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itsclydebitches · 4 years

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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Ultimatum”

Welcome back, everyone! We had an unexpected break last week due to the horror going on in Texas. I'm glad we did. Not because of any salty "RWBY is bad right now yay free Saturday" feelings, but because keeping to a schedule for a fictional webseries should never take precedence over peoples' safety. I can't believe I need to type that sentence out, but it's true! Over the last seven days I've seen fans who are not merely disappointed by the mini hiatus (understandable) but outright hostile towards the crew because they... were ensuring everyone survived during an unprecedented emergency? Yeah. Given the highly critical nature of these recaps — including today's! — I want to be clear that my thoughts towards Rooster Teeth's creative choices are distinct from any thoughts about the crew itself, including the most basic forms of compassion like, “I sure hope everyone is okay over there.” In an age where it has become horrifically common to harass creators and even send them death threats over stories, it has likewise become necessary to remind people: Don't do that shit. Never do that shit. If I can teach anyone anything at all, let it be that!

Anyway, dark fandom reminders out of the way, let's dive straight into our delayed episode. It was certainly a doozy. Titled "Ultimatum," we open on a trigger warning for flashing lights. Good on Rooster Teeth for including that, though I do wonder if creators shouldn't be including time stamps as well? Or perhaps a note that you can find those time stamps in the credits, avoiding any (minor) spoilers for everyone else? I'm not photosensitive myself, so I certainly don't mean to speak for that group, but my first thought was, "So how would I watch this episode if I was? Hand on the pause button, hoping I stop fast enough as soon as the lights start?" Hard to do given the surprise nature of the scene. Really, my answer would be, "Wait for the fandom to post warnings of their own, likely including where it happens so I know when to skip" which is perhaps an indication that this information that should be included from the get-go.

But I am glad the warning exists, regardless. The episode itself begins with a shot of Ironwood looking down at the kingdom. He's used his windows as a vantage point since Volume 7, so that's nothing new, but something about this particular shot reminded me of Ozpin, looking down from his tower. I'm sure the response from many would be simply, "Ah yes, the two power hungry dictators watching over their victims," but I think there's a much more nuanced reading here about leaders being expected to fix the literally unfixable and what that responsibility does to an individual. Of course, it's a nuance that is absolutely obliterated by the episode’s end, but the implication existed for a hot second!

Two other soldiers are in the room with Ironwood, reporting that Cinder has helped Watts escape. They try to soften this with news that they still have Jacques in custody, but receive only a, "I don't give a damn about Jacques Schnee." Which, fair. He's pretty useless at this point. It's when Ironwood learns that both Qrow and Robin escaped too that he really gets mad, something his subordinates have been expecting given their scared expressions.

Now, I'm treading lightly here because I realize how this is going to sound given the end of our episode, but I still want to note that outside of that ending... this is a weird take? Just hear me out. Since Volume 7 the show has worked very hard to make Ironwood seem scary and unstable — bad setup for what we end with today — but the problem is that none of it works in context and it certainly doesn't work when compared to other characters' actions. They are literally in the midst of an unwinnable battle and thousands of his people are dying. If the audience wants a human being — who also just lost a limb and was betrayed by half his allies — o remain perfectly poised and polite during that, sorry, but that's not how human beings work. But even beyond this, what’s the message here? Ironwood raises his voice, so does Yang. Ironwood hits his desk, Qrow hits a child. If we're going to examine how Ironwood handles his stress and anger, he often handles it better than many of our heroes. Namely, by continually taking that anger out on inanimate objects. I kept waiting for him to attack his subordinates or attack Winter this episode, especially given where we end up, but it never came. Ironwood always has enough control to break the desk or punch the wall, not the person in front of him. Which, of course, would not be a good thing in the real world. I want to be clear given these sensitive subjects that if someone is breaking things in your presence that's a major problem to address. But this isn't the real world. This is a fantasy world in the middle of a war, populated by other characters who express their anger by punching people, slamming them into walls, or screaming at them until they run away. The story wants us to fear Ironwood long before he makes his objectively horrific choices and it tries to achieve that by showing us characters who are clearly terrified in his presence, by giving us a string of broken objects in his wake. But those details don't land well when we compare them to other instances of stress. In the same volume I have watched Ironwood take a deep breath to calm himself down when things have gone horribly wrong. I've also watched Weiss start a conversation by threatening her defenseless brother. So again, what’s the message here? It can’t be that acting violently towards someone = villainous behavior because, as established since Volume 6, that’s common for the heroes. Why are these subordinates terrified about Ironwood slamming his fist on a table, but Whitley has no problem hugging the woman who threatened him? Obviously there is a HUGE difference between our main group and Ironwood when it comes to other actions (cough-bomb threats-cough), but these day-to-day moments don't match up. The show wants to use violence as a way for us to easily identify the Bad Guy while ignoring all the times when our heroes do the same thing.

All of which isn't meant to be a defense of Ironwood. As we'll see in a bit, there is no defense for what he's done. Rather, it's a way of acknowledging just how badly he's been written. Why does a man who consistently reins in his anger and takes it out on objects suddenly shoot a councilman for literally no reason? Why does a man defined by wanting to save as many people as he can suddenly threaten to bomb his city? Ironwood's characterization is all over the place, in the sense that they keep writing him as the morally gray, sometimes harsh, but ultimately compassionate man he started out as... up until they need a villain. Salem isn't here yet, so Ironwood can shoot Oscar. Salem isn't attacking yet, so Ironwood can shoot the councilman. Salem is currently reforming, so Ironwood can threaten YJR and Mantle. He's the B-plot villain whenever Salem is out of commission, which is a problem for both their characterizations. This filler doesn't make sense for Ironwood and it severely undermines the threat of Salem. You finally introduce the Magical Big Bad and our heroes are facing more of a threat from a guy with a broken army and three loyal allies left? Hmmm.

The tl;dr is that Ironwood's arc is a disaster and, frankly, it's gotten old reading simplified takes of, "It's just a realistic look at what white U.S. men will do in power sweetie :) " RWBY does not have the context capable of conveying that sort of critical take because our world is not besieged by literal monsters and an immortal witch, to say nothing of how real life good guys do not get deus ex machina canes that fix the problem instantaneously. Ironwood is not an example of anti-U.S. imperialism, he's an example of writers who don't know how to write.

Anyway, I'm getting severely off topic. Obviously Ironwood is a major part of this episode, but the problems demonstrated here are two years in the making. This is the culmination of things I've been discussing for months across hundreds of posts... so I should probably stop trying to summarize it all in a few paragraphs lol. Perhaps when RWBY is over — or Ironwood has died — I'll do a single meta on his character, try to pull everything into one, unified argument.

For now though, we have an episode to analyze.

While Ironwood is receiving this news we get flashbacks to Qrow and Robyn. Qrow attacks a soldier in his bird form, which is hilarious. Someone GIF that please. It does raise some interesting questions about this magic though: does Qrow retain his aura and strength in this form (something I thought given his choice to transform during the explosion), or was that soldier just so shocked at being attacked by a crow that he went down easy? We'll never know, because that would require establishing concrete rules for this world. The point is Qrow is going feral in his freedom, throwing punches left and right — did he kill that guard? — while Robyn watches it all from under a rock. They're apparently still somewhere in the facility since all the exits are guarded, but that's not the good thing Ironwood seems to think it is. After all, Qrow is out to murder him. He wants to be there.

We all see where this is going, right? The show is going to ignore Qrow's crazy belief that Ironwood got Clover killed in favor of a "Qrow saved Mantle by murdering Ironwood"/“Qrow got revenge for Mantle by murdering Ironwood” ending. Who cares why Qrow wanted to kill him in the first place now that Ironwood has his finger on the trigger? If RWBY is good at anything, it's writing moments that encourage you to ignore everything that came before it. We'll be seeing more of that in just a bit.

"Damn it!" Ironwood yells, because the show is leaning into its cursing. He orders that the subordinates not return until "you have Qrow Branwen in custody." Here we have another great example of the show conflating what the audience knows with what other characters know. See, we know Qrow has a vendetta against Ironwood. We know their relationship is the important one to the story and that Robyn is incidental. Ironwood doesn't know that. There's no reason for him, as a character, to specify that they only bring Qrow back, but it makes sense for the audience who has the whole, thematic picture. Our understanding of the situation is influencing Ironwood's dialogue, which is... not great.

This entire scene we've had creepy music to hammer home just how evil Ironwood is. Except, as said, he takes a breath to calm down and the music fades. Instead of flying into a rage, hurting someone, or doing anything the music suggests he might, Ironwood calmly calls in for an update — which is when the explosion hits.

It's MASSIVE, seeming to originate from a lightning strike, which is weird, since it's coming from inside the whale, but whatever. The animation is very dramatic and pretty, as we've come to expect of RWBY, but the actual plot is lackluster at best. It's funny though because I thought for a hot second, when Winter and the Ace Ops were caught in the blast, that RWBY had actually done something exciting. I mean, holy shit! There are the deaths we expect from a battle like this. My god, what is everyone going to do when they realize that Oscar's needless attack took out five characters, including Weiss' sister —

No wait, never mind. They're fine.

Let's talk about that "needless" descriptor for a moment though. Do you all remember, two weeks ago, when I went, "Hey, why isn't anyone telling Oscar that that Ace Ops are approaching with a bomb? They're on a time limit! If someone would just mention that Very Important Information then Oscar wouldn't keep standing around to fight Salem." See, at the time I was frustrated because of how the plot was needlessly allowing Oscar to put himself in danger (especially when the whole point of this mission was to rescue him). Now, I'm frustrated because that same plot needlessly wasted the most powerful weapon the group had. There was no reason for Oscar to use literal lifetimes worth of stored energy when the heroes already had a bomb to do the same job! What was the point of that? I guess he took out the other grimm too, but without the whale that still would have been a challenge with a finite end, one Ironwood's army and the remaining huntsmen should have been able to handle. It doesn't feel justified to have Oscar use a weapon kept on the bench for lifetimes when there was another option literally minutes away.

There's so much wrong with this I need another list. So:

Ozpin's cane supposedly stores kinetic energy, which may contradict what we've seen from it before. Regardless, we’ve never heard about this. The all powerful weapon comes out of nowhere

It also begs the question of why Ozpin wouldn't use that power at Beacon and why he wouldn't insist that they try to get their cane back while captured. You had an out this whole time! But we’re going to ignore that because Oscar is a little hesitant?

Which makes YJR's presence even more useless than it originally was, which was already pretty useless. Oscar essentially rescued himself

This kinetic energy miraculously doesn't hurt any people or buildings, just grimm

So what is the point of Silver Eyes? That's been their MO since they were first introduced. Sure, Silver Eyes can be used far more often than Ozpin's cane, but it still feels like a let down to learn that the Big Secret behind this weapon is... the exact same thing Ruby has been doing for years

Like Ruby, Oscar likewise didn't need any practice or training. He just set off this massive attack perfectly and without issue

We have now eliminated the biggest threat to the cast instantaneously — the whale and the other grimm — with no effort from the rest of the heroes. Like the Hound, the stakes are obliterated with no satisfying work on the part of our protagonists

Instead, as said, the actual plan already in place never happened. The bomb just... goes back. Kind of like how Cinder attacked and then just went back to Salem. Penny woke up and then just got knocked out again. We continue to go in circles

This is because no one took two seconds to tell Oscar, "There's a bomb on the way"

Because this threat is gone the show needs a new one, hence Ironwood randomly threatening Mantle with said bomb

The one way we might have justified Oscar blowing up the whale instead of Winter is if he did it to save Hazel, but Hazel is implied to be dead

Maybe he's alive, but if he's not that happened off screen and we're not sure how. It couldn't have been because of the blast itself — everyone else is fine — so what, Salem somehow killed him before she was blasted to bits? While he was holding her?

And there's no body?

Salem was torn apart multiple times during that fight and reformed instantaneously, yet now, conveniently, she's taking her time

None of the characters mention the issues above. None of them admit that there was no reason for Oscar to waste LIFETIMES worth of power when they already had a solution in the works. Fantastic

I need to take a moment to acknowledge that so far this recap feels... bad. Disjointed. Bit all over the place. Which makes a certain amount of sense because that's where my thoughts are at. There's so much going on in this episode — so much wrong with it — that I don't know how to boil it all down into a few, neat claims. This episode is a mess! We're barely a few minutes in and the combined issues of Ironwood's characterization and Oscar's choice have left me reeling. So if you're still reading this, bless your patience, I think we'll both need it for the rest of this journey.

Let's snag a neater plot-point to discuss. Amidst all the chaos Neo literally skips away with the Lamp, clearly thrilled at how her own life is going. Later in the episode she'll text Cinder with the obvious: Salem is going to be pretty pissed when she realizes this is gone. “If you want her name you know what you owe me."

So wait... what is Neo leveraging here? Is she agreeing to give the Lamp back so Cinder doesn't get in trouble with Salem? Give Salem the password she's been looking for? Or give Cinder the password to use the Lamp for herself? What would Cinder even want the Lamp for when she's after the Maiden powers? I'm confused about what Cinder is being blackmailed with. Regardless, she needs the lamp for something and presumably what she "owes" Neo is Ruby. We get a cut to her just to hammer that home.

(Side note: both pictures of Neo are hilarious.)

Before that though, back at the whale, everyone is taking stock of the situation when Marrow cries, "Hey, they were still in there!" I feel like this is another scene meant to make him look like the one good guy in the group — he cares about YJOR while the others can’t be bothered — but as always, that reading doesn't fit well with the situation as a whole. The others have barely had time to realize they're alive. I don't think it's a moral failing that they didn't instinctually worry about four betrayers, one of whom attacked them, while they're still checking that they have all their limbs intact. Besides, why does Marrow assume they're dead? The Ace Ops were caught in the blast as well, yet miraculously came out unharmed. They clearly didn't set their own bomb off, so it's logical to assume that YJOR did something themselves. It feels weird to have a "Marrow mourns them and Winter is the only other character who cares" moment when everyone is recovering from bomb shock and no one even knows if the others are dead. But, of course, the show is out to portray only two of these characters as good people, so ignore the logic and run with the emotion of the scene.

All of which is bolstered by Elm pulling away when Vine puts a hand on her shoulder. Why is she acting cold towards him now? Because they're not friends, remember?

While we get more ridiculous relationship dynamics, Ironwood calls in and congratulates them on the bomb working, but tells them to get back because they have another problem in the works. That would be Qrow and Robyn. Winter decides to tell him about the bomb in person.

We cut to Watts and Cinder watching the remnants of the blast from a rooftop. Cinder has tried calling, but no one answered. Unsurprising, given that Salem doesn't have any other allies left. Cinder says that the plan hasn't changed, she's still going to take the Winter Maiden's power for herself, and Watts can help her by bringing Penny here. He explains that he doesn't have full control over her. Rather, he implemented a virus that is setting her on a single path: open the vault, then self-destruct. Cinder, as one might expect, is furious.

She snags Watts by her grimm arm and threatens to toss him over the side of the building. Thus begins the best part of the episode, hands down. Despite the danger he's in, Watts throws common sense out the window in favor of dragging Cinder in the most satisfying manner possible.

“You think you’re entitled to everything just because you suffered, but suffering isn’t enough. You can’t just be strong, you have to be smart. You can’t just be deserving, you have to be worthy! But all you have ever been is a bloody migraine!”

It's true! You know what else is true? This speech could apply to our heroes as well. Accusations of entitlement and reminders to be smart as opposed to just strong hit hard, considering those are the same flaws our protagonists are struggling with. The difference is that Cinder, miraculously, listens, pulling Watts back to safety and going to cry by herself. That moment is simultaneously more growth than Ruby has gotten and more sympathy than Ironwood has gotten. The woman who murdered Pyrrha is treated more kindly by the narrative than one of our initial heroes and our very first villain has taken more time to reconsider her choices than our title character. You know a show is falling apart when excellent choices are applied to the worst possible character.

So Cinder is crying while Watts looks guilty and we cut back to YJOR's group post-blast. Yang is finally able to answer a call from Blake who is obviously overjoyed to see her. Weiss gives them directions to the mansion and they ask what in the world they'll do with Emerald, currently on her knees, mourning Hazel.

Thus begins the third most frustrating part of this episode. See, on the way back the group continues the conversation about what to do with Emerald, with Yang and Jaune distrusting her vs. Ren and Oscar encouraging cooperation. I can't believe I'm saying this after's Ren's speech and Oscar's entire existence... but I'm team Jaune and Yang here. Look, what Oscar and Ren say — the literal words coming out of their mouth — is nonsense. Ren goes, “We can’t let all of our actions stem from fear," as if Yang and Jaune are being ridiculous for mistrusting Emerald, one of the established villains, after years worth of harm from her. It’s weird that Yang points to her arm as something Emerald is responsible for, rather than being framed or the deaths at Beacon, but the general sentiment of, “She’s done horrible things!” is true. Ren’s perspective is the same simplification that was applied to Ironwood last volume, wherein everyone acted as if he was crazy for fearing an attack on his kingdom... post an attack on another kingdom and pre an attack on his kingdom. Putting generic lines in Ren's mouth about not being afraid makes him sound willfully ignorant, as if choosing to believe that someone is good will magically make them so, to say nothing of thinking it will erase all the harm they've already done.

Oscar at least acknowledges the difficulty here, but then follows this up with, “You don’t have to forgive her… just give her a second chance."

Oscar, honey, that amounts to the same thing in this situation. Allowing Emerald a second chance means working with her, which means trust, which means emotionally reaching a point where these characters can put aside the harm she's done them in an effort to give her that chance in the first place. This actually ties into a post I saw last night, one I've come across before, that claims redemption arcs don't require any suffering on the part of the person who has done wrong. I agree in theory, that prolonged suffering doesn't help anyone, but the problem is that people tend to conflate suffering with consequences and someone who has done this level of harm should face consequences for their actions. The problem with redemption arcs is not that the bad people suffer too much — emotionally and physically beating on them as a form of revenge — but that the people they've harmed are put into situations like this one. If Yang and Jaune let Emerald go like she suggests, they are agreeing that she doesn't have to face any consequences for the damage she's done (which, keep in mind, involves multiple deaths, not including all the lost lives here in Atlas). If they agree to give her a second chance, they are forced to jump straight to some level of forgiveness. We might claim they don't have to forgive Emerald to work with her, but from a practical perspective how are they meant to function, especially during a warzone? Anything she provides them with — information, watching their back in a fight, undertaking missions, etc. — requires trusting her enough to allow those things to happen: working with that info, letting her protect them, allowing her that responsibility. It's all about trust, trust she has yet to earn. In order for a redemption arc to be successful, the power has to be in the hands of the victims. They need to be able to see some justice for what was done to them, be offered some proof that the person in question has truly changed, and have the ability to walk away if they decide no, I don't forgive you, glad to hear you've improved, but please stay out of my life. Jaune and Yang have none of that. There are currently no systems in place for Emerald to face consequences for her choices, she has offered them no proof of her remorse or true motivations, and the other half of the group is pressuring them to give her that second chance without closure or reassurance. None of that makes for a good redemption arc and reducing that to, "So you want to see poor Emerald suffer, huh?" ignores the suffering she has already caused. The group are her victims and they are under no obligation to give her a second chance, particularly under these circumstances, which makes the story's choice to have Ren and Oscar act like Yang and Jaune are being stubborn or inconsiderate a problem. The conversation boils down to, "Give the woman you know to be a liar, manipulator, murder accomplice, and servant of our enemy a second chance based entirely on unfounded faith. If you don't you're letting yourself be ruled by fear."

RWBY's touchy-feely themes really don't sit well within its realistic, morally gray premise. We cannot continually have these characters go through hell one moment and then have others accuse them of being paranoid the next. The fact that all of this is wrapped up in the group trusting Robyn, Emerald, and Hazel over their established allies remains beyond frustrating.

Because yeah, you know how Oscar finishes his speech? “I’ve already gotten a lot of help today from someone I don’t exactly trust right now." Meaning Ozpin.

The story is trying to compare Emerald and Hazel to Ozpin.

"Oh hey, I kept a secret from you after lifetimes of watching that secret lead to betrayal and death. I keep apologizing for my mistakes while ignoring that I had no reason to trust a bunch of kids with such world-shattering information and also that you tore it from me in the most traumatic way possible."

"Oh hey, I willingly joined our world's version of the devil and helped her destroy your school, leading to numerous deaths including your friend and headmaster. It was his death that put Oscar in this position in the first place! I then continued to attack your group, leading to another near death of a friend, and a kidnapping, and the destruction of Amity, until I became scared enough to make a run for it."

Which one of these characters is granted an instant second chance? You'll never guess who!

And I do think the word "instant" is important here because just like Jaune and Yang have the right to have distance and justice from Emerald, they had that right with Ozpin too. The difference is they got it. They had the power in the situation, as evidenced by their use of the Lamp and physically attacking him. Ozpin heard what they needed from him — leave us alone — and did that without complaint. They were given months to come to terms with the secrets he kept. They were offered apologies and acts of service to demonstrate intent: saving them in the airship and continually saving Oscar. I don't believe Ozpin ever needed a redemption arc, but even if we think he did, he had it. After three volumes of material Oscar's perspective is still "I don't exactly trust [him] right now" but Hazel and Emerald have earned at least the same amount of trust in a matter of hours? They're really having my boy look at the guy who has tried desperately to do right by him despite unimaginable circumstances, and the guy who tortured him to get information for Salem, and went, "That first guy. He's the one we need to watch out for."

To make things even worse, Oscar tells the others that Ozpin took on all the torture so he wouldn't have to. So he did that and they still don't trust him? If you had told me back in Volume 6 that two years later the group would still be hostile towards Ozpin, while simultaneously urging one another to trust Emerald, I would have said you were lying. RWBY has its problems, but it's not that bad. Yet here we are. I suppose the one silver lining here is that Ren smiles when he realizes Ozpin is back? So at least one of them isn't prepared to draw their weapon at the mere mention of his name.

Both these moments raise more questions though. How in the world did Ozpin take on that torture when we clearly saw Oscar getting pummeled for a good portion of the kidnapping? Is that a weird merge thing the story hasn't bothered to explain? I wouldn't be surprised, considering Oscar said last episode he didn't want to use magic because it hastened the merge, he uses the biggest explosion of magic we've ever seen, and nothing has changed. Ozpin is still in the back of his head, thanking him for the tinniest shreds of decency they get. Ren, meanwhile, seems to be back to mindreading. How in the world does he know that Ozpin is back? I assume it has something to do with his semblance, but we don't know what. They could have shown us Oscar from Ren's perspective, perhaps with two distinct emotions swilling around to imply that he sees two different people now, not a useless shot of Emerald with purple flower petals, whatever purple means.

Oh, but no, we shouldn't have gotten either of these scenes. Remember that Ren's aura broke a very, very short time ago? Is it back already? Can he use this part of his semblance without it? Considering it was near impossible to see Ironwood's aura breaking in the Watts fight and we were then mistakenly told he used his semblance in the office, I'm going to go with, "The writers forgot."

Oscar explains that the cane had "lifetime after lifetime" of power in it and though there's still some left, "we have to be careful with how we use the rest." He says that Ozpin trusted his judgement and of course he did! Ozpin also didn’t know that there was a bomb on the way. Yet funnily enough, no one else mentions that, whoops, your choice made in ignorance was a waste and that's due entirely to us prioritizing hugs over basic mission information.

Also, all these explanations take place in front of Emerald. Half the group doesn't trust her, but they'll freely discuss their powers and limitations here. Remember how the group once wanted to talk about magical relics in front of the old lady they'd just met? Yeah, they've learned nothing.

Combine all this insanity with the fact that Ozpin's magic saved the day before Ironwood's bomb could do the same... while Ruby sat in a mansion drinking tea. Who's our hero again?

So things are a hot mess, to put it lightly. Their conversation finally ends when they hear voices and round the corner to find all the Atlas citizens huddled in the subway. For once the show actually writes them in a sympathetic manner, emphasizing how terrified and helpless they are. This image doesn't lead the group to any revelations though, certainly not anything that would tie back to Ren's earlier speech in the snow. No, once again the justified criticisms here are ignored as we hear that “However this fight ends, we could really use someone like you, [Emerald.]” That's it then. Discussion over. We knew as soon as it started that blindly trusting her was being presented as the "right" thing to do and now here we are, deciding that conclusively, despite Jaune and Yang's complaints. By the time the group reaches the mansion, Oscar is defending Emerald from Ruby. We're supposed to just accept that she's a part of the group now, only minimal pushback allowed.

Before that though we return to Ironwood getting news that their bomb never went off. He briefly wonders who else could have done that, but puts the currently unanswerable question aside for what he does know. They still have the bomb and it could be "useful." See, this moment — like shooting Oscar and the councilman — is when Ironwood just randomly goes off the deep end. One minute he's talking about what they've lost and cradling his new arm,

the next he's saying that he should have tortured Qrow to get Penny to obey him! Which doesn't even make sense since I'm pretty sure Penny hasn't ever spoken to Qrow. She wouldn't want anyone to suffer, true, but it's not like Ironwood had a close friend like Ruby to use as leverage. Qrow is just Some Guy to her. Regardless, he thinks Yang, Jaune, and Ren are decent replacements, despite Penny also having no relationships with them. This is what happens when your characters only start breaking up their teams eight years into the story, the response to Ironwood wanting to torture Ren to hurt Penny is, “Does Penny know Ren exists?” But, you know, torture is torture, right? Maybe. Probably not. I mean, if they're going to turn Ironwood into a cartoon villain, they could at least keep him smart.

Because all of this is just the height of stupidity. Ironwood wants to torture people Penny barely knows to make her listen (so just grab some civilians? It would do the same job...). Ironwood wants to shoot down empty ships, even though no one, including us, knows where in the world those ships would have gone. Ironwood wants to destroy an entire city to try and save another city. He wants to use a bomb meant for a comparatively small whale and acts like that alone will take out the majority of a kingdom. None of it makes sense! And I know the easy comeback for that is, "Well yeah, Ironwood is crazy and evil" but he's not. I mean he is. Threatening torture and bombings is obviously evil, but he's never been insane, or stupid. As said before, his arc (or lack thereof) is an absolute disaster. The fandom assumes so many things about Ironwood given the opportunity — the whale is a suicide mission. He expects the Ace Ops to die on his order — and the writing hints at so many things that never happen — he's going to hurt his subordinates, attack Winter for disobeying him — and every time what we actually get is a far more compassionate, level-headed character... until he randomly does a 180 and goes, "Let's murder a whole city now!" I never wanted Ironwood to be the bad guy, but they could have at least given me a persuasive decent into this level of horror.

So... yeah. Ironwood has got to die by the end of the volume, yeah? Between Ruby warning the whole world about him and him going into full villain mode, there's no coming back from this.

Neo sends her text to Cinder and the group makes it back to the mansion. Remember Yang's criticisms of Ruby's leadership? The ones she conveniently forgot about when Ren started to agree with her? Yeah, those are entirely gone as the sisters hug it out and, presumably, forgive one another for... daring to admit that things are bad? Look, I'm not going to deny that Ironwood's scene with Winter was creepy as fuck,

but I'm not of the opinion that the heroes are any better when it comes to the theme of obedience. They've attacked one another, screamed at one another, and any dissent from Ruby's leadership results in the questioner being left behind in the snow. We'll accept you again when you fall back in line. I used to adore the relationships in this show, but watching them now is just discomforting. The show might be 100% more obvious with Ironwood, using creepy music, a smile, and that hand on Winter's shoulder, but the concept of, "Sorry I dared to question you before! We won't ever do it again :)" isn't healthy either. The fact that the show keeps erasing theses problems with hugs — Weiss hugs Whitley now, Yang hugs Ruby, someone will probably hug Emerald soon — doesn't make the circumstances any less uncomfortable.

None of this even gets into the Blake and Yang hug. First of all, why is Blake acting like they had a fight and Yang might not want to see her? She's hiding inside rather than rushing to greet them, ears down in a devastated expression until Yang touches her. Combine this with Yang's "Do you think she's mad at me?" and it feels like the writers cut a fight in the final script and then didn't bother to remove the fallout from that. Seriously, where did any of this come from? You can't just have characters act like they've been fighting when they haven’t.

Also, can't forget this.

At this point there's nothing more I can say in regards to RWBY's almost-queer baiting. Is touching foreheads more intimate than the hugs Yang gave the others? Absolutely. Is that an appropriate stand-in for overt representation? Absolutely not. This would have been a perfect time for them to kiss. Take out Blake's nonsensical fear and replace it with them both reuniting after their first separation since Volume 5, working under the knowledge that either one could have been killed, finally admitting their feelings. Hell, they don't actually have to kiss. Not all girlfriends are interested in kissing! But they could use the terminology that makes things unequivocally canon. Another forehead touch when we got that in Volume 6? It's not enough, especially not when our straight couples have all been allowed their rep.

Ren at least wants to know where Nora is. He's presumably told what happened off screen as Oscar tells Ruby that Emerald is their friend now.

Then an emergency call from May interrupts the reunion and the group learns that Ironwood is bombing the Schnee ships. “Those ships… they were going to save people” Weiss whispers. How? Tell me how they were going to save anyone. Where were you going to take these people where they would be safer than where they are now? RWBY continually asserts things without explaining them, meaning there is precisely zero emotional weight here. Again, Ironwood is far past the point of defense, but I'd be a whole lot more critical of this particular action if I had a better sense of why it's bad. He appears to be endangering the people given May's shout to run — falling debris? — but the further implication is that Ironwood has doomed the people of Mantle by denying them these ships. It's that part that makes no sense based on what we've been told.

Which finally comes to the ultimatum of our episode title: Penny opens the vault, or Ironwood bombs Mantle. Great! So glad this plan is wicked smart and works well for his characterization. It's definitely not a nonsensical, unfounded, overblown change that feels like it belongs in a child's cartoon, complete with dramatic spotlight. Nope. Excellent writing choices all around.

Our final line of the episode is, “I hope you live up to the title I gave you," referring to Penny's job as the Protector of Mantle, and you know what? That line could have been very cool if it was delivered by an Ironwood with a persuasive fall and a halfway decent plan in place. I love that we've twisted the concept of a protector and turned the title into a horrifying, rather than honorable responsibility... I just hate everything surrounding those details.

So, usual RWBY fare.

(At least we get to see that Nora is awake!)

Will things get better over the next four episodes? I doubt it. We're still expecting the rest of the Ace Ops + Winter to ditch Ironwood, someone getting the vault open, the fall of Atlas, now the potential destruction of Mantle, and none of that includes Salem who should reform at any moment. Frankly, I'm not looking forward to any of it. The final leg of a season should make its audience excited to see how everything turns out, not dreading it. I've heard from multiple people that this is the volume that finally got them to drop the show and honestly? I'm not surprised.

As a final (happier?) note: we've finally got a bingo! I completely forgot our board last time, which was a terrible oversight, but we can update it now.

Our army of grimm can't kill anyone now that it got KOed by Oscar (that is the third one hit defeat of a major enemy we've seen this volume. Yes, I'm including the Hound considering it was obviously on its last legs after Ruby's eyes.)

I'm likewise including "Ozpin apologizes for everything including his existence" because he's done nothing but apologize since he came back. The emotion is there even if the literal words are not. Oscar reminded everyone of how untrustworthy he is, but kept the group from jumping them again. And Ozpin thanked him for it.

Neo didn't literally backstab Cinder (shame), but the Relic still counts.

So a triple bingo! Is that how bingo works? Idk, I've never played. I feel like I should have thought up some sort of humorous prize, but sadly I've got nothing. If you think of anything, let me know lol

That’s all then, folks. Until next week! 💜

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #rwby ultimatum #rwby recaps #mymetas

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ckingsbridge · 5 years

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Coastal Magic Convention Report (2/?)

Continued from Part 1

This was Coastal Magic’s first year doing a murder mystery party, and it was one of the parts of the weekend I’d been looking forward to most. I’ve done these in the past with my mom’s family during our summer family vacations, and they’re a huge amount of fun if everyone playing is willing to commit.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, for a murder mystery party, the guests take on the roles of the story’s characters. You receive instructions in advance of the party with information on your character’s personality, behavior, and wardrobe, as well as details about your relationships with some of the other characters and a few secrets you might know.

When the murder mystery takes place at a party where the guests far outnumber the named characters (like at a convention!), the majority of the guests take on the shared role of “Investigator”. In this case, they don’t receive any information in advance of the party, but they’re given a booklet when they arrive that details some juicy tidbits they know and curious things they’ve observed in relation to the named characters.

During the first part of the party, the characters circulate through the room, interacting with each other and the Investigators in-character and dropping various hints/clues as they’ve been instructed. Then at some point, there’s a - gasp - murder!!!

One of the characters is declared to have been murdered. The players themselves have no idea who is going to be killed, or which one of them is the killer - they don’t find out until they open the sealed section in the back of their character booklets in the middle of the party. Then the party shifts into crime-solving mode: the guests find clues that have been hidden around the room, investigate the crime scene, and talk to the characters some more before the characters are publicly interrogated.

At the end of the party, the guests vote for which of the characters they believe is the killer. For the one we did at Coastal Magic, we also voted for the best actor and best costume. The ballots are tallied, the results are announced, and the killer is given the opportunity to explain themselves.

The Jazz Age Murder Mystery was an absolute blast! I played one of the characters myself - Win, stuffy accountant to gangsters and criminals. For my costume, I went with a “nerdy gangster” vibe: black pencil skirt, white button-down, suspenders, old-school black stockings, and of course a jauntily angled fedora.

All of the players committed to their roles 110%, which is honestly what makes or breaks this kind of party. I was also amazed by how genuinely hilarious many of the players were. Some of them had like professional-level improv skills and comedic timing. Special props have to go to Elicia Hyder (who deservedly won “best actor” - she had my vote!), J.D. Monroe, Meghan Maslow (attorney… at law), and Avery Flynn. There were times when I was falling-down, tears-in-my-eyes cracking up!

As for the mystery itself, I was vindicated in having figured out who the murderer was as soon as the victim’s identity was announced. However, it turned out that I had ascribed a much more complex and sinister motive to the killer than the game had, LOL. (I thought the murder was a premeditated conspiracy with another character, whereas the game had it as an unintentional crime of passion, albeit rooted in the same reasons that I thought it was premeditated.) I guess that’s not surprising, given my own personal taste in murder mysteries!

The party also gave me the chance to connect with fabulous author Sarah Nicolas, a person after my own heart, who ended up being the killer. In a weird stroke of coincidence, Sarah had been drinking a gin and tonic during the party - and the murder weapon turned out to be a gin bottle!

All told, I think the murder mystery party was a roaring success, and I hope it becomes a new tradition that continues at future conventions.

Saturday was the busiest day of the convention, starting with my romantic suspense panel in the morning. There were five authors on this panel, and even though we all write romantic suspense, it was interesting to see how we all write it in very different ways. It just goes to show how much story variety there can be even within a single genre!

I had a break between the end of that panel and the start of my next commitment, and for the first time, I didn’t feel the need to return to my room to decompress and recharge my introverted self. Instead, I went to the “Improv Flash Fiction” panel, which is something Coastal Magic does every year.

For this panel, a large group of authors (I think there were 8 or 9) sit in the usual line facing the audience. The moderator asks the audience for a handful of story prompts, such as the type of protagonist, genre, setting, and main conflict. The authors then use those prompts to craft a story on the spot. Starting with the first person in line, each subsequent author builds on the contributions of the authors before them by adding anywhere from a handful of sentences to the oral equivalent of several paragraphs, introducing their own twists to the tale. As you can imagine, the story gets progressively zanier as it makes its way down the line.

This panel ranked right up there under the murder mystery party as one of the most hilarious parts of the con! And from what I’ve been told, it’s like that every year. The funniest parts, IMO, were the reactions of authors farther down the line when the author before them did something totally unexpected and wacky, then left them to deal with the fallout.

Plus, the panel was impressive as hell: all of the stories (there was enough time for 3) ended up being coherent narratives with interesting twists and turns as well as satisfying resolutions by the end.

I am in awe of people who are able to think quickly on their feet and improvise successfully - in part because it’s in such diametric opposition to my own skill set, haha. I could never, ever participate in something like this; my brain would be in a panicked scramble the whole time. But as an audience member, I love improv. Almost every podcast I subscribe to is some form of improvised comedy, and I got the same kind of kick out of the flash fiction panel.

TBC tomorrow - Lunch with an Author, and my first-ever book signing!

#RL #coastalmagic2020

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fallintosanity · 5 years

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so I just re-read Nevermore, the unintentionally final book in the Cal Leandros series by Rob Thurman. Mostly I was rereading it on the hopeless crossover nerd whim of “Noctis Lucis Caelum and Cal Leandros look remarkably similar but are basically polar opposites in terms of personality and it would frankly be hilarious if they somehow got switched and Niko had to deal with Noctis, and Ignis (or better yet, Ardyn) had to deal with Cal”.

But I’d forgotten how much I dislike the last couple books in the series despite what should be Sanity-flavored plot crack in Nevermore in particular (Cal time-travels eight years to the past to save his younger self from an assassin), and I’ve been thinking about why, and what went so terribly wrong with a series I love so much. I’ve been able to isolate three main reasons why the ending of the series frustrates me so much and why, I think, interest in the books dropped off so badly that the planned eleventh book was never published.

Cut for long ramblings about writing and storytelling (also spoilers for the entire Cal Leandros series).

The first reason is purely technical: Nevermore appears not to have been edited for spelling, punctuation, and grammar (SPaG). At all. I’m talking glaringly obvious mistakes like effect instead of affect, ‘Goodfellow grin, sword out, “I’ve been looking forward to this...”’, run-on sentences galore, and sentences just straight-up missing subjects, verbs, or objects; or which otherwise make no grammatical sense.

Thurman’s writing style has always had a bit of a... rhythm, I suppose, to it - characters tend to speak in long complex sentences with entire asides in the middle. It’s part of the appeal of her books, normally. When properly edited, her almost lyrical sentences give her books a unique and enjoyable flow. But in Nevermore, at least once a chapter and frequently more often, I had to stop reading, go back to the beginning of the paragraph, and re-read the sentence only to discover, yes, it really is missing a vital part of its structure, or its tense doesn’t agree with the sentences before and after (or occasionally with itself). Being thrown out of the book that frequently makes it very hard to read. You can’t get deeply invested in what the characters are saying if you can’t understand them.

The second two reasons are more complex, and fairly tightly intertwined. One of them is the entire issue of Robin Goodfellow. A good pass or three by an editor would have been helpful here, too, not just for SPaG, but also because Robin goes from straddling the line between “overbearing yet charming” and “obnoxious third wheel”, to straight-up puck ex machina. The plot of Nevermore is quite solid and enjoyable for the first half - but then Robin shows up. From there, it’s a downhill plunge of hand-waving his vast yet utterly unexplained network of “connections” or “minions” to solve half the problems they encounter.

How did he find the Leandros brothers overnight when Caliban was incredibly careful to make himself untraceable? Something something text-recognition software in his mailbox, and vague “informants” who pointed him directly to the apartment. Where’d he get the sword that’s too long to actually hide in the suit jacket he’s wearing? A shrug and a “it was hidden up his ass” joke. Where’d he get the credit card and “wad of cash” he uses later, after said suit (and everything else he was wearing) gets destroyed and he’s walking around in a stolen bedsheet toga? Another shrug/ass joke. How does he hide the four of them from Lazarus? A mysterious “client” with a conveniently empty, ultra-protected penthouse never before mentioned, and more minions who not only manage to stock it with clothes and other necessities in the space of roughly an hour, but mange to do so with clothes and medical cocktails perfectly fit to Robin, Cal, Caliban, and Niko.

There’s “this guy is insanely wealthy and unbelievably well-connected”, which is how Robin has always come across in past books; and there’s “this guy is a walking plot device who barely resembles himself from previous books”, which is Robin in Nevermore. And speaking of walking plot devices: on the flip side of solving half the problems they encounter, Robin “conveniently” creates a completely different problem seemingly just to set up a chapter’s worth of angst. He develops a phobia of Auphe gates so severe that he would rather die than allow Caliban to use one to get them out of a trap by Lazarus. A phobia never before mentioned in any book, despite Cal’s gates being a massive plot point in nearly all previous books (and Robin being yanked through them repeatedly).

Which is where the third massive problem with the book comes in, a problem whose roots are in the previous book, Downfall. In Downfall, the ninth book of the series, we learn out of the blue that apparently Cal and Niko are the latest version of two guys who have been reincarnating every hundred years or so for the last few millennia. Every time they’re reincarnated, they’re reincarnated together as brothers or best friends; and every time they’re reincarnated, Robin finds them and becomes their friend.

Up until this point, there’d been no mention of reincarnation in the books at all, nor any hint that Robin knew the Leandros brothers before. Downfall tries to “solve” this by adding some flashbacks of Robin meeting the brothers as children and recognizing them, but this doesn’t change the fact that his reactions when he first meets them in book 1 (or in any of the books beyond that) do not make any sense if he either met them before as children, or recognizes them as the reincarnations of his friends.

On top of that, Downfall begins and Nevermore continues with the idea that the Leandros brothers’ previous reincarnations were always famous historical figures. They were Achilles and Patroclus, they were Little John and Will Scarlet (to Goodfellow’s Robin Hood, of course). They “rustled Genghis Khan’s harem”. Name a historical figure or event, the Leandros brothers and Robin were there and probably involved up to their eyeballs.

I don’t want to say that this kind of resurrection plot, on its own, is bad. Done well, it can be quite interesting. The problems with it in this series are due to execution, not the premise itself. The reason the execution falls very, very flat is twofold.

First, like I said, the Leandros brothers were always important historical figures or involved in the business of them. If reincarnation as a thing was more prominent in the series, if we had a reason for why this is the case other than “because protagonists”, then I might buy it. As it is, it smacks unpleasantly of the “Raven Dark’ness Dementia Way” flavor of self-insert that’s fine for self-indulgence, but a lot harder to tolerate when it comes out of left field in the ninth and tenth books of a New York Times bestselling series.

It’s the author trying to make her characters awesome by making them have been all the awesome people in history, rather than allowing them to be awesome on their own merits. It’s also the author trying to force a closeness/brotherly bond between her characters that 1) doesn’t need to be forced as it’s already there, and 2) is actually weakened by making it be their ~reincarnation destiny~ rather than something they spent the last eight and a half books earning.

Second, and closely related, is the fact that there was no foreshadowing whatsoever of the reincarnation thing. If this had been set up since the first book - if Robin’s reactions to the Leandros brothers in book 1 had had even the slightest hint of this, if there had been subtle clues dropped in subsequent books - it would be a lot easier to swallow. As it is, the lack of foreshadowing gives it all the subtlety and effectiveness of an “it was all a dream” ending.

The tendency to just make up something that’s “always been there” isn’t a new one for Thurman; she’s done this repeatedly throughout the Leandros series, and does it for other things in Nevermore as well. The “coming of age” ring Caliban gives to Robin was supposedly given to him by Niko, but it was never mentioned prior to that scene. “For real and for true” is likewise something that Caliban claims was always in his and Niko’s life, but is mentioned for the first time in Nevermore. (There are other examples in previous books but I don’t remember them off the top of my head.)

The difference is that all those are relatively minor things. As a reader, I’d have loved to see the scene where Niko gives Cal the ring (where’d Niko get it? was he emotional? how did Cal respond?), but I can accept that it happened off-screen. The “for real and for true” line would have had a hell of a lot more emotional impact if it had been used in previous books, but I can buy it being a childhood thing Caliban hadn’t thought of until now.

But an entire reincarnation plot, complete with handwaved “racial memory” thanks to “Auphe genes” that allows Caliban to remember his previous incarnations? Something that big has to be set up, foreshadowed, from the very beginning. Otherwise you leave your readers distracted by the mechanics of it, the gaping plot holes where characters’ reactions don’t line up. (Don’t get me started on the hilarious lack of hard science in any mention of Cal’s Auphe heritage; that’s a whole ‘nother rant.)

In my entirely amateur opinion, both Downfall and Nevermore would have been much stronger books with the entire reincarnation plot ripped out. By our ninth book with these characters, we don’t need a convoluted reincarnation plot to either prove that Cal and Niko are awesome, or to convince readers of the powerful bonds of friendship and brotherhood between the two of them, and between them and Robin. It fails to make them seem cooler in any way, for one (this is a separate rant about how to write tricksters, but essentially, if Cal suddenly legitimizes every one of Robin’s outlandish claims about his involvement with historical figures, by remembering his past reincarnations where they did whatever thing it was, it makes Robin’s claims considerably more boring and uninteresting).

It also makes the bonds between the three of them a lot weaker. They stop earning the bonds on their own merits, and fall back on “hey we fucked our way through Roman whorehouses together in a past life, let’s be besties now”. In Nevermore, Caliban struggles to earn past!Niko’s trust for very good reasons, making for interesting, painful drama and angst as he deals with the fact that the one person who’s trusted him his entire life suddenly doesn’t. But when Robin shows up, he and Caliban swap a couple raunchy memories from a past life and suddenly Robin is willing to die for Caliban (except for the aforementioned Auphe gate phobia, which frankly feels even more forced given how fully Robin trusts Caliban after the reincarnation discussion). I would have much rather seen Caliban have to earn past!Robin’s trust the way he did in the early books in the series, the way he did with past!Niko.

So, to fix Nevermore: scale back on the puck-ex-machina - it would even be possible without changing the story that much. Cal and Caliban would both bitch about having to wear fancy clothes instead of their preferred snarky t-shirts. The boys would have had to work a bit harder to find a safe place to hole up for the night, and would have been on watch not just to wake Caliban when the nightmares started, but to keep an eye out for Lazarus. (Which, frankly, would have added another layer to Cal’s failing to wake Caliban, if he was legitimately distracted or could simply claim to have been.) Rip out the reincarnation plotline entirely. Let the boys earn each other’s trust and friendship organically, and let them be badass on their own terms rather than by borrowing historical figures’ awesomeness. And get a SPaG editor.

...all that said, if Everwar ever does come out by whatever miracle of publishing, self- or otherwise, I’m totally buying it. I miss my emo-angst-amoral-jackass and his impossibly-good asskicking older brother.

(maybe someday I’ll write that crossover too.)

(no Sanity you have too many fics already)

(but what if niko and ignis bemoaning their respective charges--)

#cal leandros #the cal leandros series #rob thurman #meta #writing #sanity talks a lot

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koalas-koalas-everywhere · 5 years

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Live-blogging The Hobbit

Since I said I’d talk about how much I love Bilbo.

Also, live-blogging might be a generous description. A report from the brim every few chapters, maybe.

Might be annoying to my current followers, but they’d do well to remember this is how I got most of them, even if the live-blogging was for a different fandom.

Now, to start! The first two chapters!

An Unexpected Party

The very first page, with the description of Bag End, had me doing a lot of double takes, mostly because of things I already thought I knew because of, you know, osmosis, so it went a bit like:

“the hobbit was fond of visitors” ????? Didn’t Bilbo use the One Ring specifically to avoid unwanted visitors?

However big you thought Bag End was, you’ll have to guess again. The most generous illustration probably got the size wrong. It not only has multiple bedrooms (not enough for all of the dwarves, though), it has wardrobes (rooms dedicated to clothes), and kitchens, and dining rooms.

“most Bagginses were rich” Clearly the best use for their money would have been to redistribute it, but are you trying to tell me some of them weren’t and the rest just said it was none of their business?

The fact that the Bagginses are described as reliable/predictable and Bungo doesn’t get much personal description while Belladonna, of the Took clan, outstanding/odd, does get further insight into her place in her family and is described as both famous and remarkable? *kisses fingers like chef*

Like, up till now, the only description he personally gets is, like, “Bungo, that was Bilbo’s father, built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her (and partly with her money)” and it’s still a description of Belladonna because the paragraph’s about her still, you can tell because, even though in the last sentence Bungo was the subject, Bilbo is still referred as “her” son.

Also fitting because Bilbo’s arc is about accepting his heritage from both parts of his family, and we’re about to get into how much of a Baggins he is, so extra emphasis into the Took side will be good for the next few chapters.

So, it says Gandalf last visited before the Old Took died, which was in S.R. 1320, when Bilbo was 30, a.k.a. 20 years before. While Gandalf is definitely remarkable enough, given the time lapse, I can forgive Bilbo for forgetting about his appearance. My reasons are that my own memory begins to get blurry about faces some five minutes after someone’s gone out of my sight.

“‘Good Morning!’ said Bilbo, and he meant it.” [to Gandalf]“‘All of them at once,” said Bilbo. “[...] If you have a pipe about you, sit down and have a fill of mine! [tobacco]’” and I’m going to skip a bit here, [to Dwalin] “‘I am just about to take tea; pray come and have some with me.’ A little stiff perhaps, but he meant it kindly.” Just... he’s so nice? Often in interpretations of the Shire and of Bilbo himself, when hobbits are nice it’s a matter of politeness for its own sake, as a ritual, but he’s so earnest? It’s really politeness as a kindness, as it should be. The only times this isn’t the case is when, after Gandalf reveals he’s looking for a fellow adventurer, when he just shit-talks adventures and looks at his mail hoping Gandalf will just go away instead of telling him himself... until he gets tired and does so. Then later when he gathers from Balin that a lot of people might be showing up and you can sense some reluctance in his decision to go without, and a focus on duty. And last as the night goes on and the dwarves keep being rude af.

Also, I once saw someone wonder why Gandalf would mention Belladonna in the movie when he supposedly knew the Old Took, and someone said it was just to make the connection more direct, son->mother, instead of son->mother->grandfather. Well,

[Picture of my book, relevant quote: “To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son; as if I was selling buttons at the door!”. End description]

Read ‘em and weep.

A funny thing about the book is the narration. It’s supposed to be Bilbo’s account, just compiled by Tolkien, right? So, Bilbo’s descriptions, meaning how he is described, are noteworthy. Admittedly, I don’t read autobiographies, so I don’t know what’s a common way to describe yourself in third person, but this narrator is kinda... distant from Bilbo? In that you don’t get the sense he’s writing the story. He’s at once roasted relentlessly and praised, mocked and defended. All in all it’s an affectionate voice, although one that feels the need to go “listen, I know how this all looks and that you doubt him now (and honestly? same), but he’s a pretty cool guy, once you get to know him.”

“Bless me, life used to be quite inter-- I mean, you used to upset things badly in these parts once upon a time.” Lmao

“Very amusing for me, very good for you” - Gandalf about sending Bilbo to his death.

Bilbo, to Gandalf: “Come tomorrow!”

Bilbo, to himself: “what”

Himself, to Bilbo: “I also don’t want me to be doing what I’m doing.”

Strange dwarf (with a blue beard?): *basically pushes his way into Bilbo’s house*. Bilbo: ............... wanna eat?

“The poor little hobbit sat down in the hall and put his head in his hands, and wondered what had happened, and what was going to happen, and whether they would all stay to supper.” Hero. Those are appropriate priorities. Meanwhile, there’s people waiting for him to open the door lmao.

*banging at Bag End’s door with a stick instead of ringing the bell*

Bilbo: who’s the fucking beast.

“Bilbo sat on a stool by the fireside, nibbling at a biscuit (his appetite was quite taken away), trying to look as if this was all perfectly ordinary and not in the least an adventure.” They [the Valar] can’t see you if you don’t move.

I like how “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold” is about both the gold and treasure and the sheer history, represented by song. Yes, the lyrics are mostly about the treasure, but the book itself says it can barely be called a song without the music. The dwarves’ work is talked about without equating it with their craft, but more as a cultural activity that builds identity, again, like songs. They’re mentioned both in the context of being sung deep in the mountain, only for dwarves ears. This comes to a head later, when the last line says “to win our harps and gold from him!” From this, I’ve reached the conclusion that dwarves don’t just want the Mountain for the economic benefits, but because of the sense of cultural identity, represented by songs and harps, that they lost along with Erebor. I’m sure this isn’t surprising in general, or a new reading of dwarves in general, or even a new reading of the song in particular, but I just wanted to put it out there.

I like how immersed in, well, everything Bilbo has been up to now. I get this feeling of constant movement in the inside from him. Every smoke ring fascinates him, and every suggestion of adventure appalls him, and everything that happens is the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to him, not (just) because of his (sometimes, this doesn’t happen that much) exaggerated reactions, but the time he takes to tell us his feelings and thoughts about things.

Also, him being snapped out of his adventurous daze by a sudden fear for his home (comfort), A+ Baggins/Took conflict.

“I want these dwarves to think I could fuck someone up, which is made all the easier by my desire to fuck them up”

“As soon as I saw your funny faces in the door-step, I had my doubts.” Bilbo that’s racist.

Gandalf is like that meme of the driver who’s threatening to turn the car around because his children are being rowdy, only instead he insists he will not turn the car around no matter how much they beg.

I don’t know if this is the I’ve Watched The Movie Where He Was A Main Character Syndrome talking, but I’m feeling much more compassionate towards Thotin this time around.

I noticed what I’d written the moment I finished the word, but this is too fucking hilarious to correct.

Bilbo: “uhh, five feet high is pretty noticeable for a door”

Tolkien: you’ll have to forgive him, he was born with dumb bitch disease. The buffoon. The absolute animal.

Also, “He loved maps, and in his hall, there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favourite walks marked in it with red ink.” In this house we love one (1) nerd.

Thorin: *bitches*

Bilbo: Not in my house. *bitches harder*

Thorin: you fucking hayseed.

Bilbo: prob, bob?

Roast Mutton

I commend Bilbo for actually going - if I had to run for 15 minutes they’d still be waiting for me.

Did Gandalf bring Bilbo an actual bag or did he just decide pipe weed and handkerchiefs were the only thing he’d need for a five month minimum journey.

If he has time to complain about it, he also has time to sew himself some clothes out of the kerchiefs ig

“[Gandalf] had eaten most, talked most, and laughed most. But now he was simply not there at all!” Gandalf you ass.

“Dwarves can make fire almost anywhere out of almost anything” this has so much comedic potential.

I relate to Bilbo because I always catch on to the fact that I’m supposed to be lying way too late.

Kinda reminds me of that post about the fae who’ve learned how to tell the truth in a very specific way so it will be misunderstood being flabbergasted by someone who just comes up to them and lies.

Bilbo: *is caught lying*

Trolls:

Bill said burrahobbit rights!

Dwarves:

Gotta hand it to Tolkien, though, Bilbo does have dumb bitch disease.

I love how Sting is supposed to be just as special as Orcrist and Glamdring, yet the narration makes such a small deal of it. It’s clear from the start it’s of the same make as them because, although it’s not mentioned along with them at first (which makes sense, since it’s sheath’s not as pretty, Thorin and Gandalf’s taking of the swords isn’t even separated from Bilbo’s by a stop, just a semicolon, yet it doesn’t get a second though.

I like how in the movie it’s all Gandalf: “Imladris” Bilbo: *delighted gasp* “Rivendell” while in the book it’s Gandalf: “Rivendell” Bilbo: “Where’s that?” Gandalf: “Don’t interrupt!”

So that’s that! Don’t know if I should stick to doing it like this, every two or so chapters, or every chapter as soon as I finish, or try to do my impressions as I go and then publish them when I’m done, because this actually took me longer than I thought it would.

#The Hobbit #liveblogging #Bilbo Baggins #Gandalf #Thorin Oakenshield III #although not much

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creideamhgradochas · 6 years

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Thanks to the lovely @interestedbystanderwrites for taking the time to answer these! Get to know more about lovely Cass, go give her a follow and then show her some love!

These questions are from this list. You should check it out, there’s 50 questions all together and they’d be great to ask your favorite fic writer!

1) How old were you when you first starting writing fan-fiction?

Ha! I was a teenager and it was Backstreet Boys – and smut didn’t exist the same way it does now but that’s another opinion for another day. What I wrote then was cutesy and romantic, probably because that was what I was daydreaming about, I guess. Just a reminder that my blog is NSFW if you’re under 18.

2) Do you prefer writing OC’s or reader inserts? Explain your answer.

I think I can get more depth from an OC but you also risk the Mary-Sue and you may pigeonhole your OC in race, sexuality etc. That can really open a can of worms with the reader, which is wholly understandable. Reader inserts are great in the way you can make it 100% person to the reader. They should imagine themselves (if that’s their choice) and not feel that the writer has alienated them in any way somehow but it is still difficult to please everybody.

3) What is your favorite genre to write for?

I like fluff – I like things that make you smile at the end, give the reader a little cuddle to maybe brighten their day.

4) If you had to delete one of your stories and never speak of it again, which would it be and why?

One that never made my masterlist – a Spider-Man super angst titled “How Long Do You Want to be Loved?”. I thought it as okay, pretty good even – but I guess people just want Bucky or Sebastian smut haha I hear you all!

5) When is your preferred time to write?

Morning when the little guy is napping ☺ Evening is hard because it’s when I play adulting catch up… or try not to fall asleep on the couch.

6) Where do you take your inspiration from?

I have a very overactive imagination, always have. And for most of my fics, I guess it’s pretty obviously the beautiful aesthetics of Sebastian Stan and to a lesser extent, Bucky Barnes.

7) In your Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series, what’s your favorite scene that you wrote?

Chapters 27 and 28 of TOFWYA – more so 28 as you get a pretty interesting insight into Sasha’s and Sebastian’s ways of coping when they’re out of sync. Long story short, they’re a mess.

8) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?

Luckily – none! The joys of a smolblog maybe?

9) Who is your favorite character to write for? Why?

I love writing for Buckster – he’s a complex devil and has a lot of layers to work with and a body to die for. Thumbs up for the material, Sebastian.

10) Who is your least favourite character to write for? Why?

As per mentioned before – Peter Parker. That fic scarred me.

11) How did you come up with the title for the Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series?

It’s actually a song lyric as are the first few chapter titles: Belinda Carlisle – Valentine

I made a rule about you, I made a plan // For getting my feet back on the ground // Bury my face in clouds, for hours on end // But time only flies when you're around

12) How did you come up with the idea for the Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series?

I was just writing some stuff, pissfarting around and all of a sudden I’d written something similar to what Chapter 22 ended up being and that’s how it all began. 150k words of nonsense really.

13) Do you have any abandoned WIP’s? What made you abandon them?

Many – but there is a long Bucky multichap fic that deserves more of my attention. As his story has evolves via MCU, the story has changed a little.

14) Are there any stories that you’ve written that you’d really love to do a sequel to?

I write one shots to TOFWYA, I don’t think I could write the sequel to it though. I’ve considered a full fic for Take Me to the Water but I doubt I will for an AU. Any sequels will be little one shots so at this stage, there is nothing planned.

15) Are there any stories that you wished you’d ended differently?

I ended Next Year very kitsch – I regret the last sentence as it currently is: You gave him a small smile, overwhelmed by his words. “I love you too, Bucky Barnes.” Blurgh.

16) Tell me about another writer(s) who you admire? What is it about them that you admire?

How much time do you have for me to talk about @whostheblondegirlwriting? Truly. My fandom soul mate. We are separated by far too many kilometres and time zones, but between her job and me mummying, we’re chatting at all hours of the day. She is a true gem and I adore her.

17) Do you have a story that you look back on and cringe when you reread it?

Luckily, it’s not available on A03 or Tumblr, but it’s still online elsewhere because I thought about it a few weeks ago – it was a Lords of Dogtown fic… and it was not good. Saying that, anything before that I would cringe at anything I’d written anyway ha!

18) Do you prefer listening to music when you’re writing or do you need silence?

Definitely music or the sound of the baby monitor that I find quite soothing.

19) Have you ever cried whilst writing a story?

Argh. “How Long Do You Want to be Loved” messed me up. Too many parental feels.

20) Which part of your Time Only Flies When You’re Around Series was the hardest to write?

The proposal. I went over it a thousand times. I thought, should it be romantic, should it be grand, should it be this or that? How it happened, just a couple in love, in the city they love, being themselves just seemed to fit when it finally came together.

21) Do you make a general outline for your stories or do you just go with the flow?

I occasionally outline – but mostly I just write, write, write and then start toying with it afterwards. I’m constantly chopping and changing, but I’m not pedantic about planning. It isn’t that kind of fic. Other multichaps I put a bit more planning and emphasis on.

22) What is something you wished you’d known before you started posting fan-fiction?

You’re only as good as your last fic and its reblogs. If you’re going to get hung up on likes/reblogs/comments, you’ll never publish something again. But it can be bloody disheartening at times.

23) Do you have a story that you feel doesn’t get as much love as you’d like?

Time Only Flies When You’re Around? Haha busted my ass on that beast for over a year. It has the hits but likes and comments are encouraging when received. When. I always considered publishing it on Tumblr, but I don’t know. It’s freely available on A03.

24) In contrast to 23 is there a story which gets lots of love which you kinda eye roll at?

Smut talks – I think Heatstroke is a little silly. But it gets hits.

25) Are any of your characters based on real people?

Nope – any characters, inc OC’s are all fictional. I don’t know if I could handle people in my real life if they were like my OC’s!

26) What’s the biggest compliment you’ve gotten?

Any body that takes the time to leave a ‘yes!’, ‘omg’ to paragraphs of reiterating your story back to you – it’s amazing! Taking the time to leave a writer a comment makes our day.

27) What’s the harshest criticism you’ve gotten?

It still makes me laugh when I read it, not quite verbatim but it was along the lines of ‘I loved this fic but it’s gone a total 180. I’ll see how you continue but you know, I’m probably out of here’. While I know you can’t please anyone, it’s a strange comment. I’m old enough to appreciate constructive criticism. This was neither here nor there, but still hilarious!

28) Do you share your story ideas with anyone else or do you keep them close to your chest?

Back to my love, @whostheblondegirlwriting, we’re constantly taunting the other or beta’ing each others stuff when we have time to help the other (let alone write our own stuff!).

29) Do people know you write fan-fiction?

In real life? No. On this hellsite? I have made some amazing writing friends!

30) What’s you favorite minor character you’ve written?

Ollie in TOFWYA – she’s a completely stereotypical New Yorker, brash, in your face and on the other hand, Sasha’s best friend in the world and they’d do anything for each other. If you knew Ollie in real life, you’d absolutely hate her.

31) What spurs you on during the writing process?

People simply enjoying your work and letting you know is the most amazing aphrodisiac. I’ll never stop writing – whether it’s for myself or for other people to enjoy. Don’t ever be scared to let a writer know if you’ve enjoyed their work or if you haven’t, a writer should be able to accept your constructive criticism and will probably appreciate your feedback if you take the time to provide it respectfully! If you’re going to go on anon and talk shit, just don’t bother. It’s boring, childish and completely unoriginal. Shows true testament to your personality offline.

32) What’s your favorite trope to write?

Friends to Lovers. THEY WERE FRIENDS AND NOW THEY ARE… LOVERS!

33) Can you remember the first fic you read? What was it about?

Not a clue – but will assume it’s Backstreet Boys-related!

34) If you could write only angst, fluff or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why?

Smut will get you the hits but fluff is forever.

#milestone celebration #ask the author #interestedbystanderwrites

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fuckingchatnoir · 7 years

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Fanboy Chapter 7

Ao3 link

Full chapter below the cut

Adrien returned her hoodie two days later, it was inevitable. He wanted to talk to her again. As he began to think about their last encounter, the night after, he realized that she possibly wanted to talk to him again as well. Over the past few months he had noticed that Marinette was a very responsible and aware individual. She wouldn’t have allowed him to simply leave with her hoodie unless there was a reason behind it.

And Adrien liked to believe that the reason was to see him again.

And even though he never got a solid answer, she didn’t look that shocked the next time she saw him and even offered him a hot chocolate before they fell into simple conversation. So, he guessed that it meant that she was at least okay with him returning, whether she intended for him to do so or not.

He didn’t visit every day of course since they both had lives and that would’ve been pretty weird, but when he would visit she was always welcoming and kind and they would talk about casual things the same way close friends would when talking about their weekends while walking to class together on a Monday morning. It was all so nice. Marinette was so nice. And even though he wasn’t exactly opening up to her about personal matters or discussing his story as she had offered previously, she never brought that up and looked happy to just talk to him about things like food and a cat that followed him for four blocks straight one day.

His visits would’ve been considered even routine if he had an actual set day of the week for them. However, due to his schedule, some days he would be too exhausted to visit whether it’d be because of his schoolwork, job, or hero duties. And Marinette seemed to understand that since she never questioned his timing. She’d usually just roll with his spontaneous visits and maybe tell him that he’d have to leave within an hour if she was too tired or had to wake up early the following day. And he’d nod in understanding, and they’d talk. And that’s how things went for a while until one Friday night.

It was almost midnight, Plagg was watching some documentary on aliens and criticizing it as usual, and Adrien was trying to write his next chapter. And by trying he meant as in attempting to do so but failing. He had written two paragraphs already that were introducing the new setting that Felix was in. However, Adrien felt that it was getting too lengthy. Half of the sentences were just one long description on the way the sunlight was shining through a window, highlighting the blue in Bridgette’s eyes. And he felt himself groan after rereading the lines for a while.

The opening scene was supposed to be romantic, yes. But he also didn’t want to write Felix as some cliché male protagonist that didn’t pay attention to his love interest because he was too distracted by their eyes.

Besides, now that he was thinking about it, FrenchBeauty95 had written something similar a few chapters ago.

Dammit.

In frustration, he highlighted everything with his mouse and deleted his words, staring at the three blank white documents soon after in dramatic agony.

He knew what he wanted to write in that chapter. From the fight sequences to Felix’s wonderful puns, he knew what was going to happen.

However, he didn’t know how to actually put it into words. And that was slowly killing him from the inside out.

He fell back into his seat and rolled himself away from the screens, his hands rubbing at his eyes so they had something to do. Yet another loud groan released from his lips and Plagg shushed him immediately.

“Plagg, I think I have writer’s block.”

“No, I think you’re just over-dramatic. I’m trying to listen.”

“You don’t even believe in aliens.”

“I don’t, but this human does, and his argument is hilarious.”

Adrien lowered his hands down and got up from his seat, walking himself over to the couch to be closer to his friend.

At least that’s what he tried telling himself when his mind was telling him that he was procrastinating.

I just want to have a quick conversation with him, and then I’ll get back to writing.

He placed his hands on the back of the couch, tempted to lean himself against it to rest for a while even though he’d been sitting down for almost an hour prior.

His eyes flickered to the screen and then back at Plagg for a few minutes, the silence between them comfortable. The program was interesting to say the least. Even though the narrator was a bit over-excited, it was still fascinating.

“How do you not believe in them? There’s so much evidence.” Adrien said.

Plagg responded but still did not turn to look back at him. Instead he stuffed a piece of cheese in his mouth and Adrien scrunched up his nose in disgust at the smell.

“You’re telling me that a world can survive without cheese?!”

Adrien snorted and rolled his eyes.

“Yes, Plagg. Is that really your counter argument?”

Plagg didn’t say anything.

“And anyways, how do you know that they don’t have cheese? Maybe they have some sort of space cheese that’s only available on their planet. Maybe it’s even better than Camembert.”

That got the god to finally look at him. He even floated to get close to the teen’s face, his small breaths tickling the teen’s nose.

“Nothing is better than Camembert.”

Adrien chuckled, “Yeah, of course. Whatever you say.”

The kwami nodded seriously.

“Why are you talking to me anyway? Don’t you have to form words on those contraptions or whatever to impress pigtails?”

“You mean write my story on my computers? Why, yes. But I was just taking a break,” He turned his head to the side slightly and crossed his arms over his chest. A light pink dusted his cheeks. “And I’m not writing it to impress Marinette.”

Why did it feel like he was lying?

“Yeah, sure. Anyway, what were you complaining about earlier?”

Plagg was no longer interested in the documentary, and completely ignored the television. So, Adrien leaned himself over the back of the couch to grab the remote from the cushion to turn it off. If he left it on all night again his dad would probably lecture him, and he wasn’t ever in the mood for that.

He sighed.

“I promised my readers a new chapter by tomorrow and I still have no clue how to write it.”

“All you gotta do is press those box letters that form words and make sentences. You told me yourself? I thought you knew.”

“Plagg, I didn’t mean that literally. I meant that I have the story in my head, but I don’t know how to introduce it, how to describe the actual scenes the way I imagined it, or how to make the body language in some parts. And I should include all the senses in my writing, but I don’t find it necessary to write about scent in this chapter? But also, this writing website said-“

“Kid, you lost me at Plagg.”

Adrien scowled.

“Why don’t you just ask Pigtails for help again? Didn’t she offer that one time?”

“I already saw her on Wednesday. I can’t just go again. And besides,” The teen began to rub the back of his neck timidly. “What if she offered that night just to make me feel better?”

Plagg tilted his head in confusion.

“Um yes? That seems to be the reason. And?”

Adrien groaned.

“That would mean that she said it to be nice but didn’t actually mean it, Plagg!”

“If she didn’t mean it then why would she say it? You’re overthinking this.”

“I am not- “Adrien groaned once more and slid his hand into the right pocket of his sweats. “You just don’t understand.”

“Obviously. You humans make everything too complicated. So, are we going or not?”

Adrien tried to scowl at him, but instead he nibbled lightly on his bottom lip in thought - Plagg floated over to his left shoulder to rest himself on it as he awaited his friend’s answer.

“You really think she meant it?” Adrien asked.

Plagg sighed, nuzzling his face into Adrien’s cotton shirt.

“She hasn’t stopped you from coming has she?”

“No but- “

“Then that means for some odd reason she finds your company enjoyable.”

Adrien didn’t respond so the small god nodded, and Adrien felt it on his shoulder.

“Yeah, kid.”

Adrien smiled to himself and nodded back.

“Okay then, claws out!”

There were a few people out that night, so it took Adrien a bit longer than usual to get to Marinette’s charming home. Not that he really minded. The clouds that barely hid the moon made it look more mysterious and bright, Adrien having enjoyed the calming and enchanting atmosphere. He also figured out where he wanted his next fight sequence to take place. While hiding from tourists he spotted the side of an abandoned building with its entirety covered with graffiti.

He thought it would make the fight look even cooler.

Once he finally arrived at his friend’s balcony, he noticed how the light in her room was on through the trap-door near that recognizable deck chair. He cleared his throat before he walked up to it and gave it a few knocks with his extended baton. His back was straightened, his shoulders were back, and his teeth were revealed through his usual welcoming smirk as he leaned himself against his baton, waiting for his friend to finally come up.

He heard her coming closer and then the door opened, revealing her bare freckled wrists and painted nails.

“Good evening, Puuuurincess.” He whispered.

He didn’t see her roll her eyes, but he could tell that she did by the tone of her voice.

“Come on in.”

He entered and took himself to her chaise in what seemed like less than a minute, the action seeming almost routine now. She walked over to her desk, her desktop on and lit up with an opened document. Chat noticed that her hair was down again, and she was wearing that familiar over-sized hoodie. He smiled softly.

“Give me a second. I’m almost done with this.”

“No worries, take your time.”

He heard her fingers tap rapidly against the keyboard. Her thoughts seemed like they were racing quickly in her head like wind or breathing. Chat found it oddly relaxing and rested himself down against the chaise, staring up at the ceiling as he awaited. Marinette was a fast typer.

“Alrighty,” He turned his head to look at her, and saw a small satisfied smile playing on her lips. Whatever she just finished writing, she looked to be proud of it and of herself. She swiveled her body in her chair over to the hero and placed her feet on the chaise right beside his knees, leaning her body back against her chair. Her hands were rested on her thighs, clasped together like she was preparing herself for a meeting.

He almost snorted at that.

“So, what’s up?” She began.

He rose an eyebrow and smiled.

“What were you writing back there that made you so happy? Did a certain talented and fan-cat-stic hero actually inspire a certain sophisticated maiden to start her own fanfiction?”

Her eyes narrowed, and she flicked his forehead gently.

“That will never happen, especially not by someone that uses horrible cat puns on the regular.”

“Hey!”

She chuckled.

“I’m the class president at my school and I just finished writing up a proposition to show my principal on Monday.”

“Oh? What about?”

“A lot of the books in the library seem to be kind of outdated. And a lot of students have been wanting newer material. I was thinking we could donate the old books and purchase new ones. Took me a few weeks to persuade him to even listen to me, but I finally got him to budge and yeah. I think it’s good.”

A light pink dusted her cheeks as she pushed some of her hair back behind her ear shyly. A small smile spread on her lips.

Chat felt his stomach flutter, so he cleared his throat.

“That’s awesome!”

She shrugged modestly before crossing her right leg over her left, her foot almost brushing Chat’s lower thigh.

“So, why are you here? You don’t usually visit more than once a week.”

This time he shrugged before he sat himself up to get a better look at her.

“I…um…was bored? Wanted to see how you were.”

He wasn’t necessarily lying since he did often wonder how his friends were doing, however, that wasn’t the whole truth and Marinette seemed to grasp that easily enough.

“Uhuh.”

“Yeah. And you seem to be doing great! So that’s cool!”

He laughed awkwardly before he noticed Marinette’s eyes flicker to his hands that were rested on his lap. He was unknowingly fidgeting his fingers. He stopped almost immediately.

Marinette gave him a knowing look with her eyebrows raised and he finally let out a breath that he didn’t know he was holding.

“I need your help.”

She hummed. “With what?”

“With the next chapter of my story.”

He wasn’t looking her in the eye and his cheeks felt warm.

She nudged his thigh with her foot and he glanced back up at her. She had a small reassuring smile playing on her lips and for some reason his face felt even warmer.

He sighed.

“I know what I want to happen in this next chapter, but I’m not sure how to write it or what details to add. I have certain plot points in mind, but I don’t know what to put in-between them? And I definitely have no idea how to start off this chapter.”

“I’d like to help but I don’t think I’m the best person to come to about this. I don’t really write.”

“But you’re super imaginative!” He blurted out before he could even think about what he was saying. Marinette’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion and Chat almost slammed his hands against his mouth.

He couldn’t just tell her that he found her sketches amazing. He couldn’t explain how intelligent she sounded when she would answer a question in their literature class. And since she never talked about her designs with Chat Noir, he couldn’t just bring that up out of nowhere. So, his eyes started to search the room quickly as he, yet again, attempted to channel his inner Ladybug to see if he could spot something that could help him out.

And then his eyes stopped searching and he almost sighed in relief.

“That mannequin,” He started almost excitedly. His right hand pointed to the object behind him that was wearing an unfinished blue ruffled blouse. It looked to be made of a shiny silk fabric and the color reminded him of his partner’s eyes. And maybe those of another’s. “You designed that, right? You’re a designer?”

He looked back at the girl and saw her expression soften, looking less skeptical.

“Oh, yeah I am. But that doesn’t mean I can write.”

“I don’t want you to write. I just want to see if you can help me brainstorm ideas? I mean,” He turned to glance at the blouse another time and couldn’t help but smile fondly at it. “You seem to be really good at that.”

Designing wasn’t easy, Adrien knew that probably better than anyone in his class - excluding Marinette of course. Ever since he was a child he would see the way his father would spends days, sometimes weeks, on rough drafts of designs that would eventually never become finalized and thrown in the trash. It was a long and tiring process. So, when he looked at that blouse on the mannequin that only had one sleeve carefully pinned to it, Adrien knew that it wasn’t any different for Marinette.

She was a hard and very creative worker and it was always so evident.

A small giggle took him out of his thoughts and he returned to his position from before, looking at his friend.

“Puns may get you nowhere, Chat. But flattery will get you everywhere.”

Adrien felt his lips separate a little.

“Tell me what you got so far. I’ll give it a try.”

They planned for what seemed like minutes but what were actually hours, the time having gone by quickly as if someone fast-forwarded their lives without them knowing. It wasn’t until Marinette yawned rather loudly that one of them finally checked the time. It was late, almost four in the morning late, and Chat almost spat out the water that he was drinking when the girl had notified him.

“Seriously?” He asked, still astonished.

“Crazy right?”

Yeah, he needed to get home immediately. If his father happened to check up on him he would be utterly screwed.

To say the least that is.

“Geez, I didn’t know it was so late. I’m so sorry, Marinette.” He apologized as he placed his glass on her desk right beside the plate of cookies she’d brought up earlier. His guilt was visible in his tone.

Marinette shook her head.

“No worries. It’s my fault too. I should’ve been more watchful of the time.”

He started walking over to her circular window and she followed behind. They both yawned in unison and both of their feet seemed to drag along the wooden floor.

“Guess we got a little carried away, huh?” He asked as he stopped right behind her chaise, his baton ready in hand.

She smiled and shrugged.

“At least you know how to write the chapter now.”

“Yeah, and then some. Thank you so much again, Marinette. I owe you one, really.”

She shook her head tiredly and ran her fingers through her bangs, attempting to move them more to the side.

“You don’t owe me anything, Chat. You were the one that came up with more than half of the ideas. I just tweaked a few things.”

“A few things? The akuma’s name now is Blackhole and he has a shadow that can devour buildings! That’s so badass.”

The girl touched the side of her chin with her index finger thoughtfully and her giant sleeve fell to her elbow.

“You are right about that. It is pretty badass. I do take full credit for that one.” She admitted, causing the two to laugh softly. “But seriously, it was… kind of fun.”

Chat waggled his eyebrows and Marinette immediately looked like she regretted her words.

“Is the princess gonna give fanfiction a chance now?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself hero. This doesn’t mean I’m going to start avidly reading stories about you and your partner loving it up,” Chat’s face reddened almost instantly. “But, it was interesting to see the whole planning process.”

“Yeah?”

Her arms were crossed over her chest now.

“Yeah. It was…cool.”

“Ah.”

“I’ll be looking out for an update email. I think it’s gonna be good.” Marinette winked, and Adrien felt a sense of something pleasant rush through him. What it was, however, he wasn’t sure. But he didn’t question it.

“Oh, Okay.” She smiled. He nodded since he didn’t really know what else to do and glanced at the window for a second before looking back. He held his baton with both hands nervously.

“So, before I go I just want to make sure of something,” He cleared his throat, trying to make his tone sound nonchalant. “Is my story still the only one you’re reading?”

“Yup. And the only one I will read.”

He blushed slightly and nodded again.

“Cool. Cool.”

She rolled her eyes and chuckled before reaching behind him to push open the window. A light breeze swept in.

“Goodnight, Chat.”

Adrien almost giggled, her hoodie was way too big for her. He bowed instead.

“Goodnight, Princess.”

Chapter 16 of “The Empty Streets of Paris”

--by FelineGood16 on FanWorkz.net

Ladybug is running towards him. And it’s not the usual kind of running where someone speeds up to get to a certain place faster. It’s the kind of running that’s desperate, as if her life depended on it. Felix sees her emotion through each rough landing - he feels her concern every time her knees bend.

She’s worried about him.

He’s under rubble, he can’t feel his right arm, and he’s trying to smile at her. But instead he wails in pain.

“Chat!”

She’s on her knees now right beside him, quickly picking up the broken and scattered pieces of cement to free him. His eyes are closed shut and his teeth are grinding against each other almost violently. He tastes blood.

“I’m sorry, Chat. Crap, I’m so sorry. I-I don’t know what to do. You’re hurt and you need to go the hospital, but also your identity I-“

“You’re okay.” He whispers in between breaths.

She’s crying now, and Felix would wipe her tears if he could lift his arm.

“You’re an idiot. Y-you shouldn’t have done that,” Her right hand is on the side of his face and her breaths are brushing the tip of his nose. She strokes his cheek gingerly with her thumb - her eyes glisten from the moisture.

“The akuma.” He says.

“I know, kitty.”

He’s never heard her use that soft tone with him before. He wishes the circumstance was different and closes his eyes.

She taps his cheek.

“Hey, hey, stay with me.” They both hear an explosion from afar and she lowers her head. Her bangs are hiding her eyes and she sniffles. “What do I do? I don’t know what to do.”

Chat Noir whispers her name and hopes she can hear him.

“Win, my lady.”

Adrien visited Marinette’s home the following week to show her all the comments and reads their chapter got. It was one of the most well received chapters he’d ever posted, and Marinette was almost as flabbergasted as he was. She warmed up some celebratory popcorn for them and they both laughed and answered comments for the rest of the night on her desktop.

The audience seemed to enjoy just about everything in the update. From the akuma (as Adrien had expected), to the romance, to the major battle scene between Blackhole and Ladybug at the end that was a mixture of both suspense and awesomeness. It was all taken so well, and it made Chat feel all bubbly inside.

Marinette seemed to have felt the same way since she giggled at almost every comment that was about the akuma itself. She kept glancing over at Chat with the biggest grin on her face while she read a few of the responses aloud.

Adrien realized then that Marinette had a very contagious smile. Each time he saw even a hint of her teeth he couldn’t help but mirror her expression. Especially when her cheeks were rosy too and were lifted in that way that made her eyes sparkle and look squinted. He only ever saw that smile when she was around Alya, or really anyone else besides him and Chloe. That expression was reserved for friends and loved ones only, and now that he was finally getting to see it for himself because of something they did together, well he couldn’t get enough.

“A job well done, Chat. You did good.”

“We did good.”

She looked up at him again from her seat and smiled once more before nodding.

“Yeah. That too.”

He nodded back and they both turned their attention back to the screen, Marinette still scrolling through the web page. Adrien lowered his body even more, since he was standing, so he could get a better view of the computer and decided last minute to look at his friend instead. His mouth was beginning to fall open, as if to say something, but he couldn’t remember exactly what he even wanted to say. So, he swallowed and cleared his throat before closing his mouth again, those potential words still lingering somewhere in the back of his mind.

The lights in her room were off, with the exception of her dim desk lamp and screen, so the shadows on her face emphasized her features. Her long eyelashes casted shadows on the very top parts of her cheeks, outlining almost each lash. The white screen in front of them was reflected in her eyes and made the remaining blue shade appear illuminated, like the color was barely there. Marinette had pale skin so the light coming from her desktop easily gave it a light blue tint that really brought out her freckles.

She had so many.

“Chat!”

Adrien almost jumped at his friend’s abrupt tone. She’d been talking to him and he was too busy staring at her to listen.

Oh my god.

“Y-yes, Marinette?”

He was hoping that the heat in his face wasn’t physically evident in the dark room. He could feel it go up to the tips of his ear.

“I asked about your author’s note.”

He couldn’t look her in the eye anymore, so he decided to look back at the screen. He rubbed his knuckles on his thigh.

“What about it?”

“You said someone helped you.”

“Yeah, and?”

She didn’t respond.

“Is that a problem? I mean I didn’t state who you were or anything, but I can take it out if you want?”

He would’ve felt dirty if he didn’t credit Marinette in some way. She did help him get out of his small writer’s block and even helped him come up with a few ideas for his next chapter. It was the very least he could do.

However, maybe he should’ve asked if it was alright with her first. He started to feel guilty until he met her eyes again. She was smiling softly. Gosh, it was like Marinette had a different smile for each mood.

“Nah, it’s alright. But next time you don’t have to say that. It’s fine.”

Adrien’s eyes widened.

Marinette cocked an eyebrow.

“What is it?”

He tried to suppress a grin and shook his head.

Next time. There’s going to be a next time.

“Nothing. But, I think I’m still going to credit you when you do help. If that’s okay.”

She eyed him silently for a second; her eyes trailed up and down his face before she finally mirrored his expression and shrugged.

“Fine by me.”

“Kim, it’s almost nine at night and I’m starving. Can you please cut the competition crap for one second?” Alix complained as she and Adrien finally walked out of the movie theater into the fresh, cool air. They just finished watching this new indie horror movie that Nino had wanted to see for a few weeks now. It was about some gigantic slime slug that ate vegetarians. It was very odd, but it did have nice camera angles and transitions and Alix and Nino kept hitting his arm at some parts with bursts of excitement and laughter, so it wasn’t all that bad.

Though, his right arm did feel a bit sore. That was the one Alix kept hitting.

“Just one second, Alix. Nino’s about to owe me twenty euros!”

Both Nino and Kim were ahead of the two, standing by a small tree that had a circle of brick surrounding it. Kim was trying to chase some pigeons away, and Nino was staring down at him with frustration, his arms crossed.

“I’m not going to owe you anything. You literally just pulled me over here so you could scare a few birds.”

Kim continued to laugh, ignoring the other boy as he fell to his knees. He started to walk himself in that manner with his hands open and his fingers bent as if he had claws. He began to make this ridiculous sound with his mouth that sounded like he was trying to mimic the slime monster from the movie and Adrien couldn’t help but chuckle, his hand covering his mouth shyly.

“Oh god, please don’t encourage him, Adrien.” Alix said, her head turned up to the side to look at him. She was so tiny and since she wasn’t wearing her signature cap that night, she looked even shorter than usual. It was adorable.

Adrien shrugged and tried to suppress a smile. She rolled her eyes teasingly and walked herself over to a bench near the tree. She sighed once she sat down, and Adrien wasn’t sure what to do so he sat on the bench as well. She slid her phone out of her pocket and pressed the home button immediately, the brightness from her screen causing her to squint briefly as her eyes tried to adjust to the lighting. She cursed under her breath and Adrien glanced back over at Kim and Nino. Nino had started to film their friend on his phone – most likely for snapchat – and Kim was starting to screech at the camera, still in character.

A few people that were exiting the theater were starting to stare at their group with confused expressions on their faces, and Adrien didn’t know whether to feel amused or embarrassed. He eventually decided on both and gave the passersby apologetic smiles when they’d look at him. God, he loved his friends.

He looked back at Alix and saw that she was typing in a phone number in her device now and put it quickly on speaker once she pressed the green telephone button. She held her phone loosely in her hand right in front of her lips and rose her eyebrows at Adrien when she met his gaze. She was giving him this sort of look as if he understood what she was doing but he really didn’t, so he just smiled back, unsure.

After a few rings the person finally picked up and the recognizable voice rang through.

“Yes, Alix?” Max said, not even bothering with a greeting.

Alix sighed dramatically to emphasize her frustration.

“Your best friend is being annoying.”

“He is your best friend too, you know.”

“As of right now he isn’t. Until I get my food, Kim is officially cancelled.”

“Alix, you cannot just cancel someone. That is logically impossible.”

Alix scowled at her phone as if Max could see her and Adrien leaned back against the seat, resting his hands on his thighs.

“Max, do you want to be cancelled as well?”

There was silence for a few seconds and Adrien could hear Nino laughing from a few feet away from them.

“…No.” He responded.

Alix smiled victoriously.

“Good answer. So, do me a favor and talk to Kim for me so I can get dinner.”

“Is he still trying to frighten those pigeons?”

Adrien cocked an eyebrow, wondering how Max could’ve possibly known that. But then realized that Nino probably sent him snaps as expected.

“Yes. Yes, he is.”

Max groaned through the line and even though he wasn’t there, Adrien imagined that the boy was adjusting his glasses like he always had when he seemed frustrated. He always moved them closer to his forehead even when it wasn’t necessary.

“Put him on.”

“Gladly.”

Alix then lowered her phone on her lap and cupped her mouth, taking in a deep breath and screaming for Nino to go over to them.

Nino jumped and almost dropped his phone.

“What the fuck, Alix. I’m right over here. Geez!”

Alix shrugged and handed over her device to him once he reached them. He was rubbing his ears back and forth as if Alix had just burnt them with her voice.

“Give this to Kim. Max is gonna tell him how stupid he’s being.”

“I’m not gonna do that,” Max defended. “I’m going to simply explain how it is surely impossible for Kim to be a slime monster. Since our bodies are not entirely made from mucus and our saliva-“

“Gross, Max. Save the lecture for, Kim alright?” Nino interrupted, rolling his eyes at Alix before finally turning himself around to return to his area from before.

“Drag him, Max!” She yelled lastly in encouragement.

Adrien snorted, and she finally gave him her attention again.

“So, where do you want to eat? I was thinking pizza.”

“Do you think Max is actually gonna stop him?”

“Yeah, totally.”

They both glanced over at Kim who was now seated on the ground, his left hand holding her phone and his right brushing through his quiff. His eyebrows were knitted together and he looked like he was listening closely to whatever Max was telling him.

“You see that,” she started again. Her small hand motioning towards her best friend. “Max is the only one that can do it.”

“Do what? Get Kim to listen? What about Chloe?”

She shook her head and smiled fondly at her friends.

“Chloe gets him to listen. But that’s because he’s intimidated by her and is still lowkey crushing on her. But Max gets him to calm down.”

She whispered the last part like it was a secret between them, and Adrien scooted himself closer to her, so their small bubble seemed more private. People have never really trusted him with secrets before, and even though her words didn’t seem super significant, it seemed to be important to Alix so therefore, it was now important to him.

“And why is that?” He muttered.

“Isn’t it obvious? Look at his face, dude.”

Adrien tilted his head slightly in confusion before obliging. Kim was giggling now, freaking giggling, and his eyes were staring directly at the phone as if he was searching for a physical reaction from someone. Nino looked uninterested standing beside them, instead looking as if he was waiting for their call to end as he was scrolling through his phone.

“Kim’s crushing on Max? I thought he liked Chloe?”

Alix shrugged.

“Dude likes both I guess. But don’t tell anyone, not even Kim. I don’t think he realizes yet.”

“That he likes, Max?”

“Bingo.”

“Hmm.” Adrien never really noticed before. He knew that Kim and Max were close, practically attached to the hip, but he never really looked deeper than that. He wondered if Kim always looked at Max the way he was looking at Alix’s phone at that moment. Adrien never even knew that someone could reveal so much with their eyes before. Sure, he’d read it before in fics and had even written about loving gazes in his own story, but he never actually saw it in person. It was interesting to say the least.

He was starting to get curious.

“I didn’t even notice until you pointed it out. How could you tell?” He asked his friend.

She pushed a strand of her pink hair behind her ear. It seemed to have been bothering her for a while.

“I’m with them almost all the time. I can tell when they’re acting different.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded.

“Same thing happened with Ivan. Kid had been far gone for Mylene since last year and he never told us. But Kim and I could both just tell. We were even betting when he’d finally break and ask her out.”

“Who won the bet?”

“Kim, but that’s because he was an ass and kept pushing Ivan even though we agreed not to do it. It wasn’t cool of him.”

Adrien nodded in agreement, remembering how Stoneheart was created in the first place. It wasn’t nice what Kim did to Ivan, no matter his intentions, but he still couldn’t help but be a bit thankful for what had happened. Because of Kim that day, he got to become Chat Noir. He got to have another life that gave him freedom.

He got to meet Ladybug.

“But yeah. People are pretty easy to understand, man. You just gotta be more observant.”

Alix placed her right arm behind her and dangled it over the backside of the bench to get herself more comfortable. Adrien was still curious, and the wind was starting to pick up.

“So, is there anyone else in the class?”

She glanced over at him, confused.

“Like anyone else that you think is crushing on someone?”

Adrien knew that it wasn’t really any of his business. But he couldn’t help himself. The conversation was interesting, Alix seemed to be okay with it, and Adrien loved to learn stuff about his classmates, no matter what that stuff was, so he didn’t think that his question was too intrusive. Alix inspected their surroundings quickly, as if to make sure that the coast was clear, before she leaned herself closer to the boy. The two of them huddled together like a football team talking about their strategies before a game.

“Okay, so I have some theories.”

“Oh?”

She nodded.

“First, Rose and Juleka. They’re so far gone for each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if they walked into class on Monday holding hands.”

Adrien nodded back. He could definitely see that happening. Those two were always together.

“Second, Nathanael. Poor guy is hung up on someone again and isn’t doing anything about it.”

“He told you?”

She shook her head.

“No, but he’s starting to draw in his sketchbook again during class with that same old dumb, hopeless, look on his face.”

“Same old?”

“Yeah, the one he used to give Marinette when she wasn’t looking. That boy pines hard and it’s kind of sad. Wish I could give him a push.”

Adrien’s stomach began to feel weird at the sound of Marinette’s name and he quickly ignored it. It was an unpleasant feeling. The similar kind he’d feel when Plagg would place aged camembert in front of his face and force him to smell it.

Weird.

“Do you think he still likes Marinette?”

Her lips formed into a thoughtful frown for a moment as she hummed.

“I’m not sure actually. We’re not really close, so I don’t know if he’s completely over her or not. He’s been kind of avoiding her since the 'incident' anyway. So, I don’t know if that’s because he’s still embarrassed or because he’s torturing himself.”

“Huh.”

“Yup. Now onto my third theory.” Adrien turned his body more towards the girl, giving her his full attention.

“Alya.”

He rose his eyebrows, trying to stop himself from glancing over at Nino.

“You think she likes Nino, right?” He whispered very lowly, his voice as soft as the blue scarf around his neck.

Her eyes brightened, and she nodded enthusiastically - the two of them chuckled loudly before Alix shushed him.

“You’re his best friend. He tells you everything, right? Is the dude interested?”

Adrien rubbed the back of his neck in contemplation. Nino had yet to announce that he was, but like Kim with Max, it was just very obvious. Nino and Alya were trapped in a cage for a whole afternoon and he wouldn’t stop gushing about how cool she was and about all the things that they surprisingly had in common for days. His friend looked over the moon for a while and even confessed that he no longer was interested in Marinette romantically after only being locked with the reporter for a few hours. There had to have been sparks between them and Adrien really thought that Nino was thinking the same thing. Though that all changed when one morning Nino looked all happy and flustered waving at Alya before sitting down and the next refused to even look at her, frowning the rest of the week. He still hadn’t told Adrien what happened, and Adrien thought that he probably never would.

They seem to be on friendly terms again, but the atmosphere did always hold a bit of unresolved tension when they were together.

“I think he is? He thinks she’s attractive. But that’s all I really know.”

“Hmmmm. I’ll do more observations this week and update you on my findings.”

“Alright.” Adrien laughed. “So, any others that you’ve been speculating about?”

“Yup! One more. Been saving the best for last.”

“Really?”

“The most obvious one. I’m actually a little surprised that you don’t know who I’m talking about.”

He furrowed his eyebrows and began to think about who she could possibly mean. She already talked about Kim, Rose, Juleka, Ivan, Nathanael, Alya, and Nino. So, who else was there? Mylene was off the table since her and Ivan were already a couple. Sabrina admired Chloe, but it didn’t seem like it was anything more than that. And Chloe didn’t really like people in general, so he thought that he would’ve known if she was crushing on someone. She was very open with her feelings and thoughts on others and he felt that she definitely would’ve let him know. So it couldn't have been her.

Besides, Adrien didn't think Alix would care enough to tell him or anyone anyway if it was about Chloe.

“Is it Max? Does he like Kim?”

She snorted.

“That’s a story for another day. But yeah, I didn’t mean him. Come on dude. You gotta know.”

“I’m sorry. But I really don’t.”

“Wow, Adrien and I thought Nino was blind.” She chuckled, and his lips formed into a small pout. He almost crossed his arms over his chest, but Alix stopped him with a small smack to his shoulder. “Just messing with you dude. But I was talking about Marinette. Thought she was a part of your other squad.”

“I mean I guess she is? I only really hang out with her when Nino and Alya invite m- wait a second.” Adrien’s eyes widened in realization as he replayed Alix’s words in his head. He sat himself up completely - his shoulders tensed. “Marinette…is crushing on someone?”

Alix nodded.

“Definitely. The signs are all there.” “Signs?”

“You know the stammering, the constant blushing, the extra clumsiness. Chick’s got it baaaad.”

“I thought she always did that?”

“Marinette? Yeah, right. I mean she used to be a little scared of Chloe before this year. But other than that, the girl’s a beast. She could walk up to anyone, punch them in the face, and I bet they’d thank her.”

“Ah.”

So, Marinette liked someone. Well that explained why she’d been acting so nervous around him. He probably knew the person and she was worried that he would find out and tell them. I mean he was still seen as the new kid by some, maybe Marinette was a part of those few and still didn’t trust him yet.

That possibility got him feeling a little down.

He wondered who she liked. They were probably wonderful, maybe even as amazing as Marinette.

“Do you know who it is? Who she likes?”

Again, it wasn’t any of his business. But maybe if he could find out who it was he could reassure Marinette that he wouldn’t tell a soul and maybe even be her wingman. Maybe they could really start being friends as his civilian self then. Maybe he could even help Marinette be with them.

Adrien’s stomach turned unpleasantly again at the last thought. He began to wonder if he had eaten anything bad earlier that day. The feeling, however, didn’t seem to linger so he let it go.

“Not a clue. Though, it’s gotta be someone at the school.”

“Yeah,” He started shuffling his feet a little against the cement floor. “It’s a possibility.”

Alix quickly stood up once she saw Kim and Nino walking over to them, a large charismatic smile on his face with her phone in his hand.

“Ready to go?”

“About time. Yeah, I’m ready!”

Alix started talking about several pizza places nearby that they could go to. And the others joined in on the conversation, suggesting things here-and-there. Adrien zoned out after a few seconds and didn’t hear much of the rest.

Who does she like?

“Adrien!”

He glanced up and saw three sets of eyes on him. He was still sitting down so he got himself up, his hands going straight to the inside of his pockets.

“Sorry, I…um,” He cleared his throat and forced a smile. “Pizza sounds good.”

“My, my, my,” The akumatized victim began, her hands clapping slowly, almost mockingly. “Color me impressed. I didn’t think you two would find me so quickly. Hawkmoth did inform me that you were both pretty tactical. Maybe I should’ve taken him more seriously.”

“Hawkmoth is a psychopathic manipulator that takes advantage of people’s emotions.” Ladybug said. Adrien could feel the passion in her voice right to his bones. She was trying to reason with the victim as she always had so she could avoid fighting them. Even though it never worked, Chat respected and admired how she always continued to try anyway. “Simone, you’re a brilliant athlete with so much potential and talent. Don’t let that villain use you like this.”

They were fighting a famous marathon runner that got second place that morning. Her villain name was Bolt and she had the power of super speed. It took them quite a while to actually locate her since she was so fast, but they eventually decided to check Le Grand Paris since all the runners were staying there and found her on the roof with all the victims tied up around the pool.

Her smile vanished, and her eyes widened tremendously. Chat for a second thought that maybe this time would be different, that maybe his Lady would actually help someone without them having to resort to violence. But then that purple butterfly appeared once more, silent and intimidating, and Bolt was muttering something to it. And then the symbol faded away and Bolt formed fists at her side. Chat imagined that her knuckles were probably white under her thick black gloves.

“You do make a good point, Ladybug.” She growled. “I am a brilliant athlete and I do have talent. And that’s why I should’ve won. But that didn’t happen. And so, before I can fix that, I need you and your little stray to give me something that doesn’t belong to you!”

Chat and Ladybug noticed a while ago that she was still wearing her second-place medal, except now it had a lightning bolt engraved in the middle. They both suspected that the purple butterfly was hiding in there. They hoped they were right. They hoped they would be able to snatch it.

She started running and both Chat and his partner leaped into the air to dodge her headbutt. He could’ve sworn that his feet grazed the top of her head even though it would’ve been impossible for a normal human to have gotten to him that fast from her distance a few seconds prior. But she was also temporarily no longer a normal human, so that was frustrating.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” Bolt yelled, turning around and staring them both down like a raging bull. She may not have had supersonic speed, but she was damn near close to having it. In a blink of an eye, before he could even react, Chat felt a punch to his jaw. His eyes closed on impact and before he or anyone else knew it, Bolt kneed him in his stomach and lifted him up from the ground by the end of his belt. She twirled him around like a rag doll and his head felt like a jar of shaken marbles. He would’ve vomited if the action would’ve gone any longer, but luckily, Ladybug used that opportunity to tie her yo-yo around the middle-aged woman and left her immobile for a while.

Chat quickly extended his baton once he was in the air to lower himself to the ground with ease. He immediately dropped to his knees to allow his mind to rest and return to normal before slowly getting himself back up to return to his lady who looked to have her hands full. Bolt was still standing, however, her whole body from her feet to her chest were wrapped with the infinite seeming length of Ladybug’s yo-yo string. The heroine went to reach for her medal.

Adrien started to run again.

Bolt began to laugh once Chat approached them and the tied-up victims screamed out words in unison that neither of the heroes understood. It all sounded like an incoherent, jumbled up mess and the boy knew that once this was all over he was going to have to take some kind of medicine for his growing headache.

“You truly believe that thread can restrain me? How insulting.”

Chat felt himself gasp at the sudden sight before him, his eyes trailing back-and-forth from the woman to Ladybug’s hands that were trying so hard to hold onto the string as she began to vibrate. Freaking vibrate. Bolt was practically pulsating her whole body to such an extent that she looked like she had several clones of herself moving along with her actions at a fast, astonishing rate. And then her body somehow went through the string as if she had no physical body and she was free, snickering in a sinister manner that gave the boy goosebumps all throughout his forearms and neck.

He couldn’t believe what he just saw. How in the hell were they going to beat her?

Ladybug seemed to be as astounded by the situation as well since she turned to look at Chat with confusion and shock in her eyes, her lips separated.

Chat just shrugged and said, “Well that did knot go as planned.”

She narrowed her eyes and refused to respond until Bolt unexpectedly grabbed her by the neck, and pinned his partner to the ground. The thud powerfully echoed throughout their surroundings. Chat felt his heart thump loudly in his chest and was frozen in place.

“I’ve got you now, bug,” Ladybug’s petite hands were on Bolt’s, attempting to free herself from the woman’s grasp but failing. Thankfully, she wasn’t choking the heroine, but she was still hurting her. “Any last words?”

The girl’s eyes shut tight as she wrapped her legs around Bolt’s waist. She still wasn’t getting anywhere, and Chat started to search around desperately.

“How cute, you’re still trying? Just admit defeat. You’re not going to win. So just accept second place.”

He sprinted to the victor of the marathon, a man named Elias from Germany, and used his claws to break through the wires. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he found out that he was the first person she captured.

“Sir, what are you-“

Chat shushed the older man and leaned his mouth closer to his ear.

“You’re going to have to trust me on this okay?”

He pulled back and saw how the foreigner didn’t reply, looking conflicted. But then, Chat continued to reassure him and after hearing yet another laugh from Bolt, Elias gulped and finally complied with a simple nod.

Chat nodded back and took a deep breath before picking the freed man up in his arms.

“Wow, Elias! Please tell me more about how deserving you were of your medal as I escape with you in my arms!”

Elias wrapped his arms tightly around Chat’s neck and glared up at him wide-eyed in disbelief.

“Do you want her to kill us?”

Chat didn’t respond, but instead began to run himself towards the staircase as loudly and as obnoxiously as he could. He forced out a mocking laugh as he turned his head to the side to see if Bolt was paying them any mind whatsoever. She wasn’t looking at them, but he could see her shoulders tense. They caught her attention.

Come on. Come on.

He cleared his throat and slowed his pace.

“Really, Elias?! Simone was that slow?! Wow! Your medal was practically given to you from the start then, huh?!”

All of the other victims that were still sitting a few feet away were groaning at his remarks - one woman that he did not recognize even cried. And Elias began to look over the hero’s shoulder in absolute fear. The man whimpered and before Chat could even ask what the matter was, he felt a strong hand on his shoulder.

He smiled.

“Would you like to repeat that?” The woman whispered in his ear in a dark tone, all sense of humor that was present before completely gone. Chat still didn’t turn around, instead he squeezed the bottom of Elias’ knee so he would look at him and mouthed ‘run’ before he finally lowered him to the ground.

His hand went to his baton. “I said your purr-ty slow.”

He turned around and quickly blocked a roundhouse kick with his staff. Bolt looked like she wanted to kill him, and Ladybug was nowhere to be found. She was probably hiding and formulating a plan. He continued to keep Bolt distracted to give his partner as much time as he could.

Block after block, dodge after dodge, insult after insult, Chat was doing it all and he was beginning to get exhausted. Bolt was too fast, and he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to take another one of her unsuspecting punches. He was definitely going to bruise.

“I am the fastest being on the planet! No one can defeat me!” She hollered before jumping in the air and aiming for Chat’s stomach with a flying back kick. The hero barely dodged it with a back-flip - his knees almost gave out once he landed.

“With the exception of Elias, of course.” He responded through a forced cocky smirk, his breaths rapid and uneven. Where was his Lady?

“That’s it! Someone needs to teach you some manners, boy!”

Bolt stood in front of him, lowering her back, bending her legs, and stretching her fingers out before she started rubbing her hands together, faster than almost anything he’d ever seen. Her piercing dark green eyes never left him and when he saw sparks beginning to ignite around her gloves, he began to internally panic.

She could generate her own electricity.

Of course.

She was smiling again, and Chat wondered if she could read minds as well since she seemed to know exactly what he was thinking and exactly how nervous and even scared she was starting to make him. He furrowed his eyebrows and twirled his baton skillfully before pointing it in front of him.

Even if he didn’t stand a chance, he refused to give up.

And then he saw the easily recognizable red string tie around the woman’s ankle and she fell on all fours. The electricity disappeared once she lost focus.

“Sorry I’m late, Chaton. Was a little busy.”

His lady pointed to the now empty poolside and Chat finally noticed that all the victims were gone.

The smile that returned on his face was once again genuine and if it weren’t for the situation at hand he would’ve gone to his partner to pat her on the shoulder. But instead, he nodded, and they prepared themselves for Bolt’s vibrating magic trick. However, it never came since instead she rubbed her hands together yet again to spark her gloves up, placing the flames against the string to free herself.

Ladybug’s eyes widened in surprise and she glanced over at Chat.

“Well, that’s…shocking.”

The feline couldn’t help himself, he placed his hand over his heart and sighed lovingly.

“My Lady.”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes quickly with a small smile on her face before jumping into the air to dodge one of Bolt’s electric punches. The two then began to coordinate their moves as they attempted to somehow snatch the untouched medal that was still around her neck. Even though they were not quite successful, they were at least notably tiring her out since the sparks around her were beginning to weaken and her speed was beginning to falter quite considerably.

Bolt seemed to be noticing this as well since she suddenly walked herself over to the edge of the building and closed her hands into tight fists, the sparks disappearing. She was breathing heavily, her shoulders rising and falling with each breath. For a second Chat thought that she might have actually given herself up.

But then that smile of hers returned and she saluted them before jumping off the building.

Chat felt his heart leap out of his throat and Ladybug gasped. Ladybug never gasped.

They both ran to the edge where the woman was seconds before and looked over at the street below them, the two of them hoping that she was okay.

“Do you see her?!” He yelled, his voice almost cracking from trepidation.

The street was empty and there seemed to be nobody within eye-view of the area. He was both relieved and concerned. He was glad that Bolt didn’t actually injure or kill herself, but now the fear was different. Now he felt as if a large poisonous spider that he just saw that was beside him went missing in less than a second. And he had to now find it in order to save himself from a possible deadly bite.

And Adrien really despised spiders.

“She must’ve fled somewhere. She may be searching for more energy.” Ladybug’s eyes were squinted. She looked to be searching for a very small needle in a very large haystack.

“More energy?! From what?!”

She sighed in frustration. She looked and sounded exhausted.

“I…I don’t know. I didn’t even know she could generate electricity till now! Who knows what else she could do.”

“Should we start scanning the area?”

“Yeah, I think for now that’s all we can do. She looked tired. So hopefully that means it’ll be easier to spot her now that she can’t run as fast any-“

They both immediately lost their footing and fell on their knees. Chat used his baton to pick both him and his lady up. The building was shaking and tilting to the left. He could hear the pool water from behind him beginning to splash around and loud laughter from below was surfacing.

Bolt was still there. But she was just on the street under their noses, destroying the building easily as if it were a toy. The atmosphere was getting warm, very warm, and smoke was beginning to surround them like fog. They had to leave.

“You think I could go down that easy?!” Bolt yelled from afar, her laughter ringing in their ears. She was throwing lightning bolts at the building, trying to burn it down, trying to kill them.

“We gotta go, my Lady. Now! The building is going down fast!” He reached for Ladybug’s hand, wanting to grab it so they could guide themselves off the premises together. “It seems like she’s waiting for us so we’re going to have to try to escape through the ba-my Lady?”

Ladybug smacked his hand away from her. Her knees were wobbling as she tried to regain balance, but at the rate the building was going, that was going to be impossible.

“She wants us to go down there. She’s waiting. If we take any longer she may leave again and destroy another building! The civilians are hiding. They’re going to be safe. This is between us now. We can stop her!”

He rested his hands on her shoulders and forced her to look at him. He probably looked insane at the moment with his eyes widened and his hair strands sticking out everywhere, but he didn’t care. He had to talk some sense into his partner and fast.

“Listen, Ladybug. If we go down there she’s probably going to try to capture us or kill us. The smoke is thick and we wouldn’t be able to see properly. I say we head out back, if anything, hide for a bit to form a plan, and look for her then.”

She shook her head - her eyes looked over at the buildings across from them with great determination and intensity. She was thinking of something, something reckless and he knew it. Adrien almost fell again as the building tumbled even lower. His mind and his heart were both racing.

“We have to move!” Ladybug didn’t say anything, she just tightened her right hand into a fist and tied her yo-yo back around her waist.

“I’m sorry, Chat. But I guess I’m going to have to do this alone.”

“Wait, Wha-“ Before he could finish his sentence, before he could grab her, his partner jumped off the building. Her body disappeared into the smoke as if it were a thick cloud and Chat felt like he was going to vomit.

Why would she do that?! What do I do?! What do I do?!

Without another thought, he gripped his baton tighter than he ever had and jumped after her.

He was desperately searching for her, for a hint of red, a blue strand of hair, for anything. But instead, all he heard was laughter and all he saw were bursts of light being flung into the air like golden rods. He extended his staff so he could get himself towards them, thinking that was where his lady was. And luckily, he was right. He spotted one of her ribbons and saw that she was still diving through the vast darkness surrounding them. She was mumbling something under her breath, refusing to reach for her yo-yo. So, when he saw a bolt going towards her, he did what he had to and lunged for her, taking his partner in his arms and lowering the both of them to the ground as gently as he could. He fell on top of her when they landed, and he slowly rolled off. She was angry at him.

“What the heck, Chat?! I told you I was going to do this!”

“You think I was going to just let you die? Are you insane?!”

They were scowling at each other, but before the conversation could go any further, Chat got back on top of his partner and rolled them both away from falling rubble. It barely missed his ankle. He took a deep breath and coughed, feeling the electric smoke enter his lungs.

“We need to get out of here.” He said.

Ladybug pushed him off before they both got themselves up.

“Where is Bolt?”

“Hello?! Are you even listening to me?! We need to leave!”

“We need to find Bolt!”

They were nose-to-nose now and not in the way Chat had dreamed of many times before. They weren’t confessing their love to each other and he wasn’t about to lean in to kiss her. No, instead her brows were furrowed, Chat was practically snarling, and they were still in the middle of a battle that was looking to be more difficult to win as seconds went by.

“Bolt is gone! The building is falling, so she probably fled to a safe area!” Ladybug’s shoulders were still back and she was still trying to make herself seem intimidating, so Chat finally sighed and stepped further away from her.

“My lady,” He said, his tone much softer than before. “when you jumped I thought you were going to-“

He sniffled, and her expression eased immediately. He placed his hands on her shoulders.

“Just please, trust me on this one.”

She placed her own hand over one of his and didn’t push it away – she just let herself hold onto it. He didn’t know what to say so he waited for her. She sighed.

“Alright, kitty. Let’s go.”

They wound up hiding on the roof of some restaurant neither of them recognized and came up with a plan. They would look for Bolt again, Ladybug would finally call for her lucky charm, Chat would find an opportunity to cataclysm the ground as she ran so she would trip, they would steal her gloves and boots so she wouldn’t be able to generate electricity, Ladybug would use her lucky charm, and hopefully they would get her medal and save Paris.

Chat was still angry and hurt by his partner and her actions from earlier and still wanted to speak to her about them, but he knew that it wasn’t the right time. That he’d have to wait till they were done for the day to be able to do so. Chat wasn’t sure if he would even have any energy left in him to have the conversation. His mind and his muscles felt like jelly and he was both mentally and physically drained and he knew that his Lady wasn’t feeling any better. He shrugged the situation off momentarily, and ran with the heroine.

After a few minutes of searching around the city, they found Bolt again. Or well, she found them. The purple butterfly outline was hovering over her face once more and Chat assumed that Hawkmoth probably demanded her to look for them so she could acquire their miraculouses.

As soon as she reached them, they didn’t hesitate. They went full force with their plan and surprisingly were succeeding. Ladybug’s lucky charm this time was a banana and after a while of thinking, she finally decided to use it right after Chat had removed the woman’s gloves. She had attempted to get up and run off again, but Ladybug quickly removed the peel from the banana and threw it in front of the woman, causing her to fall once more and injure herself. Chat immediately went for her medal and tossed it to his Lady who crushed it with her hands. The dark insect was released and after she purified it and yelled, “Miraculous Ladybug!” while throwing the banana in the air, all the smoke and dark atmosphere began to clear. People slowly began to leave their shelters and homes and were cheering for the two exhausted heroes.

They simply waved and when they finally turned to each other, their happy expressions changed. Adrien walked himself closer to her and she didn’t step back nor forward, she just stood still and stared at him, waiting for his move. Her blue eyes didn't look as alive as they usually were. They looked different - darker, and weren't sparkling. Her hair was a mess with strands going wherever they pleased and Ladybug let them be. She looked very disheveled in general and Adrien had to stop himself from fixing one of her ribbons that was loosened.

He took a deep breath.

“We’re going to have to talk about what happened.” He said.

Her earrings beeped but she didn’t even flinch.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Why?”

She glanced at the ground and the grip on her yo-yo tightened.

“You’re not ready… God, I’m not even ready!”

“Ready for what?! Please,” he held up her chin so she could look at him. His action wasn't romantic or meant to be intimidating in any way. Instead It was urgent, pleading. He was so lost and confused and he just needed her to look at him. He needed her to see him. “Talk to me.”

People were surrounding them, taking pictures and videos of their little exchange, but he paid them no mind. His ring beeped.

“We’ll talk about it in patrol, okay? I…I gotta go.”

He lowered his hand and simply nodded before she started to walk off, getting her yo-yo ready to swing away. She stopped midway, however, and turned back.

“Good job by the way.” She said, smiling.

It didn’t reach her eyes.

“Yeah, you too.”

#Fanboy #miraculous ladybug #ml #ml fanfiction #miraculous ladybug fanfiction #marichat #marichat fanfiction #marinette cheng #adrien agreste #ladybug #chat noir #ladynoir #adrinette #adrienette #ladrien

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newyorktheater · 6 years

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The Broadway composer Richard Rodgers found four things invariably gratifying: “eating, a warm bath, making love and having a successful show.”

But how gratifying is it to read about successful shows – or the people who’ve created them?

That’s the question that lingers over two recently published Broadway biographies — Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution (Henry Holt, 2018, 386 pages) by Todd S. Purdum and Renaissance Man: The Lin-Manuel Miranda Story An Unauthorized Biography (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2018, 184 pages) by Marc Shapiro Both are about people who created Broadway musicals that became cultural phenomena. But they differ so radically in quality it’s almost an offense to consider them together.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein

South Pacific, 1949. Ezio Pinza an Mary Martin

Carousel (1945 – 1947 Broadway) Music by Richard Rodgers; Book and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II Directed by Rouben Mamoulian Shown from left: Jan Clayton, John Raitt

The King and I 1951. Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner.

Oklahoma! (1955) Directed by Fred Zinnemann Shown from left: Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones, Charlotte Greenwood

Sound of Music (1959-1963, Broadway) Music by Richard Rogers, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, Book by Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse Directed by Vincent J. Donehue Shown from left: (top) Mary Martin, Joseph Stewart, Kathy Dunn, William Snowden, Lauri Peters; (front) Marilyn Rogers, Evanna Lien, Mary Susan Locke

from left to right: Richard Rodgers, Dorothy Hammerstein, Dorothy Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein. Both their wives were named Dorothy, and both were interior decorators.

Composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist/librettist Oscar Hammerstein II together wrote some half dozen musicals between 1943 and 1959 that were the most popular Broadway shows of their time. The songs from these musicals remain among the most beloved and familiar of any that have ever been sung on Broadway. Todd Purdum, a former White House correspondent for the New York Times and current writer for Politico, devotes a chapter to each of these shows – Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music. We learn where the ideas came from; how Hammerstein figured out the right lyrics (Rodgers’ process was more mysterious and often instantaneous), how the initial productions came together, how the public and the critics reacted. But the author spends almost as much time on some of the movie adaptations of these hits, and on the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows that weren’t hits – Allegro, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream, Flower Drum Song. And the first two of the book’s 11 chapters are taken up with the individual careers of the two men before they started collaborating with each other. Both had successful partnerships with other theater artists – Oscar Hammerstein with composer Jerome Kern, most notably on Show Boat; Rodgers with lyricist Larry Hart, whose 28 stage musicals together included Pal Joey and On Your Toes. And then there are the shows Purdum writes about that Rodgers and Hammerstein produced but didn’t write, most notably “Annie Get Your Gun,” which they lured Irving Berlin into scoring. And the author also goes into some depth about the projects that each man undertook separately in-between their collaborations, such as “Carmen Jones,” Hammerstein’s adaptation of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” transposed to the American South with an all African-American cast. (A revival of ‘Carmen Jones” is opening this month at the Classic Stage Company) All of this information is well researched and competently written. There are plenty of memorable tidbits. The night after “Oklahoma!” opened, we’re told, the house sold out for the next four years. During “The Sound of Music,” lead actress and investor Mary Martin had befriended a theater-loving nun, who became an advisor on the show. Among Sister Gregory’s advice: “ Please don’t have the nuns giggle. Chuckle, laugh— and even explode with laughter, but not giggle.” Yet after a while, with so much covered in its 320 pages of text, “Something Wonderful” (the title is taken from a song in “The King and I”) feels more like “Many Wonderful Things,” and occasionally even “Too Many Wonderful Things.” One begins to wonder: What’s the point of this book? And also: Why now? Rodgers died in 1979, Hammerstein in 1960. (There’s an entire chapter on what Rodgers did in the years after Hammerstein died; and more details about each of their end-of-life illnesses than I was eager to learn.) Certainly I can be excused for assuming that the book would take advantage of the passage of time to offer fresh critical perspectives. But any critical evaluations are perfunctory – largely brief excerpts from contemporary reviews. The author does offer a line or two of analysis here and there: “If Oklahoma! had satisfied wartime America’s longing for a simpler time and Carousel had tapped into the returning servicemen’s familiarity with death, South Pacific offered a dramatization of a conflict that was still visceral for millions.” But that doesn’t explain why the shows are still popular. A brief section in the Epilogue makes the current case for Rodgers and Hammerstein shows as if they’re under attack, but, again, by briefly quoting critics. Instead of critical insights, Purdum opts for a compact historical overview of two impossibly fruitful careers. We learn that during his lifetime Rodgers had written the music for some 900 songs, and Hammerstein had written the lyrics for 1,589. (The 1,589th was Edelweiss from The Sound of Music. By the end of “Something Wonderful” I can’t claim to have gotten a firm handle on either theater artist – not what made them great, nor even a vivid sense of what they were like as individuals. It is hard to blame the author for this. Mary Rodgers, Richard’s daughter and an accomplished composer in her own right, is quoted as saying: “I don’t think anybody ever knew who he really was, with the possible exception of one of the five psychiatrists he went to.” Stephen Sondheim (Hammerstein’s protégée and Rodgers one-time, unhappy collaborator) is reduced to a kind of unhelpful Zen description of the two: Hammerstein as a man of limited talent but infinite soul, and Rodgers as a man of infinite talent but limited soul. Still, “Something Wonderful” is a reasonably good read about two theater artists whose work remains familiar and beloved 75 years after they first started collaborating.

“The Sound of Music” was one of the many original Broadway cast albums lying around in the Miranda household when Lin-Manuel was growing up in Inwood, we learn in “Renaissance Man: The Lin-Manuel Miranda Story.” Hunter College Elementary School put on Oklahoma when Miranda was in the fourth grade. His senior thesis at Wesleyan was an analysis of the lyrics of Alan Lerner, Stephen Sondheim…and Oscar Hammerstein. So, yes, Rodgers and Hammerstein were among Lin-Manuel’s many influences in an eclectic cultural upbringing that featured, among many other things – as Renaissance Man reminds us — his parents’ many original cast albums, a school bus driver who loved rap, early exposure to Disney animated films, a household full of Puerto Rican culture, schooling that emphasized the arts, especially theater. “Renaissance Man” by Marc Shapiro (who specializes in “unauthorized” celebrity biographies) is a cut-and-paste job, splicing together facts and quotes gathered from newspaper articles and blog posts and podcasts and speeches. This alone wouldn’t necessarily be reason to condemn it. As with “Something Wonderful,” there should be some appeal in revisiting Lin-Manuel Miranda’s extraordinary story, even though it is by this point so thoroughly familiar – how he created “In The Heights” starting when he was a sophomore at Wesleyan; followed by the six year journey to create “Hamilton.” We can even appreciate being reminded of some of Miranda’s other activities as writer and rapper and actor – his improvisational rap group Freestyle Love Supreme, his work on other Broadway shows (co-composing Bring It On The Musical; writing the Spanish translations for a West Side Story revival) the his songwriting for the animated Disney film Moana and a Star Wars movie; his appearance as himself in Fatwa: The Musical in Curb Your Enthusiasm, his forthcoming role in the movie Mary Poppins Returns All of this is mentioned in “Renaissance Man: The Lin-Manuel Miranda Story,” but we don’t wind up caring. The book could hardly be a worse read. It’s poorly written, cliché-ridden, and so full of typos and obvious errors that one wonders what else the author got wrong. (It’s the Outer Critics Circle Awards, not The Outer City Circle Awards. It’s the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Miranda’s friend Chris Hayes is sometimes spelled Chris Harris; Hamilton performer Daveed Diggs is sometimes referred to as David.) Marc Shapiro uses the word “literal” or “literally” incorrectly so many times (“Miranda was a literal babe in the woods”…”Miranda was literally over the moon…”) that I stopped counting. There is no intelligent or even cogent insight into Miranda or his shows, and virtually no original reporting. The only apparent interview the author conducted was with one Irv Steinfink, Miranda’s 11th grade Social Studies teacher, said he assigned him to do a report on the Hamilton-Burr duel “It was a good paper. He got an A on it. As I think about it now, it may have actually been an A plus.” There are so many hilariously awkward sentences and extended forays into incoherence that I briefly wondered whether Renaissance Man was secretly a spoof. Here is a typical paragraph, which purports to explain the reason for the book: “That Lin-Manuel Miranda has emerged as the pop composer/literal renaissance man of his time was the logical reason to profile his life. Hamilton is on everybody’s lips and so, in the immortal words of the publishing bard, strike while the iron is hot became the order of the day. But it soon became something a bit more than cashing in on the latest big thing.” Actually, “Renaissance Man: The Lin-Manuel Story” is never anything more than an attempt to cash in on the latest big thing.

New Broadway Biographies: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Rodgers and Hammerstein The Broadway composer Richard Rodgers found four things invariably gratifying: “eating, a warm bath, making love and having a successful show.”

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zephfair · 7 years

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Get to Know the Author

I was tagged by @desperatlytryingtowriteabook so this is about my fanfic (or lack thereof)

1. Is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

I have 10+ fics either mostly done or heavily outlined and I just don’t want to post them. I’m not super active in any fandom anymore so I know none of the fics are very good and I just don’t care enough to put them out there. They’re all fluff or humor or smut.

2. What work of yours, if any, are you embarrassed about existing?

Eh, I’m not embarrassed about any fic I’ve written because they all meant something to me at the time, even the weird one with alien sex.

3. What order do you write in? Front of book to back? Chronological? Favourite scenes first? Something else?

Mostly chronological, I guess. When I get an idea, I just start writing as fast as I can if the outline is developing in my head. I want to get down all the ideas I have, whether or not only a fourth of them make the final cut. That helps with the chronology and then all the little dialogue snippets I come up with as I go along. Once that’s done, it’s easier to go back to the beginning and fill it all in.

4. Favourite character you’ve written?

I love writing Riario from Da Vinci’s Demons and Gustav from Tokio Hotel.

5. Character you were most surprised to end up writing?

Gustav, definitely. And Grimmjow from Bleach.

6. Something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated to change now?

Sometimes I get a hankering to go back and edit stuff to make it tighter but I’m too lazy. The only fic I’ve ever done that to is Thick as Thieves because it got weirdly popular for about a minute and every time I looked over it I found things I wanted to fix, particularly over-explaining and over-describing things. So I gave it a trim and hope that it reads a little better now.

7. When asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

The only people who know I write fanfic are online friends and I’ve had generally positive reactions from them. There was only one fandom I can think of that really looked down its nose at fanfic but I told them right off I was writing so they could judge me all they wanted.

8. Favourite genre to write?

Comedy, fluff and action. I break out in hives when I read or think about angst. And I always argue that there is a big difference between drama and angst. Drama is necessary in anything that isn’t a total fluff or slapstick comedy ficlet, but drama is good. I just can’t handle angst where everything bad happens and then more bad happens and then there is an unhappy ending.

9. What, if anything, do you do for inspiration?

I’ve been reading a lot thanks to Amazon Kindle’s freebie program thing and oh boy, does it make me appreciate good fanfic even more! Also it really helps to re-watch or re-read the source material for the fandom I want to write in. That usually brings up some more ideas for fix-it fic or adding on a scene here and there. Or suddenly realizing all the UST there was between two characters that I didn’t see a decade ago.

10. Write in silence or with background music? Alone or with others?

I have to have background noise, preferably the TV set to sports or sitcom reruns, something I won’t be paying attention to. I live alone so there’s that, but if I’m somewhere with a long wait, I’ve been known to write smut at the hairdressers and fluff fic at the garage waiting for my oil change.

11. What aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

I think my fanfic has actually gotten worse since I started posting on AO3. I feel like I hit a plateau during Teen Wolf days and then actually went downhill with characterizations and writing style. I lost the showing part of the stories and started getting lazy and relying on the telling.

12. Your weaknesses as an author?

Plots, omg, what are Plots???? I just don’t have the energy, time or creativity to come up with and execute any multi-chapter, intricately plotted fanfics. I admire and kiss the feet of fanfic authors who do. I’m madly jealous of you guys! Also lately the telling rather than showing thing, as I said.

13. Your strengths as an author?

I don’t have any. I guess I’m reasonably good at clean copy—spelling, grammar, punctuation.

14. Do you make playlists for your work?

Nah, I don’t listen to music while I write. But I do have a list of songs that reminded me of the DVD bandfic whose title I honestly can’t remember at the moment...it’s the longest title I ever made but it cracked me up at the time. Every time I hear one of those songs, I immediately think of those guys. I never shared it because it’s a weird mix of 80s and 90s hair bands, some 2010s pop and a few contemporary Christian songs whose singer was my voice model for Riario.

15. Why did you start writing?

I’ve been writing pretty much as long as I can remember, but the first time I shared it was in seventh grade when my two best friends and I started writing a book in a spiralbound notebook we passed back and forth. Now we would call it a self-insert fanfic, but we didn’t know anything except we were having a great time. Then they both left our school and I fell out of touch with them for the most part. I kept writing because I could make the world I wanted on the page so I could re-read it.

16. Are there characters that haunt you?

Canon characters that haunt me are Riario because he has layers hidden under his layers wrapped around his layers and canon did him so wrong. I still feel a lot of sympathy for Derek from Teen Wolf and want him to have a happy ending. Now I’m starting to feel a lot more feelings about Bleach characters.

17. If you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

Write what you love. Read all the things, everything, every genre. Which is weird because I’ve done both of those things and … I haven’t turned out all that great. So I guess it would be to practice more, write all the time and don’t let yourself get lazy and complain you have no energy to write, you lazy fuck.

18. Were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? What were they?

I think Elizabeth Peters influenced my writing style in the past 18 years since I discovered her. Although I don’t write fanfic in the first-person, she is a master of the unreliable narrator as well as creating characters who are lively and complicated and burst off the page (which I don’t do). But her use of language and her style is wonderful, and I see glimpses of that sometimes but not often enough. Her humor is the one thing I strive for too. Also Terry Pratchett for his use of humor and satire and his brilliant way of turning everyday, common things on their head. I once wrote a fairy tale kind of fic for a prompt fest and the prompter compared it to Discworld, and I walked around with my chest puffed out for days.

19. When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, etc?

Ha, I don’t write complicated things. But my outline process serves me pretty well when I do attempt longer fic.

20. Do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

I prefer long sit-down sessions. Once I get in the groove, things seem to roll better. If I have to keep getting up or getting distracted, it sucks.

21. What do you think when you read over your older work?

“Hahaha, I can’t believe you answered a kinkmeme prompt where the two main characters were lions in a zoo and they humped.”

22. Are there subjects that make you uncomfortable to write?

Angst. I won’t write rape or sexual violence. No non-con. No major character death. I know there are other things but I don’t run into them because I only stick to the stuff I like.

23. Any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

All the time. I’ve pulled from my professional life more than once. I wrote one fic based on a very bizarre week that happened to me and everyone thought it was very wacky and hilarious. It wasn’t at the time and I did change the ending to give it a happy resolution, but I can look back now and merely grimace. I guess it was pretty funny.

24. Have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

No, I’m the opposite. If I write an AU fic, I try to set it in a world or scene that I’m already familiar with because I’m lazy. I did do some Renaissance research when I was writing for Da Vinci’s Demons.

25. Copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of.

From Treasure in Clay Vessels which is one of my favorite things, overall, that I’ve ever written:

Even though he'd seen the smaller sample, Girolamo was amazed all over again at the sight. It was awe-inspiring—a mechanical bird flying without wires. But even more astounding was the talent and sheer audacity of a man imagining that he could make mere metal fly as well as the Creator made birds take to wing.

It was blasphemy. It was surely sin.

It was incredible.

#thank you for the tag! <3 #my fic #tagged #navel-gazing

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nythroughthelens · 7 years

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"Love is so short, forgetting is so long..." I grew up believing everyone around me could die at any moment. My parent's religion was an end times religion and so the childhood books that I used to learn to read featured colorful illustrations of people dying in fires as (their) god killed them during the last days which would presumably be happening at any minute.

I was told that the people in my classes at school who were not the same religion would fatefully end up just like the people in those illustrations. My inner voice knew this seemed suspect since I actually really liked most of the people in my classes at school (much to the distress of my parents). But that early insistence that the world would burn along with my 'worldly' friends and first crushes informed how I felt about everyone around me. If my parents went away for a weekend, I was convinced they would never come back and I would immediately grieve as they were halfway out the door.

If I left my teenage friends as I did when I was taken (not at will) to live in New Mexico for a year in High School to forget them once and for all, I grieved for the loss of them as if I would have never seen them again (I did of course. The year long trip - a last ditch attempt to get me to keep on going with the religion - didn't work at all).

While my parents used that fear that the current world would end to constantly try to convert and save people, I translated that fear into an almost nihilistic embrace of life in my late teens and early twenties after they disowned me and I moved out on my own. Long after my parents and that religion was out of my life, I carried that feeling with me: the one that hinted to me persistently that every day could be my last (since I was now 'worldly') and every person I cared about could perish at any second. It was like a locket I had been wearing around my neck for so long that it burned into my chest searing its impact deep into in my soul. Every moment felt like it could be the final one.

All conversations, even the silliest ones, felt as if they had a profound shadow edging its way over every joke. Shared experiences had a bittersweet impact.

I never said goodnight to a friend or lover without wondering if I told them how much they meant to me or if I properly resolved any issues out of a subconscious feeling that I could potentially wake up with them gone. Regret was something I feared more than loss. I worded that last paragraph in past tense but the truth is I still carry that fatalism with me as if it is woven into the fabric of my existence.

It's one of the reasons I initially went into pre-med when I finally decided to go to college. Death, which always seemed imminent, just felt like another experience on the spectrum of life and figuring out how our strange outward structures kept us waking up every day was an ongoing fascination. "My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing..." I instinctively said yes to Brooke Shaden when she asked me at the last minute if I wanted to come speak at a creative retreat she was having this past weekend. Another speaker had to bow out due to a circumstance of loss and I was apparently on the list of speakers for next year so she messaged me asking if I could come speak and attend the retreat.

It was a reflex reaction to say yes to that request. That deeply embedded fatalism that runs rampant in my bloodstream sent shivers up my arm when I thought of missing something profound. This happens to me often. It's a paradoxical reflex I carry with me alongside anxiety. Imagine saying yes to jumping out of a plane while also being mortally afraid of heights and a loss of control.

In some ways this weird fatalistic reflex reaction has worked out to my advantage in the past few years as I have literally found myself saying yes to getting into a helicopter while also feeling like my heart would unceremoniously hurl itself up my throat and out of my mouth (for example).

"Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example,'The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'" It was in Western Greenland nearly a year ago on an icebreaker that I remember standing on the deck outside at midnight thinking about the weirdness of time as a concept.

Earlier that day I had seen a documentary about how time flows differently in the Arctic where there are seasons of darkness and seasons of light.

In a place where darkness and light dictate life and where death tip toes on the perimeters of reality teetering on the thinning ice, time is simultaneously more profound and less profound. That night, I watched ice float across the vast sea as the snow covered mountains jutted up from the water like heartbeats until the dark blue whisper of night fell onto the sea like a blanket and the impermanence of Earth and humanity was tangible in that moment as if I could touch the ephemerality with my frozen fingertips.

"Reality is a permeable membrane that time slips in and out of, and time is malleable, bent by the wings of a plane or the cracking of ice sheets."

The above sentence is one that I wrote down that night that has haunted me every since.

Until this past weekend. I spent a year thinking about the above encounter. When I had to write about my book during this year of pondering all of this, I wrote about how fascinated and appalled I was by mortality, about how time simultaneously feels like a thief and an absurd imagined concept. "Love is so short, forgetting is so long..." I cried and laughed with so many other creative spirits this past weekend, maybe more than I ever have. While I initially went as a speaker, I relished meeting everyone and sharing in their own mini and major moments of catharsis.

A light switched on in my soul though when I was introduced to another of the speakers. We shared stories about a mutual friend (ironically the Astronaut Commander Hadfield who I was with during the Arctic encounter described above) and laughed a lot.

I wasn't aware of what he was speaking about or what his story was until he briefly answered what he would be speaking about before we had to go to scheduled morning lecture. His name is Jeremie Saunders and he was born with Cystic Fibrosis and he will die at any point in the next 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe later. Who knows? Again, time and mortality are simultaneously absurd.

It wasn't until I heard him give his talk though that everything shifted for me. His talk wasn't about how he has perceived his life as carrying out a death sentence but rather how he views his knowledge of his own shifting expiration date as a gift because it has let him live in a way that has caused him to embrace the life and breaths he is living and breathing now. (please check him out: he has a podcast called Sickboy that “focuses on the absurd, inspirational, educational, and often times, hilarious stories of everyday people who are living with serious, chronic & terminal illnesses.” It’s brilliant). The thing is, we are all going to die. All of us. I had heard this fact poignantly stated by Commander Hadfield in the Arctic in the context of explaining his own philosophy on life.

This isn't the first time I have thought about this. In fact, I have thought about it for decades. It has peppered every fatalistic thought I have had.

At that time, I remember looking around the room when Commander Hadfield stated that truth. I heard the audible gasps and witnessed the uncomfortable shifting in chairs. We avoid thinking of the fragility of our own mortality at the expense of enjoying it to its full extent because we think somehow that not thinking of it will render us immortal. If we never think about it maybe we can cheat the life cycle and transcend this mortal existence.

It's the weightiness of how we perceive time along with the lightness of our perception that alters our vision of life. In truth, we are carrying the DNA of an almost overwhelming amount of people who have all lived and died lives, some short and some long in a relative sense, and those lives have had an impact in some way. So when I listened to Jeremie's perspective, I felt as if I finally heard someone channeling the absurdity of existence in a poignant and hilarious way as if to let everyone know that life is meant to be lived to its fullest extent.

And I knew right then and there with almost unwavering certainty what I want to work on that may span the rest of whatever life I have left. "And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture."

I saw the first photo of me in this post in an end of the retreat slideshow. I remember the moment I walked up that path to see what was in the distance. Surrounded by trees, I felt alive. And in an instant I thought of everything I shared in the first parts of this post and how I have never shared any of that to complete strangers. What an either perfectly complementary or divergent set of thoughts to have.

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long..." I met so many people like Kristina and Jeremie this weekend who created a ripple in the fabric of my soul.

I looked into people's eyes and ugly cried with every ounce of my being. I shared deep belly laughter with more people than I can count on two hands and hugged everyone as if I would never see them again (because that is what I do as I have just established in this post.)

I never once went to bed each night wondering if the day was complete enough in thoughts, words, actions.

Brooke, beyond being an incredible artist, is also a connector of souls.

Thank you Brooke.

And thank you to everyone who inspired me and touched me in such an indelible way.

You may have also inadvertently just shaped the rest of my career. --- * all quotes aside from one of mine are from one of my favorite poems by Pablo Neruda - Tonight I Can Write (Poem 20) - if you are unfamiliar - this video below is my favorite way to experience it...

youtube

(it’s part of a playlist I made a long time ago about all the scenes and videos that have made a huge impression on my life and art if you are curious: Scenes that have stuck to my ribs and clung to my heart) The beautiful forest photos in this post were taken by Kim Winey.

#death #life #art #vivienne gucwa #brooke shaden #jeremie saunders

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luminisvii · 6 years

Text

So it’s pretty late right now and I’m liberally using the Bold function, but let’s talk about bad fanfiction.

Usually the first thing that springs to mind when it comes to bad fanfiction is My Immortal. Anyone who’s talked to me for more than five minutes knows that My Immortal is undoubtedly one of my favorite pieces of literature. And that’s not a joke, I think it’s an absolute masterpiece of bad. The misspellings, the reworkings of the characters to be goth/scene in an incredibly middle school way, to Marty McFly’s cameo to the chapter written by a self proclaimed troll--It’s a perfect storm of bad literature that makes for a hilarious read. I won’t get into a huge tangent but what makes My Immortal so funny is it has a certain level of naturalness to its writing where you’re never quite sure how serious the author is. The true joke is the mystery. We’ll never know who wrote the infamous fic and how serious they were when they did.

However, My Immortal is kind of scratching the surface. See, that’s a fic that’s actually funny bad. Most bad fanfiction is bad bad. Today, I intend to discuss the lesser known fanfic that I rank as being one of the most difficult reading experiences I ever had, and I only successfully pulled through after many years thanks to the love and support of my friends and us reading it out loud at 4 AM.

That fanfic is known as My Inner Life. Don’t let the title fool you, it was written well before our favorite goff showcase and it’s honestly a whole lot worse. This Legend of Zelda fic, written by one Jen and based on her dreams, features a young lady named Jenna who is a simple merchant traveling in Hyrule when one Link catches her eye and it goes downhill from there. The short version is that there’s a lot of overly dramatic sex, tedious clothes descriptions that include too many triforces, poor treatment of horses, Jenna getting praised and lavished with attention for no reason, and no research put into the lore. After a while it straight up forgets about being an Ocarina of Time fanfic and launches off into some nonsense about griffins and an evil lord I can’t actually remember the name of (It was very late and I was very tired so I called him Lord Asshole after a while, it has the same effect) and also that The Griffins, who live just beyond the Black Mountains, do not trust easily.

If you wish to read it, you should probably quit now, but if you are too weak (which is honestly understandable) here’s my recounting of the story.

Where to start is a little bit hard, but a good place is the insane 2,000 word author’s note at the beginning. Jen, seemingly unaware of how thin skinned she’s being, goes on about how anyone who leaves her a negative review is being is immature and thin-skinned. Here’s a delightful excerpt that shows the author’s view on all of this!

“Also as a side note, I NEVER physically hurt ANYONE with this story. I got one reviewer that said. “Oh God please stop writing, your hurting everyone.” Now I want to know where I physically touched that person. I want to know how I’m twisting anyone’s arms to read this. I have never done anything of the sort in any way, shape or form and I DO NOT appreciate being accused of that! If you’re emotionally hurt over this, its your fault not mine.”

She spends quite a bit of time talking about how reviewers need to be more mature as she dedicates that much time to complaining about negative reviews and methodically rebuking everything they say from her poor grammar to Jenna being a Mary Sue. Now, props to the author for straight up saying that Jenna is the obvious author avatar that she is--Jenna is simply the dream persona of Jen, which okay, fine, that is not that bad. It’s what happens with Jenna that really makes me want to drink.

The other majorly telling factor is the first line of the story itself.

“Dreams come in many forms. Some good, some bad, some very realistic, even ones that feels very real.”

You may have noticed a redundancy there. That is only the beginning. If you get tired of hearing about the same things repeatedly, you will be VERY tired very quickly in here. Jen likes to constantly explain things to the point where she has footnotes in the story, and just after citing a footnote she explains what was cited in text anyway so now you have a double explanation.

“A tale of love, passion, despair and hope. I enjoyed my inner life. I looked forward to going to sleep to it every night. And I look forward to ones that will come, because LOVE WILL NEVER DIE.”

I love quoting that. I’m also not sleeping so I guess I don’t know the meaning of true love.

Anything beyond this point is where I start to die because I actually grew up playing Ocarina of Time and I’m quite well versed in its lore, so if you are too this is going to be about as pleasant as root canal.

Since me recounting everything in detail means we’d be here into the next year, I’m going to try to boil this down to its essence. TL;DR: Jenna meets Link and they fuck. Badly. A month later and they’re getting married so they can fuck more. This whole time you have King Hyrule who is treating a random merchant off the street better than Zelda, the Sages are just inexplicably back despite now residing in the Sacred Realm. Zelda also inherently gives up the throne because she will not marry and thus is no longer in the line of succession but this random guy from Kokiri Forest who married a random merchant is! Ruto is turned into a jealous harpy and the other sages hardly appear at all.

After they get married they go to the part where I quit the first time I started reading this fic which was the Bonding Ceremony. If getting married to a guy you met a month ago wasn’t enough, going to a monastery and getting telepathically bonded by drinking his piss sure is. Okay, it’s not JUST the piss drinking, but that was enough to make poor 2014 me stop trying and go lie down. They also fuck in front of the monks because that’s a thing straight people do, I guess.

Somewhere in there Jenna gets pregnant and has a child. She names the child Link Jr. I don’t have anything to say about that, I think it’s comedy in itself. On top of that Epona also gets pregnant so they get new horses named Midnight Star and Star Dancer. That’s not an important detail at all, my friend simply hates those horse names and I’m bringing them up on the off chance that she reads this.

Oh yeah, Dark Link is an antagonist at one point and he inexplicably talks exactly like a stereotypical villain and ties Link and Jenna up in a room and leaves them there for no reason like a small time crook leaving Batman in a cage with all his gizmos nearby. And turns out Jenna has magical powers and is from some ancient race of super people or whatever. They have to explain this over and over again in the same few paragraphs and I want to die.

Beyond all the bad sex that has tiger metaphors (Somehow Jen knows how tigers fuck) there’s the Original Material which had me crying more than the tragedy that was the remain of OoT’s story. Once we get tired of Link and Jenna’s love story and Tiger Sex, there’s suddenly an invasion from Lord Ariakas who is threatening the Griffins who live beyond the Black Mountains, just a day’s ride from Hyrule. He’s just some evil guy who threatens the Griffins, who do not trust easily, and who live near The Black Mountains. If you think redundancy is painful then prepare for the worst redundancy you’ve seen yet. I went insane when we were reading this and tallied all the times The Black Mountains are mentioned and turns out it was a whole lot less than I thought, but almost all of them happened in a short amount of time so it felt like an eternity of explaining The Black Fucking Mountains. Turns out I’m a masochist of sorts because this STILL didn’t shake me off. In order to repel Lord Arakias’ forces, Link and Jenna need to talk to the Griffins who like to make a big deal about how they don’t trust anyone as they instantly trust Jenna and let her into their royal court to give her support and magical gifts. It’s kind of incredible how Jenna does nothing and is constantly rewarded for it.

Sadly this ends in a cliffhanger, like all good terrible fanfics. But that’s a semi-coherent retelling of the actual plot. It takes way too long to explain any of these plot points in story. Characters constantly repeat themselves, there’s a bunch of small plot points I left out because we’d REALLY be here all year if we talked about this, there’s the original material where I have to give credit that she went and did this BUT ALSO DID YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS MANY TIMES WHAT THE BLACK FUCKING MOUNTAINS ARE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

I’m not okay. Time for some deeper analysis of particularly notable parts.

The sex scenes are sadly some of the less entertaining sections. They’re pretty boring for the most part, but then you have shit like “I turned tigress” and my personal favorite, “when I took his nut sack and caressed it with my hand, it was his undoing.” That exact sentence shows up TWICE in the fic, same wording and everything. Remember this, ladies, next time you have sex with a man, caress his nut sack. It’ll be his undoing. It’s not just the silly wording, though, there’s some stupid stuff in there too about how having sex makes your children stronger and also exactly how much fluid Jenna is ejecting which is a little bit alarming to say the least. Otherwise they’re a bit bland and use the same flowery language that you’d expect from poorly written erotica. Also they fuck in front of a bunch of monks. It’s for the bonding.

If you’re into LoZ lore then you’re going to have a bad time, too. My favorite thing is showing people the segment where Jenna explains how the OoT timeskip works because it makes zero sense to everyone, OoT fan or not. Let’s take a quick history lesson for OoT if you’re not familiar with it. In Ocarina of Time, a major plot point and element of gameplay is that Link travels between past and future in a seven year gap. From Link’s point of view, the change is instantaneous, right down to the fact that his age changes from child to adult and vice versa. To everyone else, they’re living those seven years. Time continues without Link there to observe it, and in Link’s absence Hyrule collapses. Thus is the plot--trying to stop Ganondorf from destroying the future with a power that Link and Zelda accidentally gave him. The point is all Non-Link people experience time normally, and the world moves on.

Somehow Jenna missed something that I inherently understood when I was a wee child of 8, barely able to play Ocarina of Time due to poor reading comprehension and lack of Zelda Puzzle Solving Skills™.

“Gannondorf tricked the soon to be "Hero of Time" into unlocking the door to the Sacred Realm. I even noticed that Zelda was a little older then I. Last I saw her she was four years younger then me. It was told to me that when Gannondorf went into the Temple of Time and into the Scared Realm, time jumped ahead in Hyrule seven years. Yet only two years passed in my land. And in the rest of the world.

After the "Hero of Time" defeated the King of Evil, the hero was granted to either return to the past or to remain in the present time. Since he chose to remain in the present Zelda jumped ahead of me in age by four years. It seems that everyone in Hyrule jumped in age from the rest of the world.”

I’m not sure I really understand still. I’ve read this so many times trying to comprehend and maybe I’m just stupid but this doesn’t scan. But when you time travel it should affect the whole world or else that’d be pretty fucked. Back To The Future would be pretty wack if only Hill Valley was sent back to the 50s but everywhere else was still 80s.

God, I spent too much time on this. It still hurts my brain.

I also just have to have a section where I metaphorically hand Zelda a box of chocolates and a check for 5,000 dollars for even being in this mess. The real MVP of the story is Zelda for tolerating all this bullshit. She has to watch her father treat Jenna better than her, she gives Jenna a bracelet from her mother who is dead for Jenna’s wedding, she has to passively accept that because she isn’t married she’s lost her claim to the throne and it’s being handed over to Link and Jenna because despite both of them being nobodies they’re more legitimate heirs to the throne than the king’s own daughter. She also has to be the one to help Jenna birth her baby and it’s maybe a little bit weird to have the princess of a nation be your personal midwife. Even if she is your so called best friend. Were I ever in the circumstances of giving birth, I wouldn’t make my friends help. Please get an actual nurse. Also for some reason Jenna won’t stop calling her baby a miracle and it’s done so frequently it’s a little off-putting. Even the chapter where the child is born is called “The Miracle” like idk I know life is mysterious and miraculous but I’m not sure giving birth, something a lot of cis woman can do, is a “miracle.” Me not sobbing while reading this is a miracle. Zelda, honey, you deserve so much better.

I’m running out of things that will actually last a paragraph or so tangent wise, so time to wrap things up with smaller notes:

-Jenna thinks that you boot horses in the knees to get them moving. You are probably not riding a horse right if you can kick it in the knees while sitting on its back. That’s not even getting into other horse related mishaps like the fact that kneecapping them isn’t a good idea either.

-Link Jr. is capable of math at like, four months or something. I wish I was that talented.

-Ruto is my wife and I will not stand for this slander against her. Yeah, call me a fish fucker if you want, Sidon is cute too don’t @ me

-Take a shot every time Jenna mentions triforces on her outfit (actually don’t)

-Jenna makes a big deal about how Link has to go off to war and how she’ll miss him and he’ll miss her and it’s all very emotional but he’s back literally the next chapter

-One of my favorite moments is Mido rightfully pointing out that Jenna isn’t a Kokiri and thus has no right to receive a fairy but everyone thinks he’s being super rude for actually having common sense. They barely gave LINK a fairy and he grew up there!

-I inflicted this on my friends and it went as well as you’d think it would. Quote supplied by Jen who is not THAT Jen but a far superior one

-Somewhere in the fic suddenly Link and Zelda’s eyes are capable of changing color based on mood, or maybe they could do this the whole time and my eyes were changing based on mood alright, they were glazing over and I missed it

-Jen always types “threw” instead of “through” and it’s just enough to throw me off every time. Also every time a character starts a new sentence she starts another set of quotations even if they were already talking and occasionally she misspells “huge” as “hugh” which leads to some hilarious circumstances

-THEY DRANK EACH OTHER’S PISS

-Apparently when you are telepathically bonded with your Husband/Wife you aren’t allowed to be in a room with someone of the opposite sex AT ALL. Personally I think that reeks of insecurity

-Also because a good pal loses her shit every time we mention it, Jen couldn’t come up with a marriage ceremony that wasn’t just a christian one for a universe where christianity doesn’t exist, but she sure likes to put world building into those DAMN GRIFFINS

All in All? My Inner Life is not for the weak willed. It is INCREDIBLY long and redundant and while it’s still pretty funny, it’s mostly plain terrible. I consider is a much better showcase of what bad fanfiction is actually like, and also since it’s of a more standard awful, it means people can’t badly parody it while missing the point as to why it’s funny. So at least there will only be one My Inner Life and no imitators.

Seriously, I hate My Immortal imitators. Write your own terrible fanfiction, damn you! If I had a shot for every time a fanfic was compared to My Immortal I would be dead six years ago. Getting compared to MI is not a good thing, but not for the reasons you’d think. At least My Inner Life only shares the basic premise of a self insert character and the rest is a ride of complete bullshit that’s par the course for terrible Mary Sue fiction. Everyone loves Jenna for no reason and those who voice the valid concerns against her are seen as unreasonable and stupid. Characters are bent backwards to serve the threadbare plot and apparently Jenna’s love life alone is enough to constitute half of the story before we just plain forget it’s a Legend of Zelda fanfic and it goes off into some generic high fantasy horse crap with dragons and Griffins and some evil guy like what even is his name and it all ends without any real closure.

However if you are strong enough or maybe just a masochist (me) I highly recommend this fic for just being a test of endurance and also for all the funny little moments sprinkled throughout. It’ll certainly be a waste of time and it’s a good thing to read with friends. While it’s an oldie, it’s a goodie, and no one comes out unscathed.

Also the author apparently is a good sport about it now, although who knows. It’s just a thing I heard. While I like making fun of Jen throughout reading the fic, she doesn’t seem awful. Just perhaps young and unaware.

Truly, the real treasure was the piss we drank along the way. I’m sorry I will never be over that

#don't tell me tell #long post #REALLY LONG ASS POST #i couldn't sleep so i made this essay instead #i accept my fate as the bad fanfic expert #i might regret this later #but for now i need rest

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jefardi · 7 years

Link

Not my story, just wrote a review that broke the character limit on Ao3 thrice over. So posting that here. @okapifeathers

Cool, awesome and Bravo!

This is going to be a long review, so strap yourself in!

Disclaimer: I thoroughly enjoyed this story and any critiques I make are with the best intentions of helping self-improvement. Also, I tend to jump around topics a lot, sorry (not sorry)

Let me take a bit of backstory before I begin the review proper;

I honestly was just browsing tumblr idly when I came into the NicoMaki tag out of pure boredom… I want to say either 3 or 4 days ago. Discovering that this was my jam happened fairly quickly and lo and behold I ended up searching invariably for fanfic on Ao3 (which, honestly was only because I was doing it mobile, else I would be using FF.net…). Love Novels (which a friend farrrr more into Love Live then I am, has pointed out is a song name, which I had not the faintest clue) was the first long formatted story I read in the Love Live Fandom. I’ve read a few Hogwarts AU for the same pair but that’s it. Nothing else.

To a certain degree, I think this is why I’m so enamored with this story; I have no pre-conceived notions or head canons that it could realistically conflict with… oddly enough, the reason I have trouble even reading RWBY fanfiction nowadays, is because I write my own, which then makes incompatible head canons with others’. To put it simply, I can hear Nico or Maki talking in your story exactly as they do in the dub (because I’m a scrub who can’t understand Japanese…).

Perhaps what draws me the most to this pairing is one of the things that stand out the most, that is to say, the way you do the chemistry between Maki and Nico.

That is the biggest selling point, one that all other stories I read after this for this fandom will have to hold themselves to; having dialogue that flows and ebbs like the way you write it. The back and forth that happens so naturally between two characters with misaligned world views or clashing personalities.

Very often in writing, especially in fanfiction, authors have a bad tendency to not understand or have trouble differentiating between saying something in-character or just having the character be a mouthpiece to what needs to be said. Which in turn breaks the suspension of disbelief that these are real, organic characters. Characters that exist just as well as any average person off the street. The manner in which you write them completely side jumps that.

With that out of the way, lets dive in, shall we?

You handled the slow burn extremely well, in fact it was rather incredible. I think the strongest point, though possibly the oddest to me, was how to handle Maki’s end of the romance. Throughout the first half (or was it 12 chapters? It blurs a bit to me), there was a lot of build up on Nico’s end, making the audience very firmly know her point of view of the dynamic. Yet Maki’s view…. Was, how to put this, rather vague?

Perhaps that was intentional, but it certainly seemed like that we weren’t given a clear understanding of what she thought of Nico until way, way later. At first this was a non-issue, seeing as it was thought/implied that she didn’t have feelings for her and it was a one-sided romance (poor Nico), except once Christmas hit, that all changed. It was weirdly jarring how Maki suddenly went from no clue to “yup, I’ve always had these feelings wheeeeeee”

On the one hand, it seems that Maki wasn’t thinking about it up until then because she was flying by the seat of her pants once school started, yet I can’t help but think back to when they are in Nico’s apartment, in the first chapter, eating cake. That is when Maki is not quite stressed, yet it’s not even something she brings up, when its later implied she thinks heavily on it.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except your story relies heavily on introspection. In some ways, that might be an even bigger selling point then the interactions between the main characters; it is enlightening and amazing, and does exposition dumping far better and less jarring then any other way, especially since Maki is more of a introvert by her nature. Yet, by this very fact, the very fact that it isn’t brought up in introspection early one is a weird one, especially in hindsight.

This segue ways into the next thing I noticed; the way the introspection messes with the pacing.

Now that might be subjective on my end, but during the whole course of this, you’d have bits of dialogue with huge chunks of introspection. There was a tendency on my end to keep skipping the introspection to find the next dialogue, which resulted in a lot of rereading something.

The other issue I ran into during the pacing was how much it jumped around. One moment we’d be going through a very long scene and then line break, and it skims through the next several weeks. To a degree, I understand brevity is the soul of wit, but at the same time, it was beyond frustrating when this happened at several points of the story. If you want, I can go back and find though I think it’s a lost cause at this point, given that having already read it, my eagerness to jump ahead is sated haha.

Other pacing issues; this was a big one for me, but sometimes you’d have very important things happen… and then format in such a way that it didn’t pop out immediately. Again, possibly personal preference for me, but when Maki’s dad calls before the birthday, its like a sentence in the middle of the paragraph, and I swear I missed it twice before I could figure out why Maki was freaking out. This happened a few times, where a important thing that should, by all rights, have its own line, being jammed into the middle of a paragraph.

Another one of the strongest points of the story was honestly how you handled Maki and Nico’s ship sailing.

While I might have railed on it a bit, I certainly enjoyed it when it wasn’t some awkward confession, or having to watch Maki’s feelings develop and effectively watching the story drag, but instead by revealing she has always had them… that made it good. Like really good. Like A+++++ give yourself a cookie, go to start and collection a thousand dollars kind of good.

Swinging back around to the interactions, between Maki and Nico, there are some of their exchanges which made me burst out with ugly laughter. Like holy shit dude, good shiiiit. Personal favourites are of course, the time when Maki attempts to make breakfast and drops it and Nico just deadpans “well, I’m sure the floor appreciates the meal.” Another, which while its not quite nicomaki, it is related, is Nico’s realization that she has indeed left Maki home. Alone. And her kitchen might not be standing when she gets back.

There are a lot of interactions that you wrote, that I just flat out found hilarious, okay? :P

Skipping back to critiques, I think there was one moment that stuck with me… not because it was amazing but because it was ultimately one of the most unsatisfying in it. The moment where Maki goes “they know.” It’s quite obviously cliffhanger material, but nothing is quite as much a punch in the gut as getting to the next chapter and realizing that the worry that Nico has is essentially worthless (not completely, but you get what I mean). It’s akin to seeing an episode of something and ending with major developments… only for It to get regened as a dream at the beginning of next episode. Maybe I’m being a bit overly harsh but that’s what it felt like to me.

Wow, okay, I’m at 1400 words. That’s, um, huh. More then I’ve done in a long while.

Moving on…

As a story, and from my own personal experience of trying to write semi-realistic slowburn, there is something that I have to say I’m most envious of and that is the way that you created drama within the story.

For instance, the way Maki’s father is set up.

For all intents and purposes, he is the primary antagonist, or as close as we get to one. He is the one that Maki is the most concerned with, the one that continually gives Maki stress like you wouldn’t believe, the one who basically drives her to the point of several mental breakdowns and a panic attack or two. Yet for all of this, outside of the final chapter, I don’t think he says more then maybe… 10 or 15 lines? Rather it’s the looming possibility that makes him such a negative force. Realistically, he can’t do all that much to harm Maki. I mean, he COULD, but I feel like that’d be a whole another type of story.

In that way, this story is very much about Maki failing to meet her father’s expectations. Its not something grandiose like saving the world or the school, nor is it about her father blowing up. Rather its infinitely a much smaller and larger thing. Perhaps the glory of it all is that he doesn’t need to be. In fact there is real no conflict besides what Maki sets up for herself. No external forces conspiring against them, just what Maki thinks would make her father happy.

To be perfectly honest, the moment Nico rang the doorbell, I was so into the story that I could feel Maki’s anxiety, my heart was just about to pound out of my chest.

I think, at it’s core, Love Novels’ theme is about choice.

While I would call Nico and Maki the main characters, I would argue heavily that Nico isn’t the main, main character. She effectively is the same person as she was at the beginning. The only character who experiences real character growth is, of course, Maki. She goes from being a caged bird to a freed one.

To an extent.

I have to believe that this story is not over by a long shot(not just because part two is up to 3 chapters, of which I’ve read a bit of the first… thought I should this first tho).

Namely I’m wondering if Maki is actually going to finish her medical degree.

A reoccurring theme that occurs throughout this story is that of choice, and Nico brings up multiple times that Maki isn’t truly happy being a doctor, but instead hints at how she is happier being behind the piano, or being an idol. Which makes me think if she might change majors or drop out completely? Much like it was stated above, given her father isn’t abusive nor is the one with money and her mother actually gives a damn, she isn’t going to lose her inheritance at this point (though I do wonder if she will buy the café Nico works at just to make sure she doesn’t have to work ever again and lazes about in bed all day…)

At this point I’m getting speculative because I’m wanting to lock my speculations in a time capsule before starting part 2, so just a warning about that and what not…

Another thing I’ve noticed, and it still stumps me is the way the first chapter starts. The tone feels off. Like something much greater is about happen that day, when all conventional story telling wisdom would make it be the happy times before the bad, not Maki getting a sense of foreboding doom.

I have two great hopes for the next part. Maybe three, but the third is super long term.

First, I’m hoping that its something that focuses more on Nico’s development instead of Maki. I say this because as a character, Nico has literally no reason I can think of to block her from doing her dreams of being a professional idol. She doesn’t have to pay for the kids’ college, and Maki can pay her share of rent/food money. Going along with the theme of choice, it would be Nico’s turn to deal with that, albeit with some help from her ever so supportive girlfriend/soulmate/princess ;)

Another would be to see Maki’s continued development, i.e. seeing her continue her choice to do something she is passionate about not something that was pre-chosen for her at birth.

My final curiosity is less about the characters and more about the ship. Namely what you will do with a relationship in the long term. As of now, they are currently in their honey moon phase, and like all things, as the poem, Ozymandias teaches us, nothing is eternal. The good times won’t be around forever, or if they do this might get stale really quick.

I’m actually personally quite excited that you are continuing this on past the getting together stage. I’m very, VERY interested in the long term. How the stress of a first relationship would get to them, or how they would just do the wrong thing. Really anything like that. I want to see them screw up, and take a break, or get angry and yell at each other. Something that breaks their bond so it can be remolded. Speaking of which…

This might be a personal gripe, but while I can accept that they could all (Muse) of them be other than straight (quite easily, actually), I’m curious to why you had them all pair up (besides honoka)?

Buh, I think I may have missed a few things, but I’ve gone over triple the character limit that Ao3 allows so I think I should post this. I might update it later, however.

Like I said before, this was awesome! You should feel proud ^_^

Cheers!

#love live #review #maki nishikino #nico yazawa #love novels

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jasonmcgathey · 5 years

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Riots Of Passage

Well, like everything else, this book has taken much longer than expected. But Riots Of Passage is finally complete, and now available for Kindle. A paperback version will soon follow at all of your favorite retailers. So though it always feels tremendously awkward, I’m forcing myself to insert a little self-promotion here – although considering it documents a year of living on OSU campus, this book counts as legitimate Columbus history, and so might a little bit about its creation, too.

I finally got around to getting this in shape for publication in December 2017. The first draft was finished clear back in the fall of 1998 and the second in the summer of 2003. More than fourteen years would pass, then, before I even looked at this stuff again. Most of the delay was due to working on other projects, but any time I would think about this book, I was having a tough time mentally sorting out the length and the structure.

For eons I’ve been telling everyone that the campus years would be a trilogy (the first installment, One Hundred Virgins, was published in 2006). But I could never quite figure out a division point that felt right between two and three, so Riots Of Passage ended up being both. The most natural seeming break occurs after coming home from the New Year’s party, and that was always the plan, except I didn’t like where this meant starting off the last book. It would kind of leave the middle book as one long preamble, as just about all of the payoffs seem to happen in the last half of this finished project.

The major cuts all came with this third draft I began in 2017. That second draft from 2003 clocked in at over 900 full size (8 1/2 x 11″, that is) pages, something like 940, whereas the third one came in at exactly 500. So I wound up cutting out or condensing nearly half of the material. But even throughout this process, which took a year and a half almost to the day, I was still kind of stalling on the decision whether to split this into two books or not, telling myself I would know the answer and could make that call when the draft was complete.

But the truth is, you’re never entirely certain you made the right call on anything. In this instance, it felt too short for a pair of books yet too long for just one. It helps considerably with the editing process, though, that I would say – somewhat unexpectedly – that I really don’t care about any of the personal dramas now, stuff which seemed so important at the time. This is one advantage of taking so long to put something together, I suppose. In some instances entire people got the axe, along with subplots which dragged on for a month. The only consideration was whether or not it seemed essential to this central story, and if not, it got the heave ho.

Some of the decisions were pure pacing ones. In the beginning and the end especially, I was going for more of a breezy clip, therefore condensing was unavoidable. This meant that often highly interesting occasions were reduced to single sentences, or maybe even deleted altogether. In two instances I can think of, complete paragraphs which were among my top five favorites, I had to conclude didn’t fit, however painfully, and got rid of them. It sucks, but you can always console yourself with the knowledge that they might find use in other projects down the road.

These decisions, though, make you realize that you can’t really term anything the “definitive” history of an era or a subject. This is just one minuscule slice of history from that time and place. For a while, and this was true of the first book as well, this whole notion of cutting out people completely was bothering me. It feels like you’re trying to alter history based on personal preferences. Except one day I had an epiphany of sorts – I happened to be reading a Civil War book at the time, though it could have been anything – that, you know, they couldn’t possibly mention every single soldier who fought in a war, in the course of the narrative. Attempting to shoehorn in every name even if you have nothing interesting to say would make it clunky and unreadable. This doesn’t make it untrue, or mean that you are attempting to alter history.

One great example of this would occur near the end of this third draft, when I realized that an extremely entertaining cook we worked with at Damon’s hadn’t been mentioned at all. His name just hadn’t come up in any of my writings. Some of his specific episodes I had in my head the whole time, and kept thinking they were going to crop up at some point – after this many years, it’s hard to remember what you included and what you left out of a previous draft – but they never did. Instead of backtracking, though, and attempting to figure out where they belonged, I took this as a sign that these detours probably weren’t needed. And nothing personal against the guy, they just weren’t essential to these particular chapters.

Other times the opposite policy applies, where you figure, you know, I’ve got fifteen scenes at Woody’s in here, or whatever, and these are the ones which felt most crucial. There’s no reason to mention every trip you made to the bar for a solid year. In this sense, some of the lengthier scenes were paradoxically easier to cut out entirely, or categories where I was able to make some kind of broad editorial decision – so for the most part, major concerts, sporting events, and movies attended were easily gotten rid of. Writing sex scenes, too, has always been awkward, and I couldn’t imagine anyone wanted to read about these icky details either.

So it is that, paradoxically, smaller decisions somehow become the most agonizing. These open up philosophical angles that are often unexpected and fascinating. Though this admission might seem monstrous, I can honestly say that while some of the things I did in these pages should bother me, none of it does. Instead what proves cringe inducing is to look back upon what music you were listening to, the dumb stuff you were talking about, and your inane sense of humor at the time.

Somehow we have all grown accustomed to the notion that our clothing and hair choices of the past were usually questionable, and this we are okay with, dismissing them with wry, morbid humor as a fitting commentary on those hilarious times. Other details prove trickier to navigate, however, and among these I would count a) things you no longer find funny, as well as b) things you no longer believe, and c) things you said, but turned out to not be true.

To leave out these sorts of things, you are then wrestling with the notion that you’re trying to make yourself and your friends seem smoother than you actually were at the time. But I think our various personalities are well established and accurate. Omitting some of the goofier, poorly aged wisecracks or whatever isn’t distorting anything. Also, to include them produces the thought, why would I intentionally write a bad book? Sometimes, particularly with point B up above, you can maybe weave around this by explaining, “here’s what I thought at the time, but I now believe this.” Unless this insight actually occurred during the period in question, though, this is also technically assigning yourself a wisdom you didn’t have.

Thornier still are questions of how you’re going to handle behavior and/or remarks which let’s just say haven’t aged so well, yet they are important if you want to be truthful about these times. You can’t just delete them and pretend they never happened…even though including such makes it seem as though you’re endorsing them. I think you just have to try and keep yourself in the mindset of that time frame as much as possible. It always bugs me when you’re watching something that’s supposedly set in an earlier era, but they’re using slang and catchphrases which didn’t exist back then. I tried to avoid that as much as possible, true, but also more importantly to avoid putting a current spin on these old situations. It’s probably not entirely possible, but I really don’t want to ascribe what I (or anyone else) thinks about these episodes now, only what we actually thought about them back then.

Even so, of course, you end up agonizing over specific words. Some of these sentences remain intact as-is from the late 90s, but there are others, I can tell you, I was still tinkering around with yesterday. Some were bugging me as I went to sleep last night. But at some point you have to tell yourself, good enough. Let it go.

But what really has you in knots most of all, is how you say anything negative whatsoever about your friends. You’re trying to write your interpretation of events, which everyone might not agree with. You don’t want to be unnecessarily mean, but at the same time, if you’re going to excise every negative, then it’s whitewashed and toothless and no longer accurate. It’s easy to fall down additional rabbit holes from there and begin thinking, hey, maybe I’ll just leave in unflattering comments if the person in question was a jerk to me, and on the flipside, delete everything less positive if they were cool. Of course, once you start rationalizing like this, you are doomed. Maybe it’s a tie breaker, if someone is in your good graces, determining how hard you try to paint them favorably, but you cannot just start wiping out every unkind comment about your friends.

Basically I think you just have to ask yourself, is this fair? And is this a necessary reference, or can I cut it out? Have I said this as tactfully as I can manage? It does help that, by this point, hopefully everyone understands this stuff falls in the good natured ribbing department, anyway – as mentioned earlier, I don’t actually “care” about this material on a personal level after this many years, none of it. The only question is if it’s important to this book, this little slice of history I’m covering.

In many of these cases, it’s often an accidental blessing to have not captured a ton of concrete information. Sometimes I am being deliberately vague for dramatic purposes within the structure of the book, other times as some kind of strategic decision I’ve stumbled onto in the real world. But far more common are the instances where I just don’t have the details at this point. You can’t exactly Wikipedia who was at some campus keg party, or what was said at the Out-R-Inn on such and such night from 1998. Work schedules are for the most part toast or would never be made available to you, especially if canned from a place, and you can’t trust memory all that well after this many years.

One thing you may notice is that I do have slightly greater detail as the book progresses. This actually did occur to me at the time, and was an unintended benefit of buying a computer about halfway through this epoch. The whole mindset for acquiring one was that it would help me type up my first novel, yet it would soon turn out that detail and speed in future projects like this were of far greater importance. I was doing an okay job handwriting various facts in my journal, what we did and where we went on such and such day. It helped, too, that I had a job – waiting tables – where standing around scribbling things into a tiny notepad was totally normal. I just often wasn’t writing what they might have expected. But the level of detail is missing beyond this, until able to type it up and capture it quickly with a decent word processing program. And the biggie here is actual quotes, real life soundbites from people, which are somewhat lacking early on.

So if I don’t really care about any of these piddly dramas at this point, beyond their structural purpose in my history, what I do find fascinating now is specific details about anything whatsoever from the distant past. Things said, yes, but also prices, menu items, songs on a band’s set list. Which business existed at a certain address. It does make me lament my focus and choices at times, that I hadn’t concentrated more in certain areas and less in others, but there’s really nothing you can do about that.

Ultimately, this is what a book like this ends up being about: the city itself. Although by the nature of this project forced to insert myself into the middle (fun fact: I did try writing this campus period as a novel with invented character names at one point, many years ago. It didn’t work), it helps considerably to recognize that I am not the story. These experiences on the personal level are for the most part anonymous and commonplace. Though some of this weird behavior I guess is sort of amusing in sports, for the most part, I’m just melting into the background – and that’s exactly as it should be. So while it’s easy for all of us to trick ourselves into thinking, which we probably all have at times, “wow, I’m kinda like the Forrest Gump of this scene or something, all this wild stuff seems to happen when I’m around!” that’s not really not how it is at all. It’s more accurate to realize, well, I was present for 100% of the stuff I was present for. That’s why it seems amazing. But there were a million equally crazy things happening all over the place, which I missed. And this swirl of activity, this flood of information and colliding personalities, mixed in with the era and the locale itself, this is really what all such stories are about.

In the end, all you can really control is making a historical record as accurate as possible. Try to make it match what that period felt like as best as you are able to, and move on. The first time around, with One Hundred Virgins, this manifested itself in me thinking I wanted to get the timing right on a typical day. As I was working on that project, it’s true that there were almost no hard decisions whatsoever, as the pacing and flow and questions about which scenes to include almost seemed to be snapping themselves into place, in a way that hasn’t happened before or sense with anything I’ve written. But the one area I made a determined effort to focus upon then was to not include only the fireworks, to deliberately insert some boring stretches because this was more realistic. I do regret some of the florid language used in that book – to read some passages now, even I have no clue what I was trying to say there – but otherwise think it accurately captured, you know, that we weren’t partying nonstop, that there were nights I’d sit at the kitchen table alone for hours with the radio and a crossword puzzle.

The period covered in this second volume, however, is completely different. There is much less information about what else is going on around the city, because our lives have gotten more action packed, and I’m also not exactly sitting around reading article after article about Angsto The Clown or whatever, as I had been in our earlier days. Here I think the length of the book is actually more beneficial and accurate, and if I’ve decided to focus less this time around on making every sentence as artfully complex as possible, I do believe that some situational confusion serves it well, because this is how it was to live it. Therefore if you think it’s a bit brain scrambling that there are five or six Carries in this book and most of them have dark hair but no last name, are often explained away as a coworker, well, trust me, this neatly matches our experience. If sometimes you can’t quite decipher what happened or what’s really going on, yeah…welcome to the club.

Even so, I’ve never been nearly this nervous about anything else I’ve written. There are conversations I’ve successfully avoided having for over twenty years now and am dreading to some degree, once a couple of these episodes are revealed. The reception itself otherwise seems almost not nearly as important – as any of you other writers out there know, though you feel compelled to crank this stuff out for some reason, there are always conflicting emotions about it anyway. Am I hoping that nobody reads it? Of course not. Am I hoping that people do read it? I think so…yet it’s still kind of a terrifying prospect to actually sit around and ponder. I mostly try to block out that thought, too.

That last “S” fell off: original cover for “Similar Shapes” as it looks now.

Regarding the title, and the picture above, it’s true that I’ve been wrestling off and on with these names for over two decades. At one point, I intended to call that first book Similar Shapes. There are still times I wish I had. But somewhere along the line that name began to seem too generic to me, and I also became enthralled with this idea, based around this running joke that Robert Smith (from The Cure, not the legendary OSU running back) always had, whenever asked about the title of their next album: he would say One Million Virgins, though they never wound up calling any of them that. When still intending this as a trilogy, I planned to run with that concept in tying them all together, starting with Hundred and then Thousand, finally Million.

Though loosely based upon discussions we were actually having at the time, this numbering pattern eventually lost its luster. True, I could always pull an Agatha Christie and rename that first book. But really, I think I’m saving Similar Shapes for a day down the road, when I might decide to combine these two projects and issue them as one. Half the time I think that will probably happen at some point. It actually makes the most sense of all, and kind of comes full circle to that maroon binder full of pages.

Anyway, if you’re really worked up into a mad fervor and can’t wait to get your claws into a copy, as I mentioned, the Kindle version is now available on Amazon for 99 cents. I basically plan on jacking up the price by a dollar every week, as some sort of cheap stunt to inspire you to order a copy right now. So here is the link for that:

Riots Of Passage

Let me know if you spot any errors, of course. If caught early enough I might be able to squeak in corrections before the paperback version goes live. Otherwise, I guess they will wait for the inevitable revised edition. As always, thanks for reading this or anything else that pops into my head. It still seems amazing to me that anyone would do so, and I hope to never lose sight of that.

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