#Cos she’s just silly and whimsical like that | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

away-ward · 9 months ago

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"yeah, my biggest problem with Alex as a character was that she has no flaws. At lost none that are portrayed as flaws. It was fine when she was a side character, but once PD tried to bring her on as a bigger character, it was frustrating. Like PD was always telling me I had to be on her side."

ohmygod, your last sentence? I never thoughy of it that way. But now that you mentioned it, it really does sound like that, hehe? As if she's the standard of everything, even though we don't even like that standard in the first place. As if if youre against here, YOUre the one who's wrong or something. Ok Wow, thatnks for that thought! I just scrolled page and saw some discussion about alex, but i've never really thought much about her or why i was so bothered before, but i think i got a clearer understanding of why her character felt off for me. She really was acting like a ninja, which sounds like rika in conclave? 🧐🙄 anyway, whatever, i think i might have to discuss this with some of my other friends about they thought of her, and so far, they didnt like her too, because just like me, they thought her character was so cartoonish, manipulative and sex- heavy only. Like she started with little role, but suddenly she's in everything? Why was there such a big jump? We thought her jump didnt make sense because this is a group of rich af people who keep their family close, and then only for fire night for her to disappear? So it mean, the tradition wasnt so important for aydinalex and rorymicah, so we thought "huh, so why dis bitch still here until hpnighyfall epilogue then if she's disposable to the literal title of the series " DEVILS NIGHT". And for her to have so many careers and shares by then? WTF? Does PD even know how politics and shareholding work?

Like her character is just so silly and whimsical!! Like her working at the DOJO, but still have time to be a full time student? Excuse me? I study part time and work full time, and let me tell you K.O., that shit was tiring AF! And not just for any degree, hers was COMPUTER SCIENCE? So where tf was her nerd tech events she had to attend to fulfill her credits? And her being an escort, but then think about the logistic, she had to make her brows, probably her nose hair or sumn, her teeth check up, her facial hair, body hair and vaginal hair removal or wtv, then the fit check, the meeting, the schedule, and alex never mentioned once that she had an assistant for it? It was never even mentioned that she was on drugs or on time for sleep? And suddenly she's going back to fucking and then going to class? Huhhhh? What? Thats so fucking crazy K.O.!!! Not even extra co-cur will save her from this tiresome lifestyle, but for some reason, no sagging shoulders mentioned in any povs? No tiring expression? Not even being moody? So unrealistic! Even rika was looking bored, banks got agitated, winter got frustrated, and emmy git moody. But alex didnt feel anything? WTF was in her spirit? Jesus or sumn? Idk, but me and my friends thoughy her character was susp af, and the time when she was shown to be vulnerable, she kept on blaming everybody?

in nightfall though, i feel like i get why she wasnt shown to be a bitch in emmys pov, because even those evil aydin and damon got a pardon from her, and rika's bias. but what about banks, or kai, or michael or even winter, they're characters are very aloof and guarded ya know, so what charmed them so mich that they want alex around? For what reason? When i read devils night, i felt like i was on an acid trip because apart from other nonsensical things happening, alex's character, relationship and story were the most illogical to me. Pd really aint shit.

As if if youre against here, YOUre the one who's wrong or something.

This is literally it. Like, it's fine if you want me to like your character, but at least let me make up my mind. Let me see their strengths and weaknesses, and decide if I like them.

But anyway.

but suddenly she's in everything? Why was there such a big jump?

The jump was because corrupt didn't originally have any follow-ups, and then readers liked Alex, so when a series was planned, she got a bigger role. For me this is a key to why her character failed. Since she didn't have a clearly defined role or goal for a character arc, with limits to what her character could or couldn't do, she got to do anything and everything the story needed.

By the end of the series, enough people dislike where her character went and asked for less of her, so for fire night she was adventuring away from Thunder Bay.

where tf was her nerd tech events she had to attend to fulfill her credits? And her being an escort, but then think about the logistic, she had to make her brows, probably her nose hair or sumn, her teeth check up, her facial hair, body hair and vaginal hair removal or wtv, then the fit check, the meeting, the schedule, and alex never mentioned once that she had an assistant for it?

I've spoken about her insanely busy schedule, but you really brought out even more. The maintenence it takes to look that good all the time! I don't care how naturally pretty someone is, that takes time. When is she doing all of this? And she acts more like the crew's assistant than having one of her own.

they're characters are very aloof and guarded ya know, so what charmed them so mich that they want alex around

I think my biggest question mark is Katsu. Difficult to please, known for having high standards Katsu Mori? I'm sure the excuse is that he respects ambitious people but it wouldn't hurt to have at least one character not immediately love her.

I struggle with Alex because I want to like her. But she just not a real character to me. Nightfall showed her "flaws" the most, but it wasn't enough to negate the three books prior where she's nearly perfect in all ways. On top of that, even though Emory was the one to emphasis them, the narrative never let Alex be wrong. She was just a victim.

In fact, it was Damon who basically said we're all the villain in someone else's story, right? When was Alex ever the villain? In Aurora's story? But we're not supposed to sympathize with Aurora.

Thanks for the message!

#asked and answered #devil's night series #asked and answered 314 #no alex tag

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muffindaddystyles · 3 years ago

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We can get like a/b/o part 2?? Pretty please bubby 🥺

LEMME SEE WHAT COULD BE DONE FOR UU TILL THEN HAVE THIS LIL WOLFIE H BLURB I WROTE ALONSIDE THE COMPANY OF BITCHY CRAMPS

Harry’s head bobs at the deviating aura of Harry's surrounding, shedding from the lucid perfectness of quite to the homey whimsicalness due to the presence of his bubbles in his house.

His already warm ears perking up tuning into the chirpy chattering taking place downstairs at her arrival as his pack greets her with hugs, though he gets fussy over their blarney because he doesn’t want his human to be littered in anyone’s scent except his.

He’s a jealous poor thing.

He chuckles amused when Niall grunts down at Y/N's cat and she hisses back galloping away from Y/N's arms how much she tries to keep her in place, yeah ... a cat around many wolves isn’t one of the greatest idea but for Y/N, Harry had to make amends with Ozymandias.

An almighty name for a kitten who’s extra clingy and clever to get you to pet her.

He flops onto the neatly pleated duvet on his bed, leaning into the heels of his palm to wait for her and his brows stickers into confusion then they sink down in realization upon sniffing the scent that's getting closer and closer to him.

It’s like when puppies are born but less daunting; the aroma that confesses his tender assisduousness will be needed that he has to be extra caring with his lovie.

“Hi.” Harry’s eyes gleams when she pops up infront of him tuckered out, skin pale, eyes watery and hair messy with her hoodie squeezed around her small head.

“Hi poor lug.” Harry sighs breathily with a pout arms instinctively looping lazily around her waist to pull her down on his lap, she straddles his thighs in order to squish herself closer to him hiding her face into his woody smelling crook of neck.

“Missed youuuu.” She groans dragging her nose in gentle strokes to the side of his throat, eyelids closed feeling herself divulge into his warmth as if dipping her toesies into a carnelian bubbling bathtub, “Heyyyyy who’s the puppy here??” His whines muffled from peppering mellow kisses to her temple patting her bum to get her attention getting a disgruntled response in return.

“I know bubbles, I know -- moon-phases sucks.” He coos sweeping her hoodie down to feel her hair against his palm, “What?” She murmurs and he gives her a sheepish smile.

“Wolfie language.” He pecks her cheek when she giggles softly and Harry tipples off into the mattress dramatically when she smashes her face into his chest whimpering when another cramp hits her in bottom.

Harry shakes his head and tries to wiggle her off to bring her something to relax, “Don’t gooo,” She pouts wrapping herself around him like a spider web, a burrito bread where Harry’s a tall chicken tender.

He cackles loudly at which she smiles, when she crooned sweetly, “You sooo toasty.” Harry runs his hands up and down her arm not liking the way she’s all brumal.

“Not goin’ anywhere baby just bringin’ y'a heating pad.” He lays her on her side and suckles in his plushy lip to stop himself from cracking a silly joke when she blinked up at him owlishly, “How d'you know that ‘m on periods?” Harry glances down at her comically while fetching the pad from his nightstand.

“We could sniff onto satan sacrificial waterfalls from miles away.” She laughs boisterously at his gelastic statement shrinking into a shrimp next moment when her cramps starts getting more painful, “Are y'okay?” Harry asks worrisome immediately scooting back to her reach and rubs her tummy in soothing circles in effort to do anything possible to get her comfy and in unknotted position.

“It feels like a fat man’s sitting on my uterus.” She huffs and Harry fawns at her coodling her against his chest, sandwiching the heating pad in between his bicep and her tummy.

“How ‘bout we take a nap then binge eat ‘cos the fridge’s loaded with goodies Rikoo baked today, hmm?” He nudges her socksied feet with his own socksied feet tangling them from ankles then gradually sliding his thigh between hers to give her something to squeeze on.

“Sounds good ‘cos you’re really warm ...,” She yawns knuckling at her eyes, “Can you shimmy the curtains away there’s a lil dreamwork of silvers outside -- wanna see your wolfy ears.” How’s she has mastered an art to makes him this shy and giddy with these little innocent requests!? He’s very whipped for this clumsy, teensy and adorably sleepy human.

“Your wish me command.” When he’s exposed to the twinkling light there are two floppy cute ears buried into his tufts the soft fur on them matching the colour of his chocolate brown curls and his body gets warmer with his body getting slight furry.

“Can’t believe I get to have such a cutie boyfriend.” Y/N grins sleepily scratching under his ear and he gives out the softest yet most appealing purr against Y/N's cheek that's getting balmy from attaining his heat.

“Bubbles...” Harry scolds her locking his elbows around her neck to keep her head in one place and to stop her from squirming, “Y’need to rest baby.” Shakes his head in defeat when she still manages to pop herself out from his grip.

“Promise me that the ears will be still there when I wake up.” She quips and Harry strokes her cheek with the back of his knuckles and smacks couple kisses at her lips giggling when she tries to have the sensation for longer.

“Promise.” When she gives him an unsatisfied whine he hooks his pinky with hers and brings it to his mouth pretending to kiss it but instead nips at her soft flesh with a wolfish growl making her squeal and fall into spurts of giggles.

She’s grateful that with every hard day she gets to experience how caring and loving Harry is.

#WOLFIEEEEEEEEEEE HARRYYYYY #YAHOO YA YA #SOMETHING I WANTED TO WRITE FOR SO LONG #SORRY ANON BUT ABO PART WILL BE SOON I JUST DONT HAVE ANY CREATIVE IDEAS FOR IT SEND ME SOME IF U GUYS HAVE #harry styles #cute harry #harry styles blurb #harry styles smut #harry smut #harry styles fanfiction #fluff #harry angst #hsh #dom harry

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iheartbookbran · 3 years ago

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Bridgerton S2 was a mess, how could they fuck up this badly? They're lucky the actors delivered

My personal opinion on this is that the writers trying to adapt a 300-something pages book into 8 hours of television by adding a bunch of dramatic side plots is inevitably going to mess with future storylines and characters, but they apparently just don’t care. Like they could’ve focused more on Benedict since his season is approaching (I think) or on Violet and Edmund’s love story because thematically it made scene for it to be included this season… or shown more of Kate’s backstory and trauma because I cannot believe we came out knowing less about the life of the season’s co-lead than from her 300-something pages book counterpart.

Instead the writers decided to include another long dragging plot with the Featheringtons and to continue to character-assassinate Penelope (and tbh if that’s them showing her favoritism, then I wish they didn’t like her so I could be spared seeing one of my favorite HR heroines being done this dirty). At least her motivation wasn’t pettiness this time, though why Eloise was thrown into the mix is beyond me. I’m gonna go ahead and just say it: this is all the Queen’s fault because that character is dumb and her inclusion to the series has done more harm than good—like, she has to do something… and that something is to meddle needlessly into the Bridgertons’ love lives and to have a beef with a teenager, apparently?

I feel that season 1 was overall better received because TD&I is not not like? Good??? Lmao so all the changes the writers made served to improve Simon and Daphne’s story (even if the reason they decided to still include that scene still blows my mind). On the other side TVWLM is widely liked amongst HR readers and is very popular within the community. Like yeah it is a tad whimsical and silly but that kind of thing is congruous to the genre and more importantly, it worked! So deciding to cut a bunch of scenes and to focus on every single character except for the leads, especially the heroine, was not going to sit so well with audiences. Just my two cents.

#Anonymous #ask #ask pam #tbh these are all my very personal thoughts but….#bridgerton #bridgerton spoilers #bridgerton season 2 #bridgerton netflix #the viscount who loved me #meta #my meta

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letterboxd · 4 years ago

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Blurring the Line.

As a new Space Jam film beams down to Earth, Kambole Campbell argues that a commitment to silliness and a sincere love for the medium is what it takes to make a great live-action/animation hybrid.

The live-action and animation hybrid movie is something of a dicey prospect. It’s tricky to create believable interaction between what’s real and what’s drawn, puppeteered or rendered—and blending the live and the animated has so far resulted in wild swings in quality. It is a highly specific and technically demanding niche, one with only a select few major hits, though plenty of cult oddities. So what makes a good live-action/animation hybrid?

To borrow words from Hayao Miyazaki, “live action is becoming part of that whole soup called animation”. Characters distinct from the humans they interact with, but rendered as though they were real creatures (or ghosts), are everywhere lately; in Paddington, in Scooby Doo, in David Lowery’s (wonderful) update of Pete’s Dragon.

The original ‘Pete’s Dragon’ (1977) alongside the 2016 remake.

Lowery’s dragon is realized with highly realistic lighting and visual-effects work. By comparison, the cartoon-like characters in the 1977 Pete’s Dragon—along with other films listed in Louise’s handy compendium of Disney’s live-action animation—are far more exaggerated. That said, there’s still the occasional holdout for the classical version of these crossovers: this year’s Tom and Jerry replicating the look of 2D through 3D/CGI animation, specifically harkens back to the shorts of the 1940s and ’50s.

One type of live-action/animation hybrid focuses on seamless immersion, the other is interested in exploring the seams themselves. Elf (2003) uses the aberration of stop-motion animals to represent the eponymous character as a fish out of water. Ninjababy, a Letterboxd favorite from this year’s SXSW Festival, employs an animated doodle as a representation of the protagonist’s state of mind while she processes her unplanned pregnancy.

Meanwhile, every Muppets film ever literally tears at the seams until we’re in stitches, but, for the sake of simplicity, puppets are not invited to this particular party. What we are concerned with here is the overlap between hand-drawn animation and live-action scenes (with honorable mentions of equally valid stop-motion work), and the ways in which these hybrids have moved from whimsical confections to nod-and-wink blockbusters across a century of cinema.

Betty Boop and Koko the clown in a 1938 instalment of the Fleischer brothers’ ‘Out of the Inkwell’ series.

Early crossovers often involve animators playing with their characters, in scenarios such as the inventive Out of the Inkwell series of shorts from Rotoscope inventor Max Fleischer and his director brother Dave. Things get even more interactive mid-century, when Gene Kelly holds hands with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh.

The 1960s and ’70s deliver ever more delightful family fare involving human actors entering cartoon worlds, notably in the Robert Stevenson-directed Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Chuck Jones’ puntastic The Phantom Tollbooth.

Jerry and Gene dance off their worries in ‘Anchors Aweigh’ (1945).

Mary Poppins is one of the highest-rated live-action/animation hybrids on Letterboxd for good reason. Its sense of control in how it engages with its animated creations makes it—still!—an incredibly engaging watch. It is simply far less evil than the singin’, dancin’ glorification of slavery in Disney’s Song of the South (1946), and far more engaging than Victory Through Air Power (1943), a war-propaganda film about the benefits of long-range bombing in the fight against Hitler. The studio’s The Reluctant Dragon (1941) also serves a propagandistic function, as a behind-the-scenes studio tour made when the studio’s animators were striking.

By comparison, Mary Poppins’ excursions into the painted world—replicated in Rob Marshall’s belated, underrated 2018 sequel, Mary Poppins Returns—are full of magical whimsicality. “Films have added the gimmick of making animation and live characters interact countless times, but paradoxically none as pristine-looking as this creation,” writes Edgar in this review. “This is a visual landmark, a watershed… the effect of making everything float magically, to the detail of when a drawing should appear in front or the back of [Dick] Van Dyke is a creation beyond my comprehension.” (For Van Dyke, who played dual roles as Bert and Mr Dawes Senior, the experience sparked a lifelong love of animation and visual effects.)

Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and penguins, in ‘Mary Poppins’ (1964).

Generally speaking, and the Mary Poppins sequel aside, more contemporary efforts seek to subvert this feeling of harmony and control, instead embracing the chaos of two worlds colliding, the cartoons there to shock rather than sing. Henry Selick’s frequently nightmarish James and the Giant Peach (1996) leans into this crossover as something uncanny and macabre by combining live action with stop motion, as its young protagonist eats his way into another world, meeting mechanical sharks and man-eating rhinos. Sally Jane Black describes it as “riding the Burton-esque wave of mid-’90s mall goth trends and blending with the differently demonic Dahl story”.

Science-classroom staple Osmosis Jones (2001) finds that within the human body, the internal organs serve as cities full of drawn white-blood-cell cops. The late Stephen Hillenburg’s The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004) turns its real-life humans into living cartoons themselves, particularly in a bonkers sequence featuring David Hasselhoff basically turning into a speedboat.

David Hasselhoff picks up speed in ‘The Spongebob Squarepants Movie’ (2004).

The absurdity behind the collision of the drawn and the real is never better embodied than in another of our highest-rated live/animated hybrids. Released in 1988, Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit shows off a deep understanding—narratively and aesthetically—of the material that it’s parodying, seeking out the impeccable craftsmanship of legends such as director of animation Richard Williams (1993’s The Thief and the Cobbler), and his close collaborator Roy Naisbitt. The forced perspectives of Naisbitt’s mind-bending layouts provide much of the rocket fuel driving the film’s madcap cartoon opening.

Distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, Roger Rabbit utilizes the Disney stable of characters as well as the Looney Tunes cast to harken back to America’s golden age of animation. It continues a familiar scenario where the ’toons themselves are autonomous actors (as also seen in Friz Freleng’s 1940 short You Ought to Be in Pictures, in which Daffy Duck convinces Porky Pig to try his acting luck in the big studios).

Daffy Duck plots his rise up the acting ranks in ‘You Ought to Be in Pictures’ (1940).

Through this conceit, Zemeckis is able to celebrate the craft of animation, while pastiching both Chinatown, the noir genre, and the mercenary nature of the film industry (“the best part is… they work for peanuts!” a studio exec says of the cast of Fantasia). As Eddie Valiant, Bob Hoskins’ skepticism and disdain towards “toons” is a giant parody of Disney’s more traditional approach to matching humans and drawings.

Adult audiences are catered for with plenty of euphemistic humor and in-jokes about the history of the medium. It’s both hilarious (“they… dropped a piano on him,” one character solemnly notes of his son) and just the beginning of Hollywood toying with feature-length stories in which people co-exist with cartoons, rather than dipping in and out of fantasy sequences. It’s not just about how the cartoons appear on the screen, but how the human world reacts to them, and Zemeckis gets a lot of mileage out of applying ’toon lunacy to our world.

Bob Hoskins in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ (1988).

The groundbreaking optical effects and compositing are excellent (and Hoskins’ amazing performance should also be credited for holding all of it together), but what makes Roger Rabbit such a hit is that sense of controlled chaos and a clever tonal weaving of violence and noirish seediness (“I’m not bad… I’m just drawn that way”) through the cartoony feel. And it is simply very, very funny.

It could be said that, with Roger Rabbit, Zemeckis unlocked the formula for how to modernize the live-action and animation hybrid, by leaning into a winking parody of what came before. It worked so perfectly well that it helped kickstart the ‘Disney renaissance' era of animation. Roger Rabbit has influenced every well-known live-action/animation hybrid produced since, proving that there is success and fun to be had by completely upending Mary Poppins-esque quirks. Even Disney’s delightful 2007 rom-com Enchanted makes comedy out of the idea of cartoons crossing that boundary.

When a cartoon character meets real-world obstacles.

Even when done well, though, hybrids are not an automatic hit. Sitting at a 2.8-star average, Joe Dante’s stealthily great Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) is considered by the righteous to be the superior live-action/animated Looney Tunes hybrid, harkening back to the world of Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin. SilentDawn states that the film deserves the nostalgic reverence reserved for Space Jam: “From gag to gag, set piece to set piece, Back in Action is utterly bonkers in its logic-free plotting and the constant manipulation of busy frames.”

With its Tinseltown parody, Back in Action pulls from the same bag of tricks as Roger Rabbit; here, the Looney Tunes characters are famous, self-entitled actors. Dante cranks the meta comedy up to eleven, opening the film with Matthew Lillard being accosted by Shaggy for his performance in the aforementioned Scooby Doo movie (and early on throwing in backhanded jokes about the practice of films like itself as one character yells, “I was brought in to leverage your synergy!”).

Daffy Duck with more non-stop banter in ‘Looney Tunes: Back in Action’ (2003).

Back in Action is even more technically complex than Roger Rabbit, seamlessly bringing Looney Tunes physics and visual language into the real world. Don’t forget that Dante had been here before, when he had Anthony banish Ethel into a cartoon-populated television show in his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Another key to this seamlessness is star Brendan Fraser, at the height of his powers here as “Brendan Fraser’s stunt double”.

Like Hoskins before him, Fraser brings a wholehearted commitment to playing the fed-up straight man amidst cartoon zaniness. Fraser also brought that dedication to Henry Selick's Monkeybone (2001), a Roger Rabbit-inspired sex comedy that deploys a combo of stop-motion animation and live acting in a premise amusingly close to that of 1992’s Cool World (but more on that cult anomaly shortly). A commercial flop, Back in Action was the last cinematic outing for the Looney Tunes for some time.

Nowadays, when we think of live-action animation, it’s hard not to jump straight to an image of Michael Jordan’s arm stretching to do a half-court dunk to save the Looney Tunes from slavery. There’s not a lot that can be fully rationalized about the 1996 box-office smash, Space Jam. It is a bewildering cartoon advert for Michael Jordan’s baseball career, dreamed up off the back of his basketball retirement, while also mashing together different American icons. Never forget that the soundtrack—one that, according to Benjamin, “makes you have to throw ass”—includes a song with B-Real, Coolio, Method Man and LL Cool J.

Michael Jordan and teammates in ‘Space Jam’ (1996).

Space Jam is a film inherently born to sell something, predicated on the existing success of a Nike commercial rather than any obvious passion for experimentation. But its pure strangeness, a growing nostalgia for the nineties, and meticulous compositing work from visual-effects supervisor Ed Jones and the film’s animation team (a number of whom also worked on both Roger Rabbit and Back in Action), have all kept it in the cultural memory.

The films is backwards, writes Jesse, in that it wants to distance itself from the very cartoons it leverages: “This really almost feels like a follow-up to Looney Tunes: Back in Action, rather than a predecessor, because it feels like someone watched the later movie, decided these Looney Tunes characters were a problem, and asked someone to make sure they were as secondary as possible.” That attempt to place all the agency in Jordan’s hands was a point of contention for Chuck Jones, the legendary Warner Bros cartoonist. He hated the film, stating that Bugs would never ask for help and would have dealt with the aliens in seven minutes.

Space Jam has its moments, however. Guy proclaims “there is nothing that Deadpool as a character will ever have to offer that isn’t done infinitely better by a good Bugs Bunny bit”. For some, its problems are a bit more straightforward, for others it’s a matter of safety in sport. But the overriding sentiments surrounding the film point to a sort of morbid fascination with the brazenness of its concept.

Holli Would (voiced by Kim Basinger) and Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) blur the lines in ‘Cool World’ (1992).

Existing in the same demented… space… as Space Jam, Paramount Pictures bought the idea for Cool World from Ralph Bakshi as it sought to have its own Roger Rabbit. While Brad Pitt described it as “Roger Rabbit on acid” ahead of release, Cool World itself looks like a nightmare version of Toontown. The film was universally panned at the time, caught awkwardly between being far too adult for children but too lacking in any real substance for adults (there’s something of a connective thread between Jessica Rabbit, Lola Bunny and Holli Would).

Ralph Bakshi’s risqué and calamitously horny formal experiment builds on the animator’s fascination with the relationship between the medium and the human body. Of course, he would go from the immensely detailed rotoscoping of Fire and Ice (1983) to clashing hand-drawn characters with real ones, something he had already touched upon in the seventies with Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, whose animated characters were drawn into real locations. But no one besides Bakshi quite knew what to do with the perverse concept of Brad Pitt as a noir detective trying to stop Gabriel Byrne’s cartoonist from having sex with a character that he drew—an animated Kim Basinger.

Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) attempts to cross over to Hollie Would in ‘Cool World’ (1992).

Cool World’s awkwardness can be attributed to stilted interactions between Byrne, Pitt and the animated world, as well as studio meddling. Producer Frank Mancuso Jr (who was on the film due to his father running Paramount) demanded that the film be reworked into something PG-rated, against Bakshi’s wishes (he envisioned an R-rated horror), and the script was rewritten in secret. It went badly, so much so that Bakshi eventually punched Mancuso Jr in the face.

While Cool World averages two stars on Letterboxd, there are some enthusiastic holdouts. There are the people impressed by the insanity of it all, those who just love them a horny toon, and then there is Andrew, a five-star Cool World fan: “On the surface, it’s a Lovecraftian horror with Betty Boop as the villain, featuring a more impressive cityscape than Blade Runner and Dick Tracy combined, and multidimensional effects that make In the Mouth of Madness look like trash. The true star, however, proves to be the condensed surplus of unrelated gags clogging the arteries of the screen—in every corner is some of the silliest cel animation that will likely ever be created.”

There are even those who enjoy its “clear response to Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, with David writing that “the film presents a similar concept through the lens of the darkly comic, perverted world of the underground cartoonists”, though also noting that without Bakshi’s original script, the film is “a series of half steps and never really commits like it could”. Cool World feels both completely deranged and strangely low-energy, caught between different ideas as to how best to mix the two mediums. But it did give us a David Bowie jam.

‘Space Jam: A New Legacy’ is in cinemas and on HBO Max now.

Craft is of course important, but generally speaking, maybe nowadays a commitment to silliness and a sincere love for the medium’s history is the thing that makes successful live-action/animation hybrids click. It’s an idea that doesn’t lend itself to being too cool, or even entirely palatable. The trick is to be as fully dotty as Mary Poppins, or steer into the gaucheness of the concept, à la Roger Rabbit and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

It’s quite a tightrope to walk between good meta-comedy and a parade of references to intellectual property. The winningest strategy is to weave the characters into the tapestry of the plot and let the gags grow from there, rather than hoping their very inclusion is its own reward. Wait, you said what is coming out this week?

Related content

Rootfish Jones’s list of cartoons people are horny for

The 100 Sequences that Shaped Animation: the companion list to the Vulture story

Jose Moreno’s list of every animated film made from 1888 to the present

Follow Kambole on Letterboxd

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gravelyhumerus · 4 years ago

Text

Criminal Minds College AU - Chapter 8

Title: “I may just take your breath away” / Sweater Weather AU

Relationship: Jemily

Word count: 35,604

Summary:

Penelope hacks the college. JJ pets a cat. There are three blowjobs. Need I say more?

Slow-burn Jemily college AU where they live across the hall and despite all odds, the universe pushes them together. AKA they’re silly gay babies who pine after each other for months.

Read it on AO3

Tumblr: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, (bonus scene), Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Epilogue

JJ adjusted the textbook in her hands, rolling onto her side to get comfortable with it. Behind her, was the calming sounds of Penelope’s pop music and her dancing fingertips as she typed code into her computer.

She had only a few pages left to read, but she was having a hard time focusing. JJ’s brain kept drifting to the events of that weekend. On Halloween, they played spin the bottle. JJ’s spin landed right on Emily, meaning that they had to kiss.

But it was not chaste. As Penelope most eloquently put it: “you two were seconds from ripping each other’s clothes off in front of us.”

JJ couldn’t wrap her head around it.

Emily had really kissed her. There was tongue. It was not a peck to play the game; they had gone at it like teenagers in the backseat of a car at a lovers’ lane.

It made reading her textbook difficult when she knew what Emily’s tongue felt like against hers. It made doing her essay challenging when she could remember the taste of her lips. It made doing just about anything next to impossible when JJ was desperate to kiss Emily again.

“Did you know that it’s Hotch’s birthday tomorrow?” Penelope asked, spinning in her chair to look at JJ.

“Wait, what?” JJ asked. She looked up from her textbook.

“So... I’ve hacked into the college database,” Penelope said, turning back to her computer, her hands were once again typing a mile a minute. “Because of the whole thing with Reid not telling us about his birthday, the poor thing, and I didn’t want to miss anyone else’s.”

“Maybe we could do a co-birthday?” JJ mused, thinking about the logistics of that.

“You read my mind, my beautiful sporty friend,” Penelope replied. “I’ve almost got everyone’s, just a minute.”

JJ stood up, walked over to Garcia’s side of the room. Somehow, her side of the room was cleaner than JJ’s, despite the sheer amount of things. Her desk was covered in trinkets, decorations and her wall covered in posters, art prints and photographs. JJ’s, on the other hand, had significantly less stuff, and way more mess. She was a busy girl and her desk was basically useless with all of her books and loose paper and miscellaneous things she needed to deal with ages ago.

“Did you know that Morgan is a gemini?” Penelope asked.

“Figures,” JJ replied, hoping that was the right response.

Garcia had two monitors on her light, wooden desk, and a large desktop computer that she had built herself tucked underneath. On one monitor, was a file that she was slowly adding to, of birthdays written in white text on a grey background. Her own was there, alongside Spencer, Hotch, Derek….

JJ then watched as Garcia typed out Emily’s birthday: October 12. They had missed it too!

“Oh my god,” Penelope said, “why don’t they tell us these things?! How did we befriend such secretive people.”

“Wait, when was that?” JJ murmured, grabbing her wall calendar and flipping through the pages. “Oh my god I saw her that day. She was baking cookies, alone.”

“Alone?” Penelope whimpered.

JJ thought back to that night. She had barged into the kitchen, talked all about her impending break up with Will, and ate Emily’s cookies. She felt awful. Obviously they didn’t know each other as well then, but why was she alone?

“She didn’t even tell Derek,” Penelope said, “oh that sweet summer child. Who hurt her?”

JJ always celebrated her birthday. Be it a family dinner or a full on birthday party when she was a kid, JJ was used to a fuss made about her each year. It was harder after Ros, but her parents refused to let the day pass without at least a cake and a present.

As she befriended Penelope last year, their birthdays were filled with presents and friendship and alcohol, both girls making sure to give the other a thoughtful gift and make a fuss for the day.

Her heart was breaking that three of her new friends were about to let theirs pass without anything to show for it.

“We should have a party,” JJ blurted.

“You read my mind.”

JJ frankly welcomed the distraction from her circular thoughts about her kiss with Emily.

———

JJ left another store empty handed. She had first placed an order at a store downtown for a birthday cake, with three names on it which confused the baker, then began to wander downtown searching for presents.

She had another half hour before she was supposed to meet back up with Derek and Penelope, who were at the dollar store buying decorations, and she had hoped to find something for Emily by then.

The three of them were quite efficient at party planning, and they had to be with such a quick turnaround time. JJ had been tasked with finding a present for Emily.

For Hotch, they wrangled a bottle of the nicer whiskey that he liked, because even at the age of 21, he was somehow already an old man in his tastes. Spencer was also easy, because Penelope was working on knitting him a scarf. Apparently it was from the show Dr. Who, but JJ didn’t really know much about that besides that it was British and both he and Penelope were big fans.

Emily was a lot harder to shop for.

What could JJ get for her with the thirty dollars that they all had pitched in to fund her present? Not much. Especially since JJ knows that Emily comes from money. If she wanted something, she could probably just buy it for herself, right?

It was also difficult because it would be from her. It would be a token of her affections. What were her affections? Did she want to simply sleep with her? Date with her? Be her best friend? JJ’s thoughts were a mess.

JJ had been in just about every store downtown, browsing clothes, gift stores, even a plant store in which she contemplated the meaning of getting Emily a cactus. Nothing was quite right.

She had almost given up when she wandered past a used book store. She had never been in before but always meant to. Out front was a stack of old milk crates filled with books, mostly romance novels and thrillers, and inside the window, beautifully bound antique books were resting in the display.

A bell dinged as she walked in, and an elderly man waved at her from the counter before returning to his own book.

Inside, the smell of old books filled her senses, mixed with the smell of apples and cinnamon and the earthy smell of all the old buildings in her college town.

Stacked floor to ceiling were mountains of books, towering over her head.

There were a few other patrons in the shop, some sitting and reading, others wandering the stacks, pulling out the occasional book.

JJ slowly made her way through the maze. It was larger inside than she expected, with thousands of old books surrounding her, no matter where she looked. At times, she had to step over a pile of books in her path.

The books were organized by topic, but within that, JJ couldn’t discern a clear system.

She climbed the creaky staircase and pondered what kind of book Emily would like. Is buying her a romance novel too forward? JJ wondered. She probably wouldn’t be able to find one with two women anyways.

Did Emily like fantasy? Sci-fi? Non Fiction? Should JJ get her something she’s read? JJ realized that she hadn’t read anything that wasn’t for school in ages.

JJ felt overwhelmed. Was she thinking too hard?

She did a double take at the window sill, realizing that the movement that caught her eye was a black cat basking in the sunlight.

JJ reached out her hand tentatively to pet it. The cat nuzzled her hand, and began to purr. JJ smiled, spending a few minutes giving the cat much needed attention.

The cat then stood, apparently growing bored, and ran off to investigate something or chase a mouse or whatever bookstore cats got up to.

Where it lay was a small book. It was old, but not as old as some of the other leather bound texts in this store. Its white cover had a simple drawing of a boy, and written in a looping script: “Le Petit Prince.”

JJ smiled slightly, picking up the thin book. She leaned against the windowsill and carefully flipped through the pages, admiring the illustrations and trying to decipher the premise with her limited understanding of French.

It seemed like it was for children, with whimsical art of a boy on a small planet, a king, a rose and a fox, among other things. She read the first few pages, about a boy falling in love with a flower, and decided it was perfect.

It was a sign, JJ thought, the cat led her to this book.

The cat—which reminded JJ of Emily with its standoffish exterior but affectionate personality—had clearly shown her that this was the perfect present.

There was no price on it, and JJ worried that it would be out of her budget. Holding it to her chest, she descended the steps and brought the book to the clerk.

“Hello sir,” JJ greated him, setting the book down on the table, “How much is this book? ”

He was seated in a comfortable looking chair behind a counter with an old-fashioned cash register. The sign on it read, ‘cash only’ and there was a tip jar in the form of a cat mug.

“Oh this is an excellent choice!” The man lifted the book up, examining the cover. “On ne voit qu’avec le cœur.”

That was French. JJ didn’t know what it meant, only catching the word “heart” at the end. She nodded nonetheless.

“You speak French?” He asked her.

She shrugged. “I’m learning.”

“This book will teach you more than just French,” the man said. “Trust me.”

JJ didn’t know what he meant, but nodded. He still hadn’t told her how much it was.

“It’s a gift,” JJ explained, “for a friend.”

He handed her back the book, smiling at her. He gave it to her for fifteen dollars, seeming to make up the price on the spot. The black cat waited for her near the door, letting her pet him on the ears before she left.

JJ left the door, hugging the book to her chest.

———

Wrangling three of their friends into attending a surprise party was harder than it looked.

With three student athletes, nights during which none of them had games, or practices were scarce, so it took them until the next Friday before they found a free evening. Then, they had to go through the ordeal of convincing them to show up at Derek’s room at the right time.

JJ felt giddy with the secret, greatly enjoying the party planning and doing something special for her new friends. On her Wednesday afternoon study date with Emily, her excitement for the party almost overpowered her nervousness with the girl due to their recent kiss. JJ caught herself looking more at Emily than her notes, alternating between imagining them kissing and imagining the look on Emily’s face when she received her present.

By seven that Friday night, they had fully decorated Derek’s tiny dorm with streamers, balloons, and just about anything Penelope could find at the dollar store. A happy birthday sign was strung over one of the windows, with the addition of their friends' names written in marker on poster boards taped underneath.

Their presents were wrapped messily, as JJ wasn’t particularly good at using wrapping paper. The cake sat on Derek’s desk reading “Happy (belated) birthday Emily, Hotch and Spencer!” in red icing on white cake.

The three of them were frantically blowing up balloons and checking their phones. JJ felt slightly light headed by the time they were done.

Hotch and Emily were coming for a “study date” with Derek, and Spencer was expecting a Dr. Who marathon with Garcia. All were supposed to be there any minute.

There was a knock on the door.

“Get ready!” Garcia squealed, “someone’s here!”

She opened the door, and instead of the birthday kids, it was David Rossi, who JJ had met for the first time a few weeks prior. He was 22, only a few months older than Hotch, in his first year of his masters. He and Hotch were close, and Emily and Derek knew him well since he TA’d one of their classes.

“Rossi?” Derek said, “you came!”

“I never turn down an invitation to a party,” he said.

“I have to admit,” Derek said, “it’s not that much of a party.“

“It’s more of a magical birthday get together,” Penelope said as she ushered him in.

“Good thing I brought enough alcohol to make it a party,” he said.

He pulled a very expensive looking bottle of vodka out of his backpack, and more beers than should fit in a normal sized bag.

“I take it back,” Derek said, “this is definitely a party.”

There was another knock on the door.

“Come in!” Garcia said, picking up a balloon to throw.

Spencer opened the door trailed by Hotch and Emily, all looking confused as they were bombarded by a dozen balloons cascading down from above and a series of hugs from the group. All were looking around with a mix of shock and happiness on their faces.

“It’s technically none of your birthdays today,” Penelope said, “Because you are all such awful private people, BUT I got the goods and figured it out. We thought we would celebrate all of you guys, and our amazing friend group, with this little shindig.”

“It’s wonderful Garcia,” Hotch said, almost smiling, “Thank you.”

“Don’t just thank me!” she said, “It was Miss Jennifer’s idea, and she got the cake. And my beautiful Derek helped me with the decorations and loaned his room, which might I say, is strangely large for a single room.”

Derek chucked, “It was my pleasure, happy birthday you three.”

He pulled Spencer in and ruffled his hair.

“We’ve ordered pizza too!” JJ announced, “It should be here any minute now.”

“You’re too good to us,” Emily finally spoke up, after standing in the doorway with a dazed expression on her face.

Penelope guided them in, and the group exchanged hugs and laughter, and Hotch got a very Italian kiss on the cheek from Rossi. Penelope put silly birthday hats on their heads, and took photos like a proud mother.

After a few minutes of chatter—about the decorations, how they managed to keep it a secret, and most importantly, the illegality of Penelope hacking into their personal data on the university server— JJ’s phone pinged and she ran to the foyer to get the pizzas.

Munching on greasy food, there was a companionable silence with the cheery sounds of the music in the background.

As pizza wrapped up, their chatter resumed and the room filled with overlapping conversations. JJ noticed Rossi had snuck off to fish something out of Derek’s mini fridge, pouring something out into shot glasses. Then she heard the sound of whipped cream.

At that sound, all heads turned towards him. He had three cups filled to the brim with whipped cream and he looked like he was about to burst into laughter at any point.

“BIRTHDAY SHOTS!” Penelope squealed.

“No way,” Hotch said, “I’m not doing one of those.”

“One of what?” Spencer asked nervously.

“It’s not a blowjob is it?” Emily asked with a laugh.

“A blowjob?” Spencer asked even more nervously.

“It’s a shot, kid,” Derek assured him, “you just can’t use your hands and there’s the-“

He gestured at the whipped cream with a laugh.

“White stuff!” Emily said, tying up her hair into a ponytail in preparation.

Rossi had to explain the premise several times, before it sunk in that they had to fish out the small shot and drink it all without using their hands. Reid looked at them suspiciously but he warmed up to the idea after Hotch offered to go first so he could see how it’s done.

The older boy had definitely done a blowjob shot before, efficiently grabbing the plastic shot cup and downing it, his cheeks covered with whipped cream.

Emily was enthusiastically buried in the whipped cream but struggled on the follow through, spilling most of the vodka into the larger cup before she drank it.

Reid seemed nervous to get the whipped cream on his face, reeling back and wiping his cheeks then trying again.

Eventually, Derek reached his hand into the cup, retrieved the shot and held it up to Spencer’s mouth.

“Look ma, no hands!” Morgan quipped before rubbing some leftover whipped cream on the younger boy’s face as the group laughed. Reid was laughing happily, beaming as he wiped his face.

With the celebratory shot in their system, it was time for cake. JJ carefully used Penelope’s bright pink lighter to ignite candles on each piece for her three friends as they sang Happy Birthday to them.

“Happy birthday to you!” They sang, “happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Hotch, Spence and Emily! Happy birthday to you!”

They blew out their candles. All were instructed to make wishes.

As the night progressed, JJ got more and more nervous about the present. What if Emily hated it? Would she ruin the whole night? Penelope and Derek had assured her that it was a good present but what if they were wrong too?

JJ busied herself with cutting the cake, distributing pieces and making sure everyone had forks and napkins.

Rossi, who was their unofficial bartender, was stationed near the mini fridge and passed out fresh beers when called upon.

“Gifts!” Penelope exclaimed once they had made good work of the cake, dragging the presents out from their hiding space under Derek’s desk.

She handed them over to Emily, Hotch and Reid.

“We all pitched in,” Derek said.

All three looked perturbed at the fuss, murmuring “you shouldn’t have” as they looked at the gift. Spencer opened his and laughed, wrapping the incredibly long striped scarf around his neck and thanking Penelope. Aaron actually did smile at his present and expressed his gratitude by pouring them all shots.

Emily held hers for a moment, staring at the wrapped book with an unreadable expression on her face. JJ watched, holding her breath as she turned it over, then placed it back down.

“Will you excuse me for a second?” Emily said, her voice tight and sounding very… formal.

JJ gulped as Emily stood, and exited the dorm, shutting the door behind her. She immediately thought that she had done something wrong.

The group looked back and forth, not quite sure what to do, as the commotion happened mid way through Hotch doling out shots of whiskey and some were already half raised.

A moment passed as JJ thought about whether it would be worse for her to follow or leave her be. Maybe she wanted to be left alone? Maybe JJ was the last person Emily wanted to see?

She knew there was a lot about Emily that she didn’t know. Like JJ, the other girl kept a lot close to her chest. Over time, JJ had learned some details of her childhood, but not all, and what she knew didn’t look good. Maybe all of this was a bad idea? Emily might have had a reason that she didn’t celebrate her birthday. This could have been an awful plan and it would have been all JJ’s fault.

She stood and grabbed the book, deciding to follow Emily. She slipped out the door and walked slowly down the hall, unsure of what she would even say to Emily once she faced her. Hey I just gave you a gift and you all but ran out of the room before you opened it, did I offend you somehow? Or I’m sorry?

JJ wasn’t sure what she was sorry for. She just knew something was upsetting Emily and the last thing JJ wanted to be was the cause of that. In fact, she wanted to make Emily happy and make sure nothing ever bothered her ever again. It would probably be weird for her to say that, right?

She assumed that Emily had gone to the communal bathroom, as she left her lanyard with her room keys behind her in Derek’s room. If she had left the floor she would have been locked out.

JJ took a breath outside the door, then pushed it open.

Emily was standing in the bathroom that all of the girls floor shared, with its small row of stalls, old fashioned sinks and blue tiled floor. A frosted window that looked out into the courtyard. Many mornings JJ found herself brushing her teeth next to the other girl.

Emily had her arms braced on the sides of the sink, leaning forward and looking at herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were flushed and her breathing was coming in quick breaths.

“Em?” JJ said softly.

Startled by the noise, Emily looked away from her, quickly pulling up a corner of her shirt to wipe her eyes.

“You ok?” JJ asked, tucking the present behind her back.

“I’m fine,” Emily said, standing up straight and giving her a half smile. Her posture was stiff, her smile forced.

“You don’t look fine.”

Emily stepped back, leaning against the window sill. She crossed her arms, still avoiding any eye contact.

JJ walked forward, slowly closing the distance.

She leaned on the wall beside Emily, trying not to stare at her and make her feel uncomfortable.

“Did I do something wrong?” JJ asked. Her voice sounded small in her ears. She immediately kicked herself, upset at how this might sound like she was making it all about herself.

“No!” Emily exclaimed, shaking her head. “No. It wasn’t you it’s…”

She trailed off.

“I’ve never had all this before. The friends and the party and the gifts. All this attention… it’s a lot.”

She slid to the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. JJ did the same, turning to face the other girl. She didn’t want to push too hard lest Emily flee from her again.

“It’s all so nice,” Emily whispered.

“Then what’s wrong?” JJ asked softly.

Emily sighed and began to bite her nails. Her posture was hunched over, curled up on the cold tile floor.

She began to speak, then stopped herself, gritting her teeth and blinking hard. She looked over at JJ reluctantly, seeming to think hard about how to answer that question.

“I was always the new girl wherever I was,” she said. “I was never anywhere enough to make friends, real friends that is. Or have anything like all this. I would do anything to fit in and it never seemed to work.”

JJ’s heart felt like it was breaking for her friend. She tried to imagine Emily trying to be anyone else other than the Emily she knew and couldn’t. Fitting in is hard, let alone fitting into new countries and learning new languages. JJ knew she wouldn’t have been able to keep it together.

Emily shook her head, picking at the skin around her nails anxiously, JJ could tell that sharing all of this was incredibly difficult.

“I lived in a dozen different countries and was barely there long enough to make friends and when I did…” Emily sighed. “I fucked it up. I make things worse for people.”

Emily buried her face in her hands, her breaths coming harder now. Her voice was shaky and quiet, almost whispering to JJ.

“My mom was never around on my birthdays. She would leave me a present. Maybe. This year she didn’t even call.”

Emily paused.

“And then you guys do all this.”

Emily looked up, staring with unfocused eyes into the bathroom, JJ could tell she was thinking of someone else, some other day. She looked lost.

JJ wanted to hold her hand, wanted to comfort her, keep her close. She was always called the mom friend, it was in her nature to try and make sure her friends were taken care of. Her feelings for Emily complicated things. If she was anyone else, she would grab her hand, no questions asked, but she felt herself second-guessing each move.

Her actions suddenly felt like they had more weight to them. Knowing that she liked Emily made everything strange. If she held her hand, would it be weird? She didn’t know. Normally, she wouldn’t question holding a friend’s hand, hell, she’d already held Emily’s hand.

But that was before she was gay, or bi, or whatever. Before she knew she liked girls. Liked Emily. Now, touching her felt scary, like she was doing something wrong, even if she was simply trying to be nice.

Fighting against her anxious thoughts, JJ reached out, tugging at Emily’s wrist until her hand clasped onto hers. JJ ran a reassuring thumb over her hand. She sighed a breath of relief when Emily leaned into the touch.

“You’re our friend,” JJ said, simply. “And we care about you.”

Emily nodded, still not looking at her.

“When I held your present in my hands,” Emily said, “I just couldn't stop thinking of my friend Matthew. He surprised me on my sixteenth birthday, pulling me out of some stupid event my mother had dragged me to. That was the only time I got a real birthday present before now.”

JJ hadn’t heard about this friend. Emily didn’t really talk about her past, beyond the general facts. JJ had to stop herself from prying, fighting back her curiosity in favour of letting Emily talk.

She squeezed Emily’s hand in a gesture she hoped would be encouraging.

“Your gift just brought back a lot of memories,” Emily said with a whisper. “Matthew basically saved my life. He was the only friend I had before now I guess.”

She looked over at JJ.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said, wiping at her eyes.

“Don’t be.”

JJ pulled Emily into her, wrapping her arms around her and holding her tight. Emily let out a muffled sob and fell into her, with her head tucked under JJ’s chin. They sat like that for a while, JJ listening to Emily’s ragged breathing and JJ running a calming hand over her back. Emily’s face was buried in her shoulder, her soft hair tickled JJ’s face as she held her tight.

She focused on rubbing Emily’s back, making patterns with her hand on top of her soft sweater. Emily’s arms were wrapped around her waist.

For a moment, tears pricked at JJ’s eyes. Watching Emily finally be vulnerable to her, for her to share something, even if she left out details, was a lot. She blinked them back and focused on steadying her breathing, being a calm presence for Emily.

After a moment Emily pulled away, creating some distance between them, wiping her face with her sleeve and sniffling.

“JJ I don’t want you to get hurt,” Emily said, her voice cracking, “I just bring people pain.”

“What happened, Em?” JJ asked.

Emily looked at her with teary eyes and shook her head.

“You don’t have to tell me, Emily. But I need you to know that whatever it is, I’ll still be here. I care so much about you and just… like being your friend. I don’t care what happened in your past or if you think you’re going to hurt me. All I care about is us.”

“I like being your friend,” Emily said with a teary laugh.

JJ smiled at her, pulling her into another hug. Holding her tight feeling like the girl would break into pieces in front of her if she let go.

“Do you want your present?” JJ asked carefully, still hugging Emily. She could feel the other girl nod.

JJ pulled back, taking the wrapped book from the tile floor and placing it in Emily’s lap. Emily carefully began to unwrap it, as if she wasn’t allowed to rip the brightly patterned paper.

“You know you can rip it, right?” JJ said with a kind laugh. “Just tear it open, it’s part of the fun!”

Emily looked at her nervously, and half heartedly tugged at the wrapping paper.

“Harder!” JJ said, demonstrating by pulling on it and making a satisfying tearing noise. JJ assumed that the girl didn’t have the opportunity to tear open presents as a kid, and JJ wanted to make sure she didn’t miss out on that joy anymore.

Emily laughed and tore at it, ripping the paper off and revealing the small book underneath. Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

“I read this as a kid,” Emily breathed, staring at the cover reverently.

She opened the cover and looked through the first few pages.

“L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” Emily quoted the novel just as the book shop clerk had done.

“What is essential is invisible to the eyes,” JJ translated. “I don’t really get it. I tried to read it before I gave it to you, but didn’t make much headway.”

“It’s about love,” Emily said as she flipped through the pages.

Emily slowly turned the pages, smiling down at the whimsical illustrations and murmured about it in French that JJ couldn’t quite make out.

“I could translate it for you if you want?” Emily offered.

“Is it as good in English?”

“No,” Emily said with a laugh.

JJ beamed, happy that her gift was no longer making Emily upset. She hoped that whatever bad memories she had about birthdays were being amended with some joy from today.

“Well then I just have to get better at French so that I can understand it,” JJ said. “I’ll need a good tutor.”

“This is an amazing present. Thank you JJ.”

They smiled at each other.

“I’ll read it to you,” Emily said, “And you can stop me and I can explain anything you don’t understand.”

JJ’s heart fluttered at the thought of Emily reading a love story out loud. Though, from what she saw it was about a boy being in love with a flower so it couldn’t be that romantic, could it?

“Sounds like a plan,” JJ said. “Should we get back? I wouldn’t want to worry the others.”

Emily nodded, then the two of them stood up together. JJ’s legs had fallen asleep while sitting on the cold, tiled floor so she dramatically shook them out, making Emily laugh.

God her laugh, she wanted to hear that forever. She’d do anything to keep Emily smiling and happy.

As they walked back to the party, it was Emily who took JJ’s hand.

Maybe they could be friends. Maybe that would be enough.

#criminal minds #cm #criminal minds tv #jemily #emily prentiss x jennifer jareau #prentiss x jj #jennifer jareau #emily prentiss #gravelyhumerus cm college au #my post #my writing #after all that i almost forgot to actually post it #hope u all enjoy xoxoox #kennedy is not in this chapter i am sorry to her fans

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clockworkouroboros · 5 years ago

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I’m in a The Amazing Devil Discord server and have been going wild with crazy insane theories about just about everything, drawing connections that probably don’t actually exist, and generally losing my mind over both Love Run and The Horror and the Wild. That being said, I do have a theory about THatW that, if it’s not true, at least merits me a tinfoil hat, I think. Just be warned, this post will be long, and yes, I will include receipts.

So here’s this theory and Joey, if you read this, just know that I’m impressed either at how much thought was put into this, or the sheer number of coincidences that make this work if it wasn’t planned. It’s turned me into a conspiracy theorist for the past four days or so? And it’s severely affected the amount of sleep I’ve been getting.

My basic theory here is that Joey and Madeleine aren’t singing as themselves throughout this album, they’re playing characters, and those characters are old gods. Joey is the Wild, Madeleine is Time. (Alternatively, she’s Horror, fitting with the album title, but as she’s never explicitly referred to as such, I’m not insisting on that point.)

Now, where am I getting this silly idea from? None other than the title track, of course, in which Joey sings, “witness me, old man, I am the Wild, and Madeleine sings, “And I am Time itself.” And yes, they are both capitalized like that in the lyrics.

So they explicitly refer to themselves as such. But Emily, you might be saying (or not, depending on how much you care), that’s one song! This is hardly an album’s worth of proof! Sure, they might be gods in this song, but what about the other eight? To which I say, hoo boy, I’m just getting started.

Before I continue, I’d like to add something about how their characters are depicted throughout the album: Joey is more cheerful, Madeleine is not. (see: Wild Blue Yonder, Marbles, Battle Cries.) Joey is whimsical, Madeleine is practical. (See Battle Cries especially, but you can also see this in Wild Blue Yonder.) Madeleine is referred to multiple times as being stronger than Joey, and appears to assume a more protective role over Joey’s childlike. This fits in with my theory, by the way, in a roundabout sort of way that involves some squinting. Joey is the Wild, which is...well, wild. Think of little kids: cheerful, whimsical, in need of protection. Madeleine is Time. She knows what has been, what is, and what will be. Of course she’s going to be more mature, practical, and pessimistic.

And why is this important? Well, it’s kind of how I’m tying together a lot of the rest of the album. (Not all of it; Farewell Wanderlust is a notable outlier in many ways, and some of my connections are tenuous at best, but we’re going to ignore that and pretend it’s all rock-solid. Rockrose-solid. I’m sorry, I’m very tired.) I’m ignoring The Rockrose and the Thistle a little bit in this post, not because I dislike it (it’s gorgeous), but because it’s stubbornly eluding my attempts to tie it into anything other than Elsa’s Song, which isn’t even part of this album.

The vast majority of what you need to know about these two characters is in The Horror and the Wild (the song), so I’m gonna copy/paste some lyrics, and go through them. (Actually, the copy/pasting is nonexistent, these lyrics are imprinted on my brain at this point. That being said, if there are errors, lmk and I will edit the post and fix them!)

So we’ve got Madeleine starting, singing about Joey, with “You were raised by wolves and voices, every night I hear them howling deep beneath your bed, they said it all comes down to you.” Aside from the fact that I have no clue why “it all” comes down to Joey, or anything with that last bit, maybe a few more late nights with a tinfoil hat will do the trick. That being said, the first line of the song references childhood specifically in relation to Joey. Notice also how wolves are referenced in Wild Blue Yonder (“we don’t know what’s out there/could be wolves”) and That Unwanted Animal (“‘What’s the time, Mr. Wolf,’ but you, you’re blind, you bleat, you bear your claws”). The whole “howling” thing and “deep beneath your bed” both pop up in That Unwanted Animal, too: “and on the wind it howls,” for one. And for the other, there’s “you [presumably Joey] make the bed up silent on the floor so no one hears us,” later followed later in the song by “and the door below us splinters, and the creature creeps inside.”

Following this, Joey sings about Madeleine: “you’re the daughter of silent watching stones, you watch the stars hurl all their fundaments, in wonderment at you and yours, forever asking more.” First of all, I’m gonna say that this is Joey’s point of view; later on, Madeleine will refute the daughter thing (“I’m not a drunkard, a daughter, a preacher”.) Anyway, “silent watching stones” could reference Wild Blue Yonder: “every stone you threw, I stood on to better see the view.” The view being the stars hurling all their fundaments?

(Incidentally, I knew vaguely what “fundament” meant, but I looked it up to make sure I had it right, and learned that, among its other meanings, “fundament” can mean “butt.” But I don’t think that’s what Joey had in mind with this. I just think y’all should appreciate it.)

Anyway, we’ve also got in Battle Cries, “With you I could summon the gods and the stars, make them dance out the plays that we wrote from the heart, and we’d laugh at the ghosts of our fears,” with Madeleine singing, “Come on, love, please don’t start, sing your notes play your part,” and then the part that gets me every time: M: “we were gods,” J: “we were kids.” Which is a whole other can of worms involving their personalities, which I’ve already briefly outlined. My point is the whole “gods and the stars” bit.

I could (and have, on Discord) done a full, in-depth analysis of this track, and I don’t want to go all over it again, but “I promise you, they’ll sing of every Time you passed your fingers through my hair and called me child, witness me, old man, I am the Wild” has both Time and Wild as proper nouns in the lyrics, plus reinforces Time’s view of the Wild as a child. No clue who the old man is, though.

In verse two, Madeleine sings, “you [Joey] are the son of every dressing-up box, and I am Time itself, I slow and let you play, I steal the hours, and turn the night into day.” Again, this reinforces Joey’s childlike aspects (which will later be hinted at in That Unwanted Animal, with the “god-child,” who’s clearly Joey), but also shows, as in the refrain, the fact that Time has a sense of protectiveness over the Wild, at least sometimes.

That being said, although I’ve obviously referenced other songs, I still have mostly focused on the title track. So. I’m going to go through some of the other songs real quick.

The songs on the album (again, excepting Rockrose, because my attempts to tie it in have been frustrating and not gone anywhere, Mr. Batey please explain) can be grouped into categories: songs outright referencing gods (THatW, Farewell Wanderlust, That Unwanted Animal, Battle Cries), songs about their relationship, (arguably all of them, although Welly Boots is a bit confusing), and songs that refuse to allow me to classify them (Rockrose).

I would argue that this entire album is about the relationship of two old gods, but I’m not quite sure what the chronology is of the album, because it seems like it can’t be straightforward. (Farewell Wanderlust, although its placement makes sense in the setup of the album, doesn’t make sense in the chronology of this theory.) Another important note in some way is that every song on the album, with the exception of Farewell Wanderlust, is about being there for someone, or steadfastness in some capacity, while Farewell Wanderlust is about abandonment. It’s an outlier in a lot of ways. (Though not as many ways as frickin Rockrose.)

I have been talking about this at great length (and almost incessantly) on Discord, so unless you want this post to get even longer, I’m going to run by some lyrics real quick to try and show a little bit my thought process.

- “He watches her get dressed as though she’s hurtling through time” (Fair)

- “And she is stronger than he has ever been, he knows” (Fair) versus “Without you, I’m stronger, I’m no longer filled with wonder. How wrong you were” (Wild Blue Yonder, Welly Boots)

- J: “Place your hand in mine” M: “Hold the hand of the god-child, they said, as he falls from the sky” (That Unwanted Animal)

- “I’m the saint of the paint that was left in the pot, I’m your angel ellipsis, your devil of dots” (Farewell Wanderlust)

- “the fluttering of all your wings” (The Horror and the Wild) versus “when you think about him, my wings start to flap” (Farewell Wanderlust)

- “come, devil, come, she sang, call out my name. Let’s take this outside, ‘cos we’re one and the same. Our gods have abandoned us, left us, instead, take up arms, take my hand, let us waltz for the dead” (Farewell Wanderlust)

There are even more lyrics, and I’m going to be completely honest with you, I’ve gone totally insane with all of this, but this post is way too long already, so just let me know if you want any clarification or something.

Tldr: The Amazing Devil’s album The Horror and the Wild is about two old gods, one being Time, and the other being the Wild, or the god-child. The album is primarily about their relationship and steadfastness they show each other, even in tumultuous circumstances.

Now go excuse me while I attempt to take off this tinfoil hat that appears to be stuck on my head.

#music #the amazing devil #joey batey #madeleine hyland #the horror and the wild #long post #i’m...so sorry #i needed some sort of record #because enough conversation has passed on discord that those posts are now lost to time #anyway here y’all go #man joey if you read this pls don’t judge me too hard

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hlcreators · 4 years ago

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AUTHOR REC: mediawhore / @mediawhorefics

Be sure to show some love and leave kudos and a comment!

The Murmur of Yearning (93k)

Four years ago, Harry Styles was forced into a marriage of convenience to enrich and ally both his and his promised's families. The sudden, and slightly suspicious, death of the Marquess of Haxshire, however, brings great disturbance to Crescentfield Hall and, as his late's husband's closest male relative, Harry unexpectedly finds himself the head of a family he never felt he belonged to. Between a meddling distant cousin hellbent on inserting himself in Harry’s life, his wicked and mistrustful mother-in-law and his late husband’s advisors refusing to help or take him seriously, Harry struggles in the fight to keep what he’s earned and make the Estate finally feel like home.

Luckily, he doesn’t stand completely alone and finds himself an unlikely ally in Mr Tomlinson, the elusive Land Stewart who has been taking care of the property in the shadows for years. Louis Tomlinson is caring, patient, and unlike everyone else, he doesn’t seem to think Harry committed a murder.

‘Sup (6.7k)

Gemma really wants her little brother to sign up for a dating app and get back in the game after a messy divorce. Harry thinks he’s way too old to swipe. They compromise to devastatingly embarrassing results.

Meanwhile, all Louis wants is to finish the play he’s been commissioned to write, but one of the regulars at his local coffee shop keeps distracting him.

ft. older larry, pushy gemma, harry being a disaster gay and silver fox louis.

Tired Tired Sea (113k)

As a B&B owner on the most remote of all the British Isles, Louis Tomlinson is used to spending the coldest half of the year in complete isolation, with his dog and the sea as sole companions. Until, one day, a mysterious stranger on a quest to rebuild himself rents a room for the winter.

The Blood of Words (33.7k)

Louis Tomlinson hasn’t sworn off relationships per se. He just doesn’t think he’s quite ready for one yet, despite his therapist’s encouragements. He’s comfortable in his position as editor for Styles Publishing and he’s happy to focus on his career while he gives himself more time to heal.

Enter his CEO’s brother, a boxer with a heart of gold who is determined to carve himself a space in Louis’ life and, more importantly, his heart.

Peace In Your Arms (1.5k)

The happily ever after ... Or a series of TEC codas

the dead things we carry (25k)

September ‘49 He hasn’t seen him since that day in France, that horrible muddy day where for one terrifyingly long second, Louis really thought he was going to die. He winces with the phantom pain, the hand not holding his cane going to his stomach automatically, remembering the franticness, the tenderness, of Harry’s hands while Louis was bleeding out.

This is the man who saved Louis’ life.

For one second, Louis fears Harry won’t recognise him, but his eyes widen when he turns to his left and they meet Louis’. He takes a step forward, reaching for him with a shaky hand before stopping himself.

“Louis,’ Harry says with a shudder and Louis doesn’t think his name has ever carried more weight.

This is the only man Louis ever thought about kissing for real.

“Oh,” Mrs. Padley says, clearly taken aback. “You two know each other?”

There are some things people never fully come home from. Until, one day, if they’re lucky, home comes to them.

Things Gone Cold (24k)

"your heart is warm for things gone cold.”— Sophocles, Antigone

With his soulmate’s thoughts about him written on his skin and the world’s eyes trailing his every movement, Harry Styles is having a bit of a rough time releasing his second album in peace. And that’s not even counting the breakup. Or the car crash.

Through Eerie Chaos (102k)

For as long as anyone can remember, Old Hillsbridge Manor has always been believed to be haunted. Everyone in the village agrees and keeps a respectful, fearful, distance. New in town after a bad breakup and an internship that led to disappointment rather than a permanent job, Harry Styles figures taking pictures of the decrepit building could be a great new creative project. Or at least a much-needed distraction while he searches for a job and crashes at his parents’ new house. No one warned him about the apparitions though; about the music, the laughter, the people who flicker and vanish when you call after them, the echoes of a past that should be long gone… Harry has never believed in spirits but even he can admit that there’s something weird going on. What starts as mere curiosity evolves into a full-blown investigation and soon enough, Harry finds himself making friends with an aristocrat from the 1920s and struggling with finding the best way to tell him that he’s dead.

The Ghost Hunter AU where Niall lives to prove ghosts are real, Zayn is a skeptical librarian and Harry gets caught up in a century-old mystery and catches feeling in the process.

Sleep It Off (844)

I've felt better ! Hello 2017 !!

What do you mean he’s coming? (15k)

When Harry accepted to be his sister’s Maid of Honour, despite how non-traditional of a choice he was, he didn’t think writing a speech for the wedding reception would be this hard. Now, not only does he have less than two weeks left to find something moving and inspirational to say, but Gemma just confided in him that her old childhood best friend is going to be in attendance. The one who moved to LA and they haven’t seen in fifteen years because he was too busy becoming an Academy Awards winner. But hey, no pressure. It’s just Louis Fucking Tomlinson.

Harry is screwed.

a fully armed battalion (to remind you of my love) (5.6k)

“He was flirting with you by the way,” Niall says casually once he’s finished saying goodbye to Louis and he’s joined Harry outside.

“No he wasn’t,” Harry replies automatically, feeling his heart clench at the thought. Was he?

Niall simply raises a mocking eyebrow in response before wrapping his scarf twice around his neck.

“Not that it matters!” Harry says quickly, eyes widening. “I wouldn’t care even if he did because he’s awful and the worst.”

Everyone at Hogwarts knows that Professor Styles and Professor Tomlinson absolutely despise each other. It's too bad that they're in love.

Coax the Cold (86k)

England, 1897.

English Professor Louis Tomlinson’s passion for the occult has been a source of mockery and derision for most of his life. When he hears whispers of a travelling freak show newly established in London claiming the existence of a monstrous sea hybrid, half-man, half-fish, Louis sees it as his ticket to credibility amongst his peers. The summer he spends undercover working on the show, however, gives him much more than that.

All These Lights (34.8k)

“People vote for alphas because they’re strong and they’re not only beautiful but also mesmerizing. They make you want to give them all of your attention, make you want to beg for some of theirs back. They’re shiny, oozing sex appeal and a commanding presence, and people always want more and more. Omegas are enticing too for sure, but it’s not the same. It makes people uncomfortable. It doesn’t make them want to root for you.”

the canon fic where Harry is an omega and dreams come with a price.

wash him deep where the tides are turning (3.7k)

"When Harry finally tells Louis about his family’s curse and the true love spell that broke it, they’ve been dating for seven months, nineteen days and about twelve hours and Louis’ cock is buried deep inside his arse."

Part two of a practical magic au.

a long way down (to the bottom of the river) (24k)

“ Most people would call Harry silly for believing in curses. Childish would also be a probable insult thrown his way. In their little town full of little people, Harry’s whimsical nature and beliefs mean that he’s subjected to frequent judgemental looks and whispers. It doesn’t usually bother him. Most people don’t know about the magic thrumming through his veins or about how powerful words can truly be. Most people don’t carry around their ancestors grief like a burden. They don’t have to pay for deeds hundreds of years old like Harry and his family have. They get to love freely without fear.

Harry and his kin aren’t so lucky.”

a practical magic au in which Harry and his sister accidentally kill her abusive boyfriend with magic and Louis is the D.I working the case.

loose lips sink ship all the damn time (not this time) (39k)

“Louis Tomlinson is gay,” Fiona announces and she sounds calm at least. “That’s not a scandal,” Nick replies automatically even though he feels slightly sick. He needs to call Louis back. Now. “No,” Fiona agrees quickly. “But his underage gay sex tape is.” The one where Louis is outed via a sex tape he made before the X-Factor and Nick can't resist flying to America to give him a shoulder to cry on. Told through flashbacks, this is a story of getting together and getting back together.

all that i’ll ever need is in your eyes (4.2k)

Louis has known he's going to marry Harry Styles since he was eighteen years old. Five years later, he has the perfect proposal planned. Too bad he can't help blurting it out while they're detained at the mall.

hi hater, kiss kiss (3.8k)

Nick has had a crush on Louis Tomlinson ever since he first saw him perform on the x-factor. Almost four years later, he's finally accepted that their ongoing, unstoppable feud is the only thing the two of them will ever share. One game of Call or Delete with Niall Horan, however, starts to shake this belief.

your bones illuminate (5.4k)

High School AU Snapshots of Harry and Louis' relationship through their last year of sixth form. Warning: There is no plot. Only fluff.

the last people standing (at the end of the night) (7.4k)

Sequel to the greatest pretenders (in the cold morning light)

A year after his undercover assignment ended, Louis should finally feel at peace. With Cowell & Co finally dead or behind bars, his life is more simple than ever. It's too bad his feelings can't be buried as deep as the people he's lost.

An undercover cops AU

you think fashion is your friend, my friend (fashion is danger) (27k)

"Louis has one rule, and one rule only, that he simply refuses to break. He forbids himself to be attracted to anyone he might work with. No wanking to models who might wear his clothes! It’s hardly fair, considering he spends 95% of his time working with the most attractive men on the planet, but his career is more important. Besides, in Louis’ experience, it always leads to disaster. Harry Styles makes respecting the rule really damn hard though and Louis is not quite sure why."

the one where Louis is a famous British designer and Harry is the clumsy, most likely straight model that makes his heart race.

the greatest pretenders (in the cold morning light) (41.5k)

undercover cops/the departed au

Louis and Nick are on two different sides of the law and mobster Simon Cowell is not the only person they have in common. The one where Louis is an undercover cop and Harry is the court-ordered shrink who refuses to prescribe him Valium.

#writer appreciation week #1dsource #hljournal #fics #author rec

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randomvarious · 4 years ago

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Today’s compilation:

Working in a Coalmine 1992 Soul / R&B / Blues / Rock & Roll

One of my absolute most favorite things to do in this world, besides listen to music, is watch old TV commercials from the 80s and 90s. Some years ago, I came across a VHS of a Giants-Eagles game that my dad had recorded sometime in the mid-90s, and while I consider myself to be a pretty big Giants fan, I was actually way more fascinated by the commercials on that tape than I was the game. The designs of the cars, the fashion, the primitive graphics, the voiceovers, the logos, the fonts, the obsolete and extinct products and companies, the silly campaigns like the Budweiser frogs and the Bud Ice penguin, and of course, for some of them, the licensed music, too.

And this concept comp highlights that music: these are great songs that were able to earn themselves a new life because of the memorable commercials that they were featured in long after they were first released. Now, I myself have no connection to any of these songs through commercials, besides the whimsically cheery folk tune, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" by The New Seekers, which was famously co-opted by Coca-Cola into "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" (coincidentally, I actually mentioned that song in a post that I made just yesterday because one of the song's co-writers is the father of one of the artists that I was writing about); I'm just familiar with most of these songs through other means. But if anyone knows or remembers the commercials that they were featured in, I'd really love to see them.

Anyhoo, I actually kinda-sorta unwittingly developed this concept on my own a few years back with a Spotify mix I had made, too. It was the dead of winter and I really just had a hankering for summer, one like I'd never had before and haven't had since. So I ended up making a two-and-a-half-hour playlist of songs that reminded me of summers past. And guess what? By the time I had finished making it, I had come to realize that a bunch of the songs that I had first added to it were actually first exposed to me through really summery turn-of-the-millennium commercials. "Starry-Eyed Surprise" by Paul Oakenfold and Shifty Shellshock came from a Diet Coke commercial with rollerskating at dusk; the Soulchild remix of "19-2000" by the Gorillaz was in an Icebreakers ad; "Smile" by Vitamin C was from a commercial for the Hershey bar, set at an outdoor concert; "Where's Your Head At" by Basement Jaxx was in a Pringles ad that largely took place at a skate park; and Groove Armada's "My Friend" was prominently featured in a famous Nike ad. I didn't even realize how deep of an impact that these commercials had had on me, but here were all these songs from those ads sitting in front of me that my brain had somehow naturally linked to summer.

It's really wild how the human mind works.

And for anyone who's interested, here's that playlist I made. It's called "An Endless Capri Sun or Starburst or Juicyfruit Commercial From Like the Summer of 2002." It flat-out rules and it'll really put you in that late 90s-early aughts summer mindset.

Highlights:

Lee Dorsey - "Working in a Coalmine" Muddy Waters - "Mannish Boy" Percy Sledge - "When a Man Loves a Woman" Louis Armstrong - "What a Wonderful World" Fontella Bass - "Rescue Me" Ben E. King - "Stand by Me" Nina Simone - "My Baby Just Cares for Me" Muddy Waters - "You're Gonna Need My Help" Steppenwolf - "Born to Be Wild" Jerry Lee Lewis - "C.C. Rider" Little Richard - "Tutti Frutti" Sam Cooke - "Wonderful World" Mungo Jerry - "In the Summertime" The Zombies - "She's Not There" The New Seekers - "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Ray Charles - "Unchain My Heart" The Platters - "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" Little Richard - "Keep on Knockin'" Al Jarreau - "Lean on Me" The Bellamy Brothers - "Let Your Love Flow (live)" Honeybus - "I Can't Let Maggie Go" Sam Cooke - "Cupid" Dinah Washington - "Mad About the Boy"

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anadvanceddegreeinquiet · 4 years ago

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What, Me Pandemic? A Boho Crowd Stakes Its Claim (and Claims Its $48 Steaks)

Fricasse Dubois, 21, lamented the decision to pull her latest concrete poem from The Codswalloped Pisspot as she passed one of the whimsical “Maine-ducks-in-flight” mailboxes that serve as newspaper bins for the red-hot downtown rag. But her friend and intern, Banshee Fitzgerald, 33, had made a good point: The Pisspot had been flirting with questionable taste for months now.

First there was the ironic opera libretto by Steve Bannon, which cast Leo “KIDS” Fitzpatrick as a Muslim refugee in a Copenhagen no-go zone. Then there was the edgy faux-memoir from Terry Richardson, modeled on O.J. Simpson’s unpublished “If I Did It,” and accompanied by a portfolio of Juergen Teller ass-Xeroxes.

But now, the Pisspot hype was growing, and Dubois realized that she might miss the proverbial boat. Interest in the nascent publishing venture was at fever pitch; a SPAC had been formed by laid-off Gagosian and Perrotin directors eager to stage a hostile takeover of the irregularly published ‘zine.

And a dash of infamy certainly helped—the paper’s co-editor, Stizzy Fugger, had just launched a Tumblr in which she tallied the number of people she had inadvertently infected with Covid-19, updated in real-time (12,617 at press time, if you’re keeping score, more than the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally).

Anyone who has witnessed a “Pisspot drop” in the Dimes Square neighborhood of Manhattan knows to expect pandemonium. But nothing could have prepared this reporter for the foamy-mouthed jubilee and ecstatic violence of the occasion.

It was 11am on a Tuesday, and the editors appeared at the corner of Seward Park, bearing several cardboard boxes of the paper. They were trailed by the usual suspects: Pimple-necked sadcore rappers, sex-positive Zoom therapists, former Artforum critic’s pickers who now run content for Chipotle, and middle-aged men who really shouldn’t skateboard.

It’s a truism that an issue of Pisspot isn’t really read so much as it is imbibed, absorbed via the osmosis of social media’s orgiastic frenzy. In fact, the Times had a great deal of difficulty locating anyone who had physically held a copy of the paper in their smooth, unlined hands; many preferred to experience it as a series of fuzzy, thumbnail-sized images posted ironically on MySpace.

“People used to say they read Playboy for the ads,” said Kit Murano, a fish-eyed, forty-something member of a downtown-based Adderall (™) street team. “Pisspot doesn’t have ads. And no one who knows anything would be caught, like, just sitting there and flipping through the thing. It’s an attitude. It’s an essence. It’s a lifestyle.”

Okay, sure—but what about the actual content actually published in each issue? Imagine an early iteration of Vice cross-pollinated with Tiger Beat, and then add a splash of sexual-harassment-era Paris Review. It’s a bit silly, and a bit loose. Bret Easton Ellis contributes a crossword puzzle in which every answer is just another reason why millennials suck. A party report—‘Reamed & Furred’—diligently transcribes the coke-addled bon mots of the same group of six people all eating at the same restaurant every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening.

If there’s an ethos gluing all of this together, it’s a passing-of-the-torch from an older bohemian guard to a younger demographic, with their laissez-faire attitudes about sex, drugs, and global pandemics. “It’s, like, we can all still party together, and age isn’t really ‘a thing’,” explains Murano, leaning out the window of a Mini Cooper wrapped in shiny SunGen Pharma adverts.

The entire scene revolves around the lopsided triangle known as “Dimes Square,” which borrows its moniker from the culinary hotspot Dimes. (The name derives from Cockney rhyming slang for ‘elongated pinky nail.’). Every New York story is also, of course, a story about real estate. In this case, that means the Connecticut country houses that this cohort has Airbnbed out while remaining to weather the storm in lower Manhattan.

Parts of this scene are “white, but probably ambisexual-adjacent; they’re members of the creative class, but they possess enough self-hatred to seem authentic,” says Dash Johnson, a Dimes Square hanger-on who many suspect of running the Steak-Umms social media accounts. “Most of them used to work for galleries, or websites, or Garage magazine, but when those jobs dried up, they woke up one morning and said: Fuck it. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s just tweet.”

One essential element of any good scene is a gossip column to keep track—and to keep score. ArtWet’s “Wet Ass Pigment” plays that role for the Dimes Square cognoscenti. It’s a bleeding-edge social diary written by an anonymous, Gossip Girl-style correspondent who communicates solely via Signal, using a vocal transformer.

“I was sick of trying to break into this world,” they said. “I was sick of meeting Anthony Haden-Guest at a dinner, for the 387th time, and having him introduce himself all over again, like we hadn’t both thrown up in the same toilet less than three days before. Fuck gatekeepers. I built my own gate, and then I started keeping it.”

It was a Wet Ass Pigment column, in fact, which broke the season’s buzziest news: semi-disgraced first son Hunter Biden had bought an octoplex apartment directly above Dimes, where he’ll be staying as he prepares for a September solo exhibition that will open concurrently across Andrew Kreps, 56 Henry, Shoot the Lobster, and a pop-up space for Recess CBD seltzer. Unlike the gentle, “meditative” paintings that Biden had been making in recovery, the new work is brash and rudely vulgar—the product of an unexpected friendship Biden had struck up with Bjarne Melgaard and Jordan Wolfson.

Meanwhile, the group’s literary face remains 29-year-old Katarina Klaus, whose razor-sharp prose skewers her surroundings with the acidic wit of a young Evelyn Waugh. “I’ll be honest, I fucking hate writing,” Klaus admitted, blowing her nose into a Telfar bag. “I’m both super motivated and super lazy. Sometimes I’ll just copy-paste random chunks of Speedboat into a column and no one will even notice.”

So what’s next for this ragtag crew? “Dimes Square will probably be over by the time this fucking article comes out,” Klaus laments. “You’re going to have, like, some TikTok influencer house on the corner of Canal and Essex, and all the coke will have fentanyl in it again because idiots from New Jersey just have no nose. You know what? I’m regretting this already. This is all off the record.”

Meanwhile, Klaus is already rethinking her involvement in Pisspot. With a current print run of 250 copies, the instantly iconic newspaper suddenly seems a bit too exposed. She’s in discussions with a new, unnamed venture that would distribute articles and essays in a serialized format, via fortunes randomly inserted into cookies at various Chinese restaurants within a three-block radius of the Square. “It’s all about ephemerality,” she says, sucking on a DMT vape she brought back from Mexico City. “It’s all about staying relevant.”

This article was lovingly rewritten from the original by Scott Indrisek.

CORRECTION: The above edition of this story mistakenly cites Kit Murano’s age as “forty-something,” based on our reporter’s visual guesstimation. She is actually 19.

CORRECTION: ‘Dimes’ is in fact Cockney prison rhyming slang for the expression, “a bent knob is straight twice a day.”

CORRECTION: An earlier online version of this story mistakenly identified The Codswalloped Pisspot as The Duct-Taped Shitberg.

CORRECTION: An earlier, subscribers-only post of this story mislabeled the gossip blog Wet Ass Pigment as being a Spotify podcast called Wank ‘n Pose.

CORRECTION: Jordan Wolfson died in 2014.

CORRECTION: An earlier Google Doc of this story referenced a non-existent ‘hardcore maternity diary’ by Chloe Sevigny, which most likely did not appear in issue 4 of the Codtaped Shitpot.

CORRECTION: A version of this story that was sent to hapless print subscribers in Texas and Connecticut wrongly identified the geographic boundaries of “Dimes Square” as being East 45th Street, Central Park West, Freeman’s Alley, and Bedford Avenue.

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kumkaniudaku · 6 years ago

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Family Reunion

A/N: This is throwback Chad and CoCo. I queued this however long ago because I’m currently knee deep in research, so please forgive me if I don’t respond to comments immediately. Thank you so much for reading.

CHARLESTON, SC (1999)

The outdoor area of Charleston’s most historic community center buzzed with the perfect storm of sun, food, and family as Bobby Brown blasted from nearby speakers. Children ran freely across a grassy patch that kept them in their parents’ sight without bringing them close enough to listen to grown folks’ business. Older men crowded around the large charcoal grill, engaging in friendly debates and spirited conversations about past experiences. Teenagers gathered at the park equipment to escape the watchful eye of the adults for harmless mischief. Several bodies in the area donned vibrant white t-shirts decorated in a whimsical script that read ‘Boseman Family Reunion,’ noting that any person in possession of the garment were certified members of the family.

“Co, you got soda on your shirt,” Chadwick pointed out as his friend’s eyes darted to the front of her clothes in horror.

Tasha had spent all day praying she kept the reunion t-shirt clean. It was presented to her as a gift the weekend before the event, and she spent countless hours listing the activities and foods that should be avoided to end the day with no stains. So, when CoCo looked down to find the hem of the shirt free of debris, her sigh of relief was joined by a loud huff.

“Would you stop playing so much! If I get something on this shirt, your aunt is gonna kill me.”

“No she won’t,” Chadwick laughed, the sound muffled behind the burger filling his cheeks. “It’s just a shirt.”

“That’s where you’re wrong Sherlock Homeboy. This shirt is an invitation into the family. I’m actively trying to take your spot.”

Chadwick scoffed before taking a sip from the soda can in his hand, “You could never take my spot. My folks love me.”

“You sure about that?” Chadwick lifted his eyebrow at Tasha’s smirk, prompting her to turn her styrofoam to go plate in his direction to reveal its contents.

“Man! How’d you get that!”

When he reached to grab the golden brown piece of pound cake from her tray, Tasha quickly smacked Chadwick’s hand away. “I got it from your favorite auntie. You know, the one you said loved you more than anybody in the world and always let you have the first slice of her man getting pound cake.”

“You think you special, huh?”

“Oh, I know I am!”

Chadwick watched CoCo plop a piece of cake into her mouth, and he smiled. Truthfully, he didn’t mind losing out on the first slice. He was excited that his family had embraced his best friend from the first moment she came to visit the previous summer. Chad was convinced everyone loved Tasha because she was every good thing wrapped into one sassy package. CoCo was sure that her friend’s family only liked her because they loved him. The truth was that they welcomed her in like a long lost family member because they knew that one day she would become one.

The pair continued to eat in relative silence, throwing in a joke about the other every once in a while. Tasha’s eyes scanned the play area as she chewed the last bits of her hotdog. When her gaze landed on the worn basketball court, she smiled and turned to Chadwick.

“I’ll give you the rest of my cake if you beat me on the court.”

Chadwick’s eyes twinkled as he laughed, “You couldn’t think of a better way to lose that pound cake than to challenge me to something we both know I’ll win.”

“I mean, there’s two of us sitting here, and only one is a MEAC champ.”

“Oh, there goes the championships! It is gonna feel so good when I beat you and eat your cake.”

Chadwick and Tasha looked at each other with similar goofy smiles. A competition of some sort was a weekly occurrence between them, and a summer gathering wouldn’t ruin tradition.

“Play to 11? Every basket one point. No shots beyond the arc,” CoCo explained. Chadwick nodded as he always did and they made a mad dash to the concrete slab on the far edge of the playground.

Underneath the white tent at the center of the festivities, a collection of Boseman women turned their bodies to watch the show in front of them.

“So, how does it feel to have a daughter-in-law so soon,” Chadwick’s aunt questioned as she turned to his mother.

Mrs. Boseman smiled before laughing, “They aren’t quite there yet.”

“Yeah, but they ain’t too far off either. Pretty soon you’ll have to get some family reunion onesies!”

“If Miss CoCo keeps whooping his ass like that in basketball, I might have to introduce her to my Michael. He needs a woman with some sense.”

Once the conversation shifted to focus on another cousin and his tumultuous relationship, Mrs. Boseman turned her attention to the action on the court. She smiled to herself as Tasha emphatically scored her game-winning basket and started an animated running man around Chadwick.

The scene before Mrs. Boseman began to shift in her imagination as a happy child came running between the pair of friends. Tasha bent to lift the little girl into her arms and position her on her hip as Chadwick made silly faces for entertainment. Their interaction became symbolic of what Mrs. Boseman hoped would be future versions of her son and his friend.

With a smile, Mrs. Boseman shook her head before turning to rejoin the tabled conversation.

Maybe family reunion onesies weren’t so bad.

____________

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