I am pretty convinced

WYD WHEN MY GANG PULL UP !!!

friendship is magic

closeups:

captain's warm hugs! (id in alt)

nbc hannibal is a romcom purely because the central conflict results from hannibal not understanding his feelings for will and being a total loser about it because he’s never had a friend or been in love before which makes him act so silly and do the most insane things that will interprets being framed for murder as hannibal having something against him (as anyone would), and this series of misunderstandings is not resolved until hannibal’s ex girlfriend and former psychiatrist tells will that hannibal is so in love with him it makes him look stupid. after that will does not hesitate to break hannibal out of jail and douse himself in blood which is this show’s equivalent to the protagonist running to the airport to stop their love interest from leaving the country and marrying someone else before they’ve had the chance to confess that they’ve loved them ever since they’ve known them

God dude these two scenes and how roxie moves hurt my heart so so bad 🥹

it's like a mix of anger, feral, emotional breakdown, and complete sadness that just fucks me up soooo fucking bad.

it's like she's a pet who got abandoned by their owner but they see them again after years of sadness and depression of them being gone and leaving them like that and all that anger and sadness just manifest's into one bundle of emotion's towards them they cannot control.

roxie baby ur gonna be okay u deserve better :[

bob & teddy legit have the funniest arguments

yes i'm rooting for m*leven breakup because byler is neat but mostly? i'm rooting for m*leven breakup for the sake of el and mike.

to me, their romance was always a puppy love born out of a combination of social pressures, naïve curiosity, and a lack of true understanding regarding intimacy and romantic love and what it really is. it was real in that they do truly, deeply care about each other and they are close friends, maybe even shared an attraction, but a maturing romance is so much more than that. they've grown up and out of being boyfriend/girlfriend, and that's okay! i think television/film needs to show more often that most of us don't have definite "soulmates" or first childhood loves that we spend our whole lives with. it doesn't mean these relationships meant nothing and didn't impact us, it just means they've run their course and that something else is in the cards, and this is part of life!

i've always felt el was at her best and most confident self when broken up with mike, discovering who she was and what she liked alongside another girl her age instead of just relying on mike for mentorship on how to live in the real world. she deserves more of an opportunity to find herself, her autonomy, and her independence, and to love who she is, and she's made it clear she's felt insecure in the relationship with mike because she isn't being loved and understood the way she wants, needs, and deserves from someone who is her partner.

also, it's okay if mike doesn't love her in "the way he should". he is not obligated to love her romantically and stay in a relationship with her just because she's a girl, because she "needed someone", or because he cares about her a lot. he shouldn't be pressured into a romance if it's not truly coming from his heart. he deserves freedom to find out and honour who he is, too, instead of just staying in his non-functional first relationship — one he got into as a child, essentially — and defining himself that way because it's what's expected when a boy and a girl are close. he loves her in some way, yes, but it's okay if he doesn't feel comfortable or secure being her boyfriend anymore, for whatever reason that is. he's felt insecure too, and that's valid and it matters.

they are their own people and are steadily growing and changing every day. they need time to figure out who those people are, and it's become clear (at least in my opinion) that those people aren't meant to be a couple at this stage.

they deserve freedom. they deserve to grow up and be authentic to themselves and not feel like they need to lie for the sake of a relationship. they deserve to move on from this version of their relationship that isn't making them happy and rekindle the best part of their bond: their strong, beautiful friendship. they don't have to be a couple if it doesn't make them stronger and better and happier people.

i think it would be healthy and wonderful for a show, especially one consumed frequently by young adults, to show a relationship starting, progressing, and ending on good terms in this way. sometimes things don't work out, and that is okay.

Courtesy of printerest here are some shitty lazy incorrect quote thingies I guess. Sorry no rarity this time, maybe I'll make more later.

2023 reads

The Spider And Her Demons

YA Australian urban fantasy/horror

about a Malaysian-Chinese girl who’s half spider-demon, just trying to keep her head down and survive high school

when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl at school, they strike up a strange friendship and she starts to learn more about herself and the supernatural world

aroacespec/sapphic ish

why are so many adventure time fans just straight up stupid. about how stories work. and i dont even mean kids i mean like adult fans just with the absolutely dumbest takes

IMAGINE THE STORY POTENTIAL

telling myself i can't start another tdwt rewrite but dear god do i want to write one focusing on alejandro and courtney in this weird situationship thats a lot more nuanced than just alejandro manipulating courtney and her falling for it. like theyre best friends they dont trust each other theyre the same person they dont know anything about the other one theres a mutual attraction theyre pining for other people theyre codependent they dont care about each other theyre platonic soulmates like i just want to do a deep dive into how messy that relationship couldve been building off of their friendship that exists in my head except the line between romantic and platonic is so fucking blurred they have no idea what they are to the other person

When I think about what would be considered more interesting and ground breaking TV....

Is it two best guy friends who become close cuz they work closely together on a team and they become involved in each other's lives to a degree but only on the periphery because they each have their own girlfriends and families that they care more about than each other?

Or two men who start off as close friends because they work in high pressure situations on a team and they become so closely involved in each other's lives that no one, not blood family, not other love interests, can ever even hold a candle to how they feel about each other, and they start building an unconventional family together all of their own, learning what it means to be a father and a partner and a whole person and eventually learn that this love they've shared this whole time goes deeper than friendship, deeper than family, deeper than sexuality, deeper than romance and that no matter what challenges they face in life and in death they will always choose each other and the home they've built together?

i've often tried to explain why i'm friend-repulsed – what is so uniquely distressing about friendship to me, compared to other interpersonal bonds – so here's one part of it.

friendships feel distinct from other types of relationships in that they usually start without any agreements, and can be entered into without even realizing. growing up, this was frightening to me; to hear a teacher declare we had to be friends with every student in the classroom, or to be called friends with someone i was just polite or kind to. when i did see models of “people asking if they can be your friend”, it was in children's books about how rejecting them makes you a bully. there was, and is, no escape. to suddenly hear that someone considered me a friend, and that i would be an evil oath-breaker if i left them or failed to be a “good friend” or sat there and did nothing at all, was bone-chilling. i made no oath!

i'm a scrupulous person, and i was even worse as a kid, so my society's friendship norms hurt me a lot. i didn't have any cultural example of how to say “no” to “do you want to be my friend?”, no script to turn down a kind and well-intentioned request for friendship, no means of egress that didn't make me a villain. i would regularly end up in – what seemed to me – servitude to some other child, not sure how i got there but unable to leave until they lost interest in me. i felt bent to the will of one person after the other, each one oblivious to how i felt their every friendly action as suffocating, consuming, as knives carving me into an empty statue who would do what they wanted. i was given no model for negotiating a friendship contract, but always reminded that there was a contract, one that i could not see or understand or alter.

...of course, there are always unspoken rules in social interaction, and culturally-approved coercion, and awful norms around consent. but there's something about how harmless friendship is seen as, and how socially discouraged it is to deny it, that hurt me a lot. i didn't have a drive towards friendships, so my friends were decided by whichever child was pushy and domineering enough, and i assumed that was just how things worked. i never even noticed when my friends actually treated me unfairly, because all of it hurt so much that i couldn't tell the difference. until i found the apl community, i couldn't find the language or ideas to even begin to think about it!

i think in most possible worlds, i would still be aplatonic. but it's this – my own experience of friendship as an inescapable torment, tearing chunks out of myself and offering them to whoever was strong enough, while the adults around me called me “such a good friend” – that made me friend-repulsed.

crazy take: aside from actual lesbian romance stories, obviously, nothing passes the bechdel test better than moe "cute girls doing cute things" anime. its always just a group of girls, few to no named male characters, boys and dating are hardly ever brought up beyond the abstract, if at all. like we're focusing on the girls hanging out rn, we dont need to worry abt that shit. mugi just ate mio's strawberry.