#(but im NEARLY done introducing everyone who's important for a while)

[selfproclaimedunicorn]

Nearly 11.8k words, but I am finally onto the final section of chapter 6!

[ttlmt]

The supernatural thing bugs the hell out of me. Like, they’re really going to give in to a decade of shipping and finally make it canon and then immediately send the guy who just professed his gay love to Ultra Mega Hell while the guy he confessed his love to can barely refrain from calling him a slur? Nobody wanted that.

i have seen a lot of posts similar to this, and while i see the point i honestly didn’t read the scene as that way.

dean is really bad at showing emotions. he just realized everyone is going to die, he had sam at gun point earlier in the episode, like a lot was going on. as a viewer it did feel kind of out of the blue in the moment, but since that whole ‘cas true happiness’ bit got introduced i had a pipe dream it would be this. so here we are, literal death is about to breakdown the door and kill them, and cas does his confession. and honestly i think dean reacted like dean would? like if youre ‘straight’ dean who has difficulty showing emotions and your best friend of 11 years just suddenly confesses he loves you its gonna take a second to process. he was confused, this was sudden, he had no time to react, and then cas is just gone. and i think the part thats really telling is afterwards when he just fucking breaks. theres not a lot of times we see dean break. so idk how dean feels tbh, and maybe its the fact that i’ve been here for ten fucking years of my life but i think that was the break of someone who realized fuck my best friend is in love with me i thought i was straight but fuck maybe i love him too but now hes gone.

now on to sending gays to hell. again without context thats what it looks like but like this was cas’s moment of true happiness. god himself and plenty of other divine people have even made talked about how cas is in love with dean. like besides the occasional snide comment and bad joke from 2010, the show has never indicated that gay people go to hell (i actually feel like theyve said the opposite but im not looking for quotes rn). and dean, if he was homophobic, hasnt shown it in years. literally the episode before hes talking with charlie about her girlfriend. dean has grown a lot as a person. so again i think his reaction was purely just the shock of the situation.

now the kills your gays situation is a dick move. and im pissed about it. but also like they told us cas was gonna die after his moment of true happiness, and thats what happened, so it wasnt exactly a surprise in that sense. but i will form a proper opinion when the show is over cause stupid me still has hope. eileen is also supposedly super gone, destroyed by god, but i cant see them ending the show with just sam and dean (and possibly jack? Idk) alone. like that has zero growth in it. they wanted their whole lives to be out of this shit and for it to be over and all the reasons they wanted to be out of it to be gone like thats an awful ending. i guess i wouldnt put it past them but like again stupid me with the hope.

i am also not sure about jensen’s feeling about the situation, because he has not been very positive in the past and idk his opinion about things so that might have played a role, but he played the breakdown really well and very dean in my opinion and misha’s performance was great.

obviously, i could be wrong. i could be reading into it and putting too much faith in actual good storytelling. i’m also aware of the connations of everything you said, with the kill your gays and the hell and deans reaction, without context. and yes i think it could have been done better. i think a lot of the jokes are being made out of context, and they might be warranted, but again stupid me with the hope that the way that i read the scene before i checked tumblr was real.

anyway, people are having fun. yes the ship was bad and was a lot of queerbaiting and a lot of fetishization from a lot of people. but it was also important to a lot of queer people like me. supernatural is still important to a lot of queer people like me. its a found family show. people are just having fun, and outside-supernatural-tumblr got involved for better or worse. and the whole world situation is happening at the same time.

edit: this is not to discredit the queer fans of the show who are mad. they have every right to be mad. and this is not to forgive the writers for what they have done. they have been awful about this for years. this is just my opinion as a fan of the show. for me, it was exciting and i couldnt believe what had just happened. as a fan of this show for nearly ten years and fan of this ship since the beginning, i just didnt see it in the negative way a lot of people did.

[emybain]

Welcome to the Renegades!

hiiiii this is a short little oneshot of an AU im currently obsessed with where Nova’s family didn’t die and she ended up becoming a renegade (so obsessed that I made important notes for the au). this is where ruby becomes a renegade and is being given a tour by sketch’s team. I tried following some canon (besides the fact that nova is an anarchist in canon) but it was a little hard finding the exact times when each member of sketch’s team joined the renegades, so I kind of took that into my own hands. in advance, I apologize for what’s about to come, and I would also like to thank anyone who may have inspired some snippets in here:)))

   “And this is the training hall.” The elevator came to a stop, and Adrian, Danna, Oscar, and Ruby stepped out. Adrian peeked over at Ruby, watching her face light up in awe. He led the three of them down the walkway over the training facilities, going slow so she could take it all in. He thought back to the first time he saw the place, although it was brand new and not nearly as large as it was now. 

    The trials had been held a few days ago, and Ruby was the newest member to Sketch’s team. It had been a difficult fight to get her, as multiple teams had challenged her, but Adrian had seen her potential. She was trained in martial arts and her ability to bleed gems would be useless in a fight. Part of his motivation to get her on his team may have been influenced by Oscar’s interest in her at the trials as well. Even now, Adrian had to hold back a smile from watching his friend trying to keep his cool around her. 

    “My brothers would die if they saw this place.” Ruby shot a grin at Adrian. “They’re twins, and they’ve always wanted to be Renegades.”

    “Are they going to be?” Oscar watched her intently, his attention solely on her. Adrian had never seen him act this way around a girl before. Ruby was cute, he had to admit, with her bubbly attitude and freckles and black and white hair, but he wasn’t interested in her the way Oscar was. 

    Ruby shook her head, biting her bottom lip. “They’re not prodigies.” Her smile faltered for a moment, but it reappeared just as quickly as it fell as her eyes scanned the training hall. “What’s going on over there?”

    Adrian followed her gaze to the huge salt water swimming pool that was usually mostly empty save for the occasional water elemental. Today, however, a small crowd gathered around the edges, their own training forgotten, and others that passed by slowed down their stride to get a better look. He frowned, squinting. There was a group of three, or was it four, people in the pool, and from the look of it, water was going everywhere.

    Their small group headed down the stairs and to the swimming pool. Adrian exchanged glances with Oscar, who shrugged his shoulders. He must’ve been thinking the same thing: who was in the pool? Adrian racked his brain for a list of the water elementals he knew, but most of them preferred training in the early morning or at night to avoid getting other prodigies soaked. 

    Adrian pushed his way through the clump of people, craning his neck to see over them until his group had made it to the front. There were four people fighting in the water, one of the teams. He recognized the tail of Ramona Sánchez, alias Sirena, before it came crashing down into the water, spraying himself and everyone else watching. He frowned. It was rare to see her team training in the middle of the day. 

    “What the hell is Nightmare’s team doing here? It’s not the crack of dawn,” Oscar muttered beside Adrian, clearly as confused as he was. Nova Artino, the leader of Ramona’s team and an old friend of Adrian, claimed her team trained in the early hours of the morning to avoid other people. As Adrian thought of her, lips pursed, one of the prodigies was thrown from the water, landing on their back a good ten feet from the pool. They groaned and stood, spluttering water from their mouth and wiping their eyes. It was Nova, alias Nightmare, and she did not look happy. Her other two teammates, the Whisperer and the Piper, also known as Benton Halthorne and Adèle Toussaint, charged Sirena. Well, the best they could while in her realm of expertise. Her wall of water fell slightly from the distraction, but she blocked the attack physically instead of using her powers, a rare occurence to be seen for a Renegade. Nova took this opportunity to jump back in the water to aid her teammates. It was clearly a three against one fight, hardly fair, but when did Nova Artino ever fight fairly? 

    Adrian crossed his arms over his chest, mesmerized by the scuffle. It was always interesting to see what Nightmare would do next in a fight. She was arguably the most unpredictable Renegade in Gatlon, and undeniably one of the best, at least in her age group. From around him, he heard tiny gasps and mumbles of approval or shock whenever she did something. It wasn’t every day they got to watch her team train; because of Nova, they were one of the best teams in the Gatlon branch. It was hard for many to understand why, reasons being Nightmare’s team training at unholy hours in the morning when everyone else was sleeping. It was also odd watching them train because they were one of the few teams that trained together, at least for the most part. Sure, Adrian had seen them running the track or scaling the climbing wall alone, but it wasn’t often, maybe only a couple times every week. 

    Unlike others, it didn’t surprise Adrian how good Nightmare’s team was, together and as individuals. He had been friends with Nova from an early age, before his mom died, and even though they had drifted apart in recent years, he knew how determined she was to be the best.

    Eventually, her team called a truce to take a break. The crowd of people watching dispersed quickly, as if to avoid being judged by Nova. It was almost comical the way some people were afraid of her or didn’t like her because they believed she was stuck up. Adrian knew that she just liked to keep to herself and her close circle of friends, but was kind to strangers and to those who talked to her. While she could be pretty intimidating, Adrian had seen a side of her that no one else had, a side that showed just how weird and dorky she actually was. 

    Sirena was the first out of the water, her tail morphing into two human legs as the water carried her to the edge of the pool. She helped her teammates get out, and Adrian could see the burns and scratches from the pool along her arms. Nova was the last out, gratefully accepting Sirena’s hand and hopping up to sit for a moment at the edge with her. They shared a few words, smiling, their body language toward each other vastly different than it was five minutes ago. 

    “Who’s that?” Adrian nearly jumped, forgetting that his team was still beside him. He looked over at Ruby. 

    “That’s um...that’s Nightmare’s team.” He cleared his throat. “You might remember them from the trials. They were one of the team’s who wanted you to be a Renegade.”

    Ruby hummed thoughtfully, then pointed at Nova. “That’s Nova Artino, right? Ace Anarchy’s niece.”

    A mischievous smile lit up Oscar’s face. “Also known as Adrian’s girlfriend.”

    Adrian felt his cheeks grow hot. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

    “That party four months ago says otherwise,” Danna joined in, smirking. 

    Adrian rolled his eyes, trying to play it off. They had been teasing him about that party since it happened, and it was getting old. “We’ve been friends for years. It’s not like that.” He let out a long sigh. “Anyway, I’ll introduce you. Just...don’t mention her uncle, okay? It’s kind of a sensitive spot for her.”

    He led them over to Nova’s team, who were all chatting as they dried themselves off. “Hey, Nightmare, got a sec?” Nova stopped talking and turned to face Adrian, wringing out her hair with a towel. He took notice of a band aid carefully wrapped around the top of her ear; it must’ve been a new earring, this one looking like an industrial piercing. Being a sensible person, she would have taken it out along with the rest of her piercings to avoid injury while training, but since it was clearly a new one, she couldn’t remove it just yet. He had to hold back a teasing comment; she must’ve had another argument with her parents and went out to get the piercing done to aggravate them. By now, she was almost out of room on her ears and would have to start piercing other parts of her body, something he was sure her parents would kick her out of the house for. 

    “Why, so you can rub in the fact that you always get away with stealing people I wanted for my team?” She placed the towel over her shoulder and crossed her arms. 

    Adrian couldn’t help the smirk that rose to his lips. “Still jealous that Danna chose me over you, huh?” A year ago at the last trials, Danna had given an exemplary demonstration, resulting in both Adrian and Nova arguing over her. Adrian’s dads had finally let him form his own team that year as long as he could find people. It was also the same year Oscar tried out, and after getting him on his team, Adrian had been determined to find at least one more person, and Danna was perfect. So when Nova Artino spoke up, already with a team of three, one of them having joined that day, all hell broke loose. It was quite the scene; the audience was left in tears and it was in the papers the next morning. He would’ve let her take Danna for her team, knowing that there would be other chances, but he noticed the way her eyes had softened while Danna displayed her powers, the way she leaned forward and rested her head on her arm. Why not mess with her and take away her chance at romance with Danna? When he had teased her of only wanting Danna on her team because she was cute, however, she nearly put him in the hospital. Totally worth it, and Danna had been a valuable member to his team since. 

    Nova rolled her eyes. “Please, I’m not that petty.” She shot a sweet smile over at Danna. “But you’re always welcome here whenever you realize how stupid Sketch is.”   

    Danna nodded, biting her lip to hide her smile. “Noted.” When Adrian shot her a look, she shrugged. “What? It could be fun.” Fun as in Nova and Danna had struck up a friendship in the past year that was dangerous considering their personalities. Fun as in the two of them on one team would mean Nightmare’s team being unstoppable. Yeah, fun. 

    “Actually, I was here to introduce you to Ruby Tucker, alias Red Assassin.” Adrian gestured a hand in Ruby’s direction. She raised a hand and waved awkwardly at Nova. 

    “Oh yeah, I remember you from the trials.” Nova’s smile became friendly. “You gave a badass demonstration, by the way. Guillotine deserved what was coming to her for doubting your abilities. I would have welcomed you to my team, but I figured Sketch needed you more.” She winked at Ruby, who let out a small laugh and mumbled a ‘thank you’. “Anyway, this is my team: Adèle, Romana, and Benton.” She pointed to each one as she introduced them. 

    “The Piper, Sirena, and the Whisperer.” Ruby nodded enthusiastically. “It’s great to meet you. When my brothers hear about this, they’ll freak.” With a glance to Nova, she added, “they’re big fans of you guys, especially you, Nightmare.”

    Nova’s cheeks lit up, her eyes widening in slight surprise. “Oh! That’s awesome.” Although the tone of her voice said otherwise. She looked back at her teammates. “Well, we should probably get back to training. We’re already behind as it is, having to start in the middle of the day.”   

    “What’s that about, anyway?” Oscar raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you guys usually train-”

    “At four in the morning?” Adèle cut in, lips turned upward. Her accent was as thick as the day she came to Gatlon a year ago from northern France. “Yes, but Nova had to babysit overnight and her parents didn’t get home until early afternoon.”

    “Which is why we need to get back to training, right?” Adrian could tell talking about her personal life was awkward, if not upsetting, for her to do. He never really understood why she was that way; even with him when they were alone, she tended to keep the conversation on anything but her home life. Her parents were nice people, and her siblings, while sometimes overwhelming, were fun to be around. 

    Adrian nodded, being the first to change the subject. “We should get back to our tour as well. Oscar really wants to show Ruby the cafeteria.”

    He noticed the look of gratitude Nova shot his way before she turned her attention to Oscar. “Very important business, then. All you can eat nachos is no joke.”

    Oscar agreed, and Sketch’s team bid farewell to Nightmare’s, turning in the direction of the elevators.

    “That Benton guy is cuter in person,” Ruby said as they walked, glancing over her shoulder at the retreating forms of Nightmare’s team. Oscar nearly tripped over his cane, blinking wildly in her direction. 

    “Pretty sure he’s taken by Johnathan Stillion, right, Adrian?” Danna peered over at Adrian, then nodded her head in Oscar’s direction. Adrian held back a snort.

    “Yeah, but don’t worry Ruby, there are plenty of other cute Renegades. Some might even be closer than you think.” 

Adrian may have been thinking about a particular Renegade as he said those w

[hoodiedidnotdie]

Lamb

A/n: hello, this is my first post in a *while* and also my first fanfic post on Tumblr (pls go easy on me). This is actually a story i originally shared via my Wattpad acc (freakykpopotaku (hell, need to change tht username)) so if u have nothing else to do, go check it out (im not tht active either on there /w\`)! But yeah, hope u guys like it.

Pairing : Namjoon x reader x Yoongi (not really romantic-ish)

Genre : Mafia au

Warning: minor bloodshed, tiny bit of cursing

Namjoon and Yoongi remembered clearly the first time they met you.

A Saturday afternoon, four months ago, was when they went to visit your father's coffee shop.

A last minute plan they had after the numerous meetings they had all over the place. The check ups they had to do on several of their branches throughout the districts were time consuming too.

Business was booming since one of the biggest war lords of Seoul got taken down by the police. The man made a terrible mistake of trusting and leaving matters to his newest right-hand man who happened to be a police spy. Gangs such as the Bangtan were jumping at the opportunity to claim more territory and clients.

The two men have been so busy coordinating new units to new districts all the while maintaining their innocent businessmen facade that they haven't had time in months to come visit your father who loved them like they were his own sons.

Your father was the one who took them in when they were merely street rats, giving them shelter and food when Namjoon wasn't agile nor strong enough and when Yoongi couldn't hold a gun right yet. He knew the boys never liked being restricted to one place and so the back door of his tiny coffee shop was always unlocked for them to sneak in when it was too tough and the world was too mean.

When luck turned to their side and power was in their hands, the two however did not forget the kind smile and strong comforting arms of your father. They chose to often come to visit and offer him a better place to stay even if they knew he would refuse everytime.

They never knew why your father refused to move, despite being just a street away from the unruly part of the city where crimes were commited as often as Yoongi cursed in a day. However, the two never pushed it because deep down, they were also attached to this shop where everything started.

The two Bangtan bosses always made sure of keeping the shop off of any of their enemies' radar. They never worried about the police since they kept it clean and never did any of the dirty jobs there. All they wanted was the wellbeing of the generous old owner.

However, they have wondered how on Earth your father's coffee shop has never had anything close to an attempted robbery despite being so close to the worst of the city. Namjoon and Yoongi have tried to uncover the mystery when they were younger, wandering all day in the dangerous streets behind the cafe. All they had at best was rumors about your father being an ex-war lord. They've tried all the bosses back then for answers and none of them seemed willing to give the whole truth.

On that Saturday afternoon, when they stepped into the cafe with the chiming of the little blue bell over their head announcing their presence, both men stopped midway in their motions to stare at the unfamiliar barista at the cashier,

you.

Their confusion was clear in their gaze as they watched you soundlessly freeze midway in your task, your arm stopping the sweeping motion over the counter as you stared back with eyes as big as saucers. Your father never hired anyone for as long as they remembered and has always done everything on his own no matter how difficult it was. It made them question silently about you : how special were you to get hired?

As if knowing the tension reigning the first floor of his home, your father came down the stairs in rush and snatched both businessmen's attention to him with a joyful "hello". It the three of you twist your heads almost painfully fast to face him.

Namjoon seemed to drop instantly the cold shell that he displayed to the world, nearly tripping over his own feet in excitement like he used to in his younger years to reach for his father figure. Yoongi's signature gummy smile slipped right through his control before he could even stop it. The two hastily helped the elderly man down the rest of the stairs and towards a table all the while chatting animatedly like they never did in the interviews you watched on the news.

You on the contrary had eyes growing even bigger if possible witnessing the effect that your elderly father had on two of the most important and impressive up coming businessmen of the city. It made you contemplate whether to retire back to the kitchen or not. But before you could take a step back, your old man introduced you with a bright and proud signature smile.

"Boys, here's my lovely daughter, Y/N! She'll be with me from now on and will most likely taking over the coffee shop after I retire. So better start getting along right now since you will be seeing her everytime you come visit!"

The two men simply nodded in understanding as they glanced at you in mild curiosity.

From that day on, Namjoon and Yoongi slowly got used to seeing you arranging the tables, sweeping the floor or simply standing behind the counter when they stepped into shop. The three of you would exchange briefly a few greeting words like "good evening" or "it's been quite sunny these days" before the two of them drift towards your father, eager each time to conversate with him.

They remember you would often offer a small shy smile and indicate where the old man is before returning to your task after your short greetings. Sometimes they would visibly see you get flustered from having their attention on you and fumble clumsily with whatever's in your hand at that time.

Namjoon would let out an amused chuckle and Yoongi a silent 'thank you' with the ghost of a smile on his face before they head towards wherever your father was.

To them, the best animal to describe you was the lamb.

A sweet, soft little lamb.

++

It was not even a minute after Yoongi suggested to his partner to set the papers and contracts down for the night when someone burst through their office door. Hoseok, the man that they trusted to watch over the cafe and one who they considered as family, hurtled in out of breath looking like he'd just ran 40 kilometers in 10 minutes.

The poor man rapidly informed the two that an enemy of them had found out about the cafe and was sending men to capture your father and you. Hoseok had sent Jungkook and Jimin and a few of their people to try and stop the enemy before anything happens.

However, before he could finish, Namjoon and Yoongi were jumping out of them seats and heading towards the stairs. With a simple call of their secretary, Jin was at their side telling Taehyung through the phone to prepare 'items' and handling the two mens' expensive blazers as the three of them (+ a mildly surprised Hoseok) rushed down the steps with urgency.

A suffocating tension reigned in the car as it rushed down the streets towards its destination. Namjoon's impatient foot tapping and Yoongi murderously glaring out the window was heavily affecting everyone's mood. Even Hoseok did not dare to attempt lightening the mood and simply shared worried glances with who Jin chewed nervously on his puffy lip.

The only closest time where the two other males saw their leaders this livid was when a priceless shipment got almost taken away by another gang. Nobody had to question if that gang still exists after that.

When they finally arrived at the cafe after 10 painfully slow minutes, Namjoon climbed out of the car wearing his trusty black leather gloves with the same killing aura he had during the years where they still had to fight for their lives and Yoongi's eyes had turned eerily blank as he fiddled mechanically with the gun in his hands.

Inside the once clean and inviting cafe laid bloodied bodies piled  against the walls and a horrible stench of iron filled the room. Tables and chairs were flipped and destroyed across the floor and most of the mugs and decorations displayed along the walls were in bits and pieces. Jungkook and Jimin sat at the staircase leading up to the second floor with the younger of the two holding bunched up tissues against his face. Their men stood around them with a concern written in bold letter on their forehead.

The police wasn't anywhere to be seen thanks to Taehyung who was back at their base and the people around the block knew better than to call them. Jin rushed to the maknae with a first aid kit in hand while Namjoon and Yoongi looked at Jimin for explanation.

"When we arrived one of them was just about to call in reinforcement but thankfully we intercepted. Most of them were crowding on the first floor (since the stairs are quite narrow) with a few heading up at a time. We made our way up only to see that a lot of them were dropping dead like flies. It seems like mr.(Y/F/N) is injured inside the study room but a girl is guarding the door ferociously."

"Yeah, and then she didn't believe us when we said we were sent here to help and sliced me across the fvckin face." Jungkook grunts from beside Jimin.

'A girl?' Namjoon remembers turning towards Yoongi for an answer only to see the other with an unconvinced quirked eyebrow.

Jimin scooted towards the railing to give space for the two men to pass after muttering 'be careful' under his breath.

+++

The shock Namjoon and Yoongi received at that instance will most likely be engraved in their mind for eternity they'd thought as they looked towards the said door.

There you, their little soft lamb, stood wearing a bulletproof jacket, arms soaked in blood up to the elbow, hand grabbing tightly a knife with a gun in the other and body in a seemingly confident and rigid stance. Your eyes were stone cold.

Time seemed to have stopped until they light up with recognition when you seem to realize who climbed up the stairs.

The weapons clank loudly to the ground as you drop them to open the door behind you to your father for them in a hurry. Your old man was slumped in a loveseat with a bloodied hand pressed against a wound on his side and a playful grin on his face.

A gun held almost perfectly and ready to shoot was in his other one.

At that moment they realized that the rumors about the ex-warlord your father was are true

And you aren't a lamb they'd thought you'd be.

[hillybargrove]

New Years

Roger Taylor x Reader

Summary: rogers scared to crush on y/n because she’s deaky’s sister but we all know how well that’s gonna work out for him

Word Count: slightly over 2k :)

A/N: it’s january 16th which makes this less fun but i think it’s good and im really happy with how it turned out!! 

When you had first been introduced to the band, they we're already working on their fourth album. Your brother had done his best to avoid introducing you for almost five years, afraid of you taking a liking to one of his friends.

It was barely August when John gave you a call from their studio in Rockfield, asking you to come out and see him.

"Y/N?"

"John?"

"Haven't seen you in a while, how's mum?" You talked for a half hour catching up before he invited you to visit.

"Why, John? You need someone who actually knows how to do laundry?" He couldn't ever remember to separate the lights from the darks, frequently he also forgot the importance of detergent.

"Can't I just miss my baby sister?"

"Well, that almost never happens, John." You agreed, however, and packed a bag so you could stay for a night.

When you pulled in, you saw where they were staying, and how it was in fact a farmhouse. Chickens loitered the dirt road, perching on fences and cooing at some blond. You parked, saw John in your peripheral vision and threw open the car door as fast as you could to run to him.

"Hey!" You said, already airborne and jumping onto his back. There was a thud, your brother was unsuspecting and now on the ground covered in dust and probably a few bruises.

"I'm never calling you again."

"Don't be so dramatic."

The man with the chickens had laughed at the mercy of his friend, gaining your attention when you picked yourself up.

"Hi," You called out, brushing off your jeans. "Sorry about that, sibling rivalry and all."

"Fine by me," he waved you off. "John needs a bit of roughing up." Your brother made it off the dirt himself, shooting both you and the blond a look. From the right you heard footsteps approach the two of you.

"Roger, would you quit mucking around with the chickens and get in here, Freddie needs you for the operatics." Brian, as you'd remembered from pictures, had curly black hair and seemed to tower over everyone around.

"Brian and Roger meet my sister." They both gave small, awkward waves when he failed to give them your name.

"I'm Y/N, sorry. I guess he doesn't remember." You jerked your head at your brother and shot him a dirty look. "D'you forget my name or something?" His friends let out a chuckle and John now gave you a mean expression.

"Give me a minute, it's on the tip of my tongue." You dug your fingers into his sides, drawing out a painful laughter before he cried for you to stop.

"Well, it's nice to finally get the chance to meet you guys," You said, taking a step to shake their hands.

"Likewise," Brian smiled, "I'd love to stay and chat but I've got to get him in there before the bill for this album goes up any higher."

You didn't quite recognize Roger, at least not in a fur coat and a pair of dark sunglasses, but Brian immediately dragged him away from the farm animals and into the studio.

"Uh, John?" You looked at him with amusement, "you didn't tell me your band mates were hot."

"There's a reason for that."

"You've been cock-blocking me for years."

"Shut it."

•••

You had the pleasure of seeing Roger in the recording studio in the middle of his galileo's. It was incredibly tempting to laugh, but everybody else seemed annoyed he couldn't get as high as Freddie wanted.

He did his best not to look at you for too long, but there were more times than you could count that you two caught each other staring.

He also did his best at keeping away from you. Suddenly, he was always the first one up, he made the first pot of coffee in the morning and kept to himself. You hadn't known him before, but there was enough talk about it between the boys for you to know it wasn't normal.

One afternoon you offered to grab everyone lunch from a pub in town, Roger left his order on a postcard and spent the entire day holed up in his room, despite being needed in the studio.

More and more you came to stay with them, choosing the little farmhouse over college parties and pubs, and the boys loved having you around. You broke up the testosterone in the house and always made the bathroom smell like flowers. Your visits, however, revealed the pattern in Roger's strange mood swings.

Freddie noticed it at first, and pointed it out to John who then told Brian. Your brother made nothing of it, and left the two of them to talk to you about the situation.

"Y/N?" Brian turned down the music from the car radio, you two were on your way home from the grocery store.

You gave a muffled response, having had a few chips in your mouth.

"I don't mean to pry, and you don't have to answer, but–" He paused in the awkwardness, "did something happen? Between you and Roger?"

You nearly choked, "Oh my God, Brian," You sent him a look from the passenger seat, "No, definitely no." He didn't seem to like that answer, the wrinkles between his eyebrows told you so.

"Why? Did he say something?" A small rise of panic began in your throat, "Bri, I swear–"

"No! No, he didn't say anything. The boys and I have just taken a little notice of something is all." He let a few seconds pass before beginning again, "He just seems to be very quiet when your in town, stays in his room a lot, never sleeps in, and he doesn't really like to eat with us, you know?"

"Oh, okay. I mean, I don't know. I've only ever known him to be like that. Do you think something's wrong?"

"Well–"

"Wait, so you thought it was because of me?" He came to a red stoplight and turned to look at you.

"No, not at all. Well, okay maybe." His eyes grew bigger, "Not in a bad way! Of course not anything like that, he's just been so weird, and it's only when you're around. So we all kind of assumed–"

"–Cause we hooked up and it ended weird?"

"Not in so many words, but, yeah." The car lurched forward through the intersection. "But you said nothing happened."

"Nothing, yeah. Sorry, I wish I could be more help."

"S'alright, love. Just means now I've got to actually ask him what his problem is."

He told you he'd find out and let you know, but he'd make sure to ask after you went home, which was the next day.

You didn't go back for a while after that, not because of Roger, but because school was a bit more intense after midterms and your mom had started holiday baking in the middle of November.

A week before the month was over, John and the rest of them ended up stopping by on the way to a 'band event' is what they called it.

While you were coming out of the bathroom you heard voices, Freddie and Roger.

"What's your problem, Rog? We're in her bloody house and you can't even make eye contact with her, it's weird."

"Fred, Brian already pestered me about this weeks ago–"

"And he was given a vague answer, you're being rude, it's ridiculous. What's wrong with you?" Dishes clinked around in the sink, your mother walked past you into the kitchen with the leftover peas on a platter and walked back out.

"She's John's sister, okay? That's the issue." Freddie blinked.

"And?"

"She's his sister. I mean, that's off limits, it's gotta be."

"Oh." Freddie paused from washing the dishes, "Well now it all makes sense. So you like her, then?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's sweet, Rog, but it's not an excuse to be a dick."

Roger shook his head and started wrapping the chicken up with tin foil, "Trust me, I know."

You decided it was best not to go into the kitchen at that moment, instead returning to the table with noticeably red cheeks. To make matters worse, John tapped your shoulder and let you know they were staying the night.

"Are there even enough beds?" He shook his head no. "Then where are they all sleeping?"

Turns out you were sleeping on the couch, despite your complaints. John was in his room with Brian, which left your bed for Roger and Freddie.

•••

It was now almost half past one in the morning, everyone had been asleep for a while. The wine was catching up with you a second time, and you woke up in the middle of the night having to pee.

Groggily, you made your way inside and shut the door. A few minutes later, Roger felt the same pressure on his stomach and slid out from under Freddie's arm draped across him.

A yellow glare fell on the floor outside the bathroom, Roger, slightly drunk and very sleepy, assumed someone left the light on.

"Shit, sorry." The image of a girl in the bathroom made him jump, "I didn't realize anyone else was up."

"S'okay, I'm just washing my hands." You dried them and stepped out, "the door doesn't have a lock."

"I see." He rubbed his eyes and avoided making eye contact with you out of embarrassment, he suddenly felt self-conscious about being shirtless.

"Y'might want to think about knocking next time, though." You diverted your gaze downward, but your eyes lingered on his bare torso.

"Yeah, I'll make a note of that." He blushed and stepped aside for you to get past. He was almost grateful you were only just washing your hands, seeing you half naked in this situation would've been mortifying.

"Night, Roger." You disappeared from his vision around the corner to the living room.

"Night," He said, standing there for a moment before going inside the bathroom.

•••

It wasn't meant to be a big thing, just a few guys in a pub with family and friends to celebrate the new year. Freddie, however, turned his nose up at that idea and threw a party of his own.

Earlier throughout the night, you were given various drinks, mostly champagne. John did his best to keep you from taking too much, lucky for you.

"Just keeping an eye out for my baby sister," He would say, before you stuck your tongue out in protest.

The entire time knowing him, Roger had been skittish around you, for reasons you now knew. Tonight, however, he was different.

Drink after drink on his part, he warmed up to you. Brian even took notice and gave u a thumbs up when he saw the two of you talking. It wasn't about much, and it was kind of awkward, but watching his baby blue eyes glaze over underneath the yellow light of the chandelier made you feel something.

Even later in the evening, he tried to flirt. You then caught Freddie giving Roger a thumbs up like Brian had done to you.

It was charming, watching him across the room throw his head back to laugh, and he always watched you back.

Then midnight came, and with everyone gathered outside on the second story patio, he tapped your shoulder a minute before twelve.

"Roger?"

"I've got something to say to you." He was meant to continue, but your interest in other matters made him clam up.

"Where's your date?"

"Didn't bring one," He stated plainly.

"What about that brunette I saw following you around inside?" You crossed your arms over your chest and smiled.

"M'not terribly interested, I've got this thing for someone else." He said it with a lopsided smile, and you suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to kiss him.

"You've got about ten seconds to find someone, then."

"But I've already found you." It was almost innocent when the words tumbled out of his mouth, like a school boy with a crush.

"You know," You paused, the clock was ticking, "we've barely spoken, and I've only known you for a few months."

"My deepest apologies, love." His fingers found themselves in the loops of your jeans, and you watched those baby blue eyes until you could see the whites tinged red and all of a sudden people were celebrating.

Your lips were on his for a few seconds and it was soft and sweet. Then, his hands found their way around you, and it almost felt like the fireworks were for the two of you instead of New Year's Day.

[feel199x]

☆・゜☆゜・stardust, paint, and ambition・゜☆゜・．☆

painter! hwang hyunjin, college!au

a/n: introducing the muse series!! bc im a dummie with Too Many Ideas!!  masterlist  btw this is the song that is mentioned

warnings: pinch of angst

                                    ┍━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━┑

College had been kicking your ass recently, which is why you had been in a cafe for the past eight hours. You had gotten there when they opened, and since then, you had eleven cups of coffee. After that, they just gave you free refills. Finals were coming up, and you absolutely could not afford to fail. You had worked hard all semester, pulling countless all-nighters and pushing yourself until you could push no more. You thought that when you graduated high school, that would be it- you could relax a bit. You had gotten in, gotten a scholarship, so that was it, right? Wrong. In order to maintain your scholarship, you had to maintain above a B average. So, here you were, doing your best- which at this point wasn’t even really your best anymore. So when you thought a super attractive boy was staring into your soul, you assumed you were hallucinating from the caffeine. It wasn’t until you got up to use the bathroom, and his eyes shot up from a pad he was holding, that you confirmed that it wasn’t a hallucination. While you were in the restroom, you tried planning how you were going to ask him about it. As cute as he was, it was still weird to stare at someone. You were especially embarrassed about it because at some point you nearly started crying over a ten-page essay.

So when you got out, you just sat back down. And stared back. Okay, maybe this was weird. But he was the one staring first, and you weren’t one to confront others. Instead of looking away though, he just turned over to a blank page. And for less than a moment, you saw what he was working on. You.

“Alright, buddy, what’s your deal?”

He smiled, putting the pad down on the table, and laying his chin on his hands, cutely, you might add. “It’s not every day you see someone like this.”

“Like what?”

“Someone beautiful in a raw state of emotion.”

 You might’ve said something back, but you were incredibly flustered. You knew he had to be an art major though because no other major would talk that way. Or draw people at 6 pm in a cafe, on a Saturday.

“So can I?” he spoke again, voice smooth like silk, “Can I draw you?”

You stopped typing, mostly out of surprise because you expected that to be the last of your interactions. “I mean,” your words came out choppy and nervous, “I guess. If you want to. It’s a public place. Do what you want to.”

“Okay, then can you turn around for me? It won’t hurt for you to take a break.”

You looked nervously at your laptop, looking at the only half done essay. You hadn’t even taken any breaks these past few hours, other than going to the bathroom or more coffee refills. It wasn’t due today, and you didn’t have your first finals until Tuesday. But you couldn’t take a break, you had grades to upkeep. And to you, that meant everything, even if you had to push yourself until you could no longer push. Not that it ever ended well.

“I can’t take a break, sorry.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have things to do. I need to maintain my grades.”

He was quiet for a minute, tapping his pencil against his cheek as he kept staring at you. “You’ve had fifteen cups of coffee since I’ve been here, don’t take a break for me.” He winked. “Take a break for yourself.” You set a timer on your phone, finally closing your laptop. Your eyes were watery from staring at blue light for so long. “Thirty minutes,” you said, “And then you have to go back to staring at me.”

“Deal.”

You pulled up a chair from across from him, unsure of what you had agreed to. You put your chin into your hands, cupping your face the same way you had. It might’ve been risky to tease him since he could’ve just completely botched your portrait. But instead, he just smiled again.

“You’re cute.”

“Just draw the picture.”

“My name is Hyunjin, by the way.”

“____.”

“Such a pretty name, it suits you.”

“Do you flirt with everyone you draw?”

“No, just you.”

 You tried peering over the sketchpad, trying to take a look at what he was drawing. “No peeking!”

“Do you usually go around drawing people in cafes?”

“No, there’s something special about you. The stars, they aligned for us to meet.”

“Are all art majors this sappy.”

“Oh, absolutely. And I’m the worst of the worst.”

You laughed, it felt good to take a break and be able to talk to someone instead of staring at a screen where you’ve typed ‘furthermore’ more times than reasonable. The conversation continued, and you had completely forgotten about the timer you had set. You jumped when it rang, warning you that your time was up. Hyunjin wasn’t at all surprised though, putting his pencil down.

“Can I see your phone?”

“Why?”

“Don’t you want to see how it’ll turn out?”

You gave him your phone, and he handed you his. After exchanging numbers, he bid you adieu, wishing you the best on your essay.

When you got back to your dorm, you kept catching yourself drifting back to the boy from the cafe. It wasn’t particularly distracting, you finished everything you needed to and more. But it was annoying. Many people, including your family, warned you that life would pass you by if all you did was study. But your academic studies were all you knew, even if you wouldn’t admit it out loud. Dealing with people, even though you knew you had to do it in your workplace, was difficult. If given the chance, you would choose to be alone or with a few close friends. It wasn’t that you looked down on people who were friendly and outspoken, it was just something you didn’t know how to do. You laid in bed, suddenly regretting all those dances and proms you skipped, all those home games you refused to go to. You were digging yourself a deep hole of regret until your phone beeped.

jinnie: hello hello my muse

If you could uwu out loud, then you would have. You didn’t look back at the contact name once he put it in, you didn’t think he would’ve texted you again. That type of thing had happened before, well, not this exactly. But teasing, making fun of you. Throughout your high school career, many boys had asked you out as a joke. And you fell for it every time. You always had the mentality that one of these times it had to be real right? Surely, people wouldn’t keep lying to you? But they could, and they would. So once college started, you were determined not to fall into that trap again. But this boy was sure making it real hard.

you: muse?

jinnie: yes, my one and only

jinnie: has sent you a picture

Your heart felt warm as you saw the picture. But instead of just being a sketch, it was a full blown watercolor painting. You never thought of yourself as conventionally attractive, but seeing the way Hyunjin had painted you really made you feel admired. You felt like, well, a muse as Hyunjin put it. But you were wary, nothing but cautious. The painting was beautiful though, you couldn’t deny it

you: you’re a good painter, a really good painter

you: you made me look so nice, thank you!

jinnie: i had to do my muse justice

jinnie: you studying at the same cafe tomorrow? let’s meet up!

you: sure, but i have to study

jinnie: no promises, i’ll be there at eight

You spent most of the night talking about nonsense, and you felt reassured. Hyunjin never made fun of you, or did anything that alluded to the conversation being a joke. It was a lot easier to talk to him, and he carried most of the conversation, the only stress being responding to him. You were glad you didn’t have a roommate because the number of times you burst out laughing and giggling was way too much. It felt good to take a break, even though at the time you didn’t really think of it that way. It wasn’t until your alarm rang that you realized that time had flown by.

you: i didn’t realize we spent all this time talking

you: its already seven

jinnie: oh shit you’re right

jinnie: meet you there !

Suddenly, you became very nervous. It wasn’t every day that an absurdly attractive guy asked to hang out with you. Especially when that same guy knew the importance of grades to you. So, with no promises of actual conversation, what did he have to gain? Nothing, except time with you. It felt weird, out of place, and suddenly you were all cautious again. You dressed a little nicer than normal, not wanting to be in sweats again but not wanting to look like you tried too hard. Even though you most definitely were. Before you knew it, you were flinging yourself out the door, already late. But when you arrived at the cafe, your heart dropped to your stomach when you scanned the tables, and saw that he wasn’t there. Another hour passed, and your hands were flying over your laptop keyboard. This had happened before, and you knew there was no chance that someone like him would be interested in someone like you. And you were fine with that, if someone could play with someone like that- then why would you want to be with them? You were just mad that you had fallen for it, time and time again.

“Sorry I’m late.”

You looked up at him, unsure if you should’ve been mad or not. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Oh please, did you actually think I wouldn’t come to meet my muse? Plus, we have a portrait due as a final grade.”

You couldn’t help but smile, retaking notes from a previous lecture so you could revise. “Okay,” you said, “But if you’re late again, I’ll never let you paint me again.”

He gasped, clutching his shirt. “There would be no greater punishment.”

After a bit of working together in silence, Hyunjin put his sketchpad down to stare at you again. “Hey, could you put your laptop down for a bit?” You obliged, completely and utterly confused at his request. He put his chin in his hands again, cupping his face as his fingers tapped his cheeks and you copied him. Sure, Hyunjin was cute, but as he looked intently at you, studying your face for his portrait, you realized that he was so much more than that. He could be a model if he wanted to, but instead chose to make people feel beautiful. As he continued studying to your face, you could feel the heat creeping up your cheeks. He had no business being this good of a person. “You’re so cute like this,” he murmured, “I have to take a picture.” You had no time to react as he pulled out his phone and heard the phone imitate a camera shutter. “Hey! Delete that! I probably look super gross!”

“No way! I need this picture, I finally know what I’m going to paint!”

“That’s so unfair!” You slumped in your chair, whining, “You know how much grades matter to me,”

“I’m just good at arguing.”

“Then become a law major.”

“I don’t feel like selling my soul, sorry.”

Hyunjin let you study in peace for a while but told you stories about his adventures in art class while you studied. After that though, he became restless, distracting you by winking and shamelessly flirting with you.

“Hey, hey, ___!”

You sighed, closing your notebook. “Yes, Jinnie?”

Hyunjin stopped, mouth agape and then quickly shut it as he gave a ridiculously big, sweet smile. “Say it again.”

“....Jinnie?”

Hyunjin’s hands flew over the table, pinching your cheeks and stretching them out. “You have no reason to hide all this cuteness from the world.” His hands dropped back on the table. “Let’s go for a walk. I’m bored.” You shrugged, putting your stuff back into your back. “Sure, where do you want to go?” He looked surprised, but eager. Grabbing your hand, he messily shoved his sketchbook into his bag and nearly running out of the cafe. As the both of you walked up an annoyingly steep hill, you realized that the view of the city was to die for.

You both sat on the grass, over a cliff that overlooked the city. As the sunset, you understood why Hyunjin was a visual arts major. With a world as beautiful as this, a constant, ever-changing world like this, you were ashamed that you took no time to appreciate it.

“You need to stop and smell the roses, ___.”

“Can you help me?”

“Anything for my muse.”

The day after finals, you were absolutely exhausted. But even so, Hyunjin made you come out of your room. You didn’t care how you looked, you were tired and all you wanted to do was sleep. But Hyunjin brought you along to a diner, insisting that a good burger and milkshake would make you feel better. It didn’t, what made you better what spending time with an over-energetic Hyunjin.

Every night, for about eight months now, Hyunjin had kept on his promise. Even if it was just sneaking into your door room to have a spontaneous dance party (which he was weirdly good at) or just lay on your lap, giving you attention as you studied. There was one night where you had pushed yourself too far and got unreasonably upset at a grade. You knew it wasn’t a rational reason to be upset, but you cried anyway. But Hyunjin, being the angel he was, played your song on the record player he had gotten you for your birthday. At four in the morning, the two of you were slow dancing as you pressed your tear-stained against his chest, swaying to the song. It was that night, after spending all your free time with Hyunjin, and you mean all your free time. Hyunjin would wait outside your lecture hall to hang out, even sneaking into some of your classes. In return, you sat with him in some of his classes but ended falling asleep on his shoulder as his professor talked about baroque architecture. After all this time, you realized you were in love with him. Hopelessly and utterly in love with him. He made you better and you made him better. He helped you take breaks, and you helped him with paying attention to his non-art related classes.

It was the night of the gallery walk, and Hyunjin had his own little corner with all his work displayed. You had come with a bouquet of flowers, all of which he had painted at some points. But when you got there, you’d never felt more admired or in admiration. All this time, all his works contained you in some shape or form. Hyunjin was more than a painter, his painting looked like photographs. What brought tears over to your eyes was the painting of a picture he had taken a while back. You knew then, more than ever, that you needed to confess.

“Do you like them?” Hyunjin was dressed in a classic suit and tie, standing next to you.

“You make me look nicer than I actually am.”

“Nah, you’re made of stardust and ambition. You’re art, raw and unadulterated.”

“I told you to stop dropping lines from your poetry class.” You handed him the bouquet of flowers. Your hands were sweating, you knew today was the perfect chance to confess but you were shaking like an overworked washing machine.

“Jinnie.”

“Don’t call me that, I have to look like a professional artist and I can’t do that if I’m swooning over you.”

You pointed your feet towards him, grabbing onto his shoulders with shaky hands and made him look at you.

“Hyunjin.”

“Yes, my muse.”

Your voice was wavering, heart anxious to break out of your chest. “I’m,” your voice faltered, stuttering until you pushed the words out, “I’m in love with you, okay that’s a bit forward, but it’s okay if you don-”

Hyunjin cupped your face, pecking your lips. “I fell in love a while ago.” He winked, still cupping your face. “I’ll give you a more worthy kiss after the gallery walk, my muse.”

[races-erster]

The Refuge - Crutchie Morris

Requested: nope

Word count:

Warnings: mentions of the Delanceys and Snyder, brief mentions of death, mentions of abuse

A/n: I got this idea from a post (really it was a tangent I went on) that I had saved in my drafts about how when the kid in letters of the refuge told Crutchie to be quiet while he was talking about Santa Fe and how that represented Crutchie losing hope. Hopefully this is good, and it’s kinda a prequel to Without Crutchie. I hope you all like it!

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—

When Snyder grabbed him, Crutchie knew that he was done for. He yelled for Jack, but he knew that Jack wouldn’t come. Jack wouldn’t come face the man that he was terrified of, the man who had abused over a hundred children since imprisonment in the Refuge first began. He was being taken to the Refuge and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

When Crutchie got there, he was in more pain than he had been in a long time. Snyder and the Delanceys has beaten him before even having the handcuffs on. He was forcefully thrown into the back of the horse drawn police wagon and the door was nearly shut on his bad leg. Then finally, he was shoved into the small bunk filled room, and once again beaten by Snyder and his goons.

—

He couldn’t move. He felt like he was in the worst nightmare imaginable, but he couldn’t wake up from it. He was trapped. Shut off from the rest of the world, from his friends, his family. Although it was hard, he tried to remain hopeful.

He remained grateful to the kids who helped him get to the top bunk. If it weren’t for them, Snyder would be able to grab him without any effort, but this way, he was as safe as he could possibly be in the situation he was in. For the first time since he had gotten there, he didn’t feel alone. He felt taken care of.

He remained grateful to the kids who would bring him food whenever they were able to get it, whenever it was smuggled to them. They were considerate enough to not make him get off of his bunk. They were considerate enough to help him through thick and thin. He felt like he always had when he was around the boys at the lodge.

—

Crutchie could barely move. Snyder had pulled him from his bunk and dragged him by his bad leg to his office to “teach him a lesson” for striking.

Jack went to visit him, and Crutchie wanted to get down to see him, but he just couldn’t bring himself to move. Kids offered to help him down since they were well aware of everything Jack had done for the kids locked away in the Refuge, but Crutchie couldn’t go. He just wasn’t able to do anything.

—

By the next day, Crutchie was able to sit up for a short amount of time, so he took the liberty of writing down everything he would have said to Jack when he came to the window. He wanted to tell him that everything was going to be fine, that the strike was going to work and everyone would be treated fairly like they should be, that after the strike he and Jack would go straight to Santa Fe and not look back.

But that was a long shot. He wasn’t sure any of that would happen, especially not getting to Santa Fe. It was across the country. He wouldn’t be able to ride a Palomino, neither of them would. They didn’t know how. The fresh air wouldn’t fix his leg, no matter how much he tried to convince himself of it. They would be in the same situation they were in in New York, only they’d be in a different setting.

Santa Fe was a long shot. It was a fantasy, a dream that Jack had chased since Crutchie had met him. It wasn’t going to happen, but he wouldn’t tell Jack that.

He wouldn’t let Jack or the others know that he had lost hope, that he felt he would never get out, that he might die within the confining walls of the Refuge. He couldn’t tell them that. He couldn’t tell Jack that he was close to giving up.

Sure, he had an escape plan: tie a sheet to the bed, toss the end out the window, climb down, and run all the way back to the lodge or however far his legs could carry him. He knew that wasn’t going to happen. With the worsening of his leg, and the new abuse added to that, he knew he was stuck. He was trapped with nowhere to go.

He couldn’t protect himself, or the boys at the lodge whom of which he had grown to love, while he was locked away in the under-kept prison for children , but they could protect one another. If he never got out, he’d know that they were safe because they wouldn’t never let anything happen to another one of their own.

He didn’t know how to end his letter. Should he just say he was Jack’s friend? It didn’t sound right. He was more than that. Should he say that he was Jack’s best friend? That just didn’t sound right either. So Crutchie chose a relation that best represented the way he felt about Jack and the way Jack felt about him. He was Jack’s brother. He was his family. So that’s how it ended, Your brother, Crutchie.

Specs had come to check on Crutchie the following day, and was asked to give the letter directly to Jack. He obliged, and told Crutchie that he would do it right away.

—

The next week and a half, Crutchie had no visitors. He was left on his own and treated horribly by the adults in the facility. He wondered what could have happened in those men’s lives to make them so willing to hurt children and not feel any sort of remorse. All he could do was wonder.

That week alone was a blur. It felt like forever when it happened, but now looking back, it felt like only a few days, rather than being a painstaking two weeks. Without knowing what was happening next, Crutchie saw two state officials unlock all of the rooms that children were locked in.

For a moment, he started to have hope, then he realized that something bad could be happening. They could have been being let go, but they could also be taken to a more secure prison away from the city. Anxiety started to build, and Crutchie kept thinking more bad thoughts, until he saw Snyder being dragged away by two police officers.

Crutchie asked a few if the kids in his bunk to help him down to the ground so he could ask the policemen taking Snyder away for an important favor. Luckily, they obliged and the policemen did as well, and with that, Crutchie, the two policemen, and a very angry Snyder made their way down to the circulation gate of the World.

—

Jack stood above all the newsies on a balcony of the World building, telling everyone that they had won. They had beat the “king makers of New York” as Katherine had called them when she was first introduced to the group, and Crutchie couldn’t have been prouder of his large, dysfunctional family, who stood in front of him, congratulating one another.

He decided that the group of four would enter the square after Governor Roosevelt had let everyone know that the Refuge was being shut down for all of the mistreatment that had occurred. Of course, Crutchie would go first so everyone would know that he’s okay, and then the officers and Snyder would follow so Crutchie could put the handcuffs on Snyder just as Snyder had done to him two weeks prior.

Everyone was ecstatic when they saw Crutchie. He honestly wasn’t sure if they were more excited about winning the strike, or having him back, but since Crutchie knew his family, he knew that they were more happy to see him. The large group didn’t expect to ever see what they saw next. Crutchie had put the handcuffs of Snyder, hit him with his crutch, and off Snyder went to prison.

Jack had rushed down to the center of the square to see Crutchie and to thank the governor for his generosity in helping with the strike. Jack was still planning on going to Santa Fe even though he had his best friend back, was the leader of a union, had a new relationship with Katherine, and had just gotten a job offer from the very man he lead the strike against. If it weren’t for the convincing from Crutchie, Davey, and Katherine, Jack would have already been on the train, straight to Santa Fe.

The one that convinced Jack to stay was Crutchie. He had been right, they were all a family. They were always there for one another, and the last thing Jack would do was abandon his family. They were glad that Jack was staying, relieved even, but they were more happy about Crutchie,because after weeks of hell, he was safe. He had made his way back home.

—

Tag List:

@blytheandherbrain @writer-of-camelot @well-the-kids-do-too @viennaleia @sunshinecrutchie @sapphire--love @midnight-finch @crutchieee-morris @dpslover4life-blog @newsieswearingheelies @fishtankfullofpennies @musicalidiotthe3rd @ben-cook-can-cook @pandalfthesmol @carryingthedaveyjacobs @sunshine-musicals-yea @just-go-and-get-her @ilovebway-blog @was-it-the-nargles-again @fandom-fangirl07 @newsies-plaza @i-got-personality @thebroadwayaesthetic @awwwwwwdang @c0ronas @ughwaitwhat @thecaptainsgingersnap @the-woild-is-my-what-now @you-thinks-wrong-romeo @suddenly-im-respecsable @racinghiggins @bennie-badeend @ilovejoshburrage @val-dani03 @newsie-fics @newtieparker @seasickdolphin @happy-little-musician @the-story-of-the-tucks @the-world-has-buttery-smiles @spot-conlon-king-of-brooklyn @the-real-king-racetrack-higgins

[leta-the-strange]

Spoiler-free COG feelings/essay/thoughts before I see the movie. Spoiler-free because the movie isn’t out here til the end of the week but obviously, I’ve picked up info from trailers and interviews and things like that so sort of common knowledge stuff but I guess if you’ve avoided all the promos for the year I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you now so don’t read until after you’ve seen it if that’s the case (again, I only know basic info).

I have a lot of feelings that I’ve been sitting on for a while because frankly, large parts of the Fantastic Beasts and Harry Potter fandom terrify me. It’s why in my nineteen years (okay, thirteen years – I had to learn how to read) I’ve distanced myself from engaging in the fandom too much and when I do, I try and stick to as safe, neutral content as possible.

But I’m going to write a little bit a lot (my anxiety’s poppin off the charts right now) not to antagonise anyone or personally offend people just to get this pent up crap off my chest before I see the movie. 

I have Māori and Pākehā parentage. Although I am proud to be a Māori girl and I’m definitely not white-passing, I do acknowledge that out of my family, I was born with the lightest skin and being a lighter-skinned/mixed poc among my family and friends has made me recognise my privilege. That isn’t to say I haven’t experienced lifelong struggles with racism, bullying and discrimination but I will never experience the same micro-aggressions and experiences that they have. Although, I do have light-skinned privileges and I don’t ever want to take away the struggles of my family that I won’t experience on the same level, growing up looking a little different opened me up a lot of feelings of invalidation within my own culture. When I experienced racism as a child, I was also met with disdain for being upset about it when I wanted to talk about it. This was when I was a child and I didn’t understand lighter skinned privilege or the animosity from some of my own people. I am far more educated now, but during that confusing time I, like most children, turned to literature (which in turn is what helped me make sense of the world).

I’ve gotten a little off track – this isn’t overly important to what I’m writing about, but it is introducing my opinion as coming from a woman of colour who has experienced racism and horrible bullying, but I always feel the need to clarify my position as a lighter skinned poc before giving my opinion based on those experiences.

Obviously from my content, I love Leta Lestrange. Perhaps it started out as a matter of representation, but I feel like over the past year, I have become intrigued with her for a number of reasons. She’s striking me as a Sirius, Regulus and Andromeda Black type character. Different to her family and caught in a struggle of light and dark (magic, not skin colour). Loves magical creatures. I haven’t seen it yet but it seems like she is one of the centre point characters of the film. She seems to be connected to many of the main characters in one way or another and has always striked me as the most intriguing.

I really do hope I am wrong but the ‘other’ love interest’s in the Harry Potter universe are usually treated terribly. They experience character assassination to further the development of the canon/new interest.

I really hope this film doesn’t do the whole blow out a woc character to make the white, self-insert, classically beautiful, ‘im not like other girls’ character shine brighter.

Before everyone comes for me, I wouldn’t say I’m a Tina ‘anti’ whatever that is. There’s no like extreme hatred at all! I would say I don’t like Tina as a character, or Queenie for that matter. Not yet anyway. The new trailer gives me hope that this movie might win me over finally. It doesn’t need to be upsetting or offensive to anyone. There are lots of people out there with favourite and not-so-favourite characters. A lot of people dislike Ron, Dumbledore, Snape, even Harry…and there are people who have those characters as their favourite.  

There are a lot of reasons I don’t like Tina and Queenie. I may address them in a different post if being vague upsets people more than going in-depth but at this point, I am trying to stay as unconfrontational as possible but I have seen people get extremely furious when they don’t deem your reason for disliking them to be ‘good enough’ so if not saying exactly what I find uncomfortable about them is not as preferable as telling people then I can write it up as respectfully as possible if I’m treated the same way. All I’ll say is that I think Tina is a good person, but, in my opinion, not a great character. Queenie is the opposite. I would not like Queenie as a person but I have to admit, she’s a good character. But I’ll hold the rest of my opinions until after the second film. 

Honestly, the film adaptions leave some of my favourite book characters to be desired. Maybe if FB was a novel, I’d like Tina but I really dislike her in the movies. I have seen people blow up when this is said. I try to understand the outrage. I think one of the reasons I dislike Tina is one of the reasons why people love her. She is, at this point and in my opinion (which is ONLY an opinion), a self-insert character. Any Newt x Reader fanfiction can easily read as a Newtina fanfiction and vice versa. I know. Because I’m a FB fanfiction writer myself and tried to write her. Sometimes when you attach yourself to a character so much, it can feel personally offensive when someone says something as harmless such as they don’t like then. I don’t experience this as often. Every Reader/OC fanfiction is, perhaps unintentionally, but nearly always aimed at a white person in description. In actuality, nearly every character in literature is, intentionally or not, described with textbook white features or assumed white by the fandom/readers/watchers.

I know people are going to hate this opinion because I’ve seen people jump down other people’s throats when this gets brought up. I do believe, whether it is conscious or not, Leta not being white COULD, subconsciously, be a factor as to why she is so inherently hated. I’ve seen more hate for Leta than any other character – even the antagonist! I hate what they did to Lavender Brown, book and movie wise, but even she, being as over exaggeratedly unlikable as a romantic plot device, received and still receives far less fandom hate than Cho Chang (who was also eventually written to be ‘jealous, hysterical, unlikeable’, etc, etc – I don’t agree btw I love, understand and appreciate Cho and Lavender)  who was smart, talented, kind, traumatised, and until it was no longer convenient to the main characters romance for her to be ‘likeable’ anymore.

I wish I could enjoy going through the Leta tag but often, her and Newt can’t even be in a scene or photo together and people lose their minds with anger and hate. Literally, the comments on any scene/photo they are in are all along the lines of ‘stay away from newt!/poor tina/urgh, don’t flirt leta/leta WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’. Sorry, to break it to you guys but it isn’t a love triangle. It’s a love conga line. The only person getting in the way of ‘Newtina’ is Newt. Instagram is even worse. By worse, I mean horrible beyond belief. The better comments are the ones are the ones merely (though still grossly) comparing her to Tina and how much they dislike her, the other ones are wishes that she’ll get killed or join Grindelwald. It’s literally not even hidden the fact they wish either of these things happen so Newtina can happen faster. I’m not a Newtina shipper at all (Yet. Again, this might change if the films improve) but this would be one of the worst ways to further your ship. That is literally not going to change the fact that Newt’s still in love with her (you can have feelings for two people at the same time. The filmmakers confirmed - in fact, one of the first things about the new movie that they confirmed - that Newt is ‘absolutely still in love with her’), it just makes her conveniently unattainable. I do have a feeling that Leta might die and if it happens, it better not be because she’s unwillingly in the way of a ‘love triangle’ that people have forced these three characters into. If Newtina is going to happen in a way that isn’t awful, rushed and horrible, it will be slow-burn and it’s in own time AFTER Newt has healed and properly fixed things with Leta. You can’t be best friends and in love with someone for 15+ years and fall out of love with them immediately after they die, turn bad and settle for a woman you met for like two days and collectively spent maybe ten hours with. It might be a Ron/Hermione situation where it’s slow and eventual. That’s the only way I could possibly get on board and I think it could be done tastefully if they don’t resort to lazy writing. I do have my fingers crossed I’ll start to like the Goldsteins before this happens and I can enjoy it as much as everyone else does.

To be honest, after seeing the trailers, I see only two endings for Leta (and I hate them BOTH):

She joins Grindelwald: If this is the plot twist, it’s the shittiest plot twist ever. Pretty much 90% of the fans since seeing the first film have assumed/liked to believe she’s pure evil. Probably the characters themselves all assume she’s evil from her last name. I was worried the whole ‘haha, I was on Grindelwald’s side all along!’ situation was going to happen. We know JK hates Slytherins. My ‘Leta joins Grindelwald’ theory would be that she has always been on the good side – or trying to be – and after YEARS of oppression and discrimination and being distrusted by maybe the central characters in this film no matter how hard she tries AND maybe finally realising that Newt isn’t going to ever forgive her she just snaps and goes all ‘f*ck you guys then’ (I wouldn’t blame her tbh). HOWEVER, I doubt this. In a trailer, you literally see Leta THROW a fucking spell STANDING BY HERSELF (what u doin bby?) at Grindelwald. Trust me, if this was Tina it would have been all everyone was talking about but of course the fandom was all ‘yeah, see, she’s in the same frame as Grindelwald SHE’S EVIL’. One of the trailers is literally titled Leta vs. Grindelwald. Everything in the trailers/promos points to Queenie joining Grindelwald but *shrugs, I guess*.

Leta dies: I get this may seem the preferable way to appease the Leta haters and the Leta lovers especially if she dies after redeeming herself or heroically or whatever but urgh, no. I know everyone’s like ‘DoNt MAKe ThIS AbOUT RaCe’ when the woc character inevitably is killed but I’m sorry. To have been able to sit in a theatre as a little girl and see Leta Lestrange in the wizarding world would have blown my tiny mind. Honestly, as an older teen seeing Zoe Kravitz in that little photo frame in Newt’s case in the first film was iconic enough for me. After growing up being made to believe I was ‘unattractive’ because of how I looked, seeing total dreamboats like Callum Turner and Eddie Redmayne’s characters being all heart-eyes over Leta is, like...wow!  And I do have an uncomfortable truth for people who want Leta to die. That would possibly be the WORST thing to happen for the Newtina thing (would pretty much be the last nail in the coffin for me ever coming around to it). I’ve seen it happen in my family when someone you love dies. Your feelings for them essentially FREEZE. You can’t fall out of love with someone who is dead. That’s of course not to say that you don’t love again and just as much as the first time. But it takes time (LOTS of it) and there’s a little part of your heart that’s like…permanently sealed off. I don’t even like Newtina yet and I’m hoping for the sake of the Newtina fans that Leta doesn’t die because freakin’ yikes. Just let them heal and connect and be besties again goddammit, its POSSIBLE (and bet your ass I’ll write it my god damn self to prove it if they don’t). 

I know these are highly unpopular opinions and I HOPE that I am wrong, and they do her character justice and don’t discard her via death or the dark side.

In summary, I suppose my biggest struggle with Leta’s character is definitely the overwhelming fandom hate which I still can’t quite comprehend. I really want to believe it isn’t a race thing. Though, I have seen horrible posts about Leta, mean comments on nearly every Leta promo, Zoe Kravitz literally being called a c*nt in the comments of a Leta post on tumblr, a lot of fanfictions having her be primarily evil, selfish, manipulative, in some a rapist even, ugly, cruel, etc. But honestly, she’s literally not interfering in Newt having a relationship with anyone at all??? She’s literally been villainised because her friend can’t get over her (getting Snily nostalgia). But buggered if I’ve been able to find next to anything of that calibre about Jacob’s fiancée (literally a Queenie doppelganger) who left him, like, the day he met Queenie. I get that it was a deleted scene for those non-hardcore fans, but Leta-hate was literally kicked off by a picture in a photo frame and a comment made by a, in my opinion, kind of not-nearly-as-infallible-as-people-think character that barely knows Newt breaking into his head non-consensually (after being repeatedly told not to) who had an agenda to hook him up with her sister. Sooo…*shrugs*.

Even I personally have tried to keep out of the fandom debates, but I wrote a Leta and Newt story (still ongoing) that I stopped for a while because the kind of disgusting comments I was receiving about people hating the pairing. Which, I get. You don’t like a pairing, that’s cool? Why are you going and seeking out a piece about them and then taking the time to leave a comment? Whenever I start to read a story about Leta being this horrific monster of a person and being torn apart and compared and occasionally borderline racist, I just…click out? I know it’s only a small patch of weeds in what is likely a garden of roses, but I have never come across such an insecure fandom for a literal canon ship. If the relationship was that pure and strong, you wouldn’t feel the need to kill or villainise the (non-existent) ‘threat’. I just hope the writers feel the same way. You can write healthy closures and strong women of colour characters without casting them aside for plot development/man pain/stereotypical Caucasian romance/plot device, etc... I’m going to go into the theatre at the end of the week slightly optimistic to be fair but I’m also fully expecting to be disappointed but honestly, Leta could avada kedavra every character and she’s still going to be my favourite, I don’t make the rules. 

[welovekpopscenarios]

Time (Kyung x Reader)

Admin: Candi Request: “Hey!! Can I request being a backup dancer for Block B and falling for Kyung? - anon” Fandom: Block B Member/reader: Kyung x Reader Genre: Angst (im sorry if you wanted fluff omg) Warnings: None Words: 2.2k Authors note: I love writing for Block B because there’s fuck all on tumblr so don’t be shy guys!

           The day you got the place as a backup dancer for Block B was probably one of the happiest days of your life. You trained for years, you loved to dance and when you saw posters around the city announcing that they’re looking for backup dancers for Block B you threw yourself at the opportunity. Once the day arrived you remember the cold sweat dripping down your back and the nerves stirring up in your stomach. What came as a surprise and definitely didn’t help your anxiety was that Block B were actually the ones judging the performances, not their managers.

           You remember Zico introducing himself and the group, everyone was extremely nice and encouraging but because you were their fan for years their encouraging words didn’t help, you felt like screaming and you wanted to leave at once. The realization that you have to perform right there and there hit once the music came on and you stood as still as a rock. The group started whispering and your anxiety grew bigger.

           “Shit, I’m sorry!” You shouted. “I’m just nervous, I didn’t realize you’ll be watching my audition. Let me start again.” The group smiled at you and the music started up again. You took a deep breath and nailed your audition. You still remember how impressed everyone looked and they took you on straight away, they didn’t want you to wait for a phone call, they needed you to start immediately.  

           And now you’re here, dancing for them for the past year, the time went by so fast you barely even noticed its already been so long. Every day you loved coming into work and getting to hang with everyone and learn new dance routines. The other backup dancers didn’t seem to be as close to Block B as you were, it seemed like the guys took a liking to you and kind of forgot about the others but you didn’t mind, it meant getting to spend more time with them and most important with Kyung.

           Ever since you got to know them you were quite interested in Kyung and the stupid innocent crush started developing into something much deeper. You were starting to fall for him and you felt so ashamed, how could this ever work? Firstly, he probably didn’t feel the same way and secondly, you’re both so busy with work it would be damn near impossible. The best thing to do was to hide your feelings away and let them linger through you whenever he brushed his hand off yours, made eye contact with you, smiled at you, it was almost painful but you weren’t ready to risk your friendship with him.

           Their comeback was coming up very soon and everyone was working as hard as ever, nailing the dance routines so when the comeback hits you can all perform to promote the album. Work started to drain you, you weren’t getting enough rest, no one was, especially the boys. You felt sorry for yourself but one day the group came into the dance studio looking like actual zombies, between the interviews, appearances and practice they had absolutely no time to sleep, rest or eat.

           You were the first one in the studio and when they came in they didn’t even acknowledge you . You walked over to them to make sure they’re okay.

           “Guys, do you need anything?” You ask.

           “I need a lot of things but sleep is probably at the top of my list.” Ukwon says. The rest of the group hummed in agreement. You started thinking of ways to help them so you ran to the little staff room area and made everyone coffee.

           “Would you want to come over to my house today? I’ll make you dinner and you can hide away in my place. No paparazzi to be seen in my estate anyway!” You suggest. The guys look at each other and they grow fond of the idea.

           “Sounds good, it’ll be nice to have peace and quiet for one evening.” Jaehyo says.

           “Great! You can go to your places and take showers and stuff before coming to mine. It’ll take me a while to make dinner anyway.” You smile at them and go back to warming up before practice.

           After practice, you left the studio in a rush in order to make it back home and make an amazing dinner for the group. On your way home, you picked up several ingredients you needed to make a simple chicken noodle soup and japchae, you felt like a mother taking care of their kids.

 Kyung: We’ll be there in 15 minutes :)

Y/N: Awesome! Everything is nearly ready.

             You set the table and put on a movie so there’d be a relaxed atmosphere once they came in and all they could smell was the dinner. Several minutes later they all showed up and thanked you for the generous invite.

           “This is so nice of you Y/N, we’re so thankful!” Kyung grabbed your hand and smiled at you. Your heart jumped to your throat and all you could do is smile back at him without saying anything. He was always so caring and considerate, whenever you were down he’d show up out of nowhere and stay with you until you were okay, even if it was something small and stupid, he’d always be able to brighten your day. The days you spent together alone in the studio practicing by yourself is what really brought you closer to him, the alone sessions eventually turned into messing around, tickling, play fighting and having deep conversations with each other.

           “Please, take a seat and enjoy the food, there’s enough for everyone, I doubt you’re going to finish it all.” You scratch the back of your neck awkwardly, realizing how much food you made.

           “Don’t underestimate us Y/N.” Pyo turned around.

           They all enjoyed their food and licked the plates clean, there was no food left to your surprise so as soon as they all finished and passed out in their places you began to quietly clean up.

           “Let me help you with that.” Zico said quietly trying to not wake up the other members.

           “Oh, you really don’t have to it’s okay!”

           “I kind of have to talk to you about something.”

           Those words never failed to make you anxious, his face was serious and you just walked straight to the kitchen while he followed you. You placed the dirty dishes in the sink and slowly turned around, the gut wrenching feeling inside you didn’t make anything easier on you.

           “When are you going to tell him?” Zico starts and the knot in your stomach tightens.

           “Tell who what?” You play dumb and try your best not to seem nervous.

           “Y/N… I’m not as clueless as the others. You’re so into Kyung, I gag at it honestly.” He laughs and you hit his shoulder.

           “Oh my God, shut up!” You cover your mouth. “I don’t know Zico, it’s a bad time, with your comeback and all… I think you have enough to be stressing about. I don’t need to bring it up to him just yet.”

           “Your call!” Zico washed the dishes for you and made his way into the living room while you stayed in the kitchen. You sat at the table where you had a clear view of the TV and sleeping Kyung, you basked at the sight but it wasn’t long before you fell asleep yourself. Once you woke up you noticed a note on the table next to you.

Hey Y/N, thank you so much for the dinner and the movie. We’re sorry we fell asleep and didn’t get to watch it but it was still really nice of you. We didn’t want to wake you up so we just left once everyone woke up. We’ll see you tomorrow Y/N!

-Zico

You smiled at the note and went into your bedroom to throw yourself on the bed and get consumed by your sheets and your dreams. The next few days were going to be hard, there was a performance you had to do tomorrow as a teaser and a promo for the comeback so you needed your rest for it.

The next day you got up and got ready quite quickly, you had no time to waste seeing as it was an important performance and a lot of people were going to be there. You made it to the hall and went backstage where you met everyone. The group was getting their makeup done and the dancers were putting on their outfits.

“Hey Y/N! Like my hair?” Kyung smiled.

“I love you.”

“W-what?”

You realized what you said and you wanted to run away.

“I love IT HA HA, I LOVE IT!” You practically shout in his face and run away to put on your outfit. Kyungs eyes followed you, not exactly sure as to what happened. Zico laughed to himself and the others didn’t even notice you came in. 

           “And today I am happy to announce that Block B are giving us a taste of what their comeback is going to look like.” The presenter said, that was your call, you all hurried to the stage and did your bit. Throughout the whole performance, Kyung tried his best to catch your eye but you were ignoring him to your best ability. You couldn’t get over how stupid and easily avoidable that was but you were ready to face the consequences. After the show you all went backstage where the group got touched up and the backup dancers weren’t needed anymore so you got to go home.

           “Y/N?” Kyung came up behind you.

           “I’m sorry for what I said earlier haha, I’m just tired and stuff my words got mixed up!” You were a terrible liar and Kyung could see right through you.

           “We need to talk.” His face dark and his tone serious. “I talked to Zico.” He continued and he didn’t need to say anything else, you stood still and it felt like cold water was flushed all at once over your frozen body.

           “We can talk later, you need to go now!” You grabbed your things and ran towards the nearest exit, your heart pounding and ready to come out your chest. How were you going to explain you have been in love with him for a year now? He seemed so cold and serious, he definitely didn’t feel the same way.

           At home, you turned on the TV and watched Block B do the rest of the show, they gave interviews, took photos and were expected to be at a party that their manager threw for them so your body turned into a soft noodle knowing you won’t have to face him today. You decided to bake some cookies and stay in today, after the little encounter you weren’t up for seeing people and you weren’t expecting anyone so it was a good day to treat yourself.

           After about an hour or so, someone knocked on your door. You walked over and once your eyes met Kyungs you were lost for words, you couldn’t even ask him what he was doing here.

           “I told you we need to talk.” He began. “Listen, Zico told me everything and I’m not stupid either, I sort of knew.” He scratched the back of his head and you sat down quietly. “Y/N it’s just too complicated, you’re such a sweet person and I do love you with all my heart but we work together, we see each other every day and with the comeback and our future projects coming up I don’t see how I could make time to make you as happy as you deserve to be.” He kept his eyes on you but you couldn’t bring yourself to look at him, the lump in your throat grew bigger and you had to be strong and hold back the tears. “I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear but I have to be honest with you.”

           “It’s fine.” You take a deep breath and look up at him with a smile.

           “W-what?”

           “It’s okay! I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to ruin our friendship and I told Zico that I know it’s too much right now since you’re working hard towards the comeback and stuff. I’ll be okay.”

           “I’m really sorry Y/N.”            “I told you, I’m fine. Now go, you have a party to go to.” You schoo’ed him out of your apartment and quickly shut the door after him. Your hands were shaking and your legs were starting to disobey. You slid down the door and curled into a ball on the cold wooden floor. The pain you were experiencing in your heart didn’t feel real, the whole situation didn’t feel real. Your cries were silent, your breath so uneven it left you gasping for air. Eventually, the cries became louder, the more you thought about what he said the more it hurt, you couldn’t come to terms with what he said, you knew it wasn’t going to be a happy ending but that small part of you was hopeful and it was all for nothing. You were so angry for letting yourself fall for him.

But hey, time heals all wounds, doesn’t it?

[hotcocosharing]

REQUEST: What You Mean To Him (IM Headcanon)

Anonymous said:Hey there! Can you make an IM headcanon about the mc overexerts herself at work and ended up collapsing? 

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Fandom: Irresistible Mistake Category: Fluff? Whatever it is Character: Shunichiro, Toshiaki & Toma Notes: I work on my requests on no particular order, write as inspiration hits

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Shunichiro

He was not worried. Nope. Definitely not. You were a big girl, you could take care of yourself, especially after the multiple times you’d warned him to stop treating her like a little girl. He wasn’t worried when you worked overnight every night for two months; he wasn’t worried when you pushed your food to the side since you claimed you didn’t have much appetite. He most certainly wasn’t worried as he watched your energy waver.

No, not worried at all.

But right now, you stumble back, he watches her face grows pale with your legs go weak as you collapsed in slow motion in front of his eyes. Not worried?! Who is he kidding? He’s absolutely terrified.

“________!” He exclaims and rushes over, unfortunately not in time to stop you hitting the cold ground. He just manages to cradle your head and quickly shifts it onto his lap, calling your name urgently, shaking your shoulder with no response.

You’re cold as ice then he realizes how ill you must be, he calls his best friend and almost yells to the other end. You are pale and cold with a pulse weak. How the hell does he not notice? Why hasn’t he said something? He really is the worst boyfriend ever.

He knows how much the new project means to you, how eager you’re to prove your worth but pushing yourself to collapse? No project is worth dying for. Shunichiro lifts you up easily and rushes from the hallway and down to Yuki’s office. “Yuki!” He shouts but lays you down on one of the beds gently, taking a moment to tuck a strand of hair behind your ear while blaming himself for all this. He should have noticed. He should have done something.

“She’s okay, Shun.” Maki reassures, “She’s overworked, let her catches up some sleep and she’s good as new.”

Shunichiro sits beside you without a single words and makes sure he is the first person you see when you wake.

Toshiaki

Anxiety and fear flood through Toshiaki’s mind as he watches the nurses working on the tubes and machines around you, his heart aches in way that he doesn’t know possible as he watches your pale face and praying for your eyes to open.

This is too much for him.

He had been through the same torture when his ex girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. He couldn’t help but fear the same scenario happening again, watching your health and strength slip away through fingertips with your smile slowly fading from the tormenting treatment.

He couldn’t do it.

The medical professionals won’t tell him the details since he isn’t family but time passes too slowly while he waits. Not knowing when you’ll wake, not knowing how to introduce himself when your family arrives.

He craves a can of Mira Black Coffee and a smoke so badly but he couldn’t risk leaving you alone. He wants to be here, by your side, through the good times and the bad. Holding your hands and tells you in person that no matter what happens he will be there, he wants to let you know that he wouldn’t give up no matter how worse the situation is.

He will remain strong, he can be strong for the both of you.

Toma

His heart almost stops at the news when his colleagues alert him that his girlfriend has fainted. He rushes to the doctor’s office and Maki’s suspicious grin gives him a rather weird feeling but the cheeky doctor has excluded himself before Toma could ask any questions.

Sitting up, you pat the side of the bed and invite your worried man to sit down. “You gave me a heart attack! _______!” He nearly screams but soon pulls you into a warm embrace. “I’ve told you million time to slow down, work is important but so is your health!”

You can’t help but grin, kissing him sweetly on his cheek and catches him by surprise since you never get too close to him at work though everyone knows you two are dating.

“Toma,” Your voice sound unintentionally seductive, covering the hint of nervousness. “I’m sorry to worry you, I promise to take better care of myself from now. Don’t complain if I become fat from eating though.”

Toma’s lips curve into a smirk and you continue, “I’m eating for two after all.” The copywriter freezes for a few seconds before coming back to his senses, completely stunned by the good news.

“Wait? I’m a father?”

“Yes!” You nod, smiling and worrying at the same time. “Is this a bad time or..?”

“What!? No! I love kids and I love you! I freaking love you, _______! Oh my god, we are going to start a family together.”

[choicesimaginesandmore]

Eternal Highschool (Endless Summer AU) Chapter I: New Kid Summary: Nicole discovers what a general day is like at her new school and realizes that making it through this high school might be a lot harder than she originally thought. Word Count: 2501 --- The first day of school and she was already late. Nicole was a bright girl, creative, open minded, and full of ideas, and she always seemed to know exactly what was coming next. Her father had gotten a promotion and had to move to a new state in order to stay with his firm, so now Nicole finds herself in an unfamiliar state surrounded by unfamiliar faces, and late for school. As she raced down the long bland halls to her first class she took in her surroundings and realized she had quite a few options. To her left she saw a kid sitting outside by a tree, nearly asleep if not already, and not planning on getting up any time soon. He had long light brown hair and wore a Beatles shirt under his army green jacket that laid over his jeans. In front of her was a science classroom that was quiet and nearly desolate, if the door hadn't been open she would've thought the class was empty. She then looked to her right, knowing all that laid behind her, and there she found an English classroom bursting with life and laughter, the door closed but not holding in the bustling sounds of the room, and just beyond that other doors and lockers lined the hallway. She looked down at her schedule, rolled her eyes, and with a deep sigh read off her first class aloud, "Science, 1st hour." Stepping into the classroom all eyes fell on her, a cold silence overcoming the room, the students eyeing her up and down, taking in every detail of her face and clothing, judging and examining her with their eyes. "I'm Nicole," She introduced herself breaking the silence, clearing her throat first as the teacher scowled. "Sit down," the teacher grumbled, messing with some papers on her otherwise organized desk, her eyes never leaving the papers. "Where?" Nicole asked before catching the eyes of some of the students who only glared at her suspiciously. Ultimately a boy peeped up from the corner to be a contrasting welcome to her presence, "Over here." She nodded and sat next to him, setting her stuff down and sliding into her chair before turning to shake his hand, "Im Nicole." "So I've heard," he chuckled, "I'm Diego. I'll help you find your clique." "My clique? I don't really have a clique, at least I didn't," Nicole admitted pulling out a notebook after seeing the others do it as well. "Everyone has a clique," Diego lectured simply and pointed to a group along the wall, "That's Craig, Sean, and Michelle. They're the jocks." As he called their names out Michelle burst into laughter and Craig screamed something out that Nicole only made out as, "Why'd you make me do that?" Sean reassuring him that he'd be okay as soon as he did. Nicole nodded along as he continued, "That's Grace and Aleister. They totally love each other, but they'll never admit it. They're the nerds." Grace accidentally knocked her pencil off her table and muttered a nearly silent "oops" as Aleister leaned over to pick it up. "Be more careful next time, Grace," he shook his head slightly. She apologized again more softly, though it seemed impossible, and continued what they were previously doing. "That's Quinn and Raj," he explained gesturing to the two in seats in front of them, "They're really good cooks. They're in a bit of a mixed clique. Quinn's a mom friend and Raj is the fun friend." Raj playfully shoved Quinn's arm as he turned around in his chair, meeting Quinn's eyes, "I love hearing people introduce us, mom friend." Diego cackled and Quinn kicked his foot gently, "Quit it you two. You're gonna scare the new kid! I'm sure she's already scared enough!" Quinn offered her hand and Nicole accepted it with a smile, "My name is Quinn." "I'm Nicole," she grinned and turned to Raj, "And you're Raj then, I take it?" He nodded with a smirk, "That's me. Who are you again? You've only introduced yourself a million times!" Diego and Raj broke out into laughter and Quinn just rolled her eyes and let out a small chuckle. Nicole followed suit and chuckled along and soon turned her gaze to a girl sitting at a back table, and prodded them, "Who's she?" "Who?" Diego turned to see the girl and immediately locked eyes with Nicole again, "Her name's Estela. She's kind of creepy and mysterious. No one knows anything about her." "Odd," Nicole shrugged it off, but on the inside curiosity soared inside of her and she hoped to have a chance to learn more about her in the future. "Is it weird that I kind of want to be her friend even though she scares me?" Raj offered up a rhetorical question and only received an exaggerated nod from Diego. "And the kid outside?" Nicole asked, returning the conversation to the original topic, still unbelievably curious. Diego stood and took a minute to look out the window and then returned to sit fully in his seat, and Raj took the opportunity to break the silence with a question that he seemed to already know the answer to, "Back at it again?" Diego nodded and Quinn sighed, "One time he's going to mis something important!" Raj pursed his lips and leaned back, "Well the least we could do is get him to hold out longer than the first day!" Diego attempted to hold back his laughter but a stifled laugh came out anyways, Quinn only smiled widely at it. Nicole chuckled, "An every day thing I take it?" "Oh, yeah. For the most part," Diego informed, spinning his pencil in between his fingers, "His name is Jake." Nicole nodded and began to speak again when the teacher spoke abruptly, "My name is Ms. Iris." As she spoke she began writing her name on the board and as she drew a line with the blue marker under her name she continued, "Not Miss, not Ms. I, only Ms. Iris. I hope many of you already know that I will not tolerate acting out or speaking out of turn. No laughter that is not without due reason and no cell phones." A girl who's head was half shaved and her ears lined with piercings chuckled from the corner. "Who's she?" Nicole whispered to Diego, her voice unheard by the teacher who masked it with her own voice. "That's Zahra. She's a rebel at her best. Her and Craig had a thing a little while ago," Diego explained. "Jock Craig?" Nicole raised an eyebrow. "That's the one," Diego chuckled, leaning back in his chair, "You're a fast learner." Nicole smiled to herself as the teacher barked at Zahra for chuckling, "That was rude and disruptive. Do you have any idea how upsetting it is to hear that?" "If it wasn't upsetting," Zahra paused and kicked her feet up, and with a smirk continued, "I wouldn't have done it." Ms. Iris muttered something under her breath and walked back up to the board to continue a rather boring lesson and Nicole ended up doodling the entire class. As the bell rang and they moved along to second hour, a wave of students rushing out of the door, Diego, Raj, and Quinn pulled Nicole along with them. "You've got English next right?" Diego asked as they walked confidently down the hallway, Nicole racing to keep up with them. "Yeah, I do," Nicole admitted as she followed them and most of the others to their next class. "Good morning, sweetheart!" Quinn teased as Jake walked groggily through the door. He brushed off her teasing and stumbled into the English classroom. Nicole turned to meet Diego's eyes, almost asking him a question without even speaking. "Yeah, it's just a thing he does," Diego spoke, answering her unspoken question and she shot him a nod. They all piled into the class quickly, the teacher bright and bubbly, announcing a daily schedule. Nicole sat with Diego on her right, Jake on her left, and Raj and Quinn in front of them both. "Ok class, today we have a new student!" The teacher was surprisingly happy, unlike her previous teacher, and she seemed to actually enjoy being there. "Nicole, why don't you come up here and introduce yourself?" The teacher announced and as Nicole hesitantly made her way to the front of the class the teacher turned to speak to her, "I'm Ms. Lila by the way." Nicole smiled and then turned to address the class, "Um.. My name is Nicole." Noticing that Nicole didn't know what else to say Ms. Lila prompted her, "Where are you from, Nicole?" Grateful for her question she smiled, "I'm from New York but it's a pleasure to be here now." "That's very nice. You may take your seat now," Ms. Lila offered kindly. Nicole sat back down and began following he lecture closely but occasionally she could swear she caught Jake looking at her, but she couldn't think of a solid reason why. As the class came to a sudden end, Nicole was glad that time flew by so quickly and began gathering her stuff in her bag. "I'm off to third hour, yours is just around the corner. Don't be afraid to ask someone if you can't find it or get lost!" Diego smiled and was soon out the door with Quinn and Raj close in tow. Nicole chuckled to herself, shaking her head slightly and soon noticed that the only people in the classroom were her, Jake, and Ms. Lila. Relief washed over her when Jake did not speak to her immediately and Ms. Lila bid them both a good day. As they both left the door Jake headed in a different direction she wondered if he had stayed after later for a reason or if it was simply a weird and awkward coincidence. She shrugged it off and headed to her history class. Tugging on her backpack straps she strode into the classroom and awaited the beginning of the lesson. This class held few people and less familiar faces but she sat down near Sean, the only one she seemed to remember the name of at the moment. "Hey, Nicole, right?" Sean smiled. "Yeah. You're Sean?" She questioned and when he nodded, his smile never fading, she chuckled with him, "I thought so." "Way to hang around the spotlight," a girl on the other side of Sean teased. "What?" Nicole was genuinely confused but she could understand when looking back how it was taken rudely from the perspective of anyone who didn't understand her intentions. "As if you don't know who Sean is," the girl had now come into Nicole's view and she remembered that it was Michelle. "Take it easy, she's new here," Sean explained, covering for Nicole. Nicole smiled at the gesture, but brushed off the conversation as Sean and Michelle began arguing. The teacher then rose to speak, she was blonde and dressed as if she was in Texas, "Welcome to your first history class of the year." Nicole examined her clothing one final time before focusing back on her words, "My name is Ms. Massey." As if reading off of a list she continued, "We have a new student named Nicole," She gestured towards Nicole and continued, "And we're going to take the rest of the day to make sure you guys understand how this class is run." "Ugh, Rules," Zahra groaned from the back where Nicole hadn't even noticed her sitting. "No rules. Just a syllabus," Ms. Massey assured with a lighthearted laugh and began passing out papers. As the class flew by Nicole began to stare out the window at the colorful leaves falling off the trees and blowing around in the air. She began to wonder how long the year would feel when every day felt like this. "Class dismissed," Ms. Massey's voice brought her out of her daydream and she smiled at the clock noticing that she was letting them out three minutes early. As Nicole peered out of the class she noticed Jake sitting out by his tree and contemplated using her extra time to go out and speak to him. Her debate raged on in her mind before she ultimately decided against it. There will always be tomorrow, or so she convinced herself. She trudged to her next class, Spanish with Mr. Reyes. 4th hour. Walking up the stairs she smiled to herself as she seen the flags for the language classes lining the hallway and she stepped into her classroom. "Hola! Bienvenidos," Mr. Reyes smiled and she nodded along. "Hablas español?" He asked and then when she half shook her head he smiled, "All in due time." The class was strict and the rules were followed and yet it was still rather fun. The notes were meticulous and she had to pay close attention but she was beginning to understand it. As the bell rang out the halls flooded with students and she weaved her way through the crowds. She was thankful that the next thing she went to was lunch, and as she opened the door to the cafeteria she realized just how separated the cliques were. They all sat separately and spoke loudly, the room was overfilled with unnecessary noise, and she was grateful to meet Diego's eyes and for him to beckon her over. "Nicole! Nice of you to join us!" He teased as she set her stuff down and rolled her eyes. "How you liking your classes so far?" Diego prodded, opening his lunch bag with a sigh and eyeing the cafeteria food before deciding not to get food from the line, muttering something about "food poisoning wasn't worth it." "They're alright," she admitted as Quinn got out a well packed lunch and handed Diego some. "What classes do you have next?" Diego reached for her schedule that she had set on the table. "Oh no," he sighed deeply, "You're going to hate the rest of your day." "It can't be that bad, right?" Nicole was now afraid, she hadn't looked closely at the rest of the day yet and as Raj leaned over in silence she repeated herself, "Right?" "P. E. with Ms Brooke is not going to be fun to say the least," Raj began, "Math with Mr. Hunter should be terrible, but then again I just really hate math so that's probably it but still. And then you've got art with Ms. Abby which is a fun class but it's really difficult to pass." "How so?" Nicole refused to believe that art of all classes would be a hard class to pass. "You'll see," Raj grinned, "You'll see."

[alinkbetweenportraits]

(First off I dropped the ball and because I was so tired I accidentally deleted the ask. The good news is I took a screenshot earlier to show a friend so she could translate it for me in my moment of stupid. Sorry about that.)

How to let go of an RP Partner

RPers are people. And it’s a fact of life that no matter how close you are to someone, eventually things are going to change. Sometimes they get bored, sometimes they lose the muse, sometimes the relationship conditions change between partners, sometimes people get married, have kids, find a job, and just move on from the RPing scene. Fuck man, some of my past RP friends passed away for various reasons. This is usually why I tell people not to take their partners for granted. Someday it’s going to end and you’ll at least want to end it on the best note possible. In your case, however, it doesn’t sound like you’re going to get that anymore if you keep pestering them. To be frank, you’re going to make them regret their decision if you keep pushing them into RPing with you.

But there’s good news in all of this. Things aren’t entirely hopeless for you or anyone who really wants things to change for the better. Assuming you’re a rational adult that’s just stuck in a really distressing situation, here’s usually the things I tell people to do. 

1.) Recognize where it went wrong. And really, really think about this one. In your case, do you feel like utter shit for what you did to your friend? Do you regret hurting them? Good. Yeah, I know, that’s a bitchy thing to say, But it’s the truth. Feeling like this is a critical step to understanding your faults and making a real change. If you want things to get better in the future, you can’t fall for the same mistakes you made before. You have to be willing to listen and take criticism better if you want to hope for any relief. Not everyone ends on a bitter note, though. Maybe they just don’t feel the character anymore or their situation changed, and that’s perfectly okay. It’s RPing. You shouldn’t need a grand excuse to not play along. Your friend most likely doesn’t hate you. If she was kind enough to offer forgiveness after an apology, chances are she wants to let go just as much as you. But she may just need some space to heal and manage on her own. This is a critical time for RPers who have had particularly jarring instances like this. Please try to understand that sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing at all. The damage is done and unfortunately, you can’t take it back.

2.) Show you respect their decision to be left alone and work to detach yourself. When we’re particularly close to an RP partner or group, we find it hard to move on and write on our own accord. You may have headcanons, memories, personal work, even entire characters that revolve around the other. After some time, it becomes harder and harder to let go. This is the point where I usually recommend people start cleaning up. Take some time to tear things down and build yourself back up. If you have head canons that revolve around that person, try to adjust it so the character stands on their own. Your character is still a character even if they were made to know the other. They’re still entirely capable of being their own unique individual. Do you have any art or original work from the other person featured on your blog? Store it all away in a file on your computer (preferably a separate flashdrive) and try to remove what you can on your blog. Stow it away in a place where you won’t instantly run into it the moment you sit on your computer or open your files. Try taking some time to look at your blog and characters and see if it’s unique to you and you alone. Whatever you do, don’t post any more of the other person’s material from here on out. This will only cause more strife in the future. Nobody will blame you for using face claims, youtube playlists, or anything instant access if it means saving your mental health. 

But Clara! Why would I save these things if they make me feel so awful? Isn’t that kind of creepy and masochistic?

Well, that depends. Of course, not all memories are worth saving. If there are things you feel are personal attacks to your character, such as call out posts, public statements, or anything you feel is humiliating to your self esteem or the other person in question, it’s best to leave these things in the trash. It’s also not healthy to constantly look back and post about it, lest you turn your RP blog into a stalker’s shrine. However, there’s a positive kind of emotional pain, one that typically comes with grief. Speaking from personal experience and watching people go through the same mess, it usually takes about a month to three months to really feel the effects of recovery after having to lose an RP partner. But time depends on your relationship with the other, how close you were with them, and how the relationship ended. When done on a healthy level, it’s okay to recall where you and your muse learned how to become better people together. There’s no shame in acknowledging your mistakes in the past so long as your present self understands this and is willing to learn from it. It’s okay to feel sad, hurt, or lonely. Even if people dismiss it as just a game, RPing can become very personal between people.

Cutting off people entirely is something I only suggest as a last resort in order to protect yourself and people around you. Doing this will not ease the grief process. If anything, it proves to make things far more complicated and difficult. Once you start, it’s something that’s very difficult to take back. I only suggest doing this if you feel the following:

- You have been emotionally, mentally, physically, or sexually exploited by your last RP partner. 

- You feel that this person will try to reach out to you outside of the internet.

- You feel this person puts yourself and everyone around you at risk both physically and emotionally.

- This person admits to actively participating in harmful and/or illegal activities that could get you hurt as a result.

- This person is blackmailing you and threatens to publicly release this private information unless you comply to their demands.

3.) Reach out to new RPers. This is a very scary step for a lot of people, especially if you don’t find yourself very good at socializing and just went through a time where you got a good look at the worst in yourself. But take comfort in knowing that if you realize where you dropped the ball in the last relationship and took steps to improve, you’re better than ever. And if you made a friendship that memorable as your past self, why can’t you do it again? Often times we feel we need to put up a front in order to meet new people and appeal to a certain audience. However, nothing is more personal and intimate than sharing your writing, art, or ideas with other people. It’s important to be honest with the other person and yourself before you can establish any sort of genuine connection. 

It’s okay to message or IM someone asking for an RP. Be upfront, but not bossy. Ask if it’s okay with them to give the idea a shot. Listen to what the other has to say. If you see any streaming events or discord chat rooms, try to join in and introduce yourself politely while also asking for names. Know that very rarely do opportunities simply fall on your lap conveniently and that a majority of RPers are self admitted dorks who just want to have fun, too. Whatever you do, though, don’t start clinging to these RPers for emotional support on the first day. This can be emotionally exhausting and put a ton of unnecessary pressure on another. You must also learn how to manage on your own.

4.) Never forget that as bad as it gets, it’s not the end. Let me tell you a story. My last RP group went to shit really fast. People didn’t trust one another, a whole group became divided, and because the game didn’t allow an equal balance between high experience and new RPers, it wasn’t rare for people to start abusing their power, making it nearly impossible for more timid and new players to start joining. Since I was new, it was incredibly frustrating to play the game. Add to the fact that a lot of these guys were red blooded authors (some of whom already published or are working on books), it wasn’t very welcoming to someone who was young and mostly dicked around in private IM RPs. Needless to say, I was way out of my league. Rules were broken or bent, and I became so frustrated with people stopping and correcting me every step of the way but ignoring their own rules as the game moved on. RPing made me severely anxious, and I’ve had my OCs verbally ripped to shreds right in front of my eyes. I hated going online and my self esteem and overall mental and physical health plummeted to levels I didn’t think were possible. I won’t act like I’m a victim, though. Because I was angry I did things to intentionally hurt other people. I lashed out a lot, and chances are I did more damage than was necessary even considering what had happened at the time. So those same group of people. Where are they now?

We chill out, talk about cartoons, and gush about our OCs or favorite characters.

Yeah. After all the shitty things that happened, we managed to get along again, though this time I avoid the game itself and just RP freestyle. So what does this mean for you? It means that relationships are bound to change, but just because someone doesn’t want to RP anymore doesn’t also mean time can’t make a big impact. Maybe you’ll learn to stand on your own two feet having met new RPers and friends, maybe you and your partner wouldn’t mind at least being on friendlier terms again. It’s hard to say what will happen in the future, but you must always remember you are never defined by your past. What matters is did you learn anything from your mistake and how you decide to act on your newfound wisdom. 

[wineanddinosaur]

How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market

It was 1975 and bourbon sales in America were tanking. The brown spirit had hit its peak just five years earlier, selling some 80 million cases in 1970 — but it all went downhill from there.

Baby boomers coming of drinking age were rejecting the stuffy-seeming whiskey their parents drank, instead favoring beer, cheap wine, and, most especially, clear booze like vodka and tequila. The American whiskey industry was reeling and running out of ideas.

“This was a daunting task since the market was totally Scotch-taste oriented,” William Yuracko, then head of Schenley International’s export division, told the The New York Times in 1992. Japanese people mostly drank Scotch — the country had lifted all restrictions on imported spirits in 1969 — or their own homegrown whiskey, which was likewise based on a Scotch flavor profile. “Bourbon was unknown and a total departure from the taste pattern,” he wrote.

Remarkably, within a few short years, Yuracko (who would would become Schenley president from 1975 to 1984) and others would create a frenzy for bourbon in Japan. In fact, the country’s desire for very well-aged, high-proof, premium-packaged, limited editions and single-barrel bourbons helped Kentucky survive when the American bourbon market was dead as disco.

The U.S. would, in turn, follow Japan’s lead and, as the world entered a new millennium, start latching onto these trends and introducing products that helped revive America’s fervor for the once-humble spirit, ultimately and unwittingly turning it into something now rabidly pursued by connoisseurs the world over.

A Critical Mass of Bourbon

Yuracko first started taking reconnaissance trips to the Far East in 1972 and quickly realized that getting Scotch-swilling Japanese old-timers to switch to bourbon would be nearly impossible. He decided to instead focus his efforts on Japan’s youth, the “post-college consumer,” he told The Times, “whose tastes were not yet formed and who was attuned to Western products and ideas,” like Coca-Cola and Levi’s.

“They were having their own youth revolution, [like] what we had gone through in the ’60s they were going through in the 80s,” explains Chuck Cowdery, author and bourbon historian. “Rejecting their parents’ generation, including what their parents’ generation drank. They were open to trying something new.”

Enter bourbon. Then, as now, it was very hard for foreigners to make headway in Japanese business. Yuracko knew he’d need a local liaison, so he offered a distribution partnership with Suntory, the Japanese whiskey brand that already controlled 70 percent of the local market. Brown-Forman, another American whiskey powerhouse and Schenley’s best competitor, would eventually offer Suntory the same deal.

“I cannot overestimate the importance of the decision taken by Schenley management to place their most important brands in the same house with their major competitor,” Yuracko explained in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Business Strategy in 1992. “This would be tantamount to Ford and General Motors giving all their top models to Toyota to market in Japan.”

It was a major gamble for everyone involved. Suntory could, of course, intentionally torpedo all bourbon sales to assure Japanese whiskey would never again have a competitor; or it could favor one bourbon brand over the other. The fact was, however, neither Schenley nor Brown-Forman had much to lose. If they didn’t take the gamble, bourbon might not even exist by the end of the decade.

Suntory didn’t want to simply do a trial, either. According to Yuracko, Suntory wanted a “critical mass” of bourbon, “a product for every taste and price level … and each brand was given its own identity and market niche.” Schenley offered Suntory Ancient Age, J.W. Dant, and I.W. Harper. Brown-Forman handed over Early Times, Old Forester, and Jack Daniel’s.

Since most drinking in Japan was done outside of the home, Schenley and Brown-Forman together began setting up bourbon bars all over the country. The bars had “an unsophisticated atmosphere that would appeal to young people already attracted to American clothes, cars, and customs,” Yuracko explained, playing country music and serving American food like hamburgers and chili, and only pouring Suntory’s six bourbon brands.

Instead of buying single glasses of bourbon, young customers purchased bottles, stored in cabinets along the bars, each adorned with a neck tag denoting whose was whose. In an era before TikTok, it became a youthful challenge to see who could drink the most personal bottles. Thanks to heavy advertising from Suntory, one brand quickly began to rise above the others.

“I.W. Harper was the eye-opener,” explains Cowdery. A bottom-shelf product in America, it was naturally able to be sold at much higher prices in Japan, before Schenley eventually fully repositioned it as a premium, 12-year-old product. If it was only moving 2,000 cases internationally in 1969, I. W. Harper eventually became the largest-selling bourbon brand in Japan at more than 500,000 cases per year by 1991. Cowdery explains, “It was profitable to buy cases of I.W. Harper on [the American] wholesale market and privately ship them to Japan.”

Eventually, the U.S. had to take I.W. Harper off the market stateside in order to satisfy demand in Japan. Soon enough, other brands took notice and decided to see if they, too, could become “big in Japan.” By 1990, 2 million cases of bourbon were headed to the country every year.

More Brands Head to Japan

In a sleepy Osaka suburb, a three-story building that has been everything from a hotel to a brothel is now a bar styled like a western saloon. It serves American food like fried chicken, thumps Dylan and the Beatles on a vintage jukebox, and mixes up classic cocktails like the Mint Julep and another called the Scarlett O’Hara. This is Rogin’s Tavern in Moriguichi, a bourbon bar that opened in the 1970s that remains a shrine to Americana and its governmentally protected spirit, stocking more and arguably better bourbon than pretty much any single bar in America.

“I tasted my first bourbon in the basement bar of the Rihga Royal Hotel, a famous old place in Osaka,” claims Seiichiro Tatsumi, Rogin’s owner since 1977. He quickly became obsessed, reading everything he could about bourbon via literature provided by the American Cultural Center in Osaka. He finally visited Kentucky for the first time in 1984 and fell in love, driving its country roads, stopping at off-the-beaten path liquor stores, and acquiring numerous dusty bottles to bring back to Japan. He now owns a second home in Lexington.

Over the years, Tatsumi claims, he has probably “self-imported” some 5,000 bourbons from America back to his bar. “I stop at every place I pass, and I don’t just look on the shelves,” he says. “I ask the clerk to comb the cellar and check the storeroom for anything old. I can’t tell you how many cases of ancient bottles I’ve found that way.”

It wasn’t only Tatsumi. Japan gave these old bourbon brands a new lifeline. For example, Four Roses had long fallen out of favor with American drinkers by the 1970s. In 1967, Seagram’s turned the once-venerable brand into a dreaded blended whiskey, cut with grain neutral spirit and added flavoring.

“[B]y the time the ‘90s rolled around it was just an average blended whiskey,” the late Al Young, Four Roses’ former senior brand ambassador who worked at the company for 50 years, told VinePair contributor Nicholas Mancall-Bitel last year. But in Japan it was legitimate straight bourbon whiskey, packaged in sleek Cognac-style bottles with embossed silver roses, and it was a big hit. Just as Schenley and Brown-Forman had partnered with Suntory, in 1971 Four Roses struck up a partnership with Kirin, Japan’s top beer brand.

If brands like I.W. Harper, Four Roses, and Early Times were saved by Japan, others were specifically created for it. Blanton’s, for example, was spawned in 1984 by two former Fleischmann’s Distilling execs, Ferdie Falk and Bob Baranaskas. The two had acquired the Buffalo Trace distillery (then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery), as well as Schenley’s key bourbon, Ancient Age. Believing, like Yuracko, that the future of bourbon was overseas, they called their new company Age International.

“[T]he brand chased the profitable high-priced segment,” writes Fred Minnick in his book “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey.” In this case, that meant introducing the world’s first commercial single-barrel bourbon, specifically designed for Japan, and packaged in a now iconic grenade-shaped, horse-stoppered bottle.

Blanton’s was such a hit in Japan that by 1992 Japanese company Takara Shuzo had purchased Age International for $20 million. It immediately flipped the actual distillery to Sazerac, while retaining the brand trademarks for Blanton’s.

Aged Bourbons Claim a Price

Accustomed to Scotch, once Japanese consumers “moved onto other types of whiskey, they already had these expectations built in for 12-, 15-, 18-year age statements,” explains John Rudd, an American who formerly lived in Japan and runs the Tokyo Bourbon Bible blog.

Bourbon in America had typically been released after about four years — it got too oaky if it aged much longer, it was believed at the time — and few consumers particularly cared about lofty age statements. Not so in Japan and, luckily, the glut in America allowed many bourbon distilleries to unload what they thought was over-aged junk.

“With a depressed market in America, lots of bourbon, especially extra-aged bourbon, was shipped to Japan where it could command a higher price,” Rudd says.

There was Very Old St. Nick, specially created in 1984 for the Japanese market, some as old as 25 years. There was Old Grommes Very Very Rare Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which in the late 1980s started sending Japan bottles as old as two decades. A.H. Hirsch, aged 15, 16, and eventually 20 years, landed in Japan as early as 1989, and is still some of the most coveted bourbon of all time (so much so that Cowdery wrote an entire book about it).

Heaven Hill, today the largest family-owned and operated distillery in the U.S., specifically bottled an Evan Williams 23 for the Japanese market and created new brands like Martin Mills 24 Years.

“Japan considered bourbon a prestigious, highly coveted consumer good,” says Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey’s master distiller who started visiting Japan in the 1980s. Every year he returned with special bottlings from his company, some as old as 13 years, a lofty age that never existed in America. “Back then, you’d see private bottle programs at prestigious bars where high-level executives would have their own bottles of bourbon designated ‘my bottle.’”

Rogin’s Tavern, for one, started tapping distilleries for its own private, cask-strength bottlings. Willett provided a 25-year-old labeled “Rogin’s Choice.” Julian Van Winkle III, scion of the soon-to-come Pappy dynasty, offered a 12-year bottling. Van Winkle III, in particular, kept his nascent company afloat in the mid-1980s and onward by providing special bottlings, many under a name you could easily now call the entire Japanese whiskey marketplace: Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs.

Van Winkle III first released Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year in America in 1994; by the mid-2000s, Pappy had become the most coveted whiskey in the country, regularly selling for thousands of dollars per bottle.

“Bourbon became popular here [in America] again,” explains Rudd. “And people quit thinking it needed to be young.”

The American Bourbon Revival

America’s bourbon malaise would last nearly three decades, reaching its nadir in 2000, when a mere 32 million cases were moved stateside. Of course, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and, thanks to Japan’s example, things were already being put into place for bourbon’s homeland revival.

Like at Four Roses, where Jim Rutledge took over as master distiller in 1995 and made it his mission to get the company to start letting American consumers finally taste the high-quality bourbon Japan had been enjoying for decades. As Mancall-Bitel explained, however, “The bourbon was performing too well overseas and the company didn’t want to rock the boat — until it was rocked from within the company.”

Seagram’s collapsed and started selling off its assets. Rutledge convinced Kirin to buy Four Roses, and the eventual Japanese CEO, Teruyuki Daino, moved his offices from Tokyo back to the distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ky. By 2002, once again, Four Roses bourbon was sold in America. Today it’s one of the bourbon world’s most revered brands, introducing geek-friendly products like Single Barrel in 2004 and the Small Batch series in 2006.

Japan proved that well-aged, premium bourbon actually had a place in the world. Bourbon didn’t have to be Scotch’s economical, bottom-shelf brother. Blanton’s, when it was finally sold in America, was priced at $24 a bottle — then a massive price point — and was advertised in such upscale places as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Ivy League alumni mags. Around the same time, Japanese drinkers were gladly paying $115 per bottle.

Bourbon’s rebirth in America has caused many brands to pull back their products from the Japanese market and raise prices on the little still sent there. Japan’s taste for bourbon has dwindled. At the same time, American tourists were heading to Japan to clear shelves of old stock.

“It all corresponded with the American bourbon boom getting out of hand,” explains Rudd. He believes Japan is no longer the bourbon oasis that it once was, even as recently as 2014, when he lived near a liquor store that stocked rare bottles like Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs, gold wax A.H. Hirsch, Van Winkle 1974 Family Reserve 17 Year, and Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offerings from the early aughts.

Rudd says he’d buy a few bottles here and there, always resting assured that more would be there any time he returned. “Then one day, I went back to the store and nothing was left,” he says. “I asked the owner what happened and he told me, ‘Some American guy named Alex came by and purchased all of it.’”

The article How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/japan-created-american-bourbon-market/

[johnboothus]

How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market

It was 1975 and bourbon sales in America were tanking. The brown spirit had hit its peak just five years earlier, selling some 80 million cases in 1970 — but it all went downhill from there.

Baby boomers coming of drinking age were rejecting the stuffy-seeming whiskey their parents drank, instead favoring beer, cheap wine, and, most especially, clear booze like vodka and tequila. The American whiskey industry was reeling and running out of ideas.

“This was a daunting task since the market was totally Scotch-taste oriented,” William Yuracko, then head of Schenley International’s export division, told the The New York Times in 1992. Japanese people mostly drank Scotch — the country had lifted all restrictions on imported spirits in 1969 — or their own homegrown whiskey, which was likewise based on a Scotch flavor profile. “Bourbon was unknown and a total departure from the taste pattern,” he wrote.

Remarkably, within a few short years, Yuracko (who would would become Schenley president from 1975 to 1984) and others would create a frenzy for bourbon in Japan. In fact, the country’s desire for very well-aged, high-proof, premium-packaged, limited editions and single-barrel bourbons helped Kentucky survive when the American bourbon market was dead as disco.

The U.S. would, in turn, follow Japan’s lead and, as the world entered a new millennium, start latching onto these trends and introducing products that helped revive America’s fervor for the once-humble spirit, ultimately and unwittingly turning it into something now rabidly pursued by connoisseurs the world over.

A Critical Mass of Bourbon

Yuracko first started taking reconnaissance trips to the Far East in 1972 and quickly realized that getting Scotch-swilling Japanese old-timers to switch to bourbon would be nearly impossible. He decided to instead focus his efforts on Japan’s youth, the “post-college consumer,” he told The Times, “whose tastes were not yet formed and who was attuned to Western products and ideas,” like Coca-Cola and Levi’s.

“They were having their own youth revolution, [like] what we had gone through in the ’60s they were going through in the 80s,” explains Chuck Cowdery, author and bourbon historian. “Rejecting their parents’ generation, including what their parents’ generation drank. They were open to trying something new.”

Enter bourbon. Then, as now, it was very hard for foreigners to make headway in Japanese business. Yuracko knew he’d need a local liaison, so he offered a distribution partnership with Suntory, the Japanese whiskey brand that already controlled 70 percent of the local market. Brown-Forman, another American whiskey powerhouse and Schenley’s best competitor, would eventually offer Suntory the same deal.

“I cannot overestimate the importance of the decision taken by Schenley management to place their most important brands in the same house with their major competitor,” Yuracko explained in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Business Strategy in 1992. “This would be tantamount to Ford and General Motors giving all their top models to Toyota to market in Japan.”

It was a major gamble for everyone involved. Suntory could, of course, intentionally torpedo all bourbon sales to assure Japanese whiskey would never again have a competitor; or it could favor one bourbon brand over the other. The fact was, however, neither Schenley nor Brown-Forman had much to lose. If they didn’t take the gamble, bourbon might not even exist by the end of the decade.

Suntory didn’t want to simply do a trial, either. According to Yuracko, Suntory wanted a “critical mass” of bourbon, “a product for every taste and price level … and each brand was given its own identity and market niche.” Schenley offered Suntory Ancient Age, J.W. Dant, and I.W. Harper. Brown-Forman handed over Early Times, Old Forester, and Jack Daniel’s.

Since most drinking in Japan was done outside of the home, Schenley and Brown-Forman together began setting up bourbon bars all over the country. The bars had “an unsophisticated atmosphere that would appeal to young people already attracted to American clothes, cars, and customs,” Yuracko explained, playing country music and serving American food like hamburgers and chili, and only pouring Suntory’s six bourbon brands.

Instead of buying single glasses of bourbon, young customers purchased bottles, stored in cabinets along the bars, each adorned with a neck tag denoting whose was whose. In an era before TikTok, it became a youthful challenge to see who could drink the most personal bottles. Thanks to heavy advertising from Suntory, one brand quickly began to rise above the others.

“I.W. Harper was the eye-opener,” explains Cowdery. A bottom-shelf product in America, it was naturally able to be sold at much higher prices in Japan, before Schenley eventually fully repositioned it as a premium, 12-year-old product. If it was only moving 2,000 cases internationally in 1969, I. W. Harper eventually became the largest-selling bourbon brand in Japan at more than 500,000 cases per year by 1991. Cowdery explains, “It was profitable to buy cases of I.W. Harper on [the American] wholesale market and privately ship them to Japan.”

Eventually, the U.S. had to take I.W. Harper off the market stateside in order to satisfy demand in Japan. Soon enough, other brands took notice and decided to see if they, too, could become “big in Japan.” By 1990, 2 million cases of bourbon were headed to the country every year.

More Brands Head to Japan

In a sleepy Osaka suburb, a three-story building that has been everything from a hotel to a brothel is now a bar styled like a western saloon. It serves American food like fried chicken, thumps Dylan and the Beatles on a vintage jukebox, and mixes up classic cocktails like the Mint Julep and another called the Scarlett O’Hara. This is Rogin’s Tavern in Moriguichi, a bourbon bar that opened in the 1970s that remains a shrine to Americana and its governmentally protected spirit, stocking more and arguably better bourbon than pretty much any single bar in America.

“I tasted my first bourbon in the basement bar of the Rihga Royal Hotel, a famous old place in Osaka,” claims Seiichiro Tatsumi, Rogin’s owner since 1977. He quickly became obsessed, reading everything he could about bourbon via literature provided by the American Cultural Center in Osaka. He finally visited Kentucky for the first time in 1984 and fell in love, driving its country roads, stopping at off-the-beaten path liquor stores, and acquiring numerous dusty bottles to bring back to Japan. He now owns a second home in Lexington.

Over the years, Tatsumi claims, he has probably “self-imported” some 5,000 bourbons from America back to his bar. “I stop at every place I pass, and I don’t just look on the shelves,” he says. “I ask the clerk to comb the cellar and check the storeroom for anything old. I can’t tell you how many cases of ancient bottles I’ve found that way.”

It wasn’t only Tatsumi. Japan gave these old bourbon brands a new lifeline. For example, Four Roses had long fallen out of favor with American drinkers by the 1970s. In 1967, Seagram’s turned the once-venerable brand into a dreaded blended whiskey, cut with grain neutral spirit and added flavoring.

“[B]y the time the ‘90s rolled around it was just an average blended whiskey,” the late Al Young, Four Roses’ former senior brand ambassador who worked at the company for 50 years, told VinePair contributor Nicholas Mancall-Bitel last year. But in Japan it was legitimate straight bourbon whiskey, packaged in sleek Cognac-style bottles with embossed silver roses, and it was a big hit. Just as Schenley and Brown-Forman had partnered with Suntory, in 1971 Four Roses struck up a partnership with Kirin, Japan’s top beer brand.

If brands like I.W. Harper, Four Roses, and Early Times were saved by Japan, others were specifically created for it. Blanton’s, for example, was spawned in 1984 by two former Fleischmann’s Distilling execs, Ferdie Falk and Bob Baranaskas. The two had acquired the Buffalo Trace distillery (then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery), as well as Schenley’s key bourbon, Ancient Age. Believing, like Yuracko, that the future of bourbon was overseas, they called their new company Age International.

“[T]he brand chased the profitable high-priced segment,” writes Fred Minnick in his book “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey.” In this case, that meant introducing the world’s first commercial single-barrel bourbon, specifically designed for Japan, and packaged in a now iconic grenade-shaped, horse-stoppered bottle.

Blanton’s was such a hit in Japan that by 1992 Japanese company Takara Shuzo had purchased Age International for $20 million. It immediately flipped the actual distillery to Sazerac, while retaining the brand trademarks for Blanton’s.

Aged Bourbons Claim a Price

Accustomed to Scotch, once Japanese consumers “moved onto other types of whiskey, they already had these expectations built in for 12-, 15-, 18-year age statements,” explains John Rudd, an American who formerly lived in Japan and runs the Tokyo Bourbon Bible blog.

Bourbon in America had typically been released after about four years — it got too oaky if it aged much longer, it was believed at the time — and few consumers particularly cared about lofty age statements. Not so in Japan and, luckily, the glut in America allowed many bourbon distilleries to unload what they thought was over-aged junk.

“With a depressed market in America, lots of bourbon, especially extra-aged bourbon, was shipped to Japan where it could command a higher price,” Rudd says.

There was Very Old St. Nick, specially created in 1984 for the Japanese market, some as old as 25 years. There was Old Grommes Very Very Rare Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which in the late 1980s started sending Japan bottles as old as two decades. A.H. Hirsch, aged 15, 16, and eventually 20 years, landed in Japan as early as 1989, and is still some of the most coveted bourbon of all time (so much so that Cowdery wrote an entire book about it).

Heaven Hill, today the largest family-owned and operated distillery in the U.S., specifically bottled an Evan Williams 23 for the Japanese market and created new brands like Martin Mills 24 Years.

“Japan considered bourbon a prestigious, highly coveted consumer good,” says Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey’s master distiller who started visiting Japan in the 1980s. Every year he returned with special bottlings from his company, some as old as 13 years, a lofty age that never existed in America. “Back then, you’d see private bottle programs at prestigious bars where high-level executives would have their own bottles of bourbon designated ‘my bottle.’”

Rogin’s Tavern, for one, started tapping distilleries for its own private, cask-strength bottlings. Willett provided a 25-year-old labeled “Rogin’s Choice.” Julian Van Winkle III, scion of the soon-to-come Pappy dynasty, offered a 12-year bottling. Van Winkle III, in particular, kept his nascent company afloat in the mid-1980s and onward by providing special bottlings, many under a name you could easily now call the entire Japanese whiskey marketplace: Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs.

Van Winkle III first released Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year in America in 1994; by the mid-2000s, Pappy had become the most coveted whiskey in the country, regularly selling for thousands of dollars per bottle.

“Bourbon became popular here [in America] again,” explains Rudd. “And people quit thinking it needed to be young.”

The American Bourbon Revival

America’s bourbon malaise would last nearly three decades, reaching its nadir in 2000, when a mere 32 million cases were moved stateside. Of course, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and, thanks to Japan’s example, things were already being put into place for bourbon’s homeland revival.

Like at Four Roses, where Jim Rutledge took over as master distiller in 1995 and made it his mission to get the company to start letting American consumers finally taste the high-quality bourbon Japan had been enjoying for decades. As Mancall-Bitel explained, however, “The bourbon was performing too well overseas and the company didn’t want to rock the boat — until it was rocked from within the company.”

Seagram’s collapsed and started selling off its assets. Rutledge convinced Kirin to buy Four Roses, and the eventual Japanese CEO, Teruyuki Daino, moved his offices from Tokyo back to the distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ky. By 2002, once again, Four Roses bourbon was sold in America. Today it’s one of the bourbon world’s most revered brands, introducing geek-friendly products like Single Barrel in 2004 and the Small Batch series in 2006.

Japan proved that well-aged, premium bourbon actually had a place in the world. Bourbon didn’t have to be Scotch’s economical, bottom-shelf brother. Blanton’s, when it was finally sold in America, was priced at $24 a bottle — then a massive price point — and was advertised in such upscale places as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Ivy League alumni mags. Around the same time, Japanese drinkers were gladly paying $115 per bottle.

Bourbon’s rebirth in America has caused many brands to pull back their products from the Japanese market and raise prices on the little still sent there. Japan’s taste for bourbon has dwindled. At the same time, American tourists were heading to Japan to clear shelves of old stock.

“It all corresponded with the American bourbon boom getting out of hand,” explains Rudd. He believes Japan is no longer the bourbon oasis that it once was, even as recently as 2014, when he lived near a liquor store that stocked rare bottles like Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs, gold wax A.H. Hirsch, Van Winkle 1974 Family Reserve 17 Year, and Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offerings from the early aughts.

Rudd says he’d buy a few bottles here and there, always resting assured that more would be there any time he returned. “Then one day, I went back to the store and nothing was left,” he says. “I asked the owner what happened and he told me, ‘Some American guy named Alex came by and purchased all of it.’”

The article How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/japan-created-american-bourbon-market/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/how-japan-created-the-modern-american-bourbon-market

[isaiahrippinus]

How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market

It was 1975 and bourbon sales in America were tanking. The brown spirit had hit its peak just five years earlier, selling some 80 million cases in 1970 — but it all went downhill from there.

Baby boomers coming of drinking age were rejecting the stuffy-seeming whiskey their parents drank, instead favoring beer, cheap wine, and, most especially, clear booze like vodka and tequila. The American whiskey industry was reeling and running out of ideas.

“This was a daunting task since the market was totally Scotch-taste oriented,” William Yuracko, then head of Schenley International’s export division, told the The New York Times in 1992. Japanese people mostly drank Scotch — the country had lifted all restrictions on imported spirits in 1969 — or their own homegrown whiskey, which was likewise based on a Scotch flavor profile. “Bourbon was unknown and a total departure from the taste pattern,” he wrote.

Remarkably, within a few short years, Yuracko (who would would become Schenley president from 1975 to 1984) and others would create a frenzy for bourbon in Japan. In fact, the country’s desire for very well-aged, high-proof, premium-packaged, limited editions and single-barrel bourbons helped Kentucky survive when the American bourbon market was dead as disco.

The U.S. would, in turn, follow Japan’s lead and, as the world entered a new millennium, start latching onto these trends and introducing products that helped revive America’s fervor for the once-humble spirit, ultimately and unwittingly turning it into something now rabidly pursued by connoisseurs the world over.

A Critical Mass of Bourbon

Yuracko first started taking reconnaissance trips to the Far East in 1972 and quickly realized that getting Scotch-swilling Japanese old-timers to switch to bourbon would be nearly impossible. He decided to instead focus his efforts on Japan’s youth, the “post-college consumer,” he told The Times, “whose tastes were not yet formed and who was attuned to Western products and ideas,” like Coca-Cola and Levi’s.

“They were having their own youth revolution, [like] what we had gone through in the ’60s they were going through in the 80s,” explains Chuck Cowdery, author and bourbon historian. “Rejecting their parents’ generation, including what their parents’ generation drank. They were open to trying something new.”

Enter bourbon. Then, as now, it was very hard for foreigners to make headway in Japanese business. Yuracko knew he’d need a local liaison, so he offered a distribution partnership with Suntory, the Japanese whiskey brand that already controlled 70 percent of the local market. Brown-Forman, another American whiskey powerhouse and Schenley’s best competitor, would eventually offer Suntory the same deal.

“I cannot overestimate the importance of the decision taken by Schenley management to place their most important brands in the same house with their major competitor,” Yuracko explained in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Business Strategy in 1992. “This would be tantamount to Ford and General Motors giving all their top models to Toyota to market in Japan.”

It was a major gamble for everyone involved. Suntory could, of course, intentionally torpedo all bourbon sales to assure Japanese whiskey would never again have a competitor; or it could favor one bourbon brand over the other. The fact was, however, neither Schenley nor Brown-Forman had much to lose. If they didn’t take the gamble, bourbon might not even exist by the end of the decade.

Suntory didn’t want to simply do a trial, either. According to Yuracko, Suntory wanted a “critical mass” of bourbon, “a product for every taste and price level … and each brand was given its own identity and market niche.” Schenley offered Suntory Ancient Age, J.W. Dant, and I.W. Harper. Brown-Forman handed over Early Times, Old Forester, and Jack Daniel’s.

Since most drinking in Japan was done outside of the home, Schenley and Brown-Forman together began setting up bourbon bars all over the country. The bars had “an unsophisticated atmosphere that would appeal to young people already attracted to American clothes, cars, and customs,” Yuracko explained, playing country music and serving American food like hamburgers and chili, and only pouring Suntory’s six bourbon brands.

Instead of buying single glasses of bourbon, young customers purchased bottles, stored in cabinets along the bars, each adorned with a neck tag denoting whose was whose. In an era before TikTok, it became a youthful challenge to see who could drink the most personal bottles. Thanks to heavy advertising from Suntory, one brand quickly began to rise above the others.

“I.W. Harper was the eye-opener,” explains Cowdery. A bottom-shelf product in America, it was naturally able to be sold at much higher prices in Japan, before Schenley eventually fully repositioned it as a premium, 12-year-old product. If it was only moving 2,000 cases internationally in 1969, I. W. Harper eventually became the largest-selling bourbon brand in Japan at more than 500,000 cases per year by 1991. Cowdery explains, “It was profitable to buy cases of I.W. Harper on [the American] wholesale market and privately ship them to Japan.”

Eventually, the U.S. had to take I.W. Harper off the market stateside in order to satisfy demand in Japan. Soon enough, other brands took notice and decided to see if they, too, could become “big in Japan.” By 1990, 2 million cases of bourbon were headed to the country every year.

More Brands Head to Japan

In a sleepy Osaka suburb, a three-story building that has been everything from a hotel to a brothel is now a bar styled like a western saloon. It serves American food like fried chicken, thumps Dylan and the Beatles on a vintage jukebox, and mixes up classic cocktails like the Mint Julep and another called the Scarlett O’Hara. This is Rogin’s Tavern in Moriguichi, a bourbon bar that opened in the 1970s that remains a shrine to Americana and its governmentally protected spirit, stocking more and arguably better bourbon than pretty much any single bar in America.

“I tasted my first bourbon in the basement bar of the Rihga Royal Hotel, a famous old place in Osaka,” claims Seiichiro Tatsumi, Rogin’s owner since 1977. He quickly became obsessed, reading everything he could about bourbon via literature provided by the American Cultural Center in Osaka. He finally visited Kentucky for the first time in 1984 and fell in love, driving its country roads, stopping at off-the-beaten path liquor stores, and acquiring numerous dusty bottles to bring back to Japan. He now owns a second home in Lexington.

Over the years, Tatsumi claims, he has probably “self-imported” some 5,000 bourbons from America back to his bar. “I stop at every place I pass, and I don’t just look on the shelves,” he says. “I ask the clerk to comb the cellar and check the storeroom for anything old. I can’t tell you how many cases of ancient bottles I’ve found that way.”

It wasn’t only Tatsumi. Japan gave these old bourbon brands a new lifeline. For example, Four Roses had long fallen out of favor with American drinkers by the 1970s. In 1967, Seagram’s turned the once-venerable brand into a dreaded blended whiskey, cut with grain neutral spirit and added flavoring.

“[B]y the time the ‘90s rolled around it was just an average blended whiskey,” the late Al Young, Four Roses’ former senior brand ambassador who worked at the company for 50 years, told VinePair contributor Nicholas Mancall-Bitel last year. But in Japan it was legitimate straight bourbon whiskey, packaged in sleek Cognac-style bottles with embossed silver roses, and it was a big hit. Just as Schenley and Brown-Forman had partnered with Suntory, in 1971 Four Roses struck up a partnership with Kirin, Japan’s top beer brand.

If brands like I.W. Harper, Four Roses, and Early Times were saved by Japan, others were specifically created for it. Blanton’s, for example, was spawned in 1984 by two former Fleischmann’s Distilling execs, Ferdie Falk and Bob Baranaskas. The two had acquired the Buffalo Trace distillery (then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery), as well as Schenley’s key bourbon, Ancient Age. Believing, like Yuracko, that the future of bourbon was overseas, they called their new company Age International.

“[T]he brand chased the profitable high-priced segment,” writes Fred Minnick in his book “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey.” In this case, that meant introducing the world’s first commercial single-barrel bourbon, specifically designed for Japan, and packaged in a now iconic grenade-shaped, horse-stoppered bottle.

Blanton’s was such a hit in Japan that by 1992 Japanese company Takara Shuzo had purchased Age International for $20 million. It immediately flipped the actual distillery to Sazerac, while retaining the brand trademarks for Blanton’s.

Aged Bourbons Claim a Price

Accustomed to Scotch, once Japanese consumers “moved onto other types of whiskey, they already had these expectations built in for 12-, 15-, 18-year age statements,” explains John Rudd, an American who formerly lived in Japan and runs the Tokyo Bourbon Bible blog.

Bourbon in America had typically been released after about four years — it got too oaky if it aged much longer, it was believed at the time — and few consumers particularly cared about lofty age statements. Not so in Japan and, luckily, the glut in America allowed many bourbon distilleries to unload what they thought was over-aged junk.

“With a depressed market in America, lots of bourbon, especially extra-aged bourbon, was shipped to Japan where it could command a higher price,” Rudd says.

There was Very Old St. Nick, specially created in 1984 for the Japanese market, some as old as 25 years. There was Old Grommes Very Very Rare Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which in the late 1980s started sending Japan bottles as old as two decades. A.H. Hirsch, aged 15, 16, and eventually 20 years, landed in Japan as early as 1989, and is still some of the most coveted bourbon of all time (so much so that Cowdery wrote an entire book about it).

Heaven Hill, today the largest family-owned and operated distillery in the U.S., specifically bottled an Evan Williams 23 for the Japanese market and created new brands like Martin Mills 24 Years.

“Japan considered bourbon a prestigious, highly coveted consumer good,” says Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey’s master distiller who started visiting Japan in the 1980s. Every year he returned with special bottlings from his company, some as old as 13 years, a lofty age that never existed in America. “Back then, you’d see private bottle programs at prestigious bars where high-level executives would have their own bottles of bourbon designated ‘my bottle.’”

Rogin’s Tavern, for one, started tapping distilleries for its own private, cask-strength bottlings. Willett provided a 25-year-old labeled “Rogin’s Choice.” Julian Van Winkle III, scion of the soon-to-come Pappy dynasty, offered a 12-year bottling. Van Winkle III, in particular, kept his nascent company afloat in the mid-1980s and onward by providing special bottlings, many under a name you could easily now call the entire Japanese whiskey marketplace: Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs.

Van Winkle III first released Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year in America in 1994; by the mid-2000s, Pappy had become the most coveted whiskey in the country, regularly selling for thousands of dollars per bottle.

“Bourbon became popular here [in America] again,” explains Rudd. “And people quit thinking it needed to be young.”

The American Bourbon Revival

America’s bourbon malaise would last nearly three decades, reaching its nadir in 2000, when a mere 32 million cases were moved stateside. Of course, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and, thanks to Japan’s example, things were already being put into place for bourbon’s homeland revival.

Like at Four Roses, where Jim Rutledge took over as master distiller in 1995 and made it his mission to get the company to start letting American consumers finally taste the high-quality bourbon Japan had been enjoying for decades. As Mancall-Bitel explained, however, “The bourbon was performing too well overseas and the company didn’t want to rock the boat — until it was rocked from within the company.”

Seagram’s collapsed and started selling off its assets. Rutledge convinced Kirin to buy Four Roses, and the eventual Japanese CEO, Teruyuki Daino, moved his offices from Tokyo back to the distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ky. By 2002, once again, Four Roses bourbon was sold in America. Today it’s one of the bourbon world’s most revered brands, introducing geek-friendly products like Single Barrel in 2004 and the Small Batch series in 2006.

Japan proved that well-aged, premium bourbon actually had a place in the world. Bourbon didn’t have to be Scotch’s economical, bottom-shelf brother. Blanton’s, when it was finally sold in America, was priced at $24 a bottle — then a massive price point — and was advertised in such upscale places as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Ivy League alumni mags. Around the same time, Japanese drinkers were gladly paying $115 per bottle.

Bourbon’s rebirth in America has caused many brands to pull back their products from the Japanese market and raise prices on the little still sent there. Japan’s taste for bourbon has dwindled. At the same time, American tourists were heading to Japan to clear shelves of old stock.

“It all corresponded with the American bourbon boom getting out of hand,” explains Rudd. He believes Japan is no longer the bourbon oasis that it once was, even as recently as 2014, when he lived near a liquor store that stocked rare bottles like Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs, gold wax A.H. Hirsch, Van Winkle 1974 Family Reserve 17 Year, and Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offerings from the early aughts.

Rudd says he’d buy a few bottles here and there, always resting assured that more would be there any time he returned. “Then one day, I went back to the store and nothing was left,” he says. “I asked the owner what happened and he told me, ‘Some American guy named Alex came by and purchased all of it.’”

The article How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/japan-created-american-bourbon-market/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/191000805079

[brainvalve-blog]

An Early Eulogy for Text-Based Social Media

Chatting

Social Media, as a method of sharing our lives with others, has almost always been text-based. Before the internet, we shared their lives with distant friends and relatives through written letters. we would declare major life updates, crises, and events through local bulletin boards at the center of town, or through the local newspapers. Sure, we would sometimes share our albums with friends, but those pictures and home videos were never the core message.

Arguably, it was text which created the modern distinction between “direct” social media (sharing your life directly to someone) and “indirect” social media, where we post in a public space for others to view on their own time. Before text, sharing one’s life had to be in the moment of speech--sound couldn’t just stay in the air and wait until someone came along to hear it. Major announcements required town criers and scheduled gatherings where everyone could hear it at once. England still has them, for royal births.

Imagine Tweeting, except this man would scream it at your neighborhood

Text, though, offered a way to hold onto information through time, separating direct from indirect social media. This lineage remains in our jargon, even as we leave pen and pencil behind: You don’t “post” a text or SnapChat to a friend, but you do “post” something to your Tumblr or Facebook in the same way that hundreds to thousands of years ago, one would quite literally post an announcement or update on the town notice board.

Even as the digital revolution came, we shared our lives through text: Direct social media of letters transitioned into digital text in the form of the first email sent in 1971. This would be done more instantaneously and portably when the first mobile text message would be sent in 1992. And, since we’re on Tumblr, we should acknowledge the digital transition of indirect social media through the first blog’s creation in 1994. 

Blogging as a form of social media--the almost diary-like blog posts we used to demeaningly attribute to middle aged adults who weren’t cool, hip or young enough to transition to MySpace or Facebook--would hit its peak near the early 2000′s, prompting a response from Facebook in the form of Facebook Notes in 2006. Tumblr itself would launch later in 2007, presumably to ride in on the popularity of the new medium.

But really, though our generation made fun of the quaint, long-form text-based social media of a blogpost, we weren’t too far off. MySpace and Facebook, which launched in 2003 and 2004, respectively, was a distillation and centralization of the fundamentals of text-based social media. If we begin the evolution of (digital) text-based indirect social media with blogs, then Facebook was its next logical step: A place for us to post shortened text and accompanying picture to notify others of what we thought were important in our lives. A vacation. A new dog. A birthday.The only real difference between the blog of the stay-at-home and our own cool-kids Facebook post was that ours was shorter, and confined to our friends instead of the general internet.

In an odd coincidence, 2006 was also the year that Twitter launched. If Facebook was a distillation of the blog, then Twitter was the bare essence of Facebook. The purest form of text-based social media. Before its implementation of picture-embedding in 2011, Twitter was, in essence, a 140-character blog. It caught on like wildfire, much as Facebook had before it. 

Though pundits, alarmed at this trend and increasingly bemoaning the perceived growing impatience of newer generations, they only really saw the decrease in the length of text involved in social interactions: Kids aren’t reading books! They’re too stuck to short Facebook posts, Tweets, and text messages!

The fact remained, however, that the cornerstone of social interaction was still text in the 2000’s: The legendary all-consuming texting sprees between youth was a long-running joke for our parents and a reality for us involved. Apart from the occasional photos, the way we chose to share our lives with others--whether more indirectly in a Facebook post, or more directly in an IM/Facebook chat/text message--was based on written text. A whole new sub-language formed around this use of text, with ASCII emojis like :) or >:O, abbreviations like lol, lmao, wtf. To anyone who doubts the text-heavy focus of 2000’s social media, one only needs to look at the massive phone industry push for full QWERTY keyboards to support our voracious appetite for typing. QWERTY keyboards on phones far predated ease of internet surfing on phones--the massive texting marathons of our childhood days could be the only cause.

We had jumped into a digital age, but we still weren’t all that far removed from the handwritten letters of our parents. Now it was just faster. More streamlined. Perhaps with more profanity and memes. But still, in the end, text. Back in those days of furiously typing texts between multiple different friend groups, long-winded Facebook posts and comment threads, and nearly daily status posts from friends, social media then didn’t kill text--social media was the peak of text. At no previous point in history was the collective populace generating, exchanging, or consuming so much text. Perhaps it wasn’t Shakespeare, but our gradeschool dramas were getting pretty close.

SnapChatting

Time skip to the present day. A mind-boggling 1.4 billion people still use Facebook daily. Twitter and Tumblr  don’t release daily active user data, but Twitter still outputs 300 million tweets daily while Tumblr outputs 30 million blogposts a day.

And yet, open your Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitters. And try to remember what they looked like in the 2000′s, if you had an account then. How much of your feed is now pictures, videos, and GIF’s? How many posts or messages do you see nowadays that is actually only text? Instead, how many messages do you see that have a picture or video attached with it?

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As popularity is only measured by user count and not what they share or use, it is hard to track the exact decline of the text-based social media. However, we can track the rise of audiovisual-based social media as a proxy: Even if one contests that people are using text less as a medium of communication, we can’t deny the invasion of videos and images on the feed, and we can most definitely see ourselves pull out our smartphones not to hit the Facebook app, but Snapchat or Instagram instead.

And by making a timeline of site/app launch dates, we can construct a timeline of the rise of text-based social media and the rise of audiovisual-based social media which followed: Text-based social media launched in its own cluster: MySpace launched in 2003, followed by Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and Tumblr in 2007. 

Then 4 years passed, and a new cluster: Kik launched in 2010, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, and Twitch.tv (more on that later) in 2011.

And, like a rash in response, perhaps alarmed at the rapid rise of Snapchat and Instagram, another cluster from 2013 to 2016: This time of Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr adapting to be more audiovisual-focused, introducing many of the features that distinguished the audiovisual social media that launched 2010-2011.

This is why earlier, I referred to the 2000’s as the peak of text: By the turn of the decade, the horsemen of the apocalypse had arrived...and stayed. And grew. Even the old champions of text, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, had changed since. The millionth embedded video of cute dogs and memes are testament to the horsemen’s coming.

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A few years ago, when I told my little sister, only 3 years younger than me, that I didn’t have Snapchat or Instagram, she said “What?” in the way that I used to when my parents asked what Facebook was. She barely uses Facebook anymore. When I asked a few of my friends with younger siblings, they also reported that they either didn’t use Facebook at all, or mostly used Snapchat or Instagram. I’m sure that you’ve heard similar stories.

It’s not just anecdotal. ComScore, a giant digital media analytics company, releases annual reports analyzing the latest trends in consumption of everything from TV to social media. They collaborate with other companies to do a big panel on this kind of information that you can find here. In their 2018 report, they reported the following statistics about age demographics of various social media sites:

The picture doesn’t scale down very well, but the numbers tell a clear story: Only 25% of Facebook’s users are in the 16-24 age group, and about 55% are between 16 to 34. Meanwhile, Snapchat sits at 57% of users in the 16-24 range, and what seems to be near 80% of users between 16-34. 80%. Below 34. Sheesh. Kik, another app anecdotally popular with newer generations, shares remarkably similar user age demographics to Snapchat. The fact that it’s a messaging app doesn’t necessarily mean the saving of text: Kik’s youth usage (50% <34) is notably higher than other messaging apps like Messenger (35% <34), Whatsapp (31% <34), probably due to Kik’s combination of anonymity with its base integration of pictures, videos, and embedding of said visual media compared to the aforementioned text-focused messaging apps. Even a quick browse through Tumblr, boasting very similar user age demographics to Instagram, will reveal the majority of the posts on the “blog” site to be more audiovisual than text.

We can only wonder what the user age demographics for Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter would have become had they not implemented audiovisual media features from 2013-2016.

We shouldn’t be surprised. If the purpose of social media is to share your life with others, isn’t the audiovisual medium, therefore, the pinnacle of efficient social media? Instead of writing an essay of how your day looked, felt, and what you did, a 5 second Snapchat video will convey all that and more. A text Facebook status, at its best, leaves 99% of the work to your audiences’ imagination in recreating context. An image or video, meanwhile, is your life, no recreation required. In this way, SnapChat has risen to the occasion for direct social media, whereas Instagram has risen for indirect social media.

The youth may not always be right, but maybe without intending to, they are simply flocking to more efficient modes of social media communication, the same way our generation moved from the physical letters of our parents to text messaging and to Facebook.

A picture is worth a thousand words. And a thousand words is inefficient.

Stream Chatting

An IRL livestream on Twitch.tv

Video as a digital medium is nothing new: Youtube launched in 2005, and it has seen an explosive growth, with the combined number of views for the top 5 videos of each year going from 400 million in 2005 to 1.53 billion in 2006 to an unfathomable 12.88 billion views in 2017, officially surpassing the total human population of the world. 

However, the videos responsible for Youtube’s early growth could moreso be categorized as amateur recreations of pre-existing video genres: Lectures, critiques, reviews, original theatrical content. But underneath the unparalleled popularity of music videos (accounting for almost every most viewed videos every year), video blogging (”vlogging”) has been becoming more and more popular. 

The most successful (and controversial), Jake Paul of the Paul brothers, easily boasts 2+ million views per vlog on Youtube, with his more popular videos breaking 9 million views. Even as Tumblr and Wordpress continue to grow, the sudden and rapid gain in popularity of vlogging cannot be ignored.

And in 2011, vlogging saw itself evolve once again.

In 2011, Twitch.tv launched, and made live-streaming efficient and accessible the same why Youtube did for standard videos in 2005. 

Not streaming in the sense of one streaming a Netflix movie, but a livestream involving thousands, if not sometimes millions of concurrent viewers tuning in at a time to watch and interact with their favorite streamer as the streamer does everything from playing games to going about their daily lives (the latter now called “IRL” streams). There are 15 million daily active viewers as of 2018, which only keeps growing as livestreaming, like any other new media, grows, expands, and matures in producing unique content. Twitch.tv’s pressure is evident in just how many other platforms quickly implemented live-streaming features, even in the home of vlogging: Youtube.

It is much more difficult to get demographics data for Youtube or Twitch streaming (as that information is only available to the content creator or streamer), but it is widely understood in both communities that the most popular streams are fueled by the young, mostly under the age of 20. If you are inclined to search Youtube, there are videos aplenty of other streamers or content creators bemoaning how younger viewers are somehow unfairly boosting the popularity of other streams. Whether it is fair or not that the youth have so much say in the streaming world is debatable, but the widespread debate is still based on the assumption that the youth are largely backing the latest evolution in the audiovisual-based social media.

If this word-of-mouth assumption were to be true, it should not be any more surprising than SnapChat’s user age demographics. In many ways, live-streaming video is the pinnacle of social media, its core intent made manifest: It’s not just a direct, real-time sharing of one’s life to others, but Twitch and now Youtube both have live chat fields for interaction with their audiences. Snapchat lets you share seconds of your life. Live-streaming shares entire hours of yourself. 

Live-streaming’s greater demand on the time and resources of the content creator (compared to the seconds it takes to generate a Snap) may keep the number of creators from exploding the same way Youtube’s channels did. Even so, as the number of viewers grow, it might not matter.

Over My Dead Body Paragraph

It should be made clear that text in social media is not dead, nor will die. Kik still has text messaging, and the vast majority of Snaps still have some text on it. Even that 10000th dog video on your feed probably has a burgeoning meme-filled comment section. Twitch.tv’s chat is still text-based. With 1.4 billion daily active users, Facebook still outpaces Snapchat’s 186 million and Instagram’s 500 million daily active users. Even memes, GIF’s, and video loops would not be nearly so effective without text. 

And yet, the numbers don’t lie. Even as Facebook continues to grow, audiovisual social media like Snapchat’s meteoric rise in popularity with the younger generations should be heeded as the swell before the wave. 

Facebook and Twitter seems to have definitely done so, with the addition of new audiovisual-heavy features as mentioned before. Though the text-based social media giants have survived in the literal sense, their focus has changed, as evident in how they present themselves to the world:

Facebook, from 2007 to 2018, has shifted from sharing raw information to marketing itself as photos first and foremost, with no longer any explicit mention of “information.”

Even for Tumblr, a blog, the successor to the direct progenitor of text-based social media, shows just how far even blogs have come from the text-filled diary-like blogs of yesteryear. These are login screens, also from 2007 and 2018:

And what exactly, does a blog look like anymore, according to Tumblr?

Only Twitter remains aloof and vague, remaining closer to its text-based roots than the others.

And our very expectation of what social media is has changed, too--like the chicken or the egg, maybe Tumblr and Facebook have so drastically rebranded themselves to match what consumers today expect social media sites to be able to do. When Facebook added GIF support in 2015, it was met with exasperated “FINALLY”s by tech commentators, instead of “cool!”. Twitter’s photo limit increase was met with impatience, not excitement. And we betray this paradigm shift within ourselves in how we use social media today. 

The wave is already here. We are it.

A Full Circle. Almost.

“GATHER AROUND AND LISTEN YE TO THE TALES OF MY SHOPPING TRIPPE”

As tempting as it is to scowl as the social media torch passes from text to the audiovisual, we should remember that the context of social media goes even further back. Text isn’t where social media started. Far from it.

As noted in the very beginning, all text really did was allow information to pass more indirectly; direct social media had been audiovisual long before humans wrote. Even when written language was developed, sharing of one’s life to others remained an oral tradition even out of the BCE’s until widespread literacy was achieved very recently. Even still, through the rise of books, letters, text messages, emails, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitch, the deeply personal and direct oral foundation of social media never died: It remains today in the form of the family dinner table, where close people convene to share their lives over food and drink. It lives on around the cubicle corner where pregnancies are declared, pipe leaks are complained of, and sports is discussed in person. 

It revives every time you make the conscious decision to hold off telling your friend something until you decide to meet them next in person, or whenever you wait an extra week or two to see a movie together with a friend at the same theater.

After all, even the most eloquently worded text status or text message to your friend cannot match actually seeing and hearing that friend. 

In this context, perhaps text wasn’t so high and mighty after all, but in a certain interpretation, a devolution. Remember your childhood friends, separated now by long distance. Text and post as you may, it will never compare to being together in the same space, directly sharing an experience. In many ways, text is a cruel and limited distillation of the human action of social interaction, leading to misunderstandings and frustration at having to write so much what could be conveyed in a few words and a gesture. It is undeniably useful, when faced with the alternative of nothing at all, but in retrospect, it’s odd we ever thought it sufficient for social media.

The shift to the audiovisual format alleviates this somewhat--instead of trying to imagine how a friend is doing, we can see their face, at least, and see how their surroundings have changed. As a social medium, and from a humanistic perspective, I think it’s hard to cling onto text as some bastion of civilized interaction. Keep text for academia, but human socializing shouldn’t be restrained to words alone.

..and yet, memes about millenials’ inability to socialize in public aside, never forget that modern social media itself is a crutch, only a half-decent bastardized replacement for actually being with somebody else. Maybe instead of pining for the olden glory days of text, or worrying about how good the lighting looks in our latest Snap, we should remember the reason we’re on it in the first place and take a moment to hug the ones we care about while we still physically can. 

Don’t just share your life to others. Focus on sharing your life with others.