#vofs

So before Ponyboy was Ponybitches-all-the-goddamn-time-and-never-stops-crying (AKA, The Steve Interpretation™), he was the sassiest greaser in Tulsa, OK.  At least, when left in the hands of fandom.

Some of these posts are pretty iconic.  I’m talking thousands of reblogs, reposts, everybody had screenshots of it saved to their ipod touches and iphone fours.  Like this gem:

(Seeing this one in person adds five years to your life every time.  I remember being lowkey jealous of whoever made this one because I thought this was Peak Outsiders shitposting.)

So personally, Ponyboy has never been my favorite (which, ya know, they’re all my favorite, but they’re not all my favorite, catch my drift?  But they’re all equal, it’s just a preference thing, so don’t come at me, bros. Alright, I need to stop talking like they’re real and I can hurt their feelings), but he’s probably always been my favorite to like…fuck with.  Super dramatic and sassy Ponyboy is my favorite Ponyboy.  Like did y’all read the book?  This kid can’t save the smart remarks to save his life.  Forget Two-Bit – Ponyboy is frikkin salty.

(The whole “You’re tacky and I hate you" is kinda perfect, considering Ponyboy LITERALLY described Steve Randle - his brother’s best friend and member of his gang, might I remind you - as tacky, even though he seems to have no grasp on what the word actually means.  I mean, is the fact that Steve’s walking around in clothes he probably thrifted a problem for Ponyboy?  Like he don’t wear his brothers’ hand-me-downs and wears shirts with mysterious stains on them??  Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this kid?

Also, sidenote about the bottom picture: I have literally laid in my bed at night unable to sleep because I could not for the life of me figure out what “Do you ever wonder if the farts sound loud for you?” meant.) 

And to give you a preview for a later installment, I think peak Sassmaster Ponyboy is this post right here because this is literally what his facial expression embodies:

Alright, so I read The Outsiders in my seventh grade Honors English class in November of 2012.  I was thirteen, which seems to be about the age that people read this book. I really wasn’t expecting much from it, just thought it was another book we had to read (but, I mean, this was in a year where we also read such gems as The Princess Bride and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so the bar was high).  Boy-fuckin’-howdy was I wrong.  The funny thing is, is that alongside the book we obviously had classwork, and I literally saved our outside-of-school project for the last minute.

(Little seventh grade Abby had...very little to say about the book, and mostly just did the work because she was told to and did a very bad job at guessing what the various slang from the book meant.)

One of the projects we had to do was a journal entry for each chapter.  You chose from a selection of prompts, and then you wrote about it. I don’t remember all of them, but I do distinctly remember that the prompt I chose to respond to for chapter one was about which member of the gang you’d most want to be friends with, and of course I fucking put down Sodapop Patrick Curtis because Ponyboy had already roped me into believing that his brother was literally the hottest piece of ass on the planet, and, well, look where we are today.  

We also watched the movie in class, and my teacher had told us it wasn’t all that great (Mrs. Harting, I love ya, but oh my god leave them alone), and while I don’t necessarily believe it’s a cinematic masterpiece, I totally believe it’s a cinematic masterpiece, and the book is a literary masterpiece that I’ve read about ten or eleven times now.  The people in my class were constantly talking over it, though, so I would go home each day and watch the parts I missed by finding them on Youtube, and by the end of the unit, I was Outsiders trash.  So what did I do?

I got on Instagram. And discovered that there was a fandom.

Back in 2012, there was like…50,000 posts tagged, but now there’s almost 300,000, so I feel ancient. But we’ll talk more about the Instagram side of the fandom at a later time because the main focus of this is the tumblr side of this shitshow.  I discovered that side of it at about the same time, probably a few months later in early 2013, and man…you guys.

You guys.

Believe me, this is not a love letter.  This is an archival series, but I’m just thinking back on my early days and I mean…one of my first ever posts on this hellsite was about Emilio Estevez, followed by one of those “Girls, do this!” paragraphs that you would usually get in chain emails.  I came on here looking for people to talk about the book and movie with, and I found them, but at what cost, y’all?

(I made this and I am so sorry.)

Kidding!  It’s just that we’ve come to the end of this series, and there were some leftovers that I thought I should still share with you because they are still fabulous relics (like the one pictured above, made by yours truly), and fine examples of what this fandom has produced, and goddammit, like I’ve said a million times, this is all about shared experiences.  So if I’ve had to look at them, so do you.

Let’s begin this ending, shall we?

(Hey, @souljaponyboy !)

Oh, yes, a Breakfast Club/Outsiders mash-up.  I mean, The Outsiders was the launching pad for many Bratpacker careers, so I guess this is appropriate.  Also, funny.   Also also?  Probably true.

I know @but-whyston is still lurking around here, so remember this one, pal?  I thought this was the funniest shit, you don’t even know. I’ve had this baby saved for years.

Any of y’all remember the ask-an-Outsider blog trend?  It was a perfect place for horny girls to vent their sexual fantasies, so, sorry admins. But this?  This is an example of some of the purer interactions, with a 10/10 response.

I mean…@internalcontradictions was right.

Yeah, hi, this is one of my old posts inspired by that post from Part Two that has Pony and Johnny arriving at the church with the Mean Girls reference in it.  Another instance of just how much those two intersected, for whatever reason.  So, yeah, a little shameless self-promotion, but I think it’s still…kinda funny?

Okay, yeah, wow.  This is on par with the whole, comparing-Harry-Styles-to-Ponyboy thing.  There was a while there where the tag was just overrun with the same edit.  Kinda like with the “Stay Gold” palm trees.  Dark times.

Heh.  I just…like this one, I guess.

“Fridging” is a term that I’ve seen mostly used in the Supernatural fandom in reference to Mary Winchester being killed almost instantly in the pilot and being used as a plot device for the show for…oh, eleven years before being allowed to become a character.  The term fridging means “an act where the villain kills, maims, depowers, or rapes someone close to the hero (usually a woman) in order to break the hero’s spirit and attempt to make the hero chase him.” So, like, no women die in The Outsiders, so I guess what I mean by the title is we’re the villains, and we metaphorically killed Ponyboy by constantly accusing him of being a weak, whiny little bitch.  I don’t know who the hero is to come chase after us. Logically, it should be Hinton in this analogy, but I don’t think it is.

And clearly, I’m not helping.

So, until someone comes along to save the poor bastard, here are a bunch of people just absolutely ragging on Ponyboy and twisting him into a complete and utter wimp.  It may be untrue, but hey – it’s funny.  And you can’t argue with funny.

I think he just comes across really pathetic in these two.

And now he’s carrying around a manicure kit?  A fourteen-year-old boy in the 1960s American South?!  He’s fucked.

His brothers don’t even like him, apparently.

Thanks for your input, Abby.

This is a personal favorite. How much shit did Dallas order for them? Like…it was a lot.  I think this comment is fair.

And, the absolute pinnacle:

Okay, let’s get this out of the way now: if you get into the tag on Instagram and find a screenshot of one of your posts, believe it or not, you’re doing something right.  Yeah, sometimes people don’t give credit by either not mentioning you or completely cutting off your blog name, but the first time I saw one of my Outsiders posts on there, I was a bit stunned.  Because the Instagram fandom is something else, which is something we’re gonna discuss a bit here because I spent a good amount of time there and have retrieved modern-day horrors for you all to see.

*cracks knuckles* Let’s begin.

First off, you’ve got your memelords.  These are the accounts that posted – and post – images mostly along these lines:

(There’s that Patrick meme again…seriously dating this.  But do ya get it?  Do ya?  DO YA? Cuz Darry Curtis is played by the late, great Patrick Swayze.  But both Patrick and Darry-Patrick are pictured….I’ve seen a lot of variations on this, but this is the only survivor in my camera roll.)

(This one will forever hold a special place in my heart.  I can’t remember if it originated on Instagram or Tumblr, but I really think the tone of it is perfect and I would pay money to see an animatic of this.)

(The order is all out of wack here.  Steve should be the dad, Dallas the mom, Johnny the kid, and Pony the baby.  And that’s all I have to say about that.)

(This one could easily go in the next part, but I decided its services would be best here, because these Instagram accounts really seem to love pasting the guys’ heads over images, and this is a prime example.)

Alright, and then you have accounts that like to go on Tumblr, take screenshots from Outsiders accounts, and post them.  This is the first one of mine I ever saw on Instagram, and it’s one I’m pretty proud of:

I was sorta floored. I mean…I’d seen this happen to friends and other accounts I knew of before, but for it to happen to me…in this tiny little fandom…I was very flattered, even if I didn’t get credited.  I was so flattered, I screenshot it.  (And yes, that’s me in the corner.)  Here are a few other examples:

(Another appearance by @bad-outsiders-ideas.  Congrats!)

This is really peak. If this happens for you, you’re running at the top of your game.  So if you see yourself in the IG tag, congrats…?  

To wrap this up, I just wanna say something: I know a lot of you probably run Outsiders accounts on Instagram, and a lot of those accounts are perfectly fun and make fun content, and I’m not trying to make them or you feel lesser.  In fact, I left a lot of those usernames in not just to give them credit, but because you should give them a follow because they deserve it.  These are nice kids.  Keep doin’ what you’re doin’, guys – I appreciate it.  Please keep up the good work.

Unless you’re whoever posted this:

In which case, I’m gonna need you to cut that the hell out.

So for whatever reason, The Outsiders and Mean Girls go together, as we’ve seen previously.  Or, went together.  Is it past tense?  You decide. I mean, thematically, they do.  The Outsiders definitely isn’t as (intentionally) funny as Mean Girls.  It just seems to me that they get put together a lot, and back in the day, some gracious, wonderful soul put together an entire Outsiders/Mean Girls mash-up on their Instagram, and I think all of you deserve to see this masterpiece just like I did.  So, without further ado….

God, how I wish there was more, but unfortunately, that’s where it ends.  Unless it was resumed without my knowledge, but we’ll never know exactly how it ends. I think the best part is that Aaron Samuels isn’t anybody from The Outsiders, it’s just still Aaron.  Dallas is perfectly cast as Regina George.  This is honestly just so good.  Inspired.  It’s…it’s art.

Ah, Steve and Soda. Or, Stevepop.  Regardless of whether you ship them or not, it works as an OTP and BROTP name.  

And I have a lot more tolerance for Stevepop shippers than Ponypop shippers, that’s for goddamn sure.  So I just kinda lumped them together here just because I could, and also because Steve Randle hardly got any love and was oftentimes forgotten and got his name misspelled constantly.  I guess you could say we couldn’t handle him.  But times have changed.

(Oh, and by the way: Darrel Shaynne Curtis, Jr.; Steve Randle; Two-Bit Mathews; Randy Adderson.  We clear? Gucci.)

Anyways, I wanted to take this opportunity to showcase some posts that showcase our favorite BFFs. And as I was looking back on it, scrolling through my old iPod touch, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I’ve always been ahead of the curve and had a good amount of Steve content.  Like…this one:

When was this a meme? I don’t even remember what year this is from, but I’ve got quite a few Outsiders screencaps with this Patrick in them. Please, someone help me with this. iTouches didn’t keep record of dates.

Here’s another good Steve one:

Poor Steve.  I mean, this shit had me rolling, but it’s fucked that this is probably Steve’s most iconic look from the movie, besides his Canadian Tuxedo.  Also – poor Tom Cruise.  He had to do, like, eighty takes of this.  And now here he is, in all his glory, with weird little captions.  Tag yourself, I’m “Nine inches…AROUND.”

Another one that had a younger, cringier me laughing my ass off.  I also can’t remember when this was a meme, but yeah.  I think the face is kinda what did me in, that expression he has. I don’t remember anymore why I thought it was so funny, but now it’s really just nostalgia, I suppose.

Alright.  Now, I want to show y’all one of the very first posts I saw on this hellsite.

(Funny thing is, Darry doesn’t even show up in this section, or Patrick Swayze.  Maybe if y’all are nice I’ll throw him in there at the end.)

The main point of this is to point out the obvious: the thirst level amongst all of us is sky-high.  We are an insanely horny bunch.  An insanely, openly horny bunch.  This is all because of the movie.  I mean, Ponyboy straight-up calls his dead buddy ugly in the book.  But replace that hood with Matt Dillon?  Well, shit….Point is, Francis Ford Coppola casted seven cuties, and no matter which one is more your speed, if guys are your thing, this film is for you.  Personally, I’m a Rob Lowe/Sodapop gal.

(That’s me talking there at the bottom.  Hehe.)

But maybe Matt Dillon’s more your speed.

(Spongebob seems to be a little bit of a theme here.)

(And Dean Winchester may be my most tagged of anything on this blog, but when it comes to the leather jacket bad boy look, Dallas >>> Dean every day.)

I’ve mainly bounced between those two in my tenure here, but I’ve had my moments with all of them, so I figure I’ll just do an image dump here for us to drool over.

And, as promised: