#by people i mean the weirdos who come into my ask box and accuse me of being a biphobe for having lesbian headcanons

[jacquesthepigeon]

How does it feel to have all your Miraculous Ladybug opinions be so right all time?

Pure Suffering when other people don’t Get It

[beemers-hell]

i desperately wanna apologize to you but you would call bullshit and paint me like something evil bitch when in reality, i want the cycle of abuse to end and to ease my mind. i just wanna redeem myself before ending it all.

- you already know who

to everyone else sorry about this, but I've had enough, anyway i was just gonna delete this, just like i deleted the TWO suicide notes you sent me in my ask box a lil bit ago, but a number of my friends DM'd me about what you've been posting on your blog so I can only assume this all came from Nene, also known as @/shugurrsn0w , and for anyone who doesnt know Nene is, well this callout thread will get you acclimated with her REAL quick lmfao:

You are not fucking apologetic at all if you are using s0uless' full REAL name on your blog, you stupid bitch. That kind of information can put them at risk of REAL GENUINE HARM. S0uless made the mistake of using their name as their art handle when they were younger but they have been doing a pretty extensive wipe of that username being online, I know this isn't exactly doxxing because of that but USING IT WHEN THEY'RE CLEARLY NOT WANTING IT TO BE PUBLIC INFORMATION IS SOME PRETTY SCUMMY SHIT, AND CAN BE USED FOR ACTUAL REAL HARM BEING DONE TO HIM YOU JACKASS

Don't come in my ask box hiding behind anonymous acting like you actually feel bad for the shit you did when you are STILL making posts calling me and my husband fucking freaks when you know DAMN WELL we're not. Don't you dare try and act all remorseful and pitiful and like you're some misunderstood fallen angel when you've been doing but helping making our lives a fucking nightmare. You don't get to act like you've done nothing wrong when you have CONSISENTLY VICTIM BLAMED THEM, CLAIMED THEIR TRAUMA WAS FAKE, BEEN RACIST TO ME, MOCKED MY ABUELAS RECENT DEATH, THREATENED HARM ON BOTH OF US, HARASSED AND STALKED US, AND SPREAD ALL THIS INSANE SHIT ABOUT US FOR NO GODDAMN REASON. You don't get to just act like you made some petty mistakes that you can walk off, you have been non stop harassing, stalking, and falsely accusing me and s0uless of being scum of the fucking earth when there is no goddamn evidence that we are and you KNOW there isn't, because we fucking ARENT. Unlike your freak ass, we KNOW what the fuck is right and what is wrong. But that kind of shit gets around to people and makes people start thinking we ARE those freaks that we aren't.

And you should be well aware of how fucking awful that makes a mother fucker feel, you know? Since you wanna keep whining about how "people keep being mean/demonizing you for no reason." What, you don't think people are gonna DM me asking me what the fuck you're talking about in those posts you make? Newsflash dipshit, most people wanna know both party's stories regarding drama that surrounds someone they know. Don't you try to twist this and cry about how I'm some creepy weirdo that's stalking you, you should've thought harder about following someone and then IMMEDIATELY sending them an anonymous ask about me and s0uless, cause that DEFINETLY isn't fucking fishy at all, dumbass. That's how I was alerted to you and your new bullshit. Don't try and act like I'm a freak that keeps tabs on you, I thought you'd drop off the face of the earth after that one callout thread got made on you. You wanna talk about evidence of wrongdoing? Nothing really shows your true colors more than publicly being racist, harassing minors, and consistently AND RECENTLY consuming bestiality porn of minors. Try bouncing back from saying that YOU want to make noncon porn of your favs, or being a whole ass adult saying you wanna fuck a 16 year old character that you KNOW is 16. THATS some REAL freak shit that YOU admitted to your damn self, you don't get to act like me or s0uless are the real freaks when there is REAL AND RECENT EVIDENCE of you doing that shit, you gross fuck.

Leave us the fuck alone, I do not care about your pathetic ass and s0uless sure as shit doesn't either. This has been going on for over a FUCKING YEAR NOW and i dont give a single SHIT about playing nice and being quiet about it anymore. Don't fucking come whining to me and acting like you're remorseful again when you're PULLING THIS SHIT AGAIN. Leave me the fuck alone and I'll leave you the fuck alone. Expect a restraining order dumbass, it was real easy to get your info when you've got it so readily available online! If youre gonna play stupid games, expect to win stupid prizes. Get the fuck off my and my husband's dick and focus on fixing yourself you ghoul. Do some fucking introspection so you can figure out why the fuck people don't like you. And don't come to me threatening suicide again, I don't give a single SHIT about you and I'm sure as FUCK not going to give you any sympathy when you've shown no fucking growth or genuine remorse for all of this. I've thought about killing myself a lot lately too, you're not fucking special.

[honeybeewhereartthee]

Crossing × Tales || Aoi twins fanfiction

||Previous

||💌 Letter One:

||Next

TW: POSSIBLE ASIAN HOUSEHOLD DRAMA.

There seems to be something that the twins never anticipated to happened in this world they been dragged into. Not only they cannot use their abilities and powers. Rendering them weak and pitiful against possible enemies (there aren't any to begin with) and environment!

"Aniki where are we going to stay tonight?" The youngest ask the older brother who look at the surrounding. Staring at the people passing by them. "Look Yuuta -kun people don't have faces in this world." He pointed out what he notice earning a sigh from his younger brother. "That's not the point Aniki..." The youngest can only sigh and hope that it will not rain if they decided to stay in the park tonight.

...

A little later, while your walking home you saw two orange trying to not get wet from the rain. They all like pitiful cats in a box. They seems to look at your direction as you went passes them. And as a normal person would do in such situations.

You ignore them and went your way. It's not about being kind. It's more of being careless to entertain weird people you don't even know the names of. What if they are killers? Regrets only come late. Also you dont have a place that allows visitors to begin with.

When you think your walking alone back home you don't realize your being followed by those two to your home. Two set of Green eyes watches as you leave. Mischievous grins like Cheshire cat slowly form at this act of triggering the worse for you.

.

When you arrive home and taken a shower. You heard your parent arriving home and calling out for your name.

"--!!! GET YOUR ASS HERE NOW!"

"Wait!!!" You hurried to get dress and went down stairs and saw two orange setting in your dining table with your mom and dad. The two is looking at you with disappointment. You look at the two and your parents. Somehow you do not like how this is going.

"!!! How could you be so irresponsible and a bitch?" You been hit in the head with a slipper and you were about to be defensive about it but it will only trigger more hit.

"WHAT!" you question as you run around the table and refuse to be hit by the slipper once more. "I don't know what you mean? How would I be irresponsible (except for some stuff related to school) and a bitch? You calling me ill names I'm going to file for a lawsuit, this is defamation-- AW!!" you where hit in the face with another flying object.

"I did not raise you to be like that? Do you wanna leave this house for you to speak back to me like that?!" You were been attack with tropical response to a talk back. You sigh and give them a look.

"I don't know and did no crime!" You stand your ground and you parent gives you a look. "Then tell me why those two come here after they reason you breaking up with them after using them?"

"COUGH COUGH. WWWHAT THE HELL..." you chocked on nothing and you felt like you enter a drama that only happened in the shows your parents have often watch those days.

"LANGUAGE!!" You been yelled by your father and you did not accept this false accusations. "I DID NOTHING OF SORT!" you reasoned out. "D-darling... How could you be so cruel!" One of the orange clings to you with tears jerking totally fake crying face.

"You could reject me! But not my younger brother! Please! You could use me all you want and throw me away! But never my brother!" The limelight have stolen and you have the role of a villain.

"WTF." is clearly written in your face and what your saying out loud as you look at this weirdo. You don't even care if your being glared with a look of disapproval by your mom.

"My cute precious brother! How could you? *Sob. Sob." You can feel his tears staining your cloths. You almost thought his being for real till the other said the last line. "Take responsibility! Take responsibility on me and aniki who's... Pregnant with your child!" The other orange have leach onto you as well.

"W.WHAT THE FUCK!?" Your.going to die from embarrassment from those two weirdos! "HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE!"you exclaim.

"Don't you know about Omega verse?" The eldest give you a teasing Cheshire grin as if not believing you did not know of that. You turn bright red at the mention of that world but you shake your head off. ALSO WHY IS HE WHISPERING IT TO YOU?!

YOU CANNOT BELIEVE THIS CRAP.

"I DONT EVEN KNOW YOU!" you finally snap from this defamation act! Your reputation is being slander by people you don't even know!

"*GASP! D..darling how could you say such cruel words!" The eldest who change his expression back to his tragic crying face. "A...after you use me! Use me and my brother! *Hic. Hic."

"NO I DONT!" you refuse to believe this crap.

".... How could you not know them? Stop lying." Your mom can only sigh. "Why do you believe some weirdo words than your child!?" You glare at your parents before you where slapped.

".."

"... That's not how to talk to your elders." Your mother says and you just stared at them and the two. Holding your cheek. "You..." Failed me again. "Fine." You sigh as you held back your tears, giving a look to the two intruder and storming off the house. "HAVE THEM AS YOUR CHILD. FUCK OFF." you lash out as you run to the night.

[blackcrystalball]

As a major hearstopper fan, I have to to say that the fandom is nasty. Like genuinely disgusting. Every single time I get onto twitter, I see that they've managed to find a new way to be assholes. Whether it's to the actors, each other, randos on the internet, they find a way.

In the span of about a year they: bullied Kit Connor off of twitter. Were freaking weirdos in how they expressed their attraction to him. Bullied Joe Locke about his looks (like they literally called a teenager ugly) in a near constant basis. They were so many kind of racist it was a bit hard to keep up. Were extremely transphobic, both implicitly and explicitly. Harassed Sebastian over a mistranslated interview after he apologized and explained what happened. Bullied Joe Locke off of twitter for siding with his friend. And finally, they forced Kit Connor to come out, this 18 year old had to out himself because people accused him of queerbaiting, (sidenote: people cannot queerbait, at least not for the reasons they are being accused of it. Not explicitly sharing what your sexuality is, is not queerbaiting. You don't owe private information like that to anyone. That shit is your business) the fandom were literally at-ing and quote tweeting Alice Oseman asking them to recast him because apparently he's straight, they felt entitled to his information and when they didn't get it, they decided he didn't deserve his platform and accused him of being false representation.

These people need to be fucking for real, like genuinely listen to themselves. They are angry because an 18 year old, a literal fresh out of the box teenager, didn't tell them if he's bi or not. They bullied someone who literally just took his first steps out of being a child for not behaving and expressing himself the way they wanted to.

The hearstopper fandom is gross, mean and awful. Even if it isn't the whole fandom, the assholes have become the face of it, and you can't separate yourself from them as easily as you'd want to because you will always be associated with them when people think if the fandom. No one is going to see the cutesy memes and the friendship bracelets that you've made for the actors because they're too busy watching the fandom burn a child inside out.

They're too busy watching a group of children get bullied by hundred and thousands of people.

There is no "toxic minority" and "good majority" when the loudest meanest people work hard to be the face of the fandom. When the worst of the fandom ensure that they get the most attention. You cannot truly think that anyone would view the hs fandom in anything other than a negative light when this is the kind of behaviour they exhibit.

And I am aware that I'm making sweeping generalisations, and that lumping all of you into this one category of complete assholes is unfair but I think that we saw tonight that most things are unfair. They way people treated Kit Connor was unfair, me making generalisations is unfair, but I don't care. I can't care, not when people are moving in droves to ruin a child's life. People being offended by my words won't even hold a candle what their words have done to the cast of hearstopper.

[popculturebuffet]

The Not-So Secret Origins of Darkwing Duck: Clash Reunion: The Real Villian was Inside That Douche You Went to High School With All Along (Commissioned by WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy people and welcome back to The Not-So Secret Origins of Darkwing Duck, my weeklong 30th anniversary celebrating look at the many origins of the terror that flaps in the night. And this time we’re going to have some Fast Times at St. Canard high as Drake attends his high school reunion. I sadly missed my ten year one due to Covid and still don’t know if that’s ever been rescheduled or was done over zoom or some third thing. It honestly WOULD have been nice to reconnect with old friends and see how it all went. Still at least I can live through it with the Terror that Flaps in the Night.. and remind myself why it probably wouldn’t have been neat as I remember so that’s something I suppose. 

If you want to comission your own review of any tv episode or comic, feel free to hit me up via my ask box and we’ll talk over what you want me to cover. It’s only 5 bucks an issue or episode with every fourth one off so do consider it won’t you and join me under the cut as we go through Darkwing’s Awkward teenage phase. 

We open at the Mallard Household. As Gosalyn tries to scam money out of Launchpad over monopoly, Drake goes through the mail and finds his class reunion is happening this saturday, and reminisces about how he was the big man on campus alongside quarterback hamm string, who naturally is a pig...

Not you sweetheart. Just a regular if excemptionally douchey pig. I mean your exceptional anyway.. but.. okay train of though... where were we? Oh yeah... And head cheerleader. Preena Lot whose naturally a “your guess is as good as mine”.

We flashback.. and shockingly the guy who in 50 years will be lying to children about how he met a genie and his daughter/mentor died from a cola overdose was lying. Drake’s brash personality and tendency to search for mysteries that weren’t there made him a laughing stock with his peers, called “drake the dweeb” by h Hamm and Preena and bullied often. While I didn’t you know, accuse my classmates of theft like Drakey did, I can relate to being an overexcited overly intense weirdo who some douchebag mocked. 

A lightbulb goes off  in goslayn’s though when Drake points out the class nerd Elmo Sputterspark, whose picture our heroine doodles on.. and who is quickly threatened by drake for it. 

But he relents when he realizes she was indeed right. Megavolt meanwhile gets ready for said reunion and we get his origin story: turns out he was also picked on by Hamm and Preena quite a bit, though unlike Drake he did nothing and was simply picked on for being a nerd as is genre convention. 

Hamm crossed the line from regular bullying to “criminal douchebaggery” though as while Elmo was working on an experiment to use static electricity via a treadmill, bacon bitch thought ti’d be funny to up the intensity which shockingly leads to the birth of Megavolt. See kids besides basic human decency this is why you don’t bully: when you do you stand a 50 percent chance of creating a supervillian who now rightfully wants to kill you. Or a superhero whose biggest fan you are.. that last one’s still tricky it’s REALLY awkward when you find out. Just ask Flash Thompson. 

We cut back to Darkwing who continues the story: Turns out Megavolt was Darkwing’s first nemesis and formal outing. Granted this is treated like the first time in general, as Drake comes up with the name.. it’s not a huge stretch to say Paraducks happened and Drake simply forgot the details surrounding his future self and simply kept the inspiration to be a crimefighters, with the name sticking around in his subconcious. 

Drake was striking out at Prom when Megavolt showed up to wreak his.. actually pretty well earned vengance. Drake tried stopping him, because heroes have to save everyone even the douchebags or else J.Jonah Jameson would’ve died a few decades ago, but fails and is laughed at by Hamm... who is promptly easily beaten by Megavolt who prepares to torture him. 

Drake ducks back deciding he needs a disguise since no one respects drake. It oddly parallels something from Batman year one: bruce TRIED going out and fighting crime without the costume but failed miserably, got arrested and only wasn’t caught as bruce because he was in a rough disguise. Never thought i’d be comparing Darkwing Duck to anything written by frank miller. Hopefully this only happens this once and I’m not going to be reviewing an episdoe of the reboot down the line where drake forces Gosalyn to eat rats. I would be fine if they put this scene in there though. 

It’s not frank miller, but I do want it in every version of batman from now until the heat death of the universe.

So he puts on some stuff from the costume department over his tux, grabs some smoke bombs from a recent production, because of COURSE he was a theater kid, and sets about thinking up a name... The Masked Mallard, The Webbed Wonder, none of them quite landed. Also yes they really did make those ducktales refrences.. which again begs the question how the fuck Tad thought this was an alternate timeline, but hey. 

So Darkwing makes his entrance and finds his name, and has a fun dustup with Megavolt, whose hilarious as always I just don’t have time in the review to go into every time he’s fucking hilarous. Needless to say Dan Castelntia is on fire in this one. Darkwing beats him, gets the praise he deserved and comes back as Drake to get the scorn he didn’t.

I genuinely love this origin: it dosen’t undo the already brilliant one from Paraducks but enhances it, both showing how Drake’s ego anlihenated him from everyone (Though Hamm genuinely is an ass and a halff as is his future wife, so that dosen’t help), and how he manged to make it work, and letting him fully craft his ego, using some costumes and stage magic and showing he truly had the talent for superheroing, taking down an opponenet with full powers in his first outing with just some stage smoke bombs and some skill. 

So being the consummate hero Darkwing plans to head to the reunion with Launchpad in tow.. and Gosalyn staying at home. As you’d imagine this works about as well as telling her to stay in the car. 

He runs into Hamm and Preena who not only blow his cover about being universally loved, but also are still pretty much the same and instead of failing horribly, have gone on to run their own company. Somehow the assholes winning despite having learned absolutely nothing is the most realistic thing about this show. 

So after waiting six hours, Drake ends up bumping into Megavolt who launches his scheme to get revenge right this time, and Drake turns into darkwing as you’d expect to stop him. We get a bunch of good jokes about Deja Vu as the two clash again and it goes about the same as last time. 

Except.. after everyone but the most repulsive couple in america, megavolt and team darkwing are gone.. Megavolt accidently gets Drake’s mask off... and thus Megavolt, thing one and thing two all start laughing at the poor guy. Just.. for two solid minutes.. two solid minutes of the poor guy’s esteem going down the toilet. 

It’s just painful to watch, if in a good way and makes the rest of the episode credible: sure Drake’s a grown man.. but bullying like that can leave scars and just because he annoyed everybody dosen’t mean it didn’t HURT when they all laughed at him, nor was it okay for wingus and dingus to bully him. That shit hurts and being reduced back to that, to having his former tormentors and some guy he’s beaten a bunch all laugh at him for what he was in freaking high school, to make it clear no matter how far he’s come, acomplished and conquered.. he’s still just the dork he was in high school to them and the feeling that no matter what you do you’ll always be the version of yourself you hate the most.. it fucking stings. I’ve been there I know... not you know unmasked by my arch enemy in front of old tormentors but feeling you’ll never evolve and will always be the same. That i’ve been to. 

Megavolt, in a nice show of humanity, dosen’t have it in him to fry Darkwing after this. I like it, it shows a human side to him and that at the end of the day he gets it: he was bullied too, and he just did the same thing back to drake. So he lets his nemisis go.. but the two bullying dipsticks who just undid their own rescue? No them he takes to go get his long overdue vengeance on. 

So Goslayn and Launchpad, with a near catatonic drake, rush to stop him...

Eh.. I guess in the same situation i’d save them. Their assholes and they desrve to be punished but Elmo very clearly wants to kil them.. a sentence I don’t get to write near enough. Point is even if their bad people.. you have to save them. Darkwing can always have SHUSH look into their taxes later. 

So Gos and Launchpad try to motivate darkwing, talking about him being the hero, etc. Launchpad even offers to do that thing with his mouth he likes, but no luck. The two are forced to go in themselves.. and get captured pretty easily, with Megavolt planning to light them all up for the whole city and something somethign world domination. 

Drake, realising the people he loves.. and two assholes he dosen’t like but has to save anyway because darned ethics, are in trouble, and get shis second wind, returning mask or no mask, confidence or no confidence.. He was Darkwing Duck and he always will be and no petty assholery is going to change that. 

So Drake charges in, buisness as usual ensues and he gets knocked down..next to the rubber cement... which he quickly loads into his blaster, beating Megavolt and saving everybody. 

We then get a quick wrapup: the two douchebleros apologize because their greatful NOW he’s saved their lives like three times, and he hyptonitizes the knowledge of his secret ideneeity out of them because he can’t trust them, with Megavolt having it.. gets a realistic conclusion: due to his scattered mental state he can’t remember who drake was and probably won’t rmemeber he knew long enoguh to ever use it. Lucky him. 

Final Thoughts:

Another excellent episode in a trio of them. The idea of giving both Darkwing and his most iconic nemisis a shared backstory was fun, i’m always a sucker for a superheros early outfit so seeing darkwing’s first run outfit was a blast for me, and in general i’ts a breezy 20 minutes packed with so many jokes I had to gloss over them so while it probably didn’t come across how funny this episode is, belivie me i’ts really delightful. A true classic.. and sadly Megavolt’s last episode, but what a note to go out on. And of course I still got reams and reams to watch. I’ll probably be reviewing darkwing until I have a scraggly beard and are telling kids made up stories of my exploits.....which come to think of it is also my present. 

Next Time: We wrap this up with the best darkwing origin of all as we meet Ducktales take on our hero and it gets meta... and we also get a b-plot that bothers me on a molecular level. Even more than the sasquatch one. You’ve been warned. 

[babybluebanshee]

Things I’ve had to deal with as a city librarian, pt. who even knows anymore

Some of these are because Covid makes everyone’s lives a little harder. Others are just weirdos being weirdos. 

But they’re all equally baffling.

- The library has a mask mandate. You either wear one the entire time you’re in the building, or you leave. It’s that simple. The amount of people who fight us on this is staggering. One lady accused me of trying to force her into a panic attack for whatever reason, and then told me she’d have me fired because she was going to complain to the city coordinator. I didn’t feel like telling her the city coordinator was the one who wrote the policy about masks. She’d figure it out.

- We have a basket of disposable masks by all the doors for people to take if they don’t have one or forget theirs. A guy (already wearing a mask, mind) came in, grabbed all the masks out of one of the baskets, flipped through them like they were a deck of cards, then stuck them back in the basket. Then he locked eyes with me to let me know he’d done it on purpose. We had to throw them all away. 

- We haven’t been putting out the newspapers we’re subscribed to, because we don’t really have a way to effectively and properly sanitize them when patrons are done with them. A guy came in wanting to read them, and when we explained to him why they weren’t out, he turned red in the face, telling us that was unacceptable and he demanded we give him the papers. The director decided to let him have them, and we’d just quarantine them when he was finished, so we asked him which ones he wanted. He wanted all the papers from the day we closed to that current day. We closed back in March. This was happening June. He spent maybe fifteen minutes looking through this huge stack of newspapers, gave them back, and didn’t even fucking thank us.

- We had all eight seasons of Game of Thrones on DVD, and they’ve always been really popular. There was one woman who was absolutely obsessed with them. Every week, she’d check some out, then out another on reserve so it would be ready when she brought the one she had back. When other people would put them on reserve and she had to wait, she’d get angry because she put it on reserve! Why wasn’t it there yet?! And she never watched the seasons in order. She’d start with season two, then skip to season six, then back to one, then to four, and when she’d cycled through them? She’d start over. It was a little unsettling how into it she was.

- A girl, probably about eleven or twelve, came in with what I can only describe as the world’s worst grandma. The old biddy was insanely dismissive of everything the kid showed interest in. The kid spotted some graphic novels and mentioned how much she like reading them, and the grandma scoffed and was like “You mean you like looking at the pictures.” The kid mentioned the Goosebumps series and grandma goes, “Ugh, those books are terrible, pick something else. Something good.” We introduced a book box for teens recently, and when the kid saw the sign for that, she sounded interested. Grandma just went, “That’s stupid. Why don’t you pick your own books? And crafts are for children.” To the girl’s credit, she didn’t seem to let the sour old bitch get to her, but I came very close to just smacking the her several times. 

- The not-like-other-girls girl made another appearance recently. She was wearing a cape. Our IT guy was working on the computer behind the desk that day, and when he saw that, he looked at her, then looked at me like the most confused puppy. Honestly, I don’t even care that she was wearing the cape, because capes are the height of fashion and function and we should bring those bitches back. What bothered me is that it was clearly a cheap polyester thing you get in dollar store Halloween costumes. If you’re gonna be a weird in public, at least shill out for velvet. 

- Speaking of our IT guy, there was a day when our entire computer network went down for the majority of the day. It worked for about fifteen minutes after we opened, then just...stopped. We had to write up check outs by hand, we couldn’t pull reserves, and we couldn’t use the OPAC. None of the patron computers were working either. Our poor IT guy was there from 10:15 to three in the afternoon, trying to fix it, and he STILL couldn’t get them all running. It was absolute mayhem. 

- Ever since we added an Adult Fiction Graphic Novel section, we’ve had more and more people complaining about them. Mostly its parents who don’t actually, like, pay attention to what their children check out and assume comic book = equal child friendly (like the woman who let her ten year old check out Lock and Key and was horrified to realize it contains huge amounts of gore, violence, and sexual content, despite that big AF sticker on the side). An equally big section are the Christian warriors who see the horror and crime comics and are absolutely scandalized on children’s behalf, because what if a child SEES that! Despite the fact they’re in their own section, a section which is nowhere near the kid’s area. One woman found one on the new books shelf objectionable, so she covered it with other stuff. As soon as she left, I went out and rearranged it do it was the only cover you could see. Because I’m a petty bitch.

- The museum saga continues! If you’ll recall from a few posts ago, the museum is a consistent pain in our collective ass for well over a year and a half, taking over half our genealogy room to prove to the city they could run the operation without help and get money to refurbish a historical house.  Well...no one has been in the museum at all since about November of last year. It was supposed to be open every Saturday from 10 to 2, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of anyone who runs the damn thing. We normally wouldn’t care about it...but people who have temporarily donated stuff to them are starting to show up to reclaim it, and can’t get it out, because the museum staff has the key to the display cases. And we can’t get ahold of any of them. Every time we think we’ve found the right person to talk to about letting people have their stuff back, they say “Oh, no, so-and-so took over that, I have no idea about any of it.” So, they’ve got tons of stuff that does no belong to them, tucked away in locked cases that no one can get into, and everyone is big mad about it. This is pretty much exactly what we expected to happen.

- One of my former coworkers just...stopped showing up to work. She didn’t come in for a shift, and everyone tried contacting her, but she wouldn’t pick up. We tried to check her Facebook (because a few of us were friends with her), but she’d blocked all of us. We didn’t know what happened to her for weeks. Then, one day, another of my coworkers came in and said they’d been to the doctor to get some blood work done, and the former coworker was in the opposite room, drawing a different person’s blood. She pretended like she didn’t know her. None of us ever saw her again after that. She didn’t even return her polos. 

[killapunk]

the weirdest, NO, evilest, person i have every worked for

no real names are used in this piece. i refer to other weirdos and freaks throughout, sorry its a long read (i didnt intend for this) but its one of those things ya gotta settle into and believe me its a wild ride. this saga covers over three years of drama btw.

tw: mental health mentioned (inc panic attacks), chronic illness mentioned and mild sex references 

i am going to single out jess. shes more evil than a weirdo but weirdo nonetheless. pete is a secondary weirdo in this saga.

i work in retail for a long time. a fashion store to be precise. i started out in one store but transferred when i started studying at uni and remained there for the majority of the retail career. during my time there i had three managers, the longest one, who is also a fucking weirdo was pete. now before i worked with pete, before he transferred to our store. i didnt like pete when i started working with him, he annoyed the fuck outta me. but my life circumstances changed and my mental health issues got very bad AND i was diagnosed with cfs so i had to disclose it w him. turns out… he was fucking mental too, very understanding, super chill. we liked the same shit. great boss. 11/10 every time.

he would be my reference for every job ever…

…but. he started gettin involved w jess. now to jess. the main character in this piece.

jess had started at the company around the same time as me and we were always on the same level until the last year or so. jess was a bit older than the average age of staff at the store (17-20) and was 23 when this drama started. she had a college diploma, went onto do something semi-successful but related to her HND. but blew all her money, moved back into her parents and started working at the store part time and then onto full time. she was like…the perfect retail girl? small, cute, slim, bubbly… always looked cool in her uniform. customers loved the fuck out of her. 

jess had a bf when i first started and pete had a longstanding gf. jess and her bf ended things abt 4 or 5 months before pete and his gf. but i remember they started gettin cushy around about this time. im not sure if its cos im v sympathetic towards pete (a true kind soul who i hold v dearly in my heart) but even tho youd be thinking ‘boss abuses his power’ …jess was and still is fuckin manipulative and he has longstanding mental health issues and i just think she sorta got the ball rollin’. pete and his gf didn’t seem on good terms, i dunno the full story but it seemed like they should have broken a long time before the did.

i think the fortnight before pete and his gf broke up they were spotted hanging out together near where she lived. it was this hush hush thing that everyone giggled abt cos there was at the time talk they were fuckin. when it got out, after his breakup jess said she was ‘just being a friend’ cos he was ‘going through a tough time’. 

jess got promoted to keyholder even though she didnt really (at the time) have the skills or confidence to be a keyholder. and then she started to try and fuckin control the work. back during this time, everyone who worked at the store, minus literally 3 people, had worked for the company for at least a year. the store ran very well, we were always in profit. nothing went wrong. but. she started changing processes because it 'made things easier when she was opening’. like. she made everyone tally the amount of people they served in the fitting room in one box and tally the amount of things people left behind so she could make a sales chart. idk if that’s normal in other stores but like? it was just nuts and impossible to do.we always put deliveries away out the package but not folded in a particular way. she made everyone tag and (where relevant) hang items bc she had to pick everything in the morning. 

she became friends w most of the girls, including one of the supervisors. they ruled the workplace. it was a total gossip mill. she gaslit the fuck outta people. one already less-popular girl at work ended up quitting cos she kept blaming her for fuck ups, she kept getting write ups and it was impating her mental health. she spun people against her. less popular girl spoke up and called her a bully and jess acted all defensive and said she wasn’t a bully bc shed been bullied before? jess continued to fuck up the workplace. next she turned on two people in her own clique. one tbh, i think she was jealous of bc jess had always wanted to be a teacher and this gal was training to be one. the other girl was v like jess, just not a bitch… strongwilled, liked control. anyway, drama got to the point where they had to quit. waay too much drama for this textpost. at this point others started to notice n work became hostile. jess moved her girlgang clique to one of the original clique girls, a different supervisor and the other two full time staff members.

pete obv didn’t listen to people coming to him, as store manager being like… hey… there’s this major clique problem and he’d be like ‘nah everyone is just friends, jess is a bit insecure but yno things are good, people quit, its just retail. fuck it.’ jess accused everyone who didn’t get on w her as being a terrible person. those legit words. like. if someone said it was a shame x, y or z left shed rebut, nah they were shit at their job, they were a shit person. honestly. EVERYONE. was a bad person. even the nicest people in the world were the worst person, the worst at the job. she was a good person, she liked the good people. she HAD BEEN BULLIED AND WOULD NEVER BULLY. she threw the anxiety word around a lot.

once we had a staff night out and i got left alone with jess and pete at the end of the night in this terrible lil bar as i waited for someone to pick me up. this is a good point to mention jess was always weirdly jealous cos i was close to pete. fucking ridic considering he was 14 years older than me and you know my fucking boss??? this night, i was sitting right next to pete, we were both drinking, jess wasn’t (cos she likes to be in control, she even said it), he had his arm around me and was whispering something into my ear that was such a non-thing i don’t even remember. she got her phone out, started texting. he excused himself and when he returned he sat beside her. it was fucking nuts. i couldn’t believe my eyes. we had to basically carry pete out of the bar. jess said to me she was gonna drive him home cos it was on the way to hers (spoiler! it was not!). myself and pete did the open the next day. he came in wearing the same clothes. i mean, he could have just passed out and had to rush to work when he woke up. but. this guy went out a lot. he never repeated an outfit. i think jess took advantage of a very drunk him. similarly, on another night out, jess promised to drive someone home. said person got too drunk and thew up. jess refused to take them home and called them embarrassing, she gave the space in her car to pete.

i had a major bad evening shift at work concerning another staff member, kaylee. a gal who just rubbed me up the wrong way, and who didn’t like me. ill never know why but it was just one of those things where anytime i was on shift w her she would nitpick and bitch about me and just… make me feel not v good. she was possibly the laziest and rudest person i had ever worked with but someone got away with it?

i used her as a way to talk to pete about the general problems in the store (jess). and…it was fuckin surreal. i told him abt kaylee. i told him i thought jess was controlling but kinda laid off a bit like ‘i get she thinks shes doing it for good’ etc. i padded it out w a few other rly petty issues abt the store. i was actually really upset, kinda numb from life to properly let out my emotions. and then. he started cry on me. like this full-on grown man having a panic attack in front of me when i was 19, fucked on diazepam i should have never been prescribed. to this day i visualise it. me and pete were v close at this point, and like, he didn’t mention jess too much – asked me about the other girl and other issues when i came to him. we spoke about personal shit, all but jess. i kinda wonder if he didn’t have the panic attack if i would have told him his under the radar relationship w her was not on?

and then. pete sold me out in the name of jess. idk the full ins and outta everything but he had to confront the drama once and for all cos our figures were so low so he decided to blame it all on kaylee. from my understanding of the situ from a lot of ‘he said she said’ bs, pete had this big meeting w kaylee. was like. 1. do ur job right and 2. stop being rude and unapproachable. the thing is, although kaylee is rude shes one of these ppl who most ppl really liked, not in a jess/regina george theyre scared of you way but…like they thought she was a tv character and she was funny and honest. so i think she confronted some obvious allies, and jess told her, according to another staff member, that i complained about her. after hearing this i obvious went to pete and tbh, acted pretty dramatic (cos if you haven’t fucking learned already THIS STORE WAS FULL OF DRAMA QUEENS). as soon as i heard, i started texting him angrily on his day off. i remember folding something in the fitting rooms and he came up to give me a hug and i was like ‘HOW FUCKING DARE YOU TELL OTHER PEOPLE MY BUSINESS’. i confronted jess, in a lighter tone, cos i obv told pete (half) what i felt about her. jess played the fucking innocent role. like, she said something along the lines of ‘we’re both close to pete n he was so worried that when me, you and kaylee did those shifts together that something would go wrong. so he told me to keep an eye on things and that’s all i told kaylee cos she wasn’t sure why she was being targeted when so many people in this store are treating people badly. i didn’t say you reported her or anything, honestly!!!!’ queue more bs.

after this, jess didn’t bother with me but was never explicit about hating me. if there was a convo going on and i tried to join in she scolded at me for being nosey. if i was unwell (i have cfs) shed moan ‘jokingly’ that i always had to be ill. i think she ripped on me once cos i said i was late for a hand-in at uni.

her next real victim, however, was jack, my best friend in store and our supervisor. jack was getting fucked over in his supervisor role bc pete would schedule jess for anything managerial. jess started a rumour that pete didn’t trust jack bc jack fucked it at a meeting w the other stores (semi true but fucking up a meeting isn’t the end of the world). like. anything jack would be, jess would be on him. by this point 50% of the staff that were around at the start of the story HAD LEFT. jess had driven people out and had the new ones all up her arse.

pete quit. it was sudden.

not long later, facebook popped up with a fuckin ‘pete is in a relationship with jess’ status and pete has never spoken to me again. i left shortly after that, although our new manager was lovely i felt like i was working for jess.

jack ended up GETTING DEMOTED, by petes replacement who had no idea what a shitstorm she was getting herself into. the new manager PROMOTED jess and demoted jack bc she was doing all the supervisor jobs whilst jack was only doing midshifts. he didnt get shafted to the lowest pay and was instead given the title ‘trainer and authorised opener/closer’ whilst still doing the same fucking job. he transferred out, cos that shit is fucking degrading and within, like two months he was put back up his rightful position. yay for my forever work bestie. I

feel like this has been going on for too long now. i think this doesn’t do her justice. like…i cant believe someone who is NOW 26 and who got what she wanted after manipulating a mentally ill man caused so much drama and pain and tension in a fucking clothes store.

fucking horrid. im reading this completely exhausted and so i cant say much but i just feel like these people are always the ones who come out on top, and its so fucked up. im really sorry you had to deal with so many unpleasant people, and your friend as well. 

i swear mediocrity and asskissing is what gets you anywhere in this world, and manipulative cunts like this jess woman take full advantage of that. it’s pretty scary, honestly. amazing how far drama can go, huh. this is why i have trust issues.

i still hope she gets her ass kicked by life, though. there has to be some sort of karmic justice somewhere

i also feel like i should say that there’s always going to be people who won’t like you for some reason. even if you don’t do anything wrong and even though everyone else thinks they’re great. no idea why this happens, but all i can say is there’s really nothing you can do. so FUCK EM (in the most metaphorical sense as they don’t deserve you giving them the time of day)

[heathenarmyimagines]

Title: A Different Time

Summary: The Lothbrok family finds themselves in very strange and different place.

Pairing: Undecided

Taglist: @ubbesgirl, @shewolf2000, @tis-itheapplepie, @atequila, @demoncrypt1066, @greennightspider, @badbitsh13, @fireismysaftey, @minarawr, @laketaj24, @hvitserksgirl, @blahblahcookiesdoma, @fabulous-peasent, @sforsammmmmi, @minmiin1d, @courtrae89, @letsloveimagines, @tomarisela, @titty-teetee, @beyond-the-ashes@elenawrit, @mblaqgi, @whenimaunicorn, @chuflisworld, @mystruggledlife, @moose-squirrel-asstiel, @syreni-dea, @trashqueenbitch, @alykatv, @mbaku-babygirl, @perfectus-in-morte, @beyond-the-ashes, @neeadinghugs, @readsalot73, @triumphantreturnofpies, @anarchy-is-coming, @tephi101, @alicedopey, @ivarslittlebadgirl, @jtrstp, @nejijjeoroo, @charlylama, @ivartheblessed, @captstefanbrandt, @fabulouschrissi, @ivarsrideordie, @3x5gurl, @the-writer-appreciation-blog, @lolabee9, @captainfoxy22, @young-ugly-god, @im5ftbutmythroat66, @bribyyy, @irishhiggins, @cadetomlinson, @keclleon101, @slutforragnarssons, @ltkeke, @meeeeeeeeeps, @lille-kanin, @opalscarab, @ssraven7, @ivarandersen, @concretewaywardangel, @funmadnessandbadassvikings, @sharon-is-tired, @cadetomlinson, @mystruggledlife, @chuflisworld, @justmarissa97, @lol-haha-joke, @weirdly-randomly-awesome, @inlovewithmakeupcomicsanim, @idonthavehusbandsihavelovers, @alexa040004, @buckythetinman , @burntmythroatskullingmytea,@jorunnravenslayer, @two-unbeatable-beaters, @buffy-the-vampire-blogger

A/N: This damn idea has invaded my dreams since I started the show and I really wanted to do a poc reader imagine so I killed to birds with one stone.

Waking up to an empty and quiet house is something you feel in your heart you will never be used to.

You always wait to hear your mother snoring, your younger sister singing in the shower and your little brothers watching TV.

But no noise reached your ears.

You mother was still in a nursing home, you sister is God knows where after she ran off to travel, and your brothers were both in special needs boarding schools.

You lay there in bed, thinking over your plans for the day, your vacation starts today so no work. If it hadn’t been for it being Sunday you’d visit you mother, or your brothers, but the nursing home was strict about visiting hours and you couldn’t afford the across state trip to see them.

With a grunt you got up and freshened up lazily before getting dressed in your favorite cookie monster onsie. Why get fully dressed to not do a damn thing?

You sat on the couch and settled for a marathon of Supernatural reruns, you were only half watching, looking through your phone.

Suddenly you heard a loud splash coming fro the pool, making you jump and look out the window.

There was an entire group of people in your pool, more pulling themselves from it.

‘The hell?’ you asked no one as you grabbed your bat and got the cops on speed dial before going outside.

‘Who the hell are you?!’ you yelled, trying to act as if you were not scared shitless.

None of them paid you any attention, they were all focused on the water of the pool.

With a curiosity that you hated you looked at the water and saw a person was struggling to pull themselves to the surface.

‘Oh-oh my God!’ you panicked before you jumped into the cold water, the freezing temperature shocked you but still you swam down the twelve foot deep end.

You wrapped your arms around the person and kicked your legs as hard you could to carry the both of you up. You notice that the person in your arms, while, moving their arms, was not moving their legs at all.

Finally just as your lungs began to burn you made it to the surface.

Taking in a lung fill of air before dragging the poor soul the edge of the pool, where the other trespassers helped pull the person out.

Once you were sure that had gotten out you pulled yourself from the pool and cursed the chlorine in your eyes.

Blinking away the burning in your eyes you looked at the strangers closer and saw that they were standing around the person you pulled from the pool.

It was a man, a man in strange clothes like a cosplay, he was also not breathing.

‘Shit.’ you groaned, pushing past the rest of the strangers and rushed to give the man CPR.

You pumped his chest, remembering everything from your lessons.

When still no water came up you moved and gave mouth to mouth.

Man this guy had bad breath, but that was no reason to let him die.

Finally the man began to cough up the water.

You sighed in relief before standing up and walking back over to your bat and picking it up.

‘Now that I’ve avoided seeing a dead body, who the hell are you people and why are you jumping into pools when you cant fucking swim.’ you sighed.

You realize they were all dressed in the same medieval-like cosplay outfits on, it was then you see that your swimming partners legs were strapped together by leather belts.

They had similar features as if they were all related, you see that there are five of them, for men and one older woman.

One man, you notice he looks the oldest of the men, he studies you as if you were the odd one here.

‘Forgive us for trespassing on your lands, we simply wish to know where we are, and how to find our way home.’ the man said slowly, with a thick accent.

‘If by lands you mean my backyard then yes you weirdos are trespassing.’ you replied.

‘You speak our language.’ he smiled happily.

You gave a confused look.

‘You are speaking English, clear as day, granted its like a Shakespeare play, but still English.

‘Shake what? I’m not speaking English I am speaking Norse.’ he said, looking to the others for assurance. 

‘I hear Norse, I don’t understand English.’ another man says, this one is gangly and has his long hair braided.

You were about to respond when you heard a noise in the distance.

An old engine pulling into your neighbors yard.

‘Dammit, all of you hide.’ you panicked.

‘What?’ the old man asked.

You rush to your back door and open it, gesturing them to go inside.

‘Get inside before that nos bat sees you all.’ you hissed.

If that crazy woman saw them she’d tell the whole block who knows what, and you prefer to figure out what’s going on without unnecessary drama.

Still confused they hurried inside, one of the men carrying your CPR guy.

Just as the door closed you heard your name being called.

‘(Y/N)! How nice to see you outside in the sun light.’ the old woman yelled as she approached the fence that separated your yard from hers.

‘Yeah, nice to see you too Miss Cookie. I was just trying to make sure the pool light hadn’t died and I fell in.’ you lied gesturing to your we clothes.

‘Oh I see you must be more careful, what would I tell your mother if you caught flu?’

Nothing since my Mom doesn’t even talk to you, you think.

‘Who knows, anyway I should be getting out of these clothes and into dry ones.’ you dismiss yourself.

‘Take care of yourself! And make sure to water your grass it’s looking a little brown.’

‘Thanks for the heads up.’ you fake smiled before you head back to your house.

‘Oh and your-’

‘Have a nice day!’ you yelled as you entered the house and closed the door.

You look around your living room and see all the strangers are surrounding the TV, all except the one you saved, he was on the couch but clearly just as intrigued by the screen as the others.

‘What is this?’ the gangly one from before asked, reaching to touch the screen cautiously.

A different man, the one with the most electric blue eyes out of them slapped his hand away.

‘Don’t touch it! This woman is clearly a witch, she has trapped these people in this...this strange box.’ he said.

‘It’s not witchcraft, its Television. Why are you all acting like you’ve never seen anything from this century?’ you ask.

They all turn to raise a plethora of weapons, real fucking weapons, not plastic ones they hand made. No real sharp ass swords and fucking arrows; even the  guy on the couch had a dagger aimed at you.

‘Witch!’ the woman spat.

‘There is no such thing as witches! Now could you please put the weapons away before I actually have to call the police on you freaks!’ you panic.

‘Tell us where we are!’ the man on the couch demanded.

‘Dallas Texas, in America! Where half the shit you’ve done in the last ten minutes illegal!’

‘What is the year?’ the gangly one asked.

‘What year?’ you question.

‘What year is it!’ he yelled.

‘2018!’ you answered.

All weapons were lowered, and you sigh in relief.

‘Nearly two thousand years.’ the gangly one whispered to himself.

All eyes moved from you to him.

‘Hvitserk, why do I get the feeling you know something?’ the man on the couch accused.

The man in question looked away.

‘The war was near, we were a day away from a fight that would kill mostly everyone here. Our father’s heart would break if it were still beating...so I sacrificed a fine horse to the Gods and asked them to help us fix our family.’ he confessed.

‘If you wanted to fix our family why is Lagertha here? Is she the mother you wanted?’ the couch man glared at the woman, who returned the look tenfold.

‘Of course not, Ivar, but she is Bjorn’s mother and our war is just as much with her as it is with Ubbe, even more so. I’m tired of the seeing the people I’ve known and cared for my whole life kill each other.’ the man Hvitserk said in his defense.

‘That was not your decision...brother.’ the oldest one said.

‘I did not know Bjorn, I didn’t they would snatch us away from our home and place us so far in time.’ he apologized.

Still glaring at the man apparently responsible for whatever the fuck is going on here, the oldest, Bjorn lowered his head.

‘We all apologize, for disrespecting you and your home. If you will please grant us shelter until we are able find better accommodations.’ he requested.

‘You mean let the strangers with weapons that just tried to kill me sleep over.’ sure you sassed.

‘Thank you.’ he smiled.

Everyone else followed his lead and gave thanks.

‘I was being sarcastic.’ you mumbled, but seeing their relief you couldn’t just kick them out.

‘First I need all your weapons on the  floor, I don’t like deadly weapons in my home.’ you said urgently.

With a few suspicious glances they all dropped their weapons, it was quite the pile.

‘Now that’s done let us introduce ourselves. My name is Bjorn Ironside, this is my mother Lagertha, and these are my younger brothers. Ubbe, Hvitserk and Ivar, thank you for saving him.’ Bjorn introduced.

‘That is Ivar the Boneless, and I can thank her for myself.’ Ivar added.

The two glared at each other before you suddenly realized something.

‘Wait...Ivar the Boneless?’ you asked in shock.

‘Yes...do you know of me?’ he asked with a hopeful look in his eyes.

‘I do...and if you are him...then that means that you all are...Oh my fucking God.’ you gasped in awe.

‘We are what?’ Ubbe asked.

‘You are Vikings.’ 

[fancyladssnacks]

You and Whose Army

or;

What if the Seed family were actually good and Hope County is just really paranoid?

AU fic with slow burn Jacob Seed/Staci Pratt, and not-so-slow-burn John/male!Deputy in the background.

Keeping it on tumblr for now because AO3 creates scary ~commitment~ and I just want somewhere to share it with my FC5 buddies (especially you, @avaleahblog). I have not abandoned my Fallout fics. No content warnings for this chapter but I’ll flag ‘em up as necessary.

1

Pratt hasn’t been out to the St Francis Veteran Centre in years, not since he was a rookie and got called out to deal with a vagrancy complaint. The place had been long abandoned back then, the courtyard choked with weeds and faded trash. Inside it had stunk to high heaven. Bird and animal shit and the remains of campfires caked the floors.

Today as he walks up the gravel road to the gates, it’s like stepping back into another era when the hospital was open and thriving. The front court is visible, for one thing. No ivy or knotweed strangling the iron gate, and the paving beyond is level and clean.

The new owner is one Jacob Seed. Pratt’s never officially met him, though he’s seen him around now and again. Seed and his family—two brothers, plus an unknown number of hangers-on—rolled into Hope County a few months back after buying up a suspicious amount of property. The Sheriff’s Department started getting calls soon after. Just the odd one at first, but the longer the Seeds take root on this land, the more the locals are reacting against their presence.

Most of the attention is on Joseph Seed, the long-haired preacher who bought up half the island on Silver Lake and is setting up some kind of hippy commune there. Rumour has it he’s building a chapel, but in the meantime he holds open services a couple times a week in a big white tent on his land. Folks started going along out of curiosity at first, looking to sniff around what this weirdo and his barefoot harem were up to. Probably hoping there’d be naked dancing around maypoles or some such to tide them over in gossip until winter. But whatever Joseph has to say seems to be connecting with people, because almost as many locals love him as hate him now. Of course, that’s only made family members more concerned. There’s already accusations of brainwashing and devil-worship flying around.

While the Sheriff’s Department isn’t taking such nonsense seriously, there have been enough calls to the station by now that Earl Whitehorse finally agreed to address the issue. It’s been a slow couple of days, so Earl tasked his deputies with visiting various Seed family properties to cast an eye over things. Staci isn’t over the moon at being sent to St Francis’, but Jacob’s property is at the farthest reach of the county and he’s the only one who can pilot the chopper. He casts a glance back at where he left it—set down on the grass at the point of the little lake out front of the building—then sighs and pushes through the gates.

The courtyard seems deserted. There’s a new-looking Jeep with Montana plates parked near the gates, and a couple of mud-spattered ATVs further back, but no one attending them. Over in one corner is a stack of rusting bed frames and other trash, leftovers from the hospital’s former life. Pratt strolls past a dried-up fountain towards the front doors. The weather is warming up, and the prickle down his spine and under his arms makes him wish he’d left his jacket in the chopper.

Pratt lifts the brass knocker on the lobby door. His four sharp raps cut like gunfire through the hush of the valley. He turns from the door to wait and idly examines the plastic-wrapped pallets standing by the entrance. Masonry paint, sacks of cement, plasterboard sheets. Most likely ordered from out of county judging by the volume. Pratt raises an eyebrow at the huge spools of razor wire.

A couple of minutes pass, and he knocks again.

“Hello?” he calls out, but only his own voice echoes back off the high walls around the Centre.

He considers trying the door and hollering inside, but the locals he’s talked to who had run-ins with Jacob Seed have described him as anything but friendly, so he decides against it. He wanders along the ground floor instead, hoping to catch a glimpse within. The windows on this level are guarded by iron bars on the outside and dark blinds drawn inside. It seems a waste of time and fuel to fly out here for nothing, so he turns right when he reaches the corner to make a clockwise loop around the building. Along the western wall is a row of large boxes, each one almost as tall as he is, covered over with green tarps. Staci lifts a corner up to peek underneath. It’s not a box at all, but a metal cage. The kind you might keep a vicious animal or, say, a prisoner of war in.

“Great. Not disturbing at all,” he mutters to himself.

There’s more junk heaped up ready for a bonfire in back. Open dumpsters stuffed with dead weeds and other garbage. Still not a soul to be seen.

On the back wall of the hospital Pratt finds a window left uncovered. It’s barred like the others, but when he cups his hands around his eyes and leans in, he can make out the gloomy interior.

The room within is mostly empty, just a few boxes near the door and a folding table with paint trays and rollers. If Staci smushes his face to the bars and peers all the way to his left, he can see through an open doorway into another room, and in there…

“Oh, shit.”

The section of wall he can see is lined with racks, and on those racks are guns. Lots of guns. Identical assault rifles occupy one full rack, while the one beside it is harder to make out but he thinks he sees shotguns and a large hunting bow. In a glass-fronted cabinet under the racks he can make out the dark shapes of pistols against a red backing cloth.

He shifts from foot to foot, wondering whether he should take out his phone and try to get pictures. But he’s not supposed to be here, at least not sneaking round the back of the property like a burglar, and he’s wary of taking away any evidence he might regret later.

Suddenly, all he wants is to get back to Fall’s End. He heads back the way he came and crosses the courtyard at a brisk pace. He glances back only once he’s halfway along the path. The hospital’s yellow walls are catching the late afternoon sun, and Staci can’t help but marvel at what a beautiful spot this is, nestled in its own lush, wooded valley with the vast wall of Monument Mountain curving around it like protective arms, and the lake reflecting the clouds. It’s a damn shame it’s been bought up by a family of crazies.

He jogs up the grassy rise to the helicopter and around to the side. As he rounds the tail end he stops short, boots skidding on the damp grass.

Jacob Seed is sitting in the cockpit.

One foot on the landing skid and the other in the opening, his ass parked on the pilot’s seat as though he belongs there. A sleek black rifle leans against the body of the chopper within easy reach. He’s holding a rosy red apple in one hand, turning it slowly as he strips the peel into a long spiral with a pocket knife. In a holster at his thigh is a much larger hunting knife, black and menacing against the faded blue of his jeans.

“Evening, Deputy,” he says at last, not looking up from his apple.

Staci shuts his mouth and swallows painfully, throat suddenly parched. He tries to calm himself, squeezing his already sweating hands into fists at his sides. It’s fine. Just because Seed chanced upon the helicopter doesn’t mean he knows anything else. Staci glances at the expensive scope on the rifle, and gets the uneasy feeling that perhaps he’s seen everything.  

“Mr Seed,” Staci replies. It sounds stupid coming out of his mouth; makes him feel like a kid addressing a teacher. But he doesn’t know the man well enough to call him Jacob. Maybe he should have just called him Seed; he’ll remember that for next time. At least he didn’t call him Sir.

He takes a few steps closer to the chopper, but Jacob doesn’t move.

“Do you mind?”

“Mind what, exactly?” Seed sounds bored as he finishes peeling the apple and lets the ribbon of red skin drop to the grass. He looks up at Staci then, and his eyes are a clear, vivid blue.

Pratt has never seen him up close before, and it’s hard not to stare at his scars. The ones on his face are most distracting simply due to their placement. His right cheek is marred worse than the left, pocked and mottled by what Staci assumes is a burn. The meanest scars are on his arms, angry red splotches against faded pink-brown, as though already marked skin has been injured again recently. As though his first trial by fire hadn’t taught him enough of a lesson. The thought makes Staci even more anxious.

He forces his eyes back to meet Seed’s. “This chopper is property of the Hope County Sheriff Department,” he tells him.

Jacob’s eyebrows raise in feigned surprise. “That so,” he replies. He gestures with the pocket knife at the land around them. “Well, since all of this is my property, I think that means you and your chopper aren’t supposed to be on it without an invitation.” He fixes Staci with that bright blue glare. “And I don’t recall inviting you, Deputy.”

Staci clears his throat. He’s being challenged, but he’ll be damned if he makes himself look weak by apologising.

“We’ve had a couple of reports of strange activity on your family’s properties,” he says, tucking his thumbs into his belt loops. Everything he does feels awkward and transparent. It’s maddening, and more than a little embarrassing, but he doesn’t want to draw more attention by moving his hands again. He presses on. “I just came out to have a word, but you were nowhere to be seen.”

“You’ve found me now.”

Clearly the opposite is true.

Staci nods anyway. “Mind me asking what sort of operation you’re running out here?”

Seed completely ignores the question and takes a bite of apple instead, forcing Pratt to wait for his reply while he chews. He squints against the treeline thoughtfully and swallows.

“What exactly constitutes ‘strange activity’, Deputy?”

“A lot of trucks bringing stuff in from out of county. Construction noise around the clock. Blocking off footpaths.” He shrugs. “All sorts of little things, but add it all up and it’s out of the ordinary for a quiet community like this.”

“Wasn’t aware out of the ordinary was the same as illegal.”

Pratt exhales impatiently. “It’s not. But it’s putting folks on edge. Maybe if they had an idea what was going on, it would set their minds at ease.”

Seed shakes his head, still looking into the distance. “Doesn’t matter where you go,” he sighs. “People can’t mind their own damn business.”

“Come on now, Mr Seed,” Staci says. “If everything’s above board, what’s there to hide? What are you doing out here?”

“Why don’t you tell me,” Jacob says. “You got a nice long look around. What’d you find out?”

Shit. Of course he saw him. Pratt pauses, considering whether or not to admit what he saw.

“You have a lot of guns,” he replies. “Sidearms and assault rifles mostly, from what I could tell. Not your everyday hunting fare.”

“Oh, I have hunting rifles too, Deputy.”

Staci can tell Seed is loving every second of his discomfort. He isn’t even trying to make himself look innocent. All that tells Staci is that he’s arrogant. Seed’s brother may be a fancy lawyer, but that doesn’t make him or anyone in his weirdo family untouchable.

“You care to tell me why you need that kind of firepower?”

Seed takes another big bite of his apple. “Security,” he says around his mouthful.  

Pratt shifts his weight to the other foot. “Security for what?”

“For my family’s property,” he replies. “My brother Joseph is very trusting, very patient. I’m not. I told him there were gonna be people in this county who wouldn’t want to see him succeed. You just proved me right.”

“Succeed at what?” Staci blurts out.

Seed is out of the cockpit and on his feet in one swift motion. For a big man, he sure moves fast. Pratt has to steel himself to stay put rather than backing up a couple of steps the way he wants to. The way Seed is expecting him to. Of course, he has to be taller than Staci, only by a couple inches, but he makes sure to flaunt it as he moves closer.

“Are we done here, Deputy…” He peers down at the name stitched above Staci’s breast pocket. “…Pratt?” The hard consonants grit out from between his teeth, cold and clear as ice chips.

They lock eyes for a few seconds. Seed knows exactly how intimidating he is with his bulk and his scars and those intense eyes, bright blue like a gas flame. Staci doesn’t have any of his presence, but he stares back anyway, keen to show the other man that he’s no cowering fool.

Eventually he nods his head once, holding the eye contact.

“We’re done.”

Seed steps back to retrieve his rifle. “I trust that I won’t find you trespassing on my property again.”

“As long as you don’t cause any trouble, I’ll have no reason to come back.” His attempt at a warning tone is laughable and they both know it, but all Seed does as he meets Staci’s eye again is tilt one corner of his mouth up ever so slightly.

“I’ll be sure to remember it.” Without taking his eyes off Staci, he says, “Here, Judge.”

Staci frowns in confusion, mouth opening to say What? when a blur of grey and white fur flashes past him.

“Jesus Christ,” he stammers instead.

The biggest fucking dog he’s ever seen bounds over to Jacob Seed’s side and sits, sniffing his hand before turning big yellow eyes on Staci. A long pink tongue like a slice of bacon lolls from its mouth. How long was that thing watching them? There are wolves in these mountains, and the monster sitting next to Jacob Seed is either one of them or a close goddamn relative. Heart hammering, Pratt makes a mental note to look up what the law has to say about keeping wolves as pets.

Seed leans his rifle across his shoulders and saunters off with the giant hound at his side. Staci is furious. He climbs into the helicopter, slamming the cockpit door too hard behind him, and quickly checks over the control panel in case Seed decided to fuck with anything. Everything seems fine. He’s relieved, but also disappointed he doesn’t have anything to pin on him. Jacob Seed is bad fucking news, and Pratt swears to himself there and then that he’s going to be the one to prove it.

He fumbles his headset on and fires up the chopper, scowling at the controls until he’s put air between him and the ground. As he tilts the craft in the direction of home, he glances down and notices Jacob still standing at the tree line watching him. Seed raises his right hand to his head in a mocking salute, and while he’s too far away to be sure, Staci just knows the bastard is grinning.

[leslywood]

EP7: That’s why you are you

“You know I’d do anything for you. I have something to give you, I hope you like it.” Denisha said. She was carrying a gift box. She knew it in her heart she was crazy in love with this girl. Denisha was the type of person that’d do anything for someone she loves, and it could be scary.

“I know :) What is it babe?” Wandy kissed Denisha on her lips while she was washing dishes.

Denisha opened the box. There was a LEVIS shirt. It was from the Pride special edition and hard to find.

“I love it. I don’t have many shirts so.. I’ll wear it everyday. Thank you.”

“Haha you don’t have to do that. I’ll buy you more shirts. You can have everything you want. Just ask.”

“I love you and only you. Please know that.” Denisha’s heart was beating so fast as she genuinely believed what Wandy said.

“I know. I love you too.”

——————————

[Back to the present]

“I’m so sorry that we couldn’t finish our date like we expected. Well, like I expected. Can we go on a second date? I’ll make it up to you :) ” Samy said to Milan. They were sitting in the living room of the beach house. It’d been 10 days since Samy got to the Hornykru beach. After the Erin incident happened their group was the only group that didn’t go back to Leslywood. Samy admitted to herself that it was so peaceful after the other leslywood people left because she hated sharing the beautiful beach with them.

“Sure :) Can you take me to ride a horse? To be honest I’ve never been on a horse before.”

“I-” Samy was hesitating to answer. It was such a thing that she would only do with Bonita.. but as she was thinking that, she looked at Bonita who was talking to Rena in the kitchen. Samy thought “Bonita is probably having a good time with Rena.. but wait that’s none of my business.”

“Sure! Let’s go after we go to the movies. After that we can have dinner together :) ” Samy said to Milan. Well, she deserved a good date with an amazing gorgeous girl anyway.

——————————

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this mess..” Rena said to Bonita. She knew that Bonita and Carah were not talking to each other and it was because of what happened the other night at Neverland.

“Please don’t say that. It’s no one’s fault. I’m single and you are single. SHE isn’t. She has no rights to be jealous or whatever. I’m just done. ”

“I’m not sorry about what happened that night. I’m just sorry to see you sad because she thinks she still can do that. I know how close you two are and I wish this situation is not going to end your good friendship with her.”

“Yeah.. I hope you feel better though. And I want to thank you, I had a really good time. ” Bonita said.

“I had a really good time too.. but” Rena was hesitating to say something.

“What is it?”

“I think this should be the end of it. of us. I don’t think I wanna be seeing someone right now. I want to focus on myself, my better self. Let’s focus on having fun and having a good time with each other with no string attached.”

“Sure. No need to be worry. Whatever makes you happy. Well, I’d say throwing another party would be a good start but Annabelle is still missing so that wouldn’t be appropriate”

“Should we go help them find her? Luce seems to be very worried. I also don’t want them to think that this has anything to do with Erin. She is our student after all.”

“YEAH alright. Should I call Sa-” Bonita was gonna say Samy but then she realized that Samy was with Milan. She couldn’t say Carah either because they were fighting.

“Sa what? Sa who?”

“Salamanders”

“What???????”

“I mean Blair, Janice and Violet. I call my students Salamanders sometimes”

“Hahaha Weirdo” Rena giggled and questioned nothing because she was so used to everyone’s nonsense.

Bonita called the “Salamanders” and asked them to help her find Annabelle. The Salamanders agreed to meet Bonita and Rena at the living room in the Leshouse.

——————————

[Leshouse-14:00]

“She’s probably with some leslywood student tbh I saw her with a few of them that night.” Blair said. Luce got a lil bit angry hearing Blair say that, but she was too worried to fight with a student at the moment. Luce’s friends who were also in the house tried to comfort her. Luce had been waiting for the police’s call.

“Nah I don’t think so. They weren’t playing with her.” Erin said. Janice and Violet just shook their head because they were so high.

*Nanananana Chanananan La* Luce’s phone rang.

“Hello….. yes”…..… “What??!!! Where is she now??”……….. “Alright thank you I’m coming.” Luce hang up. She was freaking out.

“WHAT DID THE POLICE SAY. WAS THAT THE POLICE” Bonita panicked.

“Yeah.. they found her..”

“Okay alright let’s go everyone” Blair was heading to her car key.

“No no.. you guys don’t have to come. I’ll go alone. It’s okay. Thank you guys so much for helping me. and Erin, I’m sorry for accusing you. ”

“Wait what-” As Blair was about to say something, Luce left the house to her car and drove away.

“Wasn’t that a lil bit weird? Damn I don’t remember selling her my rainbow” Violet said

“Yeah it was weird. Well at least she is fine and found” Bonita said

The Salamanders went up to their room to smoke. Luce’s friends left and the rest was still in the living room. [Bonita, Rena, Erin, Shae, Denisha(Sleeping on Shae’s Lap)] They spent their evening  playing cards and PenguinTrap.

------------------

[hours later]

Later on, Samy and Milan were back at the house after they spent the whole day together at the movies and a restaurant. They saw no one at downstairs so they went up to look for the others at one of the movie rooms.

“I’M BAAAAACK BISHES” Samy bashed in the room uncivilizedly.

“HOLY FUCK SAMY” (Denisu)

“FUCK YOU” (Erin)

“I HOPE YOU HAVE YOUR PERIOD TWICE EVERY OTHER MONTH” (Blair)

Samy scared the shart out of everyone. They were watching a horror movie as Bonita and Rena had suggested. The movie was called “The unholy story of Ashley: Scorpio Origin”

“We are so sorry” Milan said quietly. She was a lil bit scared by the movie (that she wasn’t even watching but only heard a few sentences in the non-ghosty scene.)

“No we are not. What are y’all watching” Samy said

“It’s a horror. The internet says it helps with bonding because when people share the same fear they tend to feel closer to each other. The adrenaline rush helps intensify your feelings towards your friends and family who are watching with you, and no matter how you feel about the movie, you feel like you are having a great time.” Violet said the exact statement she found on the internet.

“So you are saying you guys are bonding without me? Why are y’all like this”

“Well if you hadn’t gone out with Milan, you would have gotten to spend time with us.” Bonita saltily said.

“Yeah Samy. This actually seems nice. Can we join?” Milan didn’t notice the salt because she was too soft and innocent. They joined the kru and they all ended up sleeping in the movie room together.  

—————————————

[3.30am that night, at the airport]

I guess this is the best way out

Carah thought as she was catching the flight.

—————————————

The End of Leslywood Season 1

[sirandking]

For @redbookpanda for the @tfcfemslashnet gift exchange - this is roughly based on the idea of Lailvarez and the worst first date ever, but also...pretty much nothing like that at all? Anyway, hope you enjoy!

“Man, I haven’t been down this way in so long,” Alvarez commented, watching crowds of people push past each other on the sidewalk in their rush to get home. She paused at a hot dog stand, watching with intrigue as a woman fed a piece of her sausage to an excited golden retriever. The dog tracked the woman’s hand with its entire head, panting from the summer heat, ear twitching and tail wagging.

Laila looked up at her voice and sighed. “Eyes on the prize, babe,” she said, gently tugging Alvarez back on track. “There’ll be plenty of dogs to pet later.”

Alvarez grinned and let herself be led through the crowds of people rushing home from work, pressing up against her girlfriend to avoid getting trampled. “I’m serious, though. I haven’t been here since, what? That time at Green Door when Jeremy tried to push all the tables together and go sock-sliding on them? Hey, is that where we’re going now? Because I am one hundred percent down for their nachos, babe. I have been deprived of good nachos for way too long.”

“Hush,” Laila said, leading them onto a side street. The sidewalks were noticeably emptier than on the main road, although the street was packed with cars trying to avoid the traffic. Alvarez kept her arm pressed against Laila’s. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

As it turned out, they did end up at Green Door, and Alvarez immediately abandoned Laila with a delighted cheer to wander around the bar and examine the decorations.

“Look, babe, they kept it!” she called, pointing at a set of bagpipes on a ledge. Laila looked up from where she was chatting quietly with a waitress and raised her eyebrows.

“We’re not stealing it,” she said. “Do you want to give Old Woman Candice another reason to have us kicked out?”

“We wouldn’t have to play it,” Alvarez said. “Just hang it on a wall somewhere. Show off your Scottish heritage.”

“I’m sure my one Scottish ancestor would be thrilled,” Laila said drily, leaving the waitress with a nod and making her way to a table near the back. “Now come on, I ordered ahead.”

“I love you,” Alvarez said, several minutes later, after their dinner had been brought out. The romance was diminished slightly by the mouthful of nachos she was speaking through, spewing crumbs all over the table. A glob of salsa dripped from the corner of her mouth, and Laila wiped it away with a thumb. She smiled fondly for a couple seconds too long, prompting Alvarez to ask, “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Laila responded, still smiling. “Just…I love you, too.”

“Okay, weirdo.”

Laila snorted and fished out another chip, twirling it to get as much cheese as possible. “Do you remember on our first date?” she asked. “When you had cheese all over your face and I was too embarrassed to tell you?”

“No, I don’t remember that,” Alvarez said, “because I was too distracted by the way you managed to knock the entire plate onto the floor and cover your dress in tomato.”

“And then you told me I looked like a fish?”

“It was a compliment! I had just gone scuba diving in Australia, I can’t help it that fish were the first thing I thought of.”

“You came back from Australia an entire month before asking me out,” Laila said, pointing a chip at Alvarez in accusation. Alvarez leaned across the table and bit off the end, causing the rest to break apart and fall toppings-first onto the table. Laila batted her girlfriend’s head away in mock-annoyance. “You just didn’t want to tell me my dress was ugly.”

“I loved that dress! I’ll never forgive you for throwing it out.”

“Where could I possibly have worn it? My mother wouldn’t even take it for her sewing projects, and her taste in fabrics is nightmarish.”

“Are you saying I have worse taste than your mother?” Alvarez asked, and Laila giggled.

“Hey,” she said, reaching across the table and threading her fingers through Alvarez’s. “Hey. You have some pretty amazing taste. And I thank the universe every day of my life that I was lucky enough to convince you to fall in love with me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Alvarez rolled with the change in tone easily, pulling their joined hands up to her lips for a kiss. “With any luck,” she said softly, “you won’t ever have to find out.”

Laila responded with a faint smile. For a second, Alvarez got lost in the contours of it, the gentle curves, the way it betrayed more emotion the longer she looked. Laila had never been one to open up easily, but Alvarez had ten years of experience reading her by now, and she knew exactly where to look to hear what Laila wasn’t saying. They would never have worked so well together, otherwise.

Then Laila glanced away, towards the bar, and then down at the table. She bit her lip and reached for another nacho, avoiding Alvarez’s questioning stare.

“So,” Laila said, staring resolutely at a poster advertising a ceilidh at a nearby Irish pub. “Do you think they changed the recipe on the salsa? Because I don’t remember it having so much salt.”

Alvarez frowned at the blatant topic change. “Laila?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine, just wondering about this salsa. Maybe I’m just more attuned to it after so many years on nutrition plans?”

Alvarez almost could have believed it, if it weren’t for the subtle quiver in Laila’s voice and the completely obvious lie. “Is something going on?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

Alvarez narrowed her eyes, suspicion growing. “You take me to my favorite pub, the place where we had our first date, you make it a big surprise, you order ahead ��”

“Can’t I just do something nice for my girlfriend while we’re back in town –?”

“You’re acting all shifty –”

“I’m not acting shifty –”

“You are –”

“And if I did have some big surprise lined up, I sure wouldn’t want to ruin it for you just because you think I’m acting shifty.”

Alvarez opened her mouth to respond and then paused, searching Laila’s face. After a few seconds of deliberation, wherein Laila put on her best puppy-dog eyes, she sighed. “Fine,” she conceded. “Fine, I’ll play along. But only because I love you, and I know how much work you put into these things.”

Laila grinned. “Thank you.”

“But you realize that if you don’t have a surprise planned, you’ve just set me up for disappointment.”

Laila leaned forward to scoop up some of the leftover nacho toppings with a fork. “I’ll just have to make something up quickly, then, won’t I?” she said, holding the fork out to Alvarez, who snorted but allowed herself to be spoon-fed nonetheless. They locked eyes with each other across the table while Alvarez licked the fork clean, and then both broke into giggles at the same time.

“Hey,” Laila whispered, giddy from inside jokes they’d long since forgotten. “Close your eyes.”

Alvarez did without question, expecting either a kiss or a faceful of salsa. Instead, she hears a slow exhale, and then a box is pressed into her hand. It’s soft, like it’s coated in velvet, small and hard, like –

“Open your eyes,” Laila breathes.

Alvarez almost doesn’t, almost just goes the rest of her life without ever opening her eyes again, because that would be better than the disappointment if it’s not what she thinks it is. But she trusts Laila, trusts her with her life and her back and definitely with her heart, so she looks up.

The ring itself is beautiful, a simple band with a clear gemstone that refracts rainbows where the light hits it, but Alvarez is much more fascinated by Laila’s face. She’s got the little pout on that she always gets when she’s nervous and a set to her jaw that says she’s going to be confident anyways, and a look in her eyes that Alvarez has never seen before, even after ten years.

Alvarez says yes before Laila even has time to ask, before she’s even realizes she’s said it.

“Bitch,” Laila says, but the pout relaxes into the clearest display of love Alvarez has ever seen on her face. “You could at least wait for me to ask.”

Alvarez shakes her head. “Yes,” she says again, wonders if it’s the only thing she’ll ever be able to say again.

“God,” Laila says, and she reaches over and takes the ring and all but shoves it onto Alvarez’s finger. “There. God.”

Alvarez grins, soppy and infatuated, like everything she hated when she was younger and didn’t know any better, but right now she can’t bring herself to care. She was going to make a spectacle in her favorite pub; she’d resigned herself to that the moment she realized what the weight in her hand meant. If there was any time when it was acceptable to start crying at a bar before 8 pm, it was now.

“Not God,” Alvarez said, and the way the light plays off Laila’s eyes is a thousand times more captivating than any ring, “but pretty damn close.”

Later that night, after the waitress has brought out celebratory dessert and they’ve sent ecstatic messages to all their friends, Laila and Alvarez sit curled up on the couch in their hotel, playing with the ring. They’d been sitting in the same position for the past two hours, occasionally dissolving into overwhelmed giggling, occasionally exchanging long, soft kisses.

“You know,” Alvarez said, holding the ring up to the light again and trying to see how many different rainbows she could count, “you never actually asked me.”

“Fuck you,” Laila said, lifting her head off Alvarez’s shoulder so she could swat at her indignantly. “Ask me yourself.”

“Will you m–?”

Laila kissed her before she could finish, but Alvarez was too in love to complain.

[donnerpartyofone]

don’t bother!

if i could change one thing about myself, worrying about what other people think would be pretty high on my list. i need to clarify that i don’t worry about what other people think OF ME, or at least, not in a way that preoccupies me or makes me feel compelled to try to trick people into liking me, or prove myself to an audience. the thing i worry about is just literally What People Think, how they came to conclusions that i think are absurd, and why they insist upon these conclusions. like long-time readers are certainly aware of (if not exhausted by) the fact that when i get rude or crazy anonymous asks, i don’t worry about the content of what they say (you’re ugly! you’re stupid! i assume that you like certain politicians, so here’s a bunch of pulpy apocrypha about how they’re the antichrist!), but i do worry about why they’re saying them. like does someone who tells me i’m busted really think that i’ll be sad when i find out that some bored faceless teenager doesn’t want to have sex with me? do nazi trolls really think that, by loading up my ask box with insulting fact-free vitriol about my naive pro-immigrant ideas, they will cause me to change my politics and my life and thereafter work toward building what they think is a safer, stronger country? i don’t really care about WHAT any of these types of assholes say, but i have to concede that i start spinning out on how anyone could possibly think that their specific behaviors are anything other than completely pointless and a poor reflection on themselves and people like them. sometimes i’ll post a reply addressing the anon with “literally what did you expect to happen when you asked me this. this is not a rhetorical question, i genuinely want you to describe to me what you thought the consequences would be, i won’t even fight with you.” they never respond. and of course, i know intellectually that there are no imagined consequences, there’s just a juvenile urge to shout at strangers, any strangers, for any reason, out of boredom and a felt lack of efficacy in real life. but my dumbass brain can’t be stopped from its calculations, from trying to imagine a sound motivation that would make ME shout at a stranger for no reason, what gain could possibly be had even if it’s only at the end of a one in a million chance.

anyway, acting insulting and superior is one thing, but i have this same baffled reaction to strangers who reach out to me to try to get me to agree with some feeling that they personally have, that i’ve already come out against for my own independent reasons. these kinds of reactions are, perhaps oddly, usually rooted in much less important issues than body image or politics or other such things that activate trolls. when someone i’ve never even heard of comes to me for personal validation, it’s usually because i’ve preemptively and for my own entertainment hated on their favorite band or show or movie. i usually carry out said hating with great attention to detail, explaining precisely how i evaluated, say, a movie’s script, and its imagery, and its direction, and its apparent message, and etc; while one might not agree with my assessment, there’s usually no room left to wonder how and why i came to my conclusion. yet, i still get these desperate characters on my virtual doorstep begging me to take it back in this “please like me” tone.

this is why i’m usually affronted into apoplexy when i launch one of these critical diatribes and i still get some clingy weirdo replying on my post about “yay, i love this movie!” when i first started writing about movies on tumblr, i got a stream of anonymous responses from an unhinged-sounding individual who, instead of engaging me in a logical argument like “A’s performance was bad, but can’t one say that this movie isn’t principally about the human factor” or “it’s true that the script didn’t make any sense, but i felt this was more of a style piece”...instead of anything so conversational, the guy would just pop his own reviews into my asks, like “this (m. night shyamalan movie you just slammed) was awesome! the story and the actors were so good. me and my wife loved it!” (you? your wife?? am i supposed to know you guys???) when i refused to answer any of his messages with more than a “i guess some anonymous stranger enjoyed one of the movies (that i just vivisected out of existence)”, he changed gears and slung a bunch of mud at me about what a nasty cunt i am for refusing to acknowledge and consider his opinions, and if i’m on the internet then i should be forced to expect that i’m going to have to hear from dissenting voices and everything. i think that’s one thing people don’t get, actually: no i’m not. i definitely shouldn’t be SURPRISED when people pick fights with me about public statements, but i’m in no way obligated to give a shit. saying things in a publicly-accessible fashion does not automatically transform my monologues into dialogs, and having a blog does not make me a civil servant. 

it’s pretty obvious that anyone who is inclined to send these kinds of messages is suffering from some crippling insecurity the likes of which i can only imagine. when i’m talking about something i like, and some grinch butts in that they HATE my precious subject of adoration, i feel hurt and annoyed, sure. but i can’t imagine what my life would be like if, every time my dash showed me a post from someone saying something shitty about my favorite X, i felt so personally attacked that i needed to raise my voice and get this perfect stranger to recant their for-their-own-pleasure statements. if i needed to “make peace” with every single nobody who, somewhere in the universe, didn’t like my thing, i mean, i’d have to quit my job, i’d never have time to sleep again. and what’s more, i can’t imagine what i’d gain if i were really able to get this weird form of apology from someone i don’t even know or have to know; a feeling of safety perhaps, like there’s no one left lurking around any future dark corner to meaninglessly disagree with the minutiae of my life? a feeling of being approved-of, even by people who i don’t know even know enough to approve of myself? what IS this shit? recently on another blog i posted something mean about an absolute broad-side-of-a-barn turkey, and some nervous little so-and-so had to reply to the tune of “i actually liked this movie. i mean this is a good review, but like, i liked this movie.” obviously at least part of this was well-meaning, and this unknown individual has no impact on my life, but my stupid omnivorous hyperactive brain CAN’T STOP trying to cook up viable reasons that another human being would address me this way, without even a dialectic response to the actual accusations i levied, just their little FEELINGS, like LITERALLY WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN HERE SIR.

i have no idea why i’m like this. i guess there’s just some tyrannical fascist deep within me, pulling the strings so i leap to life every time i think someone is ABSOLUTELY WRONG and/or DOES NOT HAVE A REASON TO SPEAK. you’d think that now i’d have a moment of lucidity where i realize that this is EXACTLY WHAT PEOPLE ARE THINKING when they troll me, or anybody, but unfortunately trolling is covered by my NO REASON TO SPEAK prohibition, so i can’t find a peaceful conclusion this way. the “REASON” part is definitely the most important issue for me, as i can’t even stay at rest when i know for sure someone is wrong. the trigger for all this mindless ire: i posted a music video directed by funnyman eric wareheim, and noted that i found one actor so moving that i was able to ignore the aggressive scatalogical sports-are-gay joke that comprised the entire rest of the video, which is surely supposed to be funny. someone unknown to me replied, “i don’t think it is supposed to be funny, or else the actor didn’t get the memo.” i had a gut feeling that this person simply wanted to take an opportunity to say “didn’t get the memo”, as it gave them some personal sensation of articulate haughtiness...but i also stupidly really let it bother me that they were unable to acknowledge the excessively ludicrous water sports gag that permeates the video as “funny”, even while the video is directed by an established comedian. this is a case where i know for a fact that i’m right, and i have no reason to care about the person replying, and yet my idiotic mind keeps going, WHY WOULD YOU THINK THIS, HOW COULD YOU THINK THIS, I’M ALREADY SURE YOU’RE WRONG BUT I WANT YOU TO DESCRIBE YOUR MENTAL PROCESSES TO ME IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL UNTIL YOU EITHER ADMIT THAT YOU’RE WRONG, OR MAKE ME UNDERSTAND THE MECHANISM OF YOUR LOGIC ON SUCH A PROFOUND LEVEL THAT I NEVER WONDER ABOUT IT EVER AGAIN.

the only things i can really say for myself here are that a) i definitely consider it a personal defect that i have these ruminations, and b) i at least don’t allow myself to lash out at actual people who behave this way, since i have at least the modicum of intelligence and decency necessary to understand that such an argument wouldn’t get me the slightest satisfaction. just the mental grind is a big problem for me though, and i definitely need to come up with some sort of coping mechanism so i can reroute all this energy into stuff that actually matters--even if the “stuff that matters” is just the delicious experience of, however intermittently, having nothing to worry about.