My boyfriend (22) and I (20) are planning to have business pero hindi namin alam kung ano. We are willing to risk naman kasi alam naman naming malaking sugal 'to pero ayun nga we need a little help since sa family ko and sa family niya wala naman idea when it comes to business. May fund kami for business, we just need to think through na magsisimula sa maliit and lumago in the long run.
We were thinking na magsell ng steak and pork ribs with our own signature taste, pero parang ang occasional niya kasi. He wants sa food industry pero anything will do naman. Thank u so much

• S05E01 - Badge of Deceit:

1. A rapist enters houses of women lives alone, assaults them, for 15 years of period.
2. Women describes that he holds the flashlight like a police would do, asks them to take a shower after the attack, and tell them to close their windows to make them feel they are also to blame.
3. When the rape houses put on the map, it reveals that all houses are close to one specific district, and a cop who lives there was responsible.

• S05E02 - Dew Process:

1. A man beats his wife to death, and makes up a story about masked intruder.
2. But the victim was cleaned and her nightgown changed, and his car was used at night.

• S05E03 - A Woman Scorned:

1. A woman kidnaps another woman she argued at gunpoint. They went to a forest with victims car, and she shots her.
2. But she picked the forest she knows, and since she is the victim's husband's ex girlfriend, this led police to her. And she left hair strands in the car and at the crime scene.

• S05E04 - A Voice from Beyond:

1. A female remains found in a barrel of and old house. The woman was pregnant. Police contacts with the owner of the house 35 years ago, and the man kills himself after.
2. The woman was his employee in a plastic tree factory, and after she got pregnant, she phoned the man's wife and told about their affair, and the man killed her in response.
3. The man simply moved out from the house leaving the barrel because it was too heavy. and it waited there for 34 years to be found.

• S05E05 - Burning Ambition:
• A policeman burns his own house for insurance money, but he uses flare for a delay and he put all his valuables to the shed.
• When police gets suspicious of these facts, he kills a young boy and bury to the area he has access to, and creates a fake document states he was the arsonist.
  
  1. But blood stains in his car and using different pen to forge the boys signature gives him away.
  2. S05E06 - Memories:
  3. A man leaves home for 30 minutes and when he was back, his wife was beaten (even her brain was visible) and in a coma, and she lost her baby. When she wake up from coma, she says it was his husband. And the man went to prison for 16 years.
  4. Finally DNA tests become available, and the semen from the woman's body matches with a convict responsible from 5 other rape & murders.
• S05E07 - Trail of Truth:
  
• A woman and 2 daughters found murdered with a knife in their house. There is no forced entry, so the killer is someone they know. Its not the husband because he is out of the state.
  
• Killer was the husband's nephew recently living with them - he left the washcloth he cleaned himself in the sink, and his roommate states he came back home with blood stains that day.
  
  • S05E08 - Material Evidence:

1. A little girl kidnapped from roadside by a man with minivan. Later her body was found, with a cardboard box used for leather car seats.
   1. Over a year later, a man kidnaps a women and tortures and rapes her, then handcuffs her and go to work. Woman manages to take out her hands and escapes, and gives the man's name.
   2. This man has a minivan and also bought leather car seats recently. Since he used that cardboard to carry the victim and cardboard has many paint pieces from his garage, he was sentenced to death.

• S05E09 - Killigraphy:

1. A man finds his wife died during her sleep, but autopsy shows bruises on her neck and popped up veins in her eye, and decided its homicide with strangulation.
2. Turns out she stopped taking her epilepsy medicine, and eye veins pops up during deadly seizures as well. And doctor took blood from the body's neck, caused the bruises. And the doctor was highly inexperienced and biased because its been told husband was keeping her at home for 30 years.

• S05E10 - Nursery Crimes:

1. In a nursery, 7 children went to respiratory arrest in a month. All when the same nurse was with the children. She was injecting succinylcholine, non traceable muscle relaxer which stops breathing in large doses.
   
2. A new test reveals succinylcholine in kids system and the nurse sentenced to 99 years for 2 kills. Its believed that the actual number of children she killed is over 60.
   

• S05E11 - Lasting Impression:

1. 3 gang members kills a girl and leaves her body inside a building in a cemetery.
2. When they found the body, the woman who saw them during the killing comes forward and give their names.
3. One of the gang members dropped his chewing gum from his mouth near the body, and the dental print on the gum gave him away.

• S05E12 - Foundation of Lies:
• A doctor kills his wife, and buries her under the new house he bought.
• However, their son testified that he heard a loud thump that night and his father came to check if he sleeps. This gave reason of warrant to the detectives.
• As he also rented a jackhammer, they dig the house's basement and found the victim.
• The man appealed the decision - the body's gallbladder was removed and her appendix was intact, unlike his wife. But DNA test proves the body belongs to her, and its just horrible autopsy work.
  
• S05E13 - Unholy Wows:
  
• A Romanian refugee who settled to US after World War 2 becomes an Orthodox Bishop of Romanian Church.
  
• Since he is on public eye, especially with other Romanian refugees, they identify him, and call authorities.
  
• FBI collects a fingerprint from a postcard from 1941 to identify him and he was deported, and died in exile in Portugal.
  
• S05E14 - Broken Promises:
  
• A woman shots her husband while he sleeps, while trying to take the gun from under the pillow by accident. Fun fact, her previous husband was also shot by her by accident too, which is enough to raise suspicions.
  
• Detectives prove that the gun can't be shot from that angle, and a tape record found at the man's workplace, and he recorded that his wife was trying to kill him for weeks, by poison. As a motive, she was cheating her husband and credit card debts are the motive.
  
• S05E15 - Time Will Tell:
  
• A fisherman finds a body caught to his fishing nets. The man's rolex watch has a serial number and he identified thanks to this. When they went his home, they found another man acts like the deceased person.
  
• Turns out this man took the victim's identity, and when victim decided to back to UK again, he killed him.
  
• The fact that he forgot the rolex watch on the corpse, and the receipt of the anchor used to keep the body in the bottom at his home gave him away. Of course, police found victims blood in the man's small yacht, and proved that it was at the crime scene by GPS records.
  
• S05E16 - Second Shot at Love:
  
• A wealthy doctor finds out that his new wife is a violent money hunger with a gun, he files for divorce. Few months later he found dead at his house, apparently killed himself.
  
• But the gun was bought by his wife just 24 hours ago, and there is a test fire been shot to one of the pillows.
  
• S05E17 - Journey to Justice:
  
• A drunk driver hit 3 children and runs away. Other kids tell the police its a green van, but the paint pieces are blue, so the police looks for blue pick up truck.
  
• An anonymous phone call to the police reveals there is a truck parked 20 miles away, and although it doesn't have any damage and tired are different, the neighbor who changes the tire and repairs the damage comes forward to testify.
  
• S05E18 - Video Diary:
  
• A man robs a gas station and shoots the woman at the counter.
  
• Security camera identifies his face, and his ex girlfriend calls the police. And his nephew finds the murder weapon in the speaker he hid, so he can be convicted.
  
• S05E19 - Deadly Knowledge:
  
• A student girl disappears, and although his boyfriend was the suspect first, he finds out that she was working as an escort. This way they reach her main client.
  
• This man did not clean the blood stains in the trunk of his car, and his brother cooperates with the police and guesses to where to find the body.
  

I’ve been stressed, ever since my California store cut hours to avoid paying us more, ever since deliveries have decreased, ever since customers have been less generous about tipping, ever since drivers have been routinely sent home early because of higher labor, and ever since I’ve had to think about going back to job-hunting and going back to school.
I’ve lost sleep over all that stress, and one day, I had to take a triple, during a rare rush after our raise. I just happened to forget some sauces on one of the deliveries. They called to complain to an insider (CSR), filling in as a manager, and he handled it poorly. I had to go back to give them their sauces, which I kicked myself about. This guy (who I assume was the granddaughter’s boyfriend) was ridiculously rude about me forgetting the sauces, considering he spent $0 on the order.
Ever since our new GM took over, and we got our state-mandated raise, we’ve had a new policy about asking for photo ID, the payment card, and a signature, because card fraud is a pretty regular thing in our area. The first time I took a delivery to the customer whose sauces I forgot, during a rush, when I was stressed, sleep-deprived, and on a triple, I made an exception to the new policy, but told the granddaughter that I needed to see both cards next time.
Today, I went back to the same place, reminded the granddaughter of what I said about the cards being present next time, but her and her friends were very rude to me, would not shut up about me forgetting the sauces last time (as though it had any relevance to our new policy), and it was a royal pain in the ass to do a work-around of having the grandmother text photos of her cards to the granddaughter.
Initially, the grandmother texted a photo of the front of the card, which didn’t have the card number. I requested a second photo of the back of the card, explained that I needed to see the last 4 digits of the card number, according to store policy. She told me the last 4 digits of the card over speaker phone. I could’ve accepted that, but because the granddaughter and her friends had given me a shitload of attitude, despite not paying 1¢ for the order, I decided to insist on seeing a second photo with the last 4 digits of the payment card. When the teens gave me shit about insisting on another photo, I told them I could just take their order back to the store.
I may seem petty to some of you, but the other day, I heard my GM talking about card receipts not having signatures, saying that she may have to start writing up drivers for not following the new policy. Write-ups eventually lead to termination. That’s not something to fuck around with, and my new GM does occasionally mention losing some rather large sums of money to card fraud.

Roommate forged signature
Hi, my boyfriend and I recently found out our roommate forged my boyfriends signature and made a check that was addressed to boyfriend out to roommate (pay to the order of x)
I'm wondering what steps to take as far as legal action and how severe the punishment is for check forgery over $1000. We are going to be pressing charges for it and I want to make sure we are taking all the steps necessary.
Thank you in advance

I am not the OOP. The OOP is u/CrazyTheatreChick posting in AITAH
Ongoing as per OOP
Content Warning : rape(stealthing)
1 update - Medium
Original - 22nd April 2024
Update - 5th May 2024
​
I made my boyfriend feel like I was afraid of him. Aitah?
​
I am new to posting in reddit but I do need advice.
I F34 have been in a relationship with "Fin" M47 for a little over a year. I live on my own and he lives on his own but occasionally I spend the night at his place. Fin is handsome, fit, funny, and charitable. His kindness was what caught my attention. He was just a very thoughtful and kind man and I love that about him.
I have struggles with ptsd so I dont feel comfortable with intimacy until I feel safe and trust that person. Fin said he understood and didn't press it. We didn't start getting intimate until 2 months in but I was pretty drunk so I was upset the next morning and he comforted me. He didn't get angry or blame me at all.
After that we had a healthy sex life. I was adamant he wear protection every time. Once while we were in the middle of "playtime" he asked if he could take the condom off. I said no, and he said that it wasn't feeling good to him and he is unable to climax with one on. I said no again. Afterwards he didn't cuddle or hold me like he always did and said nothing to me. I got up to get a water and ask if he needed anything and leaned over to kiss his cheek. He shied away from my kiss and muttered "Oh now you care about me?"
I asked him what that was about and he told me he bends over backwards to make me happy but he didn't get to feel good because I won't let him not wear a condom. I told him I am very worried about pregnancy. I live in a place where abortions are extremely difficult. He said I am on birthcontrol so what's the issue? I said that's not 100% and he knew it. I grabbed him a water and told him that if he got a vasectomy, we could talk. They are reversible and accessible. I just cannot get pregnant.
We didn't discuss it again and he even apologized for being a jerk the very next morning and took me to the spa. I apologize for ruining the night and he said it was alright and we kind of moved on.
Everything was great and around the 6 Month mark, he said he thinks we are getting serious and that he considers me his partner, and asked about the condoms again. I reminded him of my requirement for that and he said he had to think about it.
About 2 months ago, He had a work trip that lasted a week and a half and when he returned he was all over me.
At the time I was going through a difficult depression (I suffer from depression and sometimes it gets really bad). He seemed annoyed and made a remark that I am punishing him for missing and loving me so much and he held my face and started kissing me again. After the back and forth for a few more minutes I just gave up and we had sex. In the middle of it, he asked if he could take off the condom and I said no, but he said he had the vasectomy. He was so excited to get me in bed he had forgotten to tell me. I stupidly said well, alright then.
After that he would forget the condemns altogether. Until my cycle was of. At first I figured it was stress, change in diet, a billion other possible reasons but this nagging feeling came over me and I got tested. Pregnant.
He found me crying on his bathroom floor and asked what was wrong so I told him and he smiled and laughed like "really? That's amazing, baby!!!" And left me there and he went whooping through the other room. When he came back he was rattling off so much info. He had a dream about this and now it's happening so it must be a sign.
My brain finally caught up and I asked about the vasectomy and he said it's not 100% right? Like condoms and pills. I was puzzled as the only goalie we took out of the equation was condoms. He said it was a miracle and I told him absolutely not.
I explained that my best friend lives in a different state and I will be going to visit and also benefit from the reproductive health clinics there. He went silent. He asked me if I really hated him that much and I didn't understand. I said I never want to be pregnant and that he knew this about me. That hasn't changed.
He became extremely angry with me saying I wouldn't "dare murder" his child and that if I loved him, I would never threaten that again. He explained that he will take care of us, he makes plenty of money, and "don't I treat you like a queen?" So all he is asking is that I have the baby.
I said I needed to go and started packing to go home and he followed me repating things like "you won't though, right? You won't murder my baby?" And stuff like that. He kept asking where I was going and I said home. I was too tired and Emotional right now and I want to go home.
He stepped in the doorway and said no and we need to talk about this. I started to get upset as he was blocking me and I felt trapped. I asked him to move and he said no. I asked him again, I want to go home and he said no again. He said "you are not leaving, what part of that don't you get?" I started crying and grabbed my phone and backed away from him telling him to stay away from me.
Fin looked really sad and said I couldn't be serious. He would never hurt me and asked me to stop crying. I demanded he let me leave and he did.
He has since been calling and texting me begging me to talk to him. He says I really hurt him by pretending to be scared of him as I know he would never hurt me. He said he treats me like a goddess and I played the "helpless victim" card and that things like that can ruin a man's life. He then said that I wasn't thinking straight and "is your brain lying to you again?" (When I have a PTSD or depressive episode I sometimes say "my brain is lying to me again" to make it seem less heavy a topic)
He has a very community facing job and I remembered the look on his face when I backed away. I don't want to ruin his life or our relationship. In the moment my emotions were so high that I just reacted. But I wasn't pretending. I sat in my car for god knows how long shaking before I could drive home. I've been ignoring his reaching out but I feel like a coward. AITAH?
​
Comments
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omeprazolemami
He literally lied about getting a vasectomy and got you pregnant after you had explicitly set boundaries..
UnusualPotato1515
Who forgets to tell their partner they had a vasectomy?! Its not like its as simple as getting a clean at the dentist - youd take whole day off work, recover from it etc.
Creepy_Marzipan9171
Get out while you can! He’s gaslighting you!!! He lied about having a vasectomy. Purposely got you pregnant (to trap you) and then was 100% threatening to you by blocking the doorway. I have ptsd - my husband would never block a doorway because he knows that would scare the s#t out of me.. also the whole guilt trip about not loving him etc with the condoms is just pathetic (and again manipulative gaslighting bs). Make a plan for yourself (and don’t include him in the details) he’s already proven himself to be a liar of the worst kind - trust your instincts, you already know he’s not worthy of you.*
LockwoodE3
If this is a real story then call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 because this is called reproductive coercion

OOP: I will do that - thank you.

​
**Judgement - NTA*\*
​
Update - 13 days later
​
So I made an appointment and got the abortion. It was honestly such a horrible experience but my bestie was with me and the whole staff were so kind and supportive so I am grateful. Thank you to those who encouraged me to get it done, it was awful, but pregnancy and being trapped with him would have been much worse.
Fin texted Wednesday and apologized and said he said things he didn't mean and to please answer my phone as I have been ignoring him. When he called again my bestie recorded it all. Before I could finish "hello" he went on a long bit about how amazing I am, how much he loves me, what a great mother he knows I will be, and he will marry me immediately if that's a concern of mine.
When I finally got to talk I said that I am no longer pregnant and I never want to be and that I was clear about this from the beginning. He asked if it was miscarriage and then said "Because I know you wouldn't willingly murder our child, right? Say right. It's a miscarriage." I got quiet and he said that it's okay, miscarriages are "not the females fault" and that we can just try again.
I said "again? We weren't trying to begin with. I was on bc and he had the vasectomy" and you all guessed it, he laughed and said he lied about the vasectomy so I would "give up" on condemns that he long decided i was perfect and he loved me and wantrd me tl be the mother of his kids.
My best friend spoke up and said that was recorded and to leave me alone or she will post it on social media and he started screaming at us. He then sounded like he was crying and said I was a witch for this. That I am a hateful murderer and that I broke his heart. He went on to say if I tried to slander him to remember "actions have consequences".
He then broke up with me and said he will check back with me In a few days when i am actually alone and we will talk in person to see if i have come to my senses. He wants us to go to church together Sunday (which is now today) and set a time to pick me up.
I said no but I do have a ring cam and sure enough he showed up at my door. I watched him note my car was not there and at my front door, on camera, he texted me asking if I was sleeping around on him and if I let the other man "ride you like a wild horse" without a condom and if so he gets a hall pass. He said to come home immediately as we need to come to an understanding of out relationship asap.
I return home tomorrow and don't know what to do.
Edit: anyone who wants to shame my abortion...I have zero regrets and actually will advocate for them from now on. But I will happily mock you in the comments. Thanks actually, you reminded me how little an opinion means to me if it's coming from a disrespectful and/or bigoted place. At least I get to laugh through this nightmare. 💋
Edit 2: I won't be going home alone any longer - bestie is coming with me and I have a friend in the city I live with my spare key and he is now in my home watching it for me.
Edit 3: Since I've been asked in the comments (this really blew up - so sorry if I don't reply to you all) I am in a safe location with 2 male friends who know the whole story and we are looking into options. I don't want to do anything hasty- a guy friend is at my home and thus far its been quiet. I will make an update when I know more.
Edit 4: No, I will not harm myself the way some of you have messaged me. For those calling themselves prolife, you sure want me to take my own. Not very prolife at all.
And since we're on the topic, I don't want to get pregnant because I was told by my doctors that I have a high chance of passing away even before making it to term, the child also has a high rate of mortality during the pregnancy. Essentially we would both kick the bucket before delivery.
I am ineligible for tubals or hysterectomy where I live until I turn 40 at pla especially with my insurance and I would never be able to afford the out of pocket fee. The places even still "require" a husband's signature as a policy.
I would be open to adopting if I ever found the right person and were settled and ready
​
Comments
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JaecynNix
Don't go to your home alone. That dude is dangerous
Fit_Victory6650
Yup. Have a sheriff/police escort if possible. Collect your shit and find a place to go.
shemjaza
I'd get friends instead. I'd be concerned about what side local cops in an anti abortion state would take if he hurt her.
awaythrowers97
The fact that Fin misrepresented his vasectomy and coerced you into a scenario you clearly did not want is extremely unsettling and deceitful. He is acting in a dishonest and emotionally abusive manner.
​
I am not the OOP. Please do not harass the OOP.
Please remember the No Brigading Rule and to be civil in the comments

Hi, my boyfriend and I recently found out our roommate forged my boyfriends signature and made a check that was addressed to boyfriend out to roommate (pay to the order of x)
I'm wondering what steps to take as far as legal action and how severe the punishment is for check forgery over $1000. We are going to be pressing charges for it and I want to make sure we are taking all the steps necessary.
Thank you in advance

🫖 Welcome back to the Asylum write-up. This is where you live now. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
In this installment, we finally take a closer look at how Emilie Autumn's hyper-loyal fanbase gradually started losing faith in her as, among other things, it became more and more apparent that she... wasn't exactly a reliable narrator – in her semi-autobiographical book, or in general.

HOW IT STARTED: A WOMAN OF MYSTERY

Willow, weep for me Don't think I don't see This life I'm living in two But still it's something I must do I'm not unique in this Nor am I special, sweet, or kind I court a thousand smiles Yet I keep my own to hide behind (“Willow”, 2004 🎵)

I've previously referred to EA as an “expert vagueposter”, and this is relevant here.
For an artist who built her brand on a pledge of raw, rats-and-all honesty, EA has always been quite guarded about the specifics of her personal life. (Until her current partner, for instance, she always danced around calling anyone a boyfriend, even when the nature of the relationship was pretty obvious.) Her whole angle is telling “the truth”, but through whimsical fantasy. As early as the fairy-themed Enchant era, she had her own world, her own vernacular; she spoke in metaphors, in-jokes, and quirky anachronisms. Taxis were carriages, her electric keyboard was a harpsichord, she always capitalized Time and Art like Shakespeare does. On the Asylum forum, automatic word filters would change “fan” to “muffin”, “fairy” to “faerie”, “bra” to “teacup holder”, and “responsibility” to “ratsponsibility”.
She's a chatterbox who loves to share memories and funny anecdotes, but she usually keeps them short and sweet, Snapple-facts style. 📝 She's great at painting by touches in her storytelling, revealing just enough to let your imagination auto-complete the rest. 🔍 Even the most banal tidbits are very artfully told, very “on brand”, often dense with symbolism and foreshadowing – but also very abstracted.
She is especially elusive when it comes to her background and formative years. See the way she catches herself in this interview 📺📝 while describing her “favorite scar”, which is from an eel bite: “My – well, someone I knew... [gasp-laugh] had it as a pet, and...” (She was about to say “my sister”.)
In short, the way EA talks about her life is often very personal, but not all that candid – and sounds more like it's meant to provide a curated, coherent backstory for Emilie Autumn the character, rather than Emilie Autumn the person.

I'll tell the truth, all my songs Are pretty much the fucking same I'm not a fairy but I need More than this life, so I became This creature representing more to you Than just another girl... (“Swallow”, 2006 🎵)

In the beginning, this guardedness naturally contributed to the mystique. It made it all the more special when, once in a while, she would briefly drop the theatrics to share something earnest and relatively unfiltered. Like this composed, but vulnerable post from 2004 📝 about her father losing his battle to cancer, and her attempts at closure over their tense relationship. Or this 2012 anti-bullying campaign thing 📺 in which she opens up about being a target of intense physical bullying in elementary school, to a point that contributed to her being homeschooled at 9.
Fans in the early years were curious about her backstory, of course – but not too prodding or invasive, to my knowledge. I think there was an understanding that EA, like many performers, wanted to come across as human and approachable, while still cultivating an “aura” and retaining some privacy. But obviously, when she announced that she was writing a Tell-All Memoir in 2007, everyone was dying to read it. TEA TIME!

HOW IT'S GOING: A WOMAN OF... MALARKEY???

LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! (“Liar”, 2006 🎵)

As we've learned, the original 2009 release of EA's book was highly anticipated, but somewhat tainted by a bunch of shipping delays and unfulfilled promises. From the start of her career, EA had always cultivated a close parasocial involvement with her audience; many fans had as deep an attachment to her, personally, as they did to her art. So, for instance, when EA tweeted about all the personal dedications she was lovingly writing in overdue books, only for the books to arrive many months later and unsigned with no tangible explanation, it wasn't simply frustrating: it was betrayal amongst kin!
Really, it wasn't so much about fans not getting what they paid for – it was about the lack of clear communication or genuine accountability. This is pure speculation on my part, but the poppycock that EA tweeted about signing the books strikes me as the panic-lie of someone who hadn't realized just how many heartfelt, personalized dedications she would actually have to write when she came home from tour. And then she just couldn't do it, because she was overworked, paralyzed, distracted, depressed, procrastinating, whatever. Which... you know... is unfortunate, but probably not unforgivable. Especially for a touring performer who is open and vocal about their mental health issues.
I'm confident that most fans would have been happy to tell her that her well-being meant more to them than an autograph, or something along those lines. Instead, EA's cagey and avoidant demeanor around this issue left fans very salty – and newly suspicious of their favorite artist's word.
Which was regrettable timing for EA, because they had just received their copies of her memoir.
Here's a cursory look at some key biographical points that didn't hold up to scrutiny when more and more vexed fans, over the years, started looking into them.
Content warning until end of post: family estrangement, death by fire, worsening physical health issues, mention of disordered eating / weight loss / thinspiration, and LIES! LIES! LIIIIIES!

“EMILIE AUTUMN LIDDELL (BORN SEPTEMBER 22, 1979) IS AN AMERICAN SINGER-SONGWRITER...” (Wikipedia)

Every fandom has its Holy Grail. Because a number of EA's early releases were limited pressings put out through now-defunct record labels, the EA fandom in its heyday was a collector's wonderland. 📝🦠 At the height of her popularity, the original Enchant jewelcase (the one with the puzzle-poster) could easily fetch around $500 dollars on eBay, unsigned. The handwritten lyrics of an Opheliac B-side went for $940 in 2009. Don't even ask me about the hard copies of her two poetry books: those never even popped up over the five or six years that I had various alerts set up for all EA-related listings.
But the true crown jewel of EA rarities is the untitled promo version of her (also virtually unfindable) 2001 instrumental debut On a Day... No one knows how many copies exist. The darn thing is so rare that it's not even listed on Discogs. For a while, the only picture of the elusive “Violin” promo CD that was circulated online was this one.🪞 Go ahead, click the link. Notice anything odd? That black box where one composer's birth year should be?
I'm not sure why the notorious hyper-fan who originally shared this picture on the forum in the early 2010s took it upon himself to censor it before posting. I wasn't able to pinpoint when or why people started questioning EA's age, but clearly, something had already transpired to let him know that not redacting said birth year might, uh... cause an upset. In any case: at some point, people started digging – and eventually, the unredacted version of the “Violin” tracklist (as well as public records and literal receipts from eBay auctions) would be brandished as one more piece of damning evidence that EA was indeed (gasp!) two years older than she claimed to be.
“Okay, and?” you shrug. “What's the big deal?” I'm shrugging too! What can I say? People don't like realizing they've been fooled, even about something stupid. I will note that EA's fall equinox birthday (hence her middle name “Autumn”, yes) had been somewhat significant in the fandom. Over the years, EA's birthdays had been marked by online release parties, Q&A's, community events, special merch sales... A number of fans liked donning her trademark cheek heart on September 22. It felt a bit uncanny to realize that she had been announcing a false age on those occasions. It wasn't “a big deal” so much as it was incredibly odd.
Other than being appalled that Self-Proclaimed Staunch Feminist EA would give in to the cult of youth and not cop up to her real age, many fans were just plain bewildered: who would commit so stubbornly to such an inconsequential lie? What was even the point of lying by two years only? Why did she think anyone would care that she was 28 rather than 26 when Opheliac came out? What was she possibly getting out of this...??
My completely speculative theory is that, whether it was her idea or her then-manager's, the lie originated as a marketing strategy early on in her career. The “Violin” demo was recorded in 1997, when EA was 19-going-on-20. Per the liner notes of On a Day... 📝, which came out when she was 22, the demo's purpose was to be “a sort of calling card in the classical music industry”. Evidently, that didn't work out; EA claims, in the same paragraph, to have walked out on a classical recording deal at 18 because they wouldn't give her enough creative control.
Talented and unique as she was, she was trying to break out in a notoriously elitist and innovation-resistant milieu – and unlike her, most of the 22-year-old classical violinists she was in competition with had actually graduated from their prestigious music schools. But you know what sells better than an ambitious college dropout in her early twenties? Tweaking the truth just so to market yourself as an unconventional wunderkind, barely out of her teens! Any rendition of a complex, learnèd musical piece sounds more intriguing and impressive if you think it was played by an especially young (and beautiful) person. 20 was plausible, close enough to her real age, barely a lie at all, and such a nice, round number for a debut album.
Notice how much of the On a Day... liner notes, linked above, center on her precociousness, her uniqueness, and her savant-like dedication to her craft – a focus that seems absent from the promo version (from what I can decipher in those potato-quality pictures, anyway). These talking points would provide the basis for a lot of her early self-promotion and budding stage persona in the Enchant years. Even though the EP failed to make EA a household name in the classical world, the wunderkind narrative was her “in” to grab the attention and heart of a broader audience.
And I guess she's been running with it ever since.

“MY ANCESTRY IS POSITIVELY LITTERED WITH LUNATICS AND GIRLS WHO FALL DOWN RABBIT HOLES ... MY NAME IS EMILIE AUTUMN LIDDELL. YES, THAT LIDDELL.”

Oh, come on. Much as a fan may want to believe, isn't that a little on the nose? The anglophile with an obsession for tea, clocks, and madness... is literally related to Alice in Wonderland? 🔍 Curiouser and curiouser indeed.
EA came out as Emilie Autumn Liddell in The Book – of course – in a passage where she describes an interaction with a nurse. 📝 Note how she stresses the authenticity of her name, and how not-chosen it is (and the Alice connection, which just comes up organically) by disclosing it in a scene where she's filling out paperwork.
I'm pointing this out, because it would be tempting to allow room for creative license (and the slightest cringe) in a work of creative fiction based on personal experience. Buuut... TAFWG was not marketed as fiction. The main narrative in TAFWG, according to EA, is an actual fac-simile of the journals she kept during a harrowing stay at a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. This is something that EA has stressed from the inception of the book (and throughout all subsequents re-issues, even as the main narrative was altered and reworked), even claiming that a legal team had advised her to redact some names to avoid potential lawsuits. So, no, she's not doing a bit there.
When, after it made the rounds a few times, it became apparent that the claim didn't really make sense 📝🔍, reactions were mixed. Some older, diplomatic fans downplayed it as a somewhat embarrassing, but harmless self-mythologizing – similar in nature to her insistence on calling her electric keyboard a “harpsichord”. Devout EA apologists (commonly referred to as “bootlickers” in an increasingly polarized fandom – oh, don't worry, we're getting to that!) invoked the “life as performance art” defense: when she said it was literally her first name, she meant it metaphorically, duh! And either way, she probably had her reasons.
But others took offense at the boldness of the lie, or simply became curious. Was Liddell even her name at all?
If you've checked the link just above, you already know the answer. Per the public California birth log (a somewhat demented invasion of privacy that could well have been avoided by... not repeatedly drawing attention to a name that someone in the book calls “right out of a movie”?) : yes, no, kind of.
EA was born Emily Autumn Fischkopf* on September 22, 1977. The name came from her father, a first-generation immigrant from Germany. Her maternal grandmother's maiden name was Liddell (but no, not that Liddell, or so remotely that it doesn't matter). EA may have had it legally changed at some point in the last decade, but as of 2012, based on the public log of foreign visitors to Brazil (where she toured that year), her passport still bore the name “Emily Autumn Fischkopf”.
*No, EA's birth name is not literally “Fischkopf”. It's a non-silly German name that begins with an F. I know that it's ridiculous to clutch my pearls about EA's peace of mind now, but triggering new and disquieting Google alerts for a name she clearly wants nothing to do with (and that you don't care about) just feels... distasteful? I don't know. That info has been floating around long enough, the point has been made; this write-up is not about EA's last name, but about the fiends we made along the way! So Fischkopf it is.
Let's track the evolution here! It appears that she went by “Autumn Fischkopf” for at least part of her formative years, if we are to believe the credits from Mark Ruffalo's middling film debut 📺 (she was the child actor's violin-playing body double) and this random article about a Nigel Kennedy performance in 1997. 🔍 (That last link – possibly her first ever mention in the press? – is a niche favorite of mine. Violin superstar Nigel Kennedy calls her a “talented fiddler”, which suggests that she did have some cred and promise in the classical milieu at a young age, and that there is at least some truth to her claims of being a wunderkind. It also cracks me up that, out of all the things she's reiterated over the years, “I was born in '79” was a lie, but “I was attacked by a pet eel” was fact-checked by Nigel Kennedy.)
At some point in her late teens, she dropped the Teutonic surname and adopted the French ending of her given name (she made it a “LIE”! how poetic) to form the moniker “Emilie Autumn”. I assume that's also when she started privately going by Emilie / EA for short.
So there you have it. The damning evidence. A performing artist... changed her name. To her grandmother's name. Riveting stuff!
And to think that her fans could have carried on naively believing “Autumn” was her last name, or assuming it was a romantic nom de scène she picked during her Ren Fair phase. Or perhaps, even, not thinking much about her name at all, like normal people.
But nooo, she just had to poke the hornet's nest by making a whole thing out of it.

“MY ENTIRE FAMILY DIED IN A FIRE.”

If you've never encountered a method-acting con artist or a person who struggles with pathological lying (I'll let you decide for yourself which of these, if either, applies to EA), you probably believe that you'd spot them a mile away. And in my experience, that's exactly why you wouldn't! Whether it's compulsion or calculated strategy, successful fibbers rely on people's natural social cues (like their assumption of good faith, their confirmation bias, their empathy, their desire for validation, their fear of awkwardness, ...) to subtly direct the flow and tone of the conversation. This allows them to short-circuit potential questioning of their claims.
One such strategy, for instance, I call the “I-will-not-further-speak-about-the-incident maneuver”. Out of the blue, you drop a graphic and incisive one-liner about something horrific that happened to you, in a curt or flippant tone that throws the listener off and usually shuts them up – thus sparing you from having to back up your claim with any convincing specifics. I'm not saying that every person who does this is a liar. Horrific stuff does happen to people, and I'm not here to police how they're supposed to disclose it. I'm just saying that if you wanted to fabricate an obvious Tragic Backstory™ and smuggle it past otherwise rational, discerning and reasonably intelligent people, that would be one way to do it. Full disclosure: it does work better in person than it does over the internet, especially when you've kept a blog.
When EA curtly dropped this bomb on Twitter (in response to an innocuous fan question that mentioned her parents – the receipt has sadly been X'd out of existence), and every subsequent time a new fan found out about her family's tragic demise (“I had no idea!”), the response was typically one of shock and sadness – and, in a few heartbreaking cases, commiseration from other survivors of family-annihilating events.
Many fans already had a hunch that something was up with her family, of course. She hinted at neglect and possible abuse in her book and lyrics. A number of her fans also came from dysfunctional households, so her not wishing to elaborate on the topic would probably have been a non-issue. But now she's saying they're dead? All of them? In a FIRE?! Holy macaroni! And you know it must have been awful, because EA – the same woman who got a dozen bangers out of a three-month-long toxic relationship, and based over a decade of her work on one bad hospital stay – had never, not once, felt called to share a song or poem about how it might affect a person to... lose all of their entire immediate family to a fire. Hmm. Meanwhile, the handful of older fans who had been following her since Enchant and remembered her dad passing in 2004 gritted their teeth and rolled their eyes. “Do your research. That's all I can say.” (We'll get into the culture of censorship free speech regulation on the Asylum forum in due time.)
Before more and more embittered ex-fans started compiling and circulating the receipts in the early-mid-2010s, investigating the whole “dead family” thing was a lonely journey – a coming-of-age expedition for the critical-minded Plague Rat, trawling through free background check websites and old Wayback Machine archives, until you went “Welp, there it is, I guess” and suddenly felt older, stupider, and a little bit hollow inside.
Although I don't remember how I personally made my way to The Truth (lol) back in the day, I still have a vivid memory of the moment I found the Facebook profile of EA's Very Much Non-Deceased Mother. It was mostly posts about her costume design work. A few candid pictures with EA's siblings and their kids. Christmas, birthdays, a wedding. Just... aggressively normal stuff. It was bizarre, looking in on this family of cheerful strangers with familiar cheekbones. Knowing that, somewhere out there, was an estranged eldest daughter, who had run off years ago to become a fiddle-wielding rockstar – and was now passing them off as having all died a gruesome death, while her fans secretly stalked their family photos. (Because I know you'll be asking in the comments: yes, EA's family is aware. Her mother once posted a picture of young EA and her siblings on Pinterest, sarcastically captioned “After most of us were killed in the fire.” 📝)
Again, it's tempting to discount EA's remark as a metaphor for family estrangement, taken too literally by neurodivergent minors who just didn't understand performance art. Well. First of all, even as a metaphor... let's admit, once again, that that 2000s edginess has aged like fine milk. It's a little crass to make a “metaphor” out of a plausible, life-shattering trauma that other people actually have to live with. (Veronica lost a beloved house to a literal fire 🔍 during her tenure as a Crumpet, for instance; no one died, but that alone seemed pretty rough.)
But, more to the point, evidence suggests that EA also told this to real people in her real, off-stage life – such as her Trisol manager, who backed the claim on the official Asylum Forum in 2007. 📝 When questioned about this post on a renegade forum in 2013, he had this to say:

I was the fool in this case. EA made that up of course. It’s just one thing on a long list of things she made up. Let’s agree she’s very creative with facts if she wants people to believe a story. (...) I once had a short chat with [EA's mom] and I got the strong impression she wasn’t dead at the time. Haha.

(OK, dude, but did you or did you not sell fake EA tickets on a scammy website in 2008? Because we never did get the skinny on that.)
Fifteens years on, EA continues to insist, unprompted, that “the fire” destroyed her childhood drawings and baby pictures. 📝 This more recent Instagram post is like a Greatest Hits of her most notorious yarns, to a degree that's either premeditated trolling or a subconscious call for help. She casually, yet pointedly mentions her age in relation to a specific year... and specifically draws attention to the signature, one that she used well into the Enchant era. In doing so, she made me notice, for the first time, that the A blends into an F. As one could expect from an artsy, Renaissance-obsessed teenager, her OG signature was a freaking monogram for Emily Autumn Fischkopf. It's like “The Tell-Tale Heart” for the digital age! AM I THE ONLY ONE SEEING THIS?? 🦠

A BIT O' THIS & THAT: MISCELLANEOUS CLAIMS

Just for fun, here are other sundry “citation needed” facts that EA has claimed over the years. All are originally from the book unless sourced otherwise. Some of them may have been jokes, some of them might even be true! Whatever that word still means!

• She suffered near-fatal leukemia at age 2, but miraculously recovered. Doctors were baffled.
• She has perfect pitch and tone-color synesthesia. 🔍
• She also had a photographic memory before Ativan ruined it. That's how she remembers what the sky looked like on the day she came out of the hospital leukemia-free.
• It is well-known and well-established, among the bipolar community, that bipolar people all over the world will regularly and inexplicably wake up at 4 in the morning. 🎵 On the dot. No one knows why, but they do. Doctors are baffled.
• She can play the violin on horseback!
• The traumatic hospital stay happened before Opheliac until it happened after. 🔍 Doctors are time lords.
• TAFWVG “has been cited in text-books used as part of the psychology curriculum at Oxford University in London.” 📝 I would have intuited Oxford University to be in Oxford, but then again, I didn't go to Oxford.

ELECTRIC VIOLIN: UNPLUGGED

You know how whenever a musician starts behaving obnoxiously, old sages will come down from Mount Wisdom to advise disgruntled fans to “simply ignore [behavior]” and “just focus on the music”? Well, in the Asylum, “just focusing on the music” won't always preserve you from EA's shenanigans. This “claim” is a little different, but I've decided to include it because it is so odd, emblematic, and ultimately tragic. I also count it as “biographical”, because it involves a key tenet of EA's character sheet: the violin.
Being a kickass fiddler is one of EA's trademarks, and has always been central to her narrative; as of 2024, “world-class violinist” is still the first claim to fame she lists in the “Story” section of her official website. Which beggars the question: why won't she play it? And why won't she acknowledge that she's not playing it?
We got our hopes up in 2020, with that one post 📝 about her iconic 1885 Gand & Bernardel getting refurbished by a luthier – a thoughtful birthday surprise from her boyfriend – but despite the promising “More to come...” at the end of the caption, that turned out to be a false alarm. In truth, it may well have been over a decade since anyone has witnessed EA draw a single note from her cherished instrument.
The fact that Lord Autumn was able to sneak it out during lockdown without the Lady noticing tends to confirm that she hadn't been playing much behind the scenes. She seems to be under the impression that e-violin manufacturer Zeta is no longer in business (they did close down in 2010 🔍, but reopened under new management in 2012), which suggests that she hasn't been keeping up with the violin scene for a while. Besides, the fingernails don't lie. 🐀
As the live shows veered more theatrical with the release of Opheliac, the extended violin features from the Enchant era were cut to two main appearances per concert: “Face the Wall”, a seven-minute-short, Hendrixesque take on Arcangelo Corelli's “La Folia” – and “Unlaced”, an arpeggio-ed frenzy that was originally paired with a stilt-walking and ballet performance by the Crumpets. These two instrumental tracks remained a fixture on four successive tours. And on four successive tours, “Unlaced” was... well... clearly dubbed. 📺 She was holding her e-violin, her hands were playing the notes, but what was coming out of the speakers was indubitably the studio version.
There were possible explanations, of course. Some sound buffs pointed out that “Unlaced” has multiple violin layers, and that a live violin solo would have sounded harsh and unbalanced over the supporting tracks 🔍 – but then, why pick an unplayable song as a staple of the show?
The violin-miming wasn't even very hush-hush, she didn't try that hard to hide it – it was just never addressed or acknowledged. On “Unlaced”, Veronica was usually summoned to “play” the keyboard – and we knew that was make-believe, they had a whole skit about it. 📺 Ditto when EA would play the intro to a song, then get up from the keyboard as she started singing, and the harpsichord track just kept going. It was part of the theatrics, the suspension of disbelief; live playing just wasn't the focus.
Still, because playing two songs should have been in her wheelhouse, EA's choice to stand on stage and mime along with her own world-class violin skills was puzzling. We knew EA was capable of playing “Unlaced”: “Face the Wall” was proof enough that she could still shred like nobody's business, and some lucky fans got to hear her nerd out about pitch standards and rock some Bach at VIP showcases in 2011 (though it was always the same piece, and reportedly not always on point: “she made beginner mistakes, like weird jaw, wrist, elbow placement and tension...” 🐀). And sure, “Face the Wall” was an intense piece, but... it was one of two in the show. The same two, always. She was supposed to be classically trained...!
As EA's fabrications became more common knowledge among the fanbase, people took increasing issue with this odd staging choice – particularly after “Face the Wall” was retired partway through the 2011 tour, leaving only the pantomime, with nothing else happening on stage to distract from it. 📺 People started fixating on her constant and inexplicable tweaking of the truth. Fake name, fake age, fake promises, and now she was fake-fiddling and making a grand show of it? Was she outright mocking her audience, daring them to call her out? Milking a skill she had grown bored with, in the lowest-effort way possible, knowing that goo-goo-eyed fans would still pay to see it? Playing them the world's saddest song on the world's quietest e-violin?
The release of new album Fight Like a Girl in 2012 did little to soothe the Plague Rats' fiddle blues. The violin was much less prominent on FLAG than it had been on Opheliac and Enchant. There were almost no solos, which provided fewer opportunities for playing or miming on stage. “Unlaced” was retired from the touring setlist. One night in Texas during the 2012 tour, due to being on vocal rest, EA played the melody line of “Liar” on the violin. 📺 And that was pretty much the last time world-class violinist Emilie Autumn was heard playing her instrument, on stage or in recording – to the dismay of many fans who had loved her for it.

Can someone please grab this woman by her hand, lead her across her livingroom/bedroom/study, and point at that lonely forgotten dusty violin in a corner of hers so she remembers that she actually owns it? (🐀)

It was yet another bizarre, glaring inconsistency in EA's narrative that fans seemed expected to ignore. Another elephant in the padded room. (Personal anecdote that I don't have a receipt for: in early 2012, when I asked if there was a possibility of EA playing another baroque set for the VIP events on the upcoming tour, her then-manager responded that that wouldn't be possible because venues didn't have the proper acoustics.)
Through some her posts over the years , attentive fans pieced together the likely truth of EA's effective retirement as a violinist. It's actually quite sad, and may cast a different light on EA's artistic shift.
The 2011 tour was initially scheduled for late 2010. It was postponed because EA had been neglecting a jaw injury for years, and needed emergency surgery to avoid “serious and irreversible damage” to her one violin-holding jaw. 📝 She had the surgery early in September; in late November, she performed all over Latin America for six nights straight, and by January, she was back on tour. The same tour during which she made “beginner's mistakes” on the Bach partita, and retired “Face the Wall” for good after a few shows.
She underwent jaw surgery again in 2018, after three years of orthodontic treatment which she said had “prevented [her] from performing”. It was the first anyone was hearing of this (she said she hadn't been touring because she was writing the musical!), and it's as far as EA ever got in terms of half-addressing the obvious: that after dedicating a third of her time on Earth to her craft, after years of pushing through the pain night after night, rushing through recovery periods, and making compromises so the show could go on... she may not be physically able to play concert-level violin anymore.
Once again, something that should (and would) have elicited empathy and support from most fans turned into a point of frustration, speculation and mockery, for years – because EA continued to favor pretend-play and fantasy over the sobering, unglamorous truth. Well, at least everyone's unhappy.

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

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I want to apologize for the length of this post. I've posted on other sub-reddits, but looking for other perspectives. There is so much I want to say, but I’m having trouble getting my thoughts together to express them properly. The advice I’m looking for are ways that I can get over the fact that my family will never love me and I need to stop pining away that they will ever apologize to me and make things right.
So to give you some backstory. My (48M) childhood wasn’t great growing up. As kids, my sister (4 years older) and I had to do daily chores. I know I was on the lazy side, because I hated doing cleaning up the house, pulling weeds outside and mowing. But if we didn’t get them done, there would be consequences (i.e. spankings and/or being grounded). If we completed our chores, we were given an allowance. I understand that back in the day, spanking was a very common punishment, so I’m not trying to say that this was unusual. I will say that my father had (and still has) an explosive temper that he has trouble controlling, so his spankings were probably rougher than they needed to be. I had trouble reading, until my dad got me into comic books. They were thrilling to me and the perfect escape from, what I perceived, as my everyday despair. In school, I was the weird kid that really didn’t have a lot of friends and the teachers never really cared for. I always saw myself as the outcast and the one that nobody wanted. So needless to say, my grades were never really good.
A perfect example of my father’s temper was when I came home with an abysmal grade. I cannot lie, it was wretched. My teacher had asked for me to get it signed by my parents and I knew that it would be ugly when I finally showed it to them. Unfortunately, my father and I were the only two in the house and he lost it on me. He read the score and just stood over me. He started hitting me and hitting me. Eventually he stopped himself, but I was crying uncontrollably. He sat me down at the table and started going over the test paper with me to see what I had missed and why I didn’t understand the questions. Days later, I was sent to stay with my grandparents 5 hours away. During that time, I came to find out that my dad had self-admitted himself to a clinic to work on his anger.
My mother was, in my opinion, manipulative. She would always overspend and they would get into a financial crisis. Again, when my father eventually found out, he would explode (verbally) with her and she would cry, pack us up and we would stay with her parents (my grandparents) for a week or two. They would make up and repeat the cycle. There was one instance where she (or they) had overspent and she asked me to forge my father’s signature so she could cash in an investment. By this time, I was definitely over 18, and I knew that once (not if) my father had found out, I would be arrested and put in prison. So I told her no.
My sister hated me growing up. When it was time to do our chores, I always waited until the last minute. But when I did work, we always fought. She would punch me, spray Windex in my eyes, or yell at me (daily). I was the annoying kid brother, but it wasn’t all bad. She had it rough too. I always looked up to my sister. She was cool, popular, headstrong and people loved being around her. I wanted to be wanted too. So whenever my chores didn’t get done, because I was hiding in my room, I never told my parents what had happened. Therefore I received the spanking and/or was grounded. When my parents fought with my sister, she never backed down. Unlike me, who was scared of the consequences, she pushed forward. It didn’t matter who it was.
On the other hand, I was the “fixer”. I wanted everything to be peaceful. I wanted everyone to get along. I also wanted love and acceptance. I cried when people didn’t like me. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t good enough for other people to like me. I kept being rejected and it hurt me.
When I say that I’m a “fixer”, let me give you an example. When my wife and I were married, my sister had my niece with a guy who we later found out was a losedruggie/drug dealer. She was had moved back in with my parents. My parents had just sold their house, so they were living in an apartment (temporarily). My sister and the guy she was seeing (not my niece’s dad) had gotten drunk and gotten into an altercation. She went back to the apartment and he came soon after (my parents were out of town at that time). They then proceeded to get physical and police were called. He was taken away. She called me in the middle of the night and my wife (23 at the time) and I (24 at the time) packed up our daughter went to her. When we got there, blood was everywhere. I spent the next several hours cleaning the blood off of the walls, floor, etc. I knew if I didn’t do it, my father would be angry and would probably attack her. All the while, she was on the phone with her boyfriend, his parents, etc. I scrubbed the best I could, while she sat on the phone telling her side of the story. My parents found out (I can’t remember how), and they drove back early. My father was LIVID. When he walked through the door, he tried to go after my sister, but my mother held him back. I stayed to make sure that the situation wouldn’t escalate.
When my parents got sick or had major medical issues (i.e. heart attacks), I would always go to them and try to help out. I would stay at the hospital, go to their home and help out around the house, etc. I finally hit my final limit, when I (approx. 42 y/o at the time) went to their house (at the beach) to help them clean up after a hurricane. I had to work my job during the day (work from home) and help clean in the evenings. I had my phone at the table and was looking something up and my father started yelling at me about how disrespectful it was. He went on a long tirade for 10-15 minutes. I know it’s disrespectful and I am on my phone a lot, but it’s my escape. I held in my anger until the next day when I was helping to cut down some small palm trees. I had apparently thrown the brush away in the incorrect container and I heard about it. I broke. I finally yelled back and called my father every name I could think of, except a child of God. That was approximately 4-5 years ago and I really haven’t spoke since.
However, there have been three major life events that have happened in my family (really with my wife) and I feel as though none of them ever reciprocated the same towards me. When my wife (24 y/o at the time) was hit head on by a drunk driver, my parents watched our daughter, but never really stayed with us at the hospital. I was a nervous wreck, but I didn’t have anyone there to talk to. She was in the hospital for almost a week, due to her injuries/surgeries. Yes, I understand that I probably shouldn’t make this about me, since it really happened to her. However, I was young and I didn’t know what to do or who to talk to. A couple of years later, my wife (approx. 26 y/o) was pregnant with our son. She kept getting very sick and having severe pain. It turned out that she needed to have her gall bladder removed. While they were doing the surgery, they also found a benign tumor on her liver that had to be removed right then, or there was a chance that it could rupture. Once again, I called my parents, but I was essentially left alone at the hospital. The final issue (after I had broken contact with them) was when my wife was diagnosed with an aggressive form Stage 3 endometrial cancer (she was 45). My sister had reached out a couple of months before to try to reconnect and see if we could mend our bond. However, when I called to tell her about my wife, she ghosted us for seven months. My mother finally reached out to me via email, asking if she could help. She said that she had tried to email me before, but said that she had written my email address wrong. She asked if she could help and I said that I would definitely need help. However, after that initial email to me, she never contacted me again, but did stay in touch with my wife. My wife had to go through daily radiation therapy for the first month (25 treatments), with a chemo treatment at the beginning of radiation and one at the end of radiation. She then had to have brachytherapy, followed by a full hysterectomy and finally a heavier dose of chemo for several months. She’s now taking an immunotherapy and she should hopefully be done by the end of this year (2-years of treatment in total).
When we were sitting at the cancer treatment center and my wife was receiving her final chemo treatment, my sister called to let us know that she wouldn’t be at my son’s high school graduation, because she wanted to be there for her SIL’s final chemo treatment for breast cancer. She then asked if she needed to send him a card/present. I told her no, to not worry about it. The day of his graduation, she didn’t even call or text him, much less anything else. She did call about a month or so later to ask him if he had the time to watch her dogs so she could go to Hawaii with our parents. I told him to tell her no and we haven’t heard from her since. My mother did reach out to ask us to dinner, since she was in town. She brought some friends (I’m guessing as her emotional support). It was an awkward dinner. She tried to hug me, but I could only do a “half-hug”. My wife invited her to our house, because she was back in town. She brought her friends again and at the end gave me a hug and said that she loved me. I couldn’t bring myself to say it back (I know it sounds petty). I’ve never kept my wife and kids from talking to/visiting my parents or sister. However, I don’t want to. I am just tired. My parents also don’t talk or act towards my wife and kids like they do with me (my wife notices it too). I will say that my wife invited my mother, because she’s a saint. We were married young and we’ve grown up together. I wouldn’t be the man I am today, if it wasn’t for her and my kids love and support. My wife and kids make me want to be better than I was yesterday.
Once, my father told me that I shouldn’t expect for him to leave me anything when he died, which was another slap in the face to me. I guess I just want to know how other people have handled this kind of situation. How do you let go? How do you let go of the hurt, anger, emptiness? How do you get over your extended family not speaking with you, because your parents and/or sibling has poisoned them against you? Do you ever get over it?

I'm fairly new to the fragrance world and I am looking for a signature scent for my boyfriend... As a year round contender I got him a sample of diptyque eau duelle (huge love for me) which he liked, for fall and winter I got him a same of tf noir extreme & he absolutely loved that one. Now I'm facing the challenge of hooking him up with a scent for spring and summer. From the scents that he likes on me and the ones that I got him I know that he's into more of a spicy but still sweet vanilla with some woods & amber in the base. Now translating that to summery scents...
With that kind of base in mind, here's what I'm looking for:

• Fresh spicy
• Fresh aromatic
• Citrus / Aquatic

Im not really looking for anything too green, too sweet or fruity
Your help is much appreciated :)

DISCLAIMER: This post does NOT condone violence or crime, nor does it say that sexism is a good thing, but explains that it is not caused by patriarchy. It is not sociogenic, but part of nature. This does not mean it is good, but that it is not sociogenic, even if feminists say it is.
Feminists argue it was the "patriarchy" or men who created gender inequality or gender roles, and gender roles are often portrayed as evil and oppressive, but feminists reinforce them all the time in a subtle manner. It's actually evolution that caused gender inequality.
Gender equality doesn't necessarily create more happiness.
First, although there is evidence of gender equality bringing happiness, there's no consistent evidence that gender equality causes wellbeing in men or women. One study wrote: "greater gender equality has few significant effects on overall subjective well-being (males and females combined), except for a slight association of more female (relative to male) education with higher well-being." They elaborated:

Most of the gender equality measures do not predict differences between male and female subjective well-being, neither when considering zero-order correlations (Table 1) nor in regression models that control for plausible covariates (Tables 5, 6). Therefore we can confirm the conclusion of Vieira Lima (2011) that greater gender equality or higher female status does not usually benefit women more than men. For example, a higher proportion of women in high-status occupations does not raise the average subjective well- being of all women, although it is likely to do so for the minority of highly ambitious women competing for these positions. High female labor force participation and non- agricultural employment emerge as conditions that appear to reduce female relative to male (or raise male relative to female) well-being (Tables 5, 6). This result confirms and extends the observation of Tesch-Ro ̈mer et al. (2008) of a predominantly negative rela- tionship between relative female life satisfaction and relative female economic activity rate. One possible explanation is that in many (though not necessarily all) countries, the disutility of work is greater for women than men. In other words, women dislike gainful work in a modern economy more than men do.

In fact, the research found that women are happier or more satisfied with life than men in Muslim countries, countries with less Catholic people, and countries without "communist" history. Furthermore, they found that female life satisfaction is higher in countries with more old-school gender roles:

One possibility is that higher female life satisfaction in countries with traditional gender roles is caused by lower female expectations. However, in this case we would expect that traditional gender roles favor higher self-reported female life satisfaction but not neces- sarily happiness. Inspection of Fig. 1 shows this not to be the case.

Additionally, gender equality was not associated with more happiness/life satisfaction, and more female employment, or socializing it, actually reduces wellbeing for women.

The present study is strictly cross-sectional. However, it shows that greater gender equality is not associated with higher subjective well-being of women relative to men. It even suggests that high rates of female employment, or possibly a value system that insists on female employment, have the potential to reduce female well-being. Therefore we need to be aware of the possibility that continued efforts at educating women out of traditional female roles and into traditional male roles can reduce female subjective well-being, as has happened in the communist and ex-communist countries. But is this really surprising? Men would not be happy and satisfied either if they were forced out of traditional male roles and into traditional female roles. Perhaps the implicit belief among many social scientists that male-typical preferences, values and social roles are in some way superior to traditional female ones needs to be re-evaluated.

They concluded this explains why wellbeing for women in the United States has declined in the past few decades as women entered the workforce more. This study found that although gender equality promoted happiness in both developed and developing countries, the effect was stronger in democratic or high income countries compared to nondemocratic or low income countries.
This study, which is far more well-researched than others, shows a nuanced pattern across many countries. When it came to happiness, people in "gender equal" countries were more likely to simply happy but people in "gender unequal" countries are more likely to be very happy. People in "gender equal" countries were more likely to be simply satisfied with life but in "gender unequal" countries, people were more likely to be very satisfied with life. Being simply unhappy or unsatisfied did not differ between countries but being very unhappy/unsatisfied was slightly more common in "gender unequal" countries, but the percentage who were very unhappy/satisfied was minuscule. The vast majority of people in both kinds of countries were at least happy/satisfied with life. Increasing gender equality was mixed in its results:

In gender equal countries, it was seen that increasing levels of gender egalitarianism tend to improve a person’s likelihood to be either very unhappy or at higher levels of happiness than unhappy.

Increasing gender equality in the "egalitarian" countries decreased unhappiness, very slightly increased being very unhappy (very minuscule change), very slightly increased (minuscule change) being very happy and increased being simply happy. In the "unequal" countries, increasing gender equality decreased being very happy, increased being simply happy, somewhat increased being unhappy and made a minuscule decrease in being very unhappy. With life satisfaction, it decreased being unsatisfied or very unsatisfied in both kinds of countries but only made a noteworthy increase in being satisfied or being very satisfied in "unequal" countries and "equal" countries, respectively. Either way, the authors concluded that their research "demonstrates that levels of happiness and life satisfaction have a similar distribution in gender equal and unequal countries overall", and "while the impact of demographic components on happiness and life satisfaction does not vary in gender equal and unequal countries, gender egalitarianism demonstrates diversified patterns of happiness".
Sexism and gender inequality has evolutionary roots.
This is a highly controversial point, but it is true. There's a lot of talk lately about how the hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, but this is false (a myth promoted by both the far left and feminists), and women did not hunt as much as men, but that idea was "proven" by research with high amounts of methodological bias.
A study called "An evolutionary life history explanation of sexism and gender inequality" by Nan Zhu and Lei Chang shows that sexism/gender inequality is indeed evolutionary. Contrary to popular belief, sexism was more based on discriminating against men or women or singling them out due to gender roles, and gender roles were important for the success of our species and survival. It wasn't about punishing a gender for their gender. Here's the abstract:

Predisposed to differences in parental investment, men and women are expected to enact different reproduction-oriented, accelerated life-history strategies when facing high extrinsic risks or resource insecurity. Sexual selection processes would strengthen the sex differences in support of such accelerated life-history strategy, causing women to divert more time and energy to reproductive activities and depend more on men's economic provisioning and therefore enforcing sexist attitudes and gender inequality. This paper provides empirical support for this life-history explanation of sexism based on data from the World Values Survey and four United Nations sources. The results generally support our explanation in the following manners: (1) Societal-level extrinsic risks (worries over intergroup violence) were associated with higher sexism. (2) Men were more sexist, and the association between individual-level resource insecurity and sexism was more moderate in countries and regions with greater society-level extrinsic risks. (3) Societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility.

They also cite evidence for how environment affects reproductive outcomes and general behavior:

Resource insecurity, which is related to higher exposure to morbi- dity–mortality risks for offspring in almost all human forager societies (Marlowe, 2000), has been demonstrated to be associated with parental harshness and insecure attachment, which, in turn, are linked to traits of accelerated life-history strategies. These traits include earlier sexual debut and higher sexual activities during adolescence, which are pre- dicted by earlier pubertal development (Belsky, Houts & Fearon, 2010; (Belsky et al., 2010b)). In a longitudinal study, Belsky, Schlomer and Ellis (2012) found that lower income-to-needs ratio experienced during the early years was indirectly associated with higher adolescent sexuality through lower maternal parenting quality in childhood. By con- trast, Ellis and Essex (2007) observed that fewer marital conflicts, higher quality parental care, and higher socioeconomic status predicted later sexual development in girls. Overall, accelerated life-history strategies are in accordance with increased reproductive efforts at an earlier age, which are adaptive to stressful environments that reduce the chance of offspring surviving to maturity, but less so in stable and competitive environments (Del Giudice et al., 2015).

Across countries, men scored higher on beliefs about old-school gender roles (or as the authors described, more sexist) than women. It wasn't because they're the "patriarchy" or "oppressors", but this difference in beliefs was higher in countries with higher extrinsic risks like intergroup violence (e.g.: war).

We found that males exhibited higher sexism than did females and that this trend was stronger in societies facing greater intergroup violence. This is consistent with our extrapolation that the traditional, sexist “protective males” stereotype is more advocated in societies facing an elevated danger of intergroup conflicts. Moreover, given that males have more incentives to escape parenting duties to focus on mating compared with females, males likely gain more reproductive success from sexist gender roles than females do when enacting accelerated life-history strategies. This might explain why the sex difference in sexism was greater in societies with higher extrinsic risks.

Extrinsic risks were associated with accelerated life history strategies (e.g.: having children), which, in turn, is associated with gender inequality. Societal level extrinsic risks (like intergroup violence) were associated with more sexism, and "societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility." Individual-level resource insecurity and societal intergroup violence both predicted more sexism or beliefs endorsing old-school gender roles, but: "society-level intergroup violence may have overshadowed individual-level resource insecurity such that the detrimental effect of resource insecurity was less severe in societies with high intergroup violence".
Rape and intimate partner violence are not caused by patriarchy, but are evolutionary tactics (despite being immoral and evolution/nature being amoral).
This is just like how men committing crimes against men (which is far more common) is also an evolutionary tactic. Nature is amoral and humans are, to an extent, a barbaric species (like any other species). This thread of mine talks about how not only is most sexism towards women benevolent sexism, but actual misogyny is rare among men, and those men were simply full of dark triad traits, and dark triad men and misogynistic men or rapists were two sides of the same coin. Dark triad traits are an evolutionary adaptation to have lots of casual sex, and they caused men to be interested in as many sex partners as possible. When these men have unusually high aspirations about how sexually active they must be, they tend to become misogynistic because they believe they are unattractive to women when they aren't, yet engage in a lot of promiscuity. As a result, these men have committed rape to get sex, but they also have a high amount of consensual sex partners. As a result, rape was found to be an evolutionary mating strategy from dark triad traits, which I elaborated on in that thread (no, it doesn't condone or defend sexual violence).
It is also possible countries with less gender equality, which have more intergroup violence or lack of resource security (which is what causes old-school gender roles and less gender equality), have more dark triad men, and the gender difference in dark triad traits between men and women is bigger. It's not patriarchy that causes dark triad traits in these countries, but intergroup violence and lack of resource security that causes these traits there. It could be intimate partner violence might be more common in these countries and it could be for evolutionary reasons and for the same reasons these countries have gender inequality or old-school gender roles more: the environment.
Although intimate partner violence is a gender symmetrical crime, I don't know if there's evolutionary reasons for why women commit intimate partner violence. There could be, but it has probably less research because society ignores male domestic violence victims. Among men who commit the crime, there are evolutionary reasons or hardwired instincts that cause it. For example, women with boyfriends/husbands who had children from previous partners are far more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence or homicide, whereas stepfather are more likely to be abusive. This is potentially due to sexual jealousy or resentment of the actual father due to knowing their children are not biologically their children. Even other species had intimate partner violence among both males and females:

These cases demonstrate that intimate partner violence is neither exclusive to humans nor exclusive to males. Intimate partner violence is the result of a natural process—Darwinian selection. These cases also call into question the default hypothesis that physical violence between pair-bonded individuals is caused by socialization. Proponents of the socialization hypothesis would not argue that burying beetles and razorbills are socialized to inflict partner-directed violence, and it may be erroneous to assume this default position for human intimate partner violence. In every species studied to date (including humans), intimate partner violence occurs when the actions of one partner (either male or female) threaten the survival or reproduction of the other.

Men also mate guard (guard their partner from other men) when she has high reproductive value or attractiveness, is ovulating, is around other men, or has other traits making her more prone to infidelity. Men's mate retention behaviors and mate guarding about making sure where she was or knowing who she talks to was associated with intimate partner violence perpetration against her. The relationship between accusations of female infidelity and female-directed violence was mediated by non-violent direct guarding behaviors. When it comes to marital sexual aggression, women's risk of sexual coercion by their partner was not related to power in the relationship, like who controls the decision making, and thus, women with a man with the dominant position in the relationship don't experience more sexual coercion from their husbands. A lot of evidence shows that sexual coercion in marriage might be due to paternity uncertainty or worrying the wife is cheating:

Sexual coercion in response to cues of his partner's sexual infidelity might function to introduce a male's sperm into his partner's reproductive tract at a time when there is a high risk of cuckoldry (i.e., when his partner has recently been inseminated by a rival male). This sperm competition hypothesis was proposed following recognition that forced in-pair copulation (i.e., partner rape) in nonhuman species followed female extra-pair copulations and that sexual coercion and rape in human intimate relationships often followed accusations of female infidelity.

Forced in-pair copulation, unlike general forced copulation, is rare in the animal kingdom because many species don't have long-term pair bonding, which is why it cannot occur. Many avian species have long-term pair bonds, as it exists in many of these species. It does not exist randomly, and happens immediately after extra-pair copulations, intrusions by rival males, and female species in some of these species, which leads to male-favoring sex ratio. Forced in-pair copulation right after suspected or confirmed extra-pair copulation in these species is a sign of a sperm competition tactic. Some ancestral women have mated with multiple men within short periods of time so sperm from more than 1 man can enter her reproductive tract. This explains why women are hardwired to cheat or get sexually bored quicker in relationships compared to men. Men who physically abuse or rape their wives had higher scores on sexual jealousy. Women who are victims of marital rape also are more likely to have been unfaithful. If they weren't, they were perceived that way. Because women can't be cuckolded given that they know which child is theirs and men would not bring an illegitimate child into the marriage, but outside the marriage, sexual jealousy and risk of being cheated on was not linked to women committing sexual coercion, but men who worried about sexual infidelity, had a partner who was at risk of cheating or who had a partner who did cheat, engaged in more sexual coercion, and many convicted partner rapists disproportionately had wives who cheated on them. Men's sexual coercion was consistently predicted by female infidelity and this held true even when controlling for men's personalities and controlling behavior (which can amplify the risk under these circumstances). Additionally, this explains why abusive relationships have more sex, and this is true for mates in various species close to humans, including gorillas, baboons, macaques, and chimpanzees.
Obviously, most men won't do these things, but obviously personality traits can still increase the risk along with evolutionary instincts, and so can attachment anxiety. There's also other factors for intimate partner violence and homicide, such as the fact that these offenders often tend to be generally violent criminals and have violent criminal records. There's obviously antisocial men who do tend to be violent in relationships because they're generally violent, but this is talking more about at least situation partner violence/homicide. Not all women killed by their partners were abused by them, even if it's true for most, but it's even more common for them to notice their partners' sexual jealousy or worries about infidelity, which the vast majority noticed for concerns their partner had. Additonally, this thread is NOT condoning violence against women, just like how acknowledging how violence against men is evolutionary does not condone it. Most male criminals harm men, and men usually restrict violence against women to when they commit sexual violence or intimate partner violence, and evolution explains all of this. Men have less evolutionary benefits to committing non-sexual crimes against women outside their relationship, unlike when they commit the same crimes against men.
There's also evidence showing that when the sex ratio has more women (more women than men in a population), men mated with more women than sexual aggression against women declined (rapists do tend to be promiscuous, but they have dark triad traits that make them more promiscuous as an adaptation, especially if women are less available to mate with, like polygamous societies). When there were more men than women, sexual aggression by men against women increased. Another study found that a sex ratio of more men than women increases men's intimate partner violence against women, and even more so when more women are working. They explain the evolutionary reason behind it:

Multivariate regression results furnish evidence supporting evolutionary psychology by demonstrating that a high sex ratio increases male-on-female intimate partner violence. Results also show that male-on-female intimate partner violence is higher in cities where more women work. Such a finding further buttresses the logic associated with evolutionary psychology because participation in the workforce is theorized to afford a woman a greater opportunity to meet and interact with men other than her husband or boyfriend.

Conclusion
There is a lot of evidence that gender inequality or sexism comes from evolution, and as society becomes more economically successful, has less intergroup violence, and becomes more convenient as a whole, this issue in society lessens. There's also evidence that men are evolutionarily hardwired to be more likely than women to endorse old-school gender roles, or sexism, about men and women.
This is in line with my post, which cites a lot of evidence to back its statements up, about how the changes in gender roles, ages of marriage, fertility, etc. were due to changes in environment, and that feminism played no role in it.

DISCLAIMER: This post does NOT condone violence or crime, nor does it say that sexism is a good thing, but explains that it is not caused by patriarchy. It is not sociogenic, but part of nature. This does not mean it is good, but that it is not sociogenic, even if feminists say it is.
Feminists argue it was the "patriarchy" or men who created gender inequality or gender roles, and gender roles are often portrayed as evil and oppressive, but feminists reinforce them all the time in a subtle manner. It's actually evolution that caused gender inequality.
Gender equality doesn't necessarily create more happiness.
First, although there is evidence of gender equality bringing happiness, there's no consistent evidence that gender equality causes wellbeing in men or women. One study wrote: "greater gender equality has few significant effects on overall subjective well-being (males and females combined), except for a slight association of more female (relative to male) education with higher well-being." They elaborated:

Most of the gender equality measures do not predict differences between male and female subjective well-being, neither when considering zero-order correlations (Table 1) nor in regression models that control for plausible covariates (Tables 5, 6). Therefore we can confirm the conclusion of Vieira Lima (2011) that greater gender equality or higher female status does not usually benefit women more than men. For example, a higher proportion of women in high-status occupations does not raise the average subjective well- being of all women, although it is likely to do so for the minority of highly ambitious women competing for these positions. High female labor force participation and non- agricultural employment emerge as conditions that appear to reduce female relative to male (or raise male relative to female) well-being (Tables 5, 6). This result confirms and extends the observation of Tesch-Ro ̈mer et al. (2008) of a predominantly negative rela- tionship between relative female life satisfaction and relative female economic activity rate. One possible explanation is that in many (though not necessarily all) countries, the disutility of work is greater for women than men. In other words, women dislike gainful work in a modern economy more than men do.

In fact, the research found that women are happier or more satisfied with life than men in Muslim countries, countries with less Catholic people, and countries without "communist" history. Furthermore, they found that female life satisfaction is higher in countries with more old-school gender roles:

One possibility is that higher female life satisfaction in countries with traditional gender roles is caused by lower female expectations. However, in this case we would expect that traditional gender roles favor higher self-reported female life satisfaction but not neces- sarily happiness. Inspection of Fig. 1 shows this not to be the case.

Additionally, gender equality was not associated with more happiness/life satisfaction, and more female employment, or socializing it, actually reduces wellbeing for women.

The present study is strictly cross-sectional. However, it shows that greater gender equality is not associated with higher subjective well-being of women relative to men. It even suggests that high rates of female employment, or possibly a value system that insists on female employment, have the potential to reduce female well-being. Therefore we need to be aware of the possibility that continued efforts at educating women out of traditional female roles and into traditional male roles can reduce female subjective well-being, as has happened in the communist and ex-communist countries. But is this really surprising? Men would not be happy and satisfied either if they were forced out of traditional male roles and into traditional female roles. Perhaps the implicit belief among many social scientists that male-typical preferences, values and social roles are in some way superior to traditional female ones needs to be re-evaluated.

They concluded this explains why wellbeing for women in the United States has declined in the past few decades as women entered the workforce more. This study found that although gender equality promoted happiness in both developed and developing countries, the effect was stronger in democratic or high income countries compared to nondemocratic or low income countries.
This study, which is far more well-researched than others, shows a nuanced pattern across many countries. When it came to happiness, people in "gender equal" countries were more likely to simply happy but people in "gender unequal" countries are more likely to be very happy. People in "gender equal" countries were more likely to be simply satisfied with life but in "gender unequal" countries, people were more likely to be very satisfied with life. Being simply unhappy or unsatisfied did not differ between countries but being very unhappy/unsatisfied was slightly more common in "gender unequal" countries, but the percentage who were very unhappy/satisfied was minuscule. The vast majority of people in both kinds of countries were at least happy/satisfied with life. Increasing gender equality was mixed in its results:

In gender equal countries, it was seen that increasing levels of gender egalitarianism tend to improve a person’s likelihood to be either very unhappy or at higher levels of happiness than unhappy.

Increasing gender equality in the "egalitarian" countries decreased unhappiness, very slightly increased being very unhappy (very minuscule change), very slightly increased (minuscule change) being very happy and increased being simply happy. In the "unequal" countries, increasing gender equality decreased being very happy, increased being simply happy, somewhat increased being unhappy and made a minuscule decrease in being very unhappy. With life satisfaction, it decreased being unsatisfied or very unsatisfied in both kinds of countries but only made a noteworthy increase in being satisfied or being very satisfied in "unequal" countries and "equal" countries, respectively. Either way, the authors concluded that their research "demonstrates that levels of happiness and life satisfaction have a similar distribution in gender equal and unequal countries overall", and "while the impact of demographic components on happiness and life satisfaction does not vary in gender equal and unequal countries, gender egalitarianism demonstrates diversified patterns of happiness".
Sexism and gender inequality has evolutionary roots.
This is a highly controversial point, but it is true. There's a lot of talk lately about how the hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, but this is false (a myth promoted by both the far left and feminists), and women did not hunt as much as men, but that idea was "proven" by research with high amounts of methodological bias.
A study called "An evolutionary life history explanation of sexism and gender inequality" by Nan Zhu and Lei Chang shows that sexism/gender inequality is indeed evolutionary. Contrary to popular belief, sexism was more based on discriminating against men or women or singling them out due to gender roles, and gender roles were important for the success of our species and survival. It wasn't about punishing a gender for their gender. Here's the abstract:

Predisposed to differences in parental investment, men and women are expected to enact different reproduction-oriented, accelerated life-history strategies when facing high extrinsic risks or resource insecurity. Sexual selection processes would strengthen the sex differences in support of such accelerated life-history strategy, causing women to divert more time and energy to reproductive activities and depend more on men's economic provisioning and therefore enforcing sexist attitudes and gender inequality. This paper provides empirical support for this life-history explanation of sexism based on data from the World Values Survey and four United Nations sources. The results generally support our explanation in the following manners: (1) Societal-level extrinsic risks (worries over intergroup violence) were associated with higher sexism. (2) Men were more sexist, and the association between individual-level resource insecurity and sexism was more moderate in countries and regions with greater society-level extrinsic risks. (3) Societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility.

They also cite evidence for how environment affects reproductive outcomes and general behavior:

Resource insecurity, which is related to higher exposure to morbi- dity–mortality risks for offspring in almost all human forager societies (Marlowe, 2000), has been demonstrated to be associated with parental harshness and insecure attachment, which, in turn, are linked to traits of accelerated life-history strategies. These traits include earlier sexual debut and higher sexual activities during adolescence, which are pre- dicted by earlier pubertal development (Belsky, Houts & Fearon, 2010; (Belsky et al., 2010b)). In a longitudinal study, Belsky, Schlomer and Ellis (2012) found that lower income-to-needs ratio experienced during the early years was indirectly associated with higher adolescent sexuality through lower maternal parenting quality in childhood. By con- trast, Ellis and Essex (2007) observed that fewer marital conflicts, higher quality parental care, and higher socioeconomic status predicted later sexual development in girls. Overall, accelerated life-history strategies are in accordance with increased reproductive efforts at an earlier age, which are adaptive to stressful environments that reduce the chance of offspring surviving to maturity, but less so in stable and competitive environments (Del Giudice et al., 2015).

Across countries, men scored higher on beliefs about old-school gender roles (or as the authors described, more sexist) than women. It wasn't because they're the "patriarchy" or "oppressors", but this difference in beliefs was higher in countries with higher extrinsic risks like intergroup violence (e.g.: war).

We found that males exhibited higher sexism than did females and that this trend was stronger in societies facing greater intergroup violence. This is consistent with our extrapolation that the traditional, sexist “protective males” stereotype is more advocated in societies facing an elevated danger of intergroup conflicts. Moreover, given that males have more incentives to escape parenting duties to focus on mating compared with females, males likely gain more reproductive success from sexist gender roles than females do when enacting accelerated life-history strategies. This might explain why the sex difference in sexism was greater in societies with higher extrinsic risks.

Extrinsic risks were associated with accelerated life history strategies (e.g.: having children), which, in turn, is associated with gender inequality. Societal level extrinsic risks (like intergroup violence) were associated with more sexism, and "societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility." Individual-level resource insecurity and societal intergroup violence both predicted more sexism or beliefs endorsing old-school gender roles, but: "society-level intergroup violence may have overshadowed individual-level resource insecurity such that the detrimental effect of resource insecurity was less severe in societies with high intergroup violence".
Rape and intimate partner violence are not caused by patriarchy, but are evolutionary tactics (despite being immoral and evolution/nature being amoral).
This is just like how men committing crimes against men (which is far more common) is also an evolutionary tactic. Nature is amoral and humans are, to an extent, a barbaric species (like any other species). This thread of mine talks about how not only is most sexism towards women benevolent sexism, but actual misogyny is rare among men, and those men were simply full of dark triad traits, and dark triad men and misogynistic men or rapists were two sides of the same coin. Dark triad traits are an evolutionary adaptation to have lots of casual sex, and they caused men to be interested in as many sex partners as possible. When these men have unusually high aspirations about how sexually active they must be, they tend to become misogynistic because they believe they are unattractive to women when they aren't, yet engage in a lot of promiscuity. As a result, these men have committed rape to get sex, but they also have a high amount of consensual sex partners. As a result, rape was found to be an evolutionary mating strategy from dark triad traits, which I elaborated on in that thread (no, it doesn't condone or defend sexual violence).
It is also possible countries with less gender equality, which have more intergroup violence or lack of resource security (which is what causes old-school gender roles and less gender equality), have more dark triad men, and the gender difference in dark triad traits between men and women is bigger. It's not patriarchy that causes dark triad traits in these countries, but intergroup violence and lack of resource security that causes these traits there. It could be intimate partner violence might be more common in these countries and it could be for evolutionary reasons and for the same reasons these countries have gender inequality or old-school gender roles more: the environment.
Although intimate partner violence is a gender symmetrical crime, I don't know if there's evolutionary reasons for why women commit intimate partner violence. There could be, but it has probably less research because society ignores male domestic violence victims. Among men who commit the crime, there are evolutionary reasons or hardwired instincts that cause it. For example, women with boyfriends/husbands who had children from previous partners are far more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence or homicide, whereas stepfather are more likely to be abusive. This is potentially due to sexual jealousy or resentment of the actual father due to knowing their children are not biologically their children. Even other species had intimate partner violence among both males and females:

These cases demonstrate that intimate partner violence is neither exclusive to humans nor exclusive to males. Intimate partner violence is the result of a natural process—Darwinian selection. These cases also call into question the default hypothesis that physical violence between pair-bonded individuals is caused by socialization. Proponents of the socialization hypothesis would not argue that burying beetles and razorbills are socialized to inflict partner-directed violence, and it may be erroneous to assume this default position for human intimate partner violence. In every species studied to date (including humans), intimate partner violence occurs when the actions of one partner (either male or female) threaten the survival or reproduction of the other.

Men also mate guard (guard their partner from other men) when she has high reproductive value or attractiveness, is ovulating, is around other men, or has other traits making her more prone to infidelity. Men's mate retention behaviors and mate guarding about making sure where she was or knowing who she talks to was associated with intimate partner violence perpetration against her. The relationship between accusations of female infidelity and female-directed violence was mediated by non-violent direct guarding behaviors. When it comes to marital sexual aggression, women's risk of sexual coercion by their partner was not related to power in the relationship, like who controls the decision making, and thus, women with a man with the dominant position in the relationship don't experience more sexual coercion from their husbands. A lot of evidence shows that sexual coercion in marriage might be due to paternity uncertainty or worrying the wife is cheating:

Sexual coercion in response to cues of his partner's sexual infidelity might function to introduce a male's sperm into his partner's reproductive tract at a time when there is a high risk of cuckoldry (i.e., when his partner has recently been inseminated by a rival male). This sperm competition hypothesis was proposed following recognition that forced in-pair copulation (i.e., partner rape) in nonhuman species followed female extra-pair copulations and that sexual coercion and rape in human intimate relationships often followed accusations of female infidelity.

Forced in-pair copulation, unlike general forced copulation, is rare in the animal kingdom because many species don't have long-term pair bonding, which is why it cannot occur. Many avian species have long-term pair bonds, as it exists in many of these species. It does not exist randomly, and happens immediately after extra-pair copulations, intrusions by rival males, and female species in some of these species, which leads to male-favoring sex ratio. Forced in-pair copulation right after suspected or confirmed extra-pair copulation in these species is a sign of a sperm competition tactic. Some ancestral women have mated with multiple men within short periods of time so sperm from more than 1 man can enter her reproductive tract. This explains why women are hardwired to cheat or get sexually bored quicker in relationships compared to men. Men who physically abuse or rape their wives had higher scores on sexual jealousy. Women who are victims of marital rape also are more likely to have been unfaithful. If they weren't, they were perceived that way. Because women can't be cuckolded given that they know which child is theirs and men would not bring an illegitimate child into the marriage, but outside the marriage, sexual jealousy and risk of being cheated on was not linked to women committing sexual coercion, but men who worried about sexual infidelity, had a partner who was at risk of cheating or who had a partner who did cheat, engaged in more sexual coercion, and many convicted partner rapists disproportionately had wives who cheated on them. Men's sexual coercion was consistently predicted by female infidelity and this held true even when controlling for men's personalities and controlling behavior (which can amplify the risk under these circumstances). Additionally, this explains why abusive relationships have more sex, and this is true for mates in various species close to humans, including gorillas, baboons, macaques, and chimpanzees.
Obviously, most men won't do these things, but obviously personality traits can still increase the risk along with evolutionary instincts, and so can attachment anxiety. There's also other factors for intimate partner violence and homicide, such as the fact that these offenders often tend to be generally violent criminals and have violent criminal records. There's obviously antisocial men who do tend to be violent in relationships because they're generally violent, but this is talking more about at least situation partner violence/homicide. Not all women killed by their partners were abused by them, even if it's true for most, but it's even more common for them to notice their partners' sexual jealousy or worries about infidelity, which the vast majority noticed for concerns their partner had. Additonally, this thread is NOT condoning violence against women, just like how acknowledging how violence against men is evolutionary does not condone it. Most male criminals harm men, and men usually restrict violence against women to when they commit sexual violence or intimate partner violence, and evolution explains all of this. Men have less evolutionary benefits to committing non-sexual crimes against women outside their relationship, unlike when they commit the same crimes against men.
There's also evidence showing that when the sex ratio has more women (more women than men in a population), men mated with more women than sexual aggression against women declined (rapists do tend to be promiscuous, but they have dark triad traits that make them more promiscuous as an adaptation, especially if women are less available to mate with, like polygamous societies). When there were more men than women, sexual aggression by men against women increased. Another study found that a sex ratio of more men than women increases men's intimate partner violence against women, and even more so when more women are working. They explain the evolutionary reason behind it:

Multivariate regression results furnish evidence supporting evolutionary psychology by demonstrating that a high sex ratio increases male-on-female intimate partner violence. Results also show that male-on-female intimate partner violence is higher in cities where more women work. Such a finding further buttresses the logic associated with evolutionary psychology because participation in the workforce is theorized to afford a woman a greater opportunity to meet and interact with men other than her husband or boyfriend.

Conclusion
There is a lot of evidence that gender inequality or sexism comes from evolution, and as society becomes more economically successful, has less intergroup violence, and becomes more convenient as a whole, this issue in society lessens. There's also evidence that men are evolutionarily hardwired to be more likely than women to endorse old-school gender roles, or sexism, about men and women.
This is in line with my post, which cites a lot of evidence to back its statements up, about how the changes in gender roles, ages of marriage, fertility, etc. were due to changes in environment, and that feminism played no role in it.

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Welcome back to this write-up about a complicated artist's complicated book.
Don't be absurd, of course you have time!
Part 1 Part 2
Now that we've established what the book is about, let's take a look at The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls' rich publication and re-publication history. I promise, it's more scandalous than it sounds.

“HER SPEECH IS NOTHING, YET THE UNSHAPÈD USE OF IT DOTH MOVE THE HEARERS TO COLLECTION” (HORATIO, ACT IV SCENE 5)

As I've mentioned in the last installment, TAFWVG has been released multiple times, in multiple editions – four of them, to be precise. And I wish I was exaggerating when I say that three of those four releases have been veritable masterclasses in testing your audience's loyalty. In case you're wondering: the secret is to alter your source material in strange and unpredictable ways, while also constantly messing up on the customer service front.
Most of this installment condenses and combines these two excellent write-ups, which contain most of the receipts: TAFWVG: A History / The Bloody Crumpets: An Inconsistent History. 🔍 Anything that isn't sourced with links is in there. While there were only minor differences between the first and second pressings, the third and fourth editions came with significant alterations to the structure of the book and the story itself, notably the cast of fictional Asylum inmates... a handful of which had, in fact, been obvious avatars of EA's IRL friends and collaborators.
It turns out there are good reasons why most fiction authors don't do real-life inserts so overtly – but in EA's case, it did make sense, and was warmly embraced by fans upon release. When the book first came out, some of these people had been familiar to the fanbase for years, frequently appearing in candid pictures on EA's blog and leaving comments on the forum; some were also involved in her music and show. Recognizing that one character's name was a pun on So-and-So's username was a nice Easter egg for veteran fans, and newcomers got to learn about fandom lore; it brought the story to life and the community closer.
One side character, for instance, was named after EA's best friend from Chicago, whom many fans had had direct interactions with: she co-ran EA's online stores during the Enchant years, and acted as admin, main moderator and EA-liaison of the forum throughout its near-decade of existence.
One crazy girl who thinks she's a pirate is 100% OC... but her description and illustrations 🪞 were explicitly modeled after pictures of Bloody Crumpet Vecona (one of EA's back-up performers), who became the first stand-in pirate character 📺 in the live show. Captain Vecona was also celebrated as the “Asylum Seamstress” 🪞🔍: most of the iconic early Opheliac costumes were her design. She had a following of her own, even prior to touring with EA, for her professional costuming work and her collaborations with German photographer Angst-im-Wald. (Shitty archive link, sorry - most of those badass photoshoots seem to have been lost to time. But if you were a European goth in the mid-2000s, search your old hard drives: I promise you, you've downloaded some of those pictures.)
Inmate “Veronica”, a cabaret girl diagnosed as a nymphomaniac, was a doppelgänger of her namesake, burlesque dancer Veronica Varlow 🪞 – the ride-or-die Crumpet, whom EA often lovingly called her “husband”, saying they had been lovers in a previous lifetime. Veronica was part of every single tour post-Opheliac release and developed a solid fanbase of her own, which she maintains to this day.
Even the brave and well-mannered talking rats (oh yeah, there's talking rats in the Asylum story) were named after EA's real-life pet rodents, who had featured in glamorous photoshoots. (Slight NSFW for sideboob.)
You get the general gimmick by now: EA turns her personal life into art, which she turns into a fictional world, which she then prompts the audience to inhabit with her. The whole Asylum concept was essentially an open invitation to self-insert parasocial fanfic: “Here's this very personal world that I've created, in which I, the artist, exist as a fictional persona, alongside all these quirky inmate characters that you've seen in my stage show, and who are avatars my real-life friends. Come on in, make it your home, and populate it with your own zany Victorian alter egos.”
And it worked, to an extent: like I've said, most fans were on board before they'd even read the book, and the Asylum became “real” in that sense.
But it can get a bit disorienting to find your place in a fantasy world, when said world keeps changing based on the author's shifting feelings about her story, her target audience, and her friends... plus, you'd love to read the book, but the darn thing still hasn't shipped.

ROUNDS 1 & 2: THE HARDCOVERS

\A MINOR ADJUSTMENT\
TAFWVG was first teased in spoken-word bonus tracks 🎤 on a 2007 EP. In spring 2008, EA started reading excerpts from her upcoming book at live shows. Early excerpts from the Asylum narrative featured a character named “Jo Hee” 📺; in the story, she is a cellist from “the Orient” (love that Victorian geography) and Emily's childhood confidante.
In real life, Lady Jo Hee, Center of Happiness, was the OG Bloody Crumpet. 📺 She had been there since from the very first Opheliac show in Chicago in 2006, accompanying EA on the electric cello – the only instrumentalist ever featured in the line-up besides EA herself.
In August 2008, Alternative Magazine ran a feature about the upcoming book.🔍, teasing some of its pages. Fans were quick to spot a very sisterly picture of EA and Jo Hee 🪞, borrowed from a fan-favorite photoshoot of the two. (An aside: this specific picture also became famous in the fandom for another reason. At some point, someone made an edit replacing Jo Hee with Amy Lee from Evanescence; for a while, it kept making the rounds in alt/goth internet circuits, casual onlookers kept getting excited about it, and Plague Rats kept having to step in and disappoint them.)
Anyway. For reasons undisclosed by either party, Jo Hee quietly left the Crumpets after that tour, never to be mentioned again.
By the time the book came out in late 2009, the character of “Jo Hee” had been renamed “Sachiko”. (I guess it didn't matter whether the one non-white character in the story was meant to be Korean or Japanese.) Jo Hee's face had been edited out of the (still clearly recognizable) photograph, and eerily replaced with Nondescript_Asian_Woman_023.jpg from Shutterstock.🪞
You'd think that the switcheroo would have raised more eyebrows, or at least some awkward chuckles, among fans of an artist whose better-known lyrics include “If I Photoshop you out of every picture, I could / Go quietly, quiet - but would that do any good?”. Yet to my knowledge, it did not. Possibly because, by the time people got around to reading the book, some fans had been waiting for their copy longer than Jo Hee had been a Crumpet.
A ROCKY RELEASE
Although the book seemed just about ready for publication at the time of those 2008 readings, the initial release was delayed by technical difficulties (some data had been lost during the editing process). And then delayed some more when, a year later, EA cancelled the US leg of a tour and slammed the door on Trisol, accusing the label owner of exploitation and embezzlement (he was allegedly selling fake tickets to her shows on a phony website). In August 2009, she signed over to The End Records, and we were back in business, baby!
Not only was The Book on its way to the presses, but the long-awaited release would coincide with a “Deluxe” re-issue of Opheliac, with new cover art and bonus tracks. For $100, you could pre-order the “Ultimate Book/Album Collection”, which included the revamped album, the book, a t-shirt, a tote bag, a recipe booklet and some bonus digital downloads, to be shipped in October. Or, for a more up-close-and-personal experience, you could purchase a VIP bundle for her upcoming shows in the fall: $50 plus ticket price would get you the book, a swag bag, and a meet-and-greet. (VIP tickets were capped at 20 slots per show; from what I gather, informal interactions with fans at the merch table were becoming overwhelming on previous tours. Again: fast-growing audience.)
Alas, due to printing issues this time, the making and shipping were soon pushed back to December. VIP ticket-holders were assured, at the start of the tour, that their copies would be shipped first as soon as the books were printed, with handwritten dedications from EA. Purchasers of the “Book/Album” bundle would receive theirs shortly thereafter. This seemed like a reasonable trade-off for a minor delay, and no one was too upset. (Well, some might have been, but at that juncture in Asylum history – for reasons that will become apparent in a later installment, when we get to EA's altercations with her fans – I guess they knew better than to get mouthy about it.)
The bundles came first... and in many cases, “bundle” was a generous term, because they arrived incomplete. When the t-shirt or tote bag weren't missing, they were printed the wrong colors. Many digital download codes had to be requested via email. The book itself was beautiful, but poorly bound, typo-ridden, and missing entire pages. (This was largely fixed in the second hardcover release.)
As far as I know, everyone who complained to the distributor got their money back – and I imagine it was a nice surprise when some items showed up, inexplicably, months after they had already been refunded. But it was still a bit of a “sad trombone” moment for many loyal fans, who had to request a refund on the Ultimate Super-Cool Preorder Exclusive Bundle to purchase the book and album separately.
As for the VIP package books, those didn't start shipping until late 2010 – a whole year after the official book release, months after less invested fans had already received their non-preordered copies. Worse: none of the books were signed, much less lovingly adorned with a personalized handwritten note as EA had promised. (And had tweeted about doing during the year-long shipping delay!) After enough fans meekly expressed their intense disappointment, EA's BFF-forum-admin mailed out signed bookplates that people could stick in their book in lieu of a personalized autograph. No real explanation was given. As far as I know, this particular let-down didn't cause a mass exodus of disappointed fans – but, in the midst of other goings-on, it certainly contributed to eroding many fans' trust in EA's word.
EA TAKES ON HOLLYWOOD
The 2011 release of the largely-identical second edition was better planned and overall uneventful, which gives me time to catch you up on contemporaneous events – like the reason EA ditched the Opheliac red and went platinum blonde. 🪞
Around that time, EA got herself a supporting role and a solo number 🎵📺 in The Devil's Carnival, Darren Lynn Bousman's psychocircus-themed movie musical. (If you're scrambling to place the name: depending on what kind of deviant you are, DLB is either the guy who directed half of the Saw movies or the guy who directed Repo! The Genetic Opera.)
If you've clicked the last link: see the bad boy greaser she's dancing with at the end of the song? That's the titular “Scorpion”, played by Marc Senter, and they were totally hitting on each other while shooting this. 📝🪞 They've been an item for twelve years now, in what appears to be a loving and mutually supportive relationship, and they seem besotted with each other. That's only marginally relevant to the story, but it's nice to know that at least one nice thing worked out in all this mess.
Back to 2011. Through her friendship with DLB and the Devil's Carnival cast (a motley crew of top-shelf B-listers 🔍 that included Bill Moseley, Paul Sorvino, the chick from Spy Kids, and the clown from Slipknot), EA also made a bunch of new industry connexions. That's how she came to decide that TAFWVG was meant to be more than a book, more than a live show: it had to become... a musical. Full company, full orchestra, big names, the works. Her 2012 album, Fight Like a Girl, was written and recorded with this project in mind, with most songs narrating events from the book and EA singing as various characters – which turns love duets into finger food for Dr. Freud. 🎵
Shortly before the album release, EA announced on Twitter that the Asylum Musical was scheduled to debut in the London West End, under the direction of Bousman, in 2014. "Casting calls to be announced soon!" (They were not.)

ROUND 3: THE AUDIOBOOK

2014 came, and brought... another TAFWG re-release announcement.
But wait – this time, it was going to be an audiobook! EA had been teasing one since before the original release, so people were quite excited. (It also sounded like a more achievable goal for the calendar year than a West End debut.) In early 2014, recording was well on its way, and the 6-CD boxset was due to ship in May.
PLEASE STAND BY, YOUR ASYLUM WILL BE PROCESSED SHORTLY
First, EA discovered “a new microphone ... that, upon testing, produced a recording of far greater beauty and expressive quality”, which naturally meant the whole thing had to be re-recorded. Two month's delay. No biggie. Our girl is a perfectionist.
But our girl also had to write, coordinate and rehearse her upcoming “Asylum Experience” – an afternoon-long interactive theater event, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, which would be performed at five dates of the Vans Warped Tour in August. (It's not exactly the West End, but it's a start! 🔍) And then she had to prepare for the filming of the Devil's Carnival sequel in the fall. So, obviously, the July deadline was not met. When she finally gave an update in late 2014, the ETA was basically “we are ever so close, but the audiobook gets there when it gets there; feel free to ask for a refund if you're not along for the ride”.
And then she signed with a literary agent. TAFWVG was going to be made into a “real” book, that readers could purchase in stores for a normal price and request from their local library – big event! (More for EA, I think, than for her fans. By that point, the second edition could be purchased as a PDF, and I believe most people who pre-ordered the audiobook had already read the story.) But this involved tailoring the narrative to a more general audience, which meant portions of the book had to be re-written... which meant further delays.

...Besides, and let’s have a teacup of “honesty time” here, if the new Asylum becomes an internationally best-selling novel, not only can we enact more change for good, but the Asylum Musical takes over Broadway faster, the Asylum Movie takes over theatres faster, and YOU are all dressed up as rats/inmates in said movie, you guessed it, faster (“Asylum Audiobook Announcement from EA”📝)

Well, you know what they say in show business: if you can't make it in London, there's always New York.
As EA assured her fans, their patience would be rewarded with a brand new, professionally polished version of the story – and in due time, I guess, a role in the movie. (“Let's hope she doesn't find another new microphone!” 🐀)
From that point on, there seems to have been an ever-widening gap between EA's enthusiasm and fan expectations. When audiobook snippets 🎤.mp3) were released, many fans were unimpressed by the oddly flat, overproduced recording (turns out a microphone can be so good it's a problem! 🐀), which highlighted EA's stilted, uncanny diction and not-quite-transatlantic accent. That caught everyone off guard, because she didn't use to read like... that. Even die-hard apologists had to concede through gritted teeth that, tragically, it was giving William Shatner. (If you're curious, you can find more previews here 🎤📝, along with EA's captions.)
Fans weren't just getting irritated with the various delays and excuses: they were baffled, angry, and embarrassed. When EA clapped back “U know U can just get a refund, right? That is totally within your power to do” on social media, and it came out that requests for refunds had been getting ignored for weeks or months 🐀, seasoned fans were like “Yeah, that tracks.” The whole never-ending ordeal was just starting to feel silly.
All told, the audiobook took two years to complete, with little to no new music in the interim. Two years is a long time for a young-leaning audience! Fans who had preordered at the end of their sophomore year were graduating high school by the time it came out. Others who had been in the middle of undergrad were now looking for full-time jobs. People had gotten pregnant, given birth and potty trained, or had houses built from the ground up. Genuine ultra-fans of the book had had time to... presumably, read other books. (“I wonder how many people passed away waiting for this shitty audiobook to be finished?”)
When the audiobook came out, many long-time Plague Rats had defected, either lamenting the misguided decisions of their favorite artist, or just calling EA a money-grabbing fraud and a lying liar. And a number of patient and unbothered fans had, quite simply, grown out of their EA phase.
Your humble servant, for one, ordered the audiobook the week it went on sale, and stuck with that preorder through five address changes and two graduation ceremonies. Now, bear in mind: through all the ups and downs, even as the charm dispelled, my taste in music evolved, and my perception of EA herself changed, I never formally stopped considering myself a fan. (Mama didn't raise no quitter.) To this day, and to my profound embarrassment, I give enough of a shit that I'm taking the time to write this story at all, and that I was able to draft most of itfrom memory.(Mama didn't teach me how to prioritize.) Well, get this: I have never once listened to the audiobook. I remember unwrapping the signed boxset (minimal artwork, flimsy cardboard, no liner notes), thinking “this could have been an email”, telling myself I'd get around to it for old time's sake... and then I never did, because it was ten hours long, and I just couldn't force myself to care about that story anymore. I was not an isolated case.
In light of this, I apologize in advance for any potential errors in the following paragraphs; others listened so posers like me wouldn't have to 🔍, and I'm going off of their word. The new and improved edition was, indeed, a different book – in that a bunch of things that felt meaningful to fans had been either reworked or excised.
THE AUDIOBOOK EDITS
The hospital narrative had been shortened in favor of the asylum story, and the controversial “Drug / Suicide / Cutting” diaries had been scrapped. Part of the fanbase applauded this decision, but others were disappointed 🐀, as they had found the diaries to be the most (some said only) personal, authentic, and insightful chapters in the book.
Curse words, some abuse, and all mentions of abortion had also been purged. It made the book tamer, but not by much... because Emilie's age had been changed from 27 to 17. Apparently, the literary agent had suggested this to make the book more marketable to a Young Adult audience. No other biographical detail had been altered, so the main narrator was now a 17 year old girl with no parents but an established music career, who checks in by herself into a high-security adult ward, no questions asked. (I'm still perplexed by this one. Did they not expect YA readers to know how hospitals work...?)
The pirate captain, formally known by her “mass of tangled black hair”, was now... a blonde. According to EA, this was a purely aesthetic change: it made the three main Asylum girls a redhead, a blonde and a brunette, which would look better in the stage adaptation. Between the lines, it also distanced the character from its original dark-haired muse: Vecona, who had left the Crumpets in 2008 after a rumored falling-out with EA over unpaid costume work.
The minor characters based on EA's old Chicago friends had been discarded entirely. Which likely made sense for EA – she hadn't lived there in years, the friend group had drifted apart as friend groups do, and by that point, there no longer was an EA forum to administrate or comment on – but not so much for her readers. Some fans had grown fond of these fictional inmates (wasn't that the point?), and weren't too happy to see EA symbolically treat them as disposable. Others were saddened that EA would just scrap these remnants of her old life, and of what felt like simpler, happier times in the fandom. Either way, children, this is why you shouldn't get a neck tattoo of your first boyfriend's name, OR openly base the “good guys” in your career-defining book on friends you made in your early twenties.
To compensate for the loss of... most named inmate characters, Veronica was given a much more prominent role in the plot. Namely, instead of being best friends, Veronica and Emily were now... in love! Lovers! Lesbian lovers! Which naturally meant that Veronica had to die. 🔍 Besides, fans famously love it when you pull a gay ship out of thin air between your two main characters, and then kill one of them off so that the other suffers more.
One last one, because I find it especially goofy: a scrappy teddy bear named Suffer, given to Emily by the talking rats, was replaced with...a Very Large Spoon, which gets its very own number in the musical. 🎵 The rationale was that Emily could use the spoon as a weapon in the climactic uprising against the Asylum doctors. Which, fair enough... except that, prior to being a cute and anachronistic 🔍 MacGuffin in the fictional Asylum story, Suffer the Bear had been a beloved mascot🪞 from the early Opheliac live shows. Some still remembered when EA had raised HELL, even starting a #FREESUFFER campaign on Twitter, because she thought someone had stolen Suffer from the stage (it later turned out that he had been misplaced in a flight case). All that noise back in the day... and now Suffer didn't matter anymore? The nerve. “She made shirts and everything!” 🐀
All this to say, reception was lukewarm. EA hadn't performed live since 2014 and the Devil's Carnival sequel had failed to make a splash (despite decent reviews, the franchise and main collaboration fell apart before the end of the promotional tour 🔍). People were checking out. There was only one way to correct this. A true paradigm shift. A fresh start – a new theme?
Hell no. It's another edition of The Asylum for Revisionist Tortureporn Friendfictions!

ROUND 4: THE E-BOOK & THE QUEST FOR THE SPOON OF ROYALS

In 2017, about a year after the audiobook release, EA self-published a digital version of TAFWVG through Amazon. The literary agent hadn't worked out in the end: publishers were put off by how dark the book was, even after the audiobook edits. EA explained that she hadn't been comfortable with some of the alterations in the first place; she respected the agent's input and had tried to give it an honest shot, but in the end, she wanted to do it the way she wanted to do it, solo... and this was it.
EA had reverted a number of the audiobook cuts (including swear words, mentions of abortion, and the narrator's age), but kept most of the changes to the Asylum narrative – namely, the omission of Former Friends Characters, and the romance between Emily and Veronica. In the newsletter announcement, she mentions being in the process of “re-recording the few little bits of the audiobook to reflect the current text version”. Not sure where we're at on that front; it's never been brought up again, and I don't think anyone's checked. (I assume most fans had war flashbacks when they read the word “re-record”, and instantly repressed that part of the communiqué.)
The “Drug / Suicide / Cutting” diaries were still omitted in the first release of the e-book, but re-included as a coda soon after, by popular demand, under the title “Evidence of Insanity” – with fantastical “doctor's annotations” like“W14A seems to have disassociated her own identity, episodic, each lasting for a longer period of time. We suspect she will continue further in this – stronger medication is needed, schedule electroconvulsive therapy.”
A physical paperback edition was released a few months later; in anticipation of this, the e-book was a stripped-down, text-centric version of the story. (Honestly not a bad call, because the digital version from 2012 was a scanned, non-searchable, 1.3GB PDF behemoth – not super Kindle-friendly!) No elaborate backgrounds and color photographs in this edition, but the pages were still illustrated with inserts of rats, keys, teacups, and... hold on... ciphers??🪞
As always in the Asylum, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. In a throwback to the prelapsarian days of the Enchant Puzzle (remember? the one that no one ever managed to solve?), the e-book illustrations contained puzzles, which formed the master-key to... a scavenger hunt! And in keeping with tradition, the grand prize was an extravagant adornment hand-crafted by EA: the “Spoon of Royals”.🪞📝 Oh my!
Some of the puzzles are simple anagrams that can be solved for keywords. A clickable word within the adjacent text takes you to a password-protected link, which takes you through to an audio file – a song or an atmospheric instrumental that goes with that moment of the story. There are also more complex ciphers that decode into riddles. Each key depicted in the book has a number or letter engraved on it. The total number of rats in the book is apparently significant. One link takes you through to a blank page whose source code contains a list of coordinates from various bridges around the world.
Oh, it was a whole thing. When the book came out, you could send a picture of you doing EA's signature “rat claw” hand sign🪞 to request admission to a private Facebook group (the “Striped Stocking Society”) where people could help each other solve the clues and EA would occasionally pop in for a chat. There was also a series of mysterious newsletters in early 2018, culminating in a Los Angeles event where EA showed up in person to pass on extra puzzle-solving material to a handful of lucky fans (although said material raised more questions that it answered 📝).
Overall, it was a great idea! Although the fanbase was generally smaller and less active after four years without a new tour or album (and a fair amount of other drama, which we have yet to get into), the e-book puzzle did pique people's interest in purchasing yet another version of the same story.
Unfortunately, once again, EA overestimated either how intuitive her fans were, or how invested they would remain. After months of collaborative efforts across multiple platforms, a number of puzzles had been cracked 🔍, but it was still unclear how the individual anagrams and numbers and riddle-solutions all fit together as scavenger hunt clues.
EA kept up the hype for a while, but the few hints that she gave on social media only revealed yet more encryption factors without really helping fans connect the dots. One cipher remained unsolved on Instagram for days and days before EA caved in and hinted at which key to use. She did helpfully specify that if you didn't know how to read music, you'd better start learning. (...Was this a fun puzzle, or a prep school admission test?) The in-person LA event had also sown some confusion as to the rules and constraints of the game: would winning involve traveling to a physical location? That didn't seem very fair. EA had mentioned physically burying some items – but could you solve the puzzle from a distance? Is the Spoon of Royals literally just buried under the Shakespeare Bridge in Los Angeles, California?? 🐀
I'm just saying: if this had come up in 2008? People in corsets and platform boots would have been out there digging.
But this was 2018. As we've mentioned, the core of EA's active fanbase (a lot of whom had been teens and young adults when she was touring Opheliac) was fast aging out of the years when most folks have the spare time, dedication, or desire to essentially do super-involved homework out of love for their favorite singer. Uncovering new songs was a fun perk the first year – but after the new album came out in 2018, none of the passwords led to exclusive material anymore. It felt a bit lacklustre for something so labor-intensive.
(The new music itself wasn't a rallying point either. Behind the Musical was, quite literally, an intended vocal guide for the Asylum musical – so, basically a collection of demos. The sound was VERY Broadway Revival, somewhat Phantomish 🎵, in a way that's either good or bad depending on who's saying it. The violins, to fans' chagrin, sounded all-MIDI; no sign of actual instrumental recordings. EA sang all the parts herself, as she had on her previous album. I'm not saying there's no merit in a one-woman Andrew Lloyd Weber tribute. Many old fans enjoyed the new material well enough, some even really liked it – but most agreed that it just didn't hit like her earlier stuff used to, and that it felt rather unfinished.)
Unlike with the Enchant Puzzle, the prize itself was not much of an intrinsic motivation. While the Faerie Queen's Wings were a straightforward concept that evoked EA's own signature stage costumes, the Spoon of Royals was... a large spoon attached to a necklace, community-college-art-teacher style. It looked impractical both as a spoon and as a necklace, and more importantly, I'm not sure how many readers felt a deep emotional connection to the spoon in the story. The spoon that had usurped Suffer the Bear, no less!
In short: people gave up on the game because it was too hard, it came too late, and they had other things to do.
Thus, the Spoon of Royals remains unclaimed to this day, and I doubt I'll see anyone crack the puzzle in this lifetime. The Striped Stocking Society FB group was terminated in 2020, around the same time a bunch of fansites folded and EA closed her Instagram comments for the first time. By that point, both EA and her fans had bigger rats to skewer – but we have a ways to go before we reach that part of the story.
I would encourage you to give the puzzle a shot for the hell of it (in case you're a cryptography nerd and currently under house arrest or in a full-body cast) but... I just tried a bunch of the links, and the passwords don't work anymore. So I guess that's that. To quote old Bill by way of conclusion: “Much ado about nothing”.

ROUND TOO-MANY: I'LL SEE YOU ON BROADWAY OR I'LL SEE YOU IN HELL

So, what now? Well, not much.
By the late 2010s, what kept many fans semi-invested – if nothing else, because it clearly meant so much to EA herself – was the prospect of an upcoming stage musical adaptation. The way EA talked about it 📺, it was very much a “when”, not an “if”. Sure, ten years on, we were still collectively stuck in the Asylum, but it would at least be a new format – and a return to EA's main field of expertise, ie songwriting and performing. Not only did the core fanbase long for new music and new shows, but Fight Like a Girl and Behind the Musical had brought in small influxes of new fans who were very eager for any chance to see her live. So whether it was out of genuine enthusiasm for the project, or out of “let EA have her musical so we can maybe finally move on”, the fanbase was overall supportive.
Even though people still joked about the 2012 announcement of a “2014 West End debut” (seriously, what was she thinking?), EA had really buckled down in the intervening years, and it looked like the project was plausibly well underway. As in, we had more than just EA's word to go on: the involvement of other people, who did not reside in the Asylum, seemed to confirm that the musical was a thing.

[CONTINUED IN COMMENTS because Reddit is being ridiculous about the character count. I swear I was under 40,000!]

Word vomit since I just cut a guy off.
Title says it all. I’m working toward losing weight currently (in the gym, meal planning, tracking calories) so I don’t need any kind of suggestions or support there too much (thanks though!).
I’m tired of dating in this body. I know it’s not a problem exclusive to fat people but it messes with my head when I’ve had different experiences. When I weighed less, I had my first and only boyfriend (who lost attraction to me because I gained weight) and found it easier to find men that I was more compatible with and that I found attractive. Now, I only get attention from guys that just want something causal, that don’t want a long term relationship, don’t meet my non-physical standards. Hell, I’ve been told that I have to hang out with someone at their house first before they consider taking me on a date.
I’m working on other things as well in addition to weight loss like going out more, finding a signature style that suits my current body type while I’m working to lose weight, and indulging in my hobbies. I ask myself often if I’d date myself as I am and I’d like to say yes but even I think me with less weight was more attractive. So no, I wouldn’t. So how can I expect anyone else to date me?
I’m content with being single until I get more confidence in my body as I have great friends and I do a lot to keep myself busy. But seeing my peers get married, move in with their partners and even post on social media about how much they love either makes me want it for myself a little more.
I just gotta do the work. Thanks for reading.

I thought my Monday was rough. Until I experienced Tuesday. Those who believed that it was important for me to supplement my academic study of male masochism with first-hand experience — Luke, Paul, Brooke, possibly Neil as well — certainly were getting their wish. I less so, although there was no denying the authenticity of it.
I had to wait until Brooke and Luke were asleep to complete my punishment lines. When my alarm went off at 5 AM in Tuesday morning, after only four hours of sleep, I groaned.
As I was driving over to Kevin’s mom’s house, I received a text from him: Get me an Egg McMuffin from McDonald’s on your way here. Text me when you get here so you don’t wake up my mom.
I had dressed in a clean pair of yoga pants and plain black T-shirt (fortunately, at the time, my dresser wasn’t yet full of humiliating shirts, like it is today, and my cuckold horns shirt was filthy), so I was grateful for the drive-thru at McDonald’s. I resisted the temptation to order myself hash browns and instead limited myself to a banana and cup of coffee. I was determined to avoid more punishment on Saturday following my weigh-in.
Although it was to be another unseasonably hot day, the sun was just starting to rise when I pulled up to the house, so it was still fairly cool. Kevin was waiting for me on the porch. He didn’t thank me (let alone offer to reimburse me) for the sandwich, but rather ate it as he walked around his truck, inspecting the work I had already done. Finding fault with the cleanliness of his wheel rims, he instructed me to stop working on the interior of the car and to reapply myself to the wheels and hubcaps. I tried to explain that I had scrubbed these areas repeatedly yesterday, but that some of the blemishes simply could not be removed from the aging vehicle. He stood above me, supervising — as I worked on my knees — pointing to areas that he felt were not sufficiently clean.
“Sir, I can’t get this spot out. I’ve tried several times,” I said, as I strenuously, yet futilely scrubbed a black mark at the bottom of one of the rear wheels. It looked like it had been there for years. Kevin’s filthy plumber’s boots were right next to my face as I crouched down and scrubbed.
“Scrub harder.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m scrubbing as hard as I can. Some of these stains just won’t come off.”
“You’re not trying hard enough. Here, let me try.” He grabbed the sponge from me and bent over to scrub it. It took some effort, but sure enough, he was able to remove the spot.
“See, you’re not working hard enough. Luke will be disappointed.”
“Sir, I promise you that I’m trying as hard as I can. I’m just not as strong as you are, sir. You have really bulked up at the gym since the last time I saw you.” I thought a little flattery might help convince him not to complain about me to Luke.
He flexed his bicep and stared at it admiringly.
“That’s really impressive, sir. Look at mine, by comparison.” I flexed mine, and felt like Popeye without the spinach standing (or, in my case, kneeling) next to Brutus.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, if you clean my boots and tools, I might not say anything to Luke.”
Have you started to notice a pattern here? A slippery slope of submission. For example, if I hadn’t been forced to clean Luke’s truck that time I was caught by Kelly, I probably would never have met Paul and, therefore, wouldn’t later that day be going to his condo to work as his maid. It seemed that one act of submission and exposure begat another. Where would it end? Would it end? At the time I am making them, however, my concessions always seem like good ideas, given my lack of options.
And so it probably will not surprise you to learn that I replied, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I think I can use the same soapy water and leather conditioner I’m using on your truck. If you remove them, I can get started right away.”
“Remove them? Why bother? Just do them here,” he pulled down the tailgate of his truck and sat on it. I filled a fresh bucket of soap and water and got back on my knees to begin my task.
“My boots are dirtier than usual. My last job was a real shit show. Literally,” he chuckled.
I tried not to think about how exactly his boots got so filthy, as I used a towel to wipe off the foul smelling, caked-on debris. Kevin had a relaxed, arrogant expression on his face, as if having a guy twice his age kneeling before him to clean his boots was the most natural thing in the world. I heard the unmistakable noise of a photo being taken on a phone and looked up to see Kevin’s iPhone pointed at me.
“What are you doing, sir?”
“I just wanted to text Kaylee. She’ll get a kick out of this.”
What could I say in response? Challenge him and likely face Luke’s wrath? I bit my tongue.
After cleaning them, I applied some of the leather conditioner I had used on the truck’s seats and began buffing his boots energetically with a microfiber towel. It was just at that moment, of course, that Kevin’s mom, Darla, walked out of the house in sweatpants and a jacket, a cup of coffee in her hand. I will confess that my cock began to stiffen the moment I got on my knees and looked up at Kevin; the pure act of submitting stoked my arousal, as usual. But it was when Darla arrived that my cock really began to push painfully against its restraints.
“Oh, it’s you again,” she said looking down at me.
“Wally didn’t have time to finish my truck before it got dark yesterday,” said Kevin.
“Good morning, ma’am,” I said.
Ignoring me, she said, “It doesn’t look like he’s cleaning your truck right now to me. I guess Luke’s new lackey is now your lackey too. I raised some smart boys.” She smiled proudly. “At least this one isn’t wearing a bikini like Luke made his first boss wear when the old guy used to clean this truck back before he gave it to you.” She laughed heartily at the fond memory of one of my predecessors’ humiliations at the hands of her older son. So nice to be participating in the family tradition, I thought.
“Well, it is December. It’s a little cold for a bikini,” Kevin laughed. “Walter, stand up and show my mom the pantyhose, or whatever it is, that Luke makes you wear.”
I did as directed, causing Darla to laugh. “Those are women’s work-out pants, honey. But I can see the bulk beneath them. One of Luke’s signature methods of dominating the husbands he cuckolds. As I’ve heard your brother say more than once, ‘If you really want to own a man, control his cock.’”
“Wally is a college professor. Luke said he studied at one of them Ivy League schools, out East.”
“You can see where that’s gotten him,” she said. “Well, it’s a little chilly out here, I’m going back inside. I have I feeling I’ll be seeing more of you,“ she said to me with a smirk as she walked back into the house.
After I finished cleaning his boots, Kevin directed me to go into his garage, bring his tools out into the driveway and wipe them down with soapy water before loading them into the bed of his truck. He watched me work the entire time, not lifting a finger.
When I finished, he paid me a compliment. A most unwanted one, as it tuned out. “Nice job with my boots and my tools. Now that I’ve got my license, I could really use an assistant. I’m gonna talk to Luke about letting me borrow you sometimes.”
I didn’t respond, hoping this thought was just a whim of his that would soon be forgotten. I hoped in vain; it was indeed the slippery slope again, a continuation of my descent.
After I finished with his tools, I spent another hour finishing cleaning the interior of the truck before Kevin headed off to his first job of the day and I headed off to campus. This time, I did change into my jeans in a fast food restaurant on the way, too wary of facing Darla again to go back into the house.
I still wore the leather choker that day, and was highly self-conscious as I lectured to the 24 students in my Chivalry and Courtly Love In Medieval Literature class.
I had to be and Paul’s and Anna’s by 4 PM, so after my lecture, I walked to the drugstore to buy the Johnsons’ furniture wax and a toothbrush. I was starving. Having only had a banana that day, and having eaten very little besides salads, fruit and low-fat cottage cheese since my disappointing weigh-in on Saturday, I decided to treat myself to lunch at my favorite Thai restaurant in town. Given how hard I had worked and how little I had eaten over the last couple of days (and thinking about the humiliation that lay in store for me that afternoon), I figured that I deserved this one small self indulgence. I ordered seafood Tom Yum soup and beef Massaman curry. A caloric dish to be sure, but how much could it possibly hurt after my spartan diet of the last few days?
I was still savoring my soup when the waitress brought my curry and rice to the table. Just at that moment, I saw Neil enter the restaurant with a female colleague, Annabelle Nash (she taught Shakespeare, mainly). They greeted me as they went to their seats, but I could see Neil scrutinize the dishes on my table and shake his head disapprovingly (if subtly). Self conscious as I was, I nevertheless cleaned my plate (grateful Neil’s back was to me at the table where he and Annabelle sat). After I paid my check, I walked over to say goodbye to them.
Neil said, “Hey, pal, would you mind swinging by my office at around 2:30 for a few minutes?”
“Sure thing, Neil. Nice seeing you, Annabelle.”
When I met him in his office later, Neil closed the door and asked me to sit down.
“Walter, I have a bit of a dilemma that I hope you can help me out with. Luke made me promise to tell him if I caught you cheating on your diet on campus.”
“The restaurant is not on campus,” I smiled, attempting a joke.
“You know what I mean,” he answered, with a serious expression. “Was that beef Massaman curry? Do you know how many calories are in that dish?! And all the carbs in the rice? You should always ask for brown rice instead of white, you know. And you had soup too, I noticed.”
“But I barely ate anything the past three days. And I only had a banana for breakfast.”
“You’re always making excuses. That’s why you’ve basically been stuck at the same weight now for the last few weeks. You’re at a threshold, and to lose more, you need to be super disciplined about what you eat, and exercise more. No more excuses, Walter.”
“You’re right, sir. Please don’t tell Luke,” I pleaded.
“Look, I know what my telling him means for you as a consequence. But I promised him I would. And his methods with you have been successful. I feel I have to honor my promise.”
“Please, don’t. Maybe I can make it up to you somehow. How about a foot massage?”
“Giving me a foot massage isn’t going to burn many calories.” He thought for a minute. “I tell you what. The four days a week that we’re on campus together, how about if you bring me a coffee each day in between my classes? I don’t think that will conflict with your teaching schedule, and the exercise of walking to the Corner Cafe each day will do you good. It’s 3300 steps there and back; I’ve measured it on my iPhone. That way, I won’t feel as guilty for not telling Luke about catching you cheating on your diet today.”
“Yes, thanks Neil. Sir, I mean. That seems more than fair.”
Neil got up and shook my hand. “Deal. And you don’t have to call me ‘sir’ here on campus, pal.”
“Thanks, Neil.”
“But I will take you up on that offer for your amazing foot massages on Wednesdays after my back-to-back classes. You can give me one tomorrow when you bring my coffee.”
“Of course, thanks again, Neil,” I said, as I left his office. And so that is how I came to be Neil’s coffee boy for the balance of the semester (and future semesters, even during my sabbatical). And his foot boy, or reflexologist, or whatever you want to call it. Notice how it went from me offering to give him one foot massage in return for his silence, to me getting his coffee four days a week and massaging his feet once a week. In an instant! I guess negotiation was not one of my strong suits.
As I drove to Paul and Anna’s condo — the next stop on my gauntlet of service and humiliation that day —the Paul Simon song Slip Sliding Away ran through my head, the refrain in particular:
Slip sliding away You know the nearer your destination The more you’re slip sliding away
If old Paul was correct, the further I slid down the slope, the closer I’d come to my true nature. I wondered how much further I had to slip. Would I be the slave to everyone by the time I finally reached the bottom of the slope?
As I parked my car, I did another mental inventory of what I needed for my second visit to the condo. Johnsons’s furniture wax, check. Toothbrush, check. Punishment lines, check. I was wearing sheer, black nylon panties under my jeans. Then I remembered: I had completely forgotten Anna’s directive that I research and practice how to curtsy. All I could do is hope that she had forgotten. If not, maybe I could wing it? Better yet, maybe she wouldn’t be there this time. But did I really want to be alone with Paul?
Carrying a bag that contained my punishment lines as well as the furniture polish and toothbrush, I entered the lobby to find the same obnoxious doorman as last Tuesday, sitting behind his desk.
“I’m here to see Paul Betz.”
“And you are?” He knew perfectly well who I was, but wanted to force me to say it.
“The maid.” I looked down at the floor, ashamed.
He picked up the intercom. “Mr. Betz, your maid is here to clean your apartment. May I send HIM up?” The prick just had to emphasize my gender.
“Mr. Betz said you may go up. Apartment 11B. The elevator is around the corner,” he said, as if I had never been there before, a smug smile plastered to his face.
“Yes, thank you. I remember.”
When I got to their door, I got down on my knees, as Paul had instructed me. Should I have rung the bell first? Should I knock? Or would that annoy them? I had been announced, so they knew I would be coming up the elevator. I waited there for several minutes. The longer I waited, however, it seemed to make less and less sense to ring the bell. Maybe they were busy and not ready for me yet, even though I was very punctual? Maybe they were….having sex? I didn’t want to risk disturbing them. And, so, I continued to wait.
I then heard the elevator door open, with dread. A woman, probably in her mid thirties, walked by me to her apartment across the hall, staring down at me with an amused expression. When she opened her door, I heard her yell to someone in the apartment, “It looks like Paul and Anna have a new one,” before the door slammed shut.
Just then the the door in front of me finally opened. I saw Paul’s feet first.
“You may enter. Remember, on your knees.”
I put my hands down to crawl into the apartment, before he snapped at me: “No! I didn’t say on your hands and knees. I said on your knees.”
I shuffled forward into the apartment, cursing myself for having not purchased knee pads, as Paul had suggested. I told myself that I would have to start taking notes from now on , so I wouldn’t forget things I’d later regret.
“Lines,” he said, simply.
I pulled the several loose leaf pages out of my bag and handed them to Paul. “Here, sir.”
As much as it hurt my hand to write all of those lines, the mental anguish of having to repeatedly write that I would no longer mention academic integrity — a subject that I was passionate about (ridiculous as it might seem to you, coming from a professor about to clean the apartment of two of his students) — was worse. Paul knew that, of course. I was to learn that, despite their many differences in style, like Luke, he was a natural sadist, with an impressive ability to zero in on areas of his victim’s vulnerability or sensitivity to exploit for maximum humiliation. Lucky me.
“I’ll count them and check the neatness of your writing later. Did you bring the Johnsons wax and toothbrush?”
“Yes, sir. Here.” I showed him the contents of my bag.
Anna then came into the living room from the kitchen, munching on an apple. Both were dressed similarly to last time, Paul in sweatpants and Anna in tight yoga pants. Anna was barefoot this time, her pretty, pedicured toes painted a metallic silver color. She caught me staring at her toes, and smiled.
“Don’t worry, Professor Rollins, you will get to know my feet very well. They will be your best friends before long.”
“More like his unattainable crush,” Paul snickered.
“Crushes,” Anna corrected him. “Professor maid will have a crush on both of my feet and on all ten of my toes. He will worship them and he will pine for them. And they won’t give him the time of day,” she said. Then she abruptly said to me, “Obeisance!”
“Excuse me, Princess Anna?”
“Obeisance means assume the position of respect and humility before your superiors,” Paul explained.
“Yes, sir. I know the meaning of the word, but I don’t know what position she means.”
“I don’t like your condescending tone. It reminds me of when you corrected me in class on Monday about the cucking stool. We’re going to teach you not to use that tone with us. Certainly not here, where you are nothing more than a slave. But not in class either. You will be very careful in how you interact with Anna, Kelly and me in class from now on. We are your special students.”
“We are the teacher’s pets, and the teacher is our pet,” giggled Anna.
I certainly didn’t intend to be condescending — I was on my knees, for fuck’s sake — but I guess that quality just naturally creeps into my tone at times, unconsciously. Perhaps an occupational hazard of being a professor? Or at least, a hazard in the situations in which I increasingly found myself.
“Strip,” ordered, Paul.
“Yes, sir. May I stand for a moment?”
Paul nodded his ascent. I quickly removed my shoes, socks, shirt and jeans, and stood before them in my panties and chastity cage.
“Obeisance here means you drop down onto your belly, you clasp your hands behind your back and you slither like the worm you are to your superior’s feet and kiss each one reverently. Obeisance!”
I was standing several feet away from them. I did exactly what Paul described, finding that the only way to propel myself forward from that position was to grind my crotch into the floor. Not only was it incredibly uncomfortable, but I feared that my chastity cage might scratch their hardwood floor. Fortunately, there was an area rug covering most of the space separating us, so I was able to slide myself — indeed, “slither” was the correct word — towards their feet. Figuring ladies first, I planted kisses on Anna’s lovely bare feet, followed by Paul’s socked feet.
Paul asked me, “Where is Luke today?”
Still prostrate on my belly, inches from their toes, I answered, “He is traveling today, sir.”
“Overnight?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about your wife?”
“She is working tonight.”
“You didn’t say ‘sir.’ That’s one demerit. At the restaurant?”
I had never said anything to them about Brooke’s job, even during Paul’s initial interrogation of me at O’Riordans. His detailed knowledge of my life was unsettling.
“Yes, sir.”
“What time does she get home? Don’t lie, I have my ways of checking.”
“Usually around 10:30 or so, sir.”
Anna interjected, “Good, you can work longer than two hours, then. The condo is a disaster, and we’re having a little get together on Thursday. That little bitch, Chrissy, said her mother is sick. Supposedly. So she wasn’t able to clean on Sunday. You have your work cut out for you, professor maid. Where is your page uniform?”
Oh, no! Another order, I forgot. I didn’t hesitate to lie. “My wife wore the jacket today, princess. She occasionally likes to wear it.” Did Paul have ways of checking on that, too, I wondered.
“Bring it with you on Thursday. Fortunately, I picked out some other things for you to wear today. You’ll find your clothes on and next to the spanking bench in the dungeon. You can change in there and then present yourself to us before you start cleaning.”
“Yes, princess. Thank you.”
As I walked upstairs to the dungeon, I was still trying to process Anna’s extremely troubling remark a moment earlier. Not the fact that I had to work longer than two hours, nor that the condo was especially messy. Rather, it was the fact that they were planning on inviting guests on Thursday, the day I was to spend four hours with them, including preparing and serving them dinner. They had promised me that I wouldn’t be subjected to further exposure. Still, I had to risk asking, at some point, who they planned to invite to their “little get together.”
Expecting to find a maid’s uniform in the dungeon, I was not completely mistaken. Draped over the spanking bench were sheer black, thigh high stockings and a garter belt as well as a white lace maid’s cap. On the floor next to the bench were a pair of what appeared to be brand new, black high heels. Presumably, these were purchased specifically for me and would not painfully pinch my feet like Chrissy’s did.
The garter had a velcro clasp, so was relatively easy to put on. I initially struggled attaching the metal clasps to the thigh highs, but got those on as well. I then put the on the ridiculous cap. Finally, the most challenging part: the heels. They were my size, thankfully, but I was very unsteady in them, even partially twisting my ankle when I first tried to walk in them. Regarding myself in a large mirror hung inside the door to the dungeon, I looked utterly absurd, especially with my bare torso and rock-hard nipples.
Anna laughed loudly when I wobbled my way into the living room, where she and Paul were now reclining on the couch. My cock strained against its cage as I stood before my young monarchs, watching them scrutinize my ridiculously attired form.
“Don’t worry, professor. You’ll get used to the heels before you know it. Now let’s see you curtsy.”
The moment I was dreading. Should I confess to her that I had forgotten her instructions and beg her forbearance? Or should I wing it? I chose the latter, and chose unwisely. Not having a skirt to lift, I sort of mimicked lifting a phantom one and lamely bent my knees before standing straight again. There was no extending my right foot behind my left, no holding my position for two seconds when I bent my knees, no lowering my chin, no maintaining eye contact with my mistress. In other words, my improvisation was a dismal failure.
“That’s pathetic. Did you bother to practice at all?”, asked Anna, with a scowl.
“Yes, princess. Maybe I picked a bad how-to video.”
“You only watched one? You didn’t read anything about the different steps involved? It’s not hard to find instructions on Google. I checked myself. You either are lying to me or you’re a complete bimbo. Is it really true that we can’t leave marks on his ass?”, she asked Paul.
“For now, yes, unfortunately. But I think I’ve figured out some ways to punish him that won’t leave any long lasting marks.”
“Good. He deserves it. Maybe a little pain will help you remember to do what we tell you to do in the future, and to do it properly,” said Anna to me.
“Yes, Princess Anna. I promise to study how to curtsy very carefully before Thursday.”
“You better. Including a deep curtsy.”
“But that doesn’t get you off the hook for fucking up today,” said Paul. “Now get busy.”
I gathered up their dirty laundry first (scattered throughout the apartment), and started a load. The condo was indeed a mess. I later learned that Paul and Anna simply never picked up after themselves. Why should they when they had a seemingly ever increasing stable of menials to do so for them. However, when one of the servants fell ill or for some other reason failed to clean on their allotted days, the next one paid the price, as I did that day. It was quite challenging walking in the heels, but Anna was correct that I got used to them fairly quickly. By the end of the nearly four hours I was with them that Tuesday, I was managing to walk in them reasonably steadily.
As I worked, I caught snippets of their conversation.
Anna said, “It’s a bummer we don’t get to control his cock.”
Paul replied, “I know. But I’m working on that. It’s going to take a little time.”
“That’s good. Without control of his cock, it doesn’t feel like he’s truly our slave, you know what I mean?”
“I do. Just be patient.”
“How do you plan to do it?” Anna glanced at me. “Or don’t you want him to hear?”
“I don’t care if he hears or not. There’s nothing he can do about it. The key is to make friends with Luke. He was willing to lend Rollins to us at the Ren fair when we asked. My guess is he’ll be willing to share him again. And regularly. Besides, Professor Larson told me Luke built a huge pool at his house. I’d love to swim there when the weather gets nice. Indoor pools just aren’t the same.”
I knew that Paul had taken one of Neil’s classes last year, but hearing that they had been in touch since the Ren fair — bonding over their shared love of swimming, no doubt — was concerning. I hoped that there wasn’t anything else they were bonding over.
Anna instructed me to use the Johnsons wax I had purchased to polish the expensive looking coffee table and end tables in their large living room. They watched TV as I worked around them, ordering me as they did last time to serve them drinks. The toothbrush was for me to clean the crevices in the tiled bathroom floor of the master bathroom. Anna said that the crevices made it difficult to thoroughly clean with a mop. That may have been true, but I suspected this was more about humiliation than cleanliness. She supervised me as knelt down and scrubbed the first few tiles, urging me to pay particular attention to those closest to the toilet. She stood in the entrance way, as I bent over with my panty-clad ass sticking out. Although my cock fought against its confines almost the entire time I was there that day, there were certain moments such as this that the throbbing was particularly unpleasant.
As I was mopping the kitchen floor, I heard an alarm go off.
“Get your ass in here!”, I heard Paul yell from the living room. “It’s time for your punishment. Normally, I don’t administer correction until a servant has completed all assigned tasks for the day, but since we can’t leave any visible marks on you for the time being, I’m going to make an exception for you. Five demerits from last week plus one from today. Not to mention your compete failure to learn how to properly curtsy. Get over my knees.”
“But what about the punishment lines, sir?”
“You’re questioning me? They were to address a separate issue: your idiotic obsession with academic integrity.”
“But, sir, didn’t you say that you would address my demerits on Thursday when I would be here longer?”
“That was before I knew you could stay here longer today. I intend to take advantage of it. But I’m also happy to administer part of your punishment today and part of it on Thursday. I’m sure that our guests will enjoy it.”
“Uh, sir, I was meaning to ask you about that. You, you…you and Princess Anna promised you wouldn’t tell anyone or show anyone…” My tongue was tied.
“Don’t get your panties in a twist, professor. Our guests are Kelly and Archer,” said Anna.
“Archer, princess?”
“Archer is Kelly’s boyfriend. You two go way back. He saw you cleaning Luke’s truck in a speedo and you cleaned his muddy boots at the Ren fair. That was so much fun!, Anna giggled.
“What are you waiting for?,” Paul snapped.
I walked over to him and lay across his knees. Across the knees of my student, dressed as some fetishized maid. It was a truly surreal moment.
“The advantage of a hand spanking is that it can hurt quite a bit, but it won’t leave marks. The redness will fade in a couple of hours, and I think I know how to go right up to the edge of leaving bruises without actually leaving them. The key is lots of repetition. I’m going to give you twenty spanks for each demerit. Normally, it would only be ten, but that’s when I’m using a paddle, strap or crop. Or cane. We will inspect your cleaning when you’re done, and any additional demerits you earn today will be addressed on Thursday.” Paul rubbed my bottom with his hand as he spoke, a sensual exertion of control that I did not expect.
“Did you ever think you’d get to spank one of your professors?”, Anna asked her boyfriend with almost childlike delight.
“Great to check this one off the bucket list. Someday, I’d like to have a Senator or Governor over my knees.”
“How about the President?”
“You never know. There are submissive cucks and closet masochists in all walks of life.”
And with that observation, Paul’s hand came down hard on my panty-clad bottom. It came down again and again. The first strike hurt, but it was the cumulative effect that really turned this hand spanking into a tear-inducing punishment. I managed to be fairly stoic until about the 30th strike. By around the 50th, I was kicking my legs. Eventually I kicked with sufficient force that both of my heels came off. Although my sheer panties offered next to no protection, about midway through my punishment, Paul pulled them down and struck me on my bare bottom. Around the same time the tears came, I started squirming around on Paul’s lap.
“Stay still!”
I tried, but as the spanks kept coming, I continued to squirm on his lap. Paul then reached between my legs and firmly grabbed my balls. That certainly got my attention.
As he squeezed them, Paul said, “Do you think you can be still now?”
‘Yes, sir. I do!”
Through great exertion of will, I was able to remain still as Paul delivered the final twenty or strokes. He pushed me roughly off his lap onto the floor after he finished.
“Normally, I would now make you stand in the corner with your ass on display for 30 minutes or so, but I want to make sure you have time to finish cleaning.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes and replied, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Anna sat down next to Paul on the couch and, inserting her hand into his sweatpants. said, “That was hot. Did it excite you as much as it did me? Oh, I can feel that it did! Let’s go fuck on our freshly made bed.”
“Sounds good, babe. If we’re quick, he can wash the sheets again before he leaves.”
Which is exactly what happened. Their inspection of my work only resulted in two additional demerits this time.
Before I left, Anna gave me detailed instructions for the meal I was to prepare on Thursday.
It was 9:30 PM by the time I got home. Given that Luke was away, I was hoping Brooke would release me when she got home and give me footjob or maybe even allow me to make love to her like she did on Thanksgiving. As exhausted as I was, I had been in a near constant state of frustrated sexual arousal throughout the day and its myriad humiliations, and I was dying to be released.
Unfortunately, Brooke had a difficult night at the restaurant (two men who hit on her, and one who stiffed her after she politely rebuffed him) and was in a foul mood. So instead of being released, I spent still more time on my now truly aching knees, giving her a long foot massage through her sweaty stockings as she silently watched TV.
That was still the highlight of my long, long day.

Hi, I’ve been working on self care for the past month and part of what I wanted to do was establish a signature scent. I have a few perfumes, but I’m not really attached to them and it doesn’t give off the vibe I would like to go for.
I want my signature scent to come off as lovely, a bit sweet, and sexy. I’d prefer scents with either a fruity sweetness like cherry or apple (not too intense), amber, or most florals besides roses. I do not want something too warm and spicy.
I have the Marc Jacobs Daisy. I like the femininity of it, but it isn’t really sexy to me and my boyfriend doesn’t like it either. I also have the Miniso Precious Love, here are the notes for that: Top notes: Bergamot, lemon Heart notes: Rose, jasmine, lily of the valley Base notes: musk, vanilla. Other than that: I use Dove Revive deodorant which is pomegranate scented, my shampoo and conditioner is coconut milk scent, and Nutrís Brazilian Body Butter Cream.
Also, my boyfriend’s signature scent is the Prada Luna Rossa Black, which I think is insanely sexy. I’d like for my perfumes to pair well with his.
I’ve been eyeing the Chanel Chance Eau Tendre because it’s a really good fruity floral to me, but it is expensive so I haven’t picked it up yet. I also wanna look into Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry (+its B&BW dupes) and the Victor&Rolf’s Flowerbomb Tiger Lily, but please let me know your thoughts on them. I’m open to any suggestions! Thank you!

Hello!
I've been playing piano for about 15 years and my cousin and her boyfriend (both ~30 years old) are trying to pick it up! Awesome! :D I've been asking them how learning has been going and they've both pretty excited and starting from scratch.
One note though, she keeps talking about "learning how to sight read" then goes on to talk about how she'll be learning the same piece for 2 - 3 sessions.
I was slightly confused initially because with my experience, sight reading is specifically when you read a new sheet of music for the first time and play it without much preparation. (You haven't seen this music before and play it on a first read through after looking over the music and noting important parts like rhythm and key signature)
But she seems to be taking "sight reading" to mean "reading music." So she'll talk about how she's practicing sight reading by practicing the same piece of music and trying to get her hands and brain to understand what the sheet music is saying and then play it on the piano. Isn't this just practicing/ learning how to read sheet music?
Wouldn't sight reading practice entail looking at a new piece of music each time? For example, in my classes we would practice sight reading by being given a new piece of music each time. We get a minute or so to look at the time/key signatures, notable accidentals, rhythms, dynamics, and patterns, then you play it completely through. Then of course afterwards you can still practice that same piece but isn't it no longer sight reading after the first play through?
I don't want to sound elite! I just want to clarify if my definition of sight reading is wrong so then moving forward I know better. I'm really happy and proud of her for learning but I am a little confused haha

Having read https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/the-law-corporate-finance-and-management/s25-01-liability-imposed-by-signature.html
…
Assume a joint spousal trust contemplates a him co-trustee (who is a trustor contributing carefully separated assets) becoming (certified as) not capable.
Assume same trust lets the other her co-trustee(also a trustor with own separate assets) invoke one side of their mutual property POAs, concerning his (the not capable) co-trustees interests.
Assume capable trustor she creates at least 1 amendment to the trust, signing as self (trustotrustee/her) AND as AiF for other trustee/trustor (him)
Assume that she, the 90 year old surviving and capable trustoco-trustee, now appoints a generalized POA, as she herself slightly ails in the physical handwriting arena.
Presume the POA appointed is a vigorous, Colombian 20 year old boyfriend, say, just learning English, with little education and even less legal formation. So bf needs lots of education, or better STILL … EXAMPLES of what to do.
So, can the bf sign as if the capable trustor was present and signing herself, invoking the power of the property POA power vested in the trustor to sign for the other (not capable) trustor, as if present and signing itself, also?
Ie. Do the powers to sign (for not-capable trustor) transfer along the POA chain, in a TRANSITIVE manner “in effect”?
How does the bf sign? presumably
1) Agent for property Agent for (not capable) trustee - when transitivity is being used (distributing his not capable trustees separate property)
2) And Agent for (capable) trustor - when not applying transitivity (distributing her capable trustees separate property)?
———
These interactions of trustee powers and POA powers (and property POA powers), with separate assets in a joint trust, in the non capable cases….seem easily confused!
but a couple of examples would easily help him: sign like this (when selling her property), sign like that (when selling his property).

Throughout these Issues we can see how the story-telling revolves around Invincible free-agent status, also some recurrent arcs are picken there, such the crisis among the Guardains of the Globe team, and the difficulty of forming a stable team since the murder of the original members. Now, part of their ranks have departed in what previously used to be The Teen Team.
Another higlighting topic there is It is Invincible's reputation, his public figure and hero prestige , he is no longer the rookie hero as before, Invincible has already made a name for himself, even beyond redeeming his father evil actions.
In the other hand, following The Astouding Wofl-man we get to see finally Gary being taken into prission and surviving on his own as he tries to find his daugther.
______________ INDEX _________________

• Part 22 covering Invincible #51-#54
• Part 23 covering Invincible #55-#57 & The Astouding Wolf-man #11-#12. (Crossover)
• Part 24 covering Invincible Presents: Atom Eve & Rex Splode
• Part 26 covering Noble Causes #37
• Part 27 covering The Invincible War.

______The Astouding Wolfman #13______
While losing track of time while visiting his late wife, Gary had been surrounded by goverment agents in the cemetery, as result of the training he received from the Elder he managed to endure the in fight, but Agent Hunter neutralized him. Finally, after many months in the run, the Wolf-Man is done. Now he will be locked behind bars, most likely away from any super-heroic bureaucracy, awaiting trial for the fake crime of murdering his wife.
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Some time later, through an orange door, Director Stedman enters Gary's cell, only to inform him that he can no longer help him, he is out of his reach since if the public finds out that he is giving him options, this It would harm him directly. Now on, Gary must survive on his own. Also, Cecil tells Gary not to try to turn into a werewolf since he has a necklace wich disabled his super-powers.
______The Astouding Wolfman #14______
Gary Hampton's formal trial begins. During this time Chloe continues training with Zechariah, Gary persists on his own in front of the court, the only person he has on his side is his old friend Dunford.
Finally, the trial ends by convicting Gary of the murder of his wife, and as couldn´t be otherwise, the breaking news begins to spread everywhere: the Wolf-Man Guilty.
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The Wolf-Man public image and hero reputation is in ruins, also his cover blowed away, the attention of much of the world may be focused on him, especially after the recent incidents involving superheroes (it was not long ago that Omni-Man, Earth´s champion tried to take the world), even Cecil had indicated before Gary's case was too public, now the situation gets only worse.
Once the formalities of the trial are completed, Gary is ultimately taken to prison. Huge solid metal handcuffs hold a few villains aboard a special truck heading to the Stronghold Pennitentiary, it turns out that Gary is on the same transport as the Triple Threat, the same villains who tried to kill not long ago.
Gary's entry into the stronghold is very hostile. On his first day Thrill-Kill attempted to killhim, just after his check-in, but instead he murders a guard, splitting him in half.This situation just started the guards growing more hate towards Gary, blaming him for their dead mate, so the guards retaliate by harassing Gary, beating him and isolating him in a dark cell.
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After three days isolated a guard shows up, so Gary warns that if he is subdued again he will contact his contacts 'in high places' -most likely Cecil and the GDA- and inform the warden, the guard just answers they can get away with anything, even the warden doesn´t have much to do with the prison, here is somebody else calling the soots, who precisely waiting to meet Gary.
Even though Gary is a person with noble intentions, there is not much he can do, because as Cecil warned him, he is on his own now, so he takes the risk. That same night Gary is taken on a night walk through the prison yard, something that is a sign of the influence of this mysterious character who claims to be calling the shoots in Stronghold Pennitentiary. Escorted by two robust bodyguards, we see that this is a man with a mask covering his face.
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This character asks Gary to assist him scaping the prission, so Gary asks why since the stronghold works practically under his command. but this man tells Gary the problem isn´t escaping, instead enduring in the outside. The Wolf-Man identity is too public, Gary Hampton is a well-known figure, a multi-millionaire owner of leader companies. The Face has investigated and marked Gary, if there is anyone who can assist him once he is outside, it is him. Still, Gary refuses.
A few days later, Dunford heads to the Stronghold and gets to visit Gary, and tells that Chloe, his daughter, is missing, kinda disapeared. Shocked, Gary asks his old friend to find her, but the guards isolates him again.
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Chloe actual locaiton is with Zechariah, keeping her vampire training. She even drink Zechariah blood in order to be allowed to develop those kind of powers, as time goes on, Gary is rotting in prision and she keeps falling away from him.Time later, a bunch of guards breaks into Gary's cell and breaks out that The Face has given him ultimatum, if he doesn´t help him execution will await. Gary agrees to meet the villain. Once in the yard, The Face blackmails him with the information he has about the disappearance of his daughter, so Gary agrees to do anything if it means the opportunity to break out and found Chloe.
The Face orders one of his guards to remove Gary´s necklace and deactivate it, so Gary can turns into werewolf form again, but this happens just on first full moon night, so he ends up transforming so he enters on full-moon frenezi and kills a guard.
https://preview.redd.it/ilq1s6x9bzwc1.png?width=854&format=png&auto=webp&s=58e280ee0803ac8dbc394459211b807ef2bb4d70
______The Astouding Wolf-Man#15______
The Wolf-Man starts a killing spree, killing both The Face´s guards and prission guards, and then engages in combat with The Face himself, leading another guards to arrive. The warden shows up, and the Wolf-Man is taken down by the guards electric batons.
The next day, The Face finally prepares to leave the prison, but first he heads to Gary who tries to explain the moon rage. While The Face understands, he founds Gary unstable to assist in his escape, but even so Gary knows that this only happens once a month and they can isolate him so that he does not put anyone at risk. As The Face leaves, he hints that could work.
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________Invincible #58________
As time goes by everything is quiet for Invincible, especially now that he is a free-agent and doesn´t have anymore any earpiece demanding his presence in different locations. As free agent he doesn´t fight very often regular villains, but by this point many villains remembers his name, they started resenting Invincible, also he is being watched by those strange orbs.
In this new paradigm Invincible faces he understand that being a hero isn´t like before when somebody pointed the way and he faced the occasional threat, now that he made a name for him self, being a hero implies that the villains are aware of him. The point is, the increase in Invincible's prestige comes with a new weakness, and that is the ability of his enemies to learn about him and work on their plans to try to find and defeat him. Worst case scenario, they could find who Invincible really is behind the suit and mask and try to hurth him in a personal way, like Levy just did in their first fight.
So, all the training Invincible is doing with Kid Omni-Man comes with purpose, and it seems like if the younger brother is even developing his super-powers at high rate than Mark did, becoming stronger every day. Meanwhile Eve visits Stronghold Pennitentiary, she is starting working as Invincible Inc undercover agent. Now that Mark cut ties with Cecil and the GDA, he could go as free-agent, so she is trying to provide its private service to different organizations or institution willing to pay for Invincible´s protection.
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San Francisco, base of former Teen Team.
The members who departed the Guardians of the Globe are now gathering at this base. They discuss how they should name the team, Rex insists that Global Guardians is excellent and provocative, but Robot and Bulletproof oppose this name, Amanda simply thinks that being superheroes goes beyond the team´s name, the important thing is to save lives.
Reminiscent of what the Teen Team used to be, we also see Invincible and Atom-Eve casually fighting Kill-Cannon.
The Guardians keeps developing center stage in the story-telling, since Omni-Man murdered the original team they have been in crisis, few heroes passed through their ranks but somehow they don´t manage to form a stable team..
Art Tailor shop. Shapesmith goes to Artihur's workshop to ask him to design a special suit for him, since his current suit is based on a typical Martian outfit and he is not convinced, but Arthur tells him that he cannot design anything that changes shape with him, so Shapesmith uses his powers and designs his own.
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Nevada Rocky Mountains, secret base of the Guardians of the Globe.
In the locker room, Samson meets Darkwing II. There, Darkwing II brings out that he knows how Black Samson and The Immortal looks and judge him for his recent actions in Midnight City. Even so that´s true, Black Samson comforts him, he states that making choices like he did in Midnight City made him strong and worthy of earn Darkwing´s name.
Some other characters are also featured in this Issue, such as The Immortal, Kate and Lethan.
At Eve´s house, she tells Mark she has job for him as a profesional super-hero in his own private firm, Invincible Inc, initially putting him in direct contact with Stronghold Pennitentiary. Meanwhile, at the Grayson residence, April keeps teaching Oliver even after Mark and Cecil relationship falled apart. Oliver confesses that Debbie left the house just in cause, Invincible is most likely to be soon striked by a unknown threat, regarding the orbs spying on him.
At the end of the day, Invincible finds one of these orbs again, but it explodes in his hands as soon as touchs it. He asked Rex to get some intel on that stuff, so he heads to the Teen Team base. As he arrives at the base, Rudy was giving Amandea device that can slow down her de-aging in monster form.
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Despite how smart he is, Rudy can do nothing with the ashes from that orb, the only thing he can do is to warn his friend Invincible to be aware of the threat he is about to face, because whoever is so hardly spying on him so closely could have already gathere a lot of information on him, and possibly be the worst threat he will face.
Another dimension.
Who is spying so intensely on Invincible is none other than his arch villain, Angstrom Levy. Levy not only survived, indeed he traveled across the multiverse and gathered a bunch of other-dimensional evil Invincibles. He stands front towards at least 16 alternative Mark Graysons.
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Most of them are in signature suit variants, only three of them are using the dark-blue suit -some even with masks on. There ae also some rares such three of them in Viltrumite attires, one growing a viltrumite mustache and other is fully deformated, one of them keeps using the early suit that would become Bulletproof´s, one is wearing a Omni-Man´s colored inspired suit, there is also one using a Flaxan armor, and the last one, who looks full of hatred, is in a dark-yellow suit with a cape.
It is evident that in each reality the development of Invincible would not be the same. From what can be seen, in at least 3 or 4 of these dimensions he would be raised as a Viltrumite. In some others, the he would simply be ruthless or evil.
The potential of these Invincibles will not be seen until they are unleashed into this reality.
________Invincible #59________
This Issue introduces Invincible to a new villain, Powerplex. He example of how an ordinary person can broke bad and turn into a villain growing hate towards the colaretal effects of an hero actions.
It's no coincidence about this chracter being introduced just at the point when Invincible hero reputation and prestige has escalated to the point of being one of the best-known superheroes on Earth, but also one of the most repudiated by both the community -due to his father attemp to take over the world -and the villains.
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Scott Dunwall used to be a Pentagon unnaffiliated with the GDA, more specifically he worked in some technology development area. During Omni-man's fight against Invincible, Scott lost her sister and since that day he has sworn to avenge her death. At some point, Scott started stealing materials from the work offices, and used them in order to develop his powers source.
Powerplex's powers are generated thanks to bio-therm discs that allow energy to be trapped and concentrated making him capable of receiving any amount of damage from their opponents and returning it to them.
During a short time, Powerplex havoked some cities waiting for Invincible to face him, also he showed what he is capable of, defeating one of the strongest members of The Guardians of the Globe, Shapesmith. He even faced the departed faction of their ranks, defeating they too. Everytime the heroes showed up, Powerplex asked them for Invincible to face him, instead.
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Despite defeating the heroes, Powerplex's methods wern´t lethal, his ultimate goal was indeed to kill only Invincible, no any other heroes or innocent people.
The 'villain' figure we find in Powerplex is very particular.
He isn´t any kind of anti-hero since he doesn´t get involved in fighting evil by his own moral code or anything similar. It even seems that his arc is based on noble intentions, as he fully has moral and affective support of his own family, the proximity Scott has with his family is such that all the hatred that has grown towards Invincible is even based on his family, more precisely on his dead sister.
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As time passes, Scott becomes frustrated since despite his actions breaking havok and defeating some heroes teams, Invincible never shows up to face him. Scott is convinced that he is standing on a high moral ground, his goal to kill Invincible is for the great good, despite, he doesn`t will to look like a villain, as he thinks in the end people will get it and his name will be clear, since people already understands the threat that Invincible represents after his father's recent actions.
So, Scott next move is to cross te line, involving his own family and making a personal threat against Invincible This can be one of the darkest momment of the comic-series, he ended up using his family and media coverage to reach the hybrid.
At Invincible arrival, Powerplex asks if he knows Jessica Duvall. Invincible just says he doesn`t know her, angry Powerplex tells she died on the crossfire of Invincible and Omni-Man fight. That takes Invincible off-guard, so he states lots of innocent people died that day, while he is sorry his reputation was also ruined and there is nothing he can do to fix the colateral damage.
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Besides the talking, Invincible starts figthing Powerplex and endures against his energy powers, soon realizes he is facing the same villain who defeated the Teen Team, they warned he was looking for him. In this round, the hybrid realizes that Powerplex can also absorb kinetic energy from his punches, while being hit with a energy blast, blowing away.
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The fight could have been evenly matched, so Invincible just head to put innocents into safetly, what he would never think was that all of this was just set-up, as he tries to help them he figures out they are cooperating with Powerplex who quickly approaches him.
While beating the hero, Powerplex hints how much people fears Invincible an example is his potential to hurt innocent people in the crossfire of his fights, also Powerplex thinks Invincible is going to eventually side with his father and keep his attemp to take over, so killing him will protect all this people. He is convinced, before Invincible shows his true colors, he must kill him.
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Powerplex hits Invincible with an energetic blast right in the head, completely ignoring how much the hybrid tolerate without being actually damaged; the shit hits the fan as the current travels through the floor, electrocuting his wife and baby son, burning them to death.
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It happpens again, Invincible´s actions saved lifes while also indirectly ruined other lifes. Powerplex freaks out as he realizes he just killed his wife and baby son, and as soon as Invincible stands, he manages to grab Powerplex and tolerates the power discharge until draining fully draining him. With his energy fully drained, Powerplex breaks out and just cries for his dead family.
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Invincible is just disgusted. He attened to a call and ended up in a skirmish witnessing Powerplex madness and the accidental murdering of his family. Although Powerplex wasn´t match to him, he still kinda succeded in founding and facing him.
Stronghold Pennitentiary
Time later Scott is tied up by enormous metal chain inside his maximum security cell, he agrees for Invincible to pay a vissit. Instead of thinking about what he has done and that he has killed his family, Scott spended his time becoming even more obsessed with killing Invincible. As the hero tries to talk some sense into him, Scott just warns that he will investigate every single person who died because of any Invincible action, then will find a way to break out and kill him.
https://preview.redd.it/8h2ebb0omzwc1.png?width=861&format=png&auto=webp&s=c5028543f43ff59151bb0d1c559b93559ddbc472
As Invincible hears the threat, he just stares at Powerplex, he gets it. The look in Invincible's eyes says it all, although the villain is behind bars now he becomes a new open threat.
On the other hand, Invincible has another open threat, Angstrom Levy, who is in another league.
Levy traveled through the Multiverse and learned a lot about Invincible, even finding that he is evil in most of the realities he exists. Time before, he tried to hurt Mark by hurting his family, but failed. His new plans involve those evil Invincible´s from the alternative dimensions. His goal is to completely destroy Invincible - his reputation and image - as either by the evil counterparts committing acts that make everyone fear and hate him. Therefore, Mark's psyche will be directly at stake in this entire process.
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NEXT READS
Noble Causes #37
During this Issue, the central topic is the heroes public image: the heroes reputation and prestige are determining factors when inserting into the superhero community or the bureaucracy that surrounds it. It's interesting that this happens just before The Invicible War, which is a turning point for Invincible as its reputation and image will be horribly affected in the aftermath.
The Invincible War
Lot sof Image Universe heroes fighths against Invincible evil other-dimensional counterparts unleashed by Angstrom Levy.
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Killcount:

• Thrill-Kill : 1 prission guard.
• Wolf-Man: 3 prission guards.
• Powerplex: his wife and baby son.

Curiosities

• Atom Eve defeated Kill Cannon alongside her two superhero then-boyfriends.
• We can see The Immortal and Kate who seem to be taking the first steps in retiring from the Guardians of the Globe, both are looking to buy a house, even Kate plans to have children.
• Shapesmith's inappropriate behaviors are currently some of the funniest scenes on the TV show.
• We see Rudy´s second workaround to assist Amanda and her de-aging.
• Black Samson more than once is in charge of restoring morale to the team, his charisma is a sign of his participation with the original team of the Guardians of the Globe.
• Invincible indirectly caused the death of some from the Duvall family.
• Gary was into punk rock, he liked bands such as The Clash, Black Flag, Misfits and Dead Kennedys.
• Powerplex´s first apperance.
• The Face's first appearance, he will later be part of the villain faction The Order.
• Evil Invincible alternate counterparts first apperance.
• It sn´t clear how Levy managed to recruit evil Invincibles from alternate dimensions, the TV shows kinda expands this plot.
• Powerplex´s desing was leaked through season 2 production of Invincible TV Show, alongside some Thraxan persons designs.

I know this isn’t any of my business but I moved in with my boyfriend’s family about a year ago and now planning to move out and start our own. My first few months I notice that she has checks for my boyfriend with a significant amount and asked my boyfriend why and he said “she said she wants me to keep the money”. Again, none of my business but it had gotten to the point where the money reached $80k. She BEGGED and manipulated my boyfriend to let her buy a nail salon under his name to avoid getting out of paying taxes and being able to keep her “low income” benefits (ebt, health insurance, etc.) She threatened to kick us out (summer of last year) If my boyfriend didn’t cooperate and also pulled the “you don’t really care or love me” BS. I strongly advise against it as i knew it was tax fraud but my boyfriend did not listen or even have a choice at all. He thought this will build his relationship with his mom and make it better. He was wrong. The nail salon wasn’t going well and eventually sold it a month after. Come this year while filling taxes, the mother initiated that he should pay for the accountant about his fucked up taxes because of her, and thought she was doing him a favor for paying for it. Oh, she tried to do it again btw and my boyfriend had said no. Earlier this year the mother had asked a favor to write a letter for her as she doesn’t speak English well, the letter i was replying to contained about the house. I had to read to be able to reply right? I was so confused as the letter was addressed to a dead uncle that had died 10 years ago. She is asking me to forge a letter and signature for a dead person, I refused. She got mad. (she said it wasn’t a big deal as she had done it before) Come early this month she had received a mail that someone from the estate (i think?) tried to contact her by mail and electronically 3 times, well, tried to contact the dead uncle something about a foreclosure . Of course she didn’t answer, she is now trying to look for the “will” she had claimed that the dead uncle gave her. I still see sometimes that the letter is still addressed to the dead uncle. Is this illegal?