#tale as old as time

[doemiqwerty]

Devastating News: the baddest bitch alive lives in buttfuck nowhere. But like... a different buttfuck nowhere from where you are.

[bubbi-pop]

Drawing Zanechan/Zana in 2024, the world is healing (+reference pic)

[daydreamerwonderkid]

*finally decides to start reading the 750k slow burn hurt/comfort fic I've been putting off until I was in the right head space to get absolutely destroyed*

*clicks on fic*-

[txttletale]

but at some point just being reactive to the latest heinous thing a tumblr user said is no longer useful to articulate and develop an ideology. thinking mostly about how a couple weeks ago everyone was screenshot dunking on a trans girl whose political project was basically just posting reddit joker memes about Society. & obviously i do not blame the people on whose posts she was frothingly racist for responding to that but at the end of the day it was all just unnecessary like there just wasn't a serious ideology there to examine or any useful conclusions to come to and so everyone was just picking on a tgirl for being cringe

[thewalrusespublicist]

I’d love it if you could give your thoughts on john getting married a week after paul. do you think it was just a matter of outdoing paul and having ppl talk about his wedding instead or something entirely different. thx!

That moment John realises he's going to have to commit to the bit…

Nah I'm joking, but also a little bit not.

I mean the more you think about the question of why the hell John did that, the more complex it gets (and why it’s taken me so long to reply lol). Trying to boil it down to three essential points from least to most important though, I’d say it was the commitment to the ‘ballad of John and Yoko’ plotline, drug fuelled competition and then the fundamental reason underpinning it all which was the overwhelming fear of abandonment/‘thwarted love’ between John and Paul.

So let’s start of with the simple one - the ballad of John and Yoko. Part of John and Yoko’s entire brand was that they were the most in love couple in the history of love and that their love story was the symbol of progressive society and the activist movement in the late 60s. That type of brand and the undercurrent of superiority complex and fragile narcissism underpinning it can’t do with a competing love story pulling focus. Therefore, John and Yoko would have to quickly correct that by getting married as soon as possible to draw focus away from them.

Then there’s the competition. John and Paul were famously competitive with each other, but somewhere towards the late 60s, this starts to shift a lot more into the personal than it had before, probably partially due to heroin. In this landscape of drug use and high competitiveness, everything including personal happiness is a competition to win. This would be especially true when it came to dating women due to its ties to concepts of masculinity and Johns insecurity about Paul’s looks. In John’s mind, I think he partially believed Paul getting married was a strategic one-up move that John had to outdo.

But to me, the real root of the transition into personal competitiveness is actually what I believe this was all about this entire time: abandonment.

(Some of this will be similar to the breakup podcast series but I heavily agree with them so it can't be helped.)

Now competition is par the course for John's creative partnerships, but he does have a specific pattern when he feels his partners are becoming too independent. Whilst you need a lot of salt for Dakota Days, John Green/Charlie Swan does occassionally say some very insightful things which ring true, one being John's behaviour toward Yoko:

John did have a long-established pattern of early support followed by sudden withdrawal. What he required above all was Yoko's undivided attention. So long as her ideas kept her focused on him, he would support them. But as soon as she started off on her own, John would withdraw his energy, knowing that this would force her back to him.

It's not a 1-1 situation and other factors are at play with the John and Yoko dynamic but similar behaviour was present with Paul around Yesterday. Coming back to the late 60s, John was in a similar predicament. According to Pete Shotton, John was feeling isolated in 67' with George and Paul developing their own lives. Then came the engagement to Jane Asher and the arrival of Linda. It's quite notable to me that John remains so salty and annoyed about Linda and not in a 'god why did Linda pick him not me' but in a 'why did he pick Linda??' way. Add to Paul coming into his own musically to the point John has to 'swallow his jealousy' and you have a huge mess for John psychologically.

This is a view shared by many on here but the shift to personal is to me part one of the two pronged withdraw and burn strategy. Fearing that he was going to be abandoned, John withdrew emotionally from his dynamic with Paul and tried to individuate himself. As highlighted by later statements by both of them, their construction of their own identities did not allow for severance from each other. Having no option in his mind to separate from Paul and spurned on by his paranoia, his belief system morphed into a karmic yin-yang in which only one of them could be strong and successful.

The second part of the strategy (that still bleeds in with the first) is to burn and humiliate, in this instance to a new partner, and rip apart everything they had built. My big question with John is how much does he believe in what Yoko and he are doing? I think somewhat, but I'm not convinced that at least part of it is to smash apart the Beatles brand and everything he and Paul had built apart (the dead rat story especially made me really reevaluate some things). I'm not saying that John and Yoko weren't madly in love and that some of John and Yoko's own weirdness didnt factor into her being there all the time, but the constant 'Yoko has to be here, has to talk for me, 'I'd sacrifice all of you for her' feels partially performative and intentionally provocative (especially the last one, why say that when no one is really attacking them other than to make your friends feel like shit?). Paul reactive response in kind reflects that this strategy worked. It's crucial to remember that Paul brought Francie Schwartz into the studio first. This isn't about 'being too in love' to be apart, it's about getting back at each other and as Lina put it, ''playing these games' in escalating ways.

In this environment the marriage is the flipped table on the chessboard. Paul isn't playing and they can't take this back. He is now a married man whose first priority will be his wife and the children John knows he's always craved. Considering his responses to his imagined abandonment by Paul, there's no way John is jinxing his relationship with Yoko nor getting left alone at one altar as it were when there was another ready and waiting to go.

[arabella-strange]

wait. I haven't even been thinking about how my lockscreen image since MAY 2022 has been the chromatic rose:

[my edit of the B&tB prologue, because my skills at illustration are not sufficient to my imagination]

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

Jordan Peterson: [says something true] me: yeah!! Jordan Peterson: and that's what X Bible story is about me: no!!

[nuge]

team canada 🤝 edmonton oilers

mcdavid scoring a crazy goal and still losing 3-1 smdh

[neege]

I am such a sucker for mechanic Sirius & Remus who's car is making a funny noise ❤️

[crowfee]

the itch to organize a drawfee fanzine vs the multiple essays i should be writing…

[lelelego]

>hasn't finished wip comic >starts a new one >"oh yeah. this'll be short and sweet" >2 pages becomes 5

[lordwiggyton]

🎵 Certain as the sun, rising in the east, tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, Pleakley and Jumbeast... 🎵

Another JumbaxPleakley crossover, with my all-time fav Disney Princess film! I can't stop drawing them!!! Send help pls!😅🥰🥰🥰🥰

Happy valentines day to these two alien goofballs! 🥰🥰🥰

[ratatatastic]

sasha scracthed and we didnt really see him in the video for lombos dinner he didnt get sick did he-

[mikiquette]

🍓 ︴ stroke of serendipity. closed rp with @apple-caleb.

Pacing.

She's been staring at the phone in her hand for the past, maybe, fifteen minutes or so...

And she's pacing.

The familiar, apple-y profile stares her right in the face like a reminder of what she's just too chicken to do—and she should call, probably. Text, even. Something, anything!

But what would she even say, right?! Hey, how you doing?!

The thought of it has her mortified just as her phone dings with a message, and she feels lightheaded—

It's just Tara.

She gives the message a once-over, figures she could totally use some time out with friends, for once...

「 waaaahhh, actually i think it would be Real Great if we met up today T^T need a distraction...!!! 」

And maybe it's because she isn't thinking properly—or thinking too much, rather—but the second the text goes through, she realizes all too late that she hadn't switched to Tara's message.

She was still on Caleb's text profile.

The message had gone to him.

"Augh! No heckin' way! That's even worse than a 'Hey, how you doing'!!!!!!!!!! Unsend, dammit, unsend!!!!! Oh my god. Oh my god. He's going to see it, and he's going to think I'm an idiot because who the hell says THAT after going weeks without talking, and—"

[skullsemi]

yeah them

[dreamgirleviil]

the snupin brain rot is real, thinking about remus trying desperately to rizz severus up but severus is the ultimate Ice Queen on the outside yet internally flustered and endeared on the inside I think it's time to break out the google doc