In which our hero contemplates a career writing about superheroes and pop cultureâand imagines an ending.
Our latest is live! đˇď¸ Joshua Rivera looks back on the first time he wrote about Spider-Manâand wonders if this will be his last:
Itâs unmooring to spend any energy interested in stories about a character who is committed to this central mission of power and responsibility in a world where no one really seems to believe that anymore. Politics in the United States have been overrun by people who call empathy a sin, who believe power is there to be abused, who abhor responsibility, and do not seem to think blowback is real. The world has coarsened, and Iâm not sure that stories that presume we care about one another carry the same weight anymore. We are in a world run by people who see nothing wrong with Peter Parkerâs indifference.
Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!
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Hi friends, I have published a substack where I am now going to be sharing personal essays, commentary on fandom culture, original short stories, and poetry. If you'd like to support me in non fandom endeavors, please considering subscribing and supporting me. Right now it's all free and there is no obligation to pay anything.
I just want to see if I can do this writing thing beyond fanfiction and your support would mean a lot to me.
Click to read Dis, a Substack publication. Launched 21 minutes ago.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal reflection. This isnât meant to prove or disprove anything â just to share how the book felt to me as a reader. I encourage anyone reading this to keep an open mind and read the book themselves if theyâre interested.
I just finished reading The Way He Made Me Feel by Tatiana Thumbtzen, and honestly, it was heartbreaking. Not just because of the Michael Jackson parts, but because itâs really a first-person account of her life and emotions during that time. It didnât feel like a polished autobiography â it felt raw, like you were reading someoneâs diary, which makes sense since the book was based on her journals.
While reading it, I found myself putting myself in her shoes â more in a âthis feels relatableâ kind of way. Weâve all had moments where emotions take over and logic gets pushed aside, and I think thatâs something a lot of readers can relate to here. For me, the book wasnât really about Michael as much as it was about Tatiana â her experiences, her feelings, and her perspective.
You can tell the book wasnât heavily QAâd or overly edited, and honestly, that made it feel more real to me. Itâs messy at times, emotional, and not always perfectly clear â but thatâs kind of the point. She wrote it from a place where her thoughts and feelings were all over the place, and I donât think that makes her delusional or unreliable. It makes her human.
What really hurt to read was how often she seemed to be played, dismissed, or made to look foolish by people around her. Iâm not saying this as someone âshippingâ her and Michael and just because they're my favourite tandem or taking sides â Iâm saying it from a place of empathy. I genuinely felt like she was taken advantage of at different points, and thatâs hard to ignore. At the same time, I think she comes across as a strong and intelligent woman who survived a lot emotionally.
Iâll be honest: some parts of the book were confusing, especially timeline-wise. Because of that, I found myself reading forum discussions and other sources alongside the book just to better understand what she might have been trying to say. Iâve also only read excerpts from her other book, King of My Heart, so Iâm taking everything with a huge grain of salt. Speculation is easy, but none of us were actually there.
Thatâs really the key point for me: this is her account, her experience, her truth. We donât know everything that happened between her and Michael, or what else was going on in their individual lives, or who else may have been involved behind the scenes. Because of that, I think itâs important to approach the book with an open mind and not jump straight into judgment.
I also want to say, if youâre new and curious about the book, itâs available on Jetzi, and honestly, credit where credit is due for preserving and sharing Michael-related history, including this book.
At the end of the day, I donât think this story needs to be endlessly dissected or turned into arguments. Tatiana and Michael were â and are â human beings, not characters. Whatever truly happened between them is something we may never fully know, and thatâs okay. Respecting privacy, nuance, and humanity matters, especially when it comes to people who lived so much of their lives in the public eye.
PROM QUEENS AND KILLER TEENS is a zine collecting art and short essays (by me!) reflecting on the teen movies that shaped me, and the innate monstrosity of girlhood.
I'm gonna be dropping a mini run of the zine & the PDF version on my shop this Friday!
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Stepford AI, Womenâs Sacrifice, and the Cycles Weâre Expected to Accept
I recently read an essay that has stayed with me far longer than most online writing does.
âThey Built Stepford AI and Called It Progressâ by Abia Womosu examines how emerging technologies are not neutral innovations, but reflections of the cultural values already embedded in the systems that build them. In this case, the essay explores how AI is being shaped in ways that reward compliance, pleasantness, emotional labor, and erasureâqualities historically expected of women.
You can read it here:
đ https://abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built-stepford-ai-and-called?r=6f38r
What struck me most was not just the critique of technology, but the familiarity of the pattern. The language may be new. The mechanism may be digital. But the expectation is ancient.
That recognition connects directly to my own recent essay, The Ouroboros of Womenâs Sacrifice: Breaking the Generational Cycle, where I explore how women are often taughtâexplicitly and implicitlyâto contort themselves into systems that require their depletion to function. The ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, felt like the only honest metaphor: sacrifice framed as virtue, endurance mistaken for destiny, and cycles that repeat because they are rarely named.
You can read my essay here:
đ https://marthascharpingwrites.wpcomstaging.com/2025/02/21/the-ouroboros-of-womens-sacrifice-breaking-the-generational-cycle/
Read together, these two pieces feel like theyâre in conversation across time and medium. One looks forward at what we are building. The other looks backward at what we inherited. Both ask the same quiet but urgent question: who benefits when women are optimized for disappearance?
i am a fan of initially one-sided love stories not to excuse or encourage some idea of entitlement to another or on the other hand something akin to self-debasement, but because there is some tenderness in recognition. here is this one person who has taken the time to understand you without recompense without reprieve and all your life you go on thinking no one can hear you but they can hear you. they understand. they know. it may take you years to realize it but they have been here the whole time waiting for you to hear and understand and know yourself. waiting for you to be as kind to yourself as they hope they are to you. wading through the wreckage and saving of it what they can bc every piece is precious and worth holding onto. a curator's love. there's something weighty about it
Hi! I'm goblin--girrrl, and this is my space for long, arguably enduring and borderline erratic ramblings. My interests include, but are by no means limited to: film, books, horror, dystopian media, fantasy, psychology, sociology, girlhood, and the internet.
If any of that piques your interest, then please stay a while. I can't guarantee that anything I write will be grammatically correct (I have no excuse other than pure laziness), nor can I guarantee any form of consistency (I have no excuse other than laziness), but I can guarantee that what I do post will at the very least be entertaining.
If I get anything wrong, please correct me! I love to learn more and will add addendums as and when I am corrected or find new information in the form of reblogs.
And for now, that is all, so have fun, get cosy and (hopefully) enjoy my corner of the internet
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goblin--girrrl
