Tumgik
#but i threw the vast majority of them out a couple years ago but even now i still find them and theyre probably like half the trash i toss
burnpygmalion · 3 years
Text
decent bit of cleaning done today, surprised myself with how long i was working but i just kept going like ‘nah i got more in me i should ride this wave of motivation as long as i can’
#my room has like 10 years of weird shit stuffed in the corners 40% of which isnt even mine#so its an undertaking. but im starting to try to do a bit every day so itll get better over time rather than trying to do it all at once#cuz idk even if im working like a pitifully small amount on it as long as its consistent ill actually make some amount of progress#rather than just putting it off until im ready to deep clean the entire thing in one go#theres a corner thats like knee high with i dont even know what and the top bunk of my bed is also filled with boxes and old clothes#so those r the main hurdles but yeah. gonna keep picking at them#it feels really good to free up space even if its just a tiny corner by my trash can its like wow that feels so much better#its bad enough that it makes cleaning it pretty straightforward though theres never a lot of thought#u can stand in the middle and pick any direction in a 360 degree angle around you and theres something to throw out or organize#oh man theres a bunch of trash under the bed too. gotta remember that#idk i used to drink bottled water all the time and just like leave the bottles around so that was a big part of it at first#but i threw the vast majority of them out a couple years ago but even now i still find them and theyre probably like half the trash i toss#also gonna try to work on my room at my moms when im there which isnt nearly as bad but still. could use a lot of work#its mostly just getting rid of furniture theres a dresser and a huge mirror that i need to deal with
8 notes · View notes
slippinmickeys · 3 years
Note
Head Canon AU Mulder and Scully as Archeologist and Scientist at a dig in ruins in the Amazon.
Anon! Thank you so much. I saw this this morning and got that rare inspiration wherein I launched myself at this, and kind of love what I came up with. I hope you enjoy it! (It is unbeta-ed)
1. The University was being cheap. That was the first thing. Piggybacking off the hard work he’d put in: years worth of toil to arrange this meticulously set-up dig. If they wanted to send a team to study advanced medical uses of the vast biome of the Amazon rainforest, they’d do far better sending this approaching medical team into the interior. His team -- his dig -- was practically on the outskirts. The forest around them had already been explored and researched, catalogued and referenced. The real biological finds -- the cures for Alzheimer’s, cancer -- would be found in the unknown, in those places even the aboriginal people hadn’t stepped. The University was being cheap, plunking in a science team on a completely separate mission with his own, just to save some cash. That was the bottom line.
If it hadn’t been so oppressively hot so early in the morning, he might not have been quite so irritated. As it was, he stood on the bank of the river and ran an already sweat-soaked handkerchief over the back of his neck, willing the putting little outboard Evinrude to chug a little more quickly upstream. It was hot and stiflingly humid, and he’d wanted to be at the dig two hours ago, before the heat of the day set in. Too late, that.
The incoming medical team -- if you could call it a team -- seemed to consist of only one person. A short-statured wisp of a woman (if the high, top-knotted messy red bun was any indication of sex) who sat low in the backseat of the approaching riverboat, surrounded by expensive-looking boxes filled with technology that probably wouldn’t operate well in the humidity. He blew an irritated raspberry and shuffled his feet in the muddy squelch of the riverbank.
The stout block of the driver hefted a rope at Mulder as they approached, which Mulder caught easily and wrapped around a nearby tree.
“Tudo vai bem?” Mulder inquired as the man cut the engine and grunted an affirmative.
The passenger stood, keeping a hand on the side of the little tin vessel, its stern fishtailing out into the current. Mulder stepped up and held out a hand, which she grasped gratefully. He pulled and she took a confident leap, landing lightly on the ground next to him.
“Dr. Mulder, I presume?” she said on a light breath, looking up at him with a small smile, having to crane her neck to do so. She had astonishingly blue eyes, a color he’d only seen once, in an ice-cave in the far north. He shook his head after a moment and realized that he was still holding her hand. He dropped it, nodding.
“I thank God, doctor, I have been permitted to see you,” she finished, quoting the journals of Henry Morton Stanley.
Mulder outright laughed. He was smitten immediately.
2. “Be careful with that!” she’d barked, as Langly handed out her equipment to a couple of waiting locals that had been working on the project for three years.
Mulder held up a calming hand.
“You’re working with archeologists, Dr. Scully,” he said softly, “my team has the gentlest hands in the Southern Hemisphere.”
She quirked one side of a grin at him even as she threw a worried look over her shoulder at her equipment.
“Come on,” he said, giving her sleeve a gentle tug, “let me show you around.”
He showed her the latrine first, watching her face carefully for a reaction, but she just nodded nonchalantly and kept walking. Then the mess, and the tent where she’d be working when she wasn’t in the field.
“And this,” he said, taking her to an empty patch of jungle, “is where your bunk will be. My apologies that it’s not set up. There’s no female barracks and we were told you wouldn’t be here until next week. The radio communique we got this morning informing us of your arrival came as something of a surprise.”
“I’m eager to get started,” was all she said in response.
Mulder walked on and she followed him.
“I’m afraid the only empty cot is in my tent,” he said sheepishly. “Dr. Byers headed home for a funeral last month and we’re not expecting him back until March. I’ll be sure yours is set up right away, but takes some time as we have to build a platform first. Have you done jungle field work before?”
“I flew here from Borneo,” she said. “It’s not a problem.” With that, she flipped back the tent’s outer curtain and ducked inside like she owned the place.
She never did move out.
3. Scully’s father had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and hadn’t lived long enough to see her graduate from medical school. She would not let it happen to anyone else if she could help it, she’d said. She worked like a woman possessed.
Against all advice, she would march into the jungle alone and be gone for days at a time. When her grad students finally arrived, they couldn’t keep up with her, and she’d frequently leave them at base camp to work on the equipment (which, Mulder was not really that pleased to report, did have a tendency to malfunction in the miasmic humidity and heat of the Amazon basin. It wasn’t, he admitted, that easy always being right). Occasionally she could be talked into taking one of the local hires with her, but she felt bad taking workers that Mulder’s project funding paid for, and anyway, they weren’t trained in her science, she would tell him.
“I wish you wouldn’t go out on your own,” he murmured into the cup of her ear one night, a trickle of sweat running from her hairline and onto the tip of his nose.
She turned on the cot, a feat, considering its fairly narrow dimensions, and pressed her forehead against his, the flimsy pillow damp beneath them both.
“I’m careful,” she whispered, and threw a leg over him, her dewy mons pressing into the naked flesh of his thigh.
“It’s not safe-” he began to protest, but she’d captured his lips with her own and he fell headlong into the lush heat of her -- whatever concern that had been on the tip of his tongue lost to her rapacious mouth as it trailed a slick path down his torso and latched, vitae and greedy, around the rigid length of him. It was bliss. She was bliss. If he had ever thought he knew love, he was wrong.
4. The whole camp knew they were together. Her tent had become a kind of catchall storage area, and it’s not like nylon canvas could contain the breathy moans of their pleasure. That and she’d just plunk down and sit on his lap whenever the only camp chair available around the mess tent was the one with the tricky leg.
Anyway, what happened in the field stayed in the field, unless it was up for peer review.
“Are you guys going to get married or something?” Mulder’s newest grad student asked one night when the air had actually cooled enough to take the edge off of everybody’s temper. Beer had arrived with their latest resupply and Frohike had syphoned off some LN2 to cool it and it was frosty and rich and maybe the best thing Mulder had ever tasted aside from Scully’s skin.
Scully, from atop his lap, merely shrugged and took a leisurely sip of brew. Mulder pictured it sliding down her throat, the cold blooming into her belly and he dry swallowed, then leaned forward and kissed her shoulder.
“God, don’t be such a newb,” drawled Langly, pressing his glasses into his face compulsively.
Mulder knew what Langly meant. They’d all seen their share of field romances that fizzled the second your boots stepped back onto University soil, though something about Scully felt different; the way their minds worked together, the way she felt in his arms.
“I’m married to the job, bro,” Scully said, but reached back and squeezed the skin just above Mulder’s hip. He kissed her shoulder again.
“D’you tell her about the helo data?” Frohike asked, looking at Mulder from his own camp chair. The little man sat low and back in it with his shoulders hunched up, and Mulder thought he looked a bit like a toad, or an ogre guarding a burial mound.
They’d gotten the funding from a billionaire alumni to fly a helicopter over the whole of the basin in this sector of the Amazon, using light detection radar. Basically, it shot out billions of lasers as it flew overhead that were able to penetrate the rainforest’s canopy and map the landscape below.
“You had a chance to analyze it?” Scully asked, craning her head to look at him squarely.
He nodded, smiling. He’d been saving this to tell her especially.
“And you were able to combine it with the satellite data?” she asked, excited.
He nodded again. “Sóis,” he said, smiling. The settlements they’d found took their name from the Portuguese word for ‘suns.’ They were round villages, all with remarkably similar layouts, with elongated mounds circling a central plaza. When seen from above, they looked like the rays of the sun. “Pre-Columbian.”
She jumped off his lap, spilling half her beer in the process. It dripped down the bare skin of her knee, unnoticed.
“Are you kidding?!” her excitement made him giddy.
“It gets better,” he said, and she cocked her head, waiting for him to elaborate. “They’re laid out like the cosmos,” he said, giving her a full-watt smile as he rose out of the chair to stand in front of her. “We’re already plotted three different villages, all laid out in the exact design of southern constellations.” Her mouth dropped open. “Canis Major, Hydra, and Crux Australis.”
She launched herself into his arms, practically squealing -- something he’d never heard her do -- and he held her, looking around at the smiling faces of the other scientists in the mess. The find would make his career, and her excitement for him touched him profoundly.
5. Martim, one of their local hires, came careening into camp, breathing so hard he had to put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. His face was a mask of anxiety and fear. Mulder felt dread bloom in his gut, and he dropped what he was doing -- actually dropped the computer tablet he was holding to the wet forest floor -- and ran over to the man, grasping him firmly by the shoulder.
“Martim?” he said, “O que aconteceu?”
“Dr. Scully,” the man heaved, his accent thick. He could still scarcely breathe.
“Where is she?” Mulder didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to translate from English. “What happened?”
“Hurt,” the man wheezed, “she’s hurt.”
It took nearly thirty minutes to assemble a rescue party, and they had to let Martim rest for a bit and give him food and water before he could take them back out into the jungle where he’d left Scully. Mulder was beside himself by the time they finally started off, impatient as a recalcitrant child, sick to his stomach with worry.
It took three hours to hack into the area where she’d been doing her search, and a further twenty minutes of calling her name before they heard her weak call back.
Mulder raced ahead without thought to obstacle or danger, and skidded to a halt when he was practically on top of her. She was leaning back against the base of a large tree, holding onto her right ankle, which she had elevated on her left knee. There was a length of rope beside her and a climbing harness around her butt and waist.
“Scully,” he panted, falling to his knees beside her.
She smiled at him weakly, her face pale and sweaty.
“I think it’s broken,” she hissed, pointing at her ankle.
“What happened?” Mulder asked, as the rest of the rescue party trundled in behind him, pulling off backpacks and other equipment. Someone handed Scully a bottle of water.
“I saw a fungus I’d never seen before growing on the bark midway up this tree,” she said after guzzling half a bottle of Arrowhead. “The carabiner failed on my descent.”
“Oh, Scully,” Mulder said, reaching out to tuck a damp lock of titian hair behind her ear.
“I got the sample, though,” she said with a tired, but victorious glint in her eye.
They weren’t back into camp until well after nightfall.
Mulder picked her up from the field stretcher and carried her into their tent, depositing her gently onto her cot. Langly came in behind him and handed him two fresh cold packs before ducking back out without a word. Mulder popped them to activate the chemicals and pressed them gingerly on either side of Scully’s ankle.
“I’m going to call for a medical evac,” he said quietly.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, grabbing at his hand and squeezing it. “Mulder, don’t you fucking dare.”
“Scully, we’ve got to follow protocol here,” he said, trying not to sound put out.
“Do not take me out of the field, Mulder. Promise me.”
“Scully-”
“Promise me!”
“How will you even work?” he said a little desperately.
“It doesn’t need setting or surgery,” she said, gesturing to her injured limb.
“How do you know that without an X-ray?”
“I’m a medical doctor,” she said, by way of explanation, “I can secure it with supplies we have on hand. I can work from my cot for a few days and make crutches out of tree limbs. Please, Mulder,” she said, and he could feel himself relenting, even if it would get him in trouble. “Please.”
He sighed, and she smiled up at him weakly, though he didn’t say a thing.
“Thank you,” and closed her eyes, relaxing into her pillow, “thank you.”
Six weeks later the canvas of their tent ripped back and the greenish glow of leaf-filtered sunlight shone into the murky, damp depths. Mulder rose from where he was resting on his cot and looked to the entrance. Scully stood there, armpit resting on her improvised crutch, her hair a rich autumn frizz around her head. Her eyes were wide and shining, and there was something incandescent about her in that moment -- an energy pulsing from her that lit his soul from within.
“Scully-” he started, but she held up a hand to silence him. Her hands were shaking.
“I found it,” she said, her voice breathy with the triumph of discovery, “Mulder, I found it.”
164 notes · View notes
Text
Cult Girl: Doctorate (Hannibal x Female!Reader) pt. 2
Oils
Cult girl socializes at the opera and receives an unexpected call. 
Note: I tagged this as “anti mlm” as in multi-level marketing and not men-loving-men. 
Trigger warnings: Discussions of cults and emotional manipulation
It wasn't until after the opera was over that people began to notice you may have had a little fun during intermission. Hannibal's hair wasn't in its usual perfect side part and his jacket was slightly wrinkled in places. You could cover most of his love bites with your stole, but nothing could hide that post-orgasm glow.
Most opera-goers stayed to socialize for hours after the show concluded, making an already long night even longer. It was like clubbing, but for rich old people.
"So you're the future Mrs. Hannibal Lecter?" A woman with silvery hair said. She dragged her husband into the conversation by the arm. "I've heard so much about you."
You were about to say something witty, but noticed the way she was looking at you. Scanning you up and down. Looking for anything out of place to grill you about.
"Only good things, I hope." Hannibal said in your silence. His voice was vaguely threatening. "She is a doctoral student, in her second year of her graduate studies in clinical psychology."
The husband, who, up to this point, hadn't spoken a word, perked up. "Is that right?"
You smiled, excited for the chance to talk about your passion. "Yes sir. I've still got quite a ways to go, but I love my work."
"You should be proud." The man praised, looking at Hannibal. "You've got yourself an ambitious wife."
"Oh, we're not married yet." You corrected.
"So when can we expect an invitation?" The woman asked.
"Six months from now, isn't it?" Hannibal answered. "Memorial day weekend. Then I'm taking her to Italy for a lengthy honeymoon."
The woman threw her head back and sighed. "That sounds heavenly."
"You young modern girls are always so intuitive." The man commented. "I'll bet you tricked him into marrying you."
You wanted to call this guy out for his sexist bullshit, but he wasn't far off. It was Hannibal who tricked you, though.
Technically, he proposed to you within the first six months. You just didn't know it. It took until shockingly recently to find out.
It was during a ballroom dancing lesson of all places. You were sweaty, but loved the feeling of your lover's hands gently guiding your movements. You stepped away from the lesson to get some water, and innocently asked when he would propose to you.
"I believe I already did." He said with enough conviction to blur the lines of seriousness and sarcasm.
"You pretended to." You corrected. "Remember? We were just pretending to be engaged for Anna's wedding."
"But it didn't end after the wedding, did it?" He observed. "You kept calling me your fiancé long after that weekend passed."
You paused, then threw your head back in exasperation. "Oh my god, Hannibal."
Hannibal laughed. "I told you. Someday it won't be a lie."
"You're a piece of shit, you know that?" You pressed your fingers to your temples. "So we've been engaged this whole time?"
"What can I say?" He said, gently. "I knew you were my one and only even then. It was just a matter of circumventing your inhibitions."
"I'm not complaining." You folded your arms. "But a little notice would have been nice."
"Well, if you insist." He laced his fingers between his own. "[F/N] [L/N]. Will you be my wife?"
Even though the question was truly just a formality, you were still as giddy as a schoolgirl to hear those words.
"Yes, Hannibal Lecter." You said, cheeks stinging from smiling so hard. "I will marry you."
Then you just went back to the dance lesson like nothing happened. It was shockingly in-character for both of you.
"No." You shook your head. "We killed someone together and took a blood oath to never separate."
The couple laughed. Hannibal looked down at you with pride.
“So [F/N].” The man said. “Have you given any thought to your doctoral dissertation?” 
“Oh, Charles.” The woman rolled her eyes. “I’m sure she didn’t come here to be grilled about her studies.” 
“No, it’s okay.” You smiled. As long as you were talking about school, you weren’t being interrogated about the thirty-year age gap between you and Hannibal. “I have been thinking about my dissertation. There are plenty of fascinating topics to choose from, but I can’t not write it about, well, the reason I began to study psychology in the first place.” 
“And that is?” The man raised an eyebrow.
“Cults.” You said, grinning ear to ear. “Understanding them, their leaders, their followers, why people join them. How they evolve and grow more insidious as time passes. What form they’re starting to take in the digital age.” 
“That is interesting.” The woman’s voice rose, connoting genuine engagement. “And what form are they taking in the digital age?” 
You looked up at Hannibal, as if to ask for permission. Permission to rip into her and burn that bridge for good. He answered in the affirmative. 
“Ma’am, could I take a look at your bracelet?” You asked, already knowing exactly what she would say. 
Her face lit up. “Oh, do you like it?”
She pulled it off her wrist and handed it to you. You brought it to your nose and took a whiff, confirming your theory. Then you handed it off to Hannibal, whose sense of smell was much more refined. He took one breath, then recoiled. 
Hannibal covered his mouth and nose with his hand and coughed. “That is... quite strong, Mrs. DeMarco.” 
“It’s Affirm, by doTERRA.” She revealed, her voice growing defensive. “It helps you ground yourself and remember your worth.” 
You handed the bracelet back to her. “Do you sell doTERRA, Mrs. DeMarco?” 
“Well, now that you mention it...” A small smile appeared on her lips. “Why? Would you like to buy some?” 
“I hate to be the one to tell you this, ma’am, but...” You lied. “You’re actually in a cult.” 
She had nothing to say to that. She just stared at you with her mouth agape, urging you to explain yourself. 
“Multilevel marketing companies employ a host of cult manipulation tactics to con people out of their savings.” You explained. “Just because the promise is financial independence instead of a spot in paradise, doesn’t mean it’s not a lie. Research conducted by the Federal Trade Commission shows that the vast majority of participants actually lose money. The statistics are just a google search away, yet thousands of people still insist on the legitimacy of the companies they sell for.” 
“Well, I-” She protested, but couldn’t find the words to defend herself. “I’m there for the community, really. For the first time in years, I have a sisterhood of like-minded women who love me!” 
You smiled through a cringe. “That’s another pretty common cult manipulation tactic. They appropriate familial language to make people feel more connected to the group than they really should be.” 
Although you didn’t expect her to, she looked to be genuinely considering it. 
“Next time you see your ‘sisters’,” You began. “Pay attention to how they talk about people who are not in the group. Or, better yet, tell them that you’re considering leaving. You’ll see how conditional their love is.” 
An awkward, deafening silence followed. The woman looked at her husband, as if willing him to do something. To stand up to the evil twenty-something grad student who had the audacity to cite her sources. 
Instead, the husband just burst out in riotous laughter. 
“Miriam!” He nearly shouted, heaving like he was about to collapse. “I told you that oil business was up to no good! No honest company makes their employees pay to work!” 
The woman’s face turned red. You almost felt bad for her. The feeling vanished when the man put his hand on your shoulder. 
“Seriously, Dr. Lecter, you’d better keep this one.” He said, wiping a tear from his eye. “She’s an absolute godsend.” 
“No divine intervention was involved whatsoever, Dr. DeMarco.” Hannibal smiled to himself and brought a glass of champagne to his lips. “She is a woman of her own making."
"Oh, we all know that's not entirely true." The woman snapped, slipping into passive-aggression. She glanced at Hannibal. "How much are you spending on this mouthy little know-it-all? Isn't it about $80k a year?"
You, of course, brought this on yourself. You threw down the gauntlet by going after this girlboss's side hustle, so now nothing was off-limits.
"I wouldn't worry about that, Mrs. DeMarco." Hannibal said, calmly. "My soon-to-be wife's education is a much better investment than that overpriced napalm you wear on your wrist."
You couldn't help but laugh at that. It was a laugh you shared with the man. Hannibal looked down at you, admiring how your face lit up.
"You'll forgive my wife's rudeness." The man requested. "Please, Ms. [F/N], tell me more about your dissertation."
"Well," you laced your fingers together. "I'm planning to write my dissertation on the cult of academic elitism."
"I would tread lightly, dear." The woman warned, eyes darting to Hannibal. "You wouldn't want to bite the hand that feeds you."
You adjusted your stole, giving them a quick glance at the love bites along your neck.
"I assure you." You said. "He quite likes it when I bite."
Your clutch started to aggressively, audibly vibrate. You could have sworn you'd put your phone on silent, but it buzzed nonetheless.
"Probably just, y'know-" you stuttered, embarrassed. "An amber alert or something."
"We are expecting a snowstorm, I believe. I was warned of it a few minutes ago." Hannibal said, always ready to cover your ass whenever needed. The couple nodded along in understanding.
You pulled your phone from your clutch. Your eyes widened and your face turned sickly pale at the sight of a caller you thought you’d never hear from again. Without thinking, you slid the deny icon across the screen. 
“Right.” You said, tucking your phone and your secrets back into the clutch. “Winter Storm... Theresa is headed this way.” 
Hannibal cleared his throat. “In that case, [F/N] and I must take our leave before we get snowed in. It was very nice catching up with you. I will see to it that [F/N] and I have you for dinner very soon.” 
102 notes · View notes
Text
Five years ago, the women on this site who treated me like trash over loving Labyrinth and shipping Jareth/Sarah were almost always obliviously consuming Radfem propaganda, or were out and out Radfems/Terfs themselves.
They were the types of people who casually threw the word “pedophile” around against grown women who shipped an adult Sarah with Jareth, aka literally one of the most popular ships for women in fandom for 30 years.
Pretty much invariably, these women had serious sex-negative anxieties, which included a severe paranoia about any and all kink and fetish, and porn in general. I saw a lot of shocking, fear-mongering propaganda surrounding sexual expression. Pretty much invariably, their method of approach involved immediate personal shock-value attacks on anyone they perceived to be “bad.”
Today, you can look at the way some people react to other popular so-called “problematic” ships and recognize the same toxic, fear-mongering rhetoric coming from women who consider themselves regular, trans-inclusive feminists. Sometimes it even manifests in the words of very well-meaning people (including myself here), who feel the need to talk about specific issues that pertain to their own experiences of trauma and oppression.
The people who shit on Labyrinth often seem to not really be able to comprehend that the Goblin King, like the film itself, is canonically a representation of a teen girl’s psyche, a soup of fears and anxieties and desires and dreams. He’s not a literal human adult preying on a literal child, and to read the film that way seriously undermines the entire point of the film. 
When I (and people of many fandoms) say “This is fiction, calm down,” I’m not just saying it’s not real so it cant hurt you and you can’t criticize me. I’m trying to call attention to what fiction actually is - artistic representations of feelings and experiences. The Goblin King is Sarah’s fiction. Therefore, he can be anything she or any woman who identifies with her wants him to be, including her lover when she’s grown and ready for such a thing.
I once took an alarming dive into Beetlejuice fandom to see what content was there (the cartoon was a favorite when I was little). Chillingly, what you’ll find is an extremely wounded fanbase, with a sharp divide between the older women who had long been shipping BJ/Lydia because of their love for the cartoon series (and whom were previously the vast majority of the Beetlejuice fandom), and a massive amount of young people riding the wave of the musical fad who had decided that the entire old school Beetlejuice fandom was populated by literal pedophiles. 
I saw death threats. Suicide baiting. Constant, constant toxic discourse. It did not matter how the BJ/Lydia fandom dealt with any particular issues that would exist in their ship, in fact I’m certain that the people abusing them cared very little to even consider if they were trying to handle it at all. The only thing that mattered was that they were disgusting subhuman scum asking for abuse. If you have at any time reblogged recent Beetlejuice fan art or content from fans of the musical, you have more than likely been engaging positively with the content of someone participating in toxic fandom behavior.
Nobody is really sticking up for them, either, as far as I saw. It’s really hard to imagine how painful it must be to have such a large group of people explode into into your relatively private fandom space to tell you that you are evil, vile, and deserve constant abuse, and also you are no longer allowed into the fandom space to engage in it’s content. But I think there’s something very alarming indeed about this happening specifically to the BJ fandom, and I’ll explain why. 
The pop-culture characterization of Beetlejuice, which is heavily influenced by the cartoon series to be clear, has always in my mind been a vaguely ageless being who matches with the psychological maturity of whatever age Lydia is supposed to be. He’s more or less like an imaginary friend, a manifestation of Lydia’s psyche. In fact, I would argue that i think most of us who grew up with the cartoon or it’s subsequent merchandizing before the musical ever existed probably internalized the idea as BJ and Lydia as this ageless, salt-and-pepper-shaker couple beloved by the goth community, similar to Gomez and Morticia. In each version of canon he may be a creepy ghost in the literal sense, but any adult who is capable of identifying literary tropes (even just subconciously) would read cartoon!BJ as an artistic representation of a socially awkward outcast girl’s inner world. Lydia’s darker dispositions and interests, which alienate her from most others, are freely accepted and embraced by her spooky magical friend. BJ/Lydia in the cartoon were depicted as best friends, but to my memory there was always an underlying sense that they had secret feelings for each other, which I identified easily even as a small child. In fact, their dynamic and behavior perfectly reflected the psychological development of the show’s target demographic. They are best friends who get into adventures and learning experiences together, who have delicate feelings for each other but lack any true adult romantic/sexual understanding to acknowledge those feelings, let alone pursue them.
Though I haven’t seen the Musical yet, I’ve read the wiki and I would argue that it embodies this exact same concept even more so for it’s own version of the characters, in that Beetlejuice specifically exists to help Lydia process her mother’s death.
This is not a complicated thing to recognize and comprehend whatsoever. In fact, it looks downright blatant. It’s also a clear indicator of what BJ/Lydia means to the women who have long loved it. It was a story about a spooky wierd girl being loved and accepted and understood for who she was, and it gave them a sense of solidarity. It makes perfect sense why those women would stick with those characters, and create a safe little space for themselves to and imagine their beloved characters growing and having adult lives and experiencing adult drama, in just the same ways that the women of the Labyrinth fandom do. That’s all these women were doing. And now, they can’t do it without facing intense verbal violence. That safe space is poisoned now.
Having grown up with the cartoon as one of my favorites and been around goth subculture stuff for decades, I was actually shocked and squicked at the original Beetlejuice film’s narrative once I actually saw it, because it was extremely divorced from what these two characters had evolved into for goth subculture and what they meant to me. It’s not telling the same story, and is in fact about the Maitland's specifically. In pretty much exactly the same way two different versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be extremely different from each other, the film is a different animal. While I imagine that the film version has been at the heart of a lot of this confused fear-mongering around all other versions of the characters, I would no more judge different adaptations of these characters any more than I would condemn a version of Little Red in which Red and the Wolf are best friends or lovers just because the very first iteration of LRRH was about protecting yourself from predators.
I would even argue that the people who have engaged in Anti-shipper behavior over BJ/Lydia are in intense denial over the fact that BJ being interested in Lydia, either as blatant predatory behavior a la the film or on a peer level as in the cartoon (and musical?) is an inextricable part of canon. Beetlejuice was always attracted to Lydia, and it was not always cute or amusing. Beetlejuice was not always a beloved buddy character, an in fact was originally written as a gross scumbag. That’s just what he was. Even people engaging with him now by writing OC girlfriends for him (as stand-ins for the salt-and-pepper-shaker space Lydia used to take up, because obviously that was part of the core fun of the characters), or just loving him as a character, are erasing parts of his character’s history in order to do so. They are actively refusing to be held responsible for being fans of new version of him despite the fact that he engaged in overt predatory behavior in the original film. In fact, I would venture to say that they are actively erasing the fact that Musical Beetliejuice tried to marry a teenager and as far as I’m aware, seemed to like the idea (because he’s probably a fucking figment of her imagination but go off I guess). The only reason they can have a version of this character who could be perceived as “buddy” material is because...the cartoon had an impact on our pop cultural perception of what the character and his dynamic with Lydia is. 
We can have a version of the Big Bad Wolf who’s a creepy monster. We can have a version who’s sweet and lovable. We can have a version that lives in the middle. We can have a version who’s a hybrid between Red and the Wolf (a la Ruby in OUAT). All of these things can exist in the same world, and can even be loved for different reasons by the same people.
I’ve been using Beetlejuice as an example here because it’s kind of perfect for my overall point regarding the toxic ideologies in fandom right now across many different spaces, including ones for progressive and queer media, and how much so many people don’t recognize how deeply they’ve been radicalized into literalist and sex-negative radfem rhetoric, to the point where we aren’t allowed to have difficult, messy explorations of imperfect, flawed humans, and that art is never going to be 100% pure and without flaw in it’s ability to convey what it wants to convey.
This includes the rhetoric I’ve seen across the board, from She-Ra to A:TLA to Star Wars to Lovecraft Country. We don’t talk about the inherent malleable, subjective, or charmingly imperfect nature of fiction any more. Transformation and reclamation are myths in this space. Everything is in rigid categories. It is seemingly very difficult for some of these people to engage with anything that is not able to be clearly labeled as one thing or another (see the inherent transphobic and biphobic elements of the most intense rhetoric). They destroy anything they cannot filter through their ideology. When women act in a way that breaks from their narrative of womanhood (like...not having a vagina), then those women must be condemned instead of understood. Anything that challenges them or makes them uncomfortable is a mortal sin. There is an extraordinary level of both hypocrisy and repressive denial that is underlying the behavior I’m seeing now. Much like toxic Christian conservatism, these people often are discovered engaging in the same behaviors and interests that they condemn behind closed doors (or just out of sheer cognitive dissonance). As an example, one of the people who talked shit to me about Labyrinth was a huge fan of Kill La Kill, which to my knowledge was an anime about a teenage girl in like, superpowered lingere (hence why I stayed the fuck away from that shit myself). Indeed, they even allow themselves plenty of leeway for behavior far worse than they condemn others for, and create support systems for the worst of their own abusers. 
Quite frankly, I’m tired. Instead of talking about theoretical problematic shit, we need to start talking about quantifiable harm. Because as far as I can tell, the most real, immediate, and quantifiable harm done because of anybody’s favorite ships or pieces of media seems to consistently be the kind that’s done to the people who experience verbal violence and abuse and manipulation and suicide baiting and death threats from the people who have a problem.
398 notes · View notes
avasharpe · 3 years
Text
Spooky Scary Skeletons
Chapter: one/one
Summary: "What about a chick magnet and a chick?" Sara asked, pulling up the picture on her phone to show Ava.
"No," Ava said, scrunching up her nose in disgust.
The couple was lounging on the bed at Ava's house that night. With Sara laying on her stomach sideways across the bed and Ava leaning against the headboard with a glass of wine.
"Okay, what about a coffee barista and a frappuccino?" Sara asked.
Fandom: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
Relationship: Sara Lance/Ava Sharpe.
Characters: Sara Lance, Ava Sharpe, Charlie, Zari Tomaz, Mick Rory, Nora Darhk, and Ray Palmer.
Chapter Rating: General Audiences.
Additional Tags: Halloween, Costume Party, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Avalance Halloween fun! (This is an old one but It’s not posted here so!)
Read at AO3
Read at FFN
……………………………………………………………………
"Hey, Sara?" Zari asked, pulling her yogurt spoon from her lips. "Can I turn the bridge into a haunted maze for the party?"
"What party?" Sara asked, sitting her oatmeal breakfast down on the table next to Ava.
It was a fairly late morning and the crew was lazy in their efforts to get up and start the day. The majority of them were still in their pajamas as they got breakfast and were not too chatty as they ate. Apart from Zari, Ray, and Ava who were always the early birds of the team.
"The Halloween party? We are having a party, right!" Zari exclaimed.
"A party?" Nate said, popping up his head from where he had been staring into his coffee.
"A party?" Ray sang, as cheerful as ever that morning.
"Oh no," Ava said, knowing exactly where this was going.
"Can we have a party?" Mona sang, perking up.
"Can I get drunk?" Mick added, smiling despite the weary look he had a moment ago.
"Can I get laid?" Charlie sang as they all broke out in song for the last verse.
"Will there be a pretty girl for me to serenade?"
"Not you too," Ava said looking over as had Nora joined in. "It’s too early for this."
"A party, a party. Can we have a party?"
"Can I get drunk? Can I get laid?"
"Will, there be a pretty girl for me to serenade?"
Ava dropped her head into her folded arms as everyone else sang the rhyme again, but Sara wrapped her arm around Ava’s shoulder giving her a quick squeeze. "All right that's enough. We can have a party, but keep it to the bridge."
"Yes!" They all shouted.
Zari pulled out her tablet and pulled up the Pinterest board she had made with all her ideas. Her enthusiasm was contagious as they all talked over each other about the drinks and decorations they wanted. Ava gave Sara a weary look knowing how out of control these things could get, but Sara just smiled and leaned in. She kissed her lips and scooted her chair closer to her.
"Relax, it’ll be fun. I promise."
"I don’t know," Ava said, still not on board with the party. "I’ve never even been tricking or treating, much less an actual Halloween party."
"All the more reason for us to do this, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. We can dress up, have some fun food and drinks and if you’re lucky I’ll dance for you."
Ava blushed and hind her pink cheeks in Sara’s shoulder, kissing her bare skin. "Okay."
Sara leaned her head down onto Ava’s and they enjoyed the quiet moment together, despite the loud and busy conversation happening in front of them. That is, until Zari decided to try out the strobe lights and dubstep music. Causing Ava to jump and fall back in her chair.
"Zari!" Ava shouted as Sara helped her up. "A little bit of warning next time okay."
"Oops."
……………………………………………………………………
"What about a chick magnet and a chick?" Sara asked, pulling up the picture on her phone to show Ava.
"No, it just seems wrong," Ava said, scrunching up her nose in disgust.
The couple was lounging on the bed at Ava's house that night. With Sara laying on her stomach sideways across the bed and Ava leaning against the headboard with a glass of wine.
"Okay, what about a coffee barista and a frappuccino?" Sara asked.
"No, what about Marcie and Patty from Peanuts?" Ava asked showing Sara the photo she had found on her phone.
"No," Sara said, with a shake of her head. "We could do a cat lady and her cat."
"No, Mona said, she's doing that. Or something like that." Ava said, trying to think about what Mona was saying about her costume the other day.
"What about a skeleton and the grim reaper."
"No, but, what if we did Edgar Allan Poe and his raven?"
"No, what about a skeleton and a vampire!"
"No, if we're going to do a couples costume I want us to match more and why do I get the idea that all of your costumes are the sexy kind?" Ava asked looking down at Sara with her eyebrows raised.
Sara gave her a sultry smile and a wink. Ava just rolled her eyes and looked back down at her phone. It wasn't necessarily Ava’s first Halloween with Sara, but it was her first Halloween party. Last year they had just watched Halloween movies and handed out candy to trick-or-treaters and that was Ava's plan for this year as well, but Sara had never needed an excuse to dress up or to party.
"What about a pair of Beanie Babies?" Ava suggested.
"NO!" Sara yelled, rolling over onto her back and onto Ava's feet.
"Okay, Sara just admit it. You want to wear a skin tight costume, so I can try and find something we can agree on," Ava said, fed up with the current argument that was going nowhere.
"I just want to wear a sexy skin tight costume," Sara said, rolling over until she was resting in Ava's lap. "It's Halloween, I just want to have fun, get drunk, and wear a costume that has you staring at me all night."
"Okay fine," Ava said, letting her fingers run threw Sara's hair. "But I would rather wear something fun."
"Okay," Sara agreed.
They went over several options that they have been throwing at each other for the last hour. They had been having this fight all week as they tried to figure out something that they could do together. Now, they were down to the wire as it was October 30th.
"You really want to be a skeleton?" Ava asked.
"Yes," Sara said, smiling up at her.
"Okay, well I guess I could be a ghost, but like one with a white suit and hair."
Sara smiled imagining Ava in a suit with blood. She watched has Sara wiggled in excitement and got up from the bed. She went one grabbed Ava's Time Courier and opened a portal into their bedroom on the Waverider. Ava followed her threw the open portal as Sara opened the second drawer in the cabinet that was built into the wall and pulled out She held up the costume for Ava to see. It was definitely a sexy skin tight costume. It was a three piece skeleton corset, leggings, and black with white rimmed tutu.
Ava just shook her head and smiled. "Okay but now we need to get a costume for me."
……………………………………………………………………
The Halloween party was in full swing. The majority of the lights had been turned off, leaving only red and gray lights. Zari had gotten an actual smoke machine that had flooded the ground. With ghosts and skeletons hung up around the room and a vast array of spider webs crisscrossed the ceiling Zari had gone all out. Ava had already managed to get caught up in one of the spider webs and after a cup of blood punch that was heavily spiked, she was happy to sit for the rest of the party talk with Nora at one of the tables.
"Why a witch?” Ava asked Nora as she set down her yellow and black scarf on the table narrowly avoiding one of the candles set up among the pumpkins.
Nora just shrugged, "I think Ray just wanted an excuse to wear the beard and I couldn't say no."
They both looked over to where Ray was dressed as Dumbledore complete with a long white beard, standing next to the food table and talking with Nate who was dressed as Indiana Jones.
"I suppose I don't have to ask why you chose your costume,” Nora said, referring to the ghost white and gray suit that Ava was wearing along with the skull makeup and splashes of blood and cuts, before looking over to where Sara was dancing with Mona and Charlie, the white skull face makeup and bones of her costume glowed in the dark light. Accenting the low cut corset and short skirt.
"It’s what she wanted."
Nora laughed and Ava rolled her eyes at her friend, looking back at Sara. She caught Ava’s eye and now was purposely dancing seductively until Charlie pulled her aside and they went over can grab another drink.
"We’re not whipped," Ava said looking back at Nora.
"No absolutely not," Nora said with a shake of her head and a frown on her lips, as she quickly took another sip of her drink.
"Yeah, of course not," Ava said shaking your head too fast.
They took one look at each other and burst out into a fit of giggles. They both knew that they were head over heels for their partners.
"Hey, did you finish the book club book?" Ava asked thinking about the Halloweenish, boy wizard book set in England. Mona had been appalled when both of them admitted they had never read it.
"Yes," Nora said reaching over and slapping Ava's arm. "And you should too it's actually pretty good. "
"I know," Ava said frowning at the thought. "I just read the first few pages, but it was just dull and childish and the way his family treats him…"
"It gets better," Nora said. "And you know how disappointed Mona is going to be."
"What's going to disappoint me?" Mona asked appearing at their table out of breath I'm dancing but smiling, complete with cute cat whiskers headband and cat ears.
"The fact that we didn't save you any of Lady Bird Johnson's pecan pie," Nora said, quickly covering and trying her best to not look guilty.
"Oh that's okay," Mona said, waving them off. "Besides I've already had three pieces of pumpkin pie, it's my true favorite."
"I'll have to remember that for Thanksgiving," Ava said with a smile.
Mona squealed and did a whole body wiggle. "I love the holidays! Now come on you have to come dance with me."
She grabbed both Nora and Avas’ arms ignoring their whines and groans of protest as she dragged them onto the dance floor.
Ava barely lasted for fifteen minutes, before she was making up an excuse that she was thirsty and headed for the drinks that were set up on the table in the parlor. It was a bit better lit than the rest of the bridge, although not by much. Ava almost tripped over Charlie who was crouched over on the floor with a broom and dustpan picking up shards of glass. Ava looked over the mess and grabbed a rag to help whipped up the spilled drinks.
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah, Charlie nodded. “It's just those fancy glasses Zari insisted on using. They just shatter the second they hit the floor."
"Are those part of the decorations?" Ava said looking closer to see the outline of bloody footprints leading out of the room.
"Oh bullocks. It must be from Sara, she said she was gonna go get the vacuum."
"I'm going to go check on her."
There was a heavy trail of blood from mostly side or heel footprints and Ava's worry grew as she followed them over to the bathroom across the hall, rather than to the Med-Bay where Sara should have gone. They stopped at the door to the bathroom and she quickly knocked.
"Hey Sara, it's me honey. Can you open the door?"
The door to the bathroom slid open to reveal Sara on the other side of the bathroom. She was sitting on the edge of the tub with one foot resting on her other knee underneath a towel.
"Thank you Gideon,” Sara said.
Ava stepped into the bathroom and followed the blood trail. When she saw the small pool of blood on the towel, she quickly rushed over, kneeling down next to Sara and taking a look at her foot.
"It's not as bad as it looks,” Sara assured her.
Ava wasn't quite so sure. Sara's whole foot was bloody with thousands of tiny pieces of glass shards embedded across the sole of her foot. Sara grabbed a small piece of glass out of her toe with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a bowl to her left. Ava grabbed the edge of the towel and tried to lightly press it against the blood that gushed from the now open wound.
"We have to go to the Med-Bay,” Ava said looking up at her.
"No," Sara began to protest.
"Sara," Ava said grabbing her hand and gave it a squeeze. "You're bleeding quite profusely and at this rate, it's going to take at least an hour to get all this glass out."
"That was what I advised the Captain to do as well," Gideon sniped at her.
Sara rolled her eyes at both of them.
"I saw that," Gideon said.
"No, I'd rather do it myself, I'll go to the Med-Bay after I get everything out," Sara said taking out another piece of glass.
Ava just shook her head and looked back down at Sara’s foot. She got up and went over to the cabinet, grabbing another towel and bring it over. Sara switched it out with the drenched bloody towel and Ava took it straight to the trash shoot. Ava knew Sara wouldn't listen to anyone's medical advice but her own. Even if it meant withstanding a significant amount of pain and blood loss.
Ava sat down next to Sara and loosely wrapped up her foot in the new towel as carefully as possible, before pulling one arm under her knees and the other behind Sara’s back and picking her up.
"Ava what the... Put me down," Sara protested wiggling in her arms, but Ava just held onto Sara tighter as Gideon open the door for them.
"Sara, it's not going to kill you to just go to the Med-Bay straight away," Ava said, as she walked down the hall.
Sara let out a long drawn out and dramatic sigh but, she stopped wiggling and put one arm around Ava's neck.
"You don't have to carry me, you know, I can hop."
"I know," Ava said with a smile. "But one must always carry their damsel in distress."
Sara laughed at that and leaning up to kiss Ava’s collarbone, since she couldn't quite reach her lips.
When they reached the Med-Bay Ava set Sara down and snapped the bracelet around her wrist. Gideon quickly got to work on Sara's foot, as the robot arms came out and took multiple pieces a glass out at once. The bleeding hadn’t stopped but, Gideon applied a mist over the wounds and it was slowing down. Ava watched as Sara relaxed back into the chair, before lazily looking over at Ava with an easy smile.
"Gideon? Did you drug Sara?"
"Of course, I gave Captain Lance something for the pain as well as a light sedative that I give to all my difficult patients. It should wear off within a few minutes."
Ava couldn't help but laugh, especially when Sara pouted at her so adorably.
"It's not funny," Sara said.
Ava didn't respond, she just leaned in and kissed Sara, reveling in the fact that she quickly smiled against Ava's lips.
Gideon was quick and efficient, as soon as the robot hands disappeared back into the walls Sara sat up and pulled her foot back to inspect it. All the glass and blood were gone leaving only fresh new pink skin.
"Thank you Gideon," Ava said, briefly looking away from Sara and up to the ceiling. "Ah hem?"
Ava nudged Sara who prodded the new skin of her sole. "Yeah, thanks Gid."
"You’re welcome Captain."
"Ready to go back to the party?" Sara asked looking up at her.
Ava’s face betrayed her with a disgruntled look, she leaned down and rested her elbows and upper body on the chair.
"Not a fan of the party?"
"It’s fun, it’s just not really my thing, but I know it’s your thing, so we can go back for a little while longer."
Sara leaned forward and placed a kiss on Ava’s forehead. "It’s okay, I’m kinda partied out too. It’s not as fun as it was when I was 20."
Ava giggled and got back up, she held out her hand. "Want to go home, watch a movie, and hand out candy to all the cute kids."
Sara grabbed her hand and swung her legs around. She stood up and let Ava pull her in for a kiss, that was soft and sweet as they melted into their lips.
"I’m gonna go grab some candy and some wine and I’ll meet you back at the house," Sara said smoothing out the lapel of Ava’s suit.
"After you put on shoes!" Ava insisted.
"Of course."
Sara smiled and kissed Ava again, before untangling herself from Ava’s arms. She walked out the door, but not before she stopped, she held onto the door frame and winked at her. Teasing Ava with a shake of her tutu-clad butt before she disappeared.
Ava let out a breath as the heat rose in her cheeks and programed the Time Courier that was around her wrist. She opened a portal and stepped into the dark living room. She pulled out her phone and used it to turn on the lamp lights and start the fire. She ran upstairs and stripped out of her suit costume, and into a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt. Ava was relieved to be able to wipe away the heavy makeup and went back downstairs.
After grabbing two wine glasses and pulling up Beetlejuice on the tv, she heard the sound of the portal opening behind her and turned to see Sara walking in. She had traded her corset for a skeleton shit, but kept the tutu and tights, and had also wiped her face clean. Sara held up the bottle of wine and a bowl of candy that she placed on the table in the hall, then flicked on the porch light and walked back over to her. Ava reached out her arms and Sara ran up to her, Ava picked her up with ease as Sara wrapped her legs around her waist.
Sara giggled as Ava sat down on the couch with Sara in her lap and relaxed back into the cushions. Sara leaned forward and poured them each a glass of wine as Ava started the movie. They both settled in as the movie started and Ava couldn’t help but sigh in content.
"This is nice, Thank you," Ava said looking down and Sara. Sometimes she was so overwhelmed by how much she loved this woman. She felt like she was floating on cloud nine when Sara smiled at her.
Which she did, Sara smiled and kissed her lips. "I’m happy anywhere you are."
Ava kissed her again and they settled in to watch the movie. However, the quiet didn’t last long as the doorbell rang.
Sara eagerly jumped up and ran to the door with Ava trailing behind her. She leaned against the wall as she watched Sara open the door and great the kids, giving them each a handful of candy and complemented their costumes. This, a quite domestic holiday with Sara, this was perfect.
19 notes · View notes
elle-ja-bell · 3 years
Text
Among Us fic
So I have recently gotten way to into Amoung Us and I have been just dazzled by the little fandom surrounding it. I don’t know what it is about this game but it makes you feel things. Anyway I decided I had to add my two cents. This is a vast and endless idea and this is just the beginning but hopefully I can manage to post it in chapters. That will be new. 
A vast and endless sky by Ellejabell
“We’ll use suit color identifiers, names in private if you have to, but for all official communication stick to colors.”
The captain, Blue, was striding up and down the pod running them through ship protocol before they launched for The Skeld.
“Remember, try to stick in groups of two for the first couple of weeks. We haven’t had an imposer incident in MIRA in over two years so we’re not too worried but it’s protocol for a reason. Finally,” she stopped pacing and turned to face them “I want you all to remember the mission objective.”
They knew this information already but listened attentively anyway.
“We are going to recover The Skeld, one of the most impressive space stations in MIRA’s fleet before a series of imposter incidents ten years ago led to it being abandoned. I know there are rumors of it being cursed,” some light muttering at this “yes I know all about what people were whispering back at the facility and I just want to say I won't have that in my crew.” She looks each of us in the eye one by one “We’re going to do our tasks, reboot the station and get home again. 10 weeks. We can do that. So no curses, no rumors, if there is a problem you bring it to me. Got it?”
The crew immediately shouted back an affirmative but all the talk of curses had left a note of tension in the air. Blue stepped up to the front of the shuttle where Red was manning the controls.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said and strapped herself in beside him.
The engine threw itself into motion and after the uncomfortable feeling of passing through the atmosphere the crew was able to relax a bit. It would take 9 hours to reach The Skeld and people started to pull out tablets or chat with their neighbors. Black looked to be already asleep.
“I’m Pink” chirped a voice to White’s right and she managed to hide the slight start that gave her. Slowly White turned to look down at the girl in the pink space suit beside her.
“Clearly,” White said after several long seconds. Pink blinked up at her but that bright smile of hers didn’t dim.
“I’ve never been off planet before. First time for everything I suppose! I wish there was a window though, I’d love to see everything. It’s just crazy isn’t it? All of this. I mean, wow, being here with you guys, and everyone seems so nice already. I’ve never really spent much time in groups. I wonder what everyone is really like, you know?” Pink rattled this off at breakneck speed, at once exuberant and obviously nervous. She kept glancing around the cabin as if looking for someone but her eyes slid across everyone, never catching. White regarded her cooly and didn't say anything.
The shuttle lurched slightly and Pink shrieked, clutching hard at White’s arm.
“Is it supposed to do that? Are we going to die?” Everyone was looking at them now, or they were looking at Pink, but with the girl wrapped around White’s arm she too was the center of their attention.
“What are you all looking at?” She growled and most of the crew went back to what they were doing, only a few shooting back the odd glance.
White turned back to Pink and then shook her off, perhaps harder than was strictly necessary.
“Let go of me,” she snarled and the other girl recoiled a bit, her smile finally dimming. “It was-- just a bit of turbulence” White muttered, slightly more gently “It happens all the time on shuttles. We’re not gonna die.”
“Oh,” Pink laughed a little, her smile lighting up her face again. “Sorry,” she blushed, “that was silly of me. I’ve never been on a shuttle before.”
White frowned at that. They had all had to ride on shuttles in training, she didn’t think anyone was exempt from those exercises.
“What do you specialize in?” she asked and Pink looked delighted to be asked a question. Then it seemed to register and her eyes pinched slightly before her expression cleared.
“Oh this and that,” she said, “I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, you know?” White didn’t know, she had thought everyone on this mission was there with some kind of specialty. Obviously they all had training in the major areas, electrical, mechanics, navigation, but each of them had been selected because of their specific skill sets. The Skeld had been floating empty for a long time, a certain degree of expertise was required to get it up and going. She opened her mouth but was cut off with--
“What about you?” Pink’s smile was wide and genuine, nothing about her radiating anything but eagerness and curiosity. White allowed her suspicions to unclench a little.
“Weapons,” she ground out and Pink’s eyes went wide.
“Oh,” she whispered “that is insanely cool, and I guess it makes sense, you’re huge.” She blushed again “I mean, that's a good thing, obviously. I-- god I shouldn’t have said anything. Sorry!”
“You’re tiny,” White replied nonsensically.
“Yeah,” Pink smiled again, “Always have been. The others used to make fun of me and I hated it! But it makes me really good at slipping into small places. I can sneak around just about anywhere,” her eyes went big again, “I mean if I have to obviously. I always had to sneak around back home. It was the only thing I was really good at so that’s why they sent me here, I mean, shit, I’m not making any sense. Just ignore me. Sorry.” She buried her face in her hands and was blushing so hard White could see it through her fingers. There was a lot to unpack in what the girl had just said but White wasn’t particularly keen on conversation in general, or on people for that matter, so she decided to take the easy exit.
“There’s a window in the back.”
“What?” Pink’s head snapped up and White could see her eyes were damp. Good lord, this girl was emotional.
“A window,” White said uncomfortably while Pink wiped her eyes, “You said you wished there was a window? There’s one in the back.”
“Oh great!” Pink brightened immediately and started unsnapping her restraints. White closed her eyes and leaned back, waiting for Pink to get up and leave. When she didn’t White cracked her eyes back open and found Pink standing in front of her.
“Aren’t you coming?” She said, extending a hand and White wasn’t sure why, but she took it.
-------------
They’d stood at the window for hours. Pink pointing out every little thing like it was something worth noting, something amazing. White wondered how this scrap of girl who had obviously never even been to space had gotten listed on a mission as important as this one. White had practically grown up in space, her parents both high level agents with MIRA. She was here because she was the best and had assumed everyone else was too. She’d planned to spend this time reviewing the system requirements for The Skeld’s weapons and shields, reviewing the workload and making a plan for max efficiency, but here she was looking at a landscape she had seen a million times before. Pink pointed out another asteroid, gasped as they lurched to the left to avoid a collision, and claimed she could still earth, though White knew Earth had been gone for over an hour now.
“I’m tired,” Pink said suddenly, a huge yawn wrinkling her features.
White snorted.
“What?” Pink said, indignantly.
“Being that excited about everything must take it out of you,” she drawled.
“Yeah,” Pink said, seemingly immune to White’s customary biting tone. Then the smaller girl slumped against her and White almost stumbled in surprise.
“Okay back to your seat, you can sleep there.”
“Okay,” Pink yawned again.
White steered them back to their seats, and practically growled when Pink dropped her head on White’s shoulder.
“Goodnight,” Pink murmured, and then she was out.
White stared at her in shock. She didn’t know this girl. This girl certainly didn’t know her, but here she was asleep like she was safe, like she trusted her.
You’re never safe White wanted to say, afraid to move in case she woke the other girl.
She stayed there the rest of the trip, stiff and still, glaring at anyone who looked their way.
10 notes · View notes
shookethbrooketh · 4 years
Text
my pointless gatsby essay
a few days ago i mentioned that i was reading the great gatsby for class and that i wrote a paper on nick’s sexuality. some of you expressed interest in reading it, so now that i’ve finished reading the book and added in some feelings about the ending, i’m posting it so you all can read! 
a couple things: i literally wrote this for no reason. we had assignments similar to these for another book we read where i just wrote my opinions about one particularly stupid part of the book, and i wanted to it here so i just...did. if it makes the experience more hysterical for you, you should know that i let my teacher read this, and she read the beginning in the middle of my class (without my knowledge) yesterday and then i do not think she read any more. she agreed with me, though, so it’s a win. 
also, i actually honestly think nick is just gay, but the argument i made here is that he was bisexual because a) i was only about halfway through the book when i wrote the majority of this and at that time he seemed to be quite into jordan, and b) i really did not feel like trying to defend the point that he was not at all into women. you’ll be able to tell when you push ‘read more’ that i definitely had enough to say without that. it’s a solid 1250 words. have fun. 
The day I finished reading Chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby, I took to Google in search of reassurance that other people were asking the same question I was. It became clear to me that I was not alone when I typed in “Is Nick fr,” and there it was: “Is Nick from Gatsby gay?” The answer is...complicated. Although he begins dating Jordan Baker midway through the book, there is still widespread confusion surrounding Nick’s sexuality. Why, you might ask? He’s got a girlfriend--end of story. Right? Wrong. Although life would be a heck of a lot easier if it did, human sexuality doesn’t work like that, so here we are. The fact of the matter is that Nick is a heavily closeted bisexual, and he is being absolutely used by Gatsby for that. 
There are a few non-Gatsby-related clues that Nick is bisexual. For starters, he introduces each new character, male or female, with intricate and often physical detail. He narrates effectively about the physicality of characters regardless of their gender; for example, this description of Tom: 
“Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body--he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.” 
This quote, quite frankly, made me violently uncomfortable the first time I read it, so clearly either Nick would not mind being taken down by Tom or we need to have a serious talk with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not to mention the odd scene where Nick disappears for FOUR HOURS between midnight and 4:00 AM with the sole memory of standing beside a bed with a half-naked man who was earlier described as feminine and was holding  a “great portfolio.” Let’s just say that by the end of Chapter 2 some alarm bells were going off in my pea-sized brain. 
Now for the real argument: Nick is clearly infatuated with Jay Gatsby. He wrote two entire paragraphs--one in Chapter 3 and one in Chapter 4--simply about the captivating, caring nature of Gatsby’s smile. He even details later in Chapter 4 how he “held out” against Gatsby’s smile, as if it was some force drawing him into something he refused to be a part of. Overall, the entire situation of Nick and Gatsby’s first meeting screams “21st century fanfiction.” Simple, normal Nick gets invited to a fancy party and chooses to go. He starts talking to another simple, normal man who offers to take him out on the water in the morning, and it feels as if everything is falling together when suddenly he realizes his “date” is actually the party’s affluent host. He is left alone with the female friend he came with, and suddenly he becomes almost obsessed with the man he was speaking with, asking his friend about him with a sudden sense of urgency. I’ll be fair--that is an utterly ridiculous analogy. Still, it checks every box, and it seems as if Gatsby is as aware of it as I am. 
Gatsby has this odd mystery about him--every move he makes is tactfully chosen, and he seems to have a global knowledge of anything related to Daisy. Because of this, it is clear that the only reason Gatsby is friends with Nick and Jordan is because he believes he can use them to get closer to Daisy. He uses his inexplicable charm to draw Nick in and convince him to help Gatsby get the girl he’s been lusting after for years. In his one valid statement in the entire book, Tom told Nick this at the end of the book: “[Gatsby] threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s…” This statement, in and of itself, can be taken in a romantic light, but it also shows how Nick has been a bit manipulated by Gatsby. I will acknowledge that Gatsby displays many extremely relatable qualities that come together to create a characteristic I like to call “disaster gay” (literally the entirety of the panic in Chapter 5). However, Nick is the only main character in the novel who displays heavy bisexual tendencies, and Gatsby seems to be using this to his advantage. 
Finally, Chapter 9 is an emotional experience for all of us. Nick is profoundly affected by Gatsby’s death as he is left to grieve almost completely alone. Although he says in Chapter 8 that he never really liked Gatsby, his narration in Chapter 9 tells a different story. Even with Gatsby gone, he feels as if it’s him and Gatsby against the world. He’s found himself suddenly in charge of Gatsby’s funeral, growing more and more distraught with each person that disrespects the dead Gatsby. Most tellingly, he feels as if he had to care for Gatsby, or at least find someone else to be with him. Nick has this inexplicable obligation to Gatsby that screams “unrequited love” forcefully at me until I become emotional. 
All this being said, the most interesting part about it all is that I’m completely and wholly wrong. Anyone who says that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have written a bisexual narrator in the 1920s is utterly kidding themselves. Human sexuality wasn’t even perceived as more than “one or the other” until much later in the 20th century. The truth of Nick’s sexuality lies not in the text but in the reader’s perception of said text. The simplest answer to this difference in perception and reality lies in the identity of the reader, but even that doesn’t wholly explain the situation. If the narrator were a woman, chemistry between her and Gatsby would be clear to many more readers. Of course, that shows that, as is, the perception of the relationship is dependent on the reader’s experiences in life; however, it also shows that some of the misconception lies in the general culture of the 21st century. 
The vast majority of the examples I provided for Nick’s bisexuality were really written to establish mystery surrounding Gatsby’s character (or simply because Fitzgerald’s writing was excessively descriptive). He clearly had no intention of sending the message that we receive today, but in 21st-century culture, mystery and romance are often intertwined. We’re so used to correlating mystery and romance that sometimes one can come off as the other. Regardless, the best part of fiction is that it’s completely fictional. Nick can be whatever readers make him into (aside from blatant, major misinterpretations), and choosing to spend my time after we finish the book reading academic papers about Nick’s sexuality is both well within my rights and perfectly valid. 
Some side notes: 
In my research for this, I ended up on Ao3--not to read anything (spoilers, y’know), but to see how many works there were on this and what specifically was going on there, but, despite my attempts, I still managed to spoil Gatsby’s death for myself. Just so we all know the sacrifices I’ve made here. || Update: Now that we’ve finished the book, I’ve taken to reading here, and I think this is what's going to keep me sane during what I’m choosing to call the coronacation. 
I’d also like to say that I’m very suspicious of Catherine and her tendency to run off to random places across the world with other women, but we never heard anything from here again, so this is all she gets.  
21 notes · View notes
avehi-the-adamant · 4 years
Text
... What the Living Cannot
Tumblr media
Uldum was an unforgiving place to begin with; now, tenfold moreso as the forces of N'Zoth took root. The skies darkened, as structures and obelisks from the dreaded Black Empire materialized into the mortal realm. Azeroth's forces rose to meet their Twilight invaders, desperate to resist letting their world fall to madness. Instead, unbeknownst to the vast majority of them, they instead let the souls of their valiant warriors fall to something much, much worse…
Avehi knew this better than most. Her research into the disruption of the afterlife had revealed a great many things. She shared this knowledge with the Ebon Blade, finding herself working with them once again. She felt she was only lying to herself, every time she told herself this time would be different. This time would be better. She had grown distrustful of the Blade after many missteps in their history - chief among them the attack on Light's Hope Chapel during the campaign against the Burning Legion. But then… now she'd grown equally - if not more - distrustful of the Light. Xe'ra's attempt to force the Light into the Demon Hunter on Argus was still fresh in her mind. Her dealings with the Lightforged didn't help that opinion, either. And hearing from Sinafay of what her kin on Draenor had been up to for the last thirty years… she wouldn't admit it out loud, but the uncorrupted Orcs didn't deserve such oppression. No one was innocent, it seemed. No power was above misuse. No belief infallible. Avehi chose to stick with the evil she knew best, now. And that meant repledging her hammer to the Knights of the Ebon Blade.
She trudged through the sands, until she finally reached the river delta. The Lost City sat at the mouth of the river, a shadow of what it once was. Obelisks that anchored N'Zoth's forces in place protruded up from the city walls. Horrific beasts roamed the streets and surrounding areas. Screams could be heard, both faint and close by. But Avehi wasn't here to save them. She moved around the city walls until she reached the coast. The South Sea, too, looked to be in the shadow of N'Zoth's darkness. But a shimmer of light therein drew the Death Knight's eye. She stepped out atop the water, its surface freezing beneath her neatly polished hooves, and approached the glimmer just barely off the coast. She sighed as she drew near, and reached a hand out to still the water around it with more ice. A body. A Draenei body. She reached down, lifting the plated corpse up from the water to observe it more closely.
"Vindicator Zaalesh." she spoke his name aloud, recognizing his face.
Word travelled fast among the Vindicator community when one of their own fell in battle. Zaalesh's death at the hands of a Faceless monstrosity had even managed to reach Avehi's ears. A brief investigation, asking other Azerothian forces about his heroic sacrifice, led her to find him easily enough. And before anyone else, it seemed. Fortunate… for him.
She dragged the corpse back to the shore, and laid him out flat on his back. It saddened her to a degree, seeing him like this. They were friends once upon a time, at Avehi's first station in Shattrath. He had become a Vindicator all those years ago to help protect his wife and two children. All of which had perished by now. She frowned; poor Zaalesh probably thought he was off to join them in the Light. But she knew that wouldn't happen. Her lichfire eyes flared, as she reached a hand over Zaalesh's body. He deserved a second chance…
"You fought valiantly to defend this world." she uttered, as necrotic energies began to stir… and take root in Zaalesh's body. "But your work is far from over. Rise, and--"
"DEFILER!"
A blast of Light engulfed Vindicator Zaalesh’s corpse - and nearly Avehi along with it! She leapt back from the radiance, turning quickly to face her accuser. Her eyes narrowed, lips parting to a snarl.
“--Argonas! Mind yourself, you nearly struck me!” she snapped.
“Such was my intent!” the Vindicator shot back a scowl of his own as he approached - aglow with searing Light. “I cannot believe what I am witnessing! I thought you, of all the accursed Scourge Knights, knew better than to impart your ill fate on another! Least of all another Vindicator! One of your kin!”
Argonas marched up intently, weapon drawn and in his plated hands. The Light arced off his amor loosely, crackling with unbound vengeance. Word of Vindicator Zaalesh’s death seemed to have reached him, as well. He’d come to reclaim the body, and give the honored warrior a proper burial - only to find Avehi had other plans for him. The Death Knight’s tail flickered in agitation. Briefly, she glanced at Zaalesh's body, still wrapped in the blazing Light Argonas channeled. He was ruining everything! Eyes narrowing back on him, she brought a hand up defensively - the other reaching back to take hold of the hilt of her hammer.
“There are things happening you don’t understand, Argonas!” she warned him. “You may think you’re doing Zaalesh a favor, but you’re not! He won’t find rest in the afterlife!”
“Not if you have anything to say in it, it seems!” he scoffed! “The others will hear of this regardless, but I will allow you to walk away from this now - your only chance to forestall the Light’s judgment. You served it well, once. Perhaps you can reconcile your atrocities of your own accord. Take your leave now… before my hand is forced.”
“You damn fool! Blinded by the Light! Are you so ignorant to other forces and powers the worlds have shown us? This is beyond the Light! Vindicator Zaalesh is doomed to eternal torment unless--”
She didn’t get a chance to finish explaining what was happening before Argonas charged at her in a zealous rush! She dodged back from his attempted blow, finally drawing Rokaa from its resting place at her back. She growled, unholy energy coalescing into a rime on her hands and weapons. She’d known Argonas long enough to know he’d never see beyond the Light. Her needless breath was wasted trying to explain anything to this zealot! The Death Knight reached a hand out to ensnare the Vindicator in a formation of jagged icy chains - but so radiantly did his Light glow that the frost was melted away from him. 
He swung laterally with his crystalline blade, intent to cut Avehi down here and now! Avehi wasn’t quick enough to evade this time. She let out a yelp as the blace carved through her breastplate, and scraped along her skin. Thankfully, it wasn’t severe physically - but the Light suffused to the blade left a burn she felt deeply. She snarled at Argonas, baring her fangs. She had hoped to take it easy on him. Perhaps knock him around a bit, before he ran off scared with his tail between his legs. But that seemed unlikely now. And altogether too lenient. 
“... Kill... him…”
The lichfire in her eyes flared, as she charged for Argonas. She swung her hammer into his shoulder for a counter-attack, bashing his brightly-glowing pauldron down hard, and forcing him to a kneel. Quickly she swung her hammer around to knock him back, but the Vindicator was quick enough to bring his holy blade up before him to block the blow. He pushed back, shoving Avehi away from him for long enough to regain his hoofing. But no longer than that. Avehi screamed as she rushed for him yet again, raising her hammer high. He moved to block-- but she dropped the weapon behind herself, over her shoulder. A feint! Leaving himself exposed, Avehi hurled her fist for his face, an unholy blast coursing through him as she connected with him. He flew back in a daze, landing laterally on his back. 
“--Hhngh!” he grunted, rolling quickly in an attempt to recover. 
But Avehi wasn’t done. She charged up over him, and brought her hoof down for a painful stomp to his back. Frost formed down her leg, permeating over his midsection as she reached a hand back behind her. Silently she called for her weapon, and it answered, runes aglow as it levitated quickly back to her waiting hand. Argonas had precious little time to realize what was happening. He pressed his hands to the ground, and quickly pushed upward, knocking Avehi off-balance. She was forced to stagger back a couple steps, giving him a chance to get up the rest of the way. Her hammer still reached her hands, as she brought it up to the ready as he turned quickly around.
“... Kill him!”
“Enough of this! I do not wish to hurt you!” he grunted, lip cracked and face already bruising from the punch. “Lay down your hammer, and--”
It was Avehi’s turn to interrupt him, as she threw her hammer outward before her. A coil of necrotic power burst forth and slammed Argonas at center mass, causing him to stagger back in pain. His Light was glowing dimmer and dimmer…
“You had your chance to exchange words, fool!” she snapped. “We finish this!”
Argonas kept his weapon ready, just in time to clash against Avehi’s hammer. The two traded blows, each strike glancing off the other’s weapon in a clash of energies. Darkness fizzled out against the Light, as the Light diminished from the unholy darkness. 
Avehi was relentless, swinging faster than Argonas. Harder than Argonas. The necrotic powers that fueled her made her a tireless weapon of war. Her blows eventually overcame Argonas’ ability to block or parry, more and more hammer strikes smashing into his plated body. His eyes widened in panic, hands desperately moving as quickly as they could to deflect the barrage of blows… until finally, his blade was knocked from his hand. He brought his hands up, staggering back - all but defeated now.
“KILL HIM!”
Dark tendrils sprung forth, ripping Argonas towards Avehi. Her eyes were engulfed in icy blue flames, flickering wildly against her impassive visage. She held her hand out, taking a firm, icy grip of Argonas’ throat as he was tugged by unseen darkness towards her. She squeezed, fingernails - and fingertips - digging into the Vindicator’s blue skin. He gagged, hands gripping Avehi’s arm desperately attempting to pull it free from his neck. But her unholy strength was nigh-uncontestable now. Slowly, his luminous eyes began to dim, rolling backwards into his skull. His legs kicked, hooves dangling inches from the ground. His tail swayed and squirmed to no avail as he writhed in the Death Knight’s unrelenting grasp.
Avehi exhaled slowly, grip remaining constant on the Vindicator’s throat. She could’ve done it - she could’ve ended him right now, right here! No one around, no one to see. She could feel the Hunger coursing through her, urging her to tense her hand just a little more, and crush Argonas’ throat. A quick jerking motion would sever his spine. All that life force, released! For her! Since the War ended, she hadn’t had such a satisfying meal as one like Argonas would make! She licked her lips at the prospect. 
Were she any more inclined…
“I trust you’re listening now?” she growled. “You won’t understand, either way. Your Light-addled brain is too ignorant to comprehend that there are forces in this world you simply don’t understand, Argonas!”
He wheezed his response - inaudibly, as barely any air could squeak through his windpipe. His legs kicked a little slower, tail falling limp behind him, as the glow in his eyes finally diminished. He had passed out from the asphyxiation - pulse as faint as could be. But to Avehi, each weak pump rang out like a gong. She hurled his unconscious corpse back, leaving it in a slump in the soft, mossy earth of the delta. Her fingertips dripped with his blue blood, drawn as her nails broke the skin. She took a moment to lick them clean - a minor prize for her victory, at least. 
“Damned fool. If only he knew…” 
She shook her head… before turning back to Zaalesh’s corpse. With Argonas unconscious and defeated, his incantation of Light preserving the other Vindicator’s body was lifted. She sheathed Rokaa, and reached her hands out once more to pick up where she’d left off before being so rudely interrupted. 
“... Your work is far from over. Rise… and protect our people once again!”
-------
((Gif from the Hearthstone: Knights of the Frozen Throne cinematic ))
13 notes · View notes
xtattlecrimex-blog · 5 years
Text
Why Are The Fannibals So Obnoxiously Obsessive?
I’m actually getting more at the fact that they are mentally ill. Basically all of them. Once again, I am referencing the specific group of hardcore fans who throw thousands of dollars at their obsession, or still run multiple Hannigram blogs day in and day out despite the show being cancelled years ago. The 200 or so women who hang around on Tumblr and Twitter and devote their lives to worshiping Bryan Fuller and their precious pairing. Those women. People have asked me why they are so obsessive and why the vast majority of them seem to have considerable problems with mental illness. The answer is pretty simple and quite obvious. The show glamorizes mental illness.
Look at Hannibal Lecter, for example. He’s a murderer and a cannibal. Now, in the past (such as the books and then later the original movies) This was framed as a bad thing. Though Hannibal Lecter in both of those materials had some level of style and good manners, he was also portrayed as monster. Described as one too. From Red Dragon all the way through Hannibal (the third novel). I don’t include Hannibal Rising for reasons I’m not going to get into here. The point is, that in the original source material and the movies based off of the original source material, Hannibal was portrayed as creepy more so than stylized, sexualized, and handsome.
However, when you take a look at the show, how is Hannibal portrayed? Well, by a very handsome Danish man. Someone who actually won the award of “Sexist Man In Denmark” at least once that I know of but actually may have won it more than that. A very tall, chiseled, Nordic looking dude. I get that he’s not to everyone’s specific standards of handsome, or sexy, and some people find him downright ugly, but let’s all just admit he has far more appeal to the ladies than Anthony Hopkins. At least, far more appeal to Tumblr aged teenage girls. They were already in love with the likes of Matt Smith, Bill Skarsgard, and Benedict Cumberatch, so Mads really fit right in there along with that. Oh Alex Skarsgard too. The thing is that as much as he may have a very specific look that only appeals to a very specific number of people, well it doesn’t mean he’s not handsome or meant to be played as such. I personally think Mads is very attractive even if I can recognize that his very severe face may not be for everyone.
They take Mads and they turn him into Hannibal Lecter. They give him amazing suits and lots of money. He’s high society, he’s a chef, he’s smart, and he’s a psychiatrist. They show him well before his incarceration as well, and at first they shy away from making him seem too evil so you can empathize with him to some extent. They also really excuse and gloss over his behavior, justify it as him taking care of Will or getting rid of rude people. Cannibalism is bad, yes, and they do show that, but they do it in such a way that it seems fancy and delicious not in the horrific way that it actually is. It’s portrayed at nice dinner parties not in some captive and horrid situation. As much as he is a “bad guy” they put very little emphasis on this. They also have him “taking care” of others, so it seems like that makes it kind of “okay” for him to do the things he does because he’s somehow benefiting society by doing these things, not destroying it. That’s why you will see so many of these over zealous fannibal family fangirls repeating the phrase “eat the rude”.
Next, we have Will Graham. They shy away from ever actually saying he’s autistic in the show but it is heavily implied. He slowly goes insane (thanks to severe mental abuse from Hannibal) until he becomes a murderer as well. Since Hannibal is portrayed in such a “good” light, with minimal focus on the murdering and cannibalism, then this also isn’t seen as a bad thing…not really. It’s justified. Will is doing it because he’s either out of control or he’s so in love with Hannibal he wants to become Hannibal. Or some third thing. There’s ways to justify Will’s violent behavior as much as Hannibal’s. Not to mention Hugh Dancy is attractive and was known in certain circles as a heart throb well before this show aired. He already had a fanbase of fangirls who were in love with him. This allows these people to justify the horrid behavior as well as identify with it. Will is weird, socially awkward, mentally ill, but it’s also completely fine because he’s totally “in love” with Hannibal. I mean by their point of view, not what actually happened in the show.
Then you couple all of this with the fact that the show portrays death as beautiful and artsy. Edgy too. You never really see a gross corpse or the reality of death, what it does to a person, how they’d actually look, the fall out of losing someone in such a way. What you see is a beautiful sculpture of the corpses left over. Very few of them were legitimately gross dead bodies. Everything was stylized to look as pretty as possible while also being as dark as possible. In the actual world if you took someone and skinned their back open to make it look like wings, or used someone’s body to grow mushrooms on, the actual reality of the horror that would create is far worse than what the show did show on screen. Perhaps it was a style choice, and perhaps it had to do with censorship, maybe both, but the reality of death and destruction of all of these things was put through a filter. Rose colored glasses.
The fandom is so full of mentally ill people because it attracted them in this manner. It excused horrible behavior because of mental illness and made them pretty, beautiful even. It went out of its way to justify the behavior of a cannibal and the horrid abuse he put another man through in order to force a bond with him. That’s what it did. It attracted people with substantial problems because it dismissed all of these problems within the main characters and wrapped it up in a very pretty bow then threw it into high society like being mentally ill was some kind of status symbol. If you add that to the fact that the first season of the show was primarily advertised through Tumblr, and we all know what types of people are on tumblr, then one can’t really be surprised that what we have left of the most hardcore and devoted fans, is a mentally ill cesspool of special snowflakes.
One must wonder what the show might have been like had it gotten a normal PR campaign. Had it been advertised like a TV show should be or usually was. What kind of audience it may have attracted (and ratings) if a different creator had been at the helm and how well the should could have done if it hadn’t catered to mentally ill and overly obsessive Tumblr fangirls. There is a longing to know what could have been and a disappointment in knowing what never can be.
6 notes · View notes
hellotinywonder · 6 years
Text
ten years later...
[Česká Verze] This has been kicking around my head as of late, I have a dear new friend who doesn’t speak much English, and I’ve wanted to tell him about this weird, terrible moment in my life that fundamentally changed who I am and how I will forever interact with the world (both in good ways and bad). But I don’t know how to.  So I am writing it all down, which is something I have never done. And then I will leave it here, and of course, once a year I will remember and shake my fist at the world for myself and all the other victims of violent men, and then I will put my fist down, and get back to living my life.  It’s that time of year, though...
I’ve been thinking about this a lot.  It comes unbidden in the middle of the night.  When someone is walking too quickly toward me.  When someone says something inappropriate online or in person. When too many of the boxes, of that pattern of violence I have permanently etched in my head, get ticked… I think:
“Ten years ago someone tried to kill you... maybe you should run.” (Obvious content warnings apply, readers: Violence.)
Ten years is so long.  I have adapted.  I have moved past it.  But the parts of that night, those horrific hours in the morning… 4am. 5am. In the ER by 6am… the parts that are left, I feel are going to stay with me forever.
They don’t haunt, so much.  They are just there.  In the corners.  They keep me aware.  So in some ways, they keep me safe.
Daniel Rhinehardt was my housemate.  (How do I refer to him?  There is nothing colloquial about him at all, but since this is going up online, as a statement of public record, as a possible search result for Google, that might warn some poor woman who doesn’t know… Daniel Rhinehardt is his name, and I will refer to him as such.)  We did lots of things together, because I am the type, I have discovered, who likes housemates as community.  I have had many successful versions of communal housemates, who cooked together, or went on mundane errands, that sort of thing.  With no hidden agenda, no sense of obligation… healthy relationships between people.  This was not one of them.  But I was too young and naive to figure that out in time.
I won’t go into too many details, but this man became obsessed with me.  I remember being on tour for a month, bills paid in advance, and I received harassing phone calls from him because I hadn’t called him, or some nonsense like that.  We did our first Dragon Con (major convention in Atlanta, that I performed at or now do puppetry at) that year, and he came with us to sell merch.  I woke up one morning in my band’s hotel room to find him in bed next to me, which unnerved me (I had specifically requested my female friend sleep with me, to keep this weird toxicity I was starting to pick up on away).  I was looking for apartments in September of 2008.  I was looking. I hadn’t said anything, but I knew I had to leave, but I just didn’t pull it all together fast enough.
On September 20th, 2008, at my friend David’s birthday, Rhinehardt got drunk.  At the time I did not drink and was babysitting friend of mine on the roof.  They were a bit touchy feely as they were on some other substances, but I didn’t mind. I trusted them and I knew I was in control of my situation.  When we decided it was time for me to go to bed, we all cuddled a bit and they each kissed me goodnight.  They were a married couple, and there was nothing untoward with silly friendly kisses, but it set Rhinehardt off. He started yelling nonsense and threw a chair off the roof (it was caught by a lower tier, and did not fall to the street).  He stormed off screaming garbled obscenities and was gone.  The night was thrown into disarray.  We tried to call him because we were all concerned.  But I was also starting to panic.  I took a hit of my inhaler and we went back downstairs into David’s apartment.  I sat on her bed while some friends talked me down and told me I really needed to move out. I agreed and told them how I had been looking, but couldn’t find anything at the time.  I don’t know how long we were there in the apartment when Rhinehardt came back in, yelling nonsense, walked straight in at me and stabbed me in the side.
I would like to take a brief moment to mention a memory that I can never shake.  One day, apropos of nothing, Daniel Rhinehardt told me that if he was ever going to stab someone he would make sure to swing in from the side.  That is where all the organs are, defenseless.  It was so much more work to stab from the front or the back because of the ribcage.  He *told* me that once.  Well before, I think, he had any designs of stabbing me… but he told me that.  He thought it was impressive.  This vast knowledge of violence.
“...stabbed me in the side.”  It looks so small to read it back.  Such a small action.  How does it reverberate even now?
Thankfully I had enough reactionary sense to move as much as I could, being seated on a bed, and turned myself away so that his fist, no, knife… both... hit my hip and lodged there 3 inches, (8cm or so), instead of my side.  My organs were spared, and while the scar tissue presses against it, my sciatic nerve and artery were both missed.
I screamed.  He pulled the knife back and tried to stab me again, but was pulled off by someone else.  Matt McCorkle, David Forbes, and Luke Withrow all had a hand in saving my life that night.  Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if they weren’t there, if I had gone home.  Best not to think about it, not now or ever.  It would not have been good.  As fucked as I was, I was still somehow, always, lucky.
Then came the insanity that was bleeding all over my friend’s bed and floor.  Rhinehardt was pushed out of the apartment, the door was locked.  Every time someone knocked on that door I lost my shit, completely terrified.  But at the same time I was in shock and trying to sort out how I could avoid going to the hospital, one seemingly completely logical thought was: Matt’s dad was a vet… so we had access to medical supplies?  My health insurance did not start for another TEN DAYS.  (Thank you for absolutely nothing, America.)  911 was called, because of course it was. I had been stabbed right in front of a group of friends and party-goers.  I was left, lying on the floor, while Luke and Danielle held towels against my hip and thigh to try to stop the bleeding.
That’s how it went for 20 minutes? 2 hours? I could not tell (of course it couldn’t have been 2 hours, but I lost all track fo time).  Eventually paramedics arrived, cut my pants off, staunch the bleeding as best they could (my inhaler I took during the panic attack was working as a blood thinner, so that was miserable) and whisked me away.
Shock is a wonderful feeling.  I mean, it’s horrible, but it does keep you calm.  I “made friends” with them, they were very excited about their new sealing product for puncture wounds.  They whisked me into an ER.  Where I was photographed, documented, scrubbed, sutured, stapled, and asked a million questions I didn’t know how to answer.
Meanwhile everyone was sort of detained at the apartment -now crime scene- to give statements.  More photographs were taken.  I’m told they are available somewhere, public record, but I’ve never seen them.  I’ve asked once, but was unable to track them down.
I was told by the detective on my case, no, *the* case (it would become very apparent that this was not MY case, rather I was the VICTIM in the STATE’s case) that I could not go home.  It was not safe.  Did I have anywhere to go?  Anyone I could stay with?  I didn’t know.  I had friends… but I knew Matt, Amanda, David, Luke, Danielle… but I didn’t know anyone’s last names, didn’t know how to contact anyone… I am not sure if I even had my phone, no… now that I think of it,I think my phone and my bag were left behind on the floor of the apartment.  I was given crutches, scrubs (again, my pants had been cut off), and my shoes, and a voucher for a taxi, and discharged around 9am.
I was given back my shoes.  Little beat up black ballet flats.  I just stared at them.  They were splattered with blood.  I stood there in what must be one of the most cinematic scenes of my life, a mess, leaning on crutches, completely alone in a hospital lobby, as the sun crested the mountain and poured over me.  A man offered me a wheelchair, but due to the location of my wound, I was unable to sit down.  I hobbled to the sidewalk… I had no bag, no belongings, just my shoes in my hands, and as the cab driver came over to me I saw Luke and Danielle turn the corner.  They had come to find me, and subsequently adopt me.  We went back to Matt and Amanda’s apartment, which was in the same building as mine. Rhinehardt was still in jail at the time, so we went through my apartment and grabbed some essentials.  Some clothes, my laptop, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (a book I had been meaning to read), Agatha (the cat I had been cat sitting) and some other items I forget.  We sat around Matt and Amanda’s apartment for a bit, then, exhausted, back to Luke and Danielle’s where I would live for the next few weeks.  Daniel Rhinehardt would be released on bail that night, and he would never go back to jail for this crime.  Because that is how the system works in North Carolina.
When I made it back to Luke and Danielle’s house I remember calling my parents. Calling my friend Tom in the wee hours of the morning, because of the time zone, and leaving a message saying something like “you should call me back as soon as you get this.” I called work and asked to not come in for a bit.  I tried to explain.  
These mundane exercises.
I needed to inform my people.
I started using Facebook for only that reason.  To tell my people from Charlotte, my hometown (no, I don’t claim that often) that I would be back for a short stay, couldn’t drive, needed help.  Needed people around me… I don’t know.  I do know that Erich Moffitt, an ex -but I thought friend- never returned my call.  Just left me out there, drifting in the darkest void I’ve ever drifted in.  So... yeah, a polite fuck you, dude.
Everything went from bad to worse as I tried to recover, but there were still wonderful highlights to cling to.  My friend Tom created a paypal donation site for me, as I was uninsured and would need help covering the medical bills (though in the end Victim’s Compensation would cover them, but not before they went into default and cruel creditors would harass me and call the incident of someone stabbing me an “accident”), I was caught by an incredible network of friends in Asheville, who I am forever overjoyed to see, who I can rely on to this day, and I love dearly.  My birthday, 2 days later on Sept 23rd, I spent in Charlotte, my parents collected me and took me to their home a few hours away for a few days following which made sense.  It was during a gas crisis, but I didn’t know.  My friend Mike Walker and his wife Mary came to my parent’s house, collected me in the back of their car, and drove me out for Ethiopian food on my birthday.  It was truly special.
I bonded so much with Agatha, the cat, who I was cat sitting, in Luke and Danielle’s little guest room.  She was my constant companion as I recovered.  I read The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  It is one of my favourite books to this day.  It is easy, beautiful, densely illustrated, and I would get lost in it.  I would read it over and over, or just open it and look at it.  It’s still a comfort that I can’t quite describe.  Calm, dark, stable.  An adventure, but a safe one. (Fun fact, I buy copies of that book whenever I see them in second hand shops, to give to friends.  I have one now that was just unknowingly claimed by someone.)
I was wearing my punk rock jacket, covered in patches and badges, when I was stabbed, but thought nothing of it.  When I was in the courthouse, filing for a temporary restraining order, I put some coins in my pocket and they fell out onto the floor.  The knife had gone straight through.  I later stitched it back shut in red, and then silver thread over where the staples had gone.  The punkest punk rock jacket.  I still have it, but I don’t wear it anymore.
I came back to Asheville too soon, to do a Hellblinki show.  I was incredibly out of it.  I remember Ian (who I would date for 5 years, much later) visiting that show and hugging me and having no earthly idea what I had been through.  (It should have been a warning, really, I think now, but from a place of happiness, love, and sarcasm.)  I passed out on the couch at the venue.  The bar staff and owner knew what was up and looked out for me, and told me if I ever needed anything, ANYTHING, just come to them.  Just go to The Rocket Club and they would sort it.  The Rocket Club is gone now, but I think to think that the offer still stands with Ken.
I recovered physically.  I used a cane for a while, but eventually, now, I am 99%.  That 1% shows up now and again, excruciating pain if getting a massage, or just weird weather patterns and scar tissue.
Emotionally and mentally I am okay.  I have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but that’s not surprising.  If and when I run into Daniel Rhinehardt, and I have the unbelievable misfortune of doing so now and again, I sort of “blackout”.  I go into this incredible fight or flight response moment, and I always choose flight.  It’s not an option.  It is done for me.  I “come to” as I am running down a street, hiding in a bathroom, or driving away (it’s terrifying to sort of “wake up” in your own body and find you’ve been driving a car.)  These blackouts aren’t black, but I become much more a passenger and my lizard-brain takes over.  I’m mostly aware of what is happening, but I am not the one in control.
Daniel Rhinehardt received no jail time.  He was given probation, required counseling, and is a convicted felon.  It’s not much.  It’s not much, but at least it is not nothing.  He does have a record.  And he’s added to it since me.  That’s the main reason I am writing this.  Because he attacked women after me.
I would later have several women come tell me how he had abused them or been violent, but they were always too afraid to go to the police.  This breaks my heart and makes me incredibly angry.  I would have never been put in this danger if there was some record, if people warned each other about violent men.  Thankfully we as a culture are better about that now, ten years later.  The sentencing hearing at court would be laughable if it wasn’t so goddamn tragic.  Rhinehardt's lawyer claimed he only drank that night because he didn’t want to be rude to his host, then asserting that his drunkenness somehow means his violence wasn’t actually him.  David grabbed my hand.  I could tell she was furious.  I was in a weird state of disbelief and also just acceptance that the NC Court System did not and does not give a fuck about me.
After the court hearing I was dazed.  But I remember we walked out into the gray February day, and got coffees.  What else can you do?  I had gotten knocked about so much over those 5 months that nothing shocked me.  I just accepted it as best I could.  And had coffee.
I got a restraining order, but every year when I went back to renew it some judge behind a desk made me feel like I didn’t deserve it, because if it had not been violated, why did I need it?  One of them, the last one (before I stopped going, not needing to expose myself to that trauma over and over) called me “Miss Rhinehardt”, just truly horrible people who absolutely did not care about me.  Again, North Carolina, I am looking at you with so much contempt for how you treat women.
All of my legal work was handled pro bono by Pisgah Legal, and I am thankful to them forever.  I was terrified I would not qualify or I would have to prove this happened, or I don’t know what, but no, I was firmly supported and told that the 911 call and the photos were terrible, but also incredibly damning in my favor.  An odd benefit, I guess. Also, since my attack is technically domestic violence, I had access to counseling through Helpmate and OurVoice, who are both fantastic resources.
I applied for a passport.  Just seemed the right thing to do. I wanted to leave the country.  I wanted to leave it all behind for just a bit.  The passport came in the mail, but on the same day, a check from Victim’s Compensation reimbursing me, finally, for all the medical bills I had been forced to cover, arrived.  I put the two together and a few months later left the country to go do a festival with band family in London and Whitby, and visit my dear friend Xavi Quero in Barcelona, Catalonia.
There’s more mess afterward as well...  I can never quite write it all, and maybe what is left out will just fade away into obscurity.  But this is enough.  Except it is worth saying: a couple years later a woman reached out to me on Facebook because she was dating Daniel Rhinehardt and he was scaring her.  She heard about me and wanted to know if “it was all true”.  He had told her that he had a record, but said that I had cheated on him or some other nonsense, which is ridiculous for several reasons (we were not dating, gross, and if ever we were- HOW DOES THAT JUSTIFY ATTACKING A WOMAN!?)  lots of red flags on that one, but this woman didn’t see them until too late.  I did warn her, and she got away, or so I was told.  But a few months later he was arrested for assault on a female, and she had a broken jaw.  I don’t know if they are the same, but I’ve got decent powers of deduction.
He was arrested another time as well, as I was informed via mugshot (I don’t ever need to see that face again, thank you, but there it was) for another assault on a female.  I don’t know the story, I don’t want to know… and I probably already know.  It’s a pattern.  I recognize patterns.
I mentioned that I’ve run into him.  That’s god-awful.  I have another friend who looks vaguely like him, which leads to a cute comedy of errors, that still involves a PTSD meltdown for me.  I am getting better about it, and this friend knows what I am really asking if I say “Are you at Restaurant X? Or Hey, are you downtown?” because I am giving myself a precious few seconds hoping for a “yes, that’s me!” and then relief… though usually it ends up with me hyperventilating somewhere else, after having run off, literally without thinking.
But, Valerie!  You’re usually so positive about things!  What is the silver lining of all this?
No. I’m not there yet, but I am getting there.  There is something horrible about having someone try to kill you.  Someone you trusted.  Something that breaks inside you and will never be the same.  It’s strange to have a moment when someone else decided they wanted to control your fate, your life, and by control I mean try to fuck it up horrifically, or just… end it.  Someone tried to end me.  Me.  That damaged my psyche for a long time… maybe permanently, though I have put my own spin on it.
There is something about this incident that left me feeling like less of a person, I was to another human being (no matter how terrible a person): dispensable.  I will always struggle with that, copying it over to other relationships with decent enough people, this disposability.  I don’t have inherently low self esteem or anything, but as I mentioned before, something, some trust in human decency… broke.  And I’ve never been able to put it back together right.
I worry that I give this incident too much weight, but I swear to you, fereverently, it weighs only as much as it does.  But that fluctuates.  Am I digging up the past to make drama? No.  I am trying to explain how I got here, how I became the person I am.  I am always trying to accept this.  Accept the reactions of the people around me. (The local paper referred to me, anonymously, as having been “stabbed in the buttocks”.  This led to a weird sort of dark comedy, because how silly it all sounded.  Some people would latch onto that, I would sometimes try to laugh about it too, a forced laugh.  It was really horrific to have some friends very close to me miss the seriousness of my situation because of one shitty line of reporting.  I laughed along, but I was really, really broken about that for a while.)
Trying to explain to a beautiful new friend that I am fine now, but I was not always fine, and that I fought like hell to be the shining happy blueberry girl that I get to be today. But I, like any woman who has ever stepped forward and said: “Hold on, this man did X to me”, I feel like I am fighting a world that will not believe me, despite as my lawyer mentioned, the overwhelming amount of proof, evidence, the fact that this did happen, is documented, and yet people still turn a blind eye, or make excuses.  It is maddening.  It is soul destroying.
I have people I meet who inadvertently overstep. (I have a creepy neighbour who was following that pattern of violence I mentioned, and I am completely terrified of him.)  I still have trouble dealing with them.  Almost always men.  Men who want to get too close, who miss social cues, who are creepy, who seem to want something from me. I am working on accepting that a man who is interested in me, when I am not interested in him, is not necessarily a threat. They are not all threats.  They are not going to try to murder you just because you turn them down.  But I am not there yet.  I am still working on that.  It’s a work in progress...
My positive spin?  Pragmatism.  I have a deeply ingrained understanding that tomorrow is promised to no one.  So now, while I do so responsibly, I am pretty good about going after what I want, in good ways.  It took me awhile to work back to this, but I have found a healthy balance of being responsible, and chasing after whimsy because who knows, the world could end tomorrow.  My friend, who I mentioned at the top, told me once that I was brave, having caught up to him on a random adventure by myself on the other side of the world.  Bravery never occurred to me.  It was a factor, sure, I’m brave, but it was really: “No, I want to see this friend.  And I could die next week.”  I don’t think like that… not really, that I might die next week, month, year… but at the same time I do, but with different wording.  I just think “I want this experience in my life, and now might be the only chance I get, so I am going to make it happen to the best of my ability.”
Also, I adventure.  I do incredible things, and my life has been pretty spectacular so far.  I am proud of the work I have done, the art I have made, and I treasure the friendships I’ve found and the experiences I’ve had.  That is my revenge.  Daniel Rhinehardt tried to end me.  Tried to irreversibly ruin my life, and he failed.  And, while it took some time to pull my parts back together, I have done more than just survive him, I have thrived.
A friend mentioned that to me after I had a particularly good day recently (I played puppets with my art hero and fairygodfather, who I will not mention here for the same google search result reasons), she said something along the lines of “You’re doing a lot more than just surviving.” It caught me off guard, I forgot she even knew about my whole getting-stabbed incident… I don’t mind people knowing, it is a part of who I am now.  I thought about it, and said “yes.”  It’s true.  That’s my goal.  That’s what I am doing.  And I’m okay with that.
I have mentioned a few times that one of the impetus of this tirade of tragedy is this new friend of mine, who is learning English, so I wanted to have this written down, messy as it may be, so that I am not dumping a bunch of English words on him with a context that is not easily understood with new words, (and made up words as I try to describe messy feelings not found in a textbook)… but also for my English speaking friends, because I’ve never really unloaded the whole story, or even this much of the story to anyone… I am open to sharing it, but really, sharing it is exhausting.  I get a weird surge of adrenaline when I explain it, but that adrenaline is coming from fear, mistrust, vulnerability… and it just vibrates through my system with no outlet until I realize I don’t want it.  I don’t need it.  I’m just wiped out.
But this friend.  I am going to visit him and others in a different location, still on the other side of the world, in a few months.  We met in Japan, so why not continue meeting in far off countries where I have a clumsy or nearly nonexistent grasp of the language?  What could possibly go wrong? I was explaining this to my mother a week or so ago, my trip plans, dates I’m looking at, etc, and she asked me (supportively) a very motherly question:  “Do you trust this person?”
And I answered without even thinking, or maybe I did think, but it was reactionary: “Yes. Implicitly.”  I told her.  And he’s not the first stranger-turned-friend that I have trusted implicitly, there have been several over the past few years.  Like-minded individuals who I am introduced to, or who I stumble upon and I get them, they get me, and I trust them inherently, implicitly, and with all my heart.  This has been years in the works, to get back to this point, where I can just accept a person who is good, who will look out for me, who cares for me without wanting anything in return.  A mutual trust and vulnerability.  I am lucky to have this back.
I am in a good place now.  I have been in a good place for a while.  This series of terrible moments from ten years ago left a mark, and changed who I am, but also changed me into who I am today.  And I am happy with the person I ended up as.  I’m not thanking any horrific person for trying to kill me, goodness no. He’s a terrible human being, and every woman should stay well away from him. 
I guess there is one thing undeniably positive thing I have taken away from this horrific series of events.  I’ve been through some rough times in my life since then, but nothing ever like that.  And to all of it I have been able to say: “I’ve survived worse than this.”  
And it’s gotten me through a lot.
It has sort of changed my perspective, it can sometimes be a comfort or a place of strength.
Also, I quietly know that I would win every argument of “worst housemate ever”.
That’s it, really.  No overarching summary or call to action… maybe “be kind.” Try being a good person to each other, and if you see someone leaning towards violence, stop it.  Call the cops, I don’t like cops either, but you shut that down when you see it.  Put it on their record.  Give them a record.  They’ve earned it. Make them show up in that cursory google search.
Give the next woman a fighting chance.
afterward, another reason why I wrote this, as I explained in my letter to my aforementioned friend:
...and I remember thinking to myself: "oh, scars..." and looking at you and wishing this information was already in your head, but no, I would have to put it there.   So I said something like: "there is not enough time" and I left it there.     But I hope you also know, from having met me, that I'm alright now.  I wasn't for a while.  But I am now.
I hope you all understand.
18 notes · View notes
snelbz · 6 years
Text
The Moment I Knew {Nessian}
I’M BAAAAAAAAACK! (I hope!) As most of y’all know, I’ve had the worst writer’s block of my life over the past few weeks. I’ve been focusing so hard on the fact that I haven’t gotten Light Up the Ice Ch3 and Orchids and Ink Ch2 out, that I haven’t been able to write anything else. But I decided today was the day it ended.
I asked @tacmc for ship and a scenario for a oneshot and she hit me with “Nessian + First Kiss”. So that’s what I’m giving y’all. Enjoy!
Tumblr media
Nesta didn’t know why she was here. She hated large groups of people. She hated loud music and unnecessary noise. She hated people who were uncontrollably drunk. But most of all, she hated parties.
So how she ended up at Feyre’s boyfriend’s house, the one that could be seen and heard from at least a mile away, she didn’t know.
Well, she knew.
“Nesta, please!” Feyre had begged. “Just for a little while. For me, please?”
Had it just been a party celebrating the end of the semester, she would have said no. Had it just been a party celebrating the holidays, she would have said no. But it was a joint endeavor: a party to celebrate their temporary freedom, thanks to the holidays, and to celebrate Feyre’s 19th birthday.
So here she stood, a bottle of wine in her hands (because she was not drinking beer out of keg tap), talking herself into going into the small two-story house.
“You know most people just walk inside.”
The voice came from a dark corner of the porch, causing Nesta to jump, almost dropping her bottle of wine.
A lit cigarette hung from his lips and his dark hair was tied into a knot on the back of his head. He leaned on a beam supporting the roof overhanging the porch.
And there, standing in all of his 6’4” glory, was the other reason she didn’t want to come to this party.
Cassian Nazari took a step towards her, taking a drag on the cigarette, before flicking it over the railing and into the bushes. It extinguished quickly in the cool night air.
“That’s a disgusting habit,” Nesta said, her eyes following the arcing cigarette.
“I know,” he said, blowing out the last bit of smoke out. “I only do it when I drink.”
She didn’t say anything as she watched him approach. Before she knew it, he was looming over her, their breaths clouding in the small space between them.
“You’re here,” Cassian breathed.
“For my sister,” she snapped, taking a step back. “It is her birthday.” She grabbed the knob and entered the house, leaving him on the porch with nothing more than his thoughts and the cold air.
“YOU’RE HERE!!”
Nesta heard the slurred screech before she even fully made it into the kitchen. She turned around and was hit by the sheer force of her youngest sister barreling into her chest.
She grunted, catching her and hugging her around the waist. “Happy Birthday, Feyre,” she said, leaning back to look at her, then her eyebrows raised. “How much have you had to drink?”
“She’s only had a couple beers, but she’s fine,” Rhysand said, coming to slink an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder. “I’m keeping an eye on her.”
“Good,” Nesta said, turning to the cupboard to grab a wine glass out of the cabinet.
“The boys don’t have an- any fancy glasses. You’ll have to use one of theeeese,” Feyre said, hiccuping and holding out a red solo cup.
Nesta resisted the urge to shudder. She could do this. It was her sister’s birthday, after all. Turning to the counter, she rummaged through the drawer, looking for a corkscrew. The loud thumping bass of a pop song was the only thing she could focus on, aside from the warm scent of cinnamon and vanilla that suddenly enveloped her. A tanned hand appeared at her side and set a bottle opener with an attached corkscrew - like a bartender would have - on the counter next to her.
Picking it up, she said, “Thank you.” It was barely audible over the loud bass.
A tickle against her ear was the response. “Any time.”
The hair on the back of her neck rose at his husky whisper.
She’s felt an unspoken pull to Cassian Nazari the first day she met him, almost 4 years ago. She didn’t know how to explain it.
Nesta had walked into the student commons on the first day of her freshman year. Rather than eating at one of the many fast food restaurants the University of Velaris offered, Nesta made her lunch that morning in the tiny kitchen of her dorm. She looked around the vast space, scanning the faces of everyone, freshman and senior alike, to see if she recognized anyone.
As her eyes glided across the room, they landed on a set of hazel ones that were locked on her. The boy at the table looked to be about her age. He had dark hair that curled around his cheeks and a smirk seemed to be set into stone on his handsome face. And he was….massive.
A moment of familiarity flickered in her mind. He was in her Anatomy 101 class. It was her 8:00 am and she was still partially asleep when the professor was calling roll, but if she tried hard enough, she could pull his name out of the sleeping part of her mind.
Everyone else in the cafeteria was acting like Nesta didn’t exist, so she decided he was better than nothing.
As she approached, she saw his tray was piled high with something from nearly every restaurant.
“Hi,” she said, resting a hand on the chair in front of her.
“Hey,” he said, flashing her a dazzling smile of brilliant white, straight teeth.
“Uh, Cassian, right?” She asked.
His eyebrows, one marred with a scar right through it, - not that it made him any less attractive- shot towards his hairline.
“That’s right,” he said, skepticism and amusement in his tone.
“I’m Nesta,” she said, quickly. “You’re in my anatomy class, right?”
A look of recognition crossed his face. “Oh yeah, you’re the one who took notes on the syllabus.” There was that smirk again. “Nessie, yeah?”
……….. Nessie?
“It’s Nesta,” she snapped, a bit too fiercely.
“My apologies, Nesta,” he said, and put emphasis on her name. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“You, too,” she said, forcing herself to remember to smile. “Uhm, is anyone sitting here?” She pointed to the seat in front of her.
“You are.” He smiled again, and Nesta noticed he had a dimple in one of his cheeks. She was blushing and she knew it. She resisted the urge to cover her face, to hide her reddening cheeks.
“So, Nesta,” he said, that emphasis on her name again, “what’s your major? Is anatomy your true love or just a gen ed?”
“Uhm, both,” she said, pulling her sandwich and chips out of her backpack. She noticed his eyebrow cock again, but he didn’t say anything about her sack lunch.
“I want to get into the nursing program, so it’s a gen ed, but I’ll be taking a lot more of those classes.”
There was a sparkle in his hazel eyes when he said, “I guess we’ll be getting to spend a lot of time together then.”
“You’re going to be a nurse, too?” She tried not to let the shock fill her voice.
He chuckled, a deep husky sound. “No, nutritional science. But I have to know the body well to do that.”
“I guess so,” she said, taking a bite out of her sandwich.
“Wouldn’t mind getting to know your body well.”
The bite she had taken nearly choked her as she coughed. “Excuse you?” She demanded.
He laughed, the full sound carrying throughout the room. “I’m just saying.”
“I- I can’t believe- You can’t just-.” Nesta wasn’t sure what to say. She’d never had anybody speak to her like that. Well, one man had, but she tried not to think about that as often as she could.
As Nesta sputtered, another large figure appeared next to the table. His scarred hands were holding a tray as full as Cassian’s.
He asked, “Made a friend?”
Nesta stood, sweeping her lunch back into her backpack. “Definitely not.” With that, she threw the strap over her shoulder and made her way back into the quad, to eat her lunch in peace and remember why exactly she came to UV instead of the small community college in her hometown.
Cassian was right. Since then, they’d had at least one class together a semester. Nesta did everything she could to ignore him, but his presence gnawed at her mind. She always knew when he walked in a room; when he was presenting a project, his eyes were always on her; he always slid right to her seat when they were told to partner up., even as she groaned and her forehead hit the table in front of her.
And she knew it wasn’t a coincidence when he was hired as the new bartender at the dive she’d been waitressing at for nearly 3 years, just a month before Feyre’s party.
Opening her bottle of wine, she poured a hefty glass and spun, shoving the bottle into his hands. “Put this somewhere that it won’t be drank.” He waited, that scarred eyebrow raised. She groaned and murmured, “Please.”
“That’s better,” he grinned, and turned on his heel, heading down the hallway he’d just come from.
She took a sip of her wine as she watched him go. And another sip as she realized that she was watching him go and what she was specifically watching.
“NESTAAAA!” Elian’s voice carried from the living room, and she sighed as she heard how inebriated her other sister was too. “We’re playing Ring of Fire! Come oooooooon!”
Nesta took a deep breath through her nose. This was going to be a long night. And with that, she took a rather long sip of her wine.
An hour. That’s how long Nesta planned on staying.
An hour. That’s how long it took Nesta to kill her bottle of wine and start drinking the cheap whiskey she found stashed under Cassian’s bed, next to her empty wine bottle.
When she returned to the living room, taking a swig straight from the bottle, his signature eyebrow raise was all she got as she plopped onto couch across from him.
Say something, she dared him, with just a look. Her eyes were steel; blue-grey fire boring into his soul. He just held up his hands in surrender before holding a hand out for the bottle. She passed it to him and he took a quick swig before passing it back.
Nesta wasn’t paying attention to what she had gotten herself into when she sat on the couch. She hadn’t noticed the large circle of people. She hadn’t noticed the bottle sitting in the middle of the group.
Someone hollered from across the circle, “Your turn, birthday girl.”
“I caaaaaan’t,” Feyre cried. “What if it lands on someone aside from Rhys?!”
“How about this?” He said, his chin resting on her shoulder from where he sat behind her on the floor. “You spin the bottle twice to decide who goes in the closet together?”
“Okay!” She cried, crawling to the bottle. She froze. “But what if it lands on someone who has someone?”
“Then they go in together,” he said, matter-of-factly, as if it was the clearest thing ever.
“Right!” She said and spun the bottle, the glass clinking against the wood floor. Nesta began to get up as she heard Feyre scream, “OOOOOOOH, CASSSSSS!”
Her head snapped up to see his tanned cheeks had darkened. His eyes flicked to hers and they both glanced away as Feyre began to spin the bottle the second time.
The bottle seemed to spin for an eternity, slowing, but never stopping. Nesta watched it like a hawk staring at it as it came to halt.
Right in front of her.
She looked up at the excited eyes of her sisters. “No.”
“You have tooooo!” Feyre cried. “It’s my birthday!”
She opened her mouth to protest but his hand appeared in front of her. She glanced up, expecting to see the smirking asshole she met 4 years ago. Instead, she was met with a kind smile and gentle eyes.
Come on, he seemed to say. I’ll be good.
Without another word, she took his hand. Whoops filled the air and she saw Rhys and Azriel high five above Feyre and Elain’s heads.
“Seventeen minutes,” someone cooed, and Mor opened the closet door.
“Seventeen?!” Nesta said, looking at her.
“Seven is so high school,” she winked as they stepped in and she closed the door behind them.
Pitch black. She couldn’t see a single thing, not even her hand she lifted in front of her face, or Cassian’s solid chest it bumped into.
They both began to apologize.
“Sorry!”
“I’m sorry!”
He sighed and said, “Hold on a second.” After he fiddled around with his phone for a second, his flashlight came on and the room was illuminated. “The light switch is outside.”
“Right,” she said. And they fell into an awkward silence.
Seventeen minutes, what was she going to do for seventeen minutes.
She could smell the whiskey on his breath and knew hers was no better.
As she stared up into his eye, she could see the flecks of brown and green. His eyes were locked on hers, just like they were the first time they met. Neither one of them could look away. Her hand was resting on his chest, his hand on her waist. How did they get there?
She thought back over the past 4 years. Why did she even hate him? Sure, he’d been a pain in her ass, but he always tried to make her laugh. He always pulled his weight and never made her do all of a project. He made sure her tables got their drinks, even if they weren’t the first to be rung in. He’d never been anything but polite, ever since that first day, but she’s always held that against him for some reason. Something an 18-year-old freshman had said his first day on campus.
“So,” he whispered, “what do you want to-?”
She grabbed the collar of his t-shirt and pressed her lips to his.
She caught him so off guard that his back slammed against the door. It didn’t take long for him to catch up though, snaking an arm around her waist, knotting the other hand into her hair.
He broke away. “I’ve wanted to do this since the first day I met you.”
“Me too,” she breathed.
“Gods damn it, all that lost time,” he snarled and cupped her ass with both hands, lifting her. Nesta’s legs instinctively wrapped around his waist, as her arms went around his neck. One of her hands freed his hair from the ponytail it was knotted in and he groaned against her lips.
“All that lost time,” she whispered, and kissed him back.
767 notes · View notes
it-goes-both-ways · 6 years
Text
Over the last few years I've been posting more and more of my actual views, which I'm not exactly ashamed of but realise they're not so much unpopular opinions as downright rejected ones. I pretty much know why I have them, I'm aware of my biases and make every effort to restrict them to words, not allowing them to affect my relationships or treatment of others, restricting the hyperbole and rants to this blog and my long suffering partner. Unfortunately I seem to attract the worst kind of women in real life, which is not at all helping. Every time I reveal something I worry about being rejected, told I'm a monster, a failure, a disgrace, an embarrassment, but each and every time I've gotten nothing but acceptance. I am greatly honoured by your support thus far, for tolerating my increasingly frustrated outbursts and hope I won't push you away with this, but it's been all consuming for almost my whole life, and part of “cleaning up my room” is putting all that baggage out there to be scrutinised and hopefully understood, sometimes all that is needed is a willing ear, suppression only breeding resentment and isolation.
All the bullshit feminism has caused, from protesting the male pill and shutting down shared parenting efforts to the Duluth model and erasing men who are raped by women or by counting them under "violence against women" stats to boost the female victim numbers. Mary Koss, the progenitor of the 1 in 5/4/3/-69/ π r2 stat claiming that it's "inappropriate" to consider male victims of forceful envelopment by women as they are merely ambivalent about their own desires. Lobbying for laws that regard mutually drunk sexual encounters as automatically rape by men, underage consensually sexually active couples (even if they're months away from age of consent or the girl is older) as child rape on the part of the boy, guilty until proven innocent, accusation is the evidence, kangaroo courts, sentencing discounts on top of the preexisting bias which causes a 63% disparity and difference in treatment to the point where if you take every step of the justice system into account the crime rate is pretty damned even (with women often using proxy violence so they have plausible deniability, and avoid responsibility/physical risk). Treating women as the definitive victims of prostitution no matter which side of the transaction they're on. Banning men from charity fundraising events, transpeople only allowed if they provide evidence that they are biologically female. Having the NHS class women choosing to have genital piercings as being victims of female genital mutilation, while male genital mutilation performed at birth is not so much as frowned upon let alone illegal by any single country on the entire twatting planet. In fact you can buy some baby foreskins if you want to, or rub them on your face, the target market being protected from the very process that brought them their anti-ageing face cream, complaining that it costs more than men's moisturiser.
The innate gynocentrism of humanity has always led to women being their top priority, now even above children, it tries to pander, and acquiesce to their every demand while being told it hates them. The cases like the woman who filmed herself raping her own baby and getting the oh so harsh sentence of community bloody service and house arrest. The "poor, neglected" woman whose husband had become distant from her (wonder why) so she raped her son's friend, whose punishment was being banned from his school, which she considered too harsh as she missed her son's graduation. An audience of hundreds of normal regular women cheering and celebrating a man being drugged by his wife, who then cut off his penis and threw it in the "garbage disposal" permanently destroying it, just for asking for a divorce (can't think why he'd want to leave), despite no further context it was declared "fabulous" to the ecstatic jubilation of the empathetic sex. There's the idea that men commit the vast majority of rapes while calling female teachers "seducing" their students mere trysts, shameful liaisons that do not deserve prison, female prison guards committing the overwhelming majority of rape of male children and youths in juvenile detention (89%), among other women who rape men and boys (my own mother being one of them), this in addition to the rape rate among female prisoners being 3 times that of male ones, not a single damned thing is done about the propagation of the bullshit narrative. Somehow the fact that female rapists tend to target children is irrelevant because male ones target adult women, and "you don't see women going around raping adult men" (even though the stats are still around 50/50 because it's a human problem, unless those women are exhibiting toxic masculinity or something). There's the 10,000 men and boys slaughtered in their schools by Boko Haram while girls were released and allowed to go home, the boys being set on fire, their throats slit, or shot if trying to escape, no one giving the slightest hint of the merest ghost of a toss, until they realised that they weren't getting the attention they craved so they kidnapped girls, causing an international outcry and the media/celebrities changing their motivation from "eradicate western education" to "oppress women and stop them getting an education". There's the refusal by both the left and the right to look beyond the plight of women when it comes to Islam, they not only ignore the laws which oppress men, but declare those men the "real" misogynist patriarchal oppressors and innately sociopathic rapists. There's the refusal to recognise that women are a part of society and have far more influence than anyone wants to admit. There's Muslim men's obligation towards women, the segregation in Saudi where they have many public places from which men are banned unless accompanied by a female family member, where they'll be arrested for accompanying a woman to whom he is not related while the woman is merely sent home, where men face potentially fatal consequences for the same "crimes". Where homeless boys in Pakistan are pretty much guaranteed to be repeatedly raped day after day.
Then in my own life, being 6 or 7 years old, my sister 8 or 9 and told to stay put as our Reliant Robin went up in flames, having to be pulled out by a stranger, a man, because we were more afraid of disobeying than of burning to death, mother not even sparing us a glance as she grieved the loss of her car, later keeping it in the garden like some sort of shrine. Around the same year, at an LRP event (Lorien Trust's The Gathering), being left in the tent alone late at night and going to look for her, finding her on top of an unconscious man, she at least picked up on the fact that I was revelling in her severe hangover the next morning. Sneaking downstairs one night to see the aftermath of one of her "encounters", the man was broken, so started my extreme protectiveness of men and distrust of women, to the point of being called a gender traitor for the first time at around 7 years old by my 60+ year old year 1 teacher (who also wouldn't allow me to use left handed scissors or to write left handed, unwittingly making me ambidextrous. Being left with a violent babysitter who made me sleep under the table, or on the floor beside her bed (despite having 4 bloody beds), who wouldn't let me eat since burning the toast, beat me for asking for a glass of water and wouldn't even allow me to drink out of the tap, she once threw me in a wheely bin and poured dishwater over me, mother was in the garden just a few doors down, yet did nothing. She’d always try and get her boyfriends to beat us but they always just laughed it off (they’d put up with abuse themselves but never lasted long after she started bringing us into it), one in particular was into BDSM and later got mother a job as a dominatrix (she was disappointed by our complete lack of surprise), and even he had to draw the line at demonstrating how sexual intercourse works to his girlfriend’s 6 and 8 year old daughters.
My sister and I as little more than toddlers, mother putting our onesies on backwards so we couldn't take them off, having to go to the loo with them still on. Having the door handles put on upside down so that we couldn't reach up enough to open it to get to the loo so we ended up pissing ourselves. Having a daily diet of four slices of bread and the cheapest of generic vegetable spread as we weren't allowed mother's butter, being starved as punishment or just because she felt like it (having won custody of us only to spite dad), leading to malabsorption and osteoarthritis at the grand old age of twenty bloody six (3 years ago now), once a week we got an actual meal. Being around 8 or 9, visiting my auntie who was in hospital after having a stroke, having already had MS she was left paralysed, just 23 years old, granddad put together a system for her to speak by grouping letters and having her blink once for the stated grouping or letter or twice for basically undo. I gave her my only teddy which I carried everywhere, a stuffed donkey I got from Spain, she kept it. Staying in her house, continuing my habit of accidentally setting fire to the toaster, being left alone most of the night and going to look for mother in the village pub, finding her in one of her drinking competitions, walking in and vagblocking her, much to her frustration and anger. Being treated like a replacement husband, even trying to talk me into having a sex change despite only mild dysphoria, which was later greatly lessened by having an implant which stopped periods, eliminating most of the feeling of wrong (most cases of sex change regret are people who were abused, either treated like shit for their biological sex, treated as if they are opposite sex, or sexual abuse). Hearing about how the only way she'd get any when she was with dad was when he was asleep. Why did he end up dying a slow, agonising death while she gets to carry on regardless? Asking me about who I liked, later discovering exactly why she wanted to know, a man I care about was raped because I didn’t pick up on her ulterior motives. Having mother and her friends try to teach me to manipulate men, get them to pay for me, trying to turn me into a gold digger, only making me hate them even more. Coming of age (16), no longer eligible for child benefit, mother having been visiting friends more and more often until she didn't come back, only finding out that she'd been gradually moving out when we got the eviction order.
I'd been training myself to eventually join the army from the age of 5, once when I was 6 mother had asked me to go to the supermarket to get a bag of potatoes, she usually got a 20kg sack, must have taken me an hour to get it home, a man helping me carry it some of the way. When I finally enlisted I had to stop taking codeine for the malabsorption, it wasn't as much of a problem if I was eating every day (I usually forget as my body had been conditioned by neglect, not even bothering to remind me to eat any more), my hips had always made crunching and cracking sounds when I move, but as my body adjusted to the lack of codiene the pain became unbearable, upon being diagnosed with osteoarthritis I had to give up any hope of ever being a soldier, I've lost my purpose, and have nothing to replace it with, couldn't even work a whole shift when I got a factory job, humiliating, I'd informed the woman of my condition and she'd assured me that it was just a machinist job. It wasn't. It was everything you shouldn't do if you have any sort of hip problems. I'd never felt such agony and I'd fractured my bloody skull (at an LRP event). The woman was such a nasty bitch about it, she went from compassionate and understanding to mocking me for being upset that I was so damned useless now. I offered to forfeit my pay but her colleague, who also had arthritis and could no longer work the floor, was obviously far more genuinely empathetic than the woman, my brief boss was also sympathetic and even paid for a taxi to take me home after I refused an ambulance. The pain didn't subside for days.
I've never had a female friend who hasn't betrayed me, my "best friend" in school found it hilarious to punch me in the back in the middle of class, causing me to yell inadvertently as the air was knocked out of me. In year 8 the other kids stepped up their game and went from throwing stones to a house brick, when I got back to school she asked where the stitches were, just so she could punch me and reopen the wound. I was never allowed to retaliate, it would always be me who would be threatened with expulsion even if I only snapped after years of beatings which everyone knew was happening. Every birthday the other kids would falsely accuse me of something so I'd have to spend break times stood outside the headmaster's office, the equivalent of the stocks. Whether it was asperger's making me so unlikeable or if I genuinely am just a massive thundercunt, I never found out what I did to provoke them. Every time I put my trust in a woman it gets thrown in my face. My neighbour decided she was my best friend for life and would call at all hours of the day and night to get me to pick up her bloody methadone twice a bloody week, go to the chippy at 11 o'bloody clock at night, she's always trying to get me to take the pills she buys off a disabled neighbour. There are three things I refuse to take, hormones, anti-depressants, and sleeping tablets and she's always trying to get me to take them. The last straw was when her husband, who I got on very well with and whom she abused constantly, died, I told her to be careful what she wished for. When I finally called her out on using me she leapt immediately to the "after all I've done for you" bollocks.
Time after bloody time it's the same damned story, even regular everyday normal women will talk about things that would get a man arrested or at least publicly lambasted, that erections equal consent, that MGM is not at all a violation of the right to bodily autonomy, that it's absolutely fine and dandy to hit your male partner only to call the police if he defends himself, that female paedophiles shouldn't be punished because boys always want sex no matter what age they are but girls mature younger, right the way back to "We should have the vote but not have to pay with our lives as men had to in their millions while we shamed men and even underage boys into doing the same". What terrified me as a child was women's ability to completely turn off their empathy, the "woman scorned" is seen as karmic justice, there are people defending even the most brutal crimes:  assault, murder, rape, mutilation, over something as minor as rejection, or an accidental drive by fart, or just the crime of being a man who wanted a divorce. Empathetic sex my absolute arse.
A fellow MRA publicly humiliated Adam on a livestream when we went to the men's day march and conference, we were staying in an air B&B, Adam and Will Styles still riding the high of giving their first speeches, only for the woman to dredge up shit that was no one's bloody business and ruin the whole mood for no bloody reason, she also attacked 6oodfella on one of the hangouts. Another one was giving private information, with a vicious twist, poisoning the community against one of our group, Paul Elam didn't want to get involved and Janice Fiamengo immediately cut ties, treating him like a bloody criminal, what the hell did the woman say to her? I could see the Woolly Bumblebee thing coming a mile off, I worry whenever youtubers I like get girlfriends because they seem to either completely change or disappear, like Spino and Bread and Circuses respectively. I'm suspicious of female MRAs, I don't want to be but often even the sane ones are just tradcons. If it weren't for the Honeybadgers and you lot I'd have no hope at all.
The constant stream of "toxic masculinity", oppression, patriarchy, of women complaining that their air conditioned (which is also bloody sexist somehow), seated jobs at a till are paid less than the men (and women but they're not going to mention that) carrying heavy boxes, driving forklifts, working in a cold warehouse, and risking serious injury or death infinitely more than they ever will. The selfishness, solipsism, and sociopathy is too much. Throughout history women have never cared about men aside from ones they have a bond with, have never appreciated a damned thing men have done yet they demand that men prioritise them. Why should they?
I’ve seen and experienced the worst examples of female nature in action, “toxic femininity” if you will, and the difference in reaction to it, never being believed as a child no matter how many times I begged other family members and even strangers to please let me live with them instead, I’ll sleep in a tent, look I brought it with me. Pathetic, but you’d have thought someone would have cottoned on. I'm not going down the anti-women route as my sister has, given her own treatment of her partners and her own admission, she’s not so much pro male as anti-female, but it’s increasingly difficult not to resent them even if everything has a biological explanation. I still defend women if the facts bear it out, even if I don’t necessarily agree on a personal level, reals over feels, the people I agree with most also being female has definitely helped me not fall over the edge, one of whom feels very much as I do to the point where she doesn’t consider herself to be a woman due to her own observations and experiences. But the longer this goes on, the more laws are changed, media is poisoned, speech is suppressed, how the hell do I stop myself from just giving up entirely? How on earth can I stop myself from becoming an all out misogynist? Because it is women, not just feminists. It’s female nature being allowed to go unchecked, even when the same happens with male nature women are still prioritised. There are exceptions on both sides but it’s not enough to change the overall trend. There’s never been a balance, and because of human nature there never will be, which is where the problem lies. I know there’s no hope, that it’s utterly futile, completely pointless, and it’s driving me more towards extremism. I completely understand why we’ve lost so many MRAs to suicide. But I’m still going, even if the only way to make even the slightest change is to appeal to female self interest I’ll still do it. Everything I’ve been passionate about throughout my life is a pointless endeavour, I can’t stop myself from caring or change my fundamental character, it’s a downward spiral and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it.
48 notes · View notes
junker-town · 3 years
Text
Secret Base Hall of Fame: Casey Fossum
Tumblr media
Photo by Andy Lyons /Getty Images
One day fifteen years ago, this man ruined me.
“Eephus” is a stupid-looking name for a stupid-looking pitch. Only a few players across Major League Baseball history have regularly thrown it, and Casey Fossum is one of them.
Many of the greatest pitchers of all time have found success mostly by changing speeds. If you can throw 95 miles per hour one minute and 77 the next, you make it tough for the batter to lock in and time it right. This only really works if you can make it look like either one might be coming out of your hand. You can’t tip off the batter. Your delivery needs to look the same.
If you wanted to right now, you could give yourself an oversimplified demonstration of how high of an art this is. Wad up a paper ball or something. Throw it as hard as you can, paying close attention to how your arm and your body moves when you throw it. Now mimic that same throwing motion, but only throw it half as hard. You’ll then have some iota of how difficult this is to do with a baseball from 60 feet away.
But the eephus? That only hits the mitt at 55, 50, even 45 miles per hour. Here is what Fossum’s looked like.
Tumblr media
Some GIFs make a sound, and this one sounds like a slide whistle. It’s cartoonish in appearance, and it can work if it’s deployed smartly — in one newspaper report, teammates noted that he only threw about three eephus pitches per game. Deploy it too often, and they’ll catch on to you. You have to keep it a weird, sad surprise, like a cigarette butt in a load of laundry.
I don’t know why the 25 or so notable eephus pitchers in baseball history picked up that pitch, but greatness is not the common denominator. Casey Fossum was not at all a great pitcher by Major League Baseball standards; in fact, among pitchers to make at least 100 starts, Fossum finished with one of the worst ERAs of all time. But you will not hear me denigrate his abilities for two reasons: first, he was, of course good enough to stick around and make those 100-plus starts in the first place.
And second, the video game version of Casey Fossum inflicted upon me a great and terrible humiliation. One that made me swear off baseball video games forever. To this day, I have not returned.
It’s 2006, I’m 23 years old, and we’re in my apartment. This story is about Casey Fossum and not me, so I’ll only pull the curtain back a little.
If you look to the left of the TV, you’ll see a weight bench. I have a friend who likes to drive around and pick up random junk that people have left on the curb. One day he stopped by unannounced, back when people just did that, with the weight bench in the back of his truck. “You want this? I’ve already got one.” Sure.
We lugged it up to my place, and it wasn’t until a couple days later that I tried to use it, stood up, took a close look at it, and realized that it was a child-sized weight bench. This possibility never occurred to me because I didn’t realize such a thing existed. Was I mistaken here? Another friend stopped by. “No, yeah, dude, this thing is for kids. It’s gotta be.” I’m too lazy to try to sell, it, and I’m certainly not going to pay a junk hauler to drive it away, because I don’t have the kind of money you need to do … anything, really. So it’s sat there for a year. It doesn’t do anything and it isn’t going anywhere. Takes one to know one, pal.
If we can direct our attention back to the right, I’m firing up Major League Baseball 2K6 on my Xbox. I don’t know why! I don’t even like playing this game! I felt, and still feel, that realistic baseball video games are a bad idea. They should either be oversimplified like the R.B.I. Baseball series, or off-the-wall lunacy like Mario Superstar Baseball. The art of getting good wood on the ball can’t possibly be simulated by a single button-press, but that’s what this game has stuck you with, so batting really feels more like bet-placing than anything.
I’m in the lobby of this game I suck at and don’t enjoy, waiting for an online match. This is only gonna piss me off, because even by 2006 standards, my internet connection is terrible. I’ve lost Yahoo! Chess matches due to lag, that’s how bad it is. I get matched up, and as the loading screen appears, I hear some kid’s voice crackle through the mic. He probably isn’t older than 12.
Online gaming with kids is a pretty weird experience that we all just kind of have to get used to. You’ve been robbed of your superior social standing. You’re not any more dignified than they are. This is not a friendly game of Mario Kart with your youngest sibling, and you can’t laugh it off as a friendly match that’s all in fun. That’s not why people play online games. We play to win, not to have fun. Who took the time to upload a custom avi? Who carefully monitors their rating? Who patiently waited in the lobby for five minutes to find a ranked match? You did, dummy, just like they did. You’re taking this equally seriously and you cannot even try to pretend otherwise.
I’m beginning to think I might collect my first-ever win when I see that he’s chosen the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, one of the worst teams in baseball. The only real draw for selecting this team lies in Scott Kazmir, their young ace with a high-90s fastball and a terrific slider. I’m further amused when this kid doesn’t even start him.
He starts Casey Fossum.
At this time, I have no idea Fossum has an eephus pitch, or what an eephus even is. Unlike the real-life Fossum, the kid throws this thing so often that his fastball is actually the off-speed pitch. It goes something like eephus, fastball, eephus, eephus, fastball, eephus. When he strikes out the side in the first inning, all I can really do is laugh. I’ve never seen a pitch that looked like that. It moves like the clay pigeons in Duck Hunt. But it’s fine, I’ll figure it out.
He strikes out the side in the second as well. I just cannot figure this guy out. The eephus is such a strange pitch that even when I guess correctly that an eephus is coming, I still miss somehow. I can’t even make contact. Worst of all, I can’t even work the count, because the vast majority of his pitches are landing over the plate.
Around batter number five, I hear him over the mic:
What, lil’ bitch
What what, lil’ bitch
What, lil’ bitch
What what, lil’ bitch
This will continue throughout the rest of the game. He doesn’t stop.
Heading into the third inning, I talk myself through a strategy: listen, if he’s going to keep throwing the eephus, just assume he’s throwing one every single time. If I’m late on a fastball, I’m late. Just hit the eephus. If I time it right, I could hit that thing 500 feet.
He then strikes me out on three straight fastballs, all of which I am comically late on. I immediately abandon this strategy.
What, lil’ bitch
Lil’ stupid-ass bitch
What, lil’ bitch
What what, lil’ bitch
I don’t have a mic, and thank God for that.
Beyond completely destroying the opponent’s sense of timing — a thing already compromised by the lag — there’s another special utility to the eephus as deployed against you in an online game. It makes you look like a total idiot. You’re finished with your swing before the ball is even halfway to the plate. If you bet the other way and guess wrong, you don’t even begin to swing until the ball’s basically in the mitt. Video Game Fossum doesn’t even have to fool you with pitch placement. Every ball goes over the plate. He’s attacking your your ability to time, sense, react. He’s directly attacking your intellect.
Nothing will tilt an online gamer quite like being obviously and repeatedly outsmarted and made to look like a dummy. Someone will find out you’re susceptible to one particular parlor trick and beat you to death with it. There’s the phase in which you recognize what’s being done, how it’s happening, and what you need to do to counteract it. What comes after is the phase in which you realize that there’s nothing you can do. Your opponent has run this playbook a hundred times against a hundred clueless marks. You’re next on this merry-go-round, and you’re here to lose.
Hey lil’ bitch
What’s up lil’ bitch
What lil’ bitch
What what lil’ bitch
It’s the fourth inning. 12 up, 12 down, all strikeouts. This is a perfectly-targeted attack on my ego.
I think I’m smart. I think I’m an excellent tactician when it comes to video games, my abilities forged in the fires of Madden ‘93, Perfect Dark, and Rainbow Six, but also informed by the dark arts of weird old DOS strategy games. Games like Warlords and Nobunaga’s Ambition that required mastery of troops and economies to conduct campaigns of great conquest. Games this kid is too young to have a clue about.
I also think I know a lot about baseball. I watch it constantly. Even in 2006, I’m poring through Baseball-Reference every day. I want to write for a living someday, and if it can ever somehow happen, it feels like baseball is my ticket in. I’m a professional baseball writer in training. I should know what an eephus pitch is.
I think I’m a pretty laid-back guy. I don’t get angry easily. I’m really easygoing. I get along well with people. At the tech-support call center I work at, my supervisor notes in my reviews that I’m very good at de-escalating, which is to say that when mad people call me, I’m good at helping them feel more understood and less mad.
All these things mean a lot to me. They’re the basis of my ego. Hey, look at that guy. You know, he doesn’t have his shit together at all and is actually kind of a doofus, but hey, he’s a smart guy who knows stuff and is good with people. That’s something.
All those pillars are shaking. I’m a shiftless bum who can’t hit a 55-MPH pitch to save my life because I don’t know anything about baseball, and on top of that, I’m being absolutely driven up the wall by a Video Game Casey Fossum and some random 12-year-old who’s outsmarting me every chance he gets.
He is way better than me at everything I thought I was good at. My self-esteem is being annihilated.
Lil’ old bitch
What what, lil’ bitch
Lil’ old bitch
What what, lil’ bitch
One thing that to this day makes me an absolute loser is that I take online gaming etiquette very seriously. I never abandon a match, no matter how badly I’m getting destroyed. Someone can say incredibly cutting things to me and I’ll say “Thanks!” and pretend I’m not mad, that this doesn’t matter to me. Kill ‘em with kindness, you know? I’m above this. I’m better than this.
When you’re 23 years old and nothing feels like it’s breaking the right way, if it’s even breaking any way at all, it’s a lot more difficult to feel that way. But I try, I really do. I refuse to abandon the match. I am determined to solve this puzzle. This can only last for so long. Even if I can’t win this game, I can at least light him up a little bit, proving to both of us that, yes, I figured him out.
What, lil’ bitch
What what, lil’ bitch
Lil’ old bitch
What what, lil’ bitch
Imagine the experience of losing 50 consecutive rounds of rock-paper-scissors, and you might have a sense of what this is like. I’ve fouled off a handful of pitches, but I haven’t put a single ball into play. This kid is a genius, but it’s not really about that anymore, it’s about how fundamentally bad at this I am. Can I at least be okay at a video game? We’ve settled that I’m a stupid baby who doesn’t know anything and gets mad at things that don’t matter. Can I have this, at least? No.
I hope this kid thinks I’m someone his age. I hope it never occurs to him that he’s thoroughly embarrassing a grown man so badly that he’ll write about it a decade and a half later.
And I’d like Casey Fossum to know that for one day, on two televisions, he was a god.
Having surrendered every other claim I thought I had, my sense of honor is the last thing to go. Somewhere around the seventh inning, I disconnect. I don’t have time to navigate through the menus. I have run out of oxygen. I unplug the console from the wall. It was a tornado, for all that kid knows. I never play an online baseball game again.
Tumblr media
0 notes