#'you are what you love' girls who are nothing but a mosaic of their creative outbursts

[lilacerull0]

ttpd for the girlies who are doing it for the theatrics of it

[notiddygothgf]

prologue

★ pairings: choso x f!reader

★ synopsis: World famous rock star Choso Kamo’s new live-in assistant is convinced that she can fix him – substance abuse issues and all. Tensions ensue, and as new feelings rise to the surface, the two find it difficult to maintain an appropriate workplace relationship (or; the one where an unstable musician struggles to keep it friendly with his assistant).

★ c.w.: none (more content warnings and tags)

★ a/n: don't be a stranger! leave some comments for me to read teehee

★ w.c.; 2.8k

smoke and mirrors; chapter index

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY BLEEDS YOU DRY. That’s just the truth. It takes every ounce of your creative passion and tramples on it. It takes everything from you, and then it takes more. I find myself reconsidering my career path on a daily basis. There’s only one thing, in fact, that keeps me grounded.

“Choso! Choso! Choso! Choso!” 

That. The chant of the crowd. The endless bodies waving their hands over the venue, reaching for me, singing for me.

I leaned my head back, feeling the cool breeze of the backstage air against my neck, against my trembling skin. Crewmembers swarmed around me like gnats, tweaking little details of my outfit – one had a black eyeshadow palette up to my eyelid and another was messing with my hair. She had said something about needing to look intentionally messy.

The low hum of their conversation was only background noise to me. I blew a bubble with the wad of gum in my mouth – a nervous tic that clearly betrayed the calm exterior I was trying so hard to maintain.

The girl who was touching my eyeliner up snapped the palette shut. My mind was elsewhere – it was out there. 

“Choso! Choso! Choso!”

I took a deep breath to steady my racing heart. The chant of my name reverberated through the walls, a frightening reminder of what lay just beyond the curtain. 

People. Thousands of them.

“Choso! Choso! Choso!” The chorus of voices seemed to grow louder. I shut my eyes, visualizing the sea of faces, the outstretched hands, the passion in their voices. The crowd– my fans; they were my lifeline. 

Another crew member informed me, “You’re on.”

I nodded solemnly, feeling that strange pit in my stomach. It was terrifying, it was familiar, it was… exciting. 

I took another breath, then I stepped forward. With each step towards the stage, the chanting intensified. The noise was like this strange, palpable force, urging me onward. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins the moment I reached the edge of the stage. The anticipation was almost… suffocating.

I stepped out. Then, for a blissful moment, it all seemed to go quiet.

I took a moment to look at them, really look at them. All of them. The mass of humanity blurred into one collective wave of joy. From here, I couldn’t even make out faces. Only smiles, flashing lights, and limbs flailing. Signs with my name on it. People with love in their hearts. 

Nothing but them and me, hearts beating in tandem. I wondered how nervous they felt – if they knew how nervous I felt standing here before them. If they knew I had been nervously chewing on a piece of gum only moments prior.

Thousands of people who all came together for one purpose – to see me. A mosaic of adoration. 

I glanced down at my trembling hands, fingers clutching the edge of my guitar. The weight of the crowd’s expectations pressed down on me. The realization hit me a second time – they were all here for me. That both terrified and humbled me.

I licked my lips, gave my old guitar a strum, feeling those familiar vibrations amplified a hundred fold. It was loud, so loud that I could still hear it reverberating throughout the venue when I reached for the microphone.

I stole another glance at the crowd as a smile broke across my face. 

Deep breaths.

I shouted, “What the fuck is up, Paris?”

The response was deafening. The crowd erupted in cheers. I could feel their energy merging with mine – the lights, the love, the screams. In that moment, I remembered why I endured the trials of my industry. I remembered why I was still living – what I was fighting for. It was all for them, the countless faces who found solace and inspiration in my music. 

And with that realization, I felt my heart begin to race.

“How y’all doin’ tonight?” I asked.

They screamed back at me in response. I grinned.

“God, I love you guys,” I laughed. Strummed my guitar a second time. Looked at them. “I got a special show for you tonight!”

It was all for them. I do it all for them.

Life on the road was pretty crazy. I wish I could say that I had family to miss back home, but that wasn’t the case. I had been in and out of foster care for most of my life; had to grow up pretty fast so my brothers and I could stay off the streets. Other than the three of them, I never really had a family.

I turned to music as a crutch. I bought my first guitar with the first paycheck I earned – I was 16. I bandhopped for a while, alternating between the roles of lead singer, bassist, and rhythm guitarist. I found a passion for writing lyrics somewhere along the way. It felt nice, being able to put pen to paper and make my fucked up life sound appealing.

It was great.

I did basement shows right up until I turned 21. I would have been more than happy to keep on doing them – hell, sometimes I found myself wishing I could still fit those small, shitty little venues – but some big, music industry talent hotshot came and found me at one of my shows. He handed me a card. Told me he liked my sound, that I could be famous.

Who could have refused?

I never anticipated hitting it this big. Not that I’m complaining. It keeps a roof over me and my brother’s head – to say the least. I have more than enough money to live lavishly for the rest of my days.  I found my new family in my music team: my manager, my coordinators, my publicist. All of them. 

The music industry is notoriously blood-sucking. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. I realized that rather quickly, though by the time I was hot enough to hire a whole team, I was in too deep. It all seemed so… superficial.

I grew to hate it.

My hatred only grew when I lost two of my beloved brothers – Eso and Kechizu. There was a shootout at the mall. They found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember rushing to the hospital as soon as I heard the news. 

It was too late by that point, though. They had bled out long before I was able to see them.

I didn’t sleep for a week after that – I developed insomnia that would last for years to come. I spent my evenings curled up on my shower floor, sobbing into my own arms. It was the same after that, and then the day after that. I found myself spending all of my time replaying the memories in my head, thinking about where I went wrong.

It didn’t take long for me to find comfort in the lifestyle of the rich and famous – the drinking, the partying, the drugs. I would go on week-long benders, drinking myself into a sickened stupor, rolling up two joints a day, popping pills I didn’t know how to pronounce. Doping myself up so I couldn’t think about it.

Ecstasy, Molly, Coke, LSD, Acid – I’ve taken them all. Shit, you could probably find trace amounts of them in my blood at any given point in time.

Or… however the hell that shit works.

I took Adderall every day to keep me grounded. That’s what I told myself, at least. No doctor in his right mind would ever prescribe someone like me 80 milligrams on a daily basis. Good thing I paid mine enough to forget his hippocratic oath.

I wasn’t completely lost, though. I didn’t feel good about it. Yuuji, my only living brother, told me multiple times that I needed to cut down on my consumption. He wanted me to go to rehab. Shit, over my dead body.

He stopped bringing it up, but I could see it in his eyes – I was breaking his heart. I had to remind myself that he had lost his brothers, too, that day. Probably felt like he was losing the only one he had left.

I try not to dwell too hard on it, though. Got better shit to do.

Fucking hate the music industry most days. Everyone expects you to be all put-together, even though you wake up feeling like you dragged your feet through a field of broken glass shards. Even though you wake up every goddamn morning feeling you’re reliving the same day over and over again.

It’s like a painful reminder that the only people I have in my life are paid employees. I have no one – other than Yuuji – who I could confidently say would be there for me if I no longer had the funds to compensate them.

It fucking blows. I drink to forget about it. Drink and… well, everything else I put in my body.

Never put a needle in there, though… at least not for drugs. I’ve got more tattoos and piercings than I can count.

Enough about my unhealthy coping mechanisms, though.

My “family” never let me put out music I like making. They stripped my creativity from me. I lost all enjoyment in songwriting along the way. They turned me into a husk – a shell of the man I used to be.

I couldn’t recall the last time I felt real happiness. You know, the kind you got from taking a walk in nature and not from snorting and ingesting copious amounts of illicit substances. You would think that someone would see me greened out on the couch and know I was crying for help.

Nah. No one ever listens.

They never noticed. The only reason they cared about whether I was dead or alive was because I kept them well-fed and their pockets full.

That’s the fuckin’ music industry, baby. Nothing but a bunch of soulless, drugged-up puppets pumping out music they hate making. Begging for help.

But no one ever listens.

My head hung low as I snorted a line of powder off the tray my housemaid – or some other woman I didn’t know – had brought me. As quickly as she had appeared, she vanished. In her absence, I relished in the rush that hit me all too fast. 

I sniffed and coughed, shaking my head with remnants of the powder clinging to my nose. I blinked slowly, trying to make sense of my surroundings. 

The studio’s walls were adorned with gold, platinum and silver records, a shark contrast to the disheveled state of the room. Empty liquor bottles littered the floor. The air hummed with companionable conversation and the distant echoes of a repetitive beat.

As I raised my head, the scene unfolded before me. Half-naked women, draped in a hazy glow from neon lights, raised their glasses in a toast. The shots went down smoothly, accompanied by the thumping bass of my latest creation, reverberating through the studio's speakers.

The instrumental was infectious, quick and catchy, resonating with a bass that seemed to throb in sync with the erratic pulse of the room. My eyes fell to the scattered papers on the coffee table in front of me – lyrics scribbled in messy script on lined paper that had been torn straight out of my composition notebook.

Cigarette smoke, a whiskey glass,

Fading memories, like shattered glass,

Every sunrise feels like the last,

Trapped in the echos of the past.

Stuck in the rhythm of a broken clock,

Every tick’s an echo, every tock’s a shock.

A carouse of monotony,

Lost in a loop, just try’na break free.

Guitar wails like a distant scream,

Reality blurs, just like a dream.

Drift through the hours, like a ghost,

In this eternal purgatory, I’m lost.

Pouting, I wiped my nose, feeling the dull burn of the coke as it tingled in the back of my throat. I was congested as all hell. Still, I tried to sing the bridge beneath my breath. 

“Drift through the hours, like a ghost. In this eternal purgatory, I’m lost…” I hummed, pouting again when I realized I still didn’t like it. 

The women in the back of the room continued their celebration, completely oblivious to my internal struggle. They were too busy shooting the shit with my friends.

More glasses were poured, and one was handed over to me. I took a sip without looking – because it honestly didn’t matter what was in the cup, could’ve been piss for all I knew. The familiar burn of bourbon warmed me momentarily. Humming in recognition, I traced my finger over the rim of the glass, lost momentarily in the verbiage of my own creation. 

Something felt off.

Furrowing my brows, I stared down at the words on the page. I sniffled again. Then I downed about half of my glass of bourbon, standing up on unsteady feet. The room swayed slightly, especially when I walked over to the corner where the producer was set up – a lone figure surrounded by the chaos.

I nodded at him, muttering, “Play it again from the chorus. I’m try’na see somethin’.”

The producer – Chris, or some shit like that – nodded back. He pressed a button, and the beat started over. The room’s ambiance, fueled by laughter and friendly chatter, didn’t quiet down. 

I tried my best to immerse myself in the rhythm, but the distractions were just… it was just too much.

‘Guitar wails like a distant scream,

Reality blurs, just like a dream.

Drift through the hours, like a ghost,

In this eternal purgatory, I’m lost.’

I hadn’t realized I had forgotten to actually sing the words until my producer looked over at me expectantly. I shook my head, huffing out an exasperated sigh.

“Shit, sorry, take it from… take it from the chorus again, please?” My voice cut through the noise – or tried to, at least. 

The beat started over again, a few measures behind where I needed to be.

“Guitar wails like a distant scream…” I attempted once more. “Drift through the hours, like a lost– fuck, I fucked it up.”

The collective revelry around me was a wall – it fucked me up. I could feel a headache coming on.

“Can we pipe down a bit?” I groaned, massaging my temples. My ears began to ring a bit, growing louder with every passing second that the chatter continued. “Guys, shut the hell up.”

My pleas fell on deaf ears. The ringing persisted, drowning out everything else in the room. 

“Yuki,” I directed at her, a little louder now. She seemed to have been leading the conversation. “Yuki, please.”

No one ever listens.

And they didn’t. They weren’t fucking listening. I tried to make eye contact with her, but I couldn’t seem to make out her face from the rest. The room was blurry, moving side to side, hazy around the edges. I held my forehead, groaning quietly.

They were so fucking loud.

No one ever listens.

Downing the rest of my bourbon in one go, I – in a fit of frustration – hurled the glass against the wall above the couch where my friends were comfortably seated. It shattered, sending shockwaves through the room as stunned silence replaced the previous chaos.

“Yuki,” I mumbled, swaying slightly on my feet. “Shut the fuck up. I’m trying to.. Try’na fuckin’...”

“Choso,” She began quietly, her mouth slightly agape. Had she always had a twin sister, or was I dreaming? “Your… your nose– are you okay?”

I put a hand up to my nose, feeling around for anything out of the ordinary. My fingers were red when I brought them back, painted with a viscous crimson fluid. Another fell from my nostril onto the pale skin of my wrist. 

My nose is bleeding.

I wiped my nose, waving them off. “I’m fine,” I slurred – I wasn’t, least I don’t think I was, but the show must go on, or some shit like that. “Can we just… keep going, please?”

A thick, heavy silence enveloped the studio. With all of them finally keeping their mouths shut, I could hear myself think again. The ringing in my ears began to subside, and I, looking over my shoulder at Chuck– Chris, whatever the fuck– demanded, “Play that shit again.”

He swallowed nervously, clearly caught off guard by my outburst. Still, he pressed a button or two, and the song started all over again.

Drift through the hours like a ghost,

In this eternal purgatory, I’m lost.

a/n: hiiii! I hate the way this was written, but I always hate my first chaps hehe. NEXT ONE WILL BE SM BETTER I SWEAR!! this is gonna be a long, slow burn, smutty ass fanfic (loosely [very loosely] based on the show 'the idol'). and by based on ofc I mean I watched an ep and I was like damn I could make this better. Enter our beloved emo boy choso kamo. anyway!! comment your thoughts/wishes/etc!! I love an interactive community of loyal commenters and I loveee reading all of ur thoughts and lovely remarks!! keep them coming, and ill keep the chapters coming in retribution! love you bunches!

comments + reblogs are greatly appreciated!!

credits: @/2OARIN on twitter (cover art). If you know the other artist, please let me know, so I can credit them properly for their work! I obviously do not own jjk or anything related to it. please do not reproduce, copy, or translate my works anywhere. dont fk w me im a bruja.

taglist: @missphanosaur18 , @bontensbabygirl, @megumissunshine, @chocoyanchan, @littlelovebug98, @lucisimpongod, @xochyw, @jaegerstan222 , @electro-supremacy, @mellytheteddy, @clover0310 , @soraya-daydreams, @priussy, @insanehumantinker, @staygoldsquatchling02, @nonksity, @hinata7346, @chososwhoresblog, @ynjimenez , @soraya-daydreams , @nonksity , @hinata7346 , @armani78 , @mindurownbussines , @sad-darksoul , @sasuke-slut , @yuunie135 , @bratkuna , @aydene , @mshope16 , @pretentiousteentrash , @galactict3a , @kokos-property , @moonriseoverkyoto , @lyn-soso , @arilostie , @violetmatcha , @markleeisdabestdrug , @erensdior , @hp-simp505 , @fushiguro-kyuuuuuu , @bontensbabygirl , @switch-godess , @honey-yuh , @ddotsie

wanna join the taglist? | smoke and mirrors; chapter index

[thephantomofthe-internet]

Read into Me Chapter 11: Love Story

Steve Harrington x Reader

CATCH UP ON THE SERIES HERE

Words: 4,771

Warnings: fire, injury-all end of season three things!

Author’s Note: Happy belated Strangers Things 3 Day! I wanted to get this up yesterday, but I didn’t have it in me to work. This is the end of the series, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! It was a fun little ride!

Series Tag: @divinity-deos @thecaptainsgingersnap @wolfish-willow @scoopsohboi @herre-gud-nej @clockworkballerina @maddie1504 @i-am-trash-so-much-its-scary @jisungiesluv @wildcvltre @stanleyyelnatsiii @n3wtscaseofniffler5 @peterparxour @linkispink1995 @a-big-ball-of-idk @used-avocado @mochminnie @sledgy14 @the-creative-lie @yall-wildin-like-siriusly @ggclarissa @voidnarnia @anonymousonion33 @awkwardnesshabitat @darkcrystal-wolf @hannahrisacher

Paris was a lonely city. You’d arrived alone, having not seen Steve since prom and still desperate to see him one more time. You’d selfishly kept his sweatshirt, wanting a piece of him to take with you to a different country. Your mother hadn’t picked you up from the airport, having sent a car instead. She didn’t seem much interested in speaking to you after months apart; she was much more interested in redecorating her new condo and talking about her fiancé. You met him, a French fop named Jean-Pierre at least fifteen years her junior. He was nice enough, although a bit fruity for your liking. His interests were more on the modeling jobs your mother was getting him. She had no time for you, which was fine since your lessons at the salon began immediately.

You and thirty-five other young hopefuls spend your days locked in a studio with abundant resources and endless models and objects to sketch. And you hated it. You hated the long, rambling lectures from the artists who came to the salon to preach the values of the school and the importance of French art. They alternated between speaking in French and English without explaining themselves as they switched tongues. Your French language skills were nonexistent, so the lectures were exhausting and endless. The only time they ever seemed to help was when they brought you all to the Louvre to examining the long dead French men who’d made the museum possible. There, you could at least sketch out the greats and enjoy the beauty of the art. Inside the studio, you felt as though your head was going to explode. The lectures spoke too loudly and loomed over you without warning or word, you weren’t allowed your headset or Walkman in the studio to combat them, and the smell of various paints and clays made your stomach churn. The girl who’d taken up the easel next to you, a little German named Lisle, had taken to making clay pots and sculptures and the sound of her pottery wheel mixed with her incessant humming made you want to commit manslaughter. It didn’t help that the smell of the brown clay invaded your sinuses and made you sneeze violently. You dreaded the salon. But you dreaded being at home more.

Your mother had hired you a French tutor, utterly horrified by the fact that you hadn’t been practising. You tried to tell her that, despite her assumptions, Hawkins High had stopped offering a French elective two years before you started there.

“You cannot live in Paris without speaking French! It won’t do!” she moaned. Jean-Pierre was already on the phone, speaking fast into the receiver. You didn’t see what the big deal was. Everywhere you went, people spoke enough English to communicate with you fine. It didn’t occur to you till after dinner that if you were to study in the country, you’d need the language to understand your lessons.

So you got a French teacher, a short tempered older man who insisted on being called Monsieur Bérnard. His greying whiskers moved sharply as he spoke and he often spit on you as he taught proper pronunciation and conjugation. He ranted and raved all afternoon, disgusted by your apparent lack of an ear for languages and your doodling on the edges of notebook paper instead of working. You’d go from sensory overload in the salon to being bullied by a Freud-looking asshole each day with no room for a break or a breath.

You lived for weekends. Rest was very well thought of in the city so the hell spawn tutor didn’t work and the salon locked its doors. You were allowed to wander the city at your leisure, your mother glad to have you out of the apartment. You’d spend most of your days sat at a café near the Eifel Tower, a prime spot to tourists. Every day, you’d bring your sketchpad and try to draw out the profiles of those you passed you by. You spent two weekends working on a sketch of people sunbathing on the lawn in front of the tower. But it seemed you left all your talent in Hawkins. You’d spent so long drawing familiar faces back home, now that you were away from your nest, you found yourself without the skill to capture the faces around you. It occurred to you that you knew the faces of Hawkins far too well. They were engrained in your mind, your hand working like a stamp to put them on the page. France was full of strangers. You didn’t know how to understand them like you understood Hawkins. France wasn’t home. You couldn’t work out in a world of strangers.

You couldn’t work in the salon either. It was too much. Everyone was constantly showboating and trying out-do one another. You couldn’t work with people spying over your shoulder. You felt judged and insecure about what you could do. You didn’t want to be watched as you tried to make art. It didn’t help that you had no idea what to make. The closest thing you’d gotten done is that sketch of the Eifel Tower and that wasn’t something you couldn’t buy on the streets around the monument. You’d tried all the things that you couldn’t in your bedroom-paint splatter art, pottery, carving, paint pulling, mosaics. You never finished anything. The drive to push through wasn’t there.

When the loneliness and fear became too much to bear, you held Steve’s sweatshirt and cried. It still smelt like him; Irish Springs soap and Fabregè Organics shampoo and hairspray and a bit like sweat. It was nice though. You missed him. You tried to write him letters, but you knew that they wouldn’t get home before you did. You’d made up your mind that whatever the answer was, you were going home. Whether that meant deferring a semester or missing the first week of school you would go back to Hawkins. Still, you’d written over a dozen letters, all crumpled in your waste bin.

You waited until the last minute to finish something for submission. You’d tried to sketch your mother, to find who you knew in the fancy woman in front of you. With her bleached blowout and designer clothes, thirty pounds lighter and yellow gold jewellery glinting in the midday sun. She looked like the epitome of elegance, straight out of a magazine. The woman you remembered had greying roots and love handles, her only jewellery the wedding rings your father had given her. Europe had changed her into someone who you didn’t know and who didn’t seem to want to introduce herself to you. Nothing you drew seemed to capture the middle between who she was and who she is now. You realized in her profile that you weren’t a part of her life anymore, that she didn’t want you there. You were as strange to her as she was to you. You passed each other like ghosts in the hall, almost recognizable but hauntingly foreign.

The day before your final piece for submission was due; you got a letter from Steve. It only had one sentence.

“I should have asked you to stay.”

It was all you needed to hear to be inspired. You made your final project a tribute to him, mixing memories with unfinished letters building into his face. You used plain black ink to sketch his profile on the surface of the mess, building him into your loneliness. You only had your memory to recreate his face and your own letters to fill the canvas. Still, it was the only thing you’d done the whole time you were in the country that you were actually proud of. You didn’t finish it until the sun rose and you handed it off to be judged without a second thought, bleary eyed and exhausted.

You were on a plane home by the wee hours of July 4th.

Hawkins was a depressing place. After graduation, Steve found himself listless and at the hands of his father. He was a failure, a disgrace of a son. He was unready to start into the family business. His grades were pathetic. He had to get a job. Of course, with no job experience and late to the game, no decent place wanted him. The new mall only offered him one place of employment, Scoops Ahoy. And the uniform was embarrassing. Stupid sailor shirts and matching shorts, fucking knee socks and a corny paper hat. He looked like a certified geek. And his co-worker was a freak. Robin fucking Buckley did nothing but bug him all shift. It didn’t help that he had no friends without you, even Dustin had left for some nerdy science camp after the school year ended.

He was alone and lonely.

He tried to write you a half dozen times. But nothing seemed to make sense, nothing was worth telling you. What was he supposed to tell you? That he had become an even bigger loser overnight? He felt so utterly pathetic. He just wanted things to go back to the way things were. But what did that even looked like anymore? It wasn’t a life with Nancy, she’d dumped his ass, and it wasn’t a life with you, you’d left him for a different continent. He didn’t have a clue where he was going anymore. So he did what any lonely, practically friendless teenager did-he worked his ass off. Eight hours every day in the mall with smart ass Robin Buckley, waiting for the ground to suck him up. And sure, he tried to hit on the girls his age that came around. It was a good distraction from his broken heart. He’d made up his mind that he was ready to move on and try to date again. That he needed a girlfriend. That he needed to be cool again.

And then, Dustin came back and Hawkins started acting up again. He thought it was over. Those damn dogs were gone, the thing was closed, the kid was safe and acting like a kid. Everything had gone back to as close to normal as he’d seen it in awhile. But Dustin just had to find a secret code and Buckley just had to decode it and Lucas’s bitchy little sister just had to be small enough to fit into the vents and find a secret Russian elevator. And they just had to get stuck in it.

He couldn’t keep that damn kid from seeking out trouble. And yeah, it was kind of fun in a scared shitless kind of way, but it wasn’t worth getting drugged and beaten up and nearly dying for. And it certainly wasn’t worth getting tricked into thinking that he had feelings for fucking Robin. He could murder that kid for getting it in his head that he liked that girl. Robin was cool; he wouldn’t pretend that she wasn’t a decent friend to have at the end of the world. But he didn’t need the embarrassment of trying to ask out a lesbian. At least the reason for her rejecting him wasn’t that he was unattractive or lame, just that she didn’t dig dudes. He was cool with that. And at least he got to punch out a communist. If he could tell his father that without going to prison or being murdered by a Russian goon, he’d be proud. Fuck that, he was proud. He won a fight! He beat up a Russian spy! More than one, he beat some up while drugged out; at least he thought he did. He couldn’t remember much, other than watching Back to the Future with Robin. That movie was too confusing. And then he stole a car, he saved Nancy’s life, he set up that weird tower thing for Dustin-there was too much going on to even recognize how crazy he sounded. How crazy all of this sounded.

And then, the mall was on fire.

Your flight landed on the fourth of July at about ten fifteen in the evening. It took about forty-five minutes to get from the Indianapolis International Airport back to Hawkins. You were buzzing. Seven words had given you all the hope you needed to push you back to the states. Every fibre of your being was alive with energy, with excitement. You couldn’t wait for your grandfather to park the car, you jumped out as soon as you were settled in the driveway.

“Don’t you want to go upstairs and unpack?” your grandmother called after you as you booked it down the driveway.

You turned back “No, I’ll be back later!” you called. Steve’s car wasn’t in the driveway but you figured if anyone was home they’d know where he was. You bounded up the stairs, ringing the doorbell twice.

Mrs. Harrington came to the door in her bathrobe. “Oh, hello there…” she trailed off, obviously unable to remember your name.

“Y/N, hi it’s nice to see you, do you know where Steve is?” you asked, bouncing from your heels to your toes.

Mrs. Harrington narrowed her eyes “He’s at his job I assume. At the mall.” She said slowly.

“What mall?” you demanded. Mrs. Harrington’s eyes blew wide open and you realized that you were probably coming off like an insane person. “Sorry, I’ve been out of the country for about a month.”

“It’s where the Hawkins Laboratories were, off East Wood Road.” She pointed out the door towards the roads. You knew instantly that the fastest way to get there was through the woods. You ran through the backyards of your neighbours and into the woods. You didn’t like the Hawkins forests. They were dark and dim and poorly maintained. The county hadn’t been out to cut down potentially problematic trees on the few hiking paths in the woods.  Burs caught your socks and twigs scratched your legs as you hopped logs to try to get there faster. They’d carved a road through the woods, you’d found it halfway to the mall, deserted and blocked off. You could see the bright orange flames from a mile away.

Your heart stopped dead in your chest. Steve was in there. You could cry.

Instead, you hopped the blockade, running down the road despite the calls of passing fire trucks and police. You didn’t care if they tried to arrest you, although you doubted that they could. It would be a waste of time to bother with you during an emergency.

The parking lot was filled with emergency vehicles. Massive streams of water were attacking the building. Luckily, it seemed the mall was closed, judging by the few people who were milling around not in uniforms. You sprinted into the crowd, looking around frantically.

Steve had been ushered into the back of an ambulance and draped in a bright orange emergency blanket. It wasn’t that cold but he felt as though he was freezing. The EMTs had checked his vitals and disinfected the wounds on his face and knees. As for the remaining drugs in his system, he chose not to mention them. He knew that the high would wear off eventually. Robin was sat next to him, equally bandaged up and silent, save an uncontrollable shiver. Wordlessly, Steve took the blanket off his shoulders and placed it over hers. He wasn’t that cold. Moreover, he just felt numb. He’d had this happen so many times; his face beat in, an otherworldly thing trying to destroy his life and hurt his family, a major building destroyed-it all felt familiar. It made him sick to his stomach to know that it was familiar. If he had anything left in his stomach he would’ve thrown up.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something running towards him. At first, he tensed. He didn’t know what it was and it could probably kill him. His heart stopped and then raced wildly. He held out an arm to protect Robin and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Steve!” you cried. He was in an ambulance. He was hurt. He was alive. You felt as if you could cry. In the span of fifteen minutes he’d gone from working to escaping a fiery building to missing in a fire to simply hurt. And hurt was just fine, you could handle hurt.

“Oh my god Steve, are you okay? Are you alright? I love you so much…”You grabbed his face, examining the bruises. You pulled him tightly to your chest, trying not to cry or freak out. You knew it wouldn’t help.

“I love you too…” he breathed into your ear, pulling you close to him. He recognized you by the smell of your hair, the feeling of your arms around him. He could cry. He didn’t believe you were real. But when you pulled away and his hand came to your face. You were real. And you were here. And he was safe. He was safe and alive. Feelings of relief rushed through his body. He wanted to cry, but the shock was too overwhelming for a tear to even drop.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper and hoarser than he’d ever felt it. “I thought you were still in Paris.”

“I came home early,” you chuckled, pressing a kiss to his jaw bone. “I didn’t get in.” That was the nicer version, the judges laughed at your final piece, they called it pedestrian. You should’ve been more upset, your mother was furious, but you couldn’t have cared less. You were free to go home. You could’ve thanked them for rejecting you.

Steve pulled away, looking you squarely in the eye. He wouldn’t have you give up on school to hang out with him in bum fuck Indiana. But you were telling the truth, it was written plainly all over your face. “Those bastards…” Steve murmured. You laughed, your eyes watery and throat thick. You were overwhelmed. You expected to come home and just see him in his element. You expected him to not necessarily want to see you. You didn’t expect a fire or Steve being injured or Steve to even be there at all. You pulled Steve back into your arms, you didn’t want to let go.

“I missed you so much…” you whispered. Steve’s arms came around your hips, pulling you in between his legs. He needed you here, to keep you in place for awhile.

“I missed you too…” he said, pressing a gentle kiss to the top of your head. “Did you get my letter?”

You looked up “Yeah I did…” you said “I wish I had written you, I tried so many times but I couldn’t find the words and-” Steve kissed you hard, stealing the words from his throat. He didn’t care if you didn’t write him back; this was the best thing he could’ve gotten from you. A letter wouldn’t do it justice.

You were lit up by his kiss. This is what you needed. No words could do the feelings he expressed in his kiss justice. You felt alive. You felt at home. Steve tried to pull away, but you pulled him back by his shirt, kissing him as if your life depended on it. Maybe it did. You couldn’t be sure anymore.

A loud clearing of one’s throat interrupted you and you pulled away to see Robin waving awkwardly. “Oh hey Buckley…” you muttered awkwardly. “How’s Samantha?”

“No clue, she never called me back.” The younger girl shrugged nonchalantly, hopping down from the ambulance deck. “I’ll catch ya later, Harrington.”

You turned your attention back to Steve, looking down at the material still in your fists. He looked ridiculous. “What the fuck are you wearing?” you asked with a laugh. Steve’s hands settled on your lower back, holding you in between his knees as if you’d run off if he didn’t.

“Oh this? This has been my whole summer.” He groaned “I’ve been captaining a boat on an ocean of flavours.” You couldn’t help but cackle, you had no idea what he was talking about but he seemed so serious.  

“And by that you mean?” you lifted the fake red neckerchief attached to his shirt, running the material between your thumb and forefinger.

“Ice cream store in the mall,” he pointed to the embroidered Scoops Ahoy logo on his breast.

“You’re kidding…” you shook your head as if to shake the idea out of your mind. Steve’s fingers trailed the raggedy edge of your sweatshirt. Well, his sweatshirt, his last name and basketball jersey number were embossed on the back; he could feel the textured design on your lower back.

“I like my sweater,” he chuckled, reaching up to adjust the length of the drawstrings on the hood. You looked away, a bit embarrassed.

“I didn’t mean to keep it I just…missed you,” You replied “You can have it back.”

“Nah, it suits you,” he smirked “Besides, I want my girl in my stuff, it’s cute.”

“Your girl?” you grinned giddily, elbowing him in the ribs. “Since when am I your girl?” You liked the idea of being Steve’s girl. It had a nice ring to it.

Steve smirked, squeezing your hips in his hands. “Oh come on baby, you’ve been my girl for awhile…”

“Oh really? Well, I wouldn’t know since you’ve never asked me…”

You heard a loud yell and turned to see a set of paramedics carrying a stretcher towards you and Steve. They were sprinting and bringing a badly burnt and unconscious Billy Hargrove towards the ambulance you sat on. You quickly moved out of the way. Steve grabbed your hand, allowing you to tug him from the ambulance’s deck.

You only got a brief look at the teenager, but it made your stomach churn violently. You felt ill. You felt Steve squeeze your hand. You turned to look at him and saw how hollow his eyes were. You wrapped your arm around his middle. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” you said, trying to stifle a yawn. You were exhausted from your flight and your run here and the trauma that had smacked you across the face.

Steve noticed anyway “Did you just get here?” he asked, lifting your chin.

“My flight landed at ten, I came to see you as soon as I could.”

“You should’ve gone home to rest, I wouldn’t have been mad at you.” You looked absolutely exhausted. He couldn’t imagine what he looked like.

“I missed you too much to not see you. And what if you had gotten hurt, if you hadn’t made it out then I would’ve never forgiven myself…”

Steve wrapped his arms tightly around you, shielding you from the scene, as more mangled people were brought out. The beast must’ve fallen apart once the brain was destroyed. It looked as though a bomb had gone off. Steve squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to leave, but he knew that the FBI would be called and he’d have to talk to them again. He wanted you to go home, but that didn’t seem like an option now.  Selfishly, he liked having you there, it was comforting to have you in his arms, squeezing him under his ribs and keeping him calm.

“I’m not gonna get hurt, I’m okay…we’re okay…” You nodded roughly against his chest. You felt as if you were burning up and freezing at the same time. You saw blinks of red flashing lights and sirens as one of the ambulances sped past. You were so thankful that he wasn’t on that ambulance.

“Yeah, I know, I’m not gonna let you out of my sight ever again.” Steve lifted up your chin, raising an eyebrow at you. “What? Last time I did you nearly died and for what? A shit job in the mall?”

“Well, not just for a job, I was helping Robin and a couple kids who were with us,” That wasn’t the whole story. Steve knew he’d have to tell you eventually about everything, but for now he was more than comfortable ignoring the looming problem beneath their feet.

“What a hero…” you giggled, pressing a kiss to his cheek. Something had been bothering Steve for awhile now and he determined now was the best time to tackle the subject. He turned away from you, folding his hands in his lap.

“Did you mean it when you said that you loved me?” he asked quietly. Truthfully, he wasn’t certain that you meant it. Or if he had even heard you correctly. After Nancy, he wasn’t sure if anyone actually loved him back. He’d given so much of his heart away only to have it tossed to the floor and tread upon like it was nothing more than a cigarette butt. He wasn’t sure if he could trust that you meant it.

You let out a small sigh through your nose, crossing your arms over your chest. You were a bit embarrassed. You were half hoping that he would forget about it. Your response brought all of Steve’s hopes crashing down. “Yeah, yeah I do,” you admitted, rubbing your arms, having suddenly gone cold. “I will admit, I hadn’t planned on saying that this early, feels a bit middle school to say that you love someone before they’re even your boyfriend.”

Steve turned to look at you once again, a bit surprised. Your face had gone red, adorably red, but still very red and your gaze had turned down to the asphalt at your feet. He reached out and took your hand, interlacing your fingers with his. “Good,” he said with a smile. You turned up to look at him; brow furrowed “I thought I had like imagined it.”

“Oh…no you’re good.” You said slowly. He looked like a little puppy dog, his whole face was radiating sunshine; it was almost hard to look at. It was harder to not match his energy, to get drunk off it. Then again, no one was stopping you from just enjoying the moment. You let out a small breath, not so much heavy with sadness or regret, but simply exhaustion. You let your head rest on his shoulder, smiling softly despite the scene in front of you. If it weren’t for the smouldering building and the emergency vehicles surrounding the pair of you, it would almost be romantic. The fact that you were even trying to find romance in the scene felt a bit silly, but maybe that was what this was supposed to feel like. Finding love in a burning building was a bit dramatic, it certainly not what you’d expected for your life, but you determined that no matter what you’d keep Steve safe. You had no idea what was going on at this scene, you had no idea what happened. But no matter how scared you were, you knew that Steve must’ve been even more scared. You knew that you couldn’t protect him, the same way that he couldn’t protect you, but maybe together you could keep each other safe for awhile.

“I love you too, you know,” Steve said quietly, his gaze trailed on the smoke of grey smoke coming up off the extinguished fire. The front of the mall had crumbled and the giant neon ‘Star-Court Mall’ sign shattered on the pavement. You hadn’t seen the mall before the fire, you didn’t know what it was supposed to look like, but a cavernous jagged mouth probably wasn’t the design goal. Still, you turned your attention to the side of Steve’s face. He couldn’t face you, the tips of his ears bright red underneath his flat, sweaty hair.

You swallowed hard “I know,” you say softly. Steve turned to look at you, examining your face with a nervous expression. You smiled and nodded reassuringly “I know.” Steve smiled and laced his fingers with yours. He squeezed your hand tightly in his and you squeezed his back, the feeling of his hand squeezing yours the only feeling left in your body beyond the giddy buzz. You didn’t know how any of this worked, you didn’t know if you were doing this right, if there was a right way to do it. The buzz under your skin was two parts anxiety and one part excitement. But you didn’t pull away. You were glued to his side.

“You know, I think that was one of the first normal conversations we’ve ever had,” Steve mused.

You scoffed loudly rolling your eyes “That was not normal.

Steve shook his head with a small laugh “Yeah, I know…”

[nataliedanovelist]

GF - How a Star is Born ch.I

A Hercules AU, founded by @evaroze, whom this fic is a gift for. I hope y’all like it!

ch.II

AO3 link

~~~~~~~~~~

Stanford smiled down at the crib and wiggled his six fingers at the babies snuggled in togas and a blanket made of silk. The girl, Mabel, giggled, her laughter like soft bells, while the boy, Mason, stared with eyes sparkling with admiration. Stanford’s chuckle was low and warm, full of love, and he had mastered the art of scooping both babies into his arms swiftly at the same time, cradling each twin in a strong, soft arm, so neither would feel left out or abandoned.

The small amount of pain in the god’s heart was overshadowed by joy and love for his grandniece and nephew. They were the only family he had now, due to circumstances mostly out of his control, a feeling gods rarely felt and were uncomfortable with. So rather than dwell on this, Stanford chose to channel his thoughts onto his children as he looked forward to raising them as his own.

The open ballroom was filled to the brim with gods and goddesses who had come to welcome the babies, currently dancing and singing along with the muses who provided music. Mabel bounced in Stanford’s hold, eager to dance and sing and play, while Mason held onto Stanford’s toga a little tighter. The god of Intelligence and Ingenuity smiled and gave his grandnephew a small squeeze of reassurance that he was right there for him.

One god ran through the crowd, bumping into people accidentally with his glasses skewed, but he soon emerged, panting and slouched forward before brightening up like a sunflower in the light. Fiddleford, the god of Inspiration, Motivation, and the Messenger of the gods (and god of creative swears, but no one talks about that), fixed his small glasses and greeted his partner with a warm grin. Something seemed a little different about Stanford, but Fiddleford ignored it to focus on more important matters.

“Fiddleford! You made it!” Stanford gently laid the twins down and hugged him, a bit uncharacteristic for him, but Fiddleford was happy nonetheless.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world!” He replied with a pat on Stanford’s back and they both looked down at the babies, who were observing the stranger, one with delight and one with slight confusion. “How beautiful.” He awed and waved at the new gods. “What’re their names?”

“Mason and Mabel.”

“Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Oh, what’s that on Mason’s forehead?” Fiddleford asked and reached a hand to gently wipe the baby’s forehead, thinking it was a thread or something, but Stanford gently grabbed his wrist and said firmly,

“Nothing worth mentioning.”

Fiddleford swallowed, his eyes glancing down at the six fingers that stopped him, and he nodded in understanding. Clearly Stanford didn’t want unimportant differences to be accidentally weaponized against his nephew, or his niece for that matter. 

“Oh! Almost forgot.” Fiddleford reached into his endless satchel and pulled out a large bouquet of flowers and herbs. “For ya, my friend. Welcome t’the Dad Club!”

Stanford’s cheeks and ears turned pinkish as he accepted the bouquet. “Thank you, but I’m not a father…”

“Aw, hush, you’re as good as!” Fiddleford swatted his friend’s statement away. “And I brought my gifts for the wittle ones, too.” The skinny god reached into his satchel again and this time pulled out two metals with a lightning bolt hanging over a mountain, a field, and the sea. On the back, one read “Mabel” and one read “Mason” with a snap of Fiddleford’s fingers, having a bit of skill with metal. “There we are.”

“Thank you, buddy, they’re perfect.” Stanford watched as Fiddleford draped them around each baby’s neck. He was a bit worried of the necklaces choking the babies, but he swallowed his worry. They were gods, for crying out loud. What could ever happen to them?

Mabel instantly grabbed her metal and began to gnaw on it. Mason saw this and gave it a try, and then got excited and teethed far more vigorously. Stanford laughed and gently prided the gifts out of their gums, tickling their ribs and smiling as the babies cooed and laughed and grabbed his twelve fingers lovingly.

Fiddleford smiled and finally pinpointed what was so different about his old friend; he was the happiest Fiddleford had seen him in a long, long time.

“So, what gift will ya give ‘em, Fordsie?” Fiddleford asked casually.

Stanford prided his hands away from the babies as he smiled at them. “I have just the thing for them. They’re already so characteristic and different.” Stanford clapped his hands together and in a small cloud of lightning, a music box teleported into his palm, a gift he had crafted carefully well into the night. “For Mabel, something to soothe her far better than my lousy voice.”

Fiddleford rolled his eyes, an argument against the harsh statement on his lips, but he bit it back as he watched Stanford open the little chest and wind it, a tiny sailboat on a wave out at sea, rocking to the soft lullaby. Mabel and Mason’s soft brown eyes grew wide with admiration and Mabel reached up her chubby arms for the gift, giggling at the music. Stanford chuckled and placed it by the crib so the twins could watch the ship sail. While it may have been for Mabel, he was glad both of his children could enjoy it.

“And for Mason,” Stanford clapped his hands again, another cloud of lightning appeared between his hands as he pulled them apart, and a blue book decorated with a golden forest laid in his palm, thick but empty and ready to be filled with knowledge. “I’m afraid this one will have to wait until he is a little older, but it will help him to have somewhere to put his many thoughts.”

Mason’s eyes sparkled like stars and he clenched his tiny hands for it. Stanford laughed and played along, giving it to the baby to see what he would do, and the men were amused when Mason snuggled with it like it was a stuffed toy and Mabel ran her little fingers over the golden forest, finding it pretty and appealing to the eye.

The music box was still playing, slowly making the twins tired. With a sleeping Mason on top of the journal and Mabel snuggling with her brother, Stanford tucked their blanket in to keep them warm and comforted, and even kissed each baby on the cheek to wish them a peaceful slumber. And no, Fiddleford was not crying behind his friend.

“How sentimental.” A voice said from the opposite side of the vast room, and yet everyone heard it and fell silent and looked at the direction the chilly tone came from.

The gods came in many different shapes and sizes, but this god was the farthest from a human-like appearance than any other, a golden triangle with a black toga over his shoulder, the strange god floating so though he was the size of most heads, he was eye-level. That eye, that single eye, was cold and yellow with a slitted pupil, like a cat. And yet, Stanford grinned at the sight of him.

Bill, Master of the Mind and Ruler of the Underworld, as appointed by Stanford long ago, was not oblivious to the cold greeting and asked, “Yeesh, this an audience or a mosaic?”

“Bill, my friend, you finally made it.” Stanford greeted warmly as the triangle floated to him and managed to put on an eye that wrinkled in a half-convincing smile. “How is the Underworld?”

“Eh, you know, a little dark, a little gloomy,” Bill answered, tilting his hand back and forth in a so-and-so way. “And as always, full of dead people, whatcha gonna do? Ah, those the little knuckleheads? How cute.” Bill swiftly past Fiddleford, who seemed to have been standing in front of the crib, and the triangle floated over the sleeping babies, creating a change in lighting with a dark shadow over them.

Mabel and Mason stirred and Stanford smiled at his close friend and newest (and only) family members meeting. Both of the babies stared at Bill with wide eyes and blank expressions. Fiddleford read their expressions as fearful; Stanford read their expressions as surprised.

“Hm, they’re strong, like their great-uncle.” Bill observed, his eye peering at them deeply. “Powerful little tykes.”

“You really think so?” Stanford said optimistically as he stood by his friend’s side, smiling down at the babies.

“Oh, you bet. Heck, these guys one day could take on the greatest monsters the world as ever known.” Bill said, a master at hiding his bitterness at the back of his throat.

“Now, why don’t you grab some wine? Best there is! Join the celebration, live a little.” Stanford offered, gently elbowing the triangle, who drifted a few inches away as he chuckled coldly.

“Love to, babe, but unlike you other gods lounging around up here, I regretfully have a full time gig I gotta attend to. Can’t. Love to, but can’t.” Bill sneered and turned to leave.

“Good riddance.” Fiddleford mumbled under his breath, back in front of the crib with his feet firmly on the clouds, determined not to leave the twins’ side again.

“Really, Bill, you should slow down,” Stanford advised friendly. “You’ll work yourself to death.” The god paused as Fiddleford laughed behind him, then snorted and chuckled as he realized his unintentional joke. The whole room burst into laughter, grateful for something to lighten the tension on the mountain top, and Bill slipped away.

Fiddleford stood next to his friend and patted his shoulder. “Really, Stanford, I don’t trust that guy any farther than I can throw him.”

“Fiddleford, he’s my friend.” Stanford gently reminded him. “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be where I am right now. I owe him all I have, and besides, I know how it feels to be looked down upon and judged.” The god held his right hand with his left, re-counting his fingers. Six. It was always six and always would be six.

The partners were distracted from their conversation at hearing Mabel laughing. They turned to find Mason hiding behind his journal and poking out from behind, playing peek-a-boo, and Mabel squealing with laughter and wiggling her arms with joy. Stanford and Fiddleford smiled and resumed their positions by the new gods’ side.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Underworld was better than the Nightmare Realm in some ways, but worse in others. Bill’s powers were limited in the Underworld. It was cold and icy, rather than hot and fiery, like it was in the Nightmare Realm. Bill had way fewer allies here than in the Nightmare Realm, but he had more souls to vex his frustrations out on in the Underworld, and hey this place wasn’t crippling and bound to fall apart any minute, that was nice.

But what got under Bill’s bricks was the fact that he was so close. He almost had this dimension in his grasp, but he needed the help of his army to take control. If he were to strike now he would lose. He had a plan, he knew what to do, but with those two pains in the picture Bill needed to make sure they wouldn’t be in his way.

In a burst of blue fire, Bill appeared just outside of his pyramid-shaped castle and bellowed, “GIDEON!”

A chubby child with white hair up in a bun my dead twigs and a cold, icy baby-blue toga appeared smugly with a platter of worms and cockroaches. “Which will it be, my Lord…”

“Worms later, kid, just let me know the second Time Baby’s ready to talk.”

“Oh, he’s coming in… twelve seconds.”

“Thanks, go clip some Threads of Life for a few minutes.” Bill instructed as he floated inside the castle and to his high throne. A crystal orb was glowing and buzzing, and when Bill was sitting comfortably, leaning on his knuckles, the orb grew and displayed a picture of the one god Bill hated more than Sixer. “Time Baby.”

“Cipher,” The baby said in a deep, low voice. “What do you wish of me?”

“I wanna cash in that favor.” Bill stated plainly. “I have all the knowledge of the present and the past, but not the future, but you do.”

“We know that, and we know I owe you a favor, no need to narrate.” Time Baby growled. “Just tell me what you want to know so I can be on my way.”

“Sixer’s got two little brats hanging on his toga. Are they gonna get in my way or what?”

Time Baby sighed, tired and bored, and gave Bill the answer he wanted. “Eighteen years from your present date, the planets will align. When this happens, a weak spot in the dimension will form, just weak enough for you to be able to break a hole and have your allies join you. When this happens, you will finally dethrone Stanford and be free to rule.”

“YES!”

“But… if both of the twins should fight, you will lose.” And Time Baby was gone with a small pop.

Bill was still as a statue for a minute or two, until he burst into red flames with a glowing red eye and screamed, “WHAAAAAAT?!”

~~~~~~~~~~

Gideon and Bill stood side by side at the entrance to the deepest, darkest chamber in the underworld. They both smiled darkly with eyes that gleamed with sickening joy.

“Gideon?”

“Bill,”

“Got a riddle for you.” Bill led the way in through the piles of bones, to a ghostly waterfall that had it’s priceless treasure suspended from the ground. “How do you kill a god?”

Gideon’s grin widened and twisted excitedly as Bill grabbed the tiny bottle of poison. “You make ‘em mortal.”

“You got it, Short Stack.” Bill handed him the bottle and said, “Give Sixer some time. He’s so worried about losing them they sleep in his room. The dweeb will convince them to be moved to their own room. That’s when you strike. I don’t care if you do it in Olympus or not, just give the kids the potion and kill them and don’t get caught.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Bill was right; Stanford had their crib be by his bed their first month. Mostly to make sure they were taken care of, but if he was being honest it was to make sure they were safe.

Stanford was the happiest he had been in so long. Throwing lightning bolts to explode for the laughing babies, singing songs while Fiddleford played his harp, tickling their round baby bellies and reading them stories for bed and watching the young gods grow smarter and stronger. Stanford was pleasantly surprised how well he was at taking care of the children, first worried he was not equipped for the task, but Fiddleford, who had a human son on Earth, was a good friend and was always there to help.

One night the great-uncle took his time tucking the twins into the crib, making sure Mason had his journal, which he never slept without, and that Mabel’s music box would last a few minutes. “Ford, they’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“They’re still so young.” Stanford muttered. “Maybe they should stay in my room a few more nights.”

“Now, don’t ya worry yourself into a lightnin’ storm, they’ll have each other. They’ll be okay.” Fiddleford patted his back and walked the worried god out of the nursery, leaving the babies happily sleeping as they snuggled close.

Fiddleford later went on to deliver his messages and Stanford laid in his large bed to try to rest, a difficult task with his room feeling much bigger now and more intimidating, but he managed to fall asleep with his arms wrapped around his cloud-pillow.

In the dead of night, long after the music box fell silent, Mabel drooled in her sleep while Mason sucked on his toga. A dark shadow loomed over them, stirring them, and Mabel gasped and her breath was caught in her throat.

Stanford blinked drowsily as he heard a tumble, a crash, and what sounded like Mabel crying. No, not crying, screaming. The great-uncle immediately jumped out of bed and ran for his niece and nephew’s nursery, yelling, “I’M COMING!”

He threw the curtain out of his way and hurried to the crib that had been thrown over and lying on the front, Mabel still screaming and crying her little heart out. Stanford threw himself to his knees before the mess and dug around the sheets and blanket for his children, heart pounding and hands quivering. “Mason! Mabel! I’m here, I’m here!”

Stanford pulled back a sheet to reveal Mabel, lying on her stomach and wailing with hot tears streaming down her face. The god scooped her up and held her close to his warm chest as he scanned her for injuries. A little bruise was forming on her chest, but she would be okay. Stanford quickly turned his attention to the silent child, terrified something was wrong. “Mason! Mason!”

Stanford turned the whole crib upside down with one arm, scrambling for his nephew. He had to be here somewhere, they were fine, the bed only toppled over, right? Right?! But the baby was nowhere to be seen. 

Mabel continued to cry, her heart sounding broken, and Stanford ignored the single tear escaping his right eye to try to find his missing boy. “Mason! Mason! MASON!”

~~~~~~~~~~

Lightning attacked the sky angrily. A raven with a baby dangling from it’s talons flew down from the heavens onto a rocky valley, ignoring the wails from the one-month-old. It dropped the baby lazily before transforming into Gideon’s true form.

“Shut up already!” He growled, pulled out the bottle from his toga, and popped it in Mason’s mouth. The baby quickly drank the sweet potion, his heavenly glow fading as he did so. Gideon grinned and hissed, “C’mon, c’mon! Every last drop, kid.”

“Who’s there?”

Gideon jumped, turned into a snake, and slithered behind the rocks to hide, leaving Mason alone to cry and the bottle to shatter, spilling a drop into the dirt.

A hefty man with a buck tooth and worker’s clothes turned a corner with a lantern in his hand. “Over here, Melody!”

A woman with dirty blonde curls joined him, gasped, and slowly knelt beside the baby and tenderly scooped him up. “Oh, you poor thing.” She cooed. “I know, I know. It’s alright.”

“Hello! Dudes? Any dudes out there?” The big guy called out.

“Soos, I think he’s been abandoned.” Melody said sadly as the baby began to calm down.

“Poor dude.” Soos said as he petted the baby’s head and smiled. “Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of you, lil’dawg. Hey, look, a necklace.” Soos flipped it over after seeing the symbol of the gods and read off the name. “Mason. Huh. His name’s Mason.”

“What a sweet boy.” Melody complimented as Mason grabbed her finger and observed her with eyes filled with wonder. “Why would anyone leave him here?”

“I dunno, sweetie. Whoa, what’s that on his forehead?” Soos shined the lantern to his forehead to make sure it wasn’t ants or a rash, but no. It was just a birthmark. “Oh. Phew. Just some angel kisses. That’s what Abuelita calls them. Hey, looks kinda like a dipper, y’know?”

“It does.” Melody giggled. “Well, let’s take Dipper here home.”

Gideon hissed angrily as the couple walked off with the baby. Oh, well. He got rid of one twin, that was good enough, right? And besides, what chance did a stupid mortal have against the Demon of the Nightmare Realm?

[unicyclehippo]

Beauyashter prompt, 'Touch starved but oh so very patient'?

beau is good at one thing: being a smart ass. she’s been talking back to people since she was only months old, so the story goes—a red faced scrunched up ugly as all hell baby (cute despite it all, because this story was only ever told kindly) and any time her parents cooed over her or spoke to her she’d burst back with a torrent of angry baby talk, tiny baby fists waving.

wait.

beau is good at two things: being a smart ass, and being a shit kicker. she’s got a helluva mouth on her, two fists and two feet, and the gods themselves can’t do shit to stop her from using ‘em.

no, wait. fuck.

she’ll get it right this time. she’s trying this whole awareness thing, truth thing, and has this thought that, like, if she runs from the truths inherent in herself then she’s gonna miss them in other people, so—

beau is good at three things—being a smart ass, being a shit kicker, and being a nosy piece of shit. figuring stuff out. curiosity is her constant companion, infects her tongue, infects her hands, makes her say things and touch things because she wants to know who, and how, and what, and why? what’s better in this world than knowing how it all works? taking the time to figure it all out?

way back when, when she was by herself and cutting out from the archives to see the world and what it had to offer, she was interested in liars and cheats and scoundrels and gems. she loves gems. jewellery too, actually—likes the way the claws of rings hold cut stones in place, likes to watch as jewellers grins and polish them into shapes. likes examining them for facets and flaws. big surprise there, to anyone who knows beau. back then, she wouldn’t’ve said anything about it but now—months down the track and kinda embroiled in a lot of people’s messes—if anyone asked, beau might—might—admit she isn’t in it for the flaws. she just—thinks they’re important. thinks they can’t and shouldn’t be looked over. flaws...set gems apart, make them different. hell, sometimes they even make them more expensive! and it’s the same with people, in some ways. it’s not that she’s looking for the bad shit they do, or the ways in which they’re fucked up—it’s just that once you know that, once you’ve found that, sometimes it shows you more about the person.

okay, that’s a relatively new revelation.

beau used to just like to be able to point out the fact that hey, fucker, i might be a piece of shit but so are you, and here’s my fucking proof: exhibit a, and so on.

but now.

people are complicated, and they’re in over their heads, and things that sound like lies aren’t always lies—or not entirely—and beau has always been a details kinda person but she knows when to take a step back and gauge the entirety of a situation. even when it’s hard. even if it strains the mind, proves impossible.

which is all to say, that is, beau is sharing a room with jester and yasha and she hasn’t been able to sleep for thinking.

she has, as quietly as she was able, moved a small table to sit beneath the window and she has her jewellers kit laid out to clean and polish a few of the rings and other pieces they’ve picked up along their journey, the beading and crystal and stone worked into her fine expositors robes. it’s not something she does when other people can see—earns more questions than she would like, which is zero—but they’re having an audience with the king again tomorrow and they didn’t have a choice about it last time but beau would like to make something of a good impression this time.

the work is slow and methodical, repetitive. calming. gives her plenty of space to think.

so beau does.

her mind clicks over the cult and trent and caleb, and the letter, and kamordah for a moment before beau snaps away from that, powerfully enough that her head actually snaps to the side.

she shakes the thought away.

blinks over at her friends and forces her heart beat to slow and settle.

yasha sleeps differently now. deeply. beau’s mind fiddles and fusses with the details of what it has learned, fits jagged pieces together like a puzzle. a mosaic, more like, with the pieces sharp enough to cut. beau must cut herself on them because she winces when she thinks, defensive mechanism maybe? hoping to die in her sleep? or maybe just to stay in a dream where she was more of herself?

she would have to ask yasha questions to find out more. she’s not doing that.

jester, meanwhile, is sleeping fitfully. she’s laying on her side and has an extra pillow cuddled tight to her, and as beau drags a polishing cloth over the pretty emerald of what is very clearly a fake stone—a good one, but fake—she watches jester twitch and mumble something in her sleep. watches fingers dig tight into the pillow. watches her tail wrap and wrap around her calf and ankle.

a nightmare. she doesn’t have to ask jester to know that.

beau is good at three things: being a smart ass, being a shit kicker, and figuring shit out.

her friends, her girls, they need something and beau knows what some of it is: calm, safety, protection, reassurances, attention. the things most people need when they’ve been through not just one but, like, a hundred fucking traumatic experiences.

thing is, beau can figure shit out. she’s good at it, most of the time. the thing she isn’t good at—really, really isn’t good at—is fixing things.

beau returns her attention to the rings. sets the finished ones aside but the one she’s working on now—real sapphire, square cut, gold—she wears on her index finger, turning it carefully to get at the problem spots.

she isn’t good at it. but she can try.

//

yasha is in some ways harder to talk to than jester, but in a big way she’s also much easier to talk to. the woman has been admitting to things and explaining things and trying her best to make amends in whatever patchwork manner she can, and beau has zero qualms in using that for her own purpose.

‘you look like shit,’ beau tells her, sitting down across from her at the breakfast table. the inn they’ve stopped in is small but nice, and it has opened the shutters on the east wall to let the morning light stream in like pillars of gold. yasha is sat next to one of them, scritching carefully behind the ears of frumpkin.

yasha glances up. settles a moment on beau’s chest before looking away again. ‘i just bathed.’

‘that’s - no - you don’t look like actual shit,’

‘beau.’ the woman smiles. ‘i’m joking.’

beau leans back on the bench seat, braces her elbows against the back board, scoffs. ‘yeah, totally, i knew that.’ she looks away. the maid is still making up her plate. ‘you want to talk about it?’

‘sure,’ yasha agrees easily. her shoulders betray her, tensing, tightening.

they sit there in an awkward silence before,

‘usually people say something—‘

‘do you have questio—‘

‘oh, go ahead,’

‘no, no,’ yasha waves her free hand, the other still so gently petting frumpkin. she hides behind her hand like it’s a shield, interposed between them. ‘go ahead.’

beau clears her throat. feels an itch behind her eyes, exhaustion on so many levels, for so many reasons.

‘i was just gonna say, you said yes to talking but then you didn’t, so,’

‘i thought...you had questions.’

‘i didn’t mean it as a fucking interrogation, yash,’ beau says, and there’s no heat to her words at all. just dry. just dust, spilling out of her. ‘if you wanna talk, i’m here. that’s all i meant.’

yasha nods.

beau’s breakfast comes and she eats as she always does in quick motions, an arm curled around the plate as she shovels the eggs into her mouth. a few strips of bacon into the pocket for later and she’s done. she shoves the plate to the far end of the table to take back to the kitchens later. doesn’t move just yet.

she lets her eyes fall onto the window. the dark wood is painted nearly white with the morning sunlight and she can see dust motes drifting gently through the haze, puffing into swirls and eddys whenever someone moves.

‘are you going to - report me?’

beau blinks. drags her attention back to yasha. sees not fear or upset but a deep and abiding resignation in those eyes.

‘i already have,’ she tells yasha. the woman nods. ‘and i told them the truth. you weren’t yourself.’

‘you said you didn’t know that. not for sure. you said—‘

‘i say a lot of shit.’

‘you were not lying. you nearly died,’ yasha says, and she doesn’t stumble over that or flinch away from it, though she had a big hand in it. ‘i think you could barely see, then, let alone lie.’

‘i lie better than i see,’ beau tells her. shrugs. ‘but you’re not wrong. i told you i figured two things were the most likely. and we got you back, so, eliminated the other reason. you weren’t yourself,’ beau tells her with the exact force and directness she had told the high curator to their face, zero intention of negotiating or altering that statement.

after a moment, when yasha says nothing, just sits opposite her, head lowered, beau leans back in her seat and moves one booted foot forward until it touches yasha’s. she looks away, returns her attention to the window.

the other woman pulls her foot back to make room for beau’s. beau can feel yasha watching her, so she closes her eyes.

eventually, she feels a pressure against the side of her foot, yasha’s finding hers again and resting alongside it. and they sit.

//

jester is harder to talk to. she speaks in dizzying circles and makes jokes and has beau all in a tangle before she can ask anything important, but beau still tries. it takes a little longer but beau takes that step back that she needs sometimes and watches properly, like jester is a mark or a competitor. and beau sees that beyond the whirlwind of chatter and creation and creativity, that jester has made for herself a very neat little bubble. no one goes in. jester rarely comes out. so when jester makes an offer—one that she knows, she knows, beau will refuse—beau looks her square in the eyes and accepts.

jester stops in her tracks. a cute little frown digs between her brows. ‘what?’

‘i said sure,’ beau tells her, crooks a challenging smile. ‘go wild.’

‘you want me—to paint your face?’

‘yup.’

‘like, me? with my paints?’

‘yeah. it’s a party, right?’

‘yeah,’ jester agrees, eyes widening, and she clambers to her feet. ‘oh my gosh, oh my gosh, beau, this is going to be so much fun! and so much better than the last time i did it, i promise i won’t make you into a creepy snake again, it’ll be so pretty, i promise.’

beau shrugs. ‘sure. i trust you.’

jester hurries to her haversack, planted at caleb’s feet within the clear set dome of the hut. she can’t hear their conversation but does notice that jester comes close to but doesn’t quite touch caleb. respectful of his raw state, maybe. she returns with a set of familiar paints, coloured and carefully wrapped in protective cloth and leather.

‘this isn’t the magic stuff, is it?’

‘no,’ jester laughs. ‘just my normal paints. what do you want? a moor bounder?’

‘we’re in the empire so i’m gonna have to do with no.’

‘they might not know what they look like. you might just look really really cool and scary.’

‘that’s true.’

‘i could almost make you a cat or a tree or a bunny or an eagle or—‘

‘can you make me an owl?’

jester grins, eyes bright. ‘i can try. it’ll take a while and—hey caleb? can you make frumpie—‘

‘he can’t hear you, jes,’

‘CAN YOU MAKE FRUMPIE—‘

‘no,’ beau laughs, throwing a hand up over jester’s mouth. the touch sends a jolt through her palm, makes her heart race. she’s too aware of that bubble jester has made around herself, too aware that she just broke it. she lets her hand drop, wipes it on her knee, feeling the rasp of fabric make her skin prickle, tickle, in almost the same manner. ‘he’s in the hut, it blocks sound.’

‘oh. right.’

fifteen minutes later, owl frumpkin perched and sleeping on beau’s pack beside her, they are ready. jester sits beside her and lays out the paints. negotiates for a full minute how to sit so that she can comfortably paint beau’s face. her cheeks darken with colour as she scoots closer, darken further still when beau spreads her legs for her.

jester moves closer. her knees press to the inside of beau’s thighs and, when she reaches up to paint the first layer over beau’s face, her free hand comes to rest on the bunched tight muscle of beau’s thigh, stabilising herself.

beau swallows. it makes a dry click in her throat. she closes her eyes. tries to focus on the balmy day, the sounds of fjord and nott training in the field nearby, rather than the hand pressing on her leg or the wet tacky pull of the paint as it slowly layers on.

jester is quiet.

it strikes beau as odd a few minutes into this whole thing—and her brain sharpens, pulls her focus from the hazed, drifting she’s touching me, she smells like lavender to purpose.

beau’s eyes flutter open. wander over the look of peace, of focused intent, of muted joy as jester paints. feels acutely pinned under the force of blue eyes as jester leans in, drags the wet tip of the brush just so under her chin and along the side of her jaw to frame her face. when she pulls back, her eyes slide to meet beau’s and she smiles, crinkles her nose.

‘hi,’ she whispers.

‘hey.’

she doesn’t have any questions any more. jester looks at peace for once, and if this is what it takes, beau can provide it for her.

//

beau takes jester’s hand, guides her over the cracked and crumbling rocks down off the path. jester’s head tilts in the direction of yasha, walking slow and purposeful like a fucking death march by herself. so beau finds herself flanking the woman with jester, setting her hand on the small of yasha’s back.

//

yasha awakes in the swampy heat that rolls in before a storm. beau fumbles awake at her side. ignores yasha’s quiet offer to go back to sleep, to not worry. leans heavy against her shoulder when yasha takes her place at the fire and beau falls back to sleep like that. drools a little. yasha doesn’t seem to mind so much because as they make their second days’ march across the sulphur drenched fields toward pride’s call, yasha is a solid presence at her side.

//

beau braids jester’s hair.

puts a hand on yasha’s shoulder like she would for caleb when she haltingly tells them of her last visit to this pit, to pride’s call.

drapes her blue and brown coat around jester when she tosses and turns in a sleepless night, lays beside her with a hand on her staff, so jester knows she’s safe, knows beau is there for her.

brings jester into a tight hug when the other girl shivers, shakes, at the sight of the massacre in the pit, the rows and piles of dead bodies.

‘anyone else reminded of that arcane laboratory back in zadash? the one with the pit fjord fell into?’ beau asks, and she wraps her other arm around yasha. a silent addition. this wasn’t you.

fjord picks up on it easily, tracks where beau begins and ends, connected to both yasha and jester. he nods. ‘i was just thinking the same thing,’ he says, and nothing more.

//

they have to go through kamordah. a contact is there, or something. beau doesn’t quite know because her head fills with this buzzing, crackling sound and when she sees jester talking to her she can’t make out the words. she can feel, though, the way gentle hands take her and press her down to sitting and her heart stutters when strong arms wrap around her in a hug. her brain that never ever stops going...stops. almost sighs with relief. fingers wind and weave in her hair, scratching against her scalp. rubbing gently at her shoulders. soothing beau into sleep.

when she wakes, it is with a single thought prominent in her mind, like her brain had pieces it together while she slept and hung it there, waiting for her to return to consciousness, return to her own mind.

jester and yasha want to be touched, want to be reassured, safe, calm, soothed. and so do you.

//

touching and being touched are two very different things, beau realises, and now that she knows it, everything gets a little bit harder. she can’t stop reassuring jester and yasha—wouldn’t hurt them like that, she’s not an asshole—but every time she does there is a flicker not of resentment but something akin to it, not directed to them but to herself. want, maybe. guilt, maybe. touching isn’t the same as being touched, and beau wants someone to want to touch her, to care enough to see what she needs. it feels ungracious of her but...to give back a little of what she gives.

the closer they get to kamordah, the more beau remembers that it’s not going to happen again. she made a fool of herself, panicking, which is why they held her.

things work in particular ways. beau knows this. the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. the seasons follow in their set pattern. small fish eat smaller fish, big fish eat the smaller fish. things have their uses, their purposes.

beau doesn’t get to need things. that’s not who she is. she isn’t the one who needs a hug or a pat on the shoulder. she won’t get one, so—

a hand wriggles into her own. tries to, but beau has it clenched into a painful fist so jester wraps her hand arojnd her wrist instead, fingers curling and stroking there and over beau’s knuckles.

‘okay?’ she asks brightly, worry clear in her eyes.

beau swallows hard. her smile ticks at the corner of her mouth but doesn’t stick. ‘sure. why not, right?’

‘maybe because your family seems like shit,’ yasha says in a low, angry rumble. her hand is big and warm and it rubs up and down beau’s spine. makes beau’s stomach flip and twist, makes her breath crackle out of her on a shuddering breath. she almost steps away from the touch—it’s too much—but she’s greedy. that’s another thing beau is. smart ass, shit kicker, smart, greedy. four things that she is. she unfurls one hand. jester takes it, squeezes.

[fictionadventurer]

Can you share more about your story involving Alessandro and Floriano? It sounds very interesting!

I could share lots if I wanted to. I’ve been trying to write this story since 2008 (though my serious drafts are from 2013 or so). However, I’ll try to keep things brief.

A Beautiful Tomorrow is a fantasy set in a Regency-inspired fantasy world. It reads like a historical romance, especially since I never bothered doing any serious worldbuilding to take the setting beyond “vaguely old-fashioned land”.

Here’s a summary:

During her country’s civil war, Daniela spent the years in safe exile, attending and teaching at one of the continent’s most prestigious girls’ schools. When she returns to her native land, she meets the blind prince Alessandro and his younger brother, the newly crowned King Floriano, and is hired to serve as tutor to their much younger sister. As Floriano struggles to adjust to his new role, and Alessandro tries to find his place in a kingdom that no longer needs him as its king, Daniela finds herself drawn toward romance with Alessandro–only for everything to come crashing down when her father is accused of treason.

I love these characters, but since I never satisfactorily figured out the details of the war or the political intrigue, the personal and political sides of the story never came together. And believe me, I’ve tried. At this point, the stuff I’ve written is “set in stone”, so I have a very hard time changing the story so it actually makes sense and follows the rules of good story structure.

Ah, what the hey, have an excerpt. (With the usual caveats that this is a first draft, several years old, and I have half a dozen quibbles with the very premise of the scene). This is Daniela’s first meeting with the brothers, when she’s wandering the palace’s rose gardens to escape the crush of the king’s coronation ball. (This isn’t a Beauty and the Beast retelling, but it’s one of the scenes where I leaned into the unintentional parallels to the fairy tale).

Daniela contemplated, just for a moment, whether one bloom among thousands could possibly be missed.  She was startled out of her musings by a heavy step, very nearby, and she turned around.  Looming over her shoulder, close enough to touch her, was Prince Alessandro Carmazzio.  

She let out a startled yelp and stumbled back into a hedge.  

The prince started at the sound and asked, “Who’s there?”

Daniela calmed her breathing long enough to say, “D…daniela Decardi, your highness.”

He nodded in her direction.  He had a dark face full of sharp angles that made him very imposing.  His eyes were shockingly blue.  “And what brings you to the gardens, Daniela Decardi?  Have a fancy to steal a few roses?”

She remembered her fleeting thoughts of a minute before, and was glad he couldn’t see her blush.  “No, your highness,” she said.  “I’m here for the coronation ball.”

“Ah,” he said, and smiled. “Those are usually held indoors.”  He pointed his thin wooden cane over his shoulder.  “In that direction.  Lots of people and music.  You can’t miss it.”

“I know, your highness,” she said.  “But I prefer it out here.  For a while.”

“You prefer flowers to people,” the prince said knowingly.  “Not an indefensible position.  I’ve held it myself often enough.  Tonight, for instance.”

“Ah, yes, then, of course…I’ll just be leaving.”

His face hardened.  “Of course,” he said, in a voice tense enough to snap.  “The mad, blind prince is no one’s idea of good company.”

Daniela gasped, and felt her stomach drop into her kneecaps.  “No, your highness!  I meant no offense.  I only…I thought you implied…that you wished to be alone.”

His expression didn’t soften a bit.  “I’m not fond of the crowds of the ballroom, but I have no objection to your company.”  He added pointedly, “That is, if you have no objection to mine.”

“I…I have no objection, your highness.”

“Then there is no point in us wandering past each other.  Please, walk with me.”

The voice was perhaps too accustomed to giving commands, because though it was worded as an invitation, Daniela felt compelled to obey.  “That would be nice, your highness,” Daniela said.  She eyed the cane and the unfocused, unseeing eyes.  “Do you need me to guide or…”

He snapped, “I’m perfectly capable of navigating my own gardens.”

Daniela blanched, and thought perhaps she ought to have run back to the ballroom, regardless of whether he was offended.  

But he immediately softened and said, “I’m sorry.  That was beastly of me.  You hit upon a delicate subject, but you couldn’t know that.  My apologies.”

Maybe he wasn’t quite the fearsome monster he’d appeared.  “All is forgiven, highness,” Daniela replied.  

He gestured to a point on his left, indicating for Daniela to stand beside him, and they journeyed into the rest of the garden.  Daniela walked more carefully than she ever had in her life.  She wanted to stay close enough for polite conversation, but didn’t want to step accidentally in the way of his feet or cane. She feared what sort of anger a misstep might unleash.

The prince said, “You have the advantage of me, Miss Decardi.  You know everything about me and I know next to nothing about you.”

“I know you only from the papers, highness.”

“Creative journalism aside, you are in some manner familiar with me.  I know only your name, and that you are more fond of roses than ballrooms.”

[Skipping to the Floriano part]

Alessandro was about to reply, but he suddenly stopped, and turned his attention to a path on their left.  A few seconds later, they were approached by the only person that Daniela had seen today who wasn’t wearing blue or green—the newly crowned King Floriano.

The king still wore the gleaming white suit of his coronation, but the confident, regal composure was gone.  He was harried, practically jittery, as he cried, “There you are, Sandro!  The most important night of my life, and you sneak off for a stroll in the gardens!”  He rounded the corner, and stopped short when he saw Daniela.  “With a beautiful woman,” he added, confused.  

Daniela swept into a curtsy.  “Daniela Decardi, your majesty.”

Floriano’s nervousness melted like butter, leaving behind the king.  He bowed and said, “My apologies, Miss Decardi.”  He smiled, and his smile was like the missing piece of a mosaic.  It turned Floriano into one of the most handsome men that Daniela had ever seen.  

Floriano was the sunlight to his brother’s shadow, with his lighter skin and golden-brown hair and open, friendly face.  Their only shared feature was their brilliant blue eyes, though only Floriano’s were still useful as anything but ornamentation.

Floriano said, “I hope my brother has been kind to you, Miss Decardi.  He may be blind, but he is capable of astounding villainy.”  He gave Alessandro a pointed glare and added, “Such as family abandonment.”

“It’s a ball,” Alessandro said blandly.  “I thought you could manage without me.”

“My coronation ball,” Floriano replied, “Is quite a different manner.  Why did you leave?”

“The ballroom is…overwhelming,” Alessandro said.  “I needed some peace.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Try it with your eyes closed,” he retorted.  

“You need to come back,” Floriano said.  “I’m about to open the ball.” He turned to Daniela, “I doubt you’ll want to miss the dancing.”

Daniela didn’t think she would mourn if she did miss it, but she didn’t want to contradict the king. “No, I wouldn’t,” she said, and fell in step beside the king and followed him through the paths back to the ballroom.

Floriano said, “I hope my brother didn’t kidnap you to serve as companion.”

“We met on the paths,” Alessandro said.  “And we were having a very nice conversation before you interrupted us.  Miss Decardi was telling me about her experience as a teacher in Corlant.”

“Ah,” Floriano said knowingly.  “I should have known.  Always business before pleasure with you.”

[deltaengineering]

Spring Anime 2019 Part 3: the doldrums

Spoilers: There’s going to be top tier shows in this season eventually.

Also spoilers: not today.

Araiya-san! Ore to Aitsu ga Onnayu de!

What: Anime schlub has to sub in for his father, who is a professional “girl washer”. He’s not supposed to go full lewd. He does.

❌ Unlike Nande Koko ni Sensei ga, this is actual porn. You just have to go looking for the full version, because the TV version is half as long (3:30) for some reason. I dunno, probably just a tight, moist timeslot.

❌ Well, it’s still Japanese porn so even uncensored you get mosaics all over the place, so maybe look for alternatives anyway.

❌❌ It’s porn, with all the writing, production and subtitle quality implications that brings.

Gunjou no Magmel

What: People explore the mythical continent Magmel in search for treasure and fame. A shounen protagonist watches them all die.

♎ This is based on a manhua, and you can tell by the typical tone problems. Everything about the characters is like an adventure shounen for the younger set, but it’s pretty violent and full of death.

❌ There’s nothing wrong with the above per se, but it doesn’t work. I would say it plays its hand too eagerly, so it comes across less of a subversion and more as just really juvenile.

❌ Beyond that incongruence, there doesn’t seem to be much to it. People walk into a meatgrinder while our protagonist is cool and sometimes slapsticky. Wow.

♎ It looks pretty okay, but there isn’t much effort or style to it. Hey, it’s not actually by some fly-by-night operation but by Pierrot, and they know a thing or two about (cheap, long-running) shounen.

❌ Well, they made a Chinese ripoff of Made in Abyss. I suggest you watch that instead. Or maybe Hunter x Hunter.

Isekai Quartet

What: The main characters of Re:Zero, Tanya the Evil, Konosuba and Overlord end up in a high school together.

❌❌ BUT IN A HIGH SCHOOL is only slightly less creatively bankrupt a concept than isekai itself, and only slightly less common as well.

❌ This doesn’t change my opinion that all of these shows aren’t very good. At least it reinforces my opinion that Re:Zero is the least bad and Overlord is possibly a bit better than it appears.

✅ The adaptation of the character designs to SD Flash animation is done well. In particular the Tanya characters looks better than in their own show and Ramrem are Nendoroids anyway.

❌ Going by the looks, this is building on the Re:Zero SD specials. Of course, the Re:Zero characters appear the least and Konosuba characters appear the most. It makes sense, because their bad comedy aligns best with the bad comedy of this show.

❌❌ I don’t think it’s funny and I have no love for any of the franchises/characters, which makes it a complete waste of time.

Namu Amida Butsu!

What: A bunch of bodhisattvas hang out in between fighting sins. You can’t spell “bodhisattva” without “bod”.

❌ This is very clearly an anime based on a mobile game where very pretty boys wear very elaborate clothes, so the character designs are eyesearingly garish as usual.

✅ Imagine my delight then when the first thing they do is to put them into frumpy tracksuits. That’s the single best joke I’ve ever seen in one of these. In fact, the whole episode is mostly based on fish-out-of-water comedy that’s not very unique but pretty funny when applied to these dreamboats.

✅ This looks a cut above the usual as well. About as good as Doga Kobo’s Touken Ranbu, which is the closest thing I can think of.

❌ The wild swing from cute boys doing cute things to fighting the bad mans is pretty clunky and it’s only going to get worse as a plot establishes itself.

❌ This is probably the best of these shows I’ve seen yet, but that doesn’t really mean all that much. A few decent jokes is not enough to carry something like this.

One Punch Man S2

What: The meme is back, baby. What, a second season opinion on this? Yeah, know that I think that OPM was fairly okay apart from the overreliance on its one joke.

✅ That one joke doesn’t even appear in this episode, which is the best thing they ever could have done. In fact, OPM S2 seems to hardly even be a comedy anymore. As someone who liked the setting more than the humor, I approve.

✅ I still like Saitama and Genos as characters as well. Plus, it never stops amusing me that One Punch Man is better at social commentary than MP100 and MHA combined, simply by virtue of being at least a little subtle about it.

❌ However, they replaced the joke with drama that wears out its welcome and a shitton of exposition. Neither of those are something I particularly want to see either.

♎ Of course the talk of the town is that this show moved from Madhouse to J.C. Staff and there has been a severe visual downgrade. Even though I will happily accept that downgrade in exchange for the show annoying me less, I can’t deny it’s there. I’d still say that it looks okay on its own merits, it’s only in comparison to the occasionally stellar looking original that it suffers.

♎ Since I’ve made it through S1, I’ll at least attempt to watch S2. It’s different but seems to work out to about as entertaining for now.

RobiHachi

What: Robby is a galactic gigolo and flies around with his straight man Hachi and a robot vacuum cleaner. Now that you say it, that does seem familiar.

❌ I had my problem with Space Dandy, but for all of its faults it was at least visually appealing. RobiHachi has the bare minimum of visuals and is so reliant on the banter between its leads that it might as well be an audio drama.

❌ Yeah, that banter. I don’t think it works at all. There is no wit and and barely any charm to it, which makes the whole thing extremely tedious. I checked the runtime when I felt like it was going way longer than the usual 24 minutes, and I found I was 8 minutes in.

❌ So the show does put an extraordinary amount of faith in the chemistry between its leads, to the point where there’s not much else (apart from the obligatory mecha parody that any sci fi comedy anime is required to have by law). 

♎ I kind of feel bad for this show because at least it feels like it’s going for something that might have potential. It’s just incapable of pulling it off in a manner that doesn’t bore me to tears.

Strike Witches - 501-butai Hasshin Shimasu!

What: OG Strike Witches, the baseline unimaginative 4koma comedy.

❌ I’ll just say that it’s baseline unimaginative 4koma comedy that fails (like most of these do) and move on to a more interesting topic:

❌❌ Which is the way this looks, i.e. shockingly bad. Barely animated skits can still look acceptable, but this is a barely animated version of something that looks like a 4th grader’s crayon attempt. And yes, I’m not expecting everything to look like glossy moeshit. I’m just expecting the comedy spinoff of glossy moeshit to do so.

❌ It’s Strike Witches. Without butts.

Yatogame-chan Kansatsu Nikki

What: 3:30 regional/tourism anime about Nagoya, which is apparently full of strangely-accented catgirls that confound Tokyoites.

✅ This looks cute. Strike Witches could have looked like this, you have no excuse.

❌ Do you think Japanese regional accents are funny? If not, I don’t think this show is for you.

❌ The humor is shrill and obnoxious, which puts a pretty hefty dent into the cuteness.

[poppytheorist]

Scary Mask

I.

I don’t know what to say when people come apart

The road is long, the road is dark

And these are just the words to somebody else’s song

 Before I get into it, I’d like to quickly note that this is not best post to start with. Same goes for the one on “Me Laughing.” My older posts are much friendlier reads and not nearly as dense.

Okay, let’s go.

At first I thought “Scary Mask” was straightforward, i.e. Poppy uses her persona (“I wear my scary mask”) as a defense when she finds herself in uncomfortable situations (“when I’m afraid I don’t belong”). “Well that was anticlimactic.” Indeed. But, of course, this is Poppy we are talking about, and nothing with Poppy is quite so simple.

The problem with basic interpretations that sum up a song with single sentence is that such readings miss all the nuances of the work, i.e., they leave out all the fun little twists in the lyrics, the double-meanings in the lines, etc. Basically, simplistic interpretations of lyrics ignore all the poetry, which is part of what allows music to transcend language. Poetic lyrics also provide us with new pieces of language so that we can better understand the increasingly complex world around us. Nestled in the gaps between our definitions lies the inexpressible that only poetry can render sensible.

Well-written (read: poetic) lyrics are part of what allows songs to completely baffle us; they allow songs to elude simple characterization and slip the shackles of obsessive categorization (e.g., genre). A truly great piece of music leaves us speechless; we cannot simply explain it to someone. Instead, the best we can do is say, “you know what? Just listen to this,” to which they are only able to reply, “wow… you’re right.”

This is why I love metaphors and dualities. Yes, I realize the previous sentence just caused every person who hated English in school to audibly cringe. Look, I’ve been there, I get it. I used to think English was a cruel joke played at everyone’s expense and that it was stupid because ‘there is no right answer.’ Then one day, all of that changed. Almost as though a switch was suddenly flicked ‘on’ in my brain. It wasn’t until I understood English that I finally appreciated it. I’ve never wanted to go back, so hear me out.

Metaphors are essentially a way of controlling the associations formed by your brain when you read or hear a word. They can make you associate simple pieces of language with something extraordinary, and make you see things in a way you would never have previously considered.

If you’d like to get fancy, you can start introducing dualities; that is, setting two concepts on opposing ends of a spectrum. When you do so, you allow the reader to consider new and (seemingly) impossible gradations, all born from the struggle between two relatively ordinary ideas.

Take, for example, Poppy’s ‘poetry-ecstasy’ duality that she introduced in “X.” This was the first thing that made me take a more serious look at her work, i.e., “I think something else is going on here…” We know poetry and ecstasy are meant to be diametrically opposed in “X” because the colors in the music video change in sync with Poppy’s delivery.

If YouTube subtitles weren’t broken, they would read: “poetry, poetry, poetry”

Likewise: “ecstasy, ecstasy, ecstasy”

It’s not obvious that poetry is the opposite of ecstasy unless you’re in Wonderland in which case, you messed up somewhere. Moving on, when you set two concepts against each other like that, you introduce a new interplay between the two ideas. Now the audience is forced to see things from a new perspective, one they would not have otherwise considered. Or, they just ignore it, as is usually the case, but I digress.

With all this in mind, further study into “Scary Mask” reveals that some parts of the more basic reading don’t quite add up. Take, for example, lines like, “M-A-S-K, am I okay?” or “You ain’t gonna see me tonight”; these lines refuse to fit neatly into the obvious interpretation e.g., why spell out ‘mask’? Why are [they] not going to see “you” “tonight?” Most people would choose to ignore these outliers or simply shrug and go about their day. If this post’s existence didn’t clue you in, we won’t be doing much ‘shrugging’ or ‘ignoring.’

You’ve probably noticed this already, but I try to forge readings of Poppy’s work that fit as many different pieces as possible into them. To craft interpretations that capture the interplay between all the elements in a song. Often, this requires approaching the song from multiple angles, some even being right. If this post is good, each interpretation should form its own colored shard of glass, leaving the reader with a beautiful explanative mosaic. If this post is bad, grab a broom and wear shoes for a week.

Hilariously, doing justice to the more abstract bits of art usually means I have to use figurative language to explain other figurative language. “Sounds meta.” Indeed. Some puzzles can only be done justice with other puzzles, which is also why my writing frequently dips into obscurity. Close reading yields wonders, but means interpreting ‘carefully’ and ‘openly.’ “Sounds like a lot of work.” It is, but anybody can come up with a vague idea of what a song is ‘about,’ e.g., “this one’s about love!” How insightful, you should post that on Genius, that’s just what they’re looking for. I mean, really, at that point what are you even getting out of the song? A few minutes of pleasure before you move onto the next one? Is that it? Are you going to just spend your entire life constantly devouring one helping after another, waiting hungrily for your favorite artists to dish up your next meal?

I may be going to hell, but at least I won’t be stuck doing that.

II.

Rise and shine—

get out of bed!

Take my hand, 

there’s darkness ahead.

 “Scary Mask” is one of Poppy’s best songs. No, I’m not interested in arguing about this. It is also one of Poppy’s most important songs. This, however, I am interested in arguing about.

For the sake of the following discussion, I will be ignoring most of Poppy’s singles. “Metal” and “Immature Couture” and [other singles] are good but they complicate things and I don’t have time to deal with them, despite having the time to tell you how little time I have. Fancy people would probably call such exclusions “exceptionally non-rigorous,” but I’m over it.

I tried to make this section not-boring, dunno if I was successful; my writing takes on the flavor of whoever I read last, hence why the “Me Laughing” post reads like schizophrenia. Lately, I’ve been feeling especially masochistic, so I’ve been reading [redacted]. Expect that to shine through.

Let’s zoom out for a bit: “Scary Mask” is the flagship song of Poppy’s Choke EP, though I am sympathetic to arguments for “Meat.” “Scary Mask” ties the whole EP together and makes it possible. It’s critical to Choke’s ‘flow.’ This isn’t a given, I’ll explain/pretend to explain.

The structure of Choke almost perfectly mimics that of a five-act play. Yeah, like that Shakespeare guy. The EP contains exposition, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a conclusion. The methodically squeezing “Choke” sets the mood and introduces a problem statement to color the rest of the EP. With its pendulum-like bassline and hypnotizing array of voices, “Voicemail” depicts a forsaken mind becoming further and further dissociated from reality. A complete breakdown occurs in “Scary Mask,” the explosive climax of the EP and, at least so far, Poppy's work. Following “Scary Mask” comes the bleak and gruesome “Meat,” which is clearly akin to the falling action. And finally, we are given “The Holy Mountain,” the EP’s pessimistic and wistful send-off.

As for the context in which “Scary Mask” was created, Choke comes after two pop-y records, Bubblebath and poppy.computer, and a half-pop, half-??? disc, Am I A Girl. After AIAG, Poppy had a choice: back off and return to pop or double-down and bring on the metal. Thankfully, she chose the latter and made Choke. Let’s all take a minute to praise AIAG for even allowing Poppy such options, for flowing together so smoothly, etc. Okay, séance over, let’s return: “Scary Mask” carried Choke, without it, the EP would’ve been severely lacking a massive, stand-out song to serve as the EP’s creative apex.

“Scary Mask” is, in a sense, the ‘no turning back’ point for Poppy. Producing “Scary Mask” was like Poppy locking her old style away and throwing out the key; “X” and “Play Destroy” were #wild, but “Scary Mask” was the third strike. Put confusingly, “Scary Mask” was Poppy’s ‘home run’ while also being the ‘final nail in the coffin’ and other idioms. The track is so far removed from the days of Bubblebath and P.C that it actually created a distance, a gap, between nu-Poppy and Pop-y. “X” has pop elements and Poppy cutely ‘ooo-ing’; it was walk back-able. “Scary Mask” has Jason Butler demonically screaming and saying the ‘fuck’ word; fine print says “no refunds.” Or, if you’d prefer analogies that are unlikely to age well: think of a giant iceberg breaking off from the main Arctic glacier and slipping into the cold, dark sea. Once it’s off, it’s not freezing back on. In other words, once Poppy dropped “Scary Mask,” ‘princess with a pistol’ became ‘demonic metal queen.’

I’ll also argue that “Scary Mask” is the least compromising song in Poppy’s current discography. It’s her truest expression of self pre-I Disagree. All artists have to make their music listenable-enough to get bread, just like I need to make my writing readable-enough to get read. Unfortunately, compromise is inevitable, but artists can still create good music. It’s just hard and getting harder. Plus, nobody agrees what ‘good music’ even means because we have no rigorous definition for art so—

When an artist decides to really ‘go for it,’ to make no compromises, and does it well, a beautiful thing happens. That’s what “Scary Mask” is for Poppy; she decided to pull no punches, and the result was, well, “Scary Mask.”

“X” and “Play Destroy” were both successful, but they didn’t guarantee Poppy’s nu-success. “Play Destroy” had Grimes, and “X” could have been an anomaly. If Poppy went back to pop, fans could have passed off her dip into metal as ‘weird’ but ‘kinda cool’ and that would be that. However, Poppy didn’t let up—“Scary Mask” proved she could consistently make quality metal tracks, and now we’re here and Poppy is about to destroy the world or something. Nice.

In summary: “Scary Mask” functions to transition Poppy’s sound, it does a damn good job of it, and I’m definitely looking forward to her new album.

III.

You try to take the best of me

Go away

You try to take the best of me

Go away

 Alright, zoom back in. Yes, “Scary Mask” made it possible for Poppy to throw in crazy distorted guitars and for everyone to love it, but it does more than that. “Scary Mask” also transitions Poppy her(?)self, which sounds strange but it will make sense later, probably.

Now time for the fun part.

Sometimes I like to begin my analysis with a song's verses before circling back to the chorus, as was the case with "The Holy Mountain," however, "Scary Mask" is so crazy that it doesn't even matter where I start. It's what I lovingly refer to as “straight-up bonkers,” like some twisted monstrosity tearing its face off as it stumbles around in the dark. Reminds me of the psychos from Borderlands, an analogy that already has not aged well. Basically, “Scary Mask” is all over the place, so I might as well start from the ‘beginning.’ I'm going to have to pick up the pieces and stitch them into some monster that would do Mary Shelley proud anyway.

Let's dive in.

Poppy opens the song with: “I wear my scary mask when I'm afraid I don't belong.” Okay, seems pretty straightforward so far. There isn’t much to work with here, but maybe we can add some color to this line. BUILD series conducted a relatively listenable interview with Poppy earlier this year. One excerpt to note:

Interview: “Well, why wear a mask?”

Poppy: “Sometimes you just have two faces.”

Interview: “And that’s okay?”

Poppy: “Only sometimes.”

This is why I was debating just skipping “Scary Mask”—the opening line was a little cliché, and it seemed like Poppy had taken Batman Forever literally, neither of which are particularly good signs. However, I want to stress that lacking an interesting message wouldn’t necessarily make “Scary Mask” a ‘bad’ song. This idea may seem very strange, especially in modern society where it appears everyone agrees that deep themes=good art. We’ve been raised with the notion that the best art is art that tells a message, and it’s difficult for us to consider otherwise. However, not only does the conception of ‘depth’ quickly fall apart (as I noted in the “Me Laughing” post), but it’s entirely possible that thematic elements have absolutely zero bearing on the aesthetic quality of a work. In other words, ‘themes’ may not be what make art ‘good.’

Yeah, take a minute and think about that.

Anywho, after deciding I could afford to pay attention, I found many interesting things. Note Poppy’s word-choice. She uses the word “scary,” an almost child-like characterization of something fearful. Indeed, in the music video, Poppy’s hair is hidden or pulled back, giving her a youthful appearance. Look, pictures:

Moreover, peppered throughout the song are Poppy’s pouty squeals and she sings with call an almost ‘whimper-y’ tone, the end of her words marked by a spike in pitch. Obviously, we’d like to ask: why is she presenting herself to us this way?

We find answers in the second half of the line: “when I’m afraid I don’t belong.” Okay, so when she finds herself in situations where she is uncomfortable, where she is struck by the feeling of being small, almost child-like, she resorts to the mask as a defense mechanism. Now we’re getting somewhere, though I would like to ask: why is the mask “scary”?

Being two-faced does not necessarily mean the one face has to resemble Harvey Dent post-toasting, it could simply be a different side of your personality. Perhaps the next line will help:

You can’t read my brain until it’s off

Note Poppy says “brain” instead of any other word such as ‘mind’ or ‘thoughts.’ Using the word ‘brain’ signals a sense of invasiveness. Think: Sylar from Heroes cutting open peoples’ skulls and studying their brains for secrets. I’m sure many obsessive fans have tried digging up details on Poppy’s personal life and many interviewers have tried asking her inappropriate questions. It appears that Poppy wears a “scary mask” as a counter to such intrusions, as if she decided that the only appropriate response to these inappropriate behaviors was a face-to-face with the scary mask.

Holy shit, was this entire song written as a response to the AMP Radio interview? That would be hilarious.

Poppy then repeats that the mask is “not coming off.” Hey, wait a minute…

Okay, so after a fairly badass guitar interlude, Poppy begins feverishly chanting the lines: “I'm never gonna take it off, so don't touch me / Never gonna take it off, stop looking at me.” I’m sure some fans hate me because I’m always banging the drum that Poppy’s work is about obsession, and thus, appear to be attacking them, but come on, how clear would you like the message to be? Go watch “Repeat After Me” if you’re not convinced.

Anyway, in a sense, Poppy’s scary mask (read: freaky persona) operates as a shield from foreign bodies who seek to violate her personal space.

I’m going to leave Jason Butler’s lines for the end because, well, you’ll see.

IV.

In the music video for “Scary Mask,” after Poppy first puts the mask on and has a little breakdown, there are many instances where she is no longer wearing the mask, but is still acting like a possessed teen in desperate need of exorcizing. This is weird, here are some possibilities:

1) Poppy takes the mask off in the music video because she’s pretty and people want to see her lip-syncing.

2) The mask was always on.

We’re going with door #2.

Let’s look at some of the weirder lines, like Poppy chanting the incantation: “M-A-S-K, am I okay?” By spelling out ‘mask,’ Poppy signifies that the “am I okay?” question is directly referencing the mask she wears. In other words: is it okay for Poppy to wear a mask?

We already know Poppy came down pretty hard on one side of the fence when she answered “sometimes” in the BUILD series interview. My equally unambiguous answer is: “it depends.” There are many reasons why wearing a ‘mask’ is a terrible thing that slowly renders you psychologically ‘fucked,’ go read TLP or Lasch if you want more info on that (actually, you should just read them anyway). However, we’ve already established “Scary Mask” was an empowering song for Poppy because it served as a truer artistic outlet for her, so any masquerading should be approached with this in mind.

Alright, so when is it a good thing to wear a mask? How can it be a good thing to pretend to be someone you’re not?

Well, when you’re an artist, you typically create art to express something. Often, this ‘something’ is deeply personal to yourself. You put a lot of yourself into your work. This means criticism of your work can really hurt. After all, if someone calls your [song/painting/writing] ‘trash,’ it’s like calling you ‘trash.’ It feels like that criticism is aimed directly at that piece of yourself you put into your work. Yeah, that sucks. Sometimes it’s so difficult to bear that you avoid creating anything so you don’t have to be faced with such attacks. You forgo creating art because the injurious potential of criticism is too daunting. Without a creative outlet, your feelings remain bottled inside, slowly eating away at you from within. It’s a lose-lose game and everyone’s the player.

So, you ask: “what do I do?”

Well, that’s where the mask comes in.

The artist can use a persona to get around these problems. In other words, putting on a mask can actually allow you to finally be yourself, which seems paradoxical, but I’ll explain.

Take, for example, me. After reading enough of the silly words I write, you may start to form a picture of me in your head. To speculate and fantasize about what I actually look like or how I actually act. Without even knowing your thoughts, I can assure you that any such conceptions are completely inaccurate. I know that I’m not actually as [adjective] as you imagine me to be because I work with a protective persona. The persona allows me to write without worrying too much harsh criticism. Hence, with a persona, I can safely express myself through my work.

The same is true for Poppy. As I’ve noted in previous posts, Poppy has a lot to say about the world. She would like to express these messages artistically, but it’s not always easy to face criticism of her work (and Poppy gets a lot of hate). By adopting the ‘Poppy’ persona, Poppy is able to safely express herself. To finally say what she wants to say. To be who she really wants to be. And when she is faced with scathing criticism, she is able to continue her work undeterred because it feels like the criticism is directed toward Poppy (persona) instead of Poppy (person).

An alternate (and hilarious) reading of the lines “M-A-S-K, am I okay?” and “I’m alright, I’m alright, I’m alright” would be to imagine them as part of a demented question-and-answer period with Poppy. Many of her fans have expressed concerns over the effects of living your life pretending to be a [robot/alien/demonic angel], not to mention the section of Poppy’s fan-base who seem to constantly worry about Poppy being Titanic’s so-called ‘puppet’ and that he is abusive towards her. You can interpret Jason Butler screaming “I’m alright, I’m alright, I’m alright” as Poppy’s response to such concerns. Seems like an appropriate answer to me.

V.

You try to take the best of me

GO AWAY

YOU TRY TO TAKE THE BEST OF ME

GO AWAY

YOU TRY TO TAKE THE BEST OF ME

GO AWAY

 There are some remarkably odd lines in “Scary Mask” that need some serious groundwork to render sensible, so let’s switch gears for a second and complain about pop music. Yes, I know. It’s not exactly brave (let alone novel) to decry pop music as a vapid and soulless caricature of art, but I find it therapeutic. Plus, I’m clearly writing a narrative here. If these words make you indignant, first ask yourself ‘why?’ and then relax. I listen to pop music too, most of which is terrible. Also, I’m talking about the correlation, not the rule. If you fight me with exceptions, I’ll hit you back with trends.

Pop is the most apologetic music genre out there (though mumble rap and country are giving it a run for its money, literally); pop music’s main purpose is stated by its terminology: it exists to be popular. To be as widely palatable as possible so as to garner as many listeners as possible. The implications associated with a genre revolving entirely around popularity for the sake of commercial success are pretty disgusting. I’d even go so far as to say the existence of ‘pop’ as a musical genre is a strong indicator that culture is no longer treated as an essential component to human society, but is instead only another industry, and has been for a while. People love celebrating the façade or appearance of culture (partially so they can consider themselves ‘cultured’), but the truth is that culture now exists mainly as a commodity to be endlessly repackaged and sold back to people under the guise of ‘art.’ “I blame capitalism!” Sure, and you may not even be wrong, but that’s a discussion for another time. The point here is that to successfully create music with value, music that isn’t just a meaningless product, one needs to escape such a hyper-commoditized regime i.e., the corporatized pop-music industry.

Business-wise, Poppy did this by ditching Mad Decent and signing with Sumerian Records, an independent label which will hopefully make her very happy. Music-wise, she also had to transition. Recall: putting on the mask (read: persona) allowed Poppy to be herself and make the music she wanted to. So, to evolve her music, she had to also evolve the mask. After releasing two and a half pop records, people will generally expect, well, more pop. People don’t like when their favorite artists abruptly change, probably because they don’t wish to face the idea that said artists were never making music for them in the first place. Either way, for Poppy to tell tales of an impending apocalypse or drop an insane metal album like I Disagree, she had to ease fans into it. Musically, this is the second half of AIAG and the entirety of Choke, but it’s also a perfect encapsulation of “Scary Mask.” It’s possible that the bipolar nature of songs like “X,” “Concrete,” and “Scary Mask” is only due to Poppy trying to transition her sound without upsetting too many fans. Hence why these songs incorporate lighter sections to balance out the darkness. Perhaps “I Disagree” is as dark as Poppy’s going to get, but given recent news of her hanging out with Nadya Tolokno from Pussy Riot, I doubt it (“don’t know how long until they see the rest of me”).

This is also where Poppy’s YouTube videos come in. While producing new music, she can quickly put out a few videos and slowly ramp up the darkness, facilitating a comfortable change in artistic tone for the fans. Something, something, frogs and hot water.

Considering all of the above, I agree with something @thatpoppyuk said a while back in regards to people saying “Moriah is coming out!” when Poppy dyed her bangs:

Not only is it potentially insensitive to call Poppy ‘Moriah,’ it’s simply inaccurate. For better or worse, people don’t regress, they progress. Poppy is not doing something so #basic as ‘returning to her roots,’ she is becoming who she’s always wanted to be.

VI.

Now that we have completed the necessary groundwork, we are able finish off the rest of the song. Lyrically, “Scary Mask” is rather focused; we’ve actually covered all of Poppy’s lines, so I’d like to examine the role Jason Butler from Fever 333 plays in the song.

I’ve actually refrained from gushing about how good “Scary Mask” is until now, but I don’t think I can contain myself any longer. Fever 333 was an excellent feature that perfectly meshes with Poppy’s harmonics and the chomping guitar riffs. Not only that, but lyrically, Jason Butler brings an insane performance. He brings scary mask to life.

Fever 333’s role in the song is complicated and will take multiple approaches to flesh out. First, consider the scary mask (Jason Butler’s lines) as an entity speaking for Poppy, as though it were some demonic hype-man:

This would then explain the line, “well you heard the woman, so fucking look away.” It appears that Poppy needs someone telling others to “fucking look away,” betraying a sense of dependency. After all, if Poppy could handle such onlookers on her own, she wouldn’t need someone else telling them to ‘beat it.’ We may interpret this as a sign that Poppy has come to rely on the shielding-nature of the mask. She relies on her persona for protection, but reliance gives way to over-reliance. Naturally, substitution and dependency follow.

However, this isn’t wholly satisfying, nor is it very charitable. Let’s consider another, more empowering, approach, this time as Poppy speaking through the mask. In this case, a synthesis is underway between Poppy and her new persona (read: scary mask). During the violent transformation, she screams and struggles as the darkness of the mask washes through her, until the process is complete and both are one. Or, rather, Poppy is transcending her persona through her persona, a process of metamorphic self-realization.

Approaching the relationship between Poppy and the mask as a symbiotic one will perhaps explain one of the most bizarre lines in all of Poppy’s discography (minus every line in “Voicemail,” of course): “You ain’t gonna see me tonight!” I mean, what the hell. It’s difficult to explain how much this line confuses me, words simply elude me. This is one of those lines that normal people would shrug and come up with a half-hearted explanation such as: “well, Poppy is wearing a mask, and because she is wearing a mask, you aren’t going to see her. You know, because she’s wearing a mask.” Poorly-conceived explanations such as these negate the whole point of studying art. You can’t just jerk responsibility when ‘the going gets tough.’ The reward isn’t merely the end result, and people who believe this are the exact same people who Genius exploits. It is the work, the method, the climb, the struggle that is important because it is while grappling with the piece that one learns the most about oneself. With that being said, this line has haunted me for three weeks now, but I think I can do it some justice.

First, we examine the context in which the line appears in the song. The line first appears near the beginning of the song, wedged between a crushing guitar interlude and the Poppy’s staccato-ed “M-A-S-K, am I okay?” build-up. Then the line comes again at the end of Jason Butler’s insane post-chorus breakdown which is interlaced with Poppy’s disembodied screams. This second appearance follows a punchy chorus from Poppy and directly precedes a charged guitar solo and Poppy’s explosive final meltdown. From all this, we notice that “You ain’t gonna see me tonight!” is always delivered amidst a great deal of turmoil, always sprinkled into the middle of a violent episode.

Next, we look at the line itself. “Ain’t” and “gonna” are very colloquial, like the speaker hasn’t been taught to speak ‘properly’ or has lapsed into a state where they are unable to or simply do not care. I’m also picking up a touch of mentally-disturbed giddiness, as if some deranged killer is frothily barking this at you outside your window while his head jerks around. “Well, I’m definitely glad not to live on the ground-floor.” Likewise.

I must comment, however, that “Tonight” is an odd word choice. “Well, maybe they just needed a word that rhymed with ‘alright’?” Remember what I said about giving up when things get difficult? No, “tonight” relates a sense of shadowy immediacy, like a doom drawing near. Perhaps Poppy is about to descend upon the world, shrouding it in darkness with her black angel wings.

Hence, “You ain’t gonna see me tonight” relates the sense of foreboding violence that comes with Poppy’s new persona. This makes a lot of sense in the context of Poppy’s work because I Disagree is likely going to be her most aggressive album yet. See, for instance, “I Disagree.”

Basically: full dark, no stars; Poppy’s out for blood, time to take cover.

VII.

In summary: the ‘scary mask’ is a protective garment for Poppy as well as an empowering one. The adoption of an artistic persona allows her to cope with criticisms and continue her work. Recently, she has adjusted her work, and thus, her persona, to something truer to herself, and “Scary Mask” was an integral part of her transition.

Well, wasn’t that fun? I know I enjoyed myself.

Wait, what? You have a question? Ah, wait—I know what you’re thinking:

“If Poppy only wears her ‘scary mask’ when she’s ‘afraid she won’t belong,’ then why is she ‘never going to take it off’?”

Well, maybe she feels like she will never belong.

[la-paritalienne]

also reply to all the quetions.. 50k words for each one

vfghjklkgk this is quite demanding but quite funny and cute so. 

♡

zinc white; how are you really feeling today? no one-word answers please! — mmm i feel like i’m at the gates of a new life bc i’m truly about to start looking for a job and i guess i’m like… nostalgic for something that i haven’t really left behind yet? i might have ups and downs but i love my life, being ‘free’ all day, talking to my friends, going to the gym whenever etc… it’s kind of scary that everything is about to change, i’ll have real responsibilities and a tight schedule and idk, it’s just going to be different and possibly how the rest of my life could look indefinitely. but i’m also also excited, and also very grateful for what i have, i’m having a very nice night and i love my friends 

cadmium yellow; when you think of the word “happy” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? — bits and pieces of my life. it’s small moments but they mean everything. being on the beach with no worries at all. going to the cinema with my brother to see the new star wars movie, how i’m always about to tear up as it starts. crying happy tears in the metro while going the gym. how i feel when i see my parents at the airport in rome and everything that might weighing me down

lemon; what’s your comfort food? — it has to include lots of melted cheese and possibly carbs, so either pizza or a grilled cheese sandwich basically, but also a parmigiana di melanzane wouldn’t be half bad 

hansa yellow; what’s your guilty pleasure song? — idk if i believe in this concept, especially when it comes to songs… like music is supposed to be music and there’s no guilt in listening to like, ‘lighter’ stuff i guess? like i would say ‘what makes you beautiful’ but that pleasure is so not guilty… maybe atm i kinda feel like that with ‘dove e quando’ by benji e fede but like… it’s a jam so gjggkgkg ok this is a stupid reply, i’m sorry! 

yellow ochre; name an artist/band whom you just discovered & can’t get enough of! — mmmmm just discovered i’m not sure, but quite recently (beginning on this summer) this amazing artist named skott who also has a new song out these days (still need to listen to it) 

naples yellow; where do you feel most at home? — mm… a while ago i would have said here and only here in paris but tbh, my parents’ home in rome also always feels like home, although in a different way, as if i go back to being younger, a slightly different version of myself back there. so yeah, maybe paris would be the number one place, but where my family is, i feel at home, also at the seaside.

raw sienna; with whom do you feel most at home? — myself, my mom, my dad and my brother 

golden ochre; describe the relationship you have with your closest friend. — i have a few very close friends and i love them all a looot, but i’ll choose one in particular for the purposes of this reply, sooo. ummm i love her so much and i want to be there for her no matter what, i think she’s super fun and we have great times together, but we also talk about serious stuff, she’s been there for me through a lot. she’s interesting and cute, but also quite a deep and complex person, which is something i really appreciate and find quite fascinating, like i love being around people like that, i love when they share thoughts / ideas / views of the world that i wouldn’t have come up with myself, i find it enriching. of course i wish she was always happy and serene and that’s not always the case, but who is? and i mean, she’s my friend, i just love the whole package. she is an amazing listener and for that i’ll never stop being grateful, gives amazing advice, has the best stories that often make me crack tf up, great taste in music and in general... and a lot more 

golden deep; what’s your favorite season? — i love summer, but i also like a chilly autumn, especially on a sunny day, with the wind kind of brisk… but not necessarily, rainy days are cool too and idk, autumn is underrated but i love it, i love how cosy it feels, how comforting it feels when the weather sucks and you don’t feel ‘guilty’ for lazying around the house, how sweating at the gym becomes more satisfactory, love layered clothes etc… yay 

cadmium orange; what do you like to do on your days off? — go to the gym, make a meal for myself (i like making big salads with lots of different things in them, especially if some elements require cooking, it feels like a treat to me bc i normally don’t have the time / the energy for actual cooking), indulge in some dessert, a walk by myself or with some friend…

orange lake; do you have anyone you can turn to when you’re sad? — yes, my friends are quite dependable (hope this is the right word?), like maybe not all of them all the time, but there’s always someone willing to listen. + my brother

titans; do you prefer slow mornings or relaxing evenings? — why not both gkgkggkgk but i’m actually more productive in the morning and i don’t really mind starting my day as soon as i wake up, so i’ll go for evenings. 

shakhnazaryan red; are you currently binge-watching anything? — i replied to this one but not right now, the i-land was cool tho! 

red ochre; are you more right-brained (creative) or left-brained (analytical)? — i think i’m a mix of both in a way that like… i’m neither?? i try to be analytical but i’m too emotional and i guess i’m creative but i’m not truly an artist so i really don’t know, maybe from the outside someone could interpret me better? if i think about it, i think i manage to be quite analytical when it comes to others, but as far as i’m personally concerned, i live in fantasy, hypothesis, this sort of nostalgic and ‘artsy’ world of mine, maybe?

burnt sienna; is there a painting that brings you peace when you look at it? — nothing that comes to my mind like that, my favorite artists don’t exactly bring me peace, i like art that’s kind of exciting and often colorful (matisse, kandinsky, picasso, rothko) so i’m not sure, but my parents have the print of a beautiful gaugin painting in their room, and that’s always reminded me of home and calm and it’s also gorgeous, so i generally associate gauguin’s girls to this peaceful, blissful feeling.

english red; what animal do you relate to most? — a house cat. lazy but at times gets the urge to jump around and tire itself just so then they can lay on the sofa with more satisfaction. eating is what makes it get up 90 per cent of the time. cuddlier and more affectionate than it looks

vermilion; what’s your favorite accent? — mmmm i love a british accent but i also love lots of italian accents, especially on my friends, like if i associate it to them i like it even more.

cadmium red; do you have a “type” when it comes to a significant other? — not really, i just want to be loved tbh. i mean of course there’s some personality traits that i always find attractive and i had a gym girl phase but i wouldn’t say i have a type, i’m open to anything 

scarlet; describe your current crush/es. — well she’s gorgeous, talented, an advocate for body positivity, an amazing singer, feminist icon, savvy businesswoman, looks good w any kind of hair, she’s richer than beyoncé and also nicer tbh... she has a makeup brand which i’m obsessed with, a lingerie brand, a (super expensive sadly) clothing brand... the most amazing eyes....... i love her 

ruby; what does your ideal first date look like? — mm nice dinner somewhere cosy and warm but not too noisy so we can talk, ideally there’s no awkward silences and we just talk about ourselves, find out we have some stuff in common, there’s laughter etc. nothing extra, just a nice night with someone i like 

carmine; what does your ideal second date look like? — like the first one but we know each other better so maybe something even chiller like a picnic or a dinner at home??

madder lake red; would you ever kiss someone (or accept a kiss) on a first date? — yeah i mean it depends on the mood, the chemistry, the connection etc. also like if it’s a date w someone i already knew then that’s more likely to happen, if it’s a date that kind of started off like a date... idk, not exactly blind but like we haven’t exactly been friends before, then maybe there’s some pressure and i’m not sure if that would happen, but i wouldn’t say no as a rule.

rose; what’s something really positive going on in your life right now? — a friend of mine from the gym and her daughter (also a friend but i know the mom better) spontaneously offered to help me with my curriculum, to make it look prettier and more appealing. i mean it’s nothing huge and i could mention my friends or my family but i think it’s clear that i love them and that they’re a positive part of my life, so i thought i’d share this little bit of unexpected kindness that i’ve been receiving. 

quinacridone rose; what’s something you’re really looking forward to? — mahmood’s concert!

violet rose; what does your dream house look like? — an airy, luminous apartment in paris, not necessarily huge but bigger than the one i have right now, neatly furnished w the kind of stuff i would reblog on tumblr bc it’s so aesthetic, lots of white, gold and pops of color like dusty pink, peach, yellow. ancient parquet, high ceilings, white walls but maybe not all of them... like some color could be nice but that will depend on how the house is structured. a fireplace w mirror above (classic parisian), huge windows, a balcony big enough for a table where i can have breakfast in the sun and a chaise where i can tan and relax, and a beautiful view. a fancy bathroom with beautiful tiles or a mosaic, a bath tub is mandatory. and i’d like a walk-in closet

violet; is there any place in particular you’d like to settle down? — i think i’ve settled where i like, but who knows!

blue lake; what would you like to do/accomplish before you settle down? — not exactly, like when i realized paris felt like home i thought ‘so maybe i have no idea what i want to do with my life, but at least i know where i wanna be’ so that’s it

cobalt blue spectral; what is the most beautiful place you have ever been to? — probably tunisia, but i’ve recently been to normandy and i feel like i left a piece of my heart there, i feel like it’s going to be a special place for me, where i’ll go back often and make memories, if that makes sense

ultramarine; when was the last time you were in a good mood? do you know/remember what sparked it? — i think last night (when i started replying to this) simply because i was having fun w a friend. i’m not in a bad mood now but it’s like normal, plus i’m talking to my mom bc my grandma broke her foot so there’s stress in the air 

blue; what’s the most recent dream you remember? — ooooh just last night i dreamed that i was babysitting the kids i used to babysit until last year, they had two houses and they were old enough to be alone in one of them as i cleaned the other, which i didn’t have to do tho bc the floor was already wet as if someone had just cleaned it, which made me happy! i then had to wash some dishes but the kids arrived and we started eating leftovers

bright blue; what does your dream family look like? any kids or pets? how many of each? — (mom, dad, brother (2 years younger than me) and luna, fluffy, fat, adorably mean huge cat, she’s 15 but super healthy (except for neurotically licking her own belly so much that she has no hair there -.-), she’s our love) i had read what does your family look like gjgjgffjgfkgkgkgmfmgkk sorryyyy luckily i checked. well then in that case my wife, two kids (ideally the eldest is a girl and then a boy but like gender is a social construct you know) and definitely a cat or two 

blue cobalt; do you like your name? would you give yourself a different name if you could? — i do! no, i don’t think so. sometimes i think about how names are just names and like... we’re people beyond that but at the same time i feel like i am my name, you know? so i’m cool with it and i couldn’t see myself w another 

prussian azure; what’s your favorite scent? — the one that comes out of bakeries, like fresh bread or cakes, so distinctive and warming... mlmlmlml

azure blue; what’s your favorite type of tea, if any? — i love tea in general, but black rose & vanilla tea is my absolute fav

turquoise blue; if you could start a garden, what would you plant? — i don’t have a green thumb, i think, but peonies first of all 

cerulean blue; if you were guaranteed to have a viewership, would you start a youtube vlog? — probably, idk if i’d show my face bc i think i’d feel weird, but maybe after a while if i get comfortable? why not? you get a community who cares about you and most of all the chance to distract / entertain people and maybe even help them through hard times. ...and gifts djgjgkgkkgjk

glauconite; describe your body without using any negative adjectives. — gjgkhkhk a challenge but i appreciate it, i can’t be all words and no facts about body positivity. it’s minute, slightly curvy, decently toned, stronger than it looks, and it’s healthy 

yellow green; picture yourself walking in a field. what do you see & hear in this scenario? — i see a light blue sky, my feet sink in the grass but just a bit, the grass is not extremely high (otherwise i’d freak about there being insects that i can’t notice), on the horizon it looks like a pastel colored painting bc there’s flowers. i hear the birds singing and the sound of a light breeze

green light; are you in a comfortable place in life? if not, what do you think might make it better? — i can’t complain, but a job would be grand (i mean... i don’t really want to work and i don’t think that’s what makes you accomplished as a person, but it’s capitalism baby)

green; name three countries you want to visit; do you have any actual plans in place to visit any of them? — japan, mexico, tanzania. yes for the last one bc i know someone who’s just moved there and she invited me and my mom to go visit. 

emerald green; do you speak any languages besides english? are there any additional languages you want to learn? — italian bc i’m italian and french bc i live in france... sadly no others, but i want to. i’ve always wanted to learn arabic or japanese, but maybe i’ll start w something simpler and more similar to what i know already

oxide of chromium; what’s your favorite book? — i can’t choose one, i have too many that touched my life at the time i read them and made me go like wow, this is my fave. i’ll mention: the red and the black by stendhal, the enchanted mountain by thomas mann, persuasion by jane austen, the remains of the day and never let me go by ishiguro, the trilogy of the city of k by agota kristoff...

olive green; are you currently reading anything? how do you like it so far? — i’ll start a book called sorcières (witches) and i’m curious and excited about it, i’ll let you know

mars brown; what’s a movie that always puts a smile on your face/makes you laugh? — the holy trinity of my happy go to movies: monster in law, mean girls and the devil wears prada

burnt umber; what’s something you plan to do before the day is over to take care of yourself? — going to the gym!

umber; have you drank enough water today? — the day has just started and i’ve had two cups of tea. i try to stick to 2lt per day, but i’ve not been able to do it recently, which i plan to change.

voronezhskaya black; what or who is your go-to outlet for when you need to vent? — ghgkhkgkfkgk i thought for a second this was about a clothing store outlet. normally i try and talk it out w one of my friends, my mom or brother if it’s very serious or not something i wanna burden my friends with, but i also distract myself with some tv show or (yay capitalism -.-) retail therapy 

sepia; name five things that always make you happy. — a nice chat w a friend, an exhausting workout, finding (or being suggested) new music that i immediately feel myself getting obsessed with, saying yes to spontaneous, last minute plans and really enjoying myself although i often have that moment of ‘i don’t want to go’, being sent photos or memes 

indigo; what’s the best/sweetest compliment you have ever received? — probably something that ‘golden ochre’ said to me... but also something that really warms my heart is when my friend eleonora says that i’m the smartest person she knows and like... really means it. i don’t think she’s right, it’s not even about the compliment per se, but that’s she’s so serious when she says it, it makes me happy

payne’s gray; describe your aesthetic? — light grey parisian skies, a pink sunrise over the sea, glittery makeup... glittery everything tbh, notebooks filled w memories - pressed flowers, cinema tickets, photos of places i loved... mermaids, fluffy cats, pastel colors, tiny gold jewelry, a decadent buffet, a bouquet of peonies, huge empty beaches, a walk-in closet filled with incredible clothes, lana del rey x vogue italia june 2019

black; post a selfie because you are so beautiful! — fhgjgkgkg this is the most recent, closest thing i have to a selfie that’s not w some other people. it’s from pride and i was happy of my rainbow eye makeup but it doesn’t even show... sorryyyyy 

thank you for asking all of theseeee ♡

[renegade-is-in-my-blood]

Hey.

Some time ago I posted article titled I – an artist  It was immediately met with greater success I could ever dreamed of. It’s my most read,liked and commented post ever. Many of you left sweet, encouraging comments underneath it and I’m so grateful for every single one of them.

Because of such support and demand of my artworks I’m very happy to announce I got back to creating art again. My biggest thank you goes to juliemellorpoetsite . as this happened:

!!!

I received the book and started working on it. I’m very grateful for this opportunity. Even thought she made it clear I don’t have to create anything I felt like it’s the right push for me to get to creating my thing again. So here is small sneak peek of what you might expect in the future on my blog:

As you all liked my art so much I’m here to bring it even closer to you that before.

Marilyn Monroe

I myself consider my Marilyn Monroe portray the best piece I ever made and it has great personal value to me as I’m about to explain it to you in this article.

As you know by now from my I – an artist  article I attended art school when I was a kid. One day we got assignment to recreate photography into much bigger form using square net. Point was to make it as realistic as possible, we had to be precise and pay attention to the details.

I got to choose from 2 womans photographs: Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. In that time when I created my Marilyn I was just 13 years old and knew nothing much about neither of the ladies. Sure I knew their names and simple basic information but nothing else to choose by, but I was drawn to Marilyn more. I listened to my guts and you already know who I choose to draw.

I even took my final work home even though we usually left all of our artworks at school and I truly never been more proud of myself. Here is my Marilyn I drew when I was 13 (9 years ago)

For my final work at art school I simply copied this art I did before and inspired by Andy Warhol’s pop art color scheme I did my own mosaic of Marilyn Monroe. Sadly  – but not so much – I can’t show you photo of my final work as it’s displayed at my art school in my hometown.

But I decided to recreate the artwork and use it to decorate my new room in my family’s new built house. I still had the original picture so I copied it on the paper, bought some wavelets paper, glue and got to work.

I took me around two months to finish 2 pieces. It would be much quicker but this was the time I was suffering from my mental illness the most and I took the opportunity to create art as a small form of therapy. I took bunch of breaks and I considered it incredible success if I glued like 15 colorful pieces in a weak. Now it will forever remind me of my worst times and shows me the beauty that came out of it.

How I did it?

I copied the original on the baking form. Placed the baking form on clear paper and drew over existing lines with my pencil. It created imprint at new paper and I retraced those lines and the portrait was copied. Then i randomly cut colorful wavelets paper into small pieces, pour liquid glue on the paper, took small brush and glued each piece individually.

Originally I wanted to do 3 portraits and exchange the colors in each of them but then I settled just for 2 and placed original black and white work between them.

Here are some “in progress” photos (some with snapchat filters)

  And here are some detailed photos of my greatest artwork:

What started out as a simple school assignment turned out to have greater meaning to me. Since I already knew her face detailed as I drew her I slowly learned more info about her and grew to like and admire the woman. I noticed many similarities that made me relate to her. I’m sure as hell not comparing myself to most beautiful woman who ever walked the earth, but there are few things we have in common and many other I just admire about her:

Curves – Marilyn was not size 0 and neither am I. To see woman with curves viewed as a sex symbol is great boost for my and I bet many other woman self-esteem. There is still wild discussion going on whether Marilyn was or was not plus sized but the point remains the same – She knew how to wear her curves.  The confidence she had is something I greatly admire and aspire to have

Mental illness – It’s well-known fact that Marilyn suffered form mental illness. Depression, anxiety, self-doubt, low self-esteem, desperate need to be loved and admired.  Mental illness ran in her family. In the end she lost her battle as she reportedly committed suicide. (this topic is way too controversial and mysterious thought) I can surely relate to her in this one as I talked about my own experiences with mental illness in my article HERE  . To see such goddess experience mental illness and continue to work and be one of the most influential woman ever is very empowering for me.

Creativity – You can’t deny her artistic soul. It feels like artistic soul and mental illness goes hand in hand. It’s like the creativity and beauty is too much for your brain to handle so it gets sad. 

Menstrual pain – Marilyn suffered from huge menstrual pain, reportedly she once stopped her car and wince in pain at sidewalk. She took bunch of painkillers and this is something I can relate to as well. I suffered from unbearable menstrual pain since I was 14, I had strong cramps, I kept vomiting, fainting and crying in pain for 3 days a month. I couldn’t go to school or work properly as I couldn’t move because of the pain. I took hell lot of pills, but because of medical toleration I kept needing more and stronger ones. Blessings of a woman. Luckily when I was 18 my gynecologist prescribed me birth control pills to ease the pain.

Determination – Marilyn did everything it took to make her dream come true. All she wanted was to be actress and be loved. With 3 failed marriages and  shit ton of men claiming to bed her ( well of course if you had the chance you would claim you fucked Marilyn Monroe because who wouldn’t wanted to?) I’m not really sure if she was truly loved. Marilyn Monroe was loved but was Norma Jeane? There  is no denying in her being a call girl but that just proves her incredible determination to get what she wanted

Sex symbol – Considering the times when she lived and for a woman at that time being so open about her own sexuality is admirable. Even now woman talking about sex, liking sex and practising sex is still consider something shameful – we are not supposed to talk about it cuz it makes people uncomfortable. I feel like Marilyn brought grace into womans sexuality.

Style – No matter what she wore she looked incredibly. She knew how to wear clothes – important and many times neglected feature. There was confidence and sex appeal flashing out of her every move and every look.

I’m currently reading book about Marilyn’s life called Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers and I’m just couple pages in but I’m loving it:

In conclusion:

I aspire to be like her and I enjoy drawing her very much.

I end this rant with my photo with Marilyn’s wax figurine in Prague’s wax museum from this article

Thank you so much for your attention

xo Natalia

Story behind my Marilyn Hey. Some time ago I posted article titled I – an artist  It was immediately met with greater success I could ever dreamed of.

[suzanneshannon]

Chapter 9: Community

In April of 2009, Yahoo! shut down GeoCities. Practically overnight, the once beloved service had its signup page replaced with a vague message announcing its closure.

We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.

Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.

In the coming months, the company would offer little more detail than that. Within a year, user homepages built with GeoCities would blink out of existence, one by one, until they were all gone.

Reactions to the news ranged from outrage to contemptful good riddance. In general, however, the web lamented about a great loss. Former GeoCities users recalled the sites that they built using the service, often hidden from public view, and often while they were very young.

For programmer and archivist Jason Scott, nostalgic remembrances did not go far enough. He had only recently created the Archive Team, a rogue group of Internet archivists willing to lend their compute cycles to the rescue of soon departed websites. The Archive Team monitors sites on the web marked for closure. If they find one, they run scripts on their computers to download as much of the site as they could before it disappears.

Scott did not think the question of whether or not GeoCities deserved to exist was relevant. “Please recall, if you will, that for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website,” he posted to his website not long after Yahoo!‘s announcement. “[Y]ou could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full color.” GeoCities wasn‘t simply a service. It wasn’t just some website. It was burst of creative energy that surged from the web.

In the weeks and months that followed, the Archive Team set to work downloading as many GeoCities sites as they could. They would end up with millions in their archive before Yahoo! pulled the plug.

Chris Wilson recalled the promise of an early web in a talk looking back on his storied career with Mosaic, then Internet Explorer, and later Google Chrome. The first web browser, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, included the ability for users to create their own websites. As Wilson remembers it, that was the de-facto assumption about the web—that it would be a participatory medium.

“Everyone can be an author. Everyone would generate content,” Wilson said, “We had the idea that web server software should be free and everyone would run a server on their machine.” His work on Mosaic included features well ahead of their time, like built-in annotations so that users could collaborate and share thoughts on web documents together. They built server software in the hopes that groups of friends would cluster around common servers. By the time Netscape skyrocketed to popularity, however, all of those features had faded away.

GeoCities represented the last remaining bastion of this original promise of the web. Closing the service down, abruptly and without cause, was a betrayal of that promise. For some, it was the writing on the wall: the web of tomorrow was to look nothing like the web of yesterday.

In a story he recalls frequently, David Bohnett learned about the web on an airplane. Tens of thousands of feet up, untethered from any Internet network, he first saw mention of the web in a magazine. Soon thereafter, he fell in love.

Bohnett is a naturally empathetic individual. The long arc of his career so far has centered on bringing people together, both as a technologist and as a committed activist. As a graduate student, he worked as a counselor answering calls on a crisis hotline and became involved in the gay rights movement at his school. In more recent years, Bohnett has devoted his life to philanthropy.

Finding connection through compassion has been a driving force for Bohnett for a long time. At a young age, he recognized the potential of technology to help him reach others. “I was a ham radio operator in high school. It was exciting to collect postcards from people you talked to around the world,” he would later say in an interview. “[T]hat is a lot of what the Web is about.‘’

Some of the earliest websites brought together radical subcultures and common interests. People felt around in the dark of cyberspace until they found something they liked.

Riding a wave of riot grrrl ephemera in the early 1990’s, ChickClick was an early example. Featuring a mix of articles and message boards, women and young girls used ChickClick as a place to gather and swap stories from their own experience.

Much of the site centered on its strident creators, sisters Heather and Heidi Swanson. Though they each had their own areas of responsibility—Heidi provided the text and the editorial, Heather acted as the community liaison—both were integral parts of the community they created. ChickClick would not exist without the Swanson sisters. They anchored the site to their own personalities and let it expand through like-minded individuals.

Eventually, ChickClick grew into a network of linked sites, each focused on a narrower demographic; an interconnected universe of women on the web. The cost to expanding was virtually zero, just a few more bytes zipping around the Internet. ChickClick’s greatest innovation came when they offered their users their own homepages. Using a rudimentary website builder, visitors could create their own space on the web, for free and hosted by ChickClick. Readers were suddenly transformed into direct participants in the universe they had grown to love.

Bohnett would arrive at a similar idea not long after. After a brief detour running a more conventional web services agency called Beverley Hills Internet, Bohnett and his business partner John Rezner tried something new. In 1994, Bohnett sent around an email to some friends inviting them to create a free homepage (up to 15MB) on their experimental service. The project was called GeoCities.

What made GeoCities instantly iconic was that it reached for a familiar metaphor in its interface. When users created an account for the first time they had to pick an actual physical location on a virtual map—the digital “address” of their website. “This is the next wave of the net—not just information but habitation,” Bohnett would say in a press release announcing the project. Carving out a real space in cyberspace would become a trademark of the GeoCities experience. For many new users of the web, it made the confusing world of the web feel lived in and real.

The GeoCities map was broken up into a handful of neighborhoods users could join. Each neighborhood had a theme, though there wasn‘t much rhyme or reason to what they were called. Some were based on real world locations, like Beverley Hills for fashion aficionados or Broadway for theater nerds. Others simply played to a theme, like Area51 for the sci-fi crowd or Heartland for parents and families. Themes weren’t enforced, and most were later dropped in everything but name.

Credit: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age

Neighborhoods were limited to 10,000 people. When that number was reached, the neighborhood expanded into suburbs. Everywhere you went on GeoCities there was a tether to real, physical spaces.

Like any real-world community, no two neighborhoods were the same. And while some people weeded their digital gardens and tended to their homepages, others left their spaces abandoned and bare, gone almost as soon as they arrived. But a core group of people often gathered in their neighborhoods around common interests and established a set of ground rules.

Historian Ian Milligan has done extensive research on the mechanics and history of GeoCities. In his digital excavation, he discovered a rich network of GeoCities users who worked hard to keep their neighborhoods orderly and constructive. Some neighborhoods assigned users as community liaisons, something akin to a dorm room RA, or neighborhood watch. Neighbors were asked to (voluntarily) follow a set of rules. Select members acted as resources, reaching out to others to teach them how to build better homepages. “These methods, grounded in the rhetoric of both place and community,” Milligan argues, “helped make the web accessible to tens of millions of users.”

For a large majority of users, however, GeoCities was simply a place to experiment, not a formal community. GeoCities would eventually become one of the web’s most popular destinations. As more amateurs poured in, it would become known for a certain garish aesthetic, pixelated GIFs of construction workers, or bright text on bright backgrounds. People used their homepages to host their photo albums, or make celebrity fan sites, or to write about what they had for lunch. The content of GeoCities was as varied as the entirety of human experience. And it became the grounding for a lot of what came next.

“So was it community?” Black Planet founder Omar Wasow would later ask. “[I]t was community in the sense that it was user-generated content; it was self-expression.” Self-expression is a powerful ideal, and one that GeoCities proved can bring people together.

Many early communities, GeoCities in particular, offered a charming familiarity in real world connection. Other sites flipped the script entirely to create bizarre and imaginative worlds.

Neopets began as an experiment by students Donna Williams and Adam Powell in 1999. Its first version—a prototype that mixed Williams art and Powell’s tech—had many of the characteristics that would one day make it wildly popular. Users could collect and raise fictional virtual pets inside the fictional universe of Neopia. It operated like the popular handheld toy Tamagotchi, but multiplied and remixed for cyberspace.

Beyond a loose set of guidelines, there were no concrete objectives. No way to “win” the game. There were only the pets, and pet owners. Owners could create their own profiles, which let them display an ever expanding roster of new pets. Pulled from their imagination, Williams and Powell infused the site with their own personality. They created “unique characters,” as Williams later would describe it, “something fantasy-based that could live in this weird, wonderful world.”

As the site grew, the universe inside it did as well. Neopoints could be earned through online games, not as much a formal objective as much as in-world currency. They could be spent on accessories or trinkets to exhibit on profiles, or be traded in the Neopian stock market (a fully operational simulation of the real one), or used to buy pets at auction. The tens and thousands of users that soon flocked to the site created an entirely new world, mapped on top of of a digital one.

Like many community creators, Williams and Powell were fiercely protective of what they had built, and the people that used it. They worked hard to create an online environment that was safe and free from cheaters, scammers, and malevolent influence. Those who were found breaking the rules were kicked out. As a result, a younger audience, and one that was mostly young girls, were able to find their place inside of Neopia.

Neopians—as Neopets owners would often call themselves—rewarded the effort of Powell and Williams by enriching the world however they could. Together, and without any real plan, the users of Neopets crafted a vast community teeming with activity and with its own set of legal and normative standards. The trade market flourished. Users traded tips on customizing profiles, or worked together to find Easter eggs hidden throughout the site. One of the more dramatic examples of users taking ownership of the site was The Neopian Times, an entirely user-run in-universe newspaper documenting the fictional going-ons of Neopia. Its editorial has spanned decades, and continues to this day.

Though an outside observer might find the actions of Neopets frivolous, they were a serious endeavor undertaken by the site’s most devoted fans. It became a place for early web adventurers, mostly young girls and boys, to experience a version of the web that was fun, and predicated on an idea of user participation. Using a bit of code, Neopians could customize their profile to add graphics, colors, and personality to it. “Neopets made coding applicable and personal to people (like me),” said one former user, “who otherwise thought coding was a very impersonal activity.” Many Neopets coders went on to make that their careers.

Neopets was fun and interesting and limited only by the creativity of its users. It was what many imagined a version of the web would look like.

The site eventually languished under its own ambition. After it was purchased and run by Doug Dohring and later, Viacom, it set its sights on a multimedia franchise. “I never thought we could be bigger than Disney,” Dohring once said in a profile in Wired, revealing just how far that ambition went, “but if we could create something like Disney – that would be phenomenal.” As the site began to lean harder into somewhat deceptive advertising practices and emphasize expansion into different mediums (TV, games, etc.), Neopets began to overreach. Unable to keep pace with the rapid developments of the web, it has been sold to a number of different owners. The site is still intact, and thanks to its users, thriving to this day.

Candice Carpenter thought a village was a handy metaphor for an online community. Her business partner, and co-founder, Nancy Evans suggested adding an “i” to it, for interactive. Within a few years, iVillage would rise to the highest peak of Internet fortunes and hype. Carpenter would cultivate a reputation for being charismatic, fearless, and often divisive, a central figure in the pantheon of dot-com mythology. Her meteoric rise, however, began with a simple idea.

By the mid-90’s, community was a bundled, repeatable, commotized product (or to some, a “totally overused buzzword,” as Omar Wasow would later put it). Search portals like Yahoo! and Excite were popular, but their utility came from bouncing visitors off to other destinations. Online communities had a certain stickiness, as one one profile in The New Yorker put it, “the intangible quality that brings individuals to a Web site and holds them for long sessions.”

That unique quality attracted advertisers hoping to monetize the attention of a growing base of users. Waves of investment in community, whatever that meant at any given moment, followed. “The lesson was that users in an online community were perfectly capable of producing value all by themselves,” Internet historian Brian McCullough describes. The New Yorker piece framed it differently. “Audience was real estate, and whoever secured the most real estate first was bound to win.”

TheGlobe.com was set against the backdrop of this grand drama. Its rapid and spectacular rise to prominence and fall from grace is well documented. The site itself was a series of chat rooms organized by topic, created by recent Cornell alumni Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. It offered a fresh take on standard chat rooms, enabling personalization and fun in-site tools.

Backed by the notoriously aggressive Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns, and run by green, youngish recent college grads, theGlobe rose to a heavily inflated valuation in full public view. “We launched nationwide—on cable channels, MTV, networks, the whole nine yards,” Paternot recalls in his book about his experience, “We were the first online community to do any type of advertising and fourth or the fifth site to launch a TV ad campaign.” Its collapse would be just as precipitous; and just as public. The site’s founders would be on the covers of magazines and the talk of late night television shows as examples of dot-com glut, with just a hint of schadenfreude.

So too does iVillage get tucked into the annals of dot-com history. The site‘s often controversial founders were frequent features in magazine profiles and television interviews. Carpenter attracted media attention as deftly as she maneuvered her business through rounds of investment and a colossally successful IPO. Its culture was well-known in the press for being chaotic, resulting in a high rate of turnover that saw the company go through five Chief Financial Officer’s in four years.

And yet this ignores the community that iVillage managed to build. It began as a collection of different sites, each with a mix of message boards and editorial content centered around a certain topic. The first, a community for parents known as Parent Soup which began at AOL, was their flagship property. Before long, it spanned across sixteen interconnected websites. “iVillage was built on a community model,” writer Claire Evans describes in her book Broad Band, “its marquee product was forums, where women shared everything from postpartum anxiety and breast cancer stories to advice for managing work stress and unruly teenage children.”

Candice Carpenter (left) and Nancy Evans (right). Image credit: The New Yorker

Carpenter had a bold and clear vision when she began, a product that had been brewing for years. After growing tired of the slow pace of growth in positions at American Express and QVC, Carpetner was given more free rein consulting for AOL. It was her first experience with an online world. There wasn‘t a lot that impressed her about AOL, but she liked the way people gathered together in groups. “Things about people‘s lives that were just vibrant,” she’d later remark in an interview, “that’s what I felt the Internet would be.”

Parent Soup began as a single channel on AOL, but it soon moved to the web along with similar sites for different topics and interests—careers, dating, health and more. What drew people to iVillage sites was their authenticity, their ability to center conversations around topics and bring together people that were passionate about spreading advice. The site was co-founded by Nancy Evans, who had years of experience as an editor in the media industry. Together, they resisted the urge to control every aspect of their community. “The emphasis is more on what visitors to the site can contribute on the particulars of parenthood, relationships and workplace issues,” one writer noted, “rather than on top-tier columnists spouting advice and other more traditional editorial offerings used by established media companies.”

There was, however, something that bound all of the site‘s together: a focus that made iVillage startlingly consistent and popular. Carpenter would later put it concisely: “the vision is to help women in their lives with the stuff big and small that they need to get through.” Even as the site expanded to millions of users, and positioned itself as a network specifically for women, and went through one of the largest IPO’s in the tech industry, that simple fact would remain true.

What’s forgotten in the history of dot-com community is the community. There were, of course, lavish stories of instant millionaires and unbounded ambition. But much of the content that was created was generated by people, people that found each other across vast distances among a shared understanding. The lasting connections that became possible through these communities would outlast the boom and bust cycle of Internet business. Sites like iVillage became benchmarks for later social experiments to aspire to.

In February of 2002, Edgar Enyedy an active contributor to a still new Spanish version of Wikipedia posted to the Wikipedia mailing list and to Wikipedia‘s founder, Jimmy Wales. “I’ve left the project,” he announced, “Good luck with your wikiPAIDia [sic].”

As Wikipedia grew in the years after it officially launched in 2001, it began to expand to other countries. As it did, each community took on its own tenor and tone, adapting the online encyclopedia to the needs of each locale. “The organisation of topics, for example,” Enyedy would later explain, “is not the same across languages, cultures and education systems. Historiography is also obviously not the same.”

Enyedy‘s abrupt exit from the project, and his callous message, was prompted by a post from Wikipedia’s first editor-in-chief Larry Sanger. Sanger had been instrumental in the creation of Wikipedia, but he had recently been asked to step back as a paid employee due to lack of funds. Sanger suggested that sometime in the near future, Wikpedia may turn to ads.

It was more wishful thinking than actual fact—Sanger hoped that ads may bring him his job back. But it was enough to spurn Enyedy into action. The Wikipedia Revolution, author Andrew Lih explains why. “Advertising is the third-rail topic in the community—touch it only if you’re not afraid to get a massive shock.”

By the end of the month, Enyedy had created an independent fork of the Spanish Wikipedia site, along with a list of demands for him to rejoin the project. The list included moving the site from .com to .org domain and moving servers to infrastructure owned by the community and, of course, a guarantee that ads would not be used. Most of these demands would eventually be met, though its hard to tell what influence Enyedy had.

The fork of Wikipedia was both a legally and ideologically acceptable project. Wikipedia’s content is licensed under the Creative Commons license; it is freely open and distributable. The code that runs it is open source. It was never a question of whether a fork of Wikipedia was possible. It was a question of why it felt necessary. And the answer speaks to the heart of the Wikipedia community.

Wikipedia did not begin with a community, but rather as something far more conventional. The first iteration was known as Nupedia, created by Jimmy Wales in early 2000. Wales imagined a traditional encyclopedia ported into the digital space. An encyclopedia that lived online, he reasoned, could be more adaptable than the multi-volume tomes found buried in library stacks or gathering dust on bookshelves.

Wales was joined by then graduate student Larry Sanger, and together they recruited a team of expert writers and editors to contribute to Nupedia. To guarantee that articles were accurate, they set up a meticulous set of guidelines for entries. Each article contributed to Nupedia went through rounds of feedback and was subject to strict editorial oversight. After a year of work, Nupedia had less than a dozen finished articles and Wales was ready to shut the project down.

However, he had recently been introduced to the concept of a wiki, a website that anybody can contribute to. As software goes, the wiki is not overly complex. Every page has a publicly accessible “Edit” button. Anyone can go in and make edits, and those edits are tracked and logged in real time.

In order to solicit feedback on Nupedia, Wales had set up a public mailing list anyone could join. In the year since it was created, around 2,000 people had signed up. In January of 2001, he sent a message to that mailing list with a link to a wiki.

His hope was that he could crowdsource early drafts of articles from his project’s fans. Instead, users contributed a thousand articles in the first month. Within six months, there were ten thousand. Wales renamed the project to Wikipedia, changed the license for the content so that it was freely distributable, and threw open the doors to anybody that wanted to contribute.

The rules and operations of Wikipedia can be difficult to define. It has evolved almost in spite of itself. Most articles begin with a single, random contribution and evolve from there. “Wikipedia continues to grow, and articles continue to improve,” media theorist Clary Shirky wrote of the site in his seminal work Here Comes Everybody, “the process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car. And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.”

From these seemingly random connections and contributions, a tight knit group of frequent editors and writers have formed at the center of Wikipedia. Programmer and famed hacktivist Aaron Swartz described how it all came together. “When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it,” described Swartz, adding, “as a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.” And these insiders, as Swartz referes to them them, created a community.

“One of the things I like to point out is that Wikipedia is a social innovation, not a technical innovation,” Wales once said. In the discussion pages of articles and across mailing lists and blogs, Wikipedians have found ways to collaborate and communicate. The work is distributed and uneven—a small community is responsible for a large number of edits and refinements to articles—but it is impressively collated. Using the ethos of open source as a guide, the Wikipedia community created a shared set of expectations and norms, using the largest repository of human knowledge in existence as their anchor.

Loosely formed and fractured into factions, the Wikipedia community nevertheless follows a set of principles that it has defined over time. Their conventions are defined and redefined on a regular basis, as the community at the core of Wikipedia grows. When it finds a violation of these principles—such as the suggestion that ads will be plastered on the article they helped they create—they sometimes react strongly.

Wikipedia learned from the fork of Spanish Wikipedia, and set up a continuous feedback loop that has allowed its community to remain at the center of making decisions. This was a primary focus of Katherine Maher, who became exectuvie director of Wikimedia, the company behind Wikipedia, in 2016, and then CEO three years later. Wikimedia’s involvement in the community, in Maher’s words, “allows us to be honest with ourselves, and honest with our users, and accountable to our users in the spirit of continuous improvement. And I think that that is a different sort of incentive structure that is much more freeing.”

The result is a hive mind sorting collective knowledge that thrives independently twenty years after it was created. Both Maher and Wales have referred to Wikipedia as a “part of the commons,” a piece of informational infrastructure as important as the cables that pipe bandwidth around the world, built through the work of community.

Fanfiction can be hard to define. It has been the seeds of subculture and an ideological outlet; the subject of intense academic and philosophical inquiry. Fanfiction has often been noted for its unity through anti-hegemony—it is by its very nature illegal or, at the very least, extralegal. As a practice, Professor Brownen Thomas has put it plainly: “Stories produced by fans based on plot lines and characters from either a single source text or else a ‘canon’ of works; these fan-created narratives often take the pre-existing storyworld in a new, sometimes bizarre, direction.” Fanfiction predates the Internet, but the web acted as its catalyst.

Message boards, or forums, began as a technological experiment on the web, a way of replicating the Usenet groups and bulletin boards of the pre-web Internet. Once the technology had matured, people began to use them to gather around common interests. These often began with a niche—fans of a TV show, or a unique hobby—and then used as the beginning point for much wider conversation. Through threaded discussions, forum-goers would discuss a whole range of things in, around, and outside of the message board theme. “If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web,” one writer recalls, “the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit.”

Some stayed small (and some even remain so). Others grew. Fans of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer had used the official message board of the show for years. It famously took on a life of its own when the boards where shut down, and the users funded and maintained an identical version to keep the community alive. Sites like Newgrounds and DeviantART began as places to discuss games and art, respectively. Before long they were the launching pad for the careers of an entire generation of digital creators.

Fandom found something similar on the web. On message boards and on personal websites, writers swapped fanfiction stories, and readers flocked to boards to find them. They hid in plain sight, developing rules and conventions for how to share among one another without being noticed.

In the fall of 1998, developer Xing Li began posting to a number of Usenet fanfiction groups. In what would come to be known as his trademark sincerity, his message read: “I’m very happy to announce that www.fanfiction.net is now officially open!!!!!! And we have done it 3 weekss ahead of projected finish date. While everyone trick-or-treated we were hard at working debugging the site.”

Li wasn’t a fanfiction creator himself, but he thought he stumbled upon a formula for its success. What made Fanfiction.net unique was that its community tools—built-in tagging, easy subscriptions to stories, freeform message boards for discussions—was built with fandom in mind. As one writer would later describe this winning combination, “its secret to success is its limited moderation and fully-automated system, meaning posting is very quick and easy and can be done by anyone.”

Fanfiction creators found a home at Fanfiction.net, or FF.net as it was often shortened to. Throughout its early years, Li had a nerdy and steadfast devotion to the development of the site. He‘d post sometimes daily to an open changelog on the site, a mix of site-related updates and deeply personal anecdotes. “Full-text searching allows you to search for keywords/phrases within every fanfiction entry in our huge archive,” one update read. “I can‘t get the song out of my head and I need to find the song or I will go bonkers. Thanks a bunch. =)” read another (the song was The Cure‘s “Boys Don’t Cry”).

Li’s cult of personality and the unique position of the site made it immensely popular. For years, the fanfiction community had stuck to the shadows. FF.net gave them a home. Members took it upon themselves to create a welcoming environment, establishing norms and procedures for tagging and discoverability, as well as feedback for writers.

The result was a unique community on the web that attempted to lift one another up. “Sorry. It‘s just really gratifying to post your first fic and get three hits within about six seconds. It‘s pretty wild, I haven’t gotten one bad review on FF.N…” one fanfic writer posted in the site’s early days. “That makes me pretty darn happy :)”

The reader and writer relationship on FF.net was fluid. The stories generated by users acted as a reference for conversation among fellow writers and fanfiction readers. One idea often flows into the next, and it is only through sharing content that it takes on meaning. “Yes, they want recognition and adulation for their work, but there‘s also the very strong sense that they want to share, to be part of something bigger than themselves. There’s a simple, human urge to belong.”

As the dot-com era waned, community was repackaged and resold as the social web. The goals of early social communities were looser than the tight niches and imaginative worlds of early community sites. Most functioned to bring one’s real life into digital space. Classmates.com, launched in 1995, is one of the earliest examples of this type of site. Its founder, Randy Conrads, believed that the web was best suited for reconnecting people with their former schoolmates.

Not long after, AsianAve launched from the chaotic New York apartment where the site‘s six co-founders lived and worked. Though it had a specific demographic—Asian Americans—AsianAve was modeled after a few other early social web experiences, like SixDegrees. The goal was to simulate real life friend groups, and to make the web a fun place to hang out. “Most of Asian Avenue‘s content is produced by members themselves,” an early article in The New York Times describes. “[T]he site offers tool kits to create personal home pages, chat rooms and interactive soap operas.” Eventually, one of the site‘s founders, Benjamin Sun, began to explore how he could expand his idea beyond a single demographic. That’s when he met Omar Wasow.

Wasow was fascinated with technology from a young age. When he was a child, he fell in love first with early video games like Pong and Donkey Kong. By high school, he made the leap to programmer. “I begged my way out of wood shop into computer science class. And it really changed my life. I went to being somebody who consumed video games to creating video games.”

In 1993, Wasow founded New York Online, a Bulletin Board System that targeted a “broad social and ethnic ‘mix’,” instead of pulling from the same limited pool of upper-middle class tech nerds most networked projects focused on. To earn an actual living, Wasow developed websites for popular magazine brands like Vibe and Essence. It was through this work that he crossed paths with Benjamin Sun.

By the mid-1990‘s, Wasow had already gathered a loyal following and public profile, featured in magazines like Newsweek and Wired. Wasow’s reputation centered on his ability to build communities thoughtfully, to explore the social ramifications of his tech before and while he built it. When Sun approached him about expanding AsianAve to an African American audience, a site that would eventually be known as BlackPlanet, he applied the same thinking.

Wasow didn’t want to build a community from scratch. Any site that they built would need to be a continuation of the strong networks Black Americans had been building for decades. “A friend of mine once shared with me that you don’t build an online community; you join a community,” Wasow once put it, “BlackPlanet allowed us to become part of a network that already had centuries of black churches and colleges and barbecues. It meant that we, very organically, could build on this very powerful, existing set of relationships and networks and communities.”

BlackPlanet offered its users a number of ways to connect. A central profile—the same kind that MySpace and Facebook would later adopt—anchored a member’s digital presence. Chat rooms and message boards offered opportunities for friendly conversation or political discourse (or sometimes, fierce debate). News and email were built right into the app to make it a centralized place for living out your digital life.

By the mid-2000’s BlackPlanet was a sensation. It captured a large part of African Americans who were coming online for the first time. Barack Obama, still a Senator running for President, joined the site in 2007. Its growth exploded into the millions; it was a seminal experience for black youth in the United States.

After being featured on a segment on the The Oprah Winfrey Show, teaching Oprah how to use the Internet, Wasow‘s profile reached soaring heights. The New York Times dubbed him the “philosopher-prince of the digital age,” for his considered community building. “The best the Web has to offer is community-driven,” Wasow would later say. He never stopped building his community thoughtfully. and they in turn, became an integral part of the country’s culture.

Before long, a group of developers would look at BlackPlanet and wonder how to adapt it to a wider audience. The result were the web’s first true social networks.

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Chapter 9: Community published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[starlitsummermoon]

Ikemen Sengoku: Masamune X MC - Sleepless Nights (NSFW)

I’m so happy with how this turned out! I freaking LOVE Masamune! Mmmm!

Ahem.... anyways, please enjoy! ^_^

“Welcome back, Lord Masamune,” Kojuro greeted his master as he closed the sliding door behind him. Nodding in response, the warlord immediately headed towards the back of the manor to his room. The war council he just left lasted late into the night as they attempted to plan another strategy to deflect the enemy forces. He normally enjoyed these meetings, but there was once person missing. The chatelaine of Azuchi castle, Manami.

He had grown accustomed to seeing her frequently about the castle, but it had been a couple days since he had seen her, being busy with Nobunaga’s many meetings, all which she was unable to attend. Constantly thinking of her gorgeous smile, he worried he would soon forget it.

Parchment lied scattered around Manami along the floor as she sketched away, the flame from the lantern next to her burning what little light it could offer. Her mind had been running rampant these last few days with any poisonous thought. ‘Can I survive in this time long enough? Will Sasuke survive? What if I don’t want to go back? What am I saying?! I have to go back! But, what about... can I leave him knowing I’m falling in love with him..’

She accomplished her work requested by Nobunaga to keep her mind busy, but when she was left with an empty check list, she locked herself up in her room, drawing away her worries and bad thoughts, the best therapy she had access to in this time. She pushed out anything from completed works to rough sketches, fashion designs to animals, even people, especially one in particular, the one person who kept lingering in mind, intruding her thoughts.

Her current sketch was another fashion design, inspired by the clothes she had seen since she arrived here. Ever since the day she received one of her own designs made by the request of Masamune as a gift for her, her imagination sparked with infinite ideas! The thought of transforming a modern outfit to one which would fit this period was amazing and inspiring.

As her brush effortlessly applied ink to her parchment, her head snapped towards her door that suddenly flew open without warning. Masamune entered, nearly slamming the door behind him as he hastily closed the distance between them, kneeling down to her level on the floor.

“Masamune?” Manami felt her fingers tremble with his sudden, unexpected appearance as he peered into her eyes with his own. His face was so close, tempting her to nudge close enough to him, to feel his lips. Before she could act on her thoughts, he rested his forehead in the crook of her neck, his ear firmly pressed against her neck, breathing in her scent. With her heart thundering in her chest, she had no doubt he could hear it.

What felt like hours were mere seconds before he finally pulled away, his face relaxing into a smile, hoping she would be generous enough to return the gesture. How could she not? It was impossible for her to resist his charm. Whether it was from joy or surprise, she giggled, allowing him to see what he wanted most, her gorgeous smile.

“That’s right, kitten,” Masamune chuckled as he reached up to grab her chin, “smile for me.” Her giggles faded, but her smile refused to leave as his thumb stroked her chin, teasing the edge of her bottom lip. ‘I want to hear you purr for me.’

“I thought you were going to be stuck in war councils for the rest of your life,” she teased, her eyes shooting off to the side as she felt her cheeks flare up from his closeness. “I tried to visit every chance I could, but you were never there.”

“Nothing can keep me away from you for too long,” his husky tone sent chills down her spine as she attempted to hold in a sigh, afraid it would release the predator onto its prey, but it was too late. He leaned in close, her eyes started to close with anticipation. Having their faces so close, he was able to examine  her features, including her tired eyes. Concern suddenly took over. “You haven’t been worrying too much about me, have you?”

“What?” Manami whispered, disappointed to not feel him against her. “I always worry about you, but there have been other things on my mind. I guess I haven’t been getting enough sleep lately.” Her smiled faded away, tears forming at the edges of her eyes as they darted over to the mosaic of paper on the floor. Following her gaze, he took notice to her art which he adored so much.

“I don’t understand what there is to be upset about,” he reached out and grabbed one of her rough sketches, “you’re surrounded by such stunning art.” Turning to her, he kissed away the tears at the corners of her eyes, licking the salty sweetness from his lips.

“Do you really think so?” she knew he liked her work, but it still filled her with pride every time he praised it. “I guess you’re right. I’ve been drawing to make me forget my troubles.” Gathering up all her drawings from the floor, he lied down directly behind her, his pelvis and thighs cradling her lower back as he propped himself up on his elbow.

“I want to keep all these,” he said as he began to examine each one, “Keep going, I want to see you smile again.” Blushing at his compliment, she grabbed her brush and parchment and continued where she left off before the one-eyed dragon burst into her room.

The room fell silent, only the sound of her brush and shuffling papers filled the room. Her heart pounded in her chest, her eyes straying from her paper to his face every few minutes, often catching him staring back at her. When their eyes did meet, he smirked, burning her cheeks red as she darted back to her drawing.

‘Stay calm, girl! No need to get carried away, just finish this and let him look through-’ Then, the thought of her other drawings popped into her mind. “OH, NO!’

Cold electricity shot through her body as she turned back towards him, ready to snatch the papers from his hands, but it was too late. He was eyeing a drawing of two figures, a male and female. This particular paper had multiple poses featuring the same characters who had a uncanny resemblance to her and Masamune. One pose was him holding her from behind, the one below was a sweet kiss. The last one, the one he kept his gaze on, was Masamune’s figure pinning her to a wall or the floor, his lips against her neck as her face expressed pleasure. Embarrassed, she happened to glance over to the pile he had already gone through, and right on top was a similar drawing. He had seen them all.

Frozen in fear, she waited for his response, but he stared at the drawing for a short eternity before finally looking up to her, his once gentle gaze now full of desire and passion.

“Very creative,” his knee-weakening husky tone had returned as he sat up, “If I knew you were thinking about me this much, I would’ve skipped every war council to be with you.” Shifting his body towards her, she reacted with shuffling away from him, instigating his play mode.

“M-Masamune,” Manami’s voice squeaked as she crawled backwards from him, each crawl she made away from him, he made two towards her. She couldn’t deny her want for him, her need, but she wasn’t expecting it to happen like this. “It’s not what it looks like!”

“Oh?” her knees nearly hit his chest as he gained up on her, “the message is clear, lass. It’s good to know some things in the future haven’t changed much from this time.” The drumming of her heart seemed to take every ounce of her energy as her pace slowed, her arms growing weak. A piece of her wanted to be caught, his strong arms holding her close to him as he ripped her kimono to pieces, while the other part wanted to continue the chase, building up the anticipation.

At last, his hands were one either side of her hips, yet she kept shuffling away from him, a girly squeal escaping her lips as he growled after her. She wasn’t letting him catch her just yet. Wanting his kitten in his grasps now, he sped up his pace, catching her off guard.

The sudden burst in speed messed with her own pace, causing her wrist to catch the sleeve of her kimono, pulling it down passed her shoulder. The two stopped, the empty silence filling the room as their eyes gaped. Her now bare skin glowed in the flickering lantern light. His eye shifted from her shocked face to her bare chest, the collar of her kimono stopping at the very edge of her breast. Her eyes glanced down to his almost bare chest. All that shuffling loosed the top of his kimono as well, exposing his tone muscles.

Meeting his eyes with hers once again, she realized how close he was to her. Her leaping heart was almost too much to bare. ‘He’s so close!’ Her body decided for her. Grabbing onto the edge of his collar, she pulled him to her, locking her lips with his. She wanted him more than anything, more than returning back to her own time.

Feeling his smile curl against her kiss, he adjusted and lowered himself and her to the floor, his hungry kiss consuming her as his forceful lips moved against her mouth. Longing for this moment, he tasted every bit of her kiss, tugging on her bottom lip with his teeth. It didn’t take long for her tongue to greet his as he slipped his inside, dancing with each other.

“Ma-Masamune!” she panted heavily between breaths, her fingers entangling themselves in his wild, chestnut hair. He moaned at the call of his name, exciting her more. Once again, her body acted for her and bucked her hips into his.

“Easy, kitten,” Masamune breathed in her ear, his lips ticking her earlobe. Reaching up to her face, he gently stroked her cheeks with the back of his fingers. Although his knuckles were rough against her soft skin, she loved it. Pulling away from her neck, his eye found hers, drowning in them as he smiled at her. Drawn in by his gorgeous face, she reached up and cupped his cheek.

“I love you,” Manami whispered, tears forming in her eyes again, her smile hurting her cheeks. He grabbed her hand and pulled it away from his face, kissing the tender skin of her wrist, keeping their gaze locked together. His teeth carefully grazed her skin, sending goosebumps all over her arm.

“There has been no one in the world to make me feel this way,” he whispered, his smiling growing softer, “You must be a special lass to do this to me.” She accepted this as a confession of his love; no better words could have left his lips.

Not even giving her a chance to retort, his mouth quickly found her collarbone, releasing a gasp from her lips as the the tip of his tongue ran along her skin. Freeing her hand from his grasp, he used it to slid his fingers underneath the loose cloth of her kimono, sliding it over her shoulders, leaving her torso completely naked. As her back arched into him, he was able to swiftly untie her obi, the kimono leaving her completely exposed.

Sitting up from her, he quickly removed his own clothing, throwing it as far as he could. Manami gazed at his body, covered in random scars. His tone muscles stood out in what light the lantern offered. Running the tips of her fingers across his skin, touching his scars, he licked his lips at the sweet sensation. Her knees locked together, finally noticing that they were both completely naked before each other. He frowned at this little action.

Hovering over her, he divided her knees, letting her legs rub up his sides. Finding her wrists, he pinned them above her head. He watched her breasts move with her heavy panting as she awaited what was to come.

‘Am I... frightening her?’

“I want to be the only man who can see you like this,” Masamune boasted, his hands tightening around her wrists, feeling her skin move against him as she writhed beneath him. “I’m going to make you mine.”

“Take me,” she hoarsely called out, her eyes overflowing with desire. His teeth found her nipples and softly grazed them before suckling on them, alternating between rough and soft. “Aaah! Masamune!” He got exactly what he wanted; his kitten purring for him; begging for him to continue.

Shifting himself around, he was easily able to slide himself inside her; the excitement and build up made her soaking wet. Sharply inhaling at the sudden heat he felt around his member, he slowly moved into her, to be sure he wasn’t causing her any pain. Her legs squeezed at his sides and her back arched into him, bouncing her supple breasts into his face. This was everything she ever wanted; her man to herself.

His thrusts gradually became harder, rougher. Her body moved with his, trying to free her wrists from his locking grasp, but he wasn’t planning on setting her free just yet. Her head thrust back against the floor, her body arched up as high as it could go.

“Aaa-mmm!” He captured her blissful moans with his lips and tongue, the heat he felt now incinerating! Moaning with her, his body quivered with the rush of pleasure. Breaking their kiss, he peered at her face, beaded with sweat as she panted heavily. Her eyes held raw passion as she gazed at him.

“I’m- I’m sorry,” Manami panted. With her body still shaking beneath him, he placed his lips on the crook of her neck and started to suck hard. Still sensitive to any pleasure or touch, she moaned in his ear and nearly felt another eruption of pleasure in her core.

“Playtime’s not done yet, kitten,” Masamune growled in her ear, sending more chills down her sweat-covered body. Keeping a strong hold onto her wrists, he pulled her up with him. Adjusting himself once again, he guided her body to straddle him as he placed his hands on the floor behind him for support.

“Masamune,” she purred his name, stroking his lips with her delicate fingers. Snapping his teeth, he caught one of her fingers, gently biting down one it. “Oooh!” He loved hearing her moan. Escaping from his toothy trap, she placed her hands on his shoulders and her knees on either side of his hips.

She got a little too excited, now it was her turn see his lips twist with pleasure, his eye beg for more. With no warning, she began to move herself into him. It took a few bounces, but she found the sweet spot. His face contorted at her mercy, his muscles tensing with easy movement of her hips, the squeeze of her hands on his shoulders, the bouncing of her breasts in front his face, just far enough he couldn’t reach them.

“Nnn!” Masamune’s growl was softer than before, almost as if he was attempting to match her purr. Her hot fluid was starting to glide down his hips, exciting him more. He began to match her thrust with his own, intensifying the pleasure.

“Oh!” Manami gasped at the new development. “Masa-mmmune! Don’t stop!” Only able to deliver a few more thrusts, he had no choice. His muscles hardened as he grit his teeth, feeling her tight core become even tighter around him as he ejected himself deep inside her. His body collapsed against the floor, her hands landing on his chest, surprised that he would just fall like that.

“Manami,” he panted, feeling her head move up and down with his chest as she relaxed against his body. Their fluids ran down her inner thigh, mixing together, as she slid off of him, but he stopped her, pulling her back to him. Their sweaty bodies felt cold against the night air. His breath sent a wave of cool air down her back as he held her close, never wanting to let her go.

“Masamune,” she purred, bringing her face up to his ear, tugging at his earlobe with her teeth before trailing kisses down his neck. She could almost hear his smirk appear on his face. “Kitten still wants to play.” Her hands traveled down his tone chest to his torso, feeling every inch of his muscles and scars. Shifting up, keeping her knees tight against his hips, she could still feel how hard he still was inside her.

Dawn was nearly approaching and Masamune was needed at another war council meeting. It was difficult getting ready with Manami clinging to him, but it was just as fair to say that he clung to her like glue. Getting dressed was a drawn out task for he showered each piece of her bare skin in kisses and nips. By the time she was able to properly put on her kimono, her skin was blessed with various red marks on her neck, breasts, and even her navel. He was leaving with a few new battle scars, himself.

Finally allowing him to finishing getting ready, she quickly grabbed another piece of paper and sketched out another picture, this one just for him. Having some time to make it look presentable, she wanted him to leave with it. Just as he finished getting ready, leapt up to him before he could see the drawing. Stealing another kiss, or two or three, Masamune headed towards the door.

“Here,” Manami handed him a folded up piece of parchment. “In case we can’t see each other for a little while because of all these war councils.” He smiled as he accepted her gifted, placing in the breast of his kimono before pulling her into one last embrace.

“I’ll make sure I’m not gone too long,” he brought his lips to her ear, squeezing her his arms, “I can’t let my kitten get lonely.” She giggled at his teasing, looking up to meet his eye only to be greeted by his lips. “I need to get going. I’ll be sure to find you once everything’s done.”

“I believe this should finally get things going,” Nobunaga announced. “Rest up.” All the warlords were exhausted from the constant meetings, and all were looking forward to a much needed vacation from this room and each other.

“Poor Manami,” Hideyoshi teased as he came up to Masamune, “I hope she hasn’t forgotten you in all this time.”

“She could’ve fallen for another man, at this point,” Mitsuhide chimed in, “a less reckless man.”

“All I hear is the chattering of hungry monkeys,” Masamune laughed. Once the other warlords were out of sight, he pulled out the piece of paper Manami had given him before he left; he had yet to even see what she drew for him. The instant the folds exposed the ink, his face burned red.

The contents of the paper held a drawing of Manami, riding Masamune as she did the night before. Though this was what she considered a ‘rough sketch,’ she made sure to put the details of his muscles and their expressions. His heart nearly burst through his armor as he quickly folded it back up before bolting down the hallway. His lips licking his devilish smirk as he flew back to Manami’s room.

‘I love this woman!’ he screamed in his mind.

[civilorange]

Multiples of 5 (QoE specific, if you can)! :D

5. Books or authorsthat influenced your style the most.Ayn Rand, was a big influence, just because I devoured her books in high school—Icouldn’t get enough. I really liked the Kathy Mallory detective novels in highschool too—going back and reading them makes me go “oh, wow, this is different”but it wasn’t your typicalprotagonist, or at least, it didn’t seem that way when I was all of fifteenyears old.

10. 10. Pick a writerto co-write a book with and tell us what you’d write about. Oh, easy. @fictorium — for sure.I’ll just enjoy the snappy dialog and wonderful characterization from her, andthen I’ll contribute an unnecessary five paragraph introspection on like, a bagel,or whatever—how breakfast makes our protagonist feel. Let’s see, I’m going to hit up a random plot generator to getour book’s synopsis—Christina Milhouseused to have it all—the fame, the fortune, the family, and many other things startingwith F—until it all came crashing down and she was left to the generalobscurity of being a B-list celebrity. How does someone deal with becomingnothing more than the answer to local Wednesday night bar trivia? “Who used tomatter for five hundred, Alex.” Enter a disgraced FBI agent with a penchant forassuming the worst—and usually being right. Agent Nicole Michael—everyone trustsa woman with two first names—knows the only way to save the world, and stop asuspiciously Illuminati-like organization, is finding the Arcadia. That just sohappens to be a piece of set memorabilia that Christina stole—allegedly, herlawyers still insist—a decade prior. Murder, mystery, eBay, and someone’sex-wife—Nicole’s—may just be involved in the plot.

[random plot generator: mid-fortiesfemale b-list celebrity who is dishonest, early fifties female disgraced fbiagent who is head-strong, story begins in a bar, something important has beenstolen, it’s a story about loyalty, your character bites off more than she canchew.]

15. Where does yourinspiration come from?Oh, I don’t know, meng. I’m scatter-brained enough that half the time I’ll getan idea from something completely unrelated. Or it’ll just happen while writing, since I usually don’t have much of a planwhen I sit down to write.

20. Post a snippet ofa WIP you’re working on.Kara had always been a mosaic of brokenpieces—beautiful shards of a person shattered young. It was world changing forClark to finally see it, for him to realize who his cousin had always been;behind the smile, and within the laugh. She’d held missing worlds in her heartfor most of her life, it nestled deep and true when she was still only learninghow to be herself.

25. Linear ornon-linear, and why?Non-linear. I think it gives a story texture. I do it because I don’t think Ihave the capacity to follow a plot from point A to point B. I get lost in theweeds. Jumping around makes everything seem fresh, every feeling strongerbecause it’s singled out—like each little scene is amidst an ocean ofpossibility. I’ve always been a fan of detective novels, and shows, andnon-linear just feels like a big who doneit to me.

40. Original Fictionor Fanfiction, and why?They both have their highlights—I’ve done a bunch for both, though all mylonger stories are fanfiction. I like fanfiction because you get to touch aworld that’s already there—it’s already existing in the minds of those reading.You kind of get to go, “Hey, this thing we both love? This is how I see it.”Because you’re both fans, and I think that’s awesome.

45. Worst piece offeedback you’ve ever gotten.It was in sophomore year of high school. Against every instinct I signed up fora creative writing class—Amanda (my wife, though we were just buddies in 10thgrade) had joined and I was a sucker and signed up to spend the period withher. It was full of writing snobs who were like manic with their comma placement,and like very critical of any style not their own. We did peer reviews and thegirl I got partnered with basically told me I was writing wrong, and I was under the impression that wasn’t possible.Especially not in creative writing. I would have understood her being like, “yo,your grammar is garbage” because I haven’t found a sentence I didn’t thinkneeded four commas, but just straight up wrong.Nope.

50. Weirdest storyidea you’ve ever had.I once had to write something about inspiration and I remember it involved aninternational soccer game, the song “Stacy’s Mom” and au gratin potatoes.

New ask game for writers. Ask me!

[arccamagazine]

‘Where’s the chaos gone?’ An interview with Fleur Adderley by Sophie Wilson

Where’s the chaos gone?

An interview with Fleur Adderley

“We want to rebel against what we grew up knowing” editor of Arcca magazine, Fleur Adderley explains. We are sitting in a dimly lit Tudor café on Tonbridge High Street, a town situated just close enough to London for it to be known for its sad commuters. However, there is nothing at all sad or provincial about Adderley, or the magazine that she founded and edits. Arcca began in 2015, when Adderley was just sixteen years old. What started as a project between friends has expanded into a celebration of youth, art and beautiful chaos. It went into print earlier this year, joining the brigade of independent publications rejecting the accessibility of digital media. Magazines like Polyester and Sunday Girl have revived print culture for the internet generation, and Arcca has followed suit. “Everything is so easy to access now, so it starts to lose its sense of importance. Print keeps things precious” Adderley tells me, reflecting the thoughts of many young people today. This obsession with keeping things precious can be seen in Generation Z’s love for vinyl records and film photography; both of which are cherished by the archetypal reader of Adderley’s magazine.

Arcca is an organised chaos; a collage of voices pieced together by Adderley to create a mosaic-like finished product. It lets people say what they want to say and isn’t afraid to be uncoventional. “I think there should be more artists who are confronting political ideas with a really controversial approach” Adderley states. Being inspired by the 1960s and well read in philosophy, it is easy to see why she feels this way. The political climate is so chaotic it seems that the art world is still figuring out how to respond to it. Through Arcca, Adderley wants to actively challenge beauty standards and the way we confront the world. Her ambitious business mind keeps Arcca’s creative chaos in check. “I’m going to have to have no fear and just go into independent shops in London and show them what it is and if that’s a success then that’s how I’ll start making it grow in other cities when I’m at uni” she says boldly. This fearlessness drives Arcca in both a business sense and a creative one. Adderley’s confidence is backed up by the daring articles and photographs that define Arcca. Her vision for the magazine is outstanding considering she is still studying for her A-Levels, with hope to study English and Philosophy at Bristol next Autumn. However, the rise of Arcca is also peppered with much more unconventional marketing techniques. Adderley recounts how her and her friend ripped up sugar packets in a coffee shop to make business cards to hand out to people around East Dulwich. Anecdotes like these are reminders of the magazine’s authentic beginnings.

Adderley’s first inspiration was her big sister, who used to make up games for them to play together. “We played this amazing fairy game that I’ll never forget where we were all warrior fairies. I couldn’t get over how she could come up with all these ideas on the spot. We wrote a whole story about the game we played.” There has been a creative thread running through Adderley’s life ever since. Not only does she work on Arcca, but she makes films and music too. It seems of growing importance for millenials to take a multimedia approach to creativity. Occupations no longer fall into such neat categories, and instead there are a growing number of people who fit into the vague bracket of being a creative. This umbrella term aptly describes the sort of people that Arcca gives a voice to. “I’m really proud to have created something that does unite so many young people” says Adderley, who dreams of creating a Warhol style Factory to nurture young creatives.

Keeping motivated to pursue every creative avenue must be hard work, but Adderley takes it all in her stride by finding inspiration in the simplest fragments of the world around her. “I always force myself to look up because I always see people walking around and looking at the floor and I just can’t get my head round that” she explains. Adderley finds inspiration everywhere she looks, if she looks at it in the right way. We are satiated with images and writing that aims to inspire us, but it is important to be able to step back and look at the things in your life that you might not expect to inspire you.

When I ask Adderley where she hopes to be in five years time, she replies, “I’m going to carry on dreaming.” She may have asked, “Where’s the chaos gone?”, but if you look closely you can see that it is all around us. Arcca creates a space for people to harness that chaos and turn it into something thought provoking and beautiful.

[titoslondon-blog]

New Post has been published on Titos London

#Blog New Post has been published on http://www.titoslondon.co.uk/re-booting-chloe-for-the-woman-of-2018/

Re-booting Chloé for the woman of 2018

“I love Chloé!” announced Natacha Ramsay-Levi at our third meeting—just as she had done when we were chatting in Paris about her work at Balenciaga and her four-year-old son; and then again when there was a Chloé party in New York with 115 young, lively and interesting women in the world of art and music.

Now we were together in London’s Selfridges store, where she was doing a meet-and-greet for clients with Chloé CEO Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye.

And, of course, Ramsay-Levi, 37, was the mirror image of the kind of clothes she will send out this week in Paris—her second outing. The look was of a silken blouse loosely touching the body, a brief, barely-there skirt and bare legs right down to the solid leather boots. A woman who walks fast forward.

“For the first show I wanted it to be a mosaic of what I believe is really relevant for Chloé and what I like to work on—little chapters, two or three looks—a lot of layers and a lot of different things,” she said. “But I really wanted this second show to be my point of view. It’s going to be much more focussed.”

She then talked about the image of a 21st century Chloé, and her work with Steven Meisel and his cinematography.

How does she feel about—at last—being in the limelight after working with Nicolas Ghesquière, first for the transformation of Balenciaga and then as the creative go-between at Louis Vuitton? Is there a sense of freedom?

“I love Chloé, which is important,” she says. “It’s always been on my radar and I think it is very interesting to have a frame. I am such a ‘fashion kid’—there is nothing that I don’t like. I have learned, growing older, not to say, ‘No! Never!’ You can always change your mind and I like the fact that it is an ongoing conversation—a bit like taking the past to make it into something that is relevant to the future. I am not using the past as a ghost, but it is the way Sci-Fi uses it—taking the past to make what is the future.”

Her first Chloé show last September had a statement in her notes that claimed: “Chloé girls have a suave mix of sophistication and humility—they are timeless but never conventional”. It sounded rather like herself, and I gave her full marks for a modern and very French take on the whimsical Flower Child. There were high-necked tops with full sleeves and a little skirt that had French allure, as did a sharp-cut velvet trouser and a more dreamy 1970s style dress with prints of feathers. And, of course, the all important handbags.

“The first show was very broad and about a multiplicity of women, but now it is more psychological—about getting into a play of selves,’” she explained. Then adding: “And for me, the Chloé girl is very French but for a lot of people she is very English—because all the the designers were.”

Ramsay-Levi was referring to a string of British designer names including Stella Mccartney, Phoebe Philo, who just left Céline, and Clare Waight Keller, who had previously been at Chloé and has now joined Givenchy.

And what about Karl Lagerfeld, who was the hardly known designer who put Chloé on the map back in the 1970s?

‘’My first idea about Karl is the way he is totally connected to the French cinema,” the current designer explained. “It was a very 1970s house, very bourgeois and perfect in a way—but with Karl, it becomes a bit scandalous with the things he was playing with. And he was there for 15 years!”

“Really, when I started my research for Chloé, the Karl Lagerfeld years blew me over. It is incredible because it could be a woman of today.”

As someone who remembers a Karl show at Chloé, when he had torrents of water from a ‘shower’ worked in embroidery on the back of a slim evening dress, I hope to see some of these ideas re-made.

De la Bourdonnaye, who has arranged exhibitions of Chloé photographed in its early years by photographer Guy Bourdin, has throughout his tenure tried to keep the spirit of the brand’s original founder, the late Gaby Aghion, who had Egyptian origins. But like any other fashion company founded in history, there has to be a constant refreshing,

So who actually is the Chloé woman for 2018?

“I think it is not just one woman but women,” Ramsay-Levi says. “The principle of Chloé is to be a brand which comes into your life in an organic and natural way. There really is a sense of appropriation—and that is very important. On the advertising campaign, for example, we worked on different personalities. We had five different ones.’

I ask Ramsay-Levi if she thinks that there could be a single Chloé woman today, or perhaps two—one boyish, the other ultra feminine. And the designer comes up with her secret ‘weapon’ in her search for the Chloé ‘girl”.

“There is still a divide between mannish and feminine—I definitely see it,” she says. “I would say that my step-daughter is from the boyish side—I mean she is feminine and she doesn’t want to look like a boy. She is gorgeous and sometimes she puts lipstick on—she is 13. But yes, she wants to be comfortable and she likes the idea of being dressed the same way as her boyfriend. In this idea of equality, there are girls who have already stated equality by the way they dress.”

And her own life? How does she feel about being a working mother for her young son?

“First, being a mother is in the centre of it,” she says, “but also to accomplish what I want, I have been raised with the idea that you also are working.”

1/7 Suzy Menkes and Natacha Ramsay-Levi

Image: Natasha Cowan

Natacha Ramsay-Levi

Image: Alastair Nicol

CEO Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye with Natacha Ramsay-Levi

Image: Getty

Chloé at New York's SAKS Fifth Avenue

Image: Getty

Chloé spring/summer 2018

Image: InDigital

Chloé spring/summer 2018

Image: InDigital

Natacha Ramsay-Levi at Chloé spring/summer 2018

Image: InDigital

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