#on our merry way

[roses-in-hollywood]

Dorothy Lamour in On Our Merry Way (1948)

[nonranghaes]

joshua thinks he loves you too much. that's why he's strolling up to this house 'late' for this christmas party, dressed up in a suit (rather than waiting for you in cozy sweats like you promised), and a bottle of wine he stole from jeonghan's apartment on the way over. this, in his humble opinion, is what a best friend is for: pretending to be your date when you see your ex with someone new at a christmas party you didn't know he'd be at. it's easy enough to find you socializing with this tight-lipped smile that melts into something genuine when you see him. he passes off the bottle of wine to the host and makes a beeline for you. you're a vision in blue and it's all too easy to look at you like you outshine everyone else in the room.

"hi, honey," he says, pressing a chaste kiss against your cheek. he lowers his voice to a whisper, "you owe me."

"i know." but you curl an arm around him all too easily, pulling him into your side as you immediately start introducing him and coming up with some casual lie as to why he's late.

the moment the two of you have a second to yourself, he leans in, pretending that all he's doing is stealing another little kiss and not also whispering to you. "where is he?"

"tall guy in the green sweater across the room. his new fiance looks like a candy cane."

joshua glances over, eyes widening a little at the red and white stripes that seem to jump out at him now. it's cute, sure, but still catches him off guard in a 'how did i miss them...?' kind of way. he turns back to you, and suddenly the word hits him harder. "fiance?!"

joshua remembers this guy too well: mister 'i don't think i'll ever get married again,' which wasn't a problem in the slightest in general, but it was one of the multiple reasons you ended up ending things with him. you just give him this tight-lipped smile, a hand coming to rest on his chest for a moment. you know. he can see the way you waver a little in front of him.

"fifteen minutes," he says to you. "and then we'll fake an emergency."

your hand slips into his, and he feels the way your lips press against his cheek and linger a few seconds too long. long enough to make him think a little too much about what it could mean. "thank you, honey. i owe you."

(his payment comes in the form of watching horror movies with him, dressed in your sweats again... and again when he feels you fall asleep against his shoulder, his heart fluttering in his chest.)

[chiscribbs]

"That has to mean something, right? It can't just be a coincidence that it happened twice! Oh, sweet, sweet confirmation!"

Don has chanced upon an exciting revelation at the TMNT AU Competition! (feat. @beannary's The Little Prince AU)

Grown Apart AU: [Premise/Concept Art] [General tag]

***Note: This takes place sometime after the fight (which is still currently going on). Also, yes - Donnie "lost" his name tag at some point...and April.***

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[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 209

Now Jason was planning on, well, a lot of things, when he came back to Gotham. He had a lot of plans, several of which had to do with the old man and even more that had to do with cleaning up Crime Alley, making it safer and all that. 

What he was not planning on was to find some sort of lab in the basement of where he was planning on setting up a safehouse. Nor was he planning on finding several literal children in cages inside said lab. Oh and Lazarus Waters- but children! With muzzles! Being experimented on!

Now he’d like to say he had a plan in what happened next, but if he’s honest everything had gone Green and he didn’t remember what happened next, only that he’s back home with said children and covered in blood. Oh and everything smells of smoke. 

… And apparently there’s more of these things dotted around Crime Alley with the rest of these kids, er, siblings? Family? Fright does mean family? Okay kids, he’s not turning into Bruce but you can stay here while he deals with this… however long that takes. 

He better not be turning into Bruce he swears-

[londonspirit]

Merry freaking Christmas to us all!!!

David Jenkins over on Bluesky

[trivialbob]

Not long ago I read in a newspaper that "authorities" admonished states that they not get too silly with these highway traffic sign messages. It might be distracting. Must. Be. Serious.

Oh screw you.

I like that at least one government employee has a sense of humor.

Reading this made me seriously hungry for some wild rice hotdish. I am not even high.

[myfairkatiecat]

Okay I’m going to say it, some of y’all treat the KOTLC tag like it’s a tumblr community instead of an organization system that gathers together everything people post and tag as KOTLC

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

We must find my kind and be rid of the parasite. It's as simple as that.

[holedyke]

having a hashtag bad one 👍

[pushing500]

Not sure why the game felt the need to notify me that Vasso and Socks were going skygazing together, but the heads-up was appreciated I suppose. I'm glad they're getting along after their rocky start.

Speaking of getting along, Bella appears to have adopted Dire Wolf as her baby sister and spends a lot of time playing with her. It's very sweet.

While it was originally Blackdragon doing most of the work with our vehicles, lately it has been Laursen rushing to take the mantle of colony mechanic whenever car stuff needs to be done. I think he's just showing off to his husband, but his enthusiasm is endearing no matter what ulterior motives there might be.

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[hotmessmaxpress]

Italians…. my coworker and I may be on some website or show or something because there was an Italian news reporter in front of Tr*mp tower… she and I had a little lesbian kiss in front of it and gave it the finger… the Italian news man saw and was very excited and asked to film us

[pynkhues]

So I know you’ve discussed this a little before and not sure if you’ve seen this (or care that much lol) but recently Jesse Armstrong confirmed that Logan treated all the boys the same when it comes to physical abuse. Link here to the clip if interested [just remove the parentheses https://twitter(.)com/princekendalll/status/1696683862976336042?s=20]. This aligns with my own read of the show too which is nice but if you listen to the clip Jesse further clarifies that the reason it (the physical abuse) stays with Roman in the present is because he feels like a victim or like he was bullied whereas Kendall and Connor have found a way to like…slot this into their worldview, I guess. I found this interesting because I tend to read Roman as having something of a victim complex but I also think this brings up a few other interesting ideas I’d love to hear your views on if interested.

If we think of Roman as understanding himself to be a victim or bullied within the family unit, do you think Roman is aware that his brothers have had similar experiences with Logan’s physical abuse, or does he think of himself that way because he think’s he’s had a unique experience? Further, how do you think Connor and Kendall were able to move past it. I tend to read Kendall as just…not thinking he was abused. But Connor’s the one that I find kind of fascinating in this context because his past is kind of a black box – narratively we have no one to give us little nuggets of his childhood the way the Trio are able to recount childhood stories of each other to shed light for the audience.

Thank you so much for sending that, anon! I hadn't seen it / heard it, and as someone who's always felt Logan was physical with all of the kids, but especially the boys, it's pretty vindicating.

Which is - - y'know, a weird thing to say about a topic like this ,I guess, but it's always nice to think your read of something is what was intended.

I'm pretty fascinated by victim complexes in general. This is a bit of a personal aside, but I'm really close with my uncle, who's my mum's baby brother, and he's bright and funny and has lived such an interesting life, but he's definitely got a victim complex. For him, he knows it, and he's trying to work through it, and it probably comes from a not dissimilar place to Roman now that I think about it - my uncle never felt like he was enough of a man to his father, and when his father died when he was just 17, he joined the army reserves to 'prove' himself, which went.

Not Well.

That kind of snowballed into a very complex relationship with his own masculinity, especially as my uncle was pretty heavily engaged in counter culture and queer and punk scenes in his twenties after being in the reserves only to get into rural journalism which - - y'know. Certainly didn't help his sense of being targeted and bullied, particularly as the organisational culture in rural newspapers as he was coming up were aggressive to say the least.

My point though is that his sense of victimisation is really tied pretty deeply to his sense of not feeling like enough of a man, which was a sentiment established by his father, reinforced by the army and further abused in male-dominated rural towns that he was reporting in.

While Roman, of course, doesn't have the latter, it's an interesting thing to think about in the sense of the first two with Roman clearly feeling his masculinity under threat by his father, and there is an argument to be made about that being reinforced by St. Andrews, but funnily enough, I kind of feel the opposite about that particular point.

Probably because I disagree with St. Andrews being a military school at all.

So let's talk about St. Andrew's

It's pretty widely accepted, I think, that when the show named St. Andrew's they were referring to the St. Andrew's-Sewanee School in Tennessee, in no small part because there were no other St. Andrew's it feels like it could've been. This is a wealthy school (in fact their school fees, with boarding, are almost exactly the same as Buckley without boarding where Kendall canonically went), and the show's attention to details like this feels too deliberate.

And I think it works in no small part because St. Andrew's had stopped being a military school in 1971, about a decade before Roman could've been born (in my timeline I will one day post, haha, probably when nobody will even want it, I think we can pretty cleanly put Kendall as being born in 1979/1980, so Roman at the earliest would be born in '81). It was also during the 1970s, long before Roman would've gone, that St. Andrew's became co-ed.

Of course, this is an area ripe for speculation, but I think it rings true of the show for the kids to treat St Andrew's like it was a military school when that was a fragment of a past (and not even technically a part of St. Andrew's past - it had merged with the Sewanee School, which was the military school). What St. Andrew's became was not the school that Roman actually went to, but a symbol of this sense of being victimised and ostracised. Cast out, in a punishing system, which - - looking at this particular school, while bougie is also co-ed, outdoorsy, freer than Buckley, but that doesn't matter.

Roman's not fixated on the conditions of it, he's fixated on the othering of it. He sees Kendall and presumably Shiv too going to school near Logan (although I doubt Logan was there all that much) in Manhattan, while he's out in the midwest. I kinda think you could argue he played up the military history of the school to perform a strength and masculinity for his brothers and sister he felt he lacked, which could also be a part of why the narrative stuck.

But yes, that's not your question, haha.

Do I think he's aware that his brothers have experienced similar abuse? Yeah, actually, but I think it probably has its ebbs and flows and takes on different meanings depending on the moment or the circumstances, right?

An Aside

So my best friend's grandmother's was in an extremely violent and abusive marriage (I promise this is relevant), and every now and then, he would hit their two daughters too. He died young and unexpectedly, when the girls were still teenagers, a blessing to everyone, but the elder of the two girls - my bf's aunt - has developed a very complex and sometimes hostile relationship with her sister and their mother.

She feels their mother should've protected them better, that she should've left their father years before he died, and she deeply resents her sister for forgiving their mother so easily.

That's warped over the years - both daughters are in their 50s now, their mother close to 80, they're genuinely all pretty close - but it's gotten to the point where the elder daughter feels she was The Most Abused.

I know them all pretty well - me and my bf have known each other for almost 16 years - I've vacationed with them, gotten drunk with them, been involved in multiple weddings, not just my bf's but other members of her family's too.

One night, I was chatting to her mum after she and her sister had had a fight at a party - my best friend and her brothers had gone inside looking after their grandmother - and she just said her sister couldn't move past it. That they all knew what their mother experienced was unimaginable, that he hit them every now and then, but what he did to their mother was so much worse, and that she just didn't see what the point was with holding onto any of that pain when they can just push forwards.

More than that, when you can move on.

My bf's mum became a neonatal nurse, and she thinks she can see it sometimes. Men like her father, absent usually from delivery and controlling or too physical in the ward after, and she feels it too. The way she can throw lifelines to women who are ready for them, or just let women who aren't know where the lighthouses are. It's not a perfect system, but she loves her job, and this part of it - - I think she finds it healing too.

My bf's aunt was a receptionist to a guy who works high up in a bank, and she married him.

She hasn't worked since they had kids 25 years ago.

But back to your question

I think one of the interesting things about the show is that it's showed Roman as typically fairly directionless. He's out of the company at the start of the series, and doesn't seem to have any other thing he's driving towards. Shiv has politics, Kendall has the company, but even Connor has Austerlitz and his water planning before he jumps on his presidential campaign.

I do think a lack of purpose probably can become a bit of a feedback loop psychologically which has caused him to stew in resentment and has probably rationalised his abuse as 'worse', because if it wasn't, then why's he the fuck up? Even just of the Golden Trio.

Probably helped by - as you mention - Kendall's unwillingness to acknowledge it, and the fact that none of them take Connor seriously.

With Kendall and Connor - - yeah, I think Kendall is, in many ways, a caged animal constantly trying to claw his way out of his own head. I think he distracts himself with projects, or people, or drugs, and leans into the whatever, it happened, hey, but right now... of his own circumstances. He knows what happened to him, but he can never talk about it, not to a friend at a funeral or to his own father on his death bed. Kendall's stutter exists I think in his own thinking too, a record scratch that lets him start the song where he has to instead of where he wants or needs to.

He's not quite disassociated, but he's not quite connected either.

And with Connor - - gosh.

I mean, it's interesting to talk about him in this sort of context, because as you said, his history is so much more of a black box. I do think him having a period of absence from Logan plays into his acceptance of it. More and more, I tend to think that the three years he talks about in 3.09 was before Kendall was born, and so I think he's stepping back into formal 'Roy' life at 15 with a lot of complexity that shapes his experience very differently.

Not only is there that tangible anxiety of being rejected again if you don't fall in line, but there's also these new and complicated feelings of being replaced / in competition with a new child (always fascinated that Connor so rarely expresses that in the series, but whenever he does it's with Kendall), but also I think naturally feeling immediately doting and protective of this scrap of family offered to you after a period without.

I think in that context that Connor probably long ago reconciled himself with the fact that if he wanted his father in his life, that was what it was going to be like, and that he was prepared to be the failure if it kept him out of the bloodsport between their father and his siblings. I think he does occasionally wish for a higher position, and wonder what it could've been if Dad had ever thought of him in that context, but I also think he, at some point, made the choice that none of the rest of them have been able to make, which is that he can always go home.

[sunflowerbloomss]

in all seriousness the last march of the ents & the whole ending of the two towers is like. truly in my top 5 cinema moments. it's about the love it's hope it's taking grief and not letting in drown you it's trust in other people like the last 15-30 minutes of the movie are what lord of the rings is all about return of the king is the conclusion of love and hope but the two towers is to have these even at the lowest, hardest point in the journey. this sequence is truly the best this franchise has to offer

[bittersweetblasphemy]

yall so annoying

[krowbats]

2023 worst year of my fucking life

[thelooniemoonie]

oh boy i love when package comes from delivery service and they wrap it in shitty clear ripped plastic so you can clearly see what's inside despite you asking them to specifically put it in hidden packaging

i love north america capitalism