on one side there’s people commenting on taylor swift’s break up and already saying things like she’ll never get married or have a family because she’s getting old and still “going through all these men” and on other side there’s people making rude comments on millie bobby brown’s engagement and how she’s making a mistake because she’s too young and how she’s probably only getting married to “cover up a pregnancy”
and I just wonder at what age do we let women make decisions that are right for them without scrutinizing their every move and without judging every single decision they make
mean hot take but im low key glad that meet and greets are off the table because it enables her to use that extra time for a longer set which everyone can enjoy instead of just a small subset of fans who got selected to meet her. don’t get me wrong m&gs were lovely and a great way to connect with fans but in 2023? they sound like a nightmare
I keep coming back to what @likeadevils said about how Taylor kept coming back to her fear of getting older in writing Red but kept cutting it from the album.
The Taylor who wrote Red was coming off back to back relationships with older men where her age was a reason they pursued her AND a reason they ended things. She was also trying to continue a career where her accolades were made to seem more significant because they often came attached to a “youngest ever” label.
This era saw Taylor publicly embrace a more mature persona - abandoning the fairytales and whimsy that were once staples of her brand. And yet privately she wrote about how terrifying getting older was. She was desperate to grow up and stay young at the same time because of the way the men in her life, and the industry feel about age.
Imagine the mindfuck of knowing your naivety and youth are hot commodities to older men but your perceived childishness is the reason they’ll abandon you. Growing up would be a way to simultaneously protect yourself from and prove yourself to these men.
Imagine seeing how hard the women in the industry work to cling to the appearance of youth. How women she grew up admiring fell off the charts as soon as either their 20s or their beauty left them. Conversely starting her career as a teenager and writing about high school and first loves was where her detractors drew from for critique. She wasn’t a real musician to them, she was a child star.
Ultimately the desire to grow up, to be perceived as a woman and a serious music heavyweight won out. Red was her transition out of girlhood made clear and at the time it seemed like she bridged this gap effortlessly, but in the vault and on the cutting room floor she left behind traces of the battle it took to get there and the fear of what she was leaving behind.
thinking about “girlhood calcifying into bruised adulthood” and how this transition is most recognisable in the shift from speak now era to red era and how taylor chose to rerecord red tv first and then couldn’t stop writing so she recorded an original album midnights and how in both these eras from the albums to the mv and films to the interviews and talks surrounding them we have seen her talk about herself during this “bruised adulthood” with so much compassion and respect and how the next rerecording is most likely speak now tv and so she will take this grace she has learnt to give her past self and be able to reclaim her girlhood in this essay i will…
to me, the great war isn’t about a fight with your partner, it’s about a fight with yourself. it’s about mental illness getting in the way of your hope at romance: bruising your knuckles with your own sorrow, pushing away the person you love because you feel like you’re not good enough, causing a ‘great war’ of misery because you haven’t known anything different. (it lives in me. i could never give you peace.)
and it’s also about your partner wanting to stay with you despite that: reaching for your hand, past the self-destructive tendencies (crimson clover) and pain (tears on the letter). the 'sweet dream’ of a honeymoon stage is over, but their love makes them stick around through the great war. because you’re not fighting them, not really, you’re fighting yourself.
they try to help (you drew up some good faith treaties), there’s their hand before you, but you can’t take it. you know how this story ends because it has before. so you push them away before they can hurt you, before you can hurt them, you drink your poison before anyone can stop you. every time someone hurt you in the past becomes a justification for this argument: no, i’m not enough. i’m not worth it. go before you regret it.
and it’s not their fault, not really. it’s not their fault that they keep striking on the same things that hurt you before (those hairpin triggers). but you have to realize that you’re already hurting them by trying to push them away. you have to realize that you’re becoming the thing you feared. you have to look at the person you love, looking up with honour and truth, and you have to call off the troops. you have to claw your way back out of the darkness. you have to decide that you want to get better.
the kicker of the title is that no one expected there to be another world war—that’s why ww1 was called the great war. but you know. you know in hindsight that you could get very sick again, that there could be a relapse. you survived the great war, but what’s next? vowing to stick around even when it’s hard for you. vowing not to give up on what you love. we survived the great war. you vow to live.
apparently tumblr is being flocked by twitter users because the site is dying before our eyes so hi, I welcome you with open arms. this site is not perfect. has its glitches and issues.
some tips:
if you reblog a post and have something to say, keep your comments in the tags.
reblog content you enjoy. reply (if op allows) to posts you like.
you can only post / reblog / queue 250 posts within each 24 hours.
you can only follow 5,000 people
send asks to people who you want to befriend.
you will inevitably become mutuals with a swiftie and or a destiel shipper, accept it.
you can’t have group chats on here like you can on twitter (they tried and well, failed) but you can still make plenty of friends on here without being in a groupchat.
participate in fandom things.
block who you want for whatever reason. curating your own online experience is important!
we celebrate the ides of march and also november 5th 2020.
we start celebrating halloween in july.
do you love the color of the sky? i hope so.
remember: this is my turf and you are now in my homeland.
