Compiling some old posts as a narrative to bring into therapy and I am just endlessly sorry that it took this long and so many people had to get hurt before I found the healing I needed (EMDR is a game-changer, guys. Highly recommended for those of you with severe trauma).
In short: I’m doing well, and I hope you all are, too. This blog is staying an archive — too many bad memories and a truly staggering amount of shitty behavior on my part — but I’m still around on @the-reylo-void here and there.
It gets better, guys. It really does. If I could climb out of the darkness, you can, too.
A depressed guy moves into a haunted house with 7 demons, each corresponding to a deadly sin. But, they’re all trying to help him get back on his feet; Pride helps with self confidence, Lust helps him get laid, etc.
I would watch the crap outta this like wow
Envy: “Glut, back off the guy, okay?”
Gluttony: “I’m just saying he could stand to gain a few pounds! I made spaghetti!”
Sloth: “After we eat, it’s gonna be time for a nice nap. We’ve earned it!”
Pride: “Damn right we did!”
Just imagine the Catholic Church making a statement regarding this new tv show.
Wrath does nothing but encourage him to punch assholes.
“You deserve better! That was YOUR parking space!”
“He’s like three hundred pounds of muscle, Wrath.”
“And you are 165 pounds of RAGE!”
Wrath’s advice isn’t great, but he means well.
Greed spends his days trying to help him manage his budget and put money on the side
“Bro check this out i’ve got the sickest retirement plan, technically it’s tax evasion i guess but fuck those guys, right?”
No but seriously. Normalize finding love in your 40’s. Normalize discovering and chasing new dreams in your 30’s. Normalize finding yourself and your purpose in your 50’s. Life doesn’t end at 25. Let’s stop acting like it does.
is there anything more bitter than letting go of friends that you thought were your ride or die? coming to terms with the fact that you’re walking down different paths and you’ll be dismembered if you don’t let go of their hand. being true to yourself and your self-worth is something we’re never warned about. no one ever tells you that you’ll spend weeks pondering where it went wrong, what you did wrong, until you come to the somber realization that your time together on this earth just might be over.
i’ve been reading for most of the day now about howard ashman, the lyricist for the little mermaid & beauty and the beast. he was one of the biggest creative forces behind both films, helping to shape their characters, narrative arcs, and themes as well as their music; he was also a gay man who was diagnosed with aids during the production of the little mermaid and died shortly after beauty and the beast was finished. alan menken, the composer who collaborated with him on both movies, said that beauty and the beast is heavily influenced by ashman’s experiences and perspective.
and i can’t stop thinking about it. i’ve always considered beauty and the beast to be one of the darkest films in the disney canon, as well as its most beautiful. it’s entirely about monsters, about the ways that people are determined to be wrong and dangerous: there’s the beast alone in his castle in the forest, and belle mocked and sneered at by her village, and even maurice carted off to an asylum.
and that it was written and conceived of in part by a gay man who, according to his sister, trained himself out of “effeminate” physical mannerisms when he was young because he was bullied for them, and who as he wrote it was dying of an incredibly stigmatized illness— like, god.
i mean when you just listen to those songs he wrote, the mob song (“the beast is] set to sacrifice our children to his monstrous appetite / he’ll wreak havoc on our village if we let him wander free”), belle (“it’s a pity and a sin / she doesn’t quite fit in”)— and there was a cut song, human again, where the castle servants looked forward to rejoining the world.
like it’s obviously queer, but more than that, it’s the self-identification and self-validation of a man who knew this was this work was probably his last. at the end of the film, the beast is so sad, has succumbed entirely to despair and death. his society is coming to destroy him, and he can’t even be angry, because he doesn’t have anything left. but then he does. and he is still precious, and his life is still meaningful. he’s a person, and he can be loved. he can find happiness.
in the original beauty and the beast, the beast proposes marriage to belle every night and it’s her acquiescence that breaks the spell. in the disney movie, the beast only waits for belle to love him, because he cannot love himself. it’s such an unexpected blessing for both belle and the beast that they can find acceptance in each other, after both are so othered and dehumanized by their communities. their vulnerable joy in each other and themselves is so important, and their love song so wonderingly sweet. at the end, it is only when someone loves and accepts you that you stop being a monster.
john musker, one of the directors of beauty and the beast, told this story about how ashman cried at disneyland when the little mermaid’s music was integrated into a parade and said that he was glad to know that his music would outlive him. beauty and the beast was my favorite movie when i was young and trying not to be queer, when i felt very wrong and very alone. it has been unbelievably important in my life. and so i am also glad— and so grateful— that howard ashman’s music outlived him, and that he lived at all.
Dolly’s absolute amazingness aside… She is who she wants to be, and shows herself as she wants to. Anyone who sees her as a joke is in fact the joke themselves and I’m quite happy to laugh at them.
The real joke is that she’s the one finding it, not the government.
She purposely does this, y’all. I have been fascinated by her for years and she has purposely crafted this and people reacting like this is her intention. She is a master. Like, how many country artists can get away with openly being a queer ally and funding AIDS research and COVID research and all this other stuff and yet still I defy you to find a person–no matter how conservative–who will say anything worse than ‘she’s trashy’ to you–but it can’t even insult her because she says she’s trashy!! She is so good at this y’all. A master at the whole concept of reclaiming and owning one’s image. All hail Dolly.
This is the most beautiful way to describe fic, transformative storytelling and collective mythmaking. He gets it.
every time i think i can’t be more impressed with mr. sheen, he tweets another bit of casual wisdom and grace
Fanfic is so much like midrash, the hundreds of corridors of possibility, the coexisting realities of different readings of the same source text, multiple truths emerging from reveling in a creative love of the source. Of course we haven’t ‘lost’ that method, this is how Jews read Torah.
Story has always been so important to us as a species, and as individuals, it is the primary way we understand the world.
