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dossi-io · 3 years

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An introduction to DeVita

Do you want to learn all about the AOMG artist DeVita? This article will cover everything you need to know about the third female member to join the labels roster.

The content of this article is also available in video format, embedded at the bottom of this article.

Prelude

In early April of 2020, the Korean hip-hop label AOMG ambiguously announced that a new artist was signing onto the label. This label was grounded by the Korean-American triple-threat; Jay Park, who’s also one of its executives. This is a label with a very organic feel and artist-oriented nature, which stands out compared to many other music labels.

On April 3rd, the label’s official Instagram account posted a video. It was titled, “Who’s The Next AOMG?” where fellow AOMG members talked about this upcoming recruit. They sprinkled small hints and details by sharing their thoughts on the artist without mentioning who.

Around the world, fans immediately began speculating on who this could be. The major consensus was that it had to be the solo artist Lee Hi, due to reporting like this: “AOMG responds ‘nothing is confirmed’ to reports of Lee Hi signing on with the label”

A few other names got thrown in fan speculations like Hanbin (B.I), previous member of IKON, Jvcki Wai, and MOON (문) aka Moon Sujin. This despite a few of these already being signed to other labels.

On April 6th, three days later, the account was updated with a part two. This time dropping more hints, which would exclude many names from fan speculations.

On the 7th of April, the label’s official Instagram account posted a short teaser. The video sported an 80’s retrofuturistic setting, with a woman turned from the camera, dressed in all black, rocking braids, and some glistening high-heels. As it seemed to be a female, some were now certain that it had to be Lee Hi. A small few actually guessed correctly that the one who would be joining AOMG would be Ms DeVita.

Finally on April 9th, it was official! She debuted with the music video, from which the teaser clips was taken from, EVITA!, which accompanied the release of her EP, CRÈME.

What does the name DeVita mean?

The name DeVita, draws inspiration and meaning from two things. Firstly, Eva Perón – also known as Evita – who was Argentina’s former First Lady. When Chloe was learning about Eva’s life, it inspired her to combine “Devil” and “Evita”, thus creating “DeVita”. The name signifies the duality of how both Eva Perón and DeVita could be perceived. Either being a devil, or an angel depending on the eye of the beholder. Secondly, Salvatore Di Vita, a character from Cinema Paradiso, was also a source of inspiration.

An introduction to DeVita

Chloe Cho – now known under the artist name DeVita – was born and raised in South Korea, until the age of eleven. In 2009, she moved to Chicago, where she would learn English.

In 2013, she went back to Korea and participated in the third season of the show; K-pop Star. A talent show, where the “big three” (the three largest music labels in Korea) hosts auditions to find the next big k-pop star. However she didn’t win, therefore neither got signed.

Later on, she returned to Chicago and graduated high school. After reflecting on what she wanted to do next, she decided to make music. In 2014, her pursuit to become an artist brought her to the talent show Kollaboration. On this show, she performed covers and actually ended up being a finalist. Despite her talents, she did not triumph as the winner of the show.

Not letting these losses stop her, she started releasing music on Soundcloud. The earliest release I could find, Halfway Love (Ruff), was from 2016. Her catalogue consisted of both covers and original music.

One day, Kirin, an artist and CEO of the music label 8balltown Records, was introduced to DeVita’s music. He liked what he heard and the two linked up. In May of 2018, WEKEYZ, one of 8balltown’s producer duos released a track titled Sugar. This track featured both DeVita, and the AOMG rapper Ugly Duck. This was the beginning of many collaborations to come.

On August 28th of 2018, just a few months later, AOMG released Sugar (Puff Daehee Mix).

This was a remix done by Puff Daehee, the alter ego of Kirin. Along with this track, it was accompanied by a music video starring Kirin, DeVita, and Ugly Duck. For most people, this was their first time seeing DeVita.

DeVita continued doing features on many songs by Korean artists while creating a little buzz for herself. There’s one notable feature, which could be seen as an important milestone in her career. That is her feature on the track Noise, from AOMG artist Woo Won Jae’s project, titled af.

In a tweet a few days after the release of CRÈME, she shared the significance of this moment.

“I was still making minimum wage working at a restaurant back when Noise dropped- I wrote my part during my shift on the back of this receipt paper. This was about a year and a half ago. A little bit after that I got a call from Pumpkin at 3am Chicago time. He said Jay wanted to meet in Philly in 4 hours. They put me on a plane and the rest is history.”

The phone call she mentioned in her tweet, about Jay wanting to meet, must have been made around September 2018. Jay was performing in Philadelphia at the time. The moment they met in Philadelphia was actually captured through a photo of the two. However, this picture ended up getting removed later on.

Fast forward a few months and Jay had just released his Ask About Me EP. The project focused on a western audience, so he went to the States on a promo run. During his visit, he also met up with DeVita once again, as can be seen here.

Finally, on April 9th, her being signed to AOMG was officially announced and she debuted with her EP titled CRÈME. Her joining AOMG, looked like something that happened pretty naturally. The vast majority of artists she had collaborated on tracks with happened to be AOMG members. Getting comfortable with the AOMG family, likely made the decision to join crystal clear.

Artistically

Just a quick look at her body of work thus far, a majority of it is in English. However, she has no issues singing in Korean, as proven by her feature on Code Kunst’s; Let u in. The tone in her voice has this sort of mixture of many singers, a melting pot of sorts. It reminds me of Audrey Nuna, SAAY, H.E.R, some vocal riffs from Dinah Jane, and at times, just a tiny bit of Ariana Grande.

As an artist, she’s still in the early stages of carving out her own unique sound and style. There’s incredible potential here, but her distinct identity is not completely there yet. I see before me a caterpillar that within a couple years, will transform into a butterfly, with its own identifiable pattern to spread its wings out on.

From what she’s shown so far, I would say she seems most comfortable doing R&B and soul music. However, beyond a quick description I prefer to refrain from categorizing her. Mostly because artists generally feel limited when categorized. More importantly, because we have no idea what she has in store for the future.

Debut EP: CRÈME

CRÈME is DeVita’s “crème de la crème”. She constantly modified the tracklist to present her debut project in a way that held her personal standard; essentially presenting us her best tracks. The result is CRÈME, which consists of five tracks, with a runtime of fourteen minutes altogether.

This EP showcases the fact that she is a competent songwriter, able to write some soulful, emotional ballads. It is completely in English and all the tracks are written by her, telling both life stories of her own and that of others. A majority of the production was handled by her “musical soulmate”; TE RIM, but other notable names, like Code Kunst show up as well.

Tracks:

Movies, introduces the project in a very gentle manner. In the track, DeVita paints a picture of a criminal couple, getting a rush, by committing crimes together. The lyrics feel inspired by movies like Bonnie and Clyde. My initial thoughts were that, for some ears, it could possibly be “too” calm as an opener. It doesn’t demand attention the way EVITA! does. Simply put, it’s not a bad track. I would just have put this track later on in the EP.

EVITA!, is something different compared to what I hear from others in the K-R&B lane. I love the 80’s aesthetic in both the track and music video. Sonically, the nostalgic saxophone riffs, warm lush synth pads, thumping bass line, results in a trip back to the 80s. With this recipe, topped with DeVita’s “current” contemporary soul and R&B voice makes for an interesting combination. The music video had that futuristic 80’s look with the neon colors, and I loved how the guns she played around with looked a lot like the “Needlers” from the Halo franchise. The title is once again just like DeVita’s name, an ode to the controversial Eva Perón. The instrumental was originally used by TE RIM, the producer of the track in 2017. His version has the same title as DeVita’s version and I recommend giving that one a listen as well, as it has a different feel to it. This track was definitely one of the highlights of the EP.

All About You, is a simple yet beautiful piano love ballad. Originating from her own tales of love, her vocals effortlessly capture what she felt during these moments.

1974 Live, is yet another ballad, but this time, with a calm guitar backing, playing a poppier R&B chord progression. DeVita’s voice is given a lot of space to be in the center of the track. As soon as I heard this track I became curious. What was the significance of this year, which would have her title the track as such? My questions were left unanswered… until the EP had marinated a while, when she tweeted: “1974 Live is about Christine Chubbuck”. In case you’re unfamiliar, Christine Chubbuck was a television news reporter, who made history in 1974. She was the first person to commit suicide live on air. According to her mother Christine’s suicide would on paper be due to an unfullfilling personal life. All throughout her life, she had experienced unreciprocated love. With this information tying back to the track, it becomes a lot less ambiguous and reveals a more cohesive narrative.

Show Me, is the final track of the EP, featuring immaculate production from the talented CODE KUNST. The sound is very moody, which fits her voice like a glove. This is my favorite performance on the entire EP, both lyrically and vocally. The lyrics present someone who’s fed up dealing with men, who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. Now she’s looking for love with someone who’s honest and “real”.

With the project being a year old now, it has already gotten her nominated for both Rookie of the Year along with EVITA being nominated for Best R&B & Soul Track in the 18th iteration of the Korean Music Awards.

A majority of listeners seemed to enjoy the project. Many seem to be in love with her voice judging by the endless amounts of praise she has received, often described as painfully addicting, soothing, smooth, and so on.

I also asked a friend who’s a huge fan of Korean music, especially the hiphop and r&b scene to share her thoughts on the project. Here’s what she said:

"This whole project is empowering, in particular the tracks Show Me and EVITA! DeVita being a new artist, managed to impress me and many more listeners through this EP. As mentioned earlier, empowering lyrics with unique melodies and beats. Especially with the track EVITA! The fact that 1974 Live and EVITA! was referring to, two historically important women, is something that I love. This is one of my favorite EP:s of 2020 and DeVita is now included in my list of favorite artists." @Haonsmom

From what I’ve seen, only a few have been vocal about not really being too fond of the project. Some were left a bit disappointed, as they were expecting more hip-hop and R&B from an AOMG artist. The lack of “danceable” tracks was also a concern to some. Despite these criticisms, one thing was always mentioned; the girl has a beautiful voice and is obviously talented.

After listening to this EP, I hear a lot of potential. Being an EP with just five tracks, it definitely avoids overstaying its welcome. It’s brief enough to allow a listen through the entire project, no matter what you’re doing. My favorite tracks would have to be Show Me and EVITA!, but I found the whole project to be enjoyable. This EP is sprinkled with lovely vocal performances and simple but captivating production. I do still stand by my opinion that Movies would have fit better later in the tracklist if you’re chasing that mainstream ear.

I think the way EVITA! kicks you in the face, demanding attention, would’ve been a better fit as the opening track. In contrast to the other tracks, the energy level is unique, making the placement feel odd as the rest of the tracks have a chill vibe. All in all, this project gave me a taste of the “crème” but left me with a curious yearning for what this chef will whip up for dessert.

Bright future ahead

The addition of more female artists to the AOMG roster was much needed. Hoody was the first and only female member for about four years. This was the case up until late 2019, where she was then joined by sogumm, who had just won AOMG’s audition program called SignHere. Now funnily enough after DeVita, Lee Hi actually did end up officially signing with AOMG on July 22, last year.

Based on what I’ve heard during Devita’s Kollaboration days, she has improved immensely. This topped with her leaving the impression of someone passionate about their craft, bodes well for what's to come. She seems to be someone who'll constantly evolve.

Following an artist, at the early stages of their career, is something that I always find exciting. With such a lovely debut, I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for DeVita.

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The first image in article: Original photo, pre-edit from @jinveun

Gif from the Sugar Puff Daehee MV: @moxiepoints

#devita #krnb #jay park #aomg #h1ghrmusic #8balltown #kpop #review #korea #uglyduck #chloe devita #chloe cho #kirin #evita!#crème #moon sujin #khh #korean hip hop #krap

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jamestaylorswift · 4 years

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Love’s a game, wanna play? A meta-analysis of the game of love and Taylor’s love of games

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Before actually getting into this, I’m obligated to make the disclaimer that this is just my interpretation of some songs. I’m not claiming to be “right” about anything. I have no way of knowing whether my observations will hold true if/when Taylor releases more music. It doesn’t really matter. There are many ways to interpret music.

Games are not the only extended metaphor in her discography; if you understand one, you don’t necessarily understand them all. This essay is an exploration of how one particular metaphor could be so effective.

In addition, I am often the first person to say that “not everything is that deep.” Yet here I am, making something deep. I was only mildly curious about this metaphor at first. In the process of documenting my understanding, I surprised even myself as I realized how rich this metaphor is.

A warning…this essay is very long. (It’s either mildly interesting or completely ridiculous and nothing in between. Likely the second.)

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The notion of a ‘game’ is often conflated with the notion of adversarial conflict. This misunderstanding is largely due to Western structural/cultural forces. Mathematicians and economists have a passion for framing most predicaments as zero-sum, or strictly competitive, where one player’s advantageous move by definition disadvantages their opponent. But collaborative and otherwise not strictly competitive games exist too.

Taylor’s fascination with games spans her entire discography. Artistic preoccupation is reason alone to analyze her work from such an acute angle. But pleasantly, Taylor also does not share the academics’ favorite pastime. She strays away from the zero-sum bias in very unpredictable ways. In fact, she has no bias. She prefers to mix and match her language to each situation as she sees fit. Her convolution of love and games is expressive, divorced from the logical framework by which games are defined. I think examining this facet of her work with a fine-toothed comb may be especially illuminating.

It seems counterintuitive to argue that games could (or should) be anything more than Taylor’s favorite metaphorical manifestation of logos. Yet revisiting a metaphor is itself communication, conscious or not. Advancing an understanding of this extended metaphor, in my opinion, substantiates what is usually intangible about Taylor’s songwriting brilliance.

On Games

Precocious and perceptive, Taylor has, for as long as she’s been writing, placed competition, strategy, and collaboration alongside conflict. Therefore, for the sake of coherence and relative brevity, analysis is scoped only to songs with significant mentions of games, puzzles, or game-related imagery. ‘Games’ are not conflated with general fighting, trickery, toying, revenge, mention of rules/strategizing, or winning/losing. ‘Puzzles’ are not conflated with disorder; puzzle pieces must be pieces of a larger, vivid picture.

Consider football. Imagery of high school football makes “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” fair territory. Someone shouting over a football game in a bar does not qualify “Mean.” The football helmet worn in “Stay Stay Stay” is an absurd and compelling detail in context, as likely to be fictitious as it is true, and hence more significant than a televised sporting event; “Stay Stay Stay” qualifies. In essence, games are interesting as a device rather than a simple detail.

Below is a list of the songs with significant game reference(s), categorized by implied type. Note that a song can belong to multiple categories if it contains multiple references.

Generic/unspecified games: “Come in With the Rain”, “Dear John”, “State of Grace”, “Blank Space”, “Wonderland”, “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Card games: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Dice games: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Board games: “Dear John”

Sports/contests: “The Story Of Us”, “Long Live”, “Stay Stay Stay”, “End Game”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Puzzles: “Red”, “All Too Well”, “So It Goes…”

Other: “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Like many people, Taylor habitually seeks structure to manage unpredictability. (Games provide structure for situational volatility, hence her artistic love affair with this metaphor.) The stylistic choices she makes to entertain this habit, however, are anything but consistent.

The games have a variety of different players, such as in “Dear John” and “Look What You Made Me Do.”

She does not establish strict parity between characters’ emotional affiliation and the competitiveness of a game. “Dear John” features an adversarial game. Conversely, her partner in “Blank Space” is a co-conspirator/collaborator. “All Too Well” analogizes autumn leaves as puzzle pieces; puzzles are collaborative games.

Taylor famously claims that love is a game in “Blank Space.” This song is colloquially understood to be about the love story we see play out in the media. Games can thus include all parts of her ‘love life.’ Arguably, she foreshadows this in “Long Live” by intertwining parts of her ‘America’s sweetheart’ image with professional success, which is derived from writing about love.

Taylor is not always a player in a game, such as in “Cruel Summer.” Her partner may not be either; see the crossword in “Red.”

In short, humans are unpredictable, as is love. It is clear that Taylor uses games as an incredibly powerful metaphorical device. They are a genuine reflection of her feelings about love.

Musical analysis usually begins with careful consideration of each track. Given a disparate and lengthy list of songs, it is probably more fruitful to go up a layer of abstraction. Of particular intrigue for this set of songs is the relationship between time and Taylor’s willingness to divulge more information about a metaphorical game.

We revisit the set of songs to list them in chronological order. The purely ‘generic’ songs are now bolded: “Come in With the Rain”, “Dear John”, “The Story Of Us”, “Long Live”, “State of Grace”, “Red”, “All Too Well”, “Stay Stay Stay”, “Blank Space”, “Wonderland”, “New Romantics”, ”…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”, “So It Goes…”, “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Specificity about a game seems to decrease with proximity to the 1989 era.

Lyrical imprecision in “Come in With the Rain,” a true outlier, probably boils down to youth.

“State of Grace” is a preamble about the themes of Red. “Begin Again,” though much later on that album, shares the same inspiration as “State of Grace.” Red is constructed as a sandwich between these two songs which present the album’s thesis. The album considered as a whole is thus a buffer for 1989.

reputation is a buffer for 1989 because the ‘generic’ game songs are heavily and intentionally front-loaded.

“New Romantics” is a coda for 1989, and its poker game reference is slightly ambiguous. What, exactly, is poker; what is all in the timing? The thematic material of “New Romantics” is most similar to that of “Blank Space.” ‘It’ is the same crude game played in the earlier track, the affair of collecting men. Perhaps this close relation subsumes “New Romantics” under the ‘generic’ game category. (Though this is a loose explanation.)

There exists an undeniable chronological pattern to game characterization. If you graphed the amount of game-related lyrical obscurity versus time, it would look like a shallow sand dune with the tip at the 1989 era. (Or a hill. Or a big pile of leaves. You get the picture.)

Armed with a basic understanding of Taylor’s career, one might say that her desire for personal privacy manifests as reticence to define metaphorical games. The 1989 era was the height of media attention on her. This caused more than a few issues. The art created around this time would have naturally reflected how she felt about the public eye. (See: the entire reputation era.)

But isn’t Taylor almost as famous as ever today? Sure, her name is not as saturated in the zeitgeist as it was in 2014. She’s still one of the world’s mega-stars. And does she not have a very private relationship today? Taylor’s work reflects her hardened personal boundaries, but boundaries alone do not explain the pattern of how she writes about games. Otherwise Lover would be filled to the brim with songs about ‘generic’ games.

To summarize, Taylor uses games as a perennial favorite metaphor to frame her experiences of love. Increased public scrutiny undoubtedly changed the way that Taylor approached songwriting; even so, fame was not a factor that changed how she wrote about games. The connection between time and types of games suggests that we cannot consider game metaphors in isolation.

On Love

The next piece of the puzzle (no pun intended) is what she shares about love. Which 1989 songs are most revealing? Technically…most of them, if you think hard enough. I’d like to draw special attention to “Wonderland” and “You Are in Love.”

Ah, “You Are in Love.” The musical gift that keeps on giving! Fitting, because true love should be too.

In “Wonderland,” Taylor says:

It’s all fun and games ’til somebody loses their mind

Shortly thereafter in the “You Are in Love” bridge, she proclaims:

You understand now why they lost their mind and fought the wars

And why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words

Taylor reverses her opinion about the prospect of losing her mind for love. (The abruptness here is a consequence of a real-life relationship change, plus the fact that both of these songs are bonus tracks.) Of course, she also tells us an important connection between love and games.

I’ll pause here to say that I’m not going to turn this into a (frankly uninteresting) relationship timeline/proof post. But may the profound significance of “You Are in Love” and its subject never escape us.

“You Are in Love” is written in the second person. Taylor is the intensely guarded ‘you.’ We witness her emotional walls get broken down by her lover, the ‘he.’ Fascinatingly, Taylor departs from the second person point of view in the bridge. Suddenly, she alerts us to the presence of an ‘I.’ The bridge says that ‘you’ Taylor, whole and normal-person-in-a-relationship Taylor, finally understands true love. In the same breath, ‘I,’ writer Taylor, admits that she’s had it all wrong for years. (This is not to say that her writing pursuits before this moment were pointless.) Therefore, breaking the second person point of view to include the ‘I’ line shows that Taylor distills the nature of true love in that ‘eureka’ moment.

Yet she exposes the schism of writer Taylor and whole, normal person Taylor in a moment where, in theory, those two roles could not overlap more. Taylor has every reason to faithfully represent her feelings. Her sentiment is always sincere even though she may falsify details of a story. “You Are in Love” is (as far as I’m aware) the only song in which Taylor ever blatantly admits to writer-person misalignment. The schism must run extremely deep.

Taylor was—and surely still is—drawn to songwriting as a means to explore love. She tries to to capture its enigmatic essence with the written word. How fascinating it is that, at the very moment she communicates her deepest understanding of love, she says that the part of her that puts it into words is inherently disconnected from her spirit which feels it.

On Games And Love

We must briefly table the meta-implications of “You Are in Love” to return to the topic of games.

Love probably would have stopped feeling like a game after finding a real gem of a person who doesn’t mess with your head. (Love also probably would have stopped feeling like a game after dialing down on brazen PR tomfoolery.) Taylor has written several albums about her true love. It’s easier now to trace the arc of her feelings: it is a positive path, as anyone would predict.

Why would she continue to write about games after 1989? The obvious answer is that she likes doing it. It remains a useful metaphor.

But recall that chronology discourages us from considering metaphorical games in isolation. To clarify the principal function of the game metaphor in her discography, we must consider the writer-person dichotomy.

First, note that Taylor exposes the writer-person dichotomy in an honest, vulnerable moment. She confirms it as a human phenomenon. The phenomenon thus must extend beyond a singular moment during 1989. Distance between writer Taylor and whole, normal person Taylor—a measure henceforth called writer-person distance—is necessarily a function of time. Coincidentally, so is the measure of game-related lyrical obscurity.

Writer-person distance can grow or shrink. It was small in her youth; this is what pushed her into songwriting. It is small now, as she has told us in the albums since 1989 that true love has stitched her back together. Again, because writer-person distance is a human phenomenon, it changes slowly, smoothly. (“You Are in Love” simply marks the biggest distance.) Does this sound familiar? If you graphed writer-person distance versus time, the graph would look like a shallow sand dune with the tip at the 1989 era. (Or a hill. Or a big pile of leaves. Once again, you get the picture.)

To summarize, game-related lyrical obscurity and writer-person distance are smooth functions. “You Are in Love” is the inflection point of both measures.

With “Wonderland” and “You Are in Love,” Taylor tells us that games are linked to how she conceptualizes love. But not just any love. 🎶 True love. 🎶

At the same time, Taylor presents “You Are in Love” as a dividing line between ‘that which is a best attempt to understand something that inherently cannot be captured’ and ‘that which refines the thing that, against all odds, was captured.’ Our interpretation of games must synthesize an abrupt ‘eureka’ moment with both the measures’ gradual changes.

If we are to talk about metaphorical games, we also must talk about true love. But we know that if we are to talk about games, we also must talk about time. Vital to uniting these ideas is the revelation that Taylor conceptualizes the nature of true love as the nature of time. For doesn’t time define what is gradual and abrupt?

The most important line in “You Are in Love” is when Taylor finds it—‘it’ being love. A literal ‘eureka’ moment. This isn’t just a one-time coincidence.

Writer-person bifurcation clarifies why the game metaphor is surprisingly effective. As Taylor revisits the convolution of love and games, the metaphor morphs in tandem with her innate understanding of love.

Some Good Old-fashioned Song Analysis

Observing how games, love, and time are intertwined requires that we reject purely literal interpretations of game-related lyrics after “You Are in Love.” Of course, literal interpretations are still generally useful, even correct. Games are literal, so references to them should be interpreted as such. Also, lyrics about games are probably Not This Deep in reality. We didn’t have to do all this work to realize what songs might belong in conversation with each other; identifying lyrical callbacks would have been sufficient. Treating game lyrics as purely literal limits how we might decipher a recurring metaphor. Without the notions of game specificity or writer-person distance, we would lack a framework with which to fully interrogate how these songs are are connected (i.e. through time). And, after all, the ultimate goal is to understand why the game metaphor is so successful. But, I digress.

(We’ve also made it this far and we might as well keep going. Another couple thousand words…don’t threaten me with a good time, amirite?)

To observe how games, love, and time are intertwined, I propose the following rule of thumb: A game reference before “You Are in Love” is Taylor’s description of love, whereas a game reference afterwards is a pointer to past instances of that game. Such a reference is metaphysical, or more appropriately, meta-lyrical. If she’s referenced a game already, she knows how to use that reference again. If she introduces a new reference, she’s planting it for future use.

We can group the songs after “You Are in Love” by game type:

Generic/unspecified games: “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Dice games: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Card games: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Sports/contests: “End Game”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Puzzles: “So It Goes…”

Other: “It’s Nice To Have A Friend"

Analysis requires precision. We should pare down the duplicates, if possible.

“It’s Nice To Have A Friend” is tricky because it’s naturally sparse. “Video games,” for example, are more than a simple detail: they are an essential part of creating a childhood vignette. “Twenty questions” and the card game “bluff” function analogously in the later verses. The brilliance of this song lies in how Taylor illustrates the development of companionship and intimacy. The verse about marriage is the most significant verse because it reveals the meaning of the whole song. Thus, we may take the bluff to be more important than twenty questions, which is more important than video games. ��It’s Nice To Have A Friend” ultimately belongs in the card game category.

Central to the pathos of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” is the “stupid” dice game lyric. Of equal importance is the portrait of Americana, painted with lyrics about Friday night lights. This song truly belongs in two categories.

At the end of “…Ready For It?” Taylor fires a starting pistol, letting ‘generic’ games begin. “End Game” follows and we assume it must pertain to the same game. So Taylor intentionally places this song in the first category. The hook has lyrics about a varsity “A-team,” though this is probably just a nod to Ed Sheeran. The other truly interesting game-related lyric is the one about bluffing. Thus, “End Game” also belongs in the card game category.

Here’s the new list:

Generic/unspecified games: “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Dice games: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Card games: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Sports/contests: “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Puzzles: “So It Goes…”

Each of the four obvious groups of songs illustrate a different way Taylor weaves the natures of true love and time together:

Déjà vu: “So It Goes…”

Hindsight/wisdom: “…Ready For It?”, “End Game”, “Look What You Made Me Do”

Fate: “Cruel Summer”, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince”

Progress: “New Romantics”, “End Game”, “Cornelia Street”, “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”

Déjà vu

The puzzles category only contains one song, making it easiest to analyze. The namesake of “So It Goes…” is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, famously constructed like a mosaic. Puzzles are central to the meaning of this song.

“All Too Well” contains the first instance of a puzzle metaphor in her discography:

Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place

Taylor calls back to “All Too Well” in the chorus of “So It Goes…”

And our pieces fall

Right into place

Get caught up in the moment

Lipstick on your face

By referencing a previous song using identical phrasing, Taylor creates the illusion of a sudden ‘déjà vu’ moment. The effect is similar to “You Are in Love,” where she reaches sudden enlightenment.

Sonically and lyrically, the “moment” she gets caught up in is implied to be the one in which she gets lost in passionate sex. The déjà vu moment could be this moment, but it doesn’t have to be. Déjà vu is agnostic to the present in the sense that the feeling can be triggered in the strangest of times. The déjà vu moment is whatever prompted her to write this song.

This game lyric connection clearly shows how a moment of love is defined by a moment of time.

Hindsight/Wisdom

The bombastic group of singles, “…Ready For It?”, “End Game,” and “Look What You Made Me Do,” sets the tone for all of reputation. The ‘generic’ games in these songs are the same as those in 1989, particularly the crude (and, in Taylor’s case, often interchangeable) games of celebrity and dating. In “Blank Space,” Taylor spells out in gory detail what she does as an agent in the celebrity dating game. She does not explicitly define the rules of that game, though. It remains sufficient for her to prove that she knows how to play by them. (Musically, this is far more interesting.)

We know that the reputation singles’ literal proximity to 1989 indicates Taylor’s direct emotional response the previous era. The consequences of a ‘fall from grace’ underpin the entire reputation era. Therefore, Taylor uses lyrical connections from reputation back to 1989 to illustrate hindsight. She tells us what she learned from her mistakes and what she wished she would have done differently.

But first, she gets to be salty about it. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” Taylor laments the fact that she participates in public games to appease others. (Because, really, withdrawing from the celebrity circus would immediately solve a lot of her problems. Alas, megastardom is a Venus flytrap.)

I don't like your little games

Don't like your tilted stage

The role you made me play

Of the fool, no, I don't like you

Let’s return to “Blank Space” for a moment. Taylor’s boyfriend in “Blank Space” is considered a co-conspirator/collaborator with her in the celebrity dating game. Central to our understanding of that song, however, is the unequal power dynamic. Taylor is the strategic mastermind, whereas her boyfriend is just along for the ride. The two are on the same team, but they are not equals.

Taylor actually leans further into the games of the 1989 era in “…Ready For It?”

Baby, let the games begin

Unlike in 1989, her partner is an equal on her team:

Me, I was a robber first time that he saw me

Stealing hearts and running off and never saying sorry

But if I'm a thief, then he can join the heist

And we'll move to an island

She then connects “…Ready For It?” to “End Game”

Baby, let the games begin

Are you ready for it?

I wanna be your end game

Both Taylor and her partner are forced to play the same game and they share share the same goal. Her partner’s “end game” is Taylor; thus, Taylor keeps her true love by beating the celebrity dating game. They have to work together to achieve this difficult task.

Though the celebrity dating game is not true love, it impacts Taylor’s relationship with anyone who could be her true love. In hindsight, Taylor realizes how media games blew up in her face. It is wisdom—to keep her relationship private, to dial down on PR tomfoolery, to prioritize her happiness—that helps her pre-empt these problems for the reputation era. And indeed we understand the love story of reputation as the lovers’ prolonged attempt to hide from the public eye.

Hindsight comes with the natural passage of time. One only accrues wisdom, however, when they apply the lessons of hindsight to make better judgements about the future. Games again unite the ideas of love and time; they elucidate how Taylor uses wisdom to protect someone she loves.

Fate

“Cruel Summer” and “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” highlight the elegance of the meta-rule of thumb.

The dice game in “Cruel Summer” is a unique incarnation of the game metaphor because Taylor doesn’t confirm whether she is directly involved in this game:

Devils roll the dice

Angels roll their eyes

What doesn’t kill me makes me want you more // And if I bleed you’ll be the last to know

The song doesn’t reveal much about the nature of the dice game other than the fact that it is competitive. It could be a fitting description of what is going on in Taylor’s personal life. It may not be. What is more important is that Taylor positions herself as collateral damage of the outcome of the game.

This is also the dice game’s first appearance. By our rule of thumb, this lyric exists only to be a link to “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince.”

“Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” belongs to two different game categories, sports/contests and dice games.

First, dice games. We get a few more answers about the nature of the “Cruel Summer” competition:

It's you and me

That's my whole world

They whisper in the hallway, "she's a bad, bad girl"

The whole school is rolling fake dice

You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes

It's you and me

There's nothing like this

Miss Americana and The Heartbreak Prince

We're so sad, we paint the town blue

Voted most likely to run away with you

Both Taylor and her partner are forced to play the dice game by virtue of being metaphorical students. As a disgraced and about-to-be-vagrant prom queen, Taylor has finally realized that winning the school’s dice game is not worth the price of a ‘fall from grace.’

Next, sports/contests. With the understanding of these lyrics as pointers to her previous songs, sports/contests harkens back to “The Story of Us,” “Long Live,” and “Stay Stay Stay.”

“The Story Of Us” suggests that a shared quality of sports/contest metaphors is that conflict is nuanced, even hidden to outsiders:

This is looking like a contest

Of who can act like they care less

In “Stay Stay Stay,” football is connected to (for lack of a better word) violence, conflict that could result in emotional and physical harm:

I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night

I threw my phone across the room at you

I was expecting some dramatic turn away

But you stayed

This morning I said we should talk about it

'Cause I read you should never leave a fight unresolved

That's when you came in wearing a football helmet

And said, "Okay, let's talk"

Finally, “Long Live” blends the ideas of small town Americana with Taylor’s personal and professional life:

I said remember this moment

In the back of my mind

The time we stood with our shaking hands

The crowds in stands went wild

I said remember this feeling

I passed the pictures around

Of all the years that we stood there on the sidelines

Wishing for right now

We are the kings and the queens

You traded your baseball cap for a crown

When they gave us our trophies

And we held them up for our town

And the cynics were outraged

Screaming, "this is absurd"

'Cause for a moment a band of thieves in ripped up jeans

Got to rule the world

The backdrop of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” is not just any part of America. The juxtaposition of idyllic parts of American life with frictional, violent, yet sometimes subtle forces tells us that the song’s backdrop is an American culture war. It is conflict which unsettles everyone, but by nature hurts only some.

In totality, the function of the dice game metaphor is to position Taylor as collateral damage of an American culture war. (Chew on that one for a bit.)

Again, we probably could have surmised this by examining the lyrics closely. The song lends itself to being a signpost in the Lover chronology. It seems too autobiographical to be anything different. We all remember 2016.

However, “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” sticks out like a sore thumb from the album’s theme of “a love letter to love itself.” Revisiting games as a glue between love and time expands on the purpose of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” in Lover.

The “Cruel Summer” bridge contains this lyric understood to be about her true love:

And I snuck in through the garden gate

Every night that summer just to seal my fate

Taylor identifies “that summer” in the 1989 era as the moment which she sealed her fate. Implicit in this confirmation is her perspective from the future. She is looking back on 1989 from the time when her terrible fate has just been realized.

The moment of realization is—you guessed it—the chorus of “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince.” The chorus depicts post-prom queen defamation. Taylor is aware of every single action (many, probably deliberate) that helped her achieve royalty. She never divulges them. The song is scoped only to the time when she lives her fate.

We usually take observations about fate and love to describe how two souls are bound to each other. Taylor does not tell us much about her lover in “Cruel Summer” sans the fact that the shape of their body is new. Paying special attention to games reframes “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” within the Lover theme as a commentary on fate. However, the emphasis of fate should not be on her lover. The dice game connection tells us that Taylor views “that summer” in the 1989 era as the time when she sealed her fate as collateral damage in the American culture war. From the “love letter to love itself” perspective, the moral is that passion and excitement can make lovers forget the immutability of individual destiny. If you are fated to be with someone, both of you are at the mercy of whatever the world has in store for the partnership and you as individuals.

Progress

An eclectic group of songs shares a reference to bluffing in a card game. The game metaphor beautifully stitches these songs together into parts of the same story.

The first and most detailed description of the card game is in “New Romantics”

We're all here

the lights and boys are blinding

We hang back

It's all in the timing

It's poker

He can't see it in my face

But I'm about to play my ace

A bluff in poker is an attempt to trick one’s opponent into thinking one has a better hand than they do in reality. The opponent may call their bluff and challenge them to prove their hand is as good as they advertise.

Bluffing requires deception, often telegraphed by facial expressions. Here, Taylor says that she is good at bluffing because she doesn’t let her façade crack. She is not truly bluffing, though, because she possesses an ace, presumably part of her even better hand. Her opponent has called her perceived bluff to prompt to her to reveal the ace.

The opponent, “he,” behaves as though Taylor is bluffing. Taylor, strategic as ever, is prepared to counter by revealing the most powerful card. We should thus interpret this metaphor as the ‘bluffer’ exceeding expectations. (Remember that the first instance of a metaphor is a base case, so we must take its meaning more literally.)

Likewise, in “End Game” and “It’s Nice To Have A Friend”, Taylor is the bluffer:

You've been calling my bluff on all my usual tricks

Call my bluff, call you "babe"

However, “Cornelia Street” allows room for the interpretation that both Taylor and her lover are bluffers:

Back when we were card sharks, playing games

I thought you were leading me on

I packed my bags, left Cornelia Street

Before you even knew I was gone

But then you called, showed your hand

I turned around before I hit the tunnel

Sat on the roof, you and I

Taylor may have also been a trickster: “then you called” could refer to the lover calling Taylor’s bluff.

The recurring bluff metaphor coincides with progress or forward momentum in a relationship.

Recall a previous discussion of “New Romantics.” We defined the “it” which is “all in the timing” as a reference to finding romance. “New Romantics” is set in a club with a dance floor, boys, and blinding lights. It’s the kind of setting conducive only to landing one-night stands. Taylor plays games with someone in the club, but exceeds expectations for the outcome of that game. What was flirting or courting becomes something more serious than a one night stand (i.e. an actual relationship). The act of calling a bluff in a card game engenders (relationship) progress. Yet again, what is intrinsic to time is intrinsic to love.

This observation fits with each song.

reputation charts the development of Taylor’s relationship, but the card game bluff in “End Game” is at the beginning of the album. That’s exactly why this lyric works so well. Her relationship is still new, nonetheless significant, after 1989. Her verse mixes these ideas:

I hit you like bang

We tried to forget it, but we just couldn't

And I bury hatchets but I keep maps of where I put 'em

And I can't let you go, your hand print's on my soul

The “End Game” bluff represents how Taylor goes from wanting a steady relationship to wanting everything.

You might be able to see where this is going. “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” is the ‘discographical endpoint’ of the bluff metaphor. The verse about marriage delivers the song’s emotional punch:

Church bells ring, carry me home

Rice on the ground looks like snow

Call my bluff, call you "babe"

Have my back, yeah, everyday

Feels like home, stay in bed

The whole weekend

Notice, however, that the bluff metaphor occurs after the implied wedding. This is actually a beautiful sentiment. Intimacy, trust, and commitment are ongoing; growth doesn’t stop with a ring on a finger. The bluff, which represents delivering on promises and exceeding expectations for love, powers the relationship forward.

All signs point to the “Cornelia Street” bluff as the one that may have led to marriage.

Back when we were card sharks, playing games

I thought you were leading me on

I packed my bags, left Cornelia Street

Before you even knew I was gone

But then you called, showed your hand

I turned around before I hit the tunnel

Sat on the roof, you and I

So emotionally charged is this scene that we have to wonder what, exactly, Taylor’s steady partner could do to make her (1) walk out if she were being led on and (2) come back so quickly.

The most intriguing detail about this card game is that both parties may have been bluffing. The lover is leading Taylor on, but Taylor does not stay to call the bluff. She leaves. Usually in poker, one would not want their opponent to be able to prove the bluff with a good hand. (Think back to the ace in “New Romantics”.) But what if both players are on the same team at the end of the day? Calling a bluff is now setting oneself up for potential disappointment. Taylor walks out because she is frightened by the mere possibility of being let down.

Taylor is also bluffing, but her lover doesn’t let her walk away so easily. They pull out all the stops and concede their hand in a desperate attempt to get Taylor to turn around from the tunnel. It works. By our understanding of the bluff metaphor, the lover exceeds all of Taylor’s expectations. The events that transpire on the roof presumably are when Taylor reveals her own cards.

The topic of marriage fits with this emotionally charged scene. Of course both lovers would tiptoe around the topic and be scared to reveal their true feelings.

So following the bluff metaphor helps us follow the course of true love. Calling and revealing a bluff is the catalyst for Taylor’s relationship. However, it also is the nature of time which underpins progress.

I concede that interpreting the bluff metaphor as the catalyst of a story makes it vulnerable to any truth-fuzzing. Perhaps Taylor hasn’t ever written about a real-life engagement or marriage. We have no way of knowing. We instead should take comfort in the fact that her lyrics are beautiful and music is open to interpretation.

On Writing

Our beliefs about love are bound to change over time. As a writer, Taylor is in a unique position to capture this change by revisiting a metaphor.

Take “It’s Nice To Have A Friend.” The song is written as a series of vignettes to define the qualities of love that remain consistent while relationships change over time. The middle vignette, with its reference to “twenty questions,” could very well point back to the same day as the “Cornelia Street” card game. Feelings reoccur in certain moments—déjà vu. The first vignette is a picture of childhood. The last vignette is a picture of adulthood. Therefore, it seems just as natural to interpret the middle vignette as a picture of adolescence or young adulthood. Light pink skies, back-and-forth conversations, and brave, soft moments of intimacy illustrate a coming-of-age experience. The same moment that pulls Taylor forward in her relationship is the one that also pulls her back to a different time.

Then the coming-of-age experience is reminiscent of the portrait of Americana, the Friday night lights, marching band, and high school prom. During adolescence, we only have an inkling of our futures. We are less aware of all the ways we are connected to others and our world. Young and impressionable, our only job is to live, to change, to make memories and mistakes. Memories and mistakes define what was, and experience creates wisdom that shapes what will be. So Taylor captures this duality in fate. The moment a fate is realized is a moment that is equally a fossil of the past and a forecast for the future. The moment it all makes sense…eureka!

As an artist, Taylor’s job is to communicate her human experience. Listeners decide whether or not she successfully telegraphs what is universal about it. However, Taylor is no more of a spokesperson for the universal human experience than anyone else. She simply possesses the talent, work ethic, and privilege to make a career of it.

Consider Taylor’s own summary of the past decade:

I once believed love would be burnin' red

But it's golden

She consciously and elegantly edits her previous beliefs about love. (Obviously, she may plant callbacks to previous songs purely for fun. This one is certainly sincere.) These lines illustrate the craft she has worked hard to develop.

Manifested in her craft is the need to revisit her ideas. It seems as though certain recurring metaphors have become the only way for her to accurately capture some parts of love. They become self-perpetuating. Unforced yet expressive subconscious consistency constitutes artistry. It is artistry which compels us to believe in the universality of music.

The self-perpetuating love/games metaphor is especially fascinating. It is one of the purest examples, though perhaps also one of the strangest, of how writing about love engenders new experiences of it. Taylor translates love into game language. Games illustrate duality. Duality is love.

Perhaps this conclusion is something others already know about Taylor’s talent. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on it until now.

To me, it seems like the songs are writing themselves.

#taylor swift #kaylor #gaylor swift #music analysis #my post

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docholligay · 4 years

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I finally got around to reading Turn of the Screw (technically rereading, but it's been over a decade) and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on it. My immediate reaction as I finished it was "that was interesting, and I will be chewing it over in my mind for a while, but I'm not sure if I liked it." I was very aware of reading it with my Eng Lit Student hat on. Also James's approach to sentence structure sure is... something.

I really like Turn of the Screw, but I think not liking Turn of the Screw is incredibly valid.

Obviously, spoilers for Turn of the Screw.

What I thought was so interesting about Bly Manor, and I thought this extra once I thought about Hill House--Flanagan LOVES to take novels where the ghosts are ambiguous, where a place may or may not be haunted, where there’s an equal chance, presented in the narrative, that people are crazy, and make it explicit. I don’t really understand why this is. There are loads of stories where the ghosts are very obviously ghosting about, so it’s really interesting to me that he has done it twice now, where it’s not explicit, and made it explicit.

(This is getting off the topic of Turn of the Screw itself, but maybe this need he has for things to be “real” explains some of why he clearly Did Not Get Doctor Sleep. I don’t know if he really embodies or gets the idea of The Haunting is Coming From Inside the House, which is weird given how well he explored that tension in Hill House, but seeing his other work that might be a fair criticism of him.) ANYWAY. Some of what I really like about Turn of the Screw is that sense of uncertainty--the novella never tells you whether it was ghosts, or the mind of the governess, and I LOVE that sort of thing. AN ambiguous answer is my favorite one, I adore stories where sort of decide what happens in them, what was “real” and what wasn’t, I think that it speaks so much to what it’s like to be human, and to the nature of our own personal histories. VERY VERY much my thing.

But James’ way of writing, HUH??? He’s super stream of consciousness and even I can sometimes find it, uh, TOOTHSOME, if you will, to try and get through, and this is largely my time period! Western Novels/writings from 1860ish to 1900ish is my literary THING. So it’s not like I can’t take a long sentence, bring it on, but his style is JARRING AS HELL. That’s why I did the live read, I think the story comes across better when it’s read to someone instead of written.

But yeah! I have a lot of feelings about the role of stories and literature and are they always meant to be ENJOYED???? Or is that a really reductionist way to look at the role of stories? Should stories not challenge us, make us feel uncomfortable, show us truths that we would really rather avoid? I would say “or are we children?” but I actually think even children should be exposed to things that frustrate, confuse, and challenge them, so they can learn to grow up to be frustrated, confused, and challenged.

So I don’t even know if I would say I like ToS in the way that I like, say, Watership Down, where I could read it a million times (and do read it once a year) but I will say I REALLY appreciate the things it does and the way it plays with reality in a way that wasn’t super common in horror stories to that point.

#tallangrycockatiel

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dreamsmp-megaritz · 3 years

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my problems with the tone of post-season-1 Dream SMP

Here are some things I often see in Dream SMP post-season-1, which I do not see so much in season 1. Take all of this with a grain of salt, in light of how (1) I am not nearly as familiar with the seasons 2&3 material as I am with season 1 material (so there may be some or many parts of seasons 2&3 which do not have these problems, and which I am failing to give due credit to), and (2) I often cannot pin down why I feel differently about season 1 than about seasons 2&3, so I am not certain how much of my claims stem from objective differences between them vs. subjective biases on my part.

I hope this post can present some topics of further discussion, investigation, friendly debate, and/or analysis.

Problem #1. Excessive emphasis on making a clear distinction between “canon” and “non-canon.”

It seems that now players often talking about “canonically” doing X and “not canonically” doing Y. I don’t like this much. Back in season 1, people almost never used the word “canonically.” The line was blurrier, and I liked that better. This is a block-game role-play, and given this format, there are many features of the story which really cannot be pinned down with much precision.

As one example (among many), L’Manberg was a “nation” but it also seems to have consisted of only a few people. There’s arguably no way to make much sense of this within any tightly defined “canon,” and I think it’s good that the story has not tried much to do so. The canon should remain loose in some ways.

The blurriness of the canon/non-canon distinction is also good for the intertextual elements discussed in @lucemferto’s video about Philza (which is fantastic, and I highly recommend watching it). This sort of intertextuality is one of my favorite things about Dream SMP-- and I have my own theories as well, which I will write about at a later time-- but I suspect some of these cool elements may require keeping the canon/non-canon distinction at least somewhat blurry.

Of course, I totally grant there is a need for a "role-playing / not role-playing” distinction, or something along these lines. Many of the characters dislike each other in the story, but are friends in real life. Occasionally some of the younger fans get confused about this, and will become angry at content-creators under the false impression that the content-creators are mistreating each other. I fully recognize that some kind of explicit distinction is needed in order to avert these confusions, and to keep everyone on the same page of realizing it’s all in good fun. But the necessary distinction should be sensitive to the loosey-goosey nature of the storytelling format.

Back in season 1, I think content-creators would often correct young viewers’ confusion by saying “It’s a bit” i.e. a skit or game (rather than using words like “canon”). I like this “bit” terminology, because it seems appropriately loose-- instead of using the word “canonically” which seems inappropriately strict.

(Admittedly the term “bit” may be more appropriate to the very early period where there was little to no scripting. I’ll briefly return to the “scripting vs. improvising” distinction a few times. It is related to these other distinctions, but not identical to them.)

Problem #2. Some dialogue scenes are too long.

Let’s take a bunch of the one-on-one scenes between Dream in prison talking to other characters such as TommyInnit, like in this VOD and following ones. These scenes involve a lot of interesting story details, but they go on for a frankly very long time. To me they feel incredibly drawn out. They’d be better at half the length. They seem to have a lot of needless repetition, among other issues.

I’m not certain of the cause of the problem, but it seems to be stemming partially from the particular kind of combination of scripting and improvising which they involve. It isn’t always a great combination. It’s like the players have a checklist of story points to cover, but they aren’t sure how to pull it off in a way that sounds natural without taking too long.

I’m not sure how to solve it. Scripting the dialogue more thoroughly might help make them more concise-- but at the cost of sounding less natural, and losing the charm which Dream SMP’s improvisation often holds.

But further analysis would be needed to say exactly how or why the problem is happening. And not everyone might agree me that it’s happening at all. So I’ll be curious to hear other people’s assessments of the problem (if there is one) and what’s causing it.

In any case, I’ll contrast it to season 1. I believe season 1 did not have many scenes that dragged out for a long time. Season 1 has serious moments as well, and it has dramatic weight. But it does not often have the feeling of dragged out scenes. Again I think further analysis is needed to figure out whether I’m right about this or not-- and if I’m right, further analysis will be needed to figure out why the seasons feel so different, because I can’t really say for sure or in detail why it feels this way. So again I’m curious what other people will think about this.

Problem #3. Too serious.

This problem seems to be part of the cause of the first two problems. Excessive seriousness may contribute to dragged-out scenes which aren’t fun to watch, and it may contribute to taking the “canon vs. non-canon” distinction too seriously, with an excess tendency to put “serious” stuff on the “canon” side of the divide and put “non-serious” stuff on the “non-canon” side of the divide.

In any case, the storyline after season 1, or at least some parts of it (probably not other parts), seem to have a puffed up air of “seriousness” which really feels off to me.

This does not mean it never succeeds at being serious in the right way. For instance I think serious parts of the Quackity VOD “Quackity Visits Dream in Prison” actually work very well-- even the one-on-one scene between Quackity and Dream, which is one of the best prison scenes. Crucially, this specific prison scene does not seem to have the problems that I’ve complained about for other prison scenes, or at least not nearly as severely. But a lot of seasons 2 and 3, from what I’ve seen of them, appear to have the problem of feeling like they’re “trying too hard” to be taken seriously, and it doesn’t work for me.

Another strength of that Quackity VOD is that the scene with Schlatt at the afterlife gym had a combination of seriousness and levity which I thought was very strong. Whatever one may think of Schlatt’s style of comedy outside DSMP (i’m aware of the myriad controversies), I think Schlatt is incredibly skillful at pulling off an effective combination of seriousness and levity, and I think his chemistry tends to enhance other players’ ability to pull it off too.

And to be clear, season 1 has serious moments as well. But the mixture of seriousness and levity in season 1 seems stronger to me. When Schlatt wins the election, this is a dramatic moment, but it also seems to have a degree of campiness which makes it work well. When Wilbur goes through various scenes of planning to blow up Manberg, this is dramatic and a serious character arc in some ways, but it does not seem to me that it has the air of over-seriousness which parts of seasons 2 and onward seem to have.

However, I can’t really articulate why this is. Some of it may be a nostalgic bias toward the earlier material, and/or the fact that the earlier material had more novelty. And I was in a very particular kind of emotional place when I watched a lot of season 1, due to the pandemic and various other factors, which has strongly impacted how I feel about it today.

However, I think this does not account for everything. I maintain that, most likely, there are also objective differences between the seasons in their style or tone, even though I cannot really pin down what they are in detail or with much assurance.

I also want to add another disclaimer that I’m not sure how consistent this is. For instance, there are plots like the Butcher Army where I simply haven’t watched enough to get a sense of how serious or non-serious it comes across as.

Possible diagnoses?

There may be a bunch of possibilities for what causes these issues, but for now I only have the faintest speculations.

One possibility is that seasons 2&3 are more scripted, whereas season 1 was more improvised. This would explain some of the issues, if true. However, I am not sure whether it is actually true that seasons 2&3 are more scripted than season 1.

I can’t find citations offhand right now, but I recall Schlatt once said (at least a lot of) season 1 was heavily scripted, and I think that Wilbur once said season 2 is not as scripted as many people think it is. Now, I grant Schlatt and Wilbur may be using different standards of what counts as “heavily scripted,” and it’s not clear to me whether they agree or not. So there may be some ambiguity. But in any case, the combination of these two statements leads me to think season 2 is probably not significantly more scripted than season 1. And if that’s true, then the degree of scripting is not the key to understanding the problems.

Another possibility is that the difference stems from whether Wilbur or someone else is the main writer. This is most likely a big part of it. However, I am not sure of the details, as I have not researched it enough. I also do not know whether Wilbur has returned to being the lead writer yet (as of late March 2021), or if that is still upcoming.

#dream smp #quackity #jschlatt #wilbursoot

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gravityfissure · 4 years

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[meta] What, if any, games, movies, books, tv shows, etc. have you drawn influence from for your character?

Okay so round 2, much in the same vein for Arthur there are... A lot. Possibly even more things that influence and inspire where Otto’s muse and views comes from. That said in writing this there are also a LOT of similarities between the characters I can pick out certain attributes and to be honest there’s a lot of crossover with the traits and characterisations highlighted.

Namely: playful and proactive, self-serving yet loyal to those that meet his criteria as to who is deserving of it. A grifter by nature that will approach almost any situation if he feels he’ll get something out of it while equally hoping that one day someone might actually bother to ask him (and maybe give him a true reason) to stay.

Dorian - Dragon Age: Inquisition

Uh, the heir of a famous magical dynasty? A flair of magical talent that made him the envy of his peers? Studied at one of the best colleges for the magical arts before being kicked out and privately tutored before eventually vanishing and being found by Magister Gereon Alexius who offered to take him as his apprentice eventually becoming a fully-ranked enchanter. A pariah for opposing every fault his homeland is renowned for?

It’s been years since I’ve played DA:I and Dorian always was one of my favourite characters but tbh I completely forgot his background and it’s only in revisiting it now I actually realise the similarities in the framework of their characters/development/story line. Not to mention the fact they both enjoy playful flirtation and witty banter and oppose the things they don’t fit into their view of the world. They will probably do the right thing, but that doesn’t mean they might not take their sweet ass time in actually getting into a situation.

Isabela - Dragon Age II and Inquisition

AND AGAIN. Isabela’s a great character - a pirate scourge of coastlines and nations around the world who values fun, freedom and getting ahead in life. They both value solving situations in clever and devious ways and getting ahead even if it means being somewhat selfish when they’re dealing with other people, example: Otto conning Deirdre out of $28k when she tried to cover for Regan or those plans he has to try and record a banshee scream? They’re both always down for trying to squeeze that little bit extra out of a person. If it one ups them in life and people are gullible enough to fall for it well... They really did it to themselves didn’t they?

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t depths to that hardened persona they both present. There are actual feelings and things hidden behind the wall and appearance they both present to the world. And underneath it all they’re both afraid of being left behind, but figure it’s best to push people away before they decide to leave of their own volition. At least that way they can say they have some control over the situation..

Sera - Dragon Age: Inquisition

Apparently this is a DA characters list but you know what sue me. x) So NEXT on the list is Sera, an elven archer who is incredibly impulsive and reactionary. She takes pure delight in humbling the established authority she views as arrogant and selfish. It’s less about what’s right in the grand scheme of things but more about what’s right in that very moment. She doesn’t believe in actions taken for a greater good, instead viewing it as just another excuse to hurt others undeserving of such treatment because it’s easier than making the truly hard choices in life.

Felix Dawkins - Orphan Black

Look Felix is one of the many fascinating characters on Orphan Black. Don’t get me wrong there are SO many and it’s a great show. But Felix is a character whose very existence proves that you can have a very effeminate, boisterous, loud, witty gay character and not have him be limited to the perpetuation of the sassy gay friend stereotype. Why? Because he has a whole complex personality beyond just that aspect of his life. He’s got to deal with real life issues on top of all the drama clone club brings into his life and he deals and he survives and he cOPES.

Not to mention he’s a positive representation of foster children being happy, positive representation of LGBTQ+ characters and gives positive representation of sex workers. Not to mention on top of all that representation you see how he’s smart as hell, the only person who knows Sarah well enough to keep her on track. The BEST uncle to Kira and one of the most supportive characters on the show.

Sarah - Orphan Black

Felix’s foster-sister, another character that shows the positive and complex dynamic that foster families tend to have while also demonstrating the fascinating found-family dynamic with clone club. Sarah’s interesting because she’s a natural chameleon, she’s street-smart and tough, a born outsider living on the fringes by her wits while in possession of a dark sense of humour that sees her by.

Sarah and Otto have a rather morally ambiguous compass, they’re both characters who swing between being very self-serving and selfish and acting for the greater good when they decide it’s needed. Not to mention the act as if they don’t care about other people’s issues (see clone club) when actually it transpires they both might just care a little more than they actually let on.

Garcia Flynn - Timeless

Unfortunately Garcia fits the my favourite character type: tall, dark, snarky, sassy antihero motivated fiercely by love and willing to do things of questionable morality against a greater evil, self-aware and doesn’t make excuses for his behaviour, but isn’t wringing his hands over it either. A character who so dearly loves the people in his life (see revenge for his wife and daughter) so much so he’s still fighting for them 5 years later just to be alive and not even to have anything to do with him again because he knows the things he’s done are enough the he could never go back to being that person for them. The man who loved his mum and went on a trip just to make her happy and save his brother. When he truly cares for someone he does EVERYTHING for them while somehow having none of the toxic jealous possessive business, despite his well-attested Garbage Drama in other departments, and just generally being a mature adult and an essentially good person who has gone down some really dark places and is finally rediscovering what he’s buried and lost. Look man, I’m a suuuuuuuuuuuuucker for found family, enemies to lovers, and villain becomes weird family member. And he covers all of those, so yes.

There’s a lot of that I’m planning and drawing on for Otto, this weird currently antagonistic little self-serving shit who is out for his own ends but maybe along the way finds some semblence of a conscious and maybe has a fair few moral dilemmas and self-questioning moments along the way? Who maybe finds friends (and even love?) Who has to deal with FEELINGS and things he’s repressed for years because of the things he’s done just to survive the life he fell into? Uh, yes give me give me give me.

Jesse Custer - Preacher

Okay, so this one’s kind of another given. Jesse’s another character I’m fascinated with because before Genesis’ arrival he was a down upon his luck preacher. A man who was trying so hard to fit into his dad’s ideal and not let the life he had before affect his day to day. Except it all goes to hell in a handbasket because of course it does.

Jesse essentially gains the ability to make anyone do anything he says. And that power? It’s addictive, and we see the struggle he goes through to learn how to control and manipulate it to his own end. To begin with he tries to right wrongs, to tell people to stop doing the bad things they’re doing in their lives and fix them so they’re better people but with each act that power and god-complex grows. It goes to his head until we meet the moronic messiah Humperdoo and Jesse eventually agrees to take his place. The messiah-complex and power corruption is complete, and the repercussions of his choices are devastating especially with how they impact Cassidy or Tulip and the repercussions in Angelville.

Much like Otto’s own magic, the more its used the more enticing it is to carry on using it for more and more things. At first it was small deeds, little acts of good until Otto in kind started to realise that good deeds weren’t enough to make a change. They weren’t enough for other people around him and with each act it grew and grew - and it continues to grow. The question is to what level? And if it ever got out of control, would he ever know how to stop it?

Crowley - Good Omens

An overall non-threatening demon, who tries to be “evil” in his own way to fit into the role his society (other demons) expect of him. Crowley wants to save the world (for his own reasons) and can be rather self-serving in certain moments. There’s plenty of times he tried to convince Aziraphale to run away with him and let everything else forgive the irony but for lack of a better term “go to hell” but he always comes around in the end (typically to a Queen track) to help when it really counts for something.

Not to mention his flare for the dramatic, very rarely thinking things through, with many of his own plans backfiring on him.

Sound familiar?

Wrench - Watch Dogs 2

Part-hacker and full-fledged anarchist who wears a freaky mask with LED displays capable of bizarre emoticons. He's vulgar, crude, entertaining and an absolute adrenaline junkie who lives on the edge. He's jokingly called the wrench because he's the wrench you throw into somebody's gears to grind them to a halt.

The final one on the list, because it’s a side I haven’t yet played into so much but I’m curious to given means and opportunity to. Otto does have some inclination towards an anarchistic nature, if a system doesn’t seem to work he isn’t afraid to speak out or more likely act out against it. Whether it’s in the greater good or not isn’t so much relevant rather that he would happily take a torch and burn something to the ground if it meant starting again with something new and better in its place. It’s definitely something I want to explore more down the line.

I also find it interesting the whole concept of “hiding behind a mask” which is something wrench quite literally does. Both have built personas to defend themselves from people breaking through and seeing that what actually exists on the other side is a rather shy and awkward person who tries to “act out” and be “dramatic” in an attempt to get attention from a world in which there’s so much noise how could anyone ever feel like their voice mattered let alone be heard unless they started shouting “HEY, LOOK AT ME” at the top of his lungs?

#Anonymous #answered #wickedsanon #meta #headcanon #// this GOT SO LONG

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scgdoeswhat · 5 years

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Unpacking The Elementalists Finale

I’d like to dedicate this to my dear Kane anon (and other TE anons) who have been hitting my ask box up for the last several months. I’m sorry this took forever to get out and I know it doesn’t ease the fact that they ixnayed Kane, but hopefully this makes a little more sense of TE’s abrupt ending.

Without further ado...

I’ve been wanting to make this post since Book 2 Chapter 10, but life has been hectic. TE’s finale finally forced my hand and so here I am, with a bunch of theories, points, and thoughts I've had noted since the book came back from its hiatus. First off, now that TE is officially over (😭) we now know that the hiatus was primarily used to tie up all the loose story lines and to give us a tidy ending. The writing in the second half of the book was more solid, concise, and had a clear cut vision of what the writers wanted and where the plot was headed. As much as I hate to say it, the first half of the book may have been overly ambitious. They introduced the Moral Compass, potentially two villains in Kane and Alma, and a plethora of different storylines. I had a number of people tell me through the first five/six chapters of Book 2 that they were confused with the plot because it became too convoluted and hard to follow along. I think they introduced too many elements into the story, which dragged down the arc. Let’s break down some of these individually: The Moral Compass was something we were all excited to see implemented, because it gave us the potential to be an evil MC. In the end, we know it didn’t make much of a difference, save for dialogue and/or violent options. I think this was originally something intended to be greater than what it amounted to, and part of it is the limitations of the medium that the app is and simply, resources. This also ties into…. The plot involving Kane and Alma. I don’t believe having Kane as the Big Bad was supposed to be as defined as it ended up being. The two Sources were written far more ambiguous in the beginning, with the chance that depending on your choices, you could side with either one by the end of the book and/or series. The hiatus streamlined the plot, discarding elements that were difficult to pull off, including multiple MC point of views that may have held the possibility of being evil or choosing Kane, therefore placing Alma as the antagonist. In a narrative story app such as Choices (as opposed to Lovestruck, where the routes have the same players but different stories altogether), I just don’t think this advanced storytelling would have been doable. These plots are primarily linear, and MC being evil/with Kane/etc, it would present a different set of problems, including the fact that this becomes an entirely different story while there is supposed to be one solid ending. (For what it's worth, I enjoy the MC customizability of Choices more.) Looking at the group of friends, obviously Beckett was incredibly fleshed out while the others were not as much. I wanted to delve further into our friends’ backgrounds a bit more, and I think at the beginning of the book, we were on that path. Aster and her wood nymph family was a perfect example of table setting. We had two or three scenes before the hiatus to go to the forest, and I thought the Wand Wars and their involvement against Kane was slated to be more prominent. I think the writers had something bigger planned, but how would it all tie in if players started choosing the evil choices? Again, having too many choices causes a domino effect that makes it nearly impossible to navigate when the story is supposed to end with a particular goal in mind. The chapter where we can receive the wand was a symptom of ending the book early and I think the execution of the actual Wand Wars scene was lacking the emotional punch the initial introduction of it warranted. This is unfortunate because the setup they had in Book 1 made it seem much more violent, disastrous, and full of hate compared to what was shown (i.e. Attuned just being greedy bastards). We were introduced to Shreya's Serene & Sublime business and the potential of family disapproval and lack of support in the beginning, but everything was tied up with the gala chapter. Looking back, I was curious why it was so easy to get so many financial backers this early into the series, but knowing that TE only went for two books makes much more sense why we knew whether S&S succeeded or failed. (Tangent - for anyone who didn't secure backing, is S&S successful at the end of the book?) I think Griffin, his scholarship, and his decision between Natural Sciences and Thief was also slated to be a bigger subplot. We never met his parents, despite them being brought up very early in Book 1. If TE had gone the originally planned three or four books, I have no doubt his family would've been introduced and MC would have needed to help sway his parents (and the committee for the scholarship) whether Griffin continued on the NS or professional Thief path. Doing the Griffin scenes (even as platonic friends) influenced his standing for the scholarship and not doing them made him lose out to Amy, if I'm not mistaken. Question for everyone regarding Zeph and the Thief captaincy: Does he get it in everyone's playthrough? I wonder if the writers always planned for Zeph to get the captaincy or if Griff would have kept it depending on your playthrough if they had all four books to use. Another big plot point that resolved itself out of nowhere was Atlas and MC butting heads over their Sun Source mother. I was not a fan of this storyline at all. I felt like the disagreements between the siblings was unnecessary drama that came off as forced. They tried to explain Atlas' position, and I understood where they were coming from, but Atlas was very unreasonable with their constant “who cares about mom” shtick.

I think this was something that could have been more impactful if there weren't so many plotlines happening and more focus could have been given to it instead of a few screens of Atlas saying they were pissed off before storming away from MC. This was also a plotline that was directly influenced by the Kane/Alma decisions. If MC sides with Kane, it makes much more sense for MC and Atlas to be against each other as opposed to MC being good/siding with Alma.

Five major subplots were opened, but how do you seamlessly weave these elements into a 17-19 chapter book? In my opinion, you can't. Each time something new was introduced, I felt things were glossed over, despite big chunks of chapters being focused on whichever subplot the chapter was about. Throw in the romance and I think it is nearly impossible to resolve each aspect in a complete manner.

What also hurt was the pacing of the series. This was also seen in Book 1, where sometimes a chapter would span one or two days, only for a huge time jump to occur in the next chapter.

So many ideas could have been explored through the course of four books (which is what I believe they had planned), but all the different elements should have been introduced at different times. Instead, Book 2 was an amalgamation of so many ideas but not enough time, space, or resources to thoroughly hash out and have a satisfactory resolution. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it was having too much Beckett that hurt the series. He obviously kept the series afloat and was one of PB's biggest moneymakers in recent history. Despite the constant complaints on tumblr, people fail to realize that the ENTIRE online fandom (FB, IG, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Wiki) comprises maybe 0.5% - 2% of the ENTIRE player fan base. It only made sense that PB capitalized on him because their numbers dictated that the resources should be spent in that manner. The fallout from this was that Beckett was the only one who had his storyline relatively complete, and that was due to the spending power of everyone who romanced him. I think what hurt them the most was the multiple storylines and the indecision of which direction they wanted to go. They had a grand idea of the direction through Book 2 (and Book 3, let’s not lie here) but in-game mechanics and the type of game Choices is made it difficult to pull off. The app wasn’t the correct medium for what they envisioned. In my opinion, the overall story arc had the potential to be brilliant, but again, the app wasn't designed for the type of story the writers wanted to tell.

I also think the timing and having a very short turnaround hurt, as well. Players had high expectations and when you factor in the hype around the other books that were also released on Fridays, TE lost some of its sparkle. Most players didn’t get a chance to miss it for the regular 2-3 months we’ve been trained to wait for sequels. (I recognize that I’m an anomaly and the previous three sentences do not apply to me at all.)

Even with all this, I applaud the writing team for wanting to deliver a story that was worthy of a magical world. I love all the Pend Pals (‘Motley Crue’ for me), the familiars, the side characters, loved to hate the villains, and from someone who is not into Harry Potter lore at all, I was absolutely sucked into the magick universe that the writers built. (Metal Att for life ⚙!)

If TE does return in the future (and I REALLY hope it does), I think it will be even stronger than the first two books because the world building is complete. We know almost everything we need to know now. Instead of using a Book 3 to search for Sun Mama, the family is complete, MC and Atlas are attuned to all the elements, and there are so many open-ended questions that Book 2 left us.

If they implement a time jump where MC and the Pend Pals are all post grad/mid 20s, it also gives the writers a chance to move the story from the Young Adult genre to a more mature setting. We saw this in the later diamond scenes, where the writing appeared similar in their vividness (and coding in the final scene - THANK YOU, glorious writing team) to Open Heart, Bloodbound, and A Courtesan of Rome. This removes the restrictions placed on the group of being college kids, and therefore are almost fully developed with their magick, giving the possibility of moving the story out of a university setting.

If you've made it all the way here to the bottom, thank you for sticking with me and apologies for spelling/grammar since this has all been on my phone 😂 I think this comprises almost all my notes I've been keeping for the last 2 months. Feel free to agree or disagree; I just wanted to post my thoughts on this book and series that I love so much.

Now, I'm going to go back to my holiday (don't worry, I didn't write all of this while on vacay lol) and I'll try to answer asks when I have downtime.

#the elementalists #beckett harrington #shreya mistry #griffin langley #aster d'yew #playchoices #choices #beckett x mc #griffin x mc #shreya x mc #aster x mc #zeph hernandez #atlas ernhardt #te

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the-zodiacs-written-in-the-stars · 5 years

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Chapter 18: Angelique Lamour

You make a beautiful mermaid, you know.”

“What do you want, Tony? You only give out free compliments when you want something.”

Angel smiled into her mirror at the image of Tony standing behind her. The heterochromic model ran a hand through his hair and pouted at her. He was looking pretty good himself as a merman, with the various shades of purple adoring his torso and face, patterns of scales making him look completely different. Continuing to smile, Angel fixed her hair a bit. Most of them had been finished with make-up, but the shoot couldn't start without the star; Poseidon. So they were all currently waiting for the finishing touches on today's center-piece.

“I was hoping you had some hot guy you could set me up with”, sighed Tony.

“...Are you serious?”, asked Angel surprised and turned around in her chair. “You?”

Tony huffed and crossed his arms. “Look. I'm aware I'm an absolute catch and I have no problems batting my eyelashes at a guy and make him buy me a yacht. But that's all so... superficial.”

Heaving a dramatic sigh, Tony sat down on Angel's vanity, pouting at her. “Kit's been talking all about the cutesy little dates that Joss has been having with that hot lady doctor Laureen set them up with. So, I figured, maybe stop seducing rich guys who just want sex, maybe ask a good friend to set me up with someone they think is a good match. Congrats, you're the friend I chose because Kit is too much of a lesbian to even acknowledge that men could be dating material for others, she just wiggled her nose at me and glared in a very disturbed way. So. Set me up with a guy.”

Angel smiled at that and perked up a little. Tony was right, Joss had been happier in the past two weeks than Angel had seen them in a long time. Maybe if finding a date yourself isn't working, trusting a good friend can work. She was more than happy to help. Just to deflate a little.

“I... don't exactly know a lot of gay guys. Or, you know, guys on the gay-spectrum. Uhm. Would you say that like that? Like, bisexual and pansexual men”, elaborated Angel before pausing. “Actually no never mind I just had an absolute genius idea! Oh!”

She suddenly jumped up in excitement and got her phone out. Tony raised a suspicious eyebrow.

“Do not make me regret this, Lamour!”, warned Tony seriously.

Angel just giggled delighted while texting before holding up her phone and taking a picture of Tony. Look at that pretty face. Fancy a date with him? 28, professional model, hobby baker and artist at heart. He's a cutie! And you've been a sulking single for OVER a year now!!!

“Just you wait”, chimed Angel and pulled up a picture. “Look at this. Would want to date him?”

Tony made a drawn-out humming sound. “Cute. Freckles. Bit of a kitten-vibe and I'm more of a puppy-person. But sure. Nice to look at. Seems... familiar somehow.”

“He's my ex. Jamie, the pub-owner”, offered Angel, tilting her head.

“Mh. Business-owner”, whispered Tony. “Nice. Okay, sure. If he's on board, set us up for a date.”

Angel made a delighted noise at that, before someone cleared their throat next to them. Both models turned to look at Noxia Black. The photographer looked incredibly unimpressed, a glare on her face as she tapped her fingers against the side of her camera.

“If you two are done playing dating app, you're at work here”, grunted Noxia annoyed.

“Sorry, boss lady”, grinned Tony and Angel sheepishly.

“I'm not the boss lady. She is”, stated Noxia and jerked her head toward Sonia Gold.

It wasn't necessarily regular for Sonia to sit in on a shooting herself. Tony and Angel exchanged a curious look. Granted, this was a huge shoot for this campaign. Poseidon had first been presented as a competitive swimmer, showing off the swim-suit line-up together with other such sea deities. After the first big ads had been aired and plastered all over the streets, showing the athletic Olympic gods in Chiron Training gear, they now wanted to broaden the campaign and double down on the mythology. Poseidon presenting a gold-medal to an actual Olympic gold-medal winner, with the other models who played the Olympian gods dressed as mermaids and mermen surrounding them as bystanders. Angel absolutely loved the pitch for this one – and the costumes!

“Don't be bothered by the boss”, assured Sonia with one of her charming smiles.

Sonia Gold fascinated Angel. She was downright perfect. Always perfectly dressed, with no wrinkles on her clothes, not a hair out of place, make-up, shoes and jewelry always fitting the outfit. She was the perfect image of a business woman the way Angel had always pictured them.

“What can we do for you, Miss Gold?”, asked Tony, his smile matching hers.

He looked amazing with the silk wrapped around his lower body, his upper body painted purple and with scales. The only thing missing about his outfit so far were the contact lenses meant to make him look like a predator. Angel understood that; she hadn't put hers in yet. They always irritated her eyes so she'd rather wait until they were necessary.

“When I was getting ready this morning, I was thinking about the shoot and a piece of my private jewelry caught my eyes. I thought that it would work wonders with the costume-design for you, Angelique”, explained Sonia and opened her purse.

She got a black box out and opened it to show a breathtaking pearl-necklace to Angel. It was a three-strand necklace with pearls of various white and blue shades and different sizes. The biggest pearl at the front of the upper strand looked as though it had an H on it. How curious.

“This looks beautiful and expensive”, noted Angel softly.

“Oh, believe me, it is”, laughed Sonia. “You truly think I own a single piece of jewelry worth less than 50k? Sweetheart, please. I couldn't embarrass myself like this.”

“So when you say that, just... how much is this one?”, asked Tony slowly, motioning at the pearls.

“250k”, replied Sonia with a smooth smile. “So try not to lose it and return it to me later.”

“W... What? I can't wear this”, sputtered Angel flustered. “Sonia, please.”

“Oh, nonsense. I have over half a dozen pearl-necklaces”, dismissed Sonia casually. “I saw the design-pitch from Elizabeth and knew something... eye-catching was missing. This, this will do. I want this campaign to be perfect. Now, back to work, people.”

“You heard the boss lady. Back to work”, repeated Noxia louder. “Let's get this shoot started.”

~*~

Angel had a skip to her step as she walked the halls of Gold Standard, heading toward her best friend's desk. Joss looked deep in thought, hunched over their laptop. For Angel, who had come to the US from France, it had been strange to talk about a single person with plural pronouns because they were gender-neutral. That just did not naturally exist in the French language in the way English offered 'they' and ever since meeting Joss, Angel had come to appreciate this special thing about the English language. Because while Joss mostly preferred either 'she' or 'he', Angel was not a mind-reader and when not with Joss – which was generally the main instances when one used pronouns for people – Angel couldn't always know what pronouns Joss preferred that day, unless she had talked to Joss that day beforehand. Angel had voiced that confusion to Joss after the two had first become friends and Joss had encouraged her to use neutral pronouns then. Most working close with Joss knew and respected that. And some days, particularly when Joss was already stressed and telling people what they preferred was just too much work and too exhausting on top of everything, Joss just generally went with 'they'.

“Yo—ou look like you could use a cupcake.”

Smiling, Angel placed a cupcake with blue frosting in front of Joss. Blinking a few times, Joss looked up at her. After taking a bite from the cupcake, Joss offered Angel a small smile.

“Thanks”, mumbled Joss around the bite. “Sugar and food was exactly what I needed.”

“Wonderful. So that will make it easier to get details about your date”, stated Angel eagerly.

“Oh no. No. Don't”, groaned Joss. “Why are you so invested in my love-life?”

“Call me Amor, I seek love-stories”, chimed Angel. “Come on, please. You've been so busy lately, you and Sunny must be going on a ton of dates, right?”

Joss shifted a little and cleared their throat. “It was... very nice. Unexpected, to be honest. I've never been to a charity gala before. Gave me an excuse to wear that fancy cocktail dress you gave me for my last birthday. Savitri was... flustered and gaping at me. It was... a nice feeling?”

Angel giggled a little at that and sat down on the edge of the desk. “I like this new thing you have going on. With the smiling and the staring at your phone with a far-off look when she texts you.”

“Shut up”, grumbled Joss and tossed a piece of cupcake at Angel. “Did you just come here to torment me and interrogate me, or did you want something else...?”

“Yes, I wanted to go get lunch with you. And before that, I wanted to drop these off with Sonia again. They're... hers. She gave them to me for the last shoot.”

Her fingers played with the pearls. Joss narrowed their eyes at Angel. Some days, Joss presented as very feminine – with the hair, make-up, heels and wearing a skirt-suit. Angel had come to realize that the most strict of dress-code, pants and vest, when Joss would also be binding and usually had the hair up in a bun, usually meant that Joss was presenting as a guy that day. Angel, as a model, knew that clothes by far weren't everything. And then there were the more ambiguous days, or the days where even though Joss was feeling female, she still had no mind/focus/time to put thought into make-up or hair, so it was tricky to judge based on looks alone. Angel had to admit, it had fascinated her a lot at first – when she had come to Los Angeles, she had just been nineteen and only had a vague understanding of trans people existing, but a broader spectrum? She had tiptoed a lot and probably asked many inappropriate questions, but Joss had been very indulgent and patient. Which, Angel now knew, was really not something Joss had owed her and, the more often Angel saw it, saw people who did not understand anything about Joss' gender-identity, the more Angel understood just why. It really couldn't be Joss' responsibility to explain everything to everyone. Moments like those had Angel realize just how easy her life was, being CIS and also being straight. Well, the whole being pretty, white and from a well-doing European country also helped.

“Sonia is out on a lunch-meeting with Carroll Lewis”, informed Joss.

“Carroll Lewis? Like the CEO of Red Queen Records?”, asked Angel in awe. “Oh. I mean, I know they work together on many occasions, but... oh, basically all my favorite musicians are under that label. She has such a keen eye for talent, it's amazing.”

“Mh”, grunted Joss with that furrow-browed look.

“What? What is it?”, asked Angel curiously as the two of them left Joss' desk behind.

Joss led the way to the elevator. “I... have a bad feeling about her. Something about Miss Lewis is... peculiar. And not in the quirky, adorable way you are peculiar.”

“Hey”, huffed Angel with a pout. “I think I may take offense to that.”

Joss quirked their lips as they entered the elevator to make their way to get lunch.

~*~

They barely made it into Liddell's Sweets, by pushing past panicking people. Angel gulped and felt herself immediately pushed behind Joss. She stared wide-eyed over Joss' shoulder just to see the chaos. Costumers, turned to stone. Statues now. Behind the counter, a purple-skinned, scaled version of Laureen Liddell, hissing – no, her hair. Her hair was hissing. Her dreadlocks having come to life and turned into dozens of snakes. Angel squeaked high-pitched.

“What is that?”, exclaimed Angel.

“You need to get out of here”, ordered Joss seriously. “Now.”

“Oh, I am not leaving without you!”, stated Angel sternly, grabbing Joss' wrist.

Joss tried to wrangle out of her grip, but for someone as petite and dainty as Angel, the model really had an iron-grip when it came to protecting those she loved. Only around the corner did Joss manage to shake Angel off, but the blonde still stood close, glaring fiercely.

“What were you planning?”, hissed Angel. “You're my best friend, I won't have you throw your life away trying to save people when you are clearly not qualified! The police, or the local superheroes, are going to take care of this, I'm sure.”

Joss' lips thinned and their face hardened. “Angelique, this is not the time for arguments, this-”

Before Joss could continue with the preaching, a bright blue glow emitted from the pearl-necklace. Moments later and there was a... fish... floating right in front of Angel's face, bubbles – no, that was actual water but it looked like bubbles – floating along with the fish.

“Hello, I am Pisces. Please cease the quarreling, it is unproductive. That in there is Como Berenices, a powerful constellation under the element of fire. Her stare can burn the life away from a person. I am water personified. Pisces, leader of the water-signs. Best equipped to fight them.”

“I... I... The fish is talking. The fish is talking, Joss”, hissed Angel.

“So... Pisces has been laying around at Sonia's place unused”, whispered Joss wide-eyed. “Of course, she is not born under your sign so even if she found the pearl and thought it pretty, it was useless for her because the Zodiacs can only attach themselves to someone born under their sign.”

“What are you talking about? Zodiacs, like the superheroes?”, asked Angel surprised.

“But... You said that Sonia gave you the necklace? You, specifically?”, asked Joss, looking at Angel.

“Hello? Can we please focus on Coma Berenices in there?”, requested Pisces, flapping her fins.

“Yes, Sonia gave them to me, but... So, am I a superhero now?”

Angel looked from Joss to Pisces, completely overwhelmed. The little fish nodded and smiled.

“Close your eyes and concentrate on your costume and a weapon of your choice”, instructed Pisces.

Nodding, Angel did as she was told. She made a delighted sound when she opened her eyes again and turned to look into the window-front of the long-since abandoned store next to them. Most businesses around had already been evacuated thanks to the villain-attack on the café. She was wearing a strong, if her wishes had been fulfilled bullet-proof, shirt with frills running out looking like scales, her waistline highlighted like she remembered seeing mermaids in cartoons, the skirt light and wide enough to allow for good leg-movement. Her shoes were sturdy boots matching her shirt and her mask in color. Light blue, nearly cyan. Her lips were a darker shade of blue, matching the shells woven into her long, blonde hair. A braid was far more practical for fighting. And in her hand, she was holding a trident as long as she was tall.

“You look ridiculous”, whispered Joss softly. “How does a professional model have zero taste in fashion, I just... don't understand that...”

“How is that the reaction you have to me becoming a superhero and just... sparkle-changing into a new outfit! There is a flying, talking fish right there!”, exclaimed Angel frustrated.

Joss looked at her fondly before rubbing their cuff-links. A blinding, white light surrounded Joss and when it faded, they were wearing a gray cloak over a black and white checkered outfit. On their shoulder sat a black and white owl. But not like a snow-owl black and white, no one half was entirely black and, split in the middle, the other half was white. How... huh.

“This is Gemini, my partner. I've been... working in the shadows until I joined the Zodiac alliance recently”, elaborated Joss with a sigh. “Pisces. You sure it's a good idea to send Angel in there? She hasn't had a day's worth of training, not with her powers or her weapon.”

“Oh, please, dear”, huffed Angel offended, whirling her trident once. “You think I'd cook up a weapon I can't use at least some? I've learned to fight with a staff and I've actually fought with lances before, on horses, when I was working the medieval fair during high school. This? Can't be that much harder. Same principle, just got three points instead of one.”

“The important thing is: You need to concentrate. Your focus is your main weapon. If you focus, you can control water”, stated Pisces seriously. “How much and how far your reach is, that depends on just how well your grip on your concentration is.”

Angel locked eyes with Joss and nodded firmly. Together, the duo ran out from the alley and right into Liddell's Sweets. Joss immediately reached out to cover Angel's eyes. Right. Looked like Medusa, had the powers of Medusa, probably. When Joss removed their hand again, everything around them was foggy. They could vaguely make out shapes, but such a thing as actual eye-contact was impossible. Angel turned to look surprised at her best friend.

“Gemini is under the element of air. I learned to... work with that”, whispered Joss. “Make the air thinner, warmer, colder, thicker. Fog... is pretty easy. But now we have to stay alert.”

“Okay. So. What is this? I mean, this... thing... is... possessing Laureen?”, asked Angel confused.

“Sort of. Your power, your costume, your weapon, they come from a symbiotic bond with Pisces. This is... a more parasitic kind of bond”, replied Joss quickly. “We need to wash it out. In my experience, knocking them out severs the bond. An unconscious body can't be used. When they part, we have to collect the... pearl. Contain it. Got it?”

“Exhaust, wash out, take the jewelry. Simple enough”, nodded Angel seriously.

The hissing of snakes was the only warning before teeth sank into Angel's arm. She screamed and tore her arm away from the vicious Medusa-like monster that used to be this kind, sweet baker.

“If we hurt it, do we hurt her?”, asked Angel panicked.

“It... depends”, sighed Joss. “I don't know for this one. Some are capable of protecting their host.”

Angel stumbled over a petrified customer on the ground. Were they dead? Would they turn back? No time to think on that. Her head snapped up and she zoomed in on the bar.

“Okay. Okay. Okay. Can you distract her?”, asked Angel. “Buy me some time.”

“Sure. Be... careful, Pisces”, requested Joss concerned.

Joss kept their head down as they started fighting hand to hand against the alien symbiote in front of them. Angel hurried over to the bar, turning on the faucet, using everything she could find that was liquid – coffee, tea, even the water from the flower-vases on the table. Closing her eyes, she lifted all the water and aimed it at Laureen-not-Laureen. The snakes screeched as Angel surrounded them in a cocoon of water, causing Joss to immediately back off.

“Pisces. What are you doing?”, asked Joss loudly.

“You said passing out makes them part. So I make her pass out without hurting her. Well. Without hurting her too much. She just has to lose conscience. So. Shut up, because I don't wanna drown her and have to concentrate over here”, barked Angel out.

Joss looked honestly taken aback by that, but remained quiet after. Coma Berenices struggled, until she didn't and her form floating in the pillar of water became limb. A purple light faded from her and left Laureen, snakes turned back to limb dreadlocks. Angel immediately dropped the water, while Joss hurried over to give CPR. When Laureen was spitting water all over, Angel picked up the small marble. Purple and glassy. She blinked curiously and pocketed it.

“What... happened?”, asked Laureen, voice raspy.

“Nothing to worry about. You are safe now, random citizen”, assured Angel.

Joss raised an eyebrow at that, though they then urged Angel on to leave the café behind while the petrified customers slowly turned back human. The two made it around the corner before turning back to their civil identity. Angel handed the marble over to Joss.

“I'll take care of this”, nodded Joss, frowning. “But there are other things that worry me more. Sonia had a Zodiac, just like that. And then knew to give it to someone born under that sign. Then she happens to be out for lunch so you can't give a three-hundred thousand dollar necklace back.”

“You're... not suggesting that Sonia Gold is... involved with this, right?”, asked Angel worried.

With a head-shake, Joss sighed. “Come on. Let's go get lunch, Angel.”

Read here on AO3!

Previous Chapter <- || Masterpost || -> Next Chapter

#Story: Written in the Stars #Own Story #Pisces: Angelique Lamour #Project: Written in the Stars #Superheroes

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behindbeyondbelief · 5 years

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Season 1 episode 4 of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction

Season 1 episode 4 of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction gives us 4 'Fact' stories out of the 5 presented.

Of course, like all of the reportedly true stories in this show, these stories presented in each episode are very loosely based on their real-life counterparts.

Keeping that in mind, dude to the ambiguity brought about by the nature of the series’ storytelling, it can be a challenge finding the real-life stories they are based off of. However, here are a few theories about what the 'true' stories are based off of in this particular episode.

Also! For those of you unaware, this series can be viewed in it’s entirety on Amazon. I believe you can watch it for free if you have Prime.

The first story presented as ‘Fact’ is titled “E-mail”.

In this story a secretary for a law firm receives and e-mail from a mysterious sender. In the e-mail contains a claim that the woman who her boss is helping to receive an inheritance is undeserving of it and that she is lying about her identity. This leads to the shocking discovery that the sender of the e-mail is totally right! But further research reveals that the sender is a man who is already dead. In fact, it’s his death that started this fight over the inheritance in the first place.

No details are given in the episode about the were or when this happened. If anyone out there has any ideas as to what the real story could be, please share it here!

The second Fact story in this episode if titled “Cup of Joe”. In this story three college girls are on their way to a party. However, heavy rain, being unfamiliar with the area, and nightfall have the girls nervous as they try to find the location of the party. Wanting to pull off the road to get some coffee, one of the girls spots a billboard that says there’s a diner off of the next exit. However, upon taking the exit, the girls find that there is nothing there and hurry back onto the highway. Going down the road they are flagged down and told that the road is closed due to a sudden landslide triggered by the rain; had they kept going instead of getting off at the exit they would have been caught up in it and would, odds are, be dead. Upon mentioning that they had been looking for a diner indicated by a billboard and celebrating the miracle of their being spared from the landslide, the officer reacts with disbelief. He informs them that there are no billboards on the highway, as they are illegal. The girls are stunned at the news, leaving them to question what they really saw.

This story seems to have been taken from the book Strange Events Beyond Human Understanding by S. S. Robert Tralins. Many of the Fact stories from Beyond Belief are taken from his books where he retells stories he had collected from interviews with those who have had strange or unbelievable experiences. In his book the story is titled The Billboard That Wasn’t There.

Citations:

Tralins, S. Robert. Strange Events Beyond Human Understanding. New York, NY, ACE BOOKS, INC, 1966, pp. 46-49.

UPDATE:I have found a similar story to this one. In this case, there are multiple vanishing billboards on a highway in Arizona. If you would like to read it for yourself, please check out the chapter on Vortexes and Time Slips in the book True Ghosts: Haunting Tales from the Vaults of FATE Magazine by Andrew Honigman.

The third ‘Fact’ story is titled “Secret of the Family Tomb”. In this story a teenager who ran away from home is killed. Her death is already a great loss to their family, but not long after her step-mother dies as well. Both are laid to rest in a family mausoleum. When the father goes to visit and leave flowers he and the grounds keeper are stunned to find that the grave have been disrupted and the inside of the tomb trashed. This happens a couple more times. The last time the words “not here” are found painted don’t he wall of the tomb. It turns out that the girl ran away from home due to abuse by her step-mother, leading them to believe that as long as they are in the tomb together, her spirit cannot rest and will continue to rage. Removing her step-mother’s body seems to do the trick as the events in the tomb stop happening.

This story seems to be based on the story of the moving coffins of Barbados. A vault was obtained by the Chase family in Barbados in order to bury their family members in 1808. Although their was already someone in the vault, they decided not to move her body. After putting a few of their deceased family members in there, they noticed that each time they opened it the contents were moved around. But not just moved, violently thrown about and upended. This must have taken incredible effort because, if a real-life human being had done it, they would need to first break into he vault, use tremendous strength to move around the enormous heavy caskets, and then leave and relock the vault all without being noticed. The activity stopped once the bodies were removed and buried elsewhere.

Here are a couple websites on the subject for those curious

http://kinsta.blogspot.com/2012/10/halloween-special-2-spooky-unsolved.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20061027000743/http://www.castleofspirits.com/coffins.html

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=181066

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4399

The final Fact story in the episode is titled “The Unknown Patient”. In this story, an ER doctor goes all out to save a patient despite not knowing who he is. The man, assumed to be homeless with no insurance, is still a human being and therefore receives the doctor’s best efforts despite his colleague’s opinions. The next day a man and his wife come into the ER in search of their elderly father. According to them, his death had been reported in the paper which said he had died the night before in the ER. However, this was impossible because they hadn’t even given that information to the newspapers yet. Thanks to the doctor having saved a saint medal from the man, they were able to confirm that the “homeless” man from the night before was indeed the man the couple was looking for. They were unable to find the report in the newspaper afterword, giving incident an air of mystery.

This story seems to be based off of a story from the book Strange Events Beyond Human Understanding by Robert Tralins. Many of the stories from Beyond Belief are based off of stories from his book, which are supposedly true accounts from first hand interviews he had conducted. However, the story in his book is a bit different in that the man did not die and was able to be reunited with his family. The story in the book is titled The Premature Obituary.

Citations

Tralins, S. Robert. Strange Events Beyond Human Understanding. New York, NY, ACE BOOKS, INC, 1966, pp. 44-46.

About the series:

The TV series Beyond Belief; Fact or Fiction ran from 1997 to 2002 on the Fox television network in the United States. An anthology series, each episode featured five short stories, some true or "Fact" and some completely made up "Fiction" revealing only in the last few minutes which stories were true and false. Although the stories that the Fact featurettes are based upon where often very different than what was presented, the base idea of each one, if you can find what the real story in fact is, bears a striking resemblance to the original.

In the episode discussed here, actor James Brolin served as the show’s host, while the narration was provided by famed voice actor Don LaFontaine.

Please, if anyone has any other theories about the stories behind the segments in this show, share them! I think it’s really interesting to hear these sorts of stories and I’m curious about what other similar incidents are out there.

#season1 #episode 4 #supernatural #spooky #bbff #beyond belief #Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction #strange #tv #tv series

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centerforhci · 3 years

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Listening: The Do’s and Don’ts and How To Master It

The human mouth plods along at 125 words per minute, while a neuron in the brain can fire about 200 times a second. No wonder our mind wanders when there’s so much time in between the words of a conversation. This is part of the reason we remember only 25 to 50% of what we hear.

Yet listening is an incredibly important skill for everyone—including leaders. Why? If you’re not listening at work, it’s easy to misinterpret a discussion as a decision. You may underestimate the importance of objections and ambivalence. And not listening is a quick way to dissolve trust between leaders and their teams.

From my experience, leaders could use some listening practice. Why don’t they listen? Though Richard Branson once joked that leaders love to hear their own voices, there are two main reasons. For one, in general, people are not taught how to carefully listen. And secondly, society expects leaders and entrepreneurs to have all the answers.

Truly listening to someone is more difficult than it seems and requires practice. Yet practicing takes more than just “keeping it in mind” throughout your day. Let’s look at five levels of listening, the do’s and don’ts of listening, and steps you can take to improve your listening skills.

There are several levels of listening, but here are five I find most important.

Highlight: Five Levels of Listening

Ignoring is something we have all done. Someone is talking to us, but we are exploring things on the Internet, checking text messages, or thinking “what’s for dinner”. We are not actually hearing much of anything.

Pretend listening occurs when a person acts as if they are listening, but is not following the full story of what is being said. They nod and smile but do not actually take in the message. This is a skill that can be finely honed by people who do a lot of inconsequential listening, such as politicians and royalty. We all do pretend listening at times; be careful because it can damage relationships when you get caught.

Selective listening involves listening for particular things and ignoring other things. We hear what we want to hear and sometimes block out details that we are not interested in, or simply don’t want to hear. We listen for what we agree with, and then only remember that. Or we listen only for ways we don’t agree (this is usually as a result of a conflict), which can be quite frustrating when trying to come to an agreement.

Attentive listening is what many of us do most of the time. This is when we listen to the other person with the best intention, yet become distracted by our thoughts of how we will respond. In attentive listening, we dip inside our own heads for a short while, try to determine what the person really means, and formulate questions for the person before we start listening again. If you find that you’re doing this, ‘fess up! Let the other person know that your mind wandered and say, “Could you please repeat that?”

Empathic listening happens when the listener pays very close attention to what is being said, how it is being said, the message that is being portrayed, and what is not being said. Empathic listening takes much more effort than attentive listening, as it requires close concentration. It also requires empathy and understanding. You’re listening for the emotions, watching the body language and listening for needs, goals, preferences, biases, beliefs, values and so on. In other words, you’re listening in surround sound.

How to Be a Better Listener

Listening is actually a little painful. When we talk, we get a rush of chemicals sent to our reward and pleasure centers, so it is a selfish brain activity. There is no reward like that for listening. When you listen, you are halting your natural ways of thinking; it’s like holding your breath. Yet listening is a skill that can be learned, like a fitness test of the brain.

The first step to better listening is to choose to be a better listener and decide that it’s an important skill to you. It takes effort and a strategy and much like any sport, you will want to learn the steps, and then practice, practice, practice.

A Listening Acronym to Keep In Mind

Here is an acronym to help you become a better listener: NALE it.

N Note what is being said.

A Ask questions to clarify the story, and refine ambiguous words.

L Look at what the other person is doing. Are they relaxed, tense, looking away? This is all part of the communication they are sharing with you.

E Evaluate what you think is really going on with the person. You are not a psychologist yet, with a little empathy, you might pick up on some messages that are not being said. This gives you an opportunity to ask more questions. Stay in a curious state and you will learn so much more in less time.

Listening Do’s and Don’ts

To improve your listening, DO:

Be 100% present. This means turning off all electronics, and keeping your eyes on the person.

Be content to listen and to stay in the conversation until they feel like they are fully heard.

Ask questions and take notes, including clarifying meanings of words. Many words in the English language have more than one meaning, or can vary drastically (such as the word “soon”).

Show courtesy in your posture and your tone of voice by leaning into the conversation, and keeping your voice level.

Allow emotions to flow freely, and acknowledge the emotions with your words.

Pretend that you will be tested on what you heard and understood, if you are finding it difficult to concentrate.

To improve your listening, DON’T:

React emotionally. Stay calm and focused on the other person.

Offer suggestions or advice. This is a hard one! Yet if you are truly listening, all you’re doing is pulling information out. As soon as you start suggesting solutions, you are no longer listening.

Talk about yourself. Even if you have had the same experience, don’t tell your story. It takes the attention off the person and back onto you. A simple “I have been there” can do the trick.

Look at anything but the person. Stay focused on the person’s eyes, facial expressions, and body language.

Are you good at fully listening to others? Is listening a challenge for you? We’d love to hear your ideas about why listening may be difficult for leaders. Also, if you have experience working on your listening skills, let us know what steps you have taken.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send us an email, or find us on Twitter.

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#executive coaching washington dc #executive coaching dc #executive coach dc #executive coach washington dc #personal executive coach in DC

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elizabethrobertajones · 8 years

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(1/2) I can literally understand all of your bi-dean meta except for the male siren thing. The siren literally was trying to be the perfect little brother for Dean. I mean the siren literally says "I should be your little brother. Sam. You can't trust him. Not like you can trust me. In fact, I really feel like you should get him outta the way, so we can be brothers. Forever." as well as "No. I gave him what he needed. And it wasn't some bitch in a G-string. It was you. A little brother."

(2/2) I mean I’m NOT against bi-dean, everyone has the right to their own opinions. And A LOT of your analysis is interesting and valid, but if your suggesting that bi-dean is proven through “Sex and Violence.”, I’m lost, cause that seems to have incestuous subtext rather than bi-dean subtext (not that there’s anything wrong with shipping Wincest). I mean Dean could get any girl (and probably guy) if he wanted. The siren revealed what he needed/wanted most was family(specifically Sam)…

(3/2) Cause at this point, tensions were high between the brothers due to Sam’s powers/secrets and Dean needed someone he felt he could trust by his side, a little brother who was devoted to him, some one who understood him (which is why Nick shared the same tastes and interest). I mean I have a little sister and every time she likes something I enjoy, I’m fucking ecstatic. I mean I’ve watched this episode so many times and I fail to see how this is anything but an episode meant to solidify…

(4/2) and push the point that the brothers were not on the same page, and it foreshadowed the future fight and subsequent rift b/t them in “When the Levee Breaks.” I mean y'all say that Nick was a sexual being meant to seduce Dean, but it’s still weird cause he’s trying to being the perfect brother in canon. Sorry this got so long, I’m just curious at why so many people think the male siren has anything to do with bisexuality (of the non-incestuous variety, cuz I can see tht meta 4 wincest ship)

Heya!

I think this is really to do with something I was talking about last night about suggestive subtext, when trying (incoherently) to explain why I didn’t think Dean getting his memories back was textual - I think it can be taken as a strong reading and I wouldn’t disagree because I literally make the same reading, but I think it’s implied canon. Ditto the bi subtext around Larry this latest episode. We all know it’s a mechanical bull with a gendered name, not a human male, but between Dean being told he “had the hots” and the ridiculously pornographic riding sequence, and the general phallic nature of the bar they were in, it all still is overwhelmingly suggestive of queerness.

When it comes to the siren we actually had some more of this suggestiveness this episode which sort of repeats my point I’ll make about it: we only heard Sam say that there could be male sirens. No context, about brothers or even the context of the case for the easiest surface reading that it was just trying to get some hunters off its back by any means necessary. If you’ve forgotten the siren episode or it’s only a dim hazy memory and you sort of connect it to Dean but don’t regularly chug the entirety of canon and then yell about it with strangers online, the episode is not as memorable. So it’s really just posing the point that sirens aren’t all hot chicks, and giving us Dean’s reaction because, right then, he is the casual viewer, and all he knows is the concept that a siren could seduce you as a guy as well, and he just says, “huh.”

Its surface text reading (and I checked this with my mum after watching because she’s admitted she has 0 queer subtext reading skills but is a very smart, character-driven writer who knows how to read a text) is platonic, not remotely sexual, and when I told her that some of the fandom takes it as proof of Wincest, she burst into hysterical laughter at the concept, and explained to me the reading that Dean is just concerned about his brother and it was an obvious exploitable emotional weakness.

(So the rest of this answer is like a more than usual implied “sorry Mum” :P)

To me, this episode works by sorting out several layers and understanding that any reading of it you make has to have at least the surface text pasted firmly on top at all times. It WAS a platonic brother thing, and that’s the only way to wring a successful queer reading out of it, because if you start to suggest too far, you immediately cross over into wincest territory, by suggesting the surface text has the sexual element and that it was actually present in the episode as like, feelings and shit the characters were dealing with.

If you look at it as SUGGESTIVE subtext, accept that the siren is “just” Larry the mechanical bull, then you have exactly the right angle on it for the “huh” of your own.

So, I guess you’re bringing up the meta I wrote about Bobby and 4x06/4x14 - in that case Bobby is the perfect little “huh” angle into it. No one tells him on screen about the brother thing. He definitely knows the siren was presenting as male when it attacked Dean. He killed the thing :P He was the one who sussed it out by checking Nick’s FBI alias out. He knew for half the episode that Dean was being stalked by a male siren, came in, killed it, and aside from some pointed looks from under his hat, didn’t mention it.

There’s a popular text post about the episode that goes:

remember how sam and dean both thought that the siren infected its victims through sex

and when sam walks into the motel room to find dean with nick-the-siren and dean’s totally under the siren’s control sam just

rolls with it

This is the suggestive subtext at work. Nothing here affects the actual text of the episode: it’s about both our interpretation and interpretation within the text of the episode about how this situation might be read. (Obviously this mentions Sam but it goes doubly for Bobby who didn’t see the talky part of the fight, and is never corrected on screen about what he just saw.)

It’s not about wilfully forgetting that the episode has a main text about the brothers, but to see beyond it, within that text. I think it’s probably the causes of the biggest misunderstandings about this episode when you see arguing about it because I think an all or nothing “it’s literally about bisexuality” gets usurped by “I should be your brother” but saying “it’s just about these surface text platonic feelings (because the show would never make it about surface text wincest)” also means you block yourself off from analysing it. The wincest reading of the episode exists in the exact same liminal space of the subtext as the bisexual reading, which means they stumble all over each other and makes the arguments incredibly difficult to untangle because two people can both stand there pulling on the arms of the same moment arguing it means different things in a way most episodes don’t have when it comes to direct, sexual subtextual readings. (e.g the Dean & pie/cake subtext if you don’t agree can just be discarded, rather than it being directly suggestive of the completely alternative reading.)

Like, stuff your ears to the other subtext and sail right on past :P (When I did the rewatch I actually did essentially lash myself to the mast and demand to hear the song while obviously letting the ship sail to the proper place without getting dashed on the rocks, and I think it’s compelling but not my subtext and most importantly, since I read 0% of other episodes as having overt Wincest readings but many many episodes as having overt bi!Dean readings, I’m utterly secure in literally watching the siren episode and picking out the Wincest subtext and being like “yeah okay then”)

If you don’t assume that the show is saying anything profound about Wincest, though, and the “i should be your brother” is just a deflection away from overt sexual readings, it’s much more interesting for the bi Dean subtext. An example I’ve compared it to before is in 2x03, which follows a very similar emotional pattern to this episode with Dean and Gordon. Before Sam and Dean fight, we’ve seen Dean get VERY buddy buddy with Gordon, and there’s a wealth of suggestive subtext in their very brief interactions since they bond alarmingly fast at a bar, thirdwheeling Sam, and that’s immediately got hook up connotations. When Sam confronts Dean he has a sort of “I know what this is about” moment and there’s a real “Oh shit he’s going to tell Dean he’s crushing on Gordon and his judgement is impaired” moment, before Sam tells him it’s because Dean misses John and is filling the gap. I do not think the suggestiveness of Gordon and Dean’s interactions suggests that Dean had the hots for John, just like I carry on not thinking that when Crowley starts his official seduction in 9x11 comparing himself to John, or later in 10x01, to Sam.

Once I’ve got a surface reading and the deflection and the way it was read in the aftermath (yeah we’re working backwards through the episode here :P) then there’s a kind of solid place of understanding my own interpretation to examine the rest of it.

There’s this article which would be kind of pointless as evidence in other cases of actor commentary on the story because PR is not showrunning, etc, and we can’t really depend on them to answer with a proper understanding of what WE are listening out for, or what the show has crafted around their understanding, but in this one when we’re looking at suggestiveness is fascinating:

http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/147614438213/bluestar86-findmyjaffa-mishabethyname

“yeah, at that point I thought he should be ambiguously sexual. As an FBI agent he was a guys guy, but this creature wasn’t a guy or a girl. I tried to find something in between and enjoyed having control over these boys in a sexual way”

This is not describing anything between Sam and Dean, but how the actor played it between himself and them - he saw the siren at work, as using sexuality as part of its control. This reading applies to the entire episode, with all the cases of the siren at work, but obviously those were all “hot chick” siren moments, and so exerting control over the men was a given that it had been using a strip club full of female dancers as the lure to find them, so they’d be understandably into hot women. Which means the overt reading of sexuality is oh so much easier to make and credit and honestly having him say even this much about it is pretty dramatic, though of course as a killed-off one time character, he’s got a lot more freedom to chat about the process and admit to playing up sexuality in a room with 3 male actors.

I’m just going to grab my laughing from the rewatch I did for the next point, about the gap between Nick commenting that he was the siren and had trapped Dean, and the brother line:

That glorious, glorious moment of floating amazement where the it-was-a-actual-legit-seduction text peaks, and you’re allowed a moment from which most bi Dean peeps never recovered. (There’s a three strikes and you’re out policy here: Playthings, this, Dr Sexy. :P)

Because of course, whatever comes out Nick’s weasely mouth once I press play again, the question has been asked. The idea has been planted. It doesn’t matter what they say after this even setting aside all the logic of siren lore explained in the episode or any of the other circumstantial stuff which leads me to my text of the episode conclusion this is a bi Dean episode through and through.

They gave Dean a male siren and gave us these few seconds to let us reflect on that in its pure, this-was-a-seduction in the main text of the episode moment. There’s a level outside the text here where they set this all up, and threw this at us, and handled it in such a way as to leave it open to going on 7 years of fandom arguments about what interpretation was the correct one of the 3 on the table. This is the thing about these fandom arguments: when it comes to people trying to tell those who see Dean as bi that they’re making it up or something, or putting it into the text themselves, the response is usually, no, we’ve got it from the show. Even if you immediately go along with one of the other 2 alternatives (it was platonic all along despite the siren’s sexually charged MO: it was about a sexual proxy for Sam all along despite the fact the siren textually does not have to replace like for like objects of affection) THIS MOMENT before we know it’s officially about Sam, the show is textually letting you think about it for 3 seconds in a deadly serious context.

It’s like 2:30am I need to stop waxing on about this but seriously this fucking moment.

http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/125513601548/spn-hellatus-rewatch-4x14-or-honestly-this

If I ever try to explain to myself WHY this episode is bi Dean, it’s all resting first and foremost on those few seconds of screen time, because in that point, no take-back has been offered. Knowing there IS a take-back a second later doesn’t actually detract from the raw suggestiveness of this moment, which let us think, if we picked up on it immediately, that Dean had a male siren and had been seduced just like all the men and their “hot chicks”. It allows a whole moment where it seems like the show is telling us that Dean is *just* into men and the siren managed to snare him that way by catching him unawares. After all, Sam and Dean are looking for a siren-cum-stripper so getting in under their noses would be important. Dean didn’t trust Cara because she was female despite her being in a generally more socially accepted job, and she was used as a deliberate false lead by Nick (by planting the flowers) AND the show to imply that someone in their general vicinity that they’d been having a thing with that episode could be the siren. Sam’s new female character hook up was not, in fact the siren. Dean’s new male friend WAS. Admittedly it’s a lot of thinking to do in 3 seconds but if you’ve been waiting for the blow to fall that the siren has been worming its way in romantically as Cara, and going along with the surface text of the episode so far, then the instinctive “wait WHAT” is enough to do the work here before the show comes back out of slow mo and carries on like usual, establishing a nice safe cushion-y layer of no homo.

The show DOES however offer its own reading on TOP of the no homo, within the episode, to make it absolutely unequivocally clear there’s a “no incest” reading too - the surface text is EXTREMELY fragile this episode and they do a lot of hard work and backpedalling to try and maintain the fragile surface tension, so, still working backwards through the episode, we get to this:

DEANSo whatever floats the guy’s boat, that’s what they look like?

SAMYeah. You see, sirens can read minds. They see what you want most and then they can kinda, like, cloak themselves. You know, like an illusion.

Cut to the siren seducing the next dude and cue the sweet relief of the subtext that shatters the first interpretation offered by the subtext so far. Sam n Dean have had their relationship portrayed a certain way (overtly: the lying and ongoing season 4 angst, subtextually, a little odd framing and more stray comments beyond the norm) and the episode will come down about said relationship, but this random bloke is the key to what happens next.

Siren:

Disappointed mom and Jesus judging this guy:

The siren emphasises not that she’s a sexual rival (although we don’t know if that guy has Oedipal issues) but mentions that she is a sink on his time and an anchor stopping him from running away with them to be alone together forever and ever and ever, which, with their line about him not sticking her in a care home yet, suggest that she is ill and frail enough to be a full-time job for the guy, much like Dean is stuck with Sam as part of their full-time job and ongoing “look after Sammy” mentality.

So before Nick ever shows up it’s clearly shown that “floats the boat” has a surface level disconnect to the target of murder (and it’s just that statistically the siren is going after mostly hetero dudes with wives, given where they pick the men up and how lends itself to the typical MO). This scene is obviously the “lol no incest” for the end of the episode once the siren tries to drive them apart. […] Both sexualised interpretations live on: the massive logic leap to say “yeah well what if there were Oedipal undertones to this relationship?” which is a headcanon you can float which will mean the siren can still get Dean for that reason, but at this point, the main text of the episode becomes: “the siren will use sexuality to seduce the man, but the target closest to the man that will be the victim is that of unfortunate proximity, not necessarily a sexual rival to the siren.” And therefore, until the reveal after Dean drinks from the flask, we have a long stretch of episode where Nick is main-text seducing Dean with no argument, and the only counter-argument offered is Nick’s own words.

[…]

DEANWait, he killed his mom?

SAMThe woman he was closest to.

Dean’s thoughts go there. Sam shrugs it off, having either not noticed this is weird because new info makes sense to him, or he’s already worked this one through and come to the realisation the siren’s pattern isn’t strictly sexual or that this was a thing but he’s not going to judge. :P So we have two conflicting interpretations at work here; Sam’s chill attitude which surface level suggests there was nothing odd about it, and Dean’s ‘ugh wait but with the information I had available to me I have come to an incredibly awkward realisation!’ tone of voice. (And the subtextually buried one contradicted by the main text of Sam’s dialogue where it is also possible he assumes like Dean this was incest but that it isn’t weird/gross enough for comment.) Sam is implied to be ahead and be offering a rational explanation for this to Dean, i.e. wow that was an unfortunate interpretation, Dean! Fortunately, I, a better-informed individual who has had more information to work with than you before we started this conversation, have come up with a rational alternate explanation which does not involve incest!

This one particular death has pretty much the whole episode riding on it when it comes to interpretation because it is used as the way to confirm non-incestuous relationship replacement with the siren (which along with the siren still showing sexual control over Sam and Dean when he has them under his control backs up the way it seduces the man and says they should run off together romantically - Nick also makes them fight in order to be in love with one of them ~forever~ (a.k.a until the spell wears off and the survivor comes to his senses and probably kills himself over what he did)) - of course because despite the focus on the mother, the man still sleeps with the siren and it’s still framed as a romantic/sexual seduction to get him to the point of murder. The sexual element persisting after the siren says “I should be your brother” is a point I’ll get to better in a minute when I recap the conclusion from my rewatch but does essentially give you the choice of reading that he was talking crap there :P

There’s also the implication of the empty beds/back and forth of the episode, where Sam and Dean’s time management parallels back and forth. There’s suggestive subtext here between Dean and Nick because Sam has wall-banging sex with Cara, and their part of the story is directly back and forthing with Dean and Nick - we have some serious gaps in time, and when Sam returns to the room just before the fight, Nick and Dean are waiting, on those neatly made beds that seem to see no action. I don’t think they slept together. BUT the suggestiveness is right there and people have commented on it and picked it up, so it’s a valid part of the subtextual layer.

Here’s the conclusions I came to in my rewatch:

Aw, Nick, no. We were having so much fun.

MUNROEOr it could be her saliva… You really should have wiped the lip of that thing before you drank from it, Dean. I should be your little brother. Sam. You can’t trust him. Not like you can trust me. In fact, I really feel like you should get him outtta the way, so we can be brothers. Forever.

DEANYeah. Yeah, you’re right.

So, what’s left on the table?

Completely valid if out of left field for the episode’s subtext alternate reading of Dean as somewhere on the Aro spectrum so the siren doesn’t affect him at all romantically, and goes for filling the emotional void it creates from a different angle (several season 3 moments imply Dean has a void in himself for romantic love as emphatically distinct from his need for Sam, but I’m pretty sure I clocked them all coming from Sera as an ongoing subtext about Lisa as endgame, including foreshadowing of what happened with Lisa in the long run when Gamble got to write that full arc, so you could argue A: it’s all from one source as with the many contradictory writer impressions of Dean’s sexual/romantic identity, and B: it wasn’t even as straightforward as that even when she was implying it existed, as that relationship eventually wrecked itself upon the shores of the brotherly bond too, by her pen).

The interpretation that this was just about Sam, platonically, because this is his closest relationship, and the siren, recognising he was a hunter, needed to get to him fast (the other victims took a lot of softening up and a hefty blow to their bank accounts first because this is clearly how the siren makes a living: like the shifters it doesn’t need to kill to eat, just for fun, using its powers for personal benefit and amusement) and so it took an alternate approach to get under his skin in a day using the available tools: Dean is all fucked up about Sam’s secrets and sneaking around talking to Ruby and being a monster and so on, creating an ideal weak spot to get at him: Nick creates an uncomplicated ideal other human for Dean to adopt as a brother in the shortest time possible, because he fully intends just to make the hunters kill each other/themselves on realising what they did and leg it out of town before anyone comes to finish him off and so to Nick the sexual side of it is an unnecessary complication to tidying up the situation.

As above, but the wincest reading, with the siren’s sexually charged MO included despite the only proxy-kiss because of all the subtextual implications and the apparent links between Nick and Sam.

As point 2 again, but with the siren’s sexually charged MO still counting in the background of why Nick, because Dean’s repressed bisexuality made him a double easy target. Dean would not suspect the dude, while thinking he was hunting a stripper, and yet the siren’s MO still works on him as Dean’s “float the boat” umbrella is very wide. The “brother” thing goes back to the main text platonic reasons, and Nick just needs to say something to get Dean on his side that’s still broadly in character for Dean (like, he would not have just magically got through his whole gay panic in that moment: the other victims were all aware of who they were and what they wanted throughout [see also: the first man they interviewed at the start]: part of Dean’s horror in this moment is probably realising the siren affected him AS Nick and having the same moment of wondering about himself before Nick’s reassuring words ease him along - oh, this is just about Sam). So in this case Nick finds it easier to go for the surface reasons Dean was emotionally vulnerable with the emphasis on his lack of trust in Sam, because Dean IS emotionally vulnerable in his most important relationship, and creates an ideal other person is someone who represents Sam just enough to show he fits the emotional void, but is sufficiently different enough (fun, common traits and interests to Dean, trustworthy) to count as a separate identity to Sam (because Dean does have a ton of issues which do not necessarily have to be incestuous but can be to do with the most important relationship in his life having an overbearing effect on everything he does and the way he relates to other people, as constantly shown elsewhere without demanding we pay attention to the alternative reading unless the viewer is inclined to like it and look for it).

And I am aware that after talking about how the incest subtext takes the most leaps along the way, it’s the bisexuality argument which, by being debunked by platonic bros main text, gets relegated to the back seat, now needs a strong counter-argument to its own “debunking”, while the main text is more compatible to the other subtext’s conclusions.

This is why there are fights. :P

Obviously I choose to believe the very careful mental meanderings that back up my reading that there is a suggestive element to the episode that can imply Dean’s bisexuality without having to credit that the sexual element includes a wincest reading, and as I said, this is because the episode is highly suggestive, but everything it tries to tell us in text is broadly the platonic bros reading, so it is left to choice, favoured interpretation, emotional preference, whatever, to pick out what you want. There’s a valid in-text suggestion that the siren does NOT work incestuously even when the most important relationship is a family one, and if you use these as the guidelines, the rest of the suggestiveness about the sexual elements can just be read as the fact that Dean was into Nick as a person rather than having been attracted to him because he reminded him of Sam.

Although honestly it really just comes down to part 23346346 of infinity under the same heading as:

why I’m on the dean is bi train:

we’d never get a two minute montage of sam “riding larry.”

http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/157196244593/goodfemalecharacters-why-im-on-the-dean-is-bi

#Asks #4x14 #references to #12x11 #Dean is bi #long post for ts #incest for ts #suicide mention cw

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attractionjapan · 7 years

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Indirect vs. Direct Game in Japan

One of the biggest debates since the inception of the pickup community (at least in the West) has been whether to open direct or indirect. The power games of the Mystery era often settled for traditional pickup lines and indirect openers, such as opinion openers (“Can I get a female opinion on something…”). Roosh V talks about geriatric game for his international style, which essentially is an indirect style of opening based around the “elderly opener” – talk about something mundane, like a smartphone you just bought, a laptop she’s using, or whatever else seems vaguely amicable and unthreatening enough even a social elderly person would open you with. Many gamers in the early stages of the Jlair / Japan pickup scene trumpeted indirect openers like “Can you read this kanji?” or “Where is the starbucks?”

Guys in the other camp are proponents of direct game, such as telling a girl something like “Hey I noticed you from over there and just thought you were so cute so I had to come say hi.” Or “Aren’t you just adorable.” These ballsier openers lay your intentions out on the line for all to see right off the bat, and play to the power of confidence and honesty.

I break it all down in the video below (skip down below the video if you prefer text)

youtube

In reality, both of these types of openers have various strengths and weaknesses. Indirect openers are more likely to elicit an initial response, but can leave the girl feel as if you’ve bait-and-switched her unless you make a smooth transition. Also, you’ll have to deal with the fact that you’re hiding your intentions from the beginning and trying to come in under the radar. Long-term, this kind of approach can mentally tax gamers who crave honesty and purity of intention.

Direct openers, on the other hand, require some balls. On the bright side, they communicate all your intentions right off the bat. On the downside, they can be a bit overpowering, like using a bulldozer to bust down a door which you simply could have pushed open. Additionally, giving away compliments right off the bat gives the girl a bunch of validation she didn’t ask for and has probably heard many times, undermining the power of your brazen approach. The effect can be like ramming cookies down a kid’s throat before dinner – their appetite is spoiled before the main course arrives.

Ultimately, direct and indirect openers share something in common: the desire to explain the context of the interaction. In other words, indirect openers communicate “This isn’t a romantic approach (it’s something else)” and direct openers communicate “This is a romantic approach, and I like you.” However, this very need to explain yourself is the root of a subtle problem in the entire framing of the interaction.

Why do you even feel the need to explain yourself at all when opening a girl? If you were the king of a country, the boss of a company, the lord of a district, would you ever feel the need to explain why you talk to someone or ask a question? If she was your girlfriend, would you explain why you’re talking to her?

What if I told you there was a third, better way of approaching?

The Assumed Opener

I present to you the assumed opener. The assumed opener is how I open about 90% of my approaches, and how I recommend guys do pickup in Japan, especially on the street. The assumed open means you do not explain the context of why you are talking to her unless she brings it up. Instead, you assume your right to communicate with the girl (without explanation), and assume she will respond. After all, opening women on the street (or anyone or anything that piques your interest) is entirely natural, and shouldn’t be considered some otherworldly or momentous occasion which demands explanation. If she feels confused or is a bit dense as to the reason (most won’t be), she can ask you why you’re talking to her, at which point you can enlighten her.

Many guys are familiar with this strategy of vagueness in other areas, such as keeping the relationship status vague until confronted by the dreaded “So what are we?” questions, or pulling girls home with an ambiguous “We’re going to an afterparty” or “Let’s have a drink just up this way. 5 minutes this way.” Yes, we can call this tactic male omission: purposefully leaving out a piece of information until confronted with a direct question about it. And perhaps even then kicking the can further down the road.

What advantages does the assumed open carry over both direct and indirect openers? Let’s break them down.

-The assumed open assumes rapport with the girl rather than asking for it

-The assumed open conveys that talking to a stranger in the street is not a big deal. So much so that it needs no explanation, pretense, or context.

-The assumed open doesn’t give away too much validation or unearned, shallow compliments based on physical appearance (as the direct opener often does)

-The assumed open doesn’t mask your intentions behind a false premise (as the indirect opener does)

-The assumed open assumes the girl will open, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy

-The assumed open casually initiates the interaction and sets the vibe of “us talking together” rather than “me vs. you” or “me picking you up”

– in other words, it is communion, not antagonism

-The assumed open leverages the power of ambiguity and leaves her wondering what you actually want, which builds sexual tension

Yes, much like Schroedinger’s cat, once something is known, it loses some magic. The dance of seduction is at its most powerful when the woman suspects but does not know for sure if you like her. The assumed opener preserves this magic and leverages it for maximal effect off the open.

So what does the assumed opener practically look like? Here are a few simple examples.

-”You’ve got some curious blue shoes there”

-”You seem to be human.”

-”Just finished demolishing a hamburger over in Daikanyama. What are you up to?”

Yes, these fall somewhere between a direct compliment or explanation and indirect beating around the bush. You simply just begin talking to the girl. It’s important to note as well that pretty much anything can work – the content doesn’t have to be incredible. In fact, since the language barrier can often be an issue, it helps if the content is rather simple and easy to understand.

The final 10%

So I mentioned that the assumed opener accounts for about 90% of my opens. What about the last 10%? In what cases are indirect or direct openers (as opposed to assumed openers) most effective? If you are spotlighted, blatantly seen, or “clocked” on the approach in no uncertain terms (ie – she is looking directly at you and clearly notices you approaching), you can (but don’t need to) go direct. If you are in a rush on your way somewhere and have a very short time to make a good impression, you can (but don’t need to) go direct (“Hey I just saw you and think you look cute, but I’m in a huge rush right now. Let’s talk next time. What’s your LINE”) and this often works best (especially when your rush is legitimate). On the other hand, indirect can work if something conveniently incidental does pop up and strike you or if you do legitimately need directions somewhere or some sort of assistance. Otherwise, indirect rarely is the best choice. Finally, if you simply cannot fathom approaching at all, forget about this entire discussion and use whatever method gets you talking to girls. Ultimately, techniques and specifics come secondary to concrete action. As always, do whatever leads you to talk to more girls who inspire you.

The post Indirect vs. Direct Game in Japan appeared first on Attraction Japan.

from Attraction Japan http://attractionjapan.com/indirect-direct-opener-japan/

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