#JEREMY IS ALIVE?

[dont-freeze-together]

[4axel4loop]

"the task of being alive is a sacred one" / Book of Ancestors, Margaret Atwood

[jermaobsession]

[puppetlefty]

Yeah I’m posting my au now. Cause I need to make my own fnaf content now that fnaf week is over.

[jeremyfrail]

Jeremy Strong photographed for GQ. Working with Jacques Marie Mage, Kendall Roy’s Favorite Sunglasses Brand

[alittlecrow]

Portrait study from the Solitary Cyclist.

I started this in July with the intention of finishing it before the Letters from Watson substack finished SOLI and that did Not happen.

I’ve been gradually chipping away at it ever since with it being about 20hrs just for the digital rendering. And it only took that long because I had to keep scrapping and restarting Holmes’ face and hand. All my love for Jeremy Brett, but his face is so specific that it was the greatest struggle to get his likeness any decent. And I still find it lacking. But what can you do.

I appreciate the learning experience this gave and it’s made me increase my efforts in digital painting in the weeks since I started it. And my complaints aside, I really did enjoy the process. Frustrating at times, but very rewarding. And I’m quite proud to have finished it instead of leaving it in my wips folder for eternity.

Anyways, bonus traditional sketch with too big Holmes Head and too small Watson Head and initial color comp.

[kevindavidday]

if tsc 2 cover is a duck...if jean covers his tattoo with a duck or a daffodil...if jeremy hears about elodie and gives jean a cardboard duck named quack quack von quackenstein...

[hotvintagepoll]

If Ava and Jean both make it to round 3, will there be a three-way poll to keep the numbers even?

Yes. Anyone who makes it to round 3 via tie will be put into a three-way poll. This will be disastrous for everyone involved.

[driftingvoid-155]

Scooped Mike laying on top of Jeremy with his ear pressed to his chest, listening to his heartbeat as Jeremy sleeps beneath him and feeling a little melancholic bc his own heart no longer beats but also being happy because Jeremy’s does and it’s here with him

[ambeauty]

✨Family✨

[chryseiswriting-blog]

Hey hey, what if Ichirou’s fiancée is Jeremy’s sister 🙃

[thecryptidart1st]

So here's my little au idea thing that could fit into your Alive au: We have Michael & Sammy as Gregory's dads', so what if Cassie & Gregory are cousins & Evan is Cassie's dad?

OKAY SO I LOVE THIS????

NGL THE PLAN I HAD IN MIND WAS THAT CASSIE WOULD'VE BEEN STILL PART OF THE ALIVE AU'S EMILY-AFTON-FITZGERALD FAMILY.

BUT THIS????

IT FITS WAAAAAAAAY BETTER, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE I HAVE ELIZABETH BEING THE MOTHER OF VANESSA IN THE ALIVE AU

SO NOW ALL THE AFTON KIDS HAVE KIDS AND IT SHOWS HOW EACH OF THEM TREAT THEIR KIDS AFTER BEING RAISED BY WILLIAM

[vivitalks]

Last night I saw the Great Gatsby musical. Before I went, I reread the Great Gatsby book (for the first time since 11th grade!) to get a refresher on the source material and the original story. Having the book so fresh in my mind made seeing the musical really interesting, and now I am going to do something I never thought I'd do, which is post some lengthy meta about The Great Gatsby. If you haven't seen the musical, this post may still be interesting to read, but it does contain some mild spoilers, so I leave that up to you. If you also haven't read the book, godspeed lol.

There's a lot I could talk about here when it comes to the way the book was adapted for the stage. But there's one particular thing I want to zero in on in this post, and that's the "unreliable narrator" of it all.

In the book, Nick Carraway is our narrator. He's an unreliable narrator practically by default - the idea is that he's retelling events that occurred two years prior, from memory. But even knowing that Nick is probably not reporting all events and characters with complete accuracy, it's hard to know which parts exactly are wrong, or what might have happened in reality, because even though he's an unreliable narrator, he's still the only narrator and this is the only version of events we know. We're forced to take Nick as our surrogate and take him at his word. Until the musical.

(I wondered how the show was going to deal with the fact that the story of Great Gatsby is not only told by an unreliable narrator but also by an outside perspective - generally speaking the events of the Great Gatsby aren't happening to Nick, they're just kind of happening around him. Yet he's the voice of the story, so in that way he's central to it, and I was curious how they were going to balance that fact with the fact that Gatsby is functionally the main character.

I think they struck a really good balance in the end. Nick's beginning and ending lines, lifted verbatim from his book narration, frame him clearly as the anchor of the story - I think that's the best word for it; the audience jumps from scene to scene, many but not all of which contain Nick, but we know that Nick is always going to be where the action is, or that he will at least know about it. He may not be the main character, but he's an essential character. But I digress a little bit.)

The difference between the way the story is imparted to the audience in the book versus in the musical boils down to this: in the book, Nick "plays" every character, so all their dialogue and actions, their mannerisms and the way they're described and reported, it's all informed by the beliefs Nick holds about them. Whether he means to or not, his biases paint certain characters in certain lights, and because he is our eyes and ears to the story, we have no choice but to absorb those biases.

But in the musical, every character is literally played by a different actor. Nick can only speak for himself. Nick can only tell his own parts as they happened. He may be "telling" the story, but we're watching the story. We have the benefit of an unblemished perspective on things - we can watch the events the way they actually unfold, regardless of how Nick believes or remembers they went down.

This difference - between Nick as the narrator and Nick as merely his own voice - is crucial in how the musical develops each character, some of them fairly different from how Nick described them in the book. And there's one book-to-stage change - a fairly small one, all things considered - that, to me, illustrated this difference perfectly.

There's a line towards the end of the Gatsby book. Something Nick says in narration, after his final conversation with Tom Buchanan, talking about how Tom gave away Gatsby's name and location to George Wilson (which ultimately led to Gatsby's death). Nick writes:

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"

When I read this line in the book, I couldn't help vehemently agreeing. Screw those rich assholes! Money does corrupt! Tom and Daisy ARE careless wealthy people! It was easy to side with Nick, not only because he was the only perspective on the situation that I had, but also because he said this in internal response to a conversation with Tom, who, I think we can all agree, is a major jackass and a deeply unsympathetic character.

But in the musical, this line is spoken aloud by Nick. And he says it to Daisy, in her house, as she's packing up to skip town after Gatsby's death. In fact, he doesn't just say it; he shouts it, visibly and audibly outraged at her audacity to lead Gatsby on, ghost him, skip his funeral, and then move away to avoid the fallout. Nick is angry and highly critical of Daisy. But because we're no longer confined to his shoes, we also get to see Daisy's reaction - not as Nick remembers it, but as Daisy actually reacts. And because of that, we're able to really see, and confirm, that "Daisy is rich and careless" is not the full story.

I have to credit Eva Noblezada for a phenomenal performance (duh). Daisy in this scene is emotional, grieving, and it's clear she has been trying to contain these feelings for the sake of her husband and her own sanity. She's remorseful, not that Gatsby is gone necessarily, but that she allowed herself to entertain the fantasy of running away with him, only for it to be torn from her. She is trying to make the best of her unavoidable reality. And then Nick tears her a new one, calling her careless, accusing her of destroying things and being too rich to care.

And as I watched that scene, I was no longer wholly on Nick's side. I understood that this situation was so much more complex than Nick's chastisement acknowledged. Sure, Daisy wasn't innocent, but she also wasn't the callous rich girl Nick made her out to be. She did love Gatsby. And she also had a whole life with Tom. She had a daughter. She was a woman in the 1920s! That's a kind of life sentence even wealth can't erase.

The way Daisy responded may not quite have landed with Nick (if we consider the kind of fun possibility that the musical is the events as they happened and the book is Nick retelling those events as he remembers them two years later, then clearly Nick's disdain for Daisy's actions overtook whatever sympathy he felt for her), but the musical gave Daisy the opportunity to appeal to us. The audience. Having this omniscient perspective of things allowed us to draw our own conclusions, and I found myself a lot more sympathetic towards Daisy when I could both see and hear how she responded to Nick's verbal castigation.

In the book, Nick is the narrator. In the musical, Nick is a narrator. But he's no longer the sole arbiter of the story. The audience got to make our own judgements on the events as we witnessed them. Every one of us was a Nick - beholden to our own biases, maybe, but at least not beholden to his.

[d4rkshad0w]

Unpopular opinion but i think Jean committing su!cide would have been a good ending.

LET ME EXPLAIN

i love Jean he’s an amazing and complex character but i think it would’ve made sense for him to die like that if Nora didn’t want to continue the series or just wanted one book because he’s already a little suicidal to begin with and he’s dealt with so much trauma and he thinks he deserves it all even thought he doesn’t. maybe he was tired of being in pain and tired of everything that the only relief he could get was dying especially after knowing that most of the other Ravens also commuted su!cide.

but i am glad that he lived and i can’t wait to read the second book. i also think that him living is sorta like him telling himself he deserves better and that he’s finally free (somewhat free) and it’s him making his own choices for once since the raven staff and Riko made most of his choices for the last five years of his life so although him killing himself would’ve been a good ending to the first book, him surviving is a little symbolic

what could’ve been more symbolic was what if after he got back from being out with Neil and he went straight to his room, locked the door and tried to kill himself like what if he had held a knife to his throat thinking he had nothing to live for and he was always going to feel trapped one way or another and was going to do it but then Jeremy, Cat and Laila went to the door and were asking him if he was ok or if he needed anything or just were just comforting him from away and he pulled the knife away and started crying because he’s never really had anyone be nice to him or treat him with human decency so Jeremy, Cat and Laila being his first real friends and comforting him, trying to help him and him knowing he’s finally some hat safe and away from the raven he pulls the knife down and can’t do it because he finally thinks he has something to live for

[variwinn]

OH. MY. GOSH.

today is a good day for the bonnie and clyde musical fandom im afraid

do not disturb on june 24th 🚨!!!

[deeppenguinstudent]

jerejean but Jean is an assistant manager of riko and kevin (they both are actors) so he's sent to california after kevin leaves the agency to work on the music for rikos new movie.

there he meets Jeremy, lead singer of the trojans with laila and catalina and they share a spark instantaneously. Jeremy declines the offer at first but Jean was sent there to convince Jeremy no matter what because riko won't let his movie after kevin left to be nothing short of perfect.

Thus leading to Jean spending more time with the trojans and loving the lead singer a little too close to for comfort.