bit I was feeling shitty because like. have I really not made any progress? there's still a huge part of me that sees romance as inherently better than friendship. That’s why it feels bad for me to ship my main ship as a qpr/soft romo even though I really really really want to, and even though I'm actively trying to talk about the characters that way. theres? a lot to unlearn and I haven't managed to unlearn much yet, but I am in a place where at least I recognise whats harmful to me. even though I impulsively want to ship characters based on stupid shit like allos do (and even more than they do I think, since fandom culture forced shipping at me and I basically Had To Ship but? didn't think that way, never will, and therefore just partnered people off on arbitrary basis, which has become a really hard habit to break) I now know I don't have to and I can fight the urge and explore complex platonic relationships instead and not have shipping conversations that bore me deep down. the other thing internalised arophobia means for me is that I often basically have to Hard No things that technically should be a Soft No just because I need time to unlearn them as a Hard Yes. like soulmates? I think could technically maybe kinda work for aros if you changed a lot around in the au and spent lots of time worldbuilding but. I am Not in the right place to do that and first have to unlearn that soulmates are good and real and a hundred other amatonormative things. working through all this shit actually really sucks sometimes because half of me really wants to like things and knows it would be so much easier but the other half knows they'll hurt me and its really really hard work and I don't want to have to do it but! it will be better for my mental health in the long run just as building more freindships and talking to you guys about my opinons has been. I'm also really looking forward to being able to dig up my own real feelings after the amatonormativity brainwashing has all been washed away. because like,  back when I was dealing with stuff a lot worse I really subconsciously equated qprs as a backup option now that I realised I could never have a romantic relationship. so I think after ive worked through that (and uh. the mess that I am after qpr number one turned out like it is, you all know about how I freak out if I try and label shit now so that's fun) I may discover some interesting true desires for qprs, including whether at the core of it I really want one or not. So yeah right now I;m still dealing with a lot of confusion and guilt and I hate it a lot and I'm having to fight the part of me that says not bothering would be better but I think I'm heading in the right direction sorry for this incoherent wall of text.