#which is why I don't expect much

[elcorhamletlive]

It feels like ST is trying to deliver *something* with the queer storylines that they have chosen, but it is rather being very underwhelming. Not surprising, as you have said, ST is one of the most popular shows, it has always been quite heteronormative. Robin's character was great in S3 but was rather underwhelming in S4, and her love interest Vickie is no better, her character had only a couple of minutes in the long-running S4 which was like over 10 hours. And the way their relationship was portrayed leaves little to no hope for S5's outcomes, at best it seems like Vickie and Robin will get together in the last minutes of the season, and that way the writers will eat their cake and call it a day ''look we made a wlw couple on the show'' without having to deliver anything much.

Also, this is just my opinion but I fear or have the feeling that Robin's storyline and relationship with Vickie will be some sort of a coverup or alibi for the writers to do whatever they want to do with Will in the next season, either portraying him as suffering again, or making him end the show as single.

I think you're totally correct in your second paragraph, and tbh I have already seen this happening - people going "well, you can't complain about Will not having a romance, because the show has Vickie and Robin!", when a) the show has a fuckton of straight romances, no reason to not have more than one gay couple around; b) Robin and Will represent different identities, althought there's a lot of identification to be found under the LGBT umbrella in general, it's possible to mess up representation with one group while doing well with another; and c) (most importantly) Robin's storyline has Also not been great. I think some of the fault for the shift in her character lies with M4y4 Hawke, whose personality has definitely bled into Robin, amplifying her "quirkness". The other thing, imo, is the writers deciding that in order to pair her up with Nancy they needed to make her more bumbling and clumsy in order to contrast with Nancy's hyper competent and grounded personality. Which on a vacuum, I understand, but on screen was just annoying and took away from a dynamic that I mostly enjoyed, but thought I was going to enjoy more.

Vickie was also a disappointment, especially because they went through the trouble of casting a known actress which drove up the hype. I'm certain that there were more scenes between Robin and Vickie that ended up on the cutting room floor, and it's unfortunate because, as you said, this season is already ridiculously long, couldn't they have taken time away from something else to at least flesh out Vickie's character a bit? Like... it just feels like a basic disconnect with the gay fanbase, thinking that the bare minimum is going to be enough to get people to root for this couple.

Like you said, I do think they're trying, but it's not a priority to them, and they don't seem to know enough about the subject to give it an interesting, fleshed out perspective. Another thing that annoys me to no end is how big a role Steve plays in Robin and Vickie's storyline - like, yes, sure, Steve and Robin are a much more important dynamic in the context of the show and that is fine (though they did lowkey ruin this friendship to me with that goddamn "I'd date her" line). But there is something uncomfortable about making a significant chunk of the scenes between your only lesbian couple about your straight male character. The fact that Robin and Vickie's final scene ends with Steve looking to them and smiling shifts the focus: it's no longer about them, but about how nice a guy Steve is. And we already know Steve is an important ally to Robin, we saw it last season, we don't need it to be the eternal culmination of her storyline.

[muirmarie]

jim being canonically the shortest one of the triumvirate is genuinely so important to me lmao, like yesssssss, let that beefy babe be shorter than both his boyfriends!!!!

[royalarchivist]

This is what it feels like every time a new SMP has streamers I like

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.

[d1sc01nf3rn0]

I'm seeing a lot of people with neurodivergency, specially under the autism spectrum say that "Laios is annoying, never shuts up, is insensitive, and I can't stand him"; and the irony is not lost on me lmao.

[shalom-iamcominghome]

This isn't, like, the biggest deal, but I do find it funny when people are almost... surprised or shocked that converts unironically believe in judaism and also unironically align themselves with jewishness. It's just something I've seen a small handful of times and it's like... of course I (and others!) unironically believe in this stuff. I'm not putting in this work because I don't have enough going on in my life

[black-and-yellow]

OJ2 my beloved/hated

[icewindandboringhorror]

boy in silly sitting positions compilation

[mother-of-houseplants-2]

when will people stop talking about 'former gifted kid syndrome' like it's just "i used to be smart and now i'm not wah wah wah" and start talking about what it really is, which is "people expected perfection from me my whole life with no support and now i'm struggling as a grown up with no support"

[kakusu-shipping]

What's more cringe then a Gen 1 Pokemon S/I?

Season 1 Digimon Self Insert time, baybeee!!

[mashmouths]

so i started this show and it just gets worse and worseeeee not only did it lift the romance subplot directly from twilight (and not well) but they also are trying to play the forbidden love angle hard in the fantasy racism vein except it's a "cross-species" relationship between the two whitest people i've ever seen in my life and there are three people of color in the whole (first season of the) show who aren't villains and it seems that every other episode (and sometimes ebery episode and sometimes twice an episode!) there is a man physically or magically subjugating a woman and i keep waiting for the big reveal at the end to be stolen from fucking rainbow rowell

[ghostoffuturespast]

Honestly, getting real tired carrying and supporting other folks around here when most of them aren't returning the favor...

[creaturefeaster]

sorry if this is a weird/confusing question, but if Colorquest was real or at the very least just mimes, would they still look cartoonish irl? like next to a realistic person theyre super rounded. like something out of roger rabbits. or would they be somewhat realistic too

This isn't confusing at all. Honestly, it's something I feel like I struggle to convey to people quite often, so the fact that you ask really excites me... er, as long as I'm interpreting the question correctly, of course. Which, it feels like I am.

Yes, the mimes would feel very artificial. They are like what you would expect a 3D stick figure to look like in real life-- with the added (typically) cylinder/tube-like torso, of course. Smooth surfaces with no imperfections, no pores or divets. Round, cartoonishly proportionate living mannequins, with the surface area of their bodies scattering light in such a way that it's hard to get a read on their depth as if they are cell-shaded; They are almost walking cartoons, but with respect to three dimensional laws. Less decided upon, I often consider they'd have a start black outline around their silhouette, like the effect you find in Borderlands games for instance.

So basically yeah they'd look about how they do as they are drawn as they would in real life. The living would look like actual organic people like you and me.

[isfjmel-phleg]

Things that made writing good, at least for today:

Sitting at my desk

Writing by hand in a notebook

Not overthinking it too much (this is just a draft)

An idea that I was actually sort of excited about playing with

Research into chronologies that helped me know what all the characters in question would be dealing with at this time, and how that would inform any conflicts

I had fun

Maybe I'll want to do it tomorrow, we'll see

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

hmm liu bang being a verified member of the baby-tosser's club is not as cut and dried as i thought, apparently it's only mentioned in xiang yu's biography but is omitted in his. that's a conflict of interest if i've ever seen it. that being said, u gotta admit nothing about han gaozu make this seem at all out of character for him.

[crownedwille]

I've come to the conclusion that loving young royals doesn't mean I can't be critical about it, maybe especially bc I love the show so much I have such strong feelings about it, good and bad and I can love parts of canon and agree with it and appreciate it but I don't have to love it all. I have accepted that it's okay if I don't accept the ending and I don't have to force myself to support it. It's okay to not agree with all of canon and it's okay to not side with all of the creators' intentions/views. Loving a show doesn't mean you have to take everything the writers say on face value and that's the only version that is allowed to exist. Canon isn't everything and fandom is about curating your own experience that makes you happy and not miserable. You don't have to dismiss canon in every aspect and ignore it entirely, that's certainly not what I want but there is a fine line between being canon respectful, allowing some parts to exist and sometimes, yes, you just have to say "fuck canon" and move on for your own sanity and wellbeing