#(Using that as a shorthand too to keep it from showing up Elsewhere)

[koushirouizumi]

{Aut in J.P.} - "With the Light" {2000~2001} (Series originally ran until Jun. 2k10)

{My Notes + Commentary below}

[eerythingisshaka]

Ride

[Rio x Reader]

Word Count: 3.2k

“Alright, alright party people!  Coming to the stage now is your girl, Candiiii!”  

DJ Thundercat announces a dancer to the stage who sends the house into a frenzy.  Lights dance across her body giving you mere snapshots of what she had going on before the glowing red spotlight revealed her deviant frame. The deep tones of her skin  set a perfect backdrop for the light to catch.  Her smile looked like fangs as she snaked around the stage, eyeing the crowd through the hordes of money raining in front of her.  She shakes her Diana Ross-esque hair around to rev up the crowd even more.

You carry your drink tray back to the bar and lean back, enjoying the view.

“She’s  a fucking sight, ain’t she?”  The bartender, Jules says to you while popping open a can of Coke.

“Always.  I don’t know how she does it every single time…”  your voice trails as she climbs the pole, leaning back into a move called the Eye Opener.  A guy in the front row looks like he wants to eat his chair, he’s so enraptured.

“Practice and passion is all it takes.  And when your money is up, a good doctor doesn’t hurt,”  Jules says before tapping your shoulder.  “You know a drop is going down tonight.”

“Really?”  you say with worry.  “Is it the same guy as before or someone else?”

“Someone new.  He may be working with the guy from before but since he got his job back as a cop he has to keep his nose a little cleaner.”

You snort.  “Yeah right.  So what is this guy's deal?”

Jules leans closer to you.  “So you know Aviator?  Last I heard, he is behind on some payments, plural!  How he is still breathing is anybody’s guess but some dude named Rio is coming in with his crew to set up a payment plan.”

“Well that’s nice...right?”  

Jules looks at you like you shat an egg.  “Are you kidding me?  That’s just code for curtains.  Sleeping with the fishes.  Giving him a Colombian necktie.  That’s why I’m telling you in case something big goes down.  Get your ass far away from the action as possible.”

You thank Jules as she sets a couple drinks on your tray for you to serve.  You adjust your red fishnet stocking rolling down your thigh and head over to table 8. 

“Thanks honey.”  One middle aged balding man says, holding out a $10 bill.

You smile nice and wide and take hold of the bill, but he won’t let go.

“Does this get me to see a little of what those cups are holding in honey?”  He palms your breast over your pleather cups before you could even clapback.  So instead you clapped the back of his shiny noggin.

With the $10 in your possession, you push in down your cleavage.  “If you like it rough, just ask.  But if you like it hard, try again.  If swallowing glass is your kink.”   His partner applauds, laughing at his friends mishap.

You briskly walk away, heart pounding in your chest.  You hate confrontation, but you refuse to be walked over in this business.  Certainly not by some cheap regular who tips to get his ass beat by women.  

You notice some figures entering in your peripheral.  The front is too dark to see but there are several heads standing by which you find odd.  

You find Jules for another drink order.  “Hey, do you recognize those guys?”

Jules squints at them as they come forward.  A stray light finds the face of one in the middle.

“Shit.  I think that’s him.  Rio.”  

You look over but Jules pinches you.  “Don’t call attention to yourself!  Be stealthy about it.”  She sets two more Cokes on your tray and shoos you away.  

You walk more carefully than you regularly do, nervous about the new guests.  You set the drinks down for the patrons who thank you and send you off.  When you turn around you almost bump into a figure.

“Shit, sorry,” you say before freezing in place.  This Latino dude with a neck tattoo peers at you like he was expecting you.  

“No, it’s no problem.  Excuse me will suffice.”  His voice sounds like when you strained your voice at a concert the previous night, raspy and low..  You wait a minute for him to laugh or smile to let you know he is joking but enough time passed to tell you that wasn’t the case.

“Well...excuse…”  You couldn’t bring yourself to the end of that phrase as you turned to walk away.  Is this fool joking?

“You didn’t take my drink order, Ms. Waitress,” he calls out to you.  Amazingly his low, gruff voice is very distinct over Megan thee Stallion playing in the background.

You walk up to him, looking him straight in his eyes.  You can’t lie that it is impressive how his eyes trained on your never wavered elsewhere.  Especially in a skin tight strapless one piece that hugged every curve like a straight jacket, how could he be so focused on a drink?

“Sure what can I get you?” you ask sharply.

“Don’t you need a pen and paper?”  He asks.

“I’ll remember it,”  you say with a slight slip of attitude.

His smile somehow does not break his stone glare.  It actually warms his features like a hearth in the dead of winter.  He must’ve been adorable as a child, you thought.  That smile would make anyone spoil him.

“I’ll make it easy for you then.   Get me and partners some top shelf whiskey, straight.  Matter of fact, bring the bottle and some shot glasses.”  

“We don’t serve alcohol, only Coke products.  Where will you be sitting?”  you ask, mouth turning dry.

He walks beside you, stopping just inches from your ear.  “Bring it to VIP.”

You let out a heavy breath when his crew deserts you and head for Jules at the bar who is steaming.

“What did I say?”  she hisses.

“I know!  But he walked up on me!  Look, he asked for alcohol.  A bottle of whiskey for shots.  What the hell do I do?”

Jules reaches under the counter, pulling out a brand new bottle of Johnny Walker and some clean shot glasses.

“For VIP we do, we just don’t advertise.  And he is as VIP as it gets.  Don’t do anything stupid.  Girls have come out of their having done shit they couldn’t even talk to God about.”

Your heart dips at the thought of what could happen and your usually steady hands tremble under the weight of the bottle and glasses balancing on your tray.  The velvet rope in front of the heavy curtains that lead to VIP is unlatched by a bodyguard who doesn’t even look at you: stoic as the Queen’s royal guard.you push open the curtain and see Rio sitting on the purple lounge couch, legs spread and posture relaxed.  Everyone is quiet.

He looks at you, and only you.  “There she is.  Thanks for pulling this favor for me Ms. Waitress.”  

He motions you over to him and you obey, laying the tray down on the glass table in front of him.

“Would you mind pouring it for me?  My wrist ain’t what it used to be and that bottle is pretty heavy,” he says, rubbing it for emphasis.

He doesn’t come off as weak in any sense of the word, but you oblige his request.  You give him a small smile and crack open the seal, filling the room with the glug of the bottle filling five shot glasses.

“You accept tips, right?”  He asks, reaching into his pocket to pull out a roll of bills.

You stand there with your hands folded in front of you trying not to stare.  “Well, if it’s offered.”

He nods slowly pulling a couple hundreds off.  “I’ll give you this if you take these shots with me.”

He lays down the money on the tray and looks up at you waiting.  You stutter anxiously.

“I-I thought you and-and your crew were drinking?”  

“If we were, we would.  But I like to keep them sober on the clock, so I figured we could indulge.”  He picks up a glass of the brown liquor.  “Sit down for me.”

You do so hesitantly, keeping mind to leave space between you and him.  He picks up a glass and hands it to you.

“I...don’t hold my liquor well,”  you confess.

“I don’t mind.”  He lifts the glass to his lips, knocking his head back swiftly and firmly sets the emptied shot on the table.

“Do I have a choice here?  We are shorthanded out there,” you lied, trying to see if any mercy was in his heart but he just stares.  You can see his jaw tighten over your resistance, fist balling on the couch.  Could he tell this wasn’t truthful?  Whatever it took to get out of there, you had to do.  The alcohol rushes down your throat a little too fast and although it was smooth, your windpipe just doesn’t agree with liquid going in it.  You go into a mad coughing fit and slam the glass down.  

“Shit, you aren’t good with alcohol for real,”  Rio smiles again, making you relax a bit that he is satisfied.

Rio bobs his head to the music bumping faintly in the background.  “You like this song?”

You shrug.  “It’s cool.”

“You can dance if you want to.  I don’t mind,” Rio leans back to wait for your answer.  You think back to Jules and what Rio can do to people who offends him, but you decide to test something out.

“That’s gotta be an extra $300 on top of that.”  You point at the money, anticipating his reaction.  

Rio smirks.  “$200 for a dance and $300 is you take another shot with me.”

You didn’t hesitate for the drink now, picking it up confidently and holding it up to him for a toast.  He takes his, knocking it against yours with a strong tink.  You down the shot this time without mishap and get ready to move.  

You stand up with your legs widened, letting your hips sway in front of him for a good ass tease, looking back to check on him checking you.  He still only looks at your face.

“You know this outfit isn’t for modesty,”  you say turning to dip low in a squat while holding onto his knees, sliding your hands up his thighs.

He looks cool as ever with a half naked woman climbing on top of his lap.  “I get the most out of someone when they look me straight in my eyes.”

You straddle his lap, feeling his chest, gripping his shoulders.  You work your hips on him slowly.

“Shows honesty.  I like that.”  You play with his ear, feeling his muscle twinge from being ticklish there. 

He shrugs.  “Honest or not, I can tell when I’m being lied to.  Like if someone is trying to screw me or screw with me.”  His arms rest on the back of the couch instead of on your body, making you feel cold and awkward.

“Is that why you’re here?  To meet a dishonest man.”  You whisper in his ear, which must be his thing as you feel some extra friction beneath you rising.  

Rio ignores you.  “You got one more shot left for the $500.”

You shake your head.  “You can have it.  You can touch me too, you know.  Perks of VIP.”  You slide your hand down his bicep to pull his arm around you but he pulls back.

“Take the shot.”  He says firmly.  You stop your dance, reaching for the glass and tipping it back.  You set it down haphazardly with a clatter, running our hands down his chest again.  You weren’t at all phased by his tone, if anything it excites you, makes you clench a little.  The heaviness of intoxication is setting in and you feel loose staring into his eyes.  Your fingers graze his beard, his neck, summoning you to his cologne, maybe he will let you taste him there...

“Rio!  Enjoying the sights I see!”

The new voice snaps you out of your mode as you fly off his lap to the side of him.

“Aviator.  Nice of you to fly in.”  Rio says.  He looks at you and motions his finger for you to come closer.  You do a mscooch, however your leg pulled over his lap is an added touch you don’t expect.

Aviator guffaws.  “Good one!  I was gonna offer you a drink but I see you got one so no need.  On the house, of course.”

“Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?  I haven’t seen you since November,”  Rio says, massaging your leg lightly, like you’re his pet.

“Well the business is slower in the cold months so hey what can you do.”

“The weather?  You think that’s an excuse here?  Do you even own one of them anorak jackets or something?”  Rio asks you as you shake your head no instantly.  You can feel his anger mounting on your leg as his fingers dig deeper in your skin.

“Still, it’s holidays and shit.  Look we can talk about this, but let’s lose the audience, ok?  Send your guys back and let the girl work.”

“She is working, very well might I add.  So you must think I’m dumb.”

Aviator pauses, looking around the room.  “I said we can talk about this privately.  I have a plan.  You, go bus some tables.”

“Get my money Aviator.  You’re overdue.”  He looked bored by this back and forth and ready to end it.  Your body temperature drops when he looks like this.  

Aviator stood there aghast.  “You’re new here, so let me tell you something.  You’re not going to embarrass me like this in front of my employees.  Get your ass up!”  Aviator grabs you by the arm harshly, you twist your ankle trying to keep up, falling to your knees.

You hear the sound of a gun cock as your ankle throbs 

“Aviator, you embarrassed yourself by not paying me.  You’re not the first nor will you be the last owner here so take a guess on what you’re about to do.”

You look up to see Aviator’s hands up and a Glock to his chest.  

“Help Ms. Waitress here up and take her to my car so we can have that privacy you want.”

You try to get up yourself but Aviator already has you.  “Rio, I still have my shift.”

“Aviator’s got you covered, right Avi?”

Aviator curses under his breath before agreeing out loud.  You limp with him out to the Escalade waiting in the alley.  You get in without saying a word as you watch Aviator walk back in, flanked by two of Rio’s goons.  You lean back, elevating your foot on an arm rest until Rio comes out.  When he gets in he tells the driver where to go, looking at you then your ankle. 

“We gotta put ice on that soon.”  Rio says nonchalantly, laying his arm behind your head.. 

“What happened to Aviator?”  You ask quietly.

Rio looks you over.  “You don’t have to worry about that.  Not your problem”

You stare at the city passing you all by, getting dizzy from the motion and drinks earlier, you see Rio once more looking at your body.  

“You have my $500?”  You ask earnestly.  “I didn’t pick it up back there.”

Rio smirks, looking out his window.  “This courtesy ride is nice, right?”

“I didn’t tell you where I lived.”

“Do you wanna go home?”  He asks, piercing his gaze into you.  They feel like they are daring you to say yes, go away, danger ahead and reroute.

“No.  Is it because I didn’t finish the dance?  Cuz that wasn’t my fault.”

“Oh yeah, about that.  I was offering you an exit there.  Go out on the floor, do what you gotta do but the lap dance was very nice.”

You laugh out loud.  “What?!  You didn’t tell me to stop!  What’s wrong with you, so I did that for nothing?”

Rio licks his lips examining you.  “Not for nothing.  You’re wilder than I thought, and I don’t think that’s the whiskey.”

You cross your arms in a huff.  “I wanted the money.  And of course you never acted against it so…”

Rio wags a finger at you.  “I appreciate that.  Going for what you want.  You got a business head on you.  I like that.”

The ride grows quiet as you survey this man.  He acts like an OG despite his age, running a tight operation with his goons.  Even in this car not knowing where you are going after he pulls a gun on your boss, you feel safe with him beside you.  But you had to know what made him tick.

You pull yourself on top of him, kissing him needily, tearing at his neck for his shirt button.

Rio talks through your kisses, gripping your curls in his hands.  “Is this what whiskey does to you?”

You lean back, opening his shirt.  “I want my money.  And if I have to teach you to give it to me, I will.”

Rio’s hands feel across your back and ass and you shiver at the sensation.  “I admit, I am a little hardheaded.”

“I’m very very strong willed”  You lock onto his mouth once more, tasting the liquor you both shared, running your hands along the front of his pants to find the zipper.  It felt so right as his hands guided your hips along his lap, pushing you on your back across the seat.

------

The next morning you wake up in a sea of blankets and pillows, head throbbing as you stare at the late morning sun.

“You get some rest, Ms. Waitress?”  Rio stands at the doorway of the bedroom with his hands in his pockets.

You try to sit up but your head won’t stop rolling.  “God I feel awful.”

“You look it too.”  Rio says, walking up to your side of the bed.  “Wore me out last night.”

You keep the sheets close to your naked chest with regret.  “I can’t believe this.  Did we…”

Rio pauses a little too long before saying,  “Nah, you complained you were dizzy and puked all over my backseat.  Taking your clothes was just part of the clean up.  Had to dock that from your pay unfortunately but got some daytime looks over there if you need.”  Rio points to a tshirt and sweats laying on a chair.

You weren’t about to argue with a gangster over money in his own house, especially if you fucked up his car.  “Thanks, I’ll get ready to go immediately.”

“Ah don’t sweat it.  Oh, and your cut is in the sweatpants pocket.  Hope you get something nice with it.”  

“Wait, did you...kill him?”

He cocks his head to the side.  “Who?” Walking towards the door he says one more thing.  “And, I would keep in touch if I were you.  There’s more where that came from if you’re willing to go after what you want full time.  I’ll see you around.”

When Rio leaves, you get up to put on the shirt and pants, reaching into the pocket.  Magically your $500 became $5,000.  You let out some choice curse words as you thumbed through the bills, thinking back on last night.  Being on your best behavior never paid this good.  And Rio piqued your curiosity enough to see what being bad felt like.

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@chaneajoyyy​

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

The Princess Bride: Facets of Film

Movie-making is a tough and complicated business.  Once you have a studio sold on your pitch and script, there’s changes to be made, casting to be done, lighting choices, changes to the script, sets to find, costumes to make, special effects to prepare, more changes to the script, camera set-up, studio supervision, and then, possibly, more changes to the script.

In a business populated by that many people all working on the same project, every film is a minor miracle that it got made at all.  

As you may have gathered, making a movie is a huge undertaking.  There’s a lot that goes into it: cameras, music, sets, special effects, costumes, and more, managed by a lot of people who are very good at their jobs.  All of these little elements, which don’t seem that important on their own, all go into piecing together a coherent narrative in a way that makes sense, and looks good, to an audience.  

These elements, cinematography, lighting, costuming, special effects, etc., are the elements that can catch the attention of an audience, taking a ‘good’ film, and turning it into a ‘great’ film, thanks to the powers of movie magic.

See, movies are a very visual medium.  You can have a good story and characters in a book, but you have to imagine what it looks like as it moves along.  In a film, you have to watch what someone else made up.  This can be either an advantage or a disadvantage, and the difference is made entirely thanks to production design.  These ‘facets of film’, the trimmings that make a movie a movie, are vital to visual storytelling, enabling casual movie-goers to interpret what the framing of some scenes is trying to tell them.

Most audience members subconsciously internalize things like thematic costume changes, or a musical cue, without putting thought into figuring out what exactly was getting that point across.  The point is, these ‘facets of film’ are not only for filmmakers or movie critics to think about and fawn over: This storytelling shorthand is an important tool that gives the audience all of the information they need to have, without spelling it all out in dialogue.  Westley as the Dread Pirate Roberts wears all black as visual shorthand that he is dangerous, Humperdinck wears fine clothes to establish status and style, even Buttercup, whose clothing is plain when she is with Westley and uncomfortably bedecked when she is with Humperdinck, is dressed in a way that conveys something to the audience.

In other words, it’s very useful.

A good director knows to use these aspects of ‘storytelling shorthand’ well, as opposed to competently.  Too often, directors can decide to focus the production crew, and the movie itself, in the wrong place, attempting to garner praise for production design rather than substance.

There’s nothing wrong with looking good and being a well-done movie from a technical standpoint, but the balance is necessary.  A good director knows that visual storytelling accentuates its story, rather than overshadows it, intended to get the plot across in the most effective way possible, focusing on what is important: the story and characters.

Much like The Princess Bride does.

The Princess Bride isn’t exactly a blockbuster-style film.  There isn’t a huge budget spent on special effects or huge setpieces, but what is in there is done so with a remarkable touch.  Every inch of this film is designed to look like it takes place in a fairy-tale story, not exactly ‘real locations’, but looking like pictures you’d find in a story book.  That extends to the camerawork.

Camerawork is a pretty big deal in film for obvious reasons.  

The way a director uses a camera can tell the audience a lot, using some shots to emphasize different emotions, or even to get across different feelings to the audience.  Filmmakers use editing of these shots together to tell the story, to move the audience’s line of vision so that it is always centered on the action while also helping to set the mood or leave a visual impression on the audience.

So, does The Princess Bride manage that?

Most of the camerawork in The Princess Bride is fairly standard stuff, wide-shots for action, close-ups for dialogue or emotion, establishing shots for a new location, etc.  However, there are a handful of tricks that are notable: natural lighting used in the shots to make them feel open, spacious, and real, contrasting with artificial levels of darkness in the Fire Swamp, or the upwards-facing shot of Fezzik’s impersonation of the Dread Pirate Roberts, seeming to increase his size and formidability.  Other shots, like the coming-into-focus of Westley rising to point his sword at Humperdinck, are equally effective, in uses of ‘subjective camera’.  There are other, more traditional examples: shots of Buttercup’s abduction from above to make her seem even smaller, and establishing ‘relationship’ shots of people on the same level in the same frame, such as the sunset-lit kiss sequences bookending the film.  Even the editing, while being mostly standard, is given a few moments to shine, such as when the Grandfather is trying to find his place in the story after interrupting to make sure the Grandson isn’t frightened by the Shrieking Eels.  

Still, overall, it’s a fairly simple film in terms of visual style.  The cinematography is aimed at one goal: creating a charming, warm, comforting atmosphere that translates well and correctly conveys the mood of the audience.

This is even more so aided by the film’s score.

It’s fairly obvious that a movie’s soundtrack is integral to its success: a good movie can be elevated to iconic levels thanks to a good score (i.e. Jaws, Psycho, Star Wars, etc.).  In other cases, music can be passable, serviceable, without being bad or fantastic.

In the case of The Princess Bride, the score is….interesting, to say the least.  Instead of a traditional ‘fantasy’ score, the soundtrack was composed by Mark Knopfler, the front guitarist for the band Dire Straits (Money for Nothing, Walk of Life), using synthesizers and acoustic guitars to get the sound of the film.  The score, especially both the instrumental and vocal covers of ‘Storybook Love’ (sung by Willy DeVille) is memorable, overall, if nothing to write home about.  The soundtrack does what it is intended to do: set the scene, notably in the scene ‘The Chatty Duelists’, where Inigo and Westley fight to the stings of the music.  The music overall accentuates the grand, sweeping visuals as well as the tense, exciting sequences, keeping the audience in the story very well.

Speaking of grand, sweeping visuals:

The sets of The Princess Bride overall aren’t really ‘sets’ at all.  The ‘Cliffs of Insanity’ were in actuality the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, and even Humperdinck’s castle was actually a real medieval manor house.  From Miracle Max’s shack to the Fire Swamp, to Rugen’s torture chamber, the rest of the settings of The Princess Bride do their job very well, creating a fantastical atmosphere that serves the story admirably.  These aren’t the vivid, magical sets of The Wizard of Oz, designed to create an atmosphere of dreamlike fantasy, rather, the settings of The Princess Bride are more intended to create a feeling of Magical Realism, that it is a storybook, but that the locations look and feel familiar and realistic.  This is helped somewhat by the fact that the film itself doesn’t rely on special effects much at all: aside from the Shrieking Eels and the (rather unrealistic looking) ROUSes (saved by the storybook feel of the entire film), there aren’t any real fantasy-specific special effects that other films might utilize.

There’s more to an immersive movie experience than sets, costumes and music, though.  In the end, no matter how impressive, the special effects, sets and costumes don’t really mean anything if the characters aren’t believable.  The movie really rests on the shoulders of the performers: it’s on the actors to try to sell not only their surroundings and story, but the characters themselves, everything from the personality to the emotions.  

In the case of The Princess Bride?

Cary Elwes’s performance as Westley is lighthearted, emotional, and extremely sincere.  He’s charismatic, charming, and makes you believe that he’s exactly as skilled as the story needs him to be.  He also manages to convince an entire audience of the genuine love he has for Buttercup, and is distinct as both his Westley persona and his ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ persona.  In other words, he’s perfect.

Cary Elwes balances the ‘indestructibility’ that most protagonists seem to possess, seemingly in control of dire situations, as well as the vulnerability necessary for an audience’s sympathy and concern for his well-being, for his goal.  In other words, he manages to pull off a character that seems designed for an earlier time, updating it with a sense of humor and charm that perfectly suits the rest of the film.

Robin Wright is similarly well-suited for Buttercup, as she’s written.  I’ve discussed elsewhere the potential problems presented by Buttercup’s rather uninteresting personality and role in the story, but Buttercup’s Defrosting Ice Queen tendencies are very well conveyed, especially early on.  As I mentioned in other articles, her chemistry with Elwes makes the romance element of the film convincing in the few scenes they have together.  She does a good job with the material given to her, it’s just a shame that there wasn’t more for her to do.

On the other hand, Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya, despite the unconvincing accent, is inspired, with Patinkin bringing both warm humor and ice-cold vengeance and formidability to the role.  Both he and Elwes brought great physicality to their sword-fight sequences, training hard in order to do as much of their own fighting as possible, and it shows in the performances in the final product.  Inigo’s inner conflict is showcased well, with Patinkin providing both the comedic highlights as well as the intense emotional ones, especially his final duel with Rugen.  It is Inigo’s lines which tend to be the most memorable, owing a lot to Patinkin’s iconic delivery.

All three of the main trio play their parts perfectly, but they are only the chief standouts in an entire film full of them.

André René Roussimoff (better known as André the Giant) despite not being an actor in the same vein as the rest of the cast, is iconic as Fezzik.  The instant likeability present in the performance carries strongly throughout the film, with his own fair share of memorable dialogue (which, granted, nearly every member in the cast has).  His physicality isn’t really what makes him such a distinct part of the cast, rather, it’s the character’s heart and humor that makes this performance such an integral part to the film at large.

Similarly (though in the opposite direction), Wallace Shawn is a wonderful choice for Vizzini, his distinct voice and mannerisms giving the character plenty of funny dialogue without entirely removing the threat he poses.  Despite not having a lot of screen time, Shawn manages to make the role iconic instantly, with inflections that make the word ‘inconceivable’ memorable to this day.

Chris Sarandon is perfectly cast as Prince Humperdinck, playing arrogance and control that all come crashing down in the final scene.  Humperdinck is all bark and no bite, appearing confident and competent until he is met by someone who might pose a challenge.  He’s conniving, cold, and disinterested in anything other than his war, making it especially rewarding when he is defeated.

Similarly, Christopher Guest plays Count Rugen with a sophisticated coolness, never really invested in what’s going on or terribly worried about it until that ‘little Spanish brat’ comes for revenge, very well equipped to deliver it.  He plays the final duel scene notably with an increased losing of composure, cluing the audience in to his inevitable demise for the sake of vengeance.

The other characters perfectly hit their mark as well: Billy Crystal and Carol Kane are a comedic team to be reckoned with as Miracle Max and Valerie, with other special standouts including Peter Cook as the Impressive Clergymen (a scene stealer with only one appearance), and Peter Falk and Fred Savage as the Grandfather and the Grandson, respectively.

Every character in The Princess Bride comes across exactly as they should: as characters in a fairytale, fondly looked back on from a place of adulthood.  Each performance is perfectly suited to each character and the type of movie that they are in, with every performance hitting a mix of sincerity and drollness.  These performances aren’t necessarily subtle, but they aren’t supposed to be.  They are heroes and villains, giants and master swordsmen and princesses, acting out a fairy-tale that knows exactly what it is, with tonal consistency that never seeks to outdo the material the actors are given.  These performances are the final piece to cementing this film as a true classic, bringing entertainment to people decades after it’s first release.

In short, the filmmakers of The Princess Bride knew what they were doing.  Everything from the performances to the camerawork gets across every emotion and aspect of the story instantly, with the sets and costumes working to explain simply what’s going on as quickly as possible.  It’s a storybook set to film, both comforting and exciting, and the ending feels right, no matter how many times we revisit it.  

The Princess Bride has long been considered a cult classic, a hidden gem that was looked over by a public who never really knew it was there in the first place.  Even if it never reaches the high peaks of fame as other fantasy classics, it may not be a stretch to hail it as one of the greatest fantasy films (or films in general) ever made, through simple (but not simplistic) substance, if not bombastic style.  

Of course, no movie comes around accidently.  There had to be some work done behind the scenes for this film to have come about.

Join me next time as we discuss the Facets of Filmmaking: the Behind the Scenes of The Princess Bride.

Thank you guys so much for reading!  If you have something you’d like to add or say, don’t forget that the ask box is always open!  I hope to see you all in the next article.

[justheretobreakthings]

Thank you for your reply! But wouldn't it show up in the ship tag then? I don't think people would be very happy to see a fic pop up that has the pairing only in the background while the focus is completely elsewhere? Do you think the additional tags might be an option too? To put a "background char a / char b" there? You could still filter it out but it wouldn't show in the ship tag? Or do you think that's not enough warning as it is only with the other tags? I'm so unsure what would be best

[continued] Also I totally agree with you about warning for ANY non-canon ship! But as I know that sometimes as a reader I don't like canon ships either or just want to avoid anything even remotely couple-ly at all I would like to warn for that canon pairing too. Just was wondering how to do it the best way so people who want to avoid it can do it but people who like the pairing don't get their hopes up for a new story with them when they're only in the background. So thank you for helping me!

Oh, I agree on warning for canon pairings too - I just had wanted to note that unexpected appearances of canon ships aren’t generally viewed as being nearly as egregious as unexpected non-canon ships.

I do know that a lot of people use the “background A/B” or “minor A/B” tags in their fics to indicate that a ship is present but not prominent, so that would probably suffice as a warning. One other strategy is to ensure that the minor ship is the last relationship tag listed; typically, people list relationships and characters in their tags in order from most to least prominent in the story, so a relationship tag at the end of a list of other relationship tags is generally understood not to be as heavily featured in the fic as others.

This is simply one current downside to AO3′s current tagging system. One feature I would really love to see the AO3 staff implement at some point in the future is a way to distinguish between primary and secondary relationships in the fic, as well as primary and secondary characters. Don’t know how much time or coding it would take to add a feature like that, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for it to happen. For now, the shorthand of adding additional tags or descriptors to specify that the relationship is in the background will have to suffice.

[kmsherrard]

In praise of roller coaster rides

“...the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise….”

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Despite what teachers of high school science classes solemnly intone, this business of doing science is the least straightforward endeavor that can possibly be imagined. This was brought home to me in a series of unfortunate events that unfolded this week.

At first, it seemed to be that rare triumph where my simple test of a straightforward prediction actually yielded a clear positive result, instead of the more typical back-to-the-drawing board head-scratcher. If this were a story, that the protagonist was a protein named Diaphanous could serve as a hint that the plot would not prove as solid as one might hope. (Like many genes first discovered in fruit flies, Diaphanous evokes the appearance of animals lacking a functional version of that protein).

The backstory: Lately, my research has been on how stress fibers remodel  to accommodate the movements of migrating cells. But as I work on cells in intact tissues, namely the rind of follicular cells that envelops the developing cluster of cells that give rise to a fruit fly egg, I like to consider the natural experiments that unfold in the course of normal development. For example, these follicle cells migrate for a time, going round and round like hamsters running on a wheel, but then they stop and do other things, like flatten out and secrete the eggshell. They still have stress fibers—these are long contractile bundles of a similar composition to muscle, that help attach the cells to the fibrous surface outside them. But these later-stage stress fibers are much stouter and of somewhat different composition.

I had already established that the stress fibers in the migrating cells depend on an unusual partner, amusingly called DAAM, to form. The more typical protein to help build stress fibers is DAAM’s cousin Diaphanous, but I’d done experiments depleting Diaphanous that clearly showed it was not needed in this case. When I depleted DAAM, though, the stress fibers got really wispy. Oddly enough, I’d noticed that in the much later stages, after the cells stopped migrating, had stress fibers unaffected by loss of DAAM.

So the experiment I wanted to do next was to deplete Diaphanous in the later stages. This was not completely straightforward to execute, though, because I had to avoid depleting it too early. I’d already seen that this caused cells to have trouble with their normal round of cell divisions. It’s a common problem in this sort of work that it can be harder to study later processes if you mess things up before they have begun to happen. The solution makes use of the dazzling array of tissue-specific drivers of gene expression that have been invented for fruit flies. They allow you to drive expression of a gene at specific times and places, targeting particular processes you want to study. To keep a gene from being expressed, you can use something called RNAi, which basically makes a cell chop up the instructions for making a protein sent from the DNA so that protein does not get produced.

In short, I needed a driver that acted late in the follicle cells but not early. Our lab did not have such a driver, since we study the earlier stages. But we’d read a paper with some very clever experiments that made use of just such a late driver, one called Cy2. We requested the fly stock from one of the paper’s authors and she promptly mailed it off to us. Fly researchers are awesomely generous. It’s a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of the field over a century ago to share reagents this way.

Chapter the First: Quarantine. The flies arrived and had to be put in quarantine, out of an abundance of caution concerning the possible introduction of mites into our hundreds of lab stocks. In practice, this consists of isolating the vials on the top of the lab refrigerator. All stocks that arrive from elsewhere must be taken through quarantine, save those from the renowned and very reliably mite-free Bloomington stock center. It meant a delay to the start of my planned experiment, until I could obtain 3rd instar larvae and wash them, a rather amusing exercise on which I have previously posted.

So there the flies sat, two healthy vials with clearly written labels: Cy2/(Cyo); Dr/TM6b. This cryptic shorthand conveyed that along with the driver I’d asked for, the flies conveniently included markers on another chromosome, in case I wanted to build more things into the stock. Annoyingly, they were all senescent adults and developing pupal cases—ideal for surviving the mailing process, but the worst possible stage of colony development for obtaining sufficient larvae for my purposes. I would have to wait several weeks for the new generation to produce larvae I could wash.

In pre-covid times, I could have done the cross right away with existing males, dissecting the offspring on a quarantine-use microscope belonging to a neighboring lab. Normally we share a lot of equipment freely in our department. But the physical distancing requirements have temporarily stopped that sort of thing. And we can’t risk getting mites onto the equipment we use for all our normal work.

To shorten the waiting time (a frequent concern of fruit fly researchers, especially I would think those of us who work on adult rather than embryonic or larval structures, meaning our crosses must extend to the full 10+ days of development time beyond any stock-building that precedes it), I planned to wash enough larvae to siphon off a number of males for the experimental cross. To that end, I also began “blowing up” the stocks I would obtain the females from; I could virgin them ahead of time and have them all ready to go as soon as their husbands emerged from their pupal cases.

When you’re waiting to wash a quarantine stock, impatient for the experiment to begin, they seem to take longer to develop, much like a watched pot. The stock contained the mutation Tubby, which makes for shorter flies but a longer developmental time, so that was part of it. Also room temperature (on top of the fridge) slows development compared to the flies’ optimal temperature of 25 C (that’s 77 to your Fahrenheiters...and to be honest, most of us American scientists are very compartmentalized in their understanding of Celsius; outside of the lab context we speak it no better than the average U.S. citizen). So far, then, the slowness makes sense both physical and psychological. But why the quarantined flies should always produce their burst of 3rd instar larvae on a weekend day, and on the one weekend day I don’t pop into the lab, is more puzzling. But it is the rule, I have found.

I wasn’t going to let it happen this time. I watched them like a hawk (a mosquito hawk?) and sure enough, it was a Sunday when all the larvae began to wander. Wandering larvae is the other, more romantic name for the 3rd instar of Drosophila melanogaster, because they have at last eaten their fill of the mushy rotten fruit they have been burrowing through, and there is nothing else for them to do but come out into the light and air and begin to claim their inheritance as winged creatures of the sky. First, though, they must choose a spot in which to prepare their new bodies. Here in that lab, they climb around on the clean walls of the vial, above the caramel-colored dollop of food, fat, juicy larvae as big as a good-sized grain of rice, big enough to grasp gently in forceps and take through the three ritual baths, soapy water, ethanol, and salty water, that remove any lurking mites or mite eggs from their surfaces. After being placed in a fresh vial and wicked dry with a twist of Kimwipe (lab Kleenex), they will crawl around a bit more, mingling with their certified-mite-free compatriots. In a few more hours they will settle down, stop moving, and let their skins harden into bark. Inside that bark, they pretty much dissolve themselves, save for a few set-aside clusters of cells. They go on to rebuild their bodies into the adult form, complete with intricate jointed legs and multitudinously-faceted eyes and iridescent, cellophane-like wings over the course of about a week (at room temperature).

I spent several hours washing more larvae than usual to establish a clean stock, wanting to have plenty of extra males to father the experimental crosses. If I’d had access to the quarantine microscope, I could have selected extra male larvae—you can already distinguish males and females at this stage-- but it would not really have saved time. I played the numbers game instead. It was a Sunday afternoon, quietest time of the week in lab, and very peaceful. I took my time and changed the bath solutions often to make sure there wasn’t too much soapy water in the ethanol or too much ethanol in the final rinse. I wanted this all to go smoothly with no delays.

I put the now-lawful vial in the 25C incubator to develop, after carefully copying the genotype from the original handwritten labels: Cy2/(Cyo); Dr/TM6b. Incidentally, there are lots of markers of chromosomes, many going back to the original mutations described by early fly workers such as Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant. They let you follow with visible traits the invisible genes that you wish to follow through the generations. Various labs have their favorite markers, but some such as Cyo (which makes for curly wings) are ubiquitous, and Dr and TM6b were familiar to me as well. Dr (short for Dropped, I don’t know why) makes the eyes very slitted, and TM6b is a whole set of markers that comprises what is called a balancer chromosome: a chromosome that has been scrambled and rearranged so that even though it still has all its genes, they are in the wrong places. This means that none of the usual recombination between sister chromosomes that occurs when egg and sperm form can happen. The advantage to the researcher is that this keeps genes segregated in predictable places. Otherwise, all those markers would not be reliable indicators letting you keep track of the genes you put in place from one generation to another. TM6b can actually include various different markers, but one of them is Tb, easy to recognize in both the shorter larvae and pupal cases and to some extent discernible in adults as well.

Chapter the Second: Cross Purposes. Fast forward two weeks (you can—I sadly could not—this being November of 2020, I would certainly have appreciated the distraction). So I waited, none too patiently, for the new adults to emerge. Meanwhile, I tended the stocks I would virgin for females: two different RNAi lines for Diaphanous and one, a control, for its cousin DAAM which I already knew was not required for the later-stage stress fibers. I built up a collection of ladies in waiting, captured shortly after their eclosion and isolated in vials away from all male contact, so I could be sure their offspring would be the genotype I wanted. [A note about the term ‘eclosion’: one might be tempted to call the emergence of the adults from their pupal cases ‘hatching’, but that term is reserved for the larvae coming out their eggshell. You only hatch once, even in the doubled lifestyle of these metamorphosing beasties.]

Finally the washed flies began to eclose. All my usable Cy2 flies were in that one vial. I briefly knocked them out with carbon dioxide gas, used a fine paintbrush to separate the males, and added 3 males each to the three bevvies of expectant females. There were still a few males left, enough to establish the new stock of Cy2 for future use.

At last, more than a month after conceiving it, I’d begun the experimental cross. It would be two more weeks before I had the flies to dissect and the beginnings of an answer. Fly work involves a lot of waiting, and to cope with that we tend to have a lot of irons in the fire. All that juggling can be rather distracting. Sometimes, depending on how other experiments have gone in the interim, I’ve unfortunately moved on from the original urgency of a question by the time the flies are ready to examine. It’s a hazard of the work.

Though I did not yet realize it, I’d made two mistakes. First, I should have looked a bit more carefully at those Cy flies. Second, I should have done the proper control. Sure, crossing them to the DAAM flies was a pretty good control, but there was an even stricter one, that tested whether the driver stock alone had any effect (it should not, but you like to be sure). I should have crossed the Cy2 flies to what we call wild-type, a stock called w1118 that has white eyes, incidentally [link] the first fly mutant ever identified and the foundation of fly genetics.

I hadn’t wanted to use up any more of my precious males, and figured I could always do that control later, if the experiment turned out promising. A lot of us cut corners that way, and it isn’t necessarily less efficient. But sometimes it snarls you up and wastes your time instead of saving it, and makes you go through all sorts of contortions trying to make sense of your data with less information than you should have had.

Chapter the Third: The Experiment. I waited out that two weeks, pursuing other work and trying not to pay too much attention to the news. I wore my mask and stayed in touch with my loved ones over zoom and the like. I hung up bird feeders to entertain my cats and my family alike. I went on long walks by the lake. Time passed. At last the grand day arrived: my experimental flies had begun to eclose. I gassed them and tapped them out of the CO2 pad. Now here was a wrinkle I’d shoved to the back of my mind: those extra markers that I didn’t need, the Dr and TM6b. In a clean experiment I’d have gotten rid of them, but that would have required another couple generations. I’d wanted a quick provisional answer, in order to decide whether it was worth the time and trouble to do the more careful version of the experiment. So: would I dissect the TM6b-carrying flies, or the Dr-carrying flies? It had to be one or the other. The balancer chromosome carries a number of mutations so it would be more likely to do something weird to the cells I was interested in. Not that that was very likely, but I might as well be careful. Dr it was then: that only affected the eyes, as far as I knew. What were the chances it would mess up my experiment on stress fibers in follicle cells?

But none of the flies had Dr eyes. That was odd. I looked closer. Half of them sure looked like Tb flies, shorter and a bit chubbier, though you never want to depend on your ability to discern that marker in adults. The others, the longer ones? They did have some oddly short hairs on their dorsal thorax (around the back of the lower neck, if you want to be anthropomorphic about it), much shorter than the clipped ones you see with the marker Stubble. It kind of reminded me of a marker I’d seen once or twice. Well, that must be what these were; maybe the label had been written wrong.

Impatient to get the experiment done, I swept the short-haired flies into a fresh vial with a bit of yeast. The yeast was to encourage egg production (they’re called fruit flies or vinegar flies, but it’s really the yeast on the rotting fruit that they’re after). I added a few males which were there for the same end. You could say the way to a fine set of ovaries is through both the heart and the stomach. Two more days to go before the dissection. For good measure I put some plain-vanilla w1118 flies on yeast to serve as extra controls.

On the appointed day, I got out my fiercely pointed #55 forceps and began the dissection. I nearly messed up by dissecting the early stages by habit—the technique to do so destroys most of the older egg chambers—but luckily remembered what I was about it time, and switched to the method to optimize acquisition of undamaged later stages. I fixed for 15 minutes in 4% paraformaldehyde, rinsed three times in phosphate-buffered saline solution with Triton-X detergent, and added a stain that would label the filamentous actin, the principle component of stress fibers among many other cellular structures. I put it in the lab fridge (the one where no food is allowed!) to stain overnight. The next morning, early, I came in and rinsed off the stain and made slides. Then I went to the womb-like room where one of my favorite workhouse microscope lives, the renowned Nikon 800 laser scanning confocal microscope. I did the necessary 2020 ritual wipe-down of all surfaces with 70% ethanol, and fired her up.

And oh, it was beautiful. I was so disciplined; I began with the controls to set up the correct laser intensity and gain at which to collect all the images, so the brighter ones would not be out of the range of measurable brightness and everything could be properly quantified. But it was already clear from the what I saw on the computer screen as I centered examples, focused, and took images that the experimental egg chambers had strongly reduced stress fibers. I took lots of pictures, happy that for once my experiment had gone as planned and given me a clear answer.

Also, can I just say how much I love the stain Oregon Green phalloidin? The name itself is lovely: as a native of the Pacific northwest I find it so evocative: the green of deep cushiony moss and ferns and forests of hemlock and douglas firs; and phalloidin itself is a stain derived from mushrooms with which those forests are rife. (Phalloidin, now there’s a scary toxin: it binds so tightly to filamentous actin that it stops your heart. Unlike a lot of other toxins, it doesn’t make you nauseated, so you absorb it until it’s too late for any antidote. But that’s why it’s such a good stain. You just have to wear gloves, or wash your hands after pipetting it. And we all wash our hands so often nowadays it makes no never mind.) There’s red phalloidin, and far-red phalloidin, and even ultraviolet phalloidin (but most microscopes don’t have the right filter sets to light it up very well): but green phalloidin is the king as far as I’m concerned. So bright, and a short enough wavelength (only 488 nanometers, vs. 566 or 647) that it shows up structures the more finely. You can definitely see the difference: it’s sharp as can be.

So, I had the preliminary results I had hoped for: the Diaphanous flies had reduced stress fibers. It doesn’t actually happen to me all that often, that I get a clear answer, either what I predicted or the opposite which is almost as good in science. At least that’s progress, an increase in understanding. No, usually I stumble over these head-scratchers of outcomes. Interesting results, but interesting in a complicated way that require a lot more work to make sense of, if you ever do. It’s partly down to most of my experiments involving imaging with a microscope: you get a lot of unexpected information that way, if you keep your eyes open. But it’s also that I seem to be attracted to the sort of problem that does not yield neat answers—the way some people are attracted to overly hairy guys on motorcycles who are a bit too into mild-altering substances and petty crime. I think I’m the one to straighten them out, but usually I’m the one who gets burned. But this time I had prevailed!

This was just a start; of course I needed to replicate, do some more dissections, get more numbers, reach levels of statistical unassailibility. In particular, I didn’t have as many clear examples of the DAAM control as I needed. Also, I’d do the proper control, and maybe even un-double-balance that Cy2 stock to get rid of the pesky extra markers.

Chapter the Fourth: The morning after. Yeah, and now I’d better take the time to figure out what is going on with that marker that is not Dr. Because, unlikely as it was, wouldn’t it be a shame if it were somehow affecting my results? Worst-case scenario—because that’s how we self-questioning scientists have to operate, ever since the dawn of time or at least the Enlightenment—worst-case scenario, then, is this marker, whatever it is, is the thing responsible for the reduction in stress fibers. Oh, but that’s very unlikely, I tell myself. Besides, the DAAM controls didn’t have reduced stress fibers.

I looked at the original handwritten label, still on the vial of flies on top of the fridge in quarantine. Maybe that D might actually be a P. What was Pr? I’d never heard of it.

I went to the master compendium of fruit fly genetics, FlyBase.org, and looked up Pr. Purple, an eye color gene on the first chromosome. I was looking for a gene on the third chromosome, so that couldn’t be it. I tried a different approach: I DuckDuckWent (DuckDuckGoed doesn’t sound right; if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a more private alternative to Google) images of Drosophila markers. There was that classic poster I’ve seen hanging in various labs, of the most common markers. And there was that marker I’d been reminded of, with the very short hairs. Sn it was called. Could that be my marker? It would have to be some pretty bad handwriting, to make an S look like a D; r to n is easier to imagine.

I went back to FlyBase and looked up Sn. It was the gene Singed. Like if you got to close to the outdoor fire pit on the patio (a way to safely hang out with your friends outdoors even during the Chicago winter), and singed your eyebrows most of the way off (and no, I haven’t done that yet). Also on the first chromosome, though. But look here, this is interesting: Singed is an actin-bundling protein. I read further down the page that summarized the work of dozens or hundreds of researchers over the decades. Yes, it was expressed in the ovaries, and yes, it was known to affect stress fibers. That would be worrying if it were my marker. Lucky it’s not.

I wasn’t getting anywhere. I tried yet another method, going to the webpage for the Bloomington stock center. It’s very well organized, and they have a page showing the details of all the balancer stocks they keep. There ought to be a clue here, for any marker that a researcher could assume another lab would recognize. I go down the list to the TM6b stocks, and find it. Pri, aka Pr, for Prickly. Causes short thoracic bristles. That’s my guy.

Back on FlyBase, I learn that Prickly is one of the classic mutants discovered in the early days of fly research. And this is weird: it has not been annotated. That is, nobody has figured out what gene it is a mutation of, let alone what biological processes it participates in or what tissues it’s expressed in (this matters because if it’s not active in the follicle cells, my experiment would still be valid). They could; it’s a straightforward enough task given that the whole genome is sequenced, but apparently it’s not one that anyone’s found worthwhile. So all we know is it makes very short, deformed bristles that look to me a lot like those of Sn.

Okay, now I am getting worried. What are the chances that this is NOT a protein that affects something like actin bundling and therefore messes up stress fibers? Maybe I had only seen what I wanted to see with the DAAM control. That’s a hazard of doing science, because it’s a hazard of being human. That’s why controls are so important. I consider my experiment in this new and harsher light. Maybe the Diaphanous results are just a phantom of wish fulfillment, summoned by this Prickly hitchhiker I’d never meant to take along for the ride.

I’d already begun the proper control that would answer this question, but meanwhile, while I wait for those flies to emerge, is there anything else I can do? Maybe I should dissect those formerly scorned Tubby flies; at least they lack Prickly. But according to the list at Bloomington, that particular stock has a number of other mutations on its TM6b chromosome, including one called Bri. Bri is a twin of Pri in more ways than one: it also causes very short bristles, and is also unannotated so we have no idea what protein it makes or when or where it acts in the body. Without asking the researchers who sent me the flies, I had no way of knowing if Bri was in there or not.

It would be a bit awkward quizzing them about their flies. We all tend to overdo the shorthand in labeling our stocks, and don’t always remember all the extra mutations lurking there. It’s tripped me up before, when I uncovered interacting mutations I hadn’t known to worry about until they unhinged my crosses. Don’t get me started on vermillian eye color: it’s a real bear. Either way, I’d have to check the controls and unbalance the stock to have a real answer, so probably better not to pester them.

I can’t resist having a quick peek at the TM6b flies though; I’ll be dissecting them tomorrow and should know by Sunday or Monday if the Diaphanous results are evaporating or not...that is, if Bri or something else is not further muddying the waters. A positive result would be definitive; a negative one will require further research. Well, either one will require further research, but one will be more cheerful and the other more like putting nails in a coffin of my hopes one more time. And that, my friends, is what it’s like to do science. (At least I get to see more Oregon green on the confocal, though).

Epilogue. What lessons can we draw from this (mis)adventure, this stomach-churning roller coaster ride of thrills and doubts that is my life in science?

1. Do the proper controls from the beginning. (Although that would have cut out the thrills as well as the doubts, so to be honest, I’m not totally on board with this one).

2. Take the time to look at the flies you are about to cross, and make sure they have the markers you expect. Harder, probably unrealistically hard, is to make sure they don’t have the markers you don’t expect. That would require a Rumsfeldian level of perceiving unknowns unknowns.

3. Remember the limitations of shorthand for conveying a genotype, which like the face we present to the world is invariably far more complex than there is room enough and time to write out.

4. Murphy’s law reigns supreme in this world of ours. What were the chances that the unwanted marker  I’d thought I could ignore for a first-pass experiment would turn out to be a different marker I’d never heard of that might  affect stress fibers in my cells? Still, it made for a good story, which I haven’t come across in all this interminable slog of an Autumn.

[hyunllx]

                                                         Heathers & Gargoyles                A complete rewrite of Riverdale Season 3

A game, a cult, a murder. Sounds like a stereotypical october for the town of Riverdale. Yet when Betty, Jughead, Veronica, and newly freed-from-juvie Archie are recruited to join the increasingly dangerous game of Griffins and Gargoyles, they find themselves dodging assassinations and deadly traps designed to keep them on a pre-determined story path. Left without the help of their brainwashed allies, the core four must work in the shadows to stop the rising body count and unmask the King of Gargoyles before their story is finished.

                                                                   Prologue                                                                             Previous Chapter[none] | Read it on AO3

The summer leading up to junior year was like so many others in Riverdale; days spent by Sweetwater River were long and hot. Fireflies doubled the stars in the sky and the scent of wood smoke hung on the midnight air. Pink-grey dawns, filled with the song of birds and dewy treks through the forest while dusks of deep golds and purples painted the skies above countless barbeques and fireworks. The town, for once, seemed happy. Normal, if they could ever grasp the concept of ‘normal’ again. At least… most of the town.

Only in private spaces and shadowy corners was the dark cloud hanging over the community mentioned, as if the town itself wanted to forget, wanted to push away the very thought another tragedy could happen to a child everyone knew, grew up with, and loved. Though the town believed his innocence whole heartedly, they forgot about him the way one forgets a traumatic memory; slow, reluctant, and silent.

In the spaces where his cloud loomed darkest, Betty worked as an intern for Mary Andrews, putting her legal and investigative prowess to test in a more lawful setting than she was used to. She spent her days reading through old case files, police reports, and transcripts of similar court cases, analyzing and decoding the vast arrays of information into easily digestible chunks. Shorthand and stenotypy became her new language and, though she interacted daily with her friends, the codes of court ruled her consciousness until the August hearing. 

On the other side of town, Jughead put the Serpents to work collecting the not-so-legally obtained evidence and testimonies they were used to. Vigilantism was almost a comfort in the wake of Archie’s hanging shadow, a line of work Jughead threw himself into fully. There was a normalcy to it, a sense of nostalgia that ate away the trauma and suffering they had endured in the years since entering high school. 

Hyperfixation eating the peripherals of his awareness, it wasn’t until the final weeks that Serpent King Jughead Jones realized the absence of many of his members. He expected Toni and Cheryl; they spent more time together these days than the rest of the gang, though Jughead didn’t mind. He’d be hypocritical if he did given the time he and Betty and spent alone. However, as August grew from summer gold to deep early autumn red, the absence of Sweet Pea and Fangs caught his attention first.

Jughead would visit their homes in the afternoons and evenings and most of the time, there was no one home. They were often missing from the Serpent gatherings and communal activities, and their reports were brief when he asked favors or gave them a task. By the final weekend of summer vacation, Sweet Pea and Fangs had garnered a following of a dozen young Serpents, high schoolers or younger. All missing when Jughead needed them, all caught returning home or showing up to community meetings late and covered in dirt and various forest remnants. 

Though Jughead wouldn’t have known, it wasn’t just the Serpents undergoing this odd shift in youth attention-span. Veronica witnessed it too as her speakeasy, La Bonne Nuit, came to life under the floors of Pops’. Summer jobs, like most small all-American towns, were the pinnacle of high school vacation culture, and Veronica graciously contributed by hiring many of her classmates to help work on the place. This was, after all, a place for all of them to recover from the tragedies befallen the youth of the town.

Yet, as with the Serpents, many of them started skipping shifts, missing work hours, seemingly uncaring about their work or their pay as August bloomed to life. Though Veronica was not an aggressive person by nature, when she confronted their lack of vigor, she often left frustrated with no answers and a short staff. With her own attention torn between her project and her unjustly imprisoned boyfriend, the progress of La Bonne Nuit slowed to a crawl. 

Veronica was not the only person frustrated by this; her father had taken an interest in the speakeasy's construction and was growing worse at hiding his impatience as the month progressed toward the looming trial. His heed had not gone unchecked, but Veronica ignored it for the time being, not wanting to confront the man who probably put her boyfriend behind bars. It wasn’t difficult to avoid him these days; after school concluded the previous year, he’d also vanished for periods of time. 

“Business stuff,” he always said, a strange answer as he’d usually explain what the business was to her. The mystery and curtness was unusual, making his curiosity in her own projects even more grating. She finally stopped him the day before the trial, his judgement entering the speakeasy after 24 hours or longer missing from home.

“Daddy.” She greeted him with a mirror of his increasingly formal demeanor. 

“Good morning, Mija.” He forced informality as he approached the counter where she stood, rubbing dark stain into the wooden top. The smile on his didn’t reach his eyes, the wrinkles in his crow's feet and heavy brow ridge remaining flat and expressionless, “How is everything going today?”

She didn’t answer him, side-eying his suit as she focused more on the counter. Though he wore suits often, he was more dressed up than usual, and Veronica could already feel the judgement at seeing her helping with the work. Instead she asked, trying to keep the malice from her voice,

“Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I had to have an emergency meeting with a business partner.” He was lying, Veronica knew, though she couldn’t prove it. She just could tell from the way his back straightened and his hands clenched and the vein in his neck pulsed against skin as he swallowed. 

“The same business partner that’s been dragging you away all summer, I presume?”

Her father let out a tense sigh, his eyes leaving her face. His shoulders slumped slightly and for the first time that summer he looked as tired as she felt. A manipulation tactic, yet Veronica couldn’t help feel that twinge of pity deep in her chest for her dear old father. She put down the stain rag and wiped her hands on the apron around her waist, the deep mahogany brown leaving streaks on the off-white canvas.

“We’re having a bit of… a setback,” He met her gaze again, his eyes sharp as he thought about his partner with clear scorn, “Their facility is not being built properly and they’re refusing to send their employees elsewhere. It’s wasting a lot of time and money. I thought you might be able to relate.”

Veronica physically shrunk inward, the passive-aggressive swing pulling the pity straight from her torso and her self-esteem with it. She wrung the rag through her fingers again, looking down at the counter. Angry fire smoldered in the pit of her stomach in the sting of his words and she shook her head,

“No, I’m sorry. Things have been progressing just fine here.”

“Hmm…” Hiram looked skeptically at the unfinished furniture and the sparse employees laying wooden planks on the raised stage, the centerpiece for the room. His scrutiny turned back to her stained hands and the dark, unfinished splotches of the bar counter, “Well, for your sake I hope so.”

“Why are you really here? To judge how quickly we’re getting this set up and running?” Hiram looked taken aback by her sudden bite but those smolders of anger were bursting to life now.

“Two days ago the facility that is being built outside of Greendale was broken into. I figured you should know, since you’re in the same boat.”

Veronica rolled her eyes at the guilting; she had already heard about the break-in. That’s why she was working and not preparing for tomorrow’s trial like she should’ve been.

“Thank you for your concern, but I think we’ll be fine.”

Their conversation dragged on with as few words as possible, filled with vitriol and disdain. Even the boys laying the woodwork into the stage glanced over at the tension every so often felt it. Hiram finally decided his chiding was over and left with tense shoulders and a silent goodbye, and Veronica wouldn’t see him until the next day in the trial.

The entire town appeared to crowd around the courthouse that morning, as many bodies as possible squeezing into the seats and the hallway to hear the case of their beloved golden boy. Betty sat with Archie, anxiety overwhelming her relief to see him as they brought him into the room, his mother on his other side clutching his hand as tightly as possible. Jughead and Ronnie sat directly behind him, happy to see him but as anxious as Betty to his left. This could be worse, he thought.

All summer he was back and forth between holding cells, interrogation and visitation rooms, and court. Whatever the sentencing was, Archie was glad this would be over with. He knew he was innocent. His loved ones knew, and from the supportive looks around the room, everyone else did too.

For six grueling hours, Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, and the rest of the town of Riverdale sat through recounts of their recent tragedies. The death of Jason Blossom, Archie’s vigilantism, the Black Hood murders, and their apparent involvement in major crimes over the past two years.

The word ‘guilty’ stung the hearts of everyone in the room when the jury announced the verdict late that afternoon. Though the weight of reality was still a shock, Veronica knew as soon as the jury entered the room after deliberation. They made up their minds long before that…. Or had someone make it up for them. 

At Archie’s request, the four had one more day together, then he left, hauled away to juvie the day before the start of their junior year. That looming cloud returned, and the halls of Riverdale High felt empty, heavy, and dark. 

In that darkness, something new and dangerous grew; a monster with stone horns and skull mask. A game where everyone was a player, whether or not they knew it. It started as groups of nerds huddled around an upright-standing folder at lunch tables. Here and there a faint, excited whisper of demons and puzzles.

Jughead and Veronica often found their missing bodies among these secretive spaces. They’d started skipping their Serpent jackets and sports-branded sweaters for odd, costume-like clothing and black hood.

“We’re playing Griffins and Gargoyles.” Sweet Pea told Jughead one day when he’d tried to pry his way into the group.

“What’s that… like Dungeons and Dragons?” Jughead frowned, regarding the map spread out between the ‘players’. They exchanged nervous glances as he asked.

“Um… kind of. But you have to be initiated to play.”

“How do I get initiated?” Not that he wanted to be… the question was more out of curiosity about his former family.

“You wait.” The unfamiliar girl behind the erected folder wall cut in before Sweet Pea could think to respond. Her blue eyes sliced through him under her shadowy black hood. “You wait for the Gargoyle King to call you.”

Veronica had a similarly chilling encounter when players brought the game to work. The Acolytes, so called for their worship of this mysterious Gargoyle King, multiplied like cockroaches over the first week of school. As a virus spreads, so did the game throughout Riverdale High, recruiting more and more players and attracting the “Deathknights” who watched the school grounds with stone masks and tattered black clothes. 

At the surface, it appeared to be just another fun roleplaying game. Underneath, though, lay a labyrinth of danger, destruction, and crime the town’s youth grew entangled in, unable to escape. It was not a game; it was anarchy.

The school became ground-zero for the cult-like following of the game, and Betty, Jughead, Veronica tried their best to navigate their first weeks of school together, away from the rest of their friends who quickly got sucked into the Gargoyle King’s clutches. Cheryl was among the loudest recruiters after being chosen for initiation early in the game. To their surprise, Ethel was as loud as the school’s resident HBIC.

Halls and classrooms became littered, eventually decorated, with iconography, various memorabilia, and art of the ‘game’. By the second Friday of September, kids were finding satchels and cards in hidden books and cracks in the walls.

That second Friday, a large cluster of kids gathered around the outside of Veronica’s home room, their whispers excited as they discussed their latest find. She tried not to pay too much attention to the conversation as she forced her small form through the throng, but anxious whispers of ‘kill’ and ‘plan’ and ‘escape’ assaulted her ears. She pushed it out of her mind. No, they’re talking about a game. This isn’t real.

Like usual, Veronica was early as she forced her way into the classroom, and there were few bodies in the room save for herself and the quiet outcast types that sat by themselves. She attempted a smile in their direction but, as expected, they didn’t return it. Instead, she took a seat at the front of the classroom, placing her books on the desk and sliding her bag under the chair. As she leaned over to do so, she caught sight of a small envelope on the floor, trapped partially under a front desk leg. The back where she expected to see a name or address was face up and blank, but she could tell there was something inside when she yanked it out from under the leg.

The envelope was small enough to fit in her hand, yet a smooth wax of a black seal still pressed into the back enclosure, already open by the rail of paper tear stuck to it. The embossing on the seal was a figure squatting on its hands and knees. Two thin, tined antlers rose from its head, and large, stretching bat wings protruded from its shoulders, the span larger than the size of its body.

Though she knew this was someone else’s, Veronica’s morbid curiosity seized her hands and pulled the flap up. There was only one object inside; cardstock nearly the size of the envelope give or take a few centimeters. Pulling it out carefully, she immediately recognized the pattern on the back of the card as being from the game. It was the same pattern as those people found for quests. This was definitely not for her. As she turned it over, her breath caught in her throat.

The word “QUEST” scrawled in medieval-reminiscent script at the top in bold black letters. Underneath stood a painting of a knight or a soldier; a very young man in shining silver-steel armour encrusted with rubies. She did not recognize the symbol emblazoned in red across his breastplate and intricately depressed into the shield he held at his side. His eyes were a warm brown, his hair an intimately familiar shade of red-orange, and an even familiar still innocent softness to his features. 

He looked just like Archie.

Yet, that was not what shocked Veronica most about the card. At the bottom of the image, a cream-grey box held tet that, mixed with the boy looking so much like her beloved, sent shivers up her spine.

Kill the Red Paladin. 

The trill of the class bell rang through the room and more bodies shuffled in through the door. Fingers trembling, Veronica stuffed the card back into the envelope and that into the back of the textbook on her desk. She’d have to show Betty and Jughead later. For now, she pushed it out of her mind along with the other stresses of her life and pretended to be a normal teen for the day.

September swelled into autumn and left as dangerously as it began, whispers of “Kill the Red Paladin” cards popping up all over school. Betty often inquired parties she caught talking about it, the Acolytes running the games, the Deathknights that now warded the woods and public areas about it, but she met with the same answer each time.

They could not participate until they were initiated. 

Instead of forcing her way in, Betty took the route she knew best and snuck her way through, learning the patterns of the Deathknights and following them long into the nights. They lead her through the forest more often than not, winding trails snaking through trees and long back yards, always ending in the same place, an abandoned recreation center on the outskirts of Riverdale, near the detention center. The grounds swarmed with Deathknights like cockroaches. Betty was certain the Gargoyle King resided inside the building, but she never got close enough to see inside.

While she was busy tracking her way around the cult, Jughead and Veronica focused on Archie. As September wound down, he abruptly became unavailable for phone privileges, and each time they’d travel to visit in person, he had a new scar or bruise somewhere on his once boyish face. He wasn’t the only one, however, as the Serpents stuck in juvie also started appearing with mysterious black eyes and broken noses, even ones released at the ends of their sentences throughout September. 

Jughead and a group of older Serpents visited the detention center on the first day of October, waiting for their most recent member to get released back into their care. When he exited the building with the guards, his face looked the worst out of anyone, including Archie. His nose had broken and started healing out of place and he walked with a significant limp, hunched over his belongings. His lips were twice their normal size with scarred over cuts and untreated swelling.

They drove him home in silence and set him up in a group house watched over by Tom Topaz. The boys that lived there set to work helping tend to their brother’s wounds, some of them recovering from their own horrors from that detention center.

“What happened in there?” Jughead asked when the boy, Slash, started to relax into the environment. He was quiet at first, his eyes trained on the floor and his head shaking as if he were refusing to tell him, just as the others had. Jughead waited a few minutes in silence, but broke just as he made to stand up and leave.

“Fighting pits.” Slash muttered, still looking down. “They put is in fighting pits.”

“Dude-” One boy who’d been in detention previously tried to reprimand him but Jughead snapped to shut him up. If Slash wanted to speak, Jughead needed to hear,

“Like an underground wrestling ring?”

“No. MMA. Bare-knuckle. Whatever you can do to take down the other guy.”

“Why? Just for fun?”

“Lotta rich people come to watch. Place bets. Give us special names. It’s a game or something to them.”

Veronica had given Jughead the Kill the Red Paladin card for safekeeping and it was burning a hole in his pocket listening to Slash, “You’re all forced to fight? What about the other inmates, non-Serpents?”

“You’re asking about Andrews.” It wasn’t a question; Slash’s face grew dark at the memory of Archie in the pits, “Yeah… he’s their main man. The Paladin.” He spat the title with a small stream of bloody spittle. He motioned toward his nose as he continued “I couldn’t take him down like they asked. He knocked me unconscious.”

Slash shook his head. “No, they take us somewhere else. Somewhere old with a big pool.”

Jughead stood up immediately and scrambled for his phone to call Betty and Veronica, recalling the abandoned building Betty found the Deathknights operating out of. He joined her on her near-nightly trek through the trees after that, studying the building, occasionally finding the parking lot filled with shiny and out-of-place cars. The rich folk that played with the lives of the inmates. On those nights, Veronica came to meet them as quickly as she could, using her name and money to barter her way into the games.

She became a witness to the horrible treatment of the kids in the pit, scrawny, bruised, and still forced to fight until one went down in the blood-stained pool. She had yet to see Archie, though every night she went she heard whisperings about him, excitement to see him return. Three weeks from now… two weeks from now… next time... 

Finally, it came to Archie’s fight day. It surprised him to see his friends come together with such an urgency that morning, especially given it was a Friday and they should have been at school. He was even more surprised at their questions about how the guards brought him in to the pits, that he never told them about, and their plan to break him out. 

The rest of the day came in a haze, and as the sun went down, Archie felt detached when the guards retrieved him for the fight. The energy of the pit was different as they paraded Archie through the crowd, the stench of expensive booze and cigar smoke making his growling, empty stomach turn. His eyes scanned the people as they gathered to watch him descend into the pool, many of them hungering with a deadly greed he’d grown accustomed to over the past month.

As he looked over the spectators, he caught the familiar gaze of Veronica, worried yet warm with the mischievous twinkle that told him to trust whatever she was plotting. And he did, wholeheartedly. 

The guards removed the shackles around his wrists as he reached the edge of the abandoned pool. They shoved him between the shoulder blades and he stumbled over the drop, landing sloppily in a 3-point stance. The impact left his sore, bruised muscles straining, but he stood up and faced the opposite end of the makeshift arena.

As expected, the boy was just as young as him, wrapped in a near head-to-toe black cloak with a hood. He’d never faced The Rogue before, but he’d seen plenty of his victims laid up in the infirmary during his recovery time. They allowed him to jump into the pit instead of being pushed, though Archie could see the pain in his form as he landed, all the weight leaning on one leg. Had this been a real fight, he’d know to use that to his advantage.

Excited cheers burst from the crowd as they faced each other, but the sound droned to a dull hum as The Rogue drew his hood back, revealing the familiar face of Joaquin DeSantos. Scars and bruising crossed his face just like all the other boys Archie fought, but he wouldn’t forget the face of a Serpent.

The sound of a bell echoed through the empty pool, shaking Archie straight through the bone and out of his trance with the reverberation. Joaquin stepped onto his off-foot and feigned a jab at Archie’s chest, which he backpedaled away from with ease. It was more playful than serious, mirroring the smile on Joaquin’s lips.

“Hey, Andrews.”

“Follow me.” Archie whispered, side-stepping his opponent into a flanking position. Joaquin frowned at him, confused by his nervousness.

“What?”

Archie scanned the crowd again to make sure no one heard, but the patrons focused on the swing he launched toward his opponent, missing intentionally, “When you see the smoke, follow me.” He repeated, slower, more seriously to get his point across. With a heavy step, he launched forward onto the drain grate, causing the steel to clatter under his feet as it wobbled in its place. With the momentum, Archie slammed his chest into Joaquin’s shoulder, wrapping his arms around his waist and throwing his opponent down next to their escape route.

There was an echoing pop, a clatter of tin against tile, and a wayward shout as smoke began to creep along the bottom of the pool, filling the pit with obscuring whites and greys from all corners. Joaquin scrambled to his feet at the sight, looking to Archie for instruction as the smoke enveloped them like thick autumn fog.

As soon as his visibility of the audience completely vanished, Archie hopped off the grate and dug his fingers into the drainage holes, pulling up with all his weakened might. The steel was heavy, but Joaquin quickly rushed over a pulled on the edge that Archie lifted out of the hole. Struggling for a moment, they pulled it over the side of the hole, nearly taking Archie’s fingers with it. The steel grate banged loudly against the tile, but it didn’t alert the crowd as they rushed toward the exits above them, ushered by Veronica. 

“Come on, this leads outside!” Archie called to Joaquin, beckoning him to jump down first. He wheezed, and a cough wracked his body as the smoke clogged his mouth and nose. Joaquin hesitated, though, so Archie impatiently grabbed his arm and threw him into the drain pipe below. He landed with a loud thud, and Archie took a deep, wheezing breath as left the smoke swirling above.

The pipe was wide enough for them to walk in single-file, but they had to duck and brace their arms against the walls to get out quickly. It felt like hours while they made their way over spalling concrete and lichen growing through cracks in the old pipe. When Archie’s shoulders and thighs began to shake with the effort of holding himself upright, the hot, damp air, thick with the fetor of moss and fungus, suddenly caught the breeze of the outside forest. Rustling of dried leaves and grasses echoed around the mouth of the pipe when they rounded the turn into the dark forest.

“Archie!” Betty called out as soon as she saw the flash of brilliant red hair emerge into the night. She and Jughead waited next to an old pickup on an old, dusty path, the Serpent logo emblazoned on the truck’s rusting black doors. No time for relieved greetings, they packed Archie and Joaquin into the cramped space and sped off along the back roads of the Southside. 

By sunrise, news of the escape spread throughout the town, along with the alleged suicides of the warden and several guards involved in the fights. Governor Dooley issued temporary pardons by noon at the request of Mayor Hermione Lodge. Though not wholly removed from the system, Archie was finally free. 

That was, until late that night, when most of Riverdale was asleep, each of the four awoke to tapping on their window. A mirror of each other, they all grabbed the closest weapon and slowly got out of bed. In unison, the tapping ceased. There, wedged under each of their window sills, sat identical parchment envelopes, the black gargoyle wax seal too thick to slip under all the way.

Upon opening the envelopes, each found a letter summoning them in two night’s time to the Southside junkyard, where the Gargoyle King awaited their arrival. Through their subterfuge and prison escape, he had noticed them, and it was finally time for initiation. 

[chanoyu-to-wa]

Nampō Roku, Book 5 (1):   Rikyū's Preamble¹ to Book Five.

1) The Daisu, Together with the Kyū-dai daisu [及第臺子], [and] the Naka-ita [中板]².

    Furthermore³, as the fifteenth day [of the Tenth Month] was an auspicious day, although it was [an] appropriate [time] to begin your training in the various forms of the daisu, [I] unfortunately had gone out from my residence⁴.  I am concerned⁵.  Yesterday, since you had gone back [before I returned] -- because [I] had no way to anticipate [your visit] -- I feel a great sense of regret [that I had not been here to receive you].

[Rikyū’s Guidance for Those Contemplating the Study the Daisu.]⁶

￮ With respect to the daisu-sōden [臺子相傳]⁷, when performing before a lord, while we should do so with an attitude of reticence⁸, we, moreover, should endeavor to do everything in accordance with [the nobleman's] desires⁹.

￮ With respect to the daisu, only after [the candidate] has ardently desired [to learn] the details of the practice for many years¹⁰ should the deepest of the innermost secrets be imparted¹¹.  And in light of this, [the candidate] should determinedly keep in mind that even a hint of these matters must never be divulged [to others]¹².

￮ Since it is difficult to learn [this material] without illustrations, sketches¹³ should be provided [by the teacher] -- since we¹⁴ who have already received these teachings, after [a time], find [ourselves] unable to reproduce these numerous arrangements [correctly], having forgotten the details.

￮ Even though [I] have said, again and again¹⁵, that [the true heart of chanoyu] is unique to the ko-zashiki [小座敷], the true heart of chanoyu is [actually] very difficult to realize¹⁶.  It is imperative that [you] should actively endeavor¹⁷, morning and night, to achieve it [by unstintingly immersing yourself in the chanoyu of the wabi small room].

￮ When [fresh] vegetables come in from [my] fief, I will send you a basket¹⁸.

    Kashiku [かしく]¹⁹.

[Genki san-nen (元龜三年)²⁰] Jū-gatsu yō-ka [十月八日]²¹.

                                                                                 Hō一 [抛一]²²                                                                                           Sōeki [宗易]²³.

Shū-un-an Shu [集雲庵主]²⁴        mairase-sōrō [まいらせ候]²⁵.

_________________________

¹This brief “cover letter” was modified* so that it appears to contains Rikyū’s thoughts regarding the daisu -- perhaps to obscure the fact that the collection of sketches that follows was prepared by someone else, and only passed to Rikyū with the request that he verify its authenticity.

    The way he addresses Nambō Sōkei in his letter implies that the two men had not really been acquainted before Sōkei approached Rikyū with his request† -- suggesting that this is the “previous occasion” to which Rikyū alluded in his opening words in the Nambō-ate no densho [南坊宛の傳書]. Since that document is dated the sixteenth day of the Ninth Month of Tenshō gannen [天正元年], 1573, it would seem that his review of the contents of this collection of sketches was undertaken during the autumn of 1572‡.

    While the actual timeline is not clear, the best guess is that Sōkei came into this collection of sketches from an unnamed third party, and was so struck by its contents (and, perhaps, unable to satisfy his questions elsewhere), that he went to Rikyū’s house on the spur of the moment**.  And, finding Rikyū out, he simply went back to the Shū-un-an (which was about 10 minutes walk from the site of Rikyu’s Ima-ichi-machi residence). ___________ *It is difficult to know what, if any, of this material is actually authentic.  If any of it is, then the letter that forms the first part of the entry (expressing Rikyū’s regret for having been absent when Sōkei called at his house) is most likely.

    The admonitions that follow seem to have no connection with the letter; but neither do they have any direct connection with the contents of the book.  This suggests that they were added as a way to influence the reader’s approach before he sets eyes on the contents of this book.  Oddly, the admonitions degenerate after the third, with the fourth apparently advocating that wabi tea is the only true chanoyu (and so the contents of Book Five should be ignored?); while the last is not an admonition at all (even though it is formatted in exactly the same way, and written in exactly the same sort of language), but a silly little offer, to Sōkei, of a basket of fresh greens from time to time.

†Of course the two men would have seen each other, and possibly even had spoken briefly, since they were both disciples of Jōō.  Nevertheless -- if only a consequence of Sōkei’s responsibilities to the Nanshū-ji, coupled with the fact of Rikyū’s absence from Sakai for almost a decade (while studying on the continent) -- they had probably had very little to do with each other until the present occasion, when Sōkei approached Rikyū and asked him to review the contents of this collection of documents.

    The tone of Rikyū’s letter suggests that he was not used to receiving visits of this sort -- indeed, this may have been the first occasion when someone approached him in the capacity of, if not a teacher, then as a senior and respected disciple of Jōō.

‡The letter, or the appended admonitions, does not directly address the sketches that make up Book Five -- though the third of them implies that access to such a collection would be desirable, as a mnemonic tool (since otherwise it is simply too easy to forget the details).

**The surprise in Rikyū’s letter, in addition to showing that he was unaccustomed to receiving visits from the shuso [首座] of the temple (who was probably the third highest-ranked monk in the major temple in Sakai), seems to suggest that Sōkei was on his way back from making inquiries somewhere else, and, passing Rikyū’s gate, decided that maybe he might be able to provide some answers.  Nothing indicates that Sōkei left the sketches there at that time, or even left a message regarding the specifics of his visit.  He probably visited (or wrote to) Rikyū later, and tendered his request that Rikyū review this collection of papers, and make his assessment.

    Given the relationship that developed between the two men thereafter (it seems that Sōkei eventually began to act as Rikyū’s unofficial steward after his duties to Hideyoshi required him to take up residence in Kyōto), Sōkei may have kept this letter as a sort of memento of his first interaction with Rikyū.

²Daisu  narabi kyū-dai daisu ・ naka-ita [臺子 并及第臺子・中板].

    Narabi [并 seems to have been used as a shorthand for 並び] means a line or list.  In other words, the collection includes arrangements for all three of these tana.

    The name daisu [臺子] specifically means the tana that we refer to as the shin-daisu.  This tana, which is painted with shin-nuri, has four legs, and was supposed to be used only with the furo.  While a medium-sized bronze kimen-buro [鬼面風爐] was the original choice of furo for the large daisu*, and a small Chōsen-buro [朝鮮風爐] was originally used on the small daisu†, by Rikyū's day ceramic furo of several different shapes‡ were also being used on both.

    The kyū-dai daisu [及第臺子] has two legs, and the ji-ita (2-shaku 7-sun 5-bu x 1-shaku 3-sun) is smaller than the ten-ita (2-shaku 9-sun 5-bu x 1-shaku 4-sun).  It was painted with shin-nuri, and had a slightly raised rim around the ten-ita**.   On account of the size of the ten-ita, the kyū-dai daisu could only be used on a kyō-ma tatami.  This daisu was used only with the ro††.

    Naka-ita [中板] refers to the board that is now known as the naga-ita [長板].  Since it was made from the discarded ten-ita of an old (large) shin-daisu (by cutting away the edges to the innermost corner of the four leg holes‡‡, and then relacquering the entire board), there was always a certain variability in its dimensions.  It was first used by Ashikaga Yoshimasa during the period of his brief second retirement (from the end of 1489, to the first month of 1490, when Yoshimasa died).  Traditionally it could only be used with a large (often iron) furo***

    This would appear to be the title for this entry, though whether it was part of his letter, or whether it was intended to apply to the entirety of Book Five as well, is unclear††† . __________ *The shelves of the ō-daisu [大臺子] measured 2-shaku 9-sun 5-bu x 1-shaku 4-sun.  This daisu was used in a room covered with kyōma-tatami [京間疊] (these mats are 6-shaku 3-sun x 3-shaku 1-sun 5-bu), where the large daisu fit perfectly between the heri.

    In the early days, at least, the height of the ten-ita was determined by the physical stature of the host.

†The ko-daisu [小臺子] measured 2-shaku 7-sun 5-bu x 1-shaku 3-sun.  It was originally intended to be used in a room covered by inakama-tatami [田舎間疊] (which measure 5-shaku 9-sun x 2-shaku 8-sun 5-bu).

    The ko-daisu was sometimes used in a kyōma room (because this gave a feeling of insufficiency).  While originally intended to be used only with the furo, during the Edo period certain schools began to argue that the large daisu should be used with the furo, and the small daisu with the ro, and this idea has persisted into the present.

‡The original ceramic furo was the Nara-buro [奈良風爐].  It was shaped rather like a pumpkin (spherical, with a flattened top and bottom), with a round hole cut in the top for the kama, and a himado [火窓] in both the front and the back.  The kiri-kake gama rested on a pair of small wooden blocks, placed on the left and right sides of the hole, and so produced the same effect as a kake-awase furo.

    Later, after the idea of the gotoku [火卓, later 五徳] began to catch on (this trivet was derived from the small rest on which the saucer of oil was stood in a night light:  originally, the gotoku was used with the ring uppermost, and the feet standing on top of the hai-gata), the ceramic furo morphed into what is now called the mayu-buro [眉風爐] -- since this kind of furo lasted much longer than the earlier Nara-buro (in which the heat weakened the clay on which the weight of the kama rested).  This kind of furo has generally straight sides, with a himado cut only in the front.  The gotoku was arranged so that the upper side of the ring was at the same level as the top of the sides of the furo, with a space between it and the sides (for enhanced ventilation) and the kiri-kake gama sat within the gotoku, resting on a pair of wooden blocks that were placed on the ring just as it had on the Nara-buro.

**Originally made for use as a writing desk on the continent, the raised edge kept writing brushes from rolling off and falling onto the floor.

††Meaning that it only came into use during Jōō's middle period.

‡‡This is what naka-ita [中板] means -- the inner part of the board (after the outer edges have been cut off).

    Since the name was often written with kana during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and since, in classical times, the daku-ten [濁点] (the diacritical dots that change ka [か, カ] to ga [が, ガ]) were frequently omitted, by the Edo period (if not before) the name was assumed to mean naga-ita [長板], “long-board” (in analogy with the names of the shiki-ita -- the ko-ita [小板], “small board,” and ō-ita [大板], “large board”).

***The naka-ita/naga-ita was originally used to support the set of kaigu that were made to be used on the o-chanoyu-dana, when Yoshimasa began to use them in the shoin (when his storehouse was fired, he lost all of his precious imported utensils; but since his mansion was not damaged, the disused pieces on the o-chanoyu-dana in the anteroom to the shoin survived).  As these were significantly larger (originally tea was prepared at the o-chanoyu-dana by an underling, and the utensils were especially large so that tea could be available throughout the day, without any danger of running out of hot or cold water), and because at least some of them were locally made, it was not appropriate to place them on a daisu.  Because the ten-ita of his old daisu had survived the fire with minimal damage, Yoshimasa decided that reusing it in this way was appropriate to the general mood of the objects that would be arranged on it.

†††Tachibana Jitsuzan’s title of this book is Fifth [Book of the] Nampō Roku ・ Daisu [五南方録 ・ 臺子].

    The collection consisted of a stack of individual sheets of paper, which lacked a general title (or even a way to keep them together -- thus any arrangements of which he did not approve could simply have been removed, without any evidence that they ever existed).

    That said, it is unlikely that this line was actually part of Rikyū’s original letter, or (as seems more likely) was added later (by Nambō Sōkei, Tachibana Jitsuzan, or even another hand, during the Edo period), as a sort of sub-title for the book (since the scope of the book is not limited to the daisu alone, but also includes the kyū-dai daisu and naka-ita/naga-ita -- the arrangements for the latter two being derived directly from the daisu).

³Nao-nao [尚〰].

    Nao-nao [尚々] means furthermore, all the more.

    This word suggests that the first part of the letter has been lost, though whether through deterioration, or because it was intentionally expunged so as to eliminate its contents*, is unclear. __________ *During the early Edo period there was a more or less concerted effort to remove Nambō Sōkei from the historical record, and transfer all of those references that could not be deleted to Takayama Shigetomo [高山重友; 1552 ~ 1615] -- who is better known (by his title) as Takayama ukon [高山右近]; and by his baptismal name, as Takayama Justo [高山ユスト] (or Dom Justo Takayama).

    In fact, there seems to be no possibility that Shigetomo could have been referred to as Nambō until after he renounced his offices in 1587 (the Nambo-ate no densho is clearly dated Tenshō gannen [天正元年], 1573), since this was accomplished by “shaving his head” and nominally becoming a Buddhist monk (his renunciation was occasioned by Hideyoshi's promulgation of the Expulsion Edicts against the Christian Missionaries, and the prohibition of the practice of Catholicism by the inhabitants of Japan); but the sobriquet does not seem to have been actually used until he abandoned Japan for Manila in 1614 (“nambō” [南坊] means “the Monk in the South”) -- as a snide and offensive way of alluding to his (forbidden) Christian vocation.

⁴Gu-taku [愚宅].

    “My foolish residence.”  A self-deprecatory term used when especial deference is appropriate.

⁵Kashiku [かしく].

    While generally used today to mean “sincerely yours” at the closing of a letter, here -- since it is not at the end of the letter (even if we suppose that the letter itself was limited to these first several lines) -- kashiku [恐] seems to mean “to be fearful” or “apprehensive.”

    Rikyū is (perhaps politely) exaggerating his mortification that, because he was not available*, he may have caused some trouble for Sōkei.

    If this was actually the usual form kashiku (which indicates the end of a letter), that would suggest that Rikyū intended to end his letter here -- and then decided to add another sentence†.  And then wrote kashiku once again after that‡. ___________ *Possibly thinking that Sōkei may have gotten off to a bad start in his study of the daisu -- but that assumes that Rikyū knew the purpose of Sōkei’s visit at the time when he wrote this letter.

†In either case, though, the admonitions could not have been part of the letter, since there is nothing that leads up to them, or suggests that Rikyū has some advice to impart to Sōkei at this time.

‡With the five admonitions inserted between the end of the letter and the second kashiku at a later time.

⁶I have added this title to the list of five points* that follow, since some sort of transition from the letter to the admonitions seems necessary.

    As I have already implied, there is a decided sense of non sequitur between the text of Rikyū’s letter, and these five admonitions† -- as if an important (expository) part of his letter was missing‡.  Furthermore, and equally perplexing, there are no closing remarks following the list -- another point that is uncharacteristic, in the light of Rikyū’s numerous densho (which were always written in letter-form).

    Given how the modern schools have used these admonitions to further their financial agendas**, one is lead to conclude that these points were simply tacked on to the end of Rikyū’s letter later, during the Edo period††. ___________ *While all of the printed versions are formatted as if there are five admonitions of equal seriousness, in fact they begin to peter out after the third -- the fourth refers to the superiority of wabi no chanoyu; and the fifth is a chatty little piece of nonsense where Rikyū promises to send Sōkei a basket of greens whenever they are available (calculated to suggest that the two are old friends, when they appear -- at least from the tone of Rikyū’s introductory letter -- to be near-strangers).

†While the document is formatted so that it appears to have five admonitions (we do not know if this is the responsibility of Tachibana Jitsuzan, of if the original from which he made his copy was already arranged in this way), the fourth has nothing to do with advice to someone who is going to embark on a study of the daisu (indeed, if anything, its purpose is to dissuade the reader from continuing, since it suggests that a study of the daisu will be nothing but a waste of time that might better be spent in the pursuit of wabi); and the last is a totally irrelevant piece of inappropriate nonsense.

‡The dicta are usually interpreted in such a way to suggest that Nambō Sōkei was actively seeking Rikyū’s instruction (as one would go about gaining entree to a fashionable teacher) -- thus establishing Rikyū’s supremacy as the paramount teacher of his generation (in 1572).  In fact, it appears that he only began to move into such a role in the years that followed the drafting of the Nambō-ate no densho (which appeared one year after this one).

    Rikyū’s letter -- which precedes his admonitions -- suggests, to the contrary, that he was not used to being the object of such attentions; and was extremely apologetic for not having been there to receive Sōkei’s (apparently unannounced, and unexpected) visit.

**Kumakura Isao devotes four full pages (which constitutes about a third of his brief overview of Book Five) to this entry:  not only the preeminence of the iemoto (who is supposed to be the sole recipient of the isshi sōden [一子相傳]) and the modern schools’ fixed curricula and menjō system (as well as the argument for increasing the amount of the fees for instruction in the “higher temae”) is largely based upon the assertions found in these admonitions.

††Since the kiri-kami were apparently made into a sort of notebook (by folding them in half and stitching along the free edge -- this would explain why the sketches are found on one page, while their titles, and Rikyū’s kaō, are found on the next page), the paper on which Rikyū‘s letter was written could have been split open, and the “admonitions” written on the back side.  This would also explain why the second “kashiku” appears to dangle after the last of the five admonitions.

    This scenario is plausible because, if we eliminate the admonitions -- which, as has been mentioned, have no apparent connection with the letter that precedes them -- this is just the place where Rikyū’s closing (the date, his title and signature, and the name of the addressee) would fit in most comfortably.

⁷Daisu-sōden [臺子相傳].

    Sōden [相傳] means the inherited teachings, the teachings that have been passed down from generation to generation, since ancient times.  (This contrasts with those teachings peculiar to a certain teacher or master, which originated with him.)

    In Rikyū’s period, the daisu was primarily employed as a way to serve tea deferentially to a nobleman.  The reasoning behind this comes directly from the original practice, where tea was prepared, using the daisu, and offered to the Buddha.  Since the Buddha is an image, and so cannot drink the tea, it was then offered to the most honored person present (or the person that he or she indicated should take it in their stead), as a substitute for the Buddha (while also acknowledging the inherent Buddha-nature of human beings).  This thought colors, or lies behind, the four admonitions recorded here.

⁸O-yurushi sōrō-aida [御免候間].

    O-yurushi [御免 =　お許し] means (to ask) forgiveness, (to seek) permission, (to beg ones) pardon; sōrō-aida [候う間] means while doing something.  In other words, one should maintain a reticent or reserved manner while serving tea with the daisu.

⁹Kono ue ha o-kokoro-shidai ni sōrō koto [此上は御情次第ニ候事].

    O-kokoro-shidai [情次第] means “according to (ones) mind” or “in accordance with (ones) desires.”  The honorifics indicate that this refers to the nobleman's wishes or preferences.

¹⁰O-konmō ta-nen no shisai ni tsuke [御懇望多年之子細ニ付].

    O-konmo [御懇望] means plead, make an earnest request, entreat.

    Ta-nen [多年] means (for) many years, an extended period of time.

    Shisai [子細] means the details (of the practice associated with the daisu).

    In other words, the candidate must approach the teacher and sincerely request this instruction first -- the teacher should not simply offer it to him.  And the candidate must demonstrate the sincerity of his desire (by continuing to beg for these teachings for a prolonged period of time -- thus showing that this is not simply a whim).  Only after carefully vetting this disciple should the teacher decide to impart the details to him.

    Therefore, to simply say that “this is the next menjō in the series” -- as the modern schools do -- is wrong.  So, too, is it wrong to hand this information out casually, or, worse, make it available for a certain price.  The result of such behaviors will be a trivialization of this practice -- and, perhaps ultimately, the loss of precisely those disciples who would most benefit from these teachings.

¹¹Himitsu no ōgi-sōden [秘密之奥儀相伝]

    Himitsu [秘密] means the Mysteries, the esoteric teachings.

    Ōgi-sōden [奥義相伝] refers to the most secret of that body of teachings that have been handed down from generation to generation.

¹²Koto-sara gyo-i ni taishi, isasaka mo roken aru-majiku-sōrō koto [殊更御意ニ対、聊かも露顕あるましく候事].

    Koto-sara gyo-i ni taishi [殊更御意に対し]:  koto-sara [殊更] means (to do something) deliberately, intentionally; gyo-i [御意] means will, desire, intention; taishi [対し] means “in response to,” “in relation to.”  Thus, one should be resolved, in light of the fact that these teachings should only be imparted to one who has exhibited a sincere and dedicated desire (over a long period of time) for this knowledge....

    Isasaka mo roken [聊かも露顕]:  isasaka mo [聊かも] means “even a little (amount);” roken [露顕] means to disclose (specifically something that is a secret).  Aru-majiku soro-koto [あるまじく候事]:  aru-majiku [あるまじく] means should not exist, must not exist; sōrō-koto [候う事] means a case or situation where this is done.

    In other words, (in light of the above consideration), to disclose even a little (of the secret teachings) to others (specifically, those who have not gone through the vetting process and been deemed worthy to receive these teachings*) is something that should never be done†. ___________ *Araki (“Kitamuki”) Dōchin’s reticence, when pressed by Jōō to relate these details, is a good example of this.

†Because people are not likely to respect teachings that have been shared so casually.

¹³Ko-kiri-kami [小切紙] literally means (sketches) on small pieces of paper.  In other words, sketches on individual leaves of paper.

    This statement was probably inserted as an attempt to explain why this collection of sketches came to exist.

    The person who added this statement seems to have wanted to imply that Rikyū presented the sketches to Sōkei, after Sōkei -- who was one of Rikyū's long-term students* -- applied to Rikyū for instruction in the practice of the daisu†.  However, Rikyū's kaō, indicating his approval‡, coupled with the story told in his cover letter**, precludes any such interpretation. __________ *From the beginning the Senke have always been of two minds about Nambō Sōkei.  On the one hand, they were inclined to deny his very existence (since his existence would -- and did -- directly challenge the validity of Sōtan’s teachings); yet there is also a tsutsu for a chashaku carved by Sōkei that was signed by Kawakami Fuhaku [川上不白; 1705 ~ 1751], an important disciple of the Sen family (he was apparently authorized, by the great Sen Jōshinsai Sōsa, to establish a Sen school in Edo); and another that was said to have belonged to Sōtan (given to him, or to Shōan, his father, by Sōkei), according to Kanshū oshō-sama.

†Perhaps this was based on Rikyū’s introductory comments in the Shin no dai-temmoku, onaji daisu no koto no densho [眞の臺天目、同臺子の事の傳書].  However, that densho (which appears to have been written in 1586) postdates the interaction described here by some 14 years.

‡As has been mentioned before, the kaō suggests that the sketches were prepared by someone else -- given their format and other details, probably (originally) by Jōō, though since both Sōkei and Rikyū would have been familiar with Jōō's writing, these were likely a copy of Jōō's collection made by someone else -- and then came into Sōkei's possession in some way.  Perhaps accompanied by a statement that these sketches were originally by Jōō.  Sōkei, then, decided to visit Rikyū, to see if he could determine their authenticity.

**As discussed above, the tone of Rikyū's letter indicates:

1) that he had had no forewarning of Sōkei's visit, and so was nonplussed to hear about it when he returned home (which, in turn, suggests that he was not used to receiving such attentions); and,

2) the deferential usages suggest that, while the two men probably had a passing acquaintance with each other (since both had been numbered among Jōō's principal disciples), they were hardly intimate, and this, in fact, was probably the first time that Sōkei had made bold to contact Rikyū directly.

    While Nambō Sōkei's dates of birth and death are not known, the body of evidence surviving from that period suggests that he was at least several years older than Rikyū.  And, furthermore, since Rikyū had originally studied chanoyu with Araki Dōchin, Sōkei was surely the senior of the two, in terms of being one of Jōō's disciples.  Both of which would have made Sōkei's applying to Rikyū for help (it is not really possible to say that Sōkei was asking Rikyū for lessons, even if this is how many Japanese scholars, sponsored by the modern schools, prefer to interpret the course of events:  Sōkei simply wanted to know if this collection of sketches was authentic, or if some of them were, perhaps, spurious) unusual -- if not unprecedented.  In the several densho that were written in the several years after the Nambō-ate no densho, Rikyū goes to considerable length to link himself with Jōō, and in that way establish his credentials (specifically by bringing up the matter of the Daikoku-an no uta [大黒庵の歌] -- possession of which he seems to have felt demonstrated that Jōō considered him to be his successor, since owning Jōō's autograph gave him the right to use the name Daikoku-an as his own:  Rikyū's need to do so shows that he was not, in fact, well known as a teacher of tea, or, more importantly, generally regarded as Jōō's heir, as certain scholars suggest).

    Rikyū's conflict with Imai Sōkyū, which ultimately boiled down to which of the two men had the right to train Jōō's son Sōga, is significant, since it would appear that the majority of the machi-shū ultimately chose to side with Sōkyū, and turned a blind eye (even if they offered no active assistance) to the repudiation of Rikyū's reputation, and his interpretation of the practice of chanoyu, following his seppuku.

     The more commonly bandied story, where Sōkyū’s sale of pieces of Jōō’s collection (to finance Sōga’s upkeep), is difficult to accept as being the major cause of tension between him and Rikyū precisely because it was Rikyū who was instrumental in finding buyers (and negotiating the prices) for these objects.

¹⁴Warera mo shiden sude ni ato, kazu-kazu no kazari wa tsune ni tori-dasazu [我等も師傳已後、數〻之飾ハ常ニ不取出].

    Warera [我等] means we, in the sense of that faction of the tea community who have been initiated into the practice of the daisu.

    Sude ni [已 = 已に, 既に] means already.

    In other words, “we, who have already received the master's teaching, afterward....”

    Tori-dasu [取出す] means to bring out, bring forth, produce.  Here it is the negative form that is used, meaning “not (re)produce (many of these arrangements)."

¹⁵Mōshi te mo mōshi te mo [申しても〰].

    Mōshi te mo [申しても] means “even if I said that.”  The repetition adds emphasis (i.e., “even if I have said it again and again and again...”).

¹⁶Ko-zashiki nara de ha, chanoyu no hon-shin ha itari-gatashi-kōtō ni soro [小座敷ならてハ、茶之湯之本心ハ難至事ニ候].

    Ko-zashiki nara de ha [小座敷ならでは] means “(it is) unique to the small room.”

    Hon-shin [本心] means things like “true feelings,” “true mind,” “true heart.”

    Itari-gataki-koto [至り難き事]* means difficult to reach, difficult to realize (itaru [至る] means “to reach something;” gataki [難き] means “difficult”).

    While this series of admonishments is ostensibly an introduction to this collection of ancient daisu arrangements, yet the person who added this to the manuscript† was obviously a fervent practitioner of wabi no chanoyu‡.  This entry could be interpreted as an attempt to dissuade the reader from looking into this matter seriously. __________ *Possibly 難至事 is a miscopying (the order of the first two kanji has been inverted).

†While Rikyū firmly believed that chanoyu reaches its highest development in the wabi small room, he would never have disparaged the practice of the daisu (as this admonishment seems to do) -- since the daisu is the basis, the foundation, for wabi practice.

    As I have written before, when Rikyū made tea in his Mozuno ko-yashiki [百舌鳥野小屋敷], using his small unryū-gama, a kiji-tsurube, a chū-natsume, aka-raku chawan, and take-wa, he was performing the gokushin temae just as surely as he would have done seated in front of the shin-daisu with futatsu-gumi [二ツ組] and nanatsu-kazari [七ツ飾].  I will attempt to explain this as we study this book.

‡Perhaps someone closely affiliated with the Sen family.

    A person of that sort would also have seen the need to minimize the presence of Nambō Sōkei, while also deleting anything that might allude to the rather insignificant status of Rikyū at that time.

¹⁷O-kufu [御工夫].

    Kufu [工夫] means to actively work, to actively plan, to actively devise, actively invent, and so forth.  The important thing is diligently and unceasingly making the effort.  The honorific shows that this refers to Sōkei’s effort.

¹⁸Chigyō-sho no yasai ori-fushi rai-mama , ichi kago okuri-mōshi-sōrō  [知行所之野菜折ふし來候まゝ、一籠送申候]

    Chigyōsho [知行所] means a fief -- land given to a samurai, from which his income (in rice) is derived.  During the Edo period, this term appears to have referred specifically to the fief given to a banner man (hatamoto [旗本]), or member of the lord's family.  In this context, it is usually interpreted to mean Rikyū's fief at Mozuno -- though, chronologically speaking, that would have been impossible (if this document was written in 1572).

    Yasai [野菜] means greens, vegetables.

    Ori-fushi rai-mama [折節来間々]:  ori-fushi [折節] means “from time to time;” rai-mama [来間々] means “at those times when they come in.”

    Though this line is formatted as if it were another admonition, it actually is a chatty little piece of nonsense, absolutely out of keeping with the tone of the letter (which seems almost to have been written in a state of trepidation over his faux pas -- of being absent when an unexpected caller visited) that began this entry.

    Once again, it appears that this was added, during the Edo period, to “associate” Rikyū with the person he became at the end of his life (which seems to have been all of him that the Sen family knew -- since, contrary to their family history, Rikyū married Shōan's mother, Sō-on, out of Hideyoshi's harem, where she would not have gone to live until after her husband -- Miyaō Saburō Sannyū [宮王三朗三入; ? ~ 1582], Shōan's father -- was killed during the battle of Yamazaki, in the summer of 1582:  Saburō Sannyū died personally defending Hideyoshi, and Hideyoshi’s care for the widow was out of respect for her husband’s sacrifice -- as was Hideyoshi’s restoration of the Sen family name to Shōan, Saburō Sannyū’s son, several years after Rikyū’s seppuku).

¹⁹Kashiku [かしく] is a standard closing for a letter, usually translated as something like “sincerely yours.”

    Perhaps this word was added to make it seem that the list of admonitions was part of the letter.

    Alternately, it may have been that Rikyū originally was going to close his letter at the first kashiku (see footnote 5, above), changed his mind and added another sentence, and then closed it with this second kashiku.

    In either case, the five admonitions would not have been part of that letter.

²⁰Presumably.

    The Genki [元龜] era ended on the 28th day of the Seventh Month* of Genki 4 (August 25, 1573 in the proleptic Gregorian calendar).  Since the present document is dated to the eighth day of the Tenth Month, and since the Nambō-ate no densho (which mentions that Rikyū's first communication with Nambō Sōkei occurred roughly one year previously) is dated Tenshō gannen [天正元年] (the first year of the Tenshō era -- which also began on August 25, 1573), it follows that this letter must have been written in 1573. __________ *The Seventh Month had 29 days in this year.

²¹Jū-gatsu yō-ka [十月八日].

    The date would have been November 2, 1573, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.

²²Hō一 [抛一]

    This alludes to Rikyū's sai-gō [齋號], Hōsensai [拋筌齋].

    The sai-gō originated in the temple system, and was the name of the cell in which the monk lived.  Thus it was given in addition to their Buddhist name (the name that begins with the kanji Sō [宗]).  Later, laymen started to use this kind of name (which reflected either the name of their private study -- their shoin [書院]), or, as in this case, the name of their tea room.

    Other than in the present instance, the name Hōsensai is mentioned occasionally in records dating from the eighth decade of the fifteenth century, beginning around 1574.  Thus it would appear that Rikyū used it as part of his formal signature on this occasion because he had only recently been awarded this title (his master Kokei Sōchin [古渓宗陳; 1532 ~ 1597] was, like Sōkei, a monk of the Nanshū-ji in Sakai), and it would have been recognized by Sōkei.  (This is another place where Rikyū seems to be working to firm his credentials with Sōkei.)

²³Sōeki [宗易] was Rikyū's Buddhist name, which he (as was the custom in that period) used as his professional name.

²⁴Shū-un-an Shu [集雲庵主].

    “The Master of the Shū-un-an.”  Rikyū does not use Sōkei's personal name, since this would have implied an inappropriate familiarity (assuming that, as I have suggested, the two men were not close at this time).

²⁵Mairase-sōrō [まいらせ候].

    Mairase-sōrō [參らせ候う] means something like “to call upon (the forenamed individual)” -- that is, the letter is intended to take the place of a personal visit.

    It is a polite way of indicating the intended recipient of the letter.

[sophygurl]

300 Fox Way - let’s unpack the household a bit

One thing I want to take a closer look at regarding 300 Fox Way in The Raven Cycle is what the composition of the household actually is, and what their history and relationship dynamics are because it’s not all that clear. And I just love them all so much, and love the idea of the house and household so much, so I just wanna know everything we can possibly know about them!

Here are some things we know, or can assume or guess, about the makeup and personal dynamics of 300 Fox Way:

Maura, Calla, and Persephone came together from separate points and formed the 300 Fox Way household when they were fairly young (or at least when Maura and Calla were young - Persephone’s age, like everything else about her, is pretty vague and there are hints that no one really knows how old she is which makes me think she might be older than the rest)

At some point in time Jimi joined the household, and was either already with Orla then, or Orla was born there, or possibly Orla at some point lived elsewhere and joined her mom and the others later in life. All we know for sure is that Orla had been there are least since her teen years as per BLLB chapter 30: “Orla had gone through a period in her teens of telling everyone what their auras said about them. She had told Blue that her aura had meant she was short. She had been a pretty awful teenager.”

Also, Orla is at least 21 years old, as that’s the reason given for Gansey asking her along on the boat trip. I’m guessing she can’t be much older than that since she is continuously flirting with teenage boys and this isn’t seen as particularly creepy, and she also still has a pulse on the high school social scene. 

Side note: in BLLB chapter 13, Blue says that Orla “was still friends or ex-girlfriends with her entire class” - paying attention to word choice here, it doesn’t say friends or ex-friends, nor friends or ex’s. Is Orla bi? Did she date girls in high school? Food for thought. 

Blue was born into the household, and we get the sense that all of the above mentioned women were around since she was a small child and helped in the raising of her. I would guess the same would be true of Orla, and that these two were raised more or less as siblings, hence their sibling-like rivalry with one another. What cracks me up is the sibling-like relationship Maura and Orla seem to have! Maura is often snotty towards Orla, which may or may not be due in part to her motherly protectiveness of Blue. But it also seems their personalities clash a bit - Maura liking to be in charge and Orla liking to go rogue. 

Neeve comes to stay with them at the start of The Raven Boys, and after she’s gone and they find Gwenllian she joins the household.

Artemus is the only male we ever hear about living at Fox Way

Although The Gray Man does seem to stay overnight sometimes

It also seems that Orla often entertains men

There are possibly other women who live at Fox Way, or who have at one point in time lived there, or who stay there sometimes, or who just come and go a lot during the day.

These possible people are maybe related to Maura and Jimi, or maybe to others of the household, or maybe are just referred to as family due to emotional closeness.

Jimi is Maura’s sister - most likely full sister as Blue makes a point of referring to Neeve always as a half-aunt and Jimi as just an aunt

Blue also never refers to Calla or Persephone as aunts in the way you might call a close family friend an aunt, so I think Blue is very precise about what she calls her family members. So Jimi is a full aunt, Neeve is a half-aunt, Orla is a cousin, and there may or may not be other aunts and half-aunts and cousins around. 

The reason I say maybe about other family members/household members is that while Blue is precise about what she calls her family members, she also definitely does exaggerate when it comes to counting the people who live in or hang out in her house. Hence, it’s difficult to tell exactly who all might live there or be there a lot.

Some of the things Blue says about the makeup of her family/household:

TRB chapter 1: “In Blue’s intensely clairvoyant family, she was a fluke, an outsider to the vibrant conversation her mother and aunts and cousins held with a world hidden to most people.” - this seems to imply that she has multiple cousins, in addition to multiple aunts, although Orla is the only cousin she ever names.

TRB chapter 3: “There was school for Blue and work for some of the more productive (or less intuitive) aunts...” - again the implication of multiple aunts, unless Blue is referring to all of the adult women in the house as aunts in this instance.

Side note about jobs in the household: We know that Calla has a job outside the house working some kind of office job at Aglionby Academy. Orla seems to be in charge of the psychic hotline she put in, Neeve had her books and TV show, Persephone had her PhD work, and Jimi apparently has a job that requires her to sometimes have a night shift but I don’t believe we’re told what that is. It’s not clear what, if anything, Maura might have done beyond the readings or if any of the other possible inhabitants of the house had outside jobs.

TRB chapter 19: “Inside, every room was occupied with cousins and aunts and mothers.” - an example of Blue presumably exaggerating the number of people in the house. 

Then again in chapter 20: “There are three hundred and forty-two people who live in this house and they all want to be in this room.” - A clear exaggeration this time lol 

In TRB chapter 22, Blue refers to Neeve as “one of” her half-aunts, and since she only ever refers to Jimi as an aunt, we’re meant to think she has other half-aunt’s out there too. This makes me wonder - from the same side of the family as Neeve or from the other parent? How many? 

TDT chapter 26: “She stepped over two small girls (she wasn’t certain who they belonged to) playing with tanks in the middle of the hall and snuck past a sort of possible second cousin carrying two lit candles.” - none of this is described as being out of the ordinary and implies a few things -

small girls can often be found playing in the house - relatives? relatives of other household members? friend’s kids? client’s kids? did the girls bring the tanks or does Fox Way keep tanks around for little girls who come over to play with?

a possible second cousin means there are, in fact, other relatives hanging about. Assuming it is a second cousin, that would be Maura’s cousin? On Neeve’s side or the other side? How many second cousins does she have? Blue is always so casual about all of this - just gobs of female relatives and family friends so she doesn’t even bother finding out exactly who they are or how she’s related to them like?! Come on - help me out here Blue!

BLLB chapter 17: “Plus, Trinity - Jimi’s sister or cousin or friend - had brought over about one thousand little cousins or something to make soap.” - Blue, being vague as always, also exaggerating again. But aha! Another named family member of some kind. 

If Trinity is possibly Jimi’s sister or cousin, but not Maura’s, would that make her a half-sister or half-cousin and my hypothesis that Jimi is Maura’s full sister is wrong? My guess is that Trinity is a close friend of Jimi’s who is like family the way Calla and Persephone are like family. But who knows! 

Gansey also says, in BLLB chapter 43, “He found Calla and Jimi and Orla and two other young women he didn’t recognize in the kitchen.” Again, the implication that there are multiple women who are a part or semi-part of this household who are not named/generally talked about. Relatives? Family friends? Neighbors? Clients?

We’re not sure about where any male relatives (other than Artemus eventually) might be, but Blue quips in TDT chapter 13 that “It’s like boot camp. They can’t hack it. Poor things.” Presumably none of the women of Fox Way who have had children have had sons, but what about the fathers or uncles or male cousins, etc,? Not even any close male friends (at least until the Gangsey enter Blue’s life)?

We’re also not sure what happened to Blue’s grandmothers, but in the same chapter as the above quote about the men in the family, Blue tells Gansey they both died and that her mom always said they’d died of meddling. This is clearly not a serious answer, so that leaves more questions.

300 Fox Way and things related to it are often referred to in terms of belonging to Maura or to “the Sargent’s” - this could be due to Blue’s own perspective, or perhaps because Maura is the unofficial head of the household, or because there are more Sargent’s than non-Sargent’s in the household (Maura and Blue for sure, and presumably Orla and Jimi share the same last name although this is never specified). Examples:

The car:

TRB chapter 6: “His watch looked as if it cost more than her mother’s car...” - not the family car, or the household car as it is sometimes described. Does Maura own the car and everyone gets to use it, or is this just a nice shorthand? 

TRB chapter 43 - Calla says that Neeve “scuttled the car” - this time it’s more generically referred to as just the car. 

TDT chapter 48 - “Calla removed the keys to the Fox Way car from her pocket.” - from Blue’s pov, it is now the Fox Way car and not her mother’s, but could this be because her mother is currently missing and/or because Calla was the one driving it at the time?

TDT chapter 54 - described as “the shared Fox Way vehicle.”

The house:

TDT chapter 6 “Sitting on the floor of her mother’s kitchen, Blue glared up at her older cousin.” - her mother’s kitchen might imply that Maura owns the house, or, as with the car example, might just show that Blue thinks of household things as belonging to her mom.

None of the women at Fox Way were born in town or on the corpse road - so they’re all imports to the community. We know Maura (so presumably Jimi and possibly Neeve although it seems she did not grow up with Neeve) hails from West Virginia, but I don’t think we get any clues about where the other ladies come from originally. Jimi and Orla go to stay with friends in WV towards the end of TRK, which is further implication that they’re from the same area as Maura, and likely Maura and Jimi grew up together as siblings. 

The Bedroom situation:

Persephone has her own room -

TRB chapter 11 “Persephone was a poor but energetic sleeper; her midnight shouting and nocturnal leg paddling ensure she never had to share a room.”

Blue has her own room - her room is described many times as only hers, never a mention that she shares it or has ever shared it with anyone. She has privacy there and autonomy to decorate it as she wishes. 

Maura has her own room

TDT chapter 57 “The Gray Man checked out of Pleasant Valley Bed and breakfast and placed his suitcase just inside the door of Maura’s bedroom.”

Also the prologue of BLLB has Blue and Calla going through the things in Maura’s room.

Orla - does she have her own room? If not, who does she share with?

Neeve, and then Gwenllian, lived in the attic by themselves. Artemus lived in the kitchen closet by himself (ha!).

Calla and Jimi share a room - this is at first posed as owing to there not being a lot of rooms in the house, but it seems as if everyone else has their own room. You’d think that if anyone was going to be forced to share, it would be the children - Orla and Blue. So why Calla and Jimi? Why doesn’t one of them live in the attic if it’s habitable? Couldn’t one of them taken over the phone/sewing/cat room? We know there is some story about Jimi having had once punched Calla. We know Jimi is normally very sweet and compassionate. We know that Calla is a fighter and generally a gruffer person. There are perhaps some hints that Calla is gay? So? Are Calla and Jimi lovers? WHY IS THIS NEVER TALKED ABOUT! I need this, Maggie!

Some other random tidbits:

From the Christmas short story, we see that they celebrate the holiday in their usual hodgepodge way of accommodating all of their various personality and cultural background differences. There is of course a lot of pagan-influenced stuff. From Persephone’s Estonian background we have the hay under the Christmas tree. There are lots of sort of traditional Christmas things such as lights around the windows outside and fruitcake. But there are also mentions of some Kwanzaa traditions such as the black, red, and green flag pointing east. This leads me to believe that all of the headcanons about at least one person in the household being black is not just a headcanon. I think there is enough evidence that Calla is black for this just to be canon at this point. I personally think of both Jimi and Orla as being described in ways that lead to them very plausibly being black, as well. Whether this makes Maura and Blue black as well depends somewhat on if you agree with my hypothesis that Jimi and Maura are full siblings. As a white lady, take anything I say on this matter with a hefty grain of salt, but I definitely read Calla as black and the Sargents as quite possibly not-white. Persephone, otoh, is pasty as shit. 

I’ve got a whole thing about the physical descriptions of the house to make at some point, as well as a Maura/Calla/Persephone friendship analysis, some fun Orla/Blue sibling meta, some Blue and her mom’s stuff, and there will be more about FW whenever I get around to making my “questions I still have/mysteries yet unsolved” post. Any requests?? 

[tape-hiss]

Hello! This month's Tape Hiss is an Aetherian history lesson and is a little late, because I did a whole comic that went along with this. You can read it here, although be warned, it's NSFW. It concerns Cuppra (one of the Aetherian founders) and Suuhl (one of the reifa, or as most people including me call them, the skullbirds.) This post will expound on the comic a little bit, talking about what Aetheri was like at the time, how the war and post-war stuff unfolded, what Cuppra and Suuhl had to do with it all, and even a bit about skullbird culture.

So I've talked about the founders and the war-post-war events before both inside and outside of the comic, but even so, I think this side comic shows some things I've never really talked about before. The most immediately noticeable one is that Cuppra is hanging out in the palace--what's up with that?

What's up with it is this: Cuppra was an ethkarin, which is essentially a very fancy courtesan-slash-journalist. This occupation doesn't really exist in the same form in present-day Aetheri for reasons that will become obvious. The gist of it is that it used to be very typical for the Cynn, their spouse, and most nobility to have one or many ethkarin on the side--it wasn't a secret at all. I've talked some about the attitude towards marriage or what passes for it in Aetheri, and the weird disconnect I've mentioned between how the upper and lower classes each view sex and relationships was even more severe in pre-war times. Upper class Aetherians arranged partnerships and had children with people chosen for good breeding, or whatever, but if you didn't really much care for your designated partner, then you had  ethkarin to fill in for the rest of the relationship--intimacy, sex for the fun of it, and so on. Ethkarin were not employed just for sex, but also for their company and care. A little like hosting, but also not very much like hosting at all. Most ethkarin lived in-house; some of them had multiple clients, some of them did not.

The journalist bit of the job comes from the fact that part of being an  ethkarin involved retaining all of the goings-on in the palace and noble circles, scandalous or otherwise, and relaying this in columns in the press under a psuedonym. At this time in Aetheri, ethkarin were the only way anyone knew what went on in the palace. This part of the ethkarin job was not exactly a secret from their clients, either--it's just the way things were.

Outside of the upper classes,  ethkarin were viewed as essential parts of Aetherian society--an important ally to the regular people in keeping their rulers accountable. Aetheri has never had a puritanical view of sex, but the difference between classes is that outside of the nobility, the norm is to commit your life to whoever you like, good 'breeding' prospects aside. You love and have fun freely until you find the one person you really truly want to commit the rest of your hundreds of years to, and then you love and have fun with them for the rest of your days. Being an ethkarin was just a job, and usually this didn't clash with their actual love lives at all.

So Cuppra was one of the Cynn's ethkarin, in fact a favorite of theirs. Cynn Nadha, shown here in what used to be normal Aetherian royalty getup, was not a tyrant, or cruel, or careless...Cuppra would describe them as just sort of unable to relate to the people outside the Palace walls, which power will do to you, I suppose. Personally, the Cynn was quite nice, and Cuppra enjoyed working with them. So you can see immediately where Cuppra's role in the post-war revolution starts to appear.

(This occupation died out pretty soon after the revolt in the postwar period, because pretty much the entire upper class was deposed in one way or another, and the government that Escala instituted afterward was both way less extravagant and way more transparent. The transparency part has sort of faded over the years to present day--it's not that Numair or his predecessors take any extreme measures to hide what they're doing from the public, it's more that centuries of the government more or less being good stewards of the people has led the public to just expect the government to get on with it without having to be babysat. This has mostly worked, at least until recently.)

Aetheri in the immediate pre-war period was doing a lot of elbow-rubbing with other nations, though none so much as with the reifa, or skullbirds. To put it simply, the reifa were a very large nation with a tribal structure, and all of those tribes were represented by one figure who was voted in on an ad hoc basis. This figure during their interactions with Aetheri was Radh, the big cardinal-colored fella here.

What the Aetherian royal family wanted was to establish colonies offworld where the thyft weren't a problem; the reifa also wanted to spread abroad, as their world had little land suitable for them, apparently, and also they were adventurous types. The spirits had the magical means to establish and keep connection with offworld bases, and the reifa had the physical and otherwise strength necessary to help protect both the colonies and Aetherian cities from whatever lay beyond the borders. Thus, a partnership was born.

Suuhl was not a soldier--they were an artist. The reifa recorded things via drawings and etchings rather than through words. Even their simple hieroglyphic written language was really just shorthand drawings, and reading their language was not unlike reading road signs. Suuhl was essentially the historian brought along with the delegation to Aetheri to record whatever was worth taking note of. So Suuhl hung around the palace quite a bit, and that's how they and Cuppra met.

A note on the reifa: if you think the spirits are a little cavalier about sex, they're really nothing compared to the reifa. I'm not going to get too specific about these guys as more abut them will come out over time in the main comic, but suffice to say that sex in the culture of the reifa was a nexus for social bonding. It was as normal for friends to have sexual relationships as it would be for them to, like, plan a road trip together. Reifa were pretty loose in terms of romantic partnerships as well: polygamy was sort of the norm, but it didn't strike any of them as weird if a reifa were to have just one Big Favorite that they were romantic with. They also really, really did not care about species, so long as everyone involved was sentient and consenting.

The only strife that Cuppra and Suuhl had early on in their relationship was due to Aetherian attitude, not reifa. Most Aetherians did (still do) very much think that interspecies relationships were out of the question--it's probably rooted in their experiences with the thyft, which has hardwired them to regard anything that is clearly sentient but not a spirit to be a potential threat, or at least untrustworthy and beneath them. I think Cuppra felt for quite a while early on that, while they and Suuhl had been fooling around for a time, they would be crossing some sort of terrible line if it went any farther than that. Suuhl, obviously, thought this was incredibly stupid.

(And if you're wondering, the Cynn never knew about Cuppra's relationships outside of work. They never took much of an interest in their ethkarins' personal lives, not because they didn't care at all, but because you just don't do that with ethkarin.)

Now for a timeline of sorts:

The war starts to go bad when it becomes clear that Aetheri doesn't quite have the capability to make permanent doors between their world and Earth required for getting troops and supplies through consistently. They can't defend their colonies on Earth from the native monsters who very much want these literal aliens to fuck off. Someone in the world of the Palace gets it in their head that physically attaching their own universe to Earth's is the best way to make passage between the two stable, and the top magic users for that sort of thing began massaging this theory.

Meanwhile, the reifa living in Hymntup (the old name for Escalus, the capital city) have mostly integrated extremely well with the regular citizens. People have been organizing by neighborhood to drive off the thyft as they come hunting, and the reifa, having the physical ability to hurt the thyft where the spirits' magic cannot, are well-liked in their new home neighborhoods. Things are going well.

Then two things happen close together: a group of magic-users under the direction of the Cynn tries to move the universe and succeeds only in snuffing out a few others, followed by what can only be described as a culling, wherein a large group of the thyft all enter Hymntup at once and begin killing anyone they can get their hands on.

These two events completely destabilize both the war effort in the colonies and the home front in Aetheri. It doesn't take long for the reifa to realize that they suddenly cannot go home, that their world is gone, and that this was a result of Aetheri's little experiment. Radh totally and immediately withdraws the reifa from both the front lines and out of their communities in Hymntup, and they convene just outside the city in order to talk about what happened and what to do. The culling by the thyft starts immediately after this, while news is spreading to the rest of Hymntup about what they've inadvertently done to their new friends, and while the communities are now short of the people that were helping them defend against the thyft the most.

The Palace--completely protected from the thyft and out of touch with the rest of the city--was busy at this moment trying to do damage control elsewhere. The withdrawal of the reifa from Aetheri's Earth settlements kneecapped the forces there, and it was quickly turning into a slaughter. The monsters on Earth just Knew something Big had happened, but they didn't know what, only that Aetheri had done it. Aetherian forces were being routed out of their settlements so quickly that the most the Cynn could do was try to get them all evacuated before the monsters of Earth got them. At the same time, the Palace is trying to figure out what the hell just happened--no one had expected anything to go catastrophically wrong with the whole world-moving thing, more that it just wouldn't work at all, if anything. What the Cynn and the Palace was not paying attention to was any of the issues going on down in Hymntup, leaving everyone there to essentially fend for themselves.

This was when the fires were lit. Someone somewhere decided that, absent the help of the Aetherian army and the Palace and the reifa, people would have to take matters into their own hands to stop the culling the thyft were enacting on them. It was probably one of the neighborhood defense groups who thought they would do a controlled burn around the city to clear the trees away, ridding the thyft of their habitat, so that they'd have to cross miles of bare land to get to Hymntup and would be easily spotted as they did. It had been a normally damp year, and the trees were massive, so perhaps they poured more magic into it than was necessary. Or perhaps they just underestimated the amount of strength it would take to control the fires once even one tree was engulfed.

Either way, the fire got out of their control in the early morning hours, and by the time it was spotted by the city at large, it had multiplied and multiplied on itself, eating its way up a tree tens of stories tall. Hymntup was under-equipped to deal with a large fire at that moment as it was, what with the war and the culling taking its toll on their population, but brigades of people showed up to try and contain it, only to find that they couldn't. Instead they fell back and began encircling the city with fire repellent spells, in case the blaze in the tree did not burn itself out as they hoped.

Of course it didn't. There was a lot more dead wood in those trees than people had thought, and one by one, they all caught, until you could not see from Hymntup in any direction but for a wall of fire. The spells around the city offered protection from the brunt of it, but limbs kept dropping from overhead as they burned, damaging buildings and requiring constant response to keep the fires they brought with them from spreading within the city.

All of this time, no one in the Palace did anything about this. The only reason Hymntup did not burn to the ground was because of its own citizens turning out to protect it. And the people in Hymntup realized this, and resentment grew and grew. The fruitless war, the accident that destroyed whole worlds, the lack of any kind of help at all--what use was this government anyway?

Cuppra was at the Palace during much of this time, and they witnessed exactly what was going on. The government there was occupied with withdrawing from Earth, negotiating for prisoners of war with the different tribes of monsters on Earth who had taken them, trying to reverse whatever had happened to the worlds that had disappeared, trying to communicate with Radh and the reifa about this, and deciding what, exactly, to do and say if they couldn't reverse this problem. No one really raised the alarm about the fires until they had gotten totally out of control, and even then, upon finding out that Hymntup citizens had already worked to protect the city's borders, the Cynn sort of dismissed it. They figured, maybe, oh, great, so there's spells around the city, everything is already taken care of then--without another thought for what was actually going on down in Hymntup.

What they did not do, did not even think of doing, was try to send word ahead of the fires in any way to the other towns along the river. The people of Hymntup had to do that, too, using the river as a safe road to the next town, on bespelled boats to outrun the fire. Because of this, Ryvar and most other small towns along the river were able to spell their borders against the flames, and they weathered all right. There was nothing to be done, though, for the people that were still on the roads, or in camps and outposts farther out in the forest--there was no way to even find them all in time.

And then Aetherian soldiers began to come home from Earth. Most had not been warned ahead of time that their entire homeland was burning down. By the time they began arriving, the trees immediately around Hymntup had all completely crumbled, and in every direction the smoke was so thick that they couldn't see much beyond the nearest burned logs; the fires were still near enough that the smoke was luminous, meaning there was a constant, hellish orange glow about the place. The air quality was so bad above ground that most residents had to remain indoors or use the tunnels beneath Hymntup to travel, unless they had spelled masks so that they could breathe. After being so soundly and brutally defeated and driven off of the face of the Earth, this wasn't much of a welcome home.

As Suuhl explains in the comic, despite the fact that the reifa had every right to be completely furious with Aetheri, most couldn't really bring themselves to. They may never be able to go home, but they figured that if their world was truly destroyed, it would have gone so instantaneously that no one there would have noticed, before they simply ceased to exist. And, some of them postulated, there was always the chance that their world wasn't destroyed after all, merely made inaccessible and unable to be seen by the movement of the universes. Considering that in the face of the destruction around Aetheri--and the fact that their pulling out of the fighting on Earth and in Hymntup had gotten a lot of people killed--as a whole, the reifa couldn't do much more than grieve.

This is also where a lot of animosity starts to brew in certain groups of spirits towards the reifa. A lot of the Aetherian soldiers and the loved ones of those who had been killed placed a lot of the blame on the reifa's sudden pull-out on Earth. This is true and fair, to an extent--the war was already on its way to a loss when the whole world-moving thing happened. It wasn't just the reifa going AWOL that resulted in the war being lost, but it didn't help, and perhaps the routing at the end of it all wouldn't have been quite so bloody and brutal with them still fighting. This resentment stays with these Aetherians well after the last reifa had died...and it later served to reinforce the intense dislike by traditionalists for the immigrant monsters in Aetheri in present day.

But aside from those spirits, the reifa were mostly welcomed back. A lot of Aetherians felt they could relate to the intense sadness that the reifa were dealing with now in the face of losing their own world; it sort of bonded the two races together. Aetheri was the reifas' home now, whether they or the spirits liked it or not.

Meanwhile, the tensions between the Palace and Hymntup at large were growing. The Cynn was slowly realizing that things were about to get very bad, as stores of food in the city began to run low and it was clear that no current crops would be surviving or new ones growing for a while under the intense smoke. They didn't have a plan. No one had a plan. The Cynn was even loathe to open the Palace gates and its own stores of food to the populace--in fact, they sort of hid the fact that there were any stores of food in the Palace at all, though everyone in the city knew. Riots started, first just a few here and there, people attempting to get into the Palace one way or another and tangling with the Aetherian army guards in doing so, until pressure built and one day, seemingly out of nowhere, nearly a thousand people (Hymntup had a bigger population back then) showed up at the gates of the Palace and demanded to be let in. The Cynn didn't want them let in. A riot started. The people managed to overrun the guards at the gate, but the layout of the palace grounds worked against them as they would any attackers: they were shuffled into narrower paths between high walls as the land spiraled up around the hill to the Palace, and as they were, Aetherian soldiers were able to attack them from atop the walls...which they did. No one's really sure who gave those orders or if they were even given, but either way, this riot resulted in a couple hundred civilian casualties.

This, of course, escalated things. The Hymntupians (Hymntupites?) were furious, naturally, and more and more talk about undermining the Cynn's power one way or another was starting to be heard. The Cynn, meanwhile, was becoming paranoid--Cuppra would attest that they had almost a complete personality change after the riot at the Palace, becoming convinced that there was an organization of Aetherians out there who were plotting to kill them. This wasn't true (yet), but either way, the Cynn stepped up policing in Hymntup, which really only resulted in innocent people being subject to military brutality for anything that could even distantly be perceived as ill will towards the Cynn--including (and this was the last straw) publicly mourning for the Aetherians killed in the Palace riot.

So for some context, at this point, Cuppra and their siblings were already deeply involved with their communities. Escala (a bellfounder by trade) and Russi (a magical handyman? more or less) were part of their neighborhood's watch team, and they were working closely with the reifa in their neighborhood to help prevent more people from being hunted by the thyft. Ubis (an accomplished healer by this time) donated quite a lot of his time to holding health clinics in his community, doing things like teaching people very simple healing spells that anyone with a lick of magic could do for themselves. Cuppra and Suuhl were the ones that had convinced both of their communities to work together in the first place against the thyft, and they were both sort of well-known as liasons between the two (at this point, plenty of people suspected their relationship, but only Cuppra's siblings knew anything about it for certain.) 

Their roles stepped up quite a bit after the fires started: Escala and the neighborhood watch team were now responsible for feeding the community, pooling resources between neighbors and receiving goods smuggled out of the Palace, a task that became more and more dangerous as time went on; Russi was now working overtime in crews keeping the fire wards around the city maintained, designing spells to filter the air through cloth masks, to filter the ash out of the water, and so on; Ubis's healing talents were well in demand between the smoke and fires and violence in the streets; and Cuppra, of course, was a vital link to knowing what was going on in the Palace.

Here is stuff that I am telling you is what happened, but that has never been actually historically confirmed in-universe, and most Aetherian scholars consider it matters of debate.

1) It was Escala's idea to do a coup, in the end. Escala had a magnetic personality even if he wasn't terribly charismatic, and he had a way of convincing people without really trying. Things were usually very simple to him, mostly because he rarely got emotional about much of anything and had a really sharp, concrete sense of justice. In his view, it went like this:

The Aetherian government has the means and obligation to aid the people, which it is not fulfilling.

The Aetherian government is also now getting in the way of the people helping themselves.

Therefore, get rid of the government and put their resources to better use.

If this cannot be done peacefully, then it will be done violently, because it must be done.

As time went on and things got more and more ugly, people started to come around to this point of view, first in Escala's neighborhood and then beyond, until there were actually enough people on board to even consider revolt.

2) Cuppra is the one who assassinated the Cynn. This was also Escala's idea, because to him it made the most sense to have the person who was already allowed in the Cynn's presence with no suspicion in their most intimate moments commit this act. He figured, this method had the lowest risk and highest chance of success. Like Escala, Cuppra also had a unique personality--they always came off as gentle and unassuming, and no one ever tended to suspect them of anything. Cuppra did not want to do this, because while they were never in love with the Cynn, Cuppra did have some affection for them, or used to. It saddened Cuppra a lot to see the change in the Cynn's personality after the war. Before, perhaps the Cynn could be described as a bit airheaded and careless, but with their paranoia came a cruel streak that slowly started to infect every interaction they had with everyone, including their ethkarin. Cuppra wasn't exactly in denial about this. They knew the Cynn wasn't going to just step down, and they knew that the cruelty that the Cynn displayed now hadn't come from nowhere and likely wouldn't be going away. But Cuppra wasn't much of a killer, and the whole thing haunted them in one way or another for the rest of their days.

Again, this bit is debated historically in Aetheri. All anyone really knows for sure is that the Cynn was murdered in their bed, stabbed once in the back through the heart. Only Cuppra ever knew exactly how it happened.

Things happened very quickly after that. Escala led the revolt, more or less, directing people up into the Palace grounds from the tunnels underneath, where they were able to surprise the army and the nobles. It was over fast, but it was bloody. There is very little violence in general in Aetherian history before and after this point (especially compared to human history) not because Aetherians are a particularly peaceful people, but because in a world where almost everyone has magic and most can use it to a lethal degree if they so choose, any violence at all usually escalates very quickly into atrocity. Generally more thought is put into things before physical force becomes an option for Aetherians...and it helps that there hasn't historically been much that seemed worth exacting that much violence over. In this case, however, the combination of everything built into a revolution that saw hundreds killed just in storming the Palace, and hundreds more later as revolutionary forces and the parts of the military that hadn't immediately abandoned their loyalties to the royal family clashed. At the end of the few weeks that the revolution took, what was left was a palace with quite a bit of the insides burned out (including the throne room), a completely extinguished royal family (and several noble houses as well), a dissolution of all of the retainers and officials that had reported to them, and quite a few revolutionaries who were surprised that they'd gotten this far.

The Palace's stores of food were opened up immediately to the public. It didn't solve the famine, but it was enough to feed the city for a few weeks while other plans could be made. The Palace was actually left pretty much empty while the Aetherians got to work expanding lrecca hatcheries and mushroom farms, harvesting river kelp, thinning out the livestock before they starved, spelling the food they had to be preserved indefinitely--anything they could think of. The other towns along the river were doing much the same, with their own stores of food. This was all happening under Escala's guidance, as he'd found himself in a weird position wherein he'd started giving good direction during the revolt, so people kept looking to him for more afterwards, so he just kept doing what made sense.

And then at some point Russi made her reappearance. She'd been largely absent during the revolt, because it turned out that she was busy creating a huge construct out of dragon bones and compacted earth. She didn't tell anyone she was doing this (these dragons were another ally of the spirits in their bid to colonize a bit of earth, and several of them had lived and died in Aetheri as the reifa did, so using their bones for this seemed a bit wrong--but on the other hand, this was big magic, and there wasn't much material better than bone to do a big magic like this.) Her plan, she explained, was that she was going to send this construct north until it had gotten far enough up into the mountains that it could see the sun. Then it would quite literally swallow the sunlight coming down on it, storing it in its stomach, before turning around and walking home. Then it would park itself in the fields around Aetheri, and shed light enough to grow crops by. Russi planned to make another one, too, so they'd always have one in the fields and one in the mountains, but she confessed she'd like some help doing this next one.

This is a lunatic plan, of course, and it was met with a mixture of wonder and laughter (and a little bit of revulsion, and a little bit of hope.) But Russi's siblings knew her plans usually panned out all right in one way or another, so Escala let her send the first construct shambling off northward and solicited enough volunteers to help her make the next one. And then more, to go afield to other cities and help them make their own constructs, because as nuts as Russi's idea was, it worked. Aetheri starts putting itself back together again, and life goes on, albeit leanly for a long while.

And now the falling action:

Escala sort of ends up as the new Cynn accidentally the way he fell into every other leadership role. He creates the Ettaldhmi to temper the Cynn's power. His Cynnship is long, fair, and humble; he rids it of the ostentation and ritual of the prior royal family, wears the same clothes he wore as a bellfounder, leaves the throne room burnt out and shut away, and takes office instead in a small suite at the top of the Palace, with what became a nice view eventually, when the skies cleared decades later and the ash lands started to absolutely burst with greenery again. The trees never came back, but neither did the thyft, and the ash-filled soil that was left was fertile enough that the Aetherians could hardly use all of the crops they grew.

Russi's constructs, even after the sky had cleared, continued to walk back and forth from Aetheri's river to the mountains in the far north, though eventually they stopped collecting sunlight. They seemed to gain a mind of their own, but eventually they each wound down at some point, resting wherever they fell out in the vast grasslands.

Ubis opened the university in the capital city, which I have already gone on about.

Cuppra and Suuhl both worked with Escala quite a lot, lending a little compassion to his otherwise reason-focused administration. They helped make peace with the Laith people to the north, who were very displeased with all of the smoke and the large constructs rambling through their territories, and they continued to each be a liason to the other's species. They were inseparable to the end of their days. Cuppra lived to the ripe old age of 1056, and Suuhl passed soon after--some would claim that they had died of grief. In fact, that's what Aetherians said about all of the reifa. The reifa were never the same after loosing their homeland, naturally, and one by one over the centuries, they just seemed to fade away. (This is actually another sticking point in the historical literature, because no one's sure if the description of the reifa 'fading' is literal or not.) Either way, Suuhl was not the last reifa in Aetheri, but they were one of them. The last one--Radh--outlived Escala's successor, and then seemed to evaporate from living memory.

Escala was succeeded by his child Yturra, who after their father's death (because he thought these ideas were nonsense in life) renamed Hymntup to Escalus, and oversaw raising the statues of the founders we see in the comic today. The newly-coined d'Escala family continues a quiet, unspectacular reign into the present day.

And now you know...........................the rest of the story.

Thanks for reading! I know this is a long one. I hope it strung some events together for you! It you have questions about this particular point in Aetherian history, let me know!

[davidmann95]

I don't want to sound too, ah, plebian, but can you explain the meta-plot of Multiversity? The Just, SoS, etc, were all very fun, but the Ultraa Comics stuff went over my head.

Not at all! Multiversity was weird as hell,and in terms of getting what the point of it all was, it doesn’t help that mostof the one-shots only tie in thematically (aside from the basic idea that TheGentry are corrupting these worlds) rather than how in Seven Soldiers everythingcomes back plotwise for the finale. There’s breadcrumbs - a piece of Monitormythology here, a suggestion that comics reflect other events in the multiversethere - but by and large, the one-shots serve to lend context and emotionalweight rather than directly inform the larger plot with Uotan, Superman and therest of the heroes.

Iwrote about Multiversity before, always with the intent ofdoing a follow-up piece going more into the individual issues, so here’s mefinally getting around to that now that it’s been, oh my god, two years sincethe series wrapped; you’ll probably want to read that article first, since mywhole “Multiversity is about time” thesis from that is the centerof pretty much everything I’m going to talk about here, especially at the end.I’d also recommend David Uzumeri’sannotations for Comics Alliance of all the chapters up through Mastermen,and @charlotteofoz‘s excellent piece on UltraComics, as well as the piles upon piles of other great writing aboutthis book out there.

Continued below; this is a long one, obviously with plentyof spoilers.

Since Multiversity #1 is one half of alarger story that’s bookended later (it’s not even the first chronologically,since a couple characters from The Just are already at theHouse of Heroes), let’s start with SOS. More than each issue as anartifact unto itself - this thing would be even longer if I went into that, andthe annotations I linked to I think already do a more than satisfactory job inthat regard - I want to talk about these in terms of how they inform the whole,and Society of Super-Heroes sets down the template in twomajor ways in that regard:

1. Each of these stories correspond to a given decade of thehistory of the superhero - in this case, in spite of the 1920′s trappings, thatthey’re going through the parallel universe equivalent of World War II and thepresence of a number of Golden Age figures suggests this is meant to be read asrepresenting the pulpy heroes of the 1940s.

2. Each of the chapters of Multiversity correspondto a classic story published by DC Comics, but grotesquely inverted (similarly to how each arc of his Batman and Robin mirrored a classic Batman story, ending with Batman and Robin Must Die! inverting his own Batman R.I.P.); here, thefirst standalone installment of this latest multiversal threat is naturallymodeled after the original “Crisis on Earth-One!/Crisis on Earth-Two!”JLA/JSA crossover, except this time when the two parallel Earths make firstcontact (through the same crystal ball as in that original story no less), itleads to war.

And much more than a simple categorization like theabove, SOS introduces the major shared conceit of theone-shots: the degeneration of the superhero as a concept through theintroduction of time to the proceedings. In this case through wartime, as thepromise of the birth of the superhero at the beginning of the story is undoneby 5 years of hell, grinding our leads’ ethics down to the level ofkill-or-be-killed, with Doc Fate remorselessly torturing a man for information(in what I have to read as a reference to Doc Savage’s “Crime College”),Immortal Man reverting to his most primal roots, and Atom literally beating anopponent to death. It’s the most straightforward “well, in the real worldsuperheroes couldn’t be that moral” deconstruction possible, but framed as theconsequence of conditions the superhero wasn’t built to deal with rather thanan inherent failing. In that regard, while I don’t think Multiversity wastypically much influenced by the then-present goings-on at DC in the comics orelsewhere - Morrison’s said more than once that most of the issues werescripted years before the art was done, minus some tweaks here and there - it’shard not to read this issue as at least something of a reaction to the New 52and particularly Man of Steel, especially with lines like “Doc.I just killed a man. I–I brought you some time, but myprinciples–I–I killed a man.” And that fall is the direct, literalvictory of the villains of the story.

For The Just, while it owes a debt to All-StarSuperman since itwas originally planned as a spinoff of that book - an acknowledgeddebt given the appearance of Klyzyzk Klzntplkz’s Hyperpoon, even though thecircumstances of Superman’s death in here preclude this being set in that world- in spirit it’s a broken mirror to Kingdom Come and theglitzy, too-cool, airbrushed ‘90s milieu it inhabited, hence the legacy heroesand Ben Oliver’s photoreal style being notably similar to Alex Ross’s here.It’s Kingdom Come’s party scene, except for 40 pages, andSuperman never comes in to whip them all into shape. They just keep drinkingand dancing as the world burns.

In truth though, this isn’t really a comic about legacycharacters; they’re a shorthand for time having passed and the superheroicidentities having degraded over time, but it’s no coincidence that this is theonly issue to actually have characters going by Superman and Batman as theunambiguous leads (or that Superman’s a useless dope, while Batman’s the onlycompetent one but also infinitely more ridiculous and transparent than hethinks), because it’s about the DCU specifically as a decades-long construct atthis moment in history. If most of the other issues are about time damaging thesuperhero through inevitable contact with real-world morality, this shows thepainful endgame of spinning their wheels without end: they become heartlesscopies of copies of themselves, all their battles knowing pantomime, muggingfor the cameras even as there’s nothing left for them to do that anyone caresabout, least of all themselves as they question why anyone even buys comicsanymore. The Just is the CW’s DC Universe twenty years fromnow, where most of the audience has left and the budget has been slashed tonothing but just enough viewers are sticking around that they have to continueit somehow, so it devolves into old-fashioned CW soap opera bullshit, becausehow that’d apply to these characters is all they have left in their arsenal:Superman’s angry that Batman’s fucking Lex Luthor, but will they ever admitthey just want to fuck each other instead, readers? Tune innext month to find how out we’ll delay giving the answer!

Then we hop over to 1980s political horror and theinevitable shadow of Watchmen, in…maybe the best, or at leastmost remarkably-constructed single issue of a superhero comic of thedecade? Pax Americana certainly felt like it when it came out.In any case, our main concern here is another consequence of time as applied tosuperheroes: the desire, as embodied by President Harley, to force them to makesense in the real world in tune with an ‘adult’ perspective. In an attempt torectify his guilt for accidentally killing his father, the first superhero andthe only morally pure one - his entry to the murky world of adulthood, assignified by the second-to-last line “Remember? That was when it allmade sense, right?” - he wants to reconfigure superheroes into virtuous,regimented tools of the government, with himself as the greatest hero of all asa resurrected American Christ to lead the world into a new golden age.

It fails horrifically of course, because his worldview - theworldview shared by Captain Adam, and Doctor Manhattan, and Watchmen itself- is by Morrison’s perspective inherently flawed, incapable as it is ofperceiving the repercussions and chaos of truly ‘real’ humans. Take notewhen Harley’s consciousness expands that at first it fragments into personal,evocative, visceral imagery, but when that expanding holistic view of theuniverse is inevitably too much to hold all at once, it simplifies back downinto simpler symbols, shapes and geometric solids, much in line with howMorrison spoke of Watchmen’s structure in Supergods asconfining and inflexible. Where Ozymandias’s plan to save the world went offwithout a hitch - at least until it lead to him putting on a robe andkidnapping Tim Drake, as continued this November at a comic book store near youin Doomsday Clock* - Harley’s fails catastrophically, because inthe ‘real’ world superheroes wouldn’t obey genre and narrative conventionsto the extent the likes of Nite Owl and Rorschach still do, living as they doin a world that still has flying Owl-cars and villainous master plans; anyonewho put on a mask to fight crime would be violent, callous assholes of thedistinctly uncharismatic variety whose grand schemes fall apart, whoseinvestigations never reach resolution, and who end up inevitably co-opted andrendered obsolete. In the end, as we saw with Peacemaker defending Bush toHarley’s barely-restrained glee, and the V.P. lecturing about selling childhooddreams back to adults, underneath all his mature aspirations Harley just wantedto find a way to force the world to let him love something the way he did whenhe was a boy…but as Adam reminds us, when you take it all apart to thatextent, there’s not really much left, and even if you put it all back togetherit can never be the same.

* I maintain it’s a very real possibility that PaxAmericana, meant to close the book on Watchmen once andfor all, was a part of what led to its revival; that someone in DC caught windof it during production and figured “oh man, Watchmen’s aboutto get some play again, now’s the time to do something with it.”

That brings us to Thunderworld Adventures’ 1950scolor TV world of retro adventure, the logical retort to the rest of Multiversity andthe one it needed to be complete: if time destroys superheroes, why not justturn back the clock and make it like it was when you were a kid? But unlike itscounterpart comic All-Star Superman (Morrison mentionedrepeatedly in interviews that this was him giving Captain Marvel the All-Star approach,and the structure - of Marvel facing off against counterparts of himself in theface of his inevitable doom, with his scientist arch-enemy finding a way togive himself his powers - is more than a little familiar), this isn’t anattempt to recapture the best of those elements in a modern context, but a purenostalgia exercise.

Yes, that means a happy ending, and clever fun, and a nicemoral about the self-destructive nature of evil. But from a modern perspective, thatalso means the mad scientist experimenting on his own children, pointing outthat Billy Batson is an exploited youth not subject to child labor laws,Captain Marvel Jr. winning a fight by preying on a bullied girls’ insecuritiesabout her appearance with a smile on his face, and a monstrous Sivana coming ahair’s breadth away from graphically murdering Billy. Morrison mentioned ininterviews that deep down Thunderworld had signs of the sameugliness as the other issues, and it’s true; even if we go back to the good olddays, we’ve still been informed by our adult experiences, and it’s just notgoing to look quite the same. No matter how much we might want to go retreatinto a neverending Binder/Beck fairyland, we’ve seen the leering, muzzled faceof the serial-killing, likely pedophilic Hannibal Sivana. Not that it’ssecretly as cynical of its subject matter in the same way as the others - thewizard Shazam reminds us that there is something beautiful at the heart of themagic, and that we lose it the more we try and replace it with something coolerand colder - but it’s pretty on-the-nose that Sivana’s ultimate plan is to getpeople to buy years on the clock to waste, essentially selling their old livesback to them piecemeal. In the end, when Captain Marvel’s faced with theprophecy of a darker, more morally challenging threat, he doesn’t confront it,but tosses it in the trash to fly away with a picture-perfect smile. But weknow the truth: he has to. There is no such thing as timelessness, andattempting to capture it will ultimately show cracks in the foundation nomatter what.

Moving into the Guidebook’s extended homageto “The Flash of Two Worlds!” - one with a distinctly 60s feel, between all theKirby getting thrown around and the build-up of DC mythology - we get to seewhat comic book time actually looks like from the outside (via the perspectiveKamandi, from a world where time has truly passed to the tune of anapocalypse), with Fox and Infantino’s simple tale of a costumed crimefightermeeting his own childhood storybook hero metastasizing into a time-shatteringhistory of reboots and retcons and parallel worlds, and two wildly differentproducts of that process coming face-to-face. After Thunderworld andthe finale it’s the most openly optimistic of the bunch, with the irrepressiblejoy Morrison clearly takes in all the nerd arcana and Lightray’s assertion thatlight will conquer darkness in the end, but it also ends with a Justice League,reduced conceptually to animatronic cartoons of themselves, dying andresurrecting in one manufactured Crisis after another for all eternity.

Hitting Mastermen, this is probably the mostdiscounted of the bunch, especially given it reads the most like it’sunfinished. However, I’d say it’s a pretty complete tragedy (especially thanksto @globegander‘s essayon it as a spiritual adaptation of Der Ring des Nibelungen),and much like with The Just - the other least-loved of theseries - the trappings on display are largely a way of facilitating what it’s talkingabout. It’s the story of a nation in power of men with pipes looking overnuclear families with dogs, where rich white boys complain that they shouldn’tbe held responsible for the actions of their ancestors, newscasters refer togenocides perpetrated by their nation within the last century as “theethnic and ideological purges of the Hitler era”, and theretaliation against them by terrorist insurgents is from a nation they broughttheir war to. It’s very much a story of America (2000s America specifically, inline with the decade parallels in play), and while Overman still wants to makeeverything right because he’s Superman, unlike its counterpart in Superman:Red Son which shows him managing to redeem himself from similarcircumstances to some extent, Mastermen makes no bones aboutthe fact that he is damned, utterly and irrevocably, just as aconsequence of being born into this society. Time here has destroyed thesuperhero by way of conformity, with well-meaning champions of truth, justice,and the Nazi way as barely-witting defenders of a corrupted status quo,unquestionably incapable of transcending what they’ve become. Hence whySuperman already exists as a comic when Hitler learns of Kal-L, the symbolismof two Jewish kids in the depression co-opted by the powers-that-be as thefascistic representative of amoral nationalistic interests, corrupting whatSuperman is supposed to stand for until even his attempts at rectifying thingscan only compound the problem. In essence, it’s the darkest possiblecontinuation of The Curse of Superman from Morrison and GeneHa’s Action Comics #9 - and it comes to the same conclusion ofwhat it takes to fight back in the finale later on.

Ultra Comics - both the comic and the character,insomuch as there’s any meaningful division between the two - is the anti-FlexMentallo, down to the point of mimicking its four-act structure of thehistory of the superhero via montage, only replacing a ‘Renaissance’ asMorrison put it following comics ‘Dark Age’ with further brutality andadolescent defensiveness. It’s the horrors of every other chapter rolled intoone: Ultra’s an innocent superhero from circumstances that become moreunsettling the more you think about them, pre-packaged with his own ridiculousbackstory and history, who goes on an adventure forcing him to realize themorality his world is built on is impossible and defined by society rather thanan objective moral code, and he’s trapped forever in the violent structure ofhis story, consigned to repeat his life forever until it loses all meaning. Itis, as Charlotte Finn put it in her analysis, a killer bullet to the idea ofthe superheroes, hence why it’s a horrific cursed contaminant across themultiverse: in our world it’s just a depressing comic, but to a superhero it’sirrefutable evidence that their entire existence is meaningless, time almostliterally corroding him throughout the issue as he moves from optimisticsuperhero to cynical super-agent to old and realizing it was all for nothing todead. Even our own world is threatened after all, with the suggestion that allthe uplifting Flex Mentallo meta-stories and 70s Starlin-stylecosmic headtrip consciousness expansion comics that Morrison’s made so much ofhis own bread and butter on are as compromised as the rest of the genre.Incapable of saving us in the face of a larger culture preaching the embrace ofnihilism and a doomed tomorrow when the only thing a terrifying number ofreaders have gained from the message is a desire to complain about writers “rapingmy wallet” - and that without that ability to inspire, all comics, all fictionitself can do, is steal our time and rush us all the faster into thegrave courtesy of the Oblivion Machine.

With the bookends, there’s fairly little to say I didn’t inthe original article I linked to above - i.e. that it flips the premise of timeinto a positive, showing that rather than using it to spin the wheels of thesuperhero genre in perpetuity until it devours itself through exhaustion orcontact with elements it can’t bear, or framing it as something to bedisregarded in spite of the consequences, it can be used to push things forwardinto more diverse and fruitful territory (hence not only the premise of theseries, but Multiversity sounding similar to Diversity), coming up with new andbetter stories. Much as Morrison is historically onboard with pulp heroes andlegacy heroes indicative of expansive superhero universes and structurallycomplex comics and retro comics and American superheroes and meta superheroes,there’s a difference between coming up with new stories in those contexts, andrerunning the old ones over and over again, which is probably why each of thosecomics, like I said matches up with a previous decade and comic, including someof his own, finally spinning here into the 2010s and DC’s own Crisis cycle.

While the first half of the bookend is in Morrison’s ownwords him doing himself to the point of parody - the self-insert character, theMonitor mythology, the weird villains yelling about conformity, thecomics-talking-about-comics, running into alternate company equivalents as apossible commentary on the state of the industry, etc. - the second isexplicitly the analogue to Morrison using his ‘corruption’ of contact with thedarkness and perpetuation of the neverending story for a paycheck to introducethe forces of the absurd, impossible and unexpected, i.e. the New, to defeat ahomogenizing, corruptive force designed to make everything the same and bleakto the point of literally forcing the Multiverse to relive the same Crisis overand over again, i.e. More Of The Same. It’s a slight twist on his typical Youngvs. Old/Children vs. Parents concerns (as best exemplified in his DC work in Seven Soldiers of Victory), but in theend, all of this is Morrison talking about something very, very simple: thatsuperheroes can absolutely be broken, but there’s a chance to save them andmake them something good and true again that might be able to reach us,literally by the end of the book, and it’s not by rerunning the same oldstories into the ground and unthinking conformity, but through doing new anddiverse and exciting things with them to inspire us in new ways. It’s Action Comics #9 as a 400-page epic.

I’m pretty sure that’s what Multiversity is about.

[terselylove]

35 Mistakes You Will Regret Making Today, Tomorrow, And The Next Day

1. Take your days off, take your sick leave, and most of all save up money and take your vacations. Companies want you to think you are invaluable to them but in the end they will let you go and forget you as soon as you are gone.

2. Keep a close eye on your relationship with substances. Many of you will have serious problems with them and won’t realize until you’re in very deep.

3. Always watch how your love interest treats other people. The day will inevitably come when that person will treat you the same way.

4. Don’t waste time being “anti.” I spent a lot of time in high school looking down on people’s choices of music, movies, hobbies, friends, etc. I said things like, “They only like it because it’s popular. This thing I’M into is clearly better.”

I was a bit of a dick and later I realized it’s ok to let people enjoy things that I don’t. I wasted a lot of opportunities to learn new things and make new friends because of that attitude and I regret it a lot.

5. Avoid staying in a job where you’re totally bored or hate facing it every day.

Some people stick with it endlessly because “it takes too much effort to find something new” (or because they believe an alternative will probably be no better in the long run than where they are).

6. Take risks young, before you have kids, because then you are taking a risk on your family too. Plus risks are super fun and empowering when all the consequence is on you! After kids then the exhilaration becomes guilt. Not as enjoyable.

7. Triple redundancy… back up ALL your photos, videos etc, I lost about a year of photos which included a couple of big life events, mostly I backed up but got sloppy.

Cloud storage is very cheap but don’t rely on just that, put it on a hard drive as well and a few other places.

Also for those who are a little older check all those old DVD/CDs you burnt as they’re degrading and data is being lost.

8. Don’t date someone because you are lonely. Date someone because you see a future with them.

9. Not forgiving my best friend for something really minor. I stopped talking to her, even though she apologized a million times. Now, I don’t even know where she is anymore. She was a really good friend, and I was an asshole.

10. Don’t eat out of boredom or to make yourself feel better when you’re down. A slice or two of pizza on occasion is OK; a whole pizza, not so much. Also, go easy on the sugary drinks and alcohol.

11. Not breaking up with a guy immediately after he hits you for the first time. I’m sorry doesn’t press the reset button.

12. Do not lie to your S/O. They’re supposed to be your best friend. If you lie, trust will break down, the relationship will start to suck, and then you will end it due to their seemingly unwarranted paranoia, or they will end it because they cannot trust you.

13. Don’t self harm, or do drugs. If you have a crush and it’s obvious they don’t like you back, get over it. If you think you or a friend may have depression or any other mental disorders, please get help. If you’re thinking about suicide, DO. NOT. DO. IT.

14. Marriage and children are not for everyone. It’s bliss for some people. It’s absolute carnage for others.

One glove does not fit everyone. If you are happy and content being with yourself. Accept it, enjoy it. Don’t let the world let you take on a responsibility that has no expiration date.

15. When you get cheated on, don’t try to fix it and give a person another chance, just leave. It will hurt and it may seem that what i am saying is pointless but you will thank me soon and also after you get cheated on. Work on yourself first before looking for another one because if you rush it you are more likely to fail.

16. Not putting effort and the focus that was required for school. Yes, I’ve ended up doing extremely well for myself within a few years after high school. But I sure as hell wish I actually paid attention. I thought it was cool and fun to just hangout with a bunch of losers who would smoke weed all day and accomplish nothing. Late into senior year is when I made the change, although late on the school part. I began finding new people that were purely dedicated. It rubbed off on me, and now I can say that I’m glad I had a moment of true realization.

17. Love is a two way street. Not realizing that lead to many, many relationships that should have ended but didn’t because of the fear of being alone. On a related note, the fear of being alone is both real and powerful.

18. Don’t marry the wrong person. And don’t marry the wrong person’s family. That’s right, when you marry someone, you also marry their family. When I married, we lived hundreds of miles from her family, so I didn’t know them well. Things changed, and we were living within 5 miles of her family. Disaster struck.

19. Don’t show loyalty where it isn’t deserved, that applies to people, brands, companies you work for.

20. Don’t put too much thought into what people think about you. Just be a good person and have good intentions and realize that you can’t please everyone.

21. Don’t associate with those that don’t have your best interests at heart when it matters.

That usually becomes quite evident when you do something that they don’t like, they start to pick holes with everything to try and manipulate you back, or they just generally aren’t there when you need help.

22. Learn to communicate effectively. Seriously. You’ll lose good people from your life if you can’t do it right, so learn.

23. Credit cards are not free money. You may need one to build credit but be careful how much you use it, and pay it off every month. It’s so easy to charge “just this one little thing” over and over until the card is maxed out.

24. Take care of what you have before it becomes what you had.

25. Working in a family-owned business (as an outsider) can go really fucking south. You will get the silent treatment, in the worst-case scenario I’ve experienced. There will be loads of clique behavior and just the general vibe of “if we weren’t shorthanded, we’d have kept it in the family”. In general, there will always be underlying tension and loads of unprofessional behavior. I’m personally never doing it again, if I can help it.

26. Brushing your teeth might seem minor but if you don’t holy shit its finna come hit like a truck. And also makes finding a soulmate a whole lot easier.

27. If your grandparents/older relatives are alive and well, spend some time with them, call them to say hi, just check in with them. When they are gone you’re going to be the one left with regret, not them.

28. If the group of people you’re hanging around at school (or elsewhere) always make fun of you in a “joking” way, stop hanging out with them. If everybody gets their share, then it’s alright but if you’re the butt of every joke then it’s not really friendship. You’re just a lightning conductor for all their insecurities. Have some self-respect.

29. If you are pregnant and think something is wrong, please, please, PLEASE find a doctor who will listen. My last pregnancy, I was in excruciating pain, losing weight and wasn’t hungry. My OBs brushed off my concerns, just saying every pregnancy is different. I was in the ER twice with upper abdominal pain. Neither time did they check my son. I had undiagnosed HELLP Syndrome. Because the doctors wouldn’t listen, my son died. You know your body. Don’t let doctors ignore you.

30. Read your insurance policies. Know what’s in there and if you have enough or too much coverage.

31. If things come easy to you and you can pass all your classes in high school on tests alone, don’t. Do the homework, even if it’s just tedious busywork. Keep all your handouts organized and neat. Do projects and papers step by step. Once you hit college (especially in upper level stem classes) you’ll regret not having made those habits earlier. High school isn’t about learning material as much as it is teaching you HOW to learn material.

32. For the love of everything that is good, don’t ever take up smoking. Doesn’t matter how good that nicotine rush feels, sooner or later you’ll end up regretting it, and quitting is… well, a bitch.

33. Don’t ever think you still have some “fun time” left and avoid your responsibilities. It’s a slippery slope.

Like, it starts by thinking “oh, I got a few more hours before I have to worry about that report” and gradually turns into “I’m only 21, what’s the deal if I need one more semester to finish school?”. And then you wake up one day and realize you’re 24, all your friends have graduated and you’re still jerking off.

34. When picking a career it’s best to focus on what you’re actually good at than something that just sounds more interesting. Regrets have been made.

35. Follow your intuition. We are animals that have been taught to ignore our instincts. Following my instincts has save my life before.

[xaphrin]

“It’s a bit late for coffee, don’t you think?”

Shirayuki looked up from her field notes to see Obi leaning over the back of the chair across from her, scarred hands wrapped around the metal rung. He offered her that half-cocked smile that made her heart skip beats and she tried hard not to focus too much on the way his forearms rippled underneath his dark skin. She tried… and failed.

[more under the cut]

“I… I’m finishing up some notes from this afternoon.” She motioned to the chair he was leaning on and cleared her throat, hoping she didn’t look like a complete idiot. She probably did. “Want to join me? I could use a break.”

His smile filled his face, brightening his gold eyes. “Sure. Once sec.”

Obi walked up to the counter and bought a bottle of water and a pastry before moving back to her. Shirayuki was once again helpless against her blatant admiration of his body. He was wearing that stupid gray T-shirt again, the one that stretched over his muscles and made her forget her own name. Did he have to look like that? Like he’d walked out of an ad for “too-tight shirts”? She watched as he settled himself in front of her, taking a moment to split the pastry and give her half.

He chuckled at her confusion. “You probably haven’t eaten in a few hours, right?”

As if to mortify her, her stomach growled loudly in protest as he pushed the cheese danish closer to her, still laughing. It sounded warm and special, almost like a place she could call home. Shirayuki blushed (unsure if it was from embarrassment or shyness) and she took the offered pastry, not quite meeting his stare.  

“I kinda guessed you’d be the sort of girl who would get caught up in all the work you have to do and forget to eat.” He rested his forearms against the table and looked over at her shorthanded notes from this afternoon. “You look like you’re elbow-deep in work over here.”

Shirayuki shrugged and finally looked up into his face, trying to keep chewing on the pastry so she didn’t have to talk. “They’re just some notes. Tomorrow I have some research to do at the library on some past information. So, I won’t be out much for the rest of the week… except downstairs looking at microfiche.”

Obi laughed that warm laugh again, the one that bubbled up from somewhere secretive in his chest. “Microfiche? Is this an early 90’s detective special?”

Shirayuki blushed and set the pastry down. “I need some data, and unfortunately not all of it is available online yet.” She tried to give him the best serious look she could, but her smile broke through, and her heart turned over in her chest. “I guess it is a little archaic. But, it’s not my fault your tiny town is a little behind the times.”

“Hey, if I knew microfiche was that big of a deal, I would have been advocating for better technological advances at the library.” He leaned back in the chair and took a long drink of water.

Shirayuki did everything in her power to not stare at the way his throat worked as he swallowed. Really, she tried. But it was impossible to not focus on the muscles under his skin, or how a few drops of water clung to his lips right before he licked them off. And then she tried to look elsewhere, but was instead drawn to the streaks of dirt and grease over one of his biceps, peeking out from under a sleeve before disappearing again.

Hands shaking, she took a drink of coffee and pretended to be interested in a little doodle of a cactus she had done on her notes. That cactus was her only saving grace from blurting out how ridiculously attractive he was.

“So, since you’ll be in town tomorrow…”

Shirayuki pulled her head up and glanced into his face. Obi was shifting for a moment, rolling a question around in his head before deciding if he was really going to ask it.

“...I know it’s kinda weird, but… do you wanna do lunch?”

Her heart fell down into her stomach and Shirayuki could feel her face flush. Was he asking her out? She wasn’t prepared for this. “What?”

“Lunch?” He took another drink of water, as if unsure what he wanted to be doing with his mouth. Shirayuki waited patiently until Obi was done, watching as he looked at her again. He looked uncomfortable, stumbling over his words. “I know it’s kind of strange, but I have some friends that are supposed to be coming into town and I feel like you might really get along.” He offered another smile, this one just a little off-kilter. “And you should bring Yuzuri and Suzu. It could be fun with all of us.”

“Oh.” Shirayuki nodded, trying to get her breathing under control and calm her frantic heart. Friends. Right. They were sort-of friends. He’d been teaching her to work on her car, and she had been trying (and failing) to flirt with him. But, friends. She could do friends. “Suzu and Yuzuri and going to be in Santa Fe for something tomorrow, but I can come. It would probably be nice to come out and actually get some fresh air.”

Obi looked relieved and a smile pulled across his face again. “Good… it’ll be nice to see you out of the shop or the coffee shop.”

Shirayuki laughed and leaned forward. “What? Getting tired of my horrible ability to try and change a flat tire?”

“Oh, come on…” He grinned. “You’re getting marginally better.”

Shirayuki’s face fell.   

-

Shirayuki felt a little out of place as she stood outside the restaurant. It was the “one nice place” in town, where people took important dates or anniversaries or engagements, and here she was standing there in a pair of cut-offs and an oversized t-shirt that fell over one shoulder. Also, she was pretty sure there was ink somewhere on her face, but she couldn’t be certain. The restaurant was mostly empty for lunch, but there was a table tucked in the corner filled with the bright, young faces of people who looked wealthy.

Just what had she gotten herself into?

She stood outside the shop and peered inside, unsure if she should come in or not. Her stomach tightened and Obi lifted his head, waving at her through the glass. Well, she had been spotted and there was no escape now. Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and walked inside. The air conditioning hit her like a slap to the face, and she took a half-step back, her stomach turning over. Obi stood up and walked over to her, his smile wide.

“Oh good. You’re here to save me.” He laughed, the sound a little self-deprecating. “I was worried you might not show. I know this isn’t really your thing.”

“I’m happy to come.” She looked up into his eyes and felt her reservations just melt away. There was something about being next to him that made everything just feel better. He was easier to talk to than any other boy she had ever met, filled with fun jokes and an open personality that made her just feel happy. “It’ll be nice to meet other people from around here. I’m sure I’ll like your friends.”

Obi practically beamed. “Come on. I’ll introduce you.” His hand threaded through hers and he lead her through the tables.

Shirayuki looked down at his fingers tangled with her own and her heart almost burst. It wasn’t the first time they had held hands (he helped her up from the shop floor, or up into her ancient SUV more times than she cared to count), but this was the first time that it felt so personal.

She was reading too much into this. Really.

Shirayuki took a deep breath and tried to calm her nerves. They’d only known each other a few months, and she shouldn’t think that he felt the same sort of awkward way she did. He was probably used to lots of girls blowing in and out of his life, and it was stupid to think that he might get wrapped up in her like the way she was wrapped up in him. He was cute, and charming, and even if this was just friends, at least it would be fun. That’s how she had to look at this - just fun.

Obi brought her to the table and introduced her to everyone. Zen’s family apparently owned half of Taos and some other business ventures in Santa Fe, Kiki’s family worked with his, and Mitsuhide was his assistant who worked with both the families. Even after just a few minutes of pleasant conversation between them, Shirayuki wondered if their relationships were no longer built on what their families had created, but more on feelings of friendship, trust and loyalty. They seemed to create their own little family, separate from anyone else.

“So, how does Obi fit into all of this?” Shirayuki had been talking to Zen, who was sweet and attentive to her while everyone else faded into a different conversation. Zen had been taking time to make sure she was included, and that felt nice that he was looking out for her too.

“Obi is my life saver.” Zen laughed and leaned a bit closer to her, his smile bright. “My car broke down outside the res a few years ago and I couldn’t get cell service, couldn’t get the car running, and couldn’t get a single person to stop… except Obi. He was the only person who stopped to get it running, and helped me limp back to his shop where he fixed it. I don’t know what would have happened if he wasn’t there.”

“You would have been shit outta luck if I hadn’t come by.” Obi laughed and leaned back in his chair. He glanced over at Shirayuki and grinned. “It was the start of a beautiful friendship… and I get to exclusively work on all his fancy cars. Such a mutually beneficial friendship.”

Zen laughed, his face lighting up. “Yeah, yeah. You just love working on the Aston.”

“James Bond drives an Aston, Zen. James. Bond.” Obi’s smile filled his face, and he looked so stupidly attractive that it was hard for Shirayuki to look away from him. There was something about seeing him so at ease that made it feel like he was drawing her even closer to him. “It’s very important you treat her right. I’m happy to help any time.”

Zen rolled his eyes and laughed. “Okay. Next time she acts up, I’ll bring her in.”

“You’re a saint.”

Shirayuki looked around the table, at the smiling faces and laughter, and she realized how much she wanted to be a part of this. It was an indescribable itch at the back of her mind that she liked this. She liked the friendship and camaraderie between everyone, and it made her want to join in. But more than that, it made her want something with Obi. Seeing the way he was around his friends, how much love and loyalty he had, it made her want a part of that. She wanted to be part of his life, as a friend, or a companion, or something. However long she might have with him, Shirayuki realized that she wanted to be a part of this.

She was in so much trouble.  

[apparitionism]

Sound 6b

I’m still feeling my way through history in this thing, or rather (as I’ve yapped about to several extremely patient souls) trying to figure out how to show the myriad ways in which small histories intersect with larger ones—trying, really, to figure out if I’ve got the chops to show such things in the first place. But regardless of whether this succeeds or fails on whatever levels it does, I am indebted to every single one of you who bothers to read along for any of it. Including the previouslies: Soon, of course, and part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5a, part 5b, part 5c, and part 6a of this experiment known as Sound.

Sound 6b

Every violinist who has played for Phil Spector must at some point contemplate garroting himself or herself with horsehair. Helena is solidly certain of this, and she has never been so tempted to try it as she is today. She has bowed and plucked her way through nearly fifty full, recorded takes of “Winter Wonderland.” At least triple that number of untaped “try it like this”es and “no, like that”s, such that the chart in front of her looks like she has attempted to pencil a novel in shorthand atop it. Helena does not care overmuch for Myka’s beloved Russian authors and their narrative excesses, but she would read every word every one of them ever wrote—she would read those words in Russian and in English, she would learn them by heart, she would recite them as her sole means of conversation for the rest of her natural life—if only Phil would never ever ever again say the word “again.”

At long last, however, the moment does come when he judges that the recording of her exhausted violin has reached a quality (a sweetness?) that satisfies him. He immediately begins to mix. She starts to ask if they might get some rest and come back fresh tomorrow, but he grunts out, “It’s building.”

The strings alone, he mixes seventeen different ways. The vocals, percussion, guitars and keyboards, horns, none of these are placed or changed with quite as much precision, and she sees no point in lying to herself: she does like the attention he pays to strings, the minute differences he can hear between one resonance and another. Phil manipulates the console’s knobs with authority; he makes large or small adjustments and clearly knows precisely what effects will ensue. At certain points, however, he sighs and offers such laments as “Larry’d do this in a flash.”

Helena refrains from noting that he might have Larry here today, doing things in a flash, if he had only let him get some rest, regardless of what may have been building for two months straight.

The track entire is put together a number of times that Helena does not bother to count; the tape machines will no doubt decide for themselves, at some point, to smoke it off, and Helena herself fights through several stretches during which she has heard the thing so many times that there is no music as such left in it. She asks constant questions—why this fader up, why that frequency clipped—and sometimes Phil can articulate a precise, technical answer. Sometimes he shakes his head and says “Larry could tell you.” But sometimes he strands her: “the sound” he says. A lifeboat into which she cannot clamber, but—

“Wait,” she says, after the fade of the latest rendering.

“Wait for what.” His head is tilted down, but—can a head be tilted eagerly down?

“Is this it? This is it. This one, this is it.”

“You sure?” Noncommittal.

“Yes?” Helena is delirious, or maybe just wishes she were.

“How do you know.” Still nothing in his voice.

“I... I can hear all of it.”

Phil lifts his head. He nods. “You’re right. Listen. H.G., listen.”

He plays it again—loud, he loves loud playback, such that the ears ring, no doubt to force any listener into acknowledging the power of his sound—and in front of her is an edifice in which she can hear, now, every single brick and bracing. Of which her ears understand, even if her mouth cannot articulate, the reason for each piece.

Bass thick, just discernible as an instrument in its own right. Percussion occupying a full, embodied space of its own, and now she does understand why everyone raves about these echo chambers.

Vocals buried deeper than she would have thought could be correct: but they are. “What will Darlene say about where you’re putting her voice?” Helena had asked, several generations of tape ago. Phil’s response: “Who cares?”

The strings are sweet but not sickly; and she can in fact still distinguish her own violin—in particular, that pizzicato, elsewhere so often dry and delicate but here saturated, robust—from the rest. He might be using the near-masculinity of that sound to mock her, but in the end, she must echo him: who cares?

The horns are... well. She begrudges him those obscenely honking saxophones.

They have been in the studio for very near forty hours; they emerge into morning sunlight as if on the opposite side of the world.

“When’s your flight?” Phil asks.

“I have no idea. What day is it?”

The travel agent had made a reservation for her in a hotel in which she never set foot. She carries a suitcase that she never opened.

She makes the plane with very little time to spare; she spends the first half of the flight too jangled to relax, the next half too exhausted to sleep. She takes a taxi home from Idlewild, and when Myka asks “How did it go?”, she says “I don’t really know.”

“You look terrible,” Myka tells her.

Helena answers, without thought, “I feel worse.” But then she stops and does think. “Or actually... no, I don’t. I was in a studio for two days, on airplanes for another half a day, but I don’t feel terrible at all.”

“I think you enjoyed yourself.”

“I think I may have done. Not at every point, and at some points not at all, but... is that all right?”

Myka doesn’t often kiss Helena often in front of Christina, not with purpose, but she does now; she pulls Helena to her and kisses her like they are the lovers they are. Through gratitude she barely knows as such, given the distraction of lips and tongue, Helena considers the unreal-yet-real possibility that she is dreaming.

Christina, apparently unperturbed, asks, “How’s Phil?” She has met him twice, just as Myka has. Their interactions began, both times, in a studio: the first time, he had looked down at her and asked “What are you?” and Christina answered, “I’m an American. What are you?” before Helena could admonish her into politeness. The second time, his question had been, “Where do they keep the patch cables in this place?”

“Haven’t you been here before?” Christina asked him.

“Yeah, but I never needed patch cables here before.”

When Christina brought him a handful, he asked, “Do you like steak?”

“Not as much as waffles.”

So when the setup for the next day’s recording was completed to his very specific specifications, he took Christina and Helena both out for waffles. He held Helena’s chair for her, then Christina’s.

After the meal—the surprisingly pleasant meal, during which he tried to explain to Christina’s not-quite-satisfaction why he liked to double, triple, quadruple so many instruments (“makes a bigger sound,” he said, to which Christina replied “but you could just have one and they could play louder” and they squabbled about the difference between “bigger” and “louder” as if they were both children)—he put them in a taxi to go home, paying the driver in advance. He did not once remove his sunglasses. “He’s funny looking,” Christina said in the cab. “Or maybe just funny. But not funny.”

“That’s quite true,” Helena said.

So now, when Christina asks how Phil is, Helena tells her, “Still funny. Somewhat differently funny.”

“Still wearing that cape?” Myka asks.

“No cape. But the sunglasses remain. I suppose he did have on a rather striking waistcoat. Jacquard.”

“Speaking of funny,” Myka says. “Funny detail to notice.”

“I think one is meant to notice.” In her back-and-forth with Myka, she hears the reaccustoming that always occurs after a separation of any length, even so short as a workday. The pretending, also, that that is not what they are doing, pretending that everything is familiar and fine, until the moment of magic when it becomes so.

Christina chimes in again with, “Is L.A. pretty?”

Never any reaccustoming with Christina. Never any need for pretending. Helena sees her daughter, hears her voice, and everything is always already as it was. “I bought several postcards. So we could all get a look at Los Angeles, because what did I see? I saw the airport and the interior of the studio. Possibly a palm tree? I did spend time in two cars. What does one see from a car?”

“That’s probably when you saw the palm tree. Is the airport nice at least?”

“I quite frankly can’t remember, but here is a postcard that depicts it. What do you think?”

“Looks new.” Then she takes hold of Helena’s right hand, from which she had plucked the postcard. “What happened to your finger?”

It does look unattractive. Not one but two slightly horrified stewardesses had tried and failed to find her a bandage for it when it began to bleed during the flight, so Helena now has, to her mortification, a blood-stained American Airlines napkin stowed in her handbag. “We’ll call it a war wound,” she says. “Sustained during the Pizzicato Hostilities of 1963.”

“God, how much pizzicato?” Myka’s voice wavers between a gasp and a laugh.

Helena looks at the offender, holds it up to Myka evidentiarily, apologetically. “Just about this much.”

“I’d kiss it, but I don’t think that would do anything but give you an infection.”

“So romantic. Although most likely also accurate.” But they smile at each other—and there is that moment: they are themselves again, and Helena is home.

Christina is still focused on the details. “Okay, so you didn’t see L.A. But you had to eat. Was the food good?”

“I can’t remember that either. There were delivery containers at certain points. Italian?”

“I’m not sure you really went to California at all,” Christina says, shaking her head and sighing.

“Neither am I.”

“Maybe you just rode around in a cab here for two days playing pizzicato for the driver.”

“Although she did get the postcards,” Myka says, nodding at the remaining stack in Helena’s other hand.

Helena had bought as many different cards as she could grab—twenty, thirty?—before having to run for the airplane. She hands the rest to Christina, who begins flipping through them. “Good point. So we know she flew to California.”

“And we know she destroyed her poor finger on the violin.” Now Myka does take Helena’s hand, does kiss her finger, just a little, just a sigh’s press.

“Or maybe she slammed it in the door of the taxi. Mom, can I put some of these on the wall of my room?”

“Of course you may. And clearly you both are quite good at deductive reasoning. You should become police detectives.”

“We could be detectives on a TV show!” Christina enthuses. “Wells and Bering!”

“Bering and Wells,” Myka says, to which Christina delivers a thumbs-down verdict.

Helena once again is visited by that unreal-yet-real sensation as Christina and Myka continue to plan their television program.... they will be not police but private detectives... they will drive a car like the one on Route 66 (Christina’s idea)... they will need a theme song (also Christina’s idea). Christina requests Helena’s help with this latter task.

“I don’t write music.”

“I know that.” Christina is aggrieved. “But you have Nelson’s phone number.”

“Mr. Riddle.” Helena supplies the automatic correction, but she thinks she may be one of the few people in the nation who knows several other parents whose children would also recommend calling on Nelson Riddle if they were in need of a melody for their imaginary television show’s theme song.

The utter strangeness of this life.  But the suitability, too, how as each day closes she cannot imagine wanting to have had a different day.

The way Christina and Myka speak to each other: strange twinned with suitable. If Helena could determine how to capture that as a sound... an approach...

“Helena,” she hears Myka say. “You’re going to fall over. Sit down.”

Helena would not have been able to say with certainty that she had not already sat down. Or fallen over.

“Come sit at the table, Mom. You missed dinner, but we saved some for you.”

“I ate a meal on the airplane,” Helena protests, more weakly than she would like.

“But we made meatloaf. And also mushroom julienne. The meatloaf was mostly my job.”

“It was,” Myka says. The smile in her voice, the very quiet pride: it’s just meatloaf, of course. But Helena can hear, in that quiet, the day-by-day of that pride’s accrual.

“I could do even more if you’d trust me with the sharp knife like Mrs. Cho does now. Then all the julienning wouldn’t have to be your job.”

“See, no, because when she’s not around, you get sloppy. I like you with all your fingers intact.”

Conversation, suitability, strangeness. Keeping Christina intact. Maintaining this space where all of this can happen, with pride and love and family all accruing. A right fit that no one could have thought to predict; unexpected, yet apt. There must be a way to translate that, its traces, its evidence, into a sound. It would not be a wall.

Helena tries to concentrate on meatloaf and mushrooms.

Yet strangeness... in bed, later, Helena says, “I didn’t hate it. Why didn’t I hate it?” All she will ever let Myka know about is the time and effort spent, but even that is enough. A normal person would have hated it.

“Are you talking about the meatloaf?” Myka asks, and Helena does laugh. Christina likes to experiment in the kitchen, particularly with sugars... and her meatloaf had featured a surprising application of a honey glaze. The result was some combination of delicious and disgusting; Helena’s mouth and digestion have not come to an agreement in the matter. Myka shrugs, a gentle wave of motion that makes Helena’s body, in its customary position against Myka’s side and shoulder, rise and fall. “Why didn’t you hate it? Because... maybe because you recognize it. You see where you’re going.”

“Do I? I can’t... I mean, not as Phil has. And not as who he is. Never like that.”

“There’ll be an H.G. Wells way to do it. You’ll be her instead.”

“Will there? I don’t know what she’ll do. Who she’ll be, who I’ll be, as she does it. That is, if I ever have the chance to... what, invent her? Because—”

“You will.” This is followed by a long, aggressive kiss, and Helena is a bit surprised when Myka pulls back and says, “I was lonely. While you were gone.”

“Well. When you’re gone—”

“Don’t,” Myka says. Mild, but it’s a warning.

And it’s not inappropriate, that warning. Helena had been, reflexively, about to restart a familiar argument, one that they have been having for two years now—almost exactly two years: Helena knows it and she knows Myka does too, because forming their household had happened so easily, just over two years ago, as if they had at last stepped into their right lives. Their right-fit lives. The rhythm set itself in the first week: they sent Christina to school in the morning, enjoyed a few moments of blessed privacy together; then Helena kissed Myka away to her campus and took an hour or more to practice the violin alone before her day’s sessions.

Five weeks it lasted, this plain and comfortable regularity. Then Myka left, for four days, at Abigail’s behest. Helena had fretted through the entire four days, hiding it as well as she could from Christina and everyone around her. She hid it very well from her violin: both in practice and in sessions, her playing was very near flawless. She produced exactly the sounds she wanted to. She hated each note.

Adding to her fretfulness was the fact that she had no way to determine which response was right, the worry undertow or her hands’ proficient disregard of it. For four days, she tortured herself. Then Myka came back, and while she did seem to try to be reassuring, did try to comfort Helena with words and actions of love, all she would say about the issue at hand was, “I can’t talk about it.” And all Helena could say to that was, “That does not help.”

Helena still does not know which response to settle on, and Myka still does not help. They talk around it, but that solves nothing; sometimes they talk directly at it, with just as little success. Myka says “you know I can’t tell you” and Helena struggles to explain her inability to reconcile what she knows and what she needs.

Myka did try, once: she said, “This time, don’t worry.”

To which Helena had replied, with a face rapidly turning red, “How do I know if you’re telling me that simply because it’s what you think I want to hear?”

“You don’t,” Myka said. They kissed goodbye as always. The next time, Myka didn’t say anything about how Helena should feel.

Now, here in their bed, Helena says, “At least you knew I was—” But then she stops.

“Knew you were what?”

Phil and his “I’ve got a gun.” But Helena says it anyway: “You knew I was safe.”

Myka doesn’t say anything. But she exhales in a way that suggests frustration, even injury.

Helena acknowledges that bringing up safety is a provocation, for the fact of the matter is that what Myka does is what she feels she must do. But Helena now has a brief vision: if they lived in California, Abigail might find it more difficult to send Myka to Europe, to Russia. If they lived in California. “I did love the studio,” Helena ventures, and that is not a lie. “Utterly unprepossessing space, but a lovely sound. Magnificent echo chambers.”

Myka turns her head toward Helena. “Unprepossessing,” she whispers, with a tiny huffed chuckle, and she places her hand, warm and well-known, against Helena’s face.

Helena doesn’t want to leave New York: its spaces, its scene. But she has been thinking so much, of late, about the future... and she is now entertaining the wild notion that she might be the one to finally secure Myka’s freedom—that California might be Jerusalem. She could at long last fulfill her promise to keep Myka safe. And so much money is there, as witnessed by Phil’s complete indifference to the cost of flying a violinist in from New York to do his bidding for two days. She suspects he is right, that the record will be huge, and that will allow him even greater leverage to create sounds that are ever more huge... and Myka is right: for whatever reason, he likes Helena. Who would prioritize spaces and scene over security?

****

The cliché is exactly that, but it is true: everyone remembers where they were, what they were doing.

Helena is in a record store, buying the just-released A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records, cursing under her breath at Phil for not sending her an advance copy. A radio is on—news of some sort; she pays little attention, except to note the oddness of its being news, rather than music, in a record store. The time... she had realized later that it was in fact one of the first announcements, if not the first, because it was not yet two-thirty in the afternoon. Not quite two-thirty, and everything in the store stops: every conversation dies, every movement ceases. Helena has a bill in her hand, suspended over the counter; she keeps that bill in her hand, suspended over the counter.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States is dead. John F. Kennedy has died, of the wounds received in an assassination in Dallas less than an hour ago. We repeat, it has just been announced, that President Kennedy is dead.”

And Helena’s first thought is not for the nation, not for the man himself, not for his newly widowed wife, nor even for his now fatherless children. She does not worry over Christina’s potential response to such an event, or even Myka’s reaction. Instead, she looks down at the new LP on the counter in front of her, at its cheery holiday cover, its Christmas-wrapped array of Philles recording artists. And she thinks, No one will care about this record. No one at all.

And no one should care about the record, but that thought—that that is her thought—is a splinter she will never quite work out of her character.

****

In fact no one at all cares about any music at all, not for the next several days. Instead, stunned spoken refrains: “I can’t believe it. Can you believe it?” “I can’t believe it.” “Where were you? What were you doing?”

When Myka is asked the question by someone she does not know well, she says, “I was at home. Waiting for... well, waiting. Then I turned on the television.” When she is asked by someone she does know, and with whom she feels safe, she says, “I was at home, waiting for Christina to get home from school, waiting for Helena to come home from a session. Then I turned on the television.” What she never says to anyone is that her immediate, first thought had been that she needed to, but could not possibly, call Abigail.

Christina remembers it thusly: “I got home from school, and Myka had the TV on. She had the weirdest look on her face, and when she saw me, instead of saying hi, she made the weirdest noise.” What she never says to anyone is that before she fully realized what had happened, she had wondered how long the strange upset that Myka’s face and noise signaled would last: whether school might be canceled the following Monday.

After a few days, Helena hears a rumor that the record will be pulled from distribution. On impulse, she sends Phil a telegram: unpunctuated, nearly nonsensical, but telegrams are for disasters. “GRIEVING EVERYTHING TRAGEDY XMAS LP”, it says.

Phil responds in kind. Helena does not know how many telegrams he has sent before, how many he sends after. But this one reads, in toto, “BAD LUCK CHARM.” Because, she suspects, Western Union would not allow him to write “FUCK YOU.”

TBC

[chromacomaphoto]

Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Leica...

A Guide to Buying a classic Leica M Film Camera:  Part 1 ‘The Leica M3’

In recent times, I have enjoyed sharing information as to where to find good places in Thailand for the procurement of film cameras, lenses, films and service etc. Amazingly for something written by myself, it appears that this information has actually been of genuine use to people and I feel more than happy to have helped. Off the back of this minor success however, has another series of enquires arrived at my door. Specifically, ‘Which Leica M should I buy?’ This question is not always the easiest to answer. I have made several attempts at giving people the shorthand answer based around my (purely subjective) real world user recommendations yet this invariably leads to another fifteen questions. Having duly answered these questions many times for many different people, I have slowly been compiling a list of points made in all such correspondence for inclusion in my version of a Leica M film body buyer’s guide. I say ‘my version’ as this is hardly an impossible thing to find elsewhere on the internet. Lots of people have covered the subject in different ways, I don’t always agree with some things that I’ve seen around the place however and so I simply wish to provide my take on it. This assumes that you have at least heard of some of the Leica M film body models and are debating adding one to a shortlist or similar such situation. There are several exhaustive true anorak encyclopedia type books out there and they are quite well known. You can look them up on Amazon books and go from there if you need that level of detail. If you are serious about the marque, any such volume makes for a nice reference to have at home anyway. I shall try to not steal the images of others here and actually show pictures of Leica M’s that I either own or have owned in the past for the purposes of this guide. It will also have to be written in serial form as a ‘one-shot’ post would be a weighty tome and possibly become convoluted. Also, I am not aiming to produce highly technical and heavily spec centered writing on the subject, rather share my feelings on the different models by combining actual personal experience with a nod to noteworthy features and provenance.

 Leica M3

 And on the sixth day, God made the Leica M3.   In ’53, the Leica M3 was introduced and it soon took the photographic world by storm.  It wasn’t just a new camera, it brought along a whole standard for all 35mm film cameras that elevated the already very high benchmark that Leica had established to a ridiculous new level.  To borrow from the parlance of the modern corporate world (and as much as I hate this trite chunk of language), it really was ‘a game changer’. It went on to be the most popular (getting on for a quarter of a million were made and easily sold) of all the Leica M classic range.  It introduced the quick change M bayonet mount which superseded the LTM mount (whilst still allowing the older lenses to be used without too much hassle on the new ‘M’ 3), showcased three new bright line frames (50,90 and 135mm, hence the number in the name M ’3’) into an equally new and incredibly clear finder and facilitated more accurate focusing than ever before by virtue of a longer effective base length. It is still arguably the best Leica M finder to date with which to fine tune focusing using a 50mm or 90mm lens.

Speaking of the finder, when you peeked into it you couldn’t help but notice that it also came resplendent with other party tricks such as automatically changing frame lines for the first time. The camera ‘knew’ what lens the user was mounting to it and would respond in kind with the appropriate silver squares of gratitude magicallyappearing in the viewfinder waiting for your viewing pleasure. These frame lines also featured a reasonable degree of accurate parallax correction which required less guesstimation on the part of the photographer than earlier cameras. But perhaps the real magnum opus of the M3 was how focusing inside this new window on the world was to be achieved. It was done for the first time by Leica through the overlapping of two images, sometimes referred to as ‘coincidental’ images. When the two overlapped in the finder to make a single sharp image, focus was then considered optimal and an image could be taken.    

Film was advanced by a single lever, in earlier M3 models it required two strokes of said lever to advance one frame of film onwards and cock the shutter. These earlier M’s are known as ‘DS’ on account of this double-stroking operation. Internet folklore has it that the original designers and engineers feared that a single long stroke might exert too great a degree of torque onto the film itself, risking tears. Whether this is true or not is not clear to me however it sounds appropriately Germanic, logical and in keeping with Leica manufacturing brilliance of the epoch so I choose to not go any further down this rabbit hole. What is not in debate however is that Leica chose to change the design later on during the M3’s production life to be a newer, one pull affair nowadays known as a Leica M3 single stroke or ‘SS’ (not the kind to kick down your door wearing jackboots and brandishing a Luger).  I’ll return to early vs. late model differences in due course.

The single film advance lever wasn’t the only all-in-one control input on this camera either. For the first time, Leica had now managed to have all shutter speeds(from B to 1/1000th of a second) on a single, solitary dial atop the M3’s magnificent brass rampart. A huge step up from the earlier Leica cameras and their multiple shutter speed dials.

Film loading in most of the older classic M’s follows the M3 original design of using a Leica take up spool or cartridge. The first couple of times you use one, it doesn’t seem all that intuitive and you might need to refer to the excellent diagram included on the base of the camera (with the bottom removed), but with regular use you can soon see how very efficient and dependable a design it is. There are some natty little touches such as the inclusion of an arrow holed pattern that shows you exactly how far in you have locked your film leader in place. It also allowed Leica to introduce the opening back door/flap which made loading film an easier affair than with any of the screw mount Barnack Leica cameras up until the came along. Even today, this often seems structurally better than a large open swinging open rear door such as later became typical in the design of film SLR’s in the decades that were to follow. The Leica rear door still tucked back into the bottom plate when it was firmly reattached to the camera and the structural integrity remained. It all closed back up to be one solid feeling Germanic brick of photographic goodness in its owner’s hands.

Speaking of the film spool cartridge, when it was removed from the M3, a brilliantly designed film counter which was embedded nicely into the solid brass top plate to the right of the film advance lever pivot point, automatically pinged its way back to minus two frames. Once you reloaded a film and wound on the first two blanks, it was right there for you at zero and ready to tag along for another ride. The counter was placed under a bubbled, lens-like window which aided magnification in much the same way as a ‘Cyclops’ date window does on a Rolex datejust. Sheer brilliance.

The M3 also had a mechanical self-timer lever and so, although people under 25 today might find it hard to fathom, people were happily taking selfies with their carry everywhere daily cameras just fine back in ’53, imagine that? Next to this timer lever (and a well thought out safety measure it was indeed) was a guarded lens release button, like a little metal semi-circular fence that protected the lens dismount button with aplomb. It was later omitted in further M’s but is an easy way to identify an M3.

The serial numbering system for Leica is, as one would expect if one has read this far, very logical and efficient. The M3 started its earliest runs down in the low 700k range and went on to just over the 1 million mark. Collectors like the one million plus serial numbers so they are not always good value buys for actually taking photographs with. The logic behind this seems to stem from the idea that after they had been produced for that long, the production team would have been even more experienced and able to churn them out to a higher standard. I personally find this to be a likely example of an old wives’ tale and I know a few old hand camera repair people who seem to support this. Some say the early shutters were not as good, I have no real empirical research data to disprove this, but I have not seen much other than subjective opinion (yes I know, just like mine) to support it either. One could just as easily put forth an argument that the housewives of Wetzlar in 1959 (employed in the factory) might have been so sick to death of assembling M3’s by this point that they were just slapping them together willy-nilly as they discussed what would have happened if they’d won the war. No more ridiculous a notion.  However, the serial numbers do offer some advantages in terms of what you get as standard with your M3. Generally speaking, around the mid 50’s and the late 700k range, the now famous frame line preview selector lens lever (AKA the ‘what would this look like through a 90mm lens that I haven’t even got with me right now’ lever) was added. At the 900k plus mark, or thereabouts, the old double stroke design gave way to the later single stroke model. Be advised however, that lots of older double stroke cameras were retrofitted to be singles by Leica (and third party repair people) so serial numbers and film advance repetitions don’t always jive together as you might think, different strokes for different folks. Also around this time, two little cutout tabs appeared on top and under the main RF patch image in the centre of the finder window. These were carried over to the M2. They could be used for ascertaining depth of field when using a nifty fifty when the lens was approximately half open or stopped right down. The very early M3’s had shutter speeds expressed in a different (some might say more logical) way from commonly seen now, these fractions of speed might be puzzling at first. These are sometimes referred to as ‘scientific shutter speed’ dials and can be good or bad depending on how cool you might think they are. In practice, using 1 /50th when I was actually looking for the 1/60th mark on the dial has never really caused me any problems but some people don’t like it.

Nearly all M3’s ever produced are in the silver chrome looking scheme. A rare smaller quantity were in black but frankly, Leica black paint of the time was actually (and very unusually for such a gang of perfectionists) a bit crap. It soon wore off and the brass colour of the top and bottom plates showed through on high wear spots and edges, cue Cyndi Lauper. These are the so called ‘brassed’ bodies and like lots of other things in life that make no sense, these imperfect and soon discontinued bodies are now the ones worth big bucks. So big in fact that the fakers have long since moved in (sometimes with surprisingly accurate looking unofficially repainted Leicas) and this means that buying a ‘genuine’ black paint classic Leica M from the 50’s through to the early 70’s takes a large bank balance and significant testicular fortitude, especially off Ebay from a seller with single digit feedback who is happy to contact you by email and suggest that you ‘save on PayPal fees’. It’s like the anti-Henry Ford “Any Colour you like, as long as it’s not black”. That’s kind of why lots of people then want one of course, hence repainting to use rather than to defraud. In fact, it must be stated that repaints are not all bad, bad, bad (indeed…a cynic might have already passed comment on the colour of the M3 camera in this post!). A good modern repaint of an old brass Leica can actually be a truly wonderful thing as long as the workmanship is first class (there aren’t that many people or companies famous for doing it to a high standard and many of the ones that do have long waiting lists and might be in faraway lands) and nobody is trying to pass it off as Leica factory original to anyone else. The rare colour stakes were elevated to an even more insane level with the military green M3’s, usually known as ‘olive paint’ bodies. The black ones can be sold to buy you a nice used (but late model)  premium luxury car, the green ones can be used as a significant chunk of a condo! In watch terms, the green M3 is to rangefinder cameras what a 5517 British Royal Marines ‘Milsub’ is to Rolex. You’ve either got one in the attic or your late father’s dresser, or you haven’t. We can but dream. Or as they used to say on Antiques Roadshow, ‘Well, really we were just after some information about the history of the piece, how much you say?! Oh really…mmm….but we could never sell it….’ Yeah, right.

So, why the M3 over the others? Many simply say that it was the first; the best and that subsequent models have never managed to significantly improve upon it. It represents a true zenith of design and engineering from a time and place that was already setting the bar as high as could be in such a field. It’s a true cult classic and a gift that keeps on giving. It might actually outlive you which also means that you might never need to replace it (CLA and repair yes, replace? Probably not).

 A word to the wise though, it is not necessarily a perfect fit for everyone. In the era in which it was designed, 50mm was very much the standard lens and this was reflected (or rather it wasn’t) in the lack of internal 35mm frame lines. Hence if you were a wide shooter, you were almost SOL. Luckily, those clever people in Wetzlar soon sought to address this Achilles heel and many wider lenses were produced with a special optical external accessory, most often referred to nowadays as ‘goggles’ attachment lenses. The correct term is perhaps more likely to be ‘M3 version lens’ for the sake of accuracy. These lenses have a slightly bulkier (and a tad heavier) construction and the use clever optics and mechanics to allow the 35mm frame lines the ability to ‘magically’ appear in a reduced width, which just fits snugly inside the standard 50mm frame line set. This is handy as the M3 then became a 35mm lens camera just as many photojournalists slowly changed towards using‘thirty-fives as the new normal’, if you’ll excuse the snowclone butchery. This also allowed one to see more outside of the frame (and more easily) than with a normal 35mm frame line set in later M’s. This jived well with the 'see it take place outside the frame before you catch it within rangefinder' advantage that people still pay lip service to today. It also meant that those shooters who wore glasses could now use a 35mm inside a Leica viewfinder more easily, although doing so introduced them to the slight drawback that any classic early brass M metal diopter circle would ‘do a number’ on their right side glasses lens, with more scratches than Afrika Bambataa on a hot Bronx night. Despite what you might think, the goggled lenses are not a dead-end street should you commit to purchasing them for a Leica M3 and later wish to use them on other M bodies. They work just as well on other M’s (even modern digital ones!) and offer the same aforementioned advantages in such cases as well. They add a little size and weight (but really, I find it a moot point) and the difference cosmetically is a real opinion splitter. Probably the majority of people hate them on an M, I personally waiver between ambivalence and adoration, depending on the exact combo in question. As such, the best news for people wanting and using  these lenses nowadays is that despite costing more than the non-goggled (read: non M3) versions when new, they are now typically cheaper, depending on your exact locale and market forces there. Colour me happy (even though I’m really a black and white guy). The flash is also a weird one, they are unusual in having their own non-standard kind of flash connection terminal, and it won’t connect to the normal PC cord without third party adapters. I have never been concerned by this as I see the M as an available light body anyway, especially considering the fact that most of Leica’s lenses work very well wide open, at least compared to many other brands. That’s not to say that people haven’t used flash to great effect with M’s, they have but I'mjust not one of them.

Still, despite the quirks of the M3, if you are even remotely ‘bi-image curious’ :-J, you owe it to yourself to at least try one for a while. If you like rangefinders, you’ll probably fall in love. If you discover that you are just not an RF kind of shooter (and there’s honestly nothing wrong with that at all) then even the cream of the crop isn’t going to do that much for you anyway. Plus, it’s truly one of those rare things that you can usually buy and sell for the same, slightly less or slightly more than you paid for it. People say that about lots of things but so often, it just isn’t the case. With a Leica, they are always wanted and patient sellers of decent M3’s have nothing to fear.

Leica virgin, a touch for the very first time…

Enjoy

 CCP

[webanalytics]

Brand Bias: Does Branding Matter For Driving Sales in B2B? Here’s What The Data Says

The marketing world loves to talk about branding.

Take a look at just about any marketing company in the world, and you’ll find the word “brand” on at least one page.

Startups and small companies frequently look for ways to get mentions online so they can start building their brands.

And big companies often preach branding, too.

You’ll see blog posts on “improving your brand” or something similar.

And you’ll often read news stories about how a particular brand is “valued” at a certain figure.

A recent example of this would be the digital communication giant Slack. Some have recently valued Slack as a $5 billion brand.

But when you get down to the brass tacks, does branding really have anything to do with, well, anything?

More specifically, does a brand actually correlate to sales, especially for B2B players?

This is a question that companies all over the world are discussing that needs an answer.

I want to show you what the data says about branding, sales, and how it affects you.

To get started, you first have to understand how brand loyalty and value have changed.

Then, I’ll show you ways to dig deeper into each.

The basics of brand bias

Branding is, in effect, a method of creating an image around your company, product, or service.

You’re probably familiar with many multi-billion dollar brands that have anchored themselves in your life.

You do everything you can to establish your brand, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But is there data to back up this information?

And if so, what elements of branding are the most important to consider for B2B players who want to wisely join the trend?

Branding is considered conventional wisdom so these questions are often taken for granted.

I think that trend should change, so I’ve compiled a list of some of the vital elements of branding. This will help us determine whether you actually can prove ROI with them.

But before we get to those, you have to know a bit about the details of brand bias.

You’ll also hear marketers call it brand loyalty. The terms are pretty much synonymous.

Brand loyalty goes way back in our history.

Without a doubt, you could ask your grandparents about the brands they were loyal to in their youth, and they could give you an extensive list with ease.

These relationships had the staying power many companies only dream about today.

But how has brand loyalty progressed to modern times?

Despite claims that brand loyalty is dead, the truth is that the bias is still overpowering in B2C arenas. In fact, 82% of adults in the US claim loyalty to a product brand.

And the translation to B2B here is only natural.

Those same brand-loyal people are likely to be amongst the decision-makers of your clientele in the B2B world.

They want to find a brand to be loyal to. It’s a mental shorthand that looks to make decisions easier and faster.

So the biggest overall change in loyalty isn’t that it’s dying. It’s that buyers are in the driver’s seat instead of brands. They now have the power to research brands carefully.

But while the information available to your clients has grown, most industries show a relatively slow rate of growth in revenue compared to the astronomical rise of website traffic.

This trend might be eerily familiar to you. It’s likely that you’re seeing indications that the clients you’re trying to win are probing your brand and going elsewhere.

And you can bet that your target audience is doing extensive research on your brand before coming to a decision.

So at the very least, it’s clear that loyalty has changed.

And this makes sense. When you change your customer’s reality, you have to change the marketing reality with it.

The traditional brand elements like name recognition and being “top of mind” don’t pack the same punch anymore.

The result is that we need to turn more toward metrics like sales, ROI, and conversions to find an accurate measure of brand bias.

So let’s address this issue of “brand value.”

What does that mean?

This is another concept that people worldwide throw around, but the lines have become hazy.

As you would expect, because of the evolution we’ve seen in brand bias, there is an ongoing discussion of whether brand value is a monetary assessment of the company or a softer assessment of value delivered to your audience.

The former approach treats all marketing efforts as “branding” and calculates ROI based on this value.

Thus, a simple revenue-to-cost analysis provides ROI.

And unfortunately, the later causes many businesses to ignore their brand value altogether because it makes value hard to measure and puts it in a constant state of change.

The overriding principle that both tend to miss, however, is that a strong brand or “high brand value” can solve many common problems before they occur.

Therefore, linking brand value to ROI is a matter of showing a causal relationship between strong branding and the elimination of issues that can impact sales.

This requires us to look at the hard measurements that data gives us and tap into what we know of human behavior.

So now that you see the dilemma that faces marketers seeking to prove branding ROI, let’s take a look at how various sales-related data points link back to branding.

We’ll start, of course, with your biggest client.

Your brand may be the only thing keeping your biggest client

This is a pretty frightening claim, and you should be a little scared of it if you’re a B2B company.

Recently, Gallup found that 71% of B2B customers are actively considering taking their business to a different company.

That’s a staggering statistic.

But how could that be?

B2B companies should be best equipped to meet their audience’s needs, which makes a statistic like this seem out of place.

But think about the reality of the situation.

B2B companies frequently make enormous promises to their clients.

Even if they’re equipped to follow through, they set the bar high from the beginning.

And your problems compound when you remember the fact that bigger client companies have greater bargaining power.

You begin to ask, “what happens if we delay one deadline?” Suddenly, money starts to tighten in negotiations.

Tack on the ever-looming fact that poor economic growth mixed with other factors can slow success and force brands to adjust post-contract, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Even more pessimistically, only about half of B2B customers believe their vendor is delivering on their promises or feel proud to associate with that brand.

Those are pretty dismal numbers when you think about it.

And this is given greater context by the fact that 81% of consumers are satisfied with the service of B2C companies.

What are B2B companies missing?

For one, B2B companies have been slow to respond from the traditional PR-dominated branding to a now marketing-dominated branding.

The best practice used to be leaving your image in the hands of your PR team.

But with the rise in consumer research we talked about earlier, this trend is now damaging companies that are still opting for the old school.

The room for growth is astronomical, and B2B companies that fail to focus on their brand and market it effectively are essentially neglecting their future and their clients.

Your name, reputation, or brand could be the only factors preventing your clientele from leaving you.

Or worse, it could be what’s driving them to look for other options.

Brand loyalty improves engagement and customer acquisition

One of the biggest data points that links branding to B2B sales is customer acquisition.

If it’s possible to use your brand as a tool to help you gain clients, then it’s a logical conclusion that focusing on your brand can improve your marketing ROI.

And from the data I’ve compiled, there’s a compelling case that branding can indeed help improve customer acquisition.

Let’s start with the bad news.

Engagement levels for B2B customers are abysmal according to Gallup, coming in at only 29%.

This might be a curious statistic to start off with, but there’s good reason for it.

The main reason I share this fact is because fully-engaged customers share more and are better brand advocates.

In other words, brand bias and customer engagement are directly correlated.

And it’s a basic marketing principle that loyal customers refer business.

More than half of consumers who have a good experience with a brand will recommend it to people that they know.

And many of those referrals turn into loyal customers themselves.

So, that 29% of engaged B2B clients isn’t making a very big ripple when it comes to referral business.

When you consider that the remaining 71% of your clients could be referring you and aren’t, you start to see how important these numbers are.

And this picture gets a little grimmer when you take into account that two-thirds of touchpoints when a client is actively considering to do business with you come in the form of word-of-mouth or online reviews.

That means your leads, audience, and potential clients are neglecting your trained sales team to see what others have to say about your brand.

And in 2016, 62% of B2B buyers were relying more on peer recommendations than on their own research.

In the technology industry alone, 60% of buyers look for peer-to-peer reviews to aid their decision-making process.

And the majority of your clients don’t care enough to share simply because they aren’t engaged with your brand.

Imagine what could happen if you increase your customer engagement.

You’d see much more growth.

And this concept is backed by data too.

49% of B2B companies report higher ROI by investing in relationships instead of acquisition marketing.

That translates well based on all of the other data we’ve been looking at.

By improving their current level of engagement with existing customers, their ROI increases.

And that is branding – pure and simple.

Branding motivates action

There’s another question we want to answer:

Does content (and ultimately branding) truly push your digital audience to take actions that lead to sales?

First, I think it’s worth showing you how actions, content, and branding share an inherent relationship.

One way to look at branding is in relation to the actions that your leads, customers, or website visitors take.

These actions are ultimately intended to culminate in a sale.

Marketers usually call this entire action-oriented process the buyer’s journey.

And as you can see, the B2B buyer’s journey is fraught with complexity.

Branding gives definition to your buyer’s journey primarily through the content you create and share.

The general consensus among marketers is that content motivates action among your audience.

By moving through this process of fixing pain points, offering value, building a relationship, and earning trust, your content is reportedly building your brand and promoting further action.

That means that the role of content marketing is social brand building.

So, by providing the right content, the strategy is to push leads to an action and create a custom buyer’s journey that increases sales.

That means that a logical place to start for a data-driven relationship is tracking the ROI of your content marketing efforts.

You’re in luck, then.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, you can not only track ROI, but you can also attribute ROI to the various phases of your sales funnel.

This is helpful in a conversation about branding, as it lets you narrow in how effective certain parts of your campaign are at motivating action throughout the sales cycle.

That means that you have a direct window to how content affects your branding at every stage.

What’s more, the overall lean toward content marketing is very favorable.

77% of B2B marketers feel that their content marketing is successful.

That’s a pretty impressive cohort of marketing professionals who feel their content marketing is leading to actions.

And there’s a good amount of data to back up those feelings too.

Again according to the Content Marketing Institute, 75% of B2B companies can show that content marketing has increased engagement over time.

More engagement combined with precise ROI tracking makes for a strong case in terms of the branding/content/action relationship.

And when you tack on the fact that 94% of B2B buyers are going to be researching you online, these statistics only look better.

By providing actionable, curated content, you can boost conversions in your sales funnel and ultimately increase your business’s sales.

Branding often negatively affects internal productivity

You don’t often hear about your employees in terms of branding and ROI, but there’s an abundance of data that suggests a correlation between your brand and the degree to which individual employees are profitable.

In a parallel move to marketers, HR professionals have started focusing on what they call employer branding.

This is a concerted effort by companies to not only portray themselves favorably to external forces but also to align themselves with an internal brand.

And when you consider that engaged employees are 21% more profitable than their peers with lesser engagement, you begin to understand why.

What’s more, that same Gallup poll found that sales professionals are 20% more productive when actively engaged in their company’s brand.

So the correlation here is clear as day.

But what are the factors driving employee engagement?

Without diving too deeply into HR, there is one main element called the employer value proposition, or EVP.

EVP works much like a traditional branding campaign, but you’re focusing on your brand image in regard to current and future employees.

You want to appear credible, reliable, and attractive to your employees in the same way you would a client.

The more you think about this, the more it makes sense.

Employees are the frontline of customer experience and the final link between you and your clients.

In essence, they’re ambassadors for your brand.

If they don’t buy in, sales will suffer no matter how strong or weak your digital presence is.

Not only that, but a transparent and consistent brand will attract top talent at a higher rate.

That means that your brand can start bringing in high-performing professionals who will boost sales even more.

So while old-school elements like employee alignment are still big, branding is taking center stage with employee engagement and productivity.

Emotionally-charged branding efforts boost profit

Finally, I want to discuss the emotional side of your B2B brand and how it relates to your overall sales performance.

Brand loyalty always caries emotion with it.

Thankfully, brand connection is usually positive.

But that doesn’t mean you can just gloss over this point.

Tapping into the raw emotion of your brand can be a good way to see improvements in your sales.

For example, 64% of consumers report that their relationship with a brand is tied to shared values.

Values are, strictly speaking, not necessarily a metrics-based type of measurement.

Humans often determine their values based on how they feel about certain subjects.

Whether that value stirs up controversy or elicits much response, it’s simply part of a business’s branding.

And under the microscope, it becomes much clearer just how important emotions are to branding.

By understanding your audience and delivering an emotional message, the evidence suggests that you will ultimately amplify your sales.

So it follows that emotional campaigns are more successful than rational campaigns.

Interestingly enough, emotional branding efforts are even more effective than a hybrid rational-emotional mix.

That’s why branding is so powerful.

It’s the emotional core of your business.

But there’s more to consider when it comes to building an emotional brand.

We can also see how even certain words and phrases you use in branding can evoke emotional responses that drive sales.

While all of these might not be applicable to your particular B2B niche, there’s an undeniable emotional draw in each of these words and phrases.

And as long as you don’t cheapen your brand, proper emotional wording can improve your conversions.

The overall goal of emotion in branding is to create brand immersion.

This, in turn, creates loyalty and boosts sales.

So, by providing an emotional connection and going beyond a bare-bones service, you can see incremental boosts in sales.

That seems like a pretty compelling reason on its own to emphasize branding for your company.

Hyper-focused branding can improve ROI

As we’ve learned more about what works in digital marketing, our methods have evolved to match our capabilities.

One of the more noteworthy evolutions is account-based marketing, or ABM.

This hyper-focused version of marketing allows brands to cater their message to individual businesses instead of a general audience.

As a B2B-specific tactic, it’s a battle-proven method that can help you leverage your brand as the solution to your audience of one.

Strikingly, almost all B2B businesses that have attempted ABM have had a higher ROI on their marketing efforts.

And more importantly to branding, those same businesses saw a significant benefit from focusing on expanding their existing client relationships through ABM.

By focusing on the relationship and boosting engagement, these brands are seeing a higher degree of revenue for their services.

Imagine what it could do to your business then, right?

And perhaps even more telling are these statistics from ITSMA:

What other methods could you use to increase your reputation, relationships, and revenue across the board?

I’m not aware of any others.

And all of this rises and falls on branding.

ABM is all about presenting all of what you do as a solution.

It’s just relationships and engagement.

Conclusion

The branding message can get old for B2B companies, but it’s not going away anytime soon.

You’ve seen the data, and you’ve hopefully read the signs.

Your brand could be your only lifeline, or it could be pushing your biggest clients out the door.

You largely determine which scenario is the case for you.

Overall, branding improves engagement and keeps your sales funnel full of potential customers.

By positioning yourself strategically throughout your buyer’s journey with actionable content, you encourage your leads to convert and take action.

Focusing on your internal brand can boost employee loyalty and sales significantly.

And creating an emotional, well-rounded brand can position you as a reliable source in your niche and improve your sales efforts.

Finally, using a hyper-focused method like account-based marketing can revolutionize your branding efforts and draw a direct line to increased revenue.

Across the board, branding serves an important purpose toward your bottom line.

In what ways have you noticed your brand making a difference in your sales?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog https://ift.tt/2pL0qOk #Digital #Analytics #Website

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Brand Bias: Does Branding Matter For Driving Sales in B2B? Here’s What The Data Says

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The marketing world loves to talk about branding.

Take a look at just about any marketing company in the world, and you’ll find the word “brand” on at least one page.

Startups and small companies frequently look for ways to get mentions online so they can start building their brands.

And big companies often preach branding, too.

You’ll see blog posts on “improving your brand” or something similar.

And you’ll often read news stories about how a particular brand is “valued” at a certain figure.

A recent example of this would be the digital communication giant Slack. Some have recently valued Slack as a $5 billion brand.

But when you get down to the brass tacks, does branding really have anything to do with, well, anything?

More specifically, does a brand actually correlate to sales, especially for B2B players?

This is a question that companies all over the world are discussing that needs an answer.

I want to show you what the data says about branding, sales, and how it affects you.

To get started, you first have to understand how brand loyalty and value have changed.

Then, I’ll show you ways to dig deeper into each.

The basics of brand bias

Branding is, in effect, a method of creating an image around your company, product, or service.

You’re probably familiar with many multi-billion dollar brands that have anchored themselves in your life.

You do everything you can to establish your brand, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But is there data to back up this information?

And if so, what elements of branding are the most important to consider for B2B players who want to wisely join the trend?

Branding is considered conventional wisdom so these questions are often taken for granted.

I think that trend should change, so I’ve compiled a list of some of the vital elements of branding. This will help us determine whether you actually can prove ROI with them.

But before we get to those, you have to know a bit about the details of brand bias.

You’ll also hear marketers call it brand loyalty. The terms are pretty much synonymous.

Brand loyalty goes way back in our history.

Without a doubt, you could ask your grandparents about the brands they were loyal to in their youth, and they could give you an extensive list with ease.

These relationships had the staying power many companies only dream about today.

But how has brand loyalty progressed to modern times?

Despite claims that brand loyalty is dead, the truth is that the bias is still overpowering in B2C arenas. In fact, 82% of adults in the US claim loyalty to a product brand.

And the translation to B2B here is only natural.

Those same brand-loyal people are likely to be amongst the decision-makers of your clientele in the B2B world.

They want to find a brand to be loyal to. It’s a mental shorthand that looks to make decisions easier and faster.

So the biggest overall change in loyalty isn’t that it’s dying. It’s that buyers are in the driver’s seat instead of brands. They now have the power to research brands carefully.

But while the information available to your clients has grown, most industries show a relatively slow rate of growth in revenue compared to the astronomical rise of website traffic.

This trend might be eerily familiar to you. It’s likely that you’re seeing indications that the clients you’re trying to win are probing your brand and going elsewhere.

And you can bet that your target audience is doing extensive research on your brand before coming to a decision.

So at the very least, it’s clear that loyalty has changed.

And this makes sense. When you change your customer’s reality, you have to change the marketing reality with it.

The traditional brand elements like name recognition and being “top of mind” don’t pack the same punch anymore.

The result is that we need to turn more toward metrics like sales, ROI, and conversions to find an accurate measure of brand bias.

So let’s address this issue of “brand value.”

What does that mean?

This is another concept that people worldwide throw around, but the lines have become hazy.

As you would expect, because of the evolution we’ve seen in brand bias, there is an ongoing discussion of whether brand value is a monetary assessment of the company or a softer assessment of value delivered to your audience.

The former approach treats all marketing efforts as “branding” and calculates ROI based on this value.

Thus, a simple revenue-to-cost analysis provides ROI.

And unfortunately, the later causes many businesses to ignore their brand value altogether because it makes value hard to measure and puts it in a constant state of change.

The overriding principle that both tend to miss, however, is that a strong brand or “high brand value” can solve many common problems before they occur.

Therefore, linking brand value to ROI is a matter of showing a causal relationship between strong branding and the elimination of issues that can impact sales.

This requires us to look at the hard measurements that data gives us and tap into what we know of human behavior.

So now that you see the dilemma that faces marketers seeking to prove branding ROI, let’s take a look at how various sales-related data points link back to branding.

We’ll start, of course, with your biggest client.

Your brand may be the only thing keeping your biggest client

This is a pretty frightening claim, and you should be a little scared of it if you’re a B2B company.

Recently, Gallup found that 71% of B2B customers are actively considering taking their business to a different company.

That’s a staggering statistic.

But how could that be?

B2B companies should be best equipped to meet their audience’s needs, which makes a statistic like this seem out of place.

But think about the reality of the situation.

B2B companies frequently make enormous promises to their clients.

Even if they’re equipped to follow through, they set the bar high from the beginning.

And your problems compound when you remember the fact that bigger client companies have greater bargaining power.

You begin to ask, “what happens if we delay one deadline?” Suddenly, money starts to tighten in negotiations.

Tack on the ever-looming fact that poor economic growth mixed with other factors can slow success and force brands to adjust post-contract, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Even more pessimistically, only about half of B2B customers believe their vendor is delivering on their promises or feel proud to associate with that brand.

Those are pretty dismal numbers when you think about it.

And this is given greater context by the fact that 81% of consumers are satisfied with the service of B2C companies.

What are B2B companies missing?

For one, B2B companies have been slow to respond from the traditional PR-dominated branding to a now marketing-dominated branding.

The best practice used to be leaving your image in the hands of your PR team.

But with the rise in consumer research we talked about earlier, this trend is now damaging companies that are still opting for the old school.

The room for growth is astronomical, and B2B companies that fail to focus on their brand and market it effectively are essentially neglecting their future and their clients.

Your name, reputation, or brand could be the only factors preventing your clientele from leaving you.

Or worse, it could be what’s driving them to look for other options.

Brand loyalty improves engagement and customer acquisition

One of the biggest data points that links branding to B2B sales is customer acquisition.

If it’s possible to use your brand as a tool to help you gain clients, then it’s a logical conclusion that focusing on your brand can improve your marketing ROI.

And from the data I’ve compiled, there’s a compelling case that branding can indeed help improve customer acquisition.

Let’s start with the bad news.

Engagement levels for B2B customers are abysmal according to Gallup, coming in at only 29%.

This might be a curious statistic to start off with, but there’s good reason for it.

The main reason I share this fact is because fully-engaged customers share more and are better brand advocates.

In other words, brand bias and customer engagement are directly correlated.

And it’s a basic marketing principle that loyal customers refer business.

More than half of consumers who have a good experience with a brand will recommend it to people that they know.

And many of those referrals turn into loyal customers themselves.

So, that 29% of engaged B2B clients isn’t making a very big ripple when it comes to referral business.

When you consider that the remaining 71% of your clients could be referring you and aren’t, you start to see how important these numbers are.

And this picture gets a little grimmer when you take into account that two-thirds of touchpoints when a client is actively considering to do business with you come in the form of word-of-mouth or online reviews.

That means your leads, audience, and potential clients are neglecting your trained sales team to see what others have to say about your brand.

And in 2016, 62% of B2B buyers were relying more on peer recommendations than on their own research.

In the technology industry alone, 60% of buyers look for peer-to-peer reviews to aid their decision-making process.

And the majority of your clients don’t care enough to share simply because they aren’t engaged with your brand.

Imagine what could happen if you increase your customer engagement.

You’d see much more growth.

And this concept is backed by data too.

49% of B2B companies report higher ROI by investing in relationships instead of acquisition marketing.

That translates well based on all of the other data we’ve been looking at.

By improving their current level of engagement with existing customers, their ROI increases.

And that is branding – pure and simple.

Branding motivates action

There’s another question we want to answer:

Does content (and ultimately branding) truly push your digital audience to take actions that lead to sales?

First, I think it’s worth showing you how actions, content, and branding share an inherent relationship.

One way to look at branding is in relation to the actions that your leads, customers, or website visitors take.

These actions are ultimately intended to culminate in a sale.

Marketers usually call this entire action-oriented process the buyer’s journey.

And as you can see, the B2B buyer’s journey is fraught with complexity.

Branding gives definition to your buyer’s journey primarily through the content you create and share.

The general consensus among marketers is that content motivates action among your audience.

By moving through this process of fixing pain points, offering value, building a relationship, and earning trust, your content is reportedly building your brand and promoting further action.

That means that the role of content marketing is social brand building.

So, by providing the right content, the strategy is to push leads to an action and create a custom buyer’s journey that increases sales.

That means that a logical place to start for a data-driven relationship is tracking the ROI of your content marketing efforts.

You’re in luck, then.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, you can not only track ROI, but you can also attribute ROI to the various phases of your sales funnel.

This is helpful in a conversation about branding, as it lets you narrow in how effective certain parts of your campaign are at motivating action throughout the sales cycle.

That means that you have a direct window to how content affects your branding at every stage.

What’s more, the overall lean toward content marketing is very favorable.

77% of B2B marketers feel that their content marketing is successful.

That’s a pretty impressive cohort of marketing professionals who feel their content marketing is leading to actions.

And there’s a good amount of data to back up those feelings too.

Again according to the Content Marketing Institute, 75% of B2B companies can show that content marketing has increased engagement over time.

More engagement combined with precise ROI tracking makes for a strong case in terms of the branding/content/action relationship.

And when you tack on the fact that 94% of B2B buyers are going to be researching you online, these statistics only look better.

By providing actionable, curated content, you can boost conversions in your sales funnel and ultimately increase your business’s sales.

Branding often negatively affects internal productivity

You don’t often hear about your employees in terms of branding and ROI, but there’s an abundance of data that suggests a correlation between your brand and the degree to which individual employees are profitable.

In a parallel move to marketers, HR professionals have started focusing on what they call employer branding.

This is a concerted effort by companies to not only portray themselves favorably to external forces but also to align themselves with an internal brand.

And when you consider that engaged employees are 21% more profitable than their peers with lesser engagement, you begin to understand why.

What’s more, that same Gallup poll found that sales professionals are 20% more productive when actively engaged in their company’s brand.

So the correlation here is clear as day.

But what are the factors driving employee engagement?

Without diving too deeply into HR, there is one main element called the employer value proposition, or EVP.

EVP works much like a traditional branding campaign, but you’re focusing on your brand image in regard to current and future employees.

You want to appear credible, reliable, and attractive to your employees in the same way you would a client.

The more you think about this, the more it makes sense.

Employees are the frontline of customer experience and the final link between you and your clients.

In essence, they’re ambassadors for your brand.

If they don’t buy in, sales will suffer no matter how strong or weak your digital presence is.

Not only that, but a transparent and consistent brand will attract top talent at a higher rate.

That means that your brand can start bringing in high-performing professionals who will boost sales even more.

So while old-school elements like employee alignment are still big, branding is taking center stage with employee engagement and productivity.

Emotionally-charged branding efforts boost profit

Finally, I want to discuss the emotional side of your B2B brand and how it relates to your overall sales performance.

Brand loyalty always caries emotion with it.

Thankfully, brand connection is usually positive.

But that doesn’t mean you can just gloss over this point.

Tapping into the raw emotion of your brand can be a good way to see improvements in your sales.

For example, 64% of consumers report that their relationship with a brand is tied to shared values.

Values are, strictly speaking, not necessarily a metrics-based type of measurement.

Humans often determine their values based on how they feel about certain subjects.

Whether that value stirs up controversy or elicits much response, it’s simply part of a business’s branding.

And under the microscope, it becomes much clearer just how important emotions are to branding.

By understanding your audience and delivering an emotional message, the evidence suggests that you will ultimately amplify your sales.

So it follows that emotional campaigns are more successful than rational campaigns.

Interestingly enough, emotional branding efforts are even more effective than a hybrid rational-emotional mix.

That’s why branding is so powerful.

It’s the emotional core of your business.

But there’s more to consider when it comes to building an emotional brand.

We can also see how even certain words and phrases you use in branding can evoke emotional responses that drive sales.

While all of these might not be applicable to your particular B2B niche, there’s an undeniable emotional draw in each of these words and phrases.

And as long as you don’t cheapen your brand, proper emotional wording can improve your conversions.

The overall goal of emotion in branding is to create brand immersion.

This, in turn, creates loyalty and boosts sales.

So, by providing an emotional connection and going beyond a bare-bones service, you can see incremental boosts in sales.

That seems like a pretty compelling reason on its own to emphasize branding for your company.

Hyper-focused branding can improve ROI

As we’ve learned more about what works in digital marketing, our methods have evolved to match our capabilities.

One of the more noteworthy evolutions is account-based marketing, or ABM.

This hyper-focused version of marketing allows brands to cater their message to individual businesses instead of a general audience.

As a B2B-specific tactic, it’s a battle-proven method that can help you leverage your brand as the solution to your audience of one.

Strikingly, almost all B2B businesses that have attempted ABM have had a higher ROI on their marketing efforts.

And more importantly to branding, those same businesses saw a significant benefit from focusing on expanding their existing client relationships through ABM.

By focusing on the relationship and boosting engagement, these brands are seeing a higher degree of revenue for their services.

Imagine what it could do to your business then, right?

And perhaps even more telling are these statistics from ITSMA:

What other methods could you use to increase your reputation, relationships, and revenue across the board?

I’m not aware of any others.

And all of this rises and falls on branding.

ABM is all about presenting all of what you do as a solution.

It’s just relationships and engagement.

Conclusion

The branding message can get old for B2B companies, but it’s not going away anytime soon.

You’ve seen the data, and you’ve hopefully read the signs.

Your brand could be your only lifeline, or it could be pushing your biggest clients out the door.

You largely determine which scenario is the case for you.

Overall, branding improves engagement and keeps your sales funnel full of potential customers.

By positioning yourself strategically throughout your buyer’s journey with actionable content, you encourage your leads to convert and take action.

Focusing on your internal brand can boost employee loyalty and sales significantly.

And creating an emotional, well-rounded brand can position you as a reliable source in your niche and improve your sales efforts.

Finally, using a hyper-focused method like account-based marketing can revolutionize your branding efforts and draw a direct line to increased revenue.

Across the board, branding serves an important purpose toward your bottom line.

In what ways have you noticed your brand making a difference in your sales?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

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