#should I be in therapy? Yes.

[star-mum]

Rant

i have been stressed, overwhelmed and always exhausted for days, if not weeks, on end.

So, I dont really care if not wanting to spend money and time I dont have to go fucking bOWLING 7:30 PM THE WEEKEND BEFORE A SEMINAR PRESENTATION MAKES ME A SHITTY FRIEND

[astrologysaysno]

You can find my first post about trainee Shang Qinghua here

Expanding on the lore of trainee Shang Qinghua, I believe that as an author, he would definitely put random songs he likes as part of PIDW lore.

Head Disciple Shang Qinghua is spectating Qing Jing Peak with his master for a performance. News has spread of the Peak Lord unearthing some old prehistoric songs that have never been played before, and that Qing Jing has been able to successfully decipher some of the old text symbols to be played.

Shang Qinghua hears it for the first time and is at first a little off put by the fact that he recognizes it somewhat but then he remembers and begins to die inside, cause how do you explain the fact that he knows this mysterious, centuries old song, and that this actually a k-pop b-side track from about two millenias into the future.

This becomes an unfortunate dilemma where, due to the song's catchy nature, when he thought no one was looking, Shang Qinghua began singing the song.

The big problem here is that what the Qing Jing Peak has deciphered was simply a musical score sheet, and that the version Shang Qinghua is singing isn't just vocalisations, there's actual words.

Being heard by the An Ding Peak Lord, he gets the bright idea of contacting the Qing Jing Peak Lord and begins to force Qinghua and Shen Jiu to collaborate to complete the song and perform it.

No one is happy in this scenario.

Shang Qinghua now has to figure out how to work with the scum-villain-to-be Shen Jiu without giving away his nature as a transmigrator, his connection to Mobei-jun, and messing up the plot and everything going wrong

Shen Jiu now has to collab with his greatest (one-sided) nemesis into creating a show-worthy performance, all the while trying to investigate Shang Qinghua and his shady secrets.

Mobei-Jun now believes he has a rival fighting for Qinghua's affections and that he's clearly losing cause. Have you seen these lyrics? Obviously, my rival is getting the upper hand, and I won't stand for that.

[zivazivc]

Did Les ever dated in the past? Also is he with anyone recently?

Les quit school really early, like 10-years-old early, and he started working soon after, so he didn't really have friends his age. That kinda puts a buffer on a teenager's social and love life. Though there was something that happened at a house party once, that was, uh... a bad experience, and it left him with a lot of issues. Also, partially because of this, he's not really someone who acts on his crushes. So he never dated before.

But at one point the band spent a few months in the same location (dunno the reason yet, but maybe they weren't getting enough gigs and they had to take up some part time jobs for a while), and Les developed a crush on a bartender at a nearby club.

She's the only OC of mine who's visually a bigger weirdo than Les, and he definitely saw a little bit of himself in her, and hoping for someone with some shared life experience, it's what initially attracted him toward her and vice versa.

So they had a thing going on for a short time. It never developed into anything serious because sadly they are very alike, which means they are BOTH morons who are shy about making the first move. And after a while they came to the agreement that they were better as just friends.

Floyd with his persistent crush was not happy about the possible romance at first, but he ended up being happy for Les, and he finally decided to give his hopeless longing a rest, since the only good it was doing was growing a rift between his and Les's friendship.

Funny enough it was Floyd backing down which allowed the two to grow closer. Les lowered his guard since he no longer had to overthink if Floyd would interpret anything he did or said as some kind of flirting or act of love, and he no longer had to brace himself for any uncomfortable romancing coming from Floyd either.

They were already good friends since the start but they became much more casual with each other and began to understand each other on a deeper level as years passed. As Floyd got older and more mature, and became an equal with the rest of the bandmates, it was actually Les who fell for him, hard. He didn't really do anything about it though, but Floyd eventually realized this and you know he did something about it. Though Floyd's crush had gone from looking at Les as this cool experienced older guy when he was younger to now seeing him as a shy innocent teddy bear compared to his lewd self ksjhdkjs.

So technically they became each other's first proper all-encompassing relationship. And by that I mean that besides the lovey-dovey obvious stuff, they were also best friends and helped each other grow a lot. Also Floyd by the time they got together, already started a habit of hooking up with strangers at parties, so being with Les forced him to slow down and progress through a relationship slowly and at a healthy pace for someone his age (since you can't really get anywhere with Les without a lot of patience). And Floyd got Les to become comfortable with opening up and talking about his deep-rooted feelings. They talked about issues they faced, many of which were related to Les's childhood trauma, instead of him just ignoring or suppressing it all. (Floyd also opened up about his own family trauma with Les obviously, but he talked about it even before they got together.)

The relationship, especially at the start, could still be considered questionable from an outsider's perspective, but so was the band's lifestyle in general. They were good for each other during that period while they were growing up and figuring themselves and each other out, which is what matters I think.

It was honestly mainly Floyd's undiagnosed bipolar disorder that made the relationship suffer toward the end of Floyd's days in the band. It created a lot of trust issues between Floyd and Les, and also Floyd and everyone else, heck it even made Floyd distrust himself, since he and none else knew or understood what was happening with him. This led to a lot of misery and anger that he mostly ended up directing at Les, and it was what eventually made them break up and Floyd leave.

[n1ghtwr1ter]

At the end of my latest TLT reread and it’s been physically painful attempting to read the last 40+ pages of Nona. Like, the short shrift that Gideon/Kiriona gets given by the people in the story…the theoretical good guys who honestly only see her as a thing, as a means to an end with an inconvenient dead soul attached to it… It makes me want to rip my own heart out of my chest.

Nobody has cared about Gideon her whole life. Most people, in fact, if they remembered about her at all, went out of their way to tell her how much they wished she didn’t exist. In the final chapters of Gideon, she finally gets the thing she’s been desperate for her whole life: somebody telling her that they need her, they care that she exists, and they badly want her to go on doing it. This allows her to make peace with the prospect that at the ripe old age of 18, she needs to die so that that person can go on living and living and living, using the castrated remnants of her soul as fuel to do so. Not a great way to go, but at least Gideon would get to be useful to somebody, would get to be remembered for something.

And then she wakes up in the wrong body, and finds out that her sacrifice - her attempt to be useful in the most selfless way possible, in that her self will no longer exist - has been rejected. And not only that, but the person she tried to give herself to - the one who was supposed to care about her - went to extreme lengths to make completely sure that she no longer remembered about Gideon.

She literally cut Gideon out of her brain.

And now, drifting along in the worst sort of half life where she’s inhabiting her body but it’s no longer really hers, in very obvious fashion - there’s holes in it, her heart is missing, and it’s got her shitty father’s handprints all over it (not even touching how much of a violation that is), indelibly - she finally meets back up with the small group of people who could theoretically be relied upon to be glad to see her again.

But then the one who was supposed to care about her most tries to kiss her (massively OOC for Harrow), and turns out to not even be there - it’s some weird baby inhabiting her body, and doing a really shit job of it too. The rest of them won’t stop talking about how they need her to break into the Tomb - as if she was just another key, same as the ones they worked together to acquire in Canaan House, just bigger and more inconvenient - and/or how they both fucked and killed her mom, who also (surprise, surprise) wished that Gideon had never existed, but saw her as a thing that needed to be done for the good of the mission.

Ultimately, they all make it abundantly clear - Palamedes, Camilla, Pyrrha, and especially Nona, all these people who are supposed to be kind and good and right - that they would prefer she wasn’t there. That it just be her body, with no Gideon attached - at least not Gideon the way she is now, broken and rejected and miserable. They would all far have preferred that she not have her own inconvenient thoughts and feelings and desires and impulses - that she just be inanimate and let the important people, the grown ups, get things done.

They wish she didn’t exist. Same as everybody else in her life, save one, and now she’s left wondering whether Harrow really meant it at all. Because if she did, she wouldn’t have left Gideon to Kiriona’s fate.

And honestly? Really, truly? I know everybody in the fandom loves Pal and Cam and Nona and Pyrrha, but in the end I couldn’t give less of a shit about them. They are fucking side characters, and as intriguing as Nona has been from a worldbuilding standpoint, I ultimately resent having been forced to read 400+ pages of filler bullshit about fucking side characters. I am a butch, and I’m here for my sarcastic, loving, angry, vulnerable, forgiving, and yes, inconvenient sword butch. I’m here for Gideon. But Gideon has been fridged for the last two books of the series in which she is supposed to be a, if not the, main character.

And it feels like almost nobody else in the fandom feels the same way, which, fine. I’m used to that. I’m also used to being told I’m projecting; and I’m used to being told that I’m inconvenient too, in my thoughts and my opinions and the mere fact of my existence. I spent the first eighteen years of my life being told I was inconvenient. Yet another point of overidentification with Gideon.

But in case anybody still thinks that Nona proves that Gideon was an asshole all along, think about all of the above. Think about how it would make you feel to come back from not just death but from the erasure of your existence, something you chose in order to save the life of someone you loved, and be told that you’re inconvenient. Think about how you’d feel if you’d been told all your life that it would be better for everyone if you didn’t exist. And then tell me that Kiriona isn’t in the right and that I should give a rat’s ass what happens to literally anybody else.

It’s Kiriona Hours up in this House, butches. We’ve spent long enough caring about people who would prefer we weren’t around. For once in our entire lives we were told we were important; we were told we mattered; we were told we were the main character. We were going to, if not get the girl and save the world, at least get to do something real, something important, something like being the hero.

But that’s over now; we’re back to being wrong and bad and inconvenient thanks to the simple fact of our existence. So it’s time to embrace it. Let’s be a little shit. Let’s be kind of a dick. Let’s have our own agenda, let’s play our cards close to our heartless chest, let’s allow our circle of empathy to contract to ourselves and maybe one more person. That’s where I’m at right now. And I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

[monabee-draws]

Caitlyn's slow but inevitable decline into facism was painful to watch but it's Vi's tacit support of that that REALLY hurts me.

Cait was raised at the top of the hierarchy and it only took her being the one 'in danger' to flip from sympathetic to the undercity to desperately angry and wanting to return to the status quo where she and piltover are in power/control/oppress the weak 'for their own good.' I expected this to happen from the moment her rhetoric began to shift (us vs them, calling Zaunites animals, general dehumanisation.)

Vi knows that the issue is structural and the structure that's used to exercise violence against the oppressed is the enforcers, yet she still joined them anyway. It's excellent writing but the implications that has for her as a character who has been shown to have strong convictions and morals is so heartbreaking. It feels like her years in prison have eroded at the heroic spark in her to the point where she'll justify anything to return to the past. I keep asking myself how Vi could justify using The Grey as a weapon against the undercity, and her parotting what is probably Caitlyn's justification - that they used it to clear the streets and keep as many safe as possible - just rings so hollow. She felt like a lost soul just vaguely drifting through life in Act 1, and of course she did. She has no one left BUT Caitlyn. She has no place in the Undercity because it grew away from her. Her base of motivation as a kid was to fight for and protect the Lanes and now that the Lanes are gone who even is Violet anymore? If only she could rewind time and restore the uncomfortable uneven past.

Vi and Cait are actually the same person, the only difference is that Caitlyn has the power to enact her vision and Vi doesn't. I'm so sore.

[lapelduide]

I'm sorry but how dumb can you be to claim Colin has no traumas? How dumb can you be to compare people's traumas?

Colin is not lacking character in any way. If anything, he has more depth! You were just not paying attention to his story! Hiding behind traumas for their wrong choices doesn't make Anthony or Simon full characters with depth.

People are constantly trying to underestimate Colin's traumas. They're acting like Anthony is the only one who lost a father. Acting like only toxic characters have traumas that make them that way and when Colin didn't let these traumas control him he's the shallow one when it's just he has the courage to get out of his comfort zone!

This man literally has never been taken seriously by his family, they don't even have the decency to just listen his travels because he love to share these with them, they don't respond to his letters when he's away, Anthony literally congratulated him for finally being a Rake! They be acting like he can't understand anything unless he fucks!

And it's just his family. Colin literally has been betrayed by the person he thought he loved and by the person he thought he has been loved back. Marina betrayed him not only by trying to use him but by doing it while not taking him seriously too. Yes, Colin proposed to Marina when he didn't even know her properly but again: he thought he loved her. He thought love was supposed to be this fast lightning that will shock him. He believed in love at first sight. And he believed love was enough. He thought Marina was the only person who took him seriously.

Until he found out she didn't.

Yes, Marina had her reasons to try and trap a man but do not even get me started of how much how she did it affected him. How insecure it made him. We literally watched his confidence fade more and more each season. He despised his actual self so much so he felt the need to put on a mask.

But of course a certain part of the audience is ignoring it. Why? Because how can he not let these traumas control him?! How can he take action before it was too late?! He must not have enough traumas!

Or maybe he has a strong enough character. Or maybe he's brave enough to be scared of doing a certain thing but he does it anyway because he's more scared of not having the outcome of it.

He loved Penelope. He didn't know if she loved him back. But he wanted her as his beloved and not just as his friend. It could cost him their friendship. It could cost him his dearest friend. It could cost him the only person who actually appreciated him.

But it also could gift him a life full of Penelope. A life with Penelope.

So he took the risk of losing everything and gathered the courage to confess.

And if you think that's shallow you need therapy for your own sake.

[milk-ducts]

///spoilers

…,,,

me thinks they want eachother carnally ..

[deservedgrace]

one of the more frustrating aspects of ex evangelical/ex cult stuff for me personally is how hard it is to talk about. and part of that is the emotional side of it, yeah it's a shitload of cumulative and compounding trauma and trauma is hard to talk about sometimes. but it's not always hard to talk about, or at least equally hard to talk about, and the thing that's honestly more frustrating to me about that is how... extensive it is, how impossible it is to give an accurate picture of what it was like, especially succinctly. there are so many things that you need context for. there's so much that doesn't really sound that bad unless you have other information. so much was normalized to me that i have a hard time knowing what's actually "normal" and what's "yikes" to other people because i simply don't always have the context for "normal". there's so much that's normalized in society and churches that gets dismissed as "normal" when it really, really shouldn't be. there's so much i just don't remember because it slipped out of my brain the same as "normal" unimportant memories because my brain didn't process it as abuse or traumatic at the time due to that lack of context of what "normal" is; it was normal to me and just what people did and how people acted and what people said. and the thing that happens is all of this compiles into me sounding like i'm exaggerating and whining about a "normal church experience" because it's just so impossible to describe how all-encompassing being in a cult is if you don't have that experience.

[huellitaa]

listening to love potions, doing makeup, gossiping and eating sweets with my girls at 4am on halloween

[plantsandpies]

I guess I’m in a posting mood where I post crack posts, theories and takes. I have way more. But I’m talking about descendants right now.

I hate people that hate on mal. NOW, she did do a lot of fucked up stuff. Drugging someone and attempting to erase their memories is wrong. I’m not denying that nor am I excusing her actions.

However, Auradon doesn’t know how to handle mental health. All their people are happy and well adjusted. As far as we know, they all had good parents and happy childhoods.

The isle (at least in the books) had vicious child abuse. Carlos was locked in a room filled with bear traps and had to get furs. Evie obviously grew up with huge insecurities due to her mom’s thing on looks. I think Jay slept on the floor (though out of all of them I think he had the best parent. Not an award because you’re the best of the worst, but whatever). Mal’s mom was constantly manipulating her and controlling her. She created this narrative for mal. Love is evil and weak, people not inviting you is slighting you, you have to be the strongest on the isle, your mother’s daughter. The books went into more detail and it’s been a while since I read the book, so excuse my mis-remembering.

But the isle was not a fun place and aurdon is so, they don’t deal with mental health issues. So none of the vk kids have dealt with that.

So when we start at d2 it’s been six months and they just threw mal into that position. They gave her no time to adjust, put all their stuff on her (blonde hair vs. purple) and just expected her to be okay with it.

Now, a child with a parent that forces them to try and be the best and puts all their worth on impressing people for love (aka mal and her mom’s whole situation) is going to carry that even when realizing their mom sucks. So they put mal into a huge amount of responsibility maybe six months later without any sort of therapy or support system, because the isle kids are messed up and the aurodan kids aren’t so they don’t know how to help. So magic becomes her sort of safety net.

Her friends and Ben obviously love her. That’s true, but from what we’re shown in the beginning of the movie, they aren’t helping with the pressure. Evie is trying to have her give up magic and Ben is giving her gifts and helping the paparazzi but none of them are actually getting to the root cause. No one is helping lift the pressure she’s putting on herself. No one seems to even notice that that’s the problem.

Mal is trying so hard to be perfect and what everyone wants her to be, so she’s using spells to help her. She wants them to know she’s trying and she wants to love her. She might know they do, but it’s unconscious at this point. She was sixteen in the first movie. So she’s like seventeen. This is something in her mind, ingrained for sixteen years. They gave her less than six months to undo that herself.

Obviously her actions are not justified or right, but saying she’s evil and awful when what happened was a very traumatized teenager who was shoved into responsibility she wasn’t ready for, snapped, is also wrong. She’s not right, but her snapping was inevitable. This entire thing could’ve been solved had her friends and loved ones talked things out with her. If they could see the stress before it boiled over. Maybe it was because of it being a movie but her stress wasn’t really hidden. Maybe from Ben, but from Evie? This could’ve been solved had they intervened or had aurodan grew a brain and realized villain kids aren’t evil but they sure are messed up.

[zionanelequaso]

I’ve already decided I’m yapping. batman x bill cipher lore BEAM!!!!

warnings: yaoi, gravity falls spoilers, angst, yaoi, yaoi, did i mention yaoi, tbob spoilers(???)

okay. so. all the shit in gravity falls IS canon, but after stan punched bill into oblivion, bill met the axolotl and they made a deal. if bill somehow redeemed himself to the point of at least only being a little prankster, the axolotl would send him back to earth. so, the axolotl sent him to the theraprism, where 1 second in our world is 100 years there (this comes in handy for me). I still haven’t decided how many seconds in our world he was in there.

eventually he managed to redeem himself to the point of just being a mischievous being. so, the axolotl decided to send him somewhere that wasn’t gravity falls so he could have time to choose if he wanted to say sorry or not (keep this in mind). also bill got his powers back because the axolotl was feeling nice. bill got sent to gotham, and was just floating around before he met Batman. Immediately, he was quite enamored! having long moved on from ford (somehow.), he decided to start watching batman like a hawk. and follow him everywhere. and I mean everywhere. from the start, he knew Batman was bruce, yes, but he didn’t let him know that until the second time they crossed paths. yes, the second. so then, when batman was like “wait what” he went “ok so now you know I know who you are I’m gonna follow you like everywhere mk??” and for some reason, bruce (i switch between calling him either batman or bruce it just depends on how I feel okay) could find himself taking a slight “liking” to bill as well.

spoiler alert, they do get freaky on multiple occasions I’m just not writing about that stuff because I’m a minrorooririijhehjdjshdjia. leave that to your imagination FREAKS!!! (the only reason I’ve even included this fact is because I’m hypersexual!!! I won’t talk about them actually being freaks I’ll just include suggestive stuff leave me alone!!! [sorry I feel the need to apologize and explain myself a lot ok])

okay so there are multiple different ways this can go, but I mostly include 2 (with an occasional secret 3rd and 4th option)

option 1 which is actually the secret third option: since I haven’t watched or read anything with genuinely serious robins + I love love love silly robin with all my heart and soul, there’s this one, where robin (based off of Lego robin) has to just watch bill go BAZINGA over batman and be very confused.

option 2 which is actually the secret 4th option: everything basically stays the same, except ford somehow also got sent to gotham by the axolotl (with intent of having bill and ford meet up or something to see how bill reacts.) depending on how you’d feel, they can either meet pre-batman and get their yaoi back, or stanford can meet joker, have yaoi with that guy, meet bill and go “fuck off,” or they can just never meet and at some point stanford gets super close to redeeming joker. this part is a big joke my friend from school made that I expanded on but I think it’s super funny

option 3: everything stays the same, it’s just bill, batman, and the rogues.

option 4: bill comes in contact with the Justice league and somehow becomes a part of them. not explicitly, but yk he’s just there. this is probably my favorite

so, however this goes, there will always be a thing where bill gets sent back to gravity falls WITH batman (and others, depending on which interpretation you’re talking about [UNLESS you’re talking about the thing where stanford and bill DO cross paths]), and dipper gets the whole fam out, stanford tells batman everything, and bill just LOSES IT.

everything he’s worked for, just gone down the drain.

so, he can either become evil again and have to get ANOTHER redemption arc (but this time without the axolotl), or he can have a breakdown on the spot and beg for forgiveness.

if you choose the first option, he will get forgiven by his peers, but the pines family will still be wary. also, he’ll get the fuck out of gravity falls as soon as he can

if you choose the second option, bruce can either forgive him or not forgive him, which then evolves into either the 1st option or even more of a breakdown until either the 1st option or batman forgives him. that make sense??

and that’s basically it! here’s some stuff about bill

1. he actually did care about stanford or something in the past, he just felt like he had to purposefully hurt him so it wouldn’t have to be on accident (like his family)

2. he finally learned how to not feel the need to push people away!! yay!!!

3. he would get married to bruce. this is canon I’m bill’s 3rd eyelash

I wonder how alex hirsch would feel if he knew that someone out there shipped bill cipher x batman. that someone is me.

also jfc that was a lot more than I was expecting but it was super fun to write!!

[wonderviolet17]

claudia x abigail manifesto

listen okay

so claudia (iwtv) and abigail hobbs are narratively very similar right- they both doomed by the narrative, shoved into the middle of a toxic relationship that will destroy anything that comes between them. they both are daughters, forced to perform a role for far too long. they are both smart and manipulative and dangerous but somehow never the main characters, never the masters of their own fates.

however, they both are such different characters in fascinating ways- claudia revels in killing; abigail loathes it to the point that she convinces herself that she had no part in it, it scares her. claudia kills lestat; abigail agrees to help hannibal. (both acts of self preservation, but in wildly different ways) claudia sings in defiance; abigail bares her neck in obedience.

so i had a thought. what if claudia survived the théàtre des vampires. what if she came back to the states. what if the hannibal plotline took place in the 1970s rather than the 2010s. what if abigail and claudia met. what if they fell in love. what if they committed patricide. x4.

what if…

completely unrelated but my ao3 is shrike_seventeen :)

[monsterfuckermilligan]

i am not anti sam but i sometimes find myself hating sam because some samgirls are super into bio/gender essentialism whether or not they realize it. sam is a woman and dean is a man and sam is the victim and dean is his abuser like what show are you watching?

[selkie-tea-tin]

I think Mizu (blue eye samurai) and Thorfinn (Vinland Saga) should be in group therapy together. If it even matters to you.

[stuckwith-harry]

i am handing in my b.a. thesis (on motherhood in gothic fiction) in a few short days and though i have been complaining about having to write it for six months straight, right now i am actually feeling bereft of future opportunities to write academic papers about my silly little interests. for instance right now i really want to research & write about dracula daily & genre & the impacts of the newsletter format on the narrative (the addition of a timeloop)

i think about format and the specifics of narration a lot when i'm writing my own little things and i loooove when the narration - not just the narrator, but the act of telling the story - is part of the narrative. love when the narration is diegetic! love an epistolary novel (like dracula!) for this reason. should read more of them

inventory by carmen maria machado (short story! read it immediately!) is a GREAT example of this. the format of the narration is so integral to the story. does more than elevate it imo, i would argue the story genuinely wouldn't work any other way

g*d. i'm gonna have to become a video essayist

[system-of-a-feather]

FYI when it comes to trauma processing, sometimes one of the healthiest and productive decisions you can make is to ACTIVELY choose to avoid and not address an issue right now even if you "should"

Its easy to get caught in the "talk about it, use therapy productively, if you aren't doing anything, you aren't Doing Anything" and, while compulsive habitual avoidance typically causes temporary stagnation, ACTIVE acknowledgement that you are CHOOSING to ignore it and avoid it because you are CHOOSING to give yourself space and time is such a fundamental skill to emotional awareness, self regulation, self compassion, and rebuilding trust within yourself to maintain your own boundaries even when you feel that you "should" ignore them

Actively choosing to not address a topic at the moment is good practice at saying "I am not ready and I need more time and for that reason I am going to actively refuse to engage in this topic at the current moment" which helps so immensely at being more mindful of your own needs and emotional states which can be hard as someone with C-PTSD

Sometimes the best and most healing thing you can do for yourself is Nothing.