My relationship with Sex And the City growing up was nonexistent. I didn’t even know the show existed until I was well past my formative years. Therefore the attempt to watch SATC, was one made with “grown” eyes. I will be completely honest, I could not get past the whole Mr. Big obsession. This made watching video essays on SATC, more entertaining than actually watching the show. The hours poured into exploring the world of SATC through the lens of multiple video essays, as opposed to anything beyond season 1, has been enough for me to declare that Mr. Big should’ve been burned at the stake.

That may seem like a harsh punishment, however, women were burned at the stake for far less in both media and in history. Therefore, I don’t think this is that much of a far fetched idea. Mr. Big is a big reason why I could not get into SATC. He’s got me wishing that the peloton got him sooner. Unfortunately pelotons were not released until 2014, which would’ve been a bit of a timeline/continuity issue. Though, I am not above getting Dr. Strange involved.

Carrie and Big’s relationship was a major plot point that should’ve ended the second it began. While I can appreciate the realness that comes with being obsessed with a guy who honestly could not care less if you got ran over by a truck in front of him, I do disagree with all the ways in which Carrie embarrassed herself time and time again for him. It physically pains me to watch it happen. She is too much of a baddie. Baddie down. Especially considering that when she finally got him, he still continued to embarrass her. I will never ever forget when they were supposed to get married, and had Vogue cover their wedding, only for Mr. Big to not only be late, but also tell her, outside of the venue, that he did not want to marry her. The fact that she went back to him after that… humiliation ritual. I need my girl, Carrie, to stand up immediately.

To all the girls, gays, and they’s reading this… do not be a Carrie (romantically speaking). If you have a Mr. Big in your life, please do yourself, and your friends a favor, and leave him. Walk away from the humiliation ritual. As a chronically online netizen I saw this comment somewhere on the great internet that said, and I quote, “SATC is like Obsession from Mr. Big’s point of view”. You do not want to be like Bear. So, bare with the pain of not having your Mr. Big, and walk away.

Editor-In-Chief Note: In December 2021, The Hollywood Reporter published accounts from two women who accused actor Chris Noth (Mr.Big) of sexual assault in 2004 and 2015. Shortly after, additional women came forward with similar allegations. Noth was subsequently fired from CBS's The Equalizer and dropped by his talent agency, while his character's final scene in And Just Like That... was cut.

Thus, some questions remained hanging in the air. The major being: do the queer venues stand a chance in the modern world that’s rapidly changing?

This photo project was conceived with an intention to capture the atmosphere of one popular meeting spot for Berlin’s queer community – Tipsy Bear bar, usually bustling and filled with music, sex, flirtation and dancing. But to see it not only in the party lights in the midst of its regular karaoke night, but also when its dance floor is still empty, the barman behind the bar idling waiting for the first guests, neon spotlights illuminating the darkness of the stage in vain, and an eerie silence reigning in the back corridors.

I was trying to imagine what would happen if the city were to lose such get-together spots. Where would the voices of the queer community be heard then? And what would the city and its residents lose as a whole?

Tipsy Bear acts as an important sanctuary for international immigrants, trans individuals, and diverse facets of the queer community. Known as a “no-frills” hideaway, the venue is celebrated for giving emerging and multidisciplinary queer artists a platform, providing opportunities for Drag Kings, DIY drag performers, and open-stage acts to hone their craft. The bar became a focal point for queer solidarity and local activism after its Pride flag was stolen and burned. The venue responded by hosting major street demonstrations against rising local queerphobia, turning acts of hatred into visible celebrations of love and acceptance.

I think that everyone, or hopefully everyone, walks around life trying to put their best foot forward. Obviously, everyone has a different meaning of what it means to be a good person– but I really don’t think that there are many people out there that wake up and aim to be a bad person. But, is it possible that there are people who wake up and have such high moral standards that it brings their own good nature down, labeling them as people who cause more harm than good?

This idea began after spending a solid hour doom scrolling on Tiktok, actively avoiding final essays that I have to write, when I came across Hannah Glenn ( @hannahglennhannahglenn) and a video she posted about her new substack essay: Moral Superiority Will Turn You Into A Bad Person. She states that 98% of people believe they are the nicest person they have ever encountered and goes to say that how people act online shows that they never once have had any human mess ups and are in fact “the perfect person”. I feel like this can be seen in Gen Z in the past election term, when it showed many of the new democrat voters chose not to vote since Harris was not the ‘perfect politician.’

There has started to be a large emphasis on being ‘perfect’ even in possible imperfect ways. Consumers and people on social media want people to be honest, but not too honest because they have to save face; humble but not ingenuine— be niche and original but relatable. I don’t know if this is a niche reference, but around two years ago a woman posted a recipe video of her bean salad to which someone commented “can this be without beans, i hate beans.”

It has become standard now to produce things that others can be involved in– to pass opinions on. I think it also has a major influence on purity culture that has risen in the last few years. I don’t mean religious purity– though that too probably has a lot to do with this topic, but health and aesthetically. I can really see this on my college campus, if you don’t meal-prep, or go to the gym everyday, or spend 16 hours on your school work, yet still make time to go out until 2 in the morning you are doing ‘adult’ wrong. If you don’t subscribe to group-think you are outed as someone unworthy of any entertainment. People really continue to believe that how they live life is the best possible way and they hold themselves higher than those around them.

I think the best way to combat this is higher morality that causes you to end up just being a mean or ‘bad’ person, is it to recognize that all that matters is yourself. I am not suggesting everyone turn into selfish humans, but move through life understanding, you live with you the whole time and would you even want to be around you if you met yourself? I think that by focusing on these questions, you start to realise; if you can’t stand yourself you probably do not need to judge others. Obviously it’s a lot easier said than done and if I’m honest I really don’t see my generation changing much anytime soon, but maybe if at least one person starts trying to be nicer to themselves, see their own flaws, we will stop pointing out others flaws.

Edited by Lottie Bowden and Lilli Eve

“What is a person if not memories?”

Spoken by Spencer Agnew on the Smosh Pit YouTube channel while explaining the evil lore of Resident Evil. What was meant to be a passive remark about the start of this video game readily gained traction on TikTok within the highly popular niche called hopecore. The hashtag hopecore has thousands of videos and posts spanning across TikTok and Instagram, and it really has me thinking, when did being human become a trend?

Obviously, there has always been a sense of interest when it comes to human emotions that are more complex. Stories that detail the human condition go as far back as hieroglyphics in Egyptian culture, where it highlights the lifestyles of that time. Through each passage of time, an emphasis on what makes humans human has always been at the core of art. But somehow that started to become ‘performative.’

I think it started during the pandemic. I know, a very basic take. Nearly everything became a trend during COVID. You had the Tumblr aesthetic of 2014 and the Instagram baddie of 2016. You had people who liked a look but not a feeling. Then COVID happened, and soon enough, people couldn’t be people the way they always had. Everything was virtual, and sure, art and humanity found a way to weave through the limitations, but soon after, hopecore came to life.

Hopecore is essentially the trend where people look at the world with a sense of hope– it is pretty much in the name. There started to be a whole niche where the core of it was wishing for a time where we could be vivaciously human. The videos and posts under #hopecore consists mostly of dancing, laughing, and being affectionate. There is also this major wave of collective nostalgia that I am sure everyone has felt when you leave your childhood behind– but I feel like social media (I sound like an old person, but it might actually be those damn phones) has hit a total peak. Instead of actually living, we romanticize the idea of living. Maybe that is because my generation as a whole is more aware of how scary living is. Our whole lives, we were told that we were the ones to save the world, and now, drinking water is running out, we are at war, and everything is so expensive that few of us can survive on one job alone.

It’s interesting to see, because of this frankly increasingly depressive time, that this idea of hope is gaining so much traction. We are nostalgic for a time most don’t remember. We crave making memories, yet it seems most of us are just doing this from our phones. We are making edits to sounds about people having memories, but there aren’t a lot of memories being physically made in our lives. Personally, I really love this trend– contrary to how I sound writing about it. I think having hope is the best thing we can do. We seem to be longing for a time when everything was more physical, more real, after constantly second-guessing if the rabbits were actually jumping on the trampoline (TikTok: @rachelthecatlovers).

I guess my takeaway from hopecore and the quote “what is a person if not memories” is to stop applying it only to fictional characters in a show. I have seen beautiful edits to different characters from hit television shows that I save in case I need a pick-me-up later in the day. But maybe, instead of romanticizing the fictional lives in shows and the lives our parents were able to have before the chronically online lifestyle took hold, start living that life. Over spring break, I took my first adult trip. Fully paid by myself, with three of my closest friends, and yes, we took a lot of photos on our iPhones, and we made silly TikToks like the 212 trend – because we were literally in the 212 since we were in New York. However, about 75% of our photos and videos were taken on my digital camera and my best friend’s old vlog camera. Our photos came out with the fuzzy look that comes from old thrifted cameras. It made us live more in the moment; surprisingly, my phone time went down, and so did my friends. We focused on capturing memories of our first adult trip rather than capturing photos for likes – they were still great photos because we know our way around a camera.

I think it’s possible for us to have the memories and life we crave; we just literally have to put the phone down and live a little.

As Wai-Tung realizes that his father is having serious health issues, he decides to fake a marriage with one of his tenants, Wei Wei. She is a Chinese immigrant painter in need of a green card to stay in the United States. As his family arrives in the states, and this said trio’s fake marriage, their lies, secrets, and patience start to wear thin on each other as the parents deal with more health scares, truths, and disappointments. Chiang describes the film as an open space for “gay people in homophobic Asian and American communities…it also calls to mind the co-optation of the gay male in the reconstruction of Asian patriarchy” (Chiang). Lee’s film, The Wedding Banquet, shows how the characters use performative heterosexuality to maintain power, most notably through the directorial choices of lighting and music that show the instability that the characters experience as they lose the power that they once thought they had.

Lee chooses to show who is lying in a different way than normal directors do. Throughout the film he puts a focus on who is lying in the family and is burdened by the secrets from the performative heterosexuality that many of them display by keeping them out of focus or darkened while in frame. One scene that relates to how someone is lying is the scene after Wei Wei and Wai-Tung’s courthouse marriage. In this scene Wei-Wei, Wai-Tung, and his family are walking forward as Simon rushes in front to take a photo of all of them together, Simon is in complete shade and darkness compared to the other characters. Simon is the secret that Wei Wei and Wai-Tung are keeping. He is Wai-Tung’s boyfriend and rightful partner, where Wei Wei is not. Compared to Simon, Wei Wei (also in the front of the group) is completely lit up, because she is the hope for all the characters. The beard to help Wai-Tung and Simon conceal their relationship from Wai-Tung’s family and present the hope for a grandchild for Mr. and Mrs. Gao. She holds hope and secrets in her hands, theoretically holding all the power within the parties. (The Wedding Banquet, 40:33).

Wai-Tung and his father on the other hand are shadowed on one side each, the side that faces Mrs. Gao and each other. This can be theorized to be a visual representation of their lies to each other. The side of which Simon is on is lit up for Wai-Tung, because Simon knows his secrets; he is not being lied to. While Mr. Gao’s lit up side is to a wall because at this point in the film, no one, not even the audience, knows the secret he is keeping. At 40 minutes 38 seconds, just 5 seconds later, we see Wei Wei completely covering Mrs. Gao in darkness. Mrs. Gao’s power as the matriarch of the family is now being replaced by Wei Wei, ultimately making Mrs. Gao obsolete in the care of her son (The Wedding Banquet, 40:33).

Earlier in the film, we see that Mr. and Mrs. Gao are shrouded in darkness in the car upon the first time being in America to see his newly betrothed son and daughter-in-law-to-be. The darkness on their faces is almost a little too literal in sense, because in this portion of the film, both of them are completely in the “dark” about the truth of their son and his “marriage.” They do not start to be shown in light until Wei Wei continues to explain about her family: the only truth they have heard so far in the film. (The Wedding Banquet, 25:27).

Ang Lee’s choice in music with the artist Mader, also helps show how performative the characters feel they need to be and the anxieties that come with it. In the same scene in the car when the parents are picked up by Wai-Tung and Wei Wei, a more “mysterious” roll of the song “Ma & Pa Arrive” at 2 seconds as the Mr. and Mrs. Gao look at each other knowingly and concerningly because Wei Wei is from the “mainland” of China (The Wedding Banquet, 26:00). This shows their own anxieties with the fact that Wai-Tung is marrying a Chinese girl, instead of a Taiwanese girl. Taiwan and China have been at odds for centuries due to China believing they own Taiwan and Taiwan wanting independence. Letting Wai-Tung marry Wei Wei and accepting her within the family gives up a lot of the power they sought to have as traditional Taiwanese citizens. This was further shown that this scene happens right after they mention a tradition they have towards the parents of the bride that Wei Wei ultimately dismisses.

Later, in the same song, a more jazz sound starts up with a trumpet playing at a more anxious pace as we see Simon hurrying to make food for the family and rushing to the door, while also taking off his earring. This scene is important, because it shows a hurriedness in Simon to make sure everything is perfect. The song, the food, the earring; it all gives to the performance that Simon is playing for the guests that don’t even see him yet. The jazz of the music makes this feel more like a dance as well as a welcoming. (The Wedding Banquet, 26:12).

Throughout the film, Mader chooses to mix in more traditional Chinese influences into the music. During really critical points of the film Mader chose to have more of a traditional sound playing, like “The Boiling Point” during multiple scenes: when Wei Wei drunkenly takes advantage of Wai-Tung (1:08:55) or during Wei Wei’s shower scene where she ultimately realizes that she is pregnant (1:13:37). These two scenes are pivotal to the story and around times when something big is happening for Wei Wei and Wai-Tung together when no one is looking, and Wei Wei still makes Wai-Tung put on a heteronormative performance, even though she does know the truth. These are also instances that Wai-Tung has no power at all, even though he is the man, he has unwillingly given control to Wei Wei.

The final kind of music that Mader chose to include, is music mixed with his rhumba and Chinese accents. His song, “Rhumba (end credit)”, at the end of the film mixes both of the sounds we hear throughout the film and this scene also shows a mixing of cultures. With Simon, Wei Wei, and Wai-Tung all shown as finally happy. Simon has been given Mr. Gao’s blessing to be with Wai-Tung, Wai-Tung is out to his mother and has made his father proud by giving him a grandchild, and Wei Wei has a family that will be there for her and a green card so she can stay in the states and be a painter.

The Wedding Banquet (1993) is a film that takes intergenerational relationships between two cultures and tries to find common ground between them. Ultimately, at the end of the film, they all realize they had lost the power they so desperately were trying to stay hold of with the lies they were telling each other and got the happiness they wanted when they finally started telling the truth. The only character to have seemed to have genuinely gotten everything and held power the entire time is Mr. Gao. Mr. Gao held all the power throughout the film, except over his own body. He’s dying, he is having strokes, and he is in hospitals, which is why any of this happens in the first place. The lack of power each character holds is nicely shown with Ang Lee’s choice of lighting and music. The anxiety, lies, and deceit are why they all are miserable throughout the film.

Works Cited

“Ang Lee.” Edited by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Britannica Academic, 2025.

Chiang, Mark. “Coming Out into the Global Systems Postmodern Patriarchies and Transnational Sexualities in The Wedding Banquet”, Q & A: Queer in Asian America. 1998, 374-395.

Mader. “Mao / Photos.” The Wedding Banquet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), 1993. Loon Music

The Wedding Banquet. Directed by Ang Lee, Bleeker Street Media, et al. 1993

Edited by Isabelle Hampton-Zabotti

Mary Shelley is the mother of Gothic literature ever since she wrote and released her novel, Frankenstein. Many people have taken an analytical approach towards this novel and Mary Shelley herself in comparison. In Kathleen Béres Rogers’s article “The Monstrous Idea in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”, she says that “scholars have contributed valuable psychoanalytical readings of Victor Frankenstein’s various obsessions-be it the homosocial obsession with the creature, his filial obsession with his mother, or even his obsession with his father’s lack of love” (p356). On a further look into Frankenstein, one can see the similarities between Mary Shelley’s mental state and life and that of her main characters, Victor Frankenstein and the “monster. ” By focusing on Mary Shelley’s background and relationships she had with her family, friends, and the influences they had in her novel without contributing, it can be compared to Victor Frankenstein’s own relationship with his family and the “monster” he creates.

Mary Shelley grew up with her father, step-mother, and step-sister. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after she had given birth to Shelley, and it had been a guilt Shelley lived with her entire life. She had wished for her mother and visited her mother’s grave regularly, even into adulthood when she met with Percy Bysshe Shelley before they married. In “Mary Shelley as Frankenstein” by Elisabeth A. Waites, she describes in her introduction, “After a whirlwind of courtship of secret meetings with Shelley at the grave of her mother…” (pg. 583). Going into her relationship with her father, Mary Shelley and William Godwin had a strained relationship as she was growing up, as her mother was the reason he opened up into life and when she died, he became even more closed off than he was before. This grew worse when he married Shelley’s stepmother due to the strained relationship with the stepmother as well. And this worsened when she “slipped furtively from her father’s house in London to join Percy Bysshe Shelley who was waiting to elope with her to the continent” (Waites, pg 583). Waites then continues to describe the state of either side’s family during this, “[Percy Shelley] had recently left his pregnant wife and child, and had been angrily cut off by his father. Mary’s father, William Godwin, was also furious at the runaway couple and refused to be reconciled” (Waites, p583).

Mary Shelley is seen using her relationships as influence within her novel. Starting from how she thought of the novel to why she wrote it, and the comparisons between herself and the characters. Shelley felt a lot of guilt by feeling like she was the cause of death for her mother and felt even more guilt when she lost her first child after two weeks of giving birth. Waites explains that “Mary grieved her loss but was soon pregnant again…she gave birth to a son” (Waites, p583). The fact that she struggled so much with motherhood and birth can be related into the fact that in her introduction of the novel, Frankenstein, she calls the novel her “hideous progeny.” Her description can be seen as a reference to how much she struggled with motherhood with the loss of her own child and then creates Frankenstein during another pregnancy, where she could potentially have the same problems as her first child. Shelley’s struggles are analyzed by Stephen Bann who “interprets association by drawing a double analogy with Mary Shelley’s own ‘anxiety of authorship’ and ‘anxiety of monstrosity.’” (Onega, p126). In the book, this can be shown with her character Victor Frankenstein as well. Victor Frankenstein had a close relationship with his mother in the novel before she died. She then sets this guilt upon Elizabeth because “Elizabeth had caught scarlet fever…[the mother] attended her sick bed…Elizabeth was saved, but at the consequences of this imprudence were fatal to her preserver” (Shelley, p 65). Shelley is seen to have put a lot of herself into the novel’s characters.

Victor can be seen to the Creature the same way Dr. Jekyll can be seen the Mr. Hyde. Throughout the novel, both characters mirror each other in different ways. When being introduced to Victor, we are told that he wants knowledge. He consumes chem and alchemy even when his father and one of his professors tells him it is useless. He goes so far to create the perfect man, so that he can prove that he could create life. The creature on the other hand also wanted knowledge. He wanted to know how to speak the language, he wanted to know how to build a life, how to speak to people, and how to interact with everyone. He yearned for any kind of relationship with Victor and other people. But just like how Victor shunned his own creation, the creation was shunned by the world, and then shunned the world back. Shelley perfectly captures Victor’s feelings towards the creature, “instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life” (p 96). Continuing onto how the creature murdered those who had done him wrong. “Could he be (I shudder at the conception) the murderer of my brother...I became convinced of its truth…” (p 97). Victor’s brother, Victor’s friend, and Victor’s wife. After being completely betrayed and shunned by his creator he exacted vengeance on him and in return, Victor ended up dying because he wanted his own vengeance on the creature.

Victor’s own lust for knowledge can be taken back all the way to Mary Shelley herself. In the “Motherless Child in Science Fiction” by Steven Leeman, he states that “Mary Shelley’s grief over the death of her baby is refracted through the obsession of her “mad scientist protagonist”, Victor Frankenstein…underlying his megalomaniac hunger for power through procreative science” (p 49). Indicating Victor’s own want is reflected from the fact that Mary Shelley wanted her baby. The death of the baby turned Mary Shelley into a grief stricken woman which she put into Victor with his obsessions. His obsession with learning and with the creature. The creature also has an obsession, he was obsessed with the suffering of Victor.

Works Cited

Capri, Daniela, editor. “Monsters and monstrosity.” De Gruyter, vol. 16, 17 June 2019. Law & Literature, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110654615.

Lehman, Steven. “The Motherless Child in Science Fiction: ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Moreau’ (L’Orphelin de Mère Dans La Science Fiction: ‘Frankenstein’ et ‘Moreau’).” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1992, pp. 49–58. JSTOR.

Onega, Susana. “Patriarchal law and the ethics and aesthetics of monstrosity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Edited by Capri. Monsters and Monstrosity, vol. 16, 17 June 2019, pp. 115–130. Law & Literature, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110654615-007.

Rogers, Kathleen Béres “The Monstrous Idea in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Literature and Medicine, vol. 36, no. 2, 2018, pp. 356-371. ProQuest, doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2018.0018

Soccio, Anna Enrichetta. “Victorian Frankenstein: From fiction to science.” Edited by Carpri. Monsters and Monstrosity, vol. 16, 17 June 2019, pp. 131–140. Law & Literature, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110654615-008.

Waites, Elizabeth A. “MARY SHELLEY AS FRANKENSTEIN.” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 78, no. 4, 1991, pp. 583. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/mary-shelley-as-frankenstein/docview/1310158072/se-2

Edited by Hannah Villegas

Have you ever questioned your own whimsy? I mean, with the up-and-coming trends of “upping your whimsy”, how whimsical are you?

For a recent college project, my assignment teammates and I created a reel named ‘Day In My Life (Teapot Version).’ The concept was really simple: show the kettle in situations it doesn’t belong in. Use it in ways it’s not meant to be. From being used as a flower pot in the living room space to being a pen stand in the office, in every imaginable situation a kettle was suddenly there. The tea kettle goes so far as to be a cuddle buddy for the owner.

It’s absurd, I know but that’s the point of being whimsical.

While creating the reel, I felt myself push the bounds of how whimsical the reel can be while also having a satirical undertone. Of course, logically, nobody would go to sleep with their favourite kettle, but that’s the point, no, what is stopping us? I mean, the whimsical culture is the next best thing. Indulging in it would only add to your happiness. Thinking creatively gets monotonous at times, what looks visually pleasing, what fits a specific visual aesthetics. I realised, things don’t have to be so serious. Life doesn’t have to be so serious. Being whimsical breaks those chains, once freed, creatively? The world is my oyster and maybe, things won’t feel so stressful anymore. I can be creatively ambitious without wanting to cry every 5 minutes.

The last few years have been so hyper-focused on minimalism; doughnut-glazed skin and nails, clean girls, type A vs type B girls. It’s time for playful, childlike and slightly nostalgic ideas to come forth. To be honest my desi ass could never do minimalism anyways, but whimsical is definitely something I encourage.

I’ve realised as we grow older, we get serious and lose what made us, US.

I had Tamagotchi to play, hopscotch till our very technologically advanced beeping watches told us it was time to go home; our childhoods are filled with what we very serious adults would consider whimsical. All of these activities were just natural for me when I was a child. Who knows, maybe if I had a favourite kettle then, I would’ve used it as a cuddle buddy.

There was an innocence in that part of childhood which we all lost somewhere along the way into having to cough up 4 garments in the span of a few months or god forbid, get my drivers license. Can we go back to when nothing mattered the way it does now, everything had a story, and feelings. Nothing is stopping us from picking flowers on our way to the office, or wearing a princess dress for our next birthday. I vividly remember this dark pink DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE dress I wore for almost four birthdays in a row. I mean obviously comfort was a sacrifice all princesses made. That dress meant more than just a dress to me, I was literally Sofia The First in that dress. My mother didn’t even fight it, she knew that it was the only dress for me and god do I grieve that dress. It made me feel so at home.

To begin the whimsical journey, learn how to get in touch with your truest self and push yourself to get out of what you’ve nestled into, YOLO or whatever. Be the weirdo you are scared to be; you’ll never want to go back.

Edited by Hanna Villegas

Mental health in the 1950s was not taken as seriously as it is today. It was often regarded as a form of lunacy or defect, and individuals experiencing mental illness were typically institutionalized in asylums, where they received treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and early psychotropic medications (Kousoulis). Though some antidepressants had emerged during this time, specifically iproniazid and imipramine, they were still relatively new. Iproniazid, initially developed to treat tuberculosis, was discovered to have mood-lifting effects, while imipramine became the first tricyclic antidepressant (López-Muñoz).

To continue, mental health itself went through a series of acts within the world of law and medicine before Sam Selvon published his novel, Lonely Londoners. Going back to 1890, when the Lunacy Act was established. According to the National Library of Medicine, this act established legal control over psychiatric admissions, requiring only two medical certificates signed by qualified medical doctors for admission to lunatic asylums. Still, the Act required an additional ‘reception order’, generally referred to as ‘legal certification’ (Takabayashi) and helped to make sure that people were not wrongly confined within an asylum. Many psychiatrists were not on board with this because “they thought the Act deprived them of their authoritative position in mental health services, particularly through the introduction of legal certification and suspension of licensing of new private asylums” (Takabayashi). This is because private asylums were the most profitable in the psychiatric economy.

A journal article from the British Medical Journal goes into how, 40 years later, the Mental Treatment Act was established in 1930. This act had reorganized the Board of Control. The Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency oversaw the treatment of the mentally ill. And just 18 years later, the National Health Service was established. This service involved the first health system to offer free medical care to the entire population.

People of color were usually those deemed more frequently as mentally insane due to the way those in power saw them as inferior. Walter A. Adams writes about how therapists should treat patients of color. Saying things like, “[The] therapist must learn to be careful in his choice of words and learn to avoid seemingly harmless phrases” and continues with an example that “a therapist who refers to Negroes as ‘you people’ or ‘your people’ calls attention to his own differences and makes the Negro patient suspicious, wary and fearful of being patronized.”

Displacement

Sam Selvon was born in 1923 in San Fernando, Trinidad, West Indies. He died in 1994 in Trinidad. He had moved to London in 1950 and lived there for six years before publishing The Lonely Londoners (Dawes). He takes his own personal experiences and writes them into his novel, as the main character, Moses, is also a Trinidadian man who moved to London. Through the novel, the reader can see and feel the sense of displacement, loneliness, and melancholy with the characters as they go through their lives in London as immigrants. Specifically, black Caribbean immigrants in the 1950s.

Moses is Selvon’s main character, who goes through the lives of every other character met within the novel. The audience first meets him at a station, waiting for Galahad to come to London for a friend. Moses is the man everyone goes to when they are coming to London, or if they need a job. Though, he is barely afloat. His sense of isolation is felt while he is waiting for Galahad, “For the old Waterloo is a place of arrival and departure… Perhaps he was thinking is time to go back to the tropics, that’s why he feeling sort of lonely and miserable” (Selvon 1).

Moses is unhappy throughout the novel. He is the man everyone goes to for help, but he has no one to go to when he needs it. Even though he longs for it, “Sometimes during the week, when he come home and he can’t sleep, is as if he is hearing the voices in the room, all the moaning and groaning and sighing and crying, and he open his eyes expecting to see the boys sitting around” (Selvon 12). These thoughts are what lead him to consider going back to Trinidad.

Akram Al Deek wrote the book Writing Displacement: Home and Identity in Contemporary Post-Colonial English Fiction, and says, “that distance can provoke a nostalgic national consciousness…nationalism ‘affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and by doing so, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages” (p. 60). This ties in with the psychological basis of what Moses is going through. This author also says that “[the] need for a reconstruction, a translation, or a reconfiguration becomes a necessity because melancholy (a persistent mourning) over a lost past keeps the displaced distant from the moment of now and here” (p 58). This fully translates to Moses and his constant anxiety of the past and future, and lack of a present. He does not live in the now and worries about how he has not done anything with his life.

He cannot go back home, though, because just like when immigrants move to America, being promised the American dream, Moses was promised the dream life in London. This disillusionment is also where his depression stems from and is why he cannot face his family or failure, but Moses is stuck in an endless loop of survival and welcoming new immigrants to London. He is repeating the same things and has little to reflect on. As he notes, “I don’t know these people at all, yet they coming to me as if I is some liaison officer” (Selvon 2). Though he plays the role of guide and supporter, this only deepens his emotional exhaustion with people and London.

Altogether, Moses’s depression and anxieties are not just a personal struggle but emblematic of the broader postcolonial immigrant experience. It speaks to a collective trauma of displacement and the burden of living between worlds, where the past is mourned, the future feared, and the present, empty.

Family

Tolroy is a character also from the Caribbean, although where he is from specifically is never stated. He is one of Moses’ friends who is first met at Waterloo Station, as he is waiting for his mother to get to London. He is initially nervous about his mother coming to London. Which is shown when he is talking with Moses and says, “’Boy, I expect my mother to come,’ Tolroy say, in a nervous way, as if he frighten at the idea” (Selvon 5). Moses has a hard time just supporting himself throughout the story; we can imagine that Tolroy may be struggling as well, but he is taking on the responsibility of his mother as well.

Lo, and behold, his mother had decided to bring his aunt Tanty, cousin Lewis, Lewis’ wife Agnes, and their children. His mother brought them upon hearing about his earnings and decided that London could not be much different compared to their home, and that Tolroy could support them all. This is shown with his mother’s answer, “‘All of we come, Tolroy,’ Ma say. ‘This is how it happen: when you write home to say you getting five pounds a week Lewis say, ‘Oh God, I going England tomorrow” (Selvon 9).

Tolroy’s earnings, while impressive to his family, are not enough for a family in London to live off of. Showing a lack of knowledge on how the real world works, they continue to stress Tolroy out: Tanty not knowing how London works, Lewis treats his wife terribly, and when she leaves, he burdens his issues onto Tolroy.

His mother, bringing his family with her, has added more people to his personal space and free time, and they see him as the one who bears their burdens. Anyone who is losing not only financial stability but also their autonomy would not only feel stressed but also be emotionally exhausted. This is evident when Tolroy has had enough and tells Tanty he is tired of Lewis asking him where Agnes has gone. He is frustrated that his whole family has come when he sent for only his mother. He reminds Tanty that they are no longer living in Jamaica, and that London is a very different place. He is facing unnecessary and unexpected responsibilities, which further highlights a kind of burden and isolation placed upon immigrants. His family has that “immigrant dream” that brought Moses and Tolroy, but as both have been there for years now, they have woken up to the frustrations and cultural differences between the two countries.

Optimism

When Sam Selvon introduces Moses, he also introduces Galahad, or Henry Oliver, as the person Moses is meant to meet. Galahad arrives in London with almost nothing (“What luggage? … When I start a work I will buy some things.”(Selvon 13)), which shocks Moses. He is fresh-faced and ready to work, as if nothing could frighten him. This is similar to how Tolroy’s family comes to London, believing that Tolroy can take care of them. Galahad views life with optimism and aims to live in a way that exhibits resilience, as if nothing can touch him. But then he eats a pigeon. He eats a pigeon because he is hungry, he is broke, and he is out of ideas. He is in the park and decides to catch a pigeon, as they are everywhere, and brings it back to Moses. As Moses tells him that he can’t just take birds from the park like in Trinidad. This shows a breaking point, a complete psychotic break, and his disillusionment with London is broken. Galahad had what everyone else had: a reality check. Moses knew this would come because he had seen it countless times with other men whom Moses was asked to guide around London and be shown the ropes; it was also something Moses had.

Sex and Race

In The Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon offers a sharp critique of the racial and social prejudices that interracial couples faced in 1950s London, particularly through the experiences of characters like Galahad. Although interracial relationships were not illegal, they were heavily stigmatized, and public opinion often turned hostile. This is reflected in Ashley Dawson’s essay “In the Big City the Sex Life Gone Wild”: Migration, Gender, and Identity in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, where she describes a scene involving a Swedish woman and her Jamaican husband. Their argument escalates when bystanders intervene under the guise of protecting the woman, but when she defends her husband, she becomes the new target, condemned for being married to a Black man. Similar dynamics play out in Selvon’s novel, where characters like Galahad, Cap, and Bart date white women for different reasons. While Galahad seems to genuinely enjoy his relationship and sees it as a sign of belonging in his new environment, Cap is more opportunistic, often relying on white women for financial support. Bart, meanwhile, is driven by a desire to improve his social standing through these relationships.

Galahad’s experience is especially telling. He is proud to be with a white woman, takes her to shows, and even visits her family, believing there is nothing wrong with their relationship. However, when her father discovers their romance, he erupts in fury and physically chases Galahad out of the house. This becomes a pivotal moment for Galahad, one in which his earlier optimism begins to erode as he is forced to confront the harsh realities of racism in Britain. Even earlier, a seemingly innocent moment, when Galahad playfully covers his girlfriend’s eyes from behind, elicits horrified reactions from onlookers. But it is the violent rejection by her father that truly shatters Galahad’s illusion of belonging. As Dawson points out, relationships between Black men and white women in the novel are not merely personal; they are politically and socially charged, reflecting how Black male desire is constantly policed and pathologized by the white majority. These personal encounters ultimately highlight one of the novel’s central themes: the painful dissonance between hope and reality for Black immigrants trying to find identity, love, and acceptance in a deeply prejudiced society.

Modernism

Sam Selvon attempts to hold a mirror to the world and how they were treating people like him who just wanted a life different from at home. Many immigrants were treated as unwanted, inferior, dirtier, among other things. Modernist writers liked to show their world how they were treating their people. One would think that “realism” would be a better way to show the world its true horrors but Laura Winkiel states that “as for many modernists, the real world is too fragmented, irrational and chaotic to be mirrored by realism” (22). She says before that “facts, evidence, and narrative causality are hallmarks of realism, a literary and painterly technique, that attempts to imitate a rational, empirical experience and knowable social world” (22). Except that the world does not make sense and is not easily rendered in a way that is true to the point of “what you see is what there.” A different method that she mentions is the ‘mythical method’, which “’ is a step toward making the modern world possible for art’ (178)” as she quotes on page 22. She continues on to say that “myth provides form, a way of shaping the complexity, scale and diversity of the modern world into something recognizable” (22). Selvon knows that the world cannot be rendered in a “realist” way, and that is shown through his work. A way he showed this was through melancholia. Melancholy, by definition, means the feeling of sadness. In a modernist context, it becomes more grey and less definite on what the definition is. Sanja Bahun speaks at length about melancholia and its origins with Freud. He also says that “[the] most significant among them are the blurring of boundaries between the subject and the object, and the consequential impossibility to identify loss” (Bahun). Bahun continues to say that Freud claims that “Melancholia…may develop around the loss of a social abstraction such as ‘fatherland’ and ‘liberty,’ or around the loss of an actual individual (SE XIV: 243; 245); it can be triggered by loss, or intimation of loss, of an idea or a whole system of symbols” (Bahun). All our characters in The Lonely Londoners experience a loss of their “fatherland”, in the case of Moses, or “liberty”, in the case of Tolroy.

Conclusion

Sam Selvon wrote a deep criticism of how black immigrants were treated in 1950s London and held a mirror to the reality of racism and the mental horrors that they went through during that time. Moses was Selvon’s main character who struggled with the idea that if he were to go home, he would face the disappointment from his family and the failure of accomplishing anything withstanding. Tolroy has to shoulder the burdens of his family following him to London because he is doing good in the standards of their home country compared to how they were doing there. Not realizing that doing well on their standards was not the same thing as doing well on London’s standards. He has to carry the guilt of feeling burdened by his family, but also has to carry the weight of their ignorance and financial burdens. Finally, with Galahad, the loss of dreams and the disillusionment of a world that was supposed to have streets made of gold. Galahad represents those who expected great things to come for them after they immigrated to London, and ultimately failed.

Edited by Lottie Bowden

Works Cited

Adams, Walter A. “THE NEGRO PATIENT IN PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 20, no. 2, 1950, pp. 305–10, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.1950.tb06041.x.

Al Deek, Akram. Writing Displacement : Home and Identity in Contemporary Post-Colonial English Fiction. 1st ed. 2016., Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59248-4.

Bahun, Sanja. Modernism and Melancholia : Writing as Countermourning. Oxford University Press, 2014.Dawson, Ashley. “‘In the Big City the Sex Life Gone Wild’: Migration, Gender, and Identity in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.” Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, University of Michigan Press, 2007, pp. 27–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3znzng.5. Accessed 6 May 2025.

Dawes, Kwame S. N. “Samuel Selvon: History: Research Starters: EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, 2022, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/samuel-selvon.

Kousoulis, Dr Antonis. “Our History and Future: 70 Years of the Mental Health Foundation.” Mental Health Foundation, 15 July 2019, www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/blogs/our-history-and-future-70-years-mental-health-foundation#:~:text=In%20the%201950s%2C%20ignorance%20about,no%20incentive%20to%20treat%20it. Accessed 09 Apr. 2025

López-Muñoz, Francisco, and Cecilio Alamo. “Monoaminergic neurotransmission: the history of the discovery of antidepressants from 1950s until today.” Current pharmaceutical design vol. 15,14 (2009): 1563-86. doi:10.2174/138161209788168001

“Mental Treatment Act, 1930.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 3637, 1930, pp. 139–41. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25337378. Accessed 6 May 2025.

Rivett, Geoffrey. “1948–1957: Establishing the National Health Service.” Nuffield Trust, www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/chapter/1948-1957-establishing-the-national-health-service. Accessed 6 May 2025.

Takabayashi, Akinobu. “Surviving the Lunacy Act of 1890: English Psychiatrists and Professional Development during the Early Twentieth Century.” Medical History, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2017, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5426304/.

Timing is everything. As cliché as it sounds, people rarely attribute our decisions and our destinies to timing. J. Cole understood this when he released an unexpected teaser single from his long-awaited album The Fall Off. The song, titled “Disc 2 Track 2,” is built entirely around the concept of time, how it moves, how it deceives us, and how we only recognize its value once it has already passed.

Cole raps in reverse, beginning with his death and working backward through his life. From his casket, to the height of his fame, to the birth of his son, to marriage, and eventually to nights in the club lusting after women, the song unfolds back to front. This structure is a clear homage to Nas’ Rewind, where the legendary MC narrates a story in reverse chronology. But where Nas focuses on a moment, Cole zooms out, using time itself as the subject.

Listening to the track pushed me into a state of reflection. As nostalgia drowned my thoughts, I found myself being transported back to some of my earliest memories of consciously engaging with music. Foggy 6 a.m. Miami mornings, the streets quiet, except for two pit bulls barking faintly in the distance, and J. Cole’s Born Sinner blasting through my headphones. At the time, I never considered how moments like that, which I dreaded at the time, would be the fuel for me to become everything I’d ever dreamed of.

I remember walking to the bus stop, my steps subconsciously matching the tempo of the song, as if the instruments were physically tethered to my body by invisible strings. Time kept ticking; I watched the clock, hoping I’d make it before the bus pulled away. That’s the cruel trick of time: while we’re busy noticing it, it’s already moved on.

By the time you finish reading this sentence, the moment you started has already slipped into the past, another fragment of history we can never get back.

In middle school, I wasn’t privileged enough to have my own phone. Instead, I inherited the remnants of my dad’s past and present in the form of a third-generation iPod Touch. Its library was loaded with late ’90s and early 2000s rap. Burned directly into the device long before streaming existed. Back then, you had to buy albums or illegally download songs, and half the time the files didn’t even include titles.

I would play hip-hop roulette, scrolling through randomly numbered tracks, hoping one would be the song I’d been humming to myself all day. Somehow, that uncertainty made the experience even richer. That was the moment that made me fall in love with music. It felt like no matter what song played, the enjoyment was in the unknown.

There are only a few things in life that can trigger nostalgia at that magnitude. J. Cole’s music has always been one of them. Disc 2 Track 2 doesn’t just talk about time: it moves like time, unfolding backward, reminding us that every phase of life is fleeting, and every moment we’re in will one day feel distant. This song is a declaration: “I came and gave this game all I got and became one of the best to do it”. The irony in this release is Cole’s emphasis on what the general population of hip-hop fans perceives as “falling off”. He views it as ‘moving on’, but before he does he’s determined to show how much greater he has gotten over time. This may be an exact depiction of the phrase, ‘being ahead of your time’.

In a way, this review itself mirrors the song. Written as a reflection on moments already gone, it exists as proof of Cole’s message: we don’t notice time passing...we only notice once it’s passed.

Edited by Lottie Bowden

Jah’mal Lapomarel is a storyteller at heart, someone who pays attention to the small details most people overlook. Growing up in Florida, he developed a natural ear for music and conversation, which slowly turned into a passion for writing and media. Whether he’s behind a mic, interviewing artists, or putting thoughts on paper, his goal is always the same: make people feel something real.

To read more, you can find him in the following places

Substack: @jahmallapomarel https://substack.com/@jahmallapomarel

Instagram: @jahmal.l

Website: Jah’mal Lapomarel

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jah%E2%80%99mal-lapomarel-177363213/

Yes, Gen AI is bad.

For the environment, the craftsmanship of the creators involved, the integrity of art itself, and the development of the frontal cortex for future generations. Gen AI feels like the epitome of everything wrong with the massive corporate, capitalistic tech complex that’s plagued society since the term ‘social media brainrot’ became less of a derogatory slang and more of an acceptable way of life. It is not the omen that it should have been, the moment people decided to sell their human dignity, their respect for others and themselves-- for imaginary online validation, and money, of course. None of this is new. Just some of the many things that have been said and that people will continue to say within the grander scheme of all “Internet discourse” as of now and in the foreseeable future. And yet, amidst the doom and gloom and ongoing raging online debacles, one thing has left me wondering. AI is everywhere, operating in the background without us thinking about it much, if at all. However, the system under which it operates is different compared to the one that just cobbles up jumbled crap of misshapen extra limbs and plastic faces from whatever corner of the Internet it scours to steal from;

Hence, the clear distinction between Gen AI and the algorithm AIs used to feed you content instead of the other way around, which is what the former does. But forget the technology for just a moment. Let’s think about the context behind Gen AI - that is, its controversial purpose. It’s meant to create original content. Content, in this case, can span from something as relatively simple as sentences forming paragraphs to potentially entire catalogues of books that Amazon will peddle to its consumer base, because why not?. Except, there is an inherent contradiction, a paradox you can say, in its intended purpose versus the actual methods in achieving said purpose. Gen AI, after all, is still AI - artificial intelligence. It is a machine-based program that a human had to code, to input strings of numbers to produce results that feel too sterile, too detached in a way. It lacks the emotional depth that characterizes the physical and emotional process of learning and mastering a craft present in the final creation. It doesn’t understand any of this. think how we think, feel what we feel. It is just a fabricated, copied existence built on false pretenses, devoid of the self only humans are self-aware to actualize. Yet, in an act of great irony perhaps, one may only wonder where this chase for the supposed ultimate perfection, to create an ‘artificial life’ built to resemble and mimic our capabilities with minimal to little ‘human input’, had led the path they took.

However, I must return to my original point.

What has caught my attention is the emphasis that so many Gen AI users insist upon, the desire to create ‘original’ content that competes or at least levels the playing field enough for them to feel comfortable in participating with the chosen community. This is a sentiment commonly associated with those illiterate degenerates, of whom everyone else hates to hear because it is a pitiful excuse at best. It feels especially disrespectful because even now, there’s definitely a place for fun, meme-y, silly art not meant to be taken seriously (and yes, I consider writing as a form of art too)! There are a variety of styles and levels meant for anyone at any stage in their life to explore and take an interest in. And well, sure, there’s always the classic imposter syndrome, comparing yourself to well-established creators that are both “gifted” or “naturally talented” and popular. However, they still had to work on developing their skills, understanding the fundamentals through hours of practice and learning from the greats, teachers, and peers alike to reach the point they’re at.

This intuitive creative sense, for lack of a better term, is something only the individual can learn for themselves. What do I mean by this? Art is a pretty universal concept, if not a little basic, so to speak, but how it is interpreted is dependent on the individual perspective. Just because there is a classroom of artists, for example, doesn’t mean everyone will create the same work, let alone use the same medium. Their art styles, preferences, philosophies, those things are solely theirs to define their creative processes. The classroom can be given the exact same prompt, yet every single finished result will turn out quite different. You can say that that is ‘original’ content if you mean by how people interpret a concept; if we were to take the literal definition, it would be nigh impossible to create something truly 100% original. You can take upon a concept or idea and innovate, while also acknowledging the inspirations that influenced the final result, because everything is and has been influenced by something. The problem is that Gen AI does not acknowledge the works it steals from. We all know that.

However, as I continue writing out this piece, it occurred to me. The larger conversations surrounding the latest controversial topic of AI use have largely focused on two major arguments— its detrimental effects on the environment (i.e. increased water usage) and the emphasis on the genuine authenticity of human artists.

For instance, according to the United Nations Environment Assembly, every aspect of this technology, from where it’s generated down to the resources necessary to create and maintain AI, is quite demanding on the health of the planet. These massive data centers, for one, house tons of electronics that, on average, require 800 kg of raw materials for a 2 kg computer. Included in these raw materials are rare earth elements, whose mining operations contribute to the release of harmful chemicals into nearby soil, water, and air. Water, especially drinkable water, is scarce, yet they estimate that “globally, AI-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water than Denmark, a country of 6 million…a problem when a quarter of humanity already lacks access to clean water and sanitation” (UNEA). They also reported that “a request made through ChatGPT, an AI-based virtual assistant, consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google Search” (UNEA), which is crazy considering the blatant misinformation AI spits out. Though then again humans are especially prone to confirmation bias long before this iteration of AI existed, so what would I know.

Meanwhile, “Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork”, a research journal by Bellaiche, Lucas et al. suggests that, based on a study by Newman and Bloom, “humans are sensitive to an authentic process of creative production as determined simply by a label. In other words, people consider non-sensory aspects of art, like context and background, in their judgments and evaluations of art (Blank et al., 1984; Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2016; Winner, 1982)” (Bellaiche, Lucas et al.). Much in the same way communities demand healthy organic food free of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and other factors that contribute to the detriment of the earth, the growing pushback against “AI generated art” stems from a similar sentiment. That is, there are people who value the time and effort that goes into every aspect of the creative process, which that authenticity is undermined in yet another cold-cut corporate means that everyone hates because it’s another example of corporations doing something no one asked them to do. In a sense, it’s not just fighting back against corporate greed—it’s fighting back to hold said people in positions of power and authority accountable while uplifting the communities that are directly affected by said actions. These ongoing conversations help spotlight human artists either through word of mouth amongst casuals or fellow artists supporting each other in a networking process that’s like “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” kind of deal. How close-knitted these systems are largely depends on the type and size of the community, since there are so many niches artists can occupy in this general art space. However, in general, supporting small art accounts generally does good especially since most people understand the challenging logistics of creating art, and especially for making art to sell.

All of these are valid concerns, mind you. Yet, I feel like this sort of debate has plagued the art community (feel free to correct me on this), specifically because I believe the difference in skill level can not only be visibly evident but can be substantial, which can breed insecurity and envy, often attributing the artists’ craft solely to ‘born talent.’ Even comments that mean to praise often end up backhanded, guilt-trippy even, unintentional they may be. I’m sure for any artist out there, you may have heard someone say at some point, “Oh, I wish I could draw like you. I can’t even draw stick figures,” or “I can never hope to be as good as you at making pottery,” or something of the sort. I know I have, I’ve been on both sides. And I feel like that attitude is the bigger issue in terms of how the non-artists and even many other fellow artists interact with the art community as a whole. People simply can’t enjoy making art that’s silly, fun, and unserious (memes are the exception). No, the overall skill level has risen, and so has expectations for what makes art “good” or “bad”. There’s a huge difference between constructive criticism and flat out bullying—and unfortunately the Internet doesn’t give a shit. No one is safe from the Internet mob hating for the love of the game, and it’s made worse with AI. People are being accused of using AI left and right and now have to prove they’re the ones creating the art, possibly opening them up further to scrutiny and/or plagiarism down the line. Sigh.

In addition, governments such as the Trump administration has done a lot of damage to the social humanities by actively defunding entire programs dedicated to funding the arts (the National Endowment for the arts grants), while the nature of corporations inherently breed hostile work cultures dissuading creative freedom on the basis of profit-driven margins on a ticking deadline. Not to mention sports taking bigger precedence just because winning culture is louder in every single aspect—think of American football, for example, and the many more available pathways to succeed, such as collegiate football teams (I personally believe that sport is an abomination and should be permanently deleted from the collective consciousness, whoever created that should rot in hell). Creating art, on the other hand, that competes in art shows is solely based on the whims of whomever is judging, which is a lot more subjective and prone to bouts of frustration. What do you mean that person won over me? How did my piece not win when it clearly followed what the prompt asked for? Why do I bother when people can just draw anime girls and still win? Those kinds of sentiments are hard to shake off because there’s no clear consensus with art juried competitions, which is made worse by the fees that artists sometimes have to pay in order to compete in the first place. And when art is not made for immediate consumption, made just for the fun of it? Well, because it’s not quantifiable, somehow there are people who will often dismiss it as a hobby that contributes, in some ways, to the negative perception that making art doesn’t make you money.

So what is the big takeaway from all of this?

I’m not sure. I’m sure everyone is probably sick of hearing about AI, and to read another one explaining why it’s bad is tiresome. I get that. However, I believe there’s a neglected aspect to this whole debacle that isn’t really acknowledged amongst the general community. The whole thing about wanting to use AI to create art is absurd, admittedly, and yet, I do pity them in a sense. Putting aside not knowing better because they’re born without a functional brain, it’s hard to create art. And yes, I know there’s a plethora of Youtube tutorials out there but I also think that’s also a problem, in my opinion. There’s simply far too many things on the Internet demanding your attention, so it would be quite difficult to pinpoint exactly what someone starting out should even need to begin to know. What kind of art do I want to create? How do I go about creating that? What are the best supplies I should get or can afford to get? Is this the correct way to learn? Having to navigate all of that and more can tax out anyone’s brain before they can start to enjoy the fun aspects of art. And that’s not including actually learning the skill, which can be a humiliating process for those not used to not being immediately gratified with good results. Information overload is a thing, and social media is built to overstimulate its user base with loads of whatever crap the algorithm recommends them with. Not to mention the decreasing attention span, though that’s a separate issue altogether.

That’s not to say I’m trying to justify/excuse these AI bros. I must emphasize that so people won’t misconstrue my words. At the end of the day, I feel AI art is, in some ways, a more evolved form of problems that already exist within the art community manifested into yet another greedy corporate philosophy every rational human being hates. Seriously, fuck corporations.

Works Cited:

Bellaiche, Lucas et al. “Humans versus AI: whether and why we prefer human-created compared to AI-created artwork.” Cognitive research: principles and implications vol. 8,1 42. 4 Jul. 2023, doi:10.1186/s41235-023-00499-6

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10319694/

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about

Edited by Sonal Butley and Lilli Eve

Ten years ago, my mom and I started watching this new Netflix show that she thought wouldn’t be a horror show since the main characters were kids, and therefore, I, at the ripe age of 9, would be okay watching it. Around 15 minutes in, she turned it off and told me not to watch it. About two days later, I went to my then best friend’s house for a sleepover, and she had parents who didn’t really care about what their kids did, so we started this new show I was hooked on: Stranger Things.

At nine years old, I found myself falling in love with this show. At the time, I just thought it was a funny, scary show with (and yes, I knew this at 9 and I stand by it at 19) the love of my life in it—Mike Wheeler.

Throughout the later ten years of my life, I found myself adamantly falling more and more in love with this show. I would rewatch it when the new seasons came out, I would ‘illegally’ download Netflix on my ‘phone’ to watch it at night, since until around season three, I was not allowed to watch it. The person I was when I first started watching it, compared to the person who watched the finale, is two astonishingly different people. Well, one thing didn’t really change. I stayed in love with Mike Wheeler until I realized I was just in love with Finn Wolfhard, but hey, who isn’t?

Anyways, as I grew up with the show, I started to see the things that were there. New details, added subplots that the show writers were adding. Since I would rewatch the seasons every time a new one would come out, I can proudly say I wasn’t a member of the general audience; I was a solid member of the fandom.

This is all to say that after watching the last episode, I find myself completely unable to even try and watch this show again. And if I am being honest, it isn’t because I am sad this show has ended, I have dealt with shows I love to death ending and being able to rewatch them. Hell, I love when shows end because it is like a book, it ends, and now I can rewatch and see how the story always leads to the satisfying ending. Because I was too young to ever go through a show ending that was lackluster or just completely disappointing—I was in middle school when Game of Thrones (GOT) ended and it honestly was more of my moms show rather than anything I would watch since there was way too much sex for my young eyes— I never fully understood people’s devastating reactions to some show finale.

However, no, I can’t watch this show anymore, because the finale didn’t just ruin season five for me, but the whole show. I am not going to compare this show’s ending to GOT because the GOT fans get very pissed off at that, and I understand. I’ve seen the table read, everyone was crying, and no one really hid their contempt with the ending. Personally, I can’t wait to see what the Stranger Things cast says once it has been long enough for them to say stuff without it hurting their career or relationships, because, honestly, it is that serious.

My first and foremost complaint is Jane/Eleven’s story arc. My opinion on her story stands alone from my opinions on Mileven or Byler (which I have a lot of opinions on, but right now I just want to look at her story). This point, actually, was one I saw on Tiktok by the tiktoker @freddiesroommate, and after watching this video, it left me so angry I had to read one of my favorite Season five rewrites on Ao3! He talked about how one prevailing theme of the whole show is friendship and love conquers all, and can/will bring you back from the brink of death. Will’s return, El’s survival in season two, how Will was saved from position, Billy saving El in season three, Joyce saving Hopper, El resurrecting Max, Max running up that hill, and so on. Every storyline, character relationship, and everything is centered around this idea. Until it came to the end, because suddenly, El thinks even after ALL of that, the only way to end this all is to stay in the Upside Down as it caves in on itself.

Then the stupid documentary where the Duffer Brothers didn’t even have the empathy to talk about this act as anything other than “El has to k**** herself.” Look, that sure is what she is doing, but talking about it like that is insensitive and disgusting. Thereafter, these brothers go on after the show ends and talk about how El had to do it because she represented the magicalness of childhood, and “she had to disappear for the boys to move on.” Let’s pack that. They basically, and continued during the press following the ending, to contradict any ambiguity they gave her. If anyone in the fandom was keeping up with the press, they basically told me Mike’s theory is wrong, and she is dead. Right.

Then they write this character that people see themselves in, that people love. They write a teenage girl who experienced so much trauma and pain as such a complex and round character, only to, at the very end, dumb her down to being a personification of childhood, that— and these are their words— the boys have to lose. Not the party, not Max, the boys. They wrote a beautiful love girl for ten years only to force her into becoming a disposable female character. And since that is how her story ends, when I tried to rewatch season one, one of the best seasons—argue with the wall. I am sorry, I immediately started crying when El came onto my screen because that is her ending. Becoming disposable for men, just like she always was. Maybe I am being too woke or feminist, but this actually makes me want to throw up. El was a girl with a family, sure misshaped and abnormal, but the Byers and Hopper loved her. They wrote (I doubt it was the Duffers who wrote this monologue because it was actually good and didn’t sound like ChatGPT) a beautiful monologue for Hopper, begging her to see her future, all for what? It goes in one ear and out the other.

Second, they wrote one of the longest, most diabolical queer bait in the 21st century. According to the Oxford dictionary, queer baiting means the incorporation of apparently LGBTQ characters or relationships into a film, television show, etc., as a means of appealing to the LGBTQ audiences while maintaining ambiguity about the characters’ sexuality. Welp, we are back to the Duffers’ love for ambiguity! The ship was between Mike Wheeler and Will Bylers, coining the name Byler. When Stranger Things came out, and I have to admit I didn’t hop on the Byler train until around season 3, there was a small part of the fandom that seemed to believe that Mike had feelings for Will based on their relationship in season two. Continuously through seasons one to three, they hinted and alluded to the fact that Mike and Will’s friendship was different from theirs with the other characters. I personally felt like it didn’t start to get romantic until season three when Mike said, “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.”

The pinnacle of these queer allusions is season four, when they pull out the Cyrano troupe. For anyone who doesn’t know, the Cyrano trope is a common romantic trope where character A helps character B with their relationship with character C. They do this by using character A’s feelings towards character B to keep B and C’s relationship afloat. Normally, what happens is that B realizes that their feelings for C are based on A’s feelings for them, and thereby B ends their relationship with C to be with A. This is a very, very standard romantic trope; you can see it in films like Roxanne (1987), The Half of It (2020), and the critically acclaimed movie Megamind (2010)!

This is exactly what the Duffer brothers did in season four with the van conversation between Will and Mike after he lied, saying the painting was El’s commission. Right, because El, who knows nothing of Dungeons and Dragons and is not even in the painting, will commission that. At the time, this was the peak of the Byler fandom, and people had started to see that this trope was causing the main part of the fandom to ship these two characters. However, this trope was left unsatisfied as they ended it with Will being forced to come out and Mike rejecting him in the last episode, around twenty minutes in. They dragged out this story with no gall to do the story that they themselves had been building up for at least two seasons.

I think the main thing is that in between season four and five, cast members and the Duffers were talking about how the van scene ‘will pay off’. Noah Schnapp, the actor of Will Byers, saying “Byler is at its peak right now, they are building that up,” at AwesomeCon in 2022; Finn Wolfhard, Mike Wheeler, saying at another press conference in 2023 that “I asked the Duffers and they said ‘don’t worry it’ll [the van scene] pay off in the end,” credit to @1dbyler on X. However this did not happen. What happened on this ship blew up. Tumblr released its top ships of 2025, with Byler being number one. AO3, a common fanfiction writing platform, has over 32,000 stories that center around this relationship; the ship is the most popular ship from the universe across many social media platforms, and nearly every cast member has been asked about it.

So, not only did the Duffer brothers write a story that completely self-contradicts, belittles, and dumbs down the three main characters, and has too many plotholes—most likely due to the usage of ChatGPT seen in the documentary on Netflix—they basically laughed in the face of many of their fans. Because that is what this has shown, the Byler fans are a major part of this fandom, if not the largest. The forced coming out and the soft rejection led to the last two episodes being the lowest-rated episodes in the whole show, with 5.6/10 and 7.5/10 ratings, respectively. They could have jumped the scary bridge they were on and show viewers and the creators alike that you can have a queer relationship in the forefront and have a monumental, phenomenal ending that is satisfying for all the characters. But instead, Will’s arc was the basic queer arc– self-acceptance with the possibility of maybe having love in a hypothetical future, Mike turning into his father, who still doesn’t say I love you or know anything about the painting, and El, a manifestation of childhood that must be lost to grow up.

We could have seen people relate to these characters because they are in love and happy, or see that it’s possible for them; instead, there are fans who saw this and thought they needed to come out or accept themselves to not end up like these characters. A viral video on Tiktok by user @screwrossduffer says, ‘character [Mike Wheeler] ending so terrifying my dad came out.’ This is the legacy the Duffer brothers will have. Maybe one day, the show creators will see that this story not only needs to be told but deserves it. Luckily, Heated Rivalry on HBOMax is going against this pattern. However, this once beautiful show about outcasts falls into the mix with the larger queerbaiting shows like Sherlock, Voltron: Legacy Defenders, and Riverdale. I guess it just goes to show when you have two white straight men writing a story about the outcasts and the rejects of society, they’ll never get it right.

Edited by Sonal Butley

A coffee shop detour for one of Mitch’s many work meetings shortly after provided me the opportunity to break from the weight of my luggage, this would also result in me wandering close by. After seeing that the custom fragrance store I had on my list was a 7 minute walk, I left Mitch to their meeting and politely, with permission, abandoned my belongings and made my way. After being rerouted to all four corners of the street, I came face to face with barricades in front of the New York Public Library. Feeling bold from the immediate curiosity, I asked a stranger what was going on to which they replied “The King and Queen are here”, in awe. “Oh right”, I thought. Mitch did just send me a post a day before with a comment on how funny it is that the day I arrive, so do Charles and Camilla. If you know me, I am very well versed in all things Princess Diana, an expert if you will. Truthfully I often feel that I know too much about too much, however Diana has proven to be a lifelong special interest. My daily jewelry included a smaller replica of her aquamarine ring and a limited edition replica of her cartier tank watch.

Part of me wanted to say “fuck it” and keep walking, I did not have much battery on my phone from traveling all day to get here and I was much more excited about custom fragrances from a catalog of over 3,000 options. Plus, again, Team Diana all the way—the amount of psychological warfare those two imposed on another human being much younger than them. I can say it was spite, the fact that I was one of the first people there so I was right in front and the women I immediately befriended kept me there for two hours. Bonded in our classic American anti-monarchical conversations and remarks, we noticed with time that security was getting thick. There were snipers on the roof, the number of officers were growing, there were helicopters and they started slowly shutting the street down. One of the girls beside me befriended the officer next to us who started giving us all the updates. The girls were quick with it, they found out what Camilla was wearing and that Charles was actually en route to Harlem, so it was just the Queen Consort that was showing up.

Upon my own research, I found out that today marked a century since Winnie The Pooh was published. Set in the fictional Hundred Acre Wood, with a collection of short stories following the adventures of an anthropomorphic teddy bear, Winnie The Pooh (originally Edward), and his friends Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, her joey Roo, and Tigger the toy tiger. The many adventures of the Winnie The Pooh gang would go on to shape many childhoods from the late 1920’s until even today, thanks to the timeless Disney animated show that brings the stories to life. As part of their four-day U.S. state visit to strengthen British-American ties, marking the first time a British monarch has visited the city since 2010, Camilla’s itinerary focuses on cultural engagement and charity work, including a visit to the NY Public Library to gift a “Roo” doll to the Winnie-the-Pooh collection as part of a literacy campaign with her charity, The Queen’s Reading Room. Now I had all of the reasons to stay. Baby freaking Roo. A funny coincidence as I was just lamenting to a friend last week on how sad it is that Kanga was alone in that display without her baby. As a mommy myself, I hated it. Almost as much as finding out how much the real Christopher Robin resented the stories that immortalized him and his childhood stuffies.

The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was based on the real-life stuffed toys of author A.A. Milne’s son, Christopher Robin Milne, and the Sussex countryside surrounding their home. The stories were inspired by games played in the nursery with Christopher and his mother, socialite Dorothy de Sélincourt, who would then recap the imaginary play to A.A Milne, and the nearby Ashdown Forest, which became the setting for the Hundred Acre Wood. This is also believed to be where the original Baby Roo was lost during play.

In his autobiography, The Enchanted Places, Christopher recounts that, “At home I still liked [Christopher Robin], indeed felt at times quite proud that I shared his name and was able to bask in some of his glory. At school, however, I began to dislike him and I found myself disliking him more and more the older I got. Was my father aware of this? I don’t know.” It seems he may have, as in 1929, A.A. Milne decided to stop writing children’s books, at least in part because he was “amazed and disgusted” by Christopher Robin’s fame, per BBC. Although he did not go into detail about the problems that the real Christopher Robin faced, the author said that his son had already experienced too much fame. “I feel that the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for him,” Milne wrote. “I do not want C.R. Milne to ever wish that his name were Charles Robert.” Another quote from the same BBC report reads, “The family didn’t exactly shield Christopher from the publicity. He was given the fan letters that children wrote to him and would laboriously pen responses with his nanny’s help. Many photographs were taken of him with his father, and also alone. When he was seven, he participated in audio recordings that were done of the books – exploitation, his cousin later said, that showed “the unacceptable face of Pooh-dom”. The next year, Christopher performed before 350 guests at a party, reciting parts of the books and singing the song The Friend. In 1929, he acted in a pageant based on the stories.” The success of the Pooh stories also undermined the reception of the non-juvenile work Milne wrote before and after, as Milne was a prolific poet and playwright, with Christopher writing in his autobiography, “We each had our sorrows.”

Christopher grew up to serve in World War II, to which after he faced a hard time finding a job and adjusting to adulthood. He was angry and disillusioned, he felt that his early fame had held him back. It all still haunted him and he was unsure of his place in the world. This would lead to real resentment, with Chrristopher writing that, “In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.” Christopher, the only child of his parents, would become estranged from them, only seeing his mother once in the last 15 years of her life, per Time reports. Christopher married his cousin Lesley de Sélincourt (much to his parent’s disapproval), became a bookstore owner and he also found success as a writer himself, publishing three autobiographies. He is quoted saying that “each helped him come to terms with who he was.” In his father’s final years, Christopher rarely saw him, ‘My father’s heart remained buttoned-up,’ he said, ‘but I know he loved me and, of course, I loved him. And, yes, I loved Pooh, too.’ Christopher and Lesley’s daughter Clare, who passed away in 2012, was born with Cerebral Palsy. The money from Disney’s acquisition in order to produce the timeless cartoon we all know and love, helped them care for her needs and establish a non-profit for people with disabilities that is still active to this day, The Clare Milne Trust

At about the two hour mark, some of the women I befriended had started to leave. I noticed that the few of us remaining were either children of immigrants or women of color, all on their phones with their families, waiting. I lamented for a moment the current distance I have with my family, who I would have been on facetime with in the same manner–this is not something that could be experienced where my family is from and I’m sure that was the same tune for these girls as well.

My eyes snapped up as I heard the crowd and I looked towards the entrance door to the library to see some people standing on each side as if guarding the entrance, and then I saw the side of a woman’s white hair and the shaking of what seemed like white flowers. A few moments later, we saw a police escort of black SUVs leaving the other side of the library, and with that, the clearing of the barricades on the road blocked next to us. I made the correct assumption later confirmed by the officer that the Queen Consort had already left. A video later showed that the bundle of hair I had seen was Camilla, and she was waving a bouquet of false flowers. I said bye to the girls I will possibly never see again, and went back to Mitch who had finished up their meeting. It was now onto fragrance wonderland.

The next day we set out to get some work and writing done in the historic Rose Room located in the library. After about 30 minutes, I simply could not sit still. My mind remained on Baby Roo. After a restroom detour conveniently located near a set of elevators, I made my way into the Treasures room. In 1947 Elliott Macrae, president of E.P. Dutton & Co. Publishers visited A.A. Milne at his house in Sussex, where he saw the original toy animals that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh. The real Pooh and friends would then go on to tour the United States before being put on display in 1956 in the publisher’s New York Offices. After one more visit back home to England for the 50th anniversary of Winnie The Pooh, and another sale to John Dyson, the dolls were donated to the New York Public Library in 1987 where they have been on display for the public. In 1998, Gwyneth Dunwoody, a British Labour Member of Parliament (MP), famously led a campaign in 1998 to bring the original Winnie the Pooh stuffed toys back to England from the New York Public Library, stating that “Just like the Greeks want their Elgin Marbles back, so we want our Winnie the Pooh back”. This prompted then New York City Mayor, and disgraced human, Rudy Giuliani, to visit the toys and put his grubby hands on them, stating that “ Every year, they have delighted tens of thousands of children and adults from all over the world, who come to visit them at the Donnell Library. I wanted to visit them today and assure them that New York City will continue to be their home as long as they want to remain here. I told Winnie The Pooh that he should not be bothered by all the media accounts about the British parliamentarian who is demanding Pooh’s return to Britain.”

I made a bee-line straight towards the case already swarmed by people. I couldn’t help but cry once I stood in front of the beloved characters. As a child, I was nicknamed “Piglet” and my little sister’s favorite blanket you could not pry out her hands to wash was a Tigger blanket. It was wonderful seeing the original characters that made up so much of my childhood. I did not see however, the new Roo.

I went to the security guard and upon asking, I could see I was far from the first to do so, which led to an apology and some chatting. She told me that she had no idea when they would put the new Roo on display, or if they were going to. We quickly bonded over our love for Diana, with me recanting the stories I knew from Diana’s infamous tapes, and I soon found out she was the guard who opened the door for Camilla and got to see the new Roo in person. She also told me Camilla was supposed to walk down where I was and greet and take photos, however she had security concerns. After seeing how much Roo meant to me, she asked me, “would you like to see a picture?” She then airdropped me two photos she had taken of the new Roo. I could not find any photos anywhere at this time and I am FBI level when it comes to searching. There are moments in my life where I feel like a lucky girl, this was one of them. This is what journalists must feel when they get “exclusives”, however I just felt like a little girl again. The guard hilariously quipped, “it’s so ugly, it looks like a rat, New York City has enough rats.” Merrythought, the last remaining teddy bear manufacturer in England who made the original characters, were able to recreate the original Roo with old catalog archives. I thanked the guard about 25 times before I made my way back to Mitch and proceeded to write this very piece.

In The House at Pooh Corner, A.A Milne wrote that “in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” This quote still brings me to tears. I don’t think he quite knew that more than 100 years later, the boy and his bear are still playing on the pages, and in the imaginations, of thousands of children worldwide. When asked about this quote, on if that little boy and his bear will always be playing, Christopher responded, ‘I expect so,’ he smiled. ‘I don’t mind.’

Take a trip with me into Glowball’s world, one where adorable little creatures live joyfully, memes abound, and intimacy is deliciously subverted. As both an artist and curator, Glowball (aka Asia Ruggiero) has a knack for pushing her ideas to create

imaginary universes through her widely popular events in Toronto. She invents something new and captivating every time, bringing together talented creators and building an inclusive environment for all. Meeting over coffee on a rainy afternoon, I

asked Glowball if she considers community building an essential part of her practice, to which she promptly replied, “Yes! Capital Y, yes.” She added that without her support network, she would not be the artist she is today. Connecting with other artists and supporting each other is what enables her to grow.

Glowball’s personal artworks create a world of curiosity and whimsy. Swirling lines fuel the imaginative environments of her illustrations, emphasizing nature's serenity. She tells me that seeing the coloured pencil illustrations by Inuk artist Parr encouraged her to embrace her playfully intuitive style of drawing. Another of her artistic inspirations is Japanese illustrator Aya Takano, who draws in a modern, superflat style and creates enchanting environments with soft colour palettes.

Her last exhibition, ‘Perhaps I Should Keep This to Myself,’

co-created with Toronto artist Kay Rangel, allowed visitors to dive into the artist’s secrets through paintings which feel private and voyeuristic. Tiny lines of text, dispersed across the gallery walls, divulge more raunchy confessions; reading them makes me feel like I’m at a sleepover, only here the writing is literally on the wall. Hanging from the ceiling in the centre of the room is a locket necklace, to which the artists added items as a representation of the group’s care for one another. During a locket-making workshop in the gallery on Valentine’s Day, ‘Perhaps I Should Keep This to Myself’s Curators and Artists’ read from Audre Lorde’s iconic essay ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.’ Lorde’s passage, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives,” (Lorde, 1978) is a reminder of the strength gained when we are connected with our desire without shame. Glowball tells me later in the rainy-day cafe both reading and writing are essential to her artistic process; she has several notebooks for different concepts and is constantly writing ideas down all day.

An ongoing curatorial project, ‘Please Don’t Make Me Get a Job’, is the

invention of Asia and her creative partner Wolfgang Huska, exploring anything you could envision related to current internet landscapes through artworks that make you feel like you’ve just walked right into your screen. There is an intriguing contradiction between the historic principles of oil paintings and the exhibition’s ridiculous subjects, subverting centuries of rigid Eurocentric values in art. Even the duo’s Instagram page, which posts text memes and photos of minions, is a sharp contrast to a “serious” curator’s approach.

Asia tells me her curatorship practice has now become deeply intertwined with her online identity, to the point where even several of her professors have started to call her Glowball. Artists are all becoming progressively involved in the digital world to share their work, which can help create communities as well as artistic personas. Deliberately unserious, their last exhibition, ‘Pls Pay Me!,’ featured artists whose work draws visual references from anything between Reddit memes and Snapchat stories. This theme is part of an emerging style in art that Glowball feels eager to showcase: the memeification of fine arts into cultural artifacts that are intentionally superficial.

Asia’s upcoming thesis show, ‘Sunlight in a Deep Forest,’ will feature artists whose work explores methods of care, influenced by Filipino culture and her bond with her grandmother. The show will investigate topics related to end-of-life care, moments of gentleness, and emotional connections to traditions and customs, engaging with nature as a place for transformation. She tells me she wishes to tap more into her Filipina heritage and its spirituality and that this show is very personal to her.

Edited by Hanna Villegas

When I was a child, my dream was to be an author. I was always writing, always reading. I lived and breathed books, and vowed to myself that I would get to write for a living, to make my ultimate hobby a career. It didn’t seem like many other people shared this dream, or if they did, they kept it to themselves, scared of being condescended, being told ‘be realistic’, to have a backup plan when this dream inevitably didn’t work out. As I’ve grown, I haven’t quite achieved that dream just yet. But it’s still there, still flowering, nestled amongst my day job and my pile of favourite books and these articles I post online for ten people to read. Anyone can write a book, and of course, it’s important to never lose sight of your dreams.

Yes, anyone can write a book; that has always been true. Whether or not it gets published is another matter, but quite literally anyone can put a pen to paper and write a novel if they put their mind to it. And now, people are doing that, and almost all of them, it feels, are getting published. Maybe not everyone; just the handful of influencers that already have follower counts in the hundreds of thousands, and who now have the means (and the money) to try their hand at a source of income a little more…intellectual.

When did publishing become so easy? Should it be this easy? I feel as though every time I walk into a Waterstones, there are five new romantasy novels on the central display table, all with similar covers and fonts, all renditions of stories we’ve heard over and over, and at least two of them are written by names I recognise from TikTok. Maybe I feel a little pang of jealousy each time someone crops up on my feed with a gushing video about how they’ve become a debut author within less than a year - but a bigger part of me is just confused. How are people doing this?

As far as I heard, being a published author was an achievement of the highest esteem. Writing your debut novel for years, spending money on it you didn’t know you had, toiling and working so hard for it all to come together and shoot you into literary stardom, finally. Now it feels like something anyone can do, which is a good thing in terms of accessibility, but not so much for quality control.

Because yes, anyone can write a book. But that doesn’t mean that everyone should.

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It’s excellent that in the modern world, thanks to the digital age, publishing has become more accessible and affordable for all. Talented voices that would have otherwise gone unheard can now post their work for the masses, gain traction and visibility for their novel that may not even be published yet. And when it does come to that, websites like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (Amazon KDP) make it easy for a debut author to put their book up for sale online. Whilst this technology is utterly revolutionary in the world of publishing, I don’t think we should be selling our manuscripts to Big Tech conglomerates such as Amazon. But I will admit that the company has provided a good starting point for budding authors to get their work out into the world, all bug and bot issues aside.

Publishing has always felt like this impenetrable, upper-class industry that people with no connections have no hopes of breaking into, but now self-publishing and online publishing offer people, who wouldn’t otherwise have the chance, an opportunity to get their work seen. It creates a more diverse playing field in an otherwise biased industry and brings fresh, young authors’ names into the spotlight, providing opportunity for new talent instead of showcasing the same writing names that turn out five novels of the same genre a year. Amazon KDP may not offer much in-house marketing itself, but the majority of people who are uploading their novels to the site are also putting in the work elsewhere: social media. In the new age of press tours, authors can post as many Tiktoks, Instagram dumps, and Twitter threads about their novel, at no cost and minimal effort, gaining the attention of thousands of like-minded individuals online if they know how to do it right. So basically, you’re cutting out all the outrageous costs of hiring professionals to do all of this for you - you can do it yourself, if you’re willing to put in the work!

This take on traditional publishing is naturally best suited for people who aren’t in it for the money, because, realistically, self-publishing is not something that you do to make millions. That’s why the professionals are so expensive. I feel that self-publishing is for people who are just starting, or more evidently, just want their work to be out in the world, for it to be read and enjoyed. And at the end of the day, that’s the most important part of writing - you do it because you love it.

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Everything I’ve said above is true, but there’s definitely a darker side to self-publishing coming to light in more recent years. Not just self-publishing, but this entirely new ecosystem that’s been thrust upon the literary world with the rise of social media.

I’m talking primarily about Booktok. What started as a way to share which books you like with others, to see what others were reading, and to be part of a bookish community you may not have had before, Booktok has now evolved into an entirely different beast. Every single bookshop now has a table or more dedicated entirely to ‘booktok recommendations’, so basically, whatever’s trending online that week. Certain booktok influencers’ opinions are treated as gospel, only for them to be cast aside a week later due to controversy and messy parasocial relationships with other influencers. With every trending romantasy novel, a new TV or film deal gets signed, and another original film idea gets shelved. Book deals for all! And that would be fine, if all of these novels were well written, unique, commenting on new and interesting ideas. But the majority of them aren’t. The majority are poorly thought out romantasy novels with the same structure, centred around a strong willed but essentially feeble female main character who gets swept into the arms of the brooding male love interest, for them both to save the world of X, defeat the evil clan of X, and fly off into the sunset of their new kingdom with their newly wed titles on the back of their flying X. Sound familiar? A little too familiar perhaps?

One of the main causes of this major surge in sub-par fantasy literature, and something that is becoming increasingly common and increasingly worrying within the publishing industry, is popular fanfictions from massive fandoms getting turned into novels, and I think this is where the biggest issue with the rise of romantasy specifically lies in terms of quality writing. Whilst I think it’s ironic that a subsection of fandom culture that I was actively a part of and shamed for in my teen years is now being used on a worldwide scale to make money and marketed to the millions, I also think it’s a form of blatant plagiarism. To take a novel that has been published online under an alias, for fan-made entertainment purposes, and to then edit that piece of work a little, change the names, and publish it as its own ‘original’ work, doesn’t take away from the fact that it was originally a fanfiction about Hermione and Draco from Harry Potter. It is someone else’s work, their masterpiece, their worldbuilding, and their characters, just glossed over with poor-quality paint and a different title. It doesn’t feel entirely legal. And it’s worth mentioning that it’s not the best of the best fanfictions being published, that genuinely talented writers aren’t getting their dues. Because, in the words of roseworth from Tumblr: “The best fanfics can never be published as an actual book because it’s intricately woven into the canon material, so it’s inseparable even if you change the names.”

I’m not at all calling fanfiction authors bad writers - quite the opposite. But it’s becoming an increasingly common trend that people are using pre-established universes with large fandoms to write fanfiction as a means of getting their own book published: their own half-baked ideas mixed in with a world that’s already been built for them. And that’s how we end up with novels coming out each year where all the source material is the same, all attached to the names of ‘Booktok influencers’, not many of them particularly well written, and all of one particular genre of story catered solely for the young female adult demographic who have been following the writing process of this story for months already on Tiktok. Not to mention the rise in the use of AI to assist in ghostwriting novels, therefore leading to work that isn’t just poorly written, but also not even human. Because of this, it’s becoming trickier for real writers to come up with original work without being compared; the most recent example being people online comparing Powerless (Roberts, 2023) and Red Queen (Aveyard, 2015), claiming the latter plagiarises the story of the former, despite Red Queen being written and released almost a decade prior. And now, with a book adaptation of ‘All The Young Dudes’, perhaps the most popular Harry Potter fanfiction ever written, being picked up, it’s hard to visualise how a novel of a novel of the most famous film franchise ever, is going to be played off as a semi-original work, or even mildly authentic as its own body of work.

This crossover between fan-made headcanons and literature universes that are already established is bleeding over into other mediums as well, mashing tropes and ‘cores’ and classic narratives together to make something that appeals to the online craving for aesthetics and hype. For example: How many people have read A Court of Thorns and Roses (Maas, 2015) vs. Wuthering Heights (Brontë, 1847)? How many people watched Wuthering Heights (Fennell, 2026) and claimed it was ‘for the book girlies’, when not a single part of the film was book-accurate? Fennell herself admitted that her vision for the film was ‘How she imagined the book in her head when she read it at 14’. So, quite literally, bringing your own fanfiction fantasies to life and making it your own by framing it as an adaptation. Wuthering Heights would’ve received far less backlash, I feel, if it had been its own original story, instead of trying to revive one of the most retold stories of all time. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life reading and watching remixes of the same stories over and over; I want something original.

It’s clear that the rising antagonism towards the romantasy genre is rooted in misogynistic ideas, and I don’t think this image is helped by what I’ve mentioned above - so many of the published novels within the romantasy genre are based on someone else’s idea, or feel like something straight off of Wattpad. But I think that’s missing the main point; reading something is better than not reading at all. Romantasy is a genre that’s getting people reading, people who maybe haven’t picked up a book in years. The idea that the genre is a form of ‘brainrot’ (compared to TikTok? Please.) is just the opinion of one person that is being bounced around the echo chamber of social media, another indicator that people are struggling to think for themselves with the rise of a digital society. Instead of focusing on what people are reading, the anti-intellectualism debate needs to focus on people who aren’t: primarily, the American far right. Anti-intellectualism has wormed its way into politics via the US President, and that is how he is currently staying on top, with misinformation and his followers being unable to think for themselves. That same thing is happening in many other countries all over the world as well. It’s not a coincidence.

It could be mentioned that maybe more people are writing books as an act of rebellion against the digital age (see my article on this here), but this rebellion feels nullified when said novel is so heavily catered towards an online audience’s tastes, and is marketed entirely online. This digitisation of literature and the discourse around it is contributing a big part towards people not forming their own opinions on not just literature but life, and it has rapidly hurtled towards a hive mind society in terms of arts and culture. If no one is writing anything original anymore, if everyone who’s making art is doing it just for the online discourse, then I fear we may be more doomed than we think. How can a society move forward and progress if all we’re doing is fixating on a culture that’s passed?

Sources (listed in order of appearance):

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (n.d.). [online]. Available from: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/.

Joanna (2025). A frustrated author’s tale of woe [online]. Available from: https://libertabooks.com/self-pub/amazon-kdp-a-frustrated-authors-tale-of-woe/.

roseworth (n.d.). [online]. Available from: https://www.tumblr.com/roseworth?source=share.

Roberts, L. (2023). Powerless. New York City: Simon & Schuster.

Aveyard, V. (2015). Red Queen. London: Orion Books.

Bowden, L. (2026). The Analogue Reset. Kailon Magazine [online]. 27 February. Available from: https://open.substack.com/pub/kailonmagazine/p/the-analogue-reset?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web.

Maas, S. (2015). A Court of Thorns and Roses. London: Bloomsbury.

Brontë, E. (1847). Wuthering Heights. London: Penguin Books.

Fennell, E. (2026). Wuthering Heights. [cinema]. USA: MRC.

Edited by Sonal Butley

One concept I wish society didn’t push on Cancer, brain tumor, and chronic illness survivors of any kind, is the idea that once you’re out of treatment, you can go back to how things were before. I think when you are first diagnosed or enduring treatment, everyone rallies around you.You get offered all these resources, people bringing you and your family meals, get well soon cards and words of encouragement, and so on. You have this constant cheerleading squad by your side. You receive texts or cards with words of encouragement, prayer, and support.

Then once you finish treatment, and it all fades away, to quiet whispers, to background noise, then eventually nothing…

No one understands that just because treatment ends the hard part doesn’t mean the hard part ends. It’s only just beginning and it gets more difficult as time goes on.

After treatment, everyone just expects you to go back to how you were before, except you don’t. You now battle fatigue, anxiety, pain, and physical limitations, and so much more daily. According to a study done in 2020, 3 out of 5 survivors develop late effects. (Klonoff-Cohen & Polavarapu, 2020). While the study noted most of these effects were not life-threatening, they cause severe issues that affect health and quality of life. The authors of this article stated “survivors can struggle daily with: a) the complications of late effects (e.g., cardiomyopathy, central nervous system problems [thinking, learning, memory, fatigue], sexual health and fertility, and lymphedema) as well as risks of cancer recurrences, b) psychosocial difficulties of late effects such as anxiety, depression, relationship complications, body image disturbances, and poor self-esteem, and c) financial consequences of late effects including unemployment, medical insurance, and finances.” (2020)

Simply going back to your daily life after treatment is finished is an adjustment period in itself. When your pep squad leaves you on your own after treatment, you are left to navigate your new normal on your own, jumping over obstacles that are flying down your road to recovery left and right, all while grieving your past self. One of my friends, who is a brain cancer survivor, once said , “Everyone is worried, of course, when you’re in treatment with a bleak prognosis, but after the 5-year mark, or whatever, they’re like, ‘okay, move on.’ But we can’t, because this will affect us for our whole lives.”

After the treatments are done, everyone leaves you in the room, turning the light off behind them as they walk out. Your people don’t realize the darkness survivors face for years. The side effects that consume the entirety of our lives. Or if they do, they don’t know what to say, and the quiet becomes too loud, the darkness of it all is too consuming for them, and they leave you there all by yourself. I know for myself, even 18 years after my diagnosis, I sometimes just wish someone would have just sat with me through it all. But it’s like at the movies, the credits have started playing, so everyone leaves, not anticipating the bonus scene of late effects that will now start playing.

Edited by Hanna Villegas

Sources:

Klonoff-Cohen, H., & Polavarapu, M. (2020). Existence of late-effects instruments for cancer survivors: A systematic review. PloS one, 15(2), e0229222.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229222

In 1870, a woman by the name of Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist, women’s rights advocate and peace activist issued what is now recognized today as the Mother’s Day Proclamation Act, originally called Appeal to womanhood throughout the world. Within this proclamation, Howe encouraged the idea of the creation of an international body of women who could find ways to avoid war and bloodshed:

“I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed … to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” 

This would go on to be ignored of course, which prompted Howe to then seek to establish an annual Mother’s Day in June which occurred inconsistently. The Mother’s Day we all celebrate today in May is due largely in part to Anna Jarvis who established the day to honor her own mother, Ann Jarvis, a woman who gave birth to over a dozen children, losing many to illness and diseases common during the 1800’s. Ann would go on to work tirelessly in her community to help other mothers avoid the same pains and losses she underwent. Organizing “Mother’s Work Clubs” and special days where women in the community would come together to collect trash and take on projects to improve community conditions and hygiene, things would get more serious as the Civil War rolled around, the women found themselves helping both sides of the war and promoting unity and peace. Her daughter, Anna, who would never have children of her own, in order to honor her mother’s work and legacy, sought to establish a national Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May, the day her mother Ann died, encouraging people to write letters of gratitude to their mothers and to gift flowers, more notably white carnations. This would later be cemented by President Wilson with a proclamation of the first national Mother’s Day just before the start of World War I in 1914.

I write this as a mother myself, to a beautiful baby boy who is my reason for breathing, as most mothers will tell you. On this day I want to bring attention to mothers that have impacted me in my own journey, whom I feel encompass what it is to bring life to this world.

1. Mamie Till

I will never not be overcome with emotion when I think of Mamie Till, and I think about her very often. I have since I was a child and even more so as a mother myself. Mamie Till was an educator and activist, who marked history undoubtedly with how she chose to handle the brutal murder of her 14 year old son, Emmett Till. In 1955, while visiting family, Emmett was abducted and brutally murdered due to the white lies of a woman named Carolyn Bryant after Emmet was in her family’s grocery store. Part of Carolyn’s lies insisted that the young Emmett grabbed her around the waist, made sexual advances, and used vulgar language. Years later in a 2008 interview with Duke University historian Dr. Timothy Tyson, author of “The Blood of Emmett Till’, Carolyn admitted, “That part’s not true,” and stated regarding the rest of the alleged encounter, “Honestly, I just don’t remember”.

Days later after Emmett had been in the grocery store, Carolyn’s husband and his half brother abducted Emmett at gunpoint from his uncle’s home whom he had been visiting, took him to a barn and tortured him before throwing his body into the Mississippi river. Three days later, Emmett’s disfigured body was found in the river. The local sheriff’s department would then try to rush his burial that same day, an inhumane attempt to conceal one of our nation’s worst acts of racial violence to date, even prompting his uncle to sign an agreement not to open the casket. When Mamie caught wind of this, she called everyone she knew to bring her baby home.

With the help of individuals such as Civil rights leader T. R. M. Howard who provided vital assistance and financial backing, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and Illinois Governor William Stratton applied heavy political pressure to ensure his body was safely transported back to Illinois. The Illinois politicians also sought assistance from President Eisenhower and his administration, to which they got no response.

The same train that took Emmett to Mississippi brought his body back home. Upon seeing the sealed wooden casket and despite the document Emmett’s uncle signed, Mamie cried out, “Well, give me a crowbar, give me whatever. What can they do to me? They’ve taken my son.” Mamie Till would mark history by demanding an open casket funeral, famously remarking “Let the people see what they did to my boy, Let the world see what I’ve seen.” I find myself echoing Dr. Tyson’s words that, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” Emmett was Mamie’s only child. She would go on to channel her grief through life-long activism, building a 23 year career as an educator and touring the country with the NAACP speaking out against racial violence. She also founded the Emmett Till Players, a touring youth drama group.

2. Mary Wollstonecraft

Nicknamed by many as the “Mother of Feminism” (personally I think this title largely belongs to bell hooks) Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer, philosopher and foundational feminist who spent her life advocating for social and educational equality for women. Known largely for her landmark treatise, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which argued that women are not naturally inferior to men but only appear to be due to a lack of education. She wrote novels, a history of the French Revolution, travelogues, and children’s books. For women during her time she championed intellectual independence and challenging social conventions regarding women’s roles, was as impactful to later generations as her writing. She is also known as the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

3. Eliza Berry

Growing up in a family very proud and protective of their African ancestry meant that we often watched telenovelas, movies, and shows that dealt with slavery. When 12 Years A Slave came out in 2013, based on the 1853 memoir of the same name by Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana, my family was sat. Right away I was affected by Eliza Berry. I watched this film again earlier this year and while I remembered being overcome with emotion as a child at hearing the children cry out for their mother as they were ripped apart, I was now watching it as a mother. Roughly 30 minutes into the film we see Benedict Cumberbatch as plantation owner William Ford at an auction for enslaved persons in New Orleans. As if seeing humans be inspected and sold like cattle isn’t horrifying enough, we see a woman by the name of Eliza Berry clinging onto her two children, Randall and Emily. During the auction, Ford purchases Eliza after Randall is sold to another, Emily is deemed “not for sale” by the cruel slave trader Theophilus Freeman played by Paul Giamatti. Eliza desperately begs that her family not be separated, crying and pleading to keep her children with her.

Ford appears to be uncomfortable and somewhat sympathetic in comparison to the other men in the room. The scene is devastating because while Ford is portrayed as more “kind” than many other enslavers in the film, yet he still participates in and enables the system of slavery. His failure to act fully, despite recognizing Eliza’s suffering, highlights one of the movie’s central themes: that even supposedly humane people were complicit in the cruelty of slavery. I could never imagine the anxiety and pain Eliza felt, being given the false hope of freedom for her and her children by her former enslaver and the pain of having them b e ripped away so inhumanely and not knowing what happened to them. This is only a crumb of what enslaved women dealt with as mothers. There aren’t shrines big enough or history books thick enough. Eliza spends the remainder of her life stricken with grief, which later is the cause of her death.

4. Unnamed Palestinian Mother

This is one of the very first images/videos I saw that has greatly affected how I hug and kiss my child to this day. There is not one hug or kiss where I do not think of this woman. “In a touching video clip, the Palestinian woman warmly embraced her child for the last time after he was martyred in a violent raid carried out by the Israeli army on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. In this farewell embrace, the mother cried bitterly and kissed her martyred child, then held him close in a heartbreaking scene.” According to analysis by the UN and international aid organizations, the rate and number of Palestinian children killed in the current Gaza conflict have surpassed the child death tolls of any other single global conflict in recent years. Never could we ever imagine seeing as many dead children as we have with this genocide. One would think more would be shocked, that more would be done. War is fought on battlefields, but its deepest wounds are carried by women and children.

5. Michelle Obama

I love this woman down. Part of the reason for the infamous D.C trip right before Kailon Magazine going public was me wanting to see Michelle’s painting in the National Gallery. Though that one is by Amy Sherald, I much prefer this one by artist Sharon Sprung, it’s just a bit more difficult to see as it is part of the White House Collection. Michelle made us all laugh in 2022 when she said that there was a period of about 10 years where she “couldn’t stand” 44th President Barack Obama, a comment blown out of proportion later by the internet. What she was really explaining was the emotional and personal strain that came from balancing motherhood, career sacrifices, and the unequal burdens that can happen in marriage while Barack pursued a demanding political career. Her remarks gave people a deeper understanding of the unseen sacrifices she made as a wife and mother during the years leading up to Barack Obama becoming the first Black president of the United States. Michelle Obama carried not only the pressures of raising their children and supporting her husband’s ambitions, but also the weight of public scrutiny, racial hostility, and the historic expectations placed on their family. Her honesty helped humanize their relationship and showed that behind a groundbreaking presidency was a family making difficult personal sacrifices that the public rarely sees. Never have we had a first lady more influential and a powerhouse in her own right. I was recently gifted her book, The Light We Carry, which I cannot recommend enough.

6. Jocelyn Hurndall

Jocelyn Hurndall is the mother of Tom Hurndall, a British photography student, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement, and an activist against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

She became known after campaigning for justice following her son’s shooting by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2003. Tom Hurndall later died from his injuries in 2004. Jocelyn Hurndall also wrote the book Defy the Stars: The Life and Tragic Death of Tom Hurndall, documenting his life and activism. It covers profound loss, grief, and the struggle for accountability, while also highlighting the realities of life in the Gaza Strip as well as documents the family’s fight to uncover the truth after a cover-up by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).

“A brief lull in the destruction of homes and houses had been shattered while children played on a mound of sand nearby to where Tom sat. Without hesitation we are told, Tom had jumped into the line of fire, coming from Israeli soldiers masked in their watch towers and hidden inside the turrets of their tanks, to rescue the children. He had managed to bring one child to safety but when returning with the second child in his arms, a young girl – like perhaps the one whose eyes had so beckoned him in Jordan to come to Gaza – the sniper’s bullet had hit its target. The sniper’s target was simply a man who dared to care, who dared to help, and a man who also dared to believe that surely a young soldier, unthreatened in his vantage point, would not really wish to shoot and kill children or those who try to move them to safety.”

His photographs and diaries documenting the Israeli occupation of Palestine were published in a book titled, The Only House Left Standing.

Honorable Mentions

7. My Own Mother

I could never fully comprehend the extent of the hardships my mother endured throughout her life, especially considering that she became a mother to me on her nineteenth birthday. Looking back now as an adult, and especially through the lens of motherhood itself, I realize just how impossibly young she truly was. At nineteen, most people are only beginning to discover who they are, yet she was already carrying the weight and responsibility of raising another human being.

For much of my childhood, I did not know I was mixed with anything else until I was a teenager. By then, I had already spent my most formative years surrounded by my father’s culture that my mother had worked tirelessly to preserve and pass down. Learning later that she had taught herself my father’s language while pregnant with me before I was even born moved me in a way I struggle to describe. I have been with my husband since I was 16, and I still struggle with his native language. It was not something she was obligated to do, nor something expected of her, but an act of love and devotion so deep that she immersed herself entirely into a culture, traditions, and even a syncretic religion that were not originally her own until they became part of her identity too.

She was still practically a child herself, navigating adulthood and motherhood simultaneously, and in many ways my father’s family helped raise her as much as they helped raise me. Yet despite her youth, despite everything unfamiliar and overwhelming that must have surrounded her, she embraced it all with an openness and determination that I deeply admire now. There is something profoundly beautiful about the way she chose love over fear, community over isolation, and understanding over distance.

When I think about mothers throughout history, I think not only of grand acts of sacrifice remembered in books or headlines, but also of quieter, deeply personal acts like hers, the unseen labor of reshaping oneself out of love for one’s children. The willingness to learn a new language, adopt unfamiliar customs, carry traditions that are not your own, and build a bridge between worlds so your child never has to feel disconnected from either side of themselves. Those acts may never be memorialized publicly, but they are no less extraordinary.

8. My Mother-in-Law

My mother-in-law became a mother at an age when most people are still children themselves. She had her first daughter at around fourteen years old, then a second daughter soon after, and finally my husband, the youngest, the baby of the family. When I hear the stories of her early life, I am often struck by how much responsibility was placed on her so early, and how she carried it with a kind of quiet endurance that only becomes fully visible in hindsight.

I have heard fragments of the life she built in those early years, small but haunting details that linger. The tiny house they lived in, the monsoon seasons, when the rain would rise and flood their space, and she would hold my husband as a baby in her arms while climbing to higher surfaces just to keep him safe and dry.

The most painful part of her story, though, is not only what she endured then, but what she has had to endure for decades since. When she made the decision to leave her two daughters behind and come to the United States with my husband, who was then only around two years old, it was not a choice made lightly or without cost. It was a separation born of necessity and hope, and one that would become permanent in ways no one could have fully understood at the time. Due to the long and often broken realities of immigration systems, more than twenty years later she has still not been able to see her daughters in person again. She has also lost her father while being over here.

That absence is a silence that has stretched across most of her adult life. A kind of grief that does not end, but simply learns how to coexist with daily responsibilities. And yet, in the midst of that distance and loss, she continued to build a life here. She taught herself how to read in both Vietnamese and English, refusing to be limited by language or circumstance. She worked tirelessly to support her large family overseas while also raising my husband on her own here, carrying the weight of two worlds at once with relentless determination.

She is, in every sense, a woman who has had to make strength out of necessity. Not the kind of strength that is loud or performative, but the kind that is built in quiet endurance, in sacrifice that spans decades, in love that persists even when it is stretched across borders and time. To me, she is one of the strongest women I know, not because her life was easy to admire from a distance, but because it has been unimaginably hard to live through and she has continued anyway.

This weekend my best friend and I decided to have a little friend date as one does. We picked a cute restaurant to go to (also if you’re in the Tallahassee area, Sakura Sushi is the place to be on a saturday night!) and then we thought ‘why not go see the new rom-com, The Drama, with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson!’ I have to say, if anyone is planning on seeing that on a date depending on who you are I would possibly rethink that.

I walked in and expected to just see maybe a little angsty romantic comedy/drama with two people who basically helped build my personality. I mean I knew the Shake It Up choreo by heart as a kid and I’ve been a “Team Edward” girl since my sister showed me Twilight. And honestly, for the first twenty minutes, that is what it was. Their meet-cute was cute, a bit worrisome but honestly super realistic. We are introduced to all of the main players pretty quickly and, as an inspiring film producer and director, it was shot in the classic A24 indie way. With a grainy look, it seems like this is a couple in love who are about to get married with loving friends.

When I say that the plot twist, twisted… I really really mean it. I don’t want to give anything away because I think not knowing anything is the best way to go into this movie, but I feel like it brings forth a lot of interesting questions and dynamics that are not really seen in many movies. Actually, I really think this is a very original movie and I’m not super surprised, A24 has a history of taking movies that are more original, indie, or artsy or artistic. However this really is a new take on the idea of a rom-com and also the idea of “do you ever really know someone”?

Again I don’t want to spoil anything, but this is a fair warning that I may get really close to it, because the character relationships that this movie attacks needs to be discussed and context is kind of needed. I’m gonna do my best but no promises.

As someone who was in public school her whole life and now goes to FSU, the topic at hand isn’t something anyone my age isn’t familiar with either; this movie really tackles the idea of empathy towards it in a way that at least got me thinking about it a lot in the following days. I mean Zendaya’s character, Emma Harwood, is the center of the conversation but I couldn’t find it in myself to condemn her the way other characters do, specifically Alana Haim’s Rachel. To me, Emma was and probably is the most empathetic person in the whole movie: she saw the reality, she changed her mindset, she forgave, and she became a better person because of it. However, in the catalyst for the main conflict, every other character showed that their behaviors never changed.

I think it’s most seen in Rachel, which while there are conflicting opinions on this movie everyone seems to hate this character so take what you will from that. Her confession illustrates behavior that she repeats over and over again throughout the whole movie. She views herself as better than everyone else because of tragedies she was adjacent to and lets that cast herself as the victim even if she is more of a perpetrator than anyone else. She is forceful with her husband and strongly condemns Emma through the whole movie even when Emma continues to apologize.

Even Robert Pattinson’s character Charlie Thompson doesn’t really seem to have grown from his confessional, he repeats the behavior of hurting others when he is highly emotional. Nor does Mamoudou Athie’s character, Mike, seem to have changed as he stays behind Rachel through the whole movie.

Honestly, though, the story in The Drama is probably the most realistic depiction of what would happen in this situation. I have seen a lot of polarizing opinions on this movie and I really think they all have a spot in the cultural zeitgeist. I guess to add my two cents, I thought it was a well written, well shot, and well protected movie. I truly had no idea what I was walking into. All the press around it has seemed more like ‘oh lets put Zendaya and Rob in a room and see what comes out of it’ rather than actual discourse over the movie. If you were to ask my best friend, she would say the ending sucked, I personally am not totally sure about it yet. I see what the point was, but I do agree that I wish there was more around if Charlie could grow from this and if Emma truly was just going to forgive and forget. But I guess if we go into movies wishing to see everything, we’d be living in a movie rather than real life.

I think it has brought important acknowledgement towards mental health and the main topic of the movie, which I won’t say in case you are reading this before watching the movie– which may have been a bad idea, like seriously just go watch the movie. All in all I think it was a refreshing take on a Rom-Com-Dram-ady (see what I did there). With the rise of romanticizing more negative aspect of human life, The Drama, with some moments of comedy, a little bit of romance, and just full drama, it brings the conversion I think a lot of people are going to start having to see: what was the true effects of popularized violence and can one come back from mistakes as a child? I’d like to think we shouldn’t judge people for what they may have almost done but what they do, but maybe after watching this movie again I’ll have a change of heart. However, for now, The Drama sits in my letterbox with a five star rating because at the end of the day I watched this movie almost a week ago and I can’t stop thinking about it. To me, a movie that does this to its audience is a five star movie heading to be a possible cult classic.

Edited by Natalli Newman

Visibility, for lesbians, has never been a simple matter of being seen. It is about recognition without distortion, presence without erasure, and community without fragmentation. While cultural shifts might suggest broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, lesbian-specific spaces, histories, and identities are increasingly at risk of being flattened, absorbed, and LOUDLY sidelined.

The Disappearing Space

One of the most tangible markers of this erasure are physical spaces. In the 1980s, the United States had an estimated 200 lesbian bars. Today, that number has dwindled to fewer than 30, which has increased from only 15 in 2019. The dwindling of these spaces is a huge cultural loss, because they’re not “new” or “trendy”—they have rich histories that prove the persistence and resilience of the lesbian community across time.

Lesbian bars are not just nightlife venues: they are sanctuaries. They are places where lesbians can exist without explanation, without translation, and without fear. In a world that often demands invisibility or conformity, these spaces offer something rare: ease.

The sharp decline is tied to a mix of factors: gentrification, rising rents, the rise of dating apps, and the broadening (and sometimes blurring) of queer spaces into more generalized LGBTQ+ environments. While inclusivity matters, it has also, paradoxically, contributed to the dilution of spaces specifically centered on lesbians.

What happens when a community loses its place to gather without negotiation?

Visibility vs. Assimilation

Lesbian identity has long been subject to reinterpretation, often by outsiders and within the broader queer umbrella. Increased media representation has not always meant accurate or affirming visibility. Too often, lesbian characters are hypersexualized, written for the male gaze, killed off, and/or positioned as temporary phases in narratives that ultimately center heterosexuality, and more specifically, men.

In a way to undercut lesbian relationships, many (mostly those in the manosphere or in conservative spaces) will refer to the statistic from a CDC survey stating 43.8% of lesbians reported having experienced IPV (intimate partner violence). However, upon further investigation, 72% of those 43.8% experienced violence at the hands of men.

Even within LGBTQ+ spaces, lesbian identity can be overshadowed. The expansion of language around gender and sexuality has been liberating in many ways, but it has also created tension around specificity. While the term ‘lesbian’ is traditionally defined as a woman attracted to another woman, modern definitions have expanded to “non-men loving non-men”, with broader terms like “sapphic” or “lesbian-identifying individual” used as more inclusive umbrella-terms for non-binary and trans lesbians. Within the lesbian community, there is still tension around terms, definitions, and the value of exclusivity–having places just for lesbians–because contrary to popular belief, you cannot tell a lesbian by their looks.

Visibility, then, has become complicated. As with many issues often overlooked due to white supremacy or heterosexuality, it is not about being included, but about being understood.

The Data Behind the Reality

• Lesbian couples are statistically less represented in media compared to gay male couples, despite comparable population sizes.

• Studies have shown that lesbian relationships receive significantly less screen time, and are more likely to be depicted as unstable or short-lived.

• Lesbian women often face a dual marginalization: sexism and homophobia. This impacts everything from healthcare access to economic stability.

• Community surveys continue to show that many lesbians feel underrepresented, even within LGBTQ+ advocacy spaces.

These are NOT abstract issues. They shape lived experience; how safe someone feels holding their partner’s hand; how easily they can find community; how often they see themselves reflected in the world around them.

Why Visibility Still Matters

It would be easy to assume that in 2026, visibility is no longer urgent. That would be a mistake.

Visibility is about young people having language for what they feel. It’s about ensuring that lesbian identity does not become a footnote in the broader story of queerness.

Weeks like Lesbian Visibility Week are not solutions, but signals. They point to what still needs attention, protection, and care.

Reclaiming Space, Reclaiming Narrative

There is, however, a quiet resurgence happening. New lesbian bars are opening in cities that haven’t had them in decades. Pop up events, collectives, and digital communities are carving out space where none existed before. Independent media is telling more nuanced stories. There is a deliberate effort, especially among younger lesbians, to document, archive, and celebrate their identities on their own terms.

Visibility, in this sense, is evolving. It is no longer confined to physical space, though that space remains deeply important. It lives online, in art, in fashion, in language, and it still requires intention.

Without intention, erasure happens gradually. Quietly. Until one day, you realize something that once felt undeniable now feels impossible to find.

Lesbian Visibility Week asks us to notice that — and to resist it.

Not just for a week, but every day.

*Fun Fact*

The shift of RuPaul’s Drag Race from Monday nights to Fridays (specifically starting with Season 9 in 2017) had a significant, disruptive impact on gay bars and, by extension, queer spaces like lesbian bars that often hosted viewing parties.

This article has been edited and approved by our humble lesbian supreme, Hannah 💅

Sources

Queering Place: The Case of the Lesbian Bar

There are only 15 lesbian bars left in the entire country. This campaign is trying to save them

What Happened to All the Lesbian Bars?

THE LESBIAN BAR PROJECT

Why finding a lesbian bar near you is almost impossible

Number of lesbian bars in the U.S. from 1977 to 2021

As Black Maternal Health Week comes to a close, the conversations it sparks cannot end here. This week is more than a moment of awareness, it is a reminder of an ongoing public health crisis that continues to impact Black women and birthing people across the United States every single day.

I was first made aware of just how severe maternal health disparities are for Black women long before I ever had my son. Around that time, a friend of mine from high school, a Black woman, was experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and it forced me to pay closer attention. That awareness deepened when I read an article around that same time while doing some research and learned how Serena Williams quite literally had to save her own life after giving birth.

After delivering her daughter via emergency C-section in 2017, Williams, who has a history of blood clots, began to feel short of breath. Recognizing the symptoms of a pulmonary embolism, she immediately alerted medical staff and requested a CT scan along with blood thinners. Her concerns were initially dismissed, and she was instead given pain medication. As her condition worsened, further testing was finally conducted, confirming multiple blood clots in her lungs. The severe coughing that followed caused her C-section incision to reopen, leading to additional complications and multiple surgeries.

Her experience is a stark example of what so many Black women face not only during labor but in healthcare in general: not being listened to, even when they know something is wrong. While Serena Williams had the knowledge, resources, and platform to advocate for herself, many Black women do not, making these outcomes even more dangerous and, too often, fatal.

Organizations like the Black Mamas Matter Alliance (BMMA) have spent years pushing this issue into the national spotlight, they are actually the key original organizers of Black Maternal Health Week. Their work centers Black mamas and birthing people, advocating for research, policY change, and cultural shifts that prioritize equity, dignity, and care. The data they’ve compiled tells a story that is both urgent and impossible to ignore.

In the United States, Black women are three to five times more likely to die from pregnancy related causes than white women. In 2024, that reality looks like a maternal mortality rate of 44.8 per 100,000 live births, compared to 14.2 for white women. Even more devastating is the fact that over 80% of these deaths are preventable.

Despite an estimated $111 billion spent annually on maternal, prenatal, and newborn care, the United States continues to have some of the worst maternal and infant health outcomes among high-income nations. The issue is not simply access, it is the quality, consistency, and equity of care being delivered.

Black women are more likely to experience preterm labor as well as life-threatening conditions such as preeclampsia, embolisms, and hypertensive disorders. They also face higher rates of chronic conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, all of which increase the risk of complications during pregnancy and postpartum. A powerful experience shared just yesterday was by artist Jennifer White-Johnson who reveals her experience:

These disparities do not exist “just because”, they are rooted in systemic racism.

Research shows that even when accounting for income and insurance, Black women still receive lower-quality care. In fact, 22% of Black women report experiencing poorer treatment in healthcare settings, and a national study found that 67% experienced race-based discrimination when seeking reproductive or family planning services.

The impact of this goes beyond individual experiences. Chronic stress caused by racism and discrimination has measurable effects on the body, increasing risks during pregnancy and contributing to long-term health complications for both mother and child. Black women are also more likely to experience preventable chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, as well as reproductive health disorders like fibroids and endometriosis.

Economic inequality further deepens these outcomes. Black women are typically paid just 62 cents for every dollar earned by non-Hispanic white men, with median wages significantly lower overall. This gap limits access to stable housing, nutritious food, and consistent healthcare. Workplace discrimination compounds these challenges, as many Black women are forced to return to work before they are fully healed or face penalties for taking necessary leave. Nearly three in ten pregnancy discrimination claims have been filed by Black women.

Access to care remains another critical barrier. Nearly half of U.S. counties lack an obstetrician-gynecologist, leaving millions without essential maternal health services—especially in rural and underserved communities.

Still, there are solutions, and they already exist.

Community-based care models, including doulas and midwives, have been shown to improve outcomes by providing culturally competent, continuous support throughout pregnancy and postpartum. These approaches reduce emergency interventions, lower healthcare costs, and help bridge the gap between patients and providers.

As this week comes to an end, it is important to remember that Black Maternal Health Week is not the conclusion of a conversation, it is a continuation of one that must remain at the forefront.

Behind every statistic is a life, and ensuring that Black mothers are heard, respected, and protected is not just a health issue, it is a matter of justice.

Sources

Black Maternal Health Alliance

Black Maternal Health Statistic Issue Brief

New York Times Article on Serena Williams Birth Complications

How Serena Williams Saved Her Own Life

Serena Williams: What my life-threatening experience taught me about giving birth

After my brain tumor surgery, my pituitary gland, hypothalamus, and my metabolism no longer functioned properly, and therefore I started to gain a lot of weight. I was 11 years old, and only weighed about 75-80 pounds at the time of the surgery. I started gaining weight rapidly, and was diagnosed with Hypothalamic Obesity, a condition which affects weight and hunger in many brain tumor survivors. My weight is something I still struggle with18 years later. No matter how many diets I’ve tried or how much I’ve exercised, I’ve constantly faced an uphill battle.

I remember walking into Justice with my mom the summer after my surgery, to do some back-to-school clothes shopping, and suddenly realizing that not much of what they had there would fit me anymore. After finding the few things they had that I liked, we left, my mom saying she’d pick up some more clothes elsewhere for me before I went back to school.

Throughout the rest of middle school and all of high school, I struggled to find clothes that fit me that I actually liked. While some stores offered plus-sized clothing, most of what I could pick from looked like something my grandmother would wear, and was never even slightly close to resembling the style of clothes that my friends all wore. Occasionally, of course, I’d find something cute in the plus-size section, but the chances of that happening was slimmer than winning the lottery. And finding dresses for dances or parties? Especially a cute dress? That was like the shopping equivalent of Mission Impossible. I’ve lost track of the amount of time I’ve spent browsing aisles at the mall, hoping, praying that I’d find something, anything, that didn’t look like a dress you’d wear to a funeral in my size. All the while, my extreme fatigue (a side effect of my tumor and stroke) made the experience even more unbearable.

Because of this, I never really got to develop my own sense of style. My closet mostly consisted of T-shirts, jeans, sweatpants, and leggings. Sure, I had a couple of cute outfits, but most of the time, I was stuck wearing boring, old-lady-like clothes.

This trend of unfashionable plus-size clothing is still something I struggle with when shopping. It makes dressing rooms intolerable, unwelcome hell pits. I do most of my shopping online now, holding my breath when I open the packaging, praying that what’s inside will actually fit, and look good on me.

But still, even now, I have a difficult time finding fashionable, plus-sized clothing for myself. It’s like fashion designers think that the only people needing plus-sized clothing are old ladies who sit at home binge-watching TV while stuffing their faces with cake. It’s like they don’t think that younger women, moms, working women, or teens need plus-sized clothing. I don’t think it’s fair that just because someone’s built differently, they are forced to wear clothes that don’t have any style or flair to them. What a confidence booster that would’ve been for me in high school, to be able to wear clothes that fit me and actually looked remotely similar to the things my friends wore, and feel good about myself for once.

According to an article by Vogue Business: “Across 198 fashion shows, only 12 brands included any plus-size models (five brands in New York, five in London and two in Paris). The article mentioned that plus-sized models only accounted for 0.3% of models on runways, a significant decrease from already low numbers. If inclusivity is such a big trend in every other industry, why is it almost nearly omitted from fashion? Another article noted that taking away plus-sized styles and brands in the fashion industry doesn’t just mean less clothes for the plus-sized community, it causes a decreased amount of self-confidence in that whole population. “Fashion isn’t just aesthetic,” says Heinen, “It’s psychological scaffolding. When that scaffolding is absent — when someone walks into a store and sees nothing made for their body — it creates more than inconvenience. It creates emotional erosion. And over time, that erosion leaves a trace in how people speak about themselves, in how they show up socially, and in how much space they allow themselves to take up”.

Fashion is not just a form of how we dress, it’s a form of expression. It’s how we display to the world who we are. In addition to stripping away a form of self-expression, taking away plus-sized styles and brands is another way of reminding the plus-sized community that our bodies need to be fixed, and that they aren’t good enough or pretty enough. Vogue’s Business article noted that “When women’s rights are restricted, there’s often a corresponding pressure to embody an ideal that is not only physically controlled but also hyper-feminine and submissive to male desire.” Why is the women’s fashion industry so concerned with what guys want? Because the fashion industry is now so focused on pleasing men by showing thin models, body image and eating disorders are now increasing.

Additionally, when we no longer see clothes made for us, or models in our sizes, we become disconnected from fashion completely. I constantly look at the outfits my sisters-in-law’s, or my friends or co-workers wear, and think to myself, “Gee, I wish they sold that in my size, I would totally buy that!” Honestly, I’m not sure why more stores, brands, and designers haven’t started selling the cute clothes they make for regular sizes in plus sizes. They’d make a killing. It’s 2026. Why should I have to be a size small and as thin as a stick to be able to dress fashionably?

Edited by Lottie Bowden

Sources

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326974302_Images_of_Thin_and_Plus-Size_Models_Produce_Opposite_Effects_on_Women’s_Body_Image_Body_Dissatisfaction_and_Anxiety

Moreno, Silvia & Servian Franco, Fátima & Paso, Gustavo & Cepeda-Benito, Antonio. (2019). Images of Thin and Plus-Size Models Produce Opposite Effects on Women’s Body Image, Body Dissatisfaction, and Anxiety. Sex Roles. 80. 1-10. 10.1007/s11199-018-0951-3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326974302_Images_of_Thin_and_Plus-Size_Models_Produce_Opposite_Effects_on_Women’s_Body_Image_Body_Dissatisfaction_and_Anxiety.

Shoaib, M. (2025, March 17). The Vogue Business Autumn/Winter 2025 size inclusivity report. Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/article/the-vogue-business-autumn-winter-2025-size-inclusivity-report

Tovar, V. (2025, July 14). The psychological cost of the Plus-Size retail collapse. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/virgietovar/2025/07/12/the-psychological-cost-of-the-plus-size-retail-collapse/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/virgietovar/2025/07/12/the-psychological-cost-of-the-plus-size-retail-collapse/, 2025

https://www.vogue.com/article/the-vogue-business-autumn-winter-2025-size-inclusivity-report