#discourse warning i guess for me hating on the later seasons' writing

[lemonxlimee]

Intro post

Last updated: November 24th, 2024

Last update: slightly updated byf, updated song

Names: Our collective names are Lemon, Pyrite or Lock! If you know who's fronting, feel free to call us that, too! ^_^ (or, if you're not sure and up for a challenge, try to guess. ;) you can also call us Saturn, Leafy or Apollo if you wish. Label me whatever you would like

— if I sign off with &, that means the comment was collective; or it applies to General Pyrite rather than any single headmate

Age: 16

Pronouns

I live in Alberta, Canada!

PFP is from TPOT 6, with the bigender and arospec flags. Banner is Cole from Ninjago season 6. 6 isn't even my favourite number! It's 8 :)

Fandoms, in order: OSC, Chonny Jash, Minecraft, Ninjago, and (very occasionally) FNAF

Dnfi: harmful paras/pro contact, radqueers/terfs, zionists, anti-queer, if you're under 13 (get off tumblr), anti-endos*

Super thin ice: hazbin/helluva fandom, Leafy haters, nickloon shippers, fireafy shippers, "endo neutral" people*

Thin Ice: Yeah there's no one in this section yet. Boo 👻

*Not dni but it's weird if you interact: if you're over 26, anti jashippers, anti shippers in general, ageless blogs

Please interact: object show fans, lgbtqia+, anyone who lives in Western Canada (alberta/sask/bc), Leafy defenders, other systems, and anyone who shares a fandom!! ^_^ and basically anything else I guess

Complicated interaction (i.e. specific people only can interact): proshippers*, homestuck, "anti-syscourse*", Firey defenders**

*exceptions will be made on a case-by-case basis

*If you aren't in syscourse feel free to disregard this

**This one is in CompInt because half the time I'm a Firey defender and the other half the time I hate his guts

My Spotify: Leafyztar !! 💚❤️

My Wattpad: xxcloudyy-

My YouTube: L3MON // LIM3

My Ao3: l3monxlim3

My Discord: leafyztar

Friendos:

@talkingteardrop

@scn-thedog (❤️❤️❤️)

@serpyserper56 (❤️❤️❤️)

@ohmysheetmetal (❤️❤️❤️)

@tapwater118

@lillyshroom

@depraced

@twig-gy

Byf:

• I don't post about Palestine. Isreal supporters dnfi, but I can't donate to anyone, and it makes me spiral, so I've blocked the tag and I ignore asks. I'm not a bad person for this and if you tell me i am I'll ignore you.

• I say the F and D slurs very often. I'm not sorry. I don't use the T slur though, it makes me unhappy

• If you wanna send an ask, have it have some substance, please, instead of just an image (╥﹏╥)°°

• I don't do art requests! I draw, write and post whatever I want whenever I want. Maybe I'll open commissions later on.

• I'm objectum and also hhhhnng plushsiesssssss,,,

• SPECULATIVE BIOLOGIST!! Please ask me about my object spec bio. I love object spec bio. I love it. I love it. I love spec bio. I love osc spec bio. I lo

• I specialize in plants and machines, but I am trying to branch out (ha.) Into other species! I'm most knowledgeable about plants though :)

• Robotics kid (watch out)

• we have a bunch of mental disorders and a couple physical disabilities too. We often don't have the energy to do stuff and we can be pretty irritable. If this bothers you, don't follow.

• we use we/us and i/me interchangeably

• If you make me uncomfortable or angry I will likely block without warning, even if you're not in the dni or thin ice lists.

• * a proship to me is defined as a ship that includes and embraces illegal or morally awful themes. This includes but is not limited to minor/adult, human/animal, or attacker/victim. If you ship any of these things, I consider you a proshipper. Otherwise, I don't give a darn - have fun with your kismesis

• I'm anti-harassment and anti-censorship, so I don't really give a darn, and this also does not apply to kinks. "darkships" don't count either. If I don't like it, I'll just block and ignore, and I encourage you to do the same.

• This doesn't apply to radqueer shit and harmful paraphilias, especially if you're pro-contact. I'll still b+i, but you best believe I'm reporting your ass.

• i post about discourse. Not syscourse anymore though it's just tiring (feel free to send me hate mail though, i guess)

• I sometimes joke about my disabilities. Sorry if that makes you uncomfortable

• I often write in enderspeak! Translations will be provided upon request. ⟒⋏⎅⟒⍀☍⟟⋏ ⌿⌰⟒⏃⌇⟒ ⟟⋏⏁⟒⍀⏃☊⏁!

• I also speak warden (thanks dear) and I'm learning toki pona (thanks Q) :)

• Kin of a bunch of stuff; most prominently:

Cat therian (red tabby with low white spotting)

Enderman kin

Robot/techkin

Plushkin

• PROUDLY KITTYPET 🌈❤️❤️🔥🔥🔥

• I will change this as I see fit

• dm me or hit me up through an ask if you have any fic recommendations!! (yes I have read fear garden, it's my favourite book ever)

My alt accounts

@leafyztar (Leafy roleplay blog)

@usually4leaf (you know)

@little-droplet-td (td blog)

@leafy-plush (leafyplush blog)

Tags

#miscellaneous - text posts

#ask - asks; always cross-posted with miscellaneous, so if you want to look for just text posts, you're outta luck.

#my art - my art

#Pyrite's jashtober - I made my own jashtober. Go look at it. It's very incomplete but whatever I'll probably finish it soon

#bald objects - I edit osc characters to remove notable features, making them "bald." I have lost friends for this

#Saturn's hall of fame - my best sellers

#fave - other people's best sellers

#ultra fave - the best of the best

#Insane ramblings - Chonny Jash stuff. I am very unnormal about them

#ocpilled - osc ocs, mainly Lock and Twisty

#ocmaxxing - ninjago ocs, mainly Katelain and Jillian

#ocigma - any other original characters

#fagposting - Leafy bfdi❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ and Evil Leafy too I guess

My fanfic comic can be found here; "Favourite Student," a series of oneshots about Leafy in the EXIT

My kinlist can be found here; be aware of these when talking to me, as the things I say may be influenced by the connections I have made with these characters

My headcanons can be found here and here, in case you get confused during a roleplay or conversation (or if you just wanna look at them for fun)

The Bidding - Chonny Jash

[chiisana-sukima]

I think ultimately the answer is “we don’t choose our blorbos; our blorbos choose us”. People’s ids prefer certain kinds of stories, and then we end up loving characters whose place in their canon is to tell that kind of story.

For me personally, my id likes stories where a character with a lot of obvious vulnerability is subjected to horrific stress but still manages to maintain, by the skin of their teeth, their essential core autonomy and inherent innocence, and then from thereon out, conducts their relationships with the outside world from within the framework of that.

In the early seasons, both Sam and Dean’s stories had a lot of those sorts of elements, and I was actually a Dean girl until s7. But then as the seasons wore on, Dean’s vulnerability became less evident, and the writing of his character became more haphazard. As the writing deteriorated and the characters became more flanderized, I think Sam actually benefited from being somewhat neglected by the writers, because it left his character more open for Jared to inject his own take on Sam’s vulnerability into his scenes, whereas Dean became, by the end, a character who was mostly about Anger Management Issues--which is a topic I’m interested in only if the character’s vulnerability is also explored alongside it.

There were a few highlight episodes in the later seasons that were about Dean as a whole person with inherent dignity and innocence--Regarding Dean, for example--and a few missteps with Sam where they gave him takes I found difficult to reconcile with his base character--his espousal of monster genocide in The Raid, for example--but for the most part, by the end Sam had grown a lot as a person and had a full and satisfying (to me, anyway) arc that included the elements my id enjoys, whereas Dean’s character development stagnated to a point that I could no longer believe they realistically could pull off giving him enough growth before the end to make me happy. I still love Dean with all my heart, but the Dean in my heart is mostly early seasons Dean and I view the later seasons as, for him, a not entirely well-realized dark AU.

A quick question to everyone who likes Sam more than Dean. I would be very interested why

[miggydiaz]

for the salty ask: 3, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 27 for spn

I had to do this one today because I have a LOT of Supernatural feelings and so a lot of these are even longer than my CK one. But thanks for the ask @wonderwolfballoon!

UNPOPULAR SUPERNATURAL OPINIONS AHOY: INCLUDES ANTI-DESTIEL SENTIMENTS AND OTHER UNSAVORY ELEMENTS

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion? 100000000% I have unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion in the SPN fandom. SPN was the fandom that taught me to make JUDICIOUS use of the blocking feature tumblr offers in order to curate my experience. I would actually encourage anyone and everyone to use the blocking feature if they disagree with people. Honestly, we don’t owe anyone our time or energy, especially on the internet! It is much healthier than sending or responding to hate, IMO. 7. Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?* This is actually a hard one for me to answer, so let me start by saying -- I have not seen a SINGLE episode since 9x05? I think? Whichever episode was the Dr. Deanlittle one where he talks to animals. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the first 5 seasons, and they are all I watch anymore and I pretend nothing else exists after that (except The French Mistake because that episode is hilarious). But uh... I guess the simple answer is when I was originally watching it, I really loved Dean. He was brash, snarky, rough around the edges... but kind of soft in a I’m too toxically masculine to deal with my softness sort of way that I love seeing characters grow out of as they mature. But when I go back and rewatch now, much older than I was in 2006 when I first started watching, I see how awful a lot of his older behavior truly was. I still love Dean, and I will be a Dean girl until I die probably, but sometimes you gotta remind yourself that your faves have been problematic in the past so you don’t put them up on fandom constructed pedestals.

10. Most disliked arc? Why? AND AS A BONUS, MY ANSWER to 11. Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why? I could write a literal essay about all of the problems I have with the later seasons (the ones I watched, which encompasses 6, 7, 8, and a few episodes of 9). But by far and away, the thing I hated most, was the Men of Letters.

Okay, this is where I am going to recognize my love of certain characters is at FUNDAMENTAL ODDS with how that character develops later and what history and background we get later on them. I RECOGNIZE this character is problematic, and I would NEVER STAND for his shit IRL, but fiction is complicated and nuanced, and fantastic circumstances do not make for normal behaviors. That being said, with all warnings I could possibly give, and with the full understanding that what I am about to say is basically fandom blasphemy of the highest order...

I like John Winchester’s character.

I know, I know. If you wanna stop reading and block me now, you are free to do that. I will not hold it against you. I am not about to apologize for anything he has done. I just need to contextualize why I have such an issue with the MOL storyline and it starts with the simple fact that I liked John Winchester as he was originally presented.

To me, and with the full understanding that I am answering this from the perspective of someone who DOES NOT regard anything past season 5 as personal canon, John Winchester is the perfect example of a truly complicated character. Here’s a parent who, if we take the pilot and the original s2 Djinn episodes at face value, could have been a great parent, who then got shoved into a fantastically impossible situation and made terrible choices that he thought were necessary in order to keep himself and his sons safe. That does not EXCUSE the heaps of abuse that he piled onto Dean in any way. We know John and Mary didn’t have a great marriage. But we also know from the pilot that John was at least a caring and present father, mostly,  for the 4 years he got to parent in a normal world, and that if Mary had lived, John would’ve been a softball playing dad who raised his kids and had a loving marriage with his wife. (Again, I need to reiterate, I did not watch anything past the early episodes of s9. If there is later canon that negates this, I do not know about it, nor do I want to because I don’t think of anything past 5 as canon) This is all important to me because these things emphasize that John was “NORMAL”. He was a mechanic, from a family of mechanics, whose father didn’t bail on him (a man in the episode where Dean is transported back in time to Lawrence tells John to ‘say hi to your old man for me’ or something to that effect). He was just a midwestern dude. Giving John Winchester a fantastical background through this Men of Letters bullshit made me SO MAD. First of all, I hate when later canon negates previous canon. I cannon TELL you how much I hate it. And the later seasons of Supernatural are riddled with stuff that doesn’t make any damn sense in the context of original, Kripke written canon, which is exactly why I stopped watching. That’s not ~Evolution of the show.~ That’s conveniently forgetting stuff that made your show and its premise so successful to begin with in order to keep filming episodes so you can keep making money. It’s the sacrifice of art for capitalism and yes I know this is a stupid TV show but as a writer myself it PISSES ME OFF.

/rant

ALSO, the idea that this toxically masculine family was set on this path by Heaven, and inherited this curse that put them on this path from their mother was such a good plot twist in its heyday. We spent four seasons thinking of Mary Winchester as a victim of circumstance, whose fate could not have been avoided because she was the mother to Sam, who is effectively cursed. And then, we learn that its BECAUSE of Mary that this ball even got rolling in the first place. IDK if you were around for that time in the fandom but at least in my circle, this was a big fucking deal. There had been so much (rightful) discourse about John before this, and what kind of parent he was, that Mary became almost deified in the same way Dean deifies her. And then we find out that this whole story gets set in motion by a decision she made because this was the life she found herself in. This was great. It was interesting. And even though the MOL doesn’t negate any of this, it does give John this weirdly fantastical that isn’t necessary. Let this guy be just some Joe Schmoe who fell in love with a kick ass hunter and had no idea any of this even existed. Let Mary and her want to be ‘normal’ be a complicated moral choice that fundamentally altered the paths of her husband and sons. It’s good tv!

Also, I fucking hate the bunker. The best episodes are Dean and Sam having moments in the car, or while in motel rooms on their cases, or whatever. I don’t mind them having a home base. I’m fine with that. But if a building could ever be a Mary Sue character, the bunker is it. I hate all of the MOL storyline, starting with this place.

I may not even tag this as Supernatural, I don’t need angry later season stans in my inbox.

15. Unpopular opinion about the manga/show?

There’s nothing good about anything that happened after season 6. It’s all a bunch of retconning bullshit. Season 6 had its moments where it was interesting, so I cut it a little bit of slack, but as far as I’m concerned, the show ended in season 5. I’m not sure that’s necessarily unpopular, but it does feel that way on tumblr, so. 

16. If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

Aside from ending it in season 5?

Oooh, I’m about to blaspheme again. I am definitely not tagging this as Supernatural.

I would never have introduced Castiel, and I would’ve given that entire storyline to Anna. Or, alternatively, I would’ve flipped their story lines.

Look, for whatever it’s worth... I agree with the idea that Dean Winchester is a repressed bisexual. His Dr. Sexy love, the entire storyline with Benny in season 8, etc. I just don’t think he feels romantically about Castiel. And like, that’s okay! Just because you’re not into someone who is into you doesn’t mean you owe them a relationship or anything, no matter what the fandom thinks.

But I also think Dean has a big problem when it comes to women. Again, obviously later on in the series, Dean shifts and Charlie happens and Claire Novak and I know all of these things from gifs okay, context is not applicable here because I have none. But early on, Dean struggles A LOT with thinking of women as A) capable and B) trustworthy. He exists in a perpetual state of identifying women along the Madonna/Whore binary. Even Jo, however you feel about her, and to be clear, I loved Jo, but he doesn’t stop thinking of her really as a kid until they’re about to shoot the devil. Up until then, he’s genuinely surprised Ellen lets her out of the damn house.

Giving him a strong, capable woman who rebels against Heaven for HIM would have fundamentally altered Dean’s perceptions of women much earlier on than we get and would have forced him to examine some of that misogyny head on.

Dean has no problems trusting men. This is why the entire Gordon fiasco happens, right? It was less work for him to trust Castiel because Castiel is the inverse of Ruby. Angel to her Demon. Angels and demons don’t really have genders, but for the sake of presentation of vessels, man to her woman. Not even getting me started on the problematic parts of having significant demons mostly symbolized by women (Meg, Ruby, Lilith) and having significant angels mostly represented by Men (Castiel, Michael, Lucifer, Zachariah, Gabriel, Raphael), and how that ties into the idea of Original Sin and yada yada, but just like it’s interesting to have Mary and her decisions be the catalyst for the story, it’s interesting to have this badass warrior angel in Anna who marches down to Hell to yank Dean out, and through her interactions with him, decide to rebel against the ultimate patriarchy, while Dean gets an equally strong female counterpart to Sam’s Ruby, a woman for all intents and purposes that he respects as a soldier and an ally and not just a potential piece of ass.

Also, Castiel fans being literally unbearable is why I left the fandom. Nothing against Misha or anything, and not even anything against Cas as a character (who I very much enjoyed in seasons 4 and 5), but his fans have always been the worst and they try to insert him into everything.

19. What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?

Castiel/Destiel fans, which even though I also hated the direction the show was going, drove me out of the fandom. Not like, personally or directly, but just the sheer mental hoops they had to jump through in order to make their ship work and I just got tired of seeing all of the contrived meta on my dash. Oh, and the rampant misogyny that came out of those early Castiel fans. I didn’t appreciate it from the Wincest corner, and I definitely didn’t appreciate it from the fans of the new guy. Gross.

22. Popular character you hate?

Oof. I don’t know. I don’t really hate Castiel, because again, I liked him a lot in seasons 4 and 5. Even 6 was interesting, even if I don’t regard it as my own personal show canon. I don’t think there was a popular character in those first five seasons I ever really hated. I didn’t fundamentally hate a character at all until the MOL stuff came around. Um. Yeah, I don’t really have an answer for this.

23. Unpopular character you love?

Pretty much every female character ever. Jo, Ellen, Ruby, Meg... although Meg became more popular as the series went on, Anna. Um. OH, BELA. Bela ESPECIALLY, I recently rewatched season 3 and I cannot emphasize how MUCH I love Bela. She was the best purely human foil ever. Bela is hands down the character I love most that the fandom had frothing at the mouth hatred for. It doesn’t help that I legitimately think Lauren Cohan is one of the most beautiful women on the planet. But seriously, Bela. Hands down.

24. Would you recommend XXX to a friend? Why or why not? 

I have! Many of times, and ALWAYS WITH THE CAVEAT to stop at the end of season 5. Not a single one of them has listened to me and almost all of them came to me at the end of the finale and were like WHY DID I WASTE SO MUCH TIME, and I don’t want to say I told them so, but like, I explicitly in neon colored text once told them so, so like, idk what to tell them. But yes! I think if someone is interested in some classic mystery television that has an overarching theme of family and forgiveness and striking out against the boxes that life tries to put us all into, SPN is a great show. But only the first 5 seasons. Also, be prepared for some thematically problematic parts of the show because there’s a lot of cishet toxic masculinity in those early seasons, and we should examine our media critically. There’s also a lot of good though too, and IMO, the good outweighs the bad.

25. How would you end XXX/Would you change the ending of XXX?

I would’ve ended it at season 5. I would’ve had Sam escape the pit and seen him standing under the street lamp, but then I would’ve had him walking away to leave Dean with Lisa (btw, side note, I DIDN’T like Lisa because I don’t think Dean would ever be truly happy with someone completely outside the life). Not because Sam doesn’t love his brother, but because he *does* love his brother, and because he would want Dean to be happy, even though Dean and Sam’s ideas of what makes the other happy have always been a little bit screwed up.. but that’s a different story.

27. Least shippable character?

Probably Zachariah. God, could you imagine? And... maybe Alastair, but I’m sure there are fics out there that I do not want to think about.

[toshikosatos]

where I’ve been

trigger warnings for mention of suicidal ideation, and very nonspecific mention of sexual intrusive thoughts. brief mention of fear of starting a fire and contamination fears. (there is also a link to an article which I provide warnings for later, but here’s an advance warning that the article at that link mentions pedophilia.)

alternative title: “OCD: It’s More Than Just Hand Washing! (And Yet I Am Also Singlehandedly Keeping the Body Shop in Business with My Frequent Purchases of Hand Cream in a Desperate Attempt to Undo that Self-Inflicted Damage, As Well.)”

2016 was when it really started to get bad.

there was no real, or at least good, reason for this. my friend had just flown across the Atlantic and moved in with me and my parents, and it was so nice living with a friend and having that constant companionship. I had just finished my first year back in school after deciding to go back and finish my degree following a four year gap, in which I’d bounced between part-time service industry jobs, unemployment, and periods of severe mental illness. it was hard, but I got through that first year. I was 25.

things that sucked, though: season 5 of Person of Interest was happening, and after a year of anticipation, I wound up really disappointed by it. I have a tendency to fixate really unhealthily on my current favourite media, pretty much invest my entire emotional wellbeing in it, and then get totally crushed when it winds up disappointing me in some way. I still feel this cycle happening and don’t quite know how to break out of it, but it was worse back then. and the fandom was also full of REALLY toxic drama at the time that I couldn’t see clearly enough to disengage myself from (although it did ultimately lead to me quitting Tumblr). it wound up really triggering what I now understand to be my OCD, but I didn’t get that back then.

but maybe I should have seen it. I remember weird little things that popped up when I was younger. I went through a time for a few days as a tween when I couldn’t stop flaring my nostrils, or focusing on my blinking, and getting increasingly stressed out by it. later in my teens, I got more anxious about checking all the lights in my house to make sure none of them were about to burst into flames before I went to bed. I also had a bedtime ritual where I’d look at the moon and wish for my loved ones’ wellbeing, and it got more and more ritualized, in this way where I couldn’t step away and go to bed until I felt I’d looked at the moon just Enough, or done certain physical gestures by the window enough times. then I did a school project on OCD at 17 and thought, oh, hey, a lot of this sounds familiar! it made me so aware of my compulsions, but I also started doing them more and getting more stressed out by them as a result, somehow. but a little while after finishing the project, things calmed down again.

these were the things I understood to be related to OCD. I didn’t know WHAT was happening to me when I couldn’t pull myself away from Twitter arguments at 25, couldn’t stop going over the same topics with friends and explaining how I felt and getting reassurance that my friends didn’t judge my opinions, or didn’t judge me for having had a different opinion in the past. I didn’t know why I was losing hours of my life to stress over The Discourse going on on my Twitter feed. I just thought, geez, my anxiety is a mess.

then I went back to school in the fall, and it got worse. one day I remembered something offensive I’d said to be ~edgy when I was 14. read: 11 years prior. I became overcome with anxiety for the next few days, convinced that if I ever told a friend about this, they’d disown me for being an awful person. finally, I told them, and they did not care one bit. they just started listing other 14 year olds they’d known who’d done the same kind of shit. I breathed a sigh of relief. for the time being.

then I wrote an essay that led me down a questionable Youtube rabbit hole. I wound up getting very triggered by a video I saw of something that probably should have been removed from Youtube, but I also convinced myself that I was a horrible person for having looked at it and not immediately looked away. I worried about this for about a month.

then in December 2016, it got much worse. I remembered something similarly inappropriate that I’d seen online when I was 15. again: 10 years earlier. I had looked the thing up out of morbid curiosity, thought it was inappropriate, and never looked at it again. now, 10 years later, I was suddenly overwhelmingly convinced that I was a HORRIBLE person for having looked at this, and that any of my friends would agree and would leave me forever if they knew. within a few days, it became so overwhelming I told a friend, and she did not care. I felt better, for a moment. but it came back. the fear always came back. reassurance from any one person was never enough. I always knew that some remaining friend WOULD hate me for one thing or another I’d done, and it WOULD be proof that I was a terrible person.

I didn’t see how it could get any worse until January 2017. somehow, it did. my thoughts were out of control. I triggered myself eight ways till Sunday, and that January and February was one of the hardest times of my entire life. I was never suicidal - I always knew I would never actually kill myself - but I imagined myself dead every single day, and thought about how much better off we’d all be if I’d never been born. (I remember feeling this way when I took the picture I included at the top of this post.) I felt like there was no point in me living anymore because I was such a horrible person, but that I HAD to keep living, so I was just stuck in a pointless existence, not allowed to feel fulfilled anymore. it was probably the lowest I’ve ever felt. it was the worst feeling. I was anxious and afraid, but that isolating fear made me deeply depressed, too.

but it was pretty early on in all this that I tried to google what I was feeling, and was led to this famous article by Rose Cartwright about pure O OCD. (MAJOR trigger warnings on that article: she talks in detail about sexual intrusive thoughts about pedophilia as well as sexual orientation). honestly, having a name for what I was going through didn’t make me feel much better, but at least I had some idea what was happening to me, now. and it was that knowledge that EVENTUALLY helped me to help myself. it gave me the language to use with the doctors I met, an understanding of how to explain what I was going through, which eventually helped me through evaluations and got me into an OCD treatment program in the fall of 2018. and it did show me that I wasn’t alone.

but there was a sense of, “how did I never realize what this was until now?” I’d referred to myself as having OCD tendencies for a long time. “OCD habits.” I didn’t think any of it was severe enough to actually call OCD. then I found out all the different ways OCD can manifest: intrusive thoughts about sexual topics, violence, morality. I’d had them all. even back in 2013, when I first started seeing a psychotherapist, I went through a phase where I couldn’t stop having a particular intrusive sexual thought that made me feel like a monster. I told my therapist about it, desperate. she reassured me that I wasn’t a freak, and I felt a whole lot better. but she never even used the term OCD. she just said it was strange that I was having these thoughts when I didn’t have a history of abuse. but that’s not strange: it’s just how OCD works sometimes. she didn’t Get It. (I have read that psychotherapists often don’t get it, because they’re quite focused on analyzing the reasons why you feel a certain way, and OCD sufferers already do that too much. we don’t need to analyze: we need to learn to live with our bad thoughts, and not act out compulsions in response to them.) so I went on not knowing until it got much, much worse. and that is why people really need to start building a better understanding of all the different things that OCD entails.

I have intrusive sexual thoughts. I worry CONSTANTLY about everything I’ve ever done wrong and that I’m a bad person, and every single day I fight the urge to seek reassurance from my friends that every single one of those things isn’t It, the thing that will finally make them realize that I’m a horrible person and leave me forever. I second guess every decision I make to the point that I wind up frozen by my own anxiety. I obsess over contamination and harm, too. I wash my hands too much because I’m afraid if I don’t, and then I touch something someone else will touch, I might contaminate them in some way, and that would make me a horrible person. it all comes down to “this will make me a horrible person.” all my other obsessions come back to morality, in the end. I had one doctor who evaluated me tell me I was wrong to connect my sexuality obsessions to my morality obsessions, but I think she was wrong. they are absolutely connected. it is ALL about this for me, in the end.

when I was cleaning my room last year, during my treatment, I got distracted by a notebook I wrote in when I was 12, and I found a page where I wrote, in 2003, “My obsessive compulsive habits are getting out of hand.” I didn’t even remember knowing the term when I was 12. I saw it that long ago, but it took me until I was 27 to get treated for it. there’s no such thing as too late, but when I read that, I wished I could have told my younger self to get help and why. I wished I could show my 17 year old self, or my 21 year old self, or my 25 year old self that page, and let her know, “this is what’s going on. this is what you need to tell a doctor you’re dealing with.” but maybe now I can help someone else figure that out, like Rose Cartwright has helped me with her OCD activism and writing.

my treatment ended a year ago, and I haven’t been using the tools they gave me very diligently since. I’ve been really struggling as a result, but executive dysfunction is a bitch. I hope I can start working on it again soon, because I already know what I need to do to feel better.

a book we used in therapy that I found incredibly helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Over-OCD-Second-Self-Help/dp/1462529704

Rose’s book: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0118ITJUY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

[sage-nebula]

27, 26, 21, 13 (the generals), 10, 5, 4, 2, and 1 for Voltron? For The salty meme thing? (Also apologies if these were answered previously)

I’m just glad that you said what meme this was for, because this was long enough ago that I completely forgot, haha.

27.) Least shippable character?

Answered.

26.) Most shippable character?

I honestly have no idea. Maybe characters like Regris or Matt, since they have barely any personality and thus could be paired up with almost anyone if written well.

21.) What are your thoughts on crack ships?

They’re fine, and have been around in every fandom for the dawn of time. I strongly disapprove of anyone attacking anyone for whatever fictional ships they have no matter the reason, because as squicky as you might find someone else’s ships, that’s absolutely NO justification for sending death and/or rape threats, doxing, or otherwise harassing and engaging in nasty behavior. But that said, the idea of people doing this just because someone ships two characters who have never met before is especially ludicrous. It’s unacceptable in general, but when people come down on the ideas of someone writing an AU where two characters who didn’t meet in canon meet and fall in love, it’s pretty obvious that the only reason why they take issue is because this is “competition” for their ship, a concept which is especially asinine when you remember that fanworks have no bearing on canon, and as such ships can’t really be in competition anyway.

So my thoughts are: Everyone needs to stay in their own lanes. No one has to like every ship out there—god knows I have some NOTPs of my own—but that’s no excuse for harassing, attacking, threatening, and otherwise being nasty to others. Tumblr Savior and the block feature exist for a reason. What other people ship doesn’t affect me, and the same goes for everyone else.

13.) Unpopular opinion about the generals?

Acxa: While I personally only ship Acxa and Keith platonically and do not read or write romance into their relationship at all, I don’t think it would have been horrible or the end of the world had she and Keith ended up as endgame. I do think that more work should have gone into their relationship if that was to be the case, but I think that the vitriol and hatred that was spewed Acxa’s way for “getting in the way” of other potential relationship options for Keith was pretty gross and misogynistic. Acxa deserved better, full stop.

Narti: Literally the only reason why the majority of the fandom cared that she died was so that they could use her death as a reason to vilify and demonize Lotor. They never actually cared about her, and it makes me angry whenever I see her name leave any of their fingers. They don’t deserve to talk about her, tbqh.

Ezor: She’s as cruel as she is bubbly and energetic. She’s kind and loving toward those she likes, yes, but she was the one smirking when Lotor commanded Throk to be sent to rot with the ice worms, and she had no problem tossing helpless village leaders around and getting threatening when one of them disrespected Lotor. Ezor is genuinely outgoing, but she also purposefully allows people to underestimate her and let their guards down around her so she can make them pay for it later. In some ways this makes her crueler than even Zethrid.

Zethrid: According to galra beauty standards, Zethrid is widely considered the hottest and most attractive of the group. Additionally, while she has no qualms about smashing skulls and actually does like explosions and fighting, she’s also protective of those close to her and does her best to look out for them. She’s the most group-oriented member of the team.

10.) Most disliked arc? Why?

Seasons five and six. Season six in particular was so bad that it’s what caused me to drop the show. If I list out all the reasons why I hated these seasons we’ll be here all day, but suffice to say that season five did a good job of making me despise pretty much every member of Team Voltron (and the protagonist-centered morality of the show became unbearable), and season six pushed the idea that a child abuse survivor without a good parental figure will end up evil like their parents. As a child abuse survivor myself, I didn’t take kindly to that.

5.) Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?

I never shipped them romantically, but I stopped being able to enjoy Keith and Shiro’s platonic, familial relationship due to all of the wank and nastiness in the fandom. It’s sad, because when I first started watching their familial relationship was my favorite relationship in the show, but between the Shiro stans who bashed Keith because they felt he only had value when he was an accessory to prop Shiro up, to the antis who used Shiro and Keith’s platonic relationship to further their romantic ship(s) of choice, it just got to the point where I couldn’t enjoy it anymore and no longer wanted anything to do with it. It’s sad, but what can you do.

Oh, and while I never shipped Keith/Lance, fandom antis made me go from neutral on that one to full on cringing whenever I see it. So there’s that, too.

4.) Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?

Romantic Keith/Shiro has always squicked me out, because I always saw Shiro as an older brother, promoted-to-parent figure for Keith, like Guy to Luke in Tales of the Abyss, or Nani to Lilo in Lilo and Stitch, et cetera. That was the vibe I always got from their relationship in canon as early as season two, and while I tried to see where the shippers were coming from in rewatches (I really, really tried), it just squicked me whenever I thought of them romantically because of how Shiro acted like a guardian figure for Keith. Given that season six confirmed that Shiro did in fact play a part in raising Keith and that Shiro and Keith met when Shiro was an adult and Keith was a foster orphan, I can at least say that my feelings were right on the money with that one. In any case, this is one of the fandom juggernaut ships and it’s a NOTP for me, so yeah.

That said, Keith/Lance is also a NOTP for me. Aside from never seeing any chemistry in canon because Lance would barely allow Keith to even be his teammate, much less his friend (much less his boyfriend), the fandom ruined it for me as mentioned before. It’s unfair to those who ship it without being nasty, I know, but Keith/Lance became the flagship for a group of people in fandom who behaved very nastily even to people who weren’t in the fandom at all. It’s the biggest ship in the fandom and I also can’t stand it, so. There’s that.

2.) Are there any popular fandom OTPs you only BroTP?

Shiro and Keith, but as mentioned the fandom ruined it for me after all the Shiro stans I saw bashing Keith, and all the antis that made platonic content only to turn around and either a.) use it to further their ship (usually Keith/Lance), or b.) behave atrociously toward other fans / voice actors / staff members / etc. Like I’d want to go look at platonic Shiro and Keith content and have a nice time, but I’d have to worry that OP was a terrible person the entire time I did, and it was just … no fictional relationship is worth that kind of stress. So yes, I’d still see them as a brotp, but it’s not one I can have fun with anymore.

Acxa and Ezor is another one, though mainly as I write them in Paradigm Shift. Here’s another cup of unpopular tea: Acxa and Ezor’s canon dynamic is basically Keith and Lance but with girls. The only reason it became as popular as it did is because both Acxa and Ezor are pretty by our human beauty standards (although I guess the personality dynamic of “Keith and Lance but as girls” didn’t hurt among the antis). That said, while I keep their differences and the way they grate on each other in my writing (in that Acxa sees Ezor as immature, Ezor sees Acxa as a nag), they have an older sister - younger sister dynamic going on. They really do love each other, it’s just beneath a lot of arguing because one is so responsible (Acxa) and the other is … not (Ezor). 

1.) What OTPs in your fandom(s) do you just not get?

If it’s a popular ship in the Voltron fandom, you can pretty much bet I don’t ship it, lmao. Romantic Keith/Shiro, Keith/Lance, Allura/Lance, Acxa/Ezor … if it’s big, odds are I don’t like it. Only rare pairs are shipped in this house.

Note to Everyone: DO NOT reblog this to start discourse or wank or so help me god, I will block you immediately, no warnings and no regrets. Thank you.

[ponyregrets]

No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way

Kabby social media AU, 3200 words, T

did u know that 1. it is @kane-and-griffin‘s birthday 2. she accidentally went viral for ranting about Friends and 3. once I start thinking about how A Thing (random example: Marcus Kane writing viral Friends tweets) would go down I cannot stop until I just write the thing

anyway happy birthday claire!!

Marcus Kane is, unfortunately, very familiar with the Nice Guy phenomenon.

It's an occupational hazard of writing science fiction, especially in the internet age; all he has to do is look for his most obnoxious fans, and he finds an unfortunately loud contingent of entitled mostly white men who believe that the world owes them women and happiness without any effort on their parts. It's something he tries to combat as much as possible, wherever he can, and he knows it works in some cases. For every reader who's turned against him for being an SJW cuck (whatever that means), he has another who's expressed appreciation for his opening them up to perspectives they hadn't considered and broadened their empathy and understanding.

That's what sci-fi should do, as far as Marcus is concerned. The heart of science fiction is acceptance and unity.

Which is why he tells Bellamy, "I need you to do one of those Twitter threads for me."

"For what?" Bellamy asks, wary. As Marcus's assistant, he seems to think his most important duty is talking Marcus out of interacting with social media. And he may be right.

"Ross Gellar."

It takes him a second. "The guy from Friends?" he finally asks.

"Yes. I want to explain to my followers why he's bad romantic lead and role model."

To his shock, the response is instant. "Okay."

"No arguments? No lecture on how that isn't what Twitter is for?"

"No, fuck Ross," he says. "What do you want to say? I'll make it happen."

Marcus clucks his tongue. "I'll write up a statement."

* Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Last week, while ill, I watched Friends on Netflix for the first time. So, a thread on friendship, romance, Joey Tribiani, and Ross Gellar.

O @o-so-cool reblogged Sometimes my brother's boss is pretty okay.

raven @queenreyesthefirst reblogged brb adding @kanemarcus to non-sucky white dude sci-fi authors and shipping him with @scalzi

Finn Collins @finnishfirst reblogged this is kind of interesting but way too hard on ross. he does a lot of good things! see thread

Bellamy @bradburybell reblogged this is not nearly hard enough on ross

Clarke Griffin @clarkegriffin reblogged Relevant to your interests @ark-abby

*

"So here's what I think happened," says Bellamy. He's brought Marcus a coffee without being prompted, so whatever it is must be bad.

Marcus takes a sip of the drink. "When?"

"With your Twitter rant."

"Ah. I assume there are a lot of protests from the louder, stupider portion of my fanbase about how I've allowed the liberal fake media destroy my mind and masculinity?"

"Yeah, there are some of those. But, uh--it went way past your fanbase."

"Excuse me?"

"This is your most retweeted post ever. Not even close. It's viral. You've got people fighting you, people telling you it's a revelation, and about a thousand new followers already. In the last day."

He frowns. "Is Friends really still that popular?"

"Apparently." He shrugs. "Clarke says you made Buzzfeed and a couple of the other aggregator sites too. She and Raven have been texting me updates. They think it's hilarious."

"What does that mean?"

"Honestly? I don't fucking know. I told you when you hired me I'm not actually good at this stuff. I tried to warn you."

"You did." He takes another sip of coffee. "So, what do you think happened?"

"My sister retweeted it, and she spends about ninety percent of her time thinking about her social media brand, so she's got a ton of followers. Then Raven picked it up from her, her tech friends got a hold of it, and after that--" He shrugs. "You got out of your niche and into broader Twitter, and I'm not going to be able to find anything useful in your notifications for weeks. It's all Ross/Joey shipping discourse. Clarke's words, not mine," he adds.

"Should I be concerned?"

"I don't know. I guess we'll find out if it actually sells more books. And Clarke thinks we should try to leverage it into more publicity, she's got an idea for that."

Marcus hasn't actually met most of Bellamy's friends, but he references them enough that he knows who they are. Octavia, sister, Raven, ex-girlfriend, Clarke, current girlfriend. He also knows that all of them are more familiar with social media than Bellamy is, so he's not surprised that he consulted them.

Mostly, though, he still can't believe anyone really cares about this.

"An idea to leverage the Friends discourse?"

Bellamy shrugs. "Apparently this fit into an ongoing conversation she's been having with her mother. Abby Griffin? She writes for Ark AV. She did that think-piece about what mainstream science fiction gets wrong about female characters."

"Ah," says Marcus. He remembers the article, which had been harsh but ultimately fair, and an interesting take, once he'd gotten over the initial hurt of being used in a not entirely positive light. "I didn't know that was Clarke's mother."

"Yeah, I figured I'd tell you later. Once I didn't think you were going to call her up and argue with her about how much better you've gotten."

"And now you don't think I will?"

"Honestly, I don't care. I just want to see you guys fight about Friends," he says. "That sounds awesome."

"So, you have no ulterior motives here. Just looking out for my best interests."

"Obviously."

"If she's Clarke's mother, I assume she's local? Or will I be fighting her on a podcast?"

"We were thinking Starbucks on Saturday. Caffeine and lots of witnesses."

Marcus finally lets himself open up Twitter, now that he's had enough coffee. He almost always has some notifications when he looks; he's a public figure with a passionate fanbase, he's used to people trying to talk to him on Twitter. That's why he has a Twitter in the first place. But the number of notifications has never been so high, not in his memory. And, as Bellamy said, it really is a lot of passionate Friends discourse, both for and against his opinions. It's an overwhelming amount of love, hate, and passion. Like discovering an entirely new world.

He thought he understood fandom, but apparently he has a long way to go.

"Starbucks would be fine," he tells Bellamy, a little faintly. "I'd enjoy that."

*

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus A lot of new followers today. Here are a few notes for you:

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I am a published science fiction author. Those of you telling me to just write a book instead of many tweets, I have written many books.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus You can find the link to purchase them in my header.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I have never claimed to be an expert on Friends. This was my first time watching, and these are my impressions based on one viewing.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus My opinion on the Friends canon does not invalidate yours. Yours is as valid as it ever was. But if you feel threatened, examine that.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus My ideas may have merit you're reluctant to fully accept because of your own perceptions of how things should be in relationships.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus If you followed me for more Friends content, please be aware this is an outlier. I usually talk about science fiction.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus On that note, would anyone like to discuss the Hugo Awards?

Masper @gogglesdonothing Replying to @kanemarcus ross/rachel is forever tho

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus and @gogglesdonothing I'll take that as a no.

Jonty @themediumgreen Replying to @kanemarcus and @gogglesdonothing I'm so sorry Mr. Kane just ignore him I want to talk about the Hugos tell me all your favorite winners do you like Chuck Tingle

Jonty @themediumgreen Replying to @gogglesdonothing I CAN'T TAKE YOU ANYWHERE

*

Marcus will admit he does not feel broadly prepared to seriously enter the Friends discourse. He is, after all, a neophyte. If there are scholarly works on Friends, he has not read them. If there's any academic discussion of these issues, he is not familiar with it. His knowledge is vague and still forming, but for some people, this show was a huge part of their development. It matters to them on a deep, personal level.

For him, it was a decent use of his time while he was sick and confined to his couch. He had a fever for most of the first season. He's not sure he's prepared to fight anyone about it. Based on his mentions, he has many, many fewer horses in this race than other people. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe his perspective as an outsider is valuable.

Or maybe he just wants the chance to sit down with Abby Griffin. Because instead of spending the past week either working on his next book or even familiarizing himself with Friends and the criticism surrounding it, he's mostly been researching Abby Griffin herself. He'd done it some after the first article Bellamy sent, curious to see her other work, but he'd been busy with a deadline and hadn't really had much time for that, had barely scratched the surface of this woman.

He doesn't have time for it now either, of course, but it's at least relevant to something in his life. And, as Bellamy and his friends have pointed out, this is at least good publicity. It's not a complete waste of time.

The Abby Griffin stalking might be a waste, but he can't help it. She's interesting. The pop-culture writing is, apparently, a side job, something she never intended to get seriously involved in. The website had been her husband's, and when he passed away, Abby and Clarke had taken over its upkeep, and Abby had started producing content when she had time. Given her full-time job is as the director of internal medicine at the hospital, he's frankly amazed she has as much time for content as she does.

And it's good content. She and Clarke have a weekly column where they discuss a movie they went to see together, and the female characters in science fiction piece was apparently part of a series. Her taste is good and her opinions are interesting, and by the time he's meeting her, he has one big question, and one only.

They get through introductions and are settled in at the table before he finally lets it out. "Honestly, I don't understand how you can like Ross."

She lets out a surprised laugh. "Excuse me?"

"Bellamy said he was looking forward to us fighting over Friends, but I have trouble believing you disagree with my opinion of Ross. I don't know what we'd be fighting about."

She smiles into her mug. He'd known she was beautiful from the picture he found on the hospital website, but it's different to see in person, and more awkward. Bellamy and Clarke are hanging out at their own table, pretending not to eavesdrop; it's not an ideal time to be caught staring. "I don't know what he told you, but I didn't disagree. It was an impressive rant. Well reasoned and accurate. I was more interested in discussing why you posted it and the reactions you got. I saw it wasn't popular among some of your readers."

"To say the least."

"One of the things I've been curious about since getting involved in online fandom is what counts as acceptable ways to interact, especially for those of us over thirty or so. I saw a lot of people asking why a heterosexual man in his late forties would care this much about Friends at all. As if that was the problem."

"Judging from the angry responses, plenty of heterosexual men are very invested in Friends. Although I'm not sure how old they are," he grants.

"Age is the biggest issue, in my experience. You'd been participating in an acceptable way, as a creator, but once you show yourself to be invested in Friends shipping--"

"I stepped into the wrong part of fandom."

"That's my thesis, yes."

He considers. "Am I on the record?"

"I'm not a reporter, Marcus," she says, sounding amused. "I'm not trying to trick you into saying something I can use against you. But if you'd like to officially be off the record, we can say that you are."

"My hope with that post was that it would make some of my readers rethink their attitudes towards women and romance. The number of responses I got to Valena's story in Bright Sky Morning that boiled down to her being wrong for not returning Pavel's feelings even though he'd been so devoted to her was--staggering. And depressing."

"Did your female readers appreciate it?"

"They did. Apparently Jin was a much more appealing partner."

Abby smiles. "I certainly thought so."

It's not his first time meeting a fan, of course, and she might not even be a fan, in the sense they're talking about. But she's read his work and has opinions on it, and that's always a little bit flattering. Especially when they align with his. "I'm glad. I was hoping he would be." He clears his throat. "So, you'd like to talk to me as a forty-eight-year-old man who publicly had opinions on shipping."

"And to get your thoughts on Monica and Chandler," she says, all innocence. "If you don't mind."

He can't help smiling himself. "Not at all. I'm all yours."

*

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Expanded my horizons this weekend with the High School Musical trilogy. A curious cultural phenomenon.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I appreciated that Troy and Gabriela didn't go to the same college, but still stayed in the same general area.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I still don't think the couple has much of a future, but in an unrealistic movie, I appreciated that nod to practicality.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus Very disappointed about the last-minute attempt to cement Ryan's heterosexuality. Let children have LGBT role models.

Murphy @firstnameredacted Replying to @kanemarcus If you're seriously going to be talking about Disney movies from now on I'm unfollowing you, I don't give a shit about this

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus and @firstnameredacted Please do.

*

"Look," says Bellamy, two months after the first Friends rant, "I'm not going to pretend I'm good with crushes, but it would be a lot easier to just ask Abby if she wants to get dinner off the record instead of coming up with new weird shit to have opinions about on Twitter every week."

"I assume the timing of this isn't a coincidence," Marcus says. He was just getting his coat on to go meet her.

"You've already got a standing coffee date. Turn it into a real date. I'm begging you."

"You don't enjoy my opinions on the High School Musical series?"

"I actually do, I'm just getting tired of blocking people. Also, I don't know if you're aware, but dating is awesome. You should try it."

"I appreciate your concern. You don't think it would be weird for you if your boss was dating your girlfriend's mother?"

"No weirder than whatever's actually happening right now. And don't even try to tell me you're not asking her out because you're worried about how it would affect me."

It does sound absurd, when he puts it like that. "No. That wasn't a major factor."

Bellamy rolls his eyes. "Just ask if she wants to come check out the Descendants franchise with you next weekend. Definitely a solid pickup line. Chicks dig it."

"The what?"

"It's like the spiritual successor to High School Musical. I'll send you a link. You should know this stuff if you're really going in on this."

"I should give you a raise."

"That too. Say hi to Abby for me."

It's not entirely accurate to say that he thinks about what Bellamy said as he walks over to his weekly meeting with Abby. Every time he walks to her favorite coffee shop near the hospital, he's thinking these same kinds of thoughts, so it's not really Bellamy's fault. He enjoys Abby's company company and would be happy to see more of her. He already knew that. But it's been a long time since he navigated anything like this.

If only Friends had prepared him for this kind of romance.

"Marcus," says Abby, giving him a smile when he sits down across from her. As usual, she's surrounded by papers, and he sometimes doubts that she'd even have time for a relationship. She does keep herself busy. "I enjoyed your meditations on High School Musical."

"I'm glad to hear it. Bellamy says it gave me a net loss of followers, but not as much of one as he thinks I deserved."

"I'm not surprised." She considers him. "I didn't mean for our friendship to hurt your career."

"I don't think it is. Plenty of people just read my books and never even find out I'm on Twitter. It's not a large percentage of sales. You're blaming yourself for the High School Musical tweets?" he adds, curious. They are her fault, broadly speaking, but he wasn't sure she knew.

"If you don't keep coming up with hot takes, we don't have much to talk about."

He laughs. "I hope we'd come up with something."

"I hope so too."

The conversation lags, but it's not a bad lag. It feels like she's given him an opening, and it's his job to figure out how to take advantage of it.

The easiest way would be to simply propose a dinner date, as Bellamy suggested. But he's never been good at simple.

"You know, you never told me your favorite relationship on Friends."

"I didn't?"

"No, we usually talk about my opinions."

She levels her gaze at him, considering. "Do you know what I think when I watch Friends now?"

"No."

"They're all so young. And don't get me wrong, I met my husband when we were young, and the two of us were happy, but--sometimes it worries me how much emphasis we put on meeting people early in life. The younger you are, the more romantic it is. And that's one kind of romance, but it's not everything. It makes me want to shake all these kids and tell them that life doesn't end at thirty, or forty, or fifty. You'll keep on meeting new people, and you can still be happy."

He lets himself reach for her hand, and relief floods him when she lets him take it, even turns it over so she can squeeze his fingers. "So your favorite relationship on Friends is the one Rachel has when she's forty-five and Ross is dead?" he teases.

"I hope you're not comparing my husband to Ross."

He has to laugh. "No. I would never."

Abby's smile is warm, and it's suddenly so easy to not be nervous at all. "Good. Because the rest of that was right."

"Good," he agrees. "I was hoping you'd say that."

*

Sky Crew Reviews @kaneandgriffin New list from @kanemarcus: top 10 YA sci-fi books for adults! Up next, top 10 adult sci-fi books for teens. Age is nothing but a number.

Murphy @firstnameredacted Replying to @kaneandgriffin I will pay you to stop

Bellamy @bradburybell Replying to @kaneandgriffin and @firstnameredacted when are you actually going to unfollow like you keep saying you will? asking for a friend

Murphy @firstnameredacted Replying to @kaneandgriffin, @firstnameredacted, and @bradburybell I keep hoping I'm going to come back and he'll be normal again

SJW Cuck @kanemarcus Replying to @kaneandgriffin, @firstnameredacted, and @bradburybell Don't hold your breath.

[therightnewsnetwork]

Hillbilly Energy

In retrospect, that interview in the summer was a seismic warning of the election earthquake to come in the fall.

In late June last year, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance’s memoir of his tumultuous childhood lived on the border between Appalachia and the Rust Belt, appeared in bookstores, attracting little notice. A month later, an interview Vance did about the book with The American Conservative went viral, melting down this magazine’s internet server three times and propelling the book to the No. 1 slot on the New York Times bestseller list.

Vance, 31, became an overnight media star, the go-to guy to explain Donald J. Trump’s appeal to the white working class. As a Yale Law School graduate now working in finance in San Francisco, Vance straddled the sharp cultural and experiential divide between deepest Blue and deepest Red America. Given Trump’s stunning victory, and the fact that the Rust Belt delivered the win, Hillbilly Elegy was undoubtedly the most important political book of 2016.��

What does the accidental hillbilly prophet see in Trump Nation’s future? Vance forecasts a great deal of instability ahead with challenges that he is not sure either party is capable of meeting. Come what may, though, the Hillbilly Elegy experience convinced its author that he has a calling to leave the world of high finance to take a hands-on role in helping to solve the social crisis his bestselling book so powerfully describes.

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Though a Republican, Vance was not a Trump supporter. Throughout the election season, he made it clear in interviews that he believed Trump to be a false messiah bound to break the hearts of his supporters.

Nevertheless, the Trump phenomenon was an apocalypse in the strict sense of the word—that is, an unveiling that revealed some startling truths about economic class and culture in America. In the aftermath of this historical election, Vance says the vote showed most of all how staggeringly out of touch elites—both liberals and conservatives—are with an enormous number of their fellow Americans.

“They couldn’t imagine that anyone would vote for Trump, couldn’t imagine that a person might not even love Trump but would vote for him anyway,” says Vance. “Something analogous happened with the book. So many readers have told me that they had no idea that people grew up like I did. They didn’t understand where so many of us came from, so they didn’t understand Trump.”

As the national media’s premier explainer of the Trump phenomenon, Vance says journalists searching themselves to see how they got so much wrong should get out of their coastal bubbles, choked with the acrid, blinding smoke of confirmation bias, and spend serious, sustained time among ordinary Americans—both those who voted for Trump, and those who hate him.

After all, identity is a complicated, many-layered thing. Hispanic voters were expected to despise Trump and turn out in record numbers to vote for Hillary Clinton. In the end, exit polling showed that Trump won 29 percent of the Hispanic vote. One working-class Hispanic immigrant told me after the election that it shouldn’t surprise me that so many Americans like him share Trump’s view that immigration ought to be lawful and orderly.

“It’s remarkable how diverse even the most devotedly pro-Trump areas like my hometown can be,” says Vance, a native of Middletown, Ohio. “And the only way to really understand people is to spend time. Journalists have to get back to the qualitative side of things. Too many people are willing to draw very sweeping conclusions by parsing data and discussing the quantitative side of the equation. Anyone who really knew these areas would have appreciated that Trump had a very high floor.”

Even so, Vance was as surprised as anybody else that Trump won. He underestimated his own observations about the potent anger of alienated white working class voters, and the ability of Trump to channel it into a win. He was in New York City on election night, making the rounds of network interviews. In the ABC News studio, it finally hit him that Trump was really going to win.

“I mostly felt humbled: I should have seen this coming before anyone,” he confesses. “In the week leading up to the election, I had focused too much on the data component of the election—the polls and the forecasts—and not enough on the real people who were powering Trump’s success.”

Though Vance had resigned himself to the inevitability of a Clinton presidency, he’s not particularly happy that Trump will occupy the White House for the next four years. Sure, he’s pleased that “all the good people who voted for him even though the media told them he didn’t have a chance” have been vindicated, but Vance foresees years of volatility ahead for the nation. The Trumpified GOP cannot take the Rust Belt for granted, he says.

“My guess is that the white working class is going to continue swinging between two political poles until something really begins to improve,” says Vance. “That doesn’t mean people want to see overnight economic turnarounds.  But they do want some of these problems—the opioid crisis, stagnating wages, low social mobility, foreign policy failures—to show consistent signs of improvement.”

That makes sense. However, one of the things that made Hillbilly Elegy such a compelling read was Vance’s unsentimental insistence that politics and public policy cannot solve all the problems that have immiserated the white working class.

In the book, Vance said that as a younger man, he “very desperately” wanted to believe that an abundance of good jobs would fix what was broken in the Rust Belt. Experience taught him otherwise. In the summer between completing his Marine Corps service and enrolling in law school, he took a job working in a floor-tile distribution business. It was hard physical labor, but the pay and benefits were good.

Even so, the warehouse had trouble keeping workers. Far too many young men in Vance’s hometown are averse to hard work, and quick to see themselves as society’s victims. Vance wrote that he comes from “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

Does Vance believe, then, that the white working class has the cultural wherewithal to bootstrap itself out of the mire? It’s not an either-or question, he says. Politics can’t solve these problems, but it can create the conditions that allow people and their local institutions to solve them.

“We need a better leadership class to set the tone for the discussion,” Vance tells TAC. “The most depressing part of the 2016 election is that the candidates often failed to show any cultural leadership: any recognition that the world of public policy was important but hardly the only good and necessary part of our shared society.  They don’t talk about the church, about local community organizations, about businesses as anything more than providers of jobs.

“We’re very good at talking about the individual in American politics, and excellent at talking about the government,” he continues. “But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture.”

The stakes are very high now. Vance expects the Rust Belt working-class vote to be up for grabs for the next few political cycles, with struggling blue-collar voters siding with whichever candidate, Republican or Democrat, promises the greatest change. This is a prescription for instability.

“We could see the emergence of someone from the Left, a Bernie Sanders-type figure who captures the populist rage of the moment,” says Vance. “It could be someone else from the Right.  It could be a relatively innocuous figure—or it could be someone really dangerous.”

Whatever becomes of the new administration, there will be no return to the pre-Trump status quo for the GOP. This is no bad thing, argues Vance, who was only three years old when Ronald Reagan left office. There were as many years between Reagan’s 1980 election and Trump’s 2016 victory as there were between the waning months of World War II and Reagan’s win. It was time for something new politically, something more relevant, a Republican politics that prioritizes Main Street over Wall Street. Vance gets that, though he does worry that classical conservative principles could be lost in the stampede toward populism now remaking the Republican Party.

“I like Yuval Levin’s framing that conservatism’s modern approach must contain an element of nationalism,” he says. “At its core, conservatism should recognize the excesses of a given political moment, and the excesses of the past 20 years trended toward finance-centric globalism: too little concern for the communal and the local in our politics, a failure to recognize that the finance-centered American economy produced decent growth (until recently) but very little real wage growth, a preoccupation with consumption rather than dignified, stable work. The new conservatism has to incorporate within it a significant degree of economic nationalism.”

Given his class background, sympathies, and convictions, Vance is uniquely positioned to be the face of the next generation of American conservatives. He came from a broken family within a hardscrabble culture populated by what Donald Trump has described as the “forgotten people.” Thanks to his late grandmother and the United States Marine Corps, he was able to work his way from the “hollers’’ of Appalachia, so to speak, to the pinnacle of the American elite. This year, Vance has used that access and the platform it gives him to explain, and advocate for, the forgotten people.

Now, though, speaking from his present home in San Francisco, Vance has a message for Red America: as depressing as the post-election liberal meltdown has been, don’t write off the Blues and their fears.

“If it’s hard for Blue America to see Red America as anything other than a bunch of dumb, racist rednecks, it’s hard for Red America to recognize that many minorities are legitimately worried about what a Trump presidency means for their family,” he says. “You can believe that many of the election protesters are hysterical and irrational while also accepting that many of your fellow citizens have legitimate concerns with a Trump presidency.”

Consider, says Vance, how unfair and inaccurate it is for the left to call all 60 million Trump voters racist. By the same token, he says, “Republicans have got to show a little compassion” to Clinton voters anxious about their future.

“It sounds trite, but compassion and empathy are remarkable weapons against the hysteria of the moment,” he says. “Republicans have won the right to govern, but if Trump approaches that task with a little bit of humility and graciousness, I think it would have a remarkably positive effect on our political conversation.”

In fact, the hillbilly millennial who has been living off and on as a resident alien in Blue America for the past six years says Red America ought to have the grace and humility to learn from Blue successes.

“The truth is that on some of the things that matter most to us—like the marriage rate, for instance—parts of Blue America do better than Red America,” Vance points out. “Some of these people are beating us at our own damned game. That should worry us, but also give us reason to think that we can learn some things from those coastal elitists.”

Though he is doing very well professionally working at Mithril Capital, the venture-capital firm co-founded by tech billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel, Vance cannot resist the tug of home. He and his wife Usha are planning to move to Ohio next year.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes that he “was one of those kids with a grim future. I almost failed out of high school. I nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me. … Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.”

Now, Vance wants to be someone like that for other struggling Rust Belt kids. His book’s success filled Vance with a sense of gratitude and mission. As detailed in Hillbilly Elegy, loyalty is both a signature virtue and vice of the Scots-Irish Appalachians from whom he is descended. Vance can’t shake the sense that he owes it to his people to go back home and do what he can to help.

The fresh-faced, Yale-educated hillbilly lawyer is the second most unlikely political star to emerge from this bizarre year. More than a few people have speculated that Vance has a political career ahead of him. For now, J.D. Vance is focused on bringing hope and change to the Rust Belt through the means of civil society.

“The idea of a political career strikes me as a little odd, simply because I think politicians should have at least the prospect of gainful employment outside of government,” he says. “For now, the plan is to move home and try to give back a little. I’m going to start with a little nonprofit that will focus on this dreadful opioid epidemic, and maybe a couple of other issues.”

It’s a modest start, perhaps, but the man who wrote a lament for the fall of his people and their culture is determined to write the story of their rebirth and rise—even if, this time, he doesn’t use words.

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative.

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