#some of these comments are so disturbing
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jack-whatsyourangle · 6 months ago
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i have made a horrible mistake (opening sydney sweeney's comment section)
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good-to-drive · 1 month ago
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Abuse, Silence, And Why Kevin Can Fuck Himself
I recently finished watching Kevin Can Fuck Himself on Netflix, and, aside from being the most brutally honest portrayal of domestic abuse I have ever seen, I discovered a beautifully written examination of narrative as power and silence as abuse and how this manifests in our larger culture. 
Without going into too much detail, the show is filmed in two distinct styles that are interleaved throughout each episode to tell a cohesive story. Allison and Kevin’s relationship as seen by the rest of the world is told through a multi-cam, laugh-track sitcom that depicts a very typical “goofy husband, shrewish wife” mainstream comedy. Allison’s life through her own eyes is told through a single-cam drama/thriller about Allison planning to murder Kevin to escape his abuse. 
It’s an absolute masterclass in screenwriting, but more than that, every episode explores the difference between truth, fact, and reality, and how none of these things are quite as much or as little as story. But while the process of transforming the chaotic and plotless reality of life into a story is as involuntary and essential as breathing, misogyny and the degradation of women is just as ubiquitous in our society, and a story that exists at the expense of another person’s lived reality is a refutation of their humanity. 
It's also just a great show for anyone who likes to engage with history (or reality TV or true crime or “real life stories” in general), because while we have to tell ourselves stories about her own lives, we have to tell ourselves stories about other people as well. Eternal silence is narrative death, and the perpetual silence of an unspoken narrative is often the last death we can visit on someone whose story we’d rather ignore. 
I also pulled up some books – Lolita and Disgrace – that dealt with similar themes, but from the perspective of the abuser. And what strikes me the most is that, across three beautifully written stories about narrative and silence within a culture that normalizes abuse, Allison, who began her story within a state of narrative death, was the only point-of-view character who had any chance of surviving. 
One of the main themes of Kevin is that a compelling story is often a story that reinforces what we already believe or like to believe, and while the story may be factual and true it often also exists at the expense of someone's lived reality. The exact same series of events can be a silly joke or a harrowing tale of abuse depending on the lens through which we view it, but historically we've only been willing to see the multicam, laugh track, sitcom perspective on unbalanced relationships.
The alchemical process of turning a series of disjoint facts and experiences into a narrative creates something new and compelling, and erases much of what previously existed. In this way, it’s entirely irreversible. We spin our experiences into a very thin thread, a story we can tell ourselves that elicits something within us, something we need in order to live with the complex, uncertain, and unsatisfying reality of life. In think in many ways the thing we elicit in ourselves is truth. But truth is both more and less than fact, often more a reflection of our own beliefs and desires than the events of our lives. And in telling that truth we may never stray from the facts, but we almost by definition cannot give voice to another person’s reality.
There's a scene in season 2 of Kevin when Allison is hit by a door – a la the classic excuse – because of Kevin’s carelessness. And while he absolutely did not hit her, the way it's written is such an incredible allegory for how Kevin has curated their story and curated their friends' and family’s perceptions of their story such that even if she tells everyone the exact, unvarnished truth of what's happening to her and begs for help, they will only be capable of seeing the laugh-track, sitcom, “Kevin is a harmless goofball and his wife is a total shrew” perspective on the events of their lives. 
As so often happens with abuse, their friends and family saw Allison being hurt because of Kevin. But the alchemy of creating a narrative around Kevin and Allison is irreversible, and the series of events they witness can only be spun together to a joke, an accident, a silly, childish mistake. Allison’s reality, Allison’s pain and fear, is completely elided. Like a lost sound in the middle of a sentence, her experience goes silent, and their larger understanding of her relationship never has to change. And you feel so acutely how Allison lives her entire life in that silence. 
Storytelling is human, it’s essential, there’s no other way to engage with our own lives. And it’s not lying. It’s never lying to tell the truth. But it doesn’t reflect every reality, either, because another person’s reality can’t be reflected within our own narrative, because that’s what it means to be another person. To spin two different threads.
And because narrative is the essential process by which we understand our reality, denying someone their own narrative, or denying that this narrative be heard, is inherently abusive. To allow someone a voice is to give them humanity, and to suppress it is to strip that humanity away. 
Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, follows the story of a professor, David, who rapes a student and then fails to protect his daughter, Lucy, from being raped by intruders in their home. He destroys his daughter’s life  – not through failing to protect her, but through twisting her rape into a story about why the rape of his student wasn’t wrong. The main theme of the book is generally considered to be exploitation, but Coetzee doesn’t deal with the exploitation of the rape. That’s too direct, too immediate, too easy for the reader to understand as misogynistic and wrong. Rather, Coetzee delves into “the innocuous-seeming use of another person to fill one's gentler emotional needs” (Ruden).
The rape is how we understand David as a fundamentally exploitative person, a person who denies others their humanity by converting them into a vessel for his own desires, who erases their voice in order to speak through them and give himself the things he needs. And that’s how we recognize that the way he absorbs and claims the stories of his daughter and his student is another kind of violation of their humanity. Another way of turning women into vessels for men’s pain and fear and need. 
What’s fascinating is that David's student finds her voice – files a complaint against him – and is eventually able to continue with her life. The woman he raped is less damaged by him than his own daughter, because she was the woman he couldn’t permanently silence. 
In Lolita, another brilliant novel about abuse, dehumanization, and storytelling, Humbert turns to the reader at the end and says, “Imagine us, reader, for we don’t really exist if you don’t.” 
It’s not that Humbert knew he was fictional, but that he knew everyone was fictional. Believed the entire world only truly existed in his own mind, because anything beyond that was irrelevant to his needs. He coped with the collapse of his ability to dehumanize Dolores (who he called Lolita) by demanding that his voice be resurrected. Demanding immortality. Demanding his narrative exist in another person’s world, and thereby be given the existence and humanity that Allison and Dolores and Lucy and David’s student were denied. 
Pushing his needs, finally, onto the reader, because we are the only person he has left, and a person like him can only exist through the use of another. In that way, Humbert was powerless. In that way, Kevin and David were powerless, too.
In Disgrace, David’s dream is to write an opera, and at the end of the book he realizes he’ll never finish his magnum opus. He’ll never be able to terminate the process of converting himself, his world, into a story. But he does learn to decenter himself in that narrative. And it’s when he loses all fear of death, and any conception of the self, that he gains the ability to give dogs – who he generally equates to women – a voice within his opera, his life’s work. 
It’s in death that we discover our true unimportance as human beings, that we learn to let go of vanity and our conception of the self entirely. And David had degraded women so thoroughly in order to justify how he used them to meet his own emotional needs that it was only in losing all value for his own life that he could gain the ability to see them as equal voices. To actually put those voices into his own life story. It's at the cost of himself that he allows other people to truly exist, in the death of the self that he finally allows the world to exist outside of himself. It’s almost a positive character arc. Almost.
When Kevin finally loses the ability to abuse Allison, he, like many abusers, loses all desire to live. His world was built on a structure of superiority and inferiority, on beings and vessels, on the inherent value of men and the inherent meaninglessness of women’s lives. The system on which he based his entire reality has been destroyed by Allison’s declaration of the self. And, if he was a being because she was a vessel, then in losing the ability to treat her as a vessel, to fully and completely dehumanize her, he has lost his own humanity. 
It may be perfectly summed up here: “Become major. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (Coetzee).
If you’re not to be a main character, if there indeed is no split between major and minor characters, between people and the paper dolls that populate their story, between living beings and the vessels into which they pour their need – what is life for?
Nothing. At least, not for people whose narrative must exist at the expense of another. 
And that’s why I say that only a narrator like Allison could survive this kind of story. Despite beginning her story trapped in eternal silence, her reality fully elided no matter how immediate and obvious it became, Allison was the only point-of-view character of any of these three stories who didn’t establish her power through the degradation of another. Who didn’t conceptualize the world via being and vessels. Whose narrative didn’t exist, by necessity, at the expense of another person’s humanity. Whose thread could exist in a larger tapestry without destroying her sense of self.
Don’t get me wrong, she’s not generally a likable character. She’s misogynistic, cruel, selfish, jealous, desperate, afraid, and in pain. Like anyone in an abusive relationship, she’s not at her best, and she’s often pushed to do things that are ugly and disturbing because she’s simply been pushed too far. 
But, for me, the power in her character is in how her last scene never felt like a final scene. Her story didn’t have to be killed, her conception of the self didn’t have to be killed, in order to reveal the brutal reality of stories twisting and intertwining without any inherently superior truth or narrative among them. Allison’s story was one of declaring herself. And that’s why it didn’t feel like it ended at the end. Instead, this felt like a beginning.
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thefabulousfab-3 · 2 years ago
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I just watched a video where someone said that the hunger games is “conservative propaganda”. Media literacy is truly dead.
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divinekangaroo · 21 days ago
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My word but blocking tags is really the bomb
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monsterhugger · 7 months ago
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between finding a copy of dragon maid at the library and watching super lovers for my BL research i'm starting to think some anime fans have a really low bar for what they find to be objectionable content
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signeficunt · 9 months ago
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i wonder how many youtubers who got cancelled and disappeared off the platform just made new faceless channels with ai scripts and voice overs
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anomalouscutie · 7 months ago
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inappropriately honest rn but. its a streak ig.
guys for real 1-10 how abnormal is it to try to overdose like 7 times throughout without your mom “catching” you twice and so you always felt to scared to tell her you were sorry when you woke up in the morning because you were too much of a coward to just take all the pills in the bottle bc you knew if you act succeeded your mom would kill herself after and your dad might follow suit or start abusing your stepsiblings again who blame you for the “fact” that you stole their “picture perfect life.”
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thebirdandhersong · 2 years ago
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Hm
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theclosetedskeleton · 1 year ago
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WHIMSY POSTING PAUSED the day I finally stop my compulsive skin picking habits is the day its OVER for all of my enemies
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aro-aceattorney · 9 months ago
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hey I removed the comic I made yesterday bc I panicked over some negative comments lol
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perenlop · 9 months ago
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let me tell you it is so easy to tell when some people went to high school in a super liberal area or didnt suffer from bigotry there.
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seilon · 1 year ago
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i usually dont comment on these kinds of things because they shouldnt be treated with the level of weird parasocial interest they tend to be on social media generally but. claire (lil tay) was so fucking young. it doesnt take knowing her personally to feel just how jarring and genuinely tragic her sudden death is. like shit. she was only 14. she didnt even get to live her own life. sorry if this is pointless and theres no call to action or anything here but. jesus.
#kibumblabs#cw death#havent looked too deep into it because im still conflicted over it feeling voyeuristic and disrespectful to do so or not but#from what i have heard it seems sketchy re: her brother and idk i dont want to accuse anyone of anything without proper basis especially#when that someone also passed away but. considering his history of controlling behavior over her image and how it put her in some#serious danger at worst - situations a child should not be in at best... if he did have any part in this i. well i dont know.#cant exactly say he needs to see justice considering its a bit late for that but. i dont know#depending on the circumstances one of her parents may need to answer to some neglect charges. but anyway it all feels so trivial when its#already too late.#you know what. what i think i can say for sure is that i hope she's properly remembered and honored for who she actually was and not as#'lil tay the worlds youngest flexer'. a persona her brother made up that put her in dangerous situation for the sake of clout. by no means#is the public entitled to anything but if anything more is put out there in memorium i hope its something#letting the world know who she was as a real teenage girl with her own interests and personality and favorite songs and teenage obsessions#she looked like such a sweet girl. i hope her friends and family who actually knew her are haunted as little as possible by her#bastardized image on the internet. i hope they– as well as anyone else really– can separate that character from the innocent young girl#who actually existed and who's life was cut so. so fucking short.#i know i said i didnt want to comment too much about this but idk man. it really got to me. maybe because its such a novel situation thats#never exactly happened before- the way her image was on in the internet and how this case will inevitably be treated on the internet#how young she was and how little say she had in how she'd be portrayed on line– much less now how she'd be REMEMBERED.#its disturbing. and deeply deeply tragic.#2009. she was born in 2009. fuck. thats just. wrong
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szczylpierdolony · 1 year ago
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this shoudve made the movie soundtrack
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geometricalien · 2 years ago
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him, already with a girlfriend that he wants to marry: I wanted to kiss you when I saw you. I wanted to kiss you on the bridge as well.
me, externally: i- eh- what-
me, internally: soooo many red flags how can he just admit this??
#personal#when did my life become a fucking k-drama?#not that anything will happen. i firmly closed that door.#sir you can be as romantic and funny and sweet as possible but that does not excuse that red flag right there#its not romantic or sweet. its frankly disturbing and horrifying. if i knew my partner- who ive talked about marriage with- was torn like#this? over someone they have not seen in years- i would be deeply hurt#just- why man are you so messy?#why are you so presumptuous? where does this audacity come from? 'i know my feelings for you and i know your feelings for me'#HOWWWW I DONT EVEN KNOW MY OWN FEELINGS#i reject all feelings that i cannot rationalize and sort out- i- where does he get this audacity#fucking Shakespeare ass motherfucker.#BUT IM THE ONE WHO SAID 'IF OUR STARS CROSS AGAIN' I CANT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THAT- IVE BEEN IN GENSHIN BRAIN ROT FOR THE LAST 24 HOURS#AND BEYOND THAT SAPPY AKA/FURI FLUFF SOUP#excuse me if i say something poetic and poignant. stupid red flag 'isms just tear society apart' GAHHH#i still want to be friends but i SWEAR if he says some flirty earnst comment or- looks at me like im some fucking miracle like he has been#the last times we were face to face- i dont know what to do. i cant encourage that behavior. and no physical punishments either. thats just#flirting on my part. ill just- raise my eyebrows like a disapointed teacher or some shit i guess fuck#pls dont percieve#unless you have advice. tell me to ignore him. block him. cut him off. because... if you saw the way he looks at me... apollo doesnt need#to throw his red ball to manifest me messing their relationship. i refuse to do it.
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im-totally-not-an-alien-2 · 2 years ago
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Lmao i wish, its like 3,700. I think I lost a lot of people during the Rejected Soulmate au thing. I had to delete almost 200 comments since initially posting it due to people going full incel
i love trying to guess people's follower counts . i always get it terribly wrong. would love a tag game where you just try and fail miserably at guessing prev's follower count
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coridallasmultipass · 6 months ago
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i love how much you talk in tags. i love reading your words and how you talk and what about. might sound strange but its true. i like your mouth words dawg.
Technically, they're finger words.
#gonna finish answering in the tags#im so glad someone cares ab all my ridiculous tag rambles#so thank uu <3#i remember i found the 30 tag limit almost immediately upon returning to tumblr and was like#oh shit i gotta turn down the verbosity? i thought this was the blogging site!#the only platform that encourages ppl to make comments in the tags but only if u show some restraint#mf ill show u restraint im gonna hit that 30 tag limit into next week#get outta here w that nonsense#anyway#its like i can talk somewhere between loud and clear speaking voice (text post) and whisper (read more)#tags is like the chill moment when ur hangin out w someone late at night just doing ur own thing and occasionally being like#'haha this post just said [x]' 'haha nice' and then back to comfortable silence#occasionally its the 'omGG HAHAHA CHECK THIS OUT' and it disturbs the peace which is fun#even if most of it is just me rambling to myself its like that same feeling to me#chill no filter late night thoughts at any hour#or maybe im biased bc im getting rly sleepy rn and thats the vibe im getting from this ramble#ok tone shift im getting a spicy hot take/ides and im just gonna put it here instead of bury it in the graveyard of my wips#tw puppet talk ahead#so you know that movie Teeth#wouldnt it be fucked up if the ssme concept applied to puppets intended to be manipulated with an arm inside them#you do something the puppet doesnt like and you get the nom#ok sry i was aiming for 30 tags im falling asleep rm gotta cutbit short#snknjmkjmmmmm#anonyymkud#annonynkus#anonymous#askdx#asked#puppets#mentions
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