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ndmitrampur · 1 year

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Digital Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing

What distinguishes digital marketing from conventional marketing, and which should you use? Every marketer has thought about choosing the appropriate marketing type for a very long time. Here is all the information you require.

a comparison between traditional and digital marketing strategies Image courtesy of OrangeCrush

Simply put, digital marketing is the use of online platforms like websites and social media as instruments for marketing communication.

If you use social media, you are likely familiar with the advertisements that appear in your stream; this is digital marketing.

Traditional marketing: What is it? — On the other hand, traditional marketing uses conventional platforms like printed media and billboards. Imagine Don Draper from Mad Men coming up with Coca-Cola TV commercial concepts and copy for coca-cola

Pros and Cons Of A Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing has its perks. However, there are a few disadvantages to this type of marketing that we will also consider in this section.

Digital Marketing Strategies Pros

Below are some of the advantages of digital marketing that marketers worldwide can relate to.

A. It makes it a lot easier to reach a global audience

Digital marketing strategies help you reach a global target audience. For example, when you create a website, it is not limited to your locality. Everyone that’s using the internet can access the information on that site. The same goes for social media marketing.

B. Results are Measurable

Whether you’re running social media ads or search engine marketing, digital marketing allows you to easily determine how many people clicked on your ad by using a few metrics. Unlike billboard and magazine ads where you can’t tell how many people saw them.

C. Personalized Ads

Digital advertising has made it effortless to contact consumers on a more personal level unlike the traditional media that creates ads on a more general basis. By clicking on a few links on the website, businesses can target a customer in real-time, calling them by name.

D. It is cost-effective

Unlike traditional marketing methods, meeting your target audience where they are will no longer cost you a hunk of your capital. Digital marketing allows you to create several campaigns at a very cost-effective rate.

E. Building interaction

Internet marketing is the easiest way to interact with your target audience anytime, any day. By frequently posting content on social media, you can get the reactions and feelings of your consumers about your product or service.

F. Higher conversion

Digital and traditional marketing will boost conversion. However, one does it better than the other. Your digital marketing efforts are very much more liable to bring in customers because the majority of your potential customers are online.

With digital marketing, you can meet them where they are and with just a few clicks, they can buy the product before they even know it.

G. It doesn’t take your time

Although building your brand online can take a while, just like any type of marketing, advertising online doesn’t require too much time or physical effort.

Cons of digital marketing strategies

Below are some of the disadvantages of digital marketing.

A. It requires a lot of experience

To be able to carry out a digital marketing strategy successfully, you need to be very experienced in all the different aspects of digital marketing mentioned above. Well, that is why you could simply hand the job over to a digital marketing company.

B. Visible complaints and negative feedback

One of the ills of digital marketing is the fact that your target audience can see what other users have to say about your product or service—bad or good. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the quality of your product or service.

C. Competitiveness

Online marketing is inarguably the order of the day. Every company has a social media account, a website, and most likely, a digital marketing company to handle these tasks for them.

This makes digital marketing very competitive. Your audience is very likely going to be seeing your competitors as much as they see you.

D. Privacy issues

With online marketing, you need to be very careful how you use the information of consumers. You have to be careful not to breach their privacy or security terms.

Traditional marketing vs. Digital marketing: what is traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing is any marketing activity or effort that is done offline. It is the only form of marketing that was done before the internet and social media became a huge part of our existence. However, traditional marketing is still highly in use.

Traditional marketing strategies involve the use of channels like prints, magazines, billboards, television, direct mail, and radio ads for interacting with customers and potential customers. It needs to be mentioned that over 40% of direct mail never gets opened.

Traditional marketing is difficult to ignore. It is always in your face. It comes in form of TV commercials that you cannot skip. If you must watch your program, then you must watch the ad.

The traditional marketing strategy makes use of the four Ps of marketing, which includes the following:

1. Product

Traditional and digital marketing focus on products and services. However, traditional marketing takes it up a notch by getting feedback from customers about the product and ensuring that it meets the request of customers. Digital marketing doesn’t pay attention to this. It focuses solely on advertising and selling.

In traditional marketing, the product has to be presented in a way that is palatable and solves the problem of the end-user. Everything from the packaging to branding and just about anything that makes the product more appealing to the user is focused on.

2. Price

How much do we set the price at? How much do our competitors charge for this product or service? Will we make any profit by bringing down the price to drag in customers? Will we get any customers by taking the price up? Can we sell at the same price even though our brand is better? All these are questions that go into the determination of price.

Traditional marketing strategy carries price along with the product and it is not a coincidence that “pricing” is very often placed after “product” when talking about the 4 Ps.

3. Promotion

Promotion is where traditional and digital marketing has almost everything in common. The promotion has to do with every activity that helps the brand get more recognition and also helps the company make more sales.

Traditional marketing will use radio and tv commercials, one on one advertising, billboards, and several other means to promote the product. Promotion doesn’t end at advertising. Discounts, gifts, and other strategies that help customers interact with the brand also count.

4. Place

The place in traditional marketing simply refers to the location of the business—headquarters or branch.

How do we situate the office or factory in such a way that we’re able to meet our customers at the point of their needs? Where do we set up the farm so that we can easily access the market for sales? These questions and more are what “Place” in traditional marketing tackles.

The Pros and Cons of Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing has made its mark on marketing in general and will continue to do so. One question we very often get when talking about digital marketing vs. traditional marketing is whether one will outlast or terminate the other. Let us consider the pros and cons before we go into that.

Traditional Marketing Strategy Pros

Below are some of the important advantages of traditional marketing.

Establishes credibility: When you see advertising on TV, there’s a very high chance that you automatically think the company is a legit one.

Creates an easier connection with a local audience: When you create a marketing campaign on a radio station, you know you’re only relating with potential customers in that locality. It helps you channel your marketing campaigns more creatively.

It’s better for connecting to a larger and broader audience: One of the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing is that you can target an audience based on specific demographics. However, for brands that cater to more general audiences, traditional marketing helps you do that with ease.

Helps you connect emotionally: Traditional marketing allows you to communicate more emotionally to your audience, giving you room to connect more with them.

Traditional Marketing Strategy Cons

When it comes to a more modern and broader picture of marketing, the traditional way is at a disadvantage. Let’s take a look at the few cons of this form of marketing.

It is often more expensive: running a traditional marketing campaign requires so much funding. When you add the media buy and the total cost of production (+ marketing costs), you’ll see that it costs a lot to keep it running. According to Fit Small Business, the cost of running a full-page print ad can cost anywhere from $2,700 to $160,000.

The results are difficult to measure: when it comes to digital marketing vs. traditional marketing, one major deciding factor is how well these forms of marketing are doing. With traditional marketing, you cannot measure how many people interacted with your advertising campaign. How then do you know if it is worth paying for?

Most people don’t pay attention to the traditional media anymore. TVs and radios have not gone out of style but they are no longer as important as they used to be.

The traditional marketing campaign takes far too long to execute.

It is difficult to target a sub-segment audience.

How Does A Digital Marketing Strategy Differ From A Traditional Business Strategy?

The major differences between digital marketing, traditional marketing, and other types of marketing are the marketing channels and cost.

While digital marketing uses online tools and media, traditional marketing uses offline campaigns. You already know which one costs less and saves time.

Businesses that use digital marketing can reach their audiences much faster than traditional marketers because you don’t need to do

Another major difference between the two methods is that digital marketing allows you to only target an audience that has shown interest in your product or one that is interested in your industry.

You can see results in real-time with digital marketing. You know which variation of your audience is buying from you and which one may be interested but not yet ready to buy. This helps you to properly structure your campaigns.

Traditional Marketing vs Digital marketing

Deciding which one of these marketing methods to choose is not a difficult task, especially after reading through this piece of content.

Digital marketing, traditional marketing, or any other form of marketing has its good sides and not-so-good sides. However, when you consider which one has more good and less bad, you’ll know which one to choose.

From the carefully outlined advantages and disadvantages of both digital and traditional marketing mentioned above, it is obvious that digital marketing has a sharp edge over traditional methods.

Why’s that?

As of April 2021, more than 60% of the world’s population uses the internet in one way or the other. To clarify things, the world’s population is around eight (8) billion. This simply means that over half of the world’s population is on the internet doing one thing or the other.

Advertising to that population had to be the best marketing strategy ever, compared to sending direct mail, installing billboards, or using TV and radio ads.

One good thing, however, that most marketers will never tell you is that these two methods of marketing can work together to create the best campaign or strategy ever seen. This is because both methods give you access to both digital and traditional audiences.

Whether you like it or not, there will always be people who won’t and can’t use the internet. Kids, for example, influence their parents to make certain buying decisions.

Targeting this population has to be done through marketing channels where they can be met. TV shows for kids are a great place to do that.

Our advice is if you only have to choose one of digital and traditional marketing, then go digital. It is cost-effective and conversion is guaranteed, as long as you have an expert on the job.

Work With The Leading Cleveland Marketing Company

To achieve success in digital marketing, you need a highly experienced digital marketing company. It is very possible to do it alone, there’s no doubt about that. However, if you consider the time, effort, and cost of learning most of these skills, handing the task over to an expert is your best bet.

Work with the best Cleveland marketing company today and watch your business grow from where it is to where you want it to be in a matter of months.

We have been helping businesses maximize profits and boost sales. Our marketing strategy cuts across both traditional methods and digital methods.

We have a team of experts to handle all the different digital marketing channels, including social media, emails, search engines, website designs, and several others.

Conclusion

Traditional and digital marketing have proven to be important parts of the world of today’s businesses. You certainly cannot rule out the importance of one of these forms of marketing to favor the other.

Digital marketing can be referred to as the marketing method for the current world but that doesn’t rule out the fact that traditional marketing can complement its effectiveness.

Most of the time, marketers use traditional marketing to solidify the level of trust that consumers have in them and their digital campaigns.

#Top5 #Digital Marketing #insitute in Rampur #2023

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upalldown · 1 year

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SZA - SOS

Second album of r&b pop from the Solána Imani Rowe with guest appearances from Phoebe Bridgers, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Travis Scott, and Don Toliver

7/13

Emerging more than five years after her debut album Ctrl (and three years later than it was first announced) it’s been a long, odd wait for SZA’s second album SOS – to the point that over the past couple of years SZA seemed to even have a vague public spat online with Top Dawg record label boss Punch about getting it out there.

That’s a bad sign, right? Within forty-five seconds my first thought about this excellent album is the same as my concluding thought will be, an hour later: Solána Imani Rowe is a world class talent – one of the very best – and she’s not getting good enough service. Quite apart from all the horrible exes and bad shags and treacherous frenemies strewn across the songs, in real life SZA’s not being protected well enough by the business folks around her. And maybe the insecurity of that corporate failure is starting to poke through the surface of some otherwise phenomenal music.

It’s not like SZA vanished into the gap between albums. She’s not the Stone Roses. She has an Oscar nomination for her Kendrick Lamar collab ‘All The Stars’, from Black Panther. She’s guested on a pile of hits and kept the big singles coming, over the years. She’s done all the necessary social media teaser nonsense and fully embraced the hyperreal, ultra-branded expectations placed upon a modern pop superstar.

Then a month ago we got the blood-soaked body-swap psychodrama video for ‘Shirt’, co-starring LaKeith Stanfield. The song’s slow groove and aching, upswung melody belied the pace and high fantasy violence of the visuals. Even ‘Shirt’ had been long teased – fans got snippets of it online way back in 2021.

Now the album finally lands and it’s enormous. SOS is twenty-three tracks long and sonically it sprawls all over the hood. From low to high, clipped to soaring, SZA’s vocals are icily superb and her overwrought writing is vivid throughout. These progressive, ambitious melodies act like stitching to hold together the patchwork of an exceptionally diverse approach to genre and production. SOS hops around like mad. And in that context, with such an open-minded attitude to style and form, SZA deliberately – aggressively, even – forces herself into the chaotic centre, to become one of those backbone artists, whereby the music will pay service to her vision, not the other way around. It bodes well, because clearly she could sing just about anything.

Apart from slow grooves, electronic pop, and hip hop structures, there’s also a loose-limbed indie acoustic sensibility brought to quite a few of the songs. On a lot of R&B pop records those attempts at a token four-chord indie strum are the awful weak points (Lizzo’s lame-ass ‘Coldplay’ definitely shouldn’t have made the cut on her album, for example). By contrast SZA’s performances and lyric writing in that boring genre easily stand firm. It’s like she knows how to use (and abuse) white boy floppiness so effectively, it gives the harder, deeper stuff even more power.

Last week she told Billboard that because she grew up around white people, in musical terms, she accessed that kind of sound earlier. She’s having to consciously shift direction towards embracing artifice, from where she considers the ‘natural energy’ of her roots. SZA says “I wanted to be, like, crass. I’ve created the person I wanted to see in the world.”

So how does she pull it all together, especially over so many tracks, without SOS becoming bland mainstream mush? Aside from vocal variety, she does it with some truly exhausting emotional content. However dazzling it can be, SOS is often a murderously miserable record: broken-hearted, emotionally chaotic, confused and traumatised. It’s a record about desperately, unwisely, clinging onto some of the worst shit ever. A record about still having the horn for men who long proved they’re disgusting. SZA navigates such power juggling, the stupidity of fame, her broader self-knowledge, with the vicious aplomb of a daytime reality TV show, where the ratings spike when there’s a fight.

‘Blind’ for example, could be the lightest of finger-picked acoustic meanderings, except her staccato lyric slices it up.

Hey, my past can’t escape me My pussy precedes me My, my, how the times change I’m still playing the victim And you still playing the ‘pick-me’

You still talkin’ ‘bout babies And I’m still taking the Plan B

There was this one moment in that violent ‘Shirt’ video where, after abandoning her partner-in-crime (or alter-ego) to get cut to pieces by white-coated paranoia avatars, SZA’s character, now alone, suddenly turns and shoots round after round into an empty alley wall. Then you realise she’s murdering her own shadow, which detaches and drops dead onto the ground. The moment is gone in a flash – it’s a small detail. But listening to SOS (trying to get my head around all the hard dirt being uncovered), I think how apt and emotionally indicative that short scene was.

SZA represents herself shockingly often as a kind of shadow of herself in moments of death and of liberation, both at once. In the slightly Eminem-ish ‘Kill Bill’ her narrator briefly pretends to herself she’s okay with her ex and his new girl, while also pondering killing him. A therapist may try to distract her (impotently) with the notion of other guys, but no, by the final chorus she’s inevitably done the job and offed them both.

‘Nobody Gets Me’ is another heartwrekt indie ballad that comes off like a spikier Lana Del Rey, with a similar use of edgy post-millennial language to undercut what could otherwise be a soul ballad. The sentiment may boil down to “nobody gets me but you,” but the first verse has this ace summary line –

You were balls-deep, now we beefin’

That’s SOS in a nutshell. Like the shot-dead shadow, SZA liberates and destroys herself easily as blinking. She repeatedly sums up the whole in neat, seedy phrases. There are so many beefs here, it almost gets silly. The problem isn’t that the sheer scale of harshness and loneliness with exes, new partners, business acquaintances, whoever, is draining (though it is). The problem is that she skitters around all those feelings so quickly. One senses – and hopes on her behalf – that it’s not real.

‘Special’ splices flavours of Alicia Keys’ ‘New York State Of Mind’ to the self-loathing of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’. The craft is showing, so is she making it too obvious? I don’t actually enjoy this much apparent self-loathing over the course of a long record, so if there are clues that it is song-craft, rather than self-excavation, then I’m heartened. In conversation, SZA is acute about distinctions between reality and persona, which gives a reassuring clue that at least some of it is performative.

This is how I start to wonder if outside forces have, for a while, tried to manipulate her public character to present as ‘troubled’, or an antihero, while SZA herself is pushing in another direction, at least for now.

Talking to Billboard again: “That’s like my biggest goal right now, is to learn to enjoy myself and be happy.” She says, “I know that I’m blessed and I have a lot of opportunities, but I don’t know, am I building myself, like chasing after superstardom? I don’t know if that’s sustainable for me, or for anybody. It’s all so scary. I hate being on camera. I hate talking because I put my foot in my mouth a lot. It’s not like the album pressure, it’s just like life is fucking hard and to be expected to do anything at a high level while life is life-ing is fucking crazy. And then you’re supposed to be a nice person on top of that!”

Artists fretting publicly about putting their foot in their mouth is another red flag.

Meanwhile, before even listening to ‘Ghost In The Machine’ I’m annoyed that Phoebe Bridgers shows up on SOS at all. Bridgers is becoming so incredibly ubiquitous on other folks’ records, it’s starting to have the opposite effect than intended. I love her music and some of her own collabs and cover versions (she nailed Bo Burnham’s ‘That Funny Feeling’ for example) but right now she brings a kind of magic indie countercultural ‘good for business’ aura that everyone covets a piece of, regardless genre or artistic vision. I accept this is my British snobbery: the Americans simply don’t think like we do, when it comes to having a celebrity pal on an (ultra-hip, genre bending R&B electro pop) album, who was already a guest on five other records this autumn, including the solo album of the singer out of fucking Mumford & Sons. That’s on me, though.

Then suddenly ‘F2F’ (which Lizzo has a writing credit on) spins another sonic one-eighty, taking a similar horny-sad theme but sounding so much like a basic alt-pop jam (complete with fuzzy guitar stop-starts) that it could be Olivia Rodrigo, or even Maisie Peters. Miley Cyrus would slay this tune. It may be the album’s most plain upbeat moment, though the chorus is “I fuck him cos I miss you.”

It’s true for many artists but especially true here: if you dig SZA’s dextrous voice and don’t mind a load of misery, you may easily (and rightly) fall in love with SOS. I’m adoring her instrument and all the heady iconoclasm. She makes tough singing sound so easy, one can miss the tumbling journey of it all, and fail to notice the heights she’s reached along the way. And of course, it’s only because of that vocal talent and these lyrics, that the audio production can throw itself all around the park.

Also, because SZA can spit too, I think she gets bracketed too closely to the hip hop universe, when her actual vibe is so much broader, and leans nearer to the psychedelic adventures of FKA Twigs, alongside the minimalist, nihilist pinup tendencies of Del Rey. Nihilism is key. It’s starting to do my head in how much nihilism and vengefulness are centred in this modern pop, presented as though that’s somehow a more truthful part of our emotional experience than, say, the simpler ups and downs of lust and loss. A question I can’t figure is: is it self-disempowering that she embraces the tropes, or the opposite?

If there’s a failure in SOS it’s how monumentally hard it tries, as if the non-creative people around the artist are still demanding more, or demanding different, or trying to control the creative output, to a point that risks slaughtering confidence and maybe results in the desperate scattergun shooting of one’s own shadow.

A brilliant, clever, broken junkyard of an album, often compositionally and melodically so gaspingly good, I’ve completely fallen for large chunks of it. Yet at times (too many times) SOS risks coming off like self-exposing fan service for the lowest common denominator of the TikTok succubus mob. It’s too long. It may be two great albums. I might have a go at dividing the tracks myself. And this is an odd conclusion to draw from listening to a record and doing a bit of casual online reading about an artist – but I’ve ended up where I started, with a snowballing worry that SZA has enough greatness to be still higher up the food chain, and what she needs and deserves is better service from the business plods around her. So they tell her less and listen to her more. So they help her stop worrying about herself and better trust the value of what she already contributes, which is both bloody and golden.

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https://thequietus.com/articles/32478-sza-sos-review

#sza #sos

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jonathankatwhatever · 9 months

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It continues to be 11 Sept 2023. I was just overcome by childbirth imagery, with the words pick this baby up so it opens those lungs and cries.

How do I get there? Big step this morning? Elliptics are the specific of that which is contained to express to be confined, which I clearly do not yet get. That is: when there’s a complete enclosure, what is the relationship between that and the ‘future’ space, to that which occurs to the right of the yK? My mind says it’s like you take that and open it up and release it to the right. Which is the way of saying: here’s the results which come from that, because here’s the pathways which come from that, and - this is difficult to get out - those pathways produce these results, which allows them to be front loaded so you can see them. This is another version of the same D-structure issue in which we take a step to an End and add CR, meaning End+CR form, with that repeating to End+CR+End+CR, though I also see this as the expansion of the stack in which each CR hides an End. This means each listing of End or CR is really a layer in a stack at that location and in stacks which accumulate this location, up to all stacks associated.

Okay. I agree with the description. Now what? Each of the second Ends has specific Pathways which generate them. And the same is true if we add another End to the string, so we can see how each step along the chain of Ends develops the constraints into which the Pathways can construct. The way this works is beautiful: constructing a likely Pathway invokes construction of unlikely Pathways because those associate as Nots, as parity checks to those Pathways which make up Is, which I think we can define as the large meaning for Things in existence, whether for an individual Thing or a group of Things or a universe of Things. An Is is obviously very complicated, and that means we need to approach it using a large variety of tools - that is the actual value in diversity, btw, the perspective on problems - and now I have to take a detour.

Been rewatching Mad Men a few episodes a night. The part which explodes in my head is the way this could be a positive story instead. An example hit me as I was watching Megan deal with her father’s attitude, her desires to act, that she doesn’t want to be kept, and to that I match a Don who actually wants to be happy and who treats this as a problem to solve. That led me first to him saying she should work part-time because then she’d find the stimulation from both, and she wouldn’t feel like she was pulled by money into a lifestyle she didn’t earn. Makes sense if you want a positive message. But then I thought: Don tells her it took him years to learn to think about advertising as an entire campaign, so why not make her assistant creative director? Then she could do exactly what she’s good at, which is figuring out the role, the character, the part that the product plays like it’s a living actor.

That highlights the difference between this and Peter Pan: once that boy became Peter, he could only be Peter. It’s non-Abelian, very much like the SBE of the patriarchs and matriarchs: the SBE of that completes actual generations, and it does so in a way that expands the meaning. You can look at this in animals: a herd will have a male or two. The chickens we eat tend to be the unnecessary males. How does that occur? If you generate the identity concept over a generation, so there’s that middle, that 1 in the 0-1-0, then you K at the last End so it becomes 2 Ends. Those Ends count to 7, but with a caveat or distinction: Leah came first but Rachel was desired first, so the order is mixed to indicate that you can’t really say which came first, which signals this is a count to the inner edge of 7, which fits the Hexagonal. Matches the old joke about 6 being afraid of 7 too.

Non-Abelian here is clear: if you count to the End and get Rachel, then isn’t the same Pathway as to Leah. So you can’t run back and forth and get the same answer each time. You’ll get a distribution that reflects each iteration of who comes first. Maybe you can never get out of that choice. Like it can’t be Betty or Veronica. Note this translates technically to having ambiguous inverses. Interesting phrasing appears: this kind of chain that expands at one End has ambiguous identity that selects. It’s a metaphor for any Extent that K’s.

—————

Short break. When something this intense is occurring, I hear a version of you talking directly to me. And I realized words in context example is dumbass after you realize you were a dumbass and you’re reminded of this affectionately and in a shared sense, meaning to some type of Alternation which fits. Interesting how Alternation completely revives the Wheel conception of rational numbers, and that storing information in the Wheel counts becomes the other forms, including transcendentals.

So, if I sum up where I am with my inability to grasp, it would be that I didn’t get until a second ago that yes this is a balancing, literally over the = sign, of the 2 essential orthogonal concepts in grid squares, so the yK square is exactly that a yKSquare, and that this perspective represents in projection in the elliptic form. That took forever to reach.

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youwontlikethisblog · 3 years

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Picasso's Night

The previous post Adriana Arboleda brings you up to date with the analysis if you would like to go read it before you start reading this one :)

Now this day has been a pretty eventful one. For one: We witnessed Armando show contentment that morning when he saw Betty for the first time that day. Totally absorbed by her existence until Mario cleared his throat.

Armando screwed up big time when he made it seem and acted like spending some alone time with AA was a lot more important than Betty or the company. He yelled at her and said she got on his last nerve and since then Betty has been on a bad mood with Armando, who after Mario told him that Betty was jealous had a moment of realization and has been feeling pretty awful since then.

Interestingly enough as the night progressed and Betty was invited to the exhibition of Picasso's collection, Mario kept insisting that Armando go and speak with Betty since he was leaving to Miami the next day.

Though this time, unlike the last time he traveled, before Panama, Armando was a bit more hesitant to leave. It wasn't merely because of the new collection they were going to launch and it wasn't because of the state of company. Armando looked at Betty to see if he had any reason to stay, looking at his best friend for any excuse to stay.

After Marcela tells Betty to reserve two rooms at the same hotel they stayed last time and Mario agrees to them traveling he then starts to insist that Armando go speak to Betty and apologize for his behavior that day.

The one thing that Betty did begin to screw up on(aside from starting an affair with her hawt boss) is that now emotions begin to play a huge role, not in the personal part of her life but the professional.

Betty has always been good at maintaining a good separation of what is professional and what is personal(although most of the times when she didn't she was following Armando's lead or example) . At the start of their affair, the day after Armando kissed her for the first time, Betty stayed professional. Even afterwards, Betty stayed professional. When it has come to company time Betty has stayed professional except this time she didn't.

Her jealousy, her feelings took control of her, foretelling things to come, less than 24 hours away.

This also pushes Mario with this idea that Betty must be catered to by Armando in order to keep her under control, though Armando knows best and he knows Betty won't betray him, Mario keeps pushing this narrative and when Betty doesn't agree to it or deny she'll do it Mario understands this as her holding it over Armando's head because of what he did that day.

Writing this now has made me realize that that's the reason he wrote the letter to Armando, not as some stupid mistake or for Betty to find it, though that's a pretty good theory, is that he did it for Armando's sake. Here me out!

For one he truthfully believed that Armando would be stupid enough to screw up giving Betty her gifts and that it would ruin the relationship but the cruelty of this letter exceeded even his jokes behind closed doors, that Armando didn't find amusing anymore, even before he slept with Betty the first time. I'll explain this in the post regarding that fateful letter and from the point of view as a writer and why even that sequences of scenes was a bit choppy and had it's mistakes in execution.

Now here when Armando asks her if she will embellish the balance for him for the big board meeting she allows her anger and resentment to come above her labor obligations and she doesn't give him an answer, better yet she finds a way to ignore the subject. Yes you can argue that Betty was always motivated by her secret crush and her secret feelings for Armando to do all the things she did it in the past, like the first time she embellished the balance and while yes that is true. I have pointed out how Betty showed her love for Armando through her work. He had upset her as well in the past and she'd still do it because in the thick of it she couldn't see him fail when she had the "solution" in her hands but this time her feelings-though extremely valid since he did end up hurting her feelings not as his employee but as his girlfriend- come above everything because this time her ego, the one he was helping to build up, was crushed by the man himself and that is a mistake. Especially when it comes to something that doesn't only directly affect Armando but an entire enterprise where her friends happen to work in. This again foreshadows events to occur in less than 24 hours.

Later when he goes into her office to talk to her she tells him that she doesn't do that, but he interrupts her and tells her that he doesn't want to talk about that but that he wants to talk about Adriana and what happened in his office.

Again though Armando contradicts himself a lot when he is with Mario when we see him with Betty we know where the true nature of his worry or concern lies and it isn't the company but their relationship. The evidence in this is how he behaves when Mario brings up the company compared to his relationship with Betty.

After Betty leaves Mario explains why Betty was hurt and that he can't leave with Betty being hurt, angry, and resentful because she's got the company in her hands. Armando looks angry when Mario is explaining what his mistake translated to Betty. He's angry at himself, while Mario talks about the company Armando has his back to him, peaking outside of the blinds and then turns to him.

"What you're doing is throwing away all that work [we] put in the days before. You're practically telling her that the relationship is just a game. That for you the ninety sixties are a lot more important to you." Armando quickly looks at Mario when he says this, again he is maintaining himself composed and controlled with his emotions as his face doesn't give much of a reaction but the quick jerking of his eye sight allows us to know that this part, from all of what he has said, is a lot more important to him than the company, again because he trust Betty with it, and that he is more worried about the way he has offended Betty. "that this is made of paper and let me tell you something; an ugly wounded woman is more worse than a wounded tiger and that wound doesn't heal with pats on the back, no Sir."

This conversations motivates Armando, not to go talk with Betty since he already wanted to do that but to go searching for her so he could fix his mistake and clarify just how important she is to him.

At the exhibition Betty points out his needs with the models to which Armando tells her that she makes him feel like if he were some seggsually deprived man, which is true. This does make the assumption that Armando's conquests or what not where meant to be written as a borderline seggsual addiction behavior type of thing since she doesn't say "your infatuation, your affairs." she clearly says "your needs with the models".

The conversation here is important because it begins to open a can of warms. She tells him that he'd look good with her, that Adriana Arboleda and him would make a good pair. That their attractiveness complements each other.

"I understand asking for privacy for one thing only." We then see a frame of Armando(lol the painting behind him has to be comedic gold!) who glances away from her, lips with a slight frown but not tight or pursed, showing that he isn't mad or frustrated rather he is upset with himself. "You wanted to be alone with her. Besides I'm not asking for you to give me any explanations. At the end of it you are the president and I'm your assistant. Besides this all happened during work hours and since I've worked for you I perfectly know your needs with the models." She glances around and leaves as people get closer to them. Armando then goes after her.

Right now I'm going to admit that I was wrong, well somewhat. I wrote a post once saying that Betty was calling Armando Don instead of Sir as the relationship progressed but I was wrong. Betty uses the title of Sir as a term of respect for Armando. Even here when they've slept together and she's seen and felt the change of Armando towards her and their relationship she still calls him Sir or Don Armando, that doesn't change. However the somewhat mentioned does change when it comes to Armando. So I was wrong but towards who the theory fell upon. @el-moscorrofio-y-el-mercachifle was right and there isn't much of an importance when it comes to Betty and what she calls Armando. HOWEVER let me preference this that the person I was pointing this theory towards was my bad however the theory of changing names or titles is correct.

If you've read my untitled post regarding my OC and her relationship and how that helped me realize how I wasn't sympathizing with Marcela and that not only was A+M relationship toxic but as well as dependent than I gave you some glimpse into my original writing and how that process helped me be able to understand this part of their relationship and now that this is out of the way, let me tell you why these last two paragraphs are here.

My OC has a habit of never remembering peoples names on purpose, she does it as a power move. As if saying "You're not that important for me to remember your name." she does it especially to annoy people. Also because she's distracted half the time judging a person when they're first introducing themselves. Armando does something similar with Betty on her first days or weeks at Eco Moda.

Men tend to ignore women who they aren't attracted to. Armando did this to Betty. On a professional level he didn't ignore her but as a woman he did. We knows this because it was clearly presented this way at the start of the novela. However I really made my self take notice of this when I re-watched the first half of the novela(I haven't seen the ending bc I tend to avoid things that I cannot control or expect).

My OC is introduced to a guy who she can't stand and at first she calls him all sorts of names starting with the letter 'C' until she managed to remember his last name and calls him that for the remaining of the beginning of the story until they become friends, she switches between Caleb and Anderson, often times calling him by his name when they are having friendly conversation. When they become good friends and establish their friendship he no longer is just Anderson to her but Caleb, someone worth remembering. This is a small detail that I thought would allow the reader to determine the change of tonality between these two characters and their relationships and honestly one of my favorite details to write so when I first noticed this, I got too excited and projected it onto Betty when in reality it was Armando.

Now that I've spoiled my own writing(that I'll most likely never publish) let me explain why I bring this up, finally.

Armando called Betty at the start of the novela "Emperatriz". Once they became more familiar and Betty corrected him and told him he could call her Betty, he finally remembered her name. It's important to note this small detail because just like I intended to write it, so did Fernando Gaitan(I'm assuming lol). He did know her name but he didn't care to register it. Marcela called her Beatriz in front of him, Mario called her by her name, everyone did except for him, and she[Marcela] got upset at him when she heard him call her Betty because in her[Morch] eyes that was a cute nick name to have for an employee, especially for an "ugly" secretary. Now the switch between Betty and Beatriz did happen before the affair started, however the switch was a little bit more noticeable as Armando began to blur the lines of personal and impersonal.

In this scene though and the scenes before this, whenever emotions were heavily involved, especially when it was regarding their relationship Armando calls Betty, Beatriz, in fact even when she wasn't present in the room and he'd talk to Mario about his feelings and why he felt guilty(before he'd shut off this part of him bc Mario would start making jokes) Armando referred to Betty as Beatriz and not Betty but when it came to talking about her as an employee and not a woman he'd refer to her as Betty, it happens this day as well. When he gets upset that she won't let him spend alone time with AA and he yells at her and calls her Betty.

Why am I bringing up this small detail in this post? In this scene and the scene in Mario's apartment this is very evident and signifies the growth of his feelings and his conscious commitment to Betty as a woman.

Finally, after a bit of arguing inside the museum they leave together, of course, after sneaking out because Marcela went to the museum trying to catch him.

It's also important to note that when they found out Morch was in the museum that Betty asked Armando if he had anything to drink. It's pretty standard for him to be drinking, tipsy, or even drunk when he goes out with Betty. The one time I can remember him being completely sober was when he had to confess his feelings for her, soberly, the day after he kissed her for the first time. I broke that down in another post :)

Other times while he hasn't been drunk or tipsy he has had a few drinks at the office, however again it's pretty standard for him to drink and she knows this but why is it something that is brought up here?

Betty attributes Armando's behavior, especially when he is this...stubborn in doing things that could expose their relationship when he has been drinking. Not only that but also because the night they first hooked up they both had been heavily drinking, especially Armando and it is important as the continuation of the night leads us to Mario's apartment.

Outside, in his car, Armando finally gets to clarify his actions as he apologizes and tells her that he only wants her to know that she's more important to him than any other woman and he isn't shy to name the woman as he says: "than Adriana Arboleda, than Marcela or any other woman." This sounds a bit rehearsed but not like the previous times where we can even notice in his tone of voice and his micro expressions that he does so for manipulation. A great scene to use as a contrast to this attitude of his in this scene is the one where he makes out with Betty, the night he fights Roman and Co(wrote a post about it too). This lets us know that he really did think about how to apologize to her. While here his tone is rehearsed his micro expressions aren't a show, in reality his behavior is natural and goes along with what he is saying.

Now Betty in a teasing tone replies to him saying "That's not true." (also because she doesn't believe him)and Armando in a very serious tone and even a seductive tone, gazing his eyes down her body and back to her lips tells her that of course it's true and leans in, placing his hand on her face and they start to kiss.

This shows us that Armando once again isn't only feeling his emotional attraction to Betty, which is what moved his physical attraction forward in the past but now he can tell the difference between these two and he is okay with them! This is a huge step for Armando because he no longer is denying these things from himself. In fact he encourages himself and Betty to have these desires for one another and that as the days progress since their first sinful night his desire for Betty only continues to increase.

When they pull away his phone starts to ring, Betty asks if it's Marcela and Armando's facial expression and tone tells us it is as he looks annoyed and pissed that she's calling him.

This reaction is also standard for him because it's the exact same expression he pulls every time Marcela calls him. Especially when he's with Betty. However this small detail we've been given through the past episodes and this night also hold much significance in future episodes when his reaction to her call no longer is standard behavior from him.

While at the start of this phone call his tone is very forced in "lovingly" speaking to Marcela, his micro expressions again show us that he is just pretending. This tone is one we've heard a bunch of times before and it's one that is solely reserved for Marcela. Even on her part she tries to speak "politely" and just as if she were simply calling because she was curious but as this conversation goes both their dances of trying to keep things peaceful and civil subside and they basically start a mosh pit where they become more hostile until Armando implodes on her.

Marcela in a her standard of questionnaire routine asks Armando who he's with, hesitant he admits he's with Betty.

Her reaction to this however isn't standard of just guilt, taking into consideration the events of the day and that even Armando has told her that Marcela stops nagging him when she knows he's with her and because she's also eavesdropped and heard Armando say that Marcela doesn't consider her as a femininely threat, much less a woman, she once again gets hurt.

One could assume Armando did this to cover his tracks in case anyone told Marcela that they saw them leave together. It's also not hard to believe that Armando is stupid and says things without thinking them through in the heat of the moment however what is more obvious is that he probably wanted to take Marcela off his back so he tells her that he's with Betty. The small pause he takes before he says this helps me determine this. It could also be that he did so in case anyone did tell Marcela he left with Betty.

As Armando implodes on Marcela for insinuating that he lied to her i.e that he's going to go off with his mistress, Betty shifts in her seat and then she looks uncomfortable, returning to her guilt.

In this scene Betty experiences first hand this toxic side of Armando, one she has seen as a boss to employee scenario but not as a significant other. She has heard and even been in the middle of their fights in the past and while even then she behaved professionally, and also guilty this time she shows a lot more emotions raging from being uncomfortable to even being upset with Armando. This however is a small taste to what she will experience first hand not as the bystander of this side of his but as the target of his toxic behavior.

Later in the car, as he drives, Betty, with a broken heart tells Armando she believes that he should go on his trip and try to reconcile his relationship with Marcela and reconnect while they're away.

Armando, nervous and scared asks her if that's what she really wants and the hurt that it might be, he asks(really demands) for her to look him in the eyes and tell him this. Which Betty doesn't. In this moment his phone rings.

Why do these small details play such a huge role?

Less than 24 hours away, Betty finds the letter which plays the exact rhythm in which Armando and Mario planned her downfall.

For one: While in the past Betty agreed to embellish the balance for the meeting, this night she did not and because of this Armando went out to look for her at the exhibit and then took her to his best friends bach pad and slept with her all so she would embellish that balance which would keep the board members at peace allowing Armando to continue as the president of Eco Moda.

Two: That Mario called him this night, while they were together, and while Armando "played" it off that Mario wasn't aware of their affair, when she later questioned him about it and he denied it, these conversations begin to makes sense to her.

We know that's not the case. While Mario spoke about the company Armando didn't seem that concerned or even motivated to go searching for her but it wasn't until Mario mentioned how sever it was what that he implied to Betty that AA was more important to him than her[Betty] and what that meant for their relationship and how she was suffering because of it that he was motivated to search for her as he said, a terrible fear was settling in him because of it. While yes, Mario suggested that they hook up so she could be happy again and forgive him and that way the company would still be in their hands and not Nicolas, Armando didn't need any motivation for that.

In fact he hasn't needed any inspiration or motivation sober or drunk to desire Betty, often not being able to stop himself from kissing her and more. Was this based on Mario telling him to do this?

No.

It wasn't because Mario suggested it(At the office). Unlike their first night where Armando kept calling Mario and kept asking for help and advice, this time Armando gets annoyed at Mario for calling him. Even his behavior is different. While before when Mario kept insisting that he slept with Betty to get it over with, Armando showed disgust or being repugnant to doing an atrocity of that magnitude towards Betty, this time his face was poker. He showed no real disgust towards the idea of seducing Betty as in he'd sleep with her, more that Mario yet again was using something he knew was important and special to the both of them[B+A] as a weapon for the "good" of the company.

When he hangs up his phone Betty points out that the direction he's driving isn't towards her house, to which Armando tells her if she really wants to go home.

"I think it's for the best." He turns to stare at her and then pulls to the side of the road.

"That you want me to take you home?" He asks in disbelief. Betty swallows hard, the corner of her mouth look a bit downward and she looks scared. "Damnit!" He hits his steering wheel and though he is angry, his tone is completely different to that of his tone when he is angry at Marcela. "Damnit, Beatriz, all I want is to be with you tonight, I leave tomorrow, remember? I went to the museum, exclusively, to pick you up, to see you, to feel you next to me, to be with you. When we bumped into Marcela I risked my life and I am still risking it to this moment. Everything I've done is to tell you that I adore you, that you're above Adriana Arboleda, that you're above Marcela, of-of all of them!" We can determine he is honest here as he stares at her, exclusively even when she doesn't stare back at him, she looks pained and confused herself. "and the only thing you can tell me is that you want me to go to Palm Beach(I LOVE the way he says Palm Beach it's just ugh so nice) and have a marvelous honeymoon with her so that we can grow closer." He looks down, away from her and then ahead of him. His voice was no longer harsh at the end more so becoming almost a whisper. "That's what you want? Okay! Right now I'll drive you to your house because it's what you're asking from me. I don't deserve this." (BAWHAHAHA ARMANI YES YOU DO, MY BOY).

Now in a non-contextual way one could simply asume that he is doing this all under the bias of manipulation towards Betty, especially that final line of "I don't deserve this." but when you take all the context clues and you look at the bigger picture there's more that plays in here and I'm not saying that Armando isn't manipulating Betty in this exact scene, he is very much doing so, however it isn't like in the past. This time he does so to get what he wants, which is to spend the night with Betty so he guilts her with this final part of "I don't deserve this- because I've risked so much to spend this night with you."

However taking aside that guilt trip manipulation, why does Armando stumble once in his words showing he isn't rehashing this previous speech? and why does he take a breather before he tells Betty that he'll drop her off at her house like she asked?

While the first apology was what he rehearsed with himself, this second time around it took him by surprise to admit that she was above all the other women because this apology wasn't based on a "lets just make up right now." it was an apology based in heart and the self-realization of how true that statement was for him that while yes Betty was above Adriana Arboleda in her significance to him and even Marcela who he's engaged to, she is now also above all women.

How true is this statement?

Well we see a change of behavior of his with women in the future episodes which proves, yet again, that this confession of his wasn't just an apology so Betty could forgive him, but an apology that was sincere and heart felt.

Betty finally gives in and tells him to wait. With tears coating her lashes she stares at him "Sir, forgive me." She speaks solemnly. Armando's entire body relaxes just a bit as he sits back on his seat. "Sir, forgive me. I want you to understand that-that this hasn't been easy for me. [The situation] with Adriana Arboleda and now the conflict with Ms. Marcela; it's killing me, Sir." His anger and hurt begins to simmer down. "I don't know what to do, how to behave. I-I think I'm acting very bad." She looks away from him, touches the side of her face in a worried and embarrassed manor while Armando stares at her and timidly(in his nature) asks her what truly worry's him.

"But do you want to be with me?"

"Yes, of course, of course. It's what I want most." She caresses the side of his face, he leans towards her hand "in the world." and now he looks like he's come back to life. Staring at her with a soft glow and when she pulls her hand down he looks at it and follows it until he stares back at her, feeling the absences of her touch and missing it. "But you leave tomorrow." They both look away from each other but Armando only does so for a micro second before he stares back at her. "and I won't be complete without you, Sir." Again we get a frame of Armando's reaction to this. "Not being by your side will not be any easier for me." As she speaks her tone is soft, timid however not wavering showing that while she is nervous to confess this to him, she isn't scared of doing so.

"Betty." He says so adoringly towards her. "Betty" he whispers and touches her face and honestly I believe his favorite part of Betty's face is the side of her face, by her earlobe cause he's always touching her there. "Nobody said this would be easy. We knew this road was going to be a difficult one but you know what? I am going to be missing you so much. I'm going to miss you a lot."

Again the words here are lost in translation he tells her "Usted me va a hacer muchísima falta." which roughly is saying that there will be a huge lack of her in him, causing him to yarn for her a lot and feeling that absences of hers will make him miss her in a very profound way because he needs her. This separation they're both fearful of is what brings the forgiveness to shore.

Now the post for that specific scene will need an entire post dedicated to it because there's so much! Just so much.

For this episode I had to watch it on the NBC app so maybe there was some scenes missing.

I don't know if anyone noticed how important the story of Picasso and his lovers was for this and how they showed the similarities to Armando and his lovers, specifically how toxic Picasso was(all though if we're being honest that dood sounds more abusive than just toxic bc we all got a lil toxicity in our system but that foo was straight up kidnapping his lovers and locking them up while he had other's on the side? Nah man call a hotline.) towards his lovers. Though I am not saying that Armando is a saint, I don't think he is as bad as Picasso, that dood needed a restraining order against him so he could just stay away from all women.

In all seriousness though the similarity was that though Picasso had lovers he cared for each of them especially his last two lovers, i.e Betty and Marcela and it foreshadowed just how jealous and pathetic Armando would become in the future.

I mean I love Armando, I had to learn to love him bc at first I didn't, but the behavior he displays in the future episodes while yeah one could explain them are not justifiable and I will get into detail on that in the future posts and the post I am still writing regarding his abusive/toxic tendencies.

Overall this episode, which on NBC is episode 68, was pretty straightforward with a lot of small details to look at and not really for the leading on of the scenes in Mario's apartment but overall where the story continues to get pushed.

In this episode, the episode when Armando fights Roman and Co. and her birthday night celebration and the previous night of this episode are nights that Betty goes back to prove that what she reads in that letter are true, especially this night, before they got to the apartment and just how much Armando "risked" to spend that night with her.

While she tries to believe that it's all a joke because she's certain that Armando was honest and heartfelt with her through his actions and not words, she doesn't trust him. I'll explain that a lot more further in that post.

Pushing forward the plot of the story though we see just how these two have truthfully grown close together and not just as friends but as lovers who are exploring their feelings a lot more now and while Betty is learning to open herself up again, Armando is learning to love for the first time.

I say that Betty is learning to open herself up again because it's true. While in the past she asked Armando why he was interested in her, she shared poetic talk about how the moon inspired poets and how guilty she felt when she saw Marcela, she hadn't opened herself up, not until the night at the hotel and that wasn't much, she barely opened up when Armando was asking her about her first time. This night she was a lot more open. She called out Armando's behavior point blank and period, no hesitation, she spoke about her opinion and then she spoke about how she felt, not regarding her insecurity but regarding their relationship and the absences she'd feel from Armando not being there. While before she'd just say "I need you." or "You mean a lot to me." this time she goes on to further explain her feelings to Armando instead of just saying the words, this time she elaborates.

Armando is learning to love for the first time, being humble in realizing his mistakes, his limits and also understanding just how his actions affect others but the most important thing is that he is learning to be at peace with his feelings for Betty. We saw it that morning when he first saw Betty, later in the office when Betty caught him making out with the AA picture and just how guilty and embarrassed he felt because Betty saw him. Unlike with Marcela where he was scared that she'd cause a while scene, this time the problem for him was that Betty wouldn't cause a scene but be hurt and dump him for it, which would be a big deal for him. We saw it later when Betty forgave him after the letter and gift and when he realized the huge mistake he made with AA in the way he treated Betty. All of these behaviors has shown an Armando who has accepted that he cares for Betty, not love, but cares for her deeply and that she is important to him.

Thank you for being patient with me and sorry that I haven't been as active. These past days have been pretty busy and they'll continue being so. I'll probably only be able to post once a week but I hope that the post become better quality that way as well since I'll have more time to really break down the episodes.

Well 'til next time! :)

#betty la fea #betty pinzón solano #beatriz pinzón solano #beatriz pinzon solano #betty ysblf #armando ysblf #don armando #armando mendoza #analysis of ysblf #ysblf #mario calderon

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thejackofalltrades42069 · 2 years

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2. Stuff I learned rewatching Mad Men.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.

I believe some people seem to admire, or quote the main character (Don), and this is not at all what the series is trying to accomplish, he’s good at his job, yes, but he’s a very insecure and hotheaded person acting like he’s really tough, thinking he’s right about everything, and taking impulsive bad choices all the time.

I’m not saying he’s the worst person ever, we all have issues, to give some background, he’s one of those persons who are trying to suppress his own feelings all the time and running away from, and hiding his past. He does a lot of wrong stuff like cheating, and then acts as if people who do that are a-holes. He gets upset easily. His job is stressful but very well paid.

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I’ll talk about 2 things to keep this short, about a quote I’ve seen often used in the past. And about cheating, which happens all the time in the show.

There was an often-quoted thing he says, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” If I go out with my friends for example, and they keep talking about work, or something that’s not taking the conversation anywhere else after a while, I will tell them something like, “Hey, have you watched ´X´ movie yet?” and try to talk about something else. But in this case with this quote and in the context of the series, he means, change the subject immediately because I don’t care about what others have to say to me, and that’s not how conversations work, at the very least when talking to someone else, people should be trying to make sense of what the other person is saying, and replying with questions, feedback, or whatever, then, talking about something else, or seeing where the conversation leads.

I’m not saying people should just sit and listen for hours to others, but, if you want to have a real conversation with someone, at least you should understand what they’re telling you, and then continue the conversation from there. Changing the conversation because you don’t want to talk about something will stop you from learning stuff from others, you can learn something from almost anyone out there if you pay some attention to them.

Moving on to cheating. The series start with the main character cheating on his wife. I’ve thought a lot and spoken to others about why people cheat on their partners.

It seems that for many men, for whatever reason, perhaps something cultural mixed with biology, there’s this voice in the back of our heads (like that devil flying next to your ear telling you to do bad stuff) that tells us we should engage in sexual intercourse with all the women we find attractive. For women cheating is mostly for different reasons, such as being ignored by their partners for too long, and not feeling satisfied emotionally and/or physically, for not feeling a connection with their partner. It is (maybe not even necessary to say) awful to do this when in a relationship, it’s agreed that it will be an exclusive thing, and it’s a huge betrayal to your partner’s trust. Even when just going out with someone, people should ask if it’s an exclusive thing or no to avoid surprises.

Anyways, I’ve thought that there are a couple actions that people in general can take in order to have a better relationship, and to tend to avoid being too biased by environmental/ biological tendencies to cheat and take dumb decisions.

First thing, being honest with your partner and not hiding things from them is probably the most important thing you can ever do, sharing what you think, asking about things, really listening to them and having deep conversations. Perhaps hiding some things from your partner is an action that you’re taking because you think they’ll get jealous, or angry, but perhaps that’s because you have not completely discarded the possibility of doing something you shouldn’t be doing like cheating. There’s also the possibility that the society you live in has certain tendencies or values such as hiding information from your partner (like not teling your partner how much you money make). This is not a good idea in the long run, though, it will only cause trouble in the future, even if you think it’s something insignificant. (There are things that don’t need to be shared obviously, like telling your partner that your new colleague at work is very attractive.)

Second thing, integrating your partner to your life in general, to most of your activities, and introducing them to all your friends and your close family is extremely important, if they don’t meet and spend time together, they will only hear things about each other from you, and it’s likely they won’t like each other so much, when people spend time together, they understand each other better and create empathy with each other (most of the time). There will always be friends and family that for one or other reason won’t like your partner, this is something that needs to be discussed, and they need to know that if they won’t spend time with your partner, it’s likely they will not continue to be your friends, looking for solutions is a must, both with you partner, and friends and family. For sure it’s great to go out only with your friends and not with your partner sometimes, you don’t have to be glued to your partner in order to make things work. But be sure to integrate them to almost everything that you do and have them go out with you and people close to you often.

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Conclusion.

Mad Men is a great show that teaches what you shouldn’t do. It has 100’s of awful things people did and thought at the time because of their cultural biases. Back then it seemed to be politically correct to be sexist and to cheat as long as you were not caught. Many of those cultural habits and biases are still going on to date. And we’re not aware of many of those biases. I think it’s good to keep in mind that learning is not a straightforward process, but valuable information can be learned from other people, from reading, and from stories in all kinds of formats, but only if you pay close attention.

#mad men #donald draper #don draper #honesty #philosophy #relationship #betrayal #conversation #britney is free

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albino-whumpee · 3 years

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The redhead

Ok, so. This story has been cooking on my head for such a long time now and Im gonna be clear with you: I´m aware this first installment and maybe the next won´t be of many people´s liking, so if you don´t like seeing the whumping of minors, I advice you to stay away from this series.

There won´t be any noncon here, but there will be lots of other hurt/comfort tropes and many creepy whumping from multiple whumpers to a pair of whumpees, one adult and one a minor.

I´m also gonna say this is the backstory of one of Albus´s story characters.

I remember sending you an ask @deluxewhump about some ideas for this story and you wanted to be tagged, But, I can´t find them and well. Wanted to give a heads up of what it could contain.

Taglist: @whumptywhumpdump @grizzlie70

CW// Pet whump, whumping of a minor, modern slavery, human trafficking, collars, dehumanization, it as a pronoun, implied death, creepy whumper, conditioning, captivity whump and angst. (ask to tag if I missed something)

House looked like an ordinary orphanage from outside. It had big halls with bunk beds and slim metal closets next to them. Shoes tossed under the beds along with any trinket the children wanted to hide from curious or severe eyes. Beds neatly made early and kids off to the classes on other rooms. There was no need for them to learn to read or write however, so there were no books that weren’t for coloring.

Many of the lessons were taken outside, along buckets and brooms they swiped dutifully, or inside kitchens learning to identify tools and vegetables and memorizing the measurements needed of each ingredient on what recipe. Children did everything under the scrutinizing eyes of teachers who were so, so difficult to appease, but yet again, tried hard to earn their comfort and approval.

So they could graduate and leave.

The very best left early and the not so good would leave bordering their 12. There were only a few that left on their mid teens, and so, the ginger kid wearing the sandy jumper of House’s uniform, coloring with a green crayon the feathers of a toucan, had decided he didnt wanna be like that a long time ago.

He would graduate and leave house and go with a loving family that would take him, that would really love him, just like the teachers told them they would sometime soon.

It was his dream. As it was every child´s wish in House. So, he did as he was told. He cast his big green eyes down when talked to, kept quiet until he was spoken to, paid attention to class and did his tasks before the day ended. He took all the punishments while training, too. Even if he tried to keep it to a minimum, there would always be something that pissed the Teachers off.

For example, dumping the trash. Having to go to the back of the one store building, close to the one beyond the thick brick wall, with its narrow barred windows -just like House´s windows were- from where phantasmagoric sobbing and pained screaming would come through, was the most loathed chore at House. Whenever he was on duty, the little boy shook like a leaf with the heavy plastic bags dragging behind, before throwing them and run back to the building.

One time, the kid saw a pair of thin hands wrapping around the window bars and saw a woman peeking from it, hands shaking with the effort when she panted a wheezy, “help me”

The little boy had never screamed so hard in his short life.

The teachers had been mad at him, but not enough for a crate training reinforcement. He was relieved, to a point, when they punished him to clean the bathrooms alone for a week instead.

As he swiped the floor in the middle of the night, he promised himself he would get out soon. Sooner than his brothers and sisters who wouldn´t dare to defend him, saying outloud how scary the other building was and how some of them couldn´t sleep because they heard the people trapped there scream and beg all night long.

Of course they wouldn’t. Excepting a few who unknowingly shared blood, nobody shared anything but the wish to get out. If you tried to fight the Teachers, it would just delay it further. Every kid knew not to get on their bad side. It was also part of their training to see them as their preliminary Masters. A drill, of how it would be once out.

So when one finally received their collar and graduated to go to the family who had chose them, only the brave ones would wave goodbye. Jealousy taking the better of some, meanwhile others would only feel fear.

He wouldnt be like that either.

The brother he had gotten the most close to, the one who actually did protect him from the other kids bullying, had graduated months ago. Taller than normal for any kid from House -the little boy had heard the teachers say once- the brown kid and black curls with a smile sitting on his face at all times, had been his best friend.

They didn’t have names and they weren´t given one until they graduated. The Teachers used nicknames like “ginger” or “mole” or “mousy”, but that hadn´t stopped them from calling each other a secret name. A name they used only for each other and secretly, considered their true names.

“Are you happy for me, Robin? That I will finally go” Hawk asked him once, while playing on a sunday. The Kid´s free day to go anywhere they wished inside the estate´s perimeter. Close to the brick fence, a river flowed through iron bars, not letting anyone in or out.

Robin shook his head, red hair bouncing at the motion. Hawk giggled with that weightless sound, throwing away the stick on his hand they had used to play as if they were two princes in duel a few minutes earlier.

Robin stopped walking when Hawk put his hand over the wall, looking at it with conflict on his face.

“I heard the Teachers say my new Master will take me over seas” Hawk admitted. Robin didn´t understand the reason for such a long face. That only meant he would see the sea! Wasn´t that cool enough? However, the small kid kept listening. “They said he specifically requested me. But…” he punched the wall suddenly, making Robin jump in reflex “They said because I was problematic, I would be getting extra training in something called WRU”

Robin didn’t know what WRU was yet. They barely knew what was beyond the brick walls surrounding House, but it couldn’t be much worse than House, could it?

“I´m sorry. You always ended up on fights because of me…” Robin started clenching the stick on his hands tight as Hawk turned to him.

“C´mon. We´ve been over this, Birdie. It´s not your fault” he said, watching the small readhead lift his glassy eyes up “Besides, you know what to do now if they pick on you, right?”

“But I´m not as strong as you!” The boy argued before feeling the big hand of his brother ruffling his hair.

“Maybe just not yet” he said with that innate warmth of him. Like the times the other kids gathered around him late at night, hearing him talk about what one of the Teachers, one that was so close and nice to him, they had thought he would take Hawk home, had taught him after class. About all the different animals that existed, about science, about the world outside of the thick walls.

It dawned on him then, no kid would have those stories anymore, nor would he laugh first thing in the morning seeing the nest his hair was.

The child jumped to hug the older boy at the waist. “But, but, even if you go, you won’t forget us, right? If I graduate soon and our Masters meet, even if I´m already an adult, you will recognize me right?” Robin asked him, feeling the other boy’s fingers card through his short hair before squeezing him tight.

“I promise I won’t, Robin”

“I will keep the name you gave me” Robin said urgently, clenching hard so Hawk wouldn’t let go just yet. Hawk sighed quietly before burying his face on the boy’s shoulder.

“They’re ours”

“Ours alone” Robin finished.

The next day, Hawk’s new Master came for him in a black suburban with polarized windows and a few scary looking men by his side. Hawk bowed to him before the teacher ordered him to, as a perfect obedient Pet from House did before graduating. The other boys were lined up in their Sandy uniform, maybe in hopes the man would take another boy or girl, but he was completely entranced by Hawk’s face. He had lifted his chin to have a better look at it and then ruffled his hair with a big smile.

Then, the man gently buckled the new collar around Hawk´s neck, clipping the leather leash with the outmost gentleness. The man only tugged on it to test if the boy would walk forward, and when he did, he passed his hand through his hair.

Robin couldn’t hear it, but Hawk glowed at the praise his new Master gave him before giving the Teachers the ceremonial thick envelope. While the transaction happened, Hawk sneaked a look back at Robin and smiled.

“Bye, Robin” he mouthed, before feeling a pull from his neck that told him to follow his Master to the black van.

Right before the car trunk’s door closed, Robin waved goodbye with tears in his eyes the other kids didn’t stop teasing him about for weeks.

Four months after Hawk’s graduation, a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, Robin was standing in front of the building again. Now, it was his turn to graduate. His new Master was an older man that came out from a car you could smell the stench of gasoline from miles away.

“Skip the formalities. Where is it?” The man asked one of the Teachers standing next to him after the boy bowed. The woman in white clothes simply pushed him forward. Robin looked down at his shoes, so old looking against the shiny, cared for shoes of his would-be Master. The man wasn’t gentle when he fisted on the ginger’s head and forcefully lifted his face for him to see. He was better trained than to let out the pained groan bobbling up on his chest. The man hummed, pleased with his silence. “Yeah. You will do. How much for it?” The man said letting him go and quickly taking out the thick envelope from his jacket.

“I see you didn’t bring your own equipment for your new Pet, Sir. Would you want me to add the collar and leash to the sum?” The Teacher asked to the man, who grunted, too annoyed, like it was a waste of his time to ask.

“Yeah, sure, whatever” the man said without looking at Robin “It´s not for me anyways”

The small boy gripped on his uniform tight. The distress of not knowing how his real owner looked like suddenly settling in with fear when suddenly his not-Master asked the Teacher for a transport crate.

“Of course, sir. We will prepare him right away” the woman said with a wide grin as two other teachers pushed Robin to the garage. The boy´s heart leaped, but he gulped down the fear and allowed himself to get dragged. As he walked through the mocking and confused stares of the other children, he heard the woman continue to speak “If you would be so kind to accompany us to the office so we take the information needed for his shipping”

The man cursed under his breath, “Make it quick. Hearst is already pissed at me for messing up his pair”

Robin didn´t hear her reply.

The next thing the boy knew was that he had wrapped around his neck the price leather collar- the one the Teachers would only put on when they had earned a people´s meal from good results on training- with a large paper tag on it. He couldn´t know it said the name and address of his new Master, but he was static as he crawled into the plastic crate with the blue blanket on the corner he quickly wrapped around himself as he was rolled to the man´s stinky car. Maybe, if he was lucky, he would be able to catch a sight from the sea. Or maybe, from the sky above, if they went on a plane.

The car´s doors closed and he was drived out of House´s property, through the bricked fence and so, as his world, that had been confined to the same three square kilometers, suddenly grew infinitely big, filled with infinite things to see.

The man´s laughter on the driver´s seat abruptly stopped his awe.

“Enjoying the view, Pet?”

“Y-Yes, sir. Very much, thank you” Robin quickly replied.

“Well, you better burn the image to your memory, because with Hearst, you won´t be seeing anything but a kitchen and dirty restrooms” the man laughed.

“Yes, sir!” Robin said before looking out through the bars on his crate. To catch the green land and the sea expanding beyond. The man rasped his throat, muttering something under his breath.

Although he could hear him say “That´s why you wanted him young?” Robin didn´t understand and put his whole mind into catching every last detail he could get of outside.

Robin held to the image of the small houses with red ceilings surrounded by a vast blanket of green even as he was processed to go back on the cargo at the airport. They took him out of his crate to check the tag hanging from his collar and stick some papers into his uniform before pushing him back inside.

Two workers in blue jumpers, loaded him with the rest of the pets. There were some cute dogs Robin had never seen but in his coloring books and even some older Pets with the same tags hanging from their necks. All of them, including him, were wrapped around a fuzzy blanket inside their crates.

Robin was dissapointed when he found out there were no windows inside the cargo, but the feeling of being lifted off the ground, of flying, even if he slammed himself against the metal door of his cage, was completely worth it.

During the long ride, he wondered if Hawk had gone on an airplane too. What he would´ve said of that weightless feeling as he curled tighter into his blankets. The sound of paper getting scrunched was muffled with the engine and the other pets conversations between them, but Robin closed his eyes and hoped, prayed, his new Master´s family allowed him to see even once more, the world he had dreamed of seeing.

And if his wildest dreams as he was rolled off the plane, abruptly awake when his cage was thrown around and rolled by Not-Master outside where it snowed, he hoped he could see Hawk once more.

“That´s our new addition, Charles?” a man´s voice said as he stopped rolling. They seemed to be on the parking lot now. Next to a black shiny car.

“It was a nightmare, but told you I would get a replacement for Shirley. It even has red hair” The man said patting the plastic cage´s ceiling.

The man didn´t reply immediately, but Robin had crawled slightly closer to the door, to catch some of the man´s incredule face.

The man’s low, almost amused, laughter hit him like a soft salty breeze, warm and gentle. “Well, let´s see Isaac’s new partner, Let´s see what you got us” the man said before he knelt before Robin´s crate.

The wished he could say his Master had looked kind, gentle even, that first time they locked eyes. But in reality, Robin couldn’t help but think his new Master’s eyes were so much like a cat’s. A pair of narrow, clever honey colored eyes stared at his wide greens for a moment, before he copened the door and pulled him out with a swift pull on his arm. Robin´s face scrunched at his Master´s grip, cracking a smile on the man´s as he let go “How old are you, boy?” The man asked him.

He bowed instinctively before answering, “Twelve, Sir, Master”

“I see” The man´s smile hung on his face as he said “Not old enough to be on the front then” His new Master then turned to the man “Thanks for fetching me a new one. The kids are very sad without Shirley but the worst must be Isaac. He just refuses to work now”

The man grunted as he saw Hearst open the trunk of his car. “I already apologized, Will”

“What´s one more “I´m sorry, Mr. Hearst”? My slave hasn´t even eaten because of what you did to his partner” he said before turning back on Robin, expecting “Do I have to put you in myself, boy? C´mon, up you go” he said snapping his fingers in front of his face. Robin´s body moved before he was aware he had crawled inside, then laid down on his side as the man put his hand back on the door “Watch your head” he said before closing it, letting Robin in complete darkness.

It took a moment of hearing only his breathing to for him to finally sense the car moving. He was with his Master now… but he was shaking like a leaf. He didn´t stopped shaking, knowing deep on his bones, this Master would be the severe type.

It wouldn´t take him long to know he was right.

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danzinora-switch · 4 years

Text

Typing the Turtles (ROTTMNT) Part 3 - Leonardo

This started out as an investigation into the turtles’ insecurities, because one thing the show does so well is demonstrate that they are still teenagers. And being a teenager is a confusing experience - there’s angst, drama, exploring one’s identity, a lot of growth, and overall figuring out who you are. That’s a messy process, too! And we see this mess in our turtles: they mess up, they’re learning, they self-doubt, they have fears and insecurities, but they’re also discovering their strengths and how to overcome their inner obstacles.

So after thinking about all this way too long, here’s my psychological breakdown of each turtle (I’ll be referencing MBTI and the Enneagram a ton, but will include links for more general information on those if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

Parts One and Two found on the links for Raph and Don.

Leo: ESTP, 3w2

The Achiever, the Entrepreneur, the Charmer, the Explorer

I’ve wanted to say this for a long time: Leo is such a 3, he is such a 3 it hurts, oh my goodness. Read this: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-3 and tell me that isn’t Leo to a T.

It took me a little longer to figure out the MBTI for him, but he has a lot of similarities with the ESTP. This does mean we need to step away from the ‘frat bro’ stereotype of ESTPs, though. They are a lot more keen than convention would suggest.

Really, a big thing with Leo is his need to be The Best. What that means, to him, is normally something physically-related. He needs to be the best at sports or performing certain moves, which we see in episodes like The Longest Fight where he bets he can pull off the impossible skateboard move, or Shell in a Cell where he asserts he can out-perform Ghostbear. Additionally, episodes like Air Turtle really showcase the ugly side of his competitiveness. But he also desires physical perfection. He is rather image-conscious, fretting about his body in Stuck on You, and routinely referring to himself as the team’s Faceman. The biggest example of this was his idea for a disguise in Hidden City Job: the Turtle Adonis. An adonis is considered the peak physical ideal, handsome and attractive to boot. If this drive doesn’t scream Enneagram Three I don’t know what does.

Leo at his worst: Leo’s competitive side can certainly get the best of him. We see this in episodes like Air Turtle, where his ‘win at all costs’ attitude starts to alienate him from the group. Raph has also described him as a ‘poor winner’ which refers to his tendency to gloat when he does beat out the competition, or was proven right (Bug Busters, The Gumbus, You Got Served, LAIR GAMES). He’s smug, gloating, and when he does lose tries to wiggle out of it through technicalities. The one time he says something isn’t a competition is after Mikey beats him at Skateball (You Got Served). And when he ‘loses’ the Lair Games, Donnie’s win comes with a catch that Leo built in.

Threes do this for approval and validation, though, and we see that underlying his need to be the team’s Champion in Minotaur Maze and Portal Jacked! “I’m nothing without them!” he cries to Hueso. “What good is a team with just a Faceman?” Threes have a need to distinguish themselves from others, to be admired, to have attention, so that they then feel valuable and worthwhile. Other people, then, are necessary. When Leo wants to get on the Wall of Champions in Minotaur Maze, his brothers factor in to his unmet needs. “...because what good is being a Champion if you can’t rub it in your brothers’ faces?” Leo doesn’t just need to be The Best… he needs others to acknowledge it, as well.

Average Leo: He’s got a practical eye for situations and the quickness to adapt and act as needed. The ESTP is known for being bold as well as perceptive. We see this in fight scenes such as Battle Nexus: New York when he is quick to determine that physical comedy is the key to making the sprite laugh and immediately changing his approach.

He also displays a remarkable amount of common sense when making decisions. In Origami Tsunami, as the guys discuss becoming heroes, he’s the one who shoots down ideas until they reach a more achievable goal: taking on paper thieves. And he’s got a point, can you imagine the turtles taking on a spine-breaker or mangler at that point in time? When everyone else is blinded by ideals concerning fixing the Mutant Menace, he’s the only one who asks “anybody down for staying home during the anti-mutant panic?” Of course, he still goes along with their adventure, because ESTP’s live in The Moment, so why not?

Something else that I want to mention is Leo’s appreciation for the Machiavellian. He has an incredibly intuitive grasp on it, and actively appreciates twists, turns, betrayals and deceptions. His love for magic probably stems from this (The Clothes Don’t Make the Turtle) and he is the only one enjoying the series of betrayals in Warren & Hypno Sitting in a Tree. Hidden City Job also expands on the fact that Leo doesn’t have a problem with betrayal, as he revels about brotherly betrayal happening all the time. He’s cool with being betrayed… just know that he can betray you back. It’s all fair game.

This can have upsides and downsides. On the upside, his understanding of trickery can lead to brilliant plans and solutions such as what we saw in Many Unhappy Returns, where he was able to outsmart Big Mama herself. On the downside, this kind of behavior is not always the best move - his family does not appreciate being left out of the loop of his schemes, or actively being manipulated as part of them (Leo’s plan in Many Unhappy Returns worked, but he still left his brothers alone and exhausted, and did not consider the emotional effect it would have on Splinter being sent back into the arena). At that point it’s no wonder he asks “why does no one trust me?” Because you tend to have an angle, ‘Nardo. Be careful how you use that.

He is also incredibly persuasive. This is partly why I feel he is a 3 wing 2, ‘The Charmer’ because he knows how to communicate to get what he wants. When used for the right reasons, we see him settle discord such as cooling the mobs in You Got Served or apologize when he knows an apology is needed (Todd Scouts, Air Turtle, Hidden City Job). We see it used neutrally (and a bit skeptically) in Many Unhappy Returns when he declares he’ll just go to see Big Mama and “turn up the Leo”. It can also be used deceptively, however. Todd Scouts shows this when Leo is the one who convinces Todd that they’re ready to kick things up a notch by going out alone… when really they just want to get away from him. He’ll also use words to get under people’s skins: dismissing Warren Stone in Stuck on You, but also pointing out Donnie’s beach ball fear in Mind Meld. He knows which words will get the responses he wants, for better or for worse.

Leo at his Best: Leo is the team’s motivator. He’s the one giving the others the pep-talks and encouragement they need to continue (Origami Tsunami, Finale: Rise). Donnie said it best after Leo’s redemption in Air Turtle: “your confidence is giving me confidence!”

Because that’s the healthy thing about Threes: they strive to reach their own full potential, which also inspires others to reach theirs. Leo doesn’t like to fail/lose, but he won’t let anyone else succumb, either. He has the most confidence in each Mad Dog’s ability. “I knew you guys could handle it!” he says in Many Unhappy Returns, and points out with amazing accuracy just what his brothers are capable of. He not only believes in himself, he believes in those around him. And he’s able to inspire them when they’re feeling down about their own abilities or not enthused about the task (see his speech about standing up for the paper men in Origami Tsunami).

This also includes encouragement and compliments in other areas. Regarding the Shell Hogs: “Donnie, these are amazing! And I know everything I say sounds sarcastic, but I’m being completely genuine this time” (Stuck on You). When Mikey isn’t sure Hypno will like him: “What? Of course he will, you’re adorable!” (Newsworthy). To Raph, “Does this place have smoke detectors? Because you’re on fire, Big Daddy!” (The Clothes Don’t Make the Turtle).

He’s also able to step in and take charge when Raph falls because he can see what action needs to be taken (that practical and observant, yet bold ESTP side coming in). When Raph gets separated in the sewers, Leo’s the one who doesn’t treat it casually and gets the others moving to find him (Man vs Sewer). When his older brother is hypnotized by Hypno in Stuck on You, he quickly reacts and tells Mikey and Donnie what the plan is and enacts it. We see this leader potential grow bit by bit, and his awareness of each individual’s role on the team allows him to step back from areas that he knows aren’t his forte: Raph can handle the ‘teamwork’ stuff, Donnie has got the technical know-how, and Mikey takes care of positive outlook for any situation. Leo can keep things fun and inspire confidence. His puns help lighten the mood, his jokes break the ice of tense situations, and he never stops believing in their own abilities, which keeps them all going (Donnie’s Gifts, Many Unhappy Returns).

Leo Relationships:

(While Leo has a competitive episode with each of his brothers: Shell in a Cell, Lair Games, and You Got Served, there is more going on than just that).

Raph: Both Leo and Raph have strong gut feelings that can be blindsided. Leo picks up immediately that Big Mama is not trustworthy while Raph is more than happy to believe her, but Leo is blinded by his fan-love for Jupiter Jim to realize that Marcus Montcrief is a crazy and suspicious adult, which Raph becomes aware of early on (Bug Busters, Jupiter Jim Ahoy!). They both can be a little too head-first when diving into plans, such as checking out the creepy bus in One Man’s Junk or doing their best to help April in Hypno: Part Deux. But they do trust each other to have each other’s backs, and there’s (thankfully!) no Leo vs Angst in this version of their characters. It really allows them to be comfortable with each other (and egg each other on with more than just missions: see the pizza pigeon in Mind Meld).

Donnie: In some ways Leo acts like a foil for Donnie. His own natural confidence counterbalances a lot of his twin’s insecurities. They butt heads over it, sure, with Donnie perhaps taking things too seriously and Leo seemingly not taking them seriously enough, but I like I said in Donnie’s typing: one’s chill and one’s uptight. There’s a ton of back and forth between them: they are the epitome of siblings fighting one minute and getting up to no good together the next (Example from The Mystic Library: Leo grooves out with Donnie’s rap one moment and tries to get him kicked off the team in the next scene). They may antagonize each other in Lair Games, Smart Lair, the beginning of Snow Day and Hidden City Job, and so much more, but also demonstrate brotherly love (and antics) in Operation: Normal, the end of Hidden City Job and Smart Lair, and, of course, Battle Nexus: New York. “For Donnie’s honor!”

Mikey: Leo sticks up for Mikey a fair amount, especially to Raph. He supports Mikey trying to open the portal in Mystic Mayhem, and going out on his first solo mission in Hot Soup: The Game. We actually need more Leo and Mikey episodes; of the two we have one is a competition episode (You Got Served), and The Gumbus has Leo tag along intent on proving Mikey wrong. It seems they like to hang out during the down time a lot, as they play in the arcade and skateboard off-screen in episodes such as Mrs. Cuddles, You Got Served, Mind Games, and Sparring Partner. And of course, we have the gripping image of Leo protecting Mikey’s shell with his own in Battle Nexus: New York. I’d really like to see them get up to more shenanigans, though. (hint, hint @nickelodeon, @netflix).

Ultimately, Leo is a confident, competitive turtle striving to reach his full potential. He is normally great at encouraging his brothers to do the same, and devising grand strategies, but tends to forget the emotional effects his actions can have on them, especially if he gets carried away on his quest to be The Best. He’s still learning, and these traits will likely flesh out as he grows into a more leader-like role.

For more information on the ESTP and Enneagram 3 personality types, click here:

https://www.16personalities.com/estp-personality

https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-3

https://www.crystalknows.com/enneagram/type-3-wing-2

https://ih0.redbubble.net/image.155775924.2701/flat,800x800,070,f.u5.jpg

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imaginejamesandsirius · 3 years

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hiii, i don’t know if you’re doing requests still, but i’ll give this a shot in case. how about a jirius fic where they secretly like each other, and during a game of truth or dare, where their friends keep asking dirty truths (kinks etc) and then they dare them to kiss, then following that 7 minutes in heaven? with sirius lowkey giving james a lap dance and eventually smut? also i wouldn’t mine a ton of sirius on james’ lap makeouts because that’s ADORABLE

Truth or dare was the party game of choice in Gryffindor Tower, to no one's surprise. It always started out the same-- lots of dares. The more sloshed everyone got, the more they did truths because they-- or one person, at least-- couldn't reliably walk across the room without tripping.

It was the long way of saying that Sirius knew a lot about everyone's sexual preferences despite never being involved in any of their sex lives. For example, he had zero interest in Remus, and yet he knew that Moony had a daddy kink. He also knew that Marlene liked to be on top, and that her and Dorcas had been each other's first kiss. When was he ever going to need to know that? Absolutely never.

It did let him know a thing or two about what James liked, and he was a fan of that, for sure. James liked long hair and preferred men to women, even though he liked both. Sirius wanted to wave a hand in front of his best mate's face and say, "Hi, I'm right here!" but he figured that would be playing his hand a little too openly.

They'd reached the point of the night where they weren't even asking truth or dare anymore, they were just asking questions. "Sirius," Dorcas said, pointing at him with the hand that wasn't holding a butterbeer. "If you had to shag someone in this room, who would it be?"

He was tempted to say Lily just to freak her out, but this was a game of integrity and he wouldn't lie. Even though he was itching to see Lily's reaction. "Do I only get to pick one?" It would be a lot less weird for James if he got to pick more than one person.

"Pick one guy and one girl," Wormtail said, and Dorcas nodded vehemently.

"Yeah, that's good, pick one of each! That way, if you ever want to have a threesome, we know exactly who you'll pick?"

"That's your reason for asking?" James asked, face scrunched up like he thought that was weird as hell.

Sirius hummed, looking around. "I guess... Lily and James." He toasted the room with his own beer then took a sip.

"I can't believe you said Lily first," James said, shoving him. "I should be your first pick."

"You should? Why?"

"Because I'm much better looking, duh."

"Don't worry Potter," Lily said, looking slightly disturbed, "you can have all of him."

"Oof, be careful there, Lily. Don't make promises you can't keep," Sirius said.

"If I could give you to him, I would."

Sirius thought about that. A lot. Like Lily could wrap James up with a bow and hand him over to Sirius, and then he could do whatever he bloody wanted with him.

Of course, he didn't say anything about it because that was the way to madness, and he assumed that no one else remembered it or cared enough to think about it. The next time they played truth or dare proved that theory wrong.

Almost immediately, Sirius was dared to it on James's lap and stay there for the rest of the night-- or until a different dare moved one of the two of them from their position. It was weird that Mary cared that much, but Sirius didn't think too much about it until all of James's dares could be done while he stayed exactly where he was.

Even then, he wasn't suspicious until it came back around to him and Marlene dared him to kiss James. "And I mean really kiss him. I want tongue, none of this chaste kisses to the cheek rubbish."

"It disturbs me that you've already thought about exactly how you want this to go," Sirius joked, but he turned head and put a hand on the side of James's face. He was about to snog the love of his life in front of all their mates. No big deal. Don't panic under the pressure and the fact that everyone was looking at them.

He only had the chance to worry about James feeling awkward about it for a moment, because James was kissing him back just as fervently. James was as warm in his mouth as another shot of firewhiskey would've been, only more pleasant, somehow. The first swipe of his tongue against Sirius's bottom lip made his fingertips tingle.

He gripped James tighter and idly wished that he knew what James tasted like. All he could taste right now was the liquor they'd both been drinking. Or maybe it was only the liquor he'd been drinking himself that he could taste, which was worse, because then he had nothing about James to remember later. Except for the way he held onto Sirius's waist like a lifeline and leaned into his mouth. He got the feeling he'd remember that for a while.

Sirius didn't really know how long they were supposed to kiss-- all Marlene had said was 'with tongue' and 'not on the cheek'-- so he figured he'd just go until James stopped kissing him back. To his tipsy mind, it made perfect sense and wasn't suspicious in the slightest. He didn't think anything of it until they finally broke apart, and everyone was staring at them-- with the exception of Moony and Wormtail because the former was tracing something on his palm and the latter was attempting to peel the label off the bottle of wine he was holding.

The girls, at least, were all staring at them. Lily blinked. "Well damn. You know, there's a muggle party game called seven minutes in heaven, and I get the feeling you two would excel at it."

"Uh-huh," Sirius said dumbly. He wanted to say something funny-- or maybe ask what the game was, because the name didn't tell him very much-- so that they'd stop staring at them like that, but now that his attention wasn't on James's mouth, he was free to notice other things. Things that he could feel pressing against his arse because he was on James's lap, and it hadn't been there before. James was hard. Because of him. Because they'd kissed, and also probably because Sirius was on his lap. He licked his lips and moved his arm down so that it was hanging around James's shoulders. "Hey, Moons. Truth or dare."

"I dunno, are you going to make me snog someone?"

Sirius rolled his eyes and tried to pretend he wasn't effected by kissing James. He didn't think he was pretending very well, but he was just going to ignore it until he got so sloshed he wouldn't be able to tell whether or not people believed him. "No, you big baby."

"Then dare."

Sirius's mind had been rather effectively wiped from kissing James, so he cast his eyes around the room, hoping something would inspire him.

The rest of the night passed in something of a daze for Sirius. James got dared to take his shirt off a few rounds later, and Sirius had to pretend like he couldn't feel every single centimeter of James's bare skin under his arm-- because of course he put his arm back once the shirt was off. He didn't say anything to James about being turned on by their kiss, and he certainly didn't say anything about the fact that his erection didn't go away.

(He said 'the rest of the night' but honestly, it was more like ten minutes. Ten at the very most. He had to end his night in the game early because he couldn't bloody think.)

Sirius declared that he was done, but he couldn't get to his feet because he didn't want to expose James like that. There was only so long that his control would last however, and he'd officially past his limit.

James nodded and reached for his shirt. He had to lean back, and it was a touch awkward as he pulled his shirt back on, but it did stop Sirius from having to constantly catch himself from staring at his chest or the curve of his shoulder-- Sirius had never been particularly attracted to freckles before, but he almost couldn't tear his eyes away from the trail of freckles along the top of his shoulders.

"Well whatever, I still wanna drink," Remus said, snapping Sirius out of thinking about James's shoulders even though they were no longer bare to him.

"I'm with you," Marlene said, and Dorcas nodded.

"Yeah sure," Peter agreed, but Lily and Mary shook their heads and went up the stairs to their dormitory.

"C'mon," James muttered, giving Sirius a nudge to stand.

Sirius only hesitated for a second before getting to his feet-- if James thought he could hide his hard on or that no one would care, then that was his prerogative.

They stumbled up the stairs, and since James was behind him, he shut the door and leaned against. "Thanks for not saying anything. I know it was kinda-" He stopped talking because he couldn't finish his sentence with Sirius's mouth covering his own. He moaned, kissing Sirius back. Their fronts were pressed together, and Sirius was able to stop worrying about holding himself back. "What are you doing?" he whispered. He said it like he had to say it but didn't necessarily want the answer. What was obvious to Sirius though, was that James wanted to keep kissing him. Like the hard on and the moan and kissing him like that hadn't been enough of a clue for him.

"Finishing what we started," Sirius said, putting his hands under James's newly donned shirt to get his hands on skin again. It should be a crime that he'd ever had to take his hands off of him in the first place. If it hadn't been for where they were and their friends in the room, he probably wouldn't have.

"Can we finish it on a bed?" James asked with an eager-- and now relieved-- smirk. "The door's about as comfortable as it looks."

Sirius laughed, leaning back and pulling James with him. They would've been able to get to the bed a lot sooner if Sirius had been willing to let go of him, but he didn't want to take his hands off him, and his mouth was right there. No one on the planet would've had the willpower to step away from James with his eyes that intense and his lips parted and glistening. "You've got to get this bloody thing off," he said, tugging ineffectually on James's shirt.

"I will if you will," James said immediately.

Sirius pulled off his shirt, and James did the same. Kissing James while they were both shirtless was even better than before-- something he hadn't been sure was possible. Feeling all that warm skin and being able to claw at James's back in a bid to bring him closer was driving him wild because there wasn't a way of him being closer. He pushed James onto the bed and climbed back on his lap because, honestly, it was the best place he'd ever sat.

He rolled his hips and they both groaned, so he did it again. Again and again so that it was a constant fire in his veins.

James's hands went to his hips first, then slid around to grip his arse. Tentatively, at first, then more boldly when Sirius pushed back into it.

Sirius knew that he was going to come soon, and a part of him wanted to get a hand on James's prick just in case this was his only chance. But it felt too damn good to stop what he was doing, and he could feel the heat rising in his cheeks that meant he was really close, and he wouldn't have been able to stop right now for anything.

But then James stopped kissing him to suck on his neck and Sirius whined and- his hips jerked unsteadily, and for a moment, James kept moving like he had been when he suddenly tensed, biting down on his neck a little too hard.

Chest heaving, Sirius wondered if he could just fall face first into the pillow and go to sleep. His blood was still thrumming hot in his veins, but he knew that in a couple minutes, all he'd want was to wrap up in a blanket and get a solid ten hours of rest.

James rested his forehead against Sirius's shoulder, breathing just as hard. "Sorry I bit you that hard," he said.

Sirius giggled, unable to keep from feeling giddy-- a combination of having had an orgasm and the fact that it was James that had given it to him. "I'm sure I'll forgive you."

They sat like that for a little bit, just leaning against each other and catching their breath.

"Don't shag Lily," James said.

"O... kay?" Sirius said, completely thrown. "What are you on about?"

"I don't want you to shag Lily."

"Yeah, I heard you the first time. Why do you think I'd do that?"

"Well," James said, sounding discomfited, "last time we played truth or dare, you said that if you had to shag someone in the room, it would be me or Lily."

"It's a good thing you're cute because by Merlin, are you stupid," Sirius said. He tilted his head to the side so it was resting atop James's to take the sting out of his words. "I- sodding hell, mate. I'm not here because of some stupid dare or because we'd been drinking."

"Mm." He nuzzled a little closer. "Good."

#prongsfoot #marauders #james potter #sirius black #fanfic #lily evans #filled #no voldemort au #hogwarts time #getting together #siriuslystarbucks #Anonymous

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laufire · 3 years

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i definitely think clarke is an example of a villain protagonist, and fandom’s need to see her as a hero is due to the need to see protagonists as heroes. my only stipulation is that i do think fandom is capable of acknowledging that certain protagonists are villains, but only under certain conditions. like fandom can only acknowledge a character is a villain if the story really really really explicitly frames them that way. like people are willing to acknowledge that characters like (1/2)

(a few of these seem to have been lost to this hellsite’s void, sorry :/)

walter white, don draper, tony soprano, dexter morgan, the “it’s always sunny in philadelphia” protagonists ect are horrible evil people. (although even with them, there stans who engage in ridiculous apologism, ie the “walter white did nothing wrong” crowd, but i do feel like most of the audience gets that these characters are evil? maybe i’m being to optimistic, or maybe it’s just because i avoid r*ddit lol) but i think in these cases it’s mostly because the framing is so blatant, like (2/3)

like the writers basically have to beat you over the head with the fact that the main character is a horrible person for them to get it. but with characters like dean winchester, elena gilbert, and clarke griffin, the fandom largely sees them as good people, (who may be morally ambiguous sometimes, but only because they CAAARRRE SO MUCHHH) and i think it’s because the narrative framing is different than what it is with a character like walt. that’s not to say that the narrative always (3/?)

frames characters like elena, clarke, dean, ect as good people. i think the narrative sometimes engages in apologism for dean/elena/clarke, and sometimes it acknowledges how terrible they are. i think that for characters like dean/elena/clarke the framing is often much subtler than for characters like walt/don/dexter/tony soprano. i also think sexism/white female fragility plays a role in how fandom perceives elena, clarke, and jessica jones are perceived by fandom (4/?).

This is all true, but I also think there are other factors at play. On is the kind of people these two groups are -I’m less familiar with some of the others mentioned above than I am with The Triumvirate of Doom LOL, but I’d say that (maybe with the exception of Don Draper? I really need to watch Mad Men one day. I remember liking the pilot) they are fundamentally different TYPES of ~bad people. Dean, Elena, and Clarke are empaths, subconcious manipulators; to different degrees of efficiency, and Dean and Clarke use hard power more than Elena, but they’re specifically people who are difficult to parse, and difficult to accuse. They’re the kind of people who trade in social graces and do it well, often coming out of shit smelling like fucking roses. The others are excused by fandom, but Walter White, Tony Soprano and Dexter Morgan’s whole deal is different.

On top of that, there’s a matter of distance. Those you mention are all from mundane worlds, worlds like out, commiting violence in a mundane way. Dean kills monsters, Clarke commits large scale genocide by levers in a distant sci-fi post apocalyptic ‘verse, Elena even has other supernatural beings commiting supernatural violence for her. I know I myself react worse to more “realistic” violence.

And regarding the ‘verses, I think we run into an issue of the perception each of these gets, the depth people are willing to assign to each of them. Nevermind that The Vampire Diaries or Supernatural have been the two most cynically honest shows about the worst of human nature I’ve yet to encounte;, for a lot of people they’re just ~silly genre shows, the first a ~silly girly show, even. The acts committed in those universe is horrifying to the extreme, heightened forms from real-world equivalents, but easy to dismiss for a lot of people because of its source. Which annoys me, ngl, because I don’t think without characters like Elena we’d get some of the female antiheroes we have now, for better or worse; or without shows like Angel for the male ones; Angel was definitely a precursor to the Tony Sopranos of tv, IMO.

There are issues with framing in each of the shows and it matters, but there have also been moments where they have been absolutely ruthless about who Dean, Elena, Clarke, etc. were at their core, and the audience insists on keeping their eyes closed to it anyway. So framing can’t be the only issue.

fandom NEEDS to see white female protagonists as good people. i think this is because of the notion of white female innocence and purity, how white cis women are seen as inherently good and kind, and needing and deserving of protection from white men. of course fandom woobifies the shit out of white male characters too, just look at dean winchester and dean winchester. however i genuinely can’t think of a example of a white female protagonist who was explicitly framed as terrible person, (5/?)

and where most of fandom fully acknowledged her shittyness. the only real example i can think of is dee reynolds, and like that doesn’t really count because iasip is a deliberately absurd bizare sitcom where you really aren’t meant to take the characters actions seriously. the show isn’t grounded in reality and it’s not meant to be. also dee is nothing like elena or clarke, and iasip is nothing like the 100 or tvd so i’m comparing apples to oranges. (6/?)

maybe blair waldorf from gossip girl? i actually think she has a lot in common with elena and clarke, it’s just expressed in different ways. but maybe that’s due to the fact that serena was technically the female protagonist (even if the writers blatantly favored blair), and blair was introduced to the show as an antagonist for serena. although there was a fuck ton of blair apologism in the gossip girl fandom so who knows. (8/?)

i have seen daenerys targaryen referred to as a villain (even before the second last episode), but in her case i actually feel it’s somewhat unfair. i mean obviously burning down kings landing was a villainous act, but on the whole i see her as more of a mix of an anti-hero and an anti-villain. like of course she has done many horrible things, but she isn’t terrible in the same way elena and clarke are, like she is a different type of character than them. (10/?)

i also feel like the got fandom wasn’t as pro daenerys as the tvd fandom and the 100 fandom were of elena and clarke respectively. (maybe because daenerys shared protagonist status with the stark family?). (omg i am so sorry this ask was so long! i seriously thought this was going to be two parts, maybe three tops lol) (11/11)

I’m not too familiar with Blair and only half-familiar with GOT and its fandom, although yes, I would consider them slightly different cases than Clarke or Elena, on first sight.

White female fragility definitely plays an ENOURMOUS part in these characters’ perception. A lot of the Clarke vs. Bellamy discourse was profoundly racist, for example. And do not get me started on Jessica Jones and how the show portrayed, and the fandom received, her dynamics with black men.

#anonymous #replies #talking to the void #my thoughts #fandom nonsense #the writing tm

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nightswithkookmin · 3 years

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Hello Goldy 💜 So JK dint post for Jin and so does Tae. Both of them di t post for Jinins bday also. Whats going on here ? I dont understand if JK and Tae have been banned from posting on their boyfriends bday. As u can tell i am both Jikook and Taejin shipper. What do u think is happening or should i say not happening.

This topic...

Hold on, lemme put on my tinfoil hat:

I got nothing. Lol.

Secondly, aaaaah Tae Kook!

Lol. Tae Kook. The evil power duo of BTS, my favorite rageddy boogie men of ship street Avenue, PPP- pathological party poopers of Bangtan fantasyland- stomping on shipper's parade, putting commas in people's hopes and dreams. Y'all didn't get the memo? When we said y'all be snatching hearts, this is not the kind of horror heart snatching we was talking about! Y'all ratchet for this shit. Lol.

Someone give them the memo. Atatatatatat.

Lmho.

I mean for Jk, I've already speculated a few times- several times now, how I feel he's kind off been on a self assertive journey since late 2019 and coupled with a lot of things I felt was happening with him, Jimin and group around that period, that him not posting for the members' birthdays sort of make a lot of sense to me.

I've also speculated on what I felt was going on with Kook, RM and Tae around JM's birthday this year, so Tae not posting for JM also sort of made sense to me?

Tae missed Jimin's birthday as well. It would have been 'problematic' in today's social media climate if he posted for any body else within the group after that. It's the same with JK when he missed Jin's birthday last December- had he posted for anybody else, I'm afraid several trucks would have been sent to BigHit HQ demanding his head on a spike. Chileee.

Can't blame them though. Even the members themselves, during 2017 Festa, descended hard on JK for gifting a present to Jimin and not the others- they pay attention to these things, you know? Jin in his recent VLive had said he had been up waiting for texts and all- or something along the lines of that, and I'm pretty sure he pays attention to who posts what on their Twitter account on his birthday. Well we know Jimin does this too. Lol.

You don't need to be a mad scientist to figure out that one member posting for another and not the others would make the members feel some kind of way about it even if they don't say it out loud.

Frankly, like I said, I feel they set themselves up for this shit- miss one, miss them all or risk solo stans coming for your ass. That's how we roll on these fang gang streets. Lol.

But for Kook, I sort of felt his was deliberate- may be an impulsive decision at the time, but deliberate nonetheless. I mean he had all 24 hours post Jin's birthday to belate that shit- better late than never, but he didn't do that.

Whatever had transpired within that period- which I've speculated on in past posts, I feel that had pushed him to his breaking point and had incentivized him or propelled him to reel back, reevaluate his goals, intentions, purpose, calling- whatever you wanna call it, and eventually had embarked on a journey to reassert himself and take back control of his life all throughout 2020- until recent times...

- Y'all see Jikook's dynamics have flipped again post Jimin's birthday right? Clear your schedules. We gone talk. Soon. Muhahaha.

I don said, Jikook have/had been asserting themselves against eachother and against the group this year. And for Jk, that self assertion would come in the form of him putting up boundaries and reinforcing already existing boundaries among other things, which would in turn require him demanding and demonstrating his independence from anything and anyone he had relinquished his self autonomy to- prior to. In my opinion.

I'm gonna step on a few toes here and regurgitate, JK didn't just take a step back from his life, he took a step back from Jimin as well, in my opinion- I can literally hear temperatures rising. Chilee. Lmho.

It's easy to lose yourself in the process of loving someone. And when you love this person more than you love yourself, in the thick of love, under heavy public and peer scrutiny, where you are being told to change this and that about yourself everyday and everytime as a prerequisite for being able to love this person you want within a group; then you are bound to end up with nothing but the total eradication of who you are at your core or at least a drift away from your true self and the expressions of it... Sigh.

I mean all the, 'try not to be so possessive, he's our friend too' 'operation neutralize Jikook' 'chilee, don't lean too much into him, this is an award' 'I've got Jimin, restrain Kook' 'oh I think you stared too long here' 'look away' 'you got him a present, why didn't you get us any' 'is that your heart eyes?' 'Tuck it away' 'why do you film Jimin a lot?' 'use this person, not Jimin for your GCF if you want the clicks' 'GCF in Tokyo? How about OT7 in wherever mate?' - all these little tweaks and adjustments he's had to make to his personality and his expressions of self in order to hide his relationship within the group climaxes honestly. In my opinion. And late 2019 to me was that peak for JK. Again, in my opinion.

Changes like these don't come drastically. They creep up on you. Its slippery slope till you're caught knee deep in the mud. For instance, notice when the members complained about him not caring for them because he hadn't presented them with gifts like he did Jimin, he had agreed immediately to give them presents in the future in order to not answer to their question of why he had chosen to give just Jimin a present. That compromise to me was one of the early signs of him losing his authenticity. In my opinion.

Jimin and the members were quick to point out that he didn't have to do that because giving and gifting were not obligations and honestly they were right. He doesn't have to do things if he doesn't want to.

That's the paradox of Jungkook. He does the things he wants to do without shame and he is fearless and unapologetic about it. But you see, he is also often very passive when it comes to the things he doesn't want to do and would hesitate in insisting on his boundaries until he is pushed to his limits- from my observation of his interactions with the members and I think Suga and RM have talked about this too.

A classic example of this is his conversation with Jimin about their friendship- when Jimin said they were in between love and friends. His hesitation was a sign he was uncomfortable with that description but he didn't assert himself over it.

Another example would be Jimin saying during their log that he was taking a liking to JK- JK didn't react as much but JM turning to ask him if he was ok with him saying things like that was a sign they had had the talk about 'boundaries.'

JK is a very assertive person but his position as the youngest within the group places a lot of restrictions on his assertiveness I feel.

We talk a lot about Jimin being Kumbaya and sacrificing a lot of their personal happiness for the good of the group- well, I've been talking. Y'all don't say shit much- fuxking lurkers 😒 y'all suck. Lol. [Delete before you post, you idiot. They don't know you like that]

Anywho, we often talk about Jimin in this context but we- by we, I mean I, don't talk enough about all the ways JK often sacrifices his authenticity for the Kumbaya of the group as well. But unlike Jimin, I feel JK does it so he can keep his glass closet- fucking whippidy whip whipped. Lol.

And it's crazy because that sacrifice he makes of his true feelings and it's expression is what often leads people to question whether he acts exclusively with JM at all.

Often I hear shippers complain about how he did this with Jimin but he did similar thing with another member- listen, if you've heard JK sigh upon seeing RM imitating his mannerisms to try to neutralize his nonverbal gestures around Jimin, you'd understand what exclusivity means for him.

And when, you think about that he had to apologize to and explain himself for choosing to wear his man's bag over another member- it's not hard to see where his authentic self began to erode- It started from the moment the apologies begun. Never apologize for who you are- class dismissed. Lol.

Then he goes on to talk about losing his passions for his GCFs, his music- this is a person everyone within the group had said is or was the most passionate member within the group... You gotta wonder where it all went wrong. Know what I mean? Come on work me. I'm writing this at 2am. Lol.

I think Jimin was right when he said giving should never be a task. You should give from your heart and from your own free will. Not for show, and certainly not to please anyone.

Wishing a member a happy birthday should never be a duty, task or obligation- especially when such moments and expressions of it has become performative over the years rather than as true expressions of the love and affections they have for eachother- ok, I'm dozing off now. Lmho.

I mean let's face it, posting on Twitter for eachother has become more of a culture and an established tradition within the group that sentimental members within the group hold on to.

The birthday twitter post has been hijacked and lowkey/highkey advances the OT7 kumbaya agenda BigHit is bent on pushing and sells the BTS bromance fantasy to us rather than an actual representation of their love for eachother. In my opinion. I could be wrong about this.

JK asserting himself would mean him choosing not to participate in expressions that to him are performative, shallow and lacks depth whatsoever.

I know what you are gonna say- but but Jimin's birthday. But but but nothing. Lol. I have said I felt he was going to post for Jimin's birthday. Dude geared up for it with the 5/8 and everything.

And given as he's been on a journey to do the things he wants to and to pursue meaning in his expressions of self within the group, I feel and I believe he believes wishing his man a happy birthday on social is meaningful- Confirmation bias this shit. Lol.

Not that the act itself is meaningful, but that the act holds meaning to Jimin. I think I've talked extensively about Jimin and how important his birthday is to him. The only reason I feel he wouldn't or didn't post for him was if Jimin had asked him not to- which I believe he did. Posting for Jimin would have been tantamount to outing their relationship gangster style. Lol.

And we all know how the members feel about that. Smirk.

So no, I don't think he's been banned from posting for his man's birthday. I think this is him deciding not to partake in performative expressions of love- perhaps because that has never been him?

I don't know for Tae's Journey. His decision not to post feels very random to me. Who knows, he and JK have been talking a lot lately it seems and getting closer post Sope. So if you ask me, this perhaps is him taking a page out of JK's self help book and pursuing that authenticity of self expressions I've talked about?

I mean he did do awesome things for Jin's birthday so I don't think we can complain much. Getting his friends to wish Jin a happy birthday certainly pulls weight over a second post on Twitter. Jin got a birthday party with the members, RM had the same.....

The thing that bothers me and my friends over here about Jikook's incident is the lack of closure after that traumatizing experience.

With the others JK didn't post for, at least we got to see him in a VLive with them interacting and just giving us moments here and there. So even if he didn't post, we know he was with them and they shared the memory of that day together- which I feel is what we shippers want. For them to show eachother love- whatever way they express it.

With Jimin- Nada. Zero. Zilch. We got nothing my guy. Jimin didn't share any insight or give any details remotely resembling closure for us. We were hoping for a bangtan bomb or Episode but nothing so far. I hate it here.

We didn't get to see JK showing the love we know he feels for Jimin- he's proven time and again he loves that man. We didn't get to see them share the memories of that day together. Not even through narration- Jimin, you sonova bish! Lol.

Would I ever move on from that incident? No.

Do I want to move on from that incident- chileee I've been trying. It would haunt me for the rest of my Jikook life. Lol. I still get get nightmares thinking about it and it's Christmas. Sigh.

I think we would have to observe rather than anticipate how they choose to express and communicate their love for one another- especially Jikook and by extension Taejin- chilee Anon, I respect your hustle. Lol.

I don't blame you though. I mean sometimes Jin be looking like he wants to gobb-ok

What was your question again? Lol. I hope I answered it. Chilee. Keep supporting Jikook.

Signed,

GOLDY

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