#but i dont feel like writing an extensive post so ill explain some of the interesting ones here

[mcytegg]

Roshambogames Teammate tierlist 👍

its basically just my incredibly biased personal opinion on who i think ro would work well w in a team. (mapicc gets his own tier bc he is mapicc.)

[seijch]

ANNOUNCEMENT: NOT A HELLO, BUT NOT A GOODBYE EITHER

omg hi ... im like . ashamed to come back after saying brief hiatus in october and then disappearing off the face of the earth til FEBRUARY but under the cut i will be explaining myself and the following, if youre interested (and a tl;dr at the very bottom if you don’t wanna scroll thru this obnoxiously long post):

the reason(s) i was gone for so long

what i was doing during that time (its just a personal account yall can scroll past this idrc)

the status of those um . halloween requests

the future of this account

i. so . Hiatus .

i know. i know . i probably mentioned it when i made the announcement post, but my mental health likes to go on one of those rides. yknow the ones where you go like up rlly fast then down maybe and then up then DOWN .... its like that. i needed a break and every time i wanted to come back or thought about it, something would happen and i would get stuck in my own head.

a big reason for getting stuck in my head was (and i hate to admit this ... i hate to admit that i have Insecurities On The Internet) my feelings of inadequacy regarding my writing. i love to plot fics, i love concepts and characters and making little headcanons but i dont ... know if i love writing rn. and i thought for the longest time that like . whatever ill just push thru it its fine ill be fine but it kinda wasnt lmao you can kinda see it in my halloween reqs and what become of them when i get to that but i began to feel like nothing i had put out or would put out would hold up prose wise (and normally i dont feel like this im much more “idc its my life im living it” but thats not a rant for tumblr LMAO). i still feel like that -- like im better as a reader than a writer. but . You Know :-)

tl;dr: mental state go brrrrr

ii. anywhere here’s wonderwall

when i left, i was in a steadily decreasing mental and emotional state, made worse by a situation at work that really was a case of petty jealousy on my end and rlly isnt very consequential now despite how much pain and resentment it gave me when it Was a problem so i wont get into it. the tl;dr of november and december was me using work as an crutch and distraction -- i know my job, i do it well, it helped me not think about my responsibilities and obligations and inadequacies. of course, as the holiday season grew busier n busier i was scheduled so often that i moved 88 or so miles (according to my apple watch, which i ONLY wear at work since im never anywhere else outside my house) and fell into a cycle of showering n sleeping at my house before going back the next day. (theres definitely something to be said abt capitalism and “grind culture” here but once again its not the time or place snsjkdfds)

at the turn of the new year, i happened to remember a birthday card i hadnt filed away for safekeeping from a friend of mine that id been horribly out of touch with til that point. i started crying because i realized how out of touch id been in general up until that point. the month of january was great for me: i was focused, happy, and in a much better place than i had been before. the end of it brought me down focus wise and im hoping that enough time away from my distractions will refocus me bc i ... need it LMAO and though ive burned out from that level of productivity and gotten distracted again im ... trying to stay positive which i think is the most i can do 😁👍🏼

media wise, i got real into stardew valley (but burned out bc i played it extensively as a way to wind down after work), the pokemon platinum romhack renegade platinum (still havent finished it bc of school n i played it w the intent to see if i could nuzlocke it ... bitch its so hard but its so fun bc of it), briefly assassins creed: odyssey (im one of those ppl who completes an entire region before i move to the next so you can tell i burned out of that one + wouldnt have the time to properly devote to it even if i didnt), got back into genshin impact after pulling for xiao (after not touching it for like . months), and danganronpa. yes . danganronpa 😐 i Know. i stopped playing it after the second trial of the first game bc i was so hurt by the outcome and picked it up in late january only to get sucked in (thank god i had the foresight to buy the second and third games during the steam winter sale). rn im at the start of chapter 4 if anyone wants to come in my asks and um . talk to me abt danganronpa

tl;dr: I’m Into Danganronpa Now

iii. you realize halloween was three months ago right

i mentioned this in the first section, but i love to plot things. every request is plotted or at least has a solid foundation. i had fun detailing what concept i wanted to go with considering what i was given, and there were some bangers i might touch up in the future. but heres whats going to happen to the requests themselves:

there are two finished requests. one will be posted tomorrow and the other will be touched up (just bc i finished it doesnt mean its good 🧍‍♂️) and scheduled for next saturday. as for the ones i never got around to ...

i will not be finishing those requests. i hate to be That Person, but i feel like we all expected this 🧍‍♂️ what i will do is post all of my notes for each request in batches -- requests that have an @ to go with them will be mentioned in the post proper, but anon asks will be pictured. (there are some asks that came from blogs who are now deactivated but i wrote down all the prompts and remember most of those askers so ill cross that bridge when i get there) there will most likely be an excerpt or two simply bc i think i mightve written a few plot points or interactions in the form of bullet points. i rlly am sorry about doing this but i remember looking at my notion doc with all the prompts and feeling ... like i wasnt measuring up n it wasnt just to myself or to some intangible concept of “other” id constructed but it was instead to those who requested n actually WANTED to see and hear and read my writing and i ...... im gonna admit thats another big reason i avoided this site.

regardless, youll definitely get what i have (and likely more than just my bullet points and illegible handwriting).

tl;dr: im sorry. what i have in terms of plot, concept, and interaction for every request will be posted, but i cant say ill ever complete them and mean it.

iv. so what now?

well i mean . im not entirely sure how sold i am on haikyuu in the content creation department (as a creator n to a lesser extent, as a consumer). as mentioned previously, its no longer my primary focus. it doesnt mean im not into haikyuu anymore; i have a lot of love for those boys but i cant rlly say im even caught up w recent fandom activity and also havent even finished s4 pt2 LMAO thats on my to do list

and despite all that, i still want to share my plots n concepts and snippets and maybe even fics. it wont happen anytime soon. it might not even happen. but i mean . its better than me saying i wont write ever again shjdkfs but either way ill probably use this blog as a personal blog w the occasional ask game for dialogue prompts (those are always so fun i love making up aus to fit like . the most mundane prompts)

as for my works (past and any potential future), ive opened an ao3 acc here n ill be editing n possibly expanding on my old works to post there. tumblr, to me, is The x reader hub, but i figure more x reader fics on ao3 is never a bad thing.

ill be deleting/posting drafted posts to the queue since they were all meant to be queued anyway as well as (sorry again 🧍‍♂️) deleting or answering asks in the inbox. (moots if you get a notif from me saying i rbed your post from months ago ... mind your business) im very hard to get ahold of and its ... a problem. expect an overhaul of the nav n shit to reflect my new direction n also because i feel like i cant tell if my passion for carrd is shared by the majority HSDKLFS maybe its better to read my info in a normal post ykwim .......

and of course . if youve read all this n decided im no longer worth the follow, i sure as hell cant stop you. thank you for wanting to, at some point, hear what i have to say -- it means more than you think.

tl;dr: writing will be edited and reposted to ao3, this blog will be a personal blog with a hint of writing (sometimes)

the tl;dr to end all tl;drs:

im back! i wont be as active as i used to due to a lessened interest in haikyuu in general, but i have an ao3 acc now where all my past work will be edited, possibly expanded, and reposted. any future work will also find itself there. my halloween requests will be posted in batches as incomplete concepts, plots, and snippets of scenes; i wont be promising to finish any of them.

there are still fic concepts im attached to and want to finish, but i cant promise any more writing on my end. this blog will be a personal blog with maybe writing, not a writing blog with my personal thoughts all over it.

regardless if you stick around or not, its been crazy sexy cool (equal emphasis) being on haikyuu tumblr even tho i wasnt around for long ... even tho its not my main focus anymore, im still excited to see what the future might hold 🤝

love, ari 💌

[savnofilter]

hey guys, i just wanted to speak up about something because i have been getting questions if i was well and stuff and im not really sure these days. mainly because i have become uncomfortable on this blog.

and i beg that people who dont like me, please do not spread things about me please or this because i thought i owe this to my followers.

the reason as to why i feel uncomfortable is because it really dawned upon me that being here doesnt make me happy anymore. and you could see in how flat my writing has become, or how my behavior often changes from happy to sad/low in a quick second.

and since after the summer, being on here has been almost terrible for me. like i use to have many friends, many people i talked to or felt like i created a bond with a lifetime, just kind of up and left me in the dust. while i finally took the time to focus on me for once, they used it against me, they got mad at me and its just hard to keep quiet about since it has always been my goal to talk about my feelings and now i dont think i can anymore, as to why im writing this to you guys tonight..

i will not get into depth (or specific) about it because i feel like the more i try to explain myself, the more twisted it becomes. and instead of helping me, it hurts me.

over the few months, i found when i was taking breaks to be happier. 

and its not the thought of you guys, it was more of like the lingering feeling of the way i was treated by people lingering on my blog. and im afraid if i feel like this still holds truth, i will be leaving this blog sooner or later.

in truth, i feel like ive been mistreated or even to the point where my feelings were so construed that it felt like i have been gaslighted over and over and over again. and honestly i am not as mentally or emotionally mature as many people on here, and some of them know that but it was never regarded.

im sad that this experience has come to this, because i really loved interacting, interacting with everyone and sharing my stories, but with the bad experiences on here has even turned my love/passion for writing down -- and even watching anime. i feel reminded every time i see certain blogs all over my feed, or like “hey im safe with these group of people” then they would pop up again. i felt like im some sort of villain or like an unintelligent-idiot who cant think for themselves. and while people who brainlessly follow those people can blindly hate me is fine, because i will never change who i am for anyone. ever. and i hate having to make posts like these because i feel bad for being so angsty and not being the sav that you guys know because while the brand “savnofilter” or “sav” is an extension of me, i sometimes feel so detached because of how shut out ive fell in this fandom for like 5 months now.

and i sincerely apologize to any new followers, i use to not be this down all the time but it really has been brought to my attention that the only social media that has heightened my anxiety, my depression, and even a part of illnesses i thought went away has resurfaced all because of what has happened associated to this blog.

whether it be being shut out and begging for help from the people i thought would be friends, or that i was kicked to the curve simply because i was not in the right state of mind and basically told me it was my fault for being that way.

and when it was fun, when i had friends it never felt like a chore for me on here. but as i lose support like that, it just hurts even though i have someone who stays beside me all the time. once you lose that, that, ground you start to compare yourself, like normal human nature i think. i started too look at my blog and be like “why arent i getting as much as before, what am i doing wrong, what is so bad about my stuff thats good with theres”. and part of the factor was that its odd, because it wasnt even a place of jealousy. it was one of, how did i fall to be so unimportant? so... immaterial. and it was like, each writer i fell out with, everyone just followed them and im left here trying my best to fill in their spots because i missed having that friend group, or friends with me. the only who really cared for me even with the biggest arguments and hoenstly it was because they were the only the one that cared for me. and i am not trying to cause discourse so please do not contact other people about this.

and as much as i stay at this point to irk the people who want me gone, i feel like the subtle unintentional (or intentional) bad vibes being brought to me is choking me up. and its doing well.

it just, it was so odd being treated like actual shit. like dog dooky shit. like if i was the poop on the sidewalk that you walk around and wonder who fucking took that massive shit, shit. and i was afraid to speak up about it because i was afraid of the backlash id get for having fucking feelings. 

from someone who went through some shit when i was younger, and built this barrier, to being repeatedly told over and over again that my feelings are invalid, to have people to tell me “i wont do that too you” and then do it to me just made me grow as a person. or die as a person. im not sure yet.

not only was it a mixture of people leaving me for shitty reasons, it was how stupid this fandom got. yeah, stupid. completely idiotic. of course there are people who sense-ful(?) and i love you a lot for it. but like ive said before, its unfair, there is no love like there use to be. people arent how they use to be. people put on a show, but once behind close doors its completely different. and if youre thinking of anyone in specific, youve got some shit to reevaluate. 

i was so scared to talk about it before because i was so scared at the backlash id get because i was so tired for being the hurt one and being called the bad guy. and im not blind to me being a bitch, but when i feel like ive done something im upfront about it. im rambling but this happens when i finally let my thoughts out.

and if ive been truthful, ive fallen out of my routine with meeting up with my therapist which may one of the reasons i let it run on this long without really getting a clear conscience. and like ive said before, i had thought it had to do with my life but honestly the only grief i get is being on here. 

to be honest, i have projects and requests i really want to complete before i even leave. so maybe its a while before i leave, maybe if it gets too much i’ll just go. i do not know. but 2020 is the year i finally want to take my own health over everyone else before i did before. and even with how hurt i am, i still hold so much love for these people. so much. but ive always been too loyal.

i am sorry for this sorrowful note, but i do not know how much longer i will stay. i love you all, have a blessed night.

[interstellarneighbourhood]

im gonna say it

please don't take this as shade or reblog it or try to start shit but I personally do not like Melanie Martinez’s music (and by extension what I see/know of her). This means I’ll unfollow you if you post about her/her music. The way she writes extensively about things she has not experienced - like child sexual assault and dysfunctional+borderline abusive families (!!!) - in order to raise ~awareness~ is something I find somewhat tacky + romanticising (which is /really/ fucking bad) and quite frankly, pretty triggering. 

(bonus: if you wanna raise awareness, actually ~explain~ how your songs do that and provide access to *foundations* and *resources* about your topic)

As someone with mental health issues and disorders I also feel very alienated by her ableist language (have you listened. to mad hatter) as she has never properly stated that she suffers from any of the specific mental illnesses she throws around as ~edgy descriptors~. Additionally, eating disorders + body dysmorphia is something she seems to low-key ,,ridicule,, women for - through lines like “pill diet pill diet” and “silly girls”; done too via the generally childish language she associates with cosmetic surgery in mrs potato head. (this and some other stuff also comes across as pretty misogynistic but that’s a whole other thing and can be seen as reaching so I’m leaving it out)

I understand that lots of mentally ill musicians use what could be called ““ableist language”” in their music as a form of expression ( “I'm out of my mind/ I’m not seeing things right” - not today but tøp + a bunch more I'm too lazy to list), but Melanie does it in a way that’s just too close to, well, ridicule to feel relatable.

There’s so much more I haven’t covered in here, but there's no way I’m spending any more time on someone I don’t care for lmao so here y'all go. feel free to unfollow me if you disagree with this. I’ll honestly be better off for it and I won’t be checking. 

tl;dr: I dont like Melanie Martinez, I have my reasons for it, and ill unfollow you if you post about her

[machudson]

Idk if this is too late or you already did these two but Jonquil and Angelo for the ask thingy pls??

hell yeah sorry i pushed this back so long LOL. life gets in the way sometimes ya feel

jonquil

favorite thing about them: Hes Gorgeous (even if it feels like its played up a lil too much rip) least favorite thing about them: hes ssssssuch a fucking. latin lover ™ trope. like im going through his tag for fav line and he just doesnt have any good ones because theyre basically all about how hot he is. now featuring ‘tammy puts a portuguese phrase into like half of his quotes’ which is like. not. how people speak im pretty sure. and hopefully hes not like that in bup because thats just shitty writing but if he is? like there is potential to flip it around as it just being like a persona of his. he just acts that way around others so nobody actually... realizes just how Fuckt Up he is. but is she gonna follow that path? probably notfavorite line: he doesnt rly have any good ones as explained above but “at leasth they don’t just let any asshole become an agent” brOTP: SORREL and also i rly want to see post-fm him being friends w bella..... also marianOTP: daisy cosmo and also taloupenOTP: sorrel cause hes baby. also angelo. like in the timeline ive worked out for myself angelo was 15 almost 16 when he joined vi and jonquil was almost 18 so. not the Largest age gap but despite his height jonquil still more or less seems him as a teenager? idk man. also citronrandom headcanon: ok this is like an extension of what i talked about in least favorite........ hes really Not Okay. biggest thing is the incident and watching clem like.. literally almost die and shit. like thats gotta fuck someone up. plus i feel like depending on just how Shitty clem was to m & b, he kind of stopped being on board with all that once they reached their teens... kept going along with it not bc he wanted to but bc he didnt want the same shit pointed back at him.... also doesn’t have the greatest relationship with his family cause his parents divorced when he was a teenager only for his father to go and marry a fuckn cougar... plus like! finding out his familys wealth was built up illegally for the most part! hes fucked up! and his form of “coping” is getting drunk and high and going to parties and sleeping with strangers and not letting anyone in on how much of a disaster he is because hes hiding behind the facade of a party boy and as soon as anyone sees past that he has to own up to and deal with his problems and like he should do that but he doesnt Want To. he doesn’t let himself be emotionally vulnerable because he’s been bottling it all up and as soon as that hypothetical bottle cracks it’s all going to spill out. please get this sad man some help.just remembered another entirely different and not depressing headcanon. he drives a matte purple tesla. i live in Rich Fuck zone and i have on more than one occasion seen a matte purple tesla and obviously e musk is scum of the goddamn earth but like thats one sexy car bicth. and jonquils well aware that hes The Shittiest ! his dad got this car for him without actually like. asking jonquil or anything so hes just like SURE ill take it cause i dont really. have a choice. yeah. actually i lied he has thisunpopular opinion: tammy redesigned his bup hair a while ago and im not really a fan of the rly thick dreads. his hair in the pizza commission was 100x better song i associate with them: small bill$ - regina spektor, life of the party - all time low, roaring 20s - patd, heartbreaker - ah-mer-ah-su, carmen - lana del reyfavorite picture of them:

angelo

favorite thing about them: he is such a goddamn Good Boy. hes like seven feet of Has Never Done Anything Wrong. okay maybe hes done some things wrong but a lot less than other people. also he just has such a nice design? both in cct and in bup. hes the most beautiful boy ever in bup. but i cant talk about that. :( least favorite thing about them: ??? i dont even know... hes perfect... only flaw is that in canon hes a reasonable amount of ridiculously tall and not Truly ridiculously tall (as of the cct height chart hes 6ft/184cm)favorite line: “git gud” this whole thingbrOTP: tanrine obv... i think also logan whinter jonquil bella, maybe arnick and tetrox? also kirsikka. once he starts actually being social he jsut has A Lot Of Friends its good. logan and jonquil specifically are like Same Trauma solidarityOTP: im personally of the opinion of Not shipping him with anyone... depending on ages maybe merry (rd)? but also like. orca. idk what nadia/sheep/smadvil is doing in terms of repurposing her old ocs but New Orca is now named audrey and shes cutenOTP: tanrine, jonquil, citron?? idk. random headcanon: since he literally like never talks, when he does talk he talks A Lot and also has no control over his voice. also hes just got. so many health issues? some are things he was born with and some are acquired... a big one is celiac (along w a lot of other food allergies) he basically just eats like. fish. rice. chicken. other simple grains. its fineunpopular opinion: this isnt rly unpopular or anything but you know what would be REALLY GOOD? him and whinter as roommates in bup... air boys.... whinter gets used to The Birds eventuallysong i associate with them: ancient names pt. 1 & pt. 2 - lord huron, flip - glass animals, peppermint candy - lily & madeleine, magpie - the mountain goatsfavorite picture of them: like every picture where he has his mask off. so like.. over half the pictures of him out there? hes just so wonderful. 

and this is for BOTH of them

[andseperand]

thoughts

ive been sitting on this post for the better part of a year. i tried to read through it and make edits, but im going to have to post this as is. maybe ill be able to edit it someday. anyway, this is completely composed of spoilers.

tl;dr: i mostly wrote bitterness about “kung food,” “origins part 1,″ and “reflekta.”

these are my thoughts on what ive watched of the first season of miraculous ladybug (i have watched most of every episode except the last three).

i may be confused or misinformed on some points. some of this is not as serious as other parts, and the writing style is disjointed because i didnt write it all in one go. any links are formatted within brackets (as in [text]).

ordered by the order i initially watched (parts of) the episodes in and indicated by villain name somehow (english, korean, french, french translation, etc.).

stormy weather/climatika

why did alya just toss manon like that? she couldve hurt something just being thrown around with her tiny little bones and joints that lack any significant cushioning. not to mention that her neck is completely unsupported. safety, much?

the bubbler/le bulleur

so the record is fully functional but also survived getting smacked off a building on its edge? wow.

copycat/l’imposteur/the imposter

i get that alya is supposed to be that “go-getter” friend who pushes marinette to be brave, but honestly, if she had waited another minute for marinette to be more ready for making a phone call, this wouldve been less of a mess. yeah, i get the “pushing boundaries to build confidence,” but honestly we could have waited for marinette to stop stalking adrien, too.

i gotta say: marinette is truly fearless. my phone is so suspicious. i would not have the confidence to deliberately touch it with my face and risk contact with who knows what has been on it.

the “moral” or whatever of this episode is kind of unclear? steal someones phone and run into issues with security but then also somehow break into it and get what you want anyway? no, thats not okay. its not that funny that marinette legitimately stole someones phone, and she doesnt even get seriously reprimanded for this.

timebreaker/chronogirl

one of the most pressing questions i have for this episode is why no one thought of using pockets or a bag or something to hold this important watch. hand perspiration is pretty bad for a lot of older and newer mechanical objects alike. why is this clearly-important item treated any different? ive considered both the “tikki is in the bag” (doesnt mean it has to be marinettes bag) and the “girl pockets” (marinette designed her own clothes, though) possibilities, and im still stumped.

mister/monsieur/mr./m. pigeon

how did chloe know what the colors were or even what the embroidery pattern looked like from a pencil sketch? it looked like chicken scratch.

lady wifi

im not sure that “dont violate other peoples privacy” was very well stated, seeing as alya was landed with an unfairly harsh punishment due to corrupt politicians. and how did that get resolved, anyway? was she still suspended? was there even supposed to be a moral in this mess?

the pharaoh/le pharaon

the villain is a pharaoh, continuing the ages-long trend of pretending ancient egyptian culture is just ~so interesting~ and that its portrayal isnt exploitative at all. i cant really say much about this, but i dont like those special ancient egypt episodes of anything.

rogercop

a mess

im pretty sure that this was to save animation budget or something, but why was marinette picking up those croissants off the floor and arranging them so nicely as if it really mattered what she did with them besides cleaning up the spill? i guess ill let it slide if shes trained that way as an advertising thing (though advertising doesnt get a free pass by default just because its strange).

the evillustrator/evil artist/le dessinateur

off topic, but could that tablet also erase or create living beings?

dark cupid/le dislocoeur/heartbreaker

this was still technically a kiss without consent? doesnt really feel all that romantic and whatnot. i cant really get behind this as shipping material.

horrificator

side note: i really liked how chloes english voice actor delivered the lines mockingly announcing mylenes “award” in the beginning.

im not a fan of the “you must kiss as part of acting” plot point. it always gives off those peer pressure vibes from other people and opportunistic vibes from main characters who want to actually kiss the other person.

darkblade/le chevalier noir/the black knight

sabrina is honestly super lucky that marinette made her box have a hole big enough for super tiny animated character wrists or else she wouldve been in a world of more pain.

alya had a platform? im so confused about how this election worked. did they do ballots or some sort of “heads down” in-class vote thing?

the/le mime

seeing as people dont lose their memories of being attacked by the villains, i really dont see how tearing down the eiffel tower (even in an animated show where people are not in the structure at the time) is the best way to minimize traumatic experiences. i get that it was supposed to be a “wow” moment for the plot and just visual effects but not the appeal.

kung food

the second i ever laid my eyes on this name i knew it would be bad, i just didnt know how bad because there were just so many ways it couldve gone with that phrase and i didnt know what to expect until i actually watched the episode. more on this in a bit.

there was literally no point to having the famous chef be related to marinette other than contrived circumstances to get adrien into this episode. im using this as a launching off point for talk of other stuff.

why didnt marinettes parents do anything about a relative coming to their house? this really baffles me because they have their daughter meet an effective stranger with no help.

why didnt marinettes parents tell her what languages the relative spoke? honestly, it kind of seems like they just didnt even care if this would cause her extreme anxiety or anything. you would really think they would have at least discussed this as a family because it was made pretty clear that his visit was actually expected. i thought way higher of their characters until it seemed that they pulled this crap move.

i know it was supposed to be all cute and a bonding moment when adrien came over to translate, but it was even more of a disaster. why did they take a car literally around the corner to get to the hotel? why didnt the chef go directly to the hotel if it was so close? was that adriens car? who was in charge of organizing this event and making sure the contestants didnt end up in the wrong place? how in the world did the chef even get to the bakery? because of the close proximity of the hotel to the bakery, it doesnt make sense that he would go to the bakery instead from an airport or something? unless he was supposed to meet his relatives? which, in this case, was not facilitated at all? so many questions are raised.

i dont speak nor understand mandarin, but im pretty sure adriens wasnt good enough for him to actually be complimented for it. then again, its nothing new to see white people getting complimented for deigning to learn a ~foreign language~ while i get interrogated about my lack of “authenticity” for not speaking “my native tongue,” so i guess the writers were just being realistic.

he bowed...funny story, at least one time i went to a restaurant with other visibly asian people and the apparently-white waiter kept making this weird head bobbing motion every time they left the table and what im saying here is that i know adrien has presumably been learning about culture stuff, but i also know firsthand that creators really love to shove bowing into media whenever asian people show up. (that waiter did give us extra mints, so i guess that was nice.)

sarcasm alert: i love when ~asian~ people have ~asian~ accents. its not like this is a tired gimmick that i dont need to see literally everywhere i turn (oh, wait! according to the english version, it is! hooray for me! this is probably the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me ever! im not being sarcastic at all! or overly sarcastic to the point where im sarcastically putting in that everything ive written in this paragraph is sarcastic because im just so mad! or maybe it definitely is! it probably is all sarcasm!) [bonus sarcasm here]

the chefs english/default dub language fluency was either inconsistent or this was just a straight-up rude portrayal of a nonnative speaker of a language, because adrien didnt seem to wait five seconds (for the chef to even consider the question about what he was cooking) before talking to the chef (and naturally, being a polite person, the chef listened to what adrien was saying), and i feel like it was only for the sake of adrien being ~useful~ because right after that, he talks to the chef in english/whatever language? dont think i didnt notice that his english speaking got “better” after becoming a villain. you know, if they hadnt faked the accent in the first place, they wouldnt have had to hastily cover for the fact that their voice actor couldnt even execute it well.

im sure adrien and marinette tag-teaming to argue with chloe and her racist comments was supposed to be this whole “wow look at that team” deal, but it felt like adrien was shoehorned into this mess sloppily. woohoo for the white boy defending marinette because she cant do it herself or something! i do appreciate when white people help stand up for me, but in this context, it feels off.

i have such a big problem with the “pep talk” adrien gives marinette when she thinks the chef doesnt like her. first thing, white boy explaining things about a person of color to a person of color, and the two people are actually literally related? i think the bouquet misunderstanding was really bizarre, and when did adrien have time to gain all this extensive exposition? the interview when they first arrived was short, and i dont think that both adrien and the chef would be so rude as to exclude marinette from their conversation in the car on the way over. this just comes off as a way to have adrien ~encouraging~ marinette, and its not a very good one.

this supposedly super prestigious competition literally has no security to make sure no one is mucking around behind the scenes, let alone ensure that the contestants arent up to any funny business. because why not. and no cameras around either, because cooking-based television programs never show any cooking, just the tasting and subsequent subjugation by a villain (this is a sarcastic sentence). even if this is supposed to be a featured dish and thus one they dont want to showcase the recipe behind, they could still have those little soundbites interspersed with candid panorama shots (can you tell i have no idea what any of these words mean?). im just going to have to chalk this one up to animation budget and move on.

i know this was just a sort of (intendedly funny) visual thing, but i highly doubt that the objects chloe put in the soup could just go unnoticed, especially since i presume a chef would thoroughly stir (and taste) their cooking, and the soup didnt appear to have properties of decomposing things touching it. otherwise that tasting session would probably have turned out a little messier (i am completely kidding here).

why is the chef being upset about being sabotaged made into a ~cultural~ thing? why is a white boy telling marinette about her ~own~ culture? sheesh, its like you cant just be upset because your shot at a world title was ruined on live television and you have confirmation that you were deliberately sabotaged. yes, chloe did it because shes petty and racist, but the results of her actions could upset anyone! its not just because the chef is chinese! what is the point of saying that? its a pointless throwaway comment! why dont you just find some other way to get the chef alone so he can be become a villain that isnt a) nonsensical and b) making sweeping generalizations about people? (granted, i cant speak to the validity of anything said about cultures, but i sure can comment on why saying such things about them isnt okay regardless).

“kung food” oh my god. this is such a piece of crap name. it is racist. you can literally try to argue against this until youve gone far beyond oxygen deprivation and in a grave but itll still be racist by the time youre done. aside from the pharaoh, there arent a bunch of ~ethnic~ names (not that it would be okay for that to be the case anyway) running around, and yet we get one with this specific villain whose ethnic and national origin is talked to death? okay.

and ive seen this pointed out, but the villain appearance seems to have a kind of anime-inspired design, which is honestly a good laugh because who was just talking about not conflating china and japan again? weeaboos and sinaboos are often in the same boat.

okay, not related, but adrien just had to taste a suspicious substance off the floor. why. there are so many ways to figure out what a substance is before putting it in your mouth. or you could just not do that at all. before this point, they did not appear to suspect a food-related villain, so this couldve ended badly.

another side note: i dont know how that receipt retained its integrity long enough for ladybug to wrap the villain up after dipping it in the soup. do the magical items just have super special properties like extra toughness that allows them to defy the reality of paper receipts? i wonder how many of the things ive talked about in this post have been me marveling at the sturdiness of lucky charm items.

of course this turns into an ~accountability~ lesson for marinette. and chloe doesnt get reprimanded? yeah, she got booted off a panel she didnt even want to be on and no one actually clearly articulated to her that the things she said were absolutely unacceptable? then again, this is a “diversity episode,” so i dont know why my standards are so high.

wow, marinette really needed to have adrien encourage her before going to take a picture with her great-uncle? im going to be generous and allow that she wanted to make sure he would be okay with her ditching him for her much cooler great-uncle because she didnt want him to feel bad about how not-cool he is in comparison. there, you see what i mean about making up story elements? (though im really not much of a writer, oops.)

im so over people making fun of how others dress as a joke. before i realized that i am autistic and reflected back on my life, i didnt realize that i gravitate toward clothing i find comfortable rather than fashionable, and ive always gotten negative comments, ill-intended or otherwise. so i really didnt appreciate marinettes jab at chloe, even if it was to defend herself. it was just unnecessary.

i want to talk about the whole ~chinese representation~ thing in this show. yeah, i know marinette is one of the very few chinese and mixed main characters out there (and there are barely any that are both), but im going to be super honest about this: i dont think shes all that great. i am a big fan of her and this show, but that doesnt make it infallible. the fact that adrien of all people is telling her about her own culture is a huge failing in itself. i dont know everything about my own cultures, but its not cool to have a literal outsider being shown to be the expert on someones culture and be the one to guide them through that. theres barely any portrayal of sino stuff in the show as is, and i hate the way this is only shown as a kind of special episode topic. i would be way more fine with this if this wasnt basically the sole instance of discussion of marinettes heritage. and no, the fact that her mother wears stereotypical clothing doesnt count. at all.

okay, this has been a huge issue for me before and after this point, but it was in this episode that it was made abundantly clear just what we are dealing with. i know that it is completely possible, genetically speaking, for a mixed chinese and white person to have blue eyes. its also completely possible for a chinese person to have gray eyes even without being mixed (i say this because i dont know if her mother is monoracial). however, if you only have two confirmed recurring characters of chinese descent, and their eye colors are ~special~ colors...well, thats kind of iffy there. why is it that the minor chinese character has stereotypical eyes? theyre basically just expanded pupils for all intents and purposes, which is not the problem, because its possible to have irises that are so dark as to make figuring out whether they have a distinguishable brown tint to them really hard. anyway, i suppose i dont want to talk about things ahead in the season, but why is it that the background asian characters get the stereotypical eyes but the main characters who are asian get the special eye colors? (that was a rhetorical question. i know exactly why.)

im pretty that at some point in the creation of this villain name, someone patted themself on the back for being so ~clever~ like “haha kung food geddit? its like kung fu but with food because im actually not that creative and more racist than i would like to openly admit.” okay, i know im being a bit harsh. but its really annoying when one of the few things people “know” about sino people is that kung fu exists. and honestly, i kind of suspected this, but ive seen other people say that the villain more resembles a villain from anime, so...thats kind of disrespectful there...

the/le gamer

i really disliked marinettes combo move names. they all had ~asian~ words like lotus, jade, oriental, etc.

animan

i find the sniffing scene to be kind of creepy. personal space much?

the city has really high quality buses. i cant believe the bus didnt end up backfiring on their plan because if i know anything about buses its that the ones ive seen are probably way older and more decrepit than me.

antibug

how do the earrings work in this setting? as far as i can tell, it would make sense for chloe to have pierced ears and a pair of ladybug imitation earrings that she could put it, but how is it possible that ladybug was able to just pull the earrings off? because that could be a really, really messy situation if they are actually piercings with backings and everything, but is there an explanation for this? magnets, clips, anything?

the puppeteer/le marionnettiste

can that glowing bright red effect that comes from her yo-yo and the power cord being swung around just for the viewers, or can it actually be seen in-universe? or is that a null point because both items are generated by ladybugs magic?

reflekta

this show really didnt need any “haha look a ~guy~ in a dress” jokes. and honestly, this was ill handled (though arguably, its very existence was ill handled). first of all, im not the best judge of this kind of thing, but to me, ladybug felt out of character while mocking chat noir? honestly, marinette doesnt strike me as the type of person to find that kind of situation funny in the first place, so the premise doesnt really hold up in my opinion. i know marinette can make mistakes, but youd really think she would be more open to not thinking this way because she knows what its like to be bullied for other things. moving on... [though, to reiterate]

the way this was not addressed? at all? yeah, ladybug apologized for that one comment at the beginning of their conversation, but then she continued to make jokes at chat noirs expense, and it just wasnt as funny as it was probably intended to be?

i know the whole thing about ambiguous chronology, but there is no reason ladybug wouldnt take chat noirs opinion into account when planning for things anyway. it felt like that part was written specifically so he could “prove” his worth to the rest of the episode and ensure that, yes, he is still allowed to be in it after being turned into a reflekta lookalike, and the whole thing smacks of trying to write out of a corner...that was written into in the first place. if it hadnt gone the route it did with the mocking of appearances, i dont think it would have had to be as convoluted as it ended up being.

i personally dont care for high heels, but i dont get the kind of “fashion cracks” that were being made about them. like yes, high heels can be hard to move in? yeah, it isnt fun being turned into the appearance of someone who isnt you against your will? i just dont understand this gag.

guitar villain

did ladybug really honestly just full-on spray someone in the face with the contents of an aerosol can? im aware that the point was that the hair was in front of his face, but what if some had gotten into guitar villains eyes? dang, what if someone tries to emulate this in real life? ouch.

digital/numeric

kind of done with the spotlight on stalking behavior this show has.

marinette still shows no fear of suspicious screens. she continues to use parts of her face to touch one multiple times, never mind that she literally flings her yoyo all over the place.

stoneheart/coeur de pierre i

did marinette have pierced ears in the first place? shes not shown taking any earrings out, and we dont get that clear a view of her earlobes anyway. that might be deliberate for modeling budget and all.

master fu has brown eyes. so thats like four ~chinese~ characters that are in this show, and the main character and her mother have the special eye colors, and the minor character who is somewhat important to the plotline has non-black eyes, and the minor one-episode character has the black eyes. what a shining example of diversity (no).

anyway this is a good point to say that some things are just not for you. there are things that you just cant be a part of no matter how much you want to be because it just doesnt work that way. and the mess that is the miraculous “mythology” is definitely an example of this. i myself have very little knowledge of anything sino, but i sure as heck can spot that this...”history” thing is so off.

at this point i should probably mention i really dislike master fu as a character in general. just as a single point, apparently hes based off the teacher character in karate kid? i saw somewhere that the creator said he basically made marinette mixed because he was dating an asian person when he was thinking about the show and that marinette is basically his idea of their mixed kid? and back to the eye color thing (again), ive even seen someone with green eyes and blue hair suggest to him that they could be the child of marinette and adrien, and he said theyre like his grandchild? (im not really inclined to try to dig up an iron-clad, indisputably genuine source for this right now, but if youre honestly searching for completely serious, well-researched information in a really good quality post, this is not the post you are looking for.) i have no idea where i was even going with this paragraph.

stoneheart/coeur de pierre ii

why is marinette so invested in her crush on adrien? this couldve been a sweet crush, but no, she has to make it so creepy? leading up to this episode, i really didnt know what to expect because i really thought there would be some sort of explanation for just how extreme the lengths marinette goes to are, but from what i can tell, shes just being super invasive? the ambiguous timeline doesnt really help with this, nor does the fact that the origins episodes were aired at the end of the season. whatever characterization was supposed to be inferred from this feels choppy and unnecessary.

simon says/jackady/jacques a dit

i dont really blame her, but ladybug totally could have reduced the level of adrien distractedness going on here. shes previously shown signs of compartmentalizing ladybug and even having to face the fact that it isnt worth using up her power over adrien, but gosh golly, what gives?

princess/princesse fragrance

ive seen criticisms of how ladybug was written to be overly competent in this episode, which i think is fair since it keeps happening, and its so late in the season by this point that its gotten tired.

volpina

i try not to be too judgmental, but frankly, adrien is not that great of a prize.

anyway, from what i can tell about this episode, i think that there was too much on marinettes flaws, which i really think is a bit much to have in the last chronological episode of a season. its already been established that she makes mistakes with her decisions, but i just thought her unequal prioritization of adrien was too much. it just seemed contrived to squeeze in scenes that the creators wanted to animate regardless of overall context in the show, which is really unfortunate because of how the show becomes a little less chronologically ambiguous at this point.

[drippeddaily]

Album of the Year #5: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane) - volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Album of the Year #5: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane) - volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Artist: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane)

Album: volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.

Label: Self-Released

Release Date: January 29, 2017

Listen:

YouTube

Spotify

Bandcamp

Apple Music

Background

Bedwetter is the latest pseudonym of Travis Miller, best known as Lil Ugly Mane. For a more extensive history of Miller and his work as Lil Ugly Mane before the release of this album, check out my /r/indieheads For Your Consideration write-up on Oblivion Access, as this background is going to mainly focus on what led to the release of his debut project under the Bedwetter album.

After releasing Oblivion Access in late 2015, Miller, as Lil Ugly Mane, formed the group Secret Circle with frequent collaborator Antwon and Wiki (of Ratking) in 2016 and the group has released a few singles, including “KEEP IT LOW”, “SATELLITE” ft. Despot and “Tube Socks”, since the formation of the group. The Bedwetter project was teased in December 2016 with this Facebook post and the release of the singles “selfish” and “stoop lights.”

Finally, volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present. was released on January 29, 2017 on the Lil Ugly Mane Bandcamp after a concerning post on Facebook that has since been taken down. A day after the release, Miller made a new statement on the Lil Ugly Mane Facebook page after receiving a few emails from people asking about the album and what led to its release. The statement is, as below:

I keep getting emails from people.

I wrote this the day before Bedwetter was recorded.

All i could do, all i can do is write poems and basically a polemic yelp review into the notepad on my phone.

what else can i do.

im not gonna get into my own shit on some specific level because fuck you, i dont know you. pay attention to yourself.

but i feel like this is the best way i can explain shit.

polemic yelp review of american heath care system:

"After a lifetime of avoiding this shit. Ignoring this shit. FInding myself confused.

After 3 months of sleeplessly, anxiously glaring into the eyes of an old monster that suddenly grew a new head.

3 months of forgetting who i was. What i was doing.

I knew something had to happen. I'd known this for a while.

I had been reaching out

Calling.

Emailing.

After continuous unsuccessful attempts for months to contact psychiatrists and doctors, I reluctantly checked into the hospital today.

I thought maybe i could get a much needed psych evaluation and hopefully receive some sort of treatment, perhaps even simply a referral and/or an appointment to go see somebody else who could provide that.

I didn't know what else to do.

What else are you supposed to do.

For six hours I sat nervously twitching and in a freezing waiting room.

Whimpering old men being completely overtaken by their Alzheimer's.

Vomiting children.

Bleeding Fingers.

Ugly loud sagging losers who were obviously constantly there.

Begging for attention with some new ailment and concern.

Their broken humilated spouse at their side.

I was anxious and horrified by the idea of a potential forced or even voluntary intake to a psychiatric facility.

Surrending my freedom.

Surrender of my routines.

After six hours of constantly reassuring myself I was doing the right thing, I was finally seen.

Led down a hallway into a bare concrete cell with a small bed in the center. Dim lights. scratches on the drab walls.

Grates in the floor to catch whatever bodily fluids they have to hose out of there.

One of the walls was one of those steel doors that the corner store pulls down at the end of the night.

Not sure what that was about.

Empty though.

A bed and a chair.

Somebody had carved "slipknot sucks" into the plastic bed that was bolted to the floor. Seems fitting.

You're the same, you're basically just a stupid fucking sad teenager right now. You're pathetic. Good luck getting better idiot.

I was given a gown and my belongings were inventoried and confiscated.

I sat and waited in my gown.

Eventually, Two skittish nurses and some community college educated social worker baby-talked their questions to me as a lurching police officer glared at me disgustedly over their shoulders.

I'd chosen to go in at a time where I was feeling okay so i would be fully able to articulate and describe the symptoms I was experiencing so I could potentially receive the most accurate treatment. I thought that made the most sense.

I didn't want to wait until I was in the midst of some anxious episode and having to hyperventilate my troubles out thru a salty humiliated fog. I thought that made the most sense.

I sat and calmy described my symptoms. I tried to convey how terrified i was. I tried to tell them i couldnt do it anymore.

This was received with a couple bored nods and sparse notes being jotted down on a clipboard.

Eventually i was hurried along and any complexity of my disease was all quickly reduced to two simple questions:

"Are you suicidal? Do you wanna hurt anyone else?"

No.

No I don't. I can't think of anything I wanna do less than die, I can't think of anything that frightens me or gives me more anxiety than the uncertainty of what happens when you die.

No.

No I don't actively want to hurt anyone, to be honest, the fact that I voluntarily came in here could be seen as an indication that I'm absolutely exhausted and desperate to stop hurting myself and everyone else by not confronting this shit for so long.

wrong answer.

I was discharged. handed back my clothes, given a xeroxed list of some websites about suicide prevention and a "feel better" or some other equally patronizing verbal pat on the back.

Back right where I started.

Nobody is gonna help me.

Our current mental healthcare system is absolute shit.

Absolute shit that absolutely incentivizes violence and self harm by categorizing it as the sole interpretation of "severity" worth treating.

By making the idea of treatment feel so utterly hopeless to people who already exist and drown in their hopelessness.

Fuck your resources. Fuck being understaffed. Fuck your stupid priorities. You're incompetent .

Here let me clear out some space for you. Free up some of your time. Empty some rooms.

On hurting yourself:

This is a complex issue, but to briefly put it, I believe a suicidal individual should not only be afforded that right, but after some legislatively decided period of time and therapy and education to ward off impulsiveness and melodrama, the same way they treat anybody undergoing assisted suicide. A process. they should be given a safe clean environment and chemicals to facilitate their decision, no matter the reasoning. grow up.

On hurting someone else:

This is not a complex issue. As far as recidivist violent degenerate squealing psychopaths...rabid dogs just need a bullet to the head.

I've read old yeller.

They dont care. Neither do I.

boo hoo.

Conversely:

lock them in a room and keep them safe.

Is this really that hard?

"Are you an immediate threat to yourself or others are you?"

How about instead of prioritizing that question we focus more on:

"Im so tired and exhausted of constantly hurting myself and everyone around me"

Be passing over someone like me, a person who, on their own volition, came to you for help. A person who desperately wants help. You are simply and plainly creating more and more and more people who will eventually be slobbering immediate threats to themselves and all of mankind.

It creates that understanding.

In an already fractured damaged mind it is an entirely reasonable assertion that you would potentially have to commit an act of violence against yourself or others just to receive treatment. even if you didn't want to.

even if that wasn't a real compulsion.

a last resort.

This system has a very real potential to turn people who voluntarily seek help, people who aren't yet completely overtaken by their illness, into violent suicidal monsters because you are dangling their own treatment on a string in front of them, scoffing at their pitiful attempt at recovery and demanding they need to do more.

"well shit, if you want help yr gonna have to try a lot harder than that buddy, haha, comeback after you snapped a random person's neck in a grocery store and cut off all the fingers on your left hand with some scissors, fucking poser".

I'll get better one day.

Not today.

Maybe I'll have fingers.

Maybe I won't."

thanks for the well wishes.

i'm fine.

i'm just angry.

i'm not the only person dealing with this and i've lived a full, somewhat interesting life.

i hate that you are dealing with this.

Review

I don’t really know where to begin with this. volume 1, since its release, has been an incredibly difficult album to listen to due the the background and the depressing lyrical content. This isn’t the first album of 2017 to bring out a similar reaction in me, as the same can be said about Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Both are extremely painful looks at the narrator’s mental health and the events that led its deterioration. For Phil Elverum, it was the death of his wife, Geneviève, after her battle with cancer. For Travis Miller, it was the failure of the American healthcare system when his cries for help were silenced.

Miller’s music, specifically his work as Lil Ugly Mane, is deeply important to me. MISTA THUG ISOLATION and the singles he released before Oblivion Access were all extremely formative in developing my music taste and opened my ears to a lot of new sounds and expressions. Up until the release of volume 1, Miller had always took a more abstract approach to his mental health struggles, and even outright denied his music as Lil Ugly Mane held some deeper meaning. I implied in my write-up for Oblivion Access that it was the first time we were truly hearing a Travis Miller project, but it’s safe to say after listening to volume 1, I might have jumped the gun.

The album begins with the short but cryptic “john”, a remixed and chopped up reading of the Bible verse John 1:1, repeatedly fixating on “was God” before roughly transitioning into “man wearing a helmet.” Distant piano chords, rain, a chopped up female vocal sample, a father talking about his child, a jury reading out a verdict, a man asking another if he and his wife have thought about moving, a father now being interviewed about his child being kidnapped, another female voice that’s hard to decipher but is definitely talking about this child, and a drone playing behind all these people talking leads into the album’s first verse, as Miller describes another person’s childhood memories like ripping bark out of trees, pretending to be Superman, and wearing mismatched pairs of Chucks. These memories quickly turn into just that as we now cut to Miller describing this child being kidnapped: “He's a sitting duck, didn't hear the car pull up / Thought his arm broke when they shoved him in the trunk.”

This story continues as Miller further describes the child’s circumstances after being thrown in the trunk at an almost breakneck pace, seemingly trying to through the story as fast as he can before he breaks down. It’s all extremely traumatizing to hear, as the child begins to fear the worst as he looks back: “He miss his mom's affection / He miss the dinosaur blanket on the bed that he slept in / Miss throwing sticks so the dog would go fetch 'em / Missed makin' forts in the woods with his best friend.”

In the third verse, the car eventually reaches its destination and the child is carried to the kidnapper’s shelter, being led down into a dark stairwell into a lair, the only thing he can see being the “bluish glow of television flickers.” As the child continues to describe their worry at what’s to come, the listener is hit with a gut punch as “he” becomes “I,” as the child Miller was describing the whole time was really himself, revealing the origin story of where his battles with mental health begin as the hook plays on with Miller asking himself questions about this event, with all the answers being “I just don’t remember,” as he has repressed his memories of the kidnapping.

While “man wearing a helmet” looks at his past, “stoop lights” cuts to the modern day, with running static/crinkling, a dizzying string sample, synthetic bass, hi-hats, bass drums, and hand claps building the song’s foundation, as Miller begins rapping about what it’s like to be inside his head with no pretensions or greater abstract meanings. His self-hatred has evolved beyond hatred, as Miller simply wants nothing to do with himself any longer, retreating to alcohol and substance abuse to take away the pain of living, pushing himself towards death. The only light he sees are literal ones, as his description of watching them flicker in the hook leads further describing his problems with alcohol and how it’s led to his family leaving him behind.

Miller’s descriptions of his deteriorating mental state are as compelling as they are downright disturbing to here. It’s still slightly jarring to hear the man who rapped “Slick Rick said treat 'em like a prostitute” talk about alcohol abuse and depression so openly, but that’s what makes volume 1 so fascinating, as it’s essentially Miller throwing in the towel, no longer resorting to an exaggerated gangster persona or gross abstractions, but trying to describe what’s happening in his head and around him without any bullshit.

This no bullshit approach is best put to use in “haze of interference”, which starts off with a repeating sample of a man sing-talking “I’m not sure what it was,” with the rest of the song seeing Miller at not only his most angry, but his most desperate, backed behind menacing synths, distant piano chords, boom bap drums and rattling hi-hats that go back and forth in intensity. One of my favorite lines of the whole album comes out of this first verse and it’s such a simple, but perfect description of crippling depression, as Miller raps towards the end: “Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green.” The second verse sees Miller spitting with more fury than we’ve ever seen, rapping at himself expressing his anger with himself at how he deals with his problems, how he shows himself to his friends and family, and most importantly how his fans see him, with Miller breaking from rapping at “you” to rapping the line “You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?”

The whole song could end there and still leave a massive impact, but Miller keeps going lamenting the fact that he could disappear and almost no one in his immediate life would notice or care, going from referencing the Jonas Jonasson novel The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared to straight up saying “If I was glass I'd revert back to sand.” Miller ends the verse by completely shattering the fourth wall he previously damaged with the final lines “I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall / Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all,” delivered as Miller’s voice finally cracks as the song plays out for another two minutes with a fuller Jandek sample seen in the song’s intro, before sourly fading out.

And that’s the last we hear of Miller on volume 1, as the second-to-final track “this in not my stomach” features a bizarre and disturbing whisper behind a brooding instrumental, with the lyrics possibly hinting that the song is written in the perspective of the depression itself, trying to convince the host body it’s inhabiting to cut out its stomach, almost like an entity from the Black Lodge. Then, the album ends with “cave yourself over,” a lo-fi piano ballad that simply allows you to sit there and think, taking in all you’ve heard.

volume 1 sees a man afraid. A man backed into a corner. A man calling for help. A man who simply just wants to be understood after purposefully obscuring himself for so long. Music was always the thing Travis Miller could resort back to, something to distract him from his mental troubles. Travis Miller the person and Travis Miller the musician were always supposed to be separated. Then, he finally tried to get help and was humiliated, forcing the two to converge in what became Bedwetter. While mental health awareness is at an all time high in America, there’s still a ton of progress to be made as can be seen by Miller’s story. The final note I want to leave this review on isn’t my own, but Miller’s, as it’s the final paragraph of the album’s Bandcamp description:

I really thought today someone would recognize my courage, as i handed over power just to reconcile my purpose, that I needed something urgent. I was eager just to learn it. I just wanna person, lord I'm weary from this burden.

Favorite Lyrics

Crouched down by the tree at his neighbors

He liked the way the bark ripped off like paper

He pretended he was Superman, eyes had lasers

Every step he took turned earth into craters

Little brown jacket, Lee jeans with a cuff

Bowl cut, blue and yellow mismatched Chucks

“man wearing a helmet”

Waking up in situations

Feeling like I'm living in suspended animation

Guess I'm still sober on occasion

And that's enough for me to rationalize inebriation

“stoop lights”

I told you I ain’t right, you knew it going in

Just shut the fuck up if you wanna be a friend

I don’t want to stretch you more than you extend

I don’t want to spit in the hand that you lend

I did it to myself, I get what I deserve

Thoughts in my head, feel like a raw nerve

I’m lookin' for an answer, I don’t want to hurt but

I just want to sleep when I’m tired of earth

“stoop lights”

Foggy little planet where your groping hands to touch a scream

Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green

Bashful baby boy, so distracted by my toys

Rode a tractor from Wyoming to Chicago, Illinois

On a carpet of the 50 states, part of me disintegrates

The only thing I'm left with is the part I can't articulate

“haze of interference”

You're never getting better, you're addicted to the madness

You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?

“haze of interference”

If I was glass I'd revert back to sand

Scattered through the sea, I could pass through your hands

None of this will happen, nothing will ever

The things that I believe can never ever happen

I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall

Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all

“haze of interference”

Talking Points

How does volume 1 hold up to Travis’ work as Lil Ugly Mane? Is it better, worse, or a whole new beast entirely?

What are your thoughts on the production? Is it a natural evolution from Oblivion Access?

What do you think about the album’s lyrical content? Does the album’s desperate origins come across in the writing?

I also want to open up this thread as a discussion for mental health. How have you dealt with your own mental health troubles? Are they similar to Miller’s experiences?

And finally, where does this album land on your year-end list?

Thanks for reading and big thanks to /u/TheRoyalGodfrey for letting me do this again this year and for bringing Album of the Year over from /r/hiphopheads! We’re currently in the midst of our third Album of the Year series over at /r/indieheads, so if you want to come over and give us some love, that’d be greatly appreciated! You can view what we’ve done so far and what we’ve got coming up over here, and make sure to come back tomorrow on this subreddit as /u/ImWaal talks Rick Ross’ Rather You Than Me.

Artist: Bedwetter (Lil Ugly Mane)Album: volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present.Label: Self-ReleasedRelease Date: January 29, 2017Listen:YouTubeSpotifyBandcampApple MusicBackgroundBedwetter is the latest pseudonym of Travis Miller, best known as Lil Ugly Mane. For a more extensive history of Miller and his work as Lil Ugly Mane before the release of this album, check out my /r/indieheads For Your Consideration write-up on Oblivion Access, as this background is going to mainly focus on what led to the release of his debut project under the Bedwetter album.After releasing Oblivion Access in late 2015, Miller, as Lil Ugly Mane, formed the group Secret Circle with frequent collaborator Antwon and Wiki (of Ratking) in 2016 and the group has released a few singles, including “KEEP IT LOW”, “SATELLITE” ft. Despot and “Tube Socks”, since the formation of the group. The Bedwetter project was teased in December 2016 with this Facebook post and the release of the singles “selfish” and “stoop lights.”Finally, volume 1: flick your tongue against your teeth and describe the present. was released on January 29, 2017 on the Lil Ugly Mane Bandcamp after a concerning post on Facebook that has since been taken down. A day after the release, Miller made a new statement on the Lil Ugly Mane Facebook page after receiving a few emails from people asking about the album and what led to its release. The statement is, as below:I keep getting emails from people.I wrote this the day before Bedwetter was recorded.All i could do, all i can do is write poems and basically a polemic yelp review into the notepad on my phone.what else can i do.im not gonna get into my own shit on some specific level because fuck you, i dont know you. pay attention to yourself.but i feel like this is the best way i can explain shit.polemic yelp review of american heath care system:"After a lifetime of avoiding this shit. Ignoring this shit. FInding myself confused.After 3 months of sleeplessly, anxiously glaring into the eyes of an old monster that suddenly grew a new head.3 months of forgetting who i was. What i was doing.I knew something had to happen. I'd known this for a while.I had been reaching outCalling.Emailing.After continuous unsuccessful attempts for months to contact psychiatrists and doctors, I reluctantly checked into the hospital today.I thought maybe i could get a much needed psych evaluation and hopefully receive some sort of treatment, perhaps even simply a referral and/or an appointment to go see somebody else who could provide that.I didn't know what else to do.What else are you supposed to do.For six hours I sat nervously twitching and in a freezing waiting room.Whimpering old men being completely overtaken by their Alzheimer's.Vomiting children.Bleeding Fingers.Ugly loud sagging losers who were obviously constantly there.Begging for attention with some new ailment and concern.Their broken humilated spouse at their side.I was anxious and horrified by the idea of a potential forced or even voluntary intake to a psychiatric facility.Surrending my freedom.Surrender of my routines.After six hours of constantly reassuring myself I was doing the right thing, I was finally seen.Led down a hallway into a bare concrete cell with a small bed in the center. Dim lights. scratches on the drab walls.Grates in the floor to catch whatever bodily fluids they have to hose out of there.One of the walls was one of those steel doors that the corner store pulls down at the end of the night.Not sure what that was about.Empty though.A bed and a chair.Somebody had carved "slipknot sucks" into the plastic bed that was bolted to the floor. Seems fitting.You're the same, you're basically just a stupid fucking sad teenager right now. You're pathetic. Good luck getting better idiot.I was given a gown and my belongings were inventoried and confiscated.I sat and waited in my gown.Eventually, Two skittish nurses and some community college educated social worker baby-talked their questions to me as a lurching police officer glared at me disgustedly over their shoulders.I'd chosen to go in at a time where I was feeling okay so i would be fully able to articulate and describe the symptoms I was experiencing so I could potentially receive the most accurate treatment. I thought that made the most sense.I didn't want to wait until I was in the midst of some anxious episode and having to hyperventilate my troubles out thru a salty humiliated fog. I thought that made the most sense.I sat and calmy described my symptoms. I tried to convey how terrified i was. I tried to tell them i couldnt do it anymore.This was received with a couple bored nods and sparse notes being jotted down on a clipboard.Eventually i was hurried along and any complexity of my disease was all quickly reduced to two simple questions:"Are you suicidal? Do you wanna hurt anyone else?"No.No I don't. I can't think of anything I wanna do less than die, I can't think of anything that frightens me or gives me more anxiety than the uncertainty of what happens when you die.No.No I don't actively want to hurt anyone, to be honest, the fact that I voluntarily came in here could be seen as an indication that I'm absolutely exhausted and desperate to stop hurting myself and everyone else by not confronting this shit for so long.wrong answer.I was discharged. handed back my clothes, given a xeroxed list of some websites about suicide prevention and a "feel better" or some other equally patronizing verbal pat on the back.Back right where I started.Nobody is gonna help me.Our current mental healthcare system is absolute shit.Absolute shit that absolutely incentivizes violence and self harm by categorizing it as the sole interpretation of "severity" worth treating.By making the idea of treatment feel so utterly hopeless to people who already exist and drown in their hopelessness.Fuck your resources. Fuck being understaffed. Fuck your stupid priorities. You're incompetent .Here let me clear out some space for you. Free up some of your time. Empty some rooms.On hurting yourself:This is a complex issue, but to briefly put it, I believe a suicidal individual should not only be afforded that right, but after some legislatively decided period of time and therapy and education to ward off impulsiveness and melodrama, the same way they treat anybody undergoing assisted suicide. A process. they should be given a safe clean environment and chemicals to facilitate their decision, no matter the reasoning. grow up.On hurting someone else:This is not a complex issue. As far as recidivist violent degenerate squealing psychopaths...rabid dogs just need a bullet to the head.I've read old yeller.They dont care. Neither do I.boo hoo.Conversely:lock them in a room and keep them safe.Is this really that hard?"Are you an immediate threat to yourself or others are you?"How about instead of prioritizing that question we focus more on:"Im so tired and exhausted of constantly hurting myself and everyone around me"Be passing over someone like me, a person who, on their own volition, came to you for help. A person who desperately wants help. You are simply and plainly creating more and more and more people who will eventually be slobbering immediate threats to themselves and all of mankind.It creates that understanding.In an already fractured damaged mind it is an entirely reasonable assertion that you would potentially have to commit an act of violence against yourself or others just to receive treatment. even if you didn't want to.even if that wasn't a real compulsion.a last resort.This system has a very real potential to turn people who voluntarily seek help, people who aren't yet completely overtaken by their illness, into violent suicidal monsters because you are dangling their own treatment on a string in front of them, scoffing at their pitiful attempt at recovery and demanding they need to do more."well shit, if you want help yr gonna have to try a lot harder than that buddy, haha, comeback after you snapped a random person's neck in a grocery store and cut off all the fingers on your left hand with some scissors, fucking poser".I'll get better one day.Not today.Maybe I'll have fingers.Maybe I won't."thanks for the well wishes.i'm fine.i'm just angry.i'm not the only person dealing with this and i've lived a full, somewhat interesting life.i hate that you are dealing with this.ReviewI don’t really know where to begin with this. volume 1, since its release, has been an incredibly difficult album to listen to due the the background and the depressing lyrical content. This isn’t the first album of 2017 to bring out a similar reaction in me, as the same can be said about Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Both are extremely painful looks at the narrator’s mental health and the events that led its deterioration. For Phil Elverum, it was the death of his wife, Geneviève, after her battle with cancer. For Travis Miller, it was the failure of the American healthcare system when his cries for help were silenced.Miller’s music, specifically his work as Lil Ugly Mane, is deeply important to me. MISTA THUG ISOLATION and the singles he released before Oblivion Access were all extremely formative in developing my music taste and opened my ears to a lot of new sounds and expressions. Up until the release of volume 1, Miller had always took a more abstract approach to his mental health struggles, and even outright denied his music as Lil Ugly Mane held some deeper meaning. I implied in my write-up for Oblivion Access that it was the first time we were truly hearing a Travis Miller project, but it’s safe to say after listening to volume 1, I might have jumped the gun.The album begins with the short but cryptic “john”, a remixed and chopped up reading of the Bible verse John 1:1, repeatedly fixating on “was God” before roughly transitioning into “man wearing a helmet.” Distant piano chords, rain, a chopped up female vocal sample, a father talking about his child, a jury reading out a verdict, a man asking another if he and his wife have thought about moving, a father now being interviewed about his child being kidnapped, another female voice that’s hard to decipher but is definitely talking about this child, and a drone playing behind all these people talking leads into the album’s first verse, as Miller describes another person’s childhood memories like ripping bark out of trees, pretending to be Superman, and wearing mismatched pairs of Chucks. These memories quickly turn into just that as we now cut to Miller describing this child being kidnapped: “He's a sitting duck, didn't hear the car pull up / Thought his arm broke when they shoved him in the trunk.”This story continues as Miller further describes the child’s circumstances after being thrown in the trunk at an almost breakneck pace, seemingly trying to through the story as fast as he can before he breaks down. It’s all extremely traumatizing to hear, as the child begins to fear the worst as he looks back: “He miss his mom's affection / He miss the dinosaur blanket on the bed that he slept in / Miss throwing sticks so the dog would go fetch 'em / Missed makin' forts in the woods with his best friend.”In the third verse, the car eventually reaches its destination and the child is carried to the kidnapper’s shelter, being led down into a dark stairwell into a lair, the only thing he can see being the “bluish glow of television flickers.” As the child continues to describe their worry at what’s to come, the listener is hit with a gut punch as “he” becomes “I,” as the child Miller was describing the whole time was really himself, revealing the origin story of where his battles with mental health begin as the hook plays on with Miller asking himself questions about this event, with all the answers being “I just don’t remember,” as he has repressed his memories of the kidnapping.While “man wearing a helmet” looks at his past, “stoop lights” cuts to the modern day, with running static/crinkling, a dizzying string sample, synthetic bass, hi-hats, bass drums, and hand claps building the song’s foundation, as Miller begins rapping about what it’s like to be inside his head with no pretensions or greater abstract meanings. His self-hatred has evolved beyond hatred, as Miller simply wants nothing to do with himself any longer, retreating to alcohol and substance abuse to take away the pain of living, pushing himself towards death. The only light he sees are literal ones, as his description of watching them flicker in the hook leads further describing his problems with alcohol and how it’s led to his family leaving him behind.Miller’s descriptions of his deteriorating mental state are as compelling as they are downright disturbing to here. It’s still slightly jarring to hear the man who rapped “Slick Rick said treat 'em like a prostitute” talk about alcohol abuse and depression so openly, but that’s what makes volume 1 so fascinating, as it’s essentially Miller throwing in the towel, no longer resorting to an exaggerated gangster persona or gross abstractions, but trying to describe what’s happening in his head and around him without any bullshit.This no bullshit approach is best put to use in “haze of interference”, which starts off with a repeating sample of a man sing-talking “I’m not sure what it was,” with the rest of the song seeing Miller at not only his most angry, but his most desperate, backed behind menacing synths, distant piano chords, boom bap drums and rattling hi-hats that go back and forth in intensity. One of my favorite lines of the whole album comes out of this first verse and it’s such a simple, but perfect description of crippling depression, as Miller raps towards the end: “Greener on the other side, how about nothing's green.” The second verse sees Miller spitting with more fury than we’ve ever seen, rapping at himself expressing his anger with himself at how he deals with his problems, how he shows himself to his friends and family, and most importantly how his fans see him, with Miller breaking from rapping at “you” to rapping the line “You're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?”The whole song could end there and still leave a massive impact, but Miller keeps going lamenting the fact that he could disappear and almost no one in his immediate life would notice or care, going from referencing the Jonas Jonasson novel The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared to straight up saying “If I was glass I'd revert back to sand.” Miller ends the verse by completely shattering the fourth wall he previously damaged with the final lines “I'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wall / Pick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all,” delivered as Miller’s voice finally cracks as the song plays out for another two minutes with a fuller Jandek sample seen in the song’s intro, before sourly fading out.And that’s the last we hear of Miller on volume 1, as the second-to-final track “this in not my stomach” features a bizarre and disturbing whisper behind a brooding instrumental, with the lyrics possibly hinting that the song is written in the perspective of the depression itself, trying to convince the host body it’s inhabiting to cut out its stomach, almost like an entity from the Black Lodge. Then, the album ends with “cave yourself over,” a lo-fi piano ballad that simply allows you to sit there and think, taking in all you’ve heard.volume 1 sees a man afraid. A man backed into a corner. A man calling for help. A man who simply just wants to be understood after purposefully obscuring himself for so long. Music was always the thing Travis Miller could resort back to, something to distract him from his mental troubles. Travis Miller the person and Travis Miller the musician were always supposed to be separated. Then, he finally tried to get help and was humiliated, forcing the two to converge in what became Bedwetter. While mental health awareness is at an all time high in America, there’s still a ton of progress to be made as can be seen by Miller’s story. The final note I want to leave this review on isn’t my own, but Miller’s, as it’s the final paragraph of the album’s Bandcamp description:I really thought today someone would recognize my courage, as i handed over power just to reconcile my purpose, that I needed something urgent. I was eager just to learn it. I just wanna person, lord I'm weary from this burden.Favorite LyricsCrouched down by the tree at his neighborsHe liked the way the bark ripped off like paperHe pretended he was Superman, eyes had lasersEvery step he took turned earth into cratersLittle brown jacket, Lee jeans with a cuffBowl cut, blue and yellow mismatched Chucks“man wearing a helmet”Waking up in situationsFeeling like I'm living in suspended animationGuess I'm still sober on occasionAnd that's enough for me to rationalize inebriation“stoop lights”I told you I ain’t right, you knew it going inJust shut the fuck up if you wanna be a friendI don’t want to stretch you more than you extendI don’t want to spit in the hand that you lendI did it to myself, I get what I deserveThoughts in my head, feel like a raw nerveI’m lookin' for an answer, I don’t want to hurt butI just want to sleep when I’m tired of earth“stoop lights”Foggy little planet where your groping hands to touch a screamGreener on the other side, how about nothing's greenBashful baby boy, so distracted by my toysRode a tractor from Wyoming to Chicago, IllinoisOn a carpet of the 50 states, part of me disintegratesThe only thing I'm left with is the part I can't articulate“haze of interference”You're never getting better, you're addicted to the madnessYou're treated like a muse, are you happy now, Travis?“haze of interference”If I was glass I'd revert back to sandScattered through the sea, I could pass through your handsNone of this will happen, nothing will everThe things that I believe can never ever happenI'm standing by a microphone and yelling at a wallPick a thousand names, you're still nobody at all“haze of interference”Talking PointsHow does volume 1 hold up to Travis’ work as Lil Ugly Mane? Is it better, worse, or a whole new beast entirely?What are your thoughts on the production? Is it a natural evolution from Oblivion Access?What do you think about the album’s lyrical content? Does the album’s desperate origins come across in the writing?I also want to open up this thread as a discussion for mental health. How have you dealt with your own mental health troubles? Are they similar to Miller’s experiences?And finally, where does this album land on your year-end list?Thanks for reading and big thanks to /u/TheRoyalGodfrey for letting me do this again this year and for bringing Album of the Year over from /r/hiphopheads! We’re currently in the midst of our third Album of the Year series over at /r/indieheads, so if you want to come over and give us some love, that’d be greatly appreciated! You can view what we’ve done so far and what we’ve got coming up over here, and make sure to come back tomorrow on this subreddit as /u/ImWaal talks Rick Ross’ Rather You Than Me.