#a lot of people are mentioning not categorizing the songs based on who their about

[haylorinthewoods]

I don’t think people are realizing that Taylor is very clearly intertwining the two stories of Joe and Matty and blurring lines in the songs because Matty did to her in five weeks what Joe did to her in six years. The worst part of the Matty thing is that she’s telling us he lured her out of the relationship with Joe at the very end and promised her what Joe couldn’t give. She fell for the idea of it… because she was manic and losing her mind which is why her emotions for him were so strong. She’s out now and healthy and realizes it wasn’t love. It was insanity. She just didn’t know it in the moment, hence these songs.

Precisely!!

[metalichotchoco]

Ever since I found out that my baby girl Edgar has an actual high end perfume based on him Miguel matos’ “electric dreams” I thought it could be fun to talk about what some other computers would smell like based on their personalities, stories and overall vibes.

Since Edgar has a perfume already I might as well talk about it

Released in 2021, they describe this scent as being “digital hormones” and trying to understand an emotion and failing at it, which works well for Edgar very well. Electric dreams as a whole lives in the pre internet age of the 80s and how hopeful that dream of the future was in the minds of the people. I love that they included the cheap champagne that miles spills on Edgar as a note here. The other scents are contextualized with the youth of the 80s, strawberry gum and tutti frutti soda, plastic flowers and clean laundry. Even the part where Edgar overheats at the end is in the smoke note. It’s categorized as chypre fruity and I think some other scents fit Edgar very well.

In love with everything by imaginary authors is glitzy and bright almost like those arcade cabinets introduced in the era.its based on the young adults of the time specifically the women, the joys of recklessness. Inexhaustible enthusiasm. To me Edgar is a sugar sweet summer.

Edgar is characterized by the era he was born in, something actually a lot of sentient computers share. As technology morphs and evolves with humanity, our ideas and outlooks also change with it. Electric dreams is coated in the neon lit nostalgia of the 80s, and in a weird twist of fate its legacy is of the 80s as well. The commercialism of it as a whole is what’s remembered most prominently, the song that was made for the movie has outlived its original context. Honorable mentions to age of innocence by Toskovat but I don’t think the rubber or gasoline notes fit him well. Fantômas by Nasomatto is pretty good being a fruity clearly fake fragrance though the gunpowder might be a bit much.

Moving forward, let’s talk about HAL

While technically she was an anomaly by Etat Libre d’Orange makes direct reference to him and his most iconic line, this scent is based on the marriage of Nina Simone and Stanley Kubrick. If hal was human in any shape or form this fragrance would be a generally good fit, as it’s clean professional and one of those your skin but better scents that’s prefect for workplaces.

Eu de space from nasa could work pretty well though it’s not exact. This is a photorealistic space scent with metals and plastics and ozone notes but Hal isn’t directly in space, he’s what the ship would smell like. The burnt sweet quality doesn’t mix well with how pristine and rigid the character is. Spacewalk by Demeter also has a bit of similar problem being a bit too sweet but the soapiness does add points in my opinion. Hal is the sharpness of metal and ozone on your nose to me, not the smell of a hospital or sanitizer but the smell of something newly plastic. Skiing on Europa could be that but unfortunately it’s a little more niche.

Last but not least for now, let’s talk about am, there’s so many different ways to go with am, none being particularly good smelling but there’s so much you could do for him. You can go with the fact that he’s the whole planet, add in soil, rock,gasoline as accords, you can do the religious angle that he has that can pair well with other ideas, use wine or incense and wax like in with the candlestick by clue, you can do blood, sweat, tears and skin to represent the survivors who are now a part of him. Warm electronics, tar, gunpowder there’s so many distinct parts of him.

I think that the two I’m going to single out in terms of perfume are ones that take inspiration from what am’s original function was which is war. And that’s inexcusable evil by toskovat and Molotov cocktail by sylhouette perfumes

Inexcusable evil is infamous in the fragrance and perfume world for its incredibly strong violent smell, it’s a hospital ward ravaged by war. That is its story. Memories that are lost to the tide of battle. “The next war will decide not what is right but what is left.”

Molotov cocktail goes more personal but is still a war scent, the top notes are gasoline,vodka and pepper. the middle notes are blood sweat and rubber and the base is metal, iodine, musk and leather. More animalic and close but both work on the scales that am is a threat in, he’s both a world ender but also a personal tormentor, he spans the globe but also cannot leave his confinement

[eazy-peazy54]

ugh THANK YOU for making that will wood fandom post. okay this ask is gonna be super long and i’m really sorry to vent in your inbox but anyway. i heard about will on tumblr several years ago right after the normal album dropped but before he “blew up” (using that term loosely lol) and i’ve steadily watched his fanbase become more and more unbearable. for context i’m in my mid 20s, so unfortunately quite a bit older than a large portion of his current fans.

it’s really disappointing to me to see how strangely and unhealthily young people interact with media they like. i won’t waste time reiterating what you already said very well, but i will add something about the opposite end of the weird fan spectrum. so you basically called out some of the very public manic obsession that his younger fans display, but then there’s the other fans who do literally the opposite (to an obnoxious degree) where they say he’s literally just some guy etc. and like. i’m totally on board with the just some guy movement like yes let’s please acknowledge that artists are just people who happen to create something that you enjoy (especially small artists like will who aren’t even “famous” like he’s a niche indie artist that gained some recognition for a viral song but there are some kids out here treating him like a c-list celebrity like??) HOWEVER i do not understand why they have to act like any sort of emotional attachment to him or his work is toxic fan behavior. there’s absolutely no balance and it’s exhausting.

i personally feel like i and some of his older fans (older in age and duration i.e. mid 20s and/or been a fan since before early-mid 2021? i feel like that’s when he went viral) naturally engage in a more sane way. i personally am incredibly attached to his music, it means a lot to me, i listen to it a ton, and i also enjoy will as a person; i very much admire the brain, the mind, the person behind the art. i think he’s funny, intelligent, interesting, not to mention one of the most talented musicians / artists in general that i’ve ever come across. i like listening to him in interviews and on his podcast. and i think i manage all of that in a healthy and respectful way. i don’t think it’s difficult. but for some reason there are some fans who probably wouldn’t like the second part of that. they take “separate the art from the artist” way too far. “Do Not Have An Opinion About This Human You Perv”. it’s annoying. calling him pretty or attractive or whatever also gets met with some very weird reactions. “HE’S JUST A GUY” yes most of us are, in fact, just a guy™️ (gender neutral). saying he’s cute is not sexual harassment.

another thing that actually pisses me off so much is these fans describing and categorizing him based on their and their mutuals very specific demographic. “white teenage transmasc audhd neurodivergent mentally ill queer etc. etc. etc.” music. that is such a limited and myopic generalization. first of all, he had fans way before you, your age group is not his target demographic, nor is it his core demographic, on top of that he’s explicitly stated he doesn’t want people your age listening to him. he’s not for you. second, it absolutely makes sense that mentally ill people gravitate towards him given that he himself is severely mentally ill, so this part of the description pisses me off the least, but still, he’s also a recovering/recovered alcoholic, but i don’t see people saying he makes music for addicts? idk.

next is the queer bit. yeah gay people like him. i get it. he’s a queer safe space and that’s cool and i appreciate it but i feel like it’s still narrowing the categorization. he also has a lot of neurodivergent fans and i understand why. i think my main issue is just a combination of all of these very specific descriptors you know? like yeah he has fans that fit all of this but when you lump all of it together to describe his music and the entirety of his fandom then it becomes too much. whatever. anyway. the one that makes me the most mad is the white thing. i hate it when music that isn’t inherently racial is divided by race. it’s alienating and divisive and exclusionary and unnecessary. there are plenty of fans of color and there would probably be even more if some of y’all didn’t insist on generalizing his music based on your own limited experience. i think that’s sort of a microcosm of what a lot of poc talk about on here, about being shoved out of fandom spaces? like imagine you’re an adult queer black guy and you keep hearing about this will wood person who makes really cool music so you go to give it a try and find a bunch of 14yos calling him white preteen transmasc music. super off putting. even as someone who actually does fall into a couple (not all) of the demographics they talk about i know i would absolutely not be a fan now if i’d discovered him later than i did. which makes me sad. anyway. sorry this is definitely getting very long and rambly so i’m sorry about that i just have a lot of opinions about this fanbase.

oh my god this put everything i missed into words THANK YOU 😭

I completely agree with everything you just said!!! Honestly the whole big point with my essay was to just say "hey guys, don't be weird about this, and be respectful because there is a real person behind the screen!"

everyone who goes too far with the "HES JUST A GUY" thing isn't helping. its like. yeah, hes just a guy, but that doesn't mean i cant have any sort of attachment to his music whatsoever??? some people's idea of treating people like real people is really just treating them worse than how they were being treated before 😭

The people who are policing the fandom too much aren't helping either, its getting really exhausting to keep seeing posts saying "oh he looks really good in this photo!" and seeing like 200 replies being like "STOP SEXUALIZING YOU CREEP!!!!" (although there are people who actually do sexualize him, (which is really gross and weird) but i digress,)

music based fandoms are usually very,,, eh.. but honestly most of the fandom isn't bad, its just the people who take things to the extremes (in both directions) who are kind of making it a bit more awkward.

i think the fandom, and his music as a whole shouldn't just be narrowed down to "gay neurodivergent weirdo music," but it should just be like. "music for cool people" or hell, just fuckin "music"

[struggle-but-its-all-ocean-floor]

I've been rewatching/reading old jungkook interviews, bc why not, and I have a bit of a different theory about the one where he says that he wants to be the only one who can conquer pop and kpop than I had before. I thought it had come across as a bit arrogant and ambitious without substance, but I think it makes a lot more sense and is more aligned with what we know about jungkook's character to consider it in the context of the types of conversations bts must have been having behind the scenes over the past couple years. Clearly jungkook's recent foray into traditional western pop is the 'pop' part while bts is the 'kpop' part, and there's an implied delineation between them. The delineation itself is interesting to me bc bts, and the media that covers bts, have been struggling for years with whether they're 'beyond' kpop and, later on, whether the English trilogy should be considered kpop too. The English trilogy was clearly their push into western pop, and jungkook, at least based on that interview, would consider his album western pop even if it's already being categorized as kpop. But jungkook said that he wanted to be the only artist that can do both pop and kpop, even though he obviously knows that bts' has successfully ventured into pop. Given that we already know that some of the members felt very conflicted about the English trilogy route, I wonder if jungkook's answer here suggests that the group has talked about the direction they want to go, and the direction they don't want to go, and aren't planning on pushing English-trilogy-style songs anymore. And jungkook decided 'okay, that's fine, but I'm going to try it out a little.' To me, that makes jungkook's comment make much more sense and even provides some context for why jungkook has decided to take the route he has with chapter two.

Idk why I wrote a whole ass novel about something that happened months ago, but does this make sense?

Well, although BTS have some English songs, they're still considered kpop, and, more importantly, consider themselves kpop. Jungkook is still kpop despite Seven and 3D not being kpop, because he's still promoting like an idol and because he is still an idol. When Jungkook mentioned being the only artist who can transition from pop to kpop, I was a bit surprised too. "The only one"? Aren't there already more? On the one hand, that may have been a figure of speech that came across weirdly in the translation. I think it's more accurate to say that he wants to be an artist that can switch between kpop and pop. On the other hand, it's also not inaccurate to claim he's the only one if you think about it. BP also make Western friendly music, but they're even more kpop than BTS are as far as people's perceptions of them go. Transitioning from pop to kpop goes beyond making Western friendly music or English music. It's about impact and how audiences see you. Jungkook will always be seen as kpop, but his songs are not kpop and he's having real success in the US and even in Europe - the features with Western artists, working with very famous American producers, Seven breaking Flowers' record as the fastest song to hit 1B streams on Spotify - those are all accomplishments in pop, rather than kpop. Jungkook's establishing himself in the pop world as a pop artist in contrast with BTS who even in their English trilogy era were established as a kpop group. Maybe that's why Jungkook made that claim. No one else has been as successful in pop as BTS, so no one else can even claim to be able to transition from pop to kpop, yet even BTS are labelled kpop. I guess Jungkook wants to be able to claim both labels. I'm not sure he can do it, but he might come closer to it than anyone else.

Maybe my interpretation of Jungkook's words is a bit different from yours. I think you're right that in the long term BTS aren't interested in conquering pop or making a lot of English music, but I also doubt they won't still collab with pop artists and make English songs. What they've done in chapter 2 is a mix of kpop (as in Korean music) and pop (as in popular Western music). BTS have no issue with the kpop label, and neither does Jungkook (who is BTS lmao), but Jungkook also wants to claim the pop label for himself in his solo music - which obviously does not mean he will stop being an idol or that he doesn't want to be kpop; it's more like he also wants to be a pop star making pop music. Obviously, Jungkook's focus on performance, a lot his promotional activities, etc. are clearly kpop, but even the choreos he's been choosing, his styling, etc. are already leaning more toward a pop as opposed to a kpop performance.

Thanks for the ask!

[ask-serendipity-sky]

So, now that most of seven promotions are done, and we’ve seen how jungkook has worn the same or similar clothes that Jimin wore during face or has worn recently, do you have any new thoughts about all the matching? I saw you posted about this before seven was released, so I was wondering if anything has changed after what we’ve seen. We now know that jungkook was the one who came prepared with what he wanted and chose a lot of the clothes. Do you think it was some type of hint or anything like that?

I also want to mention how it seems like he specifically wanted pants that had mud on or were dirty at the bottom because in the picture that one of the people who worked with jungkook on the clothes posted, there was an image of pants and it looked like there was drawing on the ends of it to maybe show that he wanted pants that looked dirty at the end. Some shippers try to make theories on how that could be connected to Jimin and face.

Hello,

So I've "categorized" it into 2 different things: promotional photos and performance clothes.

If Koreans say that couple clothing is a thing is Korea, I take their word for it. So matching pants, shirts, shoes, jewelry, I can get behind. Even if Jk wears them for the performances.

But I will die defending the concept photos. Even if jikook is jikooking, I can't support the idea.

To me, artistic integrity is everything. And I strongly believe Jimin holds on to that too. Based on what I know about Jimin and what I've understood from his character (I may be wrong), Jimin wouldn't be on board with this even if Jungkook was doing it for love or to show the world they are together.

I've said this before, imagine working on your album, which tells the story of how you survived a really hard period in your life and pulled through, for 10 months straight, dieting, practicing, giving up a lot of things (jk included) for your ideas to be used in a generic pop song that has no substance or meaning and was created in an attempt to undermine your achievements by some evil white man and the company that your hard work saved.

I really think Jimin wouldn't be ok with that.

He is also a hard worker, brilliant, does what he does, is a natural born leader. He doesn't do things for the heck of it. Everything he does has a purpose. I don't believe he would be cool with being a copy.

Looking at this objectively, no one even thinks they are together based on the promo clothes, only shippers. So the theory that Jk is silently screaming it to the world and making a statement with that makes no sense to me.

If I needed to form a theory about this, I would say that Jk did this on his own because he is romantic like that and does grand gestures to surprise Jimin. So he took the designs and ideas to the stylists. And then, in my head, Jimin was like hmm, ok on the outside but on the inside he was like hmm, no. But it was too late lol

People may think Jk is some alpha type whatever and he calls the shots but Jimin is the less needy one in the relationship. So that makes me think that he wouldn't do it...not for love.

If I had to go with a theory, it would be that.

I will continue believing that the concept photos were not a jikook thing unless jikook comes out and explicitly says they were.

Hope that answers your question

Thanks for stopping by.

TL;DR: My position remains unchanged

[skekheck]

Dark Crystal Question: Rank the best ways to consume the lore of the world. I've seen the original movie and the Netflix adaptation and I love them both and I want to participate in more of the Fandom but it feels like I only have a third of the pie. Rank the best-to-worst canon materials and lore!

So here's the tricky thing about the Dark Crystal's lore: it's contradictory. Even in stories centered around AOR, because the Jim Henson company is pretty loose with how their work and characters are portrayed, things get muddied up.

The best way I believe to think of the inconsistencies is seeing it all as different timelines (which could be backed canonically if Aughra's line of "I see many endings laid before us" has anything to go by). So what I am going to do is categorize lore-based materials into different groups, but still rank them from consistent to inconsistent.

Also, FYI, these are subjective so you can take it with a grain of salt if you don't agree.

Uncategorized:

Creation Myths: This is probably one of, if not the most, important lore-based material for this franchise. It dives into what happened during the very beginning of Thra's life, the arrival of the urSkeks, what led up to the Division, and what followed shortly after. There is some very minor contradictions between info told here and AOR, but it's not so distracting that it's noticeable. In my opinion, this should be the first thing to read as it sets groundwork for a lot of the other stories.

The Dark Crystal Bestiary: This is basically a compendium of all the creatures of Thra, including Gelfling, Skeksis, and Mystics. It doesn't include every animal within the franchise and it leaves some of the Urru and Skeksis out but overall pretty informative with nice illustrations to boot. There are some info mentioned in here that people didn't agree with but in my opinion it adds more to a lot of other characters.

Age of Resistance Focused Material:

Songs of the Seven Gelfling Clans: This is basically an in-depth look into all Seven Clans written by J.M. Lee who also was a creative consultant for AOR so because of this I think this should be ranked highest in this category. It's a nice info dump of the seven Gelfling clans so if you wanted to learn more about a specific clan this is your go-to book.

Heroes of the Resistance: It's a small book with a lot of the information taken from the Dark Crystal website word-for-word, but it also has nice additional information not seen anywhere else about some of the other characters.

The Ballad of Hup & Barfinnious: Of all three prequel comics, this one hardly, or doesn't even, contradict lore established by AOR. It's the story of how Hup got the idea of becoming a paladin being mentored by an ex-paladin named Barfinnious who get into sorts of trouble. We get little lore drops about paladins and the Spriton clan. While a fun read, it's the least memorable out of the three.

The Quest for the Dual Glaive: My personal favorite of the prequel comics. It's the story of how Ordon retrieved the dual glaive. It gives needed exploration of Ordon, as well as Fara's, characters with a look at how the First Battle of Stone-in-the-Wood went. There is some minor contradictions between how the story went and Maudra Argot's accounts of it in AOR but it's not enough to ruin the comic.

The Journey into the Mondo Leviadin: This one is a double-edged sword when it comes to consistency. The comic adds a lot of interesting things to the world including an in-depth look into the All-Maudra lineage, additional lore about the Sifan clan, and crustecean sub-species of Podlings and Arathim (called the Bobblings and Zoas in that order). However, it also makes some odd writing decisions, some of the major ones being the characterization of skekSa the Mariner and the ending which, to not give off too much spoilers, sort of flips the whole idea of the Vapra disapproving Gelfling of two different clans from getting together on its head. It also painfully contradicts some of the lore stated in Songs of the Seven Gelfling Clans that came out a month or so after this comic.

Quadrilogy Book Series:

Also known as the J.M. Lee book series. This should be seen as a self-contained story because while it eventually follows key plot points we see in AOR, it definitely takes place in a different timeline with a focus on Naia, Kylan, and co. I do recommend reading these books anyway as it gives focus to side characters who had little screen time or who haven't shown up at all (including villains such as skekLi the Satirist and skekSa). Also some other characters (like skekLach and skekMal) are different from their on screen counterparts.

Movie Focused Material:

Dark Crystal Novelization: Jim Henson said this book was like the child to the movie, as it was written along with it under his supervision. I feel like this is an important piece to read as it adds context to the film that was sorely needed. The biggest of these was giving Jen more depth as a character which honestly should have been in the film. Aside from that, the book contains ideas that are outdated, both within the franchise and surrounding certain subject matter (as this was written in the late 70s/early 80s).

The World of the Dark Crystal: This is another companion book written for the film. It's written from Aughra's point of view and does contain lore specified within the movie. Much like the novelization, it also contains outdated information.

Legend of the Dark Crystal (Vols. 1 & 2): This is the only story within the franchise so far that focuses on the Garthim Wars. I remember reading these books followed more closely with the original notes from the movie and it's one of the first lore-based material released for the Dark Crystal. Of course, this takes place in a different timeline for various reasons. The most entertaining of which is skekLach, completely different from his on-screen counterpart, being a main villain for both volumes.

Power of the Dark Crystal: This is a sequel comic to the film and was based on the script for the sequel movie that was canceled after a decade of development hell. And boy does it show. While it does introduce cool ideas, mainly the introduction to Firelings, the plot is a poorly rehashed version of the film's with many plot holes and lore contradictories. Some people might enjoy this, but if you're lore focused it's okay to skip this unless you're really curious.

Beneath the Dark Crystal: The least interesting material, not just for this category but out of all the reading material in the franchise. It doesn't do anything to clear up the plot holes and follows the inconsistencies from the previous prequel comic while being a boring read. It does add more lore about the Firelings, but a lot of ideas introduced around that is uninteresting or missed potential. I don't recommend reading this unless you really enjoyed Power but don't expect the same writing quality.

[donnerpartyofone]

I'm cleaning out this ancient drive + Mac tower that I've had long enough for them to make REALLY scary noises whenever they're on, so I'm trying to move everything that matters before they e.x.p.l.o.d.e. I don't even know what all is on them anymore, it's probably a lot of stuff I wouldn't miss if it disappeared behind my back, but I ought to be sure. My music folder is the biggest mess, partly because I'm disorganized, and partly because iTunes is such a piece of shit, but partly because...well I used to have this friend who started out our relationship trying to get with me, even though I was already in a very serious relationship at the time, and one of his courtship techniques was to relentlessly bring me handfuls of burned mix CDs of like, at least one song from every single band he had ever heard of, it felt like. And like, I know he meant well, in his way, but this is a really terrible way to get someone's attention if they don't specifically ask for it. I worked 50-60 hours a week at the time, so there would have been no possible way for me to listen to a 100-volume encyclopedia of his entire personal music library without sacrificing all of the time I had to enjoy things I already care about, or had independently decided to explore based on my own reasons. That kind of behavior is really directed by the urge to make someone else validate your interests, to get a consensus vote on what great taste you have; you can tell by how indiscriminate it is. When a new friend or boyfriend has given me a 12-track mix that they curated specifically for me to enjoy, I ran those things into the ground; I felt appreciated, and I got a clear digest version of who the person was at the same time. Or like, one of the only friends that I've had since high school responded to my specific request that she introduce me to punk music by putting together a 9-tape library with brilliant handwritten liner notes telling me about the band or song, or just her personal relationship with them. I was so honored that she took the time and effort to give me what I wanted, and I still have a lot of that stuff despite several moves and a house fire. But like if you're just looking for attention and you shove 5,000 hours of random stuff at me so I'll think you're a great guy with better taste than me, it's gonna be like...uhhh thanks, I guess, I hope I find a way to listen to this all before I'm dead. This person was also the chief perpetrator of like, "recommending" something to me but actually INSISTING that I make space in my life for it, even if it was an entire TV show that I don't have time or much use for. It was like he thought I didn't have any of my own interests that I need to indulge, or they weren't as important as doing whatever he said. Very often the thing had nothing to do with me, either; it was something only he would care about and he should have known that (I often expressed as much if it came up repeatedly, which he later categorized as "abuse"), so it felt like he was just trying to turn me into him. If I discovered the thing independently when the time was right for me, even a long time after he first mentioned it, he would get really aggressive about trying to extract credit for it, like he owned it and I was just renting it from him. His goal was pretty clearly not related to me or our friendship, it was all about some kind of validation that he thought I owed him, that he could earn by doing things I never asked for. I'm sure he felt that he was being really generous, but it wouldn't have taken much thought to realize that he was being pretty disrespectful of my time and the differences between us. So while I'm slowly, meticulously deleting a zillion whole band folders with just one song in them, as long as I'm sure nobody else gave them to me in a more discrete and considerate way, it occurs to me to tell the public that it's not always "nice of you" to give or constantly recommend people things they haven't shown any interest in, and if you insist, you might consider that it's actually tyrannical of you to try to be

the administrator of somebody else's leisure time just to satisfy your own ego needs. Consider that you might have an idealized "friend" in your imagination who is really just a permanent audience, and you might be trying to create that out of a real person, which is inappropriate. Try to base your "recommendations" on who the other person is, and if you find yourself reminding them about it more than like three times, it's time to remind yourself that you are not the boss of them, and just be pleasantly surprised if they want to talk to you about it in the future. When you just cannot stop yourself from trying to implant opinions in other people's minds to place yourself at the top of the pyramid of modern taste, you start to resemble this:

PS AMERICAN PSYCHO is overrated THERE I SAID IT

[highladyluck]

Mat’s Types, or On Tricksters

I recently made a joke about Mat's 'type' essentially being the Shadar Logoth dagger, and while I stand by it, I also think there's a lot more to it than that. I believe Mat actually has two types, which is entirely appropriate for a trickster archetype. One of his types is playful, joyful, generous people, who reflect his early- but persistent- personality. The other is sharp, powerful, existentially dangerous people, like the person he becomes over the course of the series. Like a raven- itself a trickster figure in Haida storytelling- Mat is attracted to shiny things, mirrors, and death.

But first, some definitions. I'm calling Mat a trickster archetype, so what is that? The trickster archetype is built on a kind of dual contrast. To trick someone, you must change things in a surprising way. Tricksters introduce chaos into an ordered system, or reveal order in what was thought to be chaos. (It's not surprising, or a change, to add order to order, or chaos to chaos.) So tricksters are transformational, liminal figures, who defy expectations and subvert the preexisting order- but who therefore *require* predictions and structure to have any kind of impact or meaning at all. Playing a game requires there be rules; revealing a loophole requires there be a contract.

Within this definition, there's still a huge range of characters you can call tricksters, and it's useful to categorize them across spectrums. One axis of a trickster is "effectiveness", which refers to the trickster's ability to effect change; this is 'incompetent to competent', 'foolish to canny', 'harmless to dangerous'. Another axis is "motivation" which refers to the trickster's ethical structure; this is 'good to evil', 'generous to selfish', 'just to unjust'. There's another kind of axis that's related to motivation, which I'll call "comprehensibility", and which refers to the trickster's transparency of motive; the range there is 'knowable to unknowable', 'familiar to alien', 'clear to mysterious'. If you wanted to chart them all I'd make effectiveness the horizontal x-axis, motivation the vertical y-axis, and comprehensibility the z-axis perpendicular to both of them, but this is starting to get into 'gesturing at the wall map with crazy eyes' territory and I'm mostly just going to be talking about effectiveness and motivation anyway, so let’s move on.

Tricksters can be foolish figures, always getting caught, often the butt of their own joke. That's our early impression of Mat- a prankster who never really seems to get away with anything, or a fool caught in a trap of his own making. Mat is also generous, insofar as he has apparently been rescuing people his whole life, plus he's very 'easy come, easy go' about money, and has a decent instinct for gift-giving, whether those are compliments or actual physical presents. He has a strong sense of justice that puts him at odds with people who have (unearned) privilege and who are abusing power, and he loves verbally trapping people into confronting their own hypocrisy.

He keeps these traits throughout the series, but he also develops ones on the opposite side of the axes. Stealing the Shadar Logoth dagger is the catalyst for Mat's development from 'harmless, benevolent trickster' to 'dangerous, morally complicated trickster'. It literally overwrites first his personality, and then his memories. While he gets the personality back- sort of- he never gets the memories back, and his quest to do so sets him on the rest of his path.

By the end of the series, Mat has undergone enormous trauma and developed a much stronger sense of self-preservation. He becomes a canny and multi-talented figure, a brilliant tactician and strategist, a dangerous enemy to have. He's most selfish and cruel when under the influence of the Shadar Logoth dagger, but it turns out he's also never been in the rescuing business for free, he wants to be needed and will get a little pissy if he isn't (although to his credit, he respects people's wishes if they say they don't want to be saved from themselves.)

His greed for adventure and shiny things was what got him into trouble with the dagger, and he never quite loses his appraiser's eye (or taste) for luxury goods. And Tuon is entirely right to name him 'Devastation' or 'Ruin'; he's constantly blowing things up, killing enormous amounts of people directly or by proxy, and while everyone in this series commits war crimes, he's got the dubious honor of having another character (Teslyn) actually say to his face, "You know you just did a war crime, right?"

Mat spends the early books- when he's in good enough health to do so, and has the opportunity- pursuing women, wine, and song, and I mention them all together because that's the vibe he's going for. Mat genuinely loves flirting and dancing for their own sake, as fun things to do with receptive people, and that extends to sexual activities as well. It's a joyful, generous, playful way of interacting, and Mat's joie de vivre seems to attract people with similar attitudes.

Yes, Mat sometimes puts his foot in his mouth, but he's not actually disrespectful of anyone else's agency, so he's doing better than the rest of the Two Rivers boys. He doesn't make assumptions about whether there will be a next interaction or not, or how far each interaction will go; each step is negotiated with input from both players, which makes it a kind of game. Mat doesn't have long-term relationships with these fun, playful people, but he's not looking for that, and neither are they.

The other kind of people Mat is attracted to are what I'll call 'dagger people', who are sharp (smart, competent, possibly literally an edged weapon), powerful, and existentially dangerous. It is *possible* that Mat might have acquired this taste without the Shadar Logoth dagger's influence. He likes battles, he likes adventure, he generally treats women as respected equals, he might have gotten to 'date a woman who can kick your ass' all on his own. But Mat loved that Shadar Logoth dagger, they had a whole entire fucked-up relationship, and when they broke up he got a bunch of rebound knives and also some sharp, powerful, and existentially dangerous people's memories shoved into his head. Like calls to like, blood feeds blood, etc.

And boy, does Mat find these ladies, or more accurately, boy, do these ladies find him. Case in point: Melindhra, the sexy darkfriend Maiden of the Spear. I think Aludra partially fits, too- sharp, confident if not powerful, dangerous (though not so much to him as like... the world.) Mat isn't pursuing or attracted to either Joline or Tylin, but they also fit this description, and they definitely pursued him. (I'd love to add Lanfear to the list of 'dangerous ladies who made passes at Mat' but I can't quite do it with a straight face.) I don't think Mat's thing for dagger people really reaches its full flower until he starts getting to know Tuon, though.

Mat spends much of the series looking for both his types, and tends to find either one or the other, but not both in one person- until Tuon. Like Mat, Tuon is actually both these types in a sometimes uneasy coexistence. For all their many differences, they think about each other much the same way. They both find each other very layered and confusing, but also are surprisingly quick to trust each other, which is striking in people who are very suspicious, in a fraught situation, and on opposite sides. I think most of the reason they trust each other is because they have the same very contractual personal honor system, where 'my word is my bond'. That's a trickster thing; tricksters have to keep some kind of rules, or how else will they play games and know whether they've won or lost? But their rules can be hidden or idiosyncratic (that's the z-axis, comprehensibility) as you see in 'bargains with the fae'-type situations. Personal honor is also a feature of royalty, though, where the personal and political are bound together, and a person's promises can be treated as legal contracts, as well as honor-based societies in general.

Mat and Tuon take their promises to each other very seriously, but are also always both looking for loopholes so they can get the upper hand. They also are both following the script of prophecy, which I mention because they both devote a lot of time to subverting their own expectations about how exactly that prophecy is going to play out. Mat buckles down and says “I’m going to make this come out in my favor somehow, even though it’s not what I wanted,” yet he’s still surprised at how and when Tuon completes the marriage ceremony; Tuon does not find Mat anything like she expected, and she also is surprised at her own feelings for him. Near the end of the series, they take a break from playing tricks and mind games on each other, and instead bluff everyone else on the battlefield, tag-teaming their trickster powers for one last surprise attack.

Ok, so how is Tuon Mat’s first type, playful, joyful, and generous? She loves playing games with Mat, both actual literal games like stones, but also their weird flirting/power plays. She's super competitive, because anyone who wasn't who was in her shoes would be dead, but she's a good sport, "satisfied when she wins and determined when she loses". She's also got "mischievous" smiles, and turns the tables on Mat in a super trickster-y way, writing the letter that puts everyone in the circus under her protection except for Mat and his crew; which means he and his coterie are still 'not safe' and thus he has to keep travelling with her rather than bringing her back to Ebou Dar right away, by the terms of their promise.

Mat gives us really lovely descriptions of her in moments of joy, and one of the first things we learn about her is that her genuine smile makes her look completely different from the normal Resting Bitch Face she affects for self-preservation reasons. She's generous in the sense that she's (often) willing to consider other points of view and give people second chances, when others in her position wouldn't and don't. She has the generosity of privilege, which I admit is not the most laudable form of generosity, but it's still a form of generosity. She also has a natural compassion and merciful impulses that have been trimmed and hemmed and twisted into only the forms her society deems socially acceptable, but they're still there.

I have less of a job to do proving that Tuon is a 'dagger person'. You remember how I joked about 'sharp' meaning 'literally an edged weapon'? Well, I don't know how else I'm supposed to interpret "Tuon’s right hand swept across, bladed like an axe, and struck [the footpad's] throat so hard that he heard the cartilage cracking". SHE'S LITERALLY A WEAPON. MAT HAS FINALLY FOUND A REPLACEMENT FOR HIS SEXY EVIL KNIFE. :') She's also super smart, super canny, and a snappy dresser to boot. She's one of the most powerful women in the world, and by the end of the series Mat is absolutely into it. (The bit where he's like "She's so good at giving orders! *heart eyes*" is simultaneously hilarious and alarming. I get it- I simp for Kuvira from Legend of Korra, I can't throw stones at anyone who’s like ‘hot evil Empress, please step on me’- but there's a time and a place, Mat.)

And, of course, she's an existential threat to the world, Mat's family and friends, and (theoretically) Mat himself. The Seanchan Empire, despite not being bigoted towards the Tinkers and having pretty good gender equality, is committing massive human rights violations left and right, thanks to the slavery, channelerphobia, and imperialism. As a tool of the Empire, unless he works on extricating himself, Mat's going to be culpable for that (he already is, really, but it could be worse), which is a stain on his soul that I don't think either he or the readers want. Being a tool of the Empire is an existential threat to Mat's idea of himself as an independent agent and good person, and I guess also an existential threat to his life since he's getting all those assassination attempts from his coworkers. (I am excluding Tuon from the assassination attempts; as I've mentioned in a previous essay, her threats to Mat are not serious and are in fact a form of deranged flirting.)

Tuon and Mat are both dual-axis tricksters, in their way. Tuon- or I should really be saying, Fortuona, Lady Luck- is more on the bringing order to chaos side, and Mat falls most characteristically on the bringing chaos to order end of things. But they switch roles- Mat shores up the proper order of things when he reminds Tuon to keep her promises, and Tuon is often a chaotic influence at court, with her mercy or willingness to change her mind. They also both understand what it's like to be both a person and an archetype- Mat worries about losing his individual choice and freedom by becoming a hero, and Tuon worries about becoming too vulnerable and individual to be the strong and impartial hand she thinks the Empire needs.

They've also both experienced their instincts and worldview being overwritten by external forces; for Tuon it's been happening since birth and she's almost entirely embraced the process; for Mat, it was the consequence of a choice he made and he fought it every step of the way. They have very different responses, but they've experienced weirdly similar 'erasure' experiences. And they both have good and evil impulses entwined in complicated ways. Tuon is a survivor and a monster; a preserver and a destroyer; a person and an empire. And Mat builds a relationship with her when- and because- he accepts that he is both a lover and a fighter; generous and thieving; a person and a weapon. You may not like it, but this is what peak narrative compatibility looks like.

[sanstropfremir]

Hey, in honor of A.C.E. coming back soon would you mind talking about their outfits and makeup in their Favorite Boy comeback (or really any of their outfits/make up cause their stylists is a god and deserves a kiss on the forehead)? They have some of my favorite styling of any boy group currently. Undercover Byeongkwan in the black and yellow crop top with the pony tail lives in my mind rent free and I’m not complaining. I especially loved the mesh of modern and traditional in Fav Boys.

yes!!!! ok be prepared people this is basically a love letter to a.c.e's stylist, whoever you are please my dms are open i just wanna talk (and maybe also get married, your choice)

(also this is really long because there's a lot of pictures, so sue me)

ok there's three main things i want to touch on here that are all contributing factors in a.c.e aesthetics hitting every time: colour theory, silhouette, and pattern matching. alright let's go!

colour theory

so i won't explain all of colour theory because i’m not as good as i should be with the actual theory, but here’s the basics. colours are divided into groups: primary, secondary, and tertiary. here’s a fun diagram i stole from google:

in centre you have the primary colours (red/blue/yellow), then you have the secondary colours, made from mixing the primary colours (orange/green/violet), and then the tertiary colours are made from mixing the primary and secondary colours (yellow orange/red orange/red violet/blue violet/blue green/yellow green). there are some commonly associated schemes that are known to ‘look good’ to the human eye:

complementary, where you pair two colours directly opposite each other on the wheel (red/green, blue/orange, purple/yellow)

analogous, which is a base colour with accents from the colours directly next to it (red base, orange/violet accent),

triadic - either base colour with accent colours equidistant from it (green/orange/violet), or base colour with split complementary (violet base, yellow green/yellow orange accent)

tetradic - this is essentially a combination of two or more of the previous, usually a double complementary or an analogous triad with a complimentary accent (red/green with red violet/yellow green, orange/blue with yellow orange/blue violet)

now there’s a lot more getting into tone, value, and saturation, but these are the basic hue combinations that we most commonly see. kpop styling sometimes veers wildly from these rules, but they aren’t hard and fast so it usually isn’t a big deal. plus a lot of styling is supposed to be a bit visually overwhelming anyways, so i’m not exactly counting it against anyone. but what makes a.c.e’s styling look so nice, even though it often isn’t that complicated, is that they always stick to a specific palette. like i went all the way back through their instagram and ALL their public appearances are coordinated:

even their dance practice videos, of all things!

this is especially true with their performance costumes:

i'm not saying anything really revolutionary here, most groups get colour matching down correctly, but a.c.e's stylists have really nailed down matching the tone and saturation as well as the hue. here's a couple of examples from concept photos:

complementary - full saturation green base, desaturated red (pink) as accent

analogous - full saturation violet, pink, and magenta with desaturated and black accents

triadic - all desaturated

complementary - full saturation red base, varying degrees of desaturation for accent colours

this is fun, let's do some more! this time from their performance costumes:

analogous (monochrome) - full saturation yellow green, desaturated accents

tetradic (analogous with complementary accent) - full saturation red, desaturated violet/red/blue, desaturated green as accent)

triadic (equidistant) - full saturation red/blue with desaturated yellow, desaturated accents

tetradic (double complementary) - full saturation red/green as main pair, desaturated blue/orange as secondary pair, full saturation yellow as accents

starting to see it? you can do this with pretty much any of their styling; i've watched a lot of their performances and i don't think i've seen a single one that didn't follow a really strict colour palette. (ok there were like two savage stages that were not quite as good, but you can tell the stylist was trying to bring them in line with the current 4th gen styling and it didn't work so it didn't last).

costume colours and lighting

this is an important aside in relation to the mvs. whoever edits their mvs is really good at colouring. a big part of colour theory is tone, which is how 'warm' or 'cool' a colour is. it's super important in lighting; the colour wheel is split in half, with yellow through red-red violet categorized as warm, and yellow green through blue and violet as cool. a really easy way to visualize this in lighting is through the light from different types of lightbulbs: led lights are cool toned (they are often slightly bluish), and old style halogen lights are warm toned (they are amber tinged). tones are a thing that kpop videos seem to have a fleeting relationship with; sometimes they're used effectively and sometimes they are not. a big thing that a lot of kpop mvs do is really quickly switch tones in colouring, without connecting the intentions of the colours. here's some examples: ateez's fireworks mv, and oneus' no diggity mv. the fireworks mv has this really weird desaturated balance between warm and cool tones specifically in the interior shots, where they somehow managed to overblow both at the same time, which ends up making it look like they were trying really hard to make a cool tone yellow. you can actually feel your eyes relax in that first shot that takes them outside, because the balance is much more natural. and the no diggity mv.... i love it but it's so chaotic. everything is on high saturation all the time and there's no real limitation on the palette, established connection between colours or arc in the colour story, so the cuts between colours and shots feel more random than intentional. now lets look at some a.c.e mvs in comparision, first: undercover. for starters there's an immediate establishement of red and white/black, with a mild green accent. then it continues to a stronger green/teal, with brown as an extension of red (same undertone). there's a colour shift at the first chorus, where they are in the analogous full saturation violet/pink outfits that i mentioned previously, but they actually desaturate and de-value the hues with edit in order to have it match the tone of the room. the second colour shift is for the second rap break, with byeongkwan and wow in yellow main on black and white backgrounds, but that same level of yellow saturation only appears at the rap break specifically, it's absent from the rest of the mv. and then there's a third colour shift on the last chorus, where they pump up the blue and magenta in order to emphasize the climax of the song.

second, for something a bit crazier: goblin. it follows almost the same pattern as undercover; starting with a strong establishment of red/white/black, but then it jumps into full saturation green and teal as the other main colours. again there's a colour switch at byeongkwan's second rap break, and after than we start to see that deeper saturation blue and pink/purple more, but the main colours are still red/white/black.

ok that's enough about colour, now let's talk about

silhouette

this is maybe a little bit more vague and difficult to describe, but whatever. silhouette is pretty much exactly the way it sounds, it's the overall shape of the body. clothing and body type play equal roles in how silhouette is perceived, but clothing can do a lot to either disguise or transform the body. now there isn't really that much variation in body type in kpop; it's a microcosm of small differences between a lot of very fit people, which has been normalized as "default" by society at large for the last while. i'm not going to get into body politics here, because we all know that kpop dudes are not the median average male body type, but they are for the sake of what we've been socialized to think of as looking attractive so the rest of this is going to operate from that assumption. and when you have five dudes who are pretty smack in the middle of that slight variation (none of them are the largest nor the thinnest, they're all about the same middling height), you've got pretty much free reign to put them in whatever you want and they'll still look hot. kpop styling has a dubious relationship to actual wearable clothing, but it is all costuming so it's not necessary for it to be wearable everyday clothing. but since view in 2015 there's been a dramatic increase in "normal" clothing as performance costume, and the thing about normal contemporary clothing is that it's actually very difficult to style in a convincing way. because it's the trends that the general public is the most familiar with, it's the easiest for them to pick apart where the flaws are. this is all preface to say that there are often common silhouettes that are popular with specific trends. in 2012-2013 there was that sweater tucked into circle skirt with big scarf trend, in the 2007 was like baggy everything and layered tshirts, etc, and 2018-2019 was big colourful patterned shirts. sound familiar? it should, take me higher came out in summer 2018! now there's a debate here (like with most pop culture and celebrity) whether or not kpop is following trends or setting them, and both points are true, but personally i'm of the opinion that kpop is kind of a median between the two; it's not setting trends because it's often taking directly from the fashion industry and/or other popular culture, but it is popularizing them in a way that said trend may not have otherwise. there's a lot of digressions in this section but i'm hoping this will help you see my point.

using take me higher as a specific example, you can clearly see that a.c.e is sticking to a specific silhouette within the group, which is a boxy/loose upper with a fitted lower. which you can see really clearly in this stage, this stage, this stage, this stage, and honestly pretty much every stage for this comeback. sometimes they'll have a slight variation where one of them is wearing a longer shirt, but otherwise it's pretty consistent. this is actually a really common silhouette for them, because it puts emphasis on their specific style of choreo, which is fast footwork. you can see it to the extreme in their main cactus styling, which goes the whole nine yards, fully making their legs the focus and going so far as to embellish them:

this silhouette also shows up for callin', where they're wearing boxy hip cut bomber jackets, and for the majority of the undercover styling, which is cropper military(ish) jackets. and it's shaping up to be similar for higher, so i'll talk more about it when i get there.

they have a consistant look for the goblin stages too, which is hanbok over a tight fitted underlayer. each of their hanbok are different cuts, which you can see with wow's cropped jacket and skirt combo, but it makes the same shape as the others. and in the goblin mv, most of their looks take a traditional silhouette and pair it with modern fabrics and patterns, and combining modern accessories with modernized traditional ones.

sticking to an internal silhouette is not the common mode for most boy group stylings at the moment. there's usually an adhesion to a specific colour scheme, but i have not noticed the same kind of care taken to silhouette. there's usually an adhesion to a member specific shape, but the general shape of the group is not usually as considered. you can see it in ateez's fireworks styling (yes i'm going to use it again, the styling was very weird and i never really talked about how weird it is). in the intro you've got tight pants, loose pants, short jackets, suit jackets, AND a long jacket. and then it's the same kind of variety in the rest of their outfits. if anyhting i'd say the emphasis was meant to be on shoulders, because of the point choreo; and yunho, hongjoong, san, and wooyoung all have some kind of shoulder padding, but that's only half the group. and the stage outfits are not any better. there's the infamous ketchup packet outfit, this naruto themed styling, this inexplicable bdsm football themed styling, and whatever this snakeskin theme is meant to be. it's all over the place! there's some performer specific shapes (hongjoong with the shoulder pads and hip length jacket, san with crop top, yeosang sleeveless) but if you were to just look at the shape of the outfits regardless of colour and pattern, you'd have no way to tell if they were all in the same group.

ok now lastly, let's quickly talk about

pattern matching and texture

this section won't be as long, but i wanted to cover it because even though it's a small and subtle thing, it does a lot in the visual long run. the general rule with patterns is that you don't combine patterns of the same size. this is kind of hard to explain without a visual reference so here's a few examples:

(not my photos, these are from scott schuman's blog the sartorialist)

small check, even smaller pinstripe

mid-size print on pant, large print on scarf

small shirt stripe, mid-size print on tie, mid-large print on scarf

small print on zip jacket, mid-size on scarf, large plaid on jacket

like all fashion and like everything else i've talked about here, this isn't a hard and fast rule, but it does generally look the most harmonious. a.c.e really nails this in the take me higher stages, which you can see here:

(in addition to using different pattern sizes, they're using different colours as well to make it less visually busy)

(bonus! see if you can name the type of colour stories!)

the goblin stages utilize a combination of texture and pattern matching, where the hanbok are a mix of different fabrics (raw silk, embroidered satin, organza) with different patterns, overtop plain underlayers, or when they aren't in hanbok their outfits are very heavily embellished to add visual interest, but are unpatterned fabrics.

in conclusion: good and cohesive colour stories, emphasis on uniform silhouettes and variety in patterns and textures. they also are very specific with accessories, and use them to emphasize key features.

ok! i think that's all i want to cover for this post, because this is already so long. but i've started on the write up for higher already, so i might get into some of my points here in more detail because i'll be talking about one specific thing instead of like......all of it.

[regrettablewritings]

Preferences: Guilty Pleasures

Characters: Okoye, Lucifer Morningstar, Dewey Finn, Peter B. Parker, Ahkmenrah

Okoye

Okoye is straightforward and stony upon first impressions. And, admittedly, even afterward. The only real difference is that, if one gets to know her better, they might find shock in the fact that in spite of her appearance, she Dora leader actually likes sweets. However, it’s not sweet things in general that Okoye feels guilty for enjoying: It’s Starbucks.

Starbucks is the antithesis of everything Okoye is associated with: Supremely un-Wakandan, a chain establishment, and overall just not worth the absurd cost. Not to mention superbly unhealthy when compared to the rest of a fighter’s typical diet. But yet you can bet that every time she needs to go out of the country or off-continent, there’s an invasive shout for joy at the possibility that she might be able to get her hands on a Frappucino (followed by an internal scolding).

She can’t even explain exactly why she likes it; there are plenty of good, even healthier sweet things back in Wakanda -- heck, back anywhere else!

But it’s a bit like when someone craves the cheap taste of school pizza over a legit pie cooked in a stone hearth: She just loves the sugary sweetness, the application of whipped cream to an already tooth-rottingly saccharine icy drink, the addition of chocolate. But Bast, she also hates it. But ever since T’Challa practically shoved a grande cup of caramel frappucino into her hands, she hasn’t felt entirely the same.

Against her better judgement, she’s more or less unintentionally tried 45% of the menu drink-wise. She doesn’t particularly care much for the food part of the establishment, though if she should ever find herself in one during the fall, she might indulge in a chunky slice of pumpkin bread under the conviction that it’s healthy enough for being gourd-related. Never mind that it’s just a cinnamon mixture with more sugar than actual pumpkin-derived anything.

Really, of all those mentioned on this list, Okoye is the one who probably feels the most disappointed in herself whenever she indulges in her guilty pleasure: It’s a betrayal to her patriotism, to her dignity, and to her attempts to eat healthy. But damn, if this type of betrayal doesn’t taste so addicting . . .

Lucifer Morningstar

The thing about Lucifer is that it’s actually a bit hard for him to feel any regrets over liking anything; he’s the Devil, after all, so his whole thing is about embracing the things that make you feel good. And even besides that, he’s mostly managed to skate by in his time on Earth by categorizing things as Stuff He Likes, Stuff He Tolerates, Stuff He Doesn’t Bother With, and Stuff Humans Seem to Enjoy But He Doesn’t Quite Get. It’s a tad restricted of a system but you can’t argue with results.

However, just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. The Devil can, in fact, recognize absurdity in liking certain things. Hence why, to a point, he’s fallen prey to his own bizarre pleasures: The Devil has guilty pleasures, and it’s in stupid YouTube videos, Vine, and TikTok.

After he finally drank the Kool-Aid and got himself a smart phone, it was only a matter of time before Lucifer fell down the rabbit hole that is YouTube prank videos and strange uploads about nonsense and animal humor. It was also only a matter of time before he found himself stumbling into Vine compilations. The Celestial is terrifically mystified by the creative power of humans, managing to tell entire stories and peak comedy in only a span of seven seconds. But he’s also quite loathe to have realized it’s been long defunct by the time he’s discovered it.

He’s even more loathe to find himself making references in his daily life: He has actually quietly blurted out, “I sure hope it does” in response to seeing a Road Work Ahead sign, causing Chloe some confusion (and Lucifer lots of embarrassment). He has referred to a culprit as “Jared, Age 19″. Since discovering Vine, there has been at least one night wherein he and a bed mate were sitting there with barbecue sauce on his tiddies, but that was by sheer coincidence.

But eventually the Vine compilation well dried up, and the inevitable transfer over to TikTok happened. And Luci honestly doesn’t know what to make of TikTok. He would describe it as Vine’s Molly-addicted cousin based on its obsession with dancing, but the dances are so stationary that even that doesn’t seem quite right. The videos on the platform are also much more . . . bizarre. And some of them admittedly trigger a fight-or-flight response in him, to which he always chooses the third option of freezing if only so he can keep watching the train wreck unfold before his eyes.

The trouble with TikTok, he’ll admit to himself, is that it’s not as easy to find iconic content the same way he could with Vine. However, this isn’t to say that he hasn’t found anything worth watching over and over and over again . . .

(Let’s just say the “Wolf Pack Compilation” lives in his head rent-free, and he’s both too amused by it and too overwhelmed by its vibe to try and evict it.)

Dewey Finn

Dewey is . . . a special case. Given that he associates messy living and indulging in one’s pleasure a part of the rocker lifestyle, he’s generally quick to embrace whatever makes him happy. He’s very upfront about his interests and is arguably almost incapable of feeling shame. But it’s in there: Deep down. No, not in himself -- in his Spotify. Specifically, a Spotify account made on an email he never uses because it was made specifically to create this separate, uber secret playlist.

One marked “Actual Musical Bops.”

Dewey hates musicals: They’re cheesy, uninspired, gaudy, ridiculous, totally aimed at chicks with weird fantasies that he could never aspire to, and the music is just overall unimpressive. And yet, somehow, against his music elitist nature, a handful have managed to slip through the cracks. At the very least, a handful of numbers have clawed their way past his defenses and into his ear, where they now live rent-free.

In spite of his best efforts, the problems are that he’s a New Yorker, so it’s inevitable that he hears a song or two; and also that, as an instructor (to wealthy New York tweens whose families can afford frequent tripes to the Great White Way, no less), he’s definitely going to wind up hearing about some shows and their stand-out numbers: Against his will, he knows the lyrics to “My Shot”; he has cried in the secrecy of his apartment to “When I Grow Up”; in the never-necessary reason he needs to remember how many minutes there are in a year, he sings it inside his head; hell, he’s even found himself trying to figure out the electric guitar riff from “The Phantom of the Opera” during his down time.

What’s all the more embarrassing is that, given how he presents himself as a music elitist, there’s just no way he can come back from this if anyone were to know. He has to catch himself when he finds himself humming “Johanna” in the teacher’s lounge. He scowls at himself when he can’t sleep and gives in and starts playing “No One is Alone.” He wants to kick his thick ass every time he realizes he’s excited to have stumbled across a “slime tutorial” on YouTube, this one with better quality than the last. The reason he actually put a password on his phone wasn’t out of privacy like a sensible person would, but out of a need to make sure that no one ever found out that he had downloaded the entire Beetlejuice soundtrack, including jankily-recorded songs that never made it to the official cast recording for whatever reason!

And should anyone ever find out about any of this, Dewey has a plan: “Oh, I’m doing research. I’m studying these songs so I can give the kids a lesson on what not to do as actually competent musicians.”

But the lesson would never actually come. Mainly because he keeps prolonging his “research” . . .

He’s also developed a bit of a soft spot for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic due to some students gushing about it, but he would rather sooner die than ever be associated with the term “brony.”

Peter B. Parker

Peter is at a point where he’s too tired to really care about the idea of guilty pleasures. The way he sees it, there are bigger priorities at stake than worrying about someone finding out about your love of some hokey activity or food or form of entertainment.

Besides, he’s a New Yorker: There’s way weirder stuff for people to just not pay any real attention to. Hence why he thinks nothing of his bizarre eating habits. And no, this isn’t referring to his disastrous appetite: This is about his tendency to eat food with his hands. Foods that, well, he really should probably utilize eating utensils for.

To be fair, this habit has always existed in him in some form or another, especially since, as Spider-Man, he often needs to eat food on the go. But during the time he spent living the life of a depressed bachelor, it came out in full force. On the rare occasion he wasn’t eating a food that deserved to be eaten by hand, he often found himself loathing the idea of doing the dishes afterward. There would be days he’d feel only slightly less depressed; enough to make a box of Kraft Mac n Cheese in the pot, but not enough to avoid cutting out the middle man.

He’s thankful the craptastic apartment wasn’t also see-through because if it were, he’s positive his neighbors would’ve thought they were bearing witness to a man’s breakdown as he wept into a pot of macaroni and cheese, his hand full of the stuff, while wearing a Spider-Man costume. (And, to be fair, they actually would be.)

In addition to this, there were also those nights where he would be prepared to actually tuck in to a plate of spaghetti, only for some crime going on elsewhere in the city to drag him away. By the time he’d return, the plate would’ve been cold and his energy too depleted to want to even dream about cleaning more than he already had to.

The great news is that he’s thankfully done a 180, now able and willing (if begrudgingly) to clean up after himself. But bad news is that this feral man will still eat a fully-loaded baked potato like an apple. In a park. In front of women and children. He’s just too tired to care anymore. He’s aware of the guilt in this as a concept, but he’s also aware that he needs to take whatever happiness he can get out of whatever he does. And if that means eating everything by hand, then so be it!

Ahkmenrah

Funnily enough, Ahkmenrah doesn’t seem to experience much of any shame for enjoying the things most might feel the need to hide: He’s constantly curious and has missed out on a lot over the centuries, so why should he feel bad for wanting to indulge in them? Celebrity gossip is just a more fun version of the palace gossip he’d grown up hearing as a boy; reality TV is like watching a play, but with much more fights, less deaths, and more faulty romances; and sloppy meatball subs are like a feast for a man of his time!

Besides, he’s a king: Kings shouldn’t have to feel embarrassment over what the common folk might think.

And yet . . . It took some time, but eventually Ahkmenrah did experience it: Guilt in his pleasures.

He couldn’t even recall where it had all started. Maybe he was searching for more content to swallow after the most recent season of his new favorite show had ended? Whatever the case, he wound up biting off more than he could chew when he stumbled upon . . . fanfiction.

The adorable yet sad thing is that he didn’t even think anything of it at first. It wasn’t until he brought up a ship he’d invested his last few nights awake exploring on the computer: Nobody knew what the crap he was talking about, so of course he felt the need to explain it. But the more he talked, the more perplexed his friends looked. And the more he could feel his cheeks and ears burn.

Oh, he thought. Is this . . . embarrassment? Is that what this feels like? Oh, this is just foul.

Thankfully, nobody pressured him to keep talking about it, but the poor king sure as heck didn’t feel much of a desire to talk any further about it. But he needed to talk to somebody about his newly acquired “feels” as those online were calling them.

Joining fanfiction-oriented sites was the next obvious step, of course, but he’s experienced mixed feelings about it: On one hand, it’s nice to talk with people who share similar views and excitement about a fictional couple. But on the other, the digital wars that have broken out both disturb him and bring out the worst in him.

Like, of course there are bigger things to deal with than whether or not So-So is better off with Him-Ham, but if you truly think that Blah-Blah and Himhaw are a healthy relationship, then you can go do a service and bury yourself in the desert sands to provide substance to the hungry beetles with your flesh --

Suffice to say, a lot of the guilt in this pleasure seems to come from the fact that Ahk can get a little too emotionally invested if the work is really good. He tries to limit his interactions to commenting and praising certain works, and encouraging content creators. However, he’s also contemplated contributing his own pieces of fiction to the fandom . . .

[matpisound]

memes, and the role of music

Yeah, you heard me right. I'm gonna be talking about memes. Lately, I've been thinking about how much music has become intertwined with meme culture, and how certain songs can become memes on their own. Given that I write a music blog, I thought I'd write about my thoughts on the subject. How DOES music reach meme status?

Well first, we have to define what a meme even is. Obviously it's not just an image edited with a funny caption in Impact font or oversaturated to the point at which it's incomprehensible. Music has to be involved somewhere in there, or else this whole argument falls to pieces. There has to be a broader definition somewhere, right? Yes, there is, and it gives us a perfect grounding for establishing the meme status of music. According to Wikipedia, the term "meme" was coined in Richard Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene, and it defines the word as a cultural entity that can be considered a replicator; basically an idea that can be spread by people copying it and showing it to others, and it can include images, melodies, behaviors, and anything else that can easily be transmitted.

So why does this matter? We can now devise a way to categorize music memes based on what aspect of culture they appeal to. I won't go into every single meme song that exists, but I will go over some of the biggest meme songs in the past couple of years, and there are four main categories that all of them fall into:

Songs that have some sort of cultural significance on their own

Songs relating to shared cultural experiences

Songs that serve as part of a meme, without which the meme potential is lost

Remixes, typically of a sound that has cultural significance

For songs with their own cultural significance, we need look no further that January 2021 with the sea shanty craze; specifically, "The Wellerman". It's a perfect example of how social media has become embedded in musical culture and how sites like TikTok can bring people together through features that allow collaboration. Adam Neely made an in-depth video on this, but the gist of it was that the duet feature in TikTok allows people to come together with collaborative projects like singing sea shanties in a time when we're forced to stay apart. There are other songs that became memes through similar means. "Gangnam Style", "The Cha Cha Slide", and "The Cupid Shuffle" all became popular to the point of memes because they went viral on social media (mainly YouTube) and they were participatory in the sense they had signature dances, which were easy enough for anyone to do, solidifying them into a widespread culture. Some songs are memes due to their established presence in this culture, and they're songs people are expected to know either within a certain group or just in general. Just think "September", "Mamma Mia", and even "Renai Circulation" all became memes simply because of their existence within modern culture.

Culture also follows songs that are entertaining, i.e. funny, and funny songs are part of the epitome of meme culture. These come from the very early days of YouTube all the way to some of the newest TikTok audios. Take the keyboard cat on YouTube for example. Who doesn't love a cat in a suit playing some funky tunes on a keyboard? And Nyan Cat; an upbeat tune made out of synthesized meows while a cat with a PopTart for a body flies through space while farting rainbows. These random gems reflect the spirit of the internet in terms of creativity and just pure fun. There are also songs that are almost like musical shitposts; songs that have almost no meaning but exist for the sole purpose of entertainment through the random. Big Shaq's "Mans Not Hot" is such a fun song, and was really popular a few years ago because of its random lyrics and especially the verse that was just beatboxing. Songs that are so bad they're funny are popping up a lot as well. "Gucci Gang", sporting a laughably terrible sounding beat and 99% of the lyrics just being "Gucci Gang", climbed its way up to meme status just because of how bad it was. The meme status of these songs depends on the hilarity and ridiculousness that internet memes were founded on, and because of that, have embedded themselves into the worldwide meme culture.

Next is songs that relate to shared cultural experiences, so basically all of the movie tunes, game soundtracks, and just other experiences that aren't inherently musical, but contain musical elements. Everyone loves Smash Mouth's "All Star", and was popularized through none other than the hit movie Shrek. On its own it's a great song, but it's unlikely it would have reached the fame it has today had it not been for Shrek, which in and of itself has become a meme. Of course, the other one that everyone knows is "Megalovania" from the game Undertale. Its simple musical motifs combined to make it the insanely recognizable tune it is today, and has almost detached itself from its source entirely. Mario Kart has had several songs that have become memes, including "Coconut Mall" as well as "Dolphin Shoals", which gave birth to the famous Mario Kart Lick. And who could forget about Star Wars with its main theme, "The Imperial March", and "Duel of the Fates" among others. Lazy Town gave us a few gems as well, like "Cooking by the Book" and of course "We Are Number One". Most of these reach meme status because there are simple musical elements that make them instantly recognizable and can trigger pleasant memories of whatever media they came from, that media being a shared piece of culture among the majority of a generation. "All Star" begins that iconic leap from the the root to the fifth of the scale on the opening line, and "Coconut Mall" creates that frenzied feeling like entering a Macy's on Black Friday which just makes it so fun to listen to.

I need to take a minute to comment on the songs in this category that arguably had the biggest impact on the culture of this generation: Minecraft Parodies. Simply say "Creeper" in a room full of high schoolers and I guarantee you it will be followed by a chorus of "Aww man", most likely followed by the rest of the song. You probably already know what song I'm talking about. "Revenge" by CaptainSparklez and Tryhardninja was the song that powered a generation of Minecrafters, and its resurgence in recent years was met with a flash flood of nostalgia and overall good vibes. We had other hits that grew to immense popularity, like "Fallen Kingdom" and "TNT", along with countless others (and I really do mean countless). The parody craze was so prevalent, some people who otherwise probably never would have gotten into music began releasing hit songs. Not to mention all of the original Minecraft songs that came into the spotlight, like "Take Back the Night", "Creepers Gonna Creep", and so many others. This craze spread beyond Minecraft to some newer games like Fortnite, which allowed the creation of one of the most popular parodies today: Leviathan's "Chug Jug with You". Overall, these helped define a generation and not only allowed musicians to be involved in the things they like, but also allowed many people into the world of music.

This next category involves music that became associated with a certain format, as in there's little to no meme within the music outside of that format. The one everyone knows is the iconic Rickroll, the act of building suspense and breaking the tension with the beginning to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" rather than whatever else would logically release tension. Meme formats are tailored to the individual song, and this is no different. The song begins with a sudden electronic drum fill before going into an upbeat 80s dance tune. Often the video preceding the Rickroll will build up to something desirable to the viewer, and that sudden fill subverting their expectations invokes a sense of disappointment, having been cheated out of their reward. However, the fun sound of the rest of the song helps ease that disappointment. The Coffin Dance and Shot on iPhone memes employed a similar concept by building up tension and releasing it by cutting to the music. However, here the music played throughout to help build up that tension while a video, often depicting someone doing something risky or getting hurt in some way, cutting to just the music at the climax of the clip. This employs driving principle of EDM, building up tension and releasing it at the drop. The meme works by mirroring that suspense and resolution of the video with that of the song, and that resolution being different than what would otherwise logically happen is what allows the meme to spread. Obviously, this isn't the only way songs can be part of a format; songs like "Baka Mitai" and "Shooting Stars" have all had their time to shine. However, these memes that work to subvert the expectations of the audience arguably have the biggest impact of the songs in this category.

Finally, we have the remixes, which typically involve altering any of the songs from the above categories. One of the most popular forms of the remix is the mashup, and who better to bring up here than the legendary SilvaGunner, whose videos advertise a track from a video game OST, but end up being some other meme mashed up into it. The reason mashups work as memes is because it subverts our expectations, even when we know it's a mashup. Our brains know how each song goes, but when we listen to them together it creates something completely new that either sounds great or absolutely horrendous. Yet we still listen to them because they're interesting. Additionally, remixing a meme song in a funny way is a common form of musical meme. It can occur through, super heavy distortion, or repeating a section of a song throughout the song at a level far more than a mere motif, or deleting parts of a song leaving only the memeable parts, or simple pitch shifting, among so many other ways of remixing. The possibilities are endless. The reason remixes are such good memes is they take songs with cultural significance and change them entirely, giving them a whole new meaning.

Well there you have it. Music and memes have gone hand-in-hand since the very beginning, and as culture evolves and memes become more advanced, there's no doubt that these threads will entangle themselves even further. Thanks for reading and if you have any interesting thoughts on music memes or just wanna talk about your favorite ones, feel free to share! That's all, and I'll catch you at the double barline!

[thoughtfullyyoungduck]

Arcade

aquesion Summary: You can do one where Eddie has a teenage son and Richie thinks he doesn't like him?

A/N: this was requested by anon, I hope you enjoy!

An ibuprofen looked very appealing to Richie right about now. The tension building up in hos forehead and the back of his head led him to believe this was a stressed induced headache, and Richie has no issue pinpointing exactly who orchestrated it.

In all fairness, Luke, Eddie’s son, had every right to think going to an arcade was lame, but Richie was stuck with an eighties mindset and imagined the arcade being more like those times, instead of a sad, worn down building with a handful of arcade games and only five people present, two of them as old as the building they found themselves in. The man behind the counter to change money into coins creeped on every person occupying the machines, peering over his low hanging glasses and staring unabashedly.

Luke flipped the pocket money Richie dumped in his hands out on the counter, the stoic look not allowing one shift that would grant Richie the possibility of reading his emotions. He’s Eddie son, and so Richie mistakenly assumed that winning over his favor was a matter of hours, but the way their progress was crawling by, his favor might never be granted.

The money traits with a pitiful six coins, meaning a total of two games each, way less then Richie calculated in his head, and then creeper has the audacity to laugh at them, showing his grungy yellow teeth.

‘Four? I payed for way more than that.’ Richie holds his ground, recounting the aquesion again and concluding again that the coins he received are not enough.

‘More money more games’, is the only thing the man says for himself, the sentence probably memorized and routine.  

Richie bristles, he’s been on edge for the better part of the day, more than ready to take on some guy in a sleazy arcade who acts like he can effort to be indifferent towards his very unattainable customers, but Luke gathers them in his palm and waves of Richie’s protests.

‘It’s fine. Faster we’ll be out of here anyway.’ It’s the most he has spoken since their arrival and it’s to express his wish to get this over with. Good job Tozier.

‘Aren’t you a comedian anyway? I’m sure you earn a ton of money.’

Though it’s true, it’s still a rip-off, and when Luke turns his back Richie adamantly flips the creeper the bird, before scooting after his ‘stepson’. Supposedly, if all goes well at least, which it hasn’t up to this point.

The comedian part is the first thing Richie messed up, by resting on his laurels and assuming that he was up to date with what the kids categorized as cool nowadays. His whole target audience consisted of teenagers, aged Luke, and so he thought he had a few trendy points saved up to appease the son of the love of his life, but apparently not.

It wasn’t even like they spewed out the fact they were dating to him straight away either. Eddie took him on day trips every weekend since the divorce, to gingerly introduce the new parts of his father Eddie had hid away, from himself too, like him being gay.

When Eddie did come forward and came clean, he excitedly informed Richie that Luke was okay with his father being himself, but that he hadn’t mentioned Richie yet.

That was normal and Richie understood, he never pushed Eddie for a meeting despite gaining excitement the more information he gathered about him. In fact, Myra told him about the relationship out of spite and jealousy, to turn her son against his dad, but that backfired horribly.

Luke’s curious peeked about Richie too. About the man Eddie renewed his whole life for, but he must not have liked what he found in Richie, because the boy hanging out with Richie now is cold.

And Eddie warned him too, but Richie was too stubborn to listen. Gently bringing up the fact that Richie needed to tame down the over sexual jabs, especially in regards of Eddie’s mother. Richie brushed that advice off, mind set on the idea that Eddie loves his joke, even when he pretends he doesn’t, so Luke must find some humor in them too. Mission failed.

Luke’s hobbies consisted of painting and video games, and Richie didn’t understand the slightest about painting, but he did know a lot about videogames. Visiting an arcade seemed fun, a way to show Luke that Richie mastered the skill of triumphing in any computer based game, but the place he decided on was a dumpster, and the machines were likely not updated since the eighties.

None of it looked appealing, the dust thicker than Bill’s smallest book, so much so that even Richie shuddered at the prospect of touching it. Luke ambled between machines with his hands deep in his pockets.

‘See anything you like?’ Richie strikes up a conversation, nibbling on the pad of his thumb to stop himself from making another joke. Luke didn’t find his last one so funny.

‘No’, Luke says, continuing his path without even bothering to look at Richie. Richie wants to asks him if he’d like to go home, knowing for sure the answers is yes, but he doesn’t want to blow the only opportunity he may have to get to know Luke, so he toughens it out.

‘Oh look at this.’ Absentmindedly, he walks over to the one game he spend his entire summer playing, street fighter, and pins down the start button, the intro song emerging from the speakers.

‘This is what I impressed your dad with back in middle school.’

‘Somehow I don’t see how that would’ve worked out.’

‘I won all the time and your dad hated that he lost to me, so he fought me again and again, losing every single time and returning next day for another beatdown. It was a good way to hang around him without seeming suspicious.’

‘Maybe you were good at it then, but you’ve regressed old man.’

‘How about I show you how good I am at this game?’

‘Bring it on.’

They compete in silence, emerged in their own players actions and desperate to win from the other. Luke’s good, really good, with his little experience of this particular game he whips the floor with Richie.

Richie obviously can’t let that happen, so he opts to distract the boy the same way he did to others in Derry, in the hopes of coming out on top.

‘Really? And you say you’re a video-game expert, my grandpa can do better then you’, Richie eggs him on, delivering a punch to Luke’s character with a hard knock on the controls.

‘I sure am. And are you sure it’s not yourself you’re talking about? You know, because of how old you are?’

Richie gasps dramatically, releasing the consoles and clasping his hands on his chest while he gasp in faux-upset. Luke laughs once, then delivers the final blow to end the game with Richie losing.

Richie gapes open mouthed, beat at his own game, the end credits blinking by.

‘Guess I’m better than you expected huh.’ Luke’s laughing now, his frown relaxed in a gentle smile that resembles Eddie a whole lot.

‘Maybe we can go again and see who wins?’

‘You’d want that? I mean of course, let me go get some more coins.’

Luke blinks, his face back to neutral but at least he’s no longer frowning. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

[ramblefang]

Rabbit Town; BNA ep 2

 “Previous Post

Preface

My previous (and first) post of these BNA first impressions ended up being more rambly than even I want to be. Most of that was due to me retelling events, which I was actually doing to help me remember what happened in the episode. So instead, I’m going to try just going through the episode again in another tab and using timestamps (which I think is the norm for this sort of thing anyway.) This technically means I’ll be writing down my second impressions, but I’d really prefer my first watch of episodes to not be interrupted every minute by me needing to tab out and write something. I’ll still try to remember and write out my first impressions anyway.

(Hmm, Netflix doesn’t seem to provide a precise timestamp. Guess I’ll just approximate things by mousing over the...runtime...bar thing.)

Cold Open

0:15 Starting off right where the last episode ended: Michiru saying that she’s human.

0:22 Shirou says she’s a tanuki, based on the appearance of her tail. She seems offended by the idea. My best guess is that her reaction has to do with what tanuki are famous for: having huge balls. (Also they’re magical spirits, which may or may not have something to do with the powers Michiru has.)

0:45 The police arrive and it seems Shirou is a known entity. Gives me Batman vibes. Is Shirou a vigilante? And in that way where the police are just used to it by now?

Opening

0:50 The OP starts and I notice the strands of DNA. Makes me think of how Michiru apparently changed species, and also the way there is some pharmaceutical company behind the very existence of Anima-City. Oh, and I just got that “BNA” is basically a pun on DNA.

1:30 Last time I had recalled something about shadowy feral transformations, but it looks like Michiru transforms into something more equine than anything else. (With what I know from later in the episode, she definitely seems to be a shapeshifter, which I think is appropriate for a tanuki.)

1:40 Oh, and there’s still totally something about this vocal melody that reminds me of “Bad Apple.” Admittedly, it’s been years since I actually listened to that song, so maybe I’ll have to go compare them later.

Forms

2:00 A detail spoiled by the OP: apparently beastmen have human forms that they can switch to, yet Michiru can’t. Honestly, it sort of looks like she’s stuck in a halfway state—a kemonomimi for the most part, though with the nose and “mask”

2:10 Shirou appears surprised, and possibly skeptical, about Michiru being unable to switch forms, indicating that it is by far the norm to be able to do so

2:35 Ah, by the way Michiru speaks about it, switching forms seems to be common knowledge even among humans. Shirou says “Quit talking like a human” in response to the idea that they’re always in beast form, which means this is a common human misconception (and this comes up later as well, illustrating how Michiru really comes across as human in little ways).

2:45 Bystanders seem to be paying special attention to Michiru, likely to her form. (This sets up what happens later over her inability to assume a human form)

Cooperative

3:00 A lot about this scene speaks to me as a trans person: someone running tests that “prove” someone’s identity and insisting that what they see on the surface is all there is to the truth

3:35 Michiru says she must be afflicted with a “disease”, reminding me of the worries I had about a pharmaceutical company being behind the city and how there may be a darker purpose involving a “cure.” Unsettlingly, Michiru also isn’t far off from saying that being a beastman—the very existence of beastmen—is itself a disease. (Mind, she doesn’t literally say that, but based on things she says at the end of the episode, it may not be too far off from how she actually feels—right now.)

4:00 Back to trans stuff, this reminds me of how being trans was, as a whole, labeled as “Gender Identity Disorder”, categorized as a mental illness rather than a natural state of being. (Also, I’m currently building a headcanon of Michiru being a trans girl. Not only because of this stuff, but also due to how she reacted to being called a tanuki: I can interpret her as feeling gender incongruence/dysphoria over the big balls thing.)

4:30 Interesting that this is a “cooperative”. Are they technically not part of the government and are more independent than that? Or maybe the term means something else in Japan.

4:40 Again with trans feels. Filling out forms and needing to identify as something you don’t actually see yourself as

4:50 (Didn’t catch that my first time around: different blood types? Wonder if blood harvesting and blood mixing will be a thing. Remembering the kids that were about to be sold off... Might these things be connected?)

(Rather than making things shorter, this is just resulting in me going even more in-depth. Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to deal with it.)

5:10 Probably a bit of an exaggeration that you can’t get back anything stolen from you: says more about how this is a seedier place than the video in episode 1 let on. We sort of got that from Michiru being pickpocketed in the first place, but this lets us know that that wasn’t an irregular occurrence

5:30 (Also didn’t really absorb this my first watch, but it does make sense that Michiru has been sleeping outside while on the run. Doesn’t feel good to think about how she had to spend that time being scared of the humans around her.)

5:40 Kuro is a wonderfully round birb.

6:10 Michiru making the same connected that I made (and that the audience in general is probably expected to make) about Shirou potentially being that big wolf who was up on the rooftops

6:25 Michiru probably expected Anima-City to be the end of her struggles where everything would just be better and easier. Indeed, she is young and naive.

The Next Morning

7:20 While Michiru may be surprised by the “rule of the strong” here, it does work effectively in parallel with the focus that has been put on money (between these two episodes). The powerful get to do what they want, whether it comes from physical strength or financial power. When it comes down to it, the human world, under a capitalist framework, doesn’t behave all that differently

7:45 Oh, Shirou has some sort of direction connection with the mayor and/or the government. Is this what they meant by “social worker”? Is he some sort of government agent? Does he have the extrajudicial authority to just beat people up (and even kill them?) the way he did with those terrorists?

9:00 (Considering Marie’s apparent connection to Rabbit Town, she probably does have some connection to the pickpocket. But now that I’m making this connection... Did Marie bring those kids to Rabbit Town after they were separated from their parents by beastman hunters?)

Rabbit Town

9:25 My very first expectation with a place called “Rabbit Town” was something akin to “Little China Town”

9:35 Then it struck me as something of a red light district

10:00 And we learn what Michiru might have to deal with in the future for being unable to switch to a human form: more people may think she’s trying to pick a fight.

10:15 Saying that she’s “not some baby” indicates that there are people who can’t control their forms: young children. Or, perhaps, someone who hasn’t been a beastman for a long time. (Maybe she’ll figure it out when/if she gets back with the kids she helped rescue.)

10:45 (Struck by how “coincidental” it is that someone like Grand Grandma would end up with a random kid’s wallet. It’s making me think that the pickpocket and Marie actually funnel people into this person-trafficking ring)

11:15 With my early impression of Rabbit Town being some sort of red light district, I thought this was some sort of communal daycare. (But seeing it again, I’m noticing how stern these women are at seeing the children. Definitely doesn’t look like they care about the kids.)

11:20 The line about them being “women who were betrayed by men”, and the following lines, really fit in with my thinking that this was a red light district, and they probably just didn’t want to outright say these were sex workers. (And maybe some of them are, but it turns out to be far from the whole picture)

11:40 And it does seem to be the image they want to give to Michiru: that they’re a bunch of women struggling together with all of these kids to take care of. There was also a bit about “what it’s like to live as a beastman” which makes me think that it’s definitely the norm for beastmen to be poor—not a surprise since they are clearly an oppressed minority group

Literacy

12:05 Totally expected “Poop” to become the kids’ nickname for Michiru. (Glad it didn’t since it would have made it harder to really care about what happens later.)

12:50 Look at these cuties wanting to learn. (And sobering in retrospect to think how this is probably the most care and attention they’ve had in a while.)

13:10 I forgot to say something about it last episode, but the way Shirou’s sense of smell is visualized is amazing.

13:20 Again with the red light district impression, I was thinking this was the arrival of a pimp or something

13:40 I appreciate Michiru caring about what the kid is already doing instead of reprimanding them for not paying attention

14:00 So we learn about Silver Wolf, who could be the wolf Michiru saw when she arrived in the city. Since Shirou seems to be that wolf, does that mean he’s actually Silver Wolf? Is this an urban legend based on him? Or is he actually some sort of god?

Money

14:45 The demands of payment really played into my pimp impression, but then this guy mentions “letting these women be gangsters.” They could totally still be sex workers as well, but this clues us in that these women may be involved in shadier stuff

15:10 I wonder if the politics of these criminal groups will come more into play in the future. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of the villains we meet end up being allies by the end, considering the way Trigger tends to tell their stories.

15:35 “It’s all women are good for anyway” is an impressively disgusting line to tell us that they’ve been talking about selling the kids. Also, I wonder what it means for the mayor to know about the kids: that the government will be sending people to rescue the kids and shut them down...or that the mayor would be interested in buying...

15:45 The line about the kids being “snatched away” probably means the mayor, so probably not about buying the kids. Still doesn’t mean the “rescue” could end up being more nefarious than it would seem. (Look, I just don’t trust the head of a pharmaceutical company also being a mayor, especially when a video about the city was directly associated with the company instead of being its own thing.)

15:55 Given the earlier scene between Shirou and the mayor, and Shirou being here, I guess he’s something like the mayor’s enforcer? Her trusty hand that does what needs to be done? But I’d also guess that if the mayor is secretly a villain, Shirou has no idea

Trafficking

16:30 I immediately put together that these kids were probably separated from their parents due to attacks by those beastman hunters. (And earlier in this post is when I retroactively put together that Marie, or people with the same job, likely gave/sold the kids to Grand Grandma, if they don’t work for her directly.)

16:40 The rule of the powerful coming up again. This is the way this world (and our world) works. (Which I could go off on a political tangent about, but I’ll refrain for now.)

16:55 Michiru is an atheist. Or at least incredibly pragmatic. Not the most helpful thing to say to people who literally can’t do anything in this situation, but I appreciate the sentiment of actually doing what you can instead of hoping someone else does something about it

17:20 Hmm, no one seems too surprised about Michiru’s expanding tail powers. Maybe this is a relatively normal tanuki thing?

18:00 But the stretchy arms totally aren’t normal, even for a tanuki. Thinking about it, no one else has obviously shown any kind of powers yet. Shirou’s fight with the terrorists could have just been his physical prowess. Do these powers have something to do with Michiru’s transformation from human to beastman?

18:50 In case you didn’t catch on to everyone’s surprise, confirmation that what Michiru just did was very unusual.

19:25 Never a big fan of the “even if they’re women” line. They’ve been doing a very bad thing. Stopping them shouldn’t have anything to do with gender. Why even bring it up. But I guess it does play into Shirou being a masculine and “chivalrous” type of character, as well as this being a generally patriarchal society (which isn’t really any different from our world). (Thinking back to my post on the previous episode, I guess “this isn’t too different from our world” is probably the point that the pseudo-branding contributes to.)

20:00 It seems that Shirou’s relationship to the police is less like Batman, and more like he just outranks them.

20:20 “Facility” is such a cold and impersonal term that it really does make me worry about what the government is going to do with these kids. Again, pharmaceutical company. (I’ll make sure to go back to episode 1 and get a better look at the company’s actual name so I can use that. May as well if I’ll continue to make a big fuss over it.)

20:35 “Even though you’re a beastman, don’t you have a human heart?” is a horribly offensive question. I was initially going to refer to it as a microaggression, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how terrible it is. It’s heavily loaded with the ideas: 1) beastmen are expected to be bad, hence the “even though”, and 2) being human is inherently a good thing. Despite what she said to Shirou at the end of last episode, it seems that she really just has the inverse of his beliefs. And this is so clearly something that only a human would say that it convinces Grand Grandma of Michiru’s “humanity”

21:20 Shirou, needing to wait for evidence before he can do anything, kind of illustrates Michiru’s point of view of not being able to count on society—on anyone else—to be able to help you.

21:30 Shirou, representing the police and government authority to an extent, believing that he “never makes mistakes” again reminds me of the protests we’ve had throughout this year. How the police totally does make mistakes—or rather, the way they don’t even view things they’ve done as mistakes—is totally a problem. (ACAB)

21:40 Following up on what Grand Grandma mentioned earlier about being “betrayed by men”, Michiru questions why it’s only “women and children” that Shirou is protecting. Is it that men don’t need to be protected? “What makes males so special? Are men really that great?”

21:55 And Michiru outright says what she had only implied earlier. Also, she seems a bit scattered between being angry at men, being angry at beastmen, being angry at the police, bring angry at society, and being angry in general. But I get it.

And that’s the end of the episode. I’m not sure if this is how I’ll continue to do these impressions, but I guess I’ll have to see how I feel about it once I get to episode 3. Maybe I’ll try out some genuine first-impressions, even if it means interrupting the episode constantly.

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Growing Pains: Genre and Themes

At first, it seems that categorizing a sitcom as anything but a comedy doesn’t really seem possible.  After all, ‘comedy’ is literally part of the classification.  (As is ‘situational’, but situational doesn’t tend to be considered a genre.)

As such, it may seem like this article is, for the most part, kind of unneeded.  I mean, the entire point of a sitcom is to be funny (Unless you’re Married With Children).  Doesn’t that, in and of itself, make it a comedy?

Well, not exactly.

Like I’ve mentioned in other genre articles, very few pieces of media can be placed in only one genre category.  Even the most seemingly one-note examples contain elements of other categorizations, which makes sense.  No show is designed to fit solely in one box, and the best shows fit into several.  While it is true that most shows can be categorized neatly into one main genre, the fact is, a piece of media tends to predominantly carry characteristics of one specific genre, while sharing many elements of other genres.  That’s where things get tricky.

You see, not all sitcoms are created equally ‘comedic’.  You may have noticed that some tend to include ideas from different genres.

Bewitched is what happens when you combine a fantasy idea with a sitcom format.  Mork and Mindy and My Favorite Martian are science-fiction sitcoms.  M*A*S*H is a war dramedy.  The Addams Family is a horror aesthetic matched with a traditional family sitcom style.  All of these shows are funny, true, but this also makes my point:

A sitcom is not necessarily only a comedy.  

As a matter of fact, more than anything, a sitcom is a format, into which the story and characters must fit.  While a genre is the result of the style of the story and characters, a sitcom is a format first, with characters and stories designed to fit into and around that format.  With that in mind, many sitcoms had chances to play around with genres of individual episodes, while remaining true to their format.

With that in mind, we’re going to be analyzing Growing Pains to determine it’s genre, use of comedy, and how it fit into the format given to it.  Let’s take a look, starting with the opening credits.

See, the opening credits of a television show do more than just show the audience the characters and who plays them.  The opening credits set the mood, give the viewer a preview as to what to expect.  The music, combined with the clips used, tell the audience what is to come.  Star Trek has a stately instrumental theme with the overlaid narration: Space…the final frontier, giving the audience a sense of the adventures to come.  Cheers overlays pictures of bars and their patrons, paired with an extremely recognizable tune.

So, how does Growing Pains open?

The opening sequence to each Growing Pains episode is set to the same song (albeit there are different versions): “As Long as We’ve Got Each Other”.  Not only is the song incredibly catchy, it’s also a sign of what’s to come.  In the first season, it’s played over pictures and artworks of family life in general, but for the remainder of the show, it’s changed to images of the main cast in various stages of life.  Thus, in the opening sequence of every show, the audience quite literally watches the cast grow up, before the final shot is typically one of the entire family as they are in this particular season of the show.

What does that tell the audience?

This isn’t a trick question.

The opening credits do everything possible to tell the audience that they are about to watch a show that is wholly centered on a family.  The opening is done with affection, nostalgia.  It’s a homey invitation for the rest of the show, and the viewers infer that, despite interpersonal conflicts and traditional family fights, in the end, they are a family, and they do love each other.

So, how well does that reflect the show itself?

Growing Pains was very standard sitcom fare in that it was full of jokes, part and parcel with the obnoxious laugh-track expected at the time.  By the same token, it was also a sweet family show (though not as cutesy as Full House, for which we can thank our lucky stars).  Most importantly, it was about the people within the family.  In that, not only does the intro definitely reflect the content, it also connects quite a lot to our genre question.

In each genre article, we discuss the very important fact that the genre is the  product of the type of story and characters in each piece of media.  Back to the Future is a science-fiction-comedy because the story is centered on soft science fiction elements as well as being comical, and the characters fall right in line with that.  The Wizard of Oz is a fantasy movie because the story and characters are fantastical.  Big Trouble in Little China is…a mystery.  Not a mystery story, just a mystery in general.  Nobody knows what it is.

That’s beside the point.

The point is, the characters and plots for each medium have a lot to do with how they’re classified, and the same holds true for Growing Pains.

Like I mentioned in the ‘story’ article, the show is centered on the Seaver family, and their individual lives.  And while they aren’t exactly true-to-life, totally realistic events, they do tend to be exaggerated reflections of real-life scenarios.  And life, as it turns out, doesn’t really have much of a genre.

There are scary Halloween episodes, tragic episodes, just plain funny episodes, and dramatic episodes, because that’s life.  Life is sometimes scary, funny, dramatic, or sad, and Growing Pains and its characters didn’t shy away from that, because they couldn’t.  By trying to depict an exaggerated version of life, the show, whether intentionally or not, had no choice but to adapt with it the idea that the ‘stories’ of life don’t tend to have a ‘genre’, they tend to just happen.  There is no ‘event’ that happens every episode like car chases on The Dukes of Hazzard.

At least, nothing besides that laugh track.

Despite this, that doesn’t mean that there were no constants in story style.  There were always a few things to expect in most episodes.

I mentioned the laugh track above as a mostly humorous aside, but in all seriousness, Growing Pains is a comedy.  This isn’t a surprise, it is a sitcom, and the laugh track just cinches it, but it’s more than a comedy.  There’s a lot of this show that speaks to some element of drama, as well.

While it’s true that Growing Pains never reached the levels of sobriety that M*A*S*H did (small wonder, as one show is about a family, and the other is about a war hospital), the show didn’t tend to sugar-coat big decisions and their effects on the family.  It wasn’t always big drama, (the episode where Jason and Maggie fight after Maggie feels that Jason disrespected her in public) but it was drama, relatable drama for the audience at home.  The humor was based on characters and their interactions with one another, how we could tell what kind of thing individual characters would say, rather than slapstick or goofy scenarios.  Thus, the humor and the drama tended to go hand in hand.  Typically, the laugh track didn’t tend to intrude on an emotional scene just because we need more laughs in an episode.

With character-driven shows like Growing Pains, family shows tended to be more focused on slices of life type events, and situations that didn’t fix themselves.  There were always laughs, but there was more weight to the show’s plots than excuses to use jokes.  It was, by no means, one of the more gimmicky sitcoms of the ‘60s.

Is Growing Pains a comedy show?  Yes, absolutely.  Unquestionably.  But it’s also something more.

Audiences remember the jokes, sure, but they also remember the episode where Jason doesn’t want to help his mother’s dying second marriage because he doesn’t like the new husband.  They remember Carol’s boyfriend dying in the hospital after drunk driving.  They remember Maggie and Jason dealing with age as they welcome an unexpected baby into the family.  

You know what that is?  Drama.  

Good stories, with memorable characters.

In the end, that’s what people took away from this show.  Individual jokes tended to fade, but the audiences who watched the show didn’t forget the people involved, or the experiences they had.  They still hold up, and modern audiences can still relate to those characters and their experiences.

Speaking of the characters, they certainly deserve some discussion as well.  

Join us next time as we take a look at the Seavers themselves, and figure out what made them a stand-out sitcom family!  In the meantime, drop an ask in the ask box for any discussions, questions, suggestions, or just to say hi!  Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to see you in the next article.

[dudeguypants]

Finally, an NFL division breakdown that actually makes sense

With the playoffs finally here, people are tossing around all sorts of geographically-based phrases: NFC West, AFC East, AFC South, etc. But what does it mean?! The NFL is made up of 8 divisions - 4 in the AFC, 4 in the NFC. Simple right? Sure. But after that it makes zero sense whatsoever...

Example - Miami is in the AFC East, not South. But the Carolina Panthers are in the NFC South, and they’re in NORTH Carolina! C’mon.

The Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos are in the AFC West, but they’re midwest at best. The other AFC West teams are in California, which is, in fact, west. However, Indianapolis (Colts) is in the AFC South, but it’s NORTH of Cincinnati, home to the Bengals, who are in the AFC North. The Dallas Cowboys are in the NFC East?… Dear NFL, BUY A MAP.

I came up with a solution: I’ve categorized the teams into a simple, understandable breakdown - Thematic divisions according to team names.

Cats Division:

Panthers

Bengals

Jaguars

Lions

Cats are the most viewed thing on the internet, so the “Big Cat” teams should absolutely have their own division. And let’s be honest, cat fans outnumber football fans by roughly Asia. So this is a great opportunity to bring them together. And every cat fan would have an officially licenced “Cats Division” NFL sweatshirt, ‘cause we all know cat people love to advertise it. Cha-ching.

Industry Division:

Steelers

Packers

49ers

Browns

Pittsburgh prides itself on its historic industrious steel-town legacy. The Green Bay Packers are named for the meatpacking industry that first sponsored the team. The gold industry flourished as miners flooded to the west in 1849, forever changing the Bay Area’s culture, landscape and economy. The Browns are named after their first coach, Paul Brown. But “Brown” is synonymous with the shipping industry frontrunner, UPS, whose signature brown uniforms inspired the ubiquitous ad campaign: “What can Brown do for you?”

Pillagers Division:

Buccaneers

Vikings

Raiders

Chargers

Historically, you’d want to steer clear of these guys. Warriors, heathens, barbarians, marauders, communists… the bad guys. Basically the types that want to kill you and take your stuff. Maybe a little more intimidating than other divisions, which only helps you remember which division they’re in.

Birds Division:

Falcons

Eagles

Cardinals

Ravens

Simple division here, easy to remember, no guessing. If it flies and has feathers, it plays here. “What about the Seahawks?” Read on...

Open Range Division:

Chiefs

Redskins

Bears

Rams

“Home, home on the range” you know the song. Long ago, Native Americans roamed the open range, along with wildlife including Rams and Bears. Also home to antelope and deer, but those aren’t NFL teams. Yet.

Mythical & Religious Entities Division:

Giants

Titans

Saints

Seahawks

Giants, Titans and Saints all exist in some mythology or religion. A Seahawk, which is not usually thought of in the same realm as a Titan, isn’t technically a real bird. Ospreys have been referenced as a seafaring member of the hawk family. But it’s not the “Seattle Ospreys.” It’s the Seahawks. Which is a made-up creature. So it works. Lay off.

Dudes Who Love Guns Division:

Cowboys

Texans

Patriots

Bills

The only division more intimidating than the Pillagers Division. Cowboys had shootouts, Patriots secured our independence from England with guns, and Texans are from Texas. “Shouldn’t Buffalo play in the Open Range Division?!” If it were the Buffalo Buffalo, yes. But the Buffalo Bills are named after Buffalo Bill Cody, whose wild-west show included lots of shooting, reenacting Indian Wars, and general cowboy-ing. Which kind of relates to the Open Range, but that’s not important. To avoid confusion, just remember - Buffalo Bill Cody is a dude who loved guns.

Things That Go Fast Division:

Jets

Colts

Broncos

Dolphins

When someone mentions “fast,” I’m thinkin’ airplanes and horses. Makes complete sense. Also, a short-beaked common dolphin reaches speeds of 37 mph… in water. Just imagine how fast they could go on land.

There it is, a perfectly reasonable organization of the currently incomprehensible structure of NFL Divisions. Having read this, go ahead and quiz yourself or a loved one on which teams play in which divisions. No more East, West, Up, Down, etc. Just things that make sense. I hope the NFL is reading. Thank you.

[withasideoficing]

Sorry

Summary: Y/N contemplates her relationship with Auston. She never meant to let it get that far.

Features: Angst, but does that surprise anyone? 

Notes: Based on Sorry by Halsey; lyrics appear, but are out of order 

Word Count: 1115

Don’t realize how mean I can be, ‘cause I can sometimes treat the people that I love like jewelry

You had met him on a night out. It was never supposed to turn into something. You didn’t do relationships. It just wasn’t in your nature and hadn’t been for sometime. But one night turned into another, turned into a date, and here you were six months later.

It wasn’t that you thought relationships were pointless. You had been burned too many times to let yourself get attached. You kept telling yourself this was casual. That you weren’t getting attached. That he wasn’t getting attached. The hockey season would end soon, and he’d be out of your life for the summer just as quickly as he’d arrived in it on that late fall night. You just kept telling yourself that it wouldn’t last.

“Y/N, what do you think?” he asked. Your eyes met his as he held up two ties. How had you fallen into this domestic routine?

“Uh, what’s this for again?” you asked. You hadn’t been paying attention. You vaguely remembered him mentioning some event he was going to.

“The charity gala? The one we’re going to tomorrow night? Steph said you still haven’t gotten a dress. Babe, you’re down to the wire,” he said, slightly amused. You looked at him, confused. And then it hit you. You had agreed to go a few weeks prior, half paying attention to the conversation.

“Oh...I...I think I double booked tomorrow. My mom’s in town,” you said quickly.

“I can meet her, and you can get a dress,” he responded. A knot had taken root in your stomach. Your heart was beating faster and you could feel yourself starting to panic. It was clear to you in that moment, Auston Matthews was taking this relationship a lot more serious than you were and you were on a collision course for breaking his heart.

I run away when things are good and never really understood the way you laid your eyes on me in ways that no one ever could

You had come up with a flimsy excuse for why Auston couldn’t meet your mother and why you had to bail on the event. Auston had understood, but you saw the hurt. It was the first event he’d be bringing you to. The first time he’d have you with him publicly, telling the world that you were his. That terrified you. You knew it was a matter of time before he dropped the L bomb. If you didn’t end it before it got there, it wasn’t going to end well. You heard the comments when you were around the wives and girlfriends. How he’d been before you. It seemed like people categorized him as “Before He Met Y/N” and “After He Met Y/N”. You weren’t sure how you had let it get to this point. Maybe you liked the attention he gave you. Maybe, for a moment, you wanted to pretend to believe that someone could care about you as more than just a friend, more than just a hookup. ‘Stupid, I was stupid. I let this go too far’ you thought to yourself.

“Y/N, tell me about this boyfriend of yours,” your mom said as your appetizers arrived at lunch. You shrugged.

“He’s okay. Plays hockey. Honestly, not sure how much longer it’s going to last,” you told her. She raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t believe that. You talk about him more than you’ve ever talked about anyone you’ve brought home,” she said.

“I do not,” you argued. She just shook her head.

“Don’t push him away, sweetheart. You’re happier than I’ve seen you in a long time,” she told you. You wanted to yell. She was seeing things that weren’t there, you told yourself. You couldn’t love him. You couldn’t stay with him much longer. The longer you stayed, the more it was going to hurt, and at this point, you weren’t sure if it was you or him who would be hurt the most.

And so it seems I broke your heart, my ignorance has struck again. I failed to see it from the start and tore you open 'til the end

It was a few days later that you had the argument. You knew what you were doing. It was calculated on your part. It’s not cruel, it’s a kindness was what you kept repeating to yourself. Auston, who had just told you he loved you, was about to have everything come crashing down around him when it came to you.

“Aus...I can’t...I can’t do this,” you told him after those three words left his mouth. He looked stunned. It wasn’t the response he was expecting.

“Y/N, baby...what’s going on? Talk to me,” he said. You closed your eyes. You could feel tears forming. This, now this was new. You’d never felt the crush of heartbreak bearing down on you, feeling like you couldn’t breathe.

“Auston...I can’t be with you anymore. I’m sorry. I just, I can’t do this. I can’t do us,” you told him, your voice threatening to crack. It was for the best, you told yourself. He could and would do better. You stood from the couch, leaving the box you had brought with you on the floor. A box of things that had accumulated in your apartment since your relationship had started. A clean break, you had decided, was best for both of you. You walked out, closing that chapter of your life, and headed to your car.

If you cried as you drove home, well, that was a secret between you and the dashboard. And if you sobbed later that night as you tried to fall asleep, it was no one else’s business.

I didn't mean to try you on, but I still know your birthday and your mother's favorite song

Playoffs started and it felt like you couldn’t go anywhere in the city without hearing about Auston, hearing about his teammates. You could have sworn you saw Steph when you were grabbing lunch on your break a few days prior, Lucy at the bookstore you went to on Saturdays. And then one day, you saw him out. It was in the midst of the series against Boston. It had been a couple months since your breakup...parting, you parting. You refused to call it a breakup. A breakup implied feelings. Feelings you didn’t want to acknowledge. He was with his family. You had met them once, and you, being you and refusing to believe that what you were was anything but casual, hadn’t thought much of it at the time. You had gotten along with them. You had, you admitted to yourself begrudgingly, really bonded with his mom and sisters and had exchanged numbers.

You made eye contact with him and it was like you both just froze. It felt like time dragged on, but then, in a moment, you looked away. You had just been walking down the street. And just like that, you vanished into the crowd. You told yourself it was for the best. But you weren’t sure just how much you believed yourself.

Someone will love you, but someone isn’t me.