Confessions of a Hawthorne Fangirl

This is not normal...

[freshmangojuice]

[liz-marcs]

Red Dwarf cast attempts to sing their own theme song 13 years later.

The "This is why you all act" comment at the end is sending me...

[rneadowsoprano-deactivated20211]

Hanging out with old people rules because after a while they trust you enough to confess to murder totally unprompted

[hiscarissima]

Wait what.

[rneadowsoprano-deactivated20211]

Sometimes old ladies had to kick the ladder out from under their stepfathers when they were girls and that’s valid

[saint-batrick]

oh, my little old lady murder story was her replacing the medication in her abusive husband's capsules with rat poison.

"back in the day, our grandmothers worked on their marriages and didn't get divorced!" nah, friend, they COULDN'T get a divorce so sometimes they killed their fuckin husbands. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[smashasaurus-rex]

My grandma murdered her first husband the first time he beat their daughter.

[sandersgrey]

[thatdisasterauthor]

My college was next to an assisted living facility and one time we went over there to draw people’s portraits so we could get practice drawing older people. The lady I was drawing idly told me that she "dealt quite handily with her first husband” while making a stabbing gesture. Five minutes later she requested I make sure not to draw her double chin. I honored that request.

[need-a-new-reality]

So when I was a child my grandmother told all these great stories about growing up in the Alaskan wilderness. Amazing bad ass stories about her and my great-grandmother. I recently asked my mom why my great-grandmother moved from Texas to Alaska in the first place. Turns out my Great-grandfather was abusive to my great grandmother for years and she lived with that until the first time he hit my grandmother, who was like three at the time, my great-grandmother got him very drunk and beat him to death then moved to Alaska to hide from the cops.

[scythfi-writer]

Listen, if an old lady admitted to killing her abusive father I’d be honored

[lierdumoa]

[destroyscythe-heck]

My family lore says that back in the 20’s during prohibition one of my great grandpas was an abusive shithead to his wife (my great grandma) and was just generally hated by everyone in town and they only kept him around because he was a moonshiner

Well at least until my great grandma basically turned his still into an IED with some gunpowder and stuff

The cops pretty much let her get off scott free because she played the role of the widow who was so shocked that her husband was involved with something so horrible as moonshining that they felt pity towards her when she had literally just blown her husband up with a homemade bomb

No the family box of recipe cards didn’t look like the anarchist’s cookbook, that was a one time deal

[rhube]

I like that there are new stories on this since the last time I saw it!

[liz-marcs]

This one is slightly different, but much in the same vein.

My great-grandparents were straight off the boat from Italy, so this happened somewhere in the 1920s.

Now, my great-grandfather, a hard man himself, lived with my great-grandmother and their 5 (living) kids. The sixth died in a tragic accident. In any case, in the wake of this sixth kid dying (a daughter who was 5 or 6 at the time), he and my great-grandmother took in his then-niece. See, his brother was an abusive alcoholic whose wife had “gone missing” and he was incapable of taking care of his 5 year-old daughter. 

My great-grandparents, seeing this shit-show, and possibly having doubts about what happened with the wife, offered to take in his daughter for a little while until my great-grandfather’s brother got back on his feet. When the daughter showed up, she was undernourished, had rickets, and was afraid of everything.

A couple of months, and the kid began to flourish. 

And my great-grandmother adored her. Doted on her. And wanted to keep her. And my great-grandfather, hard man that he was, couldn’t find it in him to say no. So he asks his brother to make the temporary arrangement more permanent.

Nope, says my great-grandfather’s brother. He wanted his daughter back. Tough shit.

So, my great-grandfather offers to pay him. Payment accepted. His brother fucks off for awhile. 

Then he runs out of money and comes back for another taste. More money, or he takes the kid.

My great-grandfather agrees to meet and talk terms.

And wouldn’t you know!

While they were walking up to his brother’s third-floor tenement apartment to negotiate, his brother tragically falls down the stairs and breaks his neck. Declared dead at the scene.

The cops didn’t question too closely because, well, it was obvious the dude was drunk when he fell down the stairs. They could smell it! And my great-grandfather was soooo traumatized seeing his brother dead like that. Wailed about his poor, now fatherless niece, and swearing by the Virgin Mary that he and his wife will raise her up like their very own to be a good Catholic girl.

And then he went home.

And nothing more was said about the dead brother. And said niece became said “baby of the family” and apple of her new-mother’s eye.

But, see, since we knew my great-grandfather, we all pretty much knew the truth of the matter without it being said.

To this day, even down to my generation, we say amongst ourselves when recounting family history that, well, Auntie’s birth daddy fell down the stairs *wink* and that’s how we all got ourselves an Auntie who’s easily the best cook in the family.

(I’ve got a copy of all her delicious recipes.) 

I do so love a happy ending, don’t you?

[liz-marcs]

Public Domain Day 2021 | Center for the Study of the Public Domain

On January 1, all U.S. copyrighted works from 1925 enter the public domain. Or, in short, olly-olly-oxen-free, you’re free to play with them as you see fit.

This video highlights some of the works, and 1925 is a bit of a jackpot year for American culture, from books, to film, to music. Think:  the Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance. The Great Gatsby, to Agatha Christie, to Buster Keaton, to Harold Lloyd, to Duke Ellington, to Ma Rainey.

For more information, check out this link.

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

does anybody with hypothyroidism out there take different doses of levothyroxine within the week?

i’m currently in the process of switching to this method. i’ve been doing 25 mcg on m/w/f and 50 mcg on the other days to mimic the same pattern as when my doctor had me skipping days before, but i’m wondering if you’re actually supposed to take the same dose on consecutive days?

[liz-marcs]

I got lucky and my Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism was caught *right* at the beginning. My body and brain, I swear, started breaking down right around when we all went into lockdown in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts in March and I thought it was stress. Luckily, I had my virtual annual physical a few months later and my hormone levels were off the charts! So I’ve spent the past few months titrating my levothyroxine doses. The 50 mcg seems to be doing the trick and my levels are back down to normal and I feel 10 years younger. So I think I might be lucky.

The one weird thing that I do, though, is that I set my alarm for 5:15 a.m. to take my dose, that way nothing I eat will interfere with the medication (I go back to bed after taking my pill and get up normally around 6:30 .am., take my vitamins around 7 a.m., and eat breakfast around 8 a.m.). My doctor thinks it’s flat-out weird, but she agrees it’s a smart work-around because there’s a lot of *normal* things that can interfere with absorption if you do them (or drink them or eat them) within 1 to 2 hours of taking your meds.

Crazy as this sounds (and I’m sure you’ve tried this), maybe alter the time you take your pill? Alternating doses seems somewhat dangerous to me, because it messes with the steady state necessary to control the condition.

Then again, I could be at the lucky end of the spectrum of hypothyroidism. In that it was caught early and my thyroid didn’t get the chance to do massive damage to me or it could be that I just reacted well to the medication with minimum side-effects. I don’t know.

[liz-marcs]

Reminder: The Red Cross Still Needs Blood

I answered the @RedCross call to #DonateBlood. You can download the app at https://3cu.be/blood

And if you need further motivation, the American Red Cross automatically tests you blood for COVID-19 antibodies. For free.

All it costs you is time and a pint of blood.

[no-longer-another-bondi-blonde]

[skunkeyemcghee]

Read this again.

Read this to others.

Force the idiots, read it to them

[milady-milord-lj]

Looking for a fic

I don’t know how many people still check this group, but I’m really hoping for some help looking for a fic. I’ve been looking for it for a long time now but I can’t even remember the title, so I can’t be sure if maybe it’s been deleted/the writer’s livejournal was disabled, or if I’m just not looking in the right places. It was an Annie-centric story with a Jeff/Annie slant about Annie relapsing. I know there are a few stories like that, and while I can’t remember a lot of specific details, one I do remember is that Annie had a box she kept under her bed with reminders of her addiction in there, including a partially full bottle of pills. I’m pretty sure it was a oneshot (but a long one). I can’t remember exactly when it was written, but I know it was written some time during the first three seasons. If anyone remembers this fic and can point me in the right direction with a link, or even just the title or the author (or a “it’s not online anymore” so I can stop trying to find it if that is the case), I would be super, super appreciative.

[liz-marcs]

This was already answered over at at the Milady/Milord ElJay site:

It’s here: They Can Never Call You By It

[canipel]

Faroe mood. | Make sure you follow > Shot By Canipel & Instagram

[the-reylo-void]

Listening to The Darkest Timeline podcast with Paget Brewster and having lots of emotions (paraphrasing):

PAGET: Frankie and Jeff were supposed to be romantically involved.

ME: 🤨

PAGET: But Joel, you put the kibosh on that.

ME: 🙂

JOEL: True. I asked.

ME: 😌

PAGET: And I wouldn’t want to mess with the Annie thing. I LIKE the Annie thing.

ME: 😊

[liz-marcs]

I think I owe a ton of paranoid people over a Milady/Milord on LJ a biiiiiig apology. There were a lot of people saying that Frankie was basically “an age-appropriate Annie” and that it was obvious that they were setting Frankie up to be the romantic interest replacement.

Me (then):  C’mon. There’s NO WAY they would do something like that. Do you know how shitty that would be? A last-minute swoop in from a new character rather than go with the pairing they’ve been teasing for six fuckin’ years?

Me (today): Well, shit. I don’t know what I expected.

[the-reylo-void]

I’m just glad that from the sounds of things Joel and Paget were both solidly against it and shut it down (although a little surprised since I haven’t gotten the impression from Joel that he was a big fan of Jeff and Annie). I’m a new fan, but I’m just continually boggling at how... DUMB this show was with some of its behind-the-scenes decisions, particularly re: romance, and wondering how much of an accident it must have been that anything on that front worked at all.

[liz-marcs]

During the run of the show, Joel never really sided one way or the other. It’s after the show ended where Joel said a few minor things that -- if you squint -- indicated that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of Jeff/Annie, even if he was entirely comfortable playing romantic scenes with Alison.

I think the issue is that Joel had a kind of character-actress conflict. On the one hand, Annie is 18. On the other, Alison very much is not, and is a shitload more comfortable playing romantic than Gillian (not a slam against Gillian...she has come out and said she is hella uncomfortable doing any kind of kissing/romance and was even more so at the start of Community).

It also doesn’t help that sometimes when things would get tremendously weird on-set (which according to the cast happened all.the.damn.time because of their crazy-ass shooting schedule), Alison and Joel would kick back, pretend they were a married couple, and that they were hosing an out-of-control dinner party. (This was also recently revealed.)

I think Joel has kinda-sorta changed his mind on the whole Jeff/Annie thing, in part because “Annie” would be in her late 20s in-universe. Also, because Joel is very much a “give the people what they want” kind of guy, and he knows Jeff/Annie is easily the second most popular pairing after Troy and Abed.

So I’m very much not surprised that Joel was against a Jeff/Frankie pairing. What I am surprised about was that there were actually plans to go there.

[the-reylo-void]

Listening to The Darkest Timeline podcast with Paget Brewster and having lots of emotions (paraphrasing):

PAGET: Frankie and Jeff were supposed to be romantically involved.

ME: 🤨

PAGET: But Joel, you put the kibosh on that.

ME: 🙂

JOEL: True. I asked.

ME: 😌

PAGET: And I wouldn’t want to mess with the Annie thing. I LIKE the Annie thing.

ME: 😊

[liz-marcs]

I think I owe a ton of paranoid people over a Milady/Milord on LJ a biiiiiig apology. There were a lot of people saying that Frankie was basically “an age-appropriate Annie” and that it was obvious that they were setting Frankie up to be the romantic interest replacement.

Me (then):  C’mon. There’s NO WAY they would do something like that. Do you know how shitty that would be? A last-minute swoop in from a new character rather than go with the pairing they’ve been teasing for six fuckin’ years?

Me (today): Well, shit. I don’t know what I expected.

[liz-marcs]

So I decided to go kayaking...in the pouring rain...check out the pandemic gear.

[jackpotgirl-deactivated20260311]

Just want to throw in in response to your big J/A post that I'm a man who watched Community from my teen years into my 20s and was never a big "ship" person and I was 100% into J/A. The show played it as the main pairing. It was like Leslie and Ben or Eric and Donna or Jim and Pam. Everyone I know who watched the show viewed it like that. Dan Harmon always acted like it was way weirder than it was, which is weird in and of itself because isn't his wife like 15 years younger than him?

I think Dan Harmon is not big on romance in general, he went with J/A because they had the best romantic chemistry out of everyone and that kept people interested - I’m also fine with the way the ended them in S6 and I also understand why show runners (ever afraid of the moonlighting curse) don’t want to commit to getting will-they-won’t-they couples ever properly together (I mean, Chris Carter arguably blew the entire latter seasons of X-Files on just not committing to a committed Mulder/Scully pairing with ended up being downright comical because the story went against everything that these characters had grown into). 

But what I don’t get and what annoys me, is playing audiences for fools. Harmon is trying to cover his bases retroactively in that interview to keep the pearl-clutchers appeased while still reaping the views and the “revenue” from using J/A as a main romantic focus of the show. And even that I understand - but he could just be honest about it. That would make the pearl-clutchers angry tho, so here we are. With people who enjoy the pairing (which, and you’re the best example) aren’t just juvenile “shipper”-girls, getting the boot and a bad rep. 

I’m tired of that thing in particular but Harmon’s far from the only creator who operates this way - putting blame on largely female fan-groups who care about the human interactions and relationships of the characters for being “too invested”, while simultaneously joyfully taking their money and enthusiasm and catering outside of the material to the largely male audience members who complain loudly about everything else, assuring them that the dumb relationship-stuff is useless anyway. Only it’s not because obviously, it works. Shippers make or break shows, shippers help save shows. If all the “dumb little girls” stopped watching and interacting and tweeting and being invested, many, many shows never make it longer than a season. That’s why Britta exists. They put a will-they-won’t-they couple in the PILOT because it works. The least they could do is respect the people who are invested in things they put in the show to make it successful and not trash them for it. Or essential call all of them “young women who fantasise about older men”.

And it bugs me in the case of Community and that interview because the show wasn't ambiguous about J/A in the end. Hell, even Harmon wasn’t. His commentary of both the finale and the season 5 finally explicitly states that they love each other. I don’t understand why he feels the need to walk back on that now just because a couple people need to be woke about age differences. 

[liz-marcs]

Wow! It’s official! Harmon is clearly writing a “Community” movie and he plans to screw Jeff/Annie shippers over AGAIN!

If you’re new to Community fandom, welcome to what us veterans call “Dan Harmon’s Lucy-and-the-Football Move.”

(By the way, I predicted it would go down like this in this post here.)

Harmon, as is tradition, goes around and backhands Jeff/Annie shippers in the lead up to and during production of a new season (or possibly movie). And then, when future media/seasons/income is on-the-line, he’ll start whispering sweet nothings and swearing up and down that Jeff and Annie are in love and destined to be together “in the future.” Just stay tuned, kiddoes!

Unless it’s S6. In which case he’ll pretend it was all in our heads all season long, to the point of blocking people from social media asking, “WtH, dude! This goes against what you said the S5 finale episode was about!” Until the end of of S6, where we’re right back where we started to the point that Jeff/Annie dominates the series finale!

It’s maddening!

I have always said, from the time I started watching Community when S3 was airing on NBC through to today that Jeff and Annie was not the story Dan wanted to tell. Jeff and Annie was the thing he wanted to play with as a side bit of storytelling to throw a wrench in the romantic story he really wanted to tell, and then when it became popular, felt he couldn’t drop it because he was afraid of losing almost half his audience.

The “romantic” story Dan wanted to tell was “two narcissists colliding and falling backwards into love.” Jeff/Britta was Dan’s aim, as stated in the Pilot, and was always going to be endgame in his head. There’s just one problem:  Most of the audience haaaaaaaaated Jeff/Britta.

Now, granted, there have been some Jeff/Britta like couples in cult sitcoms in smaller venues (”You’re the Worst” formerly on FX and “Love” ironically starring GIllian Jacobs as a more realistic take on Britta on Netflix), but in order to make that couple work, you have to commit to the idea that these fucked up people are terrible to others, selfish as hell, and totally deserve each other because they’re such trainwrecks that they’d be a curse for anyone else who tried to love those pieces of shit.

Which, in the end, Dan can’t commit to. In a weird way, Dan isn’t misanthropic enough (or at least he lacks the sensibility) to write those characters when they are played by flesh-and-blood human beings. Cartoons he can, but he can’t seem to do it when it involves real actors, especially if those actors are people he actually likes. He can’t help but give them redeeming qualities. He can’t help but write characters where you think: “You know, maybe these two are a bad romantic match and they should go be with someone who makes them actual better people and who actually loves them.”

In the end, he liked Jeff and Britta too much to make them a poisonous couple. I mean, to the point that he literally admitted, on screen, by putting words into other characters’ mouths that Jeff and Britta together were toxic and spread that toxicity out to others.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah!

The point is, Dan never, ever wanted to really explore Jeff and Annie in a relationship, which is why he avoided it mightily even as he kept desperately trying to breathe life into his original endgame couple all the way up until the end of S5.

But here’s the thing about the end of S5:  Dan did NOT choose Jeff and Annie as his endgame couple. He merely decided against making Jeff and Britta his endgame couple.

[masonswritersroom-deactivated20]

community hadestown au

• abed is orpheus

• troy is eurydice

• annie is persephone

• jeff is hades

• shirley is hermes

• britta clones herself and she’s all three of the fates

(if u know how the myth ends u can draw parallels btwn that and the ending of geothermal escapism :^))

edit: dean pelton is annies understudy. i dont make the rules.

[liz-marcs]

Hilariously, I always switched Jeff and Annie.

Annie is Hades (she grabbed Jeff in full view of witnesses and dragged him down into the underworld back in Debate 109) and Jeff was Persephone (you know, as the grabee kissed against his will).

Oh! And then there’s the traditional offering of food in the Underworld when it’s just the two of them. Annie (Hades) offers Jeff (Persophone) a quick kiss on the lips. And Jeff turns around and eats Annie’s face in response. Which ends up haunting both of them to a greater or lesser degree for the next five damn years.

I think their personalities more fit with the traditional Hades/Persephone dynamic:  Annie pretty much never wavers once she decides what the rules are and that she should be in charge of enforcing them (Hades). In fact, at the end of the series she’s going to the FBI as an intern. It doesn’t get more law enforce-ish than that.

Jeff, both personality-wise and as a defense attorney, is always looking at ways to creatively get around or enforce the laws (if you look at Greek mythology, Persephone is the one who is always doing this, whether it’s coming up with creative punishments, or giving people a pass on them through creative interpretation of the rules). Plus, he escapes Annie’s circle of influence (Greendale) every summer, while Annie is no doubt preparing for her return to Greendale all summer.

Sooooo....yeah. Glad I’m not the only one who has ever thought this.

[multiversemonitoringstation-dea]

There’s a certain subsection of Jeff/Britta shippers who are these people who poured way too much energy into identifying with the asshole straight man early season 1 version of Britta who concoct these elaborate ideas about how Britta was “derailed” due to misogyny or was ruined so J/A could happen and its like bro will you please chill. Community premiered during the early days of fan engagement via Twitter and Dan Harmon and the staff writers paid close attention to reactions to the early episodes so they could figure out how to optimize the show. 

Troy and Abed got big reactions so they downplayed the Troy/Pierce dynamic and we got TroBed. 

Jeff and Annie really popped in episode 6, so they tested the waters with Debate 109, it got positive reactions, and J/A became central to the show. 

Britta was consistently unpopular until they started playing her up as kind of an awkward fuck up rather than trapping her in the stereotypical woman-in-a-sitcom role where she just lectured everyone for being funny.

It was around the early-midpoint of the season that these shifts started happening and its not a coincidence that people pretty commonly say episodes 7-9 are where the show gets good. 

Honestly in its first 5 or 6 episodes, Community is good, but its kind of generic and bland. Its not that different from Outsourced or any of the other sitcoms at the time that would last a year or so and then fade away. The changes made to its characters and their relationships are what propelled it to the heights it eventually reached. 

It just seems so bizarre and boring to me to get hung up on those very early episodes and then sit through 5 and a half seasons of the show Community became, hating it for not being what you want the whole time.

[liz-marcs]

To add on to this, there’s also something fans tend to miss if they don’t have the DVDs or listen to the commentaries on the DVDs:

1)  Dan admits in the commentary for pilot that Britta as a character literally had no motivation. She was nothing more than “the prize.” That was her whole purpose. She didn’t even have a motivation. She had no character. And worse...Dan even to this day admits that he doesn’t know if Britta believed Jeff’s lie about him being a Spanish tutor.

To give you an idea how bad this is (considering that Britta was originally supposed to be the female lead of the ensemble):  Annie and Shirley actually had more character motivation and the writers’ room knew their motivations while writing the pilot while Britta was nothing more than a plot point. In fact, Dan says in the commentary for the pilot that Annie was originally set up to be Jeff’s antagonist for the series, which you can clearly see in the pilot and the first couple of episodes.

2) It was the women in the writers’ room who were behind the change in Britta’s character in mid-season one and beyond. The *HATED* Britta. They told Dan that if they knew Britta as she existed in the first half of season one in real life,they would avoid the shit out of her. They were the ones that made her a kind of loveable loser.

3) For anyone who things Britta got dumbed down or turned into a slacktivist fake, clearly didn’t watch the second episode where Britta flat out admits she’s a slacktivist fake who often talks out of her ass. Imagine the second episode of the series in Season 3 where people say Britta is the most flanderized. Do you think that would be all that out of place in Season 3? Now take “Science of Illusion” (the one where Britta decides to play a practical joke on Chang and it spirals out of control) from Season 1 and put it in Season 3. It’s a perfect fit! What I’m saying is, if either one of these Season 1 episodes were filmed and aired in Season 3 instead, people would be claiming that Dan was Britta-bashing.

The thing is, Britta had elements of being a loveable fuck-up underneath the humorless straight-man cipher “man prize” that existed for most of Season 1. I often wonder if people who look at Season 1 Britta as if that version of the character was the best version of Britta were watching a completely different show.

[liz-marcs]

Backslid after my initial quit date, so I had to start over. It's been 8 days, $100 saved, and the use (and abuse) of my stop smoking app's progress counters for time, health, money, craving tracking, missions, and diary entries, but I've made it more than a week! Go me!

[liz-marcs]

Happy Holidays:  Fics

Just dropping this here for some holiday reading from moi. These are not new, but if you’re looking for fics to read, I’ve got some here:

Kai and Gerda in Bleak Midwinter (Community; Jeff PoV; Jeff and Annie friendship/UST; S4) It takes a moment for Jeff to realize that he’s not witnessing Annie passively daydreaming. He’s witnessing Annie actively wanting.

I Wish I Had a River (Community; Annie PoV; group fic; pre-S6) Annie's not feeling the holiday cheer. The Magic 8 Ball doesn't help.

A Gift of Ordinary Magic (Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Harry Potter crossover; Xander PoV; post-S7) There's only one thing a muggle can do when the magic abandons the world on a cold Christmas night: fight like hell to get it back. 

[liz-marcs]

Once more time. With feeling.

Wish me luck.