An Existence Like A Bug

watching the sunset outside the windows, you smolder, and I will burn.

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?”

— The Secret History, Donna Tartt

More transmasc chuuya without top surgery😼

random modern tsh au headcanons

bc i cannot stop thinking about how each of them would be if they were gen z 🤍 tried to keep all of this as true to character as possible

Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran

- Writes his essays with Chat GPT last minute

- Uses swipe to text

- Doesn’t have Marion on Snap (at least for a good, long while)

- Always has a cookie or snack cake with him when he showers

- Voted for Trump proudly

- Does not, somehow, own a MAGA hat. or at least, he doesn’t have one at Hampden

- Spends hundreds of dollars on Subway Surfers and Minion Rush every month

- Will not get anything with cinnamon dusting bc he inhaled cinnamon in public once by mistake

- Often sells Cloke ½ of his ADHD meds

- Makes Henry pick up his prescriptions

- Bluetooth Headphones. Bunny gives me major Beats vibes, tbh

- His favorite candies are Satellite Wafers

Francis Abernathy

- Keeps a refillable vape on his person at all times (his is silver and as small as refillables come,) but also has Strawberry Lemonade Loon disposables hidden places he frequents. Two in his coat pocket. One in his book bag. One hidden in his room. Two hidden at henry’s. Even one in an empty classroom at the Lyceum. He smokes cigarettes sometimes, too, but likes the accessibility of vaping

- Complains often about the TikTokification of “quiet luxury” and “dark academia”

- He has both WebMD apps

- Plays computer Sims at night & has a Sim for each person in the Greek Class. He keeps this secret bc in his Sims game, he’s married to Charles

- Walks out of the room when politics come up

- Spends time practicing writing in different fonts

- Has a pretty sizable internet following, most specifically on TikTok because he posts his outfits to brooding sounds. To his knowledge, the group is unaware. (Except Charles, anyway.)

Richard Papen

- Always asking Judy and Francis if he can hit their vapes. Will not touch Charles’s vape with a 10 foot pole.

- Dab pen under the mattress

- ‘Borrows’ Bunny’s adderall on occasion

- Sleeps through the day & forgets to eat so frequently that he has a permanent $800 dining dollar balance

- He peels his lighters until they’re white and leaves them around campus

- Has a 3 year long Duolingo streak in one language. Scottish Gaelic, of all things.

- Follows Francis’s TikTok on a burner account and spends hours stalking his posts

- He likes brat, secretly. He listens to it at Judy’s while they gossip and get high

- He’s very into Letterboxd even though he doesn’t often watch movies anymore

- A day does not go by that he is not at least looking on Depop

Henry M Winter

- Has a flip phone that he keeps in the breast pocket of his coat

- Everyone thinks he doesn’t know how to text but Camilla showed him (her first phone was a flip phone,) he just texts her and Bunny exclusively. it takes him 15 minutes to draft a text, though, so Bunny usually calls instead

- Has a collection of bespoke vintage lighters

- Keeps a single pair of unworn Golden Goose sneakers at his parents house bc he’s fascinated by the way they look so beat up and awful, yet so expensive in the same breath.

- His suits are all custom

- Always one slip of the tongue away from passionately ranting about AI & US literacy rates, or how people who vape are cowards

- Has a very large stash of swiss chocolate in his bedroom

- Bunny forced him to buy a signed Duran Duran record during one of his phases & Henry still listens to it on occasion

- Francis gifted him The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys & Wish on vinyl freshman year and he very much enjoys listening to those on occasion as well.

- Has a 10 step Korean skincare routine

- Will not drink soda of any kind. Water, coffee, and good liquor only. On very rare occasion he’ll have some juice

- He orders his liquor online because he can’t find anything good local, and Julian always signs for it. This started when he was 18 & just kept going on, even after he could sign for things himself

- Has never voted. Does not look at the news in any capacity. Would not know who the president is if it wasn’t for Bunny

- Once expressed that he found the Eras Tour rather grand & everyone pretended not to hear him because how does he even know what that is

Camilla Macaulay

- Always looking for an excuse to mention one of 3 things: how she does not have much of an internet presence, how she’s the only girl she knows who doesn’t like Taylor Swift, & how she only reads weird girl literature and classics.

- Does not carry cigarettes bc she likes to just take them from Charles or Henry

- Giggles (at least internally) every time she thinks of or speaks to Bunny after she has read Bunny by Mona Awad

- Learned how to do laundry on YouTube when she first moved to Hampden (their family always sent laundry out)

- She knits

- She tints her lashes at home to keep up the illusion of not wearing makeup

- Borrows Francis’s vape often (when Henry isn’t looking)

- Has a Samsung frame TV in her bedroom & she uses it to play study ambience that’s just paintings and classical music

- At one point she has the same haircut as Charles. They’re surprisingly difficult to tell apart when this is the case.

Charles Macaulay

- He’s got an instagram DM roster he can’t even scroll to the bottom of

- Has a tiny tattoo on his ribs of Camilla’s initials (which are also his initials- he was blacked out when he got it) and as a result refuses to swim in the summer

- He likes wax sealing envelopes. It’s relaxing

- Smokes Camel Blues (Lights) & carries a Cool Mint Puffbar disposable vape for when he inevitably loses those

- Has been known to purchase a blueberry RedBull on occasion, though he usually chugs it before anyone else in the Greek Class can see

- Also uses a burner account to stalk Francis on tiktok. Francis knows it’s him, though, because he wasn’t very inventive with the username (when will he learn to leave it as user random numbers??)

- His entire fyp on that account is Francis, people who look strikingly similar to Francis, & slime tutorials with Lifetime movies playing

- Wired headphones truther

anarchism and god complex

i love every character in the secret history. they're all freaks. they're all alcoholics. they're snobs. they deserve nothing but the worst. i adore them. i want to study them as if i were a mad ornithologist and they were rare, cantankerous, bastard birds.

got a LOT of thoughts about paratise. i feel like we're finally getting to hear more of ivan's Inner Freak(TM) rather than just seeing it animated. it's raw and and twisted like nowhere, but also kinda sexy and so desperate. he's not just lamenting the cruel reality of his existence, he's yearning. you almost get the sense that his shitty upbringing has messed up his mind so severely that he doesn't even know how to love till without feeling this.. freakish obsession with him. he's never had the safety to feel out his emotions for till healthily, so they've culminated into this all-consuming desire to be — well, consumed — by till. the lines "my wish, to live in you like parasite / you, be my own private paradise" are so full of desire, but they also come from a place of such pain. like he yearns to wholly lose himself in till, because there's no other way to love him in their fucked up little world. because of alien stage they are all constantly brushing hands with death, and their concepts of love end up equally severe. the song constantly mentions wounds, pain, darkness, shadows — and yet, it still manages to be an impassioned declaration of desire. for ivan, pain and love have always been one and the same. and as long as it continues, the way he wants till will remain just a liiiittle bit masochistic.

Henry Winter be like "I know a spot" then pushes you off it

R.i.p Henry winter you wouldve gone on about how your better than people who vape because you smoke ciggarettes "like a real person"

the fact that richard sees/wants us to see judy poovey as sort of dumb, while also seeing/wanting us to see julian morrow as some revolutionary mind when they're having the same damn thoughts is crazy to me

like near the end of the first chapter when we hear some about the class discussion, one of the points julian discusses (in simple terms lol) is how people who tend to bottle things up and stay composed all the time end up causing greater amounts of destruction when they "lose control" than people who allow themselves to lose control on occasion, but he does it with many words and references

and richard is like "wow this is awesome how sick is this guy"

then at the beginning of chapter two, judy poovey is telling richard about the time henry beat the fuck out of spike romney and she says something about how when uptight people lose it they REALLY lose it, but in terms just as simple as those

and richard just goes "yeah, i guess"

which there for sure is something to be said about the way people use words and the difference that use of language has on the way people feel about certain concepts, but you know

also: misogyny, clearly