Opinion Paper - Tumblr Posts
TLDR: i have stockholm syndrome for 2020
i miss 2020. a lot. and its kind of weird, because you only really remember the bad parts. quarantine, home-schooling, covid, ect. but then there are the points where you actually had a good time. so, in this essay i will tell you about positive highlights in 2020. (strictly highlights for me!!!)
2020 was the year i discovered dead meat. if you dont know, dead meat is an awesome horror centric youtube channel, run by james a. janisse. on their, you will find kill counts and their podcast! plus, supercuts made off of the kill counts. i actually remember my first ever dead meat video! it was the banana splits one. i revisit that one every now and again. i kind of remember how i found them. i was on my parents bed since the charging cord for my computer at the time wasnt long enough to reach my bed, i had my head phones plugged in and was watching gacha videos since i was really deep into those. it was a sunny day since it was nearing the end of the year, and i had it on auto play. so, they were the next video. i thought james' was entertaining, so i kept watching. and after watching the entirety of the banana splits one, youtube recommended another one. so, slowly, i worked my way through a bunch of his videos. and i basically became a horror junkie because of dead meat!
2020 was the year food theory was started. i love matpat's content, but i was only interested in game and film theory if it was a movie i watched, or was a game i watched a playthrough of or played myself. when food theory came around, i fell in love! im not quite sure why, but food conspiracies were more interesting then film or game ones. plus, the theory ideas were completely wack! they were questions, that, at some point, we all had. (most of them. im looking at you, koolaid thanos theory.) like the tootsie pop one, what makes a sandwich a sandwich, stuff like that!
in 2020, everyone was a little funky, so nobody could really make fun of each other. well, they could, but they looked weird too, so it was kind of hard to take them serious. this actually somebody off of tiktok's view, but it's true, so i included it.
similar to the last point, everyone was cringe. you cant deny you were a little cringey back then. whether you wore bunny hats and called yourself arson, or you wrote shitty fanfiction on wattpad (me), you were somewhat cringe.
2020 had the best drama. as referenced in my eridan post, i love drama. (as long as it doesn't involve me!) jefree star, shane dawson, dream, ect. it was all so interesting, because every day you would wake up, and see that another person got canceled, and youd always wonder what they got canceled for.
2020 music was kind of peak, ngl. people like to hate something they loved when it gets popular for one reason or another. for example, have you ever seen those comments on tally hall videos complaining about how people only know them through tiktok? yeah those. it honestly isnt bad if you find music through tiktok or not. as long as you enjoy the song and arent gatekeeping. anyways! 2020 had penelope scott, melanie martinez, ect., the music was good, the artists made good music, and it was so easy to just listen to music and let reality wash away.
now this point is like my first 2, in 2020, i got really into fanfic culture. i hadn't really read fanfiction before, so reading through it and seeing a sea of conflicting writing styles and stories that were so fast paced it felt like reading them 3x was like entering a different realm. i actually started with FnF fanfic. my main ship to read was bf x pico. and i realize now that its probably because i like lovers to enemies to friends to lovers. and since i was deep into danganronpa, i dabbled in fanfic for that. actually, my first exposure to ao3 (my go to fanfic site) was through kokichis day at the zoo and kokichis day at the waterpark. kind of a shitty way to be introduced, between just those two fics, you have beastiality, rape, and necrophilia.
2020 was the year i got my leopard geckos, kelly and angel. i got them from my aunt because she was supposed to move to hawai'i for her job, but that didnt happen. 1 is albino and the other is a regular spotted one. i dont have much more to add.
so, there are all my reasons for having stockholm syndrome towards 2020.
TLDR; i am more attached to the lost trio than the og trio
i don't know how this happened, but i find the lost trio much more, i don't know, entertaining(?) than the og trio. i also feel like the lost trio has like a counterpart to them in the og trio, so that's how im going to break down this opinion peice.
the first one i'm going to do is piper and annabeth. i chose piper for annabeth because in the books they are shown to be kind of like a direct parallel of each other, so thats my reasoning for piper as annabeth. that, and the only girls in both of their trios. i feel like i became more attached to piper since i got to see things from her perspective, i never really got that sort of thing in the original books. you are going to hear that a lot, but we only ever saw things from percy's perspective, and it was easy to get attached to characters but you were never as attached to them as you were to percy. i feel like we didn't ever get to see much from any other character's perspective, unlike tlh, where we get chapters from the three main characters perspectives. we get to see piper's personal frustration with the aphrodite cabin, or her traitor's guilt about what she's doing. we never got to see this kind of thing from annabeth, we kind of had to go with the social cues percy gave us, not annabeth directly stating. i feel more connected to piper because of how much more we got to see her emotions, and we were never told how she felt from a party that wasn't her.
next, i'll do leo and grover. they aren't a direct parallel like piper and annabeth, but i was originally going to compare jason to grover but their personalities feel too different, at least grover and leo have a little in common. i feel like we didn't see enough of grover to become properly attached. his story felt mostly wrapped up by book 4, and then his final ending in book 5 was like remembering you have leftovers from the night before. and even though he had some sort of cameo in every book, the cameos were always short. like that one family member that shows up to the function, grabs some food and leaves. and, once again, we get proper chapters from leo's view. we never really hear any sort of bad emotions from grover, the few times we did he seemed very general. like when he felt he'd never be as great of a hero as percy, or his fear of not getting his searchers license felt so general they were impersonal in a way. who knows how many demigods felt bad about themselves cause they thought they'd never amount to anything because of percy? or how many satyrs were afraid of not getting their license! were as we see leo dealing with what i assume is some form of survivor's guilt. like feeling that it was entirely his fault his mom died but he survived, it feels so personal. it makes you sympathize with him. i like leo more because of how brief grover is in most of the books.
lastly, jason to percy. they aren't the best parallel, like, at all, but they'll have to suffice. i don't think this is a real thing, but reading so many things from percy pov, i felt almost like a fatigue of reading it. at least with jason we get breaks. and unlike most readers, i actually found jason's perspective more entertaining. i don't know why, though it might have to do wiht the fact that i act a lot more like jason than percy, so there was almost a built-in connection. and percy kind of states the way he feels, and we already know most of what he had gone through, unlike the first ever interaction we have between jason and his past. he talks to lupa, and has this sort of context mental structure. he talks about how he has this feeling he isn't allowed to be weak when talking to lupa, he suppressed his emotion and he doesn't even know he did that. it feels almost like that joke where you say something traumatic under the guise that it's funny, and when they react weirdly you think, that didn't happen to you? jason doesn't even know he was taught to supresss weakness, and does it subconsciously, whereas percy expresses his emotion, even the ones that are weak. we also put percy on a gold pedestal, but jason didn't get that treatment from the fandom, since he was a demigod who felt he was better than the hero we read about first. jason just feels more relatable for the people who felt like they needed to hide anything that made them weak, or the ones who felt shunned by a large group of people. i am more attached to jason because he has subconsciously routed these ideas so deep in his brain, they are still there when hera steals his memories.
overall, i feel like the lost trio is more relatable to me than the og trio.
TLDR; i feel like lana del rey has poisoned one of my favorite songs
i feel as if lana del rey has poisoned one of my favorite songs, doin' time. the original is from a band called sublime, and lana was a huge fan of them, so she covered on of their songs. now, there isn't anything inheritably bad about this. you could search any song then put cover behind it and you'll most likely find tons of videos of fans of that song singing it. lana basically did that, but since she's a star, hers got fairly popular.
now, it's not bad to prefer hers, but i feel like she should've done more to accentuate that it wasn't an original song, since i feel that a lot of people assumed it to be an original because i believe the official music video didn't mention the original song. and since reuploads of the songs usually don't credit sublime either, lots of people think it to be hers. genius has proof i feel about why so many think that way; "As explained by Interscope CEO John Janick, Del Rey ended up doing the cover since the label “was involved in executive-producing the documentary… and Lana was talking about how big a fan she was.” After recording the track, “she felt like it fit the aesthetic” of her upcoming record Norman Fucking Rockwell! and decided to include it in the tracklist."
but here's where i feel she poisoned it; lots of fans say sublime version sucks, and lana's is better. and this is an opinion, it's okay to have, but i don't agree with it. one of their reasons i don't like because it doesn't make sense. that opinion is that sublime's song is messier, and well it might be, it's because it's ska. ska is kind of known for being chaotic. not to mention, lana's version is nearly identical to sublime's, 2 key differences though. lana's version is a girl singing, and hers is slower to match her other songs.
another one i don't agree with is the "his voice sounds ai generated." personally, i don't think that. to me his voice doesn't sound that way. he sounds like another person. he sings like a normal guy-singer would to me. this also goes with another argument that says he's just talking over background music, and it's similar to rap that way. this one isn't even subjective, it's plainly just not true. throughout the song, he's singing. talking over instrumental are songs like i fcked ur mom and ITGAMFEANIOP, and songs that are approaching talking over music are songs similar to becky by be your own pet. also not to mention that rap isn't talking over a beat. they need to match the rhythm, like many other genres do, and rhyme, like many other genres do. lana could be classified as rap because she does those two things. and i know that rap is much more than that, but i feel that is kind of the base for what rap is.
i feel like lana has ruined this song in a way because of those reasons. and you don't have to agree with me, i just wanted to get this out somewhere.