#<-- quote from penda's fen. which is a very different piece of art from the dark is rising.

[frankmillerturnonyourlocation]

oh dammit i also need to build two more pages. Sigh okay as a reminder to myself and also because i want to talk about them messily here's my two wills that ive been procrastinating on giving tags:

Will Stanton!

From The Dark Is Rising (book series). Wildly dense British fantasy from the 70s that's gonna require more nuanced understanding of western European history to fully analyze and appraise than I have in me to give. With what I've got: it's, uh, definitely a British fantasy series from the 70s, with pieces of all the flaws you'd expect and possibly some exciting new ones, but it's good-hearted overall, and damn if it isn't beautiful.

I picked up a really old copy of the second book in the series from an elementary school that was giving them away during possibly the coldest, darkest, most socially hostile period of my college experience. Real leaving in the dark and coming home after dark vibes. I ended up finishing the book in the following semester, on a bench in town right before a beautiful spring storm. So, like, of course it's tattooed onto my heart.

Will is a twelve-year-old boy who lives on a farm and is also the last of a group of ancient, magic, impossibly wise guardians of all things ontologically good or whatever and he's no longer counted among humans as one of them and he's a little shit to his big sisters and he sings soprano. He walked into the woods with a teenager who wanted to hurt him and he never again acted entirely like a child. He tried to tell his favorite brother about it once. His brother didn't understand. He is the only one of the series' many child heroes who will remember any of it, and he will remember it forever, because he will not die. and im his weird time-lost best friend babysitter he shares a soul bond with and we have small companion dragons that are manifestations of our souls and its rad as fuck okay dont worry about it istg this is as far outside of canon compliance i have gotten with a self ship thus far

and thennnn.

William Shakespeare! (THE CHARARCTER FROM SOMETHING ROTTEN!)

Musicals are so fucking fun. It's like, cool, this thing rewired my brain, and I'm never gonna see it again. And we just do this to ourselves on purpose because live theater is so special and powerful like that. We do this on purpose.

And THEN it's like cool, cool, I'm researching contraceptive methods from the renaissance now, awesome. I'm spending my one wild and precious life thinking about meetcutes with Literal Playwright William Shakespeare. Nobody unfollow me for this. It's barely even rpf.

He's a little BITCH and a PLAGIARIST and a ROCK STAR and a CYNICAL ROMANTIC. I am CROSSDRESSING as a TEENAGE BOY to safely and legally CROSSDRESS AS A WOMAN to play BIT PARTS and get HECKLED onstage. And we slowburn until we develop a deep reliance on each other as two people with few healthy and reciprocal relationships with anyone else.

At some point, he lets me write some scripts and have them performed under his name. We all fucking hear me right now, right? Jesus Christ. It's not historical rpf. But I am saying that I would allow fictionalized, slutty William Shakespeare plagiarize my writing if he let me direct a little bit and also we were in love about it. I am saying that. And we're all still here.