I Love How All The Siblings Learn That Diego Got Put In A Mental Hospital And They’re All Just Like

i just found them utterly delightful this season

Meals became the one time of day […] to be together – and I met them with equal parts […] and dread. Would today be the day I engaged Allison […] stand up to Diego’s taunts? Maybe I’d show Five the violin piece I’d been working on for weeks.

Though prone to arrogance and outbursts, even more than the average preteen, Five was my sole confidante in the years before he disappeared. It almost seemed fitting […] the siblings to leave us, it would be him who [I fully?] […] who fully trusted me. Five was […] always one […] Dad’s manipulations, and he […]-ites like my other siblings. Five […] man’s most […]-ive weakness […] compen… […] beyond […]

One morning, I left the Academy […] with clothes, snacks, and mementos […] I think I even brought a dream catcher […] from home following me wherever I went […] a bus stop, and I sat there all day long – and strangers […] first time in my life it hit me that I was completely alone. I thought I was alone my entire life, but this was new and entirely different. I was afraid of what I [didn’t know?] and would choose Dad’s torment any day over the [endless dark that stretched?] down our street. [Buses came?] […] the kind drivers away. That night I walked back […] the front doors, and no one knew I had even left to the […]. I wonder how long it would have taken them to realize the extra girl they never needed was […] existence? To this day, I’m not sure. The next time that […] was when we all did. After what happened to Ben.

Our everyday existence was full of evidence that Dad had […]-pped into treating us like experiments. Not as children, but like animals. And what happened to Ben was the last straw that finally shattered the illusion for the others, I regret that […] among what they realized that day. I didn’t […] to leave on my own. It wasn’t until Allison took off for Hollywood and Diego cursed out the old man for good […] [realized?] we were ultimately a broken family. I […] that my family would accept me into the fold. I […] as long as there was a club to belong to, one day […] notice me and invited me too. Everyone would say “Vanya, we can’t believe we’ve wasted so much time without you, you’re our sister after all.”

But it was then that I realized […] there was nothing for me to aspire to be anymore. It was […] – the life that I had wanted for as long as I could remember […] had finally fallen apart: Without The Umbrella Academy […] and the freedom to be whomever I chose. Suddenly my violin playing wasn’t stupid – it was something that made me special.

I would say it was Dad who implemented all of this. He caused my alienation through procedures, through harsh rules that we all followed for fear of the alternative. And to an extent, that’s all true. I can’t forgive what he did to me – but sometimes I wonder where Dad’s actions ended and by siblings’ began. When you consider what a mind, especially a young mind, will absorb and harness when put into dire situations, it’s not at all difficult to believe that my siblings learned cruelty from Dad until they eventually made it their own. It wasn’t just the rules keeping me out of top-secret meetings, anymore. It just made sense that I would sit at the end of the table, so Diego could help Five’s technique, or so Allison could paint Klaus’s fingernails. I became accustomed to sulking and watching them from afar – […] my morning oatmeal went uneaten and but thoroughly […]

Highlights:

Five was Vanya’s closest sibling and the one person who treated her like an equal

Five is not an angry old man from his apocalypse time, he’s just like that

Vanya once tried to run away, and when she came back, nobody even noticed she was gone

Hargreeves treated them like lab rats (but we knew that)

Ben’s death changed everything

Diego cursed out Hargreeves (Go Diego Go!)

Allison painted Klaus’ fingernails as teens

Vanya just hates that goddamn oatmeal

I would love for them to publish Vanya’s book as a companion to the series. This tea is piping hot, and I wanna figure out which part made Ben say “Oh my god, she wrote that? I can’t believe she would do that!”

*saving this for later 😎*

queer books that didn’t disappoint me the way everything else has. please enjoy.

Do you have any tips to stop cringing at/hating your own writing? Thanks!

yeah actually: write cringe shit on purpose

do you know what so fucking cringe? superheroes. most people irl associate them with five year old boys and gamer bros who like excluding people based on whether they know how many Robins there are. you MIGHT get lucky and have them associate you with shippers and fandom folks. when my brand new housemate said to me ‘oh so I hear you like superheroes?’ I felt my soul fucking evacuate my body.

anyway so I took my favourite cringe genre and made it more cringe. I stripped out most of the action and made it about melodrama. about romance. about three line prompts centred on feelings. and I filled a whole blog with it. thousands of prompts, tens of thousands of words of nothing but the most cringe-inducing, self-indulgent, emotional twaddle. I write it fast, on the fly--for most of this blog’s lifespan I was producing two prompts a day, and there was no time to edit out the yikes or the badly placed commas or the overwrought betrayal. I’ve written cancel-worthy smut prompts and twee little tooth-aching cuteness. I’ve written so much junk that no one in their right mind would show another living soul, and published it in front of more than EIGHT THOUSAND PEOPLE. 

it’s an inoculation process (get your flu shot, kids). if you write cringe shit on purpose, you mind a lot less when you write cringe shit by accident. in fact, sometimes you start to enjoy the cringe even in your serious work, because you start to recognise a fundamental truth: everything is cringe. purple prose is cringe. romances are cringe. redemption arcs are cringe. em dashes are cringe. superheroes are cringe. 

you will always be writing something cringe. always. even when you’re a bestselling author, you’ll write something and think ‘oh god that’s so fucking cringe’. the difference between you now and you in that future is that you in the future has written so much more cringe shit. you will be (semi) cringe immune. you have survived the cringe before and you will survive the cringe again. 

so keep writing. keep cringing too, but most importantly: just keep writing. it’s the only surefire cure. 

hope this helps!

a lot of people on this site are like, deeply existentially freaked out that they haven’t been in love by 19 or whatever, and are desperate for any explanation for this that might make it ok. i just want to say, you are completely ok, no explanation needed. this is MUCH more common than you think, especially if you’re not straight. you’re very very young. you’re 100% fine. if you want it, it will happen in its own time.

Vanya and Diego, 1994

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1) this is so inspired by @the-rivendell-librarian and @himbohargreeves for the whole baby hargreeves wholesome family idea.

2) this is also from an au that never lifted off because I cannot write, but I also can’t draw babies.

au where Ray, Sissy and Harlan come back to the future with the academy and Klaus makes a big event of locking everyone in the library and giving a ridiculous powerpoint that’s like ‘How To Speed Run The Past 70 Or Whatever Years’ (Five from where he’s been handcuffed to the bar: “it’s 55 you dumbass-). highlights include:

- opening with a picture from the jfk assassination (since they were all a little busy when that was going on) with a big :( drawn over it

- a fifty minute long side-tracked rant about the Vietnam war that only Five is interested in

- “And finally, after a long, painful battle for the sensible people of the world…the Beatles were Defeated”

- “Highlight this note because it WILL be on the test later- Britney Spears was born on December 2nd, 1981″

- “So one day in 1989 43 babies with magic powers were born from women who hadn’t been pregnant, and like? you know? no one ever really looked into that further? we’re in our 30s, I feel like we should have some answers by now?’

 “Speaking of 1989, there’s this fantastic album-” 

   Vanya: “Klaus they don’t need to know who Taylor Swift is-”

   Diego: “Let Him Speak.”

- “And on this day I was innocently reading a magazine and discovered my previously beloved sister Allison is friends with Beyonce and she never bothered to introduce me or invite me to a single party-” *powerpoint slide switches to a picture with Allison’s head photoshopped onto a snake* *Sissy asks who Beyonce is and that turns into another sidetracked explanation that takes nearly two hours and involves Everyone screaming*

- “And this is when Luther went to the moon-”

   Ray: “the…moon? the fucking moon?”

   Klaus: “didn’t the moon landing happen for you guys yet?”

   Allison: “no that was ‘69???”

   Klaus: “FUCK”

   Luther: “Can you try to go in order? You didn’t even tell them Dad’s an alien yet-”

  everyone: W H A T?!!?!?!!?!

- 2004: the tragic beginnings of Vanya’s weaboo stage 

- 2006: Diego has his first kiss with an Ambassadors daughter after a mission and IMMEDIATELY pukes on her after they finish. (next slide features news footage of the event; Luther has to hold Diego back from attacking Klaus while everyone else is losing their shit)

- “Klaus I really don’t think Twilight counts as a historical event”

   Five: “No, actually, it does-”

- *2 hours spent infodumping about Chernobyl while his audience gets progressively more drunk*

- “Klaus, can we please move on from the 90s already-”

  “THEY NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THE MEDIA DID TO WINONA RYDER”

- footage of Allison’s Less Than Graceful reaction when she got snubbed at the Oscar’s one year

- at some point he tries to explain Modern Speak™ and Internet Culture™ to them and it ends up going like this:

- “anyway here’s a list of probable war crimes our dad committed”

- *explanation of Ellen DeGeneres’ entire career from start to finish*

- *footage of 14 year old Luther dancing like he got a touchdown after he killed a man in battle*

- Cha Cha Slide: The Song That Changed Everything

- he slips an Entirely Fake historical event in there just to prank them and his siblings try to call him out on it but then Five backs him up because he’s drunk and wants to cause problems. Three Years Later Ray will still mention something about like The Fall Of Telephonia that resulted after a bloody battle between the two rulers and whoever he’s talking to just like. smiles and nods politely

- “And here’s the news clip where 10 year old Five found out on live air that Santa Claus isn’t real. We literally never saw him smile ever again after this”

- he starts explaining Kardashian/Jenner scandals as if they’re political scandals

but anyway. not the most educational lesson plan but I want everyone to have a break and laugh thank you goodnight lmao

The Hargreeves: Why didn’t you ever tell us Ben was here!?

Klaus: ...

Klaus: You thought I was talking to mySELF THIS WHOLE TIME!?

Klaus: I pulled out chairs for him.

Klaus: I poured him coffee.

Klaus: I asked him what he wanted to eat.

Klaus: I literally hissed at him!

The Hargreeves: ... we just kind of thought you were like that tho

my favorite thing to do right now is imagine the hargreeves children on saturdays from noon to half past noon

how to draw arms ? ?