Not so fun fact about me: I've gone to school during a bomb threat investigation.
We had a statewide test scheduled for that day, so everyone figured that it was just a kid who wanted to get out of the test pulling a prank.
A bunch of kids didn't go that day, but the majority did. Teachers didn't give us any work. I don't remember if they gave us a half day or not, but I remember everyone getting evacuated to nearby schools in the middle of the day for a while before being sent back.
At that point we all thought we were going to die and some of kids were so freaked out that they started acting like they thought the school we were evacuated to was going to get shot up at any second.
Luckily, nothing happened, but as the gun violence in Colorado today, and all the other schools that have been attacked over the years have shown, that could have very easily not been the case.
Warnings: MDNI, no pairings, gun violence, school setting, angst, dark topic, heavy topic (not sure how to tag this one)
don’t ask; idk where this came from. adding a link here for more information as well as a way to donate to those effected by school gun violence
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Pop. Pop. Pop.
It’s faint, almost like the sound of a car backfiring at the end of a parking lot. He knows better. Has been ingrained with the sound of gunfire. It follows him into his sleep. Along with the monsters and the noise of discombobulated thoughts.
His muscle memory has already kicked in, never more thankful for his fucked up training than right now. Gesturing to the others in his line of sight, he watches as they move into position. He wishes he had anything more deadly on hand than the pair of scissors he grabs from nearby. He wishes things were different.
But as his daddy used to say, if wishes were horses even beggars would ride. Or the more crude, want in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.
The door is as bolstered as he can make it with what’s available. He crouches below the eyeline of the window.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
He traded in his day job for this one, thinking it would be better. That it would be safer. And it is, to an extent. If he pulls through this, he might take another long look at his resume. He’s sure Claire wouldn’t mind giving him a hand; they both know he’s shit at writing cover letters.
Footsteps outside his door.. the handle jiggles, and his grip tightens on the makeshift weapon in his hand. Leon’s gaze shoots over to the group of kids huddled in the corner—his third period history class—before turning back to the door. If wishes were horses…
ptsd made me a hardcore marauders fan for seven months
Ao3
content warning: the following contains discussions of school violence, teen violence, (briefly) domestic violence, mental health issues, depression, and trauma. if any of these are sensitive topics for you, please proceed with caution. in addition, if you feel i've missed a warning, please nicely let me know in the comments.
I don't like Harry Potter.
Sure, I binge-read the entire series in a bored, undiagnosed-ADHD-induced haze at the age of thirteen, have spent countless hours reading and even writing fanfiction for the series, have followed tumblr tags, listened to playlists, watched youtube videos, and am in the process of very slowly hand-binding myself a copy of A Black Mass Over Highway Ninety, but—
I don't like it, but nevertheless, I was sucked in.
~
"Some kid overdosed," one of my classmates said.
"What?"
"They're clearing the hallways."
Our principal had just come on the loudspeakers to issue a "shelter in place" order, telling us to ignore all bells and stay in our current classroom until he came back on and told us otherwise. I was actually glad, hoping the extra time would allow me to finish my Spanish homework before second period, since I'd spent most of the weekend thinking about the Strictly Come Dancing finals and my King Lear presentation in English class.
I hardly thought about the order itself—they're extremely common in United State schools, both as drills and as actual occurences. "Shelter in place" originated as a milder verison of going into lockdown where, instead of hiding from a potential shooter, students and teachers must simply not leave the room. In any case, I saw no reason to worry, and set about doing my homework.
~
In fall of 2022, I started my senior year of high school at the age of seventeen. I was having a rough year—my younger sister's depression was at an all-time high and my mother was recovering from a health scare—but, fandomwise, I was doing great. After all, Our Flag Means Death had come out that spring and I was in love. All I wanted to talk about were the gay pirates, and I even bought myself a "Team Edward" t-shirt with Taika Waititi's face smack in the middle as a "back to school" present. Everything was supposed to get better.
School sucked, because I went to a big public high school that looked like a prison and had equally-shitty Wifi, my (still undiagnosed) ADHD was worsening, and my grades were getting kind of bad. Even so, for a couple of months, I remained confident that my senior year would be my best one yet.
~
Third period was gym class, meaning I was only about an hour and a half away from the King Lear presentation. Senior year was actually one of the few years where I liked gym, which was awesome. It was just me and six boys, all of whom were nice to me, and our teacher was great. I think we were playing badminton that day, when our principal came on the loudspeakers to say that we were, once again, under a "shelter in place" order.
We were nonchalant about this, just as we had been in the morning. I cannot stress how desensitized children in the U.S. are to things like this, these days. When my little sister was in elementary school, there was a day when the whole school was put in a "shelter in place" because a man was walking around outside with a bunch of knives. When I was a junior, a boy severely beat up his girlfriend in the school hallway, giving her a concussion and leading to two mass protests. There were violent fights at my town's public schools almost weekly—and all of this is very, very normal. I would go so far as to say that my situation was pretty mild.
So we sat on the floor and did homework as time crept on, wondering vaguely what was going on, but no moreso than that. Third period ended, and we stayed. It should have been lunch time—we were getting hungry—but there was still no word about the lockdown ending. We stayed. Surely, it could only be another ten minutes or so?
And then, one of my classmates looked up from his phone screen, which was displaying a chat on Discord.
"Oh my god—someone was stabbed."
~
Before, I get properly started, I'd like to be totally clear: the point of this essay isn't to bash the Harry Potter fandom, not as a whole, and certainly not the sections of it I've been in. I met some incredible people while in my period of rabidly consuming Marauders content, and I don't want to put them down or dishonor the beautiful things they've created with my attitude. I loved my time in the Marauders fandom as much as I could love anything at that point in my life and have nothing but respect for the writers, artists, and tumblrinas who welcomed me into their space.
All of that being said, I think it's fascinating that I fell into a fandom like this one, particularly when I was doing so badly mentally. My dislike of Harry Potter only increases as I grow, as does my indifference, and, while I understand that's a fairly common sentiment shared among Marauders fans, I also get the impression that nostalgia plays a big part in their participation in the fandom. A Harry Potter- loving, bookworm child grows into a cynical teen, and then into a kind, brilliant adult with a "well, fuck it" attitude towards the world, using their limited free time to take that nostalgia from a childhood book series and write the kind of queer narratives they wish they'd had in adolescence. I could, of course, be wrong, but that's more-or-less how I understood the specific parts of the fandom I was in. (I know pretty much nothing about the tik tok side of the Marauders fandom, so we're just not factoring that in at all). Also, note that I said "adult" before, because the majority of people I interacted with were in their twenties and thirties. Being eighteen at the time and still in highschool, they all seemed at least moderately grown-up and untouchable to me.
All this to say, once again, that I literally didn't care about Harry Potter until I was almost fourteen and, even then, I only started reading it out of sheer boredom. I have pretty much no nostalgia or happy childhood memories associated with the series—I even skipped large sections of the fourth and seventh books because it irritated me whenever the main characters were fighting with each other. I was, at best, a casual fan.
There's something comforting, though, about being in such a big fandom, especially when your bad habit of choice is binge-reading smutty fanfiction in order to feel less dead. And, regardless of how I actually felt about Harry Potter , the concrete safety of a completed, unchanging series of books and movies where the author was already widely disliked definitely appealed tome and my less-than-stable life. You don't need to worry about a scandal if they've all already happened and, no matter how hard she tried to on Twitter, Joanne can't actually change the contents of the books. In my world of current fandoms and kind writers and actors all accessible on social media, the fuck-ass Harry Potter fandom was a bit of a refuge.
So that's why I think it was specifically the Marauders that I got into.
~
I don't actually remember how long we were in that gym. It must have been at least two hours, including the class time beforehand, but I barely remember any of it. I texted my friends, frantically trying to determine that everyone I knew was okay, and I told my parents what was going on. To this day, the thing I am most thankful for is that my sister, who we'll call Tabitha, wasn't there. I don't know what I would have done if she'd been in school that day. The other main thing I remember thinking about was my King Lear presentation, which was supposed to happen right after lunch, and, as the time stretched on, I became more and more worried that I wouldn't get to do it that day.
Shortly after my classmate saw the Discord messages about the stabbing, a video of the fight was leaked across Snapchat, as well as an image of the wound. We all looked on in horror, including my teacher (who we'll call Mr. Blake). It's objectively horrible to watch footage of a child being stabbed, no matter how grainy the video is, but, so far, we'd received no official information from the school, so this was literally all we had, and it had happened in the same building. Our principal wasn't allowed to make any statements (at least to my understanding) without it going through our superintendant and, for whatever reason, she didn't feel it necessary to get ahead of social media on this.
I was trapped in a school with thousands of other people, one of whom had just assaulted someone.
~
The night before my second semester of senior year began, I stayed up past midnight reading Dear Your Holiness by @mollymarymarie fleabag AU where Remus is a priest by day and a local rock musician by night, and Sirius has a popular music magazine. I had also spent much of my winter break listening to a podfic of All The Young Dudes (made it to sixth year) and generally rooting around people's bookmarks and gifts to get out of my head, so it's safe to say that, by the time I got to school in January, my brain was practially deep-fried in this new fandom, and it would only get moreso.
~
Mr. Blake felt, after an hour or so, that we'd be safer in the boys' locker room. He brought us down through a stairwell I'd never seen before, tucked away in corner of a closet in the gymnasium. I was thrilled by the opportunity to explore and filmed the journey on my phone. It's a weird, haunting video, not just for the grim situation and shadowy rooms, but because I'm so lively behind the camera. We're all fairly upbeat, joking about how big the school is and what things must have been like when it opened. I won't share the video here, as I don't feel like doxing myself, but I did rewatch it in preparation for writing this and it's truly disconcerting to look at the inside of a building I haven't been in for over a year, to hear the voice of a past version of myself and know I'm seeing snapshots of a day that changed me forever.
All there was to eat in the locker room were these Gatorade protein bars—mine was supposedly cookies and cream flavoured. I still remember the taste, sickly sweet and artificial. On an empty stomach, particularly an overly sensitive autistic one like mine, it was a horrible idea, and I felt sick afterwards, but god, I was so hungry.
I sent a selfie to my parents and Tabitha, then tried to read fanfiction while listening to one of my classmates talk in what sounded like Hatian Creole with his family on the phone. Boys were constantly being paraded in to use the urinals. The walls were painted concrete blocks, the benches were narrow and hard, and so I sat there.
~
In February, I spend a weekend binge-reading A Black Mass Over Highway Ninety, which kickstarted an obsession with seventies music and fashion. I read and reread the sex scenes during my final few months of highschool, trying desperately to shut my brain up and keep me from feeling so trapped in my daily life and the school I still attended. I got into the works of @spookymoonie, who was incredibly kind to me, and used to visit and refresh their blog every day to see if they'd (sigh) written more porn. Look, man, it was really good porn.
On the day of my high school graduation, I got dressed in pants that were too small for me, a shirt that was too big, and a cap and gown that made me look like a walking body bag. I mingled with my friends beforehand, taking pictures with people who I now haven't spoken to in months. The ceremony was long and boring but I'm a sucker for that kind of symbolic stuff, so I kind of liked it. I did say for weeks afterwards, though, that I didn't feel like I'd really graduated until I was cycling home, listening to "Telephone Line" on my tinny iPhone speaker. That was my graduation.
And I only knew that song from the official Black Mass playlist.
~
By the time we were finally released from the "shelter in place" and sent for lunch, it had been about three hours since our principal's initial announcement back in third period. There was little fanfare to the whole ordeal, and I don't recall any actual information being given to our parents from the school at this point, either, though I could be misremembering. Our principal simply came on the speakers and told us that the lockdown was up and we were to go for lunch. I had a pre-packaged turkey wrap that day—my mum got them from the store sometimes as a special lunch for me. I'm a vegetarian these days, so I wouldn't eat it regardless, but, even if I weren't, I don't think I could bring myself to eat one of those wraps again, not without remembering.
We'd only been in lunch for about ten minutes when somebody pulled the fire alarm. I don't know who did it, only that it was a student and there was no fire. I hate the fire alarm for the same reasons I hate all sudden, loud noises, and I was so overwhelmed already that I remember crying as we were paraded out into the parking lots, shivering in the cold, late-December air. I sat on a curb and ate my sandwich, wishing I had left when some of my classmates had, as soon as the "shelter in place" was lifted, or at least that I had my jacket and keys with me so I could get my bike and leave right then.
The fire drill was over as quickly as it had started and, god, I wish I'd left right then. Just grabbed my shit and got the hell out of there. But, well…my English presentation.
To anyone with rational mind capabilities, it would be incredibly obvious by now that said English presentation was absolutely not happening. A child had been stabbed, we'd all seen it on video and then been trapped for three hours— King Lear was far from a pressing concern. But I was traumatized and one of my groupmates was leaving the next day, so it felt like an emergency. So long as I was focused on my presentation and the soap opera-like melodrama of the play, I didn't have to think about what was happening around me.
Anyway, we did nothing English related fourth period, instead sitting in a circle and letting our teacher talk us through how we were feeling. I'm very grateful to her for giving us the space she did to feel our fear and anger without judgement, and I will never forget her telling us that we were to use the teachers' bathrooms for the rest of the day, and if any administrators had a problem with it, they could take things up with her. It might not seem like much, but when the stabbing had occured in a student bathroom, it was really nice for someone to acknowledge that we might be scared.
Another hour, or so, and the day was over.
~
I also want to get ahead and make sure I'm not framing my leaving of the Marauders fandom as a particularly good thing, or a good time in my life. I was still depressed and unemployed and, even after I finally got a job in August, I managed to hit several more crushing lows before the end of 2023—I was just reading different fanfiction to cope. At the very least, though, I was reading fic for stuff I was actually a fan of, which is typically a good place to start.
The feeling reminded me a bit of the one I used to get after I'd finished writing and posting a piece of puppet erotica—just this overwhelming sensation of "Wait, what was that?" It's like post-nut clarity, except clearly not. My time as a Marauders fan feels, in retrospect, like a bastardization, an appropriation. I was not a real fan because I didn't really care—I just needed something safe to numb my pain and confusion. That's why it feels so important to make sure I'm not trying to represent or bash the fandom in any way. It wouldn't be fair, because I wasn't really, genuinely a part of it.
~
When I finally had cycled home and let myself in the back door, I only remember collapsing. My mum was in the living room and I just stood there, I think. All I really remember is this image of how I think I looked, as though my mind had floated out of my head and taken a photograph. My face is very pale and completely blank, my bag somewhere on the floor next to me, and I'm staring at nothing, the performance of being okay just…evaporating. I know my mum told me she'd been facetiming my grandparents and aunt throughout the day and they were worried as well.
One thing I often forget about that day is that, barely an hour after coming home, I had a violin lesson over zoom. I assume it must have been a similar situation to the King Lear presentation, where I had to act as normal as possible in order to not completely freak out. I told myself that I couldn't cancel, because then I'd have to pay the fee, but, like. I'm pretty sure he would have made an exception. I remember telling him "oh, by the way, I'm a little out of it because someone got stabbed at school today," and seeing the utterly baffled look on his face. He offered to postpone, and I declined. I was not a very good student that day—I think I'd forgotten what we did in the lesson before the hour was even finished.
I went downstairs afterward and told my mum everything—I think. Either that or I lay in bed. The next thing I remember is going to school the next day, because I was still clinging to that King Lear presentation. Or maybe it was just because I didn't know what to do with myself? No idea. The next night, I was feeling sick and tested positive for Covid.
So that was nice.
~
My high school was never the same after the stabbing. Rules got stricter, a mass of teachers quit or transfered, the classes graduated and moved on, and I truly think something died that day. No matter how bad things were beforehand, there was always this hope I felt—this optimism. Even if I'd been cynical for weeks, all it took to love that shitty old building was an orchestra concert or a school play. It was trash, but it was home. That love didn't come back.
My love for the Marauders proved to be just as fleeting. I literally woke up one day last July with a craving for this Good Omens/Buzzfeed Unsolved crossover fanfiction (called video appeal by ravel_aorla) and that was the end of my phase. Poof! Avada Kadavra!
I'm proud to say, though, that I'm doing much better now. I'm writing and editing this in my college dorm room, which I moved into just yesterday. I'm also very into My Chemical Romance now, and am able to share that interest (and a long furby) with one of my best friends, @vriska-serketboard. It's been a year and a half since my high school has darkened the door of my feet and I am worlds better for it.
Call it instinct as a former GSA leader, but that's how I want to end this. It get's better. I got better, and you can too.
It's so funny how my father is pro corporal punishment since he believes the lack of it is why there seems to be a rise in bad behavior amongst minors.
But as I look back on the stories he told about his childhood, it only emboldened my current beliefs of how it's ineffective and harmful.
My father got beat as a kid, and guess what? He didn't improve because of it. I've heard stories about he and his brother fighting other boys, I hear stories about how lazy he was, and I hear stories about him being a disrespectful and ungrateful little shit.
He got beat a lot as a kid, even over things that weren't his fault. And while he has convinced himself that it made him better. In reality, it made him worse.
Like a lot of boomers, he is very aggressive at best and violent at worst. He thinks he is entitled to good behavior he never learned himself and won't show other people in return. He is repeating the cycle of abuse because not once did he question the way he was bought up.
But the most ironic part of all is that a lot boomers like him still grew up spoiled. And it's not just shit like throwing a tantrum at a Starbucks because they have to wait either.
Their parents made sure that they had what was best so they could have a secure future. But boomers are apparently the first generation whose children are living worse off than them, and it has led to a ripple effect where even the generations after are suffering from their selfishness.
But God forbid they actually take accountability for that. Oh no. It's everyone else's fault. It's us, their children and grandchildren, who are the selfish ones. Whatever happened to the good old days, am I right?
But that tangent aside, it made me realize that violence and bad behavior in school is nothing new. That has always been a problem. Schools just can't hide it anymore because children now have phones with them and they record this shit.
I remember a lot of horrible things that happened in primary and secondary school, stuff that would've made the news. But the schools managed to hide it.
They always have been, and they're successful too because they've managed to convince the public that it's a growing problem and not one that's been there for a while.
So, of course, people like my father are convinced that this is the result of corporal punishment being banned in schools.
But corporal punishment didn't help then, and it wouldn't help now. Since the fucking 15th century, people have been reexamining how we raise children, realizing that certain ways they're brought up can harm them.
People aren't mindlessly saying we shouldn't beat kids. They looked into it and realized it wasn't helping. Not to mention, they offer much better alternatives.
It should be common knowledge at this point how harmful corporal punishment is. Even to this day, we get studies proving that it's ineffective at best and outright harmful at worse.
But people like my father don't know that. They will mindlessly believe stuff like the Bible that outright say that beating children is good because it'll help mold them into well-adjusted adults. Yeah, let's ignore the fact that this thing is thousands of years old, we don't know the actual author, and they probably never dealt with a child or should've never been trusted with them to begin with.
I am not going to follow some old ass back. I am going to the fucking professionals and learning my shit because kids deserve better and we've been doing them wrong for long enough.
hey! out of interest do you ever do a reading for someone/ an idol and get strange or bad energy from them or is it more like energies change all the time?
Hmm yes that indeed happened already. Sometimes multiple - if not all, cards that fall out are very negative (the tower, the devil, a few positive cards that fall out reversed so now they are negative ect) and rarely we genuinely get bad vibes/energy (intuitively) from an idol or actor and later it turns out they actually did something bad. We both think that we should be careful who we trust, or at least not see everything through rose tinted glasses, as idols and actors are all humans too and every human has flaws, some make smaller mistakes and some bigger ones but we shouldn't just think "this idol is perfect! So kind and nice, couldn't hurt a fly!" You know how we mean it?
Especially because the bullying rates in Korea are really high and gruesome and most of the bullies don't even get punished, if they are minors they don't get a jail or juvenile sentence, in fact they can in most cases still continue to go into the same school - usually the victims are the knew who have to transfer to different schools. And we are talking about bullying like burning someone with a curling iron, humiliating them, SA, beating, literally torturing and in some cases even setting them on fire or using other objects like forks to hurt the victims. So we would just like to point out that yes sometimes we get bad vibes from some celebrities, but it's not overly often, vut stating aware is always a good choice! We will link a video that talks about multiple such bullying cases to spread more awareness of such things in general!
Trigger warning ⚠: please don't watch this (or not alone) in case you feel unwell about the upcoming things: violence, blood, fire/burning, stabbing, humiliating, school violence, bullying
No gore in the video, regardless a heavy topic
P.s it talks about multiple bullying cases and victims, not just one of them, two of those cases inspired the kdrama "the glory"
With the recent satanic craze-like assault on trans commuinities after the recent school shootings, it has become increasingly clear that the GOP want to use this in an effort to gain traction in their campaigns.
We witness a huge wave of claims that trans people are inherently more likely to commit school shootings because of HRT and worsening mental health. (I wonder why it's worsening?)
First, let's tackle the claims that mental health is the leading cause of school shootings. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 0,5 of adults aged 18 or older have attempted suicide at least once in their lives ( https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/ ). At the same time, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, 82 percent of trans people have experienced suicidal thoughts and as much as 40 percent have attempted suicide ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32345113/ ). Matter of fact is that trans people are 80 times more likely to attempt sucide that their cis counterparts.
Meanwhile, there have been three* school shootings committed by people identifying as trans... Out of 2826. For your information that is ~0.106% of the total number of school shootings. And it's now that we bring to attention the fact that trans people make up around 1 to 2 percent of the population. That means that trans people are one THOUSAND percent less likely to commit school shootings than cis people, while being EIGHTY times more likely to attempt suicide.
*One only used it as an excuse to get out of being accused of committing a hate crime.
Mental health - while being a massive systemic problem - is not THE cause of school shootings.
And now we look at the remaining 2826 school shootings by cis people. And to be frank, it looks bleak. 98 percent of school shootings committed in America are by cis men, eventhough they only represent around 50 percent of the population.
Now through this little thought experiment, what have we found out? That the only group of people that are clearly overrepresented in school shootings in proportion to their population, is cis, white men. People who have a significantly better mental health than basically any other parts of the populace. So what is it that they have that makes them so much more likely to commit these acts of violance? Guns.
You'd be safer handing a gun to a trans person that a cis one.
