#my mother has been obsessing over her diet etc for like my entire life . and then she wouldnt believe i was severely anorexic even tho the

[oatbugs]

hmm . tw for ed related stuff

#my mother has been obsessing over her diet etc for like my entire life . and then she wouldnt believe i was severely anorexic even tho the #doctors told me i was gonna die and i almost got kicked out of school for it . and she keeps saying stuff abt food and things sarcastically #whenever shes mad at me but even tho i technically know its sarcastic its still triggering. also im autistic so like my brain #internalises it a lot even tho its meant to be sarcastic idk . she just told since u were young i found it disgusting how much u ate . #like #what the FUCK makes u wanna say that . just bc shes mad at me bc i told her im not comfortable w her randomly changing my orders at #restaurants #i need to go back on campus mein gott #this is Unbearable

[butch-reidentified]

BUTCH-REIDENTIFIED !! guess what guess what guess what

i've been researching radical feminism for a few weeks now & today was the first day in 4 years i went out w/o any makeup at all. it's not like i was spending hours doing full-face or anything but i'd always always always do my brows, contour my nose, conceal my undereyes, mascara etc. but the fact that i've been doing that since i was 11 YEARS OLD is becoming more of an upsetting idea every day.

it's so insanely normalised for 15 year old girls to be obsessed with their looks to the point of delusion and mental illness & that's sickening to me. i cared about my appearance so much that i developed a disorder that nearly killed me. i'd spend so much of my energy fixing myself, dieting, staring into every reflection i came across. there were days i just woke up "ugly" and i was so distraught i'd stay at home all day with no hope of taking my mind off it. there were days i woke up "pretty" and i was ecstatic and terrified of falling asleep in case it wore off. the idea that this happened to ONE teenage girl is horrible but the idea that this is happening to so many of us everyday makes me so so sad.

but my life has changed So Much in less than a month it makes my head spin. i'm learning new languages, i'm going outside & interacting w/ the people i love without fear of how i look. all the time would have been wasting away over a mirror are being used to create my own life. i like the way i look in a quiet, thoughtful way - not because i look different, but because i look exactly the same & my face and body are like a mosaic of all the beautiful women who came before me. when i think about how much of my childhood was spent crying over something that was carved for me through thousands of years it makes me Very Very sad in a way i can't really entirely deal with yet, but when i think of 13 year old me trying to calculate the calories in sparkling water (fucking WHAT) i know i'm doing it for her !! and i'm doing it for my mother and my sisters everywhere and the ugly crooked incredible "spinsters" that fought for us to have everything they didn't & would want us to keep fighting now.

anyway. i'm sorry you had to read through such a long message from a total fucking stranger, honestly i just wanted to thank you & tell you how things are going. you're one of the accounts that opened my eyes to all the invisible bullshit women carry on their backs everyday & honestly, at the risk of sounding so incredibly cringy, i want to be like you when i grow up.

ok alright that's it thank you x

I am so, so happy for you!! I'm so glad you're finding yourself and unlearning the absurd level of toxicity we are put through. This is such a sweet message, and some hope for women I really, really needed in light of today's news from SCOTUS. Please don't apologize! Reading this was a joy. There is nothing about you that needs to be apologized for. I hope you continue to find healing and growth, and that you are able to find strength and peace in helping other girls and women do the same. Always here if you need anything 💛

#ask #mine #anti beauty industry #radical feminism

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

What if Bella had met the Volturi's as a child? What would it change and what ties do you think it would have?

It’d change a fair amount, as in, the entire plot of Twilight would have been derailed. Or, that is, it might change nothing at all.

So, we have three options here. 

Nothing Changes

Bella is an extraordinarily delicious child visiting Italy and the small medieval town of Volterra.

If Bella doesn’t happen to be on the tour, probably whoever’s looking at her sighs, looks longingly at her delicious blood, and then walks away. The Volturi do not lose control in their own city.

Bella goes on her merry way and Twilight presumably happens. Except maybe Bella goes to Alice, “Oh yeah, Volterra, I went there once. Nifty place, nice buildings.” Alice stares.

Bella’s Eaten

Bella’s an extraordinarily delicious child whose mother thinks it’s a great idea to sign them up for the tour of Volterra castle. It’s a very exclusive tour you know! Bella’s eaten almost immediately, she’s probably fought over, Jane gets one limb and Alec gets another.

Years later, Edward arrives in Forks, his personal purgatory where he listens to the banal thoughts of teenagers. Bella Swan does not arrive. Edward continues to be miserable and depressed.

The Cullens have a game of baseball with James, Laurent, and Victoria. Unfortunately, James recognizes Alice, and is intrigued enough to come after her. Unfortunately, Alice is a vampire and not a human with human relatives to hold hostage. The Cullens murder him, Laurent flees to have sex with the sexy Denali ladies, and Victoria swears vengeance upon Jasper.

Unfortunately, her gift tells her that any attempt to murder Jasper will end up with her dead. Jasper doesn’t give her the time needed to plan. He hunts her down and murders her in cold blood.

Carlisle has the world’s worst weekend. 

Edward is still depressed and concludes this is why vampires are abominations without souls. Irina gets to keep her boyfriend, he cheats on the diet and leaves within the year. Irina drowns herself in rebound sex with pretty mortals to try and feel better abou tbeing dumped. It doesn’t work.

Aro Discovers Bella

And this is probably the route you were thinking of.

Perhaps Aro’s taking a midnight stroll with Renata, perhaps he catches Bella on the tour, but somehow he manages to meet her and happens to brush her hand. Suddenly, eating Bella is off the table forever.

Bella’s gift isn’t game changing in the way Alec and Jane’s were, necessarily, but it is something Aro does not want falling into enemy hands and something he may one day need.

He’d probably do something similar to what he intended to do with Alec and Jane. He’d leave her to live her mortal life, keep close tabs on her, and turn her when she’s a young adult (probably around twenty).

Which means Bella returns to America, probably tailed by Demetri, and has no awareness that she is at some poing going to become an immortral blood drinking creature and move to Italy to become a member of an ancient vampire sect.

Bella moves to Forks, she has a run in with Edward Cullen who very nearly eats her, Demetri calls Aro to say “we have a problem”. At first, Aro isn’t too concerned, he’s delighted to hear that Carlisle’s alive and well and my god he has a coven now. Given Edward is Carlisle’s progeny, Aro is probably sure Edward will leave the city completely to avoid temptation and the others will quickly move on.

Edward’s back within the week. He attends school. He sits within a foot of Bella Swan in Biology class.

Demetri at this point probably summons Bella out of school in the middle of Biology with no warning, gets her the hell away from Edward, and has to come up with the world’s most ridiculous lie of why she should never enter within 20 feet of Edward Cullen ever again.

Demetri is a federal agent and Edward is under suspicion of being a sexual predator and serial murderer. Here are all the women who have disappeared in various towns the Cullen family have lived in.

Bella is of course horrified and shocked, but given Edward’s reaction in that first Biology class and his weirdness in the second one... 

Aro calls Carlisle. It’s a very awkward talk. Carlisle apologizes for not writing in forever he got... distracted. Aro says it’s fine, no big, CARLISLE MISSED WATCHING THE MOON LANDING WITH HIM. But regardless, Aro is calling to ask him what the fuck.

Aro tells him about Bella, Carlisle is very uncomfortable with this girl having no choice but to become a vampire and no idea what’s going to happen to her, but there’s no talking Aro out of it. He’s even more uncomfortable that he has been begging Edward to skip town but, for some unknown reason that is perhaps pride, Edward is refusing. 

“All these worlds are yours,” Aro undoubtedly says, “Except Europa, attempt no landing there.”

In other words, hands off Isabella Swan.

Carlisle tells Edward. Edward is appalled and conflicted. At this point, he’s unwillingly fascinated by Bella but has not yet decided he’s in love. He doesn’t quite have her Carlisle persona crafted yet  and so she’s not the saintly figure deserving of worship. Right now she’s just this plain, boring, girl who dared to smell delicious.

So, a part of him thinks it serves her right. Now she will suffer for all eternity as he does. More, he can save face, the monster inside him can go back to sleep for her days are number and he can pretend he’s the wonderful person everyone thinks he is. Everything will remain as exactly as it is. EDWARD IS FINE, THIS IS FINE.

Another part of him panics. First, this girl is condemned to the worst future imaginable. Not only is she becoming a demon, but a blood drinking demon at Blood Drinking Demon HQ. More, if she becomes a vampire, no blood for Edward. And remember, this is a scent he would scour the world for. Edward salivates over the thought of her blood, obsesses over it constantly, and fantasizes over how he will devour her. Suddenly, Edward may not be able to eat her. In canon, the option of eating her is always on the table, and some part of Edward is always thinking about it, always leaving it open. Here, it’s soon to be gone.

Edward probably sneaks into her room at night to watch over her sleep. Telling himself he’s protecting her from meteors but also realizing that he’s there to test his own will power and ponder over the future in which he quietly eats her in the middle of the night. 

Now, this can go two ways

Bella wakes up, and that guy Demetri said is a sexual predator targeting her is IN HER BEDROOM LOOKING SCARY AS FUCK. Bella undoubtedly screams bloody murder and tries to hit Edward with something.

Edward panics at the noise and eats her. Then when Charlie comes running he eats Charlie Swan too. The house is an utter blood bath, Edward stands there in a daze knowing the monster inside him has won. He no longer looks anything like Carlisle Cullen (this is a thing Edward does).

Probably though, Demetri is there. Which means Edward has heard his thoughts from the beginning. While Edward has the overconfidence of Gilderoy Lockhart, and tells Bella things like the laws of physics not applying to his driving or that he could beat Jasper in a fight with both hands tied behind his back, usually when push comes to shove he knows where he stands. (He tries to fight Jane in Volterra, it doesn’t go well, and he acts very meek at being confronted by Jane, Felix, etc. When he fights Victoria, he doesn’t fight at all, but just blathers nonsense and it somehow works out for him.)

So, while Edward will tell Jasper later that he totally could have taken Demetri, he’s not going to try. 

So, instead, Demetri goes, “Hey buddy, looking for a midnight snack?” and Edward shuffles and petulantly asks, “Aren’t you looking for a midnight snack?!” Edward’s here to protect Bella, you see. Demetri just nods, of course, Edward’s here to protect Bella.

They stare at each other.

Neither leaves.

Eventually, Edward slinks away, feeling very disgusted with himself, angry and Demetri, and internally raging that he didn’t get to eat Bella.

Demetri calls Aro and notes that they’ve got to turn the girl. Demetri cannot watch her 24/7 and this boy is 100% going to eat her. Aro hops on a plane in record time, bringing Renata, and makes an awkward visit to both Carlisle and Bella.

Aro tells Bella the truth about Edward which is... a little different but also pretty scary, the truth about what’s going to happen to her and why it’s important, and anything else she wants to know.

I imagine Bella quietly and stoically accepts her fate. 

Edward doesn’t get to eat Bella Swan. He feels very conflicted about it and is filled with self-loathing that he’s conflicted about it. I imagine the Madonna complex he holds for Bella blossoms at this point, and he later comes to Italy with the intent to free her from the Volturi clutches.

This doesn’t work out. 

Knowing Edward, his attempts increase in desperation until, finally, he does something very illegal in an attempt to free her and make up for damning her to this life.

The Volturi are forced to execute Edward.

Carlisle gets yet another awkward, terrible, phone call from Aro.

#twilight #twilight meta #twilight headcanon #twilight renaissance #aro #the volturi #bella swan #demetri #carlisle cullen #edward cullen #anti edward cullen #anti edward/bella #meta #headcanon #opinion

[everlarkficexchange]

Just Close Your Eyes, You'll Be Alright

Written by: @alliswell21

Prompt 154: Soulmate au where your soulmates injuries and scars show up on your body tinted in their favorite color. Katniss through the years as she discovers new marks, pondering what it could possibly be, finally figuring out that her soulmate is being hurt way too regularly and in very specific places. Do her parents figure out Peeta is being abused? How do they find and “rescue” him? Or does Peeta live his whole childhood being abused before turning 18? Does he runaway? How do he and Katniss find their way to one another? [submitted by @lovely-tothe-bone / @peetamewllark]

Teen and up

AU- Modern setting (but like without cell phones). One Shot. 

Warnings: Canon typical violence, Language, child abuse and neglect, injuries, implied (non-descriptive) underage smut. Nobody dies! Unbetaed. 

-lyrics of Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift, Feat. The Civil Wars - Songs from District 12 and Beyond (2012)

Author’s note: Thank you to @lovely-tothe-bone for her inspiring prompt and to the organizers of EFE, for bringing the challenge back so faithfully, you ladies rock! 

KPKPKPKP

“Look at her!” Papa screeched at the policeman, lifting the back of my favorite pink polka dotted shirt. “You have to do something about this, Sheriff Cray!” Papa demanded, angrily.

  The man just watched, like he didn’t care. Then sat back down lazily, “There’s nothing much I can do, to be honest. Unless you can produce the child sporting the actual bruises, my hands are tied.” Said the policeman.

  I had no idea what the problem was, I felt fine, but ever since my 5th birthday, every time Mama helped me out of my day clothes for my bath, she wept and held me close to her chest, whispering “No child deserves to be treated so poorly,”

  Papa too always made a face and looked sad and angry when Mama showed him my back after my baths. 

  It was funny how bath time could easily be my favorite time of day, but it made the grown ups upset somehow. I just liked that mama would rub ointments on my back, bottom and thighs, carefully and without fuzzing about the time she was spending away from my baby sister, Primrose. Is not that I didn’t like Prim— I thought she was as lovely as a doll— I didn’t mind sharing mama’s snuggles with her either, but it was nice to just feel mama’s warm hands caressing me to sleep every now and then. 

  Either way, I wished someone would tell me what was so wrong with my behind that had the grown ups acting so weird. 

  They were starting to scare me, really.

  “There has to be something we can do! There are genetic tests to determine matchless people, couldn’t we use the same technology to find the markers matching my daughter’s counterpart to identify him?” 

  “Mr. Everdeen, I’m not a geneticist. I wouldn’t know about anything like it… and who’s to say we could use it to find your girl’s soulmate? Then we what? It’ll open an unknown Pandora’s box situation, people would start tracking soulmates illegally or something less than honorable. It’ll certainly set a precedent we cannot foresee the ramifications of!”

  “You’re telling me that there’s some kid out there, somewhere, getting beaten week in and week out, and you’ll do nothing about it?! You’ll allow the abuse to continue uninterrupted?” 

  The man nodded slowly, “You said it yourself, Mr. Everdeen. The kid’s ‘out there, somewhere’, we don’t even know if he’s local, or his age. In any case, I only have jurisdiction over District 12, and I can’t very well launch a country wide investigation on an alleged case of abuse, specially if  we have no victim,”

  “But my daughter’s soulmate is suffering! Who knows what permanent damage this poor child may have as an adult! It’s my daughter’s future we’re talking about!”

  “Most unfortunate, sir. I don’t wanna seem unsympathetic, Mr. Everdeen, but unless your little girl can figure out a way to communicate with her soulmate, find… an address— at the very least a name— there isn’t anything we can do to help.”

  Papa huffed, his nose flared, “Fine. Thank you for your consideration…Sheriff.” Papa put his big ol’ hand on my shoulder and guided me away, “Come on Katniss, it’s time to go home.”

  I looked up at Papa and reached for his hand. I smiled at him, “It’s okay, Papa. Mama says to give grumpy people time, and they may be nicer the next time we talk to them.”

  Papa smiled at me, but it didn’t crinkled the corner of his eyes, like real smiles did, “That’s nice sweetie… although, that usually only applies to people just waking up from naps, like you and me,”

  I giggled when he picked me up and tickled my tummy. 

  Papa kept talking to grown ups about my back, but nothing was ever done about it. 

  ———————-

I was 11 when our world pitched upside down. 

  Papa was one the foramen on shift at the town’s coal mine when the earth shifted and an entire tunnel collapsed. 

  Prim and I were in school when the sirens went off. There’s nothing worse than to hear the end of your world being advertised so loudly and without mercy. 

  I grabbed my sister’s hand and rushed to the mines; we found our mother there, clinging to the yellow tape cordoning off the site. 

  I should’ve known something wasn’t right when I was the one seeking Mama out, trying to comfort her, instead of the other way around. It was the first time the concept of a soulmate stopped being an abstract notion, and became a reality, because my mother stopped functioning altogether the moment she realized Papa had been hurt.

  I saw how much a soulmate could affect you. It wasn’t only the marks on the skin— those came without conscious pain— it was the fear of knowing that someone you loved was hurting, sometimes badly, and not being able to do anything about it. 

  Mama’s left leg started glowing pink from the shin down at first, and the color began to shift to a darker red the longer Papa laid underground. 

  Unbeknownst to us, my father had been pinned under fallen rock and dirt after pushing a man to safety, risking his own life. The sharp end of a pickax perforated Papa’s leg in the cave-in. The pickaxe worked as a plug, keeping him from bleeding out while he waited for the rescue crew to reach him. 

  Papa laid on the floor of the very last lift to surface with rescued miners. He was unconscious. Had suffered extensive blood loss. The lone medic in the rescue crew couldn’t fix him up right away, but Mama was a nurse, and like a switch flipping on, she ripped off the bottom of her skirt, and tied a tourniquet around my father’s thigh, saving his life at the cost of his limb. 

  My father lived, but his leg had to be amputated. 

  He couldn’t work in the mines anymore, and what little money we got as compensation from his injuries, were put into paying off the mortgage, because Papa decided that having a roof over his family’s heads was far more important than having a leg. 

  The rub was, a roof didn’t fill our stomachs or put a coat around Prim’s shivering shoulders. Mama put a hold on her nursing career, obsessing over Papa’s care, despite his protests. Someone had to pick up the pieces, and that someone turned to be me. 

  I started selling everything I could carry out of the house in my arms: tools, kitchen appliances, small furniture, etc. But we never had many possessions to begin with, so my wares ran out soon, and I turned to our closets for their meager treasures.

  I sold my parents best clothes, along with my sister’s winter boots that didn’t fit her anymore. I looked at my own shoes with longing, but put them into Primrose’s shoe rack, deciding I could manage with Mama’s boots, if I stuffed them with newspaper. Mama never left the house anyway. Neither did Papa for that matter, but he wasn’t dead, just convalescencing, so I left him a pair of footwear just in case, and sold his work boots and his Sunday loafers. 

  The day I was down to the last pair of clothing, we had been slurping on mint tea for the third day in a row from a few old leaves I found in the very back of the pantry. It was the last of our food, besides Papa’s bland diet, but I refused to let on on how precariously stocked we were, until absolutely necessary.

  But, nobody wanted the hand-me-down baby clothes I had for sale, nor the slightly beaten stroller I was pushing around with my ‘merchandise’. 

  Icy cold rain, soaked me to the bone. I was so tired and downtrodden, I ran to the first awning I found, unwilling to go back home to Prim’s sunken blue eyes and chapped lips, asking for something to eat, while my hands were empty. 

  I tripped and fell face first on the umbrella stroller, breaking it irreparably and soiling the few onesies I’d been trying to sell. 

  With my wares ruined, and winded by a sharp pain shooting through my elbow, I limped towards a scraggly apple tree a few feet away. I recognized the place as the alley behind the town’s bakery, just by the smell alone. 

  I cupped my elbow, wondering if I’d broken it or merely banged it up? That’s when I saw the dumpster. 

  Big ugly thing, dirty and smelly. I climbed a wooden crate to dig for anything edible inside, but before I could lift the lid, a screeching voice shouted at me.

  “Get out of there, Seam brat!” 

  I jumped off the crate, startled, and cowed behind the dumpster when I saw the baker’s grumpy wife sneering at me from the warmth of her kitchen’s back door. 

  A boy about my age— I recognized him as one of my classmates from school— peeked his towheaded face around the woman, and although they were a good five yards away, I could see his blue eyes widened as he took me in. The boy slipped back inside, as his mother spewed threats of calling the police on me and whatnot.

  I started debating whether I wanted to trace back and drag my broken stroller over; pretend I was merely trying to dump it in the garbage, while inspecting the trash for food… but the baker’s wife was nicknamed the Witch by all the neighborhood children for a reason. 

  Before my mind was made, a loud, metallic bang resonated into the street from inside the bakery. Yelling ensued, then the sound of a meaty hand against a small face. 

  A few seconds later, the witch was chasing the boy out the back door, “Toss it in the trash, you stupid creature! Nobody will pay money for burnt bread anyway!” 

  The boy scurried by with his head down. 

  My eyes stuck on the bread in his hands, was probably the reason I missed the shiner under his eye. He stopped right in front of the dumpster, but instead of throwing the ruined loaves in, he tossed them in my direction. 

  I didn’t wait around to ask if he meant for me to grab them. I just scooped them up and fled like a bat out of heck. 

  When I got home, Mama gasped in horror. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pressed me to her chest. “Oh no! It’s getting worse. They don’t even care to hide the bruises anymore!” 

  Mama lathered my face with all the medicinal herbs she had at hand, while apologizing profusely for abandoning me and Prim to our own devices. She vowed to find a job, and to take better care of us. 

  “No child should ever suffer like this!” I couldn’t tell if she meant Prim and I, or whoever my soulmate was.

  Mama interrogated me about my whereabouts and how I came upon the bread in my arms, but she seemed to rest easier after a while. 

  When I was finally able to look at my face in the mirror, I was horror struck by the deep orange bruise swelling under my eye. It took three days for the bruise to go away completely even with mama’s careful fingers.

  Coincidentally, the baker’s son didn’t show up to school for the next four days. By the time he did, I had lost any confidence in myself to go up to him and thank him for the bread that fed us for a few days; the loaves were perfect! Only the crust had been charred, but I had a hunch the boy knew that when he threw the bread to me; I was also convinced he burned the bread on purpose, I was just too chicken to ask him why? Which made it even harder to hold his gaze when we crossed each other in the school hallways. 

  All I knew was that because of the selfless actions of the boy in my year at school, my mother seemed to wake from her single minded obsession. The boy with the bread gave our family a sense of hope, despite the fact that it would take some time for Mama to find work and produce enough money for the family. Papa’s medical needs had to be met as well, and he was due a new leg. 

  While those thoughts churned in my head, my eyes focused on a bright yellow bloom across the school yard. The first dandelion of the season! I picked the cheerful blossom, and the idea on how to feed my family until Mama was back on her feet, came to me. 

  After school, I took Prim’s hand and a clean bucket in the other; together we scoured the yard and the woods nearby for all the dandelions we could fit in the bucket. That night, we gorged ourselves on dandelion salad, and the next day, I pulled from under my parent’s bed, the only thing of value we had left in the house, Papa’s hunting bow. 

  “Are you sure you can handle it, pumpkin?” My father asked, watching me carefully.

  “You taught me how to do it,” I said, trying to hide my nerves.

  “I taught you with a smaller bow,” he pointed out, “why don’t use yours?”

  I shouldered the heavy bow, and took a few loose arrows in my hand, “I sold it. These are all we have left now,”

  After a handful of days practicing, I actually shot  something worth eating. Seeing my mother’s blue eyes pop in surprise when I dropped the dead rabbit on the table, was priceless. 

  ——————-

  One early morning, right before summer break, I happened across another hunter… a trapper, to be precise. 

  A lanky, scowling boy, with three fat bunnies tied to his belt, and a fourth hanging in the air by a simple— yet elegant— wire snare. 

  I’d seen his traps before, his prey with their dead eyes and lolling tongues, just high enough off the ground to keep other animals from taking off with them. Papa told me that hunter etiquette was to be observed; if I happened across a trap that wasn’t mine, I was not to touch it, out of respect for my fellow hunters. That still didn’t discourage me from looking! After all, the snares looked like works of art, and I had no idea how to set any on my own.

  “Stealing is a punishable offense, you know,” Snapped the boy, and suddenly I realized just how tall he was. 

  From up close, I could see the beginning of some stubble under his chin. 

  “I wasn’t gonna take it…” I stepped away from the twitching bunny, with my hands raised in surrender. “Admiring your work, that’s all. By the way, I’m Katniss Everdeen, what’s your name?” I asked, trying to be friendly. 

  “Name’s Gale. Hawthorne. So… you know how to use the thing hanging from your back, Catnip, or is that just for show?” He practically bumped me onto my butt, stepping passed me while pulling a knife from his belt to cut his kill down. He turned to watch me, smirking. “That thing looks bigger than you, are you sure you can lift it up?”

  I scowled at him, wondering if he was expecting to see me squirm or something. I was smaller than the average 12 year old, but I was fast and scrappy. 

  “My name is KatNISS. I can shoot my own food thank you very much,” I held my bow aloft and moved so he could see my quiver full of arrows, “my weapons aren’t props or fakes,” I said, haughtily.

  “Yeah, well, it still looks bigger than you,”

  I rolled my eyes, fed up. Any other time I’d meekly shy away, and let him be; but I was feeling stubborn and confrontational, so I pulled my bow, nocked an arrow and let it fly, all in a fluid motion. 

  Gale gaped with a hint of fear in his gray eyes. 

  I felt smug and satisfied. 

  I wasn’t aiming at anything in particular, I just wanted the obnoxious boy to shut it, but by a stroke of luck my arrow pierced a falling leaf, and imbedded itself deep into the knot of a gnarly looking tree trunk. 

  “Wow! That was amazing, Catnip!” Gale said in awe. 

  “It’s Katniss… I’m okay, my father was better,” I said, puffing my chest a little, “I haven’t managed stealth yet, not like Papa before the accident, anyway. He doesn’t hunt anymore.”

  Gale frowned. “Was your dad in the cave-in?” He asked grimly.

  I nodded. 

  “So was mine. He almost didn’t make it.”

  “Same.”

  He just stood there, staring at the ground for a moment, then I tried to play cool, “Hey, I’d be willing to spare some shooting lessons, in exchange for some snaring techniques,” 

  Gale watched me, intently. He finally nodded and stuck his hand out for me to shake, “Deal!” 

  I smiled. Papa always said that good hunting partners were hard to find, and while I didn’t want a new hunting partner— I already had my father!— I could always exchange knowledge with a fellow hunter and improve my game. 

——————-

Papa was fitted with a basic prosthetic leg. He couldn’t run or swim with it, but having the ability to walk without crutches gave him a “new lease in life”, as he called it. 

  He found work doing odd jobs for Haymitch Abernathy, a hermit drunk, with more money than he knew what to do with, and no family to spend it on. The man needed someone to talk to every now and then, and seeing as he and my father were close in age, they developed a strange rapport between them. 

  Still, Papa wasn’t completely confident with his fake leg, no matter how many physical therapies he attended; he still walked with a pronounced limp. Yet, he always had a word of comfort for Mama. 

  My mother often blamed herself for Papa’s disability. 

  He’d tell her that she did the right thing, that it was thanks to her torniquete he was still alive, and she should never doubt her own healing skills. But every now and then, my mother would catch a glance of her permanently grey skinned leg, and silent tears would slide down her exhausted, pretty face.

  By then, I was old enough to know that the soft orange marks hidden under my clothes, meant a kid somewhere in Panem, probably my age, was getting beaten on a regular basis. It was sad to think about, but I’d grown so used to the marks, they felt like a distant happening without a meaningful connection to me. The bruises were there… just shy of a shirt sleeve, or around mid thigh, where they could be concealed by shorts; the way I saw them, they were like oversized freckles that came and went. A nuisance. That’s why watching my mother weep over her shadowy leg, was always unnerving and a little odd. 

  Was I supposed to despair the same way she did over my own soulmate marks? Was I broken or heartless if I didn’t feel as strongly? 

  Until I saw my mother’s grief over her soulmate’s leg, it didn’t register to me just how much the orange bruises were supposed to affect me. 

  I started to think if I wasn’t any better than the person dispensing the punches.

  One day, I was leaning on my parents bedroom door, watching Mama applying soothing oils to her gray leg with the utmost love and care.

  “Why do you rub so much medicine on your leg? It doesn’t seem to be bringing back your normal color,” I asked, staring where her fingers massaged into her flesh. 

  Mama stopped and called me over, to stand on her side of the bed. 

  “Papa is fast asleep, do you see?” She pointed out, kindly.

  I looked past her shoulder, where my father was sprawled on the mattress on his stomach, dead to the world. 

  I nodded.

  Mama smiled, “Do you remember all we’ve told you about soulmates? I’m sure they’ve taught you at school other stuff as well,” 

  Again, I nodded, just a little puzzled. “Soulmates have a very strong bond. They can’t feel when the other hurts, but they can see the marks, tinted in their favorite colors. That’s how we identify our soulmates, because we match and they can see themselves reflected back.” 

  “Exactly.” Said my mother, beaming. “Now, your papa and I are soulmates, and we love each other very much. When Papa’s leg was separated from his body, my body reflected that loss, despite still retaining my own leg. We match. The one thing most people don’t seem to realize, is that the connection goes both ways. I may not feel the physical pain Papa does, but I can still do things to my leg to help him feel better.

  “For example, when he feels phantom itches, I scratch and his itching sensation goes away. When he can’t fall asleep because he’s uncomfortable without his leg, I massage lavender oil on mine, until he relaxes and goes to sleep. Everything I do to heal my body, and take care of it, helps my soulmate feel better.”

  “Is that why you put lotions on my marks? To help my soulmate feel better?” 

  Mama’s lips thinned out; she didn’t like talking about the orange marks on my body. 

  “Katniss,” she said very seriously, “I tend to your bruises because I love you. I worry about your soulmate, because I love you. I try to keep you as healthy and happy as possible, because that will help your soulmate heal faster… because I love you. I can cure your soulmate’s body through yours, but I cannot protect his heart, mind, or feelings. Right now, you both are too young to feel the pull of your bond, but one day, when your bodies have matured, you’ll have this… yearning, to find one another, and then, I just hope, whoever your soulmate is, knows we tried to help.”

  I cocked my head, “Should I be sad every time new marks show up?”

  Mama inhaled a deep breath, “We should feel sad every time a child is mistreated, darling, no matter how we’re related,”

  From that day on, I paid close attention to every child in my class for bruises matching mine. I also kept pomades and tinctures in my school bag, in case I ever saw another kid getting hurt. I wouldn’t say I started to develop deeper feelings for my soulmate after that, but I did feel deeper empathy for my classmates… I just couldn’t stomach big injuries, gore or vomit, but smaller cuts and bruises… those I could manage. 

————————

“Silver Anderson figured out her cousin was dating her soulmate!” A girl in my year was telling a cluster of other 15 year-old girls in the locker room. “Do you remember how Silver has been wearing a turtleneck for the last two days with this darned awful heat?”

  The other girls hummed their yeses. 

  “Well, is because Silver’s soulmate had a hickey on the throat, given by Silver’s cousin, who was his girlfriend or whatever. But apparently the cousin went over to visit Silver with her boyfriend, and one look at the guy’s neck, and Silver recognized the mark!” 

  There were gasps all around. 

  It wasn’t rare to hear of soulmates having relationships with other people before finding each other, but it was almost unheard of a relative dating somebody’s soulmate so close.

  I finished tying up my shoelaces, and started rebranding my hair, making a mental note to double shampoo, to get all the sweat out.

  “What an idiot! Who gets hickeys from their ‘whiles’?” Snorted somebody. 

  I wasn’t much for gossip, but even I had to agree. 

  ‘Whiles’, weren’t permanent romantic interests, they were just to pass the time while waiting to find your soulmate. ‘Whiles’ were people to satisfy ones curiosity about dating and that kind of stuff, with no strings attached or substance; ‘whiles’ had a bad connotation associated with. 

  “Oh, the boy had never gotten one mark in his body that wasn’t his, so, he assumed he didn’t have a soulmate, and the cousin has already been confirmed to be a matchless.”

  A big “Oh!” Swept the room. 

  Matchless were born without a soulmate, which meant they could choose to be with whoever they wanted as long as they were matchless as well, or with nobody at all. 

  Sometimes I envied their freedom to choose, but other times I felt a sense of safety, knowing there was a person somewhere in the world meant just for me and me to them. 

  Soulmates were genetically evolved to complement one another, but some just wanted to experiment before settling down. Lately, though, matchless births were growing in number, and that upset people for whatever reason, as if the freedom of choice was scary or a curse, then again matchless were usually whiles and those were looked down on. 

  “That’s awful!” Said a girl.

  “I knew Silver’s near freakish obsession with keeping her skin pristine and hidden would bring her issues finding her soulmate someday,” Declared another.

  “I don’t think she wanted to find him,” whispered someone else.

  “Oh well, they did find each other! You can’t hide from your destiny. That’s just silly!”

  “Either way, I feel bad for the cousin, because apparently she and Silver’s soulmate were talking about marriage, since they thought they were both matchless.” Informed the first one. 

  I lost interest in the conversation when it turned speculative, and stood up to shove my P.E. uniform into my locker. 

  Someone suddenly called, “Everdeen, how about those orange blooms on your arms?” 

  My eyes widened, and immediately, I dropped my arms, pulling my sleeves as far down as they would go to cover my soulmate’s private marks.

  “Oh… um… yeah. My mother thinks my soulmate might be an athlete,” I stuttered; Mama had only said such a thing in passing once, when a couple bruises appeared that didn’t match the usual ones. “Also, he seems to work with his hands. Lots of nicks and scrapes.” I wiggled my fingers in front of me. That much was true, my soulmate probably wore those marks freely.

  “Oooh!” A girl, Delly Cartwright, reached to take a closer look. “Could be a carpenter. Or a locksmith? Maybe a farmer!”

  “It could be the blacksmith’s son! Doesn’t Silver have an unmarried brother?” Asked another girl.

  “Yeah… a kid like 10! Ugh, Everdeen, I really hope he’s not your soulmate… can you imagine being so much older than your soulmate?!” Interjected the same girl that spotted my bruises. 

  I scowled. Age was a stupid thing to complain about. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to have an age gap between soulmates… my father was six years older than my mother, and Mrs. Sae from the Soup Corner at the market, was a handful of years older than her soulmate. 

  Still…

  “No. My soulmate is most likely my age. I’ve gotten his marks my whole life,” I shrugged, absently rubbing my arm, where the brand new bruise appeared that morning. 

  “Oh… at least that’s something. Knowing that your soulmate isn’t so much younger than you, and that he might at least have an apprenticeship somewhere,”

  “Right,” I said, turning away, wondering if it was awful of me to wish for a boy who never got marks on his body, like Silver’s pristine skin? At least that would mean my soulmate was safe and treated fairly. 

———————-

Papa and I shared many qualities. I inherited his coloring: olive skin, gray eyes, dark, straight hair, our penchant for singing mountain ballads, and the same quickening of the blood when we got a kill during hunting. Prim favored our mother more closely, with their fair skin, blonde wavy licks and blue eyes, they also were more skilled as healers and more soft-hearted towards animals. 

  The day Prim brought home a half dead cat, riddled with fleas and missing an ear to be patched up and adopted into our family, my first instinct was to drown the orange pelt and be done with it, but Prim got upset and worked up, and I just couldn’t stomach her cries over what I considered to be the world’s ugliest cat… his face was flat, like it’d been smashed against a wall…

  It took a long time to calm my sister down, and Papa made me pinky promise that I wouldn’t kill the fur sack and pretend it ran away, which I only did reluctantly, because I loved my sister and didn’t want her to be crossed with me. 

  Papa asked me to walk with him into the woods, afterwards, which I did readily. 

  Before he lost his leg, we used to go hunting all the time; everything I knew about hunting and foraging, I learned from him. But after losing his leg, we’ve only gone to the woods to hike and get him used to his prosthesis in the uneven terrain. 

  It was good exercise for him. The fresh air seemed to lift his spirits too. 

  We didn’t hunt together anymore. Papa’s tread wasn’t feather-like the way it used to be, prey scattered away before we even saw it.  

  It was alright. We enjoyed being out there together, and he still had lots to teach me about edible plants. Sometimes he’d find one of his old spiles, and then it would hit me: all his knowledge would’ve been lost if he’d died in that cave-in. I would’ve never known where to look for those spiles; I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to harvest sap and turn it into syrup. 

  Sometimes, I had to sit down and catch my breath when those thoughts knocked the wind out of me. 

  I was having one such moment, when out of the blue, my father spoke in a low, calmed tone. 

  “There’s a new chief of police,” he said while sitting on a log, next to me. 

  “I heard.” I wasn’t trying to be snippy with him, but every time a new chief or sheriff was appointed to our district, Papa wanted to run back into the precinct, and demand they look for my soulmate. 

  Appealing to the police never led anywhere. It didn’t matter if they had new staff, they always gave us the same spiel: can’t investigate an abuse case without a victim. They couldn’t go looking for a person without a name or an address. 

  After a while, one just started feeling like it was an impossible task, to help one child feel safe. 

  Papa sighed. “We could try ourselves. I’ve been saving some money, and we could—“

  “What? We could what?” I snapped. “We could go door to door visiting every little town in Panem until we find the bruised up mutt matching me?” I was at the verge of tears. 

  Mama said that once my body was matured enough, I’d start feeling the pull. Well, I kinda felt it, calling desperately. It started around my 14th birthday, when I started having a regular cycle, and puberty was at its summit. 

  First, I was curious about my other half and began cataloguing all the soulmate marks I could see easily. Suddenly I had whole maps of my hands and arms, and legs. Mama suggested I keep track of my hidden marks too, just in case. The curiosity persisted and evolved into an incessant wondering: where was he? How was he getting along? How could I help him protect himself? 

  “Haymitch may have a way, sweetheart. He knows people, and he likes you… he says you’ve got spunk,” Papa smirked.

  I’d met Haymitch Abernathy countless times. He was rude and sarcastic. I usually responded to him in kind, earning myself a host of reprimands from my parents— although Papa still couldn’t hide his pride, despite trying his hardest. 

  “What would he know about soulmates anyway?” I muttered.

  Papa shook his head, standing up, “Haymitch lost his girl, mother and brother all at once during a special outing. There was a car crash. Haymitch was badly hurt, but survived. His family didn’t. His soulmate was 16, so was him. The government paid him excessively for damages and the loss of his soulmate, because it was proved the city had skimped on roadside safety that caused the accident. But money didn’t fill the void of losing his loved ones. Haymitch never recovered. 

  “He told me once that losing a soulmate is akin to drowning. Except you’re still breathing without filling your lungs with oxygen…” Papa picked up the bucket we brought to collect sap, and smiled sadly at me. “Katniss, I may be exaggerating by hounding the police about your soulmate, but sometimes I worry that if we don’t find that kid soon, you could very well share Haymitch’s fate. Believe me when I say that I’d do anything in this world, to keep that from happening to you.” 

  I turned 16 that spring.

  I started carrying a small mirror on me, to try and look over my shoulders into places I couldn’t reach, obsessing over every little mark that sprouted anew on my back. 

  I wasn’t sure if the all consuming watching, and the doubts that kept me up at night, not knowing what was being done to my soulmate, wondering if he’d survive another day, was the pull Mama talked about, or simply terror at becoming the next Haymitch Abernathy. Either way, I became more vigilant for injured teens around me, but a sinking feeling in my gut started nagging at me, that my soulmate was an expert at hiding in plain sight by now… how would I ever find him if he was as adept at camouflaging as I suspected?

—————————

“This spot is perfectly in the middle of the turkeys’ path.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest to glare at Gale, “You just spilled a bunch of blood there. No critter is gonna come this way anymore with that stink.”

  “Turkeys aren’t that smart, Catnip,” Gale looked up from his belt after securing his new catch— his pants were covered in gore from where the rabbit nearly cut its own foot off trying to fight the snare’s grip. “I’m more than confident that if we set traps here, we’ll catch at least a fat Tom…more if we set up a system wide enough,”

  After a somewhat rocky start, Gale and I learned to respect each other’s skills, even joining forces for certain seasons, like deer and turkey hunting. We also fished together on occasion. It was safe to say we had a friendship after three… almost four years of partnership in the woods. At 18 Gale was less obnoxious, but still a stubborn ass. 

  “And I’m telling you, the path is tainted now. We need to put feed on the other side of the bushes, to keep them in the area.”

  “That’ll take weeks!” 

  “Then you shouldn’t have let that bunny bleed to death in here!” 

  “Listen here, Catnip—” whatever he was about to say, died in his throat.

  “What?!” I demanded, angrily, when he just stared at me horror struck.

  “Your nose!” He roared. “Your eyes!” He tumbled forward, and squished my cheeks in his one, long-fingered hand. “There’s more coming!”

  I yanked myself away from him. “Cut it out!”

  “I think your soulmate is getting the shit beaten out of!”

  I grunted and brought my fingers to my face, as if I could feel the changes. 

  Gale had seen some of my bruises, enough to be sure I had a soulmate, but not enough to realize my soulmate was being abused.

  I rubbed under my nose, and the tip of my index came back bloody. 

  I gasped. That had never happened before. 

  “How bad is it?” I asked Gale, frantically. 

  “Um… orange keeps popping up all over your face. There’s some running up your arm right now.” He sounded careful, but frightened. “It’s like… burn marks,”

  I looked down, where indeed, long, fat tongues of intense orange glowed up my left arm. I’ve seen glowing marks before, but always in the tip of my fingers or the sides of my hands, I never connected the glowing with fire— burn marks— but it made sense. I guess my soulmate must handle fire regularly. 

  “What’s happening?” I pulled my little mirror from my pocket, to see my face, and nearly sobbed at the sight.

  One eye was completely covered in orange. Burn marks ran all the way from my elbow up to my cheek, and part of my forehead. My nose had a tiny, bloody smear, and my lip had streaks of orange here and there. 

  Whatever happened, was bad.

  “Fuck… Do you know where he is, by any chance?” Gale winced. 

  “No… but I’m about to find out!” I looked around for a place to sit, then pulled my small knife out of my boot. 

  Once seated, I examined my forearms. The flaming marks started at the elbow on my left arm, and went up on that side, my right arm was free of injury, except for my palms. Both were glowing orange, but not too bad. 

  “Okay… here goes nothing!” I gritted through my teeth, placing the tip of my knife to my arm, I traced the word, “WHERE?” crudely, and just deep enough to break the skin.

  Gale made a face, but crouched closed by, staring intently. “Do you think it’ll work?” He asked dubiously. “He might be unconscious for all we know,” 

  “We’ll see.”

  The minutes rolled by and no answer came. I was starting to panic; all I could think about was would that be the day I became the next Haymitch Abernathy? At least he got to meet his soulmate and have a relationship with her before she died; I had no idea who mine was. Was it worse that way, knowing them and then losing them, or was it worst to never meet them at all? Would I become soulless? Would my entire body turn gray? Would I ever find another soulmate? Haymitch never said if he ever looked for another, but I knew it was possible to get a secondary soulmate if enough time went by. 

  “Look!” Gale shouted. 

  A shaky “D12” appeared under my message. 

  A relieved gasp left my mouth. 

  “District 12! That’s good! He could’ve been all the way in District 4, and then what were you gonna do? Call the authorities there?” Gale muttered, clearly invested in what was happening to me.

  Tears stung my eyes. I wrote: “ME 2” 

  We’ve been in the same district the whole time, and I still had no idea where to find him! 

  I turned the knife back to the first word, and traced a line under it “WHERE?”

  The answer came back faster. “S H”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I moaned,  “What kind of abbreviation is that? Ugh! I’m trying to help you!” I screamed at my arm as if my soulmate could hear it.

  “Seam House?” Gale mused… “No, there are hundreds, if not thousands of houses in the Seam,” he said.

  The Seam was the poorer part of the district, where people like us lived: low income families, miners, laborers and the such. 

  “Ah! Ask if he means Slag Heap? If I was trying to pick a fight with someone, that’s where I’d go.”

  “He didn’t pick a fight!” I snapped, defensive and angry. “He’s been beaten every other day, since I can remember. My parents used to go to the police station every year to see if they could do something about it. Nobody ever did! They always said we needed to figure out a way to communicate with him… well, I’m doing it now!”

  Gale frowned, “That’s shitty. I’m sorry to hear that. The Slag Heap could still be it, though. Many people go there to be alone… if they’re running from someone, there’s plenty hiding spots,”

  That sounded logical, “Okay… but the slag heap isn’t exactly small, and there’s some woodsy area to consider too,”

  “Mmm… asking has been working so far,” 

  “Yeah, but the whole mutilation part is getting to me…” I glared, he wasn’t the one cutting his arm, “I’m starting to get woozy,” 

  “You’re a hunter, Catnip! Blood is nothing,”

  “Animals, Gale! Not my own blood,”

  “There’s no difference,” Gale cupped my face in his hands, to keep my eyes on his gray, steely ones. “we’re all animals. We all bleed the same. Your soulmate needs your help, if I knew who mine was, and I knew she was in trouble, I’d be rushing to them… you can do this, Catnip,”

  I took a deep, cleansing breath, and nodded. “I’ll ask him. As soon as we know where to go… could you please fetch my father? He’ll know what to do,” 

  “You got it, Catnip!” He let go of me, and I felt renewed courage after his weird pep talk.

  Once again, I trace the tip of my knife on my skin, “SLAG H? WHERE?”

  “YES    NE”

  “North East! I told you it’ll work!” 

  “Yeah,” I grumbled, spelling making one last message: “W8 4 ME”

  “K”

  With half a plan in motion, Gale rushed to find my father, and I made a mad dash to the slag heap, where years and years of dumping dirt and rocks removed from the mines had formed small hills and mounds at the edge of the district. 

  “Hello!” I called out loudly. “Can anybody hear me?!” 

  There wasn’t a whole lot of vegetation in the slag heap, only hundreds of disturbed soil pits and little mountains… some were tall and wide enough they’ll easily conceal a person or two looking for privacy. 

  “Anybody here?” I called again.

  A weak cough answered in the distance. 

  I rushed in it’s direction, hoping it was my soulmate, and not a couple trying to steal away a few minutes alone. 

  “Please, tell me where you are!” I called before another round of coughing reached me. 

  “Here to finish me off, sweetheart?” Came a weak, raspy voice from behind me.

  I turned around but saw nothing besides dirt, and sticks, and moss on rocks. 

  I swallowed, “Where are you?” I stepped closer to the heap in front of me, and then…

  “Well, don’t step on me!” 

  I jumped back and looked downwards, and finally saw dirty pieces of flannel and denim, incongruous with the area, and under all the debris, I realized a person had dug a little wedge at the foot of the hill, and thrown the stuff he’d dug out back on top of himself. The disguise was clever, camouflaging himself into the terrain. 

  I gasped and dropped to the ground, pulling handfuls of earth out of the way. A jolt of recognition hit me when a pair of bright blue eyes blinked open and shut, slowly, as if fighting off fatigue. 

  “Don’t go to sleep!” I warned.

  “I’m sorry, but it might be too late for that already. There’s an angel hovering above me, and I’m not sure I’m not dreaming it,” a row of white teeth appeared from the soil.

  My knee-jerk reaction was to chuff and roll my eyes, but if he was throwing me those cheesy lines, it meant he was somewhat lucid, and it was imperative to keep him that way. 

  “How do you know is not a nightmare?” I countered.

  “Because Katniss Everdeen coming to my rescue, and being my soulmate could never be a bad dream. On the contrary It’s only my deepest, most desperate hope, really…” he trailed off, and closed his eyes again. 

  I was momentarily frightened.

  “Keep talking,” I ordered, brushing dirt off his head. Some of it mixed in with his blood and sweat, turning into a thick mud. I could see more of his battered face; my heart beat erratically against my rib cage, there were so many bruises. “Peeta, keep talking,” 

  His untouched eye opened slowly, a lazy, sideways smile greeted me, warming me up. “You know my name?” 

  I chuckled, startled, “You know mine,”

  “Everyone knows you, Katniss ‘the huntress’ Everdeen!” He reached up, tentatively, and touched the tip of my braid, whispering under his breath, something that sounded like: unreal.

  Just saying his name felt otherworldly; like breathing for the first time. I’ve never uttered it before, for fear of bringing forward memories of that awful day in the rain, by the bakery’s scraggly apple tree. 

  “And you’re Peeta Mellark, the boy with the bread. I’ve known your name for a long time, baker’s youngest son, whose kindness saved my entire family from starvation,” I cupped his injured face in my hands, and I couldn’t help the slight tremble in my voice. 

  He seemed to melt at the sound of my voice; then his hands came to touch my face. “I can’t believe it’s you. I can’t believe you found me!” He said, an edge of incredulity and awe colored his tone, but then his face fell, “But, your sweet, beautiful face… it’s all…” a fat tear rolled down his muddy cheek, while his thumb gently caressed my temple and the side of my face. “I’m so sorry, Katniss… I never wanted you to look like this! I always tried to shift positions, so you’d never had to see how bad it got. I’m so sorry,” he was crying so hard, he started to shake and cough.

  It took inhuman strength not to cry myself; I knew he needed me to protect him, and there would be time later to fall apart and feel emotional. 

  “Shush, I’m here now.” I knelt next to him and locked my arms around his head, pulling him against my chest, so he could hear my heart beating only for him. “I’m going to take care of you.”

  “I really hoped it was you. I really did…” he heaved into my neck, his arms wrapping gingerly around my waist, “thank you for finding me,”

  “Of course I found you… I’ve been looking for you for ages,” I whispered, finally giving in, shedding some tears, relieved that the tension, fear, uncertainty, and frustration were finally gone. My soulmate was in my arms, where he belonged! “My parents started looking for you when we were little. But we’re together now,”

  Peeta calmed down some, but he was still breathing too fast, “Now that you have me… what are you gonna do with me?” He asked meekly. 

  I smiled down at him, “I’ll put you somewhere safe, where you can never get hurt again,” 

  He closed his eyes. “I’d like that…” 

  “Peeta, you can’t go to sleep just yet, okay?”

  “I’m so tired, Katniss,”

  “I know,” I cooed. I had no idea I was capable of speaking with such softness. “My father will get here soon, and then we’ll patch you up real well.”

  “I can’t go back to my house though—“

  “You ain’t going there, kid!” Papa said from a few feet away. Gale and two police officers followed closely. 

  I must’ve been completely enthralled with my soulmate, because I never heard them coming, 

  “Even if it’s the last thing I do, I won’t let you go back to that place!” My father stated. 

  And that was that!

  ——————————-

“Tell me what happened,” Officer Darius asked in a soft tone, trying to be encouraging.

  My soulmate inhaled; one eye was so swollen it was completely shut, his other one roved around the room nervously. Peeta locked his gaze with mine, beseeching, and I offered my hand in support. He clung to it like a lifeline. 

  “My mother asked me to burn a pile of leaves and branches in the backyard that had been there since fall, but the branches were damp and it was taking me a while to fire it up. Since it’s the last week to burn stuff, my mom got impatient. She screamed at me, called me incompetent and useless… the usual stuff—“

  “Does your mother call you names regularly?” Asked the officer. 

  “My mom calls everybody names. I guess that’s how she was raised. Her mom used to call her names too…” Peeta shrugged.

  “That’s no reason to keep the cycle going,” my mama grumbled quietly, so only I could hear her.”

  “After insulting you, what else happened?” Prompted the police woman, Officer Purnia.

  Peeta scowled. “I told her I’d pour some lighter fluid on the pile and let it soak for a few minutes, but she wouldn’t hear it. Said I was doing it wrong, I was too stupid, I would never accomplish shit if I couldn’t even light up some dead branches… and, well. I got fed up. I told her she could start the fire herself if I was doing such a lousy job… my mom… she—She doesn’t like to be talked back…” He sagged on his hospital bed, and turned his face away. 

  “What do you mean?” Asked officer Purnia, taking notes, trying to keep an impassive mask on.

  “The first slap landed across my ear because I dared to move away from her flying hand,” Peeta said tersely, “She didn’t like that either, so she took aim again, but with the bottle of lighter fluid on her palm. She practically smashed it against my face.” He stopped to gasp for air, while his good eye filled with tears. “I think fluid squirted everywhere, I smelled like my hair and clothes had been doused in the stuff,” he raked a shaking hand over the singed hair at his temple. 

  I caressed his arm to sooth him. 

  He smiled gratefully at me, and faced the officers to continue. “I’d just put a piece of burning cardboard into the pile. I guess the leaves caught fire during the squabble with mom, and I must’ve lost my balance after taking a plastic bottle full of liquid to the face, because next thing I know, I’m bracing my hands on the ground, on burning sticks, and then I’m on fire myself.”

  Peeta sustained first degree burns on the different spots from his left forearm, up. Luckily, his wounds were managed as soon as we got to the emergency room, and his treating doctor said he would recover, with minimal scarring.

  “How did you end up at the Slag Heap?” Asked Officer Darius. 

  Peeta sighed, “My mom kind of freaked out when she realized I was on fire. She picked up a rag from somewhere and started hitting me with it…” he paused, “in retrospect, I think she may have actually been trying to help me, but… I just saw it like she was still trying to beat me, so I ran off. I tripped, fell, then rolled on the ground, she started calling my name, coming closer to me. I was scared. I took off again and didn’t stop until I fell at the foot of that mound of dirt in the slag heap. That’s when I noticed my soulmate’s note.”

  Officer Darius quirked up a reddish eyebrow, “Your soulmate’s note?” 

  “Yeah… these,” Peeta tried to peel back the bandage over his arm, but my mother put her hand over it, and shook her head. 

  “Here!” I said, immediately shoving my own arm in front of the officers. 

  Both examined my arm. “How did you think of doing that, Miss Everdeen?” 

  “I was inspired by your bosses actually,” I snarled.

  “Katniss!” Mama chided, and then politely addressed the officers. “You see, my husband and I have come to the authorities for many years, urging them to find a way to locate our daughter’s soulmate. You see, she’d started exhibiting her soulmate’s bruises from a very young age, which in my professional experience, were inconsistent with normal toddler scrapes and bumps—“

  “The chief of police always said to find a way to communicate with him, ask where he was… so I did,” I interrupted, haughtily. “I got you a real life victim to investigate. You’re welcome.”

  The officers stared at me, flabbergasted. 

  Mama made a dismaying noise in the back of her throat, but Peeta’s face— burnt, bruised and swollen— lighted up, with the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen a person direct at me. 

  Mama interjected, conciliatory, “My husband and I believe, your department should have enough evidence to investigate Peeta’s case, now?” My mother’s searching blue eyes seemed to x-ray the officers. 

  “Well, Miss and Mrs. Everdeen, Mister Mellark, I think we have everything we need for now. Thank you for your cooperation. We’ll be in touch.” Said Officer Purnia snapping shut her notebook. 

  “Mr. Mellark, your case worker, Miss Trinket, will be in as soon as the matter of your emergency custody is settled.” Informed Officer Darius, right before wishing us a good evening.

  Peeta frowned, “Are they sending me to like a home or something? What about my brothers? They can’t stay home with my mom… she’ll go nuts on them!” 

  “No, no, Peeta,” Mama spoke softly, “Miss Trinket is already on it. Haymitch Abernathy has offered his house for your brothers to stay at for a few days while things get sorted out. You’re welcome to join them, of course, but your injuries need supervision and several cleanings daily, so Mr. Everdeen and I feel it is in everyone’s best interest if you stay with us, at least until you’ve healed enough.” Mama hesitated, and then patted my soulmate’s hand, “I hope that’s okay with you, but if it isn’t—“

  “It’s absolutely great, ma’am! Yes, I—thank you,” 

  Mama nodded, “Well, I’m gonna go get some stuff taken care of, and check on that case worker. Then they’ll hopefully let us go home… Katniss, I’ll need your help with something before we leave, alright?”

  “‘kay.” 

  “Mrs. Everdeen…thank you,” Peeta said meekly. 

  Mama just stood stoically by the door, “You’re family, Peeta, it’s the least we could do for you.” The door clicked shut leaving me alone with my soulmate.

  We were both silent for a minute. Then Peeta said half amused, half shyly, “I think the guy cop liked you. I caught him smirking a couple of times after your ruthless answers.” His smile was crooked. Boyish. I almost swooned. 

  I shrugged. “I don’t think he cared that much,”

  “Are you serious?” Peeta laughed, “Katniss, you have no idea the effect you can have,”

  I scowled at him, and he just shook his head. I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me or complimenting me. He changed the topic before I could decide which. 

  “So, you’ve been looking for me then?” He sounded nervous, and a little uncertain, “isn’t it weird…we are soulmates, but the only thing I know for sure about you, is that your favorite color is green?” He rubbed his fingers together, then showed me the tips, where he had dark green spots, exactly on the same place I had permanent calluses from pulling on my bow string. 

  I bit my lower lip, studying the thin spidering of green nicks and scratches, were I surmised my own marks have appeared after my daily trips into the woods. 

  “Your favorite color is orange. Not bright, but muted…”

  “Like the sunset,” he finished for me. 

  Mind bonding wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities between soulmates, but my understanding on the matter was, that the bond had to be physically sealed before a pair could develop those empathic connections, where soulmates shared perfectly synchronized thoughts, as if they had one mind. Peeta and I weren’t there just yet, but it felt like we understood each other pretty well already. 

  He just stared at me in fascination, before his face fell, “I hope you don’t get permanently disfigured, if my burn scars don’t go away completely… you are so pretty.”

  I rolled my eyes, pleased that he thought I was pretty, but not really knowing how to respond graciously. I’d never been called pretty by a boy before, not that it’d have the same effect as when Peeta said it… “You’re just saying that I’m pretty because I’m your soulmate,” 

  He smiled sadly, “No… I really mean it. I’ve had a crush on you since I can remember. I just new I belonged to someone since I was like 4, when I saw my first soulmate scratch on my knees. Your favorite colors back then were teal and pink. Your marks were always swirls of the two colors. I liked them. I liked that I belonged to someone who enjoyed colors, like myself… I wondered what your marks looked like, but then, I hoped you never had to see my marks. I was ashamed of them.”  

  My chest tightened, I climbed onto his bed, and pressed my side right against his, “Hey… I’ve like your marks.” I stuttered, “my parents never let me see the ones on my back until I was older, but I liked the ones you got in normal places. Yours appeared as rainbows where we were little.” I held his hand in mine. “I don’t care if we stay fire mutts forever, Peeta, the important thing is that we are together now,” 

  “Thank you for finding me,”

  “Thank you for leading me to you,”

  We leaned our heads together, and fell into an easy silence.

  “Katniss…”

  “Mmm,”

  “We are soulmates.” 

  I tilted my head away, to look at him, “Yeah. We already established that,” I said suspiciously.

  Peeta smirked, “You know, we’re supposed to be madly in love…so, it’s okay to kiss me whenever you want to,” 

  I snorted and rolled my eyes, but he was right. In any other circumstance, I’m sure we would’ve already progressed into couple-y, lovey-dovey stuff. 

  “If you’re already fishing for kisses, that means you’re healthy then!” I kissed his forehead. “But let me tell you right now, cheek and sass won’t take too far, sir,”

  “It won’t?” he pouted, “then I’ll just have to swoop in when I see an opening,” he leaned into me, and I let him plant a peck, full on my lips. 

  My first kiss ever, and all I could register was how chapped his lips were… besides the small fluttering of butterfly wings in the pit of my stomach, of course. 

  “Well, time for a sip of water, and you should rest some too.” I said feeding him the straw in the Styrofoam cup full of icy water by his bed. 

  After he drank, we gravitated towards each other, meeting in the middle. Our second kiss was short, sweet, and full of relief. 

  I liked it. In fact, I wanted another, but Peeta was drowsy after the day we’ve had. 

  “I remember you used to sing, so beautifully, even the birds would stop to listen,” Peeta said, shyly… “would you… mind singing for me?”

  “I don’t sing all that much nowadays, but if that’s what you want…”

  He stared at me expectantly, so I had no other choice. I combed back his freshly washed hair, and started.

  “Just close your eyes;

The sun is going down.

You’ll be alright;

No one can hurt you now.

Come morning light,

You and I’ll be safe and sound...”

  When Mama came back, Peeta was asleep, and so she took me outside while my father sat in the room with the case worker, signing in my soulmate’s release papers, waiting for him to wake up. 

  “I want you to take these,” Mama produced a packet of medicine from a white, pharmaceutical baggie. 

  “Birth control?!” I groaned, embarrassed. 

  “Don’t look so scandalized, Katniss,” Mama rolled her eyes, “You and Peeta are healthy, newly acquainted teenaged soulmates, who will suddenly coexist together in close quarters. Papa and I agreed that starting you on contraceptives is the right thing to do,” she fixed me with a stare that broker no protests, “That said, we are not giving you carte blanche to act on pure hormonal instincts, Katniss. While we aren’t so naive to believe you won’t explore intimacy with your soulmate, we fully expect you to use caution, and make responsible decisions. Is that clear?” 

  I nodded, and snatched the pills from Mama’s outstretched hand. My face was burning with mortification, but I was grateful for my parents’ wherewithal and openness. 

  The next few days proved harsh and blissful at the same time. After 11 years pestering the authorities, Papa finally got the law to prosecute my soulmate’s parents for abuse and neglect. To call it a victory, was understatement. 

  Peeta’s father was declared another victim of the Witch’s abuse, but court ordered him to see a therapist and get evaluated by a professional, before he could come back home to his sons. 

  Mrs. Mellark was charged with endangering a child, battery, abuse and arson. She was court ordered to seek anger management and psychological counseling. She had been abused as a child too, and after watching her son in fire, it finally clicked in her head, that she needed to put a stop to the cycle… late as it may be. She went willingly when the police served her arrest warrants. 

  Since Peeta and his middle brother were still minors, they were temporarily placed under their eldest brother’s care; but the eldest brother was only 19 and had no idea how to be a father figure, so strange as it was, my parents insisted on having them all bunk in our tiny house, which was comically insufficient. Thank heavens Haymitch Abernathy was still willing to help. 

  The grumpy old drunk invited the lot of us to stay at his place for as long as we needed, and after cleaning up all the empty bottles and general messes around his huge house, we could enjoy the place at our leisure. 

  The boys kept working at the bakery, since they needed a source of income, and something to keep themselves occupied. Mama said they needed the normalcy of their business to cope. 

  It was a good thing Haymitch’s house was so big, since Peeta started having horrible nightmares after his mother was released from holding, after making bail; her trial was still pending, but my poor soulmate suffered severe PTSD from the events that brought us together. Neither of his brothers wanted to share a room with him at night…which allowed me to slip in when I heard him crying out desperately and fearfully.

  Peeta would only go back to sleep after I laid beside him and sang, while carding my fingers through his sweat-damped, ashy blond waves. 

  “I’m not okay until I can see you’re safe,” he told me once. 

  After the third night in a row of this happening, I just stayed with him in his bed. My parents didn’t exactly approve— we were still 16— but there wasn’t much they could say to stop us. After all, our soulmate bond trumped any other familial bond; we just couldn’t legally get married and apply for housing until we were both 18. 

  Peeta still woke up in cold sweats at night, but my arms were there to fend off the terrors, and so were my lips. 

  On the night I felt a hunger so consuming and devastating, gnawing at me from my core, radiating to the tips of my being, I was glad my mother put me on birth control. 

  My soulmate gently, but steadily joined us together, cementing our physical bond for the rest of time, while branding his love and adoration to me into my very skin, with fevered lips and shaky hands. We gasped and whispered vows of devotion to one another, and then an explosion of feelings and emotions went off… I couldn’t tell where his life force started, and mine ended. We were one. Sharing a single soul. 

  After, we laid tangled together, our hearts beating as one. Peeta kissed my knuckles, and asked.

  “You looked for me, for years. Real or not real?”

  “Real.”

  He kissed my forehead, “Will you sing?” 

  “Of course,” I combed back his hair with loving fingers, and sang.

  “Just close your eyes;

You’ll be alright;

Come morning light,

You and I’ll be safe and sound.”

#alliswell21 #lovely-tothe-bone #prompt 154 #Springtime Edition 2021 #submission

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #371

“some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses”

What is one song you feel as though you sing particularly well, if any? Probably none, lol. What was the last lengthy task you completed? I love these unique questions I've had lately, but damn, are a lot of my answers "I don't know," lol. What type of photography do you enjoy looking at? Do you take any photos yourself, and if so, what types of things do you prefer to photograph? I love floral and wildlife photography. Landscapes, too, and I have a great fondness for boudoir for reasons I've mentioned in previous surveys. I like taking nature pictures, mainly. Have you ever gone out for the Black Friday shopping rush? Did you enjoy it, or not so much? Or, what’s the busiest shopping day you’ve ever experienced? Hell no, that's a hard pass. I'm sure the busiest shopping experience I've had was like at the mall or something around Christmas, idk. Do you enjoy reading diaries or stories you wrote from when you were younger, or does it embarrass you? If you’ve kept them, was there a particular reason for hanging on to them so long? NO. I DON'T. BECAUSE I CRINGE INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION. I keep a lot of it for memory's sake, but goddamn, is it always embarrassing. What would you say was your first true hobby? What about your most recently developed one? Um... the first thing I really remember is video games. I played Spyro like, a LOT, along with other childhood games. I was just really into gaming at a young age. Is there one thing that throws off your mood more than others, whether it be lack of sleep, lack of food, heat/cold, etc., and when was the last time you felt especially cranky? THE HEAT. I become so irritable. I was needlessly cranky a few days ago for whatever reason. What kinds of things are you likely to complain about? My legs hurting, more than anything. Also being hot. Do you like to put any extra effort into your food in terms of presentation, or do you prefer to just put it on a plate and eat it as it is, no frills? Ha, no. It's not gonna look fancy in my stomach, so whatever. Have you ever dated someone who had kids? No, and I very much doubt I ever would. Are there any candles in the room with you? No. Does the last person you kissed have tattoos? No, but I tell her all the time that dainty nature tattoos would be THE most beautiful on her. When was the last time someone called you pretty? I think when I last updated my Facebook profile picture. Do you like the color pink? It's my favorite! Does your cell phone have a case on it? What color? It came with this thin purple one. What was the last song you had on repeat? "Moon Baby" by Godsmack. Ever kissed someone your parents hated? No. Your most recent ex says he/she hates you, you say? I wouldn't *say* anything, I'd break down sobbing. Would you feel hurt if your last ex was in a relationship? No. Have you ever had to choose between two people? Yes: Jason and Juan. Juan and I dated for less than a day not all that long before Jason and I got together, and Juan was pretty upset. He was nooot a fan of Jason due to a shared ex-girlfriend. Jason, meanwhile, just didn't care. What is the saddest thing that has happened to you? What about the happiest? I think the saddest thing has to be my breakup, especially when you know just how madly in love I was with him and had endless trust that he would never leave, and then he was gone in a flash one night. The happiest is, in turn, my recovery from said split. I found strength in myself and felt hope for once as I learned coping mechanics and got a psychiatrist that was worth a shit in my partial hospitalization program. What was the last new drink you discovered that was delicious? *shrug* Do you have a YouTube channel? Yes. I don't make videos anymore, though. Were you happy as a teenager? God no, my depression was awful. What do you do for your mom on Mother’s Day? Sigh. Not enough. I just tell her happy Mother's Day, give her a hug, and try to be an extra good daughter. Do you know anyone who follows a raw vegan diet and lifestyle? No. Can you go see a doctor alone or do you like to take someone with you? I can do it alone (but only have once), but I like to bring my mom with me still. Would you have sex with someone of the same gender as you? I'm bi, so. Have you ever had a concussion? One or two, I can't remember. How many dresses do you own? Zero. Do you know anyone who has a pet gecko? Yeah, my friend Summer has a darling leopard gecko. I want oneeeeee. They look so damn derpy and adorable, and their chill demeanor is something I really like in pets. Would you ever go bear hunting? No. Absolutely never. Do you prefer drawing or painting? Any particular reason why? Drawing, for sure. At least you can erase stuff, and paint is just so messy. Do you like raisins? NO THANKS MAN. Do you remember your locker combinations from high school? Nope. Do you forget to flip the page of your calendar at the start of each month? I don't have a calendar. Are you racist to any race? Nope. Have you ever intentionally hurt an animal? I've given cats and dogs a small pop on the rear, but nothing more than that. I hate doing even that, but with the language barrier and all, sometimes it's the only way to get your point across. Do you own any autographed memorabilia? No. Have you ever dated a twin? No. Oreos or Chips Ahoy? Oreos. Have you ever considered being a cop? Yeah, no thank you. What’s your favorite superhero movie? Maybe Logan. I thought it was very emotional and just overall a good movie. Name somebody you know who deserves a better life than they have: MY MOM. Name something that you’re good at but don’t like: uhhhhhhhh Name something that you’re bad at but DO like: Dancing, maybe. Which is worse: Stale chips or flat soda? Stale chips, for sure. It's certainly not my preference, but I can drink flat soda. Who’s the hottest guy and hottest girl out there? M-Mark Fischbach. :') Girl... let's seeeeee... maybe Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy. GodDAMN what a WOMAN. ❤_❤ Do you ever trip over your pets? Yes, because he just looooves to follow me at my feet. What’s your relationship like with your exes? Aaron, Juan, Jason, and Tyler: nonexistent. Sara and Girt: great. What was the last thing you turned down doing? Going to my nephew's t-ball game. I always feel bad when I say no when Mom asks if I wanna go... but at least the kids know I just don't handle the heat well. Are you a party animal? Faaaaar from it, my friend. Who are you the biggest fan of? m-m-m-mMARKIPLIER You’re DJ for the night - first track to get everyone going? Uhhhh maybe "Party Hard" by Andrew W.K.? Have you ever been hit on by a pushy person? I think Juan was kinda pushy, but not to an uncomfortable degree. He respected what I felt. What accent do you find attractive? Most attractive, British. But I also really like Scottish and Irish. Also French accents in women I tend to find very beautiful-sounding. Have you ever had feelings for a friend's partner? Yes. What’s your favorite thing to do that doesn’t cost much? Drive around take pictures, maybe? Let's, uh, ignore the whole gas crisis in this answer. When in danger are you more fight or flight? Flight. Do you feel self conscious about a certain body part? *gestures to entire body* Have you been accused of being manipulative? Yes. Have you ever considered violence to solve your problem? No. Are you romantic? I personally think so. If you are a smoker, how long does a pack typically last you? If you aren’t a smoker, does anybody you are close to smoke, & if so, are you against the fact that they’re a smoker? I don't smoke. To answer the next part, yes, like my dad and stepmom. I wish they would stop so badly, like it's literally going to kill them both. Do you have more subscribers or more people that you are subscribed to? On YouTube? I'm definitely subscribed to waaay more people. Is there anything that has been drilled into your brain since you were young & you finally decided to stop listening to? How did it feel once you decided to listen to yourself over what you were told? Yes: "finish your plate." Teaching your kid to eat beyond their comfort can be very destructive, and I'm glad I never stuck to that once Mom stopped enforcing it. If you are currently in a relationship, what is one thing that seems to be unique or different about your relationship with this person, compared to other relationships in general? If you are currently single, is this more of a choice or is it more just the way things are going, not really something you chose? If you are neither “single” or officially in a relationship, what are your feelings on your current situation? I'm single, and it's just how it is. I know realistically I wouldn't tell what felt like the right person no, but it really is probably better that I stay single and keep figuring my shit out. Think of somebody famous that you have a lot of respect for. What is something that you really admire them for? To name just one thing I admire in Mark, his relentless "I'm going to do this no matter what" attitude is very inspirational to me. He lets like... n-o-t-h-i-n-g get in his way. If somebody were to leave a harsh comment on a survey you took, judging you on one of your opinions, how would you react? I'd get pretty self-conscious, just because I in general take judgment quite poorly. I obsess over "what if they're right, and you're just an idiot?". Are there any other sites you use to find surveys to take? What sites do you use? I mainly use Tumblr and LiveJournal, but in times of great desperation, I'll use Bzoink and just google surveys as well, haha. Have you sent or received any friend requests on Facebook lately? Not sent, but I got one from someone I had no mutual friends with the other day. Safe to say I declined it. Can you recall the last time you turned down an offer, of any kind? Uhhhhh no. Which fruit would you say you eat the most often? Apples. What was your pet’s last vet visit concerning? Roman has been to the vet once to get neutered (and I think shots?). I took Venus many years ago because I thought she had a respiratory infection. Thank god, she didn't. Which animals do you tend to go check out first at pet stores? The reptiles, snakes in particular. Have you ever been a victim of a house fire? No. What’s the longest you’ve ever had to wait before being seated at a restaurant? Like, over an hour. Have you ever had a cavity before? How about a root canal? A tooth pulled? Braces? Cavities and braces, yes. What is your favorite zoo animal that you would like to set free? Probably polar bears. Like especially here, it gets so hot in the summer, and the poor things sometimes only have a bit of snow in the shade. Like... they can't be very happy. Especially when you see those videos of them playing in snow, and then you think about situations like our zoo here... ugh. What kinds of artifacts fascinate you? I really think old figurines built with like clay and stuff are cool. But all artifacts I find to be very intriguing. It's so interesting to see that the desire to create has always been with us as a species. Is there anyone that you’ve visited in jail? No.

#survey #surveys #questions #lyrics: ''killing in the name of'' by rage against the machine

[mouthtrashworld]

HEAR ME OUT: PARIS HILTON INSPIRED ME TO GO TO ART SCHOOL

HEAR ME OUT: PARIS HILTON INSPIRED ME TO GO TO ART SCHOOL AND BECOME A FILMMAKER.

My sister and I played it cool until my parents dark purple grand caravan left the driveway. We knew we had to conceal our excitement of being home alone for a few hours in order to not seem suspicious. It was our chance to watch whatever trash was on television that day without the normal censorship our parents had set on us. My mother strived to win the gold medal for being a helicopter parent and my dad just agreed with whatever she said. Somehow we were always a step ahead of them. There was a vast lack of communication within my household which lead me to crave answers and sneak around to get them.

We really made a day of it. We pulled our big fluffy comforters off our beds and brought them to the couch, gathered every unhealthy snack from our cabinet (which was difficult as my mother kept a strict, low carb, low sodium, no sugar menu to chose from in our house) and hung heavy blankets over the windows to block out the glare on the 30 inch Panasonic VHS combo unit. My older sister, Cate, had control over the remote, she knew which channel number MTV played on and she memorized the Parental Control Password that was set on various channels that aired the exact rubbish it was to protect us from, but quickly became our favorite shows. At the time I didn’t even really know how Cate found out these shows existed. Our amount of media consumption was little to none. Living in a tiny town in Pennsylvania, attending private Christian school and hardly having a social life; our only connection to whats out there

would be the local blockbuster that my mother skirted us in and then quickly out of after renting wholesome family movies. I remember slipping away from my moms watch just long enough to find the “1 Night in Paris” sex tape DVD that was made in 2004 with Rick Salomon (who by the way has been married to Pamela Anderson TWICE!) and Paris Hilton as the star. A few years later, The Simple Life, featuring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie became a huge success for Fox and was later taken over by E! network. The glimpse of the DVD cover was so scandalous I felt guilty just for looking at it. We were a few years late, really just catching the reruns of the show that E!, MTV or VH1 would play during the middle of the day, but we ate it up nonetheless.

The first episode I ever watched was on Season 5. The two girls become camp counselors and every week a different theme and set of campers come in to encounter their shenanigans. This episode was “Fat Camp” and the first order of business was for Paris and Nicole to give the campers enema’s before they start their week of dieting and exercise. It was absolutely ridiculous. I felt bad that these campers who fell victim to their bratty comments, yet my sister and I couldn’t take our eyes off it. Reality TV works in that way you know, where you feel bad, but not bad enough because its not your life.

Soon Cate and I started adding other reality shows to our pallet of rebellion. The Girls Next Door, a reality show about Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends living in the Playboy Mansion. Real World Cancun, AKA Jersey Shore before there was Jersey Shore. And of course The Hills where Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag live it up in Orange County, a place I

thought was made up until I visited there in 2014. But the Simple Life remained my favorite of them all. But Paris Hilton was my first glimpse of glamour, so she always remained my favorite. Granted, Kim Kardashian has seemed to surpass her on many levels after starting out as her intern. And sure maybe Paris is an heiress who will never run out of money or resources and people behind her, producing her, but Miss Hilton found a savvy way to brand herself right at the pinnicale of the internet and she still had to work for it. As a filmmaker I am hyper aware of the way we consume media, which is why I’ve taken such an interest to Paris and this manipulation she had turned into an art form.

Before we go on, in case you don’t know how Paris got famous, I’m here to give you a brief backstory. Paris Hilton, heiress to the Hilton Hotels empire, was actually raised a lot like me. Her parents were strict. She wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or have much of a social life. I believe her parents knew what kind of name she bared and the harsh reality that could come with it, so they kept her on a tight leash. Despite their efforts to keep her tame she slipped away, out into the world long enough to meet famous photographer David LaChapelle, who became enamored with Paris and her sister Nicky, and insisting he take their photo. She knew it was highly against her parents rules to engage in that kind of activity but she went for it. He designed an elaborate set and costumes for them and they went ahead naively thinking the photos would be just for them to admire in private but were later were published in a 2001 Vanity Fair issue, getting her in a whole lot of trouble. She later had to turn down and offer to do Playboy because her parents would disinherit her. By the time she was 18 her career as a model

and professional partier could really take off. Paris became absolutely obsessed with fame. She came up with a formulated routine on how to grab the paparazzi’s attention. She would find all the places photographers would be hanging out that day and go to every single location just to be seen and her plan really seemed to work. She was the bright and shining star of every tabloid in America. She describes in the documentary film, “American Meme” how desperate she was, spending hours searching for a place with someone, anyone to take her picture no matter what it took. Her paparazzi access seemed responsible for Paris to become a household name. — add on?

We have to remember that this time, 2007-2009, was a turning point, as smart phones and blackberries were now in almost every American’s pocket and we were craving the tea more than ever. Tabloids started working around the clock to deliver us the latest scoop at the now possible all hours of the day; i.e. the tragedies of Amy Whinehouse, LiLo and her drug escapades, Britney Spears and her hairless melt down, the list goes on. We asked for it, we got it and kept asking for more. After Paris sought out these outlets, the offers poured in. Her own show, movie roles, modeling for brand name designers, she became a DJ, became an author, a business woman, a fashion designer she owns hotels in Dubai and is currently carrying a hefty 10.5 million instagram follower count.

I know what you’re thinking, like okay so who cares about this rich “bimbo” (dubbed courtesy of a New York Post article circa 2007) but just hear me out. Most of us can relate to her story and if not, at least to some of her tactics. What I grew to realize after becoming social media obsessed (possibly because I was deprived as a child) is that

no matter how information changes or what new technology comes to pass it along to us, we will always be doing it in the same way. I watched Myspace come and pass, seeing thousands of singers, bands and actresses get discovered through that site, even some playmates in Playboy magazine. I saw Facebook allow us to put every single thing about our lives on blast at any minute of the day. Twitter allows us to barf our thoughts up in once 180, now 280 characters, Vine stars made 6 seconds videos and now make 6 figures from their fame and last but not least Instagram, and trust me when I say I cringe having to say this, “influencers” sell to us with every photo or video they post. Whether that be a lifestyle, a product or just themselves as a person. A vast majority of us have to admit that we are drinking the juice. We ourselves are partaking in marketing our “best life” being lived via Instagram. So ask yourself, what is the difference between what we are doing on the Gram versus what Paris was doing in 2006, showcasing her persona to the media in the only way it was accessible at the time? Why not manipulate it the same way it manipulates us? Find out where the quote on quote Paparazzi are and market yourself the same way reality stars did.

Not that I have the intention to come up in the same way some of these heiresses who’s names are already famous or these vine stars or twitter comedians did but I have the power to show a portion of the world who I am and what I can do to earn my career as a filmmaker and communicator via social media.

I realized that what I was doing as a little kid, waiting for my parents to leave to seek a world outside my own is exactly what Paris did. She took the risk and got the answers.

Her obsession with fame coincided with my obsession with social media, to communicate and or get my work out there. I’m just trying to work system to brand myself. My research shows that the reality show we down load from an app store and place in our pockets has led me to some big wins. Upon getting hired for shoots or my work recognized in some way, I see there is a formula to the entire thing. When to post, how to post, who to follow, etc. I have no producers behind me to curate my Instagram, I have no connection to someone with a big name. All I have is myself to show for what I can do and if I keep going back to the place with the most access to the loudest voices , like Paris did I may have a shot at getting my own voice out there and I will say more important things than “thats hot” I promise you.

In the end I think that the reason I clung to Paris and her story so deeply was because it was virtually first and foremost example I had and to as impressionable young woman, that kind of thing sticks. The definition of success and how to obtain it was taught to me was by sneaking her show on a Saturday afternoon while my parents when to Shop Rite without me. I’ve just stayed observing all the ways fame has developed via internet and can lead to success. But the beauty of the defying gravity factor is that this blond “bimbo” and many other “bimbos” like her have done the same thing, most without the Hilton name. All I did was think twice before I believed that reality television was just a trashy phase. Instead I realized that I, like many others, am still consuming similar content in 2009 now in 2019, the difference is its in the palm of my hand and I’m deciding to take advantage of it.

#y2k #paris hilton #nicole richie #new york post #early 2000s #early 2000s fashion #90s fashion #90s nostalgia #90s kid #90s #the simple life #kim kardashian #kylie jenner #art school #pratt #pratt institute #blog post #art blog #journalism #cultural commentary #social commentary #new york #brooklyn #la #los angeles #nyc #photography #disposable camera

[multifandomaddictedfangirl]

The Vampire Diaries Thoughts & Opinions (rewatch)

S1 :

OMG I completely forgot how cheap was this show! The dialogues in s1 feels so forced and fake 🤮 Not to blame the actors, but sometimes it feels really unnatural, like you know you’re in a fantasy young adult tv show. It doesn’t feel like real life, like what real people would do/say. It’s too obnoxious and dramatic and... overly intense ?? 😕 Rewatching it, it might be the biggest flaw of the early seasons 🤷‍♀️

They all look SO YOUNG tough 😳

Mmmm... Stefan acts like a total creep in s1, it’s really giving me Twilight vibes 😅 like if I was Elena/Bella, I would be terrified of Stefan/Edward ! 😰 They’re creepy and stalky and weirdly intense / edgy about ordinary stuff... Their entire personality screams : “I AM A VAMPIRE AND I CANNOT CONTROL MYSELF AROUND YOU” which... #yikes 🤔

Caroline Forbes is my favorite character of the entire show, I love her SO much ❤️ “I’m never the one” is still one of the most powerful lines, for me, and I loved her characterisation throughout the show

Matt has been irrelevant since s1 🙄, honestly he was maybe funny/quirky in the double-date episode and regarding his relationship with Caroline (while not having moved on from Elena)...? But that was like a couple of episodes and apart from that he was just useless. I do not understand why he stayed alive that long

Jeremy.... oh Jeremy 😔 He was... such a cliché! He was what adults see as the “typical” rebellious edgy teenager who does nothing of his life except smoking weed. And no, I don’t like that caricature. His relationship with Vicky... 🤷‍♀️ I mean, sure, it was sweet that he cared for her that way and that he saw more in her than just the “stoned-ass trashy girl” 💁🏻‍♀️ that she was supposed to embody. But Jeremy really acted like “The Nice Guy”and it seemed like he was expecting something for being nice with Vicky. He acted like if Vicky owed him something, while she never asked for him to interfere in her problems 🙅‍♀️ I don’t know, I guess he was just supposed to be a lost teen, damaged by trauma, and I get that.

OK, so if I was Elena, seeing Katherine’s picture would FREAK. ME. OUT 😱 I would run away. So far away. I would tell everyone I love to run away 👀 I would just completely shut down. I would never want to see the guy ever again (who clearly has a fetish and an unhealthy obsession!!). I mean, talk about being clinched to your ex

Damon and Caroline’s relationship was SO TOXIC in s1 !! 💥 And the show never really acknowledged that!! I mean, sure, they did, but I don’t think Damon realised the pain he caused her: he manipulated her, fed on her, hurt her, compelled her, used her to get what he wanted, abused her, put her life in danger, over and over again 🤢🤬😡

LEXIIIIIIIIII 💖💖💖 Finally! I remember I liked her a lot, but she’s just one of the best, purest character! I’m so happy Stefan can AT LEAST count on her 💕

WHAT?! 😱 SHE DIED SO SOON IN THE SHOW??!?? 💔😭 I didn’t remember that at all! I think my mind erased that fact from my mind because it hurt too much!

Ugh, Logan 😑

I hate what they did with Bonnie 😡 In s1 she’s this incredibly judgy character who ruins every single plan by having ridiculously high moral standards (for this fictional universe, at least), ugh. I love her but they used her to create unnecessary conflict in the show and she didn’t deserve that. Also she didn’t deserve all the pain, the deaths & the misery. She’s one of the (many) characters who have suffered SO MUCH throughout the seasons and they really did her dirty and i’m so mad about that !!

The flashbacks from 1864 were quite well done. I always found it interesting to learn more about Katherine’s past and the Salvatore brothers’ tragic origin story.

*sighs* John Gilbert... urrffffgh 🙄

Isobel being Elena’s biological mother AND Alaric’s ex wife was... so weird 🤨

Overall, I don’t have a lot of opinions for that season because I was bored half of the time 🤷‍♀️ I just really wasn’t interested about the plot and/or the characters because it was all so cliché and cheap. This season was really bad. It’s not working at all, for me at least.

S2 :

Katherine is a GREAT character and you can’t fight me on that 💁🏻‍♀️👠👑

The addition of the werewolves was quite a good idea, though it was predictable so far. Werewolves and vampires often come together in fantasy 🤷‍♀️ Tyler’s storyline was interesting though 🤔 The whole idea of a curse that you activate when you become responsible for someone’s death, no matter your intentions, was good.

CAROLINE BECOMING A VAMPIRE WAS ONE OF THE BEST THING HAPPENING TO THIS SHOW : YES ! 👏 She was such a better person as a vampire. She was arguably the best vampire of them all, the one who truly succeeded the most at adapting at her new life 💕

I DO NOT understand WHY Damon would ask for troubles to Mason, a werewolf, whose bite is DEADLY to him 🙄

Elijah was so different in s2 than I remembered. So uptight, and yet so evil ?? I remembered him as the nice brother in the Michaelson family. But the way he relentlessly targets Rose and her family and friends... yikes 😣🥺

Klaus was so HYPED by the show. Even Katherine herself was terrified of him 😱 And when you think about it, he might be one of the most dangerous creature of TVD’s lore... 🧐 But compared to other vilains, he was quite friendly.

Bonnie and Jeremy... mmm.... sure. You know what, it doesn’t scream “soulmate” but it doesn’t have to be. It can be just a messy, complicated, unexplainable crush. It can just be two people liking each other and enjoying each other’s company without trying to look for a deeper thing. Plus the situation is so awkward, with Jeremy being Bonnie’s best friend’s little baby brother, that it was fun to watch! 😄

My heart still feels for Jenna 💔 She had just learnt the truth about vampires and she had JUST figured out why everyone in her life was acting so weird... and then she died. And idk she was a lovely, messy, funny, pure heartface, completely lost gardian... 💕 and I’m gonna miss her. I would have liked to see her react to what happened next on the show (and how she could have supported Elena & Jeremy through all of this, etc.) 🥺

OF COURSE STEFAN WOULD MAKE A DEAL WITH KLAUS TO GET A CURE FOR HIS BROTHER! Is this Supernatural?

So, yeah, same thing here: most of the storylines developed in this season didn’t interest me whatsoever. So I don’t have a lot of things to say about this season, but just bear with me pls 🐻

S3 :

I absolutely adore Stefan as a ripper in s3. Especially regarding his complicated relationship with Klaus... I think his dependency / addiction to blood is really interesting 🤔 Stefan can’t be a regular vampire, drinking blood from humans then erasing their memories / drinking from blood blags. He can’t because he feels so guilty for the lives he takes / the pain he inflicts on other. So he’s like all or nothing 🤷‍♀️ A human blood-free diet guy. Or a merciless killer.

Regarding of the whole delena / stelena ship war... *sighs* 😔 I honestly don’t know 🤷‍♀️ Both relationships seem hella toxic (for different reasons, but still). I do believe Elena loved them both (maybe not at the same time, though). So, I don’t know who she should have ended up with... I remember shipping her with Damon on my first watch, but now I realise that was purely for the bad boy vibes (i.e bad boy, who, deep down, isn’t so bad because turns out he can change and blah blah blah... ugh what a cliché i know 🙄). So anyway, I’m not gonna defend Delena, it’s as messed up as Stelena if you ask me. But that’s where my heart went on the first watch and that’s who she canonically ends up with, so I’m not gonna fight it and try to make a case of whether she should have ended up with another person (or alone?). In my head, she’s with Damon 🙃 Just cause’ it’s easier, more convinient, and I’m lazy that way 😅 But I understand people who ship/prefer Stelena over Delena. I’m just not THAT invested in this freaking love triangle anymore ✋

The show really took off when they introduced the original vampires if you ask me 🧛‍♂️ Their backstory is so tragic, and after that, it makes more sense why Elijah, Rebekah and Klaus are so close, trust each other so much and manage to forgive the worst of each other💖

Rebekah, that poor girl who only ever wanted to have a human normal life and to BOND with people (whether they were family, friends or more than friends...) 💕has been betrayed by EVERYONE 🔪She was daggered more times than I can even count, and I’m surprised she hasn’t killed everyone out of pure revenge yet!

Yeeeeep. Still ships Klaroline. ❤️

My God, what would I give to see Caroline explore this world and enjoy the perks of her vampire life with Klaus...🥰 She wanted that. She secretly dreamed of that. And frankly, she deserved that. She deserved to feel happy and fulfilled and excited about her future! She deserved more than the life she got in Mystic Falls ✨ More than Tyler! More than Jessy. More than Damon. And more than Stefan too, even if she did seem happy with him in the end. I think I liked Klaus as a romantic option for the same reasons I liked Damon back then. For the challenge. For the way they always push their girlfriends further, and make them want more of life than what they’ve got. For the way they make them ambitious.

I think the reason this season feels so useless is because they try to find a way to eliminate the Original family... only to find out that if they do that, EVERY VAMPIRE EVER WILL ALSO DIE 👏

I despised the whole evil alter ego trope that they did with Alaric 😪😴 I liked the idea of the ring having real bad consequences. But here, Alaric can’t take responsibility for wanting to cheat on death precisely because he has a second personality that he cannot control. The blame is just put on somebody else, an entire other person that just cohabits in Alaric’s body. I never really liked the whole Dr Jekill & Mr Hide trope 🤷‍♀️ And I don’t think it was bringing anything to the table, honestly. It’s boring (because SO obvious and predictable) and it takes forever to deal with (ugh) 😑

NOOOOOOOOOO RICK 😭💔 He was one of my favorite character. I really loved his relationship with Elena and Jeremy + his friendship with Damon. I’m gonna miss him really hard. The scene with Damon on his grave was really sweet 🥺

S4:

Elena being a vampire : YES! 👏 We’ve been waiting for this for so long, the show really needed this to go on (realistically the show would have had trouble to move on if Elena would have stayed human for a lot longer). So I’m really glad about that being the premise for s4 ☺️ Plus her transition is well handled, with her memories coming back + her emotions being heightened (the scene where she bursts into laugh and cannot stop was really funny and somehow relatable 😂).

The scene in the car with Stefan, Matt & Elena VS Stefan, Elena & her father was really well done! 👏 I loved the parallel where she wants Stefan to save Matt first, just like her father wanted him to save Elena first. So touching 💕 It’s a tough choice and Stefan will have to live with both consequences for the rest of his life, which will NOT be easy with Damon blaming him for Elena’s death. But, really, Damon kinda has a point : "in what world are you [Matt] the one that gets to live?”. Matt has been saved so many times on the show and it’s legit to ask yourself : WHY? Why him? 🤷‍♀️He’s so irrelevant and useless. But I get that’s the whole point. Human life is irrelevant and useless (in the great scheme of things). And yet, we fight for it ✊ Because somehow it matters.

S4 helped me remember what I didn’t like about Stefan, regarding his relationship with Elena. He really had a big problem with her being a vampire, and he spent half of his time trying to “control” / “fix” her 🙄 He’s got such high standards for Elena when she turns into a vampire. It’s like he expects her to not make the same mistakes as he - or any other vampire in the history of vampirism - did. He desperately wants her to be a “good” vampire right away and avoid the “killer without humanity” phase 🤔 Which is understandable. He doesn’t want her to become a bad vampire who doesn’t care about human life, as he was during his ripper phase (or like Damon).

Damon truly accepted her, the new her, vampire! Elena 👐 You can argue that it’s because he’s selfish and he wants people to act as bad and carelessly as him (that’s why he tried to manipulate Stefan into drinking human blood again in s1 : he doesn’t want to be alone and he needs someone else to party with)... But he isn’t selfish when it comes to Elena 🤷‍♀️ The show proved us that. He wanted her to have a human normal life, to be happy, to grow old and have children. He wanted to give her that, and that’s why he would have saved her over Matt on the bridge. He’s not happy that she is a vampire. That’s not what he wanted. Never. But now that she is, and that there’s nothing they can do about it (that they know of), Damon tries to make the best out of it

Anyway, Caroline is such a better teacher then Damon or Stefan 😅 Drop the Salvatore brothers and get educated on the vampire life with your bff, Elena !

Elena being sired by Damon, OMMGG! 😮😮😮 So much drama, I really loved it. It was smart to use that as a way to postpone Delena for a little bit - playing on the general doubt that Elena might not truly love Damon and she might just be under the influence of the sire bond. Which, let’s be honest, was a legit consideration to have. So, yeah... REALLY GLAD that, in the end, the sire bond didn’t create those feelings out of nowhere, it only heightened and amplified what was already there beforehand. Otherwise, it would have been really problematic, especially regarding consent issues 😕

I love that Damon makes the right choice again with Elena and “sets her free”. He doesn’t want their relationship to be fake. And so he uses the sire bond to send her away, to be herself, to live her life without worrying about what makes him happy. You can say everything you want about Damon, at least he gets it right by her ☝️Just like when he confessed his feelings to her, but compelled her to forget because she’s in love with Stefan and he doesn’t want to mess it up. He was not selfish when it came to her.

It was really heartbreaking to see Jeremy becoming a hunter and having the sudden urges to kill his own sister and basically everybody else in his life 😢

Poor Carol Lockwood! 💔 She didn’t deserve to die. She tried so hard to help for Tyler, even when she learnt he was a werewolf, she cared so much for him...😭

Their inability to communicate with each other is INSANE. At some point in s4, they all know Shane is practicing a magic called “Expression”. Damon and Stefan also know that kind of magic is incredibly dark and dangerous (from their little trip to New Orleans when they tried to find a way to deactivate the sire bond and the witch there told them she wasn’t practicing this kind of magic). But NO ONE has still put two and two together. And so, Bonnie keeps blindly trusting Shane and hanging out with him 🤦‍♀️

The whole search for the cure was quite interesting and entertaining to watch! Each one of them wanted it for a different reason : destroy it, use it, share it, give it away, save it for later... Which really well portrayed how people can react to the idea of mortality. The fact that there’s only one dose was really genius! That makes it even more interesting to see who’s gonna fight for it (i.e. Rebekah, Stefan), who’s gonna just drop it because turns out they didn’t really want it to begin with (i.e. Damon, Caroline), who’s gonna exchange/bargain it and for what (i.e Katherine, maybe), who’s gonna get it the end and what will they do with it. Will it all be worth it? 🧐

Jeremyyyyy 💔😭 R.I.P 💀

Honestly, even though I still think Matt is irrelevant to the show, let’s remember he also has lost every single person in his life (his dad and his mom are basically gone, Vicky is dead, Tyler left town again, his goddamn history teacher died too) - and now he can add Jeremy, his best friend, to the list 😭 He’s handling it all WAY better than anyone else. I mean you don’t see him burning down the house he grew up in for instance! However, I agree that Elena have lost more people in her family than him (her adoptive parents, Jenna, Alaric, Jeremy, even John... and Isobel is basically gone too). But it’s not like you can compare their lost, anyway. They boty suffered a lot, but I just wanted to say... I liked that the show acknowledged Matt lost someone important for him too 💕

No humanity! Elena, OOMMMGGG!! 🤯 I was so mad when it happened, because Damon could have just used the sire bond to make her deal with her brother’s death, he could have just helped through the grief and tell her it was going to be okay. He didn’t need to make her turn off her humanity 🙄 Real dumb move here!

I kinda liked the friendship between Elena without humanity and Rebecca! Their little trip starting off in NY was fun!

Katherine is, and will always be, the baddest bitch in town! ❤️ I was quite surprised to see her kill Jeremy so heartlessly, but I guess it fits the character. She’ll always be looking out for herself and the opportunity to take the cure and be one step ahead of everyone was obviously too good to leave out. She always had to fight for her own survival, in a world that’s always been dangerous and ruthless against her, so it makes sense she became who she is 🤷‍♀️

Of all the things that could have triggered Elena’s humanity flip switch, really? Matt Donovan? 🤨😑 I mean, it makes sense since Elena seems to value his life over everything else, including her own. But from what we’ve seen so far, she wasn’t really happy when she was dating Matt 😕 They used to fight a lot, they didn’t want the same thing out of life, they just were really different people. And that’s fine, they didn’t work out as a couple, but they can stay friend... Except you don’t really see them interract THAT much as friends. I mean it’s a lot of "say" and not enough "show", for me 🧐 You don’t feel the bond that two best friends should have... between them. You don’t see inside jokes, common interests, similar hobbies, laughters and tears, serious conversations that last for hours, or small talks over the phone... Anyway, from what we were shown so far, she shouldn’t feel that close to Matt. Not more than, idk, Bonnie, Caroline, Damon or Stefan for instance! So the fact that she cares SO MUCH about him is kinda strange 🤔

“He was your first love, I intend to be your last. However long that takes” LOOK WHO’S BAAAACK 👀 My favorite hybrid! Awww of course he was gonna come back for Caroline ❤️

Btw the ceremony was very cute 💕 It’s the end of high school! The end of an era! And they all graduated 🍾🎊🎉

Awwwwww, when Bonnie dropped the veil and everyone got to see their dead friends and family again! Stefan & Lexi, Damon and Alaric, Elena & Jeremy 💖

BONNIIIIIE, OH NOOOO, WHYYY 😭💔 oh no no no no no no no, she wants to keep her death a secret from everyone, that is such a bad idea!!! 😣

OMG SILAS IS A DOPPELGÄNGER OF STEFAN !!! 🤯 POOR STEFAN IS STUCK IN THE BOTTOM OF THE LAKE AND NO ONE KNOWS, NOOOOOO 💔😭

S5 :

The whole college experience with Caroline and Elena was so fun to rewatch😁 I wish Bonnie could have been there though, even if she kinda was.

It feels good to watch Elena and Damon being happily in love together and enjoying the summer ❤️☀️ But when you think about Stefan drowning over and over in that lake... it feels so bad :(

Katherine as a human is devastatingly entertaining! "I’m the freaking moonstone" 🤣 So iconic that she, of all people, took the cure! I loved that twist.

I loved the complicated and messy love triangle between Quetsiya, Amara and Silas. I want to empathise with Quetsiya and support her, because Silas screwed her over in such a supernatural, mystical way... he cheated on her and tricked her. He manipulated her to get what he wanted. So yeah, I’m all team Quetsiya ✊ but then again, she is sort of over-paranoid and obssesive? 🤷‍♀️ And being screwed over by a guy doesn’t exactly justify her quest for vengeance. So... I guess the only one who’s okay is Amara?? We don’t see a lot of her but I respect her wish to die after thousands of year in pain, as the anchor of the other side (which, btw, was BRILLIANT! 🤯 Quetsiya’s a genius! o.O)

"You are my life" ❤️ GOD, Damon always finding the right words!

I hate the travelers storyline 🙅‍♀️ I find it incredibly boring and I’m not that attached to Nadia. The only thing I liked about her was her relationship with her mom, Katherine. But apart from that, I don’t really like them as villains, nor as their storyline with Silas 😑😕

Stefan loosing his memory is okay-ish. It’s such a cliché as a trope, but it sort of works because Paul Wesley does such a great work at portraying different Stefans 👍 and it’s always entertaining to watch. And even though I usually ship Delena, I have to admit Elena recreating some moments with Stefan was very cute! 💕So it works but I’m not a big fan.

What I am a big fan of is the evolving relationship between Damon and Jeremy! 🥰 I mean, you can see that he didn’t really care about him, that he was mostly protecting him as a way to please Elena... But then, something changed 🤔He started caring for him for real, kinda like a big brother would:)

"You’re Katherine Pierce. Suck it up" hell yes 💪 keep fightingt, love !

Awwwwwww Bonnie 💔 Why do you always have to sacrifice yourself and put everyone else’s happiness before your own?? It’s really sad to see her becoming the anchor of the other side, feeling literally every single death of all the supernatural beings out there :’(

The Augustine vampire storyline!! 😮I’ve had completely forgotten about that! I love how they connected Damon with that institution, and how they introduced Enzo as Damon’s old mate. Well done👍

Katherine in Elena’s body: OMG! Love it! She’s such a survivor ❤️ That’s gonna mess things up so bad xD (btw the fact NO ONE notices anything is kinda weird and if I was Elena, I would be offended)

Nooooooo, don’t break up with Damon as Elena !!! 😱😱 Uuuughhh!!! Whyyy 😭

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG CAROLINE SLEPT WITH KLAUS !!! ❤️HELL YAS B**CH!!! SHE FINALLY ADMITTED HER FEELINGS FOR HIM !!! THEY KISSED !!! IT’S OFFICIAL !!! (i know klaus will never come back to TVD ever again buuuut... i’m still so so SO happy about that Klaroline reunion!)

Awwwww my baby Liv ❤️ I’ve missed her, she was so precious in season 5 !

Katherine AGRESSIVELY flirting with Stefan, while pretending to be Elena, was... both fun and hard to watch 😅Katherine was soooo pushy! And the fact that Stefan still doesn’t see she’s not Elena was infuriating! Like there’s just no way Elena would ever act like that!

"You’re never gonna as interesting as the next guy she wants to sleep with” poor Nadia 😭 that’s so true though :/ she didn’t deserve to die, I was really sad for her. She deserved a better life than the one she’s got 💔💔💔

FINALLY! 🙌 Finally they put two and two together and figured out Katherine is inside Elena’s body! Thank God 🙏 Caroline made me laugh so much with her "it’s Elena, we would have noticed something" speech. I was like YES. MY POINT EXACTLY 👏 I loved when they figured out all the little details that have been wrong ever since the beginning of this whole mess, like : Katherine was the reason that Tyler knew Caroline slept with Klaus. And Caroline’s like : oooohhh it all makes sense now. Wow. Congrats for figuring this out just now! 🙄

R.I.P Katherine ❤️ Weirdly, she will be missed. She did deserve better.

Jeremy was kind of a jerk with Bonnie in s5 ? I mean he was okay in the first few episodes i guess but then he completely ignored her... not cool bro, not cool 👎

The whole "Why do people seem to expect more of me?" speech of Caroline felt very relatable 👏 Just because she’s kind, because she’s trying to do good, doesn’t mean it’s easier for her! 😤 Plus, why do people keep slut-shaming her for having sex with Klaus when she’s not the first, nor the last, to have had one night stands with - arguably - bad people! ✋

Damon and Elena breaking up : lol 😆 As if. We know they’re endgame. Please. It’s only a matter of episodes until they find their way back to each other, which is why they are kinda cute as a couple.

Ugh 😑 Markos 🤦‍♀️ I just can’t ✋

Bonniiiiiiiiiiie !! Stop lying to everybody!! I hated how she was pretending she had a spell to escape the Other Side collapsing! Haven’t you learnt anything by now? Talk to your friend, figure out a plan together and if not, at leat say your goodbyes and enjoy your last moments with them!

Did I already say I hate the travelers storyline? Well, I do. I hate it 🤬

Season 5 finale was PEFRECT, I loved it. Bonnie resurrecting everyone, Liv doing the spell, Silas helping them just to be destroyed in the end (a fitting ending), Damon and Elena driving through the Grill to kill all the travelers, Alaric coming back, Markos dying... BUT. But, but, but, I was so upset about Damon!! It was just a matter of time and if they would have just kept going with the spell for a few seconds (damn you, Luke!), he would have been able to come through! And Lexi, omg 😭 at least she found peace❤️

Btw, that’s exactly what I meant about Bonnie’s character. Throughout the seasons she never stops sacrificing herself for other people (sometimes those people don’t even deserve it). She keeps lying to everyone. She lied when she died the day of graduation. She didn’t say how much it hurt her to be the anchor. She lied when she said they had a way to bring her back from the Other Side when it was collapsing. She kept minimising her (big-ass) problems. She kept putting other people before herself. And she’s one of the characters who suffered the most. Her storyline revolves around pain. The show doesn’t allow her to be fully happy. And btw, no one truly cares about her happiness (except maybe Jeremy and then Enzo), at least not when somebody else’s safety or comfort is at play. She’s never number 1 on the priority list. If somebody needs her to do a spell or whatever, they will use her. No matter how much danger she puts herself in 🤬

"Please don’t leave me” 😭😭😭 I felt that... It crushed my heart 💔

S6 :

I loved the way everybody coped with Bonnie and Damon’s deaths 💕 Elena got addicted to some magical herbs that made her hallucinate Damon again because she couldn’t deal with his death. Jeremy left a tone of angry voicemails to Bonnie’s old phone - which he paid for. Caroline got dragged into work and research in order to find a way to get back in Mystical Falls. Stefan moved on completely and started off a new life. It’s just... a nice way to show grief 😊

Ooohh I smell some Steroline moments!! Poor Caroline. To me, she deserved better than Stefan! He was such a jerk to her, especially in the beginning 😤😡

NOOOOOOOOOOOO 💔 ELENA DON’T ERASE YOUR MEMORIES! WHAT! WILL! YOU! DO! WHEN! DAMON! INEVITABLY! COMES! BACK! Elenaaaaa 😤 You have to learn how to deal with grief for real !

The fact she trusts Rick completely to do that was so beautiful though... They’re family and it was nice to see their bond.

Bonnie and Damon were kinda cute ! Like I don’t ship them, per say. But I get why some people do 🤷‍♀️ They had chemistry and they worked as an enemies to lovers trope. Anyway, I personally liked their friendship, how they both learnt how to support each other, how to function as a team, how they helped each other through the worst! In the end, Damon truly cared about her, and that’s why he was ready to do anything in order to save her 💪

Kaaaaaaiiiiii 🙈 i’m so conflicted about ya

I totally ship Jalaric ! ❤️ I loved how Elena tried to fix them up together! They’re really cute together. They both have complicated pasts and a messy family. They understand each other :) And Jo is such a confident woman! She knows what she wants, she’s not afraid of speaking her mind, she’s kinda fierce!

The fact that Elena wanted her memories back JUST when Alaric became human again was just... aaarrghh 🤬

"I think I deserve better than that” YES 👏 YOU 👏 DO 👏 CAROLINE! Stefan treated you like shit and you’re right to protect yourself, sweatheart 💕 I really didn’t like how he tried so hard to make amends... without acknowledging how much he hurt her, how he abandoned everyone, how he behaved like a jerk. I liked that Caroline took some distances for her own good 💖 #SelfRespectIsReal

The Gemini coven was really interesting. This idea of such a dysfunctional family, with a psychopath brother who killed half his siblings to merge with his twin sister in order to get leadership for the coven... it was all very compelling! Loved it ❤️

I think I have a thing for storylines about supernatural families in TVD : the Salvatores, the Mikealsons, the Parkers !

Liv and Tyler... mmm... don’t care 🤷‍♀️

You’re telling me that Damon got out of the prison world, even KAI got out, and BONNIE still gets stuck over there!! 🤬 Wtf ?? Why does this show hate this character so much? Why is she always the one who gets screwed in the end?? I just hate the way they treated her!! 😱

There was literally no good outcome to that whole twin-merging-together mess. If Liv merged with Luke, one of them would die and that’s not an option! If Kai merged with Jo, there was a huge chance he would win, which is simply not acceptable at all. Anyway, what a mess!

Kai literally sucking all the magic from the travelers’ spell, finally breaking it, allowing vampires to come back to Mystic Falls, was just... wOw! o.O

Luke merging with Kai 😭 R.I.P 💔

The ONLY good thing about that merge was watching Kai trying to deal with his feelings like ??? what’s going on??? 🧐🧐Why do i... feel??... stuff ?? 🤨🤨

"So I googled how to process emotional pain", i mean i hear you my boy, let’s not pretend that’s not my usual monday 👩🏻‍💻 "so i start writing and this water literally started pouring in my eyes ?? does that ever happen to you ??”, again same 😂

Jeremy going to art school... meh, it was okay. Clearly they didn’t know what to do with him anymore, so yeah, why not art school? 🤷‍♀️ The going-away party was nice :) Damon giving a joint to Jeremy was sort of sweet, Elena smoking it with him was also cool and quite funny!

Ugh 😑 Enzo & Sarah Salvatore... 🙄 this storyline was so boring, i just didn’t care

First Steroline kiss! 😳😮 Okay, that was kinda cute, I have to admit. But still, I don’t like the fondation of this ship, I think that Stefan hurt her too bad and, most importantly, didn’t respect her enough to get to come back and kiss her.

Sheriff Forbes being sick was KILLING me 😭😭😭 She didn’t deserve that at all, she was the sweatest, kindest, purest, most compassionate woman on this show... and she passed it on to Caroline...

The scene with the bike and little Caroline was so touching ❤️❤️😭 RIP Liz’!

OMGOMGOMG!!! Caroline flipped her humanity switch! 😱 "I just need the pain to be gone" 😭 I get why she did it, and I also thought Elena was being a little bit condescending with her. She had the right to turn it all out. Everyone else did. I get why she thought it was unfair :/

BONNIE’S BACK Y’ALL ❤️❤️❤️

I do not understand why people on this show just won’t accept people turning off their humanity switch 🤷‍♀️ I mean, Stefan, Damon, Elena,... they all did it! And every single time, the others tried really hard to fix that. And I’m like : why? I’m not sure it’s the smartest move here 🧐 Because they usually end up making things worse 😑 Look at Elena : she just wanted to not feel the pain of her brother’s death for a while. She even tried to make a deal with Stefan and Damon : leave me alone, let me do my things and I’ll behave. But of course, they refused 🙄🤦‍♀️ Because they couldn’t accept the fact that their precious Elena would ever be bad and do bad thing 😒🙄 And then Elena became ruthless! Who would have thought? 🙄 Same for Caroline! The poor girl lost her mother. She just wanted to get waisted, sing some karaoke songs, and live her vampire life without any care in the world. She even erased Liam’s memories when she fed on him. Her first instinct was to buy new clothes to start over and come back to her dorm to keep leaving her old college life! She kinda had it under control 🤷‍♀️ And then, she suggested a deal, kind of like the one Elena tried to make with Stefan and Damon :☝️ one year without humanity, and she behaves and doesn’t kill anyone. That’s a good deal if you ask me 🤷‍♀️ Why not let her have that? Why not agree with that deal? Caroline without humanity is still Caroline (sort of) : she’s functional, and to quote Caroline herself : she is not an idiot. She doesn’t want to feel so she’s ready to do anything to not be bothered. I think she would have respected her end of the deal. If you take a good look at it, in both cases, it’s when other people tried to bring them back, when they broke the deal, that Elena/Caroline became killers.

Stefan shutting off his humanity was so dumb 🤦‍♀️🙄 Elena was going to find Sarah, he still had time! And even if she didn’t, and Liam killed Sarah, it’d be one ☝️ dead body. But by turning off his humanity, Stefan practically ensured that there’d be more dead bodies after that!

Damon’s mom... urf, yeah? sure. I guess I should care? 🤷‍♀️ Honestly, even when I first watched the show, I found that storyline super boring. She didn’t inspire me anything whatsoever. Anyway, using her as Stefan’s emotional trigger was sort of smart, but kinda reckless. I mean, they had no idea if it was gonna work or not, and still they still risked it, I-... urf 🤦‍♀️

I liked Stefan’s little revenge 😈😈 He’s like : no, no, no, Caroline, you don’t get to have an elaborate system that protects you from feeling guilt whenever you’ll decide to turn your humanity back on. I’m gonna make your life a living-hell. I’m gonna break you. You don’t get to ruin MY life and keep being the same control-freak, organised, college girl 💁‍♀️

Alaric&Jo thinking about baby names 🥰

The cure is BACK??? Hell no 😤 I mean, sure, it was interesting the first time, don’t get me wrong. But we’ve already watched that storyline. So 🤷‍♀️

Btw, I hate how suddenly, everybody’s like "omg poor Elena will NEVER get the life that she truly wants, she’s condamned to an eternity as a vampire, without ever having the possibility of settling down and starting a family" 😱 like i don’t know Elena’s been FINE about her vampirism for like 4 seasons. She seems happy, she seems to have found a way to make the best out of it. But sure, NOW that the cure is back, she feels like her life is unbearable - how convenient🙄

"For the first time, I’m putting ME first" HELL YES, BONNIE ✊🏿 I wish she could do that more often though.

Awwww Caroline getting her humanity back was really sad and emotional 💕💕The LETTER 😭 The fucking letter 😭 "I’m sorry Stefan, I ruined everything" 😭

Are we gonna address Matt, Tyler and Alaric’s alcoholism or are we simply gonna pretend they don’t have a drinking problem and their behaviour is totally socially-acceptable ?? 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

I know it was her choice and it was probably for the best, but I think Elena taking the cure was a big mistake 😕 The show was way more entertaining when she was a vampire, and they basically erased every possibility of a "happy" ending for my favorite characters 💔 Elena will loose everyone she ever cared about, including Stefan and Caroline. She will have to move out of Mystic Falls and isolate herself from all her former friends. Damon is taking the cure with her so he will have to say goodbye to his own brother, the only family he has left. All of that... for a human life ?? A meaningless job?? Bills to pay?? School?? Money issues?? A house to maintain?? Misery and despair?? Children?? In that messed up world?? With that economy??? And the environment crisis we’re living?? Nope, I don’t get it 🤷‍♀️ I just don’t.

Secretly, I had always dreamed of Elena, Stefan, Damon and Caroline all being vampires and spending eternity together. And double date forever, I guess 😅

NOOOOOOOOO 😭😭😭 R.I.P Jo 💔

LIV !!!! 💔 NO, NO, NO, NO! Whyyyy 😭

AND THAT BASTARD GETS TO LIVE!!! What did do you do Lily? Oh my freaking God, why would you turn Kai into an heretic? He was already such a pain in the ass and now he’s even more powerful! Thanks to you, he has killed his entire family and he gets to live!! 🤬🤬

I ABSOLUTELY HATE WHAT THEY DID WITH BONNIE AND ELENA!! That whole "I linked your life with Elena’s" 😡 Cause it’s like : OF COURSE, we want to pick the main character. Of course we want Elena to come back to life. Of course we would be ready to sacrifice Bonnie if it means that Elena gets to live in the present with her friends and family. BUT BONNIE DOESN’T DESERVE THAT! She deserves to be the one, as Caroline used to say, to be picked upon everybody else. She deserves to live as much as Elena, even more (after everything she has done, everything she has sacrificed for her friends). She deserves to be happy! But now, everyone resents her for being alive, because if she’s alive then that means she is taking "Elena’s place". Now she feels guilty for being alive and breathing. For. Fucking. Being. Alive. Think about that. Again, I’m sorry if I repeat myself but : WHY THE HELL DID THIS SHOW HATE BONNIE’S CHARACTER SO MUCH?? 🤬🤬🤬

I’m just gonna say it once : The show is just not the same without Elena 🤷‍♀️

Btw, I KNOW Kai specifically said not to try anything to undo the spell he casted - otherwise Elena and Bonnie would BOTH die... But I’m surprised they didn’t even try to search for a loophole 🤔 I mean, let’s be real, when has Damon ever listened to anyone trying to reason with him? When did any of them? 🤷‍♀️ Bonnie would NEVER stop looking for a magical loophole to save her best friend. Caroline would read an entire library of mystical books to find a clue. Stefan and Damon would travelled the whole world to meet with different witches, trying to find some kind of magic that could undo the spell. No one would ever listen to Kai and just do nothing! I mean, he could be bluffing for all they know 😵 He could be saying that in order to mess with them. Were they really gonna take his word for granted? 🤔 I’m not saying "try the first anti-spell you find and roll the dices", but at least try and look for something!

S7 :

Anyway, AT LEAST, we get to see some good sweet Bamon scenes ! I love how Damon seemed to genuinely care about Bonnie. He didn’t want her to die, even if it meant he would see Elena again 💕

"You’re my best friend" awwwwww ❤️

I... liked the Heretics!😳 They were a fun new, even if they reminded me of Pearl and her vampire friends (in the "we are trying to coexist with humans but some of us don’t want to" trope). And again, I kinda have a thing for supernatural dysfunctional family, so... 🤷‍♀️ Valerie was very relatable as a depressed immortal being, Beau was so loyal it was really sweet, Malcom was boring but he died pretty quickly so he wasn’t in the show for long, Mary Louise and Nora were... the absolute cutest couple ❤️

How many times can they evacuate Mystic Falls without people realizing something’s wrong? 🤔 How many stories about gaz leak can they come up with?? 🤦‍♀️ Where are all the humans going? They’re moving away because they’re all compelled, sure, but to go where? like how can that many people find new homes in new cities, especially considering this crappy housing market? It just seems pretty unlikely that these people would just start over so easily, find new jobs, new homes for their families🧐

Stefan & Valerie was basically Steferine all over again 🤷‍♀️ I don’t have anything against Valerie herself. I think she’s probably the nicest one amongst the heretics. I even liked her chemistry with Stefan but it’s the same storyline recycled all over again, so I don’t really care much. Plus, I liked the idea that Katherine was Stefan’s first love (💕). First of all, Katherine being Stefan’s first love makes their story... EPIC. We, as an audience, care deeply about Katherine (whether we like her or not). She’s a regular and important character. We want her to have a compelling story, one that fits the legend that was Katherine Pierce. Valerie, as nice and interesting as she can be, only appears in the two last season. Plus, if Stefan had already been in love with Valerie and had already had his heart broken BEFORE knowing Katherine, then he should have acted differently when he met her 💡 He should have been way more suspiciously towards her 🧐 he wouldn’t have so easily trusted another woman, coming at his door with a pity story... if he had already been betrayed and abandoned by THE FIRST WOMAN he ever loved, the one who took his "v-card", his first love.

Hello Oscar... Goodbye Oscar 👋

Are you kidding me ? Bonnie is in pain yet again, because of some mystical element AGAIN, and nobody cares AGAIN. People keep using her, lying to her, manipulating her to get what they want and I- 🤬 Btw HOW is she okay with this? How would Bonnie ever agree to help raise people from the dead? What about her values and morals? What about everything she believes in??

These "Three Years from Now" scenes were just TERRIBLE 🤦‍♀️ Epic failure. I simply don’t care about whatever happens in the "future”. I’ll make my own headcanons, thank you ✋

JULIAN... UGH 🤢🤮 Could you be even more despicable?? Beating up a pregnant woman to the point of loosing her baby?? Poor Valerie, she didn’t feel like she could tell her own mother about that cause’ she knew Lily wouldn’t believe her 😢

Awwwwwww Ric bringing ""Jo"" back from the dead 😭💖 I felt bad for that poor vampire who just woke up in somebody else’s body, after years being trapped in some hell... And It was really heartbreaking to watch him get his hopes up and then realise she wasn’t his wife :’(

OMG CAROLINE’S PREGNANT??? 🤰WITH RIC’S BABIES??? 😱 I... I don’t even know what to think of that. I don’t really know how to react... Good for the twins? I guess? Yay, they’re alive? But... I don’t know, seems kinda rapy to put someone else’s babies inside a woman’s body without her consent ?? 🧐

The fact that Valerie HAD to confess her very traumatic story, to multiple people, MULTIPLE TIMES... because it was convenient to the plot was disgusting! 🤮🤬 She was merely used as a reason to try to kill Julian... Valerie was beaten by Julian to the point she lost her baby! She never said anything because she was afraid no one would believe her/people would judge her/people would hurt her - which is completely understandable considering how traumatic this must have been for her! But then she comes back to MF and Stefan keeps asking her to justify herself like she owes him a goddamn explanation for not having returned earlier as she had promised... um? I get that Stefan had his heart broken back then, but aren’t you mature enough NOW to understand something wrong must have happened?? And that maybe she just doesn’t want to talk about it because it still hurts?? It’s HER life and she is entitled to live it however the hell she wants?? EVEN if she just changed her mind and decided not to come back for an entirely different reason, it’s her choice! Having sex with someone ONCE doesn’t mean you OWE them anything! 🤦‍♀️🤬 Promises were made, sure, but they were both very young and things can change! ANYWAY... And when they need allies to kill Julian, she is almost forced to tell her story again, just to make people feel pity and sympathy... She’s not a damn tool, for God’s sake, respect the poor girl! 😤

While rewatching the show, I kind of like that they addressed Lily’s romantic patterns and how she had a tendency to chose violent, controlling, abusing husbands (first Giuseppe, and then Julian...) 🧐 It was touching to hear her story, and to understand that she only stayed with Giuseppe back then to protect her sons, Damon & Stefan. She had a plan to run away, she wanted to escape because she knew she was in danger with him, she was well aware he wasn’t treating her right. But sometimes you can’t just go away. Sometimes things are more complicated. 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️ I liked that she realised her own pattern and that she tried to stand up for herself against Julian after that... even though it didn’t end well (which... seriously? 🤦‍♀️ She killed herself? Is that the message you wanna send to all the people stuck in abusive/violent relationship? 🤮)

Poor Lily 😭😭😭 R.I.P. 💔

Damon burning Elena’s coffin... 🔥🔥 Yeah. Sure. As if 🙄 Honestly, even on my first watch, I wasn’t believing it. The show without Elena is such a catastrophic mess! If she had died in her sleep, it would have been devastating. I don’t think the show would have survived that. I think it would have been cancelled before s8, or something like that.

Stefan was... surprisingly not reacting a lot to Caroline being PREGNANT🤰?? I mean... I don’t know... I was expecting some kind of big talk about it. Like "hey Caroline, how are you feeling about all this? What are your thoughts about having Ric’s babies? Do you even want to pursue the pregnancy (cause you DON’T have to carry someone else’s babies!)? What does this pregnancy mean to you? What will happen once the babies are born? Would you consider having shared custody with Ric? Or if you don’t want to be involved at all, would you like the twins not to know you were the one who carried them? Did you ever or would you ever want to be a mom? Would you want to have children of your own in the future? Do you ever think of that?” 🤷‍♀️ And those are just EXAMPLES. He didn’t have to ask all of these questions all at once! But you know, I wish they could have at least discussed some of these points together. Instead, he just let her "handle her things", because good old organised Caroline has every figured it out, of course! 🙄🙄 sure, she can take care of everything on her own 🤦‍♀️

I didn’t like the idea of putting Damon & Stefan in the Phoenix Stone... if it was all JUST to do THAT in the end. They tried to add some PTSD, pain and remorse but failed at making it compelling to the audience. Wooow, Stefan must let go of his toxic relationship with his brother in order to save himself... How obnoxious can you be, TVD? And oooohh, Damon must get rid off his toxic masculinity to face the fact that he loved and misses his mother... how original!! 🙄 I just feel like TVD was trying hard to be deeper than they were, and it didn’t work (for me)

FINALLY JULIAN IS DEAD 🙌🙏🎉

The Huntress was, like, a JOKE, okay? She’s supposed to have killed a thousands of vampires. Even heretics feared her. Stefan & Damon should already have been dead by now! What is she doing? How are we supposed to be afraid of her? She’s not doing anything, she is barely a threat 🤦‍♀️

Am I the only one who kinda saw great chemistry between Nora and Bonnie?💕

I LOVE how Klaus just IMMEDIATELY understood that Caroline was NEVER gonna let go of these kids 😍 I just love how he ultimately gets her, how he’s able to predict exactly what’s she’s going to do because he just knows her that well. Their phone talk was VERY cute ❤️ I love how he teased her with her own words : how she said she couldn’t possibly allow herself to be with him because she was "in college, building a life for herself” and he just wasn’t in the picture... and then turns out... she had kids! 😅 He sounded surprised but not completely shocked and I love how he was very understanding and sweet with her, she needed that 💕

Btw this season is just desperately LONG!

Awwww... Caroline... 😬 I understand why she wanted to stay in Dallas, and why she asked Stefan to consider moving here... but she should have been honest with him right away, the minute he picked up the phone. She should have told him she wanted to be involved in these kids’ life. I know that she was afraid Stefan wouldn’t want to “settle down" with her and take care of the twins... but she could have asked him. Directly. Clearly. Maybe he wouldn’t have minded living with her and raising the twins in some kind of shared custody 🤷‍♀️ Family comes in all shapes and sizes (💖), and as long as they told the truth to the twins, it wouldn’t have been a problem. And if Stefan didn’t want that at all, or wasn’t ready, or whatever, then they could have ended their relationship in a healthy way. By acknowledging they both wanted different things and that it just didn’t work out, as it often happens in life. But here, they’re just stuck in the middle... and it’s awkward 😳😐 Clearly, Caroline wants to live near the girls. She wants to be their mom, and clearly Stefan doesn’t seem THAT into it. But no one is saying anything and it’s just weird! 😤

I understand why Damon would make the choice of dessiccating in a coffin until Elena came back 🙂 He didn’t do it just for love. Not just because he missed her. Not because life was unbearable without her. That would have been really lame btw 😒 He did it because he didn’t want to directly or indirectly hurt people around him. And you know what, for once that was kind of the best, most reasonable - and most noble - decision to make. I was proud of him. The letter he gave Alaric was pretty sweet, but I’m glad Bonnie got to catch him before he left 💕

Bonnie saying "I’m not okay with that”😭 I was soooo glad that FOR ONCE she said what she was really thinking ! 👐Damon is her best friend, and I truly believe learning he left in a letter would have been devastating for her 😞 His choice means she will most likely NEVER see him again, ever, in her entire life 💔 I can totally understand her asking sincerly "are we friends?" cause if one my friends dared to do that, I would be pretty upset. I liked that she asked him to be honest. No joke. No deflecting mecanism. No sarcasm. No insults. Just the truth. ❤️

I REALLY REALLY don’t care about what happens "three years from now" 🤷‍♀️ Ugh I hate this season, things are so slow and boring, the storyline isn’t interesting at all, and frankly... i wanna die💀

NOOOOO MARY-LOUISE AND NORA DIDN’T DESERVE THAT 💔😭😭

Ugh 😑 The whole idea of the vampire souls trapped in the Phoenix’s stone being reunited with the wrong bodies was just lame and boring 😒

I genuinely felt bad for Valerie 😞 you can see she truly loved Stefan and it must have hurt to see he didn’t feel the same, despite having spent basically three years together :/ Again, that’s kind of my general problem with Stefan: he’s so afraid he’s gonna hurt people that he’s never fully honest with anyone! 🙄 Same shit with Caroline. He just abandoned her because he couldn’t deal with this situation. What Stefan fails to realise is that he does hurt people by keeping things from them, by always running away. I’m sorry but women around him deserve better 🤷‍♀️

Bonenzo... I remember shipping it back then, but now, I just don’t feel it 🤷‍♀️ i get why people do, sure they both care deeply about each other and you can clearly see that (the guitar scenes were very cute 💕)... but it’s mostly flashbacks and that doesn’t have the same effect on me. Because I wasn’t there to see them developing a special bond over time. I still think they’re cute and I’m happy to see Bonnie finally fall in love with someone who truly loves her back ❤️

OF COURSE BONNIE IS THREATENED BY SOME MAGICAL ELEMENT THAT IS SORT OF CONVENIENT FOR THE STORY. OF COURSE. 🤬😡 I’m so mad, I’m so fucking mad at the show for treating her this way. She’s always the one in danger. She can never be happy for more than two episodes!!

Ooooohhh nooooo Bonnie’s the new Huntress 😭😭😭 She’s gonna want to kill everyone: Damon, Stefan, Caroline, even Enzo!! Nooooo 💔

OH THANK GOD, SHE DIDN’T KILL ENZO 🙏🙏🙏 I was so afraid. For Enzo but most of all for Bonnie! She would have been devastated if she’d killed him!

“You changed my life” awwww I feel bad for Ric, the same way I felt really sad for Valerie... They both hoped the moments of pure happiness they shared with their partner would turn out to be something more. They both dreamed of starting new with their loved one, to have their own perfect little happy life... 💕 even though they knew deep down the other one didn’t love them back. Not the way they wanted to be loved. And that’s sad 😭

Damon & Enzo being manipulated and brainwashed by that thing in that vault, at the end of s7 🙄 seriously? Who would have seen that coming ? 🙋‍♀️

Ugh, s7 was PAINFUL to watch 😑

S8 :

Yiiiiikes 🤢🥴 whatever that thing is, it’s not friendly! That scene where Damon and Enzo feed it was kinda freaky!

Ric running the armory makes sense actually! I’m quite happy about that :) he’s been wanting real hard to get back to his Indiana-Jones type of life ✊ He would have never been happy with a perfect little family life... even with Jo, I believe 🤷‍♀️ He truly loved her but at the end of the day, he has just seen too much. He knows too much to just stop fighting at all. That’s what makes him Ric.

A SIREN !!!! Cool ! Now we’re talking 😎

I understand why Damon would submit completely to Sybil : he has always hated himself for all the terrible things he’d done, he has always thought he wasn’t worthy of redemption, and now Sybil provided him a proof of that, a vision of literal Hell, of eternal torture... 👺😈 plus she erased all memories of Elena 😭 he has no reason not to work for Sybil. She’s the only one who can provide a way out of Hell. Who wouldn’t take that deal? If I suddenly found out no matter what you do, you’re damned to an eternity of pain and misery and loneliness, and the only way to escape that is to work for Satan, aka Cade, I would probably do it too 🤷‍♀️

The way Enzo resisted Sybil’s mind control for Bonnie was really sweet 💕 I felt bad when he had to shut down his humanity to save her life 😭

Honestly, I know I should care about Tyler’s death but he was never my favorite character and he’s been so... in and out of the show that I kinda stopped caring about him at all (since he wasn’t exactly a regular character) 😕 But he surely didn’t deserve to be collateral damage in that mess :( Also, I thought Caroline would react a bit strongly. I mean, Tyler was important for her and she barely said something? Weird 🤷‍♀️

CAROLINE AND STEFAN ARE GONNA GET MARRIED !! 💍 She said YES! OMG! Tbh I might not ship them (because I think Stefan got away with the pain he caused her a little bit too fast) but I’m happy for Caroline: she finally got to have her June Wedding!! 💛🎉 (though I’d prefer she married Klaus of course!)

I really liked the whole mythology of the sirens 🧜‍♀️ the story about the village girl and the island girl becoming sisters, having to kill and eat people in order to survive, was heartbreaking! But I was so sure Sybil was the “nice” one 🥺 Poor girl

Noooooo, poor Georgie 😭💔 knowing she is going straight to Hell is horrible, considering she’s seen and experienced it before and she knows what awaits her :(

Sebine played her game very well, no one suspected her to be Sybil’s sister 🤔 she’s really creepy and I’m so so so afraid for the girls 😱 she clearly has an evil plan for them and I’m so anxious 😱

"I’m your brother and I love you. Please come home with me” awww Stefan ❤️

Awwwwww Enzo and Bonnie ❤️ “I’m never leaving you” okay now I remember why I shipped them! They’re adorable! She chose him over her own best friend. She picked Enzo because no one else did. Ever. And she thought he deserved a chance, because deep down he is such a sweet, loving, caring person. He might not look like it, but he’s maybe the one who cares the most and who’s actually ready to do anything for his loved ones. I think Enzo might be the big love of her life. And I’m so happy she got to have that. I’m so happy she got to meet him, to enjoy his company for a little while, to appreciate every happy moments ❤️

AAAAAH SELINE TOOK THE GIRLS!! 😱

Caroline finally doing the healthy thing and prioritising her daughters over everything else 💖💖💖 Take that ring back, Stefan. At least for now. Caroline took the right decision. She cannot make compromises when it comes to the girls. She cannot allow herself to add any more variables to this already messy situation. Yes, it’s selfish but she has to be.

WHAT? I seriously hope you’re kidding Ric! HOW DARE YOU telling Caroline she isn’t the girls’ mother? 🤬😡 She carried them, she agreed to pursue the pregnancy and give birth to kids who weren’t even “her own”, she raised them, she put food on their table, she tucked them in at night, she loved and cared for them more than anyone could have ever askef her, she basically had to let go of her entire life in order to live with them as a family... She IS their mother. She will ALWAYS be ❤️

Damon and Stefan’s deal with Cade to take the twins’ place !! 😱😱🔥 I really hope they find a way to get out of this one, but I don’t see how, right now... And Stefan is heading to a dark place :/ I hope Damon will be able to bring him back!✊

Speaking of Damon, I am SO glad he got to free himself from Sybil’s influence! 🙏 Stefan, on the other hand... meh? 😒 I’m not so sure I’m a fan of the old ripper storyline, I mean we already watched it once and we KNOW it’s not gonna last for long cause they have to wrap it up eventually, and I feel like this is just here as a cheap way to create drama between him and Caroline and idk that was kinda unnecessary 🤷‍♀️

ENZOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😭😭💔 NONONONONONONONONOOOOOO!!!!! Poor Bonnie 😭 She was finally gonna get the happiness she deserved! RIP Enzo ☠️

OMGGG STEFAN’S HUMAN 🤯🤯🤯 Wow I wonder how he’s gonna take it, I mean on one hand being a vampire brought him a lot of pain, but on the other, it’s all he has known for centuries... rethinking your entire life, the basis of your existence, after all that time... ouch!

Kai is BACK ? Seriously ? Again ? I mean I like him, but let’s just say there are other people I would like to see again (#enzo❤️)

Btw I’m really conflicted about Bonnie trying to bring Enzo back : I want her to do it, of course, I want Enzo back, but I don’t want her to loose herself in the process 😱😭 I’m so scared for her :(

Stefan literally killing the Devil like 😎😎 “oh yeah bitch, bet you weren’t expecting that uh” ☝️ I am so so PROUD of my babyface :) also I’m really glad they got rid off Cade (ugh, I was so done with him)

Ahah, Kai’s in another prison world 🤣

OF 👏 COURSE 👏 KATHERINE 👏 IS 👏 THE 👏 QUEEN 👏 OF 👏 HELL 👏

Aaawwww I really really loved when Damon gave Elena’s necklace to Caroline 💕 their little chat was very cute: he knew she was quite sad because her wedding was being rushed and used as an excuse to drag out Katherine; she was going to walk down the aisle without her mother; Bonnie wasn’t gonna come; Elena wouldn’t be there; Alaric didn’t want to come... the MOST important day of her life was basically ruined 👰 and... idk he was being very sweet and compassionate with her :)

OOOOHH THEY’RE ACTUALLY GETTING MARRIED FOR REAL THOUGH! And Bonnie’s here!! Soooo cute 💖 I love how Damon insisted on the “does anybody want to object against this wedding?” part, like “really? No one?”

NOOOOOOOO THE GIRLS 😱😱🔥🤬

Omg they’re fine, I’m so relieved 🙏

Awww Bonnie saying goodbye to Enzo for real... that was so... bittersweet 😭 But he’s right: she’s gotta live her life. She cannot spend her entire life thinking about the people she could have spent more time with: Enzo, Elena, for instance. She has to focus on herself. On being happy. And I’m really glad for her ❤️

Katherine is literally gonna blow up the WHOLE TOWN !! Seems a bit extreme but I’m really not surprised xD such a Katherin-y thing to do, if you think about it

OMG FINAL EPISODE 😱😱😱

Okay, first I was like “I don’t understand why is everybody so obsessed with the idea of saving Mystic Falls”. 🤷‍♀️ Sure it’s their home, their childhood town, full of memories and all... but since Matt helped evacuate the entire town, there was no immediate danger for the population of MF. And at the end of the day, it’s JUST a town 🏙 It’s just buildings and roads and objects that can be replaced. It can be rebuilt over time. So Bonnie, Caroline, Damon, Stefan... they could have all just run far way from MF and then everything would have been just FINE 👍

But THEN Katherine captured Elena and trapped her in the high school 😈 NO WAY the Salvatore brothers would have just sacrificed Elena in hellfire 🔥🙅‍♀️

NOOOOOO I don’t want Damon to die 😭 But I also don’t want Stefan to die! Why do their plans always include one of them dying? Sounds like Supernatural 😅

THANK GOD 🙏 Bonnie’s here to save the day 💖 Damn, what would they ever do without her?? I liked how she fought for herself till the very end :) “it’s not my time” YOU BET YOUR ASS IT’S NOT 👏

OOOOMMMMGGG STEFAN’S DEAD 💀😱🔥 HE CAME BACK!!! HE CAME BACK FOR HIS BROTHER!! HE SAVED DAMON!! HE SACRIFICED HIMSELF!!! HE LEGIT DESTROYED HELL!! AND HE KILLED KATHERINE WITH IT!! 🤯

AND DAMON IS HUMAN!!! 🤯🤯🤯

AWWWWW LEXI IS THERE!! 🥰 I’m so happy to see her! I’ve missed her! Awww he found peace with his best friend 💕 I’m so glad for him! He deserves that!

“I was feeling epic” 😭😭😭😭😭😭

Honestly, it felt kinda cheap and too easy that Bonnie would just suddenly realise she had enough power to do ANYTHING, including breaking the spell that she wasn’t supposed to interfere with in ANY way, because she would be risking Elena’s life (and probably her own). Like, ok, she destroyed hell and that boosted her confidence enough that she decided she would just try it ? 🤷‍♀️ mmm... seems too easy... like why didn’t she do that earlier then ? Why did this entire season even happen then ? What was the point? What was the point of Bonnie realising she was worth living her life and that she didn’t have to feel guilty about Elena? Why would the show erase that wonderful character growth??? I- 🤷‍♀️

“We’ll see him again” ❤️ awwww I really love how they decide to develop Damon and Caroline’s relationship in the end... They both really acted like brother / sister in law. And that was genuinely cute. They both lost someone they loved and cared about deeply. I like that they know they can count on each other.

Awwwww Stefan got Caroline’s message, that’s really cute :) I hope it will help her move on, knowing he heard her, and he will love her forever too 💕

BONNIE’S HAPPY!!! SHE’S ALONE BUT SHE IS FINE BECAUSE SHE DOESN’T NEED SOMEBODY ELSE TO BE HAPPY! SHE LOVES HERSELF AND SHE LOVES LIFE AND SHE’S GONNA ENJOY HER LIFE TO THE FULLEST AND TRAVEL THE WORLD!! YAY! 🌈🎊🎉

The Salvatore boarding school : so it’s basically Hogwarts? Okay why not 🤷‍♀️ It’s not the big ending I was expecting for Caroline and tbh I’m a bit disappointed (but I guess her story doesn’t stop there and it’s more of a To Be Continued kind of ending) but it makes perfect sense for Alaric 🤔 Jo seing her daughters 💖 And Jeremy is a teacher there LMAO 😆

Awwwwww my Klaroline feels ❤️❤️❤️ “however long it takes” I CANNOT BELIEVE THE SHOW GAVE US A “MAYBE” FOR THAT SHIP. Honestly it’s more than I ever wished I would get! I’ll make my own headcanons, it’s perfect!

“I owe it all to Stefan” awww, true :’)

So what I got from Elena’s monologue: she had a great life, she was happy, she became a doctor, she grew old in Mystic Falls, she married Damon (funny how she doesn’t mention having kids? It was one of her biggest dreams, so idk 🤷‍♀️), then I guess SHE died before Damon did (-> what makes me think that is the scene where she holds his hands and says something along the lines of “I know peace exists and I know he will find it someday even though he doubts it” and then he disappears and she finds herself in the after life), and then she found peace and got reunited with her family in death 🧐 So bittersweet, I liked it! 💕 Even if I think it would have deserved to be a bit longer, a bit more explained, a bit more developed than just a “here’s what happened” 🤷‍♀️ It did feel rushed :/

“Hello brother” WAS THE LAST LINE OF THE SHOW! HOW. EPIC. IS. THAT.

#the vampire diaries #TVD #spoilers #s1 #s2 #s3 #s4 #s5 #s6 #s7 #s8 #my post #my posts #mine #my thoughts #opinions #BOOOIII THIS POST WAS LONG #I can’t believe I found the strenght to do this #feel free to comment with your personal opinions #but please be nice :) this is just my own thoughts about the show and there’s no need to be rude here :) #i can’t believe i’ve rewatched this goddamn show lmao #delena #stelena #steferine #steroline #klaroline #bonenzo #bamon #daroline #otp

[hangonimevolving]

Week 12-ish at home

Hello all!  Here in Florida, many aspects of quarantine life are purportedly starting to change “out there,” in the world.  In-house restaurant dining, salons, and misc businesses opened up a few weeks ago.  And this week, on June 1st, even more businesses began normal operations - children’s day cares, for example.  The beaches have opened.  Public parks are open, although there are restrictions on playground equipment, etc.  Most businesses have certain rules and restrictions in place, e.g. social distancing and mask usage.  But yep, they’re open.

However, our family is NOT :)  We have decided to act like nothing’s changed, at least for now - we would like to observe and see how things go “out there,” if the virus stays at a plateau in terms of numbers infected, etc., or if there is an upsurge.  If there is an upsurge, we are concerned with seeing how severe or widespread it might get.  In short - its too early for us.  We have too many factors to consider in terms of immune issues, family members with multiple risk factors, etc.  So, we continue on, living and learning within our own family unit.  And thankfully for us - this is not a huge deal.  Sure, we have our moments where we wish we could do regular things, like go hang around at a mall or a movie theater, or go visit a public playground.  Oh, how we miss eating out.  We REALLY miss seeing friends and having playdates - that part is hard.  But - its okay.  It won’t be forever.

So what are we doing these days?

I made air plant terrarium globes, and hung them around our breakfast area:

Vev participated in the virtual science fair through school, with his experiment on liquids, viscosity, and cohesion.  We tested out water, soda water, and oil.  I think he learned a good amount in the process!

We were excited when the U.S. Navy Blue Angels did a flyover in the South Florida region - and we got a killer view of the fighter jets as they zoomed over our backyard!!!

(Okay, I realize this picture isn’t that impressive - the Blue Angels are those series of dots on the blue part of the sky, surrounded by clouds.  But trust me, watching them tear across the sky in that formation was awesome).

There’s been more pancake art...

We attended a really touching event a few weeks back - a five-year-old boy in our community is undergoing treatment for a terminal brain tumor.  The entire community banded together, and threw him a socially-distanced celebration: a birthday parade comprised of fully-restored vintage cars and fancy, souped up muscle cars and vehicles.  It was an awesome, meaningful, and poignant event.

On April 30th, I finally faced the reality that quarantine snacking was getting the better of me.  I knew I had to make a change.  So I went keto on May 1st, and kept it up for 30 days.  It was honestly super hard.  But I pulled through.  There was a lot of eating like this.....

ramen soup with shirataki noodles

and.... basically just a ton of omelets.

I need to write an entire post - more like, a continuing series of posts - about how IN LOVE I am with my new Cricut Maker.  I am OBSESSED with this marvelous contraption, and have thoroughly been enjoying my time with it while at home.  I have made a couple of things thus far, and I can’t wait to show them to you.  But by way of a teaser - here are some koala and panda-themed sleep masks I made for the kids....

And here is a little bandana bib I made for Pixel, who actually seemed to enjoy wearing it!

Pixel acquired a new perch in our home.  For some reason, out of all the myriad cat beds we have bought her (memory foam, regular foam, fuzzy plush material, microfiber, etc.), her preferred toys and beds are all the ones made of corrugated cardboard. I have never quite understood why she’s so crazy about it - it looks, to my meager human eye, like a hard, cheap, NOT warm and fuzzy place to hang out.  But, she’s crazy about it.  So, I recently bought her this.

Based on the fact that she’s hardly moved from this spot in a month, except to eat 11 billion times a day - I’d say I have gotten my $12 worth already.

On the topics of cats, and crafting - my good friend Y had been telling me about her kitty and how he’s become the “loyal coworker,” since she and her family are all telecommuting these days for their jobs.  Apparently, Shams the cat perches on her cardiologist father’s desk, and oversees his daily rounds using telemedicine apps to check on his patients.  I decided to make Shams an appropriate coworker type outfit.  And again, yet another cat has surprised us by happily wearing the ridiculous outfits we humans are making for them!

What a handsome gentleman :)

What else.... ah, so Mother’s Day came along, with its customary breakfast in bed for yours truly, delivered by some other handsome gentlemen I know.

Dr. Spouse elected to disregard my keto diet, and prepare me a tasty meal of refined carbs - which I hungrily guzzled in appreciation.

Last but not least, for this post anyway - I ran my first “virtual race,” which is this deal where you pay a registration fee and are sent a race bib, shirt, and medal, but its sort of an honor system where you run the race/distance and then post to social media if you wish.  I ran a race called the “Crush Corona 5K”.  The experience of virtual racing was great.  My actual run on that day was surprisingly rough!  I left my house way later than my ordinary running time, and it was an extraordinarily hot day... I totally overheated, and between being carb-starved on the keto diet and also seriously premenstrual (sorry, TMI) - I was really glad when the run was done.  Oh well!  The proceeds of my race benefitted a good cause - a fund for healthcare and essential workers who have been on the front lines of the Coronavirus pandemic.  And bigger picture, I dedicated my race to my “Run Buchandi Run” race series which has been raising funds for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.  I also ran in memory of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and the missions of the #blacklivesmatter movement to end systemic racism generally, and police brutality against African Americans specifically.  

Multiple missions and causes, same heart.  They all overlap after all - we are all connected humans, and despite this, minorities in this country are not appreciated for being essential to our society, are also at higher risk of most health conditions, and have to live in fear of unjust targeting by law enforcement and other systems.  I believe it’s possible for us to make our personal efforts in the service of building awareness of this entire network of issues.  My heart - and my legs! - worked in service of this.

#quarantine #Vev #Dey #gardening #crafts #cricut #fitness #running #teamfox #mjff #crushcorona

[bi-apps]

Accepted - Rodolphus Lestrange

theelderlestrange

submitted:

OOC Information:

Name/Age/Timezone - Isa / 25 / EST

Activity Level - Roughly 6/10; I have a fairly demanding job during the week, but am around on the weekends and during nights!

Ships/Anti-Ships - Honestly totally open here! I do see Rodolphus and Bellatrix’s marriage as more a marriage of politics/convenience rather than love, but am super flexible in my plotting depending on chemistry/other players’ canon, etc.

Did you read the rules? - I did!

IC Information:

Character Name - Rodolphus Lestrange

Age/Birthdate - 28; January 11th

Faceclaim - Sean Teale; Rami Malek; Jack Falahee

Occupation - Rodolphus works for the Ministry of Magic as an Unspeakable, and annoyingly for him, it was not his first choice. Originally, Rodolphus had expressed to his father that he wanted to work for the International Magical Office of Law, looking to oversee the new petitions being put through. A quick conversation with his father ensured him that he was not needed there, ears already placed within that area of the Ministry. The Department of Mysteries was an interesting location, the Lestrange soon found, and he understood the necessity for where he was placed, able to pass on important information as well as overhearing things that were definitely relevant with his other line of work – being a Death Eater.

Blood Status - Pureblood

Traits …

+ Charming: While Rodolphus lacks genuine sincerity, he is good at faking it. He prides himself on being charismatic, reading the mood of the room and changing his attitude accordingly. He is able to pull out the charm in order to achieve his goals, but the entire charade has become second nature to him.

+ Dutiful: What leads Rodolphus in life is duty. He’s always been one to do just about anything to make his father proud and always step up to accept a challenge. It’s the way he’s been since day one, and he’s much better at it than his younger brother. Perhaps Rabastan is one of the reasons Rodolphus is so hard on himself. Everyone knows that as an heir of such an important family there is a lot rested upon Rodolphus’ shoulders, but it’s more than that. It’s like he’s trying to make up for his brothers slacking as of late. The two boys used to compete with each other over just about everything; Mr. Lestrange thought both boys would strive to be better if there was a competition with it, but Rodolphus always came out on the top. It seemed that after awhile Rabastan just gave up and let his brother do what needs to be done without caring that he still has his own responsibilities. Rodolphus doesn’t want to come off that way, so he always pushes himself to do his best.

+ Loyal:  He may not get too close to people, but the ones he does keep close are people he would never betray. If Rodolphus promises something he will honor it because he’s very blunt about things, meaning he wouldn’t have lied just to get someone off his back.

- Superficial: Outer beauty and how one presents themselves means a lot to Rodolphus. Coming from a family with money and power, he is quick to tell those who do not match his standards to get out of his sight.

- Self-Indulgent: Rodolphus has more money than any person needs, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t spend it. His residence is too big for one person, the price of his suits would make many pass out where they stood. He finds comforts in material items, and likes to show off when he comes into work, making a point that he is a man in charge.

- Calculating: Rodolphus can memorize and analyze. It works well for reading hundreds of pages of documents and finding out what in the stack of information is actually important. It works well for finding the weak parts in the wards around a house and either blowing them up or carefully patching them. He’s meticulous. That’s helped him become valuable to the Dark Lord quite quickly– finding every shred of evidence and wiping it out. Writing up complicated plans with contingency after contingency. He’s the person you want for strategy, be it preparing for a court case or a murder.

Patronus - Jackal

Boggart - Rodolphus’ greatest fear is literally fear itself, or more particular, of being so afraid that he is incapable of acting. This manifests itself in the form of ropes that bind and blind him.

Key Points -

EARLY CHILDHOOD

Rodolphus came to this world just like any other child. Just because people may see him as a monster in his later years, he was not born as the Devil’s spawn. He came into the world crying and laughed at things just like every other baby. Rodolphus Lestrange was full of joy and life, no matter what people may believe. He was not born as a the cold and cruel man people are used to seeing, but instead was shaped to be that way from his father mainly. The Lestrange family may be cruel and unforgiving, but Mr. Lestrange never hurt his children physically. He certainly let them know when they did something wrong, and perhaps hearing him yell stung more than any slap across the face, but he never lifted a hand or wand at his children. This doesn’t mean he was kind.

CHILDHOOD ILLNESS

When Rodolphus was six years old, he began to feel a little under the weather. He’d been at to visit his Grandfather at St Mungo’s, who due to his age, was susceptible to many illnesses. Unknown to any of the Lestrange family, he already had a strain of Dragon Pox in his system, but the care at Mungo’s had kept him from showing symptoms. Rodolphus was not so lucky. It had started off as a fever, with his mother force feeding him soup and various potions in an attempt to make him well again. When rashes began to appear, and Rodolphus grabbed his head in extreme agony before passing out, they knew it was far more serious. The Dragon Pox had already caused some of his organs to shut down, and bleeding had occurred under the skin where purple lumps had started to form.

Thankfully, the staff at St Mungo’s were quick to diagnose him and got him set on the right treatment immediately. It took Rodolphus six months to recover completely, and his skin held a green tint up until a week before his eighth birthday. Since he was able to comprehend what had happened to him, Rodolphus has been obsessed with keeping himself healthy, from proper diet to physical exercise. And since the nearly fatal incident, Rodolphus Lestrange has never been ill.

SORTING

Rodolphus was never particularly concerned as to where he should get sorted when he attended Hogwarts. The eleven year old had already had many lessons with his father introducing discipline, the meaning of purity and how to make sure he stayed worthy. At eleven, the Lestrange heir had voiced his indifference towards the entire event, as long as he was not sorted into Hufflepuff, due to its reputation, perhaps falsely, of being weak. What he had not expected, was to sit there, with the gaze of students and the hushed whispers, as the hat took an entire two and a half minutes to decide where it would place him. Rodolphus did not hope for Slytherin, nor did he particularly mind being placed there.

He knew the placement would please his father the most, but he was also aware that a Ravenclaw sorting would not have been objected either, with the house favoring scholars. Still, the cheers and loud applause that followed his sorting made him feel somewhat welcome, although he did not realise how much those two and a half minutes would come back to haunt him. When he argued with members of his house, and they accused him of not being a true Slytherin. When rumors spread that he begged the hat to place him in the house of Snakes. But the doubts stayed with him, and only fueled his future obsession with proving his worth.

FIRST INITIATION

Rodolphus had always known that, on some level, he was different. He is not like most of the students at Hogwarts, and different to many of the witches and wizards in Diagon Alley and the wider wizarding world. He does not think the same way, or react the same way. But he was always so similar to his father, and he had never had much of a reason to believe that Rabastan was any different to him – or at least, not in a way that was not simply the subtle way the all people were individuals – and so he had never given it much thought. When they were young, the two boys had been quite similar in fact; driven, vying for the attention of their father, competing to be the better Lestrange.

As they aged, however, it became apparent that the brothers were quite different, and not just because Rabastan’s behaviour changed. It seemed instead that they viewed life through very different lenses. Rabastan made connections easily, in a way that Rodolphus never had. But it was more than that: Rodolphus had never really understood others. Unless those others were analytical, and highly logical, Rodolphus could not understand their motivations. He did not understand crimes of passion, had never been able to appreciate poetry, and selfless acts seemed merely foolish.

There was a dividing wall between Rodolphus and others born from a complete lack of empathy on his part. He had friends, yes, but these friendships were formed slowly, over years and experiences. And yet, Rodolphus had not ever truly thought that there might be something wrong with him. Not until he first dipped his toe into the Death Eater pool, brought along as a newly minted graduate by his father, who was wont to test his sons’ merits and mental toughness.

She’d been pretty once, was what Rodolphus remembered thinking, as he looked at the woman to be interrogated. Before the broken jaw, and darkened, swollen eye. She hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. Nothing except for marrying the wrong man.

He was the one that they wanted at first, the husband. They had found him the day before.

Now, she was less a woman than a loose end to be tied up.

Rodolphus hadn’t been called upon to do anything, but as he watched her fall he found himself wondering what it would have been like to be the one holding the wand, doing the killing. What a rush of power must there be to choose who lived and who died. He didn’t realize how unusual, how sickeningly abnormal, the thought was until he turned and saw his brother’s pale face. He should have felt something. Should have been staring at the scene in abject horror, and not idle, morbid curiosity.

Rodolphus walked out of the experience unchanged, except, perhaps, for a desire that was slowly rearing its sleepy head to try such things for himself. If his nonchalance shocked his father, the older man did not show it.

DEATH EATER

Rodolphus is very much a believer in that magical abilities should be kept within magical families, and that allowing those who come from Muggle families is a disgrace on everything the Wizarding community has built over the years. While he doesn’t share the intense hatred towards anything less than Pureblood like some of his Death Eater friends do, he does frown upon socialising with them except for the purpose of image and reputation. Rodolphus finds himself growing more and more disgusted by their existence as time goes on, but mostly because they are causing him a great inconvenience by putting up a fight rather than just submitting to the Death Eaters demands.

Changes/Extra Info - None!

Para Sample:

There was a dead body strapped to a chair in the middle of the room, and Rodolphus stared down at it with disinterest.

More than a minute had passed in relative silence—the dripping industrial faucet in the corner did not count, nor the echoes from the Malfoys having too fancy of a basement for any practical use—since Rodolphus had sent the lower level Death Eater guards away, to drag in a new person of interest (see: victim) for questioning. Part of their remit was dragging out the bodies injured by previous inquisitions, but seeing as this poor man had not made it through the session, Rodolphus had asked that they leave it on display. It would provide extra…inspiration for their next guest to start talking, more expediently.

An empty chair sat beside the corpse’s, awaiting whichever clerk or shop owner was being plucked from the cold safety of the holding rooms upstairs. Rather than dabbling in small talk just yet—an art that Antonin Dolohov, his partner in crime for the evening, excelled in, whereas Rodolphus’s skills laid more in rebuffing those efforts, thus far—he examined the body with a bored expression.

At last, he seemed to arrive at some conclusion.

Reaching into his pocket, his hand bypassed his wand, which had already gotten a good deal of use today, and instead plucked a small, silver pocketwatch from the cloak’s folds. In one clean, doubtless motion, Rodolphus extended the blade from its holster and cut a straight chasm across the victim’s throat.

Blood spurted across the scene at once, taking a comical arc through the air and spattering both Rodolphus’s robes and the ridiculous marbled stone floors.

“A little more intimidating now,” he said, giving one curt nod of satisfaction. Then, at last, he turned his attention to Antonin, feeling freed from the burden of setting the scene. “Any interesting plans for the weekend?”

[vsgquiterightly]

Day 1.

I’m hungry. I knew this would happen, but I’m surprised at how quickly it transpired. It’s only been a few hours, but I’m ready to eat almost anything. I know this is going to be a big adjustment, going from thousands of calories a day (well, more like 1500-1700, but you know), to something closer to 700 is a big adjustment physically, but it’s also an adjustment mentally. I don’t have food to be my crutch anymore. That time is officially over. Food is now fuel and fuel alone, and it’ll take a while until I feel okay about it. I’ve always been an emotional eater. I’ve always been a binge eater. I can’t remember ever having a healthy relationship with food, but that’s part of what this is supposed to help with. It’s a detox period. I’m getting off of the processed sugars and processed foods, and graduating to a better, healthier diet of whole foods—lean meats, vegetables, etc. I am really excited about the idea of teaching my kids to eat real food, not junk. To fuel their bodies with something good. I want that for them someday. I want their sugars to be from fruit and maybe some honey. I want their grains to be whole, nutritious, and enriching.

Let me give you some history.

I can recount every significant weight gain in my entire life. I can tell you exactly how I got to this point. When I was a child, I was forced to clean my plate at every meal. I was fed fatty, southern cooking with whole milk, and forced to eat every last bite put on my plate. My grandparents always asked if I wanted more, and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. My parents were divorced when I was really young. My mother was a single mother, and while it wasn’t necessarily her fault, we did often subsist on fast food. I was 125lbs in 3rd grade. That’s fatter than 90lb Eric Cartman, by the way. By the end of sixth grade, I weighed 185lbs. I was fat. Most of that was just my environment and poor eating habits. I never went without, and for that I’m lucky, and we made things work as well as we could.

When I was 13, my mother joined WeightWatchers with me, with my doctor’s approval. Together we each lost 50lbs through hard work, diet, and exercise. I reached a low of 132lbs, with a goal weight of 135. My mother reached a low of 117lbs, with a goal weight of 135. My mother still maintains below her goal weight, though she doesn’t weigh herself much anymore. She did a great job. I gained… but I can explain! I think it’s incredible that I can point out everything that happened in my life to make me the way I am now.

I kept the weight off for two years, gaining back a total of 10 lbs at the beginning of my journey, and then staying at 142 for the rest of the time. My body just didn’t like being below 142. I would lose to 139, gain to 145, lose to 142. I was stable there. I was happy there. Then life happened.

I went to visit my dad for a summer, a three-week trip. There was nothing for me to eat at his house. He refused to buy me the things I was used to eating (low fat yogurt, skim milk, ‘light’ bread, to name a few things), and force-fed me this heavy southern cooking. I used to throw up a lot. It was just too heavy for my body to handle. He thought I was bulimic, and told my mother this, and therefore shoveled extra food in my face. I remember one night I tried to go to bed without dinner because I wasn’t hungry. I locked my door and he beat on it for over an hour until I finally came down and ate spaghetti. After this three weeks, I came home up 10lbs. Not a big gain, but devastating to me. I shared my upset feelings with my girlfriend at the time, who agreed that I was a fatass. That only made things worse for me. I always worried about my weight, even at 142, I just wanted to be at 125. I thought I was super fat, and she made it worse.

So, I went into a depression. I thought the weight would just come off when I started eating normally, but that wasn’t the case. Then I got a job at an ice cream place near my house. They offered a free meal during my shift, and I worked every day…. So every day I was eating diner food. I gained another 20lbs that summer, up to 170. Throughout the next year of being a fatass, I gained another 10 lbs, until I was maintaining at 185 again. At this point I thought I was a failure.

I played two varsity sports in high school, something I was very proud of. I swam and played water polo. I was very slow, the slowest on the team, but I managed every practice and never gave up. Despite all this working out, I didn’t lose any weight. I probably just increased my intake accordingly. I remember thinking I was a whale in high school, but looking back at photos, I looked just like everyone else. I could remember my ex-girlfriend telling me how fat I had gotten, though, so I hated myself.

I went to college after that, and gained the freshman 20. That put me at 200lbs even. This was a disaster to me. I had once said I would sooner hack off limbs than be at 200lbs, but here I was, with all my limbs, at 200lbs. I was a recluse my freshman year of college, and even though I still didn’t look all that bad, I was definitely angsting over my weight. I wasn’t doing anything about it, though.

I had always been a binge eater, but now free to do so in private whenever I wanted, I began binging almost daily. I would shove exorbitant amounts of food in my face, and cry as I did it. I would think about how I deserved to stay fat forever and feed myself until it hurt. I never purged. I wasn’t bulimic. I didn’t think this was an eating disorder at the time, just me being a pig. Now I know this was a serious issue, and I should have gotten help then, but I didn’t.

My sophomore year, I discovered energy drinks and I never slept. I never had to sleep.  I felt awesome all the time, for some strange unknown reason. I was still fat, but I no-longer cared. I thought I looked like the bomb dot com. Unfortunately, I also began having delusions of grandeur—I remember thinking aliens were going to abduct me, that cops followed me around, that everyone was out to get me., I was having auditory and visual hallucinations. I had voices in my head, people living there telling me what to say, think, feel, and do. It was terrifying, so I finally reached out to the school’s counselling center. They referred me to a psychiatrist, but I never went. I was afraid, based on my symptoms, that I would be diagnosed as schizophrenic…. and at the time, I might have been. During this time, I gained another 30lbs.

Finally, when the symptoms began to subside, I realized I needed to do something about my weight. Unfortunately for me, I was very depressed, and it was difficult for me to do anything other than school, which I could barely handle. I joined WeightWatchers again. I lost the same 20 pounds twice, then finally lost 30. I was down to 200 again by the time I graduated.

Without school to motivate me, my depression hit an all-time low. I remember not feeling a desire to do anything except play McDonald’s monopoly. I didn’t even want the food. I just wanted to peel and win. I was obsessed with winning, but of course I was eating a lot of McDonalds. I gained 50 lbs in a year!

Finally, I went to the doctor. They referred me to a psychiatrist and I finally went. I was diagnosed as Bipolar, and suddenly everything made sense. I started taking medication, and I finally felt a little better. I tried to lose the same 20 lbs again, and gained it back with some extra. I finally reached my high weight, an all-time high of 270lbs. I knew it was time to do something different.

WeightWatchers had worked for me in the past. It’s my opinion that WW is the best diet program out there. It’s not a diet. It’s a live-it. It’s a lifestyle. If you live that lifestyle, you lose the weight. 100% of the time, it has worked for me, but 100% of the time, I have fallen off the wagon. It was then that I thought of Weight loss Surgery for the first time. I originally dismissed it as not for me, too invasive, too scary… but the more I struggled, the more I realized what a good thing it could be for me. A tool in my arsenal to help me succeed. That’s why I chose to do it. I really need help. I’m a food addict. I’m a binge eater. I’m an emotional eater—and I’m battling the effects of too-long-undiagnosed bipolar disorder and BED. I’m stable now. I’m in a healthier mindset, and I’m ready to take the plunge. I have a strong support system at home, where I am lucky enough to have my food cooked and prepped for me so all I need to do is eat it. Eat the right things and succeed. I will get small again. I will get there.

This time, though, I have some perspective. My goal weight is 150. Anything below 200 is great, anything below 150 is goal. At 142, I will not think I’m a whale. I will be statistically below average, even if my BMI still says that I’m at the upper end of average.

I think that’s enough rambling for today. Take this as what it is.

Height: 5’3” HW: 270 CW: 259.4 as of 9/5 GW: 150

#personal #vsg #weight loss surgery #wls #weight loss #bipolar disorder #depression #binge eating disorder #BED #blog #sob story

[throwawayaccountbcitsobviou-blog]

I hate K. Winters

Throw away account since it will be obvious why soon enough.   I just have to vent about this woman.  She is the fucking worst.  I’m going to be as vague as possible for obvious reasons.  You’ll know who I’m talking about, I’m sure, if you know who she is from online.

i hate her.  Why?  let me write you a book.

I actually had no idea she was on youtube until very recently, though it doesn’t shock me.  It’s what pushed me to write this.

1.)If she finds you on social media, she will stalk it to find anything she deems offensive.  No fucking joke.

 She will screen shot any and everything you say, if she thinks it’s offensive and send it to your supervisor.  

Had a guy get written up for making a joke about beating his girlfriend (he was referring to them playing a  video game, I thiiink it was SSB) it was an obvious joke about the fighting game, it had a screen shot of the game and everything.  I haven’t seen him recently so he may have been fired or quit.

2.) . She thinks she’s the boss of everyone regardless of where you are in the building.

Apparently, you have to have written permission slips from your supervisor if she sees you on your phone or smoking anywhere deemed a break area.  Had her ask my coworkers if they were on break and how long were they on break and does *** know they’re down there?  How about mind your business.

3.) She smells like a wet, moldy towel left on the bottom of the hamper.

Okay, this is a petty one but it really is that pungent.  I hate having to deal with her cause it’s a consistent thing. No one wants to deal with her because of it.  Also, she has old person farts that she has no issue ripping quietly while youre at her desk.  It’s like, I’m not stupid, I have a nose.  My Oma is 94 and lives on a diet of fish and aged  cheese and her odor is not as bad as that!

4.) . She treats cute, young ladies here badly

If youre young, attractive or flirty she will zero in on you.  She will make snarky comments about you.  Look down her nose like she’s somehow superior.  I realize it’s a bitter thing, she’s not exactly an attractive woman but there’s no need to shit talk just because you’re jealous of their looks.  Been a couple times I found myself stuck small talking with her where she only talks about *** and she’s just a dumb stereotype and how did she get this job etc etc..

5.) Two of my coworkers tried to convince her not to go to a party the company was having.

No one and I mean no one there likes her.  We had a party and two people I know tried to nudge her into not going.  She mentioned something else was on the same day and they tried to get her to go to that other thing.  We wanted just one party where her smelly ass didn’t cast judgmental looks or make back handed compliments to people.  WE ended up leaving soon after she showed up and headed to a pub.

6.) . She’s on her phone on social media all day, so shes’s basically being paid to play on her phone.

Every time I see her, her face is in her phone.  No, it’s not work.  Trust me on this.

7.) . She’ll talk with authority bout everything and if you prove her wrong or tell her she’s wrong she’ll never correct herself.

One of the very first conversations I had with her involved something I hold 2 degrees in and her zero.  Instead of admitting wrong, she still acted like I had no idea what I was talking about, pretended like she was getting a phone call on her cell and excused herself.  I knew I didn’t like her after that.

8.) . She thinks since she has a DR. in front of her name, you are below her and clearly she is the superior one.

I’ve lost track of the number of times she’d talk with authority about a law or something in the news that’s completely false, but always doubles down.  Bonus points if she tells you VOX is a reputable news outlet.  Bitch, you’re a doctor you should know better.

9.) She’s been caught stealing food from the fridge.

I heard this second hand, so it may not be true but given her size, I wouldn’t be surprised.

10.) . Speaking of food, her diet is awful.

Yes, she’s one of those people that brings in smelly foods that stink up a whole floor/wing/department.  Unhealthy shit to boot, yet still sneers at the thin lady eating a salad minding her own business.

11.) . She talks to parents about her dog in *that way*

raising a kid and owning a puppers isn’t the same thing.  Stop acting like it is.

12.) . She ‘corrected’ a coworker who is an ex-muslim about his own personal experience.

I don’t know how the topic came up (I wasn’t there), but they were talking about Islam and he expressed he left the faith for some reasons and was tired/scared  of his extremist family and that’s why he moved to this country.  She interrupted him multiple times to correct him with ‘not all muslim people are bad/extremists/religious nuts’ well, no shit not all muslims are that way, that’s just a stupid thing to think.  Why are you telling an ex-muslim man how he should think about his (old) religion?

13.) . Told a lesbian she doesn’t understand the struggles non-white LGBTQ youth go through.

Granted, I don’t think K knows she’s a lesbian or Spanish (she’s fair skinned and doesn’t really talk about it), but nothing like a white woman telling a Spanish lesbian about how she couldn’t know the struggles of poc lgbtq folks.

14.) Told a woman wearing a korean traditional dress on halloween was inappropriate.  (Heard from trustworthy coworker)

((Okay, so I have to preface this next one with this: This girl is Blue eyed and blonde....however, she is, in fact part Korean.  Her mother is a blue eyed, blonde haired and her father is half white/half Korean. (and before you ask, yes she is his child.  She looks exactly like him and even has his very distinctive eyebrows/eye brow ridge) Her grandmother, who is 100% Korean, sent her the dress for her Bday. She was excited and wanted to wear it, but waited until halloween so it wouldn’t be odd showing up in a very poof-y dress.))

the girl apparently cried in the bathroom because if it.  God forbid this girl not look like what K thinks a Korean lass should look like.

15.) . She will OBSESS over people.

If she hates you, if she likes you.  It’s insanity.  I overheard her talking to someone about this man who was bullying her online constantly and my thought was she more than likely started it. She does it all the time here, start something, the person defends themselves then suddenly she’s the victim.  Did a little research into her twitter and, yeah, she does that shit in person and online.  Go figure.

16.) She is literally the person who will go out of their way to be offended by everything.

If above doesn’t make that obvious enough.  She asked a coworker what his thoughts on Trump are, then immediately unloaded on him how awful the US president is, how he could dare not have the same opinion as her, then stomped off.  The guy just said he had no opinion on him since he’s not American and he doesn’t keep up with their politics. what a Nazi, amirite..

16.) She once claimed she spoke 3 languages.

When confronted by a native speaker, she back peddled and said she was still learning.  Why lie about that, especially here?  There’s literally people from all over the world here.  I hear languages from all over walking down the hall.

17.) She tries sooooo hard to be hip and cool.

She dresses twenty years younger than she should (I think she’s in her early 50′s, dresses like she’s 25) . Low cut shirts, which come on..if you’re top heavy and they drip down that low, at least wear a supportive bra.  It’s just uncomfortable for everyone involved and you know it.

She tries to show how cool she is by watching shows/talking young, then butting her way into conversations.  Look, I’m aware she is lonely and she only has like one actual friend this entire country, but just because you hear us talking about Rick and Morty or Rifftrax or the IT crowd doesn’t give you the okay to just shove your opinion into the conversation.  It’s rude and presumptuous that we’d want to talk to you.  I know this makes us sound like assholes, but she really is unbearable to be around sometimes.

18.) I think She picks her nose when no one can see her.

I happen to come around the corner with my sup, she was coming the other way.  The hallway was empty, so I guess she assumed it was safe to go mining.  My sup and I just looked at each other and kept walking.  She played it off like she was scratching her nose...she wasn’t.  That’s the action of someone who does that shit on the regular.

19.) . She talks down to and is condescending to everyone.

She treats a lot of people, even those who hold equal degrees to hers, like they’re lesser than her.  A super hot guy she does this to is also a doctor, but he went to a waaaay better college than her.  He’s nice to everyone, she doesn’t like him.  My buddy thinks she has the hots for him, but he is way out of her league, so she talks to him like he’s an idiot to make her feel better about herself.  I think it’s because the doctorate he holds isn’t worthless.  seriously, though.  He’s fucking hot.

20.) She got drunk at a party once and complained about some dude we didn’t know who she didn’t like, like any of us gave a shit.  

I wish I was joking.  We told her to just block him and ignore it or just walk away from the internet for a while.  I mean, we’re adults not 15 y/o girls sending caddy messages to one another.  Internet drama is a pathetic thing for an old woman to get wrapped up in.   She then left to, what I thought, snapchat or face time someone.  We could see her talking into her phone with it out in front of her (she was drunk so god knows who the poor unfortunate soul was on the other end) then came back to let us know she was leaving.  

21.) . She’s clearly unhappy, so she tries to make everyone else around her the same.

No one who is happy with their life/themselves says/does the things she does/says.  Unhappy people recognize unhappy people.  I was that miserable once, I know it when I see it.

22.) She’s rude to wait staff/ baristas.

again, I wasn’t there but a coworker went with her to get coffee (He’s a nice guy to everyone, bless his heart) she rudely demanded a manager when her drink wasn’t made with what she asked for. Yeah, she’s one of THOSE people..

23.) and lastly only because I’m done talking about her; she blamed a mistake SHE made on a friend of mine, who got shit canned because if it.

Yup.  

I don’t care if this is ever discovered, don’t care if it is.  I don’t care if you believe me or think I’m some troll.  If you’re a fan of hers, rethink your fandom.  If you hate her, good on you.  Either way, I don’t care.  I just really wanted to vent out this joke of a human being. I’m not coming back to this tumblr.

farewell, noble listener from the future.

and Kristie, if you found this; Fuck you, twat.  I hope you remain miserable and alone for the rest of your life.  You deserve it for the shit you put everyone through daily.

[sweetiecutiedarling]

Penelope "Pennie" Karity Mays

This November I will be participating in NaNoWriMo, today I am working on some pre-writing for Try Not To Die. Here is the character sheet for Pennie, one of my two main characters.

Age: 22 Height: 5′ 6″, 133lbs Eye color: Clear blue Physical appearance: Pennie is an athletic woman; professional cheerleading and horseback riding, and it shows. She has long, lean legs and a six-pack. Other than looking athletic, Pennie is a beautiful woman. She comes from a long line of southern women and carries herself as such. She is always wearing makeup and taking care of her hair and skin, and yet her beauty looks effortless. She has naturally clear skin, bright eyes, and hair that seems to settle into gorgeous beach waves on its own. Her hair is naturally blonde, a lighter blonde but not quite the nearly see-through blonde of her childhood. She is also naturally tan from all of the time she spends outside. Strange or unique physical attributes: Pennie has a scar on her right leg from where she snapped it in half and out of the skin in middle school, riding a horse.  Favorite clothing style/outfit: Pennie is very ‘in style’. She wears skinny jeans, boots, and sweaters in the winter with a thick dark grey parka-type coat. In the summer she wears dresses with converse or short boots. Where does he or she live? What is it like there? Pennie lives in an apartment in Boulder, CO outside of her school (University of Colorado, Boulder). She enjoys being a little far from school because it provides quiet that she enjoys. It isn’t ‘walkable’ per se, but she has no trouble driving everywhere. It is a new looking apartment, very modern, that her parents pay for while she goes to school. There are two bedrooms, one for her to sleep in and one that serves as a recording room for her makeup work. It looks like it is out of IKEA, and is a very peaceful abode for her. She also loves hosting and has friends over all of the time. Defining gestures/movements (i.e., curling his or her lip when he or she speaks, always keeping his or her eyes on the ground, etc.): Pennie twirls her hair a lot without noticing it, especially when she is thinking. She maintains eye contact when she talks, and always looks happy (pulled from her training in cheerleading). She doesn’t really have any anxious ticks because she isn’t an anxious person.  Things about his or her appearance he or she would most like to change: Pennie is very confident, but she doesn’t have a unique look and wishes that she had a tattoo or unique hairstyle or something. Speaking style (fast, talkative, monotone, etc.): Pennie speaks like a good southern girl- sweet, as if her words themselves twinkle. She gets a deep accent when she is upset.  Pet peeves: Unsweet tea and people who aren’t southern polite and welcoming. Fondest memory: The family reunion her first year in college, it was a wonderful time with all of her brothers. It is when she finds out that her SIL Susana was pregnant with her and Jamie’s first son. Hobbies/interests: She enjoys cheerleading, horseback riding, doing makeup, shopping, and spending time with her friends. In addition, she is religious and is known to sit down and read the bible and listen to pod-casts from the church she grew up with. Finally, she likes to read Forbes and BusinessWeek. Special skills/abilities: Pennie is very good at makeup, with a nice 2.6 million followers on Instagram, and is especially business savvy. Most of what she does on her Instagram, however, is show people how to home make (mostly) vegan body/face/etc products. Insecurities: Pennie feels very plain and boring. Quirks/eccentricities: Pennie is obsessed with country music and pop music, and is known to line dance when she is really drunk. She’s also known to give a surprisingly excited rant about business if you give her the chance. Temperament (easygoing, easily angered, etc.): Friendly and kind, with a sassy turn when she feels insulted. Negative traits: She judges people on their outside appearance. She is 22, but she has a hard time being independent of her family in front of them, even though she disagrees with their (specifically the Mays) antiquated opinions. Things that upset him or her: She can’t stand animals being hurt, she doesn’t like people bullying her friends or family, and doesn’t like bugs of any sort. Things that embarrass him or her: With few exceptions, Pennie dresses very modestly, and is very embarrassed when any part of her appearance doesn’t feel comfortable.   This character is highly opinionated about: Animal rights. She only purchases food for her home from farms that are humane, and only uses vegan products for makeup and other uses. Also, feminism (inclusive feminism, which means LGBTQ+ and BLM), though she doesn’t share this with her father. Any phobias? Pennie does not have any phobias.  Things that make him or her happy: A home cooked meal, a perfectly put together outfit, a nice spa night, and dinner with loved ones. Family (describe): Pennie is the youngest of 5 children, all boys.  -Jamison “Jamie” Gerald Mays, M 30 --Married to Susana (F, 28) with two children Mary (F, 3), Jamison “JImmy” (M, 2) and another on the way -Jackson “Jack” Harrold Mays, M 28 --Married to MaryAnne (F, 27) with twins Marigold “Mary” and Elisabeth “Lizzie” (F, 2) -Joeseph “Joe” Charlie Mays, M 25 --Closeted gay man, only Pennie and Dustin know that his ‘roommate’ Michael Macalister is his boyfriend (would be married if Mays family knew) -Dustin Samuel Mays, M 24 --Recently single, seemingly uninterested in settling down Her parents are Jamison Franklin Mays (M 58) and Sarea Lee Karity-Mays Nee Karity (F 54). The Mays family is a very rich Texas family known for their wildly successful corporate law firm. The Karity family is a farming family, and her mother is the only child. Because of this, despite Jamison working inside of Houston, the family grew up on the main farm/horse ranch. All kids were sent to a part-time boarding school, overnight from Monday-Friday, in Houston that was religious.  The Mays are a close family, they have family reunions every year. The Karity family is much smaller, but it is nearly entirely women (they all kept their name) and very strong women at that.  Deepest, darkest secret: Pennie was raped by her high school mathematics teacher in her senior year. The reason he or she kept this secret for so long: She believes it is her fault and feels deep shame for it. It is how she lost her virginity and had previously planned to wait until marriage. Additionally, she shared (part) of it with her older brother Jamie, and he shamed her for it. Other people’s opinions of this character (What do people like about this character? What do they dislike about this character?): People like that Pennie is so kind and strong, though many judge her for her father’s actions and that of the Mays family. Also, because of her sweet tone and overly polite demeanor, she can come off as insincere. She’s also very “basic” and many consider her vain. Favorite bands/songs/type of music: Pennie loves country music, Carrie Underwood is her number one favorite singer and she tends to love female artists. She also enjoys pop music, though she veers away from dubstep or otherwise computer type music.   Favorite movies: Old romance: Dirty Dancing, Grease, Pretty Woman, etc. Favorite TV shows: The Bachelorette, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, etc. Favorite books: Anything Nicholas Sparks Favorite foods: Chicken fried steak, bbq, and smoothies Favorite sports/sports teams: She does not like sports Political views: Pennie is fiscally conservative and socially liberal  Religion/philosophy of life: Pennie is Christian, and doesn’t believe it interferes with her politics in the slightest. Physical health: Pennie is very healthy, though she is diabetic, it is something that she maintains with healthy diet and exercise.   Dream vacation: Pennie has traveled a lot but has never been to the Greece beaches and would love to go there. Description of his or her house: Her apartment is modern and clean, IKEA meets Pinterest. There are many pictures of her friends and family and also plenty of art. It is very clean, as any good southern girl’s home should be. Description of his or her bedroom: Her bedroom is crisp and fresh, and her closet is large. Any pets? Pennie has a small corgi that is her diabetic alert dog (once upon a time her diabetes was far from under control). His name is Sweetums and he is white with light brown spots.  Best thing that has ever happened to this character:  Pennie values her education more than anything else. Going to school away from her family allowed her to develop opinions separate from her parent’s opinions.  Worst thing that has ever happened to this character:  Pennie was raped by her high school mathematics teacher in her senior year. She decided to share this information with her oldest brother, and he shamed her for it. Superstitions: Pennie is religious and doesn’t believe in sex until marriage. Three words to describe this character: Bright, kind, shamed If a song played every time this character walked into the room, what song would it be? All American Girl, Carrie Underwood

#writing #Try Not To Die #nanowrimo2017 #pre writing #character sheet