mysterious gay goth

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

Like……..that was the core of tumblr in 2013. Its tainted life-blood. Its fetid royal palace. Destiel this and Johnlock that. Tardis-in-the-impala-at-221B URLS. Bendydoot Cucumberpatch and long analytical debates of which doctor is best doctor

And then Dashcon happened: All those people got together for a nightmarish event in the ball pit (for anyone who doesn’t know what Dashcon was, look it up and read any of the news articles about it. I promise, you will not be disappointed). 

Now, I wasn’t too active on tumblr at that point because of school reasons, but I remember finding out that the new season of Supernatural had aired on TV, and I saw NOTHING about it on tumblr. Not a single post on my dash. It was a miracle, but I was so confused. How had the whole fandom just vanished like that? I still don’t know for sure, but it was very shortly after the Dashcon incident. 

Then Doctor Who returned. New doctor and a new companion. Same scenario. Nobody said anything online. I was still big into DW so that was kind of a bummer but it was still astounding.

I went back online more readily and started realizing that fandoms, as I had known them, were essentially dead after that summer. It was like everybody simultaneously realized how toxic those communities were after they all got together in person and proved themselves to be a disgusting bunch.

It was the fastest and most unsettling jump in internet culture I’d ever seen. Overnight it became an embarrassment to admit that you were in a popular fandom. All because of fucking

- Hiatuses: Sherlock especially, but the long Doctor Who mid-season breaks didn’t help. People wandered off. Some of them to very similar shows, like Elementary, which fought initial fan scepticism to become THE Sherlock alternative.

- Fans became more critical. All three shows frequently come under fire for their treatment of women, LGBTQIA people, etc., and without new content fans had no option but to rewatch and reexamine the same episodes over and over again. Their flaws became more obvious on repeat viewings, and the comparison to new arrivals like Elementary didn’t help. I imagine there were other competitors too, but one would need to do more research to see how relevant they are here - cartoons like Steven Universe and Gravity Falls, maybe? WtNV? OUAT and OITNB? All of them are much more obviously diverse, so Superwholock starts looking bland in comparison. There’s also the quality-comparison argument (Doctor Who is not as good at plotting as a lot of other things), but I reckon that goes without saying.

- Fandom backlash! You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain. After events like the Mishapocalypse and the infamous FANDOMS GRAB YOUR WEAPONS post Superwholock became shorthand for the most obnoxious parts of Tumblr and fandom, so more people starting distancing themselves from it (see also: how Bronies killed the MLP fandom). And, yeah, it all came to a head with the Dashcon Clusterfuck 2k14.

- Fandom Backlash II: Your Fave is Problematic. Every popular figure from Joss Whedon to Taylor Swift is eventually the subject of text posts and screencaps dragging their name through the mud. Steven Moffat, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, and Jensen Ackles (I believe? It might have been Jared Padalecki. I don’t really follow Supernatural) have all had plenty of this.

IN CONCLUSION: there wasn’t enough new stuff being made. People found their own new stuff, which in many cases they found more appealling. People became less forgiving of the old stuff, its creators, and its fans. Eventually enough time passed that they gave up on the old stuff completely, so when it came back they weren’t interested.

Talia: I may have told him that coming out of the Lazarus Pit can induce a rage fever.

Ra's: That wears off after four hours. It's been three months since you dunked him.

Talia: It's therapeutic, father. He's able to express his rage without feeling guilt over it. Let him have this.

Ra's: He ruined my favorite garden!

Talia: For as much as I put into keeping this League running, he gets to ruin as much as he wants.

Okay that would be hilarious.

Jason: *goes absolutely feral*

Talia, sipping tea: You’re doing great, sweetie.

Ra’s: It’s been six months. He’s taken down nine drug rings and three corrupt governments. Will you please tell him now.

Let's get cozy, friend.

We show up to this enormous mansion, it’s at the top of a hill. We get cleared through security, and after a drive up the extravagant tree-lined path the husband is waiting for us. He’s looking pissed as hell and for some reason he’s in a bathrobe. There’s an older brown Mexican woman standing beside him. She appears to be a housekeeper. We make eye contact.

The husband is already at a 10. “THANK GOD you’re fucking here! My wife, she-”

My boss quickly stops him from making a scene. “Let’s go inside and talk in private.”

So the husband leads us inside and takes us into a meeting room. 

“Tell us everything you know,” my boss asks as we sit. His voice is bored. The two of us have done countless cheating investigations. They kind of lose their drama after the eighth time you discover a husband with a secret porn ring or a wife with a lover in Australia.

“I told her to take a vacation so I could hire you guys while she was gone. I know my wife is cheating on me,” the husband is literally wringing his hands. “I don’t know who the guy is or how she gets him in past security, but they do it in my house. She’s acting so smug lately, like she used to after we… y’know. Sadly, we stopped being intimate after my doctor said-”

“Okay,” now I’m interrupting him. I do not want to know that information. “Have you asked any of your house staff what they know or may have seen?”

The husband rolls his eyes. “None of them speak English. How would I ask them anything?”

My boss just looks at me, exhausted. I get up to go find the housekeeper from earlier.

We immediately switch to Spanish.

“What the fuck is going on with that puto mierda?”

She’s been dying to tell me. “So the wife is cheating with the vice-president of the husband’s company. She sneaks him in through the window near the garden where there aren’t any cameras. They fuck in the wine cellar when cabrón is watching sports. They have been doing this for three years.”

I nod. “Do you have proof?”

“Just go to the ‘wine cellar.’The husband never goes down there. The only people that do are us and… you know.”

We go. As soon as I open the door I’m greeted with a VERY pungent smell and endless amounts of BDSM equipment. An A-frame, stocks, swing, it’s literally a sex dungeon. 

The housekeeper turns to look at me, pointedly. I’m in so much disbelief that the husband has never discovered all this in three years or bothered to ask his staff that I have no clue what to even say.

“I’m telling you this not because I care about the husband,” the housekeeper makes sure to clarify, “but because the wife is a piece of shit who underpays us and I want to see the husband possibly kill his best friend. I am old. It will bring me joy before I die.”

We return to the meeting room, and I must have looked off because both my boss and the husband stopped talking to look directly at me.

“Yeah, I have something that you need to see. And I’m going to have to charge extra for pain and suffering damages.”

and today she’ll go home and tell her family “the cornudo hired PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS and so a gringo and a 180cm tall scary lady showed up and I TOLD THEM EVERYTHING”

and her kids and grandkids will be like “DO YOU THINK HE’S GONNA THROW PUNCHES. DO YOU THINK HE’S GONNA KILL THE DUDE.”

Found this in the original post tags and I just... SIGH

Here’s the thing, anon. Squick isn’t just ‘I don’t like this’, it’s ‘I think this is gross and it makes me deeply uncomfortable but I pass no judgement on those who enjoy it, because I acknowledge that everyone is different and those same people may have the same visceral reaction some of the things I enjoy’ and was originally made popular in the kink community.

So yeah, if you want to say that every time you come across a trope or whatever you find icky then go ahead, say that every time.

Squicks are things I find personally gross but may not be gross to someone else. They don’t upset me or provoke my PTSD, they simply do not pop my corn. Example: Omegaverse. I don’t like it, it makes me uncomfortable and I’m not going to read it, but if you like it, you do you.

Triggers are things which directly provoke my PTSD. This means that my triggers may seem completely normal and innocuous to someone else, because my triggers are so personal and intrinsically linked to a specific event in my life. My reactions to these triggers can include panic attacks and flashbacks to this traumatic event. Sometimes being triggered can affect me for several hours or even days.

If we encourage everyone to lump things that just make them slightly uncomfortable or simply aren’t to their taste in under the word “trigger”, it actually dilutes the meaning of the word. It makes it harder for us all to, for the most part, collectively agree on and understand what exactly is being described when the word gets used.

And that destruction of shared precise definitions is a problem! It is really useful to have the communal language to be able to clearly and quickly delineate between “this grosses me out, no thanks” and “this is going to set off a trauma episode, rattle my brain, and probably throw off the rest of my day/week as a result” while also maintaining your privacy, and to know that you will be understood in what you are saying. Not having it is actually detrimental to the effort of making our communities safe and navigable for people living with trauma. Which is a goal that is much more important to me, personally, than the idea of not being “cutesy” (a word which in this case which sounds a lot like it’s being used as a euphemism for “cringe”).

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistant. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowing. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

What