is this yall’s generational songwriting talent

something deeply insane about opening your comfort high school book that you annotated the shit out of and being transported back to a Time and Place that is very very different but yet also the same

you've been friends with bakugo since you could crawl. you know every single thing about each other.

he knows your favorite colors. you know his ears turn red when he's lying. he can always make you laugh with that intoned snark, no matter how annoying he is.

you can easily follow the way his lip curls with a sneer, pink and plush in all the ways a childhood friend shouldn't look. he can make out the distinct smell of your perfume... vanilla.. cherries... and something else. something entirely you. he can't keep his eyes from crossing, just a little.

when he can't bear your gaze any longer, he pulls you into a firm but uncharacteristically gentle headlock. there's a spot underneath his ribs that's particularly ticklish; you only use it as a nuclear last resort when escaping his all-too-beefy chokehold - jesus when did he get so big

The thing about her musings on her youth in this album is not just about the spending her “prime” years with someone who ultimately couldn’t give her what she thought they both wanted (family, but also in general sense the happiness you get when you’re young and your whole lives are ahead of you).

There’s SO much about her youth in general here, and how the demons of the past have raised and broken her. How each of these experiences have chipped away at her youth. This whole album is give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.

It’s all the things she’s talking about had are part of the same big trauma of the loss of that youth and innocence. It’s snakegate and how Kim K and her lackeys deliberately set out to destroy Taylor’s reputation for sport, which ripped out Taylor’s last few grasps of that young adulthood freedom without her consent. It’s mulling the price she’s paid for spending her entire youth in the spotlight and becoming a commodity instead of a person. It’s looking at a friend’s child and wishing she could protect them from the world the way she wishes she could have been had she known. It’s putting your trust in your first love who ripped the rug out from under you and your faith along with it. It’s spending your time pining for your younger days in the haze of unspeakable loss. It’s carving off parts of yourself as you grow up to make yourself palatable to your peers and your partners and as a result not knowing what parts of you are left. It’s revisiting a love from your past when you still had it all, and after the initial frenzy realizing its hollow. And yes, it’s pouring your heart and soul into a relationship you think is forever and with each passing year the light in the window flickering dimmer and dimmer, only to realize the light wasn’t coming from your home after all, and you may lose your chance to find it again before it’s too late and the dreams you so desperately cling to vanish for good.

And that’s what the end message I think ends up being in So High School: she’s reclaiming the land as it were. All these things that were taken from her and that she gave up are up for a redo. And it’s not rewriting the past, it’s coming to the realization that all those parts are still within her but so is the good. That the freedom she gave up when she released her first album is still found in the backseat of a boy’s car all these years later. That she’s older and wiser and battleworn but that doesn’t mean she can’t find that joy and lightness. “I feel so high school when I look at you” is kind of a loaded statement from someone who didn’t really get to go to high school (both actually and metaphorically). “Bittersweet sixteen suddenly” (love that wordplay btw) because again— she’s been through so much that the feelings of new love that make her giddy like a girl are tinged because she’s been here before and also never been here before because she was never that kid.

(There’s also a whole tangent there comparing Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince to So High School and how fraught the first is vs the lightness of this one.)

That’s why this isn’t just a breakup album. It’s why she dredges up 2016 and Jake and Aaron’s son and childhood and high school and any other number of things. Because she has spent her entire youth and adulthood grappling with the issues that came to roost in TTPD, and while this whole experience underscores that you can never know what’s going on with someone (least of all Taylor, a stranger to us all), I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that she has stressed how much healthier and whole she is now. That is why this whole album is a bloodletting, but it’s not just about a broken relationship. It’s about a whole belief system that has stolen girlhood from her and she’s determined to piece back together in the aftermath of the autopsy.

“Is Danny home?” Tucker asks. There’s an urgency to his voice that sends ants crawling across her skin.

Maddie turns and looks at the time on the oven. 3:55, the numbers glare at her. School let out some twenty minutes ago.

Danny should have gotten home, but she isn’t sure. She and Jack have been down in the lab, the rest of the house is absolutely silent.

I've been re-reading Proximal by @artistfingers and @dp-belongs-in-a-hoodie

and boy oh boy.

what a perfect subversion of the phandom tropes. maddie and jack are good parents, no one knows au from maddie's pov.

not a dissection fic. kind of???

~°~°~

original non-censored illustration with bones and guts and blood and gore below the cut!

transmisogyny is the cornerstone on which transphobia is built on. denying that makes you complicit in hurting the fight against ALL transphobia.

draw lomadia NEOW (if you so desire)

can I please you with a buff lom?

The thing I don’t like opla nami is that she’s too girlboss which means we won’t see any goofy usopp and nami moments😭

Kind of insane how much y'all hate queer, disabled, mentally ill adults. Especially Black and brown ones.

All this "adults who like X are creepy/ gross/disgusting" is just an excuse to hurt the most systemically vulnerable people and shame them into compliance. Shaming doesn't work on comfortable white people with stable jobs and social lives and the money to buy luxury items– they can just log off and go to a fondue party. So you just go for the people with the least socio-economic protection who depend on online communities and congratulate yourselves on your "activism" and social conscience. Even when your collateral includes people from the same minorities you're "defending".

Western leftism operates on conditional humanity and respectability politics. "We'll give a fuck about you...as long as you behave only in ways we find palatable." When we point out that punitive forms of social control always take us out first and in larger numbers, we're given to understand in no uncertain terms that we are in fact acceptable collateral in your personal social justice hero quests to "punch Nazis", "fuck the US government" and "eat the rich". All just a bunch of hyperindividualistic neoliberals resentful of being robbed of white privilege rooting around the social justice closet for cudgels that suit you.

Relatable. (Now give me a Glen Powell interview that is basically like that Chris Evans cover story from ten years ago where they got wasted and the interviewer went on a meet-cute pub crawl with him on GQ's dime while fantasizing about him taking her to the Oscars.)

Cooking is the true eldritch horror, you come in knowing maybe frying an egg, maybe your parents taught you how to make pancakes, it’s going swimmingly- but as you get you hands and pans dirty you are slowly forced to realize that all of these creamy, flavorful dishes you’ve learned to make? They all start with GRAVY AS THE BASE ITS ALL FUCKIGN GRAVY MAC AND CHEESE STEW LASAGNA IF YOURE CRAZY ENOUGH AN ELDER GOD WALKS AMONG US AND HIS NAME IS BECHEMEL

Oh, boy. Really don't wanna get emotional here, but you know, there was a moment there this season where I thought this day wouldn't really come, and, um, I had guys at one point tell me that they'd strap me to their back and carry me on the ice to get me to a thousand, so I love you guys for that. I love going to work with you every day. It's been an absolute pleasure. Love you guys.

I'm not dead; have some lines.

Week 48

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So I'm picturing the foundation to look like the cornerstone from Kingdom Hearts 2 with the seven floating feystones around it.

Enough about the trade deadline. Have we heard of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins round these parts