Guest of a Guest of a Guest

Should this section actually be called Plus One’s Plus One? Maybe! This time we have a story that made me clap my hands as soon as I saw the first line: “I'd like to submit a story where I'm the villain.”

Our Guest’s story takes place at her father’s wedding. She’s in her mid-teens, living away with her mom, and her dad is marrying a woman with a few kids of her own. She’s given little instruction on what to wear, so she borrows a dress and accessories from a friend and heads home.

At a salon on the day of the wedding, she’s instructed to do whatever she wants to her hair, so she picks something off of Pinterest. When she sees the bride and her own daughters, Our Teen Guest starts to sense she’s made a misstep. Her own hair is a complicated updo; her almost-stepfamily are wearing casual, as she puts it, “down-dos” (“the bride had a bob, so I'm not sure what else I expected her to do,” she says now).

The guests got to have a similarly dawning experience at the wedding. Our Teen Guest went first, walking with her dad. She wore the borrowed dress: light pink, with “delicate, lovely” detailing and a match-y beaded headband of the era. Behind her, her soon-to-be stepsiblings, with the sister wearing a “beachy maxidress.” Finally, her father’s new wife in a black-and-white wrap dress and bob.² 

“Throughout the reception, people kept coming up to me to tell me I was the best-dressed person there, and how they almost thought I was the bride,” she says of, again, her own dad’s wedding. “In every photo, my ‘light pink’ dress looked pure white.“

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One thing that is incredibly RARE about this post from one of AmITheAsshole’s less strict imitators,⁶ is how simply it’s written. This user, u/No_Kiwi_2 is our generation’s Hemingway. The tale is nearly as straightforward as the headline: This man’s brother proposed at his wedding — one of the absolute most important Wedding Problems that can happen!!! — even after he was told not to. Their shared mother had sided would the would-be proposer and insisted he be allowed.

Thus, when the head tables were turned and the brother was getting married, OP announced that his own wife was pregnant. This time, mom’s mad, but, OP points out that he has the “screen cap of the text messages” from her telling him to get over it at his own wedding.

The punchline comes in the comments of another subreddit entirely, the newish addition to reddit’s Comeuppanceverse⁷ called r/Ohnoconsequences, when the OP reveals his wife isn’t pregnant at all. Ohhhhhh!

Tr/opes: comeuppanceverse bait, comments twist, golden child, inappropriate proposal, indignant mother, pregnancy announcement, stubborn sibling

So another of my favorite subgenres of Reddit is what I’m going to call the ur-BORU’s post (::rimshot::). It’s named for the subreddit Best of Redditor Updates, but is less about having been updated than for feeling designed to be updated. Sure, it’s almost certainly then a fake, bait, clout-seeking post, but it has such a Dickens-y, serialized bent!

In this ur-BORU’s-y saga, a young bride-to-be doesn’t want to invite her "mentally unstable cousin" to her nuptials, but leaves enough breadcrumbs (a haircut, a name change, repeated references to being a “tom boy”) for readers to determine that said cousin is less bonkers than they are presumably trans⁸. (In her own defense, the original poster claims that the problem is the cousin’s terrifically dangerous BPD. Cool outlook!)

The specifics over the course of these six (six!!) posts are wonderfully reddit-y, if hard to believe for real human beings: the OOP handed out her wedding invitations in person by hand at a family party, so the cousin got to discover the snub in real time. The OOP’s aunt/cousin’s mother was contributing significantly to the wedding fund, meaning the bride’s “and none for Gretchen Weiners”-ass stunt jeopardized the entire event. The OOP then planned to have a big scary man with similar “values” follow her cousin around the wedding to enforce their gender, or something. OOP’s name for the cousin is, reportedly, the cousin’s actual deadname.

In the end, the cousin refused the pity invite, the shortfall could not be made up, and the wedding was cancelled. OOP has learned no lessons from this.

Tr/opes: bad bride, beggars who want to choose, cancelled wedding, mental health wrongs, payment problems, petty behavior, pity invite, phantom homophobia, screenshots, trans wrongs, unreliable narrator, update twist, ur-BORU’s

_{1. This newsletter is a work-in-progress, and our current, fungible motto is “better to just put it out there; you already missed making it weekly, Meredith, Jesus.”}

_{2. Our Teen Guest notes that her now-former stepmother purchased the dress just the week prior, at a national department store that, not to be rude, never would get to be the anchor what your town would have called the “good” mall; a detail that along with the potluck nature of the dinner, should have nudged Our Teen in a less formal direction.}

_{3. Something that occurred to me recently about being 38, as I am, is that “my entire adulthood” is now x = y for “the last twenty years.” There’s something really punishing about that! Sorry to my fellow 38-year-olds for putting that idea in your brain! I couldn’t be alone with it!}

_{4. Or perhaps I should say subatomic UNIT.}

_{5. For some journalistically verified, or at least investigated, Reddit stories, do listen to the podcast Endless Thread.}

_{6. As r/AITAH puts it, it’s just like the original “except unlike that subreddit here you can post interpersonal conflicts, anything that's AITA but is not allowed there even posting about Scar from the lion king and trying to convince redditors that he was not the AH.”}

_{7. TM Meredith Haggerty 2024!!!! See also: r/pettyrevenge, r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmItheAngel}

_{8. I will be calling these type of thuddingly common human rights violations “_____ wrongs” (trans wongs, gay wrongs, women’s wrongs, civil wrongs)}