lejay-the-impossible

[lejay-the-impossible]

Some ideas for Bartimaeus the Musical just in case the demos would actually exist one day and because I genuinely like the idea (thanks a lot @lejay-the-impossible for the ideas and inspirational pieces, he helped out me a whole lot!)

Bartimaeus being able to break a forth wall, speaking directly to the audience during his parts, mirroring his narration in the original book AND his footnotes.

In contrast, both Nathaniel and Kitty would have something close to Shakespeare soliloquys in their solo arias (a method, used when the characters words' cannot be heard by the other characters on stage, but the character is also unaware of the audience). This making Bartimaeus the only character speaking directly to us. ESPECIALLY useful for Nathaniel since this dramatic technique is very often used to express moral dillemas the character experiences in a "thinking out loud" format.

Bartimaeus and Nathaniel's song often interrupting each other. Nathaniel tried to put out all his struggles and Bartimaeus interrupts him with some vaguely connected story from his past. Bartimaeus starts bragging about his latest achievements and Nathaniel tries to cut him off with an nonsensical order. They bicker and their main motifs go from one to another like a broken record.

This can also be used as wonderful tool to underline the PG finale. They become one and previously rivaling music that kept interrupting each other merges into one and becomes unique melody.

Nathaniel's songs leaning more into classical style, becoming more and more simple and monotonic and less energetic as the story progresses and he tries to fit inside the system. Definitely not without the tragic or energetic/raging parts in itself though, this guy is a total mess.

Lovelace villian song because, while he may not deserve one, his monologues about magicians in their society is bulit for a villian song. I may or may have not have some drafts already.

Kitty's style being more open and loud and yet sometimes also soft and tender when needed. Some rap/rock might also fit in!

Speaking about rap. I need a Resistance song with Pennyfiser rapping simply because I found it very damn hilarious.

Bartimaeus' music being inspired by Egyptian and, perhaps, Sumerian motifs. See "Friend like me" but dark and sinister.

Also, if anyone wants (and I make a great emphasis on this word, absolutely no pressure in case you don't want to, it's just a little silly thing) to help out with creating instrumentals for the demos for some songs I would be incredibly glad! No particular skill needed as well, I am myself not a professional lyricists 🤲💖

[lejay-the-impossible]

I am not taking away my words. A fist draft for Bartimaeus' introductory scene song lyrics (also temporary titled "The Name") for a hypothetical Bartimaeus the Musical is here!

Pardon any occasional grammatical and/or rhythmical mistakes. I put all my love and sweat into this. Hope you enjoy!!

Tagging people who asked: @lejay-the-impossible @csmelody @asexualreptile @sentient-crystal-globe

[lejay-the-impossible]

That's not worthy to be called a first draft, more like a fleeting vibe of an idea, but I'm keeping my word! A couple of rough lines from the start of Bartimaeus' introductory song and a couple form the middle of it (a chorus, maybe?). Not tagging people yet because it's not yet a lyric, but I wanted to share the process.

[lejay-the-impossible]

Arthur Underwood to Nathaniel in chapter 15 of AoS:

“Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it. If it is too obvious, you will find yourself brought down in flames before you reach your twenties.”

Stroud when I catch you-

[lejay-the-impossible]

I found it so funny that sometimes certain fans (read: me. I'm taking about myself) would be so more scared and careful with the pairing than the author themselves and it's so silly of me. Like I would do twenty metas explaining that when I talk about bartnat I don't talk about it in the lenses of glorifying any sort of slavery and opression and that there's no moral "goodness" in slavery and opreasion and that I recognise the problems within their relationship and want to promote exactly the opposite via their canonical progression and do not wish to anyhow trigger or "romantisice" the experimece of previously enslaved races and that they're extremely complicated and that there's an arc and I want to have nothing in common with these people who make fucking "slavery AUs" of their pairs and....

Meanwhile Johnathan Stroud walk out once a couple years and goes: did you know that Bartimaeus and Nathaniel complete each other in the narrative and are basically soulmates? Did you. Did you know that their relationships are complex and contain something way deeper than occasional dislike and hatred? And also did you know that Bartimaeus is very sorry to loose Nathaniel and will wear his guise in the future sometimes? Did you know Nathaniel have quite literally given his life for Bartimaeus and Bartimaeus will bear a part of him through centuries? Did you know a part of the reason why Nathaniel let Bartimaeus go in the end is that he wanted everyone to assume Bart is dead and thus end his enslavement? Did you know his main concern was Bartimaeus' safety? Did you know. Did you Bartimaeus loved Nathaniel? Did you know Nathaniel loved Bartimaeus? Oh and also there's my top 10 of pictures where they kiss and top 5 of my favourite bartnat artists I follow. Bye.

[lejay-the-impossible]

Anyways about the Bartseq musical stuff. I am actually actually considering writing the lyrics to some songs. I know I can do that. That's an option, I have done some drafts in my other fandom. I cannot write music but I am pretty good with rhyming and wordplay. That's actually an option

What do you think of that?

[lejay-the-impossible]

First thing you see after you zoom in is how you die

How you dying 👀

[lejay-the-impossible]

[lejay-the-impossible]

"I feel that was genuine" contender for most ironic sentence of this article

[lejay-the-impossible]

Okay, it's happening! 🙌

The pre-orders for Heaven Has A Road are live!

I'm doing a very limited run of 50 sets, and 25 of them have been claimed since yesterday, so if you're interested in owning your own physical copies, don't wait!

All relevant information is in the link - read carefully so you're sure what you sign up for! Pre-orders are binding.

https://forms.gle/jmhKGD4jDTzVmkPZA

[lejay-the-impossible]

I am going to untwink all these bl bastards

[lejay-the-impossible]

every time.

[lejay-the-impossible]

Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.

Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship's sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic's wreak. And Titanic's plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I'm not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn't know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don't walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.

However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn't make them plot twists was because they couldn't have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you'd have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.

I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren't forced to do it. We've clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.

[lejay-the-impossible]

occasionally I still see people complaining abt top/bottom discourse in fandom and like. my hot take? they don’t have to have penetrative sex at all 😭

[lejay-the-impossible]

I've always looked at cartoon depiction of women as caricatures, because I saw what real girls look like and they don't have those tiny waists, small pointy noses and perfectly slick hips. Like it's just not how real life proportions work, it's an exaggeration, right?

Except now I do a lot more people watching (that's a totally normal and not creepy thing to do if you're an animator/designer which I am) and I look at some girls and they're just??? Built exactly like that??? How is your head bigger than your waist??? It's possible in real life??? Like girls just CAN BE that cartoonishly tiny???

And I mean that in a sense that I always viewed most cartoon depictions of women as a beauty propaganda preaching unrealistic standards for girls, and, it still kinda checks out, but now I see that the problem is not that they're unrealistic, but the lack of variety in body shapes.

But some of y'all are actually built like anime girls and it's kinda blowing my mind

[lejay-the-impossible]

Felt like drawing some FMA fanart again. The background perspective doesn't make any sense so just don't look there

[lejay-the-impossible]

Another interesting meta I think it would be interesting to talk (or rather focus on, since I mentioned it briefly) about from the worldbuilding in Bartseq, is how Bartimaeus — and other spirits, at least by some extent — are out of perception of human understanding of aging.

It's not that they don't have a canon age, they do — Bartimaeus is about 5015 by then end of the Trilogy and Faquarl, who is canonically 5 years older than him, is about 5020. In human understanding, they are ancient.

However, our brain cannot understand how someone who is five thousand years of age would act, since no human would ever be than old. Therefore, as I touched upon the subject here, all of the fantasy authors treat the supernatural ages as, well, a fantasy element, as they still have to "sort" the character into some actual human age — a child, a teen, a young adult, an adult. That is usually determined by the character's permanent human look (e.g what age they look like), accompanied by their behaviour or mental state, generally the way they act that is also constant at all times. It is, in fact, a really popular trope to have an immortal character to be a kid/teen in a YA story, as to make a character more relatable to the target audience (Twilight is, ironically, the first thing that came to my mind, but there's way more). And, on the contrary, adult books/fiction authors' in general tend to make their immortal character look and act around 20-30 for a similar reason (see: a huge percentage of modern romatasy books)

Bartimaeus of Uruk is...way more complicated than any of that. Don't get me wrong, his age tracks, you can tell he's been here and seen stuff, as he oftenly reminds to the reader, you can see that he gains new experience and knowledge and well, trauma. In the understanding of a "mental human age", however, I tend to think he doesn't really have one.

He's not a human child, for sure, but calling him a human adult, would be just as wrong, the same way he's nor a woman nor a man, nor a human nor an animal, nor a blonde nor a brunette. All of these are human boxes, which spirits can never fully aling themselves with, since they were never humans in the first place. Stroud compared being dragged out of the OP to being born (and that's a valid comparacement, although I think newly summoned spirit picks up everything a thousand times faster then a newborn, as Bart was already flying around and stealing stuff for the Sumerians at his first summons), but that's where the comparison between us and then ends — to be a human adult you have to be a human child, and to be a human child you have to be a human. A lot of modern fantasy tend to ignore that fact and just put character in a box of a human age, but JS is way smarter than that.

Bartimaeus doesn't have a constant human appearance. He tends to be a kid (out of grief and memory, since that's a very specific kid), or young adult before that kid was there, but in general there's no human appearance he fully matches his behaviour with. He sees his forms as separate from him, oftenly even describing them as an outside observer — "the crow flee", "the boy smiled" while describing his own movement in 1st person. Same with his behaviour, a reader can stick them more to one age or another depending on their personal interpretation and even their own age, yet he doesn't really try to act like a human kid, or a human teen, or a human adult, unless the cover requires though. He can be a terrifying all-knowing scary entity in one scene, then go and complain about not being able to wear a pilot glasses to the plane, all while exchanging jokes and prickly comments with a fourteen year old.

What I mean by that, is that we don't know the way spirits are maturing or even If there's a concept of "maturity" within their own species, and therefore it would be way less interesting to just put Bart in a role of a "grown man" or just envision him as a young boy Ptoemy was. Narratively, he's all of that and also an ancient entity, just all spirits are. The amount of human!Barts of different ages I've seen in fanfiction and how none of them seem OOC no matter what age you pick! It's such a wonderful place for the game of imagination, and a full mastery of making a character so truly inhuman there's nothing about him that checks the usual "human" or even "fictional immortal-is-actually-twenty" boxes.

And it's such an interesting concept to explore.