#It got so divorced from character stories and context that it made me very sad

[sbeep]

I'm really hesitant to bug you about this, cause I know you already answered an ask about it, but... Do you think you might feel up for letting us look at some of the star wars art again eventually? I feel silly being so broken up about it, cause it's your art and we're not entitled to it. I'm just... So sad that its gone (for us I mean), so just wanted to ask. If not, I understand of course

It's very ok to message about this! I must say it's very unlikely to see the light of day again. I adored making the art but steadily fell out of love with Star Wars and the blog was never really as fun as when I was roleplaying with my friends.

My favourite collection of pieces are up on my Artstation here, and the characters still keep turning up in my sketchbook.

Thank you for understanding, and thank you for enjoying the art I made 🫶

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

This one guy I talked to on AO3 said that Emilie shouldn't be brought back because Adrien has already moved on from her death, but I'm not so sure about that. Other people think she should be revived so she can be her own character and not just someone else's sad backstory, and so Adrien has one good parent, of course. What do you think?

I think that it depends on the story you want to tell. There are cases to be made for bringing her back and cases to be made for letting her die. In the context of canon, I find not bringing her back to be fing stupid because it makes everything feel pointless. We obviously don't know the wish yet, but why let Gabe make the wish at all if he's not going to restore Emilie? Making a different wish isn't him being a good guy at the end. It's still him playing god, he's just now using his god powers to abandon his son for no logical reason. What loving father happily leaves his son an orphan???

Yeah, Gabriel saved Nathalie. I don't care. Nathalie chose to use the peacock to support Gabriel in his plan to terrorize Paris. That wasn't some noble sacrifice on her part! She didn't deserve to be saved any more than Gabriel did. Of the three dying/dead parental figures (I really don't know Emilie's status) Emilie is the only one who was never tempted by the dark side if we ignore the uncomfortable implications of how they got the peacock in the first place/Adrien's childhood isolation and just embrace the canon narrative that Emilie was a good and loving mother who was Too Pure For This World.

Meanwhile, Nathalie was a terrible mother figure! She supported Gabriel's awful treatment of Adrien for four seasons and then spent all of season five gently prodding Gabriel to change/tell Adrien the truth while leaving Adrien completely in the dark to everything that was happening. If Gabriel hasn't won, then Adrien would have lost both his father and Nathalie who knew that they were dying, but never gave Adrien a chance to say goodbye because Nathalie never stopped putting Gabriel first in almost every way that mattered. Adrien still doesn't know that he could have been allowed say goodbye to his father because Gabriel's death was entirely predictable.

Along similar lines, I don't think that Nathalie was wrong to undo Gabriel's senticommands, but it is deeply messed up that she was happily doing it in secret and never once considered giving Adrien a chance to consent. A loving parent should find the idea of controlling their child deeply upsetting. She should have been tempted to tell Adrien the truth, especially since she knew that she was dying, but we never see her consider that.

She also does nothing to get Adrien's slave collar away from Gabriel or to stop Gabriel from terrorizing Paris even though we have a scene where she literally pins Gabriel to a table. Her turn to "good" did nothing but maintain the status quo because she continued to support Gabriel in all the ways that truly matter. She never really protects Adrien. She does not deserve to be Adrien's new mother. #BringEmilieBack!!!

All of that is assuming that Gabriel's wish saved Nathalie while sacrificing himself and Emilie. If so, then that is literally the most boring way to go about letting the wish happen. You could have just as easily had Gabriel lose and have Ladybug know a way to save Nathalie via Guardian magic. The end result would have been the same.

If Gabriel had chosen to give up on the wish entirely? Then Emilie not coming back would be a satisfying ending. I personally really like Gabriel being defeated and the heroes then bringing Emilie back. Very much a spite move for me, plus it's a nice way to lessen the sting of Gabriel's defeat. Adrien losing his father, but gaining his mother feels really satisfying to me, especially if Emilie gets to serve Gabriel divorce papers. Got your wish, old man. Now suffer for it.

No matter the case, saying that Emilie shouldn't be brought back because Adrien has moved on is bad logic as it implies that Emilie is only worth bringing back if Adrien say he wants her back, as if she's a beloved childhood toy that someone broke long ago. It also implies that Adrien wouldn't want her back just because he's accepted her loss. Those are two very different things. Imo, one of the show's failings is the fact that Adrien is denied the right to grieve as if that makes him a better person. A better show would show healthy grief vs unhealthy grief (Adrien vs Gabe). She's been gone less than a year when the story starts. Everyone processes grief different, but that's really fast to move on from the death of a parent.

[mysteriouslybluepirate]

Watching Con O'Neill's old stuff cause it's fun. Day #? Soldier Soldier S06 EP.09 Asking for it (Con's Conography. 1996)

In future if you want to read all of these posts, I've added the tag 'Con's Conography'. Now they're all in one nice spot!

Warnings for: Sexual assault/rape (committed by Con's character), abuse of power within the military structure, assault, abuse of power, sexist comments(what you would expect from the military).

Should I watch this before reading this? Is it worth it?:

Con plays a military official who abuses his station, sexually assaults a female private under his care, and semi-gets away with it with barely a scuff on the wrist in the end.

It's a really fucking good story about how women are treated in the military. Especially victims of sexual assault. He uses his power to try to get her kicked out. When that fails, he knows they're onto him. Without much evidence, he can't be prosecuted so he asks for a transfer, which he receives. He's not a repeat offender, his first assault happens mid-way through the episode, but he's a fucking jackass who couldn't take no for an answer. They give him internal reasons why he thinks he didn't go too far, and it is very real. If you're still interested, watch it.

Again, cause I went into this fully blind I will be saying whoreish things about Con. If you just look at his costumes, he has some 'hot' ones in this if you don't know what he does. If you look up Soldier Soldier a good chunk of it is people rebloging hot photos/gifs of Con without context.

He did this 1 year after Scarborough Ahoy and basically has a shorter haircut. Still in the 'hot young Con era'. They literally throw him into a pool fully clothed for fucks sake. After the scene happens, my tune changes. I promise. Again, they don't define him as a man with a history of assault, but Con's character is definitely the type to think 'I only fucked up once, I'm still a good person.' just fucking gross.

If it's too much skip around my live reaction and jump to the end for my final thoughts.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, military. Should have guessed based on that title. This intro is very 80s for the 90s. If they kill anyone I'll kind of be surprised.

CON! IMMEDIATELY!

Angry swim coach Con, yes.

God, he pulls off military type so well.

"If you've got the energy to smile, go give me a few more laps." HELL YEAH.

God, I know that's his voice, but god it sounds like it hurts.

I hate military types...so much.

This bike tampering is dumb, and dangerous, and is going to get both of them beat up. Also, these men(E-1 privates) 'respect' women more than any vet I've met.

I'd be entertained by that shit. And fucker seems like an ass so might as well give it to him.

Con looks huggable in that jacket. It's a nice soft blue. Love it.

CON IN A HAT! With a little feather.

"I never thought of you as a romantic!" GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. Can he just be evil? Or a douche? Every single fucking project this guy needs to be sad and lonely, wanting a friend/lover. Hurt by a past relationship and just wanting justice in his life. Don't get me wrong, I eat this shit up with a goddamn spoon. But Fucking HELL. EVERY CHARACTER?

HE'S DIVORCED. THAT MEANS HE'S AVAILABLE BABY. "There's only room for one woman in my life, I joined the army, she made a man out of me." I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE.

ALSO THAT CARDIGAN, AHHHH. It's obviously cheap military clothes, but god.

CON SMILING BABY!

(The young couple we've been following all episode) They're a cute couple (I say, a military brat that got out before I was 10. They'll fuck, have a kid, and be just as unhappy as anyone else on base. Divorce before their kids fifth birthday. Love that)

OHH I think I've seen clips of this scene!

ROBERT! THEY GAVE HIM THE NAME ROBERT. :) Funny in an Ironic way. He couldn't find a date? If he's a teacher then he probably doesn't leave base often, and a divorce? This man is going to be relationship adverse as fuck.

Also, parental issues be damned, he looks nice in uniform

I love that he got all up in his space, and Robert just looked fucking dead inside. Then he ruined his meal.

Also, please tell me he isn't going to fucking go after a woman in his charge. :). Please. Fucking please. I'm holding on by the edge of my rope, if he takes advantage of his subordinate, I will be pissed.

God, Con's speech around 12:30 sounds like a good ol' time.

BOB. I know it's a shortening of Robert, but Jesus fuck.

Also, this amount of restraint is admirable. He should have gotten screamed at.

We as the audience are probably supposed to think he's an ass. Nah, he didn't humiliate him in front of the other officers, held his ground when he thought he was being made fun of. This is just good leadership. Izzy Hands could fucking learn a thing.

Bitch, he would have already heard about them fucking. The gossip would have been spread by lower-level officers. This 'damn, she got away' thing shouldn't work.

OOooooo sexist Con line. Don't like that.

Small break to talk about a fun real life military thing.

His point about some people getting ahead by passing tests is a real thing many in the military resent. (In the US you go up an E-4 on day 1 if you have a bachelor's degree in anything, to Corprol. Hell, depending on if you were reserves you could go up higher, when most start as E-1). This motivates some to join up even after they could get a job away from the civilian world. If you are poor, you're fucked. Take the long way around and don't get good pay.

Personally I see what Robert is saying here to be the main thing Izzy holds a grudge with Stede over. Stede was able to purchase being a captain where as he had to fight for it. Possibly die for it.

Now, back to this episode. There are bullshit and bigoted reasons behind this belief, not just class-based. It's used to say why women shouldn't serve, etc. Con's a sexist pig here and says these same reasons. It is exactly the reason I never followed in my family's footsteps. In male-dominated fields they will 9 times out of 10 treat you like shit. BACK TO THE SHOW.

Robert, if you fucking assault this woman I will reach into the screen and murder your ass.

Okay, a drunken apology is fun. Jackass trying to get in her pants.

EWWWW.

Forced attempted kiss/assult.

Don't like this. Mam, just scream close to the doors if you feel uncomfortable. Jesus Christ. OH THAT'S FUCKED UP.

Okay, he's forcing himself onto her. Gross.

Also, real-life examples of abuse of military power.

I DON'T CARE IF IT'S EMBARRASSING TO PAY FOR SEX, RAPE ISN'T BETTER YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE

He assaults her here.

Hey, you remember when I didn't want con to be in roles where he wasn't sympathetic. NOT LIKE THIS. This is actually one of the worst things you could have made him do.

BEAT HIS ASS UP. (This is around the 40-minute mark.)

I DON'T FUCKING CARE IF HE'S HIGH RANK, IM SWINGING.

This is where I started skipping around, thus why the rest is so short. It's all too painful and real. He's called into the office to answer for his crimes and bluff.

He threatens her in private, and thinks that he's going to get away with it.

Again, the military is in to protect their ass, but it's good to see the woman investigator standing up for the victim.

OH GOOD, FUCKING KILL HIM (he's almost drowned from the victims boyfriend, but gets stopped).

So, at the end of the day. There's not enough evidence to put him in jail or kick him out. She's left traumatized, and Robert gets away with some glares and very little else.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Story: 8-9/10. Very real. I was wearing Con tinted glasses, but as a military kid who grew up around this shit, I almost immediately coped with him as the type to assault an officer. Lonely, doesn't get out much and feels like women owe him something. The type.

Con: ?/10 He plays A Fucking Vile piece of shit. The worst of it is you know his character has half a dozen reasons of justification. I was tempted to write out all the ones he says in the show, but no. I've heard it all before when men come onto me, and I tell them I'm gay. 'But you looked at me and smiled?' type shit. He plays the part really fucking well. Skin crawling performance of a 'nice guy'. He just does it so realistically I don't want to say like 3/10 you know?

Characters besides Con: Realistically, and sadly, more men would have sided with Robert. He has the rank, and though not well-liked, he would have been given the benefit of the doubt more than he was in the show. Everyone's performances were realistic and semi-heartwarming with how they believed the E-1. I liked the main couple and I hope they get together in the end. This a good example of why we need high-ranking women in the military.

Editing: Of it's era but non intrusive.

Overall: ?/10. I don't know how to put this one.

Again, if I wasn't ex-military kid/grew up around vets it wouldn't hurt as much. They sell you a dream when you grow up thinking the military does no wrong. How successful your male family members are and how they are heroes. But as a little girl, I quickly saw just how fucking dangerous to live up to these expectations was as an woman. On and off the field. If the purpose in this was to reassure the public that female victims would be believed, then it kind of works as propaganda.

This show fully explores it in a military with less rigor than the one I'm used to seeing. Still the same sexism bullshit regardless of where you are.

Don't worry, I'm watching a Val (BBC Uncle) mega cut after this to soothe my head.

I'd love to hear if anyone else has watched this, and your thoughts on it!

Have a lovely day.

thanks to @ivegotnonameidea for the list :)

[sandraharissa]

I personally did assume that Stella wasn’t that bad based on s1 but it actually has nothing to do with Stella herself and more to do with Stolas’ character seeming more grey and responsible for the bad things that happened to him/ppl around him, and that added interesting depth to his character and a potential for an interesting growth in his relationship with Blitz.

Which I consider massively important bcos in a show like HB, which is a character driven comedy, character arcs and relationships of main characters can make or break the story.

I feel like this last ep was trying to have it’s cake and eat it too and while it may sound negative, it actually worked for me, this is one of my fave episodes and I hope it ‘sticks the landing’ so to speak.

As I see it the episode arguably gets rid of the concept that:

Stolas is responsible here, he’s at fault but he’s doing it anyway

which shows just how much he’s interested in Blitz, that he sacrificed everything for him bcos he was in a boring marriage, and in a way it makes it more romantic

but it also makes for VERY flawed characters who need to grow

plus there’s the (imo unnecessary) element of adding depth to Stella

Instead we get:

Stolas is a victim, he suffered abuse a lot, the cheating seems more justified and honestly like it’s Stella’s fault,

Stolas and Blitz met as kids which makes the cheating more justified cos it’s the second time they meet and the first time was a very meaningful encounter to Stolas emotionally (without the attraction part yet)

The ep sets up that it’s truly a long pattern between them of ‘Blitz trying to use Stolas’ -> ‘Stolas being too focused on himself to notice behaviors of ppl around him and lying to himself, but also having a genuine interest in Blitz’ -> ‘Blitz developing feelings regardless but neither can handle/communicate it’ -> ‘repeat’. Having them interact as kids is a very visual way to show that their patterns of toxic behavior stem from their deep-seated childhood trauma, by actually having the relationship itself start during their childhood.

There’s the added imagery of baby Stolas having an imp plushie since birth that conveys the ‘plaything’ attitude he displays towards Blitz.

Blitz’s meanness in retrospect seems way worse, cos it now looks like Stolas is just used to it cos he’s bouncing from one abusive relationship to the next.

Ngl the emotions hit hard this episode for me, it took me by surprise but having Stolas’ whole life story play out from beginning to end made it pretty sad and hard to watch, and really got me rooting for him, including the affair, and obviously the divorce and him standing up for himself were very cathartic. Despite it being a brand new concept introduced in this episode it works as a plot twist, turning our whole perception on Stolas’ cheating on it’s head and providing a new compelling narrative to replace/follow up on the old one.

As I listed above, things changed somewhat but I’d say the gist remains the same, the relationship is toxic, Stolas has genuine immense interest but unintentionally objectifies Blitz and has a tendency to lie to himself and tolerate verbal abuse from characters around him, Blitz still has attachment issues but ultimately catches feelings for Stolas despite himself. I’d say they’re still shitty ppl and they still have flaws in their relationship in dire need of fixing, they just changed marginally bcos of the context but the core is the same.

The only thing for me that’s needed to successfully ‘eat the cake and have it’ is to get another episode, one that isn’t from Stolas’ perspective, that puts a bit more blame for the affair back on him. It makes sense that what’s essentially a Stolas episode would be sympathetic to him and portray everything that happens as understandable, and it does successfully let us see and agree with Stolas’ pov but we could also use another perspective. We can potentially get an episode in the future that humanises Stella, just to a lesser extent than I originally thought and after she plays her role as a villain, maybe showing her own struggles with craving love/unrequited love/ forbidden love (cos she’s already engaged) and how Stolas getting away with/finding somebody to cheat with is a kind of privilege she doesn’t possess. Or an episode with Via that calls him out on coping behaviors like the affair (or possibly running away cos that’s a s2 fan theory) that lead to him paying no regard to how his actions hurt the ppl around him, and that just bcos he’s hurting that doesn’t mean he’s allowed to hurt other’s. You know, smth neat like that.

[snorlaxlovesme]

full thoughts on the chaos walking movie? I want to hear more about it lol I haven’t seen it yet

it just...it felt like TKONLG but without EVERY GOOD PART, you know?

scene-wise, the closest individual scene we had to anything in the book was maybe the scene where Viola read Todd’s mother’s book to him? (even that wasn’t the same bc that was also the scene where we find out he’s illiterate, and he lets her read it right away, so there was no deep-rooted embarrassment about not being able to read). also it happened in Farbranch. BUT, like it captured the emotion of the OG scene a little, where Viola is reading to Todd and he’s hearing his ma’s words and getting emotional about it.

but all the stand-out scenes from the book, i.e. saying goodbye to Ben and Cillian, meeting the girl and getting hit in the head with a branch and bandaging her anyway, ALL of the Aaron fights, the bridge, the massacre of Farbranch, the song of Here, the Spackle, Todd’s illness, the waterfall scene, Haven, NONE of that was in the movie. so imagine all the really important and powerful moments gone

also all the overarching themes? those are gone too. todd becoming a man is  HUGE deal in the books. even in his horrible awful town he just wants to feel like he BELONGS and he’s the one person in the entire town being ostracized. two of the biggest secrets in Todd’s whole world are kept from him for the majority of the book because he’s “not yet a man”. it’s important to him. and once todd realizes the connection between Prentisstown maturity and murder, he spends the rest of that book WISHING he could be a killer. wishing he could have that kind of strength and seeing himself weak for not being able to kill. 

all of that?? gone. movie!Todd often chants the familiar “I am Todd Hewitt” (and sometimes “be a man”) when he’s nervous or trying to cover something in his Noise, and has a little tiff with Ben and Cillian at the beginning of the movie bc the Mayor sees Todd as a man while Ben and Cillian do not. (that’s a weird little bit though bc the movie never really explains why the Mayor had such an interest in Todd). but that’s about it in terms of coming-of-age material in the movie. and about murder. seeing as he doesn’t. kill. the. Spackle. let that sink in.

also like. the Noise is shown as a CONCEPT but not as a theme. the THEME of Noise is that, and I quote

“In this world of information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.”

or perhaps

“Knowing a man’s thoughts ain’t knowing a man.”

or even

“Knowledge is dangerous and men lie and the world changes, whether I want it to or not.”

in this movie, Noise would be described as like. a nuisance at worst and a superpower at best. you can hear most of every man’s thoughts in the movie, though not a constant, never ending stream. just just bits sporadically at either plot-convenient or comedic times. the Mayor (and at one point Ben, and at one point Todd) uses his Noise to construct illusions around people kind of similar to that Jake Gyllenhaal villain in Spiderman: Far From Home. 

but neither of these two main examples really SHOW the themes that Patrick Ness showed us in the books. that Noise is powerfully ANNOYING; that it can quickly break down relationships between groups of people; that it can be manipulated making large lies still possible.

like, remember when in the books, Todd and Viola get to Farbranch and poor Todd is absolutely GOBSMACKED that 1. the women are ALIVE and 2. the men and women are living together?? in harmony?? what the eff?? and you see Hildy in Tam’s Noise and just how much they genuinely love each other and Todd is like “damn we ain’t in Prentisstown anymore Manchee”. and you can just see based on the contrast that Prentisstown people are a whole different breed compared to the kindness of Farbranch?

in the movie Todd has a few moments of inner dialogue where he’s like “oh man that’s a woman. that’s nuts” and then we move on. his world should be turned upside down here and its not. and the difference between the two towns is that they kinda just made it seem like, yeah, Noise is annoying so we have the men sleep separately from the women so we all get a little peace, and it’s fine. that’s how Farbranch deals with it. it all just feels very blasé 

(i can’t remember specifically where this happens, probably either in Farbranch or cutting back to the Prentisstown men getting ready to march, but at some point a leader ends up saying something to a crowd of people and you can see how just one sentence spreads through an entire group of men and how they all start amplifying it and getting more and more panicked and i did think the mob mentality was cool. it reminded me of the beginning of The Ask and the Answer were the Mayor is addressing the citizens of Haven and you get that moment where the whole crowd flinches over the words of one man.)

and in all of this I’ve barely mentioned Viola. my wonderful girl. how they’ve massacred her story. god.

all of Viola’s development for the first half of the book is tanked from the start bc you SEE the crash, you see her stealing food from Ben and Cillian’s house (that’s the inciting incident of the movie), she talks to the Mayor in Prentisstown almost immediately after Todd finds her and his Noise helps everyone locate her, she talks to Todd a lot before getting to Farbranch after they escape Prentissown. the book does a LOT of work for Viola by having her mute and scared for the beginning and slowly showing how she comes to trust Todd. and how even after their incessent bickering in Farbranch they still choose to escape together because they know the army is after them specifically and they’re all the other has. that progression is really important in the book, as well as afterwards when we see how snarky Viola can actually be when speaking, how she thinks this entire planet is BACKWARDS and she can’t wait til her ship comes and shows them a thing or two about how to live.

movie Viola, well. she wants to find a way to communicate with her ship. she’s under the impression that since her scout ship crashed they’re gonna assume she’s dead and leave her behind. even though the Mayor brings up the settlers a lot after he learns about them, Viola curiously never really brings them up in any other context besides they need to come and get her. like it really made it sound like she planned on calling them, having them scoop her, and then they’d all just fucking leave, i guess. i don’t know what her end goal was besides CALLING HER PEOPLE which became the main point of the movie. the Mayor trying to find Todd and Viola so he could....use her to contact the ship?? that was also kind of unclear. and Viola trying to get to a communicator possibly so she could get the hell out of dodge. idk if that was her actual plan, but it was certainly what Todd was thinking, enough to where I was wondering if he was going to sabotage her mission in order to force her to stay (yeah. yeah. he had that energy about him and it was grosss)

and quickly, since all the animals couldn’t talk the way they do in the book, Manchee was more of a cute prop than anything. i could have gotten over it if he was useful in any way, but he never even like attacked a dude to save Todd or anything like that. so when he died it was sad on a dog-level but not a character level, since besides sitting next to Viola like twice while she cried he really added nothing to the story. also the shock of animal death was greatly reduced already since Todd’s horse that he used to escape Prentisstown from got a broken leg after he rode him off a cliff, so Todd used the knife (off-screen, thank god) to put him down. so Manchee getting killed was kind of lessened a little since my man Whiskey got nixed like 40 min earlier in the film.

this is getting long so I’ll cut it here since I’m gonna probably post about this a thousand more times. but yeah. if you watched it completely divorced from the books you would probably think “that was a cool concept but also what was the point of any of that” which is basically what most people thought based on the review headlines i’ve read. and if you are an avid book fan you’re gonna think you’re watching something else entirely.

[shirlleycoyle]

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon

Every fictional character you can think of has experienced 9/11 in fanfiction.

A Clone Wars veteran with two lightsabers is on United Airlines Flight 93 and prevents it from crashing. Ron and Hermione get caught up in the chaos as the towers fall. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her friends watch the attacks unfold on TV from Sunnydale. We have spent 20 years trying to process what happened on 9/11 and its fallout, and that messy process can be tracked through the countless, sad, disturbing, and sometimes very funny fanfiction left across the internet.

Many of the fanfics written in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks seemed to directly respond to the news as it happened, processing the tragedy in real-time through the eyes of characters they loved. In the absence of a canon episode where Daria Morgendorffer paid respects to those lost, writing fanfic about these characters also experiencing trauma helped fans cope.

One YuGiOh fanfic published on fanfiction.net in May 2002 could have been ripped exactly from what this writer experienced that Tuesday morning. “It started as a normal day,” user Gijinka Renamon wrote. Yugi and his friends were in school, where their teacher informed them of the attacks and sent everyone home from school.

“After reading people’s 9/11 fics, I decided to write my own, and put a certain character in it. And Yugi and his pals were my first choice,” the author's note reads, explaining the connection they felt to United flight 93 and the World Trade Center attacks. Given that they lived in Pennsylvania, and “it’s close to New York, I felt really sad about it.”

Stitch, a fandom journalist for Teen Vogue, told Motherboard that this reaction to 9/11 is not at all uncommon in fandom.

"Fandom has always been a place that positions nothing as 'off limits,'" she said. "Historical tragedies like the Titanic sinking and atrocities like… all of World War 2 show up regularly across the past 30 years of people creating stories and art about the characters they love. So, on some level, it makes sense that 9/11 and the following 20-year military installation in the Middle East has joined the ranks of things people in different fandoms turn into settings for their fan fiction."

Reactions depicted in a handful of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics published in the weeks after the attacks ring a little truer to the characters. “Tuesday, 11th September 2001,” written by Anna K, almost echoes the lyrics from “I’ve Got a Theory,” one of the songs in the musical episode that aired in November 2001. “We have seen the apocalypse. We have prevented it. Actually, we’ve prevented quite a few. So we know what they look like,” they write, before taking a darker turn. “They look a lot like…New York today.”

Killing demons and vampires doesn’t phase the Scooby Gang, but when preventable human death is brought into the picture, it’s gut wrenching.

“What am I supposed to do…When I can’t do anything to save the world?” Buffy cries  into Spike’s chest, watching the attacks unfold on TV in a fanfic the author described as being “about feeling numb and helpless.”

In “Blood Drive,” Kirayoshi writes about Buffy and her friends saving a van full of donated blood meant for victims of the attacks from a group of thirsty vampires. One Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic even takes a blindly patriotic turn, where noted lesbian witch Tara McClay helps Xander hang an American flag from the window of the magic shop to make Anya feel better.

Experiencing 9/11 as a young teenager was overwhelming not just because of the loss of life. Almost immediately after the event itself, it was as if the entirety of American culture re-oriented itself towards an overtly jingoistic stance. As we get distance from the attacks, seeing the tone of television and movies from the early 2000s is jarring, and some have gone viral on Twitter. In the world of pop music, mainstream musicians like the Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, were blacklisted from the radio while Toby Keith sang about putting a boot up the ass of terrorists. On the Disney Channel, a young Shia Labeouf reading a poem he supposedly wrote about the events. The poem concludes with the line, "it's awesome to be an American citizen."

In a world so completely saturated with this messaging, it is not surprising that fanfic authors started including 9/11 in their work so soon after the event. Even The West Wing had a strange, out of continuity, fanfic-esque episode where the characters reacted to 9/11. In some cases, it made sense that the characters in the stories would be close to or a part of the events themselves.

"For characters like John Watson or Captain America, the idea works to an extent," Stitch told Motherboard. "In the original Sherlock Holmes works and the 2011 BBC series, Watson had just returned from Afghanistan. For Captain America and other Marvel heroes, 9/11 was something that was addressed in-universe in The Amazing Spider-Man volume 2 #36. Technically, 9/11 is 'canon' to the Marvel universe."

In “Early Warning: Terrorism,” a fanfiction for the TV show Early Edition in which a man who mysteriously receives tomorrow's newspaper, predicting the future, avoids jingoism, but tries to precent 9/11 from happening. This fanfic remains unfinished; it’s unclear if the characters successfully prevent 9/11 in this retelling.

Largely in fanfic from the era just after 9/11, when many young authors were trying to emotionally grapple with it, the characters don't re-write or undo the events themselves. It's this emphasis on the reaction to tragedy that colors the fanfiction that features 9/11 going forward.

Although fanfiction authors have been writing about 9/11 consistently since soon after the event, whenever that fanfiction reaches outside of its intended audience, it looks bizarre.

A screenshot of a Naruto 9/11 fanfic on the Tumblr subreddit comes without any context, or even more than two lines and an author's note. It’s impossible to suss out if this falls into the category of sincere fanfic without the rest of the piece or a publication date, but modern-day commenters on the Reddit thread see it as classic Tumblr trash.

Screenshot from r/Tumblr

“Bin Laden/Dick Cheney, enemies to lovers, 10k words, slow burn,” one user joked in the replies, underscoring the weirdness of Naruto being in the Twin Towers by comparing it to a What If story about Cheney and Bin Laden slowly falling deeply in love.

It’s hard to tell how much of the 9/11 fanfic and fanart starting a few years after the attacks is sincere, and how much of it is ironic, and trying to make fun of the very concept of writing fanfiction about 9/11.

A 2007 anime music video (in which various clips, usually from anime, are cut together to music) that combines scenes from The Lion King with Linkin Park’s “Crawling” and clips from George Bush’s speeches immediately after the attacks feels like the perfect example of this. Even the commenters can’t seem to suss out if this person is a troll or not.

There’s no way that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 9/11 fanart could be serious, right? Especially if the description pays tribute to “some of the nation's most memorable buildings,” and features five of the main characters as child versions of themselves. The comments again are split between users thanking the artist for a thoughtful remembrance post, and people making their own headcanon for why Twilight Sparkle is surreptitiously absent from the scene.

Screengrab via DeviantArt

There’s Phineas and Ferb fanfic that combines a 9/11 tribute concert with flashbacks to Ferb being rescued from the towers as a baby, written on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. It jumps from introspection to lines like, “‘Quiet Perry the Platypus. I’m trying to listen to these kids singing a 9/11 tribute.’”

The author's notes make it more likely that they meant for this to be a tribute piece, but it doesn’t quite make sense until watching a YouTube dramatic reading of it from 2020, fully embracing the absurdity of it all.

“For me, 9/11 is synonymous with war. It completely changed the course of my life," Dreadnought, the author of a Captain America fanfic Baghdad Waltz that sees Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes fall in love over the course of the war on terror, told Motherboard. "It’s the reason I joined the military, and I developed deep connections with people who would go on to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. These very much felt like my generation’s wars, perhaps because people I graduated high school with were the youngest folks eligible to serve at the time.”

Dreadnought told Motherboard that although they didn't deploy, their career has kept 9/11 and the trauma from it in their mind. After seeing that people who fantasize about Steve and Bucky getting together seemed particularly interested in reading fanfiction that related to 9/11, they decided to try their hand at it.

"I had to do something with all of that emotionally, and I’m admittedly a bit emotionally avoidant. So I learned through fic that it’s easier for me to process those feelings and the knowledge of all the awful stuff that can happen in war if I can turn it into something creative," Dreadnought said. "Give the feelings to fake people and then have those fake people give the feelings to readers!"

To Dreadnought, who is a queer man, the experience of researching and writing this was more cathartic than they first expected, especially as a way to navigate feelings about masculinity, military culture, and queer identity. But they said the research they did, which included watching footage of first responders at ground zero, was what helped them finally process the event itself.

"It was like a delayed horror, and it was more powerful than I expected it would be." Dreadnought said. "When I was eighteen, I was pretty emotionally divorced from 9/11; I just knew I wanted to do something about it. So coming back to it in my 30s while writing this fic, it was a very different experience. Even the research for this story ended up being an extraordinarily valuable exercise in cognitively and emotionally processing 9/11 and all of its second and third order effects."

Fanfiction that features 9/11 provides an outlet for people who still grapple with the trauma from that day. But Stitch warns that the dynamics of fandom and how it relates to politics can also create fiction that's less respectful and more grotesque.

"With years of distance between the stories written and the original events of 9/11, there seems to be some sort of cushion for fans who choose to use those events as a catalyst for relationships—and Iraq and Afghanistan for settings," Stitch said. "The cushion allows them room to fictionalize real world events that changed the shape of the world as we know it, but it also insulates them from having to think about what they may be putting into the world."

The tendency of turning these events into settings or backgrounds for mostly white, male characters to fall in love has the unintended effect of displacing the effects that the war on terror has had on the world over. Steve and Bucky might fall in love during the war on terror, but they would also be acting as a part of the American military in a war that has been criticized since it started. Fanfic writers in other fandoms have come under fire for using real world tragedy as settings for fic before. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake Supernatural fanfiction about the actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki going to the island to do aid became controversial within the fandom. There have also been fics where characters grapple with the death of George Floyd that is written in a way that displaces the event from the broader cultural context of race in America.

"A Captain America story where Steve Rogers is a 'regular' man who joins the US Army and 'fights for our freedom' post-9/11 is unlikely to deal with the war’s effect on locals who are subject to US military intervention," Stitch said. "It’s unlikely to sit with what Captain America has always meant and what a writer is doing by dropping Steve Rogers into a then-ongoing conflict in any capacity."

After enough time, “never forget” can even morph into “but what if it never happened?” A 19k+ word Star Wars alternate universe fanfic asks this question, wondering what would have unfolded if someone with two lightsabers was on United Flight 93. This fic, part of a larger fanfic series with its own Wikia, considers what would have happened if Earth was a military front in the Clone Wars.

In this version of events, a decorated general who served in the Clone Wars is able to take back control of Flight 93 before it crashes, landing safely and preventing even more tragedy from happening that day. In the end, all of the passengers who made harrowing last calls to their loved ones before perishing in a Pennsylvania field survive thanks to the power of the Force, and are awarded medals of honor by President Bush.

Twenty years after the attacks, it’s painful to think about what would have happened if people got to work 15 minutes later, or missed their trains that morning. There weren’t Jedi masters deployed to save people in real life, but for some of the fanfic writers working today, the world of Star Wars might feel just as removed as the world before September 11, 2001.

Fiction serves as a powerful playground for processing cultural events, especially generational trauma. The act isn't neutral though; a decade's worth of fanfiction that takes place on or around 9/11 shows how our own understanding of a traumatic event can shift with time.

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[hope-faith-love-abide]

I haven’t been keeping up with Heartland season 14 updates the past few months, but I decided to catch up on some of it since the premiere date is coming up and the teaser trailer was released recently. And I noticed some interesting speculation about what might happen in the new season, and I have...a lot of thoughts about it, haha. I think I need to write it out in order to really sort out my thoughts and feelings on it, but I think it might get kinda long since it’s pretty major, so I’m going to put it under a cut. 

[NOTE: This post was written approximately a week or so ago, and I’ve been just sitting on it trying to decide if I wanna post or not. But having watched the full trailer for Season 14 now...I’m like 95% certain that this seems to be the route that the season is going. Still have about 5% doubt because trailers can be misleading and I could just be reading into it. We won’t really know for sure until we see the first episode, and I’m so torn between being somewhat excited just because I want to know for certain and nervous because I know I will still be sad if it’s true.

Either way, I wanted to get my thoughts down before the season premieres so here it is I guess lol]

So...it’s actually possible that Ty might die/be dead when this season begins? Which is utterly bizarre to think about because I never would have considered this to be an actual possible situation for the show. Even when there was that summary that leaked earlier this year, I still didn’t think it was a real possibility. I thought for certain that was fake, because this is Heartland. It’s one thing for a side character to disappear from the show or to be killed off, but a main character? A main character can be hurt, injured, and on the verge of death, but they won’t actually die. Especially not a character who is in one of the two major ships on the show.

Until now?

Of course, if this does happen, I don’t think it’s something anyone on the show wanted, not even the writers. In an ideal world where every actor wanted to be in every episode of the show, I imagine they’d be perfectly happy continuing to write that story.

But in cases where an actor no longer wants to be a main character on the show -- well, obviously I can’t say definitively that this is the case, because as far as I know he has never specifically said this in an interview, but from an outsider’s/fan’s perspective, it feels like that is a possibility. I don’t know the reasons behind it though, and I’m not going to go that far into speculation.

But let’s go with this scenario hypothetically. Because it does sometimes happen with television shows, where an actor for one reason or another no longer will be part of a show. 

What do you do with that character?

The character could be recast, I suppose, but I don’t think that would work in a show like Heartland. How would we explain in-universe why Ty suddenly looks different when everyone else is still the same? Even if you can find an actor that looks similar enough, we know what Ty looks like after 13 seasons, and I don’t think anyone would be fooled into thinking it’s the same guy. I guess it could be explained with the trope that he got into such a bad accident that they had to reconstruct his face, but that feels cheap and too much like a soap opera. 

So that’s a no.

The character could be written out in other ways. Ty could just be off screen somewhere...all the time. He’s at the clinic, he’s spending the day with Lyndy, he’s at a vet conference, he’s gone back to save wolves from poachers again, he’s gone back to Mongolia for the third/fourth/fifth/ten billionth time. 

That, honestly, would be frustrating. It’s maybe the least painful short term option, but long term, it’s not very enjoyable. It’s like when important side characters suddenly disappear from the show, occasionally mentioned but never seen on screen again, only 10 times worse.

Or he could be written off by...y’know, breaking up him and Amy. Which, frankly, is the absolute worst option in my opinion. It would immediately, retroactively, destroy the entire show, past, present, and future. Ty and Amy aren’t the only important part of the show, but they are a major part of it. The show has spent 13 seasons building up this relationship (with obvious ups and downs throughout, but I’m not focused on analyzing their whole relationship in this post), so to suddenly turn around and have them divorce would be an absolute trainwreck. 

What would even be the reason? Even with some of my disagreements in the writing of certain decisions the characters have made (*coughtheMongoliaplotcough*), I don’t think those are reasons enough for these two characters to break up over it. So something new would have to be invented, and it would likely be something completely ridiculous and out-of-character for them both and also likely ruin their character development from past seasons. 

Which leads us to yet another option: Ty dying. A year ago this was something I never would have considered for the actual show (or any of those other options, frankly). It could be interesting to explore in a fanfic, but on the show? No way.

But...things change. Reality sometimes gets in the way of a television show’s ideal storyline, which is one of the difficulties of the medium, especially a live action one. And just because one actor hypothetically doesn’t want to be on the show anymore doesn’t mean it should be derailed for all the other actors and crew who are on board.

So you get rid of the character. It isn’t hard to do. Probably the hardest part will be the very first episode when it’s revealed to the audience. How did it happen? Did it happen before the season begins, or does it happen in the first episode? Or if it happened before, do we get any flashbacks? 

Is it due to complications from the gunshot at the end of season 13? A freak car/motorcycle accident? An accident during a vet call? Depending on what it is and the context of it, it can be a strong final note on the kind of person Ty has become. If during a vet call/because of an animal, it happens while he’s doing what he loves, taking care of animals. If from the end of S13, it’s from him protecting his wife. If a car accident, maybe he was going to pick up Lyndy to spend time with her after leaving a vet call, because he’s a loving father. All of those are inline with Ty’s character and still support the growth that he’s had from the first episode to now. 

And then there’s all the story potential and character growth that it opens up for all the other characters. Because this is something that majorly impacts the entire family. And the description of season 14 that was put out does talk about a “life-changing challenge,” particularly for Amy for obvious reasons.

How does she deal with losing her husband? They’ve been together for so long, not just as romantic interests but as best friends. What does her life look like without him in it? How does this affect her work? Is her work with horses a comfort for her, or does it remind her too much of him? How does she guide Lyndy through this? 

And then the rest of the family. How does Jack deal with his loss? Considering Ty became like a son to him and “officially” joins the family when he marries Amy, how does it affect Jack to lose him? Especially if it was in something like a car accident, similar to Marion. How does it affect Jack and Lisa’s relationship? 

Not to mention Lily, and Lou, and Georgie, and Tim, and Caleb, and Scott, and Cass. Ty was a huge part of all their lives, so this will affect them in major ways too. 

Again, it’s not ideal. But I do feel like this option provides the best story opportunities without ruining the characters in the process the way certain other choices would. 

And, of course, this is all purely speculation. We won’t really know what’s going to happen until the season actually airs, and it’s entirely possible that the “life-changing challenge” will be something completely different, and Ty will be fine. And if so, that’s okay with me. 

But if Ty is gone...I think I could learn to be okay with it. Though it does still depend on how they handle it. Like if everyone’s sad about it for one or two episodes, but then everyone immediately moves on and everything’s fine, then I wouldn’t be happy with that. We don’t need a whole season of everyone crying all the time, but we also don’t need this to be something that’s swept under the rug. We, the audience, will need time to grieve along with the characters. Because this is a main character that we could be losing here, not just a minor side character like Mr. Hanley for example. So I hope we get to see all of the characters going through the stages of grief and processing their loss in their own ways throughout the season.

Anyway, it was nice to write through my thoughts on this. It’s kinda funny thinking about how not that long ago, I would’ve been completely 100% against this idea ever happening in the show, but now I’m like almost on-board with it. Maybe it’s the effect of 2020 or something lol

[noobsomeexagerjunk]

Left Undone

Ted didn’t want to babysit Bill’s daughter. He didn’t like Bill, and Bill didn’t like him. Why did he have to be the only one in the office who was free for the weekend? Alice didn’t exactly want to be babysat either. She’s too old for that!

Little did Ted and Alice know how much fun they were going to have.

(AU wherein Alice has not dated Deb yet, Bill hasn’t divorced yet either; MASSIVE SPOILERS for BoJack Horseman Season 3 and Moulin Rouge! are discussed)

Friday Prologue | Saturday Chapter | Sunday Chapter | Monday Epilogue

Alice woke up fairly well-rested Saturday morning, forgetting for a second that she wasn’t in her own house.

Ted Spankoffski’s house had 3 bedrooms. One was a master bedroom where Ted slept and also did any other non-CCRP related work. Another was a room where Ted’s nerdy brother stayed for the Summer; ever since Ted got himself a house, his younger brother would stay over at his place during holidays and academic breaks.

Then there was the spare guest bedroom Alice was in where Ted had to set up for her the previous evening. It was very plain.

She went downstairs, explored a little, then found no one. She went back up, knocking on Ted’s bedroom door. No response.

Alice then decided to wash up instead, to feel fresh in the morning. She did all the work in the downstairs bathroom (Ted specifically told her to use that particular bathroom), leaving it as neat as it was before she came to the house.

She tried to knock on the door again, the increased strength of her rapping revealing to her that the room had not been locked, or closed properly for that matter.

She peeked in to find Ted who was still asleep, clutching a laptop like a stuffed toy. His shirt, boxers, and socks tied together with his slumped figure, which also seemed intertwined with the bedsheets. There were used tissues all over the bed, some on the floor making a trail to a semi-used paper towel roll. There were an empty bowl and two empty beer bottles on the bedside table. It reeked of Corona and clearly imported Honey Butter Chips.

Alice stepped in to try to wake Ted up, but the floor creaking below her was enough to make him jolt awake.

“Who the fu-“ Ted calmed down from the shock of waking up so suddenly, “A-Alice?!  Shit, I forgot you’re here,”

“I-Is there anything I can eat?”

Ted rose from his position, sitting upward on his bed, “...are you allergic to eggs? Milk?”

“No, I’m not allergic to either.”

“Good,” Ted yawned, getting up and stretching, “because my fridge is fucking empty.”

“I noticed.”

That was hyperbole...sort of. The only breakfast that could be made from Ted’s pantry was egg toast and cereal. There was enough for both of them to finish all of said egg toast and cereal.

“What were you watching last night?” Alice asked Ted, playing with her fruit loops a little.

“Hm?” He swallowed the last bite of his toast with instant coffee.

“You were crying for about thirty minutes; I couldn't sleep-”

“I-It was a sad episode, alright?!” Ted was slightly embarrassed, hesitating to take another sip of coffee, “That fucking baby seahorse will never know...”

Alice raised a brow, unaware of the reference. She ate some more cereal.

“Don’t give me that look, Alice!” That was Bill’s glare, alright, “BoJack Horseman is a very good show!”

“And you binged the whole thing last night?”

“It’s the new season. I’ve got two episodes left before I finish.” Ted then proceeded to chug down what was left of his coffee.

“My laptop died during my binge but it was late and I was just,” He blew a raspberry, “...I needed to sleep.”

“I’ve done that before, not gonna lie,” Alice place down the spoon, done with her breakfast, “Though, the show I watched was kinda...yeah, it was kinda shitty,”

“Let me guess: you’ve watched it because someone hot’s in it,”

Alice blushed, “I-It’s not just that!”

“Hey hey hey,” Ted chuckled, “I’m guilty of that, I ain’t judging.”

Alice hmphed, “Should I watch that—what’s that show?”

“BoJack Horseman?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm,” Ted then began cleaning up by taking Alice’s utensils, stacking them with his, “it starts weak but gets so much better, like real fucking better. Dunno if you’re old enough to watch it though,”

“I’ve seen some pretty adult stuff! Mom makes me watch Tarantino movies with her, at least whenever Dad's not around sometimes,"

Ted nodded at Alice’s mother’s taste in film, “Aight, but that show just...it just hits somewhere really hard when you’re in your early thirties full of regret and with no discernible life direction but, hey! If you can take it, I’d be impressed.”

Alice blinked, “What? Is it like, psychological horror? The kind rooted in some comedically timed socio-political commentary?”

“Well, arguably.” Ted then got up to bring the dishes in his hands into the kitchen.

“...where can I find it?” She asked with mild interest.

“Netflix,” The sound of dishes landing in a sink was heard from Alice’s seat, “It’s a cartoon too, and like, about a bunch of animals, if those kinds of things float your boat.”

Alice never made it past Episode 1 when she tried to watch it herself, convinced Ted’s taste was shit. Personally, she will regret that.

The rest of that morning left Alice and Ted to their own individual devices. Alice typed away some interesting plots and ideas on her phone. Ted went to finish the last episodes of that sad horse show.

An hour before the time Alice would usually eat lunch, she had been cycling around various plotlines for a potential...well, something. Alice knew she just had to write something.

She was in the living area of the house when she heard Ted sloppily walk down the stairs. His eyes were teary.

"Are you alright, Mr. Spankoffski?" She looked at him with concern.

Ted shakily neared her, hesitating to sit on the couch next to her. He instead placed a languid hand on one of the couch's armrests.

"Please don't die on me, Alice, oh my God..."

He broke into sobs. Alice could only stare at this behavior in confusion.

"Did something bad happen in the show, or...?"

"Fuck, it got worse!" He sniffled, "A-And not, like, n-not in a bad writing context--that show's writing is the shit, Alice! But fuck! F-Fuck!"

Sarah Lynn was not supposed to die, but she did die and the fact left Ted devastated. A part of him knew it was gonna happen as he saw the old man, er, horse, and the poor girl in the motel, missing the Oscars. (Then again, that show had a penchant for hollowing, tragic endings per episode.)

Even in entertainment, in his favorite shows to watch, Ted Spankoffski knew better than to hope. It was more realistic for him.

"You can sit down," Alice moved aside to give Ted space to sit.

Ted cried as he sat next to her, "God, I'm sorry y-you had to see me like this,"

"I've...I-I've had worse breakdowns over a show. I-It's all good."

TV and Movie homophobia still haunted the teenage girl.

It's things like that, whether extravagant or subtle in delivery, that prompted her to write and clarify in any way that she could if only to fight. Alice Woodward was the kind of girl who refused to despair.

"Yeah, A-Alice?"

"Mhm," She nodded, quickly writing "character gets sucked into a tv show???" in her phone's Notes app.

"What if we watched something less depressing instead? You can watch it with me, Alice!" Ted breathed, "You're not bored, are you?"

She added "literally? figuratively? ehhh let the watchers decide??? kshfukdhivg" then kept her phone.

"No! N-No, I know how to keep myself, um, b-busy," Alice then shifted herself into a more comfortable position, "What movies do you have?"

Ted paused before answering, realizing he was hungry.

“You pick,” He said, getting up, “You want pizza with that?”

Alice nodded eagerly, watching Ted head for his phone.

“Wait, what am I supposed to pick?”

“There’s a bunch of CD cases in the drawer under the center table—it’s right in front of you!” Ted's voice decrescendoed as he headed upstairs.

“Drawer?” Alice wondered to herself, bending down to inspect the described center table. There was in fact a drawer.

She pulled it open to find bunches of CD cases, charging wires, and what clearly seemed to be unusable gadgets or “e-junk” as her father would, in a terribly corny way, put it.

Alice noticed a notable amount of movie musicals in one bundle of CD cases. The one that got her attention was Moulin Rouge!, unfamiliar with the title and very taken by the red-haired beauty printed on the cover. There was Jesus Christ Superstar, West Side Story, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a bunch of Disney Princess movies. Upon further inspection of the non-musical movies, Ted had a diverse taste in film, though it was primarily pretty basic in Alice's opinion, minus a few exceptions.

She closed the drawer, further inspecting the Moulin Rouge CD cover by reading the synopsis on the back. An aspiring writer falls in love with a courtesan but other things get in the way? Alice could not blame the writer, in fact, she was quick to identify with him, even if she had not seen the movie yet.

“Alice?” Ted called from upstairs, “Are you allergic to anything I should know?”

“No,” She called back, playing with the CD cover.

“Good! I’m getting us a Bacon Surprise,”

“Alright,” Apparently Ted chose to order from that  Witchwood Ovens Shop downtown.

“What movie do you wanna watch?” Ted asked as he went back down. Alice showed him the CD cover.

“Moulin Rouge?” He mispronounced, “I actually have that in there?”

Alice handed the cover to Ted as he approached her, “I don’t think I’ve seen this one,”

“No shit, Alice. This movie’s got prostitution; if I know your Dad enough,” He stared at the cover, trying to remember when he got it, "he would make sure you'd never see it. God, I remember seeing this in the theater, like, when I was about your—h-how old are you again?"

"Fifteen, but I'll be sixteen later this year,"

"Eh, close enough," Ted then placed the CD cover down, ready to set up the television set in the living room.

"Nicole Kidman, man..." Ted dusted the CD player, plugging the TV into it, "She was the fucking best in that thing."

"Do you even know what happens in it?" Alice asked as she watched Ted at work, "Or were you just hoping Nicole Kidman would step on you?"

"Don't you fucking shame me, Alice!" Ted gasped back as he blushed, "If you had any taste in women, you'd want the same Goddamn thing."

Ted guessed correctly, keeping the girl from returning his snark.

It was around the Elephant Love Medley when the pizza arrived. Ted was kind enough to pause for Alice as he went to get the pizza. Alice was still recovering from the exhilaration of the past few songs, overwhelmed with the crowd-like effect of the cheesy-Jukebox mashups that introduced Christian to that infamous dancehall, the gratuitous use of slow-mo effects, and the ridiculous use of that Can-Can. It was "Spectacular Spectacular" indeed!

Alice almost choked on her pizza during the Like A Virgin scene. It was also very clear to her, as they watched, that Ted must've forgotten a lot of what had happened in the film given some of his reactions. Ted cursed The Duke repeatedly, particularly at that scene when he found out about the true nature of Christian's play.

Ted believed that he should've seen Satine dying coming. He saw this movie before. The movie literally said so right at the start!

Why, as he watched, did he want that happy ending when the opposite was inevitably going to happen?!

Something about Satine charmed Ted, in a particularly nightmarish way. The idea of further thinking about it was repressed repeatedly, refusing to confront the roots of it all. Surely it was just him being a horny bastard, right? Right?

This totally had nothing to do with the fact that Satine had vibrant red hair, cerulean eyes, polished milky skin, and a beautiful figure.

This totally had nothing to do with how familiar this fictional character seemed to be, resembling someone Ted remembered with intense, bittersweet longing.

This totally had nothing to do with the sight of Satine breathing her last breath on a bed of roses reminding Ted of a memory that he swore hadn't happened yet.

Or it did happen?

Why debate when it happened when it shouldn't have happened at all? It wasn't supposed to happen, whatever that thing was that Ted didn't need to remember at the moment. And yet...

She didn't make a sound. Heartbreak was never so loud.

Alice's sniffling brought Ted back to reality. Ted put a hand on her shoulder.

"God, I-I look so stupid," Alice chuckled out from her tears, rubbing her teary eyes, "they literally say it in the beginning, ugh!"

Ted coddled her closer to him so he could hug her but Alice recoiled back.

"T-Thanks, but we both smell like pizza," Ted nodded back in response.

As he cleaned up the living area, he asked Alice, "How was the movie?"

"It was pretty cheesy," She pulled out her phone again, inspired to write, "but kinda fun? Like, you don't get fun movies with this much energy, at least, when I try to compare, well. You know what I mean."

"Yeah," Ted replied absent-mindedly, "It certainly brings back memories of, well,  certain times."

"I think it kinda comes off as an epic-like piece,"

"No need to wax academic, Alice,"

"You asked for it!"

"I asked about how it was, not for an essay about its themes and shit!" Ted straightened himself up with a chuckle, "It's just a movie, after all."

"It hits different though," She spat back, focused now on her phone.

Witchwood Oven Shop pizzas were notably heavier on the stomach compared to their competitors. Any leftover pizza the two had for lunch that day, Ted proceeded to reheat for dinner. He scavenged his refrigerator for any packs of instant lemonade, which were thankfully there, and prepared two glasses for the two of them.

It was a shitty excuse for dinner, but Alice didn't seem to mind. She was very concentrated on her phone.

"What'cha writing about?"

Alice tilted her phone as to hide it, "It's not really much yet. It's all a bunch of prompts so far."

"You can pitch me stuff," He swallowed a bite, "Which ones really get to you?"

"Well," She hesitated.

"Well?"

"I-I've got a traveling adventure in a fancy, cultured but mysterious new town..."

"Anything else?"

"Still deciding whether I should make it a horror or a comedy. Besides that, it's all gonna rest on a foundation of romance between our main character, and, well..."

"Who?"

"I don't know! It's all I got so far!"

"Hey, it's not bad," Ted sipped his lemonade, "You know, I bet with enough time, it can become something really fucking great. I'd be invested if this was a movie or a staged production of sorts, I don't know,"

"Y-You think it's good, Mr. Spankoffski?"

"Oh hell yeah," He placed the glass down, "Not to be cheesy, but romance really gets me."

"Yeah, same."

"Have you considered making it some sort of horror-comedy romance? I would love it if you could pull it off."

[vaguely-concerned]

Twisted Fate/Graves thoughts 2 Electric Boogaloo because none of you can stop me

and I just have a lot of feelings okay

- t.f. taking an entire paragraph mid-fall during a harrowing life or death chase to give you the context for how much the imminent destruction of his boots is a  tragedy is the funniest and most endearing character detail and also irrefutable proof that despite appearances he, too, really does only have that half a brain cell, it simply pingpongs around in there much more than graves’ half (which instead finds one idea and GOES HARD for it no matter what lol bless him)   

also his pov is basically just a flippant ‘well this is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation’ until graves literally forces him to have an honest emotion at gunpoint, and y’know... that be what love feels like sometimes when you’re like that as a person, extremely relatable, I feel for him so much

- I’m still just quietly astounded by the hmmm... implied intimacy? I guess? in the argument they’re having once they’re actually talking in burning tides. let’s look at what they’re actually saying to each other:     

T.F.: “Are you ever gonna learn? . . . Every time I try to help you, I-” and “ I tried to get us out. The rest of us saw the job was going south . . . But you wouldn’t back down. You never do.”

vs.

Graves: “You’ll run again. That’s all you’ve ever done.” and “You made out alright, though . . . You know why? It’s because you’re a coward. And nothing you’ll ever say can change that.” 

like them’s the sort of fraught fighting words you have with a spouse right towards the end of an ugly divorce, the full fruitless ‘why do you always have to --’ and ‘but you never listen to me!!!’ deal, especially from graves’ side lol. it’s the sort of hurtful you can really only be with someone you’ve been very, very close to, someone you know incredibly well. considering the whole backstory what graves is essentially saying here is ‘It’s your own fault people have left you; you deserve to be alone’.

(interestingly, in twisted fate’s pov it seems that what’s really messing with him is the part of not being listened to. he tried to plead with his family and they refused to listen, he tried to convince graves to run away with the rest of them and he didn’t listen, and here they are again and graves isn’t listening  a g a i n  and at that point t.f. clearly just sort of. gives up on actually being heard, in a slightly heartbreaking way. and from how graves reacts to seeing that I really think he’s not naturally cruel like that at all, he’s just in too much pain to think until this startles him out of it and then he does actually listen)

- through both stories graves is so desperately, enduringly horny for t.f. to be emotionally present and engaged with him without slipping away into his ~*cool magic gambler*~ persona and I find it weirdly sweet 

- graves immediately getting fond of this leaky battered old rowboat... hfsadkjfhasd he’s sort of adorable in a way? it’s also really cute how he’s got this really tight focus on tf and his mannerisms and how genuine he’s being at any given moment. it’s such a neat way to show what he’s feeling and thinking about, which must be hard with a character who’s so massively oblivious to the finer points of his own inner life lol  

ALSO can we talk about how tf literally winks at him at one point, right after they’ve sort of had a little moment of regained trust... like my good sir that is so deeply unnecessarily saucy of you, please control yourself (though in his defense graves somehow still isn’t picking up what he’s putting down so y’know maybe subtle isn’t the way to go here anyway haha)

- I wonder if t.f. used to go by his initials even before he changed his name -- graves calls him by it straight off the bat in burning tides and t.f. seems to consider his real name mildly embarrassing lol. (also intriguing that he does appear to think of it as his ‘real name’, and not ‘old name’ or something like that. it’s why I feel like we’ve got more of a dual identity going on here than a deadname situation, it feels more like two distinct levels of emotional vulnerability/availability to me. and so ‘tobias’ stops being relevant when there’s no one left to know him as that. ow.)    

- from reading his bio it seems like twisted fate has had to figure out a lot of the magic stuff on his own (except for the mention of his grandpa teaching him the fortune telling part of it -- seems like they had a bit of a special connection, really, if him leaving his old cards with the kid before they left is anything to go by). what I’m saying is that I would read thousands upon thousands of words of him experimenting with it when they were younger and graves hurriedly having to topple a table over and pull them both behind it for cover before they both explode lol 

(and then t.f. popping his head up afterwards like ‘hAH see I TOLD you I could do it!’ and graves disconsolately lighting a cigar from the burning rubble b/c the things one does for love partnerships huh)

- I’ve been looking over burning tides with a writing eye a few times to figure out what makes it work so well for me, and one of the things I really like is that there are a lot of small comments/details that are there or are framed in a certain way specifically to emphasize the familiarity and history between the characters. Just small details like He moves fast for a big man. I’d forgotten that and graves mentioning he’s never liked standing too close when t.f. does the teleporting thing -- not to mention t.f.’s name reveal, which if I understand this correctly was actually new information to the readers when burning tides was going on. (and yes it is still very funny to me that his actual name is tobias. the duality of man)   

(I also feel like there are HUGE differences in writing quality between the different POV sections -- I guess different people wrote for the different characters? Well, both of the first person sections are gold and that’s what matters to me in this story so I don’t really mind. Sadly the Miss Fortune parts read the weirdest and stiffest to me, which is unfortunate b/c I love her lore concept a lot and she’s so cool in double double-cross. WHO the fuck let an unironic ‘the crimson-haired siren’ slip through the edit, is what I really want to know. please, narrator, tell me about her cerulean orbs while you’re at it) 

- The man I used to know seems lost under years of hatred.

I don’t try to say anything else. I can see it in his eyes, now. Something’s broken inside of him.

still makes me SO SAD and I’m incredibly happy it turns out not to be true in the end thank GOD

- this might just be me reading into stuff too much, but I really like this sense that in moments of high emotion/genuine vulnerability, graves tends to sound older and more tired while t.f. sounds younger than he actually is, more frightened and hurt

- if his mind hadn’t been completely focused on partner-rescuing and open murder were in any way his style, t.f. totally could have killed gangplank right there and then before miss fortune even got to blow the fucker up haha. then again if that were the sort of guy he were he’d be dead along with all the rest of them

- it’s so good that graves tries to save miss fortune’s guy before they leave the cave but also isn’t broken up about it when it turns out he can’t, that feels like such a correct encapsulation of his moral character haha

- I really do enjoy graves’ POV so much not just because there’s something immensely comforting about how he refuses to be scared even in the face of death because he’s too damn grouchy and won’t give the world the satisfaction, but also because the language/cadence is so satisfying. he does have a way with words, in a gruff non-flashy sort of way.

It smells like the end of everything – sulfur and ash and death; cooked hair and melting skin -- the rhythm of that is so gooood and that whole section conveys the horror and destruction but also the awe of the scene so well. (I’m telling you graves isn’t actually dumb at all, just astoundingly unbendingly single minded once he’s got an idea in his head lol) 

- I keep thinking about the fact that the last two things twisted fate thinks about before he passes out from drowning is if graves is scared and ‘What would Malcolm do?’ and I’m feeling real 😭😭😭 about it

- I’m still so disproportionately intrigued by graves mentioning his mom in burning tides. considering how early and seemingly easily he left home (...not to mention that he brings her up in connection with someone punching him in the face) it might be a safe bet that they weren’t that close but like. she also seems to be one of the very very few non-revengy things he’s checked up on after getting out of prison. did he send money home sometimes? would he visit whenever they came back to bilgewater? did she ever meet t.f. and if so did she approve or was this a bit of a uncharmable mother in law from hell situation? I um. I want to know these things pls riot it’s for science

.

(First post is over here btw, if anyone’s interested!)

[wordssometimesfail]

Subtext, character arcs, and tragedy in IT Chapter 2

Y’know, I really appreciate the positivity in the Reddie fandom right now when it comes to the likelihood of Eddie reciprocating Richie’s feelings. There IS evidence to suggest he felt the same way in the movies, but like... I gotta be bitter, because it wasn’t enough. 

After a long-ass conversation with @skinks​ about this very bullshit, I tried to make it more meta-ish because I’m still pissed. 

(Everything else below the cut because this is long and spoileriffic)

It baffles me that the creators of the film were able to look at the book and see Richie’s queer-coding, but somehow didn’t catch Eddie’s. That they saw the subtext suggesting Richie had feelings for Eddie, but missed the all the subtext suggesting that Eddie returned those feelings. Or, that they DID pick up on all of that, but chose to cut it because... why? I genuinely don’t understand why. 

Eddie’s arc in Chapter 2 only makes sense when divorced from the rest of the text - not just the rest of Chapter 2, but from the book and from Chapter 1 as well. Book!Eddie was repressed, but not cowardly. His inner conflict revolved around his fear of himself, that there was something rotten and diseased in him, which was only exacerbated by his mother’s Munchhausen-by-proxy. But he was always ready to go all-out for his friends, and he did. The thing that got him in the end was a shaky belief in himself and his own power, not an inability to act despite his fear. 

And Chapter 1!Eddie was a scrapper. He was still afraid of disease, etc., but he was always ready to fight, to help, to throw the fuck down to protect himself and his friends. 

Who the fuck is Eddie in Chapter 2? You could argue that because he forgot who he was with the Losers, he buried the brave part of himself, but no, they go out of their way to show that he was always like this, the cowardice thing goes back to when he was a kid. Like, where the hell did that come from? 

It makes sense as a self-contained thing, if you look at it as the writer/director trying to make his death feel like the conclusion of a character arc, rather than an abrupt tragedy as it was in the book & miniseries. I think that was what happened, honestly. But in the context of the wider text, it doesn’t fucking work. That wasn’t the Eddie King wrote and it wasn’t the Eddie they wrote in Chapter 1. Moreover, considering Eddie’s queer-coding and the tension between him and Richie... why choose that as your arc? 

If you’re going to go all-out and canonize Richie being queer and having feelings for Eddie... why stop there? Why leave Eddie’s reciprocal feelings as subtext? Why not expand on what you already had, i.e. Eddie’s fear of disease - make it clear that it’s a metaphor for his fear of being broken/rotten/wrong inside, make it clear what that metaphor implies? Have him realize by the end that he’s not broken, there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s loved, he’s IN love, and he’s willing to fight to keep it? 

Hell, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never liked Eddie’s death, either as a fan of his character or narratively. As I said, it’s abrupt in the book and miniseries - it makes sense for his character, but only because his character is pretty static throughout the story. He lives repressed and miserable and dies repressed and miserable, only ever getting to glimpse who he might’ve been otherwise. Eddie is a rich, wonderful character, but a tragic one with no real arc. Some people like that, but I personally hate it. 

I appreciate Muschietti & co. trying to give him an arc, but I just... wish that they had done so by expanding on who he was in the text, or the version of him that they wrote. I wish they had given him a storyline that made sense for the character, rather than re-writing his character to make sense with the ending. They already changed a LOT for this adaptation, why not change that? 

And like, ultimately, canonizing Richie’s feelings and having Eddie die is just... hopeless. It doesn’t gel with the story’s overall theme of love overcoming hatred, fear, and bigotry. It works if Eddie’s story is meant to be a tragedy through-and-through, the story of a queer man who could never bring himself to admit and be happy with who he was - you get the idea that if he had been, he might’ve lived. It’s upsetting, but it works. But if his story is one of overcoming his cowardice, then that element is lost - his death is sad, but he died bravely, so his arc (as per Chapter 2) is complete. Because of this, suddenly the tragedy of his death is all about Richie losing the love of his life, in direct parallel to Adrian’s boyfriend Don, who lost his. But if that’s the story, then what are we meant to get from it? Being out didn’t save Don from heartbreak, and being closeted didn’t save Richie. And because Eddie’s queerness and feelings for Richie remain all subtext (and let’s be honest guys, it’s pretty meager subtext compared to what we get in the book & even the miniseries), we don’t even know whether Richie had a shot at happiness with him in the first place! If Eddie had lived, we don’t know that he and Richie would’ve been together. We don’t even know whether Eddie would’ve been hypothetically interested. He’s completely decentralized from his own story, because at the end of the day, what Eddie wanted and what Eddie felt for Richie isn’t treated like it matters. His death is about Richie’s grief and Richie being alone - out or on his way out of the closet, perhaps, but lonely and bereaved. It has nothing to do with Eddie anymore, and it’s hopeless and dissatisfying through-and-through. 

Normally I’m iffy on characters being spared or killed in adaptations, when that’s not what happened to them in the source material. It can work, but usually I feel like it weakens the story. In this case, I think that saving Eddie would’ve strengthened the story. But if saving him wasn’t in the cards, the least - the very least - they could’ve done was give him a better arc, and canonize his coding the way they did for Richie. Without that, his story falls so, so tragically flat. 

[crowsent]

Aspect Of Winter

Let me preface this by saying that I will be biased. Any and all words coming from my mouth, typed onto this screen with my ratchet fingers, will be heavily inclined to sing good praises of this book. For two main reasons. One: it’s a gift from a darling friend of mine. Two: it’s fucking gay and my queer ass rejoices.

But that aside, READ THIS BOOK. READ IT. MAKE YOUR LIFE RICHER AND READ THE BOOK.

It is so damn good. But! Before I bust out the magnifying glass of unnecessarily big words I definitely googled to sound as extra as I physically possibly can, here’s a brief synopsis of the book.

It follows the main character, Feayr, a high-school senior who, for the sake of literally everyone, goes by Fay. For some reason, he has magical powers that enable him to essentially wield winter like his own personal mallet where everything in the world can be a nail. He’s also hella fucking gay.

Because of his powers, Fay doesn’t really feel like he fits in with normal people. Cue Janus University. It’s a magical school for people with magical potential and is essentially Fay’s ticket to having a life and a place for himself surrounded by other people like him. So he leaps on that train of opportunity with all the grace of a dying elephant and kicks off the story.

There’s magic that’s done in a very unique way, unlike Harry Potter, or Carry On, or some of the other books with magic that I’ve read. Very fresh and new. Lots of mythological creatures as well from all over the world, not just ones with Hellenic or Gaelic origins. There’s a fuckton of shit to read and enjoy and consume like the word devourer I am.

Read the book. Please read it. It is so good. I wanted to cry a few times. Read it.

Now. Onto the magnifying glass! Beware spoilers!

First thing about the book is the syntax. Easy to read, easy to understand, no less compelling. It also helps that Tom Early, the author, has such a great sense of humour. I had to put the book down to keep myself from laughing because holy shit. There are some great moments in this book. So much so that writing down all my favourite quotes would take more than one post.

It helps that Fay is hilarious in his own right. My queer ass just understands him so much. I relate to this man on so many levels and if anything happened to him, I would kill everyone in the room and then myself. He’s so awkward and adorable!!!!! But. Honestly. I kind of feel bad for him.

One. His school has dick bitch homophobes who constantly tell him that he’s not worthy of anything. And, honestly, that hit hard. I’m fortunate enough that I wasn’t harassed like that in my earlier days. I’m a little more hardened now, and more than willing to throw hands, but if I heard that when I was younger, I would break.

It’s so sad seeing Fay struggle with his sexuality and try to carve a place for himself in a world that obviously fights back against him. Personally, I think that him wanting to go to Janus is a parallel to him wanting to be accepted as he is. A way to find someplace to belong, with people like him, so he would feel more normal and less weird. But that might be a stretch.

And while Fay has this awkward, shy side to him, he also has something much darker. Infinitely darker. Like. A piece of his soul dark. Kind of suspected it in the scene with the dullahan where the thing tries to take his soul but gets turned into an ice statue and shattered into a million bits instead.

That interaction paved the road for all the future dark things that Fay has the potential to do. And the things he DOES do, later on near the end of the book. It ties in nicely, subtle enough that the scene with Aria fucking floored me, mouth reaching for the floor, eyes wide like dinner plates. But it wasn’t out of the blue. There were enough hints that got my head gears whirring like the cogs of a dying clock. There were pieces for me to put together and holy shit did I fit them together. There’s so much that I sat there for a good few moments muttering “what the fuck” while I pictured Fay ripping off Aria’s wings.

It is such an intense moment in the book.

But the thing I love most about Fay is that he acknowledges his shortcomings. He KNOWS that he lets other people fight his battles for him. He knows that he doesn’t do a very good job of communicating his feelings to other people (like with Tyler and that whole spiel about him dragging Tyler into the magic world) and here’s the best part.

HE TRIES TO FIX IT. He sees what he lacks, and does his fucking best to fix it.

First encounter with the homophobes and Fay freezes, lets them have their words and their jabs, and walks off meekly with his head down. Some reflection later, and he FREEZES one of the homophobe’s lips together and walks away with his head high. Fucking proud and happy.

And after Tyler pointed out that Fay wasn’t communicating that good, Fay does what any good boyfriend (and person) should do and ACTUALLY COMMUNICATES. I fucking can’t. I am incapable of canning. This boy is so precious.

Of course, an equally precious child is Sam. I lowkey aspire to be her. One, the no-nonsense attitude that she isn’t afraid to show everyone. Two, the fact that literally everyone in school knows she can kick their collective asses and she knows it. Three, she has such a fun personality with her own little quirks that I just die on the inside.

If I met Sam when I was in highschool, I would be fucking gay for her. And in the books, Fay mentions, on multiple occasions, the crowd of men AND women flocking to Sam. Just a nice touch that I adore.

Sam is essentially both brains AND brawn. She’s fierce, she’s smart, she managed to make a simple spell that makes a Minor Orb of energy into a damn fucking shield she’s not afraid to use as a means to bash heads in.

And she’s an artist. Who draws. A lot. And I just. Sam feels so real to me and I am so taken with her character.

Of course, she has her flaws too. One that stood out to me was the fact that she can’t seem to back down from a fight. Sure, sounds like an inconsequential thing, but it was a crisis of character for her when she lost BECAUSE she didn’t back down.

She had an entire thing about her mom not being proud of her because she wasn’t good enough and I just choked.

Of course, there’s Tyler. A jock-type who happens to be bi. Reminded me a lot of Cooper from One Of Us Is Lying. Except. Tyler’s not exactly in the closet. He knows what he is and is proud of that and honestly fucking bet.

He doesn’t take shit from anyone too, and isn’t afraid to hold his ground if he needs to. Like. He stood up to Sam in a parking lot early on in the book. At this point, it has already been established that Sam is hell incarnate and is not afraid to kick someone’s teeth in. Sam can do a no hands running leap over a fence!!!

And Tyler stood his ground and looked her straight in the eye. Mad respect for that scene, honestly. The way it’s written makes it so that Tyler doesn’t back down, but he also doesn’t disrespect Sam.

More mad props to Tyler is that Fay is his first relationship with a guy. And he powers through. Sure, he’s nervous, but he still asked. Honestly, more than I could say for myself. It takes a great deal of courage to ask someone out, even more so if it’s the first date.

Tyler is goals tbh. He willingly follows Fay into battle knowing the risks because he doesn’t want to lose Fay. He struggles with his parents getting a divorce, has a lot of his own personal issues that can and will tie my tongue with how much he just continues moving forward. And just.

This man. This man. I have so much respect and feelings for this man. He’s kind and considerate and I just can’t.

While these three are the main characters, there’s a bunch more that Early gives life to.

Aiden, for instance, only appears for a few scenes but damn is he complex. At first, I was all: hot guy. Accent. Foreign. Hot. Holy shit. Then, after the attack on Fay’s home, I switched to “what the fuck?” “what the fuck????” “bitch what the fuck!??!?!??” And THEN, he became more like a rival than an antagonist and just. I can’t.

Good characters are honestly my driving force for reading literally anything, but the plot and mechanics is strong in the book as well.

As I mentioned earlier, the magic is unique. There’s the words but it’s not actually said in the book what those words are. But it doesn’t even matter because you see the characters and how they respond. How the magic responds to them,

There’s a whole scene where Sam and Fay try out spells, figure out what they do, and what’s compatible with them. Spells have compatibility. I really enjoyed the fact that magic in this universe seems alive, ancient, and more than just a hand wave. It feels like it’s part of the caster.

Sam’s minor orbs, for instance, is different from Fay’s. Fay’s looks like a damn snowball, while Sam’s doesn’t. Same spell, different casters = different lookin spell. Wards too. Sam’s ward is standard. Fay’s turns everything that hits the ward into ice. Again, same spell but because the people casting them is different, it changes. It’s a nice touch and makes the world itself come to life.

Fight scenes aren’t prevalent in the early half of the book, but holy shit does things go from 0 to 100 real quick. Aria’s first fight was brutal and I just practically vibrated with excitement when that happened. Motherfucking art.

The entire book is filled with scenes like that, actually. Made me stop, rethink my life decisions, praise every god that I managed to exists in a universe where Aspect of Winter is a thing. I love it. Can’t wait to read the next book (when I get my hands on it) and can’t wait for the third book to come out.

One scene in particular hit me with a mountain of questions and elicited a chorus of holy shits. Felt like I was about to sing Heathers Fight For Me. Right at the very end. I can quote it because it was seared into my very brain.

Bit of context.

The thing with Fay’s very soul bearing some part of winter? Yeah, that was how he managed to chill everything, and make his own ice sculptures whenever he wants. The thing that killed the dullahan. That thing that is such an integral part of him.

It was sealed.

No more ice magic.

Fay described it as feeling EMPTY.

So, you’d think that after being sealed away, the ice wouldn’t manifest anymore right? Whatever thing is inside Fay would stay there and not be a danger to him or to others anymore, right? Fucking wrong. The very last line of the book read as follows:

“Behind me, the stones on the beach were covered in a thin layer of frost.”

Like. Bitch!!!!!!!!!!!!! Either the seal broke, or it wasn’t strong enough.

(Didas is also a shady bitch and I don’t trust him but I don’t think he’ll endanger the lives of everyone quite so easily.)

Either way, winter is fucking coming and I am fucking terrified.

[awfully-sadistic]

{{ Book talk: Friend Request

I finished Friend Request by Laura Marshall today.

I don’t quite remember when I bought it but it was sometime during the beginning of the month of December. Jeff and I went to Fry’s and scanned the book section looking for any more Kay Hooper books, especially her Bishop novels. Anyway, there wasn’t any though I did see Christine Feehan! A few of her books, I saw Dark Fire and one of the Leopard books? I know I went and told Dot about it when I got back.

Here is the summary for this book: 1989. When Louise first notices the new girl, Maria seems to be everything the girls Louise hangs out with aren’t. Authentic. Funny. Brash. Within just a few days, Maria and Louise are on their way to becoming fast friends. 2016. Louise receives a heart-stopping email. Maria Weston wants to be friends on Facebook. Long-buried memories quickly rise to the surface: cruel decisions made and dark secrets kept, the night that would change all their lives forever.

As she tries to piece together exactly what happened that night, Louise discovers there’s more to the story than she ever knew.

I’m going to dive into the book but I’ll keep my thoughts below a cut just in case anyone who stumbles upon this doesn’t want to read on spoilers and stuff. I’ma be spoiling things. That’s the point of these talks. I want to TALK ABOUT THE BOOKS I READ AND SHIT.

First off, I don’t care about Louise. She’s a freaking weak character. She has a group of friends she hung out with in high school. She wasn’t too much of a popular kid but her “best friend”, Sophie, was even though Sophie was the one that seemed to be on the fringes of that popularity herself. Claire and some other chick were the true popular girls and Sophie used to be close with Claire until they started to push her out because you know, Sophie became a third wheel... in a group of girl friends. As you can imagine, it was a cliche catty thing. I didn’t care for that aspect but I guess it showed how terrible girls can be to one another.

Another aspect I should mention is that this author is British and this book, you can tell, is British. I didn’t mind it and although some terms/slang went over my head, it wasn’t hard to tell what things meant through the context and it was very little I ran into this problem as an American reader. Further, what caught my attention about this book was the genre of suspense and mystery. Maybe a little horror. I thought it would be like the horror movies with social media and being online, in book form. The cover looked interesting.

The tagline says “Maria Weston wants to be friends. But Maria Weston’s dead. Isn’t she?” And that’s the sort of premise of the story. Louise gets this friend request from her after many years after high school on Facebook and it’s so strange, as someone who is constantly on the Internet but over the whole “Facebook” phase to hear people talk about it like it’s this... Idk, cool thing to use when in actuality, the people that seem to use Facebook are the older generation and it seems that this is where the author fits the mold. She does hit the nail on the nose where she describes Facebook as this community where people put all of their business on it, but only the storybook and fairy tale aspects what everyone is happy to put on display for their friends and mutual to brag to. I think nearly everyone can attest to their family members using Facebook for things like this. My family does it and I think Dot’s does, too. The author does a good job emulating this in her universe. 

So, Louise gets this friend request from Maria who had been killed back in 1989, during prom night. The mystery about this is whether Maria is alive or not. Louise is a divorced mother by now, having married and had a son with a guy she loved in high school, Sam. But Sam cheated on her and eventually had another kid with the woman he left Louise for. One of the things that bothered me about this aspect is that it is never quite explained what the text message said Louise kept bringing up that caused their marriage to splinter. Things like that aren’t explicitly said but seems to be a very important detail. I get that he cheated on her, she read something that she wasn’t supposed to... or however it was described, but the fact that she never writes that detail in makes it an itch I couldn’t scratch. It bothered me. I wanted to know. I never found out what that stupid text message said.

I do like Louise’s son and the relationship she had with him. Henry was an adorable little child and I adored the way she described some of the scenes between mother and son. It gave me better insight on how to write interaction with children, something I don’t quite run into despite wanting to write interactions for Dot and her children.

Going back to Louise, I found it hard to sympathize with her because like I said before, I didn’t like her. I found that she was weak and always had been since high school. She was making decisions that would have me all “Girl, WHY” and wishing she had done things differently instead of the route she had taken. She wasn’t UNBEARABLE like some female protagonists, but she was... stupid. But I get that she was also fearful. She had been carrying around this “secret” of hers since high school, feeling responsible for Maria’s death.

I felt sorry for Maria since I brought her up. She was a new transfer to Louise’s school and at once was ostracized. The summary made it sound like she and Louise were friends but I felt that hardly happened. What happened was that she and Louise hung out about two major times; one was when Louise had been ditched by Sophie (who went to hang out with one of the popular girls and wasn’t even a real friend to her but Louise wanted so bad to fit in with these girls) at lunch and Louise and Maria hung out. Louise, in a sense, used Maria whenever she couldn’t hang out with Sophie. 

Maria had these rumors surrounding her as soon as she moved to a new school In actuality, she had a stalker. This stalker put out horrid rumors about her that ruined her reputation at her previous school and somehow, this new school. Some kid that went to that school had a cousin that attended this new school and that was how these rumors seemed to persist with Maria. It’s quite sad. She was the type that stood up for herself even though she was being treated horribly. She mouthed off to Sophie for treating her like shit and she was kind to Esther, an old friend of Louise that she ditched in order to hang out with Sophie and the popular kids. Maria was a character that you could have liked, instead, we got weak ass Louise and her inability to stand up for herself. In all fronts. The only time she did something that was strong was 1) when her son went missing and 2) when she was being choked near the end of the book. BUT SHE FAILED ALL THE OTHER TIMES TO BE A STRONG CHARACTER. I guess it’s meant to display a whole, every-day jane or something, but like... c’mon. How many chances do you get to rightfully apologize to someone for being a little shithead in your youth? She’s had so many times to apologize to Esther with how she treated her, explain and come clean with so many things, but she kept thinking of herself. She kept saying she felt bad and sorry and regretted everything she had done and how she treated people but it wasn’t until her ass was cornered and she had no other path to take that she RIGHTFULLY apologized or explained herself to the people she should have in the beginning. I felt if you were really that remorseful, you would have done so earlier.

So I didn’t quite blame Esther for feeling distrustful of Louise as she did throughout their encounters. I just thought Louise was a weak protagonist and hard to relate to. Or perhaps I felt too much sympathy for the characters who were done wrongly and came to resent Louise. Sophie was too fucking ridiculous to outright hate; I knew she was a bitch and didn’t care too much for her. She was awful. But Louise was supposed to be the main character you were supposed to be sympathetic towards. I COULDN’T DO IT, lmao.

I suppose I should talk about what I liked about the book. I mean, I only read it on my spare time--which was anytime I wasn’t doing things on my computer which meant cooking and occasionally sitting down with it. I wasn’t in a hurry to read it until that last stretch where Louise went to her high school reunion. I guess that meant it was sort of like a slow build or that just may be because I had been reading slowly. I wasn’t bothered by it, though. I wasn’t taken out of the story, I was able to dive back into it every time I picked it back up. The author’s writing voice seemed good too considering it was her first published book. It wasn’t quite my favorite type of writing style (the book was written in first person, too) but it wasn’t bad. Not at all. Just different. And there wasn’t too many romantic points in it; the romantic aspects I guess I could count were when Louise would speak about her marriage to Sam. How much they loved each other (how much she loved him because she honestly gave him everything). Sam was... something else. I won’t delve too much into his story; I mean, for as involved in the book as he was, I just... didn’t get too much of an impression of him. I didn’t like Sophie more than him and that’s hilariously weird considering the outcome.

The italic chapters, portions where it was written in someone else’s POV, were confusing and I can’t think... why it would be part of the story. I mean, from what I can remember and gather about those small chapters was that... it was in the past. They were hints, I’m going to assume, but they just felt out of place and distracting to me. I didn’t care of those small chapters.

The hints of BDSM also threw me a little. But that was probably because it was mingled in with abuse. So it wasn’t quite real BDSM practices. Just that... Sam was a piece of shit and there was signs Louise couldn’t see and she mistakenly pegged it as BDSM.

I honestly... don’t know what else to talk about this book now that I’ve expressed the little things that were bothering me and how I overall felt about it. It was a pretty... okay read. Not GREAT but it wasn’t bad either. It wasn’t what I was expecting but I wasn’t quite disappointed with what I got. 

[echoes-of-realities]

8, 14, 20, 31, 44, aaaand 45 to give us a sneak preview of some #Content we all deserve?!

8. what time are you most productive?

Any time after, like, 8pm lmao. This goes for schoolwork and writing fic, but like before that I Drag My Feet so much to do anything! But one 8pm hits??? I can write So Much. (This also means that I have an Awful Sleeping schedule and that I subsist on coffee and pure rage at myself in the mornings but sacrifices  for the creative process you know.)

14. easiest character to write

Similar to the hardest character to write, if you had asked me in January I wouldn’t have said this, but 10000% it’s Brittany now. Like. I don’t know if it’s because I worked so hard to Understand her or if something just Clicked at some point, but Brittany’s voice comes really easily to me now so. She’s both the easiest character to write for me and the most fun because I just love her and her voice a lot!!! (Special shoutout to Santana though. I feel like I Always got her voice from the beginning just because I related to her storyline so much. (Not that I was mean and popular when I was a closeted teen though lmao, I just had this very specific image of myself when I was closeted that Wasn’t Who I Was at all, so.) Which makes Brittana so much easier to write when I feel like I Get the voices of two characters who make up the ship lmao.)

20. favorite character to write

Okay, again, it’s definitely Brittany but since I just talked about her, and Santana, aside from those two it’s probably Mercedes! She’s just like, the Most Put Together of the glee club and the one Most Likely to Side Eye everyone else’s Messiness and I Love That about her. So outside of Brittana, it’s 100% Mercedes to write. (Special shoutout to Maribel though as well because, even though I don’t write in her pov very often it feels like I’m stepping into my mom’s shoes of knowing you’re raising a gay kid but also knowing not to push them. When I came out to my mom she told me “duh, I was just waiting for you to catch up” and honestly? That gave me A Lot of insight into her raising me over the years, and it allowed me to see that while I was struggling, she was too because she didn’t want to push me further into the closet, so she just patiently waited all these years and supported me where she could when I faltered. This is turning into a special shoutout to my mom (who Deserves it tbh), but basically all of this gave me the insight and ability to write Maribel too, so.)

31. easiest part of writing

Oooooh that’s a hard one tbh. Um, I would say editing but that can be Difficult sometimes too lmao. For me, I guess fic titles maybe? Like, I usually have a fic title from a song lyric long before the fic is even a couple sentences done because that’s usually what inspires me for said fic. Oh! Another one for me personally is, like, writing the tiny details of a scene or characters moving. Like dialogue and plot comes hard to me sometimes, but being able to imagine a scene and characters moving around in a scene is so easy to me for some reason. Like I might not Know what’s going to happen next, but I sure as hell know which part of a character’s fingers are twitching and how people walking down the hallway sound bouncing around an empty classroom.

44. do you write linear or do you write future scenes if you feel like it?

Lmao fuck my writing process is All Over the place. Like I’ll be writing one scene and have an idea for another scene and quickly hit enter like seven times and write that scene (or whatever tiny part came to my head). My docs are a Mess until I finish the fic. I jump around A Lot when I write, and usually my process is something like small chunk of a scene here, some new lines, a large chunk here, some new lines, two lines here, and then some new lines and an entirely new scene here. Most of my writing is literally just me writing transitions between two scenes that jumped into my head and I furiously wrote down.

It usually looks something like this with dumb notes throughout and me jumping around a whole heck of a lot:

britt and santana on first sleepover in santana’s and maribel’s new house —> a week after britt and santana’s first kiss

/

/

Brittany shifts again and her knee brushes Santana’s bare thigh and promptly bursts into so many tingles Brittany briefly wonders if it had fallen asleep and Santana had just woken it up. “Yeah, like you’re still kinda sad that he’s not around but you’re like—” Brittany sighs in frustration when she can’t find the words she’s looking for. “It’s like

/

/

/

Santana is silent for a moment, and Brittany can almost see her thoughts even though it’s still pitch-black in the room. “You’re a genius, Britt-Britt,” Santana finally says, and Brittany’s skin heats up right from her ears all the way to her collarbone. 

“Yeah, well,” she mumbles. Santana shifts 

/

/

/

/

/

“Britt?” Santana breathes.

The next flash of lightning shows that Santana’s face is a lot closer than Brittany thought it was, eyes wide and deep, and it sends something deep within Brittany’s chest fluttering like a thousand butterflies are slamming into her ribs.

45. share the synopsis of a story you work on that you haven’t published yet

(Fuck you caught me I don’t really have Any ongoing wips rn lmao)

I have a request for the s6 newbies’ views on Brittana that I really wanna write. I’m working on the next (and final 🙁) seasons fic too right now (which covers spring, like circa 3.15 to graduation; also spoiler alert Brittany is graduating and there will be no sex tape so). And I also have an interlude of sorts planned within the same universe that covers Brittana’s first kiss and Maribel’s divorce from Santana’s father and their move to the house in Lima Heights Adjacent (which is basically me trying to explain the show’s canon for Santana’s family within the context of how I write them, so (that’s also what the example of my process from the last question is from)).

So because I have like Nothing to share rn, I’ll give you the current first part from the next seasons fic instead lmao:

//

Santana’s pretty sure stargazing is, like, the most stereotypical lesbian date ever, but she can’t really find it in herself to care; not when Brittany’s curled against her, pressed all along her one side, warm and sleepy, their curfews lifted for the night for once, laying in the field beside the train tracks a couple neighbourhoods away from Santana’s house. She thinks both of their parents feel guilty about the whole thing with Karofsky, and then with Quinn, mostly because her mom held her really, really tight every evening this week, and the Pierce’s hugged her in greeting and farewell too whenever she came over to study with Brittany.

(Santana thinks her mom feels guilty most of all, because it wasn’t so long ago that Santana grew quiet at home and mean at school and she’s sure her mom knew about the moments when she would lay on her bed and stare blankly up at the ceiling and wonder and wonder and wonder—)

Brittany shifts against her as if she can sense Santana’s thoughts, and they quickly fade and are replaced by Brittany’s warm breath across her collarbone, eyelashes fluttering against the sensitive skin of her neck. Brittany draws patterns across Santana’s stomach, hearts and then stars and then their names and then what Santana thinks might be a cat. She nuzzles closer and occasionally points out a constellation and recites everything she knows about the stories behind them, Greek, and then Roman, and then the ones her dad made up for her too.

Stargazing might be the most stereotypical lesbian date ever, but Santana kinda really loves it when Brittany’s the one stargazing with her.

[gregorsamsadementiaravenway]

Stray notes after watching The Last Jedi

Or: why does this movie just keep getting worse whenever I remember it?

The notes are after the cut just in case someone hasn’t seen the film yet or doesn’t want a long ass bullet point post in their dash. Some of them are serious and well thought-out, some are nitpicky and some are there just for the heck of it.

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” - Why, that’s just peachy, Rian! Too bad the future your selling is a little shit.

In general, Rian Johnson doesn’t seem to have much respect for the past. See tathrin’s post about all the things established in TFA that were turned upside down in this film, but I think Johnson doesn’t have much consideration for the original trilogy either, reducing Chewbacca to a background character and trying to replace “May the Force be with you” with some other, less inspired line.

Seriously, why are they saying “Godspeed”? Did monotheism reach a galaxy far, far away and they now, suddenly, have a notion of God? And, while were at it, why is “treacherous snake” a thing, now? Are there snakes in the Star Was universe? ‘Cause, so far, all animals have been on the fantastic side of things. What else is there? Do they have kittens??? That’s an important question...

The movie had A LOT of hamfisted comic relief. Of course there were some honestly funny scenes (I will forever laugh at Rey feeling the Force with her hand), but most of the jokes felt very out of place. For instance, the first scene, with Hux and Poe. I laughed my ass off at that interaction, but that’s an SNL sketch, not a Star Wars scene. I was half expecting Matt, the radar technician, to show up.

Seriously, someone should tell Rian Johnson that he isn’t directing Guardians of the Galaxy. In more than one scene, the excess of jokes killed what should’ve a truly great, emotional moment.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much indifference do I feel towards porgs?

The ammount of queerbaiting that went into promoting this film was insane. Look, actors on franchises like this one have media training, so whenever, say, Oscar Isaac ran his mouth about the possibility of Finn/Poe being canon, he was at least authorized by Disney to do so (worst case scenario, he was instructed to sell this narrative). I didn’t particularly care about the ship and I think Poe Dameron could’ve died in TFA without any harm to the franchise, but to hamfist that non-sensical romance between Finn and Rose after feeding the fans’ hopes for a gay pairing was, in my opinion, downright cruel.

And don’t even get me started on Poe and Rey’s meaningful gaze at the end of the film, with Poe going all “I know” as if he’s Han Solo or some hot shit like that! Poe/Rey is the worst possible ship to become canon. Yes, the worst. Yes, you heard me, worse than Reylo.

Speaking of Reylo: after TFA, I said that I low-key shipped them ‘cause that’s the kind of fucked up ship I like. Look, there are people in this website who like to wear diapers and want to fuck Pennywise, so, screw you, I’m not apologizing for wanting to read fics about a fictional pairing made up of two adults. HOWEVER, this is not the sort of thing I want to be canon. From the get go, my opinion on Rey’s official love life has been “either she ends up with Finn or she ends up alone”. That being said, I think they handled the relationship between her and Kylo Ren very well in this film. I’m glad they didn’t deny the fucked up sexual tension that was going on there, especially coming from Ren’s side, and chose to play into it. A failed redemption arc fits them perfectly and Kylo Ren’s “please” when he asks Rey to rule beside him was a great moment for the character and one of the few truly emotional moments of the film.

But that thing were they get to hit on each other through the Force, sharing sad stories and touching hands? Yeah, I’m pretty certain I’ve read that fic. Actually, I’m pretty certain I’ve read about three fics like that.

Let’s keep on the Kylo Ren track for now, then: he did get some very nice character development in this film. The Last Jedi was more his than any other character’s, even Luke. For a minute there, before the movie came out, I thought they were going to make some changes to him due to the whole backlash, but they went full “overgrown angsty kid” with him in a way that actually made him more compelling. I like the way Luke’s fear ended up pushing a conflicted teenager into the Dark Side and that Kylo is still very much stuck at that moment. As usual with Sith and Sith by-products, Kylo Ren is moved by anger, and his anger feels much more real after this little bit of backstory.

Who is Snoke, though? Are they going to explain that in the next movie? It feels like they should’ve done it in this one, but I hope they at least give him some context before the trilogy is over.

Sooooo... Did your conflicted antagonist cladded in black, with black hair falling all over his face, just trick his bald, deformed Dark Lord by using his occlumency powers? *Owen Wilson voice* Wow.

“The Supreme Leader is dead. Long live the Supreme Leader.” - A perfect example of a really amazing moment botched by comic relief, ie, Snoke’s little tongue falling out of his dead body.

After the film ended, @robogigante​​ complained a lot about Hux’s transformation from an actual, threatening villan into a punchline, and, you know what? He’s right. There’s a scene there that looks like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do I hate evil, square-headed BB-8?

I’m sort of glad Rey’s parents aren’t anyone important. Star Wars relies too much on heritage and it’s a nice change having a hero who isn’t Space Jesus or Space Jesus’ direct lineage. Her scene in the cave was incredibly beautiful.

They did point to something else in TFA, though, implying heavily that her origin was important and that Kylo Ren already knew about her. That was some Moffat level of badly written plot twist right there.

There’s something Emma Watson-y about Daisy Ridley. This is neither a compliment nor a complaint, just something I hadn’t noticed before.

Both Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver grew a lot as actors since the last movie, especially Driver. Even though it’s still hard to take Kylo Ren seriously sometimes due to Driver’s cry-baby face, he’s way more convincing in his rage and intensity than he was in TFA, where his acting felt a little too mechanical.

However, some of the other actors aren’t living up to their potential. John Boyega’s charisma is extremely underused and I know for a fact that Domnhall Gleeson can do a lot better than what he was given here. In a couple of scenes, even Hamill and Fisher seemed a little uncomfortable in their roles.

“Shit, we’ve already signed Lupita’s check! Gotta shove her in here, somewhere!” - I’m so sorry, honey. You are so beautiful and talented... You deserved way better than that.

Kelly Marie Tran is adorable and I absolutely love her in interviews and such. She seems like a delightful person. However, her character was completely unnecessary. Her only purpose was to serve as a future love interest to Finn, and I’ve made my thoughts about that pairing quite clear already.

“...it’s saving the ones we love...” - BITCH, YOU’VE KNOWN HIM FOR WHAT? A DAY?

As a matter of fact, all of that storyline felt completely unnecessary. It was as if the writers didn’t know what to do with Finn so they gave him a spunky sidekick and a pointless mission just to kill time. I found myself wishing he had spent the whole movie in a coma, and that’s really sad, because I really like John Boyega and was hoping he would become a strong protagonist for the franchise.

Another thing @robogigante​ pointed out (and I’m quoting him ‘cause I know he’s not making a post of his own) is that Holdo had no reason whatsoever to hide her plan from Poe or anyone else in the Resistance. She just... didn’t like Poe Dameron that much...

Excessive jokes aside, casino planet was okay and helped flesh out the Star Wars universe a little bit more. However, much like Phasma, Benicio Del Toro’s character (whose name I already forgot) was just another Boba Fett, all flash and no substance, and I particularly hate that “squeaky clean abused little children representing hope” crap. It’s one of the tackiest tropes in existence.

I did get the feeling that that kid is going to join the Resistance on the next movie. Like they’re going to do a ten year jump to justify Leia’s disappearance/death. It would also help the Rebels to get their shit back together, Kylo Ren to gain more control over the First Order and Rey to learn some more about the Force in order to meet her fate. The existence of that child is still horrible and that ending was so over the top I can’t even put it into words, but it’s a good hook for a leap that, if handled well, could be very good for the story.

I also got the feeling that they originally inteded to kill one member of the original trio per film. That would’ve been cool. Too bad Leia will have to die off screen.

Was it just me or is the timeline in this movie really weird? Poe’s plan seems to take place entirely in a day, maybe two, while Rey apparently spends at least a week in Luke’s island.

I’m glad Carrie Fisher got to have at least one badass Force user scene before dying. Her flight among the debris of the Rebel cruiser was a beautiful reminder of how powerful the Force can be, on par with Luke’s astral projection, not to mention a gorgeous scene in its own right.

Holdo and Leia definitely had a torrid love affair after the Organa-Solo divorce came through. No one will ever convince me otherwise.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do I love the crystal foxes?

There was a preoccupying absence of wipe transitions and epic soundtrack inserts. Actually, I don’t even remember hearing any music at all. The editing was way too conservative. It didn’t even feel like a Star Wars movie, sometimes.

How is it possible that The Force Awakens was basically a remake of A New Hope and still felt more daring that The Last Jedi? Look, we already know you’re not killing any of the characters ‘cause they have to come back for the next installment, but raise those stakes a little bit, jeez! Give Kylo Ren and Snoke more conflict before their face-off, give Rey an opportunity to actually scare Luke with something that matters, give Finn and Poe a mission that actually means something to the Resistance, not a MacGuffin to keep them busy... Anything!

The Last Jedi is actually an okay-ish movie, to be honest, but, in a way, I think I disliked it even more than the prequels. Sure, The Phantom Menace is objectively a much worse film, but at least it had soul. George Lucas’ midichlorian and CGI packed soul, but soul nonetheless. The Last Jedi has nothing. I know Star Wars movies are all about the money, let’s not delude ourselves that this is in anyway high art, but this one just felt like the biggest money grabber of all. There is no personal investment in it whatsoever and no sign of what makes Star Wars Star Wars in the first place.

When’s Lando coming back?

BONUS: I am never watching a fucking 3D movie again in my life. The background always seems out of focus, it’s too expensive and I hate putting glasses on top of my glasses. I don’t care if I have to wait a month to watch the next Star Wars, I don’t care if I get spoilers, I’m not watching anything in 3D ever again.

[thevalkirias]

Female adolescence and prestige dramas: the case of Sally Draper

The most famous dialogue in The Virgin Suicides – “you're not even old enough to know how bad life gets” / “obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl” – says a lot about the way society sees the anxieties carried by young girls growing up and building their identities around us. The afflictions that come with not only adolescence as a whole, but specifically female adolescence, which adds the burden of misogyny to the mix, including the misogyny ingrained in ourselves, seem to make teenage girls particularly interesting for the storytellers that aren’t actually talking about them, but about their parents. Dana Brody in Homeland, Grace Florrick in The Good Wife, Paige Jennings in The Americans, Sally Draper in Mad Men: these were all part of TV shows that dedicated plenty of screen time to the teenage daughters of their main characters, who were marines/ alleged terrorist agents, lawyers returning to work after stepping away to be full-time mothers, Soviet superspies by night and suburban parents by day, or sad and alcoholic ad men.

In the four shows the exact same premise can be found: raising children is hard, and it is potentially harder if you are a spy, or someone who turned against your own country, or a good wife whose husband was very publicly arrested for corruption, or perhaps just empty on the inside. When Dana Brody takes the more cliché path of the rebellious teen and has her “Dana does drugs!”, “Dana has a questionable boyfriend!”, “Dana hates her father!” moments, or when Grace Florrick – whose mother is firmly set on the agnostic-atheist territory – and Paige Jennings –- whose parents believe that religion is the opium of the people – decide to fully dedicate themselves to Christianity, it’s all done with a single goal: to make these girls a Problem for Their Parents. Consequently, they become insufferable and, above all, uninteresting from the point of view of the narrative, since all they do is disturb the main stories.

When Homeland tried to humanize Dana, exploring the consequences that being the daughter of a traitor, terrorist and national enemy brought to her life, adding up to the experience of being a girl coming of age, it was too late. Because after two years no one had learned to empathize with her and no one wanted to watch that plot unfolding, not on that show. By then Alex Gansa and his team of writers had already made Dana only a shadow of a character, completely one-dimensional, since she existed only so that Sergeant Nicholas Brody could react to her. Just like Grace existed to create drama in Alicia’s life, the working mom (and the truly excellent character, complex and well developed). It’s because she doesn’t fit in this common and cliché categorization, which can be so unfortunate (Dana could have been a great character), that Sally Draper is so special.

There is a fundamental difference between Sally and the three other girls, of course: when Mad Men began Kiernan Shipka was seven – in other words, Sally was still a child. Back then there was still not much for her to do, except showing her unconditional love for her mostly absent father who sometimes was there to tuck her in. She existed mainly to help us read Don as a pretty terrible father – this was, after all, the man who, scared by the possibility of everyone finding out he was a deserter who had taken a dead man’s identity, decides he should run away with his mistress and has to be reminded by her that he had children to raise. Don seems surprised when he’s reminded of the children, but he assures her he would provide for them, as if his relationship with his kids was nothing but a financial matter. Sally also existed, beyond Don’s universe, to show us the difficulties Betty Draper had with her role as a mother, even though she tried more than Don.

Sally’s first big moment, which showed Shipka’s precocious talent, came in season three, when Betty’s senile and ill father moves to the Draper residence, and Sally develops a close relationship with him. When her grandfather passes away, young Sally goes through her first experience of mourning and is unable to understand why the adults around her can sit at the kitchen table and laugh when her grandfather was never, ever coming back. A young Kiernan, then a ten year old, competently portrays the complicated feelings Sally had to experience so early. The situation is further complicated when Sally’s baby brother is born soon after, and Betty decides to name him after her late father: Gene. Sally then needs to deal not only with the natural feelings of jealousy awakened in a child by the arrival of a new baby who demands attention, but also with the fact that this baby receives the name and the room that belonged to the grandfather whom she liked so much, as if her parents were trying to exchange her Gene for another when he was no longer supposed to be there. This moment is also crucial in Don’s complexification as a father: he is the one who sits Gene and Sally on his lap and tells her that that’s only her little brother, just a baby, not her grandfather – he is the only person to tell her everything was going to be alright.

Sally never becomes insufferable because Matthew Weiner and his writers make the right decision of never writing her or her stories as a mere problem that Don had to deal with. On the contrary, the father-daughter relationship exists to add nuance to a character who was always rather complex. We’re talking about a man who was chronically unfaithful and addicted to extramarital adventures, but who, when Peggy suggests a campaign based on the sexualization of the female image, stating (not wrongly) that sex sells, suggests another path – one that is based on the “I love you, daddy” card he got from Sally and is sitting on his desk. What truly sells anything, he says, is to awaken some kind of feeling. This is a discussion he has within the scope of advertisement, but it’s also a discussion he has with himself, about being more than the standard executive who “likes short skirts”, as Peggy puts it (not necessarily wrongly), about not being the man who wouldn’t understand Frank O’Hara’s poetry, like the unknown man he sees at the bar reading Meditations in an Emergency assumes, or about not being just the man who can no longer have sex with his wife – everything that builds the context surrounding him in “For Those Who Think Young”, one of the many episodes that emphasize that Don has not been a young man in the margins of the system for a really long time.

In such a context it would be easy to say that Don simply did not care about Sally and would rather not have to deal with her and fully dedicate himself to his adventures – as it happened in the abhorrent episode when he has the children with him for the weekend after the divorce and decides to go on a date, leaving them with his neighbor. But that isn’t really true, and part of the problem comes from his own internal issues, including the fact that he never had any decent father figure: Don does not know how to be a good father. To the extent that he believes that a woman who has literally just met his daughter would be better at talking to her than he would. This is what makes the character so rich and fascinating. Even when Sally exists for her father to react to her, it’s done in a good way, adding complexity to him exactly because she isn’t a one-dimensional character who exists to create problems.

One of the most important moments in this relationship is season six’s “Favors”, when Sally catches her father and his neighbor and mistress in bed. The situation was not only uncomfortable, the way it would be for anyone, but Sally knew that the neighbor was the wife of a man whom Don called his friend, a man she had seen sincerely thanking her father when Don helps freeing his son from being recruited for war. Sally had gone through a lot because of her father, but this is the big moment of rupture between them. If we all eventually find out that our parents are as flawed and human as anyone else, and this is part of the process of growing up, Sally has to face the fact that her father is absurdly flawed and, more than that, is very, very distant from the heroic father figure she had idealized for so long simply because she spent most of the time very far away from him, but under the incessant scoldings from her mother. Mad Men chooses to explore the quite devastating effects of this rupture not only for Don, the main character, but also for Sally. This choice resulted in one of the girl’s most famous scenes, when Betty offers her a cigarette, saying Don surely would have offered her a beer by then, and Sally responds, cigarette in hand (a pose that mimicked Betty herself): “my father has never given me anything”. It was an obvious but powerful case of double meaning.

Beginning with Sally’s big moment in season three, and increasingly as she grew up, she was given her own plots in some of the episodes. Maybe the good response to this choice is related to Mad Men being essentially character-driven, to the inexistence of a bigger plot that lies beyond its characters; it was common for a myriad of them to be highlighted in different episodes. So, when season six came, we were given Sally’s boarding school plot, when she was finally free from the mother about whom she complained so much. Once there, Sally smokes, drinks and takes boys to the dorm illicitly, incited by her roommates. This could represent the establishment of Sally-the-rebel-girl, but it doesn’t. Because none of what happens there reflects on Don or Betty; those are not “Sally smokes! What now, Don Draper?” moments, but moments in which Sally is away from home for the first time and has to decide who she is and what she wants to do for herself. These small transgressions of the school’s code of conduct (sometimes of the law) don’t make Sally a “mean girl”, just like her increasing interactions, full of discreet flirtation, with the boys that cross her path don’t make them the absolute center of her life. All of this is part of Sally, but none of it defines her. She is not a girl-problem, neither is she daddy’s little girl.

“I’m so many people”, says Sally in the next season. In “A Day’s Work” she spends a day in the city to go to the funeral of her friend’s mother, but also to go shopping. Sally loses her wallet and has to resort to her father, the adult she had in New York. By then she and Don were speaking to each other again, after he told her his real story right after he was forced by his partners to take a compulsory leave of absence. But Sally did not know about the second part, and she finds out in the worst way: looking for her father at the office, sure he could only be there. In face of another gigantic lie, Sally is once again upset and responds to Don’s attempts at conversation with monosyllables. It’s only when he explains what was happening and that he was ashamed and did not know how to solve it – and she sees herself being treated as an adult and as an equal –, that they make it up. After this conversation she calls one of her school friends who had been in New York with her; the girl wants to talk about trivial things, on the same day they had been looking at the dead body of someone important to their friend. Sally cuts the conversation short impatiently and soon after tells her father that the funeral had been horrible, but she had only been there so she could go shopping later. Don says he doubted that, and it’s easy to see he was right. Sally seems to take what he says under consideration as well, declaring then that she was so many people.

Mad Men allows Sally Draper to be so many people, to be the version of herself she presents to her mother, to her father or to Megan, her stepmother. It allows her to be the version of herself she presents to Glen, her long-time neighbor, or the one she presents to her roommates and to the cute boy at the hall of the fancy building where Don lives. It allows her to worry about boots and sandals, but it also allows her to be affected by a funeral. The script allows her to be much more than a mere accessory in the stories of the grownups that surround her, who are traditionally considered more important and relevant. Matthew Weiner allows Sally to at last see her parents very clearly, showing a maturity that sometimes seems to surpass theirs. It’s notorious that she declares, right before leaving on a trip with other girls, that she hopes to be someone very different from her parents and that her dream is to live far away from them – in an episode in which both Betty and Don are ridiculously flattered by the attention they receive from their daughter’s teenage friends.

Eventually Sally is forced by the circumstances to go back home, because nothing in life is so simple, and in the final stretch of her story it becomes evident that she mimics many of Betty’s mannerisms and ways. But it is in the responsibility towards her brothers that she automatically takes on when it’s necessary to do so, it is in her understanding that if there is one person she cannot count on that person is her father, it is in her realizing that her mother’s cold and stoic ways do not signify she is not feeling pain, that Sally shows an admirable level of maturity. These are moments which show us that the little girl we saw growing up throughout seven seasons and ten years is someone who has the chance of being happier – and a better person – than her parents were. At the end of Mad Men, the story of Sally’s growth functions as a formidable bildungsroman: of a character who was complex, solid and well developed, who was way too many people to be the thorn in her parent’s side.

About the author

FERNANDA

Officially a translator and proofreader, Fernanda has a special love for literature and for this writing thing. A loyal follower of the uncool lifestyle, she doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures nor in the concept of liking something ironically.

This piece was originally published in Portuguese on August 23, 2017, as "Escrevendo a adolescência feminina nos dramas de prestígio: o caso de Sally Draper". Translated by the author.

[tuckinpodcast-blog]

EPISODE TWO: THE QUEERING OF RUDOLPH VALENTINO

LISTEN: SOUNDCLOUD / ITUNES

NOTES: You can kinda hear my cat crying  this one. (Give me a break, I’m one man recording in my bedroom after my day job.)

SOURCES: listed at the end of transcript

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. Welcome to Tuck In, We’re Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. I’;m Jack, and this week and this week, we’re going to be talking about the queering of Rudolph Valentino. Rudolph Valentino is kind of an interesting person to talk about and I mentioned in, uh, in the episode before this, Episode Zero, that he’s not gay. And we will get to why we’re talking about him Now, I want to talk a little bit about the context of this story. This mostly takes place in the 1920′s, and as most people, I feel, are aware this was like -- the Great Jazz Age, you know, it gave us the -- The Great Gatsby, and the flapper revolution; these girls who smoked a lot of cigarettes and you know, didn’t necessarily want to be tired down. And you know, they did all of these fun things, and it was, you know, it was a mini sexual revolution and there was a lot of ambivalence towards gender roles.

And this is where our boy Rudy Valentino comes into play.

Rudolph Valentino was born in Italy, in Castalanetta – not a paisan, but we'll forgive him. He was born in 1895, and he immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island in 1913. While he was in New York, he made his way as something called a “tango pirate” or a “lounge lizard”. These are very funny names for basically what amounts to a high end male escort. He would take uh, rich older women dancing and spend time with them. And interestingly, this is how Clark Gable and Cary Grant made their living before they became famous.

But, I digress. RV first came into the public eye in 1915 during a divorce trial for a Chilean heiress at which he was giving testimony. And this is when the world kind of first looked at him like, “Who the heck is this guy?” He's very obviously foreign, he's very dark-looking, he's very slim, and there's something just very feminine about him. Now, in the course of this divorce trial, the husband of the heiress had him arrested and put away so that he couldn't give any more testimony, and shortly after he's released off of these um, these charges, the heiress murders her husband. And this point is when Valentino says, “You know, maybe I should get out of town for a little while.”

So, he does. And he goes to Hollywood, and when he gets to Hollywood, he finds a ton of rich older ladies who want to take care of him, and they do. They pay him to teach them how to dance and they give him cars to use. And they – at the same time, he's kind of snapped up to play bit parts by Paramount. And around this time is when he decides to marry a woman by the name of Jean Acker. And this is a huge mistake. Jean Acker is a lesbian who locks him out of their hotel room on their wedding night. That's another story for another day, but let's get back to Valentino himself.

In 1921, he makes a movie called The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, and this is kind of an important movie because it's one of the highest grossing silent films ever. And in 1921 he also made a movie called The Sheik. And, I'll – things like this are gonna come up a couple of times, where Hollywood doesn't want to cast actual people of color in roles like this. So they look at someone who looks like Valentino, very obviously foreign, very dark, and they're like, “Well, he's fine. We'll use him.” And I don't want to shy away from things like this because I feel like not mentioning it is denying that it ever happened. And yes, it was wrong, but this is what happened.

So after he makes The Sheik, this guy named Dick Dorgan – and that's, I'm not making that up – a guy named Dick Dorgan writes in Photoplay magazine – and Photoplay is kind of the Teen Beat or People of silent era film – and this is a direct quote and the language is a little strong, but it's a direct quote as I said. Dick Dorgan wrote, “The sheik is a bum Arab. He's really an Englishman who's mother is a wop or something.”

Now, this is kind of the first time since Rudolph Valentino has become a movie star that someone's really kinda of thrown down the gauntlet or come at him like this, and he's pretty pissed off about it – I mean, I would be too. So he tries to get Dick Dorgan banned from the studio, and Photoplay is like, “Oh, we're sorry, it won't happen again, you know – the next time we run an article about you, babe, don't worry about it. It's gonna be super positive.”

And then, of course, Photoplay publishes another article that's called A Song Of Hate. And it's supposedly, uh, like a good-natured like, “haha, this guy dances too well and he looks too good, haha, isn't that funny?” But it goes on to say some pretty strong stuff about his 'Roman face', 'patent leather hair', and it made a lot of references to his frilly costumes and the fact that they used to put him in earrings, and he had all this – long eyelashes and he was really pretty. And it is true, I found this picture earlier and I'm gonna reblog it onto the blog later so you folks can take a look at it. I don't know what movie it's from but he's decked out head to toe in pearls. So they did have a point about the costuming, but he was understandably pretty angry about it.

So, in 1922, amidst all of this stuff happening, he gets married to a woman named Natacha Rambova. And Natacha Rambova is … another foreign born person, she's a Russian costume designer, and she is a hard bitch in charge. She's gorgeous. I've reblogged a picture of her as well so you can take a look at her, but she's seen as this really controlling um, you know, strong woman who's steering him in a direction that he shouldn't necessarily be going. And it didn't really help his image as this kind of, like, soft effeminate man. And in 1922 he also stops, or, uh cancels his contract with Paramount and he splits from the studios. And this is seen as even more evidence of Rambova's quote-unquote “controlling influence”.

And people are writing about this, people are talking about this, and it's really, it's kind of – he's still getting very upset about it. So in 1923, he decides to pose for a magazine called How to Keep Fit, and he says, “I'm gonna take my shirt off, and I'm gonna pose, and I'm gonna look really strong, and no one's gonna question me anymore.” Now, I've seen pictures from this shoot. It's lit like a boudoir shot. It's lit like Rita Hayworth's famous Gilda pin-up. He's all soft light and brooding eyes and he just – looks like a pin-up. And it doesn't help him, and instead of people looking at – at these photos of him you know, uh, basically naked and instead of them saying “Wow! That man is super manly!” they look at it and they go, “Oh. That's – that's kinda sad.” So, also during this time, to keep him and – and Natacha afloat, he teaches dance lessons and judges beauty pageants. Really not helping himself, but, simpler times I suppose.

Um, now, after – around 1924, um, he goes back to Hollywood, and he hooks up with Charlie Chaplin and United Artists. And United Artists is a really cool thing, uh, I'm not really gonna talk about Charlie Chaplin, um, or United Artists, but it is a really cool story and you should look it up yourself, it's really interesting. But he makes a movie, again trying to disprove his femininity, called Monsiuer Beaucaire – and I'm sorry if I butchered that pronunciation, I do not speak French. He is overtly feminine in it. He is dressed up in a powdered wig and makeup, with a little fake beauty mark like a – like a French revolutionary fop. It's … it's very bad, I mean, his shirts are undone to his navel and he's got all this makeup and ruffles. And it, it really just – doesn't help him.

And around this time, he's also forced to make a uh, sequel to The Sheik, which originally cemented him as America's foremost, famous, foreign lover. And, he makes this movie, and Photoplay publishes yet another article, this one by a gentleman named Herbert Howe, and I'm gonna quote this directly: “The movie boys haven't been the same since The Four Horsemen.” And Herbert Howe goes on to point out all these feminine qualities in all these leading men. But that really wasn't what got Valentino's goat.

In July of 1926, after seeing a powder vending machine in a public men's restroom, an anonymous author in the Chicago Tribune, writes a pretty scathing article – it's almost infamous at this point, and uh, people start referring to Valentino as “The Pink Powderpuff” because of this article. And I'm gonna quote it directly because uh, the language is a little strong once again, but I won't do it justice trying to paraphrase it without direct quote. So, this is what it said: “A powder vending machine! Homo Americanus! Why didn't someone drown Rudolph Guglielmo, alias Valentino, years ago? [ … ] Do women like this type of 'man' who pats pink powder on is face in a public washroom and arranges his coiffure in a public elevator?”

The long and the short answer is: yeah. Women loved him. And I think it's around this time that it really comes to the forefront that men just really hate what women like or adore. And they sort of, um, equate anything women are associated with as being something that's unmasculine. I mean, think about it, to this day some men see housework and childrearing as quote-unquote “women's work”. And I mean, they even see feminism as something that's you know, rebellious, or something that they shouldn't be associated with. And, you know, men hate musical acts and performers or even some actors that women like. Um, you know, boy bands, female pop artists, think about Justin Beiber, One Direction, even Taylor Swift. You know, straight men aren't allowed to like things like that, which is a damn shame, in my personal opinion. I mean, even think about, um, Jai Courtney's character in, uh, Suicide Squad, Captain Boomerang. He has a pink unicorn, he's obsessed with unicorns, and he hides it in its jacket because – in his jacket because it's a shameful thing. And we're supposed to be laughing at it, it's not supposed to be – you know, it's, we're poking fun at him because he likes unicorns.

And, in the 1920's, the flapper movement kind of started this fear in men that strong women would be their downfall. They started breaking away from these social norms and this terrified men, and they panicked. And, in the same Chicago Tribune article, the 'pink powderpuff' article, it also said: “Better a rule by masculine women than feminine men.”

And Valentino's sex appeal added to his feminine quality instead of taking away from it, or building up his masculinity. And it exacerbated society's anxiety about strong, seemingly masculine women, uh, you know, based on his marriage to Natacha Rambova. Um, it – it – around this time he was often compared to the hyper-masculine Douglas Fairbanks Senior, who is a very, um, masculine gentleman. I've also included some photos of him on the blog. You know, and I've seen a photo of Dougie Fairbanks Senior, where he has an earring on, I think he's some kind of pirate or something, I haven't really uh, looked into what it's from, but it doesn't have the same effect on someone who's, for lack of a better word, as meaty-looking as Dougie Fairbanks as it did on someone as delicate and frankly, pretty, as Rudolph Valentino.

And um, Rudolph Valentino died very young, on August 23, 1926 at age 31. And, women were the vast majority of the mourners. I've seen numbers that range anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 flappers flooding the streets, tearing off their clothes, trampling through the funeral home. Um, at the time of his death he was supposedly engaged to actress Pola Negri, who literally fainted onto his coffin.

Now, as I said at the beginning of the show, there's no evidence that Valentino was gay. There's no evidence that Natacha Rambova was gay. So, why am I gonna devote an entire episode to him, in a queer history show? I mean, why am I even mentioning him at all?

What happened to Rudolph Valentino is kind of a cautionary tale. He's what happened to early stars when they were perceived as less than ultra-masculine, even if they were well loved. Even if they were good actors, and especially if they were well-loved by women. It wasn't enough that women loved him, men had to want to be him, and almost none of them did. Valentino was 'othered' for being foreign, effeminate, and a “threat” to traditional masculine roles, both in society and in films. He's what happened when the public eye turned sour, and what happens when someone kinda protests too much. Here we have the beginning of men rejecting feminine men and especially women's favorite, both in Hollywood and in – and elsewhere. Uh, maybe Valentino's story contributed to the quote-unquote “celluloid closet” that so many stars later in their life found themselves in. I mean, here's a guy who's a really good actor, but because he's seen as this overtly feminine person, he's completely shut off and completely shut down. So maybe other stars were kind of looking at him and thinking, “Well, geez, if – if people know that I'm uh, that I have sex with other men, I'm never gonna work in this town again.”

So, two interesting facts before I leave you for real. Um, Rudolph Valentino's death left kind of a gaping hole at Paramount Studios, and Paramount Studios was kind of in a fix at the time anyway because, uh, they were one of the last studios to uh, convert to talkies. And they – this was already during the Great Depression, when ticket sales and the movie business itself was just hemorrhaging money. So they were so desperate to replace him with a leading man that they replaced him with Cary Grant. And that's why we have the Cary Grant that we know and love. Um, my other second interesting fact is that I had no idea that in uh, American Horror Story: Hotel, Fin Wittrock actually plays Rudolph Valentino or something? And like there's an actress who plays uh, Natacha Rambova. So, when I was going through the tumblr tags trying to find photos of him to like, actually reblog and, so that when people went on they could see what he looked like and see what I was talking about, I couldn't find many. The tag is just flooded with American Horror Story fans, and I realize my um, that my frustration at this is very ironic in the context of this story, but I was still pretty frustrated.

So, thank you for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This episode was researched, recorded, and kind of edited by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a transcript of this episode and all of our episodes along with our sources and some other fun facts and photos on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. On tumblr, our ask box is open for comments and suggestions, or you can always message us on Facebook. We are on Soundcloud, and as of a couple of hours ago, we are officially on the iTunes Store! So please rate and subscribe to us there so that more people can find us and listen to us. Special thanks today to my friend Greg, who taught me how to properly record without getting that weird tinny reverb, and also special thanks to my friend Min, for being my very first subscriber on iTunes. So, thanks for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. I hope to see you next time.

SOURCES:

One Hundred Years Of Men Taking Off Their Shirts by Anne Helen Petersen (BUZZFEED)

The “Latin Lover” and His Enemies by Gilbert King (SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE)

My dumb high school history class where I had to sit through lots of lectures on the Roaring 20′s and never though any of it would do me any good.

Cary Grant: A Memoir by Marc Eliot (2004, Rebel Road Inc.)