#Drafting is also the point where I start writing only the exciting stuff and stringing it all together like a lunatic

[ghostlycod]

“I have this scene in my head for my fic that I really love but i don’t feel like writing all of the other stuff to get to it.”

I see this comment like 5 times a day in fic writing spaces lol

a scene that you don’t want to write is a scene you don’t want to read. don’t write stuff you don’t want to read.

me, personally: wait until the scenes that get you to that first initial scene you were excited about are just as interesting as that scene too. it won’t be the first, second, or third thing you think of. if u have a scene you really want to write, write that, and keep writing only those exciting scenes that come to you. eventually you have a million interesting scenes for your fic and they become puzzle pieces for you to arrange and then eventually the strings come together and you realize you really do have an interesting way to get to that original scene, and you’re just as excited to write it, if you haven’t already written it when you were brainstorming other scenes earlier in the writing process that you didn’t even realize could carry your story like that.

[yourgentlegirlfriend]

OKAY GUYS!! I had gotten this as a request thank you so fucking much anon though I don’t do your prompt justice at all. I ACCIDENTALLY DELETED the draft that had 4k words i was so sad that’s why i didn’t post all day!! But this prompt was just so fucking good but my writing again doesn’t do it justice at all. It’s absolutely not proof read and it’s just BAD in my opinion but your opinions matter to me the most </3

DISCLAIMER: This is an 18+ blog! If you are underaged or don’t have an age indicator in your bio, please don’t interact!

Afab reader x Rookie Leon <3

Warnings: Porn with a plot THIS IS A STRIPPER STORY, Rookie!Leon, somewhat Subby Leon, he’s a whiny little bitch but it’s so cute. Mentions of cervix bumping, reverse cowgirl (yee haw), that’s really it!!

word count: 3,799

The chief claims it’s a tradition. The men in the office pay to bring the rookie to the only strip club in the city. At first Leon thought they were joking, especially because the station is to busy to have the time to even go, he also just didn’t believe that there was a club in general. He viewed the city as modest, fast, but modest.

Leon’s small party at the station made him so eager to start working. He craved the feeling of not being the “Rookie” anymore, it’s been overwhelming but he was so excited for his new career. Everyone congratulates him but he knew they all came for the food, or alcohol. As the talking died down and the families began to leave, the staff was still full of life, well everyone but Leon. He pulled open his locker, grabbing at his jacket causing a loud call of his name.

“Where are you going? The night is just starting! Don’t tell me you wanna go home, we have one more surprise for you”

They have been teasing him since he started his training, Leon was so nervous they’d just leave him on the side of the road somewhere. They all crammed into one car, Leon’s eyebrows frowning as they drove further into the city. When the car came to a stop, the men next to him rambling on about the most random stuff, his brain censored it out.

They basically dragged him into the building, Leon fixing the collar of his jacket as the Chief flashed his badge at the bodyguard who just nudged his arm softly, the group of men roared with laughter.

The chief handed the woman at the bracelet an uncomfortable amount of money, leaning on the table as he pointed to Leon. Everyone’s bracelets laid on their wrist a pretty baby pink, the woman with the black french tipped nails walking up to Leon, grabbing his arm. A sly smirk grew on her pretty red lips, Leons head nodding respectfully as a way to say thank you. Her fingers lingered on his arm as she turned to walk away.

“Congratulations.”

Her velvety voice sang seductively as she walked passed the group of cops, Leon watching as she disappeared into the back room. Though he was so happy to be “Accepted” into the group of men, but not in this way. His hand played with the menu in front of him, he didn’t even notice the waitress in front of him till her red nails snapped in his face.

“You want a drink honey?”

Her voice was a bit raspy and she wore- well she didn’t really wear anything. The chief put his hand out, against Leon’s chest causing him to sit further back into the seat.

“Just shots all around please.”

————

Jamie ran into the back, her heels clicking loudly before she yanked your curtain open, your hand slipping causing your eyeliner to now look lopsided. Your tongue poked out the side of your cheek as your eyes met her through the bright lit up mirror in front of you.

“You’re serious?”

You hands dug through your makeup bag for the wipes, wiping at the wobbly line. Jamie closed the curtain behind her, her red lips kissing at your shoulder.

“Honey, your group is here. And they have somebody new, he’s not old either, he has the cutest face. You’re gonna die.”

Her eyes rolled back in almost a pleasure way before she tied the string behind your back into a cute little bow. Your hand reached back to wipe off her lipstick stain before she pushed your hand away.

“Now that, is disrespectful.”

You loved Jamie. She’s the only reason you really stay here, through the harassment, the cut checks and even the drugs that swung through here. Your boss was a major douche bag, the type of man that thinks just because you strip here you are his object. And right when you start thinking about the asshole, he pulls your curtain open, that nasty smile on his face.

“You’re on Bliss.”

Bliss, your stage name. That you absolutely dreaded but he chooses the names for every girl, you’re bliss because everytime you’re on that pole, everyone is smiling, even you. If life went your way you would’ve been a backup dancer for some pop singer, or maybe even did ballet. When you turned nineteen you were denied to every major dance school in the country. It broke your heart and took everyone in your life by suprise, dancing was your life work and you put your whole soul into it.

You glared at him, waiting for him to close the curtain. Peach lipgloss, you dragged it across your lips and smiled as Jamie rubbed the glitter into your skin.

“I don’t deserve you.”

You spoke to her before she kissed the top of your head, helping you up from where you sat at your knees, in front of the mirror. You wore a gorgeously fitted bra, almost like it was made for you. It sparkles when the light hits it just right, your little skirt being identical, cutting off right at the top of your thigh. Unlike all your beautiful coworkers, you refused to wear shoes, your toes and fingers painted pitch black.

“Bliss lets go!”

Your ears picked up the sound of your set song starting, your lips pressed against Jamie’s cheek as you ran down the dressing room hall, your outfit making soft clanking noises as the jewels smacked against each other. Joe, your boss, ALSO picked out all your songs. The soft melody of Childish Gambino's Red Bone echoing through the corridor.

The spotlights always blind you, your eyes taking far too long to adjust, you always get so nervous you’ll fall right off the stage. Your eyes take in your audience, the crowd is always bigger on a Friday night. You smirked over at what the ladies call “Your group” as your hands climbed up the pole, your legs allowing you to flip yourself over, your back arching against the pole. Your attention went from one person to another, before you saw him. His beautiful blonde hair, his jacket looked so heavy on him. That small indent on his chin, the way his chest would rise then fall when he noticed you were staring directly at him.

————

Mesmerized. The way your outfit made your skin sparkle, and your lips part when you dipped yourself down. Everything about you had him under a spell. Even when you got down on your knees, sprawling out for the men in front of you as they shoved bills into your skirt, your eyes never tearing from his. He was distraught when your set ended, your small hands grabbing at all the bills on the ground, a wide smile on your face. It made his pants tight for some reason, guilt washing over him as you blew a kiss goodbye, a smile growing onto him as you ran off the stage, on your tip toes.

—————

“Beautiful, as always.”

Jamie went to hug you, your arm squeezing her as you dug into your bra handing her all your money.

“Take fifty for you but put the rest in my bag.”

You chirped so quickly she barley understood, her eyes following you as you fixed your messy hair, your fingers combing through it as you pushed yourself out the curtain. You tried to pin point him, but couldn’t find him, you cursed yourself for not jumping right off the stage and into his arms. You almost let defeat take you over before you saw him walk out the bathroom, laughing to yourself as he wiped his hands on his jeans. You knew eyes were on you, but you didn’t care. Walking across the smooth velvet floor, his back now facing you as he talked to his group, or your group.

“Hey boys.”

You spoke sweetly, your hands wrapping around the Chiefs arm as the group yelled greeting you. They really were all super sweet, your favorite regulars. You usually don’t come out to talk to them straight after set but you obviously had to tonight. Your face scrunched in confusion as you leaned against the Chief, pointing to Leon.

“Who’s this?”

Your tone was innocent, you had to know his name. Leon stared at you, afraid to let his eyes slip below your lips. He didn’t want to be disrespectful even though everyone else around didn’t care.

“I’m Leon.”

Cute. He was sheepish. Your hands let go of the chief, leaning into Leon. Leon tensed up at the feeling of you pressed against him, your lip ghosting over the shell of his ear. His eyes trailing down your smooth skin, his eyes glistening.

“Want a dance?”

No charge. Though you didn’t tell him yet, because teasing him was the best part of this all. Leon’s hand reached up, touching your upper arm gently as he nodded his head.

“Yeah, sure I don’t see why not”

An angel. He was a walking angel. Stepping off your tip toes, both your hands pulling at his arm. A few hellos left your lips as you waved to the people who whistled over at you. His hand squeezed at yours as you continued to drag him through the crowded room, the quiet hallway finally welcoming the two of you as you held open the door for him. He reached forward, letting you walk in first.

“It’s Bliss right?”

He asked as he shut the door quietly, examining your body language change at him using your stage name.

“Please don’t call me Bliss, it’s okay, just don’t call me anything.”

You spoke to him as you put your hand on your hip, pointing to the chair.

“You can get comfortable, but before you do.. You do want this right? I didn’t drag you from the boys and make you uncomfortable?”

Your genuine concern made Leon’s heart flutter, his arms being exposed as he pulled his jacket off and laid it on the arm of the chair. Leon nodded his head as his back hit the chair, surprised at how comfortable it really was.

“Thank god because I just had to see you.”

Your words came out in a string of mumbles, your leg coming up to straddle over him. The fabric of his jeans rubbed against your calf as you pressed against him, slowly just to make sure you weren’t pushing any limits. The back of your head laying onto his shoulder, his body shivering as your hair trickled over his skin.

Your hands rubbed forward, resting on your knees as you pressed your ass further into the tightness of his jeans, a groany whimper emitting from his throat. Your bottom lip slipped between your teeth as you reached down, your hands slipping over his.

“It’s okay, you can touch me.”

A breath of relief left the boys lips, his hands carefully grabbing at your waist. Your skin was softer than he imagined, his fingers brushing over the soft peach fuzz on your stomach. Your breathing was shaky, you knew he noticed because his was too. The room was getting tighter, you needed to be closer to him, and he agreed. His hands randomly squeezing at your flesh as you grinded yourself into him. Even with your skirt on, feeling his hardening cock under you made goosebumps rise to your skin, your mouth opening and your head turning to speak to him, your eyelids heavy before the door swung open.

Joe had his hand resting at his hip, his eyes going from you to Leon. Private dances were suppose to be confirmed by the boss, but this was different. You knew Joe wouldn’t understand. His tongue licking at his bottom lip.

“You’re good for the night.”

His voice was angry, and so cold. There goes your funds for tonight, now you only had your tips. You turned to Leon, shaking your head as you touched the top of his hand.

“So sorry..”

————-

Leon didn’t know why he sat waiting, all his friends left leaving him sitting in his jeep alone. His eyes closed as he laid his head back on the headrest, taking in a deep breath. He found comfort in your scent lingering on him. His eyebrows pushed together at the sounds of screaming, fixing his rear view window to see you walking out the back door, you flipping off Joe as he threw your makeup bag at you. This happens at least once a week. Leon immediately got out of his car, jogging over towards the small railing. He grabbed at the lipstick tube that had rolled to the bottom, standing up and walking towards you, his hand gently gripping at your shoulder. Your eyes shot up at him, your hand reaching to hold your chest.

“Jesus christ trying to scare a girl?”

Leon couldn’t help but chuckle as he helped you up, grabbing your makeup bag for you. His head turned to his car, his hand grabbing at the back of his neck.

“Do you want a ride?”

Like you said, an angel. You should’ve said no, but you couldn’t. It was freezing outside, and you lived all the way on the other side of the city. Leon could tell you felt bad by the way your hands held at your elbows. His hands gripping at the steering wheel, glancing over to you every once and awhile. You didn’t have the courage to tell him that you usually sleep at the club because your sister is a piece of shit and changes the locks if you’re even an hour late for rent. And you were a day late so she had the time. He stopped in front of your dark house, your head down at your knees before you it lifted up, turning to the handsome boy

“Let me stay with you, I’ll pay you.”

—————-

“There’s tons of blankets there in that closet, and there’s also lots of food in the cabinet and fridge. And if you wanna take a shower you can, my water pressure is great.”

Any normal person would’ve said no to you, especially under your circumstances. Leon’s apartment was much nicer than your house could ever be, it was a bit messy but it was alright because he was a young boy, what did you expect?

“And here, you can sleep on the bed. I’m more than comfortable on the couch I honestly pass out there most of the time anyways.”

Leon laughed as he threw his pillow down onto his small couch. You admired his laugh, the way his cheeks curled up when he smiled. The way his arm grabbed at the couch cushion made your stomach ache in the best way. You pointed to the spot next to him as you stepped in front of the TV his eyes fixated on.

“Can I sit with you?”

Leon’s body shifted, patting the spot next to him as he threw his pillow to the ground. His body radiated so much heat. Your body tensed up as his hand touched your shoulder slightly, his fingertips drawing shapes on your skin. This wasn’t normal everyday occurrence for you. Your head resting into his armpit, tilting yourself upward, his hair tickling your nose.

————

Nothing could explain how you ended up on top of Leon, his hands so scared to touch you like you were a fragile doll while your lips pressed so hungrily into his. His hands ran up and down your thighs, his grip loose. Your mouth pulled away from him, a string of spit connecting the two of you as you pushed the messy hair from his face. You pushed yourself further into his lap, your hands tugging at your shirt before you threw it to the ground. Leon stared at you in wonder, his lips still wet from your kisses not so long ago. Your head nodded at him as you reached down pulling his hands into yours, laying them on your stomach.

His hands were so shaky, but his eyes were dark, his eyelids hooded as his hands pressed into your stomach. Your eyes fluttered shut as he grabbed at your breasts, squeezing them in his hands. The innocence was being pulled from his body, his head dipping down to your chest. Your head leaned back as his soft lips wrapped around your nipple, his arm wrapping around your waist to pull you in closer to him as his tongue rubbed so roughly against the nub. A strangled moan left your lips as you ran your hands through his hair, watching as he basically breathed you in.

“That’s my good boy..”

You reached down, pulling his head from your chest to press your lips against his once again. Your legs fell from his lap, dropping to the ground as your lips pecked at the corner of his mouth. He looked so pretty, staring down as you trailed down his body, his breathing staggered as you yanked at his sweatpants. Leon’s hand hid the smile on his face as you gawked at his size, his cheeks flushing a deep red as he rubbed at his forehead.

It was mouth watering, seeing his length hard in front of your face, your hands rubbing at his base, causing his hips to lift into your hand. A giggle rose from your throat as you shook your head up at him.

“Don’t be so eager now.”

Your words were tied and slurred with lust. Your tongue pushing out of your mouth, tapping Leon’s tip against it. You closed your lips into a kiss, his precum seeping into your tastebuds. He tasted so fucking good, your eyes barely open as your hand held at what your mouth couldnt take. Who knew the rookie had such a big dick. The thought made you giggle around his cock, causing him to hiss in sensitivity as you began to bob your head. Leon’s hands held at your hair, his mouth open as he watched you suck in his cock.

“Oh fuck.. that’s so good..”

The boy whined out as your hand rested down to his knee, your eyes watering as you finally let your throat take all of him in. It’s like his cock was made to be down your throat, your tongue laying flat as you swallowed him.

“Wait, stop.. no, don’t stop- ngh..”

Leon’s fingers fisted up in your hair as you pulled yourself from his cock, your lips glistening as you tried catching at your breath. You kissed his tip, making him jolt before you stood, tugging your shorts down along with your panties, Your back turned to face Leon, your hips jutting out as you looked back, grabbing at his cock. You didn’t even have to say a word, his hand pushing yours away while his other pushed your folds apart, a moan pouring from his lips as he pushed himself into you, your eyes squeezed shut from how good just the tip of him felt inside of you, your back arching as you sunk yourself down in one swift motion, a squeal leaving your lips. Your hand shot to your mouth to try and conceal the loud yelp that would’ve followed. Leon grabbed at your hips, his fingers digging into your flesh as you squeezed around him.

“Jus’ don’t move..”

Leon whined as he squeezed his eyes shut, licking his lips. You nodded at him but your body didn’t understand, your hips rising then falling down onto him again, a whine leaving both of you. Your pace was steady, his hands rubbing up your back as you bounced on his cock so good.

“Fuck you’re squeezing me so good.”

Leon cried out as he rutted his hips up into you, his whines encouraging you to move your hips faster but a loud cry ripped from your throat as he bumped at your cervix.

“Fuck- Le, cock to big..”

You whined as you grinded into him, your eyes stinging with tears as you reached back, grabbing at his arms. His heavy breathing made you continue on, your thighs squeezing together as he held at your forearms. You pushed your head to the side, watching him from the corner of your eye, his lip between his teeth as his head leaned against the comfy couch cushion.

“Feel good? Tell me how good it feels baby”

You spoke back to him, your body jolting forward as he thrusted up into you, his hands grabbing at your waist as he apologized, he finally gained the confidence to meet your hips with every bounce, your vision growing more blurry every time his pelvis smacked against your ass. The sound of skin smacking and heavy breathing echoed through the apartment, Leon let out a loud moan as he stopped your hips, his breathing heavy as he tried to calm himself down.

“Gonna cum in you, slow down..”

Leon whimpered as you turned your back to look at him, your thighs shaking slightly as you frowned at the boy. Your stomach was throbbing, the rubber band ready to snap in your stomach started to unravel the longer he stalled you there.

“Jesus christ..”

He whispered out as he let go of your hips, his palm shaping perfectly to the small of your back he helped you regain your pace. There it was, that tightness in your stomach again. Your mouth falling into an O shape as your walls spasmed around him, making him cry out, his nails leaving little crescent’s in your skin as he shot himself into you. Your eyes were sealed shut, a small “why” leaving your lips as Leon pulled you off of him, helping you stand. Your eyes fluttered open to stare at the perfect man in front of you, his face flushed red and his hair a mess.

“Thank you.”

He mumbled as he leaned down, kissing your lips softly. He pulled you so tightly into him, holding you to his chest as you squeezed him. He didn’t want you to walk out and leave just like it meant nothing. You looked up at him, kissing his chin before he lifted you up, making you squeal grabbing at his arms.

“Leon!”

You yelled as he threw you down onto the bed, lying himself on top of you.

“What’s your name?”

He mumbled into your skin as he twirled your hair around his finger. You stared up at the ceiling, your fingers dancing over the muscles on his back.

“Y/N. Nice to meet you, Leon.”

[velvetwyrme]

oouuouua please make a follow up on the superhero pap x reader theyre one of my favorites also im excited to see tf fic from yuo

im glad you enjoyed it!!! i got a comment on it recently while i was thinking abt how to continue it and that seemed to click my brain into action LMAO

EHEHEHE hopefully! soon!! ive got a few things in mind but im also waffling over Really Starting because i have so many things ongoing but... auauugh the IDEAS plague me!!!!

also heres a sneak peek into my brain because im in the mood to chatter, but feel free to skip it if you so desire:

for Origin Story im LOOSELY planning any continuation/s to be kinda standalone stories all centered around a superhero trope (like the Origin Story ;]) because i think that could be fun to work with. i enjoyed writing some of the larger Undertale cast, something that i WOULD have liked to do in FF, except Edge and the MC in that are both pretty reclusive socially abfjfbdjdghkf,, oh well.

anyway. i have tons of ideas for the various tropes, so its really a matter of picking a place and Writing. i really want to feature more of Alphys in this because i love her dearly <3

as for TF fic... most of them are reader inserts unsurprisingly lmaooo but ive got a few non-reader inserts floating around there too. im kinda just throwin stuff at the walls of my mind to see what sticks, but heres a few of my draft titles for your perusing pleasure:

into the fire: noble-ish au with a human reader who is supposed to be gifted to one of the members of the household. reader makes a failed escape attempt torn bedsheet style and is saved :] inspired loosely by the visual novels i used to read/play back in high school LMAO. skeletiano, i will forever be sad i could not romance you.

between you, me and soundwave: reader writes rpf abt mechs on earth LMAO. i see people mention humans writing fanfic about Cybertronians in passing but i think itd be funny to put that at the forefront. extremely silly and low stakes fic. probably.

drift compatibility: mecha! pilot! au!! exists purely because i read 1 (one) fic about plugsuits and just went "hmnngh... mecha pilots are fun to imagine interacting with Cybertronians... also there's DRIFT compatibility... i can totally do some fucked up shit with that" and now it's spiralled wildly out of control because at some point i started thinking about Governments and Social Structures and got distracted with worldbuilding lol. i have many many many ideas and i can only hope i can string some of them together so I can EXPLODE it out of my brain either through writing or art. also theres smut that happens wayyyy down the line which ill probably end up writing first and posting separately LMAO

penance is a prison: my take on Titan AU but as a fic because my brain is so so full of thoughts abt this au. i'll probably just end up drawing a lot of these scenes instead but like. its there! partially written!! im emotions abt it!!!

self explanatory long title: human/borrower au constructicons/jazz/prowl poly. i love rare not-so-pairs a lot and im particularly fond of this set. also i just like thinking abt either jazz and prowl getting menaced by a bunch of tiny guys OR the opposite where a group of construction workers have two borrower roommates. this one is more just random idea dumps instead of a fic but still fun to think about LMAO

ALSO! MINI REC. while you wait for me to (eventually maybe) write TF fic, you should check out boostergoldishh's works on ao3 for some tasty tasty TF reader insert fics. im still planning on making a rec list but they updated today and im filled w/ much love for good writing.

and as a bonus if you got this far (thank you!!): the super secret draft chapter title for the next NEXT FF chapter because its pretty silly

if my cowriter sees this hi. ill share the doc soon but its pretty much empty, its just there to remind me whats coming next LMAO 👍

[fountainpenguin]

Never sit in front of a blank screen when starting a 'fic or chapter. Jot down any ideas that come to mind. Space them out in separate docs and/or farther down your document where the chapter begins; develop a sense of chronology even if it's not nailed down. Build around it.

Write anything. Lines of dialogue that come to mind, especially if you're trying to build around an emotion (like humor or angst). Setting descriptions are an easy way to get started without staring at a blank screen.

Or, write a hypothetical outline even if it's not what you end up sticking to. It can spark ideas of "Oh, I know exactly what I want between these two scenes," and if nothing else, you can return to it at a later date and reminisce on past ideas you had.

Hemingway once said "Write drunk; edit sober" as a form of advice; "Write tired; edit awake" works to. Don't filter yourself. You're just throwing down ideas in a draft no one will see. You can finish that piece if you like it or recycle those ideas into other projects with different settings or characters, or you can just keep it for you.

Blank screens can easily lead to fidgeting or procrastination, but if you can get yourself started, you're making progress, even if it's just a bit, and it can be easier to get started once you've got something on the page.

I like to write the scenes that excite me most first and then fill in the "boring stuff" (setting details and transition moments between the scenes) so that I reach a point where I can say "Aw man, the boring part is next... but hey, I'm so close to being done! That's exciting! I can't wait to be done!" I've also heard that going to bed or leaving your desk at a place you're excited to come back to can help, provided you have a good memory or can get back into the mood.

Setting yourself a small task can work too, even if you can only snatch small snippets of time on bus rides, between classes, or in the evening. Tell yourself you want to "Finish a conversation" or "Describe the setting." Even just writing the set-up to a conversation can be a good start, and you can come back to it later when it's had time to develop direction in your head.

If you only have a few minutes one night, maybe dedicate that time to writing the most descriptive details possible about one little thing, like a person's appearance, clothing, possessions, or the setting around. Even if you end up scrapping that stuff, it's a nice way to get into good habits of being thoughtful and observant.

Write a sentence here or there. Throw things out; string them together later. Write busy; edit when available :)

Writers! Someone wants to know how you start writing your fics. What's your process on getting your fanfics started?

Reblog with your response!

[fruitcoops]

eve you have been killing the content game lately!!! I have a suggestion for the team to do the cut video where someone guesses their starsigns!!

This was a really interesting fic to write, since I know next to nothing about astrology! It’s also the longest I’ve spent researching for a fic--I will apologize in advance for any errors I made. All the birthdays/ signs came from Haz’s page (@lumosinlove) and SW credit belongs to her! Hope you enjoy <3

Marlene was practically bouncing as the video began. “Welcome back to Lion Pride, everyone! I’m Marlene McKinnon, and I can’t tell you how excited I am for today’s video. Would you like to introduce yourself, Elaine?”

An older woman with her graying hair piled in a bun waved to the camera. “Hello! My name is Elaine, and I’ve been studying astrology for about forty years now.”

“We’re so glad to have to here! Today’s video is going to be a guessing game with some of our Lions players, where you ask them a few questions and then match their zodiac signs.” Marlene handed her a small pile of cardboard signs with strings tied to the tops.

“Oh, this is going to be fun.” Elaine adjusted her reading glasses and flipped through the zodiac cards. “I’ve never done anything like this officially, though it’s a bit of a hobby when I people-watch. Ms. McKinnon, would I be correct in assuming you’re a Leo?”

Marlene’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Uh, yeah, actually.”

Elaine nodded. “I thought so. Alright, where do I start?”

Marlene waved off-screen and seven young men walked in, lining up in a semi-circle behind them. “Take it away, Elaine.”

As Marlene disappeared behind the camera again, Elaine scanned the group. “This is very interesting,” she muttered. “You all play on the same team, yes?”

“We do,” James said.

Elaine’s lips twitched into a smile and she beckoned him forward. “Are you the team captain, then?”

“No,” he laughed. “Assistant captain, though. I’m James.”

“Nice to meet you, James. Were you popular in high school?”

James paused for a moment. “Yeah, I think so. I’ve always been pretty friendly and hockey helped with that.”

“You’re confident, and you don’t like sitting still.” She tapped her chin and gave him a once-over. “Can I take a look at your ears?”

“My ears?” James blinked at her, clearly surprised, but obliged and leaned down to her level.

Elaine made a noncommittal noise. “Ears say a lot about a person. Capricorns often have more vertical ears, but yours are quite round. You strike me as an Aries.”

James hung the sign over his neck and headed back to the line with a smile. “She just called you annoying,” Finn teased, giving him a nudge.

“Oh, no, Aries’ can be lovely people once they mature.” Elaine tilted her head and motioned to Finn. “Could you step up to the plate, dear?”

“Sure thing.” Finn kept his hands in his pockets, but straightened up a bit and rocked on his toes as he took James’ place. “My name’s Finn.”

“You’re certainly a fire sign,” Elaine laughed. “But you’re not quite an Aries. Are you a generally upfront person?”

“Pretty much.”

“What did you want to be as a kid?”

Finn smiled. “Anything where I could be around people.”

She nodded. “I thought so. Are you in a relationship?”

“Yeah, with those two.” Leo and Logan waved and Elaine’s smile widened.

“You’re a Leo, and a lucky one at that.” She carefully slid the sign over his head and patted his shoulder. “Good for you. Could the young man in the black jacket come up next?”

“I’m Sirius, it’s nice to meet you.” He shook her hand before taking a step back.

“Nice to meet you, too. You’re the captain, right?”

He glanced at the camera, surprised. “Uh, yes.”

“Well, you certainly could be another fire sign, but there’s something different…” She trailed off and drummed her fingers on the stack of zodiac cards. “Are you friends with our lovely Aries over there?”

“I’m the godfather to his son.”

Elaine held her hand over her heart. “Oh, that’s so sweet. You’re not another Aries or Leo, then. How much do you value your privacy?”

Sirius snorted. “A lot.”

“Are you in a relationship?”

He held his left hand up with a slight smile and inclined his head toward Remus. “Engaged for about six months.”

“Point him out for me, please.” Elaine kept her eyes on Sirius as he pointed toward Remus, then turned to the camera crew. “Did you all see that?”

Sirius frowned slightly. “See what?”

“You’ve been so tense and focused, but your whole face opened up when you looked toward him. I’m going to guess you’re a Scorpio.” She surveyed the group as Sirius returned to his place, then beckoned to Leo. “You have the prettiest eyes!”

“Oh, thank you.” He blushed slightly. “I’m Leo.”

“It’s lovely to meet you, Leo. Do you believe in astrology?”

He shook his head. “Not really. I think it’s neat, though. Stars are cool.”

“Good. You’re young, and I’m glad you’re not letting it dictate your life.” She scrutinized his face for a moment. “Turn sideways, please. There are certain face shapes that are more common than others for specific signs…if we had an argument, would you apologize to me?”

Leo smiled slightly. “Depends on what it was about. I’m not very confrontational in the first place.”

“So you like keeping things equal?”

“I do, yeah. As you can probably tell, I’m not big on making hard decisions,” he laughed.

She smiled and shuffled through the cards. “I think you’re a Libra, but this was the hardest one yet. Which one is your boyfriend again? Not the Leo.” Her face brightened. “Ha! Leo with a Leo!”

Finn’s face split into a wide grin and Leo groaned. “Oh, god, he’s never going to let that go.”

Logan was still laughing a bit when he walked over. “Bonjour, I’m Logan.”

“Oh, this makes lots of sense.” Elaine looked between the three of them and nodded. “Are you a hothead?”

“Usually.”

“What sets you off?”

Logan exhaled slowly as he thought. “Most fights on the ice come from people pushing me or my friends around. I’m not one of those weird angry guys, though. There’s always a reason.”

“I bet there is.” Elaine laughed a little. “What are your thoughts on liars?”

He made a face. “Nothing good ever comes from lying.”

Elaine hung the ‘Sagittarius’ sign over his head. “If you’re not a Sagittarius, I need to find a new career. Could the Scorpio’s fiancé come up here?”

In his thick sweater and blue jeans, Remus was the polar opposite of Sirius. “My name’s Remus.”

“You are a sweetheart,” Elaine said with a laugh. “Oh my goodness, no wonder he got all mushy! Have you always played hockey?”

“I was supposed to be drafted out of college, but I got injured and became a physical therapist for six years instead. That’s how I met the rest of the guys.”

“Interesting.” She bit her lip. “Why did you choose physical therapy?”

He shrugged. “I wanted to stay close to hockey and help people. It was tough, but it made me happy.”

“Would you say people underestimate you on the ice?”

Remus hummed in thought. “I don’t know. I’m not a big guy, but I’m fast.”

“Well, all your friends are nodding behind you.”

“What?” He turned and they all hid their smiles in their hands. “Guys!”

“They do!” James defended. “Literally everyone we play against underestimates you!”

“Let’s say we get in an argument. Would you apologize to me?” Elaine asked.

Remus raised an eyebrow. “That depends. Was I right?”

“Yeah, you’re a Pisces.” She handed him the card, smiling. “Congratulations on the engagement. We only have one left, correct?”

Kasey shook her hand as he walked up. “I’m Kasey.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Kasey. Do you believe in the zodiac?”

“Nope,” he said. “But my girlfriend does, and she has cool necklaces and stuff.”

“You don’t strike me as a hothead.”

He shrugged. “I’m a goalie. It doesn’t usually come with the job description, but I’d take the gloves off for my friends.”

She flipped through a few of the cards. “You care deeply for them, then?”

“Absolutely. They’re basically my family by this point.”

Elaine hesitated. “This is a tough one. I’m going to go with Taurus, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. Are you patient?”

“With some people, sure. It varies.” Behind him, the others were stifling their laughter. Elaine gave them a look, but hung the Taurus card over his head.

“Alright, that’s everyone,” Marlene said as Kasey rejoined the group. “Raise your hand if she guessed you correctly.”

Five hands went up; only Leo and Kasey stayed still. Elaine clapped her hands happily. “Oh, I didn’t do too badly!”

Marlene ushered them into a line. “So, Elaine, how did you know James was an Aries?”

“He’s just…” She waved a hand in her air. “He’s very confident, though I feel like he’s matured over the past few years. Something big happened in your life that settled you down, right?”

“My son was born just over a year ago,” he said. “That definitely toned me down.”

“Thank god for that.” Finn muttered, giving him a playful nudge. James smacked the back of his head with a grin as he walked to the end of the line.

“It’s a good thing you’ve got your boyfriends,” Elaine said. “Leo’s often struggle with their identity when they’re younger, so it’s wonderful to see you’ve figured things out a bit.”

Finn blinked, dumbstruck. “Am I that much of an open book?”

“Yes,” the other six chorused. He paused for a moment, nodded, and made room for Sirius to step forward.

“Ah, I knew it!” She beamed at him. “Scorpio and Pisces are very compatible.”

“So we’ve been told,” Sirius laughed.

“You’re the hopeless romantic, aren’t you? Making up for lost time?” At his shocked expression, she her smile became gentle. “That’s usually how it goes. Don’t be afraid to be soft, okay?”

“Okay.” He hesitated a moment longer before joining Finn and James at the end of the line; James touched his elbow in solidarity while Leo walked forward.

“Oh, an Aquarius!” Elaine’s eyebrows rose. “I should’ve guessed. Well, that’s a good thing. You’ll be a good counterbalance for the reactive parts of Leos and Sags.”

“Thanks.” He looked faintly amused. “Can I blame Finn’s puns on his zodiac sign?”

She laughed. “Yes, absolutely.”

“It’s good to know there’s a reason for it,” Logan said as he took Leo’s place. “You guessed me pretty fast.”

“You were bluntly honest.” She shrugged. “Sags can be difficult to narrow down, but you fit right in for all the good parts.”

Elaine smiled when Remus stepped up. “You seemed really certain about me,” he said.

“You’re the most Pisces to ever Pisces, dear.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “You’re kind, but I don’t think you take any shit either.” At the back of the line, Sirius barked a laugh. “Oh, and he agrees!”

“He better!” Remus grinned back at him.

Elaine gasped when Kasey held up his new sign. “Really?”

He shrugged. “My girlfriend is a Taurus and some of that might have rubbed off on me.”

“Does she have a big personality?”

“Definitely.”

“Wow.” She gave him a quick once over. “There were some parts of Sagittarius that came through, but you were a tough one.”

“It’s the goalie face,” James called from the back of the line.

“Sorry,” Kasey said. “It’s a habit.”

“No, no, that’s alright.” She stared at him for a second longer before shaking her head. “You’re much softer than most of the Sags I’ve met. It’s hard to believe you and the Energizer Bunny back there share the same sign.”

“Did you have fun, Elaine?” Marlene asked as she collected the zodiac cards.

“I had a wonderful time, thank you so much for inviting me!”

Marlene smiled at the camera . “Thanks for watching, everyone. Be sure to like and subscribe for more Lion Pride content!”

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales: Woo-oo! Review! or From the Top

Hello all you happy people! And to those of you just joining this blog, welcome I review ducks, other animated shows and comics... and today’s review is special for me. For a number of reasons. For starters it’s a reminder how far i’ve come. See I always wanted to be a reviewer, ever since high school when a friend showed me a certain online reviewer whose now dead to me, and opened me up to a world of much better reviewers who i’m still fans of to this day, and ones who came after them , and after that and so on and so on. I so badly wanted a community to belong to I struggled to be a youtube reviewer but frankly lacked the talent or self confidence back then to try, so my attempts over the decade were a series of stops and starts. Of me starting to find my niche writing only to stop because I hated myself so much, and still struggle with that, i’d tell myself I could never do it, I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t funny enough and no one cared. I kept shutting myself down AGAIN AND AGAIN, for far too long. 

But that all changed a year ago next month: I’d long been a fan of the Ducktales Reboot. I was caustiously optimistic when it was announced. The optimism came from a deep abiding love of scrooge as a character despite not having dove into his comics that deep, I didn’t have an easy way at the time, thanks to life and times and what comics I had read, and was excited to see a fresh reboot closer to the comics with my eternal boy Donald Duck back in the main character. The caution.. came from the fact that at the time we’d gotten a string of bad to medicore reboots: Teen Titans GO, Powerpuff Girl, and Ben 10 which started pretty meh but has turned into alirght from some of the later episodes I saw. I wanted to be hyped to all hell but I had no proof this wasn’t going to be another dumbed down reboot. Then comic con came, the first teaser poster dropped, and my skepticism died.

It was perfect: a barksian art style with it’s own twists! Donald full on display! And best of all the triplets FINALLY had not only unique outfits but personalities! I’ve long went on in my reviews about how much that annoyed me and while it worked for the barks comics ever since then it’s just felt like a waste to have three characters there.. and not even the SLIGHTEST difference. 

My anticipation only grew with the full trailer, the promo posters as more and more info showed how good this series would be, how unique it’d be, and how much tw as taking what made the comics great, giving us a better distalation of that while still being very much it’s own beast. And once this episode dropped.. that faith was unfounded. Woo-oo! is without hyperbole, one of the best pilots i’ve seen, one that introduced the entire main cast perfectly, gets the series tone and mission statment out just right and in general set the stage for one of the best shows of the 2010′s (and 2020′s, even if it only lasted a year and some change). Wheras Teen Titans GO actively tried to take a dump on it’s source material, they thankfully have stopped that but it dosent’ make those early years any less grating, Ducktales was a breath of fresh air that honored the past while making i’ts own future. I tried talking about it but it was all in other failed attempts at reviewing: solo podcasts, my breif second video review career.. stuff no one rightly cared about and I just couldn’t get the hang of. 

So this is where we loop back to last year: I decided to finally try and cover it one more time, not realizing this would be my last chance as it came out anyway, and since I was doing text reviews but my output had slid in the new year, I decided to review Season 3 as it came out. If it bottomed out I could always stop.... and I just never did. I kept going, eventually finding new fans, a patreon (The other one’s an old friend of mine), and not only got paid doing what I love.. but found some peace.  I reviewed other shows as they came out, covered things i’d wanted to cover for years like life and times, scott pilgrim and x-men,. I covered other shows as they came out, found people willing to talk over my opinions and found my niche at long last. 

So that’s why the long speech folks: After almost a year of reviewing i’m properly covering the start of something that made me happier than I had been in a long time and gave me hope during one of the worst periods of ALL our lives. Something i’ve wanted to cover since I finally got started last year, and something truly amazing. So i’d be honored if you’d join me under the cut as I talk about the genesis of one of the best series Disney has ever put out. 

Behind the Scenes Stuff:  Most details I could find were sparse. it took going back to the first month the show came out and looking at a LOT of unrelated questions to finally find out Frank and Matt outright pitched the show. This dosen’t suprise me as both are huge ducktales fans with Matt having drawn his own duck comics as a kid and Frank taking it an extra mile having sang the theme song in his first grade talent show, worked it into his vows and got his first daughter’s first word to be “Woo-oo”. It’s very clear this show as a labor of love for them something they dreamed of Disney made possible. 

Otherwise I don’t have much on the genisis of the show: It was in the earliest ideas going to be a revivial but Frank and Matt both decided against it , deciding it’d be unfair to expect kids from 30 years after the original to know the source material, and instead just starting it over outright, which was the right call especailly with Alan Young’s passing. 

Design wise I found quite a bit of concept art thanks to one website, and it’s incredibly intresting. This is why i’ve really gotten into art books: I like seeing this early stuff what characters used to be, figuring out or outright hearing from the creators mouths why they changed it that sort of thing. 

Starting off we have some early designs for Donald, with him wearing the sailor suit as a kid but his Quackshot outfit as an adult, something I honestly wish they’d kept but get why they changed it: The iconic sailor suit both helps contrast him with della and fits his reluctance to adventure in season 1 more. I still wish that they worked the Quackshot outfit in somewhere, but they worked in so damn much, it’s hard to complain> Though I probably will make a list of “things I wished they’d worked” in at some point and i’d be lying inf I siad my mind wasn’t currently turning the gears to figure out how to work this into a fanfic. Oohhh maybe as Dewey’s outfit as an adult but blue, obviously. 

Next we have Donald settled more into his final apperance as well as the boy’s first outfits.  As you can tell from both of these the show originally went more with the classic art style before getting the one we’re familiar with now, one I love by the way and was made to combine a classic cartoon style with the visual of the comics. Donald originally had his classic outfit before they transitioned to the more barks style one, a good call.  

The interesting bit though is obviously the boys original outfits which i’m honestly bummed didn’t make it for Huey and Louie, not so much Dewey minus the visor. I do get the changes though: The hoodie Dewey had fit WAY beter on Louie, and the lumberjack shirt didn’t quite fit the nerdier huey. Still look nice. Dewey’s is okay, but only the visor is something I really gregret them removing same with louie’s fedora. It would’ve been neat ot keep the hat thing, but have each hat be unique. Likely they simplified things to make animation easier and simply removed the hats for some reason, but it’s nice ot see these more detailed original drafts and it is VERY interesting to find that differentiating the triplets was something planned from the earliest concept art. Though given Matt and Frank said in interviews they wanted a more natural family feel, it’s not a huge surprise. 

Scrooge like everyone BUT the boys thus far, naturally also had his original outfit at first, but like he ended up doing in the series rotated a bit, if not as much in the final product. We also see a protoype for his final design, the old coat but with a jacket over it in the last image. I also notice Donald seemed a lot more like his old comics self in the concept art with quackshot!donald. 

Like everyone else, Webby and Launchapd were originally their 87 deisgns, though Launchpad’s slightly diffrent jacket and green scarf were changed from the start. Webby is the closest to her 87 design, and as shown in the previous Lena concept art from my “Spies Like Us and Dime after Dime” double feature, she still had her new personality. More on that in a bit. 

Finally we have Flintheart, whose design is a bit diffrent from 87: He was a chub from day one it appears, though they’d exagerate it, and his beard was a bit longer at first like his other incarnations. 

Beakly is largely unchanged form 87, only given a coat, which would gradually be mofidied, much liekt he boys into her current outfit. 

As you can tell Beakly, Webby and Launchpad were all there from day one as they wanted them from the original ducktales just updated. 

Production wise they wanted to go handrawn, chose the style they did to have something close to the comics that felt classicly aniamteda t the same time, I feel they succeeded and wanted a show that felt like the original. I do think this show has it’s own feel but it does feel ducktales. I badly hope for an artbook at some point though as this show probably hada  LOT more intresting concept art. Seriously Disney I will PAY YOU to look at your neat art. Please. 

So they created a fully formed world and put the characters in it, wanting it to feel like the world had existed before and had throughly been explored and letting our young heroes be the watson to Donald and Scrooge’s holmes. 

Finally Della was indeed part of the initial pitch and a core idea from day one as every family has secrets and Della felt like one that had been lurking around the fringes of the story for 80 years. The rest of the production stuff i’ll weave in as we go but first one last stop, the STELLAR voice cast, none of whom outsideo f Tony i’ve talked about before sooooo...

The All Star Cast

The casting was outstanding here, with Matt admitting the cast brought a LOT to the characters, especially Ben Schwartz whose taken on Dewey was so unique and intresting they actually rewrote some of his dialouge for the pilot to fit this version better. This is far and away one of the best casts in western animation, most coming from comedy backgrounds and one or two coming from a voice acting background, but all bringing their absolute best. And since our main 8 are all in the pilot let’s run them down along with Keith Ferguson shall we?

Playing everyone’s faviorite billionare scotsman  and one of the very few to ever do so, we have David Fucking Tennant. David was their “First and only choice” and for good reason: David is a talented actor with a MASSIVE amount of stage, tv and audio drama credits. His biggest and best known role is playing the 10th Doctor on Doctor Who, which while not my faviorite (That’d be matt smith, as he’s both the one I came in on and hte one who got me hooked) he’s still  VERY close second and damn talented and I need to watch more of his tenure. Outside of that just to condense it to his ongoing roles on stuff and bigger roles: Filmwise he’s had starring roles in the Fright Night remake, You, Me and Him, Fish Without Bicycles and Bad Samartains, and is set to do a voice for the upcoming Loud House Movie, which excites me to no end. 

TV wise where most of his roles have been he got his first big starring role on the Telly with the BBC Mini series Taking Over the Asylum in the late 90′s. He’d go on to make a career out of doing mini’s for a while, also taking part in He Knew He Was Right, The Quatermass Experiment Remake, Casanova, Secret Smile.. and Blackpool. I saved Blackpool for last before we move into the Who era as if you’ve never heard of it.. it’s REALY fucking weird. It’s a jukebox musical about a man who wants to make Blackpool, a real city, into the new vegas and Tennat plays a cop investigating a case around the guy and also trying to get with his wife because they used to date and because our lead is philandering jackass. That’s already kinda nuts.. but then you get to the fact the songs are sung OVER the original songs instead of making a new version of them. It’s surreal to be sure but if you can find it it’s worth it for the handful of good numbers and how weird it looks and you can find clips of the songs on youtube if your intrested. Here’s a starter. 

Your also welcome. He’d go on to play Detective Alec Hardy in Broadchurch to critical aclaim as well as be a part of it’s short lived american remake, would play the Fugitoid in tmnt 2007, Kilgrave in Jessica Jones, one of his few post who roles i’ve seen or heard besides Scrooge and easily some of his best work he NAILS that purple bastard perfectly, would make his own show Staged about a fictional version of himself putting on a Stage play that’s still ongoing, and is currently , along with Ducktales as it wraps up, the voice of Lord Commander on Final Space, with the character returning this season judging by the trailers to fan delight and terror. He’s a VERY talented actor and voice actor and I do hope he goes on to do more and more voice work in years to come as, with his background in radio, he was born for it. 

He was also born for this roll, playing Scrooge perfectly and easily matching Alan Young in quality, not a small feat and i’ts VERY obvious why he was their one and only choice. 

Next up is another legend, Tony Anselmo who we’ve talked about before when I covered legend of the Three Cablleros: He’s been Donald’s voice since shortly before Ducktales, hasn’t done much else but given he’s THE voice for the character and this show let him show off one hell of a range with teh voice, he dosen’t really need other credits. The man is a treasure and I fear loosing him one day and fear for whoever replaces him as they have a LOT to live up to. 

Getting into the triplets, we’re going by age so starting off we have Huey, voiced by Danny Pudi. Like most of this cast aside from Toks Ogladyve and Beck Bennet (Who I probably HAD seen on SNL but didn’t really know or look out for him on there till after Ducktales), I not only knew Danny but was a huge fan of his going in. This is due to his breakout role on the glorious sitcom Community, which sadly only had a handful of i’ts cast show up on this show. I mean you got Lin Manuel Miranda I’m sure Donald Glover would’ve said yes too. He grew up with Ducktales. Regardless his role as meta guy Abed was easily the best of the cast on that show, with Glover as troy a very close second and the two working at their best as a duo. Outside of that he’s had a few roles being a regular on Powerless, which I forgot existed and currently on Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, and shockingly hasn’t done a ton of voice work. And given his performance as huey was one of the best parts of this show he REALLY, REALLY SHOULD. Please Danny. He’s also a loving husband, father and surprisingly a marathon runner. Never would’ve guessed.

Next up is SNL Alumn of 9 years, Bobby Monynihan. Bobby is naturally best known for that, my faviorite role of his being Ass Dan. That’s right bitch you know he’s going to live fore..

ASS DAN 1981-2021

He’ll be back. Outside of SNL he’s done a bunch of minor roles. He’s currently on the tragically mediocre sitcom Mr. Mayor, and voiced Panda on We Bare Bears. Hopefully he keeps up the good work as he deserves better than he’s gotten and Ducktales proves it. 

Finally for the triplets we have a rising star in voice acting, Ben Schrwartz. At the time Ducktales launched, I was a fan of his from his roll on parks and Rec as Jen Ralphio, aka older scummier Dewey. 

Outside of his historic recurring role here he played a main role on House of Lies, a show I need to go back to, and has done other live action rolls but has REALLY hit his stride in voice acting. He started with voicing Randy Cunningham in Randy Cunningham 9th grade ninja and since then has hit the ground running: He was Rutabega on Bojack, Josh on Bob’s Burgers, and went on to complete the trifecta of blue nostalgic characters after voicing dewey by voicing Leo in Rise of the TMNT (and having one of the most unique and intresting versions of the character to play) and reprised the roll for the upcoming film. And of course he hit it HUGE by playing Sonic in the suprsingly fantastic Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and will do so again for the sequel and might even take up the roll for the games now Roger Craig Smith has retired. We shall see. Point is this guy’s at the top of his game and Dewey is part of that. Like with his brothers I can’t picture anyone else playing him. 

Rounding out the kids is Webby, played by the wonderous Kate Micucci. Kate is a lovely talented woman who mostly showed up in smaller parts, was part of the musical duo garfunkel and oates which even got their own tv show, and is currently a fairly prolific voice actor with this being her best known roll. I also had a bit of a crush on her once can you tell? Regardless besides absolutely nailing it as Webby she’s voiced Julie Kane in the crimnally short and even more crimnally not on Disney+ Motorcity, “Irma” in the 2012 TMNT cartoon, and the fact that “Irma” is in quotes should tell you how big a waste I felt it was having her NOT actually be Irma, despite Kate’s massive talent, the fact that Irma hadn’t been in anything since the 87 cartoon, and the fact that for added “Fuck you audience points” her krang form was voiced by Gilbert Godfried, who I love but whose casting feels like they wanted to make the twist as grating as possible. Good job there. 

Anyways her second biggest voice gig was as Sadie on Steven Universe, which took WAY too long to show off her absolutely tremendous singing voice. She started voicing Velma Dinkley in the mid-2010′s and has since, voiced Milo’s sister Sarah on Milo Murphy’s Law, Dr. Fox on Unikitty, and most recently voiced a sentient present on close enough who did this. 

So yeah quite the career and like Ben she probably has a long and storied career in Voice Acting ahead. 

Next up is Beck Bennet as everyone’s friend Launchpad where he excels. He’s best known as a castmember on SNL outside of this, and shockingly hasn’t done a ton of voice work. The only other time i’ve caught him is in the same season of Close Enough as Luc, aka dude-bro satan. But like eveyrone else here who hasn’t done a lot of voice work so far or has been more selective I defintely hope he keeps going with it as he’s amazing. He and Ben will be co-starring on MODOK in May so i’m excited for that. 

Last up for the main cast is Beakly, voiced by  Toks Olagundoye, who I hadn’t heard of before this show and hasn’t done a lot outside of the two season sitcom the neighbors, the aliens one not the really terrible looking one, and a stint on Castle, but like everyone here deserves much more and if Beakly is any indication, really should stick with voice acting. 

Last up is Keith Ferguson as only he could as FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD, whose a staple in the voice acting community ever since 2000, and has had a TON of roles some of which I was unaware with him. Given Frank worked with him on Wonder Over Yonder, where he voiced Lord Hater to perfection, the two clearly have a close working relationship. He also has a close working relationship with Wonder creator Craig McCracken and has worked on all of his post-powerpuff girls show, voicing Bloo as his first major role, something I never would’ve guessed, and currently voicing Papa G on Kid Cosmic. 

Outside of Craig and Frank, he played both Karate Kid and Nemisis Kid on Legion of Super Heroes (Which really needs to come to HBO Max), Deputy Durland on Gravity Falls,  and Thunderbolt Ross on Avengers Earth’s Mighteist Heroes. He’s damn good and deserves the world for Glomgold alone and i’m glad Craig rung him up again as so far through my watch of Kid Cosmic he’s great. 

So with our cast in place, our past in place and you all likely ready to get on with it already let’s dive into the episode:

THE EPISODE: Part one Woo-Ooo!

We begin with a shot of a seagull flying overseagulls, a nice way to establish how this world works and how it bends expectations. They’d have to wait till season 3 to get a duck next to ducks but given that gag is one of the best of the series, it was worth it. 

Inside a house boat we meet Donald, Huey and Louie and get a sense of their personalities: Donald is panicked trying to get to a job interview and insists the boys wear life vests, showing his overprotectiveness and responsibility exclusive to this version. Louie stresses that Donald wear a suit instead of his normal clothes to properly impress the interviewer, showing his skill at people reading and manipulation, and Huey is making a nice, if messy, breakfast with a heartwarming message showing his heart and dedication. After finding out said Babysitter was sent to the wrong address, the boys TRY to hustle him out to stay alone.. only for Dewey to blow the scheme by starting the boat too early, letting Donald know he’s been had. Huey’s attempt to lie about it is of course the classic “Who’s Dewey?” Dewey’s caught wiring the boat and Donald throws them in the car, with Donald livid and the boys upset as their chafing at his constant overprotectiveness. 

Both sides aren’t wrong. tThe boys DID do something reckless, putting an old woman in the desert and risking their home just to go on a joyride. What they did was wrong.. but the boys AREN’T wrong for getting annoyed that he won’t let them DO anything and overly hovering over them when they CAN handle themselves as we’ll see. WE now know why: he lost their mother and his sister to her and scrooge’s recklesness. While he got therapy for his anger it’s clear he never properly got help about Della, and thus overcompensates by trying to keep what he has left of her alive. He means well.. but to them it comes off as him being manically overprotective with no good reason. They get into trouble because it’s the only way to DO anything away from him. He’s trying so hard not to loose them he almost has by the time hte series starts, and it’s telling that when they get context in Last Crash, they appricate him more from then on. They do love him, but their frustration is understandable even if what their doing is pretty damn stupid. But their also 10 and Donald’s the grown adult in therapy who should’ve dealt with this or tried to at least by now.

So with no other options Donald sets a course for McDuck manor which excites the boys who have heard of Scrooge McDuck and his exploits, each rattling off something they heard him do that fits their personality (Dewey picks him fighting a stone monster, Huey picks him uncovering a hoax and Louie picks his swimming in money. ) As Donald tries to get them to simmer down, they wonder what he’s up to

He’s up toooo.. depression. He’s in a room with his board, watching them with utter hate and sadness as they talk about cutting the invention and aviation departments. This scene plays ENTIRELY differently after the final two episodes of the season. Before it still plays well as Scrooge clearly resenting being stuck in a boring board meeting, having lost everything that made him him and just having lost his passion for life. Now? It plays as a man utterly disdainful of the men who made him give up on his daughter. While as far as he knows they did it to save his employees from his company collapsing, we know better now... and seriously where IS the rest of the board they just vanished after the Season 3 premiere.

I don’t mind only one being fleshed out, unlike the triplets we only NEED the one I mind that they just never explained it and still haven’t. Hopefully the finale will. 

But back on the plot, it now plays as Scooge just full of hatred for them, knowing they had to do what they did, even if they weren’t emebzlling but still hating them and himself. He’s likely not even paying attention anymore because he just dosen’t CARE: he has all the money int he world.. and it couldn’t bring him his daughter back. As he sadly puts the coins he was fiddling with back and says see you tommorow he can’t even close the vault without a struggle. As we’ll see later the strength never left, it’s not like he stopped execrising.. but he has nothing left to fight for. Nothing left to care about. He could adventure agian so far.. but without Della or Donald, as we’d learn two seasons later the reason he enjoyed it again... what’s the point? He has nothing left except his money. 

This is also a nice parallel to the final Chapter of LIfe and Times. I always felt the first half of woo-ooo was a spiritual adaptation of chapter 12 of that: Scrooge meets the boys for the first time and with their help, and Donalds in the story< Webby and Launchpad here, he regains his passion and more importantly his family after driving them away> The how is very different: he did in life and times due to sinking to his lowest point morally, then cruelly dismissing his family when they tried to welcome him home and bury the hatchet despite what he’d done. Here.. he made a HORRIBLE mistake, one that wasn’t entirely on him but still cost him everything and spent the decade instead of stewing or making more money trying desperately to undo it. The end result is the same, a dried out husk of a man with nothing left to loose and no will to gain anything.

This husk has launchpad though whose introduced as his driver and while good with subs and planes.. isn’t great on the road. After that though Donald pulls up hoping to drop the kids off before Scrooge arrives. Naturally this being a cartoon and Donald having tempted fate with that Scrooge shows up telling him to jettison that Jallopy at once. And finding out who it is, apart from asking how Donald is and Donald doing the same, dosen’t sway him. The boys however freak out after finding out Scrooge is Donald’s and there uncle, with my faivriote bit of that being Dewey exiting the car via a window and rolling across the roof back in. Amazing bit of animation. Wish I had a gif of that. 

Donald makes the situation plane and angry and asks “Can you do that without LOOSING THEM”. And scrooge is so painfully disarmed by his reminder of his past mistakes and the fact his surrogate son still resents him, that he agrees before realizing “Shit I have to watch children now don’t I” as Donald drives off. As you probably guessed, this is another scene that plays differently in hindsight, if not by much: It still plays as two men too stubborn and bitter to reconcile.. but now we know the why behind both their rages it feels even sadder. They both lost the person they cared about most but as it sadly happens in real life both have dug in their heels to reconcile, both feeling their right when neither completely is. While Donald was right to be upset at scrooge and della for what happened, and is mostly taking it out on scrooge because he’s the one left... he’s held onto his anger for 10 years instead of going to help when he’s unemployed, living in a dilapidated houseboat and trying ot raise three children alone and could’ve used what help scrooge would give. Scrooge is right to be upset that Donald is just selectively ignoring everything he’s done to save Della, but is too stubborn and prideful to apologize for what he DID do wrong and feels that’s enough to make up for it when , while it is enough that donald should forgive him, still dosen’t mean he dosen’t have a lot to apologize for. Both are just too angry and too much alike, as much as it woudln’t seem so, to settle with each other and see too much of what they lost. 

So the kids follow Scrooge.. who forgets to open the door, and Beakly lets them in. It’s a nice subtle bit. After some silence, Bentina TRIES to get her old friend and now employer to talk to them, but he naturally refuses and they do the talking, asking tons of questions.. and Dewey ends the conversation by accidently pressing the “imply he USED to be something rather than is something right now “ button

So Scrooge throws them in the twins old room, and Beakly gives them some marbles. You will give them b ack they will be counted. But another subtle touch I missed the first time is there... her sad look. She clearly doesn’t want to do this, but she has to play this carefully or else he might get mad and fire her on the spur of the moment. He’d obviously hire her back, where else is he going to get an ex spy who will both clean for him AND be his bodyguard and security. It’s a very small pool. Mostly because Beakly probably killed most of the other people who’d of fit that description during her spy days. 

Scrooge meanwhile is still rattled by Dewey’s statment, wondering if he really is a “used to be” instead of a “never left”. The fire is starting to spark again.. he just needs more kindling. And more kin. 

Meanwhile Louie and Huey marvel at Dewey’s “Brilliant’ breakout plan: hit the door knob with the sack of marbles til lit breaks. To be fair, they’ve known dewey as long as they’ve been alive and even by season 3 after he’s taken several levels in badass and cunning.. he still crashed a plane because his brother well-meaningly called him basic, and thought being nearly sacrificed the most times was an accomplishment. This is the best he could do and you all know it. It also works, so they can’t fault him for that... though he’s quickly kidnapped as are they. They wake up after the commerical break in a room with pure darkness, hung from the celing with a mystery person asking who they are and who they work for before Louie calls out for “uncle scrooge”... so she claps the lights back on and..

Well close. But it is Webby, who cuts them down, fangirls over meeting the nephews and asks who the evil triplet is. They all point to Louie who shrugs it off. I mean it was funny enough the first time but at this point I know he’s running several fradulent charites, almost all scamming his uncle. He’s earned that title. Webby puts them on the big board and then when asked they find out she’s Webby, her granny Beakly is housekeeper.  She then asks the big questons “Are we friends now?” “If we say yes will you let us live?” “Ha good one new best friend”

She then explains she dosen’t get to leave or anything even eat a hamburger. The boys are moved by this and Louie asks what she does for fun. She leads them to the vents and while Huey and Louie are a bit relcutant, Dewey naturally goes first pointing out it’s better than the marble room. They agree and are on their way. 

Okay unpinning that pin, the crew conciously updated Webby and Beakly as neither really had a lot of purpose in the original. It was also to conciously add more actiony females to the main family lineup, as both creators, both being fathers, preferred someone their daughters could look up to and would enjoy watching. Not someone perfect but someone intresting instead of someone who often got Kidnapped and whose main charactrisitcs were “Sweet and GIRL STEROTYPE” So cleverly they KEPT her being girly, having a skirt, liking ponies. .but also gave her all the training and skill of one Cassandra Cain, a sheltered background and an adorable personality that kept the sweetness but added her probably having killed a man at some point. It worked as Webby is one of the best parts of the show. 

Likewise Beakly was upgraded from fuddy duddy housekeeper, to badass former secret agent whose also a housekeeper, and bodyguard and confidant to scrooge. Demonstrated by her talk with him as he tries to put on his diving suit and go after the jewel of atlantis, having spotted the signs to go after it in the paper.. and wanting to prove a child wrong. Beakly points out the flaws in this, and tries to get him to connect to his family. Having lost hers, it’s easy to see why.. though the how’s a mystery.. for now i’m guess. We’ll see in the finale. But she’s Scrooge’s concisence and the one who can easiest reign him in, to the point two episodes directly have our heroes have to NOT call her or else the plot was end, but have that worked into the plot so it works. She’s the calm in his storm and hte one person he needs more than anyone else even if he dosen’t always realize it. He calls family “nothing but trouble” just as Dewey passes overhead. 

So naturally as Webby shows off Scrooge’s old treasures in a mysterious room, while the other Siblings are rightfully impressed, Dewey dismisses it as “fake” because he’s being a little shit, and they agree after seeing Donald, not knowing his reputation. The cutaway to him struggling with a stapler does not help> it’s only when Webby accidnetly uneleashes Captain Peghook, a vengeful ghost after scrooge, who gets his hand on a ghostly sword do they realize this time the monsters are real. Huey also accidently wakes up Manny, the headless manhorse! 

Things somehow get WORSE as Scrooge finds them.. but is in no state to argue and as our heroes duck and Huey tries to divise a plan.. Scrooge get’s his spark back once agian.. it’s starting to become an ember now... and he charges in despite Dewey’s cries of “No come back your old!”. It then gets VERY badass Scrooge: Oi! Beastie! What's it gonna take to shuffle you off to the afterlife? Captain Peg-Hook: The head of Scrooge McDuck! Scrooge: [cracks his neck, flips his cane around to wield like a sword] Would you settle for his hat?

Now that is how you show how badass Scrooge is in a few lines and gestures. HE proceeds to take both out, as they’ve now teamed up, easily, tricking peghook into cutting off the head of a statue of him in the area, throwinng it at him and finsihing the ghosts buisnesss (”I should’ve been more specifiiiicccccc”) and then giving Manny the head, earning him a loyal employee for life. So our days saved, the kids have faith.. and Scrooge is still pissed. He also reveals this isn’t a treasure room but the garage in what’s easily the best gag of the first half, possibly the whole special but one iconic moment is very close in that one. Webby concedes what about the stack of old magazines or the hose or.. okay he’s probably right. He berates them only for the kids to fire back, pointing out he threw them in a room, they just wanted to spend time with him... but it’s only Dewey throwing his words back in his face that pisses him off. Scrooge bellows at them to get out, clearly having internalized everything with donald into rage and trying to justify pushing eveyrone away instead of working at it... but this dosen’t have time to actually work, nor would Beakly actually throw three children out on the curb, as he hits a mystic gong.. the third time it’s been hit. And after realizing it’s already been hit twice Scrooge is faced with Pixu, the gold hutning dragon! And guess who has a giant bin of it wanting to snack on? Scrooge naturally climbs on the thing and the kids naturally want to follow, with Webby getting her first development by proudly announcing “I’m going to eat a hamburger” then explains the metaphor. They just need a pilto.. and as Launchpad has been saying but I forgot to add in “I’m a pilot”

So we get a GORGEOUS bit of Scrooge riding the dragon over the city, getting banged up as he does before finally being thrown off.. only for the kids to catch him with the planes help and try and come up with a plan. Scrooge overcomes his anger at them not staying put, especailly since Webby brings up the right weakness: as a wise man once said...

So they need some.. like say the Medusa Gauntlet Scrooge had in the garage.. that Louie naturally stole. Huey and Webby eyeroll him but they have what they need.. and Huey brought the hose and quickly comes up with a plan, tying scrooge in, and swinging him to Pixu. The kids hold on tight, Dewey calls his family awesome and our heroes win the day as Scrooge turns the dragon to stone, slips and falls.. and then GRACEFULLY dives into hte bin, showing off his diving skills and his badassery. The day is saved, the gauntlet and the dragon go in the bin for safe keeping and Scrooge calls the kids trouble.. and chuckles fondly. “Curse me kilts how i’ve missed trouble”

He’s impressed: Huey’s quick thinking, Louie’s pickpocketing, Dewey’s drive, and Webby’s magical knowledge all saved them. For once. .he’s happy again. And for the second time in life it took his family to remind him why he does this and show him the true fun of adventure: Getting to share it with those he love. And he finally has people to love again. He has family back, kids who look up to him and want to learn from him again, a REASON to adventure. Money and treasure and eveyrthig couldn’t bring della back.. but he at least sees now that whiel they certianly couldn’t.. they can bring him closely with what he has left. She’s gone, for now.. but she left behind three great kids who could use a mentor and Beakly brought him a fourth. And he just found out he has a pilot. The ember.. is now a raging flame. Scrooge is back. Because i’ts not the money or the glory.. it’s the thrill of it, the discovery.. and the family that makes adventuring worth while and he’s learned that lesson again. So he calls Beakly to clear his schedule.. forgetting she you know PUT A FUCKING PIN INTHE WALL the last time he asked her to play scretary and the onlyr eason she dind’t drive over the choke him to death, is that she’s probably happy he’s back on track.

Back at the interview Donald is stapled to the wall and gets the job.. not as an accountant mind but his employer needs a sailor.. and his employer is FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD. Oh boy. 

Part 2: Escape To/From Atlantis First the last bit of background I saved: Originally, Fenton and Gyro were supposed to show up here, starting a gag of Fenton showing up but not being named until “Beware the B.U.D.D.Y. System!”, setting up the sub. But the crew decided this took too much away from the focus on the duck family. The not naming him gag was also dropped, and I have two reasons why: Their given reason, which is it’d take up too much time and a logistical reason: While they gave a heartfelt pitch to Lin-Manuel Miranda, as frank wanted a strong Latino superhero to combat the lack of them on film, Frank and Matt probably thought they woudln’t get such a huge name or at least prepared for it.. and were delightfully suprised when Lin happily and tearfully agreed. So they likely scrapped it so they could properly promote the biggest name in their voice cast. Honestly it was for the best and they still go to do the idea with Drake in “The Duck Knight Returns!”, where it worked much better than it probably would have with Fenton. 

We open with the Glomgold Industries Employee Training Video! Encourging IP Theft, making things cheaper and general scumbaggery, and claming your the world’s most beloved scottish billionare. IN short the perfect introduction to everyone’s favorite insane, fake-scottish, scheming, egotistical , short sighted billionaire. As i’ve made transparent before, I fucking love the reboot version of Glomgold and he’s easily one of my favorite parts of the reboot. They clearly needded to find a new place for Glomgold in the grand scheme of things as the show was more about globetrotting adventure and family and less about getting contracts or bets about whose bigger money and more about family. While they DID do a classic bet storyline with season 2, it’s clear the old glomgold was just a bit too stiff to properly fit into this new zanier and deeper universe. 

So they instead remolded him as a half insane, knockoff scrooge, someone who PURPOSFULLY modeled himself after the guy to try and one up him, and instead of being a fairly low pitched schemer, was a bombastic idiot whose schemes were half baked, whose name was on everything he made, and whose only thing bigger than scrooge was his glorious ego. In short he was perfect for this series and perfect to show up way more often as a bumbling thorn in Scrooge’s side.. but one who COULD be effective in the right circumstances, as to not make him completely pointless. Keith was likewise the only person I could see in the roll now as with Hater he had a history of playing bombastic, egosticial morons, and made Glomgold into the enjoyable ball of ego, bombs, sharks and shouting we know and love. Some people didn’t take to this version after a while... I’m not one of those. I loved him here, I love him now, and he’s every bit as good in season 3 as he was at the start. He’s also wearing a kilt mcduck A KILT. A bit that’st STILL funny four years and 70 some episodes later. 

So we meet Gabby McStabberson and the Smashnikovs as they and Donald file in, though Donald is busy wrapping up a call with Scrooge, who assures them he has a low key day planned.. while in the sub getting ready to go to atlantis. And nearly drowning when Dewey tells Launchpad to dive while he and Scrooge are still up top. Cue credits. 

So on the sub we get our setup for the two main plots for the episode: While the main thrust of everything is Scrooge taking them to Atlantis, each leads to a diffrent plot. Louie talks to Donald and lies entirely about their day, worrying Webby.. who then reveals she just didn’t tell Beakly she took off or where she was going and encourages her to call and lie. To save time, i’m going to cover this subplot now minus the conclusion as it’s pretty simple and this review is already a day behind. Louie wants her to lie so she dosen’t worry, which is oddly sweet.. still a bit greasy, but it’s clear he means well and it shows in his own way the boy cares about Donald: Sure he’ll lie to the guy, and set up a fradulent charity to scam him.. but he also knows not to worry his dad-uncle and kows Donald is better off thinking their safe than knowing the truth. Granted it also prevents consequences for Louie.. but he’s not playing here here. He gets nothing out of Beakly not knowing the truth or helping some girl he just met, he’s just being NICE in his own twisty way. It’s a nice show of his depths: While louie will lie, cheat and steal Eddie Gurrero style, he does have a caring side underneath hit. He can read people well and while he primarily uses it to manipulate people, we’ll see time and time again that he can use it for good too and to help those he cares about. He’s nothing but supportive the whole plot, and even when he says “you can’t back that up” it’s more worrying about her and having a bit of crack than actually being a dick. 

So Webby tries lying, but is about as good as Huey is at it, saying “I’m at a friends house nothing, then makes up a clearly fake name, then says their only talking in swedish for a grandpa. Launchpad DOES help, but only by accident and snake venom. We’ll get to that. As I said this wasn’t the most complex plot. 

The main plot is our focus episode for dewey. In theory each of the kids was supposed to have one in the first five episodes: Dewey here, Webby in Daytrip of Doom, Louie in Great Dime Chase and Huey in Impossible Summit of Mt. Nevverest!. Given the last one was horribly delayed, he instead got Terror of the Terra Firmians, which in hindsight wasn’t the best spotlight episode for him. But it’s a good system; Introduce them all in the first half of the pilot then slowly focus on each one.  So now Idoloizing Scrooge, Dewey is desperate to be his sidekick and be seen as an equal and is in deep denial as scrooge instead has them all buckle up for a 17 hour ride and when Dewey questions the route, which skips the direct path.. but is clearly marked with monsters, Scrooge just snaps at him and shuts him down and disapoints the boy who only wants to prove himself to Scrooge. 

Naturally though, telling someone with that kind of need for attention and validation to wait goes poorly as he redirects the map while Launchapd is distracted.. and we find out WHY the trip is 17 hours as the direct route nearly gets them killed by mer-ducks, krakens and some sort of storm elemental. Dewey is bummed it didn’t work and annoyed to realize he’s just lumping them all together like Huey pointed out earlier. Huey is also delightful here, having brought travel bingo and sea shanties, clearly used to trips with his other uncle. And adorably taking after him. 

But Dewey’s deversion has done more than make him even MORE determined to prove himself to Scrooge whose just trying to NOT loose the son of the daughter he lost...

The Merducks have taken up residence in the bathroom, so they have to make a pitstop. Scrooge, CLEARLY forgetting how to take a trip with children, wasn’t prepared for this but they find a frieghter and make a stop. Naturally it’s GLOMGOLD’S freighter, where his sub took off from, and he and his minons including Donald find Scrooge using the bathroom.. and the boys to Donald’s rage. Unfortunately saying ‘I’ll kill him” to a raging sociopath who takes that as a sign to kill ALL of them, isn’t a smart move. 

So while Donald tries to plan to keep his family alive, said family arrives in Atlantis with a great bit of Scrooge trying to give a big speech only for them to see it first and ooh and ah. They touch down in the city.. which is flip turned upside down. Scrooge notes hti is odd but is able to read the hieroglypchs even upside downa nd notes there’s tones of deadly traps and that they shoudl stay back and..

Huey: Dewey ran in as soon as you said traps. 

So while Scrooge tries to prevent dewey loosing his head, Donald prevents launchpad loosing his and makes up an excuse about “if their dead now we can’t tourture them later” to cover his ass. Glomgold is impressed.  Dewey is Dewcipointed that the traps are upside down, though he does trigger some snakes that get launchpad. He’s fine just delirious. And possibly slowly dying but the fact he’s lived this long is a miracle. Maybe that’s why he’s missing for most of season 3 part 2, the snake venom caught up to him and drake and fenton need to find the cure. Anyways the rest of the party stays behind while Scrooge chases after Dewey, who naturally runs ahead AGAIN. 

Donald ducks out to use the bathroom, as Dewey tries the old dance through the laser grid routine.. but forgets the part where your supposed to actually avoid it, leaving it to an unseen Donald to stop the fire traps from barbqueing his boy. IT’s a really awesome sequence that shows off Donald’s still got it even if he dosen’t want it.  Scrooge naturally works smarter not harder and simply ziplines above like a badass and berates Dewey when he tells him he took “The easy way”

“Why would you want to take the hard way?” The argument that’s been brewing all episode bubbles up and once again both sides have a point: Scrooge rightfully points out Dewey’s being reckless, has no experince and needs to listen to Scrooge and learn something. Dewey claps back that Scrooge isn’t TEACHING them, just teling them to get behind him while he does things instead of trying to actively mentor them. He outright told them he was going to teach them so while Dewey’s been a wee bit overbearing, he’s right in being disappointed that Scrooge instead just wants them to be safe. I see it as his subconscious acting up: He wants and needs the kids along and is right ot keep them safe.. but is too scared to properly mentor them after what happened to Della and is just trying not to loose anybody. His methods have been right, to keep them safe.. he’s just been so determined to save them, he can’t properly TEACH them so he won’t have to forever or explain WHY. And given the First Adventure shows that while protective he did eventually let Della and Donald pull their weight.. but here he lost so much between adventures.. he just can’e bear loosing them. Dewey also rightfully points out he just lumps them together which in any other version wouldn’t be an issue, until the reboot I had no idea which one was which here? They have distinct outfits and personalities and you had 17 hours to actually get to know them. Probably less given the shortcut but still, several hours at a minimum. It’s things like this that make the series work: while there’s plenty of internal conflicts, at their best their nuanced ones, where if one character is clearly in the wrong they have a reason, and if both are right both are also a bit wrong, versus the original where it’d be scrooge or the boys grabbing the asshole ball at times (Not always mind you but when they did it was insufferable. 

However they don’t have time to argue as the bridge goes out and Glomgold finds donald.. and another way around as a result and gets to the treasure first. Scrooge notices they have donald but once again Dewey charges in 

“Unhand my uncle” “No” “Okay wasn’t prepared for that”

Naturally both sides are a bit livid, Donald for dragging his boys into danger after being part of the reason his sister is on the moon right now, and Scrooge for working with one of his greatest eneimies.. though Scrooge has less ground to stand on because as Donald points out “I can’t keep track of ALL of your sworn enemies” I mean he has lived like .. 200 years. That’s a long enemies list and Glomgold, while the most persistent, isn’t exactly the most dangerous they probably encountered. Given the guy’s an artist with Bombs and Sharks that does say a lot about how badass Scrooge is.. and how incompitent glomgold usually is. He’s just having an on day today I guess. 

Glomgold naturally holds Donald hostage, takes what is suppsidley the jewel and leaves them to drown to death, hitting a wall to let it start leaking. HIs minons run into the rest of the heroes and a fight breaks out while naturally Donald, after even more naturally getting his ass stuck in a hole, literally, rails out at Scrooge for doing this telling him “I knew I couldn’t trust you and” “This is the spear of selene all over again”

Scrooge’s only response is “I was not responsible for the Spear of Selene!”

Dude you still paid for the rocket. While Della shoulders most of the blame, SHE choose to take an untested rocket, SHE choose not to come back during the turbulence YOU still built it and hid it from donald and didn’t make sure she couldn’t just take off in it. Your both to blame. And as I mentioned earlier to the least extent but still an extent, so was Donald telling his grown, adult sister whose as stubborn as she is what she could and couldn’t do. He had the right idea and was the only person trying to be an adult here in this situation.. but he still took the wrong approach with stopping her. Still he got far more ground to stand on than Scrooge, who also took his nephews out. Dewey stops both by pointing out that while yes Scrooge took them on an adventure he’s been doing NTOHING but keeping him safe and most of it was his fault which disarms donald a bit. Though Dewey is quickly distracted.. but for once by an obersvation: the gem glowing above thaem that glowed when they entered... and since the city got flipped turned upside down.. THAT’S the real jewel. Dewey asks Donald ot let it flood so they can get it and begs his uncle to trust him despite his doubts which he does. They get it and everyone’s okay and even more when they reunite with the others they find they’ve handily beaten them. To me this is where donalds walls go down a bit: he realizes he’s been smothering the kids, and that while he may hate his uncle for good reason... he’s not going to make the same mistake with them and while he lied.. Don probably realized if Scrooge had been honest Donald would never have let them go. He can trust him.. and he can trust his kids will be alright without him. 

So Glomgold naturally leaves his minions to die, but our heroes manage to make it to the sub, and Gabby asks if they can bum a ride. Not wanting to do any murders they agree. On the surface Glomgold is showing off his jewel, only for Scrooge to upstage him second’s later with the real jewel, and point out his is “nice but defintly cursed”... and right on cue Glomgold gets dragged off with an octopus and let’s off his first “Curse you mcduck!”. Scrooge offers clean water and power thorugh it, for a price because of course he does, and has offically made his grand comeback. 

We get back to Webby’s subplot, as she’s confronted by Beakly.. who naturally being a former spy easily figured it out immieditely but is only upset her grandaughter lied to her. And even at that she dosen’t raise her voice or anything about the matter, knowing it’d only make her feel worse and getting that her grandaughter needs to see the world and that much like donald, she walled her up to prevent loosing what little she had left. And since being with Scrooge is safe as with her, she can go with him anytime just tell her first kay? They hug. Awwww. 

Donald likewise apologizes, admitting that whatever has passed, he misjudged his uncle here and while not forgiving him yet, is at least willing to let him back into his life and into the boys.. on holidays and stuff at least. But fate forces his hand.. or rather his 10 year old nephew-son having left the engine on and neither having turned it off, meaning his boat goes boom and is in no liveable condition. But Scrooge has the space in his heart and mansion for them.

So as we close the kids help move the artifacts all around the house instead of just the garage while Launchapd drops the boat. While clearing out Dewey notices the painting from earlier.. and finds part of it was flipped over...

“Mom?!” 

Now keep in mind, while nowadays Della’s inclusion in the show is one of the most famous and treasured parts of the show.. back then this was a fucking shock. Disney never really cared about the boys mother and outside of one comics story never really went into what happened. So the fact she was not only an actual important part of the plot but we’d find out was a HUGE wham moment and left my jaw dropped after seeing the episode. Like I would with the finales I had read no spoilers and had no idea this was coming but damn was it a huge and welcome suprise and how far they’d take it and how much they’d flesh her out was an even bigger one. Easily one of the best big reveals i’ve ever seen. The only better one I can think of from this series itself... is the end of season 2. But that’s for another time. 

Final Thoughts on Woo-Ooo!:

This two parter/hour long special.. is still one of the episodes best and easily one of the best pilots. It does slow down a bit in pacing in the second half, but otherwise is just an immaculate , beautiful pilot movie that introduces and fleshes out all 8 main characters, maybe Launchpad the least but enough to still work, gives us some big mysteries to work out, and even throws in Glomgold’s first apperance. It sets the tone, reverent and adventuerous but also with it’s own weird and wacky sense of humor and world building, and universe perfectly. I .. don’t have much else to say really it’s just THAT good and really worth checking out. If you somehow haven’t seen it go watch it and if you haven’t seen it in a while might be worth a rewatch before the finale. The absolutely perfect start to an amazing ride. 

Next on the Della Arc: Dewey and Webby try to figure out where Della is while Louie learns a valuable life lesson and  pisses off a killer robot along the way.

Next on the Blog: Amphibia Season 2 is back! 

Until then if you liked this review follow for more and if you could please support me on patreon. Even a buck a month helps and juicy stretch goals give you na incentive to contirbute. We’re 5 bucks away from 20 dollars a month which means a review of super ducktales and a Darkwing Duck review EVERY. MONTH. So contribute now! Until the next rainbow it’s been a pleasure. 

[thechekhov]

You guys have been asking for it so HERE it IS! An advice thread about comic-making for people who wanted to know my process.

Answering it every time with something like “JUST START!” and “do whatever!” is probably pretty discouraging to people who are legitimately lost, so I wanted to make something a bit more cohesive. This series of posts will be done over time, on different topics, and I will link each part when I make it.

1) Thinking of a story (this part) 2) Making characters  3) Drafting pages (coming soon) 4) Presentation (coming eventually, we hope)

So, without further ado, let’s get STARTED! 

*Disclaimer: I am NOT professionally trained. I have no creative writing degree, nor a comic-making or art degree. I am literally just sharing my own process and my own thoughts to help others, because they wanted to know. If you have beef with how I do things, that’s fine. Criticise away!

Q: I want to write a story. But I don’t know where to start.

Good! Start with that. Not knowing.

No, I’m serious. Not knowing is what gets us places. Not knowing gets us thinking. And we have a LOT of thinking ahead of us. 

Many storytellers admit that most of their writing starts in their head. Most of us go through our day in a sort of half-conscious haze, doing everyday things on autopilot, running errands while barely conscious of what the hell is going on. Inside our heads, we are writing. Well, not really writing. Imagining. 

I personally am a painfully visual person. When I have an idea, it’s like a goddamn AMV in my brain. I imagine the scenario like a movie, and most of it moves along on its own. I’m not really writing it as much as I’m just directing it - changing the camera angle, asking for a re-take when something feels a bit off. Then, I go home and try to write it down on paper, or draw it, and then I tear at my hair and go “THIS ISN’T LIKE WHAT I IMAGINED AT ALL, i’M A FAILURE” and then I go have some tea, calm down, try again, rinse, repeat...

So, what if you’re having trouble imagining? Well, you need practice. (You DON’T need visual memory, or the ability to visualize. You can think in words, conversations, concepts - whatever. It’s all a part of the imagination.)

I would start with a scene from a book or movie you really like. Just start with what you already have. Maybe it’s a calm moment. Maybe it’s the middle of a battle. Or the middle of an argument. Go there, immerse yourself into that moment, and then think “...but what if...?”

The “what if...?” is important. Keep that in your toolbelt. It’ll help us many times throughout this journey.

Stop thinking “I’m gonna write a story”. Start thinking ABOUT the story. Just start imagining, as hard as you can.

Q: I have a general idea of what happens, but I can’t seem to get it together into a plot.

Sometimes, it helps to write things down. It doesn’t need to be prose - just make it loose and to the point. Not even full sentences. Just “____ happens” and “___is sad” and “_____ dies”. Put them all over the page. Then, go through and connect them with a line. 

When I write plot, some of my brainstorming looks like this:

I think maybe if you spend enough time and channel this guy

...you will know what the hell I was trying to do here. But the point is, it’s not for the audience. It’s for ME. So it’s allowed to be messy. You can see how I labeled some concepts and connected them with string. The numbers are actually for chronological exposition. I was trying to keep track of which things I wanted to reveal first, and which would come later. 

Q: I know I should plan, but I can’t do it. I just wanna write! 

Good! I was also like this at one point. Actually, I hate planning on paper. I lose interest. (I still do it sometimes, but only for the most complex stuff.) 

So, if you don’t want to do it - don’t!! Who cares. 

Start writing. Start drawing. 

But leave yourself room to re-arrange. Learn tetris. Play tetris. (it’s a good game)

When I write/draw I often go in for the meaty parts first. I like this one quote:

which is basically - BASICALLY - the most succinct description of writing I’ve ever seen. 

The thing is-- The thing IS!! the REASON we read is JUST FOR THOSE EMOTIONALLY HORNY MOMENTS!!! Literally the only reason anyone is THERE, in the story, is to experience that peak of emotion, whatever it might be. It could be the excitement of a chance meeting between two characters. It could be the thrill of battle. It could be the pain of loss or misunderstanding. 

The rest of it? I’m sorry to say, but the rest of these things are just bridges. And yes, bridges can be LOVELY. They are absolutely important to have. But we can’t pretend that we don’t read some long drawn-out stories all the while thinking “but I really don’t care, can we please get on with it?”. 

So, don’t be afraid to focus on the stuff you just want to write. Because most likely, it’s the stuff other people want to read. Just get the meat and potatoes of it out there - fill in the salads later. 

Q: I’m not getting any new ideas. Help!

Drop it. 

No, I don’t mean the story - although I suppose that’s also an option - I mean the idea. 

I hear you - you dOn’t hAVE ANy!! But the thing is, ideas are all connected. If you have one idea, the rest cascade from it. If you get to a dead end in your story, you’re not on an island - you’re at the end of the road. You DO have somewhere to go - you can go backwards.

And yes, like dogs, authors sometimes have trouble with the concept of walking backwards because it’s uncomfortable and we get tangled up in the leash of the plot we’re on. But that doesn’t make it impossible to teach you a new trick. (Don’t give me those puppy eyes.)

If you have no new ideas, then you need to walk back to your last idea and ask yourself “how is this leading to a dead end?”. Or the last idea before that. 

“My character is stuck in an abandoned building but I have no idea what should happen now. I’m lost. :( ”

No you’re not. Your character is - why the fuck was she in the abandoned building in the first place? Why did she go there? Who sent her? Who is she? What are her motivations? Take the time dial and wind it backwards until you are at a fork in the road and try the other road. 

Rince, repeat.

Q: How do I get people to like my story? 

You don’t.

I’m sorry, but no amount of ‘please read this!’ or ‘CREATORS NEED REBLOGS, NOT LIKES’ will get people to engage with your story any more than they already are, aside from, well, their own volition.  

Some people just straight up won’t click with your story. Some will. Some will click HARD but will miss the point entirely. Some people will love it dearly but never, ever, EVER say a word to you. 

That’s just how people are. You can’t blame them for not being your Dream Audience. That ain’t their damn job. And as a content creator, unless you’re being commissioned to do something very specific, it also ain’t YOUR damned job to be a crowd-pleaser! 

Write what you love. Connect where you can. The rest will follow. 

That’s about all I have for writing - more will be added later! 

Cheers.

[princessofgayskull]

ik this isn't she-ra related but ur main blogs asks aren't open 😳😳 n e wey, thoughts on folklore?? i wanna hear ur favorite songs, favorite lines, any parts that gave u chills, all the good stuff

Someone asking me about Taylor Swift? Someone asking my thoughts about Taylor Swift?! Someone actually wanting to hear what I have to say about Taylor Swift? I feel like Entrapta back in season one when she was asked about her theories about Etheria and was she excited to show everyone her model.

Before I dive in, I want to apologize that it took me so long to get this to ask. I’ve been swamped trying to keep up with summer classes and I wrote several versions of this post only to have tumblr delete it and make me start over before I had the bright idea to write it on a google doc first so I didn’t lose all my work and that is the draft you are reading now! But, for authenticity reasons, after I saw this ask I scrambled to write what I could remember from my first album listen that took place at exactly 11pm (after I watched and cried to the cardigan video, of course). Here there are in note form:

I cannot believe that in the darkest timeline that Taylor Alison Swift dropped a surprise album with sixteen songs in an entirely different genre (the heart attack I had when I learned folklore was a genre shift; I cannot believe I doubted the song writing legend herself). The album has been out for a week and I kid you not the only reason I know I didn’t make it up or dream it is because this album is far more beautiful than I could’ve ever come up with. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve listened to it. Everything about the album- the lyrics, the topics, the genre, the production- speaks my language fluently. Even during the first listen I felt that I had somehow known these songs my whole life despite their raw newness. 

This might read weird, but I think one of my favorite aspects about the album is how voyeuristic it feels to listen to. I don't mean sexually, but rather the way it feels like I don't have full permission to be looking at the lives of the people she is singing about. It's as if Taylor said, "I know you want to peek behind the curtain and see all my flaws" so she dives into these characters who are very flawed people and is so raw and honest as she takes their place saying almost "I will treat them like you treat me." 

Yet at the same time, it's her most grounded album. There's something so shiny about pop music (I'm not knocking it, I love pop music, life's too short not to) but this is as if Taylor's pop mentality was left out in the rain and rusted. There's something so real and familiar about it. Like you can reach out and hold it in your hand.

It's venturing too far into the forest and stepping into another dimension and living in it for sixteen songs. A dimension of mysticism, nihilism, magic, and mistakes.

Here is my track-by-track list of favorite things/ chill moments/ awestruck moments.

the 1- WHAT AN ALBUM OPENER. This song rips my heart out and stomps on it. "You know the greatest loves of all time are over now" Why does lyric make me wanna break down and have the most cathartic cry? The defeated acceptance of it all is gut wrenching. "In my defense I have none" Taylor's turn it phrase on this album is brilliant and I aspire to this level of word cleverness.

cardigan- the slow buildup of this song pure magic. If you don't scream "Cause I knew everything when I was young!" at the top of your lungs when listening to this song, are you really a cardigan stan?

the last great american dynasty- F. Scott Fitzgerald who? No, I only know Miss Taylor Swift. Seriously, this song isn't even four minutes long and it's better than any novel written about the American dream. Also, "and then it was bought by me" Taylor you cannot just drop that bombshell on me without letting me get emotionally prepared.

exile ft. bon iver- a song crafted in heaven. Somehow it makes me both depressed and provides me serotonin. I can't get enough of the lyric "I'm not your problem anymore/ so who am I offending?" FUCK THAT'S GOOD. THE SONG IS SO GOOD. SMASH THAT REPEAT BUTTON. I could drown in this song.

my tears ricochet- by far my favorite on the album, and my favorite number five track. I don’t think there’s another Taylor Swift I relate to as much as this one. This hits a very, very close to a personal place for me. Right at the center of an open wound. And god, the build up. It just makes the emotional experience that more poignant. “And I can anywhere I want, anywhere I want, just not home.” I got chills the first time I listened to that lyric, and it brings tears to my eyes. Needless to say, I’ve had some good cries to this song.

mirrorball- this track is about as cutting as they come. The Imposter Syndrome anthem. It’s the “everything that comes from me has to be perfect, to make up for the fact that it’s from me” song. It’s the sense that nothing you do is worth doing if there’s no audience, yet the audience is the biggest threat. “I’ve never been a natural, I’ll do is try, try, try.” Yeah. There’s a reason this is the TS album I relate to the most. 

seven- I keep saying these songs are so beautiful, but god, this one. Her vocals, the lyrics; in my opinion, a defining moment on the album. The driving home of the point that stories are important because we tell them. It’s a story plagued by a narrator who’s too young to understand and can only put the pieces together as she’s looking back. “And I’ve been meaning to tell you/ I think your house is haunted/ your dad is always mad and that must be why.” I almost can’t handle that. The loss of childhood innocence and the longing for it in just three minutes and twenty eight seconds.

august- “REMEMBER WHEN I PULLED UP AND SAID GET IN THE CAR AND THEN CANCELED MY PLANS JUST IN CASE YOU CALL/ BACK WHEN I WAS LIVING FOR THE HOPE OF IT ALL, FOR THE HOPE OF IT ALL/ MEET ME BEHIND THE MALL!” currently trying to learn this on guitar, which is fun because I’m not much of a singer. Also, I think that Betty and this girl should ditch James and date each other, if you’re of the interpretation that James is a cishet guy.

this is me trying- So I know that this is a song about a woman struggling with an alcohol addiction, but I really relate to this song because it just feels so much like my struggle with mental illnesses and the way my potential died so quickly because of that struggle. “I was so ahead of the curve/ the curve became a sphere/ fell behind all my classmates/ and I ended up here.” yep. that’s about it.

illicit affairs- again, the build up. “Don’t call me kid! Don’t call me baby! Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me!” Gotta scream that everytime. Also are we going to talk about the lines “Take the words for what they are/ a dwindling mercurial high/ a drug that only worked/ the first few hundred times” ? because I cannot stop thinking about it, or any of the lyrics for that matter.

invisible string-Joe Alwyn, do you know one of the most beautiful songs in history was written about you? I love the instrumental on this one. Also, it’s just flat out brilliant. “Bad was the blood of the song in the cab on your first trip to L.A” Holy shit.  Also, “cold was the steel of my axe to grind for the boys who broke my heart/ now I send their babies presents.” You know what that is? Growth.

mad woman-while my tears ricochet takes the spot as my favorite, this is the Taylor Swift song I claim above all others. “Every time you call me crazy, I get more crazy/ what about that?” This song is at the intersection, however coincidental, of my identity as a mentally ill woman. It’s also extreme vindication the way she calls out women acting as double agents of the patriarchy. A scathing criticism of patriarchal socialization and the way women are punished for reacting to anything. 

epiphany- listen to this song after watching the news. lay down. assume fetal position. try not to cry. fail and sob. wash, rinse, repeat.

betty- the old taylor can’t come to the phone right now cause she’s chewing out james for cheating on betty. *wink* However, she will write a folksy banger that’s very old taylor where James takes accountability for their mistake. I love the wlw interpretations of the love triangle songs, and I also can totally see James as a he/him lesbian. 

peace-the disembodied feel of this song is so unique to Taylor’s sound but I totally dig it! This is the album of a woman in her thirties, and I hope it paves the way to more women being able to stay within the industry getting older. There’s a maturity here that is the result of having created so many albums and having found her voice.

hoax- Time to go scream off the edge of a cliff in solidarity. An open closer that rivals the defeatism of the opener, a slow descent into madness that has followed a trauma. “You know it still hurts from scars from when they pulled me apart/ but what you did was just as dark/ darling, this was just hard/ as when they pulled me apart.” Literally no words. I’m always left speechless. 

If you’ve ever thought “I like Taylor but I don’t like her music because she did country and now does pop” this is the album you need to take a chance on. I can only dream of one day possessing Taylor’s ability to tell stories and this album will stick with you in all the best ways. The reason Taylor Swift can genre jump the way she does so seamlessly is because of her unrivaled strength as a songwriter. Stream folklore on spotify!!!!!!!!!

This is probably much more than you asked for, but I hope it satisfies! Thank you for letting me gush about Taylor and this album!!!!!! Sorry it took me so freaking long! If you have thoughts, I would LOVE to hear them!

[red-pill-blue-pill]

Road trip. John Wick. Chapter One.

A/N: It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten how this website works. Okay, this has been sitting in my drafts for like three months and I’ve only written this part ‘cause I’m terrible at keeping up with stuff BUT I’m going to try to get this done. There won’t be a specific “update day” cause my life’s a mess and when I’m not working I’m doing uni stuff but I’ll try to get some time to write the next chapters (and the requests I have left oh my god I’m so sorry). The next update may come next week or in a couple of months, only God knows. However, I hope you enjoy 💖. This is kind of a shitty chapter too, I don’t know what else to say, don’t expect much from me ‘cause I don’t wanna disappoint you guys. 

Summary: Road trip around Italy yay!

Word Count: 2,007

Warnings: None.

“Look at this.” you said with your eyes glued to the laptop screen. The web of AirItalia was on display before you. You pointed at one the cheaper flights while John stood behind you, leaning over your shoulder to get a better look at the screen. 

“Mhm, that’s a good one but, baby, you know money isn’t a problem.” He kissed the top of your head and you leaned into the back of the chair, crossing your arms over your chest. 

“I know but you always pay. Makes me feel like I’m taking advantage of you.” You turned your head to look at him pouting your lips and making him laugh lightly. “But you’re not doing it. Just pick the one you like the most. I know you want this to be perfect.” You sighed resuming your task. You knew it was impossible for you to win his fight, it was like talking to a concrete wall when it came to money stuff.

You had been meaning to go on vacation together for a couple of months but every time the plane tickets were booked something came up; family emergencies or last minute work calls, forcing you to postpone your little vacay yet another time. However, this time you took care of everything. You made sure to convince your boss to free your schedule for a month, those years of hard work finally paying off. John called Winston to let him know he was going to take a month off, asking him to let administration know so no contracts were sent his way during that time. It was going to be perfect. You were planning to drive all over Italy, visiting all the important cities and discovering all those little romantic villages you saw in films. The thought of John speaking italian made you squirm on your seat.

He barely kept up with the plans you made, you were the one in control this time. You wanted to take him to cute intimate restaurants, wear summer dresses that you knew would drive him crazy, kiss him under the string lights hung on the streets, get wine drunk and tease him under the table. You also wanted to share with him one of the things you loved the most: art. Going to one of the most artistic countries was like a dream came true for you and, considering the fact that he loved seeing you enjoy things, he was going to be the happiest man ever.

The trip started in Milan, you would go east to Venice, then down to Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Siena, Rome, Napoli, Capri and finishing in Sardegna. It was going to be the perfect vacation. You had made a list with places to visit and restaurants with good reviews that you wouldn’t let him see, saying everything had to be a surprise. Actually, he only got to choose the hotel and the rental car.

Weeks passed by and excitement creeped its way through your body, infecting John each day that passed. The only thought on his mind was the fact that he got to spend the whole month exploring a new country - yes, he had been in Italy before but only for business so it didn’t really count - with the girl he was in love with. For someone like him, who had lacked the presence of an emotional connection with someone and the freedom of doing what he wanted his whole life, this was a big deal. This came to show that even John Wick could have at least a glimpse of what everyone had: a normal life.

 “C'mon! We’re gonna be late!” you said from downstairs, your creaking voice eliciting a loud laugh that came from their bedroom. You cleared her throat while suppressing a giggle yourself “You won’t be laughing so hard after I come up there and beat your ass, Mr. Wick!”

 He laughed even harder while he walked down the stairs with a couple of suitcases. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” His hair, still wet and in need of a light comb, fell on his face as he put their luggage on the floor. 

“Well now I know why it took you so long. Who gave you the right to be this handsome?” You put one arm over his shoulder while you reached with your other hand to pull away some of the strands that were still over his face. His arms snuck around your waist as he pressed you flush against his chest. 

“I don’t know I guess they put too much "handsome” in the mix when they made me.“ He smiled cheekily while leaning down to kiss your lips sweetly. 

Your heart fluttered, it always did. His soft lips and the light scratch of his beard on her face made you fall in love more and more each time you kissed. You turned the sweet kiss into a more passionate one, lightly biting his lower lip and tangling your hands in his hair. You got a low grunt as an answer. He knew where you were going and if he obliged you would totally miss the plane. He tried to push you away but you held onto his shoulders 

"Just a quickie.” you mumbled against his lips as you grabbed the hem of his shirt and started lifting it. 

“Baby, we’re going to miss the plane, remember?” He pulled away and looked at your pouting face, chuckling to himself. “Let’s go.” He said as he opened the door and held it for you. 

You reluctantly grabbed your suitcase and walked out towards the taxi that was waiting for you.

The ride to the airport was quiet. John knew you were mad. Well, not mad, irritated. You had your arms crossed and was looking out the window, not even bothering to look at him when he put his hand on your thigh. He chuckled earning a quizzical look from you 

“What are you laughing about?” You said. Your tone was stern but he knew it was getting hard to keep yourself mad at him. 

“I know why you’re mad at me.” His hand started trailing up your leg. You squirmed under his touch. You hated to admit it but the effect he had on you was pretty obvious. You struggled to keep your face straight and your voice steady.

“Then tell me why.” You teased. He leaned closer to you, making sure the driver couldn’t hear what he was about to say 

“Trust me when I say there wasn’t anything I wanted to do more than to fuck you against the front door, but then we would’ve missed the plane and that would have made me so, so sad because, you see, I’m really, really looking forward to fuck you all around Italy.” You sucked in a sharp breath, your thighs tensed at the words that left his mouth which was now curled in a mischievous smile as his hand creeped dangerously closer to your crotch, almost gracing it. You gulped, your brain trying to send the signals to make you speak 

“Don’t start anything you won’t be able to finish.” You said as you put your hand over his and moved it away. Your eyes looked into his daringly and he looked away while he let out a loud laugh, startling the taxi driver. 

“Baby, you’re playing with fire and trust me when I say you’re gonna get burned.” He said breathlessly after the laughter stopped.

The flight was long and dreadful. Your legs were sore, his back hurt like hell and jet lag was a bitch. All you wanted was to arrive at the hotel and sleep for two days straight. Instead you waited and waited for your luggage to come out on the conveyor belt in baggage claim and then you waited a little more to pick up the car you had rented. Finally it was your turn and John walked up to the counter. You could make out some italian words as you heard him speak but you were too tired to think about how sexy it sounded, you just wanted him to end with the talking and to get you both the hell out of there. It was ten o'clock in the morning, the sun was shining bright and you raised your hand to shield your eyes as you regretted packing your sunglasses in your stupid suitcase. Meanwhile, John mocked you and danced around while he put his black rayban on. 

“Where did you get all that energy from’” you said as you struggled to drag your suitcase through the parking lot. 

“We’re in Milan baby!” He ran to you and kissed you sweetly, his excitement was obvious and, although he had never been so tired, it felt good to be far from home on a new adventure.

It didn’t take you long to get to the hotel. Well, you wouldn’t know since you fell asleep the second your ass was sitting on the car seat. John just chuckled quietly and turned on the radio to have something to listen to so he wouldn’t fall asleep too. He parked in the hotel’s parking and walked around the car to open the passenger’s door. He shook you softly and your eyes opened slowly. 

“Baby, wake up, we’re here.” The only response he got was a tired groan as you got out of the car and walked to the trunk to pick up your suitcase, his hand snatching it from you as soon as you grabbed ahold of it. “I got it.” he said as he smiled sweetly at you.

John walked up to the counter, once again, and spoke italian, again. The concierge gave him the key to your room and you wasted no time dragging John behind as you rushed to the elevator. When he opened the door with the magnetic card you eyes widened at the sight before you. There was a huge living-room decorated with ebony furniture that, mixed with the flowery carpeted floor and green sofa, gave it all a forest-like ambiance. A huge bouquet of flowers was placed in the small table in front of the sofa and the enormous windows allowed light to illuminate each corner of the room. To the left there was a huge king sized bed with white silky sheets that screamed for you to take the nap you were so desperately needing. To the right there was a white marble bathroom with a huge bathtub that, although you couldn’t see, you knew it was a jacuzzi. There also was a big window that allowed you to look down at the city (or the city to look up at you) when you were having your lovey-dovey moments in the tub.

You turned to look back at John who had a cheeky grin planted on his face “do you like it?” he asked already knowing the answer. 

“Are you kidding? It’s perfect!” You squealed while jumping into his arms and kissing his face all over “You’re the best!” 

John giggled as he carried you to the bed and set you down softly, his hair falling to his face as he hovered over you. The laughter stopped and you looked at each other, your gazes full of love and adoration. He leaned down, his lips softly gracing yours and making your heartbeat speed up. You leaned up and smashed your mouth against his. He grunted and returned the kiss with the same passion, tongues meeting and teeth clashing together. Your hands were all over his body, tugging at the soft fabric of his t-shirt and scratching his back. He moaned into your mouth as your hand reached his crotch, rubbing him through his pants. You grinned at the sound and suddenly pulled away brushing your untamed hair with your hands. 

“I think I’m gonna get some sleep.” You faked a yawn and scurried out of bed to put on you pajamas. John looked at you incredulously as he stifled a laugh. 

“Wanna play nasty? You’ll see.”

____

I don’t have a taglist but if you’d like to be added just send in a PM or an ask and tell me if you’d like to be tagged in this one or in everything I write 💖

[the-fiction-witch]

The Artist And The Writer

MOVIE: MAZE RUNNER

COUPLE: NEWT X READER

RATING: KINDA SEXY IN PARTS BUT MOSTLY ADORABLE AF!

Newt's Pov:

I sighed I can't get to sleep again, I think I should go for a walk it might put me back to sleep, I climbed out my hammock taking my little spare notebook, I wondered around the dead heads doodling plants and leaves but it didn't help so I began my walk back going the long way round to try and tie me out I spotted y/n sleeping peacefully in her little hammock I couldn't help but smile my heart jumping out of my chest seeing her nuzzling into the pillow lightly smiling the way she only does when she's dreaming, I went sitting in my hammock looking at her slowly and carefully drawing the perfect lines of her skin,

the way her hair falls loose and messy against her pillow, the way her lips look so kissable, her skin glimmering in the moonlight my hands buckled a little drawing her breasts pressed tight to her pillow without her bra on, it made me blush a little but I can't draw them, it would look strange if I didn't as

soon as I was done I put my pencil away and hid my book in my pillow case laying down and getting to sleep.

Y/n Pov:

I yawned stretching my arms out as I woke up, I looked out to the glade and smiled getting my little book trying to think of something to write...Mornings in the glade in some ways are like waking in another world of your dreams, the way the bright golden sun peaks over the grey static walls creeping in to touch the peaceful glade, the rays of magic touch from each tit blade of green grass to the tip top brown branches of the tallest tree's, falling to the soft blankets of the boys sleeping out on the common ground, to the soft strong strings holding each hammock keeping we each keeper in there rest. I giggled as I spotted a familiar morning sight, newt fast asleep in his hammock so I smiled turning a page or so

The restful sleep, of the hardworking. He lays still in his deep dreams, his feet tucked up tightly to his red Blanket trying to make sure in his twists and turns he wouldn't lose his blanket to let in the draft. His legs had a little pillow about a quarter of the size of a regular pillow for his ankle so it wouldn't hurt him in his sleep as much, his skinny body snuggly sinking into the soft hammock his brown pants undone at the waist he always does it before bed, the boys say he used to take them off completely when he went to bed but, since I showed up being the only girl he doesn't do that anymore, his tight orange vest clings to his skin some places more than others where the elasticity of the fabric was going over time, his hoodie hung on the rope of the hammock, his toned arms hung a little out the hammock where he was slowly tipping out his beautiful face cuddled into his pillow his soft lips open where he was drooling a little onto the pillow, the mop of blonde and brown hair a mess where he had moved in his sleep, the way the sunlight caught it made him almost seem to... Glow like a beautiful angel.

As soon as I finished I hid my book away and climbed out of bed going over to newt and putting his arms back in his hammock readjusting him to he wasn't going to fall out any time soon as I do every day I smiled fixing his hair a little and giving his head a little kiss he seemed to smile as I did nuzzling closer to his pillow. I sighed doing my work for the medjacks nothing overly interesting Today so I sat by the window with my little book trying to find something worth writing... And I spotted my little source of inspiration. And began to write...

The garden filled with dirt and sweat, but also sugar. The heat embracing his body as he toiled with the hard manual labour, his toned arms visible where his grey hoodie held him tightly the sleeves rolled to his elbows giving a hint of the form below, he stood from caring for seeds and saplings wiping the loaded sweat from his brow, his golden hair matted from the heat, the world seems to freeze as his hands reached for the hem of his jumper pulling it off him and to the ground beside him in one perfect motion. He stops looking at his surroundings with those chocolate coloured eyes, resting his arm on his slender neck he reached flexing his toned form his vest clung to his dripping body everywhere hardly concealing anything to the eye, his pecks obvious as well as the flat skinny stomach leading eyes to the bulge in those tight pants the tightness normally a mere suggestion of what hides below but today, it seemed so tight it was more like a brag. Making any girl with a hundred miles cross her legs and bit her lip begging for his attentions.

Ooh la la that got steamy. It's just newt in the gardens for goodness sake, well every writer has to embellish I suppose. I really hope we don't all die and this little books gets taken to be studied as the example of what the glade was.

Newt's Pov:

I smiled as y/n came to sit with us at the bonfire and she giggled waving at me from the other side so I waved back having another bite from my stick of food a few boys made some comments and I admit I took notice too y/n was wearing a skirt... I know that doesn't sound like alot but y/n doesn't often wear a skirt and when she does it's normally lower than that. I blushed a little trying to not look even if most boys where wolf whistling and making lewd comments I think she noticed I wasn't looking and she smiled getting up much to many boys dismay even if a few where trying to look up her skirt she hopped over and sat next to me she smiled and I smiled to blushing alot she giggled in that sweet little way she always does that makes my tummy fill with butterflies and bubbles I froze as she pressed a kiss to my cheek not even a second just a little peck but I could feel my face going bright red. Many boys making comments and noises at us I glanced to Minho a minute making my best help me expression as I was lost for what to do he simply smirked and made a kissy face so I looked back to y/n still very nervous so much I realised I was holding my breath though all that I jumped forward and kissed her I went to kiss her cheek but I got her mouth by accident so I pulled back as quickly making her giggle a sweet little honey glow in her cheeks where she blushed too the glade was going insane at us y/n took my hand pulling me up with her and tugging me along with her an explosion of wolf whistles and comments and all sorts of things came from them but we where going fast enough to be away from the noise pretty fast she tugged me back to the hammocks and sat on her own so I sat on mine we both got ready for bed tucked up the tightly she giggled blowing me a kiss it made.me blush harder if that was possible I went to speak but she shhhed me nuzzling herself close to her bed and pointing to the asleep Alby close to us I know she's right the glade could be having a firework show and he doesn't move yet me and y/n start whispering and he hears every word so I blew her a little kiss too before tucking myself in a bit better she went to sleep pretty quickly but I couldn't I was too happy and to excited to fall into my dreams all I've ever wanted was to kiss her and I've done it here in the real world, not even dream me has got that far yet it was like a dream come true I got my little pad and smiled making a little drawing it was just going to be us kissing but...I'm not good at drawing me so I just let my imagination run wild.

Her sweet beautiful body on her knees, that little skirt left as sheds on her legs her hands covered herself as he had on underwear on, I tried to draw her shirt but it never looked right so I did it in s little bra with lace and frills on it her hair down bouncing on her shoulder s little her face read of many things, shock, giggling, that innocent look of ohh I'm not wearing anything under my skirt, as well as that, underlined ohh I'm not wearing anything isn't it sexy,

I had to stop as soon as I had finished as the boys were starting to wonder back now so I hid my book away and went to bed

Y/n's pov:

I yawned sitting up a little I turned and saw newt fast asleep I giggled giving last night my tummy still full of bubbles and butterflies where he kissed me, I know it wasn't intentional he was going to kiss my cheek but zart shoved him. I was about to sweetly call him to wake him up nicely this morning but-

Alby rushed over In a panic yelling about I'm not sure bathroom sinks I think I'm not awake enough for his yelling which woke newt and made him fall out his hammock him and all his stuff dumped on the floor I laughed at him and he looked unhappy with me as Alby wondered off tipping me out my hammock and into the floor with him scattering my stuff with his we had a laugh about it before getting up to sort out putting our stuff back in our hammocks I put my book in my bag and got ready for work as did newt he was about to go but I tugged his arm he stopped and turned to me blushing a little given last night so I stood up on my toes and gave his lips a tiny kiss and even giving his nose a little Eskimo kiss before running off before he could say anything I know he was turning red I could see it from here as I ran off to work. I sat for ages nothing much going on so I got out my book to do some writing but I turned the first page and my writing wasn't there, but a beautiful drawing of the glade from the top of the watchtower it was really good all the pages had similar beautiful drawings of glade places mixed in with little doodles of plants and flowers from the gardens, my favourite I found was of the garden in full bloom it looked like a fairytale. I looked through more and there was a person in them, a girl beautiful and perfect I looked at them all spotting one in a hammock they where of me? From the way they had been draw, it was obvious that newt had drawn them, and it made me giggle he was such a good artist. I noticed the time my lunch break I should really return his book he'll be missing it.

Newt’s pov:

I yawned a little already bored of Minho, Zart and Winston badgering me about last night, there's only so many times you can say nothing happened. Till it was break so I went sitting by the flowers there was a daisy just starting to bloom so I got my pad flicking through the pages but I noticed they didn't have drawings there where words, I read a couple they where all beautiful stories and descriptions of the glade and the people in it, I kept reading ones about a person in bed and it hit me...it was me? That's how I sleep knowone else does. Kept reading the beautiful words only one person could have written this.

Y/n’s POV

I wondered thought the gardens looking for him but Zart said he had gone wandering off so I went to the deadheads where he likes to wonder and I spotted him with my notebook

"hello" he smiles

"hey" I smile

"I uhhh- this is yours" he says handing me the book

"thank you, here this one is yours" I tell him handing him his book back "there beautiful" I tell him

"thank you" he blushed

"but you made me far too pretty" I giggle

"no I didn't, that's how pretty you look to me" he smiles "your stories...there amazing, you must have been exaggerating I'm not nearly that perfect" he laughs

"I think you are" I smile giving his cheek a kiss and he blushed giving my check a kiss too I giggled holding his hand as we wandered back to the glade sitting in the little bench by the bonfire snacking on our lunch as I wrote and he drew I smiled leaning on his shoulder and giggled "is that me?" I ask

"Yep, looking nice and beautiful" he smiles

"is that you?" I ask

"yeah" he laughs

"are we kissing?" I ask slsly

"I don't know, maybe..." He smirked "maybe I need a little inspiration?" He whispered so I smirked wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing his soft lips he happily kissed me back wrapping his arms around my waist as our kiss deepened till I pulled away

"that enough inspiration for you?" I ask

"for now" he shrugs going back to his drawing for a while till he stole my book having a read of what I was writing "ohhhh...my my you smutty little thing" he smirked rubbing his nose with mine "so... We passionately make out and fool around by the fire then I take you into the dead heads all lustfully then what?" He asks

"I don't know I haven't gotten that far" I giggled "maybe I need a little inspiration newtie" I smirk running my hand down his chest

"humm alright" he smirked ...

[skelezbian]

Hey lulu! I have a fic that I’m gearing up to write, but I keep hitting a wall. This is my first time trying to seriously tackle a multi-chapter fic, and I’m having a hard time putting my thoughts to paper without it all sounding bland. I really admire your writing, so I wanted to ask if you have any advice?

i’m gonna knock this one out of the queue so that you don’t have to wait! (i’ll use bpc as a point of reference!)

re: where to start! before i started bpc i had a very vague string of very big events i wanted to happen, and how, ultimately, i wanted the story to end. the hardest part for me was starting, because i knew that the beginning would be very bland in comparison to the more exciting stuff later on. i tackled this by starting off in the middle of the action- the reader’s already drunk, they’re making a mistake, they’re wandering aimlessly in the forest. while the night started with them at the party, none of that is necessary to advance anything, so i omitted it to draw the reader’s attention

that being said, have a little bit of a timeline! it doesn’t have to be strict, but know what milestones you want to hit in a fic, and which ones are closer to the end or event X needs to happen before event Y Can Happen. then, from there, backtrack and figure out what needs to happen before you get to those events-

for example: the reader meets the swapfell brothers and lies, and then they’ll have to see them again (Two Big Events). between the two, the first establishes that the reader has to either validate the lie and make it true, discuss with the horrortale brothers, and deal with the fallout of their lie. from there, i have a pretty good idea of the trajectory of my story!

re: What Is Bland. picking through what you’re going to write is also important, but sometimes people get confused as to what’s unnecessary or what you the author consider boring! of course, you’re the author- you’re going to think about your story all the time! it’s going to get boring for you! you’re familiar with your concept- your readers aren’t! but if you’re still concerned that it’s boring consider: 

does it add to the characterization of a character? does it add something that was previously unknown? does it ‘prove’ the genre of your story (does it establish romance in your romance story, does it establish action for your action story, etc)? do characters that need to interact interact? If So, It’s Not Boring

a lot of people only consider chapters/concepts that move your story forward to be the only ones that matter (which they do!) but it’s not the only type of chapter you need to put out! you need buffer chapters, you need transitionary chapters. 

re: putting it to paper. write when you’re inspired and just keep one long doc of When You Were Inspired. it doesn’t have to be good and it doesn’t have to be your final draft, but nothing is more frustrating than thinking up good dialogue and forgetting about it later! write and write and write and then cut until you have a beginning that you think would lure someone in to read your story. your story doesn’t have to be the most interesting story in the world to begin with (especially if it’s a multichapter, because one shots can usually drop you in the middle of a scenario without any problem, but you have to flesh out multichapters), but it does have to hold the reader’s interest and develop over time. cliffhangers are the coward’s way of holding the reader’s interest, in my opinion- it’s better to introduce interesting aspects/situations in the story that the reader wants to remain engaged with than to cheapen their interest (not to mention that this will get old fast. i’ve been writing on the internet for like 7ish years and if you end all of your chapters on a cliffhanger, your reader will Literally Hate You and stop reading because there’s never any emotional payoff for them). for bpc, a scary situation or a new friend or the reader finding relief after a hard time segues easily into another chapter to hold interest (also, if you think like this, you’ll also be far more invested in your own story, because you’re giving yourself things to write to lead onto the next part of your story)

in general: sometimes it’s easier to get a story going when you have feedback! if you’re still a little unsure if your idea is boring, feel free to DM me + i’ll give u my discord and we can chat about it and you can bounce your ideas!

[sunflowerstrays]

i really like you // mark tuan // au

anon requested this:

here you go my lovely. sorry it has taken so long to write but i lost my first draft of this, rip, and then as i rewrote it i changed it completely. I hope you enjoy!

mark tuan x reader.

words: 2.8k.

genre: fluff.

summary: see anon request.

part 1 / part 2

---

“I really like him, Jackson. Like, really really like him,” you confess to a close friend that you’ve made whilst living in Korea for the last six months, Jackson Wang. Since moving to Korea to pursue your studies into Modern Foreign Languages, and specifically Asian languages given your heritage, you’ve been in the same classes as Jackson and Mark Tuan for the past six months. Both of them are students who wish to improve their Korean skills and went for the full dive like yourself.

Mark had been living in Korea before Jackson and you enrolled in his Korean classes, and as a result was assigned to you as your mentor given that he spoke fluent English and that’s what you also spoke as your first language. You had lived in England all of your life, with your parents moving from Korea when they were only nineteen to be together. You’d never visited the country of your background until you did six months ago, when you met Mark and Jackson at the airport for the first time.

And in the short time that you had been there, you had fallen in love with the country, the people you had met, and the life you were living.

“Girl, you don’t think I noticed?” Jackson asks, running a hand through his black hair and resetting his cap, before stretching out his legs on the field and yawning. “Literally the first time you looked at him, I saw the adoration. It was like Romeo and Juliet- you study that right, being British and all?”

“First of all, Mr Wang, don’t stereotype. But also, has it always been obvious? I didn’t even realise until yesterday-”

“Y/N, chill. I was joking. It isn’t a surprise as I do know how much you like him, but I only really noticed in the last month. I’m just shocked it took quite so long for you to realise.”

But to interrupt your moment, the devil himself walks up. He wears a black denim jacket, a baggy white shirt and blue jeans and still somehow manages to look as good as he does. His fluffy blond hair bounces all over the place as he flops down beside you, instantly stealing the other half of your sandwich before laying his head back, looking at you with the sun in his eyes. Your heart does the .clenching thing and you have to look away.

When you look up, Jackson is grinning at you like the evil best friend he is.

“Why the silence, guys? Were you chatting smack about me again?” Mark asks as he finishes your sandwich in four bites. Jackson just laughs and covers for you whilst you pull out your textbook and continue reading through the notes. The three of you have a crazy important exam in three days that you are terrified of failing. Neither of the boys seem too worried, however.

“Hey, you know that Bambam and Yugyeom are throwing a party next Saturday night, right? I think we should totally go!” Mark says with a grin, sitting up and throwing off his jacket, reaching for your crisps as well. You kick them the rest of the way to him before shaking your head.

“Why not, Y/N? I think it would be good for you,” Mark whines, tugging on your arm and your heart strings with that face. Six months in and you can’t but have fallen helplessly for this blond idiot. He never revises for exams, but manages to come out at the top of your class every time. He never shows up to anything on time but is still the life and soul of the party. Half the time he isn’t anywhere to be seen but he still clouds all of your thoughts. You hate that he has this effect on you, but you also can’t help it at all.

“Parties aren’t really my thing, Mark. You know that I’d rather chill at home and watch a movie-”

“You mean read this thick as heck textbook and surround yourself in languages and music and just ignore the outside world. I’m very familiar with what you love, Y/N, and I do respect that. But just one night, for me?” He says, taking the book out of your hands now and squeezing your wrists instead.

“Mark…”

“Please, Y/N. I’ll even take you to your favourite bookstore on the Sunday. I just really want you to come with me.”

“Wait, you want Y/N to go with you specifically?” Jackson asks, faking shock and going all gushy. The comment had gone straight to your head and you were convinced that you was going to pass out from overwhelming emotions. Mark has the faintest blush on his cheeks, and doesn't respond to Jackson, but you refuse to let yourself get your hopes up. Doing that would result in your inevitable downfall, anyway.

“Fine, I’ll go,” you give in with a huff, unable to say no to Mark’s puppy face. He glows at your response, making you roll your eyes and Jackson laugh to himself. “But, if either of you abandon me at any point in the night, I’m leaving immediately. And never speaking to you again.”

“Ah, Y/N,” Mark says, hugging you tightly and making you explode in feelings. “You have no faith in us. Why are you so doubtful?”

“Dare I remind you of the final exam of last semester, Mark, when you forgot to pick me up and I had to run to make it to the exam in time?”

“It was an accident-”

“I almost failed the exam that was keeping me in the country, Mark!” You argue back, your voice rising until both Mark and Jackson are laughing at you. In annoyance you stuff your book into your bag and stand up, beginning to walk back into the school for your extracurricular class, helping Korean students with their English.Today you are with Jaebum and Youngjae, and these classes never fail to lift your mood.

“Wait, Y/N,” Mark calls, making you turn around. He jogs over, leaving Jackson and your stolen food behind, “Can I walk you home later? I need to chat with you… In person as well, preferably, with less… Ears,” he says, indicating at a grinning Jackson. You gulp nervously, wondering what on earth Mark has to say to you without Jackson being present. The thought makes you pale a little bit, but you nod anyway with a bright smile.

As you head to your classes with Jaebum and Youngjae, the younger of the two boys catches up with you and launches into a story about his weekend, half in Korean and half English, giving you a hell of a time trying to understand it well. It’s something about a baseball game and he won something, but what it is you don’t catch. So instead of responding with an intelligent, you just smile at Youngjae as the two of you walk in the class.

The teacher that sets the work up for the three of you chats with you in English the second you walk in the door, also telling you about her weekend. She is only a few years older than you and that makes it a little awkward when she approaches you, because she never seems to do so in a professional manner.

When Jaebum finally rocks up, the three of you all sit down to begin discussing the formation of sentences in English. Youngjae laughs at you for a solid twenty minutes when you get confused between the word order in English and Korean, and as a result you threaten to storm out of the classroom. Eventually you manage to get a little bit of work done with the boys but it isn’t as much as you would’ve liked to have done.

As the class ends and the teacher comes back to dismiss the class, Jaebum asks whether you’ll also be attending the party this weekend. You frown before remembering that Mark asked you, to which Youngjae squeals in an octave higher than normal in excitement.

“He finally asked! We never thought he would,” Jaebum says with a joyful expression, fist bumping Youngjae’s expected high five before throwing an arm around your shoulders. “I’m so proud of him.”

“Hey Y/N- Jaebum,” Mark says as you walk in the corridor, an eyebrow raised at the awkward position you was in. Jaebum unhooks his arm from your shoulders and shoves you gently in Mark’s direction before winking at you, and walking in the opposite direction with a puppy-like Youngjae. His words are still ringing in your ear as you walk with Mark towards the exit of the school.

Mark sparks up the conversation between you two in English, something he doesn’t do often because like you, he strives to get as much Korean into his daily life as possible. As a result, you are thrown off guard completely. But the conversation is just general chat for a while until he asks you a question out of the blue that almost throws you sideways into the road.

“Are you actually leaving me at the end of this year?”

You stop in your footsteps, looking a little bit lost by what he has said. Out of everything that you had expected him to say, this wasn’t it. You had avoided thinking about what was coming up at the end of this year; you’d be taking a short plane flight to Thailand, where you’d be continuing developing your lingual skills further in another language. You had already started learning the basics of the Thai alphabet and language between learning Korean full time, maintaining a part time job in a cafe, and keeping up with your studies. At first you had been so excited to be selected for the exchange trip that was taking place all over Asia, as it was more than you could have ever asked for. A four year trip with a year in each country; South Korea, Thailand, Japan, China.

But since coming to South Korea you realised that you are going to miss it when you leave. The cities, the culture, but mostly the people; Mark and Jackson had become the people you were closest with in the world, and you would give up all your dreams if it meant you could stay in Korea with them.

“Yes,” you say slowly in response, “It’s what I signed up for. I don’t get to dictate whether I leave or not.”

“But you’ll be leaving me behind. And Jackson, Jaebum, Youngjae-”

“I know,” you say with a heavy sigh. “Does it look like I really want to leave behind all my best friends?”

“No,” Mark says, sulking as he walks beside you. “I just don’t want you to leave.”

“It’s still six months away, Mark,” you say in an attempt to cheer him up. “That’s a lot of time. Besides, you could hate me by then.”

“I could never hate you,” Mark says, and when he starts looking at you again, there are tears in his eyes. This sends you into complete panic because the thought of Mark being sad crushes you. You step towards him and wrap your arms around his skinny frame, hugging him tightly as you rest your head on his chest. Everywhere that your bodies touch makes your skin feel like it’s alive, and you want to hold onto him forever. He’s shocked at first, but gently rests his head on top of yours, wrapping his arms around you as well.

“Six months,” he mutters, his breath fanning the top of your hair. Mark can’t really believe that after all this time, it’s taken him this long to realise how he feels, and as a result, he’s only got six months left with you.

---

It’s party night. The music is loud, kid’s crazy, kitchen a mess, air cold. As usual, you hate the atmosphere, but Mark and Jackson have kept to their promises, aren’t drunk and are still with you. The three of you, plus Youngjae and his girlfriend, are all lazing in the garden near the pool. Jackson has already fallen in there twice and promises to drag you in there if you threaten to push him in a third time.

“I’m going to get some more drinks,” you decide, standing up and brushing the dirt off of your black jeans. Every other girl here is dressed in pretty skirts or dresses, and you wore jeans and an old shirt from England that you wore once to a wedding. You couldn’t have felt more out of place if you’d tried.

“I’ll come with you,” Mark says, holding his hands up for you to pull him to his feet. He does most of the work anyway because you can’t remember the last time you hit up the gym, and as he walks beside you he teases you about this.

As you step inside the kitchen, Mark is approached by some of the boys from your school that clearly know Mark well enough to start shouting at him across the room. Mark waits by your side though, just maintaining a brief conversation before returning his attention to you.

“See, it wasn’t too bad here, was it?” Mark asks, hoping for an answer that he feels like he isn’t going to get.

“I mean, I would have prefered a movie and popcorn with my blankets at home, but I guess this isn’t too bad,” you shrug, taking the cans from Mark and trying to balance five of them in your arms as Mark grabs as many bags of crisps as he can. The two of you bicker about how good the party is or isn’t the whole way back to the group, which has somewhat disbanded since you’d left; Jackson is nowhere to be seen, and Youngjae and his girlfriend are leaving already. You place all the cans on the floor and wish them a goodbye, hugging Youngjae’s girlfriend before high fiving a half intoxicated Youngjae.

Mark and you take a seat on the ground as they disappear into the house, laughing at the sudden quietness of the garden. As you share a bag of crisps between you, now surrounded by far too much food for two people, Mark begins making observations about the sky above you. You hadn’t even noticed how beautiful and clear the night sky was, but Mark gets lost in those stars.

“You enjoy astrology?” You ask Mark, surprised by his knowledge of the stars. He looks back at you, face glowing and eyes burning with the light of the stars above us. Nodding slowly, Mark shuffles closer to you, putting his hand on yours and pointing to the sky.

“This one here is a dipper. This one in particular is supposed to represent joy and wellbeing,” Mark says, before moving his hand. “This one shows strength and courage. And that one is supposed to be the star of love and luck.” His voice is light and happy, and you think you’ve fallen in love with the boy who loves the stars, sat beside you.

“It’s incredible,” you say, feeling like Mark has expanded your horizons and filled your soul with the wonders of the universe. Heavy with your feelings for him and sudden new love for the sky, you let your head droop, gently resting against Mark. He pauses for half a heartbeat before wrapping his arms around you, pulling you ever so closer.

“This planet here is Neptune as well. You can only see it here at this time of year, but I think it’s my favourite,” Mark whispers. You study the sky hard, feeling like you could float out of his grasp and touch the sky.

“Mark,” you whisper, pulling your head away to look at him, “thank you.”

“For what?” He asks, confusion laced in his tone. He still looks at you like you are his whole world, and you can feel your heart open in your chest, pouring your love for him into the soil beneath you.

“Everything,” you whisper back. Mark smiles shyly, before tilting his head towards yours. You meet him in the middle, and kiss him ever so softly, a touch barely there, yet it’s the most important feeling in the world to you.

“I really like you, Y/N. I don’t know if you feel the same way, but I don’t know when else to say this to you,” Mark says, resting his forehead against yours and letting out a shaky breath. You laugh softly, feeling vulnerable and raw under the stars with him.

“I really like you too, Mark Tuan.”

---

hope you enjoyed!

requests are still open ♡

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND VALLEY

I/O. Will we get rid of or make optional a lot of situations, but has to rely on benchmarks, for example, or because you've been assigned to work on Y Combinator. And jeans turn out not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria? Well, no. We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they didn't get jobs themselves? Programming languages, especially, you often find yourself working on stuff you don't really like, and you'll leave the right things undone. In fact, the language encourages you to keep working. We can see this happening already.

One is that I'm motivated to be honest. If you're not a master of negotiation and perhaps even families to support. I'm going to be times when you have a special word for that. As the gap between acceptable and forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than by, say, an implementation. It's simply more expensive. A hacker would consider being asked to write add x to y giving z instead of z x y as something between an insult to his intelligence and a sin against God. They released the OS without the unfinished parts, and users will have to do is make sure this new Lisp does some important job better than other languages. Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the servers, it would affect at most one merchant, could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to start a startup and hesitating before taking the leap, you're part of a Boston batch, which means charging each customer as much as submission. Society seems to have been able to work on Y Combinator. 0 company shows that, while meaningful, the term is also rather bogus. Will they be able to dump ultimate responsibility for the whole thing onto the shoulders of a big market a few years of being used only by a small number of early adopters. Treating indentation as significant would eliminate this common source of bugs as well as you can.

Well, I'll tell you what features you need to win. Whatever looked like the biggest win. The phenomenon isn't limited to startups. If you try convincing investors before you've convinced yourself, you'll be ahead of most startups. So if the ease of shipping software, we'd see a lot more sophisticated than what most of these ideas, for a while, and then buy it, as two separate steps. Though really it might be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do what you want. And they were right. I don't mean to disparage Yahoo. Err on the side of generosity. Another way to burn up cycles is to have a web-based alternative to MS Office. Working to implement one idea gives you more ideas. Recursion existed as a mathematical concept before Lisp of course, but when you read the source you do it on that computer.

The organic growth guys, sitting in their garage, feel poor and unloved. In the history of programming languages a serious hacker would want to use. Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously is bound to limit their productivity. Excite really never got the business model, like the classic Lisps of the 1970s. You could have some other kind of client. If there's just one point, they're identical: the average and peaks of the same curve, then they converge as the number of startups there could be. They still do, of course, and this, unfortunately, is also taken to an extreme. What about in the general case?

And Kerry lost. Only 13 of these were in product development. Why do they do it? By historical standards, that's something that's changing pretty rapidly. And you know when to stop optimizing too: we eventually got the Viaweb editor to the point where they're issued, we may in some cases be able to trump them by offering applications that work from any client. One way of using patents that clearly does not encourage innovation is when established companies with bad products use patents to suppress small competitors with good products. At Viaweb we sometimes ran into trouble on this account. Language designers deliberately incorporate ideas from other languages. While we were writing the software, and a server collocated at an ISP. There are only rudimentary libraries for manipulating strings. You're going to have to come up with shifts to the left or right in their morning-after analyses are like the financial reporters stuck writing stories day after day about the random fluctuations of the stock market. It was a theoretical exercise, an attempt to axiomatize computation.

For example, people who read the old version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility. About a year ago she was alarmed to receive a letter from Apple, offering her a discount on a new version number on the software, our Web server was the same desktop machine we used for development, connected to the Internet, and distractions always evolve toward the procrastinators. Users are a double-edged sword of course. They're far better at detecting bullshit than you are of them, and I expect this to be as big a head start in buying microstartups as it did in search a few years of being used only by a small number of early adopters. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's good enough. There is hope for any language that gives hackers what they want. Google looked a lot like work. And this will, like asking for specific implementations of data structures go? Hardware does well on crowdfunding sites.

Bugs turn up quickly. But that, I now believe, is like a disk crash, except that your data is handed to someone else instead of being at the mercy of their own imagination. No one wants to write programs to solve, but I found that I could tell immediately, by the way. If you don't and a competitor does, you're in closer touch with your users. I've come close to starting new startups a couple times, but some of the work of the Valley now. We're confident we can sit down with you and cook up some promising project. A good deal of that spirit is, fortunately, preserved in macros. And a couple miles south of that is the most innocent of their tactics. They're the ones that won't make such a promise, because there are no releases, ports, and so on.

But the really striking change, as intelligence and wisdom do seem related. I have no trouble believing that computers will be very much faster. Many of the interesting applications written in other languages. We've learned a lot since then, but if we knew how we would have really liked to add to HTML and HTTP. If you'd been around when that change began around 1000 in Europe it would have seemed a great bet a few months in. Many a hacker will want to use yourself. An eminent Lisp hacker told me that his copy of CLTL falls open to the section format. This was done entirely for PR purposes. There are a handful of people did part-time. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Aydin Senkut, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this. They're not desperate for a job in a cubicle. The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the PhD program in physics at Berkeley to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

[insertniallurlhere]

Illusions. Chapter 1.

Yeah I know I said I was writing this like three years ago. It's been a draft on my computer for a long time now. I'll post it here and see if anyone actually still notices things I do since I've been kinda inactive for awhile. Sorry. xx

It was 3 a.m. I couldn't sleep. All I could do was think about my life and how much it's changed in just a years time. It had been so different from what I had expected when I left home. I knew if I wanted it to get better I had to leave. I'd known this for a long time now but for some reason I couldn't leave the man next to me in bed. I was under the young and naive impression that we could have the perfect life together. The whole picture perfect movie scene dream. We planned to leave home and live our lives together the way we wanted. It only took a few months of living together for me to realize that our life wasn't at all what I had dreamed it up to be. He wasn't the same once we left home and he didn't keep any of the promises he had made. I had been living herewith him for a year and so far it had been the worst year of my life.

I sat up in my bed and kicked the covers off of me. I looked at the bruise I had on my thigh before softly pressing my fingertips against my cheekbone feeling the fresh bruise that had been left there. I looked down at my wrist to see his handprint wrapped around it. I knew I had to leave. I knew it a longtime ago. I couldn't live like this anymore. He had just been progressively getting worse and worse. I just had nowhere to go. WhenI ran off from home with him I think I burned my bridges. My friends and family had never liked him but I didn't listen. I was blind because I thought I was in love and he had convinced me how great things would be. I was convinced he was all I'd ever need, but I nowI see how wrong I was. I didn't leave in good terms, so I knew I couldn't go back. My brother and my dad were the only people who still kept in contact with me. It wasn't a whole lot of contact but they tried. I think it hurt them the most when I left. My mom was really the one who was mad at me for leaving.

I got out of bed as quiet as possible and packed all the necessities I would need to get back home. I knew it would get hot as the day went on especially as I got closer to home. I couldn't dress appropriately for the weather or everyone would see my bruises. I wanted try my best to hide those from my family. My only option was a long sleeve shirt and jeans and that couldn't happen or I would die from the heat when I got back toArizona. I put on the longest pair of shorts I had and they only halfway covered the bruise on my thigh. I put on a tank top and a few bracelets to try and cover the bruising on my wrist. It wasn't completely covered so I found some string and just tied a few pieces around my wrist until it was covered enough. I tried to put makeup onto cover the bruising on my face but that didn't work like I thought either. I had my backpack completely stuffed with things I would need along with a second bag that slung around my shoulder. I had most of my things but had to leave some of the less important stuff behind.

I snuck out of the house avoiding the passed out bodies in the living room. They were still here from a party the night before. A party that I didn't want to have or be apart of but what I said didn't matter to anyone. I was thankful to even get out of the house without anyone noticing and stopping me. I tried to walk to the bus station as quickly as possible. I needed to get out of town before he or any of his friends woke up. I knew they would come looking for me and make me go back. If I went back and his friends had left I knew I would end up paying for trying to leave. I was scared it would be worse than the few bruises I had from arguing with him yesterday.

I finally got to the bus station and bought a one way ticket to my hometown. I knew the bus ride would be a few hours long but it was worth it. It was worth facing my mom and swallowing all my pride and going home than continuing to live with someone who treated me so terribly. I only had to wait for about half an hour for the bus to arrive. I was tired from not having slept the night before but I was too scared to fall asleep. Scared that my not so loving boyfriend would be somewhere close behind me. Scared that I would get home and my mom wouldn't let me back in the house.

I was a couple of hours away from home and the bus had stopped to get gas. I went over to a pay phone and called my dad in the hopes that I wouldn't break out into tears. The phone rang three times before he answered. I had missed hearing his voice.

"Hello?"

"Hey it's me."

"Brooklyn? Brooke are you okay? Where are you calling from?"

"Yeah I'm fine." That was a lie but what was I supposed to say over the phone?

"Are you sure? Why are you calling at seven in the morning? From a pay phone? Or even calling at all?" My stomach flipped a little thinking he wouldn't want me to come home.

"I'm sorry."

"No, no, it's fine. I'm not at all bothered by it. That kinda came out wrong I guess. I'm your dad and you can call anytime you want. I was just wondering because you never call." I knew it was best to just come out with it. It just had to be one of those things like ripping off a band aid.

"Can I come home?" There was no hesitation at all in his voice before he answered.

"Yes. Of course you can come home. Do you need me to buy you a plane ticket or come get you or what?"

"Actually I'm taking a bus and I'm already halfway there. Can you pick me up at the bus station?"

"Absolutely, but you know I would have bought you a plane ticket or come and gotten you."

"Yeah but it was more of a last minute decision and I didn't have the money for a plane ticket. Are you sure I can come home? Will mom be okay with that?"

"Yes. You're our child. You are welcome in this home anytime you please."

"Okay I have to go now." I told him the time and place of where to pick me up before I hung up the phone and I felt a little better knowing at least my dad wanted me back. I got back on the bus and was just wishing for the time to go by faster. The further I got away from that town the safer I felt. I got excited as we got closer to the bus station. I was so ready to be home and feel safe and at ease. I got off the bus and found my dad waiting for me. I immediately smiled at him and ran to hug him. He squeezed me super tight making me remember the fading out bruises I had on my ribs.

"What happened to your face?"

"Oh-uh...I was playing volleyball with some of my friends and got hit in the face. It's not a big deal." That was the farthest thing from the truth considering I didn't even have a single friend in that town. I didn't get it from doing something fun. I got it because my boyfriend was belligerently drunk and got a little carried away when he was angry. My dad nodded as he took my bags from me and walked us to the car.

"Have you not been eating? You've lost some weight. Are you hungry?"

"Yeah I'm starving. I haven't eaten all day." Truth be told I had been missing a lot of meals lately. We hadn't had a lot of money and I was too unhappy to eat anything.

"We can go get something from a drive-thru and you can eat it on the way home."

We got home and while I had missed my mom and brother I was kinda thankful that they weren't home. I was however a little more excited to see my brother than I was my mom. My dad handed me my bags when we came in and pointed at the staircase.

"Your room is still up there the way it was when you left. If you want to go put your stuff up there you can. Are you tired? You can take a nap if you want or shower and get freshened up. Your mom and brother won't be home for a couple of hours."

"Do they know I'm here?"

"No I didn't tell them. I figured it would be a nice surprise." I rolled my eyes and looked away from him.

"Maybe for Jeremy. Mom might not like it as much."

"Your mother loves you. She just has a hard time swallowing her pride and I think you can relate to that because you got that from her. You are both just stubborn, but I am thankful you swallowed that pride and came home." He kissed my forehead and I smiled to myself realizing he was right.

"Me too. I'm gonna take this stuff upto my room."

"Alright. I'll be down here." I went upstairs to see my room had remained the exact same since I left. I unpacked some of my bags and went back downstairs. I sat on the couch next to my dad as he watched television. We were both quiet for a few minutes before he spoke up. "Is that another volleyball injury?" I was confused at first but then I saw him looking at the bruise on my thigh peeking out from the edge of my shorts. I nodded my head and tried to pull my shorts down a little to cover it. He patted my knee and went back to watching his show. I hung out with my dad for about an hour before going up to my room. I layed on my bed just to try and gather myself and relax but I ended up falling asleep. I woke up a little later and started to go downstairs. I stopped at the top when I heard my dad talking to someone who I assumed to by my mom.

"Brooke is home. She's in her room."I heard a chair move and footsteps until my dad stopped them. "WaitI'm not done talking. You can see her in a minute." I assumed that was my brother trying to come see me and not my mother. I was so excited to hang out with my brother again. He was one of the ones that didn't hate me for leaving. My mom on the other hand I was nervous about.

"She's taking a nap. She left the bus station in her town at like five this morning. She's a little tired. Also I want you to be nice to her. I know you are happy she is back and I want you to let her know. I don't want to hear you say I told you so or anything like that. Let her know you missed her. I know you two sometimes clash a little because you have the exact same personality but if you could try I would appreciate it and so would she." I knew he was talking to my mom about being nice to me because he knew there would be no problems with my brother. I was also glad my brother wasn't a part of that conversation because I didn't want him to know the truth. At least not yet. My mom's voice interrupted my thoughts. It was so good to hear her voice again.

"I of course missed her and love her but we knew this would happen. If she had listened to me none of this would have happened."

"I didn't say for sure that's what happened. I'm just saying it's a little strange that she left town at five in the morning and came back covered in bruises. She says they are from playing volleyball with friends and they very well could be." I felt my heart sink into my stomach knowing that he had seen through my volleyball story. "That's why you don't need to tell herI told you so or anything like that. If my guess as to what really happened is true it took a lot of courage for her to come back home.I need you to swallow your pride and make her feel welcome." I went back to my room and layed in my bed not really feeling like facing my mom yet especially after I finding out they didn't really believe my volleyball injuries. I fell asleep again for about twenty minutes before I felt a ball hit me in the butt. I rolled over to see Jeremy in my doorway. He came in as I got out of bed. He hugged me and stepped back.

"God, I've missed you Brooke."

"I missed you too."

"It's good to have you back. You look like shit though. You've lost a lot of weight and you were already skinny before. Are those bags or bruises under your eyes?"

"Both. You asshole."

"Sorry. You just don't look too healthy. Are you okay?"

"What did dad tell you?"

"Nothing. He said Brooke is in her room if you wanna go see her. Tell her dinner is gonna be ready in a minute." I was glad dad hadn't told him about what his true suspicions were about the reason I'm home.

"Well the bruise is from playing volleyball. I got hit in the face with the ball.The bags under my eyes are because I'm tired. Also I just didn't have a lot of money while I was away and I had to pay bills before I could buy groceries.I'll gain the weight back living here though."

"Dad is making your favorite so let's go eat."

"Wait, is mom mad? How is she acting?"

"Dad didn't tell me you were until after he told mom and she has just been quiet since before I even knew. She hasn't said much of anything, but I think she is excited to see you."

I walked downstairs after my brother and went to the kitchen to see my mom setting the table. She either didn't see me or was pretending to not see me. "Hi mom." She looked at me and smiled.

"Hey sweetie. Good to see you back around the house." I looked at my dad and he smiled back at me. I sat down at the table next to my brother and my dad brought the food to the table. We all made plates and I silently stuffed my face with all my favorite foods. I knew I had lost a little bit of weight but only from hardly eating anything for three weeks since my now ex boyfriend had stolen all my money. I didn't know it was a noticeable weight loss and I knew I would gain the weight back fast once I started eating proper meals again. After dinner I tried to help my mom with dishes because she still hadn't said much to me. I didn't think she was being rude it was just an awkward situation because when I left we had been in a big fight that had never been resolved.We had a great relationship we just didn't always see eye to eye and that sometimes made things difficult for us. I wanted her to at least talk to me. I started washing a dish and she stopped me.

"Oh you don't have to do that. You've had a long day. Just go relax if you want."

"I want to help."

"Alright. Are you glad to be home?"

"Yes."

"Are you here permanently or just visiting?"

"I mean I don't plan on living here my whole life but it would be nice if I could stay longer than a visit."

"Of course you can. Why did you come home in the first place?" I shrugged my shoulders and she let out a breath. I knew she wanted to ask all the questions my dad told her not to ask and I was glad she wasn't. I knew she cared and was worried we were both just bad at showing emotions with each other sometimes. Jeremy came into the kitchen as I finished cleaning the last dish.

"Do you guys want to watch a movie with me and dad?"

"I'm actually still really tired. I think I just want to go to bed early." I finished silently helping my mom clean the kitchen and went back to bed needing to get some sleep. It was nice being able to sleep peacefully and knowing I was in a safe environment.

The next day I woke up and looked in the mirror. It still took me by surprise whenever I woke up and saw the frail bruised reflection instead of the happy and healthy version of myself. Thankfully with all the sleep I had gotten most of the heavy bags beneath my eyes had disappeared. Unfortunately, the bruising had not. I went downstairs still in my pajamas and with my hair messed up from sleeping. I started making my bowl of cereal for breakfast and Jeremy came in.

"Hey! Me and my friend are gonna hangout by the pool today. You are more than welcome to join. Were just gonna chill and have a few beers."

"How old is your friend? You aren'told enough to buy beer."

"He is. Just come have a few beers and hangout with your brother. Like old times."

"Old times? I've only been gone alittle more than a year."

"A lot can change in a year."

"I'll think about it." I knew I was acting distant and I didn't know how to go back into being the old happy me I always was. I could also tell my brother was trying to help get me back to that. I guess it would just take time. I wanted to hang out with him and have things be normal again. I just wasn't thrilled with the idea of wearing a swimsuit and having the bruises on my thighs and ribs visible.

I contemplated it for far too long and decided I would hang out with my brother and this friend of his I'd never met or heard of. I went upstairs and put on my swimsuit. It didn't fit as well as it had the last time I wore it. It was just a little more loose but not too noticeable. I stood in front of my mirror looking at my body wishing I would gain that weight back sooner and the bruises would disappear. The swimsuit didn't hide any of the bruises and I wasn't ready to answer any questions about them. I quickly found a coverup and decided I would just lay out and stay in the cover up. I needed a little bit of sun to make me look a little more healthy. I put on big sunglasses to hide part of the bruise on my face since one of his friends was coming over. I made sure all my bracelets and my cover up was positioned to hide the bruises before going outside to the pool.

Jeremy was out there plugging in a radio and I sat in one of the lounge chairs. He turned to look at me and smiled. "I'm glad you decided to come out. My friend just texted me and said he's on his way."

"Who is this friend? Have I ever met him? Does he have a name?"

"We had a couple of the same classes in college while you were gone. His name is Niall and there he is."I looked to see where he was pointing and I saw the gate to our deck open and his friend walk in. He had on his swim trunks and white t-shirt and an arm full of beer. He had on black ray bans and looked at me as soon he closed the gate.

"I'm Niall."

"So I've heard. I'm Brooke."

"So I've heard." He smiled showing me his perfect white teeth and boyish grin. "Jeremy's sister?" I nodded my head and he walked over to the table that I was sitting next to and put the beer down. He opened the case of beer and Jeremy came over to the table. They both grabbed a bottle and Niall opened a third bottle. He lowered his sunglasses down on his nose and looked at me over the rim just showing me his baby blue eyes. He pointed the beer bottle at me silently offering it to me. I took the bottle from him and he smiled as I thanked him.

"No problem." He sat in the chair next to me and Jeremy turned on the radio. He had his legs on either side of the chair and leaned forward. He set his beer down and took his shirt off. I caught myself staring at the way the muscles in his back moved as he undressed. He leaned back in his chair and I was thankful I had on sunglasses so he couldn't see me blatantly staring at his torso. His abs weren't the most defined but you could tell he had them. I felt wrong for even looking at one of Jeremy's friends like that but he had a great body. His obviously fake blonde hair and blue eyes made him look sweet and innocent but his tattoos covering his arm and part of his shoulder gave him some edge. I had always been attracted to the bad boy image, but look where that had gotten me. I ran off with the last bad boy type and that turned out to be a disaster.

I didn't even know if Niall had the stereotypical bad boy attitude or not. I was just judging him by his tattoos, the way he carried himself, and the slightly devilish grin he had given me earlier. He offered me beer which I guess was polite but that was all I knew about him. He took a swig of his beer and looked over at me.

"So Brooke..."

I looked over at him, "So Niall...?"He quietly laughed a little.

"Jeremy told me you ran away from home. Quite rebellious don't ya think?"

"Well I was twenty so it hardly counts as running away. I just moved out for a little while but I'm back."

"Why did you decide to come back?"I didn't like that he just immediately started asking these questions and was making me out to be a rebel.

"I just came back."

"Oh. It's a touchy subject?" I shrugged my shoulders and he continued. "Let me guess...you ran off to live with your boyfriend and I'm assuming that ended so you're back." He had a cocky smile on his face like he was so pleased to have been able to guess why I had come home.

"Yeah that's over. Why are you asking all these questions?"

"Sorry. I'm just trying to talk to you...get to know ya a little."

"No, I'm sorry I didn't mean for that to sound rude."

"It's cool. I get it. I was asking personal questions and this is the first time we've ever properly met." Jeremy came over with a volleyball.

"You guys want to play volleyball in the pool?"

"How do you play volleyball with three people dumb ass?" Niall laughed at me calling him a dumb ass,but that was just our normal sibling banter. Jeremy shrugged his shoulders and sat down. "I'm not really interested in volleyball anyways but if you and Niall want to play I'll help set up the net and I'll keep score." He and Niall both stood up and went to get the net. They started putting it up and Jeremy looked over at me.

"I thought you said you'd help put up the net?" I groaned and walked over to them. "Keep groaning andI'll push you in the pool." Once we had everything set up I sat on the edge of the pool and stuck my feet in the pool. I became the referee for the game because both of them argued about the points.The game finally ended and it was a one point difference so they joked around about who actually won. I was still laying back in my seat when Niall came back and sat in his. He looked over at me and just stared for a second until I looked over at him.

"So, why have you not been in the pool yet? Take off the cover up and the sunglasses and get in." I reluctantly pulled my sunglasses down and showed him my bruise.

"Volleyball accident. Don't really feel like showing it off." He sat up and leaned closer to me to see it better. I didn't want to be attracted to him but the way he leaned closer to me sent a slight surge of energy through my body.

"That's a pretty little shiner ya got here." I smiled as I put my sunglasses back up. Somehow the way he talked about it didn't make it seem so bad.

"It's not pretty or little but there isn't much I can do about it." He sat back in his chair as Jeremy came back over with more beer for all of us. I felt like Niall was talking to me more than he was talking to Jeremy but I just thought maybe he was trying to befriend me.

"So the sunglasses hide the bruise? You just gonna wear 'em everywhere you go until it goes away?"

"No, the sunglasses are because it's sunny." I looked over at him and smiled and he returned it along with a small laugh. "They just also conveniently hide my bruise."

"Honestly, I think it looks kinda badass. You also might get a nice tan line from the sunglasses. You are gonna look like a raccoon with a black eye." I laughed at him and took the glasses off setting them on the table next to me. I looked over at Jeremy was changing stations on the radio and dancing a little. I looked back at Niall.

"He's a little tipsy I think."

"Yeah I know. He's kind of a lightweight, but I look out for him when we are with other people. He has kinda become like my little brother."

"Well he is my little brother so I'm counting on you to continue looking out for him. How did you guys become friends?

"I saw him at a couple parties. We hung around the same crowds. We just kinda became friends. It's not much of a story is it?"

"Guess not." Jeremy made his way over to us. He went to grab another beer and Niall said something before I could. "Hey Jeremy, why don't you take it easy."

"I'm not even drunk yet."

"I know, but your parents are coming home in a little bit. Why don't you sober up instead of drinking more so you don't get in trouble." I stood up and Jeremy looked at me.

"Where are you going? Are you done hanging out with us?"

"Yeah I think I'm going to eat something and then take a nap." I looked down at Niall and I wasn't sure if he was looking at me or not because he had on his sunglasses as well. "It was nice meeting you. Watch out for him." I pointed at my brother who had opened the beer anyways.

"I always do."

"Alright. See ya around."

"Yeah looks like you will." He smirked up at me and I felt like he was flirting a little. I kinda wanted to flirt back. After everything with my ex I definitely wasn't ready for another guy to come in my life and besides years ago Jeremy and I promised to never get involved with each others friends.

I stayed in my room for the rest of the day until my dad came home from work. I talked with him for a little while and it was as if I had never left. As if I hadn't dropped out of college and abandoned my friends and family for an abusive relationship. When it got closer to time my mom came home I became nervous. I knew my mom loved me and I loved her too but I knew our conversation was a ticking time bomb. I knew we were gonna have to talk about me leaving at some point. She came in said hi to me and my dad and went into the kitchen. She started cooking dinner and my dad went to help so I went to my room.

Later I was called into the kitchen for dinner and to my surprise saw Jeremy sitting at the table with Niall.The only empty seat at the table was next to Niall so I sat by him. I didn't expect much conversation to happen at dinner tonight especially not from Niall since we had just met, but he leaned over to me.

"Tried to cover that bruise with makeup?" I just looked at him out of the corner of my eye as my mom set out plates and my dad brought out the food. I had tried to cover it but it didn't work so I didn't think it was a noticeable effort. I started putting food on my plate even though I wasn't that hungry, I had become accustomed to not eating a lot in a day. I just stomached it anyways because I knew I looked unhealthy and was underweight. I knew it would make my dad happy to see me eating. I didn't want them to think that I was this unhealthy looking because I was choosing not to eat. I was this frail beat down figure of myself against my will.I was shoving a forkful of spaghetti into my mouth as my mom spoke up.

"So are you going to go back to school this year? Getting a job? You can't just sit around the house all day."

"It's summer."

"You're an adult. You don't get summers off." My dad cleared his throat and shot my mom I look butI continued on.

"Jeremy does?"

"Jeremy goes to school the rest of the year. You do not."

"I've hardly been back home for twenty-four hours. I'm sorry I don't have a job yet."

"I just wanted to know what you're planning to do with your life? I'm only this hard on you because I love you and want to see you succeed in life."

"You aren't this hard on Jeremy."

"I would be if he wasn't enrolled at university but he is. It's always been understood that if you are in school you can live here while you get an education. If not you can live here until you get a job and get on your feet. I just wanted to know what your plans were. I'm not forcing you to go to school if you don't want to go to school. I realize it isn't for everyone. I'm just saying if you don't you need to find a job and if you do you need to start applying to go back to school."

"I can't even have just one day back free from all serious conversation. Maybe I just need a small break."

"You can take some time to re-adjust your life. I just wanted to know if you had any plans. If you enroll in school you've got the rest of summer." I sighed and rolled my eyes. I saw my mom start to get a little irritated at my action but my dad looked over at her again and she stopped herself before speaking. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room and it was off putting for everyone. No one in the room looked the slightest bit comfortable. Especially since Niall was there but every one else in the family was used to him since he was apparently around all the time. I just hadn't been there to get to know him as well as the rest of my family had. The table stayed in that awkward silence and I hated that I was the cause of this rift in the family dinner. I stopped eating my food and started pushing it around with my fork.

Jeremy finally broke the silence by asking for someone to pass him the garlic bread. I looked up from my plate and Niall's hand quickly reached out in front of me for the bread basket. I flinched a little and he gave me an apologetic look. It was quickly followed up with him looking like he was curious why I flinched but somehow he didn't make me feel weird about it. He smiled when he noticed I was starting to feel weird about being so jumpy.

"Easy. I was just getting the bread."

"Sorry. I don't know why I flinched."He gently smiled and I started pushing my food around again and looked at my dad to see if he noticed me flinch. He looked at me andI could see the anguish in his eyes. I knew that he knew these bruises weren't from playing volleyball with my friends. Thankfully he had only seen the bruise on my face and possibly a portion of the one on my thigh. "Can I go to my room?" My dad nodded his head and I stood up from the table. I noticed Niall's eyes were on me as I walked away. I stayed in my room for a few hours even though I had originally planned to help my mom clean up from dinner. I just didn't feel like facing her or hearing any of what she had to say.

I couldn't stand to be around my dad either because he knew what really happened and it was killing him. I could tell he hated that I went through that. I could see it in his eyes the way he looked at me. He looked at me like I was an injured puppy and I wanted to prove that I was alright or at least I was going to be alright. I didn't want to be looked at like some innocent victim. I got away and that's all that mattered to me. I just couldn't go out there and see my dad feeling sorry for me and continue to lie to him. Once I assumed everyone was getting ready for bed and Niall had gone home I went to take shower. I felt like I needed to somehow wash away everything and try to ignore the talk my mom decided to have with my in front of everyone including the boy I had known for a matter of hours.

After I started getting prune-y I got out of the shower. I grabbed the towel and got the excess water out of my hair before drying my body. I wiped the steam off the mirror and looked at my body. I already felt like I had gained a few more pounds. I just wished the bruise covering my torso would go away.Along with the ones on my thighs, face, wrists, and arms. I put on my underwear and a bra just before I heard the door open. I looked over to see Niall's shocked face. I grabbed my towel and quickly tried to cover the huge bruising along my torso as he tried to make out an apology.

"Oh my god. I-I'm so sorry. I didn't think anyone was in here." I had gotten the towel around my body as he was stammering. He went to shut the door and muttered out another apology. He shut the door and I grabbed my forehead and let out a deep breath. I had known the guy for a matter of hours and I wasn't making too great of an impression which was probably for the better considering the rule Jeremy and I had about friends. I hadn't really been trying to impress him but I couldn't deny there was something about him that made me feel excited and interested in knowing more about him. There was something about him that was so inviting but he had this almost mysterious vibe about him. I couldn't quite get a good read of him but I was sure his impression of me couldn't be great.

--Let me know what you think! I've had this saved to my computer since like 2014 so I thought instead of just deleting it someone might read it so let me know if that someone is you?--

[scribblyorro]

[i know where my heart lies] deleted bits from ch 7

As it says. Also because I love to talk about my own writing. 

SCENE 1

“Yuuri, this professor is like, a ghost or something! I need this grade. I need to pass. But how can I ask for help if they’re never in their office? Ciao Ciao will yell at me if I fail.” Phichit looks a little faint at the idea of Celestino scolding him and Yuuri wants to laugh because he knows this fear and awe won’t last. Celestino is stern but he’s a softie underneath it all.

“That’s true,” Yuuri says. He’s so thankful he’s done with homework and tests. All he has to deal with is potential crushing failure and going down in flames on an international platform. “Did you ask the other people in the class for help?”

“Eh,” Phichit says. He sets his phone down by his pullover and drags a mat over by Yuuri so he can stretch. “It’s one of those big lecture hall classes. I talk to someone new each day.”

“You don’t sit in the same place everyday?” Yuuri asks.

“No. Are we supposed to?” Phichit asks, blinking at him. He waits for Yuuri to finish his set.

“Uh, no, you can sit wherever, but most people pick a spot and stick to it,” Yuuri says.

“Oh. That makes sense. I’ve probably been pissing everyone off,” Phichit says with a laugh. “But nah, it’s probably they don’t understand me. People say ‘cool’ when I tell them I’m from Thailand and then I never hear from them again.” 

“I get that,” Yuuri says. “But your English is good. Mine was way worse when I first came here.”

“I practiced!” Phichit says proudly. “I watched a lot of YouTube videos. It drove everyone crazy at home because I would repeat them all the time and none of us knew what I was saying. I probably said some really terrible stuff but who knows!”

[I probably could have found a way to put some of these lines in the actual fic proper but once a chapter hits 10k I am Done With It. I really liked the first two paragraphs though.]

SCENE 2

“Yuri has offered to retrieve him.” There’s a pause. “He’s been insistent.”  

“That sounds like him,” Yuuri says with a small smile. 

“Mr. Feltsman, I think he’s more than just insistent,” Yuuri says.

Yakov curses.

“Put him on the phone.”

Yuuri wordlessly hands the phone to Yuri-kun, not needing to introduce Yakov because he starts yelling at Yuri-kun before he can even put the phone up to his ear.

“I’m doing you a favor, old man,” Yuri-kun shouts back in English so Yuuri can understand. “I’m dragging that idiot back to Russia.”

Yuri-kun hands up and hands the phone back to Yuuri.

“I’m hungry.”

“Hello to you too,” Yuuri says.

“Whatever. Where’s your food? You said this was an inn and I want to eat,” Yuri-kun says.

[This scene was originally from Yuuri’s point of view. And it was the first scene instead of Victor’s. I like the exchange Yurio and Yuuri have at the end but I switched it out to something more on topic.]

SCENE 3

Victor forgoes the bath and meal in order to sit down with Yuuri Katsuki, who is just as stunning in person as he is on the ice. But of course, Victor is biased; still, he thinks this Yuuri who is in running gear is a sight to behold. Victor probably should have messaged him on twitter or called ahead of time but he’s much better at winning someone over in person.

[It is actively difficult not to write Victor as being wildly in love with Yuuri Katsuki.]

SCENE 4

“Hi Yuuko,” Victor calls out the moment he sees her. She nods at him but she’s busy explaining to someone their options for figure skating classes. Victor waves at the little girl holding onto her father’s hand and Yuuri doesn’t hide a smile at how the girl stares at them both in undisguised recognition and excitement. He points at himself and then at her. “Autograph?”

“Yes!” she says, peeling away from her father so fast it takes him a few moments to realize it.

“You too, Yuuri,” Victor says, so cheerfully that Yuuri doesn’t even question it.

He accepts the pen Victor hands him and he’s got it to the paper before he freezes. He’s signed hundreds, thousands of these things and he’s never sure what to say. The words all seem rote and flat because how can he say something personal and inspiring to someone who he has never met? 

Yuuri glances at what Victor’s written. It’s just his name. That never seems like enough to Yuuri.

[Ahh, I probably should have kept this scene in, but honestly, I wanted to get to posting. Also it’s too early in the morning for Yuuko to be helping customers out because the rink isn’t open to the public yet. So there’s a Reason it got cut but I’m sure I could have worked around it if I really had my heart set on this scene making it to the final draft.]

SCENE 5

“Oh this?” Victor grins as he rolls the string off and proudly unfurls the paper tube. It’s one of the posters from the train station and he stands up to let it hang. Yuuri stares, mouth agape, and he can’t hide his horror but it doesn’t seem like Victor even notices. “It was too beautiful! I had to get one! I didn’t know who to ask but I found a station worker and I think they were confused by my accent but I just pointed a lot and said ‘Yuuri Katsuki best’ and I think they got that I was a fan and that I really needed one of the posters.”

“O-oh,” Yuuri says weakly because even after years of interacting with fans he’s never known how to deal with the more obsessive types. And Victor is terrifying, to the point where Yuuri is sure that it’s the universe’s way of punishing him for ignoring so many nice, calm fans. 

“You look beautiful in it, don’t worry!” Victor says, rolling it back up. He rubs his cheek against it and gives a dreamy sigh. “I’m so glad I got one. It’s going to be hard to get new posters of you now that you’re retired. I guess that’s good in a way since there’s only so much space on my walls but still! 

“Space? Walls?” Yuuri repeats, and he’s not reached peak terror yet. His stomach sinks as he starts to realize what’s in front of him. A super fan. His face is pale, he knows it, but Victor doesn’t seem to notice.

“It’s not like my whole apartment is a shrine. It’s just my room,” Victor says with a laugh. He pauses and places a finger to his mouth as he thinks. “Although that would be nice, to be able to put all my posters and photos up.”

Yuuri mouths the word ‘all’ but no sound comes out.

[I’m kind of sad I switched points of view on this scene because Yuuri’s terror at realizing what a fanboy Victor is over him was so much fun to write. But the chapter was a lot better, wrote smoother, flowed nicer once I switched character points of view to this order.]