Is It Ok To Mock Teenagers For Bad/mediocre Writing & Artwork?

ROSWELL NEW MEXICO ⇢ 1x10

bonus: happy max (✿◠‿◠)

i just found them utterly delightful this season

Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.

I am demonstrably sad, and lonely, and full of fear. But there are other people who will hold my hand, who will point out the hawk overhead, who will give you That Look in a public place. The other day at a coffee shop a child said "look! It's snowing!" so all of us strangers went to go look out the windows. It wasn't the first snow and it won't be the last but wasn't it lovely, like that?

How wonderful to live in a world where birds and frogs both say beep! How wonderful to have an ocean of beautiful sharks with their dinosaur teeth! How wonderful the moon and her changing face, how wonderful the bees and their dancing to communicate, how wonderful shrimp and their forbidden layers of vision! How wonderful, you, and what you will give the world! The way we love things enough to spend entire blogs devoted to them? How people will let me explain my Pokemon team to them? How we will both jump at the scare in the movie, how we laugh so loudly, how it feels to give someone your baking? How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.

This is the process of getting better. With wonderful people and wonderful strangers and wonderful friends: I am getting better, slowly. Thank you, whoever you are. In some way, you've been wonderful, and left a wonderful place in the world to ripple out to me. In some small way - isn't it beautiful - I promise, you've been helping.

You owe me one, sis.

Isn’t it fun how my personality and mental health is dictated by whatever tv show I’m watching

“I would say it was Dad who implemented all of this […] my alienation through procedures, through harsh […] all followed for fear of the alternative. And to an ex[tent?] […] true. I can’t forgive what he did to me - but somet[…] where Dad’s actions ended and my siblings’ beg[an] […] consider what a mind, especially a young mind […] harness when put into dire situations, it’s not […] believe that my siblings learned cruelty from […] [ev]entually made it their own. It wasn’t just th[e] […] of top-secret meetings, anymore. It jus[t] […] [wou]ld sit at the end of the table, so Die[go] […]ique, or so Allison could paint Klaus’ […]omed to sulking and watching the […] oatmeal went uneaten and […] 

(p.???)

      Meals became the only time of day […] to be together - and I met them with equal parts […] and dread. Would today be the day I [engaged Allison?] […] stand up to Diego’s taunts? Maybe I’d show Five […] I’d been working on for years.       Though prone to arrogance and […] than the average preteen, Five was my sole confidant years before he [disappeared] […] It almost seemed fitting […] the siblings to leave […] ////////////// Dad’s manipulation […]

[Five’s hand obscures the page.]

      One morning […]   ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// behind, I think I even […] from home following me when […] a bus stop, and I sat there all day long  […] //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////  had thought I was alone my future life […] something new and entirely different. I was afraid of what […] and would [choose Dad’s torment any day?] dark stretched down our street. […] waved the kind drivers away. That night I walked  […] front doors, and no one knew I had ever left to […] I wonder how long it would have […] extra girl they never needed was […] To this day, I’m not sure. The next time […] when we all did. After what happened to […] everyday existence was full of evidence that Dad […] into […] experiments. Not children […]mals. And what  happened to Ben was the […] shattered the illusion for the others. I […] all along what they realized that day. I didn’t […] to leave on my own. It wasn’t until Allison […]ood and Diego [cursed out?] the old man […] were ultimately a broken family. […] that my family would accept me into the fold. I […] [as] long as there was a [club?] to […] to […] notice me and invited me to. Everyone would […]ya, we can’t believe we’ve wasted so much […] you’re our sister after all.       […] it was then that I realized something […]ing for me to aspire to be anymore. It was liberat[ing] […] that I had wanted for as long as I could remember […]y fallen apart. Without The Umbrella Academy […] [fre]edom to be whomever I chose. Suddenly, my violin [was]n’t stupid - it was something that made me special.” 

(p.??-??)

Extracts from Vanya Hargreeves, Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven,[TUA 1X05]

Things to conclude from this extract:

Reginald Hargreeves was an A-grade Bad Dad, whose iron fisted rule ensured the children internalised Vanya’s exclusion from the ‘club’, and would ostracise her from any social activities from a young age. Vanya attributes this in part to the ‘dire situation’ of their childhood under Reginald’s strict tutelage, but cannot forgive their inability to think for themselves.

Five & Vanya: Five was Vanya’s sole confidant, but despite this, she spent years working on something (perhaps practising her violin?) without sharing it with him or anyone else, for fear of rejection and ridicule. 

Vanya & the others: perhaps felt intimidated by Allison (did not feel confident enough to ‘engage’ her - in conversation? Confrontation?) and was taunted by Diego.  

Vanya ran away: she went so far as to spend all day sitting at a bus stop, wondering if anyone would miss her. However, she lacked the confidence to run away, and returned to the Academy - where no one had noticed she was gone. 

Reginald’s Star Pupil: It’s implied Reginald felt the loss of Five acutely, and trained the other children past even the most tenuous ethical guidelines to compensate for his absence. It was not until Ben died, possibly as a result of these experiments, that the others finally started thinking for themselves. However, even now, they did not realise their treatment of Vanya, and did not welcome her ‘into the fold’.

Diego swore at Reginald, probably until he was blue in the face. 

Something special: Vanya realised her hopes for reconciliation with her siblings were ultimately empty. All those ‘extraordinary’ people in her life were still cruel, even without Reginald’s guiding hand. But for Vanya, it was a moment of epiphany. Where her violin had once been an embarrassment in comparison to the talents of her siblings, it was now something special all its own.   

Something else to consider: Why is this (the part about his own preteen angst and disappearance) the passage Five reads as he considers the error in his calculations? Is it a fixed point in time? Is this the ‘quantum state version’ of himself he projected himself into?  

It’s okay if you count on your fingers, if you continually change how you look, if you’re passionate about something you aren’t good at, if you’re confused about your identity, if you score low on tests often. It’s okay if you have an irregular skin tone, moles, frizzy hair, unevenly clipped nails, crooked teeth, acne, eczema. You’re enough, and you’re deserving of love.

it au where everything’s the same except they’re all wearing taylor swift merch

After reading that Ron defense post and how much you love him, I'm really curious as to why you like him so much! Have a good day xxxx

Of course! Okay, this is a mess, but off the top of my head:

Ron’s character comprises a lot of classic tropes that I particularly like—the big, stifling family; the humble beginnings; deep love under cover of laughter; the knight of heart who overcomes his fears. From the beginning, he’s colourful: an optimistic, humorous, buoyant kid, all red and gold and blue, flaring up in anger, in laughter, diffusing tensions with wide-eyed simplicity. To me, there’s something so charming in this self-proclaimed underdog, second always to his friends, and yet never hateful; so humble that he is oblivious to the fact that he is a key cog in his world dynamics.

Ron is never put under an admiring light, because Harry tends to rely on him with the spontaneity of a brother, and Hermione doesn’t share her insights with Harry. Because of Harry’s tranquil trust and because of his depiction in the movies, Ron has slowly become, in popular opinion, a simplistic oaf, a prop for crude comedic devices. To me, however, he is the easiest to identify with now—born in the worlds he inhabits, and yet overlooked by those who, he believes, shine brighter—at the Burrow, his twin brothers and his sisters, who bulldoze their way through life when he tends to take his lazy-ass time—in the magic world, Hermione and Harry, both raised by muggles and yet welcomed with open arms by strangers because of their skills. Ron’s skills are rarely put in the spotlight, and you know why? Because despite his tendency to frustration and anger, which are usually targeted towards himself anyway, he is usually quite unassuming, so convinced is he of his lack of self-worth.

Harry is humble, yes, and selfless, but he has a strong sense of his abilities, of his talent, and the luck that life, despite the hardships, has bestowed upon him. Hermione, potentially because of her blood status and lack of beauty in the early years of school, stuffs her cleverness in everybody’s face and has made it her definite trait. They can take pride in something. Ron, from beginning to end, is completely blind to his own abilities, damaging his sense of self in the process. As the series progresses, Ron falls more and more in the shadow of his friends, trying through temporary jolts to rise to the light (his trying out for the Quidditch team, Lavender,…), and falling back when this fails (keeper is still lesser than captain, and the respect he was looking for was Hermione’s, not Lavender’s). The point is: he is still looking for himself, as we all do at 15. He is still looking for a purpose, for a silver lining, when his close friends seem to have already found their purpose in life.

I think we don’t give Ron enough credit, again because Harry’s narration is biased. It’s been said that Ron is jealous, and angry, and susceptible, but time and time again Ron diffuses the tension between buttheads Hermione and Harry, and when he leaves—escaping the shadows I mentioned earlier, deciding to live for himself for a while—, Harry and Hermione’s relationship falls into silence and disinterest, because the link of warmth between them is ultimately Ron. I think he is very socially clever, despite being oblivious at times—he compliments Hermione when she most needs it, mingles his anger with Harry to lighten the burden, and is shown to worry and discuss Harry’s problems with Hermione behind the scenes, although we don’t have access to what is actually shared. He is also attuned to the atmosphere enough to crack a joke at exactly the right moment, unassumingly. I think this feelings-focused approach is also his biggest weakness: impulsive, he usually falls into self-hate and anxiety after his outbursts; attuned to his surroundings in a global rather than detailed way, he feels that he is overlooked, knows that he is under-valued, but does not know how to prove or to address it. Jealous, no—but envious of a life where he would feel more loved, more comfortable with himself, where he would get more admiration, absolutely. The issue comes from there, of course: his being poor, his being clumsy, his being always considered the Potter sidekick, second place, last place, these all erode his sense of self throughout the books. There’s a lack of self-respect in Ron: he always makes himself the butt of the joke, he becomes upset when people point out the flaws he knows and hates. But his need to be validated through others is both deeply immature and deeply relatable: it is a forced step before reaching the understanding that only you can know and respect yourself entirely.

To me, Ron (along with Neville) is the bravest of them all, and really deserves his place in Gryffindor. Contrarily to Hermione (who buckles under pressure often, because she is ultimately in need of control) and Harry, who is defined by his selflessness and is ready for self-sacrifice, Ron is always scared as fuck and yet always fights. He has the most to lose, being from such a big family. Yet he faces his arachnophobia at 12 in order to explore his best friend’s hunch about the spiders. At 11, he had chosen to potentially die in order to allow Harry safe-passing to the Mirror cave. He was born in the magical world: giants, Voldemort, even Sirius Black are not rational enemies to him, but the stuff of nightmares, legends that tamed and terrified him when he was little. How could he approach them with a level-head when he has been raised to fear them? He cannot be as rational as those who discover the existence of human villains when they reach teenagehood. To him, these are monsters. Ron not only has to fight them, he has to unlearn what petrified a whole nation, to challenge his education, the deeply ingrained fears and lore that has been part of his personality-building.

I think that’s what I like best of all: because he is so flawed and realistic from the get-go, he is allowed to undergo the most amazing character development, and to grow up before our eyes. That kid who was dismissive of “know-it-alls” and “weirdos”, raised to be casually racist towards other magical races (goblins, elves and giants), deeply unsure of his own worth, tortured between envy and deep loyalty/love, hateful of his humble station, becomes by the end of book 7 a defender of the school underdogs—standing up for Luna, Hermione and Neville several times throughout the books—; actively attuned to social justice (admiring of Grawp’s efforts, striking friendships with elves and insisting to leave them a choice to fight or to flee); too impulsive and hurt and worried not to leave the hallows quest, but humble and brave enough to come back immediately; showing time and time again pride in his family, and finally finding pride in himself through the last of Harry’s missions. Harry gives him the sword so that he can destroy an Horcrux. By the end of the book, Ron is whole enough, stable enough that he can finally equate his friend and give Hermione the fang so that she can destroy the cup as well.

Ron never sheds his anxiety, his self-consciousness, never loses this impulse of hiding behind humour; his growth is, realistically, not an ideal one. Yet his development is so compelling, and so full of lessons in life and new-found self-awareness. So yeah. That’s why I like him very much!

Give yourself an extra big hug today!

Artwork by Maeril