#I'm seriously not kidding it's a long goddamn post

[awheckery]

DEATH TW and mentions of murder so if that is triggering for you don’t read, but if it’s not then i’d like to ask if you’ve heard of forensic genealogy? while i am uneasy at the prospect of using it to find suspects, it can also be used to find the identities of unidentified decedents, who die of accidental causes or are murdered, and often it’s the only hope to identify those who have been unidentified for decades. the dna doe project is a nonprofit that’s mostly volunteer run, and i think that your research skills could be useful there or somewhere like there. i know this is kind of a random ask to receive, identification of unidentified remains is my special interest but i don’t have the time or training to get better at researching beyond a few tricks here and there.

I feel like we've read the same articles recently; did you see the tumblr post (and linked articles) about Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the Boy in the Box?

Which is to say, yes, I am aware of forensic genealogy and the DNA Doe Project, because like many white American women, I'm a true crime junkie.* My big Thing is investigative procedure tho, so I'm also deeply interested in plane & train crash investigations, medical mysteries, archaeology, anthropology... basically 'what happened, and by which processes and methods do we figure out what happened?'

So far as getting into the game myself, I dunno. I assume there's probably some sort of required formal training, along with the expectation of reliability and sustained effort, and I'm a chronically ill autodidact with ADHD. I'm the research equivalent of a sprinter; investigative genealogy requires a marathoner, because there's so much exhausting, grinding work involved.

Something I've never seen brought up before in any investigation is how many extant family trees are just wrong. Genealogical sites make it too easy to crib notes from other users, and all it takes is one person deciding 'eh that's probably the right guy' for dozens of other amateur researchers to make the same mistake, and then somebody ties that erroneous information to their DNA profile. I don't know how the forensic genealogists deal with that.

You also have to take into account how many people throughout history have just gone missing, or otherwise fallen off the historical record. Just because someone's date of death is absent doesn't mean something nefarious happened to them. (Just because someone's date of death is present doesn't mean it's correct.) People emigrate. They marry. They change their names. They die alone and unknown in a ditch**, or they die somewhere that doesn't make those records public***. Paper records can burn or flood out, and family stories rarely make it down more than one or two generations. History is messy.

I've only done serious research into my family background for two years, in fits and starts interrupted by illness flare ups. Half the time it feels like I find more questions to ask than I get answers. I've found a pair of illegitimate daughters and a handful of adoptees. I've found some two dozen 'missing persons' who may as well have disappeared into thin air, for how suddenly they dropped out of the historical record. I've found a murder victim and a (maybe) would-be murderess.

And four months ago, I found the answer to another family's 150 year old missing person case, and it changed everything I thought I knew about my mother's family.

This is how.

Five months ago, I thought I knew everything there was that could be known about John Robert McDowell.

I knew he was born July 1st of either 1868 or 1869, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. According to his naturalization petition, he came to the United States in April of 1883, when the absolute oldest he could have been was fourteen, and at the time of his naturalization in 1896 he claimed his nationality was English, presumably due to anti-Irish sentiments at the time.

I knew John's handwriting was idiosyncratic: he wrote the J in his name with a rightward upper loop that scooped up again before curving back around the center staff, and his uppercase R was a mess of curlicues. I've never seen the like before or since.

I knew that despite living in America for ten years longer than he'd lived outside it, John still had an accent in 1908 when his second son was born. Spelling is incredibly inconsistent across historical records because up until very recently, it was the practice of the record keepers to write down their best guess at what they heard, and in 1908 a midwife heard and recorded John's surname as McDoul.

John's life was actually remarkably well-documented, in comparison to his contemporaries. I bought myself access to Newspapers.com along with my Ancestry subscription, and he made semi-regular appearances in the Newport News Daily Press for the better part of thirty years as a Navy veteran, successful entrepreneur, and president of a labor union that later became the United Steelworkers Local 8888. (A seemingly throwaway notice in the Daily Press was the only record I've yet been able to find for his divorce, which eventually led me to find out whatever happened to his wife, which is another saga entirely. Pauline, you dirty rotten cheater.)

I knew that John was in and out of the hospital with thyroid cancer, but he was such a tough old bastard it took the better part of fifteen years to kill him, and he died in 1954 at the age of 86.****

According to John's death certificate (and the U.S. Government records at the VA hospital where he died), his parents' names were Thomas McDowell and Isabell Rabb (or possibly Robb, the Accent strikes again.)

This is the only record linked to either of them on Ancestry.com at all.

I have most of a history degree, so I wasn't surprised. There are next to no records of the 1890 census of the United States, and that was down to a fire in the National Archives. Ireland was dragged backwards through hell by the ankles for centuries by a succession of British monarchs and governments, and Belfast was in the prime of especially conflicted territory for much of it. No census records from John's lifetime were kept, and the likelihood his parents would show up in the surviving fragments from 1841 and 1851 was slim to none.

There were transcribed indexes from birth and marriage records available, at least, and I scoured them through, looking for a John McDowell, and there wasn't a single damn one born to a Thomas or Isabelle McDowell in a decade on either side of 1868. There wasn't any record I could find at all of a Thomas McDowell marrying an Isabelle Rabb until well after John left Ireland.

Five months ago, as far as I knew, John Robert McDowell was probably a bastard, who'd either been left out of whatever records were taken at the time, or he was one of the unfortunate ones whose birth record had been lost.

Four months ago, I realized that the record indexes on Ancestry included film numbers, which meant there were pictures of those records to be found somewhere. If they were organized chronologically, I could try to find his birth registration that way. Googling "ireland civil registration records" brought me to the Civil Records search page of a genealogy site run by, of all things, the Irish government's tourism department.

Once again, there wasn't a John McDowell born to the right parents during the right time period, so I went looking for his parents' marriage. And found it.

If they married in 1872, John would probably still technically be a bastard, but I had a point to start from. Once I clicked into the actual scan of the record I nearly snapped myself in half sitting upright in attention, because Thomas McDowell's father's name was Duncan, John named his eldest son Duncan, Isabella's father's name was John, I had to have the right two people, this couldn't be a coincidence.

And then I noticed Isabella was a widow. Isabella was a widow.

Who was your husband, and when did he die, Isabella? I searched again, and found her marriage to a Thomas Logan July 30th, 1866. No men named Thomas Logan died in Belfast between 1866 and 1870, which meant he was probably still alive when John was born. It meant I had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.

John Robb Logan came into the world on July 1st, 1868, in the Ballymacarrett district of Belfast, the second child of four born to Thomas Logan and Isabella Robb. Once I knew what I was looking for the rest came easy.

John's early life was riddled with tragedies. His younger brother Joseph was six months old when he died in March of 1870. His father died of smallpox in December of the same year, exactly one month after the birth of his sister Mary. Three months before his fifth birthday, his first half-sibling Bella died, at just five months old. And in 1879, his older brother William died after a long, miserably drawn-out illness from spinal tuberculosis.

(As an aside, god, poor Isabella. She had four children with Thomas Logan, and a further nine with Thomas McDowell, and before her early death from a long respiratory illness she buried a husband, two sons, and two daughters. How do you go on after that, how are you not forever shattered?)

If I hadn't been sure I'd found the right family, I was after William died. Thomas McDowell was the person who reported William's death to the registrar's office after sitting by his deathbed. The registrar recorded William as a "child of [the] baker" that Thomas was by profession; Thomas McDowell claimed his stepson as his own.

Duncan McDowell, John's step-grandfather, had a family burial plot in Ballygowan, and he named William Adam Logan as his grandson, with no qualifiers, when they buried him.

All the evidence suggests that the McDowells loved John Robb Logan and his siblings, and he loved them back every bit as much. You don't choose to take on the surname of people you hate, and it seems very much the case that John chose to go by McDowell when he came to America. I'm honestly not sure there was a way for Thomas McDowell to bequeath his name to his stepchildren, given John's brother William died a Logan and his sister Mary married as one.

John Robb Logan disappeared from history after his baptism, and John Robert McDowell made his first confirmed appearance in the historical record in 1883, but I was certain they were one and the same. The problem was proving it to my mother, because McDowell was her family name. She'd grown up with it, as had her sisters and her dozens of cousins and her father and his siblings and her father's father; I only had a paper trail arguing the name she knew didn't belong to any of them by blood.

So I went for blood.

I refuse to give my DNA to Ancestry.com on a principle born from paranoia and ethics concerns. It's absolutely not happening, ever, like hell do I expect a corporation to do the right thing with my genetic material. My mother doesn't share my concerns, either now or four years ago, when she bought an Ancestry DNA kit and then did absolutely nothing with her results besides marvel at the unexpected Swedish heritage in her 'Ethnicity Estimate' because doing anything else looked like too much work.

It took a few days to figure out how to hook my mother's DNA results into the tree I've built, and a few more for all the features to populate, but all told it took less than a week between learning the truth about my great-great-grandfather's parentage and proving it irrefutably with DNA, via several descendants of his full-blooded sister Mary and a grandson of his half-brother Wallace.

Ancestry doesn't tell you when new DNA matches are found, or when someone adds you to their tree (and thank god for that, my mother has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand matches). To those descendants of Mary Thomasina Logan, the handful of John's descendants who've shelled out for Ancestry DNA kits could be any random person. Frequently the relationships between matches aren't clear, because of all the folks like my mom who never add a tree to their results, or those who don't try to go any further back than their grandparents.

As far as Mary Logan's descendants know, the sons of Thomas Logan dead-ended his line, and when I do find John in their trees there's never more than a birth year and a blank space where there would usually be a year of death. (They all have the wrong Isabella Robb too, but I don't really blame them; apparently Isabella was one of the most popular names for girls for well over a century, and Robbs weren't exactly thin on the ground.)

Someday soon, I'm going to reach out. People who study genealogy do it because they're looking for something: long lost relatives, answers to questions asked too late, or even a better, more personal understanding of history by learning about the people who were there when it happened. Every family has its mysteries and this one, at least, could be solved.

John's story doesn't end here. Here is where it begins.

~

*I'm aware of the problematic nature of White Lady True Crime Brain Poisoning, but I'm gonna have to pull the 'I'm not like other girls' card. I'm incredibly discerning about my crime shows, I hate the fucking cops, and I'm realistic about how unbelievably low my chances are of ever being the victim of a violent crime. I'm white, I'm broke as shit, I'm built like a running back and walk like the Terminator, and most importantly, I'm single and planning to stay that way for the rest of my life. The only way I'm getting murdered is if I happen to get caught in a random mass shooting, which isn't outside the realm of possibility because America.

**In case anyone's gotten this far and is still interested, there's strong evidence that the mystery of the Somerton Man was finally solved last year. At some point I'd like to take a look at the tree the forensic genealogists built tho, because I have some Doubts. There was only one person in that family that fell off the map in the 40's? Just one? I was lightning-strike kinds of lucky enough to find John's real parentage, but I dug up more unanswered questions with it, because two of his half-brothers dropped out of the records after 1901. Completely setting aside the possibility of infidelity in the Webb family and how common inbreeding has been (both historically and in recent memory) in populations of European descent, I have a hard time buying that Carl Webb was the only person who could be the Somerton Man. It's still cool as shit that they have a strong possibility tho.

***Maryland and Kansas specifically can blow me, if somebody died in either of those states I have to find an obituary or a tombstone to get the mcfrickin' date, and I have to either pay money and prove a relationship to see a death certificate, or show up to an archive in person to search on their intranet, MARYLAND WHY DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO KNOW WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER DIED. (Being fair, I don't know if she died in Maryland, that's just a great-uncle's best guess, because she ran away from her family in 1949 and nobody ever saw her again after the early 60's. Helen, where the hell did you go?)

****One of the big reasons why I got into genealogy in the first place was to see if I could find how far back the predisposition to early deaths and autoimmune disease went in my family. What I hadn't expected to find was a predisposition for extreme longevity on all sides. Longevity as in 'skewing the life expectancy bell curve' kinds of longevity. As long as someone didn't come down with a freak illness or make a looooooooong string of poor life choices, they were apparently immune to death, which honestly explains a few things about Crazy Grandma, god damn.

#genealogy #forensic genealogy #research throwdown #storytime with stella #long post #I'm seriously not kidding it's a long goddamn post #image heavy #all images described in alt text #I don't think I did a particularly great job communicating why I shouldn't get into this professionally #this took a long goddamn time to figure out #I think most people want answers quicker than *checks back of hand* seven-ish months? #fwiw my mother took it remarkably well #our big family mystery has always been What Happened to Helen? #that was probably the central question of my grandfather's life: not knowing what happened to his mother #so that was my mom's big question too #and luckily we had other weird familial circumstances as precedent #me: 'heyyyyyyyy uh so great news yr great-grandfather wasn't a criminal on the lam OR a bastard child. he was kind of adopted?' #mom: 'adopted??? huh. like your grandpa with the mudds?' #me: '....actually. yeah. almost *exactly* like that. but like if grandpa changed his last name and then never told you he'd done it' #tho I still have no idea why john changed 'robb' to 'robert' #my theory for a long time was that he was just REALLY leaning into the scottish heritage; the guy named his sons duncan & bruce #then I learned about irish naming conventions and while that answered some questions it just wound up leaving me with MORE questions #I went through all 8 stages of grief a year ago when I figured out john's presbyterian funeral meant the fam married into catholicism LATER #and thus were probably scots colonizers to the plantation of ulster instead of former gallowglasses #I don't love the idea of my ancestors being unionist kiss-asses #which the naming scheme kinda supports #but john was a LABOR UNION ORGANIZER #he left well before the clearances in the 20's but labor activism was synonymous with catholicism & nationalism for aaaaaaaages #he had to have picked that up from a parent. two of his half brothers (who also emigrated to the states) were union members too

[apuckishwit]

With a Capital P

Saw this post about Stobin having no boundaries, by @grimmfitzz and oops, my hand slipped.

By all rights, there should be some awkwardness. A little lingering strangeness, an adjustment period, if you will. After all, only a few days ago, he fully thought he had feelings for Robin. Well, obviously he does have feelings for her...but he'd thought they were entirely different than the ones he has.

He's maybe a little more concussed than he'd convinced the paramedics he was. To be fair, they had a lot going on.

The point is, he feels like there should be more weirdness. A time period in which he awkwardly shuffles Robin from a box marked 'possible girlfriend?' to the one marked just 'friend'--the one Tommy and Carol used to occupy before things went so sideways (though he's still too afraid to really examine the spaces those two left, too afraid it'll just confirm that he wasted so much time with people who were never his friends at all). Maybe even slot her into the box he's slowly constructing for the kids...something not quite labeled 'friend' and not quite labeled 'family' and quickly coming to take up the biggest chunk of his battered, lonely heart (oh, wow, yeah...definitely more concussed than he let on).

Turns out, though, that being drugged and tortured together, and then launching an assault on a gigantic flesh beast from another dimension with nothing but fireworks and nerve lets you skip over a lot of the beginning phases of a relationship (romantic or otherwise). Also turns out there's a secret, fourth box he didn't even know about. One that's just marked 'Robin' that he has apparently been just waiting for her to come along and fill.

Robin ends up spending most of the rest of the summer at Steve's house, more often than not. He doesn't know what she tells her parents. Doesn't particularly care. He's always had a weird relationship with parental care and authority, so he's not sure he's really in a position to have an opinion about if Robin is lying to her parents about where she is, or if they don't care that she's hanging out at his place so much.

They spend days abusing the central air, or watching movies they swipe from Family Video, or eating snacks out by the pool (he tells her she's welcome to swim, she notes that he never gets in the water himself and doesn't ask questions...but also doesn't move from his side). At first, he makes up a guest room for her when she spends the night, but after the fourth or fifth time one (or both) of them wake up screaming (goddamn, goddamn, goddamn it, he'd just gotten a handle on the nightmares about impossible creatures bursting from the wall, now he gets new material to deal with?) Robin just groans and collapses onto Steve's bed, burrowing under his blankets with him.

"Your room is hideous," she grumbles, grabbing one of his hands and bringing their joined fingers to rest in the small space between their bodies.

"I know," he shrugs. He squeezes her hand. She squeezes back. He listens to her breaths in the dark, feels the warmth radiating off of her. It's comforting. Grounding. He's not alone. Whatever terrors the night brings for them, they'll face it together.

He wakes up hours later, sunlight streaming into his room and the beautiful girl he'd thought he was falling for snuggled right up against his side, the two of them having moved in the night. It should be the stuff of adolescent fantasies but all he feels is a distant sort of confusion that they actually slept so long. Robin's face is smashed into his shoulder and he realizes he's been drooling into her hair, and the first thing she does when she wakes up is shriek about it.

"Ewww, gross! Seriously?!"

"I didn't do it on purpose!"

"Spit, Steve! My hair is covered in your spit!"

"Well I'm pretty sure this giant booger on my shirt isn't mine, Buckley!"

"Are you accusing me of--oh, wow that is big." Robin starts rubbing at her nose as she stalks into the bathroom and the shower starts running a moment later. He opens the door long enough to toss a clean towel onto the sink and then wanders down to the kitchen to start coffee.

She makes fun of his bedhead when she comes down the stairs, he goggles at the amount of milk and sugar she puts in her coffee. And he never makes up the guest room for her again.

*

"I am telling you, Johnson is trying to kill us with his exams! It's barely October and we've already had three!" Robin stabs angrily at the chicken cutlets in the pan with her fork, holding one up so Steve can see how brown it is on one side. At his nod, she starts flipping them over. She ducks her head without looking when he reaches over her to snag the basil out of the spice cabinet, still stirring the tomato sauce with his free hand.

"Yeah, Johnson's a dick. Glad I'm done with his class for good." He dips the spoon out of the sauce and blows on it for a moment before tasting, then holds the spoon out for Robin to lick the rest of it off.

"Mmm, more red pepper. And I know! You're so lucky. How did you even pass? Cheryl Mackey was crying in the band room after she got her test back, and she's like, straight a student all the way." Robin finishes flipping the chicken and goes back to chopping carrots for their salad.

"Oh, Robert O'Connell--the guy that works down at the Snack n' Go?--he saved all his tests from when he had Johnson a few years ago. Johnson never writes new ones. You give Robert 20 bucks, you can get any of the answer keys."

Robin sets the knife down and reaches into Steve's back pocket, pulling his wallet out. "Couldn't have told me this earlier?" she grouses, yanking two tens out and shoving the wallet back in his pocket.

"Hey, that's my gas money for the week!" He grabs the pot with the noodles off the stove and takes it to the colander waiting in the sink, sticking his ass out expectantly.

"You look like a hooker trying to pick up johns."

"Well give me at least half my gas money back so I don't have to sell my body to drive you and Henderson to school this week."

"Ugh, fine." She grabs his wallet again and stuffs one of the tens back into it. Then winds up one of his dish towels and smacks his rear end hard enough that he jumps about a foot in the air.

He dumps the drained noodles back into the pot and turns around to bring it back to the stove only to find that Robin is right behind him with the pot of sauce, apparently having been bringing it over to the sink. They collide, hard, and Robin screams bloody murder as hot spaghetti sauce gets dumped all down her front.

"Hot, hot, hot, fuck, hot!"

"Shit, hold on!" He all but tosses the pot of noodles back into the sink and snatches the sauce pot out of her hands. As soon as he does she's whipping off her shirt and grabbing the dish towel she hit him with, wiping off the smears of sauce that got onto her arms. "Did it burn you?" he asks, searching her torso for blisters, even though he knows at the back of his mind that the sauce was only on a simmer.

"No...no, I think I'm good. Damn, I liked that shirt, though." She straightens, glaring down at the sauce pot he slammed onto the counter.

"You sure you're okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine."

He holds his tongue for approximately zero point three seconds.

"Okay, then can we talk about this whole situation, cause I feel like I just got a major piece of the puzzle of why you don't have a girlfriend, yet. What the hell are you wearing?"

Robin's bra is so faded it's unclear what color it was originally, two large tears right above the elastic band.

Robin looks almost comically offended. "Excuse me? I'm sorry, are you commenting on my very comfortable and perfectly functional underwear?"

"Functional, yeah, if the function is 'never get laid ever'."

Robin crosses over to the doorway that leads to the laundry room. "We can't all exclusively wear Calvin Klein, Harrington!"

"How do you know what underwear I wear?"

"Am I wrong? Also, Jesus Christ do you own any normal shirts?"

"What's wrong with my shirts now? Hey, I'm not taking fashion advice from a girl in a, a grandma bra!"

"Hey!" She steps back out of the laundry room, wearing one of his old basketball team shirts.

They keep bickering back and forth as Steve tries to salvage dinner, eventually ending up just sitting on his kitchen counter dipping pieces of breaded chicken into the remains of the pasta sauce in the pot, having decided they really didn't want to eat spaghetti that had to be fished out of the sink.

"I'm not buying a bunch of frilly, sparkly lace just to wear under my clothes," Robin informs him. "That shit itches."

"Not saying you have to, but at least get something that doesn't look like it came out of the bottom of my gym bag."

"Eww, don't talk about your gym bag while I'm eating!"

*

It is a slow day in Family Video, and Robin has been casting him strangely intense looks since she came on shift. He restocks the shelves, picks through the candy to take home the almost expired shit to give to the kids, and is halfway through the rewinding before it finally gets to him.

"What?!" he demands. Robin blinks at him, immediately shrugging. A little too fast, actually.

"What, what?" she asks. He narrows his eyes at her and she ducks her head, pretending to find her biology textbook extremely interesting. He knows she's pretending because she hates biology. They're making her dissect a frog this quarter. After a few seconds, she slams the book shut and straightens up, determined look settling on her face.

Steve has just enough time to get a little nervous before she says, "How do you do the tongue thing?"

He blinks at her. "Uh...can you be more specific?"

She rolls her eyes. "You know...the thing! The thing with your tongue."

"I promise you, I do not know. What're you talking about?"

She looks around the store, as if some customers that they somehow haven't noticed in the last three hours might suddenly appear. Then she lowers her voice. "Like, sex things. With your tongue." She huffs a frustrated sigh. "They had to combine gym periods today 'cause Mrs. Hornby had to sub for Janson's history class, and Maryanne Greene was talking about how her boyfriend wouldn't go down on her and then Sue Rennet--you remember Sue? Apparently you dated her for, like, two weeks at the end of her Sophomore year--started talking about you and how you used to do that to her and it's the best sex she's ever had."

And oh...okay, he remembers Sue. Nice girl, a little ditzy, but she hadn't wanted to get more serious, and then Nancy had caught his eye. He can't help but puff up a little. Sure, Hawkins isn't exactly a big city overrun with choices, and judging by the talk he remembers from his own locker room days, he's a little bit of an outlier as far as being concerned with making sure his partners are having as good a time as he is...but to be called the best someone has ever had is nice.

"Don't let it go to your head," Robin says, because she can read his mind quite a lot of the time. "Just...tongue thing. You know, in case I ever do get a shot with, literally anyone."

He softens at that, reaches across the counter to ruffle her hair because it annoys her as much as it annoys him when someone does that. "You will," he says softly, and thinks that he would give almost anything, would probably happily trade any shot at happiness for himself if he could make sure Robin had someone to love her the way she deserves to be loved. He grabs one of her school notebooks and tears a sheet out, grabbing a pen out of the cup beside the computer.

"Okay, so, first things first, you can't just dive right in--gotta get the motor warmed up a little first--"

"Please don't talk in car analogies the whole time," Robin says, leaning in as he draws a crude (heh, see what he did there?) sketch of what he's going to be talking about.

"Noted. So what you're gonna do is start with a little massage around this area," he points with the end of the pen, "really take your time, get things nice and slick..."

He talks, Robin listening intently and occasionally asking questions.

"No you don't--flutter your tongue, flutter it. Here, like this..."

"Okay, vibration is good, but you're not, like, trying to blow a raspberry on her clit--"

"I said flutter!"

And that is how Lucas and Dustin find them about forty minutes later: Steve with his mouth held open wide, demonstrating what he means by fluttering his tongue while Robin stares at it like it holds the secrets of the universe, pen in hand as she takes furious notes.

In retrospect, he supposes he should be grateful that Lucas didn't immediately join Dustin on the 'Steve and Robin are totally dating' train.

*

"Shit! Steve! Wake up, it's Wednesday!"

Steve's eyes shoot open and he's vertical before he's fully awake, reaching for the nailbat propped up by his bedside table, but it's not there. It's...his bedside table isn't there either.

What the fuck, where's his bed?

"Steve!" Robin shouts, and he blinks rapidly, his surroundings resolving themselves into his...living room?

"What...Rob, what the hell? You're on winter break! You don't have school today?"

Ugh, why does his mouth taste like something died? He looks around the room, at the piles of dusty boxes that look like they came from...

Oh.

Oh yeah.

He and Robin had spent yesterday dragging the Harrington family Christmas decorations down from the attic because Robin said his house looked like a sad capitalism museum and she refused to spend the holidays in a place that didn't have a single Christmas light up. And then they'd found Steve's grandmother's recipe for homemade eggnog. And he'd maybe experimented a little bit with the liquor ratios...they must have fallen asleep on the couch.

"We don't have school but we both promised Keith we'd open all this week!" Robin shouts.

Oh.

Oh fuck.

They're still dressed in their clothes from yesterday. And they smell like a goddamn distillery. Without thinking about it, he grabs her hand and starts hauling her upstairs. "Shit, shit, shit."

"Fuck, shit, fuck!" she agrees as they rocket into the bathroom. Steve starts the water while Robin yanks clean towels out of the linen closet. "Do you have pants I can wear?" she asks, tossing the towels onto the sink and stripping out of her shirt.

"Yeah, I've got those jeans from, like, three years ago. Those fit you pretty well, right?" He tosses his own jeans and boxers towards the laundry hamper, followed by his shirt, and jumps into the shower, adjusting the temperature hotter than he likes it, because Robin's a weirdo who likes to boil herself in the mornings.

"Good enough!" Robin leaps in after him and they squeeze under the spray just long enough to get hair and body wet before separating somewhat so Robin can start scrubbing herself and he can get started on his hair. "Why didn't you set an alarm?"

"Me? Why didn't you set an alarm? You're the one who wanted to take the shifts!"

"Like you're gonna turn down holiday pay."

"It's Keith! Holiday pay probably means a buy one get one coupon to Pizza World up the highway!" He sticks his head under the water again to rinse his hair out and they switch places.

"Are you saying you wouldn't take a buy one get one coupon to Pizza World?"

"I mean...no?"

They switch places again so that Steve can rinse the soap off his body and then it's a race to get dried off, teeth brushed, dressed, and out to the car so they can get to the store in time. It's only as they are piling out of the BMW in front of Family Video that it seems to occur to them both at the same time what they just did. They both pause, mid-step and turn to each other wide-eyed.

"Huh," Steve says quietly.

"Yeah," Robin answers.

Then they shrug and continue towards the store entrance, making it in with exactly three and a half minutes to spare.

*

"Steve I really think if you're worried about this, you should be talking to a doctor, not me," Robin says, peering at a medical journal she checked out from the library spread out over her lap. "Has it changed color or shape recently?"

"I don't know, maybe? I've got so many moles, it's hard to keep track."

"Any pain or tenderness?" She reaches out and taps his hip so that he turns a little more towards the light cast by her desk lamp.

"No, definitely not. I was just having, you know, private time in the shower and it looked weird to me when I looked down."

Robin hums thoughtfully and pokes at the weird-looking mole on Steve's groin. "I mean, it doesn't look like any of these pictures of bad moles, but if you think it looks different to how it used to, you should probably get it check out regardless."

"Damn it, I was afraid you'd say that," he sighs. She shuts the medical journal and props her chin on one hand as he pulls his pants back up.

"Should I call and make the appointment?"

He huffs and flops back down onto her bed. "Yes please," he grumbles. He never remembers to write down all the appointment details.

"You want me to book something over spring break so I can go with you?"

"Nah, just whatever's available soonest. I'd rather not sit around and stress about it."

It turns out to be nothing to worry about. But three weeks later, Dustin and Max come bursting into Family Video while he and Robin are watching a new report about a brutal murder, and Steve is wishing all he had to stress about was a maybe-weird mole on his dick.

*

It's not like no one was aware that Steve and Robin were...perhaps unusually close friends. It was just never much of an issue (except to Dustin, who was obsessed with the idea of the two of them getting together) before the events of the spring of '86 and after...

Well.

Who cared how weirdly codependent Steve and Robin were when Max and Eddie had nearly died and the Upside Down was bursting up into the real Hawkins? Honestly, if that was the weirdest thing about them after all they've been through, he'd count that pretty lucky.

After everything, though--after they put Vecna/Henry Creel/One/Whatever in the fucking ground, after they do what Steve was beginning to think was impossible and seal the Upside Down away from them forever, after Max is as recovered as she's ever going to be (she's probably never going to be able to get a driver's license even with glasses, and her doctors tell them the leg braces and crutches might have to be permanent, but she's alive...she's alive, she's alive, she's alive), after Robin finally feels safe enough to come out to the group at large, after Steve spends an entire week holed up in his room screaming into his pillow while Robin patted his back consolingly before marching down to Eddie's new (government-funded) trailer and announcing that it turns out he likes both and would Eddie please go on a date with him...

He thinks maybe Eddie didn't quite understand what he was getting into when he agreed almost before Steve was done asking him out.

"Uh...hey guys," Eddie says slowly, taking in the picture he and Robin present in Steve's kitchen. There's a bag of cucumbers, a few eggplants, and several bananas spread out on the island in front of them. Robin has a tape measure and a homemade pamphlet acquired from a very exclusive shop they traveled to Indianapolis to visit last weekend. Steve is holding up two of the cucumbers for comparison. "What's, uh, what's going on here?"

Steve and Robin exchange a look. Then Steve jumps up and snatches the tape measure out of her hands. "Perfect! Here, Eds, lemme measure you." He reaches for Eddie's belt, only to freeze with a look of annoyance when his boyfriend jumps back with a yelp.

"Whoa! Whoa, hey, baby, I have no idea what you're talking about and also Robbie's right there!"

"What? Oh it's fine, Rob and I have seen each other naked plenty of times."

"Ask me about the time we accidentally showered together," Robin pipes up with a grin.

"Wait, no...wait, what? How do you accidentally shower together?" Eddie asks incredulously. Then he shakes his head. "Wait, no! No, not important. Robin has never seen me naked, and I am not whipping my dick out in front of your best friend so you can measure it! And why do you want to measure it?"

"Well I was trying to just guesstimate how big you are," Steve says, gesturing to the array of produce on the island, "but it'll be easier if I can just get the numbers from the source."

"Why do you need exact measurements of my dick?!" Eddie's eyes have gone wide as dinner plates, his voice reaching an octave usually reserved for his female NPC's in his nerd game. Steve huffs.

"Babe, you said you want to fuck me, but like, all these guides say we should work up to it." He jerks a thumb back over his shoulder at the pamphlet that Robin is now helpfully holding up. "So I'm gonna figure out exactly how big you are, and then Rob and I are gonna go up to this shop we found in Indy and get some of these toys. It's supposed to help me get used to things being, you know, up there."

Robin nods seriously.

Eddie looks at him. Looks at Robin. Looks back at him.

Steve has never seen someone look touched and horrified at the same time. Eddie rakes a hand back through his hair and sighs.

"What...what measurements do you need, exactly?"

#stranger things #stranger things fic #steve harrington #robin buckley #platonic with a capital p #platonic soulmates stobin #eddie munson #steddie #at the end though this is definitely focused on Steve and Robin's friendship #background steddie #my writing

[nolita-fairytale]

Carmy as Your Baby Daddy | Social Media AU & Headcanon Series | part one

masterlist | part two now that i've finished my top gun: maverick series, it's me i'm back and gearing up for season two. after a bout of food poisoning, i finally cracked and am writing this pregnancy headcanon that i said i wouldn't bc my ovaries would explode (looking at you @allthefandomstogether). anyways, a huge thank you to @carmensberzattos who pinged many an ideas back and forth about carmy as your baby daddy and screamed into the abyss about this on a friday night. i'm writing this with my main character from the make your heart surrender-verse, but can absolutely read as a standalone piece. posting now because i'm so damn excited but i may go back and add some more things later.

oh and this a headcanon series now so. that part.

carmy as your baby daddy:

sometime after the wedding, you and carmy decide that you're ready to start a family. you're not trying but you're not not trying, meaning you've gone off of birth control but you're not carefully monitoring your ovulation cycle either. you both figure that it'll happen when it happens and if it doesn't, there are many other ways to make a family.

carmy never really thought about having kids until the two of you got together. after adopting your kitty together, carmy got to see a your more nurturing side and taking care of something together as a team made him think about how much he wants a family with you. after sugar has her baby it really ups the ante. seeing carmy become an uncle is what starts the conversation about seriously starting a family, and every time carmy sees you holding the baby, it's 'when our kids this, and when our kids that' for days after.

you swear it's food poisoning. after a somewhat questionable late night meal, you spend half the night vomiting while carmy works a later night at the restaurant. you text him to bring ginger ale and tums home. of course he comes through because are you kidding this man is a caretaker?!

you insist that you're fine and much better, even though you're absolutely exhausted. things are so busy at work for you (and have i mentioned the pregnancy fatigue) that you don't think much of it when a few nights later, you find yourself kneeling on the bathroom floor once again.

there are always little kids running around at the extended family gatherings and which led to your realization (when you first met everyone) that carmy is surprisingly good with kids.

it's not till a week or two later (after your little bout of 'food poisoning') that you're at cicero's place for a family birthday party that it hits you. one of carmy's cousins (not richie kind of cousin teehee) has just had a new baby with his wife. you've been catching up with ava, richie's daughter because you've become an auntie of sorts to her. you find some time to steal away for a some girl-time but when you return, carmy is holding his new niece/nephew in his arms.

the sight of him holding the baby not only takes your goddamn breath away as he stares long and hard your way, his blue eyes piercing right through your heart, but it's then that you realize that you're a few weeks late. it's like time stops as you look at him, seeing him coo at the baby with the softest look on his face. the realization hits you, clear as day.

"holy shit." is all you say, earning a few funny looks from the berzatto extended family and friends. "carm, can i borrow you for a second?" you and carmy find a quiet place to talk inside. "you okay, babe?" "carmy i think i'm-. what if i-. i'm late." "what do you-? like.. late late?" "now that i think about it, a few weeks late, honey." "yeah?" he asks you, totally in shock and eyes wide. "yeah."

the two of you make an excuse to leave the party as soon as possible, and hurry to the nearest drugstore to pick up a pregnancy test. you wait till you're home to take it. "do you want me to come in, sweetheart?" "no, carmy! i don't want you to watch me pee, you weirdo!" you answer, even though you know he's just excited.

the two of you are pacing back and forth, practically making dents in the floor with your footsteps for what feels like the longest two minutes of your lives. when your timer goes off, you're both simultaneously freaking out about the fact that you're lives are about to change forever, while also really, really hoping for a positive result. and as the fates would have it, the test is positive.

"holy shit. holy fucking shit. we're- you're-, we're gonna-!" carmy is ecstatic as searches for words. "we're having a baby, baby!" you squeal jumping into his arms." "god, i love you so much," he says, grinning at you as wrap your legs around his waist. "i love you too, carm. so, so much."

you literally get the biggest kick out of calling him your baby daddy: to friends and family, coworkers, random strangers, in restaurants, at the gas station. you'll take photos of him at the farmers market and post on your ig story referring to him as your baby daddy because you find it hilarious. carmy doesn't find it as funny (even though he secretly loves it) and he's cherry-tomato red when you tell the checkout clerk at the bodega across the street from your place that your baby daddy is going to pick up the tab.

everyone at the restaurant is so excited for you! even richie cries a little when you tell him the news. you hadn't really gotten close to richie until ava grew super attached to you, which opened up a whole new avenue and understanding for your friendship with richie.

ever since you found out you were pregnant, carmy always has bread and ginger ale on hand for your morning sickness. he started making you your favorite soft scrambled eggs with toast, but the chives have been way too strong of a flavor for a sensitive tummy. it's slowly become eggs & toast and then just... toast, which you promptly apologize for stripping away any kind of artistic freedom he may have previously had.

you get near compulsive cravings for certain foods, and carmy is always ready to throw on a jacket and run across the street when you get midnight cravings.

carmy hates seeing how tumultuous pregnancy has been during your first trimester. he's always ready with a hair tie or a glass of water for when you're done throwing up. okay hear me out: but carmy starting to wear hair ties because he wants to always have one ready for you. he'll even take off a morning with you or call your workplace if you need a sick day just so that he can take care of you. even if you don't need care, he just wants to spend time with you and be there for you while you go through it.

we already know that carmy is an acts of service king. he is the tenderest, most gentle partner and wants to be as helpful as possible. if you're sick, he wants to make you feel better. if the pregnancy hormones are raging against the machine, he's more than happy to let you be upset, or get you off by any means if the hormones go that way too. he'll sit on the bathroom floor with you and rub your back until you need to vomit again. he'll give you the best morning head of your life. he'll run a bath for you when you need one. he checks in every hour on the hour in your first trimester, which you appreciate, but eventually have to ask him to chill the fuck out.

speaking of physical changes, the pregnancy boobs are ELITE. carmy is always there to make you feel beautiful despite your rapidly changing body, esp when your clothes start fitting differently.

the first time your bump starts showing and you point it out to him, carmy cries. or maybe he notices it first and he's just like... weeping and you're like: babe r u ok? and then you realize that you're showing and carmy is kneeling and admiring your baby bump and now you're crying. sorry, but i don't make the rules it's just a fact that this is how it would go down.

carmy is so emotional about this because he realizes that he finally gets to build the family he didn't have and he gets to build it with you.

well this just hijacked my writing plans oops. part two will be more 'you & carmy pregnancy things' and part three will be birth & post-birth.

tagging my carmy taglist in the comments below!

#carmen berzatto x you #carmy berzatto #carmy x oc #the bear hulu #the bear fx #jeremy allen white #carmen 'carmy' berzatto #carmy berzatto x reader #carmen berzatto x reader #carmen berzatto #carmy berzatto headcanon #the bear headcanon #carmy berzatto imagines #carmy berzatto fluff #comfort and chaos #still into you #make my heart surrender #Carmy as your baby daddy

[livwritesstuff]

Just in connection to my reply to one of your posts with little baby Moe (Okay she wasn't a baby but you get it.)

I really, really need some scenes with the girls (all of them or one by one) where they tell Steve (and Eddie too) how amazing he is as a dad. Not as teeny tiny children but rather as teenagers or even as young adults. Just genuine love between them, no ulterior motives.

Because I feel like Steve NEEDS that too. Every now and then. I know parents always have moments where they feel like they've fucked up or that their children don't really like them. And I feel like Steve could spiral about these things on a bad day. Eddie telling him that the girls love him to pieces doesn't help a lot on these days, I believe (You can correct me since it's definitely your universe and your Steve and Eddie).

So I'm just asking, very VERY politely :))), what you think those moments could look like and what the girls would say or why Steve even feels like he failed them. (Okay that's a LOT I'm asking of you, I'm sorry.) Just see where the flow takes you, if it does.

Thank you thank you thank you 🥰🥰🥰🥰

HAZEL

Steve was home alone with the kids because Eddie was away for a few days of work meetings in New York. The second day of Eddie’s absence, Steve was hit with a killer migraine – his first really bad one in a while – so he set the girls up with a movie (a long one) to give himself a couple hours to try sleeping it off.

A while later, he woke up to an alarm blaring – weird, he’d thought in the moment because he probably wouldn’t have set a loud alarm for a migraine nap (seems a little counter-intuitive), but everything about his brain was foggy so who's to say.

Then, outside the door, he heard this exchange between his two oldest daughters.

Moe: Papa can turn it off.

Robbie: But we’ll get in trouble.

Robbie: It’s on fire.

Half-convinced he was dreaming, he got up and followed the girls into the kitchen where, yep, the microwave was on fire. All Steve really remembers is unplugging it and leaving it to the elements outside.

Turns out Moe had wanted to make mac and cheese (which she knew how to do – they’d actually been about to graduate her to toaster privileges until this incident) and it had been a fluke timer-based accident.

Eddie had thought coming home to a melted microwave in their driveway was hilarious, but Steve was seriously rattled about it because it was the first time he'd felt like something had happened because of a failing on his part. He shouldn't have let himself succumb to the migraine, he should have pushed through it to be there for the girls, but he’d let himself slip and then they set the goddamn microwave on fire.

The same day he got back from his trip, Eddie went out and bought a new microwave (even though it’s one of those purchases Steve would normally handle because he doesn’t trust Eddie for a second to not buy the dumbest appliances he can find), and he took all three girls with him so Steve could have a bit of time alone. When they all returned an hour or two later, the sheer volume and amount of excitement they brought with them pretty much confirmed for Steve that whatever microwave Eddie bought had way more bells and whistles than any person on Earth could possibly need.

Steve didn’t go downstairs to greet them and not too long later, the door to his and Eddie’s room opened, and then three-year-old Hazel was climbing into bed and snuggling up close to him.

“There’s a new microwave,” she told him in her matter-of-fact way she reported on everything that happened in her world.

“I know,” he replied, running a hand through her tangled blonde curls (unlike Robbie, Hazel’s tolerance for “hair time”, as they call it, is pretty much rock-bottom – her hair is more frizz than curls these days and Steve is figuring out how to cope).

“Daddy wants to turn the old one into a diagram,” she continued.

Steve furrowed his eyebrows.

“A diagram?” he repeated.

“He wants to put all the melted spoons in and make them look cool and put it on a shelf.”

Oh – also, no fucking chance. Not in Steve’s kitchen.

“I think he said diorama, Haze.”

Hazel nodded.

Then she said, “You were like a firefighter.”

Steve refrains from pointing out that he shouldn’t have needed to be like a firefighter in the first place (because that would be putting his own issues onto his children and he doesn’t want to do that), even though he knows it’s true. He should have been there.

“You’re the best dad ever,” Hazel continued.

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh,” she nods, and she’s just as matter-of-fact now as she was before, and she’s sitting on his chest in a way that has her little knees digging into his ribs, which should hurt but instead feels like a tether to the real world he can grasp onto and pull himself out of his head.

 “You think we should go check out this microwave?” he asks, starting to sit up.

Hazel nods.

“Alright, let’s go.”

MOE

When Moe was 21 – a junior in college in New York City – she and her best friend since kindergarten, Gray, started dating (finally, in Steve’s opinion, because he’d seen that coming for ages).

Steve and Eddie have known Gray for as long as Moe has, and they’ve watched Gray grow up nearly as much as their three daughters – as a kindergartener with freckles and dark brown pigtails, as a middle-schooler tearfully coming out as non-binary knowing they’d have to hide it from their family, as a high school senior, still with all those freckles, eager for the fresh start that college would bring.

It was nice to be for Gray (and for a handful of their daughters’ other friends over the years) something that Eddie and Steve had needed when they were their age – a place where they could be themselves without any consequences, a place where they didn’t have to hide, because sometimes, as was the case for Gray for many years, you have to hide. It’s nice to have a safe haven where you don’t.

During Moe and Gray’s senior year of college, the pair made plans to come home for their final spring break. When that first week of March finally rolled around, Moe called from the train to tell them that Gray was finally pulling the trigger – finally coming out to their parents, finally telling them about their relationship with Moe.

“Are they sure,” Steve had asked – not because he doubted Gray but because he hadn’t been too much older when he’d taken that leap for himself and he’d felt the subsequent loss of his parents like mourning a death.

“Positive,” he’d heard Gray reply.

Three hours after their train dropped Moe and Gray off at the Wellesley Farms station, Steve and Eddie heard the back door open. A moment later, Moe trailed in with something heavy in her eyes.

“How’d it…” Eddie started to ask from where he and Steve sat on the couch, but he stopped when Moe shook her head.

“Not over yet,” she told them, “Gray made me leave. It’s a fucking trainwreck.”

And even though he knew that was always going to be the outcome, Steve’s heart still sank.

“Damn,” Eddie commented while Steve shook his head, “They’ll always have a home with us, but…”

“Yeah,” Moe nodded, “Still sucks.” 

Steve recognizes something of his own experience in that – he feels so damn grateful that Jim and Joyce had slid into that parent role for him, especially after he’d become estranged from his actual parents in his mid-twenties. Still, they weren’t his parents, and Steve would’ve never not wanted his parents to pull through like they should have.

Moe sat down on the couch between her dads.

“Why did Gray make you leave?” Steve asked (even though he had a sneaking suspicion why).

“Uh…” Moe paused, pushing her blonde bangs back, “Well, I wouldn’t say I was yelling, exactly, but…I dunno. If you ask Gray they might tell you I was yelling.”

Yep, that seems about right.

“I just,” Moe continued, “I know Gray was prepared for this – for their parents, like, rejecting all of this – and I know they’ve always totally sucked so this was obviously how this was gonna go, but I think I had a hard time seeing it because I’d never really had to consider what it would be like for that to happen.”

Moe shook her head, her bangs falling right back into her eyes, and Steve had to resist the urge to ask if she wanted his help trimming them like he’d done when she was little.

“I just mean – it never made a difference to you who me and Haze and Robbie were or what we did. You just, like, love us regardless…and always, y’know? I never had to imagine anything happening to make that stop, and I never had to consider that it might not be like that for everyone.”

She paused again, this time for a while, her eyes trained on the carpet as she fiddled with cuffs on her jeans. 

And then Moe looked Steve dead in the eye.

“You’re the best dads,” she said, “and I’m really, really lucky.”

ROBBIE

There were eight hours between Steve and Eddie finding out their fifteen-year-old daughter had been in a car crash during a school trip to Disney World and when they finally made it down to the hospital in Orlando she’d been taken to. There were another agonizing two before Robbie woke up.

When she did, her eyes groggily blinked open, and she looked blankly around the hospital room for a moment, and then she saw them.

Then her pale face crumples and suddenly she’s crying.

And that had Steve’s heart plummeting even faster than the phone call from hell he’d gotten eight hours earlier, because Robbie doesn’t cry.

He can’t remember the last time he’d seen her cry – not since she was a baby, anyway. She’d cried constantly as a baby, but the second she had a firm enough grasp on the English language it had ceased entirely, replaced by an endless stream of words – demands and trains of thought and exclamations and everything in between.

Eddie had joked that she’d only ever been crying out of frustration over not being able to tell them what she needed, and as soon as she could tell them, she had no use for it anymore, so seeing Robbie sobbing – the kind of crying where no sound could come out, where she was barely breathing, where her tears were soaking her cheeks and staining the collar of the hospital gown someone had changed her into – it practically had Steve crying himself.

After a few minutes of we’re here and you’re okay and what do you need, Robbie had tearfully admitted, “I need a hug,” and then she’d broken down again.

She wasn’t exactly in any position to get up, obviously, so Steve had taken off his shoes (because even through tears she’d still side-eyed his sneakers) and slid onto the hospital bed so he could pull Robbie into his arms just like he used to do when bad dreams woke her up in the middle of the night.

Later, when Eddie was just outside the hospital room talking to the nurse and the chaperone for the trip about the accident and how the school was planning on moving forward in the aftermath, Robbie finally spoke.

“Papa,” she said, her face pressed into his shoulder.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’m sorry.”

Steve looked down at his daughter.

“Robbie, you don’t need to–”

“Not for this. For…just, like, in general. You–”

She paused, and Steve let her.

“I just mean…” she continued, “I haven’t been, like, good lately, and I’m sorry.”

Steve didn’t know what to say.

She’s not exactly wrong – it’s true that Robbie had been a total piece of work lately, especially since she started high school, especially since she got bumped up to the senior-level band class because she’s that good at the violin (which he and Eddie had been thrilled about initially until they realized it meant she was making friends with high school seniors) – but Steve didn’t exactly know how best to explain to her that up until this, up until she’d nearly died because of it and no matter how much Steve didn’t like it, it was normal.

It was normal for teenagers to do dumb shit, to hurt themselves, to hurt others, to drive their parents goddamn insane with worry. It wasn’t normal for them to nearly end up dead because of it, and this time it wasn’t really even her fault.

It sort of reminded him of Nancy in a way, of how Nancy had never been the same again after what happened to Barb, how Nancy had never let herself be a dumb teenager, never let herself relax, even though picking a boy over a friend was normal. Sneaking out and drinking during a badly-supervised school trip was normal. Sure, there were supposed to be consequences but there shouldn’t be a goddamn death toll.

“I know, Bean,” he finally said, something about the situation pulling out a nickname for her that he hadn’t used in a long time (because when she was born, Moe had turned Robin into Robbean and the rest was history).

“You’re really good to me,” Robbie whispered, “You and dad are so good to me, and I’m not always good back, and I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need you to be sorry,” Steve told her because, for right now at least, it was true, “Just…just stick around long enough to work with us, okay?”

Robbie nodded.

“Okay.”

#don’t ask about the melted spoons #eddie’s attention span is godawful #is this angst? i think this is angst #steddie #liv’s steddie dads verse #steddie dads #steve harrington #eddie munson

[hahawasabi]

TW: MENTIONS OF GENDER DYSPHORIA, ASSUMED P3D0PH1LIA & H0MOPHOBIA, D3@TH THREATS, SWEARING. If youre uncomfortable, please scroll past this.

I am in a tough place at the moment, and I'd like to rant about the LEGO Monkie Kid fandom.

The reason why i joined the LMK fandom was to get away from the toxicness of the eddsworld fandom. I'd like to thank my friend to introducing me to this fandom, but, this fandom wasn't the best choice. Especially the online spaces the LMK fandom is popular in.

The BIGGEST example for me was Pinterest. They're all so aggressive with their opinions, not to mention HC's and ships. Now, when I found the LMK pinterest, everything was like hell for me.

I remember commenting (THESE COMMENTS ARE NOW DELETED) how LMK!Nezha looked handsome, (because i had a crush on him), only for my Pinterest inbox to be bombed with death threats and people actively calling me a "p3d0phile". The same thing happened to me on a shadowpeach post, where people kept saying i was "homophobic" because of this, once again, i was bombed with death threats. I also recall saying I ship SpicyNoodles in a COMMENT YOUR FAVORITE SHIP POST. ONLY TO BE CALLED A FUCKING FUJOSHI, A WORD THAT IS SO GODDAMN OVERUSED IN THE PINTEREST COMMUNITY. SERIOUSLY, YOU DONT HAVE TO BE A DICK JUST BECAUSE OF AN OPINION.

Eventually, this all made me feel very insecure about myself, I kept asking why i couldn't just be "normal", or whatever is considered "normal" in this shitty fandom, or the app in general. I tried not to use Pinterest for as long as I can, but no, I kept coming back to find out what's "normal" and what isn't. This later put me in a depressive state in which I felt ashamed in everything about myself, including my own gender identity. Maybe I'm too sensitive? Maybe I'm overthinking? Maybe both?

The more I scrolled into the app, the harder it was to get out of the rabbit hole. Everyday I kept crying over nothing, all because of a stupid fandom and some "unkind" and "inappropriate" comments I made. This fandom made me loathe myself even more, more than I was in the eddsworld fandom. I wished all the time that I wasn't a girl, that I was "normal", so I can "fit" in this fandom.

People actively doxx others in this fandom, they don't allow the Chinese voices to be heard, because the only voice they hear is the one that spreads misinformation. They actively tell others to off themselves, and say that they aren't "doing their research", or that they're "disrespecting chinese culture".

This fandom has gotten me so tired..

#lmk #lmk fandom #rant #discourse #pinterest discourse #tw #hahawasabi

[warringwarrioridiot]

"They was asking for it"

YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT YOU'RE ASKING FOR?? A BIG FAT BASEBALL BAT TO THE BACK OF THE SKULL AT FULL SPEED MAX ISTG

Mfs like this need to take a long walk off of a short cliff cus if I EVER catch them I'm gonna commit some good old fashion homicide.

If you say things like "You should've enjoyed it" or "at least you got some" I'm tracking your IP and shoving ten cacti in your anal hole and/or vagina.

"game is game 🤪"

You need to shut your ketchup stain, Junkrat main, micro brain, aluminium chain, ankle sprain, CHOCOLATE RAIIIIN, with your runny nose dirty toes lick hobos cOwAbUnGa BrOs, Dude, I want you to look at your entire life. All your life choices. And tell me when you had an original idea in your brain. Your ass got kicked out and disowned and you started aggressively tapping the home button on your IPhone "Oh, help. Why is it not working?". YOUR ENTIRE EXISTENCE IS LIKE A NARUTO FILLER EPISODE, MY BOY! YOUR PRANKS ARE AS REPETITIVE AS THE AD "Whopper, Whopper, Whopper, Whopper" YOUR BRAIN IS JUST AS REAL AS THE LOVE YOUR PARENTS HAVE FOR YOU! YOUR GRANDMA GAVE BLING BLING BOY A LAP DANCE FOR PAY DAY. Wait hold on! *Punch punch punch* GIVE ME THE MONEY YOUR GRANDMA! I JUST ROBBED YOUR GRANDMA! I JUST HIT A LICK ON YOUR GRANDMA, HOW DOES THAT FEEL?! SHE POOR AS HELL NOW! YOU PUT A BALLOON ON YOUR HEAD AND THOUGHT IT WAS A DURAG! YOU LIKE RONALD MCDONALD FROM OHIO! "HEYA KID! YOU WANT A BIG MAC?!" WHEN YOU WALK DOWNSTAIRS YOUR WHOLE HOUSE STARTS RUMBLING! YOU BRING THE POWER OF EREN YEAGER AND 37 COLOSSAL TITANS DOWN YOUR STAIRCASE! AFTER YOU EAT DINNER YOU EAT THE PLATE AND THEN YOU EAT THE TABLE AS WELL! CHOMP CHOMP! YOU RENT OUT THE GAP BETWEEN YOU TEETH AS A PARKING SPACE FOR ANTS! YOU LOOK EMO ASF "CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES! THIS IS MY LAST RESORT! SUFFOCATION! NO BREATHING!" LOOK AT YOUR NOSE YOU HAVE TWO MARIO PIPES COMING OUT OF YOUR HEAD! YAHOO! LET'S A GO! THEY MADE A SEQUEL TO FINDING NEMO BASED OFF YOUR ASS CALLED "LOCATING CHROMOSOMES! IN THEATRES THIS JULY!" YOUR BEST FRIEND IS A RAT LIVING UNDER YOUR BED IN A PRINGLES CAN! YOU POSTED AN INSTAGRAM STORY ABOUT A JAMAICAN CRICKET GIVING YOU A LAP DANCE IN THE BACK OF TOYS R US! YOU TORTURED AN ANT BY TYING HIM TO YOUR BUTTHOLE AND FARTING ON HIM! I HAVE MORE ROASTS YOU KNOW! YOUR GRANDMA IS A DARK SOULS BOSS CALLED "THE WRINKLE!

EW NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO THERE IS NO WAY! THAT THIS... OLD ASS FART WRINKLE IS TALKING TO ME IN SUCH A DISRESPECTFUL MANNER. YOU KNOW IT'S ACTUALLY KINDA SAD YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH TO BE A GRANDPA NOW BUT INSTEAD OF ADVANCING YOUR BIOLOGICAL CHAIN YOU'VE INSTEAD SPENT YOUR DAYS ALONE IN YOUR ROOM READING HITLER MANIFESTOS AND COSPLAYING AS A FUCKIN' NEO NAZI. SO MANY YEARS AND SUCH LITTLE ADVANCEMENT. No seriously! Seriously I find it amusing THAT YOUR PENCIL PENIS DONKEY KONG BARREL BUILT LOOKIN' ASS WOULD ASSUME THAT I EVEN REMOTELY CARE ABOUT A SINGLE ONE. NO NO NO FUCK THAT. A SINGLE SYLLABLE OF THE VERBAL DIARRHEA GARGLE THAT'S COMING OUT OF THE DUSTY SARLAC PIT YOU CONSIDER TO BE YOUR FUCKING MOUTH! YOU WANT ME TO SHOW YOU MY FACE?? YOU WANNA SEE MY FUCKIN' FACE??? BITCH SHOW ME YOUR FUCKIN' HAIRLINE CAUSE I KNOW THERE'S NO WAY YOU'RE SPEAKING TO ME RIGHT NOW DRESSED UP AS A GOD DAMN DIABOLICAL BOY SCOUT. NAH LOOK AT THEM TEETH. BOY YOUR TEETH IN CREATIVE MODE. HELL NAH BOY STOP PLAYING YOU TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT. BRO THEY GOT FOSSIL RECORDS FOR EACH ONE OF YOUR FAT ROLLS. NAH STOP PLAYING WITH ME BOY I CAN'T TAKE YO ASS SERIOUSLY WHEN YOU DRESS UP LIKE A GODDAMN MEDIEVAL TERRORIST. BRO IS ABOUT TO SHOOT UP HIS OLD FOLKS HOME WITH A CROSSBOW AND A FUCKING TREBUCHET. YA YEET DOM DOM DOM DOM DOM DOM! SHUT YO UGLY ASS UP. WHAT THE FUCK? A HE AHHH EEEEE SHUT UP BITCH. YOU WANT ME TO TURN ON MY CAMERA? YO DICK BUILT LIKE A INVERTED BANANA. YO FOREHEAD CRACKED UP LIKE THE AFRICAN SAVANNAH. I CAUGHT YOU AND YO SISTER BUTT NAKED LAST NIGHT. SWEET HOME ALABAMA. FUCK YOU THINK THIS IS? WHAT IS YOU WEARING WITH YO GODDAMN HONEY WHERE IS MY SUPER SUIT? NAH BOY LOOK AT YO ROOM, YO HOUSE DIRTY AS HELL. YOU GOT FOUR SEWER RATS IN YO BATH TUB RIGHT NOW FLOATING ON TOP OF A PIZZA BOX SINGING. "YO HO THIEVES AND BEGGARS". LIKE SHIT, BOY I CAUGHT YOU HAVING AN EMOTIONAL CONVERSATION WITH YO TOE NAIL LAST NIGHT. WE COULD'VE BEEN SUPER STARS REMEMBER WHEN WE AS JACKING CARS. YOU AND YO TOE NAIL WAS GOING TO BE THE DYNAMIC DUO. BITCH YOU WAS GONNA BE IN AMERICA'S GOT TALENT SWINGING THAT SHIT AROUND LIKE A FUCKING BOOMERANG. SHUT YO STUPID ASS UP. BRUH I CAUGHT YOU JACK SPARROW RUNNING AROUND YOUR HOUSE WHILE YOUR DAD WAS TRYING TO BEAT YOU WITH A TOILET PLUNGER LAST NIGHT. COME HERE BOY! SHUT YO ASS UP. BITCH EVERYTIME YOU TAKE A SHIT THE GAME OF THRONES THEME SONG STARTS PLAMMERING IN YO HOUSE.BUM BUA BUM BUDUM BUM. SHUT YO UGLY ASS UP BRUH.

Are you getting mad?

Are you getting mad?

DAMN You getting mad now! Cuz yo Legal name is Ledenhouser Strogenberg. Nah don't be Smiling now boy You ain't slick Boy! I caught you in the locker room after gym class Frantically wiping yo armpits down With a kleenex While tryna smell good For the girls In the hallway. OI ZOINKS! I GOTTA- I GOTTA HURRY UP. SHUT YO ASS UP YOU LIKE A DIABETIC TOASTER STRUDEL. YOU UGLY AHH AS HELL. YOU GOT THEM BIG ASS HUMPTY DUMPTY PANTS ON BRUH. YOU USE A FRUIT ROLL UP AS A BELT TO HOLD UP YO BUNG DU BUNGLA. Shut yo ugly Ass up You got Mineral deposits In your Belly button. You dumb As hell You thought Google drive Was a brand new Taxi service. Bitch yo Grandma Threw a Rage spell On the kitchen floor And started Smacking you with A weiner schnitzel. Shut yo ass up You a Diabolical Special needs Student. Boy you was In the back of a Short bus Maniacally Planning How you was gonna Take over Your school.HMMMMM YEAHHHHHHHHHH It will be MINE! Shut yo Ass up, Boy I caught you Butt Naked Playing gorilla tag With a mouse in your Kitchen. Yo ass Be sliding around The counters Like a paraplegic Frozone. Gotta Catch 'em ALL! Shut yo ass up With yo "I got a feeling Ooooooooo!" Everytime yo Grandpa Tickles yo Butthole. Shut yo Stupid ass up You thought the One chip challenge Was sticking a Hot cheeto Up your buttcrack. Ok! Here we go Everybody! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Shut yo Dirty ass up Get yo ass on bruh.

It's actually so fucking sad these people still exist in 2024.

Istg misogynists and forced birth extremists and rapists are the most atrociously ugliest love-lacking idiots.

Image ref:

I rest my fucking case, your honor. Kill every single one of these people before I do it myself.

#feminism #warringwarrioridiot #misogynistic people are dumb asf #kill all rapists #end rape #thank you #i rest my case

[blockgamepirate]

maybe his character is genuinely just so suicidal that he doesn't give a shit anymore if he lives or dies, but I haven't had time to watch him in the past few weeks so I wouldn't know

For someone who hasn’t watched a Tubbo stream in a while, you’ve got a perfect read on his character lmaoooooooo. As a tubbling, sorry for the extra neg thrown towards your streamer’s cubito. To make a long story short, while the permadeath was out of nowhere for the streamers and their viewers, it’s been a long time coming for the tubblings and egg admins kkkkkkkk. And when we saw our cubito’s issues be overlooked and joked about again (obvious to tubbo viewers but not to anyone else because god forbid qtubbo communicates), even after his own death, we lashed out at whoever was loudest and it happened to be phil. Which is also unfair to him because when he did realize the seriousness of it, he immediately went to help. So yeah sorry again for that, hope what I said sorta makes sense. I pray that with the next reboot, our cubito gains some emotional intelligence because jesus christ tubblings are goddamn masochists. Have a good day lol :D

Makes sense, thanks for the clarification! And dw, it's fine, I'm not blaming all tubblings for a few people being annoying (and in any case being annoying isn't a crime, it just made it obnoxious to try and search for Phil posts yesterday (and pretty much any time Phil interacts with Tubbo and Sunny nowadays which sucks because I like all three of them) and it makes me wanna complain even though I know I should just ignore it and block the most annoying people and blacklist the phil neg tags because this really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, it's just typical fandom wank, and there's plenty of annoying crows out there too who I also kinda wanna block tbh)

It could be a lot worse. I know what it was like trying to read Cellbit's tag before he posted his response, it was like constantly dodging landmines. In comparison Phil's is more like walking through a forest where sometimes it's beautiful and serene and then suddenly you get ambushed by five billion mosquitoes lol

And overall Phil viewers have still been way more lucky on QSMP than back in DSMP times (which I think also just made us really jumpy) and especially on Tumblr where it feels like if anything Phil is now the popular guy when before this he was the guy the popular kids hated

#asks #cheese-water #disc horse #suicide mention

[ironmansnips]

i wanna see the bau team with a Marten Riggs type reader

realistically they'd take it very seriously but that's boring so we're ditching that idea

like in the first episode of lethal weapons he walks into the hostage situation with a fuckin pizza

the team looks away for maybe 5 minutes tops and suddenly you've gone off skipping your way twords the homicidal maniac carrying a goddamned thin crust pepperoni pizza

⏬Marten Riggs clips on YouTube ⏬

they're so fucking funny you gotta watch them😭

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https://youtu.be/HEpJD7VsM00

https://youtu.be/K0lgyf6uuDU

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they p a n i c

for shits and giggles let's say that you're a newbie

a probie if you will

so they're not close to you yet but they still don't wanna see you get murdered lmao

istg Reid nearly faints when you pull the gun closer to your head

or when you walk into that warehouse whistling Andy Griffith?

his skin paled so much it could've rivald Casper the friendly ghosts

Garcia loves you but threatens your life regularly

stop putting yourself in life threatening situations when you don't have to you little shit👺

they don't let you talk to mentally unstable unsubs cause your sarcasm would escalate the situation 🤷🏻‍♀️

let's be honest Reids in love with you☠️

an enemies to lovers perhaps?👀

fr tho mans a simp for you

listen this is very self indulgent so i'm imagining the reader has brightly hair and is goth punk and like 19😗

(i'm almost 18 and i hate it 💩)

this is the early seasons btw so Reid is like 24

since you're so young dad! hotch mode is not activated 🥺

Gideon thinks you're a cool kid

and in the newer seasons with Rossi he fuckin loves you man

he treats you like your his own kid

they scold the holy hell out of you when you pull that shit

like hotch has put you on desk duty and threatened to take away your badge

but you're really good at your job ig cause you still got it ☠️

Derek is literally your older brother

like you guys had sibling arguments all the time lmao

he'd die for you tho

they all would

jj is like your older sister

she gives the best advice fr

and Emily would do anything for you she loves you so much

you're like her kid 🥺

if you're anything like me and say dude, bro, and man religiously you're gonna get the hotchner glare 😵

like no he's sir or hotch thanks very much

Rossi thinks it's hilarious

until you hit him with a "bro"

then you get a Rossi stare down

Derek just lifts a perfect brow at the name of " endearment "

also! his eyebrows look just like this thing ~

like you guys see it too right?😭

this is getting too long i might post on it again later tho

i haven't gone back over it so it probably doesn't make sense lmao

#criminal minds #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds imagine #Spencer Reid x reader #Arron hotchner x reader #Penelope Garcia x reader #jj x reader #Emily prentiss x reader #david rossi x reader #jason gideon x reader #gender neutral reader #plus size reader

[sysmedsaresexist]

Why should I bother healing? I mean what awaits past the pain and sorrow? Feeling lightly better? I can just chase dopamine till I'll die and still have a good enough life

I feel like I know who this is, we have an unfinished conversation, don't we?? I still have your last reply and the start of my post in my drafts, waiting for me to find words that would help. If it's not you, I hope that user sees this, as well.

Friendo, don't let your current dumb feelings and silly brain get in your way of your future

Extreme positivity ahead

Fuck around on this post and find out

-the kids these days, probably

On a very serious note, I think we've all been there, where it just feels so goddamn pointless and you're so tired. Trauma survives long after the events that caused it, digging its claws into every aspect of your life-- even the parts that seemed unrelated and safe.

I can't give you the best advice because I don't know your full situation-- age, living arrangements, financial situations, education, all of that changes the conversation, but I'm going to try to give you a general bit of hope

Age and time helps

Even mental illness tends to improve with age.

As you get older, the brain naturally settles into a (generally) calmer, happier state. I promise you, with all the sincerity and genuineness in the world, even if you did nothing, in five years you'll still feel better than you do right now.

Yes, even dissociative disorders. (PDF)

Don't be so hard on yourself.

This won't apply to everyone, obviously there is a problem with mental health in aging populations, but... don't think that's the norm, or something to be expected, and you've already taken the biggest step by noting your mental health struggles early on. One of the biggest reasons that there is a problem in seniors is because there was very little early detection, and talking about mental health was seen as taboo. You're halfway there.

And as you experience more happiness and things just feel calmer, making positive changes becomes easier, especially as more opportunities open to you every year. So.

Looking back, I think my biggest mistake was looking at myself as I was, and looking at where I wanted to be-- or, more often, what I thought everyone else was. Happy, composed, financially successful, intelligent, popular.

And good god, I felt lazy. I wasn't chronically fatigued, I was lazy, I convinced myself.

Eventually, I started looking at smaller parts of my life and tried to make tiny, easy improvements, rather than anything big.

And with each tiny improvement, and with each year, I started to feel like it was worth it. And like I deserved to have a life I was happy with, whether that met anyone else's expectations or not.

Look, I don't know what kind of crack my grandmother was on, but I couldn't keep a house like that. She had six kids and a job back in the 60s, and even at nearing 85 she would still get on her hands and knees and wash the floor. That place was always immaculate.

And that's just unrealistic. And unnecessary.

My mother was the polar opposite, and I grew up in a hoarding situation.

When I finally got out on my own, it took a while to figure it out, but I settled somewhere in the middle. The idea of keeping the house as clean as my grandmother made me want to actually off myself. I am not exaggerating. The idea was daunting and terrified me. I would rather lay down and give up than find the energy.

But the closer I got to my mother's situation, the more I hated myself, because look at how gross I was.

Here's the truth:

Fuck. Everyone.

Seriously. I swear to god, one day, a lightbulb is just going to go off, and you'll realize that you never should have cared in the first place what other people thought or expected.

My home is crowded but cozy. I no longer look around feeling overwhelmed and disgusted with myself. I do what I can and I celebrate every little step.

It's my home and I'm happy with it, and that is the only thing that matters.

Life is like my house. Live it only for yourself, and do what you can. Celebrate all of the things you do, regardless how small.

Even if you did nothing, it's still going to get better.

Imagine how much EXTRA better you can make it if you just take it in tiny, tiny steps.

Like exponential growth of better.

Feeling just slightly better today makes tomorrow feel better, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Plus, think of all the (insert animal you love) that'll you'll see.

#suicide mention #tw #positivity #ptsd #depression #anxiety #did #OSDD

[caitlynnrosespn]

Another Rant. More Like A Response.

So I was going to make a video about this because I have a lot to say. But I realized that the stutter I thought I had gotten rid of Freshman years comes out heavily if I'm pissed, which I currently am, so I'll just save use the headache and type this out.

Also tagging @apexious cuz they wanted to see this.

Look. I could totally tag people. I could name names. But I'm not going to. Because at this point everyone has probably either seen this post or knows who this person is. And goddamn do I have a lot to say about them.

Number 1: If you're gonna call me out call me out bestie. Coming after me for a post I made expressing discomfort at a NSFW self ship is fine and all, but then you go ahead and say stuff like "adult people can have adult thoughts about other adults" when my post was referring to a fanfic written by a KID? Get your facts straight before you say anything that's public. Here's the thing, was my post in poor taste? Quite possibly. Was there an adult way to handle it and get the results you wanted? Oh yeah. Did you do the adult thing? Nope! Instead of either A. taking it to a private message and explaining what was wrong or B. making a respectful post that highlighted what was wrong in a mature way, you made a disrespectful, arrogant, self righteous post bashing an entire fanbase despite the fact that only a few people were at large. So now, instead of placing the responsibility of accountable parties, which I would have been included in, and allowing to own up and apologize, you have now not only included yourself into the problem, but also blown the problem wayyyy out of proportion. May I remind you that we are a fairly tiny fandom based on a video game directed at children? I've been playing since 2012, so believe me when I say these games have come a long way. Hell, these characters now in fanfics didn't have names until The Traveler season happened. Remember the days of referring to characters as "the coach from One Kiss" or "Jessy's guy in Swish Swish" or "P1 in Lean On"? Yeah, that was surprisingly not that long ago. So it is responsible to believe that the concept of NSFW or self shipping in a fandom is relatively new to us. Shit, we are not going to act like a normal fandom! This fandom is very different then others, so if we make a mistake like bagging on things that are all normal in other fandoms, then be fucking patient! Call it out in a respectable way, and let us fix it! We always do!

Next, the other problems you discussed? Are they currently in the room with us? I have not seen these problems like, at all. There is no mass shitting on people who have comfort characters. People who fetishsize and disrespect characters? Hell yeah (we took care of people like youngjackissohot and others), but not genuine comfort/kinny characters. The vast majority of us have a comfort character and that's why we are in this fucking community in the first place! Maybe i'm just blind as a bat, but I have not seen anyone tear apart anyone watching maps on Youtube. Bitch, most of us don't have a Switch so those maps on Youtube are our saving grace to stay in this community. Is this happening on another site, like Reddit or Twitter? Cuz if so maybe you should have gone and bitched to them instead of complain on here.

And you don't think we should benefit from your presence in this community? Ok Jesus, sorry you're leaving! Seriously though, while I appreciate everyone in this community and think you make an impact no matter how big it is, this is a classic case of "someone got a little too big for their britches". Sure, we hate to see you go. But like you said, you haven't been active since Lover Coaster (which you couldn't even remember the name of btw-how in the absolute fuck are you going to get involved with Fandom matters if you can't even name the last season you remember?) and we all survived without you. So don't pretend all of a sudden you're some hotshot celebrity whose mere absence in this community will affect anything. I have a few good fics that I am updating frequently that I know people will enjoy, and I've active for a good while, but I know if I fell of the face of the earth right now my absence in the fandom won't cause any major issues. Get a reality check.

Lastly, you're dealing with a fandom here. A group of humans who are all flawed and all make mistakes and all have their moments. If you're not happy with the ugly sides of that, then I'm sorry but you don't deserve to benefit from the many good sides. We are by far the least problematic fandom I have so far heard of. For the most part, we are kind to each other and care for each other and we love each other. If we make mistakes we make sure to fix them and then we carry on. If you have a problem with us not always getting along and us sometimes having our moments then don't let the door hit you on the way out.

I'm sorry you have to see this side of me, but come after this family and call us nothing more than a group of fucking assholes and see what happens next bitch. Cuz next time I won't hesitate to nane names.

#just dance #love you guys #sorry for that

[d-lude]

Finally, I'm done writing this thing.

I'm going to be completely honest on why I'm so abnormal about Justice. (No, I genuinely was not kidding about that essay earlier. And you know it's real shit when I actually use caps and proper grammar and whatnot.)

So much of my music taste is based on what others recommend to me, especially my parents. And that on its own is special, but when it's what happens 99% of the time, it sort of becomes a normal feeling.

So, imagine discovering a band on your own in this situation, one you think is actually good.

When I first listened to D.A.N.C.E, it was unlike anything I had ever heard (and seen, as I watched the music video) at the time. But there was a slight bit of familiarity in the sound, one I somewhat associated with Daft Punk, a band I had started listening to only a few months earlier. Of course, I now know that Justice are very different from Daft Punk, but I didn't realize that at that moment. I'll go into that in a few paragraphs.

It took about 2 or 3 months for me to warm up to the rest of their music, but when I finally did, it changed A LOT for me.

“The cross is a very strong visual symbol, it evokes the idea of communion. Do not see any other message! I read that some spoke of us as Christian electro. Stop! Everyone is welcome. Yes, we convert the public, but only to our music.”

-Xavier de Rosnay

...And they had succeeded in doing just that. They had converted me to their music. That was when I realized they weren't all that much like Daft Punk. While Daft Punk's music sounded much more clean, more polished, Justice weren't afraid to get their hands dirty. They weren't afraid to keep people guessing with each album that came out. Not saying Daft Punk didn't change things up, because they did. But each album sounded so different, that when I heard Get Lucky on the radio for the first time, I didn't even realize it was them.

Justice, however, somehow managed to keep that sort of signature Justice-y feel in each of their albums, despite the major differences between their three studio albums. I don't know how the hell they accomplished it, but because of that, I only proceeded to become more and more obsessed with their music. Each song I listened to never failed to impress me. I mean it when I say the French electro wizards had me fucking hooked. Each time I listened to their albums, it only got better and better. It didn't take me long to just goddamn absorb, for lack of a better word, pretty much anything and everything involving them.

Whenever I reached tough points, some of their songs would play a part in somewhat helping me out of those spots. It motivated me. It kept me going. To name one specific song, Randy. Yes, the song I named myself after. It was seriously that influential to me. I talked a little bit about it in this post after an anon jokingly sent me an ask with the lyrics to the song. (Anon, if you're reading this, I'm thanking you once again.)

Anyway, soon, I started doing research on Gaspard and Xavier, and it gave me people I could look up to. People I wanted (and still want) to be like. It was kind of surprising, honestly. I never thought I would look up to guys like them so much. In fact, I recently watched their A Cross The Universe tour documentary, and I was somewhat shocked to learn that they just seemed like fairly normal guys (Although I'm still wondering what the hell I even watched!!)

If you're reading this and haven't yet listened to Justice, I highly recommend you do. I'm not even joking, they've changed my fucking life.

TL;DR: I just think they're neat.

#randys random ramblings #justice band #long-ish post #its finally done!!

[kharmii]

Maybe Marchy wants you to delete their post because they don't want to be affiliated with you, specifically. You're sort of a trash human being who can't get past werewolves being fictional creatures who have been a part of human mythology for thousands of years. Oh, and you're also transphobic and borderline homophobic. No one seems to like you, Kharm. Take a hint and keep your opinions to yourself for a change.

I haven't seen werewolf pron in a long time because all the people into it blocked me before I had a chance to block them. Srsly tho, there is no fandom as thirsty for dog-ass as submas. Beautiful men = Out of Style. Grotesque hairy stank-factories = In Style.

I don't like a lot of you either. I'd have been over this fandom ages ago if I wasn't into making dubious translations of Asian art. It's not like I'd want to go diving head first into My Hero Academia either, as it's mostly a bunch of kids. I suppose Erasurehead x Present Mike is appealing in the 'opposites attract' sort of way, but I'm not into Endeavor x Hawks because the former is too much of an alpha male. A main plot point was how Endeavor got into an arranged marriage with a once influential family that was struggling. They sold their daughter to Endeavor so he could selectively breed perfect superhero babies.

Endeavor: *taps watch* My recovery time is twenty minutes. That's how often you are getting bred until that baby sticks. After that, we could go once an hour for fun. (My goddamn #1 hero)

Anyway, nobody has yet to answer my question about why it's acceptable in fandom to be a shitting dick nipple fkn furry into a million stupid fetishes, yet a lot of those people still have the gall to have a 'Proshippers DNI' on their pages. Why is it okay to cherry pick the two things? (Pedophilia/Incest) but it's okay to belong to a group of people (furries) who are overrepresented in irl cases of sexual abuse? Why is one sort of weirdo more socially acceptable than another?

Side note: A lot of furries I've encountered are into belly kink. You know how they are always saying yaoi is offensive to irl gay men because woman pidgeonhole gay men into heteronormative female fantasies? Well, first of all, fuck gay men and men in general. It's part of male privilege that all biological males -whether straight gay or trans- have this attitude like their feelings are of utmost importance, and that they should be allowed to regulate what we do. If gay men don't like my gay men fantasies, then fight me.

Where was I....so belly kink is a very heteronormative feminine fantasy. It's a very female fantasy to want to see a feminine looking person being comforted by their masculine partner when they are suffering with a huge swollen pregnant looking belly. I can see the appeal of it if the person with the fat belly is pretty looking, like the Dabiten ship. Unfortunately, I too often saw depictions of this featuring gross ass furries that one could just imagine the stank lines wafting out of.

Another side note: Is there the same sort of crap in other fandoms one sees in submas? -Like does every other fandom get flooded with two-dick dragon morbidly obese omegaverse bullshit? I'll say it again because I have the right to my opinion....I'll bet a lot of monster fkn bullshit is trans coded, like they want to normalize fat hairy men with vaginas and/or dubious genitals (like multiple dicks, yo..) looking pregnant. It's yet another side effect of our fossil fuel driven glut where too many people have amygdales not functioning correctly which causes dysfunction with dopamine regulation. A person with a healthy sense of their own mortality would be repulsed by pregnant trans male figures because of the potential of getting a really messed up baby.

Seriously, doctors are supposed to experiment on animals before moving to humans. How many female animals were pumped with male hormones then made pregnant? Have there been a lot of studies done on what unnatural male hormones might do to a developing baby in the womb? -Or are we in the midst of ongoing legal experimentation on humans?

#send troll prompts #the double down #endeavor #transtrender #fandumb fail #m preg #damn furries #experimenting on humans #at least there's no omegaverse #hypocrisy #ask me about my million stupid bj aus #blankshipping #leftist culture #animation

[downbytheriversside]

something you think that's underrated (show, music, ship, habit, animal, absolutely anything. can be multiple/a list. go wild)

Oh get ready to be here a while here we fuckin go...

Wind. It reminds me what it's like to be alive

Matt Maltese. Sad boy music that's so so good and makes me feel so much pain and catharsis. Also a lot of his songs are byler/Mike coded. You deserve an Oscar, shoe, everyone adores you, outrun the bear (byler will pov), as the world caves in, strange time (its second or third line is literally "and we'll both gladly lose our minds LIKE!!). Also paper thin hotel is tom wambsgan's song, and tom wambsgan's alone.

Lucas GODDAMN Sinclair. Need I say more? Doesn't matter cus I'm gonna- I genuinely believe he's the best written and performed character in the whole show, he's my sweet child ray of sunshine I love him dlfkgkfdn and he would NOT be the same without what Caleb brings to the table in his performance. And since day ONE he fucking ATE I keep putting EMPHASIS on so many WORDS but I digress. I do understand the problems with some of his writing which sucks but he is still incredible and you can tell that Caleb cares so much about him which I always love to see

The oh hellos album dear wormwood. Omg. Omfg. It's fucking TRANSCENDENT. ANYONE READING THIS WHO HAS GONE THROUGH/IS GOING THROUGH A TOXIC OR ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP OF ANY KIND LISTEN TO THIS IT IS SO HEALING. Not only is it cathartic asf but it depicts the anger and regret and pain and resignation and fucking every emotion under the sun that you experience in those kinds of relationships. And just how connected all of the songs are. The album itself is a loop, seriously. The last part of Thus Always to Tyrants (the final song on the album) leads right into the beginning of Prelude. And while we're on the subject of thus always to tyrants can we talk about how fucking impactful it is to end the album on that note? On a bittersweet toast to the people who hurt us because there is no getting rid of what they did, only making yourself stronger from it and healing?!!? About the notion that what they did was terrible but that is something you'll never forget because you can't but you're moving on to better things, wondering if they will change/have changed from who you knew them as?!??! ARE YOU FUCKNG KIDDING ME!!!!! AND just how connected the lyrics and melodies are in all of the songs. I've listened to the whole album easily over a hundred times and I still notice new lines that relate to each other or when bg melodies in one song are the main motif (?) of another. You can tell how much care and thought and love and emotion was put into its creation and I love it so so so much. Also if you dear reader do not want to spend 40 min listening to the album please please please just listen to Pale White Horse and Where is Your Rider. Oh. My. Fucking. God. Jesus fuck these songs. I'm just typing about them and I got chills like. I'm not joking at all when I say these songs actually changed my life. And the interconnectedness of them (sorta like a horse and its rider?) is just so special. They're whole fucking experiences to listen to and I will never get tired of it. Aaaaaaaahhh I wanna keep talking about this album but we'd be here for a long long long time but I might make a post about it if anyone was actually interested on my music blog @lyricsdumblikethelinoleumfloor at some point so. Stick around for that ?

Forehead kisses. We need more of those pls

Sincerity. For the love of the night sky. BE EARNEST! BE SINCERE!! BE GENUINE I WILL FUCKING STAB YOU-

Little thumb rubs while holding hands

My mutuals all of you deserve love and appreciation and tenderness every one of you fuckers I love you all <33333

Cucumbers. Shit fucks

LIBRARIES! Please if you can visit your local library, it'll be so lovely I prommy

Humans committing to silly bits together. And just like building off of each other's energy. One of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed and that I'm so grateful to have experienced

Introspection. For the love of fuck pleaaaase more people need this. Everyone needs to practice introspection idc just do it it's not some shameful act it just helps you grow

Peach flavoured things. They're yummy 😋

My ever growing gnome figurine collection pretty underrated imo kinda flying under the radar imho

Burger King foot lettuce

Laying on the floor and doing nothing. 10/10 activity honestly. Especially when you're in a sun spot shit fucks

And that's m'list! Glad you made it to the end, sorry for the long post

#nonnie you shouldn't have told me to go wild look what youve done #AND you made me be sappy. reveal yourself i need to know who did this #askings

[solradguy]

I have sent many asks to you before filled with honest yet corny-as-hell sentimental bullshit about how much your blog, and you by extension, means to me— even if we don’t even really know each other. But if this isn’t a better time to actually buckle down and give you a proper “thank you,” than I don’t know what is.

I found your blog a while back, sometime early last summer if I remember correctly, through your Guilty Gear scans. It was around the time I first started actively hunting down whatever remnants of a Guilty Gear fandom were scattered across the internet, and luckily I hit the jackpot with Tumblr (amongst other sites.) God bless whatever made you make this blog, cause the things it has done for me since then have been tremendous. From small things like your discussions about music and your random posts about vintage technology that inevitably prompt me to do deep-dives on the subject, or bigger things like your entire translation or scanning projects that open me to an entire new world of Guilty Gear media, your blog has taught me about so many new things that have molded me into the person I am today, and suffice to say, I’m proud of that person. You have introduced me to new singers, bands, books, movies, games, shows; so many goddamn things and the majority of them have turned out to be things I simply enamor. Beyond that, your art has helped me improve on my own art and has inspired me to make so much more work and work even harder. Plus, you also brought back my obsession with dragons! I used to be enthralled by dragons; collecting paintings, statues, plushies, books, you name it and I probably have it. And just to like them once more due to my exposure with the content you churn out (wether original or reblogged) is something I can also say I am grateful for. Even just ranting about personal interests in your asks or asking if you perhaps enjoy the same things that I do is something that makes me happy.

I don’t want to make you uncomfortable by saying this, but I seriously do see you as a sort of “big brother” figure in my life. It’s a parasocial relationship, sure, but I have found solitude and comfort in your blog, and even a sort of aspiration to be like you. Either way, the truth is your blog has helped me so much this year and has brought me so much more happiness than what I had before. You have seriously helped me become a better person, better in loving myself and finding something to love in the world around me as well.

So, thank you. Thank you for this blog and for everything you post on here. Thank you, and happy new years. I hope next year gives you nothing but unadulterated love. You deserve it.

Ok so, for an uncountable amount of times this has happened now, I typed a really lengthy reply to this and then cut a section of text to move it and Tumblr decided that meant "delete the whole post except the cut text and then close the post editor, deleting everything forever." It is 3:30am. I'm going to summarize what I wrote as I type it for the second time. The last two paragraphs are the only sections from the first draft that got saved.

--

First off, I apologize for taking so long to reply to this. Your message is extremely heartfelt and sincere and, when I got it (around noon), I wanted to think on it for a little and reread it a few times before replying.

I'm... not great... at accepting compliments. For a lot of my life I've been picked on for my physical appearance and interests so I learned how to take advantage of my size and how to project a pissed off aura to get people to leave me alone. It works very well. Online that doesn't work, and I wouldn't want it to, but offline I think I can be kind of a grumpy asshole. I try really hard to only appear to be that way. After making kids/babies cry just from being in the same space as them though, it can be difficult to think otherwise. I'm not used to people being this kind to me, let alone even admiring or looking up to me.

But the online format is nice; people just see me as an icon and if they don't like my posts/interests they can close the tab or filter it instead of making it my problem. Being able to talk about whatever on here and finding other people that also think it's interesting has helped me a lot too. Before getting into Guilty Gear around August 2021, this blog was mostly just an art reference blog with a very, very, small amount of personal posts scattered in-between when it was something I wanted to archive (like when I started HRT).

I started doing scans because I wanted to send a specific illustration to someone but could only find it in a low resolution. Since I had the GGX '07 art book and a scanner, I figured I might as well just scan it myself and it all sort of snowballed from there. The GG community has been incredibly motivating and I don't see myself quitting doing these scans/translations until there's nothing left to scanlate. Guilty Gear has done so much for me and I love the games and its setting probably more than any other series I've ever been into.

Know that I really, truly, appreciate you sending me this message. I have a little folder of nice messages like yours that I keep to look through on bad days. They genuinely mean a lot to me.

It's such an honor that the things I've posted about have inspired you and lead you to new interests, too, and I hope that I can keep motivating and inspiring you. 2023's gonna be a good year, I think, and I hope you get some of that unadulterated love too.

#asks #long post #I started typing my first reply at 1:30 and now it's 3:30 GOD I'm so mad Tumblr deleted my first draft............. #Next time I'm typing it in Notepad s2g #Anyway I'm sorry if any of this comes across as curt or if it's worded weirdly I'm falling asleep on my laptop hhhhhhhhhh

[plusanimablog]

Chapter 15: Maggie Coliseum Part 1

Meet Lady Maggie.

This oughtta be classist.

The group arrives in Maggie Vil, a village dedicated to an old ass lady. Some homeless guy calls the group over to explain the "village's" history. You see, it was 50 years ago where a village was built around a woman named Maggie. They named the village after her and, even though this is clearly a town, they still call it a village. Lady Maggie up there? She's a descendant of the first Maggie.

He then charged 10 billers for the history lesson.

Cooro guesses that the lady must have been impressive to have an entire village named after her. Husky guesses that she was a witch. Rose, who is still traveling with them, comes out of a store having sold her merchandise to the owner. Husky, still based, is not pleased with her presence. Rose takes notice and Nana says that Husky hates girls. Rose figures out pretty quickly that Husky must have been hurt by a girl in the past. Nana has the long overdue appropriate reaction to that hypothesis:

I'm kidding. Nana now knows that Husky hated girls before her so it wasn't her fault (not gonna blame her for jumping to that conclusion though). Nana, horrible being that she is, is happy that it's not just her Husky hates though.

Anyway, Rose is gonna buy her little brother a present with her money. Nana and Cooro ask what her brother's like and Rose says that while he doesn't look like Senri, he shares the latter's silence, his kindness and his overall moeness. Rose would live with him but he's very sick so a relative is taking care of him. Their parents are dead so she's earning the money for both of them.

Cooro comes across some guys post-winnings after betting on a coliseum game. The homeless guy from before explains that the coliseum is Maggie Vil's main attraction. The group leaves to check it out as Rose goes off to stock up on merchandise, all of them agreeing to meet up before it gets dark.

Shockingly, it turns out they have to pay to get into a coliseum. Cooro wants to break in but Husky stops him. That's when some dude walks up to Senri, calling him a Kimunkle. He says if he wants to join a match, he'll pay for him. Husky says that one has to fight to the death in the coliseum but the guy denies it. Death and serious injury is not allowed and punished by a fine but if you win a match, you get 1000 gillers. But boo, the entrance fee is 100 gillers. But yay, the guy's a scout and he'll pay the entry fee for Senri if he splits his winnings with him 50-50. The group drags Senri away before he gets dragged in however.

Now away, Husky expresses relief that the goddamn bear Anima didn't have to get in a fight that he would have to solve with his razor sharp claws. Still, all that money...after some rich kid shows up and twirls for whatever reason, Cooro asks if kids can enter. I mean, you're not allowed to get seriously hurt, right? And he can fly off if things get rough, right? That same rich girl comes back, confirms Cooro's theory and offers to take them in.

We cut to a kid named Pinion having boring school experiments run on them before a bunch of papers fly out of the window, alerting Rose to his presence. She recognizes him and gives chase, catching him before the weird guys take him away. It's here that we find out that Pinion is Rose's little brother.

The rich girl leads the group through an underground corridor, taking them out into the coliseum. Cooro thanks her, asking what her name is. She answers Magdra, ending the chapter.

Wait...Magdra can become Maggie!

#+anima #manga #review #maggie #will the old lady eat them? #find out whenever

[greenerteacups]

13. worst blorboficiation 

(Ref: this ask.)

Ooh, boy. I mean, it's Snape, yeah? It's gotta be.

This isn't even really the fandom's fault, in my opinion. Around Book 5, Snape's character takes a hard pivot from Antagonist into Morally Grey Deuteragonist, and we start ramping up to the big reveal at the end of Book 7, which is his childhood friendship with Lily. Cool. Interesting. Unfortunately, the books do this by immediately shotgunning the core of his character for 1-4, which is that he is a total jackass to children, and quite seriously abusive to unpopular kids like Neville (threatens to kill his pet, quite possibly would've if Hermione hadn't intervened) and Hermione ("I see no difference" when her teeth are jinxed — sir, that's a thirteen-year-old girl. Crucio is not enough). Up through Prisoner of Azkaban, he's an stunted bully who takes his feelings out on children; then he kind of disappears for a book, and when he comes back in OOTP, he's overshadowed by Umbridge, who's so astonishingly cruel it makes him look almost valorous in comparison. Then you get HBP, and his pact with Narcissa, which aligns him with Dumbledore and also casts him in the role of protecting a child (FOR ONCE), and by the time DH rolls around, it's been so long since we've seen him as he was in Sorcerer's Stone that we've mostly forgotten how awful he actually was. (True, he killed Dumbledore, but that only reads as a strike against him on your first readthrough of the series; if you know what's actually going on, it's another mark in his favor.)

I mean, stuff like this happens all the time, where First Installment Weirdness gets overlooked for the more interesting character work that follows. But I think that Deathly Hallows, and in particular the Epilogue, make him out to be this sad martyr who led this deeply unlucky life, when the reality is that he is everything that's wrong with himself, and he caused every problem he ever had. Which is such a goddamn fascinating character anyway I don't know why the books didn't stick with that instead of the trite martyr shit.

I should admit that I am guilty of doing this — my fic "The Climb" is a Severitus story that spins Snape in a very different direction than he goes in canon, basically diverging from the Potters' death, and it definitely leans into the Soft Snape trend. Climb!Severus is my blorbo, and I'm guilty. (That's the third act twist of this post, right, that the worst blorbo is one of MY guys.) But that's because I so dearly wish that the Severus from 5-7 had been there all along, so that we wouldn't have to sit here wondering why Harry Potter named his son after the teacher who made his best friend cry.

#greenteacup asks #ask game #thank you for all these asks by the way! #had tremendous fun writing them