MERRY CHRISTMAS (i know im late shutup) AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Oh man saw this real late but now I can say Happy New Year!!!!

Bob in female fight club au. Thoughts

Probably named Marge

Rather than doing a direct inversion (ie making the character the exact opposite, much tits -> no tits, etc) I think sort of an analogue would work better riffing off the motherly role Bob has, in combination with the group being for uterine cancer/ovarian cancer

The women come together, and they cry, cry, cry, over lost husbands, who left them because they got cancer, because overwhelmingly, men leave if their wife gets cancer, over lost relationships with children, who stayed but resent them, over lost Motherhood, that thing you were told was your worth but now you are told you're shit. Remaining Women Together. Despite. Despite despite despite.

What is it, about purposes. Want to see misery, see women fed their own physical oppression as lost salvation.

Marge, whatever her name is, her husband divorced her, left her with the kids and medical bills stacked as high as she is tall. She is thankful she still has her kids, it makes her feel like she's still worth something. She's had to try and get back into the workforce. No one wants to hire dear former stay at home mother Marge. She shows you her kids in her wallet in her purse and there are no pictures of her. There's a picture of her old husband, which she keeps to show her kids if they ask. They're old enough to go to school now, which is good, because it gives her more time to work. Life is hard, but she's doing her best.

Marge, who is on hormone therapy so she doesn't get those "side effects" she's heard about from other total hysterectomy patients, the future of early dementia and degeneration and horror. Who does pelvic floor exercises in hopes it will minimise the fallout of the surgery. Who carefully rips every hair out of her upper lip and chin because even if it would be normal for a woman, a woman whose gone through menopause, a woman at all — she knows, it's probably the estrogen tipping back over into testosterone, and she can't handle any more losses. She compensates. They all do.

The support group is her Me Time. It is the single hour plus half hour commute she can afford once a week for herself. So she gets here, and she cries, cries, cries, and the others cry with her, all over how their lives have fallen apart since they got ovarian cancer, got breast cancer, and their lives derailed because they can't be proper women anymore.

They cry in their waterproof makeup. Another product to promise womanhood. Identify yourself via consumption. Identify yourself by covering yourself up.

And when she finds fight club. When she finds something that says, jesus fuck. You are more than your children. You are more than your ability to have kids. You aren't a failed woman, that's a sack of shit you've been sold wholesale. When she finds something that promises her she will grow, achieve personhood, not because she was the ultimate martyr mother, not because she played the game of human or woman, but because it promises a freedom from all that, identification and repulsion of such sickening chains. When she stops worrying about her slightly deepened voice, and works to keep her dose even keel for her health, to avoid the toxic highs of accidentally juicing, rather than the lesser effects of a black lip hair or two. When she has a photo, not of herself in her wallet, but of the things she makes with other women from fight club, of the one view of the sunset from that one parking lot that she always thought was wonderful, when she has things in her wallet for her and her enjoyment. When she has corded muscle and a built up spine, when she sits her kids down and explains why they only see dad one weekend every other month, all the fun holidays, because dad decided staying with her through cancer was too hard even when she stayed with him through four lost jobs pissed away in alcohol and lottery tickets.

And Marge, who gets shot by the police on a regulation chill-and-drill assignment for Project Mayhem. Whose obituary in the newspaper talks about the children she left behind, how she battled cancer and kept caring for them, how she was such a strong mother, whose kids would now be shipped off to their grieving father who is so, so brave and stunning for standing up and taking care of the kids he made and dropped as soon as his live-in servant had a few issues. Her name is Marge Paulson, and she was forty-eight years old. She was a person. She will be remembered in the annals of Project Mayhem, lest what little there was of her be stolen from the world. She was killed by Project Mayhem, but they're the only ones who will remember Marge Paulson.

if Tyler were real i think he would grab random water bottles on the street with piss and everything and just drink them if he ever got thirsty (rare occasion. also based on a real story)

The most tired, wisened part of me says Yeah He Would Do That

My ears are ringing, Bob is tilting my face up, looking me in the eye, his lips are moving like he's an angel sent by god, surrounded in haze and sweat, his beautiful perfect part doubled the same as his eyes. I am not a proper prophet. My face is slack, putty in the big moosie's bruised knuckle hands.

He'd signed up to fight me. The others, they've been avoiding it nowadays. They look at me with respect I don't think I've earned and fear I think I have. That kid, that angel faced baby, no one has seen him since I broke the third rule of fight club. It is my proximity to Tyler that protects me from retaliation, I think. Even though I've not seen him in weeks.

Bob is probably the only member of fight club who thinks I don't have balls.

Bob struggled with the sixth rule for a while. The first time I saw him in that basement, switched on over to his perfect heyday of a Tuesday, the first time I saw his tits swinging around you would have thought I saw god. There was the man who cradled me to sleep the past few years. There was the man who cracked open his miserable remains of his life to let me in, right into his large, loving chest.

I'm not sure, actually, if Bob thinks I don't have balls, or if he thinks I've accepted the cancer and chose to let them kill me. The way he looks at me sometimes, like I'm something admirable, like I'm a dead man walking. I wonder if we've become the same to each other. Does he see me how I see him?

Bob, the big moosie, the big cheesebread, he corners me after club sometimes. It's not so much that I let him as that with Tyler gone, no one is tugging me out. These guys, they think every move is purposeful. I'm just some plastic waste caught in the wind. Drifting. I've been left to run all this on my own, I know Tyler's out franchising, it boils something bad in me. And Bob is here, Bob's arms have always let me rest.

Bob, Bob, Bob. He's finally stopped trying to push his testosterone too hard. He says, he's seeking balance. He looks to me and I have nothing. He's not getting his tits cut open. He doesn't want to lose range of motion, he says, doesn't want to risk losing fight club.

He says, "I don't know what your name is. Not anymore. But, Cornelius, Tyler, you gave me something to wake up for. I think about the heat of the stage, now I can go to the dank hell of the basement. I think about my wife, I think about you. I think about how my perfect dehydrated shrink wrapped body would'nt've been able to beat you to shit fifteen minutes ago."

We are out on the steps of the bar, his voice is still coming in discordant with my ears a half dimension to the left.

I lean into him. I let him tuck my face between his tits, bare, warm and sweaty. I shudder and cry. I cry what's left of my brain out, and Bob holds me like I'm crystal, like I'm an antique glass penguin from the world's most prestigious menagerie. Like if he squeezes my skull too hard, it'll pop open like a zit, crack like an egg from an eagle pumped with DDT. I'm over easy. Sunny side up, he turns my face back to his and lets his tears fall into mine.

"God, you're crazy," Bob says, voice warbling, like it's some realization he's been slowly coming to, something he's not wanted to face, but now he has and he can get over it. "You're like, fifteen different cats in one tiny bag. You're not doing well at all."

I tell Bob, I'm sorry I don't have testicular cancer. I'm sorry I lied to you, Bob Paulson. I'm sorry I used your misery and sympathy to sleep like a baby. Like one of those little commercial angels.

Bob's eyes are small in his face, wet, crushed up by his cheeks and brows. His thumbs wipe the wrinkles from mine until I'm soft, inert like uncooked porcelain. If he wants me to be, I'll be it. I tell him that. Bob, if you want it, I'll chop my balls off. It would be fair. Fair like us strewn out on the baement floor.

"I already knew," Bob says. "That's why I knocked your head in tonight. It's okay."

It's not, I say.

Bob says, "It is. I told you, at some point, I started noticing. Maybe it was my fault I didn't notice before. You were miserable enough that I couldn't tell, though, and I think that makes the difference."

We cry on each other some more. We're sitting, I'm in his lap, but I push up to cry over his shoulder. It's different. I let myself clutch at his greased, hair. Bob, I tell him. Tyler left me, he brought me all the way here and he left me, but I think he's still around. I miss him. He treats me like dogshit, and I miss him.

Maybe it's because Bob's big, warm hand is holding, cradling me in my own head.

He says, "I think I know things about you that you don't like. I don't think you've ever knowingly spoken as much as you have just now, huh."

I'd love to say no. I do presentations at work. I tell single-serving friends on airplanes what I do. I read out the rules of fight club on nights I'm there and Tyler's not. I'd love to say no.

I'm not lying to Bob anymore, though. So I introduce myself, instead, and he says, "Okay. Let me bring you home."

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

More and more, the things Tyler tells me take the place of who I was before.

I am what Tyler wants me to do.

I fly for work, I tell the single-serving friend next to me that nothing matters. One wheel on the runway, the plane leans to the side, I'm telling that single serving friend that my job security is every dollar a major car company can squeeze out of letting people die. Nothing matters. The second wheel hits the tarmac. Another plane could crash right into us as we taxi to the gate. Nothing matters.

These are Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.

The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, "We won't really die."

Haven't I?

It was me that blew up.

I am Tyler's mouth.

I am Tyler's hands.

Everybody in Project Mayhem is part of Tyler Durden, and vice versa. That is our faustian communion.

If the ship of Theseus was blown apart with homemade explosives, the remains carefully tarnished and dissolved in acid until the slag could be abandoned peacefully to poison the sea, would that be Theseus's original ship?

I am no longer who I was before I met Tyler Durden.

This isn't really death. We'll be legend, we won't grow old.

To God, this looks like one man alone, holding a gun in his own mouth, but it's Tyler holding the gun, and it was my life.

I don't think it is anymore.

Tyler looks at me, and I want to ask him when he became suicidal, when he became attached to his own shadow. It's a shame his creation was my ending, but can't he see that?

Let go, Tyler. It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. He looks down at me, face shining with tears like when he burnt his kiss in our hand.

There isn't a me and you, anymore. I think you've figured that out.

Tyler had said, let's see who's here last. The way he is staring at me, I don't think he wanted the answer.

how do you think the narrator handles the tendency for there to be at least one person in the office who is hook line and sinkered in a pyramid scheme/mlm? i think he'd find it annoying and pathetic but he definitely bought a little merchandise out of pity and mindless consumption prior to his condo exploding. i think he would wonder what a support group for that would look like, would they eternally keep trading schemes, would they ever realize it's all meant to fuck them over. he would think he is very very different as he collects his drivers licenses for Tyler's approval

hey yall sorry for posting unrelated stuff in the tag but real quick, this was originally a sideblog and i just shuffled everything onto a new blog, same old url: @jacksprostate

i will be continuing as normal there, follow if you'd like!

OKAY I finished reblogging over my old posts, there won't be any spam now, please go follow @jacksprostate !

just fyi, I'll check asks periodically here and whatnot but I'm going to start replying to stuff with the new blog. Again just fyi I've got most of december left to reblog over there, will get it in a few hours or the morning, after which I'll say smth here so you can follow without fear of spamming. sorry yall for the weird inconvenience

fave fight club headcannons ?😋

I'm having to actually think on this because there's like, a weird line between "interpretation of the piece of media" and "headcanon" which I don't think people always draw but I do... I guess the first would be something you can argue and support with text evidence or whatever while the second does not have said evidence, and then a tiny bit of wiggleroom where there's stuff that's probably headcanon but one thing somewhere you feel is evidence of xyz whatever... yeah.

That said...

I like the headcanon where if Tyler is real he's from some sort of Texas, Oklahoma type deal. Like yeah, that tracks.

The narrator as a verklempt guy who hasn't done anything with any dudes. Personally I think this straddles the interpretation line I'm sure I could find some lines to justify this but nevertheless,

Trying to list these now I'm literally like. Why can't I remember anything.

Tyler has new appliques for his bathrobe every other day. The narrator doesn't realize he's doing this

uhhhh

@tylerstesticles that is the plan, i have to wait a bit before tumblr lets me add the url to the new blog, and i'm going to leave this blog up just with direction to the new one.

this was originally a side blog and i realized the longer i wait the longer it'll take me to shift stuff to a new blog so i'm just going ahead and doing that. it should end up with the new url, will be ready within 2-3 days, i'm going to reblog all of my posts with their tags over there, hopefully in order. i guess if you want to get absolutely spammed by that you can follow @jackstaint but i'll post here once i'm done with that so you do not need to subject yourself to that actually

finally hit reblog limit at december 5th... pretty good. should be able to finish up tmrw. again if im spamming your notifications i am so sorry

im so sorry for anyone im spamming inadvertently as a result of this. if it makes u feel better im spamming myself most of all

THANK YOU, VERY VERY HELPFUL !!!

ok I'm working on this and I've run into an issue called I made her hot but idk if she looks like Tyler so. Soliciting advice on making her look like Tyler pls help. I think I've got the narrator where I want her but Tyler looks like some other hot lesbian perhaps. Also I may have just messed up the perspective a bit on her face so perhaps that doesn't help haha... It's a weird angle but I adored it in the blurry reference so I'm trying to work it over...

this was originally a side blog and i realized the longer i wait the longer it'll take me to shift stuff to a new blog so i'm just going ahead and doing that. it should end up with the new url, will be ready within 2-3 days, i'm going to reblog all of my posts with their tags over there, hopefully in order. i guess if you want to get absolutely spammed by that you can follow @jackstaint but i'll post here once i'm done with that so you do not need to subject yourself to that actually

YEAH you put into words what I was too tired to attempt effectively this morning — the premise is fundamentally connected to the fact that they're men. There's tons of interesting things which can be explored with them as women but it's more complicated because it's just not built for it in the same way. Tyler speaks of men and women in the book but Project Mayhem is made up of men because it's men who are socialized to glorify death cults and revenge violence. Etc. I talk a lot about how the grievances providing the undercurrent of fight club are legitimate and often not as based in masculinity as people assume, moreso alienation and a response to deindustralized consumerism — BUT it doesn't mean that that isn't relevant at all or that the specific response taken isn't a clear satirical criticism of the masculine response to that. And I think it's relevant to consider that gender in society serves a twofold function of maintaining male power as well as cementing the overall scheme of class power by encouraging men towards use as fodder, offering placation and threat in the form of an abusable underclass, as well as poisoning the ideological well for any sort of rebellion (arguably I think fight club is sort of all about the efficacy of that poisoning) but like... yeah. Very much, it's a criticism of the death cult, and that just doesn't translate well to female fight club per se because that's not a major part of female socialization. There's things you can use in it's place but it's hard to spin quite the same tale quite as cohesively.

and yeah I think it's important to have the same scheme of "underlying grievances valid" + "critiques and rejection somewhat valid" + "ill thought out and fundamentally useless execution of ideology that specifically lacks a concept of the future/long term"

I think that's easily solved by making her an anarchist (derogatory) which also doesn't deviate far from the original material and is entirely believable in the feminist context of the time

but there's many options

Don't you think fight club 8s actually more effective as a female universe?

Hm, not per se. It makes it about different things, at the end of the day. I mean, you can keep a lot of the same things, but fundamentally a good chunk of the focuses just reflect differently. For the shared themes, of anarchism, nihilism, accelerationism, both could do it pretty well... in some ways I think male fight club creates a more cohesive overall theming, because those work very well alongside male socialized deathcult tendencies? They advance each other nicely. Of course, perhaps it feels more cohesive there because the premise was originally created that way and has been fully written as a successful novel... no, though, I like female fight club au a whole lot and I think it provides extremely interesting introspection and contrast but I don't think it's more effective than male fight club. I do think it's way more effective than people would initially give it credit for, though.

ok I'm working on this and I've run into an issue called I made her hot but idk if she looks like Tyler so. Soliciting advice on making her look like Tyler pls help. I think I've got the narrator where I want her but Tyler looks like some other hot lesbian perhaps. Also I may have just messed up the perspective a bit on her face so perhaps that doesn't help haha... It's a weird angle but I adored it in the blurry reference so I'm trying to work it over...