My emotions are a well and I took planks and nails and I hammered until I was not able to feel anything at all. And when the flood came, taking every single plank and nail with it, I was left devastated. "How could have that happened?"
When I was younger I thought the black market was a physical place in the middle of a desert canyon somewhere, and the reason it was called that was because all the stalls used black fabric. I thought that human bones and brains in jars were sold there. I thought you could buy smuggled artifacts and stolen artwork from painters long dead. I thought that you could buy elephant ivory and endangered bird eggs. I thought that you could buy rhinoceros meat and wild chinchilla coats. I thought you could buy pirated copies of movies and hard drives full of government secrets. I kind of wanted to go, but I knew it was a terrible thing to ask. I wouldn’t have bought anything, I would have just liked to look.
Are you doing okay? We missed you at the devil’s sacrament. He mentioned you by name. Everyone was looking around and cheering until we realized you weren’t there. If you need to talk I’m always here. At the aforementioned devil’s sacrament.
I just had a physical exam today and I haven’t done the little knee hammer reflex test since I was like four years old so I was just like “yeah it’ll just make me flinch or whatever nbd” but when the doctor actually DID it my whole ass leg fucking launched into the air like I was David fucking Beckham. She didn’t even give me a second to recover either, I was gripping onto the exam table for dear life like “oh my god I’m so sorry” and WHAM she nails the other one. My entire body jolts as my foot flies three feet in the air and she twirls out of the trajectory of a five toe death kick to the groin like a capoeira master and just says “you have very brisk reflexes”. Like miss ma’am with the PHD didn’t just Ratitouille my whole shit. Like respectfully your honour you just played my skeleton like a piano, what the hell
“I’m gonna borrow that empty little head of yours.”
I was talking to someone about this in a comment of another post, but that line Vox says to Angel also takes on another meaning when we consider one of the first times we see Vox hypnotize Angel is after the events of Poison.
Poison, where Angel sings the line about disassociating and disappearing as a way to cope.
I wonder if that was something Vox took advantage of, using the moments following trauma as the best opportunity because not only is Angel already exhausted, but his mind would have likely started to drift away/shut down in an attempt to get to safety, and that made it easier for Vox to use his abilities on him. Because if Angel isn’t completely awakened the situation then he can’t really fight back.
I wonder if Angel blames himself for this. For allowing his mind to be “vulnerable”, because something that has for so long been something that helped him survive the horrors he went through ended up being something used against him.
And Angel is probably used to gaps in time, it’s not something he’s going to really question at this point.
It’s just… imagine Vox’s line about Angel’s “empty head” not only being a dig at his intelligence but also the fact that he usually takes advantage of times when Angel is at least partly disassociated to strike (except this time Vox really couldn’t wait.) And imagine Angel blaming himself in part for “letting him.” Something that he did to protect himself ended up hurting the people around him.
But now that he’s left the hotel it doesn’t matter. He can dissociate all he wants, there is no one left for him to hurt if it is used against him.
On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”
On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.
Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…
2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama
2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad
2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs
2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban
2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning
2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed
This is only a small taste of the many times that:
Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.
Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.
Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.
Fans grudge reported each other.
Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.
It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.
Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.
This is why we need AO3.
And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.
So grateful for the historical memory and the long view on a phenomenon many of us have come to late, and/or take for granted.
And this is why AO3 generates twice its goal amount in just a few days: they are irreplaceable.
As someone semi-concerned we’re entering a danger period for fandom as we’ve all come to know it, this was a fascinating skip through history.
