#All a matter of perspective

[bluewithpurplepolkadots]

Positive: This time next week the interview will be well behind me no matter what happens.

Negative: In less than a week I have an interview.

[inkpotsprite]

Jason (buried underground): *panic, clawing, digging, catatonia*

Dick: *sings the beatles*

[cosmicspaceslug]

thinking about Philomena Cunk describing WWI as history’s largest recorded instance of football-related violence

[orandzus]

Day 3 of Cube-Tober 2024: Pet

Prompts by @lukasdoodles

I really wanted to draw Lukas with Dewey, will probably draw them more in the future

[borgialucrezia]

— If you create us a kingdom, we will write the book of our future. The future of the Church, of the world we live in will be ours, yours, and your children's. You say nothing? Why do you think we wished you a cardinal? So you would be Pope one day. Carve us out a kingdom, Cesare, and be both king and pope. I am stunned into silence.

[stopthefeeling]

When we get all alone I'll make myself at home And he'll want me to stay

[deancasforcutie]

still chasing the high of that halcyon age where Supernatural was my healthy safe escape from the horrors of US politics, and then

[canisalbus]

you say machete has to be closeted then why's he always wearing them little heels

Maybe he thinks he's a tiny bit nicer looking in them.

[southern--downpour]

save the cat

( @comicaurora )

[jaundicity]

these content creators who brag and boast about "knowing more" than george himself know nothing. you're not the author. you're not the creator. you didn't come up with all these ideas about westeros and the targaryens and the seven kingdoms in the fuckin' 90s or whenever, because real talk, you never did.

that was all george. that's his work, and he has the right to criticize whoever's handling his work in such a way. at the end of the day, those are his characters and his world that #they are decimating. you'd be mad too if some rando came in and basically shat on everything you put your hard work and soul into and then had people come after you for not agreeing with the adaption.

[eobe]

why do you whitewash all your clone art

Dear Anon,

thank you for asking 🫶 I love Temuera Morrison and I want to improve my skill until I feel ready to honor his work 🤩

Until then I‘ll do the beautifully and diligently designed animation style because I honor the artist team and love what they made ☺️

I rather focus on enjoying this diverse and colorful universe and I don’t support separation in the name of an important topic that should actually be a uniting one 🫶✨

Only my own opinion, I‘m only one of the whole, so are you 🤷🏽‍♀️ Who am I to judge or even to tell 🫶

[shannonsketches]

[royalarchivist]

Etoiles: Oh, finally we had a funny moment in Purgatory, let's go. Oh, let's go! One week of wait to have a funny moment.

Roier always knows the best way to diffuse a tense situation.

[cissa-calls]

In anticipation of the finale, there are two wolves inside me right now:

1. The hope that it is a gritty, raw opening of love, grief and reflecting on oneself as an individual identity and group. Something poetic about death, longing, memory, and the continuation or breaking of cycles of trauma. However, though it is something that is definitely tear jerking (sob jerking moreso), it is not gratuitously sad to the point that it falls directly into the sapphic trope of tragic love, but still is a testament to the time and trials these witches have faced as outcasts. Answers to questions of what does it mean to want? To long? (And it’s inherent power as they near the end of the witches road and their prizes are within grasp). Is it the pursuit that is most poignant, or the result?

2. The secret and entirely unrealistic hope that it ends with the coven all reuniting! Agatha gets her powers back, Tommy is found, and a resolution about Nick is reached. Agatha and Rio fall madly in love again and live out their days in sapphic cottage core bliss with Señor Scratchy. Rio reaps souls and Agatha practices magic and gets therapy for the Evanora trauma of it all. They all have weekly coven dinners and even though they all nearly kill each other several times during the meal, wow they’re a found family with a space to freely expressly themselves (not without judgement…they still love to judge each other, but without condemnation). Agatha can’t cook and nearly burns the building down, Lilia and Jen question that out of all mortals, why did Rio pick this one? Rio is like: I’m a divine being, so I don’t need to eat (Agatha kicks her under the table)…and because I love her. Most of the time. Is this silly and only realistic in the realm of fan fiction? Absolutely, but let me live, I already KNOW these last two episodes are going to WRECK me (if episode 7 was anything to go by…)

Either way, I hope to see Agatha and Rio ending the series as it began: beating the ever loving, mother frickin CRAP outta each other. No holding back, just an all out brawl that makes Lucille and Edith’s showdown at the end of Crimson Peak look like child’s play. Nothing says I love you like cutthroat combat <3

[isthatacalzone]

it's baffling to me the lengths to which people will try to frame anyone in iwtv as being better than anyone else. everyone who says they love each other is doing it poorly. Lestat apologised to Louis on that stage and it was real and it was also a performance. Armand feels genuine remorse for not saving Claudia, claims that he couldn't prevent it but we all know he could have. Louis loved Claudia and wanted the best for her, and she was a broken doll picked up and used to soothe his guilt. Even Claudia, who did love Louis, has a specific view of everything that happened to them, to her, that made her messy, that made her angry and awful at times. why would you flatten them? why would you take away what makes these emotions real and complicated?

[joons]

This may be a prickly subject, and I'm sorry if so. But I'm trying to learn more about Elvis, and every time I bring him up to people I know, they try to tell me he was this terrible person, and point me toward Priscilla's book, the movie made on it, and the discourse. Idk if you've talked about it on here (I tried searching your blog but couldn't find anything on it). If you're willing, I'd love to hear your take on it so I can see a more nuanced view.

The film Priscilla was greenlit roughly a month after Priscilla herself was informed that she was close to becoming financially insolvent in 2022. With a business partner, Brigitte Kruse, who allegedly helped broker the film deal, she established a limited liability company called Priscilla Presley Partners that was supposed to use her image and likeness to create several lines of merchandise to coincide with the film's release. That business partner is now suing Priscilla because she did not have the rights to her image or likeness, or any ability to use the Presley name, because she had already sold all of those rights and was no longer considered in good standing with Graceland or Elvis Presley Enterprises. The entire business deal, then, according to the lawsuit, was built on her misrepresentation of how much her image was worth.

The deal between the two of them fell apart after Riley Keough, Lisa Marie's daughter and Priscilla's granddaughter, settled with Priscilla to give her a lump sum of $1 million from Lisa Marie's estate and yearly amounts of $100,000. Priscilla sued very shortly after Lisa Marie's death because she thought Lisa Marie's signature on a will had been forged because Priscilla was not included in it. All of the assets were supposed to go directly to Lisa Marie's son, Benjamin Keough, who died in 2020, and her three daughters, two of whom are still teenagers. Now, part of those assets have been claimed by Priscilla and her other son, Navarone, who has no connection to the Presley family and has stated he is glad Lisa died.

Four months before Lisa's death, Lisa wrote to Sofia Coppola and made it clear she had strong concerns about the Priscilla film and was suspicious of the intentions behind it:

"As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father. ... I will be forced to be in a position where I will have to openly say how I feel about the film and go against you, my mother and this film publicly."

Lisa was enormously grateful for efforts put into 2022's Elvis to find her father's soul and to restore his dignity in a world that often turns him and his family into a joke:

"You can feel and witness Baz’s pure love, care, and respect for my father throughout this beautiful film, and it is finally something that myself and my children and their children can be proud of forever."

It is such a strong and powerful statement, to see how much Lisa valued family, not just her father but her own children and their legacy, and how willing she was to speak up no matter what was going on in her personal life to say what was right. On this and many other things, Lisa and Priscilla's values have rarely been in alignment. A friend and EPE business associate, Joel Weinshanker, said of her, "Lisa couldn't be bought, she couldn't be pushed. If she felt that something wasn't in Elvis' best interest, it was never about money. And she really is the only Presley that you could say that about."

Priscilla, though, has adjusted her stories about her time with Elvis almost every time she discusses it. For a quick example, she said in her book, which was released in 1985, that Elvis insisted she do her hair and makeup a certain way, that he had control over her look and would get upset if she didn't dress how he wanted. But in an interview with Ladies' Home Journal in 1973, she said that she made a deliberate choice to attend makeup school so that she could learn how to style herself, and that it was her idea to wear big, black hair and big, black eyeliner. She said she was embarrassed for going overboard. She said, "I wish that Elvis had said something, but he must have liked it because he never commented." This lines up with recollections from Patti Parry, a platonic friend of Elvis' and a hairstylist, who said Priscilla always wanted Patti to do her hair in a "big boombah," but that Priscilla would then get upset when Elvis didn't notice or didn't like it.

These changes are impossible not to notice if you follow her for any length of time. At the film premiere, she said it felt just like watching her life and said she was consulted on everything, since she was an executive producer. After the film came out, she said she couldn't understand why Coppola had changed so much about the story and misrepresented events. In the '70s, she said she and Elvis lived almost totally separate lives, that she came and went as she pleased, and that she loved this freedom. Later, she said she felt completely stifled and trapped and never left the house, even though she had friends she went out with all the time. In 2019, she tweeted a forceful denial about a National Enquirer story: "This is the Enquirer folks... please don't believe everything you read. ... Never planned on being buried next to Elvis. What will they come up with next?" But part of her settlement demands in her lawsuit against Riley in 2023 asked "to be buried next to Elvis." This year, she said in two separate interviews that Lisa was with her when Elvis died and that Priscilla had to break the news to her, despite the fact that Lisa was at Graceland when it happened. She has said she gave Elvis the idea to wear belts on his jumpsuits, to have a lightning bolt as his logo, to sing "An American Trilogy," though none of that is true. She retells the story about forcing Elvis to burn all of his spiritual books to prove he loved her as an almost funny anecdote about debrainwashing him, while Elvis later said it was the worst thing he ever agreed to, a desperate attempt to make her happy by giving up the things he valued the most. (For the record, this is my opinion about their relationship on both sides: thinking they could change themselves and each other to make it work. It never did.)

Every secondhand Elvis account has to be treated lightly and only valued for its consistency with known facts and other witnesses. I try to give enormous benefit of the doubt to anyone in the Elvis world because they often only have partial knowledge of what Elvis may have been thinking at any given time, and there are numerous examples of people who were taken advantage of by unscrupulous journalists who changed the story they wanted to tell. But Priscilla's stories sometimes are not even consistent with her own statements, which makes them very poor options indeed to base anything on. However careful we are about noting potential biases and inaccuracies in other memoirs, we have to be triply, quadruply careful with anything in which Priscilla involves herself because she has a vested interest in generating discourse today in order to make money. Unfortunately, Priscilla has a habit of stifling other accounts or making sensationalized statements each time there is a possibility that she will lose some of the cachet that comes with being an Elvis Source—after Elvis' death, when she believed she was going to inherit his airplane and disinvited everyone that Vernon said could fly in it to his funeral; when she sued the parents of one of Elvis' ex-girlfriends after he died because he had allowed them to live rent-free in a house he bought for them; when she claimed that Elvis wanted to reunite with her before his death, despite the fact that he was engaged to someone else and told many people he couldn't see a reunion ever happening with her; before Vernon's death, when she convinced him to make her an executor of the Presley estate until Lisa came of age; after Lisa came of age, when she convinced Lisa to let her stay on as partner; when Lisa accused Priscilla of misspending Lisa's money, during which time anonymous sources cropped up to say Lisa was in debt and drug-addled; when Priscilla was removed from her position as an EPE spokesperson but kept collecting $900,000 a year from the company; when Lisa died, and Priscilla sued once she learned she wasn't in the will; when Priscilla was no longer associated with EPE and decided to do another adaptation of a book that she has since recanted parts of and has contradicted before and after its release.

When Priscilla thinks there is a threat to her image and position, she does new interviews and projects to muddy the waters and stir public interest, whether it is true or false, positive or negative, laudatory or defamatory. She gets corrected by Elvis' surviving family members, girlfriends, friends, and fans, but these stories do not get the same reach no matter how much they are backed by contemporaneous documents and witnesses, or how many resources there are to educate the public on how Elvis' and Priscilla's attitudes about marriage and relationships changed—along with the rest of society—between 1960 and 1970.

I think almost any single-source project is not going to advance our understanding of Elvis in any way because no one individual can speak for him, and we are kind of obligated to include all the context we can in order to appreciate his character, his successes and failures, flaws and virtues—and to treat both himself and those around him as fully three-dimensional people who have their own blind spots. Priscilla is far too aware of her own image, and far too willing to change it to suit the audience, to be particularly valuable here.

She is next scheduled to appear at the Lexington (Kentucky) Comic & Toy Con.