#'i had talked to kelley and kelley was really interested in going to the spirit'

[kellohara]

i’ll look after you

[misfitgirlwrites]

Leap of Faith NSFW (Lucifer M. x Kelley | First Place Giveaway Winner)

For our darling @heart-of-the-morningstar, the first-place winner of my giveaway!

First time with Lucifer, but Kelley is scared to take that big step and allow herself to be vulnerable with him.

18+ | SMUT: oral (male & female receiving), dry humping, p in v sex, unprotected sex (fiction is fiction is fiction is fiction), light biting, I think that's everything guys, the x reader version is on the way so get excited 💃🏽 | STILL more sin on the way, I have a fucking threesome to write how'd I get back in this building--(I walked in willingly. Glasses on and all.)

Words: 3.54k

Angel Dust and Husker watched Kelley seat herself at the bar, slumping onto the stool and placing her face against the surface, letting her hair cover her surrounding vision.

"Why the long face, toots?" Angel Dust arched a brow.

"I messed up." Kelley's response was muffled. "I need your advice."

"What'd you do?"

Kelley sighed and lifted her head, "I ran off from Lucifer last night after things got a little...heated. I've been avoiding him all day too."

"You ran off??"

"I freaked out! I panicked! I wanted to actually express how I was feeling but I thought that--"

"--You'd ruin the night and potentially the relationship?" Husker placed a drink in front of Kelley.

"Exactly. I've never done this. I've never really had the interest until now anyway. It will change everything. Maybe I'll change?"

"You go with the flow, Kels. You're thinking way too much."

"It's easier said than done."

"Ya gotta feel confident! You told me you've read some things."

"Yeah..."

"Now's the time to test it out! It's not as hard as it seems. Switch your hips, shake your ass a little, and give him the sexy eyes~" Angel Dust cooed.

"Sexy eyes?" Kelley tilted her head.

"Ya know," Angel Dust turned to face Kelley, crossing his legs. He leaned forward, locking eyes with the brunette. His half-lidded pink eyes seemed a lot more intense and focused on her, it nearly gave her chills. It was the same way Lucifer looked at her last night. Thinking about that definitely sent a pleasurable shiver down her spine.

"Of course, you can do that at the drop of a dime. I've never done that in my life." Kelley groaned and covered her face.

"You probably do it and don't even notice!"

"Stop beating yourself up. Everyone starts somewhere and no one starts as an expert. Not even Angel." Husker stated.

"You don't know that. I've always been this good." Angel Dust shrugged.

"Talk to Lucifer and tell him how you're feeling, that's the best start. Nothing bad will happen. Angel is right about one thing, you're thinking too hard. It's obvious you both love each other, so this is nothing." Husker told Kelley.

The woman nodded and grabbed her glass. Angel Dust raised his eyebrows.

"I thought that was for aesthetic. Is she really--?"

"It's a virgin drink," Husker said as Kelley downed the glass.

"I'm ready!"

"That's the spirit! Go get 'em!" Angel Dust cheered as Kelley left the parlor. "Let's hope she doesn't run off again."

"We'll know if Lucifer is at the bar next." Huskee mumbled.

~~~

"Like this?"

"Almost! That looks good!"

"...Dad, it's all misshapen."

"Do you think my first one was perfect?"

"Yes, actually."

Lucifer's bedroom door was cracked, Kelley could hear him inside with Charlie. She knocked lightly and poked her head in a bit with a smile.

Charlie looked back and stood, holding out her rubber duck. The head was a bit smaller than usual and the body was much larger with a few small dents, but from the light purple skin, white hair, and red eyepatch, it was clearly Vaggie.

"Kelley! Look!"

Lucifer looked back as Kelley's smile widened, "she's so cute!"

"You think so?"

"Vaggie will love it! It has lots of sentiment and you did great for your first try!"

"Thanks! I have to give it to her! I'll see you guys tomorrow!" A tight hug for Lucifer, then Kelley before Charlie was out of the door, closing it behind her.

Kelley looked at Lucifer, rubbing her arm. "...Hey."

Lucifer smiled, but his eyes gave away how worried he was. "Hey." He turned to face her and stood from his seat.

They both stood in silence for a bit, each second growing more and more tense before they both blurted out.

"I'm sorry!"

"What?"

They stared at each other after speaking in unison and Kelley quickly spoke up, "you have nothing to be sorry for."

"I made you uncomfortable. I didn't mean to--"

"--No. Luci, you didn't make me uncomfortable. It was just me." Kelley began to close the distance between them as she explained, "I got nervous about taking that step with you, not because I don't want to, it's because I know things will be different after. I've never done this before, and I have no experience, I could ruin everything and not even know how. I've never felt so comfortable with someone to even feel the need to do this, and it's a little scary to share a first experience with someone and not know how it will go." She stopped in front of Lucifer and grabbed his hands, caressing them with her thumbs.

"I love you so much. I want to do this. My mind is just getting the best of me. Angel says I'm thinking too much." Kelley let out a light chuckle.

"Maybe a little." Lucifer smiled at her.

"The last thing I wanted to do was run off. I got overwhelmed."

"I understand, it's okay. Apology accepted. Are you sure I didn't make you uncomfortable at all? If it's too soon--"

"I'm sure, my angel." Kelley would never get enough of Lucifer. He was so sweet, caring, and loving, why'd it take her so long to find her true love?

Lucifer gave Kelley a light tug, pulling her into a hug before pecking her lips, her forehead, and her cheeks, "I love you."

"I love you too."

"Ready to take that leap of faith with me?"

"That's a way to put it." Kelley laughed lightly.

"You're scared you'll be drastically different, or we'll be drastically different. I can safely promise that won't be the case. You trust me, don't you?"

"Of course." She nodded. "I don't trust my lack of experience."

"If you're thinking about that, you're thinking too hard." Lucifer chuckled, staring into her eyes.

There go the "sexy eyes" again.

"Well, then what do I think about, Lucifer?" Kelley inched a bit closer.

"What would make this moment better for you? Do what comes to mind."

Kelley's hands moved to the blond's face and she closed the small gap that was left between them, pressing her lips against his.

Lucifer's hands moved from her own to her arms. The light pecks got longer and longer after each one until Lucifer couldn't bear to pull away from her lips anymore.

Don't think, right? What would make this moment better? Kelley hesitantly led them towards the bed, not breaking the kiss. They both sat down, but Kelley wasn't done yet. She placed her hands on his shoulders and pulled her lips away just a bit to position herself, straddling his lap.

"Well--R-Right now is definitely an option, but if you needed time to--"

"No more time needed." Kelley could feel her cheeks heating up before she quickly kissed him again.

This time, Lucifer's hands found her hips, pulling her in closer and nipping at her lower lip. Kelley's hands quickly went to his face, cupping his cheeks and letting out a small sigh as she melted into the kiss.

If Kelley had to choose her favorite thing to do, she would always choose kissing Lucifer. Instead of thinking of a good stopping point, she focused on the warm feeling pooling inside of her as Lucifer swirled his tongue around hers before lightly sucking on it. That warm feeling quickly became hot. His hands went under her shirt, caressing the sensitive skin of her lower back before slowly moving up, tracing her sides, and lifting her shirt in the process.

Kelley pulled away a bit, lifting the shirt over her head and tossing it to the ground. Her hands went to Lucifer's chest, locking eyes with him as they slid down to the top button of his vest, undoing it. "You next?"

Kelley held back her small laugh as Lucifer rushed to take off his vest and shirt. Beautiful was the only word that could describe the blond. His porcelain shoulders were covered in a light yellow blush, along with his cheeks. Kelley continued to trail her hands down his chest before kissing him again. The blond's hands were on her bra next, unclasping it, but not pulling away from the kiss to let her take it off just yet.

Lucifer finally moved from her lips, kissing down her neck, "L-Love. You still want to go further?"

"Mhm." Kelley felt a bit fuzzy from the kiss and the trail following down her neck and shoulder wasn't helping. She was no stranger to this part of the game, but feeling the growing bulge in his pants almost made her freeze up. Remember what Angel Dust said; she's read things. She has references.

The woman gave a slow roll of her hips and took a sharp breath as Lucifer gasped. Kelley quickly found a good rhythm with her hips, leaning in close until their lips were inches apart, "how is this?"

"Don't stop, please." Lucifer let out a light moan that made Kelley grind down a little harder.

The friction was amazing for both of them. Lucifer felt rock hard under Kelley now. Each roll of her hips drew a moan or a whimper from the blond, and she wasn't exactly quiet herself. The feeling against her clit had her arousal growing with each movement.

"Shit--Kelley, I can't--"

Before she knew it, she was lifted by her hips, and their positions were flipped. Kelley was now lying on her back and Lucifer was between her legs. His blond hair was disheveled as he panted, his fingers hooking her pants and panties.

"I don't mean to cut your exploration short, I'll combust without even making you cum first at this rate."

That made Kelley blush even more, "well we can't have that, can we?"

"No, we can't~" Lucifer pulled down both garments, tossing them with her shirt and finally letting her take her bra off as well. "You're so beautiful," his hands roamed her body, cupping her breasts, and pinching her nipples lightly. It was driving Kelley crazy.

"L-Luci!"

"Am I teasing? I'm sorry, my angel." The blond's hands went to Kelley's thighs. "I'll keep going for the both of us, you just tell me at any time if it's too much." As he spoke, he spread her legs a bit more.

"I will, Lucifer."

"Did I already say that I love you?"

"I'd love to hear it again."

"I love you," Lucifer's fingers toyed at her entrance.

"I-I love you too." Kelley looked at him, "You're still teasing."

"I am, aren't I?" Lucifer slowly pushed a finger inside of her. "I'll stop now." He started to kiss her inner thigh.

Kelley's mouth opened slightly as his finger worked slowly, his focus more on leaving marks along the woman's sensitive skin. She could feel the slight pinch from his teeth, nearly leaving her trembling from the sensation. The blond carefully added another finger, curling both of them to stretch her out.

"Where's your pretty voice?" The blond purred, his kisses trailing down her thigh lower and lower, "Let me hear you." He finally reached his desired destination, letting his mouth latch onto her sensitive bud while he still worked his fingers.

A loud gasp left Kelley this time. She could feel his forked tongue circling her clit before he began to suck and--

"Oh my fuck--" Kelley's body nearly jolted as a moan tumbled from her lips.

What should she do with her hands? After the thought came, the obvious answer came right after. Her hands slid into Lucifer's hair, earning a shiver and a moan from him once she tightened her grip.

"Luci! Luci--!"

That encouraged the blond to pick up his pace. Kelley tugged at the blond strands in her grasp. "Feels good! Feels so good! Luci--!"

Lucifer slowly removed his fingers and let his tongue delve inside her, instead using his fingers, slick with her arousal to focus on her clit. Kelley was seeing stars. She could feel fire pooling in her lower abdomen as she began to roll her hips up into Lucifer's face. Her thighs were shaking, each flick of his tongue and roll of his fingers made her hotter and hotter. Each moan and praise that fell from Kelley's lips simply added fuel to the fire.

"Gonna cum--"

"Mhm." Lucifer locked eyes with her, half-lidded and blown out, begging her to cum.

That was the final straw.

Kelley's back arched and her eyes closed as her hips jerked. She could feel her body pulsing, pleasure rippling through her as she came undone. Lucifer didn't move, slowing his movements to ride out her orgasm. He only pulled away once he felt the woman moving.

The blond lifted his head, licked his lips, and smiled.

"That was amazing." Kelley was still steadying her breathing, smiling back at him. "Let's keep the show going~."

A gentle push. Lucifer let Kelley take the lead, squirming a bit once she was the one settled between his legs. Kelley decided to start slowly, running her hands up his thighs to reach the waistband of his pants.

A shaky breath left his lips, "m-my love. You don't have to--"

"I'd like to return the favor." She began to pull his pants down, "let me help you feel good?"

Lucifer couldn't possibly say no to that. He swallowed harshly, eyes never leaving her as she continued. Once his pants were off, Kelley took a small breath. Whatever she thought she felt earlier was very much an understatement to the outline of the bulge she was seeing. The boxers didn't stay on long after that.

Kelley couldn't tear her eyes away even if she wanted to (she didn't). Lucifer's cock stood at attention, precum beading at the tip, urging her to continue. Her hand slowly wrapped around him and she felt him tense up under her.

One stroke. Two, and his hips were already bucking into her strokes. She leaned in closer at a snail's pace and just when Lucifer thought he needed to beg, a loud moan left him instead when Kelley's tongue slowly dragged up the base of his dick to the weeping tip.

"Fuuuuck! W-Who's teasing now, huh?"

"Just a tiny bit~" Kelley kept stroking as she wrapped her mouth around the tip, languidly circling it with her tongue before beginning to bob her head.

It was Kelley's turn to enjoy hearing Lucifer's moans like her own little symphony as she did her best to please him. She began to take more and more of him in her mouth as Lucifer gripped the sheets under him.

"K-Keep--"

"Hmm?"

"Shit! Baby," Lucifer's moans aroused Kelley further than she thought was possible. She picked up her pace, pulling her head up a bit to focus on the blond's twitching tip.

"Baby--" he repeated.

Her tongue circled the tip of his cock before she began to suck. The blond's hips bucked and he cried out.

"ShitShitShit! That's--So good--You're so good, baby--"

Kelley could feel him throbbing in her warm mouth. She moved her hand a bit faster, drinking in the moans and praises that left the Demon King's lips. Nothing more mattered than seeing Lucifer come undone.

"Cumming! I'm gonna--"

"Mhm~" Kelley mimicked her boyfriend as he tumbled over the edge. She took each drop of cum and made sure none went to waste, swallowing his release as she kept stroking him, slowing her lace again.

Lucifer's chest was heaving, he looked completely sex-drunk, and Kelley couldn't get enough of it.

"How was that?" She asked.

"Do you really feel the need to ask?"

Kelley was on her back again before she could respond. Lucifer hovered over her, strands of his hair sticking to his sweaty forehead. "Are you still up for this, my love?"

The woman nodded, grabbing Lucifer's face. "I need you inside me."

Lucifer let out a shaky "fuck" before kissing her again, beginning to position himself. Her arms wrapped around his neck, pulling him in close as she felt him brush against her slit. It wasn't long before he was slowly sinking into her. Kelley felt like she could feel each inch of him until he bottomed out inside of her. She tensed up a bit and Lucifer buried his face into her shoulder.

"F-Fuck--Are you alright?"

A sharp nod. She was just full. Completely filled with Lucifer in a way she'd never been before, it was almost overwhelming. "Just need to s-sit." She managed to verbally respond.

"Take as long as you need," Lucifer assured her.

Once Kelley felt adjusted enough, her body began to relax. She gave a small roll of her hips as she loosened her grip. "You can move now." She told him.

Lucifer's movements were slow as his hips pulled back and connected with hers again. His head didn't move from the nape of her neck, a moan falling from his lips. His rhythm was slow and careful, not wanting to end things too soon, or worse, hurt Kelley in any way. The blond could stay like this with her tight walls wrapped around him for the rest of eternity. Was planning for next time already a bad thing? Of course, he didn't think so.

"Lucifer," Kelley's hands found their way up his back, making his rhythm stagger a bit. She tangled her fingers in his hair again. "Faster, please."

The careful pace the King of Hell worked so hard to set was broken at record speed. Pleasure began to build for both of them. The familiar heat building in Kelley's core was returning, a hand moving down between their bodies, only to be stopped by Lucifer. He leaned in close, drinking in the moans and whines that left Kelley's swollen lips before speaking, his voice low in her ear.

"Let me." His hand trailed down instead, not taking long to reach where Kelley was headed. Lucifer rubbed at the bud with firm circles, his thrusts keeping a consistent pace. The added stimulation almost made Kelley's eyes roll back. Her walls wrapped tighter around Lucifer and his rhythm began to stagger again.

"Baby,"

Kelley moaned out in response. No one's voice should be as sinful as his.

"So good. So good, angel." The blond whimpered out.

"Luci, please! Kelley could feel that she wasn't going to hold out for much longer. Her legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him in as his fingers began to work faster. "Gonna cum!"

"Cum for me. Please cum for me, let me feel you--Shit--I-I'm close myself--" His thrusts were beginning to pick up speed as he started to kiss and suck at Kelley's neck. She tugged at his hair harder, earning a muffled moan from him.

"LuciLuciLuciLuciLuci--" His name fell from her lips like a broken prayer as the tightening band finally snapped.

This was somehow more intense than the orgasm she'd just had. Her voice was taken from her, mouth open as her back arched and her pulsating walls tightened around Lucifer's cock.

"There you go. Fuck--So good--You're so good. I--" He was throbbing inside her now, both hands gripping the thighs that were wrapped tightly around him, his claws lightly digging into the supple flesh. His eyes closed, mouth slacked as loud moans escaped him. He was so close. Kelley decided to give him the push he needed.

"Please. Let me feel you, Luci~"

"D-Don't say things like that--"

"Cum inside me, please."

"Shit! Kelley--" Nail in the coffin. One buck of the hips, then another before the blond was burying himself as deep as he could. His cock twitched and his teeth were at the nape of her neck, not fully sinking in, but certainly enough to leave a mark regardless. A string of nearly incoherent praises left him as he came undone.

Sudden darkness in the room forced Kelley to focus in her euphoric state. Lucifer's wings had sprouted, fluttering slightly with each tremble of his body as his tail whipped behind him before it wrapped itself around her leg. Kelley's hands slowly moved up in his hair, feeling the base of his horns as his body finally began to relax. The two lay in their positions for a few moments longer, waiting for their breathing to even out before Lucifer slowly pulled out of her. Kelley locked eyes with the blond, staring into the yellow she was met with. Her hands moved down to his face.

"How was that for a leap of faith?"

Lucifer laughed, closing his eyes. Kelley smiled and laughed as well as he responded, "A leap for sure, but I'll never complain. You were amazing, my love."

"I should be saying that to you." Kelley noticed that his tail was still wrapped around her leg and his wings still enveloped them completely. She leaned up a bit and pecked his lips before speaking, "You don't seem tired at all."

Surprisingly enough, neither was she. The blond simply shrugged in response, leaning in to peck her lips once more, "How could I possibly get tired of you? Are you asking because you want to indulge me some more?" With that, he was lowering himself between Kelley's thighs again and the action alone set her ablaze.

Now, how could she say no to that?

Lucifer Tag List: @alastorssimp @saints-wrapped-in-plastic @liveontelevision

Requests are open! If you'd like to be tagged in future Lucifer or Hazbin Hotel content, let me know! My asks and DMs are open to all!

[13uswntimagines]

Complicated (Emily Sonnett x Reader)

Request: maybe the reader is really uptight and cold all the time until she meets emily and they somehow click + maybe the teams reaction?

Author’s Note: Hey dudes, so i know that this is a bit of a stretch for the prompt, but i just couldn’t seem to get this idea out of my head. I really hope Y’all like it! Let me know what You think!

You were… complicated. A stoic person with seemingly no heart. Someone with a massive aversion to touch and who most of the team had never seen smile. Or at least that’s how you were introduced to every newcomer to the team. They were warned to stay away from you, to avoid you in any of their shenanigans or face the consequences. 

You were never overtly rude- just detached, uninterested, completely and totally unapproachable by all accounts. Your aggression on the field was bar none and some of the vets had learned that pushing you led to the same result off the field. 

It was safe to say that most of the team was terrified of you and your stoic exterior, so they let you be. Well, except for a particular blond defender that you knew. You would never admit it out loud, but you had a bit of a soft spot for the bubbly defender. And she was determined to break through your tough outer shell. 

You sighed, staring with thinly veiled boredom at the women in front of you. Bonding nights were obligatory, but forced participation in the games they chose was not. Sure, you guessed you were technically playing truth or dare with the women, but no one dared call on you. You didn’t want them too. 

“Alright Sonny, your turn,” Alex smiled, sobering from the embarrassing story Sonnett had just been dared to tell. You leaned forward slightly, interested in what the woman would do. She sent Lindsey a mischievous smirk. “Well, I think I should pick the only person who hasn’t participated this evening,”

“Emily that might not be a good idea…” Kelley started, glancing worriedly at you. There was a reason they didn’t fuck with you. 

“Y/n, truth or dare,” Emily asked, raising her eyebrow at you, completely ignoring frat daddy senior. The rest of the team held their breath as you cocked your head to the side and squinted your eyes. 

“Truth,”

“But that’s boring,” Emily huffed, pouting. The corners of your mouth twitched at her adorableness and you rolled your eyes goodnaturedly (something that didn’t go unnoticed by a majority of the team's veterans). 

“Fine then, dare,” You raised your eyebrow, leaning back in your seat. The vets released their breath, glad that this was going well. 

“Yes!!!” she cheered, pumping her fists. Your lips twitched again into a playful smirk. She tapped her chin in thought, surprised she had gotten this far. You began to hum jeopardy theme under your breath, waiting for her to decide. And the vets yet again shared a look of disbelief. Emily was the only person who brought out this side of you. 

A mischievous smile broke across her features when she had finally thought up her dare. She wanted to do something that no one on the team had done. “I dare you to let me touch you,” 

Your smirk disappeared, your lips forming a tight line, your shoulders tensed, all humor evaporated like smoke. You didn’t do physical contact, just the thought made your skin crawl. “No,” you said sternly. 

“Oh come on. I’ll be gentle. You might even like it,” Emily pleaded, wiggling her eyebrows at you. You frowned. That was part of why you didn’t want it. You were terrified that you would like the comfort of her touch, and then what happened when she left? Everyone always left. 

“No, I change my mind. I chose truth,” You shook your head. 

“You can’t do that,” Emily whined. 

“I just did,” You said cooley, clasping your hands together, the glint in your eye just daring her to try and challenge you. 

She opened her mouth as if to respond, but Alex beat her to it. “Sonnett just let it go,” Alex said, eyeing you carefully. They didn’t need an explosion from you, frankly, she was surprised that one hadn’t happened already. 

Emily’s pout deepened. She crossed her arms like a small child, and just like that the tension left you. 

“Fine, but you have to answer the question I pick,” She huffed. 

You nodded once, biting the inside of your cheek to prevent a smile at her cuteness and gesturing for her to continue. 

Alex grabbed Kelley’s hand to prevent her from gaping at you. You never ever flipped back and forth between agitated and playful so quickly. 

“Why won’t you let us touch you? Like even a hug or a high five?” Emily asked, staring you in the eyes. 

You blinked, pursing your lips. “I don’t like it.”

“But how do you have a relationship when you won’t let people get close to you?” Emily pressed, refusing to stop this line of questioning. She really liked you, despite your brooding, and how did you have a relationship with someone who you couldn’t touch. That sounded like some fifty shades of grey bullshit and she wasn’t here for it. 

“I don’t. I’m going to bed,” You said stonily, standing and stalking towards the door, tired of this impromptu interrogation. Why was Emily so obsessed with touching you anyway?

*****

The silence that followed the slam of the door was defining, the team frozen by your sudden outburst. Emily’s mouth was left hanging at your reaction. Sure she had been warned of your moodiness, but with your playful behavior, in the beginning, she thought that it may have been safe to ask. To try and break past one of those walls. 

“You’re lucky she likes you kid,” Tobin said quietly, still watching the door. 

“You call that liking?” Emily snorted in disbelief. 

“She let you ask the question, that’s more than any of us have ever gotten,” Christen smiled sadly, patting Emily’s knee. 

You didn’t do games or get-to-know-you questions. Hell, the most the team had heard you talk was during strategy meetings. The last time someone had tried to get you involved in the team's bonding games, Abby Wambach had taken the field with a black eye (It wasn’t intentional, but pin the medal on the cutout was maybe not the best choice of games). 

“You also almost got her to smile,” Megan added kindly, trying to brighten her spirit. You liked Emily, and you always seemed to brighten around her. She didn’t want Emily to give up on you. You both deserved to be happy. 

“Why is she so grumpy all the time?” Emily asked, her eyebrows furrowing. 

“It’s complicated,” Kelley started, and Emily rolled her eyes. That was all anyone would say about you, and she found it entirely inadequate in describing the situation. 

“Y/n was hurt a long time ago, by the only person she’s ever loved. Just give her some time,” Christen said gently rubbing her back. It wasn’t their story to tell, but you liked Emily, and she would bet her hat that you would tell her eventually. 

****

“Emily this is a bad idea,” Rose whispered, huddling against the wall just behind the dining-room door. Sam and Lindsey nodded their agreement. 

Emily rolled her eyes. It wasn’t like they were gonna dump water on anyone. It was just confetti’s.“It’ll be fine guys, it’s just a prank,” 

She shushed the girls as footsteps approached. She stepped out behind the door, preparing to throw the confetti on her poor, unsuspecting teammate, only for strong hands to grip her wrists and pull her into their tall frame. 

“Whoa, there hot stuff,” You chucked, catching the woman, a smile hinting on your lips, the confetti bucket trapped conveniently between your bodies. 

“Oh, shit” Lindsey breathed out. 

“Sorry Y/N we-...” Rose stuttered, both women stopping when your gaze met theirs. All humor was gone from your eyes, and your lips curled slightly. They shrunk as far back from you and Emily as much they could. 

You glanced down, softening at the woman in your arms. “Try to time your pranks better next time, alright?” A smile hinted on your features at the woman’s too quick nod, and you squeezed her shoulders lightly, nodding back once. 

 “Ice Cream tonight?” You asked, completely missing the glances Rose and Lindsey were sharing. 

“Yeah, sure,” Emily smiled, eyes wide. You nodded, a soft smile playing across your lips. You squeezed her shoulder and leaning in to place a very soft kiss on her cheek before heading off. 

“What the fuck just happened?” Emily whispered, watching the slightly giddy way you walked away. 

“I think Y/N just asked you out,” Lindsey mumbled in disbelief. For a person with seemingly no heart, it was strange to see you acting so soft with their Disani. 

“She touched you,” Rose said, her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide. 

“Touch, she kissed her cheek,” Lindsey snorted. 

“Yeah, she did,” 

*****

Emily didn’t know what she expected from your ice cream date, but it certainly wasn’t your shy smiles and adorable jokes. You were warm and inviting with her (at least you tried to be) and Emily immensely appreciated the effort. For someone who everyone thought had no heart, she thought yours was beautiful. Hesitant and shy but very sweet. 

You had been polite, and courteous, even going so far as to insist that you walked Emily back to her room. You paused in front of her door, saddened that your night was about to be over. This was so different for you, but with Emily, opening up felt so much less scary. 

“You know, I could have walked here by myself. You’re only like 2 doors down,” Emily joked, and you rolled your eyes at the woman, pulling her hand to your lips. 

“Hmm, I know, but I wanted this to be perfect,” You smirked against her hand. 

“Well, it was pretty good,” She laughed, thoroughly enjoying your playful nature. She just hoped it didn’t disappear when you were around the others. 

“Just pretty good?” You asked, insecurity obvious in your tone. You never let someone get this close, you didn’t want to be a disappointment. 

“No, amazing,” she smiled reassuringly, taking a step closer to you. 

“I have something that will make it even better,” You murmured leaning in, draping the hand you were holding over her shoulder, and resting your hands on her waist. She tilted her head up, connecting your lips in a slow sweet kiss. Her hand traveled from your shoulder to toy with the collar of your dress shirt, and you tensed lightly. You relaxed when her tongue probed your lips, and you hesitantly parted them, your tongues sweetly touching. Her hand traced down your collar and settled on your chest, just above your heart, and she ran her fingers over the raised lines she found there. 

You pulled away when air became, resting for foreheads together. 

“Wow,” The breath from her words famed across your lips, and you felt a light pink bloom across your cheeks. 

“Good wow?” You asked.

“Fantastic,” She hummed, leaning up and connecting your lips again. The fingers not on your collar tangled in the baby hairs at the back of your neck, and you sighed into the kiss. 

You pulled away, a sudden smile breaking across your features. 

“Does this mean you’ll go out with me again?” 

“Absolutely,” she giggled. And you pecked her lips again, before pulling away to open the door for her. She leaned heavily against it and watched you retreat back to your room (totally not missing your little celebration that was not so different from Carli’s goal celebration, as you headed back to your room). She snorted. Cold-hearted her ass. 

*****

In the eight months since your date, you and Emily had only gotten closer. She was like a magnet, always drawing you back to her. You had gotten better about touch, and allowing your playful side out around the team. You loved her, and you would do anything for her. She was your person. 

You plopped down on the pitch, breathing heavily after your team (cool beans) beat Alex’s team (hot stuff) in the scrimmage. You had played alright, scoring 4 goals and leaving the other team’s defense useless. You were broken out of your thoughts by a blond shadow. You placed your hand on your brow, squinting up at the woman. 

“Good game, even though you didn’t really have to do much,” You smirked up at her, taking her outstretched hand to stand up. 

“Well spending all that time in the attacking half really made me tired,” She laughed, and you rolled your eyes at her. 

“Hop on,” You smiled, gesturing towards your back. 

The team was stunned, watching as you lifted one Emily Sonnett for a piggyback ride. What was even more surprising was the large smile plastered across your face at her repeated calls of giddy-up. 

“Is she?” Alex asked, unable to decide if it was the touching or the smiling that she was asking about. 

“Yep,” Kelley murmured back, smiling when you set Sonnett carefully on her feet and kissed her forehead. She melted a little at how softly you cradled the woman’s face. 

“She looks happy,” Alex hummed. 

“She deserves to be. They both do,”

[animatedminds]

Let’s Get Dangerous Review!

It’s dangerous. In a good way. <cue dramatic music> Okay, obviously there’s more thoughts than just that. I’ve been waiting for it for weeks, and it arrived just as awesome as I hoped. For the first time, let’s give my full movie style review to the double length Ducktales special: “Let’s Get Dangerous.”

The spoilers are open and widely discussed, so maybe don’t look past the following image if you haven’t seen the episode yet.

To note, I’m not entirely convinced that this was actually meant to be a pilot. It definitely does introduce a new status quo for the Darkwing trio of characters (minus Honker for now, here’s hoping they haven’t forgotten him), but it’s also a very remote story that still tries to take place within the context of Ducktales’ universe, so it really depends on what they choose to do.

But let’s just get down to it.

First off, as I mentioned in my earlier post… Taurus Bulba. He was maybe the biggest and most eye-catching aspect of the first part of the episode, as one of the few elements we hadn’t already seen yet, and his reputation as a really, really bad guy has quite preceded him. As I may have gushed somewhat about, he’s one of the best parts of the special.

James Monroe Inglehart, for those living away from the Disney scene for a decade, is an actor and voice actor most famous for being the original Genie on Broadway’s Aladdin. A grand, bombastic presence, he generally plays characters who - much like the genie himself - a big, jolly, kind but maybe a little mischievous souls that take the attention of a room and brighten up the characters’ day - like Lance, in Tangled the Series. The most interesting thing about Bulba is that Inglehart brings that exact same energy to the role, and so Bulba keep that jollity and lofty personality in a package that becomes increasingly less nice as the story goes on. As someone who keenly remembers Taurus Bulba as cruel monster willing to hurt kids and capable of crushing Darkwing like nobody’s business, the contrast was immediately fun to watch - and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In this story, Bulba is recast from a crime lord intending to use a super weapon go on an endless plundering spree to a FOWL scientist with a respectable reputation who intends to use a super weapon to take over the world, and the transition goes off fairly well. The end result is a pretty standard mix of superhero fight and Bond plot, as Bulba ends up holed up in his lab with his squadron of elite supervillain minions - all plundered a particular fictional universe - with the heroes having to break in / escape from his captivity and stop him before he destroys everything. It’s very Silver Age, with Bulba in the role of maniacal villain, and he’s contrasted very well with Bradford - who is as always an antagonist who prides himself on pragmatism. This contrast leads to some great moments: Bradford’s increasing frustration with the cavalier attitude of both the heroes and the villains gives him the best stint of characterization he’s had since the beginning of the season - he basically spends the whole episode arguing with everyone about how badly thought out their actions are, while also badly hiding his own secrets.

The Fearsome Five (of which Quackerjack is voices by his original actor) are great to see, though used minimally. If you’re expecting to see classic show dynamics between the villains and Darkwing, that’s not really what they’re used for. Mostly, they’re minions with personality, and they’re more there to establish both to the audience and to Drake the character himself that he is ready to take on really big threats even with his lack of superpowers.

But enough about the villains, on to the heroes!

A couple episodes ago, with the Halloween episode, I criticized that story for not balancing its A and B plot all that well. This episode does not have that problem. The story is actually maybe about three fifths Darkwing’s story, and the rest of it is Scrooge and the nephews as they figure out what Bulba is up to independently of Darkwing and try to stop him themselves. It’s somewhat similar to Timephoon, where they’re there constantly and are doing their own bid to solve the story but the focus isn’t primarily on them. Instead, we have some of the best “HDL actually matter to the story” bits of the show, where they escape Bulba’s prison on their own and lead Bradford out, all the while slowly figuring out that something is shady about the guy. Meanwhile, Scrooge gets stuck in the original Ducktales universe’s most memed scene, which was a fun gag (but not the best gag - that would be the one and only Bonkers D. Bobcat as the Harvey Bullock-style cop in the Darkwing show).

Which I suppose can lead to a digression about the mad science bit here. The alternate universes here are… interesting. I always pay special attention to how things like time travel or other dimensions or alternate universes work in a series, and this one reminds me the most - I think - of DC’s Dark Multiverse: a collection of universes that are both explicitly fictional but made real because people created them. Ultimately, it’s less as if the OG Darkwing universe exists independently of the Ducktales universe and more that the in-universe Darkwing show as a world based off of it that the characters can reach into. I wish the episode had delved into that more, and now you’ve got people trying to use it to look for more establishment of OG Darkwing elements (though I was fine with it being separate, perceiving anything else as rather needlessly inexplicable), but ultimately that is not specifically what the episode is about, and is kept rather separate.

So what is the episode about? Like you didn’t already know…

As always, Gosalyn Waddlemeyer is a little girl whose grandfather was done away with by Taurus Bulba, and who falls into Darkwing’s lap over the course of his adventure with him. Here, her grandfather is (possibly) still alive, just lost in the ether a la Gravity Falls’ Grunkle Ford. And like the mighty glazed McGuffin, Darkwing’s goal in the episode is less strictly defeating Bulba as it is helping her get her grandfather and her home back. Gosalyn here is self-sufficient and action oriented (it may be my inner Brooklyn 99 fan talking, but I loved Stephanie Beatriz as her, and kind of wish she had gotten a wider range of lines), taking on her own crusade against Bulba until she realizes she can go to Darkwing for help, and is constantly trying to pull him into the fight - even while he is reluctant, and no matter what the danger - so that they can win and she can get justice. But in the end, she has to accept that they might not be able to.

As a longtime Batman fan, I immediately recognized a plethora of Robin references with Gosalyn. She’s a kid who’s family was taken from her by a villain, given a surrogate home by the hero - like Dick Grayson. She’s a street tough who originally met the hero committing a crime, and who is both skeptical of his heroism and heavily critical of his flaws - like Jason Todd. And she’s a young genius with a lot of scientific knowledge, tech skills and common sense - just like Tim Drake. There’s even elements of Carrie Kelley or Terry McGinnis there, in her determined if not gung-ho approach to heroism despite her circumstances and the hermit-like behavior of the hero.

And in the end, this is a fairly apt comparison, because Gosalyn essentially ends the story more as a Robin figure than previously, now as Darkwing’s more of a ward and official sidekick alongside Launchpad. The story does not, to note, involve her being adopted by Drake or becoming Gosalyn Mallard. Indeed, they don’t really end up having that sort of relationship. They’re distant and don’t really know how to relate to one another, and not about to broach the subject of family except in distant terms. There’s ultimately far less emphasis than before on Gosalyn and Drake being similar and hitting it off on a personal level, or even really Drake keying into Gosalyn’s potential and spirit as a person vs an element in his adventure. Throughout the story he regards her as a victim to be saved, then ultimately as an ally with potential to be respected, and in the end he gives her an offer to take up the mantle along side him while they search for her family… which ultimately creates something very different.

For people expecting something a little more akin to the implications the show made with Gyro and BOYD, Gosalyn here. The implication that they could be a family is brought up by Launchpad, but neither Drake nor Gosalyn are really there at the end of the story - I want to say they’re not there yet, but the way the story goes gives off the impression that the dynamic duo dichotomy is the relationship for the two the writing is most comfortable giving them.

Again, I’m a longtime Batman fan, so I understand and appreciate the nod. It gives them a really cool status quo that’s distinct from what came before it. Still, the strong father/daughter relationship between the two was very much the heart and soul of the original show, an endearing quality that created the character traits we love about both characters, and ultimately one of the primary characteristics that set the Darkwing family apart even from most comic book superhero stars - so even if they made something great out of it, it’s a shame to see Ducktales ultimately keep that relationship at arms’ length.

But that’s less a criticism and more just something I wish they had chosen to do differently - and it makes sense for the 2017 team’s take on Darkwing, which has always been more focused on “irrepressible hero who doesn’t give up” - a pluckie rookie growing into his competence - than “former fool whose great potential is unleashed through the people around him.” The latter is there, sometimes, but it’s not prominent. Original Darkwing was a man made better by his daughter, while the modern Darkwing doesn’t quite need that to find the hero within.

The only (and I mean only) criticism I have is the way the characters kind of jump around in how they respond to things. Drake wanting more crime, and then freaking out when super crime shows up and it’s way more than he thought he can handle is fine, and is one of the better character bits in the special. It being unclear whether Drake is against fighting supervillains because he thinks they’re too powerful vs because he doesn’t want to risk Gosalyn’s safety is another thing, though - it seems the show intended to imply the latter but forgot to include the line somewhere, so it’s not inferred until later and Drake suddenly benching Gos towards the end lacks set-up.

For her part, Gosalyn is suddenly and quickly afraid to fight for a brief moment so Launchpad can inspire her to face impossible odds, even though it was hardly the first time she had done so in the special. The ending I think wanted the characters to be somewhere that the rest of the special hadn’t gotten them to yet. But it’s all good - it ends well, so all’s well. Best gag of the episode, btw? Fenton, who is awful at keeping his secret identity secret, has hooked up Darkwing with his own hi-tech hero lair. Darkwing, despite supposedly being a detective (or at least an actor playing a detective), ends up as one of the two or three people remaining on Earth who hasn’t figured out that Fenton is Gizmoduck. Darkwing considers himself good friends with Fenton, despite hating Gizmoduck. It’s actually very funny.

It’s as of now unclear what is coming up for Darkwing. We know the St. Canard characters are going to factor in more as the FOWL plot progresses, and this episode kicks that plot into high gear - the characters now know about FOWL and their intentions, and are preparing themselves for a far more dangerous fight than usual. In short, with the midseason comes the renewed focus on the primary plot of the season, as per the usual. Like I said before, while I’m not as on board as most with the idea that this was a pilot, St. Canard was definitely established here - with series regular Zan Owlson as it’s new mayor, and a general aesthetic and set of protagonists. It wouldn’t be remiss for a future episode this season to take place there (though we know Negaduck isn’t happening this season).

The new few episodes, however, are focused more on the quest for Finch’s treasures and FOWL, so that’s going to have to wait for a while. We’ve been promised, as I recall, an episode that brings all the kids together (unless that’s part of the finale), which is nice - I may have mentioned before that the best episodes of the series have been the ones that put the kids (who are the characters with the most focus throughout its run) together and let all their personalities run through an adventure together - and with the cast growing somewhat constantly, it’s nice to know that no one is being forgotten.

Either way, I give the episode a great deal of recommendation - I only had a couple things that bothered me, and a few wishes for different choices, and ultimately I’m planning on watching it a ton of times just like I did the first Darkwing episode. From a classic Darkwing fan, and in the words of Bat-Mite, it’s a different intepretation to be sure, but not at all one without merit.

So thanks to Frank Angones, Matt Youngberg and the Ducktales crew! I hope my virtual thumbs up reaches them somehow, but either way, it was a good day to be dangerous.

[imaginesforyourfandom]

Not Going Well - Krashlyn Imagine

A/N: This is a sequel to Following Footsteps

(Y/N) POV:

I bit my lip as I waited for the bus to come to a full stop. This was it. My first camp with the U-17 squad. I had already got a plethora of tips and advice from my parents and aunts. The dos and don’ts of how to stand out to the coaching staff. I was terrified if I am being honest. I want to be able to prove myself without everyone being dicks to me about the fact that my parents are on the national team.

“Ready to go?” Marc asked me as I nodded my head. I stood up and walked into the hotel with him. I was a few days late to camp due to prior things I had to do with my parents and because they are on the national team, I was given an exception, so I was already off to a bad start.

He told me what room I would be in and gave me a keycard as I headed up to go get settled. There was supposed to be a team meeting in about half an hour so that was just enough time to get up there and get my stuff put down. I think I had enough time to call my parents to let them know I got in safe.

I got to my room and opened the door. I could hear some chatter as I entered the room. There were two girls sitting there as I smiled. I walked over to the empty bed and sat my stuff down. They were both staring at me before looking at each other. I decided maybe I would have to make the first move here.

“Hey” I said nervously as they both stared me down for a moment. I stood there awkwardly before one of them smiled.

“Hey!” she said holding out her hand to me. “I’m Mia and this is Samantha.”

“I’m (Y/N)” I said as the girl I identified as Samantha snickered a little.

“Yeah we know.” She said sarcastically as I nodded my head. “Who doesn’t know the daughter of Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger?”

“That’s fair.” I said as she rolled her eyes.

“I’ll catch you later Mia.” She said standing up and leaving the room. Mia gave me a small smile as we stood there for a moment.

“Is the whole team going to be like that?” I asked as she gave me a sad smile. She nodded her head as I sighed. I was already hating this.

“I just think…there are a lot of questions about how you got here.” She said carefully as I nodded my head.

“I understand that.” I said as I moved to put some of my stuff in a order that would make sense to me.

“Look…all I can say is you have to try to ignore them. They are going to think what they want. So, you just got to go out there and prove you deserve to be here.” She said as I nodded my head.

“I know.”

I decided that I would wait to call my parents as Mia, and I headed down to the team meeting. When we walked in, I recognized Samantha with a couple other girls as Mia went to sit by them.

“(Y/N) come here.” Marc said as I walked over to him. I stood by him as he turned towards the group of girls. “Okay everyone listen up. This is (Y/N) Harris. She is a little late to camp due to prior commitments, but I expect you to make her feel welcomed.”

I stood there awkwardly before he finally let me sit. I sat by myself as we went through the team meeting. I could feel everyone staring at me as I tried to stay focused. I was mentally going through everything the team had told me about staying focused so that I didn’t embarrass myself more than I already had.

After the meeting, most of the girls seemed to go off on their own leaving me by myself. I had gone back to my room and called my parents to let them know I was there safe and sound.

“My baby!” my ma yelled as I smiled at hearing her voice.

“Hey ma.” I said softly as I heard a soft uh oh from the other side of the phone.

“What’s wrong?” my mom asked as I sighed.

“This doesn’t really feel like its going well.” I said honestly.

“It’s been less than a day.” She said as I nodded my head.

“Yeah, but I feel like they all only think I am here because of you guys.” I said as I heard them sigh.

The next few minutes were spent with them giving me some encouraging words. They were doing their best to keep my spirits high, but I just wasn’t having a good time. Eventually, they had to leave for practice of their own as I laid in my head deciding what to do. This was going to be a long camp.

The next few days were odd to say the least. Mia had decided to stay near me because I looked like I needed friend. I had definitely been proving myself in practice so some of the girls seemed like they were coming around to me, but some of the girls – aka Samantha—had continued to be a dick to me. Since I was hanging around Mia, it meant I had to be around Samantha. So, its more of a win-lose situation.

Currently, I was heading towards the lobby for a special team meeting with Mia, Sam, and this other girl Natalia. No one knew what the meeting was for. Just that it was mandatory.

“What do you think (Y/N)?” Mia asked me as I looked at her.

“I don’t know. I mean…this could be for literally anything.” I said as they all nodded. We continued walking as I opened the door for everyone. I went to walk in until I bumped into Sam. She had stopped and her jaw had dropped open. I frowned looking past her.

My own jaw dropped as I spotted Alex, Kelley, Christen, ma, and mom. I bit my lip trying to hide my excitement as Kelley was the first to spot me. She broke into a full on run as I braced myself when she wrapped her arms around me.

“Munchkin!” she said holding me tight to her.

“Kelley I can’t breathe.” I said as she let me go. I smiled at her as I turned to see Ma coming over. I jumped slightly falling into her arms. After the rough time I have had, I am so relieved to have them here.

“Ma.” I mumbled into her shoulder as she held me close to her. I felt another person join our hug as I immediately recognized my mom, “Mom.”

“Hey baby” she said softly as I looked at them with tears in my eyes. We stood there for a few moments before I realized mostly everyone was staring.

“I need to take a seat.” I mumbled as they laughed a little. I went and sat next to Mia. She had a smile on her face as I tried to contain my excitement. Sam hasn’t stopped staring at Alex and Christen so I think she might be a little star struck. She is a forward after all.

The meeting was basically to inform us that they would be at our final few practices to help evaluate the team and stuff. This definitely was not a coincidence, but I wasn’t going to complain. Once the meeting was over, some of the girls were just staring excitingly at my family.  

“You’re so tough. You go say hi.” Natalia said to Sam who shook her head.

“No. It’s THE Alex Morgan and THE Christen Press. You go say Hi.” She snapped as I chuckled slightly. I bit my lip deciding to have some fun. I stood up and went closer to Alex jumping slightly on her as she groaned catching me in her arms.

“Hey” I said as the forward smiled at me. Christen had her arms crossed as she was giving me an amused look.

“Hi” Alex said dropping me on the ground but keeping her arms around me. “I won’t lie. I missed you little one.”

“How could you not?” I said smugly as she jokingly pushed me away. I laughed as I turned back towards the girls who were watching in awe. “You should come meet my friends.”

“Lead the way.” Christen said as I walked towards the other girls as Sam and Mia and them had wide eyes.

“Guys meet Alex Morgan and Christen Press.” I said smiling as they all gave them excited smiles. We spent a few minutes talking as I let them talk. I felt arms wrap around my neck as I glanced up to my mom. She gave me a soft smile.

“I missed you my love.” She said softly.

“I missed you too mom.” I said as she grinned at me. The rest of the day was spent with my family and the girls. Most of them were definitely being nicer to me and I was interested to know if that would continue after this. I guess time would only tell.

The End.

[fcb-totheend]

otp questions

1. Who can’t stop smiling when the other person brings them flowers?

Julie insists on making a single trip with all the grocery bags. To be honest Alex does it too, she just doesn't look that good doing it. The main difference is probably the flowers Julie is clutching between her teeth.

Gently Alex takes them from her. Pink roses, her favorites.

"These are beautiful." Alex gives her a kiss on the cheek. "What's the occasion?"

Alex furrows her brow. She's great with important dates and today doesn't ring a bell. It's not their anniversary and she knows all of them: first date, first time they slept together, when they made it official, even when they moved in together. It's not her birthday either. Also not Blue's birthday (it's not actually his birthday obviously it's the date they adopted him. Tobin made fun of her for celebrating her dog's birthday but then Christen found out and decided to do the same. Now Tobin can't make fun of her anymore.

Julie smiles at Alex's confusion. "No occasion, I was just thinking about you." 

2. Who likes to sit on the kitchen counter while the other cooks?

There are things Alex is great at. Like soccer of course. But there's one thing she has never mastered and that's cooking. Finding out places that deliver actual healthy food is one of her specialties. But now she doesn't need them anymore. 

"Does this need more salt?" A spoon is offered to her.

Alex obliges and leans in for a taste.

"It's great."

Julie scoffs. "You always say that." 

Alex shrugs. It really did taste good to her. 

Alex quickly grabs Julie's shirt before she steps away. Julie obliges to the unsaid request and kisses Alex. She only meant it to be a quick peck but Alex deepens int

"Enough of that. We are not burning our dinner tonight."

Alex just smirks. There's still time.

3. Who takes pictures of the sky to show to their partner?

They didn't pick the best time to get together. Julie was dedicated to Chicago while Alex split her time between Orlando and Lyon. 

It was hard. Really hard. 

Taking pictures of their day was a way to say I miss you and I wish you were here.

4. Who likes to sleep on the other’s chest just to hear their heart beat? 

A lazy day is a gift they don't always get so they try to make the best out of them. Alex makes breakfast. Meaning fresh fruit, toast with peanut butter and coffee.

Julie is in charge of finding them something to watch on Netflix. Not that it matters much to Alex, soon she will lay over Julie, check social media for a while until she’ll fall asleep, listening to Julie's heartbeat and enjoying the way the defender draws circle on her lower back.

5. Who likes to splash in the puddles?

"Remember when we were the kids?"

Alex and Alyssa turn around to see what Kelley is talking about.

"Kelley you're still one of the kids." Alyssa deadpans.

"Aw thanks Lyss."

Alex doesn't pay attention to them. The image in front of her is much more interesting.

Julie and the rest of the "kids" are running around in the rain. They're not even trying to play soccer anymore, to them the field is just a giant slip and slide. Julie actually takes out Sammy when she can't stop in time. She doubles over from laughing and Alex smiles. 

"Everyone go back to the buses! The rain is not going to let up." The trainers start to herd everyone to go back to the hotel. 

Julie jogs over to Alex. "Do you want a hug?" 

There's mud and grass all over her and Alex takes a precautionary step back. "Don't even think about it."

6. Who sneaks kisses while at a formal dinner party?

Neither really. They don't like PDA

7. Who has cute pajamas they bought just for their partner?

"I'm so full." With a groan Julie laid back on her bed and put her hands on her belly.

"No one forced you to eat that last piece of pie."

Julie groans again. "But it was so good."

Alex chuckles. "Are you going to sleep like that or are you going to change?"

"Oh yeah that reminds me." With another groan Julie gets up and opens her suitcase. "Merry almost Christmas."

Alex quickly unwraps the present and grins. "They're perfect." Blue pajamas with little stars.

"And we match." Julie reaches into her suitcase again and grabs her own pajamas. Proudly she shows them to her girlfriend.

There's nothing more Alex could've asked for Christmas.

8. If they had to go laser tagging with other couples, who would they go with? 

It's not easy to find people willing to compete against Alex. Especially when most of their friends already spend enough time doing just that. Ali and Ashlyn are probably the only ones who would accept playing laser tag with them. 

Julie gets in the spirit and helps Alex destroy the enemy. 40% of that is just because victory sex is awesome.

9. Who would lift the other over their shoulders for a concert? 

It always made Alex happy when the Red Stars travelled to Orlando. Playing against Julie was a challenge that excites her every time. And knowing that Julie is going home with her soothes her ego after a close game that they ended up losing. 

To make things even better one of her sponsors got her tickets for a music festival. The crowd had a chill vibe which allowed them to be incognito and maybe a little more affectionate than they usually were on public. 

Julie was hugging her from behind, swaying them both to the music,

Julie whispers in her ear, "let me know if you want to get up on my shoulders."

It's a tempting offer and she knows Julie is strong enough but, for now, Alex is happy to enjoy the music and Julie behind her.

10. Who can’t stop horribly singing to a love song to make the other person laugh?

Alex sings all the time when she’s driving. Julie loves it, but she can’t help but point out a small detail

"That's not how it goes," Julie laughs.

"Yes it is!" Alex answers outraged.

"It's really not."

"Look it up," Alex demands, taking her eyes off the road.

After she's proven wrong Alex pouts.

Julie kisses her on the cheek. "Your version is better," she consoles her.

Alex laughs.

[aion-rsa]

Power Rangers: Ryan Parrott on Being the Architect of Power Rangers Comics

https://ift.tt/2OR4FUa

The new writer of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers tells us what to expect from the comic book universe in the days to come!

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Feature Shamus Kelley

power rangers

Apr 4, 2019

boom! studios

Ryan Parrott is about to become the architect of the Power Rangers comic universe. After leading the comic series Go Go Power Rangers for over twenty issues, Parrott will take over the “main” title of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in June with issue 40. He won’t be completely stepping away from Go Go though, co-writing it with Sina Grace.

We had the chance at WonderCon to sit down with Parrot to discuss recent developments in Go Go, his research process, the sanctity of "Green with Evil," and even Ferbus from Masked Rider.

Yeah, we went there.

In the most recent issue of Go Go Power Rangers, you included King Lexian from the Masked Rider series. Talk a little about including that character.

Well, I know it's going to disappoint some fans but I have not seen Masked Rider, so to me, I was only aware of his character in the sense that he was the one who created Alpha Five, so obviously, when we were creating Alpha One it made sense if he created Alpha Five. He obviously created the first one as well. That's why I brought him in and what I liked about the character was the idea of when you go back that far... Zordon is such a revered figure in the Mighty Morphin Universe, he's this giant floating head in the sky, right?

I loved the idea that you were seeing him at a point where he can be talked to by someone like a contemporary. Like you and I are talking right now. He is so sad and broken by his failures and Lexian is like, "Dude, suck it up." This idea that somebody would do that for him the way that he does it for the Rangers. (Lexian’s not a) mentor but a friend and that's why I liked that concept. The fact that it connected into another universe, it was more luck than it was actually me foreshadowing anything.

You even made the Command Center Edenoite architecture.

Yes. Apparently, I got it wrong though. It shouldn't have been Edenoian. I'm sorry. I failed.

See, if you watched Masked Rider...

I failed everyone.

When is Ferbus from Masked Rider going to show up? That’s the real question.

I don’t know who that is.

He is a character from the Masked Rider TV show that is both loved and hated in equal measure.

It’s a good name, Ferbus.

What about the Masked Rider character who showed up in Power Rangers in the three-parter, "A Friend in Need?" Any plans for that character?

Mostly, I just think for the books being called Mighty Morphin and Go Go, I kind of tried to stay focused on those characters and the way that story has gone out. Not to say that any of this stuff couldn't happen down the line, but for Necessary Evil and some of that, I was trying to focus mostly on bringing things back to the tone and style of the original series.

In terms of utilizing the bigger Power Rangers universe, there are a lot of different planets and aliens. What is it like playing in that sandbox and how much research do you have to do because it can get really complicated?

That was the nice thing about Go Go was that I had a very small window with which I had to write within. Obviously, I expanded in other ways, but that was fun. It's a little bigger just understanding relationships in the later series regarding Master Vile and how he (is) with all of them.

Just understanding that I've had to expand my viewing, my Mighty Morphin viewing time, a little bit more but it's daunting. Especially when you deal with all of the later seasons too because sometimes it connects and sometimes it doesn't and so trying to keep it all straight is a little difficult.

The stories in Go Go take place in another universe though, right? This comic is not trying to say, “this happened between episode 22 and 23.”

I mean this is sort of the consistent question. Obviously, the difference is, if you look at the original show, it took place in 1994 and this story takes place in present day. People have cell phones, they text and have computers and all that stuff. However, if you go back and read the Free Comic Book Day issues, which we show elements from the actual pilot, there's actual lines of dialogue that are the exact same lines.

read more: Power Rangers: The Lost Era Details Surface

If you look at moments in Go Go, when you saw the Pudgy Pig, when he arrived? Same lines of dialogue. I use those as sort of like marking posts. The way that I look at it is I think that they are all canon. I think they are a part of the TV series and the comics are the same line and they sort of intermingle together.

I feel like they sort of line up that way. They are kind of linked ... they all fit into the same timeline. Yeah, you could probably get really picky with all, but I just felt like you love the show, I love the show. I don't want to be in that point where I'm saying, "Well, this happened, but this didn't." I want to pay tribute to it the same way that you do.

Recently in Go Go, you’ve been putting a lot of focus on Trini. Are you going to keep focusing on that character or are you going to start cycling through the different characters to give them more and more focus?

I love all of them. I specifically love Trini because I've always felt that it's pretty easy, or at least it was easy when I was writing the story. It always seemed like Jason, Billy, Tommy, and Kimberly stories just naturally…Jason is the leader so he always gets a story. Billy is the techno guy so if they need something fixed, he can fix it. Kimberly always has sort of the relationships stuff, so the two people I always felt kind of got the short end of the stick are Zack and Trini and so I really liked Trini ultimately because I feel like she's kind of the soul of the Power Rangers.

She seems like she always knows what everybody else is feeling. She sort of feels like she's the gel that kind of keeps everybody in there. She's not the leader, but I feel like if she really put her foot down everybody is going to listen to Trini. I definitely want to explore all of those characters and the way that their relationship changes and evolves.

The long/short answer to all that is definitely you will see everybody sort of have a moment and hopefully get to keep expanding and evolving their characters.

When you started this comic, you had to watch a lot of Power Rangers. As you're writing it now and you're taking the story in your own directions, are you still going back and revisiting episodes, or if you’re stuck, do you go back and watch and get inspired?

I have watched so many episodes multiple times. I think one thing that is interesting about season one of Power Rangers is that it’s sixty episodes. A huge amount of time. What's really interesting about it is there's not a lot of pillar moments in season one. Season two does have a lot of pillar moments. Being aware of how they use them and they change the team and all that stuff, I think is the key to writing the series at any point. But yeah, I definitely am going back and watching stuff and always keeping it as a north star. The way that show just built the characters and what they were aiming for and trying to stay true to that spirit.

read more: The Top 54 Power Rangers Episodes That Will Make You A Fan

Are there any specific episodes that you find yourself revisiting more than others?

I remember this episode that I really enjoyed. I really liked "Gung Ho." I can say others but I feel like people might read into those the wrong way.

Were there any particular moments in the show that were just very tiny moments that you then decided, "Ooo, I'm going to really pull on that. I'm really going to extrapolate from that.”

Yes. There was one element that I read about and then I saw in the series and I don't know if it's true. I'm not doing it this way, so I don't want to give people the wrong idea, but I remember reading something that at one point Ernie was supposed to be Zordon. It was one of those things, if you go back and watch some of those early episodes, it's interesting to think about.

I really enjoyed Ernie's relationship with the Rangers, but one of the things I liked was seeing the way that idea of him being Zordon was built into the story. It didn't evolve a lot but it was there. If you look at the first issue of Go Go, obviously I tried to make Ernie and Jason's relationship very much a stronger thing. Behind the scenes stuff influenced the way that I look at how Ernie perceives the team.

read more: Power Rangers: Ranking the Red Rangers

It's not really answering your question, but it's something that was in the spirit of the show that was never stated. I looked at it and thought, "Oh, I would love to examine that and explore that a little bit more." But yes, I'm not saying that Ernie is Zordon.

In the Wondercon Boom Panel, you mentioned not wanting to retell "Green with Evil."

It’s a revered moment in Power Rangers. It seems like that's the one everybody really loves. I feel like if I were going to try and retell that or redo that, all I would do was make people mad. It's like we know it. If you want to see that story, go watch those episodes.

Did you ever think you could expand or change it up?

I just felt like the comic books work best when they are telling new stories and not retelling the old ones. I felt like, if you were going to retell "Green with Evil," I wouldn't want to say something completely different with it and I feel like it's already doing exactly what it needs to do at this point.

Does it feel like now, especially with how the MMPR title started as a post "Green with Evil" story, that in a very metatextual kind of way, "Green With Evil" is seen as the nexus of where all Power Rangers stories spring from?

From your lips, man. I feel like it is sort of the center if you look at the way that Mighty Morphin works and how Go Go works and you look at "Green with Evil" sort of being that center point, I do definitely think that is a good way to look at it.

read more: Power Rangers Seasons We Never Saw

With the White Ranger being introduced in the upcoming Necessary Evil arc, have you been watching more season two episodes to get a feel for him?

Yes, definitely. I've watched season one and season two multiple times. When we were looking for a place to bring the Ranger teams back in and get Mighty Morphin back to the version of the original series? I was looking at it and I thought, "Well, okay, if you look at Mighty Morphin [Issue] Zero, it's the arrival of the Green Ranger and how he changes the team. I just thought, "Okay, we should do the same thing. The new guy and how they change the team." It just seemed like a nice parallel to be able to spark and go forward.

Right now, the MMPR comic is in its Beyond the Grid arc. We know you can’t spoil anything, but how much of what happened in Beyond the Grid is going to impact what's going on in MMPR 40 and onward?

A lot.

read more: Power Rangers and How It Was Adapted From Super Sentai

Go Go has been character focused. It’s been less battles and more focus on the actual characters. Are you going to bring some of that to MMPR?

If you like my writing style, if you like what I've been doing in Go Go, my sensibilities aren't going to change. I really enjoy the emotions I really like and the things that I think are important, those are going to be in there. The pacing might not necessarily be the same. The scope might not be the same. The stakes might not be the same, but yes, definitely the style, the voices, and all that stuff, that's going to still remain the same.

This is a super deep cut question. There is an episode, "Foul Play in the Sky," where there is a character named Matt who is flirting with Kimberly. Was that a coincidence?

I will just say this: I am aware of that episode. I am aware of that episode before you brought it up. I'm also aware that there is a football player in the episode "Football Season" that is also called Matthew. I don't think we see him but I am aware of those things and I was aware of those things.

Did you know that actor in "Foul Play in the Sky" was almost cast as Jason?

Oh my God. Then I'm a genius. I did not know that. Holly crap. If I did know that, wouldn't that be amazing? You guys would have been like, "This guy is just-" There are a lot of little detail things in there that when we are building out... Some of it is coincidence, but also we are aware of some stuff in there and there are definitely some things that I want to touch on.

read more: Power Rangers: The Unproduced Episodes

I used the pyramid formation for God's sake. That's the stuff that's fun. The show is so crazy and that's half the fun. Going through it and going like, "Can I add this little thing? Can I draw that?" That's the fun stuff. That's the stuff that I think we're so lucky to be able to play in the sandbox with this show because it's got so many great fans and it's got so many people who love it.

There's so many weird holes -- and it's not a diss. It's just because of the nature of the way the show was built, there's so many holes and things that defy logic that half the fun of doing a series that takes place today is just finding ways to justify and answer those things.

It's like somebody always says to a writer, the best thing to do is to write yourself in a corner and then figure out a way to write yourself out. The show did that for me in a weird way and sometimes it can be a really fun and really rewarding experience.

Obviously, you're doing something with the Green Ranger shield now with Rita's mom. Since I know you're not going to give us any spoilers, let's ask the question. Is it the Japanese footage shield that looks nice or the American cloth nasty shield?

I feel like it might be like in Batman Begins. It's cloth and you hit it with an electrical fuse and it turns into the good thing. I feel like it's that, but it's the good one I guess. Yeah, I notice people notice that, that she's wearing it and that will all sort of come to a climax in the next few issues. You will sort of understand what that means and how that plays into the mythology. A lot of people notice the Green Ranger, I think it was Go Go 17 or 16, I can't remember, was not wearing the golden shield so obviously, that was important, that was on purpose.

Going forward with MMPR and Go Go, because you are working with a co-writer for Go Go now, what is that like of co-writing with someone?

Well, I broke all of Mighty Morphin by myself and then I broke 90% of Go Go by myself and the outline was done and the pitch. Then we brought Sina [Grace] to help me just do the heavy lifting of the scene work but he's really brought some of his own stuff. A lot of the things he liked are the same things I did, so I just knew it would jell well. We work on it together and go back and forth on it and send scripts back and forth and stuff. He's brought a lot of his own vibe to it and I really like it. I think people will be really happy.

read more: Power Rangers: Ranking all 25 Seasons

What other projects are you working on that are not Power Rangers? Anything you want to tell us about?

Is there anything besides Power Rangers out there? I have two creator-owned books. The first one is called Volition, which is with AfterShock [Comics]. [It's] basically about a world where robots have grown up next to us and basically there is a virus that is slowly destroying their robot consciousness and about them trying to solve that. Then Oberon, which I just started which has been a lot of fun. It’s basically about the king of fairies losing his crown and going and taking the promise child and going on a crazy adventure. They are a lot of fun. The nice thing about them is they don't have near the scrutiny of Power Rangers so I can do anything I want.

It's very different to write a book where you have to create the formula. In Power Rangers, I already knew what that formula was from day one, so I'm learning a lot about how it works and how it doesn't, so they reward me in a completely different way.

Shamus Kelley is a pop culture/television writer and official Power Rangers expert. Follow him on Twitter! Read more articles by him here!

from Books https://ift.tt/2uIIK8g

[iamnathannah]

A Personal Essay to Liza Weil on her 40th Birthday

I still kind of remember the first night I was introduced to who would become my favorite actress in a matter of years. It was a night in July or August 2000 when my mom and sister went to the local video store (remember those?) and rented a VHS tape (oh, remember those?) after a day of shopping for a vacuum cleaner at a long-dead mall in Milwaukee.

I was already becoming very TV-centric in my viewing habits and only months before took over the cable bill paying responsibilities, but I still was a couple months from finally buying a VCR for my bedroom. So I let them choose a Kevin Bacon movie, Stir of Echoes, even though as with all of my family's horror movie choices I was apt not to watch because my horror movie experiences go like this;

·Overwhelming MST3K'ing of the entire thing because their plots are awful and the special effects are crap. ·Hiding behind furniture because every bad horror director also wants to emulate a Faces of Death film.

Thankfully, this film was much different. I actually enjoyed it because it was a 'thinking person's type of film. Nothing about it was contrived, I enjoyed Illeana Douglas and her acting, and hey, I think I knew Kathryn Erbe from something on TV, though I couldn't place it. There was a young Jennifer Morrison, well before she was on House and Once Upon a Time. This was actually a pretty good film.

Then we got to a scene where this small young brunette woman was babysitting the child of Bacon's character. She immediately caught my eye as having these deep brown eyes, a nervous and small voice with tons of emotion behind it, a small form and a raw natural acting instinct. In the range of about twenty minutes in this role as Debbie the babysitter, I saw this actress go from kind of bored about babysitting some kid, to paging through a book bored, then surprised as she hears the child through the baby monitor about her missing sister, to in a full-on panic as she realizes this child has actually had paranormal conversations with her sister. She then takes him in a panic to a rapid transit station where her mother works, where a pivotal scene between the babysitter, her mother, the child and his parents takes place and she just cries like this material she's been given is second nature to her. She's living the script and on par with Kevin in acting talent. And I was interested in finding out more about her...

But back then, I still had dial-up internet. Unlike my family, I always watched closing credits, but they usually didn't after, so I never got this actress's name. But like Calista Flockhart three years before on Ally McBeal, she had magnetized my interest in her. Unfortunately, I had no idea where to search for information because IMDb was a chore to access on 56k. I put her performance in the back of my mind, wondering if I'd ever see her again. I went on with my life, moving from a KFC cashier job into my current position as a dispatcher, and banked it in the back of my mind.

Move on to about five months later. I occasionally glanced at the WB because of my sister's love of Buffy, Roswell, and Angel, but outside of Popular it was basically a network I didn't take seriously. I was more of a Fox person myself (again, Ally McBeal, along with Boston Public, and their Sunday night). I usually watched Friends by default until that season on Thursday evenings. But it was getting to be a bit tiresome (and God, I hated Ross and how he strung along Rachel). I had read in the fall preview about Gilmore Girls, but really thought nothing about it at the time. I had my own VCR now and was choosing to watch Whose Line in that timeslot. I was more into trying to discover what was on cable at the time (hint; not much). So I put that aside.

Then on one of the Buffy Tuesdays in December, I saw a promo for what they called A Gilmore Girls Christmas, which was two new episodes airing on Wednesday and Thursday of that week. At the time though I was still trying to establish myself at work though, and both nights I worked until 11pm. I thought, 'hey, this show looks kind of interesting' and set up the two nights of recording on my VCR. Hey, if it didn't mesh with me, I could always just stop watching, right? On the weekend, I watched and at first was a bit lost (being nine episodes into a 21-episode season will do that). What is this town? What is the relationship between Lorelai and Rory? Why are they so frosty around her grandparents. Who is this 'Leeza Wheel' person who's a guest star in this episode? Oh hey, it's that guy who voices the Dodge commercials! Yes, I was lost and in the weeds in a show I knew nothing about outside the EW and TV Guide fall preview write-ups which described a 'quirky' and 'funny' dramedy which basically sounded like Providence but even more syrupy than that show (a show whose theme I mocked at the time and later would learn was sung by Chantal Kreviazuk, to my chagrin). I was always an odd duck; I should have been into wrestling and Baywatch like any other man, but a long line of issues in my teens (including three years away from home because of an abusive boyfriend of my mother's) warped my media consumption considerably. I missed a whole lot of action movies in my teens, never really felt comfortable embracing macho types, and found a kindred spirit in Ally McBeal, who was just trying to get by and be herself in a frustrating world who didn't like her type of woman. And I just found violence to be an abhorrent thing to be entertained by.

I recognized Lauren Graham at least; she had been on a summer show called M.Y.O.B which was hilariously non-promoted by NBC and if it would have been picked up for a second season, we would have never had Gilmore Girls. I had seen her on a few guest roles though too, including an episode of Caroline in the City, so at least she was familiar. So I dove in, trying to make my way through the show.

We get to my first Chilton scene, and I see this young blonde woman being quippy as heck to the main character, engaging in pretty heated banter. At first I don't connect at all with her; she just seems like the average 'school bully' type mocking our heroine for her mere existence. Oh look, there's our Required WB Beefcake in Tristan, flirting with Rory. This show's different...it had pretty great references to pop culture and other things. The writing is actually on par with David E. Kelley. They're talking a little bit fast for me but hey, I've got closed captioning, so I'm good.

Later, we move to more drama at the Winter Formal. I still have no idea why I'm feeling like I want to know this bully character more. Man, Lauren Graham is a great actress, why didn't NBC ever make her a regular in a Must See TV series? Hey, that other woman looks like the mom from Dirty Dancing...hmm.

And then we get to a point where this bully has taken her cousin to the dance. In most shows, you think we'd mine two minutes out of her misery and never see her again because screw her, this Rory is the hero (and why is she named that? I knew a Rory, but he was a gruff old bus driver). She'll mock her and...

Oh my gosh, instead, this girl is revealing that she took her cousin to the dance because her mom made her, all while thinking Rory is about to reveal her plan. And she's just getting into her face, furious, speaking fast and...

...hey, I know that voice. I pour over my mind. I go over it...

Wait, I think I remember now. Brown eyes, timid yet strong voice, small stature and just a way of getting all eyes on her in a scene...

THIS IS DEBBIE FROM THAT MOVIE! And she's on a TV show I'm really liking! Wow, she's doing really great in this scene, while this other actress is holding her own.

I now had a name. I also had by then learned more about fan culture; I was never comfortable before in the newsgroups dominated by men and my quirky TV taste that I'd get mocked for (I was ashamed when an Ally post got derision). Soon, I was able to connect that the girl in Stir of Echoes was the same one in Gilmore Girls, and beyond that I was really enjoying the show completely, in the same way I did Ally. I had a name for her, and eventually her character name, Paris Gellar. But...I had to wait a month until the next episode because of Christmas. But thankfully I had time to figure out what she was in, along with Lauren Graham.

Soon I was watching the back catalog of both actors. I found Liza Weil's woman's first film, Whatever at Blockbuster and rented it. Her vulnerability as a lost teenager trying to negotiate her senior year in high school as Anna Stockard, a young woman in New Jersey wanting a New York City existence, really was brought forward. Her acting in that was top-notch. Not being into ER I didn't know about her guest role on that until a TNT rerun came along, and I missed her West Wing guest star role until it came to Bravo for a short while in 2005. I was hyped to watch her on SVU, and she did not fail to bring it in her role there. She is beyond a chameleon in her acting and I enjoyed each and ever role I could find.

I seeked out a radio play she did, American Appetites, and even in that small role her voice and mannerisms were very apparent even in audio form. An indie film she did, Lullaby (which I had to buy with a personal check from the director himself and came on a burned DVD) showed her playing a newly single mother trying to get out from an abusive situation I had known only years before myself. There was so much to this actress, even more so when I realize she did two episodes of the late, great The Adventures of Pete & Pete in two different roles, playing off her zeal for witty comedy. If not for that short while of The N actually being Nick Classic and showing older Nickelodeon shows, I would have never seen them.

But meanwhile, I fell in love with the world of Stars Hollow, along with the characters that populated it and Hartford in the world of Amy Sherman-Palladino. Every week was a peek into this world where Rory and Lorelai navigated life, and slowly began to welcome in this unsure young academic girl who felt life without Harvard was a failure, unsure of who she was. Who could have been a one-note WB bully in the hands of anyone else, was played completely different by Liza Weil. She brought a vulnerability, a passion and character into Paris Eustace Gellar, a strongly feminist young woman who rarely took any crap from anyone and who was secure in herself. Even when she was fretting over the most 'network noted' boy trouble, Paris wasn't going to compromise herself to meet the views of any man or woman, young or old. She was herself. She opened herself up to Rory, letting others into her world slowly as her parents melted away their distant, but iron grip upon how she lived her life.

I had grown to love this character even deeper than I did Ally McBeal, and as I went deeper into fandom (along with the thankful world that is broadband Internet), I felt creative. I wrote stories about her, and Rory, and how they interacted. I began friendships with other people over our mutual respect for this character unlike any we had seen before, played by a shy but open blonde from Passaic whose real home was the Philadelphia suburbs, and traveled the world, knowing her life would be on the set for time immaterial. Soon this ended up in my writing basic M/F fanfiction, some of it...well, not too good (and thankfully off the web). But most of it realizing that I found more of a spark with her and Rory than I ever did any of the love interests the WB passed over. I soon realized that others shared this view as I wrote long, long stories about the adventures of a young woman who was realizing that unlike in the show, constrained by the network and probably by affiliates, she was in love with her rival. My world widened through the eyes of Paris Gellar.

My deepest friendships have come from the love of this actress and my sharing them. A sophomore at a small college east of Battle Creek figuring out her own way in life, knowing that she too loved woman and had a deep affinity with the chemistry between Paris and Rory. She was from a small town in western Massachusetts, and never in my life could I have ever thought I would be able to share in her deepest moments, and cheer her on as she found love, married a wonderful woman she found through her own deep affinity for, of all things, two women in a crime show, with one of them played by Kevin Bacon's wife. Ultimately like Liza Weil, we are all much closer than six degrees from Kevin, and this one woman through her acting has brought me a wealth of friends that I would never give up in my entire life.

I wrote a letter to Liza just before 9/11, sending it just before then and the end of free reign of fan letters. My first fan letter, where I told her how much I enjoyed her acting and how she played Paris. How I had started a Yahoo Group in her honor where others could talk about her acting. Not really knowing how autograph etiquette worked, I sent her a $5 check. After about a few months, I gave up that she would write me back.

Eventually however, she did. I heard my sister say 'you got something from Leesa Wheel?' in the mail one day, and shrugging off the terrible pronunciation, raced for it. A small note thanking me for my note and that she enjoyed the Yahoo Group, along with a signed 8x10 glossy thanking me for all I do. I was on cloud nine for weeks, excited that she had done that. And she didn't even cash the check! Although if she still has it and really needs some quick cash, honestly, I'm good for the money!

Liza has always been a quiet person, content in acting and enjoying learning more about it every day. Her interviews are few and far between, but she always keeps a way about herself that suggests she knows she could just lose it one day and be back to a regular person just like that. I love that about her, how she appreciates what she does have and revels in the little things. After Gilmore Girls finished up (and her only time speaking badly of executives when she called them out for not doing a proper finale), she rested, settled down, doing a few guest spots on CSI and Eleventh Hour, and also did a web series, Anyone But Me, proving her worth in those small roles. She married, started a family with a great daughter who she has successfully kept grounded in the craziness that is Hollywood. I would have been content to see her popping in and out in film and television at this point in occasional roles.

Thankfully, Shonda Rhimes has thought otherwise and saw the same thing we all did. First, a cancer patient in Grey's, then a patient on Private Practice. And after that Liza helped kick-start ABC's comeback to prominence as Amanda Tanner in a very emotional role in the first season of Scandal, then moved on to be the devastatingly and complex lawyer Bonnie Winterbottom in How to Get Away With Murder, where she's the luckiest actress in Hollywood to regularly share scenes with the legendary Viola Davis, and they leave everything out there for the world to see as they work through these incredibly deep scenes between Bonnie and Annaliese.

Liza Weil is beyond a doubt, the most prolific crying actress in the world. You believe her tears and how they're mustered. Her heart is out there for all to see with every performance she's done, even in the most rudimentary of roles. She can bring life to an audio play, as she did with Opus. And her decades-long friendship with fellow actress Emily Bergl shows she knows where she's come from. She's acted with every member of her immediate family, allowing them to share her spotlight. She is always there for Noah Buschel, a filmmaker whom she has deeply supported over the years. She supports Katie Lowes and her IAMA black-box theater, ready to lend a hand to a role when needed. She is a wonderful mother to her daughter, has not let the ugliness of divorce and how garbage tabloids and bitter others tried to cover it affect her at all. Liza is a supportive woman who has an open heart, accepts anyone for who they are, even to the point of playing roles where she loved a woman, including a lesbian devil in a play once.

But most of all, to me, she has helped to open the world to a guy who felt a little odd in the world liking 'feminine' things and feeling alone, but through my love for her acting, Paris Gellar, Bonnie Winterbottom, Amanda Tanner, Lara Todd, and countless other characters, she helped me meet my friends. She helped me figure out that who I am is okay. I have never met her in person, but I know the first thing I would do now if I could was say...

Thank you. Thank you, Liza Rebecca Weil for being who you are, and helping me to meet a lot of great people through my fandom of you and your shows. Thank you for those winter Thursday nights of liking, responding and re-tweeting the silly thoughts of a guy from Wisconsin watching shows well out of his demographic. Thank you for all the friendships I've formed because of you, of being able to witness the wedding of my best friend to her wonderful wife. Thank you for helping me find my way, to know that you, someone muddling their way through the suburbs of Philadelphia in the 90's, is still a humble and caring woman who appreciates everything others do for her, and returns it all in kind. And most of all, thank you for forming complex, daring, deeply-flawed, yet fully human, completely sarcastic, and yet at their core, incredible characters through all of your work.

On this, your fortieth birthday, I wish you all the best in your life, all of the blessings from those who know you from your work or personally, and most of all, a deep happiness, knowing that your fans are among a select few, enjoying you for who you are, and hopefully a career that will go into further decades without fail, with plenty of accolades, and the hope that future generations will study your work and base their own acting choices on yours.

Happy Birthday, Liza. Thank you, for being who you are, and know you are loved and appreciated in so many ways. In response to what you wrote fifteen years ago on that glossy...thank you for all you do.

 Nathan Schimpf June 5, 2017.

[sserpicko]

the ending of the horror film “The Prodigy”

The following article includes plot spoilers for the ending of the new horror film “The Prodigy.”

In “The Prodigy,” in theaters now, Taylor Schilling plays Sarah, a mother desperate to save her young son, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott), after an entity hijacks his body and threatens to overpower his soul.

In a departure from other memorable creepy kid films in the genre, the dark force seeking to inhabit Miles’ body is not a demon but the reincarnated spirit of serial killer Edward Scarka who was himself killed by police at the exact moment Miles was born.

“One of the things that I find soft and tiresome with traditional possession stories is, you know it’s a demon and there’s going to be a priest and a battle between good and evil,” said Jeff Buhler, the film’s screenwriter. “[With reincarnation], all of a sudden, you have an element that’s a variable we don’t quite understand.”

Buhler was inspired by the 1977 psychological horror film “Audrey Rose,” a movie about a little girl whom a man believes to be his reincarnated daughter.

” ‘Audrey Rose’ had a profound effect on me as a kid,” said Buhler. “It just freaked me out. But the thing that I found so interesting about it was the idea that there’s more people on the planet who believe that we come back than there are people who believe we go to heaven or hell or some infinite place. I thought it was really interesting to play with that idea of a Western perspective.”

Miles’ unconventional host makes himself known when the 8 year old develops a sudden taste for paprika, begins talking in a rare Hungarian dialect in his sleep and develops early signs of advanced intelligence that his parents initially mistake for precociousness.

“That came from this question that [director Nicholas McCarthy] posed in one of our early conversations which is, ‘If you’re going to talk about reincarnation, what would the scariest thing be?’ ” Buhler recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, what if you had a kid, and that kid was Hannibal Lecter?’

“Hannibal Lecter was extremely smart but also unpredictable and sociopathic. So I wanted to take off-the-charts intelligence and those other sociopathic elements and plop them into this kid.

“The thing that makes it work so well is that, when you’re a new parent, if your kid’s intelligence is off the charts, you’re like, ‘We won the lottery!’ ” added Buhler. “And then it’s like…and he beats kids up with wrenches.”

RELATED: ‘The Prodigy’ filmmakers play tricks with the tropes of evil-kid movies » Despite Miles’ sadistic new personality traits, Sarah remains determined to save her son until the very end, even becoming complicit in one of his murders. After discovering a stash of papers that suggests Scarka has unfinished business with Margaret St. James, the only victim who managed to escape him, Sarah resolves to help Scarka finish the job in the hopes that it will encourage him to pass on and release her son.

“Sarah’s choice at the end of the film was the most compelling aspect of her character for me when I first read the script,” said Schilling by email. “Her maternal instinct grew into pure ferocity…but maybe that’s a result of the choices she makes. She is losing her family, so I don’t think any of her choices are completely logical or rational. She is in this fugue state based solely on survival: The survival of her husband, the survival of her son, and the survival of her family as a whole.”

Schilling, who doesn’t have any children of her own, even ran the idea by other parents to determine how plausible the idea might be.

“The progression of her actions didn’t seem unimaginable to some of the parents I spoke to,” she said. “In fact, some said her choices made sense. Sarah felt complete responsibility for Miles’ well-being, and her final choice was an outgrowth of that. She was willing to go to any length to preserve what she knew of her son.”

Source: latimes

By SONAIYA KELLEY

[undeadimpulsereviews]

Nioh

Samurai have been around for some time now; the real deals may have come and gone, but our fascination still runs strong. Yet in a decent amount of samurai stories you’ll follow the tale of someone who has the proper experience to be a samurai; however, Team Ninja’s Nioh is not one of these tales. In fact, in terms of overall setting, character, etc. You’re far from samurai material. For now let’s push that aside. Nioh is the new action role playing game from Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo; Taking some elements from games like dark souls, and other elements from Team Ninja titles we get Nioh. Now I haven’t played to many games from Team Ninja, but have played my fair share from the Koei Tecmo side. However, most of my experience with them comes from the warriors series, and Nioh is a completely different game. I went in as prepared as I could be, though I started with the thought that this would play close to something like dark souls. I’ve never finished a souls game so I was a little skeptical that I would have finish this. Though this isn’t a souls game, or whatever game came before souls; in fact this plays closer to something like Ninja Gaiden than Souls. That aside I not only finished the game, but completed the game one hundred percent. It’s not easy, and it can get aggravating at time; however I loved every moment of it. The story, it’s characters, the game play, you name it; from start to finish I had a blast. It’s a game I highly recommend if you haven’t played it yet; though let me explain why I think this is a must buy, starting with the story.

Deep in the tower of London we find our unlikely hero William, an Irishman, locked away. Thanks to Williams guardian spirit he’s lived a long, if not dangerous, life. Williams make his escape from the tower to find that Queen Elizabeth is looking to get something called amrita in the hopes of defeating Spain in their on going battle. William knows all to well what amrita is capable of and sets out to stop the queens plan. However, before leaving Williams guardian spirit is taken from him by the very person he aims to stop. So now you’re off to Japan, where amrita is rich and Oni run wild. Become a samurai and stop what has been set in motion, all while helping push the tide of Japan’s on going war.

Now the story of Nioh is nothing new for me. I’ve gone through the sengoku era of Japan many times. If you’ve played any of the samurai warriors games then you know what I’m talking about; however, Nioh tells the story in a much more serious and different fashion. Not to mention this is seen through the eyes of a foreigner. Now the main story isn’t Japan’s war, but William and his quest through Japan to stop the amrita from getting to England. William must stop a sorcerer named Edward Kelley; however, Edward plans to have some fun with the people of Japan before returning to the queen. If you haven’t experience the story of the warring states this is both the game for you and not the game. It doesn’t cover a huge extent of the war so you’ll be missing some story; however, it is one of the more serious telling of the tale. This is also one of the more fictional renditions; the outcome is the same, but with the addition of England's plans and the Oni the story tends to diverge from history. The best moment of the story come from the inner thoughts of historical figures and the guardian spirits you’ll obtain throughout the game. Overall it’s a really fast paced and fun story to go through, but for some it may feel very familiar even with the supernatural elements. The same can be said for the characters you’ll meet as you explore Japan.

In Nioh most of the characters you meet are historical figures from Japan. Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hattori Hanzo, you name it; again if you’ve played a samurai warriors game you’ll be use to these names. Though just like the story, the characters are much different in design from the warriors titles. Even their personalities are different. Lets take Tokugawa for example; in the warriors games he’s a very idealistic man who wants an age of peace. He speaks like a classic do good hero. The Tokugawa of Nioh has similar ideals, but he sounds less like a hero and more like a man of war. There are more historic figures then there are original ones; the Oni make up most of the original cast. William, Edward, and a girl name Okatsu make up the three original humans of the cast. As far as development goes don’t expect much from the historic figures; their personality and growth is mainly determined from history and how it was perceived by others. William is the one that develops the most, and in more ways than one. He enters Japan with some interest of it’s customs and practices, but still didn’t pay it much mind. Though near the end of the game he sees Japan as something far greater than what he originally envisioned; not to mention he learns what it means to be a samurai, as well as how to fight as one over the span of his adventure. Overall the characters are really enjoyable, whether it’s pre-existing people, or completely original ones. If you’re looking for a serious action packed story with a set of serious interesting characters then Nioh is right up your alley.

Now given the people behind Nioh you have to wonder what the game is going to look like graphically; I can’t speak for Team Ninja much, but Koei Tecmo has some games that, graphically speaking, are okay. It’s not terrible, but it’s not your triple A quality graphics. So how does Nioh compare? Does it fall in the category of other Koei Tecmo titles? No, Nioh looks amazing; from it’s lighting to it’s set pieces, Nioh was a great visual experience through and through. I especially love the design of the Oni you’ll be facing. From the small mobs of enemies to the bosses; there’s no shortage of nasty monsters who wish to kill you.

Above are some of these Oni you’ll be facing through Japan; I think the one problem I have with them is that even though there are a decent amount of them you fight the first boss a lot throughout the game. This felt a little lazy; I can understand fighting bosses again at a later level as normal enemies, but it gets boring fighting him over and over. Be it characters, Oni, or the levels you explore Nioh gives you something worth looking at at every turn. As for the soundtrack, I honestly can’t remember the songs that played throughout the game. The only one that comes to mind is the main menu theme, but that’s due to the fact that I don’t have much else to focus on. That being said looking back on the soundtrack it’s really good, but a lot of the music gets re-used in boss fights instead of making new songs for each. I don’t mind this to much, but there are tracks that are used for three to four fights and it feels a little lazy. With that said here are a few selection from the OST.

Overall the visuals and soundtrack are very good; they have their limits, but I can live with those limits. Both are beautiful in their own way and give the game a nice atmosphere. Lastly comes the gameplay; each area is strong in it’s own way, but overall the gameplay is where Nioh shines.

Nioh is an action RPG where you must utilize the weapons and amrita you acquire to push farther into Japan. For me I used the sword through most of the game. I feel like the way the gameplay falls short is it’s weapons. Some weapons feel far better than others and I find it harder to play the other weapons. That is why I ended up going to the sword. It’s easy and an all around great weapon. The other weapons of note, for me, were the spear and the dual swords. They have the speed and technique to push fights in your favor; though you exchange a little damage to achieve those. In Nioh you get Amrita for killing enemies and you use this to level up your stats. This is where the souls like elements come in. If you die you must retrieve your amrita from your corpse, as well as the guardian spirit who is with you. If you don’t you can’t level up or get the benefits of your spirit. Then with enough amrita you can bump up a stat like strength or speed. Other than this it’s a basic action hack and slash; attack when there is an opening, and dodge or guard when needed. The game wasn’t to terribly difficult for me, but for some friends of mine it proved to be a challenge. If you play this don’t go in expecting to play something like dark souls; you’ll be in for a rude awakening. The only thing you should take from that is not to distribute the amrita evenly; focus on one style/weapon. If you don’t like what you built you can always try something new later if you have the item for it. This game is a lot of trial and error; know your enemy, how they move and attack, what elements they’re weak to, and what ailments can be inflicted. If you go in prepared you are in for a fun fast paced experience. Near the end of the game they will give you some hard side quests to do. Instead of fighting the fight normally I had to use cheap means to win. Other then that I had a great time through; no bugs or glitches to stop me in my journey, it was all just one smooth ride. Overall I really enjoyed playing Nioh; from start to finish I had a blast. It was fast yet satisfying; not to difficult, but provided a challenge every now and then.

It’s not perfect, but the game gave me little to no problems; I’d give Nioh a 9 out of 10; it’s an amazing game that’s endless amounts of fun be it on your own or with a friend. It’s time consuming, but it’s filled with content for you to play. I highly recommend Nioh to those looking for something for next gen; it’s not for eveyone, but it’s one of the more recent games that I feel everyone should at least try.

Next week will be the review for Complex Age; I’ve been looking over that one and have come to a conclusion on what I’m planning in the future. Other then that however have a nice day and I’ll see you soon.

[meditationadvise]

Shamans, Therapists And Soul Retrieval - How To Find Spiritual Balance

Have you ever came across 'Spirit Retrieval'? Its an old approach of spiritual healing practiced by witch doctors, medicine females and also men worldwide. The idea is that when you experience some type of trauma, a part of your spirit 'runs away', causing psychological or physical sickness of one type or an additional. Author Kelley Harrell states that aiming to make use of soul access as a 'quick repair' without participating in to the concerns that caused the problems in the first area, (feeling powerless, self-sabotaging practices, sorrow, and so on) is just half the solution. Look into just what she has to claim concerning alternative healing, shamanism as well as spirituality in this article from the Huffington Message. As constantly, we're reprinting the entire thing right here for your ease:)

The New Old Writing on Spirit Retrieval

by Kelley Harrell

"It has actually constantly been the role of the shaman to go into a modified state of awareness and also track down where the spirit took off to in the alternate truths and also return it to the body of the client." - Sandra Ingerman

"' Beside himself.' Why do we describe an anxious individual as being 'next to himself'? Because the ancients thought that heart and also body can split, and also that under terrific psychological anxiety the spirit would in fact leave the body. When this took place a person was 'beside himself.' "- Thesaurus of Word Origins

Old News

It holds true that the ideas of soul loss as well as spirit retrieval are not brand-new. An element of the unlimited soul running away under duress is a state every person has at some factor experienced, no matter of terms or belief applied. In the world of shamanic job, it has been thought about the most extensive ritual in bring back the soul, life force or just what we call individual power. There are lots of methods to do a spirit access, but it consists of finding the missing soul part, returning it to the earthly awareness and integrating that returned awareness right into everyday life.

Soul Retrieval

When I began functioning with others 13 years ago, the phrase 'spirit retrieval' wasn't widely known. The idea of 'shamanism,' itself, invoked pictures of a shrouded dark figure in the timbers putting on bones and also shouting unintelligibly. For me to disclose that I saw myself as a modern shaman who dealt with others in that capability was an interested thing. The majority of people had some understanding of just what soul job meant, nevertheless insufficient, however couple of knew about spirit retrieval. In that climate, when someone came to me and also said, 'I think I need a soul access,' I paid very close attention. Nine times out of 10 they were precisely right. Whether they had an understanding of exactly what standards recognized spirit loss, their state of being mirrored it. It was a really safe presumption that if somebody can express such an odd and refined understanding, there was a similarly compelling need.

Spiritual Healing

I find currently that with a higher approval as well as understanding of alternative as well as energy medication, there is a recognition of the requirement for spiritual healing. Lots of people still have an extremely fixed otherwise antiquated photo of medicine men, though they have a much better understanding of just what we do. By default, even more individuals recognize what soul access is as well as frequently readily request it. I still pay extremely attention to just what owns an individual to particularly express the requirement for soul retrieval, though I hold it extra lightly than I made use of to.

What I've seen occurring with this influx of need for spiritual healing is that people have concerned take in 'spirit retrieval' as 'The Quick Deal with.' They have listened to that it's the quintessential shamanic mojo of recovery spiritual injuries, and that it can have profound, life-altering effects. Exactly what they don't realize is the array of behavioral, psychological, emotional as well as frequently physical changing that have to occur for that healed balance of life pressure to stay gotten in touch with the earthly awareness as well as proceed to advertise wellness.

A Holistic Approach

For those who prepare to make those modifications, spirit access could bring relatively quick release and recovery. Nevertheless, lots of people still do not recognize that spiritual recovery is not rather than various other techniques of healing. Instead, spiritual healing calls for as well as influences recovery on all degrees. If the various other layers of the self typically aren't dealt with, no spiritual healing technique could bring long lasting outcomes. With heart loss, in the lack of those required spirit aspects we develop dealing mechanisms to handle really feeling the lack of power. We could shed our capability to be crucial, or we may overindulge to compensate for sensation vacant. These sort of dealing tools are similar to other because we need to conscientiously work to launch. They don't magically vanish. We still need to resolve them along with soul access and also assimilation. We have to exercise mindfulness. We could need to change our regular, our connections or perhaps just how we see ourselves. We have to be prepared to earn whatever shift - small or excellent - is called for people to stay extremely empowered.

Like soul retrieval, this alternative technique to well-being isn't new, either. It's not New Age or western ingenuity. In fact, I can guarantee you that there are shamans, nonetheless they call themselves, deep in the woods across the globe that most likely do put on bones and talk strange languages, and each of them recognizes we must get involved in recovery ourselves. If we typically aren't willing to do the grounded work to keep open the balanced rapport between our souls as well as our earthly consciousnesses, we can't expect the parts of our spirits that require healing to stick around.

Have you ever satisfied or dealt with a witch doctor before? Would certainly you do a soul access if you had the chance? Share your ideas in the comments below.

[motorcyclemuses]

Revamp finished

Hey guys, 

after a week or so, I finally finished the revamp. This is a list of things I’ve changed:

Switch the theme

Update about the mun 

Update the rules/guidelines

Update Wanted connections

Update the muses page

Add 2 new muses and take off the ones that weren’t working for me anymore

Updated the verses pages

Under the read more there’s a small summary of all the muses in alphabetical order 

Alex is a tattoo artist from Ohio that is also a member of Sons of Anarchy. He was born in Chicago and go adopted by Shannon Beiste, NCAA 5 time football champion coach of Ohio State University. His main verse is on season 4 of Sons of Anarchy, he went to Charming while Clay and the others were in Stockton, after finding his birth mother and finding out his father is Clay Morrow. Alex also knows Gemma is the main responsible for him to be given to adoption, and that she thinks he is dead. 

Alex has a Glee verse too, where he used to go on original glee club with Rachel, Quinn and the others. He is hockey coach, and currently at war with principal Schuester, due to Schuester cutting hockey funds in 70% to give to glee.

He also has a fandomless verse where he is open his first studio, while looking for his birth parents. He knows very little about them, mostly that his mother was a student of Ohio State and gave him to adoption directly to Shannon because she knew the woman would take care of him properly. He is a motorcycle club member called Sons of Anarchy, that has a tv show based on it, which the members of the club didn’t like it cause it portrait them as something they aren’t 

Personality: Alex is a easy going man, he is an artist it’s commonly to get him doing things like grafiti. It’s also expert in bombs and explosives, it’s how he wont the nickname bomber man. He is protective from the people he loves, which is something that might go out of hand sometimes, he is also know for being too naive and easy to manipulate. 

Alexis is a daughter of Poseidon with an amazon from the ancient Greece. For the sin of hubris, Zeus decided to punish her by sending her spirit to a different time, and separating her from her beloved, Helena. Alexis reincarnated in modern time, as a daughter of a mortal couple, with no memory of what had happened. When she was 12 years old and her demigoddess powers started to show up, Poseidon found a way to help Alexis to develop them another time. Now, Alexis is part time marine biologist part time private eye/hero to the gods and other demigods, doing all she can to fall in Olympus’ good graces again, so Hades tells her where Helena is, since she is aware that her partner reincarnated in modern times too.

She also have a fandomless verse, where she is a marine biologist from New York City. She is the daughter of greek immigrant couple, who went to america to start a new life. Alexis was a marine for a while, so the they could pay for her education. She is graduated in NYU and used to live with another girl until a couple of years ago, but since things didn’t went well due to a misunderstanding, that made Alexis panic and break things up. She currently works on UCLA’s research aquarium.

Personality: Alexis in general is a really rational person. She has the tendency of over analyze everything before acting. Many also describes her as cold, but she is really warm and fun to be with people who she feels comfortable. She is also very good on reading people, although Alexis tends to not like much being in presence of crowds.

CLOSED: Christen is in the sophomore year. She’s focused on returning to the USWNT U-21 team, and believes her best chance at that is to focus on practicing harder and harder, and making this her best season of so far. What Christen didn’t count on was that perhaps her crush on Stanford’s team, Kelley O'Hara, who is also her biggest rival for NCAA’S golden boot, is also interested in her.  

Personality: Christen is a hardworker. She does all she can to be always in the top of her game and be a good student. Her parents put a lot of pressure on her, and the girl puts a maximum effort to not disappoint them, which made her to develop anxiety issues that she tries to hide saying she is fine and avoiding talk about it. She is a bit aloof, mostly for thinking that she won’t ever be good for anyone. Hence that, she has lot of trouble to realize when people are flirting with her or just being nice.  

Logan is a Navy SEAL’s Sniper and MMA Fighter. She lost her mom when she was 13 years old, her brother used to take care of her but he lost her guard during one of their fights that it got a bit too loud. Social service took her to live with her father, a man that she didn’t even know that existed since then. She started to get in a lot of trouble until she met Roni, the owner of a pub called “The Queen of Hearts”. Logan joined the Navy SEALS, and became sniper. Recently, Logan came back home recently from a tour on Syria. She is doing small MMA events to help Roni to get the money to pay the pub’s debts.  

She has a Sons of Anarchy verse, where she went to Charming after being sent to live with her estranged father, Filip Telford. Logan turned into really good friends with Roni, the owner of “The Queen of Hearts”, a pub in the central area of Charming. Years later, Logan came back to Charming, due to receiving “The Queen” as inheritance from Roni, alongside with her clients as hitman. Everyone who wants to contract those services knows that they just need ask for “off menu beverages”.

Logan has a glee verse too where she is cousin of Sam Evans. When the Social Service took her away from her brother, they took her to live with the Evans in Lima. She joined the Glee as a drummer mostly because she hadn't nothing to do all day and Sam had to take care of her not running away to go after her brother. She ended up liking. Logan worked part time at Burt Hummel's lube shop and when Sam went back to Tennessee, she went to live with the Hummels, since Burt liked having her around.  

Personality: There are two different Logan, the one in the Navy that are centered, in control, that show no signs of emotions on the battlefield, and that knows exactly what to do. However when she is back home, Logan has a lot of trouble with dealing with people, mostly because she doesn’t know know how to act or what to do or say, she has a short temper and is prone to outbursts, tends to judges people harshly as a result. 

Yes, she inspired by Octavia Blake. It’s pretty much my version of what Octavia would be on modern days. If you want, we can roleplay that verse too. 

Lucas real name is Raleigh Cohen. He is photojornalist, but also a con man. His family, The Cohen, were really rich but really crappy, father and mother used to abuse him, his older brother did bully with him, so he never felt like he fit in with then. Eventually, Raleigh/Lucas ran away and stole a man in coma id’s so he could start again, free from reprimands. Lucas currently works as photojournalist for the New York Times. He enjoys what he accomplished. However, he is worried since finding out that the real Lucas Kane woke up after years in coma in Chicago, and he will do whatever it takes to keep his life.   

Lucas has a Sons of Anarchy’s verse, that Picks on beginning of Season 4. Lucas was arrested for stealing identity, but instead of going straight into prison, he gets recruited by ATF/FBI to become infiltrated agent in Sons of Anarchy due to his striking resemblance with Jackson Nathaniel Teller, VP of Sons of Anarchy and currently in coma after someone tried to kill him in Stockton. 

And Lucas has a glee verse too, He went to live in Lima while having 16, he created Lucas’s id so he could attend school. After being caught trying to spy on Cheerios’ locker room by Mr. Schuester, Lucas joined glee club on Season 1, becoming really annoyed and making his main target to sing as many offensive songs as possible, just mr. Schue has no other option but to expel him from the club. Eventually, Lucas starts enjoying being part of glee, cause it’s the only place he actually feels accepted for liking arts and photography.   

Personality: Lucas is really charming, he knows how to please people to get what he wants from them, he is confident and smart, also the time he lived on the street taught him that people will do whatever they can to survive. However, Lucas can be really loyal with people he cares about, even though sometimes its easier for him to just leave all behind. 

Max is the daughter of a muggle and Garrick Ollivander’s son. They used to live with their mother, but they got really closer of their Father’s family after finding out they were a wix. Sorted on Gryffindor, Max showed talent on quidditch, and made on the team in the fifth year. Currently, Max is an broommaker that lives in Hogsmead. They are working on several prototypes of brooms, thinking that they just need a little more luck to get the amount of money to develop their first series of brooms. However, they have to constantly deal with their muggle mother and family, wanting them to give up their dreams on wizard world and find a regular muggle job, it doesn’t matter if its what Max wants or not .

Max has a verse where they still attend on Hogwarts that works for golden trio era, marauders or next gen era. Max goes on Hogwarts. They are in their sixth year and playing on Gryffindor’s quidditch team as chaser. Max is starting experiment using the knowledge they have about woods and wandmaking to make their firebolt faster.

Personality: Maxine is imaginative; they were never a fan of just replicating things. Also a hard-worker, since Hogwarts, Maxine thinks they lost too much stuff from being raised in muggle world, so they compensated with studying harder than the others. They tries really hard to run from anything that can bring them trouble, especially with them mother and them family, and while they tends to bottle up all the them own opinions and feelings, it usually ends with them failing miserably and just attracting more problems than they expected. They also finds difficult to stand up for themself in front of authority figures, but once Maxine does it, they doesn’t back down. 

Riley is a pro soccer player from Canada. She is a bit of troublemaker in the field, but she is expected to be the best striker of the world. Right now she is playing for Arsenal LFC in England. She is a living a dream playing in the club she supported her whole life, however this season is different to her. It’s the first time she will be team captain. And her biggest enemy is herself. Riley is known as the most wild card player of the FA WSL, due to her recklessness and bad temper. There’s even a bet in the betting sites about how long it will takes until she gets a yellow, red or a longer suspension and also how many cards she will take during the season. Right now, her personal challenge is taming that bad temper and help her team to win the FA WSL championship and a spot on WUEFA Champions league. 

CLOSED:  After years of love and hate, Riley and Callisto Gordon got married (much to the marshall’s clan happiness). Due to a fight with John Herdman, while he was still coach of CANWNT, Riley decided to deflect and play for their rivals, USWNT. Although she isn’t a rookie, the striker feels that she has a lot to prove and makes her wonder if she has what it takes to be on the top National team in the world

Personality: Despite showing off academic average, Riley is very smart generally knows how to get out of social situations really well. She is someone very easy to read too, she can’t hide much what she is feeling for a long time, because the soccer player is extremely sincere and sometimes speaks even more than she should. She likes to enjoy life, which makes very easy to find her doing something outdoor, such as hiking, fishing or going out at night.Many also describes her as cocky, however this is her mechanism to hide her trust issues, caused mostly for her father only noticing her when she had something that could make them rich. 

As the new king of Asgard, Thor’s mission is to find a new place to his people to live and his destination is Earth. However, different from what the king expected, humans didn’t take very well their new refugies. Now Thor has to deal with humans being hostile to asgardians, while helping his people to adapt in this new planet.

Thor has a non-superhero verse where he is the first in the line of succession of Swedish throne. It’s expected him to take the throne when his father Odin VI simply can’t rule anymore. However, that’s not what Thor and half of the Swedes believes. He really thinks he is not ready for the job yet, it’s why he chose to live in America, far away from his home country, trying to learn and understand what it takes to be a good king. In USA, Thor try to help his friends and be supportive of their dreams, while he works on several jobs, since his clumsy ways always puts him on bad places.

Personality: Since Thor became King, he became more humble. He believed he was worthless which made any remains of arrogance that he had completely disappear, as can be seen with his interactions towards people have become more awkward and overly-excitable. He still remains utmostly confident and assured in his abilities as a warrior, The knowledge of how Asgard really rose to power further humbled Thor even more, as he was shocked and dismayed of his father's war seeking past. Although his love and respect for Odin remained as high as ever, he has come to accept that Odin's darker nature indirectly caused Ragnarok and openly admitted that Odin had flaws in his own right, even saying that Hela had a right to be angry with Odin. Though Thor has mostly unlocked the full magnitude of his powers since Asgard’s destruction and Hela’s defeat there still remains an awkwardness to his character, especially when compared to his previous personality. During his original coronation, he yelled uproariously towards his subjects in a victorious manner but when ascending to King of Asgard he only awkwardly waved to the Asgardians behind him.

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/20/la-times-reeses-crush-on-shailene-the-feminist-label-and-more-checking-in-with-the-cast-of-big-little-lies-12/

La Times: Reese's crush on Shailene, the 'feminist' label and more: Checking in with the cast of 'Big Little Lies'

It’s fair to say there is hardly anything little about HBO’s new limited series.

“Big Little Lies,” which premieres Sunday, boasts two megastar executive producers, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. The star-studded sensibility continues from there, with a cast that includes Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley.

The seven-part series, which is based on Liane Moriarty’s 2014 bestseller of the same name, introduces viewers to a group of upper-middle-class mothers of first-graders living in Monterey, Calif., who are vexed by sexual assault, domestic violence, class issues and the everyday stresses of motherhood.

How ‘Big Littles Lies’ went from page-turner to seven-part series on HBO »

The group of women includes Madeline Mackenzie (Witherspoon), a know-it-all busybody who is trying to cope with the resentment she feels about her eldest daughter’s growing relationship with her ex-husband’s second wife, Bonnie Carlson (Kravitz), a twentysomething yoga instructor with a strong moral compass. Then there’s Madeline’s best friend, Celeste Wright (Kidman), who gave up a legal career to focus on her twin boys and is in an abusive marriage. There’s Jane Chapman (Woodley), a young single mom who just moved to Monterey to escape a difficult past. And Renata Klein (Dern), a successful businesswoman who’s at the center of school politics on and off the playground.

We spoke with the women  who brought it to life on the big little screen.

Reese Witherspoon

On not portraying women as good or bad

If you want to hear how women really talk to each other, I think you should watch the show. We’re,  at times completely cruel and at times kinder than anyone could possibly be. And there’s parts of us that are very divided in the beginning, but you have to watch the entire spectrum of the thing to understand all seven episodes. You understand how these relationships shift. And why, at the end of the show, these women will be forever together.

On how much of herself she brought to the role of Madeline

She’s a different kind of mother than me. We’re not similar. She’s very controlling, she’s kind of negative, pushy. And then you get into her back story [and] you see it comes from a place of just feeling so less than everyone else. And feeling maybe she made some wrong choices in her life.

I see myself in Jane, I see myself in Madeline, I see myself in Bonnie, I see myself in Renata. I think there definitely have been moments of being like Celeste in my life, and I think women and men alike are going to find a universality in all of these characters.

On her Shailene Woodley obsession

I literally would just stare at her sometimes. She can literally lay you down with something she says. I would read it on the page, and be like, “Ugh, that’s kind of, I don’t know how I would do that.”  And then she would find a way to say it in the most natural way, and break your heart saying it. It was just extraordinary.

Nicole Kidman

On the domestic violence research she did 

I took in an enormous amount of information. I read stories, watched interviews, talked to women. I saw some extraordinary TED Talks about domestic violence, particularly women that are seemingly successful women.

I know it. I’ve worked for the U.N. in terms of eradicating violence against women. This is a very deep subject that is prevalent and in many different ways, shapes and forms. This is just one form of it. But, on the surface, you go, “Oh, everything is great. And then as it unravels, you’re like, ‘Oh.’ ” The fragility of the relationship is just so heartbreaking. There is love there. And there’s children, and there’s a family. And it’s very authentic.

On shooting some of the more violent scenes

I just told [director] Jean-Marc [Vallée], “I trust you.” I want to be truthful and authentic. I want it to be complicated, which it should be. And the way Liane had written it, it was complicated. There’s a reason Celeste fights back. A lot of times she blames herself because she fights back. I thought that was a very interesting, but very real part of this relationship. People are going to be shocked by that at times.

It’s probably the most emotional I get when I’m discussing a role. This is a very insidious, devastating situation that this relationship is in. So, I am so careful with it and delicate with it.

Laura Dern

On how she always seems to end up playing complicated characters on HBO:

For whatever reason, HBO has given me my greatest opportunities, or we’ve worked together to create opportunities, in which not only is the character difficult at best to have empathy for — Amy Jellicoe [in “Enlightened”], [former Florida] Secretary of State Katherine Harris [in “Recount”] and now this. These are the characters on the page that you’re not necessarily going to like or be rooting for and now it’s our opportunity to dig deeper and find the other side of that person or the other side of the story. And that’s been the most fun I’ve had as an actor. You pray for those moments, and I’ve been lucky to have it several times. Without giving too much away, I’m definitely the character you want to hate.

On how people judge women in power

Isn’t it interesting when a woman is in a position of ultimate power, the boss of the group — my character being a CEO — what the perception is of that woman? It’s incredible the commentary on what the marriage must be like, what the woman must be like, what her sexuality is like and that she can’t be connected on any level with other women. Oh, and she’s a horrible mother. But that was the fun thing about it, because I think we were all madly in love with our characters. I don’t think any of the five of us women wanted anything more than to delve into the world we were in, which is thanks to David’s [Kelley] writing and the brilliant book.

On meeting Liane Moriarty and her research for the role

We got to know her. I got to have fun talking to her about where Renata came from in her brain. But as it expanded to this long-form, limited series, I got connected with a couple of extraordinary women, a couple of the more high-powered women in America who are the only women in their boardroom of 12 men. I learned so much that I never knew about what that’s like, and so everything is on the defensive.  … I know the challenges of being in the film business, but no one’s looking at me like it should be a man’s job. So I don’t have to live my life on the defensive, and it’s fascinating.

Shailene Woodley

On the feminist label that’s been attached to the show

I was just talking about this with someone else because they were like, “How does it feel to be part of a feminist project, and part of a piece that so many people are labeling as progressive or liberal or feminist?” It’s interesting to notice that if you have five male leads and their spouses, you don’t say, “Oh, this is a misogynist piece.” You don’t put a label on it. But when it comes to women, you have five women leads, and all of sudden, it becomes a feminist piece. That to me just lends to the reality that society is not able to accept five women lead roles.

It’s not the norm, yet, so we still have a lot of work to do. That being said, we’re making progress.

On returning to TV (Woodley’s breakout role was in “The Secret Life of an American Teenager,” which ran for five seasons on what used to be known as ABC Family)

Doing something for six months is a long time, but the nice thing is because we had the same director and we had the same actors, and it was all with HBO, it felt like we were just doing one large movie.

On not overwhelming “Big Little Lies” author Moriarty with too many questions

In terms of making my character, I strictly went off of what David [Kelley] wrote, but I did get to meet Liane when she was in town. She came to set for a day, and that was really neat.  You always sort of want to pick their brains, like, “What does it feel like to see your brainchild manifested, and embodied, and personified?” But also you choose to be a little bit more respectful of their space, because I can imagine how overwhelming that would be.

Zoë Kravtiz

On how first impressions can be deceiving with “Big Little Lies”

Even I’m annoyed by Bonnie at the beginning. The nicer she is, the more annoying it is. But as the story goes on, you see everyone’s character develop in such a way where you kind of feel like a [jerk] yourself for judging them so quickly. (Laughs.)  It’s beautiful the way it tricks you. You think you know who these women are, and then you learn to have such compassion for them, because everyone has so much going on and what we show to the world is only a very thin layer of who we are.

On the refreshing change of pace from blockbuster films like “Mad Max: Fury Road” and the “Divergent” series to a more intimate drama

Real character study and work, especially for women, it doesn’t happen a lot. And as a woman, to do it with other women, it’s such a gift.

On  Kidman’s and Witherspoon’s collaborative spirit as executive producers working with the younger actresses

They are the big dogs on the set, and I look up to both of them, and Laura as well, so having them ask “What do you think?” meant a lot to me, and I learned through that. It was a really beautiful experience.

The most-read Entertainment stories this hour »

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[psotu17]

Water Mill, NY

USDAC People’s State of the Union Story Circle

Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY

January 27, 2017

Circle #2

Facilitator: Lisa

Storytellers: Peter, Nancy, Kim, Joanne, Susan, Kevin

Notetaker: Kelley

FIRST ROUND

Lisa: I am a community organizer working in civil and human rights. Born in Sayville. Through organizing I go to a lot of events. A few weeks ago, my daughter and I went to a mosque. One of the first things we noticed was how many cars there were in the parking lot. We also noticed how many police cars were there–7-8. The place was packed. My husband went to one side of the building and my daughter and I went to the other. I covered my head. A little girl came up to her daughter and asked “Do you hate me?”  My daughter says “No, we are friends.” This was a big moment for me, I couldn’t believe this small child came up and asked my daughter this. I had a breakdown later that evening about how sad this was. This spoke volumes to me about the state of our union.

Joanne: Right now, I feel very saddened and upset, I’ve never really been a political person. I was raised by Democrat parents. I feel frightened, afraid of losing everything that we’ve fought for, afraid of our democracy disintegrating. Saddened by the hate that has come out. The election facilitated this. I feel less hopeful than usual.

Susan: I will talk about my experience at the women’s rally in NYC. My adult daughter hosted a party to make posters. It was interesting to watch people formulate a sentence to put on the poster. Everyone decided it should be a positive message rather than a negative one. Two young boys were there, a 9-year old boy wrote “I hate you Mr. Trump” on his poster. Another boy wrote curse words on his poster directed towards Donald Trump. It was eye-opening for me to see what the younger generation is feeling and how they are affected. They are saying things I wanted to say. This experience has been shattering; and it gets worse by the day. I was encouraged by the enthusiasm at the march and the peacefulness that was there. Trying to stay in touch with the people I marched with to keep our spirits up.

Nancy: We went all out for MLK weekend. My husband and I went to three events in our town. I was surprised by how many black and white people went to the events and got along. It upsets me when they pick on Latinos. It has a lot to do with our president. He is making Latinos the enemy. I have a Latino daughter-in-law. She doesn’t understand why people are picking on them. Her entire family has been to college. We have to be vigilant; we can’t shift such a bad attitude towards Latinos. North Fork community is doing well with black/white relations, but Latino relations have gotten worse. We need to be careful.

Kevin: I’ve been interested in civics, government, and politics since I was young. U.S. history informs my art. Politics has always felt personal for me. My mother worked at a newspaper, my father was dying from alcohol addiction. This was around the same time JFK got shot. I was going through puberty. My mother remarried someone from the opposing political party. I went with my girlfriend to Martha’s Vineyard. I found a book there, Death of a President. I decided I was going to make a painting of the JFK motorcade. Stuart Davis’ son was there. They wanted to renovate a studio, they gave me some shutters, and I decided I would make the painting on the shutters. I remember that a long time ago I wrote JFK a letter; I called the Kennedy Center to see if they had the letter, and they did! The letter was a threat—talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis. No matter how comfortable we are as a society, there is always something going on that we are responsible for. I can’t be hopeless—that’s not my style.

Peter: Racism in our country is now at the surface. I grew up very middle class. No blacks in my school. Boy Scout camp was my first experience with another race. Grew up in a liberal household. Educated about racism. Being fair, loving, accepting were my values. What worried me in the election is the rise of racism. Not the rebirth but the rekindling. The expressions of feeling depressed, I look for bright spots in our country. Read story about a black waitress, some Texans left a $400 tip for her; my hope is that there are enough good people to carry us through. This is an affluent area of NY State, that’s why we don’t know more about people. 5/7th of the people voted for Trump on Shelter Island. I need to understand these people. I saw a Ted Talk on how to learn about people from the other side of the road. It was very helpful. I was out in a storm taking pictures; my truck was on the side of the road. A man in a jeep drove by, he stopped and turned around. He drove up beside me and asked “Are you okay?” After telling him yes, he drove away and I saw a big TRUMP sticker on the back of his car. Proved to me that these people have good hearts.

Kim: During the campaign, we all remember when Trump mocked a disabled reporter. This hit me hard. He was teasing him. The problem is that when someone is in a leadership position and thinks it’s okay to do this it makes other people feel like it’s okay. People still harbor fear for people with intellectual problems because they don’t know what to expect. An example is what happened to the young black caregiver of an adult with autism. The adult had a toy truck; someone called the police and said the adult had a gun. The police asked him to get on the ground. It is very hard to get a disabled person to the ground. The caregiver, being African American, knew that if he didn’t get to the ground he would most likely be shot. He got on the ground and they still shot him. It’s absolutely terrible. Mind-blowing. The fact that the person called the police and said he had a gun; this speaks volumes to how people perceive people with intellectual disabilities. This illustrates a lot of issues. How people jump to conclusions that there is violence. Misunderstanding of people with disabilities. WhiteHouse.gov has taken down their page for people with disabilities.

Reflection & Conversation

Lisa: We’re seeing a lot of common themes here. I’m a history, government, and politics buff also. My first election was in 8th grade for Clinton/Gore. History is huge. Being afraid of the other, whether it’s disabled people, women, Latinos. I’m encouraged that tonight is a bright spot. It’s good that we can come together and talk about what’s happening. It’s amazing that we need a Ted Talk to learn how to talk to people on the other side. When did it become so hard? It hasn’t always been this way. When did this happen?

Kevin: I think you can trace it back to the early 90s. Bill Bradley was a great senator. He left because of how bad it was getting. That’s a bad sign—people with good character leaving. I think we can trace it back to the midterms before Clinton. When Newt Gingrich came in. He made blocking the democrats a top priority. His goal was all about keeping the rich, rich. I wonder if Trump has ever looked down at his own shadow. Hillary knew how to govern, he doesn’t. What does this mean? Democrats need to concentrate on the distribution of wealth. We haven’t had a lot of give and take. George W. Bush was a guy who was known for reaching across the aisle. There is a huge disconnect in how corporations dictate foreign policy. It’s right in front of us. We’ve never had a loose cannon like this before. It makes me wonder who is controlling him. We’re waiting to see. I think there is an entire part of society we don’t know about. Made up of people that think that normal people don’t have what it takes to decide what’s right for the country. It seems so outlandish, Trump, in this more progressive community. Even if I disagreed with presidents in the past, at least I knew where we both stood.

Lisa: going to rallies in the past the joke was to not get arrested. I know I will be arrested in the next four years, the question is just when.

Kevin: What is the role of the media/social media in this election? NY Post was saying he had a 9% shot at getting elected. I have friends in the middle of the country who were saying it wasn’t looking that way. Community is huge. Most of my friends in the middle of the country are doctors. They were saying that they hate Obamacare. Now we see more and more doctors running cash-only clinics. People are fed-up. I get it, but not enough to vote for Trump.

Joanne: I heard on NPR today, the things people were saying at the Pro-Life rallies. The comments were terrible. Uneducated. Saying things like “No health care for women” and “Fend for yourself.” Unsophisticated thinking stems from things like reality TV. We’re creating a population that can vote for someone like this. Alternative Facts, with this lack of intelligence, such concept could be put forth. I find this very disturbing. That this could be put forth and not laughed at. I’m hopeful, because otherwise it’s surrender.

SECOND ROUND

Lisa: 8 years ago, after Obama got elected, Marcello Lucero was murdered in Patchogue. This was a hate crime. A group of 7 men would go around and beat up people who they thought were Mexican. When this happened, I was working for a human rights organization, and I felt like I had failed. Leading up to his murder I kept hearing more and more stories of hate crime. I felt like someone was going to die.  When Marcello got murdered, his brother was left to grieve in the public eye. I contacted him and we became friends. He now goes around to schools and talks about the consequences of hateful language. I sat through every day of the trial, every hearing. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. The current state of the union brought me back to this place. This makes me want to scream. Why don’t people understand that people will die from this rhetoric? I have to feel hopeful. My dad who is a Republican voted for Hillary, he said he did because he couldn’t put me in the position I was in during the trials. There we found common ground. Being able to tell personal stories is really a good thing.

Susan: I felt detached and not included when I was in college in the 70s. Myself and one other student were out protesting at the student union against Nixon. Intellectual conservatives made up more of the student population. We were the only two protesting, this was before Watergate. I felt so outside of the culture. I wanted to go home and vote for McGovern. I hitchhiked from Boston to East Hampton. Doing this left me with a sense of pride that I took a stand for what I believed in. Looking back, I don’t regret any of that. Difficult when you see the country going in a bad direction. I feel hopeless and disenfranchised. This is reigniting my activist roots though, so that’s a good thing.

Joanne: I’ve lived out here since 1978. I have my own business in Bridgehampton. Migrant workers would come in the spring and leave in the fall. I got to know a couple of them very well. Leroy was one, he had an alcohol problem. He was very smart. Red was another one, an intelligent white man. He said “I don’t want you to be afraid of me but I’ve been to jail.” They would come talk to me in my shop and I always enjoyed their company. They would make me bouquets of flowers and they became our good friends. The migrant workers have disappeared. It’s different now. That was a great time for me.

Nancy: I have 2 sons. When they were in high school we took in an exchange student from Thailand. I didn’t know much about Thailand. He was living with us for a year. He seemed to know more about America than I did. People in other countries know much more about our country than we do. What’s the reason for this? Maybe we aren’t doing a good job in our schools—there is so much more in the world. We’re losing our globalization from this election. We need to make sure our children know that they can do anything and work anywhere. Don’t close them into one country we need to expand their minds.

Susan: When I was in commercial real estate in Manhattan, a nice man in my office was very close to Donald Trump’s brother. He asked me to go meet Donald Trump one day. I felt like I didn’t want to, I wanted to keep my environment harmonious and stay away from him. Part of me does not believe or accept that we have elected this man as president. Republicans are about fewer regulations, democrats are about more regulations. We have a gambling man as our president. He’s gotten away with a lot in real estate. I wonder if he can get along with a man. He can get along with a woman because he can manipulate her. The media is what’s making us insensitive. Everything good and positive is saved for the end of the broadcast. I feel like I’m unsafe. The media feels like they can manipulate people and psychology. The media wants us to feel scared. This gets them advertisements and makes them money. Through movies and media we have learned that it’s good to be bad. This needs to be reversed.

Kevin: Four years prior to McGovern, when I was a junior in high school, I was in an English class where we talked about politics. My teacher asked me who I was for. I said I was for McGovern. She said I was wrong, I should be for Robert Kennedy. At an event where everyone was mostly there for McGovern, Robert Kennedy got up on stage and everyone booed. He got up to the mic and said he had been wrong for wanting to stay in Vietnam, and the crowd cheered. Someone made a jet airplane; it flew around and landed at Robert Kennedy’s feet. He got up there and said he was wrong about the Vietnam War. From that moment on everyone there loved him and cheered for him. The fact that a politician could get up there and say he was wrong was huge. The Beatles put out a major release the day Kennedy was shot. I call this the day the 60s started. I put together a group art show about the Kennedy murder. One of the artists brought a public relations person from Dallas. She told me the entire story of the assassination as it related to her. It turns out she was a mistress of JFK and had a baby by him. No one knows about this woman. A lot of politics is opera. I believe we are controlled by a shadow government.

Jack: I want to talk about how confused I am. The media played a huge role in what happened. He [Trump] knows how to manipulate the media, so he used this skill to his advantage. He wanted to get as much exposure as possible, no matter what. People thought he was joking and he played on that. He was running against Hillary who is establishment. A lot of people wanted change and I think that’s another reason why he got elected. People don’t believe that he would do the things he said he would do. A complete ban on immigration, building the wall, making a trade deal, and overwriting legal abortion, DAPL, revoking visas. A lot of these people have good intentions; I believe kicking them out will stir more hate for America and Americans. They’re going through Native American holy lands for the pipeline, Trump doesn’t seem to care. Why is he so close with Russia? It’s very confusing to me.

Peter: I’m trying to still have a hopeful outlook. I want to take some action myself. I printed out 2 sheets of Lee Zeldin [Republican Congressman for NYS] shipping labels. I write him letters and put my name on it and send it to the White House. I’ve gotten two responses from Lee. One was about ACA [Affordable Care Act]. He wrote back and said he was working on it and that it is very complicated. I’m hoping there are enough good people out there to carry us through. Supporting minorities and standing up for what we know is right is more important than ever.

Kim: While raising a child with a disability, vacations were very hard. The last time we went on vacation was 2013 because we can’t find caretakers who can stay with our son. We were visiting my mom in Florida. We went to a grocery store. Out of nowhere my son threw a bunch of bananas and started to hit me. This was new behavior we haven’t experienced yet. I wasn’t sure what to do. I took my card out of my pocket and handed it to the girl who was checking us out, and took my son to the car. The employees at the store bagged all of our groceries and brought them out to the car. There was so much concern; I couldn’t believe how helpful everyone there was. Another story: our son loves the lemon bread at Starbucks. We usually go to the one in Bridgehampton, they know us there. They know that we need to be in and out. One day we decided to go to the Starbucks in Hampton Bays. It was just my son and his father there. My son started acting out, again exhibiting new behaviors. My husband had to sit on my child in the Starbucks because there was no other way he could control him. A person who had been hit by the child came and tapped on my husband’s shoulder. He decided not to make a big deal of the incident, seeing my husband struggling and in tears. After everything calmed down, my husband was crying sitting at a table. A person brought over the lemon bread to the table. There are good people in the world.

Kevin: Have you ever heard of the video on youtube, HyperNormalisation? It’s by the same person who made the video “Century of Himself” [British filmmaker Adam Curtis]. The film is about where we are now as a society. It’s about 2 hours long. Talks about Trump, Hillary, Assad, Assad’s father and synchronicity. Starts in two cities, simultaneously, goes along facts until the two cities merge. Has a lot to do with politics and history. Our future populations are going to look back and ask when we knew about climate change—why didn’t we make a difference? We’re going to have to tell them that we knew and didn’t act. Trump is feeling guilty about the low numbers at this inauguration, why is he so embarrassed of this? He’s almost obsessed with it. He wants people to like him. Almost every department has a twitter account now. I’m curious about how people feel about social media and its place in politics. I think it’s a problem we’re going to have to fix.  I have a friend who knew Trump would win from the very beginning. To this day, I still wonder about how he knew. Was he a clairvoyant? They were selling their house because they knew he would win. He asked me how I didn’t know he was going to win. If Bernie Sanders would have been Hillary’s VP pick maybe they could have won.

Lisa: Lets go around and say one word for how you’re feeling right now:

Hopeful

Enlightened

Thoughtful

Secure

Fearful

Community

Cautious-optimism

Ready

[afoolsingenuity]

A Year In Review: 2016

Every year I struggle with doing a survey for the year. I love the one with Jamie over at The Perpetual Page Turner brings out. And the Statistics Survey which Brittany at The Book Addicts Guide brings out is also fabulous. I always find they don’t work for me, though.

Instead, I’ve decided to do a few topics which cover my year in books highlighting the highs and lows. I’ll just essentially be picking and choosing from what they’ve done and a couple of other ideas from other people’s blogs to cover my whole year, not just books.

The Figures & Statistics

Books Read: 215

Number of Re-Reads: 13

Pages Read: 76392

Number of Series Read: 96

Number of Standalones: 82

Longest Book: Daughter of the Forest

(675 Pages)

Shortest Book: Kindred Spirits

(62 Pages)

Preferred Format: ebook

Most Read Author: Kelley Armstrong

Most Popular Genre: Contemporary Romance

Least Popular Genre: Horror

Highs and Lows

Favourite books read in 2016?

I had a lot of favourites. I couldn’t narrow it down to just one but instead there were many. Each were highly rated by myself and I will (hopefully) still love this time next year.

Favourite Covers?

These are just the books with the covers I most love now. I did have a much longer list… but they got cut out. I didn’t want to overwhelm you with too many covers. These are ones I would happily frame on my wall (or leave a copy artfully out for all to see).

Series I Would Most Recommend?

Just two series. I was going to have a much longer list of series I wanted to recommend but I decided to stick with Wolf by Wolf, which was a fantastic alternate history book. And the Cainsville series by Kelley Armstrong. This is the series which truly pulled me into her writing. I mean, I loved City of the Lost but as there is only one book out in that series right now I chose not to include it.

Book(s) I Can’t Believe I Waited Until 2016 To Pick It Up?

There were a lot of books I was shocked I waited so long to read but these were my main ones. I waited a whole year to read Illuminae. I spent far too long putting off buying Daughter of the Forest even though I knew I would love it. I avoided buying The Thinking Woman’s Guide To Real Magic a couple of years ago and it was only when I saw it at the library I got around to reading it. The Song Of Achilles as so many good reviews and was so well recommended and still I didn’t read it. And, finally, After The Last Dance. I have been a fan of Sarra Manning for a very long time and I remember this book being released and I wasn’t hesitant to buy as I wasn’t sure I’d like something which was so different to her usual writing. Turns out I was worried for nothing. I adored this book and I wish I’d read it sooner.

Biggest Surprise?

These Shallow Graves was a book I was hesitant to read. I’d seen it reviewed in a few places and still didn’t think I’d like it. I ended up buying it when I saw it for sale at my local supermarket and I have no regrets. I loved this book. As for Ghost Gifts, it’s a book I got it as one of my Kindle First books. I didn’t think I would like it but figured I’d gotten it free I might as well read it. I enjoyed it a lot. It was interesting and flawed and I did enjoy it.

Biggest Disappointment?

There were a lot of disappointments this year but these were the big ones. The Necklace of the Gods (Eona) was a real let down when I read and loved the first book. It just ruined everything which was built up in the first and I will never forgive it for ruining a book I thought was going to be a favourite. The Lies of Locke Lamora was a heart-breaking disappointment. People said such good things so when I read it and just couldn’t get into it and connect with it I was genuinely upset. It was like a betrayal. The Gracekeepers was a book I had added to my TBR pile simply for the gorgeous cover. I had wanted it so much so I was thrilled to get it from the library, sadly, it was extremely disappointing. I get why people liked it… but I didn’t. As for The Three Body Problem, well, I had a lot of issues with it and why the balls was it so filled with science and terrible characters. Why do people like this book?

Book I Wish I’d Spoken About More?

There were a lot of books I should have raved about but never did. These are the ones I am most upset I overlooked reviewing and flailing about. These Shallow Graves was a book I simply adored and I don’t know why I didn’t review it. The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet was a fantastic read, as you can tell from every blog review ever. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender was a really beautiful read. It was one of those books where not a whole lot happens but the way it is written is so utterly enchanting that you can’t help but loving it. I wish more people had spoken about it. I wish I had spoken about it more. Beautiful Wreck was a really strange romance which is extremely reminiscent of Outlander yet isn’t I was completely absorbed by this strange romance and the beautiful way it was written.

Book I’d Like To Most Recommend?

New Favourite Author?

Kelley Armstrong. That was easy for me to decide. I discovered her this year and have been trying to slowly read all of her books. I adored City of the Lost and I adored her Cainsville series and let’s not forget her Nadia Stafford series which I fell in love with and seems to have had the least love from others. I just really love her writing and plan to (eventually) read everything she’s written.

Looking Forward

Which Books Are You Looking Forward to Most in 2017?

This isn’t even an exhaustive list. But these are the ones which I found most easily.

Non Bookish Fun

Favourite Films?

I’m certain I’ve seen more great films than these this year, but these are the ones which sprang to mind as favourites. I loved Deadpool when it came out, it was absolutely hilarious. You forget Ryan Reynolds does comedy well until he does a role like this. I also really enjoyed Suicide Squad with it’s bad guys and humour. I mean, I liked Batman vs Superman, though, so really I just don’t agree with what the critics have to say. The Book of Life is a film I wanted to watch when it came out way back when and never got around to, turns out I should have because I loved it with the weird animation and general awesomeness. The last two feel like cheating as they are so new but Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Rogue One were utterly amazing films. I loved them so much, they are the kind of films I would happily rewatch the same day, that is how much I loved them.

Before you go accusing me of liking all films I see at the cinema I will say I went to see Passengers and that film was a bit cheesy so not all films are insta-love for me.

Favourite TV Shows?

I really wish I’d kept better track of my TV viewing this year because I know I watched more shows than this but these are the ones I remember loving this year. I think everyone loved Stranger Things but I still felt the need to include it, it was original and interesting and I watched it in a day. I know I mentioned my love for Pitch on one of my Sunday Summary posts but I will mention it again. I loved that show so much and I don’t even like baseball, but it made me like baseball. I would be willing to watch a game because of that show. Then there is The Expanse which I watched on Netflix and loved. Who knew I liked sci-fi stuff so much? This is definitely the show which reminded me I needed to read some sci-fi so I am glad I watched it. And finally, Age of Youth, it’s a Korean drama and the only really good one I’ve watched this year. It was just so nice and not to crazy over dramatic and I loved it and it’s soundtrack.

Favourite Songs?

Closer – The Chainsmokers ft Halsey

Here – Alessia Cara

Cleopatra – The Lumineers

Gravel To Tempo - Hayley Kiyoko

Way Down We Go - Kaleo

First - Cold War Kids

There was a lot more to my year, but these are the highlights, the things which spring to mind when I think about it. What were your highlights of 2016? Did you have a song you couldn’t playing or a film you couldn’t stop talking about? What books did you read that you loved and did you miss any that you absolutely need to read?

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La Times: Reese's crush on Shailene, the 'feminist' label and more: Checking in with the cast of 'Big Little Lies'

It’s fair to say there is hardly anything little about HBO’s new limited series.

“Big Little Lies,” which premieres Sunday, boasts two megastar executive producers, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. The star-studded sensibility continues from there, with a cast that includes Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley.

The seven-part series, which is based on Liane Moriarty’s 2014 bestseller of the same name, introduces viewers to a group of upper-middle-class mothers of first-graders living in Monterey, Calif., who are vexed by sexual assault, domestic violence, class issues and the everyday stresses of motherhood.

How ‘Big Littles Lies’ went from page-turner to seven-part series on HBO »

The group of women includes Madeline Mackenzie (Witherspoon), a know-it-all busybody who is trying to cope with the resentment she feels about her eldest daughter’s growing relationship with her ex-husband’s second wife, Bonnie Carlson (Kravitz), a twentysomething yoga instructor with a strong moral compass. Then there’s Madeline’s best friend, Celeste Wright (Kidman), who gave up a legal career to focus on her twin boys and is in an abusive marriage. There’s Jane Chapman (Woodley), a young single mom who just moved to Monterey to escape a difficult past. And Renata Klein (Dern), a successful businesswoman who’s at the center of school politics on and off the playground.

We spoke with the women  who brought it to life on the big little screen.

Reese Witherspoon

On not portraying women as good or bad

If you want to hear how women really talk to each other, I think you should watch the show. We’re,  at times completely cruel and at times kinder than anyone could possibly be. And there’s parts of us that are very divided in the beginning, but you have to watch the entire spectrum of the thing to understand all seven episodes. You understand how these relationships shift. And why, at the end of the show, these women will be forever together.

On how much of herself she brought to the role of Madeline

She’s a different kind of mother than me. We’re not similar. She’s very controlling, she’s kind of negative, pushy. And then you get into her back story [and] you see it comes from a place of just feeling so less than everyone else. And feeling maybe she made some wrong choices in her life.

I see myself in Jane, I see myself in Madeline, I see myself in Bonnie, I see myself in Renata. I think there definitely have been moments of being like Celeste in my life, and I think women and men alike are going to find a universality in all of these characters.

On her Shailene Woodley obsession

I literally would just stare at her sometimes. She can literally lay you down with something she says. I would read it on the page, and be like, “Ugh, that’s kind of, I don’t know how I would do that.”  And then she would find a way to say it in the most natural way, and break your heart saying it. It was just extraordinary.

Nicole Kidman

On the domestic violence research she did 

I took in an enormous amount of information. I read stories, watched interviews, talked to women. I saw some extraordinary TED Talks about domestic violence, particularly women that are seemingly successful women.

I know it. I’ve worked for the U.N. in terms of eradicating violence against women. This is a very deep subject that is prevalent and in many different ways, shapes and forms. This is just one form of it. But, on the surface, you go, “Oh, everything is great. And then as it unravels, you’re like, ‘Oh.’ ” The fragility of the relationship is just so heartbreaking. There is love there. And there’s children, and there’s a family. And it’s very authentic.

On shooting some of the more violent scenes

I just told [director] Jean-Marc [Vallée], “I trust you.” I want to be truthful and authentic. I want it to be complicated, which it should be. And the way Liane had written it, it was complicated. There’s a reason Celeste fights back. A lot of times she blames herself because she fights back. I thought that was a very interesting, but very real part of this relationship. People are going to be shocked by that at times.

It’s probably the most emotional I get when I’m discussing a role. This is a very insidious, devastating situation that this relationship is in. So, I am so careful with it and delicate with it.

Laura Dern

On how she always seems to end up playing complicated characters on HBO:

For whatever reason, HBO has given me my greatest opportunities, or we’ve worked together to create opportunities, in which not only is the character difficult at best to have empathy for — Amy Jellicoe [in “Enlightened”], [former Florida] Secretary of State Katherine Harris [in “Recount”] and now this. These are the characters on the page that you’re not necessarily going to like or be rooting for and now it’s our opportunity to dig deeper and find the other side of that person or the other side of the story. And that’s been the most fun I’ve had as an actor. You pray for those moments, and I’ve been lucky to have it several times. Without giving too much away, I’m definitely the character you want to hate.

On how people judge women in power

Isn’t it interesting when a woman is in a position of ultimate power, the boss of the group — my character being a CEO — what the perception is of that woman? It’s incredible the commentary on what the marriage must be like, what the woman must be like, what her sexuality is like and that she can’t be connected on any level with other women. Oh, and she’s a horrible mother. But that was the fun thing about it, because I think we were all madly in love with our characters. I don’t think any of the five of us women wanted anything more than to delve into the world we were in, which is thanks to David’s [Kelley] writing and the brilliant book.

On meeting Liane Moriarty and her research for the role

We got to know her. I got to have fun talking to her about where Renata came from in her brain. But as it expanded to this long-form, limited series, I got connected with a couple of extraordinary women, a couple of the more high-powered women in America who are the only women in their boardroom of 12 men. I learned so much that I never knew about what that’s like, and so everything is on the defensive.  … I know the challenges of being in the film business, but no one’s looking at me like it should be a man’s job. So I don’t have to live my life on the defensive, and it’s fascinating.

Shailene Woodley

On the feminist label that’s been attached to the show

I was just talking about this with someone else because they were like, “How does it feel to be part of a feminist project, and part of a piece that so many people are labeling as progressive or liberal or feminist?” It’s interesting to notice that if you have five male leads and their spouses, you don’t say, “Oh, this is a misogynist piece.” You don’t put a label on it. But when it comes to women, you have five women leads, and all of sudden, it becomes a feminist piece. That to me just lends to the reality that society is not able to accept five women lead roles.

It’s not the norm, yet, so we still have a lot of work to do. That being said, we’re making progress.

On returning to TV (Woodley’s breakout role was in “The Secret Life of an American Teenager,” which ran for five seasons on what used to be known as ABC Family)

Doing something for six months is a long time, but the nice thing is because we had the same director and we had the same actors, and it was all with HBO, it felt like we were just doing one large movie.

On not overwhelming “Big Little Lies” author Moriarty with too many questions

In terms of making my character, I strictly went off of what David [Kelley] wrote, but I did get to meet Liane when she was in town. She came to set for a day, and that was really neat.  You always sort of want to pick their brains, like, “What does it feel like to see your brainchild manifested, and embodied, and personified?” But also you choose to be a little bit more respectful of their space, because I can imagine how overwhelming that would be.

Zoë Kravtiz

On how first impressions can be deceiving with “Big Little Lies”

Even I’m annoyed by Bonnie at the beginning. The nicer she is, the more annoying it is. But as the story goes on, you see everyone’s character develop in such a way where you kind of feel like a [jerk] yourself for judging them so quickly. (Laughs.)  It’s beautiful the way it tricks you. You think you know who these women are, and then you learn to have such compassion for them, because everyone has so much going on and what we show to the world is only a very thin layer of who we are.

On the refreshing change of pace from blockbuster films like “Mad Max: Fury Road” and the “Divergent” series to a more intimate drama

Real character study and work, especially for women, it doesn’t happen a lot. And as a woman, to do it with other women, it’s such a gift.

On  Kidman’s and Witherspoon’s collaborative spirit as executive producers working with the younger actresses

They are the big dogs on the set, and I look up to both of them, and Laura as well, so having them ask “What do you think?” meant a lot to me, and I learned through that. It was a really beautiful experience.

The most-read Entertainment stories this hour »

yvonne.villarreal@latimes.com

Twitter: @villarrealy

sarah.rodman@latimes.com

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