I've been waiting for Caleb's tome for like 3 years now and I wish I was more excited about it, but knowing that I probably won't be able to play the game so I can get his outfit and charms is killing a lot of my excitement over it. My living situation for the past year has made it difficult to play any online games and I've been hoping things would be fixed by now but they aren't. I know it's literally just a game but I've been looking forward for this for so long and I'm probably gonna miss out on most of it.

6,7,8,9 🤪

Only seeing this today 🥺😭 thank you Fiona!!!

6. Share a spicy take.

I've completely lost perception on what's spicy and what's mild due to Internet brain rot, but I think my hottest takes are:

Yoko is amazing and she's done nothing wrong, ever

(okay, maybe she did some wrong things, but like, in a "humans are complicated and flawed" way probably not in "i'm literally a cartoon villain" way; and she's not shown the same grace we give men (cough—john specifically—cough) everything she does is interpreted in the harshest possible light and I just don't think that's how people work and it has a lot to do with sexism and racism and me saying this is not me being like uwu yoko is perfect (as I've seen people argue in the tags like that saying she suffered from racism is contributing to "the girlbossing of yoko" instead of like.... Dude she was a Japanese woman in America literally less than 15 yrs after there were putting Japanese people in internment camps, SO...) Also, her music is Good Actually and you could make the argument that it's been as influential as The Beatles, I'M NOT MAKING IT RN but you could make it, and it would go like this: without "Kiss Kiss Kiss" and "Give me Something", there's no Kanye's "808s and Heartbreak" (THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUM OF THE 2000s imho there's a hot take for ya), and then there's no Drake.)

Another maybe-hot take: John was 100% almost for sure physical and certainly emotionally abusive to his partners (Cynthia and Yoko), and me saying this is not me "cancelling" john lennon or whatever, it's just like, holding two thoughts in our minds. He grew up in an era where this was normalized, expected, and good, and he struggled a lot with anger and his views on masculinity. But it still happened.

7. What is a Beatles-discourse topic that needs to die?

Why they broke up. Fuck. They broke up because money, and coke, and human relationships, and the complexity inherent to intimacy and being known, and at this point it feels like looking at a prism, there's all these projections and you can't and will never perceive the reality of the object. Not even if you got to sit through an actual honest to go Paul McCartney therapy session would you get closer to anything resembling Actual Truth, we as a society need to let it go.

8. What do you think makes the Beatles fandom uniquely fun?

Women! I'm joking but also not 😂 I think the passion and creativity of the people in the fandom (especially women and girls) is unparalleled, and the fan-made stuff sometimes is even more fun than the original-stuff (like covers, compilations, art) i'm always floored by the level of talent and insight of the people in this fandom

9. What is the main thing that makes the music special to you?

Alright I don't know how to actually organize how much i feel about this, I'm not a fancy music person, so I'll just share a story:

I have a friend who hated the Beatles. Like, she absolutely despised them, mostly because she'd only met male Beatles fans, and they'd been so shitty to her that she'd just developed an immediate hatred to ever even giving their music a chance. We were at the beach, and upon hearing this, I was like: you know what, no. The Beatles are for the girls. The Beatles are for the people. There's a reason why they're The Beatles, and it's this: they were never precious about their music and who enjoyed it. They made joyful music, music that spoke to things deep in their souls and then they had the amazing experience of seeing other people being like "yes, this is inside my soul too". I truly believe they never got tired of that feeling. They made music to help people, and to help themselves, and to make the world a bit of a better place. Even their saddest songs are never completely unhopeful, and that's because they loved each other, and they suffered together, and to quote that one poem, whenever they were down, there was another one of them who was willing to be "No, we're going to climb out of this hole together! This is not our grave!"

And then I put on "Hey, Jude", and we watched the sun set over the brilliant ocean near Lisbon and I told her, "Doesn't your soul just want to scream along? Don't you feel that na na na na deep inside your bones? Don't you feel the joy of taking a sad song and making it better? And then getting to sing it out, scream it out, make it better better better better BETTER? Imagine being so sad, going through the depths of pain, fitting the whole spectrum of human experience into your songs, and then still making it soar like that. Doesn't it feel like being loved? Doesn't it make you happy?"

Anyway, that's why I love The Beatles.