I Hate Spring. I Hate Spring ‘cause It Makes Me Think Of Her. I Thought I Was Over Her, I Got So Used

I don’t normally believe this stuff, but a toasty bagel sounds nice.

Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.  One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.  So you don’t.  Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.  So you miss your court date.  Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear. 

Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.  And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources. So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all. 

When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into. 

So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.

you’re edwin payne. you’re a british schoolboy in the 1910s and you keep to yourself, mostly. you find your penny novels more interesting than people. there’s one boy who seems to like you but you’re too afraid to talk to him lest you make a fool of yourself. you fall asleep one night, unaware that anything might be amiss. you’re violently wrested from your slumber and dragged away scared and confused. your kidnappers are your classmates and they gag you and pin you down. one familiar boy starts chanting and—oh god, what are they calling you? you struggle against them but their grips are just too tight and before you know it the room is silent. you glimpse something crawling in a dark corner. so do they. now it’s your captors’ turn to be scared. in an instant, they’re gone, combusted into flames at a single touch. a demon reveals itself to you and you beg for mercy, for your life. it’s the only thing you can do. but the demon isn’t interested in sparing you, and he drags you down to hell.

at least he said he was sorry.

now you’re in hell. you think you’re dead, but you’re not. the demon is there too, and now he owns you. you think you’re dreaming—no, not dreaming. this is a nightmare you’ll wake up from at any moment. but the more time passes, the less faith you have that this is true. the demon says he doesn’t want you, he has no use for a living human. and so you find yourself alone, tethered in darkness while the demon searches for a trader. he finds one, and you’re brought out to meet him. this demon is different from the one who brought you here, you can feel it. more evil, more sinister. nevertheless, you attempt to take it in stride. you extend a hand and introduce yourself. the demon takes your hand with a hungry grin and you are transported in the blink of an eye. you find yourself in a poorly lit, dingy room with hallways of equal quality stretching and connecting with each other as far as you can see.

it’s eerily quiet and you instinctively know something is wrong. you stand and survey your surroundings. there’s no one here except you. but there is something. a massive lump sits in a dark corner, covered in shadows. you can’t get a proper look at it, but you don’t dare draw any closer. it shifts it’s position and you hear the clanging of a thousand pieces of glass. now you’re confused, but you’re not curious enough to investigate. you need to find a way out of here as quickly as possible, so you make a break for it. you ignore the thing and duck through the nearest hallway as fast as your slippers will take you. then you trip and fall, not quite stifling a sharp cry. you’ve scraped your knees and your palms are bleeding. but it’s no matter, you’ll force your way through the pain.

you realize you’re lost so you turn back, but you freeze before taking your first step. the thing that you couldn’t get a good look at is standing in the doorway, blotting out what little light shone through. it starts crawling toward you—slowly at first, but it picks up speed. the clanging rings in your ears and fear strikes through your heart. you run, but it’s faster than you. god, it’s faster than you. then your leg snags and a shooting pain runs up your body. you look down and see dozens of tiny limbs clawing at your skin, ripping it apart. you hear yourself scream, a bone-chilling, bloodcurdling scream with which you didn’t know your lungs were capable. it’s tearing into your body now. your arms, your torso, your chest. blood fills your throat and then you can’t scream anymore. you feel like you’re on fire. the last thing you see is a head made of a dozen glass faces.

and then you die.

and then you wake.

you see the same dark room as before. you clutch your stomach, the one that had just been ripped out, though the skin is now unmarred. your chest is similarly intact, as is your throat. there is no evidence that you’ve been mauled to shreds, but you feel it in your soul. your body remembers it too. just as you’re coming back to your senses, you hear the creature clambering back through the hall closer to you. you make yourself as small as possible, but it’s dragging something along with it. you squint, and see the most gruesome sight imaginable. it’s you. it’s your body, mangled and broken, covered in blood, hardly recognizable. your gut twists and you feel dizzy. that’s you. it was you. but now you’re here, and your body is there. so what does that make you? you don’t have time to think before your let out an involuntary sob. something squeezes around your heart as you realize your grave mistake. the creature turns its focus onto you. you know what’s about to happen and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

you’re edwin payne. yesterday, you were reading your favorite book instead of listening to a lecture. now you’re in hell, and this is your unspeakable reality for the next 73 years.

because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

I will Never get over GenLoss

something very cool about generation loss is that as the episodes go on, the space itself gets more and more complex. The first episode was filmed entirely on a 2-d plane with the rooms all in line with each other, and you never see the cameraperson. In the second episode, the rooms are still mostly in a line, but we see all the rooms from multiple angles including all four walls, AND we see the cameraperson multiple times, although they never seem to be acknowledged by the characters until the very last scene. Finally in the third episode we have a much more open space with multiple floors and camera angles that show everything, and the cameraperson is frequently visible and known by the characters.

All of this parallels the way both the characters and the audience become slowly more aware of the situation they are in throughout the show and is a very cool way of showing slowly the true complexity of the story.

Huge props to the genloss team and ranboo! the themes of the show are ingrained even just in the way it is presented to us.

This was too long for a comment so I have to reblog, sorry if that bothers you!

I took the “that was the last me” line to mean that that was the previous him and each time he is caught and killed he gets a new body to once again be caught and killed. There is a pile of past Edwin’s in the corner, he’s been at this for a while.

Interesting thought about him dying in hell the first time around though, would possibly explain the time difference between sacrifice and death. Even though it’s kind of a large discrepancy, like at least 6-7 hours between sacrifice and death, maybe it’s because Sa’al felt bad for him and it was whoever he was traded to next that killed him? Maybe he struggled so, so hard to stay alive those extra hours? Maybe it was supposed to be 1:00 am and there was a typo? (My personal favorite option) Maybe it’s Maybeline?

There are still soooo many questions I have about his time in hell, especially since he talks about being traded from demon to demon to demon to “something worse than a demon” which I took to mean that he wasn’t always in the Dollhouse. So where was he before then?? On one hand I desperately want to know everything that happened to him and on the other I very, very much do not.

Also (tw: homophobia), Mary-Ann, what Simon and Gang were calling Edwin and chanting when they sacrificed him was slang for gay/effeminate men, so it’s quite possible that people figured out or at the very least suspected that he was gay and considering the overall attitude towards queer people in the early 1900s, that could very easily be at least part of the reason his disappearance was considered an “act of God.” Of course, this is just my own interpretation of events and everyone is entitled to their own interpretations, I just thought I’d share! Have a great day/night!

I just had a realisation.

In the Payne/Rowland file the Night Nurse has, it says that Edwin died around noon (1:00 pm), and not at night, I mean, when the satanic ritual was performed. Does that mean that Saal took him to hell alive?

There was no blood covering his face when he took him, but Edwin tells Charles "this is the last me" when he asks about it. So are you telling me he died in hell?

His disappearance was label an act from God, that means he was gone, they never found a body, probably his grave is empty (?). The demon he was sacrificed to, took him to hell and he died there, being torture, and it wasn't fast.

And... that was the last him?

any time spent taking care of yourself is not wasted time

Reblog if you're pan, bi, ace, or really love chicken nuggets. I'm trying to prove something.

I’ve been looking for a place just to type, to think. I think I found it.