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okay-victoria · 2 years
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You know, I was driving to Baltimore to meet an SF friend who was in town for a wedding and contemplating how normal 98% of my life is while driving on 95 with everyone and how I felt like I gave you guys the wrong impression of my life’s general level of excitement.
I drove back down 95 on my way home pretty sure I got roped into traveling to SF to help this couple have their first threesome because they think I’ll be the least weird person for dealing with that, and realized that in fact, maybe forcing myself to describe my life to people that don’t know me is what finally is going to make me realize I really need to start saying no to things instead of yes just because saying yes seems less awkward and I don’t really care one way or the other so I chose based on not wanting to feel awkward in the moment.
It’s also forced me to realize that perhaps I make friends with these types of people because while I hate being the center of drama, being tangentially involved in other people’s drama is one of my top 3 favorite things in life so I gravitate towards people who will definitely involve me in it. Thus, why I feel like I am the boring one in my life. I’m not the drama initiator, I just sit there and enjoy it.
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okay-victoria · 2 years
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The Saga of Vicki the Eater
Guys, my apartment building is doing their yearly pest control stuff and made me take everything out of my kitchen & pantry...I might have a problem. This is me, living alone, living my best life! Also I’m really glad my coffee table hasn’t arrived yet.
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I make most stuff from scratch, shocking, I know, you wouldn’t be able to tell from these pics, so my food items are relatively small in comparison!
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okay-victoria · 2 years
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I got (briefly) accidentally almost-engaged, and you can too!
...or at least Tanya can, too.
Alright guys, buckle up, you’re going to have to learn a lot about me for this story to make any kind of sense: the story of how I accidentally almost got engaged to a former coworker 25 years older than me who I did not realize thought we were dating. Truly, a more relevant topic for my fanfic would be hard to come by.
In the end, it all comes down to context: the context we think we are operating under to make assumptions about the minds & intentions of other people that we cannot perfectly know. While I don’t think of myself as particularly unique as a person, I have some pretty specifically-unique contextual factors that led me to being able to misinterpret someone, while taking me out to a fancy-symphony event, telling me they wanted to buy me a ring and me somehow thinking they did not meant it...you know, that way.
Context 1: People really like to tell me things
I have a pretty weird relationship with many of my coworkers, as well as many people at large, who consistently volunteer personal information to me they probably should not, especially of a sexual nature and/or make possible sexual references towards me that they also probably should not do. I 99% of the time laugh it off and I mostly think it is fun/funny, and I can’t figure out if this is a good thing or I just have this-is-probably-sexual-harrassment Stockholm Syndrome.
Many, or possibly even most, of my male coworkers (I work in Finance and it’s a lot of men) behave vaguely inappropriately towards me. I always get invited to other people’s client dinners to be the “young woman” at the table. They’ll tell me which of my dresses they want me to wear more often. I get touched A LOT in a way that isn’t clearly a violation of boundaries but is definitely not a way that a guy would touch another guy. I drive a stick shift and cannot tell you how many jokes I get about me & what I can do with “sticks”. At happy hours, my coworkers pick me up and carry me places in bars or lean over behind me to help me aim my poolstick; it was determined I could do a “dumb sex line girl voice” quite well and at one point in college, when my company was redoing our answering machine-service voice, as a joke my coworkers gave me a bunch of Not-Explicit-But-Implied Sexual References Of What Our Company Will Do For You and recorded me saying them to send to our boss as fake answering-service lines. My boss found this fucking hilarious, as did I.
Some of the better things that people have said to me impromptu, with no real good context for why they would just volunteer this to me out of the blue:
> (Man) A friend of a friend of a friend who I’d spent all of an hour with trapped me in a ~2 hour long personal history of how he’d gotten into furry porn (it was his college roommate’s fault, also this was 2012 and I’m not saying confessing a furry porn addiction is mainstream in 2022, but it was WAY weirder in 2012).
> (Man) While in a regular 1:1 session, my boss has told me things about his ex-girlfriend that made me go look at a can of Coke to see if “Warning: Can for external use only” was anywhere on it. This was an ex from 30+ years ago so not like, something that happened recently he was having an OMG Can You Believe It moment over.
> (Man) A coworker trapped me in a ~30 minute explanation of how he thought porn websites had tricked him into a diaper porn fetish.
> (Woman) at happy hour went on an hour long rant to me about all her sexual fantasies, fetishes, favorite things, etc while I kept trying to make contact with other coworkers to come save me, but they did not.
> (Men & Women) Always want to confess BDSM fetishes to me. Always.
> (Man) Sent me a dick pic, while I was at work, that he had taken AT HIS DESK (especially egregious because a trading floor is not known for its privacy). He then pinged me on the company chat system to tell me he’d texted me something. This was the only time I put my foot down and determined it had gone too far, and responded negatively - I stood up, looked at him across the room, shook my head, and mouthed “not cool”. I then replied in a way I knew was intentionally a bit mean about the, shall we say, size aspect if you read it that way, and pinged back “I don’t know what you expect me to be able to do with this” which I also meant quite literally like, why would I want this shitty picture you snapped in the worst possible photographic conditions. That was the end of that, so I didn’t involve HR or anyone else.
> (Woman, this one takes the cake) Female coworker and I were sharing a bed in a hotel room, and when we woke up the next morning, she told me she’d had trouble sleeping and asked if it woke me up. I said it had not, because I sleep like a fucking rock once I fall asleep, she had not bothered me at all. She then said, Oh, Good, and proceeded to tell me that in her quest to fall asleep, she had gotten busy with herself while laying next to me in bed. I investigated as to whether this was an attempt at a lesbian come-on. It was not. She just wanted to tell me to make sure I wasn’t bothered by it. It kind of seemed like she could have just not told me, given that I’d already indicated I had slept soundly and was unaware of this, so would have been none the wiser.
> There’s a lot more less-noteworthy examples, and I’m not even going to begin to detail the amount of more “standard” off-color remarks about sex, porn, penises, etc, that goes on in my work life, as generic off-color remarks are very standard on trading desks, but I hear a lot of them.
Anyway, suffice to say, I could make a really interesting report to HR on a lot of people if I wanted to. But, I am a very all-in-good-fun person, and generally do not take things wrong unless I really need to. Why people behave like this towards me, I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s because I am really surface-friendly, so people feel like they are welcome to tell me anything, but also give off a very “I do not actually care about you or your life” vibe, and so they feel I am a sort of judgement-free zone, which is kind of true, because I don’t care.
End Result: when people who actually ARE interested in saying off-color things to me in a more than “good fun” way, I tend to respond way more positively than I probably should, which can be read as encouragement that I like *that person* specifically and am allowing them to get away with it. For example, when the man in question said to me, who was wearing heels & nylons, that he has a fetish for women wearing heels and nylons, my brain just sorta went “K” and my mouth just sorta went *happy smile because it is not that weird and also not a long story* “Oh, that’s pretty normal” <= buddy, this is not an indication I enjoyed being fetishized by you, specifically, I was just happy it was so much less weird than what I often get.
Context 2: My Miniature FriendZone FinDom Escort Service
Ok, now, here’s where it’s going to start getting kinda weird. So, what you have to understand about me is that I did not try to manipulate people into making this happen. I really was just trying to be nice and keep everyone happy. That’s all.
Alright, so, being a single woman of prime-dating age around a lot of men, I’ve had more than one coworker or former coworker ask me out. To be honest, you have no idea how happy I am to be turning 32, the age at which one former neighbor assured me women become undesirable as dating prospects, shortly before he asked me to flash some tiddy. I respected that this man had known me since I was 17 and waited until I was 30 to ask, since I have visually changed very little between these ages, so I didn’t report him to his wife.
The thing is, I’m not really that interested in dating. I would like a long-term partner, but I don’t care if we’re romantically involved. So, naturally, I always turn my coworkers down when they ask me out. Most of them take it in stride, none of them have ever gotten mad, but occasionally, they will try the “let’s just hang out as friends”.
Now, I am not unaware that this guy often expects he will be able to win me over, so does not really want to just hang out as friends. But, I try to be nice to people and give them the benefit of the doubt. If the person in question is a person whose presence *I* legitimately enjoy as a friend, I will very clearly explain that I have no interest in dating generally, they have no chance of convincing me to change my mind, but I do like them as a person so if they really want to, sure, we can hang out as friends. On occasion. These guys are fully aware they are volunteering for Friendzone duty, okay?
Now, being a woman who is old enough to know How Men Are, I still kind of...watch my back on this count. So in a bid to make sure I am not *accidentally* leading a guy on, even though I’ve told him we are Just Friends, I want to make sure he understands he is not a priority for me. Like, even if I say it’s as friends, if I go out every time he asks me out, clearly that’s going to send the wrong message. If I reply to his texts too often/fast, same thing. It’s hard to explain this without sounding like a manipulative bitch, but really, I was trying to help, and make sure guys don’t end up getting mixed messages on my level of enthusiasm for them.
So, I will frequently not reply to texts, and I will only go on *select* “dates” with them. Naturally, what ended up happening is that I selected the most appealing dates. Naturally, what this ended up looking like is that what you have to do to get my attention is offer me Fancy Things that I might not want to pay for myself. I feel like I could not be making it any more obvious that I do not actually want to date them but am willing to hang out with them alone only if they’re paying good money for it, which actually isn’t true - these people are people I do enjoy hanging out with, my selection pattern just ended up making it look like I’m only hanging out with them for money. But I felt that helped make the messaging more clear, you know?
Also, in a bid to make it Beyond Obvious they do not hold a special place in my heart, I make sure I regularly inform any of these guys that other guys are taking me out to nice restaurants, theater/symphony events, what have you. They are NOT SPECIAL and shouldn’t take my acquiescence to hang out as a sign of anything. I just really don’t want them to think I led them on!
Now, I work, as do all of these men, in the Finance Industry. The place men are always trying to prove to each other whose dick is bigger and swingier, and often, because of my career track record, feel they may even need to compete with my own proverbial BSD. So where has this led? Where has this led, you ask? To a constantly-escalating competition where I recently had to completely ghost someone who offered me a $20,000 vacation to the Maldives because it sounds kind of false to say “no, I’m not interested”. Obviously I’m interested, I just don’t want to be trapped on an island with someone I don’t want to sleep with.
Even so, whenever I accept something that feels a bit “extra”, before I commit to going to something, I will repeat: you should only invite me to this and/or pay for me if you want to because you enjoy my company *that much*, because sitting across/next to me and hearing me talk is all you are getting beyond a standard hello/goodbye 1-second hug (I generally revoke “all in good fun” touching privileges for these guys, for obvious reason). I have never slept with any of these guys, I have never kissed any of these guys, I have never held hands with any of these guys, I have never even hugged any of them too long.
It occurred to me in 2019, as I lay in a penthouse hotel suite in Seoul paid for by a college friend I have this sort of relationship with, which was all to myself, as he was visiting his family and staying with them and just took me around to do tourist stuff while providing me the benefit of translator/tour guide, that it was possible I was running something of an escort service. Needless to say, I have this sort of relationship with the guy in question in this story.
Now, I now what you are all thinking. Author, you must be 11/10 hot. No one could possibly get people to do this if they are not 11/10 hot. The answer is yes, I am 11/10 hot, if the scale is adjusted for what I’ve seen of Ohio. I am an 11/10 Ohio. But alas, that makes me something like more of a 6.5 on a real scale. I am not hot. My family consistently rates me as its ugliest member (they are all unfairly good-looking). I doubt anyone looks at me and finds me actively unattractive, but I’m just like on the better end of Plain Jane-looking.
The answer to this, I think, lies in a really funny twist of fate: I have such a bad fear of failure I attempt to exert almost no control over the direction of my life, for fear I will choose the wrong direction. But wherever life sets me down, I will go on that course at 200% energy, because I have a fear of failing on that course. The duplicative effect of these fears of various types of failures manages to average out such that I come off like I rolled a charisma stat of 100, because whatever I am doing, it is all systems go like I am convinced I probably can really do it, and because I also appear to not select for what I’m aimed at, it seems like I’m convinced I can do anything & everything.
This type of charisma has a really funny affect on people. My entire dad’s side of my family shares this personality to some degree, and despite the fact that all of our kind of extreme personalities together makes for some truly blow-out fights, we are all *really* close because it’s really hard to talk to other people about some things, like when I was trying to explain to a work-friend that I was worried I was going to get all 3 jobs I’d interviewed for (on different parts of the trading desk, so I’d have to be around the people I turned down) and didn’t know how to handle it, it came off really arrogant. Like, you think you are going to get all 3 jobs you interviewed for instead of none? Who tf do you think you are? But the thing is, in my life, too much of a good thing is almost always more of an issue than not enough. I did get all 3 job offers. It can sound like the Regina George “why are you so obsessed with me?” but when I’m with my own family, we all know that we really mean it, like: “I’m not really that great or interesting, I just kind of...exist wherever I am at full force...why...why ARE you so obsessed with me? I really don’t get it.”
....my middle brother also independently and accidentally developed his own Gay Friendzone FinDom Escort Service. He gets offered better things than I do. Very unfair. We already know about the “caused police to think my average suburban family was running a large heroin-trafficking organization” story. This is how my family rolls.
It also makes finding partnership really difficult. I don’t need someone to share my exact hobbies, likes/dislikes, opinions, etc. But I do want someone that matches my energy of what’s something like “passive chaos” - most people are either more passive and will take steps to avoid chaos when they see it coming, or are just actively chaotic and a total mess. I am really boring and have no interesting thoughts, opinions, ambitions, etc. But if life decides to nudge me off a cliff, I kind of just go with it and don’t try to resist.
I’ve technically illegally crossed an international border, because I accidentally rolled around with some Albanian Guys who needed to make a sudden trip to Kosovo for...reasons, but I don’t think I can get in trouble for this because I was technically kind of being kidnapped and wasn’t able to NOT cross the border illegally (there was a gun in the vehicle; my cell phone had been confiscated; I had no passport on me). But they weren’t really kidnapping me, I was just hanging out with them for a few days getting increasing vibes that something was a littttle off as we never seemed to pay for anything, but like, who was I to question things, we were having fun (I got introduced to them through my mom’s friend’s Albanian home repair guy who had a fiancee still in Albania...) and since we were already in the car on a daytrip together, they took me along on their journey and stuck me in a cafe with one of their female cousins + guard for a few hours overnight, and then we went back to Durres with no further comment. I have a distinct memory of being like “so if the business goes wrong, do I have to die? That seems kind of unfair.” After that, I decided maybe I should stop being driven around by them and getting free meals & hotels, so went off to explore the wonders of the Albanian Bus System.
Context 3: Inexplicable Amount of Luck
Occasionally related to the above “force of personality causes people to do weird things for me” but more along the lines of things that just...seem like they happen a weird amount to me, my sense of “this seems too good to be true” is just plain off. Usually, when it seems like life is trying to drop something too good to be true in my lap, there really isn’t a catch.
Some funny things off the top of my head that I feel fit this pattern:
I never upgrade my airline seat because 90% of the time I get upgraded anyway (and not because of Frequent Flier, I am too lazy to make accounts for these...), from anything to Main Cabin Extra up through first class;
I once won a charity cook-off event that I didn’t even enter (this was a legit cook-off, you got paired with a professional chef and there were all these rules like you guys had one minute to discuss what you were doing with the main ingredient <Wagyu Beef> and then had to put on noise-cancelling headphones so the pro giving me directions had to do it all by gesture, we got secret ingredients given to us partway through that had to be incorporated, it was timed, it was very confusing because I’d shown up late to watch it after a low-iron-induced nap and didn’t know any of the rules and got pulled up after someone who had entered chickened out and I mentioned to the security guard I liked cooking just like, as an aside, but bitch, someone paid $24,000 to charity to eat my plate of food even after watching me constantly touch my finger on it to taste it, lick my finger, and go <fuck people are watching>);
At a gala that I was already a plus one of a plus one to, so I didn’t get a ticket to the prize drawings, I picked a ticket up off the floor and won the grand prize (I now own an original Disney animation cel worth $6,000, that I recently finally got framed because I wasn’t treating it well enough since I got it for free and it got a small rip on it, good thing I don’t want to sell it haha);
At a whole other gala that I also was a plus one of a plus one to, I put $200 on the silent auction for a 4-person 10 day vacation to St. Lucia and won it;
We did a weight loss competition at my job and there was a gym on the bottom floor of the building that gave us a truly free “month” - not like a fake free month where you sign up and they give you a month for free but then have to go through hell and high water to cancel, like, they just put our names on the “accept into gym” list for a month, we didn’t get a pass, etc. During this month, the gym held a raffle. I won ~$500 worth of gym gear, divided between unisex non-clothing Underarmor stuff and a gift card to Lululemon. When the manager gave it to me I was like “you know I’m not actually a client? Are you sure you don’t want to give this to like, a paying customer?” and he was too lazy to redo the raffle. My Underarmor bag is now my family’s main duffel bag. It is very well-made.
Many times when I was traveling, random dudes offered me free things like “come to my house and my mom will make you a traditional dinner”; “hop on the back of my motorbike and I’ll drive you where you want”; I got laundry done at the Sacre Couer in Paris because a security guard got me coffee when I showed up at sunrise and I spilled it on my cardigan and then he took me along while he unlocked all the doors and I got to go to places you either can’t go as a tourist or you have to pay for.
Anyway, suffice to say, this makes it confusing! When people/life are offering me something that seems like normally would come with a catch, it usually is just a pure offer! So if someone says they wanna buy me a ring, I mean? Maybe they just do?
Context 4: Myself & Jewelry
Okay, related to the topic of “free things from life with no catch” and REALLY specific to being offered jewelry....
I have a ~$3k sapphire & diamond ring from my grandparents that I wear permanently on my right ring finger. One of my female coworkers complimented it one time, and then mentioned she had a very similar necklace.
I then mentioned that eventually, I aspired to accumulate not only a necklace, but earrings that matched my ring. My coworker then...offered me her necklace, because she said she never wore it. I was like, “umm...I feel like I can’t accept that? I mean, obviously I’d want it but like, I can’t take that from you?”
...needless to say, she came in with it the next day, and six years later, I am still in possession of this necklace and wear it often. A straight female coworker of mine honestly just gifted me a piece of jewelry worth several thousand dollars because I said I wanted it. These things can happen.
Also, immediately preceding the “hey I’d like to buy you a ring” offer, I’d specifically been talking about how I wanted to buy 2 more rings (I now have 3 “permanent” rings with real stones that I wear) - and it was clear that the fingers that would hold those rings were left thumb and right pointer finger. So I felt like, okay, I mean, THAT’S obviously what you mean to buy me. I said I wanted a ring, I indicated which fingers it would go on, and you are offering to pay for my next ring! Great. That’s something people would do for me. Yes.
Now, the real kicker here - said former coworker that wants to marry me KNOWS all this context. He has seen my “flirty” behavior with other coworkers. He should know he is not the only person on my friend-date list. He was a mutual coworker of the woman who gave me the necklace. So like, if this guy had been a total rando, I would understand maybe he didn’t have the right context to understand where my mind was. By I feel like he did have it, and I operated under that assumption.
In conclusion, TL;DR - my coworkers often say weird things to me that makes me react in an accidentally-encouraging way as long as it isn’t too weird that comes off as “I accept your flirting”; I go on Not-Dates with a number of men that I’m really really clear with them aren’t dates and I never do anything with them, but like, okay, fine, they seem like dates from the outside, I get it; people/life have a tendency to gift me things with no strings attached; I thought we were clear on which rings I wanted (not engagement ones), and, so:
I didn’t think I was dating this guy, and he was offering me a non-engagement ring as a token of extra-friendship with no strings attached.
He thought we were dating and heard me reply positively to the offer of a future ring purchase...and thank GOD followed up after our symphony show was done because he was overcome with happy emotions that the next I knew, I was ACTUALLY getting a ring/down on knee proposal and could go “oh no. No no no no. Not that ring. Not like that.”
Him: “But I can still consider you my girlfriend, right?”
Me: *Laughs from gut because of absurdity of this situation* “Absolutely Not.”
Him: “But you said you wanted to have a baby?”
Me: “Not with you.”
I’m going to end up as a statistic of women that get killed by men, probably.
In all of this, I feel the most pleased that apparently people are willing to accept that I am the Iciest Coldest Boss Bitch that you are not even allowed to really touch me without being engaged to me so it would be reasonable to think we were dating for real when we hadn’t like, done anything together you’d expect people who are dating to do, besides go on Friend Dates.
So, let this be a lesson that these things can happen, people can believe you are dating without kissing/sex, and people can come to believe that they know the context of their relationship with someone, even though it might look weird from the outside, and speak/reply to the other person within the “personal” context, not the “objective” context, without...really making 100% sure the other person agrees.
And so, in long, Tanya & Lehrgen can *definitely* get into a relationship and engaged accidentally.
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okay-victoria · 2 years
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Ayee I’ve been gone for a long time because I’ve been doing everyone’s favorite activity, spending money.
Let’s see, what happened since I last posted...I acquired a new apartment (hence all the money on decorating), a second round of COVID, a third permanent real ring on my hands (so far, my experience is that the third ring is really what takes it from guys still hitting on you thinking they can steal you from your man even through the fake engagement ring and them internalizing that your man must be much richer than them and assuming you are definitely married and NEVER LEAVING your relationship...[with yourself]) and a third gay sibling, among other things.
Uhh...anyway, now that I’m actually settled into a new job and a new apartment and have no excuses left, for the first time in like two months, my pen and writing notebook are out :)
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okay-victoria · 2 years
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I really want to have a talk with the people who tag toll plaza police on Waze.
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okay-victoria · 2 years
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For those of you that are here, I am not in fact dead, just very busy. Simultaneously I somehow contracted covid, had to cancel a vacation to Greece, have to start a job as chief of staff to ceo of major swiss company, met a guy who is FIVE years younger than me but hit it off with yet I feel weird about because unlike a fellow 31 year old I can’t say “well, you’re either settled or you aren’t” in the case that he answers negative tell him he might have to move to another country with me...he’s just hitting the age where you’re deciding whether you’re settling or you aren’t...
Anyway my main problem is that this chapter has 5 scenes and I’m one scene in and it’s 10k words and somehow Tanya’s nun friend has already brought out three separate fetishes, if you *really* think about it.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, just had to scream into the void for a moment.
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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I’m going to use this to unnecessarily update people on my life so I can get out the weird things in my brain, which I’m pretty sure is what tumblr is for, telling things you can’t tell to people in real life, even if nobody reads them.
Anyway, through a series of unrelated events, I just had to meet a full colonel and three star general and carry on a 45 minute conversation with them while topless.
Idk why at that point I didn’t just ask them to review my fanfic, because would that really have made it any more weird?
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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I’m so disappointed in myself that originally Marian only appeared in a single scene just to accomplish a random journalist task that Lehrgen needed done, they had a brief lunch for like 500 words.
It’s a bit funny, I guess in each other’s minds they both “have it all” - to Marian, Lehrgen got to have a career and could very easily have a wife and children along with it; to Lehrgen, Marian got to both strike out on her own path and not do what was expected of her but also didn’t get kicked off the family money teat like he worries he might have.
Random Personal Rant
For anyone somehow here not from the original thread, this started off me getting asked what finishing school is and me getting shit off my chest that is only mildly relevant about how I could both be of the social class that gets sent to finishing school and grows up on welfare.
With an understanding that in many parts of the world it wouldn’t qualify as so, as far as the US goes, my dad is from what counts as a very old money family from Baltimore & Philadelphia. Both his siblings went to college and one now owns a major hedge fund, and his sister is married to a C-level executive at a huge conglomerate. His parents went to college. His grandparents went to college. All eight of his great grandparents went to college. My dad…did not go to college. He was not about that life, and while I don’t mean it as an insult, when I say his primary occupation until I was ~5 was a drummer in a mediocre band I mean that he opened for a lot of great acts, and if you lived in the Boston to Atlanta area in the 80s you may have heard him play, but he was never a huge national name. But he wasn’t an amateur band playing for free at some random local gig either.
My mom grew up on a chicken farm in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania but also completely rejected her heritage and became a model, sort of like my father, of mediocre status. Not Giselle Bundchen, but had national contracts and if you have a Graco ad/box from 1990-1993 you might see both me and her on it. They met because my mom’s friends placed bets, one each, on who could sleep with a member of their favorite local band first and my mom picked my dad and…my mom was actually supposed to go be a model in Tokyo and found out she was pregnant with me and couldn’t go 😂
So, after my parents had two kids back to back with a third on the way and determined they needed lifestyles more in line with having three children, they became much poorer than they originally were because my mom stopped working and my dad, with a barely-passed-high-school education but needing a true “day job” worked day labor in construction. My dad’s father was too proud to give us money/help if my dad didn’t beg for it; despite having eventually four young children my dad never did so we ended up on all the state assistance programs one could imagine. My grandma jokes that dinners at my parents house were BYOC - bring your own chair, because we didn’t own any.
My mother and paternal grandmother had no such pride issues and I live in eternal gratitude that my welfare childhood was not as crappy as it should have been because my grandmother would have my mom accompany her on grocery runs and buy us food without my father or grandfather knowing, and every Christmas and birthday my grandparents/godparents could give us the one big ticket gift all the kids wanted that year. But, on the other side, I once got stung by a bee inside my mouth because my brother threw a hairbrush through a cracked window at me and broke it and we couldn’t afford to fix it for about two years and a hornet got in one day and rested himself in my coke can (my parents were the very American type that fed me coca-cola in baby bottles at age 8 when I was jealous of my younger siblings lol).
It is hard not to believe in “toxic masculinity” when two men warring over dumbass pride issues would rather their children/grandchildren go without food than suck it up and decide ‘help’ isn’t the worst word in the English language, and you know you’ve only been saved by two women who came from totally different backgrounds and entirely disapproved of each other but reached out the hand to shake when it came down to toddlers getting the short end of the don’t-bend-the-knee stick. It wasn’t that either of the men were bad people, I loved them both and got along great with both, but on a societal level I feel they were socialized in a very fucked up way if that was the end result, as both claimed “male pride” in these instances [my dad took multiple thousands of dollars I’d saved from working during college from me during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and didn’t tell me and that was the reason I was given for why I hadn’t been informed/asked, because it would be too emotionally difficult for an adult man to ask a young woman. My graduation present was them repaying me 1/3 of the money they’d taken from me without asking because I’d like, trusted them when it had been in a joint account that was a holdover from when I was <18 and couldn’t have my own bank account].
While in some ways my parents on the surface achieved the American dream of going from nothing to a bunch of money, the real factor in play was that my dad’s father was the bank. My parents had no credit and couldn’t get real loans. My dad worked construction and during the two major periods that flipping houses was very lucrative, he never had to get an actual loan or pay actual interest, he just had to ask his father to pay out cash and then repay him at a flat 2% interest rate that didn’t even accrue over time, just…whenever you are ready, repay the value of the loan + 2%. Because my father was doing something productive, in these instances, my grandfather was happy to pay, because it wasn’t giving away money, it was loaning it. I had a very weird situation of mostly being poor but like also getting taken to the “big donors” events at the Kennedy Center and my grandparents regularly buying me a dress as a child worth more than my mom’s wedding dress and also needing to pretend I fit in with these people.
And look. When I say “these people”…honestly, by and large, most wealthy people, whether inherited or not, are not the assholes you want to imagine. Most of them are extremely nice. Most of them are generous when it comes to the less fortunate who are in their personal sphere of being. Most of them are just really out of touch. The 100% kindest of all of them that I know once relayed to me that she thought people would be happier if once a year they did what she did…go to the airport with a purse packed full of absolute necessities, buy a one way ticket to the most appealing destination on the flight board, buy your clothes and book your accommodations after you’d arrived, and come back after you felt you’d ‘centered’ yourself. She didn’t understand why there were so many unhappy people who weren’t taking this very obvious route to being happier. I didn’t quite know how to explain that saying “most” people couldn’t afford to do that either financially or from a job/career angle didn’t even cover it, as “most” sounds like 70% instead of 99.7%.
I was both my parents eldest son and eldest daughter in the worst combination possible. I was the eldest son because I was the most stereotypically male of all my siblings, in everything from desire to physically fight the battles I was given to dislike of shopping/fashion to lack of emotional connection to my relationships, so I can now fix your average household plumbing/drywall/electrical issue better than most “city” guys I interact with and remain less clingy to them in the process. I was also very much the oldest daughter from a responsibility perspective, I managed our household and from age 10 - 24 managed the finances of our family business, my mom almost died giving birth to my youngest brother after a ruptured uterus that should never have happened in the first place if we had adequate insurance to get her a non-emergency C-section (I was just past 9 years old at the time) and I was informally withdrawn from school for two years to take care of the family when she couldn’t because there is no paid parental leave in the US and we got double-fucked by the medical industry because she got a bad “mesh” put in and then had to have a further surgery to repair that which we also had to pay for and didn’t have the money to win a lawsuit over.
I don’t know quite how to put this, but in the deepest fuck you of the universe, my rich-immigrant-ggggg grandfather’s money led to him owning banks, insurance companies, etc, and the family cashed out in a big way when their ownership was bought by and merged with what is now Cigna, one of the biggest US healthcare insurers, and my nuclear family specifically got screwed by the American health insurance industry, but anyway, we were the people selected for that karmic comeuppance so if you want to feel schadenfreude at my expense, I’ll allow it without begrudging the sentiment, my family might have fucked up your family’s life too, not just their own.
I got up twice a night to feed my brother because my dad had to sleep unmolested in my room to get to work and my mom was too weak to carry my brother or even hold him against her while she nursed so I had to hold him up to her. Adjusting to living in a city and hearing lots of random noises all the time was not easy when I’d had mom sound instincts from age 9.
I learned to drive the fall my youngest bro was born because my mom couldn’t and I had to get my middle brother to preschool and go the grocery store on my own. While I hold absolutely no ill will towards my father or grandfather for this and given that about 1/3 of my paternal family either has an autism diagnosis or should, I fully feel the struggles they both went through to be communicated with, my father wouldn’t ask for help, and my grandmother that lived 20 minutes away couldn’t give enough help because my grandfather refused to do a single dish on his own as that was outside their “marriage contract” type agreement and she couldn’t ever stay with us overnight when there wasn’t a clearly-communicated need, so they let the burden fall on a 9 - 11 year old child and that really shaped a lot of my life in both good and bad ways. My youngest brother is 22, and we have only just climbed out of the medical debt his birth left us with between my dad’s life insurance and my oldest brother and I paying for the extra cost of out-of-state college tuition.
The irony of all of this is that because my father died before his father, when my grandmother dies, my siblings and I will all inherit enough money (as a non-blood relative my mom, despite keeping her vows to part at death and not having remarried in eight years, is cut out entirely) to make this a non-issue, but my grandfather couldn’t conscience spotting his unluckiest child some money in the end of days to pay for my youngest two brothers’ education and take that worry off my father as he was dying. The day before he died I had to hold him down in bed to keep him from trying to climb in his truck to go to work because he was so anxious about trying to provide for us in spite of his father having fuck you money, because his father didn’t think it was fair to the other siblings (who, at the time, still owned a major hedge fund and were married to a C-level executive of a huge conglomerate). A day and a half later I went back to my job because at the time I was then the sole provider for the family and didn’t want to risk asking for the standard week’s bereavement leave when I knew I was capable of showing up at work the next day and was fresh out of college so hadn’t built up a reputation yet.
My father worked the day each of us was born, so I suppose it is only fair and he smiled at the choice. In spite of what it may seem, I gave a baller and very heartfelt speech at his funeral to all his rich friends that over and above everything, he’d taught us how to be happy with our own lives no matter what, and multiple of them emailed my mom in the aftermath to say they’d reassessed their relationship with their children in light of it, although…tbh I kind of doubt that lasted and they probably changed nothing 😅. The last good talk I had with him, two weeks before he died [his liver was going and it sent toxins to his brain that de-personed him after that and he no longer recognized me as his daughter, but as his sister], I reassured him that though we would all be sad he’d gone, we’d live on just fine without him because that’s how he’d raised us, and according to my mom that was what gave him the final bit of peace he needed. Although honestly, I don’t think I will ever see the strength in another human again that it took my grandmother to sit next to him and stroke his hand and tell him to close his eyes and imagine he was happy on a beach and die, for God’s sake, because he was unaware and in pain and just prolonging it for our sake by then.
That type of obsession my grandfather had with assessing his children and grandchildren on the basis of economic productivity and a very black and white idea of “fair” is one you don’t easily forget, I promise you. My hedge fund uncle is currently positioning himself to screw us out of our inheritance because of janky writing in the will and I’m doing my fuck all best to gain the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with this cold motherfucker in court as the oldest and representative member of my happily much nicer and softer younger brothers who I want to remain that way not because I even care that much about the money, I know what bills affect your credit first and what you can put off paying and all of us have good enough career prospects to do our own thing, but just because I want to give the middle finger to a man that was a multi-millionaire and drew lines on his milk and orange juice bottles when I came over so he knew if I drank what my parents couldn’t afford when I was approximately six. Anyway, ask me why I support major reforms in wealth taxation. I don’t care who it goes to, just not that guy, you feel?
Having expendable income was very exciting for a bit after I started working but once I got to the hateable point of assessing my annual bonus and internally complaining that I’d spent the money I should have spent on a Sauternes cellar to drop five digits on bedset materials (to be fair they are drop dead gorgeous, very comfy and the factory pays a living wage for people to handmake the sheets/duvets/pillows to people in San Francisco, which is not cheap, so maybe I did more good than harm with that), I two seconds later nodded to myself and went “the government needs to confiscate more money from me”. The narrative is always that the “undeserving” will use it for dumb things they don’t need like iPhones or refrigerators…?…but like…I could also have gone to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a very nice sheet/comforter set for at most a tenth of what I paid so am I really spending it responsibly either….?….who is going to get more joy out of this misspent money….?….not me, that is for sure, I probably would have had more fun going to BBB and laying on all the demo beds and buying something there.
My lifelong dream, which may become possible if/when I do have something of an inheritance, is to provide food security for one of the many towns in the US were most residents don’t have it. It’s the thing I remember the most distinctly over the years. I never could quite believe it when I got to the point that I could just…pay to eat at a restaurant. One of the most disappointed my mother has ever been in me is when I was twenty five and confessed I actually had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost in a city grocery store besides that it was probably between $1 and $5, because I didn’t have to know. For now I make a weekly drop off of my excess produce to a mom group I met under somewhat weird circumstances but I was walking through the cut-through that went through the low-income housing back to my apartment at like 2 AM on a Saturday and these moms were out there partying and smoking weed with their kids all strapped in strollers around or the older ones watched by a rotating member of the group and I felt very safe and like these moms had a very good vibe of both living their own lives [seriously for mental health parents but in most cases specifically mothers need to be able to keep up relationships with people their age] but keeping their children safe and accounted for while doing so and trying their fuckin’ best against all the odds to figure out how to make that happen when life had dealt them a shit hand.
…anyway, looping way back to the original question of what finishing school is, when I was almost done with middle school my dad had built a legit construction business that then very quickly took off because we lived in a commutable zip code to the now-rich-in-their-own-right people he went to high school with who trusted him to redo their homes. We eventually moved to that zip code but I stayed and commuted back to my old high school. But, i was a pretty wild kid which my father appreciated for a long while because I would follow him around on jobs and enjoy doing physical labor, but once I was mid-puberty and also he had to maybe show me to his high school friends that did not fly.
I snapped - not broke, snapped - my left thumb and my parents had to trap me like a wild animal to get me to go the hospital. Then I got a deep cut that partially injured a tendon in my leg and at eleven I tried to beat the shit out of my dad to prevent him from picking me up to strap me in the car and go to the hopsital. Next I got a deep splinter due to my eternal-barefoot tendencies and it wouldn’t come out so got infected and I refused to go to the doctor [another weird back story but I was minorly sexually assaulted [[to be clear, not raped or anything big traumatic]] when I was eight and had to stay in hospital for a week and my parents couldn’t be with me all the time so I have a permanent heebie-jeebie about going to the hospital, not true anxiety, I will go if I know I need to and I don’t breathe heavy or anything, and I’m actually not permanently weirded out by sex or anything, just doctors in hospitals specifically I kind of unconsciously try to justify not needing to the extent I can rationalize it] and my dad was tired of my antics so he was like “fine if you don’t go I will slice your foot in half with a Swiss Army knife to get it out” and I called his bluff and laid down on the floor, stuck my foot on his lap, and he didn’t really know what to do when a barely fourteen year old girl called his bluff so my brothers watched in fascinated but horrified awe as I got my foot sliced open spectacularly so that the infection/splinter could come out and I didn’t even make a sound out of spite despite it being quite painful to my recollection almost twenty years later.
They saw me cry from pain exactly one time when while trying to break up a fight between all three of them (it was over ice cream) I got pushed and my ankle got dislocated and what actually made me cry was snapping it back in place and they realized it was not a joke. These dumb assholes that I love have ragged on me for “skipping” chores the day after I was in the hospital because the day before that I had to spend 18 hours running Thanksgiving as a good sub-hostess like I didn’t have a serious infection that needed treating and couldn’t rest because none of them were up to any task beyond peeling potatoes.
After the Swiss Army knife incident, my dad’s discussion of sending me to finishing school became real, which I knew when my mom made me take a walk with her and talked about it. Finishing school is like…etiquette school….? In ye olden day when finishing high school was not the norm for anyone, wealthy men finished high school and wealthy women often went to “finishing” school to have a combined education on being a proper lady but also being able to hold a decent conversation with your presumably-educated husband, so it wasn’t entirely etiquette non-academic. It was more just like “what a rich man wants in a wife” school, which was sort of household management and knowing enough about cleaning/cooking to correct the staff if they fucked up, how to be a polite hostess, and how to not entirely bore him when you were alone together and had done your five minutes of sex or whatever so actually had to have a conversation. In modern times it has obviously expanded to be less bleak.
I said miss me with that, I can be a girl on my own, so I went full throttle into the girliest sport they offer in high school and ever since have gained the inestimable advantage of knowing how to also use femininity to my advantage, which I am very grateful to my parents for making me learn. It would be great if we lived in a world where that didn’t count, but it did/still does, and they really set me up to operate in all the worlds.
It is weird for me to tell the story to Internet strangers because it’s one of those things that makes your parents sound terrible and abusive in the general tone of the Internet nowadays, and while I support gender nonconforming children I don’t remember my childhood or parents that way. But, I feel like the bits and pieces of my life I’ve given don’t always make a ton of sense together without the context, so here it is, and in the end, I think a number of parts of it are areas where you can probably understand where it makes me have the opinions I do when I write.
Anyhoo, this makes my life sound far worse than it is, I actually have a great life and I am not unhappy with it at all and feel I was on the whole blessed with many more turns of luck than unluck, so, please, do not take this as a depressed artist rant, it is more like a rant of a very energetic person who rants about a lot of things all the time and didn’t need to come out but just did because the question was asked and the time was right with my life being in a bit of flux to think about how I got where I am and where I want to go and why.
Always remember no matter what problems it seems like I have, if I didn’t solve them on my 2 year round the world traveling hiatus I took from working, it’s my own fault, I definitely had the time and money to solve them and just chose not to.
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Random Personal Rant
For anyone somehow here not from the original thread, this started off me getting asked what finishing school is and me getting shit off my chest that is only mildly relevant about how I could both be of the social class that gets sent to finishing school and grows up on welfare.
With an understanding that in many parts of the world it wouldn't qualify as so, as far as the US goes, my dad is from what counts as a very old money family from Baltimore & Philadelphia. Both his siblings went to college and one now owns a major hedge fund, and his sister is married to a C-level executive at a huge conglomerate. His parents went to college. His grandparents went to college. All eight of his great grandparents went to college. My dad...did not go to college. He was not about that life, and while I don't mean it as an insult, when I say his primary occupation until I was ~5 was a drummer in a mediocre band I mean that he opened for a lot of great acts, and if you lived in the Boston to Atlanta area in the 80s you may have heard him play, but he was never a huge national name. But he wasn't an amateur band playing for free at some random local gig either.
My mom grew up on a chicken farm in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania but also completely rejected her heritage and became a model, sort of like my father, of mediocre status. Not Giselle Bundchen, but had national contracts and if you have a Graco ad/box from 1990-1993 you might see both me and her on it. They met because my mom's friends placed bets, one each, on who could sleep with a member of their favorite local band first and my mom picked my dad and...my mom was actually supposed to go be a model in Tokyo and found out she was pregnant with me and couldn't go 😂
So, after my parents had two kids back to back with a third on the way and determined they needed lifestyles more in line with having three children, they became much poorer than they originally were because my mom stopped working and my dad, with a barely-passed-high-school education but needing a true "day job" worked day labor in construction. My dad's father was too proud to give us money/help if my dad didn't beg for it; despite having eventually four young children my dad never did so we ended up on all the state assistance programs one could imagine. My grandma jokes that dinners at my parents house were BYOC - bring your own chair, because we didn't own any.
My mother and paternal grandmother had no such pride issues and I live in eternal gratitude that my welfare childhood was not as crappy as it should have been because my grandmother would have my mom accompany her on grocery runs and buy us food without my father or grandfather knowing, and every Christmas and birthday my grandparents/godparents could give us the one big ticket gift all the kids wanted that year. But, on the other side, I once got stung by a bee inside my mouth because my brother threw a hairbrush through a cracked window at me and broke it and we couldn't afford to fix it for about two years and a hornet got in one day and rested himself in my coke can (my parents were the very American type that fed me coca-cola in baby bottles at age 8 when I was jealous of my younger siblings lol).
It is hard not to believe in "toxic masculinity" when two men warring over dumbass pride issues would rather their children/grandchildren go without food than suck it up and decide 'help' isn't the worst word in the English language, and you know you've only been saved by two women who came from totally different backgrounds and entirely disapproved of each other but reached out the hand to shake when it came down to toddlers getting the short end of the don't-bend-the-knee stick. It wasn't that either of the men were bad people, I loved them both and got along great with both, but on a societal level I feel they were socialized in a very fucked up way if that was the end result, as both claimed "male pride" in these instances [my dad took multiple thousands of dollars I'd saved from working during college from me during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and didn't tell me and that was the reason I was given for why I hadn't been informed/asked, because it would be too emotionally difficult for an adult man to ask a young woman. My graduation present was them repaying me 1/3 of the money they'd taken from me without asking because I'd like, trusted them when it had been in a joint account that was a holdover from when I was <18 and couldn't have my own bank account].
While in some ways my parents on the surface achieved the American dream of going from nothing to a bunch of money, the real factor in play was that my dad's father was the bank. My parents had no credit and couldn't get real loans. My dad worked construction and during the two major periods that flipping houses was very lucrative, he never had to get an actual loan or pay actual interest, he just had to ask his father to pay out cash and then repay him at a flat 2% interest rate that didn't even accrue over time, just...whenever you are ready, repay the value of the loan + 2%. Because my father was doing something productive, in these instances, my grandfather was happy to pay, because it wasn't giving away money, it was loaning it. I had a very weird situation of mostly being poor but like also getting taken to the "big donors" events at the Kennedy Center and my grandparents regularly buying me a dress as a child worth more than my mom's wedding dress and also needing to pretend I fit in with these people.
And look. When I say "these people"...honestly, by and large, most wealthy people, whether inherited or not, are not the assholes you want to imagine. Most of them are extremely nice. Most of them are generous when it comes to the less fortunate who are in their personal sphere of being. Most of them are just really out of touch. The 100% kindest of all of them that I know once relayed to me that she thought people would be happier if once a year they did what she did...go to the airport with a purse packed full of absolute necessities, buy a one way ticket to the most appealing destination on the flight board, buy your clothes and book your accommodations after you'd arrived, and come back after you felt you'd 'centered' yourself. She didn't understand why there were so many unhappy people who weren't taking this very obvious route to being happier. I didn't quite know how to explain that saying "most" people couldn't afford to do that either financially or from a job/career angle didn't even cover it, as "most" sounds like 70% instead of 99.7%.
I was both my parents eldest son and eldest daughter in the worst combination possible. I was the eldest son because I was the most stereotypically male of all my siblings, in everything from desire to physically fight the battles I was given to dislike of shopping/fashion to lack of emotional connection to my relationships, so I can now fix your average household plumbing/drywall/electrical issue better than most "city" guys I interact with and remain less clingy to them in the process. I was also very much the oldest daughter from a responsibility perspective, I managed our household and from age 10 - 24 managed the finances of our family business, my mom almost died giving birth to my youngest brother after a ruptured uterus that should never have happened in the first place if we had adequate insurance to get her a non-emergency C-section (I was just past 9 years old at the time) and I was informally withdrawn from school for two years to take care of the family when she couldn't because there is no paid parental leave in the US and we got double-fucked by the medical industry because she got a bad "mesh" put in and then had to have a further surgery to repair that which we also had to pay for and didn't have the money to win a lawsuit over.
I don't know quite how to put this, but in the deepest fuck you of the universe, my rich-immigrant-ggggg grandfather's money led to him owning banks, insurance companies, etc, and the family cashed out in a big way when their ownership was bought by and merged with what is now Cigna, one of the biggest US healthcare insurers, and my nuclear family specifically got screwed by the American health insurance industry, but anyway, we were the people selected for that karmic comeuppance so if you want to feel schadenfreude at my expense, I'll allow it without begrudging the sentiment, my family might have fucked up your family’s life too, not just their own.
I got up twice a night to feed my brother because my dad had to sleep unmolested in my room to get to work and my mom was too weak to carry my brother or even hold him against her while she nursed so I had to hold him up to her. Adjusting to living in a city and hearing lots of random noises all the time was not easy when I'd had mom sound instincts from age 9.
I learned to drive the fall my youngest bro was born because my mom couldn't and I had to get my middle brother to preschool and go the grocery store on my own. While I hold absolutely no ill will towards my father or grandfather for this and given that about 1/3 of my paternal family either has an autism diagnosis or should, I fully feel the struggles they both went through to be communicated with, my father wouldn't ask for help, and my grandmother that lived 20 minutes away couldn't give enough help because my grandfather refused to do a single dish on his own as that was outside their "marriage contract" type agreement and she couldn't ever stay with us overnight when there wasn't a clearly-communicated need, so they let the burden fall on a 9 - 11 year old child and that really shaped a lot of my life in both good and bad ways. My youngest brother is 22, and we have only just climbed out of the medical debt his birth left us with between my dad's life insurance and my oldest brother and I paying for the extra cost of out-of-state college tuition.
The irony of all of this is that because my father died before his father, when my grandmother dies, my siblings and I will all inherit enough money (as a non-blood relative my mom, despite keeping her vows to part at death and not having remarried in eight years, is cut out entirely) to make this a non-issue, but my grandfather couldn't conscience spotting his unluckiest child some money in the end of days to pay for my youngest two brothers' education and take that worry off my father as he was dying. The day before he died I had to hold him down in bed to keep him from trying to climb in his truck to go to work because he was so anxious about trying to provide for us in spite of his father having fuck you money, because his father didn't think it was fair to the other siblings (who, at the time, still owned a major hedge fund and were married to a C-level executive of a huge conglomerate). A day and a half later I went back to my job because at the time I was then the sole provider for the family and didn't want to risk asking for the standard week's bereavement leave when I knew I was capable of showing up at work the next day and was fresh out of college so hadn't built up a reputation yet.
My father worked the day each of us was born, so I suppose it is only fair and he smiled at the choice. In spite of what it may seem, I gave a baller and very heartfelt speech at his funeral to all his rich friends that over and above everything, he'd taught us how to be happy with our own lives no matter what, and multiple of them emailed my mom in the aftermath to say they'd reassessed their relationship with their children in light of it, although...tbh I kind of doubt that lasted and they probably changed nothing 😅. The last good talk I had with him, two weeks before he died [his liver was going and it sent toxins to his brain that de-personed him after that and he no longer recognized me as his daughter, but as his sister], I reassured him that though we would all be sad he'd gone, we'd live on just fine without him because that's how he'd raised us, and according to my mom that was what gave him the final bit of peace he needed. Although honestly, I don't think I will ever see the strength in another human again that it took my grandmother to sit next to him and stroke his hand and tell him to close his eyes and imagine he was happy on a beach and die, for God's sake, because he was unaware and in pain and just prolonging it for our sake by then.
That type of obsession my grandfather had with assessing his children and grandchildren on the basis of economic productivity and a very black and white idea of "fair" is one you don't easily forget, I promise you. My hedge fund uncle is currently positioning himself to screw us out of our inheritance because of janky writing in the will and I'm doing my fuck all best to gain the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with this cold motherfucker in court as the oldest and representative member of my happily much nicer and softer younger brothers who I want to remain that way not because I even care that much about the money, I know what bills affect your credit first and what you can put off paying and all of us have good enough career prospects to do our own thing, but just because I want to give the middle finger to a man that was a multi-millionaire and drew lines on his milk and orange juice bottles when I came over so he knew if I drank what my parents couldn't afford when I was approximately six. Anyway, ask me why I support major reforms in wealth taxation. I don't care who it goes to, just not that guy, you feel?
Having expendable income was very exciting for a bit after I started working but once I got to the hateable point of assessing my annual bonus and internally complaining that I'd spent the money I should have spent on a Sauternes cellar to drop five digits on bedset materials (to be fair they are drop dead gorgeous, very comfy and the factory pays a living wage for people to handmake the sheets/duvets/pillows to people in San Francisco, which is not cheap, so maybe I did more good than harm with that), I two seconds later nodded to myself and went "the government needs to confiscate more money from me". The narrative is always that the "undeserving" will use it for dumb things they don't need like iPhones or refrigerators...?...but like...I could also have gone to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a very nice sheet/comforter set for at most a tenth of what I paid so am I really spending it responsibly either....?....who is going to get more joy out of this misspent money....?....not me, that is for sure, I probably would have had more fun going to BBB and laying on all the demo beds and buying something there.
My lifelong dream, which may become possible if/when I do have something of an inheritance, is to provide food security for one of the many towns in the US were most residents don't have it. It's the thing I remember the most distinctly over the years. I never could quite believe it when I got to the point that I could just...pay to eat at a restaurant. One of the most disappointed my mother has ever been in me is when I was twenty five and confessed I actually had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost in a city grocery store besides that it was probably between $1 and $5, because I didn't have to know. For now I make a weekly drop off of my excess produce to a mom group I met under somewhat weird circumstances but I was walking through the cut-through that went through the low-income housing back to my apartment at like 2 AM on a Saturday and these moms were out there partying and smoking weed with their kids all strapped in strollers around or the older ones watched by a rotating member of the group and I felt very safe and like these moms had a very good vibe of both living their own lives [seriously for mental health parents but in most cases specifically mothers need to be able to keep up relationships with people their age] but keeping their children safe and accounted for while doing so and trying their fuckin' best against all the odds to figure out how to make that happen when life had dealt them a shit hand.
...anyway, looping way back to the original question of what finishing school is, when I was almost done with middle school my dad had built a legit construction business that then very quickly took off because we lived in a commutable zip code to the now-rich-in-their-own-right people he went to high school with who trusted him to redo their homes. We eventually moved to that zip code but I stayed and commuted back to my old high school. But, i was a pretty wild kid which my father appreciated for a long while because I would follow him around on jobs and enjoy doing physical labor, but once I was mid-puberty and also he had to maybe show me to his high school friends that did not fly.
I snapped - not broke, snapped - my left thumb and my parents had to trap me like a wild animal to get me to go the hospital. Then I got a deep cut that partially injured a tendon in my leg and at eleven I tried to beat the shit out of my dad to prevent him from picking me up to strap me in the car and go to the hopsital. Next I got a deep splinter due to my eternal-barefoot tendencies and it wouldn't come out so got infected and I refused to go to the doctor [another weird back story but I was minorly sexually assaulted [[to be clear, not raped or anything big traumatic]] when I was eight and had to stay in hospital for a week and my parents couldn't be with me all the time so I have a permanent heebie-jeebie about going to the hospital, not true anxiety, I will go if I know I need to and I don't breathe heavy or anything, and I'm actually not permanently weirded out by sex or anything, just doctors in hospitals specifically I kind of unconsciously try to justify not needing to the extent I can rationalize it] and my dad was tired of my antics so he was like "fine if you don't go I will slice your foot in half with a Swiss Army knife to get it out" and I called his bluff and laid down on the floor, stuck my foot on his lap, and he didn't really know what to do when a barely fourteen year old girl called his bluff so my brothers watched in fascinated but horrified awe as I got my foot sliced open spectacularly so that the infection/splinter could come out and I didn't even make a sound out of spite despite it being quite painful to my recollection almost twenty years later.
They saw me cry from pain exactly one time when while trying to break up a fight between all three of them (it was over ice cream) I got pushed and my ankle got dislocated and what actually made me cry was snapping it back in place and they realized it was not a joke. These dumb assholes that I love have ragged on me for "skipping" chores the day after I was in the hospital because the day before that I had to spend 18 hours running Thanksgiving as a good sub-hostess like I didn't have a serious infection that needed treating and couldn't rest because none of them were up to any task beyond peeling potatoes.
After the Swiss Army knife incident, my dad's discussion of sending me to finishing school became real, which I knew when my mom made me take a walk with her and talked about it. Finishing school is like...etiquette school....? In ye olden day when finishing high school was not the norm for anyone, wealthy men finished high school and wealthy women often went to "finishing" school to have a combined education on being a proper lady but also being able to hold a decent conversation with your presumably-educated husband, so it wasn't entirely etiquette non-academic. It was more just like "what a rich man wants in a wife" school, which was sort of household management and knowing enough about cleaning/cooking to correct the staff if they fucked up, how to be a polite hostess, and how to not entirely bore him when you were alone together and had done your five minutes of sex or whatever so actually had to have a conversation. In modern times it has obviously expanded to be less bleak.
I said miss me with that, I can be a girl on my own, so I went full throttle into the girliest sport they offer in high school and ever since have gained the inestimable advantage of knowing how to also use femininity to my advantage, which I am very grateful to my parents for making me learn. It would be great if we lived in a world where that didn't count, but it did/still does, and they really set me up to operate in all the worlds.
It is weird for me to tell the story to Internet strangers because it's one of those things that makes your parents sound terrible and abusive in the general tone of the Internet nowadays, and while I support gender nonconforming children I don't remember my childhood or parents that way. But, I feel like the bits and pieces of my life I've given don't always make a ton of sense together without the context, so here it is, and in the end, I think a number of parts of it are areas where you can probably understand where it makes me have the opinions I do when I write.
Anyhoo, this makes my life sound far worse than it is, I actually have a great life and I am not unhappy with it at all and feel I was on the whole blessed with many more turns of luck than unluck, so, please, do not take this as a depressed artist rant, it is more like a rant of a very energetic person who rants about a lot of things all the time and didn’t need to come out but just did because the question was asked and the time was right with my life being in a bit of flux to think about how I got where I am and where I want to go and why.
Always remember no matter what problems it seems like I have, if I didn’t solve them on my 2 year round the world traveling hiatus I took from working, it’s my own fault, I definitely had the time and money to solve them and just chose not to.
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Pt 2/2
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Look, I swear I’m working on my next chapter, okay, I only have 3 out of 20 pages of the original chapter left to edit, but I may or may not have made a hungover manga re-translation this weekend.
Please someone tell my why Lehrgen looks 19 in the restaurant adaptation.
Part 1/2
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Is you victoria_kay in fanfic and archievework ?
Nice to meet you
Yes, it is me :) Nice to meet you too!
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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I’ve been reading your Tanya fic since like chapter two of Listen to Your Lies, and it’s crazy to think how much time has passed since then. Never posted anything on SB but just wanted to let you know I literally love everything you write. I even redownloaded tumblr again since like idk 2018 just to follow you. I think I read somewhere that a reader thinks Tanya might get a hobby and I just wanted to ask if that piano scene or something like it will appear again in Our Own Devil, was my fav scene 😄
I can’t believe it’s been two whole years, I have so many questions for myself from back then. I honestly thought this would be over in a year, and to be fair, if I’d kept to my original barebones 2k word chapters, it probably would have been.
Thanks for the love :) I’m having so much fun with this, I always hated writing but this has become a little obsessive project of mine.
It’s funny, when my beta reader noticed I’d split off the piano section from the chapter it was originally a part of, he was worried I wasn’t going to include it at all anymore. It was actually just a wordcount issue! The scene will appear again, though hopefully in an improved form, and quite soon, I’m currently working on a mega-chapter that I’ll probably have to split in half and it is scene #3 out of 7, so likely it will make the cut for the next chapter.
...At the beginning of the pandemic when all my siblings and I retreated to the suburbs/my mom’s for a bit, I ran an experiment on all four other people in the house for the express purpose of testing my theories on how quickly people can learn to play piano when they start from different experience levels. I can’t let it go to waste!
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Writing Dialogue
While some choices in dialogue will come down to style preference, most fanfic dialogue suffers from a much earlier problem of being done incorrectly, no matter what the stylistic preference. Once basic spelling & grammar is mastered, and assuming the fic contains more than a handful of dialogue, I think bad dialogue is the thing that kills my enjoyment the fastest. I can handwave plotholes and understand emotions that weren’t conveyed right, but I can’t read people having a conversation that doesn’t look anything like an actual human conversation.
Problem 1: Too Much Drama
We want our scenes to pulse with energy! Of course we want the dialogue to be dramatic! The problem here is, what makes for good dramatic dialogue is not people yelling powerful words at each other very passionately. What makes for dramatic dialogue is mostly the importance of that scene to the plot & the characters, so to achieve dramatic dialogue, the best thing you can do is not overly rely on the dialogue itself to be dramatic. Set up a dramatic situation, and then people don’t have to yell. They can say a few basic sentences and the audience already knows why it is important and why the characters care so much.
Have you ever seen the scene in The Room where Tommy Wiseau yells “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” Did you actually find that dramatic or did it just make you laugh because it was overdramatized? That’s what dramatic dialogue does to a story. Unless your characters are middle schoolers exclaiming it out in the hall between classes, chances are, older and more mature characters aren’t going to do a lot of yelling or make weirdly dramatic statements like the world is ending.
One of the biggest offenses on this count is overusing exclamation points and overusing emphasis. Exclamation points should be used very, very rarely, as should telling your reader what words are meant to be emphasized. Your character’s mood should primarily come through action - are they slamming doors, pacing back and forth, collapsing into a chair? Dialogue tags like “shouted” or “replied angrily” can be used to help, but should not stand on their own as the only thing portraying mood.
Instead of looking like this: “OMG! Can you believe it! Drama! Let me scream all the drama out in a monologue!” Lisa screamed, it should look like *Lisa kicks off her shoes, one leaves a mark on the wall* *Lisa slams bag down on counter, opens fridge for beer* *Lisa’s boyfriend stands frozen, as this is not normally how Lisa comes home from work. “This thing happened.” *Lisa collapses into kitchen chair and sticks head in her hands.* *Lisa’s boyfriend comes to put a hand on her back*. “One sentence reminding reader why Lisa is upset about this”.
Problem 2: Too Little Drama
Alternatively, you get scenes that sometimes look like two college roommates got high and are trying to acquire a pizza with as little effort as possible. Let’s say, for example, you have one character that has a crush on another character, and they are trying to find out information about them. While maybe the character learning this information is going to do something with it, so it’s important to the plot in another way, so the conversation itself does not need to be dramatic, it might end up looking like this:
I met Crush after class and we walked together. “What’s your favorite color?” - “Red” - “Do you like dogs?” - “Yes. Did you do the homework?” - “Yes. Math is my favorite class. How about you?” - “P.E.”
Like with the above, setup and action are everything. If you set up the scene where we know in advance how long it has taken Karen to get up the courage to talk to Chad and things like that, and then include actions in between the dialogue to show that she is nervous and therefore not very talkative, like her glancing up at him briefly but looking away as soon as he makes eye contact, or have her analyze Chad’s mood and wonder if he’s annoyed, etc, the scene can be made much more meaningful without needing to be a “dramatic” scene.
Problem 3: Dialogue is written like exposition
This tends to go unnoticed by some authors who are otherwise decent, and for me really ruins an otherwise decent story. The writing within the dialogue tags is written well, it just isn’t written like dialogue. It is written like exposition/narration.
In exposition: This project was doomed from the beginning. The improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns was going to stop it before it really started. Sounds...not excellent, I just pulled an example out of my ass, but fine.
In dialogue: “I think this project is doomed already,” Bob said, looking around the meeting room. “The improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns is going to stop it before it really starts.”
...sounds like Bob is kind of a psycho, or possibly your most pompous and hated coworker. Who the hell says “Law of Diminishing Returns” out loud if they aren’t a professor? The longer the dialogue and more flowery/technical/big vocab it becomes, which often *adds* to exposition, the worse and more unnatural the dialogue becomes.
Dialogue should not feel the same as the “speech” when a character is thinking. We tend to be fairly limited in how we express ourselves, use shorter and more simple sentence structures, more basic vocabulary, and haven’t memorized what we are going to say, so it doesn’t come out eloquently.
The one real exception to this that isn’t really dialogue, but is speech, is if you have a character making a speech or presentation, which they have prepared for in advance, and it is reasonable for them to give it uninterrupted.
If you want to make a point of one of your characters sounding like a total tool when they speak, you can also do this to achieve that and make it immediately clear to the audience why everyone hates them, but unless that’s what you’re going for, avoid this at all costs.
Problem 4: Dialogue is otherwise unnatural
Always, always, until you’re pretty damn sure you’re pretty damn good at it, say your dialogue out loud.
Would that personally really say “What is that?” or is it “What’s that?” Along the lines of not needing to use emphasis as much as you might think, if you were, say, in Scotland and just saw the Loch Ness monster pop out and want to ask your companion what it is, “What is that?” is fairly unnecessary. “What is that?” suffices. The simple fact that you didn’t use the standard contraction means the character emphasized the “is”. If you just see a piece of mail on someone’s desk that you are curious about, you’re going to say “What’s that?” and it won’t sound like you are dramatically asking about a generic piece of mail.
There are lots of very minor and small things that can easily go wrong in dialogue of this nature. It’s really important to say to yourself: if I was in this situation, how would I say it? Read it like you are acting it out in a movie and see. Also, question if a person would even say a sentence like that to begin with, or if they would be more or less direct in their approach. More direct is appropriate in many cases because people are usually trying to communicate clearly. Even if they are lying, they usually just say a direct statement that is a lie, they don’t dance around it indirectly and give hints to the other character. More indirect is appropriate when a character is trying to have a difficult conversation - we don’t tend to give tough advice or be directly rude, we try to work around it to make it sound better.
Because people want to have “exciting” or “cool” dialogue, they will often also give characters great rebuttals all the time, where they have these snappy conversations. This *can* work, but it’s really hard to pull off well, so in general I’d limit it to having a character having the occasional good rebuttal than a conversation of back-and-forth snark. Honestly, most of us just can’t think on our feet that well, and unless you’ve built the case that these characters can [ie, they’ve been married 20 years and are having the same arguments over and over so have it all thought out] it just seems very unrealistic.
Problem 5: Underutilizing dialogue tags
If you have two characters speaking, theoretically, if we know who the first speaker is and they switch off, a reader can follow the conversation indefinitely and know who is speaking.
In practice, that doesn’t happen. We like to be occasionally reminded. Personally, I try to max out at four consecutive lines of untagged speech, so no more than:
“Hey” said Kyle when he saw Brad.
“Hey.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Partying, bro, what did you think?”
“Haha, true. Do you think Lindsey will be there?”
“Man, you have such a crush on her,” Brad laughed.
Problem 6: Overusing dialogue tags
Conversely, in a conversation that is easy to follow, every single line does not need to be followed by a variation of “X person said”. If you are going for a tight back and forth conversation where neither character is thinking in between, you want to gum it up as little as possible with extraneous non-conversation. Hit us with occasional dialogue tags, and that’s it.
Problem 7: Not breaking dialogue up
This is somewhat of a style question, but in general, conversations should only be quick back and forth when that’s the point, but otherwise should generally pause briefly to “show” people doing actions, give some character thoughts, or otherwise break it up so the entire scene isn’t just a conversation.
Also, you can use these pauses as a way of showing hesitation/actual pauses that happen in the conversation.
Problem 8: Huge breaks between dialogue
This is something I am probably the *most* guilty of myself, because I’m writing a story where characters analyze the other characters a lot, so sometimes they’ll pause and think for a while in between. I haven’t quite arrived at the level where I’ve figured out how to get that all to flow in a way that breaks the dialogue up nicely, but not so much it is jarring and you’ve forgotten what the last thing a character said was.
But, anyway, definitely something to keep in mind. While a scene shouldn’t usually be all conversation, breaking the conversation up too much makes it feel like it isn’t a conversation at all.
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Writing Style & Technicals
Look, I by no means consider myself a particularly outstanding author. I’m not saying I always get this stuff right. I just over-analyze the shit out of everything, so I figure it can be a win-win for me to write down my own reminders of what can go wrong, and anyone else here that’s thinking about writing can see the type of things I think about when it comes to trying to write a fanfic that sounds like a respectable amateur approach to writing instead of the mistakes that people typically associate with fanfiction/make fun of fanfic for.
Anyway, me deciding to become an actual writer would be the biggest unexpected event of my life, and given that I one time woke up to being dragged out of bed at multiple-semiauto-point because my normal suburban family was mistakenly believed by the police as being high up in a drug cartel and responsible for a huge distribution network, that’s saying something. My thoughts are just collected ramblings of someone who attacks things at full strength at all times, even if I may never write again, they are not a substitute for actual editorial advice.
This will be made into separate posts by topic. Some will be more focused on true technical parts of writing that have right/wrong answers, others will be more on the subject of stylistic concerns, but to start off with, I’m not going to make a separate post for the easiest and most basic: grammar, usage, spelling, and all that good stuff.
There’s really nothing to explain, except to say you really need to care about getting it right. There’s no art to this, it’s all science, with the possible exception of some usage questions that aren’t strict grammatical Yes/No. As a non-native English speaker this is going to be harder, and I do think readers are willing to make some exceptions if they know that is the case, but the unfortunate truth is, no matter how well you do the rest, if a person can’t read your writing for what it is and has to be mentally correcting it, it’s going to be hard to appreciate the rest of the work you put in to the story.
Reading and internalizing good writing is probably the best overall way to do this. The fastest is probably to get someone to help you, and don’t let them just “correct” it - let them point out the error, but make you correct it.
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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What am I even supposed to be looking at? A primer.
Okay, while I don’t exactly include more subtext than the average author who is trying to do that, I think I include it differently than people are used to, at least in this fandom.
The subtext is more context than what happens next. My plot is not linear in the sense that I am not building a tower, block-by-block, to get you to the end way up high, and looking down at where you came from gives you an idea of the upwards trajectory. What happens next is often just...life moves on like normal. There’s nothing to gain by trying to predict how it will catapult up.
What you can do is predict how it ripples out, as long as you know that what you are trying to get a sense of is the structure of an entire house - where it’s built solidly, where it isn’t, and why touching here can make something happen over there. The tension in my story rests pretty much on the fact that if you move a few key pieces a little, the whole “this is normal life” structure can come down or change unrecognizably. It’s a far more demanding plot for a reader, which is why this story really is terrible in serial form, but I think it works the best for the plot points I need to achieve and one day you can read it like a book, so...one day.
I went through my most recent published chapter, which contains basically all the different plot elements I point at, and tried to give a sense of what I think a reader who invested a bunch of mental energy could pick up on as far as things that are meant to be meaningful to how the story ties together. I know, it’s a fanfic, not an English class assignment, which is why I invested the mental energy for you to show an example that hopefully makes it easier to approach other chapters without as much energy, but you can still have the enjoyment I think we get out of trying to piece the plot puzzle together, like when you’re reading a mystery novel, because you now can overturn a lot more pieces.
Uhh...anyway, I hope you’re bored, because it’s a 15,000 word chapter we’re analyzing.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nqoMixIJ2PnR4jz-ChynczSwEkcxYyuY0a5Biu-2aiU/edit?usp=sharing
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okay-victoria · 3 years
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Love of My Second Life: Tanya & Romance
This is both my take on why, despite seeming like the easiest and healthiest relationship to write, TanyaxVisha is up there with TanyaxMary in difficulty level for pulling off successfully, what I’ve seen go wrong in fanfic so far, and what needs to make it/any romance go right.
Where to start, where to start...um, a warning, for obvious reasons I’m going to have to talk about sex.
The Age Difference
This has the joy of being a bit creepy on both ends of the spectrum! Yay.
Visha Being Creepy
Visha is probably 5 - 6 years older than Tanya. While as more mature adults that age difference is relatively negligible, Tanya being 17/18 and Visha being in her early 20s doesn’t make it suddenly a non-issue. If you and a coworker, both in your first job out of college, went to happy hour and you met his/her significant other and they were a senior in high school, would you feel good about that?
The age-of-consent laws in bygone eras may help your case for why in-story characters give a pass to such things, but it doesn’t really help explain it to your readers. Unless I’m missing something, no one is reading this story from 1920s/30s Germany, and so it needs to have the relationship explained in a way that tries to work for modern standards. Additionally, I think people tend to mix up age-of-consent with “people found this generally appropriate”. A 19 year old dating a 59 year old violates no laws in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that most people are going to consider it a loving and healthy relationship without any proof. Even your in-story characters are probably going to have some thoughts.
The final issue, from Visha’s end of the spectrum, is that even when Tanya is aged up to 18+ and has gained some secondary sexual characteristics, she is sometimes still presented as being an “eternal loli” who can be easily be mistaken for someone around 14/15, an age at which girls normally have some secondary sex characteristics, but distinctly immature ones. I imagine this problem stems from two places:
1) Scenes when Tanya’s lolidom is brought up are not the same scenes as the romantic ones, so the problem is not as obvious to the author and
2) Author forgets that “short+small boobs+doesn’t have wrinkles yet” does not actually result in people looking like they are mid-puberty. Without being really creepy, as women age, their breast tissue drops down and to the side, waist/hip/leg ratios change, and the face loses its baby fat, among other things. Writing that references Tanya as looking like a teen comes along with the unfortunate implication that she actually looks like she is still mid-puberty, and Visha...is into that, instead of being someone who is attracted to petite POST pubescent women.
These are all extremely fixable problems. Really, all an author has to do is make Visha acknowledge that it’s weird, and probably try to talk to Tanya about her reservations before she starts trying to seduce her. It’s the handwave that is the issue. For the last/puberty problem, unless there is some reason I probably don’t want to know about that the author only wants to write the relationship if Tanya looks 14, simply describe her as a petite but adult woman, and if you need to use her looking young as a plot point, have her make an effort to adapt her adult characteristics to suit or hope that nobody looks hard enough to tell the difference.
Tanya Being Creepy
While Tanya is physically the junior member of the relationship, mentally, she is the senior, and by a lot. Tanya knows this. While I don’t necessarily think Salaryman is the Earth’s most morally-pure man, I have a high enough opinion of him to think that he was not pursuing college girls when he was like 35. Tanya should also have a moment of thought over this, or the relationship needs to wait until Visha is closer to her late 20s, when she is approaching a similar level of life maturity that Salaryman would have felt was close to his own.
Even if you think that Salaryman’s logical side would have been eroded by his “but I’m a guy, I can’t help it, college girls are hot” side [I’m side-eyeing you], I think it’s very unlikely that living as Tanya, and being on the receiving end of that kind of stuff, wouldn’t make her reconsider her stance on it, at least a little.
I know, I know, Visha’s been to war! She’s not the same as some random college girl in 2020! While this is allowable as a partial justification, because it is true, it ignores a whole lot.
First off, maturity is not a straightforward drive. All parts of you do not mentally mature at the same time. If you want to write early 20s Visha as a mature-enough partner for Tanya, a bit of time needs to be spent on what Visha loses because of it - she never has, and never will, get to be that happy-go-lucky girl. While making fun of young women for being dramatic gossips, obsessing about non-serious things, etc remains a popular sport, thinking that you are doing Visha a favor by taking that time of her life away from her says pretty terrible things about how society values women’s relationships with each other. If you don’t mean for your fanfic to accidentally imply that, it’s something that needs some love & care.
Alternatively, you could write a story in which Visha, while being a competent adult, still gets space to explore her “girly” side. If doing so, you are going to have to make a really strong case for why Tanya is willing to put up with this, as Salaryman does not come off as someone who would judge it a good use of time & effort to be constantly letting his girlfriend rattle off about things he thinks are silly and immature - there’s a lot of other fish in the sea, why not find one that is a competent adult *and* isn’t often talking about things you don’t care about.
The Canonical Setup of Visha & Tanya’s relationship
Opposite Goals
In a nutshell, Tanya is presented as a person that wants to live a safe, boring, and non-notable life, is doing her best to get there, and is constantly failing and being stressed about it because she needs to figure out a new plan. Visha is presented as someone who has major qualms about Tanya as a human being, but has a nigh-worshipful respect for her heroic officer side.
This is a massive, and I mean MASSIVE problem. You absolutely cannot ignore that what makes the characters happy is diametrically opposed to each other. Can you overcome it? Yes, by slowly developing the characters towards a compromise, but you can’t just not acknowledge it and expect me to think this relationship has any hope of leaving both partners happy. Either Tanya never escapes her never-ending stress cycle, or she does, and the entire basis of Visha’s attachment to Tanya disappears.
This can be fixed by: 1) Tanya coming to terms with a new side of herself, one that wants to be that hero. This cannot just be a one-paragraph epiphany. Tanya is shown to hate when she thinks her internal self is being changed by her new experiences and she needs a lot of work to get to a point where she is willing to acknowledge this in herself.
2) Visha has to go through a rocky part where she second-guesses herself - she thought she wanted Tanya, but turns out, Tanya isn’t the person she thought she is? How and why does she decide that she likes the person Tanya has become? This is probably the easier route, but I think runs the risk of having an author have Visha *say* Tanya does all these other good things for her, but never really show it happening.
3) The happiest medium is probably one where Visha *mostly* adapts towards Tanya, so Tanya gets to live a quiet but not too quiet life, and Visha learns to love another side. As Visha is compromising more in this sense, a healthy relationship is going to include Tanya realizing what is happening and deciding to make an effort to appeal to Visha and not just be like “Take me as I am. Or don’t.” and Visha unilaterally decides to accept that.
Why Does Tanya want to be in a relationship with Visha?
Tanya betrays no actual emotional attachment to Visha in the light novels. While you can read in rationalization to the reasons Tanya gives to her actions, she herself does not believe that it is because of an emotional connection.
Canonically, Tanya is portrayed as liking Visha because of how well Visha passes the “usefulness” test. This brings up another MASSIVE problem - does Tanya, in any way, shape, or form, actually like Visha as an individual, or just  her ability to conform to the role Tanya wants her to play?
Look, I don’t need Tanya to be in LOVE with Visha in the way we usually talk about people being in love to believe that Tanya can be in a relationship successfully. I’m fully on board with a portrayal in which Tanya can’t quite summon that level of emotion. However, she needs to like and respect Visha as an individual person, and summon a level of emotion beyond friend with benefits.
IMO, it is really hard to do that without showing Tanya and Visha disagreeing on a major piece of Tanya’s philosophy and Tanya actually listening and responding positively to it, not simply agreeing to disagree because it isn’t worth upsetting her useful sidekick, or whatever. There needs to be character development of both characters - Visha finding it in herself to be comfortable rocking the boat, and Tanya having a compelling enough reason to change something that she has clung to for two lives.
Everyone wants to be a lesbian
While I get it, the Empire is not the exact same as Germany, and yes, I know that Weimar Germany was relatively sexually progressive, it’s really not something that a well-written romance should handwave.
“Weimar Culture” in many ways developed as a result of how WW1 went for Germany. If you have a story where WW1 doesn’t go that way for Germany, gay culture is unlikely to flourish to the same degree.
All that aside, Tanya isn’t someone that is going to easily shrug her shoulders and say “you know, sometimes you need to jeopardize your career for the sake of hot sex/love”. She’s pretty clear on which she prioritizes. A lesbian relationship is not going to help her here, and she’s going to be aware of it. She needs to struggle with that choice.
Visha not struggling to accept herself as a lesbian is also somewhat of an oversight. It’s pretty unlikely that a woman born in her time period would come to terms with that easily. Visha is also never shown being attracted to other women besides Tanya, which carries a weird “I’m only a lesbian for you” vibe that is like a gross parallel of a straight guy wanting a lesbian to be so attracted to him she can’t help it, she wants the D.
And now, we enter the realm of Tanya’s relationship with her identity and sexuality.
Tanya is shown to have mental qualms both about entering a straight or lesbian relationship in her new life. The reasons behind those qualms are not explored at all in the LN, but they should be in a story in which Tanya goes into a relationship.
No matter which path puberty takes her down, there is the issue of Tanya being comfortable having sex as a woman. Even if it is with another woman, it is not going to be particular similar to the way she had sex with women as a man. That type of thing is pretty tied up with our identity. Tanya hates having her internal, I haven’t changed identity threatened, and not being able to give sexual pleasure/needing to receive it differently is the type of thing that is probably going to come along with some emotional reservations on her part.
Again, sexual identity being a part of our overall identity, while Tanya may remain attracted to women, that means her identity is now as a gay person, not a straight person. Given her biases from both growing up in Japan and the state of gay rights in her new life, it would seem atypical that she would consider this a non-issue and it wouldn’t make her question her priorities or the type of person she thought she was.
But...The Sex?
Look, I get it, sometimes you wanna see certain characters bang. We’ve all been there.
While yes, I recognize that many humans make terrible decisions solely in pursuit of sex, and so it’s perfectly realistic to have Tanya and Visha do the same and say that’s why you’re handwaving everything else, it is an extremely lazy storytelling technique, especially since neither character seems likely to go to extremes for it.
Because people focus so much on sex appeal, unfortunately, they use it as a substitute for making a good case for the relationship. Visha/Tanya is so attracted to Tanya/Visha, that now they are willing to undergo character development, because the pulsing loins urge them to. Really?
Do at least some of it first, lay the groundwork for romantic attraction before you slam them with physical attraction. While it often works the opposite direction in real life, that undercuts the romantic side in fictional story-telling.
I also think that because of the focus on their attraction to each other, what ends up missing in all TanyaxVisha fanfics I’ve seen so far is the tension. That makes it boring, I don’t care about it, and the entire reason I don’t care about it is because the choice to handwave the inconvenient facts means there is nothing in the way besides Tanya being a dumbass, which you can only do for so long without it becoming boring.
They are both attracted to each other, and admit it to themselves. Neither sees any real problem with the relationship other than not knowing if the other person likes them, but they aren’t even hung up on it and mostly work on straightforwardly winning the other person.
When in doubt, blame it on The Patriarchy
As far as we know, Tanya isn’t pining for relationship, and never thinks about a romantic relationship from her old life. Combined with other things Tanya says, it is hard to imagine Salaryman ever had a “considering marriage” relationship - more like, he may have felt partnership had some desirable aspects, but probably never was able to compromise on his kind of extreme worldview enough to try to make it work with someone, just figuring he’d find “the one” one day that wasn’t going to make him compromise.
While of course, you should not need to change everything about who you are for a romantic partner to like you, saying “you should like me for me” and then putting in exactly zero effort to do things because you know they are important to your partner, even if they aren’t for you, is not one of the keys to a successful relationship.
While it is not a problem inherent to Tanya & Visha’s relationship like the above sections, it is a problem in all forms of how I’ve seen the relationship written. It fails to answer a fundamental question: WHAT CHANGED?
Why did Tanya want love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last? If she did want it in her last life, why did she successfully find love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last?
Unfortunately, skipping the answer to this question implies that nothing changed. The success is then entirely reliant and Visha, and that brings along with it a really ugly answer.
Visha’s professional I’ll-do-anything-for-you is equated to a personal I’ll-do-anything-for-you, and she very much accepts Tanya for who she is, through all the flaws that are definitely there and that presumably no woman in Salaryman’s life was willing to put up with. Tanya doesn’t have to undergo any character development to be capable of making the relationship work.
This has some really, really unfortunate undertones. It is the very reason why even legal-but-large age difference relationships often aren’t healthy, because the older partner, instead of trying to be someone capable of contributing to the life of someone their own age, decides it’s easier to find someone younger who doesn’t know better and is more willing to put up with their bullshit. That, then, turns into a creepy grooming undertone - you make the less experienced partner think this is normal.
It really isn’t normal or good that Visha should have to put up with a relationship in which she never discovers who she wants to be because she’s so caught up Tanya’s idea of how to live your life. That is borderline emotional abuse, I am sure no one intends it to be there, but without giving some serious treatment to character development, unfortunately, it is.
To me, this has some of the worst overtones of the worst types of male fantasy - My Manic Pixie Dream Girl is completely devoted to me, and instead of emotionally adding to her life and/or our relationship, she is completely fine with me substituting being a Strong Heroic Man who occasionally buys her Nice Things. She demands I change nothing of myself and completely agrees with my Logical Man worldview, no matter what she needs to change about herself to get there. She’s hot, and I get to simultaneously be a straight man and have hot lesbian sex. Even better, because she’s a “strong” woman who is capable in her own right, not only am I physically satisfied, but I get the ego boost of “earning” the submission and subordination of a woman who is better than most people, because she knows I’m better than her.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the grosser it gets, so as far as fanfic goes I just try to ignore it and understand that the authors intention wasn’t to bring along all this baggage. However, to truly write a good Tanya x Visha story that gets away from all these unfortunate implications is a big undertaking, and it’s really impossible for it to make for a compelling side-plot that doesn’t get much screentime.
I’m generally fine with handwaving issues for sideplots, but if Tanya is making decisions because of her relationship with Visha that are now affecting the main plot, it really isn’t something that *should* be handwaved.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
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