Love Is A Ruthless Game, Wanna Play?

TAYLOR SWIFT A fortnight making TTPD 🤍

“soon they’ll go to their husbands, smug cause they know they can trust him” the amount of jealousy and resentment and sadness filled in this one line

this is so cute i love her 🥺 (x)

After three full days of activity, the final number for Taylor Swift’s blockbuster debut is starting to become clearer. Data nerds are now saying 2.3m+ is the new benchmark for THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (Republic), which means Swift cleared that bar with ease. Is 2.4m+ in play? Could it go higher? Anything is possible when it comes to Taylor Swift. We’ll continue to ride the over.

TAYLOR SWIFT The Tortured Poets Department

It’s Taylor’s world, we’re all just living in it. Taylor Swift’s brand-new record The Tortured Poets Department is on its way to Number 1 this week, and is already 2024’s fastest-selling album so far, according to Official Charts Company data.

With 197,000 chart units already in the bag, the album is on track to become Taylor’s 12th UK Number 1 album, while three of its tracks – Fortnight ft. Post Malone, title track The Tortured Poets Department and So Long, London eye a Top 3 takeover on this week’s Official Singles Chart too.

Can The Tortured Poets Department earn Taylor her biggest opening week in the UK so far? 2022’s Midnights is the record to beat, having managed nearly 205,000 UK chart units in its first seven days on sale.

we’ve had a double album theory every release since lover i’m BEGGING y’all to drop it

well fuck me then

CAUSE FUCK IT I WAS IN LOVE SO FUCK YOU IF I CANT HAVE US

Shit like the Great Purges and the Strikethrough of Livejournal eventually led to fans banding together to create A03, which I would have absolutely KILLED for when I was 15.

Back up ao3 was created by fans?

It’s…right on the main page. 

I love this because I will bet you that persefv has read that bit we are all so inundated with hyperbole and advertising that says that the consumer is somehow in charge of whatever product they are shilling that we all just assumed this was another sales tactic.

But we’re not even… selling anything…  *quiet sobs*

No ads. No subscriptions. No data selling.

We are the definition of “what it says on the tin.”

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

That’s the “of our own” part of the name. OTW isn’t a “them” running the site “for us.” It’s “us” making places for “us” to share what we love with others of “us.” 

Thinking a lot about how Taylor writes about fathers on TS TTPD (particularly in comparison to ways she has in the past). In But Daddy I Love Him, she starts out defiant but her dream is for her dad to come around and support her and her wild boy and fuck the rest of the world. And in The Bolter her father is the only one who adores her. Add that to the way she talked about dads during the seven speech last year while she making the record, and it feels like Scott may have been one her best friends last year. Just a fountain, so to speak, while everything else was draining her.

This album has literally EVERYTHING like it’s fucking hilarious it’s raw it’s scathing it’s lyrics are unmatched it’s got slick grooves it’s got catchy bops it’s got diss tracks its nuanced it’s heartbreaking it’s sonically cohesive it’s got 31 entire tracks and NONE of them are skips??? like I am so not kidding you I think it’s going to go down in history as one of the best albums of all time and I get to live to experience it

“she’s such a hack, there’s no poetry here, she’s rhyming aristotle with grand theft auto”

yes, on the song called “so high school” that is deliberately a lighthearted and deeply unserious song on an album that is almost exclusively dark and intricate, she went with some lighthearted juvenile tongue-in-cheek lines that are meant to be laughed at

“she claims she was raised in an asylum when you can google it and she grew up on a farm in pennsylvania”

yes, good job, that is how metaphors work and this song probably isn’t even entirely about herself. in the same song she says “the circus life made me mean” and “don’t worry folks, we took out all her teeth”. are you also calling her a liar for having teeth and not being an actual tiger or

like i swear to god it is perfectly fine to just say you don’t like her or her music/this album isn’t for you but the way some of yall are claiming there’s no substance to this album is disingenuous imho

callout post for billy joel’s piano man: he was never actually IN the bar in question!! what a hack

I can’t take credit for this thought because J suggested it while we were watching Chats & Reacts but I interpreted “your Jehovah’s Witness suit” as just like, you look stupid. BUT the way he showed up on her doorstep unsolicited and sold her a fairytale and she traded her belief system for it !!!!!!!

“Drowning in the Blue Nile, he sent me Downtown Lights, I hadn’t heard it in awhile” is so clever because the Blue Nile is both Joe and the band and she both has not heard the song in awhile and has not heard that she is desirable in awhile