#also not to be a nerd but this monologue is for the narrator character named Geoffrey who was ACTUALLY a pseudonym for the original author

[moon-shower]

“Dear god, please spare me,” still today, scrawled on the wall of Lincoln Eyre’s old cottage.

Quaintly nestled in the fields of Gloucestershire sits a small village by the name of Bibury — like a tumbled stone in the riverbed, seeing all and knowing no one. That is until 1823, when the Eyre’s cobbler business found a home in the hidden hinterland. Lincoln Eyre — a dreamer, an artist, doomed by the constraints of money and time — followed his parents with a dollar to his name.

The monotonous hand over hand, tongue over teeth made him wish to tear the skin off his body. 1, 2, 3 inhale. 1, 2, 3 coins in savings of his sanity.

With these scraps, he scraped by, expending nearly everything on paint, brushes, canvas, forsaking food to feed the mind. Cerulean blues, lush greens, and lilac purple skies — the daydreams of otherworldly freedom. Painting after painting, further and further neglecting the Eyres and their business. With nothing left, he vowed that this painting, the edges glowing and peculiar, had to be the last.

Some say Lincoln Eyre died of starvation, others that he went mad and ran into the Oxhill Wood. Yet some claim his passion ignited something special in that painting. Something which finally fulfilled his wishes and answered his prayers.

[frasier-crane-style]

So I watched this.

-The opening image is in space, with Anthony Hopkins narrating about the Mother World*, and a wormhole opens that cannot be described as anything other than a Space Pussy. Uhh, Cinema.

*(an unwieldy title for a group of bad guys, so eventually the script starts calling them "the Realm" instead, though no one bothered to go back and have them stop talking about "the domain of the Mother World" and such)

-They also try on referring to the villains as "The King's Gaze," the name of the ship they crew, and of course, it is great fun to see working actors talking very seriously about how much they fear the King's Gays.

-As in any Seven Samurai riff, the good guys are humble farmers, which in Zach Snyder Land means they are both pacifistic Luddite believers AND burly Vikings who love to fuck.

Ladies and gentlemen, a Quaker!

-They're also all white, making Sofia Boutella the only minority and also the violent outsider with a haunted past who keeps talking about how she doesn't belong and everything she touches dies and all that. It's a mite awkward. But she's also the only one who isn't DTF in the Fuck Farm, so who knows?

-The, uhh, Mother Worlders* show up and prove an eclectic blend of Peaky Binders haircuts, Soviet Russia fashion sense, working-class British accents, and, uhh, Día de Muertos parade?

Not since Cobra have so many random villain traits fallen under the same tent. You're left asking if it's political commentary or if Snyder just has something against the Angry Video Game Nerd.

-Snyder also tries to do a Good King/Evil Usurper bit with the Mother World, but makes it explicit that during the Good King's reign they were also an expansionist colonial empire just killing the shit out of things. As ever with da Snyd, it's unclear if this is meant to be subversive or just poorly thought out.

-I know there's no hiding that one is doing a Seven Samurai riff, but the MacGuffin is still... grain. The humble villagers aren't mining vibranium or anything, the evil Empire just really wants grain and these villagers are going to give it to them or else. You'd think a post-warp civilization wouldn't need to lean on subsistence farmers for snacks, but there you are.

-The appeal of this, if any, is to do R-rated Star Wars, but for some reason Netflix wanted a PG-13 version of the R-rated Star Wars, so we get something that's... maybe a little wilder than Andor? They redo the cantina confrontation between Obi-Wan and Cornelius Evazan, but here Evazan explicitly wants to rape 'Luke Skywalker' so, uhh, yay?

-Apparently the idea is to do a director's cut later on that'll be three or four hours; it's pretty obvious that stuff's been cut. The narrative spends a lot of time talking about how they're going to find a really cool guy fighting in gladiatorial combat at an arena. The heroes go to the arena, stand next to the arena, talk for a bit, and then leave. No gladiatorial combat is had.

Snyder, you're killing me, man. I thought the whole two-part business was so that we could have a whole movie to get to know these characters, but it basically goes Character Introduction > Standing Around In Crowd Scenes. Unless you're about to die, of course, in which case you get a sizable monologue to put in your acting reel before you leave.

-Oddly, they introduce quite a few characters who seem like they're going to be a part of the Magnificent Space Seven--guy trying to court Sofia Boutella, a turncoat Stormtrooper, a pacifistic robot--only to forget about them. I guess they'll show up in Part 2, but it seems unfulfilling to have this movie be a prolonged "Getting The Band Together" montage with some of the heroes not even getting to be in on the bonding. Which isn't much bonding to begin with, it's just Sofia Boutella sloooowly revealing her backstory and not even getting to the obvious punchline by the closing credits (you killed the princess, didn't ya? This universe might not have Force powers, but you don't need 'em to see that coming).

[mokis-art]

can you tell me all about void?

edit: so the week 2 half of this summary turned into an analysis so i apologize if it feels like me nerding out and talking about the dEePeR mEaNiNg

all about void.....

like all of it? am i allowed to link the wiki?

im gonna both link the wiki and a video and then give you a summary of the video because i cant be the only one that gets bored watching fnf gameplay unless its twinsomnia (even though playing vs void is actually pretty fun)

*the wiki labels a few other characters as "friend" but in the source post, they're described to be people he just gets along better with since he doesnt really form close bonds in a competitive industry

The premise to the mod is that Void, a cosmic pop star, hears about BF's rising fame and accordingly challenges him to perform at his next concert. The last line of the premise goes, "He hasn't garnered galaxy-wide fame for nothing, and there may be something *dark* under that smug exterior."

In the menu screen, the background music is replaced by supposedly some kind of remix of the original menu music, and Void kind of took it over. Once the week begins, it is very obvious that Void is an egotistical annoying little bitch but that's okay

oh also there's voice acting

Anyways he teases BF a little, boosts his own ego for a bit, and then the songs start. Nothing special happens for most of the week; BF continues to win, and Void is denying the fact that he might not hold out, thus getting more and more insecure. We don't receive a second reason about why he's so affected until the cutscene before Event Horizon, where Void's form glitches. He says nothing of it, simply continuing to tell BF where his place is. The last song is much more difficult than the others, but still very playable. The end card shows that BF and GF are enjoying their win, while Void is extremely ticked off, and the narration rhetorically asks the player, "Think you can beat the true A.C. Void?"

oh also i forgot to mention that the accretions exist, they're basically like bodyguards and try to keep void from doing SOMETHING (i forgot abt them bc they only got added after week 2)

The icon for week 2 is an album CD case, in which the CD inside is broken apart.

SPOILERS FOR WEEK 2 (this part is much longer):

BF returns to Void's stage with his motivations for doing so left ambiguous, and Void has a bit of banter with the Accretions as to which one of them let him in. Void first assumes that BF is a die-hard fan looking for an autograph, but it seems that he's learned to understand his beep language and hears that BF actually wants a rematch. Void is extremely ticked off by this, probably taking it as mockery, but BF gently persists, the Accretions back him up—and something eerie rises in Void. He agrees to do just one song.

After the song, Void—completely certain he would be able to win with so much focus—is wholly enraged by this point, but persistently holding himself back everytime he might snap. (There's a fourth-wall joke regarding the character-gets-angry-in-the-last-song trope in fnf mods between this). Void then has a brief monologue hinting at a "mistake" he made long ago, one caused by an inability to keep himself "stable." Later, his Accretions try to warn him that he might snap, but they are cut off on the word "gonna" and Void yells that he's not "gonna" anything.

Void insists on a slow, lengthy song to ensure that he can beat BF for once. Near the end of the song, however, it is evident that he was too late in his suppression, and already begins to transform. He glitches more and more, and eventually snaps, resembling the "blueballs" animation, and takes on the full name "A.C. Void." A.C. remarks darkly that it's "good to be back" and also states that "Void is gone," implying that he is somewhat separate from his smug counterpart. He proceeds to monologue with a contrast to Void—that his purpose isn't for wealth or fame (its about the mets), but rather about a type of mentally-manipulative world domination. He reveals that his motivations might equate to what is Void's motivations, but bumped up to 100 and covered in wickedness. A.C. challenges BF to "Come face the All-Consuming Void!" and the final-final song begins.

At the end of Singularity, A.C. Void seemingly faints. BF and GF casually discuss dinner but a while later, the entity regains consciousness as Void and approaches BF. Reluctantly, he thanks BF in an agree-to-disagree way since otherwise he would have "torn the galaxy in half." BF thanks Void for "a fun twelve-ish minutes" and Void simply sighs.

THEN THERE ARE FREE PLAY SONGS BUT IM NOT MAKING THIS ANY LONGER 💀 ILL DO IT IN A DIFFERENT ASK OR SMTH

[uten4]

sorawo! i wanna hear lines you like from her esp bc you're reading a whole light novel abt her, wow >u< !!

- Overall opinion: She has such problems and is so hopelessly gay and I love it!!!!!! So much!!!!!!!!!

- Gender/sexuality headcanon: Lesbian :D

- Favorite moment in canon: Toriko and Sorawo hunt for this Creachure they've seen which they call the kunekune, because Sorawo mentioned that it strongly resembles an urban legend of the same name. Thereafter Toriko assumes Sorawo is an expert on the kunekune and expects that she will know ways to find it and fight it. Sorawo highly resents this assumption, and even launches into a very long monologue about how she didn't study the kunekune in the interest of hunting it; she only did it for a school project (she's an anthropology major).

She talks at length about the places where the kunekune was said to reside, what this could say about the people who came up with it, the etymology of that word and how it connects to other Japanese mythology, and more. Then she realizes how long she's been talking and shuts herself up, thinking that Toriko probably thinks she's a nerd now.

I love this moment so much because it's such a self-own. Toriko thinks Sorawo is a nerd towards the kunekune and other urban legends, and while trying to fight that allegation, Sorawo just totally confirmed it. AND FURTHERMORE, I LOOOOOOOOOOVE THAT THE INFORMATION SORAWO TALKS ABOUT IN THIS SPEECH IS ALL SO ANTHROPOLOGY-FOCUSED FOR REAL. The writer put thought into what kinds of sub-topics Sorawo would be researching for her urban legend project :') It's reolly good....

- Favorite moment in fanwork: I love this fanart of her so much. This one is also SO cool.

- Favorite line: So after Toriko explains to Kozakura that Sorawo is her friend, we get this response from Kozakura... and then Toriko replies... and then Sorawo narrates her thought lol.

「いくらで買ったの？」 「買ってないよ。無料！」 唇を尖らせて言い返す鳥子。誰が無料だ。

"How much did you pay for her?" "I didn't buy her. She was free of charge!" Toriko grumbled in response. Who's free of charge now?

Oh my god she really is like Chaos UNIB huh...

I also like every scene where something insane is happening, like a gunfight or something, and Sorawo is just sitting there thinking about how pretty Toriko is. Girl...

– Characters I love seeing them interact with: Toriko! And... Akari, I think her name was? ^_^

– Sleeping headcanons: I got nothing tbh...

– Favorite locations headcanon: There's probably a really good answer for this from someone who remembers more of the story than I do LOL. Maybe somewhere nice and calm, where she has an actually peaceful memory of spending time with Toriko?

[koganeirou]

Ikemen Revolution - Edgar’s Route

Sirius | Lancelot | Fenrir

aka the sexiest man in the entire red army the entire cast. the hottest stud in the military. the most gorgeous boy in Alice’s harem. the man who will satisfy your wishes and desires, the man who will make your hopes and dreams come true.

THE SMOOTHEST TALKER EVER

it’s been over a month since I finished Edgar’s route but here is his long awaited and very delayed scream fest. I wrote this up bit by bit over the course of two months but I never had the time to sit down and proof read it until now because of school and I didn’t want to post something half assed because it’s Edgar! Also this is uhh... really freaking long LOOL. As usual, if you you want my actual serious final thoughts on the route, just skip to the final blurb. 

Now with literally every red army route so far (except Jonah), OF COURSE the Black Army mofos send Alice off with more NAMELESS, FACELESS soldiers who can’t do shit in the face of kidnappers, and end up getting their ass kicked, leaving poor Alice completely defenseless. This time around, the kidnappers make off with Alice’s belongings into the sunset so Alice can’t return home.

That is until our dashing gentleman aka Edgar comes in going like hey baby I’ll help you find your stuff so won’t you please come home to bed with me and of course Alice accepts because he’s a damn hot stud.

Aw Kyle don’t say that ;;;;;.

SO PRECIOUS.............

I’m going to say it right now but Edgar is ADORABLE. Literally the first half of his route is just him and Alice bonding over their love of candy and playing with animals. Edgar even takes Alice out to see a family of ducks he takes care of and he refers to them as his own family and fucking named them “The Creeks” JUST HOW PRECIOUS CAN HE GET???? Considering how Edgar is portrayed as that “evil scheming asshole here to ruin everyone’s day” in everyone else’s route, I didn’t expect him to be so sweet BUT HE IS SUCH A GOD DAMN SWEETIE as you can see I’m infinitely biased towards LIs who like animals.

What... a .... fucking... dork

lmao @ Lancelot trying to act like a do-s when he’s the complete opposite of that. This man doesn’t have a single sadistic bone in his body... he’s just a big mushy teddy bear.

WHAT A FUCKING BIG MUSHY TEDDY BEAR, BOTH OF YOU.

The red army boys are a bunch nerds you just can’t help but fall in love with after going through their routes... especially Edgar’s! I love them all so much.

OH NO MY BABY DON’T SAY THAT PLEASE.

lmao I love the blatant acknowledgement. But also mood.

Anyway after Zero zeros in on Edgar being a sketchy prick, Edgar mopes around some more because “shit Zero is exactly right” and he has a realization that he has Feelings In His Chest. Of course Alice catches on so she bakes him some super unhealthy cookies to make him feel better (ღ˘⌣˘ღ).

I MEAN... I DON’T BLAME HIM, BECAUSE SAME.

Edgar starts disappearing into the night to do “”family business”” for his totally-not-evil-uncle and I SWEAR to god at the time I was like “this mofo’s deadass going around murdering people” and now I’m just like .... ha ha.

One day Alice stumbles across Edgar coming home from “”family business”” and rushes out to greet him, only for him to freak the fuck out and hide his hands behind his back. SERIOUSLY I THOUGHT HIS HANDS WERE BLOOD SOAKED. Alice’s like wtf you doing and yanks his hands out only to find them freezing cold BECAUSE HE WAS BUSY WASHING THE BLOOD OFF OF THEM.

This is one of my favourite scenes JUST.... WARMTH... THE TENDERNESS.... THE FONDNESS.... THE SHEER AFFECTION SHE HAS FOR HIM IS SO MAGNETIZING. The god damn romantic connotations is overflowing it’s practically on the same level as a damn love confession without the actual confession of love.

I love that sort of duality between their relationship being built on fake premises, but is actually very genuine at its core. Edgar may have saved Alice with ulterior motives, but his kindness towards her both when they first met and their interactions after that was very real. It’s through little things in the writing like Alice commenting on how Edgar’ hands were warm that makes it all the more endearing and heart wrenching.

AGAIN--OH NO MY BABY DON’T SAY THAT PLEASE.

lmao never change, Jonah. Never change.

narrator: she was not fine.

look everything in this game may be a rip off but those LI-perspective side stories are just..............IT’S OKAY MY HEART IS ALREADY MADE OF DIAMOND.

Anyhoo the war between the two armies are starting to get Heated Up™ and Edgar requests Lancelot to go scouting in enemy territory alone, but Lancelot refuses bc it’s dangerous. Honestly idk what’s so dangerous about it considering how Sirius’s route was pretty much Edgar vs Black Army and the Black Army still had trouble but ANYWAY. Alice finds out and gets pissed and they end up arguing, to which everyone starts celebrating and clinking wine glasses in toasts because “holy shit Edgar actually has emotions?!” 😂😂

MY GUY LOL WHAT IS THIS.

In Edgar’s route, you don’t say “I love you”, you say THIS. SERIOUSLY MY HEART HURTS SO BAD ESPECIALLY WITH THE CONTEXT OF EDGAR’S CHARACTER AND THE STORY OF THIS ROUTE.

After Edgar’s leaves on his scouting trip Claudius decides it’s a good time to come out into the limelight and ruin some people’s lives for fun so he sends Alice a letter going like “yo here’s a plot convenient key to Edgar’s safe where he keeps his weed stash so you can see the truth that your boyfriend is a PIECE OF SHIT”. And Alice is all like “ay Edgar isn’t a piece of shit, I’m sure this is just a prank!”

too bad it isn’t.

Zero takes Alice to Edgar’s safe and seriously I was on the edge of my seat wondering wtf was in his safe. I suspected it was gonna be her belongings but with the suspense they kept building in this part I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were fucking dead bodies in that locker.

So on the bright side, there were no dead bodies in the safe. On the not so bright side, Alice finds all the letters she wrote to the Black Army, as well as warning letters from them she never received so it turned out Edgar was fabricating the letters she was exchanging with the Black Army all this time. OH GOODIE.

GAHHHH NO EDGAR. 

SERIOUSLY can we talk about how good the writing in this route is?!?  All the dialogue and monologues are just structured in a way that gets to my emotions. I fucking cried during this scene because Alice’s emotions and despair was so raw and powerful and the way Edgar just silently took all her verbal abuse because he couldn’t defend himself but he was breaking with every word she said ...... ABLHEAJTARTHEATHJAEKHT.

Anyway Alice miraculously somehow escapes the Red Army Headquarters and races back to the Black Army in one piece seriously girl did you run an entire evening without stopping to black territory??? Adrenaline mixed with terror is something only for the surprise plot convenience robbers to make a reappearance. Fortunately, our MVP Luka dashingly swoops in and saves her. He brings her back to Black Territory and cooks her dinner and is there to comfort her MPH...BABY BOY IS SO SOFT AND SWEET...................

Alice completely breaks down and ME FUCKING TOO. She can’t really say much other than a strangled sob of “You know Luka, I had a lot of fun at the Red Army. Edgar treated me really, really well” or something like that and honestly that’s also she really needed to say to convey her heartbreak and betrayal. 

lol I can imagine Edgar doing that.

THANKS I’M FUCKING DEPRESSED NOW.

Luka reveals that he and Edgar were long time friends and muses to Alice on what he’s known about Edgar throughout the years. He drops this information on Alice not to necessarily tell her how to feel, but just as food for thought for Alice as she sorts out her feelings.

THANKS I’M EVEN MORE FUCKING DEPRESSED NOW. Also this is hands down the most powerful admittance of love this game has given me.

lmao never change Seth, never change.

Anyhoo Claudius McDoucheMuffin gets into contact with Alice and is all like “hey girl I got your purse.” And for some reason, Alice thinks he’s perfectly trustworthy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯.

ALICE....ABOUT THAT....

OH NO.

Well yeah what do you know ha ha, Claudius kidnaps Alice because THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS EVERY FUCKING TIME THE BLACK ARMY SENDS A NAMELESS BODYGUARD OUT TO PROTECT HER.

Claudius takes Alice to outside Amon’s sex dungeon where Edgar is there lovingly waiting for her. Edgar is slightly surprised to see Alice and is rurl pissed over his daddy uncle manhandling her so he makes Claudius give them some alone time in the carriage while he removes Alice’s ropes and dresses her wounds. Alice isn’t keen on it but she realizes that “holy shit Claudius may be a bigger piece of shit than Edgar” so she lets him spill his token tragic backstory to her.

This is so god damned painful.......

jesus christ this puts the whole “In the Bright family, loving people is practically forbidden” into context. 

This makes me wonder what would become of Edgar in the other routes where his pact isn’t abolished-- would he really marry if this was the fate he knew his wife and children would go through, or would he just stay single and let his lineage die with him?

Unfortunately, their touching reunion doesn’t last long because Claudius is pretty much banging on their carriage door going like 

“time’s up bitches we got work to do” and pretty much barges in and yanks Alice away from Edgar.

Bring it, asshat.

Claudius unceremoniously marches Alice straight into the thick of Amon’s sex dungeon while Edgar reluctantly dallys along with the Concerned Kermit Face the entire time. Amon pretty much ditches Lance for his new buddy Claudius so they can TAKE OVER THE WORLD HUR DUR. Him and Claudius cackle about their evil plans and Alice realizes that Edgar was more or less being manipulated by them and he’s not the Actual Worst. Amon then orders Alice to be thrown into his Personal Chambers™.

Jesus christ, YOU ARE SUCH AN ASS, CLAUDIUS.

DON’T MIND ME I’M JUST BEING EMO.

We cut back to Amon and Alice and Amon does his typical evil villain monologue, takes off his hood and....

(屮゜Д゜)屮(屮゜Д゜)屮(屮゜Д゜)屮 HE HAS A CHARACTER DESIGN?!?!?!?!

I KID YOU NOT THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME I SAW AMON WITHOUT HIS HOOD AND I WAS SHOOKED TO MY FUCKING BONES. I DIDN’T THINK HE’D ACTUALLY HAVE A PROPER CHARACTER DESIGN. It was three in the morning when I played this and I literally just put my phone down and laid in my bed staring at the ceiling as I contemplated my life choices after that.

After that shocking revelation, Amon throws Alice into the dungeons for Edgar to dashingly swoop in and save. It’s the full moon so he takes her to the gates of hell Hole That No Player Ever Wants To See. Now if this was a black army route, the suitor would have thrown Alice’s sad ass straight down that hole but this isn’t a black army route so we’re spared from that. Instead we have Alice CHUCKING ALL OF HER POSSESSIONS INTO THE HOLE ((((；゜Д゜))), effectively sealing her fate of ever going back. I get it’s supposed to be a power move but my only thoughts were “WHAT IF EDGAR DIDN’T ACTUALLY RETURN YOUR FEELINGS LMAO?!” I mean it’s an otome game so of course Edgar loves her back but can you imagine how awkward it’d be if Alice was like “I’m not going back because I love you!” and Edgar’s just like “...but I don't  feel the same”. YEESH.

On a less superficial level, I was still really sad because didn’t they make a promise to go to London together one day? ໒( •́ ∧ •̀ )७ I know it wasn’t really a promise but still! Chances are all gone now.

Edgar: Alice, I’m an actual murderer. Alice: NAH, YOU’RE JUST A WEIRDO, EDGAR! (´∩｡• ᵕ •｡∩`) ♡

I AM SO FUCKING EMO.

Also!!! HE’S THE ONLY BOY SO FAR WHO HAS A KISS CG IN HIS ROUTE. (haven’t played Ray’s route yet so idk about him). You have all these Spicy CGs of the boys and Alice in sexually compromising positions and you have Actual Sex Scenes and yet this game barely has any kiss cgs LOL?! What gives?! 

He’s so romantic (ఠ్ఠ ˓̭ ఠ్ఠ).

Since Edgar’s officially betrayed Claudius, he pretty much duels him and kicks his ass and arrests him. Unfortunately, arresting Claudius doesn’t absolve Edgar of his crimes and he’s still put on trial with Lancelot and Ray as the judges. This scene kind of weirded me out because Edgar says some mumbo jumbo about how he’s going on trial so he can “become a man worthy of Alice’s love” like uHHH boy you being worthy of her love ain’t gonna mean jack shit if you’re in jail. Unless you want a nice steamy serving of this ending.

Okay I’m not trying to sound like I’m justifying murder but akjheakthake just FLEETING THOUGHTS YA KNOW. This scene was hella predictable and played out exactly like we’d all know (Edgar doesn’t go to jail hurray!) but even still the trial made me SO EMOTIONAL I STARTED CRYING LMAOO.

Oh Jonah, I know a game you’d love.

Romantic Ending:

Now that things finally calmed down, Alice and Edgar go on a date with Luka tagging along and  Jonah acting as the fourth wheel, much to Luka’s chagrin. (ღ˘⌣˘ღ) ♫･*:.｡. .｡.:*･

NEVER CHANGE JONAH, NEVER CHANGE.

Out of all the pet names my fictional boyfriend could give me, being called an angel is my number one favourite IT’S JUST SO SOFT AND MAKES MY HEART GO DOKI FUCKING DOKI YA FEEL.

is it a sin that I imagined Edgar going full blown chokemedaddy yandere jealous.... not exactly a romantic thought in the romantic ending, bUT FLEETING THOUGHTS, FLEETING THOUGHTS.

LUKA IS SO GOD DAMN PRECIOUS KILL ME NOW.

AHHH WHY ARE YOU SO CUTE.....

-------

Honestly I’m not even gonna mince words-- I loved this route and everything that came with it.

Before I go on my rampage, shout out to Luka for being the MVP supporting character in Edgar’s route. It’s hard to imagine them being friends considering how clashing their personalities are but their friendship was surprisingly heartwarming and endearing. 

I don’t even know how to articulate my thoughts on what made this route so perfect. For starters, Edgar and Alice have amazing chemistry and their personalities compliment each other well. Their bonding and budding friendship was really endearing and felt very believable. From little superficial antics like sharing candy and taking care of animals and going on silly dates, to more blatant portrayals of the depth of their love like Alice cupping Edgar’s hand to her cheek when he was vulnerable, or Edgar straight up betraying his only family to save her. 

Alice’s circumstances of being someone from another world really complimented Edgar’s character. Edgar is a character who lived in a gilded cage his entire life--trapped by his occupation and bound by dirty blood. He’s never once known freedom or has ever had any agency over his life, but Alice shatters that equation. Alice is completely unrelated to the Red Army, or Cradle entirely. She knows nothing about his occupation or his history, and so Edgar is drawn to her because there are no division of titles between them. To her, him being the Jack of Hearts is irrelevant.

He says that without her, he gets “bored”. In the game, he complains that he’s “always bored”. Using “bored” to describe a character usually makes that character seem fickle and that they can’t be serious about anything because everything is just a means to kill time. But in the context of Edgar’s character, “bored” really means “dull”, “lifeless”, or “forced to find happiness through short lived and temporary means”. He copes with his oppression and lack of freedom by chalking up all of his feelings as just boredom. And he’s not wrong-- a life where you can’t make any of your own choices or choose your own path is indeed, very boring.

He constantly calls Alice his “special guest” which on top of being an adorable nickname, carries really heavy connotations. She’s an ethereal guest from another world, from outside of Edgar’s tiny world which he always wanted to expand. I LOVED the scene where Alice says she would like to take Edgar to London with her one day, because it’s the first time you see Edgar start to doubt his world. He’s accepted that his world is small and oppressive, but the first time, it’s almost like Edgar entertains the idea of breaking free from his bird cage.

I want to compliment the relationship development between the two, which was WONDERFULLY paced, something that pitifully cannot necessarily be said about in some of the other routes. Them falling in love felt very natural and the writers did not have to rely on shallow monologues like “he breathed in my direction, what is this feeling in my chest?!” to convince me that they were in love with each other. And when the admittance of love finally happens, it happens at very pivotal moments in the story that just makes the scene so much more emotional. 

Freaking 3k+ words and I still don’t think I did Edgar’s route justice. His route was amazingly written, and Edgar is an amazingly multifaceted and endearing character. Best boy truly got best route.

Anyway I’m almost done Loki’s route; Ray is next. After that, the routes I’m REALLY looking forward to and hope do not disappoint are: Harr, Seth, Kyle, and Luka.

[yesvac]

Podcasting Dungeons & Dragons: How “The Adventure Zone” is Reviving Oral Storytelling

Topic: Podcasts, oral storytelling, “The Adventure Zone”

Date: 14 October 2019

Read time: 10 minutes

When I was young and visited my grandma’s house, I always asked her to read me Go, Dog. Go! by Dr. Seuss before I went to sleep. This was a reasonable request when I was little, but when I began to grow older, regularly reading chapter books on my own, I would still ask my grandma to read me Go Dog. Go! at the end of the night. It was something about how she sat at the side of my bed, squishing me up against the wall, and said those words that had been repeated many times before. And I am not alone in my fond memories of repeated oral story. People love repeated stories, ones told over and over: myths, narratives, family tales. We love these stories not only for their themes and the multitudes of love they contain, but because oral storytelling is a deeply human instinct: in 1998, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin described that “oral tradition… becomes story as it is retold, resung.” So where do podcasts of the modern age factor in? Podcasts are a medium of oral storytelling, and I plan to explore that idea through exploring the podcast “The Adventure Zone.” “The Adventure Zone’s” specific medium of storytelling and its enjoyed popularity teaches lessons about methods and mediums of story, and how they impact storytelling.

To understand how a podcast can do that, it’s important to know what “The Adventure Zone” is. “The Adventure Zone” is a series of publicized recordings (or, a podcast) created and recorded by the McElroy brothers (Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy), podcast-artists and comedians, with their dad. In it, they participate in and play a Dungeons & Dragons campaign they call “Balance.” “The Adventure Zone: Balance” has 69 episodes, and seven story arcs, amounting to over 75 hours. During the podcasts, the players not only play Dungeons & Dragons and fight monsters, but also develop each of their characters, and Griffin, the Dungeon Master of the game (for those who aren’t intimately familiar with D&D: he crafts the story and moderates the game), creates a web of story and plot throughout the 75-hour runtime of the campaign. There’s no way to tell how many people listen to “The Adventure Zone Podcast,” because there are dozens of podcast-streaming websites and no publicly posted number of listeners or listens; however, in the past few years, the show has enjoyed a boost of popularity and a geniune “following” of listeners. But why? What compels people spend dozens of hours listening to four men play Dungeons & Dragons? 

As I mentioned previously, podcasts are one of the newest and most explosive forms of oral storytelling. While not many of the younger generation watch news on the television (or watch television at all), almost all of them listen to public radio or podcasts through an app. As Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses in his piece “How to See the World,” the newly created “global network” has allowed us to “create, send and view images of all kinds, from photographs to video, comics, art, and animation.” Podcasting is an aspect of this new global network and may be counted as an image shared through it. Most people own technology that gives them access to podcasts through the internet, and consuming their shared images is easier now than ever. 

Through the medium of podcast, there is a certain shared experience akin to the shared experience of intimate oral storytelling. It harkens back to the days of shared story through oral connections, over a fire with friends or a family story not recorded in a written format but passed along through generations. As Juliette de Maeyer recognizes in her article “Podcasting Is the New Talk-Radio,” podcasts “bring you to places you’ve never been… give you the impression of sharing an animated kitchen-table banter... with a couple of friends. In that regard, podcasts are a “sensational” medium.” In “The Adventure Zone,” during long monologues by Griffin, the Dungeon Master, there’s often background music that recalls the musical theme used before in the campaign or arc, while Griffin narrates a story with meaningful themes of death, family, love, loss and loneliness. Certainly, “The Adventure Zone” is a sensational medium when it uses repeated music to elicit an emotional response. Additionally, this concept relates to Thomas Turino’s idea of artistic connections in his piece “Why Art Matters,” when he claimed that “the connections expressed through art flow from and create a deeper sense and a different type of understanding.” By using the repeated artistic expression of music in the podcast, the creators tap into a deeper level of understanding of the listeners. Many podcast creators do. 

What comes from this emotional response and formed connection is an imagined community by the podcast-listeners. In “How to See the World,” Mirzoeff discusses Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities: that all communities are imagined, because people in it have not truly formed a connection with all of the other members. Anderson describes imagined communities of nations, which often result in patriotism, or imagined communities of readers of newspapers, who feel connections with the readers of the same newspaper. In that case, listeners to podcasts are certainly members of an imagined community, both with the podcast artists (those who record podcasts), in the case that they feel an intimate connection through the oral tradition of storytelling, and with the other fans, in “fandom.” Two fans of the same podcast who have never met can form bonds across boundaries of nation and language because they have an imagined community of being two people who both really, really like this podcast.

But let us rewind a bit, and understand more about the oral medium of storytelling. I want to talk about the oral medium in general and why it’s so persuasive now in 2019. It’s clear that the younger generation of people are less interested in big media the way previous generations have been -- big media meaning CNN, ABC, Fox News and CBS. Even big news outlets like The Atlantic and Washington Post and The NY Times enjoy less recognition and popularity from Millenials and Gen-Z readers. Most people in this age group do not watch the news but instead listen to NPR on their favorite podcasting platform, or any other podcast and talk-radio medium recordings. There is good reason for this. As a Maeyer describes “big news” in 2019, it’s often clouded with “hateful trolls, hysterical fake news outlets, a news agenda led by Russian hackers, and a never-ending spiral of conspiracy theories.” The oft-repeated mantra of “fake news” has led to the younger generation’s rejection of big news outlets with a lack of trust, and it could also explain the younger generation’s attraction to podcasting and oral storytelling as a way to strip the spread of information down to individual voices and intimately shared connections. 

If I allowed myself a paragraph to nerd out about “The Adventure Zone” in my article about “The Adventure Zone,” it’d go a bit like this: That’s not to discredit the importance of the creativity and outstanding qualities of “The Adventure Zone.” For my argument, it’s just one example of a podcast, when there are thousands of podcasts in the world, that connects to its listeners through the format of oral storytelling. But this podcast is the real deal for an example of how revolutionary podcasting can be as a contributer to storytelling. What other form of storytelling requires its consumers to listen and pay attention for almost 100 hours -- and they do it, quite willingly? And it’s not a bore -- “The Adventure Zone” podcast is carefully organized into seven different arcs, all with unique characters, different settings, connected through a complicated non-chronological plot. It’s an intricately woven story with fully developed and realized characters and relationships between them: romantic relationships, friendships, fully-developed and realistic portrayals of family. And one of the reasons why I think its portrayal of these relationships is so popular is because it is created by a family. This podcast is created by three brothers and a dad.  They know what sibling relationships look like. They know what familial loss looks like. And the result of it is something that is so rarely created: a collaboration between a family. And, when it comes down to it, it’s also just a really funny podcast. 

Justin: Uh, I’m, I’m playing, uh, a wizard.

Griffin: ‘Kay.

Justin: His name is spelled “T-A-A-K-O”.

Travis: So like “tay… tay-ko?”

Griffin: So like “tayko…”

Justin: “Tahk”… Well, I mean, the… It’s two “a”s so…

Griffin: Is your wizard named… Are you naming your goddamn wizard “Taco”?

Methods of communication and mediums of storytelling (or, more simply, the ways to tell a story) develop along with the rapidly changing world around us. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Podcasts are widely available to any person with an internet connection and a device to listen on. Creating friends and sharing connections with people who also love the same media is a beautiful thing, regardless of how empty the promise of an imagined community is. Also, one of the reasons I study humanities is because of its focus on humans and their stories. And from what I’ve seen, the shift from bigger, more corrupt and corporate-influenced outlets and big news to individual voices has simply resulted in more intimate storytelling, and a focus on stories from people.

[momestuck]

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim... volume 18!

Imagine I edited the final shot of End of Evangelion here to put trolls on it. That’s more effort than I’m actually willing to put in. Imagining it is probably almost as good.

This chapter is fittingly called “Of Endings, Many”.

The opening narration is kind of pointed and sarcastic. It jokes about saying trite things like ‘the circle is complete’... and then goes elsewhere.

“You’ve got enough friends, now you need answers-” - and then it interrupts itself, realising it’s just the intro screen.

I wonder who writes the intro screens?

This time we have... another jadeblood, and also a final pair of purplebloods, the second troll pair.

Lanque

Lanque is written by the mysterious “V”, who previously managed to get us to lick a clown’s armpit and then wrote some interesting things about intertextuality. I have high hopes!

Content warning: Lanque’s story deals explicitly with sex with a man, in a situation of dubious consent on the player character’s part.

Lanque’s theme I’m sure I recognise from Homestuck proper, though I’d have to do some digging to see what it’s reprising. It’s called “yall know i just do the music right” - another James Roach piece.

It begins with us getting a call from Lynera. The narration somewhat uncharitably says “that nutty bitch is exactly the sort of destabilizing influence your life needs right now”. In a positive, not sarcastic way at least.

She wants to start making friends herself...

The narration is really in a hurry this time around. We reprise the party background from the last episode.

I appreciate the kind of breezy enthusiastic chaos in V’s writing.

We’re in a cape, bra and fishnets. A perfect outfit for the final chapter.

Wow the narration just isn’t giving a shit anymore. Final chapter striking hard.

We try to figure out whose hive we’re going to... and oh shit, it’s Ardata’s. First troll we ever met, as well. The party is described as a “frathouse rager” - which, Lynera acknowledges, is not her scene at all.

Is the narrator already drunk? Or is Ardata fucking with our head again?

Ardata declares that it’s a ‘kiiickback’ for all the ‘world’s fiiinest iiinfluencers’... and neither me nor Lynera is invited. Apparently she heard about it from someone called Lanque, who’s also not invited.

What is up with this narration? It’s coming across like a standup performance.

At that point, Ardata drops a... nsfw warning on us.

I didn’t actually realise this volume had an ‘accompanying mature content description’. I think what I’m gonna do is... obviously I’m gonna play the chapter, but I will put specific content warnings before sections of the post that have potentially triggering content, and if there are explicit images, I will pixellise out any explicit bits before I embed them in the post. spoiler alert: this ain’t exactly Ladykiller in a Bind there.

That’s a hell of a warning, huh. Especially given the previous armpit-licking chapter by ‘V’ was about at the absolute limit of sfw horny anyway. Fuck knows what they’re about to inflict on us now.

Also: James Roach’s track name is starting to make sense. Apparently he wants to distance himself from this episode, semi-ironically at any rate? God, what are we in for.

So, presumably the ‘oof, you’re too scared’ link takes us to an abrupt end to the chapter, we’ll check it later. Let’s go on in.

Quick soapbox: as much as I hate the kind of shallow analysis that throws around ‘problematic’ as a summary judgement of a work - nah actually, you can’t just disclaim shit under ‘challenging or controversial material’. By the same token that you can write whatever shit you want in a Homestuck computer game, critics - and random nerds on the internet, which is to say, the entire audience of this game - can discuss it however we find appropriate.

Nevertheless, you haven’t actually done anything worse than make me lick a clown’s armpit so far, and we can approach challenging themes in a way that says something meaningful and important, so let’s see what you have for us, V. To be honest I’m expecting some kind of portrayal of sexual violence given all the disclaimers, but who knows.

The party sounds like hell.

To Lynera, who remains glued to our arm, it’s ‘more than she was expecting’. But before we can leave, Lanque arrives.

I was wrong about what I thought was Lanque’s theme. Lanque’s theme is a slow, mournful saxophone piece. Maybe the music before was Lynera’s theme, and I just forgot how it went?

The narration mentions a ‘curious red stain’ on Lanque’s shirt. They’re obviously going for a whole ‘sexy vampire’ type thing with him. Maybe a Twilight parody, with Lynera in the Bella role? That would be a little dated, though.

I vaguely recall that it was said at some point that the jadebloods were all women. Which makes me suspect that Lanque is a trans guy, and this story is gonna touch on themes of transness and such. That could be something I completely confabulated, though. I’d check the wiki but no doubt it’s been updated by now, and I don’t want to spoil myself on this arc.

He seems to be in a flirty mood. Not sure how old either of these two are supposed to be.

Oh yeah. The knifemeter actually hasn’t shown up in this episode so far. He expresses surprise that Lynera has friends. Or at least, friend.

Eesh, this guy gonna be another Zebruh?

Lanque asks about us and we blather about being an alien, and also general disaster.

It’s really hard to get the sense that this is a loud party where we can barely hear each other over the noise, given both the narration and the soft jazz background.

He says something about not biting unless asked. So if it’s not already obvious... either a genuine rainbow drinker (hey, if Kanaya could do it at age 6 sweeps/13 years, no doubt he could at age... whatever age he is!), or someone who likes pretending to be one.

Anyway, our protag is apparently not overcome by friendship lust at this point, and tries to play wingman and put Lanque’s attention back onto Lynera. This... doesn’t go as well as expected.

(2.43 sweeps, that is - about 5.3 years)

Hmm, why would that be? This could be like, a transphobia thing? Do trolls have that? I’d say of course they fucking do, but apparently they don’t have homophobia, and their gender system... well who the hell knows how troll gender works, having all the signifiers of gender in the real world but none of the material consequences.

Anyway, Lanque calls Lynera a ‘nasty little bitch’. But then immediately says he’s not one to criticise.

So... maybe it’s not a trans thing? We’ll see. Lanque continues being a huge dick, suggesting that Lynera is interested in him because the ordeals are coming, and she wants to take the chance to fuck before they roll around.

Lynera is kind of... not surprisingly pretty hurt.

The narrator challenges Lanque on his rudeness without a choice.

Ah, the classic ‘she deserved it’ defence. Second only to the ‘it didn’t happen, but if it had, they would have deserved it anyway’ defence.

The protag demands to know why Lanque even invited Lynera if it was just to have such a huge go at her like that. Lanque’s explanation is... kind of unclear.

It’s not like she got much of a chance to defend herself there. So far my impression of Lanque is: this guy’s a huge cock. Or possibly a huge nook. Idk what the troll equivalent is.

The narrator decides to ‘Switzerland out of’ this conversation. They say this out loud, of course. Who needs an internal monologue, these days?

Lanque invites us to stay - we’re ‘much more interesting’ anyway. Eesh. I’m inclined to look for a ‘fuck right off where’s my pepper spray’ button, but that’s just me being a lesbian I guess. (Pepper spray is also illegal in the UK. I’m pretty sure.)

Yeah, you said it. He says he’s got ‘less time to waste than most’.

Bryn sees a meta joke about the narrative structure, Bryn clicks the screenshot button.

(Speak of the screenshot button, I had to rebind it to make it easier to paste the screenshots, you see in Ubuntu-- oh, you’re asleep?)

Anyway I kind of expected a choice around about now, but no, we barrel forwards, and end up dancing with Lanque. He takes our hand and leads us to another part of the house.

At that point, Elwurd shows up! I wonder how much of the cast is set to make an appearance in this chapter. If it’s all 35 trolls we’ve encountered so far, this is gonna be a long chapter!

Elwurd seems to be Lanque’s dealer. Not sure what drug she’s selling exactly. Apparently ‘you a drone?’ is the Alternian equivalent of ‘you a cop?’...

Anyway, Lanque buys the drug, and peer pressures us to take it. We’re like, nuh-uh.

We did not, we tell him, ask him to buy drugs for us.

I’m proud of you, protagonist. At the beginning of this story you’d have done anything to get a friend.

At that point, Diemen makes his reappearance. We really are going through the entire cast here, huh.

Yeah. That one’s just too obvious.

Anyway, undrugged, we get to dancing.

God, V, we get it, you want to fuck trolls. The narrator goes with it, though.

I find it kind of interesting how, like... our protagonist in the beginning and ending sketches is pretty much like, a marshmallow, indicating that they represent some kind of AFGNCAAP. But over time, little assumptions leak in. For example, we’re some kind of American nerd - our education system included a ‘high school’, and we had the option to learn Spanish there. We are relatively physically unfit. The wordplay suggests we know English.

Sometimes it’s deliberate - clearly someone made a choice to make it so that our protagonist has opinions about rap and knows a bit about professional wrestling, to suit the themes of the chapters. Those aren’t like, presumed traits assumed of the Homestuck audience, but things that kind of carve out a specific identity

So yeah... we’ve already had the whole ‘cheese person’ thing in Fozzer’s route, and here they’re straight up declaring the protag has pale skin. (Which doesn’t mean they’re white, necessarily, but they are apparently not Black, say.) I think that’s kind of a shame - a wasted opportunity.

Homestuck has already traded a lot on the ambiguity of its characters, which the fandom tends to read as implicitly white, except for like, a relatively small corner. This came to a head at points - most infamously the ‘CAUCASIAN’ controversy during the trickster mode phase, when Hussie ‘jokingly’ declared that his previously ambiguous characters (shaded pure #FFFFFF white, implying a ‘blank slate’) were ‘CAUCASIAN’ in bright flashing letters - at least while in trickster mode. After backlash, the panels were left as-is, but ‘CAUCASIAN’ was replaced with ‘PEACHY’.

Friendsim could have been an opportunity to improve the record a bit, especially as its narrative explicitly addresses many questions of societal oppression and occasionally makes explicit analogues to racism. But... they didn’t do that. Alas.

Anyway, moving on.

Apparently I’m very predictable because the very next panel addresses this exact line of thought.

I feel like this and the ‘not racist’ joke in the previous arc by ‘V’ are kind of... well I don’t know anything about ‘V’, and what they might be intending by these jokes. Here, it’s kind of parodying the whole thing in Homestuck rather explicitly... but whether it’s like, challenging it? There’s definitely a reading that’s like... pointed sarcasm, challenging the source material’s noncommital laziness.

Hey art interpretation is hard lol.

V’s writing is unusually striking, in a way I’m not quite sure how I feel about. I will think more about that once we’ve fully explored this chapter.

Things are getting pretty meta. He comments how we’re paper thin and he can see our blood. We’re like, ok, so you’re a vampire then?

This is the kind of thing! Writing that’s like... on the edge of like, telling a story and just directly talking to the reader, pushing us to engage with ambiguity and metaphor.

To release the tension a bit, the narrator does a ‘sexy dance’.

Anyway, we don’t get to find out what Lanque really thinks of our sexy dancing. Because at that point, Bronya shows up. Lanque decides it’s time to go.

...to a respiteblock, where else. So much for this being a friendsim and pointedly not a dating sim.

We are, it seems, safe. Lanque politely asks if we’d like to kiss. There’s another reminder that this is a very nsfw not for kids scene about to go down in this room right now.

So that’s apparently going to be our decision here. FUCK THE BOY/DO NOT FUCK THE BOY

...no, that’s not our choice. We’re kissing the boy no matter what. This is also portrayed in first person view, because consistency is important!

Apparently our blood tastes ‘sharp and dangerous - like a weapon’.

I feel like this is about to answer a whole fucking lot of fandom questions. At least as far as Hiveswap canon is concerned - arguably a separate entity to Homestuck canon, though obviously, like an expanded universe, designed to be read almost exclusively with intertextuality in mind. An elaboration, I guess.

There’s more like... hey check it out we’re going NSFW. Still nothing like a choice button yet.

One thing I find interesting is like... while this game is packed with lesbians of various stripes, and evidently many of the writers are gay or bi women, all the trolls who get really horny scenes have been boys. (Two of them written by ‘V’, admittedly). Mallek first with his shirtless scene, then much more recently Marvus, and now Lanque.

Also look at these guys. Pretty sure V has a type.

Anyway, the narrator makes the mistake of saying something vaguely derogatory about buckets.

Not sure like... what he finds derogatory there. Mentioning ‘buckets’ vs ‘pails’ (might be a distinction between reproductive and non-reproductive sex?), or saying that he doesn’t seem to have one? He says it’d be his first time.

With an alien, huh. *xenofucker fist bump*

Instead of a sex scene, we get a lore drop.

Once he gets shipped offworld, there will be no more ‘sneaking out of the caverns’. To Lanque, this effectively means his life will be over. This is his last chance to fuck!

A little overdramatic, dude!

Before we can get to it, Bronya interrupts.

So we get interrupted by Bronya. This is finally our choice point. Do we dob Lanque in, or do we fuck?

Regarding ‘problematic’, the main thing I’m seeing is like... Lanque is, at best, barely of age. Since he’s talking about getting shipped offworld soon, I’m guessing he’s close to troll adulthood. In terms of real-world narratives, this is taking on the general tone of ‘college story’ - complete with allusion to a frat party.

I think like... I’m going to read this whole visual novel, and write what I think about it. However, I can also totally understand why you would not want to read this kind of ‘first time’ story. So I’m going to leave that branch to a readmore at the end of the post. Above the cut, to give you all some kind of ending, and we’ll go down the ‘call his mum’ branch. Lol it’s not nearly as nsfw as they make it sound, there’s nothing that really need readmores, nevermind this lol.

Bronya busts the door open and tells him to get dressed immediately.

Lanque gets his mean streak back on, and goes in on Bronya now.

He does love the word ‘bitch’, does Lanque. He tells her she’s not actually his lusus (oh yeah, lusii... it’s been a while since we’ve seen one honestly. The last one was the goat.) She slaps him. He pretends like it was a sex thing.

This is not pretty. Bronya launches into a lecture on Lanque: sneaking out, being an ass to Lynera, and...

Yeah, maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get further involved.

Apparently he’s not deterred by the fact that we literally called Bronya up to get out of fucking him, and adds us on Chittr before he leaves.

So that’s an ending. Sweet look, protagonist.

But it’s not the ending ending. We get a final screen.

Sure, I want to understand. Is this going to be some kind of direct artist-to-reader commentary on what they were trying to accomplish with that chapter?

The text box turns white, and the font changes. I bet this is Doc Scratch. So no, probably not that. In fact, this segues straight into the epilogue. I think there are different versions of the epilogue depending how you approach the final chapter, or else we were supposed to play the other branch before Lanque, so for the sake of putting the epilogue at the end, I’ll save it for a future post. (I’ve already written it up.)

Now, the other Lanque branches. First of all, refusing at the NSFW notice.

So they poke fun at the reader for like, not accepting the NSFW notice. Uh-huh. You know that Steam doesn’t automatically give a mature content warning if you’ve set up your account that way right? Which I guess is my own fault lol.

Anyway, doing this leads to like... a totally different arc, and a totally different canon. Huh, I genuinely expected they’d like just end the story there.

It’s a cozy party now, apparently.

This version of Lanque is... different.

For one thing, he’s got a flower crown. And instead of soft sexy jazz, we have a pretty piano piece. He says hi to Lynera and me.

Hmm. Not entirely un-hornified, then.

Lynera gushes wildly about us, recapping a whole bunch of plot.

It turns out, rather than taking drugs and having sex and other such risqué things, this party is a chill poetry reading.

So I realise this entire branch is just like, an extended joke at the reader. Look how un-edgy this is. We’re going to support our friends and read poetry.

In this one, instead of asking to kiss us, he asks to hold hands before we read poetry. And he says this is a poem about a past relationship, and it might be a bit raw.

We get Lanque’s poem, in full.

I was going to copy-paste the whole thing in, but it’s quite long, so let’s be uncool and respect copyright or whatever because my fingers were getting tired. It is quite good... addressing loss, and memory, and the lingering influence of a past relationship. It makes me wish I had ever developed the ability to appreciate and comment on poetry, because I feel like I just don’t have the vocabulary to comment on it, or what it might connect to, or anything else. The narration agrees: raw, emotional.

I imagine, though perhaps this is presumptuous, it is reflecting something quite real in the real life of ‘V’.

Lynera also gets the chance to read out a poem. She happens to have one on hand. It’s about Bronya, sure enough, and her loneliness and alienation.

Afterwards, she is self-deprecating.

This version of Lanque is kind and reassuring - the complete opposite of his persona in the sexy branch.

We leave with Lynera after hugging it out. Reading her poem, and being with other trolls in this way, seems to have really helped Lynera. There’s another pointed bit of defensiveness at potential critics.

Soapbox: This is the state of discourse, where the complex feelings we have in relation to fictional works must get flattened out into strict ‘rules’. A character can easily support lesbian and bi interpretations; it can be a relief to bi people and upsetting for lesbians when one of those possibilities is ruled out by having her express interest in a man (not that this, ultimately, rules out lesbian interpretations, since a person can of course be mistaken about their feelings).

To lesbians, it is perhaps likely more salient that many characters they identify with end up expressing attraction to men, and this can seem like yet another instance. To bi women, narratives about picking a ‘side’ are perhaps more likely to be salient, and it can be relief to have an explicitly bi character.

The only conclusion we can draw is that gender is a hellish system of punishment and exploitation, and we should seek to be kind to each other and also abolish it forthwith, write our own stories, and abolish the stranglehold that capital holds on all aspects of our lives including the symbolic media we use to understand the world.

All that said, this repetitive defensiveness about ‘problematic’ writing does kind of annoy me a bit, even if I can understand where it comes from. Let your work speak for itself.

Anyway, that’s enough huge essays (I say, falsely). Let’s finish out the branch.

“...right?”

This branch finishes out with a poke at the whole structure of the game so far - the good endings, bad endings, and so on. We’ve not made a friend, but we have made a stronger connecting with an existing one.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take that given the way ‘valid’ has become pretty much a joke word, if this is still an extended dig at the audience, but there we are.

That was a surprisingly long and rich branch for a first choice, which is kind of nice, actually.

If we click ‘no’ on ‘do you want to understand’...

We just get a game over screen with us sitting in our watchtower looking sad.

So now... it’s time for the nsfw section discussed above. Except... it’s a total fakeout.

First of all, we get an implication that it’s not his first time at all. Anyway, then we get to it. Which is to say, we get a fade to silly anime joke. God, this is like those old 4chan stories where they’d set you up for a sex scene and then rickroll you or something.

We get a ‘dorito faced anime boy’ joke I guess?

Afterwards...

Lol.

Anyway, in this branch, he doesn’t add us on chittr. Lol.

So yeah we die of shame. Welp.

God I can’t believe I thought this would actually go there. Of course it would be a joke at the audience.

Looking back, well, you know, reading the metaphors: he’s a predatory guy and lied through his teeth to get into our pants. Obviously it’s not his first time; obviously he’s not about to bugger off to space and never have sex again T_T, obviously the shit he said was just to get us to fuck; this isn’t just cheesy narrative tropes but within the fiction him playing the protagonist in order to get us to fuck. Complete with the whole attempt to drug us, and make it very unambiguously rape. (Which no doubt Elwurd knew). He got us to explicitly consent before we did anything, but also did enough shady shit so as to make that ‘consent’ kind of questionable when viewed later.

Viewed in that light... what I originally thought was just someone writing a horny fantasy about a hot dominating guy who’s totally into you~ is actually like... a pretty sharp piece of writing about shit pulled by men. There were plenty of warning signs - the ‘objectifying’ way he looks at you, the way he attempts to drug you, etc. I would like to imagine that IRL, rather than taking it as a piece of fiction, I wouldn’t be vulnerable to the same tactics. (Well, obviously I wouldn’t from a guy, at any rate). But it’s kind of a nicely written piece to make you feel stupid and taken advantage of afterwards like... why the fuck did you go along with this.

Though given that this kind of thing is something that people like... actually go through, I feel like they could have warned for it better than ‘challenging and controversial material’. Yes, that might have robbed it of some of its power; but it would also mean that it wouldn’t trigger people who have trauma over this exact kind of thing.

So.

“V”.

Honestly, my strongest feeling about “V” is one of respect. Both their stories have been a weird blend of cheeky, challenging and playful, with some very astute elements and an enormous amount of energy and intensity. They’re prepared to fuck with the reader in ways both silly (lick the troll’s armpit!) and rather more serious (this whole arc), they fuck around with canonicity and narrative structure in creative ways... I wonder what else they’ve written?

There remains only these two clown twins, and the epilogue.

Barzum and Baizli

To finish out the set, we have another pair. The Alternian text says ‘The Soleil Twins’, so I guess that’s their surname. The twins are written by Kieran Miranda, who previously wrote Azdaja, Stelsa and Charun.

The story begins with day nearing, and the protagonist friendless. They get the idea to like... head over to relax with Skylla, but before they can, they run into a house.

A very haunted looking house.

An easy choice for us to begin. ‘No fucking way’ naturally skips this arc, right?

Nope, back at the house. We get another choice: leave left or right. I picked left. I doubt it matters.

Yep, that kind of house. We can’t escape.

After a struggle, we reach the door.

Inside, we immediately pass out with a sense of nausea. Lovely. This can only go well. We hear something like bugs skittering away.

The mansion does at least seem to be explorable. Unfortunately, the door leads to a portrait gallery full of clowns, which is not the most welcome place to end up.

Someone tunes one of the portraits. It turns out to be a TV. Dramatic piano chords come in.

Oh hey it’s some friends.

Their shtick is that the one on the right finishes the one on the left’s sentences, the one on the left speaks in all lower case, and the one on the right speaks in all caps.

They want us to find them. They’re very bored you see, and want to play a game. This is, I understand, an allusion to the Saw series of horror movies, in which I gather a person places people in buildings full of sadistic traps, monitored by various cameras and a small puppet with spiral cheeks. So I guess that’s us now.

We get our first real choice.

I think the door is too obvious. If there’s not another exit, we’ll have to take the door anyway - though that’s likely a different branch, realistically speaking.

We discover a hidden door. Behind it is... a hole in the ground.

I guess we have instant-death options later than usual in this chapter. Our final thought is about the terrible loss of our Chittr profile.

Well, that’s fine. Let’s see what happens if we go straight into the house instead of wandering around.

Approaching the house immediately just skips the wandering around; the text is the same. It was a fake choice. Skipping forward, let’s see what happens if we take the obvious door, not the hidden one.

As we move down the hallway, the lights come on and the walls start bleeding. Lovely. Glorious sense of interior decoration. Tip top.

Beyond the door, we end up in another dark room. Maybe this one will be more of a true CYOA, with death options in every room.

But no. Not immediately, anyway. Ropes come out of the ground and tie us up. The two trolls who were watching us make themselves known.

Carnivalish music kicks in. We finally get a clear view of our captors.

Baizli right (allcaps), Barzum left (lowercase). I’ll try to remember that.

The twins say some predictably sinister stuff about removing our intestines (acid tubes, in trollspeak). The narrator grumbles about once again being reduced to the status of ‘torture muppet’.

When we express a desire to leave, Barzum and Baizli swap both demeanour and capitalisation rule. Now Baizli looks sad, and speaks in lowercase, while Barzum is pissed and speaks in caps.

These two twins, in the tradition of creepy twins, seem to share one mind. Which means they can hardly prank each other! They need someone else.

They rev up a chainsaw and suddenly... we’re back in the same room we started.

Looks like we’ve had another bit of time fuckery from The Powers That Be. Compare Fozzer. The loops kick in, faster and faster. Glued. Buried alive.

Having read the epilogue, all I’ll say is that it seems like someone is trying very hard to push us onto a timeline that ‘works’.

There’s a joke about time loop movies which I don’t get because I haven’t seen very many time loop movies.

After ‘20 or so’ loops, we decide we’ve had enough. But we get a choice of what to do about it.

Let’s try ‘Fuck this.’ first.

This turns out to mean attempting to intimidate the twins instead of begging them to release us.

While they’re baffled by this display, we make a break for an air vent. Surprisingly, we make good our escape. There’s a mention of all our jogging training with Stelsa, which happened in a non-canonical timeline - there was a whole thing about it! - but fair enough. Guess that’s another thing that persists between timelines. Or maybe the protag just thinks they went jogging with Stelsa in this timeline.

We find we’ve missed a bunch of texts from Skylla while we were out, and plan to head over there. But alas... the space loop is still in effect.

We end up back at the house. Unable to escape from the pocket dimension, the branch ends...

So let’s try the other option: ‘remember who you are’.

Come, try to remember...

And that is, of course... FRIENDSHIP. This time, we have something to say to the clowns (after ensuring we haven’t pissed ourselves).

Not killing us is apparently a novel idea for the twins. Or rather, they didn’t plan to kill us - just cut us up a bit, unaware that we wouldn’t heal right back up. The protag corrects the misconception.

So now we’re teaching the creepy clown kids the meaning of friendship. Novel!

The lights come up and they put on a little circus show for us. Apparently this building is not their hive.

They show us various other dangerous-looking circus tricks with the torture/circus equipment. Ah, says the narrator, so risking their lives is these kids’ hobby.

It turns out these kids hatched from the same egg. They tell us they do in fact share a mind entirely - one mind, two bodies.

And at last we end up chilling out and sharing stories.

With this friendship established, we sense a shift of some kind. We take this as a sign that the door might have finally opened.

Not only is the door open, but the ‘pocket dimension’ has dissipated too. The power of friendship! ...or fulfilling some secret design of whoever created the pocket dimension. Mmm.

How touching.

There’s a fakeout victory jingle, which turns out to have been a prank. They explain that... the creepy blood seeping walls and so on were their ‘chucklevoodoos’, but as for the time loop... Not them at all.

“Do you want to understand?” asks the prompt again. Time... for the epilogue.

[drsallygrissom]

Why We Love ars PARADOXICA

Back in 2016, the fandom made a list of 43 reasons why we love ars PARADOXICA in honor of the 73rd anniversary of Dr. Sally Grissom’s first audio diary on October 29, 1943. When I learned that the podcast was going to end after its third season, I decided to pull together another list that was double the length of the first. 

However, the fandom was so passionate that we blew past our goal, and reached triple the length of the original list!

Without further ado, here are the 129 of the reasons why we love ars PARADOXICA:

Helen Partridge, my beautiful, beautiful wife

I just love Kristen’s laugh and it never fails to make me smile.

Mischa’s outros! “Brought to you by the internet:” 

The TimeSwimmers episode. That whole thing was a masterpiece

Sally and Nikhil's friendship

Petra, my sassy troubled daughter

The effort that went into making such a truly unique and ambitious take on time travel-based fiction

Sally, my favorite disaster ace

All of the characters are just so beautifully flawed in their own ways and are so well depicted it’s hard to pick a favorite

Every episode makes me feel SO MANY EMOTIONS

The sound effects are just so well done that I feel like I’m right there with the characters

The subtle yet mind blowing foreshadowing

The way it endlessly inspires me to create fan content

The decryption team, who I don't understand yet love to watch unravel codes

The ability to make us both love and hate a character at the same time as much as we do Esther Roberts.

Jack Wyatt

The sass, and in general wonderful interactions with the fan base on social media.

The schoolyard brawl!

Very obviously not being afraid to have fun with ads/sponsored content.

Actually making me want to listen to the version with ads even though I'm a patron

Buttsticks…

Plasticity

The outro music is simple but so, so good

Lemon drops and Limestone

My curiosity about what Esther wrote in the letter

Golden boi and his devils lettuce

With three episodes left it felt like there was so much story left to be told and such little time to tell it

The generosity to keep us entertained between seasons

The subtle symbolism of Esther's mind being represented with card games

The heart-wrenching ups and downs of Esther and Bridget's relationship

Esther and Sally’s lesbian/aroace solidarity

Bridget, my mom

Sally's #relatable ace anxieties and Nikhil's comforting response

The super cool theme song by Mischa "i do not play piano" Stanton which they apparently HEARD IN A DREAM?!

The found footage pieces between scenes

The amount of detail put into it, and being able to notice new things on each relisten

Easter eggs like QDAM

Seemingly infinite pop culture references

The commitment to posting a transcript for each episode

The GOLDEN BOY smokes the devil’s lettuce?!

The Super LUminal Recursive Processor

All of the machine code names really

Mischa’s wonderful sound design that makes me feel like I’m actually in the location the episode takes place at and made me realize how wonderful podcasts could truly be.

Sally Grissom. The wonderful disaster ace and the first ace rep I ever found.

The sound design of the show, especially the tapes adding to world building, all those clunky sounds.

Sally Grissom, ‘I wonder what would happen if I...’, Mad scientist.

This show has the most complex, humanistic portrayal of aromanticism I’ve ever experienced

I appreciate the aP creators’ dedication to nuanced portrayal of and discussion about violence

All of Curses, of fucking course

Keeping the humanity of people who do bad thing while not trying to justify them

Their commitment to “all killer, no filler”

Reminding me that science is cool, dammit!

Petra is a lovely and nuanced, complex character that I adore with my whole heart and soul.

[BLUE BLUE 09 13 18 15 26 08 04 12 20 24 05 18 14 09 17 04 05 12 01 05 The weather in Tulsa today is: Drought. At the tone, the time will be: 5400 hours]

The creators are so so fantastic and fun! I love that they interact with fans.

Sally is the disaster stoner physicist we all need in our lives. also she’s relatable as hell

The show is not afraid to tackle issues like race, gender, or sexuality and it doesn’t overstep its bounds.

The codes are so fun (even if I don’t understand all of them)!

I love how excited scientists get when they’ve discovered something-it feels like real scientists I know

How Bridget criticizes Sally for making puns under pressure even though she does exactly the same thing

The way characters interact with one another, and grow, and learn, and develop is so fascinating and beautiful.

Plasticity might have been the first podcast episode to make me cry.

I love Sally “I only know anecdotal biology and chemistry” Grissom and how her science knowledge actually makes sense??

As a huge huge physics nerd and aspiring computer scientist, I love love love the way Sally talks about science! It’s like Kristen DiMercurio is narrating my inner monologue!

The thrill of trying to keep up with the diverging timelines

☭S̶͜͞ ̀͜҉̀͢Í͠ ̸̸͟҉X̵͘͢ ̢T̷̶͞ ̢̨͟Y̧̛͘ ̨͟͢ ̴̨͜҉S̷̶͢ ̴͝Í͢͟ ҉̢̛͝X̕͝͝☭

The consideration and dedication shown in not only writing an aro-spec ace character, but addressing issues and worries often faced by people in that community.

The mind-boggling task of trying to piece together everything that’s happening when for all we know every scene could be from a different, rewritten version of the timeline.

Anthony Partridge, the most melodramatic math nerd to ever play Tetris in a bubble outside of time.

The optimism of the show and ultimate faith it shows in both science and humanity, despite all the characters’ failings.

Sally giggling over meeting her future self both times that it happens

Sally’s book (and her attempts at pronouncing NaNoWriMo).

Maggie Elbourne, because as much as I love all my the more morally ambiguous scientists it’s nice to see one who actually stood up to ODAR’s shenanigans almost as soon as she figured out what was up.

Everything about the road trip.

TimeSwimmers was already mentioned but specifically TIME DOLPHIN RYAN LOCHTE

Characters that grow and change and learn

The 77s getting name dropped in Plasticity, way before we knew who they were

Sally calling out the English language for being problematic (“oh, you mean like morally upstanding?”)

“The weather in Tulsa today is: uhh I dunno”.

It has been quite possibly the most human exploration of time travel I’ve ever seen/heard.

Reaching a happy ending I couldn't even imagine

The weather in Tulsa is: sppoookyyy

The ever changing ways the codes were presented in season 3. Giving the feeling that the anchorites were both on the run and broadcasting these messages from different points in time.

Sally’s ace representation is the best I’ve ever seen and it makes me feel so #valid.

The sound design and detail in the writing make me feel like I’m truly immersed in the story, and it feels so authentic. Are you sure you don’t secretly have a timepiece?

The characters are people I CARE about and wanted to cry over during work all the time because they’re all wonderful and I love them.

The integration of the different storylines into Sally’s, especially Petra’s, is amazing.

Petra’s characterization was really well done, and it made me really care about her, even as she was trying to more or less destroy the world.

Out-of-date pop culture references that fit seamlessly into the dialogue despite being from literally a different time period and most of the characters having no idea what it meant. They just added an extra level of hilarious.

You may not actually know a single thing about tachyon fields and gluon walls (are they even real?) but you could definitely convince me that you know exactly what you’re talking about (or at least that Sally Grissom does).

The enDING WAS JUST REALLY WELL DONE AND I LOVE A GOOD CIRCULAR ENDING AND IT MADE ME GENUINELY GO TO THE BATHROOM DURING WORK TO CRY BECAUSE IT WAS JUST BEAUTIFUL.

The fact that the whole show is wrapped up by the revelation that the entire show is actually Nikhil and Mateo curling up with board games and snacks trying to form a story out of these tapes, patching together timelines to make it all cohesive, it just feels very right.

This story fits the medium so well, and so the fact that we don’t learn that Whickman has an EYEPATCH is absolutely wild but also wonderful because as soon as I heard that I knew that that was how it belonged, like of course he has an eyepatch, that’s a very Chet thing to have.

The ending was so perfectly, painfully beautiful. It was the ending we needed but never would have imagined.

Petra’s and Sally’s relationship being so complex and real.

Nikhil and Mateo using the archive to create the framing device for the whole podcast.

The sound the timepiece makes.

The final destruction of the timepiece.

Putting time travel in a Cold War setting makes perfect sense, and they go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

Did anyone mention Helen Partridge as a character? How beautifully she was set up and the fact that she pursued her own her life, and also, how BEAUTIFULLY Susanna Kavee can sing? Because damn.

I just. Really love this show. And everyone involved. So much.

The child characters were really well done-both the actors and the writing felt real.

To me, the show feels a bit like one of those camp friendship bracelets everyone used to make, with all these colors and threads--all of the timelines, woven together, messy but beautiful.

TEETRIS

Grissom’s Gizmo Gals!

Mateo’s non-stop flirting, even in the worst of situations

Sally “It’s Dr Grissom”ed HERSELF.

The way both the story and the characters reflect a complex view on the world with people making horrible decisions and horrible things happening to them, and yet always maintaining a positive outlook, offering the possibility of change and improvement.

The top-notch voice acting from everyone involved, helping to create the wonderful characters we all love.

Sally finger-gunning her way out of a conversation with a pun about a friend almost killing her.

All the minisodes!!

Any time Bridget, Nikhil or Lou acts like they want to adopt Petra

The series ending with two characters who had been at odds coming together

The characterization of the different Petras, because they all seem like different people even though  in fact they are not (and Sylvia deciding she doesn't want to follow the legacy of Petras)

How Kristen can play 2 of the same character and make them sound different (how does she do that???)

Anthony’s will to save everyone, sacrificing himself, when the world didn't do anything good for him…

... and the constant struggle to save his friends (like when he was literally the only one aware of the Anchorites and the way their plan could have ended)

The way the show can go from time travel shenanigans to heartfelt character moments is a real testament to the talent of the writing team.

The Vegas episode, which I listened to after the finale and cried, because they were so happy and naive and everything wasn’t messy and bad and complicated.

The way gun violence is handled by the creators with respect and care

The way PTSD and mental health is handled (through Sally) is beautiful and respectful.

Partridge being named after a bird and living out his life in a cage. YOU GUYS ARE MEAN

Susanna Kavee’s absolutely amazing singing and Tau Zaman’s lyrics are an absolutely combination.

The ceaseless, unwavering commitment to puns

I love how important their friendships are to the characters (well, most of them anyways).

Sally’s conversation with Nikhil in season 3 reflects a lot of common anxieties of aromantic people, and his understanding responses

The entirety of the trial episode, which just really sort of showed the full extent of how terrible the Red Scare was by putting Esther, a Jewish woman, through it, and just shows you how defamed people in that time were.

In so many of the fictional and non-fictional representations of history, marginalized people have diminished, distorted, and stereotypical roles-but not in ars PARADOXICA. Thank you for making so many people feel seen.

All the amazing writers who started it all. 💜

Here are the signatures of some of the fans who contributed: 

Signatures

Lindsay (ioniluna/drsallygrissom)

Khanan Abayev

SJ (your friendly neighborhood slauthor)

Dave (mondas-mania)

Noah (kindadisappointed)

Sana (i-am-delta-s)

Tina (espressonist)

Meaghan (lafgl)

Katherine (Rubywolfsbane)

Artimis (jp-blindperson/ap-blindperson)

Luke (martianboyy)

Ellie (joan-and-jane-and-esther-roberts/shewrites)

Bridge (cornerandchair)

Lem (aceparadoxica)

Esme (starsparadoxica)

Glory (mercutiglo)

Carly (guardianbob)

Emese (mse)

Ben (Q)

Special thanks to the ars PARADOXICA discord for being so helpful! From the time it was just a dozen people with a spork in a shoebox, this community was a shining star that helped me through tough times. Thank you for your silliness, cleverness, and support.

Brought to you by the internet: It’s weird! It’s fun! It loves you very, very much!

[arofili]

twenty-seventmeme

so there was a disappointing lack of meme compilations last year so i took it upon myself to chronicle the memes of 2017. in roughly chronological order of when i realized ‘oh shit that’s a meme i should put that on my list’, & with minimal commentary of my own opinions. enjoy my interpretation of a bunch of visual jokes translated to text

posted 12/28/17

hollyweed / changing the hollywood sign to say other weird shit

that gif of christian bale and kermit nodding to each other in solemn agreement

punching richard spencer in the face / punching nazis

that comic where it goes "no fear / [something weird] / one fear"

my name is cow, i lik the bred

pineapple on pizza

cash me outside how bout dat

lazytown

you can’t [bad thing] if you [poor decision] (w/ the pic of the guy tapping his forehead)

nintendo logo on things that aren’t nintendo products

the trend of “let’s make this a meme”

lemony snicket narrating things

wrong name at the oscars

that reaction gif of the white guy who blinks like he doesn’t know why this shit is happening like ‘bitch what did u say’

what in tarnation / cowboy hat snapchat filter

student athlete meme

the drake meme of him dancing weird next to one pic of something you’re into & then another pic next to something you are into

expanding brain

roses are red poem, but the last two lines are replaced by an image that calls to mind a reference/another meme that rhymes in the reader’s head (i fucking hated this one, idk if i was doing it wrong but the pic always fucked up the rhythm of the poem)

newsflash asshole, [x] has been [y] the entire goddamn time!

begone THOT

Jughead’s “I’m weird, look at my hat” monologue from that shitty tv show

“guess I’ll die”

John C. Miller, CEO and President of the Denny’s Corporation, is a capitalist running dog and his wealth must be seized and redistributed to the people

‘playlist for my crush’ but it’s actually some quote from something

guy holding the 'he is gay' signs next to pics of some character op headcanons as gay

the ‘normal people/creative people’ comic

thAT tHINg whERE yoU caPITalIZE partS oF thE wOrds WIth thE SpONGEbOB PiC

griffin mcelroy with a finger over his lips and a sign that says “...you know ;)”

and i feel [emotion] in the Chili’s tonight

cracking a cold one open with the boys

while you were [x], i studied the blade

the floor is [x] ; followed by a picture of someone either floating above or lying on the floor depending on whether [x] is positive or negative

[cryptid] is real [pronoun] [performed sexual act or commenced illegal activity] behind a [fast food restaurant or regional liminal store] at [very late or very early hour of the day] (phrasing credit @peachdoxie​)

‘how to talk to people’ comic

cat pics w/ russian captions

firefly by owl city resurging (for some reason??? i mean like, a good song, but that brings me back to 2009)

also specifically “you would not believe your [body part] if [something rhyming with above body part]”

9 pics of ppl w/ the words 'thank / you / for / something / not you / something / something / something / something' ; the 'not you' is over a pic of something that doesn't quite fit in with the rest

“some [x]... that are [y]... are worse”

“self care is...” & its cousin “gay culture is...”

me talking about myself: ▶ 🔘 ──────── 0:00:04 me talking about [x]: ▶ 🔘 ──────── 8:51:03

[x] do not interact (i think these started out serious but got used as a meme?? not sure)

Animal/Pokemon/Cute creature falling into misfortune and someone responding with the screaming dude from Breaking Bad (phrasing credit @enecoo)

“right in front of my salad?”

pie graph that’s like “I’m [x]” and “I’m [x] but in blue”

that pic of the guy looking at a girls ass while his presumed girlfriend looks on in horror w/ labels over each person to make it funny

whomst’ve / ridiculously long contractions

oh worm?

cursive font

hewwo

then PERISH

taylor swift’s new song / ‘sorry the old [x] can't come to the phone...why? because she's dead’

Who would win? [something that seems like it should win] [something ridiculous that is implied to win]

griffin mcelroy holding a piece of of paper that says “i don’t know what [x] is and at this point i’m too afraid to ask”

Well first of all, [x], so jot that down

jock/prep/goth/nerd chart

clowns as pets (??? this was a WEIRD one)

we are [x] first and people second

you’ve heard of elf on the shelf, now get ready for [image that brings a phrase to mind with a similar rhythm/rhyme scheme as elf on the shelf]

meme sauce

screaming seagull

horses. just in general

distinguished/functional/disaster gay/bi/lesbian chart

[kid characters] in the car with [parental figure character 1]: McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s! [parental figure character 1]: There's food at home [kid characters]: I hate this fucking family .... [kid characters] in the car with [parental figure character 2]: McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s! [parental figure character 2]: (pulls into drive through) [kid characters]: (cheering) [parental figure character 2]: One black coffee please .... [kid characters] in the car with [parental figure character 3]: McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s! [parental figure character 3]: McDonald’s! McDonald’s! McDonald’s! 

“she’s [x]” “who?” “the girl reading this”

why weren’t you at elf practice????

you know i had to do it to em (i never saw this one but everyone was talking about it)

that fucking zootopia comic

asking for bitcoin

dave strider for senate (he lives in my fucking state i could fucking vote for him holy shit. @ my fellow washingtonians DO NOT JUST VOTE FOR HIM AS A JOKE PLEASE BE SERIOUS ABOUT VOTING AND ONLY VOTE FOR HIM IF YOU REALLY SUPPORT HIM)

if you start playing [song] at 11:[xx]:[xx] on New Year's Eve, [climactic part of the song] will play at exactly midnight. start 2018 right!

"[character] is [x]" i say into the mic ‪the crowd boos, yelling at me to get off the stage. i begin to walk off in shame when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room. ‪"they’re right” they say. i look for the owner of the voice. there in the 6th row stands: [person with authority over the character].

[analogscum]

BLOODY MOON (1981, d. Jess Franco)

You can lobby a lot of criticisms at Jess Franco, and I say that as a fan of his films. Detractors have labeled him a pornographer, a misogynist, a con man, and the devil incarnate. However, when you consider the man behind the work, I can’t help but admire his integrity. Franco could’ve easily coasted his entire career, doing the sort of weirdo Hammer knock-offs that he first made his name with. But he left it all behind, moving to France to escape the censorship of his native Spain, while also foregoing the cushy budgets and box office grosses that he had enjoyed. Yes, he gave this all up to make twisted tales of bondage nuns and lesbian vampires full of gratuitous nudity and S&M, often inspired by his obsession with the works of the Marquis de Sade, which may not strike you as all that noble. But Franco’s dedication to his craft above all else embodies what I love about cult cinema: as I discussed in the Hard Rock Zombies entry, these movies were made by people who stuck to their artistic guns, no matter how noncommercial they were. Above all else, Jess Franco cared about making Jess Franco films. At least for awhile.

Even without knowing the behind the scenes story of today’s film, 1981’s Bloody Moon, you can probably tell just by watching it that this was a money for hire job. Enticed by Wolf Hartwig and Erich Tomek, a pair of German producers with some lofty promises and bucketloads of cash — which were probably very enticing at the time, given the fact that he and his first wife, Nicole Guettard, had just divorced — Franco gave in to the zeitgeist, signing on to craft an American-style teen slasher film for the German marketplace, if you can imagine such a thing. However, it didn’t quite work out that way. To watch Bloody Moon is to watch an idiosyncratic auteur thumb his nose at a genre that he obviously sees as hopelessly formulaic, while also injecting a heaping dose of breathy Eurosleaze into the proceedings, almost as if he can’t help it. In other words, Franco gonna Franco.

We open on, what else, a disco dancing party. Miguel, a Klaus Kinski-looking creepoid with a huge facial scar that resembles fried chicken, is looking at his sister all weird. His sister, Manuela, is like, yo don’t look at me like that, I’m your sister, so yeah, the movie goes THERE immediately. Bummed out over being rejected by his sister, Miguel steals a Mickey Mouse mask and starts to mack on a lady who’s not a blood relative. She invites him back to her bungalow for some horizontal bedroom dancing, but when she takes off his Mickey Mouse mask, she’s, shall we say, less than enthused about Miguel’s fried chicken face. Oh, and she thought that he was her boyfriend, so this is basically how that gag (with like twelve quotation marks around the word gag) from Revenge of the Nerds would turn out in real life. Miguel is also, shall we say, less than enthused by this young lady’s screaming, so he stabs her a bunch of times with a pair of scissors. Glad to see we’ve come so far in terms of dealing with toxic masculinity!

Cut to: five years later. A doctor, played by Jess Franco himself, is like, hey Manuela, your brother is way less murder crazy now, so I’m going to release him into your care, just make sure he’s spared from any sort of excitement, like the constant temptation of having nubile young co-eds around to murder, anyway, byeeeee! Well, oopsies, because as it turns out, Miguel and Manuela live with their invalid billionaire aunt, who leases her land out to an organization called the International Youth Club Boarding School for Languages (you graduate when you’re able to say the name of the school without getting tripped up), which is crawling with gorgeous buh-buh-buh-baaaaaabes who are always dancing sexily and lounging topless around the pool when they’re not learning Spanish for like 5 minutes a day. Great. Things nearly go to hell immediately when, on the train home, Miguel becomes fixated on a young lady named Angela, and when Manuela sees a silk scarf stuck in the window, she somehow thinks that Miguel pushed her out of the train while her back was turned for two seconds. But then Angela gets up, and explains, to these two total strangers, that she had just dropped something on the floor and was bending down to pick it up. This is going somewhere. Cue the next paragraph!

Easily the biggest problem with this movie is the dialogue. This is the rare movie that manages to both show AND tell at the same time, as if we the audience were complete dummies. Characters are constantly talking about their relationships to one another, or narrating events that just happened seconds ago. And the dubbing in this movie…good gravy. Every character talks almost nonstop, no matter what the situation, whether they’re together or alone, in these breathless, dramatically overwrought monologues, delivered at a furious clip, full of the most flowery language. It sounds as though the movie was dubbed by some alien computer technology whose language database consisted of nothing but quotes from John Waters movies.

So as it turns out, Angela is heading to the language school to join her friends in sexy hijinks, but whoops, she has to live in the bungalow where Miguel went all scissor-happy back in the day. And gosh, wouldn’t you know it, but as soon as Miguel makes the scene at this school again, people start turning up dead. Good news, though: this movie delivers on the kills. We get to see the mean old invalid aunt get burned alive in her bed, one of Angela’s friends gets stabbed in the back and the knife pokes out through her nipple, another friend is choked by some sort of like bear trap thing, and then there’s the coup de grace, when yet another friend is beheaded by a giant circular saw. Hell yeah. On the other hand, there’s a really cruel, unnecessary scene in which a snake is beheaded by a pair of garden shears. Leave the critters alone!

For whatever reason, no one believes Angela when she’s like yo all of my friends are being murdered, because she, uh, is reading a murder mystery novel, so it must be all in her imagination? It makes no sense, but then again Angela doesn’t exactly endear herself to us by running around all over creation having a nervous breakdown. I know they can’t all be Ellen Ripley, but cheese and crackers, cut the damsel in distress act, woman! Along the way, we hit all of the major slasher plot moments: the killer POV shots, the jumping cat fakeout scare, the last girl stumbling upon the intricately posed corpses of her friends, etc. You can practically feel Franco smirking each time a scene like this happens. This leads to a final act straight out of a giallo movie, full of crazy twists and double crosses and escalating violence.

And then there is the soundtrack. One lofty promise made by Hartwig & Tomek to Franco was that Pink Floyd were slated to provide the film’s soundtrack. Yes, THAT Pink Floyd. Why Franco would believe that these German snake oil salesmen had corralled the biggest rock band in the world at the time to do a soundtrack for their no-budget horror flick I honestly don’t know. The music was eventually done by an Austrian gentleman named Gerhard Heinz, and Franco has gone on record saying it is his least favorite part of the film. However, I quite enjoy it. There is a great variety of motifs and sounds, from lounge exotica to demonic strings to Stockhausen style bleeps and bloops. And then of course, there is the film’s main theme, which does indeed sound like something that could’ve conceivably been an outtake from the Wish You Were Here sessions.

To wrap up my take on Bloody Moon, I wanna cede the floor to the master himself. Click here to watch an excellent, highly entertaining interview with Franco, shot in his home for Severin’s DVD release of the film from 2007. Beginning in charming fashion with second wife and collaborative muse Lina Romay grabbing her purse and leaving for the afternoon, Franco chain smokes about a thousand cigarettes and regals us with many an entertaining anecdote from behind the scenes of Bloody Moon, including the one promise the producers did keep to him (casting Olivia Pascal as Angela), the true identity of mysterious screenwriter “Rayo Casablanca” (co-producer Erich Tomek), the fact that he indeed did treat the film as more of a tongue-in-cheek venture (much to the producers’ chagrin), and the horrifying and inaccurate title the film was saddled with for its release in Spain (get ready for it…Raped College Girls. Yikes!) It’s sad to watch the interview knowing that Franco would only be with us for another five years. But that’s the thing with artists as prolific and driven as he was: it will take a lifetime to digest the twisted feast that is his body of work. We may have covered an outlier today, but perhaps it’s enough to get you started on exploring the sumptuous, problematic, bizarre, and wonderful world of Jess Franco.

[thimblings]

AHHH!! YES!! um. prepare your eyes, this is gonna be a long, rambly post because apparently i have A LOT OF FEELINGS and i can’t just list things like a normal person. and i also kept remembering podcasts and the list JUST KEPT GETTING LONGER. so. GIANT TEXT POST, i am so so so sorry. also, there are actually a few on this list that i’m not caught up with (some i’m like REALLY behind on) but i’m still gonna rec them... 

Welcome to Night Vale is the one i’m sure most ppl know of (although! if you have not read the novel, i’d HIGHLY recommend getting the audio book version. Cecil Baldwin does a great job of reading, and the “Voice of Night Vale” sections actually feature guest stars. i really want Cecil to do more audio book recordings omg). but!! along that same theme (radio show in a strange town w/ supernatural themes), King Falls AM is spectacular (ben and sammy are just! a freakin delight i love them). IMO it starts off feeling like it’s trying to be like WTNV, but within a few episodes it finds itself and becomes something unique (i say this bc i was initially put off by the first episode for that reason, and later came back and gave it another shot and enjoyed it immensely). it’s funny, it made me cry a few times, and i reaallyyy really really need to catch up with it. sammy stevens also has….just….a really nice voice hahaaaa The Truth is a great one. it’s mostly one-off short stories, but they’re generally really high quality and the plot of most of the episodes is really thought-provoking or just interesting in general (there’s one ep about aliens who find the Voyager craft with its recording that’s just really charming to me). the tagline “movies for your ears” is really apt. a lot of the stories veer on the side of unsettling/creepy, and it’s great if you like horror stories. i’d also recommend The Black Tapes and its sister podcast, Tanis. i love horror and unsettling mysteries, so these are right up my alley (Tanis is definitely more in the sci-fi/horror genre, but i like how it also digs into real unsolved cases and events). these are relatively well known, at least in that my friends who don’t listen to podcasts have listened to TBT at least. but they’re still great to check out if you haven’t. Limetown is really good, but ends on a cliffhanger and as far as i know there’s no immediate plans for a season 2? (i remember reading something about  them in talks for a TV show? which would be cool, but i’d miss the audio format of it). the first season is worth listening to, because it is really interesting and the audio production is pretty top notch - just be aware that a second season may or may not happen. what i’ve listened to of Hadron Gospel Hour so far is SUPER enjoyable, but i’ve only listened to the first few episodes.  arsPARADOXICA is FANTASTIC (at least the first season and a half that i’ve listened to). sally grissom is a great character and a brilliant and  scientist and i’m just really in love with her. this is a nice podcast because it has very capable women in it and the concept overall is really fascinating and handled really well. The Cleansed, set in a post-apocalyptic US, is well written and overall well produced (there’s one ep that still sits with me, because of a scene that truly unnerved me, just in the music and the atmosphere and the dialogue just ahh) and i’ve been meaning to pick it up again. In that same vein there’s We’re Alive, which is of the zombie variety. i’ve only juuuuust dipped into that one, but i’ve enjoyed what i’ve heard so far. this one has been around for a long time, like WTNV, so there’s a lot of episodes and a lot of content available. THE BRIGHT SESSIONS! i’m really really fond of this one and i just really love it, please listen. it’s about a psychologist who works with people who have “special” abilities, and all of the patients she helps are just so! precious!! i just love them a lot. Wooden Overcoats is a GREAT podcast that is pretty much the audio version of all my favorite British comedies that i watched growing up (think Fawlty Towers, Are You Being Served?, etc). it’s a comedy podcast about two competing funeral parlors (one of which is owned by the Funn’s). it’s exactly my kind of humor, and everyone involved just seems really great and kind. Antigone Funn has great lines and HONESTLY i’m surprised i haven’t seen more people quoting her and this podcast because it’s just! really great. and i don’t THINK this is a sister podcast to WO, but i always associate the two because they have some of the same people working on them but - Hector vs The Future is great. again, i haven’t listened to many episodes, but i’d still recommend it. it’s slightly different than other podcasts on this list because it’s actually filmed/recorded in front of a live audience. Homecoming is a short podcast (only 6 eps and the eps are pretty short) that i THINK is meant to be part of a larger, written universe (which i want to check out). it’s about soldiers with PTSD. this one actually has some well-known people involved - both Oscar Isaac and David Schwimmer voice characters and do a great job. The Darkest Night is another one with big names involved - Lee Pace is the narrator, which alone makes it worth checking out. overall, i’ve enjoyed it, but some episodes veer into areas i was kind of uncomfortable with (Tic-Tac-Toe is the one i’m stuck on and why i haven’t finished it yet ahh).  AND OK i really really really like space and space stories and space adventures, so my favs all have that in common hahaha Wolf359 is kind of like. okay, it’s about three people and an AI on a space station, light years away from earth - and the communications officer records his reports by pretending he’s doing a radio show. it starts off fun and humorous and things are great and then before you know it, you are going to be driving from Wichita Falls to Dallas and have to pull off on the side of the road because you’ve started sobbing while listening to it in your car. this podcast is fantastic, with a great cast of characters and strong women and DOUG EIFFEL and just. it’s very good. (i am ashamed to admit that i’m actually SUPER behind on this one. p much, i’m at the point where kepler and crew are on board but i’m only a few eps into this storyline). THIS is actually the podcast that really got me on board with the whole audio drama scene and just like….SCOURING the internet for more that would captivate me in the same way. This one is actually ending with this last season, which i think is a good thing? it’s very plot and character focused and i’m glad that they’re telling a complete story and HONESTLY! i’m just really excited to see where everyone involved goes from here. EOS_10!!!!! similar to Wolf359, it’s about a space station. there are a LOT more people there though (it’s more like an intergalactic hub). it’s about a doctor, his recovering alcoholic doctor-boss who he’s trying to help, a nurse who is spunky and maybe a bit psychotic, a hypochondriac alien-former-prince, and a “alleged” “terrorist” living in the cargo bay. idk this podcast just makes me incredibly happy. the writing is witty and fun, the characters are lovable and flawed, and i’ve listened to the whole two seasons at least 3 times because it just fills me with joy (my favorite dynamic always: assholes who are friends and they love each other but they also just….insult each other constantly. and somehow they save the world? but they’re still assholes). the universe of this show is really interesting without ever feeling like an info dump, and the unfolding mystery is very intriguing. WARNING: this show has been on hiatus for awhile, so there are only two seasons right now. but honestly??? it’s completely worth it. (obvi i’m hoping a third season will eventually come, but i enjoyed the first two enough that i love it regardless haha). and, finally, my current obsession. The Penumbra Podcast. it’s pretty much everything i’ve ever wanted in a series ever - detective film noir, but in space (on Mars), and literally everyone is queer. there’s a main story line (”Juno Steel and the [blank]”) and then one shots between each Juno story. the one shots are fantastic and really show the strength of the writers - sometimes being creepy, other times just being entertaining. The Juno Steel stories are the main running plot, done in the style of old detective radio shows - but also kind of twisting and upgrading the genre to be more inclusive and diverse. Juno Steel is a canonically non-binary and bisexual private eye (also canonically grumpy, sad most of the time, and a huge nerd who laughs at his own awful jokes in HIS OWN MONOLOGUES), and is the type of character you want to punch for being frustrating but who you also want to just…be…happy and protect from the universe. the writing in this is fantastic and beautiful and all of the characters are captivating. even one-off characters have a ton of personality and just add to the diversity/representation of the show. the voice work is top-notch and just!!! it’s so good!!!!! i have so many feelings!!!! (Juno hits close to home for me, with his self-esteem issues and depression and just…yeah, so i gushed about him there. i have a lot of feelings about the other characters but i’ve seriously rambled so much already so I WILL REFRAIN. also? gushing TOO much about a certain someone spoils the enjoyment of getting to know them at the same time Juno does) i REALLY enjoy audio drama-type podcasts so that’s mostly what i listen to. i’m also really into true crime and weird theories and occult stuff, but i’m particular about the podcasts i listen to for that. basically, i get attached to a specific host(s) and it’s hard for me to listen to anyone else talk about similar things haha. so as far as that goes, i love The Last Podcast on the Left (haha i get a bit nervous rec’ing this one because it’s really offensive, mostly in the early eps, and is def not for everyone but honestly!! i just love these boys a lot, and they discuss p much everything i’d ever be interested in ever). this one also led me to listen to Page Seven, which is celebrity gossip but honestly just really enjoyable to me. Two of the hosts from that show (Marcus is a LPOTL host as well) also do another show called Sex and Other Human Activities, which i’ve listened to a bit and enjoyed and deals with a lot of different issues - like sex, but also delving into depression and different things the hosts and their friends have gone through. but as far as non-fiction podcasts go, that’s pretty much it? i’m still planning on checking out Radio Dispatch, but that’s honestly mostly because it’s Molly (from Page Seven) and her brother and like i said, i have a problem. other podcasts i know of and have been meaning to check out: Hello From the Magic Tavern, The Adventure Zone, Pleasuretown, Lesser Gods, Tales of THATTOWN..... and ok, probably others but this has gotten excessive i am so sorry friends (some of the links may accidentally be wrong and i am very sorry)

[lair-of-books]

Fall is absolutely in the air, it’s been a long time since I’ve braved posting a TBR here simply because the past 2 years have been mood reading heavy. Unintentionally this TBR is giving off major fall vibes & I am here LIVING for it! although I’ve found a new love for Summer, the Fall season will always be me one true love. It’s when I do the most reading, rock the cute hoodies, and drink all the seasonal drinks…I’m looking at you Starbucks Irish Cream Cold Brew 😉

By the time this post goes live I’ll be in the process of reading 2 or maybe 3 of these titles, one is definitely an audiobook. All of the titles listed below are eGalleys/ARCS/ALCS I am very thankful to have received & will be trying to review within this month. If I manage to make my way through these, I have a few add-ons to choose from but ummm…

Crazy Stupid Bromance (Bromance Book Club #3) by Lyssa Kay Adams-Lyssa Kay Adams can continue writing in this world & I will buy all of her books. Here we follow Noah Logan the unofficial Bromance Book Club member who is a tech savvy nerd/hacker. As with all of these books there’s a guy who is in need of better understanding the female love interest. I’m only 15% into this book & already it’s getting hard to stop reading so fast. I love that we follow the important themes discussed in the previous book with sexual harassment at the work front. The men are still hard at work shedding toxic masculinity seen first hand at the very start when we learn that Liv (previous female love interest) has entrusted all wedding arrangements to her fiancé Braden Mack. Braden has gathered his book club to make paper carnations & GAH! I LOVE these characters so friggin much!

Horrid by Katrina Leno-In the spirit of continuing to read Horror, this could not have come at a better time. Set during the Autumns season we see a girl whose father has passed away & with her mom returns to her home town. Creepy vibes in this house where there’s a “storage”room that runs out to be a little girls bedroom. Our MC also faces bullying in this town & from what I can gather, this may come down to grieving & mental illness or something actually dark & secret. I’m intrigued but will definitely be reading this with the lights on & no my Kindle back light won’t cut it 🙂

Fable (Fable #1) by Adrienne Young-Pirates are my drug of choice but give me female pirates & now I don’t know how to act. I LOVED Adrienne Young’s Sky in the Deep & jumped at the chance of reading this on Netgalley. After losing her mother to the Sea, our MC is left to be raised by her father who in turn abandons her. Left alone to fend for herself, she sets out to make her way back to her father to convince him that she is worthy of being a member of his crew. What she doesn’t know is that during the time she was away from him, he’s picked up quite the rivals in his trade business. No one is to be trusted & nothing is as it seems…

A Deadly Education (Scholomance # 1) by Naomi Novak-I am about 15% into this book & I in NO way am here to support she who shall NOT be named. However, this book really does feel like the Slytherin story I never got. This I guess in many ways is Dark Academia with a MC who to many will come across as unlikeable. I happen to LOVE this type of character, her inner monologue has me wicked chuckling smh. She has all this dark power within her & can cast some powerful spells but doing that would bring about destruction. While others are working simpler spells to make life easier, she can’t summon anything basic. In many ways she comes across as a Bitter Betty but I can’t help LOVING her!

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole-Thought this was just a thriller but early reviewers are saying this leans more towards Horror. This is the year where I’ve started to take an interest in horror so I’m here for it! I’ve already started the audiobook via Libro.fm (my referral code) & the narration is A+! set in Brooklyn we meet a MC who is in the midst of watching her neighborhood go through the changes imposed by gentrification or is it? did the neighbors really relocate to the suburbs? I hear our MC may be a bit of an unreliable character & I love me a paranoid MC! here for it!

Kingdom Of The Wicked (Kingdom Of The Wicked #1) by Kerri Maniscalco-My! My! MY! I have yet to read a Kerri Maniscalco but this author has remained intriguing AF to me. Happy to satisfy my curiosity with this tale of twins, one Is gruesomely murdered & the other is left to find her murderer and avenge her death. Somehow, she gets thrown into meeting one of the Princes of Hell who is in charge of investigating the deaths of numerous women?!? Dark Romance?! HELL YES!

Legendborn (Legendborn #1) by Tracy Deonn– Southern Black Girl Magic? sign me up! Queer characters & secret societies within a school setting? with magical weapons? HIGH hopes! early reviews are all leaning towards this being a potential 5 star *fingers crossed*

Wayward Witch (Brooklyn Brujas #3) by Zoraida Córdova– The 3rd book in the Brooklyn Brujas trilogy & we finally get Rose Mortiz as the main POV! the littlest sister who is a rebel at heart, I’m beyond stoked! won’t go into deets cause spoilers but this is such a awesome Latinx trilogy to get into filled with magic and adventure.

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September 2020 TBR Fall is absolutely in the air, it's been a long time since I've braved posting a TBR here simply because the past 2 years have been mood reading heavy.

[praisenorcensure]

#1: 48 Shades of Brown

 by Nick Earls, 1999

I first read this book in either my last year of middle school or early high school. I picked it from the “teen” section of the Archdale Public Library, mostly because of the brightly-colored cover design and the weird duck on the front. By the time I was a senior in high school I had checked it out so many times I had purchased my own copy. The dialogue was witty, the main character was relatable in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time, and there was excessive talk of Romeo and Juliet in a non-derisive way. As a lit nerd in a school where most of my peers spark-noted their way through assignments when they had to and skimmed texts where they didn’t, a book that was sympathetic to analyzing plays was A+ in my book. I periodically returned to this book as a nice afternoon read during my college years; a sort of breath of fresh air in between ethnographies and writing papers, but I did not do much in terms of thinking about it. On New Years Day this year I decided it was time to visit with this book again, and I’m so glad I did. 

This book takes place in Brisbane, Australia, where our narrator Dan Bancroft is spending his final year of high school living with his college-age Aunt Jacq and her roommate, Naomi, as his parents are spending the year in Geneva. The story follows Dan as he grapples with calculus, literary analysis, his increasing differences with his best friend, a crush on Naomi, his aunt coming out to him, and who he is becoming as person as he goes through the transition from high school to whatever comes after. The book deftly manages the blend of teenage-boy inner monologue, rife with masturbation jokes, with deeper questions about how we consciously shape our personalities in accordance with who we think we need or want to be. Dan attempts to become a guy that he thinks Naomi would like (as she remains mostly oblivious to his intentions), to mostly negative results. He makes pesto with dirt in it, blunders when trying to casually mention scientific names of birds he halfway memorized, and gets attacked by an angry goose. Thought the situations themselves are more than a bit far-fetched, who among us hasn’t tried to change to fit a hypothetical ideal to impress someone we liked? 

Dan’s attempts to work out who he is and how he’d like the world to perceive him resonates with me in a way that’s pretty unique in my experience. He is smart, but doubts his ability to translate his intellectual ideas to the real world. For most of the book, he overthinks every plan he comes up without asking himself if the plan is necessary. His triumph at the end of the book is not getting the girl, or becoming the person he envisioned he needed to be; but is instead realizing that trying to become someone else was getting in the way of him being himself. Naomi doesn’t fall in love with him, but he gets a good score on his lit paper and understands more calculus than he did previously. He learns to do his own laundry and how to make pesto (sans dirt), has a deeper appreciation of his family, and realizes that he is cool enough, smart enough, and good enough without forcing it. May we all be so lucky.

Bonus points: I read some of Dan’s internal dialogue to my boyfriend and he was somewhat dismayed that someone was telling his secrets like that.

Also the fish tank scene in the Baz version of R&J is totally as good now as it was when this book was published bye