#it really relates to the experience you have as a high schooler and you feel like you really just can’t do it anymore you physically can’t

[lehrven]

K-12 is just the goth version of the Barbie movie

it has all the same intelligence and conviction as the barbie movie it’s just more macabre and repulsive in some scenes (in a good way)

it’s kind of like what monster high dolls were to barbie dolls

Here’s the movie free to watch on YouTube because Melanie is cool like that

[joemama-2]

ᴍᴀᴛᴄʜ ᴍʏ ꜰʀᴇᴀᴋ

pairing: gojo x reader

wc: 3.4k

tags/warnings: smut, hints of backstory

you’ve been hearing that damned song so much, it’s been haunting you for at least two weeks now. for some reason, you find yourself relating it to your own life—your own insecurities. 

match my freak. 

you really shouldn’t be taking it as seriously as you are. but you can’t help it—you came out the womb an overthinker. and it doesn’t help when your man is…gojo satoru. 

never did you think you would attract—let alone have a fine piece of meat like that. freakishly tall, striking blue eyes that make you feel naked even with the most layers on, and an even more eccentric—outgoing and confident personality. he can chat up anyone and everyone. you’ll leave him alone for five minutes to use the restroom and he’s suddenly engaged in a deep conversation with the elder man sitting next to you guys—learning about their whole life stories. 

in other words, he’s the total opposite of you. 

hence why he was the one who pursued you in the first place. it was a random work day, you usually take a stroll around the park on your lunch. little did you know, you’d meet the love of your life. 

he made every first move. first date, first hug, first kiss, first cuddle session, and of course, the first time he had sex with you. 

it was a blissful, enlightening and out of this world experience when he finally was allowed the pleasure of tasting you—of burying his long cock deep within your tight walls. you were a virgin. but even after being together for almost two years now…you can’t help but still feel like one. 

the sex is not how you would’ve wanted it to be. in your head, he’s putting you in the nastiest, most bending positions. whispering dirty praises in your ears while his pace is relentless. but in real life? it’s missionary. every. single. time. he’s soft and touches you delicately. and that’s fine and all, but you know he wants to switch things up more. he wants to be rougher, try new positions and whatnot. you can see it in his eyes and from the way his veins bulge from his self-restraint. 

all because you’re too much of a pussy to try anything new. you’re nervous and probably even scared because he’s just so experienced and you’re just so…not. you’re afraid to disappoint him—afraid he won’t like what he sees or feels if you guys try anything different. even after his multiple reassurances that everything is fine and he’ll always love you—your mind eats away at you. 

you’re the greatest representation of vanilla there is out there. 

you’re twenty-eight for fucks sake and you’re still acting like a shy high schooler. but that’s how satoru makes you feel sometimes. you just wish you can be like him—like his exes and be more assertive and spontaneous in bed. you wish you weren’t a meek little doll, letting satoru take control every single time you guys fuck. 

you just want to be a better woman to him and show him what you can do. 

in other words, you want to match his freak. 

so, you’ve been preparing yourself for this for a week now. you went to victoria’s secret a few days ago to buy the prettiest red, lacy set you could find. after some research, you learned red draws men in more—it’s more seductive. you got a wax and shaved down every other piece of your body. doing your makeup and hair, spraying the perfume satoru loves almost everywhere. not to forget, the three shots of tequila you downed to hype yourself up some more. 

he’s out with suguru and nanami, the designated driver for the night. and after hauling around his drunken friends, surprising him when he comes home might make him feel better. he just texted you he was coming back now and it’s not until you actually hear the key jiggle that your nerves skyrocket. 

eyes widening and scrambling over to the couch to hurriedly put the red, silk robe on—tying a loose knot quickly. the door opens finally, satoru stepping in with a small sigh and shrugging his jacket off. “baby? i’m ba—”

he effectively pauses in his tracks when he sees you in front him, eyes slowly widening as he registers what you’re wearing. doing a very slow look up and down. 

you clear your throat, standing up straight with an aura you can only hope he recognizes as sexy. “oh, satoru. do i look cu—sexy?” 

he doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, which further makes you anxious. he casually puts his jacket on the coat rack, all the while he’s looking at you. you curse him for wearing that tight black shirt of his—the one that makes him look extra delicious. paired with dark pants. all black fits in him are your greatest enemy. “you do,” he replies, the corner of his lip quirking upward as his hand rubs the hem of your robe together. “this for me?”

“yes!” you proudly reply, silently thanking the alcohol. “all for you—erm—only you.” an awkward chuckle escapes your lips. you quickly follow by wrapping your arms around his neck—he replies by wrapping his own around your waist. his hand finding placement atop the swell of your ass, giving a light squeeze before a small pat. 

“well what’s the occasion?” 

“no occasion. i just wanted to be a girl girlfriend to you.”

he chuckles, meeting your eyes after shamelessly checking out your cleavage. “yeah? as if you aren’t already a good one to me?”

“well, more of a good one.”

“you’re the best already, don’t need to do anything.”

your lip twitches, annoyed by the fact that he’s not giving in like he should’ve been already. it’s time to switch things up a bit. “um…well, do you wanna…have a better look?” you ask, voice lowering, head tilting. 

“what’s better than the one i have right now?”

god, he’s truly pissing you off a bit. “i mean, like—do you want to see what’s underneath?”

Satoru raises a brow, the smirk on his face deepening as his hand slowly trails up your back, his fingers lightly grazing your spine. "oh? you're full of surprises tonight, aren't you?" he teases, leaning in just enough for his breath to tickle your ear. "what exactly are you planning under that little robe of yours?"

ou feel your cheeks flush under his intense gaze, but the tequila gives you the courage to press forward. your fingers trail down his chest, feeling the firm muscle beneath the fabric. "you'll have to find out, won't you?" you reply, trying your best to sound confident, though your heart is practically racing out of your chest. 

he chuckles softly, the sound low and almost predatory, as he pulls back to meet your eyes. "oh, baby," he says, voice dripping with amusement, "you're trying to kill me, aren't you?"

you bite your lip, suppressing a nervous laugh. "Maybe," you whisper, taking his hand and guiding him to the living room. He takes this moment to appreciate the way your butt moves and peaks out beneath the robe. Allowing you to sit him down, he’s leaning back, adjusting his hips upward and man-spreading—a charming grin on his face. You step back just enough to let the silk robe slide off your shoulders and pool at your feet. You're left standing there, wearing the lace lingerie you'd spent way too much time and money picking out, every inch of your body on display for him. His reaction is immediate. His gaze darkens, his pupils blown wide as his eyes roam over your body, taking in every curve, every detail. His jaw tightens, and for a moment, he looks like he's forgotten how to breathe. "fuck," he mutters under his breath, his hand running through his hair before he licks his lips. "You—you look..." he trails off, swallowing hard as his hands settle on your waist, gripping you like he’s afraid you’ll disappear. "Jesus, sweetheart. You’re perfect.”

his words send a wave of heat rushing through you, and for the first time, you feel... powerful. His reaction is everything you hoped for and more. Emboldened, you slide your hands up his chest and hook your fingers into the hem of his shirt, tugging lightly. "Take this off," you murmur, your voice steadier now. He smirks, but there’s a hint of something desperate in his expression as he obeys, pulling the shirt over his head in one swift motion. The sight of him—lean, sculpted, with a light sheen of sweat from the night out—makes your breath hitch.

You gulp and slowly straddle his hips, rubbing his firm skin. Your skin feels prickly with nervousness and anticipation—enjoying how you can begin to fill his clothed bugle poke up at your lacy entrance. 

your breath hitches, moving your hips in a slow, tantalizing manner that utahime told you drives men crazy. his brows furrow slightly, a sharp hiss being grunted out. glancing down at the way you move, his hands drifting up to rub circles on your ribs before going back down to your hips. the air is tight with heat and for a split second, you think you may have thought too ahead of yourself. you’ve never exactly…rode him before. and the way he’s looking at you—touching you…you almost feel too nervous to continue. but you push on, guiding your hands to his clasped belt buckle. 

he says nothing, silently encouraging you to keep going by rubbing small circles along your exposed skin, giving your cheek and neck a few soft kisses. 

the metal clinks as it comes loose, tossing it aside and your shaky fingers unbutton his pants—then pulling down his zipper. you work slowly, partially because you heard they love the expense, but also because you’re fucking shitting your pants. you can only hope you’re doing this all right and that he actually is taking pleasure in seeing you on top for the first time. 

it isn’t until your fingers have brushed along his tent that he stops you. holding your wrist to halt your ministrations, using his other to pull your face away from his neck. when did you even do that? 

when he looks at you, it’s different. not the lust-filled, excited expression. but a…concerned one? “what’s wrong?”

“i…what? nothing’s wrong.” you blurt out, laughing and putting on a smile. “i’m just—just gonna fuck your brains out.”

god, you’re so fucking stupid. that doesn’t even sound right coming out of your mouth! he knows you don’t talk like that—yet look at you now. a hint of a grimace peeks through your facade after that sentence leaves you and you notice the way his eyebrow raises. “yeah, yeah, you like that?”

“y/n…”

“i’ll make you feel good, ‘toru. all you have to do is just sit back and—”

gojo gently cups your face, effectively stopping your rambling. His thumb strokes your cheek, a soft yet pointed gesture that sends your racing thoughts into a screeching halt. his piercing blue eyes meet yours, and for a moment, you’re caught in the depth of his gaze. There’s no judgment, only understanding and something deeper—something tender. “y/n,” he murmurs, voice calm but firm. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he says softly, his thumb brushing soothing circles against your skin.

your face falls, your confidence crumbling like a delicate house of cards. “W-What do you mean? I—I want to do this. I…” You trail off, your voice wavering.

Satoru tilts his head, his gaze softening. “Do you really, though? Or are you just trying to prove something to me?”

The question stings, not because it’s accusatory but because it’s true. You feel your throat tighten, your body freezing under his perceptive gaze. “I…” your words falter, and you look away, biting your lip. Your lips part to deny it again, but the weight of his gaze, the warmth of his hands, makes it impossible to pretend. You deflate slightly, lowering your eyes to his chest. “I just… I wanted to surprise you. To… be better for you.”

his hands move to cradle your waist, steadying you as he leans in to press a soft kiss to your forehead. “better? baby, what are you even talking about?” He chuckles lightly, but there’s a hint of sadness in it. “You’re perfect to me. Always have been.”

Your hands grip his shoulders tightly as you bite your lip, hesitant to say the words. “I know I’m… boring in bed, okay? I see how much you hold back for me, Satoru. I don’t want you to have to do that anymore. I want to…match you, to make you feel as good as you make me feel.”

His fingers tighten slightly on your hips, and he exhales a slow, measured breath. “Is that what’s been eating at you?” He tilts your chin up gently, forcing you to look at him. “Listen to me, Y/N. I don’t care about… positions or how wild things get. That’s not why I’m with you.”

“But—”

“no buts,” he interrupts softly, brushing a thumb over your lips to silence you. “I’m with you because I love you. The way you laugh at my dumb jokes, the way you can make me feel at home with just a smile. The way you snuggle into me at night, even when you think I’m asleep. You don’t need to do anything to impress me or prove something.” His lips quirk into a small, teasing smile. “Though I’ll admit, I’m not complaining about the outfit.”

Your face heats up, and you let out a nervous laugh, your insecurities momentarily pushed aside by his warmth and sincerity. “I just…I didn’t want you to feel like you were missing out.”

“Missing out?” He grins, leaning in so his lips hover over yours. “Baby, the only thing I’d miss out on is you feeling comfortable with me. That’s what I want most. I’m happy when you’re happy.”

your heart swells at his words, and you feel a tear slip down your cheek despite yourself. He brushes it away with his thumb, kissing your temple softly. “now,” he murmurs against your skin, voice dropping just slightly, “if you still want to keep going, I’m more than ready. But only if you’re doing it because you want to, not because you think you need to.”

You take a deep, steadying breath and look into his eyes, nodding. “i want to,” you whisper. “but…you’ll help me, right?”

A slow, mischievous grin spreads across his face, dimple peeking out. “oh, baby. I’ll help you. I’ll take very good care of you.”

and so maybe you really—really underestimated just how understanding satoru would be about it all. there goes your overthinking again. however, it’s getting harder and harder to even think in general when he’s watching you fuck yoruself on his cock like it’s your own dildo. the way his angry, red tip shows when you move up before disappearing when your hips meet his in a repetitive motion. it hits that spongy part of your that has your head tilting back, neck exposed to his dirty mouth—sucking at the spot he knows you love, licking to smooth the forming bruise. your face scrunches and hips move in a jerky, messy manner. but he doesn’t have any qualms about it—in fact—he’s helping you. moaning against the crook of your neck when he jerks his hips up to meet yours. “yeah…yeah, baby. just like that.”

“l-like—ngh—like this?”

he breathily chuckles at the fact that you’re trying to talk dirty back to him. it’s cute and endearing and what kind of boyfriend would he be if he wasn’t your number one supporter? “mhm, right there. it feels….so…good—you’re so tight.”

your nails are scraping across his chest, down to his abs and back up. tilting your chin down to look at him. you both adorn an equally fucked our expression, though his blush looks redder than yours. he’s giving you a lazy smile, looking up at you like you’re a goddess granting him life. and fuck does it make you wetter. 

the living room is filled with nothing but your noises and wet, squelchy sounds of his cock giving your pussy the fix it so desperately needs. “so big….so…f-full…”

the praise tumbles from your lips in breathy whimpers, each word accompanied by a shiver that races down your spine. Your walls flutter around him, squeezing him tighter as his hands guide your movements, gripping your hips with a reverence that makes your heart thrum in time with your ragged breaths. “Yeah?” he groans, voice husky with pleasure. “You like how full I make you, huh? Like being my good fucking girl?”

you nod frantically, too lost in the haze of pleasure to respond with anything coherent. The way his cock stretches you, fills you perfectly, has your brain short-circuiting. The tired grin on his face doesn’t help either—it’s a reminder of just how thoroughly he’s wrecking you, all while lying there and watching you come undone for him. “Keep going, baby,” he encourages, his fingers tightening just enough to spur you on. “You’re doing so good for me—fuck—you’re so perfect.”

his Adam's apple bobs as he swallows hard, his pale lashes fluttering against flushed cheeks. He’s a mess beneath you, but somehow, it makes you feel wonderful—like you’re in control of the strongest man you’ve ever known. And you are. “Satoru…” his name leaves your lips in a shaky whimper, your thighs burning as you try to keep up the rhythm. Your body trembles, overwhelmed by the stretch, the fullness, and the way he fills every inch of you. “I-I don’t think… I can—”

“Yes, you can,” he interrupts, his hands sliding up to cup your jiggling tits as he sits up slightly, his face just inches from yours. “You’re doing so good, baby. Let me help you.”

before you can respond, he shifts beneath you, his strong hands guiding your hips in an easy, grinding motion that has you crying out. His mouth finds your neck again, teeth grazing your sensitive skin before he sucks a mark that makes your toes curl. “That’s it,” he breathes against your ear, his voice husky and low. ​​your fingers find his hair, tugging hard as your body reacts to his words, his touch, his everything. The heat building in your core spirals out of control.

Your thighs are trembling with the effort of keeping your pace steady, but he doesn’t let up. His hips thrust up just enough to meet you halfway, the friction and angle sending fireworks through your core. The coil in your belly tightens, winding impossibly tighter as his praises wash over you like a drug you can’t get enough of. You’re bringing his chin up and crashing your lips into his in a messy, heated kiss. Saliva falling from the corners of your mouth, tongue and teeth mingling into the mix—but it feels right. The messier the better, actually. 

“‘Toru—‘m close… so close—!” Your voice is broken, needy, and he eats it up, his grip on your hips grounding you as your movements grow more frantic.

“I got you, baby,” he murmurs, voice dripping with adoration and something darker. “Come for me. Let me feel how good I make you feel. Show me, sweetheart.”

his words push you over the edge, and your body arches as your release crashes through you. A strangled cry tears from your throat as your walls clamp down around him, milking him for everything he’s worth. Your nails dig into his chest, and his head falls back with a deep groan, his own orgasm hot on your heels. “Fuck—Y/N,” he growls, his hips stuttering as he spills into you, filling you with warmth that only heightens your pleasure. His hands slide up your back, pulling you down to him as your body trembles with aftershocks.

You collapse onto his chest, breathless and blissed out, his hands rubbing soothing circles along your back. His heartbeat thunders against your ear, matching your own as you both come down from the high. You feel incredibly dazy, body trembling and breathing erratically. He’s rubbing your asscheeks in a way that brings him down to earth. He gulps–throat dry. Looking at you with a relieved exhale. “Baby, I—”

“Not done,” you grunt, your lips whispering against the shell of his ear. “Want–want you to fuck me…from the back—hah—p…please?”

He finds it even more attractive that your politeness still peeks through during a time like this. But with the way his cock is growing hard again inside your warm pussy, switching positions so fast that you can barely even get a gasp out before your cheek is being shoved against the couch cushion. 

“Don’t ask anymore, just tell me what to do.”

You’ve never had such a good fucking than right now. 

----

i swear i'm working on vl, pls don't rush me :( this took like 30 mins to write

[slamdunk-headcanons]

Fights, haircut and basketball - Imagine Mitsui Hisashi

Hello guys! So I decided to bring my SD imagines to this blog. They were originally written in Portuguese, and I used AI to do the most part of translation and revised it after to do some corrections and adaptations. So this is the very first one I wrote for SD, in 2016, for my favorite character, Mitsui Hisashi. My writing style is in third person, not second person. I hope you all like it!

Posted on Spirit Fanfictions, Wattpad and Nyah!Fanfiction (all Portuguese version) Word count: 3.6k Warnings: fem!reader, mention of gang fights, a bit of cursing, angst Cover by @ezrealsicons

Synopsis: Mitsui and [Name] were unseparable friends. But when their feelings became something more than just friendship, everthing caved in. With the Mitsui's injurey and his subsequent withdrawal from basketball, his personality began to be dominated by resentment and anger. The boy started to despise everything related to the sport, including [Name]. However, two years later, a fight and and old dream would finally make him remember how important she was for him.

“You did what!?"

[Name] looked at Mitsui with wide, horrified eyes. The boy had shown up at her mother's beauty salon that late afternoon without warning, his face covered in bruises and dried blood. The girl had quickly pulled him to the back of the establishment so he wouldn't draw attention in case a client arrive. The last thing she wanted was for Mitsui's problems to spill over into her mother's business. Now they were talking in the break room, which was fortunately empty.

The boy still had the same intimidating appearance that [Name] had seen the last time they met. The face that had once been marked by the features of adolescence was now almost entirely covered by his blackish-blue hair that cascaded down to his shoulders. His navy-blue eyes, once so bright and full of energy, were now dark and heavy. And to top it off, [Name] couldn’t even remember the last time she had seen Mitsui smile.

Faced with his friend's accusatory question, the senior kept his head down and his hands buried in his pockets. The shame he had felt earlier, in front of the man who had given him the determination to win the regional championship, now seemed to weigh ten tons on his broad shoulders. He could endure the accusing looks from everyone, even from Kogure and Akagi, but from [Name]...

"Hey! Answer me, Hisashi!"

He hunched his shoulders even more. It was hard enough to confess what he had done, let alone repeat it. Besides, didn’t [Name] already have enough reasons to despise him?

"I decided to get revenge on Miyagi... I wanted to do it by disqualifying Shohoku from the Nationals through a fight. If the rumor that the players were involved in a gang fight at their own school spread, they would surely be banned from the championship. So I gathered the judo team members and asked for help from a friend of mine, Tetsu-"

Mitsui didn’t get a chance to finish. A sharp, resounding slap stung his already bruised face, causing him to stagger back two steps. His hands instinctively covered the spot where he had been hit, and his navy-blue eyes rose in shock to meet the girl in front of him.

"Are you serious!?" she shouted angrily. "Didn’t I tell you to never speak to me again? And you, not only you disrespect that, but you also come and tell me something like this!?"

The high schooler lowered his gaze again and returned to his previous dejected posture.

[Name] had been his friend for years, and they had met because of basketball. She always played on the neighborhood’s public court, and it was there that he saw her for the first time. He clearly remembered being captivated by how she smiled while playing, and that made him interested in the game. He really wanted to experience the joy that made that girl seem so happy.

Mitsui then asked [Name] to introduce him to basketball. Reluctantly at first, the girl agreed to be his tutor. She taught him everything she could, from basic movements to the tricks of faking and three-point shots, which were her pride and joy. It was on that quaint basketball court that their friendship flourished.

Over the years, Mitsui and [Name] became inseparable, and their friendship began to take on new dimensions. However, neither of them had the courage to make a move, as neither was sure of their own feelings.

And that’s when everything caved in.

After Mitsui’s accident and his subsequent withdrawal from basketball, his personality started to be consumed by resentment and anger. The boy began to despise everything related to the sport, including [Name].

One day, the girl invited him to watch a street basketball game that was going to take place on the same court where they had first met. With disdain, he laughed in [Name]’s face and said he had better things to do.

"I'm not going to waste any more time with stupid things like basketball," he said with a mocking smile.

The girl looked at him in horror, unable to believe that those words had come out of Mitsui's mouth.

“What!?” she shouted, shocked.

“That’s exactly what you heard,” he spat. “I’m not wasting another second on basketball.”

And without giving [Name] a chance to ask any more questions, he spun on his heels and walked away.

After this episode, the high schooler began getting more involved with gangs and street fights, and the chasm that had formed between him and [Name] grew ever wider. Finally, one incident in particular completely ruined their friendship.

Angry after the beating they took from Mitsui’s gang, some troublemakers from Kainan High investigated Mitsui’s connections and discovered [Name]. After obtaining her address, they observed her routine for a few days. After a week, they ambushed her as she was heading home in the late afternoon. Meanwhile, one of them was tasked with delivering the message to Mitsui.

As soon as he found out, the boy was overcomed with an intense feeling of guilt and rage. He never imagined he would end up involving his friend in his fights, let alone as a hostage. Blinded by anger, he ran without hesitation to the agreed location, making a decision along the way: he would distance himself from gangs once and for all so that she would never be at risk because of him again.

When he finally reached them, he realized the true extent of the trap he had fallen into. [Name] was at the back of the alley, held by two burly high schoolers with contemptuous expressions. As soon as they spotted Mitsui, the other gang members blocked both exits of the alley, giving the boy no chance to escape.

“I knew he would come,” their leader sneered. “Let the girl go. We’ve got what we wanted.”

A momentary sense of relief washed over the student, and he searched for [Name] with his eyes. The girl was rubbing her forearms, marked by the strong grip of the thugs, and as soon as she processed that she was free, she looked for Mitsui among the figures present. When her eyes locked on his face, distorted by a mask of conflicting emotions, she marched toward him with determined steps, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

How? How had it come to this? How had he let something like this happen? And to her, of all people!?

Everyone turned to look at the slender back of the girl, who was walking forward with clenched fists. As soon as her childhood friend's face was within reach, she raised her right fist and delivered a solid punch to his left cheek.

"Bastard!" she shouted, tears streaming down her cheeks. "How did you get to this point? When did you stoop so low as to drag me into these stupid fights!?"

Mitsui kept his face turned away, his dark blue eyes vacant and empty from the shock.

"Never again..." she said through gritted teeth. "Never speak to me again."

Those words from [Name] hurt more than any punch or kick he'd ever taken in a fight. They hurt more than his knee injury. They hurt more than giving up basketball.

Even when he had given up on everything, she hadn’t. She believed that one day, the bitterness from what had happened in his first year would fade, and Mitsui's passion for basketball would resurface. And even as he sank deeper and deeper, she tried to support him, tending to his wounds so that he wouldn’t have to hear so much from his parents.

And he had simply dismissed all of it.

That day, the beating he took after being insulted and humiliated by the Kainan thugs didn’t compare to the pain of losing [Name] completely. He had deluded himself into thinking she would stand by him despite the stupid mistakes he’d been making. What else would he lose?

Since then, [Name] had never spoken to him again, and Mitsui had no choice but to respect her decision. In her absence, he continued to get involved in more and more trouble and fights, and the little hope hidden in his heart of returning to basketball disappeared completely.

However, the incident in Shohoku’s gym that day awakened old memories of basketball for Mitsui. The feeling of sinking the ball with a simple flick of the wrist, the euphoria filling his chest as he drove past opponents toward the basket... Remembering all of this, Hisashi Mitsui finally realized just how much he missed basketball and, most of all, how much he missed the person who had brought that wonderful sport into his life.

God! How he wanted to play basketball again! How he wanted to play with [Name] and see her smile in that unique and captivating way...

It was because of all this that he swallowed his pride and ran to see the girl he had dismissed out of pure arrogance and selfishness. He had to make things right. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t try.

Mitsui lifted his melancholic dark eyes to [Name] and took a deep breath.

"I know what I did was unforgivable. I really was a selfish idiot, only thinking about my whim of becoming Shohoku’s ace... and it ruined everything." He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and then reopened them, this time with a determined look. "But I need to tell you something."

The girl straightened where she stood and crossed her arms. Her eyes shifted to the floor, filled with pain and anger. She wanted so badly to believe Mitsui’s words. She wanted so badly for him to have truly recognized his mistakes and turned things around... But what he had done wasn't that simple.

With a furrowed brow, she bit her lip and lowered her head.

"I'm going back to playing basketball," Mitsui blurted out, as if the words were forcing their way out of his mouth. "I don’t want to keep pretending that I don’t want to."

[Name]'s eyes widened, and she immediately locked them onto her friend’s face.

"I know it might be a little late since I’m in my third year. But I still want to make the most of the time I have left in high school. I’m going to...

The sentence weighed heavily on his tongue, and he had to press his lips together to prevent the words from spilling out awkwardly. He wanted to show [Name] that this was once again his dream.

Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes, then opened them to look at his friend with a crease of determination on his forehead.

"I'm going to help Shohoku conquer Japan."

[Name]’s lips parted in a small “o,” but not in horror or anger, but rather in surprise. Before her eyes, she finally recognized the determined expression of the Mitsui she had known on the court in their old neighborhood. The boy she had taught to play basketball, who had become much more than just a good friend, was once again standing in front of her.

"Hisashi..." she murmured, her eyes widening further.

Mitsui straightened his shoulders, pulling his hands out of his pockets. He raised a hand to his neck and scratched it, looking down at the floor as shyness took over his gaze.

"So... [Name]-chan... I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to say or do all those stupid things to you. I know it’s not something that can be fixed with just an apology... But today, I really need you."

As soon as the last sentence left Mitsui’s lips, both felt a rush of heat rising to their faces. [Name] averted her eyes to the floor and began rubbing her fingers together with her thumb. The teenager scratched his neck even more quickly and continued:

"It’s-it’s just..." He blinked and, with great effort, looked back at the girl standing in front of him. "Since you helped me take the first step in basketball, I want you to do it again. I want you to help me take the first step back into basketball."

[Name] shifted her weight to her left leg and looked at her friend with a mix of insecurity and suppressed hope. She wanted so much to say yes. She had dreamed so many times of this moment—the moment when Mitsui would tell her that he was going back to basketball, returning to being the boy who had won her admiration in such a simple, genuine way...

But [Name] was fully aware that Mitsui's mistake was almost unforgivable, and she wasn’t going to let him think it would be easy to make everything right.

"I'm not going to play basketball with you, Hisashi," she said in the sternest voice she could muster.

The high schooler flinched as if he'd been punched in the gut. My God! How those words hurt. [Name]’s disdain was worse than any beating he had ever taken. But he deserved it; after all, he had also treated her with disdain... and in the worst possible way.

"I know," he said sadly. "But I need something only you can do."

[Name] furrowed her brows and waited. Mitsui raised his left hand until his fingers reached a lock of his dark hair.

"Could you... cut my hair?" He paused, trying not to stumble over his words, and laughed nervously. "Don’t worry. I’ll pay."

[Name]’s eyes widened so much that Mitsui thought they might pop out of their sockets.

Since girls tended to do this more often, she knew the significance of a haircut at a moment like this. Mitsui really wanted to change and wanted to leave a physical reminder of his new goal: to conquer Japan wearing Shohoku’s jersey.

After a few seconds, [Name] lowered her head and, turning on her heels, said, "Come here."

Surprised that he hadn’t received a harsh response from the girl, Mitsui promptly followed her with an astonished expression. She led him to the bathroom used by the staff and opened a cabinet containing a stack of white, fluffy towels. Grabbing one, she pushed it against the broad chest of the teenager and said, "Wipe off that blood so you don’t scare the other customers. When you’re done, go to the salon. I’ll be waiting there."

Mitsui nodded promptly and quickly cleaned himself up. When his face finally lost the most alarming signs of the fight, he folded the towel, leaving it in a corner, and headed to where [Name] was waiting. The girl was already dressed in a smock, with a cape draped over the same arm holding a pair of scissors.

"Have a seat," she said, her face wearing an indecipherable neutral expression.

Mitsui obeyed and sat down. [Name] adjusted the chair’s height and looked into the mirror to meet the boy’s blue eyes reflected there.

"So, what will it be?" she asked, running her fingers through the teenager's overgrown hair. Her touch sent involuntary shivers down Mitsui’s spine, and a slight blush spread across his cheeks.

"Ahm..." he muttered, glancing at the countertop cluttered with beauty tools. "You can cut it all off."

"All of it!?" she replied, her expression once again showing shock.

"Yeah. I mean, really short. It’s more comfortable for playing..."

The girl ran her fingers through Mitsui’s hair once more, taking a few measurements, and nodded.

"I’ll cut it little by little, and you can tell me if it’s okay, alright?"

"Uh-huh," he murmured, trying to stay still as he heard the first snips of the scissors cutting through his hair.

[Name] worked in silence, avoiding Mitsui’s deep blue eyes whenever she checked the cut in the mirror. However, it was impossible for her not to notice his features as the long hair stopped covering his face. Now that the black curtain had disappeared, [Name] could finally see the changes puberty had brought to her friend’s face. His jawline had become well-defined, but in a gentle way. Dark circles under his eyes marked the edges of his cheeks, which were covered in bruises and scratches, yet this detail still gave him a certain maturity. His straight nose had the same effect. His thick, black eyebrows perfectly crowned his pair of navy blue eyes, which had always captivated [Name] in a way she would never admit. Now they were much more visible, and this pleased her deeply.

In the end, Mitsui’s new haircut suited him very well, giving his face a more playful and determined look.

Yes... This was the Mitsui she had known.

"So?" she asked after making the final touch on the left side. "What do you think?"

He turned his head from side to side to see the new hairstyle from different angles and then smiled, satisfied. [Name] went to the counter and grabbed a square mirror so Mitsui could check the back of his hair too.

"Oh!" he said, smiling even more. "It really looks good! Thank you so much, [Name]-chan!"

While the teenager admired his friend’s work, [Name] couldn’t help but notice his features again. Mitsui had turned out much more handsome than she had anticipated.

Realizing this, her cheeks involuntarily heated up, and she lowered her face, afraid he would see her embarrassed expression.

"You’re welcome," she murmured, moving to the counter to put away the mirror and the brush she had used to remove the excess hair.

As soon as she removed the cape that had covered him, he stood up and quickly reached into his pocket, pulling out some green bills.

"How much do I owe you?" he asked, checking the amount he had.

[Name] had her back to him, organizing the counter and sweeping some leftover hair onto the floor. She bit her lip at Mitsui’s question, and the phrase he had said earlier echoed in her mind:

"I know. But I need something only you can do."

"Could you... cut my hair?"

Now that she could finally see Mitsui's eyes without his long black hair in the way, she was certain that he wasn’t just talking for the sake of it. She recognized his stubborn determination in the navy blue of his eyes. The haircut was his way of telling himself that he wanted to, and would, become who he once was. If she charged him for it, Mitsui's request would lose all its meaning.

"Nothing," she said, reaching out for the broom that was leaning nearby. "It's on me."

"But...!" he blinked, stunned as he stared at the back of her head. "I said I’d pay!"

"Shut up and accept it, idiot," she replied, too afraid to turn around and meet his eyes.

A whirlwind of emotions tore through her chest. Her head was spinning with confusion. She wanted so badly to celebrate this, to support him at his games, and to train with him... But at the same time, she couldn’t forget what he had done. And that stopped her from showing what she truly felt.

The teenager remained silent for a few moments before saying, "[Name]-chan... Please, let me pay for the haircut. I'll feel really bad i—"

"I already told you it’s on me!" she exclaimed too loudly as she turned her body and began sweeping with her eyes fixed on the floor. She walked past Mitsui and bumped into his shoulder hard. "I’m done here. You can go."

Mitsui didn’t move. His eyes went blank, staring into nothing as he digested [Name]'s harsh words. He had known from the start that he wouldn’t win her trust right away, but that didn’t lessen the weight of being treated like this by her.

However, even though she was clearly resentful, [Name] had granted his request. And if she didn’t charge for the service... it meant that, deep down, she wanted to do it for him and was happy that he had come back.

A slight smile curved Mitsui's lips as he realized this, and he quietly approached [Name] until he stood just behind her.

"[Name]-chan," he called, letting the gratitude he felt fill her name.

Hearing his voice so close, [Name] tensed up, feeling her cheeks flush once more. Trying to sound as harsh as possible, she turned sharply and growled, "Hisashi, I already told you to—"

But she couldn’t finish the sentence. As soon as she turned around, a soft, warm touch on her left cheek silenced her instantly. Mitsui was leaning in, his hand gently resting on her left shoulder as his lips placed a very sweet kiss on her blushing face.

The touch lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough to make all the hairs on [Name]'s body stand on end. Internally, she wished Mitsui’s touch had lasted a little longer. Pulling back slightly, he whispered, "Thank you."

He then straightened up, running his hand through his hair in a slightly awkward manner.

"Well, I’ll be going. See you later, [Name]-chan."

He turned on his heels and headed toward the exit of the salon. The girl remained frozen, staring at the back of her childhood friend. She hated herself for being so affected by his gesture, and even more for knowing that deep down, she really wanted Mitsui back... for herself.

Maybe it wasn’t the right time for them to reconnect, but they could start, right?

She went back to sweeping, and just as he stopped to open the door, she raised her voice: “Hey, idiot.”

Startled, the teenager turned his torso enough to look at [Name] with a questioning expression. “If you don’t make Shohoku rise to the top of Japan, I swear I’ll beat you to death".

Mitsui's eyes widened, and gradually, a smile replaced his shocked expression. He chuckled quietly as he remembered the countless times he had said he would conquer the nation. There was no turning back. This time, he had to succeed.

Widening his smile even further, he looked at [Name] defiantly and said, “I’m on it.”

[nihilistem]

Hey! I read your study tips both posts regarding adhd . (Feel free to ignore )

I am still undiagnosed and I think it's adhd but i do not have the resources nor the environment or support system to do anything about it .I am a high schooler preparing for entrance exams and i really need to like get my shit together and i feel like i have wasted sm time already but i really do want to get better. When i sit to study i just can't focus if I keep my phone in some other room then also i would just sit and stare at my books without accomplishing something. I am trying really but it's feels like my brain is frozen and my body is moving .my brain keep screaming guilty and ashamed but i can't seem to do anything about it.your study post actually i related to a lot because pomodro kind of seems to be working for everyone but me and the you described the exact same things I do

I know this is a lot to ask for please feel free to ignore but how do I stop Letting my emotions take over and study consistently because I only have one chance at the exams

Oh my, first of all I’d like to say that, as cliché as it is, I know exactly how you feel. I was undiagnosed for so long (I was only diagnosed a few months ago) and I didn’t even know that the adhd things I experience on a regular basis wasn’t normal or neurotypical for so long.

first up : I know this is difficult, but please do not say such things about yourself. I’m not gonna get into the whole thing, (cuz I have done a post on that already) but it’s true that the more you drill that bad stuff into your brain, the more it’s gonna stick. We need our brains to be in the best condition possible to study efficiently and saying bad stuff about yourself that isn’t even true is just going to hinder your performance. You got this. I promise you’re not lazy. Your brain just isn’t motivated by the same things others are, but we can work with that simple difference.

I’ll make a separate post on how not to let your emotions take over, but for now …

adhd study tips for those trying to get into the habit.

— by a stem student with adhd.

here’s my first post on adhd study tips.

— don’t put your phone in a different room. Instead, download an app that prevents you from using other apps on your phone.

there’s plenty of apps that do this but the one I prefer is ypt because all its features are completely free and it stops your timer when you exit the app unless you enter ‘allowed app mode.’ I don’t know about you, but if I find that I’m just zoning out on my textbook then I end up stopping my timer and deleting the record because I know I didn’t actually study, and this motivates me to actually get some work done. The timer also gets me motivated to keep going for longer so I have physical proof of my focus time and studies. It will feel good to even have just 1 hour of study time on it, I promise.

— even if you’re not interested in your studies, try your best to find even one thing that interests you.

novelty, challenge and interest are some of the best motivators of the adhd brain, so use it. I know that sparking your curiosity for a subject you hate seems impossible, but hear me out.

ever since I was young, I was exposed to books and I drew everyday. This caused me to become very passionate about the arts, but since I had adhd and didn’t know, I failed all my classes and specifically hated chemistry because it was specifically designed to be everything that I can’t be good at due to my poor memory and the need to memorize a TON of concepts. Then during class one day, I was doing chemistry work with my friends and felt frustrated that they could easily balance equations and work out which compounds were acids or bases purely by its chemical formula. And that’s what sparked me to start reading my textbook to see what the big deal was. How was it possible for one to just know when something is a acid solely from looking at a bunch of letters? This started a chain reaction; I found my answer, and found that the process of finding my answer and learning this new information was fulfilling. So I looked at all the other chemistry topics, and it turns out chemistry was fun. I was supposed to be an art student but now I’m majoring in chemistry and biology, all because of that sense of challenge and curiosity I was given that day.

tdlr; I was bad at chemistry but I’m now majoring in it because I felt challenged by a friend and was curious to know how they could solve chem equations easily.

All it took was a bit of curiosity. It’s a very powerful thing to the adhd brain. And if you use this as a motivator for your studies it might even cause you to hyper-fixate on your work, which means you’ll naturally spend more time studying just to find all the answers you’re now dying to know.

— use the pomodoro timer, but think about the things that you have to do that seems a little impossible to do under 25 minutes.

This fulfills the ‘challenge’ category I mentioned in the previous tip.

Let me explain; I subconsciously started doing this to myself without anyone telling me this and it’s helped me a LOT. Here’s an example;

“This chapter’s too long, it’s impossible to read through everything and understand the key concepts in just twenty five minutes.”

is it, though?

So I was off to the races, genuinely reading through every page and taking note of every single heading or bold or italicized word so I will be able to summarize the entire topic by the time the twenty five minutes is up.

And it doesn’t even matter if you don’t make that twenty five minute mark, because you’ll feel a sense of defeat and try it again with another chapter/topic.

this accomplishes two things; one, the work you’ve been putting off or zoning out on is now probably 20% - 50% completed and now you feel motivated to continue. Two, this method will train you to be faster in learning or studying new material or even just completing work in general, depending on what you’re challenging yourself to do.

— dress up, do your hair, study at a library or cafe you love (and possibly make pretty notes.)

I’ve talked about interest, I’ve talked about challenge, and now I’m gonna talk about novelty.

Do this with purpose! But what do I mean by that?

I’m sure you’ve come across studious girls in media or even people on social media making videos and taking pretty photos of their day out to study. Usually they’re dressed the part and even if they’re not, there’s a certain vibe, aesthetic or aura about them that is just so desirable that it makes you wish you were doing what they were doing. And if you don’t feel this way, find content creators or media that do make you feel this way.

How will this help me? Well, there are actually a few reasons but the first one that comes to mind is that this is also an adhd tip used outside of studying. Combining a task you don’t want to do with a task you’d like to do is a faster and more efficient way of convincing yourself to do long, difficult or even tiring tasks. Another is that doing this would also mean you’ve technically gotten yourself to desire studying, something more commonly known as romanticizing studying. If you make studying look fun, glamorous or even desirable for yourself then you’re sure to get to the hideous parts of it. Think about being a straight A student, someone who’s always wearing nice clothes with great hair and such a focused work ethic. Once you desire to be that person and you dress like that person, you’ll start to do the things that person will do.

— use the pomodoro timer but set it to even shorter bursts instead. (e.g. 15 minutes work, 5 minutes break.)

Or hell, on my worst days I set it to 5 minutes work, 5 minutes break.

The whole point of this exercise is to just start, because that’s arguably the hardest part about studying, you can’t get yourself to actually start or to actually focus. So promise yourself a five minute break after a very short amount of time of reading.

— skip straight to the questions of a topic, try to do them and identify the information you need to get the answer right.

For example, I came across a bio question that was rather simple but I didn’t know the answer to because I haven’t revised the topic for a while, and the question was, what is needed in the body for anaerobic respiration to take place? And the answer was simple, but I didn’t know because again, I didn’t study the material before answering the paper.

one’s brain can have the habit of being complacent especially when you don’t wanna do work, so diving head first into the questions and realizing that you don’t know jack shit would be a good wake up call for you and your brain—and this can connect to the second point that I made because you might find that you’d be eager to get the answer right all on your own, and become curious as to what the answer is.

important to remember …

erase everything bad that you were told or led to believe about studying. I promise that if you look for ways to make it engaging for you and form a habit, studying can be something you don’t dread or worry about everyday. You are capable. This is the start of your journey. Yes, the question of ‘what if I get distracted again’ will always be there but think about what could happen if today is the first day you’re not distracted. If you don’t at least try to start now, you will have zero chance of being able to actually focus and study. But if you try, the worst that will happen is that you tried. If you keep trying, it will happen. I promise.

If you need any more tips regarding adhd, (or being undiagnosed,) please do let me know. I’ll do my best to help.

[pinknipszz]

modern headcanons | highschool edition

⋆✮↪ neteyam, lo’ak, kiri, ao’nung, and tsireya

neteyam

he always walks you to class. he loves company, especially yours. neteyam would go the extra mile by carrying your bag or holding your stuff. and he’s so humble about it! he doesn’t even think that it’s something you should thank him for. to neteyam, it’s just the standard. he once told you that most of his childhood was spent with his mother and grandmother, two women in his life who really care about manners.

he packs extra lunch for you. neteyam is the type of guy to bring an extra lunch box just for you. if you’re not hungry or you brought your own lunch, he’ll insist you take it home. you don’t know what you did to deserve him. he would experiment with different cuisines and sneak in little notes that make you swoon. sometimes, you return the favor. when you pack his favorites, like steamed fish or grilled meat, he loses his mind. everyone finds your relationship sickeningly sweet.

lo’ak 

he probably vaped at least once. he’s the type of guy to give into peer pressure. if someone offered him a blue razz ice elfbar at a party, he would try it without thinking twice. much to your surprise, lo’ak didn’t really get into it. he likes to brag about it though, especially to ao’nung. you scold him when he does. part of the reason why he tries to stay away from that stuff is because of you. he knows that you don’t like it when he jeopardizes his health, so he makes an honest effort to be mindful of his decisions.

he skips class. a lot. honestly, you’ve lost count of how many times he’s offered to “walk you to class” and lead you in the opposite direction. you guys usually stay on campus, like maybe in the janitor’s closet or under the gym bleachers. when you guys aren’t, though, you’re usually running off to a local gas station or even the mall. it really just depends on the class period. lo’ak isn’t exactly the best influence on you.

kiri

her favorite class is biology. it’s just the closest thing she could get to botany as a high schooler. kiri is interested in all things related to plants, to the extent that she started a club dedicated to maintaining the school garden. she doesn’t have any leadership positions like tsireya, though, but she likes it that way. kiri doesn’t want to feel the pressure of dealing with other people. she also doesn’t have the mental strength to be constantly reminded of the fact that global warming exists.

she skips class occasionally. you’re always surprised at how rebellious she’s capable of being. unlike lo’ak, she doesn’t stay on campus. she’s out the door when she gets the chance. instead of staying at places like the mall, though, kiri stays at the local park. it’s where she gets most of her work done. she usually doesn’t drag you with her against your will, because she understands that the risk isn’t always worth it. you’ve never said no to her, though.

ao’nung

he plays close-contact and collision sports. remember when he tackled lo’ak in that one fight scene? yeah. ao’nung would channel that energy into sports like basketball, rugby, and even wrestling. ao’nung isn’t a team captain or anything. that’s way too much commitment, but he does have the most influence. because he earns titles like “player of the game” or “star player,” ao’nung knows how to get sponsors for trips. you hate how it gets in his big head.

he sits behind you in every single class you have together. ao’nung finds it more convenient to talk to you this way. if there’s assigned seating, he’ll bribe, beg, or do literally anything else to sit behind you. it gets him in trouble most of the time, but it’s worth the effort. if it does work, though, ao’nung likes to braid small pieces of your hair or pass notes during class. your classmates give you two funny looks, but they never say anything about it. courtesy of ao’nung.

tsireya

she’s the captain of the swim team. she’s a natural in the water. she’s also very good at raising team morale, so there’s really no other person fit for captain. you always attend her swim meets and cheer her on as much as possible. if you’re being honest, she doesn’t really need it since she crushes the competition every single time. she literally brings home gold every single year. your school will literally never find another swimmer as talented as her.

she’s the head of the house and grounds committee. tsireya would be an environmental activist. she’s got a big heart. she spearheads all activities related to the environment in your school and even started a conservation charity. you have no idea how this girl manages all of that on top of sports and school work. it does get in the way of your quality time with her, but it makes her happy so you don’t complain.

(masterlist)

[rose-morose]

stop what you are doing right now and go watch Jentry Chau vs the Underworld immediately

I instantly fell in love with this show from the moment I saw the trailer, and when it finally got its full release, it did not disappoint

(season 1 spoilers under the cut and also probably the longest post I've ever made by far)

if you have any interest in Asian/Chinese mythology and culture, fantastic animation, soundtracks full of absolute bangers, Texas for some reason, stories that touch on the subject of being Asian American, or high schoolers fighting the supernatural/demonic, or if you just like things that are good, this is the show for you

I watched through the intro in every episode, despite the presence of the skip intro button, and I even often went back to rewatch it after it finished, it is so fucking exhilarating and exciting, I have never felt more hyped in my life

I personally love Chinese mythology, but I truly do not believe that proclivity is even remotely necessary to enjoy this show, it's just all around amazing

the writing is phenomenal

Gugu: "It's a jianshi thing, they can't help but count rice."

Ed: "Hey, I can quit anytime I want!"

this fucking killed me

referencing a jianshi's need to count grains of rice is one thing, that's pretty much expected, but the implication that doing math (counting) is an addiction is so ironically model minority racist Asian stereotype coded that it is genuinely hilarious and I love it so much I'm dying

no idea if that was intentional or if I'm just seeing things, but it made me laugh all the same, and maybe I've got rose tinted glasses on because of my love of Chinese mythology and being able to relate to the Asian American experience, but regardless I cannot praise this show enough

the cast is pretty stacked as well, with solid vocal performances by Ali Wong, Lucy Liu, SungWon Cho, Bowen Yang, Jimmy O Yang, and many more talented actors

the complexity of the relationships goes so much further below surface level than your typical supernatural teen action dramedy, for example Jentry and Kit

it's not just Jentry is initially afraid of Kit because he's actually a hideous monster but learns to love him in the end for who he truly is, Jentry, while admittedly initially shocked by his true appearance, makes it clear why she's really upset with him

it's not just because he was a demon or even just because he lied about being a demon, it's not just because he has killed people in the past, it's not even just because he is several centuries older than her, she's upset because he manipulated her, used seduction to lure her in, planted the pearl that used her (partially) dead parents to draw her into a trap, and sought to kill her, and the reason he did all of this was for his personal desire to get his very own human soul

Jentry didn't believe Kit's feelings for her were genuine, and who could blame her? regardless of the fact that his feeling were, or at least eventually became real, he did seduce her and manipulate her for his own selfish ends

and Jentry even recognizes his eventual genuine desire to be with her as entirely self serving and sought out solely for his own happiness, but in the end Jentry's rejection pushes Kit towards self reflection and growth and he realizes his own selfishness, and then he proves that he is capable of putting others first, by sacrificing his life for hers without anything to gain, a sacrifice made all the more meaningful by his permanent (tentatively) status as dead, especially in a show where ghosts and undead are common place

I have so much more to say about the relationships, and not just romantic ones, I could go on forever, but I'll just stick with the example of Jentry and Kit for now

the animation is beautiful and the color pallet is gorgeous, the music is great and could not be better suited to the show, a lot of passion was clearly put into the making of this show

though my favorite part may be the show's willingness to explore the darker horror-oriented side of Chinese folklore

the painted skin demon story, the actual torture of Diyu, the unheard nü gui, the gruesome deaths, Cheng's daughter's desperate want to return to the afterlife, the content can be a bit harrowing to say the least

while still maintaining a largely PG image, the show manages to put a good bit of horror into the story, but by far the most harrowing parts of the world of Jentry Chau vs the Underworld are the real world themes that it portrays

Jentry is surrounded by people that claim to love her and want to protect her, but many characters, whether on purpose or by accident, end up using Jentry for her powers to their own gain

she was cursed with a destructive power that she cannot control, a power that she does not understand, and she has no idea how or why, but everyone seems to want these powers except for her

in a break from the genre standard, whereas the chosen one teenager might have to hide their abilities and responsibilities to keep others safe, pretty much everyone knows about Jentry's predicament right off the bat, and better yet most of them have already formulated their own misconceptions and prejudices

if you thought it was hard fitting in while trying to hide your darkest secrets, imagine how hard it is to be accepted when everyone not only already knows your secrets, but has been given ample reason to fear you because of them

it suddenly makes more sense than ever why so many chosen one teens hide their peculiarities, it is truly a frightening prospect to exist in a world where everyone around you is both different from you, and keenly aware that you are different from them, there's no fitting in after that

it presents a metaphorical dramatization of a real world experience, something I myself have experienced, growing up in America when nobody else looks like you

I grew up in an almost completely white town, and there was no way of hiding the fact that I wasn't also white, though I was really lucky to live somewhere where racism was much less common place, or at the very least less overt than it is in many parts of the country, a lack of racism didn't mean I wasn't different

Jentry goes to a school that seems fairly diverse, though still mostly white, with many other kids who also aren't white, but race isn't what makes her stand out, it's something else that she was (allegedly) born with, something she (seemingly) has no control over, and something for which she is faced with prejudice much like race, though she later discovers that she can actually change and control these things, that's not how it starts

okay this is getting way too long so I'm gonna rap it up here, but I am hardly finished speaking on the topic, if you claim to have made this far into my rambling I will simply call you a liar, but if there are two things to take away from this mess, it's this:

a - I am desperately hoping for a second season

b - GO WATCH THE FUCKING SHOW

[mentauxx]

⚠️ Spoilers for Shinrei tantei Yakumo volume 11 - file 01 ⚠️

Part 1 starts with the first victim of the four supernatural phenomena/the nasty things that'll be occuring later on in this book.

Rereading this really makes me appreciate how good Kaminaga-sensei is at building up the tension and picking your curiosity.

Especially in this form since one chapter is translated per month (or two I think (?))

Waiting every two months for a chapter is WAY better than reading the whole thing in one sitting if you ask me.

The emptiness I felt after reading this in 2019 and that major cliff hanger was just too much to handle.

Part 2 jumps to Yakumo's POV A.K.A the best POV of the series.

Now I have a lot to say on this one, so I'll be making a separate post later.

But, omg the way he smiled just thinking about her? Boy is the standard FR

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3

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It's good to see Gotou doing well after his accident in volume 10. I do wonder how he'll handle the events that are about to occur in this volume tho.

The hug between Gotou and Nao is just too precious, and the fact that Atsuko referred to him as dad. Blood relation? Who needs that?

Unfortunately, Eishin just HAD to end his momentary happiness.

He'll never escape Eishin. Not even in Shin • Yakumo haha.

“I never wanted that”

This sure reminds me of when Ayaka was begging Kinoshita to “Stop already”.

Eishin is so unserious lmao.

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4

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Love the Ishii and Miyagawa duo. Ngl I do miss when Gotou and Ishii used to investigate together, but this duo isn't bad either.

You can tell Miyagawa's respect for Ishii definitely increased, ESPECIALLY since volume 9.

The head poke is so funny. Gotou could NEVER.

I don't blame Ishii for being scared. Not even one bit.

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5

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Yaharu my beloveds~

I'm definitely making a another separate post about the drastic changes in their relationship.

But for now I'll try to focus on the plot.

If I gained enough credits and landed my dream job MONTHS before I graduate, you won't stop hearing me brag about it.

Lol Haruka acting like a proud mother when Yakumo told her HE was the one picking up trouble this time.

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6

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I love how it said This box shouldn't be opened and then they proceeded to open it lol

I mean, I would've done the same 😂

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7

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STOP THE WAY HE PUTS HIS HAND ON HER HEAD

Mission: Stop putting your hand on Haruka's head.

Difficulty level: impossible

”Spread… what are you saying?”

Oh my god Yakumo 😂

The way Haruka finds Yakumo's glare adorable is just so cute.

“What a boring era.”

Lol

-

8

-

The Kumakichi joke will NEVER get old.

So Sana is a high schooler, huh.

I don't know why I imagined her a middle schooler while reading the prologue.

Maybe because the ghost she saw was a middle schooler I guess?

I feel bad Like how tf do you expect a human being to stay sane when a drenched ghost is approaching them every day?

Gotou and Ishii bumping into each other is hilarious.

-

9

-

Do NOT listen to her. It won't end pretty for you.

I understand why he would tho. Humans will cling to their last hope even if their brains scream that it's a bad idea.

-

10

-

I just LOVE the friendship between Haruka and Makoto, and them having girls talk in front of Yakumo is just hilarious.

Haruka offered her seat and sat next to Yakumo. Happened many times. Will I stop screaming about it? No.

Haruka, Yakumo, and Makoto trio? I support.

-

11

-

Oh, fun fact: Meisei university is actually a real university.

Nooo Yakumo are you ok? I hope he doesn't experience what happened in Aokigahara's sea of trees again :(

I love how we're learning more about ghosts in this volume.

“Stop it. Don’t you dare go and confirm it even if unintentionally.”

There's a limit to how wholesome a couple be, is Kaminaga-sensei perhaps not aware of this?

THE HEAD PAT Y'ALL

Makoto is so me lol

When I first read this volume in 2019 I didn't find it odd that Yakumo made up a lie and tricked the student affairs to get a key to the warehouse, but now that I'm rereading it, will Mizukawa REALLY believe that Yakumo decided to help out voluntarily just like that? Not to mention that Mizukawa isn't the only student affairs member Yakumo was involved with.

I wonder if this little detail will change in the complete version?

-

12

-

Keiko did point that out before to which Haruka replied that she “doesn't understand how someone can act spoiled in front of the person they like.” I relate so bad.

Yakumo supporting Haruka when she was about to fall is so cute.

Human experimentation? Are you kidding me rn?

The chapter ends with them discovering Unkai's corpse. I think I'm starting to understand the direction Kaminaga-sensei is going for. I've ALWAYS been interested in the circumstances regarding Unkai's death.

Overall, an excellent intro to the tragic incident that shocked Japan.

[randal-pink-floyd]

for the first actual post on this blog, i think i'm going to talk about how some of the actors' experience (or lackthereof) added to their characters! this is all coming from my memory of Making Dazed (2005) as well as my own interpretation of the movie/characters. feel free to add to the post or send an ask or message me any thoughts you have about this! i could probably talk about dazed forever (hence why i made this blog!)

so starting with tony. anthony rapp was one of the only actors they cast that had any solid acting experience before Dazed*(sidenote about this under the cut). he came to set with his lines memorized, and it Shows. there were some times i found it a tad distracting, but that was mostly because i pick up on mannerisms really easily and i'm pretty familiar with rent (which, iirc, was pretty recent after dazed, so it makes sense there were similarities in both of his character's speech patterns).

anyway, i think it totally makes sense for tony as a character. he's one of the "intellectuals," he's a little awkward, he isn't comfortable at parties, and he speaks more eloquently/uses less slang than most of the other characters. it makes perfect sense that tony would speak as if he was reading from a script/had his lines memorized. i could totally picture tony like standing in front of a mirror and practicing what to say, you know?

then, there's mitch. absolutely no shade intended, love wiley wiggins, but the Nose Pinch. i gotta bring up the nose pinch (later) but looking at it purely from a casting stand-point, it makes so much sense to cast an actor with little-to-no experience as mitch. not only because they were already casting lesser-known actors from Austin , but because mitch is SUPPOSED to be awkward.

mitch is the epitome of the nervous up-coming freshman that just wants to fit in and look cool. throughout the movie, we see how mitch acts around older people he wants to impress, but not so much how he acts when he's alone. he's just absolutely fumbling his way through the night and it's funny, but it's also so earnest and it's honestly one of my favorite parts of the movie. (the "like how?" scene, i mean come ON) but seriously.

there are plenty lines that back up mitch's awkwardness, but the Acting ChoicesTM are also so fitting. as anyone who's paid any attention to mitch during Dazed knows, he has a habit of grabbing his nose. like SO. MUCH. and i see it talked about a lot in a negative way and, like. listen. is it award-winning acting? not really. but AGAIN. it's so earnest and endearing and in character!!

the big times i remember mitch pinching his nose are actually not directly in front of any of the high schoolers, but mostly when he's with his friends his age. at the baseball field with carl, at the emporium with sabrina, and at the beer bust with julie. what i got from all these moments is that mitch doesn't only try to play it cool in front of pink and everybody, but also in front of his peers. (i could definitely explore that in a different post, but not tonight)

at the baseball field, the football players are watching from the stands, but i don't think mitch was over-acting for them, specifically. he actually tries to act cool in front of carl later, when he buys the six pack for melvin and acts all nonchalant when carl asks him what he's got in the bag. so we know that mitch tries to act cooler than he probably is, regardless of who he's around. very relatable, tbh, ESPECIALLY because he's not even in 9th grade yet LMAO

i would say mitch also wants to act cool in front of sabrina, especially because he's still at the emporium and pink is right behind him. iirc, the nose pinch happens when sabrina tells him hirschfelder got busted, so it's possible that that was his genuine reaction, but also is it really that surprising? he could very well be playing into the hazing, because he knows that if he plays it right, he can get in with the cool crowd like pink.

and he DEFINTELY wants to act cool in front of julie. his lines totally support this, but again i think wiley wiggins' mannerisms (mitch-isms, if you will-) come across with julie, too.

whether or not the nose pinch was intentional or a habit or whatever is obvious up to interpretation. but i guess all this is to say that you can pry wiley wiggins' nose pinch and anthony rapp's perfectly delivered lines out of my cold dead hands.

there's a couple additional thoughts/facts about casting under the cut if you're interested! thanks for reading and, again, please lmk of any thoughts you have! :)

*I've heard (from various sources) that one of the reasons they didn't cast well-known actors at the time, because they spent a good portion (I think like 1mil/6 million?) of the budget on the soundtrack alone. I've also heard McConaughey say it was because there was a lull in coming-of-age movies and so there weren't as many well-known teen actors at the time! I'm pretty sure he talks about that in the doc I linked at the top of the post, but lmk if I'm wrong!

I really like this choice, especially as someone who grew up during the MCU when actors started getting cast just because of their name. that's happened forever and ever and definitely didn't start with the MCU, but it's still super refreshing to have a cast comprised of (at the time) small actors that were devoted to the film and not the fame.

it just adds to the authenticity and makes it so easy to disappear into the snapshot of time that dazed captures. i won't ramble on for too much longer and there are already youtube videos that say pretty much the same thing, but i just feel like Dazed shows its characters through a window and we can only see the parts in front of the window, but if we look hard enough we can see a little bit more. but i just work here.

if you read this far, im kissing you on the lips

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

eleven weeks down, four to go… i am Really Feeling It ngl… but we are in fact in the home stretch and i will in fact make it through and then i will take twelve days allll the way off and it will rule. december historically has involved a pretty rapid winnowing of my schedule but this year i have a bunch of lil perfectionists who have pushed their test dates to right before winter break, including one who is switching to twice a week for this month -__- also not sure what’s going to be happening with my two high schoolers, one of whom will nearly definitely be retesting and the other of whom may or may not be…. but on the bright side the kid who truly nailed it is in fact no longer retaking (or pooooossibly retaking with minimal additional prep) because of other advice they’ve received. lol. (the mom asked me about my experience with retakes for kids in his position and i was like “tbh i’ve literally never had a kid do this well and choose to retake” and she thanked me for my “unimpeachable integrity” which was very sweet lol.)

this week i came in at just under 37 hours, which was more than i planned largely because today i was between locations for a while and just chilled and hung out with a practice test. i’m not sure how i feel about 35 hours as a more long term goal (it feels like it shouldn’t be an amount that makes it feel hard to do anything else, but that is how i felt this week…), which is a thing i’m contemplating because of various goals i have relating to continuing to digitize everything and making more short drill sets because i have a pathology about feeling like if i can imagine that something would be helpful to students i feel bad not doing it, but i feel like it feels doable for these four weeks where i don’t have a ton of mental energy anyway, and where also i’m now close enough to the end that i can actually wrap my brain around, like, ok, 3 more upper level tests, 3 more lower level, 3.5 more ACTs, such and such number of workbook pages/chapters…. etc. but i’m gonna try again not to stress out about it in general but especially this week because (1) i don’t have big thanksgiving plans but i do have family plans and i do want to at least spend the day relaxing and (2) i do in fact have another cold i am hoping to rest off in the next day or so. the last one retreated to just some post nasal drip very quickly!!!

i got four workouts in this week (+ my Steps) largely because i was so sore i needed an extra rest day and after actually SLEEPING OKAY last night i woke up the day after a pretty tough full body workout with minimal soreness! further data points re cottage cheese snooze helper. very upset that i likely need to wait on gathering more data because i am prooobably not going to be up to HIIT day tomorrow (although thus far this cold, like its predecessor, is Quite Mild, knock wood…). i am downing zinc and emergen-c as permitted and in accordance with my cold rituals which i think are scientifically valid because even if the concoctions are fake science the placebo effect is very well attested to in the literature. (do you know about zinc in the early stages of a cold to make it less bad? i got this tip from a first grade teacher i associate taught for and i swear it works. if you know science explaining it doesn’t please do NOT tell me and let my immune system continue reaping the benefits of my delusion this is the one thing on which i do NOT wish to be fact checked 🙏🏼)

today i woke up, did work, tutored, did more work chilling in a salad place, got dinner at a french restaurant with v. good salmon (i say like i know anything about fine dining beyond “i like salmon”), agreed to a reschedule of the sunday night zoom session, & watched the first half of gladiator because i’ve seen approximately 700 people on the internet this week say something to the effect of “gladiator ii really makes you appreciate russell crowe” (he is so far great as promised playing a guy literally named Best Guy). one month left! technically less! i will in fact have a day off this week although i will also need to spend some of it working a bit! onwards! (to bed)

[theriu]

River Reads Midnight Sun

Well met, traveler! This is the starting post for my experiment, wherein I, who have never read the Twilight books or seen the movies, read Midnight Sun (basically Twilight from Edward's perspective) and commentate for (hopefully) your entertainment! I decided it would be easiest to do this a chapter at a time, and my commentary will essentially be a summary of each chapter so people equally unfamiliar with the story can follow along. You can follow or block this experiment with the tag #river reads midnight sun.

I think that should do it! Let's get started with:

Chapter 1: First Sight

In which Edward finds high schoolers very Boring and Inane, and also nearly goes bonkers over a potential snack.

First things first: Can we talk about how gross pomegranates look? Is the cover art SUPPOSED to resemble an optical illusion between a halved pomegranate and a bleeding heart? Either way, EW.

Right, on to business!

Edward is bored, you guys. He is SO BORED. High school is so boring. Purgatory is mentioned, as well as “tedium” and “monotonous.” He really wants us to know how bored he is, even though the word “boredom” is not used until the sixth paragraph. But trust me, he’s very bored. One begins to wonder why the immortal 100+-year-old vampire is choosing to hang out daily in such a boring place, but I’m sure it will be explained.

Now we learn about his mindreading powers! This is also very boring because most of the minds he has to read are petty high school minds. By the way, the inane sheeple chatter in the school mindscape today is all about the new girl! I wonder who she could be! Ed sure doesn’t care! He can see every angle of her face via peoples’ thoughts, and he is NOT impressed. Half the “sheep-like males” are crushing on her. Edward’s disdain for them is palpable, almost as if it's not totally normal and fine for human teenagers to find new things like a new student exciting. We may be witnessing a smidge of superiority complex, which is shocking, no doubt.

Mind-reading as a way to introduce other relevant characters is handy, I will grant the author that! Of course, Ed tries not to mindread his fellow vampires out of courtesy, but he KNOWS what they are probably thinking, and boy is he ready to tell us!

Rosalie: Is either actually super hot or super thinks she is, and apparently this debate encompasses her every waking moment. She only compares herself to VAMPIRES, of course, because humans could never be comparably hot. Related to a stagnant pool. Wow, Ed.

Emmett: Hyper competitive guy who has no new thoughts because he says EVERYTHING he thinks. Compared to a glass-clear lake. I suppose that means Ed maybe thinks he has depth? Maybe? We'll err on the side of optimism.

Jasper: Suffering. That’s literally the entire description.

Alice (who can see the future) introduces herself by beaming thoughts at Ed asking how Jasper is doing. Jasper is not doing well. Apparently he is so ready to eat people that he has forgotten how to Human and is sitting in a corpse-like rigor, because it seems when you become a vampire you lose quirks like restless leg syndrome and blinking? This feels full of potential hilarity to me, but I fear such hilarity will not be realized in this Very Serious Book.

Anyway, back to Jasper, who is SUFFERING. Alice asks if there is any danger. Edward signals no. Half a page later, his exposition about Jasper's problem adds, “Jasper was very dangerous right now." Okay, so which is it?! PICK A LANE, ED

(On a genuine note, I already like Alice; she counters Jasper’s fantasies about eating a girl by telling him her name and a few personal facts in a way that shows Alice makes an effort to know her classmates as more than just The Humans. Yay empathy!)

Btw, Ed’s internal monologue indicates they’re hanging out at this school to build their strength and endurance by being around humans and not eating them, and to that I say REALLY??? You chose high school for that?! The one where you’re SUPER BORED?? GO HANG OUT AT A COFFEE SHOP OR SOMETHING

Ope, plot progression! Bella has entered the chat lunchroom. Literally everyone is thinking about Bella, including Jessica, no doubt the requisite catty high school rival who crushed on Edward previously. She has many disgruntled thoughts about Bella, Bella noticing the Cullens, everyone noticing Bella, etc. Ed, who has been doing a great job keeping us up to date on the general thought processes of the student body, takes this moment to assure us once again how much he finds all of this chatter inane AND petty AND trivial, and he’s definitely going to try harder to block them out (again).

Wait, oh my word, was that a line of HUMOROUS BANTER between the Cullens just now?! I have renewed hope for this Very Serious Book!

So Edward is the vampires' mental scout who checks for people suspecting he and his family are inhumanly weird (as opposed to acceptably weird), and naturally he does a brain scan on Bella. Oooo but he’s not hearing anything! And now they have locked eyes! Her eyes are very odd, because of the DEPTH of them! Already, Bella is very Frail and immune to mindreading and somehow has “deeper” eyes than I guess any other human Edward has met in his 100+ years? Ed, I think you need to make eye contact more.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled torrent of inane high schooler thoughts! Amazingly, they are all still focused on Bella and being attracted to or jealous of her, because of course real high schoolers are all Inane and Tedious. (The one exception is Angela, who is busy thinking about homework. I like her, she seems normal.) Jessica is being catty again, and what’s this?! Ed suddenly has this STRANGE URGE to SHIELD Bella from this nasty girl! How very odd and unusual! Especially from a guy who very clearly finds all human teenagers Inane/Petty/Trivial! Bella must be special, except she is also “very unexceptional." Also, Ed is highly frustrated that he can’t read this girl’s mind, despite him constantly reading her like a book and her having “deceptively communicative” eyes.

Rosalie breaks Ed out of his frustration-driven contradictory spiral, and they all go to class, Ed casually mentioning his two medical degrees in an internal dig at his biology teacher (again, why are you hanging out at high school???) Naturally, Bella shows up and the only seat available is the one next to Edward, because Plot everyone is subliminally terrified of him. Ed has a moment of panic wondering if not hearing one girl’s thoughts means he has a vampire disease and is gonna lose all his mindreading, and then he has another moment of empathy for Bella having to sit next to the Scary Vampire.

Then she walks in front of an air duct, and Edward is suddenly overcome with INTENSE BLOODLUST THE LIKES OF WHICH HE HAS NEVER EXPERIENCED BEFORE!!! He wants to eat her SO BAD, you guys! He spends roughly EIGHT PAGES brooding on how badly he wants to eat her, noticing how delicious she smells, crushing the underside of a desk with his intense self-control grip (but having the presence of mind to “destroy the evidence” by rounding out the finger-shaped hole he just made), analyzing the logistics of eliminating a roomful of witnesses and whether to do so before or after eating her, seeing his monstrous reflection in her eyeballs, angsting over how bad he will feel when he murders a bunch of people, plotting ways of murdering her that WON’T result in collateral damage, questioning Bella’s sanity for daring to SHAKE HER HAIR IN HIS VICINITY, angsting about how disappointed his wonderful adoptive dad Carlisle will be (aww, that’s actually sweet), stubbornly deciding “she can’t make me,” hating Bella with the fury of a thousand suns for daring to smell so delicious, and shutting off his breathing so he has at least some self-control, which does sound uncomfortable but I applaud the effort.

Then class finally ends (for him and for us), and he goes and hides in his car. Which, honestly, relatable.

The car timeout helps restore his sanity, and he determines he does in fact not need to kill her and that hating her guts for smelling like an eight-course dinner probably isn’t fair! He just needs to avoid her as much as possible. Bless your heart for your optimism, Male Lead of a Paranormal Romance Novel.

The solution he comes up with is to charm the poor secretary (who keeps having to remind herself mentally that he’s too young for her, which, augh) into switching him to a different sixth-period course. Bella chooses this opportune moment to walk in, which he doesn’t notice until her DELICIOUS SMELL is blown over him (I question why someone with such advanced senses can only notice powerful smells when he is downwind of them). Edward’s Amazing Vampire Vision kicks in, allowing him to once again see his Monstrous Face in the reflection of her eyes, despite her being over against the wall. He briefly contemplates double homicide, then . . . uh . . . gives up on changing classes so he can walk away. This doesn’t feel like a long-term solution, Ed, but Kudos for the self-control.

The chapter wraps up with him jumping into his car (it’s the end of the day, so the others are waiting for him) and breaking the speed limit out of the parking lot. Alice uses Future Sight (it’s super effective!) to see that Ed is either going to book it out of Forks (the town) or go and murder Bella in her house. I once again have reason to like Alice, who orders him not to do it, adding that it would metaphorically kill Bella’s dad. He drops them off and races away again, not yet sure if he’s going to tell Dad Carlisle that he’s leaving or going to go eat the delicious new girl. And Scene!

Well, that wasn’t as painful as I feared, so huzzah! I kind of appreciate the internal look at his thoughts and how his mindreading lets us see other characters even when they can’t talk. Got a bit long at times, especially with how Inane and Petty and Trivial high schoolers are to Edward! LOTS OF DETAIL about how badly he wanted to eat Bella and possibly murder all bystanders, which I guess does go to show how bad the bloodlust is, because dang! (But why do none of the others have this reaction to her yet? Maybe they just don’t have classes with her. You must be this close to the Bella to ride the maniac vampire train!)

And with that, I have earned a much-deserved break before delving into CHAPTER TWO: OPEN BOOK! I’m sure Edward will totally succeed in his plan to skedaddle out of Forks and never see Bella again! Stay positive, Ed! =Dd

Chapter 2->

[our-transgender-experiences]

Hi Alex. Is it ok to vent a little bit a lot? It's completely fine if you don't post any response, I completely understand. This is a HUGE experience prompt to respond to.

I was birthed with the male sex (he/him) so you can call me that.

Over the past year and two months, I've been feeling just a little off. I keep a journal, and have since before that moment, so I have my experience written down carefully. In short form, I don't know who I am. In a longer form, I'm a weird, cringey high schooler who doesn't know who they are, who wears a galaxy backpack to school, who is agnostic (Christian, but can't prove it right or wrong), aromantic, and asexual. My experience isn't special by any means, in fact, I think I fit literally every queer stereotype known to mankind? Here's the best part: I live in Oklahoma, the famous place of Nex Benedict's horrific death.

About a month ago, I saw "Celeste" in a YouTube video about some of the hardest, but most enjoyable, games of all time. I looked it over, it's on sale for $5, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford that. So I got it and finished it within 3 days. I instantly recommended it to my brother, who also happens to be a little queer. He loved it too, but I STILL didn't know the backstory behind that game. Then, I saw the video. It was an amazing reading of Celeste, down to every minor detail of the game. One thing that stood out, was the fact that the both the creator, and the protagonist, were trans women. Even better: it was known for being a wonderful story of the trans experience, and I RELATED TO IT. EVEN BETTER: I had now recommended it to practically my entire friend group, including some incredibly religious people. So what was I gonna do about it? Not care, and continue onto the B-sides.

I want to say 5 days ago was when it really kicked in that "wait a minute, I related to Madeline in a very deep way, and she's a trans..." Now this is the climax, get ready. Because I had been journaling for so long, I had already written about my experience since those early days where I had that so-called dysphoria. And after I realized that could be because I'm trans, I immediately asked my parents what my girl names were before I was born. (doctors didn't know my sex until about two weeks before I was due) "Eden" is a pretty cool name, I guess I'll try it. I walk into my dad's office (works from home) that same day after school, and he immediately turns to me and asks: "So why did you need to know your girl names?" I immediately respond with "... idk?" Very convincing, well done. I text him after I flee to my room, "I'm experimenting, don't take that too seriously" He understands, and I'm at peace. Mom also takes it well, and we're good to actually begin the experiments I was "planning".

First up, change the online bios, like Discord. See how it actually looks on me. AAAAND my best friend sees it within a few hours. Not even prompted, we were talking, playing rocket league, and he just "hey why's your bio say you're experimenting with 'Eden' as your new name?" Explained, but he was in a weird spot. "I'm happy and will support you with whatever you **choose**." Key word there, I'm not choosing anything. I'm actually going with the flow so much more than he could imagine. But okay, we've got a pretty good ally on our side! Going great.

Except here comes "Part of Me" with the anxiety of what could happen, why I shouldn't do anything different around peers, and more importantly why I shouldn't experiment with myself. And to be honest, I believe that part of me. There's so many questions that I ask like "but what if it's all for attention?" or "but you always acted like a boy, why are you changing now? or "maybe the other Christians were right. you are a sinner after all, you're a bad person and you DO deserve to die." You know those.

And with those come the questioning part of it. Am I ACTUALLY just doing what I'm doing for attention? Like I said, I'm a high schooler. I'm a future aerospace engineer for SpaceX, I love computers, and I have top 1% test scores as a sophomore. I'm doing good with school, but that's exactly why I basically have one friend who is also up there with me. I'm not here to brag, I'm here to show that I don't get a lot of attention at school, it's basically all family members who care about me. So again, am I just trying this for attention? I don't think so, but that seems like what my brain would want me to say.

And to be honest, I needed this. I vent every day, but to nobody except Google advertisement algorithms out of Google Docs (my journal). I vent and cry into empty space, but maybe this is finally not just to my phone. This is to another human who I think has had a close experience to mine.

And of course I'm not going to ask you "who am I, who do I like, and what's my gender?" But I am going to ask you one thing: What's your take? I mean this is the trans experiences blog, but I'm not sure if I am a trans. I figured this was the best place to get a good use out of my time. Thank you so much for letting people like me do this, it seriously means a lot.

i'm glad that you feel that this is a space where you can comfortably talk about your experience, and question your gender. My advice, is to keep experimenting,and see where it takes you find out what you're comfortable with, it might take time, and it might change. It took me a while to get to where i am now, and even now i'm not 100% sure. i tried different labels that felt right at the time, but they changed later, and thats okay.

[uncloseted]

omg please talk about taylor swift!! (i am scared)

Anonymous asked:

„Taylor Swift's public image and why Midnights was a bad idea“ interesting! can you elaborate? i‘d like to know more of your thoughts on this :)

I love that of all of the things I listed, this is what people wanted to hear more about. I feel like I should start by saying that I'm not a Swiftie and so this really isn't a commentary on her music or anything, so please don't come for me 😅 I feel like I should also say that I know there's some Taylor Swift cultural critic out there who's talked about this in way more depth and detail than I ever could, but I've always been fascinated by the way that Taylor Swift has navigated the concept of relatability when it comes to her public image.

Initially when she came onto the scene during the Taylor Swift and Fearless eras, I think what people liked about her was that she was relatable. Her vibe during that time was very "I'm an unpopular girl at high school who just wants to be popular/who wants boys to like me/who's being bullied by the popular girls," and I think a lot of people who were in that same situation really resonated with those narratives. "You Belong With Me", where she complains about her crush liking the "cheer captain" while she's "on the bleachers" and "The Best Day", which was inspired by being bullied in middle school, are both examples of that kind of writing for me. In that era, Taylor was really representing herself as the underdog, and at the time, it felt very relatable, authentic, and true.

But after Fearless, that narrative of a relatable underdog kind of started to run into a problem, right? When your album spends 11 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 charts, it's kind of hard to convince people that you're an underdog who nobody likes, and so you run the risk of alienating your audience. She even got called out for doing this - in 2009, a Rolling Stone article said that her “emotional state seems to be stuck when she left school [at 16]”. The Kanye West VMAs thing kind of ameliorated this problem for a while, because it gave her a lot of public sympathy and really cemented this narrative that she's an underdog even when she's on top. When he took away her microphone at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, she could transition her public image from being an unpopular girl in school to being the victim.  Everyone can relate to a victim, since we’ve all felt victimized at one point or another in our own lives.  This event was arguably what made her a bona fide celebrity, and also what made her marketable to a wider audience.  Now she didn’t have to have “high school girl” as part of her image; she could be relatable to both her high schooler fans and older fans in their 20s and 30s. 

I think that narrative continued into the Speak Now era, which deals a lot with the difficulties of suddenly becoming a public figure and the victimization that comes with that. It's an album that's very confessional and written in kind of a diary entry way, and so it allowed listeners to project their own life stories and experiences on top of hers, and it stayed relatively relatable because of it. Sure, "Dear John" is about John Mayer and "Mean" is about a music critic and "Innocent" is about the Kanye West VMAs thing, but they could just as easily be about your terrible ex-boyfriend from high school or a girl who bullied you in high school or whatever. At the same time, I think this is the first album of hers that really invited speculation about the "truth" of these songs - who they're about and what moments inspired them. It kind of threads this needle between being relatable, casting her as an underdog, and being aware of her role as a celebrity all at the same time.

By the time Red came out, though, I think she knew that if she kept pushing this victim image, it would start to feel inauthentic because she was such a big celebrity. I think she was seeing what happened to people like Anne Hathaway, where the public turned on them for seeming inauthentic or like they were trying too hard, and she wanted to prevent that from happening. She knew it was clear that she wasn't unpopular or a high schooler or really even a victim anymore, but at the same time, she kind of had to appeal to her fans that were still unpopular high schoolers or victims of something.

So around the time Red debuted, she made this really interesting pivot to her "girl squad" era. Part of that was, I think, this desire to stop being seen as boy crazy - as she said about that time, "if I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn't sensationalize or sexualize that right?” And I think part of it was that after Speak Now, she was perceived as "not a girl's girl", so she was trying to fix that narrative. She wasn't the vengeful, boy crazy, control-freak kid she used to be portrayed as, she in on the joke. She could mock her public perception in songs like “Blank Space” and “Shake it Off”, and, in that way, mask whatever truth there was to those allegations. And at the same time, she turned those allegations into an issue of feminism- that she should be allowed to live her life as a typical young woman would, without the public speculating on her love life- even though she invited the public in to begin with. In order for her music to be successful, one kind of has to think about her private life. Because of the confessional nature of her songwriting, she could never not be a public figure. She had to be a public figure who was “about” something else - in this case, she became "about" female friendship.

But I think the biggest part of it is that having a "girl squad" allowed her to change the underdog narrative she had written for herself. Instead of being a "serial dater" she became a "serial befriender". She now had a clique of beautiful female friends in a way that felt kind of similar to the popular girls at your high school, and she was the prettiest and the most popular and the one in charge. But instead of being a mean, exclusive clique, her "squad" really pushed this parasocial idea that if you met them in real life, you'd be welcomed into the squad, too. This move allowed her to acknowledge her position of popularity while also being relatable (since most people know what it's like to have close friends), and aspirational ("I'm an unpopular girl in high school, but so was Taylor Swift and look at her now" combined with "if I just met Taylor, we would totally be friends"). The "squad" humanized her and made her seem like just another girl you might know. Sure, all of her friends are famous, but they have sleepovers and bake cookies just like us!

Around this time, she also starts leaning hard into other ways of fostering parasocial relationships between herself and her fans. She was super active on social media around this time, which was still kind of novel for celebrities to do. And in 2014, she did the first "secret session", inviting 89 fans to her actual, literal home to listen to 1989 before it was released. Again, to me this feels like the dynamic of archetypal popular girl at school inviting you over to her house and then finding out she's actually super nice. Like she said at her East Rutherford, New Jersey concert in July of 2015, it’s easy to be Taylor’s friend- the only two criteria are that “you have to like me, and you have to want to spend time with me”. So there's this promise of, if you're just a super dedicated fan, if you're into Taylor's music enough, you could be invited into her secret circle. You could be treated like one of her friends. She'll hug you when you tell her about your mother's battle with cancer or reach out to you when you post on Tumblr about your struggles with infertility- she's just that kind of girl. She'll show up unannounced at your house to give you presents because she cares about you that much. One of the people that attended the first set of secret sessions, Stephanie, said that, “people often ask how we didn’t faint, but the truth is she acted and treated everyone as she would a friend," and I think that's exactly what it is. She's treating everyone like the popular friend you wished you had in high school who brings you into her cool, fun world.

At this point, I want to take a second to say that I think a lot of this was genuine. For her part, Taylor has said that her lack of female friendships in high school is why her female friendships are so important to her as an adult. I think she really, genuinely did want to interact with her fans and do something special for them. I'm not trying to knock her or say that I think she was being manipulative or anything. I'm just saying that, intentional or not, all of this was a brilliant move for her public image because it allowed her to be more transparent about the unrelatable aspects of her life while still pushing this idea that she is, fundamentally, a girl just like you. It's relatable and asporational all at once - a difficult tightrope to walk, and one that Taylor has done incredibly well.

This is getting kind of long (I really wasn't kidding when I said I could yap about this forever) so I'll try to speed it up, but basically, this whole thing eventually crashed and burned on her. Lena Dunham started talking about how uncomfortable "the squad" made her, the New York Post accused the Squad of being a cult, Gawker published a piece called “Taylor Swift is Not Your Friend”, and Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear accused Taylor of having stringent rules for her “Squad”, including not speaking to her unless they were spoken to, a strict dress code that they had to follow, and being willing to defend Taylor in the public eye. During this time, Taylor made a few public attempts at playing the victim card, such as when she said that “there's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women," in response to a joke at the 2013 Golden Globes, and people weren't really having it. It seemed like she was over-reacting to something small, and I think people found it annoying.

Finally in early 2016 the Kanye West "Famous" thing added fuel to the fire and blew her whole thing up. There's simultaneously a lot to say about this and nothing to say about this. Taylor again tried to adopt the narrative of victimhood to save her public image, which seemed like it would have been a slam dunk for her because he was the person who victimized her in the first place way back at the VMAs, but it just didn't really take. Taylor tried to turn it into a girl-power moment at the Grammys, by encouraging young women to believe in themselves even as people "try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame." Later that year, in June, Kim Kardashian alleged that she had recordings to prove that Taylor signed off on the line, and in July, an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians verifies that Taylor did, in fact, sign off on the lyric. Again, she tries to make it a girl-power moment by saying, “You don't get to control someone's emotional response to being called 'that bitch' in front of the entire world.” When that didn’t work, she once again reverted to the “victim” role- “Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination. I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009." She would very much like to be excluded from this narrative… but it’s one she had written for herself.

That said, I think that the backlash she recieved would have happened with or without Kanye's lyrics. In the words of Jameela Jamil (broken clocks, etc.), "she's a woman in an industry whose favorite thing is to build up women to an expectation they can’t meet, hyperbolize how great she is so that other people get annoyed with her and deem her “overrated”, hyper-expose her so people become sick of seeing her face and hearing about her drama, and then take her down." I don't think it was really about how she handled the Kanye West thing so much as I think people just felt like she was overexposed and annoying and needed to be cut down to size. That said, I do think that some of what people were reacting to in that moment was the breakdown of her relatable persona. They started to realize that nobody can get to that level of fame and success as a young woman, especially as (relatively) unscathed as she has been, by being nice to everyone all the time.  Sometimes people have to abandon being genuine and being relatable in favor of playing the game, and I think it was starting to become obvious to people that there were times when she was making the decision to do that.

When it was revealed that she did sign off on "Famous", it became clear for a lot of people that Taylor Swift was not just a talented, friendly, girl next door who got lucky. She wasn’t unusually relatable or genuine. She’s someone that was very much in control of her image and her career, who was competitive, and who wanted to ensure her longevity in the music industry. And that meant not always being nice or truthful. The cracks in her image were starting to show, and that's the worst place to be for a female performer of any kind. Taylor has always known what she’s doing- she’s always been a shrewd businesswoman who intimately understands how the public sees her and adjusts her behavior accordingly. But now the secret was out for good- Taylor Swift is “calculating”. So she had to find a way to brand herself that didn’t include being a girl next door, or being genuine, relatable, honest, or nice, and she had to do it on the back of being very publicly cancelled by millions of people. Her only move was to attempt to own it, and so that's what she did.

Reputation came out about a year after the Taylor/Kanye debacle. It was Taylor’s attempt to reclaim the narrative she once wanted to be excluded from by making an album that paints her as the villain. She knew at that point that her private life couldn’t be separated from her public persona, and so she played with it. The persona that got developed for Reputation, both on the album and in her public life, attempted to be cool, jaded, and detached. "I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now…she’s dead,” she says, solidifying how we were meant to understand this new phase. If the media was going to paint her as “bad”, she was going to be the most perfect bad girl she can be. She reclaimed the assertion that she’s fake, that she’s a snake, that she’s petty. Ultimately, it wasn't a super successful persona, because it just didn't feel genuine. While she may be calculating or a perfectionist, she’s never been a manipulative seductress or a crazy, revenge obsessed ex-girlfriend.

After that, a bunch of other stuff happened that didn't really seem to make much of an impact on her image either way. The Scooter Braun debacle happened, she was in Cats, and she released Lover, which felt more genuine and honest than Reputation. It kind of acknowledged that Taylor is at heart a romantic, someone who is fundamentally a light, bright person and who loves love. On Lover, it seems like she’s no longer answering to the media or the public (at least, not as much), and she let go of the defensive, guarded persona she put on for Reputation. Alongside the album, she released diary entries from her life, again acknowledging that her private life is intimately tied to her music. As Chuck Klosterman wrote in a 2015 interview, “Swift writes about her life so directly that the listener is forced to think about her persona in order to fully appreciate what she’s doing creatively. This is her greatest power: an ability to combine her art and her life so profoundly that both spheres become more interesting to everyone.”

And that's what I think was so brilliant about Folklore and Evermore, and brings me to the mistake I think she made with Midnights. So much of Taylor's career has been about her as a person - not just the music she puts out, but what she's wearing, how she's doing her hair, who she's dating, who she's friends with, the story she's telling us about the kind of person that she is. And as she saw with Reputation, that's not a sustainable approach to a career. The public can, and inevitably, will, get tired of celebrities and tear those celebrities down because they can. Folklore and Evermore freed her music from the shackles of her public and private lives and let the music stand on its own. She had finally, fully, literally, “removed herself from this narrative.” And in doing so, she could have solidified the future of her career. By writing about characters and imbuing them with the emotions of her personal experience instead of the literal events, she could have continued with the raw, emotion-driven lyrics that she’s known for while controlling how much of herself to give up in the process. As she gets older and her life calms down, as she no longer experiences breakups and messy feuds, as she maybe settles down and has more of a private life and wants kids, she could have still had something to write about by going down the path of writing about fictional characters instead. She could have abandoned having to curate her public image as closely as she's had to since she was 16.

But instead she released Midnights, which goes back to those super-confessional, autobiographical lyrics. It puts her back into the narrative and invites people to once again speculate on her personal life, which means that she needs to continue to curate how people view her and her work. That's not necessarily a bad thing from a business perspective - she's made more money from the Eras tour than ever before - but I don't know if it's great for her public image and I don't know if it's great for her. Obviously she can do whatever she wants forever, because she's Taylor Swift and she's obscenely wealthy. To me it feels like that level of public scrutiny that she invites about her life through her lyrics is both unsustainable in the long run. But it's also all she's really ever known, and I don't know if at this point she can let it go.

I don't really have a satisfying way to end this. I don't really have a lot of thoughts about The Tortured Poets Department or what it represents, and I don't really have a lot of opinions on her relationship with Travis Kelce other than it feels like she's really gone full circle on the whole "unpopular high schooler to popular girl dating the football player" trope. Mostly I'm just curious to see how this all continues to evolve.

[zalrb]

i literally just saw a tweet re: challengers that basically said that it’s kind of hard to achieve the type of eroticism and sensuality that movies like that are supposed to have without life experience and zendaya doesn’t have that yet. i think there’s merit to that argument because i feel like zendaya either gets these roles for these huge franchises where she’s just meant to be The Girl like in spider man and dune or she gets these roles that seem too mature for her??? not that she’s immature just that it seems obvious that these films are supposed to establish her grown woman era but are just edgy in the most toothless way possible? i really think she did a great job with rue and euphoria but her film career kinda confuses me.

I think there's merit to that argument but not in relation to the eroticism but in relation to elevating a character.

“I’ve been playing 16-year-olds since I was 16,” Zendaya said, having launched her career on Disney Channel before moving on to projects such as HBO’s “Euphoria” and the most recent “Spider-Man” franchise, both centering on high schoolers. “So it was nice to play a character that was not a child anymore. It was also interesting playing parts of my life that I haven’t experienced yet: I’ve not gotten married. I’ve not had a child. Those milestones, I don’t necessarily have a direct reference point for. That was different to feel. Ultimately, it felt like the right time for a character like this.”

And I get that, but also I don't think she really pulls this off. Because as I keep saying, Tashi was underwritten but in the hands of a more mature actress, she would've been imbued with a lot more emotional nuance which would've been illustrated her complexity more.

I'm just going to repost what I said about Malcolm and Marie:

That being said, there was a review that I think succinctly and accurately summarized my feelings about Zendaya’s acting in it:

Zendaya makes a worthwhile case study, a Disney kid turned Hollywood powerhouse on the come-up. After years of playing teenagers, she is transitioning to more wholly developed, adult roles. But while I mostly enjoy her quiet, mumbling heartbreak on Euphoria — the wild, glittering teen HBO drama Levinson also spearheads — Malcolm & Marie puts into an unforgiving spotlight her weaknesses. Her decisions are obvious enough to feel them coming on. A furrowed brow. Jutted chin. She smokes cigarettes like the parody of French actors you’d expect in a midcentury Looney Tunes sketch. There’s an air just before crucial lines like she’s clearing her throat before a big speech. She doesn’t carry the weight of real emotion and complication — whether she’s quietly crying, stripped down in a bath, or shouting obscenities.

So for a movie like this, micro expressions are everything and like, when I think of micro expressions I always go to Sonequa because she’s masterful at them

so like, something like this

vs something like this:

Sonequa’s quiver doesn’t feel like she’s putting on a quiver, it feels like she’s really trying to gather herself.

This pout is a little more petulant than intended

And this isn’t to suggest that she’s bad in the movie more that I think she’s still growing as an actress and she needs to do roles like this to get better and command the screen the way she needs to because it’s not that I didn’t see her try, it’s that I saw her try.

So I absolutely agree with the assessment that she's either The Girl in the movies or she's supposed to be in her Grown Woman Era (although frankly I thought she was written as The Woman in this movie as well) but for where she needed to be/go in the present day scenes, I watched it like you have presence but you don't have the gravitas necessary for this.

[emsytocine]

LOVE ATTACK BOOK CLUB, tonight's reading #1 : She wasn't a guy.

I'm so glad I could buy a copy when it just went out. I was looking forward to it! I first had an absolute crush on a mini chapter available on Sumiko Arai's twitter (X : agu_knzm), at that time I didn't know it was going to be published! Love a good surprise ✨

My honest review 💌 : Cool high schoolers, with an open minded way of thinking and a better way to communicate. I feel close to them in mentality which is a good point for the reading experience!

For sure, I absolutely had a blast reading the first volume. The characters are endearing and funny in their own way, I love the subtle details and the way each one of them has a little spotlight at some point. I'm not an highschool student anymore but I really appreciated (and related on a deeper level) the unstoppable youth questioning, feeling different or else) brought in a very light way.

For my first review, I have to introduce myself a bit: I'm a huge fan of romance, I have many romance tropes fighting for the first place in my heart but there's nothing quite like a slow burn mixed with a friends to lovers trope. I feel like the first volume is exactly that!

I can't wait to read more 🤩. If you are curious about it, please don't hesitate to give a try.

[velvetvexations]

Hell yeah late 90s and early 2000s kids things!! Literally cannot relate to older and younger people at all lmao. And the things we grew up with entering the Nostalgic Stuff™ makes me have mixed emotions nowadays haha

There's this Family Guy bit where they go to the Teen Choice Awards and the celebrities are people with names like Chad Chaddinson and Grace McLady and it's exactly how I feel learning about each new variation of the Brothers Paul.

It's funny because I almost politely disagreed with my things being kid's things in particular - there ARE kid's things I love from that era, some of which I think are spectacularly amazing - but then I remembered that teenagers are technically kids as well. It's funny that I want to be so much younger but the age range I identify with is also the one where you most want to be seen as an adult.

The idea of a teenager, regardless of the reality, is that it's all the fun of youth with much less of the drawbacks. It's probably no coincidence that the age I feel most specifically is 16, when you get you theoretically get your driver's license. There's a perceived balance. Also probably why I'm really interested in college life, which despite knowing the many plights of college students I still can't help but painfully weep at how I didn't get that experience, which is perceived as the fun of youth with practically none of the drawbacks.

None of it is rational or actually accurate. High schoolers and college students alike do not have it easy at all. But I had built up a perception of what being a teenager was like...it would have had to have been around when I was four.

I've been deeply obsessed with being a teenager since I was a toddler and just haven't stopped lol.

It adds to my fear of pedojacketing, which I had a really bad and damaging time with many years ago, because, like. Someone once said in all seriousness that me using slang from the 60s and 70s was trying to get close to The Youths, and someone who was older than me at one point claimed I "lost all interest" in them after they turned 18.

Anyway, my point is, it's even worse optics to go around talking about identifying with being a teen, so that's another reason I can get nervous sometimes being anywhere near minors, on the internet or IRL. But I've been making efforts to try not to let anxieties like that fuck me up, and talk about what I want while continuing to avoid minors.

[she-said-hello]

Honest question. Do you not feel a little weird engaging with Emma knowing she’s 18 (legal yes) but still have a year left in HS (assuming from her asks responses) and that you’re 24? I know we all have different perspectives but I’m 20 and I honestly can’t imagine myself talking or nevertheless be in a relationship with someone younger than me, let alone someone that’s still in HS 😬 I hope you’re not taking advantage… I’ve seen and read so many wlw relationships that have experiences like that and it’s heartbreaking… it’s about the maturity level too so idk

i've answered asks like this multiple times and it's been really difficult every time. seeing people explicitly accuse me of taking advantage of someone who i care so deeply about and who i have made sure to always treat fairly and as an equal to me is so disappointing. emma is an adult and capable of making decisions for herself. i can guarantee if she felt as if i were mistreating her or taking advantage of her, she wouldn't still be talking to me. i have never forced her or manipulated her into doing anything, she has made all of her own decisions and judgments about me on her own.

if you had asked me before i met emma if i would prefer/choose to be romantically involved with someone 6 years younger than me, i would have told you no. but i've found lately that i don't feel like age means shit anymore. i have been hurt tremendously by extremely immature adults in my life. i have friends in their late 20's-30's who still act like children and have never dealt with any hardships in their lives whatsoever. i know people my age who i can't even slightly relate with because they don't have any similar experiences and their outlook on life is so different from mine. age has had nothing to do with how much i have connected with people in the past. emma isn't some little kid with no life experience and no thought processes of her own. and i don't see her for her age but for her experiences, personality, heart, wisdom, etc.

it wasn't until a few days ago that i found out that she is still in school, it's something that was kept from me but that we're working through. however, it doesn't change the way i feel about her as a person or her maturity level or anything like that. but i also don't feel it's fair to say i'm weird for "engaging with a high schooler" when i had been under the impression that she was out of school since 16. regardless, it doesn't matter. the fact that she had some setbacks in her childhood that led to her still being in school is not a negative to me. i'm very proud of her for continuing her education despite all she has been through. she is very strong and incredibly smart and determined and i admire her for that. if that makes me a "creep" then okay, but i am not taking advantage of her. i never have and never will.

i guess this is what i get for putting myself and my relationships online for people to judge, but man, the judgement never hurts any less no matter how many times i receive it. people are entitled to their own opinions but you also have to realize you never know the full story and it's hard to have a fully educated opinion when all you see is surface level stuff that we have allowed the internet to be a part of. there is so much more that will only ever stay between emma and i because we are the only two people who genuinely matter in this situation. but i think i'm realizing i can't handle putting myself out there like i initially thought i could. maybe this isn't the place for me to express myself anymore.