#but she’s so used to being defensive and not listened to
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Man I love Katherine So Much
#katherine pulitzer#newsies#her laugh is kind of a cackle#and she has made herself cry laughing before#she has a drawer where she shoves all her notebooks to keep track of them#her hand writing is illegible to anyone but herself#and even sometimes that is questionable#she likes to read the things she writes out loud and will spend hours pacing round her room doing so#she hates her curly hair and wishes it was straight#she’s not great at speaking just on the fly#especially if it’s something important#she likes to write it down and plan it out first#she blushes fiercely#her cheeks go So Pink#she can be quite callus without meaning to sometimes#but she’s so used to being defensive and not listened to#she is curious to A Fault#your honour I love her
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wait what's the betrothal au??
I'm glad you asked! The premise of the Betrothal AU, in a single sentence, is thus:
Cole and Skylor are arranged to marry each other by a contract made before either of them were born, and they take issue with this.
Of course, there's more to the AU than just the premise—how the whole contract was made and how Skylor and Cole feel about it are major questions I wanna explore in the AU, so I'll do my best to summarize them a bit here:
The contract was made by Chen and Cole's Currently Unnamed Grandfather (I used to call him Shane but I'm not liking that name as much now tbh); Chen had the upper hand in those negotiations. Like it was clear from start to finish who was in control. He initially asked for Lilly's hand, but her father threw a fit and managed to change the terms to "Chen's child will marry Lilly's youngest child by the time both are 20" (but with. more legalese). Because surely, Unnamed Grandfather thought, Chen couldn't possibly have children as an exiled-to-an-island war criminal, and surely, if Chen did find a way to father offspring, Lilly would have multiple children and her eldest would inherit the power of earth, thus preventing the earth master line from getting tangled up with the likes of Chen.
Except then about six months after Skylor was born Chen sent several baby pictures to Unnamed Grandfather to gloat. And Lilly only had Cole because she and Lou only ever wanted one child. So Cole and Skylor are engaged from... not quite birth because Skylor was born almost a year earlier and Chen waited to see if Lilly would have any other children, but definitely since they were both young enough to toddle.
Sooooo... how do Skylor and Cole feel about this? Well, for the most part.. they're kids. Yeah, they meet when they're both five and they're given their halves of a pendant and told that one day they're gonna marry each other, but at that point they were literally just children. Marriage was more of a concept to them, a silly thing they could pretend to do and think about that otherwise didn't really impact them. Especially since they only saw each other once a year (and Lou & Lilly would always throw a fit when Unnamed Grandfather took Cole to Chen's island. But Unnamed Grandfather is going to honor his debts, dammit, even the ones that suck).
But even as they did get to be kids, even as Skylor would eagerly await the 2-4 weeks every year when Unnamed Grandfather would visit with Cole in tow, even as they would run around the labyrinth and into the jungle and all over Chen's compound like the kids they were... well, Chen's a dick. Oh, sure, he wasn't trying to make them feel bad about the engagement, but he definitely wouldn't let them forget it.
So the marriage became a sort of inevitability, for Cole & Skylor. When they were 11-12, they had these cute puppy crushes on each other that they would not have had were it not for the whole "you two are going to one day marry and then spend the rest of your life together" thing hanging over their heads.
And then Unnamed Grandfather dies, and Lilly's fallen ill, and Lou is absolutely not going to go to Chen's island under any circumstances. So Cole and Skylor haven't seen each other in person since they were 13, and wrote letters instead.
So they inevitably drifted. For Skylor, the marriage was an inevitability, but one that she could deal with later—being Chen's daughter gives her way more pressing concerns to deal with daily, anyway. And it was the same for Cole—the engagement, when he thought about it (which wasn't super often) was a distant sort of inevitability, like a project due at the end of the semester that you don't think about until then because you've got assignments due now to worry about.
When Chen invites the ninja to his tournament, when Cole and Skylor see each other on that ferry...
Skylor had been sort of vaguely aware that she wasn't interested in Cole that way. From her memory, he was sweet and rowdy, and her only childhood friend her age. Not the worst person to be tied to on the legal level of marriage, but not exactly someone she was interested in. Seeing Cole in person for the first time in years, and connecting that familiar face with the most recent letters—it crystalizes, for Skylor, that she's not into him that way.
But her father always gets what he wants, and the contract is airtight. So Skylor grits her teeth, swallows her venom, and sidles over to Cole to test the waters. Hope he's not as into her as she remembers feeling about him once, when they were younger and friendlier and liked to talk about what they wanted for their wedding together while digging in the mud for cool jungle bugs.
Cole hadn't thought about his engagement as often—sure, he used the new pendant half that Chen sent him after the monastery burned down to finance every meal the grieving ninja ate at Chen's, and sure, he sent letters monthly at least. But the notion of marriage has become so distant and unimportant in the wake of Garmadon, the Great Devourer, the Overlord, and Zane's death. When he sees Skylor, standing off to the side in a cloak but nonetheless recognizable, it hits him—they really hadn't seen each other in years, and he doesn't feel anything romantic for her.
But Chen has Zane, or might have Zane and be lying—and Cole can't chance that. He needs to know for sure if Zane is alive, so he hopped on the ferry alongside the others, pendant half in hand in case it'd come in handy. But now that the reality of his engagement is staring him in the face and sidling over to him—oh, Cole just knows it's going to cause problems. He's always been good at running away from problems—but he can't run away now, can he?
so yeah tl;dr chen's a little bitch and cole & skylor are gonna have to try and work around that
#ask zaz#lego ninjago#betrothal au#skylor chen#listens to marina's ''are you satisfied'' on loop. thinks about betrothal au skylor. cries#she's using every bit of charm and manipulation she inherited from chen to play 4D chess regarding the marriage and how it'll go#trying to please her father as best she can bc it's the only defense that works for her#she's got luxuries aplenty but no real emotional connection with anyone that isn't awful and manipulative (chen) or#coerced by a situation beyond their control (cole)#so she's doing her best but also she's fully willing to screw the ninja over for her own safety#except kai starts to wiggle his way into her mind and cole's steadfastly loyal to the other ninja#and so can you really blame her for feelign a little like her life is coming apart??? when her father is reducing her to her womb and#pressuring her to deliver secrets abotu the contestants and a successful marriage and grandkids and every other little thing that he uses#her for‚ bc she's chen's tool first and foremost and a person in her own right second#so really her and cole rekindling their friendship really is a saving grace for her. a single bright spot in her life fr fr#these tags aren't super coherent but yeah. yeah#skylor and cole feeling that pressure from their predecessors (mostly chen being a bitch)#skylor especially bc she lives with chen
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Every appearance of the red-haired menace that is early Laurence forces me to sit here and stew upon how I will fix his introduction in the rewrite. As a coping mechanism. Unfortunately since I can't remember the parts where his character isn't just harassment so I can't cook with the themes the way I'd like to. Like the way he calls Aph "my love" after she very explicitly in the text of the game tells him not to do that... bad vibes. I think I could rock with his character if he'd done the same sort of approach in hitting on Aphmau as heavily, but the moment she lays down an actual boundary, he backs way the hell off. I could even fuck with her trying to be subtle about the boundary and him not getting it and continuing to make her uncomfortable before she snaps at him and he apologizes, saying that he truly didn't mean anything by it, and he respects the boundary she lays like his life depends on it from then on out. It would create some immediate complexity in his need for explicit communication, and backs up the sort of deeper character hinting they seem to try to do when he's talking about Castor and Cadenza, this idea that he deeply cares, if being a bit pushy on accident. It would also make a good detail fueling the conflicts later on with the love triangle that can sort of prevent Laurence from looking like TOO much of a dickhead (him being unaware or misinterpreting situations, and the delicate nature of it making him uncomfortable asking questions, is a compelling reason to see somebody hurting his friends' feelings, and makes him significantly more sympathetic, opening him up for feelings of remorse and guilt).
#mcd#minecraft diaries#jeremiahs mcd notes#laurence mcd#i want autisic/adhd king laurence and im not even remotely joking#i think it would add a lot to his character to give him those struggles#if i'm recalling his character right anyways#i am still very early in the series#But i do recall vaguely there being conflicts where I was absolutely not on his side#and i had a very strong sense of justice as a kid so i imagine that i'm not making that up#but also its been 8 years so who knows#but i think he can still very much get off on the wrong foot with aph and it can still be good#i think honestly having him get off on the wrong foot and then work to make it up to her would be good as hell#bc it's a situation in which she sees him be willing to work on himself without much prompting#(aka as soon as he's told there's an issue he starts to work on it and she doesn't have to ask)#and she goes oh actually. you know what. maybe hes not a dick.#and she starts to be more comfortable around him over time#It might create this dynamic where it feels like he's always trying to catch up to her level#Always apologizing always being the wrong one#and then eventually when she does something that he can't just smile and bear#(as all friends hurt each other on accident one time or another#it is unavoidable we are but human and i believe Laurence would let a lot of things slide bc he knows how much she's had to forgive him for#And I can see as well it not going over well bc aphmau is not used to the idea of being the wrong one#and she had a reason for what she did and she gets defensive#Causing an uncomfortable moment of tension#I also think that there could be a good spot where Garroth is being more controlling as to try to protect aph and she is bothered by it#feeling in that moment very robbed of control and like he's not listening to her#and then here's laurence#who is willing to build himself anew brick by brick with her input#Like this is how I would overthink it if I wanted a true love triangle conflict introduced to the plot here
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Me, when Sebastian joins my party for the first time: Okay, this time I'm not going to forget about you, Sebastian. I'm going to make an effort to use you a lot this playthrough so I can better understand you.
Also me, immediately forgetting about Sebastian while finishing Act 2 and making it halfway through Act 3 before I finally notice his Faith quest: ......................Oh. Right. My bad.
#da2#dragon age 2#sebastian vael#listen in my defense..........i don't like bringing sebastian anywhere sksksks#okay look i seriously tried but every time i bring him somewhere i always think man i wish i had brought someone else#and also i do just forget about him! i finally added him to my party at one point and he had 24 points to spend...#that's how long i neglected him after i promised myself i was gonna use him more and then i didn't#it's not that i don't like sebastian as a character though i do tend to side eye him A LOT... it's just that i like everyone else more#even aveline like i'd take aveline over sebastian any day and that's saying something... or is it? i have a lot of feelings about aveline#whereas my feelings about sebastian could maybe fill a thimble...it doesn't help that in my canon run as a mage hawke#i romance anders and well... sebastian wants me to kill anders and my hawke is like 'do i approve of blowing up the chantry? complicated.'#'am i breaking up with anders for this? absolutely. do i still love him? mmhmmm. am i going to kill him sebby? i'd sooner set varric aflame#then sebastian threatens to bring an army to kirkwall and leaves so i can't say i have the greatest opinion on him#even the time where i did kill anders and he stayed in my party he was just... there#and then he glitched out and started t posing while asking if ed ever found out what anders wanted to do in the chantry so..... yeah#but even this playthrough where i'm playing as a lady warrior with a different personality and everything... i'd just rather use anyone els#also keep him away from bethany i do not approve sksksks she's too good for him#i want to understand and see the different angles of him like with the other companions but i've yet to convince myself to do it#also sebastian romancers out there can you like... explain? genuinely can you explain the appeal? i'm curious#because of all the love interests in da2 i look at sebastian and you'd think i'd maybe be more interested? but it's like...#i know about the chaste marriage and everything like that's fine i don't need sex to be a thing in the relationship but it feels less like#an asexual romance and more like... y'know... being with a priest and i guess that's just not one of my kinks? sksksks#i guess there's also the prince angle but i romanced alistair in dao and kept him a grey warden i don't really care about royalty power#and i don't have issues with him being a part of the chantry [well i do but yknow what i mean] since i romanced cullen in dai#and his whole deal with the chantry and magic and shit makes his romance interesting to me but sebastian is just.... a bit too much i think#i don't know i'd like to understand because i really don't but i also keep forgetting about him
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If I could ask one thing of my mum it’s that she stopped calling alters ‘invaders’ or ‘intruders’. We all have a right to live in this body and experience whatever emotions we want. Our palatability to you does not mean we shouldn’t get to be here.
#did system#traumagenic did#actually did#did community#dissociative system#plural system#sysblr#did stuff#system stuff#system things#system alters#non traumagenic dni#traumagenic only#actually traumagenic#traumagenic system#endos not for you#endo dni#endos do not interact#endos dni#a persecutor of ours keeps fronting and trying her best to get better#but she’s still pretty rough and struggling#and it hurts her to hear that she’s being called an invader#and the littles try so hard to mask when. all they want to be themselves#we just want a bit of comfort#sometimes it would be nice if mum could just listen to us and be sympathetic instead of get annoyed and defensive when we aren’t ‘perfect’#we dont even have a host so idk who we mask as#we just do#for her comfort
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i think me forgetting to reply to messages is going to be a dealbreaker with [redacted]😬😬😬
#which. ok whatever#they sent me some messages which i forgot to reply to (granted it was monday and now its almost sunday😬)#ALSO bc some were voice messages and i just couldnt listen to them right away.#i went to reply to then now and. they literally deleted the messages.#like idk. ik some ppl cant stand being left on read. but also. be chill abt being left on read OR unopened. its not the end of the world#ALTHOUGH in her defense. i do take 'being chill' w unread messages a bit too hard#i have an unread convo sitting in my whatsapp from like.... june i wanna say? maybe even may#also my closest friend and i enable each other so much w this😭we leave each other on read and then dont reply to each other#until like 2 weeks later. she used to not be as cool w it but shes taken after me. and now she surpasses the master#bc sometimes /i/ find myself wondering if she'll ever reply to me LMAO (she does. w time but she does/#*)#idt [redacted] takes it as lightly tho. bc well. seeing as shes deleted her messages like ive stated above. well.#im just so confused abt my feelings for her that idk if this is good or bad. see. if my friend replied fast i could talk to her abt it.#but i cant LMAOOOOO anywayyyssssss#z xarre
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<3
#my besties here at college#when i came in we used to talk about stuff and she'd get surprised and ask me how i notice such small things#and have detailed description of everything#and always made jokes on me being deep analyzer and taking things too seriously#it was fun mostly but one time she made it in front of bcg that was when i began to have crush on him#i got so defensive i actually said not my fault you view life so blantly and superficially#how can you not see the beauty that comes in patterns that must feel awful being that oblivious almost disrespectful to nature#and i said it ofc in the funny manner and that may sound really rude but she took it in a positive way#so she began taking interest in everything and started to try to discuss and know my opinions about everything#and i loved that there was someone listening so fascinately like a kid#simultaneously she uses a lot of shuddh hindi vocab not even adults speak like that#and it was just weird to me to listen them in normal conversations#but since ive been good at hindi literature and have a good vocab i tried it too#used to feel so awkward at first almost like the words took too much effort to come out of mouth#because obviously i grew to learn the internet slangs and their medium is english so my mode of expression in hindi was#but now she surprises me with talking about things and noticing what escapes my attention#and i have to mock her say its not that deep#and i while speaking use too many shudh hindi words and then when she can't find a word i think before and give synonyms as well#and we both laugh#ive said this before ig
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and its like. i cant even act the same towards them because that just goes against my moral code and will make ME worse as a person. that used to be what it was like and thats why i was so mean to irl friends in high school
#and its just. imagine being forced to act like youre on a retail shift your entire life#and the manager doesnt even do anything when the customers are grabbing at you throwing stuff at you and yelling at you belittiling you.#im on my own in this store#and these customers are with me 24/7 . i cant retaliate because its not who i am but there also no other defense theyll listen to#i need places to hang out during the day on saturdays and sundays its so hard surviving these days at home#at least chuck e cheese is scheduling me on weekend nights like thats literally so beautiful . thank you#i need a place to go during the day to escape it all#and there was this one friend i was beonding with and visited her house for a while and i thought i could use this as my escape finally but#turns out shes literally never free so spending time at her house couldnt really happen#and my other friend usually always works on the weekends as well#tldr its so hard being a soft spoken and patient person that understands everyone is human while i live with LOUD angry people that only#help people out to feel good or to benefit themselves#does it show that im A water sign and everyone else is a fire sign
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I'm just slowly falling back in love with marcia
#marcia overstrand#the NUMBER of times she's saved septimus.#like. dozens.#at least#like she's helpful even when she's not there#(i'm on syren at the part where sep almost falls for the song and then remember's marcia disapproving face)#(and that's enough to snap him out of it.)#also his memory of her going HOW DARE YOU USE THE EMERGENCY MODE ON THE STAIRS. THERE ARE ORDINARY WIZARDS U ARE INCONVENIENCING.#when there's. a STACK of complaints about her use of the emergency mode on the stairs whenever she feels like it.#what an icon#also syren is GREAT#the descriptions of the elevator were so well-done it took me a Hot Min to realize that's what it iwas#and i wouldn't have if i hadn't just been reading something about this being set 10000 years in the future#and the submarine!!!!!#and the old stories about people going to the moon in ships...#oh i got distracted#anyways marcia is a queen#she listened to sep complain about being in the army and then packed him survival gear based on it : ((( she really listens#like when she doesn't want to she doesn't and is infuriating about it#but in her defense. he's 12#13 now maybe#he's her kid.#more than sarah's#and maybe that's unfair to sarah#she didn't choose to have him snatched from her and presumed dead as a newborn#like she was very much the victim there#but also she's just not as fun as marcia#stuff just seems to happen to her#she doesn't make a lot of decisions
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New way to kill someone in a dream. Literally ripping their soul out of their body and crushing it in my fingers??? Like ok
#speculation nation#dream shit#it was actually a really cool like. story kind of thing#idk they admitted to spying on my grandma to perfectly reconstruct her house (as a thinly veiled threat)#and i was just like. 'hm. okay.' and then just reached in front of this woman's face and Grasped#and there was a moment where i could hear her soul talking to me. begging for her life#but i decided she was a lying fucking snake and crushed her soul into nothing#her husband's soul was harder to pull out. Spiritually Stronger i guess. & i had to ask for help from my friends#and we pulled it out together. then made our escapes.#then there was a narration shot of maniacal laughter as this dude watched us go (we were the tokyo mew mew girls for some reason)#and was narrating to himself how regeneration is annoying. but not impossible. and he Would Have His Revenge..#love the implication here of the mew mews being soul snatching/crushing vigilante killers tho. lmfao#but yea ive killed in dreams before and i Will Again#usually it's just snapping someone's neck tho lol. very hands-on. this was definitely new.#LISTEN the dream killings r typically all justified. generally in self defense.#but yes i do have a real trend of killing in my dreams. and very very few times i die in my dreams.#miss me with that death shit. IM the killer.#it's a piece of psychological Something of mine that i find fascinating. dreams are so entertaining to analyse.
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apologies are hard and can be embarassing
but life is too short to let your grandma go to bed sad
#it wasnt a big bad deal#but i didnt listen and projected my guilt#i wanted to be angry and annoyed#but whats the point#is it really that important to feel right when youre actually wrong#to feel mighty bc youre less emotional than another person#its hard to swallow that pride and to admit you were wrong#but you never know if this moment is the last with that person#and putting in that perspective it makes it easy to say youre sorry#i sometimes forget this#something i learned very young after fighting with my mom and upon reflection realized i was wrong the whole time#ive always had this ability since then to swallow my pride almost immediately and jump straight to fixing what i did wrong#but then long story short i lost that ability when i learned the word 'no' for myself#i stopped paying attention and focused on only me#and sometimes i forget that this is not who i want to be. i forget to work on myself#im glad that i made myself apologize and im glad that i made sure i didnt apologize weakly#none of that 'im sorry you feel that way'#but id like to work on avoiding this all together. and thats hard for me. because it requires me to be aware like i used to#which for me is PTSD related. but i dont want to be on my deathbed recalling all the pointless times i doubled down#taking up time that could have been happy#people say its easy to be kind and it is but sometimes when youre guilty it feels good to give into your frustrations and get defensive#again nothing bad happened. i just told her i wanted to do the dishes. she was currently washing some and because of guilt#of my perception of what shes able to do i doubled down on me doing them instead of her even though she assured me she was able#i thought she was lying to me and she got upset. no yelling just not allowing her to do what little shes able#and not trusting her at her word. to be fair she does lie and will admit that she has- when doing things when i feel sick#even when i tell her that id rather choose what im able to do instead of her assuming. which is exactly what i did#me being a hypocrit. so yeah. not a great feeling on multiple levels of this scenario#but truly i need to remember to focus on what matters and that is just taking someones word for it while making sure they know they can#freely tell their feelings. meaning if shes doing the dishes and she says shes fine. let it be. and make sure she absolutely knows that when#i say im fine that i too am telling the truth
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i really just want to get the conversation over with
#im exoecting her to still be defensive#to not take back anything she said#or act like nothing is wrong#this is just another stressful outburst#and it will take some time to get her to realize how serious i am#i cant make her care about my opinion of her#i cant make her listen to my point of view#i hope she does#i hope she cares that she hurt me#and still wants us to have a relationship#i hope she hasnt been pretending to like me this whole time and these last texts are just emotional outbursts#i hope she realizes these outbursts are not ok#and she needs to change her behavior#im still so scared that im being abusive toward her#and this is punishing her for being justifiably angry at my mistreatment#but if so. then i wouldn't be considering ending the relationship right?#avoiding someones company isnt abusing them#j barely have time for my own therapy. even tho i want family therapy#ive suggested it before#this isnt the first time shes said such harsh things#about my whole personality. not just an action i did#i hope she realizes how serious i am#dear diary
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"I don't think I could have the relationship with you that you have with me," she said. She was very casual about it, and I was immediately on the defensive.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked.
She put the book she'd been reading down. "It's just, the way you've described it, and the vibe that I get, I don't think I could do it how you do it."
"I still don't know what that means," I said.
"You're always doing this like ... micro calculation thing," she said. "You weigh your words. You try to time things. You have never once called me up while I was at work, or asked me for something when it was inconvenient for me, and you check and double check that you're not being a nuisance."
"And ... that's bad?" I asked.
"No, I love that about you," she said. "It's very kind and considerate. I know that if I tell you I'm not in the mood to hang out, you'll apologize and not push it. If you suggest that we get pizza and I say I'd rather have Korean BBQ, you fold instantly and we get Korean BBQ. I like that. I get the things I want. But it seems like an exhausting way to deal with people."
"I want you to be happy," I said with a small voice.
"I am happy," she replied. "You're great. You remember when we first got together I was like 'hey, look, if you want pizza, we can get pizza, it's just not what I'm in the mood for', and you kept insisting that you didn't care, that you would rather have me follow my needs? And I just thought, 'you know, maybe I should just trust that's what they actually feel'. And it is, as far as I can tell. There's not some secret part of you that wants me to break your way."
"You think I'm ... a simpering coward?" I asked. Even as I said it, it felt too accusatory, the wrong thing to say in the situation.
"Whoa, no, not at all," she laughed. "I think you do all that stuff because ... I don't know, you want to? Because otherwise why would you do it? It's how you are with every aspect of your life, you're a tryhard. I mean you said to me that you wanted to reclaim the term. Your relationship with me is that you're a tryhard (affectionate)."
"And you're ... not?" I asked.
"I'm not that way with anyone," she replied. "You know why I hang out with you so much? It's 'cause I like you. Most days, I am very much in the mood for you, and if you ask for a meetup, I'll say yes, and if you don't ask for one, then I'll ask you first. And for you ..."
"What?" I asked.
"It's like ... you're keeping track," she said. "You want to make sure that you're not sending me more messages than I'm sending you. You're balancing social micro stuff that I don't pay attention to. You're consciously monitoring how much each of us has said and making sure it's the right number of words or whatever."
"It's really not about the number of words," I replied. "It's more ... making sure that social and emotional labor is equitable, that there's a good rhythm to the conversation. I don't think you'd get good results by tracking word count."
"But see, I don't do any of that," she said. "I talk because I feel like talking. I listen when you need to vent because I like you and it feels good to give you an outlet. I mean you are undoubtedly putting in a bunch of work, and for me, there's no work. That's all I meant, really."
"You've thought about it," I said.
"Oh, I'm just reading this book, and there are two characters like us in it, and I was like 'yes, exactly', and then 'that would not work for me'." She shrugged.
"And if I stopped 'putting in the work'?" I asked. "Would we still be ... friends?"
"See, I don't know," she said. "Because that's never who you've been. You're asking me if I would still be friends with you if you changed your personality and how we interact with each other. Maybe? Probably? Who knows? Maybe we'd be better friends somehow. Maybe we're just two basically compatible people, and every time you've ever worried about anything it would actually have been completely fine."
"Or maybe it's load-bearing," I said.
"Maybe!" she replied with a smile that slowly faded. "You okay?"
"I'm thinking," I said. I didn't know if I could verbalize what I was thinking in a way that would be palatable.
"Do you not like being this way with me?" she asked. "Because I have never asked you to. I've made my preferences known, but if you've been bending yourself into knots and feeling a burden, then ..."
"No," I said, because I knew it was what she wanted to hear. "No, I like the way things are between us."
"Good," she smiled. "I do too."
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In retrospect, four years later, I feel like the Isabel Fall incident was just the biggest ignored cautionary tale modern fandom spaces have ever had. Yes, it wasn't limited to fandom, it was also a professional author/booktok type argument, but it had a lot of crossover.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a writer, whether fan or pro, publishes a work. If one were to judge a book by its cover, something we are all taught in Kindergarten shouldn't happen but has a way of occurring regardless, one might find that there was something that seemed deeply problematic about this work. Maybe the title or summary alluded to something Wrong happening, or maybe the tags indicated there was problematic kinks or relationships. And that meant the story was Bad. So, a group of people takes to the Twittersphere to inform everyone who will listen why the work, and therefore the author, are Bad. The author, receiving an avalanche of abuse and harassment, deactivates their account, and checks into a mental health facility for monitoring for suicidal ideation. They never return to their writing space, and the harassers get a slap on the wrist (if that- usually they get praise and high-fives all around) and start waiting for their next victim to transgress.
Sounds awful familiar, doesn't it?
Isabel Fall's case, though, was even more extreme for many reasons. See, she made the terrible mistake of using a transphobic meme as the genesis to actually explore issues of gender identity.
More specifically, she used the phrase "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" to examine how marginalized identities, when they become more accepted, become nothing more than a tool for the military-industrial complex to rebrand itself as a more personable and inclusive atrocity; a chance to pursue praise for bombing brown children while being progressive, because queer people, too, can help blow up brown children now! It also contained an examination of identity and how queerness is intrinsic to a person, etc.
But... well, if harassers ever bothered to read the things they critique, we wouldn't be here, would we? So instead, they called Isabel a transphobic monster for the title alone, even starting a misinformation campaign to claim she was, in fact, a cis male nazi using a fake identity to psyop the queer community.
A few days later, after days of horrific abuse and harassment, Isabel requested that Clarkesworld magazine pull the story. She checked in to a psych ward with suicidal thoughts. That wasn't all, though; the harassment was so bad that she was forced to out herself as trans to defend against the claims.
Only... we know this type of person, the fandom harassers, don't we? You know where this is going. Outing herself did nothing to stop the harassment. No one was willing to read the book, much less examine how her sexuality and gender might have influenced her when writing it.
So some time later, Isabel deleted her social media. She is still alive, but "Isabel Fall" is not- because the harassment was so bad that Isabel detransitioned/closeted herself, too traumatized to continue living her authentic life.
Supposed trans allies were so outraged at a fictional portrayal of transness, written by a trans woman, that they harassed a real life trans woman into detransitioning.
It's heartbreakingly familiar, isn't it? Many of us in fandom communities have been in Isabel's shoes, even if the outcome wasn't so extreme (or in some cases, when it truly was). Most especially, many of us, as marginalized writers speaking from our own experiences in some way, have found that others did not enjoy our framework for examining these things, and hurt us, members of those identities, in defense of "the community" as a nebulous undefined entity.
There's a quote that was posted in a news writeup about the whole saga that was published a year after the fact. The quote is:
The delineation between paranoid and reparative readings originated in 1995, with influential critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A paranoid reading focuses on what’s wrong or problematic about a work of art. A reparative reading seeks out what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art, even if the work is flawed. Importantly, a reparative reading also tends to consider what might be nourishing or healing in a work of art for someone who isn’t the reader. This kind of nuance gets completely worn away on Twitter, home of paranoid readings. “[You might tweet], ‘Well, they didn’t discuss X, Y, or Z, so that’s bad!’ Or, ‘They didn’t’ — in this case — ‘discuss transness in a way that felt like what I feel about transness, therefore it is bad.’ That flattens everything into this very individual, very hostile way of reading,” Mandelo says. “Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.”
A paranoid reading describes perfectly what fandom culture has become in the modern times. It is why "proship", once simply a word for common sense "don't engage with what you don't like, and don't harass people who create it either" philosophies, has become the boogeyman of fandom, a bad and dangerous word. The days of reparative readings, where you would look for things you enjoyed, are all but dead. Fiction is rarely a chance to feel joy; it's an excuse to get angry, to vitriolically attack those different from oneself while surrounded with those who are the same as oneself. It's an excuse to form in-groups and out-groups that must necessarily be in a constant state of conflict, lest it come across like This side is accepting That side's faults. In other words, fandom has become the exact sort of space as the nonfandom spaces it used to seek to define itself against.
It's not about joy. It's not about resonance with plot or characters. It's about hate. It's about finding fault. If they can't find any in the story, they will, rest assured, create it by instigating fan wars- dividing fandom into factions and mercilessly attacking the other.
And that's if they even went so far as to read the work they're critiquing. The ones they don't bother to read, as you saw above, fare even worse. If an AO3 writer tagged an abuser/victim ship, it's bad, it's fetishism, even if the story is about how the victim escapes. If a trans writer uses the title "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" to find a framework to dissect rainbow-washing the military-industrial complex, it's unforgivable. It's a cesspool of kneejerk reactions, moralizing discomfort, treating good/evil as dichotomous categories that can never be escaped, and using that complex as an excuse to heap harassment on people who "deserve it." Because once you are Bad, there is no action against you that is too Bad for you to deserve.
Isabel Fall's story follows this so step-by-step that it's like a textbook case study on modern fandom behavior.
Isabel Fall wrote a short story with an inflammatory title, with a genesis in transphobic mockery, in the hopes of turning it into a genuine treatise on the intersection of gender and sexuality and the military-industrial complex. But because audiences are unprepared for the idea of inflammatory rhetoric as a tool to force discomfort to then force deeper introspection... they zeroed in on the discomfort. "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"- the title phrase, not the work- made them uncomfortable. We no longer teach people how to handle discomfort; we live in a world of euphemism and glossing over, a world where people can't even type out the words "kill" and rape", instead substituting "unalive" and "grape." We don't deal with uncomfortable feelings anymore; we censor them, we transform them, we sanitize them. When you are unable to process discomfort, when you are never given self-soothing tools, your only possible conclusion is that anything Uncomfortable must be Bad, and the creator must either be censored too, or attacked into conformity so that you never again experience the horrors of being Uncomfortable.
So the masses took to Twitter, outraged. They were Uncomfortable, and that de facto meant that they had been Wronged. Because the content was related to trans identity issues, that became the accusation; it was transphobic, inherently. It couldn't be a critique of bigger and more fluid systems than gender identity alone; it was a slight against trans people. And no amount of explanations would change their minds now, because they had already been aggrieved and made to feel Uncomfortable.
Isabel Fall was now a Bad Person, and we all know what fandom spaces do to Bad People. Bad People, because they are Bad, will always be deserving of suicide bait and namecalling and threatening. Once a person is Bad, there is no way to ever become Good again. Not by refuting the accusations (because the accusations are now self-evident facts; "there is a callout thread against them" is its own tautological proof that wrongdoing has happened regardless of the veracity of the claims in the callout) and not by apologizing and changing, because if you apologize and admit you did the Bad thing, you are still Bad, and no matter what you do in future, you were once Bad and that needs to be brought up every time you are mentioned. If you are bad, you can NEVER be more than what you were at your worst (in their definition) moment. Your are now ontologically evil, and there is no action taken against you that can be immoral.
So Isabel was doomed, naturally. It didn't matter that she outed herself to explain that she personally had lived the experience of a trans woman and could speak with authority on the atrocity of rainbow-washing the military industrial complex as a proaganda tool to capture progressives. None of it mattered. She had written a work with an Uncomfortable phrase for a title, the readers were Uncomfortable, and someone had to pay for it.
And that's the key; pay for it. Punishment. Revenge. It's never about correcting behavior. Restorative justice is not in this group's vocabulary. You will, incidentally, never find one of these folks have a stance against the death penalty; if you did Bad as a verb, you are Bad as an intrinsic, inescapable adjective, and what can you do to incorrigible people but kill them to save the Normal people? This is the same principle, on a smaller scale, that underscores their fandom activities; if a Bad fan writes Bad fiction, they are a Bad person, and their fandom persona needs to die to save Normal fans the pain of feeling Uncomfortable.
And that's what happened to Isabel Fall. The person who wrote the short story is very much alive, but the pseudonym of Isabel Fall, the identity, the lived experiences coming together in concert with imagination to form a speculative work to critique deeply problematic sociopolitical structures? That is dead. Isabel Fall will never write again, even if by some miracle the person who once used the name does. Even if she ever decides to restart her transition, she will be permanently scarred by this experience, and will never again be able to share her experience with us as a way to grow our own empathy and challenge our understanding of the world. In spirit, but not body, fandom spaces murdered Isabel Fall.
And that's... fandom, anymore. That's just what is done, routinely and without question, to Bad people. Good people are Good, so they don't make mistakes, and they never go too far when dealing with Bad people. And Bad people, well, they should have thought before they did something Bad which made them Bad people.
Isabel Fall's harassment happened in early 2020, before quarantine started, but it was in so many ways a final chance for fandom to hit the breaks. A chance for fandom to think collectively about what it wanted to be, who it wanted to be for and how it wanted to do it. And fandom looked at this and said, "more, please." It continues to harass marginalized people, especially fans of color and queen fans, into suffering mental breakdowns. With gusto.
Any ideas of reparative reading is dead. Fandom runs solely on paranoid readings. And so too is restorative justice gone for fandom transgressions, real or imagined. It is now solely about punitive, vigilante justice. It's a concerted campaign to make sure oddballs conform or die (in spirit, but sometimes even physically given how often mentally ill individuals are pushed into committing suicide).
It's a deeply toxic environment and I'm sad to say that Isabel Fall's story was, in retrospect, a sort of event horizon for the fandom. The gravitational pull of these harassment campaigns is entirely too strong now and there is no escaping it. I'm sorry, I hate to say something so bleak, but thinking the last few days about the state of fandom (not just my current one but also others I watch from the outside), I just don't think we can ever go back to peaceful "for joy" engagement, not when so many people are determined to use it as an outlet for lateral aggression against other people.
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Alright. So. I have a confession to share with you. In middle school, I strongly identified as a libertarian. In my defense, I was 13 and I had autism. Against my defense, I was literate, and capable of using common sense. I confessed this to you willingly, so go easy on me.
One thing about this that I can share with you is that I, as a 13 year old boy, read Atlas Shrugged. I read it as someone very committed to the ideology, who wanted to believe it, who wanted to like it, and there are two things I can share with you about that book from that time period.
The writing is terrible. It has the slowest, most boring, most pretentious prose you could possibly imagine. Calling it glacial would be a compliment. It makes glaciers look like Formula 1. There is no description for the pacing outside of hellish torments. It is like being condemned to watch a dog with an itchy ass wear the Himmalayas away only by scooching. It is like counting the grains of sand on a beach while Alexa reads off random phone numbers. It is like dipping saltines into lukewarm tapwater while listening to white noise in a beige room with no doors. It is like wearing a blindfold and being told to guess what a man is painting by sound alone, but there is no man, there is only a dog licking cold vaseline off a window. Forever. It is all of those things and more.
There is a multipage rant about how affairs are Good and Rational that is so insanely desparate that even middle-school-autist me thought she must have been having an affair while she wrote this. And then I googled it, and the answer was yes, she was. She called her philosophy Objectivism, because she believed, like everyone else in the world, that her ideas and motivations were Pure and Rational and Ojectively Correct, but I still find the name accurate, because it was really written with one Objective in mind, and that was finding a way to never admit that Ayn Rand had ever made a mistake in her life.
I was going to rant more about this but I kind of lost my train of thought. The book fucking sucks. It was propaganda of such remarkably low caliber that it actually helped me move out of those circles. Every time someone talked about liking the book, I'd reply with something along the lines of "Yeah, I especially loved the part where she destroyed the post modernists by unequivocally condemning affairs", and if they agreed with me, they would have lost my respect forever, and if they looked very embarrassed, I could at least acknowledge that they had a soul, albeit small and malformed. I had dozens of people claim that they read the book, and only three or four actually passed the test.
And now, goodnight.
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apologies
✧.* gojo, geto, nanami, toji, choso, sukuna, yuji, megumi, noritoshi, ino, inumaki, yuta
notes: a somewhat happier resolution and part two of arguments! thank you for reading <3
✧.* check out the fun facts after the attachments for background info about their fights and a look inside my brain hehe!
my masterlist
© vorfreudevortex | all rights reserved. do not copy, translate, repost, or otherwise share my work.
satoru cried in his office when he realized that he blamed you for something that wasn't your fault.
suguru's coworker sat on his lap as part of a weird inside joke everyone else at the school has between the two. he has no idea why he was so defensive to you and he truly wasn't cheating. he was so angry that you would believe he cheated that he started calling you out for the first thing he could think of, wearing revealing tops in public. satoru had to call you 8 times before you picked up and let him explain it to you. he's forcing her to transfer to kyoto so she never has the chance to hurt your relationship again (remember that suguru never left and became a teacher alongside satoru in my aus). the pictures sent to the reader leave out how suguru uncomfortably asked her to get off of him shortly after, since they were around other sorcerers and teachers (as politely as he could).
kento came home with so many flowers for you and he still feels awful.
toji's dumbass freaked tf out when you took home your clothes from his place. he was out drinking and gambling and didn't want to tell you. your relationship is rocky for a while but he hasn't gambled since.
choso is still learning communication skills and cried when he realized that he was being mean to you over nothing.
sukuna is a terrible texter and does NOT communicate his feelings well. this is him being vulnerable af with you because he really does love you and has no idea why he was grabbing another girl's ass at the bar. he tried to chase you down after you threw a drink on him, slapped and yelled at him, and ran out.
yuji completely panicked when a curse attacked him out of nowhere when he was out with you. you can't see them and you were so confused and scared that you couldn't move. he just cares about you so much and couldn't stand the fact that you could've died. he made megumi listen to him cry about how mean he was to you for like 3 straight hours.
megumi has no idea how to deal with his emotions and has never been in a relationship before so he literally thought you guys were broken up LMAO. he's trying really hard for you.
in my au toge can speak, just not direct commands, so he still rarely talks unless necessary. i thought it would be nice to have the reader understand that all of his communication skills are terrible and help him work on them.
noritoshi has a terrible outlook on love and relationships from his upbringing so it took him a minute to understand how awful his words were. he truly does love you and wants to marry you. he lowkey constantly thinks about cutting off the kamo clan so they can't control his life anymore.
ino literally cried to nanami after your argument. he's so used to putting jujutsu responsibilities before his own life and feelings, and struggles with having to take care of something that can't be fixed with his power or strength. nanami also called you and apologized for meddling in your relationship, he realized it was inappropriate but he just really cares about you and ino and wants the best for both of you.
yuta literally didn't even realize how insane and controlling he was being until you called him out. after he took you home, he latched onto you with his head crammed in your lap because he was so upset thinking that you might leave him. he swears to himself that he will kill himself before he treats you like that again, and he never does it again.
i don't like when big argument smaus end with "no biggie i forgive you! <3" so i tried to make sure that the reader either made sure they know they fucked up big time, apologized and talked to them face-to-face, they'd never do it again, or you wouldn't forgive them so easily, etc.
sorry this was so long! but i love knowing the background info and author's thoughts for smaus since they can be kind of limiting in content! i think i'll add background info and fun facts after all my future smaus for those who are interested. as always thank you so much for reading ♡
#jjk x reader#jjk angst#jjk#jjk smau#jjk texts#jujutsu kaisen#jjk satoru#satoru gojo#gojo satoru#jjk suguru#suguru geto#geto suguru#jjk nanami#nanami kento#kento nanami#jjk toji#toji fushiguro#jjk choso#choso kamo#jjk sukuna#sukuna#jjk yuji#yuji itadori#itadori yuji#jjk megumi#megumi fushiguro#jjk noritoshi#noritoshi kamo#jjk ino#takuma ino
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