#'as a casual player you have strikes! day 1 is for me!' no. every player in the world can practice and get good enough for day 1

[thefirstknife]

Seeing some of the latest whining over on Twitter, I think I've realized part of the problem: the content creators who have made playing D2 their life think it's "too easy" and that "toxic casuals are ruining things" because they refuse to admit they're simply too skilled to find a huge challenge anymore. But instead of rebranding to something else and moving on to learn a new game where they'll face challenge and struggle they continue to insist that the game is bad foe catering to "the lowest common denominator". Some of them also seem kind of entitled? Lime the idea that any no-name players (aka people who aren't Big Names in the fandom) could possibly do amazing snd outplay them feels like they're being cheated out of what they're "owed" as their Top Player Bragging Rights? But not everybody who puts in the work to get good at the game engages with the fandom, either. It just feels a lot like some of them think "I put in the work to master it, so nobody else should be allowed to match me and also it needs to keep up with me because I made this game my life". Feels very weird and entitled to me. And I say this as a person who has played some games so much that the highest difficulty settings are a breeze! I just accept that I've mastered it and move on when I want challenge.

Oh yeah, the new elitist dickhead whining is live in the community and it's the same thing as always. Agreed with what you wrote! I think streamers just literally want things to only be "difficult" for them and impossible for everyone else so they can feel special. They can deny it all day long, but there is no logical reason to want FEWER people to play an exciting competition and for FEWER people to feel like they can complete it. Because if people feel like they can't, they won't bother. Why would I waste my time? I'm not getting paid to play the game.

Day 1 raid race is a community contest, meant for the community, aka all players. It's not "special contest for top players only," it's a contest for everyone. It's supposed to be something everyone tries out and does their best, as well as something that is reasonably achievable for more than a grand total of 12 players.

Over the years, Bungie has been hard at work turning raids into an activity that more people will want to play and finish. Including adjusting the way day 1 race is happening and when. They WANT more people to participate which is evident through lowering the amount of grind needed to be ready and moving the race to the weekend, and now extending it to 48 hours. This helps everyone; the community and the devs.

More below:

The moment the day 1 raid race is accessible, that means more people will attempt it and more people will realise that they ARE good enough to raid and complete the contest mode. When the raid race is locked to a power level grind that nobody outside of people playing the video game for a living can achieve, that drastically reduces the number of people who will enter the race. When the raid race is releasing in the middle of the week, nobody outside of streamers will be able to compete. Now, day 1 raid race is no longer limiting in ways that we, the players, can't control.

This means more people can attempt it and at that point, we're dealing with pure numbers. More people attempting means that more people will finish. So when streamers are whining about "numbers," they're whining about the simple hard cold unchangeable logic of math. More people than ever are playing, more people than ever are attempting, more people than ever were able to watch the whole race and figure that they have a chance, and then they had plenty of time to try. This resulted in more completions than ever. Very little to do with the raid being "easy." It wasn't. It was accessible.

There are probably incredibly good players out there who couldn't participate before because they didn't have time or weren't available off work or couldn't ruin their mental and physical health over a 24 hour video game contest. There are probably perfectly average players who can still complete the raid race if they have more time to practice.

And this bothers content creators, because it's telling them that they're not special. Some Joe Shmoe with a 6 year old PC and $5 headset might be incredibly good at Destiny, possibly even better than them, but he didn't have time to compete before. Now he does, because Bungie removed the limit that a player can't control and the content creators are fucking mad as hell because Joe Shmoe, 47, a dad of 3, can finish the contest mode.

They keep insisting this is not the reason they are mad; they're mad because.... uh.... Contest mode is supposed to be SUPER HARD and it's an EXCLUSIVE EVENT that happens TWICE A YEAR!!!! And like. Yeah? Joe Shmoe has the same feeling about it. Joe Shmoe also gets two days a year to participate in a community event. Again, content creators are slowly learning that they're not special and it's a hard hitting truth. Also if more people are playing the raid race, then they're not watching them. That's gotta hurt as well. It's at least 5 fewer subs.

I am so fucking done with their bullshit and their repeated attempts to demean everyone's accomplishments by yelling about the raid being easy and bad and whatever. They are sad people with a void in their hearts.

The raid was absolutely hard. More people than EVER attempted it and MANY haven't been able to complete it. The raid wasn't "easy" in the sense they mean it (they mean easy = bad), it was different. It required different skills and it had a different goal and a different fantasy to invoke in players. Every single one of those bitches used every known cheese and meta tactic to brute force every damage phase and every mechanic, to the point of many of them not figuring out an entire mechanic in the final encounter. They straight up did not understand a mechanic and then dare to say that it was easy. But yeah. They were grasping at every broken build possible and then whining about it being easy. Well I did it with 30 resilience. I am better.

They are absolutely entitled. They feel like they are owed everything in this game because they've been here since 2014 and that if the game is not catering to them, then it's objectively bad. Literally, as you said, they've mastered the game and they're bored of it. But hey, there's money in clickbait about negative stuff so they will keep being miserable playing something they obviously don't like anymore.

I'm so done with those assholes. The raid was an absolute BLAST for me. It was super fun, it was really difficult and it took a long time to get it done, but my team did it, even through a horrible bug that cheated us out of a clear 10 hours early. The raid is SUPER fun, it's an excellent new addition to the raid roster, super helpful for newer players and newer raiders. The mechanics are really smooth and simple, they don't require a lot of callouts, but still rely a LOT on coordination of the whole team. Incredible work threading the line between an incredibly fun raid that is also accessible to everybody. I'll be doing it a lot, it's a really chill experience that still gets your adrenaline going. Bungie did an amazing work with it and I absolutely love it.

I cannot FATHOM a mindset that people have where they want people to NOT be able to experience raids. The most bizarre thing in the world to me. Raids are PEAK content in the game that devs spend a lot of time making and that is currently not being played as much as they want, which is actually a problem resource wise. Since they take so much resources to create, but aren't being used, it's a shame.

This raid was absolutely made with that in mind. They want more people to play to raids. This raid is "easy" in the sense that it is accessible. And there's nothing those assholes hate more than accessibility, I guess. God forbid people who paid for the expansion get to play the expansion. That includes the day 1 contest mode race absolutely. It's for the whole community, not for 50 people with a twitch.tv account.

Every content creator whining about this is a bitch who does not care about the health of the game or the community. They want a game made for them, and only them. They think they own it and that it's good when only 3% of the players play raids. They want every regular player to suffer and leave, to not have fun and to not experience these amazing activities.

They want the game to die.

[urbanthreads]

Slam Dunk Style: Why the All-Star Elite BBall Fan Jerseys are a Must-Have for Hoops Fans

Hey basketball enthusiasts!

If you're anything like me, your love for the game goes beyond the court. It's about representing your favorite teams and players with pride, and what better way to do that than with the All-Star Elite BBall Fan Jerseys!

Why These Jerseys Are a Game Changer

First off, let’s talk about the range. This collection isn’t just about one team or player; it's a celebration of basketball greatness. With options like Minnesota #1, Brooklyn #7, Dallas #77, Memphis #12, Boston #0, Charlotte #1, Milwaukee #34, and New Orleans #1, it's like having an NBA all-star team right in your wardrobe!

Design & Style

The design of these jerseys is a slam dunk! Available in striking white with navy blue or a vivid medium blue with navy accents, they perfectly capture the essence of each team. But it's not just about looks. These jerseys are crafted for comfort and durability, making them perfect for game day, casual outings, or even a quick game with friends.

Authenticity & Quality

When you wear one of these jerseys, you're not just wearing a piece of fabric – you're wearing a piece of basketball history. The attention to detail in the stitching and material quality is top-notch, ensuring you feel like part of the team.

Versatility

One of the best things about these jerseys is their versatility. Whether you're a die-hard fan attending every game, someone who enjoys playing basketball, or just love to sport casual athletic wear, these jerseys fit every bill.

Representing Your Favorites

Each jersey in this collection represents a basketball icon. Wearing one is like showing your allegiance, not just to a team, but to the player who inspires you the most. It’s about carrying a piece of their legacy with you.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the All-Star Elite BBall Fan Jerseys are more than just fan gear. They're a symbol of your passion for the game, a tribute to basketball legends, and a fashion statement rolled into one. Whether you're cheering from the sidelines or hitting the court, these jerseys are sure to make you feel like an MVP.

So, fellow basketball fans, are you ready to elevate your game day style with these jerseys? Let me know which team or player you're representing in the comments below!

Keep shooting hoops! 🏀💫

[voidsentprinces]

Okay. So...lets say for argument purposes I did get paid for playing this at 300$/hr

Getting set up to go through ARR takes me about 5 hours: 1 - 18 with all the running around you have to do, connecting aethernet, picking up additional quests to keep up with the MSQ initially until I am able to get the Brand New Armor and Ring for EXP gain.

Getting through ARR itself with Trusts takes roughly 8 hours. And Post-ARR takes roughly 12 hours depending on the queue wait times for the Crystal Tower Raid.

From then on I can get through every story chunk in roughly 6 - 16 hours. Except for Shadowbringers and Endwalker which take me double that cause I can get to the half way point in each at about 12 hours of playing. Trusts also take a good 30 - 45m to complete dungeons.

But lets say I have finished the MSQ up to Post where it is gear locked I am doing the All To 90 again. Well I'd need to grind out Ironworks, Shire, Scaevan, and Deepshadow Gear for Fending, Maiming, Striking, Scouting, Aiming, Healing and Casting Gear. Doing the daily roulettes necessary usually takes 2 - 3 hours. And I don't ever unlock normal raids so that limits me to a total of 570 Tomestones of Poetics a day. Lets assume I am a new player who hasn't pre-ordered the newest expansion, so I'd have to get the "earring" gear too and two "rings" gear pieces as well.

A complete set with weapons and all for all jobs of DoW/DoM of Ironworks Gear is roughly 30,385 tomestones. Assume that same estimate for Shire, Scaevan, and Deepshadow Gears we got ourselves a grand total of needed 121,540 Tomestones total.

So lets say I ran the MSQ at 300$/hr with each chunk.

ARR Prep (1 - 18) without Road to 90 or any other additions except Brand New Ring at roughly 16? 6 Hours: 1800$

ARR Afterwards - 8 Hours: 2400$

Post-ARR dependent on queue times - 12 hours: 3600$

Heavensward - 12 hours: 3600$

Post-Heavensward - 6 Hours: 1800$

Stormblood - 16 Hours cause the aether currents and Ruby Sea is an ass to travel FUCK THE LOCHS: 4800$

Post-Stormblood - 9 Hours IN DEATH DO OUR SOULS SING: 2700$

Shadowbringers - 24 hours: 7200$

Post-Shadowbringers - 16 hours: 4800$

Endwalker - 24 Hours: 7200$

Grand Total of: $39,900 from 10 - 12 Days of Gameplay assuming its uninterrupted by cats demanding cuddles. Set to the maximum time its taken me because bathroom breaks, food, sleep, etc.

But even if I was done doing the MSQ and was passively doing the Gear Grind. We got ourselves 121,450 Tomestones to grind up at 570 a day if I am unlucky and get no bonus. 215 Days of grinding more or less.

570 for roughly 3 hours of gameplay a day: 900$ casually a day.

Over the course of 215 Days longest grind? 193,500$ total from playing "casually" for the tomestone grind.

Now, I only have 1 character who has gotten all this done. Lets see the total playtime from both DoW/DoL/DoM/DoH to 90 and geared up to me contently, first shot with a few hiccups and a shorter grind cause I have pre-ordered had Fenrir for travel and already had a Deepshadow gear for just sprinting through MSQ?

46 days. 46 x 24hr = 1104 hours x 300/hr = 331,200$ + 18hrs (5400$) = 336,600 + 30m (150$) = 336,750$ total for getting everything to 90. And I haven't opened up additional raid questlines, cleared the Gold Saucer or anything else. No PotD or HoH or whatever the Allagan one is either. Just MSQ, some beast tribe rep for aiding in leveling crafting and gathering and grinding the Daily Roulette and Deliveries.

336,750$ for the 90 grind.

[rinkrats]

anyway i’m not over this article so here are some things that made me :’)

1. ...this lanky Russian star from a small, industrial town sat with his left shoulder pressed against the right shoulder of the face of hockey, this sturdy son of a Canadian harbor town. They came from wildly different backgrounds but, at this very moment, were a singular force. In many ways, this is how it should’ve been after a decade together. Two generational players, gifted to the Penguins one year apart, primed to leave an indelible mark on hockey’s biggest stage.

2. “Sometimes stars aren’t close,” says Rick Tocchet, their former assistant coach. “But those two, you know, it made things easier because of how close they are. You don’t see that every day.”

3. While Malkin’s English was limited, his mutual understanding of Crosby — on and off the ice — was pure instinct from their first days together.

“We’ve been together for a really long time now,” Crosby said. “Now that I think about it, it’s hard to believe how long it’s been. And to be honest, we became friends at the very beginning and it’s just always been that way. His English wasn’t so great at first, but we just always understood each other from the beginning.”

“I like to think I can relate to the pressure that he deals with and the expectations that come with all of that pressure. We were both high draft picks and expected to do a lot of big things when we entered the league. You are happy and excited to be drafted that high, for sure. But at the same time, there is a different kind of pressure there. Geno and I have talked about it before and I think we just always have kind of had a sense for one another, when we’re up, when we’re down, what we’re dealing with.”

4. Having failed to bring the Penguins back to a Stanley Cup Final after playing in two during their first three seasons together, Crosby and Malkin each sensed their partnership could be the next casualty for continued postseason failures.“I of course worry because GM, coach and Nealer are gone,” Malkin said three years later. “Is not mad, but worry that maybe they say Sid and I can’t play together too. We have to win again, of course. To stay together, we have to win again.

“I tell Sid we have to win again because I always want to play with you.”

5. During his rookie season, Malkin often caught himself transfixed on a framed photograph that hung above an entranceway separating the home dressing room and player’s lounge at the old Civic Arena. The framed photograph showed Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr each gripping a side of the Cup that the Penguins won in 1991 and in 1992. On the day before Game 7 of the 2009 Stanley Cup Final in Detroit, Malkin was one of the last players to leave Civic Arena. Before he departed for the airport, he took one last look at that framed photo and told a reporter, “I want one of me and Sid.”

In the euphoric chaos of the on-ice celebration in Detroit the next night, Malkin and Crosby never managed to get that picture. No big deal. They were young. They were in charge. They would have many other chances. Or so they thought. 

When the Penguins won their long-awaited second title of the Crosby/Malkin era in San Jose in 2016, they simply forgot again. Strike 2.There would be no Strike 3.

Malkin had instructed a team employee on the morning of Game 6 in Nashville to “get me and Sid with Cup if we win, no matter what.”

Lounging on a sofa with his injured toe resting on a table, dressed casually as if he had just warmed up for a tennis match against his actual brother, Malkin stroked his chin while looking at a digital picture of him and Crosby posing for the picture that had eluded them twice before.

“The best picture of my life,” Malkin says. “My two friends, and me.”

6. “I hope we win more,” Crosby said. “That’s always the goal. But no matter what, he’s my friend for life.”

7. At his apartment in Moscow, his offseason condominium on Florida’s Fisher Island and at his home in Pittsburgh, Malkin displays various memorabilia of Crosby. These include Russian nesting dolls painted in Crosby’s likeness, framed photographs, pucks and sticks from various games, anything and everything the most serious Crosby fan would want for his or her collection. Malkin jokes that Nikita, his son, will probably pick Crosby as his favorite player because of all the stuff.

“Is good,” Malkin said. “Of course, I will be his real favorite. But Sid is the best player, the best teammate. A great friend. I hope Nikita thinks of him as family. I do.”

Clearly, Crosby considers Malkin family.

“Having him around has always made my life better, on and off the ice,” Crosby said. “He has a way of knowing when to make you laugh, knowing when to lighten the room. But at the same time, he knows when to be serious, too. It’s just a great friendship. I just always liked him from the start. Always have. Always will.”

[fordanoia]

Fic Writer Interview

I was tagged way way back by @endae​ (my beloved). Thank you for the tag!!!

How many works do you have on AO3?

19 (haha), I really gotta work on moving all my paranoid ford one shots over into a one shot series though. I have about 70 fic posts on here.

What’s your total word count on AO3

180,212. Half of which all comes from Gotham Falls which isn’t a surprise.

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Mainly just Gravity Falls. 

I wouldn’t really count the other stuff I’ve done because it’s only been 1 fic, and that was it really. R.ise of the Guardians, O.utlast:Whistleblower, S.anders Sides. N.aruto and D.eath Note if you wanna go way back.

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Even Stone Crumbles 2. I Think I Saw You 3. Gotham Falls 4. A Blinded Eye for a Blinded Eye 5. Please Come

I’m pretty happy ITISY is up there since that’s kind of my ‘best series work’, Blinded Eye too, that one’s been a lot of fun to write because it’s a ficlet series.

Kind of really thrown that the Even Stone Crumbles one shot is the hightest one though, dang people really just wanted to see Ford cry huh, I can accomodate that.

Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Uh... rarely. 

Basically, it’s something where creators responding to me got me nervous so I didn’t generally do it as a creator myself until I found out some consider it polite to respond and since then I’ve been making an effort of doing it going forward. 

I’m not online that often nowadays though so... I haven’t done it much.

Wanna emphasize tho how much I THRIVE off of comments and that I appreciate them even if I didn’t reply to them. Genuinely I’ve made fics a higher priority bc a comment revitalized my passion for the fic.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Most of my paranoid one shots wind up with angsty endings where it’s implied that Ford just has to keep Living in it. 

I had one where he woke up and thought Bill had Killed A Person while he was possessing him, and it leaves off an unsettling note.

Do you write crossovers? If so, what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever written?

Rarely. I wouldn’t consider myself a crossover person, which is funny because I have one exception for that and it IS Gotham Falls (which is the stan twins from gf inside of gotham from b.atman the animated series).

For the sake of the question though imma include rp for wildest thing I’ve ever done which was rp as Chris McLean from total drama island and hosted a game of ‘rabbit doubt’ (which is an angsty rp game where 1 person is a killer and is killing the other characters until they’re the only one left or the group discovers who it is). Players included bill, some undertale characters, and etc.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

No. Worst I’ve ever gotten was slightly rude stuff.

Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

‘Rarely’ really is the word of the day here. Some g.ravity falls and some vamp oc content.  

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Nope. 

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No. Closest I’ve ever done has been rp. Remembered I co-wrote a fic with a friend when I was in middle school. Dual self-insert where the a.katsuki (from n.aruto) kidnapped us from our world and we wound up becoming ninjas.

What’s your all-time favorite ship?

hands down, B.illford. Manipulative and toxic is a ship dynamic I enjoy a lot.

Honorable second place B.lackice (J.ack Frost/P.itch Black) which i’ve been coming back to read fics for every long once in a while since 2013. Even if it’s only in spurts it is still technically the longest I’ve cared for a ship. (Surprisingly, I actually like this ship when Pitch genuinely reforms, kozmotis style)

(I don’t care about the vast majority of ships so not a hard competition here.)

What’s a WIP you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Gotham F- lol no, I’m determined to not die until I finish that bad boy.

Dear Stan(ford). Unfortunately, an easy answer. I’ve never gone back to finish it really, and it’s the lowest on the totem poles out of all my wips.

There’s nothing wrong with it, and it’s got good legs, but I think the slice-of-life sort of pace makes this harder for me to write especially with it being an episodic set up which gives me nothing much to jump to between each letter. 

It’s a bit of a ‘as the mood strikes me’ but I always have something higher priority and I’m more invested in so the mood never strikes.

What are your writing strengths?

I’d like to think that once I’ve got a character down that I can do their dialogue really well and character interactions. Characterization in general.

Also tense scenes.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Fluff, casual conversations, new characters, fighting.

Whenever I try anything entirely light hearted I generally fall flat and it all comes out so stocky/woody.

New characters, if I don’t Know A Character Through and Have A True Feel for them, then I just flounder all over the place. I don’t know how to write if I don’t know what they’d be thinking and feeling past about how ANY person would think/feel.

Fighting - I mean hell, common weakness, same issue as fluff/slice-of-life I just feel like I’m pushing words. Half the time I can get in a groove with it, but other times it’s - arm hit wall, punch go to face but miss.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Yeah, more than fine. If the 2nd language becomes plot important then I think you should either include translation or mark the language as multilingual, but yeah nah.

I’m someone that has to know what it’s saying even if it’s not Plot Important so I prefer the translations regardless (if google translate won’t get the point across for me).

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

N.aruto. 

See above for mention of that self insert a.katsuki kidnapping fic.

We posted it on quizilla, and it’s a shame it’s gone because it was actually fun to read from what I remember.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve ever written?

.... That’s a hard decision. 

My baby is Gotham Falls, always has been. I’ve reached a difficult point on it though because I’m at a point where I’m bringing in mmm 6 new characters (B.atman villains) which I’m trying to bring in over the next 10 chapters PLUS it’s going to be with fight/action scenes probably every other chapter if not nearly every chapter - both of which are really hard for me to write. I adore it probably the most and it is easily the most I’ve worked on any fic, but it’s also my biggest challenge. (And it holds some of my oldest writing which as always can hurt to read when you’re better now, but NO way am i updating 60k of old work).

Then I love doing p.aranoid ford fics, they’re my favorite go to. Writing A Prime P.aranoid Ford fic that just flows out is one of my favorite things.

Alternatively - ITISY because it’s definitely my top 5 story concepts and one of my best executions of something wasn’t a one shot. 

I’m tagging @pinesbrosfalls, @fexalted, @novantinuum and whoever else may like to do this. Sorry if I double tagged and no pressure to do it of course.

[for-ests]

Love It If We Made It: Oikawa Tooru x Reader (Part 1)

[ my masterlist ] Part 2

Warnings: angst, few mentions of death

Word count: 5, 105

Summary: You are Karasuno's volleyball manager, and when you tag along to their first match against Aoba Johsai, you reconnect with your childhood friend, Oikawa Tooru. A relationship soon develops, along with feelings that weren't present before. Problems soon arise though, because of his reputation, and your troubled past that he didn't know about. 

Everything happens for a reason.

That's what you always told yourself, realizing that one choice you made could lead to endless possibilities and situations you never thought you would find yourself in. It was far too easy to slip up, and let the world you had spent years creating turn to dust and fall between your finger tips.

You learned that the hard way, yet you were strong enough to pick yourself back up.

Joining the Karasuno Volleyball club as their manager came out of desperation on your end. In truth, it was a favor for your friend Kiyoko, who knew you were going through a tough time. When she explained the challenges, but emphasized that she couldn't do it all herself, you decided it was a good way to take your mind off things, while also helping others. Kiyoko was quiet, but it was her way of showing you she cared, by sharing her world with you and providing an outlet.

You needed something to do. Something that you could focus your energy on to forget your ex-boyfriend, the boy that had broken your heart. Along with that emotional trauma, you also had to deal with a devastating death in your family, your younger brother. Within the blink of an eye, those two events had changed you as a person. For two months, you had locked yourself away in your room to deal with it. And those who cared for you had started to grow worried.

That's why you were beyond relieved when you first walked into that gym, bombarded by underclassmen that soon became your friends. They were so happy, they were so passionate. Their optimistic nature began to inspire you in other aspects of your life.

Knowing you had a rambunctious group of boys to take care of, all the while alongside your friend, the massive hole in your heart began to repair itself.

As the weeks passed, the bond between you and the Karasuno volleyball club grew stronger, and you found yourself falling back into your healthy habits. You were smiling again, you were laughing again.

"What are you thinking about Y/N?" Hinata surprised you suddenly with a question. He had practically teleported to your side so quickly that you jumped.

"Oh!" You laughed, looking down at him with a smile to mask the once nostalgic expression that had graced your face. "I'm just really proud of you guys for making it this far."

The two of you stared down at the polished wood floors, the rows of stands, and the many, many schools that were preparing their fan sections for their upcoming games. It was the fall tournament, and the boys had won their first couple games—but now they were going to face an strong opponent- Aoba Johsai.

"Not you guys, it's us." Hinata said, conviction heavy within his tone. "We couldn't have done this without you."

A chuckle escaped your lips as you nudged him. "You're laying it on thick today."

Grinning, the orange-haired first year gave you a thumbs up. "I just want our Senpai to know that she's appreciated."

"-you have done a lot for us." Nishinoya joined in as the rest of the group caught up with you and Hinata.

All the boys had heard about your brother's accident. The trauma of it all was still looming over your head, threatening to take over your conscious at any moment. Perhaps the boys knew that being able to help and take care of them was a replacement for the family member you had lost. It felt good to be apart of a group again, with people who appreciated your time and efforts.

"Then I hope we win today." You made sure to use the inclusive pronouns. "So you didn't waste my time!"

"There she is!" Tanaka laughed a little too loudly. "Stop looking so nervous and keep making those jokes."

"I'm not nervous." You puffed your lip out, realizing the entire team had now surrounded you.

"You look really nervous." Kageyama finally spoke in monotone, seeming to deal with his own nerves in a completely different way.

"Okay fine." You grumbled. "I'm nervous."

The boys laughed.

"Why?" Kiyoko joined the huddle, looking concerned as she gazed at your face. You were trying really hard to remain calm.

Awkwardly twirling your hair between your finger tips, you tried to avoid locking eyes with anyone. "I don't want to put pressure on any of you-"

"Just tell us, it's okay Y/N." Suga's calm and reassuring voice whispered from behind you. The look in his eyes conveyed that he already knew what you were thinking, because that was also what was on his mind. This was your last year. Your last tournament. If you lost; it would be over.

"I really need you guys to win." You said. "Because I don't want this to be our last game."

It was true, when you thought about it for long enough, the threat of your time in the Karasuno volleyball club could be over in an instant.

Kiyoko gave your hand a reassuring squeeze, knowing you had grown to love the sport, and it's players, as much as she had. This moment was bittersweet.

"We will try our best, Y/N." Hinata said without his usual smile. Whenever that happened, you knew he was serious.

A brief moment of silence hung over the group, as if their situation had finally sank in.

You finally lifted your head to meet everyone's gaze. "Thank you all, really. Being apart of this team has helped me more than I can explain."

All of the boys replied instantly, more than happy that you were there with them. You could tell you meant a lot to them. Well, except with Tsukishima— but you knew you would eventually get there.

"Alright everyone, let's get to work." Coach Ukai encouraged as the tender moment faded. "We can't disappoint our managers."

He nodded at you, and you smiled back. When you really wanted to, you were a great pep talker.

"Now, Use your looks to distract our opponents!" Tanaka teased as he walked past you. Teasingly, you stuck your foot out to try and trip him- but his fast reflexes allowed him to casually step over it.

"Nice try!" He boasted.

Giggling from the interaction, you and Kiyoko crossed the volleyball court and to the coaching staff benches.

"Third years now have the ability to participate in the spring tournaments." Kiyoko said as the guys wandered off to begin warm-ups. "So if you want to, we can come back next semester."

"Really?" You breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank God."

"I could tell you were getting sentimental."

Feigning discomfort, you slumped next to her dramatically. "Knowing that beforehand would have been nice. I just embarrassed myself in front of the team."

"I think they needed to hear that from you." She said with honesty.

The genuine expression she wore warmed your heart. You and Kiyoko were incredibly different, yet incredibly similar. You always appreciated the time you spent with her, she was an important friend.

Your eyes drifted to the opposite side of the net. The team still hadn't arrived for warm-ups.

"We're playing Aoba Johsai right?" You asked, eyes searching the gym for their supposed school colors.

"Yes." Kiyoko had already immersed herself with writing down notes on her clipboard.

The name Aoba Johsai felt so familiar, as if you knew someone who attended that high school. Yet, you couldn't quite put a finger on it.

Though you were well-known at Karasuno, you were unsure about other high schools in the area. You weren't the type of girl to care about people you didn't interact with on a daily basis, even if you were considered popular.

You just went about your days trying to be kind, and trying to make a name for yourself. The last thing you wanted to be known for was what happened earlier in the year. You didn't want to be pitied.

But sometimes, the people from your past are the only ones that can heal you. Sometimes, it's better to reflect and appreciate everything that happened, even if it hurts.

Everything happens for a reason. Even if that reason doesn't seem clear at first glance.

The gym doors squeaked open, and in waltzed Karasuno's opponent- Aoba Johsai.

Though only a portion of the fan section had arrived, excited cheers sounded from the stands. You scowled, wishing your classmates had come to support your team. It definitely would have had an effect on the players, since half of them loved praise and affection.

Starting from the bottom already put you at a disadvantage. Unlike your opponents, Karasuno had a reputation to build back up. Every game counted. Every game mattered.

With that thought in mind, you had lost focus through all the noise. You could feel your nerves creeping back, threatening to overtake your smile, one that was needed as a morale booster for your players.

"Look pretty." Kiyoko teased, mocking Tanaka's ridiculous suggestion. Not every boy got worked up about girl managers with good looks like him and Nishinoya.

But still, out of habit, you ran a hand through your hair and flipped it behind your shoulders. Though you weren't the star of the show, you could still feel eyes on your back.

You needed to keep your composure. Because of her extended time as the volleyball club manager, Kiyoko has perfected her posture.

"I'm going to get some water." You whispered, standing up from the bench. That would definitely be the best option since your throat was starting to tighten.

Walking quickly, you reached the shared water table that was provided to both teams. A great plus when participating in tournaments.

Out of curiosity, as you grabbed a water bottle and took a sip, your eyes drifted to the other side of the net, where you were met with a striking, familiar, set of deep brown eyes.

For a moment that seemed to stretch past time limitations, you stood frozen in place.

"Tooru?" You whispered, voice drowned out by the cheering and movements of the players on court.

Your heart fluttered at the sight of him. It had been years since you parted ways.

Oikawa had been staring at you before you realized it was him. His look of astonishment quickly switched to one of wonder once he realized your lips had formed his name. "Y/N?" He mouthed back, flashing his notoriously handsome smile.

Without thinking, you crossed the threshold to the other side of the court.

"Oh my god-" You managed to choke, stopping abruptly in front of his towering figure. "I never thought..."

His expression wavered, as if it was begging you to follow through with the natural actions that filled your mind.

As if you had done it the day before, you threw your arms around his neck and pulled him down for a tight embrace. For the first time in a long time, you didn't care what anyone else thought about your actions.

"Hi again." He chuckled at how rash you had become, knowing you must have been overwhelmed to see him with how openly you were showing your emotions. Curling his arms around your torso, Oikawa chuckled in your ear. "You look great."

You pulled away, studying the changes he had made to his appearance. He had grown into his stalking height, one that he used to get teased for. His hair was silkier, his eyes wiser.  "So do you!"

The boy's touch lingered. "Wow." He breathed, short on words. "I never thought I'd see you again, but I really hoped."

You met his piercing gaze, one that seemed to flicker across parts of your body that a normal friend would restrict themselves from staring.  "Me too."

Your excitement passed though, as soon as you realized that the eyes of both teams were on you. Darting your eyes away in embarrassment from your rash actions, you recognized another familiar face. The regret that had built up inside of you dissipated within an instant.

"Haijime!" You waved, beckoning him to come closer.

"Hi, Y/N." He smiled, also bending down to give you a friendly hug. A hug that was much different than Oikawa's.

Teasingly, you continued the conversation. "I see that you two are the same. Still obsessed with volleyball."

Oikawa rolled his eyes. "Duh, of course. But what's more surprising is that you're a volleyball manager?"

"Yeah, I never thought that would happen." Iwaizumi added. "We inspired you, didn't we?"

Grinning from ear to ear, you nodded, reflecting on the hours that you had practiced with them. Before you had moved, the three of you would spend hours at the gym. Joining the Karasuno volleyball club had rekindled your love for the sport. And the boys were surprised that you had so much previous knowledge, which was now obvious that it had come from Oikawa.

Though what saddened you was that you had forgotten all about that. Your wholesome memories had been replaced with something far more grim.

"Hey!" The Aoba Johsai coach yelled from the opposite side. "Get back to business, all of you!"

The three of you turned and noticed that the rest of the team had stopped what they were doing, and seemed to be gossiping about your relationship to Oikawa and Iwaizumi. You immediately blushed, your contempt flooding right back in.

"Oi! don't look at her like that! She's not a piece of meat!" Oikawa pointed aggressively at his teammates, causing them to scatter and pretend they had been invested in their warm up practices the entire time.

"You're just mad that everyone is staring at her, and not you." Iwaizumi gave him a slap on the back for good measure. "Focus now."

Iwaizumi wandered off, leaving you one more brief moment with Oikawa. He glanced behind him, then back to you, looking somewhat regretful. It was most likely because the outcome of this game was going to be disappointing for one of you.

"Wait for me after the match, okay?" He asked, yet it came out more desperate. In a way that caused your heart to hammer in your chest. You really couldn't figure out if it was because of him, or if it was because of all the eyes you could still feel pointed towards you.

Throughout your younger years, Oikawa had boosted your confidence, and pushed you outside of your comfort zone. But things were slightly different now. Someone as outgoing as him could tell you had become timid, for reasons he didn't know yet, but hoped he would eventually figure out.

"Good luck, Tooru." You smiled. "You'll need it."

All he could do was flash you a devilish smile.

Oikawa had always been a flirt. It was somewhat comforting to know that his bubbly personality hadn't changed. At least on the surface. He had always commanded the attention of everyone in the room, which made your more reserved nature recoil in embarrassment.

But now, at least on the surface, you could handle it.

Because your parents moved all those years ago, you had never gained the opportunity to tell him how much he had meant to you. But as you watched his presence command the movements of his team, you realized that now was your chance.

Turning back to your teammates, who were all as equally surprised, you scratched the back of your neck awkwardly. "I'm sorry for interrupting." You apologized.

"Y/N, you know Oikawa?" Kageyama was the first one to ask.

"Y-yeah... we were friends in middle school, before I moved here."

"Interesting." Hinata dramatically set his chin in his hand, stroking it as if he had a goatee. "Y/N-chan knows both the kings!"

Kageyama immediately smacked the back of Hinata's head. "Shut up dumbass!" He scolded.

You stifled a laugh, encouraging them to continue on practicing, reassuring them that you were still crossing your fingers for Karasuno to win.

"Y/N took my suggestion a little too seriously." Tanaka sighed, watching you shyly make your way back over to the coaching bench.

"She's so popular and beautiful." Nishinoya added. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I really wish I was Oikawa right now."

Feeling more pumped up than you had before, you shouted a cheer from the sideline. "Don't disappoint me boys!"

❀∙∘✿∘∙❀

Knowing that volleyball meant the world to Oikawa, you were somewhat relived that Aoba Johsai had won the match.

You would be there for your team in the end, but in this moment, you couldn't be there for Oikawa. You hadn't been for years. That's why you were relived, knowing you couldn't stand to see him upset.

"Don't look at me like that." He teased.

"Like what?" You deadpanned, trying hard to remain upset with him, since he had just ruined Karasuno's chance at participating in the fall nationals.

"Like you're trying to hate me. Because I know you can't."

Finally cracking a smile, you averted your gaze with embarrassment. "You're right."

Oikawa instinctively stepped closer. The proximity caused your heart to pound in your chest, surprisingly because you had never felt like this with him before.

"Even if we lost, I still would have felt that I won." The boy didn't need to explain what he was referring to, because you knew it was about you. It was because you were in his life again.

Trying to remain calm, you scrunched your nose. "Now you're laying it on thick."

Seeming to accept the challenge, Oikawa continued with his flirtations. "I find it strange that I usually get everything I want, but I somehow never got you." The third year laughed sadly, staring up at the pale blue sky. He had always hoped to see you again, but he had never expected it to be in this way.

"You don't even know me anymore." You said, not intending for your words to come out so harshly.

You were right. Oikawa hated it, but you were. And for some reason it made you that much more attractive. Personality wise, and looks wise. Your maturated appearance didn't help his thoughts from wandering.

He had missed your presence more than he had realized. Knowing that you were going to be in his life again gave him a strange sense of hope. It seemed that he had been holding onto them at dream since you parted ways at the end of junior high.

Your parents moved away, taking you along with them. Since your childhood friend was no longer your neighbor and you didn't go to the same high school, your friendship prematurely ended.

Oikawa wish he had tried harder to keep contact, but something told him you might be better off without him. He was going through his own troubles, and needed to focus on himself.

"I should have called you, or something... I don't know." Oikawa admitted. Though it had been years, he still felt comfortable enough around you to speak his mind.

You were the only girl he could ever do that with. He had searched far and wide to replace you, but he always ended up empty handed. Perhaps he should have searched for you instead.

"It's okay." You assured, knowing that life had moved fast for the both of you. You would never hold a grudge against him for that, being young and naive, trying desperately to fit into your new environments. It also didn't help that neither if you had cellphones when you moved away, therefore making it practically impossible to keep in contact. "We were both busy."

Oikawa knew you were putting on an act, but it also seemed genuine. To him, you had always been confusing, your thoughts and emotions so complex that it frightened him. Girls like you had always been hard to find. Ones that were able to explain their resonating so well that it caused them to reflect on their own actions and behaviors. You had always kept Oikawa in check.

But right now, the spirit that he had grown to love was barely visible. He could tell you were happy to see him, but something inside you had been wounded. Whatever it was, Oikawa could tell you were hurting. And every fiber in his being wanted to fix it.

"What happened to you, Y/N?" He asked suddenly, the look in his eyes convincing you that you had done a terrible job concealing your emotions.

Averting your gaze, you shifted awkwardly on your toes. "A lot has happened, Tooru. Too much to explain now."

You could hear the boys loading into the bus, some of them shouting your name in reminder to hurry up your conversation. You glanced back and saw that Kiyoko was waiting outside the vehicle for your return.

Smiling to dispel the haunting memories, you continued. "I would rather hear about you for now. You must be really happy that you won."

"I worked hard...I worked my ass off for years to get where I am today." He kicked a rock across the cement sidewalk. "Watching Kageyama play so well helped me realize that I had been slacking. I guess I forgot what that feels like."

"But?" You pushed him to continue.

Oikawa grimaced, and for a moment, you wished you hadn't asked that question. "Our next opponent will be harder."

It was true. Oikawa had worked hard all his life. He hadn't been blessed with raw talent like his underclassmen Kageyama, but he followed his dream, he had followed his heart.

For some reason though, as he stared at your glowering expression, he began to second guess himself. Maybe he had been doing it wrong.

"Don't give up then." You said, voice wavering with conviction that surprised him. "Whether you were born with it or not, you still have talent. There's still ways to utilize that after High-school. If you really love volleyball then you will continue."

Oikawa's eyes widened.

"This is strange coming from you, who's been rubbing off on you?"

You chuckled. "Nobody. I just know what to say to you."

You were right again. You encouraged him in the most perfect way, but you never praised him like the others. Oikawa's mother always told him to never accept too much praise, and to never get too full of himself.

You were real. You weren't fake like the other girls who only fawned over him for his looks. He would have preferred you to watch him from the stands with genuine interest for the sport, unlike the other girls who were only there for him.

Why?

Because it was the truth. And it was normal. People who work hard to get to a certain point, stop once they reach it. But that's not what he had done. He kept trying. The boy tried harder than he needed to become the best.

No matter what anyone said, Oikawa knew he had to keep trying. He couldn't let his pride get the best of him like it had in the match against Karasuno.

Just by looking his way, he knew what you were thinking. Only a girl as special as you could make him realize that. A girl that had known him from the beginning.

He laughed at first, causing your eyes to drift towards him. You didn't seem surprised, instead, you were calm. "Well, I'm glad that hasn't changed."

You smiled as your hair rippled to the side from a gust of wind. "I missed you, Tooru." The tone of your voice was filled with hope, directly asking him to make the first move, and to not let you leave without a promise to see you again.

"I think it's finally time that you gave me your number." Oikawa held his phone out for you. You tried desperately to hide the blush that was creeping along your face. Everything he did was flirtatious, yet in a way that was childish and made you remember how you used to play with him back in primary school.

After typing in your number, you handed him back his phone. The entire time, you could feel his eyes on you, studying, lingering.

"Well," you apologized, gesturing behind you. "I can't keep them waiting."

"Go ahead, Y/N. I'll text you."

"I'll be waiting." You whispered, barely audible enough for him to hear. Turning on your heels and jogging towards the bus, you glanced behind your shoulder one last time, as if you were afraid to let him escape your gaze. Times were different now, you would see him again. You were sure of it.

You flashed him a smile.

Oikawa shoved his hands in his pockets. You would never know that you had already won over his heart. You had all those years ago, and your presence within him had remained.

Then you left, hoping and praying that he would keep his promise. Hoping and praying that nobody had taken your place.

True love wasn't real, you knew that well enough from your past experiences. Yet deep down, your heart claimed differently. You could anticipate what was going to happen.

❀∙∘✿∘∙❀

Four months ago

Your hands trembled.

Your thoughts raced as you swung your legs over the railing of your balcony, gazing at the stars that twinkled brightly in the sky.

Your bare feet brushed the plants underneath you, fresh dew gathering in their crevices.

You managed to smile.

It was a quiet and beautiful night. The moon illuminated the oak trees so mysteriously, it would have intrigued you on any other night.

But right now...

All you wanted to do was forget him.

It had been almost a month since the breakup, but you couldn't seem to forgive his iniquitous mistake.

You were a relatively calm and understanding person. But his betrayal had left you in shambles. Haruki was his name, and he had cheated on you with a girl in a different class- who knew that he was your boyfriend. A girl that hated you for no reason, only because you had something that she did not.

You had never been in a situation like this. Nobody had ever taught you how to handle the feelings that came along after heartbreak.

Your supposed first love had cheated on you, yet you didn't know how to respond. How could love just... disappear? Did he ever even love you? Had you wasted the last two years of your life on him?

You were bitter, angry, and confused. Time was supposed to heal wounds, and it did, but only to an extent.

You were a completely different person now. Some would say stronger, but some would say weaker. You had been out of touch for quite some time. And now you were finally sinking back into reality.

But what made you the most addled, was that you couldn't remember his face. It made you so angry to realize that you could forget a face you had studied for so long. Your stomach felt sick as you tried to remember the color of eyes, the taste of his lips, his smile, anything... But you were blank. You had already started to forget about the man you loved, but with good reason.

You had been so lost. And that's why it hurt so bad. You had been vulnerable, you had been taken advantage of. You felt sick knowing you didn't break from his spell on your own.

You winced, partly from the nighttime breeze, and partly from the cold hard truth. Haruki was the liar. But somehow you felt like it was your fault. How could you ever trust someone like that again? You had fallen head over heels for someone who was way under your league, pouring all of your love into the relationship.

You had tried your best to make it work, you had given him everything. All of your time, all your emotions, and all of your body.

But it was never enough. Why were you not enough?

You had made a fool of yourself. You had begged him to stay, because you felt guilty about letting him take your virginity. Haruki had cheated on you, thrown your love away like it was nothing, and left without seeming to care. But the thing was, you still cared.

You could only hold yourself together around your family and friends. But when you were alone like this, your mind drifted away.

You regretted the decisions you'd made with him. You really did. You had blindly followed a boy into a destructive relationship, thinking that he could be a man. Thinking you could fix him, and thinking you could make him better.

But if someone doesn't want to change, they won't. It hurt like hell. Because that's when you realized that people always lie.

Your love was wasted on a boy who didn't deserve it.

Guilt crept into your subconscious. Though you didn't want to admit it, you felt that you had disappointed whoever you were going to end up with in the future.

You leaned against the metallic railing, ears perking up at the undertone of cicadas. They sang mindlessly into the night, like you once had.

It wasn't meant to be, and that was alright. Yet it was still painful, the memories causing tears to prick at your eyelids. You felt helpless at times like this. Why couldn't you just forget about everything and move on?

You desperately wanted to, but deep inside, something was urging for you to never forget this pain. You had spent countless nights in this very position, staring up at the stars, cloudy sky or clear.

And it finally spelled out for you. You were never meant to brush these emotions aside. Instead, you urged to hold them close to your heart. You would never forget your mistake, so you would never make it again.

You had learned, you were stronger. You were different.

You had to put on a show for far too long, masking the pain Haruki had caused you until it was too late.

Now your broken heart was already healing.

Looking up into the black sky once again, you smiled for the first time in days. Tomorrow you would be looking at the same stars through a different lens.

You were changing, while he would stay the same. That was the greatest revenge of all. You would live on without him.

That was what you had convinced yourself until your mother called you the next day, and relayed the devastating news that your brother had died in an accident.

And just like that, two of the most important people in your life were gone.

And back into the spiral you fell.

❀∙∘✿∘∙❀

Tag list!! lmk if you want to be added for the next part <33

@ardorwrites-hq-mha​ @cuddlyasahi​ @vventure @writeiolite​ @allywritesimagines​ @benewol​

[saokpe]

HDLW SIbling Week 2020 Day 1: Adventure

It’s time to celebrate the most chaotic quartet of siblings know to duck kind with little DnD inspired fic! 

@hdlwsiblingweek2020

Ducks and Dragons

“Are we ready to start our adrenaline pumping adventure!” An ecstatic Huey proclaims over the table. His siblings occupying the remaining seats, hovering their confused gazes over a collection of figures, plastic dice, and hardcover books.

“So, uhm-” Louie begins, still analyzing the display of trinkets ahead of him, “-this is a game about pretending to go on adventures, a thing we do almost every day?” The duck’s cynical suspicion directs itself towards the cap-wearing triplet, the 10-inch cardboard wall between them doing little to block it. 

“It’s not only about going on an adventure, dear Llewellyn-” Huey agonizingly teases, “It’s about making a story!”

“Wait, wait, wait, do these colorful rocks have NUMBERS on them!” Dewey intersects, ruthlessly inspecting one of the oddly shaped dice, “I thought you said this was going to be fun! This looks like MATH!” The brother’s biting fury echoes.

“Oh c’mon guys.” Webby attempts to calm the derailing group, “I’m sure this’ll be fun. So I get that these plastic toys are to throw at other players, but what about this sheet of paper?” The girl raises the assigned and already filled character sheet, her innocently oblivious eyes curling curiously.

“No-” Huey stops himself from spewing the erratic words that were sure to fly in his frustration, “Why don’t we just start playing and see what happens from there, ok?”

“Alright.”

“Okey-dokey.”

“Better than whatever Scrooge had planned for the evening.”

“Perfect,” Huey takes a deep breath, scanning over his story notes quickly before re-addressing the party. “The night sets across the peaceful landscape, soon to rise again. Beneath the twilight, a tavern proved lively and bustling. A truth one realizes once they enter through its welcoming walls looking for a group which can help in a mission placed upon them by those that be, something that your character, Webby, is experiencing right now.”

“Oh cool!” Webby looks over to the table, “Is this when we start throwing stuff?”

“No; Dewey,” Dewey dismisses the perplexing dice he fiddled with throughout his brother’s monologue, gifting his attention to Huey now that he called his name, “-you said you were a Bard, right?”

“Yes!” He answers confidently, allowing himself to think the question through after the fact. He leans closer to the game master, “That’s the one that sings, right?”

“Yes.”

“Yes! I am a Bard!” Dewey’s previous enthusiasm manifests.

“Alright then. Webby, your character, as they dash inside the busy establishment, the sound of blasting music welcomes you. You see, standing above the sea of guests, an extravagantly dressed…” Huey signals towards the now enthralled Dewey, his awestruck gaze not shifting at the motion. Seeing no difference, he waves again.

“What is this, what are you doing?” Dewey, still maintaining his smile, asks impatiently.

“Describe your character.” Huey returns, whispering between his teeth.

“OH!” The Bard straightens up, “I’m wearing a loose contortment of cut up robes of various different colors,  and, and, he has this really cool guitar thing that kinda looks like an egg, which was weird and cool and I imagine it sounds like an electric guitar and he is rocking it, I mean totally destroying the stage. And-”

“Yeah, you get the picture,” Huey interrupts, directing himself at one awfully silent player. “How about you, Louie, what class are you?”

“Huh?” The addressed duck doesn’t move from his slouched seat, his hand fidgeting restlessly with the phone he placed his full attention on. “I don’t know, Geography.”

“I mean your Ducks and Dragons class.” Huey’s monotone corrects, sizzling annoyance in every word.

“Oh,” The brother looks over to his increasingly complex character sheet, darting across it in search of this so-called class. “Ah! Here it is.” His eyes narrow as his hands pull the piece of paper closer to his eyes, “Rogooe? Roge? Rojue?” 

“A rogue, got it.” The dismissive voice of Huey clears, a lack of further enthusiasm in his tone. “Webby, as you continue to travel through the various tables and chairs, you notice the figure you were told spent his nights in the dusted corners of the tavern you stood in. Counting the shining amulets of small gold pieces, Louie would you please describe your character.”

“Right, right, uhm, Class: Rogwe, Race: Elf… Duck? Background: Charlatan, Experience Points: 0, and Player Name: Louie Duck!” Louie triumphantly tosses the paper back to his corner of the table, falling back to his seat, staring over to his brother’s dumbfounded face with a smug and arrogant snicker.

A deep sigh sounds through the table before Huey continues, “So you see this Elf Duck, seemingly unaware of your permeating gaze, what do you do?”

“I walk towards him.” 

“Ok, Louie, just as you are about to account for the last of your previous odd job’s payment, this huge looming figure shadows over you. Webby if you could please describe your character.”

“Of course!” Webby raises from her seat, tilting her shoulder as she prepares her speech, directing her body to the somewhat disinterested Louie, catching his attention. “Standing before you, enveloping you, trapping you in their intimidating silhouette is the plated figure of a Half-Orc. Shattered armoring stabbed and overgrown over their bulging muscles, their tusks matching the dark greens of their slashed and scarred skin. My expression matching those with little value for life, I sit at the opposite side of your empty table.”

“Do you do anything about it.”

“No…” Louie responds in a petrified, wide eyed, and high pitched squeal. His now straightened and attentive body shaking as it prepares for conversation. 

Clearing her throat, Webby prepares her following sentence, which emergers in a voice that isn’t her own. Deep and gravely, a tone probably acquired from various almost-fatal strikes to the jugular, the frightening figure tells Louie’s character. “Are you Laten?”

“We’re doing scary voices now?” Louie, his voice quivering over the overpowering presence of this alter-ego his sister had made for herself, directs to the game master. 

Huey shrugs in response. 

“You mean AWESOME voice! Go on, keep going!” Dewey waves, resting his chins over his palm as he anticipates the following interaction.

“Alright then,” The cowardly duck relaxes himself for a second, allowing the immediate paranoia to wash over before responding, “Depends on who’s asking?”

“Name’s Worerdurk, I have a job for you.”

“Hey Huey, it says here that I’m a Thief Rojue, does Webby’s character have, like, a money pouch or something,” Louie breaks character.

“OOOOOOOH-” Dewey begins, “You’re gonna steal from the big giant Half-Orc person!?” 

“Just gonna check.” A mischievous grin can’t help but manifest itself over the lying schemer’s face.

“Roll a perception check then.” Huey instructs.

“Uhm,” The previously smiling duck looks down to his basically encoded paper, “What would that be?” 

“Oh, over here.“ Webby leans from her side of the table, knocking over many of the placed figurines, pointing to the skill section of the character sheet. 

“No! Don’t help him Webby, he’s gonna steal all your gold!” Dewey attempts to prevent foreseen disaster. 

“It’s alright, it’s just a game.” The victimized party assures.

The still singing Bard’s player thinks the question over, eventually whispering to himself, “No… it’s a story…”

“Ok, what do I need to roll?” Louie, still unsure in his statements, asks.

“The d20.” Huey casually instructs.

“And that would be the…?”

“The bigger round one.”

“Got it! Alright…” Llewelyn’s hand grasps onto the small plastic dice, his forearms vibrating, bouncing the tool between their fingers before it’s released, clashing across the table. “I got an 18 plus something.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely enough. You look across Worerdurk’s outfit and it seems to you that they don’t have any money on them.”

“What?” Louie’s surprise is directed back to the smiling Webby, “You expect me to do a job with you for no money then?”

“Oh, I promise you a hefty amount of gold will fill your pockets. But I think we might need a third party.” The grizzled voice suggests.

“Oh, do I hear that! Can I go over there?!” Dewey, quickly excited, bounces and pleads to his elder brother.

“Ehhh, it’s a bit Meta-gamey, but sure, why not. Your performance has ended and you rush to the corner of the tavern.”

“I don’t know what that means, but HELL YEAH!”

“So as you guys are discussing this, emerging from the stage at the opposite side of the building is an attention grabbing Duckling.”

“A Duckling? Like a child?” Webby attest. 

“Yes!” Dewey answers.

“No.” Huey corrects.

“No!” Dewey repeats.

“A Duckling is like a different race, like Elf Ducks and Half-Orcs, their traditionally not very tall, this fellow that ran over isn't much different.”

“HEY! HI! I’m Deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewerius, Dewerius the Amazing and Awesome, the coolest of my triplets and a very talented performer, it’s a pleasure.”

The table of players meet each other's gaze before resting them over the unrefined Dewey. Huey questions, “Is, uhm, Dewerius-”

“Dewerius the Amazing and Awesome."

“Dewerius the Amazing and Awesome, is he supposed to, y’know, represent a specific someone or is inspired by maybe his player or?”

“Hmm, let me think- nope, not at all, now,” He looks back to Louie and Webby, elegantly singing, partly out of note, “Are we going on an adventure or not?”

“Yes,” Louie naturally falls into character, the fluidity forcing a smile on Huey’s beak. “What exactly are we doing, Worerdurk?”

“The biggest hoarder of gold in all the land has a rather large bounty on their head, I was looking for some help to spend all of it once we kill em?”

“Ooooooh, and who is this shrewd gazillionaire? Don’t say Scrooge, this is gonna get really awkward if you say it's Scrooge.” Dewey’s charisma saps to a deadpan monotone.

“Oh don’t worry my tiny friend,” Webby’s harsh imitation of gruffness assures, “Think more a fire breathing dragon.”

“Well that’s definitely interesting,” Laten speaks out, “Only legend speaks of the wealth they carry, you can count me in.”

“And count me three!” Dewey, I mean Dewerius (the Amazing and Awesome) adds. 

“Perfect. Uhm… So what do we do now?” Webby returns to her usual voice, honest bewilderment in the question. She shares an eye with the rest of her party only to be met with the same insecurity.

“Well you can do anything you want!” Huey, still recovering from the serotonin of his family's enjoyment of the hobby, optimistically yells out.

“Anything?” Dewey asks again.

“Yes! Anything! That’s the beauty of D&D, the world is your oyster, it's a game where you can do and create anything that comes to your imaginations!” 

The playing siblings share a mischievous smile as the realization of what the excited declaration implied falls over the game master. As an almost telepathic link befell Webby, Dewey, and Louie; Huey screams out:

“Wait! No-”

The party then proceeded to spend the next four hours doing literally anything but killing a dragon. An unexpected turn for the story that Huey did not plan for. Poor kid.

Read all of my HDLW Sibling Week fics here

[bananaofswifts]

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world. I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY. Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye. The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence. For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head. Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards. After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics. My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.” The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked! The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House. “Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?” We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me … shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.” I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language. “If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.” I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville. In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris. Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.” Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org. Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?” In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.” Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention? Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.) Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won. In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.” When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened…I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.” Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.” I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.” I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!” I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday. It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things. How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power. Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989. I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it. “It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ” Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.” I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.” Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift. To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.” I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas. One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.” In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached. Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies. We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.) Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.” I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputation was that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.” She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.” Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours. “We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you.“ Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.” At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.” Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?” Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too. Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.” Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputationmay be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.” Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.” Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats as Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.” But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.” Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle. At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”) Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says. It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

[nickburn]

Things I Enjoyed in 2020 Despite Everything

Seasons Greetings! This year has felt like an eternity for so many reasons, and before it’s over, I’d like to take a look back on the distractions that got me through it. Along the way, I’ll occasionally point out where I was emotionally at the time and whether I got into a particular thing before or after the pandemic hit in mid March. I hope you enjoy this little retrospective of some of my experience during one of the worst years of human history!

Games & Mods

Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

When I was making my 2020 resolutions list late last year, one of my goals was to play more old games in my backlog and not buy many new games this year. That goal largely went on hold, because, well, I sought out enjoyment wherever I could find it instead of forcing myself to play one thing or another. But before Covid, I was really enjoying my new playthrough of M&M6. I’d made attempts at it before, but it was really GrayFace’s mod that made the game click for me. Modern features like quick saves and mouselook make the game much more accessible, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to try an old-school RPG. It’s a great stepping stone into a mostly-dead genre. I’m hoping to get back to it soon. I just jumped ship to simpler ventures like Doom Eternal after the pandemic hit and haven’t looked back since.

Pathologic 2

I learned about the Pathologic series late last year and have since become a little obsessed with it. Hbomberguy’s lengthy video essay on the original game really intrigued me and lead me to trying the sequel/remake in April via Xbox Game Pass. In a weird way, it was cathartic to be a doctor in an even more dire situation than our current one and still see signs of the townsfolk trying to help each other deal with a supernatural plague and little help from their local government. The game helped me express a lot of what I was feeling at the time, when I was still getting used to working from home and wondering just how long this could go on for. I’ve gone back to it recently, and I’m hoping to finish it someday, if I can find a way to stop dying. Above all, Pathologic 2 teaches you how to make choices in no-win scenarios with little information or resources and still persevere, despite the world going to Hell around you. And that’s maybe the most important thing to practice at the moment.

Overwatch

I’ve continued to look forward to weekly Overwatch nights with my friends every Thursday, and it’s really important to have something like that right now. Even if it’s just a new episode of a show airing, a new video from a favorite YouTuber, or a regular Zoom call with coworkers, it helps so much to have something to anticipate from week to week and month to month. Otherwise, it’s really easy to feel like nothing’s going on besides the entropic deterioration of the universe. Overwatch itself helps with this, because it’s such a positive, bright, and optimistic game, as only Blizzard can create. And it’s improved a ton in the past couple of years, in a lot of ways. If you haven’t played in a while, hop in and check out all the new content with your friends; I think you’ll have a great time. It’s looking more and more like Overwatch 2 is right around the corner, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Go

I learned how to play Go after watching a documentary released this year about  AlphaGo, the computer that beat the Go world champion, and I have a huge appreciation for the game now. I think it’s even more beautiful than chess, though even more insidious to learn. If you haven’t played before, start with a 9x9 board, teach yourself the basics, and try playing with another beginner friend. I guarantee you’ll be amazed at the amount of strategy and imagination that a game ostensibly about placing black and white stones on a grid can inspire. Go’s one of several new hobbies I’ve picked up this year, and those new hobbies have really helped me pass the time in a way that feels productive as well as take my mind off whatever depressing news just got blasted across Twitter.

Doom 64

Doom Eternal was fine, but Doom 64′s where my heart lies. The PC port on Steam is great, allowing everyone to easily play the game with mouse and keyboard. Its levels are tight and colorful, often asking the player to backtrack multiple times through the same areas to unlock new ones and take on whatever new twists await down each darkened corridor. It’s a surprisingly fresh experience. Unlike many modern Doom mods that strive to be sprawling marathons, 64′s levels are short but memorable, and the game is a great entry point to the series for newcomers because of that. Retro FPS’s continue to inspire and entertain me, and Doom 64 is one of my new favorites.

Golf With Your Friends

I’m not usually that into party games, but Golf With Your Friends strikes the right balance between casual tone and skill-based gameplay. The maps are vibrant and devious, the different modes are creative and often hilarious, and the pacing is near-perfect. If you’ve got a squad itching to play something together for a few nights, I guarantee you’ll have a lot of laughs trying to knock an opponent off the course or turning them into an acorn just as they’re about to attempt a nasty jump.

Quake 1 Mods

I probably sound like a broken record by now to a lot of you, but I won’t rest until I get more people into retro FPS’s. The outdated graphics and simple gameplay can be off-putting at first, but it doesn’t take long at all to get hooked after you’ve played the likes of excellent mods like Ancient Aliens for Doom 2 or Arcane Dimensions for Quake 1. And it’s only getting better, with this year marking probably the best year for Quake releases ever. The industry even seems to be taking notice again, with many talented mappers getting picked up for highly-anticipated, professional indie projects like Graven and Prodeus. And while the marketing around the retro FPS renaissance as the second coming of “boomer shooters” should be much maligned, the actual craft involved in making mods and brand new games in the genre has never been stronger. I even contributed four levels to the cause this year, but you’ll have to play them yourself to decide if they’re any good: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/?filtered=burnham.

Streets of Rage 4

I had not tried Steam Remote Play before this year, but it works surprisingly well if you have a decent internet connection. Because of Remote Play, I was able to complete Streets of Rage 4 with my friends, and it was very close to the experiences I had as a kid playing brawlers like Turtles in Time on the Super Nintendo. The game is just hard enough to make you sweat during the boss fights but just easy enough that the average group of gamers can complete it in a night or two, which is ideal for adults with not a lot of free time.

Hard Lads

Hard Lads is a pure delight of a game by Robert Yang about the beauty of a viral video from 2015 called “British lads hit each other with chair,” which is even more ridiculous than it sounds. It made me smile and laugh for a good half hour, and I think it’ll do the same for you.

Commander MtG

The Commander format for Magic: the Gathering is one of my favorite things, and in 2020, I dug into it more than any other year. More so even than playing or watching it being played, I created decklists for hours and hours, dreaming up new, creative strategies for winning games or just surprising my imaginary opponents. I sincerely believe this little ritual of finding a new legendary creature to build around and spending a few days crafting a brew for it got me through the majority of this summer. I didn’t have a lot of creative energy this year, but I was able to channel the little I did have into this hobby. Especially during the longer, more frustrating or depressing days at work when I had nothing else to do or just needed a break, I could often dive back into card databases and lose myself in the process of picking exactly the cards that best expressed what I wanted to do for any given deck. And it’s nice to know I can always fall back on that.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

I played a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up but never had the cards or the skill to be particularly good at it. I just knew I enjoyed the game and the 4Kids show, but I quickly them behind when I got to high school. Fast forward to 2020, and the game and franchise have evolved substantially, not always for the better. But I do find it so intriguing, with a skeptical kind of adoration. It’s not nearly as well-supported as Magic, but what it does have are gigantic anime monsters on tiny cards with enough lines of text to make your head spin. And it’s so interesting to me that a franchise like that can continue to thrive alongside more elegant games like the Pokemon TCG and Hearthstone. And the further I’ve delved into how the game has changed since I stopped playing, the more invested I’ve become, going so far as to start buying cards again and looking into possible decks I might enjoy playing. An unequivocal win for Yu-Gi-Oh! is Speed Duel, which seeks to bring old players back to the game with a watered-down, nostalgia-laden format with fewer mechanics and a much smaller card pool. So if all you want to do is pit a Blue Eyes White Dragon against a Dark Magician, that’s 100% still there for you, but the competitive scene is still alive, well, and astoundingly complicated. And I think that’s kind of beautiful.

Black Mesa

I wasn’t expecting to have the tech to play Half Life: Alyx this year, so Black Mesa seemed like the next best thing. And it really is a love letter to the first game, even if it’s far from perfect. I even prefer the original, but I did very much enjoy my time with this modern reimagining. If you’ve never played a Half Life game before, I think it’s a great place to start.

VR via the Oculus Quest

Around halfway through this year, I started to get really stir crazy and yeah, pretty depressed. It seemed like I’d be stuck in the same boring cycle forever, and I know for a lot of people, it still feels like that. So VR seemed like the perfect escape from this dubious reality where you can’t even take a safe vacation trip anymore. And you know, I think it works really well for that purpose. The Oculus Quest is especially effective, doing away with cords or cables so you have as much freedom as you have free real estate in your home. I don’t have a lot of space in my studio apartment, but I have enough to see the potential of the medium, which is completely worth it. Next gen consoles are neat and all, but I’ve got my heart set on picking up the Quest 2 as soon as possible.

* Beat Saber

I was most looking forward to trying Beat Saber on the Quest, and I was not disappointed. You’d think rhythm games had reached their peak with Rock Band and DDR, but the genre keeps on giving with gems like this. It’s hard to convey if you’ve never tried it, but the game succeeds so well in getting your entire body into the rhythm of whatever song you’re slashing through.

* Half Life: Alyx

Again, I really did not expect to be able to experience this game as intended this year, and I still don’t think I really have. The Oculus Link for the Quest is admittedly a little janky, and my PC barely meets the minimum specs to even run the game. And yet, despite that, Alyx is one of my top three games of 2020 and maybe one of my all-time favorites. Even as I was losing frames and feeling the game struggle to keep up with all the AI Combine soldiers running around, I was still having a blast. For me, it is one of the best reasons to seek out and own VR and a pinnacle of game design in its own right.

Hades

For me, Hades has mostly been similar to every other Supergiant Game that I’ve played: fun and well-polished but ultimately not engaging enough to play for very long. And there’s always this sheen of trying to be too clever with their dialogue, narration, and music that rubs me the wrong way. But Hades is certainly their best game, and I can’t deny the effect it’s had on people, much like Bastion’s reception back in 2011. And I’m really hoping Hades gets more people into roguelikes, as a more accessible and story-driven approach to the genre. Timing-wise, I wish it hadn’t come out around the same time as Spelunky, because I think it did make some people choose one over the other, when the best choice is to play both and realize they’re going for very different experiences. The precise, unforgiving, arcade-like style of Spelunky isn’t fun for everyone, though, and Hades is thankfully there to fill in that gap. I’m really glad I found more time to play it this year at least to succeed on one escape attempt; it’s a fun game to think about in a game design context. And I do think the game has a lot of merit and is doing some clever things with difficulty that the studio likely could not have honed nearly so well without the help of Early Access. The most impressive part of the game to me is not the story or the music or the combat but the massive amount of contextual dialogue they somehow found time to program, write, and record at a consistently high level. All of this is just to say, Hades is obviously one of the best games of the year, and you should play it if you have any interest in it at all.

Spelunky 2

I’ve spoken a lot about this game on Twitter, so I’m not going to rehash much of that here. For me, it’s been a journey of over 1,000 attempts to learn the intricacies and secrets of a deep and demanding game that’s been as frustrating as it’s been rewarding. But it remains a constant source of learning and discovery as well as mastery and pride for me, and I still have hopes of reaching the Cosmic Ocean and getting all the trophies someday. It’s been a joy to watch other Spelunky players too, even as some fair worse than me and others fair far better. And the Daily challenge keeps me coming back, because seeing my name high up on the leaderboard just makes me feel so damn good (or at least I’ll get a good laugh out of a hilarious death). At its heart, Spelunky is a community endeavor, and I think it succeeds at that better than almost any other game this side of Dark Souls. I think it is my Game of the Year or at least tied with Alyx, I really can’t decide. If you don’t think you’d enjoy it, all I’ll say is, the frustration and difficulty are integral to the experience of discovery and surprise, and your brain is better at video games than you think.

Chess

Okay, yes, I watched and enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit, but I think 2020 had already primed people to get into chess this year regardless. Like Yu-Gi-Oh!, chess was a childhood pastime of mine that I really enjoyed and then quickly left behind as I discovered things like music and the internet. If I had to assign a theme to my 2020, it would be rediscovering old hobbies to remind myself how good life actually is. And now I’m more committed to chess than I ever was before. I’m watching international masters and grand masters on YouTube (as well as the incomparable Northernlion), I’m playing regularly on Chess.com, and I’m even paying for lessons and probably my own theory books soon. Like most fighting games, chess is a complicated form of dueling a single opponent with zero randomness, so mistakes are always on you. And modern chess platforms offer extremely good analysis tools, showing you exactly how, when, and why you screwed up so you can do better next time. Like Hearthstone, it’s a quick, addicting, tense, and rewarding way to train your brain and have fun. And it seems more popular now than ever, in part due to a certain Netflix original TV show...

TV

The Queen’s Gambit

I think a lot of people want to be Beth Harmon, even if they know they shouldn’t. It must feel so good to be the best at something and know you’re the best, even while under the influence of certain substances. It’s what makes characters like Dr. Gregory House so fun to watch, though you’d never want to work with the guy. For me, anyway, I always wanted to be a prodigy at something, and what little success I’ve had made The Queen’s Gambit very relatable to me. More so, it’s easy to relate to growing up in a conservative environment with few real friends and fewer outlets of expression, only to realize you’ve finally found your thing, and that no one can take it from you. That’s mostly what I’m going to take from The Queen’s Gambit anyway, more than chess or the Cold War commentary or the problematic relationships Beth has with her cadre of rivals/boyfriends. The show gets a strong recommendation from me for fans of chess as well as lovers of optimistic coming-of-age stories.

March Comes in Like a Lion

Similarly, March Comes in Like a Lion features a protagonist who is scarily close to a version of myself from like eight years ago. My best friend has been urging me to watch this show for years, and I’m still only a few episodes in. But I love how it portrays a young person who’s moved to a big city away from home for the first time, with nothing more than some meager possessions and the hopes of becoming the best in the world at something. And Rei is not confident in himself or outgoing at all, he’s extremely depressed despite pursuing his dreams and trying to distance himself from his somewhat toxic family. It’s a great reminder that the smallest kindnesses can often change our entire perspective on the world, and that even the people that seem the most well-equipped to handle life often still need help. I’ve been very fortunate to have people like that despite mistakes I’ve made, and I hope to be that person for others too.

Umbrella Academy

I’m pretty burnt out on superheroes, but UA put a good enough spin on them that they felt brand new. The show is rough in places, but it’s surprising in some really clever ways. And the comics are some of the wildest stories I’ve ever read, like Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Watchmen.

HunterXHunter

I binged about 100 of the 148 episodes of HxH this year, which I recognize is not a significant number in the wider world of long-running shounen anime, but it’s quite an undertaking for me to finish a show of this length. The series goes places I never expected and made me care so strongly for characters I thought I’d hate at first. It’s the smartest and most endearing show about a band of misfits going on crazy adventures and punching people for the good of the world that you’re likely to find.

Hannibal

This is the rare show that’s simultaneously comforting and nightmare-inducing if watched for extended periods. I can remember nights after binging a few episodes where I couldn’t get many of the disturbing images out of my head. Fair to say, Hannibal is not for the faint of heart, nor is it without some low points. But for those who enjoy gory thrillers or gritty detective dramas, it’s a must-watch. 

Yu-Gi-Oh! Original Series, English Sub

You can probably imagine my surprise as I discovered this year that the Japanese version of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is not only much better than the 4Kids version we got in the States, but it’s actually a decent show. The plot makes much more sense, it’s more interesting, the stakes are higher, the voices are better, and overall it’s just more enjoyable to watch. I don’t know if I’ll stick with it long enough to finish it this time, but this is definitely the way I’d do it and would recommend to others.

Fargo Season 4

It’s a miracle we even got another season of Fargo this year, let alone on time and of the same high quality as the first two seasons. It has a great setting, cast, and conflict. I love Chris Rock, and it was so cool to see him act so well in such a serious role. There’s a Wizard of Oz homage episode that is nearly flawless. And the post-credits scene at the end of the season is just the cherry on top. If you haven’t checked out Fargo by now, you are really missing out on some of the most interesting stuff happening in TV. I can’t wait to see what Noah Hawley does with the Alien franchise.

Movies

Cats

I had to include this one because it was the last full movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic hit. I technically went to Sonic too, but my friends and I walked out after about 30 minutes. The less said about that movie, the better. Cats, though, is a strange and curious beast (pun intended), adapting an already unruly animal (pun intended) to the big screen and yowling to be recognized (pun intended). But for every awkward or embarrassing scene, there’s one of pure joy and magic, like the extended ballet sequence or Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat. The film knows exactly what it is and leans into it hard, like a familiar yet slightly insane feline begging to be stroked, which I imagine is exactly what fans of the musical wanted.

Children of Men

There’s not much I can say about this film that probably hasn’t been said better elsewhere. I was intrigued to watch it when I learned it was one of my friend’s favorite movies. And I have to say, it’s really profound in a prescient way. Clive Owen gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. You should watch it, but only when you feel like taking a severe hit to the feels.

Basic Instinct

Vertigo is probably still my favorite film, so when I learned this year that Paul Verhoeven made a bloody, sex romp homage film to it in the 90s with Michael Douglas starring, I simply had to watch it. And you know, it’s not bad. It’s nowhere near as good as Vertigo, and you can see the ending coming a mile away. But what it does have is the immaculate Sharon Stone, who you cannot take your eyes off for the entire movie. And the movie knows it, making her look as alluring and suggestive as her character is to the detective investigating her. You could do worse than to watch it, just don’t expect any of Hitchcock’s subtlety or looming dread to seep into the final product.

Books

Dune

I finally finished Dune this year, and I can genuinely say it lives up to the hype. It’s not the easiest book to get through, but it’s by no means one of the most difficult either. I’m still bummed that the new film was delayed, but it might give me time to read the rest of the original book series.

The Fifth Season

Another fantastic piece of fiction, I cannot recommend this book enough. N.K. Jemisin is one of the best living authors of our time. If you want an original setting with a brilliant magic system and complex, compelling characters, look no further.

Video Content

Northernlion

I’ve been a fan of NL for years, though I’ve never been that into The Binding of Isaac. He just has a charismatic intelligence to him that sets him apart from most “Let’s Play” YouTubers to me, and he’s very funny to boot. I guess I’d say he seems a lot like me or the person I could picture myself being if I were a professional video content creator. So I was really excited for NL’s series of Spelunky 2 videos, and I still watch them every day, months later. And now he’s teaching me how to get better at chess, being a good 600 ELO higher than myself at the moment. His sarcastic and improv-laden banter have withstood the test of years and gave me some much-needed comfort and laughter in 2020. Somehow, the man even found a way to keep up his prolific output this year while raising his firstborn child. There are those who said it couldn’t be done...

The Command Zone - Game Knights

Josh Lee Kwai and the rest of the crew at The Command Zone continue to put out some of the most well-produced tabletop gameplay videos on the internet. It’s perhaps no surprise, seeing as how Lee Kwai created trailers for such blockbuster films as Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Jimmy Wong had a supporting role in the live action remake of Disney’s Mulan. But the crew around the two hosts are just as important and talented, and it’s clear that they all share the same singular vision for the channel’s future. They’ve carefully crafted a team of expert editors, animators, cosplayers, and voice actors to deliver one delightful video after the next at a consistently high level. If you’re into Magic: the Gathering at all, you simply need to watch Game Knights.

Cimoooooooo

I found Alex Cimo’s channel shortly after the algorithm learned I was interested in Yu-Gi-Oh! again, and at first, I was less than impressed with him. But it’s clear to me now that he not only loves what he does, he’s an expert Yu-Gi-Oh! player and analyst. Plus, he’s very good at explaining some of the more complex concepts in the game in a way that newcomers can understand. I’ve watched every new episode of The Progression Series and The History of Yu-Gi-Oh! so far, and they’re the best way I’ve found to learn how the game developed and changed over the last 20 years.

Team APS

This is another great Yu-Gi-Oh! channel, focusing more on skits, gimmick videos, and casual games rather than analytical or theoretical content. Mostly, they seem like a really great group of friends that just have a blast playing Yu-Gi-Oh! together, and their love for the game makes me want to play more too.

Tolarian Community College

Somehow, a community college English professor’s channel went from a quirky little deckbox review platform to the most popular Magic: the Gathering channel on YouTube in only a few years. But it’s easy to see why when Brian clearly loves what he’s doing more than most people ever will. He’s not only a fantastic reviewer and MtG scholar, he’s one of the most outspoken voices for positive change in the community and the game. Is he too hard on the Magic team at Wizards of the Coast? Perhaps, but without his measured and well-reasoned takes on all things Magic, I think we’d be much worse off.

IRL

Cooking

Even I get tired of eating the same things every day, so I’ve taken it upon myself to learn how to make more dishes, mostly out of sheer boredom. And I know I’m not alone in that, but I have to say it’s been a rewarding and fun adventure. It’s really surprising what you can throw together with a decent recipe and a little creativity in a modest kitchen when you decide to break away from the microwave for once.

Chinchillin’

Like many people, I felt that I needed a pet to survive this year, and I’ve always wanted a chinchilla. So I took a risk and bought one from a seller on KSL a few months ago, and my life has definitely changed for the better. No longer simply alone with my thoughts all day, I have a furry little companion to commune and bond with. And it’s more difficult to find time to feel sorry for myself when a basically helpless tiny creature depends on me for almost everything. Not to say it’s been a perfect experience however, people don’t say chins are difficult to care for for nothing. And I have learned more about them than perhaps I ever cared to know before, but that’s only made them more interesting to me as a result. Overall, I would recommend them as pets, just be prepared to give them a lot more time and attention than you would to say, a fish or a hamster. I’ve seen the commitment compared to that of a large dog, and I think that’s fair, though chins seem far more difficult to train and are far less cuddly. Basically, imagine a fluffy, super fast squirrel that can jump half your height, shed its fur at will if grabbed too tightly, that sleeps all day and bathes in dust, and that cannot get wet or too hot or eat 99% of human foods without serious complications. And they get lonely, and they all have their own surprisingly distinct personalities, some shy and mischievous, others bright and social, and everything in between. But I’m glad to be part of my little buddy’s life and hope to make it a long and enjoyable one for him. Part of why I wanted a chinchilla so badly is they typically live between 10-20 years, much longer than the average rodent or even many cats and dogs. And they’re sadly endangered in the wild, poached for their incredibly soft fur, which is why I believe it’s critical that we care for and learn more about them now. And above all, I adore my chinchilla’s antics, even when he continually tries to dig up and eat the paper bedding below his cage when I’ve provided perfectly edible hay and pellets for him in much easier to reach locations.

And that’s all, folks...

If you’ve read this far, know that I really appreciate it and hope you learned something new about yourself, art, or the world. And please do let me know what’s kept you going the most this year too, as I suspect I’ll still be searching for new distractions next year, even after I’m able to get a Covid vaccine injection. As Red Green would say, we’re all in this together, and I’m pullin’ for ya. <3

[probablypartalien]

I was tagged by the amazing Vampire-Bee. I am truly honored to have such an awesome person think of me as one of their favorite Tumblr users. I shall now write out 5 things I like about myself, and I’m not going to be sarcastic or facetious or self-deprecating. We all deserve to like things about ourselves, even if we’re struggling.

1. I can admit when I am wrong. I have grown so much as a person and have an amazing ability to learn from my mistakes and use that to better myself. I grew up in a very conservative family with a mother who proudly admits to being part of the alt-right, a racist and anti Semite , a homophobe and transphobe, as well as a misogynist. Until high school, I thought that “Democrat” was an insult and that “Mexican” was a bad word. I was heavily indoctrinated into the conservative beliefs. A younger me would have even been a Trump supporter and proud of it.

I was able to recognize that I was wrong and learn to be an open minded, progressive, and accepting person. I no longer reside in a mentality of hatred. Every day, I can confront old rooted biases and defeat them. It took a long time (my entire adolescence), but I can now proudly say that I am a member of or an ally of so many incredible communities a younger me would have shunned.

2. I have a really good work ethic. Even when I’m doing a job I hate, I do it to the best of my ability. My statistics are always stellar.

3. I can write in a compelling manner. I can create cool characters and detailed worlds.

4. I am very good at reading people and masking to create a positive experience for the people in my environment. I’m not a very sociable person and my social anxiety often leads to me cutting people out of my life out of fear of disappointing them. Despite this, I have the a sixth sense when it comes to knowing how a person really feels and what would make them happy or angry. As a result, I’m often considered to be a really good team player and someone who is easy to work with. This wasn’t something I could do before. I was a very unlikable person in many regards and had the “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve my best” and “take it or leave it” attitude that coupled terribly with my fear of judgement and lead to me being very unpleasant. But I made it a point to work on this and, especially since I entered the world of retail, I’ve had the opportunity to change my behavior.

5. I work really hard to get good at things I enjoy. I firmly believe that hard work pays off. Whether it was going from not being able to read until the end of second grade to becoming a scholar, going from finishing last in every race to being in the top 5 on my team, or going from being too scared to order food at a restaurant to striking up casual conversation with strangers; I work hard to better myself. There are many things I want to improve on, so I’m going to keep working on them until it seems natural.

Now for the tags!

@rabbut @seismicsynopsis @miasunri @dekuchaan @rosesilvermoon @updateseventually @chuchuflower @pekasairroc @xbloodmuffinsx @charmed7293

[thefirstknife]

Getting real sick of a certain subset of Destiny players complaining that it’s a baby game and crying to Bungie to nerf exotics and abilities when their ENTIRE POINT IS TO BE STRONG in specific ways as if they are being locked into using them.

IF YOU WANT AN EXTRA CHALLENGE STOP BEING SUCH A DPS GOBLIN AND JUST EQUIP SOMETHING THATS NOT TOP TIER META AND STOP COMPLAINING JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

MOOD. Go off.

It's incredibly annoying to me. They always use the argument of "the game should FORCE me to do things, I should not SELF-IMPOSE challenges." And like. ? I'm sorry but what? It's a video game for a big audience, it's here to be playable and accessible to the widest possible playerbase. There are plenty of ways to make the game difficult for yourself, so knock yourself out if that's your thing, but don't force others into it.

Like, I enjoy hard content, I regularly at least attempt day 1 raids, I do master raids, GMs, solo and solo flawless content and all that. But only when I want to. Sometimes I don't and I don't want to suffer in a patrol zone or struggle in a seasonal activity I'm doing for the story. The majority of the players don't want that. Designing games for the professional gamers only has NEVER been a good idea and never will be. Fifty streamers can't sustain a video game. It needs casual players who will want to come back to the game instead of feeling defeated.

One of the reasons I really enjoy helping others is because I know that casual players tend to struggle in stuff that's basic activity for me. I've seen people unable to get through a strike. I've sat for 10 minutes rezing someone who couldn't do the jump in a seasonal activity. I want those people to be able to play basic content without feeling frustrated and I want them to know that there are people out there who will help them out.

And this doesn't apply just to basic content, although it should start with that. I think all dungeons and raids and everything should be things that all players can complete. Fine, doing a master raid with all challenges should be tough, but it should be achievable with time and practice, not impossible. What a lot of these "pros" want is just completely divorced from reality.

It takes days and days of practice every time a new master raid is out for me and my team (all with thousands of hours of playtime) to get comfortable to finally finish it. We're far from casual players and it still takes a lot of time to be able to finish hard content. Making it even harder is insane to me. Like, if something is so hard that my team full of people, each with 5000+ hours of playtime and a coordinated team that's been raiding together for years now can't finish it, that means it's absolutely impossible for probably 90% of the playerbase. That's wild to me. Raids and GMs should have more people playing them. If master raids are too easy for you, Mr. I-Play-Destiny-For-A-Living, that's on you buddy. Unequip the super god tier god roll meta guns and loadouts or play something else.

And ofc, another excuse they make is "if I don't use meta, I am not going to win a raid race!" Then don't. Idk. Let me play you the tiniest violin. This affects literally nobody except a grand total of 50 people. Run your meta in day 1, and play with random shit otherwise. Play raids with all white weapons. Play without mods. Play without a HUD. Do things solo only. I don't know, make up a way to spice things up for yourself. I'm not interested in that and neither are 99% of the players out there. The game is genuinely hard enough for the majority of the players. On top of that, I am here to feel like a powerful space fantasy superhero. I am NOT here to die to dregs in patrol zones. If there's ONE thing that I know for a fact that put people off from Lightfall (as in this year of Destiny), it's the difficulty changes. They're annoying, frustrating and for some a barrier to entry more than anything else.

[judgement-free-sideblog]

Dancing lessons

Barry Berkman x reader

Summary: Barry is finally cast in a feature, the problem? He said he could dance and now he can either disappoint Sally or found a way to learn some steps.

Warnings: Swearing, blood, violence, guns, cheating maybe.

Part 1 ● Part 2 ● Part 3 ● Part 4 ● Part 5 ● Part 6 ● Part 7 ● Part 8 ● Epilogue

Part 2

One week after the first time Barry meet Y/N he was nowhere near learning tango, let alone dancing on the level his stupid resume said he could, he only have ended with horrible pain on his knees, thighs and back. And he hasn't even practice dancing with music yet, apparently his instructor thought he first had to learn one basic step and repeat it a million times before he could start doing the "flashy and presumptuous" step, as she called them, that the director may want.

"You really don't have to worry" Sally said during breakfast, they have an agreement to spend the night at least twice a week in each other apartment but he could tell she rather if he stayed at hers since Jermaine and Nick didn't get along with her. "That girl you say is dancing with you, I just heard from Lindsay that she is totally sleeping with the director so probably the scene is an excuse to show her dancing talent and they will be focusing on her instead of you" She drank the rest of her orange juice and stood up quickly "God is so late" she checked her phone and gave him a kiss on the cheek before taking her purse and keys and rush to the door "I'll see you tonight ok? Good luck!"

"Bye, I love..." And then she was gone. "You" He finished his breakfast and took his own car to the studio where he had to finish filming his scenes.

"Barry you're here, excellent!" Andre said when he arrived, thankfully he was not the star of the film and he didn't have to listen the hundred of notes he had for the leads nor taking all the shit the PAs get from him. "Look" He said pointing at his tablet "Janice is on New York for three more weeks for a Ballet presentation, but she sent this to me, is the perfect choreography for the scene. What do you think?" He showed her a clip of Janice and some professional dancer with a song he didn't knew, probably in Spanish or Italian, dancing incredibly close, with several lifts and spins.

"Great" He said feeling dizzy "Flashy and presumptuous" He add really low.

"What was that?"

"Classy and marvelous, is a modern take on the Argentine style isn't?" He said repeating what Y/N had said to him the day before.

"I have no idea, but hey you are the expert" He gave him a pat on the back. "You can start rehearsing with Janice when she gets back" He didn't like that kind of touching, it reminded him of Fuches and make him feel uneasy.

"Sure, great, hey could you send me that video, you know to study her movements" he tried to sound casual and not frightened as he was.

"Yeah sure" he said and with a hand gesture urged him to move to the set where he got to start shooting.

The minute he was over he drove back to Y/N's studio and saw her giving her class to young girls all dressed as ballerinas, she was wearing a black seetrough dancing skirt over a leotard, and his eyes lingered on her legs a few seconds more than he should mesmerized as he was by the elegance she used to dance.

"Barry you are early" She saluted him with a smile, "Girls say hi to Mr. Block" she said at the mass of pink and white.

"Hi Mr. Block" They cheered.

"I'll be done in a few minutes but this really is a private rehearsal" She pat her lips with one finger thinking "Would you mind waiting upstairs? I mean I would hate for you to drive back home to come back in less than an hour, and the coffee place on this block sucks" She said and the girls start laughing "Don't tell your mothers" She quickly add.

"I don't want to be a burden"

"Oh nonsense, you are not, go upstairs, I have food on the fridge but I wouldn't recommend it since you are dancing later and the WiFi password is written next to the phone" She insisted and he finally accept.

The apartment was just a little bigger than the one he rented with Jermaine and had a nice walls on a blue shade that reminded him of the ocean. And a big window facing directly to the door, so the first thing you see when you entered were the rooftop of other buildings and the hills in the back.

He entered feeling himself as an intruder, but being honest that was a common feeling for him, even if he haven't break in any place in over a year, a very long year, and again the pain of thinking of Fuches maybe lurking around strike him in the chest.

He found a place to sit and after being 5 minutes in complete silence trying to not be alone with his thoughts he took out his laptop to watch the dance again. Next to the landline was a nice picture of Y/N on his wedding dress next to a man that must be her husband with golden letters and numbers written over: JPTLV150813.

Once he was connected he allow himself to look around, the living room was tastefully decorated and there were some framed paintings of wild flowers on the wall in purples and pinks. He glance at their dinner table in the other room next to her kitchen, and while he was still holding he picture his mind start wandering, maybe Sally would like to live with him in a place like that. Full of light and peaceful.

He picture himself waking every morning and walking towards the kitchen to make her breakfast, she getting out of the set exhausted, to get a glass of wine in the living room. Reading lines together in the couch, and falling asleep there watching a movie.

And then since he hadn't sleep wery well and Y/N couch was madly comfortable he fall asleep still holding the picture and suddenly Sally's face start fading away, and Y/N replaced her, in a blue version of the clothes she was wearing earlier, he saw himself dancing with her on the living room, a slow and romantic rhythm, and instead of her husband it was him smiling on the picture next to the phone. She would come upstairs tired from work and he would stop her at the door to give her a passionate kiss... then the sound of a gun going off came from the window and a blood stain start forming in her chest running and she collapsing on his arms, and then it was Sally lifeless body again who he was holding and she whispered before losing her breath You did this and fearful he looked at his own hand holding the gun...

"Barry?" Y/N's voice came from the door, and immediately woke up and shake those horrifying ideas from his mind.

"Here" He call from the couch and was careful enough to not look back and don't picture her covered in blood

"I'm so done, boy I'm glad you came upstairs, Amanda's mother is a pain in the ass, if she have seen you she would have called the cops or something" She said and sit in next of him, she was already wearing the heels she used to practice with him. "What you got there?" She said looking at the screen where the video of Janice was still on.

"Is the dance I'm supposed to do for the movie" He said glad to have something to said and he showed her the clip.

"Well... you are screwed" She said after it was finish and he gave her an imploring look. "I'm kidding, I mean is a monstrosity of showing off, and her technique is not perfect, but I'm pretty sure you can put together something, like Ed Sheeran on Thinking out loud". She said confidently.

"Who?" He asked with no idea of what she meant.

"He is a British singer, we are probably too old to know him, but couples come all the time trying to learn his routine for their wedding" She said, but his face was still puzzled "You are not very familiar with pop culture, for an actor living in L.A. I mean" She stood up and walked towards her kitchen "Do you want anything? I have wine, beer, orange juice?" She called from the other room.

"Beer is fine, and is because I only became an actor recently" He said with some embarrassment in his voice taking the bottleshe offered him "I used to amm... sell auto parts in Cleveland"

"Ohio, that's ... far" she said taking a sip of her drink.

"And before that I was a Marine" He add and she almost spit her beer but did her best to pass it down.

"Oh wow, that's unusual. I would definitely say thank you for your service, but I'm antiwar so what if I gave you a 10 percent off on the lessons and we call it even?" She grin at him

"Don't worry about that, I don't like to make a big deal about it anyway" He said sincerely "Also I'm pretty sure you are wasting your time with me"

"Don't be so harsh on yourself, here look" She took the laptop off his hands and found a video of a ginger man singing a cheezy song about eternal love "See he is not properly dancing, but he act like he is, so first you have to learn how to lead, come on take off your shoes"

"Take them off? Why?" He asked while she got rid off her heels and let her bare feet touch the wooden floor.

"Because, and I mean this with respect" She said standing and looking for a record to put in her old record player until she found one "You are huge, and I'm afraid you would step on me with those shoes" a slow rhythm start playing and he did what she asked and stood barefoot in front of her.

"That doesn't sound like the other songs" Although he like it.

"Because you have to learn to walk before you can run, now, put both of your hands on my hips" She said getting closer to him.

"Like this?" It was funny how without the heels she was way shorter and couldn't completely reach her neck so she settled for put both hands on his shoulders.

"Fine now listen to the music and move" She said moving her body rhythmically "There you go, now move me, lead, right or left, is your choice" She said letting him take small steps and occasionally looking down to watch his feet.

"This is not that bad actually" Barry was actually enjoying himself, then the music start going faster and she took his right hand on hers and pull away from him and he chose to ignore the feeling of lost that caused him.

"Now, the hand on my back has to be steady, and lead, we can spin" She said and taught him how "Or we can walk" She started walking back slowly letting him follow the steps at his own pace. "Is all about who is leading" She gave him a smile and they kept dancing until the music was ending and since he had confidence now he make her spin and catch her on his arm like Janice's partner did on the clip.

"Sorry I always wanted to try that" he said once she was standing next to him.

"It was great, you are getting it, now we can try to improve your actual steps, but we should go downstairs, my husband is about to comeback and he hates having music on when he is working" She put on her shoes again and walked out followed by Barry.

[phoenix-downer]

The Keyblade Graveyard Part 1: Japanese and English Comparison

This is the fifth in a series of translation and analysis posts I’ve done about KH3. I’ll be talking about KH3 in the context of Westerns, briefly touch on a possible connection to jidaigeki, go into detail on camera angles and camera shots, and, of course, discuss translation and the social aspects of language.

I’ve broken up this analysis into multiple parts because it was getting so long. This part will cover Aqua and Ven’s interactions with Terranort, the next will cover when he attacks Lea and Kairi, and so on and so forth up through when the Demon Tide sweeps Sora away. 

Here’s a general key for the kind of analysis I like to do:

JP: Official Japanese Dialogue

EN: Official English Dialogue

TR: My Translation (usually more literal and thus more stilted than the official English version. I’m not using natural-sounding English in order to stick as close to the Japanese versions of the lines as possible for the purpose of analysis)

Notes: things I found interesting, grammatical points, extra thoughts, etc.

One last note: media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every work of art must be viewed through the cultural lens of the people who made it. Kingdom Hearts, for all its ties to Disney, is still very much a Japanese game, so it should be analyzed in light of that.

With that in mind, let’s continue.

Terra’s introduction is like a cowboy in a Western with the dramatic smoke:

The cinematography of this whole scene strikes me as inspired by Westerns and/or Samurai cinema (chanbara, a subcategory of jidaigeki, or period films). The two genres of film have had a large influence on each other (Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven in the US, for example, and Akira Kurosawa was a fan of the American director John Ford), so this speculation might not be that far off.

This screenshot from the trailer for Seven Samurai, for example, shows a similar “dramatic smoke/dust” moment, which makes me think that this may be a trope in Samurai cinema as well:

The setting of the Keyblade Graveyard itself calls to mind the setting of a lot of Westerns, with its smoke and dust and craggy hills and desert. The conflict even takes place in a graveyard, much like the final standoff in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, one of the most famous Westerns of all time (technically a Spaghetti Western, or a Western made in Italy - in this case directed by Italian director Sergio Leone):

Anyway, continuing on. Terra is here, but he’s looking at the ground and not making eye contact with anyone:

Ven is the first to notice him, and he calls his name...

JP テラ！

EN Terra!

TR Terra!

...before taking off after to him, which stresses Aqua out (and rightfully so - can you blame her for being on edge about everyone’s safety here, especially Ven’s?):

JP ヴェン！

EN Ven!

TR Ven!

We get this wide shot of Ven running to Terra while he just sort of stands there:

There are a number of shots like this in the scene that really emphasize the scale of the conflict by showing how small the human players are compared to the setting.

This ties in well to the theme that the characters cannot change their fate - they’re just playthings of it. The Keyblade Graveyard will still be there long after they’re dead, much like how it is still here after all the people who fought in the Keyblade War died. And while Sora does later change fate, he has to face the consequences. Death claims its prize in the end.

Ven latches onto Terra’s wrist, and the camera focuses on their hands:

And then we get this over the shoulder shot that is also at a bit of a high angle to emphasize Ven’s vulnerability:

JP テラやっと会えた！

EN Terra! We found you!

TR Terra! We could meet at last!

Notes: The Japanese phrasing is a little different than the English version, but the same general meaning gets across. Ven is excited to see Terra again. His use of yatto implies it’s been a while, and he uses the potential form for meet, hence why I translated this as “could meet” despite how awkward it sounds in English.

We get this reverse over the shoulder shot from a lower angle to emphasize Terra’s greater size and strength compared to Ven:

Now, Aqua has Seen Things™ in the Realm of Darkness, and she is quick to ask if this is really the Terra they know and love. No doubt she has in mind the time they met in the Realm of Darkness and Xehanort took control of him:

JP テラ　本当にテラなの？

EN Terra, please say you’re in there.

TR Terra, is that really you? (Literally: Is [that] really Terra?)

Notes: Japanese tends to use names more than English does, whereas English favors the use of pronouns, hence why Aqua repeats Terra’s name twice in her question in the Japanese version.

She uses the ~nano construction to check for confirmation - she wants to believe this is Terra, but she has her doubts.

We get this extreme close up shot of Terra’s eyes to emphasize that while yes, they are blue, they seem a little empty and soulless:

Something I noticed about Kingdom Hearts 3 is that there are a lot of extreme close up shots like this, especially of the characters’ eyes.

Well, as I was doing some research for this analysis, it turns out this type of shot is also sometimes called an Italian shot, named for... you guessed it, Sergio Leone, who popularized it in his Spaghetti Western films.

Here’s an example of this type of shot from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

The emphasis of this type of shot is on the character’s emotions, and it serves to heighten the dramatic tension of the scene. Multiple times throughout the Keyblade Graveyard, we’ll get extreme close up shots like this that have just such an effect.

On a side note, I never noticed this many extreme close up shots in a Kingdom Hearts game before. I wonder if they hired new cutscene director(s) to work on the game who left their unique mark on it, or if the graphics capabilities of UE4 allowed them to experiment around with the cinematography more than they could in the past.

Continuing on, we see Aqua’s reaction to Terra’s soulless gaze:

She immediately moves to put herself between Ven and Terra, selfless to the end:

Ven sounds downright annoyed in the Japanese version and confused/questioning in the English version, but Aqua doesn’t care, she’s keeping him safe. Note how tense Sora is in the background:

JP 何だよアクア！

EN What gives, Aqua?

TR What(’s going on), Aqua?

Notes: Ven uses the emphatic particle yo in the Japanese version to show his annoyance with Aqua here - they’re finally all together again and yet she’s pushing him away from Terra? What gives?

The camera changes to this wide shot, once again emphasizing the epic scale of this very human conflict:

JP あなたの中にテラはいない

EN I know that you’re not him.

TR Terra isn’t inside of you.

Notes: Aqua knows the problem. Terra, or perhaps more specifically, Terra’s heart, is not inside of the body before them now. Aqua sounds angry and frustrated in her delivery in the Japanese version. She’s sick of this happening, sick of Terra still being lost to them.

Ven gasps in this next shot to indicate his surprise:

And Aqua sounds very angry/upset in the Japanese version as she commands Xehanort to release Terra. The camera angle is low again to show how Terra is towering over them, to hint at the power imbalance that we will soon see play out:

JP テラの体を返しなさい！

EN Now, let our friend go!

TR Return Terra’s body (to him)!

Notes: When Aqua was addressing Terra earlier, she used casual/intimate grammar forms. Japanese has an entire system of conjugation based on social dynamics - there are polite and casual forms of verbs, there are honorifics, humble expressions, rude expressions... all to express the relationship between the speaker and the addressee.

Aqua switches to a more polite form here. This could be because she wants to indicate social distance from Xehanort. It certainly isn’t used to be polite. This isn’t her friend; this is the man who ruined her friends’ lives as well as her own. She commands him to return Terra’s body using the honorific form nasai in a way that sounds like she’s scolding him. It’s possible she also chooses to use this particular command form as a mark of feminine speech, instead of using one of the coarser/more direct command forms at her disposal.

The camera tilts up, still at that low angle to emphasize Terra’s relative size and height advantage, and he (well, more like the heart inside of him) smirks:

We see his hair change color in a close up shot:

And then Ven’s horrified reaction. After all, he never knew what happened to Terra (as far as I can remember). The shot here really emphasizes his emotions by centering him in the frame head-on:

Fate of the Unknown has begun to play, very fitting for this scene, as Terra’s fate smacks Ven in the face (and the audience as well, for that matter). Note how everyone is ready for a fight, even if their Keyblades aren’t out yet. Knees bent, arms outstretched, or, in Goofy’s case, balled into fists:

Then we get this close up shot of Terranort’s face. His hair is fully silver and his eyes are yellow, and Mickey proclaims what has become of Terra:

JP これで１３人目ー

EN He is their thirteenth.

TR Here is (the) thirteenthー

Notes: Basically saying the same thing in both languages, just worded sligthly differently to sound more natural in English.

Dark smoke wafts off of Terranort as he finally speaks, and it’s not with Terra’s voice:

JP おまえたちはここで敗北する

EN Today is the day you all lose.

TR Here you all (will) lose.

Notes: Terranort uses the derogatory second person plural pronoun omaetachi to refer to them here. He also uses a casual form of the verb suru, indicating familiarity or, in this case, contempt. The word for “lose,” haiboku, can also mean “be defeated.”

Aqua sounds downright angry here in the Japanese version as she responds, and Ven just looks sad. The camera angle is a little off-kilter here (note how Aqua and Ven seem the same height even though they are not, and the characters in the background form a diagonal line): to indicate how “off” this whole situation is (I think this would be an example of a Dutch angle, but in case it’s not, I’ll call this kind of angle a tilted angle throughout this analysis):

JP 何を！

EN What?!

TR What!

Notes: I noticed the dialogue uses a lot of exclamation marks throughout this scene, both in the English version and the Japanese version. Emotions are running high, and all those exclamation marks really serve to show that.

Here we get a shot of Ven’s feet and Aqua’s legs...

...which is reminiscent of images and posters of famous show-downs in movies, like this one for the 1952 Western High Noon:

We even see this same sort of shot earlier in this scene, this time with Sora’s legs and Xehanort as the approaching opponent:

Once again, the framing of the shots calls to mind Westerns.

Moving on to the dialogue:

JP １３の闇にたどりつくこともなく　この場で心は肉体を離れ我が身を散らす

EN Before you even face the thirteen, every last one of you will be torn heart from body.

TR Without even reaching the thirteen darknesses, at this place (your) hearts will be separated from (your) bodies (and) I (will) scatter them (literally the bodies).

Notes: Terranort uses a different pronoun than Terra does. He uses ware, which Xehanort sometimes uses (and also sounds kind of old-fashioned), instead of the masculine pronoun ore, which is Terra’s pronoun of choice.

In the Japanese version, two different words are used for “body” here as well, nikutai in the first instance and mi in the second instance, perhaps for poetic effect and/or to avoid redundancy.

Next, he summons his weapon, which is accompanied by more darkness, and delivers this line:

JP だが安心しろ

EN But fear not.

TR But be at peace.

Notes: “Fear not” sounds a little archaic in English, as in modern English we would say “don’t be scared” or “don’t be afraid.” Over time main verbs lost the ability to move in front of negatives in English, and we insert “do” instead, which attaches to “not” to form “don’t,” while leaving the main verb in its spot.  

Terranort’s use of an older construction in English like this is very effective at making him sound pompous. In modern English saying “fear not” brings up religious connotations, as a lot of well-known quotes from the Bible are based on older translations (hello, King James version) and thus older forms of the language. Terranort sounds like he’s playing at God, here, in other words. It also makes him sound older, which is fitting for an old man who stole the body of a young one.

In the Japanese version, he uses the command form of the verb suru, shiro, to command them to be at peace. This is a very direct way to command someone to do something, kind of coarse and not at all polite.

The camera cuts to this close up shot of his face:

JP χブレードはここで完成する

EN The χ-blade will still be forged.

TR The χ-blade will be completed here.

Notes: Basically saying the same thing in both languages. I like how the English version went with “forged,” though. Fitting for the whole “creating a weapon” thing.

We see, not Aqua and Ven’s reaction to Terranort’s proclamation, but everyone else’s, Sora’s in particular. He is centered in the frame here:

And then we get a closer shot of him to better showcase his reaction. His voice sounds lower here to indicate his determination:

JP おまえたちに負けることはない

EN We’re not gonna lose to you.

TR We’ll never lose to you.

Notes: Sora uses the derogatory second person plural pronoun here, omaetachi. He’s referring to their enemies as a whole as a whole, not just Terranort. Unfortunately this nuance is somewhat lost in English because we use “you” for both singular and plural second person, though regional varieties have popped up, such as y’all, you lot, you guys, youse guys, yinz, etc. to refer to plural “you.”

(For anyone wondering, yes, English did used to make this distinction in the past, much like many modern European languages still do. It was a sad day the English language lost its second person plural pronoun for various reasons that I won’t get into here, but those regional varieties I mentioned have popped up for a reason - it is really useful to be able to make that distinction between singular and plural!)

Sora uses the ~kotowanai construction here to indicate that they’ll never lose to Xehanort and his cronies. He’s absolutely sure of it. And the English version captures his casual style of speech with “gonna.”

The shot ends with him glaring at Terranort:

And the camera cuts to Terranort, making what I will call “the Xehanort look” from here on out:

We can see the Xehanort look exemplified by Xehanort himself here:

An eyebrow raised, head tilting forward, eyes looking up - a Kubrick stare to indicate he’s a little deranged.

An example of the Kubrick Stare for reference, from the film A Clockwork Orange. The Kubrick Stare was popularized by the director Stanley Kubrick for it showing up in a lot of his films:

That is a dramatic contrast from the types of faces Terra makes:

Using Xehanort’s expressions with Terra’s body makes it very clear Terra is not the one in control here, as to my knowledge Terra never makes the Xehanort look. It’s also very unsettling to see Terra acting like Xehanort. It just feels wrong, and that really comes through in how Terranort moves and reacts.

One moment, he’s there...

...and the next, he’s gone, indicated by a whooshing noise:

He can move lightning-fast, a fact the slow motion here in the next part obscures a little for dramatic effect. This has also lead to the impression that Aqua and Ven just stood there and did nothing. That’s not entirely true. It’s more like they didn’t have time to do much of anything.

Aqua does, in fact, react to his disappearance; you can hear her make a surprised noise here:

And then he suddenly reappears between her and Ven, indicated by another whooshing noise. Note Terranort’s posture, how he is bending his knee to gather as much momentum to hit Ven with as possible. The scene also goes into slow motion for dramatic effect:

And the camera cuts to him swinging his blade and speeds up a little:

Again, Aqua barely has time to register that Terranort has moved because he’s moving so quickly. Ven is in shock because he would never imagine Terra hurting him. They didn’t have much time to launch any sort of a defense, and while I think Aqua expected Terranort to attack her, perhaps, neither she nor Ven expected Terranort to attack Ven.

Because Ven is like their younger brother, or even their son. In the Japanese version of BBS he downright said he was supposed to bring his parents to Disney Town when he gave Terra and Aqua the passes, not just grownups like the English version went with. And while Aqua and Terranort have fought before, Terra has never laid a hand on Ven. Not as Terra, not as Terranort. Ven trusts him to keep him safe, to protect him. So for Terranort to attack him, well...

It’s kind of like watching a father attack his own son as his wife watches on in horror at what’s unfolding.

The scene goes back into slow-mo as Terranort’s Keyblade connects with Ven, and Ven is folded over from the impact, Terranort hit him so hard. He makes a choked sound of pain, too, like he’s had the wind knocked out of him and can hardly breathe. Note how Aqua isn’t looking in their direction yet because she hasn’t had time to look yet:

We cut to a closer shot of Ven that puts the focus on him as he reacts, and you can see the pain written all over his face:

The scene is still in slow motion as he hurtles backwards:

And then the camera cuts to Aqua to show her reaction. She slowly turns her head (still in slow-mo, remember?), and the look of shock and horror on her face is heartbreaking to see:

The camera speeds up to normal speeds as it shows Ven being flung backwards, as if this is from Terranort’s POV:

Note how Ven’s eyes are still open, he still seems to be conscious:

And then the camera cuts to a different perspective behind the characters, as if the camera is on the ground. Note how once again the ground is at an angle instead of forming a straight line in this shot to indicate how wrong this whole situation is. We can also see Ven landing on his back with his legs in the air...

...which provides enough momentum for him to tumble backwards:

His body settles on the ground in a cloud of dust, and he no longer seems to be conscious. Note his limp head:

My guess is that landing on his back like that/hitting his head is what made him lose consciousness, as he was conscious before when he was still in the air. Terranort wasn’t necessarily trying to kill him (though I’d argue hitting your head like that would probably be enough to kill you in real life if not in video games), he was just trying to incapacitate him so it would make it easier to take his heart out of his body later on.

Riku provides credence to this theory later on when he tells Sora that the hearts of their friends are still in their bodies. If Ven had died here, that probably wouldn’t be the case.

The camera cuts to Terranort, and he has a downright smug expression on his face over what he just did. The Xehanort look is back in full force:

And it makes for quite the contrast with Aqua’s look of shock and disbelief as she gasps:

We get a shot from her POV, showing Ven crumpled on the ground:

And then a close up shot of her reaction to what has happened to Ven that showcases her emotions, her feelings. This moment is framed in terms of her pain and loss and shock, showing that we as the audience are supposed to empathize with her:

We get a closer shot of Ven that fills the frame, and Ven isn’t conscious:

And Aqua has processed everything enough to finally be able to speak:

She calls Ven’s name in a downright panicked manner and leans forward as she does:

JP ヴェン！

EN Ven!

TR Ven!

To be continued...

[xtcpanda]

Seriously, is playing Video Games as BAD as mom says?

If you grew up playing video games like I did … you’ve probably heard lots of conflicting information about games from your parents and people. Some say too much gaming will ruin your vision or rot your brain … While others claim it improves your hand-eye coordination, response time and can even make you smarter so what exactly does gaming do to our brain and body?

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with video games.

  I would stay awake for more than 48h till I wake up with keyboard marks on my face, red eyes and my body is so tired to even get up and drink some water... trust me I am not exaggerating. After all that I would go to sleep only to dream about the perfect headshot with that “AWM”.

  But there were physical effects, too. My thumbs turned into machines, quick and precise. During especially difficult levels of play, my palms would sweat. My heart would race. I’d have knots in my stomach from anxiety. It was the same feeling I’d sometimes get from watching scary movies or suspenseful TV shows.

These days the gaming industry is booming and becoming more like sports with fans, medals and everything! and thanks to smartphones and free games like fortnight and League of Legends … Gamers are increasing more than ever before. So, given that we can play virtually anywhere at any time How is all this gaming changing us physically?

Scientists are discovering that playing video games can change the way we act, think, and feel. Whether these changes are good or bad has become a subject of intense debate.

  Action games like counter-strike, overwatch and PUBG are some of the most popular with gamers these days and probably you’ve heard once or twice your grandmother says “these games will make you more violent from all the blood you see!”

Whenever a wave of teenage violence strikes, movies, TV, or video games often take the heat. Some adults assume that movies, TV, and video games are a bad influence on kids, and they blame these media for causing various problems.

  But media don’t necessarily cause violence, says James Gee. Gee is an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“You get a group of teenage boys who shoot up a school—of course they’ve played video games,” Gee says. “Everyone does. It’s like blaming food because we have obese people.”

  Video games are innocent of most of the charges against them, Gee says…

  Well, based on 15 years’ worth of study researchers have found that action games biggest positive effects were on perception: how our senses interpret external stimuli like sights and sounds, spatial cognition: which helps you orient yourself in navigating 3d environments and top-down attention: the ability to focus on one object while ignoring distractions.

  A good video game is challenging, entertaining, and complicated. It usually takes 50 to 60 hours of intense concentration to finish one. Even kids who can’t sit still in school can spend hours trying to solve a video or computer game.

“Kids diagnosed with ADHD because they can’t pay attention will play games for 9 straight hours on the computer”, Gee says. “The game focuses attention in a way that school doesn’t.”

The captivating power of video games might lie in their interactive nature. Players don’t just sit and watch. They get to participate in the action and solve problems. Some games even allow players to make changes in the game, allowing new possibilities.

  Different games have different impacts on the brain and that has to do with what you’re asked to do … just like food it doesn’t have the same vitamins after all, does it?

   “Failure is key to success”.

Ask anyone who has ever had any success in anything if they have ever failed. You will get a big clear “Yes!” because everyone has failed at something. Most people probably know about Thomas Edison and his spectacular failure rate but here are a few other examples:

J.K. Rowling -known for writing the Harry Potter fantasy series- was rejected by 12 publishers

Einstein didn’t speak until he was 4 and didn’t read until he was 7

Van Gogh only sold 1 painting in his lifetime

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

In games you get 1000 lives and more! We don’t stop playing till the game says “Game Over” but then we click on “New Game” or new try.

  “Gaming could be good for pain relief”.

a 2012 literature review published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that in the 38 studies examined, video games improved the health outcomes of 195 patients on every front, including psychological and physical therapy.

Plus, in 2010, scientists presented research at the American Pain Society's conference, which found evidence that playing video games, especially virtual reality games, are effective at reducing anxiety or pain caused by chronic illness or medical procedures.

"The focus is drawn to the game not the pain or the medical procedure, while the virtual reality experience engages visual and other senses," said Jeffrey Gold from the University of Southern California.

  “Better Decision Making”.

Shawn Green from the University of Rochester wanted to see how games affect our ability to make decisions.

The study had a group of young adults with no gaming experience play an action game for 50 hours.

A second group of the same age played a slow-paced strategy game instead.

  After the study, Green had nothing but good things to say:

“Action video games are fast-paced, and there are peripheral images and events popping up, and disappearing. These video games are teaching people to become better at taking sensory data in, and translating it into correct decisions.”

A colleague of his even went on to say that shooters can change the brain by dramatically enhancing many of our low-level perceptual functions. Definitely good news for all the Halo and Call of Duty fans out there.

  “Games Can Help (Not Hurt!) Your Eyesight”.

Who grew up without ever hearing their parents say “you’re going to go blind watching that screen all day”.

  For a while, it did seem like they had a point since we tend to blink much less frequently while playing a game.

This can cause serious problems like eyestrain and dry eye syndrome.

  Another team of researchers from the University of Rochester sought to prove if games really worsen our vision.

The 2009 study involved having a group of experienced first-person shooter gamers plays Call of Duty and Unreal Tournament 2004 while more casual gamers played slow games like The Sims 2.

  After testing, those who played the first-person shooters showed signs of having a better vision than the others.

Daphne Bavelier, the leader of the study, discovered that playing action games improves an ability called contrast sensitivity function.

This ability helps us discern between changes in shades of gray against a colored backdrop, which is very beneficial while driving at night.

“Video Games May Help Treat Depression”.

A few years back researchers in New Zealand sought to find out if video games can be used to treat mental disorders like depression.

This was done with SPARX, a game specifically designed to provide therapy to teenagers in a way that’s more active and enjoyable than regular counseling.

Over 168 teens with an average age of 15 participated, with all of them having shown previous signs of depression.

  While half of the group received traditional counseling, the other group got to play SPARX.

The game involves creating avatars to rid the virtual world of enemies representing gloomy, negative thoughts.

Every stage also introduced general facts about depression, including ways to relax and deal with negative emotions.

Here’s their conclusion after discovering that SPARX players did better at recovering from depression than the other group:

  “SPARX is a potential alternative to usual care for adolescents presenting with depressive symptoms in primary care settings and could be used to address some of the unmet demand for treatment.”

  “Games has a purpose, meaning and can actually help!”.

Darfur is Dying is a video game made in 2006 by Students at the University of Southern California that provides a window into the experience of the 2.5 million refugees in the Darfur region of Sudan. It is designed to raise awareness of the genocide taking place in Darfur and empower college students to help stop the crisis. The game was developed in cooperation with humanitarian aid workers with extensive experience in Darfur.

First, you choose a Darfurian character to represent your camp. Next, you are instructed to go out and get water, which is the goal of the game. You are warned about the implications of some of the game's rules,

In the game, the user chooses a Darfurian character out of 7: a guy at the age of 30, a 26 years old woman, 5 kids from 10 to 14 years old from both genders to find some water... but watch out hide yourself from the Janjaweed militia! Upon success or failure, they learn that their chances of succeeding were predetermined by their gender and age if they are still young the militia takes them, if they are adults they get killed or raped. The navigation system in the game enables the player to learn about the situation in Darfur, get involved with stopping the crisis.

  As we saw no one plays a game and doesn’t gain something ... either you get a positive impact or a null impact. We haven’t seen any area that has been damaged where there is worse performance.

  Playing video games can be very high speed, can create a lot of chaos, create a lot of multiple environments where you have to make decisions, and all of these are forming skills in brain so … No, I think games really help improve our cognition and awareness training our brains making us better Human beings.

But of course, too much of anything is going to be bad after all.

You will get more learning gained from smaller sessions spread out over time than one BIG block.

  When it comes to my own experience, I’ve played games for more than 13 years never suffered any gaming related injuries. While may I never know if gaming helped my brain, I do know it didn’t destroy it … so take that mom!

  —   Moaaz Akram

[makistar2018]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

Vogue

[hearyourheart]

Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“Maybe a year or two ago, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

It’s enlightening to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

In March, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23.

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

Swift has had almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.