As we all know, the milkshake brings the boys to the yard. The presence of the boys is a prerequisite for the cracking open of a cold one, but cold ones do not have any inherent boy-attracting abilities. Milkshakes, however, do. All else being equal, the boys would proceed to the milkshake yard. While it is possible to announce the presence of cold ones in the hope of attracting some boys, the pull of the milkshake is much more powerful by comparison.
mind you, all of this nonsense hinges on whether or not the boys are back in town
it’s summer, of course they’re back in town
what she says: i’m so excited for the expansion draft !!
what she means:these are grown men making millions of dollars by benefiting off of the hero praise our society gives to athletes, which inherently roots from its perpetuation of toxic hypermasculinity. the nhl as a whole is an organization that has shown disregard for the wellbeing and safety of its players, using and marketing their skill and willingness to push their bodies to the extremes to the public for profit, all while acting under the guise of pioneering diversity while not addressing issues such as abuse, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, etc. candidly. vegas is just another wave of their vapid capitalist machine that is fueled by toxic culture, and therefore i have no reason to be emotionally invested in what they do, however, i choose to derive enjoyment from this sport and its players while actively acknowledging the virulent ideologies that come with it, in doing so i will hold the organization and its players accountable and be able to compartmentalize the my derived gratification and the inherent bullshit nature of the nhl. vegas pls don’t take my fave.
is there a word for when you see a good post and then keep scrolling but it kinda slow cooks in the front of your mind for maybe about 10 seconds and then you finally scroll back up to reblog it
This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.
Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.
Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.
Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.
“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.”
A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.
Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.
So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?
(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)
(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)
This. This. A quintilian times this.
Well put
i wouldn’t enact gruesome revenge on hospitals and doctors for my recent medical nightmare – for starters, they aren’t actually at fault, shit just happens sometimes, no matter how much my subconscious doesn’t want to accept that – but i can sure as hell read ALL the winter soldier medical torture fic. i can get my catharsis through his torment, and ride his rage out of the dark place as he slaughters his tormentors.
that doesn’t make me a person who, in real life, condones bloody vengeance. it doesn’t make my rage at my doctors anything but the reflex of an animal in pain, and it doesn’t mean i would act on it.
it just makes those feelings easier to bear and to work through, having that vicarious experience to carry me for a while.
and yes, that includes noncon – visiting that level of degradation on the character helps with the catharsis. people who don’t understand seem to think i’m cheering on fictional rape like it’s a great thing. no, it’s an awful thing, and that’s why it’s there.
14. “How can I hate someone that I’m in love with?” (Hi there I combined this with another request, so this is the sequel to my 99 prompt with Neil getting hurt !!)
“All they had in the tooth-rotting section at the corner store was coffee crisp and triple fudge so I got both,” Neil announces, shouldering their door open with his hands full of ice-cream tubs and an array of keys.
He’s taken to wearing them on a lanyard like a school teacher, and Andrew knows he does it because he wants them at hand, near his heart. Renee bought him a fox charm and it hangs between the key to the court and the first one Andrew ever gave him — he’s memorized the shape of it without trying to.
Kevin glances at Neil over the screen of his laptop and stands immediately, walking wordlessly to his room. He retreats to his bedroom whenever Andrew and Neil are in a room together, lately. ‘A precautionary measure’ he’d sneered when Nicky had asked.
“Is that okay?” Neil says, suddenly standing above Andrew, head cocked.
“It’s acceptable,” Andrew replies, and opens his hand. Neil presses the triple fudge into his palm, and produces a plastic spoon from the shopping bag to balance on top.
“I figured you wouldn’t want to wait,” he explains, mouth quirked.
Andrew ignores him, hooking his finger in the plastic seal and breaking it apart. Neil collapses into the couch next to him, tossing his feet up over Andrew’s lap and dropping the bag on the carpet. Andrew looks at him. “It’ll melt.”
“Eat fast,” Neil says, and grabs Andrew’s first spoonful for himself.
“I should’ve let the FBI take you.”
“You should’ve,” Neil says seriously, “Now I’m your problem full-time.” He leans in enough that Andrew can see the chocolate in the corner of his mouth, the complicated relationship between his freckles and his burns —
“Andrew!”
He’s yanked back to the present by Nicky’s frantic voice, a high discordant thing like a wrong note in a bad piece of music. The rest of the foxes crest over the slant of the hallway, a wave of good intentions that pushes Andrew back into the wall and takes his breath. He can’t deal with them, he can’t escape to somewhere else when prying voices are trying to keep him here. He can’t be fighting to see Neil with foxes holding his hands behind his back.
“What’s the news,” Allison asks when they’re close enough, looking uncharacteristically haggard with her lipstick wearing away and her shirt untucked.
Andrew shakes his head.
“He’s not…” Dan starts to ask, horrified, and Andrew’s fists clench so hard his knuckles crack.
“No,” Matt says firmly. “The monster would be ripping this place apart.”
Andrew produces a knife instantly, and renee catches his wrist, eyes hard and terrible above her smile. “You’re going to get yourself kicked out of the hospital.”
He hates it, he hates it, because it’s the only thing that could’ve made him stop.
He drops the knife on the floor and Renee quietly stoops to pick it up and pocket it.
“He’s going to be okay, Andrew,” Nicky says earnestly, skirting carefully around Renee to stand in front of him.
“He’s survived worse,” Kevin agrees, an old haunted look on his face.
“Don’t,” Andrew says. It’s all he can manage.
There’s a knife in his chest and Neil has the handle; if he dies now the blade never comes out. If he dies it won’t matter how much armour Andrew puts on, the knife is already in, always.
just moving along like everyone else 