#when it’s literally not about the specificity of transitioning. it’s about dissociating and self repressing so deep you don’t exist

[albertserra]

Got mad reading a factually incorrect negative review of tv glow… losing the idgaf war

[ericamzdm]

Trauma Holodeck - Promise (pt 2)

PART 1 - The Memory

PART 2 (below the cut) - The Context

PART 3 - Catra’s Conclusion

Content warnings: references to the following as present or implied within the show: child abuse (physical and emotional), threats of violence against children, assault, trauma, references to trauma responses including delusion, dissociation, and disordered attachment

Now, there’s the memory, and then there’s when/why/how Catra stumbled into it, because these flashbacks are diegetic - they’re being created, witnessed, and interacted with via an in-universe mechanism (the Trauma Holodeck) which has it’s own layer of context.

Specifically, the fact that Catra here-and-now is both alone and apart in this scene.

Catra, Alone

This is Catra’s memory.

More importantly, this is Catra’s memory, only, something she encounters after pushing Adora away and running off into the depths of the Trauma Holodeck.

Angry, alone, and alienated, she fights her way through years of negative, painful memories of blame and abandonment...and finds herself back where it all began.

A place where Adora could not hope to follow.

Because Adora represses traumatic memories.

And this memory is absolutely on the “super traumatic” list for her - because, again, Catra was hurt, and Adora could do nothing. There’s no illusion of “successfully protecting” Catra to lean on here - just the reality of the violence, her inability to stop it, and the inevitable awareness that her “protection” was never anything more than a soothing lie she told herself.

Here and now, Catra is alone, because Adora does not, will not, cannot remember this.

Catra, Apart

All of the other Trauma Holodeck memories have included an inflection point where Adora and Catra transition from remembering an event to reliving it.

In a symbolism made viscerally literal via First Ones technology, up until this point they are still the children in their memories - still feelings the same feelings and nursing the same hurts, still trapped in their old, childish understanding of their lives and relationship.

But this memory is different.

Alone, witnessing the genesis of their friendship, Catra stands apart from her younger self.

This isn’t because she can’t connect to the memory - on the contrary, she clearly recalls this event in detail.

She stands apart, an outsider looking in, because she is finally Letting Go of what she thought she knew about their relationship, the things she felt so very intensely at the time, and is instead re-contextualizing the memory, and coming to a fuller understanding of what was actually happening.

And in doing so, becomes a different person than the frightened little girl who pushed aside her pain because her only friend asked her to.

PART 3 - Catra’s Conclusion

[pseudoneiiric]

meta post: lili and her gender

let me go on the record to say that i fucking love lilian eyler with my whole heart, like, i typed all this out and im so fucking emotional about her! in the past, i've written things about hello charlotte and how the lgbt representation is... lacking, let's call it, and i've also made a few headcanon posts here and there about lilian's transition and her relationship with gender. so i thought, you know, let's actually write a whole ass thing about it. so here it is.

content warnings: gender dysphoria, suicide attempts, homophobia/transphobia in the original source material

PART 1: ETHERANE'S BAD TAKES so... etherane did not handle lgbt stuff well, like, in the slightest. lili is canonically genderfluid, as seen in one of those little profile things that etherane drew that doesn't actually show up in any of the games. but her genderfluid identity isn't handled well at all in the actual source material. actually, in general, hello charlotte is pretty transphobic. to cite one example, there’s this journal entry in hello charlotte 3 talking about “defective” charlotte vessels, and one of the things that can make a charlotte vessel “defective” is for them to be born amab or intersex. this already has some really bad vibes, but then we remember also that one of the big functions of charlottes is apparently for them to be sexualized (yikes!!!!!) and so we also get this weird kind of like, “trans people aren’t hot” kind of take?

but anyway. when it comes to lilian specifically, she never actually states in canon that she’s genderfluid or otherwise trans, not even in the spinoff visual novel, which, by the way, would have been the perfect place to address her gender identity, and she consistently uses he/him pronouns. we don’t actually get to see any of her thought processes about her gender at all — like at this point, i can’t even say it’s a non-issue because that would imply that they even mentioned her gender in canon. the only time we can potentially extrapolate from canon that lili might not be cis is when anri mentions that charlotte is lili’s self-insert oc. that’s kind of heavy-handed with the whole “charlotte being the female name for charles”, but that’s another matter. the point is, with the lack of any canon basis that lilian’s even vaguely questioned her gender, the reveal that she’s actually genderfluid with like, two pieces of artwork that are detached from the actual game feels very pxrfxrmxtxvxly xnclxsxvx (performatively inclusive) especially considering how.... etherane talked about lilian’s gender in particular within the actual canon material.

after all, the story behind lilian is effectively that, after she was born, her mother was forced to abort her second child, a daughter that she would name scarlett. doing so plunged her into a really deep depression that eventually took on delusional qualities. so ever since lilian was about three years old, her mother has been referring to her exclusively as scarlett, asking her to ‘ be a good girl ’ and similarly raising her as a girl. we can see here that etherane seems to have implied that genderfluidity is something that happens because other people make it so, and isn’t an identity and lived experience. (bad take!) although, albeit unintentionally, i think etherane did lay some groundwork to talk about lilian’s relationship with her gender, specifically with regards to her projection onto her oc, charlotte. in high school, when she’s more active on the internet, we see that she’s going by charlotte and using she/her pronouns. anri, her irl friend, is pretty openly critical of that, but she sort of brushes off anri’s complaints and continues to present as feminine online. now, there’s this fanfic writer who goes by the pseudonym “c”, and lilian very quickly takes an interest in him. the way she talks to c, who doesn’t know her irl, compared anri, who does, is just like flat-out like they’re completely different people.

compare, her with c:

to her with anri:

i also wanted to mention that lili does occasionally act more “femininely” with anri, but it’s never to the extent that she does with c, and in general, affectionate banter is sort of... outright ridiculed in their friendship both ways. see this one exchange:

anri: >:) always up for some roasting lili: right? <3 <3 anri: now you’re the one being gross

unrelated but it fucking kills me that anri was like “ily <3” and lili went “gross” so she went “kys” and lili deadass goes “that’s better” like that’s what anri is referencing when she says “now you’re the one being gross” and im like... please just be healthy friends who don’t wish death on each other???

it’s also worth noting that c doesn’t know that she’s not “actually” a girl, and literally when they meet, she goes like, “it’s you who should be disappointed in me. charlotte turned out to be charles, whoops! i bet you were hoping that i’d be a cute girl.” and that’s... really depressing, like, she ended up really leaning into that cutesy side of her when she was talking to c and now she feels the need to be a lot more... sarcastic and bitter, like how she is with anri, because now c “knows the truth about her”, that she’s “actually been a guy all along”.

in any case, i think the intent that etherane was going for with this was kind of like... “lilian’s actually a repressed cis gay man!” which is . not great. it gives off this really gross vibes where it’s implied that since lili was raised as a girl and is into men, she got “confused” and started going by she/her online because she couldn’t come to terms with her sexuality or whatever. and that’s just such a bad take!!!

not to mention that a really important part of lili’s backstory is... her germaphobia. she has persistent delusions accompanied by visual hallucinations where she sees people as “parasites”, which visually manifests as them rotting or decomposing. because of that, she wears gloves all the time and is repulsed by physical touch. but when she meets c (whose real name is vincent) in person, she pretty much instantly goes for skin-to-skin contact with him, where she takes off her glove and holds his hand. and like, sure, that’s sweet, but that’s really not how mental illness... works. in the slightest. she doesn’t react at all when his hand touches hers, despite the fact that she has literally had panic attacks in canon from touching things without her gloves. and it gives off this implication that mental illness can be cured with romance somehow, and that’s a really bad take!

this feeds into fandom understanding that like, well, if lilian sees vincent as pure and allows him to touch her, then Obviously she’d let him kiss her, they could probably have sex, etc. and like... she’s canonically asexual though! and that brings us to the other implication, that asexuality is somehow... caused by something. like, there’s nothing in canon to state that lilian experiences sexual attraction (or even really romantic attraction, like i know etherane went off in heaven’s gate and did a lot of ship tease, but she never really outright says she’s crushing on anyone), but judging from the way etherane handled lilian’s gender identity, i have a sneaking suspicion that she established lilian’s asexuality with her mental illnesses specifically in mind. lilian’s autistic, germaphobic, has severe ocd, and she’s been sexually assaulted in the past. therefore, she must be asexual! that’s the sort of vibes i get from the game, and im not here for it. similarly to how her genderfluidity was handled, she makes no actual statement in canon that she doesn’t experience sexual attraction. the closest she’s ever come to this is when she says to anri in heaven’s gate that she is just straight up not interested in kissing (to which anri is like, “well what if it were vincent owo??” which. ugh. anyway). it just seems really strange to me to design a character with severe mental health issues with regards to physical touch and then just sort of treat it as a given that she’s asexual. it’s another example of etherane implying that lgbt identities are results of traumatic experiences or symptoms of mental illness and not an identity or lived experience. you can be sex-repulsed and not be asexual, and while i understand that many people do identify as ace due to trauma and other such things, it still feels like really bad rep when taken with the way lilian’s genderfluidity was portrayed.

PART 2: HOW “CHARLES” IS DIFFERENT FROM “LILIAN”

throughout hello charlotte, lilian identifies herself as a passive observer, someone who doesn’t directly interfere in events. this applies mostly to her existence in false realm, where she’s like... a god, and doesn’t want to interfere in the balance of the world. but i believe she also has always seen herself as an observer. in her very first scene, the one where she and anri are watching someone get bullied, she’s the one who tells anri that there’s no point in getting help. because her role is just to observe. to take pictures for anri, to be a good girl, to say yes to everything and to never express her opinions, feelings, thoughts.

and honestly, i think the main reason for that is that she’s dysphoric. whenever she talks about herself, she’s really self-deprecating, especially compared to when she talks about charlotte. i feel like the main reason why lilian detaches herself from the world and refuses to really perceive herself is because she’s fundamentally disgusted with her gender presentation. and like, we can see in the two times that she’s presented femininely (with c and in that one comic) that lili is just so much happier and more bubbly when she’s presenting as feminine. you can literally see her stop dissociating and becoming more present in the moment because she’s just. so much more comfortable in her skin. compare:

these pictures with this one:

it’s funny i was going to say that there is a picture where she’s presenting as masculine and actually smiles like a person, but guess what! she’s texting c! so she’s actually performing femininity!

but the point is, like... when she’s presenting as masculine, especially in the canon pictures rather than etherane’s art, she just doesn’t look... happy. and then we compare that to how much more present she seems when she’s presenting as feminine, and how much more comfortable she seems in being, like, happy! and cute! but there is a downside to this. and that is...

PART 3: DIFFICULTIES IN LILI’S TRANSITION

in my sort of... “main verse” for lili, i have it so that her suicide attempt failed and that she was somehow... saved from drowning. mother passes away and she starts to... soul search a little bit and find a reason to live, and somewhere along the line she starts to transition socially. that means she starts transitioning at a pretty... extremely vulnerable point in her life. in the year between 18-19 years old, she’d be a wreck. she’s growing her hair out, but she feels insecure about it. she starts to wear skirts, but only at home. she buys makeup and never wears it. it’s a long process for her, because it’s one thing to go by she/her online or to claim she’s just a gender-confused gay boy and a completely different thing to come out as a trans woman and to actually see herself as a woman and not some kind of imposter. considering that she was raised as a girl, she would have a large amount of guilt over transitioning, feeling like she’s going to be seen as confused, or that her gender identity is a direct result of her childhood trauma. but she’s not just worried that others will see her that way: she’s worried that she’s going to see herself that way.

and for a long time, she probably does see herself that way. for a long time, scarlett would probably treat her transition as some kind of attempt to personify her unborn sister and comply with perceived expectations rather than an attempt to feel comfortable in her own skin. she’d get nervous that she’s somehow becoming scarlett, because though she’s always thought it would be easier if she’d just been her sister, she’s never really wanted to be scarlett. she’d be scared to wear mid-length skirts, scared to put her hair up in a bun, probably even scared to wear red for a time, all because she’s scared of somehow losing herself and becoming her alter.

because of her caution and concern with identifying as a trans woman and not as the “safer“ gender identity of genderfluidity (where she can say she’s trans but never actually have to “push boundaries” by wearing feminine clothing or using any pronouns besides he/him), it would likely take her a very long time to take the step to medically transition. she’d likely never get any gender affirmation surgeries just because of how invasive the procedure is, but hormones would probably be something she’d look into once she’s much older and has a more stable income.

i mentioned before that before her transition, she uses dissociation and observation as a way to cope with her gender dysphoria. she saw herself as someone who didn’t really participate in the world, was a class ghost, invisible to everyone and a minuscule part of a vast universe. but upon transitioning, she’d feel much more actively self-conscious. once she starts to present in a feminine way, she’d feel like she’s being seen, like she’s actually participating in the world, and that’s both a blessing and a curse.

she’d be much more prone to stammering, especially when saying her name, and would blush far more often. she’d be afraid of saying the wrong thing or messing up somehow. and on top of that, she’d likely feel predatory for talking to others, always wondering if others find her cute or repulsive, always wondering if someone will perceive her and harm her in some way.

she’d very likely also feel really guilty about her own emotional experience. because she’s so used to being a passive observer, a puppet that only does what others want, she would feel like it’s selfish to be just... content. she’s so actively disgusted with herself before she transitions that she’s never allowed herself to be mentally present for a happy moment in her entire life. she always second-guesses, always dismisses positive things as a mere coincidence, and after she transitions, when she starts being more present in her life, she’d feel so guilty for just allowing herself to be happy.

because of that, she has some trouble with presenting as feminine consistently — she’d vary the “level” of her feminine presentation from day-to-day, where she might go full femme one day and another day stick with a beanie and a pair of slacks. she’s much more comfortable with presenting as more traditionally feminine when she’s at home or with trusted friends in a private space, but around 19 years old, she makes a vested effort to remain in public spaces. she’d time herself, saying, “for one hour, i’ll stay in this café while wearing a skirt, and then i can leave,” and she’d gradually increase the amount of time she spends in public spaces. and eventually, eventually she does end up feeling really comfortable with her gender presentation and falls into a more static sense of style. she really likes clothing design, so she ends up wearing a lot more dynamic outfits when she’s more comfortable with herself, and she probably also mildly gets into cosplay.

i also like to think that she reconnects with anri during her young adult years. either it’s like, right after her suicide attempt (i’ve written before that she’d had anri listed as her emergency contact and forgot to change it when she moved), or it’s at some point after she starts transitioning socially. i think it’d be really sweet for them to be friends in a more real way, and the sheer concept of anri teaching lili how to properly apply makeup and to set her hair is just so fucking sweet i might die. they both deserve to have friends so i think this is just a step up from hello charlotte canon.

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: The Actavis-Charmed White Rabbit

“Ride on, King Jesus. No man can a-hinder me.” &c. “I was but young when I begun. No man can a-hinder me.” &c. – “Ride on, King Jesus,” trad. spiritual “[The] elements which participate in the naming of the genre say nothing about the musical features, but maybe say everything about the pragmatics of the music.” – Gabriele Marino “Shit gettin’ too specific / 10 black whips, I’m too consistent.” – Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn, “POA” EVOL didn’t have to hurt, but it did anyway. As I wrote in 2016’s year-end round-up, the project came from a place of supreme negative affect, a homo-glossic hymn for the heartless. But it was brilliant: both kissing and dissing Baudrillard’s perpetually pimped system — one foot in, one foot out, in the words of one Carlton Ridenhour — it glorified and elevated the democratizing electronic reproduction technologies (i.e., DAWs) that made the trap an object of ironic reverse-salvation: more than just a locus in situ, but rather a space that has come to extend beyond temporal-spatial peripheries. EVOL eschewed mimesis, aesthetic integration, and other methods of commentary or dissent, refusing new textual structures while embracing capital and media. And yet it was pervaded and charmed by a unique, cthonic dissonance, an unflappable verbal acuity, and a flair for dramatic dialogue that, among other things, lent the project a necessary anti-message, non alternative facts. EVOL currently maintains a 6/10 user score on Metacritic. So if the medium makes the event, what claims the residual? The (pre-)produced, not the deconstructed. This crucial question-comment, an antiphonal lingerer, introduces both FUTURE and HNDRXX, twins separated at birth and equal parts of Nayvadius Wilburn’s latest project and eponymous annual feature. Both releases are less conservative, more consonant and conceptual than their year-old cousin, yet they are similarly anachronistic — without immediate precedent and avoiding emerging modalities — and, likewise, willfully ignorant of ethnic memory, along with any sincere corporal politics. The albums are rich with recuperative ideas and textures, but — unlike the heart of darkness that EVOL exposed or the heights scaled by the similarly expansive DS2 — both neglect to introduce new forms of subjectivity, instead sticking to the recognizable and shunning the reconfigured or re-encoded. As such, FUTURE and HNDRXX represent two fraternal, distinct channels of multiple identity and contradictory spirit. And while Wilburn has never been known for his consistency so much as his prolificacy, both releases, in their own ways, bathe in a lack of precision and concision, making them two of his most irregular releases yet. --- A Glorious Mess Photo: Instagram Presenting a nonlinear narrative expressed within the bounds of Wilburn’s typical, peculiar brand of promethazine-laced, earnestly-apolitical guerrilla semiotics, FUTURE, this 17-track oral odyssey, is simultaneously expansive and atomized. It is a glorious mess, inchoate and incohesive in form and objective, though always regal in pretension. Exhaustive in premise, the sheer length of the thing is demanding and results in one of his most verbose standard releases yet. It is advertised with no frills and no features, though it is, ironically, maximalist in intention. It is host to only a relatively small number of core en-bando regulars — the predictable lot of collaborators, Metro Boomin, Zaytoven, et al. — and tracks jump from interaction to action in a jarring, forced manner, shifting participatory onus onto the willing participant, demanding, again and again, critical analyses and interpretations of sequencing, companion art, etc. Despite these troublesome functions, these typical auto-histories are almost entirely logocentric, their reproductive illustration hardly pushing the sound barrier nor bolstering the appeal or nature of Wilburn’s codeine-choked, vocoded vocabulary. And for partly justifiable pretense: as What a Time to be Alive made abundantly clear, Wilburn — Astronaut, a fully-fleshed alter ego conceived and introduced in the narrows of EVOL: a reticent subject to the object Pluto and outer-spacial anti-griot active in the seeking and seizure of any negative space — is at his sharpest and most readily receptive when not stymied by the whims and wiles of those of an outer orbit. As a result, FUTURE seems to inhabit a more comfortable, self-affirming, bon vivant milieu, one that echoes the free-form, bleeding structural nature of DS2, though one counter to the asphyxiatic restraint of EVOL. The latter and FUTURE are equal-opposites, as are FUTURE and HNDRXX together, in their own, more nuanced ways. In contrast to his viscous delivery and presentational subject matter, the identities are fluid, Wilburn often self-fabricating and inhabiting Future Hendrix on the same track. The art herein gestures provocatively toward crowd-pleasing, dominant forms — embracing Wilburn’s prolific artisan-rockstar status as on lead single and self-styled whip-Shiva “Draco” or on HNDRXX’s Mustardian post-hyphy serenade “Incredible” — while at the same time innocently coveting and pretending an alternate, homogenic base, one that, in terms of lexicon, savors only distaste, hedonism, and capital (“Zoom,” “Super Trapper”). Variegated in inspiration and construction, the applied thematics and colors are, to be sure, indebted to precepts and improvisational schemata as diverse as boilerplate G-funk instrumentation (“Mask Off”), biblical-ahistorical Apocrypha (“High Demand”), athletics and English monarchical genealogy (“Lookin Exotic”), Afro-American animation history (“Super Trapper”), and rockism-affirming modalities and discourses (“Outta Time,” “I’m so Groovy,” “Use Me”). In this way, FUTURE presents a near-constant mercuriality in all respects, one unintentionally discursive upon first and even repeated listens. Ostensibly a neo-noir, it is the first Future project, to my knowledge, to feature skits. The half-sketched, condescending, and ultimately evanescent Andreësque-Snoopean-styled interludes are telling, though, pigs on the wing introducing and highlighting near-constant shifts in mood, mode, and expectation: FUTURE is also wildly uneven and inconsistent, each track transubstantiating a different, liminal amalgam of Wilburn’s stock personae. In contrast to his viscous delivery and presentational subject matter, the identities are entirely fluid, Wilburn often self-fabricating and inhabiting Future Hendrix on the same track. “I do my best to put my ego first/ I need to stop it,” Wilburn croons later on “Lookin Exotic.” And though never lacking in reminiscence, this masked other is, textually, at his least reflexive, wholly re-animating the cold-hearted caricatures EVOL brought to the fore. “I don’t care if you was my daddy/ Bitch I’ma cut off your neck” or “Sold crack to a pregnant lady/ Forgive me for the crack baby.” It’s not only to be expected but rather — in an admittedly inappropriate, spectacular fashion — welcomed: Wilburn has never truly succeeded as the tempted troubadour he aspired to be (e.g. Rihanna’s 2012 co-feature “Loveeeeeee Song”) and Romantic gestures like those making FUTURE’s penultimate track “When I Was Broke” only heighten the delightful awkwardness of transition, compounding the project’s persistent problem areas. Griots like Wilburn have traditionally held an ambiguous status, both revered and feared for their unique, lyrical ability to praise or critique. Yet Wilburn can’t seem to reconcile his will to authority with his human desire for affection and popularity, resulting in a fractured figuration of love and regret. “It can get scary when you legendary.” --- Diffusion of Ego and Selfhood Photo: Instagram Decidedly anti-Afrofuture, FUTURE and HNDRXX (the latter perhaps to a greater degree) both ignore ideology, precluding specific self-determinative typologies of diasporic history. They instead recognize and affirm a rather difference-blind urban subjecthood, a vague city-centric memory, one with yet finite reaches and concrete denotations. These stories are totems to the individual rather than the collective body, though they are firmly established in pseudo-geographic imaginations, viz the rival topography of Downtown Atlanta. The “kitchen” itself is revisited in “Scrape” and reminiscence is fond and tender, longing for a visually recognizable, though personally uninhabited, pre-Clintonian era of unfettered self-medication and exchange. It is one of FUTURE’s few political moments. Meanwhile, “I Thank U” characterizes a grotesque recognition of socioeconomic aspiration and a personal will, one insincerely personified in the nameless, disregarded, and ultimately discarded female form: “Girl, I thank you, I thank you/ I thank you/ ‘Cause you made me hustle.” Astonishingly, though, pro forma fables of interpellation, hailing by way of repressive state apparatuses (i.e., the 12, the five-o), are limited in narrative and scope, practically absent on FUTURE. The glorious absence of the political, de rigeuer for Wilburn, is notable only for its allowance of other, multicolored elements to shine to the fore. The body is also a topic of discussion, but it is a similarly fractured and elusive discourse. Here, the body reveals itself as a typical tool for extraction and gain, a figurative and literal “money machine,” a position of popped tags, a seat of sexual subjugation — “Ya baby mama fuck me better when the rent’s due” or, more pointedly and comically, “I’m ‘bout to push me some weight/ You won’t catch me in the gym.” Pucci may be different from Gucci, but, here, the song remains the same, immediately present in form and function: “I do good dope/ I got a good hoe.” This mortal corpus is furthermore a domain of abuse and disintegration: self-elision in pursuit of dissociation, mind-body dislocation (“Percocet,” Wilburn hymns delightedly on “Mask Off’s” infectious hook, “Molly, Percocet”). And to sometimes devastating effect, namely vis-à-vis “My Collection,” in which he briefly reflects, “No this codeine ain’t got nothin’ to do with my lil’ child/ I used to sell dope at my grandma’s house, as a rude child.” Or on “Might as Well,” to which age is of some concern: “I was selling crack when Snoop dropped ‘Juice and Gin’” (Wilburn was 10 years old in 1994). These are just a handful of shimmering moments that seem sincerely and meaningfully autobiographical, transcending self-imposed myth and averting any obstacle of mischaracterization. These functions of absence are yet more examples of Wilburn’s discursive methods. The body is also a topic of discussion, but it is a similarly fractured and elusive discourse. He, too, briefly pays to cum (“I’m so Groovy”), later summoning and entertaining the cursed ghost of Breezy in earnest burlesque (“High Demand”). As reflected earlier, the female body is subject to an entirely predictable, lingering gaze, one characterized and personalized by the behavior of agents of fortune populating Wilburn’s star-studded universe: “She told me she was an angel/ She fucked two rappers and three singers/ She got a few athletes on speed dial.” HNDRXX is a total rock record. Sequitur, Wilburn prefers caricatures to characters and the result is, unsurprisingly, literally objectifying. As is the case on, again, “My Collection”: “Anytime I got you, girl you my possession/ Even if I hit you once, you part of my collection.” Revisiting his tenuous relationship with ex-fiancée Ciara, this particular track makes something of a sequel to 2014’s misguided love-song “Trophy,” Wilburn only harboring an adolescent resentment for his former keepsake. “I’m so Groovy” presents a coarser analog: “Oh, that’s your bitch?/ I just bought her.” Even the aptly-titled Rihanna-feature “Selfish” is rife with interpersonal confusion and coercive tactics, interactive in its bold duplicity: the cardinal refrain “Let’s be selfish, selfish, baby/ Tonight” is an inherent evasion in its circumstance, ultimately clouding both identity and intention by way of first-person action and vernacular. (Where is the us in I?) Given the good health hip-hop is in, none of these tableaux should necessarily come as a surprise — especially coming from a man who operates prohibitively “on ratchet time,” like some Actavis-charmed white rabbit, a towering figure who once proclaimed the codeine-stained essence of his urine. Both releases neither offer, stake, nor explore any new worlds in themselves, returning only the diminished residual and the habitual. But, taken in conjunction with FUTURE’s renewed dedication to rapid-fire textual and illustrative inconsistency along with HNDRXX’s poetical, ad hoc treatment of the body and truncation of history, the project makes a token no less: reflecting a diffusion of ego and selfhood that alternately frustrates and stimulates. HNDRXX’s final track, the seven-and-a-half minute elegiac “Sorry,” is a simulation of abject contrition regarding past and future alter-egos’ behavior. Though a seemingly insufficient conclusion, the text scans like a letter penned to family, friends, and fans. Wilburn has never totally shied away from sympathetic histrionics, despite the machismo posturing, and “Sorry” embarks on yet another circuitous confession, recounting all of Wilburn’s sins, laid bare in earnest compunction. “Ain’t really tryin’ / I ain’t really tryin’,” he repeats, stammering over his auto-tuned utterances. It is an incomplete identification, neglecting the shifting autonomies that populate his character. http://j.mp/2mQabuC