#if you scroll back before like 2018 thats on you

[andromeddog]

hi intro post! i’m kelly (she/they) and i draw and this is my blog where i post the drawings and i don’t know how i got here. i don’t do comms but i rly enjoy requests okay i love you <3

aesthetic blog | gen blog | twit | insta

[show-us-kaidenshenandoah]

a loved one of mine sent me this post back in June, but i was immediately afraid of being a party-pooper so i didnt post my reply publicly but, now, ive had more than enough emotional distance from the knee-jerk anxiety of "oh no what if i correct people and everyone sends me hate and doxxes me" that im like "oh yeah i should post that" lmao (if i already did this: sorry, chronic memory loss stinks. i dont remember having done this before lmao)

if you dont like reading a long thing of text to get information btw, totally get it, here is a video link to Jessica Vill's video about the topic which will walk you through identical information if that is your preferred way to process/learn

also: you can easily google and wiki my sources, these arent hard things to verify once you know to look them up to begin with. but i did include screenshots below as my various sources; as well as evidence of "yeah, it would be super easy to fact-check me about this if you feel so inclined" [transcripts of images will be my reblog of this post under a read more, bc tumblr kept throwing a fit otherwise if i did it here] nonetheless, never blame people for not knowing what they didnt know. the misconception is absolutely the fault of PBS (for not fact-checking the author of that article pre-publication if nothing else) for publishing an article preying on the Black community's pre-existing attachment to Betty Boop for clicks. i wont be going into that article itself that had so terribly misreported, esp since PBS already apologized, im just reporting the information i know

i will add the following corrections to what i said in that DM:

i do not "blame" anyone above for the misinformation. if i "blame" anyone, it is PBS for claiming Fleischer consciously based Betty Boop's personality and design on Esther Jones, which you can see in the screenshot above; where BlackHistory.com cites and quotes that said misreported article. thats who i was groaning about in my DM, the PBS article; i was not nor was i ever attributing misinformation to come from @rikareena or @lveshae, but especially not @rikareena who fact-checked and was lied to by (a) said misinformation and (b) there not being an editorial within the snippet SAYING "oh btw sorry, our source we mentioned was bad actually. PBS apologized for the misinformation and not fact-checking it and we should too for spreading it without fact-checking our source ourselves". you should always google your facts and that is exactly what @rikareena did. it was not anybody in this post's fault that these sources were based on misinformation. do NOT blame or send negative attention to any tumblr-user/individual person within this post or outside of this post, istg, demand better of these website-sources instead (esp to have fact-checking teams themselves) and not individual people omfg

we do have few photos of Little Esther (you can see all of them in Jessica Vill's video), not just one. but they all are of her as a child. we have NO confirmed photos of her as an adult. also, to clarify, Little Esther was who i was talking about in regards to lost media, we have VERY little records of her performances (to which im glad people HAVE been looking into her and finding more about her that we can confirm is definitely her through this misreport. i love that she is re-gaining fans and her story is being shared, very big silver lining of this whole thing. if you're into uncovering lost media, please do look into her and help find more about her) also, she goes by "Baby Esther" and "Little Esther" as well as her name of Esther Jones/Esther Lee Jones

the photo i said was maybe her as an adult was incorrect. you'll see it below, it's the "Do Tell by James Van Der Zee, circa 1930" portrait that has oft been misattributed to Esther Jones. we do not know who this woman modeling for him had been

the cosplayer in question i mentioned was specifically Olya Gussy. she dressed up as Betty Boop and was photographed in 2008 by Retro Atelier. she is often misattributed as being an adult Esther Jones, which she is not

part of why i can never remember Betty Boop's primary "original" voice-actress is because Betty Boop has had SO MANY, even in just "classic Betty years". but i was specifically thinking of Mae Questel. the main three classic 1930s Betty Boop voices were Mae Questel, Mary Hines, and Bonnie Poe, but there were also several others in the 30s alone. but, yeah, when i was trying to talk about Betty Boop's voice-actress, it was Questel specifically who was in my head

i got my information wrong about the Betty Boop musical "Boop!". i got confused; i blame my chronic memory loss, but still my bad. anyway. it has so far ONLY been OFF-Broadway and is DUE to be ON Broadway in 2025 (get hyped!!! im so excited!!). off of Broadway, it has so far only been in Chicago according to the Wikipedia. and though it only had a had a short run in Chicago overall, the entire time it WAS in Chicago, Betty Boop was played by a Black musical actress: Jasmine Amy Rogers. love her, go support her!!

here are various screenshots with more information. feel free to look into them and/or the court-case on your own time. this is just "yep, shallow 2+2=4 levels of using google/wiki to fact-fact" on myself (which, to reiterate: is NOT a diss on anyone who didnt know what they didnt know, outside of this post or within it, idgaf, i do not tolerate trolls and dickheads being mean and utalizing me/my posts as a weapon to do that with) and show my sources in a more visual way

so yeah!! Betty Boop absolutely should be claimed by Black people since she has so many connections to Black American art within her performance, and Betty should 100% be drawn as a Black woman by any and everybody who wants to depict her that way

but also dont give Fleischer Studios credit for things they didnt do. they did not utalize Ether Jones in their initial conception of Betty in any purposeful or concious way; they did not design a Black animated female character in the 1930s. do not give them that credit that they have not earned. Fleischer Studios only utalized Esther Jones to get out of a court-case they had with Helen Kane. them accidentally creating a character whose performance is heavily in connection with Black American artists, like Esther Jones, is VERY DIFFERENT than them basing a character off of Esther Jones or being inspired by her in of by itself. do not give them flowers for making a Black female character star in her own shorts (and then rescind said flowers-that-they-didnt-earn for how she then "became white-washed" like that PBS article misreported) when they just?? didnt do any of that?

(also this is mostly unrelated but bc it is tangentially related to "dont give Fleischer Studios credit for things they didnt do" thing: if you know me, youll see me specifically crack jokes about Betty Boop being wlw and/or about her "he/him butch girlfriend, Freddie". im talking about her canon boyfriend, Fred or Fearless Fred, who is a human (unlike her also once-canon boyfriend of Bimbo, the anthropomorphic dog). do not take me making jokes about headcanons and how "Fred's design is too sapphic to be a cis man" as legitimate fact. youll see the internet jokes of a similar vein sometimes, im definitely not the originator of that joke)

Betty Boop is for everybody in the same way as youve likely seen that Hatsune Miku trend where everyone is making a cultural Miku re-design to their specific ethnicity or way of life; we've seen Betty Boop be flexibly "for everyone" tons of times, even outside of her being a nostalgic tribute to the flapper girl era (a cultural niche in which women of ALL backgrounds took part). in classic Betty Boop cartoons alone, we've seen:

Betty Boop as white/white-passing (especially any time they copied Helen Kane which Fleischer Studios did OFTEN and didn't even HIDE until it became a legal issue; but also Helen Kane wasn't even being that original. baby voices like Betty Boop's was a common gimmick of actresses then and Helen Kane's catch-phrase wasn't even her own. i still personally think Fleischer was copying Kane, but also it makes 100% sense why she lost that lawsuit),

we have had Betty Boop be Jewish (the most obvious being parents in some shorts speaking with thick Yiddish accents, implying she is the daughter of immigrant parents, most famously in the "Minnie the Moocher" short as part of the set-up before any music even began to play),

we've had her be rotoscoped dancing using Indigenous Hawaiian dancers, in their regalia, and given a tan (multiple times but my favorite is "Bamboo Isle" for sure),

we've had her collab with Cab Calloway (a famous Black jazz musician for anyone who doesn' recognize the name) along with others and had Betty Boop's catchphrase ultimately come from Baby Esther's scatting, along with other instances of Betty Boop's performances having connection to Black American performance-art

and, hell, you could even make arguments about Betty Boop as a cowgirl in her "Nan McGrew" parodies. cowgirls and cowboys were a largely queer and/or POC group, paid very little but allowed a lot of freedom of expression and welcomed isolation, until America cinema and the like white-washed cowboys to hell and back. you could see Betty Boop as anyone of any identity, really, but especially as being of the marginalized in that vein

Fleischer Studios did definitely (accidentally popularize infantalization in animated women woah who said that, who brought up my special-interest) only announce that they used an alagamation of flapper women in their design to better shoot down Helen Kane, but that doesn't mean it wasn't true. Betty Boop IS the 1930s tribute to the flapper era of the 20s and all the women from there, of all skin-colors and ways of life. anybody can cosplay or draw Betty Boop. but Black people especially do have a special connection to Betty Boop that cannot be denied and is v beautiful

(i could talk for a few hours about Betty Boop, and i will be the first to admit this isn't even her first "well, originally..." debate concerning her as a character, much less the breadth of her impact OR all aspects of her history. there's all the ways she did steal/borrow from Helen Kane, at least in my opinion; her impact of infantalization in animated women's designs; her hyper-sexualization and how theater at the time functioned (in a sexual way*) and her specific "gags in the margins"(*×2) animators would make; her almost movie about her and her father that a lot of Betty Boop fans have dug up and shared the conceptual work of around; and even the debate of her age as that is constantly in flux depending on where you look and at what time of history (*×3). all of which i mention in an "if you liked learning about Betty, there is a lot more to look into learning about her" way rather than an "ask me, ask me, ask me" way)

(said * clarifactions will be with the aforementioned reblog to not make this post even LONGER than it already is lmao)

anyway. again: A++ art though, absolutely love it ♡

boop-boop-a-doop

[scretladyspider]

please don’t scroll; I really need your help to reach my gofundme goal of $3500 and not become homeless.

Im Elle, a queer, ace, disabled person with ADHD, depression, and two cats. In November, I lost my job without warning. I have no savings as the job already had me living to the last dollar of every paycheck. I was denied unemployment and food stamps. I cannot work away from home, a physical job, or something with strict hours due to some yet-to-be-diagnosed illness.

this is my story — what’s going on & how I got here. (Smaller text used because it’s a lot of information/a long post.)

In early 2018, I was doing regular walk/runs. In 2019, I stopped being able to run, so I went on walks. Running took hours, then days, to recover from. My body couldn’t produce energy to do it consistently, so, walks. In 2020, I kept going on walks and tried to do aerobics. I was not able to keep doing aerobics. My body took hours upon hours to recover, where before it hadn’t, I was alone for almost all of 2020, and never developed COVID symptoms; it was what happened with running all over again. In 2021, it started to take more time to recover from walks. Then I started to need to take a nap immediately after I clocked out from work— and it was a work from home job. In 2022, I began to go from my sitting desk job straight to my bed most days, laying down exhausted right after work, even sleeping through lunch to get some rest.

On New Year's Eve 2023, I spent 30 minutes cleaning, including vacuuming my living room. I had to rest the rest of the day.

In the last five years, I've gone from running to being exhausted for hours by taking my garbage to the curb.

Imagine you were someone who enjoyed recreational exercise. Now imagine doing 1/100th of that and feeling sick for days. Thats me.

There are other symptoms also. More vulnerability to infection and more trouble fighting infection. Shooting, sharp muscle pains in large muscles such as the thigh or forearm, like a pinched nerve, that come and go at random. Pulse rate that skyrockets upon standing, to go back to normal soon after. Stomach inflammation. Inflammation without major swelling. Headaches. Complete inability to tolerate heat, leading to excruciating migraines that only go away with things like cold showers, electrolytes, and hours of rest in the dark with ice. Muscles that literally don't feel like they're getting oxygen. Random rashes. Face flushing. Being much more easily out of breath, yawning over and over, like I can't get air correctly. Weight gain, no matter what I eat or don't eat.

And just being so, so tired.

In summer of 2018, something… stopped working in my body. I felt sick all the time. I had a low, unexplainable fever nearly every day. Shooting nerve pain would wake me up at night. The doctor said I had a cold. But months went by and I didn’t get better. When my blood work and thyroid hormone level was normal, I was referred to a rheumatologist.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia after he made me wait 45 minutes, came in and asked “are you tired?", poked me hard, said I was tender, and left without running tests. This sort of “uhm the standard blood work came back normal, have you tried exercising more? I know you’re here because your body can’t recover from it but have you tried more of that? Also going to sleep at night?” has been the response over and over and over for five years. It got to the point where I even started to wonder if I was somehow making it up. I see a psych nurse. She thinks there's more than just depression, ADHD, and other things - though we both agree that managing those is vital too. She used to be a cardiologist, so this is reassuring. But when I have tried to see other doctors, it goes differently. Most of the time they see I have ADHD, a long history of depression, and hypermobile joints, and say that explains everything. I can't count how many times I've been told "well, you have depression” when the labs, if they even agreed to run them, came back normal. My standard blood work sometimes comes back with anemia, but I take an iron supplement. No improvement had come of it. I’ve had my thyroid hormone levels tested over and over, but never the antibodies. No imaging or referrals have happened, outside of one to a second rheumatologist. He ran no tests either; he just saw my joints are hypermobile and I was “sure taking a lot of mental health medications” (two at the time), and… that was that.

I had given up on actually even getting help until my SIL recommended a doctor she knew. For the first time in five years, when the standard blood work and TSH tests were normal, she told me we would keep looking. I actually cried with relief at that. It’s amazing to be believed after all this time.

Because of …. All of this, I'm trying to figure out how to either work for myself or find a work from home job that has flexible hours I can choose. I literally wouldn't be able to work a retail gig where I have to stand for eight hours, or even a 9-5 where I have to be there for those exact hours, because my body cannot do that right now. I want to get better but it's a long way off. First I need to know what's even wrong. I'm praying for a diagnosis soon. And treatment. At the least, management.

I have heard of EDS and I have been evaluated. I apparently don’t meet enough criteria, hence the diagnosis of JHS instead. It’s in the same family. I have also heard of POTS. I am pursuing testing. Same with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MCAS, fibromyalgia… yeah. The thing is nothing outside of the standard blood count and thyroid hormone level test, no other lab tests have been done. There are so many things this could be that have never been checked. Lyme disease, for example, is extremely common where I live (it’s actually just extremely common worldwide) and matches much of my experience, but 1) in the USA the initial Lyme test relies on a strain of bacteria cultured in the 80s 2) there are over 100 strains of Lyme disease in the USA 3) in spite of decades of research there are doctors who don’t believe chronic Lyme exists 4) no doctor has ever checked and I only recently learned anything about it so I never asked. But… there are a lot of things to check that I’ve never had checked is my point. Fingers crossed someone can help me get there.

I do not have a partner who can try to support me through this, and my family already supports me however they can. My severance (which was low as I found out I was being paid much less than the rest of the team later) paid only my January rent.

Since my ability to work is severely limited right now, and I've been denied unemployment and food stamps, and I would need a diagnosis and to be awarded disability benefits in court (which can take YEARS that I don’t have), I have nothing in savings because of years of underpaying jobs the cost of living and being disabled and going through prior periods of unemployment due to this and other factors, I am left in a tough spot without help. Without this help, this gofundme... I have nothing.

So... here I am. A queer nonbinary disabled neurodivergent writer, trying my best, living with some undiagnosed illness that's severely impacted my ability to function, who got fired without real reasons (in America they can just do that to you without even telling you why), asking for your help to pay my February rent and January bills so I don’t repeat the trauma of being homeless. Or for you to reblog this.

Thank you for reading all of this.

It’s been on my chest for a long time. Even if it wasn’t for the gofundme, it feels good to talk about and be honest about my health. It reminds me you’re not supposed to feel like this all the time when I tell other people and they tell me I should get help and deserve answers. It’s reassuring to see competent doctors who finally believe me. I hope we figure it out.

no donation is too small— they add up. If just 100 people gave $35, the goal would be met. Sharing is also giving— it means someone who can help is more likely to see it.

You can also help via my venmo — secretladyspider

CashApp — secretladyspider

or find PayPal in my tip jar in my linktree

Goal is $3500 or over. Funds needed ASAP. If it goes over, that’ll help with February.

Thank you for anything and everything.

[shoheiakagi]

Can you give me your thoughts of what you think of Homra alphabet boys? It could be who’s your favorite and who’s not, what you like and hate about them, who would you date and why. Etc etc…

of course i can!

i absolutely adore all of the abc boys and wish there was sooo much more content on them - fan and official content. although im a little more biased to some of them more than the others, i dont think im capable of disliking/hating any of them. theyre a lot more interesting and attractive than a lot of the major characters to me

i would literally be content with reading more stories on them getting drunk and causing chaos, despite serving no relevance to the plot lol

im gonna share some opinion/headcanons on each of the boys, so more under the cut:

Ask me shit!

akagi shouhei:

i think anyone that scrolls through my blog for like atleast 5-10 minutes will figure out that he's my favorite character in the entire series, even though he is a minor character. he's different from a lot of the other male characters that i typically go far (i usually go far guys with darker hair who have a similar personality to yata or even a quiet, cold personality similar to fushimi), but i remember reading mor for the first time and finding him super cute?? thats when i realized that even tho i typically prefer darker hair, im a huge sucker for guys with messy hair in general, especially when its tucked under a baseball cap. especially if theyre the rebellious type 🤭 think i got more interested in him when i reread mor around late 2018 and started analyzing the little details (he owned a motorcycle before joining homra, how he was all cocky and smirking when he raided that gang who kept his friend captive) that gave me this impression that hes not this generic nice guy that he likes to portray himself as. not ashamed to label this man as my fictional crush, 100% would date him irl, and 100% do think he gives chitose a run for his money when its comes to their face card (in the manga, at least). my least favorite thing about him has to be the lack of content on him. this applies to all of the boys, but i feel like the very few content we see on him, ends up relating back to bandou for the most part (i will get to that in a bit). like fuck, i want to know more about his daily routine, life before and outside of homra, his family, his friends out of homra, how hes like when hes drunk, how often does he party, whats his type, does he go to the gym, whats his views on life, etc. i also think that he can pull of the yandere stalker vibes very well cause first, he knows how hack into devices lol. second, i always see shouhei as someone who pulls this false, cheery facade to hide his true emotions. you can't really tell if hes angry or jealous unless youre closely paying attention and notice that his eyes seem darker than before, fists clenched, jaw locked, etc. and when he fights, he has this borderline psychotic grin on his face. like look at the material:

like yes daddy, pls fuck me

bandou saburouta:

i dont remember if i ever mentioned it here but out of all the boys, i related to bandou a lot when i was younger, with the whole introverted earth sign with dark hair who is jealous of their extroverted best friend who has better luck with the opposite sex lmfao. i really adore this idiot and he has me dying with how petty he can get, and how he seems to be the punching bag for some of the members (*cough* yata *cough). its so weird tho cause physically hes more of my type, but i guess its bc hes always decked out in a hoodie and shades, its hard to remember that hes actually pretty cute. the only thing that rubs me the wrong way is how the writers made his dynamic with shouhei erase some of shouhei's individuality. like even tho mor started off from shouhei's perspective, the minute we find out about bandou and him being friends, the narrative switches to bandou's inferiority complex around him. i love bandou's plotline, it definitely gives him more depth, making him one of the more developed abc boys along with eric. but i HATE how the writers made everything about shouhei, relate back to bandou. mor started off with shouhei joining homra to save his friend, which he succeeded in, great! but i feel like we learn more about bandou as a character, and whatever we do learn about shouhei, its mostly from bandou's perspective. there was also this series of short stories for each character, and boyyyyy you dont know pissed i was to see that shouhei's story was about bandou being jealous of how popular and friendly he is with girls. but when you read bandou's story, it was cute little heartfelt conversation between him and anna. i do feel like this is a reoccurring issue with the homra abc boys (we learn more about chitose and eric than we do about dewa and fuji in their respective chapters) but fuck man, at least in dewa's short story, we learn that he runs the bar when kusanagi is not around, making him popular with women, and that he loves extremely spicy food. granted, shouhei's story does provide some details such as how well liked he is and that he would take anna out shopping if totsuka and kusanagi are busy, but then most of his story morphs into bandou being jealous of him....like we get it, can we please move on from that topic? platonic banshou? 10/10, fucking love that shit. romantic banshou?? ehh, im indifferent

chitose yo:

chitose is my third favorite abc boy!! he's hot and a super fun character. its truly a shame that hes a minor character so the anime has him just standing around with a blank expression and maybe have him making a one-liner or two. hes genuinely the type of person i cant imagine staying silent and not giving his two cents, whether its during the more serious moments or the chill, laidback moments. im currently rereading mor and some panels of chitose got me like 😳🥵 cause hes fucking hot lol. but! im not a big fan of playboys/womanizers, so i never got into him the same way i did with shouhei and eric. at first, i was happy when i read one of the more recent post rok stories where it was stated that he finally found someone and got into a stable relationship! but then thinking about it, i feel like the writers should have made him seek therapy first, and then get into a relationship. cause from what we know about chitose, he was so scarred by how his first relationship ended with his late gf passing away, he avoided committed relationships bc he does not want to be emotionally vulnerable like that ever again. so clearly the guy had some psychological issues, which should have been addressed with therapy, instead of drowning himself in casual sex and alcohol. so i cant help but feel a little skeptic about him being ready to enter another relationship so soon. also hate how the writers make him say some suggestive comments about anna (getting married by 16, proposing to buy red lingerie for her as a bday gift, worry about her gaining weight for eating at night). like stop it, that shit is fucking gross and its making chitose go from a relatively harmless playboy to a creepy pedo. i never read the lost small world manga, but i remember coming across this omake (?) where chitose and dewa were talking and chitose made some comment that implied that he was willing to (or already had) have sex with a drunk girl, which is a huge no.

dewa masaomi

i would totally date dewa tbh. he fits my type irl (dark hair, introverted, can be witty/sharp, etc). it also helps that since he hangs out with chitose a lot, hes not really fazed by conventionally attractive women lol. along with fuji, he lacks a lot of depth since we don't know much about them. but hey, thats what im here for! i like to think that dewa makes all of his life choices by doing the exact opposite of what chitose does. where chitose would date and sleep any pretty girl that comes his way, dewa would be super picky and not just fall for a pretty face. chitose loves women in mini skirts and cropped tops, dewa prefers his women in suits and form-fitting long dresses that accentuates their curves without showing any skin. i think a general consensus for dewa is that he joined homra bc of chitose, which i definitely agree with. although some of the members may not be as brash and aggressive as someone like yata, i can still see them fitting in. dewa, on the otherhand, seems to be the odd one out. like the man seems like he would fit in with s4 better. but i do like the hc of dewa, despite how different he is from the other boys, dislikes authority figures trying to control his life, which is why he chose to stay with homra. cause its easier to join a gang for a friend, but its harder to stay in a gang if they dont align with your values/goals. i also like to think that dewa actually comes from a well off family, which reflects on his mannerisms and sense of dressing. but he doesnt share a close relationship with his parents. while theyre not emotionally or physically abusive, they are very emotionally absent, which is why he grows up detached from them. that doesnt stop them from trying to make his life decisions for him (i.e. have him take over the family business after college, settle down with this girl who is also from this well off family, etc), so dewa doesnt think twice before moving out once he hits 18

eric soult

my baby boy, my second fave abc boy!!! i think hes probably the only white character i like in anime lol (but then again, i dont really watch a lot of anime). i was veryy attracted to eric when i first read mor and found him so handsome (still do tbh), but now i feel so soft towards him??? like i still would tap it, but did you eat??? you look so cold, let me wrap a blanket around you!!! oh, youre telling me to back off or else you'll stab me??? aww, youre soo cute 🥰 all jokes aside, him and bandou are the most developed out of the abc boys, which makes sense on why theyre more popular than the others. i also wish we saw more of his dynamic with yata, cause i felt like their banter was fucking hilarious and i loved how eric was not scared to show him sass despite being new to homra lol. i recently started having this headcanon that eric has this old fashion mindset where as a man, you have to provide for your girl, even if its the most ridiculous and expensive thing ever, so whenever the guys talk about buying gifts for anna or any other woman in their life, hes always suggesting expensive jewelry and clothes. this also makes him very vulnerable to the wrong women, who would probably drain his wallet and emotionally abuse him if she doesnt get what she wants. i actually got this hc from the mor movie where fuji tells him that he'd fall for the type of wrong girl when he proposes buying designer gifts for anna lol. i was soo emotional when i read that eric makes the choice to travel the world by himself and taking pictures of beautiful sights. cause not only does it seem like he's honoring one of totsuka's hobbies, he's also getting this opportunity to see the world from a different and healthier perspective!!! he's going to be able to see more color in a world that was previously in shades of black and white for him!!!!

fujishima kosuke

my fellow taurus!!!! i remember thinking that he was related to mikoto when i first read the manga cause of his hair lmaooo. idk why but i always visualize him to have a deeper voice?? hes just so manly but yet so caring and nurturing, so i cant imagine him without a deep voice. i like to think that out of all of the guys, hes the only one who has a good relationship with his family, hence why he still lives with them, despite being part of a gang and having a bad habit of taking in stray animals. i know that in the same official story where chitose ends up in a relationship, fuji ends up being a carpenter, but i like the idea of fuji deciding to go back to school and becoming a vet so that he can take care of sick/injured animals. or atleast opening up his own no-kill, animal rescue agency!

[spiralsta1rcase]

the internet makes me so depressed nowadays. it's such a non issue in the grand scheme of things but really it's not that small. i think i deserve to rant about this because it makes me so angry and so sad at the same time

I TALKED TOO MUCH AGAIN SO CLICK IF YOU CARE

the rise of ai and .. really, that's just it. just the rise of ai is destroying the internet man. today when i saw that news of the ai generated instagram and facebook users it just made me think man Damn. this isn't the same place it was when i was a kid. it's weird to be able to say that im part of the generation that grew up with internet access but at least i can see just how horrible the internets becoming - i worded that weird. at least i have the knowledge of how it was before. i still remember going on websites full of people so passionate about a particular subject, video games, art, music, technology... and they were all human. and that's all it needed to be.. its always interesting to think about the internet and computers social media in the technological and technical and whatever-y way, but there's something to be said about the human part of it too. communication was really at the core of all these inventions. communication between humans of course. and to see these modern tech innovators to be raving on about ai just feels like a mockery of the internets original purpose...is there a point to talking to a robot? is there a point in watching something made by a robot? in listening to something made by a robot? what do you gain from it?

i can't have the privilege of saying i miss the early days of the internet cuz that to me just means foggy memories of video game forums. but from what i've seen. yeah. i miss it too. i don't want to ignore the graphic and hateful content just easily available for everyone in the early days of the internet of course. we can't look at things like that. oh it was just so great back in the 1990s and 2000s! there was just nothing bad back then. thats just not true. but somehow it feels the same today. or worse. homophobia and racism and ableism and sexism and fatphobia and just a general lack of empathy is just So. so so so common on the internet again. it's so disheartening. and, this is a topic i love to ramble about, but now that there's no more safe spaces for children on the internet anymore, the kids of the 2020s are just exposed to most of this stuff if their parents aren't super careful.

i feel like there was a wave from 2018-2021 of nicer people, more accepting people. body positivity and diversity and all that nice stuff... so why is everyone just such a dick again? what happened to all that activism? seriously man?? have you guys seen those tiktok comments of people talking about their "trans phases" and how they're all just sooo cringe now that they look back on it? what's that all about? and god. GOD the weird weird body stuff going on on tiktok. seriously man it's not cool. i've seen so so so many beautiful young boys and girls miserable about how they look because it doesn't align with the super strict standard they've all set for themselves. it's so depressing to see. and i find myself going down those rabbit holes myself. it's so easy to fall into. i'll find myself watching a video about cute hairstyles, then in the search i'll look, and ill find a video about th best and worst hair types to have. then i scroll down. and i keep scrolling. how to sharpen your jawline. diet ideas to lose weight fast. best eyes and worst eyes. can everyone just shut up? and the boys and girls in my class fall for this stuff too. and so do i. i can't act like im perfect. i watch these videos too and wonder if i should start dressing for the boys around me instead of for myself

i forgot what i was talking about so i had to go back up... The Internet Id Getting Worse Man!!!!! filming people in public. the weird beauty standards. the oddly racist internet memes. the misogyny. the homophia. the transphobia. what is going on??!!Im too tired to type anything more so I'll leave it at that.

[fanderstuckin2018]

I don't have much BTS content for the filming of the episode (i joined the fandom a few months after it dropped) BUT I was always on the fanfiction side, and boy were there a lot of name speculations. I remember so much of the fandom's reaction to the reveal of Deceit's character, so I can tell you lots about that. Maybe its not what you're looking for, but its an excuse for me to reminisce, so i hope you find this interesting!!

Under cut:

Popular names for Deceit

"Sympathetic" Deceit Sanders (the OOC beam hits him hard)

TLDR and my closing thoughts LOL

Popular names for pre-name-drop Deceit (and fanfics that they appeared in)

Ethan (lots of people thought he would be Ethos, like Logan and Patton are Logos and Pathos respectively) Love and Wounds

Dante (started with a D, and also a reference to Dante's Inferno, which relates to Virgil's name) care (for both self and others)

Damien, Dee, anything starting with a D really (I used these as placeholder names, sort of) Destined

Melas (means "black/dark" and was used in really only a handful of fics, but I encountered it a few times) Mortality's Remorse

Often these names would be used in AUs, like modern or school. A situation in which "Deceit" didn't work as an actual name. I remember it was so fun scrolling through all these fics because everyone had their own take on what Deceit's name would be, and really cool justification for it. (Fun fact, my friend actually guessed that his name would be Janus literally a day before SvsS dropped, and we were screaming when it was finally revealed.)

"Sympathetic" Deceit Sanders vs the Fander community

This part I remember SO vividly. We had an antagonistic character with little to no backstory or screentime actually acting as himself. He was ripe for mischaracterization, and mischaracterize the fandom did lmao!! Not saying that this is a bad thing, I definitely partook in it myself and had a lot of fun, but its an interesting phenomenon I havent really seen occur elsewhere.

At first, Deceit was mean and almost "evil" in a lot of fanfictions. But in the span of a few months, people began to adapt him to seem like- softer, more fragile in a way. I can't really explain it, other than to say it was the complete opposite of his character, both then and now. He was helpless in a way, often suffering alone, and he would be so far changed that he'd almost become like a punching bag 😭 (The amount of abuse in all that fanfiction...) You could find this kind of Deceit most often in works tagged with "Sympathetic Deceit Sanders" on AO3, I think there was a whole week for it at one point too. Of course, not all fanfics using the Sympathetic Deceit tag portrayed him like this, but the bulk of them from 2018-2020 did, imo.

I loved me a lonely, unredeemed villain, and I loved angst, so I latched onto Deceit near immediately. And because we didnt see him for a long time, the fandom kind of went down a rabbit hole making OOC Deceit content (once again, this isnt a bad thing! Just let people have fun lol). But it got to the point where I had read so many OOC Deceit fics and developed this warped version of his character in my head, that when I went back and actually rewatched CLBG? I got a weird sense of whiplash. It was like there was a clash between canon!Deceit and fanon!Deceit in my brain. And that kind of kicked me into gear to really go back and analyze his character, rather than continue to write the warped version the fandom had made him.

I think the fact that there was a bit of a content drought encouraged this kind of OOC-ification, because at the same time there was an increase in Unsympathetic Patton works. People would essentially switch Patton and Deceit's roles and go "but what if Patton bad and Deceit good?" Which in itself is interesting because what would happen if Patton was "bad"...? Anyway thats a tangent.

If you want some more fics demonstrating this I will totally give some to you!! I have a few in mind, but I dont want this to be longer than it is LOL

TLDR:

The fandom sort of watered Deceit's character down a LOT after the episode dropped, because we hadn't seen him interact in any other way with anyone else. Especially not with real Patton. Lots of angst and whump was made, but it was a fun fun time, and I miss it.

Misc:

Once again, I don't think that any of this is "bad". Was it cringy? Kinda, but that was what made it fun. So imo this period shouldnt be looked at as bad in any way, just a bunch of people (middle schoolers, in my case,) having fun and experimenting with writing. Yeah :)

(also thats why my name is Dee)

Hello! I need your guys help. If you’re a current fander, an ex fander, whatever it be.

I wanna make a video talking all about the hype cycle basically for “can lying be good” especially the speculation before and the fandom after. I have most of the script written but I want a lot of visuals from this era.

I know there’s not a lot of fanders left in the fandom actively who were there for that time/posted about that. BUT IF YOU ARE OR KNOW OF ANY POSTS. Please send links or screenshots my way of anything during that era of the fandom. So any theories about what the episode was gonna be (I remember people thinking it was gonna be about Roman’s room) or after the video and stuff about Janus. Luckily I do remember this time very vividly and that’s why I wanna make this video, I found it so fascinating and a great time in the fandom.

Right now I’m specifically looking for two main things, but of course I want anything I can get. I remember Thomas posting maybe a tweet or Instagram story perhaps of him saying he was filming at a theatre and I remember everyone thinking it meant it was Roman’s room. There was also a post Joan made on their tumblr (which I believe their tumblr has been deleted) about the notes they made about the episode including like oh Patton is wearing the wrong cardigan to show it’s Janus. Stuff like that. If you can find these posts especially PLEASEEEE send me them.

But yeah! If you have any questions lmk, please share anything you have. If you can, share this post as I wanna get as much information and data as I can. Thank you!!

[maxellminidisc]

These tags intrigued me, I have more thoughts (not confrontational or anything just fascinated by difference of experience)

Cause like I definitely don't think fandom was better circa 2012-2018??? when I was involved more deeply in fandom. I think if you're a person of color in fandom the experience then or now is especially always going to be shit and it's going to feel like wading in the fucking trenches. I think fandom culture has always been rotten as long as you got white people being the most vocal majority. And I think the one improvement we've made is that the discussion on adults behavior towards minors and about media about or containing minors, about racism, about other awful shit is now out in the open at a bigger scale. There were always people willing to talk about these things, but the likelyhood of them being drowned out by harrassment and especially racism was like on a different level, like its STILL absolutely happens and I still see it happen but I think a lot of people now have at the very least much bigger spaces to have these convos, especially amongst ourselves as targets of said fandom racism, ableism, etc. But the downside of this is that the people who HAVE gotten called out for shit are ALSO much more openly aggressive and shameless, especially towards minors and poc.

BUT like what I was referring to in my original post as something I "enjoyed" is the balance of fandom related content OUTSIDE and beside fan fiction specifically on tumblr. From my experience, it felt like a pretty balanced ratio of fanfic, fan art, gifsets, giveaways, meta discussion, fan projects like zines, etc cause they were always on my dash plain as day, literally never had to look for it and when I did it was easy to find. I even still have mutuals from those days and they too notice the change!

It wasn't like now, where you practically have to scroll past 20 pages of badly tagged fan fiction. It was always a nice mix of stuff; a fanfic here, a gifset there, a sprinkling of fan art, etc Now it's like can't go into a single interest without at least scrolling past 15 posts in a row of PURE fan fic before you find maybe one piece of fan art sanwhiched between the next ten. I literally have to put additional tags (for example rn let's say you have to be like "miguel o'hara, art, fan art" + show pictures only feature) to find specific things AND EVEN THEN fan fiction will still clog my results because tumblr picks up on the gifs, screencaps, photos, etc. people use to decorate or draw attention to their fan fic for some reason.

So it's like there absolutely is a saturation in fandoms focus on fanfiction and as someone else said in the tags, I think the general epidemic of faster hollower consumption of all things, including media and art, has both contributed to so much of that oversaturation and produced work thats not so fucking great! I mean back in the day you still had people absolutely writing very weak to badly written work, don't get me wrong, but finding and tracking down works with a substantial amount of thought into the original narratives and characterizations of their inspiration, of trying to improve their literary skills, working with editors, OF BEING OPEN TO CRITIQUE, was so much more likely! And the middle of the road stuff wasn't a complete loss either.

Like to me there is just such an apparant change in the ratio of content and quality produced in fandom and now that I think about it like the sense of idk an actual creative community?? The only time I see people really rally is when anybody has actual critique on fandom culture or on someone in fandoms behaviour. Like I mentioned before people used to get together all the time and do like collaborative fics, online zine projects, giveaways of merch they'd made or copies of things they didn't need anymore/wanted to share, other art projects like tarot decks, etc as a fun way to engage with each other. Some of these fun things absolutely still exist but they're usually done in much smaller scales and in smaller fandoms I'm in and they dont happen quite as much. Of course theres other reasons the reduction in these projects has happened (aka disastrous scams lol) but it's interesting that its fallen out of style among fan spaces, I see it more in specificically LGBT spaces that say, people get together to make a zine. Fandom now seems very very disconnected in some particular way now on here that I cant quite put into words that really doesnt feel as capable of enjoyment??? Enjoyment now comes from SUPER curating who and what you're interacting with instead of like more of a casual pick and choose, steady flow of variable content.

[askfallenroyalty]

since the epilogue is close to ending, here's some sketches of wip designs

this is very rambly so i'll add ID descriptions later, sorry. (its 4am for me rn)

Frisk looks too older, they've only aged 2 years. both chara and asriel's designs here are SO beta and non refined. I think this was drawn even before Flowey came out -I wasn't sure how much of the trans aspect was going to come into play. I initially wanted the comic to end with Chara and Asriel reconciling after the Toriel-Asriel Airplane Call scene, but realized that there was too much unsaid between the two that needed to be hashed out and the epilogue had enough to cover already.

It was going to be a last minute "oh btw, since coming home Asriel is trans now, deal with it" but THANK GOD i didn't just sneak it in like that and explored the topic in the comic instead.

I forgot where this artwork was saved so I tried to draw it back from memory a few months later:

Chara's form was starting to come together -i assume this was around the time that Chara got their boss monster form in the comic itself. I like that Frisk has a Bi flag shirt here -I should of gone with that! The cheeks are more square but ultimately I thought age 15 wouldn't allow for that much of a change. so yeah, this is what an adult frisk would look instead.

oh! for funsis: did you know i was originally going to have the other fallen humans be skeletons instead of different monsters?

I thought it was too similar to insanelyadd's skeleton fallen kids. I actually am friends with Addy now, but then I had to message and be like "🥺is it ok if i also do this i swear i'm not copying" to which they were chill about. ultmatly i felt the designs were to Sans-like and didn't allow for much creativity. (also why tf does Hol have green instead of cyan colors what was wrong with my computer or me in 2018 lmao

I always wanted to show the kids age and progress throughout the comic. oh my god the hair is SO anime here ouch! anyway I wanted Chara to really lean into the "prim and proper" role they give themself. I thought it was so cool to have them cut their hair short in the back and have long hair in the front. (wait. wait, thats what Chara does now in the epilogue. huh.)

honestly??? i like "pissed off librarian" vibes this frisk has here. Also weird to see my Frisk without an afro!

sadly no beta adult asriel designs. no idea why i never drew any then.

Here's me figuring out how Chara should have a monster form -here's proto boss monster chara, as you can see i planned out the red hair aspect early on enough that this was before the timeskip happened.

um. anyway, pre-epilogue concept sketches. I think Raine had bird wings at this stage?? dang wild. Don't ask why Franky looks like a new yorker paper boy. Hol looks too much like a raggedy ann which is funny. Ursus... well, they probably won't look much different.

Hol eye concept art. done before they were revealed in the comic itself. ..........less said about this the better

And lastly, chara's boss monster design drawn right before they showed up. First one drawn <- left to right <- You can see I wanted Chara to have a hippy/punk design, but realized like, that jacket was going to be a binch to draw over and over. so i simplified it, and then was like, "ok this is TOO plain, i need SOME detail" and got very close to the final version.

alright since I know some people like color ref sheets, here

Continue Arc full cast. Was SUPER annoying to scroll thru to find the right character lmao

hol's prequel story color ref -actually changed the Berry's hair color last minute and never got around to updating the color sheet. was very annoying to hand-color pick from a previous page instead of using the ref :/ smh @/ me

Baker's Trouble.

OLDIE. From the Start Again? and Christmas sections of the tumblr version. God. Hol is so small. Asriel looks like a mess. Good lord.

Cancelled Christmas Arc. Chara was supposed to meet up with Asriel on a boat offshore of Monsterland for Christmas, but turns out Asriel was using Chara as publicity. Except... not fully. He did want to meet up with Chara, but they get the wrong impression that Asriel was only doing this for image's sake. It'd explore how the public views Chara as an idolized figure and how Frisk plays into that too.

Anyway the story was too ambitious and I should of started this on December 1st instead of days before Christmas. Plus, I wasn't happy with how I started it and the vibes were off. I might have this as a side story in the redraw but idk

Back to the Epilogue. I changed Asriel's dress just a little bit to improve the body shape silhouette (the dress is so plane its like she's wearing a towel! gah! I should have added SOME flair to that dress dang it!) anyway the dress is more... swooshy? swirly? and the teal ties up to the neck which works nicely with the heart locket and bow combo. Actually. Shit. Why didn't I just put the locket OVER the bow i'm so stupid that'd be so much easier-

If I could redo it, I'd make some changes...

now here's the cousin and sib groups here. Flowey is actually a little TOO big and not up to scale which is funny hehe (also more blocky looking??? weird) In the Redraw version I'm modifying Raine's dress to have a sash and other details, this thing is TOO plain. Franky's Mad Scientist like outfit could of just been an actual labcoat and ideally, the fact that Franky wasn't at the party could of foreshadowed that they knew it was going to be reloaded.

(...Which, actually, Chara's surprise was a surprise for me as well. That was a impulsive idea that came to me when we were getting very close to meeting with Chara again. Thus I couldn't foreshadow it. Redraw WILL have better foreshadowing U_U;)

ACTUALLY SCREW IT for the remainder of the epilogue, i made some changes I wanted to add detail and change some designs a tad -mainly to make the designs more distinct from each other and for story continuity. (AKA: Asriel and Papyrus are supposed to be the only "red scarf" wearers. Asriel's bowtie is knitted like a scarf. previously, hol and yun had red bows which made this match up less distinct. mew Mew's design was a little too similar to Sans' and Alphys and needed some changes.)

anyway i think thats all i can share now! thanks for reading and hope you guys keep following the redraw. I really really want a completed version of this story that's not missing holes. i want AFR to be complete and well, even with the epilogue ending, it won't be "done" for a long while. But thank you guys, it's been a journey!

If you hadn't guessed, I might be finishing the epilogue today (tomorrow for me, cause i'm going to bed in a few minutes). Depends on how much I manage to draw today, but yeah. Chara is going to the party, we'll get to say hi, close some loose ends and come to end. worst case scenario, i'll have to do a little comic to tie it off (like I did with the main storyline's ending) at a later date and this will be the end of the ask-able portion of the epilogue.

[fearlessleaderbucky]

does Bucky ever get rid of the hydra arm in the comics? and what are those comics you've been posting from, I want to catch up on some Bucky loving

his arm gets destroyed Many Many times in the comics like. honest to god lost count. but it's nearly not as.. hmmm.... Dramatique™ as the mcu made it (like giving him a vibranium arm and bucky trying to distance himself from the winter soldier) so in a way he Did get rid of the arm. just. wasn't a big deal. tony fixes his arm up and gives him back-up arms too bc bucky is so reckless he loses it so many times LOL

let me remember wtf i read bc its been blurry as hell but heres ur "catch up on bucky loving" compilation with no order bc im a mess. this part is the "bucky is here for a short time but he amuses me"

what kickstarted everything was that i read winter soldier (2018) its like 5 issues and i was weeping the whole time like nooo bucky my meow meow

thunderbolts 2016 where bucky is their leader. i sure read that. i dont remember what happens on it tho. i liked strikeforce more 😭

strikeforce which is what i posted earlier before i went to bed. very funny. i loved it. its my fave teamup and it is bc most of my favorite characters are there hehe

tales of suspense which follows clint and bucky and i cant say no to that dynamic man. theyre funny

hawkeye freefall where sam and bucky are in #1 and #4 and #5

unstoppable wasp 2018 where he shows up in #7 and.. maybe the ones after that too he was there semi often but hes my fave. My beloved. my one and only

he's in sam wilson: captain america bc of course he is from #7 to #9.. or #10...

falcon & winter soldier (2020) which is just my religion basically

this is where i started being like Man bucky in the comics is just such a good guy. now i want More. so this is where its a little Longer and U Gotta Read More but its worth it bc ed brubaker loves bucky and you can tell he does so every run you end weepy over how much u love bucky

deep breath

captain america (2005) which is the official Bucky is Back run. this is where the winter soldier begins. if you're like me and you're like "man im only here for sam and bucky" you'll probably scroll down til u see them and u go AHH SHIT THERE THEY ARE. i linked you from the moment the winter soldier saga starts so :-) halfway through this turns into a bucky cap run! i am not a bucky cap enthusiast but contextually it works so well and its what the character needed. hehe

some point after bucky returns during that run he begins working undercover for fury which leads to winter kills which is like sad bucky hours BUT THE YOUNG AVENGERS ARE THERE

hes also in young avengers presents #1 which i could argue. you could skip. but i love eli and i love bucky so here he is. i wish i could order these chronologically i am just talking here

captain america and bucky for the sweet bucky pov that makes u wanna cry

captain america reborn which is just them bringing back steve. bucky is there. i dont remember much from it but its on my read list so

then its captain america #602 onwards til tje very endwhich follows bucky and zemo and all that jazz. lots of sambucky goodness imo. i dont remember if this is where the winter soldier trial begins but i think it is and then hes in siberia where he just has a very terrible not good very bad day

and then. My god. idk. shit happens. Some Event happened that i didnt read because reading comics is a lot of "and then you have to go to THIS EVENT" and im like. No thanks. so basically bucky dies, but he doesnt actually he just fakes his death so he could tie loose ends as the winter soldier. everybody mourns him even steve then theyre like Steve he didnt actually die oops. its This Issue

and then finally. winter soldier (2012) woah. its so good. Good shit. made me go through it so bad. you think you love bucky? think again. ed brubaker loves him more than you

thats p much where im caught up with bucky. he has more appearances that i'll eventually get around so ill probs update it hehe. sorry i dumped such a long list on you 😭

[isupportjikook]

im pretty sure its nothing, but it cant leave my mind no matter how i try so : in the mma 2018 video, i keep thinking about what made jk whisper the first sentences in jm's ear. like from the rest of the video we can clearly see that they can talk out loud and still understand each other very well, so why the need to hide what he was saying at the start?? there is probably a rational explaination, like i know idols often whisper in each other's ears when they dont want the cameras to capture what they are saying, but taking into account the context....... with the way jk and jm were acting the whole time and if (and only if, i am aware we dont know if thats what he said) jk really said "hyungi namchin" outloud.......... how wild was what he said in jm's ear................. anyways i know its probably delulu but i didnt see ppl talk about that part so. here i am (also excuse my english its not my native language, if you want me to clarify just ask me!!)

Your English is great :)

People clearly think I’m delulu for talking about MMA 2018 so I’ll just assume that I’m ok to keep talking about what I think about this day lol! Let’s be delulu together ;)

This post is just my opinion so please don’t take it as fact or take offence.

If you don’t agree with what I think about MMA 2018, please skip this one :)

Anon: I agree with you. JK started off with whispering in Jimin’s ear. He wanted to hide it initially. We don’t even hear them. In the whole conversation they have, we actually only see JK say 2 words.

However, people do hide what they say in these kind of situations where there are cameras all the time. I don’t think him hiding what he was saying means anything necessarily.

In regards to what I have seen people say about not speaking the language and not understanding the conversation...we can all see Jimin asking a question about him and JK (due to the pointing) and JK saying one word back (nampyeon) and then another word (namchin). Pointing is universal. As is the look on Jungkook’s face.

If you are a Jikooker and believe that they are together, when Jimin asks what they are to each other, what else would you expect him to say?

I’m not trying to make it fit. I already believe that they are a couple. It doesn’t even matter, all that I was saying in my original post was that this is when I knew they called each other ‘boyfriend’s. 

There are lots of complicated relationships out there, and I totally understand why they wouldn’t want to label it given their job and the country they live in.

Now, this is where I will talk more about my opinion so please, please don’t read if you don’t want to hear it :)

I’ve been thinking about WHY Jungkook would ask Jimin this at this particular point. This is just my thought process and all speculation.

BTS are super busy, and I expect that they weren’t getting a lot of time on their own, especially if they were still all living together. Maybe this was the only time they’d had to speak, just the 2 of them, with no-one overhearing, in a while?

Maybe JK was feeling confident and wanted to just say it when he had the courage.

Just before they have this chat, there’s a song being sung on stage which JK is clearly moved by. 

I am a huge romantic like JK, and it would have an effect on me as well, especially if I was feeling really in love (uWu) at the time.

These are some of the lyrics:

During the song, JK is singing along (he’s actually done a cover of it before) and is patting Jimin’s legs.

For me, some lyrics that really stand out - “Who cares what others say? We can’t live without each other, so what’s the problem?”

- If Jimin and Jungkook had been nervous about putting a label on their relationship, I can absolutely see how hearing something like this would affect Jungkook in the moment.

After the song, he literally pulls Jimin down to talk to him. Something couldn’t wait! What was so urgent that he had to say to Jimin quickly? It would have taken like another second for Jimin to sit down, lol.

And as you say Anon, he starts off trying to cover up what he’s saying.

Maybe he was saying something like the song sounds like their situation. Maybe he was saying he was feeling really romantic. Maybe he was saying he wanted to move forward together.

Whatever he said, Jimin was prompted to ask what they were to each other.

To which Jungkook replied. 

If people don’t want to believe that’s what Jungkook said, it doesn’t matter. I can see what he is saying with my own eyes. It fits the song before, the look on his face, the reaction from Jimin, the pointing by Jimin, the reaction of the Idol and Tae. I can’t think of anything else he could say that makes sense.

Oh and I don’t think they are talking about someone else, because why would Jimin be pointing at them both?

As I said, I am not trying to force my opinion on anyone. I already thought they were a couple. This was just the only time I’ve seen them say something like this. Didn’t change anything for me.

I personally don’t think it’s delusional to see a word that someone is clearly saying in HD zoomed onto their face. But if you do, that’s fine. As long as you are nice about it and just scroll on past this post, lol. 

This post was my opinion, not fact. 

I hope that helped Anon :) 

[ihatecispeople]

HI!! new follower here. just wanted to drop in and say that u shouldn't apologize for being into stuff!!! even if I'm not into it like you are its still awesome to see what people are enthusiastic about. I know Jack Diddly about mass effect but I can now add to my short lil list of knowin' nuggets that you like it. and I mean idk I think thats p cool

thats really kind of you to say!!! however i was a bit obnoxious there with the whole, kaidan and garrus thing a few days ago. i probably will get back into it tho bc ive decided to limit my mass effect consumption during the week (i study instead) so come the weekend.... 😔

its also the first sort of like BIG media consumption ive had since... idk, shrek 2018. obv i still consume media but i reblog at most a few posts and then move on, and before me3 i really did just post a few times about it. like when they said me3 will make you cry they really were right. i’ve never been THIS into lore since my elder scrolls obsession 2010-2013 either. ugh i need this motivation towards my own projects

anyways back to the first point, this is a really nice ask! thank you for sending it kel

[dontyouhearmehowling]

oh my god. Ok so I just scrolled through your blog and my heart hurts because there is so much love and just so much stuff I can relate too and I just ahhh damnnn it I cant even but like can I please have the story of your relationship with this girl your with? please? i'm a hopeless romantic I feel too much I love so hard my own love life is complicated but i know the kind of love you talk about thats exactly how i love the love of my life too so yours is a story I need to hear

ok so. it all started on April 31st, 2018. i reblogged one of those ask games and she sent me an emoji that said “i’m too scared to talk to you but i think you’re great” and i was like do it!!! and she did!!!! she texted me after i had already gone to sleep tho, so i only answered the next day. but then we talked all day. and the next. and the next. and we never ran out of things to talk about and even only knowing her for a few days i already felt comfortable enough with her to talk about anything?? it was wild. since day 1 we’ve had this connection that i’ve never had with anyone else and its my favorite thing in the world. after like a week we already had a bunch of inside jokes, something that i’d never had before, and i was already crushing on her. ok so we became very close friends like immediately, and i mostly ignored my crush on her bc i thought she didn’t like me back and usually i’d get meaningless crushes on everyone at first before i met her. but then this other girl and i started flirting and i realized i didnt like her bc i liked c too much, so i broke things off and kinda went like “oh shit this is real” and decided that i’d just stay friends with c until i eventually couldnt take it anymore and had to tell her abt my feelings bc thats how i am. anyways ok cool meanwhile i made her watch the good place on rabb.it with me which will be relevant later.

ok so fast forward to may 21st or something around that time. its time to sleep bc i have school the next day so we say goodnight, but then i guess she says something or reblogs something and i get sad bc i realize she doesnt like me back. so i make some hashtag sad posts abt yearning and then i realize i told her i was going to sleep and i didnt want her to think i didnt want to talk to her so i text her again and say like “ok i was going to go to sleep but then i got sad abt my crush” and SHE GOES “you have a crush????????” and im there like. what in the hell bc not only did i not try to hide it At All, i constantly posted about it and had an entire tag about her and i thought it was pretty obvious. so anyways i go “yes?? i thoought you knew that?? im literally always posting about it??” and she asks me to talk abt the crush and who it is. i say “just stalk the tag if u want, im going to sleep” then shes like “nO WAIT WHO IS IT” and im like. blatantly ignoring that and my heart is already beating out of my chest but she Really wants to know and then at one point i say “please dont make me answer that” so shE SAYS “you’re making me think that its me” and i say “i dont know what you want me to say” and SHE GOES “I WANT YOU TO SAY THAT ITS ME BC I HAVE A HUGE CRUSH ON YOU” so i just. die. right then and there. also yknow we talk about it and its like after 1 am and im just happier than i’ve ever been. ok so 2 days later she asks me out Officially and its great and shes the cutest gf ever and she made me feel more wanted than i’d ever felt in my entire life. then 6 days later she sends me a big big big text on tumblr and long story short (bc it was kinda personal), she would be deleting her all social media for the summer.

so she was gone. and we had only dated for a week at this point, but we’d known each other for 2 months, and i already loved her. i already knew she was the love of my life. i didnt even try to move on, i’d tell people i didnt wanna move on cuz i knew i was meant to love her. i had another blog like this that i used to talk about how much i loved and missed her (so like. exactly like this). i literally reasoned with myself that like. that happened because before i met her i was in a really bad place after a terrible relationship and i was almost giving up on finding someone who actually made me feel loved bc i thought it would never happened, so i was like “ok so i was in a really bad place, so the universe brought my soulmate a little early just for a while so that i would know i had to hold on, and when its actually time for us to be together, it will bring us to each other once again” like i actually told myself that, in those words. and yknow what? i wasnt even wrong. on july 15th she texted me from an empty tumblr with her old url and at first i literally couldnt believe it but we talked for hours and hours and i asked her what happened bc i thought she was disconnecting for the summer and she said “i was. i am. i just couldnt not talk to you anymore” and she said that she thought about me every single day, and i told her i missed her and she said she didnt text sooner bc she thought i’d be angry at her and ofc i wouldnt, i could never be angry at her and besides, she was just taking care of herself and i said i dont think i could be anything less than head over heels for for, and she said she felt the same way, but wasnt ready to be more than friends yet. but that had always been more than enough for me. just having her in my life would always be more than enough for me. so we stayed friends.

then, on august 9th i got this ask.

and she saw it after i said i was gonna go to bed (bc again, i had school the next day) and she texted me a whole thing about how that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about her and that i should be asleep but she had to get it out of her chest and that her anxiety made it hard for her to show how much i meant to her so she was sorry if i didnt know and this would probably make no sense but she was tired of keeping it to herself bc shes the luckiest person alive for having met me and that it was gonna be so hard because shes so difficult (shes not) and her anxiety is difficult but that she literally spent every night thinking about me and of buying plane tickets to come see me so that she could be with me. then she was like “im sorry if this is uncomfortable to you and you can just ignore it but i think im in love with you and this is over text and not romantic at all (it was the most romantic night of my life) but you’re asleep (i wasnt) and we arent together but i want to be one day” and until this i was Trying to fall asleep and then i checked my phone that kept RINGING and died a thousand times over and started to answer and she sent other texts saying “i’ve never felt this way about anyone before i’m so in love with you its fucking ridiculous and this is gonna be so complicated but fuck i want this so bad / i’m sorry it took me so long / would you move to new york with me?” and i was This Close to literally fucking exploding like. how the hell was this happening how was it not a DREAM. so we talked and i obviously said i loved her too and eventually she asked me out and thats still probably the best night of my life. other highlights: “i’ve loved you way before august 9th so jot that down” and “off topic but i love you / you’re honestly my other half” and, after i said “you cant make me laugh its 2am”, she answered “i’m going to make you laugh for the rest of your life so help me god” and thats my favorite thing anyone has ever said to me probably and so far she’s kept her word.

anyways we got back together and then she told me that she never even told her friends she broke up with me??? bc that way she could keep pretending we were still together???? literally like sjdksndk imagine being this loved. i dont have to. anyways she wrote poems abt me sometimes and her christmas gift for me was gonna be a book with all her poems and she called it “what we owe to each other” because of the good place (remember how i said it’d be relevant later? its later) bc like she said that when we were watching tgp together on rabb.it thats when she realized that she Really Truly liked me like For Real. and the inscription on the book was going to be “to the girl i love / and what i owe her” and. yall. i cry. anyways one of the poems had a huge impact on us. heres the story:

and she got them but we broke up before she got to mail them to me. what happened was she had some mental health problems and she said she couldnt give me what i needed at the time but knew i’d still give her my all bc thats just how i am and she thought it wouldnt be fair so she broke things off to work on her mental health. she said she would need some time before we could be friends. the last thing we said was that we loved each other. this was in like november 2018, and we didnt talk for months. i actually tried to move on this time after a while, but it didnt take. and then i gave up for good. havent tried since. but anyways, then, on march 11th, 2019, i had my first day of college back in my home country, and we have this “pranks”/games that seniors get to do to the freshmen, and one of them required eggs, and they asked us to paint them, so i panted mine as iron man bc it was easy, but c LOVES iron man. like. LOVES. like in a Whole New Level of loving. once when we were dating she said she loved me more than tony stark and i was like. shook. like she tattooed “T.S” on her ankle after him. u get the point. she loves him very much, its adorable and endearing and i love it. anyways. so i sent her a picture of it saying like “you dont have to answer this but i made this for my university and i thought you would like it” and she answered and IMMEDIATELY something clicked and we talked and talked and talked and it was never weird or awkward or uncomfortable. it never is with her. its incredible, i cant explain it. i Know shes my soulmate like thats the ONLY possible explanation for this kind of connection. its unreal. anyways. we became friends again! all was well.

then one beautiful night she drunk texts me sndjkajs she sends me so many texts and says it sucks that we live so far away and that she saw my posts (in this particular case, one that said something about like. when she talked about love now, was it about someone else?) and she said that it wasnt. and then she went to sleep and i only saw the texts when i woke up and i was DYING bc we had a 4 hour difference and it’d take a while for her to wake up. when she did, we talked and she said she wasnt over me and was scared she might never be, and even though we were still gonna stay friends, it was nice to know that she still loved me. ok so fast forward a bit more and i was starting to wonder if she’d moved on again, when she finds out her best friend had a crush on her, and that conversation ends up with her saying “it was 100% platonic for me / sorry if thats weird i just wanted you to know that” and it was NOT weird it was GREAT NEWS bc i was Hella jealous of her best friend and at first i wondered if they were dating and anyways the fact that she wanted me to know that was a pretty good hint that she still had feelings for me. ngl im still somewhat jealous of h (c’s best friend), but thats just bc im an insecure lil bitch and also bc they get to go out and do stuff together that i cant do with c bc of the distance, yknow? but anyways. then she went on a graduation trip in mid to the end of june and she bought me a magnet. just. out of nowhere. i cannot stress enough how Incredibly unexpected this was. so much so that i actually convinced myself that it meant she was over me????? literally. what the fuck. anyways we named him together and coincidentally (or bc of soulmate powers. who knows) we both had the same favorite names. i still love that.

okay so then we go to july 29th, 2019. first of all theres one of my favorite interactions Ever which was like after i was venting about something and i was thanking her and i said “you’re always here for me” to which she answered “nowhere else i’d rather be” and i still think thats peak romance and i will take no criticism on this. anyways so then she sent me a poem that she wrote based on a song i’d sent her (the song i called “heaven is a place” and its the BIGGEST mood for being in love and i sent it to her bc it was how i felt about her so her writing a poem about it?? literally the best thing ever. love it) anyways it was a beautiful poem and i cried and got very emotional and kinda went too far in my compliments (aka being very obvious about my romantic feelings) and then i was like oh no sorry if i made u uncomfortable and she was like. “you have NEVER. EVER EVER EVER EVER made me uncomfortable” “you’re the only person on planet earth i am comfortably myself around” and “there’s nothing you could ever say that i wouldn’t wanna hear” and anyways it was just very good and romantic conversation even tho we were just cough cough platonic hashtag gal pals hashtag no homo ✌️ and then she was like ok wait. i need to talk to u abt something. and in short she said she was waiting for us and i was like well what are you waiting for exactly? and she was like idk?? for us to accidentally bump into each other in new york in a few years?? WHICH WAS LITERALLY WHAT I’D DAYDREAM ABOUT BACK IN JUNE 2018 BEFORE SHE CAME BACK OKAY so anyways we had a Great conversation and said i love you about a thousand times each and she decided she was gonna buy tickets to come see me. and then she dID like TWO DAYS LATER. lichrally. queen of impulsivity but in the best way possible.

—————

ok quick edit here cuz i forgot to say that when i found out she was coming i asked for my mom’s help to make a necklace pendant for her from scratch. my mom works with prosthetics so she has the material to make jewelry and back when c and i were dating in 2018 i had made this lil design for a necklace that had the moon and the ocean (bc duh) and i was gonna give it to her for valentines day in 2019 but we broke up before that so i didnt get the chance, but when i found out i was meeting her i knew i had to. so i made the necklace in wax, like this:

and my mom took it to her work and heated it up to melt it and keep the shape of it to fill with silver, and this was the result:

i gave it to her when she got here and she wore it while she was here and it made me so happy. ok edit over

—————

ok so we kept being like couple-y but not officially in a relationship bc we didnt want to make her anxiety worse. also at one point she was like “so about the ‘i love you more than the moon/ocean’ thing, since we BOTH love BOTH of the moon AND the ocean, i think its only Fair if we update our love declarations to ‘i love you more than the mocean’ bc its mix of both but thats not a word, buT its pronounced exactly like ‘motion’. therefore we should both start saying ‘i love you more than the motion’”. so now we have both the wonderful, romantic, original version, and the NOT ROMANTIC AT ALL DO U HEAR ME C??? version :) and after this day she always started with the WORST!!!!!! version, and i always started with the Only Valid Version, but we’d still answer each other’s ofc because. well. thats love i gues?? it sorta goes like this though: her: i love you more than the motion / me: i hate u / me: i literally hate u so much / me: i Also love you more than the motion

but anyways she was coming to visit me but the plane ticket wasnt for my home country it was for where i was going to university at (a new university, i was starting over) and when i first got here on this campus, i didnt have a working phone number for this country, and i wouldnt be able to access the wifi for 3 days, so i had no way of talking to her. it was TERRIBLE and i missed her more than anything in my LIFE but when i got wifi (after CRYING to the people here bc theyre the most unorganized uni ever and i was already very overwhelmed and stressed) i immediately called her and she’d sent me over 100 text messages dkfjssjks it was amazing, there were two (2) videos of her singing (which is like. objectively the best thing in the world, and the song was rlly romantic and i love it sm when she showed it to me for the first time she said it made her think abt me), a poem, AND a HUGE text with “i love you” written like. a THOUSAND TIMES. seriously i have a gif of it opening and scrolling bc it was so long that the text wouldnt show up directly on the chat screen and u have to click on it to see the rest. i’d never felt more loved in my entire life by anyone ever. anyways so then it came the day for her to get here and i had to wake up at 5 am to go get her at the airport and the uber was like $40 but who CARES it was the best day of my LIFE and i got there 20 minutes earlier bUT GUESS WHAT SO DID SHE (hashtag just soulmate things) then we facetimed the entire time while she was walking through the airport and getting her luggage and then she hung up to walk to the door where i was and we hugged for like 5 minutes and we were totally in people’s way and also almost fell but it was the best thing in the world and i never should’ve let her go. but, we had to go home, so i did. and we spent 4 days together and im not gonna go into details bc this is already too long but u can always send me another ask about her visit if ur not a coward. also i bought her a hoodie from my uni and whenever she wears it i just. die. in short, those days were the happiest i’ve ever been. this campus res had never felt like home before that friday and it hasnt again since that monday, but i swear to god, during those 4 days, this was the only place i could possibly belong.

anyways then she left and i cried for the entire uber ride home and then i cried all day. lmao. also when she was here she gave me the poetry book, the magnet, and the bracelet. still wear the bracelet every single day and i love it more than anything. but then personal stuff happened and we kinda stopped being couple-y again and we’re just friends now but before new years i asked her if she still loved me and she said yes and she said she’d tell me if it changed so ✌️✌️ im assuming it hasnt. even tho my brain is a bitch and everyday its like. today. today is the day. this is when its gonna happen. buT yknow we’ve spent months before without even talking to each other and we got through that still in love, so i mostly ignore it. and tbh i know that actually like, even if we grow apart now (god forbid, but still) we’ll find our way back to each other eventually. like, i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again: nothing, not even the universe itself, can convince me that shes not my soulmate. and even if it turns out i’m not hers, loving her is still the greatest honor i can think of.

another edit: also i started drawing recently and the first person i’ve ever finished drawing was her and also (surprise surprise @c since you’re already seeing all my feelings anyway) bc of my second drawing i almost missed the deadline for one of my midterms (which was a take-home test) bc instead of writing it i spent the entire day before the deadline finishing the drawing which was a secret valentines day gift (secret as in she didnt know it was supposed to be a gift, she thought it was just a drawing inspired by a quote that she loves) and i finished at 2 am but shes 3 hours behind so for her it was still 11 pm which MEANS it was still valentines day so it still counts, i win, lesbian rights!

[bittysvalentines]

Zoo Date

From: @eatallofthepumpkinthings

To: @secretgeniusshittyknight

Content: Ransom/Holster, established relationship, canon compliant

“Good afternoon”

“Hello there young man. How many?”

“Two, please” he responded. He glanced over at Ransom who was vibrating out of his skin. His eyes were huge, his lips pursed in concentration, and his back stretched to try and get a peek past the gates. He'd spent a month creating and refining a spreadsheet that “perfectly maximizes our animal exploration time.” Their itinerary he now clutched in his large hands. Holster couldn't help but smile at his boyfriend's excitement.

“That'll be 35.95” He handed the woman his credit card and turned towards Ransom again. When Holster had suggested this a month ago, it was before a bombardment of new customer meetings, budget realignments, new team member onboardings, and all manner of project delays and hiccups. He couldn't wait to get in the gates and put the month behind him. He smiled again as Ransom saddled up beside him.

The admissions lady passed Holster back his card and a receipt which he signed. She slid him two maps. Before he could grab them, Ransom had snatched one away and was ripping it open.

“Excited, aren't we?” the lady asked. Holster chuckled.

She began to speak again but startled a bit at Ransom's boisterous “Woo hoos” He had grabbed Holster's hand and was tugging him towards the gate.

“Well before you guys head in there, do you have any questions?”

“No I think we have everything covered. Thanks!” He let Ransom tug him about a foot.

“Have fun and welcome to Franklin Park Zoo.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~**************************~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Whats up next babe?” The first section they had gone through was the “Serengeti Crossing” where they had spotted porcupines, zebras, ostriches, and warthogs. They'd just finished the “Kalahari Kingdom” section where they got to see some lounging lions and a tiger that was bathing its cubs.

They had stopped to read every info graph and inscription by each animal, plus Ransom had shared some pretty sweet, and sometimes, sick facts about each animal they saw. Holster was endeared to Ransom when he realized that his partner had spent extra time on the zoo's website and online in general to learn facts about all the animals just to share with him. But he realized they were running about 15 minutes behind schedule and wasn't sure how Ransom would react once he realized.

Holster bit his tongue as he watched Ransom review the itinerary and then look at his watch.

“We are running behind, but that shouldn't matter much right? The plan was to be out of here before closing but if we stay til then... There wasn't something you needed to get home to do right?”

“No, nothing. I got my work done for the K&R project last night so I haven't anything to do tonight. Well except maybe you” He waggled his eyebrows at him.

Ransom laughed as color rose in his cheeks. “Well then...” he wiggled his eyebrows back at him. “Lets just stick to the plan of action, but not worry too much about the time.”

“Sounds good to me!” Ransom dropped Holster's hand and unfolded the map holding it against some siding.

“If we continue down this path, we should come to the Tropical Forest building. It's what's next on the list and it's inside so we can take a quick break to cool down and to reapply sunblock to your forehead.”

Holster guffawed “Its only been an hour and a half”

“Bro, and you're already lookin' like a lobster.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~**************************~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two hours later they sat at an empty pavilion table near the “Things Wild” gift shop, taking massive bites out of Bitty's PB&J sandwiches they had packed. Holster was thanking his stars for the forethought to pack 4 sandwiches instead of just two, and he was already daydreaming about the crock pot pork they had waiting for them at home when he looked over at Ransom who was scrolling through the SMH group chat.

They had now gone through the Tropical Forest, “Bird's World”, and the “Outback Trail”; seen what felt like hundreds of different animals; and took what felt like a million different photos. When they finally sat down for their late lunch, Ransom sent some of their better photos to the group.

Tango: Can we get an ocelot for the Haus? Its so cute!

Chowder: I agree with Tango! :D

Ollie: I also agree on the condition that its Haus trained

Wicks: Did you know that ancient Australian war lords kept trained emus in their armies?

Ford: I'm not sure you guys are cut out for taking care of an animal

Tango: C'mon!

Chowder: Aww :'[

Ford: also Wicks that is like 100% false

Ollie: Nah its totally true

Ollie: do you think a monkey could hang from our lights?

Whiskey: you mean the chandelier in your room?

Chowder: totally! But monkey's aren't heavy. And look lemurs are tiny too. They could both probably hang from it

Wicks: Swawesome

Ollie: Swawsome

Ford: NO

Bitty: good lord thats a disaster waiting to happen

Bitty: yall couldn't handle a stuffed ocelot. Let alone a live animal

Tango: I could def take care of a stuffed ocelot. It doesn't even need to eat!

Chowder: Are we talking cute stuffed or weird on the wall stuffed?

Lards: Way to talk them down Bits

Jack: Thats a great shot of the flamingo. Its very difficult to get an action photo like that on a phone.

Bitty: #masternegotiator

Whiskey: That is a good shot of the flamingos guys

Nursey: yeah yeah great shots, haus pets, blah....but did none of you notice how that red kangaroo looks like Poindexter. Its like a spitting image

Dex: sdkj;fjkdsa;kdf Nurse!

Tango: Ears

Lards: EARS

Bitty: EA RS

Chowder: eARs

Shits: that Capybara is giving me good vibes guys

Shits: good vibes

“You forgot the best one babe,” Holster brushed his hands over Ransom's and then quickly grabbed his phone.

“Hey!” Ransom laughed, and so did Holster. “Which one are you sending?”

“The one with us and the hippo!”

They had just walked into the Tropical Forest building when they came face to face with a smiling hippo. A group of school children were on the opposite side of the tank and tapping on the glass. Before the children could run up to the other side of the tank, Ransom and Holster had slid their backs against the wall, locked lips, and snapped a selfie with the hippo. Holster had thought the hippo looked like it was blowing a kiss of his own, but Ransom had cheerily admonished him for anthropomorphizing the hippo. When they had gotten to the side of the tank where the children had vacated, they found a plaque informing them that the hippos name was “Fred”. Holster held back a smug face, but winked at Ransom and his scrunched up nose.

When he sent the picture to the group chat the response was near instantaneous.

Chowder: CUTE!

Tango: OMG so adorable

Wicks: Niceeeeeeeeee

Ollie: Nice!!!!!!!!!

Dex: Noiceeee

Nurse: Why does he look like a priest at your wedding?

Shits: Is that hippo ordained?

Jack: Congratulations!

Chowder: congrats!!!!!

Bitty: <3 <3 <3 oh im gonna cry

Lards: Can't believe you got hitched without us

Whiskey: Nice

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~**************************~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Before heading off to the last three sections of the park, Ransom guided him into the gift shop. He perused the shelves of books, knickknacks, and stuffed animals. He found a pink stuffed hippo and immediately grabbed it from the shelf. He snuck up behind Ransom and rubbed the hippos face against his cheek. “Mwuah”

Ransom jumped but turned and laughed at him. “Oh stop it you... you...”

“Me...”

“Cutie hippo butt face!”

“That was lame bro.” Ransom's cheeks colored more and Holster leaned over to give him a smacking wet kiss himself.

Ransom laughed and wiped his cheek. “So are we getting that?” he said pointing at the hippo.

“Hell yeah! See anything you like?”

Ransom gestured to the stuffed lemurs in front of him. “Look at this.” He grabbed the arms of the lemur that were clasped together and separated them. When he let go they snapped back together. “Magnetic”

“Oh man, the frogs are gonna love that.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~**************************~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

They made it through the rest of the zoo in an hour and a half. They saw goats, butterflies, prairie dogs, and even some cute fuzzy red pandas. Holster grinned as he thought about Ransom's face as one of the zookeepers brought over a llama for them to pet. When Ransom had stroked the llamas hair his eyes had lit up like stars and his shoulders had relaxed. It was one of the few moments all month where Holster had seen Ransom relax.

He looked over at Ransom now. Took in his drowsy form, cuddling his new stuffed hippo. His eyes drifted closed ever so slowly, and reopened even slower. He doubted that he would make it home before falling asleep. It had been a long exciting day and they were both exhausted. Holster gently took one of Ransom's hands and laced their fingers together. “You had fun babe?”

“Yeah. Can't wait to get home and cuddle though.”

“Me too.” He smiled.

Notes

Zoo website: https://www.zoonewengland.org/franklin-park-zoo/

Zoo map: https://www.zoonewengland.org/media/1517583/map-fzoo-winter-2018-hd.pdf

I implore you to look up images of and learn a little bit about all the animals mentioned! Red Pandas are my favorite.

[the-desolated-quill]

Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2018

Congratulations dear reader. You survived 2018. And you know what that means. It’s time for another best of/worst of list. Welcome to Quill’s Swill 2018. A giant septic tank for the various shit the entertainment industry produced over the course of the year. The films, games, TV shows and various other media that got on my bad side. As always please bear in mind that this is only my subjective opinion (if you happen to like any of the things on this list, good for you. I’m glad someone did) and that obviously I haven’t seen everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, sorry that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald isn’t on here. I’m sure it is as terrible as some have been suggesting. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay everyone. Grab your breathing masks and put on your rubber gloves. Let’s dive into this shit pile.

Hold The Sunset

The news that John Cleese would be returning to the world of BBC sitcoms was incredibly exciting, being a massive Fawlty Towers fan and all. Unfortunately Hold The Sunset was not quite what I had in mind. It’s one of those rare breed of situation comedies that chooses to offer no actual comedy. It’s not a sitcom. It’s a sit. Like Scrubs or The Big Bang Theory.

An elderly couple plan to elope abroad only for Alison Steadman’s son to barge in, having left his wife, and forcing them to put their plans on hold. Hence the title ‘Hold The Sunset.’ It’s like a cross between As Time Goes By and Sorry, but if all the humour and relatability were surgically removed by a deadpan mortician. The characters are weak, the plots are thin on the ground and the humour (hat little of it there is) feel incredibly dated. The middle aged mummy’s boy is something that hasn’t been funny since the 90s. It’s an utter waste of great talent and what hurts even more is that this tripe is actually getting a second series. I can only assume the people watching this are comatose. Either that or there’s an epidemic of people in Britain who have lost the remote.

Avengers: Infinity War

Yes this is one of the worst movies of 2018 and no I don’t regret saying that one little bit. Avengers: Infinity War was fucking terrible. Period. There were too many plots and characters going on, which made the film hard to follow (and what staggers me is that the so called ‘professional’ critics have condemned movies for having too many characters and plots before. Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Batman vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice and even Deadpool 2. But because this is an MCU movie, it gets a free pass. Fuck off). The characterisation was weak due to sheer number of characters they try to juggle, resulting in characters coming off as one dimensional caricatures of themselves and scenes where characters such as Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Star-Lord sound completely interchangeable. The villain, Thanos, is a stupidly and poorly written villain, but that’s hardly surprising considering what a shit job Marvel have done building him up over the course of these 20+ movies. And let’s not forget that pisstake ending. A bunch of prominent Marvel characters die and it’s all very, very sad... except all these characters just so happen to have sequels planned, which makes this ending fucking pointless and have less impact than a feather on a bouncy castle.

I don’t know which is more shocking. That Marvel and Disney think their audience are that stupid and gullible, or that their audience are actually validating their view. Fuck you Disney.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery

I’ve always wanted a Harry Potter RPG, where you could customise your character, choose your house and actually live a full school life at Hogwarts. This year, Warner Bros and Jam City gave us just that.

That was a mistake.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the mobile gaming market right now. The gameplay is boring and involving where you just tap images on a screen until a progress bar fills up. Wizard duels are little more than rock-paper-scissors challenges that require no kind of skill. Bonding with friends and caring for magical creatures just consist of pathetically simple pop quizzes and yet more boring tapping. Oh and of course you only get a certain amount of energy to complete these tedious tasks. If you run out of energy, you wait for it to fill up... or pay up for the privilege. So determined are they to extract your hard earned cash from your wallet, there’s actually a bit where Devil’s Snare strangles your eleven year old avatar and the game effectively tries to guilt trip you into paying micro-transactions to save them. It’s sleazy, gross and manipulative. Honestly, you’re better off just playing Candy Crush.

Agony

When the developers of this game said they wanted to give the player a trip through Hell, they had no idea how true that statement really was. Agony is dreadful on a number of levels. The design for Hell itself, while visually interesting at times, is often not very practical and gets quite dull and repetitive after a while. The stealth mechanics are a joke and the AI of your demonic enemies are pitiful. All of this alone would have been enough to put this game on the list, but then we also have the casual misogyny. Agony is a gorefest trying desperately to shock the player. We see men and woman get tortured, but it’s the women that often get the extreme end. The violence inflicted on them is often sexual in nature and the game seems to go out of its way to degrade and dehumanise women at every turn. The orgasmic cries of ‘pull it out’ quickly become a staple of the game’s experience as we see naked women raped, tortured and murdered, all for the purposes of ‘entertainment.’

I would call Agony sexist, but honestly that would be giving it too much credit. Agony is like a little child trying desperately to be all dark and edgy in a pathetic attempt to impress everyone around him, and we should treat it as such. Go to your room Agony. No ice cream for you.

Peter Rabbit

If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Beatrix Potter rotating in her grave.

Yes we have yet another live action/CGI hybrid, but instead of something innocuous like the Smurfs or Alvin and the Chipmunks, Sony instead decides to adapt Peter Rabbit, with James Corden in the title role.

It’s about as bad as you’d expect.

Their attempts to modernise the story are painful to say the least with pop culture references, inappropriate adult humour and twerking rabbits. Plus rather than the gentle, but slightly mischievous character we got in the source material, here Peter is a sociopathic delinquent who seems to revel in making the farmer’s life a living hell. He’s unlikable and unwatchable as far as I’m concerned and the film doesn’t in anyway earn the emotional moments it tries so desperately to sell to the audience. And the worst part is it’s getting a sequel.

Wait. Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of Beatrix Potter tearing out of the ground, ready to kill whatever idiot came up with this shit.

Fallout 76

I was excited for Fallout 76. A MMORPG where players band together to rebuild society after a nuclear apocalypse. Could have been great. Pity it wasn’t.

Fallout 76 is a dreadful game. Not only is it a buggy, glitchy mess that requires a constant online connection to play, which could result in you losing hours of progress if your WiFi went down, it’s also unbelievably tedious, and that’s because there’s nothing to do in the game. There’s no other characters to interact with, the various robots and computers you come across are really little more than quest givers, there’s no actual plot so to speak, and because of the sheer size of the world and the number of players allowed on a server, the chances of you actually meeting any actual players is remote. And let’s not forget all the behind the scenes drama. Bethesda falsely advertising Fallout themed canvas bags and players getting shitty nylon ones. Bethesda accidentally releasing the account information of various players trying to get a refund for said bag. Bethesda failing to program the year 2019 into the game code, meaning that the game’s nukes don’t work.

Maybe there’s a chance that Bethesda could pull a No Man’s Sky and fix everything over the coming years with various patches and DLCs, but the damage has already been done. It’s incredibly disappointing. The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to have be fucking incredible to win everyone back.

Mama Mia!: Here We Go Again

I can’t stand jukebox musicals anyway, but Mamma Mia was always one of the worst. Its boring, meandering story with its one note, obnoxious cast of characters screeching out ABBA songs like they’re at some drunken karaoke session at some poor sod’s hen party has always grated on my nerves. So imagine my delight when they announced we were getting a sequel. Ever wondered how Meryl Streep met her three lovers and founded her hotel? No? Well tough shit, we’re going to tell you anyway.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again is basically just Mamma Mia again. The actors still can’t sing, the characters are still annoying and story is still boring and meandering, completely at the mercy of the chosen songs rather than the filmmakers using the songs to compliment the story (you know? Like proper musicals do?).

How can I resist you? Very easily as it turns out. Gimme, gimme, gimme a fucking gun so I can end my misery.

The Cloverfield Paradox

A lot of people were unhappy about the direction Cloverfield was going. They wanted a continuation of the found footage, kaiju movie from 2008, not an anthology series. I was personally all in favour. Partially because I thought the first Cloverfield was a tad overrated, but mostly because I thought it would be a great opportunity for more experimental film projects and could be a great launchpad for new writers and filmmakers. 10 Cloverfield Lane was a great start. Then The Cloverfield Paradox happened.

The Cloverfield Paradox is basically JJ Abrams trying to have his cake and eat it too. Maintaining the anthology format whilst connecting everything together in a ‘shared universe’ (yes, yet another shared universe). The result was a cliched, poorly edited and idiotic mess of a film that actually took away from the previous two films rather than added to them. Everyone hated it and, as a result, 2018′s Overlord, which was totes going to be part of the Cloververse, was made its own standalone film and Abrams double pinky promised to make a true sequel to the original Cloverfield. A complete and total disaster. No wonder it was a straight-to-Netflix film.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Season 2

This is probably going to be the most controversial entry on the list, but please hear me out because I’m not the only one who has a problem with this season.

I was reluctant to watch The Handmaid’s Tale simply because of how gruesome the original book was, but I forced myself to watch the first season and I thought it was pretty good. It remained faithful to the source material for the most part and included some nice additions that helped to expand the story and mythos. If it was just a one off mini-series, everything would have been fine. But then they made the same mistake as The Man In The High Castle and Under The Dome did where they commissioned another season and attempted to tell a story that goes beyond the book.

There’s a reason why the original story ended where it did. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t meant to be an empowering story about women sticking it to the patriarchy. It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our civil rights truly are and how easily they can be taken away from us. It’s designed to shock, not to satisfy. So seeing a handmaid blow herself up in a suicide bombing feels very incongruous and just a little bit silly. It would be like doing a TV adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 where the first season followed the source material and then the second season turned Winston Smith into this heroic freedom fighter trying to overthrow Big Brother. It would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what the book was about in the first place.

And then of course there’s the increased level of violence in Season 2, which many have complained about. In Season 1 and the original source material, the violence was justified. In Season 2, the motivation behind the violence has gone from ‘how can we effectively demonstrate how easily a fascist patriarchy can happen in the West?’ to ‘what brutal act can we inflict upon Ofglen to shock the audience this week?’ It’s purely for shock and nothing more. And with the showrunner (who I feel I should mention is a man) announcing that he has planned ten seasons of this, it seems that The Handmaid’s Tale is going to go even further with this depravity until it effectively becomes the equivalent of a Saw film.

The Handmaid’s Tale exists as a way of shining light on and critiquing misogyny in its most extreme form. Season 2 however demonstrates that there is a serious risk of it becoming the very thing it’s criticising in the first place.

The Predator

I love the Predator franchise, but The Predator is the worst.

People thought that this would be good because director Shane Black had actually starred in the first Predator movie back in 1987. Instead we got this bloated, confusing, obnoxious and insulting mess of a film that seems to go out of its way to ruin everything that makes Predator so good. There’s no tension. No suspense. No intrigue. Just a bunch of gore, explosions and shitty one liners from annoying and lifeless characters. They essentially took this big alien game hunter from outer space and turned him into a generic monster from a bad summer blockbuster. It no longer hunts for sport. It wants to take over the world and splice our DNA with theirs. But don’t worry, a rogue Predator doesn’t want to kill humans (even though he himself kills a bunch of humans), so he gives us a Predator Iron Man suit to set up a sequel that will probably never happen because this movie was a box office bomb and it fucking SUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKEEEEEDDDD!!!

This film also has a very nasty streak towards those with disabilities. There’s a lot of jokes at the expense of a character with Tourette’s and it has an extremely ignorant and patronising view of autism, portraying the main character’s kid as being a super genius who can decipher the Predator language and even going so far as to say that he represents ‘the next stage of human evolution.’ Presumably the Predators want social communication difficulties because apparently it helps them hunt somehow.

What with Disney acquiring 20th Century Fox, the future of both the Alien and Predator franchises were very much in question. This film needed to be a success in order to make a case for Disney to keep making more of them. It wasn’t. Congratulations Shane Black. You might have just killed off this franchise for good. Thanks arsehole! :D

So those were my least favourite stories from 2018. Join me on Wednesday where we shall discuss something more positive. Yes, it’s awards season. Who shall win the coveted Quill Seal Of Approval? Watch this space...

Or don’t. It’s up to you. I don’t want to force you or anything. It’s a free country.

[buckysxgal]

It’s been a while...

Hey there guys, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve written/posted anything on this site. I’ve been lurking, reading fanfiction and reblogging random things on this app. I wanted to start off by saying I’m alright, I’ve been taking a longer break than expected but a lot has happened since I started this break so lets get into it.

*adding a read more for anyone who doesn’t want to read, and just wants to scroll past: There will be some sensitive topics talked about. So WARNING*

First, lets start with the real main reason why I took this hiatus. Back in August 2018 I found out that my mother was going to start going to court and has the possibility of going to jail. Come to find out she had been embezzling money from a company she volunteered at to afford rent and bills and groceries. She turned herself in and we find out at the end of may if she’s going to jail for 6 months or getting house arrest (we’re hoping house arrest because me and my boyfriend don’t want to struggle to bad and she’d still be able to work under house arrest). I took the hiatus because I lost all interest in writing for a while. I was too stressed and too focused with school to even think about writing anything.

Second, found out all in one week that my grandmother has cancer (which they caught early enough to remove through surgery), my grandfather has barretts esophagus (Definition:  Barrett's esophagus is a serious complication of GERD, which stands for gastroesophageal reflux disease.) and a cousin of mine (who mind you I haven’t seen in 15 years) died in a car crash. He was only 20, but it affected me roughly because almost 2 years ago I lost a close friend to a car crash in her 20s as well. I cannot imagine what his mother is going through right now (no parent should have to bury their child).

Third, the final and least worrying reason, I lost my request list. This isn’t the worst thing to have happened. I still have the requests list that I was working on (which is on my google drive) but I hadn’t had the chance to move my request list to my drive before my external harddrive crashed and I lost all my files. (remember not to keep super important things on the harddrive, put it on google drive, or the cloud, or one drive to keep it safe! Don’t be a dummy like me). So I don’t have any requests from before the hiatus and I am terribly sorry. I thought about going back through my tumblr and finding the requests but unfortuneatly I don’t have the time to do that. 

I’m in my final 2 months of college (my second time around) and it’s been amazing, I’ve made some amazing friends and it’s all been fun! Still stressed to the max but thats how my life is currently.

I’ll be coming back soon.

Love Jess ~

[midnightmisadventures]

HAHAHA guys im LIVINGGGGG I got my alpha dream lmaoooo

I honestly am dying like what a funny life to live. I-, as you all know i got drunk and followed alpha last night. Put his government on the TL like an idiot.

Earlier today he accepted me and followed me back and it....was overall underwhelming. Which duh it should be, I DONT HAVE ANY FEELINGS FOR ALPHA. Like not even sexual at this point idk...like its not there. But the biggest thing is that, fucking mk, lenina crowne herself was all over the page. I was like fuck, the reason this was supposed to be fun and silly was that i thought he was single. Like i had no idea they were STILL together are you kidding me?

And yea here I am scrolling through pics of them being hot and intensely making out and being the barbie and ken we all remember them to be. And nothing. No emotion, no stomach drops. Happy 4 them! Hope they are great lmao. Its so crazy how a pic of them on my timeline 5 years ago today would make me sob. But i was like, im cured yall

From september 4, 2018 to today. I finally did it, not you not ever. I mean talk about detaching.

Anyways, it was whatever, now we follow eachother. We'll see if he unfollows after he jerks off like last time. But i take a midday nap, and i get my FUCKING alpha dream bitches. Uni said ask and u shall recieveeeeeeee hahaha im so weak.

It was a classic chip party. All of florida was there, extended family, lots of dogs. In my dreams lately ive been like "late" to get ready. Like people are arriving and im like omg, i need to change into my outfit, my hairs a mess, give me 15mins. So that was sort of happening here. Guests were arriving and I was trying to run upstairs before people saw me. And.....apparently i invited alpha?? for line fun?? but i didnt think he would come and also no other of my friends or like people my age or from highschool showed up. Like it was supposed to be like a throw away invite for the drama and ehhh if he shows up he can talk to other people he knows. But i NEVER expected him to show up and i DIDNT think no one else would be there??

But it wasnt awkward that....more of my friends werent there. Like it wasnt like "ha ha ur a loser" embarrassing. Alpha was chillin, the big deal was that we hadnt seen eachother in forever, and now he was in my house and he was just making me nervous like i didnt wanna talk to him.

So , lots was going on. Also he brought lenina? So again, wasnt super weird but i just all in all didnt feel like talking to Alpha and lenina haha sue me. But whatever, suddenly i start seeing him make eye contact with me and rounding corners like looking at me, and no lenina. So im like....okay idk where the gf is but he's obviously trying to....give looks, as me 5 yrs ago would say. And i was like okay well, i am the only one here who is his age and not my family i should probably talk to him since i invited him.

So i was in the pantry in the chip kitchen and he just comes to the side of the table and just sits down legs spread, facing me not saying anything. Black tshirt.....most likely grey sweats. Which isnt a coincidence that hyfr was wearing that too but i'll get to that.

So i was like, ugh i have to bite the bullet and talk to him, and i still wasnt dressed. But he was sitting right next to me on purpose, so im like in the pantry, and i look over like "hey alpha, w-whats whats up?" like STUTTERING i literally hated myself for being nervous but he was making me nervous lmao. Like ahh stop.

I was like "how have you been??" like genuinely acknowledging that i havent seen him in forever and i have no idea what he's been up to. And he was being very alpha and coy and sly smiled, but then he opened his mouth lmaooo.

Tell me how this man says, "honestly i've just been pretty stoned a lot"

UHHMMM WHAT. Tell me whats weirder, hyfr trying to convince me via dream that he's into big brother or alpha via dream trying to convince me he's a STONER. Like the walking tight assed ken doll. Mr, "thats pretty bad" smoking weed aLL tHe TiMe like bull shit, Liam you keep slipping up that its just actually you.

Its so funny to me, that Liam is impersonating all of my exes via dream and doesnt actually know anything about them....so he's filling the blanks, but in doing so he exposes himself. Cause MAYBE i can believe that hyfr is like?? into bb? but no one is gonna convince me that alpha is some heavy stoner. Also the black tee and grey sweats is the last thing i saw Liam in so its absolutely not a coincidence.

Anyway, rightfully so i'm like "wait reallllyyyyyyyyy" like kinda turned on haha i was so shocked but i was like okayyy alpha the stoner like lets go smoke babe thats hot. And i was so shocked so i started asking like "did you smoke in high school or did u start after highschool?" basically like tell me more. And he started trying to explain, and i dropped what i was doing in the pantry and gave him my full attention and we were sorta being flirty, but he kept trying t talk, but over in the den my dad and erikka were having this deep discussion and i was overhearing it, and they were talking about eating, and ed, and stuff that couldve easily been directed to me but i was like so confused like is erikka having eating issues? so i kept trying to eavesdrop and was getting distracted.

And then i would turn back to alpha and be like "im so sorry can you say that again, i was distracted by my sister" and he'd be like "yea so..." and start talking again. By the way he's sitting on a stool and im in front of him, but over and over i kept getting distracted about what erikka and dad were talking about. Like they were talking about how much she was eating in a day and what her appetite was like, and i mean obv that relates to me in someway so idk.

But....somehow, alpha also overheard and was like wait maybe i shouldnt be talking about how much weed i smoke/you smoke in front of your dad and your sister bc that plays into appetite and i gues he was trying to be sensitive but also in a silly way so he was like "nevermind, i should have never brought it up"

and i was like "no no no lmao you can keep going" and we were giggling. and he was just like "no, it seems like a touchy subject i wont-"

So then i was laughing, so i playfully touched his arm with my shoulder and it wasnt a big deal but i felt him flinch like- uhhh woops dont do that. Like he didnt say anything but i felt him flinch a little. And i was thinking in my head like.....is it bc he has a gf i didnt think that was that weird.

So then im like leaving upstairs to go get ready and im like "okay okay alpha we're continuing this conversation later, im serious, im gonna come find you in a few and we're talking about this" like being jokey and cute and he was like "uh huh okay lol"

And i ran upstairs to get ready.