18072025
unwillful wish-fulfilment
styofa doing anything
Today's Document

JVL
Game of Thrones Daily
Misplaced Lens Cap
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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#extradirty

Andulka

if i look back, i am lost
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
One Nice Bug Per Day
wallacepolsom
No title available
Peter Solarz

pixel skylines

Kiana Khansmith

⁂

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Not today Justin
seen from Malaysia

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seen from United States
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seen from Romania
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@moldonyourskeleton
18072025
unwillful wish-fulfilment
My other new bit has been mentioning really obvious stuff as “eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed—“
Like I’ll spill milk all over and say “eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that there is milk on the floor.”
My husband does NOT like this bit so it’s been traveling with me outside the home.
“Eagle-eyed mutuals may have noticed I’ve reblogged 27 pictures of the blorbo today.”
“Op how does your husband not like this?” Hint: he liked it the first 1000 times he heard it
somewhere... 🍃🌷🌈🌱
The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be done with it and the sooner you can stop thinking about it. Go on, up you get, it won't be as bad as you think.
You won't want to do it later either. You might as well just do it now. Even if you don't finish it all, anything you manage to get done now is something you don't have to do later (when you still won't want to do it)
anyway been writing omegaverse this week for the first time in uhh *checks notes* 11 years and have to say something i find interesting about it is that it's this like. frankly very normal fetish thing that's just breached containtment to a bizarre degree?
on 2 separate occasions i've had conversations with people where they've mentioned something they don't Get about omegaverse and I've been like 'well it's like that bcos it's a fetish thing' and they've been like 'it's a what??'
it gets treated as this like stock fandom AU and i'll see people like 'i don't understand why anyone wants to read this' and i'm like yes that's bcos it's pretty intense* fetish content & you don't have the right assortment of fetishes for it? there's a bunch of other similar Stock Settings that just haven't breached containment.
*intense as in like, Density of fetish content involved rather than intensity of fetish if that makes sense?
im alright with fetish ideas 'breaching containment' because then its less stigmatized but like its still fetish content and its a little perplexing how people could read omegaverse stuff and not realize its fetish content?
SO i think i've observed 2 separate but related things going on:
firstly the aforementioned demographic of people who have somehow genuinely failed to clock that it's a kink thing
but also a second demographic of people who seem to have taken its like. prominence in fandom spaces as a sign that they're somehow 'expected' to like it? i've not really seen this attitude with any other kink.
ppl will talk about it the way they might talk about say high school/college AUs or coffee shop AUs which are very common and i guess are sometimes presented as things that everyone finds fluffy & relatable? when in reality it's more like idk. piss kink. it'd be pretty weird to read a piss kink fic and go 'ewww why does the author expect me to find piss sexy??' well they don't. they expect people who already think piss is sexy to read the fic.
In the name of historical accuracy here is the actual origin point on omegaverse:
Obviously there was a process of development leading up to it but this kink meme prompt led to whats generally accepted as the OG. Ultimately the brain child of this anonymous poster. Have they ever identified themselves??
An important thing to remember here is that while I appreciate why some people find world building heavy omegaverse puzzling or irritating, the fact that someone is writing primarily or exclusively SFW social commentary w world building omegaverse does NOT mean it's not a kink thing for them. Maybe world building is their kink. You don't know.
this post is going around again so have an additional Thought:
the omegaverse belongs to an genre i have mentally dubbed 'speculative kink'. there are various other types of speculative kink; a well known example in fanfiction spaces is the dom/sub AU, a kind of precursor to omegaverse where the premise is 'what if everyone was biologically a dom or a sub'.
however: there various other shared speculative kink settings out there. unfortunately I cannot get into this too much without discussing some uhhh Devils Sacraments I have attended so you will have to trust me. but I'm aware of several other demographics out there doing speculative kink worldbuilding.
a major difference between omegaverse and the other speculative kink settings I'm aware of is that omegaverse takes itself much more seriously. omegaverse works are often aiming to be understood as serious commentary on gender roles with legitimate worldbuilding. in contrast other speculative kink is typically very open about the fact that the worldbuilding is complete nonsense that exists in service of getting to the kink as soon as possible.
this is something that I think really adds to the Confusion around it! to be clear I do not think it's a bad thing and the fact is, yes you can use kink to explore social themes. but there is sometimes an apparent contradiction between the implied aims of an omegaverse work (to comment on gender roles) and the basics of the setting (Turbo Gender Roles).
this post is going
around again so have an
additional Thought:
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
It’s fascinating hearing how other people think. My dad says he has to think of a full sentence word for word before he says it whereas I don’t know what I’m gonna say until I’ve already said it.
I mostly think in words and sounds so you’d think that I would know the wording of what I’m gonna say before I say it but no almost every single word manifests as I say it.
I know what I’m gonna say but I don’t know exactly what I’m gonna say you know what I mean
I think in full sentences but they’re usually entirely separate from what I’m saying, I also have no idea what I’m going say until I’m saying it
You guys would like my posts a lot more if you had my exact life experiences and internal monologue
⚠️MY PROBLEMS‼️ + HIS PROBLEMS 🏳️🌈❓️
I just finished reading a little life for the third time, and I have a theory I want to share: Harold is modelled after Horatio. Not only the similarity of their names, but also the fatherly friend to the depressed main character, and most importantly, the only one left alive to tell the others' story.
woke up in the middle of the night (2:47 am) crying about A Little Life, but specifically the scene where Jude is unwell and being mean and rude to Harold and Julia because he doesn’t want to eat, and he expects Harold to hit him but instead Harold hugs him and calls him sweetheart and they cry. Thinking about how Jude spent his entire life up until then being quiet and convenient, discipline something the monastery forced onto him. Thinking about how he finally got parents who let him be a kid in his fifties, after never having that opportunity his entire life. Thinking about how in another life, one where Jude was found not by the monastery but Harold and Julia, he would’ve had the soft life he deserved and a soft ending.
i don't remember from which interview hanya yanagihara said this about jude, but i wrote it down nearly a year ago and i just reread it:
"in a sense he was very easy to write because his internal logic is his own and it never quite changes and he tries to get better and he doesn’t and i wanted there to be an inevitability to his life. it’s not that i think that people can’t overcome great trauma but i think for some people there is a line, there is an amount and they’re not able to come back from it and one of the things i tried to do in this book was really glide a lot between past and present tense. this idea that if you’re living with trauma, trauma is not something that happened in the past and then there’s a hard dividing line and it’s the present. trauma is something that’s waiting in the next room, you know, behind that curtain right next to you. so this idea that you live with trauma every day and some days you can live with it a little less intensely but other days you can’t is something that i really wanted to try to convey with grammar more or less, you know this idea of within the space of a couple of sentences memories creeping back in or falling out, to sort of then try to mimic this sensation of living with your past when you’re trying to only live in the present."
Brutality and Violation in A Little Life
Okay, so, I just want to talk about this a little bit. I’m going to go into some pretty heavy spoilers for this book here, so if you haven’t read it yet, you should skip this post.
I’ve seen some people accuse and refer to the violence and abuse we see in A Little Life as “torture porn”, saying it’s excessive and unnecessary, using their own shocked reactions and otherwise dry-eyed responses during such scenes in the book to back up their claims. I want to address this, because I think it’s an entirely wrong take, and I’ll just explain why.
The entire point of A Little Life is to confront the reader with the reality of certain sorts of lives. And as Hanya Yanaghihara has said, some lives, the lives we don’t see, the lives we are often so afraid to look at, are violent lives, brutal lives, torturous lives. And this book specifically forces the reader to come to terms with those violent sorts of lives, and to come to terms with the consequences, with the results of people, specifically children, living through real violence and abuse.
The abuse Jude goes through in the book is extreme, yes, but not anywhere near impossible, or even improbable. These sorts of things DO happen to people, every day. Once again, just because we don’t see it, or hear about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It is. And what this book does, what makes it so important, is that it forces us, the reader, to look at something, and acknowledge something as existing, that we otherwise would likely turn away from and pretend wasn’t there. The book doesn’t allow you to do that. It MAKES you look, and so, it makes you see the people that have gone through the kinds of horrors Jude goes through. It makes you aware, whether you want to be or not, of their existence.
Now, in terms of practical story telling, the abuse and violence we see in the book is also necessary, and here’s why.
In order for the reader to fully comprehend why Jude is as damaged as he is, we need to see what caused that damage. Jude’s struggle in the present, his mental health issues, his self-loathing, his inability, no matter how many people tell him he is deserving of kindness and love, no matter how many people tell him he’s good, or extraordinary, his inability to believe it, the impossibility for him to believe it, needs to be explained. Because Jude’s life IS a good one, on the surface. He’s professionally and personally successful. He has a high paying, important job, he has numerous friends who love and adore him, he has enough money to live a comfortable life of privilege and luxury, he’s respected, etc… So why is he so messed up? Making vague, half-hidden allusions to a dark and abuse filled past wouldn’t be satisfying enough, narratively, to explain away WHY Jude hates himself as much as he does, why he feels the need to self-harm to such an extreme and devastating degree, why his memories haunt and torture him so persistently, why he’s so unable to make them stop. A Little Life deals largely in psychology, and patterns of behavior. Jude thinks very specific things about himself, all of which are rooted in the abuse he suffered as a child. His belief that he’s unclean, that he’s spoiled and guilty, his belief that he’s a bad person, his inability to say no, or to defend himself, or understand that he even is ALLOWED to defend himself, his cutting, etc… All of this is tied up, inextricably, with what happened to him in childhood. We, as readers, NEEDED to witness Jude’s past in order to understand his present. Without it, without witnessing specifically what it is that happened to him in his childhood, we wouldn’t have nearly the psychological understanding of Jude that we end up having. His struggles and difficulties and sufferings in the present wouldn’t make any sense to us. We would wonder, by the end, why it was he felt he needed to end his life, rather then the perfect understanding we’re actually left with, rather then the empathy we have for his choice, and so one of the driving and most important themes of the book (the question of justified suicide, of what makes life unendurable) would be lost, and that would be a massive failure, and make the book far lesser as a work of art. With the inclusion of Jude’s past, the detailed and unflinching view we get into his past, we aren’t left to wonder why he’s as broken and damaged as he is, we don’t question his pain and suffering, we don’t ever think he’s being overdramatic or self-indulgent. Instead we understand perfectly why he is the way he is. As Andy tells Willem at one point, make him tell you what happened to him, and you’ll understand why he is the way he is. Like Willem needed to hear the truth, as brutal and horrible as it was, we too, as readers, needed to hear it as well.
There’s one other point I want to address too, which I’ve heard some people posit as proof that the violence and abuse we see in the book was included only for the sake of shock value. They say during these scenes of past abuse, they felt more shocked than anything, but didn’t find themselves tearing up or particularly emotional, and this is somehow supposed to be proof that the scenes are excessive and unnecessary and only included to shock the reader.
To me, this claim only shows poor reading comprehension. It shows a failure to understand the view point presented in these flashbacks.
All of the abuse scenes are told from Jude’s perspective. We are witnessing them through Jude’s eyes. One point Hanya Yanagihara has made again and again in interviews about child abuse, about what makes it such a particularly awful thing, is that children don’t possess the intellectual or emotional capacity to understand what it is that’s happening to them, and so they aren’t able to process it at all. They aren’t able to comprehend it.
While these things are happening to Jude, then, while he’s being beaten, or emotionally, mentally, or sexually abused, he doesn’t have the mental or emotional maturity yet to comprehend why these things are happening to him, or what these things even are. And again, remember, these scenes are told to us through Jude’s perspective on them, his thoughts, his feelings. Jude can’t understand what’s happening to him. While we as readers can understand it, and know intellectually that what is occurring is a tragedy, and heartbreaking, Jude can only respond to it with fear and confusion. He doesn’t have the mental or emotional capacity yet to be heartbroken, or sad, over what’s happening. He only has the capacity to be confused and afraid. And those are the emotions we’re presented with during these scenes. Confusion and fear.
Early on in the abuse, Jude also responds in the way children do when something is happening to them that they don’t understand. He throws temper tantrums. He becomes violent, screaming and throwing himself against walls and onto the floor, rebelling in a confused state of pain and terror to something that he can sense is bad, but doesn’t yet understand WHY it’s so. Eventually, in response to these tantrums, his abusers beat him badly enough, enough times, that Jude learns responding at all to what’s happening to him only makes it worse, and so he learns to repress what he’s feeling. He stops throwing tantrums, he stops screaming, he stops crying, and he shuts down. Again, remember, these flashbacks are being shown to us entirely from Jude’s perspective. So he shuts down and goes entirely within himself, learning, even , to disassociate during instances of abuse, to pretend it isn’t happening to him. That he’s only somehow witnessing the event, not experiencing it. The scenes of abuse then take on a dreary, resigned, defeated quality. They’re MEANT TO. Because, again, we’re experiencing them through Jude’s perspective. The abuse becomes an almost mundane, agonizing and oppressive part of his every day life. An inescapable reality for him. A common and inevitable part of his existence. Jude falls into a state of despair. He isn’t consciously aware of feeling anything but that resignation, then, and we feel that resignation with him. Extremity of emotion is missing from these scenes on purpose, because we’re meant to feel what Jude is feeling, which is nothing at a certain point. He disassociates, detaches, and represses his anger and pain and fear. It’s the only way he has of coping with the brutality of his life.
I think it’s also important to acknowledge the sinister, creeping nature of the abuse, and how it’s portrayed, especially in regards to Brother Luke and Dr. Traylor. More than intending to make the reader feel sad, or heartbroken, the scenes with these two, main abusers are meant to invoke in the reader a real sense of unease and unsettlement and fear. We’re aware, in a way Jude is not, that these men are manipulating him, and that their apparent kindness is nothing more than a ruse. Our awareness of this reality, while simultaneously witnessing Jude’s ignorance and naivety, while witnessing his trust, is incredibly disturbing, because we know these men are going to molest him at some point. This isn’t meant to make us cry, so much as it’s meant to make us deeply uncomfortable and frightened for Jude. We know what’s coming, even as Jude doesn’t, and it’s awful to see. And then, once again, we experience the abuse through Jude’s perspective, and once again, because of his lack of emotional or mental maturity, because of his inability to fully understand what’s happening to him, the emotions we find conjured in us are ones of confusion and fear and despair, rather than extreme heartbreak. These scenes aren’t meant to make us cry, they’re meant to make us understand what Jude is experiencing and feeling during this period of his life, which is, after a certain point, just simply resignation, and an oppressive sense of inescapability. More than anything, it is an endless drudge of misery with no end in sight, and that’s the feeling we as readers are left with, because it’s what Jude himself is feeling. He rarely cries, he never shows anger, he never rebels. He never shows any extremity of emotion. He is, more and more, introverted and emotionally suppressed, and once again, that oppressive inevitability which marks his existence is the primary feeling we’re left with.
It isn’t until Jude is older, and able to mentally comprehend what actually happened to him, that the heartbreaking tragedy behind it all comes more to the surface, and the emotions Jude, and thus, the reader, go through are more extreme in their intensity. When Jude starts to realize, as an adult, the nature of what was actually done to him, that’s when we’re met with more emotionally charged reactions from him, and in turn, we find ourselves responding with more emotion. It’s why Jude’s struggles in the present are so heartbreaking, because he’s no longer able to separate himself from the act like he had as a child, he is no longer able to pretend it happened to someone else, to escape inside himself, to shut down emotionally. He’s hit with the full brunt of his reality, and it’s devastating, both to him, and to us.
Hanya Yanaghihara has said that children are far more accepting of terrible living conditions and abuse and ill treatment than an adult would be, because they simply don’t know any better, because they simply don’t know anything else. Whatever their lives are, that’s all they can imagine as reality. They can’t imagine anything past it. And that’s what we see with Jude. As a child, while all of these terrible things are happening to him, he grows to simply accept it as his reality, and can’t imagine a life beyond it, and so he reacts to it with a deadened resignation. There’s an oppressive, suffocating sense to what he’s experiencing, more than extreme sadness, and once again, we as readers are meant to experience that oppressive suffocation with him. When he grows up, and his life improves, and he learns that life can be not just better, but infinitely so, that’s when he starts to understand what happened to him, when he begins to understand the injustice and cruelty of it, and the heartbreaking aspect of it becomes more clear, to both him and to us.
So, in conclusion, the arguments or criticisms people level at this book, particularly in regard to the scenes of abuse, don’t, in my view, hold much, if any weight, because they seem to fail entirely to grasp the purpose behind any of it. It makes them uncomfortable, which it’s meant to, and because it makes them uncomfortable, they’ve decided, as a means of relieving that discomfort, to dismiss it as unnecessary and excessive and included only for shock value, as a cheap trick to ring emotion out of the reader. Again, these sorts of takes fail to understand the purpose or importance of Jude’s past being revealed the way it is. This book is uncompromising, and understands the necessity of facing the ugly reality of child abuse head on. It understands that it achieves nothing by skirting around the issue, or by coddling the reader and making the grim and horrific reality of its subject matter more palatable for them. It would do both a disservice to Jude as a character, and our understanding of why he ends up where he does, and a disservice to real life victims of child abuse, who aren’t afforded the luxury of getting to pretend that what happened to them wasn’t so bad, who aren’t afforded the luxury of looking at it askance and at a remove. The point of this book is to show the lifelong and devastating consequences of child abuse. Jude is unable to escape the pain and vividness of his memories. He can’t get away from them. He’s made to live with them every moment of every day of his life, made to relive the horror of his past again and again, and the reader too is meant to be unable to escape it, is made to relive those moments with him, precisely so that they can then better understand Jude’s suffering, and why life is so difficult for him.
That’s the entire point.
the fact is that when jude was little he was aware of knowing how to do many things, of knowing how to cook, of knowing how to wash, of knowing how to fix things, of knowing how to plant... as he grew up he lost any positive awareness of himself and also what he knew how to do it doesn't seem like anything special to him, as he goes on with his life he starts to do all this automatically until he loses all certainty about himself and when Harold asks him to list some things that he knows how to do better than others or that he knows how to do well, he can't say anything.
whenever the "trauma porn" arguers talk about how "every adult jude met in his childhood were evil, how is that realistic?" I'm reminded of the few adults in Jude's youth who DID do right by him.
I think about the police officers who broke down the doors of the motel room, who held Jude and told him he was safe now. The only gripe I have with them is being too slow to arrest Luke before he offed himself and for not removing Jude from the room first thing.
I think about the detectives who found Jude in the field with Traylor. Who were the ones to arrest Traylor, the ones to take Jude to the hospital, and the ones who made sure that Traylor was put behind bars. The ones who came to Jude's college to tell him personally that the man who hurt him was dead and there was nothing to fear anymore. They were proud of him and told him so.
I think about the Douglasses, who took Jude in and cared for him. Who tailored their home for kids like Jude, kids with mobility aids. I think about Mr. Douglass, who sat outside the bathroom ready to step in if Jude slipped and fell. They told him to keep in touch.
I wonder if any of these adults ever saw Jude in the news, in the press, or even saw the paintings JB made of him. I wonder if they ever thought about him.
i think Jude's astounding genius is really overlooked. Even in his monastery years when he had yet to hit a double-digit age he was rattling off the scientific names of plants like it was nothing. He had BEEN mathematically and logically blessed, and showed signs of that as soon as he started getting tutored. Even his very first abusers couldn't deny this. The fact that despite going through hellish extremities of genuinely every form of abuse out there he still excelled academically is so admirable -- because usually trauma like that irreversibly damages a person's, ESPECIALLY a child's psyche and memory. Jude had a million billion problems and not ONE served as a setback for his studies this man never uttered a complain ONCE regarding academics. This is a guy who got his mathematics degree from MIT and a law one from Harvard. A guy who started formal education when he was maybe 11. A guy whose pet peeve is, canonically, 'incompetent people'. A guy who skipped 2 full highschool grades and taught his 2-years-older friends complex calculus. Hell he even did their calc work for them. A guy who is able to hold meaningful conversations and intellectually challenge professors 3 decades older than him. Bro has favorite mathematical equations. He LOVES pure maths AND is fluent in LATIN and GREEK..? . Jude is ridiculously competent in so, so many other aspects too - cooking, plumbing, baking, playing the piano, speaking, SINGING, all while being very eloquent and empathetic btw. He is disgustingly overeducated and even worse, the most humble and nonchalant about it.
not to talk about a little life again but u know what's something thats so small and special about that book. all the gifts they give to each are always about each other.
'heres this painting i made' jb says. 'heres this house i created' malcolm says, both in model forms and literally. 'heres things i love about this building you also love' says malcolm and phaedra and ali and india and the henry youngs, 'and here's the memories we have with it' adds jude.
everyone is always creating for each other and they're constantly giving little pieces of themselves to each other and they all treasure those gifted pieces SO much and so dearly.
'here,' they all seem to be saying. 'i want you to have this piece of me, i want you to keep it safe.' even jude, his last gift to harold and julia, his recorded songs from his adoption that he stashed on their bookcase. even he, purposefully unknowable and half-hidden, always, gave a piece of himself to those he loved.
Hanya saying that sometimes people endure things from which they cannot recover continues to offend a lot of takes-posting individuals online who are committed to a bad faith analysis of anything they do not personally enjoy.
Her statement is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. It is not an assertion that at X point, it's no longer possible to recover from traumatic experiences. It describes the fact that some people, for whatever reason(s), cannot or do not "get over" traumatic experiences and are affected by them for their whole lives. She didn't make that up. It's not a pleasant reality, but it is true!
And the intensity of people's reactions to A Little Life leads me to wonder: would any depiction of that reality in fiction be palatable to those readers?