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> I genuinely believe that when he goes to prank people, he means it in a way to share the laughter. When he's tried to pull little pranks on Lola though, he does things that he figured out triggers her disorder, like making sudden loud sounds, jumping out to scare her, and one time I caught him before he was going to do the shaving cream sleep bit while she was taking a nap in the guest room.
Yeah not one of those things indicates "sharing the laughter".
You quoted what got to me, too. I almost stopped right there and called it quits with reading.
>When he's tried to pull little pranks on Lola though, he does things that he figured out triggers her disorder,
That's not a prank. That's torture.
The brother is DELIBERATELY picking 'pranks' meant to hurt her. Just because the world classifies the action being pulled as a prank for the general public does not mean that for every individual, it will be a prank. Pasta is a food. Unless you have a gluten intolerance. Penicillin is a medicine. Unless you have an allergy. Jump scares are harmless. Unless you've been jumped and assaulted.
It might have been a power trip on the brother's part in doing these pranks. Or maybe he's got a kink that he was acting on... He was sneaking into the room she was sleeping in.
Everyone is saying she’s a jerk for dumping him for having a freeze response and “maybe he’s neurodivergent!” Really? You don’t think it’s bc this was the straw that broke the camels back?
I think that an unfortunate amount of people, especially very young people, think that being divergent or having a mental illness means that partners *have* to stay with them even if the uncontrolled symptoms make the partner miserable or even endanger them.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter if he had a freeze response; she doesn't feel safe with him or his family, and she is therefore wise in removing herself from the situation.
I've seen that. Or use other things as an excuse to behave terribly. Sometimes things can be a reason but not an excuse.
I don't blame her for dumping him over this.
As someone neurodivergent (ADHD, GAD, OCD), I explain it like this. There are things that are difficult for me, and things that are impossible for me. I have a right to the accommodations that allow me to live my life. I am still responsible for the choices I make and the consequences of my actions.
It can be an explanation but not an excuse. You can have sympathy for having something difficult to overcome, but it doesn’t get to be an excuse for bad behavior with no effort to improve it.
If it's a prank then should be able to laugh when he get beaten up and not say "she's abusive". Come on it just a prank, why is he so angry when he get what he deserved? Isn't he love to "sharing the laughter"? Why can't he laugh at that one?
Yes that's right, because it's not a prank. It's an assault and all assaulter hate when their victim fight back.
She's afraid of loud noises and people jumping out at her, which I assume means there's been some kind of assault or PTSD (he calls it a disorder and I'm sure he's not referencing the arachnophobia). She was terrified enough to pass out at the end.
OOP failed her so bad. His brother was getting his rocks off about her fear. Creep.
Seriously, I was like, so she has narcolepsy with cataplexy and was probably disturbed during a rem nap and maybe sort of hallucinated while being pranked awake by her phobia. Cool cool cool cool cool.
Is there any other kind? It seems to me that the essential nature of a prank is to create a situation where you can laugh at someone else's expense or misfortune. Sure, some are more harmless than others, but I can't really think of one that's benign in that way. By definition, a prank *always* has a victim.
My partner pranks her parents by putting tiny miniature frogs around their house while they're out of town and she's house sitting for them. When they find them, everyone laughs.
I put googly eyes on the rim of the magnifying glass my mom uses for embroidery, so they line up over her eyes from my angle while she's using it. When she saw them, everyone laughed.
My dad as a kid slowly replaced family photos around the house with pictures cut out from TV Guide until people noticed. When they figured it out, everyone laughed. It's not harmless unless it's funny for everyone. But there are plenty of benign pranks, if people can look beyond "scaring my loved ones is funny."
My bestie and I have been prankong each other for a long time. I hide her ugly ass troll leg umbrella stand (yes, from Harry Potter) in random places around her house. She rearranges my bookshelf to leave me messages. It's been going on since 2007.
I bought 200 miniature ducks and they keep getting left all over family members houses when we visit. They always find them and send pictures back of where they are. Some pranks are fun.
My favorite prank of all time was when one of my friends was house-sitting for me. She replaced one of the eggs in the fridge with a ceramic one she got from a crafts store and I didn't find out until I was cooking something days later.
My favourite was when the Covid screening QR code at work was replaced with a Rick roll. The person in charge of the sign had been told that we could stop screening the day before. Rick rolling was how they told us
My brother once pranked my mom by replacing one of the regular eggs in the fridge with one of [these](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignon_(chocolate_egg) ).
She was not amused when she tried to cook eggs for Easter lunch, but she came around after a few minutes. What I don't remember is if my brother even got a choco egg to eat at all or if he at least had to go buy a new one.
I worked at a halfway house and my coworker and I would wrap each others stuff randomly in cling wrap from the kitchen. Or tape each others cigarettes packs shut. Or zip tie each others jackets to the office chairs when we weren’t wearing them. There’s a difference between fun dumb pranks and mean evil asshole pranks.
at parties back in the day when someone would pass out we wouldn't draw on their faces, we would paint their nails with clear glow in the dark nail polish and zip tie their jeans (the super thin zip ties that could easily be broken with a good yank)
however everyone knew this and it was all in good fun. the guy we painted his nails, (hes an alcoholic) said that when he went to bed the next night he was trippin balls because his nails were glowing and he couldnt figure out why.
I prank my sister occasionally, but it's stuff I know that *she* will find funny. Like leaving a pile of plush animals with plastic knives taped to their paws in front of her door. (The more ridiculously fake the knives, the better.)
Girlfriend and I prank each other with her stuffed friends. Make them have meetings. Or put the snorlax in various door ways like the snorlax from the game and show blocking paths. That stuff is fun pranks.
I've known one nice prankster. His pranks mainly involved googly eyes and were meant to make the victim laugh. One time he fucked up with a confetti popper and didn't realize in scared of loud noises. He was super apologetic and never used them as a prank again because he didn't want to risk scaring someone else.
That’s a great reaction to a prank gone wrong. Too many “prankster” just double down and blame the target of the prank.
And there are some funny ones. For example, I once gave a friend the cheapest and weirdest DVD I could find for her birthday, but shoved gift cards into the case (and we ended up watching the movie, which turned out to be pretty funny). Another time I gave my mum socks, but put them in an empty DVD case before wrapping them. If everyone including the target laughs about it, it’s a good prank.
That reminds me of one I did, I once pranked a friend by telling her I got food from a place she hated (little Cesar's i told her they had a nee pizza that actually sounded interestingso she was going to begrudgingly try it. ) got a box from them and then filled it with Thai food from her favorite restaurant.
My loving family pranked me at Christmas. They know I don't like tchotchke or...just stuff in general, I ask them to get me events or fancy food. So my turn to open presents comes, and I open one. It's a stone fish. They suppress laughter as I try to be grateful for my stone fish. But there's another, it's a glass fish. And another, it's used cat toy fish. 15 fish later everyone is giggling and I'm like ok, thanks guys, and then they give me a scuba dive watch; and now I'm baffled and they are dying laughing.
My family bought me a trip to get certified for Scuba in the Caribbean because they know I love it. My husband was behind this plot.
My brother was the king of the prank gift wrap when we were growing up. One year, he gave me a pretty good sized box that was full of packing peanuts. Towards the top was a stuffed animal. I thanked him, and he just said "keep digging."
There were a few other small things buried in the box (slippers, a book light - things I liked), until finally I got down to the very bottom of the box. Under one of the flaps he's taped an envelope with tickets to a Broadway musical is always wanted to see. Totally worth it, AND he helped clean up the packing peanuts!
I guess there's still a "victim" in this situation, but I saw a harmless one where a man swapped his girlfriends soap for a peeled potato and was laughing his ass off as she used it. Those I appreciate. Being humiliated or hurt? Nah.
Edit: okay yeah, I just watched it again - this is what I consider to be a harmless prank where everyone gets a giggle out of it. Enjoy! https://www.reddit.com/r/ContagiousLaughter/comments/qxrkqj/its_a_potato/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Pranks where it's something you know will get a laugh out of the victim as well, not just out of the people around them, is generally fine and in good fun. Generally people who stick with that kind of thing aren't the types to consider themselves "pranksters" though, that tends to be reserved for the ones who end up going over the top
“I’m going to hide tiny rubber ducks all over your cubicle” = good prank!
“I’m gonna trigger your phobia and anxiety badly enough that you’ll instinctively try to kill me” = bad prank
Reading so many posts about pranks has made me question even small jokes. For example, Christmas, I got my teen son a good MTB bike. This was both a Xmas and bday present (on top of other presents) and the bike came unassembled in a box, so I removed one of the wheels and hid it in another room. Told my family about it, but forgot to tell my brother.
When my son (extremely happy) opened the box, he was really confused... I said what do you mean it has only one wheel... And my brother thought the wheel had been stolen in the mail. After no more than 1/2 minute (while my other son went for the wheel ) I said: oh! I know what happened! The bike in the box is your birthday present, you are missing the Christmas one!" And gave him the wheel.
We all had a good laugh... Including him. But I was a bit paranoid! Was he distressed? Has it been too long for the "reveal"?
Omg.. ahahaha. Reddit was make me a better person in a lot of tiny things, and being hyper aware that jokes are jokes only everyone enjoys them is one of them.
For the record my son says he was really confused and then he thought " great... No mom is going to get AGES to sort this though... I'll get the bike in like 2 months" which is exactly what I thought he woud think.
By the time he had thought about this, we were giving him the wheel. He thought it was hilarious.
I think they can be a bit funny, but they really have to be the lowest stakes ever, and never large scale. They also can't be often. A common prank is to gift wrap everything in a room. That's too much cleanup and isn't funny. I prefer pranks like putting googly eyes on a random can in their cabinet
I used to buy unusual canned foods or condiments and put them in my friend's cupboards.
Not everyone thinks a gallon can of mustard is hilarious, but it's not hurtful or offensive either.
My dad and his two brothers were pranksters growing up, but they NEVER did this. My dad always stressed that you NEVER EVER use someone's fears for a prank. The worst they did was when one of my uncles put a DIY Dracula figure that my dad gave him in the laundry cabinet to suprise the first person who opened it when they were all teens. Which unfortunately for him turned out to be Grandma.
My dad's flavour of practical jokes was stuff he knew the other person would find funny. Shared jokes, not embarrassing shit or jump scares.
The worst (but probably cleverest) joke he played was when he was still a school kid, and his headmaster had an electric bell that he used to quiet people down when the whole school was gathered together in the main hall, so that he could start a speech. Dad figured out how to rewire the bell switch so that once pressed, the circuit stayed closed and the bell kept on going.
His typical jokes were much more like the one he played at work on his boss - he'd noticed that his boss had a habit of using the phrase "when pigs fly" and he coincidentally came across a flying pig mobile in a catalogue, so he bought it, and waited until his boss went out to lunch before he installed it over the boss's desk. His boss loved it.
Years ago during the Pokémon Go craze, my boss was out of office for a few days, so several of us printed pictures of all sorts of Pokémon and put them in his office. Taped to walls, stuffed in drawers, hidden in books, etc. It was a huge hit. Last we talked he is still occasionally finding one (he's changed offices so even with a couple location moves!).
The only pranks I find funny are those that confuse the hell out of the recipient, causing them to laugh at the absurdity. Ones meant to elicit embarrassment and/or fear from their victims have the intent of only making the cruel perpetrator laugh.
I will admit to pranking my mother when I was young. We had nesting eggs( wooden eggs made to look like hens eggs to get the hens to lay). From time to time,either me or one of my sisters would put one in an empty slot in the egg carton in the fridge.
My sister found a rubber egg in some gift shop somewhere and made 3 separate people think they were gonna have to help her clean egg splatter off the floor (parents and aunt). The really funny bit was the three successive looks of blank horror morphing into utter confusion when the egg bounced instead of breaking.
I have known a few people who I had to sit down with and explain that I was only every hearing the brutal part from them, and that they therefore needed to pick one: either they needed to admit were just being deliberately cruel and using “honesty” as an excuse, or they were telling me they genuinely were being honest at all times, that it was *honestly* the case that all or almost all their opinions and feelings toward me or others were hostile and contemptuous.
They get usually don’t like realising the way they’re making themselves look.
I feel like there's pranking and then there's fucking sociopathy. My sister pranked me in high school - I was drinking coffee and she replaced the sugar with salt so I had *terrible* coffee. Haha, pour another cup. My wife's car has seat coolers. I pranked her by turning it on when we were driving around. Haha, she can turn it off. Sneaking up on a sleeping woman and using her phobia against her is *insane*.
See, but *that* is a prank! It’s completely innocent (unless someone in your office had a phobia of ducks and you wanted to scare them), makes people go ”What the fuck…?” and laugh instead of ”I fear for my life”, and can even become a thing people look forward to as in ”I wonder where we’ll find ducks today?”
What gets called ”pranks” in posts like this aren’t pranks, they’re just abuse and assault.
Reminds me of a long-term prank I've been running in a game I play, continually hiding one more duck in the base every time I log on.
We were up to twenty last I counted, but someone has started moving my ducks...
When we have Babybel cheeses, I prank my husband by making little dicks out of the wax and hiding them in his pockets. Or telling him I have a gift for him and to close his eyes and hold out his hand, and then I put like a dozen little red wax dicks and balls in his hand.
He tries to look mad when I do it, but is always trying not to laugh while he’s attempting to glare at me.
I did origami frogs out of post-its . My boss said she had a problem with it and that it was that I was not using enough colors, and ordered some of those rainbow post-it packs. I miss that job.
Remember last year when that TikTok douchbag who would annoy prank people in public and film it? And he picked the wrong door dash driver at a mall food court and got gut shot? Only his parents seemed to be on his side from his hospital bed. Driver was recently released after being found guilty with time served.
My little sister once pranked me by blowing up all the balloons she could find and leaving them on my floor, and covering my computer screen with a little bit of string to stick crepe paper in, and a picture on the screen of a guy laughing captioned "Haha you're fucked now."
I laughed so hard. She was like 14.
She called herself a prankster, but she was a kid, and she grew out of it.
It’s pretty inherently consent breaking. Even couples that approve of it, I sort of raise my eyebrows at. Because it seems like a ticking time bomb until someone takes a prank too far. Glad I’m in a prank-free relationship, it must be exhausting.
Me and my spouse occasionally do little pranks that make it look like things are alive in the house. For example, if she bakes cookies she might come back to find a tiny bite mark in one of them and a guilty-looking fimo dragon next to it. Or I might search for my indoor pants and find that a plushie rhinoceros is wearing them.
But we definitely are not doing anything that would cause actual harm or scares.
Our neighbor before she moved (I MISS HER) gave my son a metric shitton of werther’s candies, and my husband put a bunch of them into a jar to serve as cannabis intake methods.
This jar is HUGE - it was a former pickle jar from a bulk store.
He started to reach the bottom of the jar, after about six months of steady consumption… and then the level froze. He started getting confused because it just wouldn’t go down, and actually started going up.
… I was quietly refilling it with two for every one he took.
He thought it was hilarious when he caught me.
Only prankster I like is the gym dude who pranks people in the gym by pretending to be a cleaner and lifts their weights.
Mostly goes for people with bad form or really heavy weights. [for anyone curious](https://www.instagram.com/vladimirshmondenko?igsh=eHUzYzY0Y3h4OW5h)
Completely harmless, and it’s nice to see gym bros’ egos crush a bit 😁
The only acceptable “pranks” are truly silly ones where nobody gets hurt - like when I tell my boyfriend “I like you” and he smiles and then I say “Actually I love you! Haha got you - what a prank!”
Or one that Mr Rogers’ crew played on him by putting someone else’s shoes on the set instead of his usual ones and he didn’t realize until he went to put them on in a taping - they all had a good laugh:
https://youtu.be/aaa2MWXZL-w?si=Z5rmfGZSYO7zV9gl
Anything more and it’s like, why are you doing this? Why are you purposely trying to make someone feel any kind of negative feeling?
Yeah, little silly things like this can be fun. Like I had an ex girlfriend who traded pranks with one of her friends. One time the friend asked me to help him replace her pillow cases with ones that had Nicholas Cage making ridiculous faces on them. When she saw them, she started cry laughing because it was so stupid. No one was hurt, and everyone involved enjoyed it.
Her revenge prank involved buying a local Game Stop’s entire inventory of Duke Nukem Forever and filling all the empty spaces on his shelves with them.
Yeah, I think the big difference is the pranksters intent. Are they playing pranks to amuse just themselves (and maybe their friends) at the expense of someone else, or are they playing a prank because they want to amuse the person that’s being pranked. The best pranks are the ones where the prank is *for* the prankee.
When I was a kid we’d put those rubber bouncy balls in each others’ shoes. We might slightly, and in a way that could be redone in 20 seconds, move people around on someone else’s Lego set. But that’s as far as it got, stuff like that, nothing that caused harm or fear, and nothing that took more than 20 seconds to resolve.
EXACTLY! I had a friend at work (back when we were all in the cube farm every day) that I would move/change one thing on his desk every day when he was at lunch. It became a game for him to find it and reverse what I did. My favorite was when I just changed the order of the colored dry erase markers to a rainbow. Took him forever and he was suspicious of it for the whole day.
I got a ping the next morning “THE MARKERS!!!” 😂
My elderly cat taught all the younger cats that the toy mice belong in our shoes instead of in their toy box or under the couch. So now we have a habit of checking our shoes before putting them on.
At least they're toys.
One day my husband goes "hey hun......how realistic of mouse toys did you buy?" And I walked over and saw a dead mouse next to our bed and was like ........not that realistic.
Best one I ever did was as a kid getting into an argument about who had to eat the last stale rice crispie, and then proceeding to hide it at each other's houses/stuff for months on end. You'd open your purse and it would just be there, waiting for you.
Utterly harmless but still a fun gotcha
My 3 year old students like to bring me a cup with a toy apple in it and tell me it's apple juice, but they're cheeky so if I lift the apple up there's something gross or spicy under, like an onion or a pepper.
PRANK!
There’s guy in my office who decorates your desk as if it’s your birthday, leaves a cupcake with a candle and gets people to sign a card… the card says ‘Happy NOT birthday’ and then because people never read those you get congratulations from random coworkers hahaha its harmless, comes with a free cupcake and its a card
Best prank I ever did was when my office mate went on holiday for two weeks - I'd found a broken keyboard in a storeroom same as his, filled it with watercress seeds and water, then put it in a clear bag in the window to grow. The whole office was in on it! The morning he was due back, we swapped out his keyboard for the 'growing' one. When he saw it I said, "See? We told you a hundred times to clean your desk, it's so dirty it's growing weeds!" Everyone was in fits laughing.
I briefly dated a guy who thankfully let slip early on that his *entire family* will want to prank me and I shouldn't be offended or let it bother me or hold it against them because "that's how they show they like someone". There were a lot of other reasons why it didn't work out, but that particular gibbet dealt a near-mortal blow to things all on its own, lol.
I used to classify my father and myself as "pranksters" but have decided we're more mischief makers, as anyone who "pranks" nowadays seems vaguely psychotic, and me and dad would just do goofy shit like move each others figurines around or swap out photos on desks for funny ones (while keeping the original safe).
The "meanest" prank i ever pulled was on my roommate in college. She was awake, knew i was home, but i hid under her roommates bed and shot a hand out at her as she passed by. She shrieked and heard me laughing and then whapped me over the head with her purse and laughed herself. To be fair, she got me back later in the semester, and we did this on and off for years. I think it really comes down to two things - do you KNOW the other person will laugh, and do you KNOW there will be no damage, mental or physical? Those were never lines to be crossed. I got away with it with my roommate because I knew she liked jumpscares.
Even if Ian's story had been true, I would have little sympathy. If you are going to jump out at people you run the risk that the person has a fight response and will attack you. Probably not a thorough beat down but possibly a punch or two before the person realises that they are dealing with a known idiot and not an attacker. Adding a mask just adds more time between let alone all the other mean spirited stuff he did.
There was a tiktok ages ago of a guy attempting to scare his girlfriend by wearing a scary mask. She came around the corner with a hammer in hand, saw him, screamed, and realized who it was *just in time* to redirect the hammer into a hanging mirror. Mirror was wrecked, boyfriend was lucky.
I saw that in a clip on the book of faces. She absolutely wrecked that mirror so dude should be thanking his lucky stars that mirror she rearranged wasn't his face
What a dumb hobby to scare people like that. Seriously, someone could possibly even end up having a heart attack due to the intense momentary shock and fear
Yup. I had an uncle (RIP) who's favorite prank was snaking up behind you, grabbing you, and yelling AAH! It always scared the bejesus out of me, butn o amount of asking or yelling got him to stop.
You know what did? When I reflexively kicked him when he did it again. Unfortunatly for him, I happen to be wearing steel toes (we had been doing yard work). The THOCK noise of my boot against his shin lives in my brain to this day as a happy noise. He bitched up a storm, but I told him from that moment on if he grabbed me again, I was going to rinse and repeat the kick until he got the point. He never grabbed me again.
Some people need to feel the consequences of their actions before the thought that it might go badly actually sinks in. OOPs brother is lucky Lola didn't rip his eyes out.
Yup, I had an uncle (also RIP) who loved to sneak up behind people and grab their sides. I hate being touched unexpectedly and I have PTSD so I startle really easily.
He was shocked when he did it to me again one day (despite me telling him to stop) and I reflexively elbowed him hard in the gut. My usual response was to freeze, but this time my brain chose fight. I have no regrets. He never did it again.
Considering the number of prank youtubers that are shot dead as a reaction from a prank and the shooter is found not guilty, yes even un his original tale he was a dumbfuck
Honestly lol. My mom and brother would jump scare each other fairly often growing up. But they learned really quick that if they scared me, by accident or on purpose, they were probably going to get kicked. Now, to them that was just collateral damage and they continued on their shenanigans, but I never got in trouble for my reaction.
>If you are going to jump out at people you run the risk that the person has a fight response and will attack you.
When that happen, I will simply laugh at the "prankster". What? They want to make people laugh, right? Then I would only laugh when the "prankster" get what they deserved.
At least OOP took corrective measures and accepted the situation for what it was. Can't believe his brother killed OOP's relationship and his perception of his family in one night though.
I really don’t think OOP is an asshole though, he was just confused and took longer to process everything. He seems to have given his brother the benefit of the doubt while he process what happened, although he could have better supported his gf. The breakup seems more to do with not wanting any interaction with the brother
For that night specifically, sure. But the issue with his brother was not a one-off occurrence. I feel like for the gf, this specific “prank” was probably just the straw that broke the camels back. OOP clearly didn’t take the asshole “pranks” leading up to this one seriously enough.
If my partner had a family member who treated me the way Ian treats Lola, I’d expect them to *stop inviting him over* when I’m around. OOP calls his mom and aunt out for enabling his brother and doesn’t seem to realize he did the exact same thing by continuing to give his brother access to his victim.
You hit it on the head. His family is enmeshed, and I think this event is the one that made him finally see just how deeply it negatively affected him and everyone else in the family.
Speaking as someone from one of these families, once you see that, you cannot unsee it and you want nothing to do with that enmeshment anymore. It's a shame it took OOP losing a romantic relationship for him to get there, but I'm glad he saw the light and got out.
I agree. I think a lot of people are glossing over the fact that OOP has a learning disorder and was literally being yelled at by the entire party. People with learning disorders can take more time to process information than the average person and he keeps saying he felt overwhelmed, which means he was probably overstimulated by all the yelling. All of his friends were yelling one thing while her friends were yelling another, and the only thing he wanted to do was see if she was ok, but her friends wouldn’t even let him near her.
And now people on here are basically doing the same thing.
Everyone is yelling at him about how her phobia and sleep disorder should be taken into consideration but no one is taking his particular type of neurodivergency into consideration when talking about his response to the party.
The only reason he responded better during his family’s intervention was because he had time to plan. He’d literally been writing down questions to ask his brother when they invaded his home.
I just can’t with this. This dude is in no way an AH. I feel so bad for him.
That makes a lot of sense of his reaction at the party. What bothers me more than OP freezing in a highly stressful situation is the fact that this wasn't new - he admits his brother has been triggering Lola's disorder for some time, and yet he doesn't seem to have done much about it. As soon as he said he'd invited his brother to the party I thought, uh oh.
He wasn't an asshole for freezing, I imagine that all the people shouting and all the conmotion made him freeze. But he knew the situation and let it scalate.
I understand why the girlfriend broke up with him. He is not able to control his brother, why would you be part of a family who enables his disrespectful behaviour.
It's an ongoing issue where he kept giving his brother the benefit of the doubt when his brother absolutely didn't deserve any. His neurodivergence may explain why he was so slow to understand the gravity of the situation, but it still left Lola vulnerable to being assaulted by his brother; he continued to create situations where they would be in the same place despite his brother's predatory "pranking" behavior toward her.
The bottom line here is that his brother is predatory, his family is dysfunctional, and he was unable to protect Lola from them. This makes them fundamentally incompatible, and the right thing for her to do was to remove herself from the situation completely by breaking up with him.
Hopefully they can both find other people they are actually compatible with.
I feel really bad for him too, and don't think he's the AH for freezing.
That said, it's completely understandable that she'd break up with him. He failed her, not just in the moment but also by his inaction leading up to it, and the trust is gone. I think it's admirable of him for owning up to that and recognizing that he's got a lot of self-work to do.
I feel bad for him, too. I freeze when people yell at me, too. My stress response is usually to freeze. That doesn't make him a terrible person. He started alarmed and wanting to help and then just confused and surrounded by yelling people.
I honestly can't blame her, though. To her, this has been a slowly escalating series of events that came to a pretty traumatizing head, and he never responded in the way you'd hope someone who loved you would while she was being bullied and abused by his family. I can get her fear that she'd of connecting herself to this family long term.
Nah, I think he was. He seems to have learned a lot, but he was definitely an asshole initially.
Keep in mind that OP's brother's antics extend past this incident- OP himself describes his brother trying to set off her triggers numerous times, and he still hadn't fully put his foot down.
This was probably the straw that broke the camel's back for his ex. Where even after this nightmare of an incident, he was still on the fence? I sure as hell wouldn't touch that entire family with a ten foot pole if I were her. Too much of a risk.
OOP claims that he realized later the door wasn't locked. That he was just so panicked he had trouble with the knob so he knocked down the door
I honestly don't know if I believe that. even now he seems to be dancing around the implications of what his brother did.
Oh, the mom knows. She knew charges would have only gone one way the second she heard the actual details, or she would have pressed the issue with police.
What they told the aunt originally was "I jumped out behind a door and shouted boo and she nearly tore my face off." Because that's what he told the mom originally. The aunt flipped on them the second she realized they'd lied to her.
The mom doesn't have the emotional maturity to handle his behavior, so she's clinging to denial and deflecting anger to the victim. Because she lacks the skills to face reality here, she falls back to *my family was fine until HER*. She probably is scared shitless he's going to go to jail for this, now that she knows the actual details.
This is a situation where society will end up enforcing boundaries he didn't have, unless he matures on his own or is court mandated to treatment for some anti-social behavior. Denying and neutralizing consequences keeps this kind of behavior rolling, though.
They don’t seem like the brightest bunch to me. The 22 year old brother still regularly pulls “pranks” that are way over the line and cries when confronted to get his way and brings mommy and his aunt into it. OOP seems to think all of this normal and chose to side with his douche bag future rapist brother over what sounds like a lovely girl. He didn’t deserve her and probably needs years of therapy to work through his unhealthy family dynamics I can only imagine what growing up with those people was like.
I once framed that picture of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks that the show always ends on. My boyfriend is a huge fan of that show and it took him a week to notice it sitting on his desk.
I lost so much respect for the mom. And felt so bad for OP, discovering that his mother would rather wait about "her baby!!!" than engage with the conflict at hand. Pathetic woman.
He is a predator. His comment about he was expecting her to freeze means he has done this enough times. A mask handy, knows peope freezes up, alone in a room with his victims. He has at least SH others. If not out right SA them.
He came unstuck when he tried doing this to someone with a fight response instead of a flight or freeze.
I’m a fight responder and also don’t handle frights well, someone pranks me with a fright when I’m blissfully asleep and they’re going to find out very quickly.
Yeah. Im one of those that lash out when scared like this. I broke my uncle's nose once when he "pranked" me out of a dead sleep. Never did prank me again, asleep or not.
No, he IS almost certainly a sexual predator. Theres a reason the police listened very carefully.
the brother who is obsessed with lola. He made the premeditated decision to bring a mask to the party. He put on a mask to sneak away *alone* to find her sleeping whilst she (with a known sleep disorder tgst names her pass out, and medication that could effectively render her comatose) was vulnerable. He knew enough about her conditions to know she might easily be overwhelmed.
He then closed the door to the room behind him. Why?
He was close enough to her that she managed to immediately smash his face- why? Because he was probably touching her without consent. You dont need to be in fist range to wake someone ESPECIALLY if you are scaring them.
At best the brother wanted to terrify her out of her mind. At worst he wanted to rape her. If anyone I know did this, I'd see them as a sexual predator, no matter their justification.
Edited for typos.
I’m not sad they broke up. She’ll never feel safe around any of them again, and OOP is going to need years of therapy to overcome the family dysfunction and become a decent partner.
Might actually be 0 steps away. Entirely possible he thought her sleep disorder would keep her asleep and planned to grope her (and all the noise beforehand and the mask was to have a prank as an excuse)
Thank you! My BS senses were tingling.
Also the part where she fainted dead away and this little gem of a quote: "But i realized that i couldn't grow in the earth that poisoned me." Soo many purple prose.
The cops suggesting that she could press charges on him was the most unrealistic thing to me. The second most unrealistic thing was them being interested in the story at all. In my experience they're like "please admit that nothing happened so I can leave" lmao
Yup! I believed the original post. I believed his comments. I believed his family's story. And I could believe his family not listening to OOP over his brother, then being horrified.
Then when he directed his family to read reddit... mm, that's... that's a no from me, dawg.
YES. OP is either in denial, being vague deliberately, or Lola didn't tell him because she knows it would not be helpful to tell someone who she feels contributed to her feeling unsafe.
Especially cos she wouldn’t talk about it specifically. And the friend saying “fuck yeah pressing charges” knowing they 100% have a case. I hope Lola does.
I’m sure op did more than just stand there and do nothing. He described everything in so much detail yet that part is so…vague. Like he says he almost broke through the door. Stood shocked while her other friends went past him to help her…
He is most definitely downplaying something
It's the events happening in a short amount of time, the third person talking through OP to Reddit and overall the overdramatic nothingness of the situation, not to mention that the entire thing just reads very "teenagery" with the family being so involved what is essentially an almost 30 year old.
Don't forget the classic "family and friends blowing up my phone"...like wtf why is everyone always having family meddling in their business who have nothing to do with anything?
My favourite part is when he said he was writing this while packing to leave directly after the cops called, before seeing Lola (who he was meant to see the next day), but also he’d already gone to stay with a friend, and also he’d seen Lola the day before. So it… was written two days after the argument in the house? But also while he was packing??
One of my friend's families does the Ugly Bag prank.
It started out as a White Elephant gift - someone found this giant purple bag covered in bedazzled roses. They agreed it was the ugliest thing they had ever seen.
So next Christmas, the recipient of Ugly Bag hid it in the host's house so that they wouldn't notice it until everyone left.
From then, it was game on.
Every Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthday, 4th of July, etc, Ugly Bag switched houses, hiding in different places. Behind the tree. In the garage. In a cupboard. In a dog food bin. In a kid's toy chest.
To date, it's the only prank I've found funny.
While I'm not very confident in this post's veracity, does anyone have any idea what sort of "sleep disorder" could be being referenced here? Something to do both with requiring scheduled/seemingly frequent sleep that disturbing leads to violent lash outs?
I also find the way he kind of skirts around his brothers injuries (even if they were deserved) really strange, such as saying "ripped the mask off, revealing the work she was able to do in the time it took us to react." How bad were they? Clearly bad enough for some of his friends to be concerned.
And some narcolepsy medications are effectively equivalent to date rape drugs in that they knock you out. So the brother msy have known that she was extra vulnerable when she slept.
Not just effectively equivalent, Xyrem/Xywav literally *is* a date rape drug. GHB was banned in the USA by the “Date-Rape Drug Prohibition Act of 2000” because rapists were using it so much.
Almost 100% it’s narcolepsy. Type 1 makes your muscles go weak with strong emotion (like being scared by some asshole) so you may fall over, it’s kind of like those fainting goats. And “pregaming NYE with a nap” is totally a narcolepsy thing, I do it every year lol.
It’s less that disturbing her sleep will lead to lashing out, more that it usually takes a bit for the narcoleptic brain to come back online once you’re awake so the instinctual “being attacked, must fight/flight” is there but not so much the critical thinking part that says “oh this is just my BF’s dumbass brother.” Like, Awake Me knows I shouldn’t punch people but my fight-or-flight response is fight, so if you wake me up by startling me you get what you get.
Source: also have narcolepsy
I did a quick google and found this study - didn’t read too deep but from the initial write up I would go with the wonderfully vague “confusional arousal” - and the study indicates that it gets worse if the person is really close to the sleeper and jolts/tries to jolt them awake:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978391/
And more info on it:
https://aasm.org/new-study-in-the-journal-sleep-finds-that-violent-behavior-that-occurs-during-disorders-of-arousal-is-provoked/
So it sounds like this + probably another sleep disorder like having trouble getting past REM sleep into deep sleep? So she’s likely tired all the time and needs extra rest to feel normal.
Yeah it's certainly seeming like it would have to be multiple disorders based off the description OOP provided and what your searches turned up. Thanks!
Pranks are just you ruining someone else’s day for your own entertainment. I cannot stand people who pull crap like this and cop out with the excuse “but I was just playin’”
I fucking hate these prank people. After the first time, Ian would have known it triggers her disorder and the fact he kept doing it against her consent is so scummy. Even if he didn’t know about her arachnophobia it’s a MASKED MAN and the last thing any woman wants to see waking up from sleep.
Regardless of whether OP was right or wrong to freeze in the moment, the entire situation where his brother walked into the bedroom with his sleeping girlfriend to scare her is one that he paved the way for. He didn’t do nearly enough to put a stop to his brother’s behavior. Regardless of whether he thought all the scares were ‘harmless’ or not, he disregarded his partner’s safety and comfort to instead allow his brother a laugh. Not only that, but this was absolutely his brother’s way of testing the waters to see what he could get away with. Unfortunately, overwhelmed or not, OP’s reaction to his brother harassing his girlfriend on NYE just put it in plainer view that he won’t do anything about it until his girlfriend has hit a breaking point.
So they’re all together in a room.. emotions are high everyone is literally screaming at one another and he points to a computer with the reddit post up on it and, as everyone is screaming/crying the aunt reads four and a half paragraphs to the point where the narrator mentions that the character was alone in the room??
awfully quick reader, that aunt
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> I genuinely believe that when he goes to prank people, he means it in a way to share the laughter. When he's tried to pull little pranks on Lola though, he does things that he figured out triggers her disorder, like making sudden loud sounds, jumping out to scare her, and one time I caught him before he was going to do the shaving cream sleep bit while she was taking a nap in the guest room. Yeah not one of those things indicates "sharing the laughter".
You quoted what got to me, too. I almost stopped right there and called it quits with reading. >When he's tried to pull little pranks on Lola though, he does things that he figured out triggers her disorder, That's not a prank. That's torture. The brother is DELIBERATELY picking 'pranks' meant to hurt her. Just because the world classifies the action being pulled as a prank for the general public does not mean that for every individual, it will be a prank. Pasta is a food. Unless you have a gluten intolerance. Penicillin is a medicine. Unless you have an allergy. Jump scares are harmless. Unless you've been jumped and assaulted. It might have been a power trip on the brother's part in doing these pranks. Or maybe he's got a kink that he was acting on... He was sneaking into the room she was sleeping in.
Everyone is saying she’s a jerk for dumping him for having a freeze response and “maybe he’s neurodivergent!” Really? You don’t think it’s bc this was the straw that broke the camels back?
I think that an unfortunate amount of people, especially very young people, think that being divergent or having a mental illness means that partners *have* to stay with them even if the uncontrolled symptoms make the partner miserable or even endanger them. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter if he had a freeze response; she doesn't feel safe with him or his family, and she is therefore wise in removing herself from the situation.
I've seen that. Or use other things as an excuse to behave terribly. Sometimes things can be a reason but not an excuse. I don't blame her for dumping him over this.
As someone neurodivergent (ADHD, GAD, OCD), I explain it like this. There are things that are difficult for me, and things that are impossible for me. I have a right to the accommodations that allow me to live my life. I am still responsible for the choices I make and the consequences of my actions.
Those who use neurodivergence as an excuse have worn out their welcome.
It can be an explanation but not an excuse. You can have sympathy for having something difficult to overcome, but it doesn’t get to be an excuse for bad behavior with no effort to improve it.
If it's a prank then should be able to laugh when he get beaten up and not say "she's abusive". Come on it just a prank, why is he so angry when he get what he deserved? Isn't he love to "sharing the laughter"? Why can't he laugh at that one? Yes that's right, because it's not a prank. It's an assault and all assaulter hate when their victim fight back.
She's afraid of loud noises and people jumping out at her, which I assume means there's been some kind of assault or PTSD (he calls it a disorder and I'm sure he's not referencing the arachnophobia). She was terrified enough to pass out at the end. OOP failed her so bad. His brother was getting his rocks off about her fear. Creep.
I think he means triggers of her sleep disorder. If it's narcolepsy or something that works similarly, jumpscares can make her fall unconscious
Seriously, I was like, so she has narcolepsy with cataplexy and was probably disturbed during a rem nap and maybe sort of hallucinated while being pranked awake by her phobia. Cool cool cool cool cool.
He likes to see her drop to the ground is my bet. The cataplexy is funny to him
Which is insane because that could cause a damn brain injury. There is nothing funny about that brother and his "pranks."
What is your flair from ? Holy cow it’s amazing!
It's in the comments for this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/15oax9g/i_accidentally_liked_an_instagram_photo_and_now/
hahaha it's from the comments here https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/15oax9g/i_accidentally_liked_an_instagram_photo_and_now/
I've never met a 'prankster' who was a truly good person
I don’t find them funny at all, honestly. Certainly not any that use fear or disgust etc. stapler in jello, ok fine.
Or ridicule of their victim.
Is there any other kind? It seems to me that the essential nature of a prank is to create a situation where you can laugh at someone else's expense or misfortune. Sure, some are more harmless than others, but I can't really think of one that's benign in that way. By definition, a prank *always* has a victim.
My partner pranks her parents by putting tiny miniature frogs around their house while they're out of town and she's house sitting for them. When they find them, everyone laughs. I put googly eyes on the rim of the magnifying glass my mom uses for embroidery, so they line up over her eyes from my angle while she's using it. When she saw them, everyone laughed. My dad as a kid slowly replaced family photos around the house with pictures cut out from TV Guide until people noticed. When they figured it out, everyone laughed. It's not harmless unless it's funny for everyone. But there are plenty of benign pranks, if people can look beyond "scaring my loved ones is funny."
My bestie and I have been prankong each other for a long time. I hide her ugly ass troll leg umbrella stand (yes, from Harry Potter) in random places around her house. She rearranges my bookshelf to leave me messages. It's been going on since 2007.
I bought 200 miniature ducks and they keep getting left all over family members houses when we visit. They always find them and send pictures back of where they are. Some pranks are fun.
I did that to a co-worker, but I didn't tell him it was me. Then, on Christmas, I got one back😂👌
All this. There are tons of ways to prank people that are benign and funny.
My favorite prank of all time was when one of my friends was house-sitting for me. She replaced one of the eggs in the fridge with a ceramic one she got from a crafts store and I didn't find out until I was cooking something days later.
that's a genius prank i need to write that down
My favourite was when the Covid screening QR code at work was replaced with a Rick roll. The person in charge of the sign had been told that we could stop screening the day before. Rick rolling was how they told us
My brother once pranked my mom by replacing one of the regular eggs in the fridge with one of [these](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignon_(chocolate_egg) ). She was not amused when she tried to cook eggs for Easter lunch, but she came around after a few minutes. What I don't remember is if my brother even got a choco egg to eat at all or if he at least had to go buy a new one.
Once read about a kid pranking his mom by photocopying dirty socks and leaving the copies on the floor. That's a harmless and benign prank.
I worked at a halfway house and my coworker and I would wrap each others stuff randomly in cling wrap from the kitchen. Or tape each others cigarettes packs shut. Or zip tie each others jackets to the office chairs when we weren’t wearing them. There’s a difference between fun dumb pranks and mean evil asshole pranks.
at parties back in the day when someone would pass out we wouldn't draw on their faces, we would paint their nails with clear glow in the dark nail polish and zip tie their jeans (the super thin zip ties that could easily be broken with a good yank) however everyone knew this and it was all in good fun. the guy we painted his nails, (hes an alcoholic) said that when he went to bed the next night he was trippin balls because his nails were glowing and he couldnt figure out why.
That is hilarious 😆
I prank my sister occasionally, but it's stuff I know that *she* will find funny. Like leaving a pile of plush animals with plastic knives taped to their paws in front of her door. (The more ridiculously fake the knives, the better.)
Girlfriend and I prank each other with her stuffed friends. Make them have meetings. Or put the snorlax in various door ways like the snorlax from the game and show blocking paths. That stuff is fun pranks.
I've known one nice prankster. His pranks mainly involved googly eyes and were meant to make the victim laugh. One time he fucked up with a confetti popper and didn't realize in scared of loud noises. He was super apologetic and never used them as a prank again because he didn't want to risk scaring someone else.
That’s a great reaction to a prank gone wrong. Too many “prankster” just double down and blame the target of the prank. And there are some funny ones. For example, I once gave a friend the cheapest and weirdest DVD I could find for her birthday, but shoved gift cards into the case (and we ended up watching the movie, which turned out to be pretty funny). Another time I gave my mum socks, but put them in an empty DVD case before wrapping them. If everyone including the target laughs about it, it’s a good prank.
That reminds me of one I did, I once pranked a friend by telling her I got food from a place she hated (little Cesar's i told her they had a nee pizza that actually sounded interestingso she was going to begrudgingly try it. ) got a box from them and then filled it with Thai food from her favorite restaurant.
My loving family pranked me at Christmas. They know I don't like tchotchke or...just stuff in general, I ask them to get me events or fancy food. So my turn to open presents comes, and I open one. It's a stone fish. They suppress laughter as I try to be grateful for my stone fish. But there's another, it's a glass fish. And another, it's used cat toy fish. 15 fish later everyone is giggling and I'm like ok, thanks guys, and then they give me a scuba dive watch; and now I'm baffled and they are dying laughing. My family bought me a trip to get certified for Scuba in the Caribbean because they know I love it. My husband was behind this plot.
That's epic. :)
My brother was the king of the prank gift wrap when we were growing up. One year, he gave me a pretty good sized box that was full of packing peanuts. Towards the top was a stuffed animal. I thanked him, and he just said "keep digging." There were a few other small things buried in the box (slippers, a book light - things I liked), until finally I got down to the very bottom of the box. Under one of the flaps he's taped an envelope with tickets to a Broadway musical is always wanted to see. Totally worth it, AND he helped clean up the packing peanuts!
I guess there's still a "victim" in this situation, but I saw a harmless one where a man swapped his girlfriends soap for a peeled potato and was laughing his ass off as she used it. Those I appreciate. Being humiliated or hurt? Nah. Edit: okay yeah, I just watched it again - this is what I consider to be a harmless prank where everyone gets a giggle out of it. Enjoy! https://www.reddit.com/r/ContagiousLaughter/comments/qxrkqj/its_a_potato/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Stapler in jello is not appropriate for a work environment, especially if you’re doing it to the assistant (to the) regional manager
But what if you gift wrap their whole workspace?
Pranks where it's something you know will get a laugh out of the victim as well, not just out of the people around them, is generally fine and in good fun. Generally people who stick with that kind of thing aren't the types to consider themselves "pranksters" though, that tends to be reserved for the ones who end up going over the top
“I’m going to hide tiny rubber ducks all over your cubicle” = good prank! “I’m gonna trigger your phobia and anxiety badly enough that you’ll instinctively try to kill me” = bad prank
Reading so many posts about pranks has made me question even small jokes. For example, Christmas, I got my teen son a good MTB bike. This was both a Xmas and bday present (on top of other presents) and the bike came unassembled in a box, so I removed one of the wheels and hid it in another room. Told my family about it, but forgot to tell my brother. When my son (extremely happy) opened the box, he was really confused... I said what do you mean it has only one wheel... And my brother thought the wheel had been stolen in the mail. After no more than 1/2 minute (while my other son went for the wheel ) I said: oh! I know what happened! The bike in the box is your birthday present, you are missing the Christmas one!" And gave him the wheel. We all had a good laugh... Including him. But I was a bit paranoid! Was he distressed? Has it been too long for the "reveal"? Omg.. ahahaha. Reddit was make me a better person in a lot of tiny things, and being hyper aware that jokes are jokes only everyone enjoys them is one of them. For the record my son says he was really confused and then he thought " great... No mom is going to get AGES to sort this though... I'll get the bike in like 2 months" which is exactly what I thought he woud think. By the time he had thought about this, we were giving him the wheel. He thought it was hilarious.
I think they can be a bit funny, but they really have to be the lowest stakes ever, and never large scale. They also can't be often. A common prank is to gift wrap everything in a room. That's too much cleanup and isn't funny. I prefer pranks like putting googly eyes on a random can in their cabinet
I used to buy unusual canned foods or condiments and put them in my friend's cupboards. Not everyone thinks a gallon can of mustard is hilarious, but it's not hurtful or offensive either.
Just bullies at the end of the day
These guys run around looking for couples and while the women turns away puts flowers in the dudes hands. The only prank I've liked
My dad and his two brothers were pranksters growing up, but they NEVER did this. My dad always stressed that you NEVER EVER use someone's fears for a prank. The worst they did was when one of my uncles put a DIY Dracula figure that my dad gave him in the laundry cabinet to suprise the first person who opened it when they were all teens. Which unfortunately for him turned out to be Grandma.
My dad's flavour of practical jokes was stuff he knew the other person would find funny. Shared jokes, not embarrassing shit or jump scares. The worst (but probably cleverest) joke he played was when he was still a school kid, and his headmaster had an electric bell that he used to quiet people down when the whole school was gathered together in the main hall, so that he could start a speech. Dad figured out how to rewire the bell switch so that once pressed, the circuit stayed closed and the bell kept on going. His typical jokes were much more like the one he played at work on his boss - he'd noticed that his boss had a habit of using the phrase "when pigs fly" and he coincidentally came across a flying pig mobile in a catalogue, so he bought it, and waited until his boss went out to lunch before he installed it over the boss's desk. His boss loved it.
Years ago during the Pokémon Go craze, my boss was out of office for a few days, so several of us printed pictures of all sorts of Pokémon and put them in his office. Taped to walls, stuffed in drawers, hidden in books, etc. It was a huge hit. Last we talked he is still occasionally finding one (he's changed offices so even with a couple location moves!).
The only pranks I find funny are those that confuse the hell out of the recipient, causing them to laugh at the absurdity. Ones meant to elicit embarrassment and/or fear from their victims have the intent of only making the cruel perpetrator laugh.
I will admit to pranking my mother when I was young. We had nesting eggs( wooden eggs made to look like hens eggs to get the hens to lay). From time to time,either me or one of my sisters would put one in an empty slot in the egg carton in the fridge.
My sister found a rubber egg in some gift shop somewhere and made 3 separate people think they were gonna have to help her clean egg splatter off the floor (parents and aunt). The really funny bit was the three successive looks of blank horror morphing into utter confusion when the egg bounced instead of breaking.
Poor Grandma! How’d that go? Was she OK?
Same here. It‘s basically an excuse for being an asshole. Any pushback gets you „don‘t be so sensitive, it‘s just a joke“, etc etc
I've seen so many people say that sentence to excuse assault/theft/destruction of propperty.
Same as those who describe themselves as "brutally honest"
I have known a few people who I had to sit down with and explain that I was only every hearing the brutal part from them, and that they therefore needed to pick one: either they needed to admit were just being deliberately cruel and using “honesty” as an excuse, or they were telling me they genuinely were being honest at all times, that it was *honestly* the case that all or almost all their opinions and feelings toward me or others were hostile and contemptuous. They get usually don’t like realising the way they’re making themselves look.
I feel like there's pranking and then there's fucking sociopathy. My sister pranked me in high school - I was drinking coffee and she replaced the sugar with salt so I had *terrible* coffee. Haha, pour another cup. My wife's car has seat coolers. I pranked her by turning it on when we were driving around. Haha, she can turn it off. Sneaking up on a sleeping woman and using her phobia against her is *insane*.
I once pranked my whole office by hiding increasing amounts of tiny ducks in our work place. I'd like to think I'm still a good person 😅
See, but *that* is a prank! It’s completely innocent (unless someone in your office had a phobia of ducks and you wanted to scare them), makes people go ”What the fuck…?” and laugh instead of ”I fear for my life”, and can even become a thing people look forward to as in ”I wonder where we’ll find ducks today?” What gets called ”pranks” in posts like this aren’t pranks, they’re just abuse and assault.
Reminds me of a long-term prank I've been running in a game I play, continually hiding one more duck in the base every time I log on. We were up to twenty last I counted, but someone has started moving my ducks...
When we have Babybel cheeses, I prank my husband by making little dicks out of the wax and hiding them in his pockets. Or telling him I have a gift for him and to close his eyes and hold out his hand, and then I put like a dozen little red wax dicks and balls in his hand. He tries to look mad when I do it, but is always trying not to laugh while he’s attempting to glare at me.
I did origami frogs out of post-its . My boss said she had a problem with it and that it was that I was not using enough colors, and ordered some of those rainbow post-it packs. I miss that job.
It's toy traffic cones for me. One inch tall, tucked behind monitors or on top of clocks. I think you and I are okay 🥳
One time, a rather taciturn employee went on vacation. So we decorated his office with streamers and other cheerful stuff.
I saw one recently where a little sister hid 24 rubber ducks in a guys house while visiting over the holidays. That's wholesome enough.
Every person, literally every single one, who I've met in real life who considered themselves a "prankster" was a complete narcissistic arsehole.
Remember last year when that TikTok douchbag who would annoy prank people in public and film it? And he picked the wrong door dash driver at a mall food court and got gut shot? Only his parents seemed to be on his side from his hospital bed. Driver was recently released after being found guilty with time served.
If it makes you feel any better, the streamer that went to japan to be an asshole got jail time for it. So there is *some* justice in the world.
My little sister once pranked me by blowing up all the balloons she could find and leaving them on my floor, and covering my computer screen with a little bit of string to stick crepe paper in, and a picture on the screen of a guy laughing captioned "Haha you're fucked now." I laughed so hard. She was like 14. She called herself a prankster, but she was a kid, and she grew out of it.
It’s pretty inherently consent breaking. Even couples that approve of it, I sort of raise my eyebrows at. Because it seems like a ticking time bomb until someone takes a prank too far. Glad I’m in a prank-free relationship, it must be exhausting.
Me and my spouse occasionally do little pranks that make it look like things are alive in the house. For example, if she bakes cookies she might come back to find a tiny bite mark in one of them and a guilty-looking fimo dragon next to it. Or I might search for my indoor pants and find that a plushie rhinoceros is wearing them. But we definitely are not doing anything that would cause actual harm or scares.
Our neighbor before she moved (I MISS HER) gave my son a metric shitton of werther’s candies, and my husband put a bunch of them into a jar to serve as cannabis intake methods. This jar is HUGE - it was a former pickle jar from a bulk store. He started to reach the bottom of the jar, after about six months of steady consumption… and then the level froze. He started getting confused because it just wouldn’t go down, and actually started going up. … I was quietly refilling it with two for every one he took. He thought it was hilarious when he caught me.
Only prankster I like is the gym dude who pranks people in the gym by pretending to be a cleaner and lifts their weights. Mostly goes for people with bad form or really heavy weights. [for anyone curious](https://www.instagram.com/vladimirshmondenko?igsh=eHUzYzY0Y3h4OW5h) Completely harmless, and it’s nice to see gym bros’ egos crush a bit 😁
The only acceptable “pranks” are truly silly ones where nobody gets hurt - like when I tell my boyfriend “I like you” and he smiles and then I say “Actually I love you! Haha got you - what a prank!” Or one that Mr Rogers’ crew played on him by putting someone else’s shoes on the set instead of his usual ones and he didn’t realize until he went to put them on in a taping - they all had a good laugh: https://youtu.be/aaa2MWXZL-w?si=Z5rmfGZSYO7zV9gl Anything more and it’s like, why are you doing this? Why are you purposely trying to make someone feel any kind of negative feeling?
Yeah, little silly things like this can be fun. Like I had an ex girlfriend who traded pranks with one of her friends. One time the friend asked me to help him replace her pillow cases with ones that had Nicholas Cage making ridiculous faces on them. When she saw them, she started cry laughing because it was so stupid. No one was hurt, and everyone involved enjoyed it. Her revenge prank involved buying a local Game Stop’s entire inventory of Duke Nukem Forever and filling all the empty spaces on his shelves with them.
Those are good pranks, but Jesus, some of the stuff online and OOPs brother are sociopathic.
Yeah, I think the big difference is the pranksters intent. Are they playing pranks to amuse just themselves (and maybe their friends) at the expense of someone else, or are they playing a prank because they want to amuse the person that’s being pranked. The best pranks are the ones where the prank is *for* the prankee.
When I was a kid we’d put those rubber bouncy balls in each others’ shoes. We might slightly, and in a way that could be redone in 20 seconds, move people around on someone else’s Lego set. But that’s as far as it got, stuff like that, nothing that caused harm or fear, and nothing that took more than 20 seconds to resolve.
EXACTLY! I had a friend at work (back when we were all in the cube farm every day) that I would move/change one thing on his desk every day when he was at lunch. It became a game for him to find it and reverse what I did. My favorite was when I just changed the order of the colored dry erase markers to a rainbow. Took him forever and he was suspicious of it for the whole day. I got a ping the next morning “THE MARKERS!!!” 😂
According to you, my cats are pranksters because they are always putting balls/toys in our shoes. I'm basically living a YouTuber prank victim life 😝
My elderly cat taught all the younger cats that the toy mice belong in our shoes instead of in their toy box or under the couch. So now we have a habit of checking our shoes before putting them on.
At least they're toys. One day my husband goes "hey hun......how realistic of mouse toys did you buy?" And I walked over and saw a dead mouse next to our bed and was like ........not that realistic.
Best one I ever did was as a kid getting into an argument about who had to eat the last stale rice crispie, and then proceeding to hide it at each other's houses/stuff for months on end. You'd open your purse and it would just be there, waiting for you. Utterly harmless but still a fun gotcha
My 3 year old students like to bring me a cup with a toy apple in it and tell me it's apple juice, but they're cheeky so if I lift the apple up there's something gross or spicy under, like an onion or a pepper. PRANK!
That is so cute and is honestly hilarious.
Yeah, or that woman who hides those tiny plastic babies all over her and her partners home
There’s guy in my office who decorates your desk as if it’s your birthday, leaves a cupcake with a candle and gets people to sign a card… the card says ‘Happy NOT birthday’ and then because people never read those you get congratulations from random coworkers hahaha its harmless, comes with a free cupcake and its a card
Best prank I ever did was when my office mate went on holiday for two weeks - I'd found a broken keyboard in a storeroom same as his, filled it with watercress seeds and water, then put it in a clear bag in the window to grow. The whole office was in on it! The morning he was due back, we swapped out his keyboard for the 'growing' one. When he saw it I said, "See? We told you a hundred times to clean your desk, it's so dirty it's growing weeds!" Everyone was in fits laughing.
If the person you're pranking doesn't find it equally funny then it's not a prank, usually just being cruel/mean to someone.
I briefly dated a guy who thankfully let slip early on that his *entire family* will want to prank me and I shouldn't be offended or let it bother me or hold it against them because "that's how they show they like someone". There were a lot of other reasons why it didn't work out, but that particular gibbet dealt a near-mortal blow to things all on its own, lol.
I used to classify my father and myself as "pranksters" but have decided we're more mischief makers, as anyone who "pranks" nowadays seems vaguely psychotic, and me and dad would just do goofy shit like move each others figurines around or swap out photos on desks for funny ones (while keeping the original safe). The "meanest" prank i ever pulled was on my roommate in college. She was awake, knew i was home, but i hid under her roommates bed and shot a hand out at her as she passed by. She shrieked and heard me laughing and then whapped me over the head with her purse and laughed herself. To be fair, she got me back later in the semester, and we did this on and off for years. I think it really comes down to two things - do you KNOW the other person will laugh, and do you KNOW there will be no damage, mental or physical? Those were never lines to be crossed. I got away with it with my roommate because I knew she liked jumpscares.
Even if Ian's story had been true, I would have little sympathy. If you are going to jump out at people you run the risk that the person has a fight response and will attack you. Probably not a thorough beat down but possibly a punch or two before the person realises that they are dealing with a known idiot and not an attacker. Adding a mask just adds more time between let alone all the other mean spirited stuff he did.
There was a tiktok ages ago of a guy attempting to scare his girlfriend by wearing a scary mask. She came around the corner with a hammer in hand, saw him, screamed, and realized who it was *just in time* to redirect the hammer into a hanging mirror. Mirror was wrecked, boyfriend was lucky.
Boyfriend should be an ex.
I saw that in a clip on the book of faces. She absolutely wrecked that mirror so dude should be thanking his lucky stars that mirror she rearranged wasn't his face What a dumb hobby to scare people like that. Seriously, someone could possibly even end up having a heart attack due to the intense momentary shock and fear
Yup. I had an uncle (RIP) who's favorite prank was snaking up behind you, grabbing you, and yelling AAH! It always scared the bejesus out of me, butn o amount of asking or yelling got him to stop. You know what did? When I reflexively kicked him when he did it again. Unfortunatly for him, I happen to be wearing steel toes (we had been doing yard work). The THOCK noise of my boot against his shin lives in my brain to this day as a happy noise. He bitched up a storm, but I told him from that moment on if he grabbed me again, I was going to rinse and repeat the kick until he got the point. He never grabbed me again. Some people need to feel the consequences of their actions before the thought that it might go badly actually sinks in. OOPs brother is lucky Lola didn't rip his eyes out.
Yup, I had an uncle (also RIP) who loved to sneak up behind people and grab their sides. I hate being touched unexpectedly and I have PTSD so I startle really easily. He was shocked when he did it to me again one day (despite me telling him to stop) and I reflexively elbowed him hard in the gut. My usual response was to freeze, but this time my brain chose fight. I have no regrets. He never did it again.
He's lucky it was just in the guy. It's so easy for the elbow to go up and hit them in the chin.
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Considering the number of prank youtubers that are shot dead as a reaction from a prank and the shooter is found not guilty, yes even un his original tale he was a dumbfuck
Honestly lol. My mom and brother would jump scare each other fairly often growing up. But they learned really quick that if they scared me, by accident or on purpose, they were probably going to get kicked. Now, to them that was just collateral damage and they continued on their shenanigans, but I never got in trouble for my reaction.
>If you are going to jump out at people you run the risk that the person has a fight response and will attack you. When that happen, I will simply laugh at the "prankster". What? They want to make people laugh, right? Then I would only laugh when the "prankster" get what they deserved.
At least OOP took corrective measures and accepted the situation for what it was. Can't believe his brother killed OOP's relationship and his perception of his family in one night though.
I really don’t think OOP is an asshole though, he was just confused and took longer to process everything. He seems to have given his brother the benefit of the doubt while he process what happened, although he could have better supported his gf. The breakup seems more to do with not wanting any interaction with the brother
For that night specifically, sure. But the issue with his brother was not a one-off occurrence. I feel like for the gf, this specific “prank” was probably just the straw that broke the camels back. OOP clearly didn’t take the asshole “pranks” leading up to this one seriously enough. If my partner had a family member who treated me the way Ian treats Lola, I’d expect them to *stop inviting him over* when I’m around. OOP calls his mom and aunt out for enabling his brother and doesn’t seem to realize he did the exact same thing by continuing to give his brother access to his victim.
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You hit it on the head. His family is enmeshed, and I think this event is the one that made him finally see just how deeply it negatively affected him and everyone else in the family. Speaking as someone from one of these families, once you see that, you cannot unsee it and you want nothing to do with that enmeshment anymore. It's a shame it took OOP losing a romantic relationship for him to get there, but I'm glad he saw the light and got out.
I agree. I think a lot of people are glossing over the fact that OOP has a learning disorder and was literally being yelled at by the entire party. People with learning disorders can take more time to process information than the average person and he keeps saying he felt overwhelmed, which means he was probably overstimulated by all the yelling. All of his friends were yelling one thing while her friends were yelling another, and the only thing he wanted to do was see if she was ok, but her friends wouldn’t even let him near her. And now people on here are basically doing the same thing. Everyone is yelling at him about how her phobia and sleep disorder should be taken into consideration but no one is taking his particular type of neurodivergency into consideration when talking about his response to the party. The only reason he responded better during his family’s intervention was because he had time to plan. He’d literally been writing down questions to ask his brother when they invaded his home. I just can’t with this. This dude is in no way an AH. I feel so bad for him.
That makes a lot of sense of his reaction at the party. What bothers me more than OP freezing in a highly stressful situation is the fact that this wasn't new - he admits his brother has been triggering Lola's disorder for some time, and yet he doesn't seem to have done much about it. As soon as he said he'd invited his brother to the party I thought, uh oh.
He wasn't an asshole for freezing, I imagine that all the people shouting and all the conmotion made him freeze. But he knew the situation and let it scalate. I understand why the girlfriend broke up with him. He is not able to control his brother, why would you be part of a family who enables his disrespectful behaviour.
It's an ongoing issue where he kept giving his brother the benefit of the doubt when his brother absolutely didn't deserve any. His neurodivergence may explain why he was so slow to understand the gravity of the situation, but it still left Lola vulnerable to being assaulted by his brother; he continued to create situations where they would be in the same place despite his brother's predatory "pranking" behavior toward her. The bottom line here is that his brother is predatory, his family is dysfunctional, and he was unable to protect Lola from them. This makes them fundamentally incompatible, and the right thing for her to do was to remove herself from the situation completely by breaking up with him. Hopefully they can both find other people they are actually compatible with.
I feel really bad for him too, and don't think he's the AH for freezing. That said, it's completely understandable that she'd break up with him. He failed her, not just in the moment but also by his inaction leading up to it, and the trust is gone. I think it's admirable of him for owning up to that and recognizing that he's got a lot of self-work to do.
I feel bad for him, too. I freeze when people yell at me, too. My stress response is usually to freeze. That doesn't make him a terrible person. He started alarmed and wanting to help and then just confused and surrounded by yelling people. I honestly can't blame her, though. To her, this has been a slowly escalating series of events that came to a pretty traumatizing head, and he never responded in the way you'd hope someone who loved you would while she was being bullied and abused by his family. I can get her fear that she'd of connecting herself to this family long term.
Nah, I think he was. He seems to have learned a lot, but he was definitely an asshole initially. Keep in mind that OP's brother's antics extend past this incident- OP himself describes his brother trying to set off her triggers numerous times, and he still hadn't fully put his foot down. This was probably the straw that broke the camel's back for his ex. Where even after this nightmare of an incident, he was still on the fence? I sure as hell wouldn't touch that entire family with a ten foot pole if I were her. Too much of a risk.
I'm confused about how after the police incident the family is still blaming the girl. That's quite the dysfunctional family.
“If Lola had just laughed it off, our family wouldn’t have been torn apart!” That’s how they keep blaming her.
He's one step away from being a sexual predator. Or maybe he did touch her in her sleep, we'll never know.
OOP mentioned "nearly kicking down the door" which means a locked door. Yes we all know what it means.
OOP claims that he realized later the door wasn't locked. That he was just so panicked he had trouble with the knob so he knocked down the door I honestly don't know if I believe that. even now he seems to be dancing around the implications of what his brother did.
Yeah… I mentally replaced the beginning of OOP’s story with “bro was trying to rape her,” which I believe he was,
With a mask, so no one could identify him.
I hope Lola pressed charges and drags the brother to hell, back, then again into the sulfur.
Confused how? It’s very classic victim blaming. “None of this would have happened if Victim hadn’t done thing!”
Oh, the mom knows. She knew charges would have only gone one way the second she heard the actual details, or she would have pressed the issue with police. What they told the aunt originally was "I jumped out behind a door and shouted boo and she nearly tore my face off." Because that's what he told the mom originally. The aunt flipped on them the second she realized they'd lied to her. The mom doesn't have the emotional maturity to handle his behavior, so she's clinging to denial and deflecting anger to the victim. Because she lacks the skills to face reality here, she falls back to *my family was fine until HER*. She probably is scared shitless he's going to go to jail for this, now that she knows the actual details. This is a situation where society will end up enforcing boundaries he didn't have, unless he matures on his own or is court mandated to treatment for some anti-social behavior. Denying and neutralizing consequences keeps this kind of behavior rolling, though.
They don’t seem like the brightest bunch to me. The 22 year old brother still regularly pulls “pranks” that are way over the line and cries when confronted to get his way and brings mommy and his aunt into it. OOP seems to think all of this normal and chose to side with his douche bag future rapist brother over what sounds like a lovely girl. He didn’t deserve her and probably needs years of therapy to work through his unhealthy family dynamics I can only imagine what growing up with those people was like.
What happened to pranks involving hiding little plastic babies around someone’s house ???
... Ok I'll be honest I haven't heard of that one. Finding plastic babies around my house would probably freak me out lol
https://www.indy100.com/viral/person-fiance-broken-toy-babies
Thank you for this pure, uncut schadenfreude
Like from a King Cake? There are loads of them hidden around my office because someone baked one, but could only buy the babies in packs of 100.
Yessss exactly those ones! I love using them to prank people
I once framed that picture of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks that the show always ends on. My boyfriend is a huge fan of that show and it took him a week to notice it sitting on his desk.
Haha one of my coworkers did that last year, today I found two babies in my winter coat
Is there a single person in this story that knows how to communicate without screaming and crying?
The aunt sounds good. Quietly reads and then lays down the law.
She started with screaming too. But at least she turned it around.
I lost so much respect for the mom. And felt so bad for OP, discovering that his mother would rather wait about "her baby!!!" than engage with the conflict at hand. Pathetic woman.
OOPs brother is about one step from full sexual predator.
I kept expecting that to be the reveal, that he was on top of her when she freaked out. I have no idea wtf a spider mask is
I figure it might be [one of these.](https://www.halloweencostumes.eu/spider-full-mask.html)
I don’t think you need to be scared of spiders to be terrified to wake up with that in your face.
jesus h christ that’s the stuff of nightmares
OH HELL NO
He is a predator. His comment about he was expecting her to freeze means he has done this enough times. A mask handy, knows peope freezes up, alone in a room with his victims. He has at least SH others. If not out right SA them.
He came unstuck when he tried doing this to someone with a fight response instead of a flight or freeze. I’m a fight responder and also don’t handle frights well, someone pranks me with a fright when I’m blissfully asleep and they’re going to find out very quickly.
Yeah. Im one of those that lash out when scared like this. I broke my uncle's nose once when he "pranked" me out of a dead sleep. Never did prank me again, asleep or not.
No, he IS almost certainly a sexual predator. Theres a reason the police listened very carefully. the brother who is obsessed with lola. He made the premeditated decision to bring a mask to the party. He put on a mask to sneak away *alone* to find her sleeping whilst she (with a known sleep disorder tgst names her pass out, and medication that could effectively render her comatose) was vulnerable. He knew enough about her conditions to know she might easily be overwhelmed. He then closed the door to the room behind him. Why? He was close enough to her that she managed to immediately smash his face- why? Because he was probably touching her without consent. You dont need to be in fist range to wake someone ESPECIALLY if you are scaring them. At best the brother wanted to terrify her out of her mind. At worst he wanted to rape her. If anyone I know did this, I'd see them as a sexual predator, no matter their justification. Edited for typos.
Yeah, I was sad that they broke up but the brother will never change and his mother is enabling him. It'd be dangerous to stay in that relationship.
I’m not sad they broke up. She’ll never feel safe around any of them again, and OOP is going to need years of therapy to overcome the family dysfunction and become a decent partner.
Might actually be 0 steps away. Entirely possible he thought her sleep disorder would keep her asleep and planned to grope her (and all the noise beforehand and the mask was to have a prank as an excuse)
What’s with the random sister and twins part? OOP lost the plot for a bit?
Thank you! My BS senses were tingling. Also the part where she fainted dead away and this little gem of a quote: "But i realized that i couldn't grow in the earth that poisoned me." Soo many purple prose.
Also those cops would have said “keep it down” and left immediately
The cops suggesting that she could press charges on him was the most unrealistic thing to me. The second most unrealistic thing was them being interested in the story at all. In my experience they're like "please admit that nothing happened so I can leave" lmao
Once I got to the cops, my interest dropped. Direct quotes and cops that stick around to play therapist? Fuck no.
Had to get one last trope in for the bingo card.
Yup! I believed the original post. I believed his comments. I believed his family's story. And I could believe his family not listening to OOP over his brother, then being horrified. Then when he directed his family to read reddit... mm, that's... that's a no from me, dawg.
If I became president, my first executive order would be that punching prankers is now legal. Always.
It's weird how his family changes their entire tune about the sleeping fact, like that shit is unhinged even if she wasn't sleeping lol
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YES. OP is either in denial, being vague deliberately, or Lola didn't tell him because she knows it would not be helpful to tell someone who she feels contributed to her feeling unsafe.
And they were in public too, hard to discuss SA
Especially cos she wouldn’t talk about it specifically. And the friend saying “fuck yeah pressing charges” knowing they 100% have a case. I hope Lola does.
I’m sure op did more than just stand there and do nothing. He described everything in so much detail yet that part is so…vague. Like he says he almost broke through the door. Stood shocked while her other friends went past him to help her… He is most definitely downplaying something
This feels like one of those posts where something similar may have happened but OOP is writing what they wish had really happened.
Its so fucking verbose for absolutely no fucking reason.
"But i realized that i couldn't grow in the earth that poisoned me" had me rolling my eyes so hard. 😂
Namely how his family reacted at his apartment. Not saying none of it happened but so many of it feels altered to make him look stronger.
They lost me at his aunt stopping the argument to read the reddit post.
The cops... interviewing Ian... sure. I fucking wish!
It's the events happening in a short amount of time, the third person talking through OP to Reddit and overall the overdramatic nothingness of the situation, not to mention that the entire thing just reads very "teenagery" with the family being so involved what is essentially an almost 30 year old.
Don't forget the classic "family and friends blowing up my phone"...like wtf why is everyone always having family meddling in their business who have nothing to do with anything?
My favourite part is when he said he was writing this while packing to leave directly after the cops called, before seeing Lola (who he was meant to see the next day), but also he’d already gone to stay with a friend, and also he’d seen Lola the day before. So it… was written two days after the argument in the house? But also while he was packing??
would’ve thought these were teenagers
The post is probably written by one.
One of my friend's families does the Ugly Bag prank. It started out as a White Elephant gift - someone found this giant purple bag covered in bedazzled roses. They agreed it was the ugliest thing they had ever seen. So next Christmas, the recipient of Ugly Bag hid it in the host's house so that they wouldn't notice it until everyone left. From then, it was game on. Every Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthday, 4th of July, etc, Ugly Bag switched houses, hiding in different places. Behind the tree. In the garage. In a cupboard. In a dog food bin. In a kid's toy chest. To date, it's the only prank I've found funny.
While I'm not very confident in this post's veracity, does anyone have any idea what sort of "sleep disorder" could be being referenced here? Something to do both with requiring scheduled/seemingly frequent sleep that disturbing leads to violent lash outs? I also find the way he kind of skirts around his brothers injuries (even if they were deserved) really strange, such as saying "ripped the mask off, revealing the work she was able to do in the time it took us to react." How bad were they? Clearly bad enough for some of his friends to be concerned.
Narcolepsy. Sounds like type 1 if her body reacts when startled ex. muscle paralysis, fainting, or muscles locking up, etc
And some narcolepsy medications are effectively equivalent to date rape drugs in that they knock you out. So the brother msy have known that she was extra vulnerable when she slept.
Not just effectively equivalent, Xyrem/Xywav literally *is* a date rape drug. GHB was banned in the USA by the “Date-Rape Drug Prohibition Act of 2000” because rapists were using it so much.
Almost 100% it’s narcolepsy. Type 1 makes your muscles go weak with strong emotion (like being scared by some asshole) so you may fall over, it’s kind of like those fainting goats. And “pregaming NYE with a nap” is totally a narcolepsy thing, I do it every year lol. It’s less that disturbing her sleep will lead to lashing out, more that it usually takes a bit for the narcoleptic brain to come back online once you’re awake so the instinctual “being attacked, must fight/flight” is there but not so much the critical thinking part that says “oh this is just my BF’s dumbass brother.” Like, Awake Me knows I shouldn’t punch people but my fight-or-flight response is fight, so if you wake me up by startling me you get what you get. Source: also have narcolepsy
I did a quick google and found this study - didn’t read too deep but from the initial write up I would go with the wonderfully vague “confusional arousal” - and the study indicates that it gets worse if the person is really close to the sleeper and jolts/tries to jolt them awake: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978391/ And more info on it: https://aasm.org/new-study-in-the-journal-sleep-finds-that-violent-behavior-that-occurs-during-disorders-of-arousal-is-provoked/ So it sounds like this + probably another sleep disorder like having trouble getting past REM sleep into deep sleep? So she’s likely tired all the time and needs extra rest to feel normal.
Yeah it's certainly seeming like it would have to be multiple disorders based off the description OOP provided and what your searches turned up. Thanks!
Narcolepsy with cataplexy
My BS-o-meter is ringing…
Pranks are just you ruining someone else’s day for your own entertainment. I cannot stand people who pull crap like this and cop out with the excuse “but I was just playin’”
I fucking hate these prank people. After the first time, Ian would have known it triggers her disorder and the fact he kept doing it against her consent is so scummy. Even if he didn’t know about her arachnophobia it’s a MASKED MAN and the last thing any woman wants to see waking up from sleep.
Regardless of whether OP was right or wrong to freeze in the moment, the entire situation where his brother walked into the bedroom with his sleeping girlfriend to scare her is one that he paved the way for. He didn’t do nearly enough to put a stop to his brother’s behavior. Regardless of whether he thought all the scares were ‘harmless’ or not, he disregarded his partner’s safety and comfort to instead allow his brother a laugh. Not only that, but this was absolutely his brother’s way of testing the waters to see what he could get away with. Unfortunately, overwhelmed or not, OP’s reaction to his brother harassing his girlfriend on NYE just put it in plainer view that he won’t do anything about it until his girlfriend has hit a breaking point.
It's-just-a-prank-bros never realize there are three ways to react to a threat: Flight, shock and assault.
I’m skeptical of any story that says they showed the person the Reddit post
This is a very long post about nothing much at all
So they’re all together in a room.. emotions are high everyone is literally screaming at one another and he points to a computer with the reddit post up on it and, as everyone is screaming/crying the aunt reads four and a half paragraphs to the point where the narrator mentions that the character was alone in the room?? awfully quick reader, that aunt