#I feel like I’ve been an absolute…slug drawing as of late

[renardsruses]

Woowoo, it’s Wednesday

[panharmonium]

no man can know his destiny...

...because if we told him what it was, he might decide to tell destiny to bugger off!

all right, folks.  i am obviously eight years late to this party (party?  maybe not party; that’s...maybe not the best word), and i am aware that everybody who was ever in this fandom has probably already consumed all the finale reaction posts that they ever needed to read.  i am putting this S5 finale round-up together for my own purposes anyway, because now that i’m no longer avoiding spoilers, i want to make sure i get all of my own thoughts down on paper before i accidentally run into anyone else’s. 

fair warning before anyone decides to invest their time: this post is sixteen single-spaced pages long.  i am putting it under a cut here, so feel free to scroll on by.  

with that said, off we go!

in a land of myth and a time of magic (i fell in love with a ten-year-old tv show):

so, to preface this, i think it’s pretty fair to say that i very rarely complain about merlin.

i watched the first episode of merlin on a complete whim - i was by myself, on a trip to atlanta, and despite the fact that i usually never sit down and just decide to watch random tv, i was scrolling around on netflix before bed and saw merlin and thought “oh hey, that’s always been on my list as something i thought i might like.”  i clicked it.  i watched it.  i thought it was going to be a silly, fun, low-investment show i could use to fill the spare time on my trip.

it was silly.  and it was fun.  it was not low-investment.  i fell in LOVE.

and i know this comes through in the way i write about it, like - the vast majority of the blogging i have done about merlin has come from a place of THIS THING IS GREAT AND I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT’S GREAT.  sometimes the story will go places that stress me out or make me sad, but usually that hasn’t impacted my enjoyment, because generally, when i evaluate stories, i react more to my perception of the story’s integrity, as opposed to whether or not i personally ‘liked’ the ending.  so i might personally prefer stories that don’t end in tragedy, but if the story has earned its ending, with integrity, then i won’t feel any desire to criticize it.  i will talk about how sad i am or how low it made me feel, but if the story has earned its ending then i can’t - i just can’t argue with it.  i have to respect it.  

and i think i’ve demonstrated that well enough in all the other blogging i’ve done about merlin.  with 5.10 and 5.11 particularly; i felt those episodes were impossibly tragic and dark and SO unhappy, but i respected the storytelling, despite this.  i wasn’t hopping on here to make posts like ‘ugh this is getting so dark this episode sucks!!!’  i was writing about the story they were crafting - which, yes, WAS getting dark, certainly - and about how impactful it was (even when that impact was just “OUCH”).  i was still deeply engaged, at that time.

so - i think i have earned the right to say honestly that the following analysis does not come from a place of ‘this was SAD and that makes it automatically CRAPPY!!!’  that’s not how i assess things.  5.10 and 5.11 were devastating, but i respect them.  i loved watching them.  i would watch them again.  i thought that the show had the potential to pull off something masterful, after those two episodes.

but the one thing this series has always struggled with a little bit is follow-through.  bbc merlin is at its finest when they aren’t afraid to go barreling after the moral ambiguity and complexities that their show inherently contains (‘to kill the king,’ ‘the sorcerer’s shadow,’ ‘the disir,’ ‘the kindness of strangers,’ ‘the drawing of the dark,’ to name just a few), and they achieve real greatness in those moments.  but they sometimes pull back from the difficult questions they pose.  and i can’t tell if it’s that they’re deliberately chickening out, or if it’s just some variation of carelessness or ineptitude that makes them fumble the ball, but the end result is that they hit these amazing highs of “wow, i can’t believe we’re finally going there; we’re addressing the central conflict” and then all the complicated questions they asked just get dropped.   

it happens in ‘the sorcerer’s shadow’ (which is an amazing episode otherwise), when kilgharrah kind of...word-of-god handwaves away merlin’s conflict, saying ‘we just gotta wait for arthur to be king, that’s the right way to go about this.’  and they double down on this by having merlin say that it was gilli, not merlin, who had betrayed their kind - which is just not - that is not what that episode had been saying, up until that point!  the entire point of that episode was that yeah, merlin has in fact gotten himself into a position where he’s made a morally questionable decision to serve a regime that oppresses him and others like him.  they show us how conflicted he feels when he’s confronted by this reality.  they show us that he knows it’s true.  it was brilliantly done - and then they pulled WAY back.

but even then i don’t think it was like...unforgivable, at that point.  it doesn’t break the story’s integrity; i can definitely believe that merlin would take that tack - i’m not sure he’s quite ready to confront/accept the reality of his situation at that point.  so i get it.  it wouldn’t be a big deal - if the show had eventually addressed/followed through on this conflict in the end.

and i think the same is true of the episodes leading up to the finale.  they were dark and complicated and tragic, but they were telling an important story; and none of the terrible things we saw happening to the characters were dead-ends, story-wise.  there was a place for that story to go.  there was room for morgana to have her arc resolve in a meaningful way.  there was room for mordred’s arc to do the same.  the place in which we found ourselves at the end of 5.11 was as dark and complicated as merlin had ever been, and it was still bursting with potential.  

and then you watch the finale and it’s just - empty.  i described it as a paper castle in some other post, and that’s what it felt like.  no substance.  it was like they stuffed us on a bullet train and whizzed us past material that should have taken an entire season to handle, and you didn’t see any of it or feel anything because the trip took ten seconds and the scenery was a blur.

it honestly felt like they thought they had another season coming and then someone popped in and told them “actually you have to wrap this up in two episodes.”  i can’t think of another way to reasonably explain how dramatically the quality of the storytelling downshifts between 5.11 and 5.12.  i wasn’t watching the show then, so i don’t know, but it’s - at least if that had been the case, i would UNDERSTAND what had happened.  it’s just insanity, otherwise.

so anyway, with all that said, here are my own reasons for why i think the last two episodes were objectively bad writing, as opposed to just writing i don’t personally like.  nobody is obligated to agree with me on any of these points, but i’m also not putting them up here to debate them, really - i truly believe that almost everything i watched in the last two episodes was poorly-conceived.  

(there’s an entirely different discussion to be had, of course, about the relative merits of ending your, uh, hopeful fantasy story on a bummer of a death knell, and i might touch on that later, but that’s a little bit more subject to personal preference, and honestly, it’s not the point i’m trying to make here, because to be frank, these episodes are bad without even getting into who lives and who dies.)

i. plot contrivances: EVERYWHERE.

i don’t mean plot devices.  plot devices are important, in a story.  a plot device is something like how merlin throws excalibur into the lake in 1.09, and then is able to retrieve it in 3.13 because of a choice he made to show someone compassion in 2.09, and thus he is able to save the day and defeat the undead.  excalibur is a plot device, in that scenario - the ability to use it in 3.13 unfolds organically.

a plot contrivance, on the other hand, is artificial.  it’s unnaturally convenient.  it doesn’t feel convincing.  it’s what you reach for when you can’t think of a way to make something happen, but a writer is supposed to look at these things when they edit and think ‘hey.  if i can’t make this happen without it being contrived, maybe it shouldn’t happen.  maybe i need to look at this again.’

so like, from the very beginning of 5.12, we have:

the face-sucker slug.  never seen one before.  never heard of it before.  never given any indication that any such creature ever existed.  never given any indication that “stealing” magic was something that could even happen.  no idea where morgana found it.  created for and introduced in this very episode, just to give merlin a reason to go to the crystal cave; removed from the episode ten minutes after it’s introduced, forgotten.

gwaine’s sudden girlfriend.  NEVER SEEN HER BEFORE.  NEVER HEARD OF HER BEFORE.  NEVER GIVEN ANY INDICATION THAT ANY SUCH CREATURE EVER EXISTED.  where does she come from?  why do we care?  (surprise: we don’t.)  created for and introduced in this very episode for the sole purpose of explaining how morgana could get the information she needed to interfere with everyone’s plans, which was a contrived idea in and of itself, because it relied completely on making gwaine act like the kind of dope who tells a civilian military secrets.  

you just.  you can’t.  if your plot point can’t function without a) introducing a brand new character in the penultimate episode of your show and b) forcing a long-standing character to do something they just wouldn’t do, you can’t use it.  you just can’t.  you have to figure out something else.

this lady’s very existence is nonsense.  absolutely, utterly contrived.  to waste that much time on a character we’ve never seen before and don’t care about, in the last two hours of your five-season show...incredible.

morgana’s army.  they outnumber camelot’s forces “five to one.”  where did they come from?  how did she amass such a force?  in season 4 she was losing all her allies - the episode with annis and caerleon was specifically designed to show us how people were turning from her methods and aligning with arthur.  and then she spent two years in a pit.  how did she amass such a force in such a short period of time?  what could she offer them?  why do they fight for her?  there is no explanation of who the “saxons” are or what they want - the show just needed an army for camlann.

aithusa.  aithusa was, apparently, just a vehicle to enable mordred to obtain a blade forged in the dragon’s breath.  beyond that, he served no purpose.  he literally just vanishes, along with that entire storyline - the future of the dragons, everything - just dropped, forgotten, never mentioned again.

morgana in the crystal cave.  “gee, i finally caught merlin, the guy who’s supposed to be my doom.  i think i’ll just...trap him behind some rocks.  wouldn’t want to kill him, while i have him completely powerless and at my mercy.  how then would he escape from this super powerful magical cave and ensure that the next step in this impossibly weak plot unfolds?”

the crystal cave itself.  what is the entire point of this detour?  killing time while arthur and merlin are separated?  i mean, the whole “merlin loses his magic for all of five minutes” thing was a contrivance itself, just to ensure that merlin and arthur had a reason to be separated during the battle.  but even putting that aside, once merlin is in there, and balinor says ‘you have to go into the light to discover who you truly are, you have power of which you cannot conceive’ - what purpose did that serve?  all we see merlin do once he gets to camlann is call down some lightning.  he’s done that before.  he...he did that in season one.  

the entire detour in the crystal cave changed nothing.  it was a contrivance to mark time so merlin didn’t arrive at camlann at the same time as everybody else.

arthur at camlann.  the idea that we are supposed to believe that arthur somehow finds himself all alone on that battlefield, long enough for mordred to sneak up on him and stab him and for him not be found by a single other human being until merlin shows up.  he is the KING.  there is no conceivable circumstance where his army lets him go wandering around by himself after the battle has been mostly won.  it doesn’t make sense.  it isn’t believable.  it’s a contrivance to make sure mordred has an opportunity to get him.

“only the sidhe possess such magic.”  the SIDHE?????  you guys.  the last time we saw the sidhe was in that gooftastically wonderful filler episode where a pixie wanted to bone gaius.  you can’t - you just - you can’t center your entire ‘this is how we save arthur’ plan on a race of beings that we haven’t heard of since early season 3 and which we never knew anything more about than that they once possessed a farting princess.

“not without the horses.”  are you telling me.  that the reason they don’t make it to this fabulous isle in time.  is because.  their horses.  were conveniently scared away. that’s what killed the glorious once and future king.  the horses ran off.  

and the horses conveniently ran off because they were conveniently scared away by morgana, who conveniently happened to show up because she was conveniently put in a position to extract information from someone who conveniently knew where arthur was going - all of this, of course, predicated on the impossible-to-believe assumption that a) gwen would ever tell anybody where arthur was going, when the stakes were this high, when nobody needed to know and camelot had already fallen prey to spies multiple times, and b) that gwaine and percival would, if they did for some reason know where arthur was headed, be so foolish as to literally serve themselves up to morgana on a plate, when they know that the whole point of this scheme is that they WANT morgana to hang out in brineved wasting her time in order to allow arthur to reach the isle safely. 

I SAY AGAIN: if your plot point cannot function without making characters do things we just do not believe they would do, you can’t use it.  you can’t.  you have to revisit what you’re doing.  you can’t just make anything happen that you want to in order to drive the story to the place you want it to go.  it has to make sense.

kilgharrah.  is called just in time to deliver a pat explanation of the ending, but not in time to shuttle arthur over to the isle?  merlin could have called for a ride ages ago. merlin and arthur weren’t traveling fast, or far.  it’s not like kilgharrah was having that much trouble getting around.  we see that he handles carrying the two of them just fine.  we see that he flies away, zoop, no problem.  there is no reason for him not to have been called even a single hour sooner, other than that the plot demanded that he could not be, because the plot demanded that arthur not get there in time.  

it breaks the boundaries of disbelief.  it takes you right out of the story.  it reminds you, inappropriately, that all of this is a thing someone planned (poorly).  all of it is contrived.

ii. dropped plotlines

i can’t believe i actually have to say this.  

i’ve seen tv shows tank before, but usually, when tv shows tank, it’s just that the quality of their writing has declined, and they’ve resorted to resolving their plotlines in ill-conceived ways. 

i have never, in my life, seen a tv show DROP all of its major plotlines before it ends.  i have never seen a tv show just.  FORGET.  to address their premise.  never.  i still can’t believe it actually happened.  i’m sitting here trying to remember if the merlin finale was actually some kind of anxiety-induced fever dream i had while i was gearing myself up to watch the last few episodes.  

merlin bbc had, at its outset, two major plotlines.  these would be supplemented later by other throughlines (many of which were also dropped), but the two major ones always stayed the same, one for arthur and one for merlin:

for arthur, the question of him one day becoming the greatest king in history and uniting the land of albion 

for merlin, the question of him one day liberating the magical community from oppression and being able to live free from fear

those were the two constant throughlines in this show, from episode one.  the struggle to unite the land of albion, and the struggle to make the land a free and just one for ALL of its people, not just those without magic.  

this show, somehow, ended without actually addressing either of these things.

it’s amazing.  i don’t even know how they managed it.  somehow, this show ended without actually ending.

to elaborate on this (and other dropped plots):

a) the once and future king: we never see a united albion.  the show is driving at it, in seasons 4 and 5, when arthur makes peace with annis in S4, and then gets annis’s permission to travel through her lands in 5.01, and then helps Mithian’s father in S5, and makes peace with odin in 5.04, and then tries to make peace with the sarrum in 5.08, and it’s all making sense, and you expect that plotline to continue until we see its eventual fulfillment at the end of the show.  you would expect, if this were supposed to be such an important thing, that the big struggle at the end of the series would have been all the peoples of albion united together against a threat.  

but we never see any of these kingdoms again.  we never hear a peep out of them. no one ever mentions them.  it’s like they all just vanished into the wind.  as far as we’re aware, camelot fights morgana’s army on their own - it’s like annis and odin and godwyn and rodor and those five kings that came together to sign the treaty in 2.10 never existed.  

the dragon says at the end, “all you have dreamt of building has come to pass,” but we’re just like - WHERE?  we literally didn’t see it!  it was never shown to happen! you can’t just say that the most important outcome of your five-season series happened when it never did!  it demonstrably NEVER DID!  you can’t…..oh my god, you can’t...try to end your show offscreen, lol; i don’t know what else to say!

look - this is something i wrote before i knew how the series ended, when i was considering the possibility of arthur dying:

i wrote that before i even knew what happened.  that’s not the result of, you know, retroactive complaining because they killed a character and i didn’t like it.  i was doubting the idea that they would even be able to kill arthur, because i legitimately didn’t believe the show had shown us the uniting of albion yet (and they hadn’t, lol).  

it just...it truly doesn’t make sense.  something got tangled as they approached these last episodes.  in 5.10, finna tells merlin, “without you, emrys, arthur cannot build the new world we all long for,” indicating that it hasn’t been built yet.  but that scene takes place just a few weeks before the finale - you’re saying “the new world” hadn’t yet been accomplished at that point, but now, a few week later, it has?  arthur didn’t DO ANYTHING in that interval!  we saw camelot fight off a bunch of invaders (alone) like they’ve done a billion times before.  there was nothing to hint that now albion is united.  

and if finna was referring to the “new world” meaning a magical world, i mean - arthur didn’t do anything to build that, either.  he died.

something happened.  some wire got crossed.  i don’t know what it was, but it meant that the show ended without actually closing out Main Plotline #1.  

b) one day, we will be free: this show also somehow managed to end without addressing the plight of the magical community, which was THE central conflict of the show for all five seasons.  more than that, it was the show’s premise - it was how they crafted their entire idea; it was one of two defining features of their pitch to BBC: that they would “wind back the clock” to when the characters were young, and that magic in this universe would be outlawed.  

they literally abandoned the show’s premise.  the episode directly preceding the finale was entirely about camelot’s wrongdoing and the right of magic-users to stand up and fight for their rights.  it is not a crime to fight for the right to be who you are.  and then we literally never heard a word about this struggle again.  it was dropped like a hot sack of bricks.  

IMPOSSIBLE. 

and yet 

it’s just left, twisting in the wind.  we have no idea what happened.  the one and only glimpse of camelot that we get at the end of this show has nothing to do with magic; it’s grim and somber people chanting ‘long live the queen’ in the throne room.  and then we’re gone from that place, forever, never to return.  it’s like they don’t even remember that ‘freedom for magical folk!’ was the driving source of conflict for the entire show.  you would never have known that “magical oppression” was ever a feature in this show, if you just watched the end.  camelot’s wrongs are never addressed, never referred to, never amended.  the fate of the magical community is never hinted at.  we don’t have any inkling of what happened to those people.  we literally do not even have any indication of whether the magic ban was lifted.  

it’s like none of that ever existed.  it’s like the show just FORGOT its entire premise. 

this truly might be the most unbelievable thing about the finale, for me.  i’m still having trouble wrapping my head around it.  in a roomful of writers and editors and producers, not a single person pointed out “hey uhhhh...we haven’t actually resolved either of our plots?”

i was exposed to enough vague reactions from fans to expect the finale to be disappointing.  i assumed that the show would resolve its major plotlines in ways that i either didn’t approve of or found unsatisfying.  

i did NOT expect them not to resolve their major plotlines at all.

i have never seen a tv show literally forget to end.  never.  never seen that happen before in my life.

c.) i am the last of my kind: the reveal of merlin as a dragonlord ushered in a third important plotline - his responsibility to the dragons, his duty to protect them and help them thrive.  and the question was always ‘all right, so as a dragonlord, how is merlin going to ensure the survival of the dragons as a species, since they’ve been almost exterminated - .’  and that was also dropped.  like a hot potato.  like it never was.  we never get clarity on what the heck was going on with aithusa, and then at camlann, aithusa just vanishes.  gone.  literally never to be seen, mentioned, or wondered about again.

d) i am old, merlin: this is a smaller thing, but in 5.10 the show starts this subplot about kilgharrah being unwell and merlin suddenly confronting the idea that kilgharrah is not, in fact, immortal.  and it was actually very poignant and made me emotional despite how kilgharrah kind of drives us insane.  they set us up for the idea that we are going to lose him.  they set us up to expect that we will eventually see merlin arrive at a place where he doesn’t have that voice in his ear anymore, kind of like when luke goes to cloud city and obi-wan can’t help him.  

but then, in the finale, kilgharrah just shows up like he always does, and there’s no mention of anything that came before.  he’s fine.  

it’s - it’s inconsistent, it’s not appropriate; there’s no emotional throughline.  the exchange they have in 5.10 is such a beautiful moment, when a wavering merlin asks “what will i do without you?”

and kilgharrah says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, “you will remember me.”

that’s such a powerful thing.  for someone like merlin, for someone who has lost so many people who mattered to him - you can feel that line expand to cover miles and miles of ground.  it’s about more than just kilgharrah.

but having kilgharrah then show up at the end of the finale to deliver his neat little explanatory summary the same way he always does dilutes that previous moment down to almost non-meaning.  there’s no emotional consistency.  they emotionally prep us for this figure’s departure, and instead he shows up, the same as always, with no reference to the fact that a few episodes ago we were getting ready to watch him leave us. 

it’s not good writing.  it just isn’t good writing.

iii. i want you to always earn your ending

i think it’s hard to come to grips with the idea that bbc merlin was specifically a show whose kind of...big premise was being a deliciously torturous slow burn up to some massive and long-awaited reveal, and then it fizzled just before it gave the audience what it had been leading up to for five seasons.  it’s really just...wow.  i’ve seen shows fizzle before, obviously, but the fact that this one was specifically built on the idea that you were waiting for something momentous (and inevitable!) to happen - which then doesn’t happen?  that’s just...hoo boy.   

the long-awaited, promised “payoff” doesn’t happen in any way that is convincing or satisfying or remotely plausible.  it’s a little walk in the woods, and it ultimately doesn’t matter, because as soon as it’s over, so is the show, and everybody except merlin is long dead.  

not with a bang, but with a whimper, indeed.

for a show that had its audience waiting on tenterhooks for five seasons for merlin’s secret to be stripped away, the fact that the show’s biggest “payoff” ended up carrying so little weight and feeling so unconvincing is truly a shame.  there was no way for the show to give this concept the weight it deserved by flying through it in thirty minutes.  the audience knows that there’s no way this could have been resolved so quickly, so everything that happens between the “reveal” (such as it was) and the end feels...false.  it doesn’t seem real.  it’s not believable.  it feels (again, to use the word that truly sums up the entire spirit of this finale) contrived.  rushed and squished together to be neatly tied up in the time they had available.

and that’s poor craftsmanship.  stories shouldn’t feel like ‘well, i needed to reach x destination no matter what, so i made this that and the other thing happen to ensure that we got there.’  a reader/viewer shouldn’t be able to sense the presence of the author.  they shouldn’t be able to feel the hand of god reaching in and arranging pieces to force a conclusion or extract an emotion that hasn’t been earned.  

stories, if they are crafted appropriately, should feel like they have no author at all.  like they just are.  like everything that happens is the natural next step to whatever came before, as if events could not possibly have unfolded any other way.  and i don’t feel like the “reveal” and arthur’s reaction to it met those criteria.  all the supposedly super sad and emotional moments they were having at the end made me feel absolutely nothing, because the things arthur says don’t feel real.  they haven’t been earned in-story.  i felt like i was watching that sequence from a hundred miles away...just like...clinical.  removed.  like i was taken completely out of the story.  like i was in the lighting booth of a theater watching some scripted scene play out below me.    

(and this might be the time to mention that this has NOTHING to do with the actors.  the entire cast was killing it.  they were AMAZING.  their performance threatened to wring emotion out of me even despite me being completely unconvinced by the idea of what was happening.)

but that aside - how can you stay immersed in something when you can feel the creator’s hand coming down and forcing a resolution that doesn’t make sense, that hasn’t been earned?  it snaps you right out of the suspension of disbelief that all stories require you to maintain in order for you to engage with them.  the writers needed arthur to say these things sometime before the end of the show, and so he says them, regardless of whether or not it would ever actually happen like that.  but i didn’t believe it, because it wouldn’t have happened like that, and so the emotional impact was zero.

here’s the truth: you can’t use lines like “i want you to always be you” and expect me to get weepy about it when you haven’t earned that kind of resolution.  it’s a false tearjerker.  the writers are relying on our previous emotional attachment to these characters and our burning desire to see merlin validated in order to slip a contrived resolution past us without actually doing the work to make it plausible.  they’re playing on our affections in order to cover up the structural shortcomings of the story they cobbled together.

i don’t like when a story tries to manipulate me like that.  i’m not going to play that game.

iv. you are destined to be albion’s greatest king (*thor face* are you, though?)

i think there are probably some people out there for whom arthur’s death would have been a dealbreaker no matter what the rest of the story looked like.  i respect that.

i’m in the camp where i could have accepted the ‘legend-compliant’ ending, if only it had been earned.  as it is, arthur is never allowed to fully realize himself before he dies.  the show keeps saying, and i quote, “one day you will be the greatest king this land has ever known,” but arthur skips off to avalon after having reigned for a whopping total of three years, during which time he is not shown to accomplish the only goal that was prophesied for him (uniting the land of albion) and during which time he also becomes further entrenched in his father’s anti-magic views (along with the hypocrisy of using magic for his own purposes), as opposed to ever seeing the error of his ways.  he doesn’t right his father’s wrongs.  he doesn’t usher in justice and freedom for all camelot’s people.  he doesn’t change the status quo in camelot much at all, to be honest - and then he dies.  and they try to tell us “there will never be another like [him].”

how?  how can that not fall completely flat?  he hasn’t accomplished his goal yet!  he hasn’t become what they’ve kept telling us he will become.  

so i can understand the ultimate plan of arthur shuffling off this mortal coil and being prophesied to return, and i could even accept that as an appropriate ending, but not when it hasn’t been earned.  the way it actually unfolded, watching this moment feels like we skipped a season somewhere.  it feels like a sham.

we’re being asked to give arthur credit for something he did not actually achieve, and it makes the whole thing feel like a farce.

v. gratuitousness and inconsistency

i had no emotional reaction when i realized they had actually killed gwaine.  

that is insane, because you know how much i love him.  but his death was so ridiculous that I actually started laughing in disbelief.  and that in and of itself should be a sign that something wasn’t working.  when your emotional beats are landing this wrong - falling this flat - something has slid fundamentally sideways with your storytelling. 

i laughed when they killed my favorite knight!  but what other reaction was i supposed to have?  it was laughably silly!  the premise itself was already foolish - that gwaine and percival would even come out here and endanger arthur in that way - and then gwaine dies because morgana used a nathair to extract information from him?  we’ve seen morgana use the nathair twice before!  she tortured elyan with it.  she used it on alator.  neither of them died.  it’s never been indicated that being tortured with this creature will kill you. which isn’t to say that it can’t be the case, but from a writing perspective, if you’re going to use a sudden inconsistency to kill a major character, it’s noticeable!  it’s jarring!  and it makes us feel, once again, that the writers just grasped at any little thing they could think of to make what they wanted to happen happen.

and then there’s the whole question of why they wanted gwaine to die in the first place.  what purpose did it serve?  gwaine didn’t have to die in order for morgana to get the information the writers wanted her to have.  and you’d assume that if they still killed him after that, that there would be a reason for it, or that it would at least...matter, somehow, but - WE LITERALLY NEVER HEAR ABOUT HIM AGAIN LOL.  i wasn’t even sure he was dead at first.  that’s how insignificant it felt.  i felt like zuko in the ember island players.

that’s it.  we never see him or percival again after that scene.  there’s this weird moment where percival examines a footprint and the implication is that he’s going to follow morgana or something, but then it never happens.  it’s like the showrunners ran out of time and were like ‘ok well, we just won’t be able to get back to that dangling thread.’  they gratuitously axed their most developed knight and then forgot they did it.

that’s why i laughed.  it was so unbelievably bad - there was literally nothing else for me to do.

vi. let the bodies hit the floor (but like, anticlimactically)

i don’t feel like i need to examine mordred and morgana’s fates too closely, because i suspect the subject of “they deserved better” has already been done to death, and that’s kind of a different conversation than what i’m dealing with here.  i’m not here right now to argue that they should have lived (though of course, yeah, i have my opinions on what would have made a better story), i’m just here to deal with how ineffectively the story we did get was executed.

one thing that amazes me is that when i watched the S5 deleted scenes, i realized that the showrunners did in fact originally have the right ideas about making morgana and mordred’s arcs deeper/more nuanced, but somehow these ideas never made it into the final cut.  there are two deleted scenes that change so much about what could have been - one where arthur and merlin are talking about morgana and arthur is expressing regret and confusion about what happened to her, and merlin says it’s not arthur’s fault, that “there were others better placed to help morgana,” indicating his own guilty feelings.

and the other one was after mordred defected to morgana, where he has a whole conversation with her about how he thinks there is still GOOD in arthur!!!!  he’s uncertain about what he’s doing!  I JUST

i can’t believe

they had the seeds

of this better story

and they consciously decided not to pursue them.  it’s not like they didn’t have the idea.  it’s not like they just never thought of it.  they thought of it, filmed it, and deliberately removed it.  unfathomable.

it’s also pretty remarkable that the big baddie they’ve been touting for the last three seasons just pegs out from a stab wound in about 5 seconds as we’re being hustled on to something else.  there is no space devoted to morgana’s death scene (such as it was…).  it’s a parenthesis.  it feels like, ‘oh we gotta get this out of the way quick hurry up let’s move on.’  

and the thing is, i am not wholly opposed to the idea of morgana ultimately destroying herself - it’s not necessarily my first choice, but there are ways they could have gone that route and still told a meaningful story - but if they wanted to go that way, her death would have to matter.  it would have to be treated like the terrible failure it represents.  it would have to be given the weight of tragedy.

but structurally, the way this scene is set up, there is no way for this to happen.  the viewers are already hyper-strung out on tension, when she appears, because they’re suddenly starting to get this horrible realization that one of the show’s two central characters might actually be about to die, but nobody wants to stop clinging to hope despite their bad feelings so there’s just this desperate, screamingly loud ticking clock running in the background, and when morgana shows up in the middle of that clenching fear, there’s absolutely no way her death can receive the attention she deserves.  the audience doesn’t have room for something like that.  they don’t have room to feel anything on top of what they’re already feeling.  they’re already about to explode.  they’re already maxed out on investment.  they can’t focus on her; they want her to disappear because something more urgent is going on.

and so the show hustles us past her, and her death is just this blip.  it barely registers. if you sneezed, you would miss it.

(and then mordred, for his part, doesn’t even have the benefit of a structural problem to explain the anticlimax of his death.  he just gets taken out like the trash.  for a character that they just spent all this time developing and making sympathetic - boy.)

i think...the thing, ultimately, is this: if this show truly felt that what they had to do was take their previously hopeful premise and stun their audience with the death of the hero, then they should have understood that trying to stack other things on top of that is too much.  trying to squash morgana’s death right up against arthur’s is foolish.  it’s ridiculous to expect your audience to be able to process morgana’s death and arthur’s in-progress dying at the same time.  these two things happen within two minutes of each other.  the audience has been following these characters for five years.  it’s unreasonable to expect your audience to hold so much emotion at once.  

vii. you’ll just have to trust me

the last thing i want to say is a more general thing.  

the rest of this analysis focused on the ways in which the finale is poorly-crafted, rather than on my personal feelings about who they did dirty.  it’s not really about my own personal thoughts re: the merits of killing gwaine and morgana and mordred and arthur or stranding merlin across the centuries; it’s about if these things (and all the other things in these episodes) were done effectively, and the answer, sadly, is no.  the show could have killed all these people and still written something i would have respected (even though it would have been devastating), but that’s not what happened.

but here, at the end, i think i can make room for a little sentiment.  

so what i want to reflect on here is this: ultimately, i don’t end up rejecting stories just because they do things i don’t like.  the pre-finale episodes were filled with things i didn’t like.  i hated how merlin turned mordred and kara in instead of letting them run.  i hated how he let the execution proceed.  i hated how arthur refused to see the injustice of his own actions.  i hated how merlin was getting so wrapped up in ‘make sure arthur doesn’t die’ that everything else was fading away, that he was doing things he could never have done in good conscience before.  but i was still deeply wrapped up in these stories, because i believed they were plausible and true.  i accepted them.  it made sense to me, that these things would be happening, dark and unpleasant as they were.

i don’t start rejecting stories just because they go places i don’t want them to go.  i start rejecting stories when i feel they’ve betrayed my trust.  

writers and readers/viewers can only ever move together if they trust each other.  i allow stories to take me places i don’t want to go because i trust the authors to keep me safe while we travel.  i know that they may take me somewhere i don’t want to be, but i trust that they will never take me somewhere i don’t need to be.  i trust that they are taking me somewhere intentionally, with the story’s integrity in mind.  a creator i trust can take their story anywhere, because i know they will take care.  a creator i trust can end their story tragically, because they remember that i am experiencing it alongside them.  they don’t surprise-punt me off the edge of the cliff so i can crash, alone, into the painful conclusion.  they carry me the whole way, and by the time we get to the end of the line, we can both look back and see that the road that led us here was straight and true.  i don’t fault them for taking me here.  it was the right place to go.

the end of merlin didn’t feel like that to me.  putting aside the fact that it was all so contrived that it didn’t even feel real (illustrated clearly enough in the ten pages above) - the truth is that even if it had displayed the highest quality writing in the world, the way this show ended felt like the audience had been abandoned.  the bond of trust between the creator and the consumer was severed.  the show forgot to take care.

i’m a ‘galaxy far far away’ girl first and foremost, so i’ll borrow an excerpt from the world according to star wars in order to make my point:

kasdan: i think you should kill luke and have leia take over.

lucas: you don’t want to kill luke.

kasdan: okay, then kill yoda.

lucas: i don’t want to kill yoda.  you don’t have to kill people.  you’re a product of the 1980’s.  you don’t go around killing people.  it’s not nice.

kasdan: no, i’m not.  i’m trying to give the story some kind of edge to it…

lucas: by killing somebody, i think you alienate the audience. (x)

i think merlin forgot this.  

i’m not saying that merlin shouldn’t have killed anybody at the end of their show.  i’m not even saying that they shouldn’t have killed arthur.  i’m saying that they forgot to take care.

merlin bbc betrayed their audience.  you cannot take a show whose underlying theme has consistently been the promise of better things and then turn around and end it like that without taking special care of the people who are watching.  you cannot just take an audience who has spent five years listening to someone bright and full of unflinching hope say - without any indication that anyone should doubt the certainty of this statement - “one day things will be better” and expect them to walk into this kind of ending safely.   

by killing someone, i think you alienate the audience.  and this doesn’t mean that nobody can ever die.  but it does mean that if you’re going to kill someone, you have to understand that there is going to be an automatic pain reaction from your viewers/readers/etc, and if you want to maintain their trust, you have to take so much care.  you have to be sure that you know exactly what you’re doing.  you have to be sure that it’s the right thing.  the only thing.  you have to make sure that it doesn’t betray the fundamental promises you’ve made whilst crafting the rest of your story.

the end of merlin is truly stunning in a) its utter reversal/unfulfillment of every major promise that comprised its premise and b) the casualness with which it throws its characters away in the last episode.  it’s not just “killing someone.” it’s a slaughter.  we have to watch almost half the cast die onscreen, and then at the very end literally everybody is dead except merlin himself.

and this is merlin!  not game of thrones!  merlin is a “family show;” that’s what the writers/directors/producers keep calling it when you listen to the episode commentaries and they talk about how they can’t show certain things or make it too bloody.  they wanted to follow in the tradition of “big, kind of epic family-entertaining shows, that—across generations—work on lots of different levels.”  but i cannot imagine a young person who has watched this show for five years coming into the finale to see mordred and gwaine and morgana and arthur violently executed, and to see gwen in mourning, and merlin anguished and then more alone than he ever was even when he was hiding his secret, and then, whoop, there’s the credits, that’s all folks.  aren’t you glad you got on this ride? 

the show ends without fulfilling any of the promises it made repeatedly for years.  the liberation of magic, the uniting of albion, and, for merlin, especially, the long-predicted day when he would be known and recognized for who he was - all forgotten.  all abandoned.  the finale finishes without giving the audience any of the things that they have spent five years being told to expect.  the show rewards five years of emotional investment with death and desolation.  it breaks all of its promises. it doesn’t take care.

i was lucky enough to have been so disconnected by how shockingly bad these episodes were that i mostly sat there shock-laughing at them in disbelief, the first time i watched.  but going through them again to put this write-up together was just like - that’s when a deep sadness kicked in, for me.  not at the ending itself, exactly, because, as i’ve said before, it was so poorly put-together that i can’t even see it as real.  but just - at the idea that i still had to see it, period.  that i had to witness this thing that i loved so much descend into this misery, for all that i didn’t recognize it as something plausible or true.  that i still had to watch merlin drag arthur all over creation, still trying, still scrabbling for that sliver of hope, only to have arthur bite the dust like ten feet from their destination.  that all merlin ever wanted in his life was to be accepted and loved for who he is, and that he put all of this on hold so he could (supposedly) bring about a world where it would be possible, and then he never gets it.  that a life of hiding himself and believing that everybody around him hated who he was inside - that was as good as it was ever going to get, for him.  

the writers just - piled it on.  ‘you can watch mordred die, even though we just went to all this effort to make you root for him!  and now you can watch gwaine die (why????? we don’t know!!! it doesn’t change the story, but why don’t you watch it happen anyway!).  and now you can watch morgana die!  but don’t look too long, because arthur is dying!  and now you can see camelot cold and in mourning - but only for one second, because now you can see merlin, who we never showed meeting any of his friends ever again, wandering around as a solitary old man thousands of years after everybody else is dead and the universe we spent the last five seasons living in no longer exists!!!!!!’

unbelievable.  

it doesn’t upset me in the sense of “it’s so terrible that the story ended that way” because i know it didn’t, really.  it was contrived and false enough that i laughed through most of the episode.  i know it isn’t the way things would have gone, and i won’t have any trouble forgetting it; whereas if it had been well-done, i wouldn’t have been able to dismiss it so easily.  but i still had to watch it, regardless.  you’re forced to watch it, because you care, and the creators know you care enough not to look away, and they use that trust to keep you glued there while they gut-punch you over and over and over again and then peace out without concluding any of their plotlines, saying, “isn’t it clever???  we really fooled you, didn’t we?  technically, we fulfilled the prophecies - nobody ever said any of the characters would get to enjoy the new world they would build!  i bet you’re so surprised!”

it leaves you stunned.  

it’s so...mean.  

it’s so careless.

i don’t have any desire to subject myself to that a second time.  after i’m done with this post, i know i’m never going to watch those episodes again.  they weren’t good, first of all; and if you need more clarification on that, please see the first ten pages of this document.  but more importantly, i don’t feel the need to subject myself once again to the callous disregard for the trust i gave this show’s creators.  

if i’m supposed to trust a creator to carry me over rough terrain, i’m trusting them to carry me all the way to the end.  they can’t violently dump me to the ground two feet before the finish line, run me over with an ATV, and then expect me to willingly climb back into their arms.

viii: if you want something done right

in conclusion, i guess the one nice thing about this is that we can crawl the last two feet ourselves.  

for me, sadly, i think canon!merlin is always going to end at 5.11.  the last two episodes don’t feel believable to me.  i couldn’t watch them and be convinced that i was watching something plausible; i felt like i was watching two hours of scripted theater.  which is, of course, what we’re always doing - but if the story had been crafted appropriately, we shouldn’t have realized it.  we shouldn’t have been able to feel the writer’s hand reaching in and making improbable things happen.  we shouldn’t have been laughing in disbelief as supposedly “sad” things were happening in front of us, and we definitely shouldn’t have been almost falling off the couch because the last scene was so jarring we thought it was an advertisement. (the TRUCK, people.  blaring across the screen and bulldozering through medieval fantasy-adventure show merlin bbc.  nothing on earth or in high heaven could have prepared me for that moment.)

but the one good thing about a piece of media that ended so unsatisfactorily is that it lights a fire under people’s butts to go ahead and sort of...row the boat themselves.  i was afraid, before i watched this, that seeing it would make me never want to go back to merlin again.  i put off finishing season 5 for an entire year because i was in the middle of writing a fic and i thought that if the end of the show upset me, i would never want to write another word.  but now that i’m finished, i’m relieved to be able to say that the finale, while it will always be a bitterly disappointing sore spot, was also SO laughably bad that i don’t feel the slightest compunction about just...letting it lie unrecognized.  if it were well-crafted and i was just ignoring it because it made me sad, i’d feel guilty for being petty.  but it was Just Actually That Bad, so my conscience is clear.  

and so is the path to more fun things, i hope, because that is the point of fandom, in the end, to have fun with something you love in the company of other people who love it the same way.

i hope i haven’t written the last merlin thing i’ll ever write.  i hope there’s more inside me that i want to say.  i hope i haven’t come in too late to make connections.  i hope i’ll enjoy rewatching (most of) this show someday.  i couldn’t imagine that any of these things would be true, when i knew the end was going to be a let-down, but now that i’ve finished, i feel like there’s infinite room to play, and that, at least, makes me smile.

i’ve said before that this was a hell of a ride.  it ended in a trainwreck, sure, but i’m not sorry i got on.

[joelmillerthirstqz]

Your writing is fantastic and it would be great to read some rough, shove-y sex with Joel 👀 also needy, clingy sex would be cool too

yooooooo hello these are 100% my interests, i will work on (them)!

Late-October Update: First part, Shove, is up on AO3 :)

Joel crosses his ankles as he leans against the porch railing, Molly predictably taking up Eugene’s offer to sneak out of the town Christmas party to smoke. How the hell he’d been dragged along as a bystander was beyond him, but his brow snaps into a line when Ellie and Jesse emerge from the other side of the porch, dulled music pulsing the walls of the church.

They sidle up to Eugene, who greets them warmly and offers them the lit joint, Joel’s mouth hanging open in protest, which, to his credit, he rethinks. Ellie gives him a look before taking a drag, and he segues his aborted comments into:

“I’m runnin’, if Maria comes out here,” he notes.

“Head to Jesse’s place and go down to the basement if you’re spooked, we’re just leaving too,” Ellie mutters, abundantly drunk, handing off to Jesse before disappearing inside presumably to give some form of goodbye.

Molly piques an eyebrow and Eugene beams.

“Careful, Molly, Alex’ll be excited to see you,” Jesse warns in his soft drawl.

Molly grimaces.

“What’s that possibly mean?” Joel tightens.

“You know how he’s lookin’. You’ll be fine,” Jesse slugs her on the shoulder and she looks at her arm and back to him, realizing the composure in his voice was not necessarily a sober man’s. Joel looks like he’s trying to fit his own smug smirk down the neck of his beer bottle.

—

Jesse’s basement is a smoky disaster zone, most of the patrol group burrowed in to drink, smoke, or evidently crawl all over each other. Joel has the sense memory of descending into a basement when he’d visited friends at school or been forced to go get Tommy from some A&M party.

Sarah’s mom was already gone by the time he got tackled into a wall by a pretty blonde a few years younger than him one night, in a hazy room like this. Fun-chasing as Tommy was, he saw the sliver of opportunity for a carefree night for his brother and sobered up, picked up Sarah and stayed the night at Joel’s, texting his brother to come home when he wished.

None of it feels particularly real now—someone else’s memories—until he refocuses on the Molly, forever baffled by the way she looks at him with her whole attention.

“Joel,” Molly urges, smiling at him from the bottom of the stairs and holding her hand out for his. She’d accepted his coat on the walk over, and tall as she is, the sleeves offer just the tips of her slim fingers.

He takes it briefly, still subtle enough, and meets her near the bottom. Ellie manifests from a corner, somehow having beaten them there.

“Best behavior. Welcome,” she grits, shoving a—flagon? Jug? Some type of container full of harsh whisky towards them. Dina watches her interaction curiously, chin in her hand. When Ellie rejoins her, Molly sees her mouth a “you did good!”

“You good?” Molly asks, taking the flask.

“I feel eight thousand years old, why?” Joel takes it back briefly for another hard swig.

Jesse’s steel toes thunder down the stairs behind them, hooking an arm over Joel’s shoulders.

“Anyone who goes out and shivs those motherfuckers is welcome. Also, this was Eugene’s idea, my place was just far enough from the—” his eyes widen in the realization of ‘I’ve said too much.’

Joel raises his hands.

“To my grave,” he vows, Jesse snagging the sloshing liquid Joel’s trying to steady and busting between them to slink into the dark opposite end of the room, from which raucous howling resounds.

“You think Tommy knows?” Joel glances around conspiratorially.

“Maybe. Want to get absolutely tanked?”

Joel can’t remember the last time recreational drinking in Jackson had been more than a few beers or a single whisky; some of his less adroit coping skills in Boston spring to mind readily. Molly’s dimples are showing as she smiles at him and he breathes deep and dives.

They work through three shots together, overhearing Eugene telling Firefly stories that’d make Tommy clobber him over the head.

“No, they called these body shots, idiot,” one of the patrol group younger than Ellie’s age emphasizes from the far corner. He takes a shot and slams his chest into his companion and Molly bursts out laughing.

“Outbreak babies. Christ,” she comments.

“You’re going to need to fill me in,” Joel admits, not fully recognizing the words strung together as a phrase.

Molly grabs him by the collar and whispers in his ear, his face tinging pink as she speaks, carelessly grazing his ear with her mouth. If anyone was starting to do the math around them, they definitely weren’t preventing much tonight.

Recognizing it quickly as she speaks and intimates what they could do later, “You don’t think Ellie’s—” Joel slurs together.

“Joel, yeah, I definitely do,” Molly nods, leaving him to put his hands on his head and feign stretching, scanning for his kid and finding an empty couch where she’d Dina had been progressively draping limbs over her.

“College, that right?” one asks, her patrol nickname less a sign of erudition and more a signifier of the younger group begging for stories of what they assumed had to have been a great time.

“Not even close,” she folds her arms.

Joel’s looking back over at her with an unfathomable expression.

Molly raises an eyebrow at him.

“Molly!” Both Joel and Molly snap around at the sound—an inebriated Alex, ever hopeful that Molly would take interest, ambling towards them.

“Alex,” Molly acknowledges.

“Look I’m juss gonna—” he gears up, puffing his chest out.

“Heyyy!” a chorus around the room lights up as Tommy comes into view, pausing at the stairs to beckon a more hesitant pair of jeans to finish the descent.

“Look what I brought,” Tommy announces, taking Maria’s hand faux-courteously and ushering her into the room. She takes a quick glance around the room for anything really out of line, but her eyes are back on Tommy.

Molly exchanges a glance with Joel, mouth turning down in a smile she’s clearly biting the inside of her cheek through. Tommy slots in by Eugene, squinting up at Joel like he can’t process his brother’s presence, Maria swarmed by red-handed occupants trying to earn her favor with the spectrum of tipple they offer.

“I think we’re skewing the demographic a bit,” Molly turns and starts, realizing Joel had pulled much closer and they’re inches apart.

If he leans in and whispers to her with an ill-contained smile, hand on her lower back, it’s not his business if anyone chooses to see it, even if it’s intentionally around the side visible to the whole room.

—

They barely make it back to Joel’s house in one piece, Molly fully face planting into the foot of snow twice. Joel almost offers to throw her over his shoulders but realizes he’s already swaying plenty and opts for an arm around her waist, which slows their progress considerably. Joel stops them every few seconds, guiding her momentum towards him to kiss her indiscreetly.

“Y’know, never personally did one of them body shots,” he murmurs, Texas inflection pouring out of him.

“How forward,” Molly teases back.

“I think you’re supposed to be lyin’ down, actually,” he jokes, getting his keys in on the fifth try and tugging Molly inside by the waist.

“Didn’t even make sense—” she complains, Joel’s hands on either side of her face as he kisses her. She grants him easy access, inviting the taste of the dark liquor into her mouth. He grabs her knitted hat and spikes it to the floor with far more force than necessary as he gets through her buttons with surprising dexterity.  

They kiss messily between being successfully liberated from each layer of her clothing and Joel finally scoops her hips up, forcing her legs around his waist and into the dining room with the table they were already perfectly certain could handle a decent amount of stress.

“Pity my missed youth,” he implores, even as Molly is reclining and clearly interested in humoring him.

“Just get over here,” she falls back to her elbows as he hovers over her, balancing on one hand.

“You know, you’d usually come at it from the side,” Molly instructs.

“That so? I think I can do it this way,” Joel laughs, pouring the bottle he’d retrieved right onto her breastbone with no warning.

“Jooooel! Fuck!” Molly squeaks when the cold liquor slides uniformly down both sides of her abdomen, quickly chased by his hot tongue. He seems to get to her navel before the liquid can even pool there; thorough in laving the sticky liquid off of her skin, returning to her belly and swiping it clean with broad strokes.

“That was not nice,” she chastises, fisting his barely-long-enough hair in one hand, other hand pawing at the rest of him.

It makes Joel tilt his chin up at her, a look that would be sharp if they weren’t both so obviously besotted and hammered at once.

He twists free with next-to-no effort, moving back down and biting the side of Molly’s abdomen, tugging the skin a little as he pulls back.

Molly lets him look pleased with himself for a second, leaning heavily over her with a cocky smirk. She bites his lower lip, always searching for the appreciative grunt it earns, and isn’t surprised that he enjoys the pressure right up until she draws blood. Even in the low light (nobody drew the curtains against the reflective snow) his eyes are almost completely dark and he’s running them over her body and back to her face raptly.

Joel grasps Molly’s thighs, hard, and drags her roughly to the edge of the table, almost pinching.

Molly slaps him, not too hard, stinging on the ridge of his cheekbone. His mouth drops open for a second and she can’t help herself with how captivating he is, slowly tabulating what various replies may cost him with a clench of his jaw.

Joel watches her curious expression considerately and notes the flush along her front, returning the gesture with an extraordinary sense of control for being drunker than he’d been in years.

“Harder,” he challenges, eyes glinting in the snow-reflected light. Molly obliges, and they smile like they’ve stumbled on inventing a new art form together.

Molly lurches them together, grasping the back of his neck and kissing him feverishly, Joel reciprocating as their fingers overlap to get him out of his shirt. Joel shifts one knee next to Molly on the table, and the nervous groan it gives in reply makes him sigh and drag her down to the floor with him.

Molly straddles him as he kicks out of his jeans. It takes two seconds for him to flip them, slamming her back to the floor a little more roughly than he would’ve sober. He hooks the back of her right thigh over his shoulder and moves his mouth to suck on her clit without pretense.

“Joel!” Molly whines, arcing up on the chilled floor, interrupting it with a gasp when his first two fingers spread her. He glances up and tries not to break his pace, but Molly’s so fucking stunning, wreath of cropped auburn spilled on the floor, eyes boring into him with a soft upturn to her mouth.

“Hush,” he grumbles, smacking her thigh as he rises to his knees and drags her hips towards him.

Molly always feels as receptive as her demeanor towards him would suggest when he first slips inside of her, but tonight it feels like she’s thrusting into him somehow. Her shoulders stick to the floor as she’s far too wobbly to curl forward while he’s got her suspended well off the ground. Molly locks her thighs and shoves one heel into Joel’s lower back, knocking him off his knees enough to push forward into his lap.

“God damn it, Mol,” he protests thinly, gazing up at her as she grinds onto him, palms fanning over his broad shoulders.

“C-close,” she mumbles, throwing her head back and basking in the rough treatment he’s lavishing on her breasts.

Joel strokes the side of her face with a reverence she’s going to tease him for in the morning before lightly slapping her again and grasping her hair in a mostly connected movement.

Molly comes hard, exclaiming loudly enough that he feels compelled to cover her mouth with his opposite hand. Molly’s shivering pulls him over fast, certain and uncaring that she’s drawing blood along his back. Joel cries out between some kind of euphoric giggle as she nips his palm, absurdity starting to dawn on her.

They both rock for a long minute as he comes, Molly affectionately kissing along his high cheekbones and stroking where she’d scratched.

Joel strokes her back in kind, boneless and comfortably counting the thrum of their heartbeats against each other. He huffs a soft laugh first.

“Don’t start. Was that good?” Molly asks.

“If you’re good, yeah,” Joel can’t stop touching her face at the most restrained of times, and he cradles it in two hands now. He seems to beam up at her, thoroughly contented.

Molly kisses along his cheekbones once more and he nudges her with his nose.

“C’mon, put a drunk old man to bed,” he jokes, patting her lower back gently..

[chouetteffraie]

50 + 84 + dazatsu or skk for the trope mashup meme?

50. Arranged Marriage

84. Married to the Job

hmmmmm....a bit of a tough one....but a fun one uwu

So I imagine it like this! (doing skk by the way, but since you offered dazatsu too I added a little bit of that!)

The marriage isn’t exactly arranged, but neither parties feel as though they have a choice. 

After months of the organizations working together, fellow members mistaking their teasing and bickering for flirting, their efficiency for a deeper, intimate understanding, and the heads of both parties murmuring about an allegiance, they realize they have to cave.

It’s Atsushi that brings it up. He’s sitting with Dazai late at night, a habit they’ve gotten into when they both can’t sleep. They’ve always been a comfort to each other, and Dazai thought Atsushi could read him better than anyone else. He was proven wrong, though, when Atsushi asked, “So, everybody in the agency is talking about a wedding. Are you planning on proposing soon or something...?”

Dazai widens his eyes, not bothering to hide his surprise. “Eternal commitment? To Chuuya? That’s not exactly what I meant by a lover’s suicide, Atsushi.”

Atsushi is quiet, and Dazai tries desperately to fill the void, to block out the way the gears are grinding in his head. “I told you when we first met, I have no such tastes in men! I’ve been waiting my whole life to die with a beautiful woman! I won’t let Chuuya rob me of that opportunity!” He rambles on and on, using every excuse he can think of, until he asks, “What about us makes us seem so compatible, anyway?”

“Well, you two just have a chemistry. You know each other well and you seem to balance out each other’s weaknesses.”

“Yeah, in battle. In life, it’s a completely different story. Chuuya makes me wish I didn’t have mine anymore.”

“Everything makes you wish you didn’t have your life anymore, Dazai,” Atsushi chides, drawing his knees to his chest so he could rest his head on them. “I don’t know, I guess it’s because Chuuya’s such an important part of your past, and you seem so reluctant to lose some part of your history...I guess we just thought it was him.”

Dazai is quiet, and takes to watching the stars above. He isn’t sure what to think, but he starts to see that maybe he’s dug himself into a hole. Maybe that was his destiny, as one half of Double Black- to relinquish his passions and desires to bind the two organizations together and keep the peace in the city. Dazai allows himself to smile, a bittersweet quirk of his lips that Atsushi mistakes for happiness at the prospect of matrimony.

Oh, Atsushi-kun. I thought you could read me better than anybody. How I despised the slug, how utterly miserable I’ve been since these rumors started.

How I’d much rather it be you at the altar...

There isn’t a proposal, actually. There’s a late night discussion, not too long after the one with Atsushi, and a begrudging admittance that maybe it would be for the best. 

There isn’t a ceremony, just Mori, Fukuzawa, and a few witnesses from each side for both security measures and sentimental value. Hirotsu watched quietly and respectfully, while Akutagawa sported an expression of confusion and...disgust? Dazai couldn’t say he blamed him. On his side, Kunikida watched with a blank face. The only one who seemed happy with this situation was Atsushi, who was watching with stars in his eyes and a grin on his face.

With the “legal” stuff taken care of (or, at least, as legal as things can be- Chuuya is a mafia executive, after all), they two organizations get to work with their new alliance. However, both newlyweds are very important to their respective agencies: they see less and less of each other the closer their one-year anniversary looms. Dazai starts taking his paperwork seriously, for once, often staying overtime to work on it. He takes late night missions, and Atsushi often crosses paths with him on late night, mind-clearing walks (they don’t sit outside together anymore, seeing as Chuuya absolutely refused to live in an ADA dormitory). Chuuya seems to have a similar idea, claiming to be staying at the office with mountains of paperwork and spending his nights at various bars. 

They both came to a silent agreement that this marriage was not to each other; it was to their jobs, and the betterment of the city.

Atsushi seems the only person invested in the relationship, asking Dazai how things are going every chance he gets. He often encourages Dazai to go home early, to see his husband, and sometimes he’s so persistent Dazai can’t get away with staying in the office. “Atsushi-kun, if this was all it took to get you to volunteer to do my reports, I should’ve gotten married years ago!”

Atsush chuckles. “Well, at least you’re happy now, Dazai-san. Now you have it all!”

Dazai gives him a smile, and doesn’t let on how being bound to the mafia and sharing vows with his ex-partner only made him feel as if he lost everything he once had hope in.

[thedistantstorm]

Phoenix Protocol 10

Zavala x Awoken Female Warlock | Mid/Post Forsaken | Slowburn | Gratuitous Descriptions of Light | Self-Confidence/Self-Worth Issues | Redemption

When the Traveler’s Light was returned to the Guardians after the defeat of the Cabal, it did not manifest itself the same in everyone. Miyu, an Awoken Warlock, finds herself struggling with her abilities, her Light feeling different and not her own. With her Vanguard preoccupied with grief and all eyes turned to the Reef, she finds herself turning to an unlikely source in an attempt to rediscover her connection to the Light and define what it means for her as a Sunsinger.

Previously

There is a definitive weight to her gaze, when he sees her the following evening.

“Ikora did not have time to speak with me,” She confesses immediately, as if guilty she was unable to fulfill her end of the bargain. Her eyes are downcast. “I tried several times.”

He does not comment, only nodding once.

“She told me to come back another day,” Miyu scoffs, her anger still boiling, threatening to spill over. “How is it that the Vanguard Commander has time for me, but my own Vanguard does not?” When she looks up, she’s drawn to his gaze. She holds up her hands, her eyes widening in a mix of fear and concern, “Forgive me. I should not have said that aloud.”

“It can be frustrating,” He admits. “She seems to find any manner of thing to occupy her time these days.”

Her brows pull together. “Are you agreeing with me?”

The Commander does not comment, looking away as if perhaps he had said nothing at all. Leaving her to infer what she will.

The porcelain skinned Warlock giggles. It is a tiny, understated sound, like wind chimes on a clear morning, airy and light. She flushes, and it’s only then that he realizes he’s staring. “I’m sorry,” She says, looking down and away.

“Your laugh,” He says, suddenly finding himself on unsteady footing. “I do not believe I’ve heard it before.”

Quicksilver eyes blink, and soften. “I don’t know the last time I have,” She muses. “It’s been a while.”

“You should find reasons to do so more,” He replies, and she shifts, her posture demonstrating rapt attention. It means something, what he’s said to her. It’s caught her off guard, he realizes.

Does no one care for this petite Warlock, at all? He ponders it for a moment. The smallest amount of positive attention surprises her, his concern makes her uncomfortable. Not even her Vanguard seems to spare her a moment.

“Miyu, do-” He thinks on it. “Do you like it here?”

She frowns. “Do I… like it here,” Her lips parse the words as if they’re difficult to comprehend. “I don’t dislike it, I suppose. The City is my home.”

He sighs, speaking far more freely. “Others do not treat you well.”

“Most,” She replies. “Those I would consider friends are stationed far away or engrossed in their work without time to spare. We know our duty, though.” The Warlock looks at him, her eyes curious. “What is this about?”

Zavala pauses. What is this about, indeed. Even his Ghost seems to hover on the edge of his consciousness, her own curiosity piqued. “I suppose I... find myself worried that you do not have enough support.”

She looks up at him, her gaze bright and soft in equal measure. “Tamash- Ghost has always looked out for me.”

The Commander tilts his head to the side, as her Ghost appears immediately, looking very alert and confused. His gold-trimmed cones twitch before he circles and hovers carefully over her shoulder.

“And I have you,” She murmurs.

Miyu looks down and away, and whether it’s from embarrassment at her openness or being just plain shy, Zavala is outrageously grateful. His Ghost, takes that moment to prod thoughtfully at their link in his mind with something that’s still almost childlike in tone, but very unapologetic in reminding him that she absolutely told him so. This isn’t just helping. Zavala doesn’t just help. He gets invested, especially when it’s something worthwhile. And helping this wayward Warlock find a way to accept and be accepted by the Light ablaze inside her is exactly that.

His Ghost nudges him lightly, on the outskirts of his mind. It’s okay, you know, Adelaide says, just to him. I think she’s sweet. And I want us to help her, too. He thinks back to her that it isn’t okay, that this is wholly inappropriate. She’s seeking him out for help, not... whatever this is that’s giving him these new feelings.

“I’m sorry,” Miyu apologizes, “If that sounds a bit forward. I just… if you value someone,” She looks at her Ghost, who dips his entire being in the affirmative, as if he’s coaxing courage into her with his watchfulness, “I’ve learned it’s important to tell them so. Battles, wars, there’s a lot out there and... I feel like you might understand.”

The nod he gives her is slight, but his insides burn like they’ve touched fire. Damn it all if he doesn’t know just what she means.

-/

He’s late.

It’s the life of a public servant. His version of on time - if he has his way, is to arrive at least ten minutes early. Rarely does he get his way, though. Most times, he’s double - even triple - booked on meetings. If he has a spare moment, it’s typically stolen by someone or something trivial that spirals right out of control.

The Warlock is stretched in an elegant pose, sword extended straight out in front of her. Her hair is pulled back into a small bun at the base of her neck, and it’s clear by the way she focuses her breathing that she’s been at it for a while. That’s fair. He’s only... forty-five minutes later than their agreed upon time.

“I’m sorry,” He says, by way of greeting. “I-”

“It’s fine.” She tips her head to the side, concealing her blade without so much as a look at the sheath at her side. “I heard the Consensus meeting was a bit, uh,” She looks up at him with those bright eyes of hers and smiles as she approaches him. “Tense?”

He laughs. Well and truly laughs. It’s a deep, almost melodic sound for such a stoic, serious man. “Where did you hear that,” He asks, when he’s almost composed himself.

A shrug of shoulders and a tiny quirk of her lip gives her away. “Shaxx.”

“Shaxx?” His brows draw together, one arching as he regards her. “He does not normally share such sensitive information with those beneath him.”

That quirk of her lips dip into a smirk that’s almost too playful for him to equate to her. “Beneath him,” She tuts, her words dashed with a splash of something amused. “How old do you think I am, Commander?”

His step backward surprises them both. Her, because she believes she’s put him off, and him, because paired with what she’d said about battle days before, makes him truly reassess her.

“Not as old as me,” He finally settles on, giving her a once over that strikes her as proud.

Too proud to admit he has no idea.

“That’s likely true,” She agrees and lets it drop.

Their top priority is making sure that she gets the last of the measurements she requires. Afterward, they discuss the pull of Light, his personal relationship with the Void, from where she stands, under the dome of his protection.

“It held against the Cabal,” He says, when she prods the fading ripple of void as it dissipates. “In the initial assault.”

“I heard,” She agrees. “It’s impressive, you know.”

“So I’ve been told,” He replies. “It did not matter, in the end.”

“It did,” She says, softly. “There were hundreds of Guardians who made it out of the Plaza because of you, who otherwise would have died. I was one of them.”

It’s not that far fetched, he realizes. It would make sense that she had been there. Despite himself, he says, “I do not remember seeing you there.”

“My hair was longer,” She muses, “But I was wearing my helmet. Those ceremonial robes we all had on didn’t help much, either.”

“Were you on one of the shuttles?”

“No. I got out early, went into the streets. When they caged the Traveler,” She sighs. “I was casting Dawnblade. The Cabal nearly killed Tamashii,” Zavala looks at the Ghost who flutters against her cheek in gentle comfort. “I felt like I’d been cut in half,” She finally admits.

“You almost did,” Her Ghost replies to that, “You-” but Miyu shakes her head, as if speaking about it is too much.

Zavala can understand that, feeling the phantom pain of a slug in his side that he’ll never forget, no matter how many times he continues to rise. “We’re here now,” He exhales, looks up at the looming, glowing form in the sky.

“May it be enough,” Miyu replies, rocking back on her heels.

“It is,” He stands before her, blocking out the great white machine, one hand on each of her shoulders. “You are.”

Her eyes flutter shut, and they stand that way for a few moments, until she blinks her silver-white eyes open and asks, “May I try to cast now?”

He nods. “Are you changing any of your variables?”

“Yes.” She inhales deep and exhales as she summons a healing rift beneath their feet. “I’ve been thinking about the sword being heavy. I’m not going to throw it, but you should stand back.”

“Okay,” He agrees. “Let me know if there’s something I can do.”

“Stand with him,” She says to her Ghost. “I don’t want to take any chances.”

When she reaches for the fire that lives within her, it lights easily. Her fingers twitch against the heat, but the sword forms without issue. Holding it out in front of her, she thinks of the vision she’d had on Mars.

Down.

A single candle.

She plunges the sword into the ground. The flames lick her robes, but nothing else seems to happen. She waits, summoning another sword as the rift runs out. The first sword remains the longest, an extra handful of seconds before it too winks to light and ash. She looks down at her hands.

“Ghost,” She calls. The damage to her hands is minimal, but she can smell the burning fabric of her robes. She sighs.

He answers dutifully. “I can heal it, at least,” He says as he sets her hands to rights.

Zavala steps forward. “Try again in a few moments. Give yourself time.”

His patience is impressive, Miyu thinks, watching him watch her out of the corner of her eye. She wonders, for a moment, how he would be as a solar Titan, but shakes her head. She can’t imagine him summoning a flaming hammer.

Eventually the repetition catches up to her. Where she’d been unblemished, small blisters remained when Ghost tried to heal her, and where the solar fire seemed contained, it began to spiral up and up until she herself was consumed. When she wakes following resurrection, it’s with a start as she finds herself nearly nose-to-nose with the Vanguard Commander.

“What was that?” He asks, sounding angry. “I asked you to stop before it got to that point,” He barks at her roughly.

“I just want it to work,” She replies as she sits up, frustrated enough to push herself away, growling, “I have to figure it out, Zavala. I have to. It’s driving me crazy. What am I missing? Why can’t I do this? Why is it not enough?”

“Stop thinking,” He urges her. “You’re thinking too hard. How do you feel?”

“Raw.” Her eyes narrow, and her hand clutches her chest, over her heart. “It hurts.”

“Is that how you felt, casting Dawnblade, before?”

She shakes her head.

“Tell me about it,” He says, sitting cross legged in front of her. “Describe to me how it felt.”

When her eyes close, he watches her compose herself, watches her reflect. There’s no question that she’s capable of wielding the Light, but there’s some barrier preventing her from using it, from untangling it from her soul and calling upon it to utilize at will. Dark lashes beat against alabaster cheeks, and starlight skitters across her skin in fractal patterns. She does not open her eyes when she speaks.

“Vibrant,” She whispers through parted lips. “Powerful. Alive.” After a moment, she opens her eyes, twin tears dropping down pale cheeks. “Warm. It was so warm.”

Her Ghost hovers toward them, but stops at a loaded glance from Zavala.

“I’m so afraid I’ll never feel that way, again,” She confesses. “It - when I lost my Light, it burned so badly I thought I’d died. I thought I’d look down at my throwing arm and it’d be gone. But, there was nothing. It was like it’d never been mine at all, like I’d made it up in my head.” She inhales. “No one believed me. The ones who’d been using their Light when it had been ripped away were rare. Scarred. I have scars,” She says. “Mine are just… different. Like instead of being broken where someone can see, it’s inside of me.”

This time, when Ghost moves forward, he does so even with Zavala holding a hand out to discourage him in an effort to keep her talking.

“Tamashii,” She calls, asking a question that Zavala misses, stuck on the shadows in her gaze.

A small box appears between them with the shimmering glow of transmat.

She turns it toward the man across from her, an arm’s length away. Her eyes dip in time with her chin in a serious nod.

He takes it as permission, and opens the box carefully, reverently.

A cracked ghost shell sits beside a bond that looks like obsidian or lava rock. It’s black and smooth metal. He doesn’t realize that she’s moved, but she kneels in front of him, lifting the bond from the box carefully. A pale yellow light emerges from the side of it, flickering as if it’s short circuited. It’s the ceremonial bond she’d been wearing, the one given to war-decorated Warlocks, he realizes. The combination of triangles that makes the Warlock sigil is gone, and the bond itself is completely smooth. It had burned. It had burned hot.

The Commander catalogs that and eyes the shell. “You said you thought the Cabal had gotten to your Ghost.”

“He used the last of his Light to blind them, to give us time to escape. They took a swipe, but I managed to pull him away from them in time to prevent a direct attack to his core. Neither of us could think straight. I think we were in shock.”

Her ghost flutters down, resting carefully between her legs, on the crease created by their bend while she kneels. Her fingers trace the top fin of his shell deftly.

“You can’t be the only one,” He says.

“Most have made peace with their Light through pilgrimage,” She says. “To the Shard or Io.” At the sharp breath he takes, she continues, “I visited both. Ikora had sent me back again, after a time. It’s no use.”

“There has to be an answer,” Zavala tells her. “I refuse to believe there isn’t.”

“There is,” Adelaide pipes up, from her usual spot over the Commander’s left shoulder. All eyes find the child-like ghost. She shoots a beam of light directly at the Warlock’s chest, over her heart, before scanning the rest of her in a wide sweep. “It’s inside her. Whatever is holding her back, it isn’t the Light.” She eyes the other Ghost, her segments spinning and shifting like she’s thinking on how to phrase her words. “Would you agree?”

[sawyersick]

1 through 69 because you gotta twin with me

OMG ASDFGHJKL

aight here goes bitchez

1. are you religious?

nahh but my parents sent me to church camp when I was in elementary school??? For the cheap childcare I guess???

2. what animal do you think you’re most like?

I haven’t thought about this much but I think a field mouse!!

3. how do you take your coffee?

never……………………… I hate coffee

4. how old were you when you had your first kiss?

my mom’s bosses son forced himself on me when we were 6 lol so I don’t count that……….. so 15 i guess (according to my friend, if there’s no hormones it doesn’t count lol)

5. museum date or aquarium date?

AQUARIUM AQUARIUM AQUARIUM

6. do you have any tattoos or piercings? do you want more?

Just my ears are pierced and I have a whale (badly) tattooed on my hip I’ll post pix if you want but its pretty uggo

I want another whale on the other side so I’ll be symmetrical and a triangle hand tat….. maybe an eyeball tat (a tattoo of an eyeball…. not one on my eye lol)? I’m not really interested in anymore piercings tho

7. favorite fruits?

strawberries!!!

8. favorite vegetables?

when I was 12 I ate so many carrots my skin turned orange and my mom thought I had jaundice

also I heckin love mushrooms

9. i’ll only date you if _____. (fill in the blank)

I’ll only date you if you treat me with respect :(

10. do you cry a lot?

yeah lol at least twice a month minimum

11. who are your closest friends?

I don’t really have any? I’ve felt distant from my irl friends lately so idk probably just demo

12. have you ever been a part of a protest or a march?

I did the walk out for gun violence

13. do you play any video games?

helllllls yeah but I usually only play 3/ds

14. did you ever have an emo or scene phase?

yes and I think I’m still in it rip

15. what color is most of your wardrobe?

I think I wear a lot of blue! and black and white too i guess…… I’m trying to add more reds tho

16. what do you like to do for fun?

I bake and sew and draw! and listen to music

17. what is your biggest fear?

body horror tw for this one rip

being abandoned, being forced to do horrifically gross/unclean stuff, getting my eyes gouged out, getting the bones in my hands broken, getting acid poured on my face, the people around me dying, being forced to eat live slugs, getting my skin peeled off with a knife

18. name a subject you know a lot about.

whales/the ocean in general and baking!! and the band Liily

19. favorite fictional characters?

hm idk? Link and Zelda from LoZ, Clover and Snake and Aoi from 999, rhyme from TWEWY, Maka and Soul from Soul Eater, Storm from the Xmen, Ariel from the Little Mermaid, Chun Li, the Kagamines, Rilakkuma

idk I just thought about characters I have merch for

20. do you read a lot? what are your favorite books?

I used to??? Haven’t had the time for it in a while though and I’ve been reading a lot of how-to books as of late….. I really liked the Legend trilogy though

21. how would you describe your style?

art style and fashion style would both be classified as “cute but tries to be edgy” I think

22. did you have a favorite stuffed animal when you were little? do you still own it?

Yes!! a pastel elephant with a rattle in it named Elephant (very creative I know) He’s in my stuff somewhere now and this question reminded me to go find him again

23. what’s something most people love that you hate?

hmmm…. sports? mustard? airpods???? idk

24. do you think you’re a good singer?

actually yes? I wanna be in a band but I’m lowkey afraid of singing in front of people I know but have no problem doing it in front of an audience of strangers hmu if you’re in the SF bay area I’ve written 6 punk songs

25. who do you live with?

my parents and cat

26. favorite desserts?

ice cream, anything with chocolate or whipped cream, creme brulee, lemon tarts

I’m not too picky though lol

27. what is the best decision you’ve made in your life so far?

realizing that I can actually do mostly whatever I want and most things have fewer consequences than I think

also cutting people out of my life that emotionally exhaust me

28. favorite makeup brands?

uhhhh whatever’s cheap and doesn’t make my eyes burn ig urban decay is good when I can afford it

29. favorite clothing stores/brands?

Goodwill??? I used to shop at f21 but I try not to anymore

30. what was your first job?

working at a lake teaching windsurfing and sailing and I still work there

31. do you take a lot of naps?

n o  I absolutely  h a t e  taking naps and try to avoid them

32. what is your favorite part about your body?

hmm I have pretty good hair i think and sometimes my eyes? I have huge (genetic) eyebags tho which gets me down

33. are you more dominant or more submissive?

In day to day life I guess I’m more dominant??? like I make decisions when nobody else wants to :0 also idk intimately since iM aN aDuLt vIrGiN and pretty sex repulsed but probably sub 

34. are you more outgoing or more shy?

outgoing but sometimes it makes me annoying

35. how tall are you?

short…………………………. 4′8/143 cm

36. what is your body type?

uhh hourglass????? maybe pear I got them Thunder Thighs according to the guy who got kicked out of drama club for peeping in the girls changing room

37. favorite flower?

calendula, sunflowers, lavender and dianthus!!

38. favorite planet?

Neptune??????????????????

39. what do you want to dress up as for halloween this year?

I wanna be the bride of frankentstein but in a shiro lolita coordinate to make her look ~fancy~ or the Nancy part of Sid and Nancy if I’m in a relationship by that time

40. do you prefer to date people the same age as you, younger, or older?

Ideally the same age and I’m wary of dating anyone more than 2 years younger or older than me but I’m more willing to date older than younger

41. describe the person you’re in love with/have a crush on in great detail.

yall know who it is already but

in a band, dark hair, kinda tall, very fashionable, coincidentally happens to be the same racial mix as me, good at art, very humble, really sweet, lives in SoCal, has a hand tattoo of milk and “aye yah” on his arm, paints his nails orange, wears a lot of rings, gets freckles in the summer, prefers vanilla over chocolate, ties his shoes the cool way

42. who is your biggest inspiration?

idk at the moment? I like to draw from many inspirations

43. do you have any kinks?

???????????????????????????????????

44. do you own any pets?

one (1) very loving cat

45. which celebrity do people say you look the most like?

……………………….. myself

I literally had to google mixed race celebrities and STILL none look like me lol

46. do you like sports?

not really except I weirdly like baseball

47. have you ever seen a broadway musical?

Yes!! I won tickets to On Your Feet and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory

I also won Hamilton tickets but saw it in SF yall should download the app

48. what is your favorite kind of food?

noodles!!

49. would you rather be a fairy or a mermaid?

MERMAID actually I have a mermaid tail too so

50. what is your instagram?

@wishwhale :)

51. glossy lips or matte lips?

glossy by default because I have chronically dry skin/lips so matte lips are sooooooooooooooo uncomfy but it looks good on other people lol

52. do you like cherry, grape, blue raspberry, watermelon, or green apple jolly ranchers the best?

grape because im weird

53. what are your best personality traits?

I’d like to think that I’m kind and sometimes funny

54. what is your ethnicity?

asian/white

55. what different hair colors have you had?

brown and brown with pink that was supposed to be purple

56. favorite disney princess?

Ariel! bc mermaid

57. favorite album of 2017?

Humanz by Gorillaz  or Deep Dream by Daddy Issues I guess

I was weirdly obsessed with Feel Your Feelings Fool when it came out but I’m not really into it anymore though

58. have you ever had braces?

nah

59. favorite holiday?

Halloween! Because dressing up is fun

60. post a selfie.

how do I make this smaller anyways I don’t normally wear this much makeup but I’m going to a small show tonight

61. are you a good swimmer?

Yes!! I swim once a week at my local pool

62. do you wear jewelry?

I used to wear a lot………. like multiple necklaces and bracelets and rings daily but now I wear my ring every day and a necklace/earrings if I remember

63. can you play any instruments?

I’m learning guitar!!

64. do you have any siblings?

short answer is no but you can dm me for the long answer

65. are your grandparents still alive? how old are they?

just my maternal grandmother and she is almost 90! My paternal grandmother lived to 102 so I’m hoping for those good genes though (I think she would have lived longer because my family suspects elder abuse by my weird aunt)

66. who knows the most about you?

hmm probably Demo or Emily

67. are you a more quiet person or do you talk a lot?

I! Never! Shut! Up!

68. what advice would you give to your 13 year old self?

shut the fuck up you stupid bitch you arent cool

69. how many pillows do you sleep on?

two

[rawliverandcigarettes]

Writing Questionnaire

Hello people, it’s been a while. I was tagged by the delightful @natsora in this one ! I tag @stories-of-arani, @kiranwearsscienceblues, @autodiscothings and @bronzeagelove if you haven’t done it and feel like doing this.

Short stories, novels, or poems?

I like all three, I have slowly warmed up to short stories over the years, and now I really appreciate this form as well.

What genre do you prefer reading?

I kinda prefer nonfiction like essays or autobiographies, and literary fiction. It’s been a while since I read a scifi or fantasy book that really managed to caught my attention, mind and heart (which is a shame).

What genre do you prefer writing?

I recently discovered I had a crack for realism, as in the french literary movement, of bringing out the mundane out of the extraordinary. It might seem super counter-intuitive, but I really feel like we get to touch the absurd and the heartfelt out of the human experience when we bring it down to just... living, and what it costs, and what it does to us. But that’s more for the general feeling; in terms of genre, I really like to write scifi, literary and horror/thriller.

Are you a planner or a write-as-I-go kind of person?

I do both, and it totally depends. I write short stories with very few preparation and I mostly pants them, but novels require more planning to remain coherent.

What music do you listen to while writing?

What goes with the scene. It can be indie rock, it can be soundtracks, it can be dark electro. Or, when I’m very very tired and need to hold the night writing, I can even turn to the unglory of eurodance and hardbass so I can bounce around as I write in absolute shame and agony.

Fave books/movies?

For the movies, I think my heart will forever go to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which amazed me with new things to discover in storytelling, sound design, cinematography and much more every time I’ve seen it again since my first viewing at age 8.

For books, I’m not sure I could pick a favorite one, because let’s be real folks -I skipped reading a lot those past few years. So I’m going to go with Drawing Blood by Molly Crabapple, which is a fantastic autobiography that talks about politics from the 2000′s and later (the Occupy Wall Street movement, Greece, etc), the burlesque stage of New York, her life and self discovery as an artist and an activist, and fueled me with a fire to do things that matter. It’s maybe not my favorite book, but it’s the one that shook me the most those past few years.

Any current WIPs?

I have 3-ish at the moment.

Halfway Home is obviously the big one. I haven’t posted an update on this for the longest time, but I’ve been very busy doing anything but working on it, but I’m slowly carving the final outline. So much has changed you guys. I’m finally embracing structure a little bit more, and I think it does good to the story. 4 years on this bitch, still a mess. I really love it, but I’m starting to tire, not gonna lie. Still, I really need to get it out in 2019, because after I’ll be too much of a boring adult with regular income to do it justice.

I also have another project, for an original novel. I have the global outline already, and even though I need to research and polish a few details, I’m amazed at how fast it came together and how crisp the story is. It’s a major departure from the messy slug that is Halfway Home, and I even have good hopes to get it published someday. But I’m not getting to it before finishing Halfway Home, otherwise I’m afraid I will never find it in me to get back to the pain of it.

Then I have a short novel horror collection, in french. I have three quarters of the first novel, which might be the weirdest thing I ever wrote, about parasites and showers and green beans. It’s called “Gant de Toilette” (washcloth? I think it’s the correct translation), and I don’t even know.

If someone were to make a cartoon out of you, what would your standard outfit be?

Black top with long sleeves, black shorts, stockings and high heels, which is my standard everyday thing when I go out. Maybe my chainsaw necklace, even though I lost it recently :(

Create a character description for yourself:

She becomes colder the closer you get. Not much, but there is a flicker in the soul, the muscle tension -what was warmth and rageful empathy now comes with an afterthought, a plastic film maybe. You wonder if it’s egotic, if it’s dissociation, if anything before was ever true or meaningful, but you don’t ask, because if you ask, you suspect she wouldn’t know what to reply. After all, she lives within, so what does she know of herself.

(agreed, this is maybe not the most flattering portrait I could have made))

Do you like incorporating people you actually know into your writing?

I’m inspired by people I know, and I do incorporate parts of how I perceive them in my writing, but I don’t think I would straight-up pluck out someone I know from real life and put them in my story. It would feel wrong to me, and kind of uninteresting too.

Are you kill-happy with characters?

Hmmm good question. I think I am, like I enjoy killing off characters in meaningul ways and crafting the situation around, but it really depends on the WIP and whether it calls for it or not.

Coffee or tea while writing?

Both. Not at the same time, obviously, but I alternate. Cappuccino is also awesome.

Slow or fast writer?

Fast when I do write, which has not been extremely often lately.

Where/who/what do you find inspiration from?

.Everywhere really, since inspiration is but a patchwork of stuff we get to experience. Dreams are a big one; some of my most vibrants ideas come from dreams. Otherwise, reflexions on poeple, anxieties about the world and personal experiences are what drives me most of the time.

If you were put into a fantasy world, what would you be?

A low nobility in that subplot that isn’t going anywhere but still seems desperate to make a point.

Most fave book cliche? Least fave book cliche?

I think I just love the weird family of outcasts trope way too much for it to be reasonable, and I hate unnecessary romance or family links revealed to actualize characters’ relationships, because I feel like it often cheapen things or flatten them.

Fave scenes to write?

Two characters bonding bittersweetly. I can’t find any other way to describe that sort of scenes and I apologize.

Most productive time of day for writing?

Night. No question asked.

Reason for writing?

Self discovery, a way to make sense of the world, a way to speak to others with deeper layers than speech alone, and for the made up character my mind feels obliged to.

[whenimaunicorn]

A Little Taste of Home

Fandom: MCU (Thor: Ragnarok) Pairing: Valkyrie/Loki Rating: M for mature themes (they’re at an orgy) Words: 1911 Ao3 Link: http://archiveofourown.org/works/12670365/chapters/28883037

Summary: Valkyrie has an open invitation to the Grandmaster’s sex parties. When an alluring stranger appears, she actually finds herself interested in something other than the free booze. Set on Sakaar in that time between Loki and Thor’s arrivals.

Notes: this is my first fic for the MCU EVER, please be gentle!!

Valkyrie goes to the Grandmaster’s private parties for two reasons. First, that’s where he cracks out the really good stuff: rare liquors that have fallen through the wormholes, rich beers brewed on-planet that aren’t absolute shit, and the girl that makes his signature cocktails is just about as tasty as her drinks and Valkyrie can never get enough of flirting with her. Second, the parties are a great place to work the boss. Mostly she stays in the Grandmaster’s favor by bringing him new contenders for the arena that are at least halfway decent fighters. But she sees the way he looks at her, and knows how to use it to her advantage. She’s not one to actually take part in the orgies, but he seems to be titillated just by her presence. The thought that she might one night deign to sleep with him seems to be a pleasing enough spice for the tyrant’s pleasures. So as long as she acknowledges him with a few haughty little looks here and there, he leaves her alone and lets her drink his top shelf liquor while everyone else fucks each others’ brains out.

Maybe, sometimes, there’s a third reason. If Oola behind the counter mixes the drinks just right, doles them out not too slow, not too fast, and shakes her little butt for her a bit, then there are times when Valkyrie is actually in the mood to join in the spirit and let someone get her off. Oola’s not allowed to participate so on those nights Valkyrie has to find someone else. Someone who’s willing to submit to her dominant style; lately she hasn’t been able to allow any kind of intimacy with anyone unless she feels firmly in control. That’s probably the other reason she’s escaped the Grandmaster’s bed thus far; he’s not a bottom and she’s never given him any indication she could switch.

It wasn’t always this way; she can remember when she used to have a wider variety of tastes in the bedroom… but not for a long time. So she only plays at these parties if she’s in one very specific mood. And she is not in that mood tonight. Tonight is for the golden Asgardian bottle someone salvaged two days ago, and distracting herself from the bittersweet memories the familiar flavor of the mead keeps drawing up to the surface of her thoughts.

There are plenty of distractions tonight. The Grandmaster’s guest list rotates quickly, as the rise and fall of his favor is often dizzyingly fast. He seems to be interested in artists, fashionistas, and politicians lately, so the room is full of soft, slender bodies in impeccable outfits designed to be unpeeled slowly over the course of the evening. She watches the colors, the beautiful faces, and the outlandish fashion choices swirling by her without making any effort to join in their insipid conversations.

Her eyes keep sliding back to one man, pale-faced and dark-haired, in a tight green coat that looks so subdued in contrast to everyone else. A more recent arrival, perhaps, still wearing the fashions of his home. The cut of his jacket triggers the same feeling as the mead in her cup. Whenever he catches her eye she looks away, letting her gaze slide off him like he had just been an annoyance, blocking her view of someone else. She is not trying to invite any more of that kind of feeling tonight, no matter how pretty a package it comes wrapped in.

Valkyrie hits the stage of inebriation that turns her thoughts frustratingly maudlin just as the dark-haired stranger takes the seat next to her. The stage after this one is the blessed numbness she’s been chasing, so she lifts the bottle quickly as soon as she realizes how close she is to the perfect amount of drunk.

The man puts a hand on the bottle to stop her, surprising strength in the long fingers he has placed over her own. “Save some of that for me,” he requests, a smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth as he takes in her sense of urgency. “That’s the first thing from Asgard that I’ve seen in this place. I need a little taste of home.”

He’s Asgardian? Fuck. She considers walking away right there, but when she tries to wrest the bottle away from him he shows his steel, not giving up the grip he’s got on it. So instead she rolls her eyes and leans over the bar, reaching with her off-hand to grab him a glass and pour him a slug. Then she moves to change seats.

She’s stopped by his hand again; he lays it on her forearm softly, casually, without a trace of threat and yet something about it compels her to freeze. “Stay. Share this drink with me. Unless you’d really rather spend the whole night staring at me from across the room.”

She rolls her neck, getting ready to tell this asshole off.

“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Loki.”

She gets dizzy, but only for a moment. She exaggerates her sway a little as she sits back down so it just looks like drunkenness. She’s been gone from Asgard a long time but news does trickle in, even here. She knows who Loki Laufeyson is. Adopted son of Odin himself, who has at least once sat on the very throne of Asgard on his behalf. Her drunken mind tells her this here is as close to a reckoning from the king that is ever going to come for her.

“You’ve heard of me,” he continues with a smile, “no need to pretend otherwise. I can see it in those big, brown eyes of yours.”

She scoffs, takes another plug directly from the bottle and sits with her back against the bar. She’s not looking at him but she’s not leaving, either. She doesn’t know what she wants from him, but the drink is making her fucking nostalgic and dramatic and she finds she can’t just walk away now.

Loki faces in towards the bar, gives Oola a charming smile as she walks by balancing six cups in her hands. He lets Valkyrie pretend they are not talking for a few minutes. Then he leans closer, face looming with a warmth that seems just a little bit too good to be true. “At least tell me your name, you beautiful thing.”

“Scrapper 142,” she says quickly.

Loki makes a noise in his throat. “That is not a name.”

“That’s all you’re getting.”

Loki holds both palms up toward her, indicating his willingness to back off the topic. “You don’t seem to fit in at this party, one-four-two,” he says.

“Neither do you,” she grunts. “Though I’ll bet it won’t take you long to settle in, become just like them.”

Loki looks over his shoulder, leaning into hers as he surveys the room. Frivolously-dressed guests titter and simper at each other all around, offering empty praises, giving sidelong glances to those not in their little cliques and repeating mean-spirited rumors behind their hands. “I know these people,” he says, a trace of disdain in his voice. “They are the same everywhere. I know how to use them. But do not mistake me for one of them.”

She hasn’t spoken to anyone so self-assured in a while. Everyone on Sakaar is either terrified of the Grandmaster or puffed up full of a false bluster that is assuredly about to be knocked out of them, and soon. Loki’s quiet hauteur reminds her of no one here but herself. It makes her respect him more.

She allows herself to look at him fully. He doesn’t seem to know who or what she is, so it feels safe enough to give this son of Odin just a little of her attention. She keeps her face neutral as she studies the curves of his. He’s handsome, with expressive eyes and a sharp jaw. Mouth that seems perpetually angled like he knows a joke no one else does.

“You recognized my name,” Loki says, continuing the conversation when it becomes clear that she will not. “What have you heard about me?”

As full of himself as any royal, she can see that already, too.  “From Asgard,” she says curtly, shrugging like it means little too her. “Son of Odin.”

He leans in, an intense look casting over his features. “And do you know what that means?”

She suppresses a chill and her instinct to bow, even though it’s been centuries since she’s been at court. She shakes her head no, keeps her face impassive, hoping it looks bored.

“It means I am a King,” he all but whispers in her ear. “Or at least, I should be.”

As ambitious as Odin when she knew him, too, then. “But now you’re on Sakaar,” she barks back, more bitterly than she intended. “And no one ever leaves here. Sorry, Your Majesty.”

His eyes only glitter as he cocks his head at her. “I’ll figure something out.”

He looks around the room again. The guests are starting to break off into twos and threes. The orgy will likely be in full swing soon; no one is allowed to begin before the Grandmaster, who likes to draw things out and take his time choosing the partners that will accompany him in the big bed at the stern of the pleasure cruiser. Valkyrie realizes that Loki’s interruption has severely slowed down her drinking pace. She’s never been this sober by this part before.

She brings her greedy lips back to the bottle when Loki wiggles his suddenly-empty glass at her. She restrains her gulping just a bit and then pours most of the rest into the tumbler in his hand. She’ll have to select another liquor to obliterate the last of the nagging, painful thoughts still buzzing at the back of her mind.

“Are you waiting for someone?” Loki asks.

She furrows her brows at him.

Loki gestures vaguely at the room. “I haven’t seen you trying to meet anyone, find a partner or two for the next bit of… activities. You don’t play?”

She sniffs at him. “Not usually.”

“Then why do you come?”

She tips the bottle at him. “Raiding the good stuff while the Grandmaster’s distracted.”

Loki raises his glass back at her. “Fair enough,” he grins, takes another sip. “You have good taste,” he says, contemplating the mead from their homeland for a moment before his eyes flick back up to hers. “Perhaps you would you like another taste of Asgard tonight?” His leg splays out a little wider, inviting, and when her eyes flit to his mouth he licks his lips and leaves them softly parted. “Just because you usually don’t play, doesn’t mean you can’t start now. Have you ever fucked a god, Scrapper one-four-two?”

Oh, he definitely has no idea who she is, she thinks. It’s as calming as it is thrilling, to allow herself to be so close to the heir of the king she had let down, to brush so near to that which she had just spent centuries avoiding and yet be firmly in control.

She slips from her stool next to him, lets the side of her thigh brush the inside of his as she leans to speak into his ear. “I’ll pass,” she says, low and throaty, then reaches over him to grab another bottle from behind the bar.

[ts1989fanatic]

How Taylor Swift Inspired A Movie About Battle Rap

Bodied is the new film from Joseph Kahn, a music video director who's become almost as famous for his outspoken Twitter presence as for his work. But there's plenty of thought behind all his online button-pushing.

Last week, Joseph Kahn summoned the wrath of the Beyhive down upon himself — and not just once but repeatedly. For the average person online, drawing the enraged attention of one of the internet's most devoted and formidable fandoms is something to be feared and avoided at all costs. But the 44-year-old Korean-American filmmaker didn't just goad Beyoncé stans into attack with taunts about their inability to do real damage and quips to the press destined to immediately be taken out of context, he greeted the influx of bee emojis and tweeted insults like Lieutenant Dan howling defiance at a hurricane.

Or maybe just like a director with a new movie to promote. "To be honest, I did it on purpose," Kahn admitted over coffee in Toronto, referring to his campaign of strategic hive-poking and the resulting media coverage. And, he pointed out, it worked. "Everyone knows Bodied now. You can make a good film, but if you throw it out into a vacuum, the air does not get in there. The only thing people care about these days is celebrity. My movie has no stars. So all you have to do is know how to rattle the internet cage."

Bodied, which was the opening night pick of the Toronto International Film Festival's beloved Midnight Madness program, is Kahn's first film in six years, one he wrote with battle rapper Alex Larsen, aka Kid Twist. Altogether, Kahn's made three films, including 2004's self-aware Fast and the Furious-but-with-motorcycles riff Torque, and the 2011 teen-comedy-slasher genre mashup Detention, which, like Bodied, he funded himself. But the reason he's so well-acquainted with the world of dedicated pop fandoms is because it's the entity in which he spends most of his time. He's best known as a prominent, prolific, perpetually outspoken music video director who, since launching his career in the early ’90s, has worked with everyone from Muse to Destiny's Child, Britney Spears to Dr. Dre. And, of course, with Taylor Swift.

Since 2015, Swift has been the music artist with whom Kahn's career has been most closely linked. It's a connection boosted, in part, by Kahn's willingness to wade into the online fray in defense of the seemingly eternally embattled pop star (it's in talking about Swift that Kahn is most careful with his words, describing her as an "excellent target"). Kahn has directed five music videos for Swift, including the monster that is "Blank Space" (2.16 billion views and counting) and late August's internet-breaker "Look What You Made Me Do." He was still slugging it out on behalf of the latter, an intensely parsed and much-discussed video in which Swift contends with her past personas, in the days leading up to the Bodied premiere.

Kahn obviously isn't afraid of controversy or a fight. At a time when people working in Hollywood have gotten increasingly cautious about their online presences, he's maintained one of most markedly salty, trolly Twitter feeds of any filmmaker working today. (Illustrative sample: "I just gotta remind everyone that my twitter has only one message. Fuck you.") These facts are even more crystal clear when watching Bodied, which stars former Disney Channel actor Calum Worthy and actual battle rappers like Dumbfoundead and Dizaster, and is a button-pushing comedy that uses the underground hip-hop scene as a way to tackle language wars, cultural appropriation, and freedom of speech.

But if that pitch sounds like the ramp-up to the kind of potential nightmare 4chan apologia you'd want to run away from, screaming, the reality of Bodied is a lot more conflicted, considered, overstuffed with ideas, and yes, sometimes, even sensitive. It’s a film that argues on behalf of the right to say anything while simultaneously emphasizing how much words can wound. "This film has a lot of issues in it, and I'm not dismissing any of them," Kahn said. "In fact, one of the things we're trying to figure out is, in the world of absolute free speech, is there a limit? Is there a consequence to going too far? I wanted to explore the furthest reach of that."

Bodied was produced by Eminem, another artist Kahn's directed videos for, and a man who famously got his start in the freestyle rap battle scene. But while Eight Mile gets name-checked in Bodied, the film primarily owes its existence to a Swift controversy. More specifically, it was born out of the one kicked up by the video Kahn did for "Wildest Dreams," shot in part in the Serengeti and meant to evoke a location shoot for an old Hollywood production à la The African Queen, with Swift and Scott Eastwood playing actors whose onscreen romance bleeds into real life.

Kahn was aware there were, to use his word, "complexities" to this concept from the start — plenty of shit in which to step. These included concerns as to whether the video would accidentally make it look like Swift was out to shoot lions instead of a film, and whether she'd be accused of "whitewashing history and ignoring segregation" if Kahn cast a black actor to play the director of the fictional feature, as was his original impulse. These considerations failed to dampen the firestorm of arguments the video set off about whether Swift was romanticizing colonization and erasing Africans from the African setting. Kahn wasn't having it.

"I started making jokes about it. I had one joke where I said, 'Asians can't be racists. Black or white, all dogs taste the same to us.' Paper magazine wrote an entire hit piece on me talking about how I don't do videos for minorities, which is absurd, because I've done 30 years of music videos and half of them are hip-hop." Eventually, he said, the furor became an inspiration. "I thought, this is insane — no matter what I write or what I say, they just want to be social media bullies. And the nature of even talking about race is so constricted behind the accusation, and not over the analysis, and I thought, Wow, there's a movie."

Which is where battle rap came in. "There's an anger in me, and it only seemed to be expressed by a world where a white guy and a black guy could make completely racist jokes against each other, worse than anything I've ever written, and then they go get a beer together," Kahn explained. But in addition to its particular hip-hop scene, Bodied also keeps one foot on campus, where woker-than-thou characters are shown trying to one-up each other in circular conversations about race, gender, class, and privilege. One of the most provocative ideas the film floats is that the vocabulary of social justice has been co-opted for verbal one-upmanship just as competitive as battle rap.

"I feel sometimes like when people who can't outsmart me online, they'll just go back to my old tweets and say, 'Look, he's racist, don't listen to him.' It's dirty play," Kahn says. "They don't know me. They're just taking jokes, and saying that all stereotyped jokes are racist, which I genuinely do not believe. A joke is a contradiction you agree with. Just because the contradiction is dangerous doesn't mean you don't agree with it." Kahn sees Bodied as embracing that sense of danger, while acknowledging that the intersection he's been occupying between an incendiary indie movie and young music fandom can be "messy and ugly."

But also, maybe, advantageous? Bodied, which was well-received at TIFF, has yet to cement a distributor, but Kahn's been tweeting about getting multiple offers. And certainly, for Kahn, all the attention didn't hurt in getting to this place, even if so much of it was angry. "I don't think it really means much," he said of the online uproar. "I think, on one level, it's just blowing up the pop stan world," which then becomes a conduit to draw more promotion of his film work, especially when it comes to his already infamous LA Times interview in which he joked, "Beyoncé copied 'Bad Blood.'" "How many indie films get linked hundreds of times in an interview with a filmmaker talking about race?" he pointed out. Then, not one to resist, he added, "Thank you, Beyhive."

ts1989fanatic love this description of Joseph Kahn’s Twitter Feed:

Kahn obviously isn't afraid of controversy or a fight. At a time when people working in Hollywood have gotten increasingly cautious about their online presences, he's maintained one of most markedly salty, trolly Twitter feeds of any filmmaker working today. (Illustrative sample: "I just gotta remind everyone that my twitter has only one message. Fuck you.")

[thesinglesjukebox]

TWICE - LIKEY [8.00] Title checks out.

Jessica Doyle: At first listen “Likey” seems underwhelming by Twice standards, as even applying the full force of Sana to “me likey, me likey likey likey” doesn’t result in a skull piercing along the lines of “neomu hae, neomu hae” or “kung, kung” or even “sign-EUL BONAE, sig-NEUL BONAE.” (The closest we get is Momo pouting about BB cream and lipstick, and she’s immediately followed by a more conciliatory Tzuyu.) Lyrically it could even be read as a continuation of “TT,” the members painting themselves as emotional messes at the mercy of the listener. The difference is in the potential for an alternate reading: Twice as emotional messes at the mercy of the audience, Twice given the opportunity to acknowledge the constant mental-health assault that is idol life. Everything feels like a careful signal (…bonae), from Jihyo as leader holding the camera and talking about the small screen, to the tourist-pristine presentation of Vancouver in the background, to Dahyun’s brief trap interlude, to the slouchier outfits of the dance-practice video. “Likey” doesn’t have to be Twice’s catchiest or most distinctive single when it can be Twice’s smartest. [7]

Alfred Soto: A haiku of romantic need, “Likey” recalls prime Stock-Aiken-Waterman in its concentration: boom boom boom it goes, its breathy vocals and hint of woodblock percussion leading the charge, until this time it knows it’s for real. [7]

Iain Mew: “Likey” is another proof for the interpretation that made me love “Cheer Up” – that it was a demonstration of what happens when you play along with a role with such absolute conviction that real emotions and portrayed emotions begin to blur. In “Likey” the same theme is both more heartbreakingly explicit lyrically, and present again in the music. There’s no fixed-grin mega-chorus this time, but bursts of a buoyant, colourful twist on the K-pop-house wave. Each chorus plays out like a perfectly presented social media life, splashing across all the complexities and effort they sing about going on outside of it.  [9]

Katie Gill: I’m a sucker for Twice. They’re a group that knows how to have fun, which shines through in their performances and sound, and I’m always here for their bright bubbly bubblegum pop. Add in those fun synths and an amazingly fun prechorus/rap break, and you’ve got a song that’s tailor-made for me to fall in love with it. I just wish that they didn’t hang the chorus on such an awkward phrase as “me likey.” [7]

Mo Kim: “Like is such a common word, not enough to express my feelings,” Mina laments in the chorus. Nayeon is more conciliatory: “But I like you, even if I can’t sleep, even if I’m late.” And Sana, by now a familiar and comforting presence, chirps back in ironic response: “Me likey, me likey likey likey, me likey likey likey.” It may be the best-executed joke in their entire discography: if there’s one thing that Twice has mastered, it’s the gap between what we know we feel and what we know how to say, and how that gap gets mediated through cinema cosplay, hooks as persistent as a lovestruck teenager, and alien soundscapes. “Likey” draws on all of those strengths, washing the anxiety of a social-media crush through pastel pink filters and emerging as the group’s surprisingly soulful thesis statement. [10]

Alex Clifton: A sugary-sounding song about a love/hate relationship with social media described in addictive terms. The struggle to project an ideal version of oneself on social media, to put effort into the perfect selfie, is nothing new, but I’ve never heard it described in a song in such opposite terms–yes, it’s a struggle; yes, it’s something we enjoy; yes, I need that rush of dopamine any time someone likes my posts to function. I’ve tried to wean myself off social media this year, but I’ve still felt the pressure to word things perfectly to gain the most appropriate attention. How do I make this funny? How do I make this unusual? How do I make this particular post–and, by extension, myself–wholly likeable? To hear it all jumbled so starkly in such a song–especially one that’s rigorously upbeat, one that could play in the background quietly and maybe slip out of notice as a standard pop song–is magnificent. [8]

Leonel Manzanares: I’ve always enjoyed how Twice likes to get busy, production-wise. This time there’s a fuzzy guitar intro joining a line of bubbly synths, a cascade of slow arpeggios in the verses, and even a half-time trap breakdown in the bridge. And I’m glad that the inconsistencies in their previous singles are a thing of the past, but why don’t they just sound as exciting as they used to? “Signal” was absolutely divisive, but was it really their creative peak?  [6]

Ryo Miyauchi: Out of all of the animated parts, Momo’s drive the story home. Her pout about makeup before the chorus goofs around as much as it runs frantic from all of the upkeep the girls have to do for that perfect Instagram picture. The others are more concerned to hit the right vocal spots to reveal just how much they’re breaking a sweat, but that’s Twice for you: the sugary beats and ditzy voices mask a deliriousness from all this need for attention. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: In virtually every aspect of “Likey,” production duo Black Eyed Pilseung capture the inwardly frantic yet outwardly calm nature of using social media as an avenue for affirmation. It’s more structurally complex than “TT” and “Knock Knock,” but more cohesive than “Signal” and “Cheer Up.” This middle ground proves apt, as the song’s constant innovations and driving energy mirror the constant shifting of attention one experiences while scrolling through endless feeds of content. One could argue that the pre-chorus’s winding melody brings the song to a halt, but this only bolsters the song’s conceit. Compared to the rest of “Likey,” the vocalizing there registers as conversational. But it isn’t long before we’re pulled away into the chorus’s onslaught of Twice-as-hell catchphrases, transfixed by the sound of people transfixed by their screens. It’s a statement in and of itself: how could the real world possibly hold up to the notifications that blow up our phones? The entire song is sprinkled with onomatopoeiac representations that drive home this half-serious point: applying BB cream and lipstick, a crowd of people cheering, an angelic choir praising us in the chorus. And the only possible way “Likey” could have started is with its blaring horns and bouncing synthline–fanfare fit for a professional athlete’s entrance music. We’re ultimately left with our prized possession: a “Heart! Heart!” notifying us that someone’s liked our post, our image, our self. Amusingly, it’s preceded by the girls singing the sound of a quickly-beating heart. It turns out both hearts are our lifeblood. [10]

Will Adams: The popular consciousness’s fixation on millennial culture has endured for so long that it’s become easy to identify the quality of each thinkpiece: Does it treat social media users with disdain, or does it take the time to recognize the benefits they attain from it? In a better world, “Likey” would have been the urtext, at once acknowledging the enormous pressure to look a certain way – sucking it in, angling light so hits you just so, swiping through filters – and the rush of seeing the appreciation come through in short, warm buzzes. Each line offers a different reading, mimicking how quickly we sift through the emotions, never quite resolving them. And we get those mixed feelings elsewhere: a “Heart! Heart!” hook that’s both annoying and endearing, a breakbeat instrumental that’s both ecstatic and wistful, and the moment you receive that like, both time-stopping and boundless. [7]

Maxwell Cavaseno: Contrary to popular belief, sincerity is never a pure answer. There is nothing less flattering to the human face than your own tears, gushing down your face, mixing with snot and drool over your whimpering pleas to make you look more like a slug than any person of desire (no offense meant to my invertebrate audience, as someone with far less of a spine). Nowadays, in the harsh kiln of radioactive beams from our webcams, phones, and any possible source of laser-like intense study, we’ve learned to fix rigid plasticine smiles and gussy ourselves up in the desperate hope for approval and kindness from even the most distant stranger. Try making it through the days when even the robocalls don’t hit you back. I don’t imagine anyone in Twice was spending their Hallow’s Eve like myself, hysterically laughing at my own reflection after slathering on gaudy amounts of makeup and facepaint in the hopes of the slightest sliver of approval (should I be wrong, please provide info in a corresponding email). But they are likewise burdened with the task of smuggling themselves into the day-to-day of their intended audiences. This group basically shattered me with Momo’s sobbing babble of a voice and our mutual insistence that hysteria “isn’t myself at all.” Now, in the same way, her voice echoes giggling pleas for attention, acknowledgement, the cheap reminder that yes, somebody up/over/out there might be fooled into thinking they like “me.” The blare of the flange-drenched VST horns and the percussions slip from the freestyle/Atlanta bass skips on the verses to the 4x4 bridge to the hesitant 130-BPM breakstep fills on the pre-chorus are not as triumphant as they are propulsive, hurriedly pushing oneself along further and further. For all the moments that shouldn’t succeed (the Migos flow breakdown and the weird gap before the final chorus threaten to busy up the record too much), it’s a perfect balance of charming leap and trembling flail forward, doing its best to never sound as starved a record as it is. That’s the genius of Twice at their peak form, that something so violently happy never betrays the insane loneliness and desperation at its core. We love you so much. [10]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[a-l-ias]

Learning To Fly: HTTYD

I’ve always wondered how Astrid knew how to fly Toothless in HTTYD 2. Rated T for language. Enjoy!

    As with all things Hiccup Horrendous Haddock did, tinkering involved a distinctly scrupulous process. Of all people to know that being precise could mean the difference between life and death, it was him. No longer could he remember how many times broken bones, fractured joints, singed hair, seared eyebrows, or any other obscure and frankly very painful injury had been the result of negligent fiddling. With barely eighteen years of experience under his belt, Hiccup almost had it down to a science.

    Rough sketches came first; aimless doodling in his trusty weather-worn notebook that weeded out the ridiculous ideas from the ones that sparked a small flame of excitement within him. When he could not ignore the nagging fizzle of fervor, he’d then draw up a blueprint on a larger piece of parchment, paying extra attention to the minute calculations of the length and width of adjuncts. He’d hang the yellowed paper on the wooden wall decorated with all of his other lunatic inventions eagerly awaiting trial, sequestering old prints behind newer ones, and desperately trying to find just enough space to pin it while simultaneously struggling with not falling off Toothless’s head. Then came his favorite part: the actual building. So often while he locked himself in the forge did he discover small errors in his blueprint or new and better ways to make a part fit, that he’d have to mentally scold himself until he felt responsible enough to edit the print. It was this stipulation where he found things tended to go awry.

    Almost anyone who has experienced intense bouts of inspiration is privy to the knowledge of just how hard it is to pry oneself away from the source and complete trivial tasks - like, oh, changing that four to a five because godsdamnit, if you don’t you’ll come back to make modifications and mold a piece to fit a four inch rod not a five inch rod and you’ll end up with no eyebrows again!

    Again, Hiccup almost had it down to a science.

    No matter how many times he chased away his facial hair, no matter how many times he practically killed himself, he just couldn’t seem to remember to make those corrections.

    And that’s how he ended up swinging lazily upside-down, suspended by the strings detached from his riding harness on the figurehead at the top of the dome.

    “You have got to be kidding me!” Snotlout’s muffled cry came from underneath a rather large, rather scaly, dark blue lump. “Ger-off!”

    Toothless, just as disgruntled as the viking beneath him, slowly heaved himself to his feet with a dragon-sized grunt, staggering wildly as he attempted to regain his footing. His luminescent eyes rolled haphazardly in their sockets.

    Snotlout moaned from his position supine on the ground. His helmet lay askew on his forehead, covering one eye and shoving his black hair into a porcupine style.

    Ruff and Tuff came sprinting into the arena, presumably from the clubhouse having lunch, for the latter had a piece of bread and melted cheese in his hand. The twins took in the whirlwind state of the ring.

    “Woah,” Ruff remarked in her usual discordant tone. “What happened here?”

    Hiccup’s cousin roughly picked himself up from the dirt, brushing off his leggings. “What happened? What happened?” He ranted. “I’ll tell you what happened! I just got mowed over by a maniac and his five-ton salamander! And just after I’d gotten the arrow crates restacked!” He gestured angrily at the splintered pile of wood and fletching that littered the arena.

    Toothless wandered curiously over to the heap, his ears perked, and sniffed it speculatively. His brows lifted in alarm and he snorted, a motion that shook its way down to the tip of his tail. He backed up quickly, nearly running over Snotlout again, and eyed the jumble.

    Hiccup, who was still dangling from the ceiling, cleared his throat with some difficulty. “Um, guys…” He pointed to himself sloppily, feeling as if his head was about to explode.

    “Oh, right,” Ruff snickered. “Barf, Belch! Get over here and help us cut the fishbone down!”

    Hiccup was only able to ignore the comment due to his heaving stomach.

    “You know,” Tuff pointed out, “We could just leave him there. I’ve never seen anyone’s face turn purple like that.”

    It was too late, though, for Ruff to reconsider her options; Barf and Belch had already bit down on the string. Before Hiccup could comprehend what was happening, his face was planted firmly into the ground like it was attempting a head-first journey to the center of the earth.

    “Owwww…” he whined pitifully as he clutched his nose.

    “You know, that almost makes up for it,” Tuff conceded.

    “Yeah, just look at the way his face is flashing colors! It’s like a Snoggletog lantern!”

    Snotlout crowed loudly. “It’s karma Haddock.”

    Hiccup shot his cousin his best withering glare, which only proved to exacerbate the gaudy boy’s laughing.

    “Shu’ up ‘n’ ge’ me some ice.” Blood poured out of Hiccup’s nostrils, and from the numb throbbing issuing from the bridge of his nose, the male was able to surmise he had broken it. Again.

    “Yes, your majesty,” Snotlout cackled. “Oh, and for the record, you’re cleaning this mess up.”

    The three boisterous teens sauntered out of the arena, clutching their stomachs in mirth.

    Hiccup sighed and removed his left hand from his face. Overlooking the still steady flow of sticky liquid, he held his hands out to the dragon. “Come ‘ere, Toothle’. I  wanna che’ your shaddle.”

    The entire reason Hiccup was in this predicament in first place drooped shamefully in shambles off of the reptile’s back.

    “Shid,” he cursed under his breath. He held up a tough leather strap that, until recently, had been a holster for the stirrup. Not having the heart to stand up and assess the damage, Hiccup scooched along the ground on his butt until he reached the tail, only to be meet with a less than disappointing sight.

    “Shid, shid, shid, shid.” No amount of curse words could reel in his slowly sinking hopes. The tailfin he had so fondly and artfully crafted for the amputated lizard sat in an even worse condition than the saddle. Limply held on by a fraying piece of wire, it was twisted and mangled beyond repair. “Frigga, I’m goingah ta have ta start ofer.”

    He miserably wiped away a trail of blood that had snaked its way down to his chin. “Dis is not goot.”

    Mentally, he ran through a list of what could have gone wrong. While they were still in the air, Hiccup had felt a wire snap out of place - slip, or possibly one of the pulleys broke. Spontaneously, a thought occurred to him. He remembered having an epiphany over dinner one night about the extension he’d added to the shift system. He’d - big surprise - forgotten to write it down, and when he fitted a slide shifter for his prosthetic over top of the train, he didn’t have the correct measurements. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

    “I’ll say.”

    He whipped around at the voice. Of all the people on the island…

    Astrid stood at the entrance to the dome with her arms crossed and her hip jutted out, staring determinedly at him.

    Knowing he couldn’t escape reprimand, he offered her an awkward nervous smile. “Heh, yeah…”

    Stormfly bounded out from behind her, wings spread and head bent, and lumbered over to sniff him concernedly.

    She rolled her eyes at him. “When are you ever going to stop...this!?” She held her hands out, indicating both him and Toothless.

    “Oh, oh, dank you,” he stammered sarcastically, “I really thoud we were ofer dat.”

    “You’re going to kill yourself one day!”

    Hiccup opened his mouth to respond, but was cut off by the re-entrance of the twins and Snotlout, followed closely by an anxious Fishlegs. Snotlout held out a cloth bag soaked with condensation and filled with ice.

    “Here you go.”

    Hiccup took it gratefully, placing it tenderly on his aching nose.

   “If I could, I’d lock you up,” Astrid continued as if the others had not entered. “But I fear you’ll just find a way to set the pen on fire.”

    “I’m nod dat prone.”

    She stared at him disbelievingly.

    “Fide.”

    Fishlegs was still gazing around in wonderment, his mouth forming a comic ‘o’. “How -”

    “Don’t ask,” Snotlout interjected. “Now come on, Fish-face. The sooner we get cleaning, the sooner we can not be here.”

    In a rare display of kindness, Snotlout marched towards the wreckage and started hauling away the scraps.

    Astrid, who had never let her gaze deviate from the bloody boy in front of her, dropped to one knee beside him. She gently slugged him in the shoulder - an action that communicated enough to Hiccup - before tentatively removing the ice bag from his hand. Hiccup snorted in protest, but she shushed him.

    Taking one damp corner, she softly rubbed clear the dried blood from his lips and chin. The russet-haired boy seized that moment to study her face. Her cheeks were slightly reddened from frustration, but still so radiant. She bit her lip slightly in concentration, just like she always did, a gesture Hiccup found absolutely adorable.

    When she finished washing his face, she harshly shoved the bag back into his palm.

    “Don’t think I’m not mad at you.”

    Hiccup frantically shook his head.

    “Good. Now get up. The first aid supplies are in the clubhouse and I’m not letting you walk around with a broken nose.”

    She grabbed his wrist, hauling him to his foot. As he tried to take a step forward, his metal leg skidded out from under him and he pitched to the side, landing in Astrid’s shocked but ready arms.

    He growled in annoyance: the flattened tip had bent downward during the crash. He kicked his foot against the ground a few times, as if that would soothe his anger.

    Astrid smiled wanly, reaching for his arm and swinging it over her shoulder.

    “Come on, Dragon-Boy. We need to get you fixed up.”

                                                              ***

    Several hours later found Hiccup hobbling around the forge on his crutches, desperately trying to locate some morsel of the metal he needed.

    After knocking himself into one of the workbenches for the third time in as many minutes, he grumpily confessed that he was completely out, and there was no possible way he would be able to fashion another prosthetic until he ordered some from Trader Johann. What was more, he had idiotically decided that his two back-up legs needed upgrades, and had scrapped them both weeks ago.

    Hiccup amazed himself sometimes.

    Toothless crooned sympathetically from his position at the entrance, leaning back on his hindquarters with his front feet resting on the rock partition. The Night Fury looked oddly naked devoid of his usual saddle and harness.

    Hiccup sniffed, his nose still a bit tender from his unceremonious landing that morning.

    “How are we going to do this?” He asked his best friend rhetorically.

    Toothless cocked his head to one side, raising an eyebrow as if to say you got us into this mess, you get us out.

    Hiccup scoffed. “You’re so helpful.”

    Toothless grinned sardonically.

    Sticking his lip out and resting his chin on the padded end of the crutch, Hiccup studied his workshop.

    “Well, we don’t have to worry about you not being able to fly; the first prototype of your saddle is in the stables. I can lengthen the pull-wire - since you’re longer - but I do have to teach someone how to fly with it, considering I have no leg…”

    Toothless perked up at the mention of flying, but realizing Hiccup was only talking to himself, he disinterestedly turned and flopped himself into a ball, pulling his one tailfin up to cover his eyes.

    “I’ll have to redraw that cheat-sheet (I should remember everything),” Hiccup continued, oblivious to the dragon’s lack of attention, “and maybe we could start at a place with less sea stacks,” he grinned at his own joke. “Now the real question is, who will fly? Fishlegs is too big for you in that harness. Tuff won’t listen to anything I have to say - he’ll be worse than dad - and neither will Ruff. Snot probably won’t give you back…”

    A merry whistle caught his attention and for the second time that day, Hiccup marveled at the impeccable timing.

    Astrid strode down the boardwalk leading to her hut, carrying a box full of balliste ammunition.

    A slow smile danced on Hiccup’s lips, with an undertone that was decidedly devious.

    “What’d ya say bud,” Hiccup directed at the slumbering dragon, “She looks about the right size.”

                                                                   ***

    Astrid could not be described as distinctly intrepid. She liked things safe, and secure. Why else did she have the most fortified and armed house in the whole archipelago? Growing up in a world constantly ravaged by dangerous fire breathing beasts cultivated that mindset. Add on the pain of losing a loved one to the cause of not being well-prepared, Astrid’s biggest fear seemed to be that of unreadiness. It’s not to say that she wasn’t adventurous or brave - no, quite the contrary: she loved seeing new sights and meeting new people, and during a fight she was the last person you’d expect to find on the sidelines. She was loud and bold and proud and a teenager - it only fit. But that didn’t mean that she was reckless.

    She did not pride herself on discerning the most dramatic and asinine way to get herself killed like some people.

    She did not enjoy the hearty thrill of the chase and electrifying buzz of insurrection like someone she could mention.

    And she most definitely did not savor the floundering feeling of not being in control six kilometers in the air like Hiccup.

    “Please, Astrid!” His tone was getting higher and whinier, an indication that he was becoming frustrated.

    “For the eighth time, NO.”

    In the past two days since Hiccup and Toothless had crashed out of the sky, the population of the Edge had gotten used to the foreign sounds of Hiccup’s slightly nasally-er drawl that came from his now somewhat crooked nose and the hard clack, shuffle of his crutches and boot.

    Astrid more than most.

    Hiccup had apparently made it his mission to get her in the air on Toothless. He’d tried everything to make her say yes, from promising a favor in return to kidnapping her from her chores and sticking her in a tree (he’d probably asked for the new bruises that adorned his arms) to kissing her senseless in the alley between Fishlegs’ and the twin’s huts.

    None of them had made her even think about budging - except maybe the kiss: she’d been so delirious that she’d had to stop herself in the middle of saying “yes.”

    “Look at him!” He pointed at the dragon, who sat on the open wrap-around porch, his front paws drawn in close to his body and his glowing eyes wide and pitiful. “Someone needs to take him out for a romp before he explodes!”

    Toothless looked down at the floor for a second before fixing her with his most pathetic expression.

    “I will never understand how you two conspire so well together.” She picked up her plate from the table and dodged around him to walk over to the washing bin filled with the rest of the gang’s dishes. He didn’t miss a beat, spinning on his good foot and following her.

    She picked up an awaiting bucket of water from the floor and heaved it over to Stormfly. The Nadder was curled up in the sun, her silvery-blue wings folded against her body, watching her human carefully. As soon as the bucket hit the planking, Stormfly let loose a stream of white-orange fire into the liquid, making it bubble and steam welcomely. Astrid hauled the bucket back to the washing bin and dumped its contents over the ceramics. Hiccup limped over and handed her the soap bar from the adjoining table. She took it without question, dipping it into the scalding water and trying to ignore the melting of her hands. Bubbles floated cheerfully to the top, creating a thin layer of foam over the surface.

    He leaned against the wall as she started scrubbing the plates. “You’d make him so happy.”

    “I’m not going to engage in some half-assed invention of yours that nearly failed the first time!” She dropped the dripping plate onto the counter harder than she meant to, but she went along with it since the noise made Hiccup flinch.

    “It really didn’t,” he said, propping his crutches under one arm to keep him steady and gathering the drying towel and finished plate. “It worked fine until we got hit with a club for a tail.”

    Astrid couldn’t help the snort that escaped her. The way he so casually talked about his near-death experiences either had her so annoyed she wanted to punch him, or so amused she wanted to cackle.

    She probably wasn’t helping her cause too much.

    “I don’t even know how to work the dumb thing.”

    “Ah, see, that’s the beauty of teaching.”

    “I’m not getting on him knowing that if we fall, it will be my fault.”

    “Control freak.” He set another dish in the cabinet above their heads.

    “I am not!”

    “Are too! You won’t get on him because you don’t like feeling as if you can’t control him.”

    “I can control him more than I can Stormfly.”

    “Yes, but all you do on Stormfly is sit. On Toothless, you know you need to have some control, and not knowing how to have that control is disorienting to you.”

    “Who’s side are you even on?”

    He froze in the middle of stacking cups, contemplating the accusation. “You’re right. Anyway, it honestly won’t be that bad. I’ll be right there to walk you through it.”

    “Do you even remember how to use the thing?”

    “Yes, of course.”

    “It was three years ago, Hiccup.”

    “So?”

    “How did it even survive your fall?”

    “I made two, just in case.”

    “That is about as much forethought that I think I’ve ever seen you have.”

    “Why, thank you.”

    “It wasn’t a compliment.”

    “So will you do it?” He looked at her so hopefully Astrid figured she might as well get sucked in a whirlpool with no chance of getting out.

    She heaved an overdramatic sigh and finally relented, pretending not to find his wild fist pump and violent toppling cute.

                                                           ***

    The next day at dawn, Astrid met Hiccup on a  bluff overlooking the Northern Ocean. The other riders had slowly trickled in to witness the “disastrous” flying attempt. Looking around, Astrid had a sudden flashback to Hiccup’s psychotic flight-suit test runs - multiple of which failed miserably and almost ended with Hiccup-juice splattered on the rocks. Astrid frowned deeply and mentally made a note to ground Hiccup from death-defying acts for the next...forever.

    “Ok, ‘Strid.” The lanky teen pushed himself out from under Toothless’s belly, where he had been adjusting and attaching several important-looking gears. “We’re ready.” He sat up and grinned at her. Using Toothless as support, he stood, wobbling for a minute before steadying out.

    “This,” he said, pulling a rumpled piece of parchment from a pouch on his right hip, “will be your most useful tool. Don’t lose it: you will crash.”

    Astrid gulped. She recognized the tell-tale signs of second-thoughts and quickly steeled her nerves, looking defiantly at Toothless as if he were daring to question her resolve.

    “Come here,” he gestured towards himself, and clipped the parchment onto the saddle head with a double-binder system. On the paper was a grid of six squares, each containing a cartoony sketch of a tail position and marked with a number.

    “These are all the possible points the tail can be shifted to.” He held up a flattened hand. “Here’s the stirrup. Your foot will start like this,” he tilted his hand a bit forward. “That is position three. It is your takeoff and landing position.” With his free hand, he pointed at the fourth box in the grid and tilted his hand backwards. “This is position four.” He pointed at box five and tilted his hand back farther. “Position five…” he pointed at the next box and tilted his hand so that was vertical, “...and position six. Forget five and six, you won’t need those yet.”

    “What do they do?” She inquired.

    “Five basically lets him spin uncontrollably, and six is for steep dives, but we won’t be doing any of those today.” He moved his hand back to simulate position three. “This is your most useful position. For easy flights where he just wants to glide, three is basically all you need. However,” he shifted his hand forward. “Position two is also very important, and so is position one.” Position one looked just as uncomfortable as position six, lying completely vertical in the opposite direction, and Astrid learned to respect the flexibility of Hiccup’s ankles.

    “Listen carefully, now, because this part makes all the difference.” Astrid fixed her eyes on his still- hovering hand. “Both takeoff and landing require some unique dexterity. You have to synchronously switch positions while changing your weight on his back,  Toothless takes off a bit differently than Stormfly, of course, so instead a vertical climb straight from the ground, he does this sort of run/hop/skip thing and climbs at an angle. Your foot - like I said earlier - will begin in position three, and he’ll begin by running, but as soon as you feel him bunch himself in preparation to jump, you need to switch the position to two. There will be this little pause between him leaving the ground and him flapping his wings, and that’s where you switch it back to three. Once he flaps his wings, the stirrup immediately goes to position one. He’ll face himself at an angle to the ground and the second time he flaps his wings, boom, back to three. Did you get that?”

    Astrid most certainly did not get that.

    Hiccup chuckled - a deep sound that reverberated in his chest. “I’ll walk you through it again when we’re in the air. Next item!”

    Astrid desperately wanted him to slow down. He was talking so fast, just like he did whenever he got passionate about a project, and it was hard for her to completely wrap her mind around everything.

    “Toothless hates it when you sit on him like a rock, so you need to adjust your weight accordingly, especially during takeoff. It’s mostly a natural reaction, but whenever he wants to go forward, you have to lean forward, when he encounters turbulence, you need to sit him like a feather. Basic stuff.

    “For landing - it’s basically the reverse of takeoff. He’ll come in at a reasonable angle, then, just before he touches down, he’ll hover over the ground momentarily. When he starts descending, you’ll switch the stirrup to three (but you’ll probably have it already on three because you’ll be gliding), when you feel the little hiccup before he starts hovering, switch it to two, then when he drops, switch it back to three.”  He glanced warily at Astrid, trying to judge just how unhappy she was with this arrangement. “You’ll do fine,” he encouraged.

    Astrid mumbled something about him being such an ass.

    Hiccup chose to conceal his smile with a cough.

    “Well then, shall we?” He made a sweeping motion with his hand, gesturing for her to mount Toothless.

    Astrid took a deep breath before grabbing the saddle-horn and hauling herself up. She wiggled a bit, getting familiar with the unfamiliar saddle.

    “This isn’t so bad,” she said.

    “You’ve just got to put your foot in the stirrup now.” With a little struggling, she was able to fit her boot within the straps. “Good. You ready?”

    “As I’ll ever be.”

    Stormfly hummed from her seat next to Toothless on the edge of the cliff, sniffing her rider with interest. The Nadder squawked at the Night Fury, and he warbled back tiredly, as if promising for the umpteenth time that nothing was going to happen. Stormfly, however, didn’t seem too convinced. Still, she stepped back to give Toothless suitable space.

    “Looks like your dragon has about as much faith in this working as the rest of us do,” called Snotlout from where he sat leaning against a rock.

    Hiccup rolled his eyes. “It’ll work, and she’ll be fine,” he proclaimed confidently.

    “Sure.”

    Hiccup reached across her lap to grip the saddle-horn and lift himself up behind her. His thighs mirrored her own, running parallel with the tops touching the backs of her legs. He hooked both his arms loosely around her waist, and suddenly she was aware of the fire that burned across her skin everywhere he made contact.

    Great, all she needed was another damn distraction.

    She focused on the small spiny bumps between Toothless’s ears, which were decidedly less attractive than the lean male she had her back pressed against.   

    Focus.

    “Whenever you’re ready, Mi’lady,” he chippered in her ear.

    “Ok, Toothless. Let’s do this.”

    The dragon flashed her a gummy smile before taking off towards the lip. Just before reaching the edge, Astrid felt the powerful muscles underneath her contract, tensing in a wired way.

    “Position two,” Hiccup reminded her softly. The calm and confidence that emanated from him helped to clear her mind and let her focus. She pushed her foot forward slightly, hearing a small click that reverberated up her leg.

    Toothless jumped, pushing all three of them in the air. They hung there for a couple seconds - seconds where time seemed to have no hold - before Hiccup reminded her again that she needed to switch the tail.

    She counted one flap of the ginormous wings that propelled them forward jerkily. Toothless grunted as she almost missed the cue to switch to position one, but cooed encouragingly when she remembered the last shift.

     And they were flying.

    “Ha, ha!” Hiccup cheered. “You did it!”

    Astrid, although she didn’t outwardly show it, was jumping hysterically for joy inside.

    “Now all you have to do is land him!”

    “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Haddock.”

    “I’ve said it enough already, but you’ll do fine.”

    “In the meantime, though, I’ve hardly ever ridden a Night Fury, and never flown one, so let’s make this count.”

                                                              ***

    That afternoon, Astrid was beginning to regret her decision to help the chief’s son.

    It definitely wasn’t worth it, she mused as she hung suspended from the figurehead at the top of the dome, to ride the fastest known dragon, but still end up hanging from the ceiling.

[wirewitchviolet]

I am madly in love with Zelda’s Overworld

Given the state of things in America/my personal life lately, and my inability to really do anything about any of them, I’ve been playing a lot of video games. And by that, I mostly mean I’ve been putting the original Legend of Zelda through a program that randomizes all sorts of things over and over again. This has always been one of my favorite games, and Zelda Randomizer gives me a new appreciation for it, by forcing me to actually explore the overworld again looking for dungeons and shops and so forth for the first time since I memorized the optimal path through the game in the ‘80s.

In general, this game has really aged beautifully, and if I can find the energy, I might have more posts about this in me in the future, but for now, I’d like to just focus on the design of the overworld, from a few different angles. First off, I appreciate the general level of engagement it forces. The overworld in Zelda, or any other game where the term really applies, is largely “the outdoorsy bit you cut across between dungeons” and in a lot of games, even a lot of other Zelda games (pointedly, Ocarina of Time), that’s really all there is to it. There’s a big open space you run across to get to the next fun bit. The portable Zelda games make navigating the overworld more of a puzzle, largely, requiring various tools to get to various small sections.

The original Zelda though is an interesting case. For the mostpart, it’s all very open, in the sense that you can walk to any given screen of it from the start of the game, generally following pretty straightforward paths, but it’s non-trivial to do so, because there’s just enough obstacles to walk around, just enough teeth to the monsters, and just enough of a steady demand to replenish your supplies of cash and bombs that even if you could easily avoid the monsters, you usually need to be killing them as you go.

That said, Zelda does some impressive things with it’s overworld monsters. Most games at the time (for that matter, most games now) place enemies very deliberately, in certain specific places. The original Zelda though has a count of monsters on each screen, a specific list of monster types you can find on one screen, but randomizes the specific placement and ratio every time you wander through (with specific screens having fancy variations, where instead of popping in all over, they file in from other exits, or sneak in behind you). Combined with enemies having a lot of projectiles, points where they can’t be hit, and diagonal movement, you can never shut your brain off.

Then of course there’s the actual pathing of the overworld. Let’s make a little grid of every screen, and draw in the connections.

OK that’s kind of an eyesore. Let’s drop the grid and go black and white with it... and I’ll blow this up a little too.

So here’s what we have here. Bottom center is the starting screen, which I marked with a bit of a square. A bit to the right of that I have another big blob of white, which honestly doesn’t denote anything special beyond being a screen with exits on all 4 sides, two of which lead to screens that contain two distinct paths that don’t connect back with each other for a while after you leave it. This makes that particular unremarkable looking screen really significant gameplay wise as a central hub in the most maze-like part of the overworld, but I wasn’t marking it to stand out so much as I was trying to make things look nice, and my system of drawing center-to center lines when there’s one meaningful exit, and lines on the 1/3 marks where a path split just left that looking really awkward and ugly otherwise.

The other points of interest here are the arrows, two in the bottom left, one in the upper right. Those are one-way exits to the lost woods and “lost hills,” the two screens where most efforts to leave loop back to where you started, with one regular exit (east from the woods, west from the hills) and one secret exit to an otherwise inaccessible chunk of the map (just one screen north of the hills, something like a third of the overworld west of the woods). While a bit hard to see, we also have two orange dots near the southern corners, representing places where burning a hedge not only opens a dungeon, but opens a quick shortcut between neighboring screens. Up north, near the center, there’s also two blue dots where you can cross the northern river using the ladder, and access the northwestern chunk of the map without the usual detour. Oh and I left off the two islands you need the raft for since ultimately, the raft is just a funny shaped key opening dungeons from neighboring screens, so they don’t really effect navigation.

At a quick glance, in this minimalist view, things look pretty griddy. Down where you start, most screens have open connections on all sides, with travel limitations getting a bit more common the further out you get. You can’t really appreciate the practicalities of pathing though without focusing on the negative spaces, so let me splash some color around.

There we go! So now the main thing that should be jumping out at you is that big grey blob. Which technically would be even bigger if I didn’t use a different color for the edges of the map. That doesn’t particularly correspond to any one specific map feature, but it’s a massive region you have to circumnavigate to get from anywhere else to the northwest corner of things, and said corner has a couple other non-trivial barriers to boot. For what it’s worth, the “8″ is the graveyard, the pair of glasses are a remote mountain area that isn’t particularly notable, and ironically, Spectacle Rock is actually in the elongated T next door.

That mustard stain in the north seperates the desert from the river/waterfall area. The big backwards “E” divides the maze-like eastern woods from the coastline that’s more of an isolated path than it feels like, with the dark green “C” next door representing more convoluted parts of the path. The dark red slug is what keeps you along that really annoying stretch of coastline where you have a super tight path between the ocean and the cliff. It’s a little more open to the west of that. What this visualization still doesn’t really show though is how big a deal the one-way paths and ladder shortcuts really are. So let’s straighten a couple of these right angles out next.

OK. NOW we can see just how significant of a choke point the lost woods really are. These maps are all to scale by the way, 1 pixel to 1 tile. It’s not an absolutely accurate guide if you’re speed running, since exits from screens aren’t always perfectly centered, but you really get a sense here, in practical terms, how functtionally far you have to go to get from the waterfall area to “death mountain” proper. There are two technically adjacent screens which are functionally about as far apart as they can get in practical terms. Especially since, again, the whole “western” third here is gated by the lost woods, a mysterious puzzle if you’re playing the game blind.

You can also see here what a huge different that stepladder really makes. The two places you can hop over the river are ridiculously good shortcuts. Getting back to where you were if you accidentally enter the lost hills from the east is a bit of a slog too, you can see here.

Finally, from this abstraction, it’s easier to note another interesting map feature. Right in the middle of the unfolding view here, a bit west of where you start, you will notice there is a choke point that splits the entire game world roughly in half. Without the ladder or warp paths, to get from anywhere in the western/northwestern part of the world to the east, or vice versa, no matter how otherwise varied your route may be, there is one specific screen you must travel to.