#oh god i just remembered posts are bad for me

[threeacttragedy]

Entry 4 – The One About the Red Bag of Chaos

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about this fandom is that Whenever Something Good Happens it ALWAYS torpedoes into Something Bad Happening.

Every.

Single.

Time.

And, that’s why we can never have nice things.

Case in point: “Brb” and the elusive Red Bag.

On October 4, we were graced with Luke’s Instagram story of luggage with the caption “Brb.” His picture included two pieces of luggage, a small metal carryon case, and a red bag. The red bag was interesting because it appeared to be – let’s face it, we all stereotyped this into being – a woman’s tote bag of some leathery sort. Lukola Sleuths tracked Luke’s image down to the first-class lounge for British Airways. I mean, we even got a not-so-blurry reflection of Luke in the corner of the luggage. We should have been ecstatic, right? Luke had posted two days in a row (with the first post being the cutesy “Mean Girls” reference to October 3), and Nicola had been peppering the trail with Lukola-laced yumminess since early August. I mean, we should have been biting our nails in excitement waiting to see what Luke or Nicola posted next.

But, no, that’s not what happened.

Instead, hysteria struck fast and hard. Why? Because at some point in her relatively short life, Antonia had danced in front of a red bag at – oh my God, wait for it – an airport! Oh, how the Conscientiously Stupid seized this tidbit of outdated information to terrorize the Sincerely Ignorant straight into shark infested waters!

The problem with this plotline was that (a) the video of Antonia was old, possibly even a few years old; and (b) there was absolutely no evidence the red bag Antonia was dancing in front of even belonged to her! The argument that this was Antonia’s red bag was simply one being pushed by assholes who enjoyed riling up the weaker parts of the fandom. And, let me tell you, these assholes succeed every time.

But, what was dismissed and ignored was the fact Nicola had a red bag in the background of her June 15, 2024 Tatcha post. If you need to see it for yourself, the video is still up on her Instagram grid. In the video, there is a shelf full of handbags of all sizes, and on the bottom of that shelf is, what appears to be, a large red bag (we can deduce this by acknowledging (a) it is red; (b) it is on a shelf full of other bags; and (c) it appears so large it needs to be tucked into the shelf). Is it THE red bag? Who the fuck knows? That is not the point. The point is, it is a red bag of some sort, and this fact should have outweighed the argument that the red bag belonged to Antonia.

But, it didn’t?

Why?

Because the fandom enjoys hysteria?

No, I don’t think it does. I’ve spoken to too many people on the verge of a meltdown to believe they enjoy spiraling.

So, what is it that causes good things to go bad so quickly in this fandom?

In my opinion, the answer lies somewhere between (a) the fandom believing that Lukola is too good to be true; (b) the fandom questioning their own intelligence and intuition; and (c) the fandom doubting the two people at the heart of this ship – Luke and Nicola. It’s strange to me that we would rather trust online bullies pushing their own deranged narratives than trust, at the very least, ourselves.

Whenever a Conscientiously Stupid tries to derail you, or an adjacent (ugh, there’s that word I hate again) pops up trying to make waves, take a moment to take a deep breath, roll your eyes, and have a good laugh (because I’m not going to lie, some of the shit that gets put out there is laugh-out-loud funny). But, most importantly, trust yourself and your intelligence because, if you're still in this fandom, your deductive reasoning skills are a chef's kiss.

And, to finish this story about the elusive red bag, just remember that Nicola posted an amazingly happy picture of herself the day after Luke, on an airplane, in first class on Aerlingus, an affiliate of British Airways that shares its first-class lounge. If these weren’t coordinated posts, I may as well say, “Screw it all,” and go live on a deserted island. Alone. With no phone. And no mascara.

Oh, and let me just slip in here that the elusive red bag quite possibly made an intentional reappearance in Nicola’s October 11 Olaplex story. But, I’ll leave any further speculation about that for a different day.

[lettuce-tv]

grinding my teeth and veins popping out of ny neck. carving blood covered rifts in my plastic table. everything in my life is going fine. there's nothing wrong. I can see the beauty and wonder inherent to life. happiness is possible. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.

[chevs-and-spiders]

[gooperts-gunk]

im so crazy over the tragedy of everything q!bbh does being under a demon pretense even though he's a fallen angel.

do u think he just accepts the demon label because it's easier. do u think he believes it too, and catches himself in his thoughts with "oh, right. im not exactly that". and maybe he believes that he did this to himself? do u think what he did was to protect himself or someone? no matter the fall, he still has so much kindness to give and his brain just isn't wired the way a natural-born demon would be, he can't hold back instincts when time demands it, maybe that's why he fell in the first place.

and when he's finally bad, not good, it's treated like the end of the world, without empathy on why he would act out. do you think this keeps happening? the same scenario, multiple times, every timeline? he has to be used to it. so he has to take it in stride. he's good until he lashes out under extreme pressure, and suddenly he's called demon. and once again he's what heaven made him out to be. what he made himself to be, his brain would ruthlessly provide...

i don't think he wants to be that, though he hides secrets behind secrets of which neither identity is a home... but i don't think he wants to have to change, either. and i don't think that's wrong of him.

...you collapse atlantis ONE TIME and all of a sudden YOU'RE the bad guy and SURE it was FUN but REALLY now,--

[lunarharp]

into the deep end - 30k T orufrey fic, focusing on memory trauma, disability, and romance.

the sweet oblivion of the victim, the poisoned freedom of the other.

for one moment - it had felt like two parts returned - the needed reunion of two disparate halves. no more secrets, no more pain.

the moment you get to give back what you never wanted to take. that moment, under the night-blooming flowers, when they had both let out the same single broken sigh of relief.

but they were never whole to begin with, were they?

qifrey swore he wouldn't say 'sorry' to this man any more if he could help it - sorry is cheap now. he didn't want to be in a position ever again where you only have 'sorry' left. so he just looks down into the threads of his blanket, strains his eye until it hurts, feeling his insides - his throat, heart and head - burn with pain. he expects more, but olly says nothing.

olly says nothing.

[kerosene-saint]

I wish people didn't act like dd/lg or abdl were like pedophilia. not even into it and I'm a sfw age regressor (non community due to this problem) but like. ugh. and the problem is my views on it have changed so much over just this year. because guess what. whatever people do in their free time surrounding sex, as long as it is not genuinely illegal, should not fucking matter to you. it is not your fucking business to tell people you think their kink is gross and pedophilic, especially because it's not pedophilia. it is fine. to be uncomfortable with a kink page of a certain kind interacting with you. I get it. and there are some pretty mean people in those communities but guess what? there are mean people in EVERY COMMUNITY. and you do not have to relate that kink to pedophilia to say you'd prefer their kink blogs to not interact with whatever blog you have. but when you say shit like "pedos and also people into ddlg and abdl dni" it's annoying. you could say "ddlg/abdl blogs dni" absolutely fair. but saying don't interact abt an entire group of people of which you do not necessarily have the means of checking everyone for being in that community??? alright then. you have fun in puppy play isn't anything like fucking dogs but ddlg is like fucking children world.

[mashmouths]

so i started this show and it just gets worse and worseeeee not only did it lift the romance subplot directly from twilight (and not well) but they also are trying to play the forbidden love angle hard in the fantasy racism vein except it's a "cross-species" relationship between the two whitest people i've ever seen in my life and there are three people of color in the whole (first season of the) show who aren't villains and it seems that every other episode (and sometimes ebery episode and sometimes twice an episode!) there is a man physically or magically subjugating a woman and i keep waiting for the big reveal at the end to be stolen from fucking rainbow rowell

[satorugojoswiife]

What do you think about gojo ships

I feel like I'm pretty indifferent to most of them. This is super cringe of me, but whenever I fall super in love with a character I don't often like shipping them romantically with anyone. 💀 (im delusional I know)

It doesn't help that for some reason the jjk fandom (especially twt) is weirdly aggressive about ships. I know it isn't all the shippers and it's mostly just the loud minority, but seeing so much of the discourse has kinda put me off and I don't really engage much with the ships in the fandom except for rarepairs and selfships bc alot of the time those communities are more wholesome and cozy (if that makes sense LOL)

[asterdeer]

just finished the 2nd coldfire book and gerald tarrant's relationship with dignity is so interesting to me. from jump we have this man whose well-groomed, immaculate appearance damien's narration cannot stop harping on about. tarrant is the picture of dignity: cool, quiet, obsessed with cleanliness. in when true night falls and he almost blows himself up and needs damien to bury him in a hole like a flower bulb just to survive the morning, one of the first things gerald does after emerging is magicking the dirt and blood off his body and hair. it's not a preference at that point, it's a compulsion, it's an emotional necessity.

and yet gerald's approach to immortality renders him so vulnerable in just one very particular way, and in both book 1 and 2 his enemies exploit that vulnerability to such a degree that gerald is rendered little better than a rag doll. it's a one-hit almost-kill kind of vulnerability; he doesn't even have a chance to fight back. and because he is what he is, he can still survive for a long time: burned, disfigured, in agony, weakened, but "alive." in book 1, damien & co find him basically jesus-on-a-cross'd in the middle of blinding light, burned so badly that his body is barely holding together; in book 2, after he gets one-shot, the bad guys strip him almost naked and leave him pinned to the floor to wait for sunrise to finish the job. and he SURVIVES this shit. and, in book 2, in the next scene where he's conscious: put together, calm, imminently in control of himself once again.

it just gets me, this need for some sense of dignity specifically because of his power, or rather its one (1) weakness. he doesn't wear armor, he's ridiculously, stupidly dangerous and powerful, but he's got an achilles heel that can, in a matter of seconds, in the face of power great enough, put him flat on his face and suffering unimaginable pain for possibly days at a time, at the tender mercies of whoever wants him powerless, and so he still needs to project control. not a speck of dirt on his clothes, not a tangle in his hair, not a hitch of emotion in his voice. he's old enough, powerful enough, that he shouldn't need to present himself this way. and yet.

[crossbackpoke-check]

I just need you to know I was reading your tags on the Sillinger/Fantilli Deadpool/Wolverine gifset going "YES THE EYE CONTACT! AND COLE'S WHOLE FACE JOURNEY! AND *OH MY GOD* ADAM'S HAND ALMOST BUT NOT GRIPPING AT COLE'S BICEP" like that near grip Adam took had me fainting like a fucking Victorian era man who saw a woman's bare ankles like W.H.A.T.

I neeeeed to write them omg.

ANON. ANON!!!! please. write them!!!!! and send me a link if/when you do 😇 i’ll prepare my fainting couch (the floor)

[the-trans-dragon]

When did 2 gallons of milk start costing over $10?

Minimum wage here is $7.25

[0809sysblings]

it is always a little funny to me when people try to make psychologists and psychiatrists out to be the only people ever capable of being able to accurately diagnose mental illnesses and disorders and that their word is law as a way to criticize self diagnosis when like. once i was hospitalized and the psychiatrist there who i had not even known for more than a day tried to diagnose me as bipolar despite me having No history of mania because he.. couldn't really understand why i acted the way i did i guess???

[the-acid-pear]

I never tried the option myself bc it'd probably mean skipping the Reason You Suck speech at the end (fire for speedrunners though) but I Love that you can frame your Phoneys in 3, especially so if you've already killed the previous two. Like yeah couldn't send you off to die so i'll let the goverment do it for me 🧸 like its just Peak evil imo.

[clownsnake]

I don’t think hyeonseong needed to remember dokja’s order to think about him if something goes wrong. I think he’s just always thinking abt dokja

and I love him for that

[amethysttribble]

Next time I’m dealing with an upset kid, I’m going to remember my aunt saying to me, “That fight was the beginning of the end for you and [cousin who a whole airport staff couldn’t unload all my baggage with]” when I was jokingly recounting a spat we had when we were twelve and I called her a ‘motherucking bitch’

Because that flabbergasted me so much I legitimately laughed and I’m still thinking about it.

‘Cause no. Oh my god no. That was the end of the end. That was when I finally said, “I can’t do this anymore.” That was it.

But my aunt couldn’t see that because to her we were just two twelve year olds calling each other names, /oh those two, so ‘close’ (in truth, we were just two girls who were the same age, our moms said we had to be close) but always bickering/ not the continued saga of pain and harassment that had been our shared childhood, twelve years worth, and the moment I was finally old enough to realize, “I should stop trying to be friends and instead never talk to her again.”

‘The beginning of the end’. As if those years when we were younger didn’t count and weren’t informative. They were. As if we didn’t have interiority and a complicated, broken relationship before that. We did. As if it was all petty before we were teenagers. It wasn’t.

It had ended a long time ago.

[undermostcorgi]

the media which consumes your entire soul at age 12 will forever be a part of you. this is an unavoidable consequence of living and you have to accept this fact. no matter how old you get, no matter how long it has been since you last saw its smug face peeking out from the bushes as it follows you, no matter if you think you have outrun it for good and that you're finally finally safe and you hardly even remember it exists anymore and your brain knows a few brief moments of true peace, it WILL catch up to you in your moment of weakness. and listen you don't want to hear this but sometimes this is necessary for your mental health. you will on instinct want to reject it and run away again but sometimes. sometimes you just need to watch that old show or listen to that silly song or read that weird book again as an adult and it will hurt you a little bit in various little ways but it will also heal you a little bit. you can call it nostalgia you can call it connecting with your inner child or whatever you want but just listen to me it WILL HAPPEN TO YOU TOO AT SOME POINT AND YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED FOR THIS (i am forcibly dragged off the stage by security)