#also claire vc: fuck them up fuck them UP

[samscartoonsofficial]

*Waking up hungover* *checks gallery on phone*

Eggman voice: "Ugh..what the fuck happened last night??"

Hailey once again has BULLIED me /j/ I to more Shrike x Cephany content but with the mention of the movie thumbalina. Shrike and his ass would NOT be a charming prince...put on the Disney princess dress. You only won Hailey because I LET you *squints eyes*

AND because I can show off your stuff as well hehehe >:) screenshot redraw wip by @haileybirdart

And @houseofdoodles with THIS!! me and Hailey were screaming! Sparkl L my beloved. Shrikes face is awesome too lol.

But seriously Thank you guys again for a fun and great night I love talking to you guys on VC and doodling shenanigans.

Also this as well! For @monoclairx the true Thumbalina couple :')) they're adorable your honor I love them.

Also had alot of fun with Clair last night doing readings and finding out our Deities too :3

*closes everyones eyes*

[oksanaastankova]

hmmm okay some fiction that has at least left me thinking (idk if it fucked me up) would be woman, eating by Claire Kohda

and of course anything by VC Andrews 😹

but as far as like a lasting emotional impact, the poppy war trilogy by RF Kuang really had me emotional :’(

also if you like young adult, the uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfeld is one of the best dystopian series I’ve read and I still think about it all the time

Darcie Little Badger also has books for younger audiences that make me almost cry (which is more than any other book hahah), particularly a snake falls to earth

Idk if any of these are to your taste but I hope you find something!!

i'll look them up anon thank you🩷🩷

[sls-60]

Me, coming home from doctors to this dash rn:

[quillsink]

1, 14 and 15?

1. Which reoccuring theme is present in all of your WIPs?

Lmaoo I have a lot.

Fire my beloved. In legit all of my fics, Hamilton, his hair, his ambition, his personality, literally all of them are compared to fire. I can’t help it FIRE IS FUCKING COOL OKAY. Also in my Polly WIP fire plays a big role heheheheh

Next, we know John was fond of nature, so I have Henry or John comparing Eleanor to flowers? I did this unconsciously at first then started doing it on purpose cuz it’s cool

I use the phrase “spiralled into darkness” a LOT to describe depression lmaoo

Also the themes of internalised and period typical homophobia, self hatred, fucked up mental health, ambition, legacy, and gay are present in all my fics wdym i’m projecting hahahah-

14. Is there a specific moment you’re looking forward to when it comes to your WIP? Which one?

YES I SO AM. I infodumped about it to Clair on VC the other day and I’m not gonna spoil it for y’all, but basically it’s near the end of the story, and three characters who either have never met each other or have not met for a long ass time finally confront each other and face all the changes that have happened and reveal secrets and its so goooood aaarrgghh I can’t wait to write it!

15. What’s the best writing advice you have come across? What’s the worst?

Imma start off with the worst, and the worst I’d say is to write for other people. Unless you need money or smth—don‘t. The best is to write for yourself. Write for you, and you only.

[haloese]

            jack vc maybe if i close my eyes, they’ll be gone.             (opens eyes, sees the bullshit)       S I G H S .

📣 hi is it too much to ask for an rp reality show spin-off for supernatural as a way for me to cope with what’s happening for the entire series’ seasons ??   just everyone in a suburban setting with shitload of normal, modern problems. idk maybe like castiel and lucifer out-sassing each other over jack’s custody. jack hating dean and castiel for not driving through mcdonalds and hating this fucking family. what is the secret for sam’s beautiful hair. everyone hates rich uncle gabriel except jack because he has free presents whenever gabe returns from his travels. adam shows up for family dinner while dean and sam chew too loudly. claire goes teenage rebellious phase and castiel is having a headache. dean goes to a therapist because of a bet and chokes the doctor on live television. sam has to bail him out. jack just wants to sleep and eat nougats, but sam said it’s not a job. 

   you know what, i’ll write an au of this in my verses, give me a minute.   

   this can be a group rp au for some sort. or it can be closed with individuals as well. just dm me or something if you’re interested !!!

EDIT // like we can also sort of like write something about cameras following them lmao. or have anyone interview another character about anything. for example, hey who do you like or will kill in this family?

jack, without hesitation, looking at the camera with deadpan voice: i’ll kms cas: WHAT jack, softly: i mean Keep Myself Safe.

ALSO !!!   for the convenience of the group, it can be discord rp for easy communication and fast responses at real time. then all ideas and conversations can be referenced in tumblr. i’m also new at server rp shit especially when i spearhead the shenanigans, so help me out bros.

[ofbrutus-blog]

if only u all knew about how pumped i am for this ,, i highkey haven’t been in a group in literal months ?? anyway, i’m claire, i’m 18, i’m from australia ( hello gmt +11 ,, hello hell ) & sloane is ... lsiten i love this child ?? a lot ?? & i’m SO EXCITED to be able 2 play him again bc honestly i care abt this fuckin mess so much & i’m lit already in love w everyone else’s muses & i’m just so ..., fuckenin excited ?? anyway ! i’ve got all his details under the cut ,, it got rly long i am so sorry

‹ × landon liboiron ×  › yo, meet sloane vonnegut, aka brutus, a twenty-seven year old lion mess from texas. he’s been living in hennessy for two months now and was convicted of, believe it or not, corruption. a bisexual scorpio, this bartender is pragmatic & equitable, as well as jaundiced & tempestuous.

B A C K G R O U N D.

born in the heart of texas, sloane was raised to be a perfect southern gentleman from the start. whilst his parents were insistent on teaching him right and wrong, they never inflicted any kind of physical, mental, verbal or emotional harm upon their son if he strayed down the wrong path from time to time. as a result, sloane grew to absolutely adore his parents and to this day, he keeps a photo of them in his wallet to remind him to stay grounded. they ultimately taught him the true value of family, and he can never thank them enough for that.

growing up, sloane’s interest in the police force and, ultimately, the fbi, was absolutely undeniable. ( he had the miranda rights memorised before the time he was ten. ) evidently a passion of his, annabelle and joseph vonnegut encouraged sloane to run for it. he starts his police training at fifteen, and by the time he’s eighteen, he’s recruited into the force. ( to this day, he still says it was the happiest day of his life. )

sloane’s a fucking good police officer. wonderfully charming, yet cunning and sly, crime rates plummet under officer vonnegut’s rule. armed with nothing but a sunny smile and a fast-track mind, he’s ( taylor swift vc ) a nightmare dressed like a daydream. he’s every criminal’s worst nightmare, because he’ll send you off with a smile and a lovely little threat.

he’d planned to accelerate through and move to virginia to try and get a training spot with the fbi ; his plans are ruined when, at twenty-four, his girlfriend announces that she’s pregnant with his child. a year later, as he’s cradling his newborn son, he gets a call from his father that his mother has been diagnosed with stage iii breast cancer. that basically puts everything on a halt, bc little mr. family man can’t just let his mother die while he’s off in virginia. 

tbh, he worked his ass off to provide for his then-fiancée, hayley, and their infant son, connor. he was also working to earn enough for his mother’s chemotherapy, and to pay off their mortgage, so ngl he’s working to do a shit ton !!

the pressure gets to him when a killer offers a bribe to look the other way. he knows it’s the wrong thing to do, but he accepts, and he still hasn’t lived it down. sloane fucking hates himself for accepting that bribe, just bc of the consequences.

obviously he gets thrown in hennessy, but hayley breaks off their engagement and tells him it’s best if he doesn’t see connor again which is .. the fuckin final blow bc u know that sloane cares about that baby more than he cares about anything else and the entire concept of not being able to see him fucks him up BEYOND BELIEF

P E R S O N A L I T Y.

once upon a time, sloane was the picture of southern hospitality. sunny smile plastered across his face, he’d lend a helping hand to anyone who needed it. ( bc he’s a good guy that way. )

the police force never really changed that sunny disposition, tbh - he just got a little more suspicious of people, and stopped believing that everyone was good at heart. he realised the nature of humanity to do harm and it fucked him up a lil ngl

at hennessy, he’s got a bit of a reputation as an alcoholic hardass. he’s never quite forgiven himself for taking a bribe and letting a killer walk free, and it’s taken a toll on him. he drinks to deal with the guilt, and as such, he’s a horribly bitter man. 

catch him on a good day, and you might get to see a glimpse of a past self - he might throw you a generous smile, make a genuinely funny joke, he might even treat you to that southern hospitality that still lingers somewhere within him. catch him on a bad day, though, and you’ll swear that it’s the devil standing in front of you. he’ll get bitter, and angry, and he might start going off for no apparent reason, and he’ll look gorgeous while he’s doing it but you just know that you shouldn’t go anywhere near him bc jesus fuckin christ that’s an angry man.

A P P E A R A N C E.

standing at a solid six foot, he uses his height as an intimidation tactic sometimes. he’s not even that tall compared to some, but he gotta do what he gotta do tbh.

his hair curls right down, past his jawline now. he’s too lazy to cut it again, so he’s full-on growing it out.

his beard is disgusting and he needs to shave it and everybody should tell him this

his tattoos are ,, actually so pretty ?? i haven’t decided on what they are yet, but they’ll get their own tag and they spiral down both arms, across his back, down his hips and he has a few on his thighs bc why the fuck not. he loves tattoos so much ??

he has ,, really pretty eyes ?? like they’re this piercing green and they can be so warm n inviting but also they can get cold and harsh and bitter so QUICKLY and it’s kinda hot

he’s real pretty and everyone hates it

W A N T E D  P L O T S.

honestly give me cute shit bc i’m a baby and i want sloane to like ,, not be sad

confidant: gimme someone who sloane just ,, talks to ?? is actually a decent human being to ?? is actually soft n nice and gentle ??

friends with benefits: drowning their sorrows in sex ?? drowning anything in sex ?? absolutely

sparring partners: whether it be verbal or physical, these two work their aggression out on each other and whilst they don’t openly hate each other, they look like they could tear each other’s heads off whilst they’re going at it.

honestly i have a ton more but just like ,, fuck idk

[disndatradio]

Nicole Dollanganger’s Honeymoon Phase

Lately, Nicole Dollanganger has been spending a lot of time in abandoned love motels. In March of this year, she released five tracks from her forthcoming album, Heart Shaped Bed — her first full-length record since Natural Born Losers, the 2015 breakout that brought her to the attention of Grimes. Soon after, she departed for the Poconos, ancestral homeland of the honeymoon resort, to film a handful of music video with Grimes’ brother, director Mac Boucher.

“I went there assuming it was still this land of love,” Dollanganger, 27, told me on a scorching summer afternoon in New York, just a few days after she finished the video shoot. But when she arrived, she found the area hollowed-out and in disrepair: “A lot of the abandoned resorts developed weird reputations of being, like, unsavory swingers’ joints, and it developed a seedy reputation so they all shut down,” she explained. The viscera of the motels’ previous tenants still litter the rooms — keys; customer complaint forms; dangling bits of tinsel. She eagerly dove in, collecting these memento mori as if they were evidence or forgotten relics.

“She could probably be Indiana Jones in another universe,” said Boucher.

Though the Poconos were not quite what Dollanganger expected, somehow, what she found in rural Pennsylvania was even better. “It had this weird Sleepy Hollow meets dystopian Las Vegas kind of vibe,” Boucher told me. “Everything is love-based, but it’s broken down and destroyed, which is one of the coolest paradoxes that you can find.”

Heart Shaped Bed was already about the ugly, fucked-up, dark parts of love; standing there, amid the ruins of the honeymoon resorts, Dollanganger thought there was more she could do with the unreleased second half of the album. And then she started working on it again.

“There’s no more obvious metaphor for a bad relationship or a doomed relationship than an abandoned honeymoon resort,” Dollanganger explained. (“It felt like we were walking into the record,” Matthew Tomasi, her frequent collaborator, told me.) A recurring theme on Heart Shaped Bed, she said, is how a person’s sense of individual identity can become blurred inside a relationship. “Some of the songs, though they were still love songs, were almost me trying to reclaim personal identity. After the Poconos, I could still feel that, but it just became a bigger scope.”

Dollanganger was staying in Newark, New Jersey, where she and her keyboard set up shop in a rented apartment to continue writing. Through her publicist, I had asked if there was anything she wanted to do while she was in, or near, New York; her manager had suggested Ellen’s Stardust Diner, in Times Square. Before even looking it up, I said yes: I, like Nicole, really love a diner.

But Ellen’s Stardust Diner is not really a diner. At Ellen’s Stardust, the Broadway-hopeful wait staff belts out show tunes and dances across tables while patrons of varying degrees of patience try to eat their all-day breakfast. (For me, a grilled cheese; for Dollanganger, an egg sandwich.) Occasionally, our conversation was punctuated by such musical interludes: the dramatic finale of “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific; the fateful meeting of Anna and Prince Hans during “Love Is An Open Door” from Frozen; and also the song from High School Musical.

Heart Shaped Bed, out today, is Dollanganger’s sixth record. (Despite the fitting title, it’s named not for the literal heart-shaped beds found at honeymoon resorts, but for its association with “one of the most expensive, rare items” on Neopets.) In the art for the album’s lead single “Lemonade,” Dollanganger appears bathed in a blue glow, gazing back over her shoulder. Her eyes are rimmed with black, her hair a long blonde wig.

All year, she’s been posting similar photos, taken from various love motels, to her Instagram, an immaculately curated feed of retro slip dresses and heart-shaped bathtubs that creates a vivid visual world for Heart Shaped Bed. When we met, though, she wore a simple black dress with a sheer kimono, a velvet headband holding back her hair. She texts with flourishes of emojis — the flower bouquet and the deep red heart — and exclamation points. She’s generous and open, frequently turning the conversation back to me.

Dollanganger grew up in Stouffville, Ontario, a small town an hour outside Toronto that she described as half-farmland, half-suburbs, where she started going to hardcore shows in high school. After graduating, she attended film school for a couple years — and adopted the Dollanganger name, borrowed from a series by her favorite writer, VC Andrews — but dropped out when she was diagnosed with an eating disorder in her early twenties. While in recovery, much of which was spent on bed rest, she started furiously writing and recording her own songs. She uploaded a few to her Tumblr and then to Bandcamp, where they found a small but fervent audience.

Dollanganger wrote relentlessly: By the time her music came to the attention of Grimes three years ago, she had already put out four albums. She never returned to film school, but her love of film — especially horror — still girds her work. In the Poconos, she and Boucher tried to capture the violence of a horror film without being exploitative: “How do you do that in a way that’s not going to be triggering or offensive or turn people off, but is an add to the beauty of it, while still being true?” Boucher wondered.

As the myth goes, Grimes heard “You’re So Cool,” the closing track of Natural Born Losers, and decided to launch Eerie, the label-cum-music collective, in order to put out the album. “It’s a crime against humanity for this music not to be heard,” she said at the time. (Dollanganger remains Eerie’s only musician.) Where Dollanganger’s previous bedroom recordings had been almost diaristic in their intimacy — her voice and a quietly plucked guitar — Natural Born Losers dispensed wholly with the twee edge of her early work, replacing it with the thrum of slide guitars, distorted electric chords, and looped vocals lushly illustrating images of sexual violence and rural poverty.

At the same time, Grimes selected Dollanganger to open for her on the Rhinestone Cowgirls tour in support of 2016’s Art Angels. It was Dollanganger’s first foray into playing live, and she recruited her longtime friends Tomasi and Kevin Jenkins to accompany her. I saw them play at Montreal’s Metropolis in November 2015: Dollanganger stood center stage, dressed in a black three-quarter sleeve dress and fingerless gloves and backed by two big dudes with hair obscuring their faces. (Tomasi pulled double duty as guitarist and drummer; Jenkins played bass.) They covered Type O Negative. The juxtaposition between her delicate voice and the otherwise metal look and feel, as pointed out in reviews at the time, was irresistible.

Shy and withdrawn, Dollanganger didn’t immediately take to being on the road. She battled stage fright, often needing a drink to prevent her hands from shaking as she held the microphone, and strained her voice, naturally breathy and soft, against the backing of a full band. She slept in shady motels with a bunch of men. “Just, like, rough living,” she told me. “It was basically all my fears happening at once.”

It wasn’t without its benefits, though. “Everyone that I’ve toured with, they’ve all been very experienced, so they’ve all had great advice, but especially [Grimes], because she is a powerhouse, she works alone, she’s just doing her thing,” Dollanganger said. “There were a few times when I was just really struggling on the road or whatever and she was just really great with bringing me back to reality that this can’t always be perfect and that’s not what it’s about.” (“Claire respects how hard it is being a solo female artist,” Dollanganger told The Fader in 2015, shortly before the Rhinestone Cowgirls tour.) They’ve stayed in touch, occasionally exchanging music, and Grimes’ brother, whom she met during a show in Toronto, offered to help her shape the visual landscape of Heart Shaped Bed.

After Rhinestone Cowgirls, Dollanganger kept touring, playing with (Sandy) Alex G, Elvis Depressedly, and Teen Suicide, and hardcore outfits Code Orange and Free At Last. And when she wasn’t touring, she was planning for touring. “It consumed everything,” she told me, adding that she found it challenging to write while on the road. She put out the odd single — “Chapel,” “Beautiful & Bad,” “Have You Seen Me?” — but this was practically radio silence compared with the record-a-year pace she had maintained when she started out.

Eventually, she had to go back home, back to Stouffville — and she had to start writing again. Touring “changed everything,” Dollanganger told me. (We paused for a minute as our waiter stepped on stage to perform “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton.) “It was almost like I had to relearn how to make music,” she went on. “When I got home, I would be writing songs and I would just be like, ‘I can’t play this live.’ I went from someone who felt very — almost to an extreme degree — I’ll just say whatever. I felt very free. Coming home from touring and that exposure, I suddenly felt like I lost that inhibition.” She found herself critiquing her work before she could even finish getting the song down on paper, trying to forecast how it would be received by a theoretical audience.

Here, a waitress belted out the Phantom Of The Opera theme, briefly pausing our conversation. We decided we had to leave. We paid the bill and packed up what remained of our lunch, high-tailing it down towards Broadway as a waiter singing “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies — connection to Broadway unclear — bore down behind us, practically chasing us out the door. Outside, it was one of those days where you could practically see the heat rising off the pavement; even midtown Manhattan felt suppressed, quieter, its energy sweated out. We walked a few blocks north, towards Central Park, where we found a shaded patch, the sun unremitting. A pair of dogs frolicked nearby; at one point, a pair of tourists asked Dollanganger to take a photo for them.

After the success of Natural Born Losers, she thought perhaps she could replicate it — “There was a lot of conversation about the creepy-cute, and I felt a lot of pressure to deliver something that would be gross but not,” she said — but it came out contrived. It wasn’t just that she was second-guessing how her music would be received; she was also trying to suppress her impulse to write love songs. Dollanganger simply did not want to write another love record. (The first was Ode To Dawn Wiener: Embarrassing Love Songs, in 2013.) She wrote, and discarded, hundreds of songs, wrote entire records she would never put out. She tried not to write another love record. But, eventually, that’s what came out. “I don’t think we super get to choose these things,” she said, describing Heart Shaped Bed as “the darker side” of the previous record.

There was no one moment where Dollanganger found herself writing freely again — it’s still hard, she said. But a producer friend, Arthur Rizk, who she met in March around the time of an early scouting mission to the Poconos and who helped produce three tracks on Heart Shaped Bed — “Chapel,” “Snake,” and “Lacrymaria Olor” — offered her some particularly valuable advice: “You don’t second-guess yourself; you just keep going with it,” she quoted. “At the end of the day, if the song is finished and you don’t like it, that’s fine.”

Heart Shaped Bed started to come into focus last August. Dollanganger and a handful of other musicians, including Tomasi, set up camp in an abandoned elementary school, where they spent two weeks honing her demos and writing new songs.

“I didn’t fare very well,” she recalled. “For me, music has to be very personal, very self-contained.”

A couple relics from that session made it onto the completed record: the piano parts in “Uncle” and “Lemonade”; some slide guitar and piano in “Lacrymaria Olor.” One night during that period, Dollanganger couldn’t sleep. It was early morning, maybe two or three, and she crept away to write. “It just kind of spilled out of me at this weird hour,” she said. The song was “Tammy Faye,” which she later re-recorded in Tomasi’s studio. “For me, the songs that happen like that,” she said, “They speak to me the most.”

After the elementary school, Dollanganger and Tomasi continued working on the songs they had demoed in his basement studio. “When I got home and I was listening, I was like, ‘OK, I know I feel good about these songs, it’s more like the delivery of them that doesn’t feel right,’” she said. “When we started working on it and I could be fully producing and everything, that was when I was like, this is it.”

So here’s what this is: Heart Shaped Bed, with its recurring images of ambivalent marriages, incest, and the big and small violences that can be found inside romantic relationships, depicts the ugliness that can accompany such intimacy with another person. But in looking so deeply, so unflinchingly into the ugliness, it peers through to the other side. And over there, it’s beautiful. “Make something gross feel romantic,” Dollanganger instructs on the title track, urging her lover to take her to a love motel where they can enact their own fantasy world. “The sign says, ‘Heaven waits on the other side.’”

If the first five tracks — the sampler songs, “Uncle” through “Heart Shaped Bed” — describe a bleak landscape of broken love (“I will always come to you when I’m weak and empty,” she chants on “Uncle,” named for a lost VC Andrews short story called “I Slept With My Uncle On My Wedding Night.”) Then the second five songs form the album’s sunken underworld. Heart Shaped Bedcloses with “Lacrymaria Olor,” a song named for a bloodthirsty little single-celled organism known colloquially as a “swan’s tear.” The song begins and ends with a piercing, unearthly wail, Dollanganger’s own voice pitch-shifted and warped beyond recognition.

She recorded the track at Rizk’s studio in Philadelphia in the fall, and listening back through it, she recognized as the conclusion to Heart Shaped Bed. “There needs to be something on a record that ties everything together, otherwise it’s just a compilation of songs,” Rizk told me, “and I feel like that is definitely the roof.” Tomasi echoed this: “I was like, this is a genius track,” he said. “This is going to be the record closer.”

At first, Dollanganger thought she’d call the song some variation on “Tears Of A Swan” — “tears just falling into the pond are meaningless,” she explained — but first, she did a quick search to make sure that wasn’t something that already existed. She became strangely captivated by the tiny ciliate that, when decapitated, can grow a new head within moments, and she gave the song its name.

It came into strange alignment with the cover art for Heart Shaped Bed. Dollanganger, decapitated, stands on a heart-shaped mattress, paddling her way down the River Styx. Her head, severed from her shoulders, bobs alongside the raft, and she’s in the process of scooping it up with an oar. She’s Ophelia, plucking her own head from the lake.

Source link

source https://disndatradio.com/nicole-dollangangers-honeymoon-phase/