There is nothing moral or ethical about tormenting a person with dementia and the fact that this has to be said is astounding
People like this are more upset they never got the chance to be bullies and abusers than anything else and just can't wait to have the chance to hold power against the vulnerable
also uhhhhhh elder abuse is just as bad as child abuse??? that's a vulnerable person who cannot defend themself and who doesn't even remember why you are doing that. did no one ever teach you "an eye for an eye leaves the world blind"?? Jesus fuck
When my mother in law, who was a complex, intelligent person but a terrible mother, developed dementia, we took care of her as well as she could possibly be taken care of, not for her sake but for the sake of the voice in my husband's head that would echo her words to him in childhood. We can tell that voice, "he was a better son than she ever was a mother"
Interestingly the more she declined, the better she was to him. It doesn't negate the harm she did when he was a kid, but he walked away from her death knowing he'd done his best.
It helped that we inherited a fair amount of money from her but it wasn't why we did it.
This does not mean you are obligated to take care of people who were awful to you, but breaking the cycle on purpose is good, whatever that looks like.
Human beings deserve care, even if we don't like them. No one deserves abuse.
And if a chance for compassion and seeing the complexity of a person and finding some peace in their old age is possible, that is better for you in the long run than holding your fury longer than you need it.
We could have made her miserable. She probably deserved him walking away. But he deserves knowing that he is so much better a person, as both a parent and a child, than she ever knew how to be.
i think any time you form a sentence that looks like "... you get no human rights" you should stop and think real hard about what you just said and whether you have understood what the concept of a human right is.
I got my (now 18-year-old) daughter into Ao3 back in 2021. I taught her she should always comment - even if the fic looks old or abandoned or whatever. She did.
Well - she got this email this morning:
The fic was written in 2014 and essentially abandoned.
Bethy read and reviewed in 2021 (and was actually the only person who had commented at all).
Today in 2025 - the final chapter was posted by the author and this was her reply to Bethy’s comment.
———
Never question whether a fic is too old to comment on.
so i did that thing again where i quit something. and it sucks, because at the start i felt so so so much love for it, but in the end. well, i don't know what happened in the end. there's the reason i gave, yes. but at the same time there's also a tiredness i felt towards the people, an overwhelm for something coming up in april, a lot of tiny things i didn't speak up about that grated on me.
never mind that. it's over, i quit. there's something else i want to talk about.
i really love fanfiction. in these past few weeks of endless thinking about what i was going to do, what helped me the most was fanfiction. other things helped, yes. i rewatched hot fuzz three times in a week at one of my lowest points when i had stopped eating properly. and the youtube videos i watched were also somewhat helpful. but when i started reading fanfiction again, it was really different. at first, it was your run of the mill binge; there was a ship i liked, so i read all the good fics for that ship. it's the same as when i read rwtw fanfiction back in the day. i would eventually stop, and the fics wouldn't leave that much of a lasting impression on me. i would move on.
i didn't stop reading, though. i read so much fanfiction. greats like passerine and heal thyself. so many hot fuzz stories. a number of mid stories i dropped not even a quarter of the way through, or gritted my teeth and finished because i wanted to know how things would wrap up.
the last fanfiction i read cannot easily be found online anymore, but i was able to get a copy. it was 75k words, and i sped through it from sunday to tuesday. and god, where to begin? i first read it in late 2021, when my life was a little bit unusual. i remember it, the bugs flying towards my dim laptop in a room by the sea, the strangeness of this image of me reading a fanfiction in this town in the middle of nowhere filled with people that could probably not wrap their heads around what i was reading. to rediscover this fanfiction in 2025 and read it with such a hunger was so interesting, because in between 2021 and 2025 was so much. and yet, this fanfiction perfectly sandwiches those two points in my life, and finishing it this second time made me think, huh, despite everything, it's still me. despite the hospitalization and the treatment and the grad school and the election and the following resignation, despite all the relationships i made and likely fucked up grandly with that email i sent on monday evening, still keiji sat in that motorbike behind osamu, the first inkstains of dawn breaking over their heads. still i saw in my mind's eye the sun rising over the outskirts of osaka.
it makes me think about this march, and how i will be standing in kamakura imagining percy and nico and the nodding buddha bobble heads from 16 years ago. it makes me think about my train pausing at natori station, miyagi in july 2024, me considering stepping outside and looking for the park tobio and shouyou ate taiyaki at.
it makes me think about my first job, my decision to go to grad school for biology, my career that i endeavor to despair over in these next six months. and how my last shining moment of undergrad was researching about introgressive hybridization between wild boars and domestic pigs in fukushima, a topic i chose for class partly because just months ago, i was trying to write a story of the characters of haikyuu and the 2011 disaster.
i don't know what it means, that i have these memories and thoughts regarding stories that occupy such a small sliver of existence. a nagging thought comes to mind: it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. i mean, i guess. but maybe, like the person to whom that was said, i don't dwell. maybe i get up, and i carry. i carry these fanfictions with me throughout life in both conscious and unconscious ways. they make me smile at the sight of an open train door, or a warm pastry. they make me look forward to year 2030 or so, when the last few chapters of haikyuu get animated. and they teach me understanding, respect, compromise, patience, and love.
i'll eventually move on from that motorbike and that mango milk and that nonexistent episode of chef's table. i'll probably go back to school later in the year, graduate with this insignificant degree, then use the credentials to pursue something tangentially related and with a lot more sense to me than the path i had been telling myself to go on. but right now, in the middle of the disaster that is my life as of january 2025, i will think about fanfiction. i will think about its place in my life. i will think about a future in which the act of writing and the act of science are deeply intertwined. and i will insist that i can make it my reality.
god i'm so tired of everybody's bad faith interpretations of everything. where's the trust. where's the forgiveness. where's the understanding that most things are complex and most people have many layers. and like the black eyed peas once said. where is the love
I just watched Hot Fuzz again and I need to talk about it.
The writers for Hot Fuzz have said several times that Nicolas originally had a female love interest but she took up too much time without being connected to the murder plot so they removed her completely and instead gave her core dialogue and scenes to Danny, making him the love interest.
The movie constantly makes connections between Danny and Nicolas’ ex-girlfriend. For example, she complained about Nicolas forgetting her birthday so later on Nicolas panics when nobody told him it was Danny’s birthday. She told him he has to find someone he can love more than work and by the end he chose Danny over working in London. He gifts Danny flowers and wins him a stuffed toy. They spend the night out together followed by Danny inviting Nicolas home. They have a romantic theme that only plays during their emotional scenes. We even see the exact moment Nicolas realise he’s in love with Danny when the old lady asks if he’s buying flowers for a special someone and he says “….Yes” with a shy little smile.
The only thing missing is an actual kiss but in the Cornetto trilogy romantic relationships are rarely sealed with a kiss. In Shaun of The Dead the main romantic couple Shaun and Liz never kissed once and they had as much physical contact as Nicolas and Danny.
It’s funny to watch this movie and realise it has more queer content than some more modern movies and shows that are hailed as good queer media.
Like, I’ve never heard anyone accuse Hot Fuzz of queerbaiting but because it treats Nicolas and Danny’s relationship the same way most movies treat straight romances in the genre (it was literally originally written as a straight romance) people just didn’t notice it was a queer movie or thought it was a joke on homoerotic buddy cop movies. If it came out today it would absolutely be on the queer movie list.
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