new rabbit holes every few years @ceceredux - Tumblr Blog

home [friendly rivalry fanfic]

My second fic for @fr-fest! This was supposed to be much more focused on the prompt, but it kind of grew into...whatever it is now. Basically a post-canon one-shot of Kyung and Yeri and their eventful and yuriful evening together. It’s a lil bit rushed because I was trying to finish by the end of the month and the plot doesn’t really make any sense if you think about it too much but haha oh well. Thanks for reading <3

cw: brief description of attempted SA

~~~~~~~~~~

The first time the phone rang, Kyung ignored it. The second time, she declined the call, tossed the phone into her desk drawer, and hunched over her notes, hoping to regain her focus by staring intently at them. But when it continued to buzz—the dull rattle inside the desk like the mumbling of her insufferable classmates, who didn’t dare speak up lest they be caught having an opinion—she gritted her teeth and answered it.

“Kyung-yaaah.” The way the voice drew out the last syllable made Kyung’s skin prickle. “Why wouldn’t you pick up?”

“Ju Ye-ri?” As soon as she recognized the voice, Kyung stood abruptly, her free hand catching the desk chair before it fell over. “Whose number is this?”

#holy shit wait i just got to this #this is so perfectly fr in that im screaming in rage and smiling ear to ear within the same thirty seconds #and so perfectly Ye-ri x Kyung in the way it portrays love that's awkward and messy and cringe and beautiful and heroic and REAL #fantastic Kyung POV too with her desires being so on the surface her entire life but always something to be ashamed of #never connected to the deeply buried love she's had in her heart this entire time because surely those can't go together...#and i love the way you write Kyung to be so [rightly!] attuned to the autonomy and physical security Ye-ri's living space represents #but then in turn capturing that Ye-ri's materialism has always been at least partly about taking who she is wherever she goes #and if that place is beside Kyung it's exactly where she wants to be #friendly rivalry

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chaehwa-archives

bridges and stairs: directional movement in friendly rivalry

Ha. Well I tried, but I just can’t quit. Somehow I still have enough FR thoughts bouncing around in my brain to write another essay—and somehow it’s just in time for the anniversay of the final episode?

Since finishing the deep dives, I’ve been able to think more about the themes across the series without having to focus on one episode at a time. Lately I’ve been thinking about all the rooftop scenes, and the prevalence of bridges and staircases. My thoughts are still kind of all over the place but maybe if I’m lucky writing them down will help me make sense of it all.

#the skateboard hop??!!#your attention to the smallest details in both images and motion #and the ability to locate exactly what job they're doing to reinforce the thematic foundations #is the best i've ever seen #“the rooftop is as much a dead end as the river bottom”/“she loses her power but gains the world” yeah this might be your masterpiece #friendly rivalry #friendly rivalry meta

chaehwa-archives

Noticing that every character has a missing parent: Jaeyi’s mother is rarely seen, Gyung’s dad is only mentioned in passing, Yeri’s biological dad is out of the picture and stepdad too, Seulgi who has no parents but gains a stepmom

Idk what to do with this info, but it def seems intentional

First of all, if you haven’t already, read this post!! It’s by far the best breakdown I’ve seen of family dynamics in FR and how they work thematically.

I don’t necessarily have anything to say that @ceceredux didn’t already say better, but a few scattered thoughts…

There’s a good chance the missing parents were at least partly a budgetary thing. Kim Tae-hee mentions the budget a lot in the Blu-ray commentary and it seems like they always had to be conscious of those constraints. I’m sure that must have factored into deciding how many actors they could hire, especially for bit parts. The other parents might have been present in earlier versions of the script but the parts were so small or inconsequential that they decided to cut them to save money.

But one of KTH’s strengths as a director is using those limitations and the gaps in the story to her advantage, so even if it was a practical decision, I don’t think it was *just* that. One thing that stands out to me is that they could have explained away all the absent parents with death or divorce (the most common forms of childhood trauma in western storytelling) but they don’t. And I think that helps FR avoid the trap of enshrining the nuclear family as a Garden of Eden that kids are tragically tossed out of the moment the family structure is ruptured. In FR the family itself is traumatizing, even or maybe especially when it’s fully intact. Jaeyi is the only character who has two parents appear on screen together, and her family situation is the worst of them all. By the end it’s clear that both main characters are better off without their dads!

I think by showing us these families that on paper seem like relatively ideal specimens of the traditional family, but by showing them in these variously dysfunctional states with half of the parental figures absent, FR is saying, actually, there is no paradise to be lost here. The structure is fundamentally unsound.

If you think about why the parents aren’t there, we can assume Yeri and Kyung’s dads are always working (or you know off going bankrupt in the countryside in the case of Yeri’s dad, whatever that entails). The kind of job it takes to sustain the illusion of bourgeois normalcy effectively erases them from their children’s lives. Jaeyi’s mom shrinks into an embittered non-entity under her husband’s abusive and obsessive control, while Yeri’s mom herself is abusive and controlling because she projects onto her daughter everything she’s internalized about how family, as a survival strategy, is built and maintained—you have to secure the (sexual) attention of someone who can take good care of you. (And of course the precarity of that arrangement is emphasized when Dad goes broke and Yeri is forced to fend for herself.) All these families are “broken” fundamentally, regardless of whether the parents are legally together or not.

The only thing approaching a functional family, as ceceredux points out, is built in the void left over where the traditional family should be, by two people who have never met. So while it’s not quite a family abolition manifesto, I do think FR ends up being quite radically against all the more traditional family structures that we see.

ceceredux

I deeply appreciate the shoutout but I must return the compliment here twice over, because the ask and the response both capture something important I didn't quite get to! "Wait, you only ever see one parent for anyone" is a fantastic observation, and of course the connections @chaehwa-archives makes between the show's logistical constraints, its narrative ambiguity, and its thematic potency within a broader cultural canon are [as always] incredibly clarifying. And now that you've got me thinking about it... "no paradise to be lost" captures FR's thesis on the nuclear family so perfectly, because the family in FR proudly proclaims itself a paradise and then constantly negates itself with self-destructive pride and inflexibility, as if Adam and Eve's exile were reframed as God being a terrible landlord. [Or as Jaeyi might put it: girl did you fall from Heaven? because your Father abandoned you <3] It's a fatal mismatch of advertising and reality – great two parent households happen all the time, and they take full advantage of having multiple sources of support, but they do so with collaboration, with teamwork, with mutual celebration. And of course this is Friendly Rivalry, we don't do that here! Just like two students aren't supposed to be content to occupy the same place in the rankings together, a patriarchal marriage isn't meant to be a full partnership but another exercise in hierarchy – and even strictly numerically, two parents cannot remain greater than one if one parent always subsumes the other. Like you point out, even when the system works as intended it produces families that are less than the sum of their parts or worse, and in this one fucked up way Seulgi's on a level playing field, with a chance to come out on top. And since it's always supposed to be the father doing the subsuming, any failure of that process in any direction immediately leaves everyone in no-man's land, as it were. Taejun's "success" is so terrifying because you see those glimpses of exactly what his wife has been reduced to and the way that amplifies the child abuse, but Yeri and Kyung's mothers'...stronger personalities are notably the ones paired with fathers who might as well not exist. Kyung's mother gives us the control sample for "baseline respectable household" where everyone is holding it together but not having a good time Managing the Contradictions, and Yeri's mother is what happens when everyone involved lets go of the rope at once and leaves the kid holding the counterfeit designer bag. The ideal of the two-parent household [and notably all its real benefits could also apply to n > 2, the number isn't special] is rendered an unreachable fantasy by its own mandate. There simply isn't room under the patriarchal bargain for co-equal personalities in nurturing these children, having to manage that compression in turn selects for abusers with greater frequency, and so any given kid just has to pray they get lucky. It's what makes the "but for" part of Huiyun's story so haunting, that she could have very easily fallen into any of these camps had her husband lived, and then has to fight twice as hard to do right by her daughter after he dies. So I think "not quite family abolition" hits it so well - it's a critique that says we desperately need all the good and vital things family promises to be, but that the Actually Existing Family is designed to betray those promises. And it says that something better might look completely different or superficially similar, that part need not matter, but the nature of the underlying relationships and the restrictive, reverent mythology used to justify them requires nothing short of revolution. It's a philosophy FR takes with basically all of its themes, allowing it to avoid so many common pitfalls where art assumes it has to trade convictions for realism or vice versa, and it comes out the other side feeling even more radical as a result.

#friendly rivalry #friendly rivalry meta #i can't express how grateful i am for the reception to I Also Have A Guardian #and for the brilliant work that chaehwa-archives produces damn near every day #and for how vibrant and enriching this entire fandom has become

chaehwa-archives

orphanage, part 1 [friendly rivalry fanfic]

Finally! My very late response to the first prompt for @fr-fest. This is just the first half of a two-part story because I am a slow writer, and I want to try to respond to at least one other prompt before the month ends. Unfortunately that means this is pretty much all set-up and no pay-off, but hopefully you won’t have to wait too long for Part 2.

Thanks for reading <3

~~~~~~~~~~

Sister Sim-gi could classify most volunteers in seconds. There were the high school students who came to put Community Service on their applications. Such a waste when they went to university and spurned their true calling, as stage magicians; vanishing was the one thing they were good at. Then there were the daytrippers, who arrived in festive flocks on Christmas and Children’s Day, believing in their heart of hearts that a few hours’ harassment from an unbearably optimistic adult would leave some poor orphan’s life forever changed. Worst of all were the nonprofit groups with their creepy pamphlets and Protestant tenacity. At least the others had the decency to get lost when they weren’t wanted.

And then…there was this girl. After three days Sister Sim-gi still didn’t know what to make of her. That was rare.

#ahhh this rules #fr fic is so hard its almost impossible to capture the specific way the show tells stories with the usual vocabulary of the medium #but this is exactly it - the tone the atmosphere the ambiguity the attention to those on the margins of the story #society itself as a living breathing character in its own right #op is the FR meta GOAT btw everyone watch the show so you can read the Chaehwa Archives deep dives and also this im so serious #friendly rivalry #frfest

"I also have a guardian"

ok before Home Week of FR-Fest ends i think this is as good a time as any to post my Way Too Many Thoughts about Seul-gi and her stepmom and parenthood in Friendly Rivalry that i've had marinating in the drafts for like six months. Kids can't have homes of their own, after all, only the ones created for them, and thus Seul-gi's physical precarity all her life and her abandonment as a child are one and the same — she has to fight and claw to survive on her own, because there's no roof over her head she can ever trust. Until there is. If you have no idea what I'm talking about please watch Friendly Rivalry if it seems like your speed, and if you're here for @fr-fest thank you for helping build the fandom that's been such a big part of my experience with the show. And now, onward! It's fascinating that a show like Friendly Rivalry, with its dark and gritty genre and tone that's perfectly suited to depicting the unsparingly bleak side of life, could very well have made every adult some form of antagonist and every parent-child relationship some form of toxic. And it very nearly does! It comes so close; as far as Seul-gi is concerned at first there's no reason to think it would be otherwise! And the ways in which Kwon Hui-yun is the sole exception have burrowed into my brain and refuse to leave.

We can only guess, and in another instance of incredibly thoughtful restraint we never get any other hints of what her marriage was like, including when/if she ever would have found out who Do-hyeok truly was had he survived [her half-truth explanation to Seul-gi for why she settles the lawsuit, "I don't want to be disappointed by your dad anymore," is soul-crushing for how understated it is. And her one briefly narrated interlude where she attributes her understanding of Je-na's situation to "women's intuition?" That's simply the void screaming at you, forever]. In any case, whatever plans of parenthood she once had are replaced by a very different reality, a classic "one door closes/another door opens" story but with none of the triteness of a cliche — and one where Hui-yun forces the door open herself, initiating the search for Seul-gi after her father had given up and sustaining it past the point where any pretenses of self-interest, of restoring or creating a "real" biological family, were still in play. EDIT: ok i knew i was gonna miss something and i know the FR timeline is hard to keep straight but this is pretty embarrassing: of course Do-hyeok IS [briefly] alive at the moment they find Seul-gi, *because Tae-jun is the one who makes that possible,* manipulating this man's love for his daughter [possibly the last thing he doesn't hate about himself] to facilitate that same man's abuse of his own, and extract advantage for himself at every step. It's a horrifying final twist of the knife that every circumstance of Seul-gi's life and presence at Chaehwa has been an object of exploitation from the very beginning, with Jae-yi's manipulations only the unwitting aftershocks of her father's, but it's also grimly poetic. In assuming Seul-gi was a disposable bargaining chip and accidentally bringing her into the lives of both her father's widow and his own daughter, Tae-jun has brought her to the two woman who will love her in ways he could never fathom, and in underestimating all three of them he ensures his own downfall. END EDIT

We never know for sure exactly how much Seul-gi thinks this is actually going to work. And when her stepmom gets the call, she has all the excuses in the world not to respond, if she truly didn't care. The hard u-turn she takes, and her subsequent furious challenge to the entire power structure of Chaehwa [who in their bottomless apathy don't even understand why she's there at first] can only be attributed to love, and even Seul-gi knows it. So it's after this that she starts smiling freely around her stepmom in a way we otherwise only ever see with Jae-yi; she opens up to the love of her life and her newfound parent in parallel as they both keep showing up for her in the same places, and proving her assumptions that she's unloveable wrong in different ways. EDIT: my other miss was right here, though the thrust of it all still stands – it's just that the trust was already planted in the car ride over from the hospital, when Hui-yun tells her not to back down and belatedly fills her in about the lawsuit negotiations Seul-gi had left the apartment earlier to avoid; that gesture of goodwill, so far removed from her prior hesitancy to even ask for Seul-gi to communicate when she'll be home "if we're going to live together," is an unambiguous signal that she's ready to stop doubting herself and take this parenting shit seriously. So when Seul-gi makes the call, there's still uncertainty, but she does have reason to be confident it'll work. END EDIT And then there's the most explicit moment of all — the one exchange where the unspoken becomes spoken, when Hui-yun prevents a desperate and rage-stricken Seul-gi from throwing her future away permanently by murdering Tae-jun. In the aftermath, both of them shaken, she admits her refusal to settle the lawsuit in the face of Seul-gi's fear that she'd do the opposite, but reframes it from the perspective of the parent — Tae-jun's lawyers are trying to guilt her. What kind of parent would put their child through this? What kind of parent would pass up the financial windfall of a settlement to protect her child's future? If she's failing to prioritize Seul-gi, maybe it's because she's a stepmother? But what makes Hui-yun so unique as a parent is that she doesn't TELL Seul-gi what to think about this, she asks her what she DOES think.

The moment she refutes Beom-su's lie, she doesn't do it to the administrators, or to her attacker, but to Hui-yun. For the first time, she cares what a figure of authority in her life thinks of her. For the first time, she wants an adult to be proud of her — and in the back of her mind she's probably terrified that even if her stepmom has inexplicably stuck by her up to this point, now she has a reason to stop doing so. And when Hui-yun never doubts her for a second, and instead throws protective scorn over every other adult in the room, they truly become a family. It's why Seul-gi can say no when an indignant Hui-yun tells her they're leaving in protest, because now she knows she's talking to someone who will protect her at all costs but also respects her as a human being. The impact of this growing bond is significant, but never overplayed; never distracting from the main story, but always mattering when it appears. When Hui-yun is forced to go back on her promise to Seul-gi and settle the lawsuit [because Tae-jun nearly kills both of them via vehicular sabotage while making Jae-yi watch, naturally, jfc this show], it's not a moment of high melodrama, merely a grimly necessary choice and its consequences. Her chance for closure is gone, justice is impossible, but her daughter's safety comes before any of that. So she lets Seul-gi believe it was an accident, even knowing that the missing context will make Seul-gi resent her for settling for what she thinks are purely financial considerations — better her daughter be furious with her than live every moment of her life in incapacitating terror. She even takes a moment to ask Seul-gi if she wants to keep her father's wrecked old car — not because that's a reasonable course of action, but because she wants Seul-gi to know that she has a say, that her opinions matter. And yes, she's also guiltily covering for the choice about the lawsuit that she's not going to give Seul-gi for her own safety. Even the best things don't get be clean in Friendly Rivalry, but they do get to be Good, in the end.

#friendly rivalry #frfest #long post #friendly rivalry meta #friendly rivalry spoilers

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Ok so I read The Sovereign finally and I've been physically unmoored for several hours lmao, anyone who loves The Locked Tomb or really any of the Fucked Up Lesbian Media Canon - please please read C.L. Clark's Magic of the Lost trilogy now that it's all out, this should be a massive fucking cultural touchstone of a series. I promise you'll find things in it you didn't realize you wanted and weren't getting anywhere else - political intrigue that takes its world seriously, political philosophy with a strong backbone and urgently relevant themes of decolonization, beautifully unapologetic depictions of lesbian love and desire and sex with none of the edges smoothed off, a persistent refusal to condescend to the audience or the characters in all their fucked up humanity, and across all three books the most harrowing tension you've ever seen jfc it never breaks, never alleviates, it just keeps changing form and changing YOU as you experience it all. anyway its 4 am and there is so little screaming about these books on the internet up to this point so i will be the change i want to see in the world and then pass out

#The Sovereign #The Faithless #The Unbroken #Magic of the Lost #C.L. Clark #book recommendations

Whale Store XOXO E08: "oh huh, closeted people do know what they're doing, oops"

i'm miserable. no notes

I have my share of problems with Whale Store XOXO — the story is just NOW getting to an interesting tension with WanMaewnam that I wanted to spend way more time in [let our poor hyper-competent greenflag have a burnout arc!!], and I worry that the relatively nuanced realism about the limits of small town economies and the prejudicial downside of close-knit communities is gonna go out the window to give us a crowd pleasing triumph over the EEEEVIL big box store, but goddamn do I appreciate Chompoo being vindicated!!

I was always on her "side" [which, even saying that I feel stupid! there were no sides!! they were both doing everything they could without being superhumanly perfect about a situation that intractably sucks, that's what made it compelling!!!] because the whole thing with coming out is the worst case scenario is SO FUCKING DANGEROUS. If someone thinks they should play it safe, they're probably right, and even if it turns out fine you cannot go wrong with an abundance of caution!! Of course Tonnam didn't have to stay, a breakup at any point would have been a tragic but reasonable course of action, but she was making the hard choice to keep going because even if she was hopeful that Chompoo's anxiety was unfounded, she still understood that this is literally safety first. And Chompoo's biggest mistake was ultimately second guessing herself and trying to push too hard to prove Tonnam's optimism right; under no circumstances should they have ever given up the apartment of their own, and now they're trapped in the nightmare she always saw coming.

the casual removal of her space and privacy...such a terrifying abusive flex of parental power [and more evidence for my Everything is Housing unified theory of GLs, but that's another post] And I LOVE the direction they went in with Chompoo's mother — you genuinely didn't know which way it was going to go anymore than Chompoo did, because she's in many ways a sweet, charismatic, likable woman! She's a homophobe in a painfully realistic way where her flaws seem at first like charming personality quirks disguising something more insidious. The abusive way she treats her kid is hauntingly subtle, easy to mistake as motherly banter in a single moment and visible for what it is only in the long run. And her avoidant strategies this episode to maintain plausible deniability as she hurts her daughter and acts like the victim were so fucking chilling; let it not go unsaid that it's been an excellent performance by Chompu Thansita from the very beginning.

an absolute tour de force of passive aggression and hostile hospitality, she nails every single layer of how people like this can ruthlessly dismantle your confidence with a smile on their face Do I think she'll immediately get redeemed? Absolutely lmfao, if the dad from fuckin Pluto got his switch flipped to Good in the last episode there's no shot they'll withhold it from a character who has exhibited kindness onscreen at literally any point. But still!! Even if they don't give me a satisfying ending, I appreciate that they took things in a more realistic, more heartbreaking, more thematically incisive direction, at least for a little while. Whale Store XOXO has always been at its best depicting the down to earth textures of how working class society actually functions without condescending OR sugarcoating, and this was the best example of that yet.

#Whale Store XOXO

five stray thoughts after a Friendly Rivalry rewatch [new era, it's a long story lmao]:

1) there is SO much more Ye-ri x Gyeong than I remembered and it all rules; never mind class rank the real competition between them and Jae-yi x Seul-gi is who can be more obviously down bad at all times and they play to WIN

2) I know the lesbian love story is the main draw, and for my money its one of the GOATs, but I'll also never stop being emotional at the very subtle but very impactful background arc where Seul-gi, convinced all her life she'll always be despised and abandoned, slowly realizes her stepmother loves her - the "my daughter won't give an interview...you people have no manners" scene makes me cry every time

3) when the kids go Super-Sleuth mode and they needle drop the BloodStain instrumental I get amped up to run through a brick wall, and it happens again when the already legendary Final Shot transitions into Burn It Down one more time - truly an all time great soundtrack on top of everything else

4) the number of times Jae-yi absolutely books it up or down way too many flights of stairs [and somehow always for the urgent purpose of holding Seul-gi's hand for a few seconds] gives me vicarious knee pain

5) Hye-ri has the fame and the accolades and the flashier role getting to play the Enigmatic Antihero and she deserves every bit of it, absolute perfection from start to finish, but my god Chung Su-bin might be giving my favorite performance in. anything?? ever??? the way she swings Seul-gi between bottomless suffering, teenage euphoria, beaten down cynicism, and every emotion in between, all while keeping the performance bolted firmly to the ground to allow the show's hyperreal stylism and Hye-ri's magnetic inscrutability to dance around her [and ultimately be molded by her!] is so breathtaking to watch, I'll never get over it

#friendly rivalry

kuboe-deactivated20231023-deact

dr seuss yaoi

kuboe-deactivated20231023-deact

I was gonna say “I bet this exists” because I had genuinely forgotten one of the most gargantuan eras in the history of this website

jaoxn

Posts that scare new tumblr users

spirit-of-science

Why would this scare new users? How bad could it possibly be??

flying-potato2

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elizabitchtaylor-deactivated202

I learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese in two separate psychology classes, at two separate universities. It was studied as an example of the “bystander effect”, which is a phenomenon that occurs when witnesses do not offer help to a victim when there are other people present.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late.

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar.

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

chemicalheart-deactivated202009

this was one of the first lessons I had in psych too and we were never told about this either nor was it in any of the reading materials

thelingerieaddict-deactivated20

I never knew this.

dsudis

I also never knew this about Kitty Genovese, but I do know that, in fact, many of the dozen (not thirty-eight) people who witnessed some part of the attack (which took place after 3AM, on a chilly night in March when most people’s windows were closed) tried to help in some way.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

(Also, going by the content of the murderer’s confession, it was indeed a random attack.)

talesofthestarshipregeneration

how on EARTH was this “scientifically” studied but the details gotten so wrong and the wrong as hell conclusion published and taught in schools?!?!?! where were those scientists observation skills?! on vacation?!

deadcatwithaflamethrower

How to take facts and turn them into an urban legend that gets taught in schools: Make a bad made-for-t.v.-movie about it, watch it, believe everything the movie says, annnnnnnd go! That’s how it gets taught as this supposed “scientific study.” Someone got fucking lazy.

Spread the real deal, kids.

tehriz

A book about this, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Nonfiction this year! if anyone wants to check it out try your local library!

racefortheironthrone

I want to add one crucial but telling detail: the story about the 38 witnesses didn’t come out of nowhere, it was handed to the New York Times City Editor by the Police Commissioner in order to distract said editor from asking unwelcome questions about a different case, and the story that was eventually written and which made headlines was almost entirely composed from police sources.

At the time, the NYPD was coming under quite a bit of criticism about rising crime rates and the seeming ineffectiveness of the police’s response to the problem. In the Kitty Genovese case, even though people did in fact call the police, it took about an hour for them to show up and the first detectives didn’t arrive until three hours later (at which point they mostly spent their time interrogating Kitty’s girlfriend about their relationship, because for “some reason” they considered her to be the most likely suspect for the murder. In fact, the police wouldn’t catch the actual killer until six days later when he was picked up for having a stolen TV in the trunk of his car, at which point he admitted to having committed a total of three murders). It’s not an accident that one of the things to come out of the Genovese case was the establishment of the 9-1-1 system, because at the time that the attack happened, you had to call the specific number of a particular police precinct and it was up to the duty sergeant on the desk to take action - which was usually to send someone out from the precinct to the address reported, because cops on foot patrol wouldn’t be outfitted with two-way radios for several years. It’s more than a little convenient that at a time when the NYPD is coming in for public scrutiny about its ability to do the basic job of responding to reports of crimes in a timely fashion, the Police Commissioner happens to hand the City Editor of the city’s most prominent newspaper a story which puts the blame for the slow response on the apathy and inaction of New Yorkers, neatly absolving the NYPD for its ridiculously poor performance in this case in particular and its response to the rise in crime in general.

It’s also quite telling that the New York Times ran with the story the way they did. It’s not like there weren’t people on the scene who said they had called the police, or that the basic facts about how many witnesses there were and what they had seen didn’t match the account that the commissioner had given. The writer the Times sent out chose not to include this information because “it would have ruined the story.“ The Times wanted to frame the story as a narrative about how the root of NYC’s problems was urban apathy and anomie - and the news organizations that picked up on the Times’ reporting and made the Kitty Genovese case a national and global story wanted to frame the story as proof that NYC was a dangerous urban jungle that deserved its decline because of the bad character of its residents. I think the takeaway from this case isn’t just about sloppy scientific research, it’s that you have to always consider how official narratives are used to assign blame to specific individuals and groups and absolve larger institutions of responsibility.

it’s Sunday and I’m bored so have some Galaxy Lesbian Brain One Direction Lyrical Interpretations: -Steal My Girl is a self love empowerment anthem for trans girls with unsupportive dads -the he in “Does He Know” is actually He, and the song is in the thematic tradition of Only the Good Die Young -all the song titles in Better Than Words are 1D trying to remember which song the Best Song Ever actually was (it was Irreplaceable by Beyonce) -the wolves aren’t a metaphor -”that” doesn’t refer to the fact that she doesn’t know she’s beautiful, Harry’s just pointing demonstratively at her whole vibe as she does pull-ups on a salmon ladder

#one direction #1d

vicholas

Everyday I log into this site and people force me to think about Star Wars

vicholas

retrogamingblog2

Eeveelution Planters made by LV99DOGE

tahthetrickster

#ICONIC

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warmleveret-deactivated20170910

as funny as “those are his hooves you bitch” I’m mad that it overshadows that lil wayne really did have socks on in a jacuzzi

nenchaenmoved-blog

can y'all stop just throwing random words together and expecting us to understand it

re-bee-key

you had to be there

pinene

this post makes me so angry bc the socks in the jacuzzi was literally overshadowed again. the point of this post is now that someone doesn’t know about the socks not the socks themselves. maybe we aren’t allowed to discuss it

destructions-daughter

to all the people who may be coming back here from twitter in light of elon’s purchase:

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