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#the rufus and jenny one… real #the serena and nate one LMAO

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it’s the way btvs is engaging with the fundamental instability of “truth” and memory with the introduction of dawn because we and the characters have entirely different memories of s1-s4. we will never see the version they know they lived and they will never see the version we believe to be “true” and “real”. is the version we saw more true because it’s the story on our screen that we have access to . is theirs, the one with dawn, more true because it’s the one they really know. there’s no answer. no one involved has the “real” story of buffy the vampire slayer. it’s the instability of absolute knowledge . “you’re just a girl” “that’s what I keep saying” in the season finale of the season where the whole world changes . reality so unstable it must be iterated again and again. reality so clear you know it even as everyone tells you it’s something different . all of this coming down to — there is your sister in the world and you love her. is that “true?”. who cares, you love her. even if it’s not true, it’s real. it’s “the wish” to “normal again” . the wish — “how do you know the other world is any better than this one” “because it has to be” — the world for the characters in the wishverse is just as real as the world they resume at the end of the episode, the pre-dawn timeline. both equally real and not real. it’s buffy in the asylum choosing the world with her sister in it even if it’s not “real” — who’s to say one thing is more real than the other. it’s “graduation day” — “is this your mind or mine?” “beats me” in a moment where dawn’s existence is peeking through the ether (counting down from 730…). is this your mind or mine. is the remembered world of the viewers real? realER than the one remembered in-show that we never see? beats me. it’s just whatever we keep saying.

#btvs #dawn summers #buffy summers #dawn & buffy #btvs meta #YEAH

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Arrested Development meets Gossip Girl  

Suggested by anonymous 

#WAIT SO TRUE #gossip girl #jenny humphrey #eric van der soodsn #jenny & eric

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LUCY HALE as JANE WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU ( 2023 ) dir. Peter Hutchings

#haven’t watched but im gay! #lucy hale beloved

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also what i really especially like about this is that alec’s actual demeanor doesn’t change that much. his expression is a little more obvious upset when he usually has a more negative affect while upset, but it’s really the magic rocks and environment swirling around him that’s supposed to show his inner state of anxiety. and the thing is!!! pretty strongly believe that’s how alec feels a lot of the time, but because he tends to have the aforementioned negative affect, it doesn’t always seem so obvious. but anxiety (and lowkey this is a straight up panic attack, i mean, the magic makes it seem more metaphorical, but it’s just highlighting what’s already there) can look different on different people, and i love seeing that with alec <3333

i do love the scene in alliance where alec, connected to lorenzo’s magic, starts freaking out because the group got split up and he can’t track or send a fire message the way he normally would and the environment growing wild around him as his panic rises… it’s literally never been clearer that the boy needs to be on SOME sort of anxiety medication lmao.

#i have several flavors of panic attack and ‘looks mostly fine if disgruntled while actually screaning internally’ is definitely one of them #not the most Common one for me but. i digress #shadowhunters #alec lightwood

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i do love the scene in alliance where alec, connected to lorenzo’s magic, starts freaking out because the group got split up and he can’t track or send a fire message the way he normally would and the environment growing wild around him as his panic rises… it’s literally never been clearer that the boy needs to be on SOME sort of anxiety medication lmao.

#shadowhunters #alec lightwood #and he calms himself down by putting in the engagement ring magnus gave him…. sobbing sobbing forever #this was actually very clear from the get-go but alliance goes out of its way tbh like ‘you know. he’s kind of still a neurotic wreck’ #and that’s so true of them

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sorry I love this painfully mid media so much I could throw up

#shadowhunters

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#shadowhunters #alec lightwood #gifs #HE GOT THIS #<3333

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SABRINA BARTLETT AS SIENA ROSSO IN BRIDGERTON

#bridgerton #gifs #siena rosso #<333

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Lily and Jenny. Jenny and Lily.

The good girls gone bad.

The transformers who’ve shaped and molded themselves into different people depending on who they felt they had to be.

From sweet young girls to the groupie & the rebel. To the billionaire’s wife & the queen bee.

The two girls who left the only home they had known as teenagers hoping for something new, something better. The two women who returned to the world that made them cold and cruel anyway.

The girls who were never allowed to deal with their trauma.

Giving up a child. A sexual assault at a party. All while still a child yourself.

Jenny tells Lily what happened. Once. She tells Lily it’s fine, she’s over it now, she wants the past to be the past.

Maybe Lily should’ve pressed more. But she doesn’t. Because she said those same words on that same couch only a year ago.

She wants to believe Jenny is fine now. She has to believe Jenny is fine now.

Because if Jenny isn’t fine now, what does that say about Lily?

#gossip girl #jenny humphrey #lily van der woodsen #!!!! #sexual assault //

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#unapologetically free form’s shadowhunters #unfortunately the presentation will likely barely be focused on the plot and more so on the complicated inner workings of the lightwood #family dynamic

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souvenir

trigger warnings: this is a jenny character study fic that takes place in the context of the s3 finale and all the ensuing dubious consent issues regarding the situation with ch*ck. there are mentions of bleeding as the result of her first sexual experience, self-blaming thoughts, a very conflicted jenny who is spiraling, and a moment of suicial thoughts/urges. please proceed with caution and no worries if this is too triggery for anyone.

note: title is a reference from the song 'souvenir' by annie blackman, which did partly inspire the fic. feel free to listen while you read for maximum emotions. also shout out to @fritextramole for making me realize jenny took the sheets with her?? which i somehow never realized before?? anyway. here we go.

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Jenny’s making the bed back up when she sees it—dark crimson spotting the bedsheets, pooled in one area and then scattered out like starburst specks. If the room was any dimmer, she might not have seen it. It reminds her of the night she got her first period at eleven and three-quarters, and her mother had to help her wash her bedspread in the middle of the night, back when her mother still wanted to be around. Then, she’d cried and felt merely embarrassed, but her mother had soothed her back to sleep with relative ease. She told her it was perfectly natural and stayed sitting with Jenny until she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore.

Now, Jenny thinks maybe she should be afraid—is that what’s supposed to happen? part of her wonders—but mostly, she feels hollowed out and shameful, like a dark, dirty secret is out on display for the rest of the world to see. Something territorial claws inside her chest.

She glances through the frosted glass window of Chuck’s room and makes out the shadowed shapes of him and Blair, her sitting, as though in tableau, on one of the kitchen stools, him saying something she doesn’t care to discern, probably in that low, raspy, harsh voice of his, the voice that—

She calculatedly, purposefully does not shiver, performing for an audience that isn’t around and wouldn’t care anymore, anyway. Her father’s given up on her, and she doubts Dan is far behind.

They’re shipping her off to a mother she doesn’t think will recognize her.

What Chuck did tonight—what she let happen, she didn’t say no, she didn’t want to be alone, she didn’t say no, she didn’t—is what they’ve been expecting from her. Maybe that’s why she let it go on, why the ache between her legs feels almost like a degrading kind of defiance. They wanted a lost cause, and now they had one.

She strips the bed of its sheets and doesn’t give the bare mattress a second thought. Chuck’s probably got a thousand spares anyway, and he’s certainly rich enough to buy more, even if he doesn’t. And she knows he won’t want Blair seeing the mess he’d left, even if she feels a little sick at the thought. 

Is there someone in there?

No, nobody.

Jenny doesn’t know if Chuck knows she could hear him from inside his bedroom walls. It doesn’t matter, anyway. She’d stopped listening after that. It’s not like she didn’t know she was nobody to him. She hates him, she hates him, so why—?

But it’s nothing she didn’t already know. 

In the darkness, left in the wake of the candle she’d snuffed out for him, she is nobody, and she is nowhere.

Nobody doesn’t leave through the front door. She cracks open his window and journeys down the fire escape, the ruined sheets dangling from her shoulder as she goes, lightly flowing in the late-night breeze. 

It would be so easy to go a little too fast while a little too high, to let the sheets get tangled up, and to trip off one of the rungs. People might even think it was an accident. She closes her eyes against the image. When she opens them again, she continues her descent. When she gets to the second to last rung, she makes a little hop and lands firmly on the cement beneath her. She sticks the landing.

She needs to get rid of the sheets. She can’t leave them here—she can’t leave her blood on Chuck’s property, can’t let him have anything else of her—but she can’t take them back to Lily’s place, where anyone could see.

Funny. For all her talk this last year, Jenny still thinks of it that way, with its pristine walls and fine silverware. The idea of the bloody, sex-stained sheets stuffed into a trash can there is incongruous with the image she has of the well-manicured place, lovely but cold and impersonal, without any of the clutter of her childhood home. For so long, all Jenny wanted was to belong in a place like that. And now that she does, somehow, she still doesn’t.

With the sheets bunched up against her chest, all of a sudden, she feels very small.

It’s nearing summer, but still, her bare arms pick up the chill of night as she hears her phone buzzing. It’s another text from her father, asking where she is and would she please answer him. 

Everyone’s at the hospital, she knows. She knows she isn’t welcome. Still. It’s where everyone is. Where else is she supposed to go? Her home isn’t her home, and she can’t stay here.

She shrugs on her jacket and manages to hail a cab. The woman behind the driver’s seat doesn’t ask her what’s wrong, but she stares at Jenny in the rearview mirror a moment too long, and that’s when Jenny realizes she’s crying, eyeliner gone wet and ugly and smudged. The driver asks if she cares for any music. Jenny shrugs and doesn’t say anything but the address. Some top forty hit plays, as though this is any night at all.

The driver says nothing further. Jenny tips her with a twenty.

When she gets to the hospital, she finds a dumpster out behind the back of the building and disposes of the sheets there. No one dumpster diving at a hospital would think twice about those bloodied sheets. She can’t even find it in herself to be proud of the fact as she stares at them there. 

Unbidden, a memory comes. In it, Dan is playing at superhero, the colorful kiddy sheets from his bed tucked behind the back of his t-shirt and flowing behind him like a cape as he whizzes around the old Brooklyn apartment, Jenny propped up on his shoulders. 

Higher, Dan, she’d hollered. Higher, higher, I wanna fly!

It is cold, and late, and dark, and she is standing out by a dumpster, and all she can think is what she asked Nate weeks ago now: what’s wrong with me? how’d i end up here?

But maybe what she’d really meant was, Why does this keep happening? or, Is it just me? Do I cause this somehow? It might just be me.

At the time, he’d said there was nothing wrong about her. She wonders what he might say now. 

She can’t stay out by the dumpster, either. For the stench and the sight of those goddamn sheets, if nothing else. 

But she can’t face everyone. Today is supposed to be a joyful day, with a new life emerging. All she seems able to manage is to make things worse for herself and everyone around her, so she wanders the hospital aimlessly for a while. People don’t seem to pay her any mind, busy nurses brushing past her aside. 

Eventually, she finds her way to the empty hospital chapel and regards it, for a moment, with idle fascination and something akin to grief. Her family’s not exceptionally religious, only really going to church for things like Easter, and even that’s been a forgotten tradition for years. Christmas has long since become an excuse to buy presents and drink hot cocoa, yet it hasn’t truly felt the same since their parents split up.

Truthfully, she’s not even sure she believes much in God, these days. But maybe she can tell herself she does.

She sits, feeling a little bit like it’s forbidden, like any moment, someone will come and shoo her out, as though she’s nothing but a nuisance, a chastened child.

When no one comes, she starts to pray. She prays for things she can’t quite name. But she thinks she wants to try.

The loss of childhood, she thinks. To feel clean again.

She waits and waits and waits to feel different, not bothering to clear her face of the storm of inky makeup she knows her tears have left in their wake.

It’s a long time before anyone comes searching for her. She can’t blame them, she doesn’t think. It’s not like she can find herself, either.

#anti chuck bass #jenny humphrey #can't decide if i wanna post to ao3 or not #might change my mind but no for now #anyway. i just have a lot of thoughts and feelings about her #this is messy but #my fic #dubious consent // #sexual assault #suicidal thoughts // #ask to tag // #rape //

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I feel like there’s definitely an alternate universe where Jenny & Eric dated for like a month and then Eric came out as gay. Like I feel like artsy girls briefly dating gay guys before they come out was a right of passage at my high school. Canon event.

well now I need a fic where, instead of the 2 episode asher arc, eric is the boyfriend jenny finds until he comes out in the next episode. I think that would make me normal

#gossip girl #eric van der woodsen #jenny humphrey #eric & jenny #dan humphrey #serena van der wooden #rufus humphrey #OH I LOVE THIS

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I really do wish we'd gotten the eric season 4 guilt spiral bc how do you even begin to unpack all of that. eric was friends with chuck. he probably did tell jenny that "chuck's not so bad once you talk to him" (how could he know that jenny tried and was almost raped in return? she's doesn't exactly talk about it)

"he has always been that person and he always will be" could he have known? could he have said something at the time? could he have prevented some of it?

chuck was his brother until bart died and chuck made it clear he didn't want to be anymore- he never apologized. jenny was his sister until she made it clear she doesn't wanna be. eric finds her in the chapel and doesn't mention being family at all. "you're still my best friend"

he stops talking to chuck midway through season 2. chuck apologies to jenny towards the end of the season- eric probably finds out then. he doesn't go back to talking to chuck

he spends most of season 3 at odds with jenny. the moments where he's not are moments he isn't there. eric was never a series regular

jenny didn't talk to chuck until in season 3. because chuck "deeply regrets his actions." he promised to not be around but he's around her more than ever. didn't he graduate? why is he scheming with a high schooler? dan and serena barely talk to their respective younger siblings anymore. it's just jenny, eric, and chuck

but eric was never a series regular. so jenny falls further and further in with chuck

eric doesn't do anything to stop it. he cant stop anything. and nobody can stop jenny. (he encouraged this, once upon a time)

jonathan breaks up with eric. but that's jenny's fault. everything's jenny's fault

jenny's crying in the chapel. her family hates her. everyone wants to send her away. even she wants to send her away. only eric wants her to stay- but eric cant stop anything. and nobody can stop jenny

she also says it wasn't chuck's fault. you know that's not true. not everything is jenny's fault

chuck hurt jenny, and eric's seen the full extent. he knows it's unforgivable

chuck hurt serena, but eric only knows parts. and everyone knows chuck's a sleaze (and serena's a slut) so everyone forgets. (maybe even serena, who encourages her best friend to date chuck. you try not to think about it)

jenny's gone. eric's second older sister would kill her if she came back (she begged chuck to come back)

elliot breaks up with eric and that's not jenny's fault. jenny's not even here and things are still bad. was anything jenny's fault?

damian's here. and at least he's someone. and the way that ended probably wasn't jenny's fault (even if the way it went might have been)

but damian was only here for serena (because it's always about serena) but at least she's safe. and at least eric got some sleep

jenny's gone, but she's still a series regular. you assume things are better for her. things don't seem like they're allowed to get better for her

jenny's in hudson and serena's in college and chuck should be in hell but he's not

it's tragic

it was avoidable

if only eric could stop anything

eric tells rufus what happened. he's angry until he's told not to be. you're pretty sure his wife is lying. she seems the type

jenny's gone and jonathan's gone and elliot's gone and damian's gone serena's in college and chuck's still not in hell

dan knows. dan's angry too

until dans dating blair. then it stops coming up

but at least blair isnt dating chuck

at least chuck can feel like he's in hell

eric was never a series regular

#rape tw #gossip girl #eric van der woodsen #jenny humphrey #anti chuck bass #!!!!!! #i think ‘he’s angry until he’s told not to be’ is my fave line #lots to unpack there #just. GOD #i respect conner didn’t want to be a series regular but THE WORLD IF ERIC WAS GIVEN MORE NARRATIVE AGENCY?? #and was forced to reckon with these things #serena van der woodsen #his guilt about jenny atp also would absolutely force him to reckon with him bonding with chuck while he was actively sexually harassing #serena #i don’t hate eric i Love him #but he has flaws let him have flaws and storylines!!?

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i would give ANYTHING to have a transcript of what all the different characters are yelling at each other while A) they’re under a spell B) alec is literally lying unconscious on the ground right behind them C) magnus solves whole whole thing by himself. lmao

#STILL THIS. AGAIN

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still this. i guess technically we did see the baby lightwood sib trio in a training flashback in s3! but! c’mon! canon era alec & izzy training sequence would have HIT

the fact that we never got an alec&izzy sparring/training scene is criminal btw!

#why would they deprive us in this way. inquiring mind want to know #shadowhunters #lightwood siblings #alec lightwood #isabelle lightwood

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propaganda rant: justice for my girl!!

tw: discussion of sexual assault, dubious consent situations, bullying, and classism

jenny humphrey was a bright-eyed, ambitious, creative character who sure, had flaws, but was not any more flawed than the rest of the (wealthy) main cast, yet they are celebrated by the narrative and fandom where she is punished and ridiculed. people who argue she got ‘annoying’ in the later seasons fail to recognize that after 3 seasons of bullying, family issues, and multiple incidents of being (or almost being) sexually assaulted, she developed such a personality as a defense mechanism! and then, at the ripe age of 16, her family decided she is, idk, evil for acting out, instead of a traumatized girl who needs to go to therapy, and decides to ship her off to her mother in a diffirent city (and while this is probably the best thing for her, the way the narrative frames it is like. everyone throws their hands up in the air and goes “guess she’s a lost cause!”) and when it’s clear she feels she has nowhere else to turn, chuck, a character with a history of abusive behavior and sexual assault (who assaulted HER in the very first episode of the show) preys on her emotional vulnerability and that is her first sexual experience, which i would argue was inherently a dubious consent situation at Best. chuck’s main love interest blair will find out and blame jenny (and chuck, but she eventually forgives him) despite them not being together when it happens, and will repeatedly slutshame her for it and “banishes” her from the city, promising to make her life a living hell if she returns (and when she does, that’s where the slutshaming comes in.) casual viewership and general fandom spaces alike to this day will commonly refer to jenny, a traumatized 16 year old girl, as annoying and villify her for doing the same things as the other main cast members (and will often do even more of, re manipulation, spreading rumors, etc.) to really hammer home how bad and evil she is (the narrative claims its the vity bring out the worst in her, which is bey she needs to stay away, but it’s really plot contrivance) they bring her back and have her participate in a sketchy plot to take another main character down a peg, basically. she didn’t realize the extent of the plot (which was being led by an antagonistic recurring character) and eventually came clean about it. but it’s such?? a weird moment? for a character that the narrative had previously shown was working on growing and healing and changing.

also: she, as a character who, while not impoverished, is not wealthy in the way most of the main cast is, and she’s villainized both in-show and in-fandom for being a “social climber” in a narrative that glamorizes wealth and privelege, and because the industry she’s interested in (fashion design) neccessitates having those kind of contacts, and because she wants to make friends at the private school her father insists she go to, she works REALLY hard to fit in, but because that upsets the status quo, she’s treated as immoral for it. will defend her to my dying breath, so just wanted to say my piece in her favor.

Round 2

Matthew Leibowicz submission

Jenny Humphrey submission

#gossip girl #jenny humphrey #she may not win the poll but i still need people to know what they DID to my girl #jenny ily forever <3 #polls