#ties back to that post I believe Rat made on their blog a while back

[bluebelleisabelle]

❗️Monster high mummy in the mirror spoilers❗️

*Cleo cursing her mirror doppelgänger*

*Frankie falling in love*

LIKE LOOK AT THEIR FACE

YOU CAN JUST SEE THE HEARTS

[ratstuckinamarble]

#ties back to that post I believe Rat made on their blog a while back#something about Frankie’s reaction to seeing Cleo curse someone#I tried looking for it but I couldn’t find it djdjdj

@bluebelleisabelle found it >:D

It just occurred to me that Frankie never saw Cleo try to curse someone. Would she float while the sky darkens with scarabs flying dramatically around her -every- time? I'm not sure Frankie's heart could take that.

[soukoku-rivals]

Author's Note

There are so many things I would love to tell you! But, I decided to keep it short and simple. After all, Rivals is a comic, you're not here to read blocks of text.

I will address what are, in my opinion, most important issues.

1. Why is Fyodor actually alive after chapter 9?

Well, we had an 'in comic' explanation - Chuuya wants to believe Fyodor has some feelings for him after Fyodor intentionally missed all of his vital organs when stabbing him. Dazai tries to be a better person so he cannot simply kill someone who is already tied and defenseless, no matter how much he hates him.

Real life explanation - it was the best choice for the continuity. Rivals is very much an AU when it comes to Chuuya's past and quite possibly Dazai's past [I honestly know nothing about Dazai's past before 15. There might be something mentioned in Stormbringer but I avoid spoilers until we get official English translation]. However, it still takes place after season 2 of the anime and the Dead Apple movie. Which means season 3 comes after.

Basically, if you ignore the 15 episodes, you can imagine season 3 continues after Rivals and Dazai and Chuuya are somewhat dating at that point, which is also why Ranpo found it so easy to outsmart Chuuya. And then, all the events in the anime/canon slowly lead to them finding the Book and the Epilogue.

I know, you have to stretch your imagination a little to make that work, but honestly, it's fun to imagine Soukoku dating while all that stuff is going on.

Obviously, none of that could happen if Fyodor dies, so here you go!

2. Does Chuuya actually have feelings for Fyodor?

Short answer - yes. And it's not only because the author ships Fyoya. [I ship almost all Chuuya/X pairings, most notably Chuuya/Sigma, deal with it.]

As explained in the comic, Fyodor was there when Chuuya had nobody and nothing after he lost his memories. He told Chuuya they were partners and lovers, and Chuuya was his most loyal man. Obviously, that would influence Chuuya's opinion.

We, as readers, outside observers, didn't realle get to see much of their interactions [I couldn't make the chapters that long] but we did see that Fyodor is a manipulative bastard. But it wouldn't fully work if he wasn't gentle at times. As manipulative as Fyodor was, he has also shown compassion and care towards Chuuya in his state. That purposefully missed stabbing at the end only confirmed to Chuuya that Fyodor doesn't actually want him dead. Maybe he wants to hurt him to push him away, like Dazai did all those years ago? To protect him. To make sure the Mafia and Dazai know they aren't working together.

How can Chuuya not appreciate that? After all there was only one person before who hurt him not to actually hurt him but for his protection.

So yeah, Chuuya believes Fyodor has some feelings for him, he believes there might be a good person hiding in the rat, just like there was a good person hiding in Dazai. Dazai and Fyodor were too similar at one point for Chuuya not to develop any feelings for him.

I'm not saying it's healthy or logical. I'm saying this is how it happened.

3. Does Fyodor have feelings for Chuuya?

Short answer - also, surprisingly, yes! I mean, how can you not love Chuuya?

I couldn't really show it clearly in the comic. We already had so many characters and Fyodor/Fyoya weren't the focal point so I couldn't dive to deep. However, here is what I can say now.

At the start, obviously, Fyodor saw Chuuya only as a tool. Chuuya was a powerful weapon, with a powerful ability and most importantly, he served as a great distraction for Dazai.

Fyodor, however, made a mistake when he convinced Chuuya they were lovers. Because that meant he had to spend more time with him than originally planned. And as much as Fyodor hates abilities and believes they are a sin, he could not not notice all Chuuya's good qualities. Even rushing that mission to destroy some building, when he knew it was possible Chuuya wouldn't survive, was mostly because Fyodor wanted to push him away. And to push his feelings away. He knew he was growing fond of Chuuya and if he didn't stop that soon, he might grow some conscience.

Unfortunately for him, it was too late. And thus, we go back again to the train station stabbing. For all intents and purposes, the most beneficial thing for Fyodor to do was to kill Chuuya right there and there. With Chuuya dead he would have been able to leave with Atsushi, find the Book and leave Dazai broken after his love's death and Mafia without its most powerful weapon.

Fyodor just couldn't bring himself to do that.

4. Extra - unused sequel idea.

This has nothing to do with any unexplained plot points but, yeah, there was a sequel idea. A few actually. But let's go with the one that has most sense.

At the train station, after Soukoku leave, only Atsushi stays there to keep an eye on Fyodor while Loki searcher through his memories for the Book.

Unbeknownst to Atsushi, while Locke goes through Fyodor's memories, he finds something very interesting. A memory of Fyodor who looks like he's talking to his mirror reflection but his words are directed at Loki. And with a smile on his face, Fyodor informs Loki that the Book can change reality, he can destroy people and give them life. There is already a person created by the Book. From nothing! So, it is not entirely unbelievable to assume that it could bring somebody to life. Like, let's say, a certain red headed girl.

If Loki helps Fyodor escape, he will be able to bring Hela back to life.

Locke loves his daughter very much, so obviously, he agrees. And instead of lead to season 3 when Fyodor escapes, he get an Agency/Mafia vs Fyodor/Locke story.

This is not happening but it was a nice idea.

And this time, this is really it! There is nothing more left for me to say, Rivals is done!

Thank you so much for reading it, some of you were here for years, some joined only a few month ago, some will find this story in the future, but I thank you all the same! I would have never gotten this far without you. You are all very precious to me. I hope to see you soon, when @kkfil-soukoku starts updating.

And now, for a couple of unrelated announcements:

Merch design is going great. I have all die cut stickers and the second charm already finished, and most of them is already published on Kofi for supporters. Also, the Rivals sticker page is all drafted. Support me on Kofi to view them all and to get an extra sticker with your order: https://ko-fi.com/hayatepl

After Kiss Kiss Fall in <Love3 comic is done, I will be working on an original idea, to be published on Webtoons/Tapas. It's going to be a supernatural adventure story featuring a witch, a warrior and a dragon, set in modern times. For more info when that happens, follow me on @hayateart and @sylvankaart

I also started using twitter again: https://twitter.com/SylvankaArt

And instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sylvankaart/ [Yes, it's all SylvankaArt, I thought it would make it easier to remember. As for tumblr HayateArt blog will remain my fanblog for fanart but all original posts will be published on SylvankaArt.]

[astoria00]

Repost: Cinder is an extension of Salem...sorta

My original post doesn't show in the tags again, thanks tumblr, so I decided I'll try to repost this while leaving the original one up, cause some already shared their own thoughts there. If you're interested you can find it on my blog ^^

Heyo, so it has been a while and of course, seeing as the trailer dropped just today I just couldn't contain myself to make another Cinder...theorie? Not sure on that front XD

Anyways, what do I mean when I say that Cinder is an extension of Salem?

Well, maybe some of you remember my old theories where I babbled about Cinder and Salem's connection and what it could be outside of the Grimm arm and stuff. One idea it was about magic and the other was splitting a part of her soul and giving it to Cinder, but this time it's a more...tamed approach.

With the new trailer we got a little bit of something that could be a conversation between Salem and Cinder.

This game is not yours to win.

It's mine.

All you need concern yourself with is your ability to act when I tell you to.

Without you I'm nothing.

Now, what is so telling about this?

It's two things, the first one is more obvious. Cinder's words. Ultimately, they sparked all of this, because, you see, Cinder actually means them. She doesn't just list off what Salem wants to hear her say, she truly believes that without Salem, she is nothing.

That on itself wouldn't be so momentous, but I live for every small interaction Cinder had with Salem and every scene she talks about her. So let's get this rolling.

In vol 3 episode 7 we get our first glimpse of Cinder in a flashback talking to Salem about the maiden powers she had managed to secure...well the half of them XD

What did she say there?

Yes...I will claim what is ours.

Thank you.

Ours...OURS. Yep, Cinder and Salem are all buddy buddy now.

No but seriously, this isn't the only instance Cinder has some trouble to differentiate between herself and Salem.

Remember her talk with Neo in vol 6 episode 7?

Now you understand.

I've got to get the relic before it can be secured in Atlas. It's the only way that Salem...

(inhales)

It's the only way we can accomplish our goal.

Now we know that for Cinder Salem is her concept of power, but apparently there is something even deeper going on. Cinder could have said anything, she could have said she knows she needs to be greatful, that she wouldn't be where she was today without Salem, yada yada, but she said she would be NOTHING without her...which makes me think.

Is it only pure grooming and conditioning? If we turn this on its head, Emerald did use a totally different line to describe why she is following Cinder. She owes everything to her, that's what she said. And yet Cinder chooses to say she would be nothing, not even a nobody, just nothing. Still, she doesn't regard Salem as her goddess and divine savior, not that we have been made aware of at least.

So back on track I propose the possibility that Cinder's line of... individuality is blurred. She doesn't know what or who she is outside of Salem, only what she wants to be...and that is Salem as well.

This is why isolation is used as Cinder's punishment. Cinder doesn't know who to be without Salem, she is what she wants her to be, even if it's not a conscious effort. Whatever Cinder's backstory winds up to be, if she is a normal child having had a horrible childhood, was saved by Salem from the brink of dead with magic, was experimented on or even created by her, she doesn't think of herself outside of Salem. It's why emulating her comes so easy to her.

But then Ruby threw a wrench in her thoughts. Ruby made her desire outside of Salem, made her think of herself as an individuum instead of an extension of Salem and that is new territory. Something she is even afraid of. But because of this we finally see Cinder dealing with her own emotions and her own sense of self.

This is why Neo is such an important and interesting factor. Cinder and Neo were joined by their mutual desire to get revenge on Ruby. They share a room, Neo let's Cinder get close and even seems to have fun goofing and teasing in her own way and Cinder gets to be a little drama queen, she almost seemed like she had fun.

They both were comfortable enough with each other to lean close and watching on Neo's scroll when Watts and Tyrian were called out and remember what happened after?

Cinder switched their objective. Salem's desires won out and she needed to act.

Even when Neo brought her the lamp it was about what Salem wanted and Cinder just failed a second time to obtain the maiden powers. And both times she wasn't truly fighting as Salem's extension, but herself and that cost her.

Neo seeing and maybe even questioning Cinder's behavior in vol 8 might be an important part later on if she is to find her own individuality some day.

Oh yeah, I said there was a second thing I noticed in the trailer, right?

Well, it's about Salem's tone. We have heard her get angry before. In a loud way, in a dangerously soft way, in a frustrated way, but...this time... it's almost comforting, warm...nice?

Of course this could be taken out of context and she might not talk to Cinder...but if she is then it shows us an integral part of how she molds her.

It's not harsh, it's almost gentle, like a soft reminder that this is about her and Cinder is an extension of herself and only has to do what she tells her to, while ultimately also trying to teach her how to strategize.

As someone else pointed out in a post before Cinder's weapons fluctuate, as if she is unsure of who she is supposed to be after the events of vol 3 and that is exactly it.

Cinder doesn't know who she is when she is not tied to Salem. Not a failure, dirt, trash, even a street rat...she is nothing. Whatever Salem did with her she's done a terrifying job ^^'

[azizi-kellerfamilyadventure]

Reflection of the last 6 weeks of travelling on the road....

Yay! I'm finally getting around to starting my blog all about our travelling adventures around the US.! This is a my first time blogging so my kids would definitely call me a "noob" (thank you Minecraft!). I personally prefer the name "newbie" instead...lol

So here it goes......after a lot of persuasion on my part (close to 2 years of trying to convince my husband to tap out of this rat race with me and the kids to slow things down and enjoy our life together while travelling the US) and a lot of planning on both our parts (another year once he agreed to my crazy plan), we began on our Epic Travelling Adventure on March 15th!

6 weeks into it we have really truly only explored Arizona but we are not complaining because oh my goodness......Arizona is absolutely beautiful! It's so nice to know that since we live in CA we can come back and explore again and again! Plus we did get to spend some wonderful quality time with family from both sides 2 of those 6 weeks!

Next we are heading to Utah. We made a pit stop near 4 corners hoping we could have the kids take pictures while being in all 4 states at once. But unfortunately, it was still closed due to Covid. While that was a bummer, the kids still thought it was cool that they could go from Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado all within 5 minutes of each other! We haven't explored Utah before so Michael and I are super excited about the next couple of weeks!

This trip has already been so wonderful for our kids. Not only have they been able to spend time with some quality time with their cousins on both sides of the family but they have also really enjoyed getting to meet and play with other kids from all over the country. Surprisingly, our idea is not as novel as I originally thought....lol. We have met SO many families who are doing what we are doing. A lot of them do have one parent who is still working remotely while the other parent focuses on home schooling their children. There are not many families where both parents are not working so we know we are truly fortunately! Really the only people we meet who are not working are those who have retired and their kids are grown up.

Another thing that I have enjoyed seeing is that my kids can stay connected to most of the kids they meet virtually through games like Roblox or Minecraft! And while I'm not a huge proponent of games and many aspects of our new "tech world" (for example my kids wanting to get on youtube to watch other people live their lives!), I'm happy to report that this is one aspect of the virtual video game world that I'm ok with....lol

So I was never really worried about my kids not having opportunities to socialize with other kids since I know that my kids are super social and make friends easily both with kids and adults, the real surprise for me was how wonderful the camping community has been! Everyone is just so kind, friendly and helpful. We have learned so much and received so many great tips from so many amazing people at almost each campsite we have been too. I would say that we have felt the community vibe at almost all of the Thousand Trails campgrounds and would highly recommend anyway interested in camping to sign up for a membership! (Btw....if you are interested in learning more about a membership just reach out and I can give you some information on it)

After avoiding people for so long due to Covid, it's been so wonderful for all of us to connect with people again! While we started off strong wearing masks every where we went, we have loosened up quit a bit each day. Since Michael and I have been vaccinated and we don't see my parents often while travelling, we seemed to be less worried about it. Plus, many people that we meet have been vaccinated so that's always a good thing too!

To be fair, honest and realistic about our experiences, I'm going to include my top 5 "not so fabulous" things about our travelling adventures.

5) Not having enough space for cooking! OMG! Even the simplest dinners are challenging to make because there's just not enough counter space on our kitchen. And did I mention that I have to constantly take out or put back our air fryer, blender, toaster oven....and the list continues! And I still haven't used the instapot! It's so big I don't know where to put it...lol

4) Making my bed! So I love making my bed in the morning. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and I just like to look at a clean bed. While our bed is SUPER comfortable so no complaints there, it's a King Size bed but there's not a King Size space for the bed. I literally have to get on my bed to make my bed. I know that doesn't even make any sense but believe me when I say it sucks and I'm not how sure how long the "daily making of my bed" is going to last...lol

3) So...one of the main reasons of this trip was to spend more quality time with the kids. Umm...I'm now thinking it would have been smarter if we could have traveled throughout the US in our actual house. I mean literally take our house on the road. My kids seem to think it's an actual home. They still want to play hide and seek, tag, and the boys constantly want to wrestle. I keep reminding them that our RV is at max 240 sq. ft of living space so we can't treat it like our house back in Temecula. But I'm confident it's going in one ear out the other.

And I'm not quite sure how I forgot but I did... the arguing! It's kind of driving me a little crazy. And of course it mostly happens on our travelling days or when it's raining outside but oh my goodness! I think I used to just walk away and let them figure it out on their own but now I don't really have a place to hide. Did I mention that we lack space?!? LOL

On a positive note, almost every adult with kids whom my children have played with have literally made a point to come and tell us how well behaved, kind and wonderful our kids are. I smile and thank them for their kind words. But I can't lie....every once in a while really I just want to show them the video of them arguing about 30 minutes earlier....lol

2) Laundry! Ugh! I wish we would have purchased an RV with a washer and dryer. We are considering purchasing at least a washer but we need to find room for it first! Did I mention that we struggle with a lack of space...lol. In the meantime, I've literally been having the kids wear there clothes two days in a row (easier for Milah to do than the boys...ugh!) But don't worry, they are still changing their underwear and socks everyday...lol

1) Wifi! Where is this 5G network I've been hearing about because I can't seem to find it! When I was thinking of a name for my blog I was highly considering "wifi hunter extraordinaire". This has been my #1 thorn in my side. We decided to let the kids finish off their school year at their traditional public school since online was an option. Our thought was that it would make for an easier transition for them and it was only 8 weeks after spring break. Can we say "hindsight is 20/20"! I plan on homeschooling them next school year and should have just made the switch when we left. Don't get me wrong, the kids teachers are awesome! Super supportive and really try to be flexible but we still feel tied to being online at certain times for the zoom classes. I'm definitely counting down the days until they are done with school this year (29 days!)

But the most difficult thing about being on the road has been being away from my parents, brothers, sister-in-law, nieces and cousins in southern CA. Family has always been so very important to me and have always been a part of my "happy place". I wish I could take them all of with me on this epic journey. But for now, I'm once again thankful for technological advances like face time! (if only I could get reliable connection while on the road or at our campsites I would be much more thankful...ugh!)

Okey Dokey Artichokey....that's it for today! The good, the bad and the ugly for our first 6 weeks on the road. This took me longer than I expected to reflect upon our travelling experiences on the road so I will definitely be posting more often and not as lengthy....I think...lol

The rain has let up and the kid's movie is almost done so it's time to get the kids outside to burn off some energy then shower up and make some dinner...

Signing off for now....

~Durana

[ontuesdaylast]

Can I trust you?

Hello again! The first topic we wanted to discuss was Hecate and how everyone in the hotel relates to the seemingly gravitational pull around her. We will also discuss the tools of Hecate’s machinations briefly. As we were writing this, we kept being tempted to go off on tangents of other things but that’s the brilliance of this show and doing a deep dive like this: there are still so many elements left to be discussed. 

In case you missed it, here is an explanation of what we’re attempting to do with this blog. 

These opinions are entirely on our own and based on specific observations. We do not claim this to be a definitive reading of Hecate or the hotel in relation to her. Some of these things are also based on choices made by specific residents so significance can change based on that. Our hope is that this post will spur a discussion, even if you flat out disagree with us. We truly look forward to your thoughts!

Significant spoilers under the cut… It is our belief that the hotel is best experienced if you are able to go in blindly and would therefore encourage everyone who is newer to the hotel not read this. We will not be gatekeepers, however. The choice is entirely yours.

First, this entire train of thought makes the assumption that Hecate is controlling and manipulating all of the events in the hotel to her bidding. We think there’s a debate to be had about whether she has some goal or if her goal is just general chaos and eternal purgatory for the pawns in her story. 

Let’s unpack Hecate controlling things more: It is our belief that this is the case. There appear to be two clearly defined teams within the hotel: (1) Team Hecate and (2) Team Lab Rats but there is also a third team of characters that appear to be either outside of her scope slightly in a gray area. We’ll call them Team Gray haha. There also has to be a discussion about how wittingly all of these people are participating, which we will also touch on below. 

Team Hecate, in our minds, consists of Hecate at the top, the three witches (Boy, Sexy and Bald), Speakeasy, Taxidermist and Porter. 

Team Lab Rats consists of Macbeth, Macduff, Lady Macduff, Malcolm, Duncan, Banquo and Agnes.

Team Gray consists of Lady Macbeth, Danvers, Fulton, Nurse Christian and Matron.

The Witches

The witches at first glance appear to be willing participants in Hecate’s plot. However, cracks appear at various points in each of their stories. All three of the witches appear to break down and reveal their true natures underneath the manipulative exteriors. The concurrent time for this is after the rave:

Boy Witch breaks down in the shower

Bald Witch, in some portrayals we’ve seen of the character, appears to be a wounded animal as she bathes herself in the apothecary. On the flip side, we’ve also seen interpretations where even in this moment, Bald Witch is manipulative and in control so there could be an argument that she is the only true believer of the three witches.

Sexy Witch appears to be in turmoil after the rave. Lennox saw Sexy Witches reach out to a White Mask for support with pain in her eyes only to be snatched back by Hecate.

Boy Witch also appears to let the mask drop in two other instances. The first is after he taunts the Porter in the phone booth dance in the lobby. During that sequence, Boy Witch lures Porter to him, flirting with him but then ultimately literally throwing him away and leaving him. Boy Witch then runs up to the Speakeasy, where he writhes emotionally on the pool table like he’s having a fit and also lashes out at a White Mask standing nearby claiming that “This is all your fault.” 

The final moment where Boy Witch appears to let the mask drop is during his 1:1. After he lip syncs to Peggy Lee’s rendition of “Is That All There Is?” he has a White Mask wipe away his tears, taunting Porter who tried to do that himself. Boy Witch then pulls that White Mask into one of the phone booths, wraps the phone booth curtain around the pair of them and whispers some variation of “Last night, I woke with your name on my lips.” He kisses the White Mask on the cheek and walks out of the phone booth, going the mirror and collecting himself. We believe there’s an argument to be made here that he could just be manipulating the White Mask but that also feels like it could be down to how the performer plays the moment. Some feel genuine, others feel manipulative. We prefer the genuine moment because it makes his following actions that much more tragic when the hard shell comes back on after leaving the phone booth. He’s a tortured soul and that makes him a tragic anti-hero. 

Speakeasy & Taxidermist

Speaks and Taxi can feel like the most on team Hecate out of everyone. In other words, they tend to feel like the most active participants in her plot. 

We believe that they are also aware of the loops. One of the purposes that Speakeasy serves is to reset props. We like to ascribe the meaning to this that he is aware of what is happening and is encouraging those things to happen by resetting the props. He’s literally setting up the tools of the characters’ demise and there’s something very sinister about that. 

The other quality of Speaks is that he seems consistently aware of the audience. This manifests in the moments when Speaks interacts with White Masks, i.e. the shot game and escorting people to the rave, but also the fact that Speaks doesn’t seem to look through White Masks as much as other characters do (we’ll get into this more below when talking about the lab rats). It seems to be a consistent thing that Speaks makes eye contact and seem to be aware that he has an audience. 

Taxi has similar tendencies as well. Taxi seems to be the most thoroughly evil of Hecate’s helpers. This is brought into stark reality in his 1:1. His lines are taken from the murderers in Macbeth in the moment when Macbeth instructs them to kill Banquo. Others have written in more depth about the significance of Taxidermist as a murderer, including how it’s likely he murdered the Macduff child whose blood-stained bed you can see through the mirror on the third floor and maybe we’ll dive into that more in a future post. For now, we think it’s worth mentioning how Taxidermist also seems to be the most willing participant in Hecate’s game. Like Speaks, he never appears to have a moment of wavering in his support of Hecate. He also escorts White Masks to the rave and is particularly focused on either messing with or recruiting Fulton to the cause. 

Both Speaks and Taxis’ 1:1s also bear the significance that they are recruiting the White Mask to Team Hecate. Where others attempt to protect people from Hecate, Speaks and Taxi appear to be actively in pursuit of more servants for Hecate. Both of their 1:1s include the White Mask ingesting something, in Speaks’ case a shot of whisky, in Taxi’s case a dyed-blue gum drop. In both cases, the characters also partake in the items and often “cheers” the White Mask beforehand. There is feeling that you are “joining the team” in these 1:1s. 

The Porter

The Porter appears to be the most conflicted of the team Hecate members. He attempts to reject Hecate’s requests and also tries to save Lady Macduff but then he also does seem to enjoy messing with Agnes Naismith. Let’s dive into the moments. 

One of the Porter’s most prevalent drives is his love for Boy Witch. The nature of their relationship is unclear but there do seem to be indications that they had a prior relationship of some kind. As we said above, Boy Witch seems to feel bad occasionally about his treatment of the Porter. After Boy Witch tempts then rejects Porter at the phone booths, Porter pulls a White Mask in for his 1:1. This 1:1 happens concurrently to Boy Witch’s fit on the pool table in the speakeasy so the significance of that can’t be understated. 

Within Porter’s 1:1, he ashamedly and nervously puts on lipstick and then a wig. It’s debatable if this is a reference to Hecate or a nod to his sexuality. What do others think about this moment? He then clutches the White Mask, crying, kisses them on the cheek and thanks them, escorting them back to the lobby. The action clearly pains him. It is a haunting, tragic moment to experience. 

In another moment in his back office, Porter draws out a diagram on a piece of paper. This happens during the first prophecy happening in the lobby. There is a reference to the forest, “her” and “her bar”, a ring and then most importantly “The Boy”, which he circles multiple times. This suggests to us that while he’s been conscripted into Hecate’s war, everything he does is ultimately for Boy Witch. We like to think that Porter joined Team Hecate to be closer Boy Witch or maybe even to save him. While in her employ, however, he regrets the things that he has to do. He’s made a deal with the devil. Is it worth it or not is the ultimate question. 

One of Hecate’s 1:1s sends the White Mask on a mission with a letter to the Porter. The letter is asking Porter to find her ring, to which he writes a reply that he is unable to complete the quest, which he then instructs that person to bring back to Hecate. (More on Hecate’s ring later) He appears to be actively resisting her in this moment. 

That fact makes his treatment of Agnes all the more confusing. He seems to regale in the opportunity to mess with her. He gleefully tips her suitcase onto the floor and taunts her openly. These moments feel incongruous to the rest of his actions and personality. Is this him temporarily giving in to Hecate’s power over him or is there another, darker reason for his treatment of Agnes?

There is also some discourse out there that Porter has ties to Norman Bates. His 1:1 has a Psycho-ish quality to it when viewed through that lens. The Porter’s job is also obviously reminiscent to Norman’s job in the film. Others have written about how there is a reference to a missing girl in his office, the indication then being that he murdered her, a la Norman Bates. We have not seen this news clipping but felt that it was worth mentioning. This reading of him adds another level to his story and we love it.

He does attempt to save Lady Macduff. He tries to stop Danvers from poisoning her with the blue milk. But, he is tragically unsuccessful in saving her. He is distracted by the White Mask bringing Hecate’s letter about finding her ring and is writing the letter back to Hecate. By the time he is finished, Lady Macduff is dead. Despite his best intentions to be good, Hecate thwarts him once again. 

He is ultimately all the more tragic for that reason.

Tears in Relation to Hecate’s Power

Tears seem to be particularly significant to Hecate’s control over her subordinates. There is a sequence of events where tears seem to be the main focus. It begins with Agnes coming to the rep bar after being sent there by the Porter. Agnes comes to the rep bar and timidly sits at the table with Hecate. After a series of manipulations, Agnes begins to cry and Hecate harvests her tears into a small vial. Agnes then storms out of the rep bar, leaving Hecate apparently gleeful at her success with Agnes. 

This has clearly been Hecate’s intention all along so what exactly does Hecate gain by harvesting Agnes’s tears? Clearly, she is gaining control over Agnes but we are unclear in what way. This moment happens at the end of the narrative loop so is it Hecate’s way of keeping everyone stuck in this never-ending, ever-repeating hell-scape?

Hecate then feeds Agnes’s tears to Speaks, and also gives him the necklace to reset. Hecate then pulls a White Mask in for a 1:1. This 1:1 is the letter to the Porter asking him to bring her her ring. At the beginning of the 1:1, Hecate fees the White Mask a vial of tears (really likely salt water) that is identical to the one she fed to Speaks. She then asks if she can trust you, smiles when you nod yes and gives you the letter to the Porter. She also tells you to hurry back. 

Therefore, the question becomes what is the significance of tears to Hecate’s power? Clearly they have something to do with working for Hecate. Also, whose tears does she feed the White Mask in the 1:1? Can they be anyone’s tears? Or should we assume that they are Porter’s because you are about it to manipulate him? 

As I said, this sequence of events happens at the very end of the narrative loop. Speaks does have an interaction with Agnes toward the beginning of the loop. It happens right before Boy Witch storms in for his fit on the pool table after taunting the porter. Boy Witch screams at Agnes to get out as he walks in. But before that, the interaction between Agnes and Speaks is tame. He offers her a drink and not much else happens. Therefore, there’s no pay off to Hecate feeding Speaks Agnes’s tears. Unless we are missing something and someone can illuminate us on this. Possibly, Speaks was about to manipulate Agnes further but Boy Witch interrupted that with his outburst? 

Hecate also appears to fake tears during her lip sync to Tony Bennett’s rendition of “If That’s All There Is?” that happens concurrently to Boy Witch’s lip sync in the lobby. There is an argument to be made that Hecate is acting out the lip sync as a marionette for Boy Witch. He cries, though the tears appear to be fake, perhaps because she cries. If Hecate is controlling Boy Witch, in this moment, the only person it could be to manipulate is Porter, who watches longingly and tragically from a distance. This feeds into the idea that the way Hecate keeps Porter’s loyalty is through Boy Witch. 

Regarding the tears, Hecate’s tears appear to be fake and Boy Witch’s are as well. He does cry real tears, encouraged by something Porter wipes under Boy Witch’s eyes before the start of the lip sync (Vicks Vaporub?). But after the lip sync, Boy Witch uses the tears to manipulate Porter when he selects a White Mask to wipe them off instead of allowing Porter to do it.

There is discourse that witches can’t cry, which adds another level to all of this. There is something intrinsically human about crying so the fact that Hecate uses tears to manipulate both her servants and the people she is torturing makes it feel that by accepting the tears, you are signing a deal with the devil. 

We also think it’s worth discussing salt, bible verses, holy water and mirrors in relation to magical powers but feel like that would be going on too much of a tangent in this post. 

Hecate’s Ring

Hecate’s lost ring is a big motif in the story. As mentioned above, Hecate implores Porter to find her ring, to which he replies that he cannot. Hecate’s third 1:1 is her telling the White Mask to find her ring. In the past, the ring did actually exist. The ring is no longer a prop to be found and returned to her. When the ring did exist and could be found, people reported if they returned the ring to her it would unlock significant interactions for future trips but no one has said publicly what those were.

We have two questions about this ring: what is the significance of the ring to Hecate and what is the significance of the fact that the ring is something that can never be found? 

Is the ring something that Hecate genuinely cares about? Or, is it just another thing she is using to manipulate people? Has she just sent Porter and the White Masks who get her 1:1 on a wild goose chase, essentially perpetuating their existence in purgatory, knowing that the ring doesn’t exist? Or, does she still believe the ring is out there and genuinely want someone to find it? 

We don’t have answers to these questions. We’d love to hear others’ thoughts about them. 

Next, let’s look at Team Lab Rats. 

Team Lab Rats

There is a sense that the Macbeth characters excluding the witches are Hecate’s toys that she is playing with. What is her goal? Is it just straight chaos? Or is there some deeper meaning to what she is doing? 

Whatever the goal, it is clear that she rejoices in the downfalls of the characters. It is Hecate’s design that the witches manipulate everyone. Macbeth is the clearest victim of this but let’s look at the other characters as well. The significance can’t be lost that each witch dances with another one of these characters at the ball:

Bald Witch dances with Banquo, implanting the first seed that leads Banquo astray

Sexy Witch dances with Macduff, distracting him so that he doesn’t notice Lady Macduff being poisoned by Danvers

Boy Witch dances with Malcolm, seemingly poisoning him so that he has to run up to the detective agency to give himself the antidote, therefore missing Lady Macbeth poisoning Duncan so that he falls into a deep sleep in the canopy bed, making it easier for Macbeth to murder him. Malcolm, in his 1:1 talks about seeing signs that Duncan will die but Boy Witch’s distraction causes him to arrive too late.

The witches continue to manipulate Banquo after the ball as well. All three follow him up to the lobby, where he receives a letter from Porter. Sexy Witch then seduces him, eventually kissing him, sending him into a deep sleep, from which is woken by Bald Witch shortly after. He never truly recovers from that, however, making him easier prey for Macbeth’s aggression. 

Macbeth’s downfall is obvious. The witches give him two prophecies: the first in the lobby telling him that he will be Thane of Cawdor and eventually king. The second is the rave in the rep bar, predicting his demise when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. 

Macbeth’s downfall is also encouraged by Lady Macbeth, a point we will discuss below. 

As we’ve already discussed, Agnes is also manipulated by Hecate. Agnes has come to Gallow Green looking for her missing sister, Grace. She is then sent on a wild goose chase to find her. One stop is see Malcolm, the detective, who appears to have already been tasked with finding Grace by some other unknown person. Is this another of Hecate’s machinations, perhaps carried out by one of her surrogates or by herself before the events that take place in the show? Or is there another unknown person looking for Grace for some unknown reason? Does anyone have thoughts about this? 

In the middle of this interaction between Agnes and Malcolm, an obvious spell takes hold of them, making them seemingly fall in love with each other. It’s all clearly a ruse cooked up by Hecate, however, and is meant to distract both of them from their quests and Malcolm from realizing that Duncan is about to be murdered. 

Agnes does seem to have some resistance left over to resist Hecate as she breaks free from the spell and runs away from Malcolm. She also attempts to protect those she brings into 1:1 by giving them a locket that contains a bible verse. This small resistance makes her capitulation towards the end of the loop all the more tragic. 

Macduff and Lady Macduff are, in our opinion, the most tragic characters in the hotel. How many times have we said tragic in this post? We don’t follow them often, mainly because we find them too depressing. We already discussed earlier how they are all manipulated by witches. We discuss later on how Danvers torments Lady Macduff but here we’ll mentioned that Lady Macduff seems to foresee her own death so her connection to supernatural comes into the focus there. 

We could do a whole discussion of the loops, and probably will, but the consensus is that the narrative loop begins after the Hitchcock Suite ends. So, if you’re looking at the Macduffs, in that moment, Lady Macduff has just made her way up to the Macduff apartment and climbs up onto the bookshelf, apparently in a distraught trance. Macduff also “wakes up” alone at the beginning of his loop literally under the door and makes his way to Lady Macduff to try to comfort her and tell that it was all a dream and that she shouldn’t worry. They both appear to have just woken up from a nightmare but the tragedy is that their nightmare is just beginning again. 

In our opinion, you could either choose to believe that for some reason the Macduffs begin their loop far later than every other character - i.e. halfway through the end of their follow dance on the couches of their living room - or you can choose to look at it with the view that Lady Macduff begins with her waking up from her own murder, as though she waking up from the prediction of her own murder. The beginning of her loop, therefore is her distraught over the horror that is to come. She allows herself to forget about it momentarily when soothed by Macduff but is plunged into despair quickly again when she is poisoned at the ball. 

She also predicts her own murder in her 1:1 and, like a few other characters, attempts to protect the person in her 1:1 with the packet of salt wrapped in a bible verse. Again, it will be significant to discuss the effectiveness of these items at a later date.

Team Gray 

This is the group of characters that don’t clearly fit into either of the above categories. Let’s take them one by one. 

Lady Macbeth is in this gray area for us because the reasons behind her actions seem to be slightly gray. We can see the argument that she is team Hecate and we could also see the argument that she is acting on her own accord with a nefarious goal. 

There does appear to be a consensus that Lady Macbeth was formerly a patient at the King James Sanatorium. There are patient files for her on the 5th floor and it makes sense that she would choose to go back to the sanatorium when she’s lost everything at the end of her loop; it’s the only place she has left. 

She also appears to be connected to the supernatural. We think it’s debatable whether she is being controlled by Hecate or acting of her own volition. Does anyone have strong opinions either way? We do also think that is an argument to be made if she is a witch herself or not. This particularly comes into question when she appears to summon the witches to her to start the ball. She kneels down before the music starts and motions like she’s conjuring the ball. The three witches then descend on her. She will then generally kiss all three in turn. 

The fact she also works to convince Macbeth to kill Duncan could suggest that she is working with Hecate as well. 

However, despite all of these signs, it still feels to us like she still has her own agency and can therefore makes her own choices in a way a lot of the other team Hecate characters appear not to. What do you all think about this? 

Mrs Danvers also falls into a similar category as Lady Macbeth for us. She is definitely working toward similar goals as Hecate - poisoning Lady Macduff and helping Lady Macbeth poison Duncan - but she also feels completely in control of her own actions. If Danvers is working for anyone, the assumption must be that it is Lady Macbeth since Danvers gives Lady Macbeth the poisoned whisky for Duncan. Danvers, unlike Lady Macbeth, does not feel to us like she possesses any magical ability or interact with the supernatural. 

We also don’t think you can overlook the fact that neither Lady Macbeth or Danvers interact with Hecate. Despite Hecate having pull throughout the hotel, all of the other characters who are operating based on Hecate’s orders physically interact with her at some point. 

Whose orders is Danvers operating under in poisoning Lady Macduff? It serves the bigger goal that Hecate has for the Macbeth characters but feels separate to the other chaos Hecate is enacting within the hotel. We will also discuss the implications of Hitchcock’s and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca on the plot of SNM in a later post. We will mention here that there are, in our opinion, leftovers of the second Mrs de Winter’s character in Lady Macduff, particularly when it comes to Danvers’ torment of her and Lady Macbeth possesses Rebecca-like qualities in a number of ways. We’ll dig into that in a later post. 

A note about a specific performance here: Ross saw one performer as Lady Macbeth act very annoyed when Lady Macduff interrupted her with Duncan. That performer then motioned to Danvers, who was bringing her the poisoned whisky as though to say “Deal with that.” That could be one interpretation, that that is the moment when Danvers chooses to zone in on Lady Macduff.

We believe based on all of this that while Lady Macbeth and Danvers are acting upon their individual goals.

It bears mentioning that Danvers also has a relationship with Duncan. There appears to be a Mrs Danvers/Maxim de Winter-style relationship going on. We believe that Danvers is in love with Duncan and Lady Macbeth, similar to how Mrs Danvers acts in Rebecca. The romantic feelings for Duncan do appear to be one-sided. We like to believe that the druggy, slowed-down version of “Moonlight Becomes You” by Bing Crosby to which Danvers and Duncan dance is a daydream of Danvers’. We could also see the argument that it is a machination of Hecate’s, in the same style as the interaction between Malcolm and Agnes. However, we like the interpretation more that Danvers is daydreaming this moment with Duncan.    

Fulton falls into a similar category to Agnes but he still feels slightly outside of the actions happening within the hotel. On a logistical basis, Fulton’s primary function seems to be as an observer of the carnage in order to direct audience members to the big moments, in a similar way to Speakeasy resetting props. For example, Fulton observes the rave, the Macbeth fight in their bedroom and Banquo’s ghost walking down High Street. His presence draws an audience after him and therefore directs them to not miss those moments. 

This also serves a story purpose, however. Fulton is a pious man attempting to cleanse the town of sinister forces, while also inadvertently accidentally falling into them. These moments are, for example, when he finds Sexy Witch in the mortuary, when Taxidermist targets him and when he goes for a drink in the Speakeasy. He continuously attempts to resist and, like Agnes, gives the White Mask who gets his 1:1 a talisman that he says is to protect them from the evil in the hotel, but despite his best intentions, he does get swept up in the goings on in Gallow Green. 

Fun story: Lennox had Fulton’s 1:1 one time wearing a mask that had a Hecate kiss on it. That Fulton performer didn’t seem to notice the kiss until after he’d pulled Lennox into the room. He grabbed the holy water, turned around and only then did he notice the kiss. He jumped back and then flung the holy water at Lennox. It was hilarious. Poor Fulton.

We’ve placed him in the gray category because it doesn’t feel like Hecate knows about him or is targeting him like she is the other dolls in her playhouse. It is our opinion that Taxidermist’s targeting of Futon is Taxidermist’s choice and not part of some bigger plot. We could see it being the case that Taxidermist is trying to recruit Fulton - even though he is going about in an extremely poor way, if that’s the case. We don’t know about you guys, but we don’t try to beat up the people we would like to be friends with. 

We will look into the Paisley Witch Trials in a later discussion post but the implications but I did want to mention here briefly that Margaret Fulton was the name of one of the women accused of witchcraft in those trials and that could have significance to Fulton’s role within the story. This is already so long that it doesn’t suit anyone for us to discuss that here. 

Finally, let’s look at the people on the fifth floor in how they related to Hecate: Nurse Christian and Matron. It’s also possible to discuss this in relation to King James Sanatorium being outside of Hecate’s purview or not. We’re not going to pretend to be experts on the fifth floor. We honestly don’t spend too much time there but we’ll touch on things briefly. We look forward to hearing others’ thoughts about these characters in relation to Hecate. 

Nurse Christian Shaw is also a character based on one of the participants in the Paisley Witch trials. We will get into that in more detail in a later post but for now, we’ll just say that Christian Shaw was a young girl who was the first to accuse the women in Paisley of being witches. She also suffered from “fits”. You can see these character traits in the SNM version of Christian Shaw. She experiences multiple fits throughout the loop. In the case of SNM, she definitely appears to be supernatural in some way. 

She is also connected to Lady Macbeth. The assumption is that Nurse Christian and Lady Macbeth were patients at the sanatorium together. They were likely friends and Nurse Christian is still keeping watch over Lady Macbeth. She occasionally appears in important moments in Lady Macbeth’s loop, such as Lady Macbeth’s bath on the fifth floor and she watches over the banquet from the mezzanine before pulling a White Mask into the room off of the mezzanine where she implores them to look after Lady Macbeth. She also resets Lady Macbeth’s clothing after the bath. 

For these reasons and the fact that she doesn’t appear to have any connection to Hecate, we’ve placed her in Team Gray. 

Matron is another interesting case. She is also named after Margaret Lang, another participant in the Paisley Witch Trials who was hanged for witchcraft. 

Sleep No More’s Matron used to be the Matron of the King James sanatorium. She has now retreated and locked herself away in her hut in the corner. We love the idea that Matron stops the loops repeating by finally agreeing to leave the forest with Nurse. We think that we could spend another (couch) 5,000 words talking about the loops and peoples’ places in them and what breaks the repeating cycle and we probably will at some point. All that we’re going to say here is that Matron seems to have retreated into the hut to protect herself. 

Matron is supernatural-sensitive. She likely has visions, based on the fit she has in her 1:1, and appears to want to protect the White Mask from the horrors happening in the hotel. It is a brave act that she chooses to step out of the hut and that is why we like the idea that she somehow prompts a break in the repeating loops. This is also encouraged by the fact that she looks all around her as she is walking downstairs, horrified by the destruction, almost like she is waking up from a nightmare. 

In Conclusion

We need to get a life... Just kidding… Well sorta not… 

But we are really intrigued by everything we’ve discussed above. We hope that others will join in on the discussion because we think this could add more to the fandom beyond just cast lists and whispered questions. Truly, no opinions are unwelcome. You can submit them to us privately, reply here or send us asks (anonymous or otherwise) and we’ll post them.

[holeinwallpoem]

Hey folks that for some reason follow this blog, today I’m going to be talking about a random topic and that topic will be my “analysis” of the songs in Twisted, though it’s pretty much just what songs I think they sound most similar to/what references there are. Source: me, a fan of Starkid, Disney movies, and Wicked, who only knows minimal music theory. 

(I had a video on this but I was scared Disney would sue me.)

Prologue: I don’t know if this song is actually called “Prologue” in Twisted (is it actually just considered part of the beginning of Dream A Little Harder?), but it sounds extremely similar to the Prologue of Beauty and the Beast. The scenes are also both setting up backstory for the events of the actual story, so they’re similar in that way. Plus the BatB parallels become more apparent in the next song...

Dream A Little Harder: I think most people realize that this song is mostly a parody of Belle from BatB, especially at the beginning. There are several quotes from the original song, such as “Marie! The baguettes! Hurry up!” and “I need six eggs!”, plus Ja’far does everything Belle does in the original. The song also specifically references “Whistle While You Work” and “Spoonful of Sugar”.

I Steal Everything: This is Aladdin’s introduction song, and so it parodies Aladdin’s original introduction song, “One Jump Ahead”. Again, this is probably pretty obvious. The line leading into the song is “I steal only what I can’t afford, and that’s everything”, which is a line from “One Jump Ahead”. The sections of the song that go “Hippie! Fucker! Slacker! Sucker!” parallel “Riff raff! Street rat! Scoundrel! Take that!”.

Everything and More: This is a princess “I Want” song, so what better song to use as a reference than another princess “I Want” song? This parodies “Part Of Your World”. It is not quite as direct as some others, but it is especially obvious in the structure of the song and the lyrics at the beginning and the end: “Look at my life from the outside and sure, I've got servants and tigers and stuff. You're probably thinking, ‘She's got everything’. Well it's true 'cause I do, But so the fuck what, it's not enough” vs. “she's got everything. I've got gadgets and gizmos aplenty, I've got whozits and whatzits galore. (You want thingamabobs? I got twenty) But who cares? No big deal. I want more,” and “What I wouldn't give to live in a new situation” vs. “What would I give, If I could live outta these waters?”.

Sands of Time: I can’t think of a particular song this one could be inspired by. It makes me sad though.

Golden Rule (& Evil Reprise I guess): It could just be me but this song really reminds me of “The Bare Necessities”. Both songs are sharing a character’s philosophy of life, plus the lyrics “simple reciprocity is always my philosophy, I get back what I give” reminds me of “I mean the bare necessities, Old Mother Nature's recipes, that brings the bare necessities of life”. I think the jazzy instrumentals sound similar as well. I guess the Evil Reprise would just be the dark version?

A Thousand and One Nights: I don’t think this song parodies a specific other song, but it seems to be inspired by other Disney romantic duets. However, I think the guitar is reminiscent of a lot of Wicked songs, like “Dancing Through Life” and “As Long As You’re Mine”. The credits version is a parody of the cheesy pop/R&B versions of duets in Disney movies from the 90s and even early 2000s.

If I Believed: This song doesn’t really remind me of any others either. It also makes me sad though.

Orphaned at 33: This one parodies “Proud of Your Boy”, another Aladdin ballad. Even though the latter was only included as part of the musical, which was after Twisted, it was written for the movie and included as bonus features. The structures of the songs are the same, especially the bridge sections. I think both are in the same key as well. You can basically sing the lyrics to the bridge of one song to the melody of the other:

“They call me a jerkoff, a burnout, a punk But I can't let that junk in my head I could've been a contender If not for the fact that my parents are dead All things considered, I think I turned out pretty good Pulled myself up by my bootstraps and started Stealing all I could” vs.

“Tell me that I've been a louse and loafer You won't get a fight here, no ma'am Say I'm a goldbrick, a goof-off, no good But that couldn't be all that I am, Water flows under the bridge Let it pass, let it go There's no good reason that you should believe me Not yet, I know but“

Bonus: “I’m gonna live forever!” is reference to “Fame”.

Happy Ending: Ja’far’s lyrics to this song parody Elphaba in “The Wizard And I”. Both characters are fantasizing about a future where they will be celebrated, and there’s a bit of ironic foreshadowing. The instrumentals also sound similar, though kind of at different parts (“one day the genie will say to me...” lines up more with “unlimited, my future is unlimited” in terms of piano underscoring, though the lyrics better match “one day he’ll say to me...).

“They'll throw a parade in my honor...The people will cheer for the royal vizier...Not that I care for glory...And one day the genie will say to me: ‘Ja'far, you're a man of such virtue’...share an itty-bitty living space,”

“A celebration throughout Oz that's all to do with me!...When people see me, they will scream...But of course that's not important to me...And one day, he'll say to me, ‘Elphaba, A girl who is so superior’...I’d be so happy I could melt!”

No One Remembers Achmed: I don’t think this one parodies any specific songs. Or maybe I just don’t remember them?

Take Off Your Clothes: Again, pretty obvious, but this one parodies “A Whole New World”. The structure of the songs is the same, lyrics are similar (”shining, sparkling, metallic” and “shining, shimmering, splendid”), the rhythms are the same or similar, and the melodies are basically inverses of each other.

Twisted: The parts for the other villains parody their songs, ie. Ursula’s part sounds like “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and Scar’s part sounds like “Be Prepared”. Ja’far’s part I think sounds similar to “No Good Deed” in Wicked. Both characters have chosen to become the villain everyone thinks they are after believing they have lost everything (...even though neither one really becomes a villain even after this part). Lots of electric guitar. Genius also says the beginning music sounds like “Damned For All Time” from Jesus Christ, Superstar, but I’m not a big ALW fan so I can’t vouch for that. It probably does though. Ja’far also references Hamlet by using a phrase from the “To Be or Not To Be?” soliloquy, “’tis nobler in the mind”.

“But I had good intentions, I did it for a reason...I'll give them all the unsung antihero they deserve. I've nothing left to lose, so the only path to choose is twisted...Let my life be twisted, I'll be twisted, it's my turn!”

“Who cares if no one will ever mourn me?”

“My road of good intentions led where such roads always lead...Let all Oz be agreed, I'm wicked through and through...I promise no good deed will I attempt to do again, ever again! No good deed will I do again!”

“No one mourns the wicked.”

The Power In Me: In theme and location in the show, as well as some of the lyrics, this song parallels “For Good” from Wicked. The lyrics “I’ll carry you in my heart” are similar to “you’ll be with me, like a handprint on my heart.” Other than that I don’t think the music is that similar but the themes definitely are.

A Thousand And One Nights (Reprise): This one parodies Disney finales. It sounds kinda like the Aladdin finale, which is a reprise of “A Whole New World”.

Ok that’s it! Idk why I made this post, but here you go!

[delonhurt]

Blog Post #1

During these weeks of class we discussed a variety of topics, themes, and meanings of Black Horror films. Most recently we watched the award-winning film Get Out by Jordan Peele, I film that I’ve seen before but while re watching it this time I noticed so many different details and symbolism within objects that I didn't catch before. At this time I want to focus on the meaning the deer played in the movie. I believe it was meant to represent the foreshadowing death of black people. My first observation of this came from when Rose and Chris were driving to her parents house to visit, as they are driving on the highway a deer runs across the road and Rose hits it causing its death. After the accident both Rose and Chris get out of the car to check for any damage, while looking Chris hears the deer's cry and goes to check on it despite Rose telling him not. When he gets up to the deer, the camera takes a close-up shot switching back and forth between the deer and Chris and you can see the concern in Chris’s face. But it seems like the deer is staring back at him, almost as if the deer is concerned for his life as well. A warning for what's to come during this trip for Chris. This scene to me represented how only a black person could hear the cries of other black people, while the others which in this case Rose, chooses to ignore it.

The next scene where the deer symbolism comes into place is when Rose and Chris finally make it to her parents house. They get in and her parents ask the drive in was, Rose proceeds to tell them how they hit a deer on the way in. The mother shows some concern but the father says “One down a couple hundred thousand to go” and “they’re taking over, I’m sick of it. They’re like rats and destroying the ecosystem. I see a dead deer on the road I say to myself that's a start.” This tangent her father goes on was a metaphor for black people and how he sees them as threats to the world instead of allies. Which is why I believe he chooses to perform the coagula procedure on Black people because he feels the only way to stop them from “infecting” the rest of the world is to take out their brains and turning them into something else.    

The last significant scene where the deer’s symbolism plays a role is at the end of the movie where Chris wakes up ties to a seat and in front of him is a deer’s head mounted on the wall. This represented a role reversal from the original scene when Chris was watching the deer about to die. It was a foreshadowing for Chris’s future as the deer head is mounted on the wall watching what seems to be his last minutes alive before he's taken into the procedure. But a plot twist occurs when Chris finds a way to escape the chair, grabs the deer head and uses it to kill the father. The irony of the father being killed by what he despised is what made the scheme so powerful to me. This scheme represented persistence of how we wont stop, no matter how much the odds are stacked against us. Chris represented for all black people and by fighting back I believe he showed  how we as a people will never quit or surrender just because the odds are against us.

[mnranger5]

Biggun’s in June, Tonka Teas, The Pig Saga (part 3) and some serious Boat Drama, Cedar Lake (New Prague) and Lake Minnetonka 6/21/19 -6/24/19

June fishing has been historically great fishing for me!  I’ve some serious pigs in June, and I’m not talking about the pork variety.  Generally, June sees fish coming out of their post spawn funk and ready to get chomping.  This is exactly what we experienced on 6/21/19 at Cedar Lake in New Prague.  The only thing is, the highlight of the night was quite unexpected.

I had a slight dilemma on my hands.  Nerd Alert: Josh and I had a good session of Call of Duty going.  We had one victory in the books and were playing well.  Mike texted and asked about fishing.  We had talked about taking my boat because his was in the shop getting some electrical work done.  I had a decision to make.  Fishing or Call of Duty.  The wind was blowing like a hurricane, which I hate.  But obviously, I still picked fishing!  I loaded the boat up and headed over to Mike’s.

Prelude to the Boat Drama (later in the blog): My boat trailer has been acting up.  The wheels have been getting blazing hot on occasion and smell like something is burning.  I knew something wasn’t right with the trailer which is why I canceled our Mille Lacs trip that weekend.  I didn’t want to take the trailer on a long ride.  Instead I suggested we stay local.

So local is what we did.  Mike and I trailered my boat over to Cedar Lake, a short 5 minute drive from his house.  We dumped the Nitro in the lake, and slowly made our way out of the shallow bay and toward the main lake.  Cedar Lake is a very shallow lake, known for it’s crappies, largemouth bass and occasional tiger musky.  Mike an I have fished this lake a few times together and had some decent luck.

We spent the first 30 minutes using side imaging to mark locations (rocks) we wanted to come back and fish.  We couldn’t fish them while marking the rocks because we were running the motor in about 5-7FOW and likely spooking everything around us.  We’d come back later and sneak up on ‘em with the trolling motor (if we could get it to work...)

We started on the eastern shoreline, a bit protected from the wind.  We hit it with jig, crankbait and spinnerbait.  Picking up a couple of very small bass.

We buzzed to the western shoreline looking for a downed tree that has ALWAYS produced fish on previous occasions.  Unfortunately, the bay was choked out with weeds this year which is very unusual because the lake floor is usually so clean in this area.  Anyway, it took us awhile, but we did find the tree buried in curly tail pondweed.  We fished it for less than 5 minutes before leaving.  Now that the fish have cover in all the weeds around the tree, they didn’t appear to be sitting on the tree.  Bummer.

We moved over to the prominent point on the SW side of the lake.  No bites.  We continued south, around the point.  I decided to slow down the presentation.  I tied on a shakeyhead with a 7” Motor Oil ribbontail worm.  On my fist cast, I landed just next to a dock post.  Let it sink.  Popped it two times.  It was buried in the grass.  Popped it again.  At this point the line started moving to the left.  Something had picked it up.  I set the hook hard to some solid resistance.  I started reeling it in telling Mike I didn’t think it was very big.  The fish came flying out of the water and Mike bellow out, “That’s a giant!”  The fish pulled around the back side of the boat before I pulled him in next to the boat.  Mike pulled him out.  He was a giant.  Although my scale had run out of batteries, we figured this fish was in the 4.5 pound range.

We were getting hammered with the wind so we moved out of the wind to the eastern shoreline, fishing docks with shakeyhead and other more finesse techniques.  We were getting bit, but most fish were in the 10-12” range.  Not the size fish we were looking for.  

We decided on moving back out on the rocks in open water.  Yes, the wind may make things tough for boat control, but we have Ultrex spot lock which makes fishing in wind less of a hassle.  Mike worked the rocks with a big jig while I went with the drop shot.  We picked up a couple more small bass and one crappie.  We moved down the rocky point close to the shoreline.  As the wind blew around the corner, there was a swirl in the water – looked like an eddy.  I cast right in the middle of it.  Right as I cast, Mike mentioned something about the swirl in the water and how I needed to cast it.  Great minds think alike!  Just as he said it, I felt a fish bump my 2.5” natural colored Gulp drop shot worm.  I set the hook.  Oh yeah, there was definitely a fish on.  The fish almost lethargically moved from the front to the back of the boat, staying deep in the water column.  I laugh when I think about that because deep in this area means the fish was circling the boat in 4-5 FOW.  It’s a bit surprising we could not see him swimming, but it was overcast, and the water is stained.  The fish worked the length of the boat two different times as I tried my best to reel in the drag it was pulling out.  My setup was either 4lb test line, and the only reason I was using such light line is that I had it setup for Aidan when he goes fishing over at Cobblestone for panfish.  After about 2 minutes of cursing myself as to why I didn’t bump up the line diameter on this reel, the fish finally came to the surface.  It was a musky, a big strong tiger musky!  An excitement came over the boat that doesn’t usually happen.  Musky are rare.  It’s said that musky hit on 1 in 10,000 casts.   For me, it’s probably more like 1:30,000. Mike and I both wanted this fish in the boat.  Mike netted the musky, which didn’t fit in the net too well.  The back half of the freshwater Jaws spilled out of the net, dangling over the edge.  Mike hoisted the net into the boat.  She was secured.  

Only the second musky I have ever caught and landed in my life!  This one came in at 44” long.  A true giant by tiger musky standards.

We finished the evening fishing the south shoreline of the lake.  Neither of us had ever fished this area, which is surprising, because the shoreline was littered with downed trees, docks and lily pads One tree in particular, we mush have taken a dozen casts at with no bites.  We came back to the tree after a few minutes and casted it another dozen times.  Mike worked it hard with the lizard.  On his last cast to the tree, he was rewarded with this 3+ pound bass.

6/22/19

As I eluded to earlier, Mike and I were supposed to take my boat up to Mille Lacs this morning.  But, with the trailer problem I was having, I decided to keep our fishing trip local.  Mike showed up at my house at 4:40AM and we headed off to Minnetonka.

We spent a significant portion of the morning fishing the bridge between Crystal and Smith Bay as well as the shoreline of Smith Bay.  Smith Bay proved most productive as we picked up several smaller bass.  We looked for bass around Gale Island, Mahpiyata Island, the boat slip inlet around Narrows Bridge.  We ventured further west fishing in Spring Park Bay, Black Lake, Seton Lake before moving into Jennings Bay.  Just before the girls were set to meet us at Lord Fletchers, I hooked up with this chunky little girl using a Strike King squarebill crankbait over a rocky hump just south of Deering Island.

By 1PM, the weekend warriors owned the lake with their jet skis, wake boats and yachts.  The seas were fierce.  Fishing the main lake was out of the question.  Dyan and Rachel met us at Lord Fletchers for some great food, and drinks.  I think they were called Tonka Teas.  A little bit of tea, and a whole lot of vodka!

We all then made a crazy insane boat ride down to Menards.  The waves were so big, some of those in our party had bruises on their butts by the time we arrived.  The ride made for a lot of laughs.  We had more good food, and more beverages.  Before taking a final boat ride back to Grays Bay.  An amazing day on the water!

6/23/19

Mike put Pepa on the smoker around 8AM.  She cooked all day long and turned out looking a little prettier than her sister, George.  

Around 4PM, Mike sliced her open.  She was done perfectly.  The extra week she lived allowed her to put on nearly 10 more pounds, and it definitely made a noticeable difference in the amount of meat yielded.

6/24/19

Seriously, with the amount of issues I’ve had with my Z19, I almost have to chuckle and look around for the hidden camera.  Nobody in their right mind would spend the amount of money on a brand new boat that we spent and be cool with the boat being at the shop more than it’s been on the water.   The boat went back to the shop first thing Monday morning.  I dropped it off at Cabela’s at 9AM.  The service manager approached my boat along with a technician before I even got out of the truck.  Nice, this was some serious service!  But it was short lived….very short lived.

Without even inspecting the boat, the service manager indicated everything looked just fine, and that the wheels were supposed to heat up.  As the service manager was doing his best job to send me on my way,the tech reached down and felt the wheel.  Blazing hot.  He pulled his hand away like he’d just had molten lava spilled on him. “Whoa!” he yelped, “that’s not normal.”  The tech ran off to the garage like he was in search of ice.  The service manager rolled his eyes and asked where I bought the boat.  “Oklahoma,” I responded.  But he cut off anything else I was about to say with informing me I clearly bought it from a “sh!tty” dealership that didn’t give a “rat’s @ss” about the rigging of the boat.  I was listening.  He informed me the dealership didn’t set up the trolling motor or Talons correctly.   The tech returned, with a jack.  He raised one side of the trailer.  Both wheels should have spun freely.  Both were locked up in place.  He lifted the other side.  Same result.  This trailer had major issues.  The service manager now believed it was shot bearing and needed now brakes, pads and rotors.  I would be leaving the boat with them today.  I also told him about the intermittent power and the problematic release cable on the trolling motor.  They said they would look at it.

Later in the afternoon, Cabelas called saying the boat and trailer were fixed up and ready to be picked up.  Upon arriving, the service manager again met me in the parking lot.  He said they fixed the bearings, and e-brake.  He then went on to tell me that they re-rigged my Talons and are now done correct.  They also said they could not replicate the trolling motor issues, so nothing was fixed.

I left Cabelas happy to have my trailer fixed.  When I got home that night, I backed the trailer into the garage.  For good measure, I felt the trailer wheels fully expecting them to be perfectly cool.  They were blazing hot.  You’ve got to be kidding me.  Nothing had been fixed, or at least the problem had not been fixed.  This trailer needed more time in the shop.

National Dance Competition, Wisconsin Dells, 6/26/19

The girls have been so excited for this week for a long time now.  It was Nationals Week!  Lucky for me, all but one of the girls dances fell on one day, so I was able to drive to the Dells early Wednesday morning and catch  their dances.  As usual, the girls both received platinum awards for their dances - the highest awards given.  They’ve worked so hard all year. so I was thrilled for them that they were rewarded with such amazing results at Nationals!

[deathblooded-blog]

i was going to wait until i’d written nikolai for a little bit longer, but i really do need to get some headcanons down here as to make his character a little clearer to those who wish to interact with him. since this is the first headcanon post i’ve made on this blog, it is likely that it will end up being fairly long, and for that reason, i’m putting it under the cut.

- nikolai does not like change, especially changes in his living arrangements and home life. his natural instincts drive him to stay in one place and make that place ideal for him to live in. this includes, for example, buying or stealing small, various items to place around his home/room and generally making sure that his home is his own. this is mainly due to the fact that he considers himself to be godlike, and believes that everything should be perfect for him. therefore, he is not at all pleased when he has to leave their home in russia to travel to yokohama, japan.

- coming off that last point, nikolai has strong religious beliefs like his host, and perceives himself to be a ‘god tied down to a mortal.’ however, this does not mean that he dislikes fyodor in any kind of way. instead, he has taken the view that he must help fyodor gain the status of a god too, and actively thinks that getting the book will help them reach that goal. though he originally didn’t think too highly of fyodor when they were younger, nikolai’s opinions have since changed and he gets along well with his host.

- as they share a similar genetic build, nikolai also has the anemia that effects his host, though - being an ability - he doesn’t suffer from it as badly as fyodor does. it is seen as, at most, an inconvenience to him in day to day life. this, however, does show in the way that nikolai is often tired, and the extremely pale colour of his skin. he could be described as looking rather sickly on the worst days, or when his anemia is severe. he has, however, become better at managing it over time.

- he likes to collect little ‘tokens’ from the places he has to visit as part of the organisation. these all end up in his room back home, which is filled with various small items that he has collected, pillows and blankets, though he doesn’t use these frequently.

- despite being an ability and therefore not having to eat, nikolai likes to try and blend in with human beings as people tend to trust others of their species. if he can get somebody to admit to doing something morally wrong, then nikolai can manipulate and blackmail them with his own gifts. therefore he attempts to get close to people in order to hear about or witness these supposed ‘crimes’, which will then give him power over them.

- nikolai is fond of soft things - pillows, blankets, anything that’s soft. usually he’ll pile up blankets on his bed and lie on those instead of the actual bed. it’s not even that he likes the idea of hoarding soft things; it plays into the idea of everything feeling like home. though in japan he refuses to use blankets properly as it’s far too warm for him there, and he doesn’t acclimatise quickly.

- he does not deal well with the heat, as it makes him feel nauseous. therefore, he is not fond of japan, where it appears to be very warm to him. nikolai prefers the colder seasons in at home, and frequently stays inside when the warmer seasons come around. while in japan, nikolai insists that they turn air conditioning way up in any hotel room he and fyodor get - and that anybody they stay with keeps the area cold, otherwise nikolai refuses to use his own abilities when it’s warm, simply because he barely wants to move when it’s too warm due to his nausea.

- nikolai can play the piano, and has been doing so since he was much younger. he plays frequently, and can cover a range of musical pieces from a range of musical periods, though he seems to favour playing classical music. he doesn’t tend to play in front of other people though, as music is something he holds quite dear and prefers to keep a very private affair. he does, however, have no problems playing in front of fyodor, and he’s a little more likely to play around any of the rats. 

- he has not met any of the guild members (ability of otherwise) personally until he comes to japan. this is mainly because nikolai dislikes making conversation with anybody he does not intend to use or make friends with. the guild - who were business partners at the time - did not catch nikolai’s interest, despite the fact that fyodor had decided to ally with them. he will, however, make an effort to sustain a conversation should the need arrive, and does not feel at all threatened around guild members.

- he has a strong dislike and mistrust for both the port mafia and the armed detective agency, though he is not scared of them at all. if he’s caught by either, nikolai has no problems putting a gun to his own head and killing himself, as he’ll then reappear next to his host. this is also a way that he can get away from being followed if he needs to head back to fyodor quickly and without anybody tailing him for whatever reason.

[thosegooodvibrations]

we can de-power capitalism by supporting each other

hey friends, here’s a blog post i wrote this week about de-powering capitalism via community support networks - let me know if ya like it and/or if you agree with it <3

In June, I’ll be graduating college, and I’m going to have to find the answers to questions like, “How will I pay my rent?”, and, “How will I buy food?”. I am extremely privileged to have been able to not worry about these things, for the most part, up until this point, because many of us deal with these questions all our lives. Capitalism is what puts us in a situation of scarcity, controlled conditions in which we need to work to survive, and that’s what most of us do. Get a job, work hard, pay rent, buy food, and repeat. This is survival.

Not exactly feeling excited about the prospect of entering this rat race, naturally I’ve been thinking creatively about how I can support myself. At the same time, I’ve also been thinking a lot about how much of my money goes to places and people I don’t know. Naturally, it dawned on me the other day: What if my friends and I all just supported each other? What if we lent each other resources, food, money, places to stay, and looked out for each other? What if we traded and bartered with each other? What if we supported each other’s creative projects with our patronage and by spreading the word? Our money, time, and resources, would go directly to supporting and lifting up other people, who in turn, could also lift us up in our times of need.

I believe we can depower capitalism by supporting each other, in the ways outlined above. I like to think about capitalism as a machine we can, together, slowly shut down by increasingly sharing our time, energy, money, and resources. By embracing community support, we can eliminate money from some exchanges or meeting of needs altogether! In other situations, we can ensure our money goes to people and organizations we want to support.

Though these proposals might not entirely eliminate the need to work, they do create an alternative cushion to rely on aside from one’s own personal income. They also challenge us to deepen and strengthen our relationships with our friends and our communities. Think about it - when was the last time you shared something with someone who is not one of your closest friends or family? When is the last time when you went out of your way to support someone? In today’s capitalist, neoliberal society, sharing is hard! Take Genevieve Vaughn’s perspective on the matter: “Where there is enough, we can abundantly nurture others. The problem is that scarcity is usually the case, artificially created in order to maintain control, so that other-orientation [ie sharing] becomes difficult and self-depleting. In fact, exchange [capitalism] requires scarcity because, if needs are abundantly satisfied, no one is constrained to give up anything [ie giving up your time and energy to a job] in order to receive what they need.” In contexts of scarcity, it’s difficult for us to remember to share, protect, and nurture each other, and we focus on doing so for ourselves first. Living and sharing this way is a challenge.

That doesn’t mean we can’t do it. In an article on the gift economy, Paul Van Slambrouck says, “The fact is that we are probably all wired, both physiologically and socially, to seek cooperation and collaboration despite an educational system and social context that works from cradle to grave to inculcate in us a zero-sum view of the world.” I agree! Although I just asked us to think about how uncommon sharing behavior might be in our lives, I would also like to ask us to ponder what we do when we need help, financially or in other ways. I ask for help, and I receive it. A friend might pay for my dinner or offer me a free place to stay, my sister might buy me a shirt, my mom might find me a task to do in exchange for some money while I’m home for break. Despite the capitalist economy’s best efforts, sharing behaviors and the inclination to assist one another do persist in some contexts. Which is why my above proposal - simply supporting each other - doesn’t sound ludicrous to me. I believe in the collective power and creativity of my community of friends.

Creativity is key for creating alternative networks of support, because finding ways to support ourselves and our friends without absolute reliance on jobs and money is both a challenge and an opportunity for inventiveness. In his discussion of the solidarity economy, Ethan Miller picks out this quote from feminist economic geographer J.K. Gibson-Graham: “If we viewed the economic landscape as imperfectly colonized, homogenized, systematized, might we not find openings for projects of noncapitalist invention? Might we not find ways to construct different communities and societies, building upon what already exists?". Their perspective asks us to look for opportunities to work around capitalism, to build on the basic forms of economic independence and support, and to think creatively about how to support others and be supported ourselves.

I believe we already live in that creative age. More generously-oriented systems have existed alongside and within capitalism for a long time. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the internet allow efforts like these to mushroom. Now we live in the age of crowdfunding, KickStarter, GoFundMe, Patreon, Etsy, and others. With systems like these, we have better infrastructure for supporting each other in our daily lives and in our creative endeavors. We are also getting more creative with how we accept compensation. Many individuals and organizations accept payments on sliding scale, utilize the notaflof (no one turned away for lack of funds) tradition, or simply ask people to “pay what you can”. Other organizations accept barter and trade or work exchanges. These creative solutions to the tradition of exchanging money for goods and services allow more people access to what was previously only exchanged for a set price in dollars. They also signal our creative problem solving capabilities!

Sometimes, you don’t even need to pay. In many activist circles, I see and hear the phrase “I want you to have it,”. Goods and services are gifted, free of charge. And why not? In a piece advocating for the gift economy, Paul Van Slambrouck writes, “What exactly did I (or you) do to deserve to be alive? If you can process that question and come out thinking it was a gift that you can’t ever pay back, then beginning a life of greater giving is the only logical and remotely reciprocal way to go. If the most valuable thing you have isn’t anything you earned, why be stingy with all the lesser stuff.” . While this view does, of course, assume that its audience is in the position to be able to give, I do believe that many of us have things to give to each other, whether these be things that can be measured in dollars and cents or not.

What started as the search for a way out of the rat race has blossomed into a hopeful discovery: I believe we are in a moment of pioneering the crowdfunding and community supported vision of a future without extractive capitalism, where we give to each other and take care of each other and generously grant access to those in need. My next question is simply, how can I create this in my own community? Here are my ideas:

We can spend time with our friends! Developing our relationships with others strengthens our community support network and widens the circle we can call on in times of need. Plus, it’s good for us.

Support our friends’ creative projects. Buy our friends’ art and music, share our friends’ websites on our social media, volunteer to help out with projects for free.

Give each other money. If we have a little extra, instead of just going to Chipotle again, maybe we can lend to a friend in need, asking them to pay it forward. We could use the extra we might find in our budget to help our friend pay off student loans or give to a local organization or activist collective.

Give what we can. Even if we don’t have money, if we have other assets, sharing them generously is a surefire way to encourage community support. Even if all you’ve got is a smushy couch where someone can stay the night, that is something that can help someone out.

Make goods and trade with our friends. I make delicious bread. Will someone trade me some homemade toothpaste? I’m running out (seriously).

Expand our networks. Stretch our sharing and trusting abilities by including people we don’t know as well in these loving and supportive interactions. Example: once I let a band of five men from Iowa, Condor and Jaybird,  sleep on all the extra beds and couches in my house. Even though I didn’t know them, it was great. They were good company, and they made their beds when they left in the morning.

I know that in some ways these suggestions can be very radical. Imagine if you used some surplus in your monthly budget to help your friend or partner pay off their student loans, just because you cared about them? Interactions like these test what capitalism has tried to ingrain in us; we might feel like they owe us something, or like we’re doing them a favor. But if we recall that life is a gift, and that our well being is tied up in the well being of others, then we can gift others what they need when we have the resources, without feeling entitled to anything in return.

At the same time, I know that these suggestions might seem elementary to some, as we already practice these in many of our close relationships. What I’m advocating for today is that we take the forms of support we do perform for our communities, and up the ante. We can extend these forms of support, whether they be material, emotional, or otherwise, to people who we had previously not included, and also intensify these supports in relationships where they do exist. As Grace Lee Boggs put it in one of my favorite books of all time, The Next American Revolution, "We ourselves must begin practicing in the social realm the capacity to care for each other, to share food, skills, time, and ideas that up to now most of us have limited to our most personal cherished relationships…..We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other."

If that’s not a brilliant and inviting call to action, I don’t know what is. With love, support, and the power to de-power,

Madeleine.

For more on these concepts, check out links and books recommended above, and look into this solidarity economy map, and this more involved definition of the gift economy.

In some locales, there are groups on Facebook designated for gift or solidarity economies, and there are also freecycle groups! Check those out too if you like! And let me know if you have any resources for me to add here :)

In the spirit of community support networks, if you want to support my future writing, I would really, really, be extremely stoked and appreciative. There are a few ways you can support my blog and help me get my message out. You can DONATE via Paypal to help me pay for toilet paper and such, and you can LIKE on Facebook and also share this post with people in your life, especially your creative anti-capitalist besties. Depower!!!

Illustrations by the lovely Phoebe Wahl!

[arsnovac12]

Blog Post 1

I go on runs from time to time when I’m back in Burbank, I enjoy keeping active, but it’s mostly an excuse to get out of the house. When I come home on holiday, I become confined to my parents house without any means of viable transportation. I have my drivers license, sure, but no car. My parents can’t afford to buy me one, and I can’t afford to get one myself. In fact, even if I could afford a car, I certainly couldn’t afford the insurance to go with it. Anyway, all this is to say I go on runs so I don’t feel too confined to my house.

That’s not very interesting, is it? Some things just tend to be that way. The life of a poor twenty-one year old white kid is never all that interesting in the first place. My life, my story, whatever it is, is not irregular. In fact, it’s one most people in America know very well, because it gets championed whenever one of us poor white kids gets rich and famous. Surprise, surprise, it happens pretty frequently.

So why write about it? I don’t know. Does it really matter if no one sees it in the first place? Maybe not. I guess I backed myself into a corner. If you’re reading this (if anyone is reading this) you’re probably expecting me to dive further in. Ultimately, you might say, there’s no point in agonizing over whether or not you’re going to talk about your life, because you already started writing a blog post about it, and it has to go somewhere. It does, doesn’t it? So why start with a lengthy preamble full of rhetorical questions? Besides being a clear literary crutch I’m struggling with, I think I feel indebted to having a conversation or dialogue about these things, as if to hide from some private guilt I have in telling any personal story. Writing has clearly become some sort of therapy to me, where I play both doctor and patient. The results are always inconclusive.

Anyway I should get back to the bullshit lede about running. Look, I like running, and it’s when my head is its most clear, so forgive me for using it as a starting point. Most of my ideas come to me when I run, so it was only fitting that it become the brief anecdote that starts a blog post that holds the kernel of what I’m going for. Which, now that I’m thinking about it, I didn’t really get to. Look at me, whining before I even finished my “insignificant thing is contorted into something profound” anecdote. Okay, I’ll finish the story:

I like to go on runs. I feel trapped at my house, and I like to get out. Anyway, whenever I run, I take the same path. It leads away from my house towards the park in the hills where people would take their prom photos back in high school. The path mostly runs parallel to the major streets and hits several large intersections on its way. In all, the run from the house to the park and back is about five miles. Yesterday, I reached the park and stopped for some water. This wasn’t irregular or anything, but I took my time and drank more that I usually would. Then, something compelled me to keep running. The hills in Burbank are filled with expensive homes, and near the top of the street, sort of tucked away, there’s a pretty large mansion that’s almost gothic in its design. Anyway, I guess it was my curiosity that drove me to keep going. To get a look at that mansion, and the others around it.

So, I kept running for another half mile or so to see this mansion. On the way up, the houses got larger and more impressive looking, and I was filled with a mounting sense of dread. Eventually I reached the cul-de-sac with the house on its end. Naturally the street, called Viewcrest if you can believe it, was the most decadent one yet. Their driveways were filled with expensive cars I don’t know the names of, carefully manicured lawns, and about ten security cameras lining every porch. I got closer to the end of the street where the imposing mansion was, but it was tucked away from the front and hardly visible. I didn’t get much closer than fifty or sixty feet. The drive way had a large black Hummer sitting in it; another, more psychological warning sign for someone like me to keep away.

I left pretty quickly after I got there. No one was out, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being unwelcome. Before I turned the corner and left the street completely, I had the strange desire for someone to come out of their house and scold me for even coming there. In this fantasy, would I stand my ground, or run away as is fitting for my station? My brain firing it’s typically small amount of synapses couldn’t quite make it that far. Instead, I was caught up in the swell of what righteous injustice such a thing should muster.

This story isn’t very interesting, I know. Nothing really happens in it and there isn’t much imagery to it, but it caught me off guard as I thought about it again today. I had the idea to write about the experience soon after it happened while I was still running, but I, ever the proactive one, put it off. In sitting down with it today, I realize how full of shit I am.

Before I go on, I’ll give a little more context for my life. As mentioned briefly before, I’m a poor white kid. My parents are loving if occasionally abusive, or maybe abusive if occasionally loving. We live in my (deceased) grandmothers house and can’t afford any necessary repairs on it to make the place livable. My dad lost his job about a year and a half ago that was going to take him to retirement, now he works at target. My mother is a hoarder, not to the extreme you may have seen on television, but certainly well beyond what the general society might deem as healthy. She works just enough hours at the Disney Corporation’s day care so that they don’t have to give her full time benefits.

Two of my adult brothers still live at home, crowding the house further. They could, should they allot their funds correctly, afford to have their own place, but my parents discourage that sort of thing. Coming from lower middle class families, both of them have really only known economic uncertainty their whole lives. To have their children live lives separated from themselves means certain uncertainty. Plus, when you don’t have the kids at home, there’s no one left to accuse of being a burden.

I, more than any of my brothers, struggled against my parents to have a normal life. For a while I was pretty damaged; my parents fundamental conservatism really did a number on me. I was a hateful kid, saying cruel things to people that didn’t deserve it. When I got to high school, it took a little while, but I became a better person. Still prone to bouts of selfishness, I began to try a little harder for things. I quit running competitively in high school to join the theater, much to my parents chagrin, and also started dating. Naturally my parents tried putting a stop to both.

By the time I finished high school, I had cut ties with most everyone that knew me there. By its end, I had partially realized that I hadn’t progressed all that much as a person and was still rather selfish. My assumptions that people did not like me were eventually proven correct when I had finally done something that had made me worth disliking. I receded further into myself, even more aware of my deepest flaws.

Eventually I made it to college where I became more depressed than I had ever been before. Towards the end of the semester, my mom ordered me to call after weeks of ignoring her. During that phone call, I told her that I wanted to kill myself. Horrified, she said that they could afford to send me to therapy, I said no, it would be too much of a hassle and it would get to be too expensive. She was relieved and thus the matter was settled and never spoken of again.

So today, I sit in my crowded bedroom in my decaying house (yes, there are rats now) and try and write a story, a true story, about how running in the rich part of town made me sad. So often I am desperately seeking a new lede, some way to ease into the story of my life, so I come up with the flimsiest ones imaginable as opposed to just starting from the beginning. I’m no one I tell myself, so why bother in the first place? No one will read it anyway. But so often, I’m met with the same dull idea that I have a story worth telling. The cynic in me is so embarrassed to want to explain away my life that it has to invent a dialogue with no one to justify wanting to tell an over told story. The poet in me wants to make something beautiful out of my life, and will find any excuse to do so in the most meaningless of events. The realist is here with you trying to make sense of these two voices.

I am obsessed with artifice. Look anywhere in my life and you’ll see it. I’m a theater performance major. I sit at home alone and watch movies that very few people like to gage some sensationalist position on. I go running by major streets hoping that someone, anyone from my past will see me and say hello. I run to the park I took my prom pictures at for the hope that some ounce of high school happiness will be absorbed back into myself, so that I can pretend I didn’t lose all my friends from those years by being selfish. I run further into the hills because deep down I know it might lead to something worth writing about. Only to now finally realize there wasn’t much of a story there to begin with. There, or anywhere.

Self pitying is probably what most people would call this. I’ll probably call it that too. Maybe it’s a cry for help. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a desperate plea for attention from an empty audience, because the author thinks that’s most poetic of all.

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5 YouTube Personalities Who Escaped From Scandal Unscathed

I’ve come to the conclusion that a big YouTube personality could hunt people on a private island, make a video about it called “Human Death Prank,” and that it would A) get several million views and B) would have no lasting consequences for the YouTuber.

We’ve fallen into a pattern wherein there’s a new scandal featuring one of these people every month, and it always ends the same way. The performer will lay low for a few weeks. YouTube might slap them on the wrist, maybe an advertiser drops. Then they’ll just start churning out the exact same content, having learned nothing and making just as much (in some cases more) money than before. Here, let’s revisit some recently scandalized social media celebs and see where they are now …

5

Logan Paul

You probably know Logan Paul as one of the many YouTube celebrities who looks like all of his hair is trying to escape from his head.

Logan Paul/YouTubeHis father is a Bloomin’ Onion and his mother a can of Red Bull.

You might also have heard of his most recent scandal, in which he posted a video of a suicide victim’s corpse in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. After a public uproar, he spoke to Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, saying, “I am a good guy who made a bad decision” — a claim that is 100 percent true if you remove the word “good” from it.

For you see, good guy Logan Paul has a storied past of doing things that are objectively dumb and also terrible. Like the time he pretend to be shot in the back of the head in front a crowd of screaming 10-12-year-old children. As soon as he returned to YouTube after the suicide forest video controversy, he immediately showed his respect for the sanctity of life by pulling a fish out of a pond and pretending to give it CPR and tasing some dead rats.

YouTube cited Paul’s “recent pattern of behavior” (corporate speak for “We’re secretly worried this person might be a budding serial killer”) when they decided to suspend ad revenue on his account, which has 16 million subscribers, many or most of whom are children. The suspension lasted for two whole weeks. It’s been reported that he actually gained around 80,000 subscribers after his recent controversies. And why not? He made international headlines. You can’t buy that kind of publicity!

And the next time he thinks his channel needs a boost, well, now he knows exactly how to do it.

4

Carter Reynolds

If you Google “Carter Reynolds,” the first result is a Business Insider article titled “The Rise And Fall Of Cater Reynolds.” Directly below that is the link for Reynolds’ Twitter account. He has 3.08 million followers. That … seems like a pretty cushy fall, but we’ll come back to that.

Reynolds got his start on Vine (remember that?), where at some point he is reported to have had four million followers — enough that he was able to get sponsorships from brands like Coca-Cola and travel the U.S. with “The Carter Tour.” He’s the kind of social media star who’s not particularly famous for anything more than being affable and good-looking in a non-threatening way that’s especially appealing to young girls. A few weeks ago, he tweeted “frozen yogurt sounds so good right now” …

Carters Reynolds/Twitter

… and it was retweeted 451 times. That’s pretty representative of his creative output.

Read Next

4 Mistakes We Shouldn't Let Movies And Shows Get Away With

In June of 2015, a video was leaked of Reynolds (19 at the time) and his ex-girlfriend, fellow social media star Maggie Lindemann (16 at the time). In it, Reynolds tries to pressure the visibly intoxicated Lindemann into giving him oral sex while he records it. Lindemann continuously repeats “I can’t” and “This makes me so uncomfortable” until he turns off the camera. Reynolds at first apologized in a single-line tweet, but then did a quick 360, saying on a YouNow stream that Lindemann owed him an apology for “things you guys don’t know about.” He added, “I didn’t rape her. She knows that herself … The fact that she’s trying to be all innocent now or something … it didn’t affect her that much. I know it didn’t.”

When Lindemann tweeted that she was in the hospital shortly after the video was released, Reynolds responded by tweeting, “Maggie is saying I’m the reason why she’s in the hospital … lol nah you’re just crazy and psychotic. Fuck you.” After receiving backlash, he then threatened to commit suicide on Twitter, apologized for it, and took a social media sabbatical.

The result? Well, in addition to his 3.08 million Twitter followers, today he has 3.2 million Instagram followers and 817,000 YouTube subscribers. While he’s no longer sponsored by Coca-Cola, he still does sponsored Instagram posts, including a recent one for Core water. He also sells merchandise and is getting ready to launch a clothing line with his new girlfriend, who is an Instagram model. Don’t follow his example, kids, or else that wretched fate may befall you too.

3

Sam Pepper

Sam Pepper is a former Big Brother UK contestant who managed to translate his brief reality TV fame into YouTube fame. He’s known for “pranking” people, which to be fair, isn’t some outrageous new trend. When I was in high school, guys were trying to punch each other in the dick and film it like Jackass, or screaming, “You just got Punk’d!” after knocking a friend’s book out of his hands.

The difference between Pepper and Ashton Kutcher is that Pepper’s audience is younger, and there’s no “Don’t try this at home kids” warning running in front of his content. His first controversy came in 2014, when he uploaded a video he called “fake hand ass pinch video,” which was just him pinching unsuspecting women’s asses with his real hand. After the backlash over the video, several women came forward with detailed accounts of sexual harassment and rape by Pepper. At least one rape accusation was investigated by the LAPD, but Pepper was never charged because the victim was not willing to testify after her father told her it would hurt her career.

Pepper continued his successful YouTube channel until 2015, when he staged another hilarious prank in which he convinced a young Vine star that his best friend was brutally murdered in front of him. After months of criticism about this incident, Pepper publicly confessed that his pranks were all faked, because if you did the things he pretended to do in public, you would be arrested. He then made his YouTube account private and deleted all of his tweets, going dark online for three whole months.

Today he still has 2.3 million YouTube subscribers despite infrequent posting (his latest video is called “HOW TO BUY ALCOHOL UNDERAGE * IT WORKED *”), plus he can boast another 1.3 million fans between Twitter and Instagram, plus some unknowable number of Snapchat followers. Oh, and he’s out there on the front line defending Logan Paul’s suicide forest video. Everyone is so triggered, you guys!

2

PewDiePie

PewDiePie is the Titan of YouTube. There’s really no comparable star in the old media world right now. You would have to make a human centipede out of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling to approximate the star power that PewDiePie has on YouTube. He currently has 61 million subscribers, ahead of his closest competitor by 23 million. Like a medically resistant staph infection, there just doesn’t seem to be anything that can stop him from growing.

In February of 2017, he paid two men on Fiverr (a “Pay strangers to do things for $5” site) to hold up a sign that said “Death to all Jews,” under the guise of this being the weirdest thing he could think to have somebody do for that amount of money.

PewDiePie/YouTube“Don’t forget to ‘Like’ and ‘Genocide’!”

Thanks to an article in The Wall Street Journal, the outrage went mainstream and a whole generation of old people had to figure out how to say “PewDiePie.”

The incident caused Disney’s Maker Studios to cut ties with him, as well as YouTube to drop him from their Google Preferred ad program. PewDiePie responded with a video saying his actions were a joke, which kind of isn’t the point. (Meanwhile, neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer featured a blog post congratulating him for “making the masses comfortable with our ideas.”)

But hey, anybody can screw up once. Seven months after this apology, however, PewDiePie loudly and clearly yelled the N-word while streaming an online game, noting later that he’d forgotten he was streaming to the public (you know, it’s the kind of thing he normally only says among friends). This time he said, “I’m not going to make any excuses for why I did it, because there are no excuses for it.” He went on to say he was disappointed in himself.

By now, you know how the story ends. The kind of thing that would have permanently sank the career of, say, a Seinfeld co-star is but a scratch on the hull of PewDiePie’s Star Destroyer. According to Forbes, he made 20 percent less than his 2016 earnings … which means he netted $12 million. Meanwhile, he gained about two million subscribers after the controversies, seemingly without losing any.

1

JonTron

Since this is 2018 and we find ourselves involuntarily grading racism on a curve, it’s easy to argue that PewDiePie isn’t as bad as the swarm of unapologetic racists that fill YouTube. He repeatedly says he doesn’t believe those things, that it’s all just shock value humor, that he’s learned his lesson, etc. That is not the case for JonTron, who was extremely eager to tell the world that those are in fact his views.

JonTron has 3.9 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, and turns up on a couple of others. He’s actually pretty funny — his whole persona is the cuddly nerd next door. Which is why it was so shocking to his fans when he took to Twitter to defend Republican Senator Steve King’s comment that “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

JonTron/Twitter

When people called him out for it, he decided to clarify his views on the subject by discussing them with Steve Bonnell, a Twitch streamer knows as Destiny. Over the course of an excruciating two hours, JonTron clarified in great detail that he thinks racial purity is extremely important to the future of America, and that he fears the day whites become a minority (which he estimated would happen in 2042).

In response to angry fans, he said, “The fact that people think it’s troubling is what’s troubling.” In the course of the debate, he also claimed that wealthy black Americans commit more crimes than poor white Americans, that Mexicans are somehow attempting to recapture American land, and that “We don’t need immigrants from incompatible places.” Gee, I wonder which places he considers incompatible?

He then issued an apology for his clarification, saying, “I do completely understand that historically the African American community has had a raw deal in this country. Discrimination certainly exists but I do believe it goes all ways.” And later, “Any of the things in the stream that could be considered weird sounding or off-putting, I probably agree with you that they were. So, I hope you don’t read too much into it.”

OK? He seemed to swing wildly between “I’m a comedian, I don’t want to talk about politics” and “But here are my terrible politics, and if you don’t like them, you’re policing my thoughts” before finally landing on “Don’t listen to the things that I say.” At this point, do we even need to point out not only that JonTron still has his millions of subscribers, but also that his videos are still sponsored? The only lasting effect seems to be the entry about the controversy on his Wikipedia page.

The promise of the internet was always that there’d be no gatekeepers. You can publish directly to the world, bypassing editors, publishers, censors, TV networks, etc. Well, here it is. There is nothing between these guys and their audience, and what we’ve found is that their audience is not scared away by sexism, racism, or anything else.

The rest of us will have our weeks of outrage, and we’ll see vague headlines about boycotts and suspensions. While we’re patting ourselves on the back, these guys know they just need to hunker down for a bit and weather it. They know the audience isn’t going anywhere, and as long as the eyeballs are there, the money will follow. No matter what.

Ever notice how normal photographers are never embroiled in scandals? Stick to still-life with a Nikon DSLR camera.

Support Cracked’s journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out 5 Crappy Sides Of YouTube Stardom No One Talks About and The Fate Of 4 Internet ‘Celebrities’ After Viral Fame.

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Hyperallergic: Required Reading

Photo-realistic renderings of the proposed home by London-based designer James Whitaker is going to be built in the Californian desert out of white cargo containers and the internet is already obsessed with them. More images at Dezeen. (via Dezeen)

A good story about architect Eero Saarinen’s ties to Michigan, a place that allowed him to experiment:

After high school, Saarinen studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris before graduating from the Yale School of Architecture, where he excelled with the traditional Beaux-Arts curriculum. When Saarinen returned to Cranbrook in between school breaks and later in his 20s, he stayed in an upstairs bedroom at the Saarinen House. Even as Eliel Saarinen served as president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1932 to 1946 and was its resident architect, Eero Saarinen began entering into architectural competitions with him in the late 1930s.

As I walked back downstairs, I recalled a framed photo of the Gothic-inpired design that Eliel Saarinen submitted for the Chicago Tribune competition that I had seen in the house earlier. In many ways, the Saarinen House represented the transition from Eliel’s genius to Eero’s distinct design skills. It was almost as if the creative energy in the Cranbrook community catapulted Eero Saarinen to greatness, evidenced by his early influences in the family home.

The Huntington Museum published this video about a very rare Tiffany (only three example are known to survive), which was inspired by a trip to Bermuda:

Banksy’s “Snorting Copper” is back on the street but there are questions about its reappearance, including:

Jet washed, painted over and attacked by thieves, Banksy’s Snorting Copper artwork in London’s Shoreditch had been thought lost forever. So just how has the £1m piece been brought back into public view – and is it still “a Banksy” at all after so much restoration work?

The science behind our experience of architecture, as explained by Paul Goldberger:

This doesn’t mean that Goldhagen is willing to let architects have their way with the world. She comes down as hard as anyone on Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, for example, much of whose work is known for the same sharp angles and clashing lines that provoked her ire with Nouvel’s pavilion. She is unsparing when it comes to those buildings that she believes cause discomfort because of their neurological effects, stating: “Humans respond to compositions dominated by sharp, irregular, angled forms with discomfort, even fear.” But she looks kindly on the “lilting forms” of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a swooping, curving building that she describes as a place in which “the human body’s presence and movement in space [are] the animating features in a design.” She sees, correctly, that Gehry’s unusual forms are driven not by a desire to shock, but by a wish to find new ways to elicit a sense of pleasure.

What’s the biggest question facing artist today? The Guardian asked a number of artists and my favorite reply is by artist Jeremy Deller:

“WTF?” That’s the question facing artists today.

A new online resource maps the LGBTQ history of St. Louis, and it includes a section on the impact of segregation, policing of LGBTQ communities, and the history of political activism.

Even Pokémon Go was used in an “extensive Russian-linked meddling effort“:

To date, Facebook has said that it identified 470 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, while Twitter has identified 201 accounts. Google has not released its findings, though CNN has confirmed that the company has identified tens of thousands of dollars spent on ad buys by Russian accounts.

Facebook and Twitter have submitted detailed records of their findings to both Congress and the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Friday, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, made her displeasure with this story clear in a Facebook post written in Russian, calling CNN a “talentless television channel” and saying,”Again the Russians are to blame… and the Pokémons they control.”

Eminem goes after President Trump in his latest rhyme:

Why does this matter? The New York Times explains:

The fact of Eminem’s whiteness, though, also means that he reaches a different listener. A recent Times article that looked at music fandom across the country noted that his base is “strongest in whiter and more rural places: West Virginia; southern Ohio; eastern Kentucky; deep north Maine; the Ozarks in Missouri; across the Great Plains.”

Related:

Not totally sure how rap battles work, but I believe Eminem is now the President of the United States of America.

— andy lassner (@andylassner) October 11, 2017

If you’re old you remember AIM (AOL’s instant messenger service), and — hate to break it to you but … — now it’s dead:

We made our first attempts, on AIM, of transfiguring our mysterious and unpredictable thoughts into lively and personable textual performances. We were witty and dramatic. We invented our online selves—we invented ourselves.

We got bored. Myspace and Xanga helped us set up temporary and ramshackle museums of our tastes. Then Facebook came along, with all the frisson of “only college students use it,” and we drifted there. Its pseudo-maturity and time-delayed interactions allured us. Our AIM status messages went to Facebook instead: It was where we mourned the end of the field-hockey season or the final showing of the winter musical. We posted photos of each other on Facebook and liked them and commented on them—but sometimes still chatted about them on AIM. We asked homework questions via each other’s walls. We wrote subtweety openings as our Facebook status, hoping our crush would comment there instead. Eventually Facebook had its own chat product too, and it made more sense to use that, or Gchat, or to just text.

It’s not every day the world discovers a species thought to be extinct, and this time it’s the “tree lobster” (via Boing Boing):

When black rats were accidentally introduced to the island by a shipwreck in 1918, 600 kilometres (370 miles) off the east coast of Australia, they devastated the population of the phasmid, Dryococelus australis.

The rats were a disaster. They wiped out several native species – five birds, two plants and 13 invertebrates (including D. australis) – not found anywhere else in the world.

But in the 1960s, rock climbers on Ball’s Pyramid, a volcanic stack 20 kilometres (12 miles) southeast of the island, made an exciting discovery: a collection of fresh insect corpses that seemed to be the stick insect.

But they didn’t look like specimens recovered from Lord Howe Island, as seen in the image below (the Ball’s Pyramid insect is on the right), so the species was officially declared extinct in 1986.

Academics are for sale to the CIA, and this article goes into details (and lest we forget art historian Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy):

More than any other academic arena, conferences lend themselves to espionage. Assisted by globalisation, these social and intellectual rituals have become ubiquitous. Like stops on the world golf or tennis circuits, they sprout up wherever the climate is favourable, and draw a jet-setting crowd. What they lack in prize money, they make up for in prestige. Although researchers chat electronically all the time, virtual meetings are no substitute for getting together with peers, networking for jobs, checking out the latest gadgets and delivering papers that will later be published in volumes of conference proceedings. “The attraction of the conference circuit,” English novelist David Lodge wrote in Small World, his 1984 send-up of academic life, is that “it’s a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s expense. Write a paper and see the world!”

The importance of a conference may be measured not just by the number of Nobel prize-winners or Oxford dons it attracts, but by the number of spies. US and foreign intelligence officers flock to conferences for the same reason that army recruiters concentrate on low-income neighbourhoods: they make the best hunting grounds. While a university campus might have only one or two professors of interest to an intelligence service, the right conference �� on drone technology, perhaps, or Isis – could have dozens.

“Every intelligence service in the world works conferences, sponsors conferences, and looks for ways to get people to conferences,” said one former CIA operative.

Every wonder how tax cuts help the rich? This Vox video tells you:

Some random guy on Facebook tried to mansplain the costumes of Indiana Jones to this woman not realizing she was the movie’s costume designer. Priceless:

HOLY FUCKING SHIT dude online tries to mainsplain the costumes of Indiana Jones to my mom… …the costume designer of Indiana Jones. http://pic.twitter.com/bkYVtsnYPF

— Macks-O-Lantern (@Uptomyknees) October 11, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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5 YouTube Personalities Who Escaped From Scandal Unscathed

I’ve come to the conclusion that a big YouTube personality could hunt people on a private island, make a video about it called “Human Death Prank,” and that it would A) get several million views and B) would have no lasting consequences for the YouTuber.

We’ve fallen into a pattern wherein there’s a new scandal featuring one of these people every month, and it always ends the same way. The performer will lay low for a few weeks. YouTube might slap them on the wrist, maybe an advertiser drops. Then they’ll just start churning out the exact same content, having learned nothing and making just as much (in some cases more) money than before. Here, let’s revisit some recently scandalized social media celebs and see where they are now …

5

Logan Paul

You probably know Logan Paul as one of the many YouTube celebrities who looks like all of his hair is trying to escape from his head.

Logan Paul/YouTubeHis father is a Bloomin’ Onion and his mother a can of Red Bull.

You might also have heard of his most recent scandal, in which he posted a video of a suicide victim’s corpse in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. After a public uproar, he spoke to Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, saying, “I am a good guy who made a bad decision” — a claim that is 100 percent true if you remove the word “good” from it.

For you see, good guy Logan Paul has a storied past of doing things that are objectively dumb and also terrible. Like the time he pretend to be shot in the back of the head in front a crowd of screaming 10-12-year-old children. As soon as he returned to YouTube after the suicide forest video controversy, he immediately showed his respect for the sanctity of life by pulling a fish out of a pond and pretending to give it CPR and tasing some dead rats.

YouTube cited Paul’s “recent pattern of behavior” (corporate speak for “We’re secretly worried this person might be a budding serial killer”) when they decided to suspend ad revenue on his account, which has 16 million subscribers, many or most of whom are children. The suspension lasted for two whole weeks. It’s been reported that he actually gained around 80,000 subscribers after his recent controversies. And why not? He made international headlines. You can’t buy that kind of publicity!

And the next time he thinks his channel needs a boost, well, now he knows exactly how to do it.

4

Carter Reynolds

If you Google “Carter Reynolds,” the first result is a Business Insider article titled “The Rise And Fall Of Cater Reynolds.” Directly below that is the link for Reynolds’ Twitter account. He has 3.08 million followers. That … seems like a pretty cushy fall, but we’ll come back to that.

Reynolds got his start on Vine (remember that?), where at some point he is reported to have had four million followers — enough that he was able to get sponsorships from brands like Coca-Cola and travel the U.S. with “The Carter Tour.” He’s the kind of social media star who’s not particularly famous for anything more than being affable and good-looking in a non-threatening way that’s especially appealing to young girls. A few weeks ago, he tweeted “frozen yogurt sounds so good right now” …

Carters Reynolds/Twitter

… and it was retweeted 451 times. That’s pretty representative of his creative output.

Read Next

4 Mistakes We Shouldn't Let Movies And Shows Get Away With

In June of 2015, a video was leaked of Reynolds (19 at the time) and his ex-girlfriend, fellow social media star Maggie Lindemann (16 at the time). In it, Reynolds tries to pressure the visibly intoxicated Lindemann into giving him oral sex while he records it. Lindemann continuously repeats “I can’t” and “This makes me so uncomfortable” until he turns off the camera. Reynolds at first apologized in a single-line tweet, but then did a quick 360, saying on a YouNow stream that Lindemann owed him an apology for “things you guys don’t know about.” He added, “I didn’t rape her. She knows that herself … The fact that she’s trying to be all innocent now or something … it didn’t affect her that much. I know it didn’t.”

When Lindemann tweeted that she was in the hospital shortly after the video was released, Reynolds responded by tweeting, “Maggie is saying I’m the reason why she’s in the hospital … lol nah you’re just crazy and psychotic. Fuck you.” After receiving backlash, he then threatened to commit suicide on Twitter, apologized for it, and took a social media sabbatical.

The result? Well, in addition to his 3.08 million Twitter followers, today he has 3.2 million Instagram followers and 817,000 YouTube subscribers. While he’s no longer sponsored by Coca-Cola, he still does sponsored Instagram posts, including a recent one for Core water. He also sells merchandise and is getting ready to launch a clothing line with his new girlfriend, who is an Instagram model. Don’t follow his example, kids, or else that wretched fate may befall you too.

3

Sam Pepper

Sam Pepper is a former Big Brother UK contestant who managed to translate his brief reality TV fame into YouTube fame. He’s known for “pranking” people, which to be fair, isn’t some outrageous new trend. When I was in high school, guys were trying to punch each other in the dick and film it like Jackass, or screaming, “You just got Punk’d!” after knocking a friend’s book out of his hands.

The difference between Pepper and Ashton Kutcher is that Pepper’s audience is younger, and there’s no “Don’t try this at home kids” warning running in front of his content. His first controversy came in 2014, when he uploaded a video he called “fake hand ass pinch video,” which was just him pinching unsuspecting women’s asses with his real hand. After the backlash over the video, several women came forward with detailed accounts of sexual harassment and rape by Pepper. At least one rape accusation was investigated by the LAPD, but Pepper was never charged because the victim was not willing to testify after her father told her it would hurt her career.

Pepper continued his successful YouTube channel until 2015, when he staged another hilarious prank in which he convinced a young Vine star that his best friend was brutally murdered in front of him. After months of criticism about this incident, Pepper publicly confessed that his pranks were all faked, because if you did the things he pretended to do in public, you would be arrested. He then made his YouTube account private and deleted all of his tweets, going dark online for three whole months.

Today he still has 2.3 million YouTube subscribers despite infrequent posting (his latest video is called “HOW TO BUY ALCOHOL UNDERAGE * IT WORKED *”), plus he can boast another 1.3 million fans between Twitter and Instagram, plus some unknowable number of Snapchat followers. Oh, and he’s out there on the front line defending Logan Paul’s suicide forest video. Everyone is so triggered, you guys!

2

PewDiePie

PewDiePie is the Titan of YouTube. There’s really no comparable star in the old media world right now. You would have to make a human centipede out of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Ryan Gosling to approximate the star power that PewDiePie has on YouTube. He currently has 61 million subscribers, ahead of his closest competitor by 23 million. Like a medically resistant staph infection, there just doesn’t seem to be anything that can stop him from growing.

In February of 2017, he paid two men on Fiverr (a “Pay strangers to do things for $5” site) to hold up a sign that said “Death to all Jews,” under the guise of this being the weirdest thing he could think to have somebody do for that amount of money.

PewDiePie/YouTube“Don’t forget to ‘Like’ and ‘Genocide’!”

Thanks to an article in The Wall Street Journal, the outrage went mainstream and a whole generation of old people had to figure out how to say “PewDiePie.”

The incident caused Disney’s Maker Studios to cut ties with him, as well as YouTube to drop him from their Google Preferred ad program. PewDiePie responded with a video saying his actions were a joke, which kind of isn’t the point. (Meanwhile, neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer featured a blog post congratulating him for “making the masses comfortable with our ideas.”)

But hey, anybody can screw up once. Seven months after this apology, however, PewDiePie loudly and clearly yelled the N-word while streaming an online game, noting later that he’d forgotten he was streaming to the public (you know, it’s the kind of thing he normally only says among friends). This time he said, “I’m not going to make any excuses for why I did it, because there are no excuses for it.” He went on to say he was disappointed in himself.

By now, you know how the story ends. The kind of thing that would have permanently sank the career of, say, a Seinfeld co-star is but a scratch on the hull of PewDiePie’s Star Destroyer. According to Forbes, he made 20 percent less than his 2016 earnings … which means he netted $12 million. Meanwhile, he gained about two million subscribers after the controversies, seemingly without losing any.

1

JonTron

Since this is 2018 and we find ourselves involuntarily grading racism on a curve, it’s easy to argue that PewDiePie isn’t as bad as the swarm of unapologetic racists that fill YouTube. He repeatedly says he doesn’t believe those things, that it’s all just shock value humor, that he’s learned his lesson, etc. That is not the case for JonTron, who was extremely eager to tell the world that those are in fact his views.

JonTron has 3.9 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, and turns up on a couple of others. He’s actually pretty funny — his whole persona is the cuddly nerd next door. Which is why it was so shocking to his fans when he took to Twitter to defend Republican Senator Steve King’s comment that “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

JonTron/Twitter

When people called him out for it, he decided to clarify his views on the subject by discussing them with Steve Bonnell, a Twitch streamer knows as Destiny. Over the course of an excruciating two hours, JonTron clarified in great detail that he thinks racial purity is extremely important to the future of America, and that he fears the day whites become a minority (which he estimated would happen in 2042).

In response to angry fans, he said, “The fact that people think it’s troubling is what’s troubling.” In the course of the debate, he also claimed that wealthy black Americans commit more crimes than poor white Americans, that Mexicans are somehow attempting to recapture American land, and that “We don’t need immigrants from incompatible places.” Gee, I wonder which places he considers incompatible?

He then issued an apology for his clarification, saying, “I do completely understand that historically the African American community has had a raw deal in this country. Discrimination certainly exists but I do believe it goes all ways.” And later, “Any of the things in the stream that could be considered weird sounding or off-putting, I probably agree with you that they were. So, I hope you don’t read too much into it.”

OK? He seemed to swing wildly between “I’m a comedian, I don’t want to talk about politics” and “But here are my terrible politics, and if you don’t like them, you’re policing my thoughts” before finally landing on “Don’t listen to the things that I say.” At this point, do we even need to point out not only that JonTron still has his millions of subscribers, but also that his videos are still sponsored? The only lasting effect seems to be the entry about the controversy on his Wikipedia page.

The promise of the internet was always that there’d be no gatekeepers. You can publish directly to the world, bypassing editors, publishers, censors, TV networks, etc. Well, here it is. There is nothing between these guys and their audience, and what we’ve found is that their audience is not scared away by sexism, racism, or anything else.

The rest of us will have our weeks of outrage, and we’ll see vague headlines about boycotts and suspensions. While we’re patting ourselves on the back, these guys know they just need to hunker down for a bit and weather it. They know the audience isn’t going anywhere, and as long as the eyeballs are there, the money will follow. No matter what.

Ever notice how normal photographers are never embroiled in scandals? Stick to still-life with a Nikon DSLR camera.

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