#this is probably not super coherent and i dont expect anyone else to care but this is my blog and i get to choose the bullshit

[lycheecreature]

hrhnghgggg vent 👎 don't read this unless ur ready for giant block of whining. tldr:

I literally feel soooo guilty complaining abt this esp cause I've def done it already in different terms but it's been boiling for so long idk I need to like :/ break it down a little I guess. same shit different day etc etc

I feel like its really fucking with me that as I make larger steps to actually,,, have coherent story content I keep getting excited to share stuff and then I end up super disappointed and fucking embarrassed when it totally flops 💀 esp when I was gonna try and share more of my writing and?? I know I'm not entitled to anyone's time or interest but even friends never got back to me on it and it's like,, yeah realistically I didn't expect everyone to give detailed feedback or even read it necessarily bc yeah ppl are busy I get it and i dont wanna blame anyone,, it's just the fact that I struck out every. single. time!?? Couldnt even get a single one? Even if it was negative feedback, at least I'd have some idea of what I might need to work on.

Now I'm even more self concious about sharing it than I was before, and I don't even know what it is that I'm embarrassed about other than a nebulous sense of "bro nobody cares." And yea i probably *should* try to promote it more! Except now i feel awkward and shameful and concieted for it! But again I don't want to guilt anyone bc its not like,, the fault of any specific person. On an individual level I get stuff slips by and ppl have plenty of their own shit going on, I've def done the same. Plus, if someone was gonna read my stuff, I'd want it to be bc they wanted to and not bc I heckled them into it yknow :/ just makes me sad

Then of course I get super fucking jealous of everyone else who does actually does get praise and attention which also makes me feel like a horrible person. I know part of it is just that I don't have the best social skills (to put it lightly) but mannn. The more this happens to me over and over again the less motivated I feel to try and start conversations. I'm getting real weird and paranoid over it, and it's getting worse the longer I don't talk about it while simultaneously reaffirming my belief that there is no one for me to talk to. Regardless of if that's even fucking true. And because I am Too Sad, I hardly even have the energy to hold a normal fucking conversation.

Idk, I felt like I had a similar dumb angst during artfight. And artfight wasn't even bad for me, esp compared to like the first year i did it when hardly anyone I attacked even acknowledged that I'd done so 🫠 ofc this is 100% *not* the fault of the ppl I attacked!! I had fun interacting w everyone and seeing their stuff! But I was kinda sad that I initiated everything except for an attack from one random person who doesn't follow me. Its like,, I absolutely do not ever expect to be first on anyone's list, but damn I was hoping I could at least be like... eighth or something??( <- petty ass baby complaint. )

Literally the only conclusion I can come to is that I need to train myself better to Never Expect Anything. I'm actually so terrified that I must obviously be an entitled egocentric asshole for getting crazy over this. God. Idk my real life is already very pathetic and lonely rn and I am constantly deeply ashamed of myself for not being better. Can't even blame The Autism for this shit bc apparently so many of the people who are actually able to foster communities also have The Autism. It's literally just a Me problem.

To be clear, I still very much enjoy making things and my little story and I'd be making the things regardless of if I posted them or not so I might as well try to share them. And I'm wellllll past expecting to ever be majorly successful as an artist or anything. Everything's just been making me feel bad lately. Been writing a bit again and I'm glad for that, but then whenever I'm getting too excited about it I have to stop myself and be like "hey man don't get your hopes up. no one's gonna be that into it." I have to remind myself like yeah I knowww it's not marketable it doesn't have everyone's favorite tropes and character archetypes. Even if *i* constantly seek out unusual content I am definitely *not* representative of the general media consuming populace or the art community or the oc community. And i will not fucking change anything just to be more palatable for Consumers. Just wish I wasn't soooo lonelyyyyyyy. Or that I could at least get an idea of what I'm missing here.

Uhhh on the off chance you did read this whole thing PLEASE PLEASE DO NOT FEEL BAD OR GUILTY FOR ANYTHING ABOUT ME I am very mentally ill. idk maybe its the daylight savings. sad ant with bindle dot jpeg.

[sirensorisons]

ok as your resident english major i finally got around to watching the daisy ridley ophelia movie and i have thoughts. im on mobile so no read more, sorry! spoilers ahead

the premise of the movie was obviously a big draw. like wake up babes new feminist take on hamlet just dropped. but one of my biggest complaints was that i felt they didn't push it far enough? like i could totally see what they were going for but it felt like all the #girlboss moments were given to other women. that was kind of disappointing given that this is supposed to be ophelia's story. like yes please uplift other women in the film but...

it felt like the writers or director were torn on whether to focus on ophelia or gertrude. i think they did quite a bit of work offering a more nuanced take on gertrude, but ophelia was kind of. frustrating. like, ok, the one major change they made to the play (besides ophelia being alive) was gertrude killing claudius. super fucking loved that.

but a couple minutes before, i had been wishing they would let ophelia barge into the room and either A) stop the fight between hamlet and laertes by showing them both she was alive, or B) stop it by pretending to be a ghost like she almost did with gertrude.

ophelia's ending was such a letdown. i like the intention behind her telling this story to her daughter someday, and breaking toxic cycles by getting out of it. but she had no impact on the events of hamlet's story, which was irritating. like i wouldn't want hamlet to run away with her or have the evil claudius vanquished and everyone else lives happily ever after bc that's not the point. it's a tragedy.

the hopeful twist they put on it for ophelia was interesting, and i don't totally hate it, but it's just kind of baffling. like her father dies and she doesn't get to express much genuine grief over it, just scheming from there on out to save hamlet, and she doesn't seem to spare a single thought for her brother in all of this. like i said, she could've stopped their whole feud by revealing herself or pretending to be a ghost. or at least show her on the brink of doing that, but she's unable to do so before the norwegian forces charge in.

also, i didn't care for the gertrude twin plotline. shakespeare loves his long-lost twins (comedy of errors, twelfth night) so it's not entirely out of place, but it felt unnecessary. a little too convenient as a device to introduce the different poisons and bring the norwegians to the castle. plus, this version of getrude seems to genuinely love her son enough that watching him die would drive her to kill claudius, without the added motive of him fucking over her sister.

i like how hamlet and horatio first coming upon ophelia while she's in the water turned the whole fish/fishmonger thing into even more of an inside joke. it was cute. also, the tension introduced by comparing it to the myth of diana and the hunter was interesting

i felt like, starting from that scene with the diana myth when gertrude gets upset that hamlet insulted her likeness, there was an intriguing rivalry brewing between getrude and ophelia for hamlet's affections, as his mother and wife, respectively. all the "hamlet oedipus complex" truthers make me roll my eyes, but there's gotta be some sort of reverse of that where it's the mother who has a toxic obsession with her son. you definitely see it happen often enough irl with self-proclaimed "boy moms". anyway, it seemed like that rivalry was a major dropped thread. would've been interesting to see that pursued further

idk shit about medieval clothing or costuming in general but i thought the costuming in this was gorgeous. the hairstyles, the dresses, the cloaks. the way ophelia always stood out in the frame so our eyes would be naturally drawn to her

the setup and payoff for horatio's illegal bodysnatching was also quite good but im biased bc i love horatio and him and ophelia being bros

[swampgallows]

syn-admin replied to your post “well, so, tumblr ate my post on my phone, but the gist of what i...”

Beautifully written. I felt similar things, though I saw myself in Elisa. It's incredible to see an older, unconventionally beautiful, disabled woman represented not only as a STRONG, whole, sexual person on her own but also as someone to be loved and desired by the beautiful amphibian man. I've always thought of monsters and robots to be just the same as humans if not better... there's a purity and innocence. I want to be loved by a creature who doesn't understand I'm incomplete.

Thank you! i wrote that post for a second time at 5am in a kinda loose mental state so i thought i had written about elisa and realize now upon waking that i didn’t. my only possible complaint about the film is that i wished we could have seen elisa and the fishman interact more. obviously i’m a sucker for that shit, but it also would have shown more of his communicative capabilities (though i guess they were implied well enough; anything else would have purely been for fluff. but that’s what i WANT)

elisa was fantastic. as someone who is reaching what would’ve been considered Old Maid status a generation ago, seeing an older woman was great. Not attempting to speak over anyone here, but I think most of us who identify with monsters or feel an attraction to them are often in the position that makes us an Other: her gay older roommate, her black friend/coworker, she herself as a mute woman. and that was all tacitly alluded to in the film as well: not only does fishman “not see what she lacks”, as elisa puts it, but he is an Other, and therefore, really, just one of us. “He’s not human!” “If we don’t save him, neither are we!” 

I guess I didn’t mention all this in my original post because to me it’s so implicit. I saw myself as elisa too. although i’m not “classically” disabled, i’m mentally ill and have a host of “unattractive” qualities: acne, bad eyes, bad teeth, bad blood which makes me physically weak, and i’m generally not conventionally attractive (as i have been dutifully informed throughout my life). where i differ from elisa is that i have sexual trauma and identify as [bi] asexual, so for me personally having a relationship with a “humanoid” creature would be a chance to exist as i am without having to adhere to human sexuality, or alternatively getting a chance to “try again”. but dont get me wrong i am EXTREMELY HAPPY she was shown as a sexual being; disabled people, especially older disabled people, are immediately written off and glossed over sexually. i feel like everything im saying is very obvious so it feels silly to say it “out loud” but it also feels good to talk about it. this was a really.... self-indulgent film for me hahahaahha

but i mean, why shouldn’t it be? nobody watches romance films so they can go home and think. i’ve just... never been able to have this experience before. i’ve never been able to indulge in this or have this idea entertained with such sophistication. beauty and the beast is as close as many of us got, but even then he becomes a human prince at the end. 

When her kiss transforms the Beast, she is furious. “You should have warned me! Here I was smitten by an exceptional being, and all of a sudden, my fiance becomes an ordinary distinguished young man!” — the 1909 play Beauty and the Beast:  Fantasy in Two Acts by Fernand Noziere, the very first published version of the story where the Beauty is disappointed when the Beast transforms into a human at the end

the appeal of monsters is that they are not human. and those of us that have felt so excluded and different find a kinship in them because all of the humans we have ever known have simply dismissed us. while ideally we should find humans of our own ilk to bond with (and, ideally, we do) the monster also represents the escape from having to try. 

i wish i could remember where i found or read this, but i read statistics once that explained “gendered fantasy”: young boys surveyed overall maintained a superhero power fantasy, of being The One to save the world, to be a super-human. young girls had this fantasy too, somewhat, but it never took place here. they were a queen or a princess of a far-off enchanted kingdom, or they turned out to be The One in that they were a lost princess and had to return home. Women feel alien on their own planet, and we feel so shut out from attaining any sort of power that we, even as children, find it more pleasing—no, find it ideal—to be from another world rather than having to struggle in this one. and when i read that i felt like so many of my fantasies were validated: that, and the “disabled woman’s” fantasy of being rapunzel in the tower, not locked up of her own accord, but the validity in “wanting to be saved”, that it is not “unfeminist” not to expect disabled women to save themselves. 

so all of these aspects came together in the shape of water and a lot of this... is it even a genre? monster romance. though the true ending was that elisa dies, the ending we visually see is her wrapped in the arms of her love and her scars becoming gills, which is so many worlds of empowering and symbolic. what crippled her in this world becomes the thing that lets her breathe in the world she truly belongs to. she gets to escape this world with her love and be with him in the sea. she gets to renounce human society and be in the world she belongs in without leaving her identity behind; she will never be a fish-person, but she is “fish enough”, and that is leagues better than ever having to scrape by to be “human enough”. i would rather be the scrawny human outcast assimilated into a clan of orcs than have to be the scrawny human outcast among other humans the rest of my life, and that’s because i have felt disowned by humans. i have been shunned and rejected by them. so even if i am different among these non-humans, i am accepted. 

“He doesn’t know what I lack,” is how Elisa puts it. It’s not that he doesn’t know, in my opinion; it’s that it’s of no concern. an orc wouldn’t care if i have acne (well, maybe. they shunned those with the red pox but that was more about quarantining a contagion than looks); they would only care about their own values. although, with my weak body and brittle teeth i would probably be among their dregs too, hahaha. but then there’s also the fantasy of the healing taking place: the fishman could heal wounds and was a god; orcs in warcraft have healing magic and could probably regenerate my teeth (god aint that the fuckin DREAM) and train me enough to have some physical strength even if i have poor stamina. 

but even then, the ultimate fantasy is that i would overall be accepted as i am, and in being accepted, also protected. and THAT is essentially why i LOVE playing a forsaken and being part of the horde. I am this skinny, sickly, brittle thing that is protected and valued anyway, and i have left my human life behind and gained power in doing so. i am still physically weak but i have attained a strength of other means: camaraderie, healing magic, political asylum. I belong in their lands, with them, with their magic.

ahhaha you can see as i’ve started waking up that I’ve gotten a little more coherent. At least, I hope I have. 

[tiracallout]

The following is a copypasted submission from my inbox

hello. this is a year overdue and i personally doubt that anything about this blog is still active but i hadn’t really cared to write anything out until the other day. i don’t care about anonymity seeing as i’m already mentioned on another submission here so i go by tara currently and i’m an at the time 29 year old member of a system. i tend to be long winded but it’s a bit more coherent than the other system member’s was and skips straight past providing context for our living situation and is strictly edel relevant only

my memory isn’t exactly ‘good’ but if i can remember correctly i met him when he approached devon and seemed really excited to meet me because he thought i was nice. he was flat out told that i wasn’t exactly social or super openly friendly but he insisted anyways. i don’t know why i said hello after that but i guess i must’ve been lonely or bored. i don’t remember what i said but the conversation couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. this was some time during the general end of year 2015/new year 2016 i’m pretty sure in hindsight he probably thought because i was a 'fictive’ i’d have to like him. other people have agreed with me that they think he thought that because i’m a 'fictive’ who isn’t afraid of confrontation he’d get an excellent attack dog out of this. i’ll never know the truth about this either way

honestly i barely remember talking to the guy. one thing i remembered was asking him what was wrong only to find out he was having a breakdown over some 14 year old posting ship art or something and making fun of them for jokingly calling themselves trash. i didn’t want to get involved so i mentioned that the kid was 14 and being twice this kid’s age but that i didn’t quite get it and moved on with my day. maybe a comment or two in passing. i keep to myself he still has this odd insistence that i’m actually a super nice and friendly person. even if i’m the one who says otherwise. as if he knows me better than i do. he also tells devon, who is 17 and pretends that he’s not, that he finds it admirable that i’m not afraid to call people on bullshit and can be blunt if i have to be i make a twitter at some point. according to the records it says that it’s february 2016 he asks to follow it so i let him. it’s a small thing with 20-30 followers. i have that i might softblock at any time in the bio. at some point i softblock him, along with a small handful of other people, because i don’t care about idol games and this was the one thing that i knew i could have as mine and mine alone. i go out of my way to message him about it and say that it was nothing personal because i saw that was what he had asked his reaction was a little… disproportionate. he went on to threaten suicide and forced everyone into comforting him even when he admitted that he was being manipulative. i was shittalked for this in plain sight and everything that he said happened just wasn’t true. which is fine i guess, personally i have better things to do and i couldn’t give half a shit about it. what did bother me is that it wasn’t just me that saw it but devon, because we were cofronting more often at the time. he had seen the context of everything and had a breakdown over watching edel’s breakdown i give edel a 24 hour cooldown period before messaging him asking for an apology for the 17 year old he set off. i said that i didn’t care for one and wasn’t going to say anything else. or i guess i phrased it as 'withholding my comments’ which might’ve sounded harsh i guess but i was on edge for an unrelated reason and that’s just kind of how i talk. other people said that i deserved an apology but it’s in the past either way i got to watch him specifically @ someone begging them to kill him because he had made them promise to at some point. i got front row seats for this whole shitshow and was lead to believe it was my fault. this went on for several hours. this had all started over a softblock. talk about asinine when he eventually calms down, and this whole thing takes forever. i get this nice little message “oK now that i’m calm, I will apologize for upsetting Devon but its unbelievably distasteful asking me to apologize for having a breakdown over something that someone left me for a few days before. How am I supposed to react when I feel like people only care about my interests, not me as a person? I don’t hate either one of you. Not even you. I don’t hate anyone. I was upset but I got it out of my system and calmed down. I’m very sorry for upsetting anyone. I really am. But I really dont appreciate this wording, or the implication you have something nasty to say to me.” firstly i had had no clue that someone had softblocked him recently and i apparently had pushed him over his weekly unfollower limit or whatever. even if it weren’t my space to do what i want with how the hell was i expected to know that. secondly i never expected him to apologize for having a breakdown, it was that he did it where devon and i could watch it when he had to have had other accounts. i wasn’t super thrilled about having my personal business thrown around to begin with but there was nothing to do about it at this point. lastly that “i don’t hate anyone line is full of shit” and i didn’t really need to be chastised for telling him to own up to hurting someone or be treated like i was being given some sort of pass and i hadn’t earned it. regardless i was tired and didn’t care to try and argue so i apologized for being 'rude’ and explained that i was tense about something else entirely and that there were no hard feelings and moved the fuck on with my day

according to the archived dms this was around april 2016 i’m fairly sure

this is where devon starts seeing everyone talking about being treated like shit on top of personally witnessing it happening to me before he loudly cuts edel off

at some point i find out that edel is dating a minor under wraps and there’s a set up with bunch of middlemen to talk about things. that was all him. we’re both reassured that things will be broken off and he 'didn’t know better’

i have no way to keep an eye on the situation devon has been effectively given a gag order after a mutual friend did something of their own volition and he assumed that it’s because devon has been talking. devon hasn’t even been around and people have told edel that. having no point of contact with anything on that end on top of having things offline be in a crisis of sorts i take everyone at their word and expect that it’ll be done. something that i’m not proud of to this day

this was around may-june 2016 months down the line and 3000 miles later i find out completely on accident that that’s not the case. i have no way to get in contact with anyone and i’m absolutely fucking horrified. if i try and talk about any of this i’m risking someone who was manipulated by edel at that point being hospitalized due to the stress of it all. i try and do what i can to keep the kid anonymous, hoping that it’ll keep him at least a little safer than they would be otherwise. including finding out devon found out he knew a systemhop mod and personally sending a message asking them to take posts with identifying info about them down because i had heard they hadn’t consented to being outted like that and that edel was checking the blog. i really wish i could’ve done more and had known exactly how the hell to handle that situation. edel had still been discrediting devon and i both months later and i had no way to even keep an eye on anything without spying on a teenager, which i wasn’t willing to do

estimated around september-october 2016 apparently we were always referred to as a package deal. even in the 'apology’. it was pretty heavily implied by how he treated other 'fictives’ that i didn’t have my own free will and opinions in this. that was even more obvious when devon was the one listed on the 'do not follow if you follow’ list next to outted abusers and pedophiles and i wasn’t even mentioned despite having separate accounts and him knowing the username. i had to message him personally to get that removed anyways once he was called out so some fucking apology that was. two lines for the both of us despite getting massively different treatment. devon, the younger and less 'fictional’ of the two of us, was cornered into apologies and i was talked down to and shamed, not taken seriously from the beginning

after i saw the apology i messaged him and other than telling him to remove the username i told him i didn’t want an apology or even a direct response and that he wouldn’t hear from me again. as far as i’m aware we haven’t had any sort of contact since. i don’t know why i’m submitting this really but it gives a semi solid timeline/backup for other people’s submissions so why the hell not

this was october 2016