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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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chiliiscereal · 3 years ago

Text

Well my standards have really lowered when I comes to writing fanfiction a XD

First I didn’t want to write any at all, then I didn’t want to write for any cartoons, then I didn’t want to write for cartoon turtles... and here i am.

Here I am starting a x reader fanfiction... with the 2014/2016 version of Raph

Still a bit uncomfortable with this but I had an idea so here we go! If I like it then I’ll keep going :p

Lol what am I doing with my life XD

Too tall

Raph x tall! Fem! Reader

Summary: yes this is me self projecting. Reader is 6 foot 4 inches tall and literally every boy she meets is too insecure to date her when she’s that tall. After a while of being treated like she unbreakable and a giant she gets tired of it. Luckily there’s someone else out there who understands how she feels.

———-

You tapped the cafe table impatiently, trying not to watch your friend and her boyfriend across from you. You attempted to look at the door instead. Maybe if you stared at it long enough then your date would show up.

“It’s okay! I’m sure he’ll show up.” She tried to console you as her boyfriend held her tiny little hand.

Perfect.

Small.

You looked at your own clenched hands and wished that yours could fit so perfectly in someone else’s hands. But, sadly, big hands come with height.

No boy your age ever came close to you.

It’s not that you minded.

It’s that they did.

You didn’t care that practically every boy you met barely went up to your shoulder. You wanted companionship. You didn’t need them to be a hulking giant. You needed someone who loved you.

This wasn’t Tall Girl for goodness sake.

You weren’t waiting around for some tall man to show up.

Unfortunately no guy was willing to step up to the plate.

Why might you ask?

Insecurity of course.

The last three guys that turned you down all said they weren’t comfortable with being shorter than their girlfriend. Others said they weren’t looking for a girlfriend.

Funnily enough they all ended up with girlfriends maybe a week later.

The other girls were incredibly tiny. They barely even made it to the boys shoulders. If that.

But you thought maybe this boy would be different.

He seemed like he was.

He seemed interested at least.

He SEEMED like he was excited when you asked him on a double date with your best friend and her boyfriend.

But an hour passed already and he wasn’t there.

You sat up with a bit of a huff. “It’s fine. Let’s just... let’s just enjoy dinner.”

Your friend frowned at you but decided to let it drop. She knew you hated whenever anything like this was addressed so she bit her tongue and changed the subject.

You couldn’t enjoy dinner or pay attention to anything brought up.

Oh you tried.

You gave it the old college try.

But you found your mind wandering back to the lost date way to often.

After another thirty minutes you stood up. “You know what? I’m kind of tired and I still have some homework to finish up. You two enjoy your date!” You grabbed your bag and walked out before your friend could even call you back.

You just needed some time to yourself.

Time to think.

You walked down the sidewalk slowly, half heartedly wishing that the boy would call you and give an amazing reason as to why he was two hours late.

You stopped yourself from reaching for your phone to check for a text.

No it was his loss.

Not yours.

Surely there was someone out there for you... waiting for you to come along.

Someone that wouldn’t care if you were a little taller than them.

You huffed and zipped your bag shut. Whoever they were, they definitely weren’t that boy.

“Hey girl, who you all dressed up for?” Came a voice from the alley you were about to pass.

“No time to talk.” You answered quickly and continued walking.

You weren’t about to give them the time of day. There was a tub of ice cream and a sappy romance movie waiting for you back at your apartment.

“Come on, a girl like you with legs like that? Surely you’re dressed up for somebody.” The man stepped out of the alleyway and leaned against the brick wall. “I’m thinkin’ maybe it’s me.”

Oh you wanted to turn him around and hit him with your bag.

But it wasn’t worth the risk.

“Hell no.” You stated curtly and walked by him briskly.

He snatched your wrist, effectively making your skin crawl. “Look at me when I’m talking to ya.”

He pulled you into the alley before you could stop him.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me.” You growled and tried to rip yourself away. “HELL. NO.”

“Come on, baby! Give me a chance-!” He attempted you sweet talk before he was interrupted.

You caught his hand before he could grab you anywhere inappropriate. “I have had a REALLY terrible day. I am a MINOR and if you don’t get lost RIGHT NOW then you’re gonna have some serious problems.”

He was close enough that you could smell the bitter alcohol on his breath.

He was probably a head shorter than you and had no idea what he was getting into.

“I don’t care if you’re a minor-.” He started.

Your fist smashing into his nose stopped his words.

“Like I said!” You growled as you shook the pain out of your knuckles, “I have had a really really REALLY bad day. And YOU are some little gnat just buzzing in my FACE!”

He gripped his nose with a cry, blood dripping down it like a waterfall. “YOU BROKE MY NOSE!”

“YOU PULLED ME INTO AN ALLEY AND TRIED TO TOUCH ME!” You shouted back, hitting him with your purse before he could charge at you. “YOU MADE THIS CHOICE AFTER I WARNED YOU!”

It felt good to take your rage out on somebody. And it was justified to! It wasn’t like you were just beating this man. He wasn’t letting you leave! He kept grabbing you before you could go.

————-

Turtles pov

They crouched above the alleyway, watching the man pull you into the alleyway.

“We gotta get involved man.” The red masked one whispered. “This doesn’t look to good.”

“I told you, we only get involved if it gets really bad.” The blue one responded with an eye roll. “We can’t risk being seen!”

“It already looks really bad!”

“If she gets anymore hurt then we jump in!”

The orange masked turtle jumped into the conversation. “I don’t know, I think my money’s on the girl.”

“Mikey shut up!” The purple masked brother whispered. “This is serious!”

“So am I! Look at her! She isn’t even scared!”

“I think she at least looks a little scared.”

“Probably cause she’s trying to keep herself from beating the shit out of him!”

Raph rolled his eyes and shoved his younger brother. “It’s our job to do the protectin’ round here. Shut up and- HOLY SHIT!”

The all gasped as you reeled your hand back and knocked your fist into the creeps nose.

“Damn that looked like it hurt.” Leo observed. “Maybe she doesn’t need our help.”

“I say we stay here in case it goes south.” Raph argued, waiting for Leo to argue with him.

“Fine, but we leave when it looks like she’s safe.” Leo nodded and looked back to the fight.

Raph didn’t have time to feel proud that he’d been listened to. Mikey was inching closer to watch. “What the hell are ya doin’?” He reached forward to pull him back. “She’s gonna see ya!”

Mikey leaned over the edge anyway. “Look at her go! I told you he didn’t stand a chance!”

“Who knew using a purse was so effective?” Leo nodded. “Think she’s got it?”

“Looks like it to me!” Mikey laughed and watched with glee. “This is real entertainment.”

“Mikey you’re too close to the edge!” Raph tried to grab him but was shoved away. “You’re gonna fall-!”

————

With that you shoved the man into the wall. “Are you FINALLY done? Have you FINALLY learned your lesson?”

He spit out the blood from his mouth and nodded. “Fine! Please just leave me alone!”

“Good choice!” You shoved him away from you. “Go before I change my mind!”

He was gone before you could even blink.

“That’s right! Get out of here!” You shouted to him as he scurried away.

You lifted your chin triumphantly.

Maybe you hadn’t gotten that date but you sure did beat the crap out of a creep.

You dusted your hands off and snatched your purse off the ground.

“If I catch you harassing anyone else you’ll get it twice as bad!”

No answer of course.

He was long gone.

Still, it felt good to shout.

You could finally go home.

You turned back to the edge of the alleyway with a sigh of relief.

You took one step forward.

Then, the least expected thing happened.

“OH SHIT!”

Next thing you knew you were on the ground after something very large crashed into you.

“What the hell!” You sat up and rubbed your head. “Who just sits on a roof above an alleyway?!”

You grabbed your purse quickly and stood up, ready for another fight.

It wasn’t another creep.

And from the looks of it... it wasn’t even human.

Well, THEY weren’t even human.

You didn’t know what they were.

Green...

Huge...

And shells...

The finally looked at you.

Why were they wearing masks?

What even were they?

Why were they there!?

The one in orange immediately scurried behind the one in red. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit!”

The one in red looked at you and then looked at the guy behind him. “You dragged me into this! You fix it!”

He pulled him forward.

Honestly you had no idea what to think.

There were two GIANT turtles right in front of you! And they were talking!

You gripped your purse a little tighter, waiting to see what they would do.

The one directly in front of you tried to speak only to look back at the red masked one and then back up at where they had fallen.

You looked from him to where he was looking quickly. “Are there more of you?”

He gulped quickly and attempted to hide behind the bigger turtle. “Uh... yeah?”

You took a small step to the exit. “Are you... are you gonna try to take my purse or something?”

The red one glared at you. “No! We’re just.. just here to protect the city. We ain’t monsters!”

You noticed him getting defensive immediately and nodded. “...okay then. Well, if you’re not going to rob me then I’m going to pretend I saw nothing and go on my way.”

The red one frowned.

You were acting waaaaaaay too casual.

Surely there had to be some other motive.

“Hold on a minute... you ain’t goin’ anywhere yet.”

You glared at him and held out your purse. “Are you gonna stop me?”

Mikey took a step back and Raph rolled his eyes.

“I don’t think a purse is gonna do much against someone like me.” He stated.

“I don’t even know who you are.” You stepped back again and tightened your grip. “I didn’t even know people like you existed until now.”

You looked them up and down, taking them all in.

This couldn’t be real.

It couldn’t be.

“You say anything bout this and you’re dead, got it?” He pointed around you as if aggression could make you quiet.

“Can you at least let me go home and finish my ice cream before you decide to kill me?” You backed up again.

You were so close to running away.

So close to escape.

Before you could back up any further, two more creatures dropped from the sky behind you.

You jumped and scrambled away, nearly running into the red masked turtle.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the way my brother phrased everything.” The new turtle glared at his companion. “What he meant to say is that we protect the city. We were watching that man just in case he tried anything and these two,” he glared at the first two again, “fell off the roof.”

The one next to him pushed up his glasses. “I’m surprised you haven’t passed out from fear yet. The first person we met did just that!”

Your back hit the wall and you had no where else to go. “I’m not too sure if I won’t do that.” You glanced between the four of them. “What even are you guys?”

“Turtles!” The orange one spoke up before the red one could shush him.

“Mutants as well.” The purple one joined.

“And ninjas.”

“And teenagers.”

You couldn’t help but snort. “Mutant turtle teen ninjas? I think you need to rebrand that.”

Maybe you were insane.

Here you were cracking jokes with large turtles at dinner time.

But so far they were harmless, despite their stature. According to the blue one they protect New York.

“Ya got a problem with it?” The red one grew even more tense.

You shook your head quickly. “No. Just... surprised.”

“And scared?” He added. “Scared of monsters like us?”

You narrowed your eyes at him. “I thought you just said you weren’t monsters.”

That seemed to stop him.

So you continued with a deep breath. “You’re all just... really huge. I thought I was tall but standing next to you...” you swallowed and tried not to let your nerves get to you. You turned to the blue one since he seemed to be the leader. “...can I go now? I won’t tell anyone you exist or... whatever it is you want.”

The blue one was skeptical but the purple one butted in.

“Do you have a way home? Like a friend you can call?”

You opened your purse. “Yeah I should be able to call an Uber with my...” you pulled out the broken device. “...my phone.”

Well crap.

You stuffed it back in quickly. “It’s okay I’ll just walk-!”

“I can fix it.” He offered. “Besides it’ll be an extra security measure for us if we have your contact information.” He gestured loosely to the hand you’d punched the creep with. “We could also bandage up those cuts.”

You brought up your hand and inspected the blood with surprise.

Well... when were you gonna get another opportunity like this? It’s not everyday a girl gets invited into the homes of local mutants.

Besides you really didn’t want to walk home with your phone destroyed.

The red one looked at the purple one angrily. “You wanna being ‘er back??”

“Our job is to help people, Raph.” He rolled his eyes.

“I’m with Donnie. It’s only fair since we broke her phone.” The blue one nodded.

“Well if it’s not too much trouble...”

—————

Next thing you know you were whisked away to none other than the sewers.

Well that kind of made sense.

No one would ever really want to go down there anyway.

The purple one, whose name you learned was Donnie, had your phone in his three fingers the moment you stepped foot in their home.

“I’ll do a little fixing up, maybe an upgrade, and Raph can take a look at your hands.” He muttered as he started to disappear into a lab like room.

Raph...

He was the red angry one wasn’t he.

The tallest and biggest out of them all.

He didn’t seem too happy about it either.

“Why me?” He protested. “What ‘bout Leo? Or-or Master Splinter? Heck, even Mikey!” He gestured to his orange masked brother as if to showcase how he’d be better at it.

You couldn’t help but silently agree with him.

Mikey seemed the most open on the way here. He’d talked your ear off the whole trip, asking questions about what it was like to be a human and bragging about all the people he’d saved. He’d even wanted you to play a video game with you when you got to their home. He’d been a bit overbearing but that was better than Mr. miffed muscle mountain.

“Hey you’ve broken the skin on your knuckles before. You’ve got experience in it. Just fix her hand and be done.” With that, Donnie was gone.

You shared an awkward moment of eye contact with Raph before he sighed.

“Well, I’m gonna go play my game.” Mikey dashed over to the tv. “Let me know when you two are done and we can play!” He grabbed Leo by the back of his shell and pulled him along.

You bit the inside of your cheek nervously.

It was just you two.

You and the giant turtle boy beside you.

“Aight well...” he cleared his throat. “I guess I’ll take you up to the work out room then?”

He stopped and you realized he was waiting for you to say something. You quickly tried to scrounge up a comprehensible sentence.

“Y-yeah, sounds good with me.” You followed after him quietly, holding your hand so the blood wouldn’t drip everywhere.

The room was smaller than you imagined but still... it was huge to you.

He began rummaging through a box on the table, fumbling with objects. “You can uh... you can sit down while I grab the-the stuff.” He told you quickly.

You didn’t know where to sit so you interpreted his words to mean that you should sit on the work out bench.

You watched patiently as he found the roll of gauze.

Clearly he was just as nervous as you.

You didn’t know why HE was nervous though. He was a giant turtle for goodness sake. He could snap you in half easily.

“Here lemme see that hand.” He shuffled over and reached out.

You gave your right one to him, trying to hold in your nervous shaking.

“Ain’t gonna bite ya.” He rolled his eyes.

“I know.” You commented, watching him start applying disinfectant. “Just never been in a situation like this before.”

He snorted and continued his work.

You couldn’t help but notice how small your hand looked compared to his. Ha. That was new. Usually it was you watching little pick me girls compare their hand size to their crushes. How strange it was for it to be you.

“And I thought I had big hands.” You couldn’t help but blurt out.

He kept his eyes on your hand, examining it a little more. “Ya call this big?”

“Yep.” You glanced around the room, taking in the ‘scenery’.

He snorted. “Damn tiny to me.” He pulled out the gauze and began wrapping your knuckles. “Look, I’m uh... I’m sorry ‘bout the way I handled earlier. My dumbnut brother got us exposed when ya clearly had the situation handled.”

You cringed, remembering that they’d seen you beating the creep. “Yeah I could have handled that better as well.”

He paused for a half second, as if considering his next words, and then continued. “Heard ya say you were havin’ a shit day as well.”

You weren’t exactly sure if you wanted this brought up in the middle of the weirdest experience ever but you were desperate for a smooth conversation. “Yeah, some jackass stood me up.”

He frowned and momentarily made confused eye contact with you. “Stood ya up?”

“You know, as in he said he was gonna go on a date with me and just didn’t show up.” You forced out a laugh. “But it’s fine I got ice cream at home.”

“Mmm.” He muttered. “Sounds like a douche bag.”

Well outta room! Part two will be up I had too much fun :)

#tmnt headcanons #tmnt raphael #tmnt fanfiction #tmnt #tmnt 2014 #raph x reader

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gerrydelano · 3 years ago

Note

HI! new installment!!! the title of this one….. love this shit sm. anyways figured i’d livereact because it’s been a while since i’ve done one and im just hanging out by the pool rn so i have nothing to do! ok it commences 😵‍💫 jon making tea my beloved……. i love him i love him!!! hiiiii adelard i feel like basira has so much going on and while i don’t love her i do feel bad for her.. jon uses almond blossom conditioner? nice. basira girl don’t go back to the force girl don’t even think about it especially since you’re Dark-ed now. i don’t know why but that feels like a very bad idea lol <3 “sword and shield” i do love the analogy tbh. immaculate. jon getting compared to internet vegans….. ough. that’s rough buddy 👍 ex (ish) catholic martin we (ex catholics) love to see it.. i did go to ash wednesday this year though i think??? made me late to choir rehearsal lol ugh. that shit makes you break out so bad. ohhh martin is jealous…. man. tattoo!!! yesss. ohhhh melanie…. she’s being very sweet w basira which is nice! are they hitting the bong?????? ok go off i guess JON???????????? JON WHY DID YOU STEAL FROM MIKE CREW??? that’s such a bad decision .. who’s this guy? oh it’s salaesa…. hmmmm…. anyways i loved this so much your tma writing is like everything for me !!!

damn, that was fast! hey! i hope you're having fun at the pool nice

jon making HUGE tubs of masala chai my BELOVED!

basira has So much going on, like. a big point i want to make here in terms of Everyone is "a person can be right About something and Have a right to their feelings, without being IN the right and always justified." that goes for daisy here, too, but like... very much basira on a whole. nobody deserves what she's going through rn.

jon takes personal grooming VERY seriously. he smells Lovely

she doesn't want to go back to the force!

hang on Spoiler Time

you know the whole "your first thought doesn't define you, your Second one does" thing? they're pressuring her to say her First Thoughts, her gut feelings, the things she doesn't even agree with and wouldn't act on but has to Process Aloud if she wants to suppress the dark. it sucks a lot! but she's only saying all of That out of a sense of ingrained guilt and responsibility, dw.

daisy and basira as sword and shield (derogatory) vs danny and martin as sword and shield (benevolent)

JUDITH TORE HIM A NEW ONE WITH THAT YEP. queen

oh yeah he's very heavy on the EX there but the slaughter bullet is Doing Things to him about it and WUH OH!

VERY JEALOUS HGBJKN LIKE! divshah triggers the shit out of danny because she reminds him of the contortionist but it only hits danny after that Martin Didn't Even Know That, He Just DID This. JHBKJN. "Oh,"

melanie is the kindest person in tma i stand by that. she has no reason to PUNISH basira right now, like. she's being punished enough! she needs a friend rn! and melanie is the best suited for that atm.

they sure ARE hitting the bong! dream blunt rotation

SURPRISE! JON IS A FUCKING WILDMAN AND NEVER LEARNS! EVER! he's about to regret this so fucking hard lol

hiiii salesa mikaele salesa who everyone thought died in an explosion in 2014 what uhhhh what brings you here aha screams

thank you so much as always! i'm thrilled that you enjoyed the chapter 😭

#asks #oliverbanks #pbr tag #reviews

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lunarfly · 3 years ago

Note

Honestly, you should check out this Dante Wood fella on Quora. He’s this multi potterhead ship hater who asks many rude and insulting questions on Romione, Harmione, Hinny and Dramione shippers. He’s literally become the bane of their existence. I almost would feel bad for them but then I realize these are the same users/shippers that ask insincere questions to the other ship/shipper. Guess karma is a bitch;)

Hello, thank you for the ask!

Yeah, I checked out his profile and I'm not so impressed. He's hateful and spiteful. But I must admit, he has got a very fair point. Before I talk about that though, I'll just bring up a few things:

Even though he often underlines very important issues with our fandom's "ship wars," his account still shouldn't exist. He's rude and he goes the wrong way about sending his messages. He keeps spitting venom out of his mouth when he should try to be logical and explain his points without any insults and attacks. But when do respectful people ever get anything, it's always the drama and over exaggeration that draws people's attention.

He's hypocritical. He says he hates the fact that shippers constantly generalize the other sides of the fandom but he also generalizes shippers himself. He calls out shippers collectively, as if we were all to blame for a few people's toxic behavior and generalizing tendencies. He generalizes us (the shippers) by saying we all generalize each other (the other shippers).

He hates on Harmione/Romione/Hinny/Dramione and only justifies his hatred by the shippers. But just hating it isn't bad at all, everyone's allowed to hate something. The thing is, he also claims that all of these ships "suck" and are all "garbage." He never presents any arguments or constructive criticism, he just says they're objectively bad ships because they have bad shippers. I'm pretty sure everyone can see the problem with this logic.

Now about his messages. I must say, I agree with him a whole lot. So many people in this fandom tend to generalize everyone. Examples of this?

"Harmione shippers haven't read the books! They only ship it because of the movies!"

"You only ship Hermione with ___ because you use her as a self-insert tool! You ___/Hermione shippers only want to project your own feelings onto her, you don't actually understand her character!"

"All Romione/Hinny shippers are toxic! None of them respect our ship!"

"All Harmione/Dramione shippers hate Ron and Ginny"

And much more.

While many of those claims do apply to many shippers, they don't apply to everyone. And generalizing a group of people while talking about them negatively is obviously wrong and harms both sides of the "war."

The ridiculous argument that "Harmony shippers haven't read the books" started (or gained popularity) in 2005 when J.K. Rowling said this in an interview:

JKR: Well I think anyone who is still shipping Harry/Hermione after this book –

ES: [whispered] Delusional!

JKR: Uh ’ no! But they need to go back and reread, I think.

That one simple comment still affects the H/Hr shipping community to this day, even after JKR admitted the possibility of H/Hr in 2014.. People are still calling us dumb and delusional, people still claim that we haven't read the books - and this argument has been expanded after people started noticing how the movies were sort of pushing a H/Hr narrative - people still make fun of us and many don't take us seriously. But people were shipping Harmione long before the release of the movies and they (including me) have written countless analyses pointing out moments from the books and reasons why Harry and Hermione would make a good couple but this ridiculous generalization, a kind of rumor, is still around and I don't think it's going to leave any time soon.

The Ron and Ginny bashing rumor is more understandable since a huge part of the H/Hr fandom absolutely hate the two gingers and will find anything to tear them down and make them seem as cartoonishly evil as possible. But we still shouldn't apply this to everyone. I, for one, love Ron and Ginny and know many Harmione shippers who feel the same way.

(In the following paragraphs I am talking about the HP fandom generally but obviously these things don't apply to every person individually.)

The majority of the Harry Potter fandom these days only truly accepts book lovers into discussions and their "main" fandom (people who solely make video edits or such are in a different kind of fandom). But everyone who's a book lover and doesn't ship Romione/Hinny or dislikes Ron/Ginny will slowly be forced to either liking these or leaving the fandom. Because, according to most of the fandom, if you don't like these characters/pairings, you haven't read the books, you're toxic and you're stupid. If you like Harmione, you're automatically labeled with "Movie Watcher," "Weasley Basher," "Toxic Garbage." People will start making assumptions about you and your work before they know you. Even if people learn that you're not any of those, these generalizations won't stop. No matter how much you do, no one will take you seriously, no one will care, no one will accept you, no one will explore your work. You will only be acknowledged in the book-loving fandom if you ship Romione and Hinny or if you're an extremely toxic person (that way you'll get mocked for every word that comes out of your mouth, but you'll deserve it if you're really a toxic person). This fandom also tends to misunderstand the words "toxic" and "bashing." Any sort of criticism is labeled with "bashing" and the author of that criticism is labeled with "toxic." Not that there aren't people who are toxic and hateful but our fandom tends to fail to see the difference between constructive criticism and hate.

And there are also those "big" accounts who are praised for every word they say. They can bash any ship or character they want to and the majority of the fandom (the book-loving, canon-ship-loving one that I explained) will agree with it and spread their words around. When they say something about one shipper, it will automatically be applied to everyone who ships that. If they say that any ship with Harry and Hermione that isn't Romione and Harmione suck, the majority of the fandom will accept it as objective truth and since they have most of the fandom supporting them they feel comfortable repeating and accepting these things. As a result of these things being accepted as common knowledge, the people who don't agree feel isolated from the fandom. For example, I do. I follow lots of people who ship Romione and Hinny or love Ron and Ginny because I also feel the same way about these characters and pairings. But I can't go a day without seeing at least one of them degrade Harmione and send hate to the ship + shippers. The more hate my ship gets, the more these rumors, labels and arguments spread around. And Harmione shippers get called stupid for loving a fictional pairing, so I constantly feel invalidated in this fandom, even if no one addresses me specifically. The ideas that Harmione is a horrible ship and its shippers are toxic and so on are so engrained in our fandom that they're seen as almost "rules" of the fandom and no single person can change that. I constantly feel like I'm invalid for liking Harmione and this isn't normal. Our fandom pushes the idea that the only intelligent people are those who support the canon pairings and disapprove of ships like Harmione, Fremione and etc. I understand the hatred against Dramione and every other toxic ship, but I can't for my life figure out why people feel the need to tear down every healthy fanon ship. But they do it anyway. They consider everyone who disagrees with them "stupid" and unintelligent. I feel like I don't belong every time I see comments like "Ugh, how can someone ship Harry and Hermione? They're like siblings, people! You clearly haven't read the books." or "Anyone who ships this doesn't have a brain, they're too strongly influenced by the movies. They clearly don't understand Harry and Hermione." Sometimes I see my own friends calling H/Hr "strange" and such and they clearly don't help me feel any better. I feel the need to go in Harmony-only spaces to recharge myself and regain the confidence and get the validation I need. Otherwise, I feel completely isolated and invalid.

I can't blame only one side of the fandom though. The shippers have been divided for decades now and they have been throwing insults at each other ever since. It's a never-ending war. The bad side of this today is that the book-loving fandom (the "main" fandom) has merged with the canon ships fandom and now these are inseparable. If you like the HP books, you must also like the canon pairings and dislike most of the others, otherwise you're never going to feel like you belong. So now anyone who ships Harmione won't be able to properly interact with the "main" fandom because nobody thinks their opinions that Harry and Hermione are a better match than Ron and Hermione are valid. Same thing with Dramione shippers. Do you see how Dramiones and Harmonians don't really engage in discussions or just don't interact with the "main" fandom in general (unless they're defending their ship)? They have created their own spaces, separated from the "main" fandom and that's where they are most of the time. That's where I go when I need more positivity and validation. I have the discord server and the Harmione subreddit to go to. That's the only place I'm really comfortable in. If I go to a more "general" part of the fandom like the main HP subreddit or some of the biggest HP books fan accounts, it will affect me negatively because I will mostly see Romione and Hinny be glorified and Harmione treated like trash. Not only my ship but also the shippers. Which is probably the main reason I find the fandom toxic. All of this just ties into the stupid generalization and name-calling that causes the rift between OBHWF and Harmione shippers which leads me to seeing both sides of the fandom be attacked and bombarded depending on which space I choose to spend my time in.

I'm not going to pretend that the Harmione fandom is full of angels who are oppressed by Romione shippers. Because whenever I go to a Harmione-oriented space, I will find anti-Ron/Romione/Hinny/Ginny (and their stans) posts. Harmonians will often call Romiones toxic and hateful and will basically do everything in order to insult them. And they return the favor excellently. This happens with the majority of the fandoms so both of the sides just think every shipper is like the toxic shippers they interacted with, causing generalization and all of the problems I talked about above. And that forms a toxic environment.

I generally just talked about my experiences with generalization and insulting but there are many more things wrong with the fandom, so I definitely agree with Dante Wood in that aspect. But again, I don't think every single shipper is toxic and hateful and I most certainly don't think that Romione, Harmione and Hinny are trash (Dramione just might be). I pointed out all of my reasons for disliking his account at the beginning of my post. I just wish he fixed those problems with his account, then he would have such a great one.

I almost would feel bad for them but then I realize these are the same users/shippers that ask insincere questions to the other ship/shipper. Guess karma is a bitch;)

Here's where I get confused. Why did you send me this message? I am not one of those people who go and attack a part of the fandom I disagree with. I don't constantly attack Romione and Hinny, nor their shippers. I actually love those ships. I might criticize Dramione and other toxic ships but I'm not the one at war with them. I know I wrote a post basically calling Dramiones brainless once and I regret that. I think I'm a better person now. No matter how much I hate this ship I won't send hate to its shippers (P*dophilic ships are a different deal though, those ships are even more serious). So how exactly is this a consequence for what I've done when I've done basically nothing? And even if I did, how is Dante Wood's account supposed to affect me? He talks about the toxicity of shippers while being toxic and hateful himself. Am I supposed to take that seriously? He calls us hypocritical and proceeds to do the same himself. That's not the kind of person I take criticism seriously from (ignoring the fact that many of his posts aren't even criticism, it's just hate).

Anyway, thank you for taking your time to send me that message! Sharing my thoughts on Dante Wood's thoughts and account was fun! :)

#harry potter fandom

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trutimeline · 4 years ago

Text

idislikecispeople, The Most Infamous Dyscourse Blogger: Part 1.0, Rumors

idislikecispeople, also known as many names throughout her time on Tumblr (such as Adele, Kat, Mami, Samantha and Sayaka), was a former Tumblr blogger who became infamous for coining the term "tucute", among many other controversial things she has posted on her blogs. This was supposed to be one, very long masterpost about her, but Tumblr's post editor is a bitch and won't let me do that.

In this post, I'll be debunking or confirming rumors commonly spread about idislikecispeople. The rest of my posts about her will each be dedicated to a specific controversial belief she held or situations she got into. For simplicity's sake, I'll be referring to idislikecispeople as Kat for the rest of this post and future ones.

Rumors

Kat Coined the Terms "Truscum" and "Tucute"

Verdict: Partially True

Kat coined the term tucute, but she did not coin the terms truscum or transmedicalist.

Here's a screenshot of Kat's original definition of a tucute:

Transcript:

What is Tucute?

What does tucute mean?

Tucute is basically just the opposite of truscum, it’s a term and community for trans, nonbinary, and/or non-cis individuals created to separate anti-truscum from truscum and to serve as a safe place from truscum and from cis people, where they believe that being trans requires dysphoria, we do not,where they think that being trans is a medical condition, we do not,and where they deny numerous gender identities on the basis that it “discredits the trans community” we do not.

What are the prerequisites to be a part of the tucute community?

You have to be trans, nonbinary, and/or non-cis in general

You have to accept all pronouns and gender identities

You haveto believe that dysphoria is not necessary to be trans

You have to dislike truscum

You cannot side with truscum or believe in their ideology

You cannot misgender anyone no matter how mad they make you

You cannot be an ableist whatsoever

Did you invent the tucute community? Why?

I indeed did coin the tucute term and community and anyone who says otherwise are creeps who are trying to steal it from me and redefine it for their own nefarious doings. I started this community so anti-truscum could separate themselves from truscum and cis people who are a part of the truscum community, it serves as a safe space from both truscum and cis people.

I’m cis, can I be tucute if I believe in your movement and want to help?

No, you can’t be tucute if you’re cis, you can only be a tucute ally, and you need to be sure to never speak for or over a trans person.

I see a lot of tucuties being just as harmful as truscum, what will you do about it?

There isn’t much I can do to them other than ask them to stop aligning with the tucute community, and of course, that doesn’t mean they will. Also be noted that truscum and cis people will pretend to be tucute just to tarnish the name of the tucute community, so tread lightly, you might be talking to a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Spread the word, use the tag #tucute and join the army today!

[A digital drawing of Sayaka Miki from Puella Magi Madoka Magica in her magical girl form, with a banner underneath her reading "Tucute 4 U!"]

(source) (source)

Kat Was a Cisgender Woman Who Lied About Being a Transgender Woman

Verdict: False

This rumor primarily comes from a post on Kat's oldest known Tumblr blog, chromaghost, where she claims that she wasn't MTF and only tagged a selfie as such because she thought that transgender people were "cool".

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: are you a mtf? i seen it tagged on one of your photos.

No lol. I wanted to post it to the tag because transgender people are cool :3

(source) (source) (source)

However, Kat addressed this post and made it clear she very much was a transgender woman multiple times on her later blogs. This claim can also be confirmed with nude photos Kat posted online, which I don't feel comfortable spreading, so you'll just have to trust me on that one. I also don't feel comfortable directly encouraging you to go and dig up those nudes, as most of her nude photos were either taken when she was a minor, spread without her consent and/or were uploaded because people pressured her into posting nudes to "prove" she was a transgender woman.

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: you bound with ace bandage in one of your selfies. i don't know what to think about you anymore. according to some people you're a 27 year old cis woman scamming us, but you say you're a 22 year old trans woman. i want to trust you but i don't know if i can. i'm sorry.

Rest assured I’m not 27 years old lol. What you’re referring to is a less than graceful ~art piece~ we did (”Playing a Boy” or something) on deviantART when we were 16/17 (?) and really ill-informed. I ask you to not take that as how I stand currently – as I have learned so much more since, and I have a penis and I was designated male at birth because of it (feel free to purchase a passcode to our nsfw blog to see for yourself). At the time we were developing breast tissue but still had to appear as a ‘boy.’ Don’t bind with Ace bandages, kids, it can damage your rib cage, something we didn’t know at the time.

(source) (source)

Transcript:

[A picture of two prescriptions, estradiol and spironolactone, both prescribed to Adele Sheffield.]

grandtran still gonna think I photoshopped it or what

(source)

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: In other words, you aren't gonna cough up the pics because you know you can't fake that shit because you're actually cis. Cool. BTW why do you keep changing your story about the blog, and if the blog was run by you when you were in denial about being trans because of self hate, why were the pics tagged mtf and you were constantly saying trans people were cool?

Yeah I’m not gonna do something for y’all and get nothing in return except more doubt from you, you see how one sided that kind of request is? Also its technically considered sexual harassment, just because its on the internet, you’re a coward (whats your username btw?), and you think I’m cis and you want me to prove time and time again to you that I’m dmab doesn’t justify sexually soliciting someone when they’re not comfortable in being solicited – for free no less.

At first I genuinely had no memory of that blog, it was only active for all of 2 months and for some reason I moved onto a new email and new tumblr, and I haven’t the foggiest why. As for the whole “me claiming to not be ~mtf~” I don’t have any memories from that time, I can only assume it was a lot of dysphoria fueled self-hatred and wanting to be seen/pass as a cis girl lesbian.

If you’re really gonna solicit nudes from a trans woman (a second time) as they do sex work to try and stay on their feet without offering anything in return just so your transmisogynistic ass can get off to trying to tell me my dick is fake isn’t classy at all. I perish the thought of what you’re parents would think of this behavior from you. But yeah, feel free to send some money to my paypal so I can get the gender markers on my records changed because that’s gonna cost a lot apparently, and I’ll definitely send you the dick pics you want. :)

(source) (source) (source)

Transcript:

[A picture of a a hospital bracelet on Kat's wrist. The patient's name is Adele Sheffield and her sex is labeled as "M".]

(source)

Kat Lied About Having Diabetes To Get Money From Tumblr Users

Verdict: False

This doesn't need much commentary from me, just view the screenshots below.

Transcript:

To the people who keep harping on me buying a $15 video game for my mental health 7 MONTHS ago “with my donation money,” well, here you go, some proof, links and screenshots provided

So for everyone spreading misinformation about me spending $15 on a video game for my mental health, here’s a full list of reasons why there is no way, shape, or form I spent my paypal money on it:

Yes, I spent $15 of my own money after selling one of my possessions, not denying it:

[A screenshot of a Tumblr post by Kat where she shows off a copy of Fall Out: New Vegas, marked with a price of $14.99. The date of the post is marked as July 21, 2014 at 06:28.39 PM.]

Be sure to look at the date, July 21st, 2014 6:28 PM. Now lets look at my first donation post asking for help:

[A screenshot of a Tumblr post by Kat where she asks for donations to be able to afford insulin because she has no insurance. The date of the post is marked as July 20, 2014 at 08:14.00 PM.]

Hmm, one day before the purchase of said game, July 20th 2014 at 8:14 PM. Now, I’ve never heard of a video game store — much less a non-chain video game store accepting payment for video games in the form of virtual Amazon gift cards, have you? Oh, but you’re gonna say, “well you bought the game with your paypal donations anyway!” Well, here’s exhibit C:

[Another screenshot of a separate post made by Kat where she is also asking for donations to be able to afford insulin. The date of the post is marked as July 23, 2014 at 12:27.46 PM.]

Again, looking at the date of this posting which is the original donations post, you can see it was posted on July 23rd, 2014 at 12:27 PM, a full 2 days after I had bought the game. Now, if there’s no way for me to use Amazon gift cards for a real life video game store, then how can I go back in time a minimum of 2 full days to give past me $15 to buy said game, hm? This isn’t even accounting for the fact that I didn’t even have my own bank account associated with it until over a week later, and it surely doesn’t account for the fact that it takes up to 5 days to transfer from paypal to your bank account. All the dates are linked to the original unedited posts so you can see for yourself, and for added measure my first deposit was on August 14th, 2014:

[A screenshot of a deposit made by Kat. The date is marked as 08/14/14.]

Oh but yeah, anti-sjs, truscum, and the like took damniwishidthoughtofabettername’s postthey used to gaslight us with misinformation and you all bought it. Tell me how I could misuse donations that I could not use outside of Amazon and money I didn’t even start receiving until a full two days later, let alone the fact that there’s no way I could have transferred said money and used it two days prior as of the date of the paypal donations post.

I hope some of y’all could reblog this and get the word out, I’m sick and tired of people buying into that misinformation that person did solely to gaslight me as a means to try and disrupt my donations drive.

(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source)

Transcript:

[A selfie of Kat holding up a vial of Novolin to the camera.]

Hey anon, I don’t feel comfy giving you my receipts (because doxxing is a thing) but here you go, a selfie with my most recent insulin purchase. 👽

(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source)

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: Getting desperate for money again I see. How is your fake diabetes lately. I bet your blood sugar is like 800 this time and you're still able to be alive somehow.

You got me, I’m ~totally faking~

[A selfie of Kat. In the background several items used by diabetics are seen such as insulin syringes, glucose tablets, a blood sugar tester and test strips.]

[A picture that gives us a closer look at the background of the previous selfie.]

[A selfie of Kat holding up two vials, one of Lantus and the other of Humalog.]

Gee, must be one dedicated faker, right? To have hundreds of dollars of insulin equipment and insulin itself. Hmmm… Insulin syringes, glucose tablets, a blood sugar tester and test strips.. oh and insulin, hmmmm….

Oh and because you didn’t learn from last time you don’t die instantly when your blood sugar goes over 600 lol, something anyone who studies endocrinology can tell you, and I would know, being a diabetic, having to be hospitalized numerous times for ketoacidosis where the blood sugar has been too high for too long. Things you clearly do not know and you’re just jumping on the disableist bandwagon. I have an idea of who you are anyway, just doing this for future reference.

(source)

#idislikecispeople #dyscourse #transmed #truscum #tucute

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absolutepx · 4 years ago

Text

So I've been playing Death Stranding lately. Wait, that's not what this post is about. Well, it kind of is. Hang on. What is Death Stranding about?

A: Norman Reedus getting bare ass naked B. Sneaking around ghosts with the help of your sidekick, an actual baby C: Carrying 50 Amazon packages up a hill while trying to not topple over D: Waking up in the morning and drinking 5 Monster Energy™ for breakfast

For those following along at home, the answer is actually none of the above. Despite the set dressing being bizarre to the point of near absurdity, what the game is actually about, like thematically, is actually really simple.

See, the development of Death Stranding was actually quite a trip. Hideo Kojima is the video game world's equivalent of an auteur director. He has a very recognizable personal style. It's thoroughly horny – he caught a bunch of shit for the design of Quiet in MGSV, but like, a lot of Kojima characters are just -like that-, including the dudes. Also, this is going to possibly be important later.

Anyway, so Kojima was going to do a rebootmakequel of Silent Hill, and the demo actually made it to the PS store and I could actually write a whole side essay about why P.T. (it was called P.T. for some reason btw) was brilliant game design for how it used the same hallway over and over and it was somehow beneficial to the overall feeling of horror. So Konami it turns out kinda sucks nowadays and they like, fired Kojima (they were huge dicks about it behind closed doors, too) and scrapped the project and kicked him out on the street and kept the Metal Gear series which was his baby (literally the baby in the sink in P.T., he snuck a bunch of messaging about the Konami situation into the demo like a breakup album) and Kojima would go on to form his own studio and poach some of the people who worked with him to boot. So the thing about Kojima is this: he's got a reputation for already putting some wild shit in his games, like a ladder that takes like 10 real time minutes to climb in MGS3 for dramatic effect, and a boss in MGS3 that summons the ghosts of all the people you were too lazy to stealth past and killed, or a sniper battle with a really old guy that he wanted to have last two weeks or some shit until he died of old age but he was "told that "this was impossible and not recommended." That is a real quote I just looked up. So he's coming off the heels of making this hugely successful game with MGSV and the hype of the P.T. Demo and he fucking, he like took all the people that were going to be working on P.T. Along like Guillermo Del Toro was going to co-write it and Norman Reedus was going to star in it, and he's like, I'm going to make this game called Death Stranding. And the first trailer comes out for it and it's completely nuts. Norman Reedus wakes up naked on a beach crying with a baby and there are floating people in the sky? So we're all like hooooooly shit, there's no one to tell him "this is impossible and not recommended" anymore. What's he going to make now!?

So the whole time the game is in development I keep seeing these tweets where it'll be like, Kojima and one of his homies smiling with some saccharine message about being spiritual warriors and changing the world. And not just Del Toro and Reedus, there was Mads Mikkelsen (another guy Kojima puts in the game just because he apparently loves him), and the band Chvches, and also like, Keanu Reeves at one point? You know how everyone has just kind of accepted that Keanu is a being of light? Here he was endorsing Kojima. The hype was pretty confused and frantic.

The game eventually comes out. A lot of game journos hate it because I think there was this expectation it was going to be, you know, less weird and have more of the conventional structure of a video game. That's not to say the average gamer wasn't also dismissive of it, but I think on the ground level there was more of an understanding that like, yeah, Kojima just be like that sometimes.

Because the game was a timed console exclusive and your homie don't play like that, I spent the first year or so cautiously viewing Death Stranding from a distance. I wasn't sure I was going to like it – except for being really impressed with P.T., I wasn't actually a big fan of Kojima's games as games – but I -was- sure that I was going to buy it, because of the way Konami fucked him over, just out of support. And the shit I was hearing was really out there. The primary mode of gameplay is just delivery packages. You collect Norman Reedus' bathwater and pee and use it as grenades. You get a motorcycle that looks like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus, and when you sit on it, his character in the game says "Wow, this thing is like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus!"

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But I didn't really want to know that much about it. Something has that much fucking crazy person energy, you want to go in mostly blind, right? So maybe people just weren't talking about this, or maybe I wasn't seeing it, but then I watched Girlfriend Reviews' video about it and they came right out and said it (link provided if you want to hear Shelby say it more articulately than me):

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Death Stranding is basically about the exact opposite of Twitter. It's about remembering how to be kind to each other, how to reconnect in a world where people are so often hostile to each other by default. Prophetically, it's about a world where people are afraid to go outside or touch other people and how damaging that is. It's not a game about carrying packages, it's a game about helping people by being brave enough to walk through a wasteland carrying their burdens because they can't. It's about rebuilding the lost connections between people, about restoring roads and giving people hope. I bet, for Kojima and the people close to him, it's about how to answer hostility with compassion. You can't kill people in Death Stranding. You can and are absolutely encouraged to fucking throw hands with people sometimes, but all the tools and weapons are nonlethal. So I think Kojima took all the Twitter heat he got over the Quiet nontroversy, and all the feelings of isolation he had from Konami separating him from his team during the end of the development of MGSV, and all the support and encouragement he got from his bros Del Toro and Mads and the rest, and decided to channel that into making a game that was a statement about all of it. And sure, it's a little heavy handed, and sure, it's a little saccharine, and sure, the gameplay sometimes borders on miserable in service of creating emotional payoffs. For me, especially in 2020, this message is a huge success. Social media should be an opportunity for all of us to feel more connected to each other, yet primarily it feels like one of the main forces driving people apart. Why is that? Why is the internet of today such a hostile place? I'm old enough to remember web 1.0: I can haz cheezburger memes; YTMND; the early wild west days of Youtube... What happened to us? I've thrown the blame at Twitter in the past, and I think the architecture of the user experience on Twitter is absolutely a big piece of the puzzle, because it fosters negative interactions. But in terms of the behavior, people have observed that 2018 Twitter was actually almost exactly like 2014 Tumblr. (For the record, Tumblr is now one of the chillest places left on the internet, because so few fucks are left to give.)

I think part of it is the anonymity. The dehumanizing disconnection of the separation of screens and miles. Louis CK, before he was cancelled, had a great point about cyberbullying, and why it's so much more savage than kids are IRL. When you pick on someone in person and you are confronted with seeing the pain you caused them, for most sane people it causes negative feedback and you become disgusted with your actions and eventually learn to stop being a shithead. Online, at best you can "break the wrist, walk away".

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At worst, you can become addicted to "clout chasing" and the psychological thrill of being cheered on by your social ingroup. It's even worse if you feel like it's not bullying and your actions are justified because whoever you've targeted is a bad person so you don't have to feel bad about what you do to them. This is where reductive, unhelpful catchphrases like "punch a nazi" come in. For every argument, one or both sides have convinced themselves that the other side is subhuman because their beliefs are so disgusting. And sometimes it's even true! A lot of times, especially these days, people really are acting like animals or worse online. Entire disinformation engines are roaring day and night, churning out garbage and cluttering the social consciousness. (Kojima talked about this bit, too, way back in MGS2. As if I wasn't already in danger of losing my thread through this.)

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The human brain was not built to live like this. You can't wake up every morning, roll over and open your phone, and be immediately faced with a tidal wave of anger and indignity. It wasn't built to be aware of fully how horrible the world is at any moment ALL AT ONCE, ALL THE TIME. And you will be. Because of another way that our brain works – the way we are more likely to share negative opinions. And because of the cottage industry built on farming outrage clicks, and because of constant performative activism.

It's not that I don't agree that being informed is important.

It's not that I don't agree that the causes people get riled up about are important.

They are. They absolutely are.

But we can't keep living like this. The constant, unending flood of tragedy, arguments, and hot takes. How much of the negativity we associate with online culture is the product of this feedback loop? What if the rise of doomer culture has been, if not entirely created by, has been nourished and exacerbated by our hostile attitudes toward each other? Incels and TERFs, white supremacists, radfems, tankies and Trumpers – it seems like on every side of every issue, there are people simultaneously getting it wrong in multiple directions at once and there are more being radicalized every day. They are the toxic waste left behind by the state of discourse. And any hill is a hill worth dying on.

So what am I actually advocating? I don't know. There are a lot of fights going on right now that are important and we can't just climb into bunkers and ignore our problems hoping that Norman Reedus and his fine ass are going to leave the shit we need on our doorsteps. We need to find the strength to carry those hypothetical packages for ourselves sometimes - and hopefully, for others as well. Humans are social creatures. We need interaction and enrichment.

We need love.

So just try to remember the connections between humanity. Try to put more good stuff into the world when you can. Share more shitposts and memes. Tell your friends and family that you love them. Share good news when you hear it. Go on a weird fucking tangent about Death Stranding. Find a way to "be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes."

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#death stranding #hideo kojima #video games #cancel culture #essay #oc

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percywinchester27 · 4 years ago

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A lot like ‘Us’ (Part-6)

Word count: 3.5K

Pairing: Sam X Reader AU

Warnings: fluff, feels

Series Summary: Y/N Y/L/N is eager and honestly, still in awe that she managed to get herself an acceptance from Stanford Law School. On the face of it, her life seems as put together, mysterious and independent as one might hope for. On the insides, she carries the burden of past that haunts her till date. Seemingly, she’d left it all behind; that is until she sets foot in the class of the Law School’s youngest, most promising professor.

A/N: The story employs two different timelines. The present timeline for the story takes place in 2014. Please let me know what you guys think :)

Beta: @deanssweetheart23 I love you, babe <3

A lot like ‘Us’ masterlist

“This is fun!” You rolled the ball along the lane. It didn’t even reach halfway before sliding to the side.

“You actually suck!” Jack exclaimed somewhat surprised. “You weren’t lying about that.”

Sticking your tongue out at him, you let him pass to the aisle, carrying another bowling ball. He knocked out 2 pins in the first strike.

You cheered for him as he drew another and in his second turn knocked down four more.

He triumphantly pumped his fists in the air and you high fived him. “That’s more than either of us have accomplished this evening.”

Jack threw a wry look at the girl he had been eyeing all evening. “I don’t think I’ve impressed her.”

The girl in question was a pretty blonde and you had definitely seen her check Jack out at least once. Jack was actually quite good-looking with his soft brown hair and a guileless smile.

“You know what I think?” You winked. “You should go talk to her.”

“Noooooo,” he backed off real quick. “She’s never going to want to talk to me.”

“I’ll bake you those cookies I gave Cas if you do it!”

He made a face. “Aw Y/N! You’re not playing fair.”

You shrugged. “It’s a one time deal. Take it or leave it.”

“You drive a hard bargain.” He glanced at the girl once. “I get the cookies even if she doesn’t agree?”

“Sure do. You just gotta ask her out!”

He gave you one accusing look, then walked over to the girl at the counter. You watched as she smiled sweetly and he nervously scratched his neck. After a few minutes, he came back waving a chit and a huge, disbelieving grin on his face. “She gave me her number. Can you believe that?”

“Whoever would have guessed.” You feigned disinterest.

“This is such a win-win. I got a date on Sunday and I get the cookies,” he sighed happily.

You wanted to reach out and shuffle his hair, so you did and Jack wrinkled his nose at you.

The two of you grabbed a quick bite at a fast food trolley and walked home teasing each other about how sucky the bowling was.

“I thought the ball was going to drag you with it that one time,” Jack said as you opened the door to your apartment.

“Know what?” You said conspiratorially. “I did, too.”

You waved a goodbye and then locked the door behind you, exhausted in the good way. The moment your head hit the pillow you were fast asleep.

**************************

14th August 2008

“C’mon, Y/N, you can do better than that,” Jo encouraged and you threw the ball hard. It still landed at her feet.

“I can’t do this,” you gave up, going to sit under the tree in the park. “I’m tired.”

Jo sighed as she sat down beside you. “It’s been almost a month since your Gran… you know… You can talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” you muttered, plucking the grass at your feet.

She laid back on the grass, staring into the bright blue sky. “It’s just that I know you’re hurting- I know it, but if you don’t tell me what to do, I can’t help you!”

No one could help you. Help could only be given in times of a disaster or a problem. There was no help for the last person left alive in the world. No one was coming for that person… just like no help was coming for you who were the last one left in your world.

“There you are!” Dean Winchester was walking up the small hillock, a wicker basket in his hand. He looked damn good in that leather jacket, the sunlight making his hair glint golden.

You gave Jo a questioning look and she smiled guilty. “I uhhh… arranged for a surprise picnic for us. Dean offered to get us sandwiches.”

You wanted to feel annoyed with her. The last thing you needed was to pretend to smile for company. Dean had been exceptionally kind to you, but you didn’t want to make him a victim of your isolation driven lethargy.

“Hey,” Dean said, his eyes softening when he saw you. “How’re you doing?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” you said automatically.

He pushed the wicker basket towards you. “Jo said you liked muffins. Now, we tried baking some, but they come with health warnings.”

“We?”

“Sammy and I,” he said, jerking his head sideways. You saw Sam coming up the hillock with a thermos in his hand.

You sat up straight.

You hadn’t seen Sam since your return to Lawrence for good and felt a bit ashamed about how you had behaved at the funeral, clinging to him the way that you had throughout the night. The brothers had walked you to the house and stayed over along with Ellen and Jo. They had left with Jo before you were up the following morning.

Ellen had stayed with you for the better part of that week, helping you tie the loose ends. She absolutely refused to leave till you agreed to come with. After a while of resisting her, you had given in. Who was left here for you anyway?

After returning to Lawrence, you mostly locked yourself in the room, rereading the books you had bought with you. It was immature and highly inappropriate to be this unhelpful in someone else's house, but you couldn’t bear the pitying looks in everyone’s eyes. Sam had come by once or twice. You had pretended to be asleep each time after hearing his voice downstairs.

Now, you didn’t have a choice but to talk to him.

“We’ve already pulled out the death by muffins, I see,” he said, sitting down next to his brother. He looked up and your heart almost leapt out of your chest. You had forgotten just how good-looking he was… and then when he was looking at you like that...

“We tried, Y/N,” Sam said apologetically. “We really did. Asked the recipe from Karen and all, but they just taste weirdly bitter.”

“It’s too much chocolate,” Jo said, wrinkling her nose as she took a small bite out of one innocent looking muffin.

“Here, you wanna try some?” Sam offered, looking so hopeful that you automatically took it from him. When your fingers touched his, it felt electric.

It was awful. The bitterness wasn’t the rich bitterness of chocolate. It was excess baking soda. It left the insides of your mouth feeling desiccated.

“Well, you’re officially the bravest person I’ve ever met,” Dean declared, his face twisted in absolute disgust. “What did you eat the full thing for?”

“It’s not that -”

“Bad?” Dean asked, revolted. “It’s disgusting. Satan’s rear end tastes like that. We only brought them with us to see we could feed them to the ducks! Sammy and I bet money on that.”

He looked so horrified that you laughed with a mouthful of the muffin, the crumbs sputtering out of your mouth, in all their caustic horribleness. Once the laughter broke out, a fit overtook you and you fell back into the soft grass laughing till tears rolled down the sides of your eyes.

“You guys suck at baking,” you coughed in between the chortles.

“Yeah, Y/N is our resident baker. Her cakes and cookies are to die for!” Jo lauded. You punched her in the arm lightly to stop her from praising you.

“Maybe you can teach us,” Sam said, and there was an undercurrent to his voice, warm and inviting.

“Alright you crazy kids hang around here with the basket,” Jo said. “We’re heading out for a while to the diner. There’s a couple of things we have to pick up for mom. Don’t hog the muffins.”

You sat up straight, realising that laying around like that wasn’t displaying any sense of propriety.

“Will you be alright?” Jo asked, worry lining her forehead.

“Yes, don’t worry about me.”

Jo still looked concerned as she walked down the hillock and disappeared from view.

You closed your eyes, and before Sam could utter a word, said, “Listen, I’m really sorry about how I behaved at the- the funeral. It was anything but appropriate to put you through that. I’m really sorry.”

When Sam didn’t say anything, you opened your eyes, albeit reluctantly.

He was staring into the distance, not at you. When he finally spoke, you couldn’t place the tone of his voice. “Is that really how you feel?”

“What do you mean?”

He regarded you closely, the wind ruffling his hair. “I was under the impression that me being there helped you- even if just a bit. But if all it did was make you feel sorry, then maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

“It did help me,” you said quickly. “Really. The mere thought that there was someone who wasn’t there because they had to be there was more help that I can even begin to explain. I mean Aunt Ellen and Jo are family, and though they didn’t know Gran too well, they still had at least some level of obligation to be there. And it was so thoughtful of Dean to drive Jo. But not a single person was there only and only for me, except you. Trust me, you got me through that evening.”

“Then why are you sorry?” He asked, perplexed. Though he appeared relieved at the same time.

“Because,” you said, resigning to finally saying it out loud. “It doesn’t justify clinging to you like that. It was really kind of you to come, but I think I overstepped my boundary.”

“Y/N,” Sam said, placing his hand on top of yours. “I didn’t come there from the kindness of my heart. I came because I was worried about you. It was driving me crazy thinking about how you were. I had to make sure with my own two eyes that you were okay. I’ve known you for what, a week? And even then, drove all the way across Kansas to just see you! And you think you overstepped boundaries?”

“As wrong as it sounds, I was really glad to see you. I don’t regret a minute of having you next to me. I think it kept me standing throughout the dinner,” you said in a low voice, not meeting his eyes. “The next day a few women brought casseroles over and they asked about you. I didn’t know what to tell them.”

“Not that you needed to tell them anything, because it was none of their business,” Sam said through gritted teeth, “But aren’t we, at least, friends?”

At least.

People didn’t want to kiss their friends, and you wanted to kiss Sam. Very Much.

“Thank you for being there, Sam,” you said, instead of replying to the question. “It meant a lot to me. It still means a lot to me.”

“What’re you going to do now?”

You shrugged. “Hope for an acceptance and then apply for a student loan. Then I can get out of Ellen’s hair.”

Sam braced himself against the smooth grass with his other hand- the one not laying over yours- resting it behind his back. This way, his torso stretched out, his t-shirt hitching up just a bit to reveal his belt. You tried your best not to look.

“You know Ellen and Jo don’t think like that,” Sam reasoned. “Jo was so worried about you. She still is.”

You sighed. “I know she is. This isn’t them. I’m just not comfortable. I just miss Gran so much, and I hate that I wasn’t there for her. I know I couldn’t have done anything to prevent it. It was a stroke and it was instantaneous, but I just can’t help feeling guilty… like if I had been there, I could have stopped it somehow. “

Sam didn’t say anything to contradict your words, didn’t try to oppose you in any way or tell you how you shouldn’t be feeling this way. He knew that one couldn’t control the way they felt. He simply put his hand on your shoulder, something he had done a lot that other evening. It was comforting and more familiar than it should have been. Your body simply accepted his touch now.

“She left the house to my name, or so a lawyer told me. He said I should sell it and use the money for college. I don’t want to sell it like it was a shack that didn’t mean anything to anyone. I want to keep it and turn it into a bakery one day, so someone who loves baking as much as Gran did can run it one day.”

You didn’t understand why you were telling him any of this. Maybe because you knew Sam wouldn’t preach or discredit any of your words. He simply listened. Listened and understood, not just what was spoken but also that which was left unsaid. He stroked the back of your hand with his thumb, the feel of his skin on yours felt calming.

“So what did you bet on?” You said after several moments of silence, raising the muffin from hell and waving it in front of him.

“That the ducks would eat it.” His mouth quirked up. “I don’t have high hopes, though.”

“We should at least try,” you suggested. “Ducks are vicious creatures. They just might eat it.”

The ducks did not eat it.

You tried throwing small pieces into the little pond in the park, and Sam tried chasing them much to your entertainment, but the ducks were smarter than you gave them the credit for.

“Blood fiends,” you glared as a couple of them flew off.

“You don’t like ducks?” He asked, amused.

“I was 6 when a duck attacked me. They are monsters.”

Sam laughed as the two of you made your way to the bench in the park. It was the same bench where he had taken you the first time you had met him. You could see the bar across the shrubbery in the distance.

When you looked back at Sam, his cheeks were slightly pink and so were the tips of his ears.

“Hey,” he said, his hand tucking his hair behind his ear. “Do you want to go out for dinner sometime?”

“Like a date?” You asked, surprised.

He licked his lips. “Yeah. Like a date.”

Sam was clearly nervous about this, absurdly more than you were. “That sounds nice,” you said.

“How about Saturday?” He asked, then laughed a short laugh. “I mean. I would have wanted to go sooner but I’m flying out of town.”

“It sounds great.”

Then he said those words that made your heart melt. “Y/N, I can’t wait for Saturday.”

**************************

“Damn, woman! You can bake.” Meg came hovering out of her room still in her pajamas. “This is what heaven smells like.”

You smiled at her over the fresh batch of cookies you had pulled out of the oven.

“Y/N! It smells like a Bakery in there. What are you doing?”

It was Kevin, shouting from the balcony.

“Come out here!” He yelled, and Meg opened the glass doors of the balcony wide.

“In a minute!” You shouted back, replacing the tray with a new one in the oven and adjusting the dials.

Both Jack and Kevin were in the window, looking like they had just woken up. Even the undergrads seemed to be out on their balconies downstairs. You could hear the muttering.

“I’m baking cookies for everyone,” you announced, leaning against the railing.

“And by everyone, you mean...?” Asked Meg.

“Just everyone,” you waved your hand vaguely. “So far there’s 138 and counting. I’ve been up since six.”

“You’re mental,” said Meg.

“Those cookies were just for me!” Said Jack at the same time as her.

Pam, who was just entering the apartment from what must have been a night shift at the bar looked up at the assembled crowd.

“What the hell?” She shouted. “Y’all are really this jobless first thing in the morning, huh?” Then she paused to sniff. “What’s that wonderful smell?”

“Y/N’s baking cookies for everyone.” Kevin was kind enough to provide her with an answer.

“Don’t you have better things to do than feed these idiots?”

You grinned down at her. “There’s a whole batch for you.”

“Well, God bless your soul, you sweet child,” she said and disappeared under the awning.

You were sure to pack some cookies with you while leaving for the first day of your job.

The Robert Crown Law library was starting to feel homely enough by this point, thanks to having spent so much of last week there for the Civil Procedure assignment. The Librarian on duty was supposed to overlap her shift with you for today and tomorrow, so you could be trained. Molly was sweet and really helpful. The library was fairly empty today. It was easier for her to run you through the bookshelves and their arrangement, the basics of handling the data centre and the ultra-systematic cataloging. Molly insisted that she take the desk duty for the day while you familiarized yourself with everything. Back when you had worked as the library assistant in TU, you had always considered yourself to be lucky to get paid for spending time amidst so many books. That hadn’t changed.

“We’re really lucky with the Law library,” said Molly. “The other libraries are a mess, especially the big ones. People keep calling there all the time, and even visitors are allowed without appointments. Law library only gets our usual crowd and very few people are a particular pain in the ass.”

Molly was a final year student. She had taken a break after her second year to backpack across Europe. Apparently she really didn’t have any anxiety whatsoever about her career. Whatever the case was, she was super chill.

“These cookies kick ass, by the way,” she hummed after taking a bite out of the one that you had offered. You smiled and bent down to retrieve the tags.

“How’s it going, Molly?”

You stilled.

“Sam!” You heard Molly squeal. “You’re back again? Spending an awful lot of time here these days, aren’t you?”

“Oh, it’s the loneliness,” he said in a mocking voice.

“Y/N, What’re you doing down there. Get up,” Molly called.

Slowly you got to your feet.

Sam straightened like a rod at the sight of you. He was wearing flannel today over a pair of jeans, which shocked you because you were so not used to seeing him in anything except suits. It made him look so young. Not like your Sam, or the professor you distanced yourself from, but painfully somewhere in between.

“Sam, this is Y/N. She’s the new odd-shifts librarian,” Molly introduced cheerfully. “Y/N, this is Sam Winchester. Does he teach you?”

She turned to Sam. “Do you teach her?”

“Uhh-”

“Oh, of course you don’t remember her name, even if you do teach her. It’s been like two weeks,” she prattled on. “Do you take a class for the first year?”

“Civil procedure,” he said curtly, not sparing you a single glance. Then he spoke to Molly. “Can you grab that book I was reading yesterday? I think I asked you to keep that one aside.”

“Sure. Here,” She handed him a Code violation handbook from under the table. He promptly turned away from the table, heading straight for a bench that did not have a view of the Librarian’s desk.

It hurt. It hurt like a whiplash each time he ignored you. Pretended that you didn’t exist. And it sucked that you couldn’t even blame him for it.

“Isn’t he amazing?” Molly sighed after Sam.

“Sure,” you muttered, going back to retrieving the cards.

“It’s not unusual for professors to be here, but Sam’s been spending an awful lot of time in the library since the past few weeks. I wonder what’s up.”

You avoided the whole section of the library where Sam sat, sticking to the computers and going through the database cataloging. It wasn’t long before Sam was back at the table.

“Actually, can I take this book to go?” He asked.

“Leaving already?” You heard the thrumming of keys as Molly entered the book’s name in the directory of issued books.

You did not turn around to peep, and the desk was almost out of earshot anyway.

“That’s it, then?”

“Thanks, Molly.”

“Hey, you want to grab a cookie before you leave?”

“Sure!”

You heard the crumbling sound of the wrappers and then a crunch.

There was a pause. In an almost imperceptible voice, so low that you had to strain your ears to hear it, Sam said, “Tell her these are lovely.”

Blood rushed to your ears, and you did not hear the rest of the interaction. You didn’t even go back to the desk again till the end of the shift. By the time you returned, all the cookies were gone and Molly was humming to herself softly, completely having forgotten about passing on the compliment. She waved at you as you left for the day and you waved back absentmindedly.

Tell her these are lovely.

He knew. He just knew.

*******************************

A/N 2: Last slow chapter!!! Yay. Things start escalating pretty quickly after the next chapter. No playing footsie. ;)

TO THE FIVE OF YOU WHO LEAVE COMMENTS- Y’all are the ones keeping me posting, really. You RULE!

PLEASE let me know what you think of this story?

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desiraypark · 4 years ago

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Drawing the Line (Pt. II)

PART I Characters: Kylo Ren x Tiffany Palmer (OC, Blk/F) Setting: Modern/Current Universe - comparable to an urban area in present-day U.S.A. Content: Infidelity; a little pushiness? Lust/lust-driven relationship; quick smut near the end. | The Ren House Word Count: 1,810

AUTUMN 2014

“We haven’t changed the colors or done much repainting, and I have no intention of doing so. I love the house as it is. But as for the furniture, in here, I want something fancy and vintage, but not super ornate. None of that Jetsons, space age shit. I’m talking Gibson girl era. No...flapper era...”

“Art deco,” Kylo chimed in.

Chelsea Ren whirled around and glanced at her tattooed husband. He shrugged at her. He was leaning against the pillar of the entryway, watching Chelsea and the interior decorator observe the living room. Well, he was watching the interior decorator. Tiffany Palmer.

As soon as stepped into the house, he soaked every inch of her in--her painted face, the curly ponytail down her back. She wore a sweater dress that clung to every curve of her body. And every time she walked by, he quietly breathed in her scent--floral, with a hint of fruit.

“That actually sounds perfect, Mrs. Ren,” she said. She looked up at the ceiling, then back down at the floor. “Intricate, unique lines, but plenty of pieces with solid colors.

Chelsea nodded. “I’m going to be honest with you Ms. Palmer, I have no clue what the fuck art decor is.”

“Art deco,” Kylo corrected.

“Honey, why don’t you go look around at the rest of the house. See what other ideas you can come up with?” Chelsea said.

“Why the fuck am I here if you don’t want my opinion?” Kylo asked.

Tiffany swallowed and unwittingly began backing into the corner of the living room.

“I want your opinion. But only when I ask for it,” she said.

“Fuck you,” Kylo said with a scoff. He walked out of the kitchen and completely out of the house. Chelsea smiled at Tiffany, whose eyebrows were raised. Then, she rubbed her full belly.

“The only thing he’s done is spit a fucking teaspoon of semen in my cunt and been a complete dick about it. Now he wants to be involved in things,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Tiffany walked back to Chelsea’s side. “Maybe he’s trying to do better, Mrs. Ren. Art deco living room, arts and craft style dining area. He has some good ideas.”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” Chelsea said.

____________________

DECEMBER 2014

“Good morning, Ms. Palmer!”

“Good morning, Grace!”

“These flowers are for you!” Grace, the receptionist said. She held up a large bouquet of red and white roses that had sprigs of holly sticking out.

“Oh, this is gorgeous,” Tiffany said.

“Isn’t it?” Grace asked. “You must have made them super happy.” “I hope so,” Tiffany said, smiling. She grabbed the bouquet, winked at Grace, and went into her office with it.

Tiffany got gifts from clients all of the time--bottles of wine, flowers, chocolates, etc. She put the bouquet on her credenza and grabbed the envelope. “K. Ren” it said on the front. An eyebrow quirked--the Rens had already sent her a box of gourmet chocolates and a Christmas card for decorating their living room, dining room, and entertainment space. She sat in her chair and opened the card to beautiful cursive handwriting.

“Gifting beautiful flowers to a beautiful, gracious, and understanding woman. Thank you for listening to me. Have a happy holiday.”

Tiffany had caught Mr. Ren’s glances and stares whenever she met with him and Mrs. Ren. It also didn’t take her long to realize what kind of clients she was working for--two spoiled people who somehow wound up in a relationship. Both control freaks who didn’t like hearing the word “no”. Her bratty, him hot-headed. But of course, she leaned more towards Mrs. Ren’s side. Even if she was bitchy, no amount of bitchiness justified looking your interior decorator up and down every chance you got...

...and even if Tiffany did go home and finger herself, imagining Mr. Ren on top of her, it still didn’t justify his flirty glances.

And it certainly didn’t justify these flowers.

Tiffany tossed the card in one of her desk drawers and started on some paperwork. Just as she was about to head out and grab lunch, her phone rang. She sighed but answered it anyway--praying the conversation wouldn’t be a long one.

“Cannon Street Design Firm, this is Tiffany Palmer speaking,” she said.

“Ms. Palmer, this is Kylo Ren,” a baritone voice said on the other end. The sound made her shudder a bit.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Ren,” Tiffany responded. “I received your flowers, thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome, Ms. Palmer. I meant every word that I said in that card. Thank you for listening to my ideas. You executed everything beautifully…”

Tiffany looked at the time on her computer. “I appreciate it, Mr. Ren. I’m glad you and Mrs. Ren like the results.”

“You can call me Kylo, Ms. Palmer,” he said.

“You know what, Mr. Ren, I actually can’t,” she said, voice firm. “I don’t know what’s happening right now but it’s very inappropriate. And I have a mind to call your wife right now and ask her if she knows about this extra gift.”

She heard a deep, short chuckle on the other end. “I wouldn’t give a fuck, Ms. Palmer.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Tiffany said. She hung up the phone and rose again to head out for lunch, but stopped when she got to the door. Instead of walking through, she closed and locked it and sat back down at her desk. Then, she lifted her skirt, opened her legs, pulled her panties to the side, and licked the pads of her fingers...

____________________

TWO YEARS LATER

“...but anyway, thank you all so much for another year of great service and for providing our clients with great experiences.”

Adelle raised her glass of champagne, and the staff of Cannon Street Design did the same. They clinked their glasses together and sipped the beverage down, and right on cue, servers came through with their holiday meal.

“I’ll be right back,” Tiffany said, getting up from the table. As she made her way to the restroom, she noticed a familiar figure face sitting at the bar. Mr. Ren--with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Tiffany scoffed, shook her head, and went into the ladies’ restroom. When she came out, Kylo was standing in the short hallway where the restrooms were tucked away.

He looked...different. A little bulkier than the last time she’d seen him. His hair now stopped just above his shoulders and he had a goatee.

“Good evening, Ms. Palmer,” he said.

Tiffany rolled her eyes. “That’s not your wife out there.”

Kylo looked over his shoulder and back at Tiffany. “It’s not. Chelsea and I are separated.”

I wonder why, Tiffany thought to herself.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Enjoy your evening.”

Tiffany started to walk around Kylo, but he stepped in front of her. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you, Ms. Palmer.”

“Mr. Ren…you knew me for like...a month. If that…”

“And that entire month, I wished I was decorating a home with you and not Chelsea…”

Tiffany stared at him with a dropped jaw. “This is insane, Mr. Ren.” She tried to step around him again, but he blocked her.

“Almost as insane as that time we came by the house and I touched the small of your back...and you had to run to the bathroom to play with your fucking pussy...” he said.

Tiffany’s eyes widened, and she swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Ren...”

Kylo chuckled, “Oh, yes you do.” He stepped closer to her. “I know what a woman looks like after she’s come hard.”

Tiffany looked away and took a deep breath. “Even so, Mr. Ren. We’ve both done some inappropriate things, and should leave them in the past.”

Tiffany finally got around him.

“I’m taking my date home, soon,” he said. Tiffany glanced over her shoulder.

“And?”

“I’m staying at the Alderaan Hotel. Room 610. I’d like to be in the presence of a real woman tonight.”

Tiffany scoffed, rolled her eyes, and walked back to the table...

...her clit throbbing the whole way.

She ate dinner with her co-workers and was prepared to take the train home. But Kylo’s voice echoed in her brain. His scent was still in her nose. The sight of him--so big and tall--was etched into her brain. She stood outside of the restaurant and ordered a Lyft to take her to the Alderaan Hotel.

____________________

“Fuck…” Kylo and Tiffany said at the same time. He held on to her thighs as he plunged deeper into her--so hot and wet.

“Fuck, you’re so beautiful,” he said, leaning down and kissing her on the neck. He found the perfect rhythm that sent Tiffany’s legs around his waist and her hands around his neck. “I’ve wanted you all this time. All this fucking time...”

Tiffany’s nails pressed into his back. He was too thick; felt too painful, felt too good.

“Really, Kylo?” she asked. She bit her lip as he pressed deeper. “Fuck!”

“Yes, really. I’ve thought about you every day. Every fucking night...” he grabbed her breasts and gave her a kiss so passionate that he almost pulled her entire mouth into his.

They licked and sucked and ground into each other for what felt like hours--melding their bodies and intertwining their souls. Tiffany didn’t want to believe that this man had fallen so deeply in love with her in such a short time, but he made love to her like she was his, and he was hers. He said all the right things that she didn’t want to trust, but he held her chin and made her stare into his eyes--forcing her to stare into his sincere soul.

He wanted her, and as wrong as it felt, she wanted him, too. She always did.

All was well for a few weeks. So passionate, so loving, so quick. He took her out to dinner and to all of the high end stores in the city. Suddenly, he became distant. He didn’t answer her calls or her texts for about three days. One morning, he called and asked to meet her for lunch. He told her that him and Chelsea were back together--for Kylo’s family had threatened him with a bad time if he jeopardized their lucrative business with Chelsea’s family.

But the same evening he broke the news, he showed up at her place with gifts. He confessed that no one ever made him feel important--like his opinion was worth taking into consideration. She made him feel like more than just Michael Ren’s big, reckless, raven-haired son--the son that everyone questioned...

In exchange for his material tokens, promises of security, and many orgasm-filled nights, Tiffany gave Kylo Ren her heart, her mind, and her body...

...when he texted her and said that he was available to receive them...

#drawing the line

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crusherthedoctor · 5 years ago

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The Lutrudis Hadeer Design Concept Masterpost

Every now and then, I get the occasional question about my very own Lutrudis, which I'm always gladly willing to answer. Yet for all the times I've answered such questions, it seems some folks are still a bit left in the dark as to how Trudy came to be. So I figured I could make one big post all about the creation process. Maybe not every single detail per say, but at least everything that I think is worth mentioning in a post of this sort.

I'm aware that fellow pal @benignmilitancy covered this subject herself recently, but I might as well do my part to back up what she said.

1. When did Lutrudis become an idea?

The basic idea for Lutrudis - and indeed, the setting of Viridonia and Beyond the Stars itself as a story - was thought up as early as 2014. When I say basic idea however, I really do mean it, as aside from the general concept of her being the latest Friend of the Week helping Sonic and Co fight evil on her home island, very little else about Trudy was set up, including her name and species. While some aspects of her personality were already set in stone by that point, I focused on the design first when I decided to go ahead and make her and Beyond the Stars a real thing. The idea being to use what personality traits I had in mind to create a mental image, then use that mental image to help figure out the rest of her traits, as a design can often help out with working out a personality.

So basically, I scratched my back, so that I could scratch it again. Made sense to me.

2. Why a horse? Is it because friendship is magic?

Maybe...

Actually, I wanted a species that hadn't been used before, at least in the games, its continuity being the one Beyond the Stars takes place in. But at the same time, I also wanted to go with a fairly mundane species rather than anything rare, extinct, or extravagant, as I felt that the latter would undermine the story arc that I had in mind for this particular character. Compared to the likes of Sonic, Shadow, or Blaze, Lutrudis is more akin to Amy in the sense that she's ordinary by comparison, despite her living conditions and the magical brand of ammo she eventually decides to use. To have the arc of a “normal” lady becoming a hero in her own right be represented by a T-rex or a dragon wouldn't really land the same impact in the context of this universe.

Already, I was quickly warming up to making her a horse because of this. But then I realised that many of Trudy's personality traits - her loyalty, her passion, her elegance - were ALSO commonly attributed to horses in real life. And if you're not aware, I'm a big fan of letting Sonic and Co have character tics representative of their species, and a horse in particular had plenty of potential to have some funny and cute moments by letting their horsiness show itself. This additional thought helped make my decision on the matter final.

...Well, that and I wanted Trudy to have longer hair than the average Sonic female due to how, IMO, short hair wouldn't work as well for her. Obviously horses have manes, so that made it easier to get away with than it would have if she were a hedgehog, though it also helps that Trudy's hair is never any more detailed than the rest of her, meaning her hair actually looks like her own rather than her wearing an overly detailed wig to appease a certain disgraced comic writer, one of whom I will probably have the entirety of Beyond the Stars uploaded by the time he actually does something with his echidna libido-fueled comic at this rate... Looking forward to it in 2030.

As for what kind of horse she is, I decided to go with an English Thoroughbred, if only to further justify Trudy's English accent, which is nonetheless fairly mild compared to everyone else in Viridonia, who sound as though they jumped out of a 90's Rareware title.

3. “THIS IS WHO I AM... But who am I?”

Believe it or not, but even by 2016, I still hadn't decided on what to call my little pony. I had already figured that whatever I was going to call her, it would abide by the same naming convention as Amy Rose, Miles Prower, and Ivo Robotnik, to help further add to the aforementioned notion that she's an ordinary lady who wasn't born with any superpowers. That, and because “___ the Horse” doesn't have the same ring to it as “___ the Hedgehog” or “___ the Echidna”.

So what did I do?

I looked up a list of female names for baby girls. Duh.

Well, it worked out, because I stumbled across “Lutrudis”, which was German for “strength of the village”. The more I repeated it in my head, the more it appealed to me. Sometimes, you can have various names that mean the same thing, yet one in particular will just have that perfect sound to it. That was me with this name. This horse being named Lutrudis felt right to me, even if I perfectly understood that it was perhaps a bit more exotic than your usual Sonic anthro name.

Not that it mattered too much, since I was quick to think of “Trudy” as a nickname for her, since in addition to being less of a mouthful, that name - also German in origin - had a similar meaning, “universal strength”. Fit her character and arc just as well.

So that was the first name sorted, but what about the surname? Well, when looking at a selection of appropriate words, I stumbled on “Hadeer”, and while the Arabic meaning of the name is slightly unclear - some sources say “adventurous”, others say “sound of the water falls” - I felt that the meanings associated with it were all equally appropriate regardless. Then I combined it with the first name, said the full name over and over again in my head, and thought “Yeah... this sounds correct.”

I realise the irony of a part-German, part-Arabic name being associated with an English character, but considering this is the same universe where a man who is presumably not Polish is given a Polish term for a name (Robotnik), I think we can let it slide.

4. “You guys know what EDS is, right?”

It's no secret that another friend of mine, @greenyvertekins, has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which has a lot of unfortunate complications to it, but in laymen's terms basically means your body is more fragile than that of the average person's. This condition is rather rare, so much so that a majority of people have never heard of it. Sure enough, I was one of those people, until I became friends with Verte.

After hearing Verte talk about her EDS and what she's had to go through, along with doing my own research on the condition, not only was I considerably more informed on it, but I also felt very sympathetic to not only my friend, but everyone else who has had to experience it, particularly with how ignorant other people continue to react to it due to lack of public awareness. It made me want to do something in dedication, and in the process, a certain pony eventually crossed my mind.

This wasn't done for the sake of appeasing blue checkmarks on Twitter. I genuinely wanted to help raise awareness of EDS however I could, and I considered that perhaps its inclusion in my story would help do that, so long as it didn't sacrifice everything else about the story or forget that it was still a Sonic the Hedgehog story. Yes, it's a fanfic, and thus not as well known as a Hollywood blockbuster or a bestselling novel, but if even a few people were to end up learning about EDS through Lutrudis, I would be happy.

However, I was well aware that the idea of a Sonic character having EDS might be seen as a bit jarring, and if done badly, could potentially be accidentally insulting. So I made sure to consult Verte about it, saying that I would only go through with it if she was comfortable with me doing so, and made it very clear that I would try to make its representation as tasteful and as faithful as I can, despite the inherent nature of the Sonic universe that Trudy is part of.

By the way, horses in real life can fall victim to very similar disorders, so that was yet another reason why I went with that choice.

5. “Hey Benign, I'm shite at art, please help.”

I can't remember the exact conversation that led to it, but after I talked to @benignmilitancy about Lutrudis, she offered to bring the character's design to life through her mad art skillz. Initially I was hesitant to take up the offer, since I felt guilty about having to rely on someone else to show people what my own character looks like, but I was giddily honored by the offer and decided to agree as long as she was willing. Luckily for her, she wasn't working with a blank canvas so to speak, as I had a relatively complete image in my mind regarding what Trudy would look like, having already reasoned to myself why this or that would apply.

When putting my vision into words to Benign, I mentioned that...

- Since Trudy is the same age as Rouge, logically that should mean she's given a similar mature build as the latter, as opposed to the pipe limbs you see with the other female characters. Since Trudy spends a lot of time with Amy and Cream and has a lot of motherly interactions with the latter in particular, it helps signify that she's older than them.

- Being a horse, she would have two slits for nostrils rather than the usual dot nose that most characters have. Similarly, though you don't see them most of the time anyway, her feet are grey hooves, but they abide by the usual Sonic-style feet rather than being more realistic ala Clove's hooves, if only because the latter didn't look right for this character IMO.

- To add to her gentle warmth, her eyes would be a honey shade of brown. Just like how Cream has brown eyes. Again, it's like poetry, they sort of, they rhyme. Every stanza kinda rhymes with the last one. *shrug* Hopefully it'll work.

- Since EDS tends to apply several subtle physical traits to those who have it, at least some of them should logically apply to Trudy as well. Those with EDS often have a bluish-grey tint to their sclera, and they also tend to have paler skin than most, so Trudy would have those qualities too.

- To emphasize her love for Mother Nature and all its amazing sights, and also to contrast with Amy and Cream's colour schemes, Trudy herself would be green, albeit a more gentler green rather than the brighter tones of Vector and Jet, while her clothes would be blue, with slightly different shades depending on the clothing to prevent her from looking like a drab curtain. After a few initial sketches, Benign eventually suggested that some of her clothing could be changed to brown to balance out her overall colour scheme, as well as to further add to the subtle nature motif by having brown (trees) go along with blue (water) and green (grass). Needless to say, I wholeheartedly approved of this idea, and decided that the best placement for the brown sections would be for her leggings and glove cuffs.

- Speaking of, as a nod to her equine status, she would wear leggings that could pass off as Equestrian jodhpurs. (Not that she has an aversion to wearing skirts or dresses, since she's girly and tomboyish in pretty much equal measures, compared to how Sonic females usually lean towards one or the other.)

- People with EDS are unable to wear heels since they can hurt their feet, so heels were out of the equation for this little horsie. But I also figured that regular shoes or sandals wouldn't mesh well with the rest of Trudy's clothing, so I went with boots that were flat at the heels. They can allude to her adventurous streak AND allude to how there's a lady willing to kick ass behind that quiet, mellow, introverted demeanour. Plus, much like how being stomped by a real horse's hoof would be very painful to put it mildly, so too would being stomped by this horse's boot.

- Seeing how Trudy's arms have permanent scars on them - permanent scars being another common effect of EDS - she would wear elbow-length gloves over them, since she wouldn't be comfortable with showing them publicly. Note however that she would still wear long gloves even if she didn't have those scars, since they genuinely happen to appeal to her fashion tastes as well. Covering the scars up is just a bonus. And since long gloves are often associated with royalty and high class, they're also suiting for a lady who lives in a fancy castle (despite not being royalty).

- Her hair is kept in a big bouncy ponytail, not unlike Coco Bandicoot or Shantae, since it's both cute and tomboyish... that and because the visual pun of a horse with a ponytail was too good to resist, let alone it humorously mirroring the general shape of her actual tail.

- To contrast with Sonic's spiky quills, a lot of Trudy's design is emphasized to have a round quality, such as her tail, her ponytail, and her sloped ears. To add to this design philosophy, she would wear a headscarf similar to Wave's. Me and Benign contemplated on whether Trudy's muzzle should be more blocky like that of a real horse, before we agreed that the softer muzzle fit both the round aesthetic and her general character better.

- Trudy has trouble breathing in colder temperatures, and she also has a sensitive nose that reacts strongly to heavy scents. As such, she would have a bandanna that she could cover over her mouth and nose to help out with either of those things whenever the situation called for it, or any other scenario where she deems it appropriate. It helps that a bandanna suits a horse anthro anyway.

Truth be told, I was worried that I was coming off as too demanding. But Benign assured me that giving all these details helped rather than hindered. In any case, I was more than pleased with the final result, as it was precisely spot on to what I had in my head, although even her initial sketches during the work in progress were great stuff.

6. If Amy uses a hammer, then Lutrudis uses...

Trudy has surprising arm and leg strength despite her appearance, which is mainly due to her horsie genes. But since she's still got EDS, it's still wise for her to equip herself with a weapon or two to even the odds. I contemplated a few ideas in this case, including a quarterstaff, but ultimately I decided that the following would be a little more interesting, while still remaining appropriate for the character in question.

I thought to myself “What's stopping her from having two weapons, one for short-range, the other for long-range?” I decided on the long-range weapon first: bow and arrows, the latter of which would eventually include the Ethereal Zone-powered crystals inside the cavern below her castle. Goes without saying that a bow suits her elegance and how it can be used from a stealthy distance, and the use of the crystals and their different abilities also helps to keep the reader guessing on what exactly is the nature of the elusive Ethereal Zone itself. I also reasoned that Trudy using a bow was a nice contrast to Amy's hammer, although I'm aware that Amy herself used a bow in the Fleetway comics. But no one uses a bow in the games (yet), so it's fine, right?

As for her short-range weapon, I thought it'd be funny if she had a whip that resembled a riding crop. Not only would it be used to give Eggman's robots the Simon Belmont treatment, it could also extend up to a certain distance to help grapple onto things and allow her to overcome areas that would otherwise cause complications for her body. Is it a bit ludicrous? Maybe, but so is a blue hedgehog fighting a Roosevelt lookalike. You just kind of have to live with it.

So there you have it! Everything you need to know about how Lutrudis Hadeer's name, species, design, and EDS came to be finalised. Now when you turn her into a monkey without my knowledge or permission for the sake of dunking on her because you don't approve of me making fun of Kingdom Hearts rejects, at least you'll have a better idea on what you're actually talking about. :^)

#Lutrudis Hadeer #Sonic Character Design

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popwasabi · 4 years ago

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“Do the Right Thing” and “the language of the unheard”

Two things tend to happen following the death of unarmed African American at the hands of law enforcement in this country.

The first are protests that often lead to heightened demonstrations of anger, which lead to police decked out in riot gear to come in and put a stop to it while property and storefronts often burn around them. The second is a condemnation of all that but less so of the brutality that led to the riots but of the riots themselves.

In America, there is a modern philosophy of “civility” at any costs, that even when angry, even when rightfully enraged by the injustices that befall a group of people, you are STILL expected to “behave” and it is YOUR responsibility to stay calm and do the right thing.

“I’m sorry, I agree with you, but I just can’t support you because of the way you demonstrated that belief” are often the words that follow.

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I’m not saying you should ignore all toxic behavior or that you can’t take issue with a movement’s methods, I’ll leave that up to you to decide, but I used to stringently believe this myself. In the wake of the Ferguson riots in 2014 where a Missouri police officer shot and killed unarmed African American Michael Brown for the crime of allegedly *check notes* stealing a box of swishers, I found myself participating in the same tone policing as much of the wider country.

“Yeah, the police were wrong to kill Michael Brown like that but also the protesters have no right to destroy their own city. That’s wrong, they should do it peacefully!” I proudly proclaimed at the time.

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Six years later my feelings on this have taken a complete 180, partially because the circumstances of our times have become exponentially more volatile but it really began with finally understanding an ending to a movie I got around to seeing in 2009; Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”

Back in the “halcyon” days of 2009 I used to be a part of a small Myspace (yea, I know…) movie club group where we all shared various movie reviews amongst each other upon individual recommendations. One day one of these members recommended watching 1989’s “Do the Right Thing.” Up until that day I really didn’t know much about Spike Lee beyond him being a rabid Knicks fan and opinionated Clint Eastwood agitator but I gave it a watch and I liked it quite a bit.

(Shade you can hear.)

“Do the Right Thing” details a day in the life of Mookie, played by Spike himself, as he navigates his rough Brooklyn neighborhood. Throughout his day, he and his mostly black neighbors, friends, and acquaintances encounter various micro aggressions in the form of gentrifiers, white and Asian store owners who disrespect them despite being their primary customers, widespread income inequality, and of course the police who monitor their every step. The movie examines the intersection of race and how it all comes colliding together when circumstances are less than perfect specifically to those that exist in African American neighborhoods.

I enjoyed this aspect of the film, it felt real and authentic to me, even humorous at times, critiquing the very real issues black Americans face every day while also examining how other groups of people interact with them.

Where I took issue with the film, at the time, was its aforementioned climax.

At the film’s end, tensions have boiled over as Radio Raheem, one of Mookie’s friends, is called the n-word by Sal, Mookie’s white pizza store owner boss, leading to a scuffle between the two of them. Police are then called, pulling Radio Raheem away, nevermind that it was Sal’s words that ignited the fight, and put him in a chokehold and well, you know this story already…

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Finally, the anger that has been rising throughout the film ignites with a growing mob agitated at Sal and his sons who they see as the main instigators. Mookie stands rubbing his face for a few moments before picking up a trashcan and tossing it at the window of the pizzeria, simply yelling “Hate!” as it crashes through.

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A riot of course ensues, as the largely African American neighborhood tear the store apart, looting it of all its material goods before it burns to the ground. The next day Mookie returns to the scene of the unrest to ask Sal directly for his paycheck who angrily tells him his stunt destroyed his business to which Mookie simply retorts “Radio Raheem is dead.” The two argue for a bit but somehow ends with the two quietly understanding each other before they go their separate ways.

For the longest time I couldn’t square exactly with the ending despite my enjoyment of the movie. I never outright condemned the entire film’s message, (some people within that group I spoke of did though…), but I did find myself saying I couldn’t condone how it ended. Afterall, what did Sal do to deserve that kind of backlash, why did his storefront deserve to be destroyed? It had “nothing” to do with Radio Raheem’s death, right?

Fast forward to today and well, my attitude has definitely changed.

At this point I’m not going to spend an entire paragraph describing our current events as you all should be smart enough to know by now what’s going on but an African American friend of mine summed up these past two weeks in the most concise way possible I feel; “the results of oppression, poverty, hopelessness, and frustration is destruction and violence.”

Throughout “Do the Right Thing” Spike Lee shows us a microcosm of the effects of societal neglect and institutionalized racism has on his community. He tells us exactly why Mookie did what he did and yet still largely white viewers, which included myself at one point, were confused by this. At a certain point a person, a group of people, an entire community can only take so much before they take actions into their own hands.

When our white dominated society tells African Americans it’s “inappropriate” to protest during the national anthem, that it’s inappropriate to “make everything about race,”, ask “What about black on black crime,” respond back “#BlueLivesMatter” or “#AlllivesMatter,” when largely white Americans, especially those in power, ignore and refuse to believe all evidence that says otherwise this is what happens. These are the results of the neglected, ignored, and unheard.

(Btw, Roger Goodell can fuck all the way off with his crocodile tears until he gives a formal apology to Colin Kaepernick on behalf of the league, AT MINIMUM.)

There is a rush to judgment when the looting and rioting starts following these tragedies around the country. Nevermind the fact that police are largely the aggressors in all these interactions and attack peaceful protesters who are “doing it the right way” anyways but the blame for the destruction is almost only squared on the rioters themselves.

Cries of “Martin Luther King would have never supported this” and “He would call for peace and #unity right now!” are typical when this happens. King was a far more nuanced and complicated man than the liberal hippie that both Republicans and Democrats liken him to be and when you invoke his name to condemn protesters before the cops who actually started this you, and I cannot emphasize this enough, ARE NOT HELPING.

(If you won’t listen to me, listen to his daughter, you assholes.)

People generally want to empathize with victims but for some reason only want the perfect victim in this country. A victim that is a Saint in real life, lays down, does all the right things, and still gets hurt for it because they are “doing it the right way.” Sometimes victims are imperfect, including people who have been murdered by cops and people who loot and riot, but they STILL deserve to be heard and most importantly they deserve JUSTICE.

Nevertheless, these people are villainized to their most extreme as people are disproportionately being harassed by the cops while it all happens. Again, I cannot emphasize this enough, when you spend more time talking about “good” vs “bad” protesters you are helping those who benefit from maintaining the status quo. They WANT you to make this about those “criminals” and “thugs” who would “destroy our communities.” Nevermind, that upping the militarization of our police force only INCREASES the chances of a protest turning violent anyways.

(Tell me who is this protecting? Who is this serving?)

By making this about the “bad protesters” they drive a wedge between you and the cause so that police brutality can be maintained, so that power structures are not changed, so that you can be “protected” from people who are actually fighting for your rights right now. When the media and politicians use this kind of language, they are giving cops free reign to justify all forms of heinous means of pacifying these demonstrations, including ones that are banned in war. They want you to miss the point, they want you to forget why this started, hell they want you to forget they looted your asses long before the “rioters” looted a multibillion dollar company’s store who has more than enough insurance to recoup their losses anyways.

Spike Lee is often asked about the ending to “Do the Right Thing,” a question I would’ve asked him myself even just a few years ago, and he’s quoted as saying “only white people ever ask me that question.”

MLK’s name is often invoked when shit hits the fan in these demonstrations and while I’ll admit that I don’t like seeing neighborhoods destroyed and certainly don’t like seeing small businesses torn down and looted it’s important that King wanted us to understand why they happen and to keep our eyes on the ball:

“A riot is the language of the unheard” is important in understanding “Do the Right Thing” and this current moment we are having in history. While I have been pleasantly surprised by the near unanimous support Black Lives Matter has had across the board by people I would never thought to become radicalized there are still pockets of people who make this about the “right way” to protest.

To quote Spike Lee even he says he is unsure if Mookie did the “right thing” or not in that situation but he also says, “I know who did the wrong thing.”

Some of you might be saying still that MLK would not have supported these riots and hell, that may be true but need I remind you, there’s a reason he's not here today to tell you himself.

I’ll leave you with the same two quotes Spike left his audience in 1989 from MLK and Malcom X. I want you to read them both thoroughly and see if you have done the right thing yourselves over these past two weeks.

I truly hope you have...

youtube

Love and respect, y’all.

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bloodthirstymoonstone · 5 years ago

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Square One (ooc ramble)

So I thought I’d make a quick post talking about my continued journey into getting my Spicy Mental Health™ treated and how all that’s going. TLDR, I may have isolated the problem as to my noticeable decline with attention span over the past year or year and a half, but the good thing is that there’s probably a very easy way to fix it! Which is definitely good to know!

It gets pretty long winded and vent-y, too, though, so be warned. This is just a Real Ass Scoot Moment With Scoot Being Real, so keep that in mind.

So here’s a realization I made quite recently about my medication. For the longest time (I’m talking nearly 10 years or so) I assumed I didn’t have ADD, I just had anxiety and depression which was mimicking those symptoms. I believed this strongly, and for years despite getting legitimately diagnosed back in middle school (I think I was 13), before my anxiety diagnosis when I was 16. I think this is due in part to a REALLY BAD reaction to the drug Ritalin, which is notorious for making you feel like you’ve drank 10 coffees all at once. I honestly think that experience traumatized me so badly I truly thought I just didn’t have ADD at all.

I also probably believed this, in part, due to the anxiety medication I was on later, which did a great deal more to helping my condition. I won’t say which ones I was on because that would be TMI, but when I moved to Boston in 2016, I was on three different medications to treat my anxiety and depression. One was ancient and I’d been on it since I was first diagnosed back in 2009. One that was prescribed later when my Rock Bottom™ years started (I’m guessing 2011-2012). And then one I got at the tail end of my Rock Bottom™ years, in March of 2014. That last one might have been the one that Defeated The Evil and go the monkey of rampant, unchecked depression off my back for good, as well as a few key lifestyle changes.

Sometime when I moved here, I got a psychiatrist that, in retrospect, was fucking terrible for me. She barely listened to me at all, would shut me down when I came up with solutions she didn’t like, and ultimately discouraged me so much that I stopped doing anything more than going to her to get refills, and totally stopped going to therapy all together. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about my problems anymore, including her, because it was just so discouraging going to her about anything that she tainted the whole process for me. She shamed me for my weight, for not being social and making friends in a city and a part of the country I was totally unfamiliar with, and just never ever seemed to listen to me.

The most egregious case of this is when she fucked with my medication. Remember that list I just gave on the three types of meds I was on when I moved up here? Yeah, now I’m just on the last one. She took me off of the first two in 2016 (I think? Maybe it was 2017 -- my memory is shit), completely against my wishes, and she went totally cold turkey with it, too. I went to her, telling her that I ran out of those two maybe 10 days or so ago and though I wasn’t experiencing any withdrawal symptoms yet, but I’d really like to get back on the combination that had already taken me so far, and she literally refused. Saying “Oh, well, you’ve been off them both for so long already, so let’s see how it goes. I really don’t think you need to be on that much.”

It struck me as weird and panic inducing, even then, but she was adamant about it, saying that she didn’t want to risk me getting Serotonin Syndrome from taking so much medication for depression at once. Which, alright, fair enough, but she didn’t even try to ween me off of them. She just cut me off. But I trusted her judgement as a professional and certainly didn’t want to get sick or even die from taking too much medication, so I listened to her. And I never had a huge, unprompted depressive episode, so hey, maybe things were alright!

There’s a catch though. The second drug I was introduced to, approximately in 2011? Remember that? Yeah, guess what. I did my own research recently and came to find out that it’s also been known to aid significantly in patients that have ADD but don’t want to be put on stimulants like Ritalin. Because if you have anxiety as well as ADD, it makes you painfully aware of that racing heart sensation. For the past 2+ years, I’ve felt my attention span slipping in ways I couldn’t understand or control, all because someone who didn’t really know me (remember, I’d only moved to this region a few short months before I even saw her) decided to play God with my life and not listen to my totally justifiable fears.

I feel like all that time, all those abandoned threads and plot ideas, all the shit that I blamed myself for because I just couldn’t understand why it was so hard to pay attention suddenly!!! Is all her fault. I listened to everything she told me to do and then got so conditioned to never questioning her or talking to her about my problems anymore, that I didn’t even raise the difficulties I was having that were adversely affecting my life for what seemed at the time to be no reason at all. I feel cheated and angry. I might have cried a little bit when I realized it.

The good news in this is that, 1) I don’t have her as a psychiatrist anymore THANK GOD. Last I heard, I think she was leaving the practice (probably because she was treating other patients as terribly as she was treating me), but she’s definitely no longer with the business I frequent. I’ve only met with my new psychiatrist once, and he already seems so much more kind than her, and I’m grateful for him. And 2) getting back on the medication that I was yanked off of should be an easy enough process. I really just have to talk to my new guy and tell him what I want. I’m not interested in going back on the first, because afaik, it wasn’t doing much for me anyways, and maybe serotonin syndrome actually is a problem I should be worried about taking all three at once. But at least I’ll have the two that helped get me through Job Corps and the most stressful move of my life helping me out again.

More than that, I’ve started going to therapy again, and that’s a huge relief as well. I miss my old therapist, but she seems to have moved to another office of the same company that’s slightly further away, but I love the new woman I go to see. She’s so friendly and easy to talk to, and she’s also from out of town, so we get to crack jokes about New England Drivers™, which is always fun, lol. More than that, she’s helped me see that there are good qualities to me instead of All The Things I Want To Fix, like my creativity, sense of humor, and passion for caring about and defending my friends and those I care deeply about.

If we’re being honest, when I look back at these past years, it still kind of hurts. I can see quite clearly the break where my dwindling attention span started impacting my life and my presence in the RP community (technically it happened before I went indie, which means you guys have been dealing with 2 Braincell Scoot this whole time... My deepest apologies), and how it just kept getting worse and how frustrated I was with myself and things I couldn’t change about it.

But that’s also the good thing about all this. I can and will get better, hopefully sooner rather than later, and I hope you guys will be around to reap the benefits. I love you guys, and hopefully I’ll be able to get to some replies soon! Either on this blog or any of the three others.

#long post #ooc #ramblings #tw: medication #lmk if it needs any other tags idk #tw: vent

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skywalkersapprentice · 6 years ago

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so when I saw infinity war the second time, i brought a pen and a notebook with me and took notes in the dark the whole time. for my second endgame viewing yesterday, i did the same. i now present to you my Thoughts About Endgame. (this is. long.)

Major Spoilers Ahead.

okay seriously, nobody called clint up when there was a giant invasion in wakanda??? nobody???

also it was daytime in wakanda when the snap happened. it’s also daytime wherever clint is in america when the snap happens. someone explain.

god the dawning panic when clint realizes his family is gone. that whole scene is so empty and unsettling, it was shot really well

i automatically associate 80s music with space thanks to marvel.

tony stark adopting strays everywhere he goes since 2013.... i love this about him

nebula finally got to win something!!!! “it was fun.”

and then she gives him their final ration. i’m- :((((

back on earth..... thank god the beard is gone.

“I lost the kid” tony’s face wow that’s devastating, no thanks

“Is um...” what was tony going to say after that??

“I thought you were a build-a-bear.” “Maybe I am.” fuckign.... tony please sdfgdfg

“And I needed you.” tony :(((

“No trust. Liar.” this entire scene is just. chilling. heartbreaking. tony has nothing left for anyone, and especially nothing left for steve, except-

him ripping the metaphorical heart out of his chest and handing it to steve made me literally gasp the first time i watched this film. i feel like it hasn’t been talked about enough, but it’s incredibly poetic.

“where are you going?” “to kill thanos” i haven’t seen captain marvel but i’m already in love with carol danvers

and now they have hope, they still think they can bring everyone back... what a dangerous thing

suddenly steve is looking at his locket of peggy all the time.starting in this film only. can we let him grieve for his actual friends?? you know, the ones he just lost? does he even mention sam or bucky in the entire film? alright russos, i have several bones to pick with you about this, but alright....

i gotta say, when i first watched this i was astounded that thanos destroyed the stones and then got beheaded in the first twenty minutes. it really left me wondering, well- what now? and that was exciting.

five years later. i mean, we knew there would be a time jump, but i wasn’t expecting this.

we’re really calling this cameo by russo representation huh

lol

and like??? steve brings up nobody he lost in the snap, instead chosing to focus on “the love of his life” that he met and lost in 1945. this struck me as odd the first time i watched and now i’m like. man they’re really trying 2 justify their later decision, huh

so they’re calling those who were snapped “The Vanished” according to the sanfran memorial

avengers r still a thing and their complex has actually grown in size?? who is funding this. is it tony

my next note just says HAIR SDFDSDFG aka heLLO carol danvers

nat :((((

crying and eating a sandwich is a mood

god. the quiet grief

natasha romanoff has come such a long way from her introduction in iron man 2. she cries freely, loves her family, actively wants to be a better person, even if a lot of her family isn’t around today. i just- love her so much.

“we both need to get a life.” “you first.” goddamnit

i.... love happy, peaceful, good dad Tony Stark, so much.

“define lunch or be disintegrated” morgan h stark is so cute

“you like going in the garage, huh? so does daddy.” tony was already so proud of her god i just :((((

me, zooming in on nat: ARROW NECKLACE

does she only wear that when she’s missing clint, or

I’m truly in my feelings about Tony being The Best Dad

Bruce apparently spent 18 months in a gamma lab, which is interesting.

god the scene with the kids asking for a selfie was so cringe are you telling me they could include this but steve couldn’t mourn for his friends

tony does dishes now. a true housedad.

that’s!!!! his first son!!!!!! :((((((

can you believe it was peter parker who pushed tony to invent time travel

“i’ve got something on my mind.” “is it juice pops?” i’m just thinking now about how howard most definitely would have sent tony straight to bed, but tony lets morgan stay up and eat juice pops with him. this is just. straight up great content.

“I love you 3000″ can you just. his face when she says that. also i’m never getting over that phrase ever

“I can stop,” Tony says, on the brink of inventing time travel.

“But would you be able to rest?” says Pepper, who has been trying and failing to get him to stop for a good 15 years.

the parallels between this and her last words to tony. ouch.

this is such a good and steady relationship now :(.

sdfgfdfg why is steve dressing like he’s from the 40s again is this a visual sign of his regression

god they did thor so dirty in this film. not with his character- him falling into great depression and having ptsd is not a bad thing, but treating it like a joke is. the audience is invited to laugh at him. Bad.

thor threatening “noobmaster69″ over the headset for his rock friend is very funny though.

hey tokyo looks alright compared to a lot of america.

every single clintasha scene in this film kills the man.

also everyone knows thanos’s name. i assume that means the world knows why everyone disappeared.

“you’re only a genius on earth” yeah but who invented time travel, rocket

rhodey wanting to straight up murder baby thanos is hilarious

the explanations of time travel in this film give me a headache

“TIME HEIST BRAINSTORMING SESSION”

bruce, nat and tony all laying around throwing ideas back and forth.... this movie is valid sometimes

“see you in a minute,” natasha says, and she’s smiling.

this is her family you guys :(((((

NEW YORK 2012

MY FAVOURITE SCENE

omg bruce making such a halfhearted attempt at smashing things please i love

okay cut to 2013 Asgard, and Thor sneaks right by his currently dead brother without even looking at him. this movie confuses me

fuck the scene where rocket slaps thor for having a panic attack. i’m glad thor ended up abandoning him.

okay so everything important happens between 2012-2014

cap/tony/scott, clintasha, nebula/rhodey.... these are such ideal teamups

“we’re a long way from budapest” give me my clintasha movie, marvel!!!

okay back in 2012, HOW did JARVIS not register the fact that there were two steves and two tonys in Stark Tower

god this entire scene is fucking hilarious the entire mcu was worth everything for the 2012 time travel scene

fuckign.... loki

ELEVATOR SCENE

as a cap 2 stan i feel so validated

HA IL HYDRA

WHEN I SAY I GASPED IN DELIGHT

CAP VS CAP

“I CAN DO THIS ALL DAY”

“YEAH, I KNOW, I KNOW”

sadfgfdfg are u really telling me that cap takes the peggy locket everywhere

BUCKY IS ALIVE

THAT IS AMERICAS ASS SDFGFSDF PLEASE

2012 avengers best avengers

meanwhile the sorcerer lady is giving bruce a time travel lesson and i didn’t understand any of it but basically each reality requires six stones in order to not be torn apart by the forces of darkness? ??

I’m just glad thor got some kind of closure by talking to his mom

side note you can definitely tell that frigga raised loki

“EAT A SALAD”

“i’m still worthy” asdfgfdf yeah but now this timeline thor has no hammer!!!

QUILL SDFGFDSDFGHFDS

this movie is so entertaining

i live for nebula and rhodey just judging everyone

so do the guardians just.... not happen in the 2014 timeline?

gamora is ready to Fight thanos when the maw threatens nebula

was that young alexander pierce headed underground in 1970?

bone 2 pick with this whole time travel thing

thor got closure by talking to his mom

tony got closure by talking to his dad

steve saw peggy working, successful and thriving, through a window. closure where????

he should have gotten a chance to talk to her and received closure that way.

hank pym is an asshole but i guess we already knew that

“my wife is expecting” so tony was born 1970/1971 ig

howard’s dad beat him with a belt. i suppose every stark does a little better parenting-wise

Jarvis!!!!!!! agent carter is canon!!!!

vormir oh god here we go

“under different circumstances, this would be totally awesome” i’m inclined to agree with clint

this part goddamit

handholding :((((

my next note just says “aveng ers 1 paralels fu k”

the way this was filmed was beautiful. the colours, the lighting, the acting, the dialogue, the parallels to the first clintasha fight in avengers 1..... if natasha had to die, this was.... a good death, i think.

“damn you!”

“it’s okay.”

clint is begging her this hurts so much :(((

god. tears.

clint just sobbing in the water with the soul stone in his hand hits some kind of way

where is natasha’s funeral, huh??? why does steve shed like one (1) tear?

also why does the gauntlet need to physically be snapped like what does that dO

i just realized that thor’s fake eye is amber.

Infinity Stones:

almost killed thanos after 2 uses

destroyed bruce’s arm

killed tony

imagine an alternate scene where all six original avengers survived until this point and all of them held one stone as they snapped thanos’s army out of existence. that would have been the ultimate fanservice and i would have astral projected. anyway we’re getting off topic

“don’t change anything from the last five years.” what tony means is “please don’t erase my daughter”.

SNAP

yay they did it except-

how did everyone survive thanos blowing up the avengers compound

2014 gamora sounds just- slightly different than 2018 gamora. a little harsher. the guardians haven’t yet softened her edges.

“we become sisters” and suddenly gamora has hope

i- did that lightning just braid thor’s hair sdfgdsdfgh

this is a harsher thanos. thanos who died in 2018 had been changed. weakened, maybe.

thor, cap and tony fought in avengers one. now, they’re fighting thanos together.

l just. love that clint has a sword now.

“he won’t let me” nebula.... :(((((( and she dies crying

i have a note here that says “thor’s lightning + tony = c o o l”

STEVE WITH MJOLNIR

ASDFGFSDF FUCK THIS WAS WORTH EVERYTHING MARVEL HAS EVER PUT ME THROUGH

LIGHTNING POWERS

i LIVE

oooh it’s personal for thanos now

YOUR

LEFT

the portals scene fUCK

this is just. worth it. on every level.

PETER AND TONY

“this is nice” please :((((((

poor peter quill gets snapped, gamora’s loss fresh in his mind, then he thinks he’s gotten her back and she’s not the gamora he knew. ouch.

tell me why everyone but steve gets a reunion scene lol

peter introducing himself to everyone!!!! he’s so sweet.

CAPTAIN MARVEL HAS ARRIVED

i’m gay. oh my god.

hhhhgn hair

GIRLS

this is fanservice!!! as in, i am a fan and i feel fuckign SERVICED

thor duel welding mjolnir and stormbreaker is AWESOME.

strange holds up one finger. tony gives a look of heartbreaking acceptance.

god. tony stark, you brave, brave man. he knew he wasn’t going to survive this one.

“I am inevitable.”

“I. am. Iron Man.”

SNAP (2)

you lose, thanos.

but also, i lose, because oh god tony.

peter :(((

“Mr Stark!”

“Sir!!”

“Tony!!”

oh. fuck.

“you can rest now” do you SEE the parallels to the earlier conversation between tony and pepper :(((

the arc reactor going out physically broke me

i didn’t take many notes after this because i was literally sobbing lol

“I love you 3000″ stabs me again

“proof that tony stark has a heart” yes well my heart is breaking

happy :((( is morgan’s jarvis :(((((

Queen!!!! Valkyrie!!!

this dick measuring contest between Quill and Thor got old five hours of content ago.

:))))) rage time :))))))

bruce tried to bring back nat with the snap :(((

oh god bucky.

his face!!!!! his voice!!!! he’s trying to be strong and find but he looks dead inside

i just- fuck. he knew and he let steve go.

why did he show up on that bench i don’t understand

“I’m happy for you” are you telling me sam wasn’t the least bit hurt or mad

the ONLY good thing about this is Captain Sam

fuck steve tho

what year is this dance in

i mean. it’s sweet. but this is not steve.

I think i’ve talked enough about my dislike of the direction steve’s character went in in this film. that was the major point of dislike for me, but given that the council has made a stupid ass decision i’ve elected to ignore it. i understand that both tony and steve had to make their exist from the franchise here, but.... there were better ways to go about that.

i think a few different relationships slipped through the cracks here- characters suddenly grieving people they haven’t seen in /years/ and completely ignoring others who only recently died was a big one for me. but other characters saw a lot of development- nebula was a favourite of mine in this film, which i was not expecting! she and rhodey made a really good team- i feel like they understand one another.

the Original Six all saw a decent amount of screen time, which i appreciated. nobody got left behind there. there were so many references to other films that i know i didn’t catch them all, but it really made this movie seem like a love letter to the fans.

i want to make it clear that i actually loved most of this film. i think it was a good send off for the avengers and i love a good time travel plot (like, it’s one of my all-time favourite tropes. i was vibrating with excitement in the theater during the 2012 scenes.) i went in expecting a lot of the emotion to be sidelined in favor of plot and action, and while that happened a little bit, i was overall pleasantly surprised with the amount of emotion that they fit into this film. characterization and emotion is perhaps even more important to me than a good plot, and this film got the emotion down.

it’s definitely not a perfect film but it could have been so much worse, so i’m grateful that we got a good sendoff for the avengers.

7/10.

#endgame #endgame spoilers #avengers endgame #marvel #spoilers #shelby reviews movies #it took me two hours to write this out bye

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