#another fucking panic lyric caption from me. what’s new.

[epiicaricacy-arts]

there’s something beautiful and tragic in the fall out

here’s more babygirl. alternate version and commentary UTC (not really a process discussion more like. wailing.)

i’ve never been so indecisive on a piece in my life !!!! i redid the rendering once and this strayed so far from what i originally wanted for the sketch. idk how i feel about it actually. i might come back and redo it someday cause this isn’t what i wanted to do but im so sick of this drawing lmao i don’t wanna spend another 10 hours figuring it out again. i got finals to study for 👎

i was trying to combine my painterly art style with the more graphic style of my last drawing cause i thought it’d be cool. i was also looking at some of the art from reverse: 1999 but that didn’t really carry through in the final piece. i really wanted to do more painting ☹️ but whatever ive drawn so much in the last 2 weeks i need to stop lmao

this is the sample i made after i restarted the rendering. i like how this looks a lot more but i think a big problem was how i rushed the second lighting source (blue) so it wasn’t executed very well. the finished piece is just way too clean for what i imagined but i mean its still cool!

i could not figure out how to do the weird magic soul taking thing for the LIFE OF ME. i spent 20 minutes just redrawing it 😔

ok that’s all. i need to go will myself into studying now. o7

#another fucking panic lyric caption from me. what’s new. #he’s sooo twtltrtd to me. please agree. 🙂 #my art #fanart #digital art #a date with death #a date with death visual novel #casper a date with death #two and a half studios #artists on tumblr #artists of tumblr

[tegan-taylors-version]

When @taylorswift owns your life and you have to email your professor explaining why your paper is late:

Hi Professor,

So I know my paper is late but you see Grammy award winning, singer-song writer, cat lover, born in 1989, pop superstar Taylor Swift kind of claimed my life for the past 3 days and I’ve been very distracted. You see I woke up Thursday morning with every intention of writing my paper only to find that there was a livestream showing fans gathering at a butterfly mural in Nashville for no other reason than it vaguely resembling her Instagram aesthetic. So like every other Swifitie on the planet I tuned in. As time goes by more and more people gather for absolutely no apparent reason. I mean the cops are there, television crews, radio people. For absolutely no fucking reason other than that this butterfly has some cats in it and Taylor likes cats. So I’m watching this on my laptop and am on Tumblr on my phone (multitasking is key). And the Swifitie fandom is dying. We can’t believe these people are making us look like boo boo the fool again, especially after the whole five holes in the fence embarrassment. Five holes in the fence you ask? Let me digress.

I want to take you back to the 24th of February when Miss Swift posted a photo of 7 palms trees with the caption of 7 palm tree emoji’s. Swifties were like “is this a clue”, “what does this mean?”. Next came a photo a photo of her sitting on some stairs. So Swifties got out their calculators and used their math skills once again and decided that Taylor was indeed sitting on the sixth step. “Could this be a countdown?” Swifities everywhere began asking themselves. Pandemonium. New music is coming. We have cracked the code….or so we thought. One day later Taylor posts another photo of her standing behind a fence. A FENCE WITH FIVE HOLES (I mean we had got good at counting by this point). “This has to be a countdown”, said the Swifities. I mean we had the fricken news reporting on this so-called countdown. Taylor Swift obviously saw our stupidity and our crackhead theories and decided to call out of stupidity on Instagram to her 116 million follows and reject the countdown we had made up in our heads… We won’t even talk about her dragging us on national television.

Still following? Ok. Back to the livestream. So Tumblr is complete chaos. We cannot believe hundreds of people have gathered around this mural for absolutely no reason, yet 2 hours have gone by and we are all still watching this tomfoolery. We are asking begging Taylor to put these clown Swifites out their misery and send them home. And then after three hours of staring at a butterfly mural, THE TAYLOR ALISON SWIFT shows up and takes selfies with every. single. person. And is all like “oh hey see this cool mural I had made” and then leaves. But not before convincing us we have to watch the NFL draft that night to find out more about her new music.

Now you may be thinking well you had five hours between the livestream and the NFL draft you could’ve done your paper. And you would be incorrect. You see I had actually stopped breathing by this point and had to wait for someone to come resuscitate me. After being resurrected from the dead, 8pm comes around and I’m tuning into the NFL draft even though I know nothing about American football. Couldn’t name a single team. I mean what does NFL even stand for? Not important.

So I’m watching the draft because Taylor owns my heart (body and soul) waiting for her to drop us a bone. Miss Swift shows up looking like a glitter rainbow goddess and tells her song ME! Comes out at midnight with Brendon Urie from Panic! At the disco. WWHHHHHAAAATTTTTT! Once again I’ve forgotten how to breathe, I’m in a full body sweat and quite honestly I need to be heavily sedated. You could say I was all PANIC and no DISCO. I honestly don’t remember what happened between now and midnight. I think I blacked out.

Midnight rolls around (not really it was the longest wait of my entire life), and Taylor releases A FRICKEN BOP. I mean did we expect anything less? No. Taylor said you can’t spell AWESOME without ME and she is correct. Taylor is smart. For obvious reasons I can’t just watch it once. I must watch it on repeat. I must learn every lyric. I must know every piece of choreography. I must learn french.

By now it is around 5:30am, and I decide to get a solid hour of sleep before having to get up to watch GMA for a Taylor Swift interview. I roll out of bed and assume my position on the couch and tune in only to discover that GMA has done something bad and punk’d Swifities with no new interview or announcement. Bad GMA. So this is when I decide to go be productive and actually write my paper. Good Tegan.

Minding my own business, writing my paper, Taylor Swift decides to go live on Instagram and roast us for missing obvious clues in the music video. I mean you can see the shock in her face at our stupidity and lack of attention to detail. CHAOS follows. I was the opposite of JE SUIS CALME. We must not let our leader down. We must band together and crack this code. So for the next several hours I am watching the ME! Video repeatedly. IN SLOW MOTION. I have a notebook out and am taking notes. We had to redeem ourselves after the five holes in the fence mess. We have to be the FBI detectives that Taylor told us we are. So for the rest of the evening, along with every other Swifitie, I am trying to crack this darn clue. I am going from YouTube to Instagram to Tumblr to Twitter back to YouTube. It was a mess (and not the mess that Taylor wanted).

So this brings me to today. The mystery is still not solved and we are clowns. I know I am getting an MA in Forensic Psychology and should be able to crack these clues but you see Miss Swift has been watching Law and Order for many years and she is a pro. And after the whole five holes in the fence fiasco we have really lost our touch.

I apologize for my paper being late and a total and utter mess but as you can see I had other more pressing matters to deal with.

Kind regards from a crackhead Swifitie,

Tegan*

*Property of Taylor Swift

#thankyou for coming to my ted talk #taylor swift #taylor nation

[sweetsweetamber]

23.06.2020

Emailed this to a friend earlier today.

I have been putting off even beginning to allow myself to process my feelings on this since I found out Zac Hanson was a raging racist, transphobic, sexist piece of shit. The problem is he keeps doubling down on his stance and making it so much worse, instead of letting me delete him from my memory and never have to think about him ever again.

This is so different to when multiple women came forward with allegations against Jesse Lacey. Like the second I found that out I never listened to Brand New ever again. Done, deleted. They were one of my favourite bands too, like the same level as Fall Out Boy, MCR, Panic and anything Andrew McMahon does. It hurt, mostly because I used their music to help me get through dealing with shitty men doing similar things to what Jesse Lacey did. But I haven’t really thought about them since, and I only miss their music sometimes. Maybe one day I’ll be able to listen to it without feeling disgusted, but that time is still a long way off.

I am also not the kind of person to idolise celebrities really? Not since I was a kid, anyway. Like all my favourite bands now, I have no idea about their personal lives beyond probably the mid 2000s. I have no clue what their kids, or wives names are, or even how many kids they have. I don’t even know all the names of the people in the band sometimes! I don’t feel connected to them as a person, I feel connected to them through their art, their music, their lyrics. As well as the fandom, the fans, the concerts, and the things I experienced in my life while listening to their music.

Anyway, here’s a brief timeline of what lead up to the main blowout to help put things in context:

May 25th-27th: George Floyd was murdered and Hanson posts normal content on social media with ordinary fan comments

May 28th: Protests against police brutality happen across America, Hanson shares a post about the rocket launch. A handful of fans (mostly Black and POC) express their hurt and frustration with Hanson in the comments

May 31st: Hanson posts advertising a livestream with an organisation that provides mental health support to musicians. Fans comment pleading with them to do the right thing, other fans start absolutely dog-piling those fans and tell them to stop “attacking” Hanson

June 2nd: Black out Tuesday. Taylor posts a black square and a few people comment asking him to actually say Black Lives Matter. The main Hanson account posts nothing.

June 3rd: Isaac posts on his account that “racism is wrong!” to very mixed reactions. Still won’t say Black Lives Matter.

June 4th: Zac posts about recording a podcast. He responds to a few comments about why he won’t say Black Lives Matter, it turns into a shit show and he deletes all the comments.

June 5th: The main Hanson account makes a post advertising their shitty yearly island vacation but it got blown up with backlash in the comments so they deleted the post. Zac makes a really fucking weird instagram text post, that says “Racism is wrong, but simply saying I denounce racism in a post will not save the life of the next young black man who comes upon it, or the next victim of reckless brutality”. The main Hanson account posts a photo with the one black hand in it they could find and still refuse to say Black Lives Matter.

This is where I jumped in and commented “Open your purse” and got completely torn apart by racist fans. I spent hours fighting back and supporting another indigenous Hanson fan who was also getting hurled tons of abuse in the comments. It was genuinely hard to try to calmly engage with these people who were spewing paragraphs about how Hanson don’t owe us anything and to “stop forcing your beliefs on them”. Whew. I think I blocked like 60 accounts, and had to change all my instagram settings to keep me as protected as possible without having to go private.

I knew Hanson fans were terrible. I found this out while in line for their first concert, when everyone was obnoxious assholes who wanted to brag about how many tens of thousands of dollars they’d spent following the tour (no one in line with me in the mornings were locals or even from New Zealand). The more money you spent, the more of a fan you were in their eyes.

This put me completely off ever going to their yearly fanclub island retreat which had been on my bucket list for at least a decade. The thought of being trapped on an island with Hanson and hundreds of complete assholes put me right off for life.

The funny thing is, I always met the nicest and most amazing fellow Hanson fans in line for other bands concerts? But the second concert I went to really solidified my opinion of Hanson fans being the most entitled assholes ever. I should have known it was only a hop skip and a jump for them to slide over being to racist as hell.

I eventually ended up deleting my original comment because a week later I was still getting angry racists coming at me for a fairly mild but sassy post. Which is hilarious because when Gerard Way made a similar half-assed post on his instagram, nearly every comment was “open your purse” and sarcastic “we stan a king who does nothing!!”. The next day he was like, I fucked up, here are some links and resources, we are redirecting the MCR store page to links to donate etc. There were probably some fans getting angry at the “backlash”, but if there were any I didn’t see it. Just insane to see the difference between two groups of fans for bands that I like(d).

On June 6th, a whole lot of Zac’s personal social media accounts got leaked, including a Pinterest board, youtube account and instagram account. He then he publicly confirmed they were all his because he’s a fucking idiot.

A few days later I got sent a link to the r/PostHanson subreddit, which had screengrabs of all of Zac’s pinterest boards. Seeing all those ridiculous and incredibly offensive “memes” was like a punch in the gut.

I had not kept up with this dude's personal life at all, I have forgotten his wife's name and lost track of how many kids he has after the first one. I just figured he was probably conservative because homeschooled + super religious + getting married quick and churning out babies. I’d never really heard or seen Hanson take a political stance on anything, but I didn’t really follow them too closely.

Apparently it was known to fans that Zac was SUPER INTO GUNS and played airsoft which is basically paintball crossed with modern military reenactment?

His pinterest page was completely full of stuff he’d pinned about guns (so many guns) and second amendment memes, that said things like “an 18 year old is too young to buy a gun, but a 5 year old is old enough to decide its own gender?” and one with a picture of a man and a woman with the caption “I told her guns make me feel uncomfortable, she said we should both see other men” which he added the comment “So true” to. The worst were the ones that were supportive of George Zimmerman.

I felt frightened, disgusted, and upset.

On June 8th the Hanson instagram account finally posted (with comments turned off) saying Black Lives Matter.

Since then, Zac has really just…. doubled down on being a shithead. He’s been posting as normal on his main account, blocking fans and deleting even mildly critical comments, liking the most disgusting comments that racist fans have been posting in support of him - one comment he liked was a fan justifying Zimmerman murdering Trayvon Martin. Also replying to some critical fans, making a ridiculously long comment where he thinks everyone is mad at him for being a second amendment nutter which genuinely made me more upset, angry and scared. He truly is the most dangerous type of white person: uneducated, ignorant, arrogant, and with a massive platform to spread his fucked up views. As someone else summed up so perfectly in a comment on one of his posts:

Too stubborn to look inward and see how their own actions, thoughts and behaviours are problematic. No desire to actually hear out marginalised voices. Instead, they'd rather create their own narrative, they want to play the victim, feign being attacked, deflect from any of the issues brought up, and will do anything BUT hold themselves accountable. Instead, they block black people and other POC (Rule #1 of what NOT to do right now), and will "like" comments of other uneducated ignorant white fans who are blindly loyal to anything he says and also don't care at all about marginalised and underrepresented people. Because it's all about HIM. The Poor, entitled, white man is feeling attacked. Zac, you are less than a man. Your development, somewhere down the line, was truly stunted.You are so brainwashed, so self righteous and so far gone, I don't know if you are even salvageable at this point. You would rather be in your bubble, clutching your guns and "liking" comments on your page that are defending the murder of black children than taking the bandwidth, introspection and WORK is takes to actually evolve and be a good person. As a black woman, at least I know now not to waste another dime of my money on you. Now go do what you do best and block another black voice, or write yet another tone deaf and ignorant response to make POC feel crazy (ie: "I'm sorry you are feeling hurt", "I love you", etc.) SAVE IT. That's more deflection bc YOU as the white man are CAUSING the hurt. If you want to love black people, start with explaining to all of your black fans why you believe a young, innocent black child named Trayvon Martin deserved to die because he attacked George Zimmerman. You were man enough to post it. Be man enough to defend it and stand BY your actions.

So I’m not entirely sure where that leaves me or where to go from here. I feel completely blindsided by the boy I picked as my favorite member when I was 12 grew up to be an abhorrent racist fuckhead. I saw in the subreddit support group someone said it feels like someone died and we are all in mourning, which sounds strange but it really does. The Zac Hanson I thought I knew is dead. He never really existed in the first place, or maybe he did for a short while before all the hate wormed its way into his heart.

I also believe that the type of music you choose says a lot about you as a person, and so much of my identity in my preteen and early teen years are wrapped up in Hanson. Both them as individuals as much as the music - I think that's why I can’t separate them because there has never been any separation between the two for me. I first heard Hanson on MTV with their music video for Mmmbop and decided I was in love with Zac before the song was over. I don’t think I can ever stomach listening to that song ever again.

Everyone makes mistakes, has racism to unlearn etc, but Zac hasn’t even bothered to lie and give us the PR answer of “I’m listening and learning etc”, even if he isn’t. He doesn’t even want to seem like he’s saving face because he truly thinks nothing he said or did was wrong, and that is the most horrifying thing of all.

I don’t know how to move past this. It's very easy to think, “people are flawed so you shouldn’t idolise them” but I can’t just snap my fingers and remove this weird 23 year old bond I have that is a mix of intense love and nostalgia? Like there was genuinely a point at age 13 where I actually truly believed: if he could just come to NZ and lock eyes with me at a concert we would fall in love and get married. Which sounds wild but it's how all 3 of them met their wives so it actually was a pretty solid plan.

I immediately took down my signed photo of the band that I had on the wall though because seeing it didn’t remind me of the happy memory of seeing them in concert for the very first time, it just reminded me that Zac is an awful person and his brothers are probably the same and just better at keeping their views private.

I always wanted to get my Hanson tattoo covered and redone but now I think I’m just going to get it covered. A lot of fans are selling or throwing out merch, but I don't want to do that so I've just packed the few things I have away so I don't have to see them for now.

Thinking about the time I met Zac makes me feel sick. It used to genuinely be the best day of my life that I could think about if I was having a shitty day and think “Hey, remember Zac Hanson hugged you”. I’m just so angry that he has tainted so many amazing and happy memories with the hateful rhetoric he is spewing now. I know over time it will hurt less but everything just hurts a lot right now.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk lmao.

#personal essay