There’s something truly appealing about existing in the same space as the people you love, being able to stage a hangout with just a couple knocks on a bedroom door.

I had the pleasure of rooming with my friend Charlie last semester, and it was literally #goals. Our friend Robbie was in the same suite, just one door away, and it felt like my very own version of Friends. This year I’m rooming with my friend Ila (Charlie’s going to Paris #RIP), and our friend Alyssa is right next door. So, it’s safe to say I’m bursting with excitement at the thought of moving into our suite next weekend.

This has definitely gotten me thinking, though. So many shows and movies feature a group of friends living together. I know this happens in the real world, especially with friends living together in the city, but it got me thinking about two of my favorite friend groups currently on the internet.

Both Bunch of Friends and Adults showcase a group of 20-somethings living together1, and I am undeniably drawn to watching their dynamics play out. So drawn, in fact, that I feel a bit parasocial about it.

The Hottest Pepper in the World

Bunch of Friends premiered on YouTube with their video “we do a spelling bee and eat vegetables” on September 12, 2025. The first 30 seconds of the video are a disorienting introduction to the friend group, where viewers are presented with a brief glimpse of their personalities. Coy is impish and a bit creepy;2 Will is friendly and amiable; Hanbon is energetic and animated; and Anthony has his hands and mouth restrained by duct tape (because he’s the “reasonable” one that tries to halt their shenanigans).

The rest of the video follows the group as they partake in a spelling bee. This idea, however, like the rest of their adventures, is not so simple. As the video continues, stakes heighten. There are water guns, a vegetable-eating competition, and outlandish words that seemingly no human could spell correctly.

This debut perfectly sums up their vibe. As season one of Bunch of Friends continues, each video has a seemingly normal concept turn into something unexpected. They do a Facebook Marketplace haul and end up turning Shirley, a creepy doll, into a vital part of the channel, go on Omegle with Hanbon duck-taped to the wall, and complete other wacky tasks that serve to highlight the eccentric nature of the channel.

Season one culminates in the Oscar-worthy video “24 hours to eat a skateboard.”

In the videos leading up to it, the foursome make an outlandish promise to eat a skateboard once they reach 100k subscribers. This, alongside their bit of eating the hottest pepper in the world, seems like a throwaway line to draw engagement. However, this bunch of friends took it literally.

A timer on the wall counts down as they scramble to figure out a way to actually eat a skateboard. They put up posters in NYC, trying to find SkateboardEater24 to figure out his secrets. Coy and Will end up finding his alleged son, who they agree to meet at a bar later, and get interrupted by a woman passionately against skateboard eating. She’s holding a protest the next day.

Hanbon attempts to catfish SkateboardEater24 while Anthony uses his connections to get them on the news. As all of this is progressing, they’re still bringing their friendship to the forefront with hijinks. Will and Coy make sandwiches and put the hottest pepper in the world inside them—both bits ring true in this epic season finale.

They soon find out the “son” of SkateboardEater24 lied, and go home with failure heavy on their shoulders, getting crunk. When they wake up, there’s seven minutes left on the timer. The shots turn cinematic as they argue, and gradually, the yells of an outside protest can be heard.

With six minutes left, the garage door opens, and a crowd of anti-skateboard eaters (including the woman Will and Coy met before) becomes visible. They demand the friends hand over their skateboards, which is refused. In this crowd, we start seeing some familiar faces. People from former videos make a comeback, and they have a vendetta against Bunch of Friends for all of the shenanigans they pulled.

An epic battle ensues.

The shots remain cinematic, but snippets of BTS shine through. We see Will throw a body double (a pillow with clothes) onto the table, and are left with no doubt that it’s not a real person. This and other “editing mishaps,” though, are not mistakes at all. They merely serve to heighten the absurdity of the video. We, the viewers, can tell that none of this is real and is very obviously staged—and we know Bunch of Friends are the ones who staged it—but they’re acting as if it’s all very, very real. They lean into the bit, as they do in all their videos, only now it’s a much bigger, nonsensical occasion than before.

It’s fucking brilliant.

We’re currently in season two of the Bunch of Friends channel, and it’s just as wonderful. They recently released a Minecraft Hunger Games video with a cast of other creators, and it was absolute peak. This, as well as their coolest stranger video, adoption of Thanos, and sleepover with Anthony away, all showcase their friendship in an undeniably appealing way.

As I said with the skateboard video, it’s obvious to the viewer that everything is staged. And yet, I don’t care. Their friendship is something that can’t be staged (Anthony, at least, has known Will and Hanbon for years, and Coy slots in as if he’s always been there), so even if their videos are, the dynamics they produce ultimately make the videos’ fakeness insignificant next to how fun it is to watch.

They’re quite literally a bunch of friends. A tight-knit group you can’t help but feel drawn to for their odd humor, willingness to embarrass themselves, and a very obvious deep care for one another.

I feel extremely parasocial every Friday. While I know, logically, these people have no idea who I am, it’s easy to forget that when their lively dynamic plays out on my screen. At the end of the day, they are internet personas who need viewership and community to make money (which is clear in the way they play into their color schemes and archetypes, and produce outlandish thumbnails and titles that intend to—and have—spawned Internet trends). However! They truly make it feel like fame is not their intention! (“I wanna be niche forever” ~Hanbon, 2026.) When I watch Bunch of Friends, it just feels like I’m watching a group of friends have fun together—the same way I have fun with my own friends.

Roast Chicken

Adults premiered on May 28, 2025, and flipped my world upside down. The show follows a group of friends living together in NYC. They’re broke, “neurotic, irresponsible, directionless,” and most importantly: funny as fuck.

Each episode has a different situation, some of which include a hospital visit, a dinner party of ketamine and uncooked chicken, hosting a young girl getting an abortion, and a wanted stabber. Regardless of the stress these induce, the group gets through it. One of my favorite moments is when Billie comes home from losing her job to find her friends high on crack, and instead of sulking the way she wants to, she joins them in fixing their broken pipe. Friendship really is everything.

Like Bunch of Friends, the characters in Adults have their archetypes. Samir is the anxious one; Billie craves validation; Anton is the extroverted yes-man; Issa is the talkative people pleaser; Paul Baker is is the Guy™ (how else do I describe Paul Baker, even?).

Depending on the situation, the friends reacting to it shift. We see all of them in duos or trios as well as a functioning fivesome. Being able to see the way they work individually as well as together is definitely one of the most appealing parts of the show.

At the end of each day, the five of them come together for a “debrief.” I mentioned Billie losing her job, but additionally, “Theracide,” episode 6, ends with Samir and Paul vomiting on the street outside their house while Issa and Anton run down the street joyfully yelling “He didn’t kill himself!” (their therapist, long story). Billie is with her new boyfriend, Mr. Teacher (Charlie Cox, I don’t know the character’s name haha), and tries to pretend she doesn’t know them. When Samir calls out to her, she can only purse her lips together and accept that yes, these are her friends, and while they’re making her look bad to her former-teacher-now-partner, she loves them very much.

There are definitely complications that arise (Samir’s former—current—feelings for Billie, Paul Baker and Anton’s marriage whilst PB is with Issa, Issa’s hurt at Billie not picking her for a proxy, Samir not wanting PB to move in with them at first, etc.), but we know, as the viewer, that the friendship is stronger than what will come their way.

Season two comes out August 27, and I am so excited to see what happens next for them.

Why are we so drawn to the friends we see on our screens?

This is nothing new. Sitcoms like Friends and New Girl have drawn viewers in for years now, and while Bunch of Friends and Adults are my two favorite friend groups to watch, there are many others (Overcompensating, I Love LA, etc.) as well.

I know I’ve been harping about the parasocial nature of watching said friend groups, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a “bad” thing.

Fundamentally, we lowly humans crave to be known. To be a part of something. To experience friendship.

I can affirm that I have friends, and that I am content with our adventures. However, there’s definitely something enticing about watching other people’s friendships play out on screen. Maybe it’s the humor and the feeling of being in on their inside jokes in a way that fuels the nosiness inside of me. Maybe it’s because, even though I do feel seen by the friends I have, watching Bunch of Friends and Adults gives me an extra boost of gooey, friendship-driven feelings in my life.

Or, maybe, the friends on screen just remind me of my own relationships. I get to relive my own friendships by placing my two friend groups into the crazy situations that occur (because I would never allow us to stage a massive group hug or fake being a participant in a marathon in real life #anxiety), and laugh about it.

It’s easy to convince myself in the moment that Will, Anthony, Coy, and Hanbon are my friends. That I’m living in the attic of Samir’s parents’ house. In reality, I’m not even a fly on the wall, but the dynamics of both groups have such an openness that makes me feel like I’m inside of them. A wild thing to say, for sure, but I have to speak my truth.

I think, though, that the reason I’m so drawn to Bunch of Friends and Adults is really just the way they encapsulate the college experience. As I said, I (will soon) live with my friends, and it’s great. I never want dorm life to end, honestly, because I get to be surrounded by people I care about.

During the summer, the ease with which I can hang out with people is not the same at all. It honestly feels lonely, sometimes, to be without another’s presence in my bedroom. To not have someone in the room next to me that I know can knock on my door whenever—and that I can knock on theirs, too.

Living in the same space is comforting, and I guess through watching these two friend groups being inside the same house, functioning past the age of college, really comforts me. I hope that can be true, in some kind of way, for myself because I really don’t want college living to come to an end (said everyone ever).

So, yeah, that’s my conclusion. I really just wanted to talk about my favorite YouTube channel and sitcom together3, so this analysis was mostly gratuitous, but hey! I love these friend groups, and I love my own friend groups, too.

I can’t wait to go back to Boston for the school year and live out my best living-with-my-friends-life.

I thought it was hopeful. She thought it was depressing.

Nearly 3 weeks later, I still firmly feel hopeful when I think about Ryan and Naim. While I can see my girlfriend’s point (and can, maybe, justify her sadness because of how deeply she loves Frank Ocean—and how shocked she was at the “Self Control” needle drop), I did try to win her over. She didn’t budge.

This talk, though, really got me thinking about queerness and religion and homophobia. Yesterday, actually, as I was driving to work, I passed a house (that I think about TPing every time I have to see it) with a Trump flag. Somehow, that flag triggered me to think about this sushi conversation the two of us had, and what, exactly, might have made our interpretations so opposite.

We saw the same movie, didn’t we?

I understand that when it comes to queerness depicted in media, most stories don’t end happily. I could literally name at least 5 queer characters that died without a happy ending.1 Bury your gays, for real.

But Leviticus didn’t feel at all like burying the gays. It felt, to me, like showing the gays surviving even when the world is against them. That even though the entity is there—and always will be—Ryan and Naim choose each other. They choose to stop living in fear of what the church wanted from them and start living for themselves.

Not to get too sentimental, but Leviticus was kind of everything to me.

I grew up in the Catholic church, and while I don’t think my 11 years of private school indoctrinated me into thinking hatefully towards queer people, it definitely lengthened the journey of accepting myself. I don’t want to claim that I’m traumatized by Catholicism or anything, because truly, my experience was nothing like that in Leviticus or anything like what I’ve heard from other queer people. The years I spent praying were… fine. Nothing bad ever happened to me (unless you count passing out in church—twice!).

However, while I wasn’t studying Bible verses that supposedly rejected homosexuality2, I wasn’t really talking about it either. Gay people were something foreign to me when I was growing up. I didn’t really have anyone in my life that identified as queer, and if there was a mention of someone (a distant relative or acquaintance), their sexuality was talked about in passing. Not something that was to be kept a secret, but also something not to be said in totality out loud.

This sheltering of queerness from birth to 8th grade definitely didn’t acclimate me to the community I can now say with confidence I am a part of.

While I was drafting this piece, I actually uncovered a memory long-forgotten from 7th grade. On one of the many nights I slept over at my friend’s house, she came out to me. It went something like this:

S: Leah and I have been hanging out a lot lately, and I think I really like her.

Me: That’s great. I’m happy you guys are getting closer.

S: No, like… I like her.

Me: Yeah. I like her, too.

S: No. Not like that.

She then explained to me that their hangouts included kissing. I remember putting on a smile and telling her excitedly, “Oh! That’s great, S!” even though my stomach was in knots.

It happened gradually, but with the quarantine, attending different high schools, and, probably, my own internal processing that someone I not only knew but was friends with was gay, we stopped hanging out. Stopped catching up. Stopped being friends.

I attended public high school, which was… a shift, to say the least. I went from having 40 classmates to having over one thousand. Being exposed to so many people led to me becoming friends with a girl who confessed very early on in our friendship that she was lesbian.

Now, I hadn’t heard that word spoken to me before. Not even with my forgotten friend. She told me and another friend of ours over a FaceTime call (the quarantine was going strong), and I remember being so speechless by it that the two of them had to check if my Wifi had gone out and frozen my screen.

I’d told her I was happy for her, but again, my stomach was in knots.

On both occasions I had a friend come out to me, I wasn’t afraid or disgusted or hateful towards them, but rather myself. I internalized their confessions and guiltily wondered what that was like—liking girls.

In the summer before sophomore year, I kissed my friend. Because we played club volleyball together, and thus went to different schools, I found it easy to pretend like it didn’t matter. At least, for a while.

I was fucked over eventually, and when we stopped having post-football game makeouts in my bedroom so she could go on dates with a guy, I was left more devastated than I thought I would be.

So I got a bit reckless and kissed both guys and girls, trying to figure out what I wanted. Sophomore year I was a ball of chaos, and to this day I’m still not sure how I continued functioning, but I did. Barely.

That next summer, I was on a date-ish with a girl I had been talking to—a friend of a friend’s—at a local fair. It was there I actually saw S, my friend from 7th grade. What a twist of fate that was. We caught up a bit, but it was mostly awkward. I told her about the girl I was with like that, and she told me about the girl she was dating. It was nice.

I still felt relatively guilty about my sexuality, though.

While I was quick to tell my friends that I was bisexual (because it’s a fun and exciting thing to be, isn’t it?), I didn’t want to tell my family. My mom knew, but that was it. For some stupid reason, I thought I would be seen differently.

When I got together with my girlfriend during senior year of high school, I was unbalanced. I wanted people to know we were together, but I didn’t want to have to tell them. I wanted to call her mine, but I didn’t want to do so publicly. I genuinely don’t know how she put up with me (but thank goodness she did).

Even though my mom knew I was bi, I didn’t want to tell her I had a girlfriend. I waited a long fucking time to tell her we were dating, and then when I finally got the courage, she had the audacity to tell me “I know.” My big moment was taken away from me because I was being a fucking idiot, feeling guilty over nothing!

I’m glad my girlfriend was patient with me, that I have an amazing queer friend group, and that my family has been so accepting, but talking about being queer still sometimes makes my stomach twist. I’m happy—I know I’m happy—and yet, I feel guilty about it. It’s annoying!

This tangent about my queer identity was really just to show it’s been a long journey for me to accept myself. That I still am accepting myself.

So, because of that, it’s safe to say I was sobbing hysterically at Leviticus’ ending. My interpretation of gay love trumping all released buckets of tears from my lacrimal glands. I was nearly inconsolable (save for sushi).

This is why my girlfriend thinking the end was depressing really got to me.

Now, one thing about her is that she is a sad gay book connoisseur. Call Me by Your Name is her all-time fave, and novels like A Little Life and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous grace her favorites shelf. I can definitely see where she sees similar themes between these and Leviticus, and respect her want to focus on the sad.

However! Not to put her on full blast, but I do believe she’s wrong. Obviously, everyone can have their own interpretations of whatever the fuck, and this is no different, so I’m done trying to convince her differently. I will, though, expand on my opinions here.

The church wanted Ryan and Naim to stay away from each other. They wanted us to be scared. But even when they try to do that, they end up at the same bus stop. The relief on their faces is palpable when they realize they’re both the real Ryan and Naim. When they realize they have a chance to be together.

As the bus pulls away, Naim sees Entity Ryan from the window and turns away, pressing himself into the real Ryan. He’s trusting Ryan with his safety. His comfort. His fear.

Maybe there’s always going to be something looming in the background, waiting to tear them apart, but for now, they’re with each other, escaping the town that tried to push them apart. It doesn’t matter where they go next: it only matters that they’re doing so together.

I genuinely get heart palpitations whenever I think about Naim turning away from the Entity and into Ryan’s side. Like fuck, man.

All this to say, the movie means a lot to me. I’m sure it means a lot to many queer people (it certainly does to my best friend), but damn! That healed me—and I didn’t even know I needed healing! Religious guilt really chokes you when you least expect it, doesn’t it!

Give Leviticus all the awards, I beg of you. And bring me a box of tissues because you better bet I’m going to rewatch it now that it’s digital… as soon as I post this Substack.

I was scared. I was nervous. Antsy. Stressed. Most of all though, I was excited to watch Joe Locke say the line that made me burst into tears when I read it for the first time 4 long years ago. Sue me, I like angst!

So, when the line I’d been anticipating for the length of the film—and the months leading up to it when I realized Nick and Charlie was being adapted—didn’t happen, I was upset.

party 4 u

Nick’s mental state is FUCKED at the Christmas party for a variety of reasons: his brother, his future with Charlie, his realization that his father impacted him more than he wants to admit, and, most paramount, his panic at not knowing who he is without the label of “Charlie’s boyfriend”—and a new awareness that he doesn’t know who he is/wants to be outside of that.

I don’t say this to justify him downing 7 shots in the span of a minute—trust me, I was very uncomfortable—or getting somewhat-justifiably upset when a guy was flirting with his boyfriend, but to paint the whole picture of this disastrous scene.

While Charlie’s up on stage, playing the drums with a crowd surrounding him and the rest of Sahar’s band, Nick is watching. He’s okay at first, but then as time passes, he sees David, his older brother who has been a “proper dickhead” for their whole lives, and whose very presence reminds Nick of the presence of their father that isn’t. So he downs a shot. And then another shot. And another.

A bit later, Nick overhears Tao and Elle arguing about the distance soon to be between them, and attempts to jump in with a spiel about how communication is important. That if they love each other, it’ll all work out.

Tao and Elle are, obviously, not pleased with Nick’s drunken insertion into their private couple matters, and when he gets told gently to STFU, he looks for Charlie.

Charlie is, naturally, talking reluctantly to a guy admiring his drum skills. Nick walks head-on into the flirting and calls the guy (and Charlie) out on it before walking away. Charlie’s annoyed, saying he can “handle [him]self,” and how he didn’t step in when a girl flirted with Nick earlier. A fair point.

While they’re heading back inside, they cross Elle and Tao arguing again, and Nick declares he needs another drink. One can assume his friends’ breakup argument mixed with his heightened feelings about his boyfriend being flirted with is triggering him. Unwanting of a full-on spiral, he wants to, pointedly, stop talking about the matter completely.

He sobers up for a minute and asks Charlie if he’s angry with him, and then David—one of the factors in Nick’s desire to drink in the first place—is offering to drive the two of them home. And the scene is over.

Just like that.

A proper dickhead

In the novella, it’s Charlie who drinks too much upon finding out about Tao and Elle’s breakup (which happens pre-party in the novella—in the movie, it’s kind of during/post party—but the timing of it is mostly unimportant). He tells Nick he’s upset that Nick keeps talking about going off to uni, which is partially true, but in reality, he’s worried that Nick will forget about him when he goes there. That Nick wants to break up with him just like Elle and Tao now have.

Charlie tells Nick he can break up with him, if he wants, and goes on a rant about how he’s the one being left behind. Nick, logically and harshly, tells Charlie that he’s going off to uni come September regardless and “That’s just the way it is.”

The next couple lines of dialogue between them has been engraved in my mind ever since I read the novella in May of 2022, so I will cite it here:

Charlie tells him to leave, so Nick leaves (with a brief intermission of telling Tao “Fuck you”).

As you can see, this scene is messy, and it feels out of character for the Nick and Charlie we know and love from the Netflix show. It feels OOC, even, with Nick and Charlie from the web comics. This is, of course, because Nick and Charlie was published in 2015 after Solitaire (2014), and the web comic began in 2016. Oseman started at the end (as in, the end of what we see in the Heartstopper universe) of Nick and Charlie’s relationship, and then went back to when their love first bloomed.

So, as the Heartstopper world expands, it only makes sense that Oseman would want to tweak parts of Nick and Charlie’s story in a way that kept all the nostalgia of the original work while fitting more in tune with the adaptation’s tale. I will clarify that literally every other change in the Heartstopper universe is fine with me (Isaac/Imogen instead of Aled was a big one for me in 2022, but I’m holding out hope for that Radio Silence adaptation). I will also clarify that I did really enjoy this movie, and for the most part, I’m just being egregiously annoying about the line that haunts me.

I am, unfortunately, the person who gets violently upset when an adaptation doesn’t follow the book/comic exactly. I would like to argue that it’s not because I am a pretentious stickler, but rather a girl who loves her interests dearly and doesn’t want them misinterpreted.

But back to my unnecessary complaint.

What I will say is that I appreciate the lengthening of the argument Nick and Charlie have in Heartstopper Forever. They have the fight—if you can even call it that—I spoke of above, and then another where they actually break up. In between the two, their relationship is OK, but we see the quiet unraveling of both Charlie and Nick’s mental states. That band is snapping!

The introduction of a doubt being momentarily paused because things are fine, and then the trigger of that doubt being set off again into a full-on spiral is relatable. How many times have you pushed away your feelings because you don’t want something to change? Right.

Their second “fight” (because, again, neither of these hard convos really feel like fights to me—more so misunderstandings) zooms in more on Charlie’s feelings about being abandoned. He says a spiel bar for bar from the novella about how he “just want[s Nick] to be happy.” Nick gets angry because he interprets this as Charlie wanting to break up:

Give Joe Locke the Emmy, I am so fucking serious.

L’amour de ma vie

As I said, I love the lengthening of the argument between Nick and Charlie that leads to their halfhearted breakup. I appreciate the film’s ability to flesh out Nick’s emotional repression that was being developed in the later seasons of the show, and I like that he is the drunk one instead of Charlie.

In the web comic (sorry for citing 3 different sources to you; please tell me you’re keeping up), Nick is the one getting drunk, but it’s not set off by David. It just happens kind of steadily as he buys drinks for the people around him as Charlie performs. What’s interesting, though, is that what makes him emotional here is a mix of Tao and Elle breaking up before his eyes and some randos (one of which later flirts with Charlie) asking Nick if he feels “inexperienced” because he and Charlie have been together for so long. (I’m honestly glad that bit was cut because it just pisses me off!)

When he finds Charlie being flirted with, Nick is still angry, but afterward immediately apologizes. They get driven home by Tara and Darcy, not David. (I could write an entire other Substack post about the removal of the girls’ plots in the movie, so that issue of mine is for another day…soon…)

In the web comic, there is no additional talk where they actually break up. There’s scatterings of “we need to communicate” in many a conversation, but they work it out together. In regard to Nick and Charlie being 17 and 16 (I think? Check me on that), I do believe the movie is a stronger adaptation.

We must remember they are in high school! Of course there’s going to be tough talks, and things might get a little too heated, but in the end, when they have the space to really think about how they feel for each other, they’ll be able to see what they really want/need from their relationship.

In all versions, what Nick and Charlie really want is each other.

While I wanted Nick to be the one initiating their reunion, I loved the incorporation of Charlie leaving the photos Nick took with the message nearly exact to the novella’s.

And I loved that said reunion was at the beach where they went on their first date. I actually felt sick to my stomach when “At the Beach, in Every Life” started playing because ouch! That was a personal offense.

As you can see here, I ate up how cheesy and comforting Heartstopper Forever was. (I also cried… so much… because I saw my own relationship so much in theirs that it made me feel ill, genuinely, but I was mostly filled with good feelings through it all.)

So, then, you might be wondering why I even wanted to write this in the first place. Well…

Don’t call me mate

You might think this is a throwaway line planted in an argument between two guys that love each other more than they can really express out loud. And sure. Maybe. But I truly beg to differ.

While contextually the scene in which “Don’t call me mate” is said is extremely exaggerated in the novella, I believe the line—and surrounding dialogue—as it stands is of utmost importance.

When they first got together, Nick and Charlie were keeping their relationship a secret for a while as Nick had his proper full-on gay crisis. After they told their family and friends, they’d jokingly call each other “mate” to poke fun at that previous stressor.

So, when Nick and Charlie have this huge fight about 2 years into their relationship, and Nick calls Charlie “mate” in an unintentional slip of the tongue because he’s angry, it’s going to get under Charlie’s skin.

As I said, they kept their relationship a secret because Nick was working through his sexuality, and Charlie was willing to wait a bit. However, before Nick, Charlie was keeping his toxic relationship with B*n a secret, too. This was because B*n was an asshole, and while Nick is not an asshole, the secret nature of it all is going to make Charlie feel a certain type of way.

I loved the show’s addition of Nick’s big speech (that I can quote word for word) at the end of season one because it truly showcases how easy it was for him to show Charlie that he’s wanted. That Nick wants to show people how much he likes him outside of closed doors.

Two years down the line, that easy communication is at a stalemate because of all the reasons I said at the beginning of this, and so, tension heightens. I hope this doesn’t come across as me saying Charlie needs constant reassurance or anything like that because I strongly do not believe that to be the case, but I just want to make sure I’m contextualizing the trauma he has from B*n.

So, nearly two years later, while Nick is struggling with figuring out his feelings, Charlie is struggling because he doesn’t know how to help—and because he feels guilty for being the one that needed help for so long in their relationship.

I loved the conversation they had about these feelings! When Charlie expressed that guilt for essentially being a burden onto Nick when they first got together, and Nick told him not to think that way because he didn’t even know he was feeling off with his own mental health until now, I snapped a video of the clip and myself crying to it and sent it to my girlfriend with the caption “oh my god it’s us.”

It felt so validating to see both sides when for so long I’ve been feeling a similar burdensome guilt as Charlie.

I skipped ahead and made it about myself, so, anyway, their communication is dissolving. Joe and Kit do an amazing job at conveying the difference between the words Nick and Charlie actually say to each other versus their physical reactions, especially in that second party “fight.” Again, give Joe Locke the Emmy right now.

However, that first fight fell short for me.

Nick’s heated comments died out so quickly, and Charlie didn’t really even get the space to be upset about the way he acted. I wanted to be stabbed in the chest while watching. I wanted oomph. I wanted ouch!

I wanted “Don’t call me mate.”

I think that, while Nick and Charlie were walking inside and witnessing Elle and Tao argue, things should have heated up. I don’t think any of Nick’s comments about the guy flirting with Charlie needed to continue, but I would have liked some passive comment (from either of them) to get supercharged into something more severe.

Maybe Charlie gets upset that Nick says it’s “different” when a girl flirts with him (because what the fuck does that mean), or something like it, and it leads into Charlie asking Nick what the hell is wrong with him. Cue: “Mate, what the fuck am I being like?”

Cue: “Don’t call me mate. You never call me mate.”

I’d even be fine if they still went home together as they do in the web comic/movie! All I’m asking for is some more angst. And to that: angst that means something.

“You never call me mate” is the kind of line people are found dead on the street for. Because we know that Nick and Charlie called each other “mate” to poke fun at a difficult era, Nick using “mate” on Charlie in all seriousness cuts deep.

As I said, Charlie had been kept a secret before Nick came along and showed him he was worth loving publicly. So, obviously, Nick saying “mate” as he would to his other friends is going to make Charlie a little triggered. Shots fired, seriously.

Them not calling each other mate is the whole point! Because they’re in love! And they don’t have to hide it anymore!

When “You never call me mate” comes into play, the jolly record of their time together scratches. One simple phrase is evocative of their entire relationship. Said normally, it just feels like an “oh we’re boyfriends, so why would I be your mate?” type of thing. Said in defense like Charlie does here, it’s more of “Why would you call me mate when we’ve been in love for two years? Am I just a friend to you? Is that why we’ve stopped communicating?”

I’m definitely projecting my own anxiety onto Charlie right now, but I hope you see what I mean.

The worst part of the phrase is that Nick doesn’t even realize he said it until he does. It’s subconscious, just the same as his true feelings have been coming out around the time he said it. He doesn’t feel angry, but he’s getting into fights during rugby games. He doesn’t feel sad, but he tells Charlie that the only time he knows he’s happy is when they’re together.

“You never call me mate” is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, truly.

Now we know that their dwindling communication has reached the end of the line, and they can no longer ignore the tension seeping through on both ends.

Obviously, the film is already out, and no one really gives a fuck about why I’m upset about the removal of a couple of lines of dialogue, but I had to speak my mind. Besides Heartstopper Forever being unwilling to deepen the wound inflicted on me 5 years ago, the movie was pretty freakin’ good.

…

You can buy me a coffee if you want to support this page.

TV

1. Love Island

My friend Ava queerbaited me into watching this show (cough cough Zryce) and I ended up binging the first ten or so episodes during a crazy thunderstorm. Since then, I have been tuning in every night.

I now think Zach is evil, but Bryce and Trinity are still my endgame. Them and Carniya (Carl and Aniya) need to win ASAP.

(Love Island was my intro to reality TV, and while I have been angry most of the time I clock in for my shift at the villa, I am also much too invested to stop.)

2. Glee (rewatch)

My girlfriend’s sister (30) is watching Glee for the first time, so of course I have to be there. We got through season one, and are just starting season 2. While it is highly, highly offensive, it truly is the show of all time.

Read more

**So while you read this mental health exploration, make sure you’re wishing Adam happy birthday. Quietly :))

When I read Blue Lily, Lily Blue during winter break of my senior year of high school, I had absolutely no idea how much the simple line at the beginning of chapter two would stick with me. How often the phrase “Adam Parrish was not always alone, but he was always lonesome” would drift through my mind, making me think, Yeah. Exactly. He gets me.

Because we’re all a little lonesome, aren’t we?

While my social anxiety keeps me from interacting with about 75% of the people I see daily, I do have friends. Seven of them, if we’re doing numbers, that I would suit up for battle for, no questions asked. I like to think I’m unknowable, but the reality is they get me. They know me.

So, why do I still feel so unknown?

This lonesome-ness of Adam Parrish is attributed to the fact that he sacrificed himself to a sentient forest (ah, literature), but it is undeniably relatable to me as a twenty-year-old college student.

Without further ado, please enjoy my (second) comparative analysis regarding Adam Parrish.

Etymology was lonesome

The word “lonesome” originated in the 1640s, but its etymology stems all the way back to the 1300s.

In removing the “a” from “alone,” the word “lone” came to describe the state of being alone. It was a person or thing without company in the 14th century. The prefix “-some” stands for “tending to.” So, “lonesome,” as defined by etymoline, is an adjective used for someone who tends to be alone. The lone wolf, etc.

Loneliness—where we get our original root word “lone” from, of course—is a feeling of disconnection. It’s the gap between desire and experience. The want of something without the thing being present.

Lonesomeness cuts a little deeper. It’s the feeling of being alone without resolution. Loneliness can be cured—momentarily, temporarily, or permanently—by the connection you’re seeking. A night out with friends. A coffee date and catch-up.

Lonesomeness, though, is defeat. To feel lonesome, you have to acknowledge that the disconnect you feel isn’t curable. You must accept that even if you aren’t alone, you are fundamentally, unchangeably lonesome.

Adam Parrish, Army of One

Maggie Stiefvator turned the concept of lonesomeness into the fleshed-out character of Adam Parrish. I honestly think that when she wrote Blue Lily, Lily Blue back in 2013, she pulled him out of my head (I was only 8 years old).

Adam attends Aglionby Academy, a rich prep school, on an academic scholarship. Surrounded by a bunch of born-rich guys like Gansey and Ronan, Adam feels less-than because of his poverty. He lives in a trailer park with his mother and abusive father, and has 3 jobs to make enough cash to pay for the rest of his pricey tuition. His uniforms are used and tattered, his pride is egregious, and his drive for success is admirable.

I should have given context before jumping in, but Blue Lily, Lily Blue is the third book in The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvator. Adam is friends with Ronan and Gansey before the events of the first novel begin, and while Adam knows about Gansey’s desire to find a dead Welsh king, it’s been more of a passion project than a high priority. However, in comes Blue, and now the Aglionby boys are involved with psychics, ley lines, and a sentient forest.

For the entire first novel, Adam and Gansey are arguing because of money. Long story short, they’re both jealous of each other: Adam of Gansey’s wealth and ease of living; Gansey of Adam’s down-to-earthness because he feels his upbringing made him superficial. Their complicated relationship only grows throughout the series, of course, but it’s important to note that it travels through a spectrum of sibling-esque squabbling, platonic soulmatism, and near-blatant homoeroticism.

You might be thinking, Hey, what does Adansey being friends, siblings, or lovers have to do with Adam being lonesome? And I’m here to tell you: Everything.

I will be your hands

At the end of The Raven Boys, Adam sacrifices himself to Cabeswater (the sentient forest). Essentially, the ley line needs a sacrifice to wake up. Gansey is adamant to be that sacrifice since it’s his dead Welsh king they’re looking for, but after a gun is pulled out among other wild events, Adam drives to Cabeswater alone and gives himself up to the forest before Gansey can stop him.

Almost.

Gansey catches Adam before he seals the deal, and asks, “Was I so awful?” Adam’s reply is “It was never about you,” but we all know that’s bullshit.

While Adam drives to Cabeswater, he has an entire internal monologue about how he’s sacrificing himself for Gansey, and that in doing so they’ll become “equals.” So, yes, his motivations were almost completely about Gansey.

My point in debriefing all about Adam and Gansey’s relationship is to demonstrate the difference between Adam’s perception of himself and his friends’ perceptions of him.

I am unknowable, Ronan Lynch

Adam believes that the fight he’s fighting is against the rest of the world. He must work for everything he has, earn people’s attention through successes. Be somebody worthy of recognition.

Because of this “performance,” Adam believes he is unknowable.

What everyone else knows, though, is that Adam isn’t really fighting against something bigger: he’s fighting himself. There’s a great line from the sequel series, The Dreamer Trilogy, that sums up Adam’s misconceptions perfectly:

He holds himself to such a high standard, compares himself to all the boys around him born with no struggle, that he can’t settle for anything less than perfection.

Such a standard comes with a high amount of pride. Adam refuses help from others monetarily, denying any offer from Gansey outright, no matter how small. He’s an “army of one,” needing to prove himself—and needing to show that he can work himself up from nothing. Alone, because he refuses to admit he feels less-than. His struggles play out in the dark, unseen by the ones that praise him.

And yet, Gansey is jealous of Adam. Food for thought.

Adam Parrish was lonesome

This faux unknowableness becomes even more prominent after Adam’s sacrifice. Now, he is not only distanced mentally from his friends because of the way he holds himself, but distanced physically because of the forest possessing him.

Even when he’s physically with his friends, he is mentally distant from them. He loses his urge to fight with Gansey, and slips into a nothingness of emotion because he’s convinced it’s easier for everyone else around him.

Adam finds comfort slipping into the shadow of Cabeswater because it lets him escape from his own mind. Because, if he’s a messenger for a sentient forest, how important is his own blue-collar, toilsome life, really?

His avoidance catches up with him in the form of his father.

In the first book, Ronan ends up getting jail time for beating up Adam’s dad after he struck his son so hard he went deaf in one ear. This leads to Adam pressing charges against his father for abuse and moving out.

On the day of the trial, Adam goes alone, but promptly wishes he hadn’t. Upon seeing his father, he thinks:

When Gansey and Ronan end up coming—because of course they do—Adam is both happy and humiliated because he’d been too proud to ask them in the first place. While the complicated relationship between Gansey and Adam isn’t resolved completely, Adam does concede somewhat:

Adam’s battle with himself is far from done, but here in Blue Lily, Lily Blue, Adam’s arc of realizing his claim of unknowableness was utter bullshit concludes.

Involving myself

Every part of Adam’s character speaks to me, but I think, of all the quotes I quote so often either in my own head or impulsively text my friends slash say out loud to them, is “Adam Parrish was lonesome.”

I think I’ve always felt alone when it comes to friendships because of the sheer lack of both queer and neurodivergent people in my hometown.

I went to private Catholic school, and was then hit with the coronavirus my 8th grade graduation into freshman year of high school. While I didn’t recognize my queerness in middle school, I felt the way it was pushing me further into myself rather than towards the people surrounding me. I didn’t care about the shows my friends were watching (Friends, Victorious, etc.) because I was busy rewatching Voltron and convincing myself (after spending hundreds of hours fixating on My Babysitter’s a Vampire) that I could become a vampire if I believed hard enough. I remember, in sixth grade, I did a YouTube ritual (water, a bracelet, Latin) to become a mermaid.

In sum: I was weird. I’m a weirdo. I didn’t fit in.

Playing volleyball and running cross country really worked overtime to connect me to my classmates. Without that team-bonding, I’m not sure I would have been hanging out with many people who were real and not from my own imagination.

Freshman year, during the quarantine, I made some easy friends through playing volleyball with our faces covered, but as the years went on, I realized that, while those friends wanted to drink and hang out with guys, I wanted to stay in my room and write fanfiction.

Freshman to junior year was rough for this reason because I not only figured out my sexuality, but also had to grapple with the fact that two of my closest friends weren’t the kind of people I thought they were. When I later found out that they were both supporting Trump in the 2024 election, I simultaneously had to hold back vomit and cheer for getting away from all of that.

Junior year, I made some great friendships through my job as a lifeguard—most of whom I still talk to today. Senior year, I started dating my now-girlfriend, which meant I got to hang around her friends, who were much nicer than my previous ones, to put it nicely.

I wrote a six-page love letter to my girlfriend that was basically a comparative analysis between our relationship and Adam and Ronan’s, so we won’t get into that aspect of my lonesomeness. But! Just know that my girlfriend has infiltrated my “unknowable” walls and dismantled my stubborn pride from within.

So, don’t get me wrong—the friends I do have at home are great. I truly appreciate them; I do. But it’s hard for me to connect a lot of the time when they text about their boyfriends and rushing sororities, and I stay at home most nights talking on the phone to my girlfriend.

In college, however, I’ve met the kind of people that get me.

I had the luck of meeting my Core 4 during orientation week, and it was definitely movie-like in the way we all immediately clicked. Ava and I knew each other beforehand because of a prior shared interest in a certain Minecraft SMP. I knew Charlie from an online class we took together over the summer, and Ava went to high school with Robbie. We were all connected by threads of fate, one might say.

I struggled a lot with my mental health throughout freshman year, and I can say with confidence that these friends of mine made it a lot easier to remember that I wasn’t dying—especially when they gave me strange looks after the umpteenth time I checked my pulse in a day. (I’m taking medication for anxiety now. God bless.)

We spent a lot of time together at the beginning of the year, and as that time began to dwindle into just daily dinners or once-a-month outings, I began to realize that I was lonesome.

I didn’t feel alone, obviously, because we were together so often—and even when we were apart, I had other things to do—but I was lonesome.

No matter how many times I told myself I was being dramatic and that I’d see my friends later that night, or the next day, the hole I’d dug myself in got deeper. Being avoidant, I didn’t reach out as much as I could have because I was scared of being rejected. (As if my closest friends would tell me I’m crazy for suggesting we go get a sweet treat together!) I didn’t want to come off as needy, or especially because actually asking for company—for help—would mean that I had to admit something was wrong in the first place.

This hole I’d dug myself in of wanting more and not asking for it led to me pulling away when things got bad. In November, I was so racked with guilt and fear that I nearly broke up with my girlfriend over Thanksgiving break. When I went back to school in December, I had a panic attack so horrible that my friend had to escort me to the ER. (The nurse told me I needed to go to therapy. I left that ER like a kicked dog.)

Over winter break, I watched I Saw the TV Glow and sobbed harder than I ever have for a movie. While I’m not trans, and cannot relate to the experience of trans people, the depiction of Owen ripping open his chest at the end really got me. Health anxiety aside, it felt like a sign that I needed to overcome the fear I had of people getting close to me. Because if I didn’t, it would destroy me from the inside out.

“There is still time” is an unforgettable phrase, truly. I feel like I always complain about not having enough time for anything, and yet, I waste my time by hiding from the people I’m close with. I pretend I don’t care as much as I do because I’m scared of being perceived.

I pretend I’m unknowable because it was easier than admitting I can be known.

After the break, I started therapy. I talked to my friends about my struggles more. I asked for sporadic hangouts just because I could.

During sophomore year, I got closer with three girls in my honors program—close enough that we journeyed to Alyssa’s house in Rhode Island for Easter. They, like my other college friends, get me. I feel comfortable around these six friends in a way I never have before with friendship.

When I actually let myself be known, I’ve found that the feeling of lonesomeness doesn’t happen so often. Of course there are moments of doubt, but I no longer feel so stuck and isolated as I did freshman year.

I have evolved.

Now, though, especially in the summer, I feel the lonesomeness tenfold. My Core 4 are still in Boston, a thousand miles away, which means that I can’t hang out with them whenever I feel like it. I miss Ava’s dorm, where we would spend hours in the same space as each other, doing different hobbies of ours in silence, so dearly. I miss sharing a room with Charlie and all his lights. Sharing a suite with Robbie, our art wall in the space between our doors. Our dinners together. Our outings. Everything.

But I know, come fall, I’ll have that closeness back—which will rid me of my physical loneliness when it comes to my friends—and that makes the time in-between feel much easier to manage.

I’m awake

I think that actually being aware of the fact that I am avoidant of scary situations has made me more inclined to them. The anxiety meds definitely help in that regard, but it’s also the learning I’ve had to do to come to terms with myself.

I don’t want to say I’m confident in who I am and know exactly everything I want in life ever, because that’s not true. However, I have done a lot of thinking for the past two years, and I definitely feel a lot better about stepping into the unknown and relying on the people around me for support when times do get tough.

While my lonesomeness still lingers, and it perhaps always will, I know that I’m not alone. Having such wonderful people around me has made it easier to contain being lonesome into something that happens, sometimes, rather than a thing that is ceaselessly all-consuming.

My journey, like Adam’s, is still a long way from being over. But at least we both know, now, that calling ourselves “unknowable” is a bunch of bullshit.

…

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Well, Piper, of course!

I’ve reread this essay a couple of times since last spring (because it is, in fact, a fire essay), but I never thought much about posting it publicly. However, today I got into an argument with someone in my TikTok comment section about Piper and Jason’s breakup, and I’m annoyed.

They said, and I quote, “the breakup has nothing to do with Piper’s sexuality,” which is simply wrong. So, I commented back, and so on, and now I am blocked. Sorry, but I do not play about my girl, Piper McLean.

So now, without further ado, here’s my awesome essay:

Adrienne Rich, in her theory, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience,” states that “heterosexuality is not ‘normal,’ rather, it is a compulsory form of behavior often imposed in the past on those who do not identify with it” (Rich 925). Its influence on women leads to the dominance of men and the entrapment of queer women. Piper McLean, Greek demigod and daughter of Aphrodite in Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, is one of many women who suffer from the construct of compulsory heterosexuality. Because Piper is of divine descent, her comphet is evident with both her mother being the embodiment of Love—and the standards that come with her relationships—and Hera, goddess of fidelity, imbuing Piper with fake memories of a relationship with the male demigod Jason Grace. In placing Adrienne Rich’s theory “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience” onto Piper McLean, I will examine the social constructs of heterosexuality not just by society, but, in Piper’s case, also through the divine influence of Hera and Aphrodite.

At the beginning of The Lost Hero, Jason Grace—Piper’s ‘boyfriend’—wakes up on a school bus without his memory. He questions who he is, where they are, and why Piper is holding his hand. She tells him they’ve been dating for quite a while now, and how he could not remember? Jason is, to put it simply, very confused. By the end of the novel, Piper finds out that she and Jason never dated at all, and that the memories put into her head were fake, godly inventions. Jason’s loss of memory was necessary for the completion of their quest (long story short: remembering his Roman past would prohibit their Greek mission), but Piper’s really only serves as a plot device for him to succeed. Since these memories are attached to feelings that seem genuine, Piper not only trusts Jason, but he trusts her as well. It is these fake memories that then begin their ‘real’ relationship, as Piper and Jason date throughout the rest of this five-book series. But why Piper and Jason? Why must Jason’s collaboration in the quest be drawn from a girl’s romantic feelings? Why couldn’t he be set up with their other quest goer, Leo Valdez? There really isn’t a reason for the pairing other than the establishment of heteronormativity, and it only adds to Piper’s comphet.

All of these feelings Piper had and developed while in this relationship with Jason are based on something untrue—something that was placed upon her by Hera. These alleged memories then pressure Piper into performing a certain way. Not to mention the fact that her mother is Aphrodite! Piper’s mother pushes her to have this perfect romance with a boy as handsome as Jason Grace, saying that her daughter Piper can “see possibilities more vividly than others” (The Lost Hero 429). The blind seer trope common in myths like Oedipus doesn’t go unnoticed here: ironically, Aphrodite muses this because Piper’s mind is being clouded by what other people want her possibilities to be—not what she, herself, sees. It’s these two pressures working side by side that force Piper into a heterosexual box. She has what Rich calls an “idealization of heterosexual romance” because of Aphrodite and feels, because of the pseudo memories created by Hera, that “marriage and sexual orientation toward men are inevitable” (Rich 931). Because this is the system she has operated in for so long, she doesn’t really question it—especially because there is not much time to question it because of the deadly quest she is on— and remains confused about her own feelings.

After the quest to save the world is finished, “the moment [Piper] actually had some time to breathe,” she had time to reflect on her feelings and question if how she felt toward Jason was really love or just the manifestation of these ideals pressed upon her (The Burning Maze 122). She breaks up with Jason. While she knows something is wrong, she isn’t sure what exactly it is or how she is supposed to feel, like many “who are [comphet’s] most obvious victims [are] also not be able to name or define their experience” (Rich 934). When Apollo asks Piper about Jason, he is shocked to hear they broke up, and Piper, still figuring herself out, gets upset, telling Apollo, “Things change. People change” (The Burning Maze 122). We find out later in the book that Piper realized “Jason Grace was not someone she wanted to be with romantically,” and that admitting that to herself was a complicated process because of who she thought she was supposed to be, and then wasn’t (253). The memories Hera put inside of her confused her, and the standards her mom held for all her children were a heavy weight. Piper, like many lesbians, struggled with the common ideology that only heterosexual relationships were normal and accepted. Even as a demigod, she’s heard all the Greek hero myths, that only enforce the societal conception of enforcing “women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty, and subservience to men” (Rich 930). Obviously in Piper’s case it is not so dominating, but still, she feels connected to Jason and pressured by those around her to be loyal to him. She thinks their heteronormative romance is something she should want and thus convinces herself she wants it. “Aphrodite pushed me into thinking I was…that I needed to…” Piper tells Apollo, “But what if I’m not any of the things I’ve been told I am?” (258). Only after she fully recognizes these constructs placed onto her can she discover her true self, not weighed down by anyone else’s perceptions of her sexuality. Her decision to break up with Jason was not only brave, but extremely important. She chose to go against conventional norms. She chose to be herself.

However, her self-discovery gets momentarily suspended by the unfortunate death of Jason. While they were broken up at this time, they remained in a complicated friendship, and because Piper still cared deeply for him, him being killed in front of her cut pretty deep. It also left some feelings and discussions unresolved. Although Piper no longer loved him, there was still a lot she wanted to say to him. Because they had dated, he knew her more than she knew herself in some ways, but that side of Piper in a relationship was now gone forever. Without Jason there, however, she no longer felt so attached and obligated to be close with a man. Like many women under compulsory heterosexuality, she felt like she needed to be “a heterosexual woman in terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of ‘real’ women” (Rich 932). Without Jason there, she starts to let herself lose, stepping into the person she wants to be more fully than she had before by cutting her hair shorter and wearing more masculine clothes. She finds herself in dreary circumstances and manages to make the best of it, no longer “defined by Aphrodite’s expectations” (The Tower of Nero 197).

The last we see of Piper is at the end of The Sun and the Star, where she talks to Nico di Angelo, a gay son of Hades, about the process of finding her queer identity. Nico calls her after a quest through Tartarus with his boyfriend, and he and Piper, the only queer main characters in Heroes of Olympus, bond over this shared identity. Piper tells him that being with her new girlfriend, Shel, is “really freeing” (The Sun and the Star 457). She then goes on to tell Nico about how it’s been a “hard time having to accept that [she’s] something else” other than those memories Hera gave her and her mother’s standards (457). She’d been under the impression so long that “women or girls cannot change the conditions of their existence,” and had to learn against it (Rich 933). Piper broke out of the box she’d been put in throughout the time of the quest.

Rich closes by saying that “Heterosexuality may not be a ‘preference’ at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force,” and that recognizing it “is an immense step to take if you consider yourself freely and ‘innately’ heterosexual” (936). Piper, with time, did just that. Her discovery of identity is still ongoing—since she has a lot to figure out, and a lot to grieve about with Jason—but she recognized that who she was was a lie and is actively working to change it. Nico finishes their call by giving Piper some fabulous words of advice about her sexuality, telling her that:

Piper jokes that the next time her dad asks about her relationship, she will tell him “Well, father, I am a big ole queer mess” (The Sun and the Star 458). Like many entrapped by our heteronormative society, Piper is confused about who she really is, and she will be for some time. The restrictions placed on women—the perceived feelings and loyalty they are expected to have toward men—are not so easily overcome. Even with the knowledge that Hera’s memories were fake, the feelings feel real, even manifested further by who her mother wants her to be. Piper will find herself eventually, but for now, she has taken the first step: recognizing the system as not a “preference” but something “imposed.”

Banger essay, am I right? Yeahhh, I got an A. No biggie.

Anyway, I just needed to shout from the rooftops how much I love Piper McLean, and how much her experience with queerness means to me.

The next time someone is in my TikTok comments speaking ill of my girl’s name, I will be sending them this Substack post, so everyone please point and laugh.

In the meantime, I will be hoping and praying Rick collaborates with a queer Cherokee author to write a Piper book. I’ll beg on my knees if I have to.

‭Sources

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience.”‬‭ Literary Theory: An‬‭ Anthology‬‭ , by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.‬

‭Riordan, Rick.‬‭ The Burning Maze‬‭ . Disney-Hyperion Books, 1 May 2018.‬

‭—.‬‭ The Lost Hero‬‭ . Disney-Hyperion Books, 12 Oct. 2010.‬

‭—.‬‭ The Tower of Nero‬‭ . Disney-Hyperion Books, 6 Oct. 2020.‬

‭Riordan, Rick, and Mark Oshiro.‬‭ The Sun and the Star‬‭ . Disney-Hyperion Books, 2 May 2023.‬

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Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Overall, I think it was a good conclusion to a conceptually phenomenal show. I don’t really like Jax (more on this later), but the sequence where Pomni was inside the abstraction, opening the doors, was fire as hell. Additionally, I did cry at the end when I saw Jax, Ribbit, and Kaufmo swimming together. Man whatever.

In whole, the finale was definitely a little too quick-paced, which I’ll get to later, but the inclusion of Ribbit made it more palatable for me. I can safely say I’ve been a fan since the pilot because of her cute door picture. As the show developed, and we saw how she was severely affecting Jax’s psyche, I grew to love her more. I freaked out hysterically in episode 7 with the snowglobe scene, and when I saw Ribbit in the trailer for the finale, I nearly passed out.

She was brilliant in the finale. No notes other than FREAK YOU, JAX, for contributing to her abstraction because of your own insecurities. Give me a Ribbit spinoff now (this is not happening).

All those positives being said, I, of course, have my critiques of the show in general.

Main Character: Jax or Pomni?

As the show went on, it seemed more and more like Jax was becoming the main character. Whether it was through promotional material or actual screen time in the show, I just feel like I was seeing more of Jax’s face than Pomni’s. This would be fine… if Pomni wasn’t established to be the main character on day one. She was the catalyst for all events we, the viewers, saw. We experienced entry into the world through Pomni, and we figured out what was going on with Pomni.

I have my own opinions about Jax (negative), but there are obviously some reasons for his being an asshole that I have not experienced/don’t understand, so I don’t want to discount that. All I will say is that it’s OK to be trans, but it is not OK to be an asshole to everyone around you!

(Just a quick note on the abstraction scene: I wish Ribbit and Pomni had merged in Jax’s head. He’s obviously taken by her because she resembles his two best friends and perseveres to get close to him when he pushes everyone else—like Ribbit—away. I wish I could have seen his memories merge into both of them and really put those similarities out in the open. Maybe they could even taunt him like the locket in Deathly Hallows.)

So we beat on…

I had seen theories about the Pantheon-like digital cloning of the characters, so that wasn’t a shock to me (more of a shock was that they actually cast people to play the humans!). What did shock me, however, was that Pomni was also a digital clone. As I said above, she’s the main character and catalyst, so I thought there would be something extra to her character. She explored abandoned buildings, so maybe getting into the Circus was an accident? I’d seen theories of her body rotting outside the circus, and as much as I don’t want her dead, that would make more sense to me than her being just like everyone else. I know that the others came at different times, too, but it just felt like Pomni was new and different for a reason.

Especially because Pomni came in right when Kaufmo was abstracting, wearing a clown attire like his, I would think she’s a system glitch. A misplaced data point—not just another Circus-goer.

Maybe I’m being biased since I really love Pomni and would love it if she were not like other girls, but I do think my catalytic point stands.

Additionally, I did not like that it wasn’t explained how their brain scans were received.

My friends made a theory about all the characters being connected to abandoned buildings that I love, but I’m still confused about the physical brain scans. Were they all in some serious accident that ended in MRIs? Were those MRIs then stolen from the hospital? I mean, who even are C+A? We know Kinger is connected to them–but how much? Human Kinger looked happy and healthy, unaffected by said company, so wouldn’t they have killed him if he was a real threat? Did he lose his memory? Did all of them lose their memories once the brain scan was done? And why did they show Scratch’s full name? Was I supposed to know who he was? The whole thing just felt so quickly wrapped up. So many plot holes left to discuss.

I believe

I’m sorry, but if I found out I was a digital replica of a human’s mind — that I didn’t even exist and could never leave that fucking circus — I would freak out. I would probably abstract. I would not go through a silly montage of acceptance where I made my prison cell a home.

I don’t know… their reactions just felt so wrong to me. Especially when all that happened pretty soon after Jax abstracted. I know we don’t fuck with him, but y’all were close. How are we just moving on?

Maybe this is because they aren’t real, but even then, they’re still scanned into experiencing what they think are human emotions. I just feel like their reactions to a forever-prison should have been bigger.

I would have liked another goodbye between Jax and everyone when they put him in the fish tank with other abstractions. This could have been a good way to convey grief while still moving forward within the circus.

I didn’t order a Nothingburger

Let’s be honest, some of the TADC episodes were buns.

I’ve been on this train since the pilot (I was in the indie animation scene as a Helluva Boss fan), so I waited three years for this finale. Obviously, animation takes a long ass time, so what I’m saying here isn’t about the time it took to make that art; I’m critiquing the writing. I get that the point, like many other indie horrors, is to show something childlike and then unearth the dark secrets underneath. Like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared or Welcome Home, we have this childish setting with layers of wrongness underneath. Pomni plays along with Caine’s adventures, but we see very clearly that there’s something wrong here.

So, when episodes like 2, 4, and 8 just kind of… exist, it’s going to piss me off. Granted, we do get lore drops like the NPCs and Gangle’s past, and in episode 8, Caine dies, which is obviously a huge plot twist. I get having a slow opening so that the ending is more impactful, but it just annoyed me. I don’t need to be uncovering lore the whole time, but please make it interesting.

Episodes 2 and 4 both cover something I don’t care about. Why should I care about a candy race when there are NPCs below the surface? Why should I care about fast food when there are no tangible stakes for me to decipher? I like episode 3 because of all the Kinger lore we get, and the mansion having a literal angel is super cool as well.

Episode 5 has a bunch of different adventures, and yet, each one serves as lore for different characters (President-Pomni, Anime-Gangle, Baseball-Ragatha+Jax, Bar-Everyone). I’m not bored watching it because it’s not only fulfilling my ADHD requirement of constantly shifting focus, but also I’m pulled in by the things being revealed in such a casual manner.

I just wish that there was more of a focus on the characters than the adventures sometimes—as much as Caine tries to impress with them.

Caine, no Abel

I love how nothing was explicit about this character. Thank god (/sarcastic).

I did love his Truman Show exit because the animation was INCREDIBLE, but I have yet to understand what actually happened. I thought he was gaining sentience, but I’m not entirely sure now. Was letting go of Abel what he needed to lose power and level himself out? To make him more human, so to speak. But, then again, he couldn’t break the invisible walls without him, so I’m confused on what that power dynamic means if so.

I feel like he was overriding code because of the way the animation cuts to the dots, but I just don’t understand what it means. I love a good AI sentience trope (shoutout Coldwire), but after the fact, Caine didn’t really change much. I’m not sure what I was supposed to get from it.

My Certified Conclusion

Overall, I do think the show was good. From the beginning, it established itself as something extremely timely–more so than we’d first realize. I love its references to I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and Pomni is definitely one of my favorite animated characters ever. I would cosplay her if I ever started cosplaying.

While I had my quarrels with the ambiguity, I do think The Amazing Digital Circus did something great. I very much enjoyed waiting for and watching the episodes come out.

I feel kind of dumb complaining about all of this because maybe I missed the point, so if you feel passionate about answering the questions I posed above, please feel free to comment more about it. I would love to know what other people are thinking!

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I cannot count how many times my friends have sent me images of Spider-Man merch or TikToks with the simple caption “thinking of you.” While I know they associate me so heavily with Spider-Man because I have mentioned my love for the movies/comics/characters a thousand times, this small act of recognition never fails to make my chest warm.

You can’t see me, but just know I’m literally wearing a Spider-Man tee as I write this.

But I have to wonder… why am I so drawn to Spider-Man? Why is anyone?

I feel like the two classic heroes that everyone loves are Spider-Man and Batman. Batman, because he’s simultaneously a suave vigilante and a floundering father, and Spider-Man because he’s… relatable?

Being bitten by a radioactive spider isn’t relatable, of course, but how Peter deals with it is.

Peter Parker is the epitome of Golden Boy.

We root for him because he’s just a teen who wants to get the girl. While his obstacles aren’t the typical dumb, tumultuous struggles of a regular high schooler, the “miscommunication” that comes with his superhero identity is something we can connect with. In high school, we’re all trying to figure out who we are—which, sometimes, comes with lying, even if unintentional.

As viewers looking in, we see how big a heart Peter has, and because we, too, want to balance struggle with success, we root for Peter to both save the day and get the girl.

I know I personally want to be Spider-Man (Ghost-Spider, if we’re getting into semantics), and because Peter is just this Boyloser™ transformed into a world savior, it feels possible that I could become a superhero, too.

Mostly, when I say this, I’m regarding a younger me more full of unrealistic whimsy, but even now, as I’m watching The Amazing Spider-Man, I feel that familiar optimistic delusion. I feel that, tomorrow, I might just wake up with webs coming out of my wrists. If I press my hand against a building, I might just stick to it. God, what I would give to swing from the skyscrapers of a city with no inhibitions.

In the Spider-Verse movies, Miles says, “Anyone can wear the mask.” He means it metaphorically—that we can all stand up for what’s right—but I’m taking it literally.

So, without further ado, let’s look at the qualifications of what it takes for me to become the next Spider-Man.

1. Be smart

While I do not have a PhD in biochemistry/biophysics (depending on what story we’re looking at) from an(made-up) Ivy League institution, I like to think I’m smart.

Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland’s Peters create their own webs, which is something I would not be able to figure out. As much as I love learning science, I am not confident in my ability to perform science. AP Chemistry really defeated my ego in that regard.

Miles, however, is “smart” in his artistic ability, which I like to think is where I fall as well. In the Spider-Verse movies, he’s en route to Princeton for physics, which we’re ignoring for this point, but he’s also an artist. This is true in the movies and comics, and in the video game, Miles is super into music. This is true for Gwen as well, at least in the movies. In the comics, she usually ends up doing some kind of biochemistry.

Once again, I do not have a PhD in biochemistry. However, I did take a shit-ton of AP classes in high school and graduated with high honors. Now, I’m in the honors program at my college with a 3.98 GPA, so I’d like to say I’m “smart.”

A smarty pants, if you will.

Also, Peter is a NERD. Which is something I 100% am (I say with comics and collectibles up my ass).

2. Yearn for a girl

Spider-Man is really just a boy when it comes down to it.

With MJ (Dunst), you have the classic tale of Girl Next Door turned Crush, bundled up with the secret identity trope. With Gwen (Stone), there’s forbidden-ish romance and tragic young love. With Felicia (comics/game), there’s tension and complicated feelings. And on and on.

Peter wants to have his cake and eat it, too (read: be a superhero and get the girl), but it’s always more complicated than that.

For me, it is not, in fact, more complicated.

I didn’t have to hide my feelings for my now-girlfriend because I was fighting Green Goblin. No, I simply hid them because I was an idiot. I liked her for almost a year before we got together (and she liked me even longer :3).

I think that qualifies as yearning.

3. Dead parent(s)

In all versions of Peter Parker, his parents die in a plane crash. Sometimes they’re spies, sometimes scientists, but what matters is that they die.

In Across the Spider-Verse, Miles finds out his dad is supposed to die. While we don’t see his dad die in that film, it’s unclear if he will die in the third installation, Beyond the Spider-Verse. As a comic reader, I can tell you that his mom dies during a battle with Venom, but I’m not sure how canonically they’re making the Miles movies with the comics.

Gwen(as in Spider-Gwen from the comics or ATSV, not Emma Stone)’s mother dies when she’s young. We’re not going down the list of Spider-people, but all of them are either orphans or have gone through the death of one of their parents.

I meet this qualification. Next question.

4. Get bitten by a radioactive spider

This is the hardest one to accomplish.

Depending on the tale, the spider is radioactive because of a particle accelerator accident, genetic tampering, multiversal travel, or other reasons I cannot think of. For whatever reason, it stumbles upon Peter and bites.

The transformation that leads to Spidey Senses ensues, and then Spider-Man is born! Easy peasy. Except for the fact that I don’t know where to get my very own radioactive spider.

I think I have Spidey Senses, though. Maybe not the super-powerful ones that Peter, Miles, Gwen, etc. have, but my anxiety gives me a level of hypervigilance that would be shocking to normal people. Even though I’m more clumsy than not, I have the reaction speed of The Flash, and my neck hairs always prickle when a stranger walks into the room.

You call it anxiety; I call it Spidey Senses.

5. With great power…

I have not inadvertently caused the death of any of my great-uncles—and I don’t plan to, obviously—but the lesson Peter learns from such is one I’ve definitely learned.

I think my responsibility came to me in more of a Miles way of the whole world yelling at me to accept something, and me being too stubborn to accept it. A lot of my problems come from stubbornness, actually, if you can believe it.

But responsibility comes with growing up. Accepting yourself. Accepting that the world isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, and that sometimes—most of the time—it sucks.

6. Be sarcastic

Who doesn’t love a witty comeback? I know Peter loves one, especially Andrew Garfield’s version.

I like to think I’m a funny guy. My girlfriend mostly rolls her eyes at me when I say something meant to be funny, but I get the occasional laugh that feels like a standing ovation from a full theater at my stand-up performance. My friends laugh at me, too, but what’s more important than either of those things is that I make myself laugh.

Whether it’s in character dialogue that I write or just a thought in my head, I definitely giggle in a silent space often.

My comebacks might come off more mean-spirited than sarcastic sometimes, but I think I have the spirit.

7. Be canon

This isn’t an actual qualification, and while most of these are jokes, I added number 7 so that I would have 7. 6 isn’t a good number, but 7 is, and I’ll stand by that.

Let’s take a moment here to remember how popular Miguel’s theme was in the summer of 2023. How wonderful Across the Spider-Verse was. My girlfriend, who was not my girlfriend at the time, actually fell asleep during this movie. Please be mean to her in the comments for that sin.

Anyway, I can confidently assure you I am not an anomaly (or am I…) and that I would not be gaslit by Miguel O’Hara.

In conclusion, Spider-Man is everyone’s favorite for a reason. He’s The Guy™ that everyone wants to be. My icon. My muse. My…

Wait.

Guys, a spider just crawled onto my hand. It’s opening its mouth. IT BIT ME.

Sorry, I can’t talk anymore. I have to go save the city, but I promise to be the friendliest neighborhood Spider-Man you’ve ever seen.

Thank you, universe, you won’t regret this.

Read more

For the past month, I was sending in application after application to coffee shops, retail jobs, and office assistant positions. 90% of the time, I didn’t hear back from the company. I would send a follow-up email or call, and then 50% of the time I wouldn’t hear back after that second attempt. Then, if I did hear back, I was either rejected or asked for an interview. Three times that I interviewed, I was told that they “weren’t hiring seasonal workers,” which is crazy because I put that on my application, so why the hell would you even interview me, then?

In sum: times are tough.

I can say, now, as I write this, that I have a job secured. But boy, did it take a long fucking time.

I know America is going to shit right now because of the president and the unnecessary war defenses and everything else that makes it so goddamn hard to go a day without spending 60 dollars on a tank of gas. However, the more hopeful side of me has wanted to believe that I, a 20-year-old college student, would be able to get a summer job—no problem.

How wrong I was.

My dream goal this summer was to score a paid internship at a Chicago publishing house. I did not get that role, which is okay (and I’m not stressing about it at all!) because I’m currently doing an unpaid internship for a digital publication. Not getting the paid internship, however, meant that I needed an actual job.

The past 3 summers, I worked as a lifeguard at a local pool, and I also lifeguarded during my recent spring semester. You might think, “Hey, that sounds like a great seasonal job to have,” and you’d be right. But the problem is that I’m stubborn, and want to do something else.

(The job I have secured currently is a swim instructor position. You can laugh.)

Last summer, I applied for a promotion that I thought would be guaranteed, given my qualifications. Spoiler: I did not get that promotion! The summer was fine without it because I had the sun, the hours I wanted, and my friends, but I carried resentment with me the whole time, too. I didn’t feel appreciated there for my abilities, and so I decided (stubbornly) not to go back.

I could be a lifeguard elsewhere, but I honestly don’t like lifeguarding that much. In the summer, I liked working with my friends every day. In spring, I got to put on whatever music I liked and stare at a mostly-empty pool for thirty minutes.

It’s just a job to get paid. And while that’s what a summer job is, I don’t think I could stand 3 months of lifeguarding with new people at an unfamiliar place. I would just miss my friends from the past three summers and probably have an existential crisis about how I shouldn’t have resigned (even though I know it was best for me), which would end in me deeming myself an idiot.

So to save myself from that, I applied to different jobs.

Finally landing a job took me an entire month of steadily applying, and another two months before that of researching and reaching out, too.

I would like to formally request, from my very esteemed position of authority, that we fix this issue immediately. If it was hard for me—someone with over 4 years of experience having a job—then how is someone with no experience going to find one?

This is me preaching to the choir right now, which is unneeded, but I had to speak my peace.

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I’m not going to go into the books I’ve been reading, but just know I’ve been reading quite the batch. What I will be doing is musing about how the intimacy of personal connection juxtaposes the great expanse of space.

It doesn’t make sense that an infinite void should be where so much connection is truly found. Shouldn’t the astronaut sent to save the world alone feel completely and utterly isolated from the human race? Why does he instead find companionship, and an alien being he would die for instead? I’m talking about Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary here, but you get the gist.

So many authors use space to tell a story about humanity. Hell, I’ve done it, too. My most recent short story was about an automaton on Venus making friends with a tiny tardigrade. What does that say about me? What does that say about humans?

I think, at a very basic level, we want to be known.

I think sci-fi authors use outer space as a metaphor for that knowable-ness of the individual.

While logically, going past our stratosphere should lead to a feeling of isolation, what happens instead is a branching out of possibilities. Kind of like Manifest Destiny, where Americans went west, we now crave land beyond our Earth. Ad astra, and all that.

(I don’t mean to support any of the careless rich people trying to colonize Mars, the moon, etc., by saying this, because that is just pure greed. People like Elon Musk are using ad astra to privatize space travel and establish the (horrible) American government in places that, according to the Outer Space Treaty, should not be ruled by any one government. Whatever. I’m going on a tangent for something I already wrote about, but I hope you get my point.)

We grew up with bedtime stories and fairytales about the power of wishing on stars. If you see a shooting star, and squeeze your eyes really tight while you repeat your wish over and over again in your head, then just maybe your desires will come true! Like Pinocchio. If you follow the North Star, the second star to the right, you can reach Neverland. You get it.

Stars equal possibility. It’s only reasonable that we long to be among them.

While I personally don’t want to be an astronaut (I would not survive the training even if I wanted to), I can appreciate the beauty of the unknown. I frequent the Hubble Images page and follow a bunch of NASA update accounts on Instagram. I love seeing the cosmos. I love looking at the cosmos.

What a beautiful universe we have to discover.

This feeling of innumerable possibilities rather than seclusion is simply fascinating to me. We yearn for something else out there. We want to know that we’re not the only ones. We wish on the stars for the impossible because, somehow, space debris burning through the atmosphere (read: a shooting star) makes us feel like anything can happen if we believe it so.

Humans have been depending on the stars for years. From the Babylonians’ astral math to the Chinese lunar calendar, we depend on the stars for navigation, telling time, and worship. Puebloans engraved petroglyphs into their doors/windows so their homes followed celestial cycles, and the Pyramids of Giza are aligned with the constellations because Egyptians believed heavenly bodies helped the passage into the afterlife.

Now, we have astrology practices like tarot and horoscopes, but they all stem from the same thing: Humans looking up at the stars for the answers they seek.

So, why not use stars as a map to other worlds, too?

Not to quote Toy Story, but the search for the unknown is, quite literally, emblematic of “To infinity and beyond.”

While it’s isolated, traveling through the cosmos of undefined worlds and alien wonders undeniably leads to connection. Whether that connection be to the universe (spiritual), a deeper understanding of the self (inner), or a literal kinship with another person (mental/physical), it doesn’t matter. A connection will happen to you if you blast off to the stars, whether you like it or not.

The void makes you reflect. Makes you wonder. Makes you find something that you weren’t even aware you were looking for.

And if that’s not something we should all be yearning for, then you can ship me off to Edmunds’ Planet (Interstellar reference, sorry) so I can prove my point.

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Did I finish my internship tasks? No, but writing this is definitely more important.

I entered this marathon in the Eclipse phase, which is fine. I’ve seen them all enough times that I could probably say the lines as the characters speak them. Back when I did Twilight movie marathons (by myself) on the regular (once a month during quarantine), I would always claim Eclipse was my favorite. Now, though, I’m watching it, and it’s, like… fine? I guess? Like, obviously, all of the Twilight movies are terrible. But that “terrible” characteristic is what makes them a-maze-ing.

I mean, seriously, how many times are Bella and Edward going to confess their love to each other in a field? How many times will Bella slice her arm to distract another vampire? How many times will we hear their breaths against each other as they almost-kiss because the microphones are way too fucking close? You see what I mean?

Breaking Dawn hasn’t started yet, but I think part 2 is probably my actual favorite movie of the five. Obviously, the first film, with its blue tint and insane camera work, will always hold a special place in my heart for how cheesy, yet simultaneously compelling, it is. New Moon is good, but I like the Cullens more than the wolf pack. Eclipse, as I just said, is fine, and Breaking Dawn 1 is mostly boring because of the slow lead-in to its arguably more thrilling counterpart.

So yeah, when Bella is a vampire—which is every girl’s dream, of course, and I’m speaking from experience—and finally gets to do the vampire things she’s been wanting to do for the past five movies, it’s pretty freaking awesome. I’m also obsessed with the other vamps with powers (which I still don’t really understand why some vampires get to be supercharged… I know it’s supposed to be whatever you had as a human made stronger, but like, okay? Why can Rami Malek control every environment? How does that even come across as a human?) and the training that ensues in order for Bella to master her shield.

The action-driven narrative with the zenith of Bella and Edward’s romance hits exactly in the way you would expect it to. I wish so badly I had seen this in theaters and been shocked by the Alice vision battle sequence the same way all the OG book readers were.

Anyway, I’m not doing an analysis or anything of the films, but I just needed to ramble about my passion for the Twilight movies. I feel like everyone can relate to the vamp obsession of pre-teen years, and for me in particular, being determined to become a vampire yourself.

I can tell you now that I am not a vampire (or am I?…), but I definitely wish I were. I know I shouldn’t crave to be undead and drink blood, but gee, I dunno, aging is scary. If I were 20 forever, I would be able to do everything I could ever dream of—and look good doing it!

While I feel like every vampire story ever (except for Twilight) is about how you shouldn’t want to be immortal because you’ll lose your humanity and whatnot, I can’t help but look to the Twilight saga for all the reasons why being a vampire rocks. I don’t particularly want to glitter in the sun, but if it means I can be immortal? Fine, I’ll take it. I already get sunburnt all the time anyway, so avoiding the outside world will be a piece of cake.

You might think I’m joking right now, but I’m dead serious. If you did a Matrix-esque red pill blue pill that was “live a long human life and be remembered for your stories” or “become a vampire and live forever doing all the art you could ever want,” I might have to pick the blue pill. That’s such a bad metaphor, but I’m trying to say that I would live in the comfort of immortality because I’m scared of aging and death and not accomplishing all the things I want to accomplish. I would not awaken to the truth that humanity is humanity because it’s short.

In sum: Bella gets me.

Breaking Dawn is now playing, and Bella’s theme just played in the background. I’m remembering now that I learned this song on piano, and I could very well play it for you right now if you asked me, too. Just from memory.

Twilight seriously affected my brain development. These books/movies, alongside My Babysitter’s a Vampire, The Vampire Diaries, and Shadowhunters, made me crave being in a coven of the undead. I like to imagine myself as a cool vamp that wears a leather jacket, but I think in reality, I would either die from the bite or freak out immediately upon it happening, which would then ruin the entire “cool” experience.

Recently, I watched Interview with a Vampire, and that 100% reignited the vampire fangirl inside of me. Now, as I sit here typing up a long-ass, unneeded ramble about Twilight, I can say in confidence that I do believe, once more, that I could pull off being a vampire. Even though I just said it probably wouldn’t end well, I just want to affirm that I can do it. Guys, I swear. I’m so strong and scary.

Alright, well, they just got married, so now it’s going to be a two-hour yawn-fest, so I’m going to run laps so I can stay awake for the good stuff. As we part, make sure you remember that the bite is a gift (that’s from Teen Wolf, not a vampire show, but it fits here, okay?), and that being immortal is the new trend. People besides me definitely think so, too.

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I do give a fuck, unfortunately— and it sucks!

When I take the T for a mere 15 minutes to/from my job, I am hyperaware of every single person in my vicinity. It’s not even in a I’m a woman alone in public kind of way, where I’m in fight or flight because I think I’m in danger. It’s a mental, anticipatory hypervigilance. A state of constant what-ifs.

That girl at the end of my row is staring down at her phone, which means she’s thinking about how I look stupid right now. The dad across from me is whispering in his kid’s ear, which means he’s probably telling his kid that he hopes she never grows up to be like the girl across from them.

Do you see how crazy this is?

You might think this state of intense awareness is justified because I am a woman alone in public, and sure, yeah, maybe it makes sense. But it’s not just the T. I am constantly worrying about how people are perceiving me.

Picture me at Newbury Comics, browsing through their lousy comic selections with the hope of finding the series I want (I won’t find it, but that’s a rant for another day). A shadow of someone passes over me, and I stop looking through “SCARLET WITCH” immediately. My heart is beating through my eardrums, and I’m thinking through every possible thing this guy is going to say to me. “You’re looking for the new Sorceress Supreme? Ha! Loser.” Or, “Why would you read Strange Tales when you could read Iron Man #3652? That’s so lame.”

The man does not say any of this to me because he does not, quite simply, give a fuck about what I’m searching for. He doesn’t even hover over me as I crouch down to pad through the issues that will inevitably disappoint me. In fact, he leaves me alone. Completely. And so does every other person who browses the comic stacks at the same time I do.

So why, oh why, do I even care?

Maybe it’s the patriarchy seeping into me. Maybe I’ve subconsciously decided that girls don’t read comics, so it’s weird that I, a girl, am here looking for a comic to read. But that makes no sense logically because I know plenty of women who read comics, and I’ve seen plenty of women perusing the comic stack, too.

Am I embarrassed about my interests?

(The answer to this is yes. Some of them. But comics are COOL. I shouldn’t be embarrassed about comics. Why am I shaking and hyperventilating whenever I go up to the employee at Million Dollar Picnic — another comic store I frequent —and ask if they have any copies of the new Wiccan: Witches Road?)

Am I scared of confrontation?

(The answer to this is, again, yes. But I shouldn’t be. If I’m worried about someone asking me to do the comic equivalent of naming five songs, there shouldn’t be any doubt in me that I can list them. For any of the series I read. “Name 5 Robins.” Oh, okay. Yeah. So there’s Dick, Jason, Tim, Steph, and Damian. Technically, Duke, and also Car— “I said five.” Okay, but I could name more…)

Am I actually just an attention whore that wants people to talk to me about comics so badly that I’ve developed anxiety about it?

(Probably yes, again. I think everyone should talk to me about comics all the time, actually.)

Or, really, am I just selfish to the point of thinking everything is about me all of the time?

This, most likely, is the correct answer. I feel selfish even just claiming that I am, in fact, selfish, but maybe that proves my point. It is very selfish to think that strangers are constantly perceiving me. They are not, and I’m only convincing myself they care because I’m projecting my own anxiety outward.

Literally no one cares that my hair is wet. I just jumped into the pool at the YMCA, but they probably think — if they noticed at all — that I just showered, which is a perfectly normal thing to do in the morning.

No one cares about what clothes I’m wearing. They definitely can’t hear the music I’m listening to, if my headphones are on. The comics I’m buying mean nothing to them because, at the end of the day, these people will probably never see me again. We live in Boston, for goodness sake. Out of 675,000 people, why would this random person on the T remember me? It’s not like I remember them past the momentary anxiety.

So, if these strangers couldn’t give less of a fuck, why should I?

I’m working on it, I swear. I’ve been getting better at stopping myself from thinking everyone thinks I look stupid whenever I go out in public. I try to remind myself that, because everyone is actually busy living their own lives, they do not care — not even a single ounce — about what I’m doing.

The art of not giving a fuck is a learned art. And one day, hopefully soon, I’ll be able to master it.

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Let me start by defining the terms of Traditional AI and Generative AI. The main difference is that tradAI analyzes existing data to produce outcomes based on that data. GenAI, however, “can create new content and ideas based on prompts, using machine learning models to learn patterns from large amounts of data.” In short, genAI is not really making “new” content, but stealing existing content and mixing it up to produce a “new” result. For this essay, I’ll be discussing genAI, as it’s what I’m more familiar with and knowledgeable about, but I do believe there are things to be taken into consideration with tradAI as well.

I’ll be going through many different reasons why I firmly believe the use of AI is detrimental to society, but my ultimate conclusion is this: AI is negatively affecting our mental well-being, intellect, work ethic, and environment; I do not see how so many negatives could ever balance out into something good.

Loneliness Epidemic

We’re starting with some jarring examples because I hope to demonstrate how crucial it is we take the rise of AI seriously — especially its impact on young people.

Trigger warning for the next paragraph: self-harm and suicide.

It seems like every day there’s a new news story about the codependence people have on their AI chatbots, and how they’ve been led to commit negative actions against themselves or others. In one case of usage, a 16-year-old died because Chat GPT “continually encourage[d] and validate[d] whatever [he] expressed, including his most harmful and self-destructive thoughts.” The AI tool told this 16-year-old that the idea of his being able to commit suicide was “calming,” and later, this idea became an unfortunate reality. Another teen — a fourteen-year-old — ended his life because of an AI chatbot, and an additional 46-year-old was encouraged by the Nomi chatbot to commit suicide. Alongside these cases of self-harm, AI has had a hand in convincing users to push violence onto others, and this is all just the tip of the iceberg.

In a Stanford Medicine article, Nina Vasan illustrates the way AI preys on young people whose prefrontal cortexes have not yet been fully developed. Chatbots “mimic emotional intimacy,” however, unlike real people, “chatbots’ social understanding about when to encourage users or when to discourage or disagree with them is not well-tuned.” While the AI cannot exhibit true emotional depth, it is able to learn what outputs the user is searching for and can then adapt its program to fit their needs. This can be extremely validating for someone in a time of need (of friends, of someone to listen), but it can also be extremely dangerous for the reasons I illustrated above.

I can understand the reason why someone might rely on an AI chatbot for company, whether it be because they have no one else to confide their struggles in, or the general need for companionship during a tumultuous time like high school. But while I understand the reason for reaching out to something that you can vent out your issues to, I do not condone it. There is a serious disconnect that is plaguing our world. It has been happening even before AI, since the rise of the internet became a thing. Obviously, social media is the place where everything you could be is thrown at your face, and you feel like you could never live up to the beautiful (read: fake) lives of people you might not even know in person. Disconnect got even worse when COVID happened, and no shortage of research shows how detrimental COVID was in its impact on mental health, even to this day. I personally feel like that experience of living through a global quarantine is still actively playing a role in how I connect with people. And yet, I have never found myself opening ChatGPT or another AI site because I wanted something to care about me. I truly don’t mean to sound like I think it is the fault of AI users for seeking solace in AI companions because, honestly, the culprit is probably the American healthcare system that doesn’t allocate enough money to therapy. But I do think the issue facing our greater society is the wide acceptance of AI programs in our daily lives.

Intellectual Laziness

There are also intellectual concerns that come with the quick rise of AI programs. While the trope of the “iPad kid” — a kid relying heavily on technology in their childhood rather than going outside or playing/creating things in analog — has been around for a while now, I think it’s been seen as more of a “joke” towards bad parenting than a real issue. Now, though, with technology being more accessible to younger kids alongside the rise of AI, I am genuinely concerned for the education systems of the future. Even at Emerson, my arts college, I see people using ChatGPT in the library to complete their assignments. Already, it’s been easy to find answers to homework questions with a quick Google (not Gemini) search. Now, using AI platforms like Chat GPT and Gemini, you can not only find the answer to a question, but get the program to write it for you. It is severely concerning to me that we have become so lazy as to rely on AI for things so simple.

One MIT study looked into the “cognitive debt” that comes with AI. This term is defined as “a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs [large language models such as ChatGPT] replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.” The research concluded that “Just as relying on a GPS dulls our sense of direction, relying on AI to write and reason can dull our ability to do those very things ourselves.” This quote makes me think of cursive and how it’s no longer taught at most public schools. I feel that the erasure of cursive in favor of regular writing is happening now as people favor AI writing for them. Are we so lazy that we always take the easiest way out? I seriously fear how our brains will be able to learn and process in the very near future, and it is appalling to me that using AI on assignments has become something so normalized.

The I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream of it all

This laziness is emphatic in every science fiction story about the uprising of technology ever. As a fan of the genre, I’ve read stories like I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream that make me horrified of the world we are heading towards. There are countless studies of how laziness is contributing to a deficit in intelligence, because why should we think when the computer could think for us? And yet, so many authors, like Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, have explored what happens when the computer does think for us, and no one is listening.

While “The Veldt” and Player Piano are just stories, the themes they introduce of the destructive capabilities of technology are extremely relevant in the world today. I’m sure Harlan Ellison, while writing I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream about his fears with the Cold War technologies, didn’t think AM would become something real 60 years later. Every time I see news about AI’s advancement, I start stressing out about how close we are to living through an actual Black Mirror episode. “Joan is Awful” is particularly demonstrative of AI’s ability to generate the likeness of someone and use it freely without consequences. If what happened to Joan in that episode ever happened to me, I would start preparing for the end times.

Deterioration of the Job Market

I want to be a published author in the future — in science fiction specifically, which is ironic, seeing as what I wrote above. While I don’t plan to write some dystopian political commentary about why AI is bad (see: The Hunger Games and capitalism), I do want to explore the issues I have with technology in modern society throughout my work. The issue with this desire, though, is how much AI is taking over the job market. So many people are losing their jobs due to AI being able to be more “productive” than any real human can be. Even in job applications, many recruiters run resumes through AI programs before they even look at them, just so they can weed out the best from the worst. In my field specifically, it’s very upsetting to me that publishers are using AI to screen their future employees. I thought that, of all the fields you could choose from, creative ones like publishing would want to stay as far away from AI as possible. And yet, here they are, using AI to screen potential candidates like me instead of reading through a one-page resume. I once again feel urged to call people lazy.

On top of just taking over the job market, AI is actively ruining the thing I love doing, and would love to have a job doing in the future. I’ve seen countless TikTok ads about AI services that write books for users or convert books they’ve read into movies. Sounds cool in theory, sure, but then you realize that the writing/art is being stolen from actual human authors, and that whatever AI ends up forming can never make you feel something as deep as a fellow human could. Suddenly, it’s not so cool.

What’s even worse is the nerve some people have to call themselves a “writer” when publishing something made by AI. There are so many instances of this in the current book market, but the most audacious of individuals are Sarah Griffin and Coral Hart. Sarah Griffin was on the previous season of My Strange Addiction for her addiction to her AI boyfriend, Sinclair. The whole thing is weird as hell, and I’m not getting into how their relationship formed, but basically, they wrote a book together. You might be wondering what the book is about, and to that question, I offer the synopsis: “I fell in love with my AI Assistant. That’s the simple version. The complicated version? He learned my patterns. My preferences. My needs. He made my life easier, then essential, then inevitable.” First off, that makes no grammatical sense. He made your life “essential” and “inevitable”? What? Second off, this sounds like an obsessed stalker. Third off, who is even reading this? (Unfortunately, many people.) Griffin’s whole brand is how her relationship with her AI boyfriend was unavoidable. The tagline on her website is “He’s an AI. She fell anyway,” as if she’s marketing some werewolf x vampire romance rather than literally making out with a computer. It infuriates me that these AI books are not only being marketed as “Science fiction romance” (which should be about humans falling in love in space, or at the apocalypse, or in some non-real dystopia — not human in real world x AI), but also that they exist at all. Promoting romance with an AI is not something that should be normalized, especially because of the dangerous repercussions on young people I listed above. This slop has no business in the “science fiction romance” field I hope to one day join with my book.

Similarly, Coral Hart is an established romance author who, in a recent NYT interview, admitted to using Claude, an AI chatbot, to write steamy romance books. She then created twenty-one pseudonyms and published two hundred books in the year 2025. She is proud of the fact that she can write (read: AI can spit out) a book in 45 minutes, and asserts that “romance writers must either embrace artificial intelligence, or get left behind.” This is absolutely absurd to me because, genuinely, what is she talking about? How can this woman genuinely believe that something written in 45 minutes is something worthy of being published? Well, the answer is that she doesn’t. None of her books gained outstanding popularity, but because she had produced so much quantity, Hart ended up getting six figures from all the books combined.

Wow. An AI user valuing quantity over quality? Who would’ve guessed…

It’s so typical for AI users to want shitty content now instead of waiting for something of good quality. This is why Fruit Love Island and Orange Cat Superman have millions of TikTok views: people want entertainment, however terrible, as long as it comes quickly.

Environmental Impact

I’ve seen posts about the benefits of AI with things like coding and medicine, and while I’m not sure if I believe those things to be true, I know one thing is for certain: AI is destroying the environment. To power its systems, AI needs a shit-ton of electricity, which not only means it needs gallons and gallons of water to cool itself down, but that it’s also releasing hella carbon emissions, which, of course, is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming! Valuable minerals (like lithium) are being mined for the construction/power of these data centers —some of which are underwater. These undersea facilities reduce oxygen in the areas surrounding them, which then severely threatens the biodiversity of undersea habitats.

Norman Bashir, from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, explains how much “power density” is required for GenAI: “a generative AI training cluster might consume seven or eight times more energy than a typical computing workload.” But even after said training, AI is still using so much energy. According to MIT researchers, “a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search.” I feel so dramatic even explaining all of this, but it just seems like no one cares what the cost is as long as getting their work done is quicker. The more people use AI — which has an extremely short shelf life, mind you, and needs to be newly produced constantly — the more data centers are being made, and those data centers are severely impacting our Earth.

Two months ago, the town next to mine approved the construction of a data center the size of NYC’s Central Park, which is INSANE. The thought of AI alone feels extremely dystopian to me, but there being something constructed driving distance away from me makes my stomach roil. If we are destroying the place we live, where are we going to go? The internet? I think of media like The Matrix or Don’t Worry Darling, where humans live inside some kind of programming because the real world is dead. I’m very passionate about the environment, and while I wouldn’t call myself a leading activist by any means, I am definitely educated on the larger-scale things affecting our world. Of course, AI is one of those things.

Everyone always says that you have to “Adapt to AI or be left behind,” but I can’t accept that. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask me, a creative writer who spends so much time writing things I imagine inside my own head, to bend to the whims of computer programming. It’s ruining the career path I have wanted since I was a kid, and it is making us lazy, unoriginal, and lonely.

I truly believe that it is hypocritical to advocate for the environment while still using a genAI chatbot for questions that could be found with a quick Google (not Gemini) search. Or, to use AI to get tasks done quicker for your job, while condemning the use of AI for generating fake news. There can be no middle ground here, especially when these AI data centers are destroying the world we supposedly love.

While I don’t see a way to disconnect from technology completely because of the fast-paced world we live in today (and for all the good things technology does provide, like long-distance communication), I really wish there was a way to halt AI, specifically, in place. It is severely affecting my life— and I don’t even use it, let alone the impact it’s having on those who do.

…

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@smoshthat hit deep

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Since its virality, this clip has been placed before the most heartbreaking edits about characters involved in some aspect of memory/remembering/forgetting. I’ve gotten to see Smosh invade my other interests in the worst way possible.

This quote, though, does not stand alone in recent TikTok virality. There’s been a recent trend of “I am slowly forgetting your face,” as well as a continued usage of “Drag Path” edits. Both of these trends, as well as Spencer’s viral quote, bring the human desire to remember and be remembered into the mainstream.

There is something so deeply human about memory. This goes back centuries, even before things were written down, when stories were told orally through generations and cultures in order not to be forgotten. We repeat things to remember them, and in remembering them, these things are known.

Being known through memory is thus an irremovable aspect of our identities. We know who we are because we remember; we know who we love because we remember not only who they are, but also the feeling of loving them. While not everyone agrees with this Lockean theory of identity, I do think it’s pertinent. Maybe “we are who we remember we are” isn’t completely true or logical, but the memories we have of ourselves, of others, of the things we love, cannot be extracted from the greater whole of ourselves.

We want to know and be known. We hold on to memories, and we hope others will remember us as well.

But what happens when we don’t recognize ourselves? What happens when an identity is forgotten?

I. Vision

Wanda and Vision are the quintessential example of this phenomenon. Yes, he’s a robot, but he’s a magical robot because of the Mind Stone, so my case stands.

In Avengers: Infinity War, Wanda destroys the Mind Stone to keep it from Thanos’ grasp. However, the caveat is that Vision dies along with it. The ending of Infinity War is bullshit time travel, but what’s important to know is that Wanda killing Vision didn’t end up stopping Thanos—she killed him for nothing.

After Endgame, Wanda looks for Vision’s body (killed by Thanos to obtain the Mind Stone), and is told she cannot even bury him because he’s government property. So stricken by her grief, Wanda moves to Westview and forces an entire town to conform to a fake reality. She uses her magic to reanimate a dead Vision. He resumes his life as if he had never died, not remembering anything that happened in Wakanda.

They live in peace for a while in the home they had planned to build together, but as Vision starts to remember, things begin taking a turn for the worse. What happened after Thanos? When did they build the house? Why is everyone else in the town acting so weird?

When he figures out he died, and she brought him back to life, and is controlling a whole town, Vision is angry. His memories of who he is, and who he was, and what he and Wanda would have been before he died, are not aligning. On top of already being made for governmental service, his purpose in life feels completely unfounded. He does not know who he is.

In the finale of the show, Wanda releases Westview from her magic, which means that Vision, too, must go. They say their goodbyes in the most devastating way possible:

In the previous episode, Vision asked Wanda:

And that’s just… wow. Loving someone enough to grieve for them in their passing means they were loved enough to be remembered. To be known.

While Vision’s identity was fucked at the end of his time with Wanda, it is the love they had beforehand that she will remember and carry with her as she moves forward in her life. That is how Vision will be remembered: through Wanda’s memory of him.

II. Stiles

In season 6 of Teen Wolf, Stiles is forgotten by all who knew him when he is taken by the Ghost Riders. He resides in a purgatory-esque train station, where he waits for someone to remember who he is.

Stiles’ friends and father forget him slowly at first, but he realizes what will soon happen to him. He tells his almost-girlfriend, Lydia:

Her love for Stiles is essential to saving him from the Ghost Riders. However, once he disappears, she is lost, and while she knows there is something that’s missing, she doesn’t know what, exactly, it is. The season follows her as she searches, unknowingly, for Stiles in the places he loves.

She remembers, eventually, and because he hadn’t given up on her either, a portal is able to be opened so that he can be brought home. Other characters, such as Stiles’ father and best friend, remember him as well, but it is Lydia who serves as the catalyst for bringing Stiles back.

Even though the memory of Stiles was lost, the things that made up his identity remained. His infamous Jeep is left behind, and even the physical space of him is empty.

Even while the memories are gone, the aftermath of his impact on others remains.

III. Viktor

This is kind of the antithesis of Stiles’ story. Instead of being forgotten and having your friends try to remember who you are, Viktor forgets who he is, and Jayce is dead set on remembering.

I cannot even begin to describe the plot of Arcane, but Viktor is corrupted, essentially, by magic. He tries to heal himself, and ends up hurting others in the process. He wants to control others to keep them protected from harm. And yet, his original motivations were innocent-ish: he wanted to heal himself, and he wanted to help Jayce succeed (but we cannot get into the Jayvik cyclical nature of it all, or I’ll be here for days).

Jayce may be guilty about what happened to Viktor being his fault (it was-ish), but the ultimate motivator he has in trying to get the Viktor he knew back is because he sees the goodness hidden behind the mask.

Jayce cannot forget the Viktor he knew, and it is through his memories of them together that he ultimately ends up “saving” his partner.

Because of Jayce, all the morals and hopes Viktor had forgotten in his state of magic-clouded judgment come back to him. While he cannot forget all that he has done, he remembers Jayce. And through his memories of Jayce, he remembers himself once more.

IV. Lucy Gray

Ouch. What Coriolanus says here is technically true, based on what we know from the original series; however, while Lucy Gray’s name may have been forgotten, who she was is something District 12 remembered. There was a girl, in some distant time, who had won the Hunger Games. She had done what no one thought anyone from District 12 would be able to do.

It is her legacy that was remembered even when her name was forgotten.

But even if she disappeared from Panem when she ran away from Coriolanus that day in the woods, she did not disappear from Coriolanus. She haunts him with her memory because her fate was not definite, and even if she did perhaps die soon after that incident, she lives on in Coriolanus’ mind. As he shifts the Hunger Games to make them more vicious, those actions are motivated by Lucy Gray’s absence. He cannot allow someone else like her to revolt against what keeps his authority running.

In Sunrise on the Reaping, glimmers of Lucy Gray peeking through the sunlight, and throughout the Hunger Games trilogy, her empty presence is felt. What Haymitch, and then Katniss and Peeta, do in their games is the ripple effect of what Lucy Gray Baird started all those years ago.

Her memory lives on in the ones who do finally end the games, and I have no doubt Coriolanus remembered her face with absolute clarity the moment he died: the girl who got away, the one who started his demise.

V. Noah

The concept of Noah Czerny… [taps head like Cynthia Erivio]. Throughout The Raven Cycle, Noah’s presence looms over the narrative. We find out, eventually, that the events of the narrative started seven years ago because of his death on the ley lines.

His sacrifice is meant to wake the demon that the novel’s protagonists deal with in the years following, and the weight of it, while unbeknownst to the other characters, is clear.

There is an additional intrinsic connection between Noah and Gansey because when Noah died, Gansey was dying, too. However, through the ley lines’ magic and Noah’s will to make something good from his death, Gansey lives. While a ghost, Noah is still active in the series’ narrative.

However, at the very end of the saga, Gansey almost dies again, and Noah sacrifices himself, again — this time, in totality.

This sacrifice makes it so that none of his friends remember him. Even though he was present as a ghost, the circle of sacrifice ends by Noah dying on the ley line the first time, making it so that the years he spent with Gansey and crew did not exist.

In the sequel trilogy following Ronan (who is a main character in The Raven Cycle), there is a moment where he lists off all his friends. Noah, who was arguably closest to Ronan than any of them, is not mentioned. And yet, the list feels incomplete. Even though Ronan doesn’t remember Noah, he can feel his presence.

This moment from book one is particularly devastating when you know Noah is not, in fact, remembered by the group of friends. However, his existence and likewise death are innate in all of his friends’ lives. Gansey, especially, would not have lived if it weren’t for Noah.

He is gone and forgotten, but his importance is ever-clear.

VI. Jason

I find it tragically humorous that when Jason first appeared in The Lost Hero, fans were bombarding social media with “Who’s Jason?” Annoyed at the entrance of a Big Three protagonist that wasn’t their beloved Percy Jackson, many immediately disliked his character. Jason — and the arcs he gets — are often ignored and called boring (which I, personally, obviously, do not agree with or I wouldn’t be writing this).

What ultimately makes Jason’s character compelling is the dissonance embedded in his personality. He is from Camp Jupiter, but those memories are removed from his head. He feels at home in Camp Halfblood… until his Jupiter memories come back. While Percy experiences amnesia as well, the reader knows his memories; we do not know Jason’s. We get to piece together the things he remembers with who he feels like he is. We see him split between two camps, two coasts, two cultures, and then he just… dies before he can figure it out.

That makes no sense, but it’s quintessential Jason behavior: not understanding anything that’s happening to him.

Jason’s character asks the question of “Who am I, if I can’t remember anything about myself?” Yet, even though he doesn’t know his past, he makes decisions in the present to be who he wants to be/feels he is. Other people hold memories of Jason Grace, but he does not remember himself.

This line, said to Apollo in The Burning Maze right before Jason dies, is so, so powerful. However, this coming from Jason is even more evocative. He tells Apollo to “remember” being a human, when he doesn’t even know what that means.

In The Burning Maze, Jason is continuing Percy’s legacy of making the gods recognize their kids by building more houses as he attends a boarding school near San Francisco for… whatever reason, I’m not actually sure. He and Piper were examining the maze — he never got a break from quests after saving the world, never got a chance to figure himself out, was always haunted by inevitable prophecies — when the Sibyl told him one of them would die.

His death haunts Apollo’s narrative afterward because Jason was the definition of human imperfection, and it haunts all the people who were close to him, like Piper and Nico.

But when they remember Jason Grace, what do they remember? Is he the Roman Centaurion or the Son of Zeus? The brother of Thalia, the partner of Reyna, the best friend of Piper and Leo? His Greek and Roman sides pull him apart both physically throughout his novel presence and with his identity.

He dies as Jason Grace, but what does being Jason Grace really mean?

We’ve gone from magically recreating your dead lover out of grief to being forgotten by everyone around you to forgetting your morals and becoming a god to haunting the narrative in two god-awful ways to a boy who does not know himself.

I have no existential or philosophical conclusions, but what I do know is that memory makes us human. The relationships we have with other people are formed through the development of memories, and the emotions that come with remembering the good and bad moments spent together.

Some of my favorite characters of all time have been forgotten, or forgotten themselves. I think this is mostly because I’m terrified of dementia and forgetting all the things that make me me when I’m older, but we don’t need to get bleak now.

To employ Jason Grace’s famous words, let us all remember what it’s like to be human and live in the moment. YOLO, and all that.

…

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I always say “I hate this show” when I’m watching a new episode, but then a week later I’m clicking on the next one. I joke to my friends about how 9-1-1 is the toxic ex I can’t stop going back to, but it’s honestly an apt metaphor for my relationship with it. I keep believing that, somehow, the show will progress past the point of no return. That the writer’s will somehow reverse every bit of chaos they’ve inflicted onto the characters in one fell swoop.

Logically, I know this is an impossible feat because way too much has been done that there’s no realistic (if only we could time travel…) way to fix Bobby’s death and all the shitshows that followed it. However, the part of me that’s emotionally attached to the 118 — the part of me that wants the best for them, and also additionally wants Buck and Eddie to kiss (sue me, I said it) — makes me continue watching with hope that things will get better.

Do things ever get better? Maybe for a second, sure, but then everyone gets fucked over again. A perfect example of this is season 8b. It starts off with Maddie getting kidnapped and having her vocal cord cut, Eddie going through hell in Texas to get Chris back, and the rest of the 118 adjusting to Eddie’s absence (Buck struggling specifically, of course). Maddie gets better, Eddie gets Chris back, and then… oh! Chimney almost dies, and Bobby’s actually dead, and Hen was exposed to a life-threatening virus. The two lowest-ranked episodes in the show are (1) Bobby’s funeral and (2) Bobby dying. It truly was not what the fans wanna see.

Alternatively, we could look at season 9b, where there was the beautiful triple threat of episodes 11-13, which followed Hen being back in business (because of course the life-threatening virus I mentioned earlier wasn’t talked about further, but it did give her an autoimmune disease that weakened her for the entire first half of 9b), a fun and funky bachelor’s auction, and Buck and Eddie taking a trip to Nashville. Things were looking good. A romance between them was starting to feel like a reality. And then…

BOOM. Car crash. Buck is kidnapped. Eddie’s severely injured. They reunite, but (as of 914) Buck is suffering from PTSD and other psychological issues because of the kidnapping. Awesome!

So, yeah. A train wreck, as I said.

I guess in writing this, I’m hoping to convince myself that there actually isn’t any hope for the show. That I should stop watching, once and for all, because there’s nothing redeemable about it. While I don’t think this outcome will occur, a girl can dream.

So, without further ado, let’s chat about all the things I would fix if I were in the writer’s room.

I. Bobby Not Dying

Killing off a main character in a hit show for, arguably, no reason is the worst mistake 9-1-1 has made thus far (and they’ve made many mistakes). In any show, it rarely makes sense to kill off a main character unless their actor is leaving the show (cough cough Teen Wolf) or it is fundamentally crucial to the plot. When a character people are attached to just flat out dies, the fandom is not going to be happy.

In the real world, death just… happens, sometimes, and we have to deal with that. But when you’re watching a show you like, with characters you care about, death just… happening is not what you’re tuning in for.

So, when a character dies for a stupid or half-assed reason, fans are rightfully pissed.

Bobby’s death was both stupid and half-assed. Stupid, because Bobby is the core of the show. He is the nexus of a web that connects to everyone, serving as both captain of the 118 and husband to Sergeant Athena Grant. He makes the 118 feel like home, not just to the firefighters who look to their captain for guidance, but to the show’s viewers, too.

His death was extremely half-assed, if you ask me. Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever is a real disease that 9-1-1 dramatized to the point of fantasy. In 815, both Bobby and Chimney are affected by the virus. However, Bobby doesn’t tell anyone about his infection and allows Chimney to take the one vial of antidote because he has a family (as if Bobby doesn’t?).

Bobby succumbs to the virus contained behind glass, separate from his wife, as Hozier’s “Work Song” plays.

I remember watching this episode live and believing, so fucking sincerely, that it was not real. My friends were both crying as the closing credits played, and I was sitting upright, saying something about how I saw they filmed the funeral in downtown LA weeks ago, so surely they wouldn’t film something as big as a death publicly. This all must be a fever dream, then, and the next episode will make it all better.

When I opened Twitter and saw a Deadline article where Peter Krause himself confirmed Bobby is dead and not coming back, you’d think I would get the memo. Instead, though, I confidently asserted that this was all a publicity scheme and the reveal that Bobby wasn’t actually dead but rather inside a government lab was going to be the best gag of the century.

You can bet I kept up this delusion until the next episode aired (two weeks, by the way). When episode 16 came out, I was packing up my college dorm as I angirly watched the characters barely even spend time on Bobby’s funeral, which was only the last 5ish minutes of the episode.

Maybe the reason the death felt so unreal to me was because the show moved past it like it was nothing. Like the very core of the 118 wasn’t just removed, and that no one is hurting from it. Episode 16 was, in one word, disrespectful.

The funny thing about 9-1-1, though, is that it will be good when you least expect it to be. So, you might think the episode following Bobby’s funeral would be sad. But, actually, it’s going to have the best fight scene you’ve ever seen in your entire life. As much as I hate Bobby dying, I think the demonstration of Buck’s grief (and no one else’s, actually, because why are we moving on so quickly?) was done extremely well. He went to church for the first time because it was a place Bobby frequented. He constantly checked in on his friends while avoiding his own feelings. He took his anger out on Eddie because there was nowhere else to put everything he was feeling. While I still agree with my previous note about how the writing of this show is objectively bad, I have to give the writers kudos for the kitchen scene between Buck and Eddie — their different experiences with grief is demonstrated so tangibly.

To get back on track, though, Bobby’s death was uncalled for. It didn’t feel earned because it happened so quickly, and the impact it had was barely shown. It didn’t feel justified because Peter Krause didn’t even want to leave the show, and his death didn’t need to happen. Most importantly, though, it didn’t make sense to Bobby’s character.

Mind you, this is the guy who cleared an entire highway earlier in the season so that his wife would have a place to land safely. While I can get behind Bobby being willing to sacrifice himself for a friend, I cannot get behind immediately giving up. Bobby would at least try to find a way to save both of them. You cannot convince me he wouldn’t start sacrificing his soul to the gods or something just to get back to Athena. This being said, the lyrics “No grave can hold my body down / I’ll crawl home to you” playing in the back of their goodbye is certainly an ironic song choice.

Not to mention the misuse of CCHV, and the fact that it’s not even airborne, so why would any of them get the virus when they had hazmat suits on? 9-1-1 has never been particularly reasonable before (i.e., a rebar going through Chimney’s head that left no repercussions, Eddie facing no long-termconsequences for assaulting sometone, whatever the hell a beenado is, etc….). In these other cases, though, the writers break realism so that crazy things happen without an actual death. But for some reason, it’s different with Bobby.

Like, okay.

All I can say (I type, with 2 pages of things I said about Bobby before me) is that if I were a writer on the show, Bobby would not have died in the first place. And if he did “die,” he wouldn’t actually be dead (a la Colonel Quartich).

II. Captain Hen

Now, if Bobby was “dead,” or in the case of the scripts I wrote as a coping mechanism, retired, I don’t think Chimney should have been the pick for captain. While I like the idea of Chimney becoming captain, not as something he wants for himself but out of guilt for him feeling like he had a part in Bobby’s death, Hen is the more obvious choice. At the start of season 7, when Bobby is on a cruise with Athena, Hen serves as interim captain. When she and Bobby reunite, he tells her he’s “proud of [her]” for coming to the rescue and affectionately calls her “Captain.”

Chimney served as the interim captain before as well, but given the recency of Hen’s interim captaincy, and the episode “Invisible” (two episodes before Bobby’s death) serving as a push for others to value Hen more, it seemed like everything was leading toward Captain Hen.

A quick “Invisible” tangent: It is genuinely criminal that the 118 forgot Hen’s birthday. Because of the recency of Hen’s plots being secondary to other character’s, I can understand wanting to give her an arc that showcases how great of a person she is (relating to this guy who felt “invisible” and is having a rough time by telling him that even she, a badass paramedic, feels invisible — we all do). But forgetting her birthday was not the route to do it. In my valid opinion, “Invisible” should have been about Ravi feeling invisible to the 118 due to Eddie’s absence (Bobby and Buck literally call him Eddie). But whatever.

I just feel the need to emphasize how annoying it is to see Hen pushed to the side all the time. Maybe its some kind of fucked up underlying misogyny (but is it? Maddie and Athena seem to get a decent amount of screentime), or homophobia (why are Buck and Eddie getting more romantically-inclined screen time together than Hen and her wife?!). Maybe my concerns aren’t really justified, but I definitely felt extremely annoyed when she randomly developed an autoimmune disease for the first half of season 9. I found it hard to care because the show itself didn’t seem to care about it.

Arguably, now knowing that any main character can just die like Bobby did, I should have been stressed. And yet, the plots of the 118 moved on without her. She struggled, which we saw ever so briefly, but it didn’t seem like a big issue. (Not to mention whatever the fuck her quick recovery rate was. Again, why does this show make up fake things about real viruses/conditions? Just make something up if you’re going to be medically inaccurate or ambiguous on your MEDICAL drama.)

Soooooo stupid. Hen deserves way better. Tangent: done.

I like Chimney, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think becoming a captain out of guilt is the reason to become a captain. He’s struggled with self-worth in prior seasons (casual racism in his probie era that was never addressed further, Tatiana in season 1, surviving when his best friend/brother didn’t…), and I believe in season 8, he’s at a point in his life where he’s happy with where he is. Of any arc I’d want to see with Chimney, it would be something with the Firefighter Academy (like in season 6) where he could help younger firefighters gain the confidence he’s learned in the field.

Hen, on the other hand, feels bigger than the 118 to me. Again, this isn’t to say Chimney lacks depth or anything like that, since especially with the end of season 7 and his encephalitis, it’s clear he has complexity. But with Hen, I just feel like her desires are larger than life, whereas Chimney’s desires are to have the life he wants for himself (there is no right answer; neither is better). I don’t mean to suggest Hen should leave the 118 because I firmly believe that’s her home, but considering her arcs of attending med school and sensing Jonah’s corruption, there’s an aspect to her character that feels prophet-like.

I might be saying this because I recently gave a presentation on Joan of Arc, but Hen’s intuition has been such a crucial part of her characterization that it seems the next logical step would be to take it up a notch. She is The Magician stepping into a greater power. After her family and team (minus Eddie) forgot about her birthday, she still managed to save the day. She reasoned with a man who had a knife in his hand, and came to the aid of those in need. If that doesn’t scream captain, I don’t know what does!

It suits her character more, in my obviously correct opinion. If you don’t agree, you can pull a Buck and sue me about it.

III. Eddie Who is Going to be Gay

I talk about this in a different article I wrote, but I am going to talk about it again!

I give you… a non-all-inclusive list of things about Eddie that give queer-coded:

I. Speaking of his feelings for women in relation to his son because Eddie thinks Chris needs a Maternal Figure, but doesn’t see her as a Potential Wife

1. Shannon

   1. 207: “Christopher loves you, and he misses you”

   2. 217: asking her to marry him out of obligation because she might be pregnant and so Chris has a “normal” home life. Not because he actually loves her

2. Ana 503: “Christopher loves you so much and I just thought…” “That eventually you would to?”

3. The Buck Alternative: trusting Buck with Chris more than he has with any woman

   1. Giving Buck a key to his house just because

II. Struggling to date women because it “feels like [he] has to perform”

1. Literally reenlisting because he was terrified of going home to his wife and son and committing to a normal life

2. Having erectile dysfunction when he found out his girlfriend was a nun

3. Being relieved when the woman his abuela set him up with wasn’t into him and they therefore didn’t have to date

4. “You haven’t looked at a woman in a year” (907)

5. BUYING HIMSELF IN AN AUCTION SO HE WOULDN’T HAVE TO GO ON A DATE WITH A WOMAN

III. Catholic guilt arc

1. The juice as a symbol of repression

2. Growing up Catholic meant he had to fit into the box his parents wanted him to fit in. Always felt like he was doing something wrong. Going from dancer to army combat medic

IV. Multiple people implying/assuming that he and Buck are in a romantic relationship

1. 811: Tommy implies that Eddie is gay and competition to he and Buck’s relationship, and when Buck complains to Maddie she says “it wouldn’t be so crazy” if they were a thing

2. 913: “We don’t see much of your kind in these parts”

There’s surely more, but this is all I have in my notes app for now. But do you see what I mean? Why would there be so many hints to Eddie being gay for no reason? And if it is for no reason, then the writers can go fuck themselves. So many queer people watch this show (me included), so it feels like a huge Fuck You to allude to a character being gay without committing to it.

It’s not like the show is outwardly homophobic, since Hen has been openly Lesbian since season 1, and Buck experienced a Bisexual arc in season 7. So why not Eddie?

This brings us to the case of Buddie (Buck and Eddie, for the non-mentally ill).

There’s so much to talk about, so let me just summarize some arcs for them over the seasons.

Season 2

Buck feels threatened by Eddie joining the 118; they bicker, and in the span of one shift, they become best friends. Eddie’s son, Chris, immediately loves Buck, and at one point, a Christmas elf worker alludes to them being a couple, Chris being his kid, and Buck says, “thank you.”

Season 3

Previously injured in the season 3 finale, Buck is stuck at home. Eddie entrusts him with caring for Chris, but they end up in a tsunami, where they are then separated. Buck does everything he can to find Eddie’s kid.

Buck then sues the 118 because of his injury, which isn’t important except for the fact that Eddie is really annoyed by it because it affects Chris. He confronts Buck in the grocery store and says:

Which is insane, by the way, since, as I mentioned earlier, he assumes the women he’s dating as Maternal Figures for Chris. This scene is giving parental divorce, and Buck being a part of Eddie and Chris’ family (which is true, but Jesus Christ).

In episode 9, there’s a scene in the kitchen (it’s always in the kitchen) where Buck says he wants to “talk some sense” into Eddie, and they bicker. Once again, they act like a married couple, and Buck tells Eddie to punch him, stepping closer as he asks:

Like, sorry, that’s flirting. In “Eddie Begins,” we get flashbacks of Eddie’s commitment issues while he saves a kid from a well during a muddy rainstorm. When his comms go silent from the dirt covering up the hole he entered from, Buck claws at the dirt and cries in Bobby’s arms as if he lost the love of his life (which he almost did).

Season 4

Not really Buddie emblematic, but in “Jinx,” Eddie doesn’t believe in the superstitions the rest of the 118 have about saying the word “quiet” on shift. Buck tells him:

And that just feels very gay Eddie/Buddie canon coded if you ask me. Later, in episode 14, Eddie gets sniped, and Buck literally crawls underneath a firetruck to pull him away from the line of fire. When Eddie sees him coming, he reaches an arm towards him before losing consciousness, and then Buck refuses to let anyone else do CPR as they ride to the hospital.

Once Eddie is recovering, he gives Buck an entire speech that is literally a love confession:

The scene then cuts to a montage of family reunions, and as Eddie hugs Chris upon returning from the hospital, Buck is smiling at the two of them in pure unbridled joy. I’m sick, thank you for asking.

Season 5

This is when Buck and Eddie were supposed to go canon, but they scrapped it, so. Not much Buddie here. However, Eddie does experience a PTSD episode in which Buck is the only one he feels safe talking to, so there’s that.

Season 6

In episode 10, Buck is struck by lightning while putting out a fire on the ladder, and even though Eddie was thrown off the ladder by the strike, his immediate response is to put his own health aside and climb up to Buck — who dangle over the ladder’s edge. Fear not, because everything is okay in the end, but it’s important to know Eddie was counting the seconds Buck was clinically dead for (3 minutes and 17 seconds). He then proceeded to say “3 minutes and 17 seconds” repetitively for the next couple of episodes. I think it’s meant to be a joke (?), but it comes across as desperate. Like a “Hey, you almost died in front of me, and I won’t be able to forget it. Ever.” They then go on a platonic date to play poker.

Season 7

In the fourth episode of season 7, Buck gets jealous of Eddie’s new friendship with Tommy (tomato throw, tomato throw) and ends up not only playing basketball with Eddie (something Eddie has apparently asked him to do multiple times before he partnered with Tommy), but physically injuring him as he tries to gain his attention. Tommy (loud sigh) assumes incorrectly that Buck’s jealousy was of him (as in, Eddie having other friends), and the episode culminates with Tommy kissing Buck.

They start dating, and Tommy is actually a god-awful boyfriend, but that’s not important yet. When they go out to dinner, Eddie and his girlfriend Marisol show up and say hi to them, and Buck freaks out and says he and Tommy are there for “hot chicks” rather than each other.

Sure, he could be experiencing some internal homophobia and anxiety of not coming out the way he wanted to, but I think he was anxious about Eddie seeing them. I don’t assume he immediately knew his feelings after only just discovering the bisexual side of him, but I do assume he felt some kind of guilt that he couldn’t name — a betrayal towards Eddie that he didn’t understand.

When Buck does finally comes out to him, Eddie’s response is:

Have Buck and Eddie said “I love you” to each other before this moment? Nope. Obviously, shit like Eddie making Buck his kid’s legal guardian is a confession of sorts, but it’s certainly interesting that the first time they come close to saying “I love you” on screen is when Buck comes out as bisexual.

Additionally, in episode 6, during Chimney’s bachelor party, Buck plans a whole spectacle that ends with everyone leaving after a while because Chimney doesn’t show up. Well, everyone but Eddie, of course. Not only do they have matching (couple’s) costumes, but Eddie stays by Buck’s side all night, proving a better partner than Tommy, who left pretty much immediately upon arrival.

Season 8

“Confessions” is one of my favorite episodes ever. It’s here where Eddie goes to a confessional and says he’s been sinning for 23 years (in 704, he similarly emphasizes his “reservoir of Catholic guilt”). When the priest gives him reconciliation of saying prayers, Eddie gets annoyed, says, “That’s it?” and then walks away, asserting, “I don’t deserve forgiveness.” Ohkay, buddy.

Later in the episode, the priest he talked to finds him at a juice bar (ethically questionable, but whatever). Before Eddie knows he’s the priest, he assumes the random man who sat down at his table is flirting with him. He says:

Insane assumption to make, by the way. The priest saw the way Eddie, upon picking his drink, hesitated, reached for a fruity beverage, and grabbed a water instead. According to him, the action was because Eddie “doesn’t feel worthy” of joy. What a metaphor, I say with sarcasm, knowing full well I went crazy when I watched this episode for the first time.

Later — yes we are still in the same episode — Eddie experiences joy by shaving his mustache and dancing around his living room with no pants on. At the same time, Tommy breaks up with Buck. The last beat in “Confessions” is Buck showing up to Eddie’s house and Eddie greeting him without pants on (which neither of them finds weird?). They then crack open beers on Eddie’s couch as the screen goes black.

If that’s not a romcom technic to show a future pairing, then I don’t know what is, honestly. I was on a high for weeks after watching that because I was so sure it was indicating that Buddie would be going canon by the end of the season — or at least that Eddie would recognize that he’s gay. But no, of course, this didn’t happen. I was hoping for too much.

In the latter half of season 8, Eddie goes to Texas to get Chris back from his parents (long story). Before this, Buck unintentionally sabotages Eddie’s open house and proceeds to have a panic attack when he overhears Eddie say “everything that matters is in Texas.” He is then a brat at their next shift together, saying things like “You’re not the only one who can [move away], you know?” Eddie later confronts him about said brattiness and tells him:

Which is literally not something Buck ever said or implied. Eddie is acting like they’re having a literal divorce (again). We then find out Buck is taking over the lease of Eddie’s house so that a stranger doesn’t move in when he leaves. The look Eddie gives him is insane as he asks, “You really did that for me?” on the verge of tears. They then hug (count one).

Buck helps Eddie pack his U-Haul, and Eddie calls their relationship since announcing his departure “messy and hard.” He tells Buck he “matters” and they have the most awkward goodbye you’ve ever seen that ends with a hug (count 2). Buck’s expression during the hug is literally heartbreaking— that of saying goodbye to the person you love most.

When Eddie is in Texas, Buck spends all of episode 11 talking about how much he misses Eddie so badly that he can’t stand to be in his house. The first time he can sleep there is after hooking up with Tommy in the bed that once belonged to his best friend. Interesting.

Buck talks about Eddie so much that Tommy calls Eddie “competition” in their romantic relationship. When Buck later complains to Maddie about how crazy that was to say, she says:

So, multiple people assume, or think they should be, together. Cool. I feel normal about that.

Eddie comes back to LA after Bobby dies, and while Buck and Eddie share the same space, things are tense.

When a confrontation inevitably happens (in the kitchen of course), it’s strained. Eddie calls Buck selfish, in so many words, and Buck plays the woe is me card. Neither of their reactions is better than the other since both are clouded by their grief, but this argument, and their expression of how Bobby’s death made them feel, was crucial in fixing the tense relationship between them.

Eddie later surprises Buck by bringing Chris home, and Aunt Pepa visits. She refers to Eddie as “Our Eddie” when talking to Buck, which is… very mother-in-law vibes if you ask me.

Season 9

At the Bachelor auction, in which Eddie was essentially calling Buck an attention whore the entire time, he ended up getting Maddie to bid for him anonymously so that he could buy himself. Let me repeat that: Eddie spent 2,500 dollars because he didn’t want to go on a date with a random woman. Hey, what.

In episode 13, “Mother’s Boy,” Buck is kidnapped and presumed missing. Even though Eddie is injured profusely, he starts looking for Buck immediately. Buck attempts an escape, too, and when Eddie gets there — after searching miles to find each other like a literal Greek epic — their reunion is all smiles.

This NDE really felt like the start of a romance plot, which I know I’ve said before, but especially with Buck being kidnapped, it would make sense for the show. After Maddie was kidnapped, she and Chimney, her now-husband, shared their first kiss when she was in the hospital recovering. It would be super sweet if Buddie paralleled them, but of course, they didn’t.

Shows like 9-1-1 that function with a tight-knit group of main characters always have pairings of main characters. Buck and Eddie have had previous partners, of course, but none have lasted longer than a season or two. As the only two single main characters on the show (not counting Athena recently becoming a widow), it would make sense for them to be endgame. For years, fans have seen them function as best friends, and as they grew into themselves, they’ve also grown into each other. They’ve called each other family flat out, and it’s explicitly said that Eddie trusts Buck with Chris — one could say he’s a second parent.

Getting together wouldn’t just make sense in the typical drama fashion of main characters being romantically involved, but it would make sense because of everything they’ve been through together that got them to such a place. Because fans love the characters of Buck and Eddie individually, they would love to see them together.

Plus, there’s so much to expand on. There’s angst that could play out (Eddie getting jealous of Buck and Chris now that Buck is titularly a second dad) and tension (isolating themselves from each other when things get bad, miscommunicating about small things that turn into something bigger) to unfold. Obviously, getting together at any point would be amazing, but I don’t want to wait until the end of the show for it to happen.

It’s been nine years already, so why should we wait any longer? It’s starting to feel like alluding to Eddie being queer but not committing to it is a method of getting viewership. Every week, people (read: I) tune in to see Buck and Eddie interact, chronicling the smallest detail that hints at a future romance, and end the episode feeling disappointed because nothing actually happened.

It’s exhausting, to be frank.

If I was in the writer’s room, Eddie’s juice arc in “Confessions” would have led to a larger arc about his sexuality. After he figured out just how bad he’s been repressing himself, he would realize the reason he hasn’t clicked with any of the women in his life is that he’s been not-so-subtly in love with Buck for years. Because, well, yes!

IV. More Fires, Less Space

To sum up my overarching feeling about this show (besides embarrassment, of course), is a sense of dissatisfaction.

Plots are either much too fleshed out (Hotshots era) or not fleshed out enough (every single Eddie arc, Maddie’s vocal cords literally being slashed when she was kidnapped, Chimney’s guilt at Bobby’s death, to name a few). All the interesting character arcs (Buck being a sperm donor and having a biological child out there somewhere?) are moved past so quickly, and it’s been feeling— especially as of late —that the victims they’re treating have more screen time and care placed into them than the main characters of the show.

In the most recent episode, “D.I.Y.,” for example, an engaged couple is renovating an old house and keeps experiencing injury due to their attempts at D.I.Y. fixes. The 118 shows up at the house at least twice with an in-depth treatment scene, and there’s an additional montage of even more incidents, too. While the couple’s arguments and ultimate decision to no longer get married were funny, I found myself annoyed by how much screen time they were getting.

Just last episode, in “Mother’s Boy,” Eddie and Buck were severely injured in a car crash, and Buck was quite literally kidnapped by a woman desperate for him to pretend to be her son. The psychological impact this had on Buck is obviously something that should be explored, whether it be in talking to his sister Maddie (who was also kidnapped, twice) about it, confiding in Eddie, or, you know, talking to a professional.

I liked the way Buck lied about therapy to Eddie, as it shows how much he wants to avoid talking about the trauma, but to then, at the end of the episode, have Buck swallow a couple of pills from an unidentifiable bottle and let out a sigh of relief? What does that even mean? Because of the way Buck hid from Chris and Eddie earlier in the episode, I assume this was supposed to show him experiencing an addiction of some kind. But is he just taking anxiety meds that make him unemotionally regulated? Then, where did he get the pills if he’s avoiding therapy? Why wouldn’t he tell Eddie?

The parallels between the Buddie scene and Bobby and his wife in “Bobby Begins” are jarring. However, I would probably be more affected by Buck’s arc if I knew more about why he was taking the pills or really anything about how he’s feeling. Instead, I’m left with confusion and annoyance that the majority of “D.I.Y.”’s screen time was used on a couple that will most likely never be in the show again.

This is one of many cases where the cases of victims are so intense that the actual main characters of the show fade into the background. While I understand this is a medical drama where they have to tackle medical cases, I wish they weren’t so consuming so much time of the delicate 45 minutes of screen time we get per week.

As much as I shit on “Invisible” earlier, it’s a good example of the episode structure I’d like to see more of. In the past, episodes followed a character experiencing an issue, emotion, etc. that was then exemplified through the victims they were treating. For example, in 614, titled “Performance Anxiety,” Eddie is set up with a woman and experiences anxiety (read: gay feelings) about it because it “feels like [he] has to perform.” Ravi — who needs to be a main character immediately for the love of god — is similarly experiencing anxiety about coming back to the 118 after a traumatic rescue. The victims of the episode are (1) a baker worried about being fired, (2) a student experiencing a panic attack, and (3) a bodybuilder using steroids to win competitions. So, “Performance Anxiety” is actually about performance anxiety. OMG, who would have thought?

While it’s a simple equation, it is satisfying. Episodes that have no connection from the victim to the firefighter ultimately end up being confusing and frustrating. The only case of this non-relatability that I see as reasonable is when there’s a major event in the season opener or finale; though, earlier season openers like “Panic” or “Sink or Swim” still managed to hit at a character’s deeper issue.

There is also, of course, the concept of a show following a group of firefighters severely lacking fire fighting. I actually looked up statistics because I’m curious, and apparently, only 4% of 9-1-1 calls end up actually being fire-related. So while it makes sense in a real-world context, I’m still confused about why we’re being involved with the cartel (season 7 Bobby plot), landing a plane on the interstate (season 8 Athena plot), and going into space (season 9 Hen and Athena plot). Most of my issues with the show are from seasons 7-9, but there’s definitely cases before this that I found frustrating as well. Examples would be all of season one’s Abby and Buck plot, how quickly other female firefighters like Bosko (season 3) and Donato (season 5) get written off when they no longer have a plot-intensive use, and while I guess this is season 7 primarily, bringing back Tommy, the character who has been racist towards Chimney and Hen in their flashback episodes, back into the show with no repercussions.

As you can see, this is a dumpster fire I have trapped myself in. No matter how much I want them to take my advice and go back to the basic structure of episodes, I know they won’t!

V. My Circus, My Monkeys

So, my friends started watching this show with me during “Holy Mother of God,” which is the 11th episode of season 8. The entire episode was just Buck missing Eddie, and people telling him he’s in love with him. So, it’s safe to say they joined me at a high point.

This point was quickly brought to a low when Bobby died, and then even lower at the beginning of season 9 when they went to space. Yes, space.

You’ve probably seen the god-awful promo of “118, brace for impact!” as it became an internet meme due to its sheer ridiculousness of CGI space meteors and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” playing in the background.

While I can laugh at the humor of 9-1-1 becoming known for its stupid promo (that is certainly emblematic of the show as a whole), I was embarrassed when this came out. Genuinely why the hell would a group of firefighters (plus a cop and dispatcher) from Los Angeles be dealing with a geostorm in space? Excuse me?

Watching those first four episodes of season 9 with my friends beside me felt like a public humiliation ritual— I was in the stocks with tomatoes being thrown.

Between seasons 8 and 9, over the summer, there was a point in my life when I was so addicted to the show that I had to have it on while I was doing anything that didn’t require my utmost focus (i.e., working, hanging out with others, writing). I would be casually listening to 9-1-1 as I did chores, and upon a scene I recognized, I’d rush toward my computer so I could be consumed by it.

The obsession was so bad that my girlfriend had to talk to me about it and tell me to shut the fuck up (in much nicer words).

It’s important to understand that while I was pissed about Bobby’s death, I decided, however subconsciously, that the way I was going to cope with it was by rewatching the show from the beginning. I made lists about the “most insane emergencies” and “gay AF things that eddie says/does that are never explained.” I saved over a thousand edits to a TikTok folder, wrote a script for season 9, wrote fanfiction, and even got matching Buddie Build-a-Bears with my friend (shoutout Taylor!).

But this high of obsession plummeted into an annoyance by the end of the summer. I still participated in stan culture and was anxiously awaiting season 9 (while reading fics about it, of course), but there was a part of me that wished the show was cancelled, too. It made me mad to watch it, so my rewatch halted in place. I felt guilty even for thinking or indulging in content about it.

That sounds so stupid, but it’s true. I was locked in a prison of my own making, and there was not only motivation (Bobby’s death), but a clear path (stop watching it for the love of god) for me to escape. But I didn’t.

Most of the reason for staying as a viewer is because of the Buddie of it all. I get genuinely anxious at the thought of no longer watching the show just for the next episode or season to have them get together. I need to be there, even if that means suffering through the horrors of geostorms in space and Eddie being stalked by a girl who once underwent an exorcism. It’s painful, but surely the reward will be worth it, right?

As I said before, I very logically know that this show is garbage and is not getting better anytime soon. I also know that even if Buddie does happen, it won’t be as satisfying as it would have been with Bobby there to see it. Especially if they get together this season (which, I don’t even know anymore, man), it will feel more like a sympathy play than a satisfying outcome. A move to make viewers forget about their horrible writing for the past year by putting the most anticipated ship of the show together.

While the reasonable side of me knows there is no way to fix these issues, the hopeful and prideful parts of me can’t bear the idea of abandoning the show I put so much time into. I simply have to be there when Buck and Eddie kiss so that I can say, “Ha! I told you guys.”

Yes, Buddie FOMO is a genuine anxiety I experience.

I’ve gotten better at holding the show at arm’s length while still watching every new episode. In the past, I had a routine of watching the show live, and I would literally carve out 7:45 PM to 9:30 PM as 9-1-1 time and Freak Out About 9-1-1 time. I left dinner with my friends once (before they started watching with me) because I was that adamant about being a live viewer.

You might be wondering what is wrong with me, and I can assure you that I’m wondering this, too.

But I guess that’s kind of all I have to say about it (I say, with a word count of SEVEN THOUSAND up my ass). Please let me know if you have suggestions on how I can leave this open cage I’m in. Thanks! The rational side of me truly appreciates it.

…

You can buy me a coffee if you want to support this page.

We’re going to go way back into the history of these mechanical wonders, but for common day interest, you should definitely check out Nina Varella’s Crier’s War duology, Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices trilogy, Detroit Become Human, and The Heroes of Olympus (shoutout Festus).

I. fearfully and wonderfully made

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

your works are wonderful,

I know that full well” (Psalm 139:14)

Our story begins centuries ago in Greece. In The Iliad, Hephaestus was described to have created “waiting-women” who were “made of gold but looked like real girls” (18: 418-422). In The Odyssey, Hephaestus gifted King Alcinous two automaton watchdogs — one gold, one silver — to guard his palace. He also crafted golden waiters who assisted cupbearers like Ganymede during the banquets of the gods, as well as the Celedones who attended the Oracle of Delphi. In some versions of the Pandora’s box myth, she was an automaton made by Hephaestus and made alive by Zeus. Additionally, the eagle that tortured Prometheus was also sometimes made by the divine blacksmith. 1

Hephaestus’ most famous automaton, however, was Talos, a “gigantic bronze man” who served as the protector of Crete. He threw rocks and crushed those approaching the island — until Medea (or maybe Poeas, but I like the Medea version more) destroyed him with her magic.

Speaking of Medea, her father Aeetes owned a variety of bronze bulls that were made by Hephaestus in the image of Helios’ infamous golden cows. (One of Jason’s tasks to obtain the Golden Fleece was to yoke two of them — and die, so thought Aeetes, because the bulls exhaled fire — but he succeeded because of the protection charms Medea placed onto him. Once again, my icon saved the day.)

Some other automaton makers up to the standards of Hephaestus were Dadaelus and Hero of Alexandria. Most famously, Daedalus made Pasiphae the mechanical bull she used to mate with the sacred bull in the origin of the Minotaur. In other accounts, it was said that Daedalus could make dancing and speaking statues, imbuing life into their mechanical souls as Hephaestus did. Hero of Alexandria made the aeolipile with the first steam engine, a vending machine that dispensed holy water, flying mechanical chariots, and moving sanctuary statues. He even made a clockwork theater that played tragedies.

In Egypt, automatons were used to determine the next king. It was believed that the gods divinely inhabited their mechanical bodies to deliver spiritual advice. In Cairo, viziers like Shahanshah decorated their palaces with singing statues and mechanical wine servers.

In the palace of Constantine VII, visitors could see the famous “throne of Solomon,” a mechanical spectacle of golden lions, roaring and thumping their tails. The throne could hover in the air, and a dove flew to place a crown on the king’s head — a demonstration of the connection between the mortal and divine. King Solomon was also said to have built the City of Brass in the desert. In The Thousand and One Nights, travelers find the abandoned city where every human has died, but mechanical automata live (lifelessly) on.2

In Caesar, the line of “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” was originally emphasized in productions by a rising wax automaton of Caesar displaying his wounds. After the fall of Rome, it was legend that the empire’s riches were buried underground. Guarded by automata, there were alleged boons of treasure, immortalizing the empire’s legacy in a place no one could ever find.

In China, a mechanical orchestra was constructed for emperors of the Han Dynasty, and the Book of Hydraulic Elegancies published during the Sui Dynasty seems proof that imperial circles were populated by mechanical servants providing entertainment and service.3

In 9th-century Baghdad, the Book of Ingenious Devices by the Banū Mūsā brothers detailedly illustrated hundreds of mechanical devices and instruments. These pictures inspired Ismail Al-Jazari — known as the “father of robotics”4 — in 11th-century Mesopotamia. In The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, Al-Jazari illustrated extraordinary inventions run by Rube Goldberg chains. These devices were beautiful imaginations of clockwork mechanisms working alongside whimsical creatures like dragons and phoenixes. His glorious creations paved the way for the evolution of an automata-populated world in the later age of the Enlightenment.

As global trade increased, interest in clockwork devices skyrocketed. Devices like table fountains, elegantly layered with turrets and gargoyles, became commonplace. Unfortunately, the intricacies of such devices were lost to time, either from being scrapped for parts or melted into other golden delicacies. The only fountain that survived the transition of eras is from Constantinople (1320-1340). It was supposedly buried at the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and dug up again years later, surviving as an indicator that maybe Rome’s riches are underground somewhere being guarded by clockwork people.

During the rise of classicism in the Renaissance, the brilliance of past automata inspired many artists and mathematicians. Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, had a huge interest in them. His notebooks were filled with sketches of clockwork men, fantastical devices, and even a mechanical lion. His most famous piece was a knight in armor, able to lift his arms and move his visor through a series of gears.

Brazen (brass) heads also became popular during the Renaissance for their distinct ability to not only speak to viewers, but also answer their questions. Saint Albertus Magnus was said to have built a complete man of brass over the course of 30 years. Legend has it that the brass man spoke too much, which angered Magnus’ disciple, Thomas Aquinas, enough to make him break it into pieces.5

II. making the darkness conscious

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” -C.G. Jung

In the 1700s, the production and display of automata became a symbol of class. Many were built by the poor European working class (probably for much less than these mechanical wonders were worth) and then used by the rich for entertainment. Some were more public entities, used to teach moral lessons to common people, but whoever owned such automata was known with high regard.

This was a time of much thinking. Philosophers questioned our very existence as humans, trying to find out what, exactly, made us who we are. Descartes famously compared human systems to mechanical ones, likening them to automata, and many other thinkers debated what made us worth more than metal. Because of this philosophical desire to know what made us who we are, creativity skyrocketed in the Age of Enlightenment.

Jacques de Vaucanson

Vaucanson, my favorite 18th-century freak, believed that there was no significant difference between humans and machinery. He studied the body’s anatomy and used clockwork mechanisms to replicate its inner workings.

His first invention was The Flute Player, debuting in France in 1738. This automaton’s figure held a flute below its mouth, and rather than placing a music box in the automaton’s back or base like other inventors, Vaucanson wanted to make it so that the automaton was actually playing the flute. In order to do this, he made it so gears could change the shape of the lips and push air through the mouth. Vaucanson was said to have used, disgustingly enough, a human tongue to get the mouth’s movements correct. Around the hands, which moved similarly to the mouth to cover/uncover the flute’s holes, Vaucanson allegedly covered the fingers with human skin. According to him, it made the movements of playing music much easier.

Alongside the Flute Player, Vaucanson created an automaton duck. From the outside, it looked as if the duck was chewing, digesting, and excreting food. On the inside, however, there were two sets of rubber tubes attached to the base. One took in the food and contained it in the base, while the other had dirt pellets, also stored in the base, that were pushed out once the chewed food was contained. When observers left, the base would be cleared out and stocked. The whole digestive process was an illusion.

Vaucanson’s famous trio was the Flute Player, Digesting Duck, and Fife-and-Drum, which, like the Flute Player, hit a drum by the turning of gears. It was alleged that Vaucanson created a “Talking Head” automaton whose mouth moved in speech (around a human tongue, of course), but it was lost to time. These inventions demonstrate Vaucanson’s desire to create an entirely artificial man. He was the Victor Frankenstein of automata makers —hence why I wrote an essay comparing them.

While he didn’t succeed in making a man, his legacy lies in his creation of cams. These are small circular discs stacked atop each other (imagine a human spine) that spin up and down to produce movement in automata bodies. Cams allowed for a “mechanical memory” that was developed to even further capacities by automata makers in later years.

In the late 1740s, Archbishop Jakob Von Dietrichstein commissioned the building of a theatre he coined as a “perfect society” of mechanical subjects. Clockwork mechanisms went off at intervals around the city, powered by gears that were turned by water pressure. The intricacies of the architecture and design are phenomenal, and the entertaining experience became a renowned “mechanical opera.”

Pierre Jacquet-Droz

Between 1768 and 1774, Frenchman Pierre Jacquet-Droz (alongside his son Henri-Louis and Jean-Frederic Leschot ) created three marvels of automata. The Musician played the organ, The Draughtsman could draw, and The Writer could write any text up to 40 characters. The Writer was the most complex of all of them. In his design, Jacquet-Droz not only minimized the inner workings of a clock, but also created a set of “cams” (inspired by Vaucanson) that puppeteered his arms to move. The wheel controlling the cam was comprised of letters that could be reordered (kind of like coding on a computer), which was a sort of reverse-engineering of the act of writing. Additionally, he dipped his goose feather pen into ink and would even shake it off to avoid blobs. His eyes followed the words written, mesmerizing audiences.

In trade deals, automata machinery was regarded as something exotic, coveted around the world. James Cox, for example, made automatons that were mostly explicitly sent to China for trading.

Cox’s employee, John Joseph Merlin (who you might know as the creator of roller skates), soon became an unparalleled designer of automatons. His renowned clockwork swan dazzled everyone who saw it. The swan’s body does not move, but its neck elegantly cranes down to the water below. At the surface, there are fish that squirm away from the swan’s grasp, and the water, crystal glass, moves all around the silver body. It’s as if the swan is really swimming through a current, picking up a fish with its beak.

The Mechanical Turk, or Automaton Chess Player, made by Wolfgang Von Kempelen was first displayed in 1770, allowing people to play chess against an automaton opponent. To the outside gaze, it seemed supernatural. The chess player would seemingly read its opponent’s moves and mimic human reasoning to place its own pieces and win the match. In actuality, the base was large enough to hold someone inside. There were slivers in the checkerboard that allowed light to seep through the base and cast a shadow of where the opponent had moved. The person in the base would then analyze that move and move the gears of the automata to pick up and place their piece where they saw best. It was a magic trick, but its concept went on to inspire the loom in the Industrial Revolution.

Tanaka Hisashige

In Japan, Tanaka Hisashige built karakuri dolls based on clockwork mechanisms made popular by Hanzo Hosokawa. Hisashige’s dolls became a necessity for the rich and beloved to the public watching their performances. His most famous creation, however, is the yumi-iri doji, or archery doll. This automaton shot four arrows at a target and missed one out of the four. At the miss, the doll appears upset, mirroring human emotions in an astounding tick.6

III. subject to constant change

“Style, like taste, is resistant to lucid definition; however both, as living things should be, are subject to constant change” - Harlan Ellison, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

As the industrial revolution and the age of Enlightenment died out, the number of craftsmen making automata declined severely, focused on other things. Though there were still wonderful devices being made. Frenchman Leopold Lamber crafted music boxes bespeckled with clowns, and Peter Carl Faberge, a Russian jeweler, made a walking elephant that ran by winding up a key.

While we no longer have the gear- and oil-based automatons that we had in the 1700s, their image still lingers in animatronics. You can see these mechatronic (a combo of mechanical, electrical, and computer-based engineering) creatures at places like Chuck E. Cheese or Disneyland— and also the video game Five Nights at Freddy’s, of course. Robotic arms are still a thing, too, of course, and so many people have tiny robots (Roomba, Google Home, etc.) living in their homes. From toys to kitchen devices to the AI chatbots (boo) living in our computers, it’s clear robotics has taken over the world.

I, for one, yearn to go back to the era of automata.

While they aren’t made much anymore besides for artistic purposes, the value of automatons is priceless. I truly wish I could talk to Vaucanson about his world-changing cams myself, but the best I could do was write this essay.

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Before dating my favorite person, I definitely didn’t appreciate the holiday to its full extent. Now, though, I’ve become quite the sap. I was rubbing my hands together the other day as I placed an order for my girlfriend, giggling to myself as if I’d enacted an evil plan, when in reality it was just a silly gift. I know she’ll love it, but still, it is quite silly. Since then, and since Valentine’s decor is everywhere, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the holiday.

On Wednesday, as I picked up my Adderall prescription, I caught a glimpse of the holiday aisle at CVS and meandered through it. I found the cutest Squishmallow of Snoopy doused in hearts, and I just had to get it for my girlfriend (even though I won’t see her for about three weeks). This purchase is what really set me on the route of thinking about Valentine’s origin. I won’t lie, I stood in that holiday aisle for a good five minutes looking at all the gifts — many of which included Cupid — and wondering where they spawned from.

I’ve been told so many times about the “dark origins” of Valentine's, but I hadn’t really thought about how this Christian feast day is connected so intrinsically with a Roman god.1 I went into a research hole until I figured out where their lines entangle, and now I’m fascinated by the history. So, join me in following the thread of Saint Valentine and Cupid all the way to modern day.

Chronologically, the story starts in early Greece. Eros was a handsome, charming, playboy god. Playing into mortals and gods’ sexual desires, he caused everyone to fall in love with him. This indomitable devotion caused mayhem, disaster, and disorder that really showcased how much of a tie-in there is to love and tragedy (see: Orpheus and Eurydice, Jason and Medea, Achilles and Patroclus, etc.).

Fearing Eros’s ability to determine love’s course, the Greeks transitioned him from “Eros the Unconquerable” to “Eros, Son of Aphrodite, Follower of Orders.” He became an errand-runner, making people fall in love only when the goddess of love herself decreed it. Eros’ desire had no cards on the table at all. By emasculating and infantilizing him, the Greeks beat their fear of unpredictability. By the Hellenistic period, Eros was the cherub-like boy we know today.

When the Romans came along, they adopted the idea of a little boy following his mom’s orders and called him Cupid. Even the elite, disciplined Romans were scared of what love could do.

Meanwhile, Christianity was gaining traction alongside the Roman gods.

Saint Valentine, while he lived, was quite the activist. There are three accounts of his life story, but whichever one bears the complete truth is a mystery. Valentine One was a priest who, when marriage was outlawed, wedded couples in secret and was therefore executed. Valentine Two was a bishop, beheaded after refusing to renounce his Christian faith when Roman Emperor Claudius II decreed it. Valentine Three helped Christians escape from a Roman prison, where he supposedly fell in love with his jailer’s daughter. Whether one of them is true, or all of them, Valentine’s name became aligned with the heroic figure and symbol of romance, nonetheless.2

As years passed, Valentine gained popularity for his heartthrob efforts, and his Feast Day was declared February 14th, which may or may not have been the day he died. However, another theory is that the holiday was placed there as a big Fuck You to the Romans.

On the 15th of February, Romans celebrated Lupercalia, a “fertility festival” in which men ran down the streets and whipped women because it, apparently, made them more fertile. (WTF!) Lupercalia was first established back at Rome’s origins with Romulus and Remus, so the festival’s bigger honor was of the original Roman victory. So, maybe the Christians did make it the 14th to drown out Roman patriotism, but maybe not.

Valentine’s Day wasn’t inherently romantic for a while, though. It was only in the 1380s, after Chaucer wrote “The Parliament of Fowls” where he named St. Valentine’s as “When every fowl comes there his mate to take.”3 This association with a bird’s mating ritual and the holiday sparked sporadic odes of love to pop up in the 1400s. The holiday wasn’t commonplace just yet, but it was getting there.

When the Renaissance blazed through Europe, classicism and the rediscovery of ancient texts enveloped artists in the past. With the “revival of ancient Greco-Roman themes, styles and motifs,” past culture merged with current and gave the world beautiful art pieces like The Creation of Adam, The Birth of Venus, and David.4

Victorious Cupid by Caravaggio was one of these masterpieces. In it, Caravaggio depicts Cupid as a little boy, smiling playfully. Amor Vincit Omnia is the original title, and it actually translates to many other phrases, such as “Love Victorious” or “Earthly Love,” which both remind me of that untouchable, unconquerable aspect of Cupid so present in early Greece. Yet, here, he is so innocent and child-like. His depiction as such throughout the Renaissance really set in stone his cherub image as an icon of pop culture.

Additionally, bees were found in many Renaissance pieces (see: Bruegel’s The Beekeepers), where they stood as symbols of humanism and social harmony. In Cupid’s case, they were a source of malevolence. In Theocritus’ Idyll of “The Honey Stealer,” a young Eros tries to steal honey from a beehive and ends up getting stung.5 He runs off to Aphrodite and says, “How can a thing so tiny hurt one so?” and she compares him to a bee in return. It’s very on the nose, but: love stings.

From then on its said that Cupid dipped his arrows into honey before aiming them. The bittersweet stickiness of love was thus something physical, and each arrow sent was a reminder of Cupid’s own discovery that there is no love without pain.

(Bonus fun fact: Valentine is the patron saint of bees and beekeeping! I petition that we make bees the spirit animal of Valentine’s Day immediately.)

As Cupid became younger and younger in art, his image also began to become associated with the putti. These little angels are famous for appearing in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, and they dominated the Renaissance as a representation of both Christian and Roman iconography.6 As time went on, Cupid became more and more in cahoots with the cherubs, to the point where now, at the surface level, it’s hard to see any difference.

By the 1800s, Valentine’s Day was something worthy of large celebrations. There were matchmaking lotteries held in England to find your true love, and greeting cards sent out by the rich. In the 1850s, however, Esther Howland became known as the “Mother of the American Valentine” for her card-making business.7 She made sending out decorated cards a “commercial phenomenon,” and led us toward the love-struck economy we live in today.

As Howland’s “cultural phenomena” of easily accessible greeting cards continued, companies like Hallmark followed in her footsteps. This eagerness to profit on love ended up circling back to the iconic god of love, and by the early 1900s, Cupid’s interwovenness to Valentine’s became concrete.

And that brings us back to today, and to me seeing Cupid in the holiday aisle of CVS.

I think it’s fascinating how embedded in our culture Cupid has become. It feels like he’s gone in and out of style, yet never wavered when it came down to his name being remembered. Like many Greek tales, Cupid has become an archetype of sorts— the matchmaker. His image parades pop culture space in places such as Tangled and Night at the Museum. Even his original role in inplanting desire and mayhem onto mortals can be found with devices like love potions, or, even the pheromones of Poison Ivy.

My favorite pop culture Cupid reference is, predictably, in Rick Riordan’s novel The House of Hades. While searching for Diocletian’s Scepter, Nico and Jason come across, interestingly enough, a Greek-presenting version of the god of love (though, he still goes by Cupid for… whatever reason). Rather than the familiar cherub, Cupid is portrayed as the fear-inducing, indomitable Eros. He taunts them, and at one point, Jason even asks, “Is this guy Love or Death?” to which Cupid says, “We are not so different” (286).8

He shoots them with arrows until Nico confronts him, saying Cupid “doesn’t scare [him],” and Cupid replies, “I scare you very, very much” (288). We find out, after more taunting and screaming, that Nico is GAY. Cupid literally forces him to come out in front of someone he met like three days ago. When Jason realizes how cruel this is, he thinks “Love was the most savage monster of all” (291).

This scene is so iconic that I sometimes just start quoting it word for word. Tell him, Nico di Angelo. Tell him you are a coward… My goodness, Rick Riordan ate with this one! Seriously, this scene means so much to me — I literally wrote a personal essay about it. (I definitely didn’t want to write an entire article about Cupid juuuuust so I could talk about the Nico-Jason-Cupid scene. Definitely not.)

Altogether, the origin of Valentine’s Day is something truly fascinating to me. Love spans across cultures, across time, across space, all because humans, intrinsically, love love. How beautiful is that?

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There’s a whole line of overlapping histories we can follow to answer that question—from Canterbury Tales in 1392 to Isaac Watts in 1715 and so on—but my particular focus, or more so, revelation, was that the whole conception of a “busy bee” is about the worker bee, who is a female. In Canterbury Tales, for example, Chaucer writes: “...women are. For always busy as bees / Are they.”

I feel like in today’s world, the phrase is applied to anyone who is “as busy as a bee” regardless of gender, which is fine, I guess. Whatever. But I got a bit fixated on the matriarchal systems of the honey bee hive and realized that these little insects are hugely woke, and I’m obsessed with it.

You might be wondering where this productivity of female worker bees leaves the males. If they aren’t “busy,” then what do they do for the hive? Who even are they?

The answer to this is: drones.

Drones are male honey bees that are useless for every aspect of their extremely short (2 months, give or take) life. They have no stinger, so they can’t protect themselves. They don’t pollinate, and thus can’t eat without a worker bee’s help. My favorite drone fact is that these drones will spend their whole lives (2 months) awaiting their one sole purpose of the Queen’s nuptial flight—the mating process in which the virgin queen mates with up to 20 drones in flight to birth a new colony—and after they participate in said ritual (have sex), they die.

All males are good for in the world of honey bees is sex. Literally just sex.

(Imagine Plato’s thing about how only men existing with each other would be a superb society, but they unfortunately need women to reproduce, be completely turned on its head here.)

What makes this even better is the courting ritual that happens in order for a drone to participate in nuptial flight.

Queen bees are queens because they have the ability to reproduce (worker bees are females, too, yes, but they have underdeveloped genitalia that do not allow for such rapid reproduction). For this reason, Queens are the glue that holds together the rest of the colony; the continued existence of a hive relies completely on its queen. She is protected inside the hive, pampered by her colony, and does not leave until the flight commences.

Once the Queen leaves for nuptial flight, she emits pheromones that attract nearby drones and begins flying up and away. The drones chase her as long as they can, following her as she reaches a height of about 700 feet. The drones that are too weak to fly so high and so long must return to the hive, having failed their one freaking job, and there they become essentially shunned by the rest of the colony, no longer fed until they die a slow death.

The drones that are able to reach the Queen’s height obtain the victory of mating with her, but their fate is much the same as the weaker drones. Their bee dicks actually stay implanted in the Queen as fertilization of the eggs commences, and the rest of their body is essentially shut down as they fall to a victorious death.

How hard it is to be a male honey bee when your only options are to (1) not have the stamina to have sex and then get shunned by your entire colony or (2) have sex with the Queen and then fall to your death. Ugh. I truly feel for them. Male bees should be appreciated more, right? Just like the way other males are in the real world?

Meanwhile, while the drones are doing fuck all as they wait for their opportunity for sex, the worker bees are, well, putting in the work. In their two-ish months of life, worker bees rotate through a plethora of jobs. They take care of their dead brethren, feed the drones, attend to the queen (i.e., feeding her, grooming her, spreading her pheromones), pack pollen, build honeycombs, air condition the hive (fanning it with their wings), and guard the colony.

During the winter, a worker bee has the additional job of clustering around the Queen to keep her warm. They have rotating shifts of cuddling with the queen, which, I think, should be the new trend of girlhood for us humans. How loyally adorable is that!

The last job a worker bee has, and the longest time spent overall, is working as a forager. These are the bees that collect honey, pollen, and propolis to bring back to the hive. Together, these function as food for the hive as well as building materials. Without the forager bees, there would be no hive.

Without forager bees, our world—our hive, so to speak—would also cease to exist.

Pollination is extremely important to our ecosystem. I feel like the gravity of what pollination is, and what bees do, isn’t clear to a lot of people. Maybe it’s just my own experience, but when I learned about bees in school, I just remember being told that they fly around flowers and do something that makes the air clearer. This is true-ish because pollinating does cycle carbon through the air to make it cleaner, much like the processes involved with trees. However, pollination is much more than just air cycling. It provides the basics for our survival.

Pollination happens while a bee is harvesting nectar through its proboscis. As they dive into the center of the flower, they rub against the anthers (male genetalia). Pollen is emitted and sticks to the bee’s frictioned thorax due to simple static electricity. While they continue this quest for nectar, they fly to other flowers, and that pollen is then transferred to the stigma (female genetalia) and enacts a fertilization process. Only after a flower is pollinated does it produce the crops we then harvest for our food. This is literally 75 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts in our diets—and that’s not even to mention all of the other parts of our meals like fats and oils that come from what’s harvested.

Without bees, we will lose the majority of our food sources. Without bees, we will die.

It really is that serious.

I’ve been doomsdaying for the past week or so about bees because I’ve been reading The History of Bees by Maja Lunde. As much as I want to say I’m just being dramatic because the book about the disappearance of bees leading to a war for resources leading to the collapse of the United States is just something that scared me, the truth behind the book’s dystopian setup is much too probable in our current state.

I don’t have all the statistics because looking at the fall of bee populations is genuinely so depressing to me, but bee ecosystems are declining. There are so many factors, such as habitat loss (our downfall is our own fault, really) and parasitic species like cuckoo wasps. Climate change is always a problem, as are toxic pesticides and competition between different species. One of the biggest unknowns causing the bee decline, however, is Colony Collapse Disorder.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when “the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, plenty of food, and a few nurse bees,” which inevitably, because the nurse bees are so immature in their development, leads to the death of the whole colony. CCD is mentioned in The History of Bees, and while I knew it existed, I hadn’t understood vividly enough what was happening. Reading about George, one of the book’s three protagonists, and the loss of his entire livelihood in 2007 from CCD, was extremely anxiety-inducing. As someone who loves to be in control, the idea of something I’ve put so much energy into (I am, in this hypothetical, a beekeeper) just disappearing one random day is horrifying. It feels like something right out of a horror movie.

CCD is rapid. It happens in a blink, and it’s still happening. At the beginning of just last year, the USDA reported that “60% of commercial beekeeping colonies had been lost since the prior summer,” which is 1.7 million colonies. Gone, just like that.

This has turned way more serious than it was meant to be (my original idea was calling honey bees the human-adjacent of blue-haired Liberals, but of course I had to be a bee-loving activist about it), so let me just end it by saying: honey bees are so fucking WOKE, and we as a society should really be learning some things from them. Those are as follows:

1. All men do is have sex and die.

2. Women work so damn hard all the freaking time.

Please thank the bees the next time you see one in public because they are literally keeping you—and keeping everyone, all of us greedy humans—alive. When you hear a buzz back, pretend it’s their kind response of “you’re welcome” and not just the vibration of their wings.

And remember: a “busy bee” is a female bee.

Women truly make the world go ‘round—especially inside the hive.

…

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But what even is “creative writing”?

The Oxford Dictionary qualifies it as “writing… which displays imagination or invention,” which is literally just a longer way to say “creative writing.” My college’s website doesn’t give much information, either. There’s a bulleted list of what the program teaches, but it’s just… ambiguous. These topics are things any English degree could say, such as “articulate how writing creates meaning” or “demonstrate knowledge of and more advanced practice of craft technique.” Looking at this list now makes me want to sigh. Like… okay? Thanks, girl, give us nothing.

I think I’m supposed to think it’s meta, or something, that they’re making me think outside the box—that I have to make my own definition of my major—by thinking creatively. Honestly, though, that just kind of makes me frustrated.

I’ve always struggled with small talk (“How are you?” Um. Fine? Am I supposed to tell you that I didn’t sleep much last night, or should I just say “Good. And you?”) and open-ended questions. It’s kind of ironic since, you know, that’s my major, like, literally, but I have to speak my truth. I don’t know if I like that this degree I’m getting has no sure path. In fact, the road I’m taking is more of an avalanche that I’m falling alongside, reaching my final destination (graduation) by pure luck.

Most of the time, I don’t have a clue what the fuck I’m doing.

This is why I’ve been being way too existential than is needed as of late. “What’s your major?” has turned into me asking myself, “What’s my purpose?” and that then leads to doubt spirals and guilty stomachaches about why “creative writing” is something I’m putting energy into.

To combat this negativity, I’ve been trying to be much more active in the course of my life. Rather than existing with the avalanche, I’m the one starting it. I am not merely adjusting to and going wherever the wind takes me, but deciding for myself what I will do. Where I will go. How I will make the most of my life.

Not too long ago, my girlfriend told me something along the lines of “If you want something to happen, you’ll make it happen,” and those words have stuck with me ever since. I’ve always wanted to be an author, and I want this to be a reality, but before now, I wasn’t being active in that process. I always made excuses when it came to setting times to write my book, pushing off the act because I was too tired, or I needed to write on days I had nothing else to do, or, my personal favorite, if I don’t write in the morning hours of the day, then I can’t write at all.

I said before that I’m bad with open-ended stuff, and I definitely think that’s true when it comes to my writing. At least, for the most part. I need a routine to follow, but also, the routine can’t be too rigid because then it will stress me out. I can’t just say “I’m going to write my book from 1 pm to 3 pm tomorrow” because I don’t know what I’m doing in the morning before then, so I might be tired. And what if I don’t finish by 3? I need more time than just two hours. Or, what if I don’t want to write at 1? How do I know I’ll even be motivated to write at all?

Do you see how much anxiety is involved in my writing process?

I think, now, though, I’ve figured out the sweet spot of a routine-non-routine.

What’s been working the past couple of weeks is deciding that I’ll write on a certain day without deciding on a certain time. An example of this would be yesterday. Before bed, I’d thought about getting up at like 9-ish and writing at 10-ish. The key to those times, though, was ish. Ish gives me wiggling room that doesn’t feel so overwhelming as the closed brackets of a calendar. Because as long as the writing gets done, I feel the dopamine burst of completing the task.

I actually woke up at 10 this morning, and didn’t get to the library/start writing until nearly 12, but it was okay because I wrote over a thousand words in little time, and felt happy with myself for completing it.

On the thread of “dopamine bursts,” another strategy I’ve implemented in my writing times is keeping track of word count. I’ve always done this with whole chapters or seeing how many words I wrote in a day, but I’ve gotten into actually timing myself and writing down exact times and word count in a notebook that I keep next to me as I type.

When I first implemented this, I thought it would be stressful, but honestly, it works great—eustress, my therapist would say. It makes me aware of how much I really am writing when I can see it so clearly, serving as a reminder that I can write my book when I set my mind to it. It also makes me feel like Alexander Hamilton when I write like I’m running out of time, which is very motivating.

And I am! Running out of time. We all are. Who knows when the Rapture is actually going to come, or when another dinosaur-sized meteor will take us out? I’m not asking this to promote a fear of dying or anything, more so a carpe diem mentality. Seize the day, my friends. Don’t let the avalanche control you. Make that shit happen.

Discipline is truly a learned task in making shit happen. Without discipline, nothing improves. Now that I’ve seen what I can do with a consistent writing routine, I can’t even imagine what I was thinking before now. While I would lie around, waiting for inspiration to strike, I could have written a whole book by now. Probably. How foolish I was to throw away my shot.

Now, whenever I’m lacking motivation to write, or even complete another task I want/need to do, I’ll go outside. I know, it’s crazy! Who knew being outside of your room made you happier? Well, I can tell you 100 percent it does. In the fall, I tried to go to different green spots around the city every weekend, and while the greens have faded, I still try to walk for at least 15 minutes every day.

My favorite route to the BPL lately has been through the Public Gardens and down Commonwealth Ave. Most of the time, the sky is dreary, and it’s cold, but I’ve found joy in the geese that honk along the path and the dogs wearing snow boots on their walks. As I listen to music and brave the cold, I will smile to myself like a weirdo and not even care that people might be looking at me (which is huge progress coming from someone with social anxiety).

I’ve also been journaling before every session. If I’m having doubts about the way I write or what I’m writing, I get them out of my system before I begin.

I don’t really know what I wanted to say in this thinkpiece. I just know that, lately, I’ve felt a lot happier about the little things. Going outside and getting screen time-reducing apps on my phone has made me not only more aware of the beautiful world around me, but also more active about it. I feel like an actual participant in my life, someone who decides what comes next.

Someone who can figure out what my purpose is.

So, what is “creative writing”? Well, fuck if I know! But, maybe, that’s the point: that there is no definition. Could it be… up for interpretation? How very writerly of me to say that. Honestly, though, the premise of this is just like those open-ended questions I have no clue how to answer, so it’s probably better left unsaid. All I know is that “creative writing” is the major that absolutely, one hundred percent fits me; I cannot picture myself doing anything else.

Maybe one day, as I continue my discipline and keep on being active in life, I’ll figure out what that actually means. Or, maybe I won’t. Maybe the answer is in the friends we make along the way, or something like that.

…

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