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adorpheus · 4 years ago

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on fujoshi and fetishization

Lately, more and more, both here on tumblr and on other sites, I keep seeing people spew unfiltered hatred at fujoshi - that is, women who like mlm content such as gay fanfic and fanart featuring men with other men. And I don’t mean like a specific type of fujoshi, like the ones who are genuinely being weird about it, but just like a general hatred for girls (but especially straight identifying girls) who express love for gay romance.

I hate to break this to you all, but women (including straight women!) actually are allowed to like mlm fanfiction and fanart, even enthusiastically so. A woman simply expressing her love of gay fanfic, even if it is in kind of a cringey way or a way that you personally don’t like, is NOT automatically fetishization.

I’ve been on the receiving end of fetishization for my entire life, from a very young age, as many black and brown folx have, so I consider myself pretty well acquainted with how it works. Fetishization isn’t just like, being really into drawings of boys kissing, or whatever the fuck y’all are trying to imply on this god forsaken site.

Fetishization is complicated imo, and can encompass a lot of things, such as (but not limited to):

1 - dehumanization, e.g. viewing a group of people as sexual objects who exist purely for entertainment purposes, rather than acknowledging them as actual people who deserve respect and rights

and

2 - projecting certain assumptions onto said people based on their race/sexuality/whatever is being fetishized. These assumptions are often, but not always, sexual in nature (like the idea that black people in general are more sexual than other races, etc etc etc).

I’m going to use myself as an example to illustrate my point. Please note this isn’t the best or most nuanced example, but it is the most simplistic. A white person finding me attractive and respectfully appreciating my black features as part of what makes me beautiful is not, on its own, fetishization. A white person finding me attractive solely or mostly because I’m a PoC is now in fetishization territory. Similarly, assuming I’m dominant because of my blackness (like saying “step on me mommy” and shit like that) is hella fetishistic.

That being said, theres definitely a difference between how fetishization works in real life with real people, and how it shows up in fandom.

Fetishization manifests in many different ways in fandom, but most commonly on the mlm side of things, I personally see it appear as conservative (or centrist) women who love the idea of two men together, but don’t actually like gay people, and don’t necessarily think LGBT+ people deserve rights (or “special treatment” as its sometimes dog whistled). These women view queer men as sexual objects for entertainment rather than an actual group of people who deserve to be protected from systemic oppression. I’ve noticed that they often don’t even think of the men they “ship” together as actually being gay, and may even express disgust at the idea of a character in an mlm ship being headcanon’d gay. In case its not obvious, this is pretty much exactly the same way a lot of cishet men fetishize lesbians (they see “lesbian” as a porn category, rather than like, what actual LGBT people think of when we read the word lesbian). There’s a pretty popular viral tweet thread going around where someone explains seeing this trend of conservative women who like mlm stuff, and I have also personally witnessed this phenomenon myself in more than one fandom.

The funny thing is, maybe its just me buuuut.... The place I see this particular kind of fetishization happen most is not in the anime/BL fandom, from which the term fujoshi originates - I actually see these type of women way way more in western fandom spaces like Supernatural, Harry Potter, and Hannibal. I can’t stress this enough, there’s a shocking amount of people who are like, straight up trump supporters in these fandoms. If you want to experience it, try joining a Hannigram or Destiel group on facebook and you will probably encounter one eventually especially if you happen to be living through a major historical event. Like these women probably wouldn’t even be considered “fujoshi”, because that term doesn’t really apply to them given they aren’t in the BL/anime fandom, yet they’re the ones I personally see actually doing the most harm.

Of course this isn’t the ONLY kind of fetishizing woman in the mlm/BL world, there are other ways fetishization shows up, but this is the most toxic kind that I see.

A girl just being really into BL or whatever may be “cringe” to you, or she may be expressing her love for BL in a “cringey” way, but a straight woman really enjoying BL is not, on its own, somehow inherently fetishization. Yes, sometimes teenage girls act kind of cringe about how much they like BL and that might be annoying to you, but its not necessarily ~problematic~.

That being said, IT NEEDS BE REMARKED that a lot of the “fujoshi” that you all hate so deeply, are actually closeted trans men or nonbinary people who haven’t yet come to terms with their gender identity, or are otherwise just NOT cishet. I know because I was one of these closeted people for years, and I honestly think tumblr and the cultural obsession around purity is one of the many reasons I was closeted so deeply for so long. STORYTIME LOL!!! In my early adolescence, I was a sort of proto “fujoshi”. I identified as a bi girl who was mostly attracted to men, or as most (biphobic) people called it, “practically straight”. I wrote and read “slash” fanfic and looked at as well as drew my own fanart. We didn’t use the term fujoshi back then, but that’s definitely how I could have been described. I was obsessed with yaoi, BL, whatever you want to call it, to a cringe-inducing degree. I really struggled to relate to most het romances, so when I first discovered yaoi fanfics (as we called them at the time), I fell in love and felt like I finally found the type of romance content that was made for me. I didn’t know exactly why, I just knew it hit different. LGBT+ fanart and fanfiction brought me an immense amount of joy, and I didn’t really think too hard about why.

At some point, in my early 20s, after reading lots of discourse™ here on tumblr and other places like twitter, I started to get the sinking feeling that my passion for gay fanfiction was ~problematic~. I had always felt a sense of guilt for being into mlm content, because literally anyone who found out I liked BL (especially the men I dated) shamed me for liking it all the fucking time (which btw is literally just homophobic, like can we talk about that?). In addition to THAT bullshit, now I’m seeing posts telling me that girls who like BL are cringey gross fetishists who inspire rage and should go die?

Let me tell you, I internalized the fuck out of messages like this. I desperately wanted to avoid being ~problematic~. At the time, I thought being problematic was like the worst thing you could be. I was terrified of being “cancelled”, before canceling was even really a thing. I thought to myself, “oh my god, I’m gross for liking this stuff? I should stop.” I beat myself up over this. I wanted so badly to be accepted, and to be deemed a Good Person by the internet and society at large.

I tried to shape up and become a good ally (lmfao). I stopped writing fanfic and deleted all the ones I was working on at the time. I made a concerted effort to assimilate into cishet culture, including trying to indulge myself more deeply in the few fandoms I could find that had het content I did enjoy (Buffy, True Blood, Pretty Little Liars, etc). I would occasionally look at BL/fanfic/etc in private, but then I would repress my interest in it and not look for a while. Instead I would look at women in straight relationships, and create extremely heterosexual Couple Goals pinterest boards, and try to figure out how I could become more like these women, so I, too, could be loved someday.

This cycle of repression lasted like eight years. Throughout it all, I was performing womanhood to the best of my ability and trying to become a woman that was worthy of being in a relationship. I went in and out of several “straight” relationships, wondering why they didn’t make me feel the way reading fanfic did. Most of all, I couldn’t figure out why straight intimacy didn’t work for me. I just didn’t enjoy it. I always preferred looking at or making gay fanfiction/fanart over actual intimacy with men in real life.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a trans coming out video that someone I was following posted online, my egg started to crack, and to make an extremely long story short, after like 3 years of introspection and many gender panic attacks that I still experience to this day, I realized that I’m uh... MAYBE... NOT CIS..!? :|

I truly believe if I had just been ALLOWED TO LIKE GAY STUFF WITHOUT BEING SHAMED FOR IT, I probably would have realized I was trans way way sooner. Because for me, indulging in my love of gay romance and writing gay fanfic wasn’t me being a weirdo fetishist, it was actually me exploring my own gender identity. It is what helped me come to terms with being a nonbinary trans boy.

Not everyone realizes they are trans at age 2 or whatever the fuck. Sometimes you have to go through a cringey fujoshi phase and multiple existential crises to realize how fucking gay you are AND THATS FINE.

And one more thing - can we just be real here?

A lot of anti-fujoshi sentiment is literally just misogyny. omg please realize this. Its “women aren’t allowed to enjoy things” but, like... with gay fanfics. Some of the anti-fujoshi posts I see come across my dash are clearly ppl projecting a caricature they invented in their head of a demonic fujoshi fetishist onto any woman who expresses what they consider to be a little too much enthusiasm for gay content and then using their perception of that individual as an excuse to justify their disdain for any women, especially straight women, ‘invading’ their ~oh so exclusive~ queer fandom spaces.

god get over yrselfs this is gatekeeping by another name

idk why i spent so long writing this no one is even going to read it, does anyone even still use this site

*EDIT: HOLY SHIT WHEN DOING RESEARCH FOR THIS POST I FOUND OUT THAT Y-GALLERY IS BACK OMG!!!

#rant #fujoshi #I SAID WHAT I SAID #personal #gender stuff

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blue-shaded · 4 years ago

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hiya! i’m the dream anon from earlier so i’ll send some of the stuff i can find because i know i have some of the stuff saved, especially the tweets. however for some of the stuff that’s been said on lives may take me a bit longer because many of the dream smp members go live multiple times a week/month for hours on end and i don’t really clip twitch streams, so it’ll take me a bit to sort through that but i Will get it to you :)

a thread about the lynching situation, with a clip of the stream: https://twitter.com/pinkdlsc/status/1338189556152225798?s=21

his apology: https://twitter.com/dreamwastaken/status/1338205864650547207?s=21

(note: i for some reason forgot about the war cry controversy. this one still upsets me and basically dream did a war cry during one of his minecraft streams and it was seemed very reminiscent and mocking of native american war cries, though he says that he was mimicking the spongebob victory speech)

thread, with the clip: https://twitter.com/94lcvr/status/1289367315914452992?s=21

dream’s initial (and incredibly shitty) response: https://twitter.com/honkcait/status/1289601630975844353?s=21

he then deleted the tweets and went live later that day, addressing that situation and also other situations: https://youtu.be/Js8Ir22FVmE (the original vod is no longer on twitch as twitch deletes vods after like two months)

^ in that video is also where he says that he is okay with being shipped with “the guys” aka georgenotfound and sapnap who were on the stream with him aka the group known as the dream team! besides saying he’s okay with being shipped with the dream team, he also says that creators should not be sexualized, especially if they explicitly say they’re uncomfortable with it (referencing tubbo talking about being sexualized in the past) and if they’re a minor (i assume he’s referencing both tommy and tubbo here because they’re close friends of his that were being sexualized at the time, solidified by the fact that tommy and tubbo reacted to dream’s stream in real time and said “he’s talking about us” when he mentioned the sexualization of minors)

^^ that video also addresses something that i didn’t mention that wasn’t really a controversy but sparked a lot of rumors that the dream team was homophobic and transphobic because they didn’t put their pronouns in their bios and they address the reasoning for that there

tommy and tubbo reacting to dream’s live: https://youtu.be/1kaBc6N7D5o

as for the tommyinnit and ninja situation, i would like to apologize, i was misinformed about this one. the incident of someone asking the age of consent in the discord call n dream chiming in in chat was a different situation separate to that of the tommy and ninja situation. this one’s hard to pinpoint to a short clip because it’s quite a long stream. for those who’d like to watch the full thing, this is the full video of ninja and tommy’s stream: https://youtu.be/nnax_Ecez9I

for example of some of ninja’s sexual comments, you can go to 22:46 and 26:53. like the other comments he makes, the sexual comment is not about tommy, but it is directed to him since he’s speaking to him. a lot of people think that this is around the point when tommy used his panic word, but that’s just speculation because tommy and wilbur’s discord messages are private and we shouldn’t try to speculate on them. dream makes the “16 is legal in the uk” comment at around the 23 minute mark. wilbur soot shows up and mentions the panic word at around 1:08:30, with tommy promptly waving him off. wilbur comes on anyway, as do many of the other members of the dream smp later on in the video. in the video you can see tommy message tubbo at one point to ‘save him because ninja’s a weirdo’ but this remained confusing to many of the people who were watching because they were unsure if it was a bit or not as all the dream smp members like to jokingly insult one another to each other. regardless, he definitely did seem uncomfortable at some points and dream shouldn’t have perpetuated the joke.

not sure if this would be relevant to your thread at all, but for further context, tommy was most likely just uncomfortable because it was ninja and not due to the sexual content itself. tommy’s known for being a little vulgar and lewd (he’s known for writing the joke books “how to sex 1” and “how to sex 2” , which aren’t explicitly vulgar, but many of the dream smp members joke about, which he’s seemed fine with in the past. tommy also has a video called “I asked GeorgeNotFound VERY inappropriate questions.” this video is basically just a whole bit where tommy uses the fact that he and tubbo are both minors to mess with badboyhalo and georgenotfound (who are 25 and 23, respectively) by asking jokingly sexual questions, such as what is an std, what is cum, and what is sex. all in good fun, but it shows that he’s usually fine joking about sex, ninja just took it over the line)

besides his past apologies, dream addressed most of his past controversies in this, some of which i haven’t mentioned in this ask or in the past ask because it happened long before i became a fan of any of the dream smp members, so hopefully someone else can give some sources for these events just so people can see what he did/said firsthand: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sre9uo

that’s all i have for now, for stuff that i said in the last thread that i do not have sources for now, i’ll try n go back through the twitch streams and find them! hope this helps

Awesome thank you!

#Anonymous

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catbountry · 8 years ago

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Deleting kiwi farms was a cowardly act. By giving into the threats the owner is letting them win.

It’s caused Null a lot of trouble. That Trans Lifeline lady showing up to his house with a knife (and Vordrak calling him a coward for wanting to hide from the crazy person COMING TO HIS HOUSE WITH A KNIFE) indicated that things were getting uncomfortably real. Vordrak himself called in school shooting threats in the local area in Null’s name. Null’s powerword has been known for a while, because he figured having it out there instead of remaining anonymous would basically take away any power that doxing him might have. I’m pretty sure Hotwheels of 8chan basically uses the same tactic, but Hotwheels has brittle Bone Disease and is in a wheelchair and is not living with his mother. But for a while, it seemed to work for Null… until Vordrak went after Null’s mother and basically got her fired and had her real estate license taken away under false allegations of the site hosting CP.

The FBI investigated the site several times and didn’t find any CP. They investigated Null and found nothing on him. But word of mouth to his mother’s employers, as well as threats being sent to her, finally convinced Null to SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING.

I can’t really blame him. His family has been hurt by this. Vordrak won by basically shooting him right in the mother.

Both Kiwi Farms and the Lolcow Wiki are down, but ED still has an article on Vordrak, whose made it his sole mission to destroy the farms ever since he had a thread made on him eight months ago for getting into fights with teenage girls on the internet over Evanescence while being an adult man in an elected government position and a lawyer.

Oh and Dynastia may have made things worse by being Dynastia and baiting the fuck out of Vordrak. I’m sure Vordrak would love to ruin Dynastia as well, if he could.

I’m not going to say Kiwi Farms was a good site, or an evil one. It started as a forum dedicated to Chris-chan and his antics, and expanded to watching other internet weirdos. Honestly, I don’t see it as that much different from Something Awful or Portal of Evil back in the day. I’m sure Goons will try and say they were never as bad, and they had a similar “don’t touch the poop” policy, but Goons violated that all the time in order to get content. Since Something Awful has become more and more SJ, that sort of thing is now unfashionable… though you’ll still see people on Tumblr and Twitter basically do the same shit we did to more “acceptable” targets (i.e., straight white male nerds who disagree with them). There’s always going to be EDs, dramachans, fandom_wanks, you name it. Katsukitty apparently has the site backed up; if she becomes the new Null, the SJW types that hate us will surely pull up any and all latent transphobia to get at her and probably accuse her of being truscum or a TERF or some other stupid bullshit. So that would be a total shitshow.

The CWCki is still up though.

#drama #yourchangelingoverlord

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amorremanet · 8 years ago

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what's your novel about??

Oh my gosh, nonny, thank you so much for asking!!

Okay, so the absolute shortest version — the, “summarize this thing and make it sound as shitty as possible” meme version — is, “Superpowered LGBTIQ neurodivergent and/or mentally ill mutant weirdos with emotional problems (and their self-appointed sidekick, who isn’t a mutant but is very enthusiastic about the work) investigate some seemingly unrelated incidents and accidentally uncover a neo-fascist supervillain club that’s trying to take over the U.S. on as many levels as possible — currently, by pulling strings to sabotage the lead-up to the still-upcoming 2016 election — and the neo-fascist supervillains are, unfortunately, very good at this.

“Also, our heroes start out as a ragtag group of misfits with superpowers [or, in Pete’s case, enthusiasm, wit, dedication af, adaptability, and a rather sizable collection of lime-green hot-pants], and progressively become both an actual team and a set of accidental rising stars in the superhero world. Is it a bit of a tired plot? Yeah, especially given how often superhero teams have to do some kind of song and dance like this — but: 1. it’s done so often because it resonates with people and, when done well, it can work; and 2. tired or not, it’s something that viewers/readers deserve to actually see happening, rather than just being told, ‘oh yeah, now they’re a team, okay? okay cool.’”

At least, that’s the plot of the first book, since…… I can’t make anything simple or less-difficult for myself, series are often more fun in general, and I just have a lot of characters here who I love, so the whole, “These incidents are starting to string themselves together in really suspicious ways, oh shit fuck goddammit, the election is being sabotaged” plot is just the start of things.* The bigger series plot would be more about trying to deal with further attempts by the neo-fascist supervillain club to wreak all kinds of neo-fascist supervillain Hell all over everything.

Then, the way I’m looking at this, structurally? Is that I have an ensemble cast, in the end. There are different tiers of importance among the different characters, because that’s unavoidable — I mean, I rail against JKR’s habit of treating her characters as plot devices first and people second, but even if you all treat your characters as people, you have to prioritize some of them over the others at different points, or else you end up worse off than George RR Martin, drowning in impossible goals and strangled by the giant pile of fictional people you made up to tell stories about — but I still view the cast as fundamentally an ensemble.

However, for the sake of reining in my horrible attention span and trying to avoid GRRM’s example, each installment has a focal character, whose own personal story of the moment gets to exist alongside the bigger plotty plot-stuff of each book (…I am a serious business writer, oh yes I am). As an approach, this has its drawbacks — balancing things without making it all too coincidentally intertwined is a big one — but I also love it because, to me, it reflects the way that life has several different levels to it that aren’t always intimately woven together, but still affect each other and need to find some kind of balance if you’re going to get anywhere

Anywho, the focal character for book one is Sebastian, because on one hand, he was here first. Like, he was originally for a game that my Sunday night RP group was playing this past summer, which was still the same-ish idea of mutant superheroes, except that it was more closely modeled on the way that Aya Brea’s powers work in the Parasite Eve games

Meaning, “the system is very openly based on Parasite Eve, it says so in the player’s handbook and everything,” rather than a motley hodgepodge assortment of superhero comics and movies/TV, speculative fiction in general, LGBTIQ theories and histories and cultures, “okay, I’d kind of like to be more active in superhero-related fandoms, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that the stories I want to tell right now are not easily mapped onto characters who already exist, I won’t feel fulfilled in trying to change them so I can shoehorn Sam and Steve and Nat and Bucky or Dick, Jason Stephanie, Tim, Cass, Duke, and Harper into them, so I’ve got to just say, ‘fuck it’ and do my own thing”

and, “what if I did [something that is a big and very, very deliberate middle finger to either Marvel or DC, possibly both, for some reason or another]” — e.g., “what if I made a pair of characters who are a pretty blatant satire of/commentary on/response to/whatever Marvel’s perpetual, annoying as fuck Cherik-baiting, except that they’re actually married — and they will be literally married as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court rules on Obergefell v. Hodges in-universe — and also they are old lady lesbians, nah nah nah nah nah nah *flips off Stan Lee et al. with both middle fingers while doing a, ‘come at me, bro’ dance and generally being a Stunning Bastion Of Authorial Maturity Lmao Not Really*”

So, yeah. I had to rescope some things after my RP group dropped that game, but in the name of, “developing my character and giving Jake, my DM and high school friend, material with which to torment my character, and also, Double-Cross’s system actually makes character development and characterization pretty important elements to playing the game,” I’d already written way too much stuff to just let it go, and Sebastian had endeared himself to me in a big way, and I just went, “Fuck it, I’ll write my own thing with him in it, it’ll be fun.”

I don’t remember when he decided to look like Hayden Christensen, only that I tried to stop that mental image from solidifying, and trying to stop it only made it worse, so I just gave up and went, “Fine, whatever, look like Hayden Christensen, see what I care.” But then, more importantly than, “Sebastian gets to go first because in fairness, he was here first”? Well.

On a thematic level, I feel like this little mutant disaster’s biggest personal story of the moment (trying desperately to get his shit together after making it to 30 without his clinical depression getting noticed as depression, much less treated; trying to stay sober and find something to do with his life that feels even vaguely fulfilling, which for him would mean, “helping people, doing some kind of good in the world, trying to make someone else happy because he is fairly certain that he never will be, period”; trying to actually deal with the past and move forward, not forgetting it or forsaking it entirely, but also not being frozen and chained to the past, learning from it and building something new)…

…has the most common ground and overlap with the current round of big plotty plot-type stuff, since it’s all about things like, “whoo, the formation of a new team! whoo, the new team getting it together and learning how to work as a team and trying to figure out their team identity and values! oh no, emergence of previously unseen threats that have not actually come from out of nowhere, even though it kind of looks like they have, and are more complicated than previously estimated! oh no, we can’t just delete them from existence because they’re insidious and entrenched in more places than we entirely realize at first, so how do we even fight this! ohhh no, progressive realization that we’re fighting a symptom rather than the actual facts problem, but we can’t just NOT-treat the symptom or shit is even more fucked than it will be if we treat the symptom by not the actual problem, and in some ways we don’t even entirely know what the bigger-picture problem is yet! oh man, what do we do!”

—so, like. These two threads work together better than they would with different parts of the larger, longer story.

(And then there’s Pete, who is an admitted authorial pet of mine, just like GRRM blatantly favors Tyrion and JKR visibly projects onto Harry and Hermione, and who I feel lends himself better to a format more like, “Dunk and Egg”-esque novellas, or a collection of, “chronicles of side-kicking” short stories about his little side-adventures and myriad hijinks that aren’t always immediately relevant to the main story but that are really fun. But I also feel like that might just be an excuse to write more weird adventures for him that aren’t necessarily tied together in the right order, like novels generally need to be unless you have some kind of reason not to do that.

idk, man, I just really love my stale cinnamon roll Dramatic bb theatre kid with a heart of gold who will tell you that you’re wrong and he so does not have a heart of gold while he is digging around Seb’s kitchen and making dinner for himself and his Princess because an unfortunate side-effect of one of Seb’s superpowers — the toxin filtering part of his mutant healing factor — is that his body doesn’t only filter out poisons, gases, narcotics, caffeine, and alcohol… it also filters the antidepressants that he gets given a prescription for about ten hours before abruptly being thrust headlong into his newly-awoken mutant superpowers.

Which is a huge mess all over — though, yes, there is a huge part of this that is a pretty deliberate, “fuck you” to literally every piece of media that goes, “and then the hero found out they had superpowers or magic or the fuck whatever and lol suddenly no more mental illness or disabilities or any kind of neurodivergence or anything neener neener” — and anyway, Pete’s hypothetically just found Seb half-spaced out and listening to, “Careless Whisper” on repeat, and Pete is going to tell you that he doesn’t have any kind of heart of gold because he’s a heartless wretch shut your mouth……

…while he’s making them dinner and going, “okay, come on, Princess. Sit up, let’s try and get you through this. No, don’t argue with me. You did the same — or similar, anyway — for me in that entire ten-day stretch when you knew I wasn’t eating disorder okay but couldn’t get me to talk about it and we’ve been over this: if that’s what friends do for each other, then it cuts both ways, so come on. Dinner. Do you want me to put on Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, Female Trouble, Ten Things I Hate About You, or some other thing until you feel like talking.”)

But anyway, as I was saying.

I look at the attempt to find thematic crossover between the plot parts of a book in the series and the story parts of a book as being kind of like how, in the first three seasons of Community, whatever class the Study Group had together was a of synergistic reflection of certain season-long themes and developments for them as characters and in their relationships.

Like, in season one, they were learning how to talk to each other and the basics of building relationships with and understanding each other, so they took Spanish, a language class.

In season two, they took Anthropology — in-universe described as, “the study of humanity” and which is presented as being so open-ended that shitty memetic youtube vids are as valid an object of study as humanity’s development and use of tools, and the different processes by which humans work together to do greater shit than we can do solo — and in that year’s shenanigans, the Study Group cemented their trust as friends, but also went through Hell together in several cases, and in the last two episodes (the cowboy/Star Warts paintball two-parter), they had to face the question of whether or not removing one of them for his shitty behavior (Pierce) would be better or worse for the overall health of the group.

And in season three, they took Biology, defined in-universe as, “the study of life” (which isn’t wrong irl, but the specific phrasing is important to me, here), and they spend a lot of time exploring and developing their lives, both together and individually, both at Greendale Community College and more importantly outside its walls. There’s also the season-long theme of evolution, because the Study Group have evolved as people and continue to evolve — which reaches its biggest culminations in the finale, not just in Jeff’s Winger Speech, but also with five of the big seven (Annie and Britta are sort of adrift but Troy, Abed, Shirley, and Pierce all have moments, and Jeff has the BIGGEST, most obvious moment).

So, with the books, I’m trying to do something kind of similar. Not quite the same, because…… well, TV vs. novels, school setting vs. a variety of settings but none quite as structured as a school (even one that’s as, well, Greendalian as you get on Community), a million other reasons besides — but having some kind of thematic synergy between the plot part of each of the books and the focal characters’ personal stories in each book…… idk, it gives me a comforting sense of structure to play with?

And aside from that, I feel like it’s probably a better choice for the sake of the whole stories because having those points of connection means they can more easily work to enhance each other, rather than distracting from each other. Like, one of the biggest issues that I have with shoehorned-in romance plots in stories that don’t need a romance plot? Even overlooking how they are almost invariably white and m/f and heteronormative and can be all kinds of, “uggggh” in several other ways besides, it comes down to whether or not they work, thematically and tonally, with everything else.

[this is where i had a tangent trying to illustrate my point by talking about pointlessly shoehorned-in white, m/f romance plots in otherwise no romo stories, then cut it after i started to feel moderately ashamed of how many examples and trends about this that i just have in my back pocket]

The point being: you can use dissonance and conflicting juxtaposed parts of the story to different effects, but it’s often harder to pull off and you do need to have some idea of what you’re doing, otherwise you’re going to end up with a huge mess and no idea where to start sorting through it (I say this based on having done this exact thing several times before)

So, in the interests of not doing that, I like the idea of trying to find the big points of synergy and connection between any given book’s focal char’s story, and the plot points of that installment and how it fits into the larger story. And, for the sake of book 1, Sebastian’s big story of the moment is the one that lines up best with the plot stuff, thematically.

Also, apropos of nothing but, he spends like all of two minutes coming up with his nom de spandex, and ends up with Pete being Unimpressed at him because…… Really, Princess? Princess, really. Like. Princess. Really. Your family is obnoxiously insistent on your Frenchness, even though you were all born and raised in fucking Baltimore and your Dad’s family hasn’t been in France itself since your ancestor sold the old ancestral marquisate and came to save the Revolution with the Marquis de Lafayette… and now you turn into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man…… and you picked out the official, “it is on your actual facts government-issued vigilante hero license” name of…… Gévaudan.

Really, Princess. Fucking. REALLY. Ugggggggh, you’re more creative than that, why did you pick the stupidly obvious werewolf name ffs, your family isn’t even FROM Gévaudan or anywhere in its general damn vicinity, why did you have to pick THAT name, it’s BORING.

And now I don’t know how to wrap this up so I’m gonna abruptly stop talking (apart from the footnote below, which I wrote a couple hours ago, whoops)

Thank you so much for asking this and giving me a free excuse to talk about my novel, nonny

*: Given my chosen subject matter, I feel like it has to be? Partly, yeah, it’s authorial self-gratification because I love my weirdos and their adventures.

But another part of it is the idea that it’s not enough to punch fascists in the face. Like, yes, by all means, we need to do that, too — but fascism is insidious and easily enabled by so many aspects of our contemporary societies. So, we need to resist the urge to simplify the discussion. We can go, “Fascism is wrong, period” while also trying to understand the different ways that fascism draws people into supporting it, how it can spread so far and so thoroughly in nominally non-fascist societies, and its different manifestations and ways of working, so that we can better fight it.

Additionally, we’re products of the same societies that create people who do become fascists and we can easily become complicit in both fascism and oppression more generally, so we need to hold ourselves and each other accountable while trying to fight fascism, instead of putting it off for later, because…… historically, and based on several different precedents? Putting off addressing the internal issues among ourselves doesn’t work; it just creates fertile ground for more problems to breed and makes it even harder for people down the line.

And there aren’t any easy answers here. There are some part of them that are easy or at least easier than others — e.g., agreeing on the statement, “Fascism is wrong and we should oppose it” — but unfortunately, not everything in life and resistance can be as easy as, “This thing is wrong, we should oppose it.”

Even getting into the questions of HOW to best and most effectively fight back against fascism gets complicated, to say nothing of situations where there isn’t an obvious Right Side or Wrong Side, no matter how many people try to turn those discussions into Right vs. Wrong and get into a lot of binary-thinking moral absolutism that ultimately upholds a lot of the shit we’re nominally trying to fight, and does more harm than good to everyone involved.

(ftr, those discussions are not things like, “Fascism is wrong, Y/N,” but more like disagreements between people, none of whom are outright in the wrong, but all of whom have different sets of values, different kinds of grievances with each other [some fair, some not so fair], different points of view on any given topic, and so on, usually about things like, “is it more important for people to be free but with more potential for people to abuse that freedom in hurtful ways, or for people to be safe but in ways that give us new ways to hurt each other in the name of safety,” however the Hell these issues are manifesting in a specific context at any given moment)

And, well. It’s a precarious line to walk on, as someone who wants to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be and as true to my handful of basic guiding principles as possible. Principles that I have because…… uh, I want to be as ethical and responsible a writer as I can be? And I want to always work on failing better, as @saathi1013 would put it?

so, if you’re going to do that, you kinda need to have something to stand for and try to be more aware of what’s going on in the world, more aware where the content you’re making fits into those discussions, and more aware of yourself and how you work so that you can try to find places of potential Unfortunate Implications or places where you’re not actually living up to the values that you want to put in your work — c.f., JKR’s handling of House Elves and Muggles in the HP series, or how she wants the books to be anti-abuse but gives Dumbledore a free pass on hardcore manipulating both Harry and Snape [to say nothing of how he doesn’t do shit to make Snape act like a teacher, not a bully, because of reasons], and gives Molly and Arthur a total free pass on all of their unadulterated abusive bullshit

—and part of all this is knowing what you stand for, knowing what you think and feel as much as you can, and being willing to actually interrogate your positions and adjust your views and stances as you come into new information, new experiences, etc. Call it a belief, call it a good idea, call it whatever you want, but for me? You have to have some kind of principles to stand for/by, if you really want to be ethical and/or responsible content creator, because if you don’t have your principles, then what’s guiding you in this, exactly? Principles are what separate people who at least try to be ethical and/or responsible content creators from fuckbishops like the Dadaists, the Marquis de Sade, and the creative team of Family Guy.

And one of my principles here is, essentially, “People are people, and this means, on one hand, that all people deserve basic human rights and civil liberties. But on the other hand, it means that many of our problems are, in the words of Pterry and Gneil in Good Omens, caused not by people being either Good or Evil, but by people being fundamentally people. We’re all a bunch of disasters to varying degrees, and most situations are not going to come down to Good vs. Evil, but to (as Richard Siken puts it) need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone has the potential to be doing wrong by/unto someone else, even if some of us are going to come out more wrong than others based on our actions and/or the context of the situation.”

Which all basically adds up to…… yes, “Fascism is wrong” is a simple and straightforward statement, but there are situations and debates that arise surrounding most simple, straightforward statements that are tangled up and complicated. In this case, for example, how fascism takes root and spreads, how to best fight it in which situations, how it takes advantage of structures and practices even within non-fascist communities and uses them to fester and draw people into supporting it + what the fuck to do about that especially since at a certain point all of us become complicit in it to some degree or another, by virtue of being people who are alive and take part in our civilizations, and what’s at stake for everyone in all these discussions + how best to approach the question(s) of priorities

(…see, what I mean when I say that yes, I have interest in contemporary sociopolitical goings-on for their own sake but also bring them back to the novel pretty easily and regularly? It’s kinda unavoidable when you’re living in the times we are now, writing about superheroes who have to fight very explicitly neo-fascist supervillains)

So, anyway, the TL;DR of my basic point here is that I do try to approach my writing with principles in mind, but I don’t believe in oversimplifying shit — based on what I’ve encountered so far, I believe that oversimplifying things in a lot of these discussions usually starts in an understandable sort of place, but only ends up creating more problems for everyone in the long run, because it too easily fosters binaristic thinking and moral absolutism, dehumanizing each other, creating arbitrary hierarchies that we always end up using to justify hurting each other, and so on — and I don’t want to be a preacher in my work. I’d be a lot happier if I inspired actual discussions.

……Unfortunately, I’ve been in fandom and literature generally for too long to think that this is going to happen without the risk of people playing the apologist cards, the [douchebag character] in Leather Pants card, and all of that good stuff, but…… well.

I’m just trying to tell myself that this is a risk I’m going to have to live with, and if I do everything that I can reasonably do to prevent that and it still happens anyway, then hey, I’m in good company with George Orwell (all the people who have read 1984 as a defense or endorsement of right-wing anything when Orwell was a Socialist, he just opposed fucking Stalinism), Dr. Seuss (the anti-reproductive rights brigade who co-opted Horton Hears A Who to make it a screed against abortion), Emily Brontë (everyone who thinks Heathcliff is romantic and awesome when no. NO. fuck ALL the way OFF, he is an abusive jackass who literally kills a puppy and torments a generation of kids into reenacting his and Cathy’s relationship, just to get back at her for dumping him, and whose author was a fucking abuse survivor, now can everyone please get off her tits and stop using her book to justify their own abusive garbage behaviors), and so many countless others

But that’s a whole other kettle of monkeys, and I should only be so lucky to maybe someday have enough people reading anything I write that there are actually popular misinterpretations of anything. Like, would it be ideal if the misinterpretations didn’t happen? Yeah, but that’s not how writing works and it’s not how reading works and it’s not how most contemporary socialization trains us to read and see things, and everyone who reads anything I write is going to come up with their own interpretation because I can’t tell them how to read it, so

*shrugs* The Author Is Not God, y’know? I can do the work to try and best actualize my vision of things, but there will be things in it that other people see that I didn’t intend or didn’t notice, and my version of the story can’t be the absolute truth because the readers’ input is just as vital to the life of a written work as the work itself. It’s an unavoidable risk of writing shit on shit, so we make do, the end, I guess?

#that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #sebastian moncrieff: mutant disaster #pete arden: dramatic disaster #pete x seb #mine: asks #mine: writing #nonny hi you're my favorite today if ur still around #reaction gifs//#depression cw//#writing meta #Anonymous

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survivor-of-removal · 4 years ago

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even today i can still that word in my head from those fuckers, weirdo, weirdo, gay, freak, cunt, mad, psycho, weirdo weirdo" if i just walked past on smiled at them politely or said hello they would have a go at me. i never understood why. At home i would go straight to my room, read creepypastas, cry my eyes out every night, bite myself on my arm, coming down for dinner, i would become irritable at the sound of my parents eating, i wouldn't even finish my dinner. Half the plate was there. Thinking back on it i feel so guilty and upset. My parents must have been agonized by all this, my isolating behaviour, my obsession with slender man. My mum knew of course. She showed me the something awful forum thread. i cried myself to sleep that night. i knew he was real, but no, to everyone else it was a meme. a stupid urban legend. i began to view him, the slender man, as the only person i had, the only one apart from a few people that i saw from time to time. when i wasn't around them things would go back to shit. Seeing them were the only lights in my life. and another lesson go and it would go back to the dirty looks and the insults and the shoving around and the making fun of me when i was trying to do my work. Or in the lunch queue, stupid year 11 girls coming up to me "Look at this boy man, he's so weird, hey tell this girl about that thing thats stalking you", "oh he believes in slender man", "he's a freak but kind of cute", "he's a fucking weirdo, a stupid loner". Depression kicked in, i would just bang my head against the wall until my eyes flashed in my head. i hated myself. Their words leaked into me. and all the time seeing that thing following me around. slender man, could he help me?

On Saturdays i started going to the woods, i wore a mask i made based to the marble hornets Masky mask, i would wear a black hoodie, black trousers and off id go to the woods, calling his name, asking him things. i saw him a few times, mainly i just spoke to him, a few people coming through the woods giving me Odd looks and such. People in the park staring at me as i made my way up to the woods in my mask. The mask was all i had. and it wasn't long until some two stupid kids asked me if i was possessed in the playground at the park on the edge of the woods thought it would be funny to push my off the swing and grab my mask. and ill never forget what they said:

"oh my god its Steven" my laughed tore up my mask and fucking ran off. pussies. The funniest part was i didn't even recognize them but surely enough when i went to school on Monday it spread like wildfire that i was apparently "stalking people in the woods with a creepy mask". and sure i was. in the name of slender man, because i thought he would be the only one to save me, the operator was my salvation.

i saw the rake once out the school cafeteria window and got freaked out, clearly i was attracting attention from their realm or whatever. i got more and more engrossed, every Saturday it was off to the woods on my bike, running past the cunts at the park, into the woods, stalking people. i started to get revelations, a deep monstrous voice as i did so. i knew who it was, it was him: the Slender man. apparently i was training. What for i didn't know, i began getting manic episodes even at school which of course Didn’t help at all.

There was a festival just up the road from my grandparents house, in a small village. It was a parade of people dressed up playing drums and stuff. That night whilst my family was enjoying themselves in the theme park after the parade had gone, i ran off to the tree line. he was there, in the shadows, suit, tie everything. i got on my knees saying i wished to serve him as a proxy. i got this sudden sense of... i dont even know, it was a weird feeling of joy, something i had not felt in so long. i got up nodded my head and said "yes master" to nothing, for no reason, i just new now though i was his, i was his proxy and if i was a good servant he would give me relief, perhaps even hurt the bullies that had been after me for too long now.

The wooded Saturdays continued. The kids there knew who i was now. Just a creep running into the woods. i did stalk these two boys trying to lure them to the woods, but the one younger than me ran up at hit me, really going for me so i ran off. I’m not surprised to be fair. Who wouldn't seeing a child wearing all black, hooded with a mask. Especially if older

the late October holidays were coming and i went to Cyprus. Nothing happened there. It was like a proxy break almost. i read Creepypasta there and everything but other than that it was a sweet break. From school as well which at that point had gotten so bad i was beginning to consider running way. i did put a knife to my neck though with serious intent because i got upset one night. i dont even remember why. Mad times...

when i got back to school thought everything went bad again, my life became gray once more. The brief moment of family enjoyment turned sour and my mum contacted mental health services. i became rude, isolative, silent on occasions and regective of going out. Weekends became worse as my family relationship really began to break down. We were arguing all the time, shouting at each other. i was aggressive, violent, i threw things. i even began to be nasty to my dog, my own sweet bichon frize. She was my dog, practically brought for me. i would chase her off and shout at her. i didn't hit her or anything though. Wow, what a dick i was, maybe i deserved what i got. Maybe not... i dont know

i tried recruiting another guy at school as a proxy, i gave him a letter he signed, a proxy approval. My mum found a copy and said shed call the police if shed ever found anything like that again. i had to climb out the front bathroom window to grab the one i had left in the drive way for slender man. when i would go to the woods i started to get confused. With everything still going on, people now telling me to go and kill myself, that no one loved me, my dads a nerd, I’m a girl (i flashed myself to prove them i was a boy), I’m gay, i have no friends and never will. they began shoving me around a lot more and people began making false accusations. Making fun of my obsession and my interest in slender man. i went to the woods asking him for help. i waited another week. At this point i started to get in serious trouble. i had to be removed from the class for being disruptive. they locked the gate that led to my hiding place and said i couldn't sit up at the fire exit. my family had really started to argue. i asked my mum to take me home, saying i was sick. i wasn't really. Just so fed up with the bullies. i would lock myself in the bathroom or stay inside close to the staff. i spent entire times in the library on the computers still being mocked by everyone who came by. someone changed my screensaver to the troll face and deleted a lot of my work when i went to get a book. Every day i woke up i considered running away before going to school because it was just getting too much. i would walk through the grounds and people would shout names to me. i hanged out with the guy i tried to make a proxy, he was big and i thought it was safe. It was as safe as i could get i suppose. But people still took the piss. he told them to fuck off and they did. i would cry and cry for hours when i went home, Barricading myself in my bedroom. i decided slender man wasn't doing anything good for me. people at school would make fun of me for going to the woods calling me a stalker and a freak saying i wanted to rape and murder people. The boy i trusted began turning his back on me because he didn't want to get in trouble and the big lad i felt safe with was busy with other friends. i just had to hide in the toilets sometimes i wouldn't even come out for lessons too scared of what will happen to me. more name-calling, more people sighing if i was paired up, people insulting me without the teacher doing anything, the teachers joined in sometimes i swear saying stuff like "well he is very disruptive". i would get shouted at, but i didn't care anymore. i felt numb, what had i done to myself. no... it was him.... he did this to me... slender man...

if it weren't for him i wouldn't have isolated myself, i wouldn't have talked about such things that the other students classed as freaky and weird. i biked to the woods one final time, no mask, no hoodie. i got chased by one of the bullies on his bike who grabbed me and beat me before running off. i tried complimenting him on his skills, but he showed no mercy. Everyone hated me now. fuck it, fuck you, fuck you slender man. i dumped my bike, went into the woods shouting into the distance that i quit. My family life, my school life, even my dreams were unbearable. heartbreaking. i was sick, thinking about suicide. Names, insults, mocks shouted into my ears every day. Even at home my mum began to call me different. We argued for so long sometimes, the shouting got so loud. i quit being a proxy. fuck you slender man. You ruined my chance at this academy full of jerks, you messed up all of this you fucking dickhead. i felt as if i was bleeding everyday, tears and sweat. bruises, punches, death threats. It was too much, death seemed a better option. a good cut up the wrists. Anything to end the agony, the distress, the torture i faced everyday. The sickness didn't even get better, the obsession still dominating my life. Notebooks and whole packs of paper, my school books covered in the operator symbol, slender man drawings. Drawings of people impaled, people hanging from their necks i was disturbed, i didn't even know what i was doing anymore. as the year grew colder my life became worse and worse. i couldn't cough without a dirty look, i couldn't come into the classroom without an insult, i could be in a sports lesson without groaning. i didn't know what to do anymore. Everything was falling apart. Everything. i couldn't eat, i didn't sleep, i didn't go out, i didn't talk to my parents, when i did it was arguments and curses. every night tears, teeth and blood. Bad dreams in the precious hours of sleep i got.

Even in those rare incidents i did go out in public i was scared of being spotted, being humiliated in front of my own mother. It was a mixture of anger, anxiety and depression, a huge weight of boiling water in my chest. Soon enough at school i slowly walked up the fire exit staircase outside. this was it. i had enough. slender man would never go away. i was to be dead soon anyway. i looked down at the ground ready to jump off before the big lad led me down.

i was placed on 1:1 where someone needs to supervise me doing everything. a thorough risk assessment was made. Classes like DT (woodwork), art, anything involving something i could use to hurt myself was monitored closely. i couldn't see my big friend anymore. The other guy i trusted had turned his back on me, as for the other guy who defended me, the people he hanged out with didn't like me as much as he tried to tell them i had been victimized

i tried forgetting slender man. About 6 months of obsession was not easy to forget. i tried focusing my time on learning German. But even then the popular "der ritter" and "der großmann came up. i tried focusing on anything but i couldn't get it out my head. i tried immersing myself in a fantasy world with imaginary friends. i was on the brink of insanity.

i made a mistake then... someone asked me a question about slender man. i said "I’m moving on, i dont want to talk about that" im such a fucking idiot (in their own words too) why did i say that. For the next two weeks everywhere i went: "slender" "slender mans coming to get you" and it made me sick. didn't these fuckers know if i didn't forget i could be in serious danger? oh! wait no, because they didn't believe in what i did. after all i was just a stupid psychotic weirdo. It was a game to them. who can piss him off the most. Even in drama class someone made a play. they all smiled and shouted out the title of the play before preforming "slender returns" i felt sick, dizzy. i charged out the classroom covering my ears crying. i locked myself in a toilet and cried for twenty minutes. a staff member found me after checking all the toilets. apparently they had been looking all over for me. i sat with them for a while. It wasn't long after i began dissociating regularly, finding out that i had done this and that... i hadn't... at least not me...

It was the twelve of December. The day i would die of suicide. But i wanted to annoy them, to make them feel guilty after everything i had done. Whilst everyone was getting changed i tied a noose around my neck standing on my tiptoes on my school bag. For some odd reason everyone was going mad, begging me not to. this always irritates me. these were the same fuckers who told me to kill myself every time they fucking saw me. these were the fuckers that poked and prodded me and shoved me around, these were the fuckers that harassed me when i was minding my own business. These were the fuckers that would call me a weirdo every time i walked past them, these were the fuckers that spoke to me like a piece of shit, that never picked me, and when they had to they groaned like i stunk, these were the fuckers that treated me like a piece of shit, had no remorse or empathy, made a laughingstock of me, scapegoated me, lied about me, manipulated me, made allegations. Even when i tried to be nice, these fuckers were cunts. they deserved to see me die. If i am not a human being like them then why should they care?

The sports teacher ran in and undid the noose practically carried me out made me undress and dress in front of him, and then he called my mum, and we waited about 4 hours in A and E for a couple of doctors to come up and assess me. luckily i went home that night. The school sent me work. My mum didn't exactly approve, instead giving me her own timetable of mainly, creative art work and creative writing. She saved me. it was no more slender man... no more bullies... our relationship rebuilt. The family became closer. i paid more attention to my dog. and once again our dogly friendship rebuilt. slender man became a distant thought. i destroyed everything i had on him, the drawings, the notebooks, everything... he was gone. I stopped reading creepypastas full stop

i went to the woods one final time then. Just to say goodbye, a Canine goodbye, i told him he may be a force for good and maybe he should think next time how to do things properly. i said goodbye. i snapped a picture of him, the Facebook account i posted it on was oddly terminated. Anyway i asked him to leave me alone, just this once let his victim go. i felt oddly peaceful as i walked out the woods despite encountering a bully who asked why i wasn't in school. i said because i tried to kill myself, he said "because of slender man" and did this stupid noise with his lounge. in a way he was right. But i said "no, because of you" and walked off. they stole my bike helmet whilst i was in the woods, fucking sods. they probably still have it after all these years.

The new year began peaceful. 2013 was out the fucking window. Maybe 13 is an unlucky number. Whatever the case i was ready to begin a new life without slender man, get into a new school and try again. Cliche, i was fucking wrong. Because as i now know, slender man is not a force for good, and trust me, he ldoesn't leave his victims alone.

(End of part 4)

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jackfollmanwriter-blog · 6 years ago

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The Phantom

No one knew more about the West Texas Phantom than grizzlymane415.

I exhausted all of the available information online - the Wikipedia page, the citations on the Wikipedia page, the weird blogspots, wordpresses and even a couple of Angelfires back in the day, the annoying slideshows which promised shocking revelations, but delivered none and just crashed my browser - they had all been laid to waste. My last bastion for any good information about the Phantom was an unsolved murder subreddit populated by other lonely weirdos who were probably collecting unemployment checks and ignoring the creepy messages on their numerous online dating profiles.

The group was great for the passionate discussions about the Phantom I could only have with complete, anonymous strangers who didn't assume I was some kind of sociopathic serial killer myself when I wanted to talk about my fascination with the still free killer of more than 20 people who stalked the plains and oil fields of West Texas in the late-80s. The group was also well-stocked with fascinating theories, like how the Phantom may have been a railroad conductor, or how he was a well-known high school football coach named Butch whose crimes were covered up to protect his legacy.

I also relished when some "newb" would wander into the group and start spouting out information we all had already dissected down to the finest molecule. It got to the point where I put a sticky on top of the page which focused on the six principle pieces of information which defined the Phantom and led to my gang's particular fascination with him. Unless someone had NEW information about any of these principles, any posts about them would be promptly deleted.

The Phantom took all of his victims in broad daylight (whether or not they were killed during the day was up for debate)

All of the Phantom's victims were regular women, not the common prostitute victims most serial killers claimed

He used an 1894 Marlin Model rifle. An incredibly rare and valuable weapon.

It is likely he had a regular, white collar job as his killing sprees tended to take place just once a year in two-week spans.

It is possible he used railroads for transportation as nearly all of his killings took place near rail stops.

Tracks from a 1959 Chevrolet Apache truck were found leaving a few of the scenes.

However, none of this fully-satisfied my appetite for discovery. The only person who was able to do that was grizzlymane415.

It all started when grizzlymane415 posted viciously gruesome autopsy photos of one of the Phantom's first victims. The images were so horrifying I felt I should have put that white powder they use in autopsy rooms in cop shows/movies underneath my nostrils so I didn't vomit all over my keyboard. Full disclosure, about 90 percent of what I know about crime comes directly from TV and movies.

RachWhov: How did you get that?

I couldn't have typed the question fast enough. I never got an answer.

That would be far from the last juicy nuggets grizzlymane415 would post. Within days, he posted a copy of a letter to a news reporter at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. The letter took credit for the first three murders which had been attributed to the Phantom and another I had never heard of which had never been connected to the Phantom.

RachWhov: Where did you get that?

I would get an answer this time from grizzlymane415, but not necessarily to that exact question.

(Note, for some reason, grizzlymane415 always typed in all caps. Sorry, I know)

grizzlymane415: THE PHANTOM LEFT CLUES EVERYWHERE. HE WAS ACTUALLY ONE OF THE SLOPPIEST SERIAL KILLERS TO NEVER GET CAUGHT. SOMETIMES I THINK HE DID IT ON PURPOSE. DID YOU KNOW HE USED TO TAKE MONEY FROM THE WALLETS OF EACH VICTIM AND THEIR JEWELRY TO RAISE AT LEAST SOME DOUBT IN THE COPS' MINDS THAT MAYBE HIS VICTIMS WERE SIMPLE VICTIMS OF ROBBERY?

RachWhov: I never heard that.

grizzlymane415: IT'S TRUE. CHECK ALL THE CASES. DO A LITTLE MORE GOOGLE SEARCHING. YOU WILL SEE SOME OF THE THEORIES.

grizzlymane415 was right. Everything I could find online suggest The Phantom had stolen money from each victim and their jewelry. Reports never seemed to focus on that too much, but it was occasionally mentioned. While it was never really mentioned in the stories, online threads and comment threads on stories frequently pointed it out, sometimes with foolish dissenters chiming in that he was just a random thief or many of his killings were just random robberies in the area which were attributed to him.

grizzlymane415: DON'T BELIEVE THE FOOLS THAT SAY IT WASN'T HIM EITHER. THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. THE COPS KEPT TABS ON ALL THE PAWN SHOPS AND GOLD BUYERS IN TEXAS AND NONE OF THAT JEWELRY EVER WAS SOLD AGAIN. SO IT WAS NOT SOMEONE KILLING FOR A QUICK BUCK.

RachWhov: I believe that, it wouldn't make a whole lotta sense.

grizzlymane415: AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW THE CRAZY PART YET. THE JEWELRY SHOWED UP AGAIN, BUT IT WASN'T SOLD.

RachWhov: What?

grizzlymane415: CORRECT. THE JEWELRY STARTED SHOWING UP ON STATUES AROUND CHURCHES IN TEXAS. ANY VIRGIN MARY STATUES THAT HAD FINGERS WHICH COULD FIT THE RINGS OR NECKS FOR NECKLACES.

grizzlymane415 attached a few pictures of virgin Mary statues with rings and necklaces on them in what looked like Texas settings. The hair on my arms stood at attention. It was enough for me to put the brakes on the forum, and grizzlymane415, for a little while. I slunk back to my other favorite haunts of the Internet – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, OKCupid – for a little while to stay safe and warm.

But I had to go back to the forum. At first I thought I would just ignore grizzlymane415, check out other cases, chat with my other super non-creepy, anonymous Internet friends, but I just couldn't do it. Here was my dream. Someone who could help me solve the crime which had engrossed and haunted me for years and I was going to run away because I was a scared, little girl? Plus, what's the worst that could happen? It was an anonymous board.

I cracked.

RachWhov: Where did you get those pictures.

grizzlymane415: THINGS ARE OUT THERE. HAVE YOU READ ABOUT THE JUDY PARCH AND PETRA HOLLIVER MURDERS?

RachWhov: Nope.

Tip – don't ever Google the Judy Parch and Petra Holliver murders. It is one of those cases which cues up first-page results of gruesome photos which will cling to your brain like an old stick of gum burned onto the sidewalk of a city street. My search pulled up a black and white photo of two women who I assumed were Judy and Petra clinging to each other in the backseat of a car, a blood-drenched blanket just not quite covering the damage of their faces.

To me, it wasn't even the gore of the photo which struck me so hard. It was the image of these two women who were clinging together like the last thing they wanted to do in the world was let each other know they loved one another before they suffered the world's great insult. They didn't even get the respect of having their final moments filled out with color. Nor, did they get the closure of having their case solved. Which brings me to one of the first major curiosities of grizzlymane415.

The murders of Judy Parch and Petra Holliver had never been connected to The Phantom in any way that I could find. Plus, they were murdered more than 1,000 miles away from The Phantom's stomping grounds of West Texas in Yucaipa, California, 50 miles or so outside of Los Angeles.

Overall there wasn't much information about the murder of Judy and Petra, other than a few archived articles from 1990 in the The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California and some brief cold case pages. Not even a Wikipedia page frustratingly lacking of hyperlinks to other stories to engross yourself in. Their murder was just a little footnote in the murder history of the Inland Empire of California.

RachWhov: There is nothing at all on the Internet which connects The Phantom to the murder of Judy and Petra. Where are you getting this?

grizzlymane415: CHECK THE RECORDS ON THE CASE. OTHER THAN THE LOCATION, IT ALL POINTS TO THE PHANTOM. REMEMBER YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES ON THE TOP OF THIS PAGE.

I did live in California, but hours away from Yucaipa, so driving out there to check their public records search wasn't in the cards. However, my fascination with The Phantom runs deep, and I was able to get in touch with an old high school classmate who lived in Yucaipa who I Paypalled cash in return for wasting a Saturday morning and afternoon going through old murder records for me.

grizzlymane415 was correct, the Yucaipa muders covered all of the bases of my principles except the sixth.

The bodies of Judy and Petra were found just before sunset on a February day, meaning they were murdered sometime during the day.

Both women worked for the school district and were married, with children. They were in no way prostitutes or people who operated in "risky" behavior.

Ballistics showed the women were shot with an 1894 Marlin rifle.

The women's murder occurred in middle of the two-week stretch of The Phantom's last killing spree.

The bodies were found less than a mile from train tracks.

RachWhov: You were right. Everything adds up to Judy and Petra being victims of The Phantom. Why is this not out there anywhere? Couldn't that bring a huge break in the case?

grizzlymane415:

RachWhov: I get it, cops suck, but this isn't right. Have you told the police there?

I didn't get an answer. A week went by.

RachWhov: ???

Another week.

grizzlymane415: I THOUGHT YOU WERE CAPABLE OF NOT NEEDING HAND HOLDING ON THIS, BUT JUDY WAS THE WIFE OF THE POLICE CHIEF IN YUCAIPA. YOU THINK HE WAS VERY INTERESTED IN KEEPING THE DETAILS OF HIS WIFE GETTING MURDERED IN THE BACKSEAT OF A CAR, HALF NAKED WITH ANOTHER WOMAN IN THE PUBLIC EYE? YOU DO THE MATH.

Another curiosity. I couldn't find anywhere, or in anything my friend from Yucaipa sent me where it said Judy and Petra were "half naked" when they were shot. A self-taught expert on my murder myself, I knew this reeked of a detail cops would deliberately leave out of public record to filter out false confessions. Something only the actual killer would know about the murder.

My house grew cold in the middle of an 80-degree day even though I didn't have air conditioning. It's entirely possible grizzlymane415 was completely making this detail up, or it was something he had heard through word of mouth, but those goosebumps upon my arms also knew another thing most self-taught murder experts learn in their 101 class. Murderers love to brag about their work, even though they know it almost always leads to them being caught.

I went over to the front door of my house and checked the lock.

I cut off all communication with grizzlymane415. He probably wasn't really The Phantom, but at best, he was an asshole who was trying to get underneath my skin. I didn't need that. I already had three online dating profiles adept at connecting me with sociopathic beta males who get off on messing with your head.

I remained on the board. I couldn't pass the monotony of semi-employed life and single woman living in a town of just 16,000 without the comfort of faceless online companionship which revolves around the cold murders of human souls.

Things were fine for quite a while, probably a few weeks, before I received another message out of the blue from grizzlymane415.

grizzlymane415:

grizzlymane415: KNOW WHAT THAT IS?

I didn't have to even look it up. I just assumed it was an 1894 Marlin rifle.

He was probably some dumb fuck 15-year-old boy fucking with me who pulled the image off of Google or a gun message board or something, but I can't act like I wasn't totally scared shitless by the thing.

My response came in the form of deleting my account. It may have been the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, but it was all I could do to keep my sanity. It wasn't worth it. Sorry Reddit.

Tyler came back in the heat of summer. I flinched when I heard the familiar rumble of his old motorcycle pull into the gravel of my driveway. Tears welled into the corner of my eyes when I walked out onto my rickety porch to see him pulling his helmet off of his shaggy brown hair.

Tyler and I were engaged, technically maybe still engaged. We never officially broke it off.

We met just after college, when both of us were fighting off the adult world by being full-time snowboard bums in Tahoe. We moved in with each other in just a couple of months out of financial convenience, but somehow dated just casually for a few years before we turned up the heat.

Tyler finally proposed about a year before this. That's when things started to get weird between us. I don't think either of us could take the pressure. Engagement meant we were creeping towards adulthood – getting real jobs, paying taxes, moving off the mountain. We decided we would start working on getting "real jobs" in Reno - maybe even Sacramento. We got a rustic rental house in Truckee, California to stay in an earthy little town, but still get a little bit away from Tahoe and try to figure out our lives.

We were in no way ready and took it out on each other. I shocked myself when I discovered I was in no way interested in an office or professional job after a few interviews where I felt I wanted to rip the business casual outfit off of my body and run out into the snow to do what I truly wanted to do with life.

Even more shockingly, Tyler went in the other direction. A quick taste of an internship at a law firm stoked the fire of opportunity which apparently burned inside of him once you got past the haze of weed smoke, shaggy hair and dirty beard.

Tyler came home late from work one night, told me about his plan to move us to the Bay Area where he had a full-time job opportunity lined up and we slowly but surely slipped into a fight which led to him driving off on his motorcycle to go to "San Francisco."

It would be more than six months before he would come back.

I couldn't believe it was him when I saw Tyler walk up the porch, but he didn't let me get a word out before he grabbed me sternly on the back of the head and pulled me in for a kiss. We went inside the house without a word spoken and headed to the bedroom.

We would exchange a few words for the next hour or so, but it would be dark before we had a real conversation.

"How was San Francisco?" I broke the numbing sound of our breathing as we laid in bed.

Tyler just gave a dismissive laugh.

"Not good?"

"No. I was just only there for like three weeks, sleeping on Mike's couch. Couldn't get a job, couldn't afford to live there."

I could tell Tyler was embarrassed when he responded. He knew what question was coming next. He tried to distract me by grabbing the modest engagement ring he gave me months before out of the pocket of his jeans which were sprawled next to us on the bed. He slid the ring onto my ring finger.

"Did you go to your parents?"

"Yeah," Tyler almost whispered his answer before he kissed me behind my ear lobe.

I figured Tyler ran back to the comfort of his parents' five-bedroom house on the coast in Orange County once he said San Francisco didn't work out. I would have done the same, but swap out Orange for Marin.

"What...

Tyler pushed his index finger upon my lips.

"Let's not ruin the moment. Talk about that stuff now. We're just going to get into a fight about it."

"Okay," I agreed, upping the pitch on the second half of the phrase.

"How the fuck is it so hot in here?" Tyler broke the silence and jump up out of the bed naked.

Tyler shuffled over to the large bay window doors of the master bedroom of the house, unlatched them and pushed them out onto the little deck which housed a few pots filled with neglected plants about 10 feet up off of the ground below. I admired Tyler as he stood in the pale moonlight the open doorway let in, his back to me, his arms outstretched. I slipped the ring off of my finger and placed it in a little crystal bowl I kept by the side of my bed.

Tyler yawned when he turned back to me and crawled into bed. He pulled another item out of his jean pocket before I could ask another question.

"You still?" Tyler sheepishly offered up a pipe.

"Yeah, yeah," I took the pipe right after Tyler filled it.

I lied. I hadn't smoked since Tyler left. Too poor. Too depressed and honestly too lazy to go out and get weed myself.

I took a heavy, heavy hit and deflated back down onto the bed. It felt divine.

I watched Tyler take a stiff hit himself. Turned down his second offer.

The hit kicked the malaise and fatigue which was pumping through my veins into overdrive. It wasn't long before I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I could tell I was going to fall asleep before 10 and that was fine for me. I let it come, a cool, gentle breeze drifted through the open bay window doors and gave me a kiss goodnight.

I woke up with a calm in my blood I had not felt in quite some time. The comfort of no longer sleeping alone seemed to put my soul at ease. The fresh morning sun of Summer was shining bright through the open door, melting away the refreshing cold of morning. It was just about a damn perfect morning. The kind you would see in a commercial for coffee.

I yawned and looked over to Tyler asleep on his back next to me, the pipe comically rested on his shoulder like the parrot of a pirate. I moved a little bit closer to him but hoped to not wake him at the same time.

My attempt to keep Tyler awake didn't work. He weaved his hand into mine as soon as I slipped over to his side of the bed.

"What happened to the ring?" Tyler said with a froggy, morning throat.

"Oh, uh. I took it off. My fingers swell up in my sleep sometimes, so I don't sleep with rings on. But I can put it back on."

I stretched my body back over across my side of the bed and blindly dropped my hand down into the little bowl. The ring wasn't there. I furiously scanned my hand around the dish a number of times.

"What the hell?"

"What?"

"The ring is gone?"

"You sure you didn't just put it somewhere else?"

"Yes."

I got up out of bed and stood over my nightstand. The ring was not in the bowl or anywhere near it. I dropped hard down to the floor and combed the slick hardwood, looked underneath the bed and behind the nightstand. It was nowhere to be found.

Crawling on all fours, I turned my attention to the floor which led to the open deck door. Quickly stopped dead in my tracks.

Ever-so-faintly pressed into the dust of the floor were boot tracks – the tread of the boots looking like cookie cutter stamps of dog kibble upon the floor.

"Shit."

I traced the tracks to the open door of the deck.

"We didn't just lose a thousand dollars, did we?" Tyler asked from behind.

"That's the last thing I am worried about right now," I shot back. "I think someone came in here and took the ring last night."

It took Tyler a few seconds to reply, but when he did, his voice carried the tenor or building fright.

"Are you serious?"

I turned to see Tyler looking down at me.

"You're joking, right?" He added.

I looked down at the boot tracks one more time.

"Unless you walked around here with boots last night and lost the ring, I'm not."

My mind instantly went to grizzlymane415. I hadn't communicated with him for a while, but he was the last creepy thing taking up residence inside the dark recesses of my brain.

But how the hell could he have tracked me down?

I never shared any personal information with grizzlymane415. There was no information on my profile. I was unsearchable on Facebook and pretty much everything else and he didn't even have my real name. Even RachWhov didn't have a direct connection to me. Rach was short for my middle name and Whov was a play on my last name of Hoover, but the combination of those two would lead nowhere.

Oh shit. Nevermind.

The thought building in my brain shut down every single sense of my body for a moment.

Instagram. Fuck.

My username on the Instagram account I hadn't updated in nearly a year was RachWhov and it was a picture journal of my life for the past few years, including a fine documentation where I visually bragged about our killer little house in Truckee.

"You think someone climbed up onto our deck in the middle of the night, snuck in here, grabbed just the ring, nothing else, and left without us waking up?" Tyler asked from over by the deck.

"Uh huh. We, were, high."

"Well that's comforting," Tyler snipped before turning back around to me. "Who the hell could have done that?"

"No idea."

I lied. I was not yet ready to tell anyone else about my online life and I myself was far from convinced grizzlymane415 was the one who took the ring. It was a pretty outrageous thought that he found my Instagram and was able to find exactly where I lived and snuck into my bedroom and stole the ring.

I logged into my Reddit account to see if I had received any new messages from grizzlymane415.

grizzlymane415: WHERE DID YOU GO?

grizzlymane415: SORRY IF I WAS A DICK. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SHIT?!?!?!?

What followed was a link to an article detailing a string of three murders which had taken place across the Southwest over the past couple of weeks – one in West Texas, one in New Mexico, one outside of Las Vegas. All three had the calling cards of The Phantom, including taking place in a two-week cluster. Worse yet, they occurred in the order which suggested The Phantom was moving in a Northwest pattern, right towards Northern California.

grizzlymane: HE'S BACK.............

I typed up: Where do you live?

Was about to hit Enter...

"Hey," Tyler's voice shot up from behind me in the living room.

I jumped up out of my seat, scrambled to close my browser.

"You looking at porn?" Tyler quipped from behind me.

"No."

Tyler let out a deep exhale.

"I found something weird in the mailbox."

Tyler pushed a bullet into my face. I don't think I had ever actually seen one in-person so it would have been a jarring vision even if he hadn't explained it was resting in our mailbox.

"It was just sitting in there. There weren't letters or anything else."

"Shit. Shit. Shit."

"What?"

"This just has me totally freaked out."

"Well let's go down and talk to the cops."

Tyler had a good idea for the first time in a really long time.

"I gotta take my motorcycle down to Devin's shop anyways."

He followed it up with a really bad one.

"Just take my car with me. We should go together."

"Devin just texted me. If I don't get it down there in like twenty minutes, I won't be able to get it looked at till Monday and I might need it this weekend. I'll just meet you at the station."

I didn't even want to know why Tyler might need his motorcycle for the weekend.

"Fine."

"Alright," Tyler grabbed his motorcycle helmet before he had even finished the word.

"Wait," I pleaded.

Tyler was already out the door.

"Motherfucker."

I could still see the dust lingering from the tires of Tyler's motorcyle when I walked out into our dirt driveway. I fought the urge to call him. He wouldn't answer anyway.

The morning glow which made the start of the day so glorious was long gone. A hazy sky of moist gray hung above, threatening rain and a cold wind whipped around the side of the house.

I jumped into my battered Ford Focus. Shook my head to myself about Tyler's ridiculous selfishness, wondered if I should just say fuck it and drive straight to my parents' house in Marin, but I couldn't do it. It was only about a 10 minute drive down the highway to the station and I was pretty sure the cops would be able to at least bring me some soul relief for a little while.

The road from our house to the main highway was probably the last road I wanted to be on at the moment. It was a glorified gravel road, lined with trees and tree-surrounded little shacks and shanties next to the river. Once upon the road, my eyes lingered on something sticking out of the tall grass next to the road - Tyler's motorcycle, propped up halfway between the road and the woods.

I took my foot off the gas, slowly pushed on the brake, felt the world outside my car window come back into regular speed.

Then I felt something hit my bumper.

What the?

I shot a hurried look into my rear-view mirror to see a black truck stuck onto the bumper of my car. The afternoon haze and the brevity of my glance didn't allow me to see the face of the driver behind the wheel, but I took in the outline of a dark hat and dark gloves draped upon the steering wheel.

Another thud hit hard upon my bumper, pushing me off to the side of the road. I tried to correct, but couldn't pull it off, my car went off the embankment of the country road and rumbled into the tall grass field which flanked it.

It now felt as if I was on some kind of rocky road amusement park type ride. My car bounced up and down, roughly and wildly, everything inside the cab, myself included, thrashed about violently. The seatbelt was the only thing saving me from smashing up against the windshield or the steering wheel.

I had much more sinister fears at the moment than smashing my head against the wheel and there was no way a seatbelt could save me from them. Another look out my rear view mirror while airborne allowed me to see more of the truck which had slammed into me from behind and I recognized it all too well. I knew nothing about trucks, but I could pick out a 1959 Chevrolet Apache in any lineup.

My car finally started to slow as I approached the line of trees which led into the woods. The entire world around me got darker when the front of my car smashed into the light shrubs at the edge of the tree line and started plowing over some of the younger trees. It came to a stop just under the cover of the tall firs.

I wasted no time in ripping off my seatbelt, going for the handle of my car door, but it wouldn't budge. The door appeared to be wedged up hard against the thick trunk of a tree.

I climbed over to the passenger-side door. My eyes threw a glance out the back window of my car and saw the black Apache parked on the side of the road.

"Ah, shit!" I screamed when the passenger-side door wouldn't open either.

I shot another look out of the back window – didn't see any movement, but heard the familiar sound of a truck door closing. I didn't wait to see if anyone was walking out of the truck, dove into the backseat and tried one of the back doors.

The highest I have ever felt in my entire life was when I felt that back door give and open out into the darkened forest. I piled out of it before I even got the thing all the way open.

I dragged my field of vision across the grass between the Apache and the back of my car when I climbed out of the car. The driver of the truck was out of his vehicle, his black cowboy hat obscured his pale face just enough to where I couldn't make it out. He took tall strides around the front of the truck in a long, black trench coat.

I wasted no more moments in observation, turned into the woods and fled, pissed at myself for leaving my cell phone in the center console. It didn't matter now, my only hope was running deeper into the woods, finding a house, the river or something, basically just losing the approaching stranger behind me.

For a second, I thought I heard the rumble of the river coming in front of me, but the sound quickly took a familiar form. It was Tyler's motorcycle. I slowed my sprint, shot a look over my shoulder. At the edge of the trees was Tyler on his motorcycle, he reared back on the cycle, tried to maneuver his way through the brush which served as the doormat for the thicker forest.

"Tyler," I screamed through the trees. "Call the cops. Call the cops."

But he couldn't hear me over the sound of his motorcycle. I came to a complete stop and watched him make his way into the forest where he would have a little bit more space to snake his motorcycle around trees. I tried to also look out behind him, where the truck was parked up near the roadway, but couldn't see that far.

Tyler put the motorcycle into a skid just before he reached me. He killed the engine and jumped off, was greeted by me screaming out at him over the sounds of his dying engine.

"Where is he?"

Tyler whipped around, looked back through the woods.

"The guy in the truck. He ran me off the road."

Tyler lifted up the belly of his shirt to show a horrible road rash sprayed across his stomach.

"I hid in the woods for a while. I tried to call you, but you didn't answer."

"He ran me off the road too," I screamed in Tyler's face. "Where is he?"

Tyler kept his eyes off through the woods.

"He peeled out and drove off when I got back on my motorcycle. He's gone."

I followed Tyler's eyes through the darkening woods and had to agree. There were no signs of the driver, or his truck.

The cops had a really tough time not just believing what I told them happened, but even understanding it. I had to pull up Reddit on one of the officer's computers to show them all what it was and how it worked.

Honestly, it seemed like they all thought we were concocting some kind of elaborate alibi to cover up a domestic squabble and/or drunk driving accident. They basically did the least amount of work they could to document it and stopped returning our calls after a couple of weeks. I told them all of the details about The Phantom of West Texas. They didn't care in the least. I may have well just said The Phantom of the Opera.

Making it a little harder to believe my story, I deleted my account and apparently so did grizzlymane415. There was no record of our conversations, all of our comments within the board said they were posted by [deleted].

I found the generic form email for the FBI and a couple of police departments in West Texas, but I never even heard back from them. Maybe the only people who still cared about The Phantom were me and my weirdo Internet friends. Maybe it was a sign that I should just forget about that kind of stuff. At least that was Tyler's opinion.

We left Truckee that day, took the important stuff out of our house and never came back. We moved to Marin County where Tyler was able to get an entry level job with my dad's company and I could find a real job in the office of the local hospital with some of the friends I grew up with.

Speaking of growing up, it was officially time to. I left the Internet serial killer groupie community behind me and focused on my job and trying to re-plan a real wedding with Tyler.

The months went by and I had almost completely forgotten about that old life and that horrible cloudy day, or at least I tried to, but I could not fully run away. My blood ran cold when I received a voicemail on my phone after getting a missed call from my former landlord, Dale, back in Truckee.

I initially thought the message would be a scolding for the state we left the house in or bailing on the last five months of our lease, but Dale actually seemed to have a softer tone than he usually used. He wanted to get in touch with me because someone had left what seemed like an important piece of mail for us in the mailbox. He just needed our new address so he could send it to us.

I chewed my nails down to the tender skin the next few days, feveriously anticipating receiving our unopened mail. Dale was polite in insisting he would absolutely not open our mail for us, even if we wanted him to (which I did).

I tore into the little forwarded envelope as fast as humanly possible when it showed up.

I recognized exactly what was in the envelope as soon as I opened it up. It was my engagement ring, the tiny little diamond perched upon the top of it glittering back at me.

A note fell out of the envelope.

It was just a cursive signature written in black ink.

It read: The Phantom.

Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com.

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