#I was into it when I was young it’s part of my art style forever now

[badlydrawnlegendarydragons]

The others do not agree

[jojikawa]

Sukuna’s Vessel, Yuuji Itadori.

Your time as Sukuna’s wife was a small blip in time. Something you nearly forgot until a pink-haired boy tries to talk to you

tw// fluff, adult language, MC is Lilith! (a powerful demoness) if this does well I will make multiple parts.

masterlist

Art by icebuko

Was inspired by this scene from RWBY. dividers

You have already adjusted to your life in this world. It was hard to know if this is what you enjoyed or not but there was much less violence and a lot more excitement and love…You figured the mundane life suited you better. You became interested in the culture of Japan, you taught yourself its current traditions and you learned to be an elementary school teacher. No idea of why you were resurrected in this modern age came to your mind, but all you could do was live. Although, for years upon years, you felt like something was missing, you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. 

Just when that feeling was beginning to fade, you met a particular boy. You stood in the spring rain with your transparent umbrella, dressed in business casual as you helped your young, toddler students cross the busy street. Silently, you desperately tried to shield the babies from the harsh rain and cold air. The children scattered, going on their way back home using the routes you taught them so that they could be fast.

“Um, excuse me…?”

It was the boy you had seen before. He was young, probably a teenager. You noticed him stalking you for a bit now. What could he have wanted from you?

His hair was an unnatural color, maybe dyed. His uniform wasn’t anything like you had recognized and on his feet were painfully red shoes that hurt your eyes. Truly the sense of style for a young boy in this age fashion.

“Yes?” You turned around to look at the boy. He was visibly nervous but you tried to comfort him with a welcoming smile. As you examined him, you got a sense of familiarity.

“Are you….(y/n)?”

You blinked for a moment. Could this have been an older sibling of one of your students?

“I am.” You replied. “Is there…something you want to speak to me about?” You tilted your head and he became increasingly restless under your watchful eyes. “Can we talk in private?” The boy asked politely. You looked down at your watch. It seemed you had time before you needed to go home to prepare your lesson for the next day of teaching.

You humored the boy. The two of you walked to a nearby park where he told you his name and his occupation. He told you why he was going to school. If what he was told was true, you should already know about curses and sorcerers. He also asked you questions.

Yuuji asked things like if you had a family, what you’ve been doing with your time, etc. But then he asked who you were and if you loved anyone.

You found it rather inappropriate that someone so young and strange to you was asking about your personal life.

Now, the two of you sat on the bench. The rain eased to a drizzle and you began to enjoy the little time you had left with the boy. “Why does who I may love matter to a boy like you? You should be into girls your own age.” You joked, closing your umbrella and leaning it against the edge of your wooden seat. Yuuji blushed at your comment and raised his hands before shouting. “N-No, it’s not like that! I was asking f-for a friend!”

“A friend?” You repeated, raising your eyebrow slightly. You couldn’t recall anyone who wouldn’t be interested in you. “Well, I need to get going.” You told him. “Dinner’s calling me and I have to grade my student’s tests.” You smiled kindly, beginning to stand before the boy suddenly stopped you. He grabbed the sleeve of your attire before uttering:

“Are you really the wife of Ryomen Sukuna?”

Your mouth opened to speak. You felt the world stop and it was like you couldn’t feel the rain on your skin anymore. That was a name you haven’t heard forever.

“Who told you that name?”  Your ability to make Yuuji feel calm was soon diminishing. Yuuji didn’t reply at first. His eyes darted from you and often looked to the right as if he were in thought. He would hold his head but never made an effort to mention why he was behaving so erratically.

“I guess that means you are her.”

Your face eased. “So, I assume that you have revealed yourself to me because you plan to kill me like what happened hundreds of years ago or so?” You tilted your head before giving him a closed-eyed smile. “Huh?? Oh, N-No, of course not. My sensei doesn’t even know I’m here.”

“Then…who sent you?” You sat back down by Yuuji. The boy didn’t answer you. His gaze broke from yours. “Yeah, Yeah, I’m getting to that!” He muttered but rather loudly. The boy didn’t seem to be talking to you.

He then turned his full attention to you again. “How did you meet Sukuna?” His question was innocent but it held unimaginable weight. “First,” You raised a finger. “How do you know that name?”

Yuuji shoved his hands into his pockets. “School.” He lied…half lied.

“They’re teaching you about him at your school…? Gods…” You sighed softly. “I knew Sukuna a long time ago but my story goes beyond him. I’m much older than him, you see.” You looked down at your black pumps. It was expected of you to wear this for your job. You suddenly felt the pressure of walking in them all day and kicked them off just a bit.

“Older?”

You nodded. “I was actually the first woman. I was the first wife of Adam. You know who that is?” You broke your gaze with the ground to see that the boy was staring at you rather intently. Was he even listening? He wasn’t even blinking. “Yuuji.” You called, ripping him from his daydream.

“H-Huh? Oh, Adam? Um…” He thought for a moment before shaking his head. You smiled. “It’s okay if you don’t. It’s more of a Western tale…” Your manicured nails dug into the soft wooden chair. “Adam was a jerk.” The frown you held was small but behind it was an anger that only the Gods could fathom.

The boy’s ears perked up. “Oh, like Adam and Eve! You’re Eve!” He looked as if he had hit the lottery with a guess that good. But…

You laughed again. “No. Eve came after me. She was the more obedient wife. I’m often erased from history.” Your posture eased and you leaned your back against the bench. “Ryomen Sukuna was the only man that ever loved me. And that I loved back.” Your heart rate quickened thinking of your lover. “You humans know him as a horrible threat…which is true.”

“But I was a horrible person too. We were horrible together…my Ryomen.” You said his name so breathlessly. It was so long ago but you replayed your favorite moments with him. There was no harm in talking about Sukuna, right? He was long gone so this boy’s superiors couldn’t have been targeting you for any reason. You enjoyed pretending to be a human. This wouldn’t be a problem, right?

Yuuji didn’t say a word. He hid his eyes from you, sinking further into his jacket. Without saying much of anything, you effortlessly humanized Sukuna. It didn’t make the boy feel any less hostile toward the King of Curses but it did give him insight into what kind of person he was. He had a soft spot for at least one person. Without warning, he sat up straight. “Um…would you say you still loved him?”

Normally, you would be put off by such a question, but you were already deep in this conversation. Your eyes wandered to the people entering the park here and there. They pushed their kids in strollers and walked their dogs. The sound of the cars driving behind you was painstakingly loud as you tried to think of the past. You answered. “Yes, I do.”

Suddenly, Yuuji erupted with activity. The way he pulled his hood over his head and turned away concerned you. “Are you alright, sweetheart?” You leaned over going to rest a hand on your shoulder when you heard muffled speaking. “Yuuji—”

“I-It’s nothing! ‘Just cold, sorry!” He blurted out, causing you to recoil back. “I see…” You replied, going back into your place. “I wonder what ever happened to Ryomen.” You looked down at your watch. It was time for you to go now.

“I know where Sukuna is.”

“What?” The corner of your mouth instinctively raised into a smirk but your eyes were wide as saucers. “I didn’t peg you as a prankster but I suppose I should’ve expected it.” Your tenseness eased, before shutting your eyes and laughing to yourself. Sukuna? Here? No, that surely wasn’t true. The world would be in ruin if he were. 

“I’m serious!” Yuuji then proceeded to explain to you his unique situation that involved him swallowing your lover’s fingers and, in turn, bonding them together. You still didn’t know what to believe. It almost made you angry…you somehow felt that perhaps, sorcerers were watching you, waiting to see if you’d break your masquerade as a human if they convinced you that he was alive.

You clenched the handle of your umbrella as it lay beside you. “If Sukuna is really inside of your body, then let me speak to him.” You were….half serious. You wanted so badly to just hear his voice again, even if he were saying something vulgar or pure evil. Or to know if this was all just a trick. Yuuji rubbed the nape of his neck. “I can’t really do that. Not in public, he might—”

“He won’t.” You interrupted. “I’ll make sure he won’t.” 

Yuuji had no choice but to trust you. For the last day, he’s had Sukuna yelling at him so loudly and often that he wasn’t able to tune it out like always. For a moment, Yuuji stopped resisting Sukuna’s pull on him, allowing the curse to take over his body. There was a familiar set of markings that appeared on his body and face. The amount of joy, confusion, and concern that filled your body was undeniable.

Although your Ryomen Sukuna was in front of you, trapped inside the body of a boy, you felt like it was a trick. Maybe it wasn’t sorcerers casting a spell on your mind. Perhaps it was God punishing you one last time or it was Adam trying to take one last jab at you before you experienced true death.

Once you laid eyes upon Sukuna, it still looked as if Yuuji still had control. His eyes were like that of a dear in headlights while his face was full of admiration.

“Ryomen?” You called his name, causing the vessel he was in to flinch. His eyes then turned serpent-like. They were eyes you knew very well.

“It seems as though you have been resurrected.” He rested his head on his palm, those same eyes wandering your body, staring shamelessly at your chest area and thighs. “But you can never be too sure. How do I know you’re real?” He fidgeted more in his seat—more than Yuuji actually. He tapped his foot on the ground, drummed his fingers on his leg, and even sank his nails into his jawline out of anticipation.

The question caused you to blink. “You’re asking me if I’m real—?”

“Hurry. You have—” His gaze shifted downward for a brief moment before it went back to you. “—less than 60 seconds. If you can’t answer me, I’ll kill you and be done with it. Tell me what I said to you the first time we met. Only I and the real (y/n) know of this.” 

Your mouth curled into a pleasant smile. You turned your hips towards him. “I’m not scared of a little monster like you.” You locked eyes with him. “When I met Ryomen, the first words to me were ‘You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’ And I said, ‘I think the Gods would disagree.’ He laughed in a way I would never forget before telling me: ‘Give me a son and I’ll give you the world.’” 

Sukuna was unmoving. His antics completely stopped and he listened. So silent…it was unlike him. You continued.

“I was devastated when he asked that of me. I said ‘I can not have a child. My womb is corrupt.’ And so he vowed to make—”

“Shit, it really is you.” The words pour out of his mouth like a waterfall. “It’s been so long. I thought I would never see you again. What are you doing living a mundane life with mortal scum?!” He cursed and threw out his insults, not even caring about the poor humans who walked by and were forced to listen to him. You smiled attractively. “I kinda like this ‘scum’” You replied, mimicking his voice so well you sounded like a female version of him.

“What happened to your body? Why are you burrowed away inside of a child?” Your head tilted with curiosity. His vessel was much smaller than his original although, it was nice seeing what he’d be like as more of a man human and less of a monster.

Sukuna parroted the same thing Yuuji did, confirming the truth. The boy ate his finger.

“…but once I return to full power, I’ll make the Gods pay for what they did to you.” He wanted nothing more than to just reach out and touch you. It’s been so long since he’s seen you…

…since he’s heard your voice.

Hundreds and hundreds of years of his consciousness lingered beyond his execution and his only thought was you. Even then, aspects of you had faded in his memory. Where were your horns and claws? Did you even have either of those? You had a sword too? No? Oh, he couldn’t remember but one thing that did stick with him was your presence. Sukuna could track you like a bloodhound and find you at every corner of the earth.

“The Gods wouldn’t care about you, Ryo.” A dry laugh left your lips at his awestruck face. “They don’t even care about me…but, my ex-husband Adam—will return. You’ll be good to me and kill him, right?” Your sweet smile turned into a smirk, your eyes turned warm and filled with lust. Sukuna picked up on your subtle cues, his mouth going from slightly agape to a twisted, toothy grin. “I’ll bring you his head, I swear!”

“Hm.” Your eyes lit up with enthusiasm. You couldn’t help but rest your palm on his cheek. Yuuji’s skin was much smoother and softer than Sukuna’s monstrous features. “…and if you objectify me again, I’ll obliterate you.” Your manicured nails grazed his skin, threatening to pierce the vessel at any moment.

Sukuna was confused—not afraid. He hasn’t wronged you so why are you threatening him? It was then that he noticed your eyes. They glowed red.

That’s right, you were rather observant. His hungry eyes were already sexualizing in every way possible.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Sukuna replied, his wide demonic grin returning to his soft features.  “But ya know, if you want, you can have me right now.”

Your eyes softened before you exhaled. “In that body?” You chuckled. “Maybe when it matures a little.” Your words made his smile fade and his nose scrunch up in disgust. “Who cares how old this vessel is?! It’s ME!”

“And you’re a bit short for my liking.” You fake pouted before letting go of his face. Upon instinct, he rubbed the claw markings you left behind. “I’m still taller than your small ass. You women are so picky with your size kinks.” he spat, rolling his eyes. “Next, you’ll ask me to put the world in your hands. And what do you bring to the table, huh?”

“Myself.” You replied before placing an innocent kiss on his cheek.

“Then, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to stick around.”

[ultimateshixiongfuckertournament]

Noncanonicals Tournament FINAL

This final is between Han Ying from Word of Honor (shizun/mentor: Zhou Zishu) and Fang Duobing from Mysterious Lotus Casebook (shizun/mentor: Li Xiangyi / Li Lianhua)

Propaganda under the cut! (Warning: Propaganda may include spoilers about the characters and their media)

Han Ying:

He idolized and was mentored by Zhou Zishu to the point of recruiting other young martial artists to revive ZZS’s dying sect and willing to die live happily ever after for it.

#han ying wants to fuck zhou zishu SO BAD#han ying#shizunfucker tournament

#my sweet ying'er wants to fuck zzs so bad he's gagging for it

#HAN YING HANDS DOWN#would have licked his boots if he asked

#han ying wanted nothing more than to officially become zzs's student/part of his sect#it was literally his dying wish that his brothers in arms may get to do that#he says several times in the show to zzs's very face that he's 100% down for dying for him#he swears allegiance EXCLUSIVELY to zzs and not the prince they're all serving#he comes up with bangers like 'if there is anything you need I will lay down my life with no regret'#'if you were gone one day how could I live alone'#'a loyal servant wouldn't have two masters in his life'#he sneaks into zzs's abandoned residence and homoerotically-#-strokes the painting of a flower that symbolizes a) zzs himself b) zzs's grief for being the lone survivor of his sect#and he wanted to join siji so so badly#it was his life's dream and he died IN siji but before getting to have that 😭#listen he makes me insane#anyway they should have fucked sloppy style and zzs would have had an out of body experience if hy called him shizun#my final thesis goodbye

#it's HAN YING#you could power entire nations with the power of that yearning

#han ying saw zhou zishu and IMMEDIATELY dropped to his knees are you joking#wen kexing immediately clocked him

#ying'er my sweet prince#he wants the dick so badly

Fang Duobing:

Fang Duobing has most definitely had several fantasies of being dommed by his shifu Li Xiangyi! He is also equally invested in marrying Li Lianhua - travelling the jianghu, going on rooftop moonlit dates, incorporating looking after him forever and ever into his general future plans. This is even before he knows that Li Lianhua and Li Xiangyi are the same person. Oh there are Layers to the shizunfucking. Where's that post about being so devoted to someone that it breaks the pedestal they're put on and comes full circle to loving them for the person they are? (its here: https://www.tumblr.com/difeisheng/733133489565745152/the-core-of-fanghua-is-built-around-fang-duobings) When they finally do get to know each other 10 years later, after Li Xiangyi's identity is found out, Fang Duobing insists on being equals rather than master-and-disciple! Li lianhua is Fang Duobing’s guide in the Jianghu! He leaves his house, dog and the only records of his unique martial arts to Fang Duobing before running away!! Fang Duobing’s most important agenda is to save Li Lianhua from slow death by poison!!! He doesn't care if Li Lianhua keeps leaving him behind and lying to him and is 'at peace' with dying!! They live together. They'll never be equals. They've been equals all along. They're zhiji. They're master and disciple. they're married. They're everything.

#this man wanted to fuck his shizun under two whole ass different identities#this man was given one million choices between his shizun and his entire cushy rich boi life and did not sweat the decision even once#this man was engaged to a princess - who was COOL - and went “no thanks i’d rather follow shizun around in a fantasy china airstream’

#this cannot not be fang duobing let's be serious#polls#he's been drawing hearts around his shizun's name since age 8

#Fang Duobing going through it for what he thinks is two different people but is just one guy#so he gets my vote easy

#pls he is head employee at shizunfucker.co

[cedarxwing]

The ending of Hannibal the novel explained

(aka the breastfeeding scene)

Here's the passage (end of Chapter 101):

I thought everyone was kidding about the breastfeeding kink jokes until my partner read Hannibal and the whole ending flew over their head. Their main takeaway was "that was weird." When I checked reddit, it seemed everyone was confused there too. I was gobsmacked to see one guy say that Thomas Harris was playing some cruel joke on the reader by writing an ending that didn't make sense!

How many people are reading Hannibal like this, completely missing the resolution to Hannibal's character arc? They must finish the book confused about what it was all about in the first place. So here's how I understand it!

First, I need to get this out of the way: a lot of people hate this scene, and from what I understand it's because they're weirded out by the "breastfeeding kink." Which is fine, but it makes me want to gently hold them by the hand and tell them that it's ok for someone to suck on a nipple. It happens all the time. Sometimes it just feels good, sometimes it's part of a breastfeeding fantasy, and sometimes it's literal breastfeeding. Between consenting adults, this is all fine and normal. Let's all move past this knee-jerk repulsion (or alternatively, sit in our discomfort and expand our horizons) so we can analyze this piece of art together. :)

Next, authors LOVE Freudian psychoanalysis. Even though it's all nonsense, it's full of literary allusion and makes for compelling narratives and character studies (childhood maladjustment, repressed memories, etc), which is basically catnip for a writer. Thomas Harris was no exception, and probably creamed himself (as I did) when he learned that Freud's oral-sadistic stage was also termed the "cannibalistic stage," referring to the time when an infant is growing teeth and begins to bite at the breast--the psychosexual urge to devour and destroy the thing you love. What could be more appropriate for Hannibal?

Next, consider the pattern of Hannibal's Il Mostro murders. He killed young couples in one of the most romantic cities in the world, then arranged them as Chloris and Zephyr from Botticelli's Primavera, exposing Chloris's left breast just like in the painting. In classical art, an exposed breast is often a symbol of fertility. Chloris is associated with spring, new growth, and transformation.

Perhaps, at the time, Hannibal rationalized these murders as retribution for rude behavior. Maybe the couples were performing disgusting PDA. Maybe they were obnoxious tourists on their honeymoons. Either way, it's clear to the reader that Hannibal has some deep-seated hang up about sex and romance.

The particulars of this hang up are open to interpretation, but based on Hannibal's obsession with the rape and transformation of Chloris as well as his embarrassment at the paintings of Leda and the Swan in the German's house, I think it's safe to say that Hannibal feels like any relationship he has with a woman who isn't aware of his true (monstrous) identity would involve a degree of violence/lack of consent. He is forever barred from normal romance.

Having given up on sex/romance, Hannibal is unable to consciously recognize his desire for Clarice, so he sublimates it into a more general familial love. He longs for a return to innocence, to return to the time before he ate Mischa and became an unlovable monster (cue the teacup metaphor).

But even familial love seems like too much to hope for, so he sublimates it further into something that seems more attainable: resurrecting the person whom he loved and devoured, and who loved him in turn (Mischa) through Clarice.

So we have the breast as a symbol of sex/fertility (Chloris/Clarice), as an object that is loved and devoured (Mischa), and as a literal source of sustenance that must be given up during infancy (mommy).

Big brain Clarice connects all these dots and, in the very same style of therapy that Hannibal has been using on her, distills Hannibal's psychological problems into a single poetic gesture that completely fixes Hannibal in an instant, proving that she's not only his intellectual equal, but is, in some ways, his superior.

When Clarice asks, "Did you ever feel that you had to relinquish the breast to Mischa? Did you ever feel you were required to give it up for her?", she's ostensibly asking Hannibal if he's stuck in the oral stage of childhood development (which yeah he probably is). On a deeper level, she's asking Hannibal to consider if he's given up on love.

When Clarice exposes her breast in the same fashion as Chloris, says, "You don’t have to give up this one", and suspends the drop of wine from her nipple, she is shifting his perception of her breast from familial devoured sustenance to a sexual object. Basically, "Why do you want me to pretend I'm your sister when we could be banging?" Hannibal is being aged out of his childlike mindset, not regressing into one.

There are other layers of meaning in this act. The hedonism of using thousand dollar wine for food play is a sign of Clarice's character development. The way Hannibal kneels before Clarice is a position of subservience, but could also be interpreted as devouring Clarice in a way that's new to him. It's the most self-actualized thing Hannibal has done since escaping prison (LOL) and marks the end of his hero's journey (as one of the first things we see him do in Hannibal Rising is nurse).

Personally, I don't read this scene as breastfeeding kink. Yeah, Clarice talks about breastfeeding, but that was more a metaphor for other stuff. Considering the direction of Hannibal's character arc, I understand this scene as him briefly licking the wine off before they have sex. But to each their own! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ANYWAY, yeah, it's unsettling. It's obviously meant to be. But it's beautifully unsettling! Hate it all you want, but this is peak cannibal romance, to me!!

[berryz-writes]

Grayson Hawthorne Headcanons- when he was younger

He took ages to sleep. Playing chess games with himself, trying to draw the world map by memory literally did anything to fall asleep faster

Sometimes when he had nightmares he would just lay in bed knowing that Jameson would come to his room first. Once he did they would talk about things (never about their nightmares) but just in general. Once he knew Jameson was asleep he would finally sleep as well

Always took care of Xander even if it meant being the uptight brother

Wanted his mothers attention so would draw her cute cards and gave her flowers that he had dug up from the gardens

When he was bored, if his grandfather was at home he would follow him around sometimes discretely to see what he did and how he acted (he wanted tips on what to do once he got the fortune)

Being super young, Grayson sometimes wondered down corridors, just so he could get lost and then maybe he would get a little attention and someone would come find him

Instead he just found his way back to his room because obvs he's extremely smart

He also made up a lot of games for him, Xander and Jameson to play when they were younger

Always asked Nash for advice before doing anything because he didn't want to do it wrong

Never or barely cried in front of everyone because he didn't want to be seen as weak

He was a quiet child in class but always put his hand up to give the answer

Liked it when Jameson joined his school because Jameson was able to make friends in a heartbeat with literally everyone

Didn't trust his friends completely but he did enjoy spending time with them

His favourite extra curricular was Photography which he had joined because he had wanted to create memories that lasted forever

He is naturally good at drawing/art.

When he was small and the boys had a maid he would tell her "Please could you style my hair so it looks neat?" Cared about his presentation when he was like 6 years old

Also was always so so polite. His teachers always complimented his manners in parent meetings

Great at sports especially cricket but he's not really a fan of how long the game is

Whenever he wanted something he would whisper it at first "Could I please have the crayon?" He had to repeat himself like twice before the other children could hear him

Wasn't necessarily a shy child but he was quiet compared to Jamie

Jamie and Gray always get compared by teachers "You sure he's your brother? He's the complete opposite"

Anytime any child made eye contact with him he would give them the sweetest smile his dimples showing.

He didn't have very close friends but everyone in the class liked him so he was voted for class president quite a few times

His uniform was always so clean like there would not be a spot of dirt on his clothes. He was a clean child.

Unlike Xander who always had paint splotches down his shirt

When Xander was super young like 4 years old, all 3 of them would go to Nash's room and make him read a bed time story on Saturday nights

Slowly this tradition changed to Grayson also getting a part in reading. Xander and Jamie would fall asleep and so whenever it was Jameson's turn to read he had fallen asleep

Nash would ask if he wanted to sleep here as well but because Grayson likes to be independent he would leave to his own room- half an hour later he would creep into Nash's room and sleep next to Xander

Also still liked spending time by himself. Finding a comfy corner in the library to read his favourite book to escape for a bit- he would usually find Jamie here as well seen as though he loves reading

When he was quite young he insisted on having an opticians appointment because he thought people with glasses were smarter. Of course he turned out to have 20-20 vision.

He is the most hot fucking person in the whole of Hawthorne house

[xsweetcatastrophe]

You Broke Me First

this is my first time writing anything. be nice.

part 1

He's late.

Zoe sat at the end of the bar, her phone on one side and her recorder on the other. She fought off ordering a beer, she wanted to be polite and wait for him.

But if he's going to take his time and be a half hour late, all manners are going out the window at this point.

Right when she was about to flag the bartender down, her phone buzzed.

Sorry, there was traffic. Parking now and walking up. Be there in 5. - C

Zoe couldn't have rolled her eyes harder.

"I hate to ask, but did you get stood up for a first date?" the young bartender finally said, noticing her and walking over. "You've been staring at the door the entire time like you're expecting someone"

"I'm expecting someone, but it's not a date, trust me." Zoe said, holding up her recorder. "Can I have a Allagash White? you can keep it open" She said, handing the bartender her card.

Zoe went into journalism because she cared about people and their stories. She felt it was a lost art; the industry now is filled with clickbait articles and poorly researched topics that led people to believe a false narrative.

One of Zoe's favorite childhood memories is reading the Reader's Digest with her father. She would wait for it in the mail, run to him in the living room where he normally was - in his recliner smoking a cigarette watching the news - and read it from cover to cover with him. Her favorite was the jokes section when she was younger. As she got older, she would ask her father questions and it would open the door to deep conversations about the world in the people in it. She continued these conversations with her dad well into her teenage years; as well as when he was in the hospital dying of lung cancer from the very cigarettes that were burned into her favorite memories of him.

She went to Columbia. Masters in Journalism. She thought her writing was going to change the world and show people how they could fall in love with journalism and get excited to read articles again; Spark conversations with people and have them connect with one another.

Why was she working for Page Six doing celebrity profiles?

Honestly - it paid the bills. Student loans aren't going to pay themselves. She learned the hard way that life is not an early 2000's rom-com; where you could have a column in a magazine, live in a brownstone and go out every night with your friends drinking cosmos.

No, life right now was living in a 1 bedroom apartment, with a questionable water stain on the ceiling, a window AC that barely works and a 70 year old lady who lives next door that has more men over than you do.

It's just temporary, yes. She might of been here for 3 years already, but it's not forever. 32 isn't old and she can still find her forever job. Yes, everything is fine. All part of the plan.

At least, that's what she tells herself when she's having a panic attack about it at night.

In a strange way, she IS learning about people... celebrities, that is. Her interview style was more casual; she felt people opened up more when they were doing something they loved, or over a drink. And people did open up.. she got to interview Leonardo DiCaprio and got a lecture from him when she asked her bartender for a straw. She never heard the end of that one. She learned how to roll a joint from Seth Rogan. She got to have coffee with Anne Hathaway and she showed her all the outfits she kept from when she filed The Devil Wears Prada. This would be any girl's dream... why can't she appreciate it more?

Finally, he walked in.

He was in a black T-shirt, jeans and boots. He looked around the somewhat empty bar, looking for someone who might be expecting him. Zoe caught his attention, and he walked over.

"Sorry, so sorry... this traffic sucks," he said, pulling out the barstool next to her.

"I'm Cillian, nice to meet you"

[authoralexharvey]

INTERVIEW WITH A WRITEBLR — @vsnotresponding

Who You Are:

V || They/she

Born and raised in a town in Catalonia, Spain. I always had an interest for stories and storytelling, and art in general, as well as math. I wrote my first book at 17 as my project to graduate high school. I'm currently majoring in math, translating said book, and plotting another one.

What You Write:

What genres do you write in? What age ranges do you write for?

Fantasy, Paranormal, Sci-Fi, Tragedy. Young and New Adult

What genre would you write in for the rest of your life, if you could? What about that genre appeals to you?

fantasy, mainly because i love worldbuilding and i often focus on religions or magic systems

What genre/s will you not write unless you HAVE to? What about that genre turns you off?

i don't think i could ever write a purely romance book. my aroaceness makes it very hard for me to write romance in general.

Who is your target audience? Do you think anyone outside of that would get anything out of your works?

i'm not really sure. i write mostly for me. probably just soft fantasy readers? i think people that enjoy worldbuilding and lore might enjoy my stories too. i think anyone could get something out of my books. the setting is just an excuse to write about other things at the end of the day

What kind of themes do you tend to focus on? What kinds of tropes? What about them appeals to you?

grief and circular time appeal the most to me, also main characters struggling with mental health, feeling displaced and out of place. as for tropes, found family and people who dislike each other forced to work together. i don't know why grief comes up that much in my stories. i am obsessed with thinking about circular time, tho. and the mental health issues of my main characters is mostly projecting. as for the tropes, it's all about finding your people whom you feel like yourself with.

What themes or tropes can you not stand? What about them turn you off?

i can deal with pretty much any trope as long as it's entertaining. certain styles of writing is what ultimately turn me off when reading.

What are you currently working on? How long have you been working on it?

i'm currently translating and posting púlsar, i book i wrote when i was 17. i've been translating for three months, and posting for one. i'm also working on untitled project (that's the actual name for the wip), figuring out plot details and that kinda things. i've been doing that since 2019, when UP was born

Why do you write? What keeps you writing?

i write because i am my own target audience, and because i want to tell my ocs' stories. that's what keeps me going too. i can't just be rid of them, they live rent free in my brain

How long have you been writing? What do you think first drew you to it?

since forever, i guess. i remember writing stories as a kid. i was also an avid reader, and a lonely only child that was left alone to their own devices too often, so i found ways to entertain myself

Where do you get your inspiration from? Is that how you got your inspiration for your current project? If not, where did the inspiration come from?

from my daily life, i guess. púlsar doesn't have that many sources of inspiration that i'm aware of, but UP has lots of influences from my philosophy classes from back in high school. in general, music helps a lot with how i approach my writing.

What work of yours are you most proud of? Why?

some short stories i wrote in high school. they are all writing assignments, but i went so hard on them they are still one of the bests things i've ever written. also my answer to a question in my philosophy final, which i later turned into a short story. circular time, man, i told you

Have you published anything? Do you want to?

i haven't, but i'd like to. i just want to share my worlds and characters with other people

What part of the publishing process most appeals to you? What part least appeals to you?

the sharing, but i also think it's very stressful

What part of the writing process most appeals to you? What part is least appealing?

putting it all together. i love finding out how i've unintentionally set up scenes i hadn't even thought about, or how unimportant details turn vital when i add a new scene

Do you have a writing process? Do you have an ideal setup? Do you write in pure chaos? Talk about your process a bit.

oh boy. my writing process is a mess. it's mostly non linear, and i sit with my stories for a long long time before ever starting to write. i also pull from my drawings. sometimes i'll randomly draw one oc doing something completely arbitrary, and then see that it actually fits with the plot so why not add it. generally, i have a very rough direction of where i want to go, 2 or 3 key scenes i know for sure have to happen, then i put the characters in A Situation and let them take the reins from there. because i've sit with them for so long before actually writing, i'm confident enough in my knowledge of them so i never doubt where they are going, they just go. usually i plan ahead for two or three chapters, mostly a bullet point summary or an explanation of events for UP it's been way more complicated because of the nature of the story and its non linearity

Your Thoughts on Writeblr:

How long have you been a writeblr? What inspired you to join the community?

i joined four months ago. i just wanted to share my work with other like minded people, and i'm honestly glad i did. i've met so many wonderful people in such a short amount of time, and the community is wonderful

Shout out some of your favorite writeblrs. How did you find them and what made you want to follow them?

i recently started following @mjjune. i simply fell in love with their now betaing twtr and their general vibes @moondust-bard has also created a bunch of writblr initiatives like a tag game list, and other ongoing projects and i have to mention @my-cursed-prince. she asked me a lot of questions about circular time, and then i checked out her wips and adopted her ocs on the spot

What is your favorite part about writeblr?

tag/asks games, and in general the community. i like sharing, sure, but it's also nice to be able to talk about worlbuilding and lore and how annoying ocs sometimes are with people that get it

What do you think writeblr could improve on? How do you think we can go about doing so?

huh, i'm not sure. more interaction with actual written stuff would be great, but everyone's busy with their lives outside of here so we can't ask of everyone to read everything that comes across their dashboards every day. it'd be great to have an easy to access place to check old and new writing without having to go to an individual blog every time, but that's also a time consuming project to manage

How do you contribute to the writeblr community? Do you think you could be doing more?

if i see someone asking for asks i always send one. i also try to be encouraging of others as much as i can. i do think i could be doing much more. for starters, i'd like to engage more with written content from other writblrs more, but i can't due to time constraints

What kinds of posts do you most like to interact with?

anything that strikes my fancy. i enjoy posts about the writing process struggles people have, or little thoughts they have as they write or plot

What kind of posts do you most like to make?

i love rambling when someone asks me a question. and also posting púlsar

Finally, anywhere else online we may be able to find you?

i have a half abandoned instagram art account with the same handle (vsnotresponding), and my main tumblr blog @iwrotemyowndeliverancesblog (i talk about maths and complain about life)

[tamavonpineapple]

Leosagi culture shocks I wanna see (based on my personal hcs)

Medicine/hygiene: as excited as Leo is to finally have Usagi visiting New York, you can't tell me that one of the first things Leo does isn't throwing his edo period boyfriend in the shower and chucking his clothes in the washing machine. Since they live in a sewer, Splinter made extra sure to drill good hygiene and cleanliness into his tots. As such Usagi's first two visits are spent learning about soap/shampoo (special kind for fur from Hidden City), toothbrushing, toilets, etc. I feel like he'd be amazed and shocked at how much cleanliness actually matters when it comes to health. He'd also be dragged to Donnie's lab frequently for vaccines. Even after bacteria and viruses are explained to him, Usagi would still be kind of scared and Leo is just holding his boyfriend's hand the whole time. Considering Leo is the resident medic, Usagi would be very interested in hearing Leo info dump on how surgeries and major wound stitches are done along with disinfection.

Modern tech: this one's obvious, he's from the Edo period and Leo is from the 21st century. Usagi is mesmerized by how advanced everything is and is shocked that none of it is magic. Donnie takes immense pleasure in educating Usagi in the ways of modern technology and how it all functions.

Culture: as a traveller, Usagi probably has quite the open mind for his time and generally appreciates the new cultures he comes across. I think he'd be so amazed at how big and how diverse the world is. Especially when it settles in how Japan (what was previously his whole world) is such a small part for an enormous planet. Considering that New York is an immigrant city, Usagi would probably adore how much of a cultural melting pot it is. Leo gets them some cloaking broaches and the two have several dates just exploring the cultural hubs of New York. Be it the traditional preserved cultures or the new ones created from the mesh.

Self expression: another thing I feel Usagi would appreciate is how freely people can express themselves. Be it gender or culturally, people just wear what they want. Especially people as nonchalant as the turtles. The four have been having fashion nights with April since forever and no way they didn't absolutely slay in dresses and skirts. No way they also didn't drag Usagi into their fashion shenanigans.

Art: it's canonically confirmed that Usagi is a lover of art in all its forms. He'd absolutely loose his mind at how many styles of everything there are. I can see him bonding with Mikey in this aspect, with the young turtle showing Usagi all the best drawing/painting techniques there are. Music is another big thing: he's that one dude who's spotify is just a mix of everything (different genres, languages, instruments, etc). Electro music is something he'd take longer to warm up too, but I think he'd end up enjoying vocaloid. Mostly because of how diverse in themes vocaloid is (depression, love, violence, redemption, etc) and because it's his first exposure to modern music that he can actually understand (since it's japanese).

Reading: I don't think Usagi would've been an avid reader before Leo. Mostly cause there wasn't much to read. Now that he can visit New York, he just gobbles up whatever literature he can find. He reads a mix of Japanese and English (helped him learn the language faster). Usagi really likes mythology, history, and poetry books. He also has a taste for the occasional novel and manga that Leo recommends him. As a samurai, Usagi's all about self improvement. So I feel like he'd read a lot therapy-esque books regarding things like healthy relationship and adjusting to new perspectives. He'd also work on any biases or assumptions he has from living in Edo Japan (like towards disabilities).

Media: like with any other tech, Usagi is shocked by how easy it is to learn anything curtesy of the internet. I also feel like he'd have a deep appreciation for the art of cinema considering its like theater but so much more. Especially with animation since its story told through moving art. Hell I bet he and Mikey have their own little animation stop motion drawing pads.

Relationships: here's where the biggest shocks are mostly cause how different things are from how Usagi was raised. First comes his relationship with Leo and how they each express love. Even nowadays PDA is frowned upon in Japan and Japanese don't tend to explicitly outright say they love each other. Usagi, who's probably very reserved with his affection and likely a little touch starved, is just floored with how openly affectionate both physically and verbally Leo is. I feel like he'd be a little embarrassed at first and slowly ease into being more open with how he loves Leo in more physical ways. Then there's the general Hamato dynamic. Even now, japanese culture has emphasis on respecting elders and the heavy expectations children have to succeed in the eyes of said parents. Combined with general edo period extreme formalities between parents and their children plus how Usagi's father barely raised him yet still put pressure on him to become a great samurai. Then we have Splinter: a rat man who's doing his absolute best to be involved in his kids lives and make up for the time they lost due to his trauma (mother's death, kidnapping, battle nexus, turning into a rat, etc), never pressures his kids, lets them grow as individuals and enjoy their own interests, very involved in their shenanigans, works hard to support his kids, and (most importantly) freely shows unconditional love. Just seeing a parent as involved and affectionate as Splinter is would be a big shock to Usagi. Especially a male parent cause traditional gender roles and since Usagi is from an era where fathers freely send their sons to die for honor while Splinter would blow up the Earth before even thinking of knowingly putting his sons at risk. Plus the brothers constant talk back and disobey their father. Then we go to the sibling dynamics. Like with parent-child relationships, edo period sibling dynamics were draped in formality and seriousness: affection is very reserved and any threats are literal plus the hierarchy placed by seniority. The Hamato siblings are probably Usagi's first exposure to a normal healthy sibling dynamic. Which would probably be confusing in itself since sibling relationships are a weird mesh of superficial hate but genuine love. Like Donnie wouldn't hesitate to take a bullet for Leo but no way in hell is he touching his new boots. Any of the brothers could be arguing as if they're about to kill each other and be cuddling on the couch not 15 minutes later. The constant back and forth would be a whiplash for Usagi and it would take some time to fully decipher how they communicate. Then there's their relationship with April. Splinter doesn't see her as his daughter but she is undeniably the Hamato's big sister. If you add in Cass and Sunita, then you have Usagi reveling in finally having strong independent female friends who aren't potential love interests. Throw in Casey Jr and the typical TMNT adventures and you've got Usagi collapsing exhausted from the sheer craziness of this friend group. Usagi would be civil and respectful with Draxum.

Okay i completely forgot about this, I saw it during vacations and then proceeded to forget about it. Sorry Okay, ejem, there are thing that I want to adress.

1. During that (and previous) period, japan already had toothbrushes, shampoo and soap, they already new about hygiene. We tend to imagine that this topics are modern and, let's be honest, came from Europe. No, for GODS' SAKE TOILET PAPER WAS INVENTED IN CHINA DURING THE 6th CENTURY!! And let's bw honest, Usagi lives in a world of furries, of course they already specialize soap/shampoo. I had nothing to add to the vaccines, i had a couple of scenes already planned regarding that topic. However, Usagi has been stabbed a couple times, and was perfectly fine with Chizu drugging him so he could get a rest, I can't really picture this man being a childman who needs to hold someone's hand to get vaccinated. (tho it'll be ironic, ngl)

Culture: Usagi himself has stated some levelnof discomfort regarding immigrants in Japan, because is japan, I wont go deep here, cuz theres a bunch of articles and videos about japan being an isolated country. It is certainly easier to imagine an initial rejection and a LONG adaptation process that will culminate with him accepting that the world is much more diverse than he imagined, but he would not stop being himself.

Art: usagi and Mikey bonding through art It's another plot that I had envisioned for rabbit stew, Usagi's fascinated by markets, color pencils, and all that, but usagi will also showed him the traditional techniques from his father homeland, cuz you know, sumi-e and ukiyo-e, since they're not inferior to modern of different techniques. (Btw have you ever heard of that band that plays with modern and traditional instruments?)

As for the rest of it, I mostly agree with the other points you've made. Except for one small detail that is bothering me and that is that it only seems to focus on how New York is going to change Usagi... I'll be real with you all, if we are just going to make Usagi a white dude and erase what being a 16th century samurai is... Well, I don't see the appeal anymore.

There are also things to rescue from there that the modern society lacks, despite of how murky the society in which he was raised may be. But here it seems like we're focusing on how cool New York is over Japan.

And let me tell you, food, environment, manners, global warming? These are some of the many things that Usagi will have a strong opinion on... That's if it survives the rot that is being fed microplastics to actually learn about it.

[klaineccfanficlibrary]

Hi! Do you know any fic where it's set in the 60s/70s/80s around that time period?

Here are an assortment from previous asks! ~ Jen

To Be Myself by @wowbright

What if Kurt had been born 25 years earlier? A story about Gen X Kurt Hummel learning about love and, most importantly, learning to be himself, 1976-1985.

It Must Be Love by lovely_sparkle

It’s 1987, and Blaine just wants to fit in with the cool kids at school. So he wears trendy clothes even though they aren’t his style, saves his singing and dancing for his bedroom, and keeps his sexuality a secret by dating a popular cheerleader. But everything changes when teen sensation Kurt Hummel, lead singer of the latest New Wave craze Social Heap, enters his world. And little does Kurt know that his world is about to be turned upside-down, too.

~~~~~

Hummel and Oats by elfinder

Klaine ‘80s AU. Sometimes even potential soulmates can get off on the wrong foot. Enter Kurt, the ballsy co-manager of Dare to Flare, the hottest gay club in the East Village, and Blaine, a newly hired cover band artist at the same club. Right from the start, the boys’ first impressions of one another go astray thanks to some incorrect gossip and an accidentally spilt drink. Can two men who aren’t even on a first name basis ever put their differences aside?

~~~~~

80s Verse by @whenidance

AU set in the 1980s. Dalton doesn’t exist, Blaine transfers to McKinley, and Rachel and Kurt help him figure out who he really is, complete with a cheestastic soundtrack. A season two rewrite with all that in mind.

~~~~~

Can’t take my eyes off you by gleekto

1969 Klaine AU.

Blaine is a gay. He’s known for years and he’s not ashamed. He just wants to be sensible about it as it carries a lot of risks. So he chooses to study Arts at one of the best colleges in the country - Columbia - that makes his parents happy. And it also happens to have the first college sanctioned gay group in the country - the Student Homophile League - for people like him. And that makes him happy. He hopes. He just has to muster up the courage to actually go to one of the League meetings. Instead he wastes his time staring at that icy hippie in his music history class who doesn’t know he exists. He needs to stop pretending people are gay in his head and actually meet some real homosexuals.

Blaine coming of age in 1969. Hippie!Kurt. Elliott and Sebastian as Blaine’s mentor-friends. Unironic use of ‘groovy’. Coming out and fitting in and falling in love.

~~~~~

Gimme Shelterby Kurtswish

On a joyride out with friends, Blaine stumbles upon a man that would change his life forever. It is a time when changes are coming swiftly with Civil Rights laws and Vietnam on the forefront of everyone’s minds. Finding each other and romance should have been the hard part, but what will two young men endure in the time of free love and war. Story is complete.

~~~~~

The Sound Of Silenceby brokenlovesong

It’s 1968 and Blaine runs away from home. He meet a boy different from anyone he’s ever met who changes everything he thought he new about himself and life, and quickly his entire world changes drastically. Strong language, sex, drugs, drinking, violence

~~~~~

Here I Am, Honeyby luckie_dee

When Blaine Anderson visits Kellerman’s Mountain Home with his family in the summer of 1963, he isn’t expecting anything more than days in the sun and games of croquet, but when he and his cousin Rachel meet the staff dance instructors, his plans get thrown for a loop. Blaine’s family vacation might just end up being the time of his life. A Klaine Dirty Dancing AU. Title from Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.”

Immutability and Other Sins series by fabfemmeboy (not completed)

This is an AU that spans from the late 1950s to just shy of modern-day. With the exception of the prologue, it goes in order. It begins in the fall of 1959 at Dalton Academy and follows the trajectory of the American gay experience through our not-always-so-happy couple. While the central story series is Klaine, there are some genfic stories on the side, set in the same universe and timeframe. Mostly because, as I planned out the main story, I kept coming back to all the ways in which the members of New Directions would be different 50 years ago, how many ways their worlds would be unfamiliar or more limited than we think of today. For all politicians seem to talk about what a great time the 1950s were, they weren’t for a lot of people.

There will be links periodically to songs involved in the story. Sometimes it’s a big plot point, sometimes the character is singing it, sometimes it’s just what’s on in the background. Think of it like the soundtrack, since it’s not something we can hear in the episode because there is no episode. Or disregard it entirely, that’s up to you.

And if you happen to want a great kind of nonfiction companion reading, check out Making Gay History by Eric Marcus.

HKVoyage’s Note: This series is not completed (last updated in December 2017). However, at 674k words, it is well worth the read, even though you wish there was more. The author has written up to the late 1970s.

~~~~~

Come Alive by delires

1960s NYC: Newly-wed junior advertising exec Blaine Anderson finds a missing piece to his puzzle in the back room of a Manhattan bar. Mad Men era AU.

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

Life Is a Cabaret! The Shimmering Kander and Ebb Classic Heads Back to Broadway Starring Eddie Redmayne

BY ADRIENNE MILLER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIEN MARTINEZ LECLERC

STYLED BY HARRY LAMBERT

March 5, 2024

When I was 15 years old, I saw Cabaret for the first time, at a community theater in northeast Ohio. Though I considered myself sophisticated in important ways (I recall that I was wearing a wide-leg Donna Karan bodysuit that evening), my experience as a theatergoer was then limited to The Sound of Music and Ice Capades: Let’s Celebrate. I wonder if my parents, who had season tickets to the theater, knew that the show wasn’t exactly “family” entertainment. Set in 1931 Berlin as it careens toward the abyss, Cabaret depicts alternating stories. There’s the doomed romance between a fledgling novelist named Clifford Bradshaw and a young singer of supreme charisma (and mediocre talent) named Sally Bowles. And then there’s the seedy nightclub, the Kit Kat Club, which is populated with a highly sexualized cast of misfits and overseen by a ghoulish Master of Ceremonies. The show’s ethos—the glamour and terror, the irreverence, the campiness, the unreality—shaped my taste forever, and I knew that I had just experienced one of the greatest works of art ever created. I would never look at theater, or life, in the same way again.

Over three decades later, I’ve seen more stage productions of Cabaret than any other show, including a revival starring the original Emcee, Joel Grey; I’ve seen the Bob Fosse film version over 50 times. I’ve pretty much always got one of Fred Ebb’s sardonic lyrics jangling around in my head. Today, it’s “You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam, mein Herr,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Youthful exposure to Cabaret also turned out to be a life-changing event for the star of the new production opening this month on Broadway, Eddie Redmayne. “Weirdly, when I was 15, it was the first thing that made me believe in this whole process,” he says. Redmayne was a student at Eton when he first played the Emcee; he had never seen Cabaret when he was cast. On this late-autumn evening, Redmayne is speaking to me from Budapest, where he is shooting a TV series. “It reaffirmed my love for the theater,” he says of his first experience. “It made me believe that this profession, were I ever to have the opportunity to pursue it, was something that I wanted to do.”

Now, as he prepares for the transfer of the smash-hit 2021 London production of Cabaret (in which he also starred), Redmayne is reflecting on the power and durability of the John Kander and Fred Ebb masterpiece. “The show was just so intriguing and intoxicating,” he says, adding that the character of the Emcee posed many questions when he portrayed him for the first time, but provided scant answers. A few years later, when he was an art-history student at Cambridge, he again tackled the part of the Emcee at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. At a dingy performance space called the Underbelly, he did two shows a night, the audiences getting rowdier and more intoxicated throughout the evening. He’d get up the following afternoon and stand along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile handing out flyers for the show, dressed in latex. “There was just a sort of general debauchery that lived in the experience,” he says. When his parents came one night, they were alarmed to find that their son had turned into a “pale, lacking-in-vitamin-D skeleton.”

Flash forward 15 years. The Underbelly cofounders and directors, Charlie Wood and Ed Bartlam, would approach Redmayne—now with an Academy Award for The Theory of Everything and a Tony for Red under his belt—with the idea of again playing the Emcee. Redmayne was eager to return to the role, but many questions remained—principally, who might direct it. In 2019 he happened to have been seated in front of the visionary young director Rebecca Frecknall at the last performance of her West End production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. It was an emotional evening for Frecknall, who’d been working on the project on and off for a decade. She and Redmayne were introduced, but “I had mascara down my face and probably didn’t make a very coherent first impression,” she tells me from London, where her new show, The House of Bernarda Alba, has just opened at the National Theatre.

Redmayne was astonished by the depth and delicacy of understanding that Frecknall brought to Summer and Smoke, a romance with the classic Williams themes of loneliness, self-delusion, and unrequited love. A few months later, Redmayne asked Frecknall if she’d consider directing a revival of Cabaret. “I said, ‘Of course I’ll do it, but you’ll never get the rights,’ ” she recalls. Those rights were held up with another production but were shortly thereafter released, and Frecknall went to work assembling her creative team—among them musical supervisor Jennifer Whyte, choreographer Julia Cheng, and set and costume designer Tom Scutt. Frecknall’s transcendent production of Cabaret opened on the West End at the tail end of the pandemic and succeeded in reinventing the show anew, winning seven Olivier Awards, including one for Redmayne and one for Frecknall as best director.

When Cabaret begins its run in April at the August Wilson Theatre, starring Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, Bebe Neuwirth, and Ato Blankson-​Wood, it will be just the second major production of the show directed by a woman. (Gillian Lynne directed the 1986 London revival.) In Frecknall’s version, Sally emerges as the beating heart of the show. “I find that most of my work has a female protagonist,” says Frecknall, who has also directed radical new interpretations of A Street­car Named Desire, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and Romeo and Juliet. “And I have a different connection to Sally,” she says. “I was really drawn to how young she was…and how she uses that sexuality and how other people prey on that as well.” The role of Sally Bowles, originated in this production by Jessie Buckley, who also won an Olivier for her performance, will be played this spring by the brilliant Scottish actor Gayle Rankin.

“When I first met with Gayle, I was blown away by her passion and fearlessness,” says Frecknall. “She’s a real stage animal and brings a rawness and wit to her work, which will shine through. She’s going to be a bold, brutal, and brilliant Bowles.” Redmayne also praises Rankin for the depth of emotion she brings to the part, and for the vulnerable and volcanic quality of her interpretation.

Rankin arrives at a candlelit West Village restaurant on a chilly winter evening in a sumptuous furry white coat that would put Sally Bowles to shame. Her platinum hair is pulled back from her face and her dark blue eyes project a wry intelligence. Rankin lives near the restaurant and mentions that she has recently joined a nearby gym—not that she’s going to have much time for workouts in the coming months. Over small seafood plates (of her shrimp cocktail, she shrugs and concedes, “It’s a weird order, but okay”), she shares her own rich history with Cabaret.

She grew up in a small Scottish village, watching Old Hollywood movies with her mother and grandmother. At 15, she left home to attend a musical theater school in Glasgow; on her 16th birthday, she visited New York for the first time with her family. “It sounds like a cheesy, made-up story,” she says, but when she and her parents took a tour of the city on a double-decker bus, they passed by the Juilliard School. “I thought,” she says, “ ‘I am going to go there.’ ” The following year, she and her father flew from Glasgow to New York for her audition. She would become the first Scottish drama student to attend the institution.

At Juilliard, there’s an annual cabaret night, in which all third-year drama students perform songs. Rankin sang “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, but she recalls her acute sense that she could have chosen a number from Cabaret. “I think I secretly always wanted to be that girl,” she says of the classmate who did perform those songs.

A couple of years after she graduated Juilliard in 2011, Rankin’s agents approached her with an opportunity to audition for Sam Mendes’s 2014 revival of his celebrated 1998 Broadway version (first staged in London in 1993), with Alan Cumming reprising his Emcee role. She was cast as Fräulein Kost—an accordionist sex worker who is revealed as a Nazi—playing opposite a revolving cast of Sallys, including Michelle Williams and Emma Stone.

Rankin has recently emerged as a fierce presence in films and in television (The Greatest Showman and two HBO series—Perry Mason and the upcoming season of House of the Dragon), but then “it kind of came across my desk this summer to throw my hat in the ring for Sally.” How does Rankin make sense of this fascinating, mystifying character? “Everything is so sort of up for grabs…. People feel as if they have a claim over her or know who she is. And the real truth is, only Sally gets to know who Sally is.” She has been rereading Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin—the inspiration for the show—in which the English writer sets the dying days of the Weimar Republic against his relationship with the young singer Sally Bowles. (In 1951, the playwright and director John Van Druten adapted the book for the stage with I Am a Camera; in 1963, Broadway director-producer extraordinaire Harold Prince saw that the play could be musicalized and hired Joe Masteroff for the libretto and the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb.) Isherwood based Sally—somewhat—on Jean Ross, a British flapper and chanteuse who later became a well-regarded film critic, war correspondent, political thinker, and Communist. (He gave the character the last name of writer and composer Paul Bowles.) For the rest of her life, Ross maintained (correctly) that Isherwood’s portrayal of her diminished her reputation as an activist and as an intellectual.

“Ross wanted so badly to write to Isherwood,” says Rankin, “and to condemn him: ‘You slandered my name. You said all these things about me that weren’t true.’ And as far as she got in the letter was ‘Dear Christopher.’ ” As Rankin builds the character, it’s this notion of the real Sally—not the fictive version constructed by Isherwood—that she finds so captivating, and heartbreaking.

The upending of Sally as an “object” is another core conceit behind the production. “I felt that other productions I’d seen had this slightly stereotypical male-gaze idea,” Frecknall says. She views Sally’s musical numbers as describing different facets of female identity. “Don’t Tell Mama” deals with the fetishization of youth and virginity, and in Frecknall’s production, Sally, disturbingly, appears in a sexy Little Bo Peep costume; “Mein Herr,” a song about manipulation, control, and female sexual desire, is in conversation with the cliché of the strong, “dominant” woman. “I think Sally’s very clever at being able to play an identity, and also play it against you,” she adds. The character “has secrets to tell us,” Rankin says. “Important things to share with us. And I think that’s the umbilical cord between her and the Emcee.”

Although Sally and the Emcee share the stage for less than five minutes, the Emcee’s musical numbers can be seen as a kind of meta-commentary about Sally’s actions. “What interested me was the idea that the Emcee was a character created by Hal Prince and Joel Grey,” says Redmayne, referring to the actor who portrayed the Emcee in the original 1966 production. “He doesn’t exist in the book Goodbye to Berlin and was their conceit to connect the story of Sally Bowles.” Rankin believes that there is a kind of mystical bond between the two characters. “As to whether or not he’s a higher power, or higher being, he does have an access to a higher knowledge,” Rankin suggests. “I think Sally feels that too.”

And who is the Emcee? A supernatural being? Puppeteer or puppet? There are no clues in the text. Prince conceived of the character as a metaphor representing Berlin itself. “The idea of him as an abstraction,” Redmayne says, “and so purposely intangible, meant that I actually found a new way of working.” Redmayne built the character from the ground up, starting with big, broad gestures that would be gradually refined. The “very fierce, ferocious intensity” of Herbert von Karajan, the famously dictatorial Austrian conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and a Nazi party member, served as a particularly fertile inspiration.

Historically, the role of Emcee has been coded as gay, and embodied, in most prominent productions, by gay actors. Frecknall’s production had to address what it meant to cast Redmayne, a straight white male actor, in the role. “Tom [Scutt] and I felt very clearly that, well, it’s not going to be the Emcee’s tragedy,” Frecknall says. A person like Redmayne—given his class, ethnicity, and sexuality—would emerge from the catastrophe unscathed. Redmayne concurs: “As the walls of fascism begin to close in, he has the privilege to be able to shape-shift his way out of it.” The character’s journey is from Shakespearean fool to Shakespearean king.

In Hal Prince’s 1966 production, Grey’s delicate, meticulous performance as the cane-twirling Emcee is pure nihilism—as a representation of Germany’s conscience. In the later Mendes iteration, the Emcee emerges as the central victim: In that production’s chilling last scene, Alan Cumming’s louche Emcee removes a black trench coat to reveal a concentration camp uniform; a burst of bright white light follows, from, presumably, a firing squad. But in Frecknall’s version, the Emcee is exposed not as a victim of the system, but as the chief perpetrator. The show, she notes, “becomes the ensemble’s tragedy.”

“I was really intent that we cast it very queer and inclusive,” says Tom Scutt, Cabaret’s multitalented set and costume designer. We are sitting on a black banquette in the lobby of his hotel, across the street from Lincoln Center, where he’s working on Georges Bizet’s Carmen. To mount a revival of Cabaret in 2024, Scutt contends that “there’s no other way. That was really at the headline of our mission.”

There are two casts in the show: the main company and the prologue cast, which provides pre-curtain entertainment. In general, the members of the prologue cast don’t come from traditional musical-theater backgrounds, but from the worlds of street dance and hip-hop—“dancehall, voguing, and ballroom scene,” Scutt notes—and in the London production, some of the prologue performers have been promoted to the main cast. “There is something deeply, deeply moving about how we’ve managed to navigate the usual slipstream of employment.”

Part of Scutt’s intention with Cabaret has been to “smudge and diffuse’’ the audience’s preconceived notions. Inclusive casting is one mode for change; iconography is another. In this case, that has meant no bowler hats, no bentwood chairs, no fishnet stockings. The aesthetic is less Bob Fosse and more Stanley Kubrick. “We started off in a place of ritual,” he says. “I really wanted the place to feel as if you’ve come into some sort of Eyes Wide Shut temple.”

Scutt has reimagined the 1,250-seat August Wilson Theatre as an intimate club—warrens of labyrinthine new corridors and passageways, three new bars, and an auditorium reinvented as a theater-in-the-round. Boris Aronson, the set designer of the show’s iconic original 1966 production, suspended a mirror on the stage in which the audience members would see their own reflections—a metaphor that forced the audience to examine its own complicity; but in Scutt’s design, the audience members must look at one another. Access to the building is through a side entrance; as soon as you arrive, you’ve already lost your bearings.

In many ways, it’s remarkable that such a weird and complex work of art masquerading as a garishly entertaining variety show has had such longevity. Scutt has an explanation about why this piece—created by a group of brilliant Jewish men about the rise of antisemitism and hate, about the dangers of apathy—​continues to speak to us so profoundly almost 60 years after its Broadway debut.

“I can’t really think of anything else, truly, that has the same breadth of feeling in its bones,” Scutt suggests. “I honestly can’t think of another musical that does so much.” As grave, and as tragically relevant, as the messages of Cabaret are, he and the members of the company have found refuge in theater. Both Scutt and Frecknall grew up singing in their churches as children; theater is to them a secular church, a space where human beings can congregate and share healing. “It was made with such pain and such love,” Scutt says. “Which is absolutely the piece.” 

In this story: hair, Matt Mulhall; makeup, Niamh Quinn. Produced by Farago Projects. Set Design: Afra Zamara.

[waitmyturtles]

Turtles Catches Up With Old GMMTV: SOTUS S and Our Skyy x SOTUS Edition

[What’s going on here? After joining Tumblr and discovering Thai BLs through KinnPorsche in 2022, I began watching GMMTV’s new offerings -- and realized that I had a lot of history to catch up on, to appreciate the more recent works that I was delving into. From tropes to BL frameworks, what we’re watching now hails from somewhere, and I’m learning about Thai BL's history through what I’m calling the Old GMMTV Challenge (OGMMTVC). Starting with recommendations from @absolutebl on their post regarding how GMMTV is correcting for its mistakes with its shows today, I’ve made an expansive list to get me through a condensed history of essential/classic/significant Thai BLs produced by GMMTV and many other BL studios. My watchlist, pasted below, lists what I’ve watched and what’s upcoming, along with the reviews I’ve written so far. Today, I’ll cover SOTUS S and Our Skyy x SOTUS, to close out this series and the KristSingto ship.]

Listen -- I did it to myself. All in the midst of my absolute INSANITY for Our Skyy 2 x Bad Buddy this week, and Our Skyy 2 x ATOTS next week. I did all this to myself! My mind’s mush.

For some reason, as I was scrolling through MDL last month, I thought my OGMMTVC watchlist wasn’t complete if I didn’t finish the rest of the series of GMMTV’s first HUGE BL in SOTUS (2016). A lot of my priorities regarding learning about the history of Thai BLs have changed over the course of this project, and the watchlist has definitely expanded from @absolutebl‘s original three suggested BLs to watch to understand the old GMMTV brand of BLs. And, as I’m inching ever closer to He’s Coming To Me (2019) -- I realized that there would be quite the gap in my seeing the development of Singto Prachaya as an actor from when he first premiered in SOTUS to HCTM. I felt that, in order to be REALLY prepared to become a SUPER FAN of HCTM -- I needed to freshen up on my Singto. 

What I wanted to see was -- could he save the franchise at all, simply by way of his acting? As ABL Sensei noted about the original SOTUS -- it was problematic enough to be emblematic of a style of BL that GMMTV is now moving away from. 

From that point of view? I’m honestly VERY glad I finished out SOTUS as a franchise. I think it was hugely important for the OGMMTVC project, and for me to understand what GMMTV was experimenting with, and how the channel slowly developed with more expertise in making BLs and/or queer media over the course of the last eight years, particularly under the production eye of Aof Noppharnach as he took more control of GMMTV’s BL steering wheel. It was worth it for me to take the pain of dealing with Krist’s acting again, and as many of the WONDERFUL Tumblr family noted for me: SOTUS S and Our Skyy x SOTUS were by far easier to watch than SOTUS. 

So -- I’m making a few assumptions, since I don’t concretely know the detailed history -- by the time SOTUS S comes out, KristSingto are an established pair. Fans are likely chomping for more (and spending more), and SOTUS S comes through as a means of continuing Arthit and Kongpob’s relationship. 

Fam, all of you were right. Our Skyy x SOTUS was WAY, WAY better than either of the seasons of SOTUS. 

SOTUS S was fine. It reminded me of the Korean period dramas I used to watch as a young woman when they first started airing in America, ones that I’d watch with my mom. Lots of, like, sitting at long tables with your trusted war advisors on how to take over the Goryeo dynasties. SOTUS S was like a Japanese work drama, where like, the STORY of the WORK is PART of the POINT of the drama (maybe a little like Step By Step right now? I think it’s always hard to create DRAMA around, like, a WORK PROJECT, but anyway. Minor quibble.). 

Whatever. As with the original SOTUS: it took fucking FOREVER in SOTUS S to get to the meat of the story of where the relationship was landing with Arthit and Kong. 

But let me give Krist a little credit. After Arthit got used to Kong being an intern at the company -- I will say that I felt Krist, in his acting, loosened up a bit. A little wink here, an actual smile there. Instead of playing defense at the baseline, Arthit/Krist started hitting some shots at the net. (I see he’s “loosening up” even more right now in Be My Favorite... yeah? I dunno, I ain’t watchin’ that.)

Did I feel like Krist’s betterment in acting was in response to Singto’s acting? Not... quite. Not yet. 

Once I watched Our Skyy x SOTUS, I realized a couple of things. The style of workshopping that GMMTV BL actors go through NOW, CLEARLY didn’t exist at the time of SOTUS. I felt like SOTUS and SOTUS S WERE the workshop for these two.

And then Our Skyy premieres, and I’m like -- OHHHHHHHHHH. OH! Krist kinda has it in him to pull out some real acting!

The Our Skyy episode also had 1) great structure, 2) a CONCISE and CRISP storyline, and 3) SHARP dialogue. It didn’t seem like these guys needed to IMPROV their emotions, the way that Krist DID, and seemed to STRUGGLE to do in the first two seasons. 

But most importantly, for me -- in relation to what I said about Singto earlier -- I realized something about Singto. Like I said in my review of the original SOTUS -- Krist could not catch what Singto was throwing. 

I think in SOTUS S, Singto... didn’t give up, per se. He just STILL didn’t HAVE the means by which to ACT RESPONSIVELY to someone who WASN’T RESPONDING to him. I didn’t see Singto grow, at all, in his role in SOTUS S. He was still the same seme automaton. And there’s a problem with that, I think. I could not see, AGAIN, for the LIFE of me, why Kong would be ATTRACTED to Arthit -- EVEN IF Krist were playing Arthit as a very held-back, stuffy type. Kong/Singto radiated with energy and a POTENTIAL of love -- and watching them interact in SOTUS S was like watching the emanation of an incorrect math equation.

I was surprised. I thought I’d see more development, more flexibility, more comfort in the role of Kong. Both Arthit and Kong seemed to be playing their robotic TYPES. 

Not so in Our Skyy. Finally. The guys seemed looser. I felt this most greatly after Kong cooked Arthit breakfast, and Arthit scoffs (as usual) away from Kong’s affections. And Singto/Kong opens his arms for a hug.

FINALLY. Wordless communication! IT WAS GREAT. And the message of the hug -- we don’t know if this will be our last hug, so let’s hug and make it count -- it was a great and meaningful message.

If I had to get through SOTUS S to get to that moment, and to see these two be able to share well-acted emotion by the time of Our Skyy -- I would argue, for my sake and sanity, that it was worth it for this project. Because that ship/pair was so important for early BL. I had to think that there HAD to be some art, AT SOME POINT, between those two, and we got just a taste in Our Skyy. 

I want to think, and to say, that for GMMTV -- that may have been a bit of a breakthrough moment, that Our Skyy x SOTUS episode. Many of those other first Our Skyy moments, like Puppy Honey and Kiss The Series/Kiss Me Again -- those were appendages to existing series where the BL aspect was secondary. I think that wordless communication, the emotion and the hug from Kong and Arthit, mayyyyybe potentially showed that, hey -- we can create a bit of a foundation of emotional art here, with this format. 

Some quick other thoughts on SOTUS S and Our Skyy before I move on:

1) I liked Cherry. Yes -- a femme-ish character set up for the laughs. But Cherry wasn’t designed nearly as problematically as the femme characters of Love Sick. I think, by adding Cherry, that the writers of SOTUS were beginning to acknowledge that their brand of BL NEEDED to step its toe into queer recognition -- especially considering that other shows that had aired around the time of SOTUS (namely Make It Right) dealt with queerness so head on.

2) WHERE WAS NAMMON IN OUR SKYY??? Come awn! He and Guy Sivakorn had AMAZING chemistry! (Guy Sivakorn, y’all, great GMMTV stable guy!)

3) I REALLY LOVED SEEING KONG’S CLASSMATES in Our Skyy, even for a second. All the homies with their flashy hair. I felt total nostalgia for all of them during SOTUS S and Our Skyy.

4) Durian’s outing of Kong and Arthit was bullshit. THAT was problematic AF. Judgy and shady. 

5) Oh, speaking of non-continued couples: no Earth and Tod in Our Skyy. Dang. I thought Earth would come around. (The whole SOTUS franchise REALLY left couples hanging. Remember Prem and Wad?? Wtf! Graveyard of potential!)

Anyway. Listen. I don’t really consider this review over until I watch He’s Coming To Me. I now need to see Singto in a pairing with an actor who ACTS RESPONSIVELY, who is able to CATCH what Singto is PRESENTING. 

I will admit Krist DRASTICALLY improved, even from SOTUS S to Our Skyy. 

BUT. I now know, from Make It Right and Bad Buddy, that few actors can hold like Ohm Pawat in BLs (but I’ve yet to get familiar with Gun, and I can’t wait to do some talent comparisons between the gold stars of GMMTV soon enough). 

And that’s what I’m looking forward to watching -- the SUBVERSION of a huge ship for the SAKE of getting two damn talented actors together for what I know will be a fucking gem of a show in HCTM. I cannot wait to get to it, and it’ll be really soon. 

[Alright! On to Love By Chance, with darling Perth Tanapon and my first ride with Saint Suppakong. I’ve mentioned this here and there, but many thanks to the WONDERFUL @bengiyo for filling me in on all the deets of the break-up of the PerthSaint ship. As I get closer to He’s Coming To Me, understanding Perth’s and Ohm’s reputations -- especially as I close out watching Double Savage this week, and understanding how their ship subversions affected their careers in and out of BLs -- is super helpful context. 

Here’s the list as it stands. As I said last week, I’ll definitely be a touch delayed with LBC, as I’ll be likely watching and rewatching Our Skyy 2 x BBS (x ATOTS??) and Our Skyy 2 x ATOTS (x BBS??!?) this week and next. BUT STILL, WE PLUG ALONG! And one tiny little change: because this project is so inspired by my passion for the art and the history of Bad Buddy, I’m including a full BBS and Our Skyy 2 x BBS rewatch as a means of honoring this whole undertaking.

As always, I’ll take any input or recommendations from all of you LOVELY family!

1) Love Sick and Love Sick 2 (2014 and 2015) (review here) 2) Make It Right (2016) (review here) 3) SOTUS (2016-2017) (review here) 4) Make It Right 2 (2017) (review here) 5) Together With Me (2017) (review here) 6) SOTUS S/Our Skyy x SOTUS (2017-2018) 7) Love By Chance (2018) (watching) 8) Kiss Me Again: PeteKao cuts (2018) 9) He’s Coming To Me (2019) 10) Dark Blue Kiss (2019) 11) TharnType (2019) 12) Senior Secret Love: Puppy Honey (BL cuts) (2016 and 2017) (I’m watching this out of order just to get familiar with OffGun before Theory of Love -- will likely not review) 13) Theory of Love (2019) 14) Dew the Movie (2019) (not an official part of the OGMMTVC watchlist, but I want to watch this in chronological order with everything else) 15) Until We Meet Again (2019-2020) 16) 2gether (2020) 17) Still 2gether (2020) 18) I Told Sunset About You (2020) 19) Manner of Death (2020-2021) (not a true BL, but a MaxTul queer/gay romance set within a genre-based show that likely influenced Not Me and KinnPorsche) 20) A Tale of Thousand Stars (2021) (review here) 21) I Promised You the Moon (2021) 22) Not Me (2021-2022) 23) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) (thesis here) 24) Bad Buddy (2021-2022) and Our Skyy 2 x BBS (2023) OGMMTVC Rewatch 25) Secret Crush On You (2022) [watching for Cheewin’s trajectory of studying queer joy from Make It Right (high school), to SCOY (college), to Bed Friend (working adults)] 26) KinnPorsche (2022) (tag here) 27) The Eclipse (2022) (tag here) 28) My School President (2022-2023) 29) Moonlight Chicken (2023) (tag here) 30) Bed Friend (2023) (tag here) (Cheewin’s latest show, depicting a queer joy journey among working adults)]

[jellybeanium124]

once upon a time I was a skinny white child who liked drawing. consequently, I drew a lot of self portraits and a lot of doodles of characters who looked like me: other skinny white children. I have so, so many OCs from my youth I used to draw comics about, and all of them are skinny white children. then I got a little bit older, and became a skinny white teenager. I had boobs now, though, so I had to learn how to draw boobs if I wanted to keep drawing accurate self-portraits. so I learned how to draw skinny white teenage cis girls. then in late high school thru my first year of uni, I put on a bit of weight and went from being properly skinny to more medium sized, so if I wanted to keep drawing accurate self portraits I had to learn how to draw people who were medium sized. so I did.

and at this point I was an adult, and became more aware of my failings as an artist. I realized I was so used to drawing cis women that I didn't know how to draw an adult with a more traditionally masculine body. I didn't like that I only knew how to draw one kind of nose. so I challenged myself. I learned how to draw men. I learned how to draw different kinds of noses. I learned how to draw fat people and muscular people. I looked up reference images and challenged myself to learn how to draw different Black hairstyles. I watched our flag, and realized I only knew how to draw young people, so I learned how to draw middle aged and old people.

I'm not perfect, and I'm still learning and growing as an artist. as all of these things were happening, I was also trying to learn proportions, how to draw people at different angles and in different positions, or even how to add necks that look right and hands with fingers. anyone who's seen my art knows that it's cute and nice, but not professional level or something anyone would pay for. I'm not trying to make money, I'm trying to become a better for the sake of my own growth as an artist.

I'm not mad at myself or wracked with guilt for spending my entire childhood drawing skinny white kids. kids are naturally self-centered, and I also happened to look exactly like what society deems a "normal" girl. of course I was going to draw people who look like me. that's normal. it's also normal, to say, be 11 or 12 and beg your parent for the "how to draw anime" book and learn how to draw anime characters from it. that book will also only teach you how to draw skinny young people.

but we don't stay kids forever. we grow up, and as an adult artist, it is your responsibility to learn how to draw diverse people along every axis. challenge yourself. it's ok if it's a challenge at first, or if the drawings turn out bad. you don't have to post every drawing you make to the internet. but keep practicing!! the same way you eventually learned how to draw hands and feet, you will eventually learn how to draw diverse faces, bodies, hairstyles, ages, etc.

i's fun and easy to draw things you're comfortable and familiar with, but it's also fun to draw new things. when I draw something new and challenging, it lights up a different part of my brain that's excited to learn. humans naturally want to learn our entire lives. that's how we're built. I just don't understand how so many adult artists whose technical skills are leagues above mine can be happy with themselves knowing they can only draw twinks. don't you want to be able to do more? don't you want to be able to draw anybody? even if you're a very stylized artist like myself, don't you want to be able to capture people in your own style in a way that makes viewers think you captured how that person looks accurately? don't you want to learn and grow???

2019:

2020:

2021:

2022:

2023:

2024:

[arwainian]

Reading This Week 2024 #42

hello and good morning! progress on my thesis moves at roughly the pace I set out for myself, maybe even a little bit faster which is exciting. yesterday I dropped by barnes & noble and picked up yet more books to add to my tbr. it will never get shorter no matter how speedily I read

Finished:

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, audiobook narrate by Natalie Naudus rereading this was an absolute delight. i'm really looking forward to talking about it with my friends!

Blue Box, Vol. 4 by Kouji Miura, translated by Christine Dashiell

Fool's Quest by Robin Hob, audiobook narrated by Elliot Hill the fucking Gender that is present in this book between Bee, Ash, Spark, the Fool, and Amber.....excited for when I feel ready to take on the last book

My Dress-Up Darling, Vol. 1 by Shinichi Fukude, translated by Taylor Engel rey got my DM reaction but the male protagonist of this manga has major egg energy. unfortunately i find the art style extremely un-sexy so I'm having a hard time getting into it (maybe i'll check out the anime?)

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 4 written by Kanehito Yamada, art by Tsukasa Abe, translated by Misa 'Japanese Ammo'

Fadeout by Joseph Hansen, audiobook narrated by Keith Szarabajka i think i was recced this forever ago when looking for non-cop mystery novels. this follows a gay insurance investigator for its sleuth. still a maybe on if i'll check out more of the series

The Wicken + The Divine, Vol. 5-6: Imperial Phase Part 1 & 2 written by Kieron Gillen, art by Jamie McKelvie

The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel, audiobook narrated by the author read for november queer lit book club. oh, i cried!

another sunset by rozecrest on ao3

to hold me like water by rozecrest on ao3 fanfic reading! yay!

Fer-De-Lance by Rex Stout, audiobook narrated by Michael Prichard there is a bit too much casual/implicit misogyny for me to really want to keep on with this series, but it was a fun enough mystery on its own with an eccentric homebody detective

Started/Ongoing:

Magic's Promise by Mereces Lackey, audiobook narrated by Gregory St. John reading to keep up with shelved by genre! big status quo change from the end of the magic's pawn. i'm really liking the storyline with the bard-gifted young man at Vanyel's father's court

The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett, audiobook narrated by Thomas Judd if anything bad happens to steve i'm going to kill everyone in this book and then myself.

[foundtherightwords]

The Quiet Chaos - Chapter 6

Pairing: Billy Knight (Lethal White/Strike) x OFC

Summary: After a bad breakup throws her carefully-planned life into disarray, Esme has sworn off dating forever. However, when she forms an unexpected connection with a young man named Billy, who's dealing with his own struggles, Esme is forced to face the truth: sometimes you can't plan for love.  

Warnings: mental health issues, angst, slow-burn, developing relationship, dysfunctional family, some violence (non-graphic), some smut (non-explicit)

Chapter warnings: discussion of parental neglect/parentification

Chapter word count: 4.1k

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5

Chapter 6 - Christmas

As Esme had predicted, her parents didn't care about Billy's condition at all. But then again, she had never worried about that. If anything, her worries were the opposite—that her parents would be too nice to Billy and smother him with their affection. On Christmas Eve, she called them again to run through a list of do's and don'ts that she'd compiled.

"Please don't whisper around him, that'll make him paranoid. And don't shout either. I know you can get very loud when you're excited, Dad. Oh, you do. Please just remember to tone it down a bit. And please, please, Mum, don't ask him a million questions, and if he doesn't want to say something, please don't make up an answer for him. Don't make up stories about him or put him into one of your books."

Mum took offense at that. "Darling, when I do put someone into my book, I only use them as inspiration, you know that!" she said. "They never recognize themselves."

Yeah, like I didn't recognize myself, thought Esme bitterly, but she only said, "I'd know, alright? He's had a very tough life, he's not a source of inspiration for you."

"All right, Esme, we'll be on our best behavior," Dad assured her.

"And please do a normal Christmas dinner for once. None of your weird foods or experimental cuisine."

"We promise."

But Esme still didn't quite believe that they would keep their promise. It wasn't that they were malicious or deceptive, they were just terribly scatterbrained and it would slip their minds. So just to be on the safe side, she made a Christmas pudding with some brandy butter and brought it along. She was determined to give Billy a proper taste of Christmas, even if her parents fell through.

She had also told Billy that if he wasn't feeling up to it, he could change his mind about the visit or leave early. But he seemed quite calm when they met at the train station—calmer than Esme herself, at any rate. He only showed a bit of nervousness when he held out a package. "I know you said I don't have to bring presents," he said. "But I made these. Are they OK?"

It was a set of wooden cooking spoons, their handles carved with leafy vines and flowers, almost Art Nouveau in style. Just the day before, when he dropped by the clinic, Billy had given her a similar present—only hers were six measuring cups, and carved with what was easily recognizable was Angua and her five pups. They were almost too cute to be used.

"Oh, Billy, these are beautiful," she exclaimed over the spoons. "They'll love it. But—"

"What?"

"My parents don't really cook." That wasn't entirely true. "And when they do, they wouldn't use fancy spoons such as these." That part was true. Dad, the cook in the family, was the type who viewed recipes as more of a guideline, and to him, anything could be used as a kitchen utensil if you were determined enough. But Billy looked so crestfallen that Esme's soft heart took over. "You can still give them those though. They're so beautiful, my parents will probably put them on display or something." 

His face brightened up. "You sure?"

"Of course!"

As they got off the train at Rochester, Esme saw a familiar figure waiting outside the station by her parents' old car. "That's my sister, Sybil," she said to Billy.

"Photographer, lives in Edinburgh, right?"

Esme nodded, just as Sybil ran up to her and wrapped her in a bear hug. "Hiya, big sis!" She bent down to Angua. "And this must be Angua! Let's see if we can find her a Carrot, yeah?" Sybil was the one blessed with looks in the family. Esme's soft and rounded profile made her look meek and sometimes dumpy, as she was wont to describe herself, while Sybil was all sharp angles and delicate, elfin features, made all the more striking by her short black hair. But as the sister closest to Esme in age—only two years younger—she was also the closest Esme had to an ally in the family.

Esme introduced Billy. Sybil shook his hand, then whispered loudly to Esme, "He's cute, sis!"

"You have a girlfriend, Sibby," Esme chided, rolling her eyes.

"Hey, I'm allowed to appreciate beauty, am I not?"

"Don't mind her," Esme told Billy, who was looking like his whole face was on fire. "She's a terrible flirt."

On the drive from the station to their parents' house, Sybil insisted on making a detour to show Billy some of the sights. "That's where Charles Dickens used to live," she would say, or "That's the house used as the model for Miss Havisham's house in Great Expectations." Meanwhile, Esme became more and more aware of a permeating stink in the car, a nauseating mix of manure and decaying flesh. By the crinkle of his nose, she was sure Billy had noticed it as well but was too polite to say anything. Finally, she couldn't take it anymore and asked, "Sibby, what's that smell?"

"What smell?" Sybil replied. "Oh, in the car? That'll be the lamb."

For a second, Esme thought it was her younger siblings' stupid idea of a prank. "What lamb?"

"The lamb for our dinner." Sybil chuckled to herself. "So Dad saw this chap on TV making this thing called '24-hour lamb', right, and he wanted to recreate it, so yesterday he and I went to pick up a freshly slaughtered lamb from some lady he knows who has a farm. Had to drive all the way down to Lydd too."

Esme exchanged a look with Billy and groaned inwardly. Either her dad had forgotten his promise to do a "normal" dinner, or this was his idea of normal. She didn't know which was worse.

"What on earth is a '24-hour lamb'?" Billy chimed in.

"You dig a hole in the ground, start a fire in there, put some damp straw on top, then you put a lamb in and cover it up and leave it there for 24 hours," said Sybil, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Supposedly the meat will just fall off the bones."

Billy turned to Esme with a raise of his eyebrow, either of curiosity or concern, but Esme only shook her head hopelessly. "Don't get your hopes up," she told him. "Knowing my dad, you'll be too busy picking bits of straw and dirt out of it to enjoy it. That is if it's even edible."

"Oh, don't worry about that," Sybil said over her shoulder. "It'll turn out fine."

Esme wanted to point out the many times Dad's experiments had, in fact, not turned out fine, but she knew she was fighting a losing battle and had no choice but to resign to what fate, or rather, her family had in store for her.

***

Finally, they arrived at the cottage that Esme's parents had chosen to settle down in seventeen years ago, a low, rambling building with a sagging roof and whitewashed brick walls that were usually hidden under a curtain of clematis and wisteria in the summer, and even now, still retained a certain romantic air thanks to a web of skeletal vines. A sprawling garden surrounded it.

Sybil parked the car out front and they all went in. The front door was pushed open with some difficulty, and it soon became clear why—jackets and scarves and wellies and umbrellas were piled up in a corner of the front hall, just behind the door, nearly obscuring the floor tiles. Esme was appalled to see Sybil casually kick the pile to the side before adding her own jacket and scarf to it. With a sigh, Esme picked the pile up and tried to sort it out, but there was no place to put the clothes except for a long dresser, and this was already covered in mail. She attempted to clear off the letters and flyers and parcels, but her hands were full of clothes.

"Oh, Esme, get off it," Sybil said, not turning around. "You know that once you leave, it'll just get messy again."

Billy stepped in. "Here," he said, putting the post into a tottering stack, leaving some room on top of the dresser for Esme to put the clothes down into a vague semblance of order. She gave him a grateful smile.

The house seemed deserted, but they could hear excited voices from the back. "They must be in the garden, digging up the lamb," Sybil said.

While they followed her through the house, Billy grabbed Esme's hand and whispered, "Relax." She nodded uncertainly.

The back garden was as unkempt as the rest of the house. For some, the place might look picturesque, with the bare tree limbs and raggedy bramble bushes forming a perfectly muted background for the bright red and orange of the holly and firethorn berries, but for Esme, it just brought back memories of getting scratched by stray branches and fending off the bugs that bred like mad under the cover of the thickets. The only place that looked like it had some attention was the shed at the bottom of the garden, where her dad did his glassblowing.

Four people were gathered in front of the shed, looking intently at something on the ground and arguing amongst themselves. "I'm telling you, Dad, it's not ready yet!" This was Tiffany, shaking her head of bright magenta hair.

Sam and Dad were both waving their long, gangly arms in front of her, looking like two windmills in dispute. "But it's called 24-hour lamb, and it's been 24 hours!" Dad said.

"Yeah, it may be burned, Tiff!" Sam always took Dad's side in every argument.

Mum looked up and saw Sybil striding toward them, with Esme and Billy trailing behind. Her face broke into a smile, and she ran to them with her arms wide open. Before anyone could open their mouth, Mum had engulfed first Esme, then Billy in a tight hug. Only after she'd let a startled Billy go that she seemed to remember herself. "Oh I'm so sorry," she said. "I should've asked if you'd like a hug first, shouldn't I?"

"No, it's alright," Billy managed to say. "Very nice to meet you, Mrs. Pendergast."

"Please, call me Ivy. It's lovely to meet you too, Billy. Hello, you," this was to Esme, along with a pinch of her cheek.

"Hi, Mum." Out of all the kids, Esme was the one that resembled their mum the most, at least in terms of their physical traits—the same dark hair and hazel eyes, the same soft features—and yet the way they carried themselves was so different that most people didn't pick up on their resemblance right away. Mum filled every space she was in with big, exuberant gestures, and even her hair was always loose, flying all over the place, while Esme always hung back, kept still, trying to make herself smaller and unnoticed, her hair in a neat, tight French braid.

She introduced her dad, Tiffany, and Sam. Their greetings were no less enthusiastic than Mum's, but Esme was glad when they didn't heap their attention on Billy, instead turning toward the mound of dirt on the ground. "Ever had salt-marsh lamb, Billy?" Dad asked. "Sorry, do you eat meat? I forgot to check with Esme."

"I still don't think it's ready," Tiffany said.

"But I'm hungry," whined Sam.

"Esme brought a pudding," Sybil said. "Eat that if you can't wait."

"No!" Esme shouted. "That's for later!"

She recognized in Billy the nonplussed but amused look people often had when they met her family for the first time, as he answered Dad, "Um, yes. No. I mean, I do eat meat, but I've never had salt-marsh lamb."

"Great! This will be your first taste then! Sam, fetch me the spade."

Under six pairs of watchful eyes, seven if you count Angua, Dad uncovered the mound of dirt with the solemn air of one of the Sutton Hoo excavators. Esme expected a plume of smoke, a cloud of steam, or the smell of cooking meat, to come out, but there was nothing, except for the smell of dirt and that stink she'd smelled in the car, getting stronger and stronger the further down the spade went. Dad, however, didn't seem to notice anything wrong.

"Aha!" he exclaimed triumphantly as he unearthed a blackened lump in the shape of... yes, the shape of a whole lamb. Billy turned away, his face turning a worrying shade of green.

"That looks... that looks raw, Dad," Sam said, as Dad scraped away some of the soot and ashes and opened the piece of burlap wrapped around the lamb.

"How can it be raw?!" Dad roared.

But if the smell was any indication, the lamb was indeed raw. And, to further drive home the point, Angua took an appreciative sniff and bounded forward, ready to sink her teeth into the haunch of raw sheep. "Angua, no!!!" Esme shouted and pulled her back, just in time.

She looked around at her family. Mum was shaking her head. Dad was red-faced and scraping in vain at the hole, trying to figure out where it had gone wrong. Her younger siblings were trying to suppress laughter, but a narrow glance from Esme sobered them up. Billy was still looking queasy. Her heart sank. He probably thinks we're all a bunch of ghouls.

"Dad, leave it," she said, trying to keep her voice calm. "Mum, what are we going to do for dinner? Do we have anything else in the house?"

A panicked look crossed Mum's face, as if someone had just asked her to recite the first 100 digits of pi from memory.

"Are you telling me that this—lamb—was going to be our entire dinner?" Esme felt close to tears. "No sides, nothing?" But nobody was listening to her.

"It's the damned straw!" Dad shouted. "It's wet! I told you it was supposed to be damp, not wet!"

"Back in medieval times, people would've been glad for all this meat," Tiffany, who was studying history at Cambridge, said. "They wouldn't need side dishes."

"We—are—not—medieval—people!" Esme said through gritted teeth.

"Relax, Esme. It's fine," Sybil said.

"Hey, maybe we can put it in Dad's kiln!" Sam piped up. "That ought to cook it, right?"

Esme buried her face in her hands.

***

And so for Billy's first Christmas dinner with Esme's family, which took place on Boxing Day, they ended up eating Chinese takeaway before finishing with Esme's Christmas pudding, which had gone a little stale and had to be fried up in some butter, but that was actually quite delicious, so it was all right.

Still, the slight irritation Esme had felt the moment she arrived home and saw the messy front hall refused to go away. It wasn't directed at anyone in particular, just a general annoyance when the two parts of her life collided and she couldn't decide which part she belonged to, the sensible, practical one in London, or the chaotic but charming one in Kent.

The one thing that cheered her up was that Billy took it all in his strides. While waiting for Sybil to bring back the food, they lounged around the kitchen for a bit of a chat, and the inevitable question of how the two of them had met came up.

"Billy brought Angua into the clinic—" Esme began.

"Then we found her pups under a bridge," Billy followed. "We didn't meet a troll though, despite my name," he quickly added.

Everybody laughed, and Esme turned to Billy with a surprised grin. He grinned back. He must be feeling quite relaxed to be making jokes like that. Perhaps this would turn out well after all.

Once they sat down to eat (another oddity in the Pendergast household, which had no set mealtimes), Billy gave her mum the spoons, apologizing for not wrapping them nicely. Everybody oohed and aahed over them, and Dad started asking Billy all sorts of questions about woodworking, which Billy didn't seem to mind talking about. In fact, he was looking quite at home, though from time to time, he would take Esme's hand or touch his knee to her leg, either to assure her that everything was fine, or to assure himself that she was still there.

When the conversation turned to childhood, Esme started feeling a bit nervous. Mum was telling Billy about how the kids had all shown their aptitudes from a very early age—Sybil snapping away with the Polaroid camera she found at a flea market when she was five, Tiffany insisting on stopping at every historical site they came across while driving around in the camper van, and Sam going to bed as a baby with a paintbrush in his fist. "And Esme was always bringing home little injured things, of course," Mum said. "I still remember the first time. It was a worm that she accidentally cut in half while playing in the dirt. She was in tears for days after."

"I didn't know if it grew back or not, alright?" Esme said to Billy, defensive. "I thought I'd killed it. Not all worms can grow back, you know."

"What about you, Billy?" Dad said. "I bet you were the same as a kid, always tinkering around with chisel and things, right?"

Esme closed her eyes briefly. I've told them a million times, don't ask him about his life! She was trying to think of something to change the subject, but to her surprise, Billy was answering, calmly, "I suppose so. I used to carve the Uffington White Horse on little pendants for my dad, to sell in shops." His hand was clenched around hers under the table, but he gave her a brief smile to say it was all right.

Mum suddenly asked, "How come you're not wearing your White Horse necklace, Esme? I thought you loved it."

Esme hadn't worn the necklace since she and Billy started seeing each other, and she'd completely forgotten about it. "The silver's a bit tarnished, so I want to have it cleaned," she lied, ignoring Billy's questioning look.

Her answer seemed to satisfy Mum. They talked about the White Horse a bit, and then, to Esme's immense relief, the conversation veered toward prehistoric hill figures in general, and nothing more was said about horses or childhood.

It was only when they were on the late train back to London and Esme saw Billy almost visibly sag down in the seat that she realized how hard he'd tried to mask his anxiety during the visit. "You didn't have to put so much pressure on yourself," she said. "My parents really like you."

Probably even more than me, an unkind thought flitted through her mind, before she could stamp it down. Oh, she knew her parents loved her, albeit in a general, abstract way. But like? They didn't like her much. They tried to hide it, but Esme could always tell, even as a child. Kids can pick up on that kind of thing. She was too serious, too rigid for them. Well, they shouldn't have named me after a certain stern old witch then...

"Are you mad at me for giving them the spoons?" Billy asked.

"What? No! I told you it was fine."

"Then what is it?"

Was her irritation that noticeable? Esme knew that if she tried to change the subject, Billy would brood over it and become convinced that it was his fault somehow, so she spoke the truth. "It's not you. It's my parents. They always get on my nerves."

"So they're a bit absent-minded. It's not the end of the world."

"Try growing up with them, never knowing what you're going to eat, because they forget to prepare a meal, and you'll be having chocolate cake for dinner." In her anger, Esme had forgotten her self-imposed rule of not whinging about her parents to Billy. "Sibby and I constantly got into trouble at school because they kept forgetting Parents' Evening. When Tiff and Sam started school, I had to be the one that reminded them. I had to be strict with my siblings, so our parents could be fun. Sibby understood a bit of that, but Tiff and Sam never did. And all of my friends were always banging on about how they wished their parents were as cool as mine—"

"They still love you. They're still nice people."

Esme retorted, "You're just saying that because they're not your parents." Next to her, Billy flinched, almost imperceptibly—she felt it, rather than saw it, a slight stiffening of his shoulder, a tiny shift of his body away from her, and realized how cruel she'd sounded. "I'm sorry."

"No, 's alright." Billy gave her hand an awkward pat. "Just because I have a shit childhood doesn't mean you can't tell me about yours. We're not competing to see who has a shittier childhood, are we?"

"But I don't want to burden you with all this..."

"Is that why you stop wearing your necklace too, because you don't want to burden me?"

She was shocked at his accusing tone. "No! I just thought—I'm just being considerate..."

"What, you think I'm so fragile that I can't even look at a necklace?"

She didn't know how to respond to that. Billy was watching her intently, but when she didn't answer, when she couldn't even look at him, he turned toward the window and kept his eyes fixed on the glass, though there was nothing to see but darkness, broken by pockets of light from some village or town. They remained silent for the rest of the ride.

***

Esme decided to accompany Billy from the station back to his flat, hoping the walk would erase the strange tension between them, although this meant she would have to take the bus home. Billy just shrugged and said "Whatever you want," which she took as a bad sign. Silence thickened between them, heavy and sullen. More than once, Esme tried to say something to break it, but her mind was drawing a blank. Talking about it would make him feel bad, but not talking about it would confirm his accusation. So they just walked, Billy with his shoulder hunched, avoiding her eyes, while Angua scampered between them, looking from one person to another as if to ask what was wrong.

They had almost reached Billy's flat and the turn for the bus stop, where Esme planned to say goodbye, when Billy stopped so abruptly that she nearly walked into him.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"I don't remember leaving the lights on," Billy said. Both windows of his flat were indeed ablaze with light.

They approached slowly. The front door was closed but not locked. Esme's slight concern edged into panic. "Do you want me to call the police?" she asked, digging her phone out of her bag.

Billy shook his head, but his hand trembled as he pushed the door open, and he looked frightened, like a—like a lamb being led into slaughter, thought Esme. It was a silly idea, but it stuck, perhaps because her dad's horrible cooking experiment was still fresh in her mind. Yes, Billy didn't look like he was afraid because he didn't know what was behind the door. He was afraid because he knew exactly what was behind it.

And what was behind it was a man. A man, sprawled on the sofa and stuffing his face with the pigs in blankets Esme had made for Billy the other day in lieu of a proper Christmas dinner. He looked to be in his late thirties, with close-cropped hair, a square jaw, heavy stubble, and muscular, tattooed arms accentuated by his wrinkled T-shirt. Angua growled.

The other man's eyes, of a lighter brown than Billy's, turned to them, regarding them coldly.

"There you are, Billy. Thought I'd missed you," he said. "A family reunion at Christmas. Isn't it nice?"

Billy seemed to shrink in front of those malevolent eyes.

"H-hello, Jimmy," he said.

Chapter 7

A/N: I totally stole the lamb story from Joe Thomas's insane episode of the Off Menu podcast. If you haven't listened to Off Menu (or have only listened to Joe Quinn's episode), I highly recommend it.

Also, some spiciness is coming next chapter (properly this time, not like the embarrassing scene in Chapter 5!)

Taglist: @quinnypixie, @accidentalslag, @etherealglimmer

[vanhelsingapologist]

I am more than a little obsessed with how you draw Victor Vallakovich, I cannot lie, and also pardon finding your blog and then spamming notifications a lil bit, but dang I love your art and the designs for CoS characters you’ve done are just *chef kiss.*

Our DM did Victor from a completely different angle (like very different) from RAW, so I’m always curious about the Victors done a little closer to original, and the design you gave him, oh wow, I love him, I lowkey wanna adopt him a little bit not going to lie. But yeah I just needed to state as such and ramble! How’s his tenure as burgomeister (apparently?) going? 👀

This is so kind! Thank you! Spam all you like, it has no negative effect on me. Also, I love talking character analysis from our games, so if you wanted, I’d be more than happy to provide you with how we interpreted him, if you’re cool reading it!

Spoilers, as always, for our campaign.

Design

My DM has our Victor in his early 20’s. They wanted to play Victor as someone who was a victim of his dad’s abuse, and they thought that the trope of shutting one’s child away in their home for ‘protection’ would hit our party harder if he was a young adult. It became more controlling. So when designing him, it was important that he maintained a gaunt, haunted look. Almost Tim Burton-y. I combined Victorian, Traditional Slavic, and modern gothic influences to really hit Victor’s style. If you like the chains on his belt but want a younger look at him, @tantaliax has an INCREDIBLE design that utilizes a lot of these influences too.

As for the hair, our Vallakoviches canonically have vitiligo, passed down through Vargas. If I ever drew Victor from the back, his neck would have some. I think he also has some local vitiligo on his chest. I wanted Victor to have a couple streaks to set him apart from Vargas, but not too much

As for his tenure as Burgomaster…

Now that Vargas is good and dead, Victor’s a bit distracted by the power, enforcing odd laws and taking long, brooding walks in the dark that are probably illegal to interrupt him on, but he really has no idea what he’s doing. He sees it as a temporary distraction before he fucks off and leaves Barovia forever.

He likes to do the fun stuff. The being mean, the soirées, the gothifying his ancestral home, the BANNING OF THE FESTIVALS. But he hates the administration, which is funny because he’s actually pretty good at it. And he won’t give speeches. No speeches.

He repurposed the reformation center into a school and when people were like “weren’t people tortured there?” Victor was like “UGH I would’ve loved to learn in a place where people were tortured.” No one really knows what to do with that, but Victor spearheading the Barovian public education platform was whiplash inducing.

For the most part? He lets Emilia do most of it. She’s like, his shadow government while he acts as the face. He happily miserably sits in his attic and experiments or paints when we aren’t plucking him up and companion-izing him.

The main problem? Lady Wachter. He has her under house arrest for riot reasons, but “his” hesitance to decisively end anything has let her cult run amok. People in Vallaki are starting to say he’s too young, weak, and scared to do anything, which is once again garnering support to her.

I think Strahd’s also going to start tempting him with more power or the ability to leave to get him off the party’s side. Vallaki is super Pro-Party right now, and if Wachter’s second bid falls flat, I think Strahd will get that foothold in.

[toxic-spike-plumeria]

The Mural

Rated M for Mature for sexual themes.

Disclaimer: I do not own Pokemon.

Note: Takes part in my Cigarettes and Hibiscus universe, art description is inspired by MCR's Revenge era, and punk propaganda art. If it helps, I wrote the ending while listening "Welcome to the Black Parade".

The first time Plumeria had seen The Mural, as it was so affectionately called, was the day she had arrived in Spikemuth.  She didn't understand the meaning or sentiment behind it at the time, all she saw was beauty and art- on pitch black background was a side profile view of Piers, cyan eyes glinting with a large, dark starburst, as he sported his signature colors of black and white and magenta, underneath the portrait was a decaying, waving paperesque-stlyed banner that read “Our Lord of Sorrows”.  Below him to the left was another side profile of a young woman, with side shaved pigtails, and blue eyes that almost matched the man she was depicted beside.  Her colors were still vibrant, but softer, a bright baby pink and light gray with a deep indigo shadow, her banner reading “Spiritus Tenax”.  The portraits were graffiti’d in a mix of noir/deco/grunge, true to the anarchist style of the city leaders it displayed so proudly.  Plumeria was blown away by it, completely mesmerized, her drive to reconnect with her boyfriend all the stronger.  Just like the music notes behind him on the bricking, she followed the sounds of heavy guitars and eerily angelic vocals to her other half, pouring his heart out on stage, their eyes meeting, and worlds connecting in less than a second. 

He stopped mid song to embrace her, something that shocked everyone around, before leading her to the front, and continuing on.  Without knowing why the two Yell grunts acting security kept the strange, new woman safe from prying eyes and glares and stares of the others.  Something shifted in Spikemuth that day, everyone could tell.

A few more months had passed before The Mural was passed by again from either of the couple.  This time it was Piers who had noticed it, the image that had been there for so many years, ever since he took over the gym, suddenly changed overnight, raising a brow and piquing his interest.  He could see from the main road bold shades of rosy pink and lemon yellow highlights had been aurad'd around another figure that sat to Piers’ right.  Upon further inspection he smirked, noting the figure of his lover there, one leg bent to her chest, arms wrapped around it, tender eyes looking out.  She had no banner, but around her like a halo was the phrase “Tenebris Lux”.  He immediately took a picture and sent it to Plumeria, providing no explanation.  Something within his heart fluttered with a newfound pride for his city, and a new spark for her.  He couldn't wipe the smile from his face the rest of the way home, or when he took Plumeria to bed upon arrival.  

Tenebris lux: the light in the darkness.  And in the dark of their shared room, naked bodies twisting and breathing heavy, hearts full of passion and love, Piers could see why the painter, whomever they may be, gave her that as her descriptor.  Underneath his form, covered in sweat, panting hard and moaning loud, Plumeria was the only light he'd ever need.   And he'd swear she glowed with every orgasm, lighting up the room, and his soul.

Then just like that his light was snuffed out, and he was left in the darkness once again.  Her part in the mural became a memoriam, golden flecks and peace crosses added to her halo. Her once warm eyes now closed forever, covered by a blackened shroud.  The word ‘Sorrow’ in Piers’ title had been bolded, the paint dripping like the tears he often shed.

In Alola she was a martyr, though only to Ula’ula and Akala, where her efforts and sacrifice made way to revelation and freedom, but not without war.  And every war has casualties.  

The siblings had seen the update before they had seen the arrival.  And a striking update it was- the whole of The Mural had changed, from poses to colors; only the titles and art style itself stayed the same.  The mural now centered on the theme of family, with Marnie now sporting the official gym leader clothing of Spikemuth, her stare one of determination, eyes bright and large.  She held a wide stance, a dusk ball popped open with a freshly released Morpeko, metallic bronzed thunder bolts painted over small splashes of magenta and baby pink , the rest of her portrait grayscale monochrome, except for the blue in her eyes.

Piers was stationed above her to the left, donning his performance uniform of plaid distressed pants and a printed tee with a spiked jacket, his trusty Obstagoon modeled to his left side, rocking out in its signature pose, both monochrome save for Piers’ cyan eyes and splatters of aquamarine and violet shadowing them.  His notorious medallion and jacket spikes had been accentuated with a metallic silver paint, adding definition and shine. His face, crying the last he saw, was dark and energized, his fist raised in rebellion.   

Lastly, to his right stood Plumeria, her left arm up, holding a metallic golden ball of light, while Alohi was cradled in her right arm.  She was dressed in her signature concert outfit- high rise pleather shorts paired with split top halter and fishnet shirt, completed by the studded leather jacket Piers had gotten made for her, and her signature fashion boots.  A halo of metallic golden paint adorned her head, and her eyes were flaked golden as well.  Harsh blotches of yellow and rosy acted as a backsplash against the monochrome, much like how Marnie's and Piers’ portraits were done. And all around her body were the scars Guzma had left when Piers had followed her to Alola.  Right before she was gone forever…but who here would know about those?

The banner waved anew, freshly painted and waved so that all three bore their titles: Our Lord of Sorrows, Spiritus Tenax, and Plumeria’s new title- Our Lady of Resilience.  Upon further inspection Marnie noticed that the banner wasn't the only thing ‘freshly’ painted. The whole mural had been redone recently, the fumes still wafting in the air, if barely, and further down the alleyway were the empty cans of colors, appropriately discarded into their respective receptacles. 

Piers had never run so fast in his life.  The only way anyone could know about the scars was to see them.  He damn near busted the door down to the apartment, Marnie hot on his trail.  And when they finally entered, they say a very confused Plumeria looking around, before being tackled in a crushing, loving embrace by her other half.  She was real, she was here, and she was alive.  Piers sobbed in her arms, joined soon by his sister, both having missed the Alolan in their own way. That night Piers made another vow to her, so that he would never be far from her again.  He couldn't bear it.

The mural only changed twice more after that.  When Plumeria joined Marnie as a co host  to the gym, her outfit and pose on the mural were changed to reflect her poison type colors of neon green and electric purple. Her hand now holding a poison barb, and Alohi's evolution into Veneon was updated.  

The final time it changed was the day Piers and Plumeria wed.  Their colors, for the most part, stayed the same- monochrome clothes with splashes of their personal pallets behind them, save for the color of their eyes, and the newly adorned metallic silver and gold coronets above their heads.  They were modeled in their wedding clothes, Piers in his distressed and spiked tuxedo and jacket, and Plumeria in her layered satin and mesh corseted gown.  They faced each other, Plumeria holding a bouquet of her name bearing flowers along with their sacred fire blooms from Alola. Piers held her chin in his hand, tilting her head slightly, ready to lean in for the matrimonial kiss.  The banner twisted around them this time, reading the phrase “Tenebris Tenetur, Lux Est”. Two smaller scrolls below their portraits revealed their new titles: Our King of Pains, Our Queen of Hearts.  Marnie had been removed from this mural, having her own now, located across on the other side of the alley.  She still wore her uniform, and was still posed with her Morpeko, the metallic bronzed bolts shimmering over a scattering of her colors, matching a metallic bronze tiara above her head.  On her banner was her new title as well: Our Lady of Tenacity.  And this was how Spikemuth's royalty stayed immortalized.