#until she asked what time is it

[xylophone888]

i love my aus so much i got fired from my job as the nonposting beauty

heres one of em

[francesderwent]

“decrying the manipulative cowardice of cohabitation” I would love to hear more of this take on TTPD if you’re willing

boy am I willing!

I am going to start with You’re Losing Me, because I think it’s a crucial prologue to the album. You’re Losing Me is about a relationship that’s dying, because the partner she’s singing to is stuck in inactivity. she begs, “do something, babe, say something. lose something, babe, risk something. choose something, babe, I’ve got nothing to believe unless you’re choosing me.” we’re in new territory, for Taylor. she sings, “now I just sit in the dark, and wonder if it’s time.” he isn’t leaving (Forever & Always), and he’s not doing something so awful that she has to leave (The Moment I Knew). he is staying—which for so long has been the hallmark of a happy ending in her music (Stay Stay Stay, All You Had To Do Was Stay, New Year’s Day, The Archer)! but he won’t make some decisive move, won’t risk something, won’t choose her. but he is with her, so what is that choice?

and the thing about TTPD is, when she’s speaking directly about that relationship, she doesn’t exactly just tell us. So Long London is more about what the collapse of the relationship felt like for her than a story of how it collapsed—she felt like he wasn’t giving himself to the relationship, she felt like she was putting in all the work, she felt like her sadness wasn’t taken seriously, she felt unsure of whether he even wanted to be with her. and she throws in there amidst all of this: “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free” and “you swore that you loved me but where were the clues, I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” they were together for a long time, but still she’s waiting for something—still she felt like she was taken advantage of when that something didn’t come. the altar line is the clearest hint—along with “my beloved ghost and me sitting in a tree D-Y-I-N-G” in How Did It End—what was missing was marriage. she felt left at the altar. the relationship that should have followed the traditional trajectory of “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage” stalled out after love.

don’t get me wrong, I think she totally captures the feeling of slow despair when your partner won’t commit—but she doesn’t come out and say “you liar, when I fell in love with you, you told me we would get married and have a family, but you never followed through”. on the face of it, she barely focuses on this relationship at all—at first glance only the track 5s are obviously about the long-term live-in partner. instead, she presents us with a twist: not an album about the six year relationship which ended out of nowhere, but an album seemingly mostly about a rebound that only lasted a few weeks.

but the rebound doesn’t leave the theme of marriage behind! no! in fact, marriage comes to the forefront right away in the title track: “at dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on, and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.” and again in Fresh Out the Slammer: “ain’t no way I’m gonna screw up now that I know what’s at stake here at the park where we used to sit on children’s swings, wearing imaginary rings.” so despite everything that she knows from the get-go is wrong with this guy (“you’re in self-sabotage mode, throwing spikes down on the road”, “all your indecent exposures”, “I know he’s crazy”, “the jokes that he told across the bar were revolting and far too loud”) it’s evident to me why this is the one she wants—because this guy says, clearly, that he is willing to give her what her last partner would not. marriage isn’t the unspoken wound that’s made the relationship bleed out��it’s out in the open! this guy is making moves! and so the story of how the live-in partnership fell apart starts to come together: she was lured away by the rebound guy, someone she had a former acquaintance with but who’s appeared again in her life at a decisive moment (see: Fortnight & Guilty as Sin) precisely because here was a way to actually have the happy ending that she thought she was promised in her old relationship. “it’s gonna be alright, I did my time”!

but of course, that’s not what happens. just as quickly as the rebound guy swept into her life and promised to fix everything, he disappears without a word. Down Bad paints the picture starkly: their love affair was so quick and so dramatic that she feels like she was abducted by aliens and then dropped back at home with a story no one seems to believe—but it was real, he did say all those things, she was in love. until finally, in The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, she has to admit: whatever he was after, whatever his motivations were, it wasn’t love. he used her.

why is this important, when we’re talking about cohabitation and not rebounds or hookups? let’s turn to loml. loml tells the story of a relationship which from the beginning seemed like it was heading straight from the first kiss to marriage, but which turns out to be not what she thought it was—“a con-man sells a fool a get-love-quick scheme”. perhaps the most telling line on the whole album, “you shit-talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles”, tells us: in private where no one could see, he made her all these promises. but she can see now that he didn’t mean them, that although she’s mourning the loss of their love, what she’s mourning wasn’t even real: “something counterfeit is dead”. who is this song about? lines like “in your suit and tie” “you low-down boy” “you holy ghost” “told me I reformed you” and “Mr. Steal Your Girl and make her cry” seem to point to the rebound—but lines like “you stand-up guy” “you cinephile in black and white” and “all those plot twists” seem to be references to the partner. and the closer you look, the blurrier it gets. “you holy ghost” applies to both of them—one ghosted her by disappearing, but the other became a ghost in their home. “told me I reformed you” sounds like I Can Fix Him—but her relationship with the partner started in an album that opened with “knew he was a killer first time that I saw him”. the rebound stole her from her partner, making him Mr Steal Your Girl, but the partner did the same thing back in the day. “something counterfeit” could be pointing to “was any of it true” in Smallest Man—or it could be pointing to “your faithless love’s the only hoax I believe in”. the more you know the lore, the more you have all her old lyrics memorized, the more references you see.  Taylor has always been famous for calling her boyfriends out publicly, but this time, she didn’t hide any identifying clues for us to unearth. she blurred the details, she painted everybody with the same brush. loml is about both of them. they both told her they were heading towards marriage and kids—and they both disappeared on her.

and once you start to see the parallels, they start popping up all over the album. the title track is about the rebound—but it says “I’ve seen this episode and still loved the show”, hinting that everything with him feels familiar for some reason, and her plea “who's gonna hold you like me? who’s gonna know you like me?” echoes her triumphant statement to her partner in ME!: “I promise that nobody’s gonna love you like me”. My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys tells the same story as loml of the man who gave you all kinds of attention at the beginning and then when he saw forever coming, smashed it up—“I’m queen of sandcastles he destroys” parallels both “once your queen had come you’d treat her like an also-ran” in Smallest Man and “salute to me, I’m your American queen” in King of My Heart. “but you should have seen him when he first got me” is the thesis of practically every song she wrote about her partner from evermore to Midnights, when she had to go back to the beginning of the relationship to find something romantic to sing about. Down Bad is the same story again, of singling her out and making her feel special, and then abandoning her. Fresh Out the Slammer parallels High Infidelity, which had her current partner cast in the part of the one she was running home to, the one who brought her back to life. “we’ve already done it in my head” in Guilty as Sin is the sinister reprise of “in the middle of the night in my dreams, you should see the things we do, baby” in Ready For It. is The Albatross about the public outcry in But Daddy I Love Him, or is it about “here’s to my baby, he ain’t reading what they call me lately” in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things? in Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, who is she talking about when she says it would haunt her to know their love was real? Peter weaves the two stories into each other: both men met her when they were twenty-five—one said he wasn’t ready for a relationship but maybe they’d connect again later, the other said he was ready for a relationship but he wasn’t ready to get married. “we said it was just goodbye for now, you said you were gonna grow up then you were gonna come find me”. but all those promises, from both of them, from every guy she’s ever dated, were never ever kept.

in the album liner notes, she sums it all up: “and so I was out of the oven and into the microwave”. both men did exactly the same thing—the only difference is one did it slow, over six years, and one did it fast.

that’s a really powerful, and a really unexpected statement. think about it. most people in our society don’t really believe that marriage is until death do us part; they believe in the possibility of divorce, they believe that marriage is until one or both parties call it quits. therefore, marriage is essentially no different from living together: both are committed, but not unbreakably vowed. so the death of Taylor’s six-year cohabiting relationship is, for many people, the death of the most serious kind of relationship there is. and instead of delivering the “mature adult breakup” party line of “sometimes things are good and right for a season of life, but they just don’t work out”, what the album says is “what you did is exactly the same as if you’d fed me a few pretty lines to get me into bed then stopped answering my texts”. living with someone without proposing marriage to them EQUALS love-bombing them then ghosting. one lasts a lot longer, but it’s still just manipulation and use. she has to ask herself about both of them what it was they really wanted—“were you writing a book, were you a sleeper-cell spy?” about the rebound, and “was it hazing for a cruel fraternity I pledged and I still mean it? were you making fun of me with some esoteric joke?” about the partner—because they clearly did not want her.

I think in the end what she saw was that it’s not about timing, it’s not about fate, it’s not about anything other than whether the man has the courage to make a commitment. she says in loml “the coward claimed he was a lion”, and in The Black Dog “you said I needed a brave man, then proceeded to play him until I believed it too”—these men pretended like they were brave enough to get married, but then “there was danger in the heat of my touch, he saw forever so he smashed it up”. he gets scared and gives up; he’s “lost to the lost boys’ chapter of life”. all that courage was false bravado. “tail between your legs, you’re leaving”. by the end of the album, she has lost all patience and respect for these blokes who warm the benches on the fields of love.

I really do believe that the album she gave us is more sophisticated than if she had simply written a callout of her partner in the style of Smallest Man or Should’ve Said No. she can give detailed accounts of individual sins all day long, but by looking at the big picture and drawing equivalencies, what we get isn’t an accusation so much as it is the development of an ethics.

I mean, come on. that’s cool.

[so-bitya]

years... years!! people held this image against lizzy for saying this for years!!! "shes torturing him! she doesn't get his interests!" only to flash forward a couple chapters to this!!!

Every time i see fandom claim ciel hates lizzy's hobbies, with her dolls and arts and crafts etc... LIKE WHAT IS HIS JOB AGAIN? HIS DREAM JOB???

wild how much fans degraded lizzy's obsession with cuteness and often write ciel being annoyed by its uselessness, seeing how much of his career is all about seeing cute things, researching cute things, hell he even uses her as a beta tester for products, going to her for feedback because he values her taste in cute things but ok SURE she doesn't get his interests at all...

[demigodofhoolemere]

Trying to find nice stuff for Wish but everywhere you go people are being painfully wrong in their interpretations of the movie

[fumifooms]

thanks for infecting me with marchil its so so fun to just see them pair themselves up in the background now

especially love how much she picks him up like a cat (and when he has the opportunity to do it to her too he just lugs her around like a sack of oats) gosh i love them they're so funny

YAAAAAA 🎉🎉 I’m so glad to hear it welcome to the sillies corner 🤝

THEY’RE SOOO SO FUNNY

They’re worsties that cannot get enough of each other

[bearimba]

Silver doesn't need another father. He's already got one of those, technically, but the man turned out to be a weak, cowardly bastard who couldn't face his own problems let alone raise a child. The way he sees it, there's no need to set himself for more disappointment. He's got a roof over his head and food to eat, and that's far more than he could ever depend on in the last... however many years he'd been living on the streets. Lance and Clair are annoying as hell, but while he's training in the Dragon Den, he doesn't exactly have much room to complain. Not out loud, anyways.

Lance doesn't particularly want to be a dad either. He's already got too much responsibility on his plate as Champion, and this kid clearly needs so much more emotional support than he feels like he can provide. Simply convincing him to move into his guest room was enough of a struggle, and it only really worked because Lance had promised Silver he could "earn" his keep. What the hell is up with that, anyways? He's not sure what Silver's past looks like, and he's not about to go prying, but the bare minimum he can do is make sure he doesn't have to rough it out in the woods anymore. At least Clair seems to be having fun training him...

Clair is more than ready to be an aunt. The other two refuse to admit to caring for each other, but unlike them, she's not afraid of something as stupid as her emotions. The brat's slowly but surely been mellowing out during his training, and her idiot cousin has actually been taking care of himself for once in order to be a "good example." Silver has even caught on to calling Lance "old man" like she does, on account of those ugly-ass reading glasses the all-mighty Champion has to wear, and she couldn't be prouder. Best part is, she doesn't have to spend a dime except to treat the kid every so often! That's a win in her book if ever there was one.

[brionysea]

allison and five are actually fascinating to write together. allison is the sibling for checking on people and asking in plain english if they're okay but five would literally rather bleed out than show a shred of vulnerability

[feroluce]

Thinking today of henghill on some cold planet, one like Jarilo-VI or wherever, and Dan Heng getting his tongue stuck on some metal part of Boothill's VSKJSNSJD

Like Dan Heng is stuck to his neck, so Boothill has to pick him up and carry him to try to sneak them around to somewhere warm to thaw his tongue out. Don't worry, poor Dan Heng is just tired, that's why he's carrying him like this, no no he's fine don'tlookthatcloselybye!!

(Also Boothill is carrying Dan Heng bridal style. Obviously.)

And now, I get to show you all @hydrachea 's newest blessing upon this ship, because she took that and RAN WITH IT-

Crying imagining Dan Heng still stuck and trying to throttle Boothill to keep him from talking anymore JSJIZJSKKE

[eyes1nthewoods]

hello 2018 dbh fandom. before you are two characters. one is a woman with complex but clumsy writing. the other is a white man with no spoken lines who appears for less than a minute. you have 10 seconds before the saw traps go off. choose wisely.

[water-weaving]

holy shit i just got a "jesus saves" lecture from the lab nurse. took me by surprise because i've seen her many times before and she was always very nice and only asked a few respectful questions about the whole trans situation. like geez maam i thought we were cool!!

[sincapjelly]

Do you think baby Cole ever became so sick and Lilly panicked, thought it was her fault and cried beside the sleeping baby?..

She herself grew up as a sickly child, her father would be so worried that she might just die one day because her immune system was so weak. Seeing Cole get sick like that as a few months old baby, she knows why it's happening and she is blaming herself, thinking she passed her curse on him. History is going to repeat, that's what she thinks despite knowing Cole is growing up under better conditions. And Lilly wasn't sick when she gave birth to Cole and passed shortly after, like her mother did.

None of these stop her from crying beside the baby though. She knows she survived her fragile baby days because of her powers healing her, and he has her powers now, yet she is worrying deeply for Cole's health. She wouldn't handle losing her baby because she passed him her terrible immune system.

[automatic-midnight]

Ritsuko Akagi in Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0

[joinmeinjoy]

I really like how in s3 they made an active effort to show how Hannibal really did live in his mind palace as much as he could while in the BSHCI.....absolutely devastating

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Both my parents actually suffer from HORRID emotional dysregulation and are prone to snapping and going into rages. My sister is the same way tbh. I am now realizing this is why they are constantly baffled by the question of whether or not I am mad at them.

I don't have external meltdowns.

I could. I don't let it happen.

I keep my rage on the inside and stay pretty quiet about it. It's just as strong as theirs [physically shaking nose bleed from high blood pressure kind of bad], but like as a kid I saw how terrifying it was to be around [dad breaking dishes, mom putting our lawn chairs into walls] and I just internalized that I wasn't going to wear that anger on the outside.

So my mother genuinely cannot tell if I am just being quiet or if I am silently hearing the dial-up noises of pure rage. This has lead her to both making strong and confident statements like "You are a pacifist who would never hurt a fly U.U" but also acting like I am secretly dangerous maybe... It's because she has never seen me snap.

She knows what her temper is like [throwing chairs through walls], she knows what my father's temper is like [pick up child and toss out door], and she can tell I am being tested, but she doesn't know what happens when I snap or where that breaking point is.

Her -perhaps unhinged- solution to this, my whole life, has been to do things that should obviously enrage me or shut me down completely, like ignoring important boundaries, repeatedly, punishing me for expressing emotions or needs at all, etc... And then to constantly ask me if I am angry with her when I get too quiet [right after near directly telling me to shut up].

It has occurred to me now, they have never once seen me lose my temper, so they literally just can't tell if I am angry at them. My sister is easy, my mother fights and screams with my sister constantly, my mother understands this. My mother doesn't have any grasp of feelings or boundaries that are not screamed at her [apparently, and I fear my sister is the same way]. Her and my sister are close despite constant fucking fighting because they understand each other.

They are trying to get me to engage the same way and it is not working. I realize now that this has been hard for them.

I was so successfully taught to suppress my emotions, by being punished for any outburst, that rage quiet looks the same as any other kind of quiet from the outside. To them anyway.

I did tell her. For the record. I used my words. I did tell her very calmly that my response to rage, in order to avoid doing the things that terrified me as a child, was to simply leave [the autistic urge to GTFO]. When a situation or person causes too much of the dial-up rage noise, I simply extract myself from that situation, up to and including never speaking to a person again. I explained this calmly. I explained it calmly 100 times and I explained that I explain myself calmly as my rage response 1-5 [also pretty much every other negative emotion tbh], and I told her that what came next was me simply opting out and fucking off. I told her this. I couldn't understand why she never took me seriously, or why she never fucking understood.

I couldn't understand what made her like this.

But it's the same problem I have with everyone else multiplied by a factor of 10.

If I am explaining myself calmly, they can't understand that it's actually serious or that I am actually upset. ESPECIALLY because they read me as "female" and women "aren't that rational" so if I am not screaming and crying about something, which I never do, people assume I can't be upset and it isn't serious.

And then after having my boundaries ignored too many times despite having calmly explained how and why it's a problem [shaking inside or not]... I leave. I leave and everyone gets upset like this is unexpected behaviour, even though I told them 50 times that is how I would respond if they kept doing *the thing.*

And for neurotypical people especially, they are expecting there to be a disconnect between what someone says they need or feel and what their actually boundaries and feelings are, and they expect the latter to be demonstrated with emotions. Telling them bluntly you do not function that way somehow never helps?

My mother isn't just looking for normal yelling or a few tears to know I am serious, whether or not I do those either [I don't], she's looking for an explosion to know there's a problem at all.

Fucked if I know how she proceeds through life this way in general or if this is just her expectation of her own kids???

And I couldn't get why my mother couldn't read my emotions and didn't seem to think I have any. It's because she's testing for the rage limit to see where my 'actual' limit is instead of taking my word for it. Never the fuck mind that she could simply *not* test at my boundaries instead of letting me have them. Separate issue.

I couldn't figure out what made her *like this*

She's expecting me to throw a giant meltdown violent tantrum at people when I have 'actually' had enough. Maybe she got away with those being like 5'4" in another time, but I am the size of the average man, I do not get to have giant screaming rages, whether or not people perceive me consciously as a woman, and least of all because a lot of people -at least unconsciously- read me as 'masculine' or at least always "they guy" of the situation compared to all other women and some men [bigger stronger and more rational, more able to just absorb the damage and let it go so the less rational screaming/crying one doesn't have to be dealt with]. Even if it was in me to be willing to terrify people [usually never], there are such limited instances where it wouldn't just blow back on me. Potentially very dangerously.

I am going to be the quiet calm one. You are going to have to let me use my words, bitch.

So she kept ignoring my boundaries until I had to cut her out of my life, and she probably doesn't understand and probably thinks it feels sudden -after 36 long years of bullshit- abrupt and unfair.

But I told her hundreds of times.

I probably should have just screamed at her.

[deva-arts]

zomg... the girls! Sketched out! And a few characters I never showed designs for! haha! I keep thinking about the beach, so this is their swimwear.

I hope to make a full fledged drawing for all of them soon~ then the guys~~

Some newbies are: Aura (blue!) Katya (Gold!) and more of Verra (Green!) We'll eventually see more about them as I draw more things and doodles.

[tovaicas]

↳ ꜰꜰxɪᴠ — ʀᴏᴜᴠᴀꜱᴛʀᴇ ᴅᴇ ʟᴇᴜᴠ��ᴄʜɪᴇʀ ⇄ ᴇꜱᴛᴇᴇᴍ

Today, tomorrow — forever on, from one war to the next. Have you ever wondered when our war ends? Does it even matter? Were we not meant to be nothing but weapons from the day we were born, our edges kept sharp and bloody when needed and hung up and set aside like good, obedient little soldiers when not?

(Steel Temper! Heavensbreaker! The Warrior of Light! Our Weapon of Light!)

Look in the mirror. Do you still feel him crawling up your spine, setting within your bone? Do you feel it gnawing at the edge of your soul? Feel the blood in your fingers again. Remember your purpose. Remember the grind of the bone beneath your fist. Remember. Remember. Remember. Stare into my eyes and REMEMBER.

(Even now, you continue to deny it. Well. Deny me all you want. You cannot deny what we have done.)

You feel it, don’t you? There’s no point to hiding it. I know you. Feel the furious pulse of hot blood in your head. Feel it in your teeth. Feel it in your throat. Feel it in your heart. Feel my hand on yours, cloak it in scale, and grind it deep into where it needs to be. Again, and then again. One broken shield exchanged for another. It’s never enough. It will never be enough.

(Or you could beat every single one of them to death with your bare hands. You would like that, wouldn’t you?)

But you know as well as we — that it was never the Eye.

(I knew you would.)

It was always just you.