#quinn

quinn:

my bald princess. where do i start. in a group setting he is a phenomenal musician if you’re able to acknowledge that he did come up with the musical basis for the majority of the used’s songs while he was in the band. that’s not why i love him but it does bother me when people try to downplay or detract from that.

he has a certain passion that i think is really beautiful and is hard for me to describe. a small way to try to exemplify this is the way that he edited these specific vlogs, with songs from hammock like “the house where we grew up” that has these really tender cinematic shots that differ so greatly from their usual goofy videos and that goes hand in hand with the fact that he has kept all of the photos he’s ever taken while in the band—of bert and him and the other guys, and that over the years he would box up all of the fan art and letters they’d receive on tour and mail it back to his house and to this day he still has all of it. even though the band had such a painful ending for him, it’s clear to me how much he really cared and still does care. he still said that bert’s voice is pretty and that he’s a great writer and he admitted that he’s cried over the situation and i don’t think many men would admit to that.

when thinking about this, i have to admit that a lot of what i like about him has to do with bert, and on a surface level that seems unfair because he’s his own person, but his relationship with bert from the very beginning reveals a lot about his character—how endlessly caring he was and how, despite him trying to make it seem like he emotionally disconnected from him in his book, he never gave up on him and he was eager to work things out even at the very end. it’s hard to describe how their entire story paints a picture of him in my mind, and i am not trying to say that he was some sort of well-behaved angel, but him not being able to punch bert in the face despite the fact that bert most definitely deserved it, and him sitting in the parking lot during bert’s na meetings to be there for him when he got out, the fact that at 19 he promised a boy he barely knew that “i’ll take care of you” (real quote) because he saw him as this sad struggling kid with nail polish and barrettes in his hair and a little purse who was so unabashedly himself and had been so neglected and was in need of help… and he ended up trying to “make things okay” for him for years which is obviously an extremely difficult task. of course you could argue that part of this is him not wanting the band to implode but a lot of the more moving details, to me, occurred before the band had any sort of fame.

and then combined with all of that, he was a dude who was occasionally aggressive and partied and did drugs and got arrested and didn’t care at all about being seen naked in public, and he was gross like all boys are, yet he has this really sensitive compassionate side to him that i find super compelling and endlessly interesting and also he’s sexy.

bert:

bert, unlike quinn, i have complicated feelings about. but i’ll stick to what i love about him in the spirit of answering your question.

i love that he has been so heartwrenchingly open in his art in a way that i think very few other men are. i love that he wrote an 80 minute record solely about a man he had an intimate relationship with, and i don’t mean to speculate about the private life of a dead non-famous person, but i feel strongly that bert saying that they only had one encounter together isn’t the entire truth to what happened between them. and i don’t need to know, the point is that it’s shocking how brutally open he has been and that’s why he’s my favourite artist.

i love that in the early 2000s he described himself as being “partly a girl” and being “in touch with his feminine side” and saying that “i could be gay but i could not be; it doesn’t really matter” and admitting that he “has a hard time cumming” when he’s not emotionally into it. i love that he wrote quinn poetry and would read it to him after they’d argued, perhaps to explain how he feels.

i love that he likes his stomach being kissed and his hand held, and despite saying all of these vulnerable things, he’d still try to act tough and edgy and he’d try to start fights with people and he’d get a tattoo of a schoolgirl that had been raped by satan, and he’d say that he wanted people to hate him. you might think those are “bad things” but i like that he is sensitive and self-described “girly” and so emotionally open that it hurts and at the same time he’s an absolute fucking asshole and getting sober didn’t fix that. i like how complicated he is. it makes him interesting.

jepha:

the thing i like the most about him is probably that he got “please” tattooed on both of his hands so that he can clasp them together and beg to the person who’s domming him. i love that he likes getting pegged and that he probably has a pain kink. there are a lot of things i dislike about him but i won’t get into that here.

dan:

dan has always been really funny and i think the fratboy straight dude energy he had combined with quinn describing him as “the strongest guy i’ve ever met” mixed with jepha’s not-so-secret interest in bdsm and subbing is delicious for rpf but other than that i view dan critically and he is far from my favourite member because him being 31 (at the time) and dating an 18 year old fan (who jepha had met after a show when she was 15) will always be creepy to me. so that informs my characterization of him a lot and i do think it’s very underexplored (i’m speaking as if anyone writes dan-centric fic.) i find the bad parts of them just as interesting as the good parts and i don’t really relate to people who want to shy away from that. but anyways. dan makes me laugh sometimes and i appreciate that he filmed some of their vlogs but i think he generally sucks and i don’t think he’s very smart.

branden:

my favourite thing about branden is that he’s not in the used anymore. i’m not going to be a bitch and rant about why i dislike him because your question is about my favourite things so i’ll just decline to answer lmao