#we as a society deserve unhinged gay people

[mana-jjk]

tw: lisa frankenstein spoilers, jjk implied spoilers, violence, implied suicide, horror themes, im not kidding this is a hilariously violent movie, bullying, non-explicit loss of limbs, you know the works

I AM THE SPIRIT OUTSIDE RATTLING YOUR WINDOWS

i watched lisa frankenstein and immediately thought of inuokko because i am entirely not normal !! the greatest part is that this story would work both ways so just sprint with me right now

my preference for insane yuuta is entirely prevalent btw

option 1:

yuuta’s entire family moves after the sudden death of his childhood friend to give him a fresh start. he struggles to find a place to belong in school, and struggles even more in the bad relationship with his parents. his little sister is one of his last positive relationships and tries her best to keep him included. he spends most of his time in an abandoned ceremony, at a grave of a boy who died at his age, accused of witchcraft.

he has a parasocial relationship with him in that he’s absolutely obsessed with the concept of a loner, rejected by society, just like him. and spends hours just talking to him, taking care of his grave, and staring at his statue like a weirdo !

after a party gone wrong, where he drank spiked punch and after being pestered about a girlfriend, he goes back to the cemetery in time to see the beloved grave get struck by lightning. hence toge rising from the dead, confused but recognizing yuuta’s voice from being the only person to talk to him. his throat is damaged from being hanged, some of his skin has been damaged enough to see the bone, and he’s missing an arm.

yuuta hides him in his room, and toge hears everything. one night, after a particularly bad one-sided argument between yuuta and his father, toge thought he was going to hurt the only person to be kind to him. so for the first time since he died, he used his abilities and killed the man. immediately after he was remorseful and afraid yuuta would hate him, but he got the exact opposite reaction. yuuta was so touched that someone would go to such lengths for him, and strangely delighted by the gruesome scene. enough to where he wanted to recreate it.

so yuuta starts picking off the people who bullied him, harvesting what toge needs to be put together again. they diy a lab with lightning and every time toge looks more and more alive until you couldn’t tell him apart from any other person. he gets more confident in school too, becoming friends with maki and panda who see him as a little weirdo. in the process, yuuta falls in love with him beyond the parasocial relationship of before, especially when toge accepts his new murderous habits so easily.

eventually they’re found out after yuuta ends the second parental figure and his sister walks in on him. she’s devastated, traumatized, and runs out of the house covered in blood. he decides then to join toge and so they can start a new life together. a few months later, they’re not even a thought in anyone’s mind, except for his sister who keeps their existence a secret, living with their uncle gojo.

option 2:

toge has just moved in with a distant relative after the last of his immediate family was murdered. the trauma of witnessing their deaths led to his already selective mutism to complete silence. he is bullied at his new school, especially since he doesn’t defend himself. his classmates maki and panda take him under their wing, but he spends most of the time at the cemetery.

it’s quiet there, abandoned and full of greenery. there’s also a grave of a boy who died of a broken heart after a life of sadness. he spends a lot of time there, just sitting alone and keeping company to this lonely boy. he leaves behind a handmade charm, hoping to give him a little peace. it’s something he hopes someone might care enough to do for him someday. he’s already planning to request his very own burial at this peaceful place.

panda invites him to go to a party, but after being harassed about his voice and separated from his friends, he ends up stumbling home, half-drunk from an awful concoction. it’s there that he finds yuuta, fresh from the grave. he’s missing an eye, ear, leg, and covered in cuts that crisscross across his face and chest. in his hands, he holds the charm toge made for him. after a mini freak out, he cleans him up and hides him in his room. yuuta talks in slurring words but his eyes are full of wonder at the kindness he gives him. he follows him like a hobbling lost puppy, nearly getting him caught several times.

it’s when one of the biological, older, slightly bum kids who has been harassing toge since he came that he moves to protect him. he doesn’t even hesitate before he’s bursting out of the closet to strangle him. afterwards, they take his leg and toge sews it onto yuuta, who almost looks up at him like he’s waiting for approval. toge knows it was wrong, should tell him not to do it again, but part of him couldn’t help but feel protected for the first time in his life. and yuuta, who was so kind to him, was still suffering, wasn’t he? so maybe he couldn’t help but notice that one of his bullies has striking silver eyes.

it’s not hard to lure them, and yuuta takes care of the rest. diligently, toge replaces the lost parts until yuuta looks just as alive as he does. in return, yuuta encourages him to stop hiding his face, enough to where others begin to notice him. the moment yuuta is complete, he swings toge around until he laughs and then kisses him.

they aren’t actually caught before they leave, they both want to start over, and hearing that toge is a suspect is enough for them to book town. he decides to join yuuta, it works as now everyone thinks he’s dead. the only person with their suspicions is maki, who visits his grave with panda regularly, and sees the charm she knows toge made.

listen to me very carefully when i tell you we NEED more dark inuokko, and by that i do not mean sadness. i physically cannot read angst without a happy ending. i mean unhinged, crazy, mutually obsessed inuokko that don’t burn each other, they just burn the world around them. THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT !!

also please watch lisa frankenstein, scream about this with me in my asks, and share your dark inuokko fic ideas !!

[narcissa-black-supermacy]

and for 003, all 5 Black cousins pls!!

ok its time to answer theseee

003 | send me 5 characters and I will rank them in order of preference

SIRIUS BLACK - obviously, the GOAT, the real main character, the best thing to ever happen to our pathetic human existence, the man too beautiful for any actor and too deep for any words, the eternal number one for me that nobody could ever top (except for jfp himself). no clever words or deep analysis on this bc it would take me 37 pages.

NARCISSA - there's this recent trend i'm seeing of trying to make her more "relevant" but making her gay or giving her a different love interest but i think people don't appreciate enough the depth and complexity of her canon story. trying to keep your family together through war and terrorism and your husband going to jail and your son being forced to join a terror cult is something that's very very personal to me, especially with the way she sticks to her familial values and traditions but is still willing to sacrifice anything for her son and husband. it's a tragic story with a rare happy ending and it always touched me on a very personal level.

BELLATRIX - again, from my own personal perspective, what Bellatrix does and the way she defies the expectations society has for her is even more revolutionary than what Sirius did, because she is doing it while still staying within the system. it's an angle we rarely see - we don't get many stories where a person wants to stay within the family circle of an abusive, conservative culture, but still breaks stereotypes inside of it. this is what creates change, in the long run, and it deserves recognition no less (also she's hot and unhinged and we love that)

REGULUS - I enjoy his character a lot, but only when he stays within the frame of very grey morality. I like Regulus who's very different from Sirius, who has a good relationship with Walburga and Orion, who dropped out of school and joined the DEs at 16 willingly bc he thought it would give him power and then ended up being disappointed in his own leader and tried to take him down (but failed bc he's still a 18yo idiot).

ADNROMEDA - i don't care much for Andromeda unless it's in the context of Black Sisters Drama. can I put Walburga instead? I love Walburga if she was on the list she would be n 3 <3

[cupidquinn-moved]

A few things to know about my treatment of Harley and the DCU (ie: the movies and shit)

— For as much as I still like the og Susquad for the sake of it being just...ridiculous and a lot of the aesthetic (look, we can go back and forth about Harley and sexualization until the planet’s heat death, but Harley has always been portrayed as a sexy girl that wore sexy outfits, and you can say that Ayer was probably not thinking about her agency as a person to dress however the fuck she wanted, but it’s how I choose to interpret it. Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to interpret her as an oversexualized character, but I also think we need to sit down and have a long conversation about women simply existing in society is often sexualized without putting her in high heel sneakers and booty shorts), I felt really weird about the implication that she was somehow involved or complicit in Jason Todd’s death. Which oh boy, let me talk about that. Harley wasn’t even a character yet when Death in the Family came out, so it’s often ignored in her canon/fanon as a general rule. Now, most of the comics I’ve read with Harley in them hasn’t broached the matter, and in fan discourse, her involvement in it seems to be written off as a) it was before they got together b) it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and she bounced before things got crazy (and she feels bad that she wasn’t strong enough at that point to take Jason with her) or c) it was during one of their breaks, the whole situation actually attributed to the Jarley trope that Harley was the voice of reason between the two. ie: Had they been together, Harley would have never let it go that far, and because they’re broken up, Joker indulges in his darkest urges. Jarley shippers tend to take it a little further and say that Joker is in berserk mode as a way of coping with the breakup with Harley, like murder and mayhem is his ice cream pints and sad songs. Anyway, my point is, I super do not ascribe to Harley being any part of Jason’s death. Generally I just go with it happened before her or while they were on a break.

— I really like Birds of Prey so I’m pretty okay with referencing back to it if I’m rping with someone. Honestly, I will never know how to feel about Black Mask in that movie. I love it because I love Ewan and the aesthetic, and I like what he brought to the character. Yeah, yeah, evil gay, but I think we deserve the evil gays as much as we deserve the good gays in representation, and it should absolutely be noted that he never portrayed him as a predatory gay. He was never a threat because of his sexuality; he was a threat because he was a dangerously unhinged mob boss with a psychopath with a thing for knives and cutting people’s faces off at his beck and call. And yet......as much as I loved it, I also felt the dread of how chud nerds would bitch. Of course I forgot that they would be too busy being mad about women leading the film. lmao. Anyway, yes, my point is, I dig BoP

— Gunn’s Susquad is perfect and even though I have no idea where it sits in the DCU timeline, I’m kind of okay with it. I’ve watched the Susquad animations and read some comics, and it just kinda sits in its own little world. So I’m kinda whatever on how I fit it in to my canon. Oh look, I don’t have a lengthy tangent to go on.

tl:dr: Really, we’re all just vibes here. 

[charismastaticarchive]

manuela hc:

the grande dame : an exploration of lgbt/camp tropes and anime jokes leading to a complex and likable portrayal of a modern day stock tropes.’

the grande dame is a stock trope of Older Women who represent the stuffy, uppity matronly upper class to comedic effect. 

from the tvtropes page  : ‘they are usually a spinster or widow’ (such as manuela is Forever Unlucky In Love) and if they are married they will be a patron of the arts that drags her husband to operas, even more cultured than the ‘prima donna’ (which manuela was implied to be in the past, but has grown past to become a highly educated professor healer and warrior in addition to her talents in theatre). when the grande dame does have a sympathetic streak, they tend to be an oddball themself (like manuela). she can be a ‘moral guardian’ (and manuela’s skills are in faith magic and she does believe in the goddess), but failing their duty towards ‘respectability’ they turn to drink. (which sounds exactly like manuela).

we could just say that manuela was thus a complicated prima donna that gave up the theatre and turned to drink after aging out of her youthful beauty, into a grande dame figure. certainly, if you look at examples of the grande dame in classical literature, it seems to be a very open-and-shut stock caricature played completely for comedic effect, as does manuela’s whininess and flirtatious milf/cougarness and ‘well i never!’ esque tone. (and she certainly does seem to turn to drink for that very reason.)

but why would u ever compare an OPERA SINGER to classic literature when u could instead compare her to the stage and screen? she’s an actress with a theatrical personality. and that’s where the lgbt readding comes in, as well as why so many lgbt people are attached to manuela, and characters like manuela, in my opinion.

the grande dame has a storied history with the lgbt community. first and foremost, in western society, there was a long history where only men could be actors (this was true in many other places of course, but we’re focusing on the west as manuela’s characterization is mostly focused on western tropes). 

matronly older women characters played for comedic effect (such as the nurse in romeo&juliet, among other such classic roles), were thus played by men in drag. but the tradition of drag for matronly older women in theatre continued long after, to the point where the ‘pantomine dame’ is a storied character/trope in british pantomine---noted for its camp and ‘over the top’ performances, and the tradition continued across the sea in vaudeville drag performances---where lgbt people could graduate from grande dame roles to primma donnas in starring roles as women themselves, regardless of their assigned gender.

after the decline of the vaudeville era BECAUSE of its connection to the lgbt community (and sex work) during the prohibition/”progressive” era, the grande dame (and the inherent camp/gay sensibility of an older woman) did not just STOP EXISTING in the consciousness of western people, and especially not western lgbt people.

no, instead, the grande dame evolved into a still classically camp (over the top, out of place) but a character ever-more entangled in other classic tropes for tough/fierce/unhinged/dramatic women, that we still can see traces of today in every genre that lgbt people are attracted to.

from horror (whatever happened to baby jane and the 'hagsploitation’ that followed it) to musicals (mama rose in ‘rose’s turn’ is literally my tag for manuela but also cats the musical’s ‘memories’ could basically be the benevolent/sad grande dame mood), to fairy tales and children’s stories (Mother Gothel from tangled tho u could make a case for every disney woman villain and also scar as being one tbh, but also mia’s mother in a princess diaries is definitely one, and so is professor macgonagall), to spy dramas (judi dench), to biopics (from joan crawford to every queen pretty much ever) alllll the way back around to drag again (if you’ve ever watched drag race? half the winning snatch games are dames lol). to basically everything ryan murphy has ever done in his whole damn life, especially with Mother Jessica Lange.

the grande dame’s mean strictness and spite has come to represent a trapping for her secret vulnerability/softness (which is the source of her beauty), something lgbt people in particular can relate to as they have to hide their self/love from a world. the camp grande dame is almost always obsessed with beauty and age (so much of our community can’t picture getting old---or doesn’t want to, with many people being deathly afraid of hair loss due to hormones, etc. and then when it comes to attractiveness, attractiveness is often our measure of worth especially in the trans and gay sector, where ‘passing’ or ‘masculinity’ is viewed as a shorthand for ‘respectability’---and so many of us judge each other so harshly based on looks.) but more than anything, the grande dame is always LONELY, or alone, whether it be from being the best/most powerful/rich (and it’s lonely at the top), or in imposed exile due to her age/lack of beauty, the terrible things she’s done, the grande dame is almost always a metaphor for lgbt loneliness.

manuela’s characterization very much abides by these classic camp/gay sensibilities (as well as the classic ones). the modern day gay reading of the grande dame is a much more textured and layered one---but often, grande dames such as they done by judi dench in the 007 movies, or even ryan murphy using jessica lange in the politician---are still objectified by the male gaze with either sexual jokes, or as being made ‘more’ OR ‘less’ than human.... because the grande dame is such a stock trope (even when more complicated by Us Gays), the grande dame is either hypercompetent (in the case of litcherally all of judi dench’s characters or julie andrews’ characters, a Badass Older Woman who is not allowed to be anything more Than Tough And Perfect even when she is in a frenzied huff) or, on the other side of the coin, a complete and total joke or a sob story or picture of an abuser (or all three at once), such as in the case of All Jessica Lange’s Ryan Murphy Characters. Please God Let This Woman Be Free Of Ryan Murphy’s Clutches.

manuela, to me, represents an interesting figure in the Grand Canon of Grande Dames. 

because while she is in every way an anime character---she represents a trope in anime we don’t see often. there are not a lot of older women characters in anime, and when they are---they are usually mid-20s maximum, or they are Sexually Dominant Women, extremely strong and competent women that Can And Will Beat Your Ass ( such as in the case of tsunade from naruto OR lotus from 999, etc). manuela is, thankfully, neither of these.

while fe3h presents manuela as a joke---like classic grande dames were presented as jokes,  the way that manuela is presented, is as an ANIME character with ANIME jokes to people who are ALL familiar at this point with anime jokes, and we are able to relate to her more on a human level than we would relate to the fussy, bitter, overly loquacious grande dames of literature.

the average anime gamer can’t relate to a jane austen biddy talking to you about how the man you are dating is not of marriagable status, and does not think that is funny. but the average anime gamer WILL see you give manuela a porn magazine she thinks is ‘very valuable’ and chuckle a bit to themselves.

but more than that---the game really wants you to LIKE manuela. it makes her relatable to the average gamer who hasn’t cleaned their room in weeks---that sometimes will eat food off the floor, that likes to sing a little too loudly and who feels lonely sometimes (or always).

and even more than any of that, instead of presenting manuela as an UGLY or evil old woman, or an abuser, or an extremely rich woman, and in presenting manuela instead as so very likable and funny, it presents manuela as someone who looks and acts desirable as a friend (and a lover). manuela is a grande dame who is not only sympathetic---she’s human AND FLAWED, just like you, even when her behavior is all jokes and huffiness.

you WANT to be manuela’s friend. you WANT to look deeper into manuela as a person and not a trope---even though she is OBJECTIVELY made up of anime jokes and stock character tropes!

and so this game ends up painting a picture of a lonely woman, a woman who considers herself weak, a woman who is messy, and funny, and loud, who fights (and sometimes is bested by those who are stronger than her)--who pushes other women out of the way to get ahead, but still loves children, who still wants (and deserves) to be loved. even tho most of this information, as manuela relays it to you, is viewed as comedic.

and as manuela is not painted as the grande dame who is a villain---as she is painted so beautifully and theatrically in opera tropes---you can really and truly see her as the star of her own show, a lovely woman trying to live her life the best she can in an adult world that is hard and cruel. just like you are, regardless of ur gender, age, or sexuality.

and from that point of understanding manuela as the grande dame, u can extrapolate manuela in ur own tropes that view her as more human and Deep---and in my opinion, most powerfully, that she is a bisexual woman and hopeless romantic that is most interested in ‘princely’/strong women types. but that’s a hc post for another day.

manuela is THE SUPREME ANIME GRANDE DAME and that anime recontextualization makes her a much better representation of older women than western canon grande dames, the end, send tweet.

[swampertspawner]

Me, Myself, and So On

A draft for our nonficiton class in university. I hope you enjoy!

I’ll be completely honest in saying I don’t know who I am. After all, what’s the measure of truly knowing a person? Is it knowing their tics? Is it knowing their secrets? Is it knowing their life story? I know all of this. Why then, don’t I feel like I know myself? Most days I don’t feel like a person, more like someone’s original character: a messy hodge-podge of other popular characters that the creator has as comfort characters. If I am to speak candidly, I feel like I’ve taken the best characteristics from the people I admire most and made a vain effort of emulating them just to create a singular personality. My best friend’s compassion, my blockmates kinship, one of my previous classmate’s work ethic, and the lessons in patience I learned from my ex-partner. What happens if it’s all torn away? Who’s left? What will I see? Will I even want to see it? Now, like many people, ever since I started quarantine I’ve had nothing but time. Unlike most people, though, my choices of activity were limited: eating, sleeping, using the computer, maybe watching the TV once but that’s pretty much it. Sometimes when I got tired of those I started thinking instead. Thinking about what state the world was going to end up in. Thinking about what I’d be doing once this all blows over (even though sometimes I felt like it never will). After that I ask what I’ll be like by that time. Then the ultimate question that comes up time and time again in my life reared it’s ugly head: who am I in the first place? Every time I tried to get at the bottom of this question, I’m met with many different answers. Some I’d like to show you while we think about themーme as I’m writing this and you as you’re reading this. I’m a personal believer that two minds are greater than one, but since I’ve lost mine over quarantine, I hope you can keep up for the both of us while you’re reading my revised stream of consciousness. The first answer I’ve come to is that I’m a reincarnation of my mother: bright, joyful, and even coming with a striking resemblance. Honestly, I felt like Harryーconstantly being told that I have my mother's eyes, along with her cheeks, nose, mouth, and so on. I feel like a clone they’ve started to project onto. I don’t completely blame them; my mother passed away at a relatively young age, and I’m one of the only things they can really remember her by. Still, it would be nice if they saw me as my own person instead of seeing my mother all the time. Even as I say that, I’ve still done my part in making sure I live up to the name she made for herself. She’s one of the people I look up to the most. The cutting intellect she possessed, the joy she seemed to emanate to other people; I aspire to be like her one day. I suppose that’s the biggest thing stopping me from claiming this is the fact that I feel like I don’t deserve to. I’m not so mean to myself that I’d say I haven’t done anything meaningful, but it’s harder to say that any of them amount to how my maternal family and her old co-workers talk about her. Of course, every light has its own dark, and it seems this idyllic answer of me that my maternal family keeps in their hearts is eclipsed by the constant sight that my paternal family--the relatives I spend more time with--sees. Seemingly on the computer 24/7, with no real world experience or motivation to do anything other than eat, play video games, use the computer, and sleep. Truly, it’s quite a stark difference depending on whoever I’m with. Like many people though, I do change, whether consciously or unconsciously, how I act towards other people. At some point I felt some pang of guilt every time I realized it, then eventually it just started fading away. Another answer I came upon is my online presence, and all the people I’ve met and all the people I’ve brushed with. This is the most speculative and sporadic answer because so many different people have so many different imprints of me. A lot of it is also dependent on what online circle and community I’m in. Sure, I have a general vibe that I exude to many people: a very chill shitposter that’s funny sometimes, soft all the time. Even still, I think about the people I’ve talked with before and lost touch with. What imprint do I have of them? What do they think of me? Do they still even think of me in the first place? One thing I don’t doubt is my negative influence. A good chunk of my time online was spent being a general asshole with the usual discriminatory bullshit you expect from someone growing up in the Philippines at the time. Trash-talking (even though I wasn’t very good at it), trolling, thinking I was hot shit even though it was far, far from the truth. Granted, I was 12 and growing, but that doesn’t make it any better. The fact still stands that there might be people’s lives I’ve impacted for the worse. Sometimes I think about them, how I want to make it up to them, maybe show them I’ve changed and give them closure if they need it. Sadly, with the imperfect world we live within, the last interaction it ever allowed me with those people is a negative one. Despite all this, I’m happy to report that I’ve grown as a person. At least, this answer has grown as a person. I’ve learned compassion. I’ve learned patience. I’ve learned respect. Sometimes I scare myself, since I say something bad and have to catch myself slipping mentally and right myself right after. Learning never stops, after all. Neither does the fear of going back to who you once were. The growth and development this persona’s gone through was definitely shaped by the fact that I was online a lot. While I’m sure it resulted in deeper psychological scars with a lasting impact on the rest of my life, I’m not sure what those are. Partly because I don’t entirely remember where those scars even are. You see, the funny thing about the brain is that it's smart, and it’s smart enough to hide away the things that make it feel bad (most of the time). For most of the things that happened to me, even if I want to remember them, I kinda can’t. Nonetheless, I still know they’re there. For one, it was pretty early on that I started to break away from the backwards values that I’ve been raised on that were steeped in misogyny, homophobia, colorism...the list just goes on. Philippine media (and quite frankly media in general) has a way of reinforcing the negativity that society tries to correct and progress past. Gay stereotypes, whitening ads, the usual storylines of teledramas that give 0 agency to the women in the story; it’s honestly so tiring, but I’m glad I can see what’s wrong with it all now. Another thing is that I was able to meet so many people that have irrevocably changed my life, whether for the better or the worse. Similar to how I’ve been able to impact many people in passing, such is the case for me too: thousands of people that have changed my life despite staying in my life for barely a moment. I wonder if they think the same way about me as I do with the people I’ve influenced. That’s the beauty of the internet really; so many people can touch your life even for just a fraction of a second and still leave you a different person than who you were before you met them. The third answer for me to show you is what my classmates see: someone demure or unassuming at first glance that suddenly evolves into a noisy, unhinged crackhead that you wonder how you became friends in the first place. This persona’s had an interesting development because I’ve started to completely disregard the demure part and start being a crackhead right out of the gate. The biggest reason for it was that I had the thought that acting so likely attracts similar people; similar people that I’ve desperately wanted to know and meet for most of my life. The truth is that there’s a singular driving force behind me having multiple faces for multiple people. Growing up, I’ve never been able to fully express myself for many reasons. The first one being that in the place I grew up in, I was practically the only person that had the interests I did. That pretty much stands true ‘til this day. To be frank, my household is one of the few that’s able to afford the privileges I enjoyed growing up (namely cable tv and the Internet). Because of it I was the only one that knew what the hell Adventure Time, Regular Show, and et cetera was for a long time. I was the only one in my neighborhood familiar with Youtube communities other than the site just being used for music. That’s not to say the people in my neighborhood were completely devoid of online culture. Everyone was familiar with the usual suspects of Pisonet Online Games: Audition, Crossfire, DOTA, League of Legends, and so on. The problem really only lies in the fact that I wasn’t able to really connect with those communities and ended up alienating myself. You can say the same about my other faces. My being put on a pedestal as my mother’s son was not helped by the fact I was also naturally smart and bright myself. One of the remnants that my mother left me was English being my first language. For the longest time I was talking English better than Filipino (and you can imagine everything that entails a bully-able kid only speaking English the Philippines). Even online, which is often seen as the last bastion for people to find others that they can connect with, other people that share the same interests, I felt alienated. I went so long without discovering those communities or being unable to fully express myself in those communities because widdle baby Raven wasn’t smart enough to make an alternate account. As such, even voicing myself online was restricted. There was never any avenue for me to really be myself. Well, not until recently, of course. Some people say that if a person has been depressed since childhood, once they reach adulthood they often try to take back the childhood they spent thinking they would kill themselves before they even became adults. While I’ve never been depressed myself, I resonate so goddamn hard with this sentiment that I thought I manifested an earthquake when I first heard it (I didn’t; god just wanted to fuck with me for some reason). I’ve spent so much of my life repressing who I was that I don’t even express it to people that would understand or accept. I end up feeling caged in my house, wistfully standing in a dark room and looking out of the window as I watch Spongebob and Patrick have fun being themselves. The final answer we have to our original question is a simple one: it’s the person of who I am when I’m alone, and truth be told, I have no idea who that person is. When I’m alone in my room at night, who am I really? When I have the house to myself, who comes out? I’ll be honest in saying that even when I’m completely alone, whoever the person I really am is, they barely come out. There’s nothing to make a face for, no front that’s needed, so why do they still stay cooped up and hidden? They’re quite the enigma. For one they paradoxically like being expressive. They blast music and sing and dance along with it. Maybe because they stay inside for such long periods of time they bask whenever they do come out. Another thing about this mystery person is how incredibly horny they are. Seriously, you would think they’re a teenager because of their constant thirst. Maybe this is their attempt to connect. They weren’t raised with the healthiest views on intimacy you see. It’s very warped. Despite the things they’ve done to remedy it, they slip at times. Or maybe it’s not horniness. Maybe they just do it systemically. They know that jacking off releases dopamine; maybe they do just whenever they need dopamine and not just because they feel something carnal. There’s so many things I can tell you about them, still: how much they like ambient sounds of rain, how they like listening to K-Pop music because they want to listen to music but not be distracted by lyrics they understand, how puzzling it is that they’re still unknown even though I’ve been given nothing but time these 8 months in quarantine. I can go on and on about all these but at the end of the day, it boils down to the fact that I have no idea who they are despite how much I know about them. It’s true I know a lot about them, but what do I know about them? Why does it feel like they keep giving me tidbits and not the whole thing? What the hell do these small pieces of personality tell me about the whole? As I’m writing this, I’m still thinking about who I really am. The person that’s dwelling just beneath the surface, trying their best to stay hidden against all my efforts to pull them out. For as long as I’ve been in quarantine, I’ve been starting to wonder if I even want to. Is all this trouble truly worth it? What if I don’t like what comes out? The other answers I have are so much nicer than the parts that the final one shows. I’ve lived for so long being comfortable with how I am now; is it really that important I find out what the “real” one is? At the end of the day, I don’t know. I’m a very tired person; I reserve my energy just for the things I deem the most important. As such, continuing with this may just be a waste of my energy, but I’ll really only find out by the end of it, right? It’s still a horrifying prospect to imagine that I wasted so much of my time to find out, only for it to be for nothing. There’s still a silver lining, though, that if I don’t like what comes out, maybe I can just keep looking for an answer that I like instead.

[techcrunchappcom]

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Author Likens Meghan Markle, Prince Harry To Hitler In Unhinged Interview - HuffPost

Author and reality TV personality Lady Colin Campbell likened Meghan Markle and Prince Harry to Adolf Hitler in an unhinged interview Thursday. 

Campbell, who once claimed during a media appearance that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile, compared the royal couple to Hitler while speaking with “Access All Areas” hosts Joanna Chimonides and Stephen Leng on Fubar Radio. 

“I have no doubt that they tell themselves they’re doing the right thing, but we also need to remember that history is littered with people who thought they were doing good,” she said of the Sussexes. “I only have to mention Adolf Hitler, not that I’m putting them in the same camp as him.” 

“Adolf Hitler thought he was doing good for the world. Mao Zedong, who also killed hundreds of millions of his own people, he thought he was doing good,” she added. 

Campbell also surmised that the prince’s late mother, Princess Diana, would disapprove of the couple’s decisions. 

“Diana, for all her failings, was very royal,” the author said, adding that she would be “completely horrified” by the couple’s decision to step back as working members of the royal family and pursue financial independence. 

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Lady Colin Campbell, here on a Fox special on Meghan Markle,” says the couple just thinks they’re doing the right thing.

Campbell said that Meghan, whom she claimed was “overindulged” and “spoiled by her father,” set out making the plans for the couple to live in Los Angeles despite the prince’s public insistence that that was not the case.  

Campbell also speculated the couple was leaking their own press. 

“I mean, honestly. You know, I have never seen people rape their privacy to the extent that they have raped their own privacy on a daily basis,” she added. 

The 70-year-old, who once appeared on the reality show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here,” is one of the many who continue to attack the Duchess of Sussex, who has weathered misogynistic and racist attacks since she first began dating Prince Harry.

While Campbell, who also recently shamed a British news presenter for “living a lie” and coming out as gay later in life, has claimed that the duchess is a “fame addict” and that she has political aspirations to run for president one day. The Hitler comments, though, have escalated her baseless commentary to a new level of vile.

Meanwhile, the Sussexes have carried on with their charity efforts in Los Angeles and continue to speak up for racial justice amid the Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing protests and marches after the May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

Meghan recently spoke with Althea Bernstein, who is biracial and was the victim of an alleged hate crime by four white men in Wisconsin. The duchess talked to her about healing and staying off of social media during a 40-minute phone call, and she got the 18-year-old’s number to be able to check in with her again. 

Chris Jackson via Getty Images

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex meet children at the Commonwealth Day Service 2020 on March 9 in London.

The Duke of Sussex also gave an impassioned speech decrying institutional racism during a surprise appearance at the 2020 Diana Awards on Wednesday. 

“My wife said recently that our generation and the ones before us haven’t done enough to right the wrongs of the past. I too am sorry,” he said.

“Sorry that we haven’t got the world to the place that you deserve it to be. Institutional racism has no place in our societies. Yet it is still endemic. Unconscious bias must be acknowledged without blame to create a better world for all of you.” 

Together, the royal couple has also privately advocated for the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, according to Axios, which asks companies to pause spending advertising money on Facebook until the platform figures out a way to curb the spread of hate speech and disinformation. 

The NAACP praised the Sussexes for their solidarity with the campaign, as did Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, whose organization designs “campaigns powerful enough to end practices that unfairly hold Black people back, and champions solutions that move us all forward.” 

“I’ve appreciated the thoughtful conversations I’ve had with the Duke and Duchess,” Robinson said on Twitter. “Even more, I appreciate that they are using their platform to reach out to key corporations and share the goals of the #StopHateForProfit campaign.” 

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5 Great Books of Hollywood Outsiders

The Los Angeles literary genre became a household staple when my family moved there from Italy in 1994. My parents unloaded garage sale finds of Joan Didion, Nathanael West, Christopher Isherwood, and Raymond Chandler, and countless celebrity biographies at the house every weekend. The books were intended as literary tour guides to understand a certain kind of loneliness, a feeling of being unhinged that was specific to the city, particularly Hollywood; the pinnacles of success and dark areas of addiction of Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, the sordid repertoire of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, and Marya Wyeth’s painful meanderings in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays were a warning about the things that could happen to the women of the land: psychiatric ward internments, suicides, divorce, and nocturnal excursions on freeways.

For me, the texts functioned as group therapy, introducing me to a circle of ghosts and living legends that provided much needed comfort: everyone went through it—brutality, fear, solitude, miraculous streaks of good luck, bursting bank accounts and overdrawn notices. Whether or not you became successful, the toll was always the same. Nathanael West’s The Day of The Locust reassured me that madness was not elitist. It visited the rich and the poor, the industry’s insiders and newcomers without distinction. Jean Stein’s oral history West of Eden, Eve Babitz’s L.A. Woman and Slow Days Fast Company, and David Ulin’s anthology Writing Los Angeles live by my bedside table and serve as a plane ticket from Italy whenever I want to escape to grandeur, desperation, and lust.

But as much as I love a good LA-based novel or essay, I’ve noticed that the stories that truly kept me company were the ones about outsiders, the people who lived on the fringes of show business and re-invented the rules according to their own vision. Maybe everyone in Hollywood feels like an outsider, but below are my favorite ones.

Christopher Isherwood Diaries, Volume 1, 1939-1960, ed. Katherine Bucknell

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A European writer in exile, Isherwood immigrated to the United States in 1939 with his friend W.H. Auden and joined the community of expats, artists, and intellectuals who had fled Nazism. As uncontrollably cool as Isherwood was, there was no way he could not have been an outsider: British, gay, a pacifist, an ardent explorer of Hinduism, mysticism, and vedantic consciousness, and the future life partner of a man thirty years younger than him.

He worked in Hollywood as a writer for hire, but to him it was a way to have an income: “The studio, is just an office I visit in the daytime.” His diaries offer a unique insight into the feelings of those who had been lucky enough to escape the war. He essentially became an outsider observing outsiders, people striving to find a moral balance between everything they had left behind (war, deportations, bombings, persecution) and everything they were stepping into (sunshine, movies, ocean).

How did they navigate the duality of this shaky territory? Where and how did their sense of guilt for having escaped come into play? The diaries are also filled with observations about Hollywood figures like Greta Garbo. In particular I adore his account of a picnic with the diva and the guru Krishnamurti: “Garbo was anxious to meet Krishnamurti. She was naturally drawn to prophets––genuine or otherwise . . . She wanted to be told the secret to eternal youth, the meaning of life—but quickly in one lesson, before her butterfly attention wandered away.”

The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, ed. by Katherine Bucknell

Katherine Bucknell deserves a monument for the archival work she’s done editing Isherwood’s diaries. It’s thanks to her research and drive that I encountered the epistolary relationship between Christopher Isherwood and his lover, the American portrait artist Don Bachardy. The two met in 1952, becoming involved shortly thereafter and openly living together in Hollywood for decades as a gay couple with a big age gap. Through their letters (and the subsequent podcast curated by Bucknell, where Simon Callow interprets Isherwood’s letters and Alan Cumming plays Bachardy) I fell in love with this brave and visionary couple.

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The letters reveal what it means to be a real artist, true to your calling, essentially timeless and disconnected from fashion, moralist impositions, and lifestyle trends. Isherwood allowed their love story to develop over years and long distances (Hollywood, New York, London, and continental Europe) so that Bachardy could develop his artistic career and see the world. The Animals is both a book about love and a book that teaches us the grace of being part of one’s artistic milieu (literature, film, art, ballet in this case) without falling into the trap of having to adhere to its rules. Isherwood and Bachardy wrote to each other for years in the guise of horse and cat. Bachardy was “Kitty”, “Fluffcat,” “Sweetpaws,” and Isherwood is “Drub,” “Dobbin,” “Old Pony.” The safe animal world they created was their way of making sense of their existence, lived simultaneously on the fringes of society and in extreme engagement with it.

Peter Viertel, The Canyon

This somewhat autobiographical coming of age gem from 1940 is virtually impossible to find today. The protagonist, George, grows up in a canyon by the ocean with a small gang of friends, a delightful cast that includes Betsy, a sensual tomboy who opens him up to his budding sexuality. As the kids grow they become more aware of their class differences, and the wild, free life of the canyon grows more complex and layered. At 17 the group breaks up for good. In the novel, a twenty-something George ponders those days of early youth and the way in which a small neighborhood was once considered a town.

Even though this is not a proper Hollywood book, it is written by a personality who is Hollywood as they come. Peter Viertel was the son of poet and theatre director Berthold Viertel, and screen and fiction writer Salka Viertel, who was a great friend of Greta Garbo and a godmother figure to Isherwood. They immigrated to America during the First World War when Peter was still a boy. On Sundays, the Viertel house hosted members of a certain kind of bohemian expat community, including Marlene Dietrich, Charles Chaplin, and Aldous Huxley. This novel is in a way a reflection of Peter’s own relationship with the land and people he was tied to from an early stage in life. Somewhere beneath the surface is the suggestion that if you move to Los Angeles, Hollywood will find a way to creep inside the hidden canyon of your community, break up your friendships, and instill its barriers, determining from early on who is in and who is out.

Isis Aquarian with Electricity Aquarian, The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family  

Thanks to the documentary Wild Wild Country, it has become easier to understand why hundreds of wide-eyed young people would live communally, run organic restaurants, and follow a charismatic guru who acts like a rock star. I have always been fascinated by Father Yod, an otherworldly Hollywood Hills figure who started a commune and married 14 women, all of whom were young, beautiful and seemingly either pregnant, breastfeeding or with small children on their hips.

This book, edited by one of these very women, Isis Aquarian, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for Document Journal has been an essential travel companion for me since I first discovered it. Part oral history, part photography book, it documents the lives of the members of the Source family, the other side of the coin of the Manson family. As Isis says: “We were the beautiful, rich and generous. We had sex, drugs and rock and roll, but we encountered the spirit.” Father opened The Source Cafe in the late 1960s on Sunset strip, hosting a bunch of kids in a mansion in the hills in exchange for their work at the restaurant.

In its heyday, the Cafe’s patrons included Jack Nicholson, Frank Zappa, Julie Christie, Marlon Brando, and Warren Beatty. But not long after the Manson murders of 1969, Hollywood had little patience left for white robes and polyamorous cult leaders, and the very people who had enjoyed the “divertissement” of this peculiar gang of Hollywood cool kids were the ones who drove them out of the city. Though the family possessed the aura of rock stars (father fronted a psychedelic rock band called Ya Ho Wa 13. The CD is included in the book) this remains a story of outcasts and lost souls. When the family broke up, several of them relocated together to Hawaii in 1974, only to be rejected by the locals there. With nowhere to go and very little money left, Father Yod made a grand exit by jumping off a cliff with a hand glider on a windy day. He broke his back, refused to go to a hospital, and died surrounded by his most faithful “children.” This exceptional book goes hand in hand with the The Source Family a feature length documentary directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos.

Michael Frank, The Mighty Franks 

The Hollywood memoir as a genre in itself deserves a whole other best-of list in my personal repertoire. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it weren’t for Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, Drew Barrymore’s Little Girl Lost, Priscilla Presley’s Elvis and Me, and the classic Mommy Dearest by Christina Crawford. Within this genre, Michael Frank’s recent memoir, The Mighty Franks, is a tsunami of everything I love most: a dysfunctional family with no sense of boundaries, Laurel Canyon, European Jewish émigrés, amazing style, and a passion for arts and film. At the center of this story is the relationship between young Michael and his mercurial, seductive aunt Harriet, or “Hankie,” who elects him as the heir of the family’s artistic legacy––aunt Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch are screenwriters and producers, and the title The Mighty Franks is Hankie’s way of addressing the family.

Good read found on the Lithub

[ayoswim]

The Problem With XXXTentacion

By Kyle Mantha

As humans, we are obsessed with danger. We love to watch movies and listen to music about people who have a complete disregard for the rules, as well the lives of other humans. We don’t love Scarface because Tony Montana is a great guy, we love it because seeing a man go through life without giving a single fuck is liberating. We get to live vicariously through the lives of people who let nothing stand in their way. It makes us feel better about the lives we live. When we see Jordan Belfort show a complete lack of empathy towards anyone and everyone in “The Wolf of Wall Street”, it allows us to escape from our mundane, 9-5 lives. That is why artists like XXXTentacion are so wildly praised. The idea of being completely unhinged and not giving a fuck is appealing to many people because they feel trapped in their own lives, unable to say how they truly feel or follow their heart.

I have avoided writing about XXXTentacion for a while. I’m not really sure why. I guess it just seems like everything that needs to be said has been said already. He’s also a bit of a controversial subject due to his legal troubles, and I kinda hate dabbling in controversial shit. But, I thought about it, and the job of a writer is to talk about things that are uncomfortable to talk about, and if I’m avoiding controversial subjects just because they are controversial, then I am not being honest with myself or others. So here goes nothing.

For the unfamiliar, XXXTentacion is an up and coming rapper from Florida that is quickly gaining traction in the hip hop scene. His abrasive and accidentally Lo-Fi single “Look At Me” became a huge hit in the underground trap scene, eventually moving up into the mainstream consciousness. The song is mostly known for it’s vulgar lyrics, overblown production, and XXX’s loud, screaming delivery. “Look At Me” is a pretty good representation of X, both as a person and a rapper. It sums up his very brutal and minimalistic style, and also goes along with his wild public persona.

One of the first major co-signs that X got was from Los Angeles podcaster Adam22. Adam brought X on his No Jumper podcast. For those that don’t know, No Jumper has become a bit of a cultural landmark in the underground hip hop scene. Once an artist has been interviewed on No Jumper, they tend to pop off pretty quickly after that. X’s No Jumper episode is a particularly popular one, mostly because of the controversial subject matter. Over the course of an hour and some change, X describes many of the violent fights he’s been in, including an incident in prison where he nearly beat a gay man to death for staring at him while he changed. That’s not an exaggeration either. X states in the interview that the goal of the beating was to kill the man.

Because of this interview, I wasn’t exactly the biggest XXXTentacion fan. I was only further turned off from his music when stories began to circulate of him assaulting his pregnant girlfriend. Now, the facts of the case are up for debate, and nobody's exactly sure what the truth is, but X is currently sitting in jail awaiting his court date. Some say that the woman wasn’t pregnant, while others claim that the entire story is made up. I’m not here to make judgements on an on-going criminal case, but it’s likely that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. As of now, the most commonly accepted version of events is that X locked his girlfriend in the bathroom and assaulted her because she played one of his friends songs. To me, this sounds like an oversimplification, and it’s very likely that more was done to provoke X. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, however, and it’s interesting to me that so many of his fans will rush to his defense.

Kendrick Lamar said in the song “Mortal Man”: “When the shit hits the fan is you still a fan?” It’s a valid question. Many fans claim to ride for an artist, but then something goes down and all of a sudden the fans have turned on the artist without even a hint of evidence. We saw this happen when Freddie Gibbs was accused of sexually assaulting a woman. Freddie was found not guilty, but the damage was done. The incident will forever be a mark on his career. The same is true for XXX, but the difference is that Freddie didn’t leave a breadcrumb trail of behavioral problems that lead people to believe he could do such a thing. So much of X’s mystique is that he is wild, crazy, and will snap into fight mode at any moment. Is it really so hard to believe that a man who admittedly has no problem assaulting other human beings over trivialities would assault his girlfriend? I’m not calling for the man’s execution, but we need to look at the facts here. We need to stop saying “Free X.” We need to stop glorifying and romanticising the behavior of someone who is clearly mentally ill. It’s only serving to create an environment where abusive people are able to shine and gain notoriety without being truly criticized for their behaviour.

News broke yesterday that XXX is out of jail. The details haven’t been released yet so it’s still not known whether he is out on bail or out for good. Regardless, big things are going to start happening for X once he is released. He’s poised to be the next big artist, and to be completely honest, I feel like it’s a bad look for hip hop. Even if you put aside all of the accusations, he is still a violent, volatile, mentally unstable person who needs severe rehabilitation. If X makes an effort to better himself and right his wrongs, then of course, he should be given a second chance. Everyone deserves a second chance, as long as you make the effort to fix what you’ve done. I’d really like to see that happen for him.

Personal life aside, I think X is a very interesting rapper and will take the genre to a new place sonically. His style is pretty much lifted from his contemporaries, and he brings nothing new to the table lyrically, but his strength lies in his mixing (or lack thereof). Everything is turned up to a ten on his tracks. The bass is distorted beyond belief and the drums and samples often sound like they are being played through very old and worn out speakers. He may be the first example of lo-fi trap music to truly break through to the mainstream. There is a lot of talk about rap entering it’s punk phase, and whether or not you agree, you have to admit that rap is certainly more experimental than it has ever been, and XXX is definitely going to help push the genre in a more experimental direction.

However, despite his obvious effort to break musical norms, many consider XXX to be a lackluster artist. I can’t say I disagree. While his contributions to the growing experimentalism of hip hop are definitely something to be commended, I just can’t help but feel like that’s all he has to offer. Maybe he’ll prove me wrong with his debut full-length project, but as of right now it seems like the only thing X puts forward is an edgy aesthetic that people can latch onto. His music is all about the style and vibe, but there is absolutely no emphasis on songwriting, lyricism, or production. Don’t get me wrong, not every song has to be lyrical or full of meaning, but if you are going to pull back lyrically, you need to be able to make up for it with your production. X doesn’t even come close to making up for it with his production. The majority of the beats he raps on are just run of the mill trap beats that are distorted as much as humanly possible. Other than that, he really doesn’t bring much new to the table in terms of production.

At the end of the day, XXXTentacion is probably not going anywhere any time soon. Many speculate that he will be a one hit wonder, but his fervishly devoted fanbase seems to say otherwise. His ship will never truly sink because he has built a cult like following that will keep him afloat no matter how choppy the waters get. What matters now is how we choose to respond to his incoming stardom. Do we demonize him? Do we romanticize his poor behavior? Truthfully, I don’t have the answers. I think it’s best to wait and see how he responds to his controversies, and go from there, but others may disagree. All I hope is that we as hip hop fans are careful not to endorse X’s horrible actions.

We, as a society, are often enamored with fictionalized violence. Unfortunately, this infatuation with the dangerous elements of life often bleed into real life. It is important that we do not allow our desire for escapism to cloud our judgement when dealing with real people. Rappers are people just like me and you. XXXTentacion is not a movie character, and we certainly can’t treat him as such.

Kyle Mantha is a writer and musician living in Ontario, Canada. You can follow him on Twitter here.