#idk man I'm just upset

[mosspapi]

Hhhhh I really don't wanna b laying in bed all day again but I fear that's what I'm gonna b doing

[cluescorner]

The Council of Optimuses: Pleasant, generally positive, they exiled Bayverse a while ago but they still check in once in a while to make sure he's ok/out of curiosity, Earthspark enables One's 'I can fix him' delusion to the point that Prime is falling into it too, IDW does NOT want to add to the delusion pile so he shuts up, Cyberverse kinda doesn't want to be at this meeting it feels too much like a party, IDW keeps making calls to somebody but he won't tell anyone who, they used to have 'bring your Bumblebee to work day' but Skybound had a breakdown over it so they can't do that anymore, everybody is suspicious of Skybound's new arm but the only person who actually brought it up was Bayverse whose solution was 'kill him' so now everybody thinks they are getting paranoid and should maybe start seeing a therapist (they should start seeing therapists, but they ARE right about the arm).

The Council of Megatrons: They are having a great time even if it looks horrible from the outside looking in, Prime constantly wants to fight IDW for his spot as the strongest Megatron but IDW is not about that, they tried to kick out Earthspark but he somehow keeps getting in (IDW leaves the door open), One has like 5 devils on his shoulder telling him to escalate and two fallen angels who are desperately trying to get across that maybe total destruction isn't the move, IDW is trying to hide his redemption arc in order to keep the situation under control (only Earthspark is aware of it, though Skybound has his suspicions), Cyberverse always tries to kill the others to take over their universes and it's the highlight of everybody's month, Bayverse is mocked for being killed by Optimus but secretly everybody is kinda jealous about it (Prime especially), one time an unidentified Starscream (it was Animated) broke in and it was on sight (he got away because every Megatron wanted to be the one who killed him and they fought each other over it), IDW keeps taking calls from somebody but he won't tell anyone who, Skybound can listen in on his Optimus's meetings due to being his arm and reports back, there is an ongoing debate about whether Galvatrons should be included.

Inspired by @jyang030107 's art of ES and IDW Megs advising their One counterpart.

[good-to-drive]

Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture. 

Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse. 

It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity. 

It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore. 

I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving. 

One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.

The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.

There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives. 

As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence. 

Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.

And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away. 

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life  – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).

The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need. 

What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence. 

In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.” 

It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied. 

Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.

In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work. 

It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.

When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity. 

It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).

If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?

Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another. 

And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far. 

But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.

[skibasyndrome]

.

[hyacinth42-blog]

“You know, if you break up with Sveta, meet a gorgeous girl and break Sveta’s heart again, I’m obligated to throw you into the center of the Atlantic Ocean.”

....What does this mean Vicky? He's not allowed to date anyone pretty ever again???

[wizardnuke]

um personally i think that if your girlfriend is insecure over you being friends with another girl you should run far away really fast. but i may be misreading the situation. i don't think i am though.

[seventh-district]

again and again i find myself lamenting that audio roleplay isn't taken more seriously by some people. like yeah, they often have a romantic element, and by nature they usually directly involve/address the listener- and i totally get that those things aren't to everyone's taste. no art or entertainment is universally appealing, and that's okay! but.. it still makes me a lil sad that the "cringe" reputation of asmr/audio rp precedes it. there's a whole lot of talent and creativity being poured into these audios by so many people that i feel goes unrecognized and/or disrespected simply due to the medium that the stories are being told through.

[keeps-ache]

buttered noodles 💫💛🍜

[syn0vial]

kinda surreal to see people on tumblr like, "the people on that submersible should have known the risks and were just too rich and stupid to think they could die" and then reading the account by the 19-year-old's aunt saying he was "terrified" to get in the sub and only did so to please his dad on father's day weekend...

makes me think about how we comfort ourselves through horror movies by latching onto some little mistake a character makes and going, "oh, that's so stupid! i would never do that!" and thus insulating ourselves from the horror that terrible things can happen to us, too.

and, i know, i know, the true thing protecting all of us from this exact fate is that none of us have $250,000 in recreational savings to burn on submersible trips down to the titanic anyway, but. there are plenty of other situations where we might overlook our own instincts that say to get the hell out of dodge just to please a friend or loved one, or because it's their "special day" and we don't want to rain on their parade, and where we might indeed end up paying for it with life or limb. i can think of several such incidents from my own life that could've ended with me just as dead, and that's just off the top of my head!

so yeah. it's a sad thing to hear about and i wonder how much of our collective scorn for the dead is in fact a self-soothing behavior to ward off our own fears of mortality...

[lilowoof]

ngl gamers, I think I'm gonna inevitably lose to the hormones and depression in the near future XD

Can't bring myself to be active cause I'm using a lot of energy to not vent post all the time. But fuck it, into the tags I go!

[cosmicredcadet]

Never ask me my thoughts on anything because 99% of the time I have no fucking idea how to answer.

[lab-gr0wn-lambs]

Ok I've had some time to chill, lemme say a bunch of things I DID like about The Star Beast:

The right vibes are back. THIS feels like Doctor Who and I have a lot of faith in what's to come once they have time to pace things out

The characters are great. A+

Made me laugh

Silly practical effects!

Obviously Marvelous MARVELOUS to have Donna back with us, even if it's just for a little while

New intro is bangin

New Tardis is Nice. I honestly didn't like the crystal one.

The trans rep comes from a sincere place, I can tell. I think a lot of the gender talk was awkward and confused and kinda. stupid. in places. but. I appreciate it anyway

Really nice that they didn't kill off Wilf despite Bernard Cribbin's passing

[robinsnest2111]

still not quite over my emotional support coworker casually talking and joking about his honestly physically damaging eating habits and tbh all I wanna do is gently grab his face and tell him to please not do this to himself because I don't want him to destroy his body even more than it already is... like. my guy. I have an unhealthy emotional attachment to you. I want you to thrive. I don't want you to suffer. pls don't do that...

[animoogus]

I really truly think that the vast majority of people aren't capable of being objective enough for me to trust their judgement, and it makes me feel so so so so lonely. I'm not talking about people having opposing political views to me, or extreme views or whatever. I'm talking about everyone everywhere all the time no matter how much I like them or love them or sympathise.

I feel so alone in this and I don't know how to deal with [not trusting all of humanity] but I guess I'll have to feel alone by definition, if this is what I think. And I realise this makes me sound so bad which doesn't help one be less lonely.

[roundaboutnow]

i mean, i know i present very feminine, and im okay with she/her pronouns, so it doesnt seem like im genderqueer, but i am. and i know that can seem kinda alarming to a lot of people because how are you supposed to know? you don't know, and thats okay with me, im not going to be upset if you get it wrong. but there are people in my life that i've told a thousand times and they still dont get it.

the truth is, it's not hard to respect my gender identity. im fine with pretty much anything, so you cant really get it wrong.

but then youre visibly uncomfortable with how I live my life.

i dont dress feminine enough

i dont shave

i dont plan on getting married and im not sure how i feel about having kids.

you dont judge my brothers about these things. but you judge me.

and i think you should respect any woman or man or genderqueer person for all of the criteria above and more.

but when you judge me, i feel like you don't actually take me seriously when i say im genderqueer. i dont think you get it. i think you just see a girl who is not good enough and you only love me despite these things.

you said it was fine when i said i was genderqueer. i dont think you meant it.

[moe-broey]

"Return of THE KING" about Moe as if. I'm not CONSTANTLY on my bullshit about it. I need to forcemasc it though the situation is so dire. LIKE. Exclusive it/its/itself user but also fucks with masculine titles/language. As part of its identity, but also an elaborate parody. Guy who's doing it Wrong ON PURPOSE. WITH INTENT. TO KILL‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️