#and i mean. there's stuff 'for kids' in the sense of tweens/teens

[decepti-thots]

no offense but with all the uptick of posts i'm seeing from people hoping eathspark series two will be 'darker' or 'more complex', this seems like a good time to gently remind people: earthspark is aimed at six year olds and upwards, through the solidly pre-teen target demo. it is going to continue to be extremely 'teach very young kids Good Morals' the entire time. earthspark isn't even for older kids really, it is for young children. if you find earthspark difficult to watch because of how simplistic, wholesome and morally straightforward it is much of the time, this is likely to be less a failing of the show and more a completely reasonable disinterest in watching children's TV as a full grown adult! but mostly just... don't get your hope up s2 is magically going to turn into a show for adults, because that absolutely isn't gonna happen, sorry.

#and i mean. there's stuff 'for kids' in the sense of tweens/teens #see: something like Prime mostly #which a lot of adults can still enjoy #and then there's what ES is doing which. i didn't pull the six year old thing outta thin air! #prior to airing when it was originally announced- they specified it was for a six and up demographic in the press releases #i saw an unfavourable comparison to ARCANE recently and like. that is a show for grown adults. that's not a fair comparison. #(sidnote: i love ES! i also like. enjoy kids' stuff for what it is generally. so it's just not a big barrier for me. shrug.)

[david-talks-sw]

Debunking more myths in the GFFA: the Jedi and the clones.

I wrote a post debunking the various myths about how "the Jedi condone slavery", a while ago. Something I had omitted (because it's such a big topic) was the following two statements that concern the clone troopers' relations with the Jedi:

"The clones were genetically bred to have accelerated growth, so they're technically child soldiers."

"The clones were slaves of the Jedi."

Both the above statements are inaccurate, let's explore why. 

"The clones were child soldiers"

Let's get the easy one out of the way first, because it's a logic that cuts both ways. If age is our only determination of the maturity of a Star Wars character, then Grogu is not a baby. He is aged 50, and is thus a middle-aged man.

Who cruelly eats the babies of a woman...

... and knowingly tortures animals for his own sadistic pleasure.

Of course, I'm kidding. Grogu's none of the above things.

The narrative frames him as a cute baby who does innocent baby stuff. Him eating the eggs is played off as comedic, as is him lifting with the frog. To this day, some fans still call him "Baby Yoda".

Conversely, despite the clones being 10/14-years-old, their actions, behaviors, way of thinking, sense of humor, morals etc, are all those of an adult.

Like, Ahsoka is technically older than Rex in this scene.

The scene doesn't portray them as peers, though. This isn't written as "a teen and a tween talking". No, Rex looks, acts and behaves like a grown-up and is thus framed as such by the narrative.

You can make the argument "they're child soldiers", but (unless you're doing so in bad faith) you'd also have to argue that "Grogu's an adult".

"The clones were the Jedi's slaves"

Nope. For all intents and purposes, they're in the same boat as the Jedi, who George Lucas stated multiple times had been drafted to fight in the war.

Again: both the Jedi (monk/diplomats untrained for fighting on a battlefield) and clones (literally bred en masse only to fight) are being forced to fight by Palpatine and the Senate.

Though, on paper, the clones were commissioned by Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas, it was actually done by the Sith (who either manipulated or assassinated Sifo-Dyas then stole his identity, depending on the continuity you choose to adhere to). The rest of the Jedi had no idea these clones were being created.

So while the clones are slaves... they're not owned by the Jedi.

They're the army of the Republic, they belong to the Senate. This isn't exactly a scoop, they refer to the clones as something to purchase...

... and manufacture.

As far as the Senate’s concerned, clones are property, like droids. 

Like there's a whole subplot in The Bad Batch about this very point: after the war, the clones are decommissioned and left out to dry because they literally have no rights, they served their purpose.

The only trooper to ever canonically blame the Jedi for the clones' enslavement is Slick, who the narrative frames as having been bribed and manipulated by Asajj Ventress into betraying his comrades.

Also, the only canonical Jedi shown to ever be mean, dismissive or mistreating the clones in any way, is Pong Krell.

And it's eventually revealed he’s in fact a full-on traitor, hence why the story frames him as an antagonistic dick from the moment he's introduced. He doesn’t represent the Jedi in any way.

We know this because the other Jedi we’ve been shown are always prioritizing their clones’ lives over theirs, if given the chance.

Finally, if we wanna get even more specific... as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the clones belong to Palpatine. 

Palpatine who is a Sith Lord. 

Palpatine who arranged for the creation of the clones and had them all injected with a chip that would activate upon hearing a code-word...

... and forced them to murder their Jedi without hesitation or remorse.

When you bear all that  ⬆️  in mind and when you read this quote by George Lucas...

"The Jedi won't lead droids. Their whole basis is connecting with the life force. They'd just say, 'That's not the way we operate. We don't function with non-life-forms.” So if there is to be a Republic army, it would have to be an army of humans."    - The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005, 2020  

... narratively-speaking, everything falls into place.

Sidious knows that:

If he orchestrates a war designed to thin the Jedi's numbers, corrupt their values and plunge the galaxy into chaos...

If he wants to draft the Jedi - peace-keeping diplomats who’d never willingly join the fray - to fight in his war...

... then the only way they won't resist the draft and abstain from fighting is if they think joining the conflict will save lives.

So he creates a set of cruel, sadistic villains for them to face, opponents who will target innocent civilians at every turn...

... and instead of lifeless droids, he prepares for the Jedi an army of men... living, mortal people who, despite being well-trained, will be completely out of their league when facing the likes of Dooku...

... Ventress...

... Grievous...

... Savage Opress...

... or the defoliator, a tank that annihilates organic matter.

Thus, in order to save as many clone and civilian lives, the Jedi join the fray despite knowing that doing so will corrupt their values. 

And as the war rages on, a bond of respect is formed between the two groups.

Clearly, the Jedi don't like the fact that the Republic is using the clones to fight a war, but for that matter, they don't like being in a war, in fact they advocated against it.

However, it's happening regardless of their issues with the idea or personal philosophies. Said The Clone Wars writer Henry Gilroy:

"I’d rather not get into the Jedi’s philosophical issues about an army of living beings created to fight, but the Jedi are in a tough spot themselves, being peacekeepers turned warriors trying to save the Republic."

And bear in mind, the Jedi are basically space psychics, the clones are living beings that they can individually feel in the Force... 

... so the Jedi feel every death but need to move on, regardless, only being able to mourn the troopers at the end of every battle.

We see this in the Legends continuity too, by the way.

(that is, when the writers actually try to engage with the narrative)

Also, if you ask the clones, they’re grateful the Jedi have their backs.

When Depa Billaba voices her concerns about how the war is impacting the Jedi's principles, troopers Grey and Styles are quick to make it clear how grateful they all are for the Jedi's involvement:

So the clones aren't the Jedi's slaves. If anything, they're both slaves of the Republic (considering how low the Jedi's status actually is in the hierarchy).

Only I'd argue the clones have it much, much worse. 

The Senate sees the Jedi as "ugh, the holier-than-thou space-monk lapdogs who work for us"... but a Jedi has the option to give up that responsibility. They can leave the Order, no fuss or stigma. 

A clone trooper cannot leave the GAR! If they do, they’re marked for treason and execution. Again, they’re not perceived as “people”.

And it doesn’t help that the Kaminoans, the clones’ very creators, see the troopers as products/units/merchandise. A notion that the Jedi are quick to correct whenever they get the chance.

How The Clone Wars writers describe the clones' relationship with the Jedi.

George Lucas hasn’t spoken much about this subject aside from the quote from further up. But to be fair... the Prequels aren’t about the clones’ dynamic with the Jedi, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t talk on that subject so much.

He did mention that part of The Clone Wars’ perks is that he could:

“Do stories about some of the individual clones and get to know them.”

But that’s as far as it gets. 

So for this part, I'm just gonna let Dave Filoni, showrunner of The Clone Wars and the upcoming series Ahsoka, and TCW writer Henry Gilroy - both of whom worked closely with Lucas - take the wheel. They make themselves pretty clear on how the clone/Jedi dynamic is meant to be viewed. 

Here’s Henry Gilroy:

"In my mind, the Jedi see the clones as individuals, living beings that have the same right to life as any other being, but understand that they have a job to do."

"The clones see the Jedi as their commanding officers on one hand, but also, at least subconsciously, they look to them for clues to social/moral behavior."    

"Some clones may find themselves getting philosophical leadership from the Jedi that helps them answer some of the deeper questions of life."    

"We thought this was a great opportunity to show how the Jedi interact with clones. Specifically, Yoda in a teaching role of the clones, who were socially new, who kind of grew up— who were created to fight, and he really broadened their horizons and helped them realize there was a great big universe out there that was bigger than just fighting and killing."    

And here’s Dave Filoni’s comments:

"I truly believe that the Jedi try to humanize their clones and make them more individual, as Henry says."    

"I think we saw that in Revenge of the Sith, when the Clones were colorful and named under the Jedi Generals, and then in the final shots of the film with Palpatine and Vader near the new Death Star, the ships are grey, the color and life is sucked out. The Stormtroopers are only numbers and identified by black and white armor or uniforms in A New Hope." 

"The soldiers have become disposable to the Emperor."    

"That is something the Jedi would never do."    

"Yoda teaching the clones much like he taught Luke. ‘Cause that was kind of natural for [the Jedi], a natural instinct to take to these clones like they’re students."    

None of the above quotes from two different writers of The Clone Wars, who had many interactions with George Lucas, frame the Jedi and the clones’ relationship in a negative way. 

How much more proof do we need that "the clones were slaves of the Jedi” isn’t the intended narrative?

My point being that while the clones' ordeal is indeed horrible, the Jedi have nothing to do with it. The narrative of The Clone Wars always frames it as the fault of the Sith, the Senate and the Kaminoans.

If you go by the intended narrative, the Jedi were the clones' teachers and brothers-in-arms. The clones and the Jedi were not just comrades.

They were friends.

#long post #But most of this is GIFs used for evidence #meta #SW meta #jedi #Jedi Order #in defense of the jedi #Clones #The Clone Wars #on the jedi's involvement in the clone wars #TCW #Clone Troopers #Rex #Cody #Plo Koon #Mace Windu #Obi-Wan #Yoda #Dave Filoni #Henry Gilroy #Grogu #George Lucas #flashing gif

[reallyromealone]

I sure can!

You're very welcome!

Also in this Mikey is still friends with his old friends

@kodasstar

♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

(Name) was quiet as he sat up front with Takeomi, their son currently getting chewed the fuck out from the rest of the pack as the eldest alpha rested his hand on (name)s thigh, rubbing gently as he drove them home.

"You come from an Omega and yet you disrespect them?! Have we taught you nothing!" Koko said heatedly as (sons name) shrunk more, trying to make himself invisible from his parents lecturing because fuck did it hurt.

They were disappointed and angry with him but (name) still said nothing to him.

That's kind of what terrified the tween the most.

Mama hadn't said anything.

When they got home the alphas led (name) to the sitting area and made sure he was comfortable and smooched his forehead before going to sons room and literally taking everything that could possibly bring him entertainment out of his room as Ran ordered Omega rights books and books written by omegas (basically this universes version on feminist books and women's rights) and Rindō looked up classes that were sure to take up all his spare time outside doing homework "when these books come we want a report on what they were about and what you learned from them"

"B-but--"

"Do you really think arguing with us is the smartest move right now?" Mikey's voice was cold and thankfully (name) was away from earshot.

He knew (name) didn't like that voice even though it's never been directed at him.

Their son shut up at that and just silently fumed at this.

This made him hold a grudge against not just the student but omegas, he didn't understand why omegas were put on a pedestal and why his mama got away with Yelling at his dad's like that.

It didn't make sense for his dumb tween brain.

After all his stuff was locked up in the basement he was sent to his room for the night, dinner would be brought to him.

"Now..." Mikeys voice was soft as the men went to their mate who was fidgeting slightly "why didn't you tell us baby?"

"Which thing"

"Well first the whole Omega thing and then the pregnancy thing preferably" Ran said as they all got comfortable around their mate who looked down "You guys were really busy with that project and I didn't want to add more stress... I chose to stay at home so I could handle this...." (Name)s voice was meek as he avoided eye contact.

That 'project' aka drug trade was six months ago.

"He's been acting like an ass for that long?"

"I-I thought it was a phase ya know? Edgy teen stuff... He's apparently hanging out with these other elitist alphas and I don't know what happened "

The alphas watched (name) crumble and stepped closer "baby no matter how busy we seem you can always come to us... He's our kid too even if he's being a complete dick "

"Speaking of kids, bow long have you known about this one?" Mochi said pointing at (name)s stomach and the Omega blushed a bit "since my doctors appointment two days ago..."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"I was already stressed, I didn't know how to bring it up" (name) slowly looked up "I'm sorry alphas..."

"Just talk to us when you're dealing with stuff, ok?"

(Name) just nodded and the alphas were reluctant to let him cook dinner especially after the events that transpired but (name) managed to convince them so long as they could supervise.

They didn't want their pregnant omega lifting anything heavier than an egg.

Dinner took considerably longer with the Alphas trying to help him though none of them could cook by any means.

"I'm gonna take (sons name) his portion" Ran said grabbing a plate and a cup before going to their sons room, Mikey nosing at (name)s neck when he smelt the slight distress coming off him "don't worry baby, we will get him right"

"I just miss my pup..." (Name) mumbled and the family began eating, the Alphas trying to feed (name) more with the new information of a pup on the way.

Ran walked to their sons room, he was still pissed with him.

Treating his dam like that?

The person who loves him unconditionally and would die for him, just to turn around and belittle and treat them like a second class citizen.

Disgusting.

(Sons name) was stewing in his room, doing homework as ran set the food down and stared at him "you know despite your shit show, your dam still loves you" Ran said simply as he looked around his sons room before looking at the tween "even tried to have us go easy on you"

(Sons name) said nothing as he continued working "breaks coming soon, we will decide what you will be doing with your time off"

Ran left without saying anything else, returning to the others and smiling at his omegas much better mood.

When (name) went to bed the men gathered around the sitting room as now they would discuss the real punishment that would come when their pup would be on break.

They loved their kid, thus why they are sending him to work under the most terrifying Omega they all knew outside of (name) when they fuck up.

Nahoya Kawata.

Everyone in the room agreed he was not to be fucked with and maybe a few weeks with him and Souya would prove to show (sons name) that omegas weren't weak and definitely not to be fucked with.

Mikey would be making the call come morning as they went to go change for bed, smiling as they looked at their mate who was snuggled in the Alaskan king bed in one of their shirts.

They stopped buying (name) sleep attire unless it was for non sleep activities.

#tokyo revengers x male reader #tokyo revengers x reader #tokyo revengers fluff #bonten x reader #omega male reader #omegaverse

[drdemonprince]

hi devon! i recently binged all your medium articles, your writing hits so close to home and has opened so many doors of self-reflection for me, thank you. one of your latest ones was about porn and autism, i have some differing opinions on porn itself, but i enjoyed your perspective on it.

i would love to hear your thoughts on autism and hypersexuality in a broader sense. i’m someone that’s recently realised how much my premature exposure to sexuality and porn in childhood made me hypersexual in a way that really stunted my personal growth and had me traumatising myself with my own compulsive sexual behavior. as an undiagnosed autistic adhd kid i was just grasping after any form of stimulating and self-soothing behavior, but also looking after ways to make myself more interesting and appealing to peers and most importantly boys (because interest from men = value as a human i learned early on). i think i could’ve figured out gender and sexuality stuff a little earlier and avoided my comphet phase had it not been for how obsessed i was with sexualising and objectifying myself in my tweens and early teens tbh. i hope to see more people talking about autism and sexuality. my heart breaks thinking about how so many demonise kids with problematic sexualised behavior when they’re literal children trying to figure out this having a body thing and there’s usually grown-ups around them standing idly by doing nothing effective to help.

Hi there! I love hearing from people who don't share my perspective completely but can still get a lot out of my work.

I alluded to this yesterday, but I don't believe hypersexuality or hyposexuality are a thing. Where do we draw the line where it becomes pathological, and why? Clearly humans have varied in how much they desire and think about sex since the beginning of time, and while we still have not figured out a respectful, appropriate way to cope with the fact of it, children also sometimes have an interest in sex and masturbation and a curiosity about it that is completely value neutral. It's just a thing that happens because children are living human beings.

Unfortunately we inhabit a paradigm where this is supposed to be either ignored or punished and discouraged, and anyone who does bring it up is viewed as having some ulterior motive beyond the liberation of children from abuse. And so if a child is curious about sex or driven to explore it in some way, they only means they have of pursuing that interest is by consuming adult material, which a lot of people look back on having done with a variety of different feelings. It sounds like you saw a lot of porn from a young age that really gave you unhelpful expectations for yourself and others and that it really hurt you, and I'm really sorry to hear that.

I consumed a lot of adult content as a child and a teen, not just porn but also real life gore and jump scare videos and elaborate, violent sexual stories, and of all those experiences, the only one that seemed to scar me was the jump scare videos. Seriously, newgrounds fucked me up, and not because I was playing games like Orgasm Angel. It was shit like kikia that fucked me up. The potential that my most beloved friend, the computer, could start screaming at me and showing me dead babies at any moment meant I was on edge and obsessively read all the comments on every video I ever viewed for like... seven or eight years. Even if a friend or classmate wanted to show me a youtube video, I forced them to read through all the comments and convince me it wasn't a jumpscare video first. For like years.

It might be that the only reason I was able to watch and read and play a lot of porn online as a kid without any real adverse effects was because I had a really specific fetish, and so most of the content I was able to view was of an obviously fictional and fantastical variety or was made directly by the people who starred in it. As I wrote in my essay, I'm glad that I started watching brainwashing gifs on weird websites and masturbating to them as a kid. It helped me feel less alone in my fetish and it didn't scar me, and provided a sexual outlet that was actually pretty safe and private and didn't put me in contact with any adults. It was a really nice pressure valve, a way to stim and zone out and regulate my breathing and get off, and finding content like that helped me to realize there was a whole big wide world out there where freaks like me could be okay.

THAT said, I can understand your experience! Porn didn't fuck me up as a kid, but I did learn some really pernicious sexual norms as a teen, because I had abstinence only education at school and I obsessively read Dan Savage's advice column Savage Love as a replacement for having any kind of credible sex ed. I used to worship Dan Savage. I met him for pancakes once, you can read about my whole complex relationship to him and his work in a very old piece I wrote pre transition here:

Dan Savage's work was really influential on me and on a lot of people of my generation. From his stuff, I learned that I should be good, giving, and game for just about anything a partner wanted -- which meant I pressured myself to do things I didn't always want to do. He normalized a kind of casual, unarticulated nonmonogamy among people of my age group including everyone I dated -- and so being open without really discussing what that meant was the norm for me from age 19 until about age 23.

Dan Savage wrote that blowjobs come standard and that any model who is not equipped with them should be returned to the lot -- thats really how he described women who didn't do oral. As broken cars. Dan Savage said that asexuals should only date other asexuals and probably werent real anyway. He said vaginas looked like canned hams dropped from great heights. He said a gay trans guy who couldnt take T for health reasons was 'delusional' for wanting to date fellow gay men. Reading Dan Savage fucked me up, and it's not even his fault -- he was just an outspoken faggot with an advice column that was always clear in reflecting his biases and agendas, and I was just a horny confused kid with no sex education and no where else to learn about sex other than porn and the back of the local alternative mag.

So, this is all a very long and meandering way of saying that I'm sorry you also got attached very young to untrustworthy sources of sexual information and that they also scarred you and left you pressured to be something you were not. I was there. I think many of my generation were and some still are. and not just the Autistics. I know so many people who got swept up in the messages that conventional porn and writers like dan savage had to peddle -- straight people, queer people, poly people, disabled people, everyone. The sad part is that Dan Savage for all his faults was still a lot more progressive than where many of my peers turned, which was sites like efukt or the predecessors to the chan sites and shit. It was brutal out there.

It's also the case that many of us Autistic people are prone to intense fixation and rumination and obsession, by neurotypical standards, sometimes to our detriment, sometimes in a completely neutral way that would cause us zero harm if it weren't for all the societal stigma and judgement. and that can mean that, especially when we are lonely and closeted teens, that we retreat into a lot of damaging digital messages and imagery, and I think a lot of bad, sexist straight porn unfortunately played that role in a lot of people's lives. My version of that was instead compulsively reading pro ana livejournals (as a teen) and then later terf detransition blogs (in my 20s). So again I don't think it's necessarily a phemoneon of porn per se, but obviously there is a lot of really toxic shit out there that has warped a lot of people's viewpoints around sex and relationships, I can't deny that.

I wish I knew what the solution was to help prevent future generations of kids from going through the kinds of damage you and I went through, but I think we are so far from being prepared as a culture to have this conversation that most attempts to broach it end up making things worse for kids in all kinds of scary new ways -- parents heavily monitoring and controlling their kids browsing habits for example. That sure as hell isn't going to help a closeted queer kid who is exploring themselves in most cases. Instead of building a world that is more liberatory and supportive to kids, we just keep trying to control them more and more, and impose more and more strict standards on them, which always hurts the weirdest and queerest among us the worse. It fucking sucks. Shit. i really am going to have to write about about child liberation one day wont i

[ectonurites]

What are your opinions on Teen titans

'Teen Titans' is very broad. lots of things that could refer to, so i'll give my opinions on all the possible ones i can think of:

Vol. 1 / Silver Age - i have read like 3 total comics from that era but love the vibes tbh

1967 Filmation shorts - THESE ARE SO FUNNY PLS WATCH THEM!!! they're like on youtube. theres so much going on

The New Teen Titans (80s) - i still need to actually read this run start to finish not just in random chunks when the mood strikes/i have a specific question im trying to answer but like, iconic

Vol. 2 (90s) - i forgot this one existed until i was just looking at all the different possible teen titans things to talk about. so. i think that says my thoughts about that

2003 Cartoon - i grew up on this one babey (like i remember watching it as new episodes came out and everything) its always gonna hold a special place in my heart and tbh was one of my first introductions to superhero stuff in general

New Teen Titans shorts - these were so cute. the who is red x one where gar insists its jason... iconic

Vol. 3 (2003) - Geoff Johns face my wrath for what you did to the core four. but um. a WILD ride from start to finish i can tell you that!!!! i shit talk this comic a lot but like it does definitely have its moments and there are some cool and interesting things it did, it just also showed a blatant disregard for previous characterization of four of its main characters which annoys the shit out of me and always will.

Tiny Titans - SHOWSTOPPING. LEGENDARY. THE ONLY COMIC EVER

Teen Titans Go! - im going to be so real with you i understand why so many ppl hate this show but its actually so fucking funny to me. i dont regularly watch it or anything but like. it is so amusing to me. every time i remember the urn marked 'Robin II' displayed next to a crowbar i lose MY MIND. or the 'NOBODY CARES ABOUT TIIIIM DRAKE'.

Vol. 4 (2011/New 52) - this comic caused me physical pain to read. nothing makes sense. none of the characters are themselves. shit is just a mess, an absolute mess. however Bunker? Miguel? I love him. best thing to come out of this damn comic.

Teen Titans Go! To The Movies - go watch this right fucking now if you haven't seen it. its literally so good even most ppl who hate ttg still will admit its good. my friend recently reminded me that when we saw it in theaters there was a part that made me laugh so hard i literally fell out of my chair

Vol. 5 (2014/Still New 52) - this one is also really bad but at least its kinda funny. definitely more pleasant to read than Vol. 4 but like its still not good or pleasant to read, i just mean that like, in comparison. the last two issues i actually genuinely like tbh (bc #23 is a standalone like, just nice team story, and then #24 is a memorial for Tim after he 'died' in Rebirth)

Justice League vs Teen Titans movie - the dcamu is a fucking fever dream but like the concept of max from wizards of waverly place voicing jaime while violet from american horror story voices raven amused me so much. also the FUCKIN UHHH MAGICAL GIRL-ESQUE TRANSFORMATION SCENE WITH DAMIAN THEN JUST TRYING TO BREAK INTO THE CAR FOR HIS SWORD IS SO FUCKING FUNNY

Teen Titans: Judas Contract movie - its the judas contract. it is what it is.

Vol. 6 (Rebirth) - i have not read too much of this one (like. ive read... chunks of it but not the whole thing) but eh. i've heard bad things about later parts of it especially and from what i've read that seems to... line up.

Titans TV show - a hot mess. superhero riverdale. i binged the first two seasons within 48 hours. very nice costumes and mostly very well cast but the writing makes me die

Tween Titans - in that one episode of dc superhero girls. im just obsessed with Dick having the thick jersey accent its so fucking funny

Teen Titans Academy - I really was not vibing with it early on but as we've actually gotten to focus on the new kids more i've liked it more, but overall its just way too bloated of a cast. having the new characters students, the previous team older students, and then the og titans as teachers is just... too much to focus on in one book. then also did not like the attempt at dick/babs/kory love triangle drama in like issue 2 get tht shit outta here

and if u meant more just the team overall like. i think the titans are cool

#do not think about the order of things here too much i was trying to do chronological #but also just kinda when i remembered things

[lucindarobinsonvevo]

okay, i keep seeing you talk and post about it and i have to ask... what is eerie indiana and should i watch it? :))

what is Eerie, Indiana? Well. on a surface level Eerie Indiana is a family mystery show produced jointly by Hearst Entertainment and NBC in 1992. A show that the network was unable to properly advertise due to the 'tween' audience not yet being a thing it ended up being pit against 60 minutes (and in one case literally not even being aired at all so they could air the speech of a presidential hopeful /conspiracy theorist from jail, and another not being aired due to the network pulling it due to content, it was released by Fox in the 1998 reruns) essentially dooming it to fail. Despite this, NBC ordered a half season and a re-tooling of the show to introduce a more serialized set of storylines rather than episodic. Sadly, this wasn't enough to save the show and it was cancelled after one, single, glorious, practically perfect season in 1992, running for a mere 19 episodes.

Created by Jose Rivera and Karl Schafer (who most recently did Z Nation) the show is made up of immese talent at the very start of their career. I can't even tell you about the amount of talent on this oddball little show. Joe Dante (of Gremlins fame) directs and even acts in one episode. Bob Balaban directs some episodes, Claude Atkins plays a ghost cowboy, Anita Morris plays a sexy secret agent, Ray Walston plays an alien (i mean. duh.), René Auberjonois plays a literal devil business man named 'The Donald', Tobey Maguire (your beloved) plays a ghost who haunts Marshall and makes his family say slurs, Vincent Schiavelli plays an evil dentist, Future Scream Queen Danielle Harris plays a heart transplant recipient...The twist? The heart came from one of Marshall's best friends. and, best of all, John Astin (THEE JOHN ASTIN. GOMEZ ADDAMS) plays the mysterious owner/operator of The World 'O Stuff - the local hangout - for the final six episodes. Like the talent here is truly unreal. (did I mention John Astin?)

with a cast headed by Omri Katz (who you might know from Hocus Pocus) the plot of the show follows the adventures of Marshall Teller (Katz), his best friend/kid sidekick Simon Holmes (Justin Shenkarrow , you might know as the voice of Harold in Hey Arnold) and in the last six episodes, his homoerotic nemesis Dash X (Jason Marsden, you might know him from his many iconic voice roles - notably Max in a Goofy Movie, and also as Thackery Binx in Hocus Pocus) an alien with no memory of his past. On the surface, Eerie is a normal if slightly the Burbs esque small town, but once you look a little closer you start to see...Some cracks. A cult of housewives sealing themselves and their families in giant tupperware so they don't age. A Mayor who sends young men up to wolf mountain to ensure low taxes and they...Don't come back. A mysterious Loyal Order of Corn who...Run Things. Marshall and Simon investigate their strange hometown and are literally Just Trying to Get Through This Bestie. In one episode, Marshall goes where lost items go. In another, his friend Steve's retainer starts picking up the traitorous thoughts of the local dog population.

Eerie is a cult classic in basically every sense of the world. After you've seen it, you can see it's fingerprints all over the 'kids with bikes' genre. Stranger Things, Gravity Falls, Goosebumps (the show) all of them owe a massive debt to Eerie Indiana. The show itself is massively intertextual. It references everything from little shop of horrors, to the Howling, to the Twilight Zone to the Fly. But you don't need to have that knowledge to enjoy it, Eerie is a family show. By that I mean it was created for viewing by the whole family, not specifically teens or adults only. If you like Round the Twist (predates Eerie by 4 years), than you'll like Eerie.

in 1998 there was a controversial reboot made in Canada staring Bill Switzler and Daniel Clark. It too only lasted a season. I love TOD but many hate it. Lastly, should you watch it? YES! I recommend Eerie to everyone I know basically. It is a little dated in parts, and some of the themes are really heavy (Child abuse and neglect are very present, long running themes in many episodes - I actually agree that Broken Record should have been pulled from airing because i find the ending very upsetting) Marshall, our protagonist is a very sweet, empathetic teenage boy character who I NEVER saw on television when I was growing up in the era of the Dan Schnider mean spirited sitcom. He's sort of an asshole sometimes but hey - he's a teenager. Simon is just adorable and literally deserves the whole world. Dash X is very cool, mysterious, gay and totally unhinged. Every character on this show is written fantastically, there are no half hearted performances, everyone is selling it the entire time. I'm very fussy about television, but Eerie is a show that I think is genuinely nearly perfect. I almost am glad it was cancelled so no one had a chance to ruin it lol.

If you're interested (and I hope I've sold you) then you can buy it on youtube, basically. It was previously on Amazon Prime but isn't anymore sadly. You can pay through the nose for an expensive DVD set like I did or.....You can do the smart thing, google it and watch on like. Kisscartoon lmao. Eerie is a show I am so so passionate about so if you're interested PLEASE watch it and feel free to join in discussion here on the hellsite, or you can go to Dreamwidth (@froodlemonkey/@catschimericalcreations runs this and has a MASSIVE back catalogue of fics, art, meta, random twitter posts, scripts, even the first Eerie Fanfiction...which was published in a ZINE in the 90s! seriously if someone has ever said anything about eerie ever than Cat has catalogued it with her extensive, fantastical tagging system) or even discord but like yeah. Eerie is amazing and you should like totally watch it :)

#sonyarebecchi #eerie indiana #eeriepost #mitzianswers #longpost/

[crystalirises]

in regards to ur recent post—i have been waiting so so long for someone to mention that song in relation to Fundy and i wanna hear u elaborate on how well it fits cuz ur thoughts are interesting 👀👀

Hello anon! And yeah I tried to explain why the song fits although I might not get some points across since I'm not ver articulate with my thoughts. I also apologize for responding so late since I actually posted my post at like... Past midnight so I wasn't able to respond immediately. But anyway, here's the sort of lyric analysis (??? Is this right lol) of why Not Your Seed is a Fundy song. And I mean Character Fundy not the actual person. So the Fundy mentioned here is the character.

This is long because it's me lol.

TW: brief mention of drugs, brief mention of sex (cause it's literally part of a song lyric and quite honestly I don't even want to talk about that kinda stuff), a lot of parental neglect, insane!Wilbur Soot, and possible cheating (cause Fundywastaken is mentioned). Stay safe everyone and please read the trigger warnings.

I'm not your girl anymore

I'm not that tween that you drove here for

I'm not your girl anymore

I overtook her body with an infectious spore

Okay, first of the first part of the song doesn't make sense out of the context of the musical (obviously). However if we kinda try to look at this in a "metaphorical" sense, it just gives off the message of Fundy not being the person who he used to be. If we were to say that Fundy was a kid during the first war, it's like a way to saying that he's no longer than innocent kid that he used to be. And for the "infectious spore" thing, if taken metaphorically, could mean the bitterness and anger that Fundy feels against the rest of the server (or at least against Wilbur) for the way they've treated him. Those bitter feelings have led him to just doing things that he would have never done (such as the 'blowing up L'Manburg's supply thing before the Doomsday War').

Also AU where Fundy gets infected the red egg and Wilbur gets ressurected I guess.

You left me out of your sight for one second

And look what happens, nightmare time

It's worse than you could imagine

Not sex and not drugs

Just alien invading minds

Okay for the first two lyrics, we all know very well that Wilbur did not look away for a second (he looked away for an entire damn arc is what he did lol). So essentially, from that first line it just implies that Wilbur (and I say Wilbur mostly cause 'Not Your Seed' is literally a daughter singing this to her father song) looked away from Fundy. Except, Wilbur looked away or ignored Fundy for a very long time, enough so that the last time Fundy saw Wilbur alive was Wilbur pretty much calling him a traitor and then promptly ignoring until he can back as Ghostbur. Which then leads to the second line since that neglect left some impressions on Fundy even after Wilbur was gone.

For the next three lines, combining the first two lines together, the usual fears that a parent would have regarding their children are well... Them engaging in sex and drugs (well the drugs is debatable cause Wilbur literally made a drug van so). However, Wilbur's issues regarding were never those matters but instead he had to deal with the aftermath of his emotional neglect that Fundy gained from Wilbur's parenting. As for the last line "Just alien invading minds," again does not make sense out of the context of the musical. However, metaphorically it could be seen as like... "alien" as in "different/outside emotions" that Fundy had never felt before (am I reaching XD). Essentially, negative emotions that Fundy had never felt before (or at least witheld for a very long time) have pretty much engulfed Fundy's mind and kinda led him down a terrible path.

No more family vacays together

'Cause your only daughter's under the weather

And if you actually paid attention to me

Okay, I have to admit that the first two lines are kinda out of the Fundy interpretation thing and I guess if someone wanted to, just alternate the family vacays to family hangouts since... They never took vacays lol. As for the second line, one could interpret it as just well Fundy drifting away from Wilbur... Essentially, he's sick of Wilbur. (This is reaching and I know that XD).

But it's the third line here that's definitely a Fundy line. "And if you actually paid attention to me," is a line that I believe embodies Fundy to an extent. Yes, Wilbur was there for Fundy and one could argue that whe was a doting father but that does not necessarily mean he was a good one. Wilbur was there for Fundy but he never paid attention to him, if anything, he babied Fundy. During the war? Babied him. During the time L'Manburg gained independence? Babied him. During the election arc? Babied him. Wilbur was there but he never listened to Fundy, he never saw Fundy as anything more than a child. There are many ways that a parent could be neglectful towards their children and I believe that though Wilbur was very doting he was not very attentive towards what Fundy had to say (and this is only hitting the beginning, I haven't even gotten to the "I despise you" part of the Pogtopia Arc.)

You'd see, I'm not your seed

I'm not your angsty teen

No matter what you believe

The apple's fallen far from the tree

Alright so for the first two lines, these could easily be equated to the fact that Wilbur, again, babies Fundy. What especially strikes me is the fact that Wilbur refers to Fundy's creation of Coconut 2020 and his sudden change of clothes to Fundy being in his teenage rebellious phase. Wilbur thinks that Fundy is just being rebellious and it's really just Fundy trying to separate himself from just being Wilbur's son and finding a way to make his dad proud via his own accomplishments, essentially finding something to get Wilbur's acknowledgement or approval while also doing something for himself. This line is like Fundy refuting the idea that everything he's done is just him going through an angsty teenage rebellious phase when he wasn't going through one in the first place.

For the third and fourth lines, I honestly think this represents Fundy's way of trying to separate himself as being known as Wilbur's son. He doesn't want to just be acknowledged as that, he wants to be more than his father's son. He wants to be his own person. In all honesty, I'd like to think that this is Fundy actually saying this to himself. He truly wants to believe that he's being independent but at the same time he's still looking for Wilbur's approval. No matter how much he wants to be his own man, he still looks to Wilbur because at the end of the day he wants to prove himself to Wilbur while also wanting to be independent. It's odd but it's kind of understandable. It's difficult to try and step out of somebody's shadow without turning around to see if they actually notice what you're doing. Fundy is like that. At least he was, and probably still is (with Phil before the whole breakdown arc).

It's not my fault anymore

No more curfews to be late for

It's not my fault anymore

No more being worried and waiting by the door

Again, these four lines are essentially just normal parent-child stuff. Children usually have curfews on when they should be home and parents tend to wait by the doors everytime their kid is a little bit late to arriving home. The thing about this kind of thing tho, if it was something that happened during the L'Manburg war, Fundy would have definitely felt constricted within the walls of L'Manburg. It wouldn't have been easy to just leave the safety of L'Manburg since the enemy could literally be waiting outside to ambush anyone they could. So, if character Fundy were the type of person to occasionally leave L'Manburg (and I believe he would be), he'd definitely feel guilty at times since it would have been very stressful for Wilbur. It's the middle of a war, Wilbur's a general and a father (tho he definitely he focused on one more than the other) and the least Fundy should be doing is to just stay within the walls. So, in a scenario where Fundy occasionally leaves L'Manburg, he would definitely feel guilty and blame himself for adding any unnecessary stress to Wilbur...

Again tho, this is an imagined scenario since this never really occured within the actual storyline... But then again Wilbur did claim the walls as "The wall I built to keep him (Fundy) safe." So it probably did happen and Fundy would have probably felt guilty for just leaving every now and then. Although Wilbur would have a point (it's literally the middle of a war), Fundy would have wanted to see the outside world and not have been forced to stay within the confines of L'Manburg (Fundy would have some slight fault here, that should be noted.)

Like I said, this is more of an imagined scenario that may or may not have occured.

Did you know that I wanted to live with you? (Look what happens, nightmare time)

O-ooh

And when you needed to fight, you gave her that too (aliens invading minds)

Ah-ooh

Alright so the first line really hits me since "live" could almost sound like "leave" (I know they're pronounced different don't @ me). For this piece of line, it sounds like a confrontation between Fundy and insane!Wilbur (Wilbur in Pogtopia Arc). At the very beginning of Schlatt's Administration, Fundy had always made it clear to at least himself (and Eret) that he was a spy on the inside. Fundy - at the beginning - didn't support Schlatt's administration at all. So if one were to think of the line with the word "leave" instead of "live," it gives off the context that Fundy wanted to go with Wilbur and Tommy when they were exiled... But he didn't because he wanted to be a spy for them. Technically, you don't have to change "live" with "leave" cause it essentially means the same thing, it just feels more painful this way cause it implies that Fundy forced himself to stay even if he didn't want to. Tis sad times for Fundy's hidden spy arc.

As for the third line, in the context of the musical this is referring to Bill (the father) essentially giving up custody of his daughter Alice to her mother. Of course in Fundy's case that doesn't work. But if this line were to be though of in a metaphorical way, it could come out as something else. "And when you needed to fight, you gave her that too." Think of it as Wilbur choosing L'Manburg over Fundy. Wilbur never "fought" for Fundy. Pet war? Nope. Tommy publicly disowning him? Nope. People calling Fundy a furry despite him being an anthromorphic fox (and as far as I'm aware, this is canon)? Nope. Schlatt hitting Fundy with a bottle during the November 16th war? Nope. Wilbur never cared enough to defend his son, but he was always ready to fight for L'Manburg.

Did you know mom let Deb sleep over?

And you're right about Deb - she's a hardcore stoner

And if you wonder what led your daughter astray

Well, daddy wasn't here to stay

... listen *gets bonked* Okay, serious interpretation first before I make the crack joke. This line really doesn't work cause this is essentially Alice (the daughter) talking about Deb (her girlfriend) who Bill (the father) does not really like. If anything, I'd like to say that... Change these lines to Fundy admitting that Schlatt is actually doing a great job as president? (Let's all be honest, Fundy at one point did express that he thought Schlatt was a good president). So yeah just Fundy admitting that Schlatt is a good president even though he is an alcoholic.

("Did you know Schlatt let Dre sleep over?

And you were right about Dre - he's a hardcore liar.")

For the last two lines. I imagine this could be said to two versions of Wilbur. If we're talking about insane!Wilbur then this is just a confrontation of how Wilbur pretty much just left Fundy in a hostile country where he was forced to adapt unless he wanted to get executed like Tubbo or imprisoned like Niki. There's a reason why Schlatt asked Fundy about his parentage and his association with Wilbur. As such, Fundy had to learn how to be another person because Wilbur left.

Another way to interpret this is Fundy telling it to Ghostbur. The reason why Fundy is bitter and the way he is is because Wilbur left him... Both emotionally and physically, the man died and they were never able to resolve their issues before Wilbur died. Fundy is the way he is because Wilbur never stayed to resolve their issues. The line "Well, daddy wasn't here to stay" really hits how Fundy is influenced by what Wilbur did, and Fundy is still looking for that one person - the one person - who would stay for him. His dad didn't stay for him, his grandfather stay, Eret did not go to the adoption, and his best friend (Ranboo???) didn't stay... Everyone has left him and that hurts him since that is exactly what Wilbur did and it still continues to haunt him even after Wilbur is dead and gone.

Not your seed

I'm not your perfect teen

I'm fucking sevente-en

At least I was before you left me

With the first two lines, I suppose one could say that this is how Wilbur saw Fundy. "I'm not your perfect teen," is one way that Wilbur could've seen Fundy or at least how he forced himself to see Fundy as. Since the beginning of the L'Manburg War, he regarded Fundy as a child and during the Election Arc he regarded Fundy as a rebellious teenager... But with slight endearment. Like he's honestly amused by Fundy's sudden show of rebellion... It's only when Fundy sides with Quackity that Wilbur begins to realize that Fundy is serious about the whole separating-himself-from-Wilbur thing and even then continues to look at Fundy condescendingly, especially when Fundy ran for presidency. And, although this is my own interpretation, that part of the Election Arc where Fundy wanted to run for the presidency too and Wilbur just allowed it after a moment of awkward silence, feels like a parent who just decided to concede with their child's wishes cause it's amusing and "hey, what's the harm in letting the kid have what he wants?" But... Fundy is not the kid that Wilbur sees him as at all, but Wilbur can't get over that and it even translates over to the way Ghostbur looks and regards Fundy as.

As for the last two lines, there are two ways this could be interpreted as. In the first interpretation, don't look at the age but at the context. Fundy was a kid who was born and grew up in a war-torn country, Wilbur may have been there physically but he had long since emotionally left Fundy since Wilbur was busy with the war effort to really be there for Fundy. Fundy, like Tommy and Tubbo, was forced to grow up because it was a war and they had no choice but to grow if they wanted to survive. The second interpretation is... A bit sadder. I don't really know what Fundy's age is. Like... Is he older than Tommy or Tubbo but how was he born in L'Manburg then??? But confusion aside. If we were to assume that Fundy was 14 during the Election Arc (as Ghostbur said but he's unreliable) or at least Fundy was a teen at that point of time, Wilbur left his son in an enemy country (though of course not any initial fault of his own since he was exiled XD). Fundy - like in the first interpretation - was forced to grow up and adapt because Schlatt could have literally just killed him for being Wilbur's son.

Why does it hurt to love you?

Why am I in pain?

Why does it hurt to know you?

You'll let me down again

If I turned my insides out, would you even know that I was there?

Ah ;-; the lines that make me cry.

Alright so I can definitely say that all of these lines are just relatable to Fundy. "Why does it hurt to love you?" Fundy does probably care a whole lot about Wilbur but with this care and love comes the pain of how Wilbur emotionally neglected and disrespected him. Fundy loves Wilbur. He does. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt. He still recognizes Wilbur as his father to some degree and does love the Wilbur that was his dad, but with everything that's happened, loving Wilbur has become too painful for him to bear. Everytime he tries, it just feels like a stab to the heart since he's reminded of how absent Wilbur truly was in his life.... Even if Ghostbur tried to be there for Fundy, it doesn't erase the pain that Wilbur inflicted when he was alive.

For the second line, "Why am I in pain?" Fundy's character is undeniably one of the most tragic characters (at least from my perspective). The guy has been through a lot and even if this line isn't supported by the first, it still indicates that Fundy has suffered a lot (and yes a lot of characters have suffered too and I am not invalidating any of the other characters). He's hurting. And to be honest, they're all hurting. Everyone has their own ways of coping, and Fundy is honestly quite lost in what he should be doing. He's still reeling from everything, enough so that he canonically took a break and left the DSMP altogether (yes it was canonised that his character had taken a break).

For the following lines, I'd like to think this is directed to Ghostbur. "Why does it hurt to know you?" It feels like Fundy meeting Wilbur - or at least a version of Wilbur - after everything that's happened. He knows the real Wilbur and although Ghostbur reminds him of the father that he used to have, he can't just forget what the real Wilbur did. It hurts to not be able to move on even though he has a second chance with Ghostbur. It hurts because everytime he sees Ghostbur he'll just be reminded that Ghostbur is nothing more than a remnant of a once broken man. He knows Wilbur, he knew the real Wilbur. And it hurts to not be able to move on from the real Wilbur. The reason why it feels like something Fundy would say to Ghostbur is furthe remphasized by the next line in the song.

"You'll let me down again." That is definitely something that Fundy would say or at least feel towards Ghostbur. He wants to get to know this new version of his father, he wants to... But he can't. Cause again there's still that underlying fear of Ghostbur just messing up again and further hurting Fundy. In a way, Ghostbur did in fact hurt Fundy and he did in fact let Fundy down again. The issue with Ghostbur is that he refused to acknowledged the problems that he inflicted to everyone around him. When Fundy confronted him, Ghostbur ignored it. He ran away. So yeah, Fundy couldn't let himself know Ghostbur because Ghostbur would have and did let him down again.

Finally, the last line, "If I turned my insides out, would you even know that I was there?" As we've already seen, Fundy has tried to gain Wilbur's attention and acknowledgement in the past. First, with the running for presidency and secondly, with the spying for Pogtopia thing. Fundy has gone - and would have possibly gone to even worse - to great lengths just to gain Wilbur's approval. This line just shows the desperation that Fundy had just so he could get his father's approval. He tried to be independent, but it didn't work. He tried to help his father against Schlatt, it didn't work. He went so far as to burn the flag down since he wanted to get into Schlatt's good graces so he could be a better spy. He went to great lengths for Wilbur's acknowledgement... But he never got it, at least, not in the way that he wanted to.

Why does it hurt to love you?

Why does it hurt to love?

For the first line, "Why does it hurt to love you?" it just really shows how painful it is for Fundy to try and love a father who was barely even there for him. He does love Wilbur - as I said before - but loving Wilbur comes with a lot of pain (as I'm sure even other characters affiliated with Wilbur can attest). Wilbur went crazy before he died and he wasn't the best father towards Fundy and though Fundy still holds on to some semblance of love for the man he once saw as his dad, he still feels hurt over everything that's happened. Wilbur is a sore and touchy subject for many people within the story, not even just Fundy. They all suffer at the thought of Wilbur... At least, Alivebur.

Ohhhh... Like...this is obvious. The second line is obvious for Fundy XD. Because: his father was barely there, his possible last words to Fundy were "I despise you," and then he died and came back as a ghost who straight up ignores all the problems that he caused when he was alive, his grandfather disowned him, his fiancé broke up and possibly cheated on him (if you consider fwt canon), his best friend called him a coward and left, his home got destroyed thrice, Eret never showed up for the adoption, and he went through a breakdown arc in which it was so bad that he left to take a break from everything that happened. Everything that he's ever loved just finds a way to hurt him.

I'm not your seed (not your girl, not your girl)

Now maybe you'll listen to me (listen to me, listen to me)

Or do you let me bleed? (let me bleed)

Now your daughter's not a girl no more (girl no more, girl no more)

Now that Fundy's gone through a possible recovery arc (since he canonically left the server for one year or was it fours years?), he's probably more well-adjusted to everything else. If Wilbur does indeed get ressurected at some point. This is a way of like showing how Wilbur and Fundy may interact. (Also, I know it could also sound like Villain Fundy but I honestly have moved on from that particular thing and just want Fundy to recover). "Now maybe you'll listen to me," is just Fundy trying to confront Wilbur after everything except this time Fundy has recovered enough to actually speak to Wilbur without getting mad or upset once Wilbur refuses to acknowledge anything's wrong. Still, this is just in the case where Wilbur is ressurected and Fundy is recovered enough to confront Wilbur for everything that's happened.

So for these last lines, I'll only focus on the third line which is "Or do you let me bleed?" If Fundy and ressurected!Wilbur do interact, there are two possible ways for that to go. Wilbur either acknowledges and apologizes for what he did wrong, Fundy apologizes for the things he also did (come on, burning the flag, tearing down the walls, and disowning Wilbur is very painful regardless of what Fundy was trying to accomplish), and they both learn to accept the past and move on so they can beat that stupid egg (red egg, my beloved) and maybe Dream. Or... Wilbur could just ignore Fundy all over again and refuse to acknowledge what he did wrong. Hopefully this time, Fundy would be recovered enough to just realize that Wilbur is never gonna change and that Fundy needs to move on from Wilbur. So, yes. In this possible scenario, Wilbur and Fundy could either make up ("Now maybe you'll listen to me") or Wilbur refuses to acknowledge anything that went wrong and Fundy moves on by himself ("Or do you let me bleed?") Again, this is just a possible scenario.

Not at all your seed!

Cause I'm not your girl anymore

Just, well, further emphasis that Fundy isn't the same person he used to be and he never will be again. Like everyone else, he's gone through a lot. He's different, he's changed.

----------------------------------------------------------

So yeah... I am so sorry to the anon if this is just so confusing or me rambling and I'm pretty sure you didn't ask for a damn essay. But ye... Have this... Sorry if it’s not the analysis you wanted tho ;-;

Apologies tho if this seems confusing and I would gladly clear things up if there's some points that are confusing.

So...ye... Have fun with this

(what do I tag this as, pls help—)

#fundy #fundywastaken #<--- briefly mentioned tho #pls read the trigger warnings

[hood-ex]

Hey there! Sorry this ask is a bit long but I’m really curious about this subject and would love to hear your thoughts! So, when Dick was a kid (tween, teen years) how do you think his school days went? Where did he fit in socially (like cliques and stuff)? Was he popular? I personally imagined him as the weird, nerdy theater kid. Do you think he got along with the teachers? It must be annoying to have a student who randomly disappears all the time. Anyway hope this ask was fun. Love your blog!

Sometimes it can be hard to peg traits that are consistent throughout the years, especially when some stuff is retconned. I’ll try and give you a general summary of what kind of student he was, and then I’ll give you a bunch of panels to look at (some of them take place in his college years) so you can kind of draw your own consensus as well. Keep in mind that a lot of this information is going to come from older comics since Dick hasn’t really been shown as a young student in recent comics.

Academics

In early comics, Dick was a great student who seemed to excel at math and chemistry. He liked to be involved in school and was even a math tutor during his college years (before it got retconned). In Tomasi’s Nightwing run, he was a history buff, so I guess we can assume that he also excelled at history.  

I’ve included some panels from Untold Legend of Batman. You’ll see that Dick was thrilled to get out of high school, and in those panels Dick didn’t seem to enjoy school as much. This comic shows some hardships Dick had as Bruce Wayne’s ward. He was known as a rich kid and that set him apart from the other kids.

Dick saw himself as different than the other kids because of the fact that he was Robin. In both Untold Legend of Batman and in Batman #162, Dick wished he could be like other kids. In Batman #162, he was upset because he couldn’t play basketball to his full ability since people might have connected him to Robin if he was playing too good.

Being Robin also gave Dick some trouble when he was in college. He’d spend a lot of time working cases, meaning his attendance at school suffered. He was great at school when he was actually there, but skipping so many classes to do Robin stuff caused problems for him with his professor.

In the storyline where Bruce fired Dick after Dick got shot by the Joker, Dick went to college for a little bit and didn’t too tell well. He was depressed about what happened between him and Bruce, and I guess that on top of doing Robin solo reflected poorly on his academic performance. Dick then dropped out of college and went to work with the Titans.

Robin: Year One came out in 2000 and depicted Dick as a middle school student. Alfred commented that Dick was doing great in both his academic and Robin studies. 

In Rebirth Nightwing, Dick was briefly shown as a college student, and he ended up getting distracted from his college stuff to work on a case instead.

So you can see how there’s a bit of a contrast between Dick’s academic progress during his middle school and high school years vs. his college years. And even his college years aren’t consistent across the continuities/reboots. Like I said, he was considered a book worm in college, but in other depictions, he didn’t seem to mesh with college that well.

Batman #18

Batman #202

Robin: Year One #2

Untold Legend of Batman #2

Batman #250

Detective Comics #495

Secret Origins #13

Social Life

Socially, Dick had school friends and girlfriends. I don’t think he was really what you would call a “popular kid.” He was kind of a nerd in the studious sense.

The Untold Legend of Batman #2 shows that Dick was possibly treated differently because of his status as the ward of a rich billionaire. 

In Robin: Year One, he’s depicted as just any other kid playing ball with some kids at school. He also goes skating with his friends and his crush. 

The Untold Legend of Batman #2

Robin: Year One #1

Robin: Year One #2

Robin: Year One #2

Extra Curricular

In Batman #162, Dick is seen playing basketball for his high school team. He’s also seen playing basketball for fun in Robin: Year One. I think it’s safe to say that basketball was probably his go-to sport.

Batman #162

#Dick Grayson #academics #social life #sports #school

[popculturebuffet]

Amphibia: If You Give A Frog A Cookie Comments (Since none of these actually releate to the other episode in teh pair)

pixxyofice

The nickname Darcy is actually from the credits of Olivia and Yunan. Just correcting that- it's the official name

Fair enough I didn’t notice and usually only watch the credits of a show as needed. Nothing against the talented people who work on them, I can usually just get any credits I need elsewhere. 

I respect the crew’s choice to name a character whatever they want, but I don’t have to LIKE said choice as I feel that this really isn’t a “dark’ marcy” She’s being used as a puppet for an entirely different being instead of having a tragic downward spiral into being her current self like most “dark’ versions of a character. That said I fully admit that it’s personal preference on my part and that everyone has different definitions of things, so their free to call her that just as i’m free to not call her that, which I feel free to do since i’m not renaming a chracter but a version of a character. And I do give them wiggle room as we havne’t seen enough of Puppeted Marcy to see if any of Marcy’s personality is horribly twisted up in there or it’s entirely the core. 

azdfox

I'm surprised you didn't mention the fact that one of the portals Frakes opened led to The Boiling Isles

That’s because I missed it. I shoudlv’e looked closer at the portals honestly. But it does continue to support my theory that Amphibia and Owl House share an earth and timeline. (With Amphibbia just taking place slightly further down the road), as the boiling isles is clearly linked to earth somehow. Though it was already pretty concrete as both shows have left small nods that make it claer Gravity Falls takes place on their earth with the Boonchuy Garage having a Stan bobblehead and Eda having used an alias that “just happens” to be the same as Stan’s ex wife. It also means, given Andrais’ experince with the multiverse, that amphibia and the boiling isles might of crossed paths at one point. Given Luz’s portal was able to reach amphibia shockingly easily, it’s not out of the question. 

teleinsights

Speaking of which, Dana said Disney had cold feet about the show because of its serialization.

That dosen’t suprise me. Disney has this.. WEIRD aversion to shows that are heavily sealized that aren’t on Disney+ these days. And it makes no fucking sense to me since every seralized show they have had  (Owl House, Amphibia, Duck Tales) has been a huge hit. Not only that kids don’t mind it. My own nieces really enjoy seralized anime (My Hero Academia and hunter x hunter for the older one and Sailor Moon Crystal for the younger), with the younger one also really liking tangled the series, which did get heavily seralized as it went on and is something that dosen’t seem to remotely bother her. From personal experince, when I was a kid about 20 years ago, I THROUGHLY enjoyed Danny Phantom FOR it’s ongoing story arcs and Kids Next Door picked up more for me once it started having a much stronger continuity with more consequences and overarching plot starting with the season 2 finale. Even into my tweens and teens I loved Avatar the last airbender despite having missed some crucial chapters due to not having a dvr yet. (Tophs introduction, the chase, the bloodbending episode, and Zuko joining the team, the last one I had to read a recap of), same with Teen Titans. 

Kids LIKE continuity, having stories to follow and development to track. They kick themselves missing something but in this day and age with so many aps and many kids watching episodes in second run on stremaing, this isn’t an issue. It’s easier than ever to catch up on episodes you missed or find detailed synopsis like mine that fill you in on what you missed.  Not only that.. but Disney REALLY needs to accept that kids arne’t the only ones watching this stuff: Owl House has a massive Teen, Young Adult and Adult (Points at self) Fanbase, and Amphibia and Ducktales are no slouches, with all three shows beign written to be enjoyed by adults and children and often with refrences ONLY the adults will get. it’s OKAY to have a show not just target one audience and it constantly frustrates me Disney dosen’t get that.. while actively shilling star wars and marvel to adults and kids alike. They get it when it comes to MOVIES they need mass appearl, they need to understand cartoons have those too. They made a fucking star wars anime for fucks sake, they have to ON SOME LEVEL get this. 

You are all welcome to join my discord btb thank you for commenting. I so rarely get comments on my reviews, and it not only helps me improve them but I like discussing this stuff

#pixxyoffice #adzfox #telinsights

[urmomsstuntdouble]

i hope this helps you in your ranting/rambling mood! im curious about what hetalia canon you’d change, if any, and why. alternatively, what canon do you wish the fandom would pay more attention to?

1thanks for the ask! sorry this is so late btw, i sort of had to be Out and About today, but i do have many thoughts. i hope this is to your liking :)

 so the first thing that comes to mind is how infuriating the canon ages are. i dont think hima put very much thought into how ages work, or maybe he tweaked it to fit a specific character without considering the internal logic of the series at large. what he did was make it so that every character is about the same age during the modern day, and painted himself into a corner where ages need to be traced backwards from the present day, if that makes sense. like he wants everyone to be in their teens or 20s but not all countries are the same “age” if you can say that..idk, like how china and america could be confused for being the same age when china is like 25 times older than him. and this sort of results in some anachronisms (which, anachronisms and misinformation are inevitable when you try to personify countries because you’re just one person writing your interpretation of history and you have biases and whatnot, which is why its important for fans to DO YOUR RESEARCH) or just weird inconsistent stuff like america being the same age during the revolution as he is in the present day and also the entirity of chibitalia.

chibitalia makes absolutely no sense beyond a narrative perspective, and the narrative didnt even need children for it to be good. im also especially annoyed by chibitalia because it serves as proof that himaruya doesnt care about the internal logic of age in hetalia. factors such as “strength-” which i assume to mean military power- the economy, political stability, and cultural identity are what seem to be the driving forces behind the nations’ ages. so let’s take a look at chibitalia through those lenses. if we’re talking military power in the time frame of chibitalia, which im taking to be the early modern period (1500-1800), but it really could be When Fucking Ever during the hapsburg rule of northern italy. the papal states managed to organize and carry out several crusades to recapture jerusalem, and despite none of them being successful and also occasionally resulting in wars against the turks, it does take a lot to consistently organize and carry out that sort of military action without having what we today would consider a politically unified country. this is sort of acknowledged in canon, although its more of an offhanded mention thats brought up once and then never mentioned again, when turkey says that italy kicked his ass one time a couple hundred years ago. concerning the economy, italy’s economy during the early modern period was off the shits, actually. the whole. renaissance thing? although john green raises an interesting point of Did The Renaissance Actually Happen, its a convenient name for the time period, so we’re going with it. and especially where venice is concerned, seeing as venice was one of the wealthiest city states in the entire country, and i believe veneto still is. and then there’s political stability- this is an interesting one because it can be interpreted in different ways both in and out of the hetalia canon. for example, former soviet states are depicted as being younger, despite many of them being very old countries, and america and canada are depicted as babies during the colonial period- even though the colonies basically governed themselves with little oversight from the british crown. this also applies to moldova, who is referenced as being a fierce warrior by hungary when she’s a kid- about 1000 years ago- and is still depicted as being a 12 year old in the modern day. i think where chibitalia is concerned, hima used the control of northern italy by the hapsburg dynasty and the holy roman empire to mean that there was a lack of political strength for the northern italian city states, but! the final say in all matters belonged to the church. it had been like that for hundreds of years, and the church was very much not a design of the hre or the hapsburg dynasty. the church was kind of in greater control over the hre and the hapsburgs than the actual monarchs (until 1648) at some points, which i think would make italy a bit more politically strong than austria or hre. not that he’d be a whole adult or anything, more that they’d all be around the same age physically- or even that austria would be younger! and of course the italian cultural identity was long since formed. because of all that i dont think it makes any goddamn sense for italy to be a child- and of course this also applies to romano, who’s mostly representing naples and sicily. some things are different of course due to the north/south split, but most of this does apply to both. 

anyway, i also think that america’s age makes no sense. i love america as a teenager, i really do. teenagers scare the living shit out of me and america is teenagers. but the way that he ages is totally historically inaccurate. so he’s a child during the 7 years war? cool. why does he age like a regular human during the interwar period leading up to the revolutionary war? yes america was politically stable yes the south was filthy fucking rich off slave labor, but where’s the american cultural identity? nonexistent. the military might? there is no american military in 1750. so yes america should be a little older than a child, but he shouldn’t be the same adult he is in 1780 that he is in ww2 and in the modern day strips. i think this was done because it might be a lil fucked to have grown ass england be fighting a tween in the revolutionary war strips, although i say lean into that fucked-ness. of course thats just me, although i do think it might be more narratively impactful if arthur was an adult and alfred was a child during the revolutionary war strips, and more accurate. i think 11-14 is a good age, because at the time of the revolution, the states were more like their own countries, and no one particularly had an allegiance to america, they just had an allegiance against britain. people didnt really consider themselves americans over their state until after the war of 1812 (which ended in 1815), so him being middle-school aged at that point in time would really be interesting. kind of like an identity crisis, ya know? because it was, in all honesty, an identity crisis- who were the people of these united states (these united states is the og name)? n e whay, yeah. age is stupid and theres more characters i could talk about but id be here all night and i am tired! 

as for something i wish got more attention by fans, i think just all the weird shit. like they truly are Weird People, absolutely no sex appeal. anyway. im gonna go to sleep now, hope that was a cool answer! 

#as always feel free to correct any inaccuraccies #this was. longer than i thought it would be but ah well #hetalia #hws #hws italy #hws america #hope you enjoy! #nation lore? i guess? idk #ceros posting

[punkscowardschampions]

Gen 4.1 Planning

Libi: Okay, so my basic premise for who Libi is going to be at her core, WOO; I was thinking about how we said that she is Tess' second (lowkey third but I'll let you live gal) chance at 'getting it right' and raising a child well, which, OBVIOUSLY, she's never told or anything but there's an innate pressure in that that you'd know on some level, likewise her mum AND dad died so everyone would be quick with those comparisons always, this family and Liam's mum when that contact is made because her daughter died as well as; Then that made me think of the pressure Ro felt because you know, bad shit happened to Bea (Edie and Liam in this case) and then she got saved by McVickers and felt like she owed everyone to be great and do great things; so my vibe is that BUT COMING FROM A LESS SELFISH, WEIRD, PERFECTIONISM ANGLE soz not soz Ro, we know what you did; I see her being better behaved as she grows up, far more than her parents obviously but lowkey better behaved than any of the mcvickers or cali kids ever were because she thinks everyone deserves that, her not causing any more problems, but again UNLIKE Ro, she wouldn't be different to a degree of not fitting in because she'd make a massive effort to be there for everyone and every event, be likeable and get along with as much of the fam as possible, obviously some of that is natural charm but it's also putting in the time ahem Rosaline; like, she's a people pleaser, to a fault, and all she cares about is making everyone else, Tess, Fearghal, Ali, JJ etc etc, happy and making sure she's being what she thinks they want her to be/need her to be, and like that is what makes her happy because she is doing it out of love and respect not obligation but she doesn't know she's doing it, you know? Again, it's innate, how she is, but that's where the arc can come in, in realising that she goes with what makes everyone else happy, is who they need, but what does SHE want herself, and what does SHE need? A way I thought we could make this a Bobby/Libi storyline if we wanted (but we do not have to) is if she does have feelings for him, could be any point on his timeline gfs and kids wise whatever, but she lets him go and have whatever gf or do whatever thing because she's like that's what he wants he doesn't like me or want me like that etc, because she doesn't let herself want things selfishly or do anything just for herself Bobby: we should totally have them be together as little bubs because they are and it's like a running joke that they are gonna get together/get married like we've lowkey already said but more so but maybe the vibe is he is really shy how he is and lowkey it's like a my sister and me vibe where she does all the talking and socialising for him and like all their friends are joint friends Bobby: not in a creepy Ro and Ali way but Bobby: and we will let you outgrow that sir Libi: it makes sense because obviously we're learning sign language so simply Bobby can't communicate with most kids by himself, that's facts, and it's easier to have another kid help you than Jimmy always being there, or whoever he has helping him at school, you know Bobby: oh snap maybe I flip reverse what I said and Cammie's mum is the deaf one too and the vibe could be that like Libi pushes him to get some deaf friends as they become like tweens/teens so he can communicate himself so he does and does become more outgrowing that way but maybe he lowkey leans too hard into deaf culture for a while there and she feels like pushed out by it because it's something she can't be a part of Libi: ooh yeah, that makes a lot of sense Bobby: it adds something to Cammie's character as well being hearing but having two deaf parents so that's interesting Bobby: and also makes sense why JJ have to help them so much as well as them just being young Libi: right, there's a lot of shit Cammie would have to do from a young age if not for JJ lowkey 'cos it's just easier for a hearing kid than it is a deaf adult in this world Libi: her mum could maybe be more partial for ease but yes Bobby: and like it makes sense that Libi would push her feelings aside when those two grow closer/happen because she'd be like well they're both deaf that's something I can't give him and something I want him to have Libi: exactly, it'd feel really selfish to wreck that even if you didn't have all the ingrained shit she does around it Bobby: and obviously he actually wants to be with her as well but thinks she doesn't want that and before you now it there's baby Cammie so it's like well now I gotta try and make this work because don't wanna be a shit father like I had Libi: oh the drama of it all Libi: love it Libi: and we've not really got (that I can think of) a never mind I'll find someone like you type deal Libi: because usually it's like JUST SAY IT but it actually makes sense here to pine and long but let him go Libi: hence I'm here for it Libi: So, what I'm thinking right now is, that they're like never officially together, like it just keeps being an in-joke kinda vibe and like we're JUST best friends and then kind of like family, but obviously as they get into tween/teen years it's beyond a stage you can pretend you're just a kid playing at being girlfriend and boyfriend and as you said boo, that will coincide with JJ wedding and kids roughly so then it'd be more obvious like it's not going to happen seriously, then she can encourage him to get deaf friends etc, but I feel like he should only meet Cammie's mum just before or at uni (or whatever equivalent he's doing after school) so then it is quick and not like they were even mates before so it's less of a shock for all, you know? Bobby: I totally agree because I strongly pictured him being best man at the JJ wedding (soz Pete) and her being one of the bridesmaids and all the bants that go along with that and them both being SO 😳 Bobby: and yeah he could live the cliché that Jac was mocking and literally get with this girl freshers week I'd believe it Libi: Right? it then mirrors the Jameson/Cammie thing except they literally are just BFFs and there isn't anything going on Libi: there's actually weight to this but we're just like haha no don't be silly Bobby: and we've literally not done that trope with childhood boy girl best friends before really because baze are probably the closest but they were always so clearly in love and refusing to fight it so it's fun Libi: exactly, because unknowingly or otherwise, we're fighting against all the cliches and tropes that come with this family Libi: like I'm going to not do any of those things that caused drama for everyone and this is clearly too close to home, even though I don't think anyone would actually be that bothered, we've just really internalized and gone with it Bobby: like how nobody cares Jac is gay except Jac herself Libi: right Libi: but obviously she's good at keeping this all internal because no one can or is gonna clock it and be like, babe, it's okay Libi: like JJ might be a bit like oop, keeping it in the family but as long as you're both happy they really don't care, and same for mcvickers even if Tess is suspish of everyone that comes into any gal's life 'cos trauma lol Bobby: Bobby wasn't trying to make deaf culture happen for himself but Libi would have been so excited for him to get out there and do it that he would've been excited too and then it is literally like a new world opening up because who has he ever interacted with that's deaf before Bobby: didn't mean to lowkey leave you behind gal but Libi: it's kinda her own fault, not to blame you but clearly literally what we do like okay he's happy now mission accomplished Bobby: and maybe Cammie's mum is like the deaf equivalent of those gays who make it their whole identity so she's really selling it and so he also thinks okay this is who I should be with Libi: we know the vibe, like it's more excusable but still, I get you Libi: I see it Libi: a bit of a baby gay equivalent like go too hard and you're like I need to calm this down Libi: UNRELATED BUT Libi: think it will please you Libi: Jay is born 32 like Bobby, I'm pretty sure, and I thought Libi and her would also make for interesting content because Jay obviously feels she owes a lot to the fam for not being stuck with Chloe etc etc and the very little we did with her gave off a similar energy to me Libi: and she has her commitment issues in relationships because of her mum situation so they can bond over the shit that holds 'em back even though it's different stuff Bobby: and her relationship with Ava being her mum but also not being is something I feel like Libi can relate to because of how she was raised and the Rio and Buster-ness of it all because they wanted to raise her and obvs they wanted to raise Jay for a while there too Bobby: plus all the travelling she does is something that Libi could potentially join her in doing if she needs an escape so that's nice Libi: 100% it makes for a strong friendship there's a lot of parallels if not total similarities Libi: it makes a lot of sense, it's coming together baby Bobby: if you need to get away from seeing Bobby literally playing happy families, I can offer you that gal because I'm gonna have her go to uni/live in new york probably now that Nancy isn't because her face actually did live there idk if they still do or what but Bobby: we know the vibe is that she goes everywhere and can't settle so you'll have lots of chances to run away in a way that won't upset anyone Bobby: and when she gets her man and it works out we could totally coincide that because she can be like if I can do it so can you Libi: a mood a moment Bobby: all I know is Bobby is gonna be more chatty because neither Jimothy or Jesse are so I must but not to Jude levels of !!! Libi: a nice middleground Libi: which is kind of what I see for her honestly Libi: less in your face than 1. we were as a little bub 2. a lot of the fam but still sociable enough that it jives well with most of 'em Bobby: I'm so happy about all of this and honestly Cammie's mum being deaf makes so much sense in terms of what we were already thinking about her being more distant and working a lot Libi: if she doesn't give up the fight, she could be some kind of advocate vibe Libi: 'cos then Cammie can't even call her out really Libi: like soz this is important, maam your child Bobby: exactly what I was thinking we're in sync rn boo Libi: because it all makes sense, you gotta follow one thread and then the story shows itself tbh Libi: because tying in Astrid too, obviously that makes sense because she loses her mum too, and she'd ultimately be a really good influence because after Ro dies Astrid is kind of freed to do whatever she wants for herself Libi: and how much happier it makes her, how much she improves...well Libi: sips tea Bobby: I LOVE THIS Libi: and who else is taking the autistic girl that seriously and letting her teach you things Libi: love that for you Libi: she's living her best life and we can see that Bobby: she can be in their friend group, I'm happy Libi: ALSO, I feel as if she couldn't lie to Astrid Libi: because she says how she sees it bluntly and we're not going to feel comfortable fobbing her off because of that insistence, so that'll be good for you even when we're hiding it from everyone else Libi: everyone else you've just got to be vaguely like oh no no and it's dropped and like okay Bobby: we're gonna get to show so many different sides of Libi, I'm always here for that Bobby: and however far we go down the Astrid and her gf eating disorder rabbit hole, we''ll have Libi not treating her like a kid which is great Libi: yeah, there's loads we can do with the end of gen 4 for them all it's a mood Bobby: okay so what or who would you like to throw Libi at first Libi: that is the question Bobby: just so we know Bobby is going to Trinity and studying Business, Economics and Social Studies (B.E.S.S.) which is business, economics, political science and sociology basically so he can end up working at that advertising place with Jimothy after he has done this 4 years Bobby: Cammie's mum is there doing deaf studies which is also 4 years Libi: do we wanna do a rough timeline for these people mentioned here Libi: Jay born 32, we find out about her when she's 7 in 39 Libi: Bobby is born 32 and comes into the story 38 Libi: Libi is born 34, Edam die 35, we know this situation, is 4 soon to be 5 when she meets Bobby vias JJ Libi: Astrid is born 35 and Ro dies in 44 when Astrid is 9 Libi: JJ can get married 46, so Libi is 12 and Bobby is 14 Libi: doesn't have to be when we intro the deaf friends to the point of exclusion obvs but it's timed so we never have the 'real' relationship chat of it all obvs Libi: so Bobby would go to uni in 50-51 and Camie is born 51 start of 2nd year Libi: that gives us this good 4 year period before uni to play with, then obviously we know the vibe of when she's born and making that work etc Libi: Hmm, I think it would make the most sense to do a gap year then stay local, like that's the ideal Libi: because I really think she'd struggle being away from the fam Libi: but I'm kinda thinking maybe to be cruel she DOES go away because it seems like something the fam are like yay about Libi: 'cos she'd try really, really hard to stay but they should at least notice that and she can transfer for a reprieve Bobby: that's really nice actually Libi: she should do her first year in Liverpool, the rest at Trinity Libi: okay, so film studies, it was only 3 years in Liverpool but we're changing to trinity and you do years 1 and 2 (aka whilst Bobby is still there at least for year 1 but I need to check anyway) there and years 3 and 4 at Columbia uni in new york, aka where Jay is Libi: **remind me to check the times but we need to give him a solid bday and I'm changing hers up too Libi: this is just roughly Libi: but this way we can be cruel with it lol

#gen 4 #just bibi actually but you know #a bit of jay and astrid etc

[kuriquinn]

Dear Mr. Kuri, thank you so much for your recent post concerning the young artist who was effectively censored from sharing his/her/their art on a particular subject (just... so sad). I was hoping to get your thoughts on how adults might navigate interactions with minors in this space. Specifically, extending our support for their work w/out necessarily... engaging with them. I know this sounds crazy stupid but before tumblr I wasn't really active on any social media and I had no idea (cont'd)

there were so many users under the age of 16 on this site. I've even come to learn that some identified users I had interacted with early on were as young as 13, and as someone in my 30's - tbh that scared the shit out of me. I totally agree that someone that young and impressionable would be crushed by the kind of criticism that poor artist faced, and would likely never create or share again... to their detriment. The thing is though, I feel really hesitant following any creator (cont'd)

that isn't 18 or older... What are your thoughts on following/reblogging/interacting with minors in fandom? I fully agree that they need support, especially from older users who don't care what some stranger on the internet has to say... but I just feel... like I don't know how to go about that the right way. I really REALLY don't want minors on my blog at all... sorry to bother you with this, just wondering how you'd suggest handling this. I didn't comment on the post bc I didn't (cont'd)

want to risk that young artist reading my inquiry and feeling even more alienated. As always, thank you for your time and insight. - Birk

I may go a bit off-topic here, but let me give this a try:

I think in, In the end, it all comes down to communication and mutual respect.

Adults have this pervading mentality that until a child hits 18, they need to be infantilized and sheltered, but once they pass that magical number, then it’s a free for all. So, for eighteen years, it’s all about sticking a Potemkin village in front of any idea, person or situation that a child might find uncomfortable (read: they don’t like the feelings it gives them; very different from actual harmful ideas/persons/situations). Then, these sheltered almost-adults enter public spaces and expect society to keep doing that…when it turns out that’s not how it works, they become toxic.

This is how poisonous movements like purity-culture develop online, or new fans who demonize older fans and adults as being perverts for enjoying the very same pastimes they have.

For those of us interacting with these people, the automatic reaction is to “cancel” that person, thereby alienating and isolating them even more in their bad behavior. Instead of taking the time to talk with and try to show them through actions that the world isn’t limited to what they know.

As adults in fandom, we know that a large majority of the fandom is younger, because we were them once. We were that 12-year-old discovering fanfiction existed or sharing drawings we made of our original Harry Potter characters or quoting our favorite movies and televisions ad infinite. We got shit for it in real life, so we had to create spaces of our own online.

We, in effect, built fandom so that it would be more welcoming for the generations that came after us. And while a lot of us stick to that unwritten knowledge, as the years pass, a lot more become gatekeepers. They set a standard of what a fan must know or do to be considered a “real” fan, and they’re mean about how they do that.

Is it any wonder that new fans coming in experience this behavior and then jump on the “adults in fandom is creepy” bandwagon?

These new fans coming in, especially tweens and teens, they still live in this false reality where they only get to enjoy themselves and be kids for a limited amount of time, and once they Become Adult they have to give it all up—and can’t figure out why all those old creeps online are still a part of such “childish” things.

That fault lies squarely on our society, which pushes kids from a young age to be thinking of what they want to do when they grow up so they can get out there and start producing, producing, producing for the state and becoming a “useful” member of society.

We as fandom veterans, need to do our best to teach them differently, and that comes right back to my point: communication and mutual respect.

Older fans need to respect newcomers, as much as the new baby fans need to learn to respect their fandom elders. There is no maximum age for fandom; there’s no minimum age, either, although the younger the fan, the more their parents should be keeping an eye out for the truly damaging stuff and teaching their kids how to avoid that stuff on their own.

Now, obviously, people don’t always announce online how old they are (though it does happen more frequently now than when I started writing), but regardless, there should be a certain etiquette to it.

When you interact with someone online, you don’t know if they are 15 or 50. And the way you interact with them shouldn’t change based on knowing their age. We should maintain the same level of respect for the new fans as the older fans.

So, as to how adults might navigate interactions with minors (especially when you know they’re minors)?

Treat them as any other intelligent human being: with respect.

Because how else are they going to learn?

My mom always used to say to us, “I’m not raising children, I’m raising adults,” which basically meant she was teaching us how to be adults. Kids don’t pop out of the womb magically knowing how to interact with the world, they take their cues from the adults that are already there.

Fandom babies learn how to be active participants in fandom from the people who are already there. And they’re more likely to listen to and look up to someone that treats them as a mature and capable being, than someone who dismisses them as too young or too green, or dismisses their knowledge and experience because they haven’t earned their metaphorical stripes.

Remember, a lot of these kids are coming to fandom because they need an outlet. In this age of helicopter parents, this is the only place where they get to be treated as an individual adult-in-the-making instead of the overly protected child or student that must be shielded from the world. A lot of them are trying to figure out how to deal with the horrors that happen to them or around them every day. That 16-year-old girl writing a rape/non-con fic under a pseudonym? She could be exorcising her own demons through the only way she has because no one in her life is listening to her. That 14-year-old writing about homelessness might know more about it than someone twice his age.

Expertise and experience knows no age, and as adults, we need to not fall into the trap of thinking it does. There are some kids out there that have seen and endured more than I can even imagine.

In recent years, there’s been this trend of treating kids like sexless beings until we, the adults, deem them capable of having a sense of sexuality. When the reality is, once kids start puberty, they’re developing that sexuality, and are trying to figure out what it means to them and how to navigate it, and the world. It doesn’t matter if adults are uncomfortable with it, this is what our human biology has decided for us.

And chances are, as much as adults try to curate the world and keep kids from seeing the darker, less safe stuff? They’re already doing it. I saw this when I was teaching, the kids are already accessing and interacting with stuff like sex, drugs, relationships… Whenever a faceless censor tries to block that sort of thing, they find a way around it. Humans are funny like that—we want the things that are kept away from us, whether harmful or not.

It’s our responsibility to help them think critically about what they’re seeing, and teach them to express themselves about it in a respectful manner.

So by all means: follow that amazing artist even if they are only 15. Their age doesn’t negate the fact that they have talent that needs to be nurtured and encouraged. Reblog the images and the fics that strike you, even if you find out the person writing it isn’t 18 yet. Send a shoutout via DM or review or comment to someone that you admire whether you know they’re age or not.

Unless you’re being actively creepy and offensive (and seriously, don’t do that, it’s gross whether the recipient is a minor or not), chances are these creators are desperate for some assurance that the medium they choose to express themselves in is having an effect on people—and that they have the power to make even adults sit up and listen.

So…TL;DR:

When interacting with younger fans, do so with respect. And if they say something problematic, don’t automatically cancel them and write them off as “obviously too young and immature to understand”. They understand more than you think and will seek out their interests whether adults think it’s appropriate or not. That’s how freedom works. But if we’re going to nip bad behavior like purity culture and agism in the bud, we need to start by treating minors in fandom as adults developing their worldview, not as infants to be sheltered.  

#longpost #asks #fandom #content creators #content consumers #reading #writing #online etiquette

[aion-rsa]

Boy Meets World’s Slasher Episode Was Scarier Than it Had Any Right To Be

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Blood-curdling screams. Taunting phone calls from a psycho killer. Creepy, ominous music with lyrics like “Here’s a knife. Here’s a gun. There’ll be fun for everyone. Death is on the menu tonight!” Elements of a forgotten ‘90s slasher classic? Nope. Just some highlights from the most memorable episode of ABC’s family sitcom Boy Meets World.

With the launch of Disney+ and ample time to get nostalgic and revisit old movies and TV shows due to the pandemic, many older millennials are diving back into Boy Meets World, which ran for seven seasons from 1993 through 2000 as a staple of ABC’s TGIF lineup. The show centered on Philadelphia teenager Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) navigating life with his best friend Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong), his love interest Topanga Lawrence (Danielle Fishel), and brother Eric (Will Friedle), while perpetually receiving life lessons from longtime teacher and eventual principal Mr. Feeny (William Daniels). 

Boy Meets World had no shortage of standout moments and episodes, like WWE wrestler Vader appearing as the father of a misunderstood school bully, a young Linda Cardellini being the girl who almost destroyed the Cory and Topanga love story for good, and Peter Tork (who briefly played Topanga’s father), Micky Dolenz, and Davy Jones staging an impromptu Monkees reunion. And who could forget when Ben Savage’s famous brother Fred guest starred as a creepy college professor and was shoved through a glass door? 

But perhaps no other Boy Meets World episode made a bigger impact to impressionable young minds than the fifth season highlight “And Then There Was Shawn,” a format-breaking homage to the popular slasher films of the moment, like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer (the latter of which hit theaters just four months earlier). Serving as a metaphor for the fear and uncertainty Shawn feels over the recent breakup of Cory and Topanga, the episode is a mini-horror movie that operates in dream logic and features shocking cast deaths, zeitgeisty jokes, and a big ‘90s teen idol cameo. Many young fans were genuinely frightened by the scares conjured up in the episode, while older fans loved the campy, winking references and the change of pace storytelling.

“And Then There Was Shawn” writer Jeff Menell was typically happy to do what was asked of him on the series, but he jumped at the chance to write a horror-influenced episode. “I’m a diehard movie fan. I have been my entire life. But as a writer on set, I just did whatever I was told,” Menell said in a phone interview with Den of Geek. “I never went after anything. But I begged to write this one because I just knew I could do it.”

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The episode finds the high school-aged cast members serving detention with Mr. Feeny after a fight, springing from Cory and Topanga’s recent breakup, disrupts the class. Things quickly take a turn when the kids see a message in blood written on the chalkboard that reads “No One Gets Out Alive!” and hear a discomforting jingle with menacing lyrics playing over the high school’s PA system. Initially, the kids believe that Mr. Feeny is playing a prank on them, but things take a turn for the serious — and scary – when classmate Kenny is murdered in the dark by the masked killer wielding a pencil (prompting a very timely “You Killed Kenny!” reference). None other than Mr. Feeny himself bites the dust shortly thereafter via scissors to the back.

“You know, usually you go off for two weeks and you go write this draft and you bring it back, and then the room rewrites it. That always was the process. I wrote this one like in two days, and I had to pretend that it took longer because if you’ve written the script in two days, they assume it sucks, or that you didn’t really care or make an effort,” Menell says.

When Menell brought the initial draft to the writer’s room, however, there were minimal changes to his script. The episode’s director, Jeff McCracken, was impressed. 

“Jeff (Menell) went out and wrote his episode and when it came in it was perfect. It was an absolutely perfect flow of the script. He just nailed it.”

Emulating classic slasher film elements, McCracken had to approach the filming of “And Then There Was Shawn” differently than a typical episode. 

“It was so much fun,” McCracken says. “Because it had all these special sequences, we really had to shoot it like a film. We rehearsed for two days, then shot it for three, and then we showed it before a live audience. The film style is generally single style or two cameras, but I shot a lot of it with three to four cameras so that we wouldn’t have to do multiple retakes. You couldn’t have done the whole thing in front of a live audience because it would have taken too much time to set everything up and run through a show with an audience sitting there.”

The pencil kill is the most memorable moment from the episode, but McCracken nor Menell can take credit for it. “I remember the one gag that was not in the script, the one gag that Michael Jacobs (creator/executive producer) came up with, which was genius, was the pencil dynamic,” McCracken recalls. After classmate Kenny is shown impaled through the head with a pencil, his body slumps down the wall, leaving a lead pencil mark behind him. Cory quips, “We’ll always remember he was this tall.”

Kenny and Feeny’s deaths are bloodless, but they leave a mighty impression for a network family-friendly series. Both writer and director knew that they’d have to tread lightly if they were going to be faithful to the slasher genre (“I’m surprised they let us have Feeny with (scissors) in his back, to tell you the truth,” Menell says) but they both made a concerted effort to surround the kills with humor. 

“We had to make it funny,” McCracken says.” I mean, you put (scissors) in someone’s back, it can be very disturbing for a young audience. You can’t traumatize them. We did it with some sense of humor and it wasn’t so graphic.”

Part of the humor was derived from the very specific references made in the episode. Like Scream standout character Randy, Shawn makes meta references to the rules of the horror genre, telling his friends that virgins are the only ones who are safe. Eric says, “I’m dead,” Jack says, “I’m dead,” and Shawn says, “I’ll get as sick as you can without dying.” 

This slightly scandalous joke wasn’t anything new for the series, but the violent nature of the episode led to “And Then There Was Shawn” receiving the show’s first TV-PG-V rating. According to Menell, Michael Jacobs had a way of pushing the boundaries with network executives. “He got away with a lot more stuff than most people because he could really browbeat some network executives at times to get what he wanted.”

One major addition to the cast for “And Then There Was Shawn” probably helped Jacobs catch the network in the right mood. Jennifer Love Hewitt, coming off Party of Five and at the height of her scream queen powers, guest stars as new John Adams High student Jennifer Love Fefferman. Hewitt at the time was dating Will Friedle and it’s believed their relationship inspired her cameo. 

“We maybe asked him to ask her, because obviously she was in I Know What You Did Last Summer, so having her there just adds horror film credibility to it,” Menell says. “She was great. She was such a great sport, and it was fun having her on.”

McCracken concurs: “It was such a pleasure. It was one of those things that you don’t know how a major star walking in on your set, how they’re going to be, what their demands are going to be, what their personality is going to be like, what their disposition for the script’s going to be like, and she just came in full guns blazing and just had a blast and that made everything just wonderful. She was game for anything.”

One thing that Hewitt was game for was a big makeout scene with Friedle’s Eric, that may or may not have been improvised. “I don’t think we wrote that in, I think they just wanted to do it and we let it,” Menell laughs.

Amongst all of the horror homage fun, the episode ends with Shawn removing the killer’s mask to find himself starring back, having gone through this whole slasher bit just to get his friends back together. It’s quite the philosophical ending for a show primarily aimed at tweens and teens. 

“When it did get serious with Shawn at the end, it was more poignant than it was scary and it was also a great reveal that it was him,” McCracken says. “It was metaphorical in the sense that that component of Shawn is in us all and it’s always lurking and it’s always out there. And so, be vigilant.”

The Jeffs knew that they had a special episode on their hands with “And Then There Was Shawn,” but who could have guessed the episode would have this sort of longevity 22 years later?

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“We got a few letters from people that were so scared, couldn’t believe we would kill Feeny. And we got some people that were upset,” Menell says. “But we had no idea until years later when the internet came on how popular that episode became. We did some crossovers, some time flashbacks, and some other really cool episodes, but this was a show that was nothing like any other episode we had aired or would air. It was probably the most fun … it’s certainly the most scary.”

The post Boy Meets World’s Slasher Episode Was Scarier Than it Had Any Right To Be appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[allsassnoclass]

15, 18 (specifically for the tie me down 'verse ending since i KNOW you were talking about that but if you don't want to disclose then that's cool i just think about it a lot), and 20 go crazy love you a lot xoxo bella

Thank you bella :)

okay these are going under a read more because they got ridiculously long. I really enjoy talking about my writing lol

also some spoilers ahead....

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)? I think this really depends!  On occasion, I’ll have a title while I’m writing a piece, but otherwise titles are pretty difficult for me because I really want them to have some sort of meaning. I don’t like just plucking song lyrics for them unless the song has some sort of significance to the fic, but sometimes I have to because I can’t think of anything else and that’s the accepted way to name fics.  Something like All I Really Want Is You is okay because I referenced slsp in the fic.  Something like Puzzle Pieces was taken from a running metaphor in the fic, which I feel better about because it’s something that is more specific to the fic itself.  Summaries are also difficult because sometimes I don’t have a few lines that I feel properly introduce the fic and hook the reader without giving things away, but I feel like people are less likely to read if there isn’t an excerpt??? idk.  tags are pretty easy though even though I’m always guessing a little and worried that someone will say I should have tagged it with something else or that it doesn’t fit a tag I added.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them. For the most part, I don’t have alternate versions unless it’s a prompt fic that I started out going one direction then deleted and flipped it around.  HOWEVER the Tie Me Down trilogy DID have a possible different third installment (spoilers ahead)

If I had written the epilogue from Jack’s perspective, it would’ve been a little bit of a different ending.  Something I mentioned in both of the first parts was Jack’s restlessness and Alex’s desire for something more settled, and one day I was listening to peace by Taylor swift and was like “wow this is Jack from the tie me down verse,” and that song could’ve very easily been the inspiration behind the third part.  Alex’s epilogue was based on best years because he recognized that he hadn’t treated Jack the best but resolved to then make up for it by giving Jack the best years possible ahead with all of his love.  peace as an epilogue song would’ve pushed the story away from a crystal-clear resolution.  that would’ve focused a bit more on the struggle of making it work with two people who want/need fundamentally different things.  It would’ve had much more to do with the compromise of Jack being able to give Alex infinite love and devotion, but not the peace that he craves.  Inevitably, something would go wrong.  “The rain is always gonna come if you’re standing with me.”  The epilogue would’ve then been about Jack living with that knowledge and trusting that Alex would stay anyway and that their relationship would be enough, but there’s still a lot of uncertainty of an imperfect relationship in that song, and it inevitably would’ve ended up in the fic.  that’s why the Alex epilogue was the one I went with: I needed a strong, conclusive, and positive ending for them, and Jack’s epilogue would not have given that

otherwise though I don’t think my fics shift too terribly much between when I think of them and when they get published.  nothing is coming to mind, at least not for things that I have completed.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?) Okayyyyyy a lot of my symbolism is in the short angsty fics and when I talk about it I feel like I didn’t do it well lol but for my unrequited lashton (I was done but you undid me) (spoiler) the buckling of the seatbelt was something I thought about a lot and ending the fic with that action was important to me because it was Luke making the conscious decision to protect himself in this situation.  there’s a lot of symbolism in the lie to me music vid in general but back seat of the car/no seatbelt is very significant because 1. he can’t swerve, he just has to take the crash and 2. he isn’t doing the bare minimum to protect himself from the hit, he’s letting himself take maximum damage from it.  while Luke may be in the passenger seat in the fic, he can still take that little step to protect himself metaphorically, which goes along with the decision to protect himself by not trying to pursue something with Ashton or try to get the validation from him that he wants but that would ultimately be a lie.

also fun fact! my angsty Luke song is putting the dog to sleep by the antlers, which partially inspired the bear-trap metaphor despite bear traps not being mentioned in the song at all.  when I wasn’t listening to a version of lie to me while writing that, I was listening to that song.

the tie me down trilogy also included a whole bunch of metaphors that first appeared in tie me down and I hate that for you.  when I do song fics, I really look at the songs for inspiration, so a lot of the figurative language and images in the songs were incorporated into the fics, then I combined stuff for the third installment.  best years arguably had the least amount of influence over the installment out of that trilogy.

I have had a few people ask if the cocktail chats reference in off-screen was intentional.  it was.  that moment in cocktail chats inspired the entire fic.  it all stemmed from a desire to put that one little moment into a fic.  also my personal thought is that off-screen Ashton pretends to dislike petunia but he actually adores her and calls her darling all the time when they’re alone.  Luke heard him do it once and teased him mercilessly.

now for puzzle pieces!!!! sorry bella I know that you asked this question and haven’t read this one yet but I want to talk about it so you can stop reading now because that’s what the rest of this ask is.

I talked about this briefly once, but the colors for puzzle pieces were chosen specifically!  there was thought behind it! 

Michael got red not just because of the iconic red hair, which is how I almost think of younger Michael, but because it’s a pretty loud and brash color.  Michael (especially when he was younger) doesn’t really filter things and wears a decent amount of his personality on his sleeve. that’s red to me, baby!

Calum has always been forest green to be.  This is partially influenced by the empathy hoodie (even though that’s a bit brighter than forest green), but it’s more because my associations with green have always said it’s a very dependable, stable color.  It reminds me of pine trees, and I think Calum can give off that same sense of reliability in weathering the seasons.  It’s a quieter color but can really pop next to another one.  It also worked out nicely that Calum and Michael’s colors were compliments

Luke gets gold because he is a sunshine boy!  Luke actually was the person I had the most trouble with, because I was flipping between gold, a lighter blue, or pink.  Pink ultimately was too close to red to make me be able to visualize what the marks looked like on each boy to my satisfaction like it just looked ugly.  I went with gold because there is a lot of outward brightness in Luke.  He’s the kind of person where if he’s happy everyone else gets a bit happier, and gold also seemed fitting for the eventual shift into a rockstar and the amount of talent he has

Ashton gets purple, but a deeper purple.  Dynamic but still relatively stable, has a lot of depth.  Purple is a secret color, but it’s still beautiful and it draws people in.  When I visualize it it ends up being a really dark shade, but in reality he’s probably more of a royal purple than a plum purple

I have a lot of favorite moments in that fic but one that’s standing out now is right when Ashton and Michael do their first touch: “The dark purple reminds him of spilling grape juice on his clothes as a kid, and when he collapses into Ashton he feels like they could have known each other at that age, too.”  There is something so charming about meeting someone later and feeling like you’ve known them your whole life, and that was significant here because Michael has known Calum and Luke since they were younger (although Luke did come in the picture when they were tweens/young teens instead of kids).  I wanted to be sure that although Michael, Calum, and Luke are the triangle, Ashton is an equal part of their soulmate group.  He doesn’t have the same history, but that doesn’t matter because it feels like he does.

also pretty early on in the fic (I think it’s when Calum is in Brazil) I say that Michael is always touch-starved for Calum, and I brought that line back in the hair dye scene because baby seasons change but people don’t!  one thing is consistent about Michael and that is his love for Calum, expressed here through the love language of physical touch

As for clues for future scenes... :)

anyway! ask me some fun meta writer asks!

#ask #bella #thank you for indulging me #to anyone who read this whole thing: wowza #I have many things to say and will not be concise about it

[soulvomit]

Ok, so, apropos of this post, where I claim that the whole concept of teenagehood has been lost:

This is why I think so.

There is a particular institution of teenhood of the late 20th century - in general, in the 50s and beyond - that I'm referring to.

This is very much the context I came of age in, and part of why I argue that Gen Xrs were "the last generation of American teenager."

As a late 20th century teen, you're not an adult yet, but you're also not a child, either.

I WANT to do what we do here on Tumblr and argue that this is class based but I just can't, except in the sense that maybe *rich* kids, especially girls, might exist in a more sheltered delayed-development social space, and there are some culture spaces (this was true with some families who were tracking their kids into professional/STEM careers) where young people were discouraged from focusing on anything at all except for getting into a good university. But the thing is, it was still pretty broadly true for the time that what we think of as the "twentieth century teenage lifestyle" per the media *did* represent, even if clumsily, more actual teenagers than it does now. I really feel like many more of us had a life independent of school and our family. What's been normalized as a teenager now is very much something that would've been considered a child/tween/early teen lifestyle *at the time.*

What was common in a middle class teenage lifestyle, where I lived, across a broad social spectrum:

* preparing for a career. What differed between social classes, is the shape that this takes. Many solid middle class kids that I knew, had part time jobs. It's important to point out that Boomer expectations around what constitutes "entry level" are based on Gen X and older employees. It didn't mean someone who had just graduated college, with zero work experience. It meant, specifically, someone with 80s/90s teenage/young adult-typical work experience who was entry level *in a career track job.* (it was also based on the assumption that people stay with the same company for a decade or more and are making a long term investment in training that individual.) The whole concept of what "entry level" even means, is just a confusing mess now. It definitely had one specific meaning in the 1980s and before. Also, most middle class college students that I knew in the 80s and 90s, had part time jobs, and so did I during my first try at college. But the rising costs and changing work world (it was a lot easier to have a fixed schedule in the 80s and 90s from what I gather) actually disincentivized student employment to a huge degree. Can only get sufficient student aid as a full time student, can't work enough hours/get enough pay while in school to make it worthwhile, increased stigma on student workers that didn't exist when a student worker was a potential 20 year employee. And if you're on a loan then it may even be more financially viable to double up on coursework and try to get done as quickly as possible.

* making money. I think there were just more ways to make money in the community, away from the internet, for older children/younger teens. Just to use broad stereotypes: we allowed 12 year old boys to chuck a newspaper from a bike at the crack of dawn, and we allowed 12 year old girls to be alone in a house with a baby. I can think of lots of things, though, that older children and young teens no longer do for money.

* dating. We were caught in a cultural liminal space between Silent Generation and older courtship practices (and earlier marriage), and a 70s-90s more liberal dating culture that allowed for sexual experimentation and serial monogamy. It isn't that so many older adults turned a blind eye to our dating so much as that they thought we were COURTING. High school dating used to be taken a lot more seriously. And in between the time when our parents married their high school sweetheart and our kids got brought up with abstinence-only sex education... there was a lot of dating.

* sex. Ok, so: I grew up in a fairly liberal big city. The reason why socially awkward people felt like everyone was having sex but them was... in many spaces, partially TRUE. And even if you were only going to have sex with one person ever, I'm sure that if you're my age and relatively neurotypical and not the most isolated teenager on the planet, and raised in a really average west coast white middle class family, then you probably made out here and there at a party and got in some heavy petting at a makeout spot before you finally had sex for the first time. (Or maybe I just ran with a fun crowd, I don't know.)

This brings me to how all of this sex and dating was even possible for so many middle class teens.

How could this happen, you might ask?

Many, many more teens drove cars.

If you had a car, or dated someone with a car, you had a place to make out. (This got more complicated if you're in a visible, socially unacceptable relationship. But I am talking about broad norms.) I'm guessing some of you (if you're my age) made 3rd base in yours or someone else's car.

Also: most of my teen friends with cars were driving big old American beaters, not cute little economy cars.

What's a big old car?

For lots of us, a hotel room on wheels.

But driving is still the biggest rite of passage I can think of, for many teens of my generation and older, that marked the passage into a space that was no longer a child but still not an adult. (There was a lot of cultural pressure and economic/insurance stuff to end a broad culture of teenage driving. That happened after I was out of my teens. **sniff** I'm so lucky.)

Maybe not as many girls drove (I didn't), but in my middle class crowd a majority of boys did starting at 16.

We not only had more freedom than Millennials and Zoomers did, we had way more freedom than you probably are even possibly imagining.

[helly-watermelonsmellinfellon]

Random anon here. I recently saw your ask about Severus Snape and I wanted to know, what are your reasons for supporting him? I'm not trying to start an argument I swear (personally he seems to fall more on the "love to hate" side of morality, but that's my opinion, not yours!) I'm just struggling to find my own opinion and I've seen both extremes on the topic. I realize this is kind of a racy question so feel free to just ignore me if'n ya want!

Okay, so I am not well off, and it was especially worse when I was younger. I grew up in a ghetto, on the worst side of the city. I didn’t have friends for the longest time. It was hard, and even then, I wasn’t aware of just how hard it truly was for my mom and I.

When reading Harry Potter, I never saw Severus as a bully. In fact, I just really didn’t take him seriously because he came off exactly as McGonagall, which is really strict. I’ve had teachers do far worse things than he’s ever done, so to me, Professor Snape was just really strict like a nun. At least he couldn’t hit the kids, which is different compared to the school I went to for years. Comparing my experiences at school, to his actions toward students, is nothing.

For the longest time I didn’t hold an opinion on him, other than why the hell does he care what happens to Harry if he doesn’t like him, you know?

PoA starts to put it together really. Dumbledore’s stupid comment in PS wasn’t really considered because I was more angry over Slytherin getting shafted out of points after being declared winners. (I was 6 when I saw the film the first time, and my sister was only a year older when she saw the film the first time and that was her first reaction too.)

But in PoA, Harry gets dragged into Snape’s office where he mouths off and Severus reveals that Harry’s father and his buddies nearly got him killed, and that whatever Dumbledore said, was greatly watered down to make James appear great. However, I was still very young and didn’t comprehend everything. Only that Remus literally admits at the end of the book, that Severus would have died because of Sirius using Remus to play an awful prank, and Dumbledore made Severus stay quiet about it, which wasn’t fair.

Sirius allows Severus’ unconscious form to bang into everything, Severus conjurs stretchers for everyone, including Sirius, and there was banging in sight.

In GoF Sirius tries to make him out to be someone super horrible but I couldn’t take him seriously because he obviously hates Severus and is really immature about it if we use the banging his head off of stuff as an example. How would he know that Severus was evil before coming to school?

The next time I truly consider him beyond that of a strict teacher, is in OotP when Harry rudely rifles through his memories and we see a scene that I have personal experience with. We see his ‘worst memory’, meaning it’s bad.

As stated earlier, I grew up in a ghetto. Mom and I were the only ‘white people’ in said ghetto that was African/Mexican. And while most people backed off when they learned that my sperm donor is a black man with many large, black brothers, some still bothered me. And when I transferred to the public Elementary School down the street, I wasn’t safe there either. I got bullied in my neighborhood, and bullied at school by the popular kids.

So we all know James was supposedly well-liked, meaning popular. And Severus wasn’t. And with how the series treats Slytherins, it’s not shocking Slytherins are bullied just for their House.

Severus is assaulted by 4 people on one, which annoyed me because I was used to that. Sometimes even more people. And if I fought back, they would claim I was the bully and try to get me in trouble at school. I had a bad reputation, and no one questioned the favorites because how could they ever do wrong?

The unfairness of a many on one scenario, made me so angry as a tween and to see him going through that just immediately put me off to James Potter. They held him down and choked him and stripped him, and a similar situation happened to me once in the park down the street where they struggled to pin me and managed to get only my pants off before I got free. 5 boys against 1 girl. Just because Severus has a dick, doesn’t mean the situation is any better with him in it.

James says he does it ‘because he exists’. Something else I’m familiar with. And then we get right from Lily’s own mouth, that the Marauders are arrogant and cocky and pick on anything just because they feel like it. She makes that observation. Severus saying a bad word once in the whole series wasn’t really enough to suddenly get me to hate him. I was disappointed with him, but was more hyped up at the time, on the fact that the great and wonderful Marauders, were just a group of bullies.

And then 1 chapter later, Sirius and Remus confirm EVERYTHING, but try to play it off as something simple. They said they never stopped bothering him, but that they got better at hiding it so Lily wouldn’t know. The bulling continued all throughout school. They graduated as bullies. It was very clear to me.

Effin wonderful.

And by the end of the book, we see that Severus was giving water to Umbridge instead of a truth serum. That he alerted the Order to Harry’s vision and told Sirius to remain behind on Dumbledore’s orders. That he went into the FoD to search for them when they didn’t return with Umbridge. He did all this when he didn’t have to.

I was a mixed bag of emotions in HBP because I don’t like Dumbledore at all so Severus killing him didn’t affect me in the least. His supposed betrayal though, hit hard and I was so sad. I read that book during the utter height of my Depression, so it was especially hard for a character that I formed a close bond with due to mutual experience, would truly be Voldemort’s man. This was before I understood that liking an evil character doesn’t make you evil. And it just contradicted all I knew about Severus’ actions during Harry’s school years and was difficult to come to grips with.

And yet in DH his actions made no sense. Sending Ginny to Hagrid for detention instead of to the Carrows? That was supposed to be a punishment when he knew they were friends?

And then all is revealed and we got more back story. He was just as poor as me, bullied before school even. Petunia bullied him for being poor. She bullied her own sister for having magic. Like, seriously, she’s horrible. 

On the first day, James and Sirius began picking on him for wanting to be in Slytherin. They hadn’t even been sorted yet and they were already bothering him.

And I felt Lily, the Prefect, expecting him to control his Housemates who aren’t even his friends, wasn’t fair since he was at the bottom of the ranks in Slytherin for his blood status. She made no attempt to control the actions of the Marauders, which Remus didn’t either as he too was a Prefect. They actually had power in those situations and never used it, which isn’t Severus’ fault.

Dumbledore’s plan comes into the light and nooooo, Severus was never on Voldemort’s side! Thank God!

And then he died to see Voldemort taken down.

It was pretty cut and dry in my eyes. He worked for Dumbles the whole time, just to make up for his mistake.

I am much older now. I know more things. I am in a better mental state than I was when I finished HP. I love Voldemort and I am unashamed of it, because I know that I can like an evil character and not approve of their actions.

I have seen other people’s thoughts of Severus and looked at his actions from different points of view.

How he treats his students is still nowhere near to what I was used to growing up. From my personal experience, he was very easy on his students when in such a dangerous class. It however, is bullying. I know that now, and I am disappointed in it, though can understand that half is for show, and the other half is because he’s a bitter asshat.

I too am bitter. I don’t like kids. I hate people in general. I lack tolerance for most things that annoy me. I am not mentally healthy despite being better than I was.

Harry had similar experiences to Severus. People use him somehow coming out perfectly as the only possible example of an abuse victim to become. He is in fact, unrealistic. To the extreme.

I understand now why Severus is the way he is. I understand why I am the way I am. That will not excuse the shitty things we’ve done, but it makes sense. Our experiences shape us, and people expecting someone who went through what Severus went through, to come out fine, are stupid.

I connect to Severus Snape very deeply. And with wiser eyes, I can see even more problems deeply entrenched in the things that happened. The stripping of someone without consent is sexual assault for example. Every now and then I re-read and pick up the more abusive aspects of what I read, and Severus was on the receiving end of some terrible shit that people overlook or excuse.

And it angers me when people ignore his plights as a teen because to them, he was the world’s biggest bully as an adult. Yes, it’s immature that he took his justified anger at James out on Harry. No, it is not okay behavior. No, he is not the biggest bully to ever live. No, his actions to stop Voldemort are not diminished simply because he was an ass to kids. Yes, he earned his redemption for joining the Death Eaters by helping to end Voldemort. Plain and simple.

If people can blame 15 year old Severus for what he did then and in the future, I am allowed to hold the Marauders accountable for the shit things they did as teens. Simple concept.

My #Severus Snape tag would take you on a trip.

#Severus Snape #Snape