making it great again

I don't even need to say I'm smarter than you. 

[aderringer]

if you had to pick a decade that either captures your muse or one they’d do a project on/dress up like, which would it be? adonis is the 60’s for the latter half of the civil rights movement and goes with the jimi hendrix look

[joey-emery]

joey is the 80′s for reagan, the greed of capitalism at an all time high, and the ultra pro-america/democracy/western values mentality. he tries to pull off the tom cruise or tom selleck cool guy look and fails.

[joey-emery]

valentine’s day was a scam. joey would tell anyone who would listen about how he loved the free market, but hated this downfall of consumerism. women controlled the market by buying up useless crap and creating emotional weapons (ie: holidays) to get even more out of men. birthdays and mother’s day just weren’t enough anymore. when embry mentioned that 12 had another holiday, sweetest day, which was essentially the exact same thing, he about lost his mind. luckily he lived in 4 and only had to put up with a few wacky holidays, most of which could be avoided by staying in the northern part of the district year round. 

his mother poisoned the idea for him. she’d get so upset when chase would forget valentine’s day despite the fact he kept a roof over their heads. he saw her cry about it once when he was younger and asked his dad why he made her cry. iris was the one breaking the social contract, he explained. he worked while she stayed home. it was her job to take care of the kids and mind her own business since that was what his paychecks demanded of her. her need for a crappy bouquet or earrings was her own issue. if she wanted them so damn bad, she could buy them herself. 

that was the mentality he wanted to stick with, but chase advised him that only applied after marriage. presents on valentine’s day were only required to get your wife to put out. if you didn’t need her services, there was no real point. but before then, he’d have to play the game every man played just to win a woman over.

whenever they were off again and february rolled around, he’d mock the holiday and the men who engaged with it. whenever they were on again he’d grab a bouquet on the way to school or over to her place and hand it over. he’d buy expensive ones, sure, but she could count on him only making a stop at the florist. no matter how many hints she’d drop for anything else, she’d get a bouquet, and always sound appreciative of the gesture. she’d get him some present that he’d glance over and thank her for before initiating a kiss or some kind of physical contact. valentine’s day wasn’t all bad for men.

-

he roamed the halls of his house and heard each step echo. aside from the housekeepers, he was entirely alone. rio hadn’t returned since his 18th birthday. hazel and scarlett were at the hospital again and wouldn’t be back until cod knows when. he didn’t have to worry about buying a gift at all this year and the vase on the kitchen table stayed completely empty.

[joey-emery]

Downfall

Despite being genuinely hated by everyone other than Hazel and Embry, Joey continues to make appearances in the lives of the main group until his sophomore year of high school. He deliberately only spends time with Hazel alone rather than engaging in a group setting because he knows the others don’t like him and he doesn’t want to deal with their criticism. He always felt a chill between him and the rest of the group, and this only amplifies after he defends what Chase said about Embry back when they were in middle school. 

After that point, he’s staying with Chase in the big house while Iris struggles to get by while Chase keeps fighting having to pay child support for Rainbow ‘if he’s not seeing her anyways’. Iris and Rainbow lean heavily on the Salmons at this time as they get on their feet and take comfort alongside the Shaws. Rainbow becomes pretty attached to Hazel, strives to be Nadia, and ends up infatuated with Embry. It’s not that surprising; the Salmon sisters are her only friends and Embry is the only guy who is genuinely nice to her. Like any preteen, she’s in love with the idea of love and the idea of being a woman (especially one like Nadia or Hazel). 

While Rainbow solidifies herself as a friend (albeit a younger outlier one), Joey becomes more annoyed with how the group always ‘endured’ her before and seems to welcome her with open arms now. Iris and Rainbow always reached out before attending on of the frequent parent/kid get togethers at the Odairs or Salmons, but he was stubborn and legitimately afraid of the Odair twins. 

Adonis ‘taking his rightful place’ drives him absolutely insane. He never liked Adonis as a person, but watching him win over ‘his people’ is too much. Any time he can, he’s making jabs about Adonis, his family, how money can’t buy class, general bullshit. Unfortunately for Joey, Adonis doesn’t take the Embry internalization approach and heckles him right back in far funnier and more creative ways. 

He falls in with other rich asshole types. Iris made attempts to get him off ‘of those forums’ and into more inclusive groups, but he cut her out almost immediately and blocked her number and Rainbow’s after she got remarried. Chase has full control over him and leads him down that dark path into being an openly hateful, intolerant person. His new friends are other hateful, intolerant people and their equally abhorrent parents. He loves the affluent lifestyle and how bashing ‘little people’ make him feel bigger. 

He’s able to keep most of this under wraps around Hazel since he knows she’s a bleeding heart, but that line starts to blur once they’re in high school and he finds himself negging and gaslighting her for ‘caring about pointless shit’. It’s frustrating that she’s refusing to fall into the role he wants her to play in his life and he tells her as much, often citing how the other girls in his friend group understand how the world works but she’s still ‘acting like a child’ and not ‘a mature woman’. Seeing her get friendlier with Adonis is taken as a huge insult, especially when his friends point out that he shouldn’t have expected better from her and that it’s better that they don’t mingle with ‘those kinds of people’. When he tries to explain to her that she needs to stop socializing with ‘trash like she always has’, he’s dumbfounded that she’s not apologizing for her sin against him, but straight up telling him that he’s a misogynistic pig. 

It only gets worse. She distances herself from him and he’s embarrassed that he’s been rejected by both a woman and a woman beneath his self-perceived status. He goes on the offense and breaks down the last wall of his fake persona. His true self takes over as he helps form a Young Patriots club at school, insists his dad will sue if the school bans certain symbols (’freedom of speech’), and feels the need to always play Devil’s Advocate in history class, particularly if Hazel has given her opinion moments before. 

And then...

Rainbow wakes up extra early that morning to spend more time getting ready for school. The day seems to fly by while she’s in a daze. Finally, the bus drops her off at the high school for Creative Writing class. Before she makes it to class, she’s stopping at a nearby locker with a birthday present in hand. She prattles on about how Iris helped her make the magnet look just like the flag she saw online and how she checked with his mama that it wasn’t offensive to make. Embry’s extremely flattered by the gesture and unaware of her true feelings. He thanks her for the gift but is genuinely shocked by her wrapping her arms around him since she’s never hugged him before. 

Before Embry can untangle himself and set a polite but firm boundary, they’re interrupted by an absolutely livid Joey. Other students stop to watch in horror as he berates Embry for even going near Rainbow and how his dad was right about the kind of people Embry was/came from. Rainbow begs him to stop and tells him he’s wrong about Embry and ‘wrong about everything!’, making the last crack in him for him to become completely unhinged. After a rain of ableism and misogyny down upon her, the shoe finally drops when he tells her that it’s disgusting and embarrassing enough that she’s autistic, so she doesn’t need to be a ‘filthy ***skin fucker too’. 

Nobody says anything. The spectators look around nervously while Rainbow and Embry stare blankly at Joey. He’d said not to subtle things alluding to his feelings on race, but he’d never actually said a slur before. Rather than being angry like he should be, Embry feels too embarrassed to move. It isn’t until Rainbow bursts into tears and runs off that he’s able to even tell Joey to ‘go fuck himself’. She’s too far down the hall to chase after and he’s worried about how that would look anyways.

In a twist of fate, she runs into the same bathroom Nadia and her friends are primping in. Nadia immediately jumps into maternal mode and asks her friends for privacy while Rainbow stims. When she able to speak again, she gets enough of the story out for Nadia to put the pieces together. Nadia walks her to the guidance counselor’s office and makes sure she’s safe. 

Rainbow asks her not to tell since Joey said he’d get Embry in trouble. Remembering how embarrassed Embry was when she spilled on what Chase had said back in middle school, she keeps from immediately telling her friends or Hazel. Her parents find out from Iris, who calls to cry to Mel, but also to thank Nadia for her kindness. Unsure if she can keep her mouth shut about something this awful, she tries to encourage Embry to tell, but he’s more concerned about Rainbow than he is what Joey said to him.

She’s able to keep her mouth shut until lunch rolls around. There’s obvious tension in the air. When Adonis sits down and asks Embry why he heard a rumor about him fighting Joey during last period the day before, it all comes tumbling out. Adonis asks Embry if what Nadia said is true and the group takes his silence as the confirmation it is. As soon as the bell rings, Embry takes off to avoid answering any questions. 

A few days pass before Leah and Iris arrange a sit down where Embry is able to let Rainbow down gently. It’s inappropriate for them to be anything more than friends. He likes being her friend and wants her to respect that boundary. The way he treats her is how everyone should treat her and not a romantic gesture. She’s bummed out and embarrassed, but he handles it with the exact kind of grace she needs to not be too crushed. She also wants to be friends still and agrees to not cross that line again.

It’s hard to stay upset with Nadia, so those two make up quickly when she explains that she didn’t tell everyone to embarrass him or Rainbow, but so that they could defend both of them. She loves them both dearly but knows they’d never defend themselves and that it would keep happening. He’s annoyed but understands where she’s coming from. With Rainbow not being hurt by them knowing, he’s not as upset as before, but admits he hated looking so cowardly in front of them. Nadia remarks that there’s no cowardice in diplomacy, but that even the best diplomats learn when fighting back in necessary to defense. 

As for this asshole,

Joey felt no guilt at all. When he told Chase what happened, he seemed proud that Joey took a stand against what others were too afraid to speak out about. After they laughed in colorful terms about Embry and Rainbow and even his whore mother, he felt like he had completely won the encounter. His friends gave the same positive feedback when he explained how he put Embry in his place. 

That high ended abruptly and painfully when on the way back from a bathroom break, he has the living shit beat out of him. He was thrown headfirst into a row of lockers, knocked onto his stomach, and takes a kick to the face. He pulls himself up in time to get punched back down. It could have only been a minute tops, but it seemed to drag on with each hit. Once it was over and he was certain he was alone again, he limped back to the bathroom to try and clean himself up. 

He’s a bloody pulp and everyone is asking questions, but he didn’t see who jumped him. If he had to guess, it had to be Hunter. He had left a class in the AP hallway, so it couldn’t have been Embry or Adonis seeking revenge. Even when Hunter’s teacher during that period vouches for him saying he never left, Chase is screaming about suing Eli for all he’s worth, which Eli finds amusing more than threatening. 

His friend swear to get justice for him, but they’re all just as afraid to fight Hunter, so they’ll ‘let the administration do the right thing’. He tries to use his wounds to get sympathy from Hazel, only for her to basically beat the shit out of him again by verbally eviscerating him and cutting all ties with him. He stalks off to his locker after calling her a fucking heartless bitch. Eventually, he notices a figure watching him from just inside the AP Calculus room. Using his good eye, he watches in horror as he’s given the finger from the bruised-knuckled hand of Scout Odair. 

[joey-emery]

[batesmotel]

[joey-emery]

[joey-emery]

what Rio and Scarlett likely look like versus their face claims

[scout-odair]

//In which Hazel is more enthusiastic about having their photo taken than Joseph (who is probably shooting that dirty look at his mother)

[maxthieriot]

requested by anon

[hazyspacy]

Freddie Highmore

[midqueenally]

[joey-emery]

[cinematapestry]

“I was overwhelmed with sadness when I realized that I was going to change. That it was all most likely going to get worse, like a nostalgia for the present.” 

-The Art of Getting By (2011) dir. Gavin Wiesen

[elena-gilbert]

Clara + crossed arms

[serial-scout]

Prince Joseph Emery 

Keep reading

[jerbearlee]

we know jeremy’s karaoke song is jukebox hero, but what is everyone else singing when they’re drunk at 2am?

[nauticalnadia]

nadia is the typical sorority girl singing before he cheats with a vodka cran in hand or she’s singing california gurls complete with choreography she totally didn’t come up with before tonight

[joey-emery]

joey attempts to sing piano man and it’s the only time people don’t mind his presence. he thinks it’s because he’s doing well, but it’s really because all bars sing along to piano man

[ging-gum]