I’ve been going through some rough stuff for over 20 years, now. My parents got divorced 2 months before 9/11, two years before that, my Mom’s brother died, two years after 9/11, my Mom’s mom died. All that made me feel life is short, to try to touch the sky, exhaust yourself doing what’s right. But I was bullied in Middle School and High School, so I tried to turn myself into what I thought they wanted me to be, a crazed anti-Bush fanatic who believed in conspiracy theories. But, despite how I appeared, I didn’t hate the man, I was more disappointed in him because I thought he could please more people. I was actually wary of Obama during the election, but only because the American people were treating him like a god. He was a fine man and a great President, especially compared to the two previous, but he wasn’t going to wave his hand and make things amazing. The congregation of Church I attended at the time dug in its heels and began speaking like the growing Tea Party movement.
Meanwhile, I saw The Laramie Project in college. I can’t tell what hurt worse, the brutality of Matthew Shepherd’s death, or that every Christian in the play thought to some degree, “He got what he deserved.” Reading The Shack and listening to Miley Cyrus advocating for LGBTQ+ rights at the time made me believe kindness should be at the core of every action a Christian takes. I lived this philosophy as best I could, but it got hard when my heroine was the subject of nigh-endless scandal in 2010, with entertainment reporters putting her down as a slut, a whore, whichever of the 200+ words to mean “woman who casually has sex.” A divorce declaration struck her parents and she was filmed using salvia. The angry voices kept ringing in my head, “you picked another failure like Britney, she’s going to Hell, and so will you for liking her. Cut her out of your life if you want to get to Heaven!” It stopped, though, when I read Martin Luther ask in a book at Church if we have a realistic view of sin. We all sin, but that doesn’t make us bad people, what does is how we treat each other.
My mind stumbled towards recovery in the coming months, the case was withdrawn, they seemed close-knit again and I started to branch out to Classic Rock bands that weren’t The Beatles to ease my mental load. I started with Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd, because Billy Ray had talked about them a lot. I got a huge Classic Rock education from Wikipedia articles, and decided to buy “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath one day, partially because of the movies. I was a bit startled when the MP3 listed “Ozzy Osbourne” as the composer, since I thought he and Black Sabbath were separate, and my relatively sheltered upbringing made me scared of the Metal scene, with names like Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. However, the door was opened in 2012 when I bought Stryper’s “The Covering.” They were an explicitly Christian Hair Metal band and, on this album, they performed songs by those three and Iron Maiden, UFO, Van Halen and Led Zeppelin, the last of which I already enjoyed. I was also at a place where I was hoping to find kindred spirits after three men in the Men’s Group at the Church I went to then verbally assaulted me for choosing to be an ally, quoting Leviticus and Sodom and Gomorrah at me. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. In Junior Year in High School I was with classmates in the library and an old friend from Cub Scouts came up. Out of nowhere, he started about how he hated organized religion, especially Christianity. I told him I was Lutheran, hoping he’d respect me and wait to talk about this with his friends until after I was gone. No such luck. He ranted for what felt like 5 minutes about all the New Testament things that he believed were untrue and made-up, from the shape of the cross to Mary being a Virgin to the origins and celebrations of Easter. Shortly after that, The Da Vinci Code was released and I was more furious than I had ever been. In fact, I started getting into Hannah Montana because around that time Miley Cyrus said, “It’s hard to be a Christian in Hollywood.”
So I was seeking more kinship, a larger circle that could build me up. And I learned a lot about Heavy Metal and Hard Rock, going to concerts from Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Whitesnake and Def Leppard. And I still caught Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato when they were in town. But, Stryper never came to Washington State. Also, Michael Sweet’s Twitter kept linking to articles written by Tea Partiers and Wallbuilders and I began noting the lyrics seemed more aggressive than they had on first listen, some seeming to claim you have to be as pure a Christian as possible, and be an actual Church-going Christian, or God was going to dump you in Hellfire. “To Hell With The Devil” and “Always There For You” were still classics (to me) of the Hair Metal Genre, so I kept going. However, a friendship I had forged at my then-current Church over Stryper, The Mariners, Christian Rock and Metal and Classic Rock crumbled, because I was sharing articles about how the Church needed to accept the LGBTQ+ community from Rachel Held Evans. The man had previously displayed a “Marie Barone passive-aggressive guilt bomb” attitude when I said I was going to see Led Zeppelin or Sammy Hagar, now he was more direct, asking me if I read Leviticus on Facebook. My friends, my Dad among them, told him off…so he directly messaged me an article condemning what I was doing. When I was let go from a short-lived job in June 2015, right after gay marriage was legalized, and he attempted to start conversation in Church, I could tell where it was going. “You would’ve kept your job if you didn’t care about gay people.” Mom tried to help me by asking me to help her friend. Her friend got into a conversation with another congregant right in front of me where she said the country had become “The United States of Sodom and Gomorrah.” All I could do is when she said she’d go to Canada, I told her it’d been legal there for ten years at that point. That was my last time there.
So I went to Garden Street United Methodist Church, a reconciling congregation, and finally felt free. No longer was there dissonance between the compassionate God I had heard of at the Western States Youth Gathering in 2005 and the God being preached about on Sunday and in the hearts of the congregation. I moved to my current apartment and things felt good for a few months. On November 23rd, 2015, her own birthday, Michael Sweet implied Miley Cyrus was going to Hell. The image he had built of being a regular, reasonable person cracked. Still, I followed his page. He started getting excited over a CEO joining the Republican Primary and tweeted almost non-stop about him and Ted Cruz. This CEO started saying the most unhinged, deranged and violent threats I’d heard in a campaign outside of old footage of Hitler’s rallies in Germany. Michael Sweet was the only one on Twitter cheering him on. And still I followed him. This monster of a man bragged about sexually assaulting a woman, saying “grab ‘em by the [vagina]!” and in a total reversal of his stance less than a year ago, Michael Sweet tweeted it was okay for him to say that and that his crew should still vote for him. Because I had contacted him once, he was following me, so I posted whatever I could to show he was wrong, this was not a good, Christian man, this was a devil who loved violence and murder and lusted after women, a deluded psychopath who saw himself as a 20-something muscular man who could crush Mt. Everest with one punch! And nothing worked. He was the only one happy in November. I saw Tegan and Sara, Demi Lovato, Laura Bailey, Vicky Beeching and Rachel Held Evans weep in text, images, gifs. I was so crushed I thought about killing myself.
Everything changed and got worse. I had already had a lot of misery on DeviantArt because people wanted me to write their fan fictions about characters I didn’t know, never met and had no interest in. Now, some were revealing they were just like 45. Art of that monster, who insisted on being the headline every day, who threatened LGBTQ+ people, who stereotyped and insulted Asians at any opportunity and kissed the barbarian Putin’s shoes, increased, depicting him as the hero. The lesbians who drew Samus and Zelda cuddling started to disappear, probably scared off by his minions. I got into Soundgarden due to the Halestorm cover, and two days after my birthday, Chris Cornell was gone. To this day, I can’t help but believe part of the reason was that he sang a song for “16 Hours,” a film about an attack in Benghazi, Libya, which some accused of being a Republican propaganda film, since Obama and Hillary decide to let the complex go. A few days later, Gregg Allman died, and on Chris Cornell’s Birthday, Chester Bennington of Linkin Park also hung himself.
The young adult group at the Church kept me going, as did Miley Cyrus’ “Younger Now,” the fourth Black Country Communion album, the Wonder Woman movie and seeing Geoff Tate and Billy Ray Cyrus live. Then 2018 hit, and it broke me. Dad got a pulmonary embolism in January, almost dying. To comfort myself, I bought figurines of Yang and Blake from RWBY. Mom was upset because the money was for two trips, making me feel bad about trying to make myself feel better. I went on, but lost interest in things, missing concerts, not posting on social media, I didn’t know what to do with myself. The only comfort, to me, was singing along to Judas Priest’s “Rising from Ruins.” Andrew and I went to a Mariners game and that brought me out of it a bit. The next few months were okay, then came October. Two Trump fanatics sat near me at lunch, babbling about how great he was and how he was a great Christian. I left, played “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath, then went to the Noah Cyrus concert in Seattle that night. What a show that was, she was 18 and only had a guitarist, keyboard player and drummer backing her and she produced a well-done, intimate show. She also kind of looked like Ruby Rose from RWBY due to her haircut. It was a fun show, then I came home the next day and found out my favorite professional wrestler, Roman Reigns, was going to battle Leukemia. I was hurt, he wasn’t old by any means, and in my experience, cancer was a “you have it, make out your will” deal. I stopped watching WWE during his treatment and collected DVDs of matches I loved. I then visited Andrew in Portland for a big birthday party, my fears subdued by the company. Two weeks later, Jon Short was dead.
I pretty much stopped living at that point. Nothing seemed fun anymore, not even my new smartphone. I was only able to deal with it by watching Aquaman, getting a Switch and listening to Miley Cyrus’ “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart” and Toni Cornell’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I also highly anticipated the coming Godzilla movie. In February, Roman Reigns was in remission, and things began looking up. Good protest songs were released by Sammy Hagar, Pearl Jam, Billy Ray Cyrus, Geoff Tate and Miley Cyrus, I was playing the biggest Super Smash Bros. game ever and a Fire Emblem game was announced with the voice of Mitsuru from Persona 3 and a character like Starfire from the Teen Titans. The Godzilla film became probably my favorite movie, and I was riding high on the positive emotions. I looked forward to a 4-band mega concert and the Mariners playing the Braves in 2020.
But we all know what happened. A virus struck and the Executive Branch of the Federal Government refused to believe it existed. We shut ourselves down, I only left for prescriptions and groceries. I decided to play through that Fire Emblem game. Tara Platt’s character, Edelgard, had been often trashed as an inexcusable, irredeemable villain on DeviantArt. Mind you, this website says the same things about Azula from Avatar, Asuka from Evangelion, Emma Frost from X-Men, trashes the Anime Fairy Tail just because it has fanservice, one user even writing the women of the show out of existence by having his original character turn them into Pokémon, catch them, and enslave them. I liked Mitsuru’s voice, though, so I chose her. I found a story of a woman who has been hurt by her past, tried to get support through the established Church, it denied her, ignoring her pain and grief, so she set out to change the system so it would work more for the powerless, by removing the existing structure. I heard a story of her siblings going crazy and killing each other, and the next month, we see that at Remire Village. Meanwhile, the one in charge sends us to kill those who disagree with her, not to pursue the ones responsible. I grew angry at this fictional character saying the man who turned into a beast due to a spear “deserved it,” while Edelgard pointed out how intelligent he was, but was overlooked simply because he didn’t have a crest. It reminded me of a time at my previous Church when one congregant said God was using natural disasters to wake up America from voting Democrat and embracing LGBTQ+ people, smacking his coffee cup for emphasis. Another said God permitted 9/11 so America would stop worshiping its military and wealth. It especially reminded me of the attitude of the then-current President. Combined with Edelgard’s backstory of Dr. Mengele-type experiments and her siblings going insane and dying, I felt three things:
She’s Been Through Enough
She Needs Love
Leave Her Alone
Eventually, the final boss was beaten and a new order with a raised floor was built, and I had found the first canonically, openly bisexual Nintendo character.
And DeviantArt hated my guts. I would tell them to vote for Biden, desiring to restore hope, and they insulted me. They drew art of Yang and Blake, canonically a 2-women-couple, dead. Edelgard getting killed was also drawn and there were floods of Dimitri and Rhea artwork. It said to me, “we like the idea of a theocracy, so long as it means no f**s!” I tried to leave multiple times, but kept coming back…until the Kickstarter project hit.
Since beating the game, I followed Tara Platt on Twitter, returning more fully after mostly being off it from 2017-2020. Annette was a well-liked character from the game, but I hadn’t made any real encounters with her, so I was forced to fight her. Nonetheless, the art was cute and funny and it made me wonder, what if I had recruited that character, how does she fit in our puzzle? The thing that finally got me going was a Kickstarter project with both Tara Platt and Abby Trott (Annette’s actress) as voices. So decided to play again and I could post screenshots from it to advertise. The project fell through and the tension at DeviantArt was unbearable. Ten years of work, ten years of watching people be assholes to your favorite characters, you submit over 4,000 items, but they all only care about 5 you made when you didn’t know what you were doing and now hate, partially because of how overexposed it is! On January 1st of this year, I deactivated my account, and I have no regrets.
Now, I need to go forward. This link has a list of things I’d like to do, some hard to pull off, others not. This is all I’ve been through and I’m tired of feeling bad.
http://djshort89.blogspot.com/2022/05/things-i-would-like.html
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