#Averno musical

[drondskaath]

Saevus Finis | Facilis Descensus Averno | 2024

Portuguese Death Metal

Artwork by Pedro Mau

[porcelainvino]

i don’t think i like music anymore 😭

[atripandahalf]

cw// averno

--

if anyone has any recordings of any of the old (now lost) averno songs - specifically the dazed album - could you please send it to me? i'm working on a project but all the averno content seems to have been purged from the internet, which i fully support but is also frustrating from a collection standpoint!

[dykerightsmp3]

every time I see people posting about that musical theater TikTok cult I have to remember the time I was friends with their third and she spent the entire year we were friends being like “they were actually fine they were just victims of cancel culture on our college campus🥰”. and then a WEEK after we stopped being friends the Averno google doc dropped. and then also we found out they all fucked in a tent in the common room. Absolute loss of the plot

[scentedinksandwhackedseals]

I was just thinking about the averno lyrics

“If you were lonely give it up cause here we are/ This is the kind of love that doesn’t break your heart”

versus the boygenius lyrics

“You could absolutely break my heart/ That’s how I know that we’re in love”

when, in bittersummer, the averno musical, that love does end up breaking the main character’s heart when all his friends leave him behind. when the boys are still friends after all these years, when they haven’t broken each other’s hearts, when they’re still together, still a band, still breaking everyone’s hearts in the best way. when averno did break my heart and the hearts of so many people while the boys have only healed all of our hearts and made us feel seen.

the love of friendship can break your heart just as much as romantic love can because it’s just as powerful. admission of vulnerability does not doom a relationship, in fact it can strengthen it.

anyway.

[dyketennant]

about to go to an mfa reading featuring the person who created averno (that cult-like universe of musicals that turned out to be really shitty) do y’all want anything while i’m out

[ao3-kintou]

Hi there! I love all of your writing- especially homesick, which is my ultimate comfort fic. I read it whenever I'm feeling burnt out and sad, and it gently rocks me back to a balanced state. I was looking through your posts, and I can see that you're really inspired by poets, writers, and other literature. I'm curious about what inspires you from other mediums- music, visual art, performance, etc. What are other places you pull from?

Hello! Thank you so much for your ask 😊 Writing Homesick got me through my burn out, so I completely understand. I hope those feelings will pass soon.

I really am! I think that I’ve named a few of the important ones but a musician that inspired me the most is Ichiko Aoba.

For Homesick I read a lot of more traditional Japanese poems, like Bashō, and I really learned to love them (&these days I even write some of my own poems around them). Then there’s amazing women writing about life (emotions, nature, tradition) like Louise Glück (Averno, winter recipes from a collective, a village life etc), Mary Oliver of course and Ada Limón (:

For prose I loved reading The eight mountains (there’s a movie for it too now) while writing! Recently I was very inspired by Giovanni’s room but it’s quite sad (I got upset while reading it).

Then I love the filmmaker Naomi Kawase, especially her works with her grandma in it like: Sky, wind, fire, water, earth & Katatsumori.

Then recently I’ve loved shows that are about silently cooking, or cooking together like Kitchen for singles (on YouTube, short and very calming) or something more cute like Our dining table!

Then I was also inspired a lot by illustrated books like The illustrated guide to Japanese architecture and everyday things! Also I read a lot of illustrated/manga Yokai stories like Onibi, Diary of a yokai ghost hunter, which is fun!

Hope this will give you some fun things to check out! Thank you for your compliment again ❤️🌙

[frauggiethecreature]

If you could relive any of your memories, which would it be?

forgot to answer this, uhhh honestly just bc i was feeling nostalgic last night im gonna say listening to one of the averno musicals for the first time :]

averno was a multimedia project that had like, gravity falls + yearning and dark academia vibes and the music was incredible and i loved it so much and i think id love it even more now but almost everything got deleted after the project went down in flames

[hopeforkitten]

This is a concept that suddenly became the sweet backstory of my character Itel and her affair with Raphael.

She laughs.

Laughing and spinning in front of him, as if they were on a noisy holiday. But after all... Has this ever happened? If there was music in the background, then for Raphael it turned into an oppressive hum, like a loud noise of blood vessels in his head. Like the surrounding background, it darkens, turns into a storm of black sand and narrows to a single spot, she.

A little bored princess, a pale drow with poor health, is a rather specific case. By the will of fate, her first book was not the teachings of Lolth, but literature about devils, of rather dubious quality. However, this same dubious quality saved her from meeting really ancient creatures. Poems, love stories, adventures, everything that could offer her a line about Baator was highly appreciated by Itel. And the appeal books contained almost absolute heresy.

She even fulfilled the recommendation to brand herself with a soul coin, a trace of which she shyly showed to Raphael. Perhaps he could have easily rid her of such a ridiculous trail.

What was that little head looking for anyway? Companies and participation. If she had a tail, she would have happily waved it at their first meeting. The devil has finally answered her call, hasn't he? His mouse shouldn't know that the ritual didn't work. She signed the first piece of paper he handed her, and was satisfied with only a brief agreement to her foolish desires.

The contract contained clauses about her health. The girl was weak, and all the conditions of the underdark did not make it easier. She was constantly freezing, the heavy cold and damp local air did not suit her, and she was also allergic to mushroom spores, so during their activity life became completely unbearable. And in the climate of Averno, she saw an excellent solution to all these problems: warmth, dryness, even with a sulfurous smell.

Of course, the contract left him the freedom to just throw her out on the battlefield of the Blood War, because there is still a /healing/Averno air.

At first, their meetings were a time of rest for Raphael.  He just took her with him and the naive creature was next to him, like a fawn studying the lion's cave.

Nevertheless, her behavior was a pleasant surprise, Itel had only asked and admired before, but as soon as he changed the situation, the princess began to establish her own rules. It was worth leaving her in the boudoir for an hour and that was it, she would light incense herself, take a bath and apply care products on herself. And ... it turned out to be so pleasant for Raphael. A small, good-smelling hobby, why not. She purred when his hand was in her hair and was so charmingly embarrassed when their faces were dangerously close, as if she had just realized that she was not in her house.

Itel hurriedly pulled away, and remembering the need to get dressed, expressed dissatisfaction with the outfit that was offered to her, and she had already chosen another one in one of the closets. Raphael grinned and let her do so. Her scent reached him, she used his rose oil, but added other light flowers, jasmine and a neutral vanilla spice. There were no flowers in the underdark, but if there had been, they would have smelled like that and very faintly due to the lack of sun.

All the outfits available to her were similar, equally stylish and open, so her choice didn't bother Raphael much.

Itel grimaced thinking about it. Nevertheless, all the dresses were with infernal accents, which could not but please her. She chose the style that seemed to her the softest, dressed and was puzzled by her bare feet.

Is she barefoot and not cold? Unbelievable.

Nevertheless, for the sake of decency, she looked in the closet for short and intricate stockings that were not one-piece and left half of the foot open, which was already enough for convenience.

The girl appreciated the outfit and complimented the devil's taste, while avoiding direct gratitude for the reception.

Raphael expected to just read at these meetings, but Itel used his every look and phrase as a chance to clarify from him what she had read earlier. As a result, most of her literature turned out to be useless and he gave her a large heavy book on the history of Baator. It was not convenient to read her in bed (Surely this is part of an evil plan), so the princess settled down at the table, these were the longest moments of silence with her.

Nevertheless, this book did not provide the devil with peace, she will not run away, and now she wants to do something else. After a few meetings, she came with her hands full of white thread and a crochet hook. Raphael asked a question about her occupation, to which Itel replied with a frown of displeasure, "You avoid dialogue with me, being distracted by your studies, now I will do that too."

Raphael grinned at this almost threat and left everything as it is.

* The video in an accelerated shooting to cheerful music, Raphael sits motionless, and Itel has changed all possible knitting positions, except that she did not climb on his horns*

Before leaving, she tries on a mixture of cobwebs and lace napkins on the table and says that she will process it next time and will be able to leave it.

Itel needs a lot of meetings to be emboldened and distract Raphael from his business to let him know that she is bored. She waves her copy of the contract text in front of him, flows her finger into the points about magic. Well, he has no right to refuse her.

Will you shut me up with a book again? Well, no, now you're going to waste your time on me, devil.

She was clearly bolder in her fantasies. In reality, she was such a lovely puppet, balancing awkwardly on her feet while he guided her hands and voiced instructions somewhere above her head.

Perhaps, for now, she will really make do with dancing lights or will be more independent in her training.

It is the meeting with Raphael that motivates Itel to practice magic and fencing. She will have time to take her first few fencing lessons before leaving the underdark forever and becoming a regular guest of the house of hope.

In his dream, Raphael replays the story of this lovely creature once again and does not notice how her dancing image takes the crown of karsus out of the bag.

She waves it in front of him, teases him, as if putting it on her head, holding it at a finger's distance from her forehead. Well, no, he told her about Karsus' madness, she wouldn't do that, it was just for show.

her dance stops, Itel twirls the crown in her hands and puts it on his head, what a good girl. She walks away again, admiring him (he likes that look so much), looking at him playfully and waiting for him to respond.

I know that this does not suit the right drow at all, but this character is made to write funny lines about the heroes of friends and also transfer the maximum of my traits from real life. I pointed my finger at the sky and got into the fact that drow can handle cobwebs- and I like to work with threads in a bunch of techniques, so I can canonically knit, personally I get 100 points for it.

my friend has a semi-drow character, so we will take care of Kar'niss in 4 hands, after the battle on the roof of the moon towers, and he will live on, and I will cause unknown emotions in people, telling them that the knitted things I gave them are made of threads from kar'niss.

[ihavenoideaw]

EVERYBODY I FOUND THE THING,

It’s supernova by sushi soucy and janeen Garcia, it’s part of the musical album over and out as part the of a three album set released by Averno

[doublelp]

This is a jumping off point for me to talk about this odd internet fandom that developed in like 2020-2021 and went down in flames. I basically watched the whole thing go down from the sidelines and have no skin in the game. It's pretty funny imo.

So Morgan Smith was a fairly young (late teens/early twenties) musical creative who had some momentum after the success of their last amateur musical Oceanborn. In a fairly ambitious move, they decided their next project would be not just a musical, but an entire media franchise. It would be a boring fantasy universe that includes cryptids, witches, queerness, all kinds of stuff that young gen z fandom nerds would eat up. It also felt vaugly inspired by harry potter, to the point that it was practically a way to advertise itself as an "alternative".

Anyway, Smith recruited a few creative-types including songwriter Sushi Soucy to help with musicals. To my knowledge, no actual musicals were made, but there were soundtracks and plot summaries and i think a webcomic that was passed off as a graphic novel. They also advertised an epic poem as part of the franchise but it's all lukewarm at best. The fandom was called Averno and it was way more style than substance. As a marketing machine, it seemed fairly effective at cultivating it's niche online audience, though my assessment is that it was too messy for any mainstream appeal. It did spawn a few articles and interviews so clearly it gained some traction, but not enough to put off any productions.

So the fandom was developing slowly, primarily over discord, and I lurked a lot to see how the hell everything would pan out. Lots of promo (including an ARG), but barely anything to show for it. Granted, there were studio recordings of the show tunes, but no show. Before any big moves could be made (I assume covid prevented things from happening), the shoe dropped on Smith. A big google document called Exverno detailed all of the wrongdoings. It was the callout post to rival all callout posts.

The extent of Smith's behavior amounts to 1. Not paying Averno creatives appropriately, à la Greg Ginn's SST accounting, and 2. Grooming, mostly in the form of "can't wait until you turn 18!" You can probably find the Exverno document for yourself, it's gotta be floating around the internet. It's pretty long. The reaction from both employed creatives and fandom was complete ostracism for Smith and their partner. The discord went through a meltdown before rebranding into a generic and shallow cryptid/fantasy community or something. I didn't stick around. Due to the community being prone to exaggeration (likely from limited life experiences and theater kid energy), a lot will claim that Averno was a cult and Smith was a cult leader. I don't doubt that Smith's actions were shitty but I cannot stress enough that this was a far cry from Heaven's Gate. It was a dumb fandom that revolved around the idea of it's media rather than the media itself. Highly impressionable young people got swindled, basically.

I believe the key takeaway is that young creatives should not bite off more than they can chew. Obviously Morgan Smith was too inexperienced to properly manage a fandom while also developing an entire franchise. I read the words "Like the Marvel Universe but for musicals" more than once, which kind of tells you everything that you need to know. Shoot for the stars I suppose.

Smith's epilogue is that they've laid low and continued theirs studies at NYU, I'm assuming for drama or something like that. I don't see them becoming a big public figure again anytime soon for their own personal projects, but I'd bet they'll make pathways for themselves in broadway.

Sushi Soucy's epilogue involves moving on to another mediocre music for fandom kids to eat up. A cursory look at his instagram reveals that they've done ANOTHER google doc callout post for a seperate person that I do not know or care to know. Time really is a flat circle.

[bonebugboy]

Nova is Lost

Solar had told Nova to meet them in one of the DUE tunnels. They did not think that request through at all. It was around half an hour after the agreed upon time and Nova was still stumbling around the dimly lit tunnels trying to find where Solar had said they were going to be. The tunnels were a labyrinth that never seemed to stay in the same spot, and she swore that she had seen the same pile of Mt. Dew cans at least four times. She was contemplating just staying in this spot until someone found her because her current method of navigation was obviously not getting her anywhere.  

Then what little light there was went out.

“Shit.” 

Nova was on the brink of panic and this was only making it worse. What if she couldn’t find her way out? What if she was stuck down here forever? What if she stood there in the dark until she just became part of the tunnel? 

Something brushed her arm.

“AHHH!”

“Calm down Nova it’s just me,”

“What the fuck Solar? You scared the shit out of me!” A flashlight came out of the dark and Nova could see Solar holding it.

“Sorry, but some of the DUE students are looking for a cryptid and insisted on turning the lights off.” Solar said.

“I am never coming down here by myself again. I could have been down here for days!”

“Yeah I guess I should have just met you at your department.” Nova nodded in agreement. “Anyway, the place we were meeting at is just around the corner, and  I promise this won’t happen again and I will make it up to you.” Solar added.

“I forgive you,” Nova replied, grabbing Solar’s free hand. “But why did either of us think that me coming down here by myself was a good idea?”

“I honestly don’t know.” They both chuckled as Solar led Nova out of the tunnels.

[multimousenette]

[image description: text in bold reading ‘the Averno universe is a worldwide internet phenomenon where teens have found a safe haven in the times of quarantine. Why do you feel so many teens have found comfort in the Averno Universe?’ in regular text, ‘I created Averno to do that. It’s no coincidence - it’s tailor made. I, and so many other people found home in stories growing up. Even with all of the horribleness surrounding J. K. Rowling, I still get homesick for Hogwarts every year in the winter.’]

oh god I found this quote from an interview with Morgan and this aged like MILK

[basicallyrybread]

adding onto this because I guess I’m going down the road of reprocessing my averno-related trauma tonight

I realized that I haven’t played my violin or my ukulele since everything happened with averno. I find it really unsettling that since everything happened with it, I haven’t been able to play or write music for my ukulele and violin which were both super prominent instruments in averno media. fuck dude I can barely stomach looking at my violin after knowing what happened to the violinist who was on the averno team.

I miss playing it I’m not gonna lie…

so tiktok has been showing me so much yaelokre stuff and i am borderline freaking out because its triggering a level of anxiety I havent felt since averno was a thing

like the fandom jokingly calling themselves a cult and getting so involved in the story that sometimes its hard to tell whats real is so reminiscent of what averno was like (on top of actually literally being a cult) that its making me like “oh shit here we go again”

even though yes, I know the creator has condemned the people calling yaelokre a cult and stuff but still it feels so damn similar its scary

[averno-ans-evan]

[lindos-avernos]

Caos ya tengo demasiado, dame un poco de paz.

Skade.