#she's writing unprompted meta essays now

[fabdante]

omgomgomg it's too hard to choose but

The One Were Kat Gets To Yell At Vergil (DmC)

The Mai/Jet dream captivated me (Atla/Mai and Jet)

these two immediately caught my attention!!

Also, +bonus wildcard because meta WIPs is genius why didn't I think of that!!!

Essay no one asked for on spiderverse and grief mostly because I'm obsessed with the black out kingpin causes

(you certainly know much more about this topic than i do but I'm curious regardless lmao)

hello my beloved friend!! thank you for sending this ask with so many wips this delights me dfghjk i will go through them one by one!! (link to the WIP game here!)

I'll try to keep the excerpts short since there's three of them even if I'm very excited about all three of these dfghjk

The One Where Kat Gets To Yell At Vergil (DmC)

Ok so this one is a rework of an old wip. It's not an edited version it's just like a whole new version because I liked the fic and wanted to do it again sdfghj. I love post game Verat, the emotions and drama are so high with those two.

I wanted to share a bit of the part that I started this fic for but I cut out the lines I specifically wrote it for mostly because I was trying to find a nice end point of the excerpt fghjk so here you go:

“I spent the last five years worried all I ever was to you was useful,” she says, “and then you stand there at the end of the world and you call me useful.” He’s taking up too much space to look at her like he does, small and sorry. Because he knows what he’s done is unforgivable. But he doesn’t waver, Vergil’s gaze always on her and unmoving. And Kat…Kat laughs. Bitter and miserable, fixated on one corner of the room before looking at him. Wild. Angry. Hurt. It almost makes him flinch, the weight of the accusations in her gaze. “I almost died for you,” she says. “I was ready to let myself get shot for your plan because I thought it was for the best. That’s what we all thought! People are dead for you that I cared about! That I knew and cared about and they’re just dead now.” He swallows. “But I didn’t die, I get to live and know that all of them fucking died so you could try and become god king. Because of course Vergil DiAngelo wants to be king. Freeing mankind isn’t enough for him!”

The Mai/Jet dream captivated me (ATLA/Mai and Jet)

So I had this dream like last year unprompted about Jet and Mai. I don't even remember the context anymore dfghjkl I can't recall if it was within a Zutara dream I was having or another dream I was having or if I'd dreamed up the whole plot? No idea, can't remember.

What I do know is it caused me to write this whole fan fic around the concept because I am in love with them this is a slept on dynamic I think sadfghjk here's an excerpt from the beginning which gives some backstory:

Mai think’s she handles the three random strange Earth Kingdom kids who bust through her bedroom door in ill-fitting work uniforms pretty well. She asks, expression unchanging, “and who are you supposed to be?” And the tallest, proudest, with a smug grin on his face and down turned brows takes a step closer, then two as he reveals a knife. Mai immediately considers four separate ways she can disarm him, and does not move her eyes from him. He says to her, “we’re the Freedom Fighters, and we’re here to kidnap you.” “Oh thank Agni.” It’s…clearly not the response they expected.

Essay no one asked for on spiderverse and grief mostly because i'm obsessed with the black out kingpin causes

I'm OBSESSED with Kingpins design from Spiderverse like it's just SO SMART ok like its BRILLIANT like I love grief narratives we know that we know that on fabdante.tumblr.com we love a grief narrative and my favorite thing about Spiderverse is this focus on the Spiderman story as a grief narrative which it always has been but sometimes that grief narrative can get a bit lost where as in Spiderverse it's sort of the center of it the center of it is grief and the pain of that grief and what we do with that grief.

This essay was one I was going to kind of ignore for a while, ngl, but then I saw someone read Miguels whole thing from the second movie as like capitalist? Which I mean who am I to argue how one reads the story, if that's how you read the story then I fully support ones right to read Spiderverse as a narrative on capitalism like I mean that's a fair read.

However it refilled my interest in analyzing Spiderverse as a grief narrative asdfghj because look I love a grief narrative I love a grief narrative and Spiderverse is such a good grief narrative. Here's an excerpt (also apologies it's the least polished thing here because I mostly started it to get out these thoughts dfghjk):

Every time Spiderverse Kingpin enters the frame we are consumed by him. Now, this is typical of his character design across media. But in Spiderverse, this is amplified by the choice to dress him in black. He not only takes up large portions of the screen or even all of it at times, you cannot see past him. He’s even lost in the black, a small head and hands and peaks of the white of his shirt just surrounded by the blackness of his suit. He’s dressed for a funeral. Formal, black clothes, black tie, clean and pressed. And this is what’s so brilliant about it because every time we see Kingpin, we are not only seeing him but we are confronted by his grief. We are forced to see it. And he exists within it, drowns within it, is consumed by it.

I really need to get back to this essay I feel very strongly about Kingpins design in Spiderverse and Spiderverse as a grief narrative dfghjkl

Thank you again my friend I hope you enjoy these!!

[terrainofheartfelt]

do y— do you guys think that maybe blair had The Glow (tm) during the dair relationship because...nobody had ever been that happy to just be with her before?

not to say that she hadn't been in love before, or the other people she'd been with didn't love her but there were always these external things that were causing strife for her partners, and even if she knew that it wasn't about her, she'd have had to internalize that, at least a little.

nate in s1 & 2 was dealing with some shit. like some difficult, hard to untangle, adult shit, and he carried a lot of discontent within him for that, and I think that's why blair and nate's dynamic at the onset of the show was her being very much like, "you're not happy, and I don't know why, but I really want to fix it" her methods, of course, the brunches, the scavenger hunts, the plans to have sex, are not what he needs, but they all tie back to her need to Fix It.

and chuck...he's never satisfied, I don't want to get into All of It, but the most telling moment is That Episode (3x17) when he says something to the effect of "you are not enough" i.e., he's lost his hotel, and he can never be happy without it. he always needs something Beyond, that blair can never seem to give him.

louis on the surface comes close, until he doesn’t. like the sweetest moments of him (when blair tells him about her pregnancy, when he says to serena "can you believe it? she's marrying me!") that's all undercut by the way he behaves in the rest of the relationship (again, not getting into the All of That rn), he is always setting her up as the one needing to prove herself in the relationship, and in 5a he turns so unhappy, and blair cannot find a way to untangle it.

But dan??? I just want to spend the day with you dan? I was hoping I could have a sleepover with you dan? It's you. It couldn't be awful dan? dan, who when blair asked him tell me what would make you happy kissed her? kissed her like she was the answer? because what would make him happy was her?

I don't think she ever had that before, that simplicity of accomplishment of just knowing that she made someone happy by being with them, by wanting them, by choosing them. and the way she talks in 5x09, she probably was walking around feeling...cursed, like she was doomed to always let the people she loved down, and I have to think that in That Moment at the end of 5x17, when she shows up at the loft and dan blinks himself back to life at the realization that she wants him, I have to think maybe that gave her a little bit of faith back.

[yes-dal456]

My Dad, The Child

I went home the other day and my dad greeted me. He hugged me, grabbed my tangled curls with both of his hands, pulled them down over my ears, and wrapped them under my chin. The next weekend I went home, he fixated on my sleeves. He lifted my sleeves and kept folding the cuffs.

For those moments, I felt the gaze of a father who took care of his daughter.

But he can’t.

He has memory loss. The front of his brain’s lobe is dwindling. Much like the body of an elderly person that shrinks, loses mobility and muscle, the same thing is happening to the front of his brain. Nasty plaque is also building up in the front of his brain, and the proteins have misshapen his brain’s nerve cells. Instead of his brain looking full, round and plump, it’s now riddled with holes. The image of a small and deflated brain provides me with patience when I get frustrated over my father’s changed behavior.

Hell, some of the doctors said he has frontotemporal degeteration/degeneration (FTD), others said he has Parkinson’s-like symptoms. All I know is that he has some form of dementia. I’d like to draw your attention to my verb choice. He has memory loss, he does not suffer from it. In fact, it’s more the families that suffer rather than the person.

I, along with my entire family, wish we could do something proactive to fix it. My mother has pored over websites offering mostly ineffective advice that this vitamin or that kind of food can help prevent further mind deterioration. So what I can do is try to shape the way others interact with people who have it – and equally important, their caregivers and loved ones.

I write this essay to help bring the disease out of the shadows, for my mother and all family members whose loved ones have transformed into different people. I write for people who care, but don’t know what to do for those who have dementia or their families.

Skills and actions we take for granted evaporate over time for those with dementia: driving, reading, writing, speaking, eating, swallowing, flossing, bathroom use, and for some, walking. These daily tasks fall to the caregivers.

I find simple questions difficult to answer. Based on my experience, I suspect many people whose loved ones have memory loss go out and socialize to escape the incessant tasks at home. These questions take me to a painful place. Trigger warning, trigger warning! I want to tell them, if I talk about this too much, I WILL cry. For my mother, her coping mechanism is to completely shut down the conversation by saying everything is fine or to quickly change the subject.

Here are a few things people who are caring for someone with a mental illness hate to hear:

1. “I’m so sorry to hear that – how could that happen to him?”

No one really knows.

2. “Wow, I know someone who is even older, and they are fine.”

Getting older isn’t fun. Half of my father’s friends have died—of cancer, of heart attacks or they have some sort of ailment. The lucky ones don’t. But what use is the comparison?

3. “How old is your father?”

Does age matter with degenerative disorders? Not really. It can happen to a 60-year-old, 70-year-old and so on. The book-turned-movie “Still Alice” does a great job of describing it through the lens of a 50-year-old woman who gets early-onset Alzheimer’s. I highly recommend it.

4. “He used to be so active.”

No use crying over spilled milk.

5. “He lived a great life.”

He’s still alive! He enjoys eating, dancing and laughing. He smiles when he sees me. I hold his hand and he squeezes mine. I tell jokes and he laughs. We tease my mother together. This is life—just a different one than one we knew before.

6. “That makes me so sad.”

We’re the ones living with it. We don’t ask for pity and comfort. The last thing we want to do is comfort you too.

7. “I know what it’s like.”

Perhaps. But it doesn’t make us feel any better. I will say that there is a kind of camaraderie among friends whose parents suffer from similar mental diseases, but each case is so different.

What we like to hear:

1. “How are YOU doing?”

It’s hard to be a caregiver. Today, as families are separated and smaller, it can be difficult to find trusted help. Many are forced to turn to external caregivers or the controversial homes for the elderly. Even when you do find someone, you always wonder if they are treating your loved one the way you would want them to. Indeed, the elderly are some of the most vulnerable today.

2. “What can I do to help?”

For a while, my mother used to get mad and frustrated. Here’s a man that used to take care of everything in the house and many things in her life. Today, the responsibilities have fallen on her shoulders. She now must look after the large yard of the house that they live in, walk the dog, take care of my father, handle the finances, and carve out time for herself to stay fit and happy in order to provide my father with proper care. I know she appreciates it when I can come home for a bit and hang out with him, and she’d appreciated if others did too.

The dementia has rendered my father a child. There are times I deeply miss him and wish he was there to provide fatherly advice. Today, at 32 years of age, I possess similar interests as him. I love art, poetry, exercise, and I’m generally curious about the world. I wish he were fully here to share them with me. I do count my blessings that he is still here and we can still go on walks together, laugh at a stupid joke, or eat a great meal together.

I’ve found beauty in my parents’ marriage. My mother, who is 19 years younger than my father, has gone from being the one taken care of to the caregiver. Her love has taken the form of sacrifice. I find it awe-inspiring. Now, as I search for my own life partner, I think to myself, would I care for him the way my mother would? More importantly, would I do so with love and without resentment?

I want to tell him about my company’s latest projects, my most recent date, and my new apartment. And I do. But it ends there. So rather than wish he was the way he used to be, I try to enjoy the time with the father that I have now. One way we do so is by singing songs from musicals we used to watch together—Oliver! is a big favorite. I encourage him to sing along to the choruses or finish the last words of a line so that he doesn’t fully lose his speech.

I now read to him before bed every Sunday. Once I lay next to him, staring into his eyes and unprompted, he said, “I love you.” There’s part of him still there. It comes out sometimes. I have some guesses as to why that happens. Perhaps it’s when there are few distractions in the room, when he sees someone he knows from the past, or when he hears a song or poem that he used to know. Ultimately, these are just guesses.

As people around the world live longer, we should support not only the elderly but the families and caregivers of those who see a person they once knew dwindle before their eyes. Support can mean a simple personal phone call, offer to run an errand, or a quick visit. It is the families and caregivers that live with it daily and suffer, rather than the people with it.

Six months ago, I went on a walk with my father and asked him, “Dad, do you think you’ve lost your memory? Or have trouble remembering things?”

He responded quickly, “No.”

His inability to remember his memory loss provided me with some solace. He doesn’t realize what he’s lost. He is a different person with a different brain. He’s not in pain and he enjoys simple things in life, like eating, slap stick humor and the rhythms of cha cha music.

This notion was shattered last month, when I woke him up in the morning and I guided him to brush his teeth, he looked at me with the urge to say something—unable to grasp the words thanks to his newly shaped brain, he managed to say, “I’ve even forgotten how to speak!” The moment of meta-realization hurt to hear, but I think moment later, he forgot that too.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2rfH0Cw from Blogger http://ift.tt/2rYKPx3

[imreviewblog]

My Dad, The Child

I went home the other day and my dad greeted me. He hugged me, grabbed my tangled curls with both of his hands, pulled them down over my ears, and wrapped them under my chin. The next weekend I went home, he fixated on my sleeves. He lifted my sleeves and kept folding the cuffs.

For those moments, I felt the gaze of a father who took care of his daughter.

But he can’t.

He has memory loss. The front of his brain’s lobe is dwindling. Much like the body of an elderly person that shrinks, loses mobility and muscle, the same thing is happening to the front of his brain. Nasty plaque is also building up in the front of his brain, and the proteins have misshapen his brain’s nerve cells. Instead of his brain looking full, round and plump, it’s now riddled with holes. The image of a small and deflated brain provides me with patience when I get frustrated over my father’s changed behavior.

Hell, some of the doctors said he has frontotemporal degeteration/degeneration (FTD), others said he has Parkinson’s-like symptoms. All I know is that he has some form of dementia. I’d like to draw your attention to my verb choice. He has memory loss, he does not suffer from it. In fact, it’s more the families that suffer rather than the person.

I, along with my entire family, wish we could do something proactive to fix it. My mother has pored over websites offering mostly ineffective advice that this vitamin or that kind of food can help prevent further mind deterioration. So what I can do is try to shape the way others interact with people who have it – and equally important, their caregivers and loved ones.

I write this essay to help bring the disease out of the shadows, for my mother and all family members whose loved ones have transformed into different people. I write for people who care, but don’t know what to do for those who have dementia or their families.

Skills and actions we take for granted evaporate over time for those with dementia: driving, reading, writing, speaking, eating, swallowing, flossing, bathroom use, and for some, walking. These daily tasks fall to the caregivers.

I find simple questions difficult to answer. Based on my experience, I suspect many people whose loved ones have memory loss go out and socialize to escape the incessant tasks at home. These questions take me to a painful place. Trigger warning, trigger warning! I want to tell them, if I talk about this too much, I WILL cry. For my mother, her coping mechanism is to completely shut down the conversation by saying everything is fine or to quickly change the subject.

Here are a few things people who are caring for someone with a mental illness hate to hear:

1. “I’m so sorry to hear that – how could that happen to him?”

No one really knows.

2. “Wow, I know someone who is even older, and they are fine.”

Getting older isn’t fun. Half of my father’s friends have died—of cancer, of heart attacks or they have some sort of ailment. The lucky ones don’t. But what use is the comparison?

3. “How old is your father?”

Does age matter with degenerative disorders? Not really. It can happen to a 60-year-old, 70-year-old and so on. The book-turned-movie “Still Alice” does a great job of describing it through the lens of a 50-year-old woman who gets early-onset Alzheimer’s. I highly recommend it.

4. “He used to be so active.”

No use crying over spilled milk.

5. “He lived a great life.”

He’s still alive! He enjoys eating, dancing and laughing. He smiles when he sees me. I hold his hand and he squeezes mine. I tell jokes and he laughs. We tease my mother together. This is life—just a different one than one we knew before.

6. “That makes me so sad.”

We’re the ones living with it. We don’t ask for pity and comfort. The last thing we want to do is comfort you too.

7. “I know what it’s like.”

Perhaps. But it doesn’t make us feel any better. I will say that there is a kind of camaraderie among friends whose parents suffer from similar mental diseases, but each case is so different.

What we like to hear:

1. “How are YOU doing?”

It’s hard to be a caregiver. Today, as families are separated and smaller, it can be difficult to find trusted help. Many are forced to turn to external caregivers or the controversial homes for the elderly. Even when you do find someone, you always wonder if they are treating your loved one the way you would want them to. Indeed, the elderly are some of the most vulnerable today.

2. “What can I do to help?”

For a while, my mother used to get mad and frustrated. Here’s a man that used to take care of everything in the house and many things in her life. Today, the responsibilities have fallen on her shoulders. She now must look after the large yard of the house that they live in, walk the dog, take care of my father, handle the finances, and carve out time for herself to stay fit and happy in order to provide my father with proper care. I know she appreciates it when I can come home for a bit and hang out with him, and she’d appreciated if others did too.

The dementia has rendered my father a child. There are times I deeply miss him and wish he was there to provide fatherly advice. Today, at 32 years of age, I possess similar interests as him. I love art, poetry, exercise, and I’m generally curious about the world. I wish he were fully here to share them with me. I do count my blessings that he is still here and we can still go on walks together, laugh at a stupid joke, or eat a great meal together.

I’ve found beauty in my parents’ marriage. My mother, who is 19 years younger than my father, has gone from being the one taken care of to the caregiver. Her love has taken the form of sacrifice. I find it awe-inspiring. Now, as I search for my own life partner, I think to myself, would I care for him the way my mother would? More importantly, would I do so with love and without resentment?

I want to tell him about my company’s latest projects, my most recent date, and my new apartment. And I do. But it ends there. So rather than wish he was the way he used to be, I try to enjoy the time with the father that I have now. One way we do so is by singing songs from musicals we used to watch together—Oliver! is a big favorite. I encourage him to sing along to the choruses or finish the last words of a line so that he doesn’t fully lose his speech.

I now read to him before bed every Sunday. Once I lay next to him, staring into his eyes and unprompted, he said, “I love you.” There’s part of him still there. It comes out sometimes. I have some guesses as to why that happens. Perhaps it’s when there are few distractions in the room, when he sees someone he knows from the past, or when he hears a song or poem that he used to know. Ultimately, these are just guesses.

As people around the world live longer, we should support not only the elderly but the families and caregivers of those who see a person they once knew dwindle before their eyes. Support can mean a simple personal phone call, offer to run an errand, or a quick visit. It is the families and caregivers that live with it daily and suffer, rather than the people with it.

Six months ago, I went on a walk with my father and asked him, “Dad, do you think you’ve lost your memory? Or have trouble remembering things?”

He responded quickly, “No.”

His inability to remember his memory loss provided me with some solace. He doesn’t realize what he’s lost. He is a different person with a different brain. He’s not in pain and he enjoys simple things in life, like eating, slap stick humor and the rhythms of cha cha music.

This notion was shattered last month, when I woke him up in the morning and I guided him to brush his teeth, he looked at me with the urge to say something—unable to grasp the words thanks to his newly shaped brain, he managed to say, “I’ve even forgotten how to speak!” The moment of meta-realization hurt to hear, but I think moment later, he forgot that too.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://bit.ly/2ssYUiW

[cerisia76]

I went into the dark side of Tumblr tonight and seeing the "anti dair" always calling out Dan for his issues but demonize them compared to other characters's is actually quite... annoying.

But the most interesting part comes from them repeating that Dair fans are never explaining WHY Dair was a good ship. This actually is the perfect answer to give them.

do y— do you guys think that maybe blair had The Glow (tm) during the dair relationship because...nobody had ever been that happy to just be with her before?

not to say that she hadn't been in love before, or the other people she'd been with didn't love her but there were always these external things that were causing strife for her partners, and even if she knew that it wasn't about her, she'd have had to internalize that, at least a little.

nate in s1 & 2 was dealing with some shit. like some difficult, hard to untangle, adult shit, and he carried a lot of discontent within him for that, and I think that's why blair and nate's dynamic at the onset of the show was her being very much like, "you're not happy, and I don't know why, but I really want to fix it" her methods, of course, the brunches, the scavenger hunts, the plans to have sex, are not what he needs, but they all tie back to her need to Fix It.

and chuck...he's never satisfied, I don't want to get into All of It, but the most telling moment is That Episode (3x17) when he says something to the effect of "you are not enough" i.e., he's lost his hotel, and he can never be happy without it. he always needs something Beyond, that blair can never seem to give him.

louis on the surface comes close, until he doesn’t. like the sweetest moments of him (when blair tells him about her pregnancy, when he says to serena "can you believe it? she's marrying me!") that's all undercut by the way he behaves in the rest of the relationship (again, not getting into the All of That rn), he is always setting her up as the one needing to prove herself in the relationship, and in 5a he turns so unhappy, and blair cannot find a way to untangle it.

But dan??? I just want to spend the day with you dan? I was hoping I could have a sleepover with you dan? It's you. It couldn't be awful dan? dan, who when blair asked him tell me what would make you happy kissed her? kissed her like she was the answer? because what would make him happy was her?

I don't think she ever had that before, that simplicity of accomplishment of just knowing that she made someone happy by being with them, by wanting them, by choosing them. and the way she talks in 5x09, she probably was walking around feeling...cursed, like she was doomed to always let the people she loved down, and I have to think that in That Moment at the end of 5x17, when she shows up at the loft and dan blinks himself back to life at the realization that she wants him, I have to think maybe that gave her a little bit of faith back.