#I feel like I’m witnessing the existence of someone spectacular and then said someone goes ‘yeah my/our life is pretty boring’

[noodle-shenaniganery]

There are people on Earth—and specifically, on Tumblr—living lives so intricate, complex, chaotic, and fascinating that, if written, their biography would probably become a best-seller.

But, like. So many of the folks I’ve seen that are like this seem so unaware?? Just. Casually saying things about themselves as if it’s not incredibly rare or interesting information.

How Do I Explain To You That You Are Cool.

[demaury]

defying gravity (5.5k)

“I’ve lied. To you.” 

He turns his head to Eliott, who suddenly seems far too interested by the tobacco packet he exhumes from his pocket to look at him straight in the eye. Lucas watches as he tucks a filter tip between his lips and goes on to fill the roll.

“If that’s the moment you admit you’re a psycho who followed me all the way from Paris, it couldn’t have come at a better time, I’m ready to die.”

OR. Lucas hates everything, but perhaps not everyone. 

You know, it’s almost funny, when you think about it.

Three days ago, he’d never have guessed that there’s a single thing in the world that could be worse than the idea of his dad’s remarriage. And yet here he is. Hiding from the crowd of family friends and family members behind a grey Audi, dressed as a fucking penguin, constantly trying to loosen the knot of the shitty tie everyone has insisted for him to wear — all the while riding a spectacular hangover on what’s probably the warmest spring day ever.

It shouldn’t be this hot already. Not in fucking April.

His hand shoots up to wipe away a drop of sweat rolling down the back of his neck, just above the collar of his dress-shirt.

It’s a nightmare.

Everything is just so noisy and so- so peopley. He adjusts his sunglasses on his nose, and reaches for the water bottle he managed to score from a disbelieved waiter at the bar to take a sip. Wherever his gaze lands, it’s like someone is looking back and is ready to make conversation — hence why he sought refuge behind a fucking car, far, far away from the tent, because that’s just how much he needs to avoid people at the moment. They’re all so cheerful, chatting eagerly around a glass of champagne, and between the town hall ceremony and the huge-ass country house his dad has ranted for the occasion, he’s lost count of how many ‘Lucas honey you’ve changed so much!’ have been shot his way. Nice of them all to collectively ignore that although he’s not exactly tall, he still got taller since the last time he saw any of these people.

A few kids are scattered around, playing football, and he recognizes one of the ten-year-old girls as his now-stepmother’s daughter. Which probably makes her his stepsister, now that he thinks about it. Fuck. Call him slow, but it’s never really sunk in up until now. They are all playing like there’s no tomorrow, running and screeching and yelling and screaming some more, and he grits his teeth in a wince as a hammer pounds against his frontal lobe with every single glass-shattering sound they manage to produce. It’s probably for the best he doesn’t have a car here, otherwise he would have hopped in and driven back to Paris before his dad would even think about searching for him — although to be fair it’d surely take a while before that happens.

His eyes dart to the side when he hears footsteps approaching, already ready to tell whoever it is to go fuck themselves, when his stomach clenches brutally and his eyes widen behind his sunglasses. He has to do a double-take because it is not fucking happening, right?

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he hears himself mutter.

Problem is, he’s not the only one to hear it. The gorgeous-looking dude walking in fucking slow-motion on the gravel path near-by hears it too, and soon there’s a pair of grey eyes landing on him. Lucas mentally thanks the sunglasses on his nose — how else would he be able to handle that look, now that he’s sober? The guy’s pace falters about a meter away from the Audi Lucas is sitting against, a small frown of confusion making his brow furrow.

Lucas sighs and pushes his sunglasses up on his head. It’s always nice to know that whatever you do, the universe still has some jokes in store for your miserable existence. Of all the what-the-fuck experiences he’s had in his life, this one is probably a solid top-three.

Grey-eyes-dude stares back at him, and his gaze narrow when realization downs on him. “Okay, just so you know, I didn’t follow you all the way here,” he guy says, sounding almost defensive.

What’s his name again? Lucas racks his brain in search of an answer, but he’s not sure they’ve exchanged names at all in the first place. That being said he’s not entirely sure they didn’t. Nice job, brain. In the meantime, he makes a point to look unimpressed. Like it’s his daily lot to have one-night-stands, stalkers, and goddamn models following him around, hours away from the city.

“Didn’t even think of it,” he shrugs, hoping to strike casual.

The guy looks vaguely embarrassed as he drapes his jacket over his arm. Funny how he wasn’t so careful last night about literally any of their clothes. Lucas grabs his water bottle, maybe just because he needs to do something, anything at all, but as he takes a sip the guy’s still standing there, looking like that, with his navy slacks and light-blue button-up, and believe it or not but it’s surprisingly hard to make eye-contact with a guy who had his dick inside you less than twelve hours ago.

Like, seriously. When it’s not an exclusive relationship situation, it’s the epitome of w-

Hold the fuck on.

A weird feeling creeps up his spine.

What is he doing here? Not in a fuck-he’s-creepy kind of way, but in a fuck-this-is-family-only kind of way. He doesn’t know half of the people who’re under the tent. Let alone those who weren’t there for the pre-ceremony chit-chat. Fuck, what if he’s one of his cousins? Did he just bang one of his fucking cousins? He tries counting but he doesn’t even remember how many of them he’s supposed to-

Shit he’s started to talk, Lucas freezes as Mr. Fuck-Don’t-Be-My-Cousin is already mid-sentence.

“What?”, he calls out dumbly, cutting him off.

“The bride,” the guy says again, and he gestures towards the tent like Lucas can possibly forget there’s a wedding going on. “She’s my sister’s godmother.”

Oh. Okay. That’s better.

Not a cousin. Good.

Go-od.

He presses his lips together with a nod. “Small world,” he mumbles. It’s not like he’s actively trying to be sarcastic, but that’s just the way it sounds like. Whatever. There’s an awkward silence stretching, until his slow brain catches up. “That’s my dad,” he simply offers with a vague gesture of the hand. “The groom. Or whatever that’s called when it’s not the first time around.” He folds his legs and brings his knees close to his chest, letting his eyes wander away.

“Why are you hiding here then?”, the guy asks and Lucas rolls his eyes to himself. He’s really tempted to tell him that them banging last night doesn’t qualify as an obligation to make small-talks on cue at formal gatherings. “Shouldn’t you be like, celebrating out there?”

“I’m celebrating,” he counters, and when his one-night-stand-turned-shrink cocks an eyebrow, he waves his water bottle. He’s sitting flat on his ass on a patch of grass, desperately trying to let the world forget he’s ever existed — which is working spectacularly, obviously —, it’s quite noticeable he’s living his best life at the moment. “Fine, I needed a bit of quiet. Hangover and all. Happy?”

Praying that his dad chokes on the wedding-cake by the end of the day is definitely an activity that can keep it busy for a couple of hours anyway. Not that it’s his business. Or anybody’s.

The guy clears his throat. “Right,” he says, and he offers a small shrug. “I’m going to, uh, greet everyone.”

It sounds almost as a question and Lucas turns his face away, putting his sunglasses back on his nose with a noncommittal noise. He pretends to find an interest in the kids’ messy football game, which for some reason seems to have turned into a kickball game in the meantime, to avoid following him with his eyes as he walks away.

*

He has to leave his hiding spot, eventually. Not that he’s dying to.

The afternoon has already long merged into early evening as he does so, and the sun setting has made it much more complicated to stay outside in a simple dress-shirt without his teeth starting to clatter. He gives a few tight smiles as he makes his way under the tent, where everybody is cruising around and reading the nametags to find out about the sitting arrangements.

His name is two tables away from the main table, which he should be grateful about, he guesses. The last thing he needs is to end up squeezed in-between his dad’s already half-drunk witness and his stepmother’s sister. He might be an adult, legally speaking, but there’s a limit to the amount of adult-bullshit he can go through in a single day and he’s already dangerously dangling off the edge as it is, there’s no need to push any more than that. He lets his eyes wander on the other nametags on each side of him. There’s one with his paternal cousins’ name and another one he doesn’t recognize — Eliott.

Maybe it’s from Marjorie’s side, he thinks offhandedly.

Who cares.

He’s about to slouch into his seat when a small huff makes his head swivel to the side. His hook-up from last night is staring at him, hands shoved in his pockets like he’s just walked straight of an Armani campaign. “I’m going to start thinking you’re the one following me,” he says, cocking an eyebrow, and when Lucas frowns, he takes a step closer and pointedly draws the chair next to his own like it’s really no bother.

Eliott. So he’s Eliott. Great. Nice. Awesome.

“You wish,” Lucas retorts, and as much as this guy is triggering his fight-or-flight instincts, he tries to shove them back down as he sits down as well.

Hear him out. He’s not big on random hook-ups. He doesn’t do well with the whole no-strings attached bullshit, so throwing himself at a goddamn stranger isn’t something he does. He banged a random guy once.

Fucking once.

Jesus that will teach him to think with his dick.

Maybe it’s all that sunshine outside that grilled his brain but he’s sure he can feel him stare at him — probably just to test his nerves, like the rest of the world seems inclined to do. When he throws a quick glance to the side, Eliott nonchalantly looks away, his hands resting calmly on his thighs, and Lucas rolls his eyes to himself. No one has to know they’ve ever met each other anyway — and even then, ‘meeting’ is a bit of a strong word. Not that it’s such a problem or that he’s ashamed or anything, there’s just literally nothing to say. Sure, the sex was great. But that’s literally it. At this point he’s not even sure he remembers what they had to drink.

What are you concerned about anyway?, a voice snickers. He can be perfectly chill about it too. No problem. Why would that be a problem? Because on a scale of 10 Eliott happens to be a solid 15? Hell, he should be bragging about it, if anything. But there aren’t many people to brag about it with in the first place, so. The silence stretches between them and Lucas begrudgingly takes in his surroundings. A brunette in a floral-patterned jumpsuit rounds their table, and from the corner of his eye he can see her nudging Eliott in the shoulder. “Hey, mom wants us to take a selfie with Marjorie.”

“When did she become obsessed with those?”, Eliott grumbles without budging, but another nudge gets him rising from his seat with a sigh.

There’s an unintentional eye-contact as Eliott is leaving the table, but Lucas’ eyes automatically dart onto the three glasses sitting in front of him. It’s like they’re making fun of his hangover. Ah ah ah you should have gotten drunk tonight.

Well, maybe he’s gonna do that.

Maybe he’ll just steal a bottle of whisky or whatever they were offering at the bar and down it by himself in the bedroom waiting for him inside the house. He grumpily digs out his phone and starts scrolling through his IG feed and his twitter timeline. It’s already near impossible to drown out the noises all around, but it gets particularly complicated when the few cousins mentioned on the nametags come to his table to settle in their designated seats.

“Shit, Lulu,” his cousin Charline exclaims as soon as she’s done adjusting her frizzy red hair, “we’ve been looking for you for hours.”

He gestures vaguely. “I was there. Talking. With people.” Hiding from you all.

Her brother Nicolas sits next to her, and two more girls slide into the remaining chairs. He’s not good with faces but he’s 100% sure they are from his stepmother’s side. There’s a bit of an awkward silence at first and a few attempts at small-talk, only disturbed by the ‘thank you’ Charline chirps happily when a waiter spinning around the tables like a professional octopus drops a freezing cold water bottle and two bottles of wine at the center of their table, next to the centerpiece.

“Who’s Eliott?” Charline wonders, frowning, as she leans closer to peer at the nametag next to him, and Lucas reclines against his backrest with a mental huff when her hair hits him in the face.

One of the two girls in front of him grins. “Oh, we got Eliott? I thought we had Gaby. He’s her brother.”

“Marjo is her godmother, right?” The girl nods and Charline turns to him excitedly, hopping from one topic to another like she’s paid to do that. “Hey, we didn’t get to talk yet. How are things going for you?”

Awesome. I drunk like a moron last night and I almost missed my train because I couldn’t walk straight this morning. Oh, and the guy I slept with on an impulse is five minutes away from sitting his ass next to me for the next six hours to come. So exciting indeed. He doesn’t even know why it’s a big deal. Probably because he’s a man of principles. Yes. And the principle of one-night-stands is precisely not to stick around long enough to give the other person the time to regret their choices.

He gives her an unimpressed look and a no-less impressed shoulder raise. “It’s fine.”

He reaches for the water bottle to fill the biggest wine-glass at his disposal, when Eliott swiftly slides in the seat next to him. There’s a round of ‘oh hey’ ‘hi’ ‘I’m Eliott’ ‘it’s written on the nametag’ ‘oh yeah’ that Lucas is trying his best not to partake in, which isn’t made any easier by Charline’s throaty laugh that surprisingly enough (note the irony) gets really fast onto his nerves.

“I’m working in an art gallery,” Eliott says at one point.

There’s a whistle. “Shit, that sounds serious,” Nicolas observes.

Did he mention that Nico’s sense of responsibilities is non-existent? Last he heard of him, a few years ago, he was trying to pick a college with a good party scene. If he had been born American, he’d be your typical fuckboy lurking around the frathouse at 25 — Lucas himself is not exceptionally ambition-driven himself, but there’s a limit.

“It’s mostly sending emails,” Eliott huffs a laugh. “And running around before the automatic alarm sets off at night to get everything in order.”

Charline goes onto flaunting her degree in sociology, like she didn't move to Quebec because it’s easier over there, and Lucas is this close to roll his eyes — but instead he bites it down, because he’s survived this long without causing a diplomatic incident to let it all go to waste. The conversation picks up without him. He keeps himself busy with his phone and his plate, while everyone else chit-chats obnoxiously. They talk about family memories and Christmas mornings, about vacations at the beach, about missing swim-trunks stories and kindergarten tantrums, and with every single one of them he feels his grip tightening around his fork. A day to celebrate, my ass, he thinks bitterly, stabbing a piece of his food.

“Wine?”

His eyes meet Eliott’s, who waves the bottle of red wine.  

He shakes his head. “Thanks, I’m gonna stick to water,” he mutters, and suddenly it’s like everybody remembers he exists, for better or for worse. Eliott is busy filling the glass of one of the girls but he shoots him a glare anyway. It’s his fault. It has to be.

“You’re still a student, right?” Charline asks between two bites of the first course.

“I graduated last year,” he replies stiffly, travelling a piece of his fish terrine in his plate, and since she’s still not looking somewhere else he elaborates: “I’m on a six-month internship in a private cabinet.”

“Oh, yeah! Accounting, right?”

“Architecture.”

There are plenty of reasons why she wouldn’t remember his major, objectively he knows that, but it goes with the fact that she barely remembers his age and that he’s practically sure the last time they texted was for Christmas two years ago — it only fuels his desire to flee. His attention drifts away to the main table, where his dad and his new wife stand up from their respective seats to start greeting each table. They’re lucky enough (joke) to be from the main family, so it’s a given one of them will drop by their table in a little while, and he’d rather die than have his dad looking all pleased and cheerful asking him why he’s not having fun.

“I need some fresh air,” he mutters to no one in particular, as he grabs his jacket and his phone before leaving the table.

Not like anyone will care.

Not like he gives a fuck if they do.

*

Since he’s not a fan of losing himself in the woods near-by and that hiding in the improvised parking-lot has gotten a lot creepier now that it’s dark as a pit, he’s opted for the bedroom that has been assigned to him for the weekend. At first, when his dad and his stepmother started talking about the sleeping arrangements, they had talked about him sharing with at least one if not two cousins, but he had been petty enough to say that if he had to share, he might as well not come at all.

He didn’t mean it. Like, sharing was really no big deal. He was just trying to push until his dad eventually burst and so he got a reason to dodge this whole bullshit altogether. But his dad had not burst. He had not done much, aside from sighing, shrugging, and saying that he’d get a bedroom to himself.

What a fucking joke.

He’s sitting on the balcony, trying to calm his nerves with a cigarette, when there’s a small knock on the door. He turns half-heartedly, only to stare at Eliott standing in the doorway, one shoulder nonchalantly resting against the doorframe like he’s always belonged here.

“How did you find me?”, he grumbles.

Eliott offers a small smirk in return. “Trust me I’ve majored in finding quiet spots to sulk.” He seems to hesitate, before he takes a few tentative steps in the room.

Lucas swallows down a huff. He’s half-tempted to tell him that he isn’t about to explode, but he simply turns away. “I’m not sulking. And you didn’t have to come, I’m fine.” Even if he flings himself off the railing, it’s only the first floor anyway. The worst that could happen would be for him to break his back. Or a leg. In short, more shit to deal with. It’d deter anyone.

Eliott footsteps grow closer, and soon he’s stepping on the balcony. “Do you want me to go?”

Not really. Maybe a little. He can’t really make his mind.

“Whatever,” he shrugs, vaguely gesturing with the hand holding the cigarette, and it makes the smoke draw intricate patterns in the air.

He’s not a heavy smoker. He’s just your typical stress-smoker who needs some nicotine in his system to avoid a major breakdown — he always ends up breaking down anyway, but whatever. Eliott seems to ponder for a hot minute, and Lucas is this close to burst and yell ‘in or out’ when he eventually brings himself to sit down next to him. They stay quiet for a moment, the silence only disturbed by the loud conversations coming from under the tent.

“I’ve lied. To you.”

He turns his head to Eliott, who suddenly seems far too interested by the tobacco packet he exhumes from his pocket to look at him straight in the eye. Lucas watches as he tucks a filter tip between his lips and goes on to fill the roll with tobacco.

“If that’s the moment you admit you’re a psycho who followed me all the way from Paris, it couldn’t have come at a better time, I’m ready to die.”

“Nah,” Eliott lets out, his lighter flickering as he lights up the cigarette a moment later. “I wasn’t at your table. I switched the nametags when no one was looking.”

He doesn’t really know why but it draws a small snort from him, as he tugs on his cigarette. It’s not that he hates having him around, he just didn’t expect him to exist outside of the bar from last night. It was the deal, right? He’s pretty sure it was. He remembers flashes of skin and ragged breathes, he remembers fisting his hand into Eliott’s hair and he remembers creeping out of his flat in the middle of the night. There’s a reason he didn’t leave his number behind — but at the same time it sort of balances out with the rest, and he can’t pinpoint why.

Except that now Eliott is sitting there, and he exists, and the leather jacket has left way to a suit jacket, and his hair is all combed. It’s weird, Lucas decides.

“I wish you had removed mine instead of yours,” he mumbles. At least it would have kept the cousins away.

Eliott huffs a laugh, glancing at him. “Way too obvious. You’re the son of the groom, I’m sure they paid extra attention to where you’d be sitting.”

Lucas slowly shakes his head with a snort. “You’ve got a high opinion of my dad.”

Like everybody else, he almost adds. No one is really able to fathom how much that charming and easy-going man can be borderline cold and uncaring when he sets his mind to be — and that’s even without mentioning that he’s never even bothered acknowledging he’s gay. It’s just like Lucas never came out.

A group loudly erupts in laughter under the tent, and Lucas’ eyebrow twitches in exasperation as he puffs out a cloud of smoke. “Can I ask something?”, Eliott asks, thoughtfully considering the cigarette between his fingers. “You don’t have to answer.” Lucas shrugs, letting some ash fall into the empty plastic cup he found on the way up here. “Why did you come at all if you don’t like them?”

It draws another snort from him. He makes it sound like it’s… yeah, like it’s easy. “Peer pressure,” he says neutrally. There’s an ocean between not wanting to attend this wedding and making it plain, and actually getting away with not going. He heaves a sigh and rubs the back of his neck. “It’s not that I don’t like them. They just… You know. They’re all nice and fun until you actually need them.”

He brings his cigarette to his lips and tries to focus on the gulp making its way in his chest to avoid thinking about his eyes and the way they’re starting to sting. He presses his lips tighter. “My mom. She’s schizophrenic. Half of the people you see here were once part of her family too and I can count on one hand how many of them actually offered to help whenever shit would go down.”

And that includes my dad. Between those who clearly didn’t want to deal with it and those who kept acting like she was a ticking bomb whenever she was in the same room as them, there weren’t many left to spend Christmas with or throw birthday parties. Shitty annual family gatherings stopped when he was 14 and no one really tried to push for them to be maintained. Every kind of relationship needs work on both parts to function, even family, and he’s not the only one to blame for shutting them out.

Eliott doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t know if it’s good or bad. He doesn’t really care anyway. It’s not like he’s expecting anything from him. He puts out his cigarette against the ground and drops it in the plastic cup.

“I know what it feels like,” Eliott muses, exhaling a puff of smoke. Lucas gives him a questioning look, and Eliott answers with a twist of his mouth. “The ticking-bomb thing. People dropping you.” He has a sigh, looking away as he brushes invisible specks of dust off his pants. “It sucks big time. Even when you think you’re over it, it still stings.”

It stings. “Yeah.” They fall silent again, and Lucas folds his legs against his chest to try and warm himself a bit, resting his chin on his knees. “You should probably head back anyway, my mood isn’t gonna improve in a matter of seconds.” It’s not because he’s dreaming to be literally anywhere else on the planet at the moment that he has to ruin the party for everyone, he guesses.

“Don’t worry, I’m not expecting anything else,” Eliott scoffs. Lucas shoots him a half-surprised, half-offended glance. “I mean, I offered you a drink last night and you straight up went ‘no names no talking’ on me.”

It should make him feel self-conscious. Embarrassed. But instead he finds himself huffing a laugh and the smile on Eliott’s lips broadens. “Is that a laugh I’m hearing?”

“Fuck off, you’re not that interesting.”

Eliott hums with an eyebrow raise and puts out his cigarette. He keeps the smoke trapped in his mouth for a second, then he tips his head back and releases it in a long puff swirling away in the darkness. It shouldn’t look so good and yet. It’s probably easier to look sexy while smoking when you look like an Armani ad printed on glossy paper.

“It kinda bummed me out that you didn’t leave a number,” Eliott says, quietly, and for a moment Lucas is too confused to put 2 and 2 together. He turns his head eventually, meeting Lucas’ eyes, and his only response at first is to twist his mouth a little.

“I’m not really an expert in one-night-hook-ups, but isn’t that the point?”

Eliott ponders the answer, and eventually gives a casual shrug. “Dunno. I’m not good with those either. I get attached, things get messy.” He punctuates it with a wrinkle of his nose before looking away, right in front of him.

Lucas’ voice sounds a little rough when he braces himself to ask. “Is that what’s happening?”

Why would someone like Eliott even get attached to someone like him anyway? That’s fucking surreal. It feels like he’s being trapped in a prank show. Will hot-dude-Eliott manage to make regular-Lucas believe it in the next two hours? Stay tuned to find out! Eliott glances at him sideways, and the way he ducks his head, it seems like he’s purposefully trying to make himself smaller. “Will you freak out if I say maybe?”

“A little, probably,” he admits. About your taste in men, definitely. Eliott doesn’t reply anything, and for some reason he finds himself leaning to the side a little, and gives him a slight nudge of the shoulder. “Relax I’m joking.”

“A laugh and a joke?” Eliott deadpans. “Turns out you’re quite the life of the party after all. Can’t wait to see you run downstairs on the dancefloor.”

As if. Lucas lets out a snort and shakes his head. “I’m not moving unless they play Emile & Images.”

As soon as the name dangles off his mouth, he knows he could very well be screwed. Knowing what crappy DJs like the one currently working in the backyard like to play, it’s a given that Jusqu'au bout de la nuit is on the track list. Eliott seems to have followed the exact same train of thoughts, because he starts laughing, his shoulders relaxing and a large smile brightening his features.

“That’s literally two tracks away, no take-backs,” he snickers, but when Lucas rolls his eyes and huffs a laugh, it comes out shaky. Eliott pauses, frowning. “Dude, you’re freezing. C’mon, let’s go inside,” he says, immediately rising on his feet.

Dude. Is he fucking serious? Lucas stares at him with wide eyes from his spot on the ground, not budging. “Did you really just ‘dude’ me?”, he scoffs, lifting himself off the floor. Seriously, if it’s his way of friend-zoning all of a sudden, hello whiplash.

“I was trying to be casual, thanks for ruining it,” Eliott retorts. He heads inside the bedroom without looking back and Lucas closes the bay-window behind him as he steps in. “Plus, I thought names were off the table anyway.”

Lucas waves dismissively as he sits down on the bed. “That was before you showed up here and we both had a nametag attached to our plate.”

Maybe he’s just not made for one-night-stands. Maybe that’s just the universe’s way of telling ‘you suck at those, get a grip’. Yeah. Probably. After a while Eliott joins him, settling at the foot of the bed. There’s a silence stretching a little, and he doesn’t know what to think of it now. They can hear the music coming from under the tent, distant and muffled but far too present for either of them to be able to forget about it.

He presses his lips together and glances at Eliott. “Lucas,” he says eventually, holding out a hand still tingling a little from the cold, “22 years of daddy issues crammed into a surprisingly muscular body.”

It gets him a chuckle, rough but sweet. “Eliott,” he says, squeezing his hand. “Your local, problematic dubstep fan with a gravity problem.”

“Dubstep,” Lucas repeats, raising an eyebrow.

“Dubstep,” Eliott nods, unabashed, almost defiant.

He hasn’t let go of his hand yet.

Lucas isn’t quite sure he wants him to.

*

He stirs awake with a small grunt when the mattress starts dipping. It’s weird. He doesn’t even remember falling asleep in the first place. A rustle of fabric accompanies Eliott’s movements while he sits up to sweep his phone unlocked, still clad in his button up and his dark slacks.

“Sorry,” Eliott whispers sheepishly as he glances at him. “Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Lucas pushes himself onto his back, drowsily reaching to rub a hand over his face. He’s slept with clothes on before, but never with a suit — and it sucks. The sleeves of his shirt are too tight, his pants feel like sandpaper and his belt is digging into his midsection.

“What time is it?”, he mumbles approximatively, but it turns out a bit more muffled and with fewer words than that.

The room is completely dark, aside from Eliott’s phone, and he no longer hears any music outside. Last time he remembers checking the time was… maybe around 2? 3? He didn’t do it often though. There was surprisingly enough of Eliott to keep him busy, conversation wise. That’s probably why they are laying down the way they are, in the middle of the bed.

“Almost 6. I have to go,” Eliott says, sitting on the edge. The look of confusion Lucas sends him apparently prompts him to add: “Marjorie rented a cottage for my parents, and my sister’s looking for me.”

Everything is a bit blurry, though, and what he gathers at first isn’t exactly a full sentence. But the moment Eliott’s starting to move, he reaches out, hand winding onto his hip a bit haphazardly. It’s too dark for him to be able to see anything, so he has no way of knowing what Eliott’s reaction might have possibly been when he mumbles: “Can you stay?”

Please. He doesn’t add it, for some reason, which is weird because his mom raised him well in the end, but Eliott doesn’t seem to mind that it’s lacking. “Yeah, okay,” he says after a moment. There’s another outpour of bright light that makes Lucas squeeze his eyes shut and bury his face into the comforter, when Eliott unlocks his phone to type a quick text.

That’s absolutely not something he should ask for. That he shouldn’t even be in a position to ask for.

But he wants to be selfish — just this time. The light goes out as quickly as it arrived, leaving him completely blind as Eliott lays back down, and it feels almost wrong not to be able to look at him when he just knows they’re so close. But again, his eyes are heavy and his mind a bit fuzzy. He’s almost drifting back asleep already by the time he feels gentle fingers grazing his cheekbone.

“Lucas,” he whispers, so softly that he almost thinks it’s not meant for him to hear at first. “I think I’m falling for you.”

“You and your gravity problems,” he mumbles with a small huff, but he leans into the touch anyway.

Maybe something good can still come out of this, is the last thing he thinks before sleep takes over.  

[antimatterpod]

Transcript - 72. What About Manperson?

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You can listen to the original episode here.

Anika: Welcome to Antimatter Pod, a Star Trek podcast where we discuss fashion, feminism, subtext and subspace, hosted by Anika and Liz. This week, we're taking a trip back to 1977 to discuss a write up of a panel on 'feminism in Treklit'.

Liz: And I pushed for this one because I promised us [an episode about] zines, and I had misremembered where the zine archive was. And then I stumbled across this essay, and it was so interesting and wild, and I figured we could probably get some discussion out of it.

Anika: Absolutely. I just want to start by saying that 'Treklit' is the cutest little word ever.

Liz: I know!

Anika: 'Treklit'. I love it so much.

Liz: And there's no, "Oh, no, we mustn't call it literature. It's just fan fiction" about it. Because there were no tie-in novels back then, there were just a handful of novelizations and so forth. So go for it, ladies!

Anika: Really bad ones, too.

Liz: Yeah, yeah.

Anika: I've read those. They're bad.

Liz: The panelists in this discussion were Sharon Ferraro, who was a zine publisher, fic writer and con organizer, and Jean Lorrah, a fic writer, novelist and editor, who would go on to write tie-in fiction, including The Vulcan Academy Murders and the TNG novel Survivors, which we discussed in our tie-in fiction episode. And this panel took place at SekwesterCon in 1976. It was tape-recorded by one fan and written up by the [convention] organizers for a zine.

Anika: Which is also adorable.

Liz: I know! And it sounds like just the whole room got into it. And it was so interesting! I can only imagine the drama if this panel was held today, because they sit down and start calling out authors and fics by name and title. And one of the authors stands up and argues back. And it's just wildly interesting, and a snapshot of fandom, and fic writing fandom, at the time.

Anika: Amazing. You put that note, you know, "Can you imagine if this panel was held today," and I was thinking about it, I was like, it sort of is, but it's in social media and in comments.

Liz: Yeah.

Anika: But like, even there, there's not really so much of a -- there's a lot of discourse, you know how we use that word now, "discourse", sort of to mean something completely different than what it actually means.

But if there's that there's still sort of this, etiquette to it, I would say. If someone leaves you a nasty comment on a fic and you didn't ask for it, everybody will come in and say, "That was inappropriate, you shouldn't have done that."

And even online, if you're going to say, "Oh, I've just read this horrible Star Trek fan fiction, it was so bad and so ridiculous," like you don't use the names and you don't link to it. You protect the anonymity of the person. And so it's sort of like, yeah, even even though we can still be just as vicious and just as critical, there is sort of this accepted way of doing things.

Liz: Yeah.

Anika: That this discussion sort of flies in the face of, which is interesting, it's like, huh, you know, they can you can go both ways on that. That has pros and cons.

Liz: Yeah, there was a discussion on Twitter a few weeks ago about racism in fandom and on AO3. One person cited a very specific Michael/Lorca slavery AU, and I knew exactly which fic she was talking about. And I have shared her opinion, and that fic is vile, and I hate it. And I hate that it's on AO3 and there's no way to block it when I search for Lorca fic.

But no one was linking to it. No one was saying this to the author's face. Apparently people have tried to go, "This is a very bad idea for a fic," and she's just like, "LOL, whatevs!"

We are critical. But there's also just too many people in fandom to get all of us in a room or on one mailing list to be part of this discussion.

Anika: It's so interesting that you mention mailing lists, because I was there for the mailing list, um, Trek stuff. And I do remember, you know, there was a lot of -- I guess it was like camps, you know, people who would be on one side or the other of a discussion. And that could get pretty intense sometimes. I don't have any -- it was sort of the end of it when I was involved, so I feel like I witnessed the move from email list to online, I don't know--

Liz: Blogs.

Anika: Yeah, like blogs and all, your own space, I guess.

Liz: Yes.

Anika: As opposed to -- we would like email each other our fan fictions, and they wouldn't go anywhere else, it would just be on this email list, and the copy of the email list that was in Yahoogroups, or whatever.

Liz: And if you were, for example, part of a Janeway/Chakotay group, you weren't necessarily with your friends or people you knew. Certainly for me, my first mailing group was JetC22, and I just signed up and was allocated to this particular group. And there were some people there that I liked very much, and there were some people there that I really, really disliked. And--

Anika: Right.

Liz: --from there that gave me a foundation to go to the people I did like, "Hey, let's start our own group with hookers and booze."

Anika: Right. It's amazing and crazy to think, "Oh, we could just all have a conversation in one room and discuss it all." And that was cool.

Liz: I'm sort of glad that we don't have to go back to those days, but at the same time, like, I like to think that these ladies would look at my fic and go, "Oh, yeah, she's totally feminist by the standards of 1976."

Because the essay starts off, "Feminism in much of Treklit can be regarded as non-existent, particularly in GRUP type stories." And GRUP was an adult content zine which took its name from the slang for grown ups in the TOS episode "Miri. And I'm like, I can't think of a worse thing to name your smut zine.

Anika: I know! That's so, so bad. I'm turned off immediately, but that's just me here in 2021.

Liz: Right. And it's interesting that they're complaining here that the smut fic was very much generic, which I think is still a complaint these days. Sometimes you read a fic and you're like, "I don't think that really taught me anything new about the characters, I have no insight into how this author feels about them, save that she's sort of mashing her action figures together." Which is not a bad thing, but it's not what I enjoy in fic

Anika: Right, it's definitely not what I enjoy in fic. I think that my interests are very well known at this point, and it's pretty much never sex.

Liz: No.

Anika: So. Oh, well!

Liz: It goes on to say, "Some stories are anti-feminist in that women are segregated out of them. Action is all concerned with the male characters. And the implication is that women are not liable to participate in such matters." I like to think that fandom has moved on.

Anika: Well...

Liz: Yeah.

Anika: Yes. Yes, fandom has moved on, but has society?

Liz: Well, no. I think what's notable here is that they're not specifically talking about slash fic, they're probably talking about, I guess what in the X-Files fandom was called case files or casefics, where it's basically, "I'm writing a Star Trek episode, but in prose format." And they're sort of reflecting The Original Series in that it is very dudely.

Anika: Yeah, absolutely.

Liz: You know, we say, "Oh, fandom is so subversive, fic is about reclaiming the narrative." But honestly, some people write fic because they like the narrative and they want more of it. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but if you're not applying a critical eye to your source then maybe you're reproducing its problems.

Anika: Hmm, it's interesting. I mean, I just said I, I have very specific likes and dislikes. And there's a lot of stuff like -- casefic, I don't really need, because I can watch the show for that. But curtain fic, which is, like --

Liz: The domestic...

Anika: -- the characters just, like washing the dishes or arguing about Netflix, like that. I eat it up. That's my favorite thing. There's no saving the world, there's just, "We saved the world, and now we're going home to relax and, and decompress--"

Liz: Yes.

Anika: "-- and do whatever we want to do." Like, those are the fics that I like.

Liz: And "what happens after you save the world?" is a good story.

Anika: It's not subversive, but it is something that's not in the fiction as it stands.

Liz: I think it is subversive in a small way, because you're adding the domesticity which has been excluded from the primary narrative, and in doing so, highlighting that it, too, has value.

Anika: It definitely has value.

Liz: I really like casefic that's character-driven, that's about the people. And I used to have that itch scratched by tie-in fiction, and it doesn't so much anymore -- Una McCormack, thank God, she exists. But, yeah, it's not really something we see so much now that tie-in fiction exists.

And also, I think there's a stronger impetus to file serial numbers off and turn a fic into an original work. And if you're going into all the effort of writing a plot anyway, just throw in that little bit more effort and make it original. I feel like there's less need for casefic.

Anika: Yeah, I agree. But I don't search it out, so maybe it's there, and I just don't read it.

Liz: Yeah, possibly. I have this idea for a Lorca/Cornwell casefic, where they're in their thirties, and they have to go undercover as a married couple on, like, a human settlement that's outside of the Federation. And the reason I haven't started writing it is that I'm like, well, it's not very shippy, so where's where's the hook?

Anika: "Right. So why am I doing it?"

Liz: Yeah!

Anika: I get that.

Liz: The essay goes on, "Other fics concern women, but in a very negative light," and they go on to discuss two fics in particular. One has the rather spectacular title of "Murder, Rape and Other Unsocial Acts". And it's -- I looked it up, it has a Fanlore page of its own. -- it's about a Klingon family, and there's a lot of comedy rape because it's the '70s. And ... yeah, it seems like something that would not really fly these days, and obviously, it was subject to criticism at the time.

And the other fic is titled "An Abortive Attempt", in which a human gynecologist is effectively extradited to Vulcan to face charges for performing an abortion on a Vulcan woman.

Anika: Amazing!

Liz: This is such a specifically 1970s concept. And I have to disagree that this is not a feminist story. This, to me, is a wildly feminist story. Just because something bad happens to a woman -- I'm guessing that this -- I couldn't find it online, but I'm assuming that this is not actually pro-life propaganda, and therefore it is a feminist story, defending choice. I guess? Probably?

Anika: I guess. It's amazing that -- just thinking about, you know, what do Vulcans think about abortion is like -- oh, my goodness! What a great thing.

Liz: Because we would go, "Well, obviously reproductive rights and controlling fertility down to the micro level is very logical." Pardon me, I'm losing my voice. We would think that extreme reproductive rights and micromanaging fertility is very logical.

But then you think, "Well, they've got these arranged marriages, and it's really hard to get a divorce, and Spock is actually quite sexist in The Original Series." He's sort of the logic over feelings guy, as opposed to feminist Jim Kirk, who's like, "But feelings, Spock! They have their place. Women! They're so beautiful!" So, for the '70s, it's a logical extrapolation of Vulcan culture

Anika: Of pro-life Vulcans?

Liz: I guess?

Anika: I mean, yeah, I get it, I get it, but it's also -- I can't imagine it would happen very often on Vulcan, just because they know their cycles so well -- that sounds so weird. And so, if something came up, I feel like there would be a logical reason for it to be needed. I don't know. I just I feel like you could use logic to come up with [a reason] why you should have an abortion easier than why you shouldn't.

Liz: No, I agree. Like, I kind of perceive the Star Trek universe as being a lot like Lois McMaster Bujold's future, where we just control fertility so well and we have extra-uterine gestation anyway, so unwanted pregnancies aren't really an issue for people very often?

Anika: We can only hope.

Liz: It's a nice idea. But it's just interesting to me that this fic is such a reflection of the time in which it's written. And in twenty years, will people be looking back -- on their podcast that's broadcast straight into people's brains -- and going, "Wow, there were a lot of fics about gay marriage back then. Gosh, that's such a product of its time."

Anika: Oh, my goodness. I mean, again, we can only hope.

Liz: Yeah.

Anika: I would love for our progressive future to actually be progressive.

Liz: Yes, yes! I would love to do a thesis on something or something about tracking social progress through issues in fan fiction and depictions in fan fiction. One day, when I have time to do a PhD, and can also go to Iowa to go through their zine archive.

Anika: Cool.

Liz: Then we get to the discussion of specifically anti-feminist stories. And here they discuss a fic called "How About a Raffle?" in which -- it's a Kirk/Uhura fic, and Kirk accidentally sells Uhura into slavery.

Anika: Yikes. I don't think that just happens. Like I was gonna say it happens, but no. No, that's not not true. It doesn't just happen.

Liz: They're dealing with some Orions, and Uhura enters a dance contest, but it turns out that the winner is, like, the top slave or something.

Anika: Oh my God.

Liz: It's still racist.

Anika: I like the attempt to world build for the Orions

Liz: Don't get carried away. Mary Louise Dodge, the author, quote, "Rose and astonished the floor by stating that they were anti-feminist, and anyway, the Orion dancers were only humanoid, not human or intelligent."

Anika: Big yikes!

Liz: Big yikes indeed!

Anika: That is straight up from, you know, stories about masters--

Liz: Straight up slavery?

Anika: Yeah. Like, you know, and, yeah, bad. Bad. Don't ever go there ever. [laughs] I don't want to be an anti...

Liz: Well, it's interesting! I looked up Mary Louise Dodge, and she was involved in fandom for a really long time. She was on the Welcommittee, she ran the mailroom, she organized cons. She wrote a lot of fic. And I feel like we would have crossed paths, had I been in fandom at the time, because she was very much a het writer. And she wrote a lot of Kirk/Uhura, which I probably would have shipped back then.

And she was very vocally anti-slash and anti-porn. I've actually put a note here, that I guess you could call her fandom's first anti. After one con, she wrote a famous letter to a bunch of zines, complaining that there was smut -- smutty zines and smutty art openly displayed on the floor and in the art show. And, you know, "why can't we get back to the good wholesome values of the 1960s?"

Anika: Yay for concern trolling having a deep history.

Liz: You know, I do think smut should be opt-in. And certainly, she is the person responsible for, like, age statements in zines and stuff. And there were a lot of things in fan culture at the time that wouldn't be acceptable today, like dressing up as Spock and Kirk's erect penises. Can you imagine going to, like, Comic Con in that costume?

Anika: And seeing that?

Liz: Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, like, she's not talking about consent, she's talking about -- she just hates smut and hates slash, and is quite deeply homophobic.

Anika: Right.

Liz: And doesn't apologize, which I enjoy, but I've sort of started thinking of her as the Phyllis Schlafly of fandom.

Anika: You're Wrong About, the podcast, just did a deep dive into Tipper Gore versus, you know, like heavy metal, basically,

Liz: It's sitting in my podcast feed, but the Reply All expose on Bon Appetit came up and took precedence.

Anika: I understand your priorities. But it really reminds me of all this stuff. Not just what we're talking about here with Mary Louise, but also with the whole anti culture now.

Liz: Yeah.

Anika: And even in academia, the idea that should you put a content warning or not on your syllabus? And there is a difference between opting in, like, having it having it be clear what something is, versus censorship.

Liz: Yes!

Anika: And it's like, we've been talking about this for fifty years, and we still haven't figured that out. And it's just really interesting.

And the issue is that if you look at what Mary Louise has problems with, versus what Tipper Gore has problems with, versus what the whole anti-Reylo crowd have problems with, it's like the bar shifts, but what it comes down to is, "I don't like this, and therefore, it shouldn't be a part of society."

Liz: Yeah, as opposed to, "I don't like this, therefore, I don't want to see it."

Anika: Right. Which is the whole argument for, you know, using tags.

Liz: Yeah.

Anika: And using databases and having the little sticker that says explicit lyrics. It's not hurting anyone. But if there was like -- they wanted the occult stickers, and it's like, guys, you can't just go around saying, you know, "This is the occult." There are certain things that are subjective, and you can't decide to have a label that has that level of subjectivity.

Liz: Yeah. Yeah.

Anika: That's a slippery slope towards, you know, "Oh, now we're gonna have Muslim stickers, or we're gonna have Jewish stickers." You know, it gets really bad really quickly.

Liz: And there are certainly parts of America where Catholicism would get an occult sticker.

Anika: Exactly. So it's just really -- there are levels. And this is a conversation that, like I said, we've been having for a long time, and I think we're going to continue having for a long time.

Liz: I think it's good that we keep having this conversation, because the context is always changing. And we need to keep examining it.

Anika: As much as we were talking about the Lorca and Michael slave fic, that I'm not going to read and I'm not going to encourage in any way. But I also am not going to say she can't write it or post it. I just want to opt out.

And the same with Mary Louise and her "Let's accidentally sell Uhura into slavery." Like, that's nothing I ever want to read, and I'm kind of upset hearing about it. But okay, you're, you're allowed to do that. I don't want to read it. And I want to know that it's gonna happen so that I don't have to read it.

Liz: And, you know, the problem with AO3 is that there is no way to block this author, or to stop this fic from appearing in every single tag that the author applies. And I think particularly blocking someone is an option that they really need. When you look at zines, it's much, much harder to avoid -- unless you only subscribe to zines whose editors won't publish Mary Louise Dodge. And I'm sure that there were some, she seems to have been incredibly polarizing. But what if you want, you know, Nice Hetfic Zine issue three, and it has five great stories and one Mary Louise Dodge?

Anika: Right, exactly. The reason that we keep talking about it is there's no easy answer. There's just compromises. And it's hard. It's a thorny question.

Liz: And for the record, I would have subscribed to Nice Hetfic Zine issue three. And then I would have written a snarky letter to its letter column complaining about Mary Louise Dodge and her terrible fic, because that was acceptable at the time.

Anika: Exactly. That's the other thing. It's so interesting.

Liz: Yeah!

Anika: It's so interesting. And then, you know, comments on AO3 are like I would say at least eighty percent positive.

Liz: Yeah. And I think that's because comments are for the author. Whereas this is a review culture rather than a feedback culture.

Anika: Oooh, that's good.

Liz: So the discussion is less -- it's more readers talking to readers, than readers talking to writers.

Anika: Yes. That's another thing that I kind of wish we still had, fanfic treated as -- like, I would love to read some reviews or a deep dive into one author's recurring themes, or something like that. I would be super into it. I understand that people wouldn't like it -- the authors. But I would love it. And honestly, I wouldn't mind if people did it for me.

Liz: I was just going to say, the themes of domesticity -- and you write a lot of baby fic, but it's not because [you're going], "Oh, babies are so cute. I love children!" I'm sure you do, babies are cute. But it's about, "What do we, as flawed parents, pass on to our children? And how do we make them better than -- how do we make their lives better than what we've had?" And this seems to recur in all of your fics that I've read in any fandom.

Anika: So strange that I'm obsessed with the relationship between parents and children and their parents! Mm, so strange. And trauma. I know the things that I focus on. I focus on adoption, I focus on identity. I focus on sibling relationships. Like, these are things that are -- I think I've said before that everything I write is actually about me. I don't have to put a Mary Sue in anything, a nd I don't have very many original characters. But I one hundred percent give Katrina Cornwell my own backstory.

Liz: Right. And I've seen that in your fic. She -- often in your fics, she has lost a parent at a young age, and is dealing with that even into adulthood. But it doesn't feel like, oh, yeah, that's just Anika putting her own thing on Kat. It feels like exploring.

Anika: Yeah. Yeah, at least that's my intention. But yeah, so I would love to be even a part of like, a book club, or something where we meet each other and talk about it. Like, I think that would be so fun. And I'm sort of sad that that culture doesn't exist anymore.

Liz: It's sort of like how bookmarks on AO3 are for readers rather than writers. And sometimes, like, there's a piece of feedback that was attached -- it wasn't feedback, it was just a note attached to a bookmark of one of my fics that said, "really good handling of disability." And I was like, "This is the greatest feedback I have ever not really received."

But the other thing is, quite a few years ago, in Doctor Who fandom, I created a sock puppet and started reviewing the fics that were nominated for an award. It started out as a very mean, bitchy sort of thing to do, because I thought that the fics being nominated were not award-worthy -- note my own fics were nominated. So I was not a neutral observer.

But I wound up finding like it was a really interesting way of reading outside of my usual field and going, "Okay, well, this is a Ten/Rose fic, and I don't ship that. And this fic is almost entirely made up of things that don't resonate with me at all, and now I understand why I don't read this fit this sort of in this genre. But this is actually a really good fic, and I think that if you were a Ten/Rose shipper, you would really like it."

And then, you know, one of my so called friends revealed my identity on an anon meme, and there was wank, and people still think I'm one of the worst people in Doctor Who fandom which, yeah, it was a whole thing. I don't recommend doing this. It was not great. But in terms of reviewing fics as pieces of literature, it was a really interesting experience. And I actually had people say, "Hey, will you review my fic?"

Anika: I don't use beta readers very often, because I have a very particular way of writing, and I like my style, and I don't want to change it. So I don't give it to people and say, "Does this make sense? Did I forget something? You know, is this good?" I just don't need someone to tell me that before it's published.

Liz: Yep.

Anika: But once it's published, I would love someone to read it and critique it. I don't know why.

Liz: You are flying without a wire!

Anika: I just don't want to change it while I'm writing it. But I would love to know what people think of it after the fact.

Liz: That's -- that's very interesting!

And I do use a beta reader -- hi, I know you're listening -- because I have this problem where I don't close quotation marks, and she's very good at finding stuff like that. And she also knows when to tell me that I'm disappearing up my own butt, and when I am doing something really cool that she's enjoying, and I appreciate that. I appreciate you a lot.

Back to the essay, Jean Lorrah replied that it was not the treatment of the Orion women that was irritating, but Kirk's condescending good old boy attitude, "the cute little girl is drunk," and that that attitude coming from the female characters was unfortunately common in Trek literature. "Do my thinking for me."

Anika: Yeah.

Liz: They sort of move on to original characters. And apparently there was a trend of pairing off McCoy with a sweet, innocent eighteen-year-old girls.

Anika: Again, I don't want to be an anti. But why? What is that about?

Liz: Yeah, it's not the sort of thing that I find appealing.

Anika: My note here is just "yikes". I mean, doesn't McCoy have an eighteen-year-old daughter?

Liz: Yes. And according to Mary Louise, there was a lot of fic where he slept with his daughter. And I know--

Anika: No, no.

Liz: But because I don't fully trust Mary Louise is a source, I'm like, is that one fic she saw and it was an outlier and probably written to shock, like the notorious Draco/Lucius skullfucking fic, or was it an actual trend? And I'm pretty sure I really--

Anika: I'm disturbed. But I'm also like, wow, what was going on? What was that about? I'm very curious. I mean, I guess because McCoy is the oldest, and is the most paternal, but he's also the most, like, I don't want to say feminine, but, like, feminine.

Liz: He's a very caring person.

Anika: And so it's interesting. It's very interesting, you know, and I could definitely imagine being an eighteen-year-old girl, and deciding that I wanted to date, McCoy. Or like, I could imagine, of all of the people in Star Trek, he would be the best relationship, I can sort of see it going that way, and ending up with this crazy fic. But if it was a trend ... I'm just so interested. It's so weird.

Liz: And the thing is, these weren't eighteen-year-old girls generally writing these fics, these were, like housewives?

Anika: Yeah, housewives.

Liz: Yeah, adult women.

Anika: It's like the whole "Twilight is read by teenage girls and their mothers" thing.

Liz: Yes.

Anika: This is what it sounds like. To me.

Liz: This is not to disparage either housewives or mothers who read Twilight, because I feel like housewives, stereotypically, and middle aged women are as dismissed as teenage girls. But it's just interesting.

Anika: And they don't make anybody any money.

Liz: There's a very nice remark here. "Some of the reasons for badly drawn female characters is simply bad writing, and male characters are just as unrealistic, but this can improve." And then they talk about a specific series again, it looks like a series, like, pairing Sarek with a lady named Lorna. So Sarek gets his own Mary Sue.

Anika: I have to go off on a tangent on this because Lorna is a very specific name. It's pretty old fashioned at this point, like now, but my last name, Dane, is taken from Lorna Dane, who was an X Men character created in 1968. She was introduced in 1968, but then she joined the team in the late '70s. So Lorna Dane is Polaris, and she is Magneto's daughter, at least seventy-five percent of the time.

Liz: Right. His kids seem to have fluctuating identities.

Anika: And she's my favorite X Men, X Men, X Woman, whatever. X. My favorite X. So when I was published in a book of comic book essays, I was published under the name Anika Dane Milik. And so when I got divorced, and I changed my name, I just went to Dane.

Liz: That makes sense. Yes.

Anika: But it's like, it's Lorna, it's Lorna Dane, that's who it is. And this idea that this character that was created in the mid to late '70s, as Sarek's wife after Amanda died, I'm like, so, Sarek is now a part of my identity. And I am really excited about that! And apparently, Lorna's last name is Mitchell, so it's like Gary Mitchell's daughter, Lorna. But she's from the past. Everything about it is amazing. Everything about this, I had to look it up, and I'm so excited by the whole idea.

Liz: This sounds fantastic.

Anika: I love it. I love it, and now I get to be, in some universes, married to Sarek.

Liz: I am deeply sorry for you.

Then they go on to remark that from Lorna in one fic to Lorna in another, "there has been a vast elevation of consciousness". And it's like, as I read that, like my clothes turned into flares and my hair centre-parted... just peak '77

Anika: Yeah, you started hearing … what's that song from Hair.

Liz: Oh, I was dreaming about Hair last night.

Anika: It was like in my head. But, you know, the morning song.

Liz: Yeah, yeah.

Anika: "In the... nah, nah, nah." That song. Anyway, you start hearing that song, I start hearing that song, just can't remember the lyrics.

And that sentence is also so supremely Lorna Dane. The reason that I love Lorna Dane so much is that she's completely different every single time you meet her. She has all of these like, weird relationships with her parents, both Magneto and then her adoptive parents. Her relationships are all crazy. And she never feels good enough, and she's an only child, and all she ever wants is siblings. And she's -- there's so much. And it's literally crazy. I mean, everything in the X Men is crazy. But she is, by far, one of the most -- like just the fact that every other story she's either Magneto's daughter or not is enough.

Liz: Honestly, I'm getting very powerful Wanda Maximoff vibes from this?

Anika: Oh, yeah, exactly.

Liz: I find it interesting that Magneto's daughters tend to be sort of very fluid, dynamic characters whose personalities and backstories are always changing.

Anika: And going back to something we were just discussing in this essay, there's this sort of idea that Magneto can be super powerful, and be able to destroy the planet at a whim, and he is very serious and sad, and we have a lot of respect for him even if we don't agree with him.

Whereas Wanda and Lorna have the same amount of power and can destroy things, and they are crazy. And they need to be, have to be--

Liz: They're unstable and they need to be stopped.

Anika: --locked up, and are a danger to themselves and others. And it's like, okay, so Magneto definitely tried to take over the world four times, but he's not a danger to himself or others? You created an entire prison for him that no one else would ever need, yet he's not considered crazy or unstable or dangerous the way that Wanda and Lorna are.

Liz: Yeah.

Anika: That's a thing.

Liz: The next note in this essay is that a common theme in feminist Treklit is responsibility, and stories about women being given responsibility and handling it properly, or needing to learn responsibility and doing so.

My note here was, "Are women people?" but it turns out that this is a story that the comics and superhero genre, at least, is still grappling with, and I think WandaVision is doing it in a really interesting way. And Wanda's allies are Monica and what's her face? Darcy.

Anika: Darcy

Liz: Yeah. And Jimmy Wu, and to a lesser extent right now, Vision. But these, with one exception, are not white people -- sorry, not white men. And--

Anika: And Vision is played by a white man but I don't -- like he's one of those on the line kind of people.

Liz: Yeah, I'm just -- Paul Bettany...

Anika: He is a white man but he's also not, in the context of the story.

Liz: My feelings about Paul Bettany are very complicated for Johnny Depp reasons. So I'm lukewarm on wanting to see him, ever. But his performance is great, and all. And I just think it's depressing that this [storyline] is still something that media struggles with.

Anika: And it one hundred percent is. It's something that -- I mean, look at Rey.

Liz: Yes. So--

Anika: That's gonna be my answer to everything. Yeah, women are not people is generally the key. Women are vessels that we can put ideas onto, I guess, is the way it goes.

Liz: Yeah. And then the other issue they discuss is issues that are of specific concern to women, or of special concern to women, rather, and they talk about a fic where, quote, "a rape case threatens to obscure the issue of a female officer's rights by triggering an overprotective reaction".

Which, again, going by TOS alone, seems like a pretty valid basis for a fic -- look at look at all those episodes where Janice Rand is attacked, and the only people she has to go to about it are Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Even if it was Kirk's evil double that attacked her.

Anika: It's just bad.

Liz: It's -- yeah.

Anika: Again, I'm really interested in this idea that they wrote -- they were writing stories about rape, and not -- I mean, I haven't read the story, but it doesn't seem like it was sensationalizing rape. It seems like it was, "Hey, this is a thing that happened in canon that didn't get the treatment that I want. And so let's talk about that."

Liz: Yes. "And let's talk about how, not not the rape itself, but the reaction afterwards impedes justice, and recovery." That's super interesting, and still contemporary!

Anika: And still contemporary.

Liz:   And then they talk about Mary Sue, and, you know, everyone on the Enterprise is extraordinary. But if you create a woman who is extraordinary, then she's a Mary Sue. And they debate, you know, do you write a male character and then make it female? Or do you try and create a three dimensional woman? 

And I still see these discussions now, and I'm like, whatever gets you to a good character is a valid technique.

Anika:   A couple of things really jumped out at me. One was "showed some problems Spock could have if he had been female, as well as first officer."

Liz:   Yeah!

Anika:   I'm very picky about gender swap fic. Because it can be done so poorly, so easily.

Liz:   Yes.

Anika:   But that's a really interesting question. If everything was the same, except Spock was a woman, what would that mean? I'm interested in that. And if it was done well, then it could be a really amazing story.

Liz:   Right?

Anika:   So I love that they're bringing these questions up. And then another one was, "when one writes a female officer onto the ship, and part of this usually lies with her occupation: what does she do? Why is she on the ship, and what is her function when she is sent down to the planet?" 

And I'm just like, uh, I'm pretty sure you'd have to ask those questions about any original character that you made up?

Liz:   Yeah. Men can have jobs too!

Anika:   And so what it comes down to is that -- it goes back to the earlier comment about how there weren't women in the show, and the women that were in the show didn't get to do what the men did, that Uhura got to take command once, ever.

Liz:   Yes.

Anika:   And it was too late, basically.

Liz:   And it was in the animated series. Which to an extent--

Anika:   Which, who even watched?

Liz:   Yeah, I don't want to say it doesn't count. But it's only just now being treated as a serious and valid part of the Star Trek universe. Aside from "Yesteryear".

Anika:   So really, it's really interesting that they were sort of asking these questions seriously, amongst themselves, you know, and treating it with any kind of gravity, 'cos (a) I think the answer is obvious.

Liz:   Yes.

Anika:   And (b), we shouldn't have to answer this. What it's just the whole thing of "let's create a male character and, and write it as a man and then switch it at the end." Like, yeah, sure. And if you're not going to do that, which is fine, because gender does have an impact -- or you know, can, I should say can have an impact -- it's okay for someone's gender to have a meaning to them. But you shouldn't have an emotional and intellectual quandary about why this woman is on this ship.

Liz:   If you wouldn't have that same quandary for a male character, why are you having it for this lady?

Anika:   Right! They belong on the ship. That's my answer.

Liz:   She's on the ship because that's her job. It's where Starfleet told her to be, the end.

Anika:   Finally, the one that really, you know, just made me smile. "One dead giveaway of a Mary Sue is when everyone on the ship loves her except Kirk." That is my favorite fun fact that I've never heard before.

Liz:   No, me neither. I've seen Mary Sues where Kirk loves her and Spock doesn't. And I've seen all sorts of Mary Sues, and they're all great.

Anika:   It was just amazing. I I loved that idea. The idea that people are reading a story, and all of a sudden Kirk doesn't like someone, and they're like, "Mary Sue!" And that's it, that character is tainted and you can't see that character as anything other than a Mary Sue. It's just crazy. But amazing. And I'm not saying that it's not true. I just think it's hilarious.

Liz:   I don't think it's a data point that became universal. Like you don't see this in Star Trek Mary Sue litmus tests. Remember litmus tests? Wow. Speaking of fandom history!

Anika:   They were like 80 questions long.

Liz:   I know!

Anika:   And you had to put it in, and then it would tell you if your original character was a Mary Sue or not. And I will tell you, I don't write a lot of original characters, like I said, I never put in any original characters. But I constantly put in my version of canon characters. And the thing is that more than fifty percent of my answers were canon. I wasn't making things up about these people.I was reading the canon, when I was answering the question as my interpretation of the character that I saw on screen.

Liz:   No, this makes perfect sense to me because -- I think it's Seanan McGuire who had an essay on LiveJournal, pointing out that "Mary Sue" is just another word for protagonist.

Anika:   Exactly. So usually I would get, "You are close to the line of crossing over into Mary Sue-dom and you should take away at least one flaw," or, you know, something like that. It's just like, okay!

Liz:   Whatevs!

Anika:   I will tell Gene Roddenberry?

Liz:   Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I need to summon the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to tell him that Sherlock Holmes is a Mary Sue.

Anika:   You know who's a real Mary Sue? Watson.

Liz:   Yes!

Anika:   One hundred percent a Mary Sue.

Liz:   I feel like Holmes is the idealized Mary Sue and Watson is the self insert Mary Sue.

Anika:   Mm, I can see that.

Liz:   "The panel then fled from Mary Sue stories."

Anika:   As did we all.

Liz:   And they talk about how it's difficult to create a good female character, because there aren't many templates to draw from in Star Trek. And--

Anika:   Like I said.

Liz:   Yeah. "There are plenty of strong masculine characters to work from, but very few women."

Anika:   And that's the thing. Again, here in 2021, every woman in Star Trek has been called a Mary Sue at least once.

Liz:   And honestly, most of [the women in TOS] are pretty interesting. Like, they're not necessarily strong people. But generally, they're more complex than we give credit for.

Anika:   Right. So it's --first of all, just stop talking about Mary Sues and let it go. That's that's my take number one. And take number two, just because a woman is a woman and a new character in an old fandom does not mean that they are a Mary Sue automatically.

Liz:   Yeah. 

Then they talk about -- it's sort of a digression, which obviously we're familiar with  here. "Most blonde women were dependent and ineffectual, well, brunettes were usually forceful, and control their own destinies." And they give the example of Majel Barrett, who goes from Number One to Chapel. 

I had never thought of this, and I think overall, as a pattern, it holds for The Original Series. But I also think that there were, you know, existing stereotypes about blondes versus brunettes.

Anika:   Yeah, I don't think that Star Trek--

Liz:   No.

Anika:   I don't think Star Trek created that idea.

Liz:   No, you know, [in] Marilyn Monroe movies, she always has a brunette offsider, who's a lot smarter and more together than she is.

Anika:   So strange, it's like, blondes are more beautiful and have more fun, and people are more interested in them. But the brunettes are the smart ones. And the ones with depth. That is just -- like, this is weird, okay?

Liz:   Unless you get the sort of Hitchcock blonde who is terribly intelligent, but also cold and damaged. And that's Seven of Nine.

Anika:   Yes.

Liz:   But it's also interesting that they cite Chapel, because the whole reason that I wanted to do an episode on zines is that I have a paper copy of issue 25 of T-negative, which has a wonderful essay about Christine Chapel, basically saying, everyone writes her off as a dumb blonde with no agency who's only in love with Kirk. [Obviously I meant Spock, don't @ me…] And actually she is a really, really interesting character. And then the author goes on to discuss Christine in both canon and in fiction. 

It was a wonderful essay, and I was going to cite it -- we talked about doing a Chapel episode, but Women at Warp had just done one. Justice for Christine Chapel, who's not even a character I really care about. But this essay made me want to.

Anika:   Right, that's my take on a lot -- you know, there's the characters that I really, really, really care about, and everybody who listens to this podcast could name them. And then there's all the other women characters who -- like, I will meet you in an alley and punch you--

Liz:   Right?

Anika:   --to protect them, I will one hundred percent go to battle for every woman on Star Trek.

Liz:   Yes. Even the ones I don't like

Anika:   Because all of the arguments against them are sexist. That's where I'm at.

Liz:   One day, I'm going to present the argument that Lwaxana Troi is narcissistic, and not necessarily fully abusive to Deanna, but she is not good to Deanna. And that's the only argument that I will accept against Lwaxana.

Anika:   And the difference is that that is a critique of Lwaxana as a person, which is totally fair.

Liz:   It's not just "she's middle aged and thinks she's sexy."

Anika:   Right, we shouldn't put women on a pedestal, either. But the critiques aren't critiques, they're just, "I don't like" -- again, it's, "I don't like this, and I'm going to write them off." I just watched Star Trek 2009.

Liz:   You did!

Anika:   And I am so ready to go to battle for Uhura. Like, it's upsetting to me. I've seen that movie many times now. You know, like a dozen, let's say, -- I don't know.

Liz:   I've seen it twice!

Anika:   And I can just hear all the negative comments as I'm watching the show. Like, I'm sitting here and I'm watching the movie, and I just hear all this chatter. You know, Uhura is telling Spock to put her on the Enterprise, and there's eight hundred voices in my head saying how she's a nagging girlfriend. And I just like, "No, no, she is not!" She is standing up for herself the way that any person should, and the fact -- their relationship is a wrinkle to it. It is not the reason for it. And if Kirk did exactly the same thing, people would be applauding him.

Liz:   Yes, yes.

Anika:   So I can't. As I was watching the movie, every single thing that Uhura did, I imagined Kirk doing it, and having all of the people like you know, saying "Oh, he was the best version of Kirk." I was just like, ugh! And I know I'm saying that as someone who thinks that Chris Pine is the best version of Kirk...

Liz:   You know, there are credible rumours that Strange New Worlds is going to feature a young Uhura. There's a casting call for a young African American woman to play a comms officer, whose name in the casting call is African, just as Uhura is based on the Swahili. 

And I see people going, "Oh, good, Strange New Worlds is going to fix Uhura, they're going to do her properly." And I'm like, no, they're just going to do her differently. Peck!Spock is not better than Quinto!Spock. They're just different interpretations of Nimoy!Spock.

Anika:   Mm hmm.

Liz:   Anyway.

Anika:   Yeah, so sorry, tangent, but I just get super defensive of these women characters because people are against them for really silly reasons.

Liz:   Moving on, we hit a marvelous piece of fake news. "Another problem with female characters is that feminism can become too much an issue."

Anika:   Oh, dear. I love this because literally like two paragraphs before that, they're saying that feminism is the reason like -- that the lack of female characters is the reason that it's hard to write female characters. It's like, guess what, guys, you're being feminist in that argument. And so now, these women are saying that there's too much feminism in my Star Trek, and I -- again, I'm pretty defensive.

Liz:   They cite this amazing sounding fic when Number One is now -- it says in this recap, she is now an alien ambassador. But according to the Fanlore page for the fic itself, she is the captain of the USS Hood. And any Friends of DeSoto can just take a moment to say, "Best boss I ever had." 

She sits down with a Romulan commander and they both, quote, "bitch interminably about being trodden on by the men in their lives, losing the plot amongst the complaints." 

And like, maybe the fic is sort of hijacked by this, and the story it promised to tell is not the story that eventually came out. I just really, really want to read this fic.

Anika:   I really want to read it too. And that's what I'm saying, that is the kind of stuff that I love to read and write in fic, which has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, but is all about their feelings and their lives and their interpretation of what's going on.

Liz:   And I just love the idea of Number One and a Romulan, comparing notes. I'm just saying, the Romulans had women in command before the Federation.

Anika:   Yeah. I ship it.

Liz:   And they note that the theme of women cooperating with women is a good one, and just beginning to develop. And, you know, I still get a weird warm, self-righteous glow whenever I write that in my fic, so I'm glad it's still a thing. I wish it was more of a thing. And then they move on--

Anika:   This is the best.

Liz:   --to the most important question. What about the men?

Anika:   Okay, so again, I have to tell a story about today. My most popular fanvid on YouTube is a vid about the animated women in Star Wars. So it's all animation, Rebels and Clone Wars. And that's -- actually, I made it before Resistance. So that's it, Rebels and Clone Wars. And this one is what I'm one of, if not my best -- and it's my most popular, right? And it's ages old now. Like I said, pre the last season of Rebels. 

And I still get comments all the time, because, again, it's the one that shows up in the algorithm or whatever. And today I got this amazing comment that was just one question. Four words. "What about man person?"

Liz:   Man person!

Anika:   Man person! And I just started laughing and laughing. I was like, Okay, I'm designing a T-shirt that just says, "What about man person?" and I'm buying one for all of my friends, because that is an amazing comment.

Liz:   I think that we need to release stickers on RedBubble that say, "What about man person?"

Anika:   "What about man person?" Like, that -- it was just so good. That's how I ended up with "social justice Klingon warrior" in my Twitter bio, because somebody accused me of being a social justice warrior for Klingons, and I was like, yup, yes I am. 

Liz:   Well, we've found this episode's title.

[I realise that Anika specifies that it's four words, and then I used three in the title, but, ummmmm, anyway, changing these things post-release is a pain.]

Anika:   What about man person?

Liz:   What about man person?

Anika:   Like, okay, dude, this video is literally a celebration of women. That's, that's the title. That's what it says, Star Wars: Women. I made one for Star Trek, too: Star Trek: Women.

Liz:   But, Anika, what about man person?

Anika:   Go watch Star Trek! Go watch, literally the entire original trilogy and most of the rest. And you can find all the man person you want.

Liz:   So the discussion here, what about man person? Why aren't men writing Trek fic? "There are many males in Trek, why aren't they writing? One suggestion was that men can't take criticism very well. And women are used to it."

Anika:   I mean, every answer that they come up with is actually kind of great.

Liz:   It is! But I'm like, people call us misandrists, and look at this! 

"Criticism is a good tool. The Star Trek world would seem to appeal to males. One expects Marty Sues but gets Mary Sues. But many male Trekfen don't want to write about it, instead want to be in it." 

And I think this is really interesting, because if you look at the fanworks which are dominated by men at the writing and production level, it's fan films. And there's the perennial post on the Star Trek subreddit, "Hey, I just wrote a Star Trek novel, how do I get it published?" And they never want my AO3 invite.

Anika:   Yeah! I mean, I think that this is actually a really amazing insight that is absolutely true. Like, in, in all fandom--

Liz:   Yeah. And I think--

Anika:   --men--

Liz:   Go on.

Anika:   Do that. Like women -- I think we've discussed before how there's the transformative versus, like, critical or or--

Liz:   Collecting?

Anika:   Collector, yeah. Yeah. And, again, we just said there aren't enough women doing stuff in Star Trek in 1977. And so they were, they were saying, "Hey, I'm going to create a woman character who does something." And whereas the men are like, "I'm going to, you know, make a movie where I play Captain Kirk."

Liz:   Yeah.

Anika:   And somehow, they don't see that as fanfic?

[Note from Liz: it's not that there's anything wrong with that approach! I just find it weird how things like Star Trek Continues are treated as semi-canonical, whereas fic mostly … is not.]

[Oh no, do we need to start doing eps on fic the way other podcasts do eps on fan films?]

Liz:   No, no. A few years ago, pre pandemic, I saw the play Puffs, which is essentially a Gary Stu fic in the form of a play. And it's a professional piece of theatre! You can see it on Broadway Online or something, and I highly recommend it. It was a good evening. I have very mixed feelings about Harry Potter these days, but it was a lot of fun. 

But it struck me that "the ordinary kid gets his Hogwarts letter and goes to Hogwarts and is on the periphery of the events of Harry's school years" is a fic that I have seen many, many times. And the difference is--

Anika:   So many times.

Liz:   The difference is like those fics were mostly written by women. And this guy was like, "Oh, yeah, that's a valid idea. I'm going to write a play, and I am going to make it enough of a parody that it is a professional endeavor." And it's just interesting that men are more--

Anika:   Willing to do that.

Liz:   Yeah! And I think it's -- I love fan fiction, and I love that we have this community of amateur writers who love something, but do we, as the women and marginalized people of fandom, need to be more open to also being professionals? Or does something get lost in that?

Anika:   Yeah. It's a really good question because I am very much of the opinion that if all you want to do is write fan fiction, more power to you.

Liz:   Absolutely.

Anika:   That is absolutely valid. That is you're still a writer. You can call yourself a writer. You are a creative. You are coming up with something that someone else didn't do. Your fic is original, even if it's fanfic.

Liz:   Right, and even if it's using tropes and ideas that have been used before, unless you are literally copying and pasting from someone else's story, it is still unique.

Anika:   Right.

Liz:   They speculate that boys aren't interested in writing. "It's cute in girls and effeminate in boys in the high school years, and boys should go out and do it, not daydream." And I think there might be some level of truth in that. Or certainly, there may have been then. And, you know, toxic masculinity and all of that.

Anika:   So here's what I wrote after I copied that over into my notes, that sentence, "writing is looked upon as cute in girls, effeminate in boys". And the sentence that I wrote is, "Hey, is it possible that this nonsense is why we have so few women writing trek novels right now?"

Liz:   Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anika:   Just an idea. Just a thought.

Liz:   They do go on to note, "most SF writers and men, but that that isn't Trek."

Anika:   And also, that's not true.

Liz:   Yeah. Even back then that was not true.

Anika:   Sorry. That definitely wasn't true in the '70s. There were many women writing science fiction in the '70s.

Liz:   This was the age of McCaffrey and Butler and Le Guin. And more. Those are just the ones we remember!

Anika:   Literally everything I read in the '80s was written in the '70s. So that's just wrong. 

Liz:   Joanna Russ was writing Kirk/Spock fic and also science fiction novels.

Anika:   Exactly. It's society. It's not us. It's not me and you who's keeping Una McCormack as the only woman allowed to write Star Trek right now.

Liz:   Right, right.

Anika:   Like, it's the people in charge. And the people in charge have decided that science fiction should only be written by men, and they are going to like, make that happen.

Liz:   Right? And so it's interesting that men seem to self exclude from fan fiction. I think that's less true now than it was then. But it's certainly interesting because they go on, there's a bit down here, "at least a third of Trekfen are male." [laughs] I died! 

But they speculate that "perhaps the dearth of men in zines is self perpetuating, since male writers are reluctant to submit their precious manuscripts to female criticism."

Anika:   That is true. Like, I will say, I know some male writers who have not submitted their manuscripts because they don't want to hear it. And I said a while ago that I don't have a beta reader for the same reason, so I'm not saying that they shouldn't be like that. But it is a thing.

Liz:   No, no. What struck me was that with the internet, like the gatekeepers in the editorial process disappeared for fan fiction and we see some more men now than we had then. But still not that many. And it's like it's a mystery to me.

Anika:   I don't know any.

Liz:   Writing fan fiction is great. Why would you not?

Anika:   There aren't any men in our Kat Cornwell discord. There are a couple of non binary people, but no men?

Liz:   Certainly no cis men. Is it just not a community that's appealing to cis men?

Anika:   And why? Is it because they're not paid for it and you have to like, you know, "I hunt and gather and bring everything in"? Again the patriarchy is bad for everybody. Capitalism is bad for everybody.

Liz:   There's a very strange and amusing digression here: "Cogswell and Spano ((MAY SLIME DEVILS INFEST THEIR TYPEWRITER)) were mentioned as trotting around at cons, getting opinions for Spock Mess--but again, those are pros ((SUCH AS THEY ARE))." 

And I assume that Cogswell and Spano are nicknames. I don't know what Spock Mess is. I didn't really get any useful Google results. It might be a zine. 

I was wondering if maybe they were nicknames for Harlan Ellison or Isaac Asimov or David Gerrold, who were all part of the fan community and were certainly known as people who trotted around at cons. Gerrold was deeply hated by a lot of women in fandom because he's a complete donkey, and was not able to say "I don't care for slash" without also saying, "slash is written by fat ugly housewives who need to get laid."

Anika:   Ugh. Yeah, so--

Liz:   Thanks for the tribbles, mate, you can just move along.

Anika:   Again, fine, you don't have to read the slash. But that's just "I don't like this thing...."

Liz:   If anyone out there knows who this aside refers to please, tell us because I require much gossip.

Anika:   Also, I kind of want to have an opinion on Spock Mess.

Liz:   Yeah, I would very much like to know what it is so that I can have an opinion on it.

Anika:   I'd really like to have an opinion about it. So let me know what that means.

Liz:   "It's a waste if we can get mediocre rotten and fairly good ideas from female authors, why not from male?"

Anika:   Okay, look, I don't actually need men to have a bigger footprint in fandom, because they have reality.

Liz:   It's true. It's true. But fandom was so female dominated back then, "at least a third of Trekren are male," that I understand why, in these formative years, it would have been nicer to have 50/50. 

And then it goes, "Masculine domination of straight SF was brought up again, with the observation that SF is written by and large for adolescent males." 

No, that is not true! That was not true in the 70s! 

"And that the field has been changing to human relationship or alien relationship stories, largely on account of the female writers." Who did exist! 

And I love that they discuss original SF alongside fic. "Treklit."

Anika:   Yeah, that they're basically talking about them the same way. Like, these are both forms of science fiction writing.

Liz:   Right. And like I said, Joanna Russ was writing Kirk/Spock fic. And these days, Naomi Novik is the founder of AO3, and also writing acclaimed novels, which I personally do not care for, but I don't read them and don't complain that they exist.

Anika:   Because there's a lot of stuff that I don't read and don't complain that it exists. I'll just put that out there.

Liz:   Because I'm sort of in the con organizing scene, I pay a lot of attention to like Hugos, and I nominate and I try to read as many of the nominated works as I can. And sometimes I'm like, No, no, this is a bad year for works specifically designed to appeal to me.

Anika:   I probably read more fan fiction than published science fiction. I'll be honest.

Liz:   A lot of people do.

Anika:   Partly because it's free. Partly because it's about characters I already love.

Liz:   Yeah. And it is so hard to care -- like it takes real skill to create original characters that other people care about. It's hard!

Anika:   That is true.

Liz:   It's a real skill!

Anika:   That is very true. And even when you do -- like, let's take Daenerys Targaryen--

Liz:   Alas.

Anika:   George R R Martin created her, right? Whatever. Him

Liz:   Yes. He made you care about her.

Anika:   I guarantee that I care more about Daenerys Targaryen than he does. And I also guarantee I care more about Daenerys Targaryen than DB or the other D.

Liz:   I don't know about GRRM, but I absolutely agree with you on that. You win that easily.

Anika:   So that's why I'm gonna go read fan fiction about Daenerys Targaryen instead of caring about when Winds of Winter ever comes out.

Liz:   But also, you know, you're entering into a contract with a fic writer where they're saying, "Look, I love this character, and I care about them too." And you're like, "Cool, I'm gonna sit with you and we're going to care together."

Anika:   Right, we're gonna care together, I'm -- we're going to fix -- like, you know, fix it fic is like a really popular tag for every fandom because every fandom needs to be fixed for someone.

Liz:   I was very against the idea of fix it fic as a concept because I'm like, Sure you can change and you can alter what the show does, but ultimately, you know, what I love is canon. And then they blew someone up and I am very pro fix it fic. I am a Cornwell denialist.

Anika:   It's interesting. This is where my love of alternate universes comes in, where I can -- like a fix it fic is just an alternate universe, it doesn't mean that the canon didn't happen. It's like, here's a different way it could have gone. 

And I love that, because characters who are thrown into many different plots and many different situations and circumstances and the way things went, seeing the similarities, the throughlines, and their strengths and their skills and their innermost being, like, how it comes out? That's what's interesting to me, that's the identity stuff that I'm always talking about. That's like, this is what matters to this character.

Liz:   And there's a really interesting writing trick where, if you're not sure you understand your original character, you should go and write an AU of them. So if you're trying to write a fantasy, go scribble out a coffee shop AU and see, see what is actually essential to that character.

Anika:   Exactly, yes.

Liz:   And now I'm wondering, is the reason for the whole Mary Sue discourse, and this whole discussion about original characters in fan fiction, because a lot of these writers were novices and didn't have the skills to make people care about their original characters?

Anika:   Absolutely! I still have some of my fanfic that I wrote when I was 13. And it is bad. Even -- there are two Voyager fics that I wrote way back when that I put on my AO3, because they're the two that I think are acceptable, and they are still bad.

Liz:   Oh, yeah.

Anika:   They are … like, I put them up because I'm proud of them. But I'm proud of them twenty years ago. You know, it's like, thank God, I have improved since this time.

Liz:   The first fic I actually finished was a Savage Garden songfic where Q watches Janeway and Chakotay dance. It is not good at all. But in my defense, I was 14 years old.

Anika:   Exactly. And I think that that's, that matters. One thing that I really love about fanfic, and that I love about having a profile on Archive of Our Own, is that I can go back to this stuff that is fifteen years old, and I can say like, Oh, this is like, I'm telling this, this story again, in this new fic. But look at how much I've improved, look at how I've been able to, like, tease those ideas into something so much like -- into so much more of a blossom.

Liz:   And with these women who are writing fic in the '70s -- you know, the general profile of a Trekkie back then was a middle-aged, college educated woman who had married straight after college, had children. Maybe she had a part-time job as a receptionist, or a secretary or something like that. But this was her first creative outlet in decades. And her first writing work in decades. And it is the work of intelligent, educated but untrained writers who are practicing. And - - -

Anika:   Exactly, practicing. 

I love that fanfic doesn't have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You don't have to waste time on telling them about the character, you can just tell them about what the character is feeling right now, because I already know who Spock is. 

So you don't have to tell me who Spock is. You just have to tell me what Spock is doing right now, and how it makes him feel, and how it's different from what he feels in the episode I just watched. 

It allows you to hone your skills with a very low like bar. You don't have to prove anything. The worst thing that happens is someone doesn't like your fic.

Liz:   And we talked at the beginning, and I guess this brings us full circle, but we talked at the beginning about how the criticisms in this panel were not the sorts of things that would fly today, and people could be really upfront about not liking stuff. 

But I read some of the letters of comment for big fics around this time, and there was one, and it's a very well known writer, and I cannot remember who she was - possibly even Paula -- no, not Paula Smith. 

Anyway, the letter of comment was basically, "You need to slow down," or, no, "she needs to slow down," it was a letter to the zine, not to the writer. 

"She needs to slow down and consider her pacing and really take time to settle into a scene and let things unfold. Because she is not a bad writer now, but she is going to be really, really good when she's comfortable enough to take her time." 

And that's really, really fantastic feedback. And put really kindly And so yeah, fandom hasn't changed that much.

Anika:   You know, you can go to college for literature, or whatever, and mostly you get beaten down. And you get told, you know, this is what you're doing wrong, and this is the way you need to do better. 

And fanfic is the opposite, where it's like, they're not going to tell you how to fix things necessarily. They're gonna encourage you, and even when they say something negative, it's in an encouraging way. And I think that the balance of both is the perfect, you know, that the best way to make a writer is to have both.

Liz:   Absolutely. 

Are we done? Should I outro?

Anika:   I think so.

Liz:   Okay. It's really hot here. I need another shower.

Anika:   I'm sorry.

Liz:   I'm sorry for Texas!

Anika:   It is. Yeah, it is cold and snowing here.

Liz:   If I could send you my excess heat...

Anika:   And I'm not Texas. Thank God.  

Liz:   Thank you for listening to Antimatter Pod. You can find our show notes at  antimatterpod.tumblr.com, including links to our social media and credits for our theme music. 

You can follow us on Twitter at @Antimatter Pod, and on Facebook, because as far as Facebook is concerned, we are not a news source. That's a bit of Australian humour for you. 

If you like us, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you consume your podcasts. 

The more reviews the easier it is for new listeners to find us and join us in two weeks, when we'll be discussing bisexuality and Star Trek.

Anika:   It will be great!

[spnfanficpond]

January Angel Fish Awards

Every month all of you fantastic writers work your asses off to post some truly incredible stories. Our Angel Fish Awards are the way for all of us, as a community of writers and readers, to lift each other up and give praise to those who have captured our attention and deserve a few kind words.

The monthly Angel Fish Awards are peer-nominated, meaning ANYONE IN THE POND CAN NOMINATE ANY POND MEMBER’S FIC. While the Pond was founded to support the Guppies, everyone in this community deserves to be showered with love and feedback, and we hope that by opening this up as a Pond wide system, we’ll be able to share the love as far as it can go.

NOTE: WE’VE BEEN HAVING OCCASIONAL PROBLEMS WITH ASKS GOING MISSING. Please use the Submit button when submitting your nominations and make sure you’re signed into Tumblr or your URL won’t show. (If the form asks for your name and email address, then you’re not signed in.) If you like, you can also send a message to Michelle or Mana to check and make sure we got your submission.

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE THE FIRST ANGEL FISH AWARDS OF 2020!

Cabin Fever (a long oneshot) by @slytherkins​ was nominated three times!

I said all of this in my reblog, but this is FUCKING GOLD. It depicts life with chronic pain so beautifully, I read most of this with my heart in my throat. Have tissues, heed the warnings, but definitely read this! - @mrswhozeewhatsis​​

Tara is the Queen of Angst. She never fails to break my heart but this fic was something else entirely. I always feel like her stories could be canon and this is no exception!! Dean was exactly how I imagine he would be, Sam too. Without giving any spoilers: the scene setting - I was there, I could see them preparing dinner, sat around the table eating, I felt the coldness of the snow.

The raw emotions were sublime, I cried with Dean. I felt I could feel his pain, I was with him every step of the way, I felt his desperation. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.  - @princessmisery666​​

O. M. G. I don’t expect anything less than incredible when I read Tara’s stuff, but this is on another level. The angst is painful (literally, sometimes), the detail is exquisite. She put heart and soul into this, and it shows. And as always, her Dean is spot-tf-on. Tara’s a brilliant writer, and this fic is amazing. ❤❤❤ - @risingphoenix761​​ 

Nominated by @manawhaat​

Satin (oneshot) by @wingedcatninja​

This fic has some out of the box, vulnerable, sexy, surprising Dean feels! I went into it expecting one thing and what I got was so different from what I could have imagined, but it was so wonderful and refreshing to read! 

Next Year (series) by @wingedcatninja​

Holy crap, the intensity and control in this fic is astounding. It’s so palpable from start to end and this is only the first fucking part. Seriously stellar and surprisingly reverential. 

Nominated by @mrswhozeewhatsis​

For Better or Worst (ongoing series) by @stunudo​​ 

There’s so much mystery and intrigue in this series and I just can’t stop wondering how it’s all going to work out! Sam made some kind of deal to save the world and the deal involved marrying this woman and getting out of hunting. But what was the deal, exactly? And where’s Dean? And who is this woman? What about Cas and Jack? I’m so freaking hooked and I can’t wait to find out!!

Nominated by @princessmisery666​

Love You To Death (series) by @negans-lucille-tblr​

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not into AU’s but this had me hooked from the beginning. I hate Y/N, I hope she gets whats coming to her, but I also so desperately want to be her, which is a testament to the wonderful writing of both Lisa and Bee. I can’t wait to see how this one unfolds.

These two together are a force to be reckoned with.

Nominated by @deanwinchesterswitch​

One And One Make Three (series) by @supernatural-jackles​ 

 This series was absolutely stunning, beautifully written, and an amazing rollercoaster of emotion. Jen handled some very sensitive subject matters with grace and wit. It has ALL the feels; I cried, laughed, and loved right along with the characters.

Nominated by @flamencodiva 

Skeptics and True Believers (series) by @d-s-winchester​ 

I love this story! It had me on the edge of my seat when I read through the master list. the way she wove the story together made me happy for the ending to the story!

Good Things (series) by @crashdevlin​​

This is Part one to four parts of writing GOLD! Cassie knows how to completely put you in the story and envision what is happening. 

How Do You Spell Forever? (series) by @kittenofdoomage​​ 

This is part one of a four parter and OMG! Can I say that this is sweet and cute and full of A/B/O goodness? because this is! and it should be read and shared!

Nominated by @girl-with-a-fandom-fettish​

Heathens (series) by @pink1031​ 

Why: I have been 1000000% hooked on this story since the first chapter was published. It’s a little bit twisted, a little bit wrong, a whole lot dirty, and a whole lot of amazing writing! At the time of this submission, the last chapter is in progress (don’t get me started on the fact that it’s ending D:). It is without a doubt, one of the few stories I stop what I am doing (life permitting) and read the new chapter when I get notified. READ THE WARNINGS CAREFULLY THOUGH, this is not a story for the faint of heart or those that get squicked out (is that even a term?). But if you like dark and dirty, this fic will absolutely be your jam.

Nominated by @risingphoenix761​

My Home (oneshot) by @kittenofdoomage​

Short and sweet, but it got me all choked up. To repeat what I said in tags, bless this fic and the hands that typed it.

Feels Like The First Time (oneshot) by @stusbunker​ 

This gets better every time I reread it. Sweet and sexy and kinda touching. Any time I need a Samwitch fix, I come back to this one. ❤

Nominated by @lovetusk​ ( @fictionalabyss​​ )

Turning Into Butter (oneshot) by @thing-you-do-with-that-thing

Lets be honest with this one, shall we? We’d ALL get that distracted by a half naked Dean. 

Please Don’t Go (oneshot) by @sorenmarie87​

Dawn tested out her Angsting abilities in this Adam x Reader fic, and I’m hoping we get to see more of it. Like why is Dean so angry? I NEED TO KNOW!

Someone You Loved (oneshot) by @ne-gans​

So glad ne-gans is now part of the pond because now I can nominate this beautiful thing that made me cry. 

Nominated by @impala-dreamer

Stupor (oneshot) by @dontshootmespence​

The hottest hot to ever hot in the hottest way possible - SOULLESS!DOM!SAM!! I ded. Very hot. Much smut. Very good.

Hurt So Good (oneshot) by @alleiradayne​

This was tasty. Pun intended. I have such a biting thing and Sam would be so amazing. Yes. Devour me, Winchester!! Loved it.

Nominated by @thegirlwhorunswithwinchesters​

Isn’t That My Line (oneshot) by @princessmisery666​

I went into this one intrigued by the concept and I got even more than I was hoping for. A little twist I didn’t expect here, a perfect ending there. Amazing.

Control And Release (series) by @thecleverdame​

I just needed to bring this one back. Started rereading the entire series and it’s still as amazing as the first time I read this masterpiece.

Photographs and Gasoline (oneshot) by @ne-gans​

Always gotta check the new pond member list when I’m making my rounds. Found this fic and fell in love. It’s absolutely heartbreaking but I loved every second of it. Guess if I have to torture myself, I prefer to do it with beautiful writing like this. 

Nominated by @thoughtslikeaminefield​​​

Smokes and Sex Toys (oneshot) by @wayward-and-worn​ 

This is delightfully fucking filthy. But that’s not all; Dean’s characterization is SO DEAN - flirty yet straightforward - it reminded me of the scene with the bartender in Defending Your Life, I love the simple yet creative premise, and I adore that it’s left open-ended. 

Sick Day - @fangirlxwritesx67​​ 

Viv wrote this for me - it’s true - but that isn’t the reason I’m nominating this; it’s because this is so warm and comfortable and just feels like Dean. Like I actually felt like I was in his lap while I feel asleep reading this. (Also, check out my girl’s other works. She’s fairly new but balls to the wall and bursting with ideas and words for just about anyone.) 

Nominated by @slytherkins​

Isn’t That My Line (oneshot) by @princessmisery666​

Short. Sinful. Sexy. It’s like a smutty snack that hits the spot. (And so does Dean.) 

Nominated by @kittenofdoomage​​

What Goes Bump In The Night (series) by @saxxxology​​

A phenomenal series, historic and dark, with all the fantastic detail you’d expect from Saxxy and more! Please heed the warnings though!

The World Doesn’t Know (oneshot) by @negans-lucille-tblr​​

A wonderful little smutty J2 fic, for those who enjoy that fantasy.

Marked (series) by @there-must-be-a-lock​

I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but hot damn! This is a spectacular start to a promisingly dark series. AND The Right Spot - a smutty smutty follow up to another oneshot that literally made me sweat.

Just Like A Pill  by @princessmisery666​​

The angsty sequel to In Spite Of What My Heart Says and you should totally read both parts, just keep tissues by you in case of heartbreak!

Nominated by @focusonspn​​

House Of The Rising Sun (series) by @kittenofdoomage​​

I’ve never liked BDSM themes too much but, OH MY GOOD!! This series is AMAZING!! It even has a sequel: The Ones You Love. Go and read it, you won’t regret it.

Yes, Sir (series) by @evansrogerskitten​​

Ash must be tired of me praising this fic but I can’t help myself, it’s one of my favorite series ever and deserves this recognition. This is a series that every John girl out there should be reading RIGHT NOW. It has everything! Smut, fluff and a tiny bit of angst and drama.

Good Vibrations (series) by @impala-dreamer​​

At first I wasn’t sure if I should bring this fic here because all the drama I heard it existed about it but, then I thought it twice, and I came to the conclusion that this fic definitely deserve to be part of these awards. This piece of writing was the first (after Dear John, I have to admit) that actually made me cry. It’s dark, it’s sad as fuck, it’s damn well written, and makes you easily get inside the characters and feel what they’re feeling. That being said, if you’re thinking of reading it, please HEED THE WARNINGS.

Take a Drunk Girl Home (oneshot) by @amanda-teaches​​

This fic is so beautiful and so well written that I promise you even can end up tearing up a little, but it’s so worth it that you won’t care a bit.

Nominated by @emilyshurley​​

His Property (series) by @negans-lucille-tblr​​

I freaking love this series to the point that i binged the series (and it’s sequel, Yours) in a single day.  

Just Me & My Baby (oneshot) by @deanwinchesterswitch​​

Can’t get over how adorable it is.

Guns and Ribbons (series) by @myinconnelly1​​

What can I say Dean Winchester deserves all the love in this world and so does this series.

I Can See Clearly Now (oneshot) by @katehuntington​​

I can’t. I don’t have words. This is perfection.

In the Heat of the Night (series) by @evansrogerskitten​​

Nominated by @impalaimagining​​

Goals (oneshot) by @atc74​​

Okay. It's been a long time since I've found Sam smut that really gets me into it. This though - it's a whole different level of wonderful. I love the way it explores a woman finding and embracing her own sexuality, and the frustration that can come along with it. It's obvious how much effort and research and actual planning went into this. My favorite kinds of fics are those that draw from real life experiences, which I think it what makes this one so special. And the end? Yes please!

Nominated by @fangirlxwritesx67​​ 

Everything (series) by @there-must-be-a-lock​ 

I can’t even talk about how great this J2 x reader series is without incoherent fangirl flailing. It’s wildly creative, sharply well written, and absolutely panty-melting filthy! And then just when you’re so hot and bothered that you can’t see straight, *boom*, it’s sweet and intimate and loving. I don’t think there’s a series out there I’ve read this many times!

Hark and Hush by @thoughtslikeaminefield​​

This is a luscious, dark and twisted fairy tale about Dean and the spirit of the Big Bad Wolf. It’s written so vividly that you can see and smell and taste the whole story. Sexy af, of course, and so intense- take the warnings seriously!

The Kind of Girl You Like (series) by @thoughtslikeaminefield​​ 

To me, MJ will always be the Queen of the Winchester threesome and this series shows exactly why. Smoking hot story about the brothers sharing a sub that quickly unfolds into something complex and beautiful. The last chapter especially is written with so much emotional depth- the first time I read it, I was swearing and crying and smiling all at once because it was so well done! Just the best!

Nominated by @supersassyprobablysad​​ 

How You & I Will Be (series) by @katehuntington​​ 

Hey so I wanted to do an angel fish award nom for Kate for her How You & I Will Be fic. In 5 parts she not only developed believable characters but by the end I was ugly crying (and I don’t cry a lot so that’s saying something). The ending feels totally necessary too, not like it was just done for shock value. Anyway I love it, it’s the best I’ve read in a long time.

Thank you all for the awesome work and great feedback!

As with the BFAs, these are not actual awards! This system is set up so everyone in the pond has a chance to share the love and promote a fic/author that has grabbed your attention. The more people that participate, and the more everyone remembers to submit their own fics after posting, the better this will be :D

THANK YOU ALL AGAIN, KEEP UP THE AMAZING WORK, AND AS ALWAYS, HAPPY WRITING!

[martydriscoll]

Day 3. Favorite Episode?

This one was legitimately so hard because I remember things in terms of scenes and not episodes if that makes sense, but after a lot of deliberation, I think I have to go with “Cyrus’ Bash-Mitzvah!”. It was a long episode, so I guess this is kind of a cop out, but I really don’t care. There were so many things about that episode that made me happy, proud, and shocked. It was a whirlwind of emotion, but I’m going to try to sort through it.

First of all, it’s a Bar Mitzvah episode. How often on television do you get to see a Jewish character not only celebrate their Bar Mitzvah, but partake in the rituals that goes into that celebration? We got to see a Jewish character (played by a Jewish actor) read Hebrew on television, and that right there...that encapsulates why I love this show so much. It shows things that other shows rarely do, and it’s a kids show! Beyond that, the celebration was so, so Cyrus (see: Bash-Mitzvah, not Bar Mitzvah). It was such a fun celebration, and don’t even get me started about the dance! The dance is honestly one of the most memorable scenes of the show for me, and I’m not sure why. It was just such a fun scene and I absolutely loved it because if anyone was going to be performing a choreographed dance at a Bar Mitzvah, it would be the Good Hair Crew.

Moving on from that, this was the episode that Cyrus came out to Andi, which I absolutely loved. It was portrayed so well. With Buffy, we got the more heartfelt, accepting coming out portrayal, and while Cyrus coming out to Andi definitley had elements of that too, it also incorporated more of the confused aspects that can sometimes go into a coming out with Andi not realizing the implications of what Cyrus was saying until it clicked. I loved being able to see a still positive, but slightly different reaction to Cyrus’ original coming out scene because in the real world, each coming out experience is just a bit different.

Another aspect of the episode I loved? The fortune teller. I feel like this particular aspect was a little hit or miss with people, but I for one loved it. You got to see inside the minds of all of the different characters, and what was important to them at the time: Andi’s boy troubles, Buffy’s family situation, Cyrus’ future education, and TJ’s possible discalculia. These scenes set up for and foreshadowed so many upcoming scenes in the season that looking back, it was one of the most clever scenes in the show in my opinion. Andi was told that she would get a boyfriend soon and now she is with Jonah, Buffy was told that she would stay with her mother but not remain home and got the moving arc, and TJ was told that he had discalculia and that his friend would help him, all of which quickly became a reality. The only person whose fortune did not come true (yet) was Cyrus’ for obvious reasons, and I have no doubt in my mind that it will later (I definitley do not think we’ll get to see it, but I believe it will happen). Obviously, that was all by design. The fortune teller was a plot device to introduce and allude to these plots and keep them going, but it did it in a way that kept that little spark of magic and wonder that Andi Mack likes to keep- it was a fortune teller, which many believe cannot be real, yet so far, everything that the woman predicted came true.

The Good Hair Crew moments were so good this episode! The dance? Iconic! The fortune teller scene? Spectacular! The coming out scene? Absolutley heartwarming! And the scene where Buffy finds out she might be moving? Absolutley heartbreaking! The Good Hair crew’s dynamic is so rich and strong, and I love, love, love episodes that give us little glimpses into the past, present, and future of their friendship.

Furthermore, Walker was introduced! I absolutely love Walker as a character, and I think him and Andi would have made an amazing couple. Walker is so sweet and respectful, and him and Andi have so much in common. I absolutely love Wandi, and though I do not believe it is going to be endgame anymore, I think for a while there was a real possibility that they could have been. There is so much that we do not know about Walker that I am curious about, and I love that they introduced him in this episode specifically because it really opens up the idea that he could be Jewish. Obviously, you don’t need to be Jewish to be a charactature artist at a Bar Mitzvah, but it really gives us the possibility, and that is a headcanon that I absolutley love. We do not see nearly enough Jewish POC characters.

Another part of this episode I adored was the moment between Bowie and Andi. I am an absolute sucker for the family moments in this show, and this episode did not disappoint. Bowie telling Andi that he could “live without the universe but not her” absolutley melted my heart. Andi Mack was so groundbreaking for showing the effects of a teenage pregnancy on a children’s show, and seeing a family like Bex, Bowie, and Andi’s, one in which the parents are not together (initially), is so important for kids. It can be hard being a child whose parents are not together, especially if you think they still have that spark and that potential to be together. Seeing Andi, Bex, and Bowie have to navigate the development of Bowie having a relationship with someone who is not Bex is so important in my opinion because it is such a common thing in the real world. Bowie making sure Andi knows that she is his priority was so heartwarming and real.

Though I am not always the biggest fan of Jandi due to their previous communication issues and relationship dynamics, seeing Bex give Andi relationship advice was another moment that I absolutley adored. Witnessing Bex come into her own as a mother was so heartwarming. As I said before, I absolutley LIVE for the family moments that Andi Mack gives us, especially with the interesting dynamic between Bex and Andi. Andi had grown up thinking CeCe was her mother. I would imagine that she never really got to openly discuss boys with CeCe as a mother given her age and CeCe’s initial thoughts on things like boyfriends. With Bex as her parent, Andi was finally able to get advice from a parent on boys, and with Andi as Bex’s daughter, Bex was finally able to give advice in that way. If anyone has “learned the hard way” about things in this show, it was Bex, and I absolutley adore scenes in which she gets to share her experience and wisdom with her daughter.

Another winner in this episode for me? Bex and Bowie. Though they’re sort of a typical television “will they, won’t they” couple-with-a-past, I (along with probably everyone else) always root for them as a couple, but root for them even more as parents. Even with their changing dynamic (Andi and Bex had just found out about Bowie’s then sort-of-new-but-still-strong relationship with Miranda and Bex had recently realized her feelings for Bowie), they still came together to put Andi and the family first. Plus, even though they aren’t the pinnacle of communication (see: their proposals and will-they-won’t-they suspense), they do (eventually) always tell each other how they feel and where they stand on things. In this episode, it was Bowie giving Bex the napkin he had written down all of his feelings on.

Another thing I loved was that CeCe and Ham and Bex and Bowie were shown at the Bar Mitzvah, and they were actively involved with some things! Andi Mack has always done a good job of establishing the dynamics between all of the characters, even the adults. Seeing Andi’s entire family there on Cyrus’ big day just reiderates the fact that those two have been friends for such a long time that their lives are intertwined. Andi’s family is a big part of Cyrus’ life, and I’m sure it’s the same the other way around (it’s just not really shown because the show isn’t Cyrus Goodman- it’s Andi Mack), and I love the little reminders of that.

Another plot point of the episode that I loved: Jonah’s panic attack and the real start of his anxiety arc. As someone with anxiety, I know how it feels. The terror. Your heart beating out of your chest. Feeling like whatever triggered you at that moment is end of the world. Seeing Jonah, an established popular kid and main character, have a panic attack, learn what they are, learn about anxiety, be embarrassed about what happened, and not want to tell anyone- it normalizes mental health through the characters like Cyrus’ father, Cyrus, Buffy, and TJ, who all help Jonah with his anxiety in some way and assure him that he is no different because of it, while also portraying it in a way that is true to the experience of someone who is embarrassed and ashamed to have it through Jonah. I didn’t always know what a panic attack was or that anxiety disorders existed. I thought the panic I felt was normal, and I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time, and after my doctor told me no- that was certainly not something that everyone went through- I wanted to keep it hidden. Jonah’s anxiety arc is one that I know will start some very needed conversations and reach many children and adults alike who go through this. I know for certain that it will because it reached me.

Also, on a similar but not exactly the same note, I think that this episode was a very early start to TJ’s redemption arc. I found it very refreshing that TJ was the one who found help for Jonah- the action did not erase his previous behavior, but it showed a different side of him. I believe this other side of TJ was also shown through his talk with Buffy, interaction with the psychic, and interaction with Cyrus in the deleted scene, as those scenes introduced his fear of being “different” in reguards to his (then possible, now confirmed) discalculia. This leads me to my next and final reason why the Bash Mitzvah scene is my favorite episode.

Finally, though it did not make it into the episode, the moment between TJ and Cyrus at the Bash Mitzvah may be one of my favorite moments in the show. For those of you who do not know, there was a deleted scene in the Bash Mitzvah episode where Cyrus can’t open a bottle of apple juice, and TJ helps him open it just enough so that Cyrus can pop the cork and get the glory for opening it. Again, though it does not erase his actions towards Buffy, it definitely painted TJ in a different light. I really would have liked to see that scene, but just knowing that it’s out there and what it contained is enough. It was such a soft, chemistry-building moment between the two of them, one that would have helped set their relationship up even better than it already has been.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

reading part 1 and like, it feels silly to go ‘dang nice first line’ when you clearly worked hard on the first line, you know full well it’s nice, but still. nice first line. drops you right in the world, has that ring of myth but also of urgency, explains right away what the problem is, and also now I’m overanalyzing but it does start things right off by making sure you don’t trust Crispin, don’t trust what he appears to be no matter what. it puts you on edge, on guard, making sure you assume

he’ll lie to you (well, to Brenneth). And like. I know what the original story is, it’s not like I needed the reminder, but the sharp sense of unbalance and distrust that you get right at the start of the story is quite good. ++ Funny - I realize suddenly that I don’t actually know what Crispin looks like. I know you’ve described him somewhere, but it didn’t stick, or maybe you just didn’t mention the hair. I don’t remember it being red-gold.

(the hades and persephone au)

Fun fact, I scrapped THREE, count them, THREE intro scenes before I settled on this one, so no, you are no over-analyzing.  Some fragments of the other intro scenes wound up elsewhere in the story, but mostly?  I just chucked them wholesale and started from scratch.  So, like, yeah, I’m really glad that one works out because I was rapidly running out of good places in the story to pick up the action.  Also, this is both a nod to the actual intro to the novel and wildly at odds, because on the one hand, it does open with a mysterious individual who has, presumably, broken into Brenneth’s home, but it’s also all trust all the time with Crispin from the very first line of the novel, so.

Yoo the season thing is tight, that is the good stuff, and by saying it’s jarring you make it into a bad, unnatural thing, not a thing of wonder as it would be in most stories. Nice. ++ “mundane lightning, if such a thing even existed” Interesting. Not even sure why exactly, just.. interesting. ++ I like that he stabs her xD ++ “her best emotionless expression” NICE I like how this shows, without explaining why, not only that she’s upset somehow, but that it’s a big deal (her BEST such

expression, this is a big effort she’s making). It suggests a personal connection, which, ok, I know she has one bc I know Alleirat, but this is fanfic, that’s allowed. Anyway it’s a very economical way of showing it, so nice job. ++ “the snarl evaporated into a smile” Huh. He trusts her, in a way, even if only in that he thinks he knows her well enough to know what to expect. ++ "If you wanted to talk” I wonder if he really does think, even for a moment, that this is just personal.

Crispin…like, to be completely honest, he’s not completely stable at this moment–I was going to say “not completely himself” but that wouldn’t be accurate–and he wants to force Brenneth into saying out loud what’s upsetting her.  Largely because it will upset her to say it out loud.  It’s a cruel jab, to do it in a way that reminds her that they’re friends, but he’s also trying to drive her into lashing out and, quite frankly, attempting his execution then and there, so he goes for cruelty over efficiency.

"gentle note of menace” Interesting. What menace does he threaten? What can he threaten, here? Or is it just generalized menace? Maybe he’s just a menacing guy. ++ "glittered like a jewel in a setting” An unusual metaphor for a person. I like how it makes him hard and sharp, and fey in how he glitters, and trapped, like jewels are by their settings. ++ Brenneth is very polite. I think I like that about her. I think she does it because she’s solid, steady. She knows who she wants to be, and she’s

not about to be any less than that, even in the little things. 

Brenneth is one of those people where a short temper that tends to flare hot and spectacular but largely harmless, which I think is a satisfying contrast with Crispin, who’s slow to lose his temper and coldly precise but absolutely lethal when he does.  And above anything else…she’s sad, I think.  Brenneth doesn’t like admitting it, in any universe, but she’s sad about a lot of things, a lot of the time, and that makes her a little more likely to offer civility to someone trying to hurt her.  Not invulnerable to snapping and getting violent, but it buys 

++ @the shards in his eyes: holy shit that’s good imagery. it’s a common enough concept but you’ve phrased it so poetically that it gains new strength ++ god that conversation’s intense. I like that she was mortal before – grounded in the world, in a life, in mundane mortality. And he emerged from a storm, no connections to anything, not even kin, not even parentage. His first memories a furious and beautiful destruction, chaos given

form. And he’s the one who’s Spring, and she who’s Death. ++ "His hands were burned badly across the palms” Good way to keep her fire in the story, even with her being Death and not anything typically considered fiery. Interesting that his hands are burnt where he touched her, but no part of him is burnt from her touching him, not even his chiton. ++ Shiko is bound to a task Brenneth set her, one that benefits Brenneth’s kingdom, and can only leave at her express will, yet Brenneth doesn’t think

of her as a servant, is even uneasy at the thought. I wonder how she does think of Shiko. It doesn’t seem to bother her that Shiko calls her ‘my lord’. (Incidentally I like the Lord thing. It’s a little weird at first but it works. Not sure how to really interpret it yet, if at all - guess I’ll know later in the story - but I like it.) 

First of all, I use and abuse a lot of misapplied titles in this, and I would say “lord” is probably the most common one, for a number of reasons.  The primary one is probably that Brenneth was introduced into the pantheon as a mortal, which already put her at a disadvantage, so her use of “lord” is making a very clear and specific point about her rank.  There’s that quote re: the Tortall about Alanna making a point with “sir” and Kel making a different point with “lady,” and Brenneth is making the former, whereas Krei eventually makes the latter.

Second of all, Brenneth’s whole stance on Shiko is very conflicted.  On the one hand, she saved Shiko from an eternity of torment, absolutely and without question, but she did it by basically chaining Shiko to the ferry unless she’s specifically sent on an errand.  Shiko has known her longer thank anyone and more completely than anyone with the possible exception of Crispin, so Brenneth thinks of them as equals, but Shiko is acutely aware that her existence as someone not being tortured is entirely dependent on Brenneth’s good will, and Brenneth is aware of that as well.  And, of course, Brenneth killed Shiko, and it was Shiko’s actions that resulted in Brenneth’s appointment as the god of death.  There’s a lot of baggage there.

++ ‘“Well,” Shiko said, and abandoned the sentence.’ And my, what that says about how Brenneth is treated, and what Shiko thinks of it, and what Brenneth thinks

of it. I may be reading too much into it, but after what Crispin said, I don’t think I am. ++ She doesn’t mind thinking of Rada as a servant. Is it the choice? It sounds like though she could compel any shade to serve her (like one from Tartarus), she doesn’t, and they know they have a choice. But Shiko is bound to obey her, so Brenneth is uneasy about it? 

Yeah, basically.  Shiko has to serve Brenneth or her shade will be banished to the Fields of Punishment, whereas allowing shades to serve in her palace gives them the chance to wait for their family.  It’s a kindness she’s offering them, at its core level, whereas Brenneth sees Shiko’s task as the lesser of two fairly serious evils, even though it doesn’t bother Shiko overmuch, and she has a hard time living with having done that to someone who she feels was used and misled, rather than causing problems out of malicious intent.

++ “seeking something to consume” How odd that this is how it manifests. "her godhood was screaming for it” Ok now that’s intriguing. Does

she often get the urge to kill people? Is it only people who ‘should’ be dead? By what measure of ‘should’? ++ I wonder if she only breathes out of habit, from when she was mortal. I wonder if all gods breathe, or if they only bother occasionally. I wonder if Crispin’s heart has ever beat. 

Gods’ hearts don’t beat, as far as I’m concerned.  If they even have hearts, I guess, I’d be hard pressed to make that call on the spot.  Brenneth, basically, kept her mortal body and froze it at the moment of her apotheosis, so she doesn’t need a heartbeat or breathing, but she does them out of habit and as a sort of self-soothing pattern.  Oh, and I’d say that speaking with a throat does require breathing regardless of whether the oxygen is needed, on a purely mechanical level, so for those purposes all gods breathe when they’re speaking aloud.

Also, I’d say that it’s rare for Brenneth and her “god-self”, as it were, to be in direct conflict, but gods kill people for disrespect.  Brenneth does not.  This is her primary conflict with the part of her that operates as a deity first and a “self” second.

++ I think it means Rada’s brave, that he didn’t even back away when his form started to fall apart from her leaking rage. Or that he trusts her, or both. I like him. Witnesses, she asks for. What for?

What did they witness? Does she want to hold a trial? Or does she mean his victims? She can have her pick of those, I think. So many of them work in her palace, and many more are doubtless crowding her kingdom. She could probably just walk out and shout, “who wants to talk shit about the god of spring,” and she’d get like fifty volunteers in 2 seconds flat.

ok I think I’m gonna sleep. also, amusingly, I have now sent you enough asks that I have to prove I’m not a robot to send any more.

Rada is my BEST BOY and I LOVE HIM.  He worries SO MUCH about his boss.  In canon, he was Brenneth’s third in command when she was hunting Crispin, Torei’s most trusted subordinate, and he was EXACTLY like this, eternally fretting over people’s wellbeing and how seriously Torei was injured and whether or not Brenneth had remembered to eat.  He’s a GOOD BOY.  DOING HIS BEST.  His family is from the south of Alleirat in canon, which means their coloring is a lot like Brenneth’s and she reminds him of one of his younger sisters, so he’s particularly protective of her.

And yeah, everyone’s very eager to talk shit about Crispin.  Rada has exactly NO trouble finding volunteers.  He just wanders into Asphodel and goes “hey who wants to complain to the Lord of the Underworld about that fucker” and has a line OUT THE DOOR.

[hagarenmovie]

[Translation] CINEMA SQUARE 9/08/2017 FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST

THE SHOOTING SCENE SP

The Director & Producer talk about movie filming

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST

The shooting of the highly acclaimed movie FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST was done during summer 2016. We had an exclusive interview with director Fumihiko Sori after the end of the movie filming! In addition, there will be special comments from the protagonist Ryosuke Yamada during shooting, and we will also deliver an extremely passionate shooting report that will wipe away the anxiety of the original manga fans.

Despite the huge number of total CG cuts, the major highlight of the movie is deep “brotherly love”

Medieval Alchemist rituals were once performed at the shooting location so it felt like we were destined to shoot here

The idea of making this project had begun 10 years ago, and the presence of Alphonse was the biggest challenge in the live action

— I heard that the planning of the movie had been going on for quite a while.

Sori: Planning started more than 10 years ago. I think we earnestly started working on it right after I finished “Tomorrow’s Joe”.  Actually “Tomorrow’s Joe” was a work that included many challenging CGI aspects, so what we developed [from there] was quite effective. The biggest challenge in “FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST” (Hagaren) is the presence of another hero, Alphonse (hereinafter referred to as “Al”) with the leading character Edward (hereinafter referred to as “Ed”/Ryosuke Yamada). Before we could visualize Al convincingly in full CGI, we felt that this work shouldn’t be made. Because I had a great confidence in the CGI techniques that I managed to implement in “Tomorrow’s Joe”, project planning [for Hagaren] began to move concretely from there.

— Surely since Ed’s younger brother Al is a soul trapped inside a suit of armor, it should definitely be a CG character, right?

Sori: Since his height is around 2.2m, it’s almost impossible to visualize him with actual real beings. You’ll understand this once you watch the movie, but Al will move very lightly there (laughs). Conversely, if we manage to bring Al through CGI, I feel that the Japanese movie industry will enter a great new era. 

— Even just by [visiting] the shooting location, the theme of the work clearly speaks “brotherly love”.

Sori: That’s right. Although the amount of CGI cuts in this movie is amazing, I would like [the viewers] not to think too much on the CGI (laughs).  I don’t want them to worry about the CGI here and there, instead, I’d like the viewers to follow the story of Ed and Al, and feel that Al and his personality really do exist, since it was a superb acting performance. Thanks to Yamada-kun’s acting skills, Ed was brilliantly played.

Someone who can win when he has to, Yamada is “the chosen one”

— How was Yamada-san?

Sori: He is a true actor [T/N: Sori used 役者 (yakusha) here instead of俳優 (haiyuu). Though both means actors, In Japanese terms “yakusha” is considered as an actor who becomes the character and able to bring out more versatility compares to “haiyuu”.  So from here I will refer “yakusha” as a true actor if that makes more sense to this translation]. I don’t know much about him as an idol, so I can only watch him as Ryosuke Yamada the actor. If you watch the movie, I’m sure his fans will be surprised. In this movie you will discover a Ryosuke Yamada that you’ve never seen before. He is so keen to learn things and has a deep understanding about the original work. In other words, he doesn’t just simply imitate a character, he is a true actor who’s very motivated to create his own Ed. He is very intuitive, he’s really fluent in using his tongue and voice [in his acting]. He is blessed with a great sense as an actor and there are many things [about him] that surprised me during filming.

— His action performance too?

Sori: Both action and acting performance. No matter what kind of action stunts he needs to do, he’ll do it all by himself. No matter how many times I recommended him to use a stunt double, he’ll say “I’ll do it myself” … he’s a person like Tom Cruise (laughs). Even when everyone around him was nervous, he gracefully took responsibility as the lead, and everyone knew it. One of the moments that surprised me the most, was during an action scene where he had to jump from a really high place after running 25 meters at full speed and he said, “We don’t need to practice.” I thought to myself, “Huh?!” but he managed to do it in one take. Of course he has an incredible physical ability, and his concentration skill is also amazing. At the same time I also thought, “He’s the chosen one.“ He’s the type of person that will win when he has to win.

—The other cast members are also marvelous!

Sori: Though I previously said I was surprised by Yamada’s performance, I think that was also because the acting showdown between every one of the cast members is really amazing, it feels like a battlefield for acting. For example Yamada vs Tsubasa Honda, Yamada vs Dean Fujioka, Yamada vs Yasuko Matsuyuki. Everyone’s respect for the original work is amazing, especially Yasuko Matsuyuki-san’s acting during the final scene, I think she [portrayed Lust] with even more detail than my instruction (laughs). Because Matsuyuki-san was able to do it to that extent, the other people had to do it too. As a director it was fun to have a sparking scene on set! 

— Dean-san’s character, Roy Mustang, is also very popular isn’t he?

Sori: Dean-san is super cool! He’s basically a cool person in general, but I was dazed by his acting as Mustang. I’d say this about Yamada-kun too, [Dean] is a person who has an aura and a certain level of coolness that is out of this world that really suit the [Fullmetal Alchemist] world.

— Did the fact that you shot the first half of the movie in Italy contribute to the establishment of the [Fullmetal Alchemist] world?

Sori: It was huge. I was really thankful that we were able to run a 100 year-old locomotive in Tuscany for the shooting, in any case, the popularity of FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST in Italy is enormous. In the beautiful city called Volterra, I can’t be thankful enough for having them cooperate with the shooting by closing an entire main street for 3 days. One of the most impressive things was when we shot in the square of a church in Volterra, there were a lot of Alchemist symbols inside the church and the outer wall. Actually, when I entered the church, there was even a chimera [statue] (a beast that also appeared in the original work). I heard that during the medieval ages alchemists performed their rituals in these places. That’s why the place where the priest goes on a rampage and where [Ed] transmutes his spear are all places where real alchemists used to perform these ceremonies. I can’t help but feel that we were destined to [film here].

— We’re getting even more excited!

Sori: My goal is to have everyone enjoy this film as one single movie no matter from where you watch it, whether you’re a fan of the manga or don’t know anything about it. Please look forward to it!

Edward Elric Actor – Yamada Ryosuke:

I thought, "No one can portray Ed but me!”

— What were your honest feelings when you first heard about this project?

Yamada: Since I really love the original work, I asked myself, “Can we really turn this into a live action?” I was worried about whether I could portray such a popular hero like Ed. But when I saw the demo (CGI) footage of Al, the quality was so amazing that I thought, “Ah, this is alright!” and after that I trusted the director and the staff to handle this project, while I devoted myself to bringing Ed [to live action].

— The costume for Ed is really spot on, but how comfortable was it to wear them?

Yamada: It was really hot [wearing them] (laughs). But personally, since I did countless costume fittings, it really was made to fit my exact body measurements down to the millimeter. At first, doing action scenes while wearing the coat was difficult, but now I’m the opposite, always saying, ‘let’s wear the coat!’ It makes me feel like I’m really [playing Ed]. 

— What was your impression on Director Sori, working together with him for the first time?

Yamada: We spent some time together inside a car during our shooting in Italy. We talked passionately about the work (laughs). He lets me do things the way I want, in a good way. But this time the CGI (Al) was a huge challenge, as expected it was really difficult… the director was really strict about playing the emotional parts, as I was acting against someone that wasn’t entirely visible to me, I was really worried about it the day prior to the shooting. Since Ed’s [character] base is that of a big brother who loves his younger brother Al and is always thinking about him, I thought, ‘I have to always be a passionate and caring big brother.’

— What do you think about the character Ed?

Yamada: Though this comes from myself, I worked very hard to become Ed, so I’m quite confident about playing him. I didn’t want to give this role to anyone else, so now I think, “no one can portray Ed but me!”

—  How did the [Hey! Say! JUMP] members respond to this?

Yamada: It seems that everyone loves the original work, when I got the gig to play Ed, they said things like, “What?! I’m so envious!” Arioka (Daiki) said, “Good thing you’re a pipsqueak, huh?” and I replied, “You’re a pipsqueak too ya know!” (laughs). But really, I’m so glad I’m a pipsqueak!

Location Report: Witnessing Yamada=Ed’s incredible high level of physical ability!

Going back about a year ago. It was August 2016, the hottest time of year, identical to 2017, and Director Sori who had wrapped up shooting in Italy about 1 month earlier, was directing the climax scene of the entire movie in a Tokyo studio after a total of 3 months shooting. That day, a spectacular action scene involving the life of one of the important characters in the movie is taken under a serious heat. And from behind another character, firing flames at it, was Mustang (Dean Fujioka), a popular character that evens out Ed’s popularity even in the original work. Just as Director Sori stated, Dean seems to be portraying Mustang the “Flame Alchemist” perfectly. In a vast open set, there was a scene where Mustang suffered an injury and collapsed, he looked fearless and sexy.

And then, Ed (Ryosuke Yamada) appeared! It was a scene shot with a green screen, his dyed golden hair and bright red coat shines vividly amongst the green. Yamada mentioned how it was difficult for him to do action scenes with the coat at first, but from the second half, he was able to say “Since the coat needs to sway lightly, I thought about ways to make it look even cooler everyday. ” Although it was a quick counter action sequence, in order to avoid a violent attack from the villain Lust (Yasuko Matsuyuki), from an angular starting point we can clearly see Yamada’s high level of physical ability exquisitely shown in each take.

Source: Cinema Square 9/08/2017

[class-wom]

downtonabbeyandausten asked: Tell us how you think "Matthew's Mary", aka the best version of Mary, differed from the Mary we got during the post-Matthew seasons. You already know that I agree with pretty much everything you'll say on this point :)

First of all, as I think a bit more about this, I should probably warn you that there may be an edit or two.  Or three, four, or five for good measure. 😈  Bwahaha…anyway, here goes…

I think the biggest difference is that, at least from what I’ve been hearing, the Lady Mary of later seasons seemed to shift dramatically from one extreme of goodness to another extreme of badness with little if any balance.  The Lady Mary of earlier seasons seemed to be a lot more evenly distributed and was using her cool demeanor as a front to hide a much more complicated personality capable of deeper feelings.  As I mentioned before, my personal favorite example of this is the moment from the second season where she observes “Aren’t we all stuck with the choices we make?” and proceeds to soberly stir her tea as everyone else looks on thoughtfully.  For some reason, it reminds me of one of my favorite “No dialogue necessary”-moments from the 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility where, following the departure of Wilhoughby, Elinor quietly sips her tea alone on the steps listening to the intense and passionate wailing of her mother and sisters from their respective rooms.  (I guess it’s in the sense of everyone else surrounding her clearly going through a great deal of emotional torture and turmoil while the lady in question has clearly reached a level of acceptance of her own situation if that makes any sense.  The fact that both cases involve a cup of tea is simply a British coincidence, I’m sure!  😁 LOL…)

And that, I think, is another major difference.  I think it was you who may have mentioned that she’s the type of person who will very quietly work behind the scenes (definitely a trait she picked up from her grandmother) and support others, such as informing William of his mother’s illness in the first season or arranging for Anna’s “honeymoon” with Bates by “reserving” an upstairs room in the second season.   Another character this trait reminds me of is Rick from Casablanca: Rather than taking center stage with “causes” a la Victor and leading the entire Cafe Americain in a rousing rendition of “Marseilles” to drown out the Nazis, he would very quietly turn a blind eye to rumors of resistance meetings or even sneakily arrange for a young Bolivian couple to win much-needed escape money at the roulette wheel.  Perhaps not as dramatic as Victor’s definitive stance of defiance, but not an entirely convincing display of neutrality either.

And I think that’s another quality of “the True Mary:”  She’s quietly supportive and/or helpful rather than swinging from one side of nastiness to the other side of subservient angel, as we saw her devolve into from the fourth to the sixth seasons.  And I think the scenes from the second season where she coped with Matthew’s wartime woes and grappled with the existence of his engagement were the most telling of that blend of character; far from being a wooden caricature of later seasons, we would see her persona shift from cool and calm to deeply disturbed and troubled, such as the scene where she witnesses Matthew’s arrival at the hospital following his injury or the moment she walks away from him after (at his urging) she has given him a carefully-worded prognostication of his condition.  (One of my favorite scenes, in case you can’t tell; as far as I’m concerned, Dan and Michelle absolutely hit that one out of the park in terms of showing the turmoil lurking under the surface.)

Do I think “the True Mary” has to be deadly serious?  Absolutely not.  As a matter of fact, I think many of MD’s scenes with DS gave her some wiggle-room to add an element of humor; the post-dance scene where Mary and Matthew quickly realize that an ill Lavinia has “caught them in the act” and they flash those “hands-in-the-cookie-jar” smiles at her is a terrific example.  I also thought the scene from the third season where she and Matthew quietly let a fleeing Branson into the house and make up the silly BS-story at the dinner table about who was at the door (some guy giving out pamphlets or something like that) gave a hint that, if MD had given lighter and more humorous material with which to work on a regular basis, she could have had a lot of fun and been spectacular.  (Perhaps DS could have reconsidered his decision to leave had he also been given more post-S2 opportunities to shine and/or flex his own acting/humor muscles, but that’s another topic! 😈)  I have never actually watched her in Good Behavior, but I’ve seen a commercial or two that seems to suggest that she’s really showing that she can handle some pretty crazy comic situations and opportunities and could have really done Sir Fellowes proud had he generously allowed her the flexibility to do so.  Now maybe those who actually watched S4-S6 could tell me if she ever was able to add those elements of humor in later seasons, but from what I’ve seen, basically she just seemed to be a naughty little girl who finally got scolded until she “agreed to be a good little wife" with little if any of the dimension of earlier seasons.  (That’s how it looked from my vantage point, anyway!)

As I said, I may edit this at a later time.  But this seems to be a good start! 😁

Okay, a few edits and a day later, lol, I’ve had more extensive thoughts on what I mentioned yesterday about S6 Mary’s “emotional extremes” versus her more balanced persona of S2 in particular.  And I will be honest:  This is going to be a rant, and it’s mostly going to be an anti-S6 Mary (or more to the point, the cynical subtext of her fate and the treatment thereof, at least as I saw it) expounding on what I mean when I refer to extremes of “Good Mary vs. Bad Mary” and the so-called “implications” as they appear to have been intended.

So if you’re a reader who's had his or her fill of anti-S6 rants and anti-S6 character rants, I understand, and this is a fair warning:  You may turn back if you like, and I respect your decision to do so. 😉

Yes, I could have simply edited these thoughts into my original post.  However, I wanted to verify that they would be seen; I had hoped to simply reply to my original post, but that doesn’t appear to be happening, I suppose since I was responding to a message or whatever. 🤷

Okay, so we start out with seemingly relatively independent, all-business Mary at the beginning of Season 6 announcing “I’d rather be alone than with the wrong man.”  Fair enough, right?  Sounds reasonable to me: A once-happy wife now blossoming into a strong, surprisingly capable widow working towards the legacy of Downton to preserve it in the name of her late husband for her son, which as I see it would have been true to “the True Mary" and a fitting homage to the memory of Matthew, to say nothing of a promising future for George.  (Okay, yeah, Depression, World War II, yadda yadda yadda, lol...)  From therein (again, at least as I understand it from the spoilers I can stomach), we devolve into scrutiny over Mary’s “high standards” in men (again, I personally see nothing wrong with this; I mean, hey, we are talking about the whole “Till death us do part”-thing, so she better be sure, and if she’s not, she’ll be better off in the end!) which earns her endless ridicule from friends and family, then insults, then a barage and constant repetition of the word “love” which is simply supposed to “convince” us to accept this manipulation of rewriting of Mary’s character as suddenly “deciding” she’s in love (yes, I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but please bear in mind that this so-called “cowardly bullying bitch” was only “convinced” after literally everybody and her sister had to coerce her into “confessing” she’s in love...but she’s the only bully that counts here, I suppose because she’s an old-fashioned bully rather than a progressive bully 🙄).

Now during the aforementioned, we have what I call the “Bad Mary”-extreme (throw the “Edith’s deep dark secret” in here for good measure, since this ultimately plays no small part in it; I believe I’ve made those thoughts quite clear otherwise, lol), which is to manipulate the viewer into shrieking, “For crying out loud, can’t something be done to get her back in line?!?”  Now as I remember interviews and press at the time, the way we were supposed to watch this was that “Mary was supposed to learn to 'love herself’ (wait...did she hate herself with Matthew?!? whaaaat?!?) and ‘make peace’ with her situation”...by “professing her love” and entering lickety-split into matrimonial sex (yes, I’m calling it as I see it) with a car guy (by all accounts, Violet and Evelyn came perhaps the closest to addressing this issue head-on)...but hey, it’s okay, because she’s in love.

Yes, that’s it -- she’s in love, everyone (it’s repeated as many times as possible rather than richly shown, as it would have been in previous seasons)...and now she’s getting that “wonderful” (not to mention productive) sex...and because she is now a well-sexed wife, she is now the extreme of the “Good Mary” character.

And here we come to the cynical note of this type of writing, and why I refer to it as “extreme characterization” compared to “the True Mary,” most notably of S2.  I had mentioned the more subtle subtext, I had mentioned that scene that reminded me so much of that 1995 Elinor moment from Sense and Sensibility and why.  Frankly, Mary’s ultimate "romance” to me felt like Elinor marrying Edward*, only to lose him in a crazy barnyard accident, then years later being approached by some hot, wild-and-woolly brother/cousin of Wilhoughby (since he married someone rich, he’s out, lol), and when she ultimately resists, is scolded by her mother to “make peace” because she “believes in love,” so they head off to Gretna Greene and drive off in his speedy new barouche!

And this begs the million-pound question:  What would Jane Austen say?  Or any other true romantic, for that matter?

*Yes, I know who plays Edward in the 2008 version; I can assure you that’s unintentional.  LOL...

[lauramarlingnatural]

like, i bet ever since that happened he gets pulled over on the regular every time some adult complains about 'suspicious looking teenagers' regardless of whether he was anywhere near the area etc. gets a bit wearing. it must have had a really complicated effect on his relationship with his father too, who we know was constantly being bailed out of jail by Fred. (1)

Answering each ask here but in order because, phew, so much to unpack! I also hope you don’t mind me posting publicly, because I wanted to save it somewhere, i really loved these asks a lot. Also, lmao, i’m glad my socio/crim degrees are going to use for the purpose of discussing fictional characters. Responses under the cut to save people’s dashes. 

To address the first part: Yes, there’s no doubt in my mind he comes into contact with law enforcement more so after his incarceration, although imo it would have been a constant presence in his life before even this. @onceuponamirror (hope u don’t mind me tagging u in but i feel weird talking about people and not tagging them, lol) did a beautiful meta-analysis here that included the headcanon about Jughead and Archie at one time being from the same socio-economic background but eventually Fred moves Slightly Up and FP moves All The Way Down. This is also my personal headcanon. We don’t know when Jug moved socio-economically/geographically from being semi on the North Side of town to being ~murkily somewhere more South~ but, no doubt he did before he was incarcerated at age 10, and it’s a fact that lower socio-economic areas are over-policed. I think the look on his face when he’s being hauled in in ep7 is one of utter terror because he knows, and that’s not the look of a kid who thinks the criminal punishment system is Fair and Just. It’s the look of a kid that knows how easily he could become a scapegoat… probably because it’s happened to him before, but for more minor infractions etc. This I think also coincides with his loner, outcast role that he casts himself into – he’s likely lived the better part of his life under the constant threat/reality of surveillance, especially as you mention with FP being in and out of lock-up. He reacts to this surveillance by trying to dissolve himself into the background. With his novel, too, he’s trying to re-gain some control of his presence within Riverdale by casting himself as narrator, the person which the audience cannot judge/interact/condemn. Obviously his attempt at this gets utterly thwarted as the story unravels, but i think on some subconscious level that was his initial motivation. 

I do think this really complicated things with his father. As much as Jughead is angry with his dad, he also knows what it’s like to feel persecuted and he really wrestles with the complexities that both a) yes, FP is an alcoholic and makes terrible choices and does bad things sometimes but also b) he is treated unfairly and a lot of Jughead’s troubles can be traced back to the roots of social injustice and inequality. On some like, childish level he gets this (i say childish because as smart as he is he’s still 16 so his self-awareness won’t be that spectacular, though i think it is much more heightened than his peers possibly due to years of being so insular and also trying to grapple with the image others have of him). i think this causes him to be both protective and frustrated with FP because imo he kind of is just like, dad, stop proving everybody right, you know? 

(2) i actually have some complicated feelings about ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ being associated with Juggie, because while it’s a good shorthand for disaffected youth, and their are some passing physical resemblances between the two (especially now he has the leather jacket), the very last thing Juggie is is ‘without a cause’ in either sense

(3) He has the 'Cause’ of the mystery and his novel to motivate him, but on a deeper level his life has been nothing BUT a series of things that have caused him to become that 'rebel’ in the first place, while in the original film we are given little more than the idea of 'generation gap tension’ as the problem. But I’m probably rambling now…!

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. I remember reading somewhere (I think it was Cole who said this but i can’t remember where/when exactly) that Jughead is meant to be the Moral Compass of the show in some way. (I feel like this is really confusing because Jug self-describes himself as a conscientious objector – er, not in the ‘to the war’ sense, that is v obviously a Political Stance – but… maybe the cognitive dissonance here is an example of someone who desperately wants to be content with being the Apathetic Outsider but in actual reality, is too motivated by notions of truth and justice to fit in that role. Idk. Shrug emoji about this, basically.)

When Jughead is being interrogated by Keller and is talking to Betty about the West Memphis Three (he calls them the Paradise Lost kids which i think is a weird reference for a teen of the late 2010′s, there have been more recent media incarnations about them, lol @ Riverdale’s ~~~timelessness), he mentions that “all those kids did was wear black and listen to Metallica” to get themselves on death row, Actually, that wasn’t all, they were also poor, and had come into previous contact with law enforcement. Damien Echolls literally says that he was fingered for the crime because he was “poor white trash” (i hate this term, pls forgive me for repeating it but. You get the picture, right. also i can’t find the source, it was probably in the documentary West of Memphis, but i remember it being said really clearly). I also think the comparison that Jughead makes here is so, so telling. The West Memphis 3 were outsiders who had been known and disliked by the police in their town since their early adolescence, and two of them had initially bonded over their distaste for the cultural values of their small town. 

There is absolutely nothing about Jughead’s character that is “without ‘cause’”. on maybe a really superficial level the comparison between rwac and Jug might make sense, because of like… the leather jacket, lmfao, and broodiness, and maybe some of the more conservative elements of the Jones Family Storyline about like, FP needing to Get A Job And Be A Man, and Everything will be Okay if the family gets back together (witness me rolling my eyes forever and always). But I think the Serpent storyline goes completely against the idea of there being a generational gap – more, we see the generational cycle. There’s no gap. Also… as far as what the main ‘cause’ might be – class mobility just does not exist, not for those who have been cast into the underclass and criminalized. The potential of Serpent Jughead as Rebelling against this social position he’s been cast into by creating bonds of solidarity with those of his kin – which is what gangs do in some sense, this is obviously Not Ideal or like, without consequence or anything but. Literally gangs exist as bonds of social solidarity in the face of brutalization by police, neglect by the state and demonization by the upper-middle class, and there’s a lot of literature that attests to this. It’s not pointless rebelling or Evil Poors Tryna Scare The Middle Class Folk (lol). 

And now i’m rambling probably lol. Thank you for these brilliant asks!! And to anyone else who maybe reads this: we started talking about Jughead’s childhood incarceration and about how disturbed we both are about it and then this happened

[worddonor]

...Aaah ah

"Suit and taaah aah ah!" "Watch out fa mee, I'm aboouuut to glow-oh..." Tired. Tired of being a naai. Tired of living like a weak piece of k#k. Tired of swallowing my hopes and dreams and giving in to a st attitude of laziness and listlessness and fear and anxiety and f#*+ing depression (forgive my foul mouth Lord, they need to feel my frustration). No man. Jesus didn't bleed out on a wooden cross so I can wish and wish and wish, blatantly ignoring the grace and power he bestowed upon me and every single person on Earth to possess. If we just listened to Him, His Word and took possession of our destinies, of our own unique personas: who we were MADE to be, we'd be changing the world...not fudging looking at the next man to try and do what he's doing or the next lady to duplicate her path and then getting sad because we could never achieve the greatness they do no matter what we do. Of course we couldn't do that as well as the person we're eyeing: why!? Because you're an eye and that person is a hand. Finish and kla. An eye can't hold a hammer, it can look hard at that hammer and wish it could fling it around but it can't. What it CAN do is make sure that hand knows where the fudge it should be hammering otherwise it's swinging in no man's land moering everything in range except for its intended target. What good is that? How many times must this story be told before it hits home?? I should take my own damn advice, for fudge-sake. I've been doing this my entire life, you'd think I'd get it by now, but usually relationships are formed through things we have in common or can all relate to. This usually means aligning with people who have the same interests and joining a group or keeping up with a particular crowd to feel that 'deep' sense of connection we NEED to ignite those explosions of tangible 'happiness' or contentment...to feel loved (or what we think is love)...to feel like we belong to something/someone...to feel like we matter at all. We're humans man. Sometimes we just want to be part of a tribe - it feels good, it's comforting. It's good to follow positive influences, but if following a path or people comes at the expense of our individuality, principles and unique gifts for the purpose of fitting in: it's destructive and drives us away from purpose and the paths and people we should be following. We were not made to live as silos or islands alone, even I get a buzz from having a stimulating chat with folk. You instantly feel better about life, especially about whatever struggles you're facing internally or your circumstances at home etc. It brings perspective and genuine joy. Why don't we look to who made us and ask Him for guidance? My whole life I've been comparing and writing basically full-on essays about other people, their strengths compared to my myriad weaknesses...comparing myself to John, comparing myself to Jill, beating myself up, hating myself because I could never be as confident or as cool or as athletic or dance as good or be as quick-witted or work as fast, or work as cleanly and as beautifully with my hands or make friends as easily as John or Jill. I could never be as sure of myself as them or as content with my personality, not even my strengths let alone my quirks and weaknesses. I still don't understand my strengths - only God can show me what I'm good at so I'm going to try listen and see what he says, say what you will if you think I'm a mal naai - I probably am. What has this mal naai got to lose in any case seeing as I'm basically talking to myself on this piece of twak blog. I actually enjoy reading other people's daily entries, even if it's mundane crap, I don't know why - I love people's stories and getting to know their weird and wonderful perspectives yet making small talk in person is like climbing Mount blady Everest for a man, goodness. I make too many excuses, stuff that noise. I must make a greater effort, so what if I'm shit - I have to keep falling on my face until one day when I make that step and it's glorious; absolutely fudging spectacular and nothing but winning follows thereafter - I can pat myself on the back for a job well conquered. Going to Vegas and riding around with my cousin having experienced the life he's built for himself overseas inspired me: I had never felt so free and so full of positivity as the time spent with him. Goodness. Plus he actually enjoys my writing, the poetry or the prose or whatever else - he enjoys it and can't wait for me to write more. That in itself is enough to keep me going as he is someone I admire a great deal (we've come a long way), it helps me get up in the morning I won't lie. BTW did I mention that I prayed out loud (medium volume levels, lol) in a small group at church yesterday?? Sounds like nothing, but you cannot believe how intimidating it is for me to speak at ALL with anyone other than family especially in prayer - even though it was just my mother and another church member (albeit someone we all know well, he has quite a strong personality and is deeply knowledgeable of the Word [is that correct English?], academically inclined, works out so has a decent physical frame [it matters bru] and not afraid to share his views about anything, definitely no push over). I held my own although I fluffed a bit when I hit a wall towards the end of the prayer there, but I was proud of myself - me, proud of something I did? Is the sky falling? Are we all gonna burst into flames on New Year's Eve?? Yes, I was pleased that I didn't wuss out like I always do. I manned the fudge up and went for it despite stammering and all that jazz. Of course God knows I'm capable of much more - I limit myself, so it probably wasn't much for Him. I have prayed before, but it's been years since I've been in that setting and felt confident enough to add my two cent-chees there. Anyway, coming back to today...yesterday may have contributed to why I was so upset today at the end of the day...I felt like I was slow because there were tasks I couldn't complete that I tried to make and time ran out...I knew for a fact my colleagues would have finished what they needed to on time...even walking out the door I felt like I was unable to keep up with them without sweating a bit by trying to move faster...I just felt stupid, I know making any decision is kak-hard for me to do fast if at all so I have always felt like I was holding everyone up and still feel like this. This includes holding myself up which is keeping me from moving forward. It's terrible. The last thing I want to do is make people wait, because I hate waiting as much as the next person, but shit man I'm such a damn slow poke. My head keeps wheel-spinning and getting nowhere. Ai. I love looking at the sky though and the clouds and at details of things around me and at people and their quirks and habits, especially their body language...it's soo interesting, I could people-watch for daayyyzzz bru. I enjoy reading so much too...Just tryna figure us out... Anyway, as of recently, for the first time in my Life, my WHOLE LIFE, I can sense my purpose taking shape, I feel a peace that I've NEVER felt before, NEVER! The Holy Spirit is speaking to me and guiding me and it's being proven to me each and every day I take a step of faith [note: a STEP!], words from different sources (twitter, the Bible, Facebook, my dreams, Youtube videos [Prince Ea whaddup!], the books I'm reading, the things I watch on TV): ALL of it. When I act in faith, another little door opens. When I shimmy a tad forward, another window opens and so it goes. I'm enjoying this...like the Bible says in more eloquent terms though, 'Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.' (Psalm 119:105) - just a lamp, not full daylight, just enough to keep me going forward and to keep me holding on to it, to keep me looking into it for for further guidance as I take my next step in the dark. For the first time in my 30 years in existence, I've felt a weight lift from my shoulders regarding purpose. The Lord said he's got my back, so I'm just going to keep taking life one step at a time (my mother also said this the other day...one day at a time - I was frustrated then too, but it's a good strategy, my previous methods haven't worked so it's time I try this.). Who knows what I'll be doing next, where I'll be doing it and with whom :). Peace people. P.S. Las Vegas was phenomenal and I was treated like a king at the fam's home. The US is a beautiful place (saw the Grand Canyon, went wild at Six Flags Magic Mountain and even made it through to Venice Beach :D - my favourite place if I must be honest), I'll definitely be back soon.

[peachymess]

Do you like how Armin has been described on his Attack on Titan wikia page?

Altogether,I think it’s a very standard, ok surface description. It’s great for looking upsomething you’re unsure about, but I don’t think you get the depth of thecharacters from the wiki in general. And it might just be me, but I get a veryanime-leaning vibe from the site, so I don’t consult it very often. There is a point I want to make about Armin being an unreliable narrator, andI’m going to use this ask as my opportunity to touch upon it, but first, I’llnitpick on some other stuff I found, since you ask:

“Althoughhe appears to be the physically weakest of the 104th Taning Corps,his intelligence and strategic genius makes him an invaluable asset, especiallywhen paired with Hange Zoë’s mind,” the wiki says in the introduction. Well, Ihave two issues with this: the first is the claim that Armin appears to be theweakest of the 104th. This is why I say the wiki feels eerilyanime-favoring; in the anime, things are sometimes simplified, and we get theshortcut, gimmicky version of the manga. Its logic goes like this: “Armin isweak, his issue is inferiority due to that weakness, and he didn’t graduate topten. Conclusion: he is the weakest of the class.” But this isn’t necessarilytrue; top ten is the icing on the cake. Did they not see all the unnamed cadetson the training grounds? In the smartpass interview, when asked if he couldtake down Historia in combat, Armin didn’t even dignify the question with ananswer, he merely asked if he really looked that weak. And even if he came in absolutelast place – out of what, fifty cadets – it could be due to more than strength:it could be stamina, stealth, etc. Drawing such under-developed conclusions as“he is the weakest” is what I dislike with the anime, and the false narrativethat it pushes onto the fans until they believe it. They simplify thecharacters, and I think in Armin’s case, it’s the reason why so many walk awaythinking he is weak and useless, when in reality that description hardly fitshim.  

Secondly,the Hanji comment, to me, seemed absolutely unnecessary and out of place. Arminis an invaluable asset, period. He can’t be more invaluable by addingan extra component. Invaluable is invaluable. If they wanted to say that heworks well with the new commander, that point could find a much more naturalplace somewhere else in the text. Adding this to the very introduction ofArmin’s page, tells me yet again, that the fanbase has become misguided in howthey view Armin: he’s not a great add-on, he’s his own asset. He doesn’t giveother character an extra edge, he’s his own force to be reckoned with. All ofArmin biggest moments, greatest plans, most spectacular wins, were all productsof his own mind alone! Yet again, we’ve been fooled by the simplicity that theanime promotes: we assume that, as clever characters, Armin and Hanji are boundto be a dream team – because all smarties get along, right? To some extent,they do produce results together, but they aren’t very compatible outsidespitballing; Hanji spins on Armin’s input and leaves him in the dust becausethey prefer to run their own show, not even considering what part of it comesfrom Armin’s own skill to keep up. That’s their personality, and I’m not tryingto fault them for it, but why mention how well Armin works with Hanji, when thelatter doesn’t even recognize Armin’s skill for their own (as further shown inShiganshina, when Hanji did not so much as mention there being a dilemma worthconsidering – nor has expressed any sort of sentiment towards Armin’s contributionto the group ever since he was saved by Levi, if ever). Armin’s short period ofthrowing ball with Hanji is so insignificant to his person (and personality),that I feel like most anything else could be a better way of closing thatopening paragraph on him.

Anotherone: “Armin is rather short for his age,” the wiki page says. While shorterthan most of the other prominent teen boys of the story, Armin beingparticularly short is not something that has ever been given any significancein canon. I’m not saying he’s not short, but this wording makes it sound likeit’s a very prominent part of his appearance, which it isn’t. In your teens,you’re in constant growth, and hormones kicking in later than others’, isnatural. I looked up average height for 15 year old males (present time), andwhile he’s shorter than the average of 170 cm, he fit the average of a 14 yearold to the decimal. For one, it’s not unusual to be a late bloomer, and also, Ihave a theory that he might have been 14 and a half throughout the Trost arc: untilthere is explicit canon proof that Armin is the oldest of the trio (and bornthe year before Eren), he could very well have been turning 15 throughoutmost of the story so far; it’s never explicitly said that you had to be 12 to join bootcamp; as with many schools, perhaps you only needed to turn 12that year, meaning he could have been 11, going on 12 the year of enrollment. Thus,he could be fourteen and a half (and only half a year away from being theaverage height for his age) back in Trost. What’s more: humans have continuouslybecome taller on average. A hundred years ago, the average was considerablyshorter, as the average in the SNK universe could be. Regardless: while Armincould still be shorter than average, there’s absolutely a difference between“below average” and “rather short”. Again, this is an anime-worthygeneralization that skews his character to less keen consumers.

Now, on towhat I’m really here to talk about: “too timid to defend himself, Armin wouldoften need to rely on his friends (Eren Yeager and Mikasa Ackerman) to protecthim from local bullies.” We all know this to be true, right? Why? Because Armintells us so, repeatedly, through his own narrative. But what he feeds us – asboth narrator of the story, and as a main character with frequent innermonologs – is his own skewed perception of his childhood. If we were asked todescribe the trio’s dynamic back in Shiganshina, most of us would be inclinedto say something along the lines of “Eren and Armin would talk about theoutside world while Mikasa listened, and whenever Armin got picked on, his twofriends would have to come to his rescue because he was too weak to defendhimself.” But this isn’t entirely true, as rather: it’s an image with weightwrongfully placed on Armin’s uselessness – a uselessness he’s put on himself,and that nobody but him actually experiences. Let’s look at what Armin says vs.what the manga shows us: Armin portrays himself as a hopeless coward faced with his bullies. But in thevery first encounter we see him have with them, he talks back and stands up forhimself like a badass. In Eren’s flashback in chapter 83, it’s confirmed thatArmin never runs away from those bullies, and probably stands his ground thesame way he did in the first chapter. While Eren and Mikasa would beat his bulliesfor him, that’s not the only way to win or be strong – as Eren would agree,deeply impacted by Armin’s resolve as he was. Armin talks about how he was tooweak to fight for himself, and he selects the images of him crying on theground to emphasis this – so we’re fooled to see the same thing he sees – but that’san image that’s stripped of the positive aspects of him, because it’s hisimages. What we don’t see from his perspective, but that we see in the reallife encounter, as well as Eren’s flashback, is a strong-willed boy with witsto make up for lack of muscle. Does it not take just as much strength to standyour ground (and not hit back), as it takes to wrestle someone to the ground?

Somethingthat further drives home the point that Armin shapes the past to fit hisnarrative, is how he gives us the impression that the fist fights the trio gotinto were all for the sake of him. But that actually isn’t the case! Back inchapter 45, we get a description of the same past, through the eyes of an outsider,and I think you’ll find that it’s rather different from Armin’s way ofportraying it:

Rightbefore these pages, Mikasa and Armin muse on how sad it is that Eren alwaysseemed to run away from them. That, paired with what Hannes is saying, itappears that the dynamic was thus: the trio had each other’s back and weren’tparticularly fond of others, because others weren’t frond of them. Armin wouldget picked on and helped out by his loyal friends, but Eren would also be arowdy kid with a lot of energy, who ran off and got himself into trouble thathis friends would try to help him out of. As Mikasa seemed to be left behind aswell, I’d wager she was more calm and wished Eren would be less antsy. See?This is a dynamic that actually feels more – dynamic! It’s not an entireexistence focused on aiding a lesser human (Armin). Armin had his own struggleswhere others had his back, but that was only one third of this trio’sstructure. Yet, his issues blinded him, because he was too ashamed to look pastthem. So, as narrator, that’s the only third he’s able to pass on to us. We, asviewers, have done him huge injustice by taking it as proof. We’ve missed thepoint: this is what Armin thinks, and he’s wrong! We aren’t shown his skewed interpretationof his childhood to learn about his past, it’s shown to us so that we can seehow warped his self-image is – to see what he’s struggling with! Ultimately, sothat we can understand what a major feat it is to have achieved everything he’sachieved! Armin even says it himself early on: it was all in his head! Yet, the anime – and by extension, big parts of the fandom (and the wiki) –simplifies his character. They choose to go with Armin’s own accounts, and sowe’re continuously fed this (third of a) narrative that is unhealthy andincorrect, by way of excluding context. Armin was helped out by his friends –like everyone with good friends is – and so was Eren! That isn’t a detrimentalsign of weakness to Armin’s character – not until Armin starts telling us itis. Having friend who are willing to fight for you, doesn’t equal you beingweak and a burden. Our mistake is that we didn’t fact check. Coming back to thewiki, I’m not overly excited about them presenting it the way Armin does,because it adheres to the simplification and “no questions asked” approach thatthe anime has. But again, I know this, so I steer clear of the site,personally.

As a sidenote: in Hannes’ memories, Armin has barged into the midst of the fight and isholding back Eren, so it doesn’t appear that he was afraid of going hands-on ina non-violent way – further proving that him not being violent for his owndefense, was at least to some degree a conscious choice instead of a weakback-down).

Other thanthat, yeah, the wiki gives a pretty standard, ok surface description, if youneed a quick gloss-over refresher on Armin Arlert.

[justanothercinemaniac]

Epic Movie (Re)Watch #121 - Back to the Future

Spoilers below.

Have I seen it before: Yes

Did I like it then: Yes!

Do I remember it: Yes.

Did I see it in theaters: Yes.

Was it a movie I saw since August 22nd, 2009: Yes. #383.

Format: Blu-ray

This is super long. You have been warned.

1) I love this movie. With all my heart. With a burning passion. It is my favorite film of all time. I first saw it...well, I was probably 7 when I first saw it but I didn’t remember it much. I first saw it and remembered it on my 13th birthday and watched it with my family and freaking fell in love! I ended up watching it once a month for the next year, I’ve seen it easily at least 20 times, I even got a chance to see the entire trilogy in theaters on October 21, 2015! And I think that’s all because it is connected to a time in my life when I needed an escape like this. Back to the Future provided me with comfort during a year in my life which was one of the hardest in my life. I would not be a film student today if it were not for this movie, I could probably write a book on the trilogy! I’ll do my best to keep this shorter than a book though.

2) The opening pan of Doc Brown’s lab is a great way to start the film. The high number of clocks puts an emphasis on times (with the clock of Harry Lloyd hanging from the hour hand being particularly foreshadowing), and we get a lot of information for smoothly.

Doc Brown used to be rich but his mansion burned down.

We know the film is set in 1985.

There is some missing plutonium.

Doc is an inventor, as seen from all the inventions he has in the lab.

It’s a simple, memorable way to start the film and I love it.

3) Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly!

Marty McFly is honestly you’re average guy without being boring. He’s got people in his life he cares about and who care about him, he’s got ambitions even if they’re not “change the world” ambitions, he has anxieties, and he’s just very relatable. Also he’s pretty cool, and his introduction establishes a lot of important things about Marty. It shows us his love for music, a sharp wit (“Rock ‘n Roll!”), and an ability to roll with the punches (for example, being flung across the room by an amplifier and then saying, “Rock ‘n Roll!”).

Honestly Marty NEEDS Michael J. Fox. Eric Stoltz was originally cast in the role as Fox (who was the filmmakers’ first choice) was busy on his TV show “Family Ties” at the time but Stoltz was just NOT working out. It’s easy to make Marty sort of annoying on paper. There’s a Back to the Future comic book running right now and there was an arc starting around issue #6 where Marty started to bug me. And that’s because he was PURELY writing, there was no Michael J. Fox to bring that x factor Marty needs so badly. Fox (who ended up working on both “Family Ties” and Back to the Future at the same time) is what MAKES the character. There is no Marty McFly without Michael J. Fox.

4) Doc tells Marty that his, “experiment worked! [The clocks] are all exactly 25 minutes slow!” How is that an experiment? Can’t I do that with my clocks?

5) “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis & The News is a great theme song for the film. I personally prefer “Back in Time” which plays towards the end of the film, but there’s no underestimating the power of “The Power of Love”. It’s a memorable, slick tune, which plays under a scene which very easily gives us a sense of what the town of Hill Valley is like. Another key ingredient to the film.

6) Freaking Strickland.

Strickland is not on screen for much time but he’s memorable. And that’s because he’s a raging asshole. Actor James Tolkan is able to play Strickland well in his few scenes because he makes his assholish nature funny. Much like Jeffrey Jones’ character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Strickland is someone MAD with the little power he has. I mean look at that GIF above! Personal space, dude! It’s hysterical, and the character forever changes the way I hear the word, “slacker!”

7) Hey, look Huey it is! (I’m so sorry.)

8) In there few scenes together, Michael J. Fox and Claudia Wells make you feel that Marty and Jennifer REALLY love each other. There’s a quiet trust and honesty to their performance, an ability to talk with each other openly while being true to who they are. Do you think Marty would tell ANYONE else his fears about his rejection? His parents? No, no he wouldn’t. It’s a shame we didn’t get more Jennifer in the film, but the little we do is much appreciated.

9) This film really excels in the exposition department, because it gives you the information you need to know in smooth natural ways. You don’t feel like the film has paused to tell you, “This information is important,” it just makes sense! Whether it’s done for laughs or because it’s an honest character moment, it just works! This is true in:

The “Save the Clocktower” scene.

Lorraine telling her children how her and George met.

Doc Brown giving us ALL the exposition we need about his time machine.

10) Oh Biff.

Biff [after we learn he wrecked George’s car]: “I can’t believe you lent me your car without telling me it had a blind spot in it!”

I’ll talk more about Biff once we get to 1955.

11) Thomas F. Wilson, Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson all day amazingly playing the old age versions of their characters. You don’t feel like you’re watching 20 somethings play adults, you feel like you’re watching adult performers! And then it feels as natural when they’re playing the teenagers in 1955. It just works and I give massive credit to not only the actors for pulling that off but also the makeup people for not making the old age stuff look too ridiculous.

12) Okay, what 47 year old man calls someone a butt head? Like, how juvenile is that? I mean that’s probably the point, because it’s Biff, but still!

13) It’s a running gag throughout the series that Marty’s uncle/Lorraine’s sister Joey is in jail. Except...WHAT IS HE IN JAIL FOR!?!? I MUST KNOW!!!! MURDER!? ARSON!? FRAUD!? FALSE ADVERTISING!? WHAT IS IT JOEY!?

14) So, Lorraine in 1985 seems...pretty miserable to me. With watching it 20+ times I see that she’s pretty much an alcoholic, she’s always morose, she rarely smiles, and the look on her face after she recounts the story of how she and George fell in love...like she does NOT look happy!

And then that line becomes sort of greater after finishing the film. By 1955 standards she “chased” Marty as Calvin Klein, meaning she probably felt that she chased George too. Now she regrets that and wants to A) create some revisionist history and B) make sure other people don’t make her perceived mistakes. Thank god for time travel to make her life better though!

15) Remember this sign:

16) Alan Silvestri’s INCREDIBLE score does not kick in until 18 minutes into the film, first appearing when the DeLorean first shows up. That’s because up until this point life was normal. Marty went to school, got busted for being late, Biff was an ass, a normal day. Then the extraordinary enters the picture and Silvestri’s score signals us of that.

17) Christopher Lloyd as the iconic Doctor Emmett Brown.

(GIF source unknown [if this is your GIF please let me know].)

Lloyd is spectacular in the role. Be is able to mash up the mad scientist archetype and bring to it a warmth and childlike glee to every moment. He is EXCITED! He’s passionate about all he does and that is his dominating personality trait. He’s not mean or condescending like Dr. Frankenstein, he’s just this guy who wants to do something great with his life and he finally accomplishes that! Lloyd is great through and through, bringing that essential warmth and energy to every scene Doc is in. He feels over the top but he never feels phony. And his chemistry with Fox is off the charts.

Fun fact: Doc’s signature hunched over stature came about because Christopher Lloyd (6'1") is significantly taller than Michael J. Fox (5'4½") & they had to appear in frame together.

18) There is a fan theory out there that Doc was actually trying to commit suicide the night of the DeLorean test. He had himself and Marty placed right in front of the car, was joyfully surprised when it actually worked, and in 1955 comments that he, “finally invent[s] something that works!” That makes the film way dark way fast so we’re going to move on.

19) The DeLorean going into the future is just such an iconic image.

(GIF sources unknown [if these are your GIFs please let me know].)

Everything about that visually is so iconic and incredible. From the flames to the pair turning around, and ESPECIALLY the spinning license plate! All great!

20) The DeLorean.

Marty: “Wait a minute, wait a minute Doc! Are you telling me that you built a TIME MACHINE...out of a DeLorean?”

Doc’s immediate response was that he wanted to build a time machine with some style, and then goes on to say, “The stainless steel construction was perfect for,” and is cut off by the DeLorean returning to the present. WHAT IS THE STAINLESS STELL CONSTRUCTION PERFECT FOR DOC!? WHAT!?

According to IMDb:

Writers Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis actually received a fan letter from John DeLorean after the film's release, thanking them for immortalizing his car.

21) The interior of the car is just as sleek and simple as the exterior. There is nothing superfluous in this film, and everything that’s necessary is fun!

(I know this GIF is from Part II but it’s the best one I can find of the readout.)

22) I read a post on Tumblr which you can find here which said:

One of my favorite phrases my Creative Writing professor had for when you’re writing fantasy is ‘giving your story a Flux Capacitor’.

Because it’s not real, it doesn’t exist. But the way it’s thrown into Back to the Future, at no point does it throw the audience off or suspend any more disbelief than time travel would. You believe Doc when he says he created the Flux Capacitor - the thing that makes time travel possible, because the universe never questions him.

So it essentially means like, there are going to be elements to your universe that are just not gonna make any sense, even if you set up a whole system based on it. And the only way to make it work is completely own it. You cannot second-guess your system or else the reader will too. You can give it the strangest explanation, but write it like you own it.

23) Foreshadowing!

Doc [after he says he’ll visit 25 years in the future]: “I’ll also be able to see who wins the next 25 world series!”

24) The car chase between Marty and the Libyan nationalists is the first showcase of the film’s excellent action. In the action-y parts of the film the audience is kept tense at every turn. Every little moment has a cause and an effect and you’re just waiting on the edge of your seat to see what happens because of it. That’s great.

25) Robert Zemeckis has said that he and the filmmakers talked about having the time travel sequence be long and cool, but they realized it should be instantaneous. That when you travel back in time, you travel back in time in the same spot you’re in. It’s not like a TARDIS which moves you through time and space: if where you are was a farm 30 years ago, then when you travel back 30 years in time you’ll be in a farm.

26) Remember this:

27) The scene where Marty is wandering through Hill Valley in 1955 is done so well, and it establishes Hill Valley’s character. Because that’s what this town is: a character. Marty never travels back to Ancient Rome or Capone’s Chicago, it is ALWAYS Hill Valley and we get to know the town and its history because of that.

28) Biff and his crew.

Biff is shown at his most villainous in 1955, when he’s a big freaking bully! But Thomas F. Wilson also makes him enjoyable to watch. You like it when he gets punched and embarrassed, and Wilson brings a lot of humor to what could be a very cold role. I’ll talk about one important improv later.

PS: That guy with the toothpick is Billy Zane!

(GIF originally posted by @d-white211)

29) Crispin Glover SHINES as 1955 George.

He’s a total weirdo in the role but that’s what makes it work! He’s socially awkward and a pushover and THAT’S his character, but Glover also makes it believable that George goes through the transformation he does by film’s end. It’s a shame they couldn’t really get him for the sequels.

30) Man, just wait until Lou gets to 2008.

Lou [after he hears that Goldie Wilson wants to be mayor, which he becomes]: “A colored mayor, that’ll be the day.”

31) This film handles the ideas of expectations vs reality well (like when Marty finds out his dad’s a peeping tom), and that’s where it shines. This isn’t some time travel film about time bandits or something. The science fiction is just the device to tell this really interesting, human story about a kid realizing he’s got more in common with his parents than he thought. And THAT’S why it’s so special!

32) Wait...

Sam Bane [after Marty pushes George out of the road and gets hit by his car]: “Stella! Another one of these damn kids jumped in front of my car!”

ANOTHER!?

33) Okay so the fact that Lorraine has the hots for her future son Marty is creepy (that’s the point), but it also makes sense. As I understand it human beings are naturally disposed to experience physical attraction to our own genetics in other people. So if you don’t KNOW it is your family member, than you just think it’s someone who’s cute because they look like you.

Also the way Lorraine handles herself around Marty (ie: over the top attracted to him, pushing him into a chair next to her, being so shocked by him showing up at school she falls back into her locker) makes me think she may be REALLY sexually repressed. Like, unhealthily so. Freaking 50s, man.

34) And there’s only one way Doc Brown could possibly open a door: looking like this.

35) A fun fact about this line:

Doc: “Then tell me, future boy: who’s president of the United States in 1985.”

Marty: “Ronald Reagan.”

Doc: “Ronald Reagan!? The actor!?”

President Reagan loved that line so much he asked the projectionist to play it again, and even used the quote, “Where we’re going we don’t need roads,” in his 1986 State of the Union address. I miss having a President who was secure like that.

36) Me too Marty. Me too.

Doc [after hearing they need 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to get the DeLorean to work]: “1.21 GIGAWATTS!? 1.21 GIGAWATTS! GREAT SCOTT!”

Also, did you notice that this is my 121st Epic Movie (Re)Watch? As in 121. As in 1.21? ;)

37) Roll credits!

Doc: “Next Saturday night, we’re sending you back TO THE FUTURE!”

38) Doc’s bemusement at Marty’s slang is so great to me. It feeds into his idea about what the future will be like.

Doc: “Why is everything so heavy in the future, is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull?”

39) I never got why Strickland called George a slacker for being bullied but he never calls out the bullies. Granted this has been happening in schools all across America for years now and I don’t get that either.

40) Remember how I said Lorraine’s marriage to George was unhappy?

Doc [about Marty’s parents]: “What are their common interests? What do they like to do together?

Marty [after a beat]: “Nothing.”

41) The idea of this being a boy who gets to know his parents really comes through when Marty learns that George writes sci-fi stories but doesn’t share them with anyone for fear or rejection. In the original timeline, did George keep writing sci-fi as an adult? Did Lorraine know? Did he tell ANYBODY and get rejected and that just made him stop writing? I have so many questions!

42) Thomas F. Wilson improvised this iconic line of Biff’s:

43) According to IMDb:

Universal Pictures head Sid Sheinberg did not like the title “Back to the Future", insisting that nobody would see a movie with "future" in the title. In a memo to Robert Zemeckis, he said that the title should be changed to "Spaceman From Pluto", tying in with the Marty-as-alien jokes in the film, and also suggested further changes like replacing the "I'm Darth Vader from planet Vulcan" line with "I am a spaceman from Pluto!" Sheinberg was persuaded to change his mind by a response memo from Steven Spielberg, which thanked him for sending a wonderful "joke memo", and that everyone got a kick out of it. Sheinberg, too proud to admit he was serious, gave in to letting the film retain its title.

44) George is absolutely hysterical in the diner scene.

DUDE YOU’RE A WRITER!!! DID YOU REALLY THINK THAT’S WHAT YOU WROTE DOWN!?!?!?

45) When Marty is confronting Biff at the bar and then in the skateboard chase around town, he plays it smart not tough. He distracts Biff before his one punch of the big brute and then maneuvers him around town in a way that’ll be beneficial to the young time traveler. It’s another excellent action scene which keeps you riveted at every turn.

46) There are probably so many GIFs out there of just Doc Brown reacting. This is one of my favorites:

47) Marty and his mother don’t get to know each other as well as George and Marty do, primarily because she’s trying to seduce him during his entire stay in 1955. But the scenes of George and Marty together as friends are great.

48) Also this line is attributed to Doc in the beginning of the film but we never hear him say it. Jennifer says it to Marty, Marty to George, and then George to Marty in the future.

49) Doc and Marty’s friendship in this film is great, as Marty is trying desperately to save Doc’s life in the future despite Doc not wanting to know. Marty respects Doc’s wishes but will be damned if he does nothing (hence the letter). Their friendship is developed as the trilogy progresses but it starts out strong.

50) Marty tries to prevent Lorraine’s alcoholism by keeping her from drinking when she’s 17. I appreciate that.

50.1) One of the best bloopers ever.

51) (Trigger Warning For This Note: RAPE) Okay, I love this movie but as I grow older I find that it kind of glosses over the fact that Biff is trying to RAPE Lorraine. And later in 1985 she’s totally fine having her attempted rapist come by their place regularly to wax their cars. Like...that’s super weird.

52) I always felt this scene could have either gone two ways: George becomes a self confident hero, or George becomes Norman Bates.

That’s like a really murdery face.

53) This is a very Hitchockian rule: it’s never over when you think it’s over. George punched out the bad guy and he’s going to the dance with Lorraine. All’s well right!? Well...no. Marty has to play guitar otherwise it’ll all go to shit. Marty, who’s super self conscious about rejection when it comes to playing guitar.

54) Johnny B. Goode!

The filmmakers described this scene as Marty’s victory lap. He just got his parents together! He’s playing the school dance! He’s going to go back to the future tonight! He’s going to have fun, and that’s what the number is. It doesn’t feel superfluous or unnecessary, it adds to the heart and excitement of the film. It’s amazing!

55) According to IMDb:

In the original script, Marty's playing rock and roll at the dance caused a riot which had to be broken up by police. This, combined with Marty accidentally tipping Doc off to the "secret ingredient" that made the time machine work (Coca-Cola) caused history to change. When Marty got back to the 1980s, he found that it was now the 1950s conception of that decade, with air-cars and what-not (all invented by Doc Brown and running on Coca-Cola). Marty also discovers that rock and roll was never invented, and he dedicates himself to starting the delayed cultural revolution. Meanwhile, his dad digs out the newspaper from the day after the dance and sees his son in the picture of the riot.

I don’t know how accurate that is but it’s fun to think about!

56) Not only am I going to include this next quote, but I’m also going to include what I said the first time I watched this movie with my family.

Doc [waiting for Marty to show up]: “Damn where is that kid?”

Doc [waiting, then checking watch]: “Damn.”

Me [with my family]: “Man, there’s a lot of swearing in this movie.”

Doc [checking his watch again]: “DAMN DAMN!”

That scene is so much funnier to me now just because of that instance.

57) The Clock Tower Climax is spectacular and it follows an age old rule of conflict: everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The cable comes undone, the car won’t start, Doc falls off the ledge (remember that foreshadowing I mentioned in point #2?), the cable is stuck on a tree, all while the clock is literally ticking away at their once chance to get this. It is glorious, and using the clock tower just reinforces the idea of time in the film (it was originally going to be a nuclear test site, à la Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) but they went for this iconic scene instead. Thank you filmmakers. Thank you.

58) Remember how the mall was called Twin Pine Mall in the beginning of the movie, and then when Marty went back in time he killed one of Peabody’s pines? Well when he goes back to the future something is a little different.

59) So now that Lorraine and George are happily married and George pursued his writing career, they family is like upper middle class (I don’t think they’re upper class). Crisping Glover did not like the fact that the films ending directly tied together money and happiness.

60) This film’s iconic ending was originally NOT meant to set up a sequel, but instead just tell the audience that the adventure kept going. Of course Robert Zemeckis and writing partner Bob Gale would return and finish what ended up being a trilogy in 1989 and 1990. But until then we have this perfect finishing line.

If my love for Back to the Future isn’t clear after the sixty notes you just read, let me reiterate: I freaking love this film. I love everything about it. I love the acting, the story, the direction, the music, the heart, the humor, the visuals, the themes, I love it all. I can’t imagine it not being my favorite film ever. Everyone needs to watch it as soon as possible. Seriously, everyone.

[shelbymeyer131-blog]

ESSAY I WROTE ON POSTMODERN ADS ( Images linked in paper)

_____

The Advertising Equivalent of Wearing Sunglasses Inside

It’s a little weird that when I started researching for this paper, when my brain was at its wit’s end with Fredrick Jameson, that I switched to reading a Thomas Pynchon novel. I was sitting in the same Los Angeles coffee shop where I’d read Less Than Zero last August; the same coffee shop across from the now-closed Tower Records, which had been decorated to look like it did in the late 80s. It looks legit, but behind the convincing facade is an empty shop. I wanted to take a break from postmodernism and was met with overwhelming postmodernism.

* * *

When I’m not reading postmodern novels, I’m trying my hardest to be a postmodern graphic designer. Postmodernism speaks to my soul; as much as it drives me crazy to research, it’s like an excuse to study stuff I actually care about in an serious context and still have it be valid. If it means I get to design book cover with a photo of traffic, Ralph Lauren ads, and 1960s computer graphics, then I’m happy to live in a postmodern world. There isn’t an official definition for postmodernism; the whole concept is pretty vague, and extremely controversial. The boiled down explanation consists of a fragmented reuse of existing imagery or ideas in a different cultural context, acknowledgement of medium, and less distinction between high and colloquial culture. Postmodernism is hallmarked by the existence of multiple yet coexisting identities or interpretations, and the realization that reality is a collage of things rather than one universal narrative. SPY magazine columnist Bruce Handy puts it best:

"It [postmodernism] can mean anything that's sort of old, but sort of new, a little bit ironic, or kind of self conscious-- like movies that steal bits from old movies, or photographs of the photographer. It's used in reference to creative endeavors that never had a modernist movement to begin with-- art forms such as music videos, rap songs, and panty-hose design. It's culturespeak shorthand for Stuff That's Cool in 1988.”

If I’m vain enough to claim I’m a postmodern designer, then I’m definitely vain enough to claim I’m a cool one too. Like postmodernism, “cool” is difficult to define because it’s applicable to a vast array of different contexts. My inclination is to list famous people (Keith Richards, James Dean, Debbie Harry, Jimi Hendrix, Kate Moss, et cetera, et cetera) but, while that seems to make perfect sense, it requires a bit more finesse of words. For something, or someone, to be cool, they must acknowledge a rule or cultural standard and deliberately subvert it. Specifically, a cool person understands what a rule means, deems it oppressive or wrong in some way, and decides that that particular rule no longer applies to them. In doing so, said cool person exhibits a certain confidence in their own judgement, deeming their opinion to be more correct than the established one. It’s important to note that the rules being broken aren’t THAT dangerous to other people (wearing all black is cool, murder is not) and that the actual break doesn’t stray too far from established.

It actually sounds a lot like the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. As David Harvey, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity: “We see postmodernism emerge as a full-blown though still incoherent movement out of the chrysalis of the anti-modern movement of the 1960s.” Postmodernism, knowing the strict rules of modernism, decided they no longer apply. Postmodernism is cool. I’m specifically interested in how this applies to advertisements; how the use of postmodern elements makes for cool ads.

The best place to start is with pastiche; it’s the most easily identifiable element of postmodernism, and one of my favorite things to see. It’s like an affectionate repurposing of a style or placing an existing style with its own context into a new one. It doesn’t modify the style to send a specific message, as done in parody, and it doesn’t necessarily intend to make the user think of it’s source. It’s like like unwrapping a present and reusing the wrapping paper, it can look the same from the outside, but the contents of the presents can be completely different.

Personally, I love when pastiche is used in advertising. The single most influential pieces of advertising, are the merchandise ads for Daft Punk’s 2013 album Random Access Memories. I’ve spent the past four years going on about how spectacular they are, using them as primary inspiration for multiple projects, including my conceptually driven sophomore studio capstone piece. I've admired the supposed realism of these ads, claiming that, in the right context, they’d be indeterminable from other advertisements from the 1970s. It’s true, they look like they could be found in old issues of Billboard or Circus. In the past, I’ve cited them as accurately depicting the style of that time period, but perhaps it isn’t. Pastiche is repurposing of a style not an time period. It isn’t the 70s being depicted, rather it’s the abstract "feeling" of the 70s (https://www.daftpunk.com/) 

Fredric Jameson, in his paper Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, uses the film Body Heat to better explain what it that “feeling” is. The film is set in the early 80s; the costuming, props, and demeanor of the characters enforce that, but the essence of the film feels like a 1930s film noir. Jameson argues that accurately capturing a time period is not possible to accurately capture a historical time period in term, rather it is the essence of how that time felt that is portrayed. In the case of Body Heat, it’s 1930s-ness.

Random Access Memories (and its ad campaign) is still a piece of 2013 culture but in terms of feeling and style, it is from the 1970s. Rather than capturing how the 70s accurately were, these ads aim to capture the feeling of 1970s-ness. It’s more than just an allusion to that time period, the immersive pastiche completely repurposes the disco visual style in a new time period. The ads confidently represents a world that doesn’t exist, that can’t exist because it never existed in the first place.  

Recontextualization alone isn’t what makes these ads cool. What makes them cool is the confidence to use a style that isn’t particularly revered in retrospect. I don’t think I’ve heard a style of music made fun of more than disco, and my first concert was KC and the Sunshine Band. Disco doesn’t get the musical respect it maybe deserves (as a visual style it isn’t much better off), and yet these ads don’t hold back. What makes them cool, in addition to being a visually seamless pastiche, is that they’re affectionally recreating a notoriously unpopular style. Rather than recreate something established as cool, the ads recreate a style that isn’t. They're daring and boldly ignoring the cultural status of disco. Confidence in that embrace makes the band seem more genuine and less reliant on wide acceptance. It makes them more likable, and the ads more compelling.

I love pastiche, but it doesn’t have a ton of depth. Honestly, postmodernism design, as a movement, isn’t exactly known for its depth. This means that what you see is what you get; there doesn’t have to be philosophical implications behind visual choices; an ad is often just an ad. Mass cultural critic Julian Stallabrass, argues that, beginning in the 1980s, ads started to be seen as a cultural art form, and there was less distinction between an advertisement and what it was trying to sell. This can result in reliance on the medium, in this case, the fact that it’s an advertisement. I’ve always been drawn to ads that announce their status as ads; it feels honest and sarcastic. There’s something attractive about a self referential ad that talks down to its viewer. M&C Saachti’s minimalist masterpiece for Ketel One is one of my favorite ads. (http://mcsaatchi-la.com/portfolio/dear-ketel-one-2/)

Its minimal black text, in Ketel One logo type, rests in the upper left segment of a stark white surface; the ad is doing little to connect with what it’s selling, and yet I’m completely inthralled because it’s ‘cool’. Visually speaking, the only notable connection to the product is the banded type face; the rest stays completely neutral. It feels effortless and aloof. It begins by directly addressing the viewer, announcing it’s ad, and immediately apologizing for it’s existence. Seemingly, Ketel One is completely transparent in it’s marketing strategy: stripping away the pretty visuals and fluffy copy, directly stating a message, and acknowledging that the viewer isn’t so easily fooled. It even goes so far as to apologize for ads being manipulative in the past. I was tempted to believe this ad wasn’t trying to trick me into wanting Ketel One, but I couldn’t shake the sarcastic tone I was getting from it. Perhaps it isn’t as direct as it seems

Sure, on the surface Ketel One is telling me “this is an advertisement” but, what I’d argue they’re actually saying is “Yeah, we’re advertising because so and so executive says we need  to, but we really shouldn’t have to. You should already know that Ketel One is great, and if you don’t already drink it, well, you’re the loser.” Maybe not in those exact words, but that’s certainly the tone I get. The goal isn’t genuine transparency, rather it’s using transparency to distance itself from how things are typically marketed. Rather than highlighting the positive aspects of the product and incising the viewer to buy it, this ad completely ignores this audience. It seems to confidently announce that Ketel One is great, regardless to if the viewer likes it or not. The ad dares the viewer to ignore it, the opposite of what ads are supposed to do. That’s what makes it cool, the confidence to be ambivalent toward the audience.  It acknowledges that ads are supposed to be manipulative, blatantly deciding not to fall into those trends, and, interestingly, that makes the product more desirable. The viewers wants to buy Ketel One, not because it will make their life better, not because celebrities are drinking it, but because it makes them feel like they’re missing out on something they absolutely shouldn’t be missing out on. It piques interest in the product, without acknowledging any need for the viewer.

If Ketel One ignores the viewer through its self reference, Moschino outright insults them.  If you don’t know, Moschino is a ridiculous Italian high-fashion house that often uses recognizable brands, like SpongeBob or McDonalds, in their designs. In this particular ad a photo of an expansive partly cloudy sky covers three quarters of the spread. Over the clouds reads in serifed text “this is an advertisement!” and below, in italicized script font “Couture!” The bottom quarter is filled with “MOSCHINO” in large black text. Visually, there isn’t anything denoting that Moschino is a fashion company. Honestly it feels very cliché. The copy appears to be self declarative and neutral but, upon closer inspection, is a direct insult. It's literally screaming "couture" at the viewer, as if to say “you wouldn’t know couture if it slapped you in the face, so here let me help you, MOSCHINO IS HIGH FASHION.” (http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/24523/1/cult-vault-moschino-s-rebellious-90s-ads)

Similarly to Ketel One, the strategy should push the viewer away, but since it’s confidently subverting established marketing techniques it seems more appealing. Seemingly, Moschino doesn’t care if it alienates some viewers, they don’t care about what they’re supposed to do.

Additionally, the cloud imagery feels more suited to the back of a 90s country CD or an Old Navy ad; it definitely doesn’t fit with standard high fashion imagery. Including both fancy and casual elements illustrate the postmodern concept of fragmentation. Rather than there being only one reality, the world is made up of tons of pieces. This made embracing more than one identity acceptable, and break down of the distinction between high and low culture. Fragmentation makes it acceptable that my parents to be yuppie deadheads, or me using drugstore eyeliner and $60 mascara. Moschino is using a cliché colloquial image of clouds and pairing it with they’re identity as a haute couture fashion company.  

Even more directly than Moschino’s clouds, is Gucci’s meme culture. Unlike Moschino, Gucci aligns more strictly with high fashion culture, and yet their new line of watches are being marketed with meme imagery and informal text. One of the more recognizable ads, created by Instagram artist Derek Lucas, alludes to a still image from the children’s TV show Arthur. The original image of a clenched fist is often paired with situational text as a visualization of frustration. In the case of Gucci, the image is a photo recreation of the popular image with a Gucci watch on the wrist. The photo is accompanied by the phrase “When your girl doesn’t notice your new watch.” Other than the watch being in the ad, there is no call back to Gucci specifically, the name isn’t present at all. It’s supposed to look like a meme. (http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/03/17/gucci-fashion-memes/)

Memes are made very quickly, and are not expertly planned before; unlike fashion, which takes months to prepare and thought about seasons in advance. They’re two extremely different worlds, and while the allusion could be seen as bridging the gap between a high fashion house and internet culture to expand the buying market; I don’t think that’s the case, especially since the watch pictured costs $850. Rather, I’d argue, it’s expanding the brand identity to include both expensive watches and dinky internet memes. It’s cool because Gucci is being inclusive of a style that it, historically, shouldn’t be inclusive of; it makes it feel like Gucci is purposely going against trends, but it somehow feels cringe inducing and isn’t very well liked. Objectively this is a cool ad, but it also feels like they spent a lot of money to make it look like they didn’t spend a lot of money.  

A more likable example is the fantastic M&C Saatchi creations for the Getty Center in Los Angeles. These ads feature medieval, classical, and renaissance paintings paired with exploitative tabloid headlines. For examples, one highlights the piece Bathsheba Bathing, where a nude woman stands in a pool while a man in a window stares at her. Surrounding the painting, in all caps, is the phrase “’He just stood there staring at my bits!’ Full frontal seductress tells all in royal peeping tom scandal.” on an expressive red background. (https://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/getty-center-creepy-king-9582005/)

The strategy could be seen as making the museum feel more inclusive, mixing highly revered paintings with pulp magazine headlines, but I don’t think that’s the case. Instead, it’s attempting to make a stuffy museum in Brentwood, California (the heart of wealthy, scenic LA) feel more lively and scandalous. It’s taking the modernist sacredness of the museum and dirtying it up; making the rules no longer applicable. Using low culture to market an upscale museum, makes them seem cooler. It seemingly allows the viewer to notice the more exploitative elements of the paintings, something that shatters the strict rules typically held by art critics and museum connoisseurs. That breaking of identity rules falls in the category of ‘cool,’ and, since it doesn’t stray THAT far from the established, is also a successful rebrand of the Getty.

In general, I think that postmodern advertising is a positive trend, something that breaks away from the established is, to me at least, more likable. In the same way Chuck Klosterman claims that the villains are more compelling because of their high regard for themselves and bravado, cool ads can make what’s being advertised more attractive. I’d rather see subversive and style heavy marketing than a paragraph explaining why a product will make my life better. The opportunity to repurpose any style in any context is liberating, and the results look better on the wall than earlier ads. The rebellious spirit of postmodernism advertising is not only inspirational, but completely cool.

[junker-town]

'The Bachelor' episode 9 recap: Raven's never had an orgasm, Corinne’s fate is sealed

In a short episode, we learn a whole lot about Raven’s past.

The last episode of The Bachelor ended on a cliffhanger, and I have a message for ABC: Stop it. At this point, these shouldn’t even be called cliffhangers, they should be called “how The Bachelor always ends now.”

You don’t have to do this. We didn’t come this far — TO THE FINAL FOUR — not to find out what happens. Those of us still watching this show are in it for the long haul. And sometimes, we just want to find out who gets sent home at the end of an episode like we did in the good old days.

WHATEVER, I’M OVER IT, LET’S DO THIS

When we left off, Andi Dorfman, Nick’s first Bachelor-franchise love, had just showed up at Nick’s hotel room. The producers tried to make it seem like maybe something was going to happen between them, but we, Sports Bachelor Nation, are smarter than that. We knew this was a fake-out, and we were right.

It's a whiskey conversation. @AndiDorfman #TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/otd0mIRK3x

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) February 28, 2017

All they do is sit around drinking whiskey and talking about Nick’s feelings. Andi’s like, “Soooo, how areeee youuuu?” in that typical way one does when one is on national TV catching up with one’s ex one met and dumped on national TV. Andi tells Nick he should sleep with the women in the fantasy suites if he wants to, rather than hold back in his desire for “clarity” (whatever that means). She calls it her feminist rant.

Most of the whiskey-fueled, feminist rants my friends and I go on end with, “AND THAT’S WHY ALL MEN ARE INHERENTLY BAD AND THE PATRIARCHY MUST BE DISMANTLED!” so I’m not sure Andi’s qualifies, but I guess there are degrees to everything.

Andi asks Nick if he regrets asking, after she dumped him, “Why would you make love with me if you weren’t in love with me?” Nick apologizes. High five, Nick. Way to realize that women don’t have to be in love to get it on.

THE COLDEST ROSE CEREMONY OF ALL TIME

The four remaining women are standing outside on a deck at a hotel in Brooklyn. They’re wearing evening gowns with jackets layered over them. It makes no sense to have them wait outside in New York City in the winter, a place that — believe it or not — does have heated indoor rooms. Trust me, I’m sitting in one right now. They exist.

The chill of a final four rose ceremony just got literal. #TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/72TyfVIXjO

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) February 28, 2017

All the women are anxiety spiraling in confessionals while Nick gets drunk with his ex-girlfriend. We’re about to cut to commercial, but, before we do, we see a preview of the rest of the episode we’re about to watch, in which Raven tells the camera that she’s never had an orgasm before.

That is ... there is ... WHAT?! She’s 25 and has never had an orgasm? Never at all? Or never with a man she’s having sex with? I have so many questions, but I’m going to wait to worry about it until we actually get to that part of the show.

BACK AT THE FREEZING COLD ROSE CEREMONY

Nick shows up. Raven gets a rose, as we knew she would, thanks to that bombshell of a tease. We know that Rachel won’t end up being the love of Nick’s life because she’s the next Bachelorette, but she’s safe for now.

Oh, God. It’s between Vanessa and Corinne.

NOOOOOO, CORINNNEEEE, NOOOOOOO!

I’m actually yelling at my TV. I knew Corinne had to go home. I knew it, but it still hurts. She’s a young 24, whereas Raven is coming across as an older 25, even though they’re both way too young for Nick, who’s a washed-up, 36-year-old Bachelor-goer-on-er. But I digress: Back to Corinne. NOOOOOO!

#TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/qNzGGAVGF9

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) February 28, 2017

Nick walks her out, and she apologizes between sobs for ever doing anything wrong. He’s very sweet with her; he’s like, “Trust me, you didn’t.” You can tell he really cares about her, just not in a “wife” way.

Corinne’s sad limo goodbye scene is so Corinne and therefore so perfect that, despite my heartbreak over about not getting to hang out with this spectacular creature every Monday night, I feel a little bit better. She says:

“I just want to feel loved the way it’s supposed to be, like, the normal way. Like, why can’t I just have a normal relationship? I say the things that men think are appropriate and, you know what, I’m done. I’m done trying to show my men how much I love them and care for them and support them. I need that, so if someone feels that way about me, they can come and tell me, and bring a ring, too. I’m done trying to impress these men. I’m going to be me. And whatever happens happens. But I will never kiss up to a man, ever again, in my life. I want to go to sleep.”

And she closes her eyes and goes to sleep.

Corinne’s, I would argue, is the true feminist rant of the night. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.

IT’S TIME TO GO TO FINLAND, THE TROPICS OF THE NORTH

The Bachelor always ends in a tropical location, but you know what they say about Finland: “It’s the Barbados of the Arctic Circle!”

Which is ostensibly why we’re here. It’s very beautiful. There are also only three hours of daylight, which means even more time to get rip-roaring drunk in darkness.

Raven’s date starts out in a bar. They’re playing darts with locals — three jolly, round white dudes wearing fur hats who must be Santa’s cousins.

Yes, this also against the rules in Finland. #TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/suqXF1KOzV

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) February 28, 2017

To the camera, Nick says that Raven has a “Southern, sweet charm” and a “wonderful, edgy craziness,” which is the “perfect combo of salty and sweet.” He’s “falling harder and harder for her.”

I don’t love the salty-sweet analogy because I don’t think you’d ever describe a man that way, but Nick assures us he’s a feminist when he insists that he doesn’t expect a wife to cook and clean for him.

Raven is like, “That’s good, because I can’t cook.” And Nick is like, “How do you feel about laundry?” And she’s like, “I own a clothing store, I fold stuff all day.” And he’s like, “Well, I can iron.” And she’s like, “Cool, but I’m going to introduce you to a steamer and change your life,” and I’m like, “Why are we trying to one-up each other about chores?”

But, hey, at least they’re discussing the logistics of having a life together rather than just talking about how talking about their feelings went.

RAVEN’S ORGASM-LESS LIFE

Raven, to the camera, says, “I’ve only have sex with one person. I’ve never had an orgasm before. It’s really taboo to discuss, but it’s important ... maybe I hadn’t before with my last person because I really didn’t trust him. You have to trust someone to be able to go there.”

HOO, BOY, there’s a lot to unpack here.

“Being physical and emotional means double the heartbreak if it ends up not being me at the end.” –Raven #TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/Y2gGlhTiFm

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) February 28, 2017

Imagine a man saying he’d never had an orgasm at the age of 25. I’m sure those guys are out there, but they’re few and far between, because in our society, men are supposed to. And yet, for women, there’s still a lot of shame associated with sexual pleasure.

That’s garbage.

Men: BE BETTER AT SEX!

Honestly, what is your problem? Figure out how to make a woman feel good and then do it, for crying out loud.

R.I.P. Raven’s ex. You just got dunked on so hard on national TV that I’m pretty sure you’re dead now.

If Raven’s lying, and she did have good sex with her ex but is just saying this to get back at him for cheating on her with that nurse, it’s the most impressive troll job I’ve ever witnessed. I wouldn’t put it past her, given that she’s already told us she hit him over the head with a stiletto.

DINNER IN FINLAND WITH LOTS OF WINE AND TALK ABOUT FEELINGS

At dinner, Raven is mainlining red wine, and Nick’s like, “Whoah, take it easy, champ!” Except he doesn’t say that, he just gently makes her put it down.

Raven tells him she was with her ex for two years but they never said I love you, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, you had bad sex with this guy for two years?”

“I’m embracing that I’m in love with Nick and I could spend my life with him.” –Raven#TheBachelor http://pic.twitter.com/LMIMoK7reB

— The Bachelor (@BachelorABC) February 28, 2017

Raven, through tears, says that she feels really comfortable with Nick, and then she says this:

“My dad used to tell me as a little girl that he prayed I would have an easy love. From the very beginning it was easy for me to see you as a partner. It was easy for me to see you, after seeing you with Bella [his little sister they keep trotting out on this show] as being a dad. And then it was too easy, how comfortable I felt with you. And I do love you. The worst thing I could do would be not tell you that.”

I’m here for this. Love is best when it’s easy. When it doesn’t feel like something you have to carve out space for or something that saps energy from you.

I’m going to be earnest for a second and channel my inner advice columnist, something I’ve secretly always wanted to be: If a relationship is painful — if the communication is bad, if the other person can be mean, or make you feel stupid, or taken for granted, or used, or left hanging — that’s hard, difficult love. It can still be love, sure. You can really care about someone who makes you miserable.

You just don’t have to put up with them.

Because I guarantee you — I guarantee — that there’s someone else out there who will be kind to you. Someone who will enrich your life rather than making you want to pull your hair out. “Easy love” won’t always be easy, of course, but starting from a good place makes the bad times far more tolerable than starting from a place that often hurts.

Hold out for that.

*~*~OK, back to your regularly scheduled jokes~*~*

Raven is like, now that I’ve said “I love you,” can I have more wine please? And then she tells Nick she’s never had an orgasm.

We end with Nick reenacting the training montage from Rocky in the snowy, northern woods.

A FEW THOUGHTS

At least there won’t be any added pressure on Nick to make this a good sexual experience for Raven!

I bet he ends up not sleeping with her. He kind of chickens out a lot, so that would be on brand for Mr. Curveball.

I think Nick really likes Raven. I think Raven is going to win.

This was a short episode. Next week is a regular two-hour long, Finnish extravaganza, followed by “The Women Tell All,” when the ones who got kicked off get to confront Nick. So please know that if I die next Tuesday, it was The Bachelor that killed me.

Everyone’s giving Nick shit about the turtleneck sweater he wore, but I don’t really have strong opinions about it. How’s that for a lukewarm take?