Sir, That’s My Emotional Support Bastard!

Run.

Kell: By you

Lila: -and people got hurt

Mitch: Yeah.

I remember copying Ingres at school was gruelling but equally rewarding. It usually involved hours at the Met drawing room with a magnifier. Each one of his lines is expressive, and every edge is finely controlled. An Ingres copy wouldn’t have the feel of the original at all if it’s not done this carefully with a SHAAARP pencil on very smooth paper. (Ironically, not Ingres paper...)

I took out the same magnifier and all the Ingres catalogues I could find at my place for this drawing too... The struggle is real (?)

Victor’s love for Angie aside, I understand why he’d look away whenever they kiss, or are together, why he wanted Eli’s attention, why he tries to covet them seperately— he wanted Eli or Angie but not together. Because if they are together, they don’t spare even a second of attention at him. When they are together it is the most alone that he ever felt.

It’s not so much that he is jealous of their love. He’s jealous of their easy relationship / interaction.

Friendship-jealousy. Fear of being the third wheel. A fear of being forgotten. A fear of being left adrift.

Everyone wants a place in the world, and as much as Victor narrated to us in the books of how he doesn’t care— he cares so so much, but he hides his heart. It isn’t him to be vulnerable. He hates being vulnerable.

His parent’s might have something to do with it. He’s left alone when they go on tours, and Victor doesn’t get any attention from his parents other than the fact that they just want to fix him (and I will argue an entire essay how Victor’s personality is a result of nurture rather than nature, and it his parent’s neglect that played a big factor in creating who Victor is now — and if his dam parents have anyone to blame, it is themselves for failing to practice what they preach).

Victor found two people who understands him. He had Angie. He had Eli. But then, when they both got together, he now has no one. And that is frustrating. It hurts, it hurts so much. It’s not love, it’s nothing as simple as that, but it’s this severance of connection. Being shoved outside of somewhere you thought is finally comfortable, safe, where you can leave all of your facades at the door.

Victor is; as everyone is, desperate for attention. He is desperate to be understood, even if he doesn’t act like it. He wanted his friends, okay. He wanted them to focus on him. He wanted to be seen. Why is it that love ruins everything? Why is it that when you are in love with someone, you forget everyone else?

People who are in love don’t realise how much pain it causes to others when you neglect them. And I felt it from Victor, I felt that pain from him. The feeling of being discarded or tossed aside. Being deemed less important, less of a priority, that he needs to freakin’ fight for some scrap of attention, and damn it, I felt his frustration, his anger and his internalised hurt.

“Victor Vale is not a fucking sidekick.”

You think that it’s the ego talking, and you are half-right. That is his internalised hurt and rage of being shoved to the side. That is him not wanting to ever be neglected again.

That is him trying to give reason to why he is hurting so much, and I hope everyone would understand that it isn’t so simple to sexualise Victor’s feelings as that he wanted to have sex with Eli or Angie. Even without that huge ASEXUAL label on him, I find the fandom’s response to the university arc to be highly dimissive of Victor’s (nonsexualised) feelings.

This is Victor trying to cope (and failing) as many do when their best friend gets together with their other best friend. Once again, it damn hurts.

Victor: I literally don’t care what you do. I’m busy don’t bother me again.

Based off of this lovely post

https://eypril-eypril.tumblr.com/post/635866506213851136/yeah-yeah-we-all-know-edward-was-a-104-year-old

But I feel like people often gloss over how… quietly traumatising it is to grow up being told that there is only one way to be happy— and that everybody who doesn't conform to that norm is secretly miserable and just doesn't know it— and then to gradually realise that, for reasons that you cannot help, that is never going to happen for you.

You're not going to find a prince/princess and ride off into the sunset. Or if you do, then it's not going to look exactly the way it does in fairytales. You're not going to get a 'normal' relationship, because you are not 'normal', and everybody and everything around you keeps telling you that that's bad.

You see films where characters are presented as being financially stable, genuinely passionate about their work and surrounded by friends and family, but then spend the rest of the plot realising that the real thing they needed was a (romantic and sexual) partner, to make them 'complete'.

You absorb the idea that any relationships you have with allo people will ultimately be unfulfilling on their side, and that this will be your fault (even if you discussed things with your partner beforehand and they decided that they were a-okay with having those sorts of boundaries in a relationship) unless you deliberately force yourself into situations that you aren't comfortable with, so as to make uo for your 'defects'.

You grow up feeling lowkey gaslighted because all the adults in your life (even in LGBT+ spaces. In fact especially in LGBT+ spaces) are insisting that it's totally normal to not be attracted to anybody at your age, and then you go to school and everybody keeps pressuring you to name somebody you're attracted to because they can't imagine not being attracted to anybody at your age.

And then you get older and realise that one day you're going to be expected to leave home, and that one day all your friends are going to be expected to put aside other relationships and 'settle down' with a primary partner and you don't know what you're going to do after that because you straight up don't have a roadmap for what a 'happy ending' looks like for someone like you.

(And the LGBT+ community is little help, because so many people in there are more than happy to tell you that you're not oppressed at all. That you're like this because you don't want to have sex, and/or you don't want to have any relationships, that your orientation is some sort of choice you made— like not eating bananas— rather than an intrinsic part of you that a lot of us have at some point tried to wish away.)

Even if you're grey or demi, and do experience those feelings, you still have to deal with the fact that you're not experiencing them the 'normal' way and that that's going to effect your relationships and your ability to find one in the first place.

If you're aiming for lifelong singlehood (which is valid af) or looking for a qpp, then you're going to have to spend the rest of your life either letting people make wrong assumptions about your situation (at best that your relationship is of a different nature than it actually is, at worst that the life you've chosen is really just a consolation prize because you 'failed' at finding a romantic/sexual partner) or pulling out a powerpoint and several webpages every time you want to explain it.

This what being aspec looks like for most people, and it is constantly minimised as being unimportant and not worth fighting against— even in aspec spaces— because we've all on some level absorbed the idea that oppression is only worth fighting against if it's big, and dramatic, and immediately obvious. That all the little incidents of suffering that we experience on a daily basis are not enough to be worth bothering about.

I mean, who gives a shit if you feel broken, inherently toxic as a partner, and like you're going to be denied happiness because of your orientation? Shouldn't we all just shut up and thank our lucky stars we don't have to deal with all the stuff some of the other letters in the acronym have to put up with (leaving aside the fact that there are many aspec people who identify with more than one letter)?

So you know what? If you're aspec and you relate to anything I've said above (or can think of other things relating your your aspec-ness that I haven't mentioned) then this is me telling you now that it's enough. Even if we got rid of all the big stuff (which we're unlikely to do any time soon because— Shock! Horror!— the big stuff is actually connected to all the small stuff) we would still be unable to consider our fight 'over' because what you are experiencing is not 'basically okay' and something we should just be expected to 'put up with'.